Monday This and That

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin 

My Building According to Season

 

(Mid-September)

(End of October)

(Yesterday)

Happy Monday, everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend. I know I did. Got everything accomplished that needed to be done and still had plenty of time for reading and looking online for some Christmas ideas.  It's kind of stormy outside this morning, so I've decided this would be a great day to play a little hooky and extend the weekend a bit. It's not that I don't like rain.  I actually love rainy days.  I guess I am just aching for a day to stay in.

I had to go back to my old neighborhood on Friday...and talk about a ghost town.  There is nothing there anymore. What once was a lively neighborhood appears to be decaying like some of the old neighborhoods of Brooklyn. And while those old decaying neighborhoods are being rebuilt, my once thriving neighborhood appears to be falling by the wayside with its row of vacant, boarded up stores   Not that my old neighborhood is turning into a slum, by any means.  In fact, it is actually undergoing its own transition  as a new ethnic group continues it's takeover, but that is the story of Brooklyn. It is a borough of change.  

Had quite a fiasco here on Saturday.  On Friday evening the new super came to put in a new fire and carbon monoxide alarm.  That's good.  My bedroom is in the back of the apartment, and it makes me feel safer knowing there is a warning system in the front.  However, the alarm seems to be a wee bit too sensitive.  Saturday afternoon I decided to sage my house.  Big mistake.  Not only did that dreadful high-pitched beep start going off, but the darned thing started yelling, "Fire, fire, fire",  and wouldn't stop.  I have 14 foot ceilings, and it is far too high for me to reach so I began beating it with a broom.  No luck.  I opened all the windows wide.  I opened the door.  I called for the super, but he wasn't around.  It went on and on and on.  I was sure the fire department was going to pull up any moment.  Eventually, it did stop, but not before it had all the neighbors popping their heads out.

Something I discovered this weekend made me feel very sad, but then I realized that I have to stop taking things so personally. Blog friends come and go, and I have several friends who no longer post on their blogs, but we are still friends and are there for each other even though we are not in regular contact.  But, this person just totally cut me out of her life.

I had begun following a blog in the early days of my blogging, and she began following mine.  Then, one day she stopped blogging.  I emailed her to check on her health because she was up in years, but she never responded.  Worried now, I emailed again.  No response. It was then that I saw that she had removed her name from my list of followers.  I really didn't think much of it.  After all, some people do choose to follow anonymously. We were friends, weren't we?  Then, on Sunday I accidentally discovered that she had gone back to publishing her 'old' blog and that it was only for those who had been invited...and I wasn't one of them.

Immediately I began racking my brain trying to figure out what "I" had done to sabotage our friendship.  I must have said something.  I even went back to her last post and my comment.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  In fact, my comment was very warm and friendly.  I just couldn't get it out of my mind.  Later it hit me that just because someone isn't happy with me doesn't mean that I have done something wrong. In fact, self-blame is a pattern that has been with me since childhood.  Some people blame others for everything that goes wrong; I blame myself. And just when you think you have it under control, it rears its ugly head again.

Needless to say, not inviting me to participate in her blog was not about me; it was about her and what she seeks in a friendship, and, the truth be told, we really did have little in common. We meet many different people as we pass through life.  Some are like 'ships in the night'.  We meet for a short time, share a few words, and then they move on and continue on their way.  And none of it has anything to do with us.  It's just something that was meant to be.
me

Dear to us are those who love us, the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life; but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.''  

Ralph Waldo Emerson