Just in case I jinx it I can’t share it, but I will swiftly change the subject and remark that I am composing a novelty song about keeping bears happy.
2020 says it never happened. Also I have no idea what this is
Just in case I jinx it I can’t share it, but I will swiftly change the subject and remark that I am composing a novelty song about keeping bears happy.
2020 says it never happened. Also I have no idea what this is
If we now construct the word fabulous to mean that ‘We did nothing, and enjoyed it immensely’ I had a fabulous visit to the parents’. My role as a grandchild deliverywoman is now complete. Katie had a really good night of sleep, which is excellent because she hasn’t been sleeping too well. I slept 8 hours continuously which must be a recent record. I think one of the reasons I sleep so well there is because they keep the humidity set to “Human, rejoice!” as opposed to most gas heated homes, which in the winter time is “Human, all your mucous mebranes are belong to us! Suffer! Mwa ha ha!”
My blood sugar is 6. My blood pressure is 136 over 88. Not worrisome but it’s definitely time to take some weight off. These are the kinds of things one learns when one visits parents!
I bought the What Colour is Your Parachute 2012 workbook, and it’s making me turn things over in my mind. I also bought yet another writing book. I haven’t set a record, but I may yet.
Home made bean with bacon soup going to church with me today. I extracted one bowlful for Jeff, as he said “Oo!” when he saw/smelled it.
Izzy is doing very well. He’s eating every five days, and becoming quite hand tame. He really likes Katie’s glasses. He will be almost two metres long when he quits growing in a couple of years.
State Troopers of Connecticut have assigned a detail of Troopers to protect the families of the slain children and staff from unwanted attention. This is in response to the crushing attention of the media, may they all experience the pangs of conscience, and the unindicted miscreants of the Westboro Baptist Church, who have promised to picket the funeral. Given that the American public LOATHES the Westboro Baptist Church and is starting to get pissed off at the media, I think the response is fitting and an appropriate use of government resources.
Now I DEFINITELY need more coffee. This is going to be a long day. I am once again opening and closing at church and there is yet another interminable church discussion today. If I get out of the meeting without offending anyone I’ll count it a plus. HA HA KIDDING. That’s half the fun. NEED COFFEE.
Margot didn’t even respond when I came through the door last night (after a 6 hour journey, blech, thanks to the *ing weather in the Strait yesterday).
I light a row of candles for the parents, friends, coworkers and relatives of all those slain in CT yesterday. Tragic news. Here’s Ebert on the subject – almost 10 years before it happened.
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
I have written 35 songs on a science, science fiction, or filkable character theme. I really do have a pretty long list of filk tunes! Enough for three albums, or two given that I like having everything over in three minutes.
Today off to Victoria, back late Saturday. I may or may not post.
So five years ago I was too fat and unfit to flirt with (this was SAID, not IMPLIED), but today I am not. I will never understand men if I live to be 100. If the flirting turns into asking me out, I’ma about lose my mind, and of course politely say no. You sure as hell can’t unring that bell.
I enjoyed the job interview yesterday. They certainly conducted it with dispatch – I was in and out of there in 25 minutes.
I am going to get a little PC to handle PC type stuff for church. I don’t want to get a virtual machine on my Mac, given that it and its hard drive is quite old and Apple has already told me to go fuck myself if I want to replace it, okay maybe not those words but “This is so old, why don’t you get a new one” were literally what the fixit man said when I was having troubles with the DVD player.
Made refrigerator cookies yesterday. It’s almost four in the morning and I’m thinking of getting up and slapping some into the oven.
It’s part time and shift work, but you can’t always get what you want, and it’s for a company that will have work as long as we have a functioning society, so that’s good.
