Author: Allegra

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

Lotza words

Fifteen hundred or so yesterday. How would you like a Sixer to turn up on your 21st floor balcony? Well, if you had just had a family meal where your stepmother excoriated you for two hours about how you were the stupidest woman alive for not finding a way of making money out of Sixers WHEN YOU MET THEM AND HOW STUPID ARE YOU ANYWAY maybe you’d greet them more cheerfully than you running around in a nightie might suggest.

Besides, everyone trusts Michel.  He does what he says and stays out of stuff that isn’t his business. Or does he?  Only time will tell…

Gave Katie a driving lesson the other day, one of the advantages of Paul leaving me the car.

It is always good to be able to help friends and family.  I made sure Keith and Paul had a meal prepped in their fridge (cannelloni cilantro almond & onion salad plus Singapore style noodles I’d picked up earlier) and picked them up at Edmonds after their trip to Toronto/London (yes, Paul met up with Carrie and Keith, bless him, poked his head in on The Vampire Family, which makes me very, very happy)  and handed over the car.  Of course if it hadn’t been on a night of the full moon I wouldn’t have been awake, but them’s the breaks, and they broke the right way.

Three loads of laundry yesterday.  Practiced mandolin already this morning. Poor Margot doesn’t know she’s going back to the vet tomorrow but she’s obviously suffering, poor lamb.  I put her favourite rug in the wash just now along with the upstairs sofa cover, since various babies and cats have been yielding up their valuable inner resources onto them both of late.

I didn’t know that Jean Webster had published anything beside Dear Enemy and Daddy-Long-Legs so I’m going to be checking out the other books on Gutenberg today.  It annoys me that she died so young in childbirth; she should have lived to be a hundred.

 

Cats

I’m off to feed Ayesha.

Margot is having her teeth cleaned and her abscess drained on Thursday.  I didn’t even know she had anything wrong with her until the vet pointed it out last week.

Took Katie driving yesterday. She’s going to be a fine driver but needs the practice.  I had a super brief encounter with Alex; it takes him a while to warm up to me but he was smiling and running and kicking a ball to me within minutes.  As usual I made no attempt to pick him up.

592 words yesterday on a subject dear to my heart.

More insomnia

I managed to go back to bed and wake up around 8 but I feel blerllghly or some analog of that word.

Paul has loaned me his car while he and Keith are in London ON.  I will go get some groceries shortly.

A couple of hundred words.  I really feel like I’m getting my money’s worth from this toothpaste tube.

Definitely maybe

I’ve been walking in the lovely October sunshine – more walkies with Paul yesterday afternoon at the Quay, plus yummy tortilla soup, and then more writing, just a drib around 100 words but very promising.  Any interactions between Michel and Theo are always welcome, and this one promises to amuse while advancing Theo’s new goal in life.  Most of the characters have been approaching me and asking me to stop giving them dialogue they wouldn’t actually say.

New addition to the Blogroll, Eclectic Explorations.

Sundry thoughts

I think I have thought my way out of the box. The writing box.  We shall see.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Yes, WHY would I ask you to watch this remarkable 16 minute video….  Well, it’s like a 16 minute preview of the election campaign. Everybody thinks Justin Trudeau is a lightweight going into the fight.  Watch and be unintentionally impressed.  This is a fight for charity.  There are SO many interesting little tidbits in this fight and in the commentary and byplay, I will be watching it again for sure.  I knew about it and Shirley on fb already told me to watch it but Mike showed it last night.

Pork chops, cannelloni beans and onions in the crockpot for supper – I took a bunch over to Mike for dins.  (It was SUPER TASTY) He had beer!  Also, the pummelling – my shoulders are MUCH better this morning.

Magnanimous in victory, unrepentant in defeat.  That’s how I hope to be in any contest.

Super weird dreams.  There was a WALL OF COMIC BOOKS. and the teenager had to be told we could not escape across the desert with all of them.  AND I had to wash dishes first, while everybody else messed off to play with the Van de Graaf Generator. The great big sparky thing, not the noted prog rock band from the 60’s and 70’s which reformed in this millennium and occasionally still plays.

Hurricane Patricia is exceeding strong and is going to beat up parts of the US. It’s already registering off the charts for windspeed.  The last time something this big made landfall 6300 people died in the Philippines although to be fair if the authorities had taken the NOAA warnings and those of their own weather scientists seriously and done the math regarding the storm surge there would have been fewer dead.

I am covered in powdered sugar.  I walked back in the cool predawn and grabbed a couple of croissants for me and Jeff for brekky.

Took Miss Margot yesterday to get her shots and a brief checkup.  She HATES ME TODAY and she has a tooth abscess I have to get dealt with.  Also, she DOES have fleas but not too bad.

I think I am working on a new tune.  I’ll get back to you on that.

 

Walk plus roti

I had the curried potatoes, and chickpeas over pigeon peas and rice with a couple of Red Stripes, and Paul had shrimp curry over same, and one Red Stripe.

We walked there and back – a bit more than 2 k roundtrip. There’s a nice little restaurant row there.  It was Wednesday, so Spring Garden, the newish Chinese restaurant on 12th south of 10th Avenue, is closed. Otherwise I would have been thinking Dim Sum.

