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I suppose it is fair to day that my lovely parade of dreams last night left me with the distinct impression that I was not to write anything “hot” today. Last night’s dreams were preceded by a nap dream yesterday afternoon, in which I asked a milk deliveryman if he had any gallon containers of milk, instead of the smaller containers he was delivering somewhere else, and he similed, said, he thought he might have gallon containers. Then, around dawn this morning, my friend Brenda in north Georgia called and said she made fresh vegetable soup yesterday, and in a dream last night, she told me she had made it and it was in her refrigerator, if I wanted some. No meat in vegetable soup, nothing tough to chew, and it was cold, being in the refrigerator. And, she said, she had not spiced it up.
So …
First off, you might wish to open today’s online edition of the Citizen - www.keysnews.com - and pay to see the entire edition. There are several interesting articles on global warming at the world and Florida Keys levels. Also included is a good comparison of rising seas caused by global warming, to the sea rise Hurricane Wilma brought to most of the Keys.
North Roosevelt Blvd’s tidal surge during Wilma
I probably won’t be around when the Keys start to “sink”, but people living here then will have to deal with it.
I know vehicles and salt water do not mix, and vehicles down here rust out sooner than later due to salt in the morning dew. The Little Torch Key dirt road on which I lived has salt in the clay part of the road, and that salt was working over the undercarraige of my Toyota Camry. The steel parts of my now a little over one-year-old aluminium Treck one-speed bicycle are externally rusted over.
Assistant City Manager John Jones, who was an Alabama native, told me in the fall of 2005, a couple of weeks after Wilma came through, that the city lost 10,000 vehicles in an hour, due to the very high tide (tidal surge), which came in behind Wilma, as she was leaving. I lost a car during Wilma, parked right in front of where I now live. This home took 3/12 feet of seawater inside.
All the appliances in this home were ruined and were hauled out to the street to be picked up by haulers contracted out by the city. Every street was lined with piles of appliances, mopeds, bicycles, sofas, TVs. wet sheet rock, mattresses, dead shrubs and trees. After the haulers cleared all of that out and took it to the mainland, the streets were loaded up again with what had not been discarded the first go round. Up the Keys was the same.
This place look like the moon - no leaves on trees and shrubs. The high winds had blown the leaves away. Two earlier hurricanes brushing by, John Jones told me, had done the same to the leaves. Those two times, the leaves grew back. But after Wilma, the leaves did not grow back right away. The trees and shrubs gave up and went dormant. it was a while, John said, before leaves started coming out again.
I told a fellow at Jack Flats last night, who said he lives in Syracuse New York and had owned a home down here and then had sold it, but was thinking of buying another home down here, that after I sold my place on Little Torch Key, I decided it was too much trouble for me to own a home down here. I prefered to rent, let the landlord worry about hurricanes and high causualty insurance rates. I didn’t think to mention rising seas due to global warming, maybe because I don’t see me still being on this planet when that happens.
I suppose the best contribution I could make to not causing global warming would be to sell my car and only use my bicycle and walk and public transportation, when I need to travel somewhere. And not use airconditioning, which I have not used for three years now, except when I’m on a highway in my car, because running with the windows down makes an awful racket and probably uses more gas, due to the increased wind resitance, than using airconditioning uses.
It was my hope to some day build an off the grid home on the Little Torch property, one acre, overgrown, across the dirt road from a state wildlife refuge. Key Deer and all sorts of other wildlife. Totally solar reliant. Water from cisterns. An electric compost toilet. Designed to shade windows from direct sunlight, to create a natural air flow from underneath up through a vented roof.
Well, it was a nice dream, I thought, but maybe building such a home and living in it would have been different from dreaming about it. And it was remote, a far bicycle ride to the Winn-Dixie shopping center on Big Pine Key, and a somewhat shorter pedal to Looe Key Tiki Bar on Ramrod Key. Maybe I would have succumbed to a small motorcycle, they don’t use much gasoline. I didn’t see me growing wings and being able to fly anywhere.
A friend, who used to live in Marathon and played duplicate bridge at bridge club up there, wrote to my yesterday on Facebook, and that led to me telling her about something that happened the other day to another Marathon person she knew.
