Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

A quick phone call

Keith called to advise that after consulting with his siblings, and the geriatric social worker, Paul has decided to move into the residence we visited last week.

I cannot express the extent of my gratitude and relief to have been part of the process. I’m so happy for Keith right now I don’t have words. More when a lease is signed or if for whatever reason it falls through, but at the moment there’s no reason to believe it will. Love to the siblings!

very hot in the house

The aircon didn’t get turned on yesterday and it is still very hot upstairs. I’m about to throw the door open and get some air in here – it’s 17ºC outside.

Laid back day, nothing of particular interest to report.

The grind around Bakhmut continues. The Russians are demoralized, panicky, poorly-led and -provisioned and the Ukrainians have more and better armaments almost every day. And men are still dying in droves, mostly on the Russian side.

Apparently every day that’s nice men go down to Wreck Beach and take photos of the beachgoers. I’m not saying men are scum, but I wish the old timers’ ways of dealing with rubberneckers still obtained.

a minor change GRADATIM

So… I repointed this one; I changed the instrument from a piano to a harp and asked Finale to use the Human Expression – Funk setting for playback.

Rev 1.4 of Words Fail. The tune is repeated twice. Think of it as being a theme song for a tv show (they are usually one minute long or less) …. obviously with the full orchestral work up!

Happy mother’s day to those who celebrate. The homily for today is in the PDF of all my homilies jammed together in a book.

 

 

Shifting emphasis

I’m thinking keep the blog but make it just the release point for a podcast (with a complete and accurate transcript so visually impaired and deaf people can consume it) on a regular schedule. I have some ideas. LOL. I am, after all, an idea factory. I’m making a list of episode subjects and am considering various formats.

I don’t know why, but I’m thinking of a film made in Africa (I was 18, forgive me if I didn’t keep my class notes about which country it was filmed in and I can’t find anything in Wikipedia.) In it, the present day in a bustling city is depicted in colour; but his fantasies about becoming rich and immigrating are in black and white. I remember at the time being much struck by the emotional resonance of this; that your fantasies are so shopworn as to no longer be vibrant, and as a visual metaphor for the protagonist’s internal life I’ve rarely seen the equal.

We finished “One Day as a Lion”. mOm, picture Totally Boned if it was a het couple and set in the hottest ass end of Oklahoma (and people get shot…). I personally loved it (there were so many little beaut touches), Jeff was so so and said the script needed a punch up and the ending was too abrupt (both valid comments.) It is TOTALLY an ‘instant family Harlequin Romance with dead bodies.”

I forgive Scott Caan (son of James) his ‘career’ as a rapper (I believe I have made CLEAR my opinion of white rappers who did not come up in the business credibly integrated with Black ones) if he can produce little bloodstained film confections like this.

I have to do my Lumosity and get dressed, Jeff wants to do a schlep this morning. We don’t normally go on the weekend. Just checked to make sure they’re open at 7, since we hardly ever go on Sunday (the organic homo is usually all gone.)

As predicted air quality (the Alberta fires) is moderately bad (60 and variable) and today’s going to be the hottest day of this heat wave so don’t do a goddamned thing outside today. Just sayin.

Efforts to teach Buster to count to three are going badly. All he does is start salivating when I count to three, since that means I’m about to drop some treats on his little tuffet. Considering that other people’s pets do things like speculate as to whether a new human baby brother will cry when being stuck in the car seat I feel sad until he commands me to pet him, at which point I calm down.

 

Nothing but electronic horn stabs

Don’t waste your ears on this, I’m just posting it so I can find it later. It is entitled, Brought Before My Oppressors, and it’s BAD VIBES and TOO MUCH VOLUME BLASTS CAN’T YOU EQUALIZE THIS JFC and the bitter grinding sameness of fascism. So, like, I frikkin’ warndja. And of course (pfffft, blowing through lips) PROCESSING? I dan do processing, man. It’s an outrage, but there you have it.

I really don’t want to post the Kaossilator settings for this one since it’s just evil in a bag like Satan’s cat horking up a woolly one and one should have a conscience, but I know for a fucking fact that if I don’t record it, it will be as gone as the (deep breath and avoidance of anecdon’t let’s just say the day before yesterday is a gift that keeps on holy shit what now?ing at me).

BPM 20 – ze lowest setting, which is one of the reasons the sound is so vertiginously choppy.

L02

G08 (Gate arpeggiator set for the first half of the first beat in every four beat bar.)

Minor Third scale

Low C

HONESTLY I WARNED YOU two minutes of audio torture but of course if you use it to drive cockroaches from your home, and use snippets of it in funny animal videos you’re editing, that’s on you.

 

Pulse check

Spoke to Dave and Keith yesterday.

