All is merry and bright

  1. Paul gave me and Jeff motion detector lights; the upgetting to pee is now a lot easier.  Paul’s approach to Christmas gifts is to buy a bag of useful objects and let you pick which one you like – this year the theme was light, so it was headlamp, motion detector light or keychain flashlight.
  2. I was really resentful about ‘having’ to do Christmas dinner, and then I asked myself what it would take to be less resentful.  I immediately thought “If I don’t have to buy the turkey and lug it home!”  To which Paul happily agreed, and Keith lugged it over here.  Resentment vanished, I went to Granville Island with Tammy for the rest of the veg and happily lugged that home.
  3. I made vegan squash soup – there wasn’t enough for everybody and it was damned good.
  4. so much good beer – pumpkin ale, winter ale, shipwreck IPA! Tammy brought some nice wine.
  5. The turkey was good – the meat delicious, the skin like an advertisement – but what was really amazing was the gravy. I ended up eating it cold as a side for leftover pie, and it was SO GOOD.  It was pan dripping gravy.  I stuck the pan drippings in a blender, added a tablespoon of cake flour and about half a cup of milk, blended the shit out of it and then nuked it for a minute.  From such pedestrian beginnings came a voluptuously smooth gravy with a meaty and almost nutty flavour.
  6. Mike and Tammy and Paul and Katie and Keith and I sang and played afterwards, and Alex grooved along.  He really really likes music, and he is most fabulously strong.  He apparently likes his Christmas present, which was a stuffed T Rex. Paul introduced Tammy to Never Set the Cat on Fire, which was wonderful.
  7. Wine was spilled on Granny’s linen tablecloth… horrors! and it came out again the next morning with some Amaze.  Tablecloth is clean, folded and ready for use.
  8. Earlier this week I got the lobster dinner I have been drooling for, except it was lunch, and it was with Tammy, so it was pretty much perfect.
  9. Although the kitchen is once again the habitation of orcs this morning, I HAD cleaned up and ran a dishwasher and got rid of the empties and straightened out the living room the next morning and returned some sanity to the proceedings.
  10. Today I hope to get cat litter.  With two cats, more shit.  It is the law.
  11. Autumn is a boy.  He is now Buster.  Jeff and I are fine with this, but not fine with not noticing earlier.  He will be snipped in a week or so.
  12. He has been to the vet for suturing because he’s already gotten in fights. Margot was disturbed by him before, but with a cone on his head she is Miss Hissy each time he approaches.
  13. I am really enjoying everybody’s pics of how happy their Christmas has been.  The various traditions from around the world and around the various ethnicities of my friends and flist make me happy in their variety and conviviality.
  14. I am sad to have missed Christmas Eve service because it was the last time a certain church member will ever provide music for us, because he is awesome, but also sick.  As sad as I am about this, I made happy memories in my own home with my loves and kin.
  15. Keith was sober, and he was Mom’s taxi.  He: ferried Tammy to and from Edmonds, drove his sister home, drove Rob to Church and drove Mike and his Dad home.  As happy as I was to see Alex, Keith did a lot to make the evening perfect, and I am now considering (which I can do here, since he never reads my blog, haw haw) how I shall appropriately reward him for his service.
  16. A car was stolen from in front of our house at 3:30 am Christmas morning.  I spoke to a Burnaby RCMP officer about it… Jeff and I were asleep at the time, or in no position to see what was happening.  I thanked her for working Christmas Day and wished for her to stay safe out there.
  17. I made chocolate cake.  I am thinking perhaps cinnamon rolls later. The turkey soup is made and in the freezer.

This concludes my report….

Today’s meal

The bird goes in the oven at 1.  No stuffing this time.  The rest of the day is me counting back from when supper hits the table (’round 5:15), prepping veggies so they have a fighting chance of being ready to go at the appointed time, fetching guests from Skytrain stations and cleaning things.

Watched this PG family adventure movie yesterday and quite liked it: Ragnarok. With bonus Sofia Helin from the Bridge series.

 

 

Laundry list

This is for mOm. Art and cancer.

