Month: February 2012

It’s 10:18 and I have 20 minutes to write a list of 100 things to do with a manta ray skin

  1. Cat armour.  This was obvious, but not, alas, to my cat.
  2. A decorative gauntlet.
  3. Wrap it round a ceremonial pole
  4. A portion of a warlords personal banner
  5. Use it as a frame for a touch up mirror in a club.
  6. Cut it into strips and use in hatmaking.
  7. Ditto jewelery.
  8. Ditto applique for sweaters
  9. Ditto coat lapels or pocket trim.
  10. Turn off all the lights and shine multicolour LED lighting displays on it.
  11. Cut out a skull shape and put it on your mailbox
  12. Make cat collars out of them.
  13. Roll ink over it and press it out to see what the pattern looked like.
  14. Break an egg over it and take a picture of it.
  15. Nail it to the bottom of a table for no reason.
  16. Take pictures of it everywhere you go and talk to it like it was sentient.
  17. Turn it into Gor girl nip covers.
  18. Make a bondage habitat for hamsters.
  19. Make a bandanna for Aku Aku with it.
  20. Deck out a Harley with it.
  21. Ask your lawyer what to do about it.
  22. Tie it to your car aerial.
  23. Glue it to the underside of the glass table where your brother won’t see it until he moves some papers and which will freak the fuck out of him.
  24. Paint Dali’s signature on it and call it done.
  25. Put it on the altar at church.
  26. Get fresh with it.
  27. Put it up to your ear to see if you can hear the ocean,
  28. Ask it for forgiveness.
  29. Blow your nose with it.
  30. Run the eyes through the belt for a creepy gothic vibe.
  31. Cut carefully into gear shapes.
  32. Use in a multimedia collage.
  33. Make a fob for a cell phone.
  34. Make a wallet for a tarot deck.
  35. Eat it.
  36. Make hair decorations from it.
  37. Glue pieces of it to your nails.
  38. Repair a broken relationship with it.
  39. Make a video about its relationship with a rabbit skin and the crazy stuff those kids get up to.
  40. Greet proseletizers at the door wearing it as a thong.
  41. Masks for Mardi Gras.
  42. Dracula style decor.
  43. Use it as a mold for alien skin patterns for effects.
  44. Carve a crow’s head and decorate it with that.
  45. A breastplate.
  46. A crest, mixed with feathers.
  47. Set dec for Lego figures.
  48. Or Robot Chicken.  I would like that.
  49. A cape for baby Cthulhu.
  50. Thrones for evil geckos.
  51. Bathroom tiling for queen bees.
  52. Doll house I don’t know what but it would kick ass.
  53. Fill it full of catnip and give it to a cougar.
  54. Dog toy.
  55. Harness decoration for a draft animal, perhaps a reindeer.
  56. Decoration for a magical item used in a shamanic ritual, possibly involving the appearance of something unlikely and untoward.
  57. Mac cover.
  58. World’s wackiest Book of Hours cover.
  59. Give it to a real designer and let her figure it out.
  60. Corset decoration.
  61. A habitat for a pseudoscorpion (suitably closed off).
  62. Something for the costume of the Black Swan.
  63. Find out what its resonant frequency is.
  64. Use it to drive the decision to find out about the  trade that brought it through your door.
  65. Ditto about the habits of the creature.
  66. Ditto a consideration about the ways of the manta.
  67. Open up a case file on it.
  68. Bring it to the office so other people can admire it.
  69. Cry on it and see if it splashes strangely.
  70. Gently run it over your nose.
  71. Go to Stephen Harper and ask him for his opinion.
  72. Examine it under microscopy and spectroscopy,
  73. Determine its resistance.
  74. Watch Spinal Tap with it.
  75. Take it cloudwatching.
  76. Carefully weigh and measure it.  Weigh it and measure it every day for the rest of your life.
  77. Fling it from the observation tower of a building.
  78. Swim across Sasamat Lake with it in your mouth.
  79. Cut out the words Unbelievable and applique them to a jacket you normally wear to work.
  80. Then wear it to a funeral.
  81. Try to wear it inappropriately as much as possible.
  82. Toy with it on stage while doing standup.  Oh, right; that’s prop comedy. fuck all yall
  83. Take a high def photo of it and post it as your background on your work desktop.
  84. Sew it to a silk cloth, frame it and sell it to a restaurant.
  85. Make a native loincloth out of it for a movie.  That you make mostly in your bathtub.  While running a temperature of 103.
  86. Use it as an opening gambit in a mating dance.

As you can see it took me until 10:59 to come up with 86 but somehow I don’t mind.

 

 

Katie hasn’t actually been home since we got her the new channel

and it’s very strange to be here on a Friday night by myself.  Cindy’s off at a Browncoat or Stargate thing and Paul’s in Ontario with his sis, so no musique. Peggy was supposed to get the Bean today but he’s been illing.  The little snot machine, just like mine were.

One of my coworkers was fired this week.  Nobody saw it coming; nobody is sure why; everybody is very sad about it.  Because either the bosses screwed up big time or she actually did something work getting fired over, and either way I don’t want to believe it.  My boss sat me down and gave me just enough more detail that I’m no longer panicking and chewing on my arm, but it was sad.

This time last year I was suicidal.  Man, I wish somebody had told me to take Vitamin D.  I haven’t come anywhere close to feeling depressed – although I do give in to anxiety once in a while – since I started taking it.  I’m sleeping better, my joints quit hurting, my back is better, and my mood – for February – is great.  Neurochemistry is shore strange.

