Author: Allegra

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

We are now referring to them as the Olympox.

That’s a royal we, not a literal we.

I don’t share my opinions with others, in the sense that my opinions are commonly held.  In the other sense, why, look, I’m coming up on 6 years of blogging on a daily basis.  It’s been peace of mind inducing, because I can actually see progress, even at this late date.  Yes, it has quite a bit, now I think on it.  It’s been useful, with recipes and background deets for KittyKate’s ongoing relationship woes, and dammit, the source of MUCH amusement in retrospect and in PROSPECT, because so far I’ve lived to blog the tale, and yes, the worst of the bad bits aren’t here, but that’s cause my mother doesn’t want to read them.

You know, I don’t go back into the non wordpress archives unless I’m looking for a quote or a specific event.  I was looking for a dream description last week (took me a blazing age to find the damned thing, too, the archives are a bear to search) but I can’t remember the time I looked before last.  Might have been… oh yeah, I remember, I wanted to know the date we first watched Heroes of the East (Shaolin vs. Ninja).

I do look at the more recent archives more.  Easier to search.  It’s always about usability.

Just got an email asking me to apply for a job.

Damnedest thing – I applied for one job and this software company warmly encouraged me to apply for another.  I also could have had an ongoing permanent part time job, but I levelled with the temp agency gal and said, er, um.  No, because I’ll just quit.

Today I:

Made quinoa tabbouleh.  I was expecting to like it.  I didn’t expect to eat all of it.  I did.  I sat down and ate the whole salad in three installments.

Ingredients

  • One cup quinoa (prepare with salted water or chicken bouillon)
  • One bunch parsley chopped fine
  • Two shallots chopped fine
  • Lemon juice or white vinegar (two tablespoons)
  • Garlic to taste

Add the parsley to the cooked quinoa, toss with rest of ingredients and devour warm or cold.

Cheap and nourishing – quinoa is a complete protein and 12-16 % protein by volume.  Even better, it is covered with saponin so birds don’t eat it.  Better still, I just ordered some – I am going to grow it as part of my “The shit is going to hit the fan re food production within the next couple of years” plan.  So the recipe will still work after the collapse of civilization, if I learn how to make vinegar too.

Did some ironing and clothing repair which restored one of my best dresses to usefulness, always a good thing during a job hunt.  Ironing takes too bloody long, it really does.

Followed up on the job hunt with a number of phone calls and emails.

Put away all of my clothes

Cleaned the bathroom

Fed Gizmo a special treat of tuna, with broth. (He’s lost 1/3rd of his body weight since the kitten arrived, so we’re probably going to have to rearrange his eating area so he’s not harassed as he eats.)  We’ll be doing everything we can to fatten him up.

Updated the master shopping list because I don’t buy Marmite any more, among other reasons.

Ordered seeds for the spring, including Marquis, a kind of wheat that has been grown in Canada for 100 years, and is probably among the cultivars my ancestors grew.

Cleaned the washer and the dryer.

Played with Margot for half an hour. At one point Eddie joined her, which was very amusing; they were chasing a bell on a string which I dragged under a rug and which Eddie found irresistable.

Waiting is….

I’m waiting for a call back regarding a job, and that’s always good for an adrenaline spike.   Now I am going to put down the laptop, finish my coffee, and grind through an AWFUL lot of boring housework.

I made a double batch of bagels yesterday.  Between the four of us (Paul and Keith were here yesterday, Paul just for supper and Keith for an evening of gaming, Brutal Legend mostly) we demolished them and I had the second last one this morning.  This time I put the sesame seeds in and under the bagels, and properly proofed the dough, and left them in to bake for a long time.  They looked so amazing I asked Jeff to take a picture.  (My camera is screwy right now and I can’t afford another one).  And the house smelled heavenly.

Watched Beautiful Girls yesterday. Natalie Portman as a precocious young teen is brilliant.  One of my fave scenes in the movie turns out to have been unrehearsed, which is cool.  I remember being 13 and having crushes on older men, and her performance rang crystal-true.  I have much more to say on the subject, but backspaced over all of it.  I like watching the ill tempered and stupid and crazy and boundaryless words get sucked up into the neverwas.

Miss Margot jumped for a table with a table cloth yesterday and if I hadn’t been in the room she would have pulled the whole damned thing down on herself, possibly being injured, although with all that fur it’s hard to tell.

Jeff is planning on having a friend come and stay during the Olympics, now that he knows that he’s ‘on vacation’ for the Olympics.  It’s a good thing; if I’m still off work we may get to some projects, who knows.

Katie got more sleep last night, and so did Granny.  I am so relieved she’s able to step up like this (not just because I originally volunteered and then it turned out to make more sense for Katie to do it).