I said to Paul IF YOU WANT ME TO COOK IT YOU MUST BUY IT. So there’s a fresh turkey in my fridge, and I now have Katie, Alex, Keith, Paul, Rob W, Mike M, possibly one other person from Mike’s work and I hope Tammy for Christmas Eve dinner.  It’s a family plus orphans dinner!!!

Today I have to buy vegetables and hopefully I’ll remember the cranberry sauce. Also I need to lay on at least a couple of bottles of wine and some beer.

I’m seeing Tammy for lunch at Granville Island today.  Hope it’s the Keg, I am dying for lobster.

If you like Downton Abbey, you must see the Christmas Text to Santa special, in which George Clooney appears.  Happy sigh.

Andrew Wakefield, you are POND SCUM. Or, a carelessly formed biofilm of dubious utility.

Family drama is blergh.  But I like watching it sometimes anyway.  My reaction. (Sorta for Jeff, who’s doing a complete TNG rewatch).  I’m talking other people’s families… I am doing okay.

Chocolate cake for breakfast, FOR REASONS.

Heavy sighs for all the dust I’m going to raise getting the living room ready, har har.

 

 

 

 

Katie’s angel wings for real

So there I am more or less on time for church (and I’m up for coffee but I’m hardly alone – Karen and Laura and and Sandra and Arlette and Tom all got up in cheese cutting and dish washing and table bussing and cake baking and cake cutting and various kinds of arranging and fooding).  I take full responsibility for the black tea shortage. I learn from Sandra that Katie has already arrived with Alex and I’m all excited because I’m there to hand out one giant stuffed tyrannosaurus (with a beautiful golden ribbon round his middle cause I’ll be dipped in dogshit before I wrap another present) and also quantity one family heirloom Christmas stocking, made by Alex’s great great grandma Evelyn, which is obviously a much bigger deal that the stuffed animal and made Katie’s eyes light up.

She comes downstairs to nurse Alex who is hongry (he kipped after) and tells me a delightful story about how she’s standing on the Skytrain platform, minding her usual, and a getting on for elderly woman approaches her and says, My vision really sucks and I want to make sure I’m getting the right train (note: the station is a transfer point).  Can you put me on the Millennium train?  That’s where I’m going, says Katie.  I’m actually going to church, the woman says.  Me too says Katie.  I’m going to Beacon, the woman says.  Me too says Katie.

Helen  – the woman in question – says one doesn’t expect Unitarian angels but they are everywhere. I wasn’t expecting my daughter to be one.

Alex was deliciously cute in dress pants and a tailored white cotton shirt.  He didn’t smile at me but he wiggled and grinned at his mother in that orgy of mutual admiration that is a properly functioning kid-mama bond, and I almost feel there was something wrong, he didn’t fart once.

I have to say I’m a very fond grandma right now.

Caution, language

Somebody commented on Miles V’s facebook page yesterday, and a mighty wrath swept over me when somebody played the #NOTALLWHITES race card.

This is how I responded.

 

As long as the cops are selectively targeting people of color upon whom to practice their monopoly on the legal use of force, I’m fucking well going to base my comments on skin color. As long as the cops don’t look like the people they police in the Interior of BC, I’m fucking well going to base my comments on skin color. As long as there are 1200 missing women of First Nations descent in my country and the Prime Minister says finding what happened to them isn’t a priority and besides the local police are handling it fine, I’m fucking well going to base my comments on skin color. As long as clueless white people hope to atomize individual cases in which white cops commit homicide, hoping to grind it up so fine it can’t be connected to the systemic racism dating back to *before* the Civil War, I’m fucking well going to base my comments on skin color.

Sleepovers and trash

Keith and Paul and Mike dropped by last night for pizza, movies and conversation, and it was wonderful to see them all.

I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life, but picking my friends hasn’t been one of them.

Keith slept over – I put a bunch of Woly shoe creme on his work shoes, which are so trashed by salt water that the leather is starting to come apart in layers. There must be six bucks worth of it on there… I hadn’t even opened it and I’ve had it three years, so I’m glad to be using a resource.

One of my fave Beaconites, Dina Davidson, local midwife extraordinaire, got some press time on her favourite subject.

Katie cut her dad’s hair yesterday.  Given that she and Paul hadn’t spoken in the best part of a month – immediately after the birth of the first grandchild – I will leave you to parse that as best you may.

