Month: February 2023

Biscotti exclamation mark

So I need to find some packaging to get the biscotti off to the people who need to get it in the mail, and separate the JEFF AND I ARE EATING THESE biscotti from the ones I’m mailing off. This batch is even better than the last one and it is JAM PACKED WITH ALMONDS.

Going to see Paul this am for a walk. Also if I can force myself to get some blood work done that would be cool.

no change on word count

Wordle in 3.

Twitter isn’t paying its suppliers and is laying off people so fast cracks and breakages and outages are happening all the time. I will probably end up on Mastodon. I wish I didn’t love twitter so much.

 

 

Made beef stew

Oh, it is yummy. And soon it will be gone. And when it’s gone, I’ll make tofu and egg and pork and chicken fried noodles. Or something.

22,300 words.

Happy birthday Tammy darling, hope you have an awesome day!!

As for the rest of you, love yourself today with some self-care.

Don’t know if it’s self care; I think I’ll make some more biscotti. Paul phoned yesterday to thank me for the last batch.

Digestion equals weirdness

Something is rearranging itself amidships. Nothing hurts, but it’s very odd and my usual schedule is non existent. For example I was woken from a sound sleep at 2 am for a run to the john…. but everything was fine. Just urgent. It is possible this is Metformin reminding me that it needs to be taken 1.5 hours earlier in the evening, in which case, carry on, noble poop chute.

Suzanne was here, and I slept through most of it since I was having a super off day. She folded my last load of laundry, may blessings rain. She’s barely recovered from her walking pneumonia. No fever or cough or anything, for me it was just exhaustion. Sometimes I think I have to schedule a recovery day after seeing Paul. Katie advised that she saw the salt I got for her and got into her biscotti delivery already.

Got the Wordle in three (such a lucky guess, that second one) and two top five scores and one best score in Lumosity, so my general feeling that whatever my body is doing my brain is in reasonable order continues. Celebrated with a giant mug of coffee. Nom.

Today, STEW. We bought a roast yesterday so I cut it in half so that Jeff and I can have a mini roast beast for a Sunday dinner soon and hacked the other half into stew bites. Also prepped all the rest of the meat we purchased yesterday into strips for stir fries, so I’m ready to go with pork and chicken strips.

Keith and Alex are having a wonderful time in Victoria and you have no idea how happy that makes me. mOm is bursting with family visit vibes in consequence. It’s very nice to have family that you like, trust, enjoy and honour. I greet and thank my ancestors and accept their gifts and lessons with humility and a desire to honour them. ‘cept for the land stealing bit, but if my suspicions are correct and I’m descended from the Sakai the land stealing is kinda what we did/do and we’ll have to unlearn it.

Every morning with Buster is different. He made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in training today and so I dropped treats on his head and watched as he lay down and lazily stretched out to pop them in his mouth (he uses his front paws like hands A LOT).

A couple of days back the flicker was on the food platform yelling for sunflower seeds; two mornings ago a fox sparrow danced up and down the side yard, cheeping, very obviously dancing for food (Jeff was most struck by its movements, which seemed out of the ordinary). And the crows came in droves yesterday; I put out all the suet and fat from the meat trimmings just before sunset, when the crows are overhead going back to their roosts, and it was GONE within MINUTES. Better some fat get in their bellies than it turn into rancid malodorous vapours in the compost bucket.

Cousin Alex is hosting her mOm this weekend.

If you get a chance to see John Waters’ 2015 commencement address it’s worth seeing. Elder creators who gave themselves to their art and support up and comers so fiercely are a blessing on this world.

There is at least a foot of snow on everything. It is already starting to melt but lord God I am not looking forward to shovelling the front sidewalk. Jeff will assess what else may need to be done and then do it. I’m taking the little chair out there with me, I came so close to stroking out the last brace of snowfalls (or it felt that way, I ‘greyed out’ a couple of times.)

22099 words. For whatever reason this part is easy to write. Then I finish the section (it’s too long to be a chapter) by going back to where I started with Blossom, and mirroring their journey in Guyana with a road trip. TO OTTAWA and beyond LOL.

 

 

Errands and Paul and biscotti fae

got a call midmorning from Katie saying that what with Paul being alone in the house while Keith and Alex are off in Saamich and Dax and Katie being at work he might be lonely.

So I used the opportunity to drop off his household’s biscotti portion, get a meal into him at Pho Edmonds, ran biscotti over to Sue and to Peggy, walked in Fraser Foreshore (JEEEBUS it was cold and Paul was definitely having mobility issues, although he perked up after a few hundred metres), and picked up a bag of walkway salt for his household after I noticed they were almost out of it (paid a swingeing great price for it too but it’s 20 kilos and who knows how long the salt will last in the stores, so I’m glad I did it, glad, I tell you), and then a couple of party favours from the Bohemian.

