I was able to get my Mabon ritual in early in the morning yesterday…about three-ish.
I set up my alter with a fall leaf, amber incense, an ivory and an orange candle, pentacle, water, athame, and chalice of milk (wish I would have had apple cider). I cast my circle, invoked the elements, and called upon the God and Goddess. I meditated upon fall, the changing of the season, the harvest. I thanked the God and Goddess for being there, drank the milk in their honor, and bade them goodbye. I bade the elments goodbye as well and closed the circle.

Felt good to do a ritual again.

Unfortunetly, I haven’t been able to get a Mabon ritual in….yet. In a small apartment with 2 kids, it’s very hard to get the time to do it. The night of Mabon, my youngest was up late and by the time he went to bed, I was too exhausted from the day. I was going to get set up last night for a ritual, but then my youngest again stayed up til after 1am and my oldest woke up around 2am and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Arrg! So I’m gonna try for tonight and hope it all works out. Just a few days late, but I’m still looking forward to celebrating. Merry Mabon!

It’s been a lot cooler here the past couple of days…Mabon having ushered in the fall. Though we are considerably cooler than usual, I’m not complaining.

News is in on how bad hurricane Rita was. And she wasn’t all that bad. She had reduced to a catagory 3 at landfall and didn’t cause major damage in Texas. Parts of New Orleans was back under water, as one of the weakened spots on the levee broke…but no new damage was caused.

BEAUMONT, Texas - Hurricane Rita slammed into Texas and Louisiana early Saturday, flooding coastal towns, sparking fires and knocking power out to more than 1 million customers, but largely sparing vulnerable Houston and much of the region’s vital oil refining industry.

New Orleans, already reeling from Hurricane Katrina, escaped the worst of the storm, but some of its poor neighborhoods flooded anew as engineers scrambled to repair weakened levees. Rescuers used boats and helicopters to reach hundreds of residents along the Lousiana coast, where the storm surge reached 15 feet.

Rita made landfall at 3:30 a.m. EDT as a Category 3 storm just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line, bringing top winds of 120 mph and warnings of up to 25 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Center said. Weakening steadily, it was downgraded to a tropical storm with top sustained winds of 65 mph as it moved north past Lufkin in the afternoon.

As the next hurricane barrels down on Texas and Louisiana at a monsterous catagory 5, evacuations have already begun. The south has learned a bitter lesson from Katrina…and as Rita whirls in, most people decided to leave rather than risk what could happen again. And the government’s trying to make up the slack for Katrina.

Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the U.S. mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the U.S. mainland — most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.

Government officials eager to show they had learned their lessons from the sluggish response to Katrina sent in hundreds of buses to evacuate the poor, moved out hospital and nursing home patients, dispatched truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and put rescue and medical teams on standby. An Army general in Texas was told to be ready to assume control of a military task force in Rita’s wake.

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I kinda didn’t feel like doing a whole ritual last night in honor of the Goddess…and I do have the Mabon ritual to look forward to on the 22nd. So I just lit some rose incense, lit a white candle and meditated on the Moon and the Goddess in her Mother aspect.
I asked for an online friend of mine to have blessings today as she had a court date with her ex over child custody. Turns out, she won’t be losing custody of her kids!

The God and Goddess shine down on all. Blessed be!

Ahhh…it’s nice to sit down at the computer and not sweat as I type. Cooler weather is upon us and it feels good. Autumn is only a few days away (Mabon…or the Autumn Equinox…is the week), but it has been considerably cooler than normal at this time of year. I don’t mind…LOL! I’m not partial to the heat of summer.

My 9 year old, ‘G’, has his first major field trip this week. Wednesday and Thursday his grade is going to Leadership Camp. It’s his first overnight school trip. And then Friday is an inservice day, so this should be a fun week for him!

Between all the other stuff I’m busy with, I’m finally about half-way through the 5th Harry Potter book. Good stuff, I tell you…..with a character, like in the other books, that is rather annoying…but more than that, one that is despisable. I found out just how much when I was reading the other night. Ooo, she irks me!
Oh! And there was a link on the message board I frequent to a trailer to the 4th Harry Potter movie coming out in November! It’s a longer one that I hadn’t seen before. I am so going to see this movie!

