Month: January 2010

nautilus3 is going to upload herself into an AI and keep working

….because her list of shizz to do before she dies is TOO LONG

Here’s the list as edited by me. I’m leaving the family names off.

Cousin’s letter (which I have stolen as an idea for an SF story).  A cousin’s letter goes around to all the cousins and they add something to it and send it to the next person on the list.  This has been a ten year project.

She does a family calendar (with Loki) and has done for a dozen years – one each for both sides of the family.

She has a family history site and blog.

She maintains a genealogical database.  Note to self… if Alex is going to catch the family history next, what the hell is going to happen when the database needs to be switched from PC to Mac?

Two other family letters.

Activities around a once-every-three-years family reunion.

Family tree, third edition due soon.

Completed projects include Aunt Mary’s diary, my paternal granny’s life story, a Dresden plate quilt worked on by five generations of women (gives me chills to think about it, which, thankfully, a quilt can fix),  a dozen life stories of family members and their life partners, my dad’s stories, my grandad’s stories, transcriptions of diaries, letters, and papers of yet more rellies, in profusion, picture her hacking her way through flabby sentences and questionable spelling with her Editrix Machete of Coherence, her dad’s stories (a two volume opus of such merit and wonder that I am baffled as to how to describe it).

And there’s more.

Coming up …MORE THAN TWENTY PROJECTS.  I went through the list but I started to feel chest pain at the notion of retyping it.  I exaggerate, barely.

All I meant to say about this is that, just in case nobody had noticed, my mother is completely awesome.  In addition to all that she quilts, knits, keeps my dad fed and happy, puts up hordes of relatives and is a meeting point for many friends and family coming through town (she recently entertained both Bonnie and Rani when Bonnie visited her sister in Victoria), is a two time cancer survivor and is intimately involved in the eldercare of her 98 year old mom-in-law, reads non-fiction, keeps up with contemporary movies and TV on DVD, gardens, bird watches, clears about thirty to sixty email messages a day, and keeps her temper while being pestered for her ‘prayers’ for ministry by relatives in furrin lands civilizin’ the heathens. She is currently in the market for atheist tracts to send to relatives.  No luck so far.  I may have to write one for her.

To recap.  Awesome, and a good person, too.  I’m not going to say that everybody who meets her loves her, but the fans outnumber the detractors by a very wide margin.

So I hope nautilus3 lives until the singularity and uploads herself, because I’d like to think that she’ll be giving her attention to her family members for another thousand years.  In my universe, she is grandmother spider, holding the family together with a skein of light and powerful threads.

The chocolate chip banana pistachio bread is all gone

ScaryClown was here last night to ingest food, beer and ZULU in that order.  We had fun.  I have seen that movie at least twenty times, and every time it blows me away.  Keith was here too.

Today I am being different versions of myself.  Off to a meeting in PoCo this afternoon.  Perhaps I will go to some kind of social media Tweetup tonight but then again, maybe not.  I’m finishing up a couple of songs, you know how it is when you’re hacking away at the ends of things and they take slightly more time than anticipated; at the same time starting things seems to go much faster.  nautilus3 is scowling.  Then she smiles.

I’m getting the playing callouses back on my fingers.

A friend just emailed me a job listing that sounds perfect for me.  I heart my friends.

Jeff cleaned the furnace filter.  Unless I can come up with a better word than disgusting, it will have to do.  The furnace filter appears to have been manufactured sometime prior to the dawn of time.

nautilus3 will like this. It’s the Gordon Mackay catalogue from early in the last century.  The colours and textures and design are wonderful.  Colin forwarded the link via facebook.

small world

I follow Salim Jiwa on twitter and regularly go to his site vancouverite.com – he’s a professional independent internet reporter, which makes him kinda cool in my view.  He doesn’t represent me personally in the information collection business, but ANYBODY who is trying to make a go of independent reporting, especially if that person makes their political biases known, is okay by me.  I know people who don’t have much use for him because of his reporting (“self-serving, incomplete and useless” were among the characterizing words :)) of the Air India bombing (for which I got call up papers as a potential juror, as did Patricia, and this is long before I met her), but you can expect anybody in the court system to pretty much loathe anybody with “Press” tucked into their hatband.  As I have now spent a good portion of my life for the last 5 years trying to come up with ‘news’ (only had one scoop, but o well) on a daily basis, I have some sympathy for how bleeping hard it is, and thus am somewhat more prepared to cut slack.

