Month: December 2012

Duck Duck

 

A Christmas Duck not for eating.

Went to the job hut yesterday and I’ll see a career counselor today at 9.  I know how to write a resume and get interviews but since I’m not finding employment I’m obviously doing something wrong.  And when you’re doing something wrong, you have to stop doing it and get on the right track… you know, that stop digging advice.

O gosh the bean with bacon soup is amazing!  There is lots of yummy food in the fridge right now.

It is snowing very steadily and the wind has picked up.  V. glad I don’t have to cross a bridge today.

What would Jack Do and My Needle have gone off to the songbook compiler (Cindy!) for inclusion in the Conflikt 6 song book.  Hard to believe that John was still alive for the first Conflikt.  He sure brought the fun with him.  And I think he would have enjoyed SG1, and every time I write a new song I can see him rocking with laughter or listening intently (or going meh) as the song required.  I think also he would have approved of me finally practicing enough… speaking of which, another item on the to do list!

Paul gave me some coffee that he bought in Maui.  I made it really strong, but I haven’t had any yet so I think I will follow Jeff’s example (he said I made it like espresso).

Paul’s mum dislocated her hip.  Lois is with her now and Paul will be going later.  I hope she can stand the idea of assisted living; I know she’s still sharp and fiercely independent but sometimes the flesh does not cooperate with the spirit.

Watched the documentary about Boubakar Traore called I’ll sing for you.  Mali does not come across as a place I’d like to visit, although Dogon architecture kicks ass, and the guitar work (a Takamine!) is cherce. And too infrequent.  At one point, with no commentary, there are a group of pictures shown about the ‘grin’ (shebeen) movement and there’s a line of people, including a woman with a huge shiner, and I’m thinking, oh great.  I know, I can get downcast too easily.

The Dalai Lama’s book on interfaith dialogue is very interesting (Toward a True Kinship of Faiths).  He says that a global religion is both impossible and undesirable because of cultural and linguistic divisions, but interfaith dialogue is crucial because of the underlying human drive towards religion (or the numinous, or the feeling that we are all part of one big family).  Interfaith action enobles all religion.  (Yeah, as long as we’re not hating on queers…. and women…. don’t think I’m not seeing the lacunae, but I’m trying to elevate the tone here.) He talks about his relationships with other faith leaders, and what a naive little monk he was in 1956, when he first got exposed to other religious practices. He spends a lot of time on India as the model of interfaith dialogue, which is interesting, because they really have been doing it longer than everyone else.    He also talks about his understanding of the other major faith traditions and their similarities and differences… He also talks about how he wishes his English was better – he uses a translator for everything he writes in English.  Anyway, recommended.

an unusual discovery

Jeff was looking at the drives pOp gave him and there are slide shows.  Oh, yeah.  Here’s the best out of the lot.

Bean with bacon soup is simmering on the stove; I don’t have to cook any more today, yay, as there is lots in the fridge to eat and the soup will be ready by noon.

Snow has fallen – it was hailing earlier.

Jeff’s watching feetsball on the PVR and I’m trying to get my exciting song about bears recorded in some fashion.  I hear people scraping off cars.  I am amused.  I will salt the walkway now, it’s the fiendly thing to do.

 

AllegraJeffBalcony

Things ta do

I have already applied for two jobs and it’s just gone 6 am.

I will continue to look, however.  I’m supposed to hear back about the job in New West today.  Hope I do, it’s a fifteen minute bus ride.

Kitchen clean up.

STACKS of church paperwork, but I have been given an energy boost by positive interactions at church yesterday.

Laundry…. the continuing saga.

Trying to figure out a mandolin part for the keeping bears happy song.  Or a guitar part, but I hear mandolin.

Justin Timberlake clogs.  In a movie, not a drain. 

Margot was running around the house doing the crazy cat thing.  Since she’s never done this before, she’s now laid up in the cat hotel in the corner of the living room and breathing with an astonishing stertorousness.

I need to find out what those folks are doing with my tax returns.

