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T asked me out on a date last night and we started by taking a nice bubble bath and then we went to Meaux Bar on Rampart Street. Debbie waited on us, of course, and the food was divine – we started with a beet salad, then steak tartare and then had oxtail stew with ziti – YUM YUM YUM. Matthew’s cooking is fabulous.

This was a great end to the chaos of the last couple of days of email madness and market insanity. We eased into the night with a nice soak in the tub and then were able to sit and enjoy our meal and cosmopolitans without all the weight of the week on our shoulders.

I was reminded to smile at my computer because I have been grimacing since yesterday. The email situation is still a bust because of a corrupt database issue that has yet to be resolved. You’d think after losing ALL my work emails that there was nothing left to corrupt, but au contraire.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to evaluate anything else like stock market crashes, surges, uncertainty, or any of the cosmic topics that seem to be bubbling up to the top these days – is our money safe in banks? (who knows), will Obama win the presidency (read my lips: we will all leave the United States if he doesn’t), will a hurricane wipe out New Orleans, Florida, Texas? (I hope not), will my email ever work normally again? (sigh).

Of all these things what takes precedence in my pea-brain mind are things like Gal Holiday agreed to play at our In & Out party in December (woo hoo!), T is taking me to one of my favorite places, Istanbul, for my 50th birthday present! (another woo hoo!), and most importantly, T.G.I.F.!

My email database bit the dust yesterday and that took me on a sojourn into the realm of tech assistance from Microsoft – it was a ten hour journey. I arrived without my bags. And this morning, guess what? My email crashed! UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

We are going through something here – there are such enormous changes going on around the world – it’s exciting, challenging, dynamic times.

We instill in everything we encounter, our own prejudice, our own bias, our own stain, our own limitation, our own knowledge, our own experience.

So when you’re wondering why everyone is against you, or why your mind is in contra flow to the rest of the world, or why you never seem to be lucky – the why might be a big huge arrow with a u-turn in it that points directly back to you.

Why are you against the world when the world is with you? Why are you out of sync, when you are part of the world? Why are you perceiving your life as unlucky when it’s not?

Empty out your mind and start filling it with good things – good thoughts – good intentions. And see if that doesn’t change your mind.

We had friends over for dinner last night and ate out on the screen porch enjoying the breezy beginnings of fall. We would have normally been indulging in the exotic scent of night blooming jasmine but thanks to Gustav, there was none.

One of my friends had performed a heroic act saving folks during Gustav when water had lapped up over the bank by several feet within hours and caught everyone unaware.

16 September 2008
Hannah Strange
News Reporter, Times Online

Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter.

The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

At a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God on June 8 this year, Mrs Palin described how Thomas Muthee had laid his hands on her when he visited the church as a guest preacher in late 2005, prior to her successful gubernatorial bid.

In video footage of the speech, she is seen saying: “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.”

“And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not “oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,” no, he just prayed for it. He said “Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that’s exactly
what happened.”

She then adds: “So, again, very very powerful, coming from this church,” before the presiding pastor comments on the “prophetic power” of the event.

An African evangelist, Pastor Muthee has given guest sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God on at least 10 occasions in his role as the founder of the Word of Faith Church, also known as the Prayer Cave.

Pastor Muthee founded the Prayer Cave in 1989 in Kiambu, Kenya after “God spoke” to him and his late wife Margaret and called him to the country, according to the church’s website.

The pastor speaks of his offensive against a demonic presence in the town in a trailer for the evangelical video “Transformations”, made by Sentinel Group, a Christian research and information agency.

“We prayed, we fasted, the Lord showed us a spirit of witchcraft resting over the place,” Pastor Muthee says.

After the spirit was broken, the crime rate dropped to almost zero and there was “explosive church growth” while almost every bar in the town closed down, the video says.

The full Transformations video featuring Pastor Muthee’s story has recently been removed from YouTube but the rest of the story is detailed in a 1999 article in the Christian Science Monitor, as well as on numerous evangelical websites.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, six months of fervent prayer and research identified the source of the witchcraft as a local woman called Mama Jane, who ran a “divination” centre called the Emmanuel Clinic.

Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town’s ills, and order her to offer her up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu.

