Month: January 2015

Moar coffee

I got a perfectly good nights’ sleep but I feel very sludgy today.

On the list of things to do:  Mail package to Sandy.  Buy butter.  Make a list of the stuff I have to get  for the Feast of St. Brigid – we’re having a musical evening at Planet Bachelor on February 1st and I’m cooking (and likely cleaning, if trends hold). Practice songs and assemble song books for that event. Moar editing – I’m doing a little every day, which is happy making.  Hopefully it will result in fewer “What the hell is this??” notes from Dianne. Make some phone calls.  Go for a walk – I am thinking of walking up to the library. Watch the Librarians double episode season closer. Put away my clothes, including my COAT which Buster PISSED ON.  Argh.  Sally told me yesterday that once male cats get that habit you’ll be dealing with it forever, but we can has UV lights for piss detection and we shall enzyme clean and Feliway everything in the house if we have to.  Right now it’s REDOLENT up in here. Take a metric crapstack of painkillers and clean. Figure out how to get the mirror off the wall in the bathroom so I can get it resilvered, I am tired of looking like a zombie in my own bathroom mirror.  Fix my website. Get more crap to Value Village. Make a square blankee for Alex.

Jeff is really liking Z Nation – it’s not a soap opera with occasional zombies like Walking Dead, it’s all zombies, all the time, with occasional stops for breath.  He sometimes comes upstairs and tells me of the new and improved zombie killing methods the show comes up with, like squishing them with the Liberty Bell, which you have to admit is hilarious.  Also it’s shot in the Pacific NW so props.

Seahawks did the ultimate haw haw you thought being two td’s ahead was going to stop us to the Packers yesterday.  The fans screamed themselves hoarse.

I forgot to say how VERY HAPPY I was to see Ivy back at church yesterday.  I love that woman and I’m glad to see she’s recovering well from her busted hip.

 

 

Church today

I am wearing my pink dress and my tie dyed tights today; I won’t be easy to miss.

Buster peed on one my mOm’s quilts which is very annoying but Jeff popped it in the laundry for me.

I am continuing with the decluttering.  Yesterday it was all my bookmarks on my computer.

I edited three sections totalling over 15K words today and yesterday.  I will go back and edit them again, tightening, deleting, expanding, and upgrading the punctuation.

A brief exchange of food

Paul dropped by yesterday morning on the way to work to drop off a cheque for his half of the baby carriage (which it turns out Alex loathes unless it’s moving). He brought fresh bread (cousin Jim’s recipe) and I had a container of home made rice pudding (strangely, IN a commercial rice pudding container).  He couldn’t stay so we chucked food at each other and he left.

Buster got out the door.  He paused (like a moran) on the deck to inhale the sweet air of freedom – and I chucked him back in the house.  He doesn’t hate me but he was not amused.

He gets snipped on Tuesday.  The whole house smells like pee, sigh, but we have a plan to deal with that as Buster recuperates.  I will be ever so glad when he can FINALLY get off the cone of shame.

I’ve put some items on craigslist for sale. No responses yet.

Alex at three months

He looked like Katie the last time he was here; now he looks breathtakingly like Keith at that age, most especially when he has a look of concentration or is smiling.

He responds to music by turning his head to see what’s going on. Alex is delightful to perform for. We spent about half an hour ‘walking’ him back and forth between me and Katie. So strong.

I took him downstairs to commune with the Star Trek pinball game, and he swam around on his stomach on the glass, sometimes following the ball with tremendous concentration, other times just slapping the living shit out of the glass and drooling on it while making the usual gurgling cooing noises.

Man, he hates the stroller unless it’s moving; then he’s unconscious.

I have video of him but can’t find my camera cable.  It’s getting to the point I prefer using my camera phone, because it’s so instantaneous and hassle free.

Mash up

So I finagled a tune.  I hum it all the bloody time, but I never wrote it down before today.  I uploaded it and of course my computer went crazy and won’t let me actually save the damned file to the media portion of my blog.  FML!

(Jeff says: you can hear it by clicking the following link and choosing to open the file. It should play in your computer’s default audio player. 60s tv show theme)

Anyway, tunage wise, it’s what happens when you collide the Dick Van Dyke Show theme song with the Red Dwarf theme song.  You’re welcome.  Hey, I did something about my backlog today and it isn’t even NOON.

KATIE AND ALEX ARE COMING.  I hope.  Things do change.

Good morning!

I’ve been awake since one ayem and up for 45 minutes; I had rice pudding for breakfast plus a large mug of coffee, so that puts paid to me sleeping – or does it?

Spoke to a girlfriend this morning.  Her husband is giving her grief.  I am trying to be sympathetic, but she knew she was marrying an alcoholic, and even if he’s dry now the physical and behavioural consequences of his life choices are not allowing him to be a good mate.  I am on a drama-reduced diet, myself.

I joined a decluttering group online and so far I’ve removed two bags of clothes from the premises.  I am going to deal with the tyres today (the group leader is English).  They’ve been sitting in the garage for two years, why not.

 

 

My day so far

I’ve climbed back on the writing horse, but since it’s edits I can’t really say OH I WROTE THIS MUCH TODAY.  It’s going well.  I have to figure out how to represent targets though.  Manuscript pages edited?  Dunno, that seems most likely.

I baked bacon for BLTs and made up ingredients so they are ready to go.

I watched the last Hobbit movie.  It was quite well done, although purists will be shuddering from head to foot for the duration.  I am not a purist.

I went for a walk in the predawn murk and fetched cream for coffee and milk for tea, to keep that writer’s support of caffeine flowing.

Poor Hannah, the gal who was supposed to help yesterday, was sick. I was sick all the bloody time when I was her age.  Now I literally cannot remember the last time I had anything resembling a cold or flu; how much I’m washing my hands might have something to do with that.

