Buddha’s Birthday Celebration

Wednesday was fortunate for Doug. Doug is a fairly new guy at Zen and I don’t think he knows about chanting practice at 6:30 PM before the 7:00PM meditation practice. I say he is lucky because this was the first Wednesday of the month, and that means it was teachers meeting night. That leads to me chanting by myself. For those of you who (fortunately) don’t know, my voice sounds like a cat in a blender. We did the hour of meditation practice then went downstairs to help fold newsletters.

Jump forward to Sunday and we had our Buddha’s Birthday celebration. Doug did show up, so it was nice to see a fairly new person show up. The abbot performed his poem, with his brother accompanying him on a drum. One of the funniest things I have heard in quite some time. After that it was downstairs for some grazing.

The community room was pretty full of people laughing, grazing, and sipping coffee, Papua New Guinea in fact. Everyone brought in birthday presents for the Zen Center, so the place is stocked for awhile. Heck, I brought weather stripping for the door. Not good when the door is closed and you can see daylight! Especially in Wisconsin where we had a light snowfall today!

Soon To Be Underwater….

Well the late season snowfall over the weekend has mostly melted away, allowing the dogs to track in a ton of mud all over the house, yeah! And now it looks as if we are getting rain for the next four days, so with a small bit of luck, we will not all be floating away.

Lot of anniversaries at AA last night. One of the new guys, Jim, had thirty days, so good for him. I think I’ll pick up a mala from Zen this evening and give it to him. I think if he uses it with a little mantra, whenever that urge comes on he’ll have something to grab hold of to help focus the mind. I know it has helped me and it sure can’t help to make the offer after all.

It’s about time for me to get my ass in my car and head on up to the Zen Center. Also time to see how this new Windows Live Writer thing works with blogger. I guess I’ll just have to push the Publish button and find out!

Peace Vigil Class Announced!

The Master Teachers Tony and Linda will be holding a class for Tony's new book, Peace Vigil: Living Without Hesitation. This class will meet for six Tuesday nights from 6:30-9:00 starting on April 21st. For more information, you can call the Zen Center at 1-262-638-8580.

If you feel like stopping by, here is a map for you. Check out the ORZC website to keep up to date with everything that's going on there!

Getting the Calendars Up

OK, testing out the linking and embedding of Google Calendars in a web page. With a bit of luck, the calendars will all populate as they should. After we test them out here and we get the thumbs up, we should be able to get them up on the Zen Centers web site. Personally, with everyone having their calendars on their phones, laptops, iPod's, etc., I think it is useful and helpful to have a standardized digital calendar format for quick and easy checks and updates without forcing everyone to do it manually. After all with dozens of people making dozens of calendar entries, eventually someone is gonna make an entry in the wrong date. At least this way, if the main calendar gets screwed up, everyone will be screwed up together so the event can still go on!!

This morning I finally got a hold of my sister on the phone so I could help her set up her laptop so she could access the wireless router in the house. I sent her an email with all of the stuff I usually have the family load on their computers, so hopefully she will have most of it loaded up by the time I get there for Easter. I think I've talked her into preparing lamb for dinner, now I just have to decide what I will be making. Maybe some type of coconut curry. Humm, lamb, onion, red potato, coconut milk, red or yellow curry over rice....just made that up I did, sounds pretty damn good to me.

On the coffee front, I did screw up a batch of New Guinea Peaberry. Set it on cool too early so it was mostly fruity/herby and the coffee flavors were not well developed at all. Oh well, such things happen upon occasion. Followed that up with some Guatemalan 50/50. That turned out quite nice. I think I like this one just a bit darker than normal.

Dharma Talk

Well tonight Amanda gave her first Dharma talk in quite some time (damn close to a year). It was both excellent and hilarious at the same time. I can only hope to do 1/2 as well when I get up there.

