Author: Allegra

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

Behind the scenes

I have taken all of the songs I have written off 3 x 5 index cards and entered them into an Excel spreadsheet.  This gives me a much better idea of what the hell I’ve done and what remains to be done, and by the blessed Virgin, it’s a lot of work.  But I can sort things more easily now.

I have my T4 – actually my choice of T4’s – so my taxes may or may not get done soon.

I am thinking of taking a year off work, but it will have to be no sooner than about six months from now. Why?  To learn valuable post collapse skillz and then be able to turn around and teach them.  Also, to do a bunch of travelling and other stuff that we won’t be able to do so much in future.

The friend I was worrying about so much with respect to her divorce IS DONE!!! The decree’s been granted, hallayluya!

Jeff is still trying to get a picture of Eddie doing something very cute – nesting in his underwear.  Weird, man, cats are very weird.

I think my bank card is finally working properly. Me happy.

I am pressuring Loki to let me post his ‘Tales of Grampa’ and he has at least agreed to consider it.  He just doesn’t want to get anybody in trouble.  Including himself.  Poysenally, I think that his stories BELONG TO THE WORLD, but Loki always has had issues with that concept.  I don’t blame him, really. 

I’m going to visit Victoria soon and hope to have progeny, at least some progeny, in tow.  We shall see.

I’m thinking fish for supper, it’s been ages.

I made fun of my mother’s list of projects.  I have since talked with her about it, and it was only because IT IS SO ******** BIG that it looks like Obama’s to do list crossed with the logistics of D-Day and a royal wedding.  flargle!

One of my coworkers crept up behind me and blew on my neck last week.  I yelped, leaped about, and then poutily said  that that was the closest I’d been to sex in many long periods of time, which caused him no end of amusement.

The guy who gave me oxygen a while back says it was all stress.  Why should I have stress?

I have a big long list of all the things that are currently bugging me and I’m working my way through it.  A lot of it involves me changing a lot of behaviours, and I guess I’m all hissy because I’m still coasting on quitting smoking, and much remains to be done.

Big dog

Samantha is a mastiff cross, and small, dainty and elegant do not describe her. What she is, is big, although as we slogged through the rain and mud at Trout Lake yesterday there were bigger dogs yet at the offleash part of the park.  My companion was amazed that there could be an offleash park where there were nesting birds, and I asked, somewhat rhetorically, if he’d ever been to Trout Lake in the summer time, when it is a warm green hymn to avian fecal material. Given that human beings also swim there (I have seen it, although you wouldn’t catch me in there unless the person next to me was encouraging me with a semi automatic) I don’t imagine the city fathers care if a few birds get harassed.  The fewer nesting there the better, and none of them are exactly what I would call endangered species.

While we were there, the tree next to the parking lot was full of birds, all singing as loud as they could simultaneously.  The light was crappy, but it sure sounded like starlings and red winged blackbirds having a smackdown.  It was so loud that I just stood gaping in the rain.

Samantha got in the water and got very dirty.

When my companion came to pick me up, we attempted a greeting kiss. We both ended up kissing Samantha’s nose.  I can’t remember laughing that hard in quite a while.  After the park we went to Burnaby Palace (Jeff got the leftovers, so apart from waffles on Saturday morning I dodged cooking every meal this weekend), and had a lovely time.

Church was great yesterday morning, Marci Green did the service, which was about the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign.

Peaceful

I really like this neighbourhood.

The crows didn’t cooperate yesterday.

Prime Minister Harper has just announced that Highway 11 between Saskatoon and Prince Albert is going to be twinned.  I’ve been up that highway to go here.

Keith slept over.  He really is one of my favorite people, and I love him more all the time.  It’s just the way he says things that gets me, the way he is so solemn and yet so cheerful at the same time, like a very secular monk.

Katie says she is coming with me to Grandma’s next weekend.  Whether this will happen I have no clue, but I’m going whether she does or not. She is still doing well in school but sometimes when she mentions Daxus I get a trifle annoyed and have to look the other way, metaphorically.  I don’t have any beef with Daxus currently.  The last time I saw him, he took one look at my face, gave me a hug, and took his leave of Katie thus allowing us to do girly things (actually I was consulting Katie about a personal matter.  It’s great when your kids are old enough to consult…)

I don’t want to waken the boys, but I don’t want to have breakfast too late because I’m off to a nice restaurant for lunch today with the Dunnetteers.  I am so looking forward to it, and Keith is going too!  I get to show him off, te he.

Today, pay rent, a quick tidy of the room, clean out the fridge (gah!) and other than that nothing but frivol and frolic.

The Black Fox, and why you shouldn’t have to pay to poop in a plane

Wow.

Anyway, I hears that Ryanair wants to charge me a pound every time I go to the crapper.

Mh.. hrm.  So, speaking as somebody who pooped themselves in public as an adult – it’s a funny story, but I won’t tell it here – I have to say that if I did my drawers to make a political statement, and everybody around me sued Ryanair because all of a sudden they couldn’t eat their packets of crisps for the eyewatering stench, where would the profit be then?  Charging people a pound to poop in the correct place on an airplane is one of the most irritatingly stupid things I’ve ever heard.  The first time some guy pulls out his schlong and fills a paper cup with pee as an economizing gesture, that’s gonna fly real well too, even if I later ask him for his business card.  What the hell is wrong with these people at Ryanair?  Have they not heard that the Grim Reaper has a little sister, and her name is Unintended Consequences?  IT’S A SAFETY ISSUE.  You don’t want tampons, crap and urine in the cabin of an airplane if you can possibly help it, and there are a LOTS of good reasons why.  It’s common courtesy, and common sense, and they don’t want to go to the place where they will end up.  Really.

Relief at last

I lost my bank card about three weeks ago but only called the bank to replace it a week ago, and it turned up yesterday.  Without a bank card I couldn’t pay bills on line which was bad, or spend much money, which was good.  I think I will start leaving it at home unless I have a planned cash expenditure that day.  I run a tab at the cafeteria at work and only pay it off twice a month.

I light a candle for Zari at work; her mum died back in Iran and she couldn’t go to the funeral, and she’s been feeling really blue ever since.  Then she said something that made me really sad; she said that even with everything that is so bad about back home, she’d be retired by now if she lived in Iran.  I will be working until I am sixty-five, so I know how she feels…

After sober consideration, Jeff responded to the twit next door who told him in a note on his windshield to quit parking in his space.  There is no assigned parking on this street.  To think I cut a hole in the snowbank so the neighbour could have access to his car, during the last snowstorm!  To think he has SIX PLACES TO PARK, two in his garage, two in his paved over yard, and two in front of his house!  Anyway, Jeff’s letter was a masterpiece; too bad it won’t help do anything except vent Jeff’s spleen.

I forgot to mention that when I left Mike’s place on Monday night a skunk greeