Month: January 2010

My letter to the folks that are looking after my retirement money

Dear K and G,

The $xxxx.xx was not transferred into my account on Friday.  I am curious.  Did you folks, in the process of transferring my accounts out of one bucket into another, forget that I had a direct deposit set up?

What are the odds your company will recompense me for the overdraft charges I’ve incurred as a result of the mishandling of my money?  Or am I going to get a polite version of ‘suck it up, buttercup’?  It seems I have much to look forward to.  I’ve been getting the deposits since July of last year, and two out of the seven deposits have been late so far…. Alas, my creditors aren’t as sloppy about dates as I am.  It’s sad, isn’t it, how consistent and heartless my creditors are in the face of my incompetence.  Yes, I take one hundred percent responsibility for the money not being in my account on Friday, because, after all, I chose you as my service provider and now I must live with the results.  See how helpful I’m being?  I told myself to suck it up.

I know that what I have parked with (your company) isn’t much money the way you folks calculate things, but it’s all I have, and you don’t need to keep custody of it, if it’s too much like work.  Hope to hear from you on Monday to get this sorted out.  I’ll be in a great mood, since I will have spent the whole weekend worrying about what’s happened to my retirement money.

Allegra

Needless to say, I await their response with interest.

I just did something I’ve never done before.  I had people doing Christian witness on my door step; I smiled graciously at them, said, “Sorry, I’m an atheist,” and closed the door.  Seeing as how I was in the middle of writing the above noted letter, it wasn’t hard at all to be in a truth telling mood.

Katie has safely arrived in Sammitch, I mean Saanich.

Girl howdoo, but there are a lot of goofy loan names from First Nations languages.  They started out as whatever they were, poetic or prosaic or the sound of the sea slapping fish-weirs, but the transition to English was painful and lingering.

Anyway, I conferred briefly with my mother and raised a hosannah that a) Katie’s helping look after her great granny b) she’s going to get paid to do it and c) she’s going to be a busy lassie and in no good position to repine on any other matters and d) sober second consideration yielded the nugget that what I had slotted in here was ill-tempered and prurient, always a lovely, somehow quite regressive, almost, you know, Republican combination, so I’m passing on this next line.  TLDR = Me happy.

I made stir fried noodles with thinly sliced very well aged steak, quartered mushroms, two onions, bean sprouts, the leftover sausage patties from brekky, celery, fresh green beans, soy sauce, peanut oil and the merest hint of Madras style curry powder.  Jeff devoured it/them with what appeared to be intense happiness, and his happiness was improved upon learning that there were turnovers in the house.  Store bought, it’s true. We watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  I really liked it, but honestly, Joe (Jude Law) should have punched Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow) MUCH earlier in the proceedings.  Gal’s a safety hazard, and no Einstein neither…

Paul and I conferred briefly today about vegetables.  He has a darling, nicely cultivated plot in the back yard at his rental which he apparently will be allowed to plant this year.  We shall see.  I am thinking pole beans and raspberry canes here.  Rather than plant a lot of stuff, a lot of one or two stuffs instead.

Heavy sigh, happy sigh

So the heavy sigh is for missing posting yesterday, but I got called into work.  The great thing about temping is that you get to see what other places to work really look like.

This place had:

  • decent coffee
  • an infestation of mechanical engineers about six deep
  • it’s own ERP
  • a decent fast restaurant in the basement
  • one bus ride from here
  • less than twenty minutes from here
  • walking distance from here in a pinch or bad weather
  • interesting, worthwhile work
  • and the job is currently available

The heavy sigh is because I won’t get it, but gosh it was pleasant working there and I would have had loads of fun teasing elderly engineers.  I would have also got to watch the Skytrain go by all day long, which doesn’t hurt my feelings.

BEST LINE OF THE DAY.  One of the engineers, responding to something a contractor was saying in a conference call, and sounding, how shall I put it, mildly exasperated, said, “You are confusing expediency with practicality“, which caused me to SWOON.

Then I came home after a satisfying day, smiling in the rain and clutching my signed sheet, which I still haven’t faxed, and found my brother had just got home.  He said, “I got ya a present, I hope you like it.”

Well, it was from that batch of slides that Loki processed from 35 millimeter to digital, the slides from when we were, like, 9 months old and 2 and a half, respectively, and Jeff’d had it blown up to half poster size (with Blossom Su of course, the framing magician of pictures, art and media, she wot did the Inuit hunters).  Of all of the pictures in that batch, it was the one I wanted.  Both of us look incredibly goofy, and nothing much has changed.  I could hardly be more pleased.

A thoroughly satisfactory day.

Today, dentition maintenance at noon.  Dafter Katie (that’s daughter written US Revolutionary War style) is going to Victoria to be a prop and stay to her grandmother (and, if I may be so bold as to say it, to get the hell out of Dodge the week before her -hopefully- last legal encounter with her ex boyfriend.)

