Month: December 2004

AP photo credit. These are lynx kittens. One last furry animal pic for the year.

May I take this opportunity to wish my audience (that would be my mother, two of my coworkers and a couple of Unitarians) a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR, filled with peace, prosperity, and not very much broken glass. I’ll be soaking in a hot tub at midnight. Hope you will be as comfortable as I.

Pic is random BC scenery, prob’ly Widgeon Creek.

The Lymond series changed my life. Dorothy Dunnett is one of the best writers in English. The six novels in the series are The Game of Kings, Queen’s Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle and Checkmate.

I can’t recommend them enough. Despite the fact they are jam packed with battles on land and sea, historical characters, and have the single most incredible hero in all of literature, Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, for some reason they are considered chick books.

I remember Ingrid telling me that for a YEAR after she read the Lymond books, she was thinking to herself in situations What Would Lymond Do? Then I read the Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold and had yet a new hero to worship. If you like humour, action, dastardly villains and I mean DASTARDLY and deeply flawed and brilliant heroes, look no further than any of the Vorkosigan novels. I started with (strangely enough, loaned by Ingrid) Cordelia’s Honor and that’s not a bad place to start, as it has the single most memorable exchange between a happily married couple in all of English literature. Suffice it to say that the word “Shopping” is involved.

Wade Davis in person and in print is a man to change your brain. In person he’s the single most attractive person I ever saw who wasn’t making a living from his appearance; as a presenter, I have only ever seen one other person who could command a room like that, and that was Harlan Ellison in his heyday. On a printed page he has a masterful and restrained prose style. He has a new book out which Chapters, may they disappear into the Hellmouth, isn’t carrying. At Xmas time they aren’t carrying a coffee table book by a local author? Duh. Anyway, the book I like best of Wade’s, which I reread every winter, is One River.

Edward Shlain’s Sex, Time and Power. Some of it is just plain wrong, some wrongheaded. But where he got it right, he got it very right indeed, and I read the book in 24 hours last Christmas while my brain just about burst. It is impossible to look at the godawful mess between men and women the same way after reading this book. It improved my life a lot. Essentially, once I read it, many human activities which had made no sense to me at all, did. The hair thing, for one thing.

Elaine Pagels’ the Gnostic Gospels. The first place I ran into God as Female and it made sense. (God was a boy for me prior to that). Spinetingling.

Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, Men and Women in Conversation. This book changed how I talk to men, and how I listen to them. I should probably go back for a refresher.

First Things First by Stephen Covey and a couple of his henchthingies – one of those neverending self improvement books. However there are a LOT of good ideas in it and it continues to help me.

On the self improvement note, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. So simple that a sophisticated person might say what nonsense, but I didn’t. A powerful and thought provoking little book.

Kerri Hulme’s The Bone People. I don’t know what to say about this Booker Prize winning novel except that it is such a rare and crazy book with such deeply memorable characters, that the flimsy plot means nothing compared to how it’s written. Easily one of my top ten favourite books.

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy. Finally picked it up in soft cover. A beautiful and chilling fantasy.

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, OF COURSE.

The Lost Queen of Egypt by Lucille Morrison. Yes, I know this is a children’s book. But the depiction of family life and the strength of the friendship between the characters is truly memorable. I’ve been looking for an (affordable) copy for 30 years.

Paul Blackburn Collected Poems. I dedicated the long poem In Colours Unsuspected to him. A great great poet. Everything I love best about poetry, the direct voice, the passion, the economy, the grinding down of one’s own daily life in the mill of art to achieve transcendance, it’s all there.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s the Mists of Avalon. The ultimate read in the bath book. Makes magic and myth and real life into something truly great.

I light a candle for Tori’s stepdad, who died of cancer in Newfoundland this week. She’s gone to the funeral, where I hope she will be of some comfort to her poor mother, who is burying her second husband. My woes look small and my complaints like the bleating of a sheep stuck, due to its own stupidity, to a fence, by comparison.