Once again he greeted me by asking me whose idea it was to take away his licence. I told him his license is in his wallet, same as always, and now that he’s had symptoms like chatting with people who aren’t there it’s too dangerous for him to drive. If he wants to book and pass a drivers test in BC he can drive again no matter what his doctor says, and he objected most strenuously to this and asserted that I couldn’t pass a drivers test either and my driving was terrible. As best as I can make out, he wants me to get a dementia diagnosis as well, but as long as my LPI on Lumosity is over 1400 I’m not doing any such goddamned thing. My performance stats are above 80th percentile for every game for people my age and over 95th percentile for 5 out of the 7 categories (I do worst in math but still better than 4/5 people my age). I do not have dementia. Has driving in Vancouver, recently rated the 2nd worst city in NA for traffic, RUINED my driving??? POSSIBLY. But I don’t need to surrender my licence yet.

Since Paul says this to me every time we get together in an attempt to get me to admit it’s my fault, I stopped inserting myself in the picture and told him what to do to fix it.  Thirty seconds later he tells me he keeps missing appointments and he’s anxious about his skull scan. The lack of insight which characterizes his ailment is a sore trial, but he has not stopped being loveable good company when he’s not grumping about the shitty hand he’s been dealt.

Peggy’s biscotti response:

No one seems to know where the bag of biscotti came from. I tested them for poison and survived. It was necessary to have a second test to be sure.

I am suspicious that they came from you and just wanted to say thank you

My response to this:

It was hilarious. I tried the door and came in. I said, Hello this house. Then I said Hello this house, louder, and Kali ran up barking and I assumed the sniff hand position and said in a jolly voice, relax Kali you know me. I could hear voices (?) coming from the downstairs bathroom, the door of which was closed, and not wanting to linger and loving the idea that I could just manifest biscotti in your house, I put the biscotti on the counter, ensured that the dog did not escape and the door was in fact latched, and departed, to Paul, who was waiting in the car.

Sue’s response:

I was out getting a mani/pedi and when I came home, love was at my door. ????????

Sue

That was so sweet of you. I’m sorry I wasn’t home but not sorry cause it was such a wonderful surprise. I shall have biscotti with hot sweet tea this very evening.

Cleaning specialist today

Hopefully Suzanne will be pleased that I folded all my laundry (she often does it for me), washed all her cleaning cloths and am about to launder the kitchen rugs so she doesn’t have to. Her lungs are still in terrible shape from her cold.

I’m also going to bake biscotti this morning; I made the dough yesterday and I’m letting it warm slightly for ease of log-shaping. Should make for nicer ‘crumbs’ as proofing (up to a point) makes the outcome better.

20560 words, sent some to mOm

Be level headed and practical in your kindness today!

Jim Palmer’s Celebration of Life has been confirmed for April 29. Keith, Kate and however many kids, me and Paul all plan to go. More details as events warrant.

Cold and windy

Buster finds that weather a sore trial. Checked ventusky and the swells travelling down the coast from Haida Gwaii to Mexico are the same size as current Antarctic storms….

19946 words.

Started watching the spy/dramatized historical show ‘A Spy among Friends’ with Damien Lewis, Guy Pearce and Anna Maxwell Martin, all actors we enjoy. I quite liked the script but the ‘jumping around timelines to keep it interesting’ overdid it and a couple of times we were scrambling to figure out where we were and what year it was supposed to be. That will not stop us from watching it.

I need to go for a walk today. At the absolute minimum I need to get out of the house for more than fetching delivery from the stoop.

Still snickering about Joe Biden going for a stroll in Kyiv. He was an asshole for crushing the railway strike – as events in East Palestine show – but damn he had to be brave to take that walk. Right before Putie’s all staff meeting, er, address to the nation. He must have been incandescent with rage. LOL.

Officially old, got my pension letter from service Canada.

Perhaps I should pop over to Caspell Junction.

 

 

mood

All I did yesterday was change my clothes, post to my blog, roast all the remaining almonds (fit for three batches of biscotti), do the Wordle, complete Lumosity training for the day, get Jeff some tea and a fried egg sammy (I just had the eggs with the bell peppers I roasted the other day), take my pills, throw out some compostables, empty the sink, train the cat with paw claps and running catches, police up my eyebrows, run the dishwasher, watch TV including the most recent TLoU and Vera, talk to Aunt Mary on the phone, work on Totally Boned, post shit on twitter and facebook, and order Japanese food (finally got the amount right, we had virtually no leftovers.)

