Month: September 2004

I am feeling entirely blah, joints achy, fighting off some form of ick. Katie is still headachy but not light sensitive so I am hoping it isn’t a migraine. All I want to do is curl up and drowse, maybe with Svejk to hand, and I have to go to work today.

Paul off to Calgary to fix a recalcitrant airplane. Not an airworthiness item – more light pipe problems. The thing about fibreoptic stuff is that it has many more ways to go weird than plain electrics. And a single box has 18 connectors and if you get one wrong the whole thing is squirrelly. And instead of troubleshooting the techs who aren’t really familiar with the system replace boxes, which frequently doesn’t fix the problem and adds a whole new level of complexity to it. And also people don’t report error messages, on the time honoured military principle that if you don’t report it you don’t have to do anything about it. So wish him luck, the airplane is only going to be on the ground for four hours. We all know Paul is a genius, but four hours to get a fix in for an ongoing glitch in an entertainment system with four separate operating systems all interfacing madly, AND it could be a power issue, AND it could be just cabling, is a bit much. Just a wee tad. Mind you if he pulls it off he’ll be very pleased.

Keith was sparring last night, and he nearly got off unscathed but he fell down when somebody trapped his foot.

Katie and I and Paul and Ashley went to the Canada Games Pool last night and all I did was soak, I was so freaking exhausted. Ashley kept exploding out of her bikini top in the most entertaining way. I’m so tired I can barely lift my arms to type. SIgh.

I didn’t REALLY get enough sleep.

Great time singing and playing at Tom and Peggy’s last night. Mike J, Nicki and Denise in attendance, as well as the usual gang of idiots (myself, Paul and John). They fed us exquisite cherry broiled salmon. And then bickered about how it was overcooked. Some people!!! Paul and I thought it was perfect… maybe they got the wrong end or sumthin.

Picked Katie up at Jessica D’s afterwards and she was complaining of a headache so I fluttered around her and fed her various nostrums until she went to bed. Then I forced Paul out of bed to ask her if she was feeling well enough to sleep now. Paul is really hesitant to talk to Katie because she can be pretty crabby towards him, but I said that if he doesn’t occasionally act like a caregiver rather than an authority figure he’s missing some points when he’s counting his crib.

The sunshine yesterday was glorious and I’m so happy I was out in it. Homemade chicken soup for lunch today, and it’s yummy. Put some dirt in the hole in the front yard and planted some digitalis and camas and dill and something else, I can’t remember. Very random, just like me.

I light a candle for Darfur.

I light a candle for all victims of cross border kidnap for the purposes of prostitution, and all the child victims of prostitution.

I light a candle for my sermon next weekend in Courtenay….hope it goes well. But my MOM and my GRANNY and my AUNTIE will be there, so it will be swell. And I get to drive up the island highway…. road trip road trip road trip!!! My mother is ECSTATIC that I’m driving. Frankly so am I, I love that stretch of road.

 

(note from the perspective of 2019 – I did not mention that I had an IBS attack and everybody else had to wait in the car while I had an attack of brown sad just off the Island Highway)

Watched Heroes of the East last night with Mike. Very funny movie, just begs to be remade with a post millennial sensibility. Chinese Kung Fu expert is tied in an arranged marriage to a Japanese martial arts expert (female, of course) and they get into a cross cultural argument about which form of martial arts is best. Well, one thing leads to another and she goes crying back to Japan after hubby whips her butt in a couple of fights using different techniques. He kind of remonstrates with her about ninja techniques and that’s when she blows town. (Subtext: Why are you trying to f*cking sneak up on me and kill me? Wa, you don’t love me any more!)

Hubby writes her a letter saying, c’mon home, I’ll whip your butt again, and it falls into the hands of her sensei’s best pupil (who thinks she’s kinda cute), who takes it as a challenge to the honour of Japanese martial arts. Many many many many many fight scenes ensue.

The dubbing and the sound effects are so bad that words cannot begin to describe the watery monstrous depths of their incompetence, but as is the case with so many badly dubbed Chinese chop socky films, the bad dubbing ends up being part of the fun. There’s even a crypto homo thing in it which just had me rubbing my eyes. The guy with the sai (now there’s a nice phrase) is represented as being a flamer. Watch the movie and tell me I’m wrong.