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Alice Perks Charlton Happy early birthday, Sloan! -
Sloan Bashinsky Thanks, Alice, how you been doing? Well, I hope. You look like it when I blow up your FB photo.
Juneellen Lott went had made herself famous down here Thursday afternoon. After leaving the bridge club at the Key West Senior Citizen Center, she went out to her car and a big tree limb fell on it, and she got saved by the car but roughed up some. I had heard of it from a No Name Key friend right after it happened, but no clue it was Junellen. I was on Duval Street when I got word, and that the tree limb was being cut up and disappeared (the evidence), but by the time I got there the tree limb remains and all the people had gotten clean away. The Citizen article the next day reported it, but no names, so still I was clueless it was Junellen. The article didn’t make it out to look like the tree owner was trying to get clean away, which was welcome news, as you know that ain’t all ways how things go down here. The Citizen article on it this morning provided the details heretofore missing. All included below, in case you is interested in who all you know nearly got whomped but in the end got mostly clean away. I called Junellen around noon today and caught her. She has a headache and they told her she can’t take a shower because of a heap of stitches, 18, I think, holding her brain in her head, or some other lifesaving maneuver. I asked if she was in the horespital, and she said no, she was at home, and I said that’s her castle, she can do anything she wants to do there; at least she can draw a tub of hot water and climb into that. I said if I was up there, I might be able to do something to help her headache, but, as is, she’s going to have to wait until we play the first time this year in Jeanie the Good Witch’s club next Thursday. As it turned out, Junellen was to be my playing partner on that day, me not yet knowing she by then would be a major celebrity down here, nor did she have that futurecast sensation yet either. The Citizen article coming. -
Sloan Bashinsky Saturday, September 27, 2014 Marathon woman, 88, healing from tree mishap BY GWEN FILOSA Citizen Staff
gfilosa@keysnews.com
The 88-year-old woman struck by two tree limbs, including one weighing nearly 1,200 pounds, on Thursday outside the Harvey Government Center is healing from the mishap that required many stitches to her head.
Junellen Lott of Marathon had just left a bridge game at the senior center, 1016 Georgia St., at 4:45 p.m. when a heavy tree limb from the sprawling almond tree at one corner of the parking lot fell to the ground.
“I was just opening my trunk to put a shirt in and that’s when it happened,” Lott said from her home Friday. “That could have been worse.”
Lott was pinned in the parking lot outside the county office building, 1200 Truman Ave., when a passerby ran to her aid, finding an elderly woman caught up in a thicket of branches and leaves. She was bleeding from where her head had struck the concrete curb.
“I couldn’t get the tree off her,” said Brandon Diko, 43, who was walking his dog at the time. “I was afraid I’d hurt her more. I was just screaming for people to come out and help me.”
Two women ran out from the senior center and tried to help him free Lott, he said.
That’s when the second, and far heavier, limb fell from above on all of them.
“It felt like a cement block hit me and I blacked out for a couple minutes,” Diko said Friday, reporting that he is badly bruised across his back and shoulders. “That tree fell on all of us. It hit the car.”
Both Lott and Diko were taken by ambulance to Lower Keys Medical Center and treated and released that night. The two women who joined with Diko to try to free Lott — Koko Ozeki, 75, and Angela McClain, 86, both of Key West — refused medical treatment, according to the police report.
County and city public works employees gathered at the scene Thursday and spent nearly two hours cutting the almond tree down to size and clearing the fallen debris.
The county is reviewing the incident, but on Friday officials were not ready to comment.
“Besides wishing those injured a speedy recovery, we’re still looking into it,” said county attorney Bob Shillinger. “It would be inappropriate to comment at this time.”
Shillinger returned messages left for Kevin Wilson, division director of the county’s Public Works and Engineering Department, who was out of the office Friday.
The scene of the mishap Thursday drew several onlookers, most of whom simply stared at the fallen limbs in bewilderment. Police blocked off Georgia Street so that workmen could clean up the mess by trimming the tree and disposing of debris by shoving it through a wood chipper.
“Police tape was up; they had a lot of hands on deck,” said Margaret Romero, a three-time mayoral candidate who happened upon the scene after first responders had arrived. “The tree limb was literally on the roof of the car.”