I also read a lot of stuff on the internet about long COVID. Anyone reading this has survived a mass disabling event, and we’re either irritable or transfixed with our grief. When will we come to an understanding that we’ve globally:

Normalized people dropping dead from cardiovascular issues…. at any age.

increased the number of children who will never be able to pursue gainful employment in a fashion that is useful to end stage capitalism due to thymus collapse; as adults they will be immunocompromised for their entire lives.  You know how in Victorian times there were ‘delicate children’, well, this kid over here will have had a stroke at age three and have a withered arm; this kid over there will die if she doesn’t get her allergy medication and her albuterol; that kid over there had a series of mini strokes in utero and will never take herself to the toilet unassisted; this kid over here will move to the city with his parents at the age of five and never be healthy again; these kids will catch fungal infections from playing in contaminated water after an earthquake and slowly die as their lungs turn black from the inside out; and all these kids here and there will die of childhood ailments because no group of people is consistently vaccinating against them any more and water treatment will get harder and harder as there’s less and less water.

reduced the fertility of the smallest upcoming generation in history and so we will thus be subjected, over and over, in family after family, to our own little version of the ‘children of men’. The current fertility data for younger people is horrifying. Many young men simply aren’t producing enough motile and healthy sperm to be able to count on fathering children if they get the opportunity. For young women, the problem will not so much be getting pregnant (although anecdotally this seems to be an issue) as maintaining a pregnancy for 8 months and then not dying of the consequences of gestational diabetes, like eclampsia, or losing the child late in the pregnancy. Eclampsia events during pregnancy have increased (according to the CDC (US)) by 30 PERCENT IN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS. (If you don’t hear the original Star Trek klaxon at this point you’re not getting me, here.) Since the pando started. COVID hides in reproductive tissues as easily as anywhere else in the human body. Fertility gods and goddesses are planning a comeback.

 

and so ….in sum …. we’ve fixed it so that we’ll, as a species, have fewer kids and more of them will be born disabled, or sacrificed to disability after they’re born because of terrible public health policies.

The people who will bear the brunt of all this are women. Because we carry children. Because we birth them. Because we care for them. And because the patriarchy would rather that we women die and the children be born.

So my mood is bleak, on this day after ‘family day.’

 

 

Late post

The smell of roasting bell peppers (for sammiches) is filling the house. They were brought by Keith, who’s starting a buyer’s coop for costco runs. We had a lovely and information-dense convo.

Spoke to Paul briefly yesterday. Janice was having car trouble so he got put on a bus and got back Thursday. This required Keith to move the BRAIN IMAGING APPOINTMENT again, so the less I say about that the better.

Mike and Jeff and I watched Samsara (2001) and Mike had already seen and loved it but Jeff and I were blown away.

Just started watching “Poker Face”; Rian Johnson writing what Natasha Lyonne says? YES PLEASE THANK YOU.

 

Alex and the guitar

His dad bought him a half-sized guitar and mentioned I could help him put new strings on it. While the strings were off I polished the guitar. Alex put four out of the six strings on and took to it like a duck to water, massively enjoying using the guitar tool for all of its uses. Handy little thing. Then I tuned it, warned him it wouldn’t stay in tune and then we fixed the guitar bag. The bag had two broken zipper pulls so I handmade replacements out of leather thongs I got during my “spend money on steampunkish things” days and a steampunk style heart and a gear (Alex picked what he wanted out of the pile and picked the thong colour so it’s to his specifications). Now all the pulls work and the guitar is back in the bag. It will go home so the folks can admire all the work he did, but come back here to live when he next comes over.

We made our walk to Timmy Ho’s but I almost didn’t make it – walking so close to taking my BP meds leaves me pretty wrung out. However I managed to rejoin my party after about ten minutes of lying down once we got home. I could hear Jeff and Alex talking and laughing, which is just so homey…..

My digestion right now is completely shot. I need to not drink coffee when I’m marginal, That Much I KNow for sURe.

In a second I’ll run back downstairs and fire up Peggle on the xBox. That game is almost twenty years old, amazing. It’s on the same disc as Plants Vs Zombies and Zuma.

Everyone have a good day, y’all, and if you’re feeling poorly remember you can always call me and I’ll say ‘there there’ to absolutely no effect, but I will say it.

Special love today for Sue G., who keeps crossing my thoughtways, Derry, who will be missed by our family as long as one of us remembers her, and Susie H, who was an awesome mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and whose kindness and skill is ever a beacon of memory.

Delightful visit

He is playing on his tablet currently and we’re marshalling the energy to walk over to Timmy Ho’s. When we get back we’re going to put strings on the kid’s sized guitar his dad got him; Mike bought me a second restringing tool a few weeks back so that will make it all much easier. I may leave it in an open tuning so it’s more fun for him to play, then again maybe not.

I thought I put too much ham in the split pea with ham soup and Jeff says naw sis. It’s really damned good.

Slept much better downstairs than I normally do because I hauled the weighted blanket Keith and Kate gave me downstairs.  What a difference.

Spoke to Dave yesterday.

19619 words. Sent some to mOm.

Alex is coming

Alex will be here for a sleepover tonight.

Two loads of laundry. 19336 words.

I made split pea with ham soup yesterday. I’d bought the ingredients but hadn’t got my shit together to make it. The soup filled the house with a heavenly aroma; then the flatus begins.

I hope you all have a wonderful day.

posted these yesterday on social media

I would rather adjust my life to your absence, than adjust my boundaries to accommodate your disrespect.

graffiti from Esquimalt, FART ON COPS

REASONS TO LIVE BOOKSHOP ADVERTISING STICKER my other car suddenly has its alarm going off onboard the queen of surrey while en route to Reasons to Live books and records