Author: Allegra

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

Cat plus pig = cute picture

I warned you. Scanged from Reddit.

I checked my job card again and I don’t have to be at work today until one.  Full report upon my return.

Paul called me up yesterday and we went for a walk on the Quay and then we sang and played for a while – like a couple of hours, so it was a singing kind of day yesterday.  Also, balm to my wounded ego, he wanted to play along to a bunch of my tunes (he did the back up guitar for the recorded version of “Evening News” which I have always found quite tasty).

John’s six string Guild is a Man’s Freaking Guitar; the tips of my left hand fingers feel like I tried to stop a grinding wheel with them. And of course playing it without crying is hard to do sometimes; I’ll be messing with it and there will be a vertiginous sense of loss, and then it’s “Just keep playing, just keep playing.”

On the plus side I know how to play the rhythm mandolin for Two and Twenty Blues now, and the only solace as my fingers started to burn was that Paul was having a bear of a time with the guitar portion.  We played just the guitar and mando parts through about four times; Paul said it was all he could do to play the guitar part let alone sing on top of it. The mando and the guitar sound sweet together – the final result will be worth it.  We STILL don’t have a set list, but I suppose I shouldn’t whine, it’s all about the having fun, right?  Except it doesn’t sound bad, and I enjoy performing, during the brief spells when I’m not wanting to cocoon against the rain and the O Rim Pics.

After weeks of being impossible to keep in tune, the mandolin is finally behaving.  Turns out the problem is the hanger!  When I hang the mandolin up on the wall it promptly goes out of tune and stays that way.  However, when I put the mandolin in the case and hang THAT on the hanger, it behaves.  The guitar doesn’t behave like that at all.  I need new mando picks, all my old ones have wandered away, the little beggars.

After 8 months, Margot has finally figured out that when I pick her up I may just brush her, so she’s learned to scamper away at my approach.  If this keeps up I’m going to have to take her to a groomer and get her taken down to about an inch.

She really enjoys getting right behind Eddie when he’s eating and enthusiastically licking his butthole.  Eddie makes a series of loud and unhappy noises – mixed with eating sounds – but stands his ground.  The visual is really quite striking.  She never does that to Gizmo.  I guess there’s something really irresistable about Eddie’s butt, and if I ever said I wanted to come back as a cat, I take it all back now.  Really.

Birthday party

Last night I attended a co-birthday party with Kat and Kashka and Katie and their friends, which included the following events and observations.

  1. Kick ass margarita courtesy of Kat.
  2. Hugs from Cassie, which were improved by her Dita-von-Teese-worthy hat and veil.
  3. Communing with Speck, who LOVES my hat.
  4. “O my gosh, there’s a snake on your hat”.
  5. Feeling better after letting a snake crawl around my hat, collar and glasses for a while.  I have no idea why this would be, but it is so.  It might be the beautiful, incremental muscle motion; it might be knowing that somebody really enjoys my body heat. Speck is a lovely, lovely snake, pretty and sociable.
  6. Getting a chance to hang with my current favourite teenaged boy (in terms of raw appearance).  I gots nothing to say to him, but he’s so pretty and good natured that it hardly matters.
  7. And what music were they listening to?  The very same stuff I was listening to in Toronto on CFNY during the eighties.  At least half a dozen times I said, “The first time I heard this song I was your age.”  All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
  8. I told them about the fan made Brad Sucks “Making Me Nervous” video and we watched it.
  9. The girls got Pocky and lamb kebobs for their birthday.

Today, The Dreaded Tapioca Song goes to church.

The atheist’s dilemma

There are essentially two broad lifestreams, ways or paths of being an atheist.  One is to define oneself in opposition to theists and purveyors of superstition.  The other is to define yourself in terms of reason and leave God out altogether.

Up until this point I’ve felt the need to define myself in opposition to God-wallopers, but more and more atheists are striking up a new tune.  There is no reason for superstitious people to expect to call us down to their level for the purpose of the argument they wish to win; it’s the job of the modern atheist to get free of the mire and muck of hatred and ignorance, however fancily garbed – and stay that way.

