Month: June 2007

glad news, sad news

My philosophical buddy Avinash called and reminded me to be rational – it was a lovely conversation.  I met him while I was running the Simplicity Meetup group last year.

Katie has a job!!!! She picked it out, applied, interviewed her new boss as hard as he interviewed her, and I am very proud of her.

Lady Miss Banjola is a pharmacist! Dred her blisterpakking skillz!

I have come to the conscious decision to let go of some stuff and it hurts, but it’s kind of a good hurt, if you know what I mean.  I’m talking material stuff.

Sad news…. Cali, Tom and Peggy’s kitty, aetat 24, is v. poorly and not going to make it.

I-I-I-I phone

Godawmighty, the techsphere’s buzzing like a rhythmically whacked wasp’s nest about the Iphone.  Boingboing.net went so gaga they might as well be writing advertising copy for Apple, and someguy over there said ‘THIS IS THE UI WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR’.  They are aware, of course, how breathless and ecstatic they sound so they posted under the title “Jesus is Risen”.  o RLY.  Indeed, as RobofNine would say.
Just so, as mOm would say.

I just found the remote that came with my computer. Who knew, back in 1992, that computers could have remotes?
Saw Keith, read TWO (okay, most of two) Aubrey/Maturin books yesterday AND went to Shrek III.  Yes, Shrek III isn’t ‘as good’ as the first two.  But it’s still way funnier than just about everything else out there.  Would have been nicer if it had taken me less than an hour to get home, but oh well. That’s life with no car.  While he was here I unlimbered my credit card and bought (or so I believe, but I never got a frikking confirmation email) two books about … gee… can you guess???? Aubrey Maturin!!!!  One of them is a book by book atlas and the other is detailed illustrations of all those heaps of frikkin nautical terms.  I’ll probably break into them before I give them to Keith, but he’s jiggy with that.  Anyway, with any luck they’ll get here before his birthday, and if they don’t nae borra.  He’ll be 21.  Can you believe I pushed him out of my body 21 years ago??? it’s bizarre.  He’s so adult and calm and inspiring, and so easily pleased.

Day 1 of no beer.  At Katie’s grad I said I didn’t think I could live a month without beer.  Then I realized that this was the single saddest, and possibly stupidest, thing I had ever heard myself say.  After taking thought, I figured if I can pass most of the month of July without beer, I’ll be in good shape.  Dunno how I’m going to get through Tuesday though – I always drink a beer before I perform (One beer Only), as I find it prevents worry.  More than one beer, though, impedes performance.  Didn’t Shakespeare do a bit on that? It’s also bizarre to think that in my personal take on Ol’ Abe Maslow’s Cone of Consciousness, Beer outranks Sex. What am I, Homer Simpson??? Sad mismanagement in that, dear friends.
Off to the weight room now, I have an appointment with one of the infernal machines.

Bad week for a vacation

The weather has not been great this week.

I light a candle for the people in my circle of acquaintance who are feeling suicidal right now.  Hang in there!

At a friend’s urging, I watched What the Bleep do we Know.  It was in spots really entertaining, but I preferred Mindwalk, which covered a lot of the same ground.  Also, when one of the people being interviewed turned out to be a medium channelling a star-being, Ramtha, and another one of them was a sex scandal star, I was getting steady pings from the baloney detector.  This whole create your own reality thing is great, but I have a couple of comments.

