** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Dear friends,

WYFP has been a long-running tradition at Daily Kos, starting in December 2003 as the brainchild of theoria. A variety of others have posted under that banner, most recently pastordan of Street Prophets. I started in spring or early summer of 2005, and it has warmed my heart, taught me a lot, and brought me a lot of joy. After much thought though, I've decided to pass the WYFP torch to others.

** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

First, I've already thanked him but I want to thank Michael (Musing85) again for posting WYFP last week!! He did a fine job. And I want to apologize to everyone who was looking for it at the usual time--I actually forgot about it till I got up Sunday morning. I have no excuse except that.

** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Sorry I'm late!! I was busy all day today and forgot about WYFP! Please forgive me for not having anything written up--as always, your effing problems are the main event. What's bothering you tonight?

** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

First, THANK YOU SO MUCH to One Bite At A Time who did a fantastic (and fun) job hosting WYFP last week while I was moving into my new apartment. I knew she would though!!

** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

As I've been mentioning for a while, I'll be moving to a new apartment at the beginning of December--next Saturday actually, meaning there will be someone posting in my place... One Bite At A Time, if you are reading would you consider doing that, if you will be available?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I hope nobody will find this topic, er, morbid, really I hope it can be life-affirming.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I may not be able to participate as much as I like to tonight, since I'm doing this on a borrowed laptop--my computer crashed and is currently in the shop being diagnosed. It seems to be a hardware issue but I don't think it's the hard drive, at least I pray it is not the hard drive. I have a second HD in there that I always meant to hook up and use to back up my data, but I've never actually done so.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I have plenty of effing problems, yet I can't bring myself to want to complain about any of them tonight. I feel at peace with them. Life is good in spite of them. Maybe they just spice it up. I can even appreciate them on some level! So, I'll just listen to others' worries tonight.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Well, last week in WYFP I wrote a reflection on depression, which many people replied to with much more interesting reflection and insights. Toward the end of the evening someone came along and berated me for my gall in wasting his time and bit packets with such a generic and literarily undistinguished assertion that depression should be taken seriously. Some people jumped to my defense and told him he was being rude (which he was of course); I thanked the person for his feedback and pointed out that the action in WYFP is in the comments and the diary itself is perhaps best regarded as a conversation starter. And it was a good one too, since it sparked good conversation. :-)

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I'm not actually depressed these days. But I spent much of my life very, very depressed. I was in so much pain, and my future just looked like a brick wall to me. I've been through some incredibly hard times, and every week on WYFP people talk about their struggles with anything from minor doldrums to crushing darkness.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I've always been fascinated by St. Francis of Assisi. I love animals, and he's well known as the patron saint of animals and ecology, but this is the merest tip of Francis' iceberg. In Catholic tradition, canonical saints have a job to do in conveying something about holiness, and no other saint in the whole tradition managed such a mind-bogglingly literal imitation of Christ in practically every aspect of his life. Remember his (alleged) saying, "preach always; use words if you have to"?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I want to give a big thanks to One Bite At A Time, who did a wonderful job hosting WYFP last Saturday while I was out of town. I have to confess I did not read through all of it so please alert me if there was something I should have read! And, this week I have a bit of a head cold and I'm feeling kind of tired so forgive me if I don't have lots to say. On the other hand Derek went out to get some takeout food for dinner, which is very nice of him.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Earl Grey the timneh African grey parrot has been with me for about 13 years--since I was in high school. He is intelligent, loyal, affectionate, funny, beautiful, and very dear to my heart. I love him so much actually that I tend to look right past his more difficult aspects. Like chewing up the kitchen.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I and my boyfriend will both be moving within the coming months, I to a different apartment in the same city, he to another state. So, we spent some time today sorting through all our crap in the garage. What to keep? What to sell? What to give away?

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Spent the day at Fighting Bob Fest at the Baraboo, Wisconsin County Fairgrounds, with fellow kossacks EconAtheist and OrangeClouds. This is a great annual event, a progressive "chautauqua" with excellent speakers and a relaxed, folksy atmosphere. It was unseasonably nippy, but it didn't rain on us. The highlights, to me, were the speeches by 96 year old Doris "Granny D" Haddock and independent journalist Amy Goodman--both of them awesomely strong, brilliant, passionate, prophetic women. Granny D's speech was a rare and stirring masterpiece of rhetoric by a woman weakening in body but clearly not in any other way. Amy's was... well, you probably know she's pretty intense--she makes you contemplate the stark suffering there is in the world. It's a challenge to do something about it.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I don't have a problem tonight, really. Or at least not one simple enough to know how to write about.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

Many longtime WYFP readers know that I have a combination of mild to moderate disabilities (traumatic brain injury and asperger's syndrome) that have kept me unemployed for 3 or 4 years, during which time I've been trying to get Social Security Disability benefits. I applied, got turned down, moped for too long to start the appeal process and then re-applied, received a presumptive approval of my claim (some will remember this), then had the claim turned down. I appealed it, with some new medical evidence, and just yesterday afternoon I received a phone call letting me know a real, final decision has been made in my favor. I will start receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments right away.

WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)

I am broke, so I am trying to figure out what I can sell on eBay. Some of the things are tough choices... do I keep it because of its sentimental value or sell it for the monetary value? And, for what I think it's "really" worth, or what people will actually pay for it (this can be an especially ouchy issue with art items I've put a lot of hours into)? I'm leaning toward the conclusion that stuff is just stuff, especially when it's stuff I don't need, and it is more important to be able to buy food and pay bills. This can be looked at either as depressing or as liberating, I think. If I can detach myself from the stuff, I feel lighter somehow.