Month: September 2008

From Paul – for Keith

Next time you talk to Keith, you might like to pass him some kudos.
Here’s the skinny: we’re doing Mr. Canoehead coming home from Deer Lake.
Keith’s driving for the first time in a year or two & he doesn’t like the
idea of Canada Way at 18:30 so I say pull into the Esso on the corner &
watch the traffic for a while & if you don’t like it, I’ll take over.
Second time the light goes red for Canada Way he says “Let’s go for it and
I’ll drive along in my own little space,” and starts to pull out onto the road
when this idiot turns left into the station and winds up stopped in the
roadway head on to us.
I say, don’t worry about it Keith & he blithely maneuvers around and heads
south. Of course a few more idiots have to blow by us like we’re going
backwards even though we’re doing the limit, but Keith doesn’t get rattled,
just stays in his lane & asks for advice when he needs it.
Best part of all was when he had to parallel park in front of the house.
We’ve got a space that’s about 7 ft. longer than we are & we’ve got a canoe
on top. To make a long story even longer, Keith, with a little coaching put
rear wheel 2 in from the curb, front wheel on and three feet space in back,
four out front IN ONE PASS no guff folks.
He was pretty proud of himself.

And SO AM I.

Cat / lessons / good news

My mandolin teacher is what I’d look like if I had nicer hair and more of it, put on forty pounds and was 15 years older.  She’s pretty stern.  Fortunately she’s also pretty flexible, and I already know one additional chord, and have a LOT OF FREEEEKING HOMEWORK.  Eddie, who normally ignores female visitors, came out and inspected the living hell out of her, including trying to get under her skirt.  It was quite a performance.

Spartan kitty.

Work continues to have the worst kind of oil, being turm-oil,  but I have laid to rest most of my anxieties and concerns.  There’s still a lot of thrashing around, and I have to move desks for the first time in years, but other than that things are slowly returning to normal, or whatever the new normal is.  When you’ve been through a great deal, you get punchy.

Pig for mOm.

Squirrel mom vs curious dog. Hint, squirrel FTW.

Tuna salad bowl for dinner last night.  Jeff does NOT like the little red cheeses; they are responsible for him wanting to bail on dairy entirely.  Ha, what, no ice cream?  I made enough tuna salad for two meals, and that’s exactly what Katie did, made two meals out of it.  She apparently didn’t want to get out of bed yesterday morning (she was at Daxus’) and he forced her out, coffee in hand, saying, “Yer mom’ll kill me if you don’t go to school.”  That he would even pretend to care about my opinion cheered me no end.  Please note, I am not for killing anybody, although there are about six people I’d like to personally spank, and about a hundred I would like to be paid to verbally humiliate. I’m so good at it I really oughta get paid.  But of course, there’s no room at the standup inn.  Oooh, speaking of Standup, anybody see Marg Cho’s Christian rant?  Most amusing!

Katie K has sold her condo.  This is awesome awesome news, and it made me very happy when I heard it.

I have to pack up my desk today, which means basically that I have to throw a lot of crap out.

I really like Jeff’s kitties, but I wish they were more affectionate. I just want a kitty to curl up on me once in a while.  Like dis.

Releasing my inner zombie /coffee

Wow, I guess I always subconsciously knew this.

Do you know what I’d do if I was at home, and there was an earthquake, and my house didn’t collapse or catch fire?

After I ensured that the cats and my brother were safe, I’d send Jeff on a mission to get another propane canister or two, and I’d make coffee.  I’d light the barbecue burner on the back deck and boil water to make coffee with.  Coffee is hot.  Coffee wakes you up. And coffee is what you are going to want when you’ve been pulling people out of buildings all morning.

The global system of commerce may collapse (I personally have my doubts that it will do anything but restructure itself after years of privation, just like the last time) but as long as people want sugar and coffee and there’s a boat that can carry them, I’m not too worried about the future of my relationship with coffee.

I mentioned coffee is hot.  A study on social isolation – it’s in the last couple of days on eurekalert.org – says that social isolation makes people literally feel cold.  That’s why hot food is an integral part of social connectedness and discourse in this and any other culture, whether it’s a tropical country or not.

After I made coffee I’d deliver it to people who needed it.  Then I’d go back to the barbecue and make an immense pot of oatmeal.  Then I’d start taking stuff out of the freezer and cooking it so it didn’t go bad.  That’s what I’d do – I’d stay close to my technologically sophisticated hearth.

False alarm – I havna lost my gaming platform

Jeff, having proved not to have already gone to bed, suffered me to borrowed his car keys.  My little blue brick was right where I left it on the floor mat.

The sheets I bought at Costco tonight are already clean and dry.  I feel so happy to have another set of sheets for my bed, more or less the same pale sage colour, but about twice the thread count.  There was so little lint in the dryer I could have, without troubling my conscience, left it for the next person.  They feel like silk but they are pure cotton.  And I have a drive, I gotta message Robof9 and tell him not to buy me one like we discussed.  Got chicken for the freezer, and also little red cheeses, which should make Katie happy as she appears to be feeding half of her class with her lunches.  If Keith ever turns up again he’ll probably devour a few, provided they ain’t all et.

Am I most of the way through a full bore meltdown?

Check.  I’m being very relaxed and restrained about my mental meltdown, but I just lost my cell phone, and that’s about as crazy as I like to get.  Losing things is what agitated, preoccupied and outright loony people do; I misplace things relatively frequently but outright lose them, no.

