Author: Allegra

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

Board meeting and other stuff

So I’ll be having lunch or dinner with Carol and Sue sometime after mid February regarding the transition to becoming Secretary for the church.  I think Carol is very relieved to be going off the board – Karen is too.  Everybody is so busy and tired but the meetings are very cheerful and energizing and sometimes quite passionate without ever becoming disrespectful or heated.  It’s at  the Board Meetings I really feel like I’m living my U*U values…. the whole “Step up instead of back” and “Respect for oneself, respect for others” stuff that’s very hard to learn unless you have ongoing, important and committed EXAMPLES in front of you.

 

The weather continues glorious.  As does my mood.  Even if – one of my star performers at work is probably going to find another position within the company which will be insane making for me especially if, as I see likely, they will tell me that there won’t be a replacement.

The cats have decided to only come near me if I’m feeding them or on the can.  Eddie always looks at me like “Why can’t you use a cat box like a normal person”.

I want to slap everybody in Finance, with about three exceptions, until they cry.  Shows you that my U*U principles can’t stand the strain of crossing the threshold at Doc Oc’s Lab here.  But we must bring our light out into the world, until somebody steals the damned thing.  And when my light gets stolen, I get PISSED.

As I mentioned to Chipper this am…

I have a delightful 1st world problem – I have sung 15 tunes (and there are more floating around I haven’t recorded) into my phone just so I don’t lose the melody.  Now I have to transcribe them.  This pushes my number of tunes way past 200, but only about 100 are written down or recorded.  Most of the songs I’m doing for Conflikt have never been recorded.  In fact, I’m thinking none of them have.  Since I now have an album’s worth of filk material. …… Nope, no more projects this year, I’m full up.

 

Any day I don’t have to scrape or defog the car is a good one / Resolution list

Katie’s coworkers reacted to her new boots (she WORE THEM AT WORK for the last half of the shift, they is that comfy) with a gratifying display of jealousy, appreciation and WTF that her mOm would spend that much money on her.

Wednesday, probably, I go have dins with my old beau from the bike shop.  Looking forward to catching up with him.  It didn’t work out between us (he has a sweetie in Seattle, where have I heard THAT before) but I still appreciate him for his complete and blithe disregard for whatever is fashionable in favour of what he likes.

Check this out.  Laughed my ass off.  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/horoscoped/  It is a wordcloud of all the words in 22000 horoscopes, with A COMPLETELY GENERIC horoscope at the end.  So much for augury…..

Per the tarot reading which said I have so many, I have prepared my new years resolutions. Being ten in number, as recommended.

Remember to bring cans, rice and pasta for the food bank at least 3 out of 4 Food Bank Sundays.  I keep forgetting and it really feels bad.

Prep for taking on the duties of a Secretary at Beacon (I expect to be acclaimed, and still no Treasurer, bah).  Since this involves a lovely long lunch with Carol and Sue on my dime, I can’t imagine this one taking too long to tick off.

Lose 20 pounds by this time next year.  Awk, oh well.

Attend at least one Humanist meeting, even though there are two regular attendees whose smooth and seemingly impenetrable pomposity I would like to test a laser on.  Oh Allegra you are really doing them a favour aren’t you.

Attend at least one Lunch Bunch meeting.  It means I have to be on vacation or take a day off, but I have an evol plan for that.  It means connecting with some of the church elders, whom we do not have with us forever.  Their wisdom and humour is the reason I keep going back to church and yet I never socialize with them.  Wrongo me bucko, as they say.

Go to one open mic per month, except in January.  I plan to map out the ones closest to the house thanks to http://www.openmicvancouver.com/

Gather up all my homilies for publication.  Yeah, I know.  I will self-publish but it’s easy to do for cheap and I’m enjoying the notion of my mother having something to send her strict Christian relatives.

Monetize the web site.  Yes, start selling shit or advertising.  Seeing as how I will have to stop linking all over the web thanks to SOPA, I might as well start covering costs, cheap as they are.

Track the amount of time I spend watching TV (this, not the weight loss, is the real asskicker).

Get good or at least fun at making hats for cats and steampunk jewelry.  Cindy says she will tutah me.  Might even be a revenue stream, who knows.  It won’t be until I’ve recovered the $100 I’ve spent on supplies – I am keeping track.

And there you have it.  2012 will be all about connecting and creativity.  And hopefully some relief for my poor tubby knees.

committing consumerism

Drove Keith to the Main Station for work and then mounted a dawn assault (well, 10 am on a Saturday) on the Fluevog flagship store.  (Did you know John Fluevog is a Burnaby Boy?) Scored parking right outside and then bought Katie a stunning pair of black heeled boots and I got two more pairs of ‘vogs, one being a buckle up number in sage green (which was just over 100 dollars because I pointed out to the salesman that the toe caps seemed to be from two different dye lots) and t’other being flat black boots made of unbelievably soft leather.  The salesman was petting the leather and making happy noises which cracked me up.  Thanks Wesley!  Katie had trouble believing that heels could be so comfy, and I had trouble with the price tag, but I told her I’d buy her anything in the store that she liked and fit her, so I’m happy to be doing that.  I am tired of her always wearing trashy shoes and frankly so is she.