Also today I have to phone my old employer and work some contacts.  I am so ready to go back to work it’s ridiculous.  And to think, a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had forgotten how.  I am anticipating work – but things are, apparently, not very rosy at the old place and I have had two different engineers tell me not to come back, although I suspect both of them have ulterior motives.  Maybe it IS time for me to move on, can’t step in the same stream twice, harrumph harrumph.

News out of Haiti is very grim

The wikipedia article is claiming that there may be more than 100000 dead.  Three Canadian police are unaccounted for; the Catholic archbishop was killed when his office collapsed.  Communication is impossible.  I light a candle for the survivors; I think some of them may soon have cause to envy the dead.  Red Cross donations link is here.

Update:  the news is worse and worse, but a couple of the missing police officers turned up.

Still feeling cheerful despite everything

My thinky thoughts include sadness at the dissolution of my granny, who, candidly, ain’t getting better, and why should she, being 98, and what I’m going to plant when I have a garden next year, and how I need to get going on my projects because I won’t have much time soon because I suspect I’ll be working full time, and how well the bagels went over yesterday (I took homemade bagels, plus butter and cream cheese, in to my assignment), and how I’m a bad puppy for leaving the passenger side door unlocked the last time I borrowed Jeff’s vehicle, and how not taking glucosamine for three days makes my back hurt scandalously, and how Jeff is working on getting a somewhat more modern furnace filter installed (you should see the old one – it is disgusting), and how I wouldn’t mind learning how to do different things to my hair as opposed what I do now which is wash, comb, leave it be, and how hilarious it was that Robert Wagner and Michael Weatherly got to play opposite each other on NCIS when Michael Weatherly looks so much like Robert Wagner he played him in The Mystery of Natalie Wood. By all accounts a ludicrously bad miniseries.  This all represents a tiny fraction of what I am currently processing.

Bedside reading – Worship that Works, The Artist’s Way at Work, and a Latin English dictionary.  I should probably find something fictional. It’s just, as I get older, I realize that the odds of me reading any fiction that will be as good as Dunnett or O’Brian is freaking small, so I’m a lot happier with non-fiction.

And now for something incredibly cheerful, and sexist (all the way ’round).  The person who forwarded it to me (the Luddite) called it “East Germany’s answer to West Side Story” but I suspect it’s actually West German.  I don’t know how they got all the women to dance like penguins, and all the men to scowl in such an ineffectual way, but full points for goofiness, folks!

All done!

My temp assignment, being, uh, temporary…. is over.  Free lunch, pleasant work, really great supervisor (she faxed my pay sheet in for me), really smart fellow temps.  A magnificent reboot of paid employment.

I will be cooking hockey pucks for dinner (note, this means filet mignon) and the rest of the meal will be leftovers.

Honestly, I’m so happy right now I can’t stop smiling (and singing Shuffle off to Buffalo, which is weird).

Cat plus pig = cute picture

I warned you. Scanged from Reddit.

I checked my job card again and I don’t have to be at work today until one.  Full report upon my return.

Paul called me up yesterday and we went for a walk on the Quay and then we sang and played for a while – like a couple of hours, so it was a singing kind of day yesterday.  Also, balm to my wounded ego, he wanted to play along to a bunch of my tunes (he did the back up guitar for the recorded version of “Evening News” which I have always found quite tasty).

John’s six string Guild is a Man’s Freaking Guitar; the tips of my left hand fingers feel like I tried to stop a grinding wheel with them. And of course playing it without crying is hard to do sometimes; I’ll be messing with it and there will be a vertiginous sense of loss, and then it’s “Just keep playing, just keep playing.”

On the plus side I know how to play the rhythm mandolin for Two and Twenty Blues now, and the only solace as my fingers started to burn was that Paul was having a bear of a time with the guitar portion.  We played just the guitar and mando parts through about four times; Paul said it was all he could do to play the guitar part let alone sing on top of it. The mando and the guitar sound sweet together – the final result will be worth it.  We STILL don’t have a set list, but I suppose I shouldn’t whine, it’s all about the having fun, right?  Except it doesn’t sound bad, and I enjoy performing, during the brief spells when I’m not wanting to cocoon against the rain and the O Rim Pics.

After weeks of being impossible to keep in tune, the mandolin is finally behaving.  Turns out the problem is the hanger!  When I hang the mandolin up on the wall it promptly goes out of tune and stays that way.  However, when I put the mandolin in the case and hang THAT on the hanger, it behaves.  The guitar doesn’t behave like that at all.  I need new mando picks, all my old ones have wandered away, the little beggars.

After 8 months, Margot has finally figured out that when I pick her up I may just brush her, so she’s learned to scamper away at my approach.  If this keeps up I’m going to have to take her to a groomer and get her taken down to about an inch.

She really enjoys getting right behind Eddie when he’s eating and enthusiastically licking his butthole.  Eddie makes a series of loud and unhappy noises – mixed with eating sounds – but stands his ground.  The visual is really quite striking.  She never does that to Gizmo.  I guess there’s something really irresistable about Eddie’s butt, and if I ever said I wanted to come back as a cat, I take it all back now.  Really.

Birthday party

Last night I attended a co-birthday party with Kat and Kashka and Katie and their friends, which included the following events and observations.

  1. Kick ass margarita courtesy of Kat.
  2. Hugs from Cassie, which were improved by her Dita-von-Teese-worthy hat and veil.
  3. Communing with Speck, who LOVES my hat.
  4. “O my gosh, there’s a snake on your hat”.
  5. Feeling better after letting a snake crawl around my hat, collar and glasses for a while.  I have no idea why this would be, but it is so.  It might be the beautiful, incremental muscle motion; it might be knowing that somebody really enjoys my body heat. Speck is a lovely, lovely snake, pretty and sociable.
  6. Getting a chance to hang with my current favourite teenaged boy (in terms of raw appearance).  I gots nothing to say to him, but he’s so pretty and good natured that it hardly matters.
  7. And what music were they listening to?  The very same stuff I was listening to in Toronto on CFNY during the eighties.  At least half a dozen times I said, “The first time I heard this song I was your age.”  All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
  8. I told them about the fan made Brad Sucks “Making Me Nervous” video and we watched it.
  9. The girls got Pocky and lamb kebobs for their birthday.

Today, The Dreaded Tapioca Song goes to church.

The atheist’s dilemma

There are essentially two broad lifestreams, ways or paths of being an atheist.  One is to define oneself in opposition to theists and purveyors of superstition.  The other is to define yourself in terms of reason and leave God out altogether.

Up until this point I’ve felt the need to define myself in opposition to God-wallopers, but more and more atheists are striking up a new tune.  There is no reason for superstitious people to expect to call us down to their level for the purpose of the argument they wish to win; it’s the job of the modern atheist to get free of the mire and muck of hatred and ignorance, however fancily garbed – and stay that way.

I believe in the power of the human mind, and sadly rue its limitations. I would rather live with those limitations than any imposed by any supernatural being, however benign.

I believe that an ounce of my experience is worth a pound of someone else’s prescription; but when I don’t have the experience, I will gladly fill the prescription.

I believe that from atoms I was constructed, in the shelter of my mother’s womb, and to atoms I will return, and that these atoms will never appear again in this orderly dance, no, never, even if the universe is eternal.

I believe that apes are my cousins and that we share a common ancestor not just with apes, but with every mammal; I believe that every cell in my body is a timeline of life on Earth, from the viruses my ancestors took into their bodies and bequeathed to me, to the DDT that’s lodged in my body fat.

I believe with a passion and anger that occasionally startles me, that every child born should be a longed for, welcomed member of my planetary family.

I believe that every person on earth has meaning, value and inherent dignity, even the ones who hate me and want to kill me.  I believe that if I cannot look at a good and productive person and an violent malefactor without seeing myself mirrored there, I am likely lying to myself and losing a lesson.

I believe that the power of intelligent consensus will replace the clunky and meanspirited political engines running amok in the world today, and to the extent I can, I run my life by consensus.

I believe that corporations should not be legal persons.  Until a corporation could be jailed, it cannot be a person.

Family, love, learning, work and service to others are the five pillars of my life, and each day is an opportunity to give myself to these things.

I believe I am responsible for my own health, mental and otherwise, and that part of that responsibility is looking out for others so that they will see some benefit in looking out for me.

I believe in drinking beer from the bottle to avoid dirtying dishes unnecessarily; that games and sports are to be played first and watched only a distant second; that self-sufficiency and generosity co-exist in a balanced life, and that although no good deed goes unpunished, it’s the badly thought through good deeds that tend to cause the most trouble.

I believe it’s possible to think about things too much.  As much as I like words, I cannot express all I think I know, and all I know I feel.  I believe I must spend a part of every day deconstructing myself, my biases, my weaknesses and my strengths; part of every day laughing; part of every day working; but I am happiest when I don’t seem to be thinking at all.

I believe that science, inquiry, observation and intuition all have their place in coming up with solutions to human problems.  I believe that I will never fully understand how my mind, my senses and my body work, or don’t work, together, and that’s okay.

I believe in the power of individuals and families and whole civilizations to change, both for the better and for the worse, and that change for the better takes love and work, and change for the worse takes hate and destructiveness. We may never tire of war; the uniforms are too cool.

I believe in the healing power of nature; the grandeur of space; our cosmic good fortune in dwelling on our green blue world.

I believe that the moon belongs to everybody, and the earth does too.  But I don’t believe that anybody else will necessarily agree with me, and I believe it would be a terrible world if everybody agreed with me and was just like me.  I believe in variety, I believe in mongrels, and I believe in life.