Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
I have subcontracted the logo work for the restaurant, although the font for the sign is picked out.
It’s supposed to rain in the next 48 hours as much as it rained in the last 48 days. Which will be a very dampening experience I am sure.
I am off to do a small shop. Further bulletins as events warrant.
Getting down to the wire here.
Fortunately I have lots of other things to keep me busy, lol.
Saw Mike last night and he ran his magical MBA brain over the numbers. I now have a drop dead number for sales if we are going to make a go of the business. It is stretchy, but by no means impossible. Katie asked this morning how much more I would be willing to invest before walking away, and fortunately that IS something I have thought about so it wasn’t hard to say. She wants me to concentrate on obtaining cooking tenants.
I have an insurance quote. It’s a tad higher than I’d like, but not unreasonable given the liability coverage.
Receipts for church have all been mailed or hand delivered, glory be.
Bank account set up – waiting to hear back from owner about meeting with landlord. If it goes badly, I will be returning various moneys back to proper home and I will be somewhat downcast. However, I have an inkling of how much the current owner would like to rejoin her hubby Stateside and feel confident it will be fine.
The grandsnake has outgrown his hidey box and we had to buy a new one (and a mouse…) today. This will probably calm him down because his ass is currently hanging out when he settles into it right now, or else he’s lifting it up right off the bottom of his cage. He’s eating like an ogre and pretty much growing like one too. His having been bred for tameness means he has a minor genetic defect and trembles when he gets excited or confused. Yup, it’s a really crappy idea to overbreed critters. However I think he is a very pretty and biddable boy, even if I can’t stomach feeding time.
The rest of the tax receipts are in the mail. phew….
UUism asks us to love each other for the life we are and not to hate each other for what we believe. This is antithetical to the current trend in atheism to denounce anybody with any spiritual leanings at all. UUism says it’s a false dichotomy, given we all occupy one planet, are born, live and die. As an atheist UU serving on a Board, I understand why a lot of atheists say why bother, and my explanation is that if you want a Sunday school that encourages questions, teaches science based age appropriate sexuality information, teaches children from non traditional families and doesn’t enforce the gender binary, you can either start your own as an atheist or come to a UU church, where they’ve been thinking about this for 50 years and have curriculum, training and teachers to encourage children to develop both compassion and critical thinking skills. The two most important things about UUs is RE and fellowship of like minded people.
Baking up a storm of maple bacon muffins, some of which will accompany to her foodsafe 2 class today.
Keith is going to the grands this weekend, and he will have biscotti in tow if the gods are kind.
Today I am ENDURING THE HORRAH of completing my first tax documents for the church. I will be glad when this term is over, despite all I have learned.
It is astonishingly windy – the recycling bin keeps leaping up and trying to make a run for it down the porch stairs. The cats really don’t like it the noise.
Jeff says Margot had some kind of fit the other day. Her eyes were open but she was impossible to rouse. Then she perked up and was completely normal or as normalz as that crazy little fur machine ever gets. Obviously I am mildly concerned but when cats are eating and drinking as per normal it’s hard to stay that way.
mOm, you will be amused to hear that Katie just came up behind me and said “can you read that in the dark?” and turned the lamp on.
Long and amusing phone call with Chipper yesterday. She’s in much better spirits – her wordplay and sense of proportion have been somewhat restored – and she has been the biggest booster of the plan for the cafe.
I suppose I should pick up the phone and apologize to Carrie for our unfortunate text exchange, but I am still a little mad about it and if I am still resentful an apology will just make things worse.
Saw Mambo Kings the other day. I enjoyed the musical numbers and costume design a lot, and Antonio Banderas is a wriggling sack of puppies cute.
Lots of people asked me for the lyrics to my Beacon bday tune, so I am happy about that.
Receipting for tax time for donors at the church is done…. I will also be stuffing envelopes today.
And laundry. I thought I was all caught up but the laundry basket is telling me different.
Windy but glorious out there.
I am drinking cold cocoa and preparing to go to the church 30th birthday party. It should be fun and festive. I will report on how the song went over before I go to church tomorrow (I’m opening for Audrey the Wonderful (she really is, too, so firm of mind and so soft of voice)).
Paul just called – he’ll be coming as well and is making up some of his famed quinoa tabbouleh. Of course he had to be reminded about it and that’s okay, it’s cool that he’s coming.
Kate is at her level two Foodsafe course, Monday we open a business account, Tuesday my money to close should come in, and then we hammer a cheque and get it to the current owner and get an introduction to the landlord at some point prior to closing. Work is happening every day on the purchase, and while I would have preferred opening an account on Friday one business day won’t make a difference.
Everything people are saying on the internet about Amanda Fucking Palmer’s ‘the Bed Song’ is TRUE. DO NOT WATCH UNLESS YOU ARE OKAY WITH CRYING.
I am writing YET ANOTHER character song for Midnite Moving. It’s from George to Raven and it’s called ‘and then you smile’.
and I deleted the whole thing in 2020 because it was DREADFUL thank god I have this power.
We can now trot forward on other urgent matters. Can’t stop and chat, I am still working on the receipts for church. I have been correcting errors (thankfully not many) and meditating on just how awesome my church community is.
And I am here at home working away on receipts and getting the printer hooked up to the new computer (Jeff advised, I finally took the advice).