So many people, including the visitors from last week, volunteered that it made life much easier; the soup lunch is always quite chaotic, and then there was a business meeting at the end of it that I was just as happy to stay out of. I had Peggy’s turkey soup.  It was quite yummy.

I wore my brown snowflake motif pj’s and my steampunk hat, and was complimented.  Seriously. By everybody from Jane (who has an identical set in purple, it’s like she’s my time twin or something) to the minister, who cracked up and then told me she admired my sense of style.  The only places in the world that make me feel anything approaching the same level of acceptance, in order of closeness, Mike’s place, Planet Bachelor (but only when Janice isn’t there…. ha ha), Tom and Peggy’s, my fOlks’, Conflikt and Polycamp. I am a lucky hound, f’sure.

I told Rob to invite himself to supper sometime.  He was happy to hear it.

I’m selling printer ink on Craigslist – buyer is supposed to show up tonight around supper.  There’s nothing like buying $75 of ink and having the fucking printer promptly quit.  I’m letting it go for cheap just to get it out of the house.

Sue drove me home again, home again, and then off to an audition.  I hope I’m like her in 18 years!!

Katie didn’t come to church but she just posted that Alex rolled from his back to his tummy.  I wonder if and when he’s going to start crawling.

Margot stared me into throwing a treat to her this morning.  I can’t wait for Buster to get fixed, he’s so lively, even with the cone of shame, that it’s quite exhausting for her.

I dejunked my phone this morning.  I took out a hundred phone numbers, mostly for the café, which, duh, I no longer need, and 1.2 gigs of crapware.  Go me.

I got enough sleep last night! I went to bed at 8 pm and woke up at 5, which is wonderful.

Here are the cinnamon buns I made yesterday.

Cinnamonbuns

 

 

Churchy day

Sue is coming to get me for church at 10; I’m doing coffee today with one of the youth, who is well disposed to like me since I gave her about $300 of Fluevogs the other day.  I am trying to think of which stupid hat I should wear.  As a concession, I will wear other clothes too.

There’s a budget meeting and soup lunch today too so I’ll be there quite late. But it’s good that I don’t have to borrow Jeff’s car.

 

Vampire, pass by

Paul and I gave blood yesterday. (I drained in 8 minutes, a new personal record!) He was joshing with the phlebotomist and she turns to me and asks if she can trust him and I said, blandly, “He’s my ex so I’m the wrong person to ask” which triggered much hilarity. Paul clots so fast he literally does not have to put pressure on the sticking point, and the vampire didn’t believe him. I bruise like crazy so I follow the instructions.
 
I know it sounds kinda weird but I think of giving blood as a kind of communion; it connects me to strangers who need my help, and it connects me with John, who gave a lot of blood over the course of his life, and it connects me to the rest of my family; Katie and I and Paul and Keith all give blood when so able, and mOm gave gallons when she was a nurse.
I drove both ways.  Traffic was good, traffic was good.
Around 7 I felt like all the air had been let out of my tires so I crashed; looks like I got a solid 8 hours of sleep.
Sue and I had a lovely (and for me, hobbitly) breakfast at Ricky’s on Lougheed Coquitlam yesterday.  We noted a side room which might work okay for pub night although there’s no good transit close by; she’s going to advise the minister.
Just learned that South Fraser is being kicked out of their home.  I light a candle for them finding space cheap, fast, painlessly.
I have a song that the Conflikt folks really like in this year’s songbook, so even if I can’t go (money…) I will still represent.
Archer’s back!

At last a deadline

I am going to try to complete a couple of songs in Songwriter so I can export them as PDFs and get them into the Conflikt song book.

Much as it pains me to say it, I can’t afford to make trips to the US and otherwise spend the income I have, so I am going to go to $15 worth of church event as opposed to the $500 con.  Yes – I could spend less but I don’t like going to a convention if I have to bunk in with anyone else for the usual reasons, like my privacy requirements now I’m no longer a live in parent are rather absurdly high.

So I’ll be sending the songs along instead.  I’ll send Gateway and Dishing with Joyce, since Fred Pohl’s stuff is going to be commercialized over the next couple of years (I believe it’s going to be a tv show, which would likely work fine, helmed correctly) and Buffy never stops being popular with certain crowds and the Scoobie gang have dozens of songs and Joyce not so much. I find it amusing that I have repurposed a song with was a song about a crush on a coworker into a filk, but one of the great appeals of filk is how it mashes things together into a great media pulp.

Saw Mike yesterday, and he popped by later, after he fed me a light supper at the Oliver Twist, and I will be seeing Sue for brekkie this morning to feast her for her birthday.  She is so wonderful, I am sure we will have a lovely earflapping. For she is the Great She-Elephant, and I am her dear chum.

Okay, enough demonstrating that I left the house yesterday (I did twice, and with all the cat commotion with Buster and his collar Jeff did three times) and I have friends, I gots work to do, coffee to make and songs about Giant Squids (words) (music) to listen to for its inspirational effect on my opus.

Hate is strong

I really hate Bell Mobility and their stupid goddamned website.  I went through everything to update my plan and was told, on the same page, that it hadn’t gone through, and it had been confirmed.  I haven’t gotten an email confirming the update, so I am assuming it did not in fact go through.  Emmanuel on chat was helpful.

At some point today I’m hoping we can do a shop. I haven’t left the house to do more than put trash out in three days, so I should probably stir my stumps; on the plus side I can see some of my floor and almost all my clothes are clean.

 

Whineypants

I just backspaced over a thousand words of whining.  THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE.

Only one thing has happened recently worth reporting.  Keith came over yesterday.  I said, “I’m so happy to see you I’m going to clean my glasses so I can see you better.”  He’s rewatching Ken Burns’ Civil War with us.