Month: March 2022

beautiful day for a pap smear

So I saw the doc, got a pap smear, had to wait an hour and a half. “Everything looks fine down there” what a relief eh.

Something odd came out of the overnight BP study. A couple of hours after I went to sleep that night my BP crashed and stayed there for about two hours. I mean crashed; literally so low that I’d be hospitalized. I guess I just have to be a weirdo. Otherwise the drugs seem to be doing their job and I’m not in Sky High About To Pop a Clog territory any more.

Jeff gave me a no-SMS-card phone so I have a calculator and alarm and game platform and I have now killed both of the chargers he loaned me so I have to replace them.

Got my meds re-upped – yet another change, this time because the drug is literally so old the drug company doesn’t want to make it in that formulation anymore, sounds like me. Anyway that’s set up and I should have enough prescriptions to cover me during an earthquake. I’ll be going off the inderal eventually. Very glad I’ve added vitamin c to the mix of pills I take every morning – as is often the case my teeth hurt less.

Today maybe I’ll get that bloodwork done, but it’s more likely because I have to go to the same building for my prescription,

Katie, Alex, Ryker and I are going to travel to Victoria at some point. This means that M&D have to re-jig their visiting from other relatives which I kinda feel bad about but it would have been hella worse if the unvaxxed baby breathed all over the immunocompromised elder, so at least everyone involved has consent. We’re also going to do RATs before we leave to ensure none of us are actively illin’.

I am not going to comment about the assault at the Oscars because as far as I can tell, with maybe one exception, every single white person whose comments I’ve seen has applied all the intersectionality of non-Euclidean geometry and all the nuance of a cast iron frying pan flung across the kitchen. Given that I am not the great white hope (sarcasm alert…. sarcasm & POOR CHOICE OF PHRASING alert) of contemporary anti-racism activities and thought, I won’t do better and therefore, if you want to know how I feel about it (I have three main points to make) you can ask me in person, and of your kindness, wear the rainsuit.

I am not going to comment as much about the Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. I’m against it; I continue to donate and send letters and whatnot in the background; Putin won’t give up until he’s dead or deposed; Canada is as involved as it reasonably can be and maybe even more so anyplace it can get away with it; Russia and India and China are now doing a pavane and in the end China will crush Russia. In terms of will, planning, execution and numbers, China can’t do anything else.

The suffering of the Ukrainian people, and the Russians dragged into this war by violent paranoid old bigots, is not imaginable by those not experiencing it; we uphold their courage and denounce the frauds who’ve started this terrible slaughter.

6646 words, still waiting on further oomph to finish it. Haven’t seen any kudos yet this morning. I got the wordle in 5 this morning, but it was a complete bear of a word.

 

 

Rob was here

One of Jeff’s oldest buddies came over for beer, ‘za and March Madness, and all was delightful. It had been so long since I’d seen him that I mistook him for the pizza delivery person, and of course this immediately makes me remember a Supernatural (2005) trope. He’s retired, and I’m so happy for him.

Current count 6620, two kudos overnight. Sad boys are sad right mOm (I’ve been sending her updates a day at a time so she knows what I’m talking about.)

Various things are annoying me this morning. I’m thinking “Should I vent my spleen? or should I just go about the tasks of daily living?” And you know what, I think I’ll just put it down.

 

 

stalled, but only for a minute

6102 words total on the story. Hope to get back into it today, still thinking about things.

2 kudos overnight.

Another sleepy day yesterday. Today I need bloodwork and tomorrow a doc appointment and upping on scrips; I’ll be walking over there when the lab opens.

Still thinking about Ryker and his magical little smiles and total body squirms.

Here’s the MP3 (acapella, natch)

of me singing the ‘Russian Major General’ filk posted previously. As mentioned previously the lyrics were written by @AndrejNkv who hails from Edinburgh.

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

What is this site and how do I:

What:

This is the personal website of Allegra Sloman. I’ve been doing it for almost two decades. It’s a public on line diary. I try to post every day and I’m generally feeling punk or travelling if I don’t post. KEEP SCROLLING FOR MORE

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

How:

Contact me? info  at  allegrasloman   dot   com.  If you send me a soliciting email it gets trashed.

