Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Helped Katie with her job hunting.
Bought a dresser. Previous landpeers paid back the deposit (to Jeff, not to me, but I don’t care, candidly). I would like to publicly thank Jeff for dealing with this entire mess with his usual deft combination of skill, smarts and calm.
Then re watched True Blood (yeah… s’addiction, s’what?)
Rearranged my room somewhat and can see more floor. Yay, me.
Depending on a number of things I have no control over, I probably won’t be going to Hot Springs Cove this weekend, and may end up in Castlegar instead. More news as events warrant.
Dentist again today.
Then, helping Katie find work. It’s good to be able to help her, and she’s feeling rather blah these days.
It was very emotional looking at John’s books. Keith got the martial arts books, and I got the anarchism books, and Ruth will be looking after figuring out where the rest of them go. The temptation to cherry pick nearly killed me but Paul fortunately restrained me.
True Blood ep 3 season 2 was AWESOME. Eric totally kicked ass and Vampire Bill pulled out some angry angsty goodness. The magical midget doctor from the books was PERFECT. I mean, absolutely freaking perfect. And it will be a recurring role, so I am really happy. It just goes on and on being better and better and I’m really happy about that.
Paul asked “Do you miss work?” and I realized I had not actually thought about work in two or three days. So either I’m knee deep in a nasty form of denial, or I am really not missing it. Or I’m just keeping busy and finding other things, like Margot and my freaking teeth and my Unca Dave and the fact I prob’ly won’t knock a damned thing off my bucket list today.
Parm me maam has you seen my bukkit?
Pondfilk / John’s memorial was great. A neighbourhood stranger wandered in with his daughter and picked up the guitar and started singing Wish You Were Here and THAT was the point I had to flee. I like two people singing that. One of them is me, and the other is Mike, and this guy’s version was raucous and came close to being guitar abuse.
I wandered around the pond, talking to Katie on my cell phone, and cherishing the tech that allows me to do that, and all the men and women who maintain the network… because I could BE there for her while she was crying and unhappy about her life. I told her to quit worrying so hard about finding a job. To tell her to stop feeling bad about Dax – who has another girlfriend named Kayla now – is pointless, so I didn’t try that. And I talked to her for 45 minutes.
My Unca Dave is going back for more radiation therapy in Kelowna next month. He had a health blowout that sounded, and was, very scary, and I got the description from his own mouth yesterday in a phone conversation. I chaffed him – people who are quite sick get sick of being treated with a pall of frightened solicitude, so I decided to be bracing, rather than go all, There There on him.
Paul turned up at Pondside about 7 and we sang and played and talked until about 11, when I hauled him out of there pleading exhaustion (no, it was some guy playing Wish You Were Here with no delicacy or spirit of overwhelmed longing). Thank you mOm for putting up with both of us.
Breakfast (porridge and decaf coffee with skim milk and no sugar) has been consumed, and now Paul and I will turn to the great Stack of John’s Books and try to make some sense of them.
Carrie and her spouse John attended, it was lovely to meet John. They are headed back up to Telegraph Creek soon. She seems to think I’ll be going up there, but alas, unless I fly most of the way, or somebody gives me a ride in an extremely comfortable vehicle, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell. The wine was awesome!
Douglas sang Bigfoot. I updated John’s memorial site… the man who wrote, and taught John, “Hit them in the Bottom Line” Alan O’Dean, was there so I got the skinny on that song and by the blessings of reason, did we make a loud singing noise on the choruses. Or Chori, as Douglas would say. Also found out that the Mother Nature song was written by the Berrymans.
It will be sad to see them go. With John dead, Juliana has little reason to stay in Victoria; she’ll be heading off to Columbus OH sometime later this year. They have purchased a house there. They’ll need somebody to stay in the house but she’s hoping to arrange that through church.
I missed Tom and Peggy by minutes. Sigh. Her bass on Tapioca is always something to look forward to.
The Devon Rexes, especially Sugar, previously shown on this blog, were in fine form, as was John’s erstwhile cat, Vincent.
Anyway, apart from a little residual sadness from talking to Katie, who really is having a rough go of it if her facebook posts are anything to go by, I am in a really happy, centered place. So I guess I can be more or less guaranteed that something interesting and challenging is about to happen… cause you know, it never lasts.