Anyway, it’s kind of a seven samurai thing. Given that the Nipponese f*cking hurt China really badly, I think there’s much less racism in it than one would expect given the date (1972) and the Chinese are represented as gracious victors (of course the Kung Fu types win, which is not really what happens in real life when you do freestyle stuff these days because it’s the kickboxers who are cleaning up).

This movie could really stand to be remade and if I warnt so busy I’d be sitting down with Mike and hammering out a script; talk about a piece of cake. I would DEFINITELY leave in the part where she destroys the garden during a practice. “Master Master! She’s kicking down the walls!” “What the ffff? You stop that rightnow, or we’ll have no house!” “But you didn’t give me a place to practice!” “Practice in the gym, you crazy woman! And wear something less cheesy than that stupid gi, your bazooms are hanging out.” “Hmph! Okay, but only if I get to throw out all your Chinese junk martial arts weapons.” “Over my dead body, you maniac!” “Hya! I kick your worthless ass!” FIGHT SCENE.

And I’d leave in the scene with the food fight. With CGI you could have a real picnic, all those little grains of rice falling to say “Kung Fu is better!” and “Karate rules”.

And I’d leave in the scene where they slap all the hand weapons they are concealing in their robs on the table between them. That was really weird and funny. The way things are between men and women in this culture right now, that could be made very political and quite cutting. The drunken Buddha fight scene is a classic. So all I’d be doing is writing about 30 lines of script and putting “Insert really nicely choreographed fight scene here” and then I could go back to sleep. Life is grand.

The best thing about a remake, of course, would be the ability to actually give people hairstyles that suit them. Big hair for men? Holy crap! Big hair that never moves during a fight scene? Bleechhh!

Coat and bustier received with thanks from Sally. When I have the complete ensemble (2 weeks hence) I will have a photo taken. The coat makes me look nine feet tall, and people get the hell out of my way when I’m wearing it. (Tried it out at Superstore, just for giggles). The bustier is just plain rude, there’s no way around it. (Paul and Mike approved, though! Mike referred to the material as Nauga-conda.) I think I will substitute a black turtleneck when I’m wearing the outfit to church. I’m keeping an open mind about wearing the bustier to work though. I think about the time I shaved my head (okay, buzzed my head) and how Ina screamed and threw all the mail into the air when she saw me for the first time after I did it. I suspect this will have a similar effect…. Who could pass up on such malicious joy?

Many pardons for the typo in the previous post, should read ROBES, not robs.

Great youth session today, although the adults outnumbered the youth…. hm, there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Off to get some calories, much love to all.

(2019 I gave the coat away but the bustier’s sitting around somewhere. Sally died two years back – she’d complained to her doc for months and by the time they found it was cancer she had about a month left. FUCK DOCTORS, FUCK EM HARD)

I am in the process of assembling a list of music to be played at my funeral/wake. I remember reading about Anselm Adorne’s funeral arrangements… how many ells of cloth for him to be wrapped in, later to be donated to the poor (note to self, blecch)… how many prayers to be said by how many holy people, which pieces of property went off the the church to grease his putative entrance into the life of the redeemed, etc etc.

You start off, when you make funeral arrangements, with a very comfortable and in some ways ludicrous assumption, which is that there is going to be a civil society to look after all that, and relatives who won’t just be rolling you into the nearest convenient hole.

Having acknowledged that it is at best morbid and at worst a wretched waste of time to think about it, here is a brief selection of the music I want played at my funeral (not in order):

John Hiatt’s The River. Very elegiac and appropriate.

Bill Nelson’s Flaming Desire. Guess that’s more for the wake, being a quite secular song. Bill’s got a nice blog, or did the last time I checked.

Enya’s Crazy Day (also for the wake).

Meshell Ndegeocello’s God Shiva.

Dead Can Dance Saltarello (of course) and Song of Sophia.

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Sheryl Crow’s Every Day is a Winding Road.

David Sylvian and Robert Fripp God’s Monkey.

Radiohead’s I Might be Wrong.

Oysterhead’s Oz is ever Floating.

The Cult’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.