Stephen Harper’s government has dropped 15 points in the polls in 15 days.  Sort of reminds me of an uncontrolled descent from the Andes, eckshully.

I have to rehearse for Conflikt III.  I already talked to Peggy; we’re going down a day earlier than usual to avoid the worst of the border insanity, which adds to the cost but we also get more filking in.

No, the Americans are NOT blocking aid coming into Haiti. If it wasn’t for their logistical abilities, there’d be zip all coming into Haiti except through the DR.

The power of the checklist, and other news items

Finance, airplanes and checklists.

Katie is still in Victoria looking after Granny.  Having somebody there is making life a lot easier for my folks, who are mad with worry about her, and for Garry and Dianne and Greg and Tracy, all of whom have come to visit her.

I talked on the phone with Katie for about half an hour yesterday.  Apart from her reading Twilight, (Keith’s anguished cry, “I tried to set her on the right path!”), and not getting enough sleep, she’s doing well.  I am so proud of her helping out like this.  Kat and Kashka miss her.

Watched Touching the Void yesterday.  UNBELIEVABLE.  A must see.  I cannot recommend it highly enough; suitable for all ages except at one point there’s some quite lurid cursing, and since there’s a lot of atheism in it it’s not recommended for deists.  The lurid cursing seems entirely appropriate to me.  You’ve broken your leg, hung in midair for 90 minutes, had your climbing partner cut the rope and you’ve just fallen an additional 100 feet into a crevasse.  I’d be painting the air a pretty bright blue meself at that point.  Except right about then I’d give up, and Joe didn’t.

My letter to the folks that are looking after my retirement money

Dear K and G,

The $xxxx.xx was not transferred into my account on Friday.  I am curious.  Did you folks, in the process of transferring my accounts out of one bucket into another, forget that I had a direct deposit set up?

What are the odds your company will recompense me for the overdraft charges I’ve incurred as a result of the mishandling of my money?  Or am I going to get a polite version of ‘suck it up, buttercup’?  It seems I have much to look forward to.  I’ve been getting the deposits since July of last year, and two out of the seven deposits have been late so far…. Alas, my creditors aren’t as sloppy about dates as I am.  It’s sad, isn’t it, how consistent and heartless my creditors are in the face of my incompetence.  Yes, I take one hundred percent responsibility for the money not being in my account on Friday, because, after all, I chose you as my service provider and now I must live with the results.  See how helpful I’m being?  I told myself to suck it up.

I know that what I have parked with (your company) isn’t much money the way you folks calculate things, but it’s all I have, and you don’t need to keep custody of it, if it’s too much like work.  Hope to hear from you on Monday to get this sorted out.  I’ll be in a great mood, since I will have spent the whole weekend worrying about what’s happened to my retirement money.

Allegra

Needless to say, I await their response with interest.

I just did something I’ve never done before.  I had people doing Christian witness on my door step; I smiled graciously at them, said, “Sorry, I’m an atheist,” and closed the door.  Seeing as how I was in the middle of writing the above noted letter, it wasn’t hard at all to be in a truth telling mood.

Katie has safely arrived in Sammitch, I mean Saanich.

Girl howdoo, but there are a lot of goofy loan names from First Nations languages.  They started out as whatever they were, poetic or prosaic or the sound of the sea slapping fish-weirs, but the transition to English was painful and lingering.

Anyway, I conferred briefly with my mother and raised a hosannah that a) Katie’s helping look after her great granny b) she’s going to get paid to do it and c) she’s going to be a busy lassie and in no good position to repine on any other matters and d) sober second consideration yielded the nugget that what I had slotted in here was ill-tempered and prurient, always a lovely, somehow quite regressive, almost, you know, Republican combination, so I’m passing on this next line.  TLDR = Me happy.

I made stir fried noodles with thinly sliced very well aged steak, quartered mushroms, two onions, bean sprouts, the leftover sausage patties from brekky, celery, fresh green beans, soy sauce, peanut oil and the merest hint of Madras style curry powder.  Jeff devoured it/them with what appeared to be intense happiness, and his happiness was improved upon learning that there were turnovers in the house.  Store bought, it’s true. We watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  I really liked it, but honestly, Joe (Jude Law) should have punched Polly (Gwyneth Paltrow) MUCH earlier in the proceedings.  Gal’s a safety hazard, and no Einstein neither…

Paul and I conferred briefly today about vegetables.  He has a darling, nicely cultivated plot in the back yard at his rental which he apparently will be allowed to plant this year.  We shall see.  I am thinking pole beans and raspberry canes here.  Rather than plant a lot of stuff, a lot of one or two stuffs instead.

