Open Buddha

So, R and I got back from her folks’ place at 11:00 pm last night via that cattlecar of the sky, the Boeing airplane. I don’t blame Boeing though, I blame airlines. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the security measures at our wonderful airports didn’t require coming over two hours early to guarantee making your flight and if our flight hadn’t left almost an hour late because of some dumbass’ inability to go “hmmm…we have X gates and X+25 planes coming in… perhaps this could be a problem….” I’m convinced that the airlines and greyhound are in competition for the shittiest travel experience and it’s a toss up right now. At least the airlines compress the misery into only a few hours (until I go to Greece).

Anyway…R and I managed to bum around quite a bit in Berkeley and surounding areas while we were there. California is so damn brown though. It’s nice to return to the green Pacific Northwet. The cats and the ferret (Mr. Doodle) were quite happy to see us and they hadn’t even attacked each other.

On Saturday, we went to the Rosicicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose at the suggestion of and others. I was actually fairly well impressed. For a small museum run by aging Californian weirdo Rosicrucians (who used to advertise in Popular Mechanics!) it was very well put together and professionally run. They have two floors of stuff dividing into sections. One, on the afterlife, has an Egyptian mummy, many sarcophogi and the only full size replica of an existing Egyptian tomb in the Western Hemisphere (they claim). You go down many faux stone stairs and through a number of chambers. The scenes are accurately painted on the walls and such. Cool.

They also had a large selection of jewelry and textiles from Egypt and a small section on Mespotamia and surrounding cultures. That one had a lot of the seals and amulets along with many clay tablets. My personal favorite there was the diorama of what is called, in the Ogdoadic magical tradition, the Ziggurat of Light. This is the seven leveled ziggurat (built by Sargon II, I believe) which had each of the levels associated with a god, its planet and painted in the appropriate color. The whole complex was orientated to the cardinal points. All of the planetary magical rituals that I would with use the imagry of this ziggurate so it was a nice surprise to see a decent sized model of it.

R and I also shopped at many many bookstores. Among the various things that I picked up were yet another copy of an out of print Denning and Philips book (for members of my group), a copy of Chagdud Rinpoche’s P’howa Commentary (which Chagdud Gonpa will no longer sell to you until you take that empowerment) along with his “Gates of Buddhist Practice” book. I found a 1960’s hardcover edition of W.E. Butler’s “Apprenticed to Magic” (my favorite book on magic) and a book by Guenther on Buddhism that I hadn’t seen before. My bag was pretty loaded down by the time we came back to Seattle.

Our Atkins diet got fairly scrambled by Thanksgiving and we paid the price in gastromic distress as our bodies tried to figure out what to do with the carbs we ate. Back on the protein train!! On a positive note there, we did find out our scale at home is about five pounds heavy so I’m actually within about 15 pounds of my target weight. (I’ve lost about 25 from where I was six months ago.)

Alright, enough now. I’m going to go find coffee and tease Doodle.