I believe in the power of the human mind, and sadly rue its limitations. I would rather live with those limitations than any imposed by any supernatural being, however benign.

I believe that an ounce of my experience is worth a pound of someone else’s prescription; but when I don’t have the experience, I will gladly fill the prescription.

I believe that from atoms I was constructed, in the shelter of my mother’s womb, and to atoms I will return, and that these atoms will never appear again in this orderly dance, no, never, even if the universe is eternal.

I believe that apes are my cousins and that we share a common ancestor not just with apes, but with every mammal; I believe that every cell in my body is a timeline of life on Earth, from the viruses my ancestors took into their bodies and bequeathed to me, to the DDT that’s lodged in my body fat.

I believe with a passion and anger that occasionally startles me, that every child born should be a longed for, welcomed member of my planetary family.

I believe that every person on earth has meaning, value and inherent dignity, even the ones who hate me and want to kill me.  I believe that if I cannot look at a good and productive person and an violent malefactor without seeing myself mirrored there, I am likely lying to myself and losing a lesson.

I believe that the power of intelligent consensus will replace the clunky and meanspirited political engines running amok in the world today, and to the extent I can, I run my life by consensus.

I believe that corporations should not be legal persons.  Until a corporation could be jailed, it cannot be a person.

Family, love, learning, work and service to others are the five pillars of my life, and each day is an opportunity to give myself to these things.

I believe I am responsible for my own health, mental and otherwise, and that part of that responsibility is looking out for others so that they will see some benefit in looking out for me.

I believe in drinking beer from the bottle to avoid dirtying dishes unnecessarily; that games and sports are to be played first and watched only a distant second; that self-sufficiency and generosity co-exist in a balanced life, and that although no good deed goes unpunished, it’s the badly thought through good deeds that tend to cause the most trouble.

I believe it’s possible to think about things too much.  As much as I like words, I cannot express all I think I know, and all I know I feel.  I believe I must spend a part of every day deconstructing myself, my biases, my weaknesses and my strengths; part of every day laughing; part of every day working; but I am happiest when I don’t seem to be thinking at all.

I believe that science, inquiry, observation and intuition all have their place in coming up with solutions to human problems.  I believe that I will never fully understand how my mind, my senses and my body work, or don’t work, together, and that’s okay.

I believe in the power of individuals and families and whole civilizations to change, both for the better and for the worse, and that change for the better takes love and work, and change for the worse takes hate and destructiveness. We may never tire of war; the uniforms are too cool.

I believe in the healing power of nature; the grandeur of space; our cosmic good fortune in dwelling on our green blue world.

I believe that the moon belongs to everybody, and the earth does too.  But I don’t believe that anybody else will necessarily agree with me, and I believe it would be a terrible world if everybody agreed with me and was just like me.  I believe in variety, I believe in mongrels, and I believe in life.

nautilus3 is going to upload herself into an AI and keep working

….because her list of shizz to do before she dies is TOO LONG

Here’s the list as edited by me. I’m leaving the family names off.

Cousin’s letter (which I have stolen as an idea for an SF story).  A cousin’s letter goes around to all the cousins and they add something to it and send it to the next person on the list.  This has been a ten year project.

She does a family calendar (with Loki) and has done for a dozen years – one each for both sides of the family.

She has a family history site and blog.

She maintains a genealogical database.  Note to self… if Alex is going to catch the family history next, what the hell is going to happen when the database needs to be switched from PC to Mac?

Two other family letters.

Activities around a once-every-three-years family reunion.

Family tree, third edition due soon.

Completed projects include Aunt Mary’s diary, my paternal granny’s life story, a Dresden plate quilt worked on by five generations of women (gives me chills to think about it, which, thankfully, a quilt can fix),  a dozen life stories of family members and their life partners, my dad’s stories, my grandad’s stories, transcriptions of diaries, letters, and papers of yet more rellies, in profusion, picture her hacking her way through flabby sentences and questionable spelling with her Editrix Machete of Coherence, her dad’s stories (a two volume opus of such merit and wonder that I am baffled as to how to describe it).

And there’s more.

