Off to breakfast

I bagged out at midnight, which is scandalously early for filk; but I have Tapioca with ass on my H2, which means I recorded it.  I have been too scared to listen to it.

It is a charming convention, full of twists, turns, and sequin covered capes.

I think I want to do the next Conflikt entirely in steampunk costume.  Gives me a whole year to prepare, don’t you know.

It should come as no surprise that Tom Smith is awesome.  I got to hear him play Sheep Marketing Ploy and many other grand pieces of flurrious words and fantastical songs.

That is BASS not ASS.  But I leave it anyway…

Slow and fast, warm and cold

Right now life is a slurry of goodbyes and re-introductions; changes in temperature, ambiance, the furnace breaks, the filk convention looms, the tooth is snaggled, Granny’s dead, I’m finally back on the ERP at work, I am up again and spinning at a great rate of knots.  The distance between life and the blog is bigger than normal, and I have few venues (not none, fortunately) for venting about it.  Some things are burning brightly, some are swallowed by silence and distrust of the future.  The major thing is allowing myself to be happy by how genuinely pleased people are to see me.  I feel like I’m home, and I’m happy.

My back hurts.  Commuting subjects me to lots of interesting loading on my lower back. This is making me crabbier than normal.

One of my coworkers dreamed I was coming back to work.  I don’t know whether to believe it and I’m not really worried about it either way.  I’ve had one precognitive dream that I remembered, so although my sample size is small my willingness to believe is large.

Pocky.  It’s what’s for dinner. I bought Robbie B lunch.

Long hours of sleep, punchuated in the morning with traffic noise. Lest my mother be upset, that typo was deliberate….. now let me wander off my rails again and think about how we can set up an Aspie friendly place for the boys to do their mourning.  Because as sure as Darwin’s winnowing fan claims us all, I can think of four of my blood kin who need to go off and have their own corner to grieve in.  Of such are the ways of the accommodationist, the ever blooming woman of the boundary layer, who would be, of course, me.

Memorial service will be later

Probably during the week – the staff at the Cedars want to go.

Work is awesome, and will be even more awesome when I have email, ERP and a proper phone for the call center work.

I am thinking of my dad and it’s hard not to cry.  It doesn’t matter how much you expect it, it is still shattering.  And while shattered, you must get up, and eat, and deal with lawyers and doctors and arrange things and make lists.

CUte OVerloading warning

A lot of very cute interspecies animal friendship videos. The Boston terrier and the pig video is my fave.

I met Caroline last night to watch Awake My Soul; she’s the gal trying to put together a Sacred Harp sing here in Vancouver.  This is a worthy goal.  I also met her cat Tully, who is a Superior Creature and who trained me in door management within minutes of meeting me.  Sacred Harp or shaped note singing is a kind of Xtreme congregational singing.  The trebles, altos, tenors and basses sit facing each other in a square and the song leader (who can be anybody in the congregation, and it alternates among congregants) keeps the beat.  The music is upwards of a couple centuries old, or as new as the Nineties, because the singing tradition has had a revival in this past century. It is, among other things, intense, loud as blazes, polyphonal in spots, fugue like in spots and entirely weird and strange and although it’s a total piece of Americana, it seems almost too spiritual and pure to be part of the American worship tradition.

It would be bloody amazing at Beacon, but I ain’t the choir director.

Off to work in 45 minutes

And I have to say it’s a really good feeling.

Vilma fed us (me Mike Jeff and Keith) chicken and salad and baked apples and cake with fruit and whipped cream, and it was HER birthday.  This amuses me; anybody who knows me knows I’ve often done the cooking not only for my birthday but for mother’s day, as I don’t really take any of those days seriously anyway, much as I know other people do.

Then we watched a film that was so amazing I am going to have to obtain a copy and watch it repeatedly.  It’s called It Might Get Loud and if you’re a guitarist, or a fan of any of the bands Led Zeppelin, White Stripes or U2, or like slide guitar, it is a must see.  It’s pretty overwhelming, and when they break out ‘the Weight’ by the Band and play a three guitar/two singers version of it it’s like every campfire Mike ever played at got slapped up onto the screen.  Mindblowing.  The best parts are the thirty second bits where all three of them start ramping up on one of their hits (like Ramble On) and all three guitar sounds come crashing together.  Spinechilling.  I was gawking like a complete hick and exclaiming under my breath during the entire movie.

Vilma is 42.  Devoid of makeup and fresh from an encounter with a hot stove, there is no way in hell you could give her a day over 35.  She says she has good genes. Mike, you lucky barstard.

Tonight I will attempt once more to get bandified or at least singing groupified.  We shall see.

PZ Myers I luvs him so

PZ Myers, recursively noted atheist of note, has the following to say about a non science oriented health dude who is LOSING his SH*T over being bumped down the shorty awards (a fun but BS tweeting award).

Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.

Brian Eno on Gospel Singing

“I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records — and I have — and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.”

Rest of the interview is here.

Memorial Service did him justice

It went long, and it was emotional.  Tre and Battery and Tanya had to leave because Tre got fussy, but Lindsay (strangely enough! my former boss and grandboss at work) came and sat next to me, and while I didn’t speak much to him, I’d like to thank him for being with me.  Tanya came back in to greet Owen with me and then we went home.

Ryan was a very special young man, in a lot of ways, and sure I was crying for myself (thinking about what it would be like to lose one of the kids) and for his parents (whose mental state is easy enough to guess), but I ended up doing most of my crying for his friends, who really loved him and who will have to work very hard to live up to his standards.

I have a packet of seeds of Ryan’s favorite flower in my coat pocket now, and I’ll plant them when it’s a bit more like spring.