New definition of fabulous

If we now construct the word fabulous to mean that ‘We did nothing, and enjoyed it immensely’ I had a fabulous visit to the parents’. My role as a grandchild deliverywoman is now complete.  Katie had a really good night of sleep, which is excellent because she hasn’t been sleeping too well.  I slept 8 hours continuously which must be a recent record.  I think one of the reasons I sleep so well there is because they keep the humidity set to “Human, rejoice!” as opposed to most gas heated homes, which in the winter time is “Human, all your mucous mebranes are belong to us!  Suffer!  Mwa ha ha!”

My blood sugar is 6.  My blood pressure is 136 over 88.  Not worrisome but it’s definitely time to take some weight off.  These are the kinds of things one learns when one visits parents!

I bought the What Colour is Your Parachute 2012 workbook, and it’s making me turn things over in my mind. I also bought yet another writing book.  I haven’t set a record, but I may yet.

Home made bean with bacon soup going to church with me today.  I extracted one bowlful for Jeff, as he said “Oo!” when he saw/smelled it.

Izzy is doing very well.  He’s eating every five days, and becoming quite hand tame.  He really likes Katie’s glasses.  He will be almost two metres long when he quits growing in a couple of years.

State Troopers of Connecticut have assigned a detail of Troopers to protect the families of the slain children and staff from unwanted attention.  This is in response to the crushing attention of the media, may they all experience the pangs of conscience, and the unindicted miscreants of the Westboro Baptist Church, who have promised to picket the funeral.  Given that the American public LOATHES the Westboro Baptist Church and is starting to get pissed off at the media, I think the response is fitting and an appropriate use of government resources.

Now I DEFINITELY need more coffee.  This is going to be a long day.  I am once again opening and closing at church and there is yet another interminable church discussion today.  If I get out of the meeting without offending anyone I’ll count it a plus.  HA HA KIDDING.  That’s half the fun.  NEED COFFEE.

Margot didn’t even respond when I came through the door last night (after a 6 hour journey, blech, thanks to the *ing weather in the Strait yesterday).

 

A row of candles

I light a row of candles for the parents, friends, coworkers and relatives of all those slain in CT yesterday.  Tragic news.  Here’s Ebert on the subject – almost 10 years before it happened.

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Thinky thoughts

So five years ago I was too fat and unfit to flirt with (this was SAID, not IMPLIED), but today I am not.  I will never understand men if I live to be 100.  If the flirting turns into asking me out, I’ma about lose my mind, and of course politely say no. You sure as hell can’t unring that bell.

I enjoyed the job interview yesterday.  They certainly conducted it with dispatch – I was in and out of there in 25 minutes.

I am going to get a little PC to handle PC type stuff for church.  I don’t want to get a virtual machine on my Mac, given that it and its hard drive is quite old and Apple has already told me to go fuck myself if I want to replace it, okay maybe not those words but “This is so old, why don’t you get a new one” were literally what the fixit man said when I was having troubles with the DVD player.

Made refrigerator cookies yesterday.  It’s almost four in the morning and I’m thinking of getting up and slapping some into the oven.

 

Two and a half hours

Lovely lunch with Keith, at the wrong location.  We’d agreed on Heritage but I gapped it and ended up at Ki Sushi.  To say sorry I paid.  It was delightful to see him.  That was from noon til one.  Then I parked at Value Village, walked across the street, went to the library and put a hold on Antifragile (as per LTGW’s suggestion) and picked up three other books including Pinker’s The Blank Slate which has been on my list for EVER, then I made an appointment with a case manager at WorkBC (as I am taking my unemployment seriously now); then I walked to the TD and deposited a large check, then I went to YYoga and picked up some brochures, then I went to the beer store (I’m sorry, but I can’t teetotal when Lion Winter Ale is available) and then I went back to the car and went home.  I should have picked up gas and coffee cream, but that was a lot of walking so I came home and collapsed, when I shouldn’t have.  But it was a jam packed 2 1/2 hours!