1. Practiced “The Weight” by the Band. Practiced “That Godforsaken Hellhole I Call Home”. Practiced “The Exchange I Make”, “All the Con Men I have Known”, “Words Fail” (also known to my fans as the Telecom Song) and numbers of others. Found the lyrics for “Daybreak” and added to CESOAS. Entered most of “Grieg” on Songwriter, finished “Didn’t he Die?” (which was my memorial jig for Grandad – and just figuring out which TIME signature to put it in nearly killed me but aftet that it was okay), put finishing touches on John’s Song (AKA the Filker’s Farewell) including chords and performance instructions. Found YET another tune I had forgotten and wrote it down in the Canonical Excel Spreadsheet of Allegra’s Songs. Hacked around in Garageband and may have a new instrumental.
2. Exercise. Not so much. Have much reduced beer intake and stopped drinking coffee.
3. Found, remembered the password for (phew!) most of my erotica, re-read it, and now have the strong urge to edit ALL of it. I can’t find the really really good one I wrote in Montreal, damnit. I need to revise it all; just tweaking.
4. Talked to Jeff about K-side. I need to update the definitions and then he has plans to make it web based. w00t.
5. Margot’s okay. Everytime Eddie sees her with her cone on (which I have to leave on or she licks the incision point non stop) he hisses in dismay. Scratch that, he just hisses every time he sees her, whether the cone is on or not.
6. Waffles.
7. Laundry.
8. I am struggling with the incompatible notions of somehow making an atheist liturgy legitimate or playing it strictly for laughs. Of COURSE I want to make it hilarious “And on the Sunday closest to April Fools, the Reader shall wear a clown nose; and on the Sunday closest to December 25, the Reader shall wear a furry red hat with white trim…” You get the idea. But that doesn’t fix the problem. Keeping it all under fifteen minutes including the responsive reading will be pretty funny. And this is all part of the “Atheism is a religion” thing my Christian and other faith based friends, relatives and neighbours say.
9. Jehovah’s Witnesses. She got past good morning how are you, and my response was, “Very well thank you but I don’t require any religious instruction today.” Can’t you recruit on the internet like pedophiles and neoNazis and people who think contrails are a government plot? Derh.
10. Well, I’m never going to make the 9 am ferry at this rate, so I think I’ll dress and jump on the bus. Sunday schedules suck.
We can go get her any time now. Sigh of relief.
So Jeff and I will pick her up at 5:30. We intend to video Her Loopiness.
Yes, indeed. Jeff and I got in the car at 1 minute after 4, and in rush hour traffic we a) made it to our destination, a cash only appliance place just north of the Justice Institute on McBride b) parked c) examined three dishwashers d) made our choice e) split up while he made delivery arrangements and I deked south to the Shell station to get cash f) regrouped to pay for it g) burst out laughing simultaneously when the guy, who had already taken the delivery money but had no urge to deliver it, said, “What kind car you got?”so I said, “A sports car” so he insisted on looking at the vehicle with a view to its suitability to have the dishwasher loaded onto it, triggering even more gales of laughter (you should have seen this guy’s face, it’s like buddy, where the bejabbers do you put a dishwasher in an MR2?) and h) drove home in 38 minutes.
Yes, I am concerned about Margot. But I can still be enchanted by the world and crack jokes, c’est mon métier.
Doc Mehdi says her platelet count is so low that if he operated now she’d bleed out. Good thing I went for the pre-op screening. One of two things is going on. Either the results were f*cked up, AND they didn’t call me to tell us before Jeff took her in, or she’s genuinely sick (which, given her behaviour is virtually impossible to believe) and, I say again, how come nobody called? I quoted LM Montgomery when remonstrating with the doc this morning, “Sad mismanagement somewhere!” So I have to pay for yet more tests but they are keeping her overnight for free. Apparently no work is getting done in the office as all the assistants are ignoring the phone for a chance to play with her; she’s already giving orders and being carried about from place to place. Nobody who has met Miss Margot will fail to see that it’s just as well somebody as heartless and callous as me got her, or she’d be ruling the world by now. Honestly. She’s not a cat, she’s a benevolent dictatrix in feline form.