Coming up …MORE THAN TWENTY PROJECTS.  I went through the list but I started to feel chest pain at the notion of retyping it.  I exaggerate, barely.

All I meant to say about this is that, just in case nobody had noticed, my mother is completely awesome.  In addition to all that she quilts, knits, keeps my dad fed and happy, puts up hordes of relatives and is a meeting point for many friends and family coming through town (she recently entertained both Bonnie and Rani when Bonnie visited her sister in Victoria), is a two time cancer survivor and is intimately involved in the eldercare of her 98 year old mom-in-law, reads non-fiction, keeps up with contemporary movies and TV on DVD, gardens, bird watches, clears about thirty to sixty email messages a day, and keeps her temper while being pestered for her ‘prayers’ for ministry by relatives in furrin lands civilizin’ the heathens. She is currently in the market for atheist tracts to send to relatives.  No luck so far.  I may have to write one for her.

To recap.  Awesome, and a good person, too.  I’m not going to say that everybody who meets her loves her, but the fans outnumber the detractors by a very wide margin.

So I hope nautilus3 lives until the singularity and uploads herself, because I’d like to think that she’ll be giving her attention to her family members for another thousand years.  In my universe, she is grandmother spider, holding the family together with a skein of light and powerful threads.

The chocolate chip banana pistachio bread is all gone

ScaryClown was here last night to ingest food, beer and ZULU in that order.  We had fun.  I have seen that movie at least twenty times, and every time it blows me away.  Keith was here too.

Today I am being different versions of myself.  Off to a meeting in PoCo this afternoon.  Perhaps I will go to some kind of social media Tweetup tonight but then again, maybe not.  I’m finishing up a couple of songs, you know how it is when you’re hacking away at the ends of things and they take slightly more time than anticipated; at the same time starting things seems to go much faster.  nautilus3 is scowling.  Then she smiles.

I’m getting the playing callouses back on my fingers.

A friend just emailed me a job listing that sounds perfect for me.  I heart my friends.

Jeff cleaned the furnace filter.  Unless I can come up with a better word than disgusting, it will have to do.  The furnace filter appears to have been manufactured sometime prior to the dawn of time.

nautilus3 will like this. It’s the Gordon Mackay catalogue from early in the last century.  The colours and textures and design are wonderful.  Colin forwarded the link via facebook.

small world

I follow Salim Jiwa on twitter and regularly go to his site vancouverite.com – he’s a professional independent internet reporter, which makes him kinda cool in my view.  He doesn’t represent me personally in the information collection business, but ANYBODY who is trying to make a go of independent reporting, especially if that person makes their political biases known, is okay by me.  I know people who don’t have much use for him because of his reporting (“self-serving, incomplete and useless” were among the characterizing words :)) of the Air India bombing (for which I got call up papers as a potential juror, as did Patricia, and this is long before I met her), but you can expect anybody in the court system to pretty much loathe anybody with “Press” tucked into their hatband.  As I have now spent a good portion of my life for the last 5 years trying to come up with ‘news’ (only had one scoop, but o well) on a daily basis, I have some sympathy for how bleeping hard it is, and thus am somewhat more prepared to cut slack.

Anyway, I saw somebody mentioned on his site the other day, and as soon as I saw the name I thought, “I grew up with that kid in Ottawa, except he’s a dirty great grown man now with a really really fine ‘stache.”  So I messaged Salim and yup, he lived across from me when I lived on Dunham in Cardinal Heights. He even remembers me.  I remember him, he was one of the sweetest kids I ever knew.  It’s no surprise he grew up to be an RCMP officer; we grew up living next door to the Chief of Police.  The reason I know he remembers me is because I messaged Salim, and he contacted Dan, and then he emailed me.  Thanks Salim!

So yeah, small world.

In other news, The Reader is a harrowing movie, (either because of the subject matter or because it has some of the longest pauses ever outside of a film adaptation of Pinter) but you get to see David Kross naked (and he’s cute) and you get to see lots and lots of Kate Winslet naked.  Yeah. I remember saying, “She breastfed her kids!” (She has two).