Yikes, it’s been a little while since I posted! Well, there’s a reason for that…kind of an obsession really. ‘J’ has been wanting to try the online computer game, EverQuest for a while now. Well, he didn’t get anything on his birthday last month since we had no money, so a week ago we went down to CompUSA and found EverQuest II, the deluxe DVD edition. So we bought it. As I watched him make up his character, I became interested in it. So I made up a character and have been playing ever since. I guess you could say I got hooked! I have never really been into playing computer games (but was an avid console game player before we got the computer). My character’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself….a Wood Elf Scout/Rouge.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I have also made a few new siggie tags and keepin’ busy filling requests.

I cried when I read this. It’s touching and has a happy ending. Click the link below for the full story.

A child in charge of `6 babies’
By Ellen Barry Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Tue Sep 6, 9:40 AM ET

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans.

In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead” or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

“It goes back to the same thing,” he said. “How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?”

Seems like Washington was aware that the levees in New Orleans needed upgrading…but decided to hold its proverbial breath and put the funding elsewhere. And now we have a disaster of massive proportions, that could have partly been avoided had the governement paid attention to warnings about the flood system. Shame on you, Washington!

WASHINGTON — For years, Washington had been warned that doom lurked just beyond the levees. And for years, the White House and Congress had dickered over how much money to put into shoring up century-old dikes and carrying out newer flood control projects to protect the city of New Orleans.

As recently as three months ago, the alarms were sounding — and being brushed aside.

In late May, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers formally notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock out two of the big pumping stations that must operate night and day even under normal conditions to keep the city dry.

Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need to be raised. And it reminded Washington that an ambitious flood-control study proposed four years before remained just that — a written proposal never put into action for lack of funding.

What a powerful hurricane could do to New Orleans and the area’s critical transportation, energy and petrochemical facilities had been well understood. So now, nearly a week into the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, hard questions are being raised about Washington officials who crossed their fingers and counted on luck once too often. The reasons the city’s defenses were not strengthened enough to handle such a storm are deeply rooted in the politics and bureaucracy of Washington.

With the advantage of hindsight, the miscues seem even broader. Construction proposals were often underfunded or not completed. Washington officials could never agree on how much money would be needed to protect New Orleans. And there hung in the air a false sense of security that a storm like Katrina was a long shot anyway.

As a result, when the immediate crisis eases and inquiries into what went wrong begin, there is likely to be responsibility and blame enough for almost every institution in Washington, including the White House, Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers and a host of other federal agencies.

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After 4 days of doing nothing, our government finally got their butts in gear….but not before many people died from lack of food, water, and/or medical supplies. It’s sad and it angers me to think that so many more lives could have been saved had our government been on standby and got right in there after the storm. So many people died needlessly.

NEW ORLEANS - The last bedraggled refugees were rescued from the Superdome on Saturday and the convention center was all but cleared, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.

No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina’s floods and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.

“The first few days were a natural disaster. The last four days were a man-made disaster,” said Phillip Holt, 51, who was rescued from his home Saturday with his partner and three of their aging Chihuahuas. They left a fourth behind they couldn’t grab in time.

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Please help if you can by donating to The American Red Cross, or any number of other relief charities. You can find more here: One.org

The situation in New Orleans is getting worse by the minute….looting, fights, and if you can believe it, even rapes. It’s sad and very much unacceptable. Those people are suffering with no food, water, or medical supplies…..there are eldery people and children dying. And our government is just now….after 5 days….sending in people to help??? I simply cannot believe this is how we treat fellow Americans. We rush off to to aid other countries when disaster strikes, but we take our sweet time helping our own. It disgusts me the way those poor people have been treated….almost forgotten about. The government should have been on top of the situation from day 1. Taking 5 days to get these people food and water is unacceptable. The US is even being talked about in other countries…how horrible it is that we haven’t gotten those people aid sooner. It’s bad when other countries, who we’ve helped in the past, riduicle us for not helping our own. Well, here’s what I have to say to our government….get off your asses and help those people!!

National Guardsmen Pour Into Louisiana
World stunned as US struggles with Katrina