No responses to any of my job applications so far, but I guess I wasn’t expecting any.  Sigh.

aw hell, I don’t work there anymore anyway

So once upon a time I had a customer.  A nice one.  Polite, friendly, helpful.
He needed a replacement unit for a customer, we couldn’t ship.
So the customer’s customers, a married couple,  got their litigation on; lawyer’s letter, ugly words exchanged on the phone, BBB threats, I will ruin your reputation, full court press.
Unit FINALLY ships & gets installed.  Customer goes to homeowner getting paperwork signed off and she purrs at him (this the woman who hired a lawyer to sue him) “Wanna go for dinner, my husband’s out of town!”
As I said to the customer, from lawsuit to linguine in one fell swoop.  His comment “I’ve taken one for the team plenty, but I’ve never done THAT.”
We were both howling, it was so funny.  And even funnier because this is an awesome guy, nobody ever LESS deserved to be sued.

Happy Birthday mOm

Tonstant weaders will believe that I have a rather rose coloured view of my mother; those who actually know my mother will know that my pen is a feeble reed in limning all of her sterling personal characteristics.  So to prevent this little screed from becoming a full on panegyric, I’ll take the first three words that come to my mind when I think about her, which are kind, intelligent and industrious, and attempt to fill in the gaps a little.

The grimmer aspects of childrearing aside (for my mother was not kind when she wanted me to clean my room) my mother is kind.  To the extent that she knows of the feelings of others, she doesn’t tread on them.  I had her example in front of me during my growing up and it’s great – also a burden, because the world is full of assholes and sometimes I’d like to go join that party, but my mother’s lingering influence prevents me from going full bore asshole for more than short periods.  My dad is also kind, but he specializes in unemphatic demonstrations of practicality, punctuated by full on goofiness.  My mother’s kindness consists of superb discernment in conversation and a finely tuned ability to see and experience the best in other people; hospitableness; a really amazing ability to take people as they are without immediately rushing to judgement; and most of all taking her own needs seriously while making the people around her comfortable.

That she’s intelligent can be, I suppose, demonstrated by the degrees on the wall, but we’ve all met educated fools.  My mother’s intelligence is woven fine; it encompasses the practical and kinesthetic skills of what used to be called the womanly arts as well as the ability to be curious and ever learning about archaeology and cosmology and sociology; the ability to grow things and be in nature with joy; to envision and execute a multiplicity of ongoing writing and craft projects; to keep the more eyeglazing aspects of family history firmly in hand; and most important, to understand the limits of her intelligence with humour and candour.

Oh, the industriousness.  I don’t envy her kindness or her intelligence.  Both of those things are part of her makeup at least in my view.  But people CHOOSE to be industrious, and that my mother has done.  There’s been a lot of bs in the internet press about ‘having it all’; how hard it is for a woman to have a career, husband, children, house, garden and restful sleep at night.  The reason I think it’s bs is because I’VE SEEN IT DONE.  I know how it’s done.  If you have a supportive husband and reasonably cooperative children, it’s possible.  You just can’t do anything else and not have things go SPUNG.  Oftentimes I think that the whiners are saying “I want all that stuff but I still want exotic vacations and drinks with the girls and 45 minutes of working out every day.”  My mother did not, and does not, give a tinker’s cuss about any of that stuff.  Her priorities were as plain as a three by five card.  It was “Husband, kids, career, home, family, friends” in some order, but not necessarily that order.  And in order to do that, she cooked a lot of meals, and burned a lot of midnight oil studying, and got woken up a lot by puking or nightmare-frightened children, and scrubbed a lot of tubs, and filled in a lot of incident reports, and sewed and knitted a lot of clothing, and pulled a lot of weeds, and took the pager (disproportionately a lot, thanks you sexist asshats) as administrator on call for the hospital, and wrote a lot of letters, and put long hours in at the office, and worked (discreetly and without fanfare) on keeping the magic in her marriage.   (All of this makes it sound like my pOp didn’t do anything; believe me, he was in there working his butt off, but much of what he did was less visible to me as a child.)

So there you have it.  My mOm, in brief.  Happy Birthday, mOm!