Clipper ships did not exist during the time of Columbus.  The story about the First Nations of the Caribbean “not being able to see the ships” – nice story, but bogus.  That was actually the point where I got lost.  I will watch Marlee Matlin in practically anything, and I enjoyed her performance, and the special effects were fun.  But, and this is a big but, quantum physics as we (and I mean we in the sense of a small number of human beings) currently understand it does not change anything about the world.  It doesn’t.  It may make certain kinds of technology or cosmology possible, but it will do dick all about the mess the world is in or feed anything actionable into the hopper of possible solutions.
You can say – as they frequently did, in the film – that we’re all deeply intertwingled “We are One”, and intention is everything.  Then they wisely pull out the rug, and take it all away by saying our minds keep us separate because of addictions, and if your intention isn’t perfect you can’t manifest a better reality or the reality will be flawed by your lapses in intention.   We are one hundred percent responsible for our own reality.  Ka ching.  I don’t mind the notion of personal responsibility, but a) you have to be in a position to think about that responsibility and b) you are issued at birth a number of possibilities, none of which have anything to do with responsibility or intention, and which directly impact your ability to be able to even form these ideas.  Whenever I see people twittering on about intention, I feel like showing wards full of AIDS babies and starving children in camps overtop of their words so we can see how incredibly egocentric and lacking in compassion the whole “You can create your own reality” shtick is.  And talking about addictions??  Christ, there are times when I think that we aren’t “meaning” machines as much as we are “stimulus response” machines.
Now, I don’t know a damned thing about philosophy – I leave the heavy lifting to the experts – so I stick pretty close to Allegra’s Law; everything about human beings points back to breeding rights and the acquisition of entitlements which allow you to extend, control, contribute to or benefit from your kinship network.  Evolution is conservative, imperfect and slow, and there’s chunks of the human genome which no longer appear to point to breeding and extension of kinship networks.  But when I look hard enough I can see the connection, thanks to books like the Third Chimpanzee and Sex, Time and Power.
I dream of being a perfect and enlightened being.  Then I wake up and worry about my kids.  So be it.

What news?

I learned last night that the closing date has been moved in two weeks; it’s now July 15th.

Sandra sent me pics of a fine looking woman sitting in her living room in Syria with two tame hyenas.  Brr. Those things are loony dangerous!  It would be like taming bears, no sane person would do it.  Anyway, I’d repost it but for some reason I could not copy the pic to post.

I am definitely NOT coming to Victoria this weekend, as I suspect I will be heaving crap out of the two sheds this weekend once I hear when is convenient so to do with Paul.

Sigh.  V. happy about Katie still, and why the hell not.

My telus webmail is down.  Normally I wouldn’t mention such a trifle, but I ran a personal ad.  And that’s where all the replies are going, and the Telus minion was both rude and uninformative as to when the webmail will be up again.   Gr.

Rereading Master and Commander as I don’t have any fresh Aubrey/Maturin books.

Today, the photo for my passport, and possibly some of the other paperwork dealt with.

Hey pOp

I read the first 21 pages of St Eve’s charge to the jury in the Black mail and wire fraud trial. What I read was really interesting, although being bird witted I ran out of steam and decided even if I hadn’t read the whole thing it was worth posting the link.

Scroll down until you hit the “Read the instructions to the jury” link.

Katie’s principal read out loud at the graduation that “Katie hopes that her grandparents are proud of her.” I’d say bursting with pride about covers it. Purpose sure is an amazing school.

I don’t have pics because Katie danced off with her camera and Paul drove her home. It was an exceedingly pleasant and low key event. All the speeches were terse, whether off the cuff or scripted, the mike got handed round the room, and of course, the piece de resistance was the two musical teachers singing a Grad Parody of Man of Constant Sorrow, as sung in O Brother Where Art Thou.

Meshugas after I got home – the front door exit lever was broken. You could open it from the outside with the pass card but not from the inside with the lever. This freaked the hell out of Katie, Paul and Suzanne; Paul’s comment was that it was a fire hazard and needed to be corrected immediately. I had already stuck the after hours emergency number in my cell phone… so I left a message and by the time the folks left the door had been fixed. I may have had nothing to do with it but it certainly argues that the building is being properly maintained.
Oh, also pOp you should be hearing from Katie shortly, something about the Spike Jones and the City Slickers tape being trashed and how much she would really appreciate another one. I found some on the internet and Katie got all gooey eyed about it.

Gosh, you should have seen her, a vision in Gothic Black. Dax looked sharp too. I would have killed to have worn the shoes Suzanne did; extra high topped black and white sneakers with gel insoles. yowza. The venue was STUNNING, the mood electrically happy but mellow, the food rocked and did I mention the speeches were short? All in all a truly successful evening. Then we came back here and some of us drank beer (that would be me and Paul) and some of us drank Baja Rosa (that would be Katie, who was showing signs of snogging the entire thing, and Suzanne and Dax). And we listened to Man of Constant Sorrow from the soundtrack, and Bob Dylan, and Mika, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs ang Peggy Lee and Spike Jones and we watched the Triumph motorcycle ad. I mean, gather round the fire, folks.