Anyhoo, 247 words today, all on the backyard scene.

 

I voated

Once again I have fallen off the registry list which is tedious, but reregistering is a snap so.

Jeff and I walked down together a little after 8:30.

I have finally reported the dead vehicle on my street (no tags since August 2014) to Parking Enforcement.  It’s not like the street is crawling with parking spaces for the number of cars we have.

92 words yesterday.

OH IT WAS SO GOOD TO SEE ALEX.  I have forwarded some video to the Great She Elephant.

HE LET ME PICK HIM UP twice – I pointed him at a light switch to play with.  After 30 seconds he got squirmy.

Also, he was refusing to nap so I took him outside so he could get really really upset and nurse himself to sleep, a mean trick which worked.

 

Domestic blitz

Yesterday I emptied the dishwasher, prepped raw veggies, baked buns and cookies and turned down offers of exercise.

I also spoke to Keith’s counsellor on the phone hoping to help straighten out this communication thing we have (not) going on. That went well.

AND I SAW BABY ALEX.  Also baby Ellie, who is so food positive that she makes me howl and her mama Jessica obviously. There is nothing in the world like pulling food from the oven and taking it to your grandson to eat.  Everybody was in a really good mood.

John Caspell would have been 64 years old today.

Feeling proud

Today is LE GORGEOUS fall day, swirling leaves and soft breezes.  We went to Oakalla, and on a whim when we got there I bore left and we walked the long way ’round, ending up at Hart House.  Sensing that the downscale price was upscale in size, I went for the shaved prime rib on ciabatta sammie with crunchy onions and Nippon style aioli and Paul went for the seared fish, which I knew was gonna be tiny, but the presentation was so amazing I’ll leave it to your imagination rather shove it in your face.  The heritage parti-coloured radish slices danced a magnificent solo in a spotlight in the early afternoon sun (Paul picked the best lit table in the whole place, surprise surprise.) Then I ate them. And now they are turning into something dark and unpleasant, and such is the fate of every restaurant meal that every food critic ever had time to digest.

Shit Allegra why would you do that?  Hey, I could have posted a picture, but I don’t even take pictures of my grandson most of the time. He is a verb, and pictures seem a very pale representation of his business and verve. I understand why people pic their meals but gadfrey sir a little restraint.

And of course for privacy reasons fewer pictures.

After the meal we made a post-prandial tour of the southern side of the lake, linking back up with the trail at the first diversion from the western parking lot. I have since measured it and it totalled 5.5 K and I was thrilled because that’s what I eyeballed it (I had said what is this, 5, 5.5 k) so I’m glad I can accurately estimate a distance, being reality based is good.

I did not finish my sammie.  I looked at the second half and thought “There are few things on this earth that could make Jeff happier to eat right now”” and I took it home to him, and he ate it with every sign of delight.  I left him to watch Z Nation and came upstairs to tell you that my feet HURT.  Feel good though!

 

countermeasures

What a fucking disaster of a review.

Eventually the movie review will be gone, so here’s a quote.

 

What’s it like for him to be alone for years? Is the sheer solitude a burden? Is the simple lack of human contact a cause of psychological derangement? Are there exercises that he does in order to ward off hallucinations, to control inner voices? And what are those voices? What does Mark say to himself? What does he think–or feel? Is there anything that he has to overcome in order to remain mentally sharp and emotionally stable?

oh my FUCKING GOD you asinine critter, don’t you think astronauts are SELECTED for their ability to stay sane in these circumstances?  It’s called WORKING THE PROBLEM.  They don’t show him masturbating, although disposing of the consequences would be a funny couple of minutes, and they don’t show him crying, or hitting things, or any of that stuff. Any sane person knows it happened; we don’t need to see it.

 

THE IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS MOVIE WAS NOT THE PERSONALITIES of the characters involved.

It was in their ability to work problems.

The author of this review, who’s a chump’s own chump, is under the impression that science fiction fans – a demographic that is rapidly approaching everyone who is not a religious fanatic, hermit or killjoy – want to see another movie with people talking about their feelings or their interior lives.  No, we want to see a SCIENCE fiction movie. Not a movie that waves its hands when it comes to science but one that says you have to understand orbital mechanics to link up with a flying object in the Mars gravity well. Where mass and math and persistence and grit make survival possible, make triumph possible, make the unification of the world in its concern for a single human being possible.

The ’emotional tenor’ of the movie is SIMPLE.

We’re going to take our feelings, and we are going to set them aside, and WORK A FUCKING PROBLEM until it is done.

And despite the whitewashing of the movie, and yes it’s true, ethnicities were changed and that’s notable, something was preserved that I think is more important.  A young black mathematician gets called a steely eyed missile man by the Hermes crew, which is, without a word of a lie, the highest praise you can give a technical man in a space crisis situation. A generation of black kids will be dreaming of Mars based on this one sentence in the movie.  May the great parent of the Universe give a line of reasoning to Richard Brody, since he could really use one.

The emotional tenor of the movie is simple.  Why do people rescue other people.  BECAUSE WE ARE SOCIAL.  Now leave me alone, I’m working a solution that’s going to help other people.  You can assume I have an interior life. Because we all do.