Two thoughts:

1) She is all shades of lovely.

2) I am friends with some people who have belittled me, dragged me down, scared me, indimidated me, guilt-tripped me, emotionally blackmailed me, bullied me, tore apart what I considered my world to be at the time and generally been quite unpleasant towards me.

If I can still be friends with THEM, why shouldn't I be friends with the woman I was madly in love with for two years?

"A bird flew into a cage then when it turned around it found the cage was locked.

If the bird was a God, what would be it's cage?"

From the Book of Questions by Vyassa.

(or, more accurately, from the tabletop rpg 'Nobilis'. A Game so vast in scope that I have only ever run it once for a couple of hours. However, thanks to tvtropes I found the blog of the Lady who wrote it (and all the little 'extracts' in the margins.)

Hitherby Dragons

I hope you enjoy them too.

P.

Laika (from the Russian: Лайка, a breed of dog, literally meaning, "Barker" or "Howler") was a Soviet space dog (c. 1954–November 3, 1957) who became the first living mammal to orbit the Earth and the first orbital casualty.
Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things at the time Laika's mission was launched. Some scientists believed humans would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so space engineers viewed flights by non-human animals as a necessary precursor to human missions.[1] The United States used chimpanzees; the Soviet program elected to use dogs.
Laika, a stray, originally named Kudryavka (Russian: кудрявка, literally meaning, "Little Curly-Haired One"), underwent training with two other dogs, and was eventually chosen as the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into space on November 3, 1957.
Laika died a few hours after launch from stress and overheating, probably due to a malfunction in the thermal control system. The true cause of her death was not made public until decades after the flight.[2]
Although Laika did not survive the trip, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness. It paved the way for human spaceflight and provided scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.
On April 11, 2008, Russian officials unveiled a monument to Laika. The small monument is near a military research facility in Moscow that prepared Laika's flight to space. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket."

(From Wikipedia.org)

I have decided that every year on this day I am going to think of Laika.

Peat.