The next subject is a little more sordid but could lead to a prosperous opportunity. And that is the discussion of bottle dumps. Old bottles, in need of disposal, were thrown down a dirt-covered or grassy bank near a brook. Wow, that sounds like my neighbors.

Maybe there was an official bottle dump next to my house. Maybe the bottles were worth money. The family and their descendants had been living there at least one hundred years tossing bottles out.  Possibly, when I was banging down over the bottle-covered bank to get into the brook, fleeing Nike, I was stomping over money. 

I had an introduction to the concept of bottle dumps when I was probably about 10 years old. We drove by one location to get from one town to the next.  My parents exclaimed, “Oh that's quite a bottle dump over there.” I think my mother wanted to plan an adventure to search the area. Funny, it never occurred to anyone we might be living next to a valuable bottle dump. While fleeing for my life I did not have a moment to even glance at what kind of bottles lay there.   

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While visiting some friends, one of them knew a site with wonderful bottles. I went with them and I did find some extremely unique light green medicine bottles. I proudly placed them upon a shelf in my new home. 

There was total excavation to occurring a couple of houses away. I slowly made some connections with the growing chaos up the street from me. The church powers-that-be was making room for a parking lot. 

Animals had to find new places to live. This is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's song: ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. Instead of tearing down Paradise as in the verses of the song, they tore down trees which were paradise for the birds. 

They also tore down two houses which profited me because I could easily access wood from those 1800’s houses and the 1950s siding of the same era as my house. But then they did put up a parking lot for a church and the many automobiles.  

The bottle dump unearthed was located just downhill from the 1800s houses. Strolling through the area after getting home from work, I noticed the workers had saved out the many bottles they had found. I became very excited and thought maybe I'd take some for my collection I had previously begun, imagining what a nice addition they would be to my shelved collection. 

A very weird energy incident struck me. I hefted the box into my arms, and headed back toward my house. A strange sensation caused me to halt in my steps.  A strong odor of cigarettes and stale alcohol reminded me those were not my bottles. 

Someone had worked very hard gathering them.  I returned the box, set it down, trudged home, and when inside,  gazed at the bottles on my living room shelf. I felt good, I had legitimately collected those. I believe if I had brought the bottles home with me and placed them on my shelf, the energy in the room would not have felt good. There would have been a constricting darkness left there. 

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As long as we're talking about spirits of darkness,  it is probably a good time for me to sum up the catalysts leading to why I have such difficulty with math. This may answer some questions for others too. 

While training to be an effective advocate for abuse victims, I attended a workshop addressing the effects of sexual abuse on children. I receive an important insight into my life struggles. I've always wondered why I have had such difficulty with math I know some of it is my ADD but There is something else. And in this workshop I found what the something else was. 

I learned the possible causes for some children to find any success in attacking math problems or operations. There are many children and adults, unable to do well with math. And I fit that pattern. 

If a child is being molested, their mind works to forget it, oftentimes to go blank. In the classroom when emotionally wounded students are learning math facts and sorting things out, a defensive blockage results.

If their math activities require memorizing,  the child doesn't want to remember anything. They do not want to remember what has happened to them. You see if that child is trying to remember their math facts, they may be hesitant to do so because remembering the math facts might cause them to remember being molested.

They have protectively shut down. This theory makes a lot of sense to me as to why even as an adult I cannot do math. I did not learn how to tell time until 4th grade and I still don't do well with digital clocks or calendars. In working with adults who were victimized as children, I discovered there were many who claimed they were unable to do math with confidence.   

When I was teaching math in the sixth grade there were word problems, the worst scenario for me. I was going over how to solve a word problem and didn't really grasp how to do it.  It might have been one of those puzzles regarding two trains leaving at different times. 

All I could think of was to be glad I didn’t have to catch any trains. The other conundrum was how many people it would take to paint a fence. I was just glad I didn't have to have them paint my fence.  It hurts my head to figure out math problems, no longer on some math book page, but in my life.

I  want so much to know which would be the best deal according to how much something is per ounce. Note, the problem is, often the information provided is measured by the pound. I have no idea where to begin, so I just take the cheapest price. 

If you think back to my father's money system for marks on our report card, I never got any more than nickels for a reward for my marks in math. As I got into high school my marks grew worse.  In graduate school, I was doing fine with everything until I got into a situation where I had to figure out some kind of statistics for a study I was doing regarding student readers. Math has just been a complete nemesis for me.

I am a little sad as we come up to daylight savings time.  My dear friend who recently passed, and I  used to joke about how we should adjust the clock. She used to call me to remind me it was daylight savings time and to not even bother move my clock. 

She suggested we wait to fix it in the morning. And I've been doing that ever since. What is sad right now is she won't be calling me, to tell me to move my clock. She's just gone. That's what happens to people who just die without any warning.  She's just gone.