Author: Allegra

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

The bed, she is together

I remembered the ballad of Frank.  Frank was the plasterer at Amedeo Garden Court some 30 years ago, and he taught me a lesson without ever saying a word.

He worked so deliberately that he looked like he was surfing on molasses.  He never stopped.  He never, ever stopped, until a stopping point came.  He started ready to do the job and he kept at it, taking his mandated breaks, from 8 until 4.

So the ballad of Frank is, when you have a job of work in front of you, gather your materials, mentally prepare yourself, and don’t stop until it’s done.  Which I did.  I counted the pieces, counted the hardware, read the instructions, cast them aside except to consult them as to which kind of hardware I should use next, and took just under four hours to assemble it, stopping only to remove most of the crap out of my room for construction space, and to stay hydrated.  Please remember, I was assembling it alone and you know that awkward little bit at the beginning when you’re trying to get the fracking dowels to line up…. I let go of the footboard and it stood on its own.  So did the other end.  That really helped.

Margot came in and was an entire pain in the ass, chasing screws around, patting them through the holes, and then when I dropped a piece of hardware on the other side of the footboard I said, “Be a love and pass that over here,” which she obligingly did, and how I long to have taped that.

It is an Ikea style single/single bunk bed two shades darker than the floors.  One of the pieces of assembly hardware is so cool I fell in love with it.  And I had to assemble the drawers from 6 pieces plus much screwing, hell now, there were like twelve screws in those bloody drawers.  They ain’t comin’ apart again, by gar.

And I had to screw down the slats (I didn’t put in all the screws supplied, mostly because squirmy eight year olds will not be sleeping in it).  As I affirm to an uncaring universe, if a small child moved in with me I would definitely screw those slats down as much mischief is avoided if the bed is more solid.  And there was the ladder to assemble with count’em TWENTY dowels, plus screws, plus mounting bolts, and the extra screw for the baby rails on the top bunk on three sides, and the getting the two beds lined up on their little metal posts (that was actually the hardest and most awkward part).

So…. tired.   Must sleep now.

Oh, and I finished Imagination and Don’t Put Too Much Sugar In the Bottles.  The short ones go fast.

Sundry and various

My bed showed up!  The trucker specializes in Victoria / Vancouver so maybe he can assist us in getting stuff back from Victoria, namely, pinballs.

Now I have to assemble the sumbitch.  But tonight, I sleep OFF THE FLOOR, which is a wondrous thing.

Peggy came by and traded organic raspberries for salmon paté.

Now for a poetry break.  I wrote this in 1989:

Abundance

Cantaloupes block the doors open
there is an orange in the mirror

cherries lurk in the crisper
bananas curl up in a basket

pears loll on the dining room table
I found four peach pits in the sink
leftover raspberries and cream on the counter

chocolate fondue burbles in the bathroom

the pineapple is waist deep in apricots

I caught her eating blueberries in bed
courageous woman, all her sheets are white
& summer is a stain of every colour

Yesterday I was lazy

I took the kids to Harry Potter VI and to Red Robin afterwards for eats, and Paul met us there, and apart from working on two songs and breaking down some boxes I didn’t do a damned thing.  Today I am going to wait for my new bed to be delivered and then I am going to see Peggy as she comes to collect her share of the smoked salmon paté.  Whatever I do I’d better buckle down and actually do some WORK.

Satisfying day.

I have really and officially put Weekend’s Over to bed; now I’m trying to make Evening News sound like the way I sing it.  I was very pleased to see how much work I’d already done on that tune; now all I have to do is fix bars 56 through 70, which have both tune and timing issues, add the lyrics, and I can move that one over to the DONE pile.  I Must Admit it Troubles Me is SEVERELY pissing me off, I cannot figure out what time signature it’s in.  I am suspecting it’s in eight.  Two did not seem to work.  Neither four.  Not being able to read music, and having a severe mental block about learning, is a drip drag, mah friends.  Worked more on the atheist liturgy.

Paul came by yesterday with the Eskimo hunters (two pieces of felt art my mOm made 17 billion years ago which I got framed about 10 years ago and stayed at Planet Bachelor until I had walls for them) and also the sewing machine and sewing kit, and took away boxes for packing (he and Keith are moving in a couple of weeks to the apartment downstairs from them) and also a bunch of book donations for Value Village. Thank you Paul!