Just Blue – Can’t remember the artists, it’s a cylinder record at my parent’s place, but it has quite the most remarkable clarinet solo on it I have ever heard.

Anyway, that’s enough to go on with. I guess most of that is stuff for the wake… I should sort through the list at some point.

In family news, those anxious to hear about Zeek! should be at ease. He in fact had no rotten teeth, and merely needed a good cleaning. Zeek’s attitude towards awakening from having his teeth cleaned and sitz platz glands cleaned out was to unlimber his appetite (I didn’t get breakfast, you know) and eat everything he could con us into putting in his bowl.

Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Vet, I’m going to eat like a front end loader, CAUSE I CAN.

Kira’s vanished. There was lightning this morning, so she will probably not be in a hurry to come home, she’s terrified of lightning and probably cowering somewhere.

Mike’s bringing Heroes of the East over. If he says it’s his favourite Kung Fu movie of all time it should be pretty spectacular. We will probably be turning his laptop into a viewer again. Must remind Keith to prep the speakers.

Off to Sally’s in Maple Ridge to get the bustier and the pants fitted at 10 this am, then back into town to do a food shop (Paul says he’s coming with), and then if it quits raining some yard work and if it doesn’t some long overdue dejunking. Paul has made it quite clear that something, hopefully a long list of something, has gotta go; the clutter is increasingly a mental health issue for him and I can’t really argue the point.

I am seriously considering posting an open letter to the VP HR at my work to this blog, but I imagine the sane coworkers who read this will hold my hand, look deeply into my eyes over the lunch table and say, “You rahhhhlly don’t want to do that, do you?” and I’ll probably sigh and agree. It’s going to be great though, I was taking as my text the Clue Train manifesto and the definition of a court jester I found in a scholarly book from the University of Chicago. It was going to be a masterpiece, honest.

Well, I’m burning daylight. I have food to prep, dishes to do, and a very grumpy husband to placate. He’s spent the last two days of his days off busting ass on fixing yet another rotten spot in the basement (I guess I didn’t mention the flood in my blog), and what with that and teens at home (Katie busted ass too I might add, she washed the kitchen floor yesterday among other cleaning activities may the saints be praised) and hauling Zeek to the vet, why, he hardly had any time to go flying with Dan P. Funny that. The kids and I went downstairs to watch Star Wars – Episode IV, thank you very much – and about 1/3 of the way through the movie the sound track mostly deregistered from the video with F_CKING HILARIOUS results. Imagine, HOWL HOWL WHURF SNORG GARGLE ‘rescue!’ HOWL WOWWOW BRRRRRUMMMM, while they’re about to shoot their way into the trash pile. I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself. Keith and Katie were laughing too. Then Keith said he could fix it and I disbelieved him and he did so fix it. So there. But I think the tape is pooched now. Then I came upstairs and Tom L. was sitting at my dining room table, along with Dan P and Paul, who had called Tom L. to come collect his trailer as we had filled it with junk. Next time we’ll MAKE him put the tarp on the damned thing. Long about 4 I heard the rain and groaned. With all that Drywall in there the rain will go SPONGE and the tipping fee will be much higher. Note to self, Tom L. needs a trailer tarp. I have a bunch of phone calls to make today and I’m feeling roughly as sociable as a Trappist monk, to quote Dunnett. Oh well.

Circle at Carol’s last night, very pleasant. Paul and Dan busy ripping up the basement floor (again) and Dan reputed to have said, How attached are you to this house? Brr.

I see Christy Clark is off to look after her 3 year old son Hamish. I think she’s off to look after Christy Clark, personally. Christy Clark, for those of you who don’t follow BC politics, is the deputy premier and generally considered one of the sharpest (in a political sense) of Gordo’s Merry Band of Troughlickers. She’s been stuck in the McFamilies portfolio with no hope of parole and has said so in public, so you know she’s choked.

So supposing you’re young, and well-connected, and energetic, and you’re hanging around with a bunch of guys who hate women and are too smart to say so in public? And your connections tell you something entertaining – get the f*ck out of cabinet beFORE scandals that will permanently taint you come rolling out of the Basi investigations? She hit a convergence – all the motivation in the world and a keen understanding of her life span as a politician – and she’ll be back in politics in a few years as the familiar-but-fresh-faced, has her priorities straight, untainted by scandal small-l liberal to prop the party up after Gordo’s gotten too smelly to approach. Mark my words, Christy Clark will be Premier during the 2010 Olympics. If that isn’t what she’s planning, I’ll eat something leathery; and I was going to put something rude in here, but my lawyer said it was a bad idea, although within the bounds of satire. Had something to do with Dick Clark.