Dave’s bathroom ceiling caved in yesterday morning. It’s possible a poorly installed bidet in the upstairs apartment is the reason but let’s face it the building is not new and it could be other leaks as well. I asked him how close he came to getting killed and he said about ten minutes. A miss, as they say, is as good a mile.

Keith told me to hang in there, to keep working on not taking Paul stuff personally, to thank me for my efforts and to invite me to go look at the next care facility.

Did not dress or leave the house yesterday. Updated my care sheet to include that I’m due for a mammogram. I made flower rolls (white bread buns) and they came out just spectacular (the texture is pure pillowy softness) and I’m irritated now because I am not 100% sure exactly which recipe I followed or whether I jammed two together. ADD, ADD, polishes as it cleans, ting!

Jeff’s day has started and he is drinking tea.

Buster has hairballs and refuses to let me dose him with hairball remedy.

Other than that, it’s hot in the house and I’m going to ask Jeff to turn on the aircon.

 

errands

Accompanied Paul for a meal and errands yesterday. It was a beautiful day again and I kept my temper for most of it, but learning that he had received a new bank card and just thrown out the last one without calling the number and getting it authorized meant that we now had another errand, meaning going to the bank and stooging around for half an hour while the world’s most patient bank clerk dealt with Paul not being able to enter the same pin number twice running and not being able to remember his own home phone number that he’s had since 1996 and laughing about it. Then we learned his credit cards were buggered up too, and the clerk squared what he could away. Two children from a five child family screamed and moaned right next to us the entire time this was going on, just to give you the true, “If it’s Thursday this must be the third level of hell” feel to the occasion. Anyway, I paid for the banker boxes he bought and he paid me back at the bank.

I got him lunch at Nando’s at Market Crossing and realized that Paul is having more and more and more trouble handling food and I should have gotten him something less knife and fork to eat. The meal took almost an hour and he had a beer too. I was shrugging it off so I asked him to sit in the car while I got more babby plant pots and some embroidery hoops while I poked my head into Michaels.

While we were picking up banker boxes, something funny happened. We miss Jim, of course we do, and in Paul’s case the missing him comes out in song; it was Jim who told us about Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers and gave us our first few cassette tapes, which we listened to constantly. One of them, a traditional song, is called Sarah, and has the following chorus:

Sarah, Sarah won’t you come out tonight,
Sarah, Sarah the moon is shining bright,
Put your hat and jacket on, tell your mother you won’t be long,
And I’ll be waiting for you round the corner

Except that when Paul sang it, it came out, “The moon is brining shite,” at which point I laughed helplessly for about a minute.

BRAINz working okay today, tiny amount of writing, but the real big cognitive news is that I got eight hours of sleep.

Some positive movement

Absolutely gorgeous day. Stunning. And we’re going to have a mini heat dome for Mother’s Day, la la la!! Emailed the kids and said I want nothing but a phone call for Mother’s Day.

Paul, Keith and I went to a local (walking distance…) independent living manor and it had many, many amenities and conveniences to recommend it. It’s a swingeing amount of money per month but all the food, internet, cable and cleaning is included so it’s actually a pretty good deal, and there are tons of activities and many different rooms to do things in. The org that runs it is a non-profit and the building itself is almost brand new (our family watched it being built.) We will be visiting other places this month as well, or at least the menfOlks will.

Paul was engaged, communicative, task-oriented and equable throughout the visit and continued to contribute to the conversation for about half an hour after the tour was over (they let us sit in an absolutely gorgeous common space to talk, and of course because the weather was perfect and there were floor to ceiling windows along the corner walls looking out into a courtyard completely surrounded by mature trees, it was a nice place to chat.) He liked the apartment (we saw the show suite and a vacant mirror image, both on the top floor and looking into cedars and fir trees) and the three enormous closets and was pleased to hear that the two malls that he is most familiar with in terms of amenities and layout are also the two malls that they bus folks to twice a week. The food looks fantastic and residents are served restaurant style with servers taking orders at the table.

Dax dropped by in the late afternoon to collect an air compressor from Paul’s Echo’s trunk. Why? Because the grandsons have deflated balls. Many, many deflated balls. All the deflated balls, apparently. There will be some vigorous kicking in their future I imagine.

Today I’m taking Paul to get boxes at the Staples down the hill and hopefully finally getting that watch fixed. I also want to pick up some more veg (I like the veg place in Market Crossing and maybe the Cobbs has reopened YUP just checked, they were renovating) and maybe a treat or two if the winds are propitious. And maybe a visit to FISH to get some halibut, always a welcome basis for a meal.

Finished the run of Endeavour. Abso loved it, it’s going in rotation, and thank you Dave SO MUCH for recommending it. Desperately seeking something of equivalent volume and quality to replace it!

