Author: Allegra

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

Moosekiss and weather

I had yet another wretched night of insomnia on Saturday night and was so messed up it rather upset my plans for the day.  I suspect that even if I’d been compos enough to go to work I would have thought twice given what the weather did yesterday, which was everything including blow really hard.  Instead I cooked a couple of meals and stayed in bed and slept for a good chunk of the day.

I’m feeling a lot better today.  Better enough to post this moose picture forwarded from Leo, provenance unknown. There’s another moose in there for good measure.

busy morning

Off to the clinic for an early appointment, (Jeff gave me a lift) and then I went completely berserk.  Wandered into a cooking supply place, got a bunch of kitchen gadgets I actually needed, and a bunch I don’t but had to have.  Bought a new handbag (basically a black shopping bag with zippers, just barely big enough to hold my laptop).  Bought two stems of white freesia.  Walked from Cambie and Broadway to Kingsway and Broadway.  On the way poked my head into the Luddite’s place of work and got off the perfect line… the Luddite’s boss said, “For me?” when he saw the flowers and I just grinned and said, “No, for him!”  which amused the Luddite no end. He’s much the same as always, except more so.  Of course he wouldn’t take the flowers from me so I got to be a smart ass to his boss AND keep the flowers.  Then I wandered into a mattress store and after telling the guy to wake me in an hour after finding the perfect mattress, purchased two single mattresses with covers, to be delivered next Saturday. That’s so Keith has a proper bed when he sleeps over.  Also, as much as I like the Fjord Queen bed it’s too damned big for my little bedroom, so I’m going to go back to sleeping on the floor.  I have a week to reorganize things so when the mattresses show up I have places to put them.  With that done I walked to the next bus stop and went home, many hundreds of dollars poorer.   But I can julienne things, and I have proper garlic technology, and I found out where to buy a cast iron grill for the oven, and I got two cute little egg poachers and promptly used them to make our lunch (Jeff declared himself contented), and I can now properly clean tea and coffeepots, and I got to listen to the chef in the back (there are cooking classes at the back of the store) shriek and giggle in a most entertaining way. I also got to listen to an openly gay man tell the gal at the counter that the store was worse than crack, and I was in no position to debate the point….

Now:

I assault the bathroom and remove scum and squick;

I do some on line banking to backstop my purchases;

I run some laundry;

I do some mending;

I fix my little green hat so it sits on my head properly;

I review the list of things to do that I made while waiting for the very sweet woman who saw me at a clinic (never get two perimenopausal women in the same room discussing the joys thereof, it’s wonderful for us but murder on the appointment schedule).

It has to be spring.  I got my mo back.

From Bloomberg today

more China stuff…  Good luck with that!

China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is asking “the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets,” Wen said today in Beijing at a press briefing after the annual meeting of the legislature.

“China should be concerned, in that they hold roughly a third of their almost $2 trillion in FX reserves in U.S. Treasuries,” said Michael Pond, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Barclays Capital Inc. one of 16 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “As a Chinese official put it a couple weeks ago, and I’ll paraphrase, he said, where else will we go?”

China held $696 billion of U.S. government securities at the end of last year, 46 percent more than 12 months earlier.

Money-market rates show short-term borrowing costs are still increasing as banks hoard cash after almost $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.

Fresh water

We watched the Planet Earth episode on Fresh Water.  I can’t recommend this series highly enough, especially in HD.

I had a couple of good days last week, but I’m all wobbly again.  Spring – work – the weather change.

Egg fried rice for dinner.

My new friend is off in Winnipeg visiting rellies.  We will get together upon his return.

I looked up the words liturgy and worship yesterday to see if they could be used in an atheist context, and guess what, they can!  An atheist liturgy is not only possible, it might even be desirable.

House buying

I have been watching the news, and paying attention to the details of my own life, and I am arriving at the sad conclusion that buying a house in Vancouver is looking increasingly like a stupid idea.  In fact, until the Olympics are paid off – and just as I predicted when we won the fool  things … how can you call it winning when it means grabbing your ankles first to be sexually toyed with and then to give your masters a convenient way of hanging you upsidedown to shake your pockets out – it’s turning into a black hole of corruption and price increases while Gordon’s chosen siphon off the goodies.

