I have lots and lots to complain about. Like, lots. But I’ve decided to save my best and purest bile for real live people instead of the intarboobs, and the saddest and teariest of complaints for other real live people, and the horrid consequences of brutal self-examination strictly to myself.
Jeff and Paul are off to Victoria this morning with a truck to fetch various items from the estate for us and Katie. They should be back in time for Paul to be able to go to the housefilk.
Today I am going to address something that has been on my list for a very long time, and no doubt add to the list considerably. I haven’t been putting things ON the list, because I’m in mourning. I mourn rather differently than other people seem to, but one thing I’ve learned is that I don’t get as much done when I feel like this, and so taking stuff off my list, or putting things in abeyance, is the humane thing to do.
I was talking to Owen yesterday – he came by the office to talk to folks, and he dropped by my desk. He was my boss for the longest time, and he was a good one as these things go, but it’s in his role as father that he inspires my most fervent admiration. And it’s in his role as father that he’s experienced the special and poignant grief that comes with burying a child. The thing I love about Owen is that although he’s temperate in his use of language, he doesn’t sugar coat things. He’s reality based in a big hearted and fun loving way. The grief of losing Ryan has passed from the acute sunburn stage to the ‘everything throbs’ stage. His daughter is still not attending school full time. The principal said that kids at her age (end of public school) feel incredible pressure for everything to be normal, to attend school no matter what. She’s being given time to grieve in her own way. May we all have the privilege, when it comes our time to pay love’s debt with grief.
I said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about black armbands.” Owen got it right away. “People might be nicer to you if they knew you’d had a loss.” Then, the mischief, which is never far from the surface with Owen, peeped over the wall and he said, “Now there’s a business idea.”
Work is good. I had a lovely long talk with a customer yesterday (and it wasn’t just me jawing, I was in part talking him down from a bad situation) and found out he wrote the only prank article that was ever published in a world famous trade magazine specific to my business. I’m gonna look it up as it sounded hilarious from the customer’s description. Every once in a while one of the elders of the trade gets on the phone and I think I’m talking to Robert Heinlein – a professional engineer with a libertarian bent and courtly manners. As soon as he found out about my dreams of gunnery, he perked right up. Well, I’m the same way, when people talk about kids and other baby animals, my favourite shows, etc.
Paul spent the night, mostly because he wanted to have somebody wake him up by banging on his door rather than deal with being late to get the truck. He didn’t need to, he was up and doing by five. He’s trying to be quiet in the kitchen right now, putting together oatmeal for breakfast, which is awesome.
I’ve added Omega 3-6-9 to my arsenal of pills. I am now taking that, calcium and vitamin D, acidophilus and glucosamine. The oil immediately – seriously, within 24 hours – reduced back pain, brain fog, and the number of times I wake up in the night. It also gives me the most horrific fishy tasting eructations imaginable.
The Olympics are making it harder to source bus tickets. You’d think translink would have… well no, what was I thinking. Translink is not a shiny example of corporate communication. I want to find the bobblehead who posts their tweets and kick his, her or its ass into a 100-1 scale version of a pink golf ball. Or a brown one, those being my choices, roughly.
Work is leaving the Olympics running 24 7 in the training room. Good for morale. Many folks at work have tickets to events and they come back all starry-eyed. I’m not decrying the Olympics now that they are happening, but I don’t have to like it or go to any of the events. I’ve seen some of it on tv. I know people who carried the torch (three, personally, if you can believe it).
The tights I ordered came. They are gorgeous. Simply and eyepoppingly gorgeous. Jeff had to fork over 15 bucks to get them past the door (why can’t American companies ship stuff to Canada without there being customs due???) but other than that the order was complete and what I expected. I’m not wearing tie dye to work any more (except in silk scarves and tights) because I’m not wearing tshirts to work anymore. Yes, I’ve updated my look. Dress shoes most days (I took a break yesterday), dresses or dress pants, proper shirts. I can hardly wait for the first time I wear one of my two dozen black dresses with multicolour tights.
John A at work gave me his mother’s Nanaimo bar recipe, the one with HALF the sugar. Needless to say, I’ll be heading down to Galloway’s soon to load up on ingredaments.
Church on Sunday will be about a spiritual journey from Catholicism to wherever our speaker ended up. Last I heard he was able to countenance god language without difficulty, but there was some pretty spirited atheism in there too during the faithwalk. Should be interesting. Unitarians have less difficulty with the notion of a faith continuum than most churches. My big spiritual issues right now are ‘the language housecleaning’ by which I mean the conscious effort to strip god language from my daily speech, and ‘right relationship with money’ which, if you think is me trying to understand what a reasonable pledge is now that I’m working, would be partially correct – there’s the rest of it too, like ‘at what point is anger appropriate’ and ‘whose church is it anyway’.
ack…. had to delete the next paragraph as I was getting stabby and blamey.
House filk tonight at Tom and Peggy’s. Woman only jam band tomorrow night. And I was working on “Mythical” last night. I have a nice set of callouses these days, and I’d like to keep them.