Sue’s mom died two days ago.  She made a good death – if you’re going to die in hospital, dying 10 minutes after your husband has told you he loves you, surrounded by other family members, after 75 years of marriage, isn’t a bad way to go.  Sue just went to the board meeting like nothing had happened.  I know she’s sad, but she’s such a trouper, and I just love and respect her so much, she’s really an important person in my life and I hardly ever talk about her.

Peggy gave me asparagus last night, I just cooked it up with the leftover Chinese food Keith bought me, om nom nom.

Jeff and I are loving Sg1.  I was expecting to find it cheesy, and it is, but in that happy making way the best cheese in ST:TOS was.  We’re into season 3.  The characters continue to develop, the plots are interesting, the ideas depicted show thought and are described well, the shows clip along nicely, the villains are hideously awful (so when one gets tossed into a vat of liquid nitrogen it’s HELL YEAHS all round) and I’ve even got used to the irredeemably cheesy opening score.

Margot wants to know where Jeff is.  She’s hanging around the back door waiting for him to get back from Rob’s where he’s apparently doing something computery.

In the middle of all the emotional chaos at work there is even more genuine chaos.  The other section of our team which got reamalgamated after the bosses shuffled stuff around yet once more, has moved in with us.  I feel so sorry for the guy who moved in next to me (where somebody had been laid off from, so it’s been vacant for a couple of months).  He’ll have to get used to me talking to customers loudly on the phone and cackling with laughter and singing.  Yup, I’m a fucking bowl of joy to sit next to, although nobody ever complains, maybe because they are scared of my bilious and variable sense of humor.

I sang “A Habitrail named Klein” at the lunch desk today.  Kevin loved it.  Everybody else put up with it.

Sick and weak with anxiety ain’t no way to start a work week

But yes, that’s where I am.  It’s performance evaluation week!

Let’s dig into the psychiatric attic, shall we!  I wrote the song Performance Evaluation when I was 24 years old.  In 30 years, my darlings, very little has changed.

 

He looks at me and says
I think you’ve got an attitude problem
“Who me?” “Yeah, you, you’ve got an attitude” x 2

“We’ll meet in two weeks time
To talk about performance issues”
“That’s fine.  Just get me out of here” x 2

Does this mean that I get to talk about some things
that have been on my mind
Like your temper tantrums and your drinking problem
Does this mean that I get to talk about some things
that have been on my mind
Like the underpaid shit work that you give us

Everywhere I look there’s people waking up and saying
Hey, this ain’t, this ain’t what I signed up for
Everywhere I look, there’s people waking up and saying
10 years I bust my butt, and now I get the door
10 years I bust my butt, and now I get the door.

 

 

Marion King Hubbert saith he:

The world’s present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.

The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.

Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.

Wrap it up

You know, I’m not going to talk much about Conflikt.  It was awesome, let’s leave it at that. I got demonstrations of everything that’s good and bad about my people, and you just gotta roll with it.  The Bad:  domestic breakup, but the good buried in that is that I sang “Invective” to all the appropriate people.  The Good: Lark the Cello took a spill after a concert.  And broke scrollwork.  How can that be good? After we made sure the owner was okay we took up an instant and enormous collection for her repair, and the cello got a filk to Mary Ellen Carter written for her.  There’s more than enough money to fix her and buy strings and upgrade the gigbag, and a competent luthier was instantly located, and beauty will continue to sing through her elegant wooden frame. My peeps, they are phenomenally amazing.

Last night just as I was leaving work Tom called and asked if I had dinner plans. Then he and Peggy invited me over for PRAWNS om nommm nommmm.  Then I had to scooch back to my place because Cindy came over for filking filking filking hot damm.  And I wasn’t expecting to have the Tom and Peggy show as well, but Tom shortly thereafter showed up with his guitar in his hand and Peggy showed up shortly after that after having dropped the Beanpie back at his folks’ place.  We wound it up around 10 – if John was still alive he just would have gone back to Cindy’s and kept singing.  But me, my pumpkin carriage was outside my bedroom door, honking.

Beanpie is so adorable!  he makes the same sounds Keith did at that age, but his voice is if anything even more musical.  He’s also mothering strong and very, very enthusiastic about food.  Like me!  Prawns, omg om nom.

And because I am  eployed, comfortably domiciled with my bro, and undeservedly lucky, we’re going out to brekky and making wit da flapjacks.

 

I sure wish I could stop writing songs in waltz time.

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

I won’t force you into a pair

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

You talent’s exceedingly rare

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

I tell you for I truly care

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

A skillset like yours should be shared

 

In this life there’s a bias for binary thoughtless

It starts with your left hand and right

Couple Up and De-Couple!

sells novels and newspapers

Tropes that are tragic and trite.

Whatever your naughty bits com-mu-ni-ca-tion

is key to affairs of the heart

so in delineating polyamory

that is the place that I start

 

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

I won’t force you into a pair

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

You talent’s exceedingly rare

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

I tell you for I truly care

Be Mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s

A skillset like yours should be shared

 

You don’t make assumptions or fail to do checkins

When you’re angry you use your words

You try not to judge, but when something goes ‘squick’

you are quick to say that’s for the birds

You rarely make promises, but you will keep them

on that your friends may be assured

and you’re made out of action, instead of excuses

a life style choice I much prefer