Month: August 2008

feeling yucky

I can’t really focus my eyes right now so I think I’ll give them a rest and go back to sleep.  I had a migraine earlier this week which had me go for a lie down at work for about 90 minutes. At the height of the migraine, just like Lymond, I was blind.  I could see in normal perspective about 1/10th of my normal visual field and the rest of it was a beige wad of cotton batten with a couple of flashing lights stuck in it.  That part – thankfully – only lasted about ten minutes, and I had the first aid attendant with me – and I got into a dark room and unconscious fast enough that it didn’t get worse or convert to head pain.  Also earlier this week I got tingling and numbness in my extremities. I suspect all this weirdness has to do with the spinal decompression stuff and will lift when I stop getting treatments.  In the meantime, I enjoy the treatments a lot and they seem to be helping with range of motion and my sleep, which is much improved for the most part.  The symptoms I wanted to get cleared up – the numbness and weakness in my right foot and leg, which is with me night and day and is emotionally and physically exhausting – I still have in plenty.  Oh well…..  Such a whiner…. really.  I need to count my blessings.

Visit

Keith and Paul and Mike were over. We watched Coffee and Cigarettes. Somehow I’ve got to get off my duff and get this place looking like there weren’t drunken frat boys partying here last night. Supper was barbecued chicken breasts (with Paul taking the helm there), swiss chard of such exceptional wondrous tastiness that it bankrumpts my powers of description, garlic bread (of course), salad and European style cheesecake from the Austin Deli.

Paul has the daintiest snore of anybody I ever met. Coffee and Cigarettes, after he’s hauled a brace of midnights, was not enough to hold his attention, and he flaked out on the love seat. I like the Iggy Pop/Tom Waits and Steven Wright/Robert Benigni segments the best, although the ‘twins’ one is also pretty funny. Especially since those two men are actually cousins.

Sigh. Back to housework.

Eddie

Eddie must be getting desperate – what with Jeff being gone.  Last night he came into my room, jumped up on the bed, and criss crossed it a number of times looking for the perfect place to sleep.  I was a little taken aback when that turned out to be wedged between my thighs, but oh well.  He was curled up there for a couple of hours.  I sometimes wonder how much is behind Eddie’s almost vacant stare but I’m beginning to suspect the vestiges of a sense of humour.

Then he woke up at four am and knocked everything he could off my desk.  Bastard.

Pride Parade

I asked Joy for this picture and she sent it to me in literally seconds. Ah! Anyway, the good looking one is Joy, and that’s me in a pink polyester lei from last year’s Pride – I gave away my plastic peace bling from last year to one of Nita’s MAWO buddies – and the Queen’s Fluffiest Pillow t-shirt number one son gave me. Okay, I’ll stop grinning if and when I ever feel sad again.

The Luddite’s over and we’re having a low key conversation.

Who paid for THIS research?????

I call major amounts of BS.  Maybe it is true that fertilizer/pesticide grown products are not ‘nutritionally’ superior,

BUT

Did it not occur to these bozos that maybe people are prepared to pay a premium for products that aren’t coated in pesticides and other crap?  And, I hate to say it, but virtually all of the organic produce I’ve eaten in the last couple of years tasted way better than the regular stuff, especially the bananas.  Mind you, I haven’t done a blind taste test so I might have my head up my butt for that.  Anybody want to do some science with food?

Family supper

It was so hot here yesterday that after an hour at the back clinic in the lovely air conditioning I thought I was going to melt when I went outside. Fortunately I didn’t have to go home on the bus; Katie and Paul texted me and invited me for dinner.  I picked up some Cutthroat and a singleton tequila cooler for Katie (there’s never anything she wants to drink in the fridge at her dad’s (or here either)). They cooked me pork chomps, fresh organic swiss chard (O my GOD it was good), tater salad, caesar salad, rice and gravy and there was fresh fruit and yogurt for dessert but I was too full at that point.  It was entirely yummy and flavoured with that “I didn’t cook it” sauce that makes everything taste so good.