Anyways, I met her at the Zen center about an hour and a half before she had to give her talk. We made mala's and chit-chatted for some time, listed to music on the iPod. She told me she was very nervous and wanted to throw-up. I told her just to get up there and talk about what she had in mind and not to give a rat's ass about it, as it was a bit late to do much about it now.

She really did an amazing job. There is a slight possibility that my 'don't give a rat's ass' speech may have taken just a bit of the edge off of it. Oh who am I kidding, she knew she was good to go and delivered a stand-up Dharma talk!

I guess that means that come Wednesday I'll need to throw my name up in a square and do one myself sometime soon. Maybe if I do it on April 13th, just two days before taxes are due the place will be near empty...yeah, right!

So after a year....

So a year has come and gone since I last made a post here. Not too much different, still playing poker, though not nearly as much as I was. We lost a critter or two, and gained a couple. I started going to local AA meetings after realizing I had a problem (sober around five months or so). Made my return to Zen a few months ago, didn't realize how much I missed it until I returned. Oh, and I also started roasting my own coffee at home.

So Zen has been good. A couple of people have moved along, but several more new people have appeared. The temple has expanded so we now have an actual community room and a full kitchen. That kitchen makes retreats run much smoother, no more running next door for the food relay.

Also, Tony has a new book coming out on 3/15 with a release party the following Thursday (3/19). The book is titled Peace Vigil: Living Without Hesitation and is going for $19.95. The book also got a nice write-up by the Racine Journal Times. Tony will be talking about the book and how you can use it to help bring peace into your life and to those around you. It will be held at the Original Root Zen Center from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M.

And on that note, I'll be roasting up the coffee the day before so it will be nice and fresh, just for you!! The current plan is to do a Full City Roast on some Guatemalan Antigua, which, in my opinion, is one of the best coffees on the planet. If for no other reason, show up for the coffee and the snacks, they will both be worth your time.

I also just started to use Twitter. So far, so good, let's just hope I can make myself hop on for about 15 minutes a day to throw a few updates per day there. Just the other day I stumbled upon a FireFox add-on called Power Twitter. I love that extension, especially for expanding the tiny url's that most Twitter feeds use. If you Tweet, it's defiantly worth the download.

My oh My

My oh my, it has been a crazy couple of weeks hasn’t it? The BBT3 fields have been unbelievable so far, and we have not even had a $10 NLHE game yet! I think I’m almost afraid to play the Mookie tonight with the size it will probably end up being, that and the miserable cold that has me in bed by 10 PM. Speaking of Mookie, congrats to you and Ms. Mookie on the birth of your 108^th daughter. Think about it sir, in just a few years time you and your girls will be ½ the field in every blogger event!

On the flip side, sympathies go out to PokerEnthusiast on the loss of his father. It’s never a good thing to lose someone you are close to.

Also sadly, yesterday gamers the world over are shedding a tear for the loss of Gary Gygax, co-developer of D&D. Like so many others, I spent a good portion of my teenage years in the basement with some friends on a dungeon crawl. Thank you sir for the gift you gave to many a gamer geek.

Politics, well I for one am less than pleased with the results of the Democratic elections, especially Ohio. Personally, I think that if Ohio had been much closer, Clinton would have to had given serious consideration into dropping when you take her narrow win in Texas (assuming she takes the caucus there as well). With some luck, Obama will take some big wins in the near future and make it pretty much a done deal.

And now for my own little political commentary, Clinton has been going on and on about how she is ready for the big military decisions that will need to be made and how over 30 former and current Generals and Admirals back her for Commander-in-Chief. Now here is a question for you all, if you were one of those Generals/Admirals, who would you pick, someone who may well question your recommendations and methods and actually think before giving the orders, or someone who you feel you can most easily influence to do what you want and is afraid to “look weak” if a decision is not made at a moments notice. If I were the Brass, I would only recommend someone who I felt could get the job done, i.e. do what I say, when I say then get out of my way so I can go blow things up. (much like the current situation). If you ask me, the last thing we need now is another puppet for the military/DHS to take advantage of.