I went to my bedroom, inspected my underwear drawer for sacrificial offerings, and then went downstairs and measured Jeff’s coffee table.  Then I came back upstairs and cracked open the sewing kit, which can haz LOTS of Velcro.  I love sewing with Velcro.  I took out 5 feet of black nylon strap webbing (for a packsack project I never even started) sewed four inches of Velcro on either end, and then cut up a pair of navy tights and sewed seven pockets and made a remote caddy for Jeff.  It holds ALL the remotes for the downstairs system – all 6 of them – plus I made an extra pocket for the end so he could either put the wireless xbox controller in there or something else.  I phoned him, all excited, because once I’d done the measurements and visualized it, it took less than 20 minutes to do it, and I didn’t have to spend any money on the project because everything was already in the sewing kit.  Except why IS it that every time I borrow the sewing machine I have to wind a bobbin?  I’m not complaining, I kinda like doing that too.  Jeff laughed and told me to sew Holy Moly’s eyes back on if I was feeling so inspired.  So I did that too.

Holy Moly is a part of our childhood.  mOm made this pointy nosed mole cushiony thing with a multicoloured body and big brown and yellow eyes.  He must be 45 years old if he’s a day.  Anyway, Jeff ended up with him and he lives in the AV room, along with baby Cthulhu (from Lexi), Pirate Ducky (from Archie McPhee in Seattle), and Nautiloid (from mOm).  Various other stuffed animals mOm made are peering down from assorted vantage points in the house, including a blue baby heffalump and a knitted baby tiger.

The Ladybones and Katie’s two salon heads are arranged above the hutch in the living room.  If you don’t like severed heads… don’t look up! There’s a little shrine to John in the living room; the embroidered dragon has his earrings sitting in front of it.

The locksmith showed up and we are going to get new strikeplates for the doors, get a new door handle for the back door and of course this is not being paid for by the landlord, but while the deadbolts are okay the doors are trash from having been repeatedly kicked in (oh joy) so they need the reinforcement.  Then we’ll get the alarm system activated, but we figured there was no point activating the alarm when the doors were such a disaster.

What else happened yesterday…. Mike asked what I was doing that evening, and I said, “Feeding you!” and so I fed him and then called Keith to get over.  While I was prepping for and cleaning up after dinner Mike played guitar.  So nice – and he’s learning new tunes!  and then we re-watched Trueblood 3 and 4, neither of which Mike had seen.  Episode three is SO much fun.

I am thinking of doing something I haven’t done for years…. go to a movie by myself.  Harry Potter’s at the Dolphin at 1 pm.  If I get enough work done this morning I will go.

Cthulhu is coming

Earthquakes, giant squid. Where will it all END?

Blasted through the entire first and only season of Lucy the Daughter of the Devil. The IMDB link is not particularly useful, so I’m not posting it.  ScaryClown has been trying to get me and Jeff to watch it for, like, a year, and now I have to say it’s so funny and so disgusting… and I really like the style of animation.

I made cinnamon buns yesterday.  Keith really enjoyed the sensation of walking into the house.  He promptly ate a few.  Jeff said they were the best ever, but he ALWAYS says that, it’s a joke really.  That said, they were damned good.  I was supposed to mow the lawn but ducked out of it.  I will do it today.

The locksmith comes today, and that’s good, because the locks in this house are shite, what with the doors having been kicked in a couple of times.

Jeff wandered around the house testing all the outlets. Almost every outlet in the house was wired in backwards; some were sideways, even, and a couple were upside down.  My role was to yell whether it was on or off (the lights in the tester) while Jeff turned breakers on and off to prevent untimely electrocution (although timely electrocution, in my view, is more the province of lightning than AC provided by BC Hydro.  I mean, after all, people have been cured of a wide variety of ailments subsequent to a lightning strike.  But I digress, as usual.)

The most recent True Blood was fabulous (Alan  Ball wrote this one) and much funnier than normal.  Vampire Bill gets a couple of good lines.

I found a letter that somebody hates me wrote to me three years ago and I THREW IT OUT.  After defacing it, of course.  I have actually been throwing my writing out, too, which is good, because a lot of it is baggage, crap and nonsense.  The good stuff I do keep.

Found the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s New Year’s Day and wrote it down; found the SF story I wrote (with Michael Bishop’s markups all over it, o joy) & now I have to a) enter it because of course I don’t seem to have the original soft copy and b) get it whipped into good enough shape that I can start sending it out.

Atheist liturgy is coming along nicely.  Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote some very nice stuff about atheism and I scarfed some for a reading.  Didn’t know AE Housman was an atheist either; there’s some good stuff in there.

Sunworshipping fun

Let’s see.

Katie helped me find my bedroom floor on the weekend.  Me happy.

I have finished another song “The weekend’s over” which I wrote for ScaryClown’s birthday three years ago.  I even learned how to use the ‘repeat’ notation in Songwriter, woo hoo.

Jeff hung the clothesline, which should save some money on electricity this year.  Still loving my compost bucket.

Gizmo got sprayed by a skunk this past weekend.  Freaked the hell out of me; he was on the back deck foaming at the mouth when I realized something had gone Terribly Awry; he still smells terrible and we’ll have to wash him and his bedding repeatedly, but at least the whole house doesn’t smell as bad as it did yesterday.