Zeek! is off to the vet to have dentition rearranged. Wailed like a baby the entire ride; he didn’t get breakfast and that’s a hanging offense as far as he’s concerned. Kira still coughing every morning and every night.

I light a candle for those dead as a consequence of Ivan. There is a much higher fatality toll in the Caribbean than was reported as the truth is bad for tourism, don’t you know. And when there’s no oil to bring the tourists, falsehoods will not avail you.

And Jeanne is coming. I suspect the current track is wrong and she’ll make landfall at the top of Florida. Time to buy orange juice again.

Katie dragged Keith and me down to the puddle (Canada Games Pool) last night to work out, and I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone in my pain so I called Tom and Peggy. I’m already down two pounds from Monday so I can’t say I’m unhappy, and I’m sleeping lots better.

Couple hundred thousand people without power now in the South, but I guess people actually took the warnings seriously and not many fatalities. Katie’s bitching about her math and socials and how hard it is to do this year. She only does two courses at a time and it’s compressed and you can’t possibly miss a day, and there’s some inducement because you get a free lunch every week if you have perfect attendance. Keith is not talking about school much, but he did get a cinnamon bun off Natasha 2 yesterday, so that was the high point of his day. Must fly, have to herd kids into car and get to work.

Raining again. Katie stood in the kitchen looking out the back deck while a haircurling stream of curses came forth about the weather, and how the second she had to go back to school the weather started to suck.

Working out again tonight. Looks like it will be raining for the next 6 months, so finding appropriate indoor activities is a must. Spoke to Anne from church yesterday and she mentioned she’d been in the hospital briefly for tests and they’d actually put her in the emerg for a while but she’s okay now. What with the fallout from their parking lot accident, and the accident the day of Carmen’s funeral last February, they’ve had an exciting time lately, filled with doctors. None of the accidents were their fault, by the way. Just like my grandad, who drove a lifetime and never caused an accident, but whose back bumper seemed to have “BUTTHEAD ATTRACTANT” painted on it, in a colour only buttheads could see.

Ivan is headed directly for New Orleans, but hurricane tracks are chancy things. The 5 day forecasts have been dead wrong all the way along; we’ll see what happens.

I pray that there will be no fatalities, but given the love affair Americans have with cars and driving in ludicrously bad weather I doubt it. The ports along the Gulf Coast have been closed by the Coast Guard and a stretch of the Mississippi is closed as well. Katie’s friend Ashleigh asked if the Hurricane could come here and I said, kindly, no. Then I wanted to fish out an atlas and lecture her, but I didn’t take lectures too well when I was her age, so I kept shut.

Katie’s teacher Kelly took her camera away yesterday but gave it back. Katie sounded completely outraged which means she was probably being quite inappropriate with its use during school hours.

Absolutely dumping berloody rain. Katie said I gotta work out I gotta work out…. so we’re going tonight after work. She GOT UP AT 6:45 this morning AND TOOK A PICTURE OF THE SUNRISE. Special emphasis to pOp. Is that not disgusting? Keith appears to be suffering from some kind of queasiness and low grade fever but I think he went to school anyway. As this has been happening on and off for a couple of months now I suppose I should drag him in to a doctor.

Ivan is continuing to make the lives of my customers difficult. I have now heard quite a variety of stories, and all I can say is that I am watching the track very narrowly. I keep thinking it’s going to veer and hit New Orleans. Either that or it’s going to hit Mississippi, where they aren’t exactly expecting it. I notice that the current track is aimed right at Toronto. Thank heavens it’s just earthquakes out here!

Anybody read Eurekalert.org today? There’s plenty of hydrocarbons 10 miles down… relax, there is no oil crisis. Technology will save our asses from our current problems and give us new ones to be panic-stricken about.

