Month: June 2020

Staying calm and kind

Yesterday I got to see Katie (she brought sourdough bread from Costco) and we had a LOVELY LONG CHAT and my god it was wonderful. I also spoke to my mOm and pOp, went for a walk with Paul and watched a lot of Time Team. I also had a bath, carefully cleaned my feet, washed my hair, and did a whole bunch of old lady maintenance, which left me feeling physically much better.

Weather continues quite overcast and really cool for this time of year – it rained yesterday but not all day.

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Today my only task is writing a 2500 word essay for Keith’s birthday, to accompany a picture I want to give to him. Oh look, it’s 10% complete already. I know what I’m like, if I don’t finish it today I’ll be writing myself into a coma on his birthday morning.

My fOlks have with tremendous timing given me some funds and I intend to spend them both intelligently *and* foolishly. so there.

Buster has the best object permanence of any cat I ever met. Also, he demanded to be trained HARD this morning, and I was about to run off and tell Jeff all about it…. I mean, he did FOUR PAW CLAPS FOR TREATS, including flipping the treat onto his wrist and eating it….

when I realized his food dish was empty, he was hoping I wouldn’t notice so he could eat the rest of the treat bag. Li’l scam artiste….

I had a single piece of sourdough toast cut into three pieces this for breakfast. One piece had fine liverwurst, one piece a ten cm thin slice of brie, and one a hefty chunk of smoked salmon. I recount this not to brag but to allow my mother to experience a ghost of their gustatory charms as part of her morning. Also to brag. The sharing was more meaningful than the bragging, I assure you.

 

Temp grex

We’re having lots of fun watching Time Team. Mick Aston, a working class landscape archaeologist, wears handmade stripey sweaters and is a vegetarian anarchist atheist naturist polyamorist, so I loves him, and Phil Harding says OOO AARRR with an Oxfordshire accent so thick it’s like he’s a parody of himself and Jeff and I DIE every time he ‘makes a find’, or talks about digging, or wears those incredible digging booty shorts, which could provoke mirth in a heart of stone.

Funniest bit so far was when the courtly and soft spoken farmer is sitting round a table with the team at the end of day one and they all whine and he says, “You’re always like this at the end of day one.”

second season of Trapped

Was so sad and violent, but also very watchable. After sleeping until 2:30 am I went back to bed around 9:30 and woke up again around 1:30 pm. I watched some TV and now I’m back in bed crying. I’m overdue. I very very rarely cry, rarely cry for more than a couple of minutes because it does horrible things to me, but even so I can only go so long without emotional crying. It’s a fine balance.

I’m a lot more fucked up about yesterday than I can publicly speak of, and of course it’s coming out in my body. The random stabbing pains are not much fun and my feet hurt a lot; my orthotics are giving up and I have to buy new ones, these can’t be reconditioned a second time. It’s four hundred dollars though, so now I have to communicate with my dwindling finances man and tell him to loosen more money.

I’m very glad I took taxis most of the way rather than transit (I took the Skytrain to Edmonds, since Chambar is rather providentially next to a station).

The taxi driver from Edmonds accepted the Capshield as his fare. He was desi, more than that I couldn’t tell you. I told him exactly what I paid for it and it was within 50 cents of the fare. Twice I offered payment, because I want cab drivers to be safe, given how much they ferry little old ladies around. He wouldn’t accept, deflecting me most politely. Contemplate the stubborn hospitality of poor people, their ability not to count cost.

 

It’s 8:30 in the evening and I’m feeling a little better. This too shall pass.

political action of the day

MAILED IT TODAY June 10 when Jeff and I went for a walk. Then we ordered pizza and watched Time Team.

 

June 9, 2020

Gina Nicoli-Moen
Superintendent of Schools
Board of Education
Burnaby School District 41
5325 Kincaid Street
Burnaby BC V5G 1W2

Dear Ms. Nicoli-Moen,

Please listen to your Black and Indigenous students and remove the RCMP from their current roles, including attending career days, in Burnaby schools.

<—– my request

I would support this action as a Burnaby voter, parent of two former School District 41 students who commented frequently on racial tension at their school, and politically curious person who is speculating why it is that everyone on the senior management team of your organization is white, when Burnaby is not a majority white city.

<—– my cred, with a boot to the ass in the last sentence and there’s NO FUCKING WAY I’m telling you which school, although ten bucks says someone who reads this letter checks the records

With my hopes you and your loved ones will stay safe during the pandemic,

<—– despite my distaste for cops in schools, I bear you no personal ill will

 

 

Now I have to print it and find an envelope and sign it and post it so this is a draft until I actually move

 

she gets a star trek stamp, I’m thinking JANEWAY … fuck I love myself sometimes  ha ha used Sisko instead

a nested series of sad realizations

I saw Tammy at her Airbnb yesterday. It’s very nice; hilariously, out of all the buildings in downtown Vancouver she could have ended up with (her booking was changed twice before she settled) she ended up in the same building as Patricia used to live in, in a mirror image of that same apartment.

Her life is very trying right now; as a provider of psychological counselling to half a dozen front line health care workers she’s hearing and processing stuff that’s hard, cruel hard, and the fact that it isn’t happening directly to her doesn’t take the pressure off trying to do her best for them.

Thanks to Justin McElroy for the tip about Chambar, the food was fantastic. also to keep my self honest I had two 5% beers

DUCK AND LAMB, DUCK AND LAMB GOD IT WAS YUMMY DUCK AND LAMB the tajine was mmmmwaaaaaah and the duck was PERFECTLY COOKED also asparagus and olives and pistachios and nomnomnom

but in some respects the visit was a bunch of painful realizations that I’m simply not the same person I used to be. And that I’m a coward.

I’ll see her again on Thursday, she’s going home on Sunday, Paul is apparently seeing her today.

 

life is not returning to normal

Sadly, Katie has put the kibosh on an visits by Tammy to Planet Bachelor because she does not support Tammy coming out from Toronto, that known festering pit of COVID. If she comes to Geekhaus she’ll be on the back deck and only coming inside for the washroom.

I don’t know what she has planned but I hope to get together with her SHOOOON in some reasonably social distancing way. Jeff took me to Cockney Kings and we ordered takeout (people were eating on the patio) and my god that haddock was so good.

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MAZEL TOV COCKTAILS are one thing, the comments were something else. @pjcarey11 said, Next, scream at the police: “Why don’t you call your mothers? Would it kill you to visit once in awhile?” anyway usually the comments thread is a trash fire but the comments after this post were a howl.

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This morning we had to shut off the smoke detector, it blasted off at 4 am and Jeff climbed onto a chair and killed it. I guess I’ve set the fucker off so many times that the battery died.