We also poked our heads into Nood and JUST LIKE IS TYPICAL OF MY FAMILY Katie made straight for the most expensive item in the store (a $1700 fiberglass 3/4 circle chair in white and royal red – think Austin Powers).  I read her the price tag and she leaped up like her ass was on fire.  I fell in love with a very beautiful dresser that was actually a good deal for $800 (beautifully made and designed with MANY different shapes and depths of drawers!) but stuck to the mission of shoeness.

The rest of the day I’m going to do laundry and let my debit card cool off. Possibly, I will make HATS for CATS.

I have come up with the name of my steampunk band, Mission Dirigible.  It’s imaginary, but awesome.

 

Woke up at 1, back to sleep at 2:30

Up again at 6:30, after a dream during which a cop with a hot dog stand style radar gun pulled me over and I said to him in annoyance “My car is supposed to go fast”. And then I woke up.

Weather is pleasant today, with many many crows.

Katie and Jeff and I had a very pleasant evening.

There’s going to be a Housefilk at Casa Libra!  I loves me those folks, the last housefilk over there was stunningly awesome.  And resulted in Jeff and I getting Al Jazeera in the house, so it’s amazing how the tentacles of filk affect all of my daily life.

The Bean is walking! Also climbing, chortling and being a very mobile Beanpie.  I am looking forward to my next chance to chase after him.

Poor Tanya, my coworker.  She’s got a pinched nerve in her back and is feeling dreadful.  All I can say is thank god it’s slow on the phone or it would be insane around here.  Hope she’s back on Monday but if not I hope she feels better soon.

Katie gave me a new top that wasn’t fitting her properly and I’m wearing it to work today.  She’s going to go look at another apartment tonight.  She has started to take my advice about dressing up to go look at apartments.  Yeah, kid, your mother ain’t a total frikkin’ moron, but whatever.

I leave you with cute video… http://icanhascheezburger.com/2012/01/05/funny-pictures-videos-cat-and-deer-snuggle/

Good news, bad news.

http://imgur.com/nYl6h  Guess who wrote that….

The single most incompetent and lazy employee who ever worked here (who was released into the wild years ago by the precursor firm, at which news I danced at my desk for it was glorious in my eyes) is in the building for an interview.  This is what lies on your LinkedIn profile will do, sweetcakes.  I need to be self-employed, this is bullshit.

I have had a very restful and yet sociable weekend.

This is a lovely combinertation in my view.

 

(Excerpt from The Warlord’s Cook)

I had this story from my mother.  She said it was from a book that was burned, but she read the book many times before she was fifteen and swears this is how it went.

Once upon a time, there was a man seeking employment speaking gibberish.  He could have gone into guild politics, and it would have been easier yet to go into religion.  He was an honest speaker of gibberish, nothing more, and he asked only that he be given an opportunity to practice his trade.

It was his job to hang around a certain rich man (actually, it was a group of rich guys who took him on as a kind of time share court jester but that only becomes relevant in a different story)- and while he was hanging around a certain rich guy, he was brought into the company of those who, for whatever reason, the rich guy wanted to mock and bewilder and otherwise mentally mess about with.

In those days – which weren’t that long ago, truth be told, although how far away it seems now for those of us too young to have been there – the rich man would have business meetings and the man who spoke gibberish would sit in a corner of the room, out of the way, and occasionally say something quietly but clearly in gibberish, and the rich man would pause, and say, “I will definitely have to consider that.”  The negotiations, of whatever form, would stagger along for a few moments and then there would be another outburst from the corner.  The rich man would pause, and say something soothing again. The fourth time this happened the rich man looked at him and paused long enough to eat a whole nut, and then said,

“Now Blib, you’re disturbing the work we’re doing. You’ve given me enough advice for tonight.”

Glaring (he had a ghost white face and big googly eyes) Blib would leave the room, looking like he was ready to kill someone.

“I hope he doesn’t mean to come back,” the rich man would say and then only the strongest minded individual would be able to continue along the path he had set for himself prior to the meeting.

Blib had similar sorts of jobs with other rich men, and he would sometimes pretend to be a soup-spilling waiter who also spoke gibberish, which caused no end of hijinks.

Abruptly one day the rich men all decided they wanted to spend the same amount of money for different things.  Blib had no work. One by one each of them turned to paying someone else to amuse them.  One preferred sex with men, one sex with women, one took up exotic drugs, one consumed more alcohol, and the last became depraved in the company of sheep. The moral of this story is very simple.

Depending on rich people is like building on sand.

 

If I think the warlord is being an ass I tell him one of my mother’s Blib stories.  She had a lot of them and they all ended the same way, hell for Blib.  He always managed to get another job though; Blib had a facility for survival that I always admired.