Get a user account on this site? info   at    allegrasloman   dot com.

Buy a book? leanpub.com/upsun

Read a book for free? https://allegrasloman.com/midnite-moving-co/

Check out my music? Search on Song-a-day or check on ‘pages’ for Portfolio.

 

 

Low energy day

Once again, another day of being tired. I felt dizzy after we got back from the store (didn’t last long, but my balance was shot all day) and after watching a Time Team with Jeff I went back upstairs and …. slept until supper time? I mean I woke up around midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep so more sleep was in order, and I just had a normal night of sleep and feel fine, but that was weird. Fortunately Jeff had both lots of work and lots of squeaky squeaky time (March Madness) to watch.

The little tweety birds have a series of songs and dances that they do to encourage me to put down more seeds. (Juncos and chipping sparrows.) Bought peanuts yesterday for the corbies. They made what I put out disappear in a real hurry.

I mentioned that I ordered a Fluent Pet starter board which will ‘allow’ Buster to talk and they emailed me a 36 page starter guide to read before the six buttons and the panels they sit on get here. I think Jeff is quite dubious, but I am really looking forward to it.

No work on the story because I slept all day but much pondering – the next convo is going to be hard to set up and write so that it flows correctly. One lead character is being an asshole to cover how traumatized they are and the other lead character’s about to drop the hammer and explain (kindly, firmly) that ‘your trauma doesn’t suddenly give you an all access asshole pass’….. Four kudos overnight. The gal who’s reading all my stuff on AO3 is, as promised, reading all my stuff. Squee.

Alex is coming for a sleepover tonight. I’m thinking of doing things a leedle differently than normal but mOm I’ll be trying to give you a call before bedtime tonight so you get to hear his voice. Tomorrow, bouncing around the lazy river at the community centre with my grandsons and co-grandma and Mamabear.

Fuck Ginni Thomas, I hope she goes to hell through a cenote-style sinkhole appearing in the goddamned floor. Stories all over the internet about what a great *** she is.

Despite everything that’s wrong with me yesterday I wrote A NEW INTRO for Gelis and Niccolo (I cannot let go of that song) – one that uses fingerpicking style rather than hammered guitar – and I’m thrilled with it because it just came to me in a lightning flash and there’s a really wonderful rhythmic change that makes me feel like I am, you know, a musician with a little flair, a little showpersonship.

Vyshyvanka are about to get reaaaaallly popular. I predict it. They are the Ukrainian national shirt. Go to Etsy and look it up for examples. The black shirt with buff and gold embroidery made me DIE OF WANT.

Here’s a photo that is really hard to interpret because none of us speak or read Russian. Here we go:

So there we have some bog standard Russian iconography from the days of the Soviet Union. This looks not particularly rude in anyone’s terms, it’s a hammer and sickle with the words “Mow” “and” “Hammer” BUT according to Alexey at Meduza, it’s an extremely sophisticated visual pun.

Why? because ‘Reap’ (aka ‘mow’) is Russian slang for DODGE THE DRAFT and ‘Hammer’ is Russian slang for IGNORE DRAFT NOTICES. So this means that the iconography of the former Soviet Union is now UNIVERSALLY ESTABLISHED as a symbol for draft dodging, inside Russia, and that is to my mind so fucking hilarious I want everyone who reads my blog to know about it!

There’s also a joke going around (not in Russia) that the reason the current war symbol is a ‘Z’ is that, thanks to Russian Engineering, the other two arms of the swastika fell off.

this is Mariupol:

schlep today

Yesterday we had a houseful, but it’s all people inside our bubble: Suzanne the Baby Whisperer, Alex the Tube Shot Master, Ryker the teething baby who still managed to be only cry for ten minutes or less, and Katie the magnificent. She came over at the end of Suzanne’s cleaning tenure and we had a simply lovely time. Alex played that xBox game with the crashing cars, and Ryker cried because he was teething and was calmed fairly readily by Suzanne. (Also by me, but survey says Suzanne is a marvel for that).