I am doing coffee at church tomorrow.  I think I’ll make a cake, but make something else to leave here so Jeff doesn’t come looking all expectant with no treats.  So I have to remember to immediately put on bread dough the instant I get up tomorrow, because if I do it today, it will be gone tomorrow. Treat Logistics.

I am learning to my horror that the second section of the book is in disarray, and the timelines are all squidded up, and I appear to have TWICE written the same scene twice without incorporating the necessary elements from the other draft.  It’s ugly and I’m frustrated.  I think I’m going to need another writing week without the siren song of Agents of SHIELD to fix this mess (although we are close to the end LOL) so I’ll be checking in with the mOmster to see when would or might be convenient.  Won’t be until after my homily January 4 though.

Autumn, who may really be Peaches, loves Agent Coulson.  She sits on the back of the sofa and gazes at him adoringly.

I have laundry.  I’m doing it, I’m not digging it.  I have to ditch a whole bunch of my clothes because they are not meeting my needs, but that in itself makes me sad.  I should just take a picture and move on.

I’m also hoping to walk over to 6th and do a mini shop.

We’ll see what happens when Keith gets up… he may want a late brekkie.  I can definitely help out with the coffee.

There’s been an update to wordpress, the engine that runs this blog, and it allows me to have an empty screen when I’m typing, which is actually kind of cool and gives you a nice electronic typewriter feeling.

Alien baby names

Some are traditional.  Some are suggested by that prankster Michel.  Some Kima just likes the sound of.  This is not the complete list, and each of the first few names I’ve written some backstory for.  The number is the number assigned by Kima.  Not all the babies are going to make it; a number of them who would normally get et and reabsorbed by their mom are allowed to develop, with occasionally weird and sad results.  W means watermorph and G, T, O indicates who dad is.

 

1 – Pharos WG aka Beaky.  He’s the biggest

2 – Kima Jr. WT

3 – Lumpy WO

4 – Rivergrass WG

5 – Zosime, later Cutshine WG

6 – Panops WT

7 – Gyorg WO

8 – Lara WG

9 – Peleas WG

10 – Phokas WG

11 – Cauchemar WO

12 – Bellerophon WO

13 – Friday WG – she’s melanistic, which is unprecedented.

14 – Hydra WG

15 – Bonnie WG

16 – 16

17 – TRex

18 – Spectrum

19 – Apex

20 – Star

21 – Polydorus – 0

22 – Nereus – 0

23 – Pudding – 0

24 – Neophytos – 0

25 – Aesklepios – 0 AKA Kleppy

26 – Evangelos 0 – AKA Evan

27 – Glykeria – 0 AKA Sweetie

28 – Spyridion – 0 AKA Spiro

29 – Nicoleta – 0 AKA Nico

30 – Zinovia – 0

31 – Aglaia – 0

32 – Stelian – 0

33 – Luca – 0

34 – Borbala – 0

35 – Pelagia – 0

36 – Elefteria – 0

37 – Temair – WG

38 – Graunch – WG

39 – Seawolf WG

40 – Tide – WG

41 – Orca WG

42 – Thisandthat – WG

43 – S01E01 – WG

44 – Corafae – WG (this is a pun – a coryphee is the lead dancer in a a ballet chorus)

45 – DeltaV WG

46 – Blue

47 – Mireille

Brigitte

Denis

Sparrow

Euclid

Stentor

Leonidas

Harry

Genie

Carita

Plenty

Vaslav

Goodgrief

Halloween

Yaya

Pietro

Paulo

Joe

Vic

Leo

Carlo

Tony

Francesco

Shotgun Bob

Mel

Strowler

Sansabri

Cuir

Spielberg

Benthe

Transversal

Torsion

Tension

Compression

Shear

Bending

Quanta

Tracer

Tomasz

Robin

Mason

Jas

Satraj WG F

Ivy

Menlo

Etazonia

Kojo

Incantare

Tengerész teng gay ress – means Mariner

Vonzó

Avantaj

Straylight

Rejtett pron. Raytett Hidden

Lelkes pron Lelkesh, keen

Hullám pron Hoolam wave

Captain

Kalyptra (veil)

Kiborion Chalice

Ráðgjöf – rowthjyeuf

Doofus

Umpteen

Elif

Just so you know

I don’t appreciate having ads for Kinder Morgan on my site, and am trying to figure out how to get rid of them.