Did I mention my bundle buggy spectacularly exploded as I was exiting the 135 bus at Hastings and Willingdon today? I got down on my hands and knees and grabbed all the washers and the spring, which had sproinged, as springs do, and then spent an unhappy five minutes crawling about on the sidewalk jamming it back together and wishing I had some lockwire. (Subsequent analysis by Paul caused him to exclaim that I should have asked for the fat stuff, not the skinny lockwire, and subsequent subsequent analysis caused him to say it really needed a cotter pin anyways.) We only had three feet of the skinny stuff, which isn’t enough for otherwise stabilizing it. I will have to get by without it for a while, I sure don’t want to go through that again although I did keep my head at the time and actually did a quick count on the other side to make sure I had all the washers. Do I sound absurdly proud of myself? Good.
I got a picture of Daxus wearing my fake snake coat. He’s standing under an exit sign. V. cute.

Sleep

I knew that Katie’s boyfriend’s court date was Monday, but apparently with the move (Katie and her mom in common-law are moving again) and the Grad and everything it slipped everybody’s mind, so nobody went to court.  To bring everybody up to date, Dax laid a beating on Katie for her birthday last year.  This is a matter of established fact and he already entered a guilty plea, so it’s not like I’m jumping the guilty until proven innocent gun.  The court date has now been set for the 3rd of July.  I am perhaps alone in the family in wishing this were over?

Grad tonight.  Weather right now is mixed wind and sun with your big fluffy clouds.

I slept about 12 hours yesterday; I suspect I’m trying to throw off a bug.  I bailed on Jericho – I just slept and slept.
Anybody who wants to see a very cute baby skunk, click here.

Click here, scroll down until you see Eli

Then contemplate the dog’s face for a while.  All hail the beedogs!

Eli’s expression perfectly matches how I feel right now.

From the Be Careful What You Wish For Department, I had a tremendous urge to hear a Cars tune or two a couple of nights ago, and last night I got about an hour’s worth at Elly’s.  I now have the crunching opening guitar riff of Good Times Roll jammed in my head.

Also listened to Alice in Chains Jar of Flies.  It is an annoying, and yet somehow deeply satisfying album.  ALSO and this was the big win of the evening in terms of auralstim, the EP from around the same time called Sap.  Wonderful harmonies, tunes like a drunk tripping downstairs in terms of structure, and oh, the crunchy, crunchy guitars.  How I like the sound, even if the lyrics are uninspired.  Can’t have everything.  I mean, I write a mean tune, but can I sing it?  Which reminds me, time to pick the mando up again. A mandolin can’t tell you to shut up, unless, of course, somebody else is trying to beat your head in with it.

Wandering the West End

Went to Doug and Elly’s a bit early yesterday; they are currently making a documentary called a day in the life of Uncle Doug and Aunt Elly, and I wish they were making it for me because it sounds hilarious.  Essentially it’s an ADVERTISEMENT; they want some people to come and visit them so instead of bugging THEM about it, they are going to make their apartment seem so unbelievably attractive to the kids that they’ll come out to Vancouver just to get the kids to shut up.

Anyway the earlyness meant I had 90 minutes to stooge around so I got a pedicure; it wasn’t as nice as the last one and I now have a big hole in my foot where none ought to be, but it doesn’t hurt much and she did actually pay attention to me when I asked her NOT to trim my big toenails down as much as she was planning (or is that planing?)  to.  This is what is known as Too Much Information, or TMI.  But dammit, my feet are important, at least to me.  They are a big chunk of my operational effectiveness, I’ll have you know.

Doug made three cheese hot pepper salami pizza which was awesome, and crantinis (I only had one, as the first one hit like  an a-bomb.  My tolerance for alcohol has completely evaporated this summer…. getting old I guess.)

Patricia’s coming up the hill for lunch so I have about two hours to clean up after the kids…. errrr….. and thaw things and cook.  Damn, I’m lazy!  I only just got up!

Exciting things are happening in my life.  It’s wonderful.