129 words on the fic, brain is sort of working, towels washed and put away, one load of laundry done but sitting around downstairs.

what a day

The Moscow Victory parade had a single tank.

LOL.

George Santos has had criminal charges filed against him under seal at a federal court in the eastern district of New York.

LOL.

Trump was given a five million dollar fine for sexually abuse of E. Jean Carroll. He should have to be registered as a sex offender. He was told by the judge to keep his flipping mouth shut, but as usual he went to ‘Truth Social’ and stretched it out another yard.  He’ll probably be assessed a fine for THAT, too.

LOL.

 

lovely lunch and walk

We went to the Fraser Foreshore after going to the Crest and sending Ruth a bucket of documents from Paul for her to sort and analyze. We were supposed to go to the Fraser restaurant after for lunch but it was JAMMED I mean the entire parking lot from one end to the other was jammed and the outside tables were all jammed too. So we went to our fallback, Phó Edmonds, and had a lovely meal; then visited the bakery next door for treats for Paul and Keith (picked up flower bread for Jeff) and went back to Casa Caspell, where I googooed at both Oreo and Ryker and picked up ten bucks worth of beef stew, frozen, from Keith, which is now defrosting in the fridge.

The birds in the forest were in full spate – we saw the usual brace of songbirds and ducks and great blue herons, and walked at least 2 k, so we really made an effort after weeks of my being a lazy bum.

It’s turned out a simply lovely, warm sun/cool breeze sort of spring day full of dappled sunshine.

Tomorrow we’re doing a tour of one of the local homes for eldercare. I’ll be heading over to Paul’s for about 9:30 am and then we’ll run some errands afterward. Keith will be joining us.

Paul was quite sour when we first started walking, making many comments that nudged up against “EVERYBODY IS BLAMING ME FOR EVERYTHING” and I did my best to not take it personally until walking enough and eating put him into a better mood. He says that any time he talks to Keith, Keith ignores him, and I hate to be a contrarian, but it just ain’t so.

I promised if he went into care I’d see him Tuesdays and Thursdays and take him for walks and run errands. No weekends cause that would be for the kids and grandkids. Yes I’ve been terrible about this since the weekend of Jim’s memorial. I have not been 100%.

Just got a forward on twitter from Michael Balter about this. What a HORRIBLE TRASHFIRE ABYSS OF SUCK that woman is.

Anyway, my day is back under my control so I’m going to run a load of laundry and check my mail and I’m finally well slept enough I don’t need a nap.

apologies

This site was briefly down.

I have eaten all the shirazi salad, so I made more. I drank all the coffee, so I made more. I brought Jeff black tea this morning (I usually give him a choice of coffee, black tea or peppermint tea so that he can stay hydrated while he’s doing things like encouraging my site to come back up and beating his customers’ sites into submission).

I hope you all have a lovely day filled with hummingbirds and butterflies and clement weather. It will be seasonal and partly cloudy here today. I intend to have an entirely brainless day, since both wordle and lumosity tell me that I have no brains whatsoever this morning. So brainless I am! brainless I was when I awoke, and brainless all day I will be! I cheerfully predict it, and it’s okay. One kudo overnight, so I re-read the story thus adorned and found it a pleasant diversion. I mean, that’s what fanfic is for, right? I got in maybe two words on the new one and while I think non stop about Totally Boned I haven’t had any movement as far as pushing pixels is concerned.

Had a simply SPLENDID conversation with pOp yesterday about pOOping. (I never talk to pOp on the phone so it was a pleasant surprise.) I greeted him thusly, “Oh what a terrible thing it is that you have been forced to answer the phone. Has anything fallen off you lately?” (This in keeping with the family lore that pOp has quietly become a very well-behaved not-eating-mOm’s-brains zombie.)

I have been eating enough fibre and things are good amidships, with occasional Metformin induced explosions, but he reports much sadness with various tubes and wishes that they would behave in a more reasonable fashion. Blessings ON ALL YOUR TUBES AND WIRES pOp, I hope you can get them to do their thing without being so troublesome.

I carry no brief for John Cleese as I believe I’ve made clear in past posts, but him mocking the living shit out of Chuck & Cheesewit getting crowned was balm to my wounded soul.

 

Mike came over!

He brought us Chicken Roti and … other things. We nommed.

We watched Beavis and Butthead (a new tradition) and Bohemian Rhapsody (which I hadn’t previously seen). It was pretty impressive given that the director was fired about three weeks before production wrapped and an actor wa threatening to quit because they clashed with Singer (the original director) so much.

Coffee’s made. Time to fold laundry and think limply about running an errand or two.