I have not so great news; business is slow at the eyecare place so Keith’s hours have been cut back to zero.  Now he faces the choice of looking hard for another job in the field which he might not get or asking Superstore for more hours.

Came home and really I should have put the air conditioner on but I popped open both doors and got some – not a lot, but some – air going through here.

Look at the time.  Urk.  Must run.

The shame, the shame

I’m not posting the link, because my spine curls and my skin shrivels at the notion of linking to ANYthing with Paris Hilton in it, but Paris Hilton’s response video to McCain is pretty funny.  I think my favourite part is where she’s trying really hard to look presidential….

I guess there are a lot of sites I don’t like admitting going to, but hey, once you’ve admitted you had a picture of Trudeau on your wall when you were a kid, and that you pooped your pants in the Parliament buildings when you were a kid, and that you like classic seventies porn especially anything with Marilyn Chambers in it,  it’s obvious that shame is not the motivating factor. Mike showed me Autobiography of a Flea on the weekend, and I loved it.

Shame…. is there any?  I mean, I’m not exhibiting much.  I must claim to some.  After all, my parents read this blog, but I know that my mother isn’t reading right now and my dad doesn’t bother when my mom’s not around, so bwa ha ha!  I feel liberated to talk about badshit!  Actually not, if I want to talk about badshit I use the “whining” or “sexxxay” filter in livejournal.

Whining is for when it’s obvious that it’s time to ‘bang a teakettle’ in the shtetl phrase.  What?  No Yiddish?  Let me elaborate.  This is from Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions by Arthur Naiman, as I recollect (and Cousin Reck likes it too, so there).  Anyway, in the days of the pogroms back in oldt contry, when a woman had absolutely had her fill of her domestic situation, she would grab a wooden spoon and a teakettle and run into the middle of the street banging the snot out of the teakettle and yelling like a she’d been trodden on by a golem.  All her neighbours who were able would run out into the street too and there would be an impromptu therapy session.  A magnificent social invention.  Also, I have girlfriends I can call, whose lives are every bit as ‘interesting’, ‘difficult’ and ‘complicated’ as mine, some more so because they have more children and screw YOU if you don’t think that doesn’t make for more complexification, especially once you get into steps, grands, adoptees and homestays, so I can ‘bang a teakettle’ with them, but sometimes as a writer I want to keep the mood green and nothing beats that like writing it down.  After all, if I hadn’t written down my long, long paragraph of vituperative venom, I would not have kept hold of the expression “pig’s ass in vomit” which was how I characterized somebody I was, uh, not very fond of at the time.  Then I learned that you’re defined by what you hate and had to give that emotional tone up, but it’s still a damned evocative expression and I have every intention of using it where appropriate.  Except when the Dalai Lama’s in town, that would be wrong.

Sexxxay is for all the stuff that can’t make it into this blog because my mother would wince and my dad would heave.  Then they would stare at each other uncomprehendingly.  They do that a lot, with respect to their children.  I am still at the involved stage, which means I long to slap my kids instead of just look uncomprehending.

Speaking of the kids, Katie said something re shame the other day.  “In the videos you never yell at us”  and I just looked at her like she had a closed skull fracture and said, WTF?  Of COURSE I wasn’t yelling at you in the videos!!!! Why would I want evidence of my dreadful parenting and worse vocabulary immortalized for all time?  whassamatta u????  One of the best women I know thought about drowning her offspring in a bathtub when she was a young mother.  I can’t recollect ever wanting to harm the kids, but they will attest to the fact that I did use physical discipline, and they’ll also stand right by me and defend me for doing it, such are the strange ways of the simian brain.

Well, I’d simply love to ramble on more about shame.  There are times I want to take all my clothes off at work.  The right people would dig it, and the right people would get completely freaked out.  But my boss has told me that I should just let that urge roll right on over and straight on through, because she doesn’t think there’s a snowball’s chance I’d stay employed, no matter what she said in my defense afterwards.  She has a point.  Now it’s time to go to work.  Shame about that, really.