I light a candle for George P who passed away from heart failure this week. He will be sorely missed by many for his honesty and deep mind.

I light a candle for a member of my family experiencing issues around custody right now. May it come right for the child involved.

The non bf was here yesterday and chose to interact with me rather more than has been the case previously. As in, Katie said Don’t Send Him that Picture, and I said I will, and then revealed that I already knew what his email address is. Oops. Nosy woman that I am.

Hi Sam! For those of you who don’t know, the picture of the people standing around a truck that’s gone off the road was actually provided by Sam, who said she was really surprised when she found it on my website. Just remember, in cyberspace nobody can hear you scream, and a picture is forever, once ‘oogle picks it up!

Honourable mentions for Books. Brain Droppings by George Carlin, a very funny book.

Blue Skies No Candy by Gael Greene. A very funny, entertaining soft core porn novel. All the soft core I’ve done is in emulation of that book… the notion that there are a MILLION nice men out there, and you simply WON’T have time to sleep with them all – so you’ll have to write about it instead. Sigh…. Man, ya gotta be careful what you read when you’re 18.

Um. Angel is on his knees embracing Buffy. Like, the Bufferama is over, but the images linger on – we got to episode 4 of the 3rd season and that’s where we got beached. I ADMIT IT. When David Boreanaz/Angel fell back out of hell into the vamps mansion, stark naked, I made Katie run it back. More than once. Then Katie said it might be a stunt man. Jumping Jimmy Christmas, what a horrid notion! That my own child could say such a thing. Mind you, I’m thinking that a place of torture that makes you look like you just spent 6 months working out and powering down protein shakes can’t be all bad. Where do I sign up?

I shake my fist at Glen, who got me started on all this stuff. Glower, glower. But he knows I love him anyway.

o, books! I forgot Dave D’s Machine Language, the best poem ever in the English language, but I’m prejudiced; he uses a word I invented. But that isn’t really a book… I’m sliding off the criteria now. Enough rambling, I have to get back to my world building.

Finally got it straight with my webmeister how to get into Wiki so I can mess with my website and make it more fun interesting and educational. Don’t know when THAT will happen, but at least the possibility is there.

Went walking in Deer Lake Park with Paul and Peggy, then they fed us lunch. Any lunch that includes cold sliced lamb is a feast indeed.

Saw the Incredibles yesterday. Enjoyed it tremendously. Asked Paul what he liked best about the movie and he said, “The way they all worked together as a team.” Subtext: We don’t.

Here’s a pic from the walk.

I had pics of Joe L. setting fire to things at a beach but I’m taking them down as I transfer over the blog posts.

I was waiting for a final count before I posted anything, but the scale of the destruction in the area affected by the boxing day earthquake is such that the exact death toll will never be known. I light a candle for the victims, survivors and rescue workers.

If you have the time and money, please make a donation to the International Red Cross.

Glen added something to my site and now I have to come up with the gumption to look at / deal with it. Sometimes I wish I had a tech geek grafted to me.

Much slayage in our domicile last evening, but we all swore a mightly oath that we’d do SOMETHING outside today and no longer fall into the arms of Drusilla and Spike and the rest of the bloodsucking crew.

I should examine our food stores and determine exactly what we have to for picanic baskets.

Buffy has definitely given me a boot in the rear end in her patented high kicking way… A project I shelved a while back was whispering to me half the night. There’s nothing in common between Buffy and this other thing except that there is ‘a situation’ and a bunch of lovely, weird, intelligent people in it. But a pilot and 13 episodes? Sheesh. That’s a lot of writing. Every time I think of the characters, I can SEE them! I can see what the front reception area looks like, and what the main character looks like, and what his voice sounds like when he sings (he’s a retired one hit wonder). There is A LOT of music in the story. Music is actually integral to the story. No more talking about it, it’s bad luck.

My domestic sitcheeation at the moment does unspeakable things to long dead bears, and there’s zip I can do about it except stiffen my orbicularis oris to the point the speech is no longer possible.