Says the Monitor, “Muthee held a crusade that “brought about 200 people to Christ”.” They set up round-the-clock prayer intercession in the basement of a grocery store and eventually, says the pastor “the demonic influence – the ‘principality’ over Kiambu –was broken”, and Mama Jane fled
the town.

According to accounts of the witchhunt circulated on evangelical websites such as Prayer Links Ministries, after Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to
raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.

After Mama Jane was questioned by police – and released – she decided it was time to leave town, the account says.

Pastor Muthee has frequently referred to this witchhunt in his sermons as an example of the power of “spiritual warfare”. In October 2005, he delivered ten sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the audio of which was available on the church’s website until it was removed around the time Mrs Palin’s candidacy was announced. The blog Irregular Times has listings and screen grabs of the sermons.

It was during that these sermons that Mrs Palin, who was then preparing for her gubernatorial run, was anointed by Pastor Muthee. His intercession, she says, was “awesome”.

Her June 8 speech was to mark the graduation of students from the Wasilla Assembly of God’s Masters’ Commission, which, as Pastor Ed Kalins explains, believes Alaska will be the refuge for American evangelicals upon the coming “End of Days”. After her speech, Mrs Palin was presented with an honorary Masters’ Commission diploma.

Posted at 12:15 PM in Sarah Palin | Permalink

Heaven knows we need one! A friend’s mother is dying, another friend’s mother is struggling to get over a hip break, a friend’s daughter is stable but dying. In times like these, we need to have levity to get through the day – a friend sends this:

This from Sara Silverman–had to pass it on:

“A waiter approaches a table of Jewish woman and asks: Is anything alright?”

A friend was telling me she wants to move to New York because she wants to grow old there. I said I can’t imagine almost 50 and moving to NY because I think the life would be hard there. But I can see her point – there are way more mod cons available for the elderly than there are in most suburbs where once driving becomes an issue, the elderly live like shut ins till they die.

Last night, someone asked me if I have children, and I said, “not yet” – I said I’ll be 50 next year but I still believe a child will enter my/our life. She told me a great story, her mother was adopted as a baby by a woman who was 72 years old! Wow! Isn’t that unbelievable – it gave me goose bumps then and gives them to me now.

It’s never too late, or you’re never too old to start your life in earnest, to go for what you want in your life, to see your dreams come true. Age is someone else’s limitation.

Another person who was in the conversation said about the fact that I am with a woman now but was married three times before, “Were you in denial?”

“No,” I laughed, “I was not in denial.” At each phase of my life, each lover, each husband, and now girlfriend, I’ve been exactly where I was supposed to be, no matter how things seemed to appear.

I think I gave Rita and Ike short shrift because they didn’t come here as hard as elsewhere but just like Gustav was a “miss” but a serious storm that caused a lot of damage (some people still don’t have electricity from Gustav), sometimes bad is relative. I feel for all those people in Texas, especially along the coast who are not able to get home – getting home is almost imperative for most of us here in the Gulf South.

Staying home is like a dream come true. I walked through City Park this morning and was thinking of all the small parks I drove by in Atlanta that had a plaque up saying Frederick Law Olmsted had designed them. There was something so tidy widy about those parks that fit the landscape of Atlanta’s almost sterile environs. City Park is not so tidy – it has trees that have cultivated their own space and dimension, a lagoon that rises and sinks in accordance with nature, and a whole host of creatures and birds make their home there.

After Gustav and Ike, the park staff rushed to clean up and pick up fallen trees, limbs, signs, and even this morning all of the grass was mowed and the park’s serenity enveloped me and Loca on our walk. Snowy white swans with their heads in the water, herons and egrets perched on branches; it was as if harmony had been restored to our neck of the woods.

It helps that fall is in the air. My calendar says that autumn officially starts next Monday, September 22nd. But fall started yesterday here in New Orleans. The birds know it. The dogs know it. Humans feel it. And although nature threatens and challenges us at every turn down here in the Gulf South, it is in nature where I take sanctuary and find respite from the grind.

Fall is my absolute favorite season. I feel an overwhelming sense of myself and my connections – at this moment in my life, my heart is bursting with love for T, for my life, for my friends and family, that all of the nonsense of Wall Street seems so far removed from my psyche.

The pelicans will be returning soon.