Anyway, I am so heartless that if it turns out she’s a goner, I’m going to keep her skull. It is an entirely remarkable shape, and I would mount it at the top of a staff as an extremely scary object. I mentioned this to Jeff earlier and he was grossed out. Hope you are too. Mind you, if she’s okay and they just screwed up her bloodwork, I’m going to find another vet, after the operation. She has to be spayed, she’d die if she ever was bred to anything but a very tiny male purebred. And in the meantime, if she doesn’t have cancer or untreatable thrombocytopenia, I guess I’m on the rack for a LOT of expensive vet bills. Cazart.
I am feeling a bit fluttery about Miss Margot’s operation today. She has a strong heart (Persians sometimes run to heart trouble) and her pre-op screen came back okay, but I’m still unhappy, and listening to her cry for her lost dinner and breakfast is making me sad. Wait til she comes home reeking of anaesthetic, loopy as all get out, while the boys gather round goggling at her. They’ll be happy to have her so subdued …. And so will the rest of us, she’s about to go into heat. (Noiser, more affectionate and really anxious to go out).
Jeff has just left with Miss Margot. There was a flaw in my cunning plan… I didn’t give him my credit card to pay for it all, so I think I will just go there at the end of the day and Jeff can drive us both home. Continue reading Fluttery
I am currently of the view that he starved himself into a heart attack, probably with the assistance of ‘diet pills’.
I looked up Michael Moschen and hung around on his website for a while, and then decided that I wanted to find out what David Van Tieghem, the guy who did the music for the PBS special “In Motion”, was doing these days. I found out that he scored some porn films (?!) and then stumbled upon this. Reading Annie Sprinkle review her own movies put me in a very good mood. Your mileage may vary. To be fair to David Van Tieghem, he is an accomplished and energetic musician and if you read just what he’s done in the last two years you get breathless. But if I didn’t like his music, I wouldn’t have ended up on Annie’s site.
So There. Now I want Jeff to find out if some of those movies are available on Zip.ca; although really I’m more interested in the documentaries than the porn. Really.
Anyway, it’ll be 10 am soon and time to quit playing and do some frakkin’ work.
After being here for a couple of hours including grabbing a bath and some shut eye, Katie left in the middle of the night and let all three cats out. I heard squawking about an hour ago and got up to let them in, and Margot was soaked and FILTHY. Considering you have to hold her underwater for about an hour to get her really wet (nothing seems to get through to her undercoat) most of it brushed off. The bathroom floor is covered in debris that fell off her.
She’s going to be fixed on Friday. O goodie.
Then Sunday, John’s memorial Pondfilk. I’m not going there with Paul but with luck will get a lift back with him. The rest of this week should be devoted to music and continuing to get the house organized.
Awake at 4:30, up at 6, made breakfast for me and Jeff, showered and headed off to Edmonds Skytrain Station, where I met up with Katie and went into the VCC to be the ‘living model’ for her three hour practical exam. This won’t mean anything to anybody who hasn’t seen episode 2 of this season’s True Blood, but when Eric comes down the stairs with full salon regalia on, I just about died laughing. And so did Kate when she saw it just now. When she was foiling my hair this morning I couldn’t stop laughing. Anyway, my hair is the same colour but curlier and shorter. It’s a change. I’ll let others decide if it’s an improvement.
I bought a bed but it won’t be delivered until July 16.
Mike SLEPT through his dentist appointment, a ferociously bad state of affairs, and I’d talk about it more except my opinions are late and useless.
I cooked roast beef with steamed carrots, long beans, broccoli, cauliflower and baked potatoes; I made GRAVY. Ser yum. And I fed Jeff, Keith, Kate and Paul. Mike would have come but he feels dreffle.
Of course I played it through in Midi format and realized that I’m going to have to re-do it, but at least the main tune and chorus are written down. Damn me for making the tune of every single verse different for dramatic effect. So that’s ONE song scratched off, if not perfectly. Tomorrow, something else!
Now I’m off to Mike’s to cook him lunch and render aid and comfort… he has toofache. And no relief until Wednesday. Must remember to pack beer for Mike, all the better to wash painkillers down with.
