Dear Asshole programmers at FB: You could at least ASK if I want to do the year in review thing rather than keep shoving photos of my recently dead cat in my face.
I couldn’t agree more Catherine.
Dear Asshole programmers at FB: You could at least ASK if I want to do the year in review thing rather than keep shoving photos of my recently dead cat in my face.
I couldn’t agree more Catherine.
This concludes my report….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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??!!
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’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.