Pic is something random from the last few days.

Didn’t get out of bed until almost ten, although I was up reading around 9; finished Bob Wilson’s Bios, an sf novel about an extremely poisonous planet.

Paul is frying turkey sausages for the stuffing, and cutting up onions. Pretty soon I have to go downstairs and liberate the turkey from John’s fridge (there was obviously no room at the inn in OUR fridge, and we weren’t leaving it on the back deck…) and clean it, stuff it and toss it on the oven.

I am trying to develop enthusiasm for anything but it’s as if when I’m not at work I’m an unwound clock.

In about 15 minutes Jan and Jim will turn up (presumably with Carly in tow) and then I get to hang out with some of my favourite people.

Katie and John bonded last night over Buffy. Sigh. John and Katie have not had the best uncle niece relationship ever, but it has improved quite a bit since the summer, and that is a relief. Don’t know exactly what triggered the shift in Katie; John is the same as he ever was, only more so, if you know what I mean, and if you know John you know exactly what I mean.

It was wonderful seeing my folks yesterday. Paul’s mum Phyllis called while we were there to let us know she wasn’t spending Christmas evening by herself. I was relieved about that, too.

I imagine Keith is having a great time sitting around in his underwear playing games at Jeff’s. Must start on the books Jeff gave me. The new Coupland looks lovely and it’s set in Vancouver…. the other one is about how men are going to disappear in 125000 years. Is that nearly soon enough? I personally think mass human extinction is a lot closer than that, in fact I may be a participant, but I will examine the evidence.

Have a lovely boxing day, and try not to spend any money.

After a lovely turkey lunch care of my mother we visited with Barry and Jackie and Bonnie and Rani in the sun room, while watching all the birds at the feeders and then we watched quite a bit of Lord of the Rings III on Adrenaline and now we’re about to jump on the boat and come home. All in all a fine visit. Keith’s off to Jeff’s. Sigh. Wonder if I can talk Paul into doing the Pacific Buffet on the boat? Kids made out like bandits, and I got books for xmas, big surprise. Happy Boxing day everybody.

Have yourself a medicated Christmas

As your purse allows,

Numb your brain cells, then sit in a chair and browse

but have yourself a medicated Christmas now.

now we’re home for the holidays

they’ll be squalid days

I know…..

etc.

Got on the ferry at 7 am; Katie slept not at all, Paul was up at 3 am and I slept like the big baby I am until about 5, when Paul came back in. To my utter astonishment Katie came for a hug, so I already got my Christmas present. For me Christmas is about food and family. The ever heightening Mutually Assured Consumption drives me batty; Paul and I deked around Christmas presents for each other with no difficulty, and considering what a curmudgeon he’s being I am so glad. Wouldn’t give me a penny for coffee on the freaking ferry this morning! I had to go back down to the car deck and shake the Subaru out for change, dadgum it. Found and reported a suspicious package but I guess nobody wanted to believe that it was a bomb, so it was still there when I got off the boat. Keith wanted to touch it and I told him not to.

Ate a fantastic meal at Mike’s place last night. Tori gave me a self-portrait, which is a)very fine and b) still there, because in my haste to depart (to get enough shut eye, and get Keith out of there because he was feeling a little under the weather, etc) I left it on the mantel like a dolt. Had to phone back to apologize, but I’ll be back to collect it Monday or Tuesday.

Also Tori had a couple of mixed music playing-off-the-computer music loops which were tasteful and appropriate. Paul and I were really impressed, a solid & eclectic mix of music.

Still can’t believe what happened in Toronto with respect to travel. Paul and I and the kids would probably have been able to get in, but travelling around Toronto would have been a nightmare and flying/renting a car to get to London would have been one of those You Could, But Why Did You Bother stories. Hope to heaven Lexi and her hubby got to Europe and Bonnie got to Victoria – I will phone her sis shortly to find out.