Lovely lunch with Keith, at the wrong location. We’d agreed on Heritage but I gapped it and ended up at Ki Sushi. To say sorry I paid. It was delightful to see him. That was from noon til one. Then I parked at Value Village, walked across the street, went to the library and put a hold on Antifragile (as per LTGW’s suggestion) and picked up three other books including Pinker’s The Blank Slate which has been on my list for EVER, then I made an appointment with a case manager at WorkBC (as I am taking my unemployment seriously now); then I walked to the TD and deposited a large check, then I went to YYoga and picked up some brochures, then I went to the beer store (I’m sorry, but I can’t teetotal when Lion Winter Ale is available) and then I went back to the car and went home. I should have picked up gas and coffee cream, but that was a lot of walking so I came home and collapsed, when I shouldn’t have. But it was a jam packed 2 1/2 hours!
No responses to any of my job applications so far, but I guess I wasn’t expecting any. Sigh.
Tonstant weaders will believe that I have a rather rose coloured view of my mother; those who actually know my mother will know that my pen is a feeble reed in limning all of her sterling personal characteristics. So to prevent this little screed from becoming a full on panegyric, I’ll take the first three words that come to my mind when I think about her, which are kind, intelligent and industrious, and attempt to fill in the gaps a little.
The grimmer aspects of childrearing aside (for my mother was not kind when she wanted me to clean my room) my mother is kind. To the extent that she knows of the feelings of others, she doesn’t tread on them. I had her example in front of me during my growing up and it’s great – also a burden, because the world is full of assholes and sometimes I’d like to go join that party, but my mother’s lingering influence prevents me from going full bore asshole for more than short periods. My dad is also kind, but he specializes in unemphatic demonstrations of practicality, punctuated by full on goofiness. My mother’s kindness consists of superb discernment in conversation and a finely tuned ability to see and experience the best in other people; hospitableness; a really amazing ability to take people as they are without immediately rushing to judgement; and most of all taking her own needs seriously while making the people around her comfortable.
That she’s intelligent can be, I suppose, demonstrated by the degrees on the wall, but we’ve all met educated fools. My mother’s intelligence is woven fine; it encompasses the practical and kinesthetic skills of what used to be called the womanly arts as well as the ability to be curious and ever learning about archaeology and cosmology and sociology; the ability to grow things and be in nature with joy; to envision and execute a multiplicity of ongoing writing and craft projects; to keep the more eyeglazing aspects of family history firmly in hand; and most important, to understand the limits of her intelligence with humour and candour.
Oh, the industriousness. I don’t envy her kindness or her intelligence. Both of those things are part of her makeup at least in my view. But people CHOOSE to be industrious, and that my mother has done. There’s been a lot of bs in the internet press about ‘having it all’; how hard it is for a woman to have a career, husband, children, house, garden and restful sleep at night. The reason I think it’s bs is because I’VE SEEN IT DONE. I know how it’s done. If you have a supportive husband and reasonably cooperative children, it’s possible. You just can’t do anything else and not have things go SPUNG. Oftentimes I think that the whiners are saying “I want all that stuff but I still want exotic vacations and drinks with the girls and 45 minutes of working out every day.” My mother did not, and does not, give a tinker’s cuss about any of that stuff. Her priorities were as plain as a three by five card. It was “Husband, kids, career, home, family, friends” in some order, but not necessarily that order. And in order to do that, she cooked a lot of meals, and burned a lot of midnight oil studying, and got woken up a lot by puking or nightmare-frightened children, and scrubbed a lot of tubs, and filled in a lot of incident reports, and sewed and knitted a lot of clothing, and pulled a lot of weeds, and took the pager (disproportionately a lot, thanks you sexist asshats) as administrator on call for the hospital, and wrote a lot of letters, and put long hours in at the office, and worked (discreetly and without fanfare) on keeping the magic in her marriage. (All of this makes it sound like my pOp didn’t do anything; believe me, he was in there working his butt off, but much of what he did was less visible to me as a child.)
So there you have it. My mOm, in brief. Happy Birthday, mOm!
To quote an Aberdonian “Aw naw, snaw!”