Diko and Lott on Friday were relieved to learn through others that each other had survived the tree mishap, albeit battered and bruised. Both, however, said the incident had left them shaken.
“She was barely conscious and definitely confused,” said Diko, a hairdresser who lives at the corner of Truman Avenue and Georgia Street. “Then the second (limb) fell on all of us. It was a little traumatic.”
The almond tree isn’t rotten, said a city worker Thursday at the scene, but with the recent heavy rains it likely had swollen limbs it could no longer hold.
By Friday, the tree had been cut back and cordoned off.
“I’ve lived across the street for two years and I’ve never seen them trim that tree,” Diko said.
“I’m just glad she’s alive and I’m alive,” Diko said of Lott. He didn’t know her name on Friday but called the senior center to ask after her.
“I called over there,” Diko said. “A lady called me back and said, thanks for checking on her; she’s going to be fine.”18 hours ago · "}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10203980661468731_10203982139025669:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.3.$likeToggle:0:$action:0">Like -
Sloan Bashinsky How this got routed to me via No Name Key, was Diko called a friend on No Name and told her what was going down, and she, in turned, called me about it. I don’t know Diko. What I would have done on Junellen was feather-light craniosacral therapy and related energy work, if I had been with her and she had let me put my hands on her , which might or might not have gotten very far. I learned how to do that stuff several lifetimes ago - had I known the nature of the lifetimes to come, I might have tried harder to get abducted by aliens.
Back when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I actually saw a space ship hovering next to a smallish cloud over my home. The cloud was maybe 100 times the size of the space ship. Circa 1993, give or take.
I was sitting on our side patio with my wife, her 10-or-so-year-old son, and a guy friend of ours. My wife and the guy friend were licensed clinical social workers.
I told them to look up at the space ship parked beside the cloud, and they laughed. I said it was really there, look at it. They laughed. Then, it jumped around behind the cloud, and I told them that, and they laughed. Then, that cloud started getting stretched across the sky at a pretty good clip, looking like a jet leaving a vapor trail, but this was a considerably wider vapor trail, and moving a lot faster than a jet would move. I told them what I was watching, they laughed, didn’t look up.
When I lived in Boulder, something taught me a way to help things move, which were not moving. I used it for a few years, and then it stopped working for me and I was given other methods to use. When some years later, 2006 actually, I tried to introduce the Boulder method to people in Key West, I was told in a dream that it was not sustaining, and to go about things in the way I then was going about things, which tended to be pretty rough. However, I got the sense the other day, and more so since then, that perhaps I should explain the Boulder method again. So here goes.
Go somewhere quiet, where you will not be interrupted. Turn off your cell phone, if you have one. Close your eyes. Focus mentally on something which concerns you. Ask that something to show you where is physically is represented in your body. When you feel it in your body, ask for the remedy, and wait for something to come to you internally. Perhaps you see something. perhaps you hear something, perhaps you feel something. It should come within a minute, if it is coming. If it comes, ask it to let you feel it in your body. When you feel it in your body, that’s the end of the “ritual”. Now go on about whatever you were doing, and observe what, if anything, happens in the situation which concerned you.
A short version, simply close your eyes and focus internally on something which concerns you, and ask for its remedy. When something comes, that’s the end of the “ritual”.
I came to call it “rainbow alchemy”, based on a poem that jumped out of me in the fall of 1993, as I was learning the method:
White is black
Black is white
When they fuse
Rainbows bloom
A related poem came around the same time:
“Rainbows” (fragment of original poem)
Rainbows know no master,
Fueled by Father Sun
They touch Misty Earth
Only Heaven knows where.
Rainbows are more shiny than silver
and more brilliant than gold,
More valuable than diamonds
and more precious than perarls.
Rainbows paint heavens beautiful,
Make angels sing.
Rainbows are you, and me,
Full spectrums of Infinity
blazing across Eternity.
Rainbows are now.
(1993)
I taught rainbow alchemy to a number of people in Boulder, who said they were able to use it and get results. The results varied and were beyond the control of the people who used the method.
There also were people who tried to use rainbow alchemy and nothing happened internally, they said.
I haven’t used rainbow alchemmy in a long time. Maybe it will become available to me again. I’ll let you know if that happens.
Sloan Bashinsky
keysmyhome@hotmail.com