Heavy sigh, happy sigh

So the heavy sigh is for missing posting yesterday, but I got called into work.  The great thing about temping is that you get to see what other places to work really look like.

This place had:

  • decent coffee
  • an infestation of mechanical engineers about six deep
  • it’s own ERP
  • a decent fast restaurant in the basement
  • one bus ride from here
  • less than twenty minutes from here
  • walking distance from here in a pinch or bad weather
  • interesting, worthwhile work
  • and the job is currently available

The heavy sigh is because I won’t get it, but gosh it was pleasant working there and I would have had loads of fun teasing elderly engineers.  I would have also got to watch the Skytrain go by all day long, which doesn’t hurt my feelings.

BEST LINE OF THE DAY.  One of the engineers, responding to something a contractor was saying in a conference call, and sounding, how shall I put it, mildly exasperated, said, “You are confusing expediency with practicality“, which caused me to SWOON.

Then I came home after a satisfying day, smiling in the rain and clutching my signed sheet, which I still haven’t faxed, and found my brother had just got home.  He said, “I got ya a present, I hope you like it.”

Well, it was from that batch of slides that Loki processed from 35 millimeter to digital, the slides from when we were, like, 9 months old and 2 and a half, respectively, and Jeff’d had it blown up to half poster size (with Blossom Su of course, the framing magician of pictures, art and media, she wot did the Inuit hunters).  Of all of the pictures in that batch, it was the one I wanted.  Both of us look incredibly goofy, and nothing much has changed.  I could hardly be more pleased.

A thoroughly satisfactory day.

Today, dentition maintenance at noon.  Dafter Katie (that’s daughter written US Revolutionary War style) is going to Victoria to be a prop and stay to her grandmother (and, if I may be so bold as to say it, to get the hell out of Dodge the week before her -hopefully- last legal encounter with her ex boyfriend.)

Also today I have to phone my old employer and work some contacts.  I am so ready to go back to work it’s ridiculous.  And to think, a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had forgotten how.  I am anticipating work – but things are, apparently, not very rosy at the old place and I have had two different engineers tell me not to come back, although I suspect both of them have ulterior motives.  Maybe it IS time for me to move on, can’t step in the same stream twice, harrumph harrumph.

News out of Haiti is very grim

The wikipedia article is claiming that there may be more than 100000 dead.  Three Canadian police are unaccounted for; the Catholic archbishop was killed when his office collapsed.  Communication is impossible.  I light a candle for the survivors; I think some of them may soon have cause to envy the dead.  Red Cross donations link is here.

Update:  the news is worse and worse, but a couple of the missing police officers turned up.

Still feeling cheerful despite everything

My thinky thoughts include sadness at the dissolution of my granny, who, candidly, ain’t getting better, and why should she, being 98, and what I’m going to plant when I have a garden next year, and how I need to get going on my projects because I won’t have much time soon because I suspect I’ll be working full time, and how well the bagels went over yesterday (I took homemade bagels, plus butter and cream cheese, in to my assignment), and how I’m a bad puppy for leaving the passenger side door unlocked the last time I borrowed Jeff’s vehicle, and how not taking glucosamine for three days makes my back hurt scandalously, and how Jeff is working on getting a somewhat more modern furnace filter installed (you should see the old one – it is disgusting), and how I wouldn’t mind learning how to do different things to my hair as opposed what I do now which is wash, comb, leave it be, and how hilarious it was that Robert Wagner and Michael Weatherly got to play opposite each other on NCIS when Michael Weatherly looks so much like Robert Wagner he played him in The Mystery of Natalie Wood. By all accounts a ludicrously bad miniseries.  This all represents a tiny fraction of what I am currently processing.

Bedside reading – Worship that Works, The Artist’s Way at Work, and a Latin English dictionary.  I should probably find something fictional. It’s just, as I get older, I realize that the odds of me reading any fiction that will be as good as Dunnett or O’Brian is freaking small, so I’m a lot happier with non-fiction.

And now for something incredibly cheerful, and sexist (all the way ’round).  The person who forwarded it to me (the Luddite) called it “East Germany’s answer to West Side Story” but I suspect it’s actually West German.  I don’t know how they got all the women to dance like penguins, and all the men to scowl in such an ineffectual way, but full points for goofiness, folks!

All done!

My temp assignment, being, uh, temporary…. is over.  Free lunch, pleasant work, really great supervisor (she faxed my pay sheet in for me), really smart fellow temps.  A magnificent reboot of paid employment.

I will be cooking hockey pucks for dinner (note, this means filet mignon) and the rest of the meal will be leftovers.

Honestly, I’m so happy right now I can’t stop smiling (and singing Shuffle off to Buffalo, which is weird).