Author: Allegra

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

rrr

No Wreck Beach yesterday – I was too ill to deal with the stairs.  I feel fine now, of course.

Also, hardly any words at all yesterday and the day before, I think I managed 135 words.  Hope I manage better today.

not much to report

Sinatra under siege.

World’s cutest seal pup (think Pharos.)

I wrote about a hundred words yesterday.

I mostly concentrated on interviewing the candidate for GP (she passed…. she’s my age and she understands about pubic symphysis pain,  yo.)

I looked up yo.  It was popularized in American culture when blacks and Italians mingled in Philadelphia neighbourhoods. It is turning into a singular gender neutral pronoun in Baltimore. “Yo laughed” “I called yo”.

I use it at the end of sentences like the character Jesse in Breaking Bad, or to respond when my name is called, or very occasionally to call attention, “Yo, Paul!”

I am feeling sickly amidships.  It’s painful and really distracting from writing. Yo.

 

Guru Purnima

Today is a day to celebrate spiritual and academic teachers:

Jeff, because he’s both.

My fOlks of course.

Doug Bain and John Hamilton, two of my high school teachers who are most responsible for shaping how I think and why I bother to.

Sue Sparlin.

Patricia!  So pithy, so witty, so wise.  If you ever decide to write a book of life advice, I will be ripping pages out of the typewriter as they come and killing myself laughin’, I’m sure.

Mike and Jarmo.

Dorothy Dunnett.

I won’t say all the Unitarian ministers I’ve ever had dealings with, but most of them.

And the Grey Hymnal, a haven from the stupidity of the world.

All the black, trans*, differently othered and First Nations activists who have kicked my ass and pointed my thoughts in a different direction.  Without their clear voices, without their clear vision, I’m just another temporarily-abled settler colonial gender essentialist living the good life on unceded land.

 

Happy birthday Jeff.

My goodbye to a dogooder organization

All my outrage leaked away when I realized most white activists care more about dead male lions killed by dentists than dead First Nations women killed by cops.  I need to get away from social media and get my moral bearings for a while.  There can be no more important issues than how we treat each other in our daily lives, and whose lives need our love and care most.  I don’t trust the opinions of your organization on what is important any more.  Thank you for your work.

Moar wurz

600 wordie word blurdie birdies yesterday. I am very much enjoying having the editrix on facebook now, we are trading witticisms with much amusement.

I broke the small fan yesterday.  I accidentally kicked it over when I was carrying laundry and one of the fan blades snapped.  I had only recently rearranged the airflow to bring ac air to the basement and the difference was so remarkable Jeff was saying FAN under his breath within minutes. (The fan also pushes air down the hallway so cooler air has easier access to our bedrooms – I was FUCKING SWELTERING last night and it’s not a good look on a post menopausal woman.)  We’re off to the hardware store to get another one as soon as it opens.

Sorry Jeff.

 

 

Walkies

Keith and Paul came over last night and we walked in the neighbourhood.

Apart from running laundry and writing and a brief schlep and returning library books I did nothing yesterday.  Very happy with progress. I read George’s most recent blog post to Chipper and she enjoyed it; I also fired it off to mOm.

I have to stay off the internet today, it makes me so unreasonably mad!  Although I do enjoy knowing what my friends are up to. Also, when a man disagrees with me it isn’t always misogyny although Jumping Jimmy Christmas it appears that way sometimes.

So I looked up the guy’s name on the internet, found out that he’s a prof at a University one of my fOlks graduated from, read his student reviews, and realized that even if he is a published sf author, and even if his comments on genre are pronounced with professorial fussiness – I don’t have to take him as seriously as he obviously takes himself.  All before 7 am.

The reason I say this is as follows.  He says Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time ruined the genre fiction by mixing magic based (fantasy) and science based (science fiction).

OH BWA TO THE HA TO THE HA HA HA.

It’s all fiction, ya dingbat.  Genre is a convenience.  It’s not holy textual purity for crying out loud.

I am mashing genres so hard with this trilogy they’ve all gone off to get ice and aspirin, but they’ll be back.