I leave you with a quote from the brilliant writer / novelist Phillip Pullman…

What’s true about depicting life in general is true of our responsibility when it comes to depicting people. There’s a sentence I saw not long ago from Walter Savage Landor which is the best definition of this sort of responsibility I’ve ever seen: “We must not indulge in unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.” Easy cynicism is no more truthful than easy optimism, though it seems to be so to the young. In depicting characters who struggle to do good or be brave, and succeed, or who are tempted to be weak or greedy, but refrain, we the storytellers are providing our readers with friends whose own good behaviour, and whose high valuation of the courtesy or steadfastness or generosity of others, provides an image of how to behave well; and thus, we hope, we leave the world at least no worse than we found it.

It’ll probably be gone by the time you look, but there is a screechingly funny typo here:

http://www.internationaldelivers.com/site_layout/severe/cxt.asp

Hint, if it’s gone, they spelled Seamless, Seemless. Seems like less, get it? And then you look at what they are selling, which is for people who think Hummers are too easy to park.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that funny. Am I the last person in North America who konws owh to sepll?

Saw nicely coiled magenta coyote scat on the way out of the office. Wonder what SHE’S been eating. Also heard something that sounded like a bullfrog… in the middle of the yard at the next office building over. What it was I will likely never know, but it sure freaked me out. Are there birds that sound like bullfrogs?

Pictured is Keith and Kate feeding ducks at Kings Pond in Victoria.

Worked out last night. I was thinking about what to say about that that didn’t make me sound like an idiot and gave up. I mean, more gormless than normal. Katie joined me and Paul. So this morning I would like to talk about language, since actually using language to tell a short story seems to be beyond me.

I think I believe that everything we -can- see is somehow a gloss for a book or a piece of communication that we -can’t- see. The alphabet of the universe is the periodic table, and the grammar is the set of rules that govern how all those atoms interact. But there is a deeper grammar than that, a grammar that makes people believe in things they can’t see.

News Flash ! !

Gravity just got weirder.

Sorry, just had to throw that in. If it’s true about superstrings – and we’re just as a species starting to assemble the math to be able to come up with a question to prove it, or at least not be able to prove it untrue – then all that New Age horse puckey about vibrations, and some people vibrating on a higher plane, may just turn out to be true. Oh how the folks who worship at the concrete slab, wherein hides the spirit of reason, will wail and gnash their teeth. For I think the great moment of history is creeping up to us in dirty great rubber soled shoes, when enquiry will irrevocably prove itself the final pillar of faith. The Muslims – Muslims who have actually read the Koran instead of memorizing it – believe there is no question a human being can ask which does not lead one to a higher and more worshipful and awestruck appreciation of the creator. You cannot diminish God by trying to find out how the world is put together. It’s just not possible. I have dispensed with a personal creator as being rather untidy, although I believe you can’t diminish the creator by asking questions. There’s nothing in the Koran against science. There’s a lot of directions about how to behave, including the most sensible approach to money of all the world religions. Believe me, the world would be a better place damned near instantly if we actually followed the strictures of the Koran about money. Fat chance, of course. And like all the world’s religious tomes, the Koran suffers terribly from not having been able to predict the discovery of Ohm’s law and the invention of birth control, but that’s another issue.

The Hindus believe that there could be a billion billion people, and each worshipping a different face of the divine, and different faces yet would obtain.

Devout Christians believe that bats are birds, because the Bible tells them so. And when they are asked why the New Testament goes into Joseph’s ancestry in such great detail when he had nothing to do with Jesus in a biological sense, they all look like they’ve hit a door, and then tell me they’ll have to ask the pastor about that one. I’m mean – I send them to a website called Biblical Errancy and say that can’t properly call themselves Christians until they’ve worked through all the logical objections to the Bible. Really, if you’ve swallowed a heffalump, why strain at a tobacco horn worm? I think I’d RATHER eat a heffalump, they’re imaginary. Can’t possibly give you heartburn. Wonder what the caloric and food value of a tobacco horn worm is? Truly, my mind is a wonderful thing, and it always leads back to questions no sane human would see fit to ask. I mean, could I live on tobacco horn worms? Never Cry Hornworm, next up on the Discovery Channel.

