Month: December 2012

Weather report

To quote an Aberdonian “Aw naw, snaw!”

Yup, soggy shit be fallin’ from de skies.

Open and close at church again today (traded with someone so she could be with her family).

I am currently working up yet another shopping list (this one will be official and look purty).

In family news, the grandsnake is now called Izzy.  HE IS HONGRY ALL THE TIME OM NOM NOM.  Kyle said he wanted to feed him live ones, but he’s eating reconstituted frozen ones as if he was a high school linebacker let loose on an all you can eat buffet.  So Katie’s year of snake care (she actually slept in Opal’s room) comes through again.  He’s shedding, so he’s crabby.  Katie says he’s becoming hand tame very fast…. provided YOU move slow.

Now I need to jump in the shower and get gwine.

xmas cards

Almost 20 stamped, addressed and ready to go.  I concentrated on people at church who don’t come often and people I wanted to thank for their presence in my lives, including people I normally only interact with on facebook or elsewhere on the Internet.

also, mOm when you see this can I have mailing addys for Greg and Tracy, ontie Mary and Uncas Barry and Gary, as well as Phyllis?  I can’t find my mailing list from years past…..

Despite everything – unemployment, the weather, and other things one shouldn’t publicly relate – I’m in a really good mood.  I got a ‘wretched chore’ off my list yesterday and everything balanced to the penny, so I’m a happy happy girl.  Also, I went to London Drugs yesterday looking for Blue Heron Coffee and couldn’t find it.  Now normally I’d lose my shit and panic, but old age is causing me to do things like (literally, in this case) step back and look more carefully.  THEY CHANGED THE EFFING PACKAGING.  grr.  So then I looked, and there they were, for 8.99 A PACKAGE.  Normal price 14.99, normal discount and London Drugs 11.99.  I bought 5.  Glad I went! And if anybody from church is reading this, this is why I don’t buy coffee at church.  Plus I hate Spitfire Longbottom with a passion, it tastes like mud a Komodo dragon got busy in.

Also I dropped off more receipts at the accountants and I may actually get my taxes up to date, and I found the perfect gift for Jeff, which I have no intention of buying – it’s coasters made of Antarctic maps.  Jeff’s on a really serious “READ ALL THE BOOKS ABOUT ANTARCTICA” kick; he’s relating all the best anecdotes.

I still have to go to Surrey, but maybe I’ll combine it with another errand. A leathery or musical errand.  Or maybe I’ll just grimly go straight to my errand and come back.  Thinking about my mortality doesn’t please me, and thinking that my final resting place is going to be a funerary park in Surrey about blows my tiny mind.  Paul was so sweet – when I told him I was getting the cremation ‘package’ I bought back in 95 transferred to the Lower Mainland he asked if he needed to pay for it (there’s room for two in that niche, haw haw), and I said, “Considering we had a joint checking account in those days, uh, no…. you already did.”  And besides the separation agreement says we no longer owe each other anything, although I keep thinking I want to break into his apartment and steal the damned rug we bought on Pender Island.  I LERV DAT TING.

Margot is still playing “Go Home Fly You’re Drunk” in the kitchen.  I don’t know where all these sleepy, weaving, falling down flies are coming from, but even so they’re more than a match for Miss Margot.

Andrew forwards this for Xmas (from facebook/filker)
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my Facebook feed sent me:

12 Wonka’s snarking
11 rants at Congress (Canadians use Harper)
10 McKayla’s scowling
9 Gangnams dancing
8 jokes a-milking
7 pics Takei-ing
6 geese from Farmville
CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!!!

4 game invites
3 LOLcats
2 friend requests
…and a cartoon from xkcd!

Chipping away at the hard stuff

Today, Holiday Greeting Cards and a teensy bit of Xmas shopping.  Jeff’s insisting on a no fly zone for prezzies so I’ll probably cook him something festive at some point instead.

I applied for ten different jobs this morning.  Now to drift down New West way and pick up and drop off various interesting, paper related or comestible items.

Also, Surrey.  Really don’t want to go.  But I must.

 

 

frabjous news

I have simply spectacular good news but I can’t say anything about it until I receive authorization.  It has to do with me and music.  I’ll leave it at that.

Board meeting was excellent and productive.  We had a board meeting/potluck and Jeff grazed on leftovers.  One of the joys of Unitarianism is candle wax, and I got some on my gran’s linen tablecloth but sing HA I have already ironed the wax out and I’ve run the tablecloth through the laundry.  So no harm done.  We had to make some hard choices, but Debra is an awesome minister and she is completely unFaZed by organizational change, is a great communicator and gosh darn a nice person.  She told her partner recently that she’s falling in love with Beacon.  I dearly love Rev Katie and really enjoy her posts (and her hubby’s) on facebook (the only way I keep track of her as there is meshugas about a retired minister poking head back in to a church for a couple of years) but she is a reserved individual and Debra is a gregarious individual and it’s obviously playing out in an interesting way in congregational life.

