About
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 thought about commercializing this blog, but everything I like doing I’ll do for free anyway, so what’s the point? 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 Nova Scotia. 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, Katie who lives with her boyfriend in New West and Keith who lives with his dad in Burnaby. I live in East Burnaby – in the same house I lived in when I first came to Vancouver in 1997. 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 fixed my clothesline. And a metric crapstack of other stuff.
I write a wide variety of materials, sing, play acoustic six string guitar and mandolin and octave mandolin and electric 12 string guitar, and occasionally I write sermons (well, really they’re homilies, but most people call them sermons) – and the last one was is at Beacon Unitarian Church in April 2012; I do standup (although mostly when nobody is listening) and bake biscotti and pick up hitchhikers and am on the Board of Trustees of my Church. 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, steampunk as an aesthetic, bugs and critters, writing, anarchism, science fiction, Unitarianism, 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. The really disgusting stuff is in a moleskine diary, and if that baby ever breaks loose whoa nellie. I’m u_must_b_joking on LJ, TheCorrection on twitter, Allegra Sloman on Traifbook, and I’ma not tellin’ you my account name on Reddit ’cause I’ve said things there that don’t reflect my Unitarian values very well. But they are funny. I dated up until about a year 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 celibate, 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. It is sexist in language but quite clear in intent.
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 Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, and anything you think is cool. Run it through Snopes first please, this isn’t internet 101.
My Unitarian Jihad name is Sister Birch Rod of Sweet Reason.
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 Rogers 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!
I’m a freethinker, 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 sovereignty, climate change, globalization and human rights in Canada. I have qualified for a Firearms Acquisition Certificate… but I don’t have it yet. 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.
This picture was taken in late 2008 and is a reasonably accurate likeness..
Last prior update October 26 2009, last update Dec 11 2009, last update June 2011, most recent update August 2012