 

Being a middle aged fannish woman looks like this

“Oh we’ve never seen anything present with those symptoms before, and candidly if you lost 40 (gained 20) pounds most of the problems – which appear to be in your head anyway – would go away, and here’s an antidepresessant and here’s an antipsychotic since I haven’t destroyed your ability to complain about your imaginary symptoms and there’s another test I’d like you to try. I wouldn’t be using that word iatrogenic in quite that snippy tone my dear.” Rinse, repeat with different doctors, 15 years later get a diagnosis from literally the FIRST DOCTOR WHO TAKES A PROPER HISTORY OH MY GOD. I wish I had heard this story only once. I have heard variants of it at least once a year for the last ten.  I only dodged it by stopping with the prescription mood drugs. I know I would have had a smoother time of it this last while, but life with the mountains ground down to a Vancouver lawn in July and the deep rolling waters turned into greasy holes full of algae ten feet deep / across is no place I want to live.

 

Also, god damn child abusers.  We need to end this scourge.

 

Sauna

Mike rented the basement of the Hastings Sauna and I got very warm last night.  Also in attendance were Jarmo and Susanna, Cassidy and Paul.

I was really careful not to get overheated and I did sleep reasonably well until I woke up half an hour ago.

Thus concludes Mike’s birthday weekend.  Hope to write lots today, only managed 200 words yesterday.

service plus party

Paul and I were very moved by the service for David Hamilton, who in death seems even more quietly mythic than he was in life.  A genuine, humble, intelligent, thoughtful, listening kind of man, with music in his very soul, the eulogies were funny and moving and real and the comments by his daughters-in-law particularly stood out as coming from two very different women, but uttering the same grateful praise.

We spent a lot of time catching up (I refused to look at my watch.)

So we were late to the restaurant, but it all came out okay.

Then back here.  We played Cards Against Humanity and had so much fun.  I haven’t heard Jeff laugh that hard in company since high school.  Both of us laughed until we were leaking, and at the point when we thought our ribs couldn’t take it any more we’d start laughing again.  Keith played games master. Also in attendance Cassidy, Mike (birthday lad), Joe and his gf, whom I’ve probably been introduced to four times but whose name I cannot remember, Brian and Chari, Paul of course.  Paul had the advantage, with Keith, Mike and Cassidy, of having played it before, and he came up with some combos that were hilariously unprintable.  I won a round with the best and simplest two card combo.

“For my next trick I will try to pull HOPE out of MY SEX LIFE.” Keith was the judge that round, ya shoulda seen his face.

I also won a round with “Dick Fingers”.  Since there was also “Five Dollar Foot Longs” coming up as a card in that round the group immediately came up with a  band name of Dick Fingers and his Five Dollar Foot Longs.

Yes, we had fun.

Jeff wore his Stargate “No Place Like Home” hoodie, squee.

I don’t even know who won and I don’t care.  It wasn’t the point.

Keith noted that you aren’t supposed to play it with family members but we managed all that quite nicely.  It’s an extremely rude game, and you may learn, as Jeff remarked, things you really didn’t want to.

Thank you to Jeff for getting the pinballs going – Joe and gf, who is apparently a pinball enthusiast from way back, went downstairs and made pinging noises for at least an hour and then dropped into the middle of the CaH game.

Around 9:30 I realized I could no longer stay upright so I went to bed.  Also, darkness equals bugs.

Thank you to all the beautiful people, friends and Beaconites, who made it such a perfect, and perfectly exhausting day.  Now I can’t sleep.

 

The true final count was

Final word count for the day was over 1500 words.  (This included editing, since I was ripping adverbs and adjectives out with vigour.)  I still have not commenced the new chapters. Also worked on the chapter entitled Exit Interview.

Today a memorial service for a church member and a birthday party for one of my closest friends.  I find that often happens to me, two big events in one day; I imagine I’ll be ready to get my drink on by a quarter to five.

We blasted through the rest of the Bojack Horseman season.  I really enjoyed it, especially the stuff going on in the background and the non-stop shellacking of all manner of Hollywoo ‘types’.

One of these days I’ll talk about the process, but in the meantime I’ll just say I love Scrivener.

The latest theatre shooting in the States was at a feminist movie and the people who were shot and killed were all women.  There IS NO WAR ON WOMEN MOVE ALONG PLEASE.  Right wing radio gave him a platform for his hate.  And thank you for killing yourself you fucking scumskin, your parents and ex-wife probably got their first night of sleep in ages, despite their grief and horror.

1028 words today

Jeff’s off at a client’s and I’ve done my writing for the day, on the chapter entitled “I don’t know what they are for”, so I think I’ll have another cup of coffee and make a list. I can survive the next couple of days without issue – if I have a list.  mOm I’ll send you what I have of that chapter so far.  Domestic arguments about aliens.  Yeah.

Being able to comfort baby Alex was my big accomplishment this week.  The way he greeted me and Paul made me want to float away and dance with unicorns and other magical creatures.