Naughty, naughty mOm

She’s gone off to the wilds, the wilds I say, of Saskatchewan (although whether she’s off to be a Saskatchewan River Pirate remains to be seen) and in the time she’s been gone she’s neither phoned, nor emailed, nor in any matter indicated that she’s still in the land of the living.  pOp and I attribute this to a number of possibilities….

She forgot her own telephone number.  Hey, it happens.

She’s being held in an undisclosed location so that a bunch of well-meaning rellies can convert her to Christianity.  Hint.  Good luck, Chuck!  That’s one die hard mother of an atheist ya got there.

She’s just damned busy and has no internet access.

She’s killed her travelling companion in an attempt to get a little peace and quiet and is working on a suitable body disposal method.  Ontie Mary rocks the free world with her memory and her sense of humour, but the Energizer Bunny hides in terror from her mouth.  I say this as someone who occasionally makes with the pressured speech herself.  Okay, that is the polite way of describing it… I’m a motormouth, are you happy now?

She figures we’re all bloody grownups and we’ll hear about her travels soon enough.

Jeff is continuing to spit blood and yard trimmings over the computer he’s doing up for mOm (it’s not that bad, but it IS a Windows machine).

I had total flow with customer interactions on the phone today.  No nasties, all pleasant and/or funny and/or appreciative of me taking the time to answer the questions properly.  After the weekend, and that SIX count em SIX escalation calls day last week, I figured I deserved it.  I even threatened to kiss one guy when he said, point blank, “So is this marketing speak or what?” about one of the single most pernicious uh, LIES, LIES okay… did I make that clear enough??? that the Marketing wonks ever passed off on an increasingly weary and skeptical public, and I said, “Yup, that’s what it are; a more reasonable expectation of the product’s behaviour, life expectancy and usefulness to your application is….x”. And he thanked me.  He thanked me a lot.  Okay I just remembered, I got off the phone after one call and said “I tremble for my country when I reflect that we have Newfies,” and SalmonMan snickered over in his IT corner.  But the Newfie wasn’t evil, he was just not clear on the concept of a warranty period.

Mike has been phoning me and taunting me to convert my options and sell out.  I’m lazy, I’ll wait for the deal to close.  He lectures me about opportunity costs, blah blah blah.  This time he phoned from Wreck Beach, the bastard; I could practically smell the suntan oil and stray whiffs of reefer and there’s me on my way home from work thinking I should have just taken a mental health day and gone with him.  I’ll get him, dagnabit.  He keeps leaving massage oil here, maybe I’ll grease up the kitchen floor without telling him.

I just found out who one of my lurkers is, via email.  He says he loves my blog.  Hint… he loves musicals.  All the best people do, you know.  It’s a canonical law, in my universe.  Why I even had a dream one time, recounted in this blog, that included a giant insectoid alien singing in a musical.  He was having a gas pretending to be a railroad man in a musical set in the nineteen thirties. Johnny Depp was in it, too.  Can’t go wrong with a twist like that.
It was really weird having garlic bread tonight and nobody to share it with.

kids over

It was lovely to see the kids; we lazed around and ate takeout and watched CSI reruns and Scent of Green Papaya (Keith was bored).  It doesn’t sound too exciting but frankly I was still recovering from my day in the sun.  Jeff should be back either today or Friday. I miss him ferociously, and the cats do too; Eddie did the CUTEST thing I have ever seen a cat do.  When Jeff phoned day before yesterday, on a lark I held the phone up to him so he could hear daddy’s voice and his ears immediately perked up, he looked straight at the speaker on the phone, and then he started rubbing up against the receiver, all in less time than it takes to describe it.

For reasons best known to god and my volunteering spirit I will be orgalizing an X-1 company reunion. In otherwords, the company I joined when I moved to Vancouver, which morphed into the company I am now working for.  I am now racking my brains for a venue… there could be upwards of 100 people, if we crack open the invite list to spouses.  I’ve got to figure on a date, too.  I know we could do it in a restaurant but I would prefer a quieter venue.