This past week has shown both the ugly and good sides of America.  First the ugly.  Sate legislators in two states passed laws that had no purpose other than to discriminate against LGBTQ people, or protect those that do.  In Georgia, it was in the form of a religious freedom bill.  This on its face oriented religious organizations from having to do anything against their beliefs.  That is fine and dandy, and that is already federal law.  It also extended the protections to anyone acting on their religious beliefs.  That is the issue.

Now that I have had a week to recover, and an still trying to catch up on sleep at that, it is time to write up a bit about the festival.

It honestly got off to a slightly shaky start as we were waiting for local members to arrive from work.  So the opening rite had to pull from some of the other talent present.  It was done, and the trance journey that was used as part of the rite did its job.  The opening dinner and then social time were good, and we all went to bed late.

Next weekend will be the first festival that is run by my grove.  Weirdly enough, the things u worried about when planning in August were no problem, the things I thought would go smooth didn't.  My worries at the start were the obvious ones.... Would we get people?  Would we get enough workshops?  Would we meet our obligation to the hotel?  Well, we got 22 different people showing up, some I have never met before.  We also met our obligation in food and rooms to the hotel.  Workshops also were not a problem as we have 2, possibly 3 that were shelved.

There are many ways that we can give back.  Now that I have some "free" time, I have gone back to doing something that I last did about 4 years ago.  That is volunteering with Project Gutenberg.  How?  Well I'm helping through their Distributed Proofreaders program.  Yes, for those of you in ADF, another DP I may use that is not what you think it is.  You can find out more about this project at: http://www.pgdp.net/c/

When the news broke last week about the death of Antonin Scalia, I quickly saw my social media feeds explode with people happy with his death, and the political banter that a new judge should be appoint or not.  I'm not going to get into the politics of this, nobody wins with that.

Back in 2006, I began a journey that I did not fully realize how it would shape my life.  I started the Clergy Training Program of ADF.  At that time, we really didn't have a program, we were using the Generalist Program as our first circle.  Over the next couple years we added new circles, and then we rearranged the courses and added a few more.  The program itself surely has changed since I first started working on it.  I have survived these changes, and did get everything done to get the old version of the CTP completed before that was sunset...

Over the past two weeks or so, the topic of racism within the Neo-Pagan community has reared its ugly head again.  A good article on this can be found here.

Kirk (the cat) has gone back to the vet today for a follow up to see how the drugs are working for him.  I have to say, in the past couple weeks, he has become himself again.  The inappropriate urination has stopped, and he's been more snuggly like he usually was prior to Christmas.  Overall, he's back to what he was like... for better or worse.  The goal of the vet visit was a heart rate between 120 and 160.  It was around 150 when he was calm, and 180 when he was excited... not bad overall, especially considering he was at a place that makes him nervous.

Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, which would have been his 87th.  Today is a day we should be focused on the state of racism and bigotry in America as that is what King worked hard to get us past.  So, how are we doing?

I have been living in my house now for about 11.5 years.  That first year here, I had discovered a mouse in the house, only one, and I was able to catch it with a live trap.  I released it out at the back of my property, and I never had another issue.  Since that time, I have added a few cats to the family, 3 cats to be specific.  I figured that I would never have mouse issues again as at least one of them would be a mouser.