I’m seeing Katie for lunch today – her treat, yippee.

TAMMY IS COMING THIS MONTH.  So looking forward to seeing her and her mum, whom I usually see at the festive season.

Sue is playing Santa Claus in a play which I am going to go see.  She says playing Santa Claus is hot and hard, which kinda makes it sound pornographic now I write it out like that.

I got a completely unprintable and exceedingly welcome compliment from somebody recently, to the point that I must now quote Mark Twain: “I can live two months on a good compliment”.  I may have to stretch it out even farther than that.

I have a very obnoxious complaint to make about somebody and I am not going to publicly state it.  I want a medal or something.

I think Jeff is thrilled we had company; there’s whipped cream in the fridge and the kitchen table is now clear.  Oops, just put laundry on it.  O well, it was nice while it lasted.

This afternoon after my Katietime I will do something productive, just haven’t figured out which of my piles of shit I should attempt to render into something useful first.

I love Lockout.  Guy Pearce is A GREAT SMARTASS. Man after my own heart.  Here’s a quote from him: [2007, on his music] “I don’t want to make music to get into the pop charts and make a career out of it. I just want to play music with other people. Sometimes I record it. I think there is a value in recording it in the same way that you might write a diary. Writing a diary does not mean that you want to publish it. If this is my diary, I’m not sure that I want it to be read. And anyway, I think there is an automatic disdain for somebody who is too ambitious. People think as an actor you are gifted and don’t have any troubles in life. You are lucky to be doing this thing where all you have to do is go around telling lies and you get to kiss beautiful women. So how dare you want to be able to do this other thing. I am not interested in releasing music to a skeptical audience.”

I mourn the passing of Dave Brubeck, and light a candle also for the victims of the Montréal Massacre

More life

  • Wonderful meeting with Bareld; I am now feeling MUCH better about being a treasurer. He said “I’ve seen it all” and he shared.  We often end services with “You are not alone” as the benediction, and he provided coffee chocolate and sage advice so I really felt the benediction!  Also got to see Marylke briefly as she came in from erranding about.
  • Paid UPS so we won’t lose our church mailbox.  Given it’s the address on the cheques…. you see the problem.
  • Tomorrow, cleaning and cooking for the board meeting at my house.  It will be a potluck.  I’m actually kinda looking forward to it.
  • Keith has framed and will be hanging up his ‘shingle’ – his diploma and professional designations – at the place he is now working.  I AM THRILLED.
  • Katie phoned me yesterday to ‘hear the sound of my voice’ (and can there BE words a mother more wants to hear, at least a partway functioning mom) and to tell me she’s trying to rearrange her sched so she’s got Sunday Monday off.  This is partly because she wants to actually SEE Kyle, and also because as she said, “If I get it you’ll see more of me in church.”  THRILLED ALSO.  Two very very happy making convos in one day, it was rather delightfully dizzying.
  • Saw Premium Rush AND LOVED IT.  I had heard it was a guilty pleasure of a movie, but all I can say is that it was very well constructed and didn’t have airs or pretensions – it was made to entertain, at which it succeeded marvellously.  I now have Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s evol chuckle percolating through my brain.
  • Margot barfed on my copy of Red Roses and Dead Things.  This does not accord with my opinion of this fine work of music.
  • Jeff continues to be the World’s Most Awesome Broâ„¢.

 

 

 

 

Daysigns

Wow.

First thing I saw when I left the house yesterday was a man still drunk from the night before taking a swig from a flask and then walking into the Serbian Orthodox Church.  Now I wish I had a god to thank that I don’t have to be drunk to go to church.

Church was excellent.  Debra preaches a mighty sermon – this one was essentially how we should cherish our doubts.  You can’t hurt truth by doubting. Doubt and faith are not enemies.  Also, holy sheep Batman, but we’re having to put out more and more chairs.  And she brought her partner, who is the very model of a fine gentleman.

 

I had to open and close and it took forever because of a Christmas pageant rehearsal.  Then something challenging and unpleasant happened, so I went home and collapsed and ordered Chinese food.

The order of the universe having now been somewhat restored, I’m going to bitch about some things.

 

Stephen Harper, not recognizing steps on the way to Palestinian statehood makes me VERY ANGRY.  I didn’t vote for you and I wish the rest of those fucking morans hadn’t either.

THE WEATHER HOLY SHEEP HOW GHASTLY.  Rain, rain, rain til Thursday.