I find it entertaining to review what I’ve lost in my life, like the watch my grandparents had given me LESS THAN 24 HOURS PREVIOUSLY …. I took if off in a restroom in the Dorval Airport to wash my hands, back when I was, like, ten years old and left it there.  Oh, I shed many a bitter tear over that loss, I’ll tell ya.  I lost the first guitar I was given when I foolishly gave it to Daxus.  I guess I wasn’t expecting him to smash it.  I’m still kinda irritated with him about that; it’s like there’s no percentage in forgiving him if it turns me into a sap the next time. I guess it’s a XXXXsight harder to live my Unitarian Universalist principles than I thought.

Did you know that Unitarianism was almost a STATE RELIGION in part of Europe?  Trust Unitarians to get excited over the Edict of Turda.  Couldn’t they have named it after anything else but what sounds like Turd’s twin sister’s name?  I’m sure it means “Land of Stunning Trannies” in Hungarian or Romanian but it does, as the saying goes, sound like shit in English.  Then a Catholic came back on the throne and Unitarianism gotsked itself persemacuted.  That old timey stuffed looked ZIP like contemporary Unitarianism except that durned tolerance thing we’re so notably noted for.  North American Unitarians adopt 2nd and 3rd world Unitarian churches because they are so cute and old fashioned, and in the case of the Transylvanian churches SERVICES ARE SEGREGATED BY SEX which is just like, freaky, and I’ve only seen that in real life in a Russian Orthodox Church and an Ahmadi mosque so that’s kind of a triple whammy on the freaky for me.  I only go into these ‘other peoples” sanctuaries once in a lifetime and yet it reminds me of the old fashioned Unitarian churches in Transylvania (actually northern Romania, out Kobatfalva way). Not that I’ve ever been there, but I know people who’ve gone.  There’s video of kids driving critters down the main drag.  And the services. For me it’s all about the singing, those mournful Hungarian tunes.  I much prefer the livelier contemporary hymns for myself on an ongoing basis, especially anything which sounds like the attenuated and timid version of Gospel singing as performed by U*Us.

Google, entertainingly, knows where Kobatfalva is on the map, but is unable to provide enough of a close up to demonstrate there’s even a cowpath where the arrow is pointing, and it and the surrounding countryside is made up of rocky vertiginous hills split by rivers which in spring can swell in no time to floods that come right through town. You have to live in the valley bottom cause it’s the only place you have a fond hope of growing food and raising most critters.

Of course, to loop elliptically back to my opening comments; of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.

Special thanks to Jeff for dinner, it was yummy.

Ashokan Farewell and who let the bear out

Cousin Gerald, because he appears to have MIND READING on his resume, sent me the MP3 of Jay Ungar’s version of Ashokan Farewell, which is from the soundtrack of the Civil War documentary I’ve been watching.

I publicly express my weeping gratitude!  It’s also meaningful to me because the folks at Jericho Beach Folk Club play it for every ingathering, so it’s already familiar to me.

Chipper THANKS for this… Who let the bear out? Adventures in animal release…..

ADDED LATER

I just learned that Ashokan Farewell was written by Jay Ungar, who played it on the soundtrack, so it’s one of those ‘contemporary trad’ tunes, like the kind Dr. Filk likes so much.

Lee’s army is surrounded on three sides by Union troops

Surrender is inevitable.  Heavy sigh.  Such a gallant army.  Such an inglorious cause.

Anyway, I should drag myself away from the Rebel defeat long enough to comment on chicken breasts, curried rice and salad for dinner last night (v mild curry, due to Katie really not being a big fan).  Jeff’s doing the trash.  It’s all very domestic and boring, and frankly, that’s the way I likes it.  Katie left about 7:30 last night to parts unknown, but she had all her school crap with her and she’s supposed to text me when she’s on her way to school.  I’m not too worried; it would hardly help if I was.

I am now facing the prospect of doing scratch recordings of all the songs I have selected for inclusion in the musical, with some horror.  But it must be done….

Hymn Sing

So we made with the churchy ballads at Tom and Peggy’s last night, and it was wonderful fun.  Paul and Keith had come over earlier to have a low key birthday celebration for Paul; we watched The Bucket List and I made tortillas.  Then I made pork fried rice for Jeff so he’d have some dinner, and I made lentil soup to take to the hymn sing.  Keith came along too… I nearly lost my eyes when I saw him eating lentil soup.  He really is pushing the envelope on food these days, which makes me extremely happy.

Katie is here, boiling up eggs and making a healthy lunch.

It’s bizarre to be watching the Civil War documentary at the same time as following the American election.  I feel like a whole bunch of people need to be reminded that it was a Republican president who issued the Emancipation proclamation.  Democrats are talking about Republicans as if they are brain dead traitors, and Republicans are talking about black people as if the Civil War had never happened.  It’s disgusting.  It has nothing to do with the glory of the Constitution.  Oh my neighbours, a house divided… will you never learn?

I am really glad I’m Canadian, and I learned how to seethe gently without taking up arms.

I did all my laundry this weekend, and put it all away, and cleaned my room.  It’s completely changed the acoustics in there.

On the highway, going fast….

And then this vehicle zips on past.

I especially like the sound effect of whoever’s holding the camera.  It is a sound of astonishment and wonder.  Scanged from Fark.

We are working our way through Ken Burn’s The Civil War.  I think Shelby Foote (who was court martialed for stealing a jeep during WWII to visit his gf, and never saw active service) was absolutely right when he said that without an understanding of the Civil War, an understanding of the American character is hardly possible.

No music

Mr. Music has a family member in hospital and so we have re-skedded our music meeting for next Friday.  In the meantime, I have a lot of cleaning and laundry to do, so I’m going to get at it.

Patricia’s off in San Francisco, I hope she’s having a good time.