Last note. I am so mad I could take up carpeting with my face. Yesterday Katie logged on, or tried to, to her MSN account and found out it had been hacked and she no longer had access, although the password clue had been changed to If u want ur mail talk to demos_love_all. Using her brother’s account, she checked the profile and demos_love_all@hotmail.com purports to be a man living in Egypt. Anyway, he – or whoever – told her if she wanted her mail back to contact him, and Paul and I immediately said no, and then made a panicked call to Mike, who promptly emailed us something to scan our system with. Katie then was the freaked out recipient of a lecture about computer security (above noted scumbag had not actually messed with her profile) and told to use Mozilla instead of Internet Exploder. Then we checked to see if there had been unauthorized access to anything else on the hard drive, and apparently not. Needless to say we’re all really shaken and cheesed off, and Katie is scared all of her friends will think any nasty emails that demos_love_all writes are really from her. Also, she never wrote down anybody’s email address, so she’s flying blind – apart from her non-bf and a couple of other people she’s no idea what the addresses are of all of her friends. I have memorized everybody’s email for anybody that matters to me so I don’t have to go through this kind of crap if my hard drive crashes. When my hard drive crashes. Heavy sigh.

Much Christmas Joy and Hugs to you all. I wish my brother would get here, can’t open prezzies until he shows up!

Just made myself a hot rum toddy. I am feeling much better now.

Take a gander at it while you can – archives will disappear on December 31st.

(2019 says not)

Off to Mike’s for dins tonight. Haven’t figured out the exact lineup of attendees – Paul has already declared that he’s going to stay home and do revision on the 340, seeing as how he’s actually going to be called upon to fix them in the New Year.

Gave Katie one of her Christmas presents early (she was whining about wanting to open something NOW) so I handed her the Chicken soup for the teenager diary and she promptly locked herself in her room for the day, only coming out to say such things as “What do you think is my best feature?” and OF COURSE I say physical or character, and she says, physical, and I say, because it’s a no brainer, her eyes. (This sentence deleted, because even though Katie doesn’t read my blog she’d flail the mucus out of me if I even hinted at it.) Then she goes back in her room and I can hear her cursing every once in a while because ‘this is really hard’. Then she comes out and asks for a definition of compassion, which really has me squirming until I come up with something half assed, and then she goes back into her room. Some powerful alchemy going on in there, can’t say what the results will be.

Keith, who each day drifts a little closer to being a Buddhist, is constantly yelling at me, usually while he’s playing war games on the computer, to practice a little compassion every day. This is in response to my ill mannered attempts to pound sense into my spouse. (I’m still verbally abusive, I’m just much more crabby about it than I used to be). He’s right of course, and if I can make my way through the thickets of pomo irony, I’m sure a more compassionate heart will be mine.

Keith just crawled outta bed and is taking in Cowboy Bebop, a gift from Who Else, Mike.

Okay, I’ve been putting this off for many weeks now, but I finally have to confess, and it’s crazy making.

My cat has asthma. I really wish this weren’t true, but we went to the vet and the vet gave her steroids in pill form, which she ingested without question in her food, and she promptly stopped making that god awful coughing like she was going to die sound. So then we spent an ungodly amount of money on her puffer. Yes, Kira has a freaking puffer, with a little kitty mask. Keith picks her up every night and administers her meds and then promptly feeds her (associating something nice with something unpleasant). Now I come from a universe where cats are a free good and they don’t cost anything to maintain except food. So the notion that I’m going to be coughing up, you’ll excuse the expression, money for the rest of her natural goes against all of my feelings about how cats are supposed to be. People who like cats – or love cats – or are obsessed about cats – will think I’m an inhuman beast. But really the only thing that concerns me is that Keith is gonna be gone for a week and I’m the one on puffer duty while he’s at my brother’s. Apparently a week of the new LOTR game and sitting in his underwear has more appeal than hanging around here, and who could blame him? Pic is a childhood memory.