Check it out!  Isn’t it great when men who will have access to date rape drugs make fun about date rape?

A friend is having trouble with a band council administration.  Colonialism has made a proper mess of First Nations life.  This story has alcohol, violence and threats of it, substandard housing, employment being contingent on who your cousins are, more alcohol, treatment centers that drive their their residents in to town to buy cigarettes (fuck you must be kidding), people walking into your house in the middle of the night and not leaving when asked, being fired for no cause when you’re doing your job properly, having to call the RCMP on your in laws, racism and more bullshit than could be shoveled in a month by ten strong men.

If I hadn’t heard from a dear friend today, who is doing fine, I’d be very much on edge.d

Back to my babies.  Literary, squidly babies, with large appetites.

My take on Hitchens

That which can be asserted without evidence should be ignored without distress.  And no, I don’t apologize to dead men.

I’m having a much harder time assembling part II than part I since I don’t seem to have as many connecting links between the pieces.

My friend Catherine was on the telly last night talking about her role in rescuing 60 cats.  Despite her allergies she is fostering two immense, extremely affectionate rescue cats, Riopelle and Smokey. Complaints about their point loading have already been registered.

We are enjoying Agents of Shield while ignoring plot holes, bad acting and the comic book world’s lack of sophistication with respect to air frame physics.

Haunting

I find this haunting. Someone has tried to reconstruct Babylonian song.

Yesterday I saw Sue in Little Women the Musical.  Unfortunately the book was not as good as the actors and musicians.  Fortunately I was able to argue my points with the actors afterwards without being dishonest or unkind, and it widened into a broader discussion of the challenges and rewards of musical theatre.  Ten years ago I would have said, Oh it was great, it was great.  Now I have the brains to respect people enough to be honest and the social intelligence to be honest without being a cad.

It was in Granville Island.  I had half an hour to Christmas shop.  I got an Alexosaurus (stuffed T Rex) and a kazoo.  Strangely, that is what I wanted.  I have rarely had a briefer and more pleasant Christmas shop.  The weather was crisply glorious and I likely won’t get to Granville Island again until Tammy comes.

Jeff and I walked to IHOP and back for breakfast.  It was very pleasant.

I think Riddle Number II is a cloud.  What do you think?

Work on the trilogy continues. Kima is pregnant – with more than 100 zygotes  by three fathers of two different morphs. This presents any number of social, emotional, physiological and ‘race’ issues.

I had a pleasant recent conversation with Dave JD.  He has joined the ranks of the unemployed.  I tried to get Facetime to reduce the expense of talking to him and repeated and lengthy attempts to purchase it were fruitless.  I really loathe anything to do with Apple customer service.  When I want an Android app or book I press a button, and free or not, it appears on my phone in about five minutes.  (I’m still on the first chapter of the Piketty book -if anyone wants to mock me… go ahead).

I can’t really deal with heeled shoes any more so I took two pairs of Fluevogs into church yesterday (the bus DIDN’T COME at 10:03, or even five minutes earlier according to the guy I ran into so I was 25 minutes late for church, screw you translink).  Anyway the teenaged co-congregant who had admired my steampunky shoes got about 300 dollars worth of footgear in a little bag, and if I did nothing else yesterday I made her very happy.  Her socks MATCHED the second pair of shoes, in a most gratifying way.

How do you detect an extrasolar planet? With objects found in hardware stores and Nikon lenses and software and a little something something to remove blur.

Yesterday morning I awoke to a dream in which Hitler’s mustache was crawling up my door frame.  I woke up for real and spent a disoriented couple of seconds looking for it.  Very odd, and not a little disturbing.

Breakfast of writing champions! Peanut butter cookies warm from the oven and fair trade coffee with real cream.  Ha!

We think Autumn may be knocked up.  It’s always something.

wooooo hooooo!

I just wrote 2461 words on Kima…. and I had fun and whacked out all the unnecessary verbiage as I went.