Yup, soggy shit be fallin’ from de skies.
Open and close at church again today (traded with someone so she could be with her family).
I am currently working up yet another shopping list (this one will be official and look purty).
In family news, the grandsnake is now called Izzy. HE IS HONGRY ALL THE TIME OM NOM NOM. Kyle said he wanted to feed him live ones, but he’s eating reconstituted frozen ones as if he was a high school linebacker let loose on an all you can eat buffet. So Katie’s year of snake care (she actually slept in Opal’s room) comes through again. He’s shedding, so he’s crabby. Katie says he’s becoming hand tame very fast…. provided YOU move slow.
Now I need to jump in the shower and get gwine.
Almost 20 stamped, addressed and ready to go. I concentrated on people at church who don’t come often and people I wanted to thank for their presence in my lives, including people I normally only interact with on facebook or elsewhere on the Internet.
also, mOm when you see this can I have mailing addys for Greg and Tracy, ontie Mary and Uncas Barry and Gary, as well as Phyllis? I can’t find my mailing list from years past…..
Despite everything – unemployment, the weather, and other things one shouldn’t publicly relate – I’m in a really good mood. I got a ‘wretched chore’ off my list yesterday and everything balanced to the penny, so I’m a happy happy girl. Also, I went to London Drugs yesterday looking for Blue Heron Coffee and couldn’t find it. Now normally I’d lose my shit and panic, but old age is causing me to do things like (literally, in this case) step back and look more carefully. THEY CHANGED THE EFFING PACKAGING. grr. So then I looked, and there they were, for 8.99 A PACKAGE. Normal price 14.99, normal discount and London Drugs 11.99. I bought 5. Glad I went! And if anybody from church is reading this, this is why I don’t buy coffee at church. Plus I hate Spitfire Longbottom with a passion, it tastes like mud a Komodo dragon got busy in.
Also I dropped off more receipts at the accountants and I may actually get my taxes up to date, and I found the perfect gift for Jeff, which I have no intention of buying – it’s coasters made of Antarctic maps. Jeff’s on a really serious “READ ALL THE BOOKS ABOUT ANTARCTICA” kick; he’s relating all the best anecdotes.
I still have to go to Surrey, but maybe I’ll combine it with another errand. A leathery or musical errand. Or maybe I’ll just grimly go straight to my errand and come back. Thinking about my mortality doesn’t please me, and thinking that my final resting place is going to be a funerary park in Surrey about blows my tiny mind. Paul was so sweet – when I told him I was getting the cremation ‘package’ I bought back in 95 transferred to the Lower Mainland he asked if he needed to pay for it (there’s room for two in that niche, haw haw), and I said, “Considering we had a joint checking account in those days, uh, no…. you already did.” And besides the separation agreement says we no longer owe each other anything, although I keep thinking I want to break into his apartment and steal the damned rug we bought on Pender Island. I LERV DAT TING.
Margot is still playing “Go Home Fly You’re Drunk” in the kitchen. I don’t know where all these sleepy, weaving, falling down flies are coming from, but even so they’re more than a match for Miss Margot.
There’s a picture going around the internet of a horse attempting to have congress with a policeman. My comment “You shouldn’t have posted that without a Trigger warning.”
12 Wonka’s snarking
11 rants at Congress (Canadians use Harper)
10 McKayla’s scowling
9 Gangnams dancing
8 jokes a-milking
7 pics Takei-ing
6 geese from Farmville
CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!!!
4 game invites
3 LOLcats
2 friend requests
…and a cartoon from xkcd!
Today, Holiday Greeting Cards and a teensy bit of Xmas shopping. Jeff’s insisting on a no fly zone for prezzies so I’ll probably cook him something festive at some point instead.
I applied for ten different jobs this morning. Now to drift down New West way and pick up and drop off various interesting, paper related or comestible items.
Also, Surrey. Really don’t want to go. But I must.