Margot has been defluffed (as if….) and rendered a little less stabby, as I took off some talon action on her back feet. She barfed all over my Fraser Health certificate plan and now I have to print another one.
This may seem like a particularly asinine comment, but if the way they blocked off Kingsway and 14h this morning is anything to go by, the Burnaby RCMP couldn’t organize an orgy at a porn convention.
This afternoon we bake, and Jeff will be the (hopefully) happy recipient of the largesse.
Peggy is back from China, I am so looking forward to talking to her about it.
I formally dropped out of the Chalice circle. I am too set in my ways – the first one was so good, and was all about deepening friendship, which thank you very much IS spiritual. However I was alternately disturbed and disappointed by the materials we were supposed to read, and the presence of two of the long time members of the former iteration of the circle was not a sufficiently appealing inducement.
Still need the business name registration, waiting until later this week…. sigh.
Naomi said, “There’s no chairs downstairs!” as soon as she saw me at church yesterday, so John H and I put out tables and chairs. John’s over 80 so I really appreciated his assistance, especially when he realized that somebody had stacked the chairs in such a fashion that one good shove would put a couple of hundred pounds of chairs on top of somebody, probably a small child. We fixed that problem. Hope the insurance people don’t find out.
Today I am going to harass the business licence people to find out why the hell they haven’t gotten back to us in three days like they promise on the web site (if ever a girl was fooled…). Rat(((((ers.
Also, baking today. I’m going to find out where the cheapest almonds are and buy and toast a lot of them, and then make a quadruple batch of biscotti. (Some for the Beacon Birthday party!).
Also, buying more printer ink, why else was I born….
Also cleaning kitchen which is a sty after my cooking frenzy yesterday (haddock and veg, butter chicken).
Also, reviewing the deposit sheets for church to cross check the donation amounts by donor, plus updating the new addresses in the system. A treasurer’s work is only done when she leaves the job at the AGM!!! Two more months, and a bit. I believe I should actually have the receipts out in time!
Yeah. I should never have volunteered for anything at church. I hope the word no comes to my lips with more efficacy in future but in the meantime I have stopped associating church with awe and wonder and now associate it with work and worry. Plus I’m no good at it… and of course there’s stuff I can’t put in a public place, boorah.
So I am going to back away from the chalice circle, and finish up, as best as I am able, the work for the church year (I am finishing the receipt data entry this morning) and then traverse the moments between now and the AGM and then pretty much stop going to church. I was reading the church folly lane book that Latham wrote yesterday, and for all the people who are infused with energy about church thanks to his workshop, what will happen? All he did was get everybody enthusiastic and the second everybody allows themselves to feel the exhaustion associated with the massive amounts of labour in putting on a 30th birthday show (and I don’t include myself in that because all I’m doing is open church the next day, bringing food, helping set up starting at two next Saturday, and singing a song I composed especially for the occasion which I really should rehearse again for at least half a dozen times between now and then) we will be able to TALK enthusiastically, but to steer the church through a course of transitioning from family to pastoral to program church is impossible with the people and the energy that we have. Being a small church is in the DNA of the church. The second we reach a certain size, there’s always a crisis and people quit. (I am thinking of the RE director debacle we had a few years back and by debacle I’m talking about how we p8ssed all over the covenant we have to be mutually supportive and face our problems with courage and truthfulness, not anything the RE director did).
I have said it before and I’ll say it again. RELIGIOUS EDUCATION is the engine of growth of a church. If you don’t tend it lovingly and house it appropriately, you can’t grow the church, because there’s no place for young adults with children to attach to the church. No young adults, no new members to train in organizational leadership. No relief for the people who run the church; they get to do the same thing over and over and fresh faces and ideas don’t come in. Now Robert Latham says you must have a clear sense of mission and then the church will be vibrant, or else you’re just a social club for aging liberals.
Church didn’t do anything to me. I did it to myself. I wanted to make things better, make it more welcoming for young people. Still, we sing old songs that apart from the lyrics are exactly what you hear in other churches, still, we don’t use technology effectively in our services, still, we have no decent RE space, still, we are renters, still we do not challenge ourselves with service content. We are consistent, we are generous, we are friendly. And we’re old. Average age on the Board is 60. That is terrible. It says everything about our leadership, our energy level, our demographics.
Like I said I’ll keep pledging. And if I am spared, I’m going to start my own church. That’s how you really make money in this modern world. Ask anybody.
Entered bunches of data for tax receipts, got church bank recs done, should have financials for tonight. Wow, a board meeting on Valentine’s day. Should prove that whatever we are it isn’t sentimental.
The master of ceremonies for the Beacon birthday party is now in possession of my lyrics, and I guess he’s a convert.
Phew!
Met with current proprietor of cafe yesterday afternoon, reviewed the inventory, all looks good. The inventory covers all but 10K of the asking price; we’ll have to buy knives, a coffee maker, a meat slicer and a couple of microwaves, but all of that we can do without too much difficulty. Waiting with bated breath for the registered name to come back.
Katie came up with an idea for a muffin that nobody else is serving in the lower mainland. If it takes off, we’ll have people driving out of their way to eat it. Just mentioning it to a couple of people yesterday made their eyes light up.
And we will be serving gluten friendly (can’t say gluten free because it’s a mixed use kitchen) food, as well as vegan offerings.
Happiness….
