Decade in Review: 2006

June 2006.  On the solstice, Mark and I signed a zillion papers and became the owners of a new house.  We probably bought at the hight of the housing bubble.

Our realtor was great; she put up with me pretending to be a drunk undergraduate and shrieking "I am soooo drunk" as an illustration of why we didn't want to live in the Student Hell part of town; and put up with Mark asking during one open house, "So, is this where they hide the bodies?"


June 27 2006.  I lead a Wicca 101 ritual as a Sunday presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene.  The presentation was a brief lecture on the stations of the sun, followed by a Tree of Life meditation and a Spiral Dance.  It went really well, and everyone seemed friendly and enthusiastic.  It was so refreshing to find a "Neo-Pagan Church" that wasn't a collection of (in my harsher moments) "flakey, superstitious refugees from Math and Science."

I was very excited to be at UUCE, and I was hoping for rabbinical discussions of the Spirit of Life as experienced through rituals of the four elements.   In the months that followed, I had high hopes for an active Covenant of UU Pagans, actively, ardently, and jubilantly exploring the Seventh Principle (Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of Which We Are a Part) with the tools of the Sixth Source (spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions) tempered with those of the Fifth Source (the guidance of reason and the results of science).


September 2006.  After lots of painting and scraping and cleaning, with lots of help from my dad, we moved into the new house.  About this time I crenelated what I thought was the front boxwood, but was in fact, the front azalea.  Mark was horrified and the azalea has only recovered in about 2013.  I've been banned from pruning or trimming in the garden ever since.

Against Mark's advice, I set up a green gazing globe in the back yard.  We'd had the gazing globe in our old place's front yard and I loved it:  it was an axis mundi for me.    It lasted about a month before The Child grabbed its base as I was picking him up.  Let's just say the whole event was like a Greek play by Euripides.