Anyway, I saw somebody mentioned on his site the other day, and as soon as I saw the name I thought, “I grew up with that kid in Ottawa, except he’s a dirty great grown man now with a really really fine ‘stache.”  So I messaged Salim and yup, he lived across from me when I lived on Dunham in Cardinal Heights. He even remembers me.  I remember him, he was one of the sweetest kids I ever knew.  It’s no surprise he grew up to be an RCMP officer; we grew up living next door to the Chief of Police.  The reason I know he remembers me is because I messaged Salim, and he contacted Dan, and then he emailed me.  Thanks Salim!

So yeah, small world.

In other news, The Reader is a harrowing movie, (either because of the subject matter or because it has some of the longest pauses ever outside of a film adaptation of Pinter) but you get to see David Kross naked (and he’s cute) and you get to see lots and lots of Kate Winslet naked.  Yeah. I remember saying, “She breastfed her kids!” (She has two).

2009 roundup, my good wishes for this year 2010, and I’m outta here for a week

January I went to Conflikt II, one of the last times I saw John.  I bought him a meal, and that makes me happy; there’s video of him from the con, and that makes me happy, too.  I started dating a nice man, but he some months later abruptly stopped calling me when I said something as a joke to one of his friends.  It was too bad; his trailer site down by the border is one of the best kept secrets in the lower mainland, and I did like his friends and they enjoyed my music.  Once I tried to kiss him and his dog got in the way.  I would give anything to have pictures of his mastiff cross Sammy getting a big smack in the jowls from me.  Given that we didn’t so much as kiss for the rest of our dating career, he wasn’t the right guy for me, but I also know he had had a horrific divorce and might have been dating because his friends were bugging him to.  I think kindly of him.

February I sent Valentine’s cards to my coworkers.  If I am going to do it again this year, I should probably start writing the poems now.  I saw David Byrne while wearing a holter monitor, and if that isn’t one of the most baby boom quotes ever, well, I am in the wrong demographic bulge. I got a holter monitor because I had chest pain, triggering an ambulance call, which pain was, apparently, stress related.  I also got the last of my hepatitis shots and distributed biscotti at 4 in the morning at Conflikt II.

March I visited with Wendybird,  I also got Miss Margot, two days after seeing her picture for the first time.  I did it; I fell in love with another creature because I saw her picture.  I really feel like she was destined to come and live with me, and now, when she sits nose to nose with Eddy on Jeff’s bed and bats Gizmo’s tail while he does the cat equivalent of rolling his eyes, she’s just one of the family.  I can hear her snoring right now.  I also bugged my dad enough that he coughed up a single family story.  Bwa ha ha!  Paul and I got a great visit in with cousin Ruth and Katie read the Sookie Stackhouse books after being exposed to True Blood.  Paul had what he found out later was going to be his last alone time with his brother John; they sang and played together, which they hadn’t done in ages.

April John was struck off his motorcycle by a woman in Victoria.  I made a canonical list of my songs (topping out at 130 – the total is now 152 so I’ve either written 22 songs in the last 8 months or I remembered some I’d earlier forgotten or some combination thereof) .  I had a hissy fit and tried to bail on living with Jeff; with some effort (more on his end than mine) it didn’t happen and all I can say, sitting in my living room in my quiet little house in Burnaby, is thanks Jeff.  I also thought about renting a trailer site in White Rock.  Glad I didn’t do that either.

May Jeff and I got an eviction notice, and John died 15 minutes before we got to the hospital,  in a one two punch over two days that drove me insane for about two months.  I looked okay, I sounded okay, and I was definitely, hopelessly and pretty much every minute I was conscious – not okay.  Carrie stayed with us a while. There were horrible bad words exchanged with Paul’s relatives about the memorial service, and I’d like to publicly state that not talking about that on my blog was very hard to do.  I gave notice at work.  I couldn’t concentrate anyway.  At the end of May we found where we are living now thanks to Paul’s timely information.  I thank Mike most reverently for the material and moral support he provided to me after John’s death;  Jeff’s love and support was just about the only thing that kept me going some days.