Ah, feeling much better. The inaugural soak was really quite wonderfully self-indulgent and there were a lot of folks there. It was good to see the Dalai Jarmo and his lady wife and stepson; also in attendance, Trent, Tori, Mike of course and two of my krewe, being Paul and Keith. Got home about one and didn’t get out of bed until AFTER ten o’clock, which is like, miraculous, or something.

Had a warm human experience with a government employee this morning. For reasons that I REALLY don’t want to get into right now, I need my divorce decree. Jumping Jimmy Christmas, don’t get me started. This is a rant I will simply have to save for the stage; my blood pressure leaps up like a homesick angel when I think about it. Now that means I had to go to the government of Ontario webslight and try to find information. Got it wrong once, then went back to the webslight to find out that there was some not particularly small print and that led to the SEXIEST MAN’S VOICE IN HISTORY SAYING, “Hi. (short sexy pause, I’m not making this up). You ‘ave reach da Central Registry for Divorce. Please leave a message wit’ your name only and your telephone number, area code firs’, and we will return your call as soon as possible. Bonjour, vous avez rejoint…” etc. Honest to Murgatroyd, he sounded like he was recording a message as to which item of clothing I should remove first during our next tryst. I damned near dropped the phone. I wanted to play it for the kids but it was a toll call, and besides, they refused. Anyway, I carefully spelled by name and left my number – this was yesterday, mind – and some bushy tailed female of a certain age returned my call this morning, we had a pleasant and productive conversation and I now have my decree file number, which means I can get a copy. And don’t get me started about what I need it for, you’re gonna have to pay to get in for that story. Except my mom, you can have the story for free.

I know it’s going to strike a lot of you as weird, but I write this blog for two people – me and my mother. I know I have fans – they send me pix, some of which I post – but mostly I write this stuff for me and my Mom. Now I’m late, and my mother is suffering low blog pressure, so I’ll hit send and get going on “Allegra Avoids Christmas, opus 46”.

Sidney Redlitch… that name ring a bell? How about Collignon? He’s da guy who gets his apartment turned upside down by Amelie? The cat in Monty Python (‘he’s on the mend’)? Madmartigan from Willow when the fairy dust hits him? That feeling you get when somebody clearly enunciated one thing, but your nervous system forced you to hear something else? When the universe completely shuts down, restarts, and comes back as a man in blackface singing “Mammy?”

My charisma machine is in the shop, so I’ll have to do some thinking for a change. Sigh. I’m so unused to it. That is what scares the wee-hoo outta me about going back to school. Think? Or “that kind of think” again? I have been constructing a nest for my brain for what feels like a thousand years (some days) and the idea of forcing myself out of it causes me no end of grief.

And when I am not thinking about that, I’m thinking about my shoes. I am really emotionally attached to my shoes and I want to wear them everywhere, whether or not they are appropriate to the occasion, and really I should be wearing other shoes. But I am telling you, at my age, a comfortable pair of shoes is worth diamonds and rubies and all that carborundaceous gaudery that you’re supposed to want more than a decent pair of shoes because it’s inherently more “valuable”. I could be dead tomorrow – I want a comfortable pair of shoes today. Dadgum it. There’s a lot of other things I want today too, and with any luck I’ll get them.

Distributed hugs, TTR and biscotti at the office, with Samantha and Katie in tow, and then stepped into Loughell Mall long enough to realize I could feed two teenaged girls or get the Starcrud card tanked up again, and realized that people come before things so put food into the children, not that it was really food, and went home where I listened to Keith blether on most entertainingly about the game engine in the new Lord of the Rings game.

Now the dreaded Buffy has returned to my screen so we’re in Out of Mind Out of Sight right now. Knee high black boots and a pink on pink floral skirt and a white v neck tee? Okay, I’m confused. Now she’s entirely clad in black leather. That’s more the heck like it. And Angel just showed up, and he is smouldering as always. This sentence deleted but I will mime it on demand, in person.