So local taxes will skyrocket – in the middle of a depression – and anybody left standing when the second and third waves of layoffs and downsizings will get to pay – and at the same time the government will use it as an excuse to avoid increasing services or even paying for them at all, and why not, everybody who belongs to a union is a socialist anyway, right?

I am going to buy something someplace else. I just haven’t figured out exactly where yet, or when, and there’s lots else I don’t yet know.

Some progress

I have written down another song.  I decided to pick something simple, and so it only took half an hour.  This one is called Staycation, and it’s about the joys of staying home.

Watched Wit last night.  Emma Thompson is a force of nature.  Yes it IS a downer, but such is death.

nothing to say

so I’ll just blather.

Checked the Vancouver open mic scene.  There’s nothing I want to do until the 18th of March… I put it on the calendar.

Jeff’s up doing garbage, it being that time of week again.

Watched The Bank Job last night. I quite liked Jason Statham as a venal everyman forced to think fast.

I am going to try to get to work early this morning, the weather was supremely uncooperative yeesterday.  I left 20 minutes early and got there 2o minutes late.  I hope the person who made the decision to put the office at the top of that bloody hill gets a sound caning at some point.

We’re in the Phony War part of the depression.  Nobody but the homeless believes it’s happening.  You can still get sushi and big screen tvs.  China’s governors are proclaiming 8 percent growth this year.  I cannot believe, after closing 65000 factories, that anybody in China or out of it could spout such nonsense.  Global and domestic demand has plummeted.  There are millions of unemployed who left the cities to go back home so as to at least be able to mooch food off their families.  They sit around smoking and gambling and getting into trouble, and this is going to help domestic tranquillity how?

Katie has a plan to move out of her dad’s place and in with two girlfriends.  I know for a certainty this is not going to end well, and I can’t do or say a damned thing about it.  She can’t really move until she has a job, and I have tried to help her with that, including a snotty voicemail to change her equally snotty voicemail message.  If I was an employer and I heard that message I’d slam the phone down and say ‘next’!

Darwin is the cutest baby I didn’t give birth to, but I’m sure he’ll lose that crown when Tanya’s tamaiti is born.

I left Grampa’s stories in Paul’s car, and now he and Keith are reading them.  Bwa ha ha!  My evil plan is working.  That would be the plan where I do things by accident and things turn out well anyway.

I can’t think of anything else and I should shower and caffeinate and swap laundry and depart.

I know we’re all too smart to fall for this

But here’s a reminder from TELUS anyway:

 

TELUS is warning customers to be aware of these frauds, and to just hang up when scammers call.

The scams are:

  • Fraudulent email to telus.net email customers. The email falsely states TELUS is sending this email to all customers for ‘safety/maintenance from spam mails.’ It asks users to reply to the email with account information including name and password, saying they will be disconnected if they do not reply.
  • Credit card limit increase phone scam. The fraudster claim to be with your credit card company and offers to increase your credit limit. He/she asks for information to verify who you are. If the caller was actually from your credit card company they wouldn’t have to ask for basic information.
  • Vehicle warranty. There are several variants of this scheme and in most cases the caller is attempting to sell a warranty extension for your vehicle. Several of the organizations behind these schemes have been banned from soliciting in some provinces and states due to misrepresentation of their products and failure to comply with local insurance laws.
  • 809 Caribbean scam. The fraudster will try to convince the customer to call a number starting with 809 about winning a prize or a lawsuit or for information about an injured or ill family member. 809 is the country area code for the Dominican Republic, which lacks the robust phone laws Canadians are accustomed to. When victims call back, they are often put on hold for an extended period of time, racking up large phone bills.
  • The 90# scam. This phone scam affects businesses with a commercial switchboard called a PBX. These systems have a feature that allows switchboard operators to give callers an outside line by dialing 9, 0, #. Fraudsters take advantage of this feature by posing as technicians or other legitimate callers, and convincing operators to give them an outside line which they then use for an expensive overseas call. While residential phone customers cannot be directly affected by this scam they do get calls, which can often be frightening.

 

snow

After the glorious sunshine in Victoria yesterday, it was a sad shock to come home to whiteout conditions at Main and Marine.

It’s good to be home, nevertheless.

Last night I had the first dream I can remember in ages.  I dreamed I went to rent a fabulous apartment in Paris for 200 euros a month and I didn’t take it because there was a brothel across the street.  The prostitutes were sitting on the balcony displaying their wares in a most unpleasant way.