No writing yesterday because there were people here from 10 am to 5 pm and I took a break. Too early (as I type) for kudos.

I keep opening the fridge door to marvel at how clean and empty it is. Also that nothing DEAD wafts with all the delicacy of a hippo at a wallow through the house as soon as you open the door.

Suzanne vacuumed in the guest room; we determined that it had been just under a decade since someone vacuumed in there (it was a very amusing conversation). She also made the bed god bless her, I’d put everything on the bed so she could vacuum, snicker.

hey mOm I got Jeff to take a picture of me in my Oodie with Ryker (it was cold in the house) so ask him to send it to you also Jeff could you send it to me.

Three whole kudos this morning; all the same person. She started reading my fics two days ago and is working her way through them all by the look of things.

today the enshinening

Okay, that didn’t really work as a blog post title, but the Suzanne the Cleaning Specialist and Carer will be here today and Jeff and I have sworn a mighty blood oath (okay maybe it was coffee and PowerAde) that we’ll clean out the fridge today as our part in the enshinening.

Two kudos overnight; word count stands at 4890; my fave sentence out of the last writing session is

He tried to get in the front seat and she stared at him, a bleak and judgemental reckoning which took in every aspect of his appearance until the impossible happened; he got redder.

They’re about to visit a brothel, but not for any regular reason. Aren’t you anxious to learn why? NB he’s red because he’s sunburned, and not because he’s a tourist.

Jeff and I emptied the fridge of its rottenness (Jeff was the motor). We now have three different kinds of cheese, and condiments. Shop tomorrow I reckon. I am taking a 20 minute break because my back is screaming and then I’ll wipe down the bums of all the containers and plug everything back into the fridge.  Next up: scheduling the next clean. (later it’s on the household calendar) I believe according to the Sidetracked Sisters you’re supposed to do the fridge once a month but if we do it twice a year that would be amazing. Suzanne will do it but she’s only marginally bendier than me and Jeff and she does charge extra for that, so …. (Later, still have to clean one piece of glass and wipe out the freezer but it’s done)

and in war news, the tank manufacturer in the former Soviet Union has shut down the line, no parts. Whoever told Putin YEAH SURE WE ARE TIGHT AND GOOD FOR SUPPLY CHAIN ON ARMAMENTS is probably licking out privies in NovySibirsk now under the lazy eye of a guard who’s probably busy wearing out his pocket icon of Our Lady Derzhavnaya in thanks for not being posted to the front.

aaaaaand them damn gritty Ukrainians be torching Russian ships, which are large and invitingly shootable-at and pretty much defenceless given the collapse of daytime air support for Russian assault troops and supply chains…  since it turns out that the Ukrainian air force, tiny as it is, is blisteringly effective, and the mobile rocket launchers are STILL BEING OPERATED from inside Mariupol which means that whatever the fucking Russians say, Mariupol has not been pacified.

Tyler Rogoway, whom I started following on twitter some years back (he’s an American military aircraft journalist with Ukrainian ancestors) says that Putin has to quit, because if he wins, he’ll be facing the worst insurgency in the history of warfare; porous borders with hundreds of millions of dollars of modern mobile armaments, and a civilian population armed to the teeth, properly trained and disciplined and bitter af, and people around the world who can’t tell the difference between a sh and a shch will be raising money to make it even worse for the grunts on the ground; while Russians starve and he’s forced to figure out whether to withdraw troops to pacify his own civilians, especially the ones closest to Ukraine who are getting more of the real story. If a billionaire who isn’t a citizen of the NATO countries starts ordering and shipping aircraft to Ukraine man that would be entertaining and horrific — and I want the Russian army to go home and stay there.

Katie’s coming with both the boys after Suzanne leaves.

 

the achieve of, the mastery of the thing

yeah I know Hopkins was writing about a falcon but just look at this first century Roman glass bowl, now in the Metropolitan Museum.

lovely convo with Dave today, so happy they fixed his shower, but now he comments that maybe it’s TOO MUCH water pressure and I’m thinking GIVE ME THE RHINOCEROS FLENSING SPEED.

the Hopkins quote is from ‘The Windhover’ of course.

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover: