This blog is essentially an open letter to my mother, in which I talk about what’s going on with me and what I find interesting and what projects I’m working on. It’s a vanity blog I keep thinking about ‘commercializing’ it but I get all sweaty and tired just thinking about it. If you want to post a comment, ya hafta email me at info at allegrasloman dot com…. I’ll make an account for you. Once you comment, it’s held until moderated once and then after that you can comment at will, if you remember your password. If you don’t, email me, and I’ll reset your password. A partial list of who I mention here used to be in the Dramatis Personae link, but I removed it out privacy concerns. Unless people are dead or public figures or something about them has been announced on facebook I don’t mention last names on the blog. People get nicknames if they are particularly memorable.
I was born in 1958 in western Mi?kma?ki. I had a magical childhood until my parents went to grad school. I was briefly engaged to a man whom I broke up with; married a fellow poet and lived with him for two years (he died October 2011); divorced him after I met Paul. Paul and I split up in 2007. We maintain good relations because it’s stupid not to and we still occasionally do things as a family. We have two grown children, daughter Katie who lives with her son Alex in the same household as Keith and Paul in Burnaby. I live in East Burnaby – in the same house I lived in when I first came to Vancouver in 1996. I now live with my only sibling, Jeff, who guest blogs here occasionally. As of this writing, I am content with and grateful for my domestic arrangements, and Jeff’s way too smart to comment one way or the other. Plus he fixes things, like the kitchen light, my fan, the toilets I don’t know how many times, the internet blah blah etc etc.
I write a wide variety of materials, sing, play acoustic six string guitar and mandolin, octave mandolin, mountain dulcimer and kazoo and occasionally I write sermons (well, really they’re homilies, but most people call them sermons) – and the last one was at Beacon Unitarian Church in January 2015, I think. For a variety of tiresome reasons, I no longer go to church. I gave it the old college try, but I’m not a very good Unitarian, even if the theology is interesting; I’m too easily offended and was raised atheist so I gave up membership August 2015.
I do standup (although mostly when nobody is listening) and bake biscotti. I worked in customer service for many years but I took 7 months off after Paul’s brother John died and by a miracle, considering that he cleaned out my desk, my boss took me back in the spring of 2010. I was then laid off May 30 2012. I wasn’t sorry. It wasn’t the same company, and I was properly remunerated for my trouble.
My interests include film, technology, bugs and critters, writing, anarchism, science fiction, Unitarianism, Quakerism, unamplified homemade music including filk, the internet (duh…) and the cooler side of genealogy – the bad stories about black sheep. I am also interested in all kinds of things my mother finds incomprehensible, so mostly I don’t post about them 😉 except to my locked Livejournal account, which is gone now, so sorry. I’m @TheCorrection on twitter, I quit facebook when Miss Margot, my last cat, died, and I’ma not tellin’ you my account name on Reddit ’cause I’ve said things there that are in horrific taste. But they are funny. I dated up until about eight years ago but after I was sexually assaulted (relax – while it really was sexual assault, I really wasn’t hurt physically and not much mentally) I stopped thinking of myself as being someone who will ‘find someone’ and am now cheerfully out of the game, although I will make rude and non public comments occasionally along the lines of Phwa! what pecs! or Dat ass! regarding any human I find attractive. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I do consider myself to be polyamorous – you can love more than one person and if you’re a wedding planner gymnast crossbred with a quartermaster and a ninja, you can even keep up the intense self-management and communication requirements that go along with that. I make no such claims on my own account and have no problems sitting on the sidelines of romance henceforward although it took the best part of a year and getting all the way through menopause for me to arrive at this point.
Please send me pictures of baby animals including baby relatives, anybody doing martial arts, medical news, moose, airplanes, technological marvels, microphotography, weird weather phenomena especially ice, hail, cyclones and lenticular or or fallstreak or Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, and anything you think is cool. Run it through Snopes and Wikipedia first please, this isn’t internet 101.
I really didn’t want cable, and in previous editions of this ‘about’ fulminated against cable with vigour, but now I have both cable and the Shaw equivalent of TIVO, and I have to say I don’t mind having the ability to tape stuff I can’t watch real-time. See how easy it is to change my mind? ‘specially when someone else is paying for it…. *update, I pay for half. The slippery slope! And we are cord cutting, but slowly.
I’m a freethinker/mostly anarchist, and I generally vote NDP or Green, not because I think they could manage their way out of a wet paper bag, but because the alternatives are demonstrably and meaningfully worse, specifically with reference to Indigenous rights, climate change, globalization and human rights in Canada. Except John Horgan, he’s a fucking capitalist in an orange toque. I have qualified for a Firearms Acquisition Certificate… but I don’t have it yet. I have chosen not to own firearms. I do love the sound of a pump action shotgun. The first real gun I ever fired was a black powder rifle. (I don’t count air guns.) Cousin Reck (d. spring 2012, and what a loss) called me ‘fierce’. IRL I’m pretty laid back and actually, the word ‘wimp’ does come to mind. YMMV.
I try really hard not to use racist, sexist or bigoted language. I do anyway, but I want to be called on it.
The abovenoted picture was taken in 2020 and then filtered. It’s a reasonably accurate likeness of what I looked like then.
I have been vaccinated for COVID-19, got a booster, and get a flu shot every year. I have been vaccinated for Hepatitis as well since I was in food production very briefly.