I have now set up an entire subplot for the next book in the trilogy, one that has implications for George and Kima’s friendship, ethics regarding experimentation on sentient creatures, ELF broadcast technology (Kima figures out how to miniaturize it to the point of packing it into a Sixer body which would be required anyway because an ELF transmitter normally has to be massive) and will be the catalyst for the world coming together in a way that has not been seen since the moon landing, and almost triggers world war III.  In order for me to carry off this dance of technobabble, I will now have to learn more than I want to about ocean currents, maps of magnetic force around and through the Earth, and what a Sixer would have to do to get an entire sheet of bioluminescent plankton to make a pattern visible from space… as a prank.

 

did i say i was having fun??!!

Depressing thoughts

Re the current clusterhump of police/public relations in the US:

Nothing’s going to improve until Obama decertifies the largest cop unions. Without the union backing, civil suits against cops will stack to the ceiling, and cops will rein in their behaviour because they don’t want to be fired (having lost that golden handcuff as they would now be at-will employees) and they really don’t want to be sued. I say let the market take care of this one, and it would be a nice, nice callback to the f*ckery Reagan got up to with the air traffic controllers. And yes, I am well aware that supporting union rights and saying this is hypocritical, but let’s not kid ourselves what police unions have turned into in the last 50 years; bastions of racism, corruption, thuggery, theft, forfeiture, policing by numbers and a high kicking chorus line of lawyers as a fence around their fiefdom of the War on Drugs.

My friend Mario asked me what news outlets I could trust.  I answered, as I frequently do, with obliquity.

 

I am at a loss, cher Mario, to answer the question.  The difficulty is in apprehending and correcting my biases as I greet ‘new’ news.

I once had a t-shirt made.  “Everybody has cognitive biases. Mine are smaller, cuter and rarer than yours.”
So I push myself to get news – and opinion – from other sources. I read Men’s Rights Activist sites and Smash the Patriarchy sites; I browse through hate sites and mainstream media and left wing sites and libertarian sites and atheist sites and devoutly Christian sites.  I ask myself in any situation involving large sums of money who is profiting and why? I tell myself not to disbelieve my culture’s persons of colour or poor people just because I’ve been trained to.
I have learned to detect when the argument has failed and now people are merely flailing around, angry and uninterested in an exchange of views, however frank, but an exchange of abuse which profits nothing and no one.
I have learned to distrust anyone who doesn’t invite all the interested parties in a matter to sit down and hash it out.  I have learned that our justice system is so irredeemably biased that it seems more likely to be a trigger for mass protest in the near future, rather than an impartial settler of culture wide issues.
I have learned that people lie for profit, but also from ignorance, malice, the desire to protect love ones, and despair.
I have learned that the pressure to perform in the highest levels of academe, journalism and the business world have led to constant low level plagiarism.  You can’t trust wikipedia, and I have screen shots to prove it.
I have learned that the patriarchy’s greatest success, it’s crowning achievement, it’s piece de resistance, has been in directing the anger of two generations of men not at the leaders who have betrayed them in a thousand ways, from offshoring jobs to smashing the access of veterans to healthcare, but at the women they have been trained to despise, and whom they believe have only one goal: to unfasten them from every remaining teat of privilege.
The hatred of modern men toward women is often so raw, so glistening, so constant, that it is always a matter of wonder that it is so misdirected, and all at the whim of a handful of wealthy men.
Men’s desire for a hierarchy they can feel comfortable in has rarely been used against them with such diabolical skill, and makes the task of developing a cultural map that puts men squarely in the centre of civilization an exigent need.  What we have now is not a civilization.  It is a noisy crowd of uninformed factions, frightened and broke and anxious, ready to turn on each other at a hint from the media or in fear of losing their paltry wages.

2500 word day

I’m supposed to be editing, but I ended up adding and deleting and adding and deleting…. and the adding was 2500 words more than the deleting.  So I’m going to have some hot chocolate and run a couple of loads of laundry and call it a day.

Oh, and it’s official. I am no longer looking for work.  I wrote a long, sick, sad post about it, but I am just going to suck it up and say NO to gainful underemployment.  Or as John frequently remarked, “I’m far too well to come to work today.”

Maybe Jeff wants to watch some more Agents of Shield.