My pOp, may the spirit of enquiry truly bless him, will be rolling his eyes at all this and wishing he’d never taken philosophy. It’s not that philosophy is a bad thing; it’s a very good thing, an intrinsically powerful tool in the Baloney Detection Kit without which modern life is difficult to navigate, and investigate. It’s just that philosophy renders one unfit for public life, because there’s nobody left around who can keep up with your arguments or is willing to fix the grounds for the argument long enough to make the whole foray into the tilting ground of reasoned argument worthwhile. It’s as if everybody wants the trumpets, the silken banners, the Byzantine silver armour with blue egret plumes, the tender maidens going ooo and aaaa, the jingling of spurs and harnesses, the snorting of horses and the ting of the jester’s bells, the flap of the great canopies in the summer breeze, the delicious fragrances from the hawker’s stalls…. but nobody wants to get out and fight ’cause it’s too bloody hard. Okay, everybody go home, nothing to see here. Move along. You want an argument? I have a night stick…. I didn’t think you wanted to argue with me. That’s where reasoned discourse has gone. It’s hiding, like the last Pilipino rail. Not quite mythical, but nearly extinct.

 

I am predicting that Hurricane Ivan will make landfall at Dauphin Island, and that the worst of the hurricane (in terms of rainfall) will pour down on Mobile (it’s at the back of a long inlet, making the storm surge a nightmare) and western Florida. I am also predicting it will be a category 3 when it hits, but wide as my back end, and the geography will go against folks; most of the fatalities on the mainland will be drowning. As NOAA urges: TURN AROUND, DON’T DROWN!

The mayor of New Orleans has just called for an evacuation; during Hurricane Georges in 99, the evacuation turned out not to be necessary… maybe New Orleans will luck out again. But if my spidey sense is correct, it’s Mobile that’s going to be underwater in 48 – 60 hours. Up until this morning I thought it would be the City of New Orleans. Oh, and watch for tornadoes… there will be some awesome twisters spinning off of Ivan. You can expect LA, AL and FL to all apply for federal disaster money – they are all going to need it.

another random picture from the recently taken ones, this one from the skate park. Shown are Katie and Samantha, who really should take no for an answer.

Paul was supposed to start his holidays yesterday and didn’t notice that he wasn’t supposed to go into work. Seeing as how the entertainment system on (aircraft identity deleted on the insistence of my lawyer) had decided to do a series of very bizarre things (turn on the reading light in row 13, works on row 22, among other Mack Sennett style symptoms) and it’s an overseas aircraft, he spent the whole day – from 7 am until I picked him up AFTER 10 pm – working on fixing it, it was just as well he went in. Two of his coworkers who will not be named although for two pins I would and to hell with my lawyer, WATCHED THE F*CKING HOCKEY GAME IN THE READY ROOM instead of helping him, after the widebodies were done around 2 pm. PS the aircraft is fixed now, although Paul is still wondering who walked off with the freaking (deleted on insistence of lawyer) and didn’t put them back. Note to self. Make sure the (deleted) are actually on the aircraft the next time you get on a plane.

Paul worried all the way to work about how his leadership style was ineffective, and I said if you can show me how to lead slackers (slackers being a milder substitute for the original word, which inferred sexual abuse towards the canine ilk) without hitting them repeatedly in tender areas and then asking Do You Understand Me Now? you will truly be stellar among leaders. Leading by example just doesn’t work anymore. There’s no societal notion of shame that actually operates across age, sex, cultural and religious lines. People can get on tv for doing unbelievably shameful, brutally stupid and just plain mind gogglingly rude things and people will pay for the privilege of watching them complain about how much sh*t they’ve received for ‘such a small error in judgement’. You can lead by example inside a group of people who already agree on certain things – like inside a church – and I can see the proof of that all the time. But generally? Across the board? Nah. You can’t wring shame from the shameless; you’re just raising the blood pressure of the well-behaved when you try. (This line deleted on the fevered insistence of my lawyer, after reading me the relevant sections on libel and slander in the Criminal Code of Canada). So Paul decided he’d just get them sent home from work without pay, so they can watch the World Cup on their own f*cking time.

I should prob’ly proceed to other things.

Leaving for church in about an hour… my first experience with the church youth. Will we survive? Will anybody attend? Sigh.