Watched Terminator III, some more Civil War, and a whole bunch of How The West Was Won yesterday.

And further to my love of sunbathing…. Good news, everyone!

copy of my email to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page

Please allow me to provide some encouragement for your important work and to convey my regards to you and your staff as you continue to make available to the people of Canada facts and data about government expenditures and the Canadian economy.  The press is reporting that both the Liberals and the Conservatives think you’re a pain in the cheeks and that can only mean one thing…. You’re doing your job.

With respect and admiration,

Allegra Sloman
Burnaby BC

sitting on the back deck blogging and thinkin’ ’bout the King of Pop

Gizmo is sitting on the carpet we’ve had airing on the back deck for a week, Miss Margot is chasing fluff around the deck and being a crazy cat, first batch of waffles is on, and Katie’s coming over later to help motivate me to unpack.  Sometime between now and her arrival I must pick off another song. Time’s a-wasting!  At my age a year goes by like nothing!

On a completely different subject I have been thinking about the cultural reverber-erberations around Michael Jackson’s unfortunate death.  He was fifty and I’m fifty and don’t think I haven’t thought about what he did in his life and with it and what I’ve done with mine.  I am the tape measure for everything I perceive.  I must make a big effort to see things otherwise.

If I was taking 10 Xanax every night, my brother would stage an intervention.  It would take him a long time to work up to it, because he’s a pretty laid back guy and doesn’t stick his nose in other people’s biz without thinking about it in a considered way, but he’d pick up the phone, call the kids and Paul, and get me to a doctor.

The saddest thing about Jackson’s death is the extent to which it reveals how none of his friends thought enough of his one, single, precious life to make more than arm-wavy gestures about his drug use. One of his sisters tried, apparently, and one can only wonder at why she didn’t pick up the phone and call the cops.  He needed to be arrested for the godawful stew of illegally prescribed/obtained drugs he had in his house, and so did every person illegally prescribing and obtaining them on his behalf.

The best case scenario was a Robert Downey Jr. style self-reinvention as somebody who beat addiction and childhood trauma to head to the top of his game.  It would have involved his handlers and psychic moneychangers getting their meretricious mitts away from him and into something resembling honest employment. The worst case scenario was dying like Elvis, which, according to published reports by Lisa Presley, he fully expected to happen.  Kinda like Christ knowing he was going to get it; except in this case a willing offering on the pyre of celebrity.

And, of course, once again I think about this song I wrote, because with each passing day it gets more true.  When I wrote “Zombies stalk the headlines” I wasn’t thinking about MJ’s groundbreaking Thriller video, but if I had a buck for everytime I wrote a sentence in imagination to have it come true in reality (or what passes for my reality, as always your mileage may vary), I could stay drunk on the proceeds for a day.

The drugs Michael Jackson ingested and sought cause oblivion. They completely detach your consciousness from the rest of you.  Whether or not you seek oblivion, it will find you, and I would prefer to get more bang for my life.  If it’s true he raised three hundred million dollars for charity, that is a great thing.  The rest of the story is unbearably sordid, sad, full of missed opportunities, and just plain contemptible in spots.  And the horror, the horror!  Like the Anna Nicole Smith saga which triggered my writing Slimfast and Methadone, this sucker’s going to live on for a long time.  I suspect the lawsuits alone will not be resolved for 10 to 15 years.

Just, like, you know, don’t loan me anything.

Who loaned me Ceedo on a white Lexar thumbdrive?  Now I have to send emails out, grump grump.  I know it’s not mine and somebody is probably annoyed with me right now because I haven’t given it back.

Marylke and Bareld’s meal was of uniform excellence in setting, food, company and weather.  Stupendous.

The cats are all acting nutty, especially the Giz.

Today is shaping up to be the kind of day I envisioned when I quit

I gave up on Grieg – and got Give Me Five, Give Me Ten done in 1 hour flat.  Then Alex and Darwin (and his IMMENSE font of charm, appetite and ENERGY) came for a visit and we played in the park and it was merveilleux.  Later today I’ll wander over to Planet Bachelor and Paul and I will go to an Indonesian dinner at Bareld and Marylke’s.  (Fellow churchgoers… and it’s somebody’s 50th b day so I will have to ensure I have a proper card for the occasion.) Keith and Jeff will probably get together to replay campaigns or kill zombies or such like.

The weather is of unexcelled glory, the expression on Gizmo’s face the first time he saw Darwin was priceless, and all is as it should be, most wonderfully.

I can haz video of Darwin playing with a three and a half year old girl although darn, I missed filming him getting his face licked by a very sweet and gentle Jack Russell terrier in the park (that was so funny).  When your kids are old enough to drink and be cynical with, how fast we forget their marvellous baby playfulness and those mischievous grins.