Month: March 2023

Garage sale?

I will try to help out as I can with the housing situation with the kids but good god. My mind is just whirling. And it could be me and Jeff in a minute, so it’s really making me into a VAST vat of STEW. (Keith whomped up some of his thyme flavoured stew yesterday. My only contribution was washing the spuds. I tried the Beyond Meat burger but texturally it just doesn’t do it, I prefer it in chili.)

But I can’t DO anything. Not at the moment. I must find other things to do than stew. I did talk to Paul about a garage sale and he seemed glad of the offer of help.

Oreo shoulder surfed on me yesterday THREE TIMES. Purring ferociously the entire time. She did it long enough that Paul took a picture but I haven’t received it yet because I had to text it to Katie using Paul’s phone and she’s a little thrawn at the moment.

Alex has bright dyed red hair now. He loves it.

The last of the laundry is dry but not put away – this last load was almost entirely mismatched socks LOL. I can stop buy socks if I have enough of them, and pretty soon I will.

Leftover palak paneer for breakfast; cooked pork chomps, taters, broccoli, mushrooms and carrots for supper last night. Should be some sign of my mental state coming home yesterday that I didn’t think to consult with Jeff, who had already eaten… Today marinated ginger tofu with beansprouts and rice vermicelli in some kind sauce. And I got to eat that half melon.

Only 1 top score in Lumosity (again, tanking scores…) and the only writing yesterday was social media and an attempt to make a poem out of a several years old and quite expired to do list.

Trans Day of Visibility today. There’s a rally at Grandview Park at 3:30.

today

wordle in three, I will not be writing today and didn’t yesterday, Lumosity scores IN THE TANK, schlep this morning now that Jeff’s back, I’m going to update the master shopping list with the aisle numbers of the grocery store (eventually), one more load of laundry to do and then literally my only dirty clothes will be the ones I’m wearing, bedding all changed and comfy (slept admirably well last night)…

I gaze at the Three Piles Paper Cruft and sigh heavily. At least I know where my INCREDIBLY out of date will is. I have actually updated it. Keith never answered me about being my executor. I think I’ll ask Kate. Later. She said yes. She also told me she’s being renovicted, along with everyone else at Caspell Junction, by August of this year. Three months to find space in one of the worst rental markets in global history.

You can see my floor

This once in a lifetime viewing experience is my clean room

also my fingers, I took the photo with the computer. I still have about a day of work to decruft papers and get my granddad’s desk to Surface Zero.

Also…. silverfish et Tish’s last letter to me. I am abashed. Literally illegible now. Time to haul off to the hardware store and get diatomaceous earth.

Also…. today I am going to take a bunch of stuff to the thrift store. Perhaps I will be able to wheedle Jeff into going as well, although he usually needs a day to recover from getting home from the ferry. The drivers in this town are quite something…

Seriously thinking about going to the Trans Day of Visibility rally in Grandview Park tomorrow, but I also want to not go alone.

Beautiful day yesterday

Took down the cobwebs in my room and vacuumed, so as soon as I’m out of this bed (won’t be long) I’ll wash my bedding and finish putting stuff back (throwing stuff out….)

The house two doors down caught fire but it was put out almost instantly by the BFD. I mean I smelled smoke and heard sirens at the same time. No injuries that I could see.

FINALLY GOT GAS IN THE CAR. The idea that fifty bucks won’t fill the Echo is repellent to me personally but it is as things are.

My twitter friend Greg exposed me to the band ‘Pigeon Pit’ – folk music instruments, bluegrass and folk and folk rock arrangements and blazingly cheerful social justice lyrics? Yes please and thank you Greg.

Filking/bluegrass practice at Peggy’s last night. Paul came and had less trouble with the guitar than last time, and while the beauty of his voice is dimmed he’s still singing, darn it. He worked his usual Tuesday yesterday as a volunteer but he was obviously a bit bushed – still cheerful though – and moving super slow. Peggy made blueberry pie. I didn’t partake as I’d had enough to eat that day. We tried to see the planetary alignment but only Venus made it through the haze. Paul missed his colonoscopy. He knew it was happening but gapped the prep. Drove him home from filking a little after ten and made sure he got to the stairs but I noted Dax on the back deck so knew he had someone’s help if he needed it.

Talked to Dave on the phone, very encouraging that he sounds a lot more chipper, although his energy level still sucks.

 

Another gorgeous day

I am probably falling prey to the pathetic fallacy, but GODDAMN is it easier to clean on a sunny day, or what.

My room enshinening continues. Didn’t get to the bedding yesterday but until the cobwebs are down and the floors are vacuumed/mopped clean and the rug shaken out it’s probably better to wait. Leftover everything for breakfast, and I still have coffee from yesterday. (Later…. damn that was a good cup of coffee. Once again, no cream, and I put about half a teaspoon of sugar in to soften that ‘sat in the carafe’ taste.)

Lumosity, one top five, Wordle in 4, no words on anything except social media and my blog.