June I left my job after a lovely going away party; Miss Margot was neutered; we moved in here, and the cats were very, very happy to have a nice big back deck and a yard and alleyway to explore.  Went to John’s Memorial Pondfilk and it was lovely.

July the pinball games came to live in the basement.  I wrote a lot of songs down.  Jerome and Shannon had a little boy.  My little cousin Alyssa turned one. I attended Patricia’s Cavalcade of Cheese.  Went to Wreck Beach with Katie and her friends and Mike, and it was just about the most enjoyable day ever.  I decompressed a great deal.

August me and Jeff and Mike went to the Pretenders and it was the best outdoor concert I’ve ever been to.  Read the most recent translations of Rumi and the Epic of Gilgamesh and was moved to tears by both.  Paul and I visited Unca Dave at the Cancer Lodge.  That would be the second last time I saw him alive, and the last time for Paul.

September I went to the Jericho beach folk club a couple of times and was treated to awesome concerts there.  We emptied the last of the storage lockers and thereby saved ourselves some bucks.  I met Vilma, Mike’s new GF, and found out I had a bunch more songs tucked away someplace, so my lifetime total of songs crept up another notch.  Katie and Keith and I went to Victoria to say goodbye to Unca Dave. I bought a Kaossilator after jamming with Brian C and Mike on a fabulous evening (which Katie also attended, and during which I heard Jeff and Keith, watching something funny downstairs, laugh so hard they made the house shake.)  I started getting more involved with church.

October I had THE BEST HOLIDAY EVER in Ontario.  I got totally energized by what happened to me; seeing Deb, Jan, Chipper, Catherine and Tammy made me so happy I nearly exploded with it, and seriously, when I am having a rough day, I think about that holiday and FEEL BETTER.  Boingboing.net ran an item on lampreys and I used it as an opportunity to drive traffic to Jim Palmer’s Lampreyland site (see sidebar).  I moved minced moose to the minister.  (Honestly, you thought I’d get through a whole year of recap without once mentioning moose?  Whose blog is this?).  I did one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life, and I can’t talk about it publicly.

November I turned 51 the day my Unca Dave died.  Keith said, Now I’ve lost two cool uncles in a single year.  I had one amazing date with a guy who never called me back.  I had another amazing date with a guy who never called me back.  I spend a lot of time wondering what the hell is wrong with me.  I applied for my old job.

December I avoided Christmas but not family get togethers, and started dating a really cool guy with a very chill dog.  We have in the short time we’ve been dating met our exes and some of our kids. I auditioned for a band and didn’t get it.  I emailed a woman who’s putting together women only rehearsal space and that appears to be happening in January, but we’ll see.   I learned how to clean Margot’s eye gunk properly and trimmed her whiskers, which were pushing into her eyes when she was trying to eat, a most unhappy and unsanitary state of affairs.  And I greeted the new year with snores, as evidenced by me mout’ bein’ as dry as a sand trap when I woke up this morning.

In summary; 2009 was a transitional year.  I quit looking for a boyfriend (this one will either work out or I will quit looking); I got a lot of work done but not nearly enough to satisfy me; I reconnected with church and formally rejoined; I found out what I’m like when somebody close to me dies and I really didn’t enjoy the learning;  I learned a great deal of family history and each fragment of it falls into place in such a way that the fabric of life is made richer and stronger; I realized that my gifts are greater than my challenges.

I send a big hug out to all my relations, friends and readers; I hope 2010 is a year full of enticing prospects and the riches of family, work, contentment, honour and playful creativity.  And biscotti.

Now it is with some trepidation that I announce I’ll be intermedia fasting for the rest of the week.  So, no blogging, no tweeting, no facebooking, no livejournal, no compulsively checking email.  I’ll see you back here on the 8th.