Reconnection with an online colleague from the past

Yesterday I checked one of my email accounts that I hadn't checked in a while (about a year actually) and noticed that I had an email there from an online colleague that I connected with last year but I hadn't heard from in a while.

I thought maybe he got offended by something I said and just decided to stop communicating with me, but that wasn't the case at all. Apparently he sent me an email as usual, but it got bounced, telling him I had banned his IP (I hadn't) and then he tried at another email (this is the one I found the other day) as he thought I had felt offended by him. I could tell this by the way he phrased his email - telling me that if I didn't want to talk to him any more, then good luck with my life. Obviously he wrote that because he didn't hear from me and thought I was not interested in communicating with him any more.
I got confused at first with the date of the email as it had May, then I realised it was from May 2009, a whole year ago! What a surprise, but a nice surprise.

I sent him an email back telling him that I just found his email and that I couldn't believe I never saw it before that I didn't understand why I never heard back from him but that someone else was having issues with my email account recently too. He replied back today and showed me the error message he got with the bounced email. He also said that he was a bit miffed because he wanted to share his experience about being in Europe with me, but wasn't able to. So weird that it happened like that!

At least now there is another person I can talk to, albeit online, so it's all good.

I know him as he is the technical contact and we struck up a friendship after I contacted him with some technical questions, discovering that we are both from the same country of origin and speak the same native language and have similar personality traits.  He's both left and right brained (creative and logical) like me and that is so nice to find as it means it's someone who understands me a lot. Most people are either strongly creative or strongly logical, but not equally strongly both, so they have very different perspectives to me. It's nice when I meet people (even in the virtual world) that are similar to me, as it means they understand me and it means I can have intellectual discourse with them, but also discuss creative endeavours too.

It will be a nice reconnection as he's got a lot in common with me and he seems like a nice person.

Some more of my mothers delusions

On two occasions recently my mother has suggested I take my brother for a drive somewhere and have a nice chat with him. She said it would be nice if we, brother and sister could spend some quality time together like that.

Each time she said it, I just looked at her in complete amazement that her delusions would make her say something as insane as that.It's unfathomable to me that she is so deep in her delusions that she cant seem to understand that ours is not a "happy family" and that it never has been and that something like that will not work.

The idiot brother of mine, when he sees me, either tells me "fuck off" or "you fucking loser" or he sticks up his finger to me and gives me "the bird", with his middle finger. And if I try to talk to him, he tells me to "get lost". That is the person I am supposed to talk to to try to ask him to come with my anywhere?  She is kidding!

Even when I have tried to be nice him in the recent past, by asking him if he wanted food or telling him I closed up the chicken pen, he just grunts at me from his closed bedroom door, but only after I knock many times because at first he does not even deign to respond. Oh yes, he is such a normal person and the "suggestion" my mother made is so feasible and sensible. Totally not!

I told my mother that first of all he wears strong perfume and I cant tolerate it in the house where doors are open, nevertheless in an enclosed space like the car, which will just make it hard for me to breathe and secondly, he is an obnoxious asshole who takes great pleasure in antagonising, hurting and insulting me every chance he can get. I then told her I didn't know what planet she was living on, but it wasn't planet reality. Each time I then walked out of the room where she decided to accost me with this "suggestion".

I just kept shaking my head at this major delusion of hers. She will not see the reality and that is the issue here. She is responsible for keeping him behaving the way he behaves because she does not set up any boundaries (never has) for him, she does not apply any consequences to his actions and she allows him to get away with basically anything he does. Then she lays the blame all on me for everything, she continues to defend him and that just makes him behave even worse because he knows he can get away with anything as she will protect him. I am in such an unenviable position here.

How dare she lay all the responsibility on me. How dare she try to make it all about me. How dare she try to make it look like if I just took him aside, that is all it would take to make him behave normally and of course that puts all the blame and onus on me!  She is some piece of work that mother of mine! And I refuse to buy into her mad delusions any more.

Downpour of rain today

I left the house today to get to an appointment in the city, but as I was catching public transport, I was late - public transport options are either quite often unreliable. It made me 15 minutes late.

After I finished up, I went to the mall for a bit of window shopping and a little while later, a huge thunderstorm started. I heard this regular noise, like scratching when I was walking around - I was on the top floor and the ceiling has a glass roof.

It seemed that one minute the sky was just cloudy and there was still light with the sun not completely overcast and then the next minute, there was a huge deluge of rain that came pouring down, rapping loudly on the roof of the shopping mall. The downpour was so severe that it seemed to drop a whole lot of rain very quickly in a very short time. There was also some amazing lighting and thunder that was part of this thunderstorm - the lightning looked like it was sheet lighting and occurred quite far in the distance.

When I went to catch a bus later, it was still raining heavily, with big splats of rain falling down from the sky. I was exceedingly thankful that my good sense made me go back to the house to get my jacket and umbrella before I left, because not only was it raining heavily but it was also cold too.

Despite having an umbrella, my jeans were soaked from the calf down, partly from the rain and partly because it was a bit flooded on the roads and footpaths, from that sudden and huge deluge and both of those factors caused my pants to get soaked.  When I was on the bus, I could see that there were certain roads that were quite flooded, especially near the kerb area and it was quite interesting to see all the water be divided and fly off to the side when a car was driving through the flooded roads.

Now, four hours later, the storm has started up again. All of a sudden, this violent rain has come pouring down. You can hear the rain beating hard against the roof and the windows - it's raining quite steadily now and will probably continue to do so right throughout the night. Thank goodness I am inside now with the heater, warm and comfortable. They are predicting rain for tomorrow too, so looks like I wont be going anywhere tomorrow but staying in.

The gorgeous kitty is sleeping on my bed again - I think he really loves being here as it's soft, warm and comfortable. He was waiting on the mat at the back door when I went outside to look for him. He started purring as soon as I picked him up and took him to my room. He's such a beautiful cat!