Jeff’s visit proceeds apace. Printer(s?) working again at the fOlks’. Now, BREAKFAST I gots me a busy day. Buster is, of course, being much more affectionate than usual; I left my bedroom door open last night so he could come and go as he pleased but he came in around 2:45 and snuggled for a while. He got down when I asked him nicely so I could go make my breakfast, and about ten minutes ago I popped open the cat door. I said DOOR OPEN, DOOR OPEN, DOOR OPEN with him trotting along beside me and then ‘good boy’ after he sniffed the night air and poked his head out.

4 am and all’s well.

 

I keep FINDING things

I am laboriously cleaning my room – the dust is unconscionable – and I have located my Labyrinth poem from 2004 – I’ve never transcribed it and the damned thing is seventeen pages long. I imagine I’ll be revising it most severely all the time I’m transcribing it.

I ordered delivery for breakfast and supper. That said, I’ve eaten more fruit and vegetables today than I have in any given day in weeks (fantastic assorted fruit cup for brekky and an orange and broccolini) and my digestion is telling me that my liver, while not exactly happy, is now much less inflamed and behaving much better.

I made coffee to go with breakfast and learned that if I don’t smother it in cream and sugar it doesn’t torch my gut in anything like the usual way, so that was a pleasant discovery.

I could have gone to Caspell Junction for lunch but once I realized I was actually in the mood to clean I committed. Now to wash bedding.

Jeff is away

He’s off to Saamich.

Today! WHAT’S ON FOR ME

PUT LAUNDRY IN SLIDING CAVES! (drawers.)

CALL PEOPLE TO BE FRIENDLY AT THEM! HULLO FREN I AM FRENNLY! I was thinking locals.

WISH ALAN A HAPPY BDAY. (He’s our Bowen Island Fren and I already did that on facebook.)

GET MY HANDS ON THAT BASS UKULELE because it is highly weird (John Belushi eyebrows) but so am I! SO I GUESS I NEED TO VISIT PEGGY

CURSE MYSELF FOR NOT GIVING KNITTED EEYORE TO MY brO FOR mOm TO REPAIR! (I recently rescued it from the floor at Caspell Junction and washed it, so it’s ready to be repaired.) (I suppose I could try but honestly when a childhood toy that your mother made for you and your sibling is damaged and she’s still alive, the urge to give it back to her and say MUMMY FIX! is still LORGE.)

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! REMEMBERING THAT OVFF IS NOT CARNEGIE HALL, BUT EVEN SO. and no I have no plans to go to OVFF because I’m not getting on a jet again; I’m allowed to be honestly disgusted at the entire prospect of modern travel. I mean if I could push a button and end up at Dave’s front door I’d go for it, but a thousand dollars to be herded and refrigerated and lightly starved and jostled and soaked in some mofo’s cologne and chairkicked by somebody’s badtempered crotchfruit and mocked for wearing a mask, and deprived of sleep, comfort and easy access to a bathroom for the best part of a day and exposed to the Arcturus variant of COVID anyway, which is currently ravaging India and has already turned up in Washington state, and then forced to LONG MARCH through YVR, which is a pretty, useless airport and YYZ, which is just so effin’ big, and then an hour minimum on transit or a sixty dollar cab ride all seems more than my wee brain and iffy mood can deal with. But I’d like to be there. I am weak and lazy.

Hullo Dave!

Due to reasons this blog need not hear, he is dreaming a lot these days, and he has been recounting them. They are eerie and ordinary, the way dreams often are. We have been talking about where stories and creativity comes from, and whether dreams draw at that same human well, and candidly, it’s hard to believe otherwise. Me, I haven’t remembered a dream in weeks, and it was benign, thank goodness. There are enough horrors in waking life; I need not experience them at night.

I can’t think of anything else I want to do. Much love to the handful of people who visit every day! I hope you have a simply delightful day, and a tolerable one if delight is not in the cards.

 

Finished Gettysburg

It is a long movie.

There is a reunification of the couple at the end, in this case two brothers on the Union side. That Zizek dude is ludicrous in some respects (I refer with awe to his belief structure, which is arcane) but he’s such an inventive and compelling film critic that he makes every other film critic I ever ran across look like a series of slurs designed to invoke a picture of someone unblessed with any powers of reason, rhetoric, charisma or observation.

My estimation of Tom Berenger went up – I didn’t remember his performance at all from the first time I watched it, but he obviously gets more dialogue in this version. Sheen’s performance, consistent and attention-worthy as it was, made Lee seem a lot more ‘dreamy’ as Jeff put it than was necessary and it might have been actor-sweat well spent to make that dreaminess more like complete mental and physical exhaustion after two solid years of war.

My mood is so much better today I am equating normalcy to giddiness. I have folded my laundry but I haven’t put it away.

Time to make phone calls.

pleasant times

Lovely indoor walk with Paul yesterday at Lougheed. He seems very beaten down and oppressed by his illness but cheered up for the walk. It always cheers folks up to eat, so we got some lo mai gai, which was particularly fine in comparison with previous outings, and there was a lone har gaw in there because they were out of enough lo mai gai to fulfil my order, and the hot and sour soup was as good as I ever remember it being there. We went to Cobb’s but I didn’t buy treats, just spongy crusty white bread which is my kryptonite for stuff I’m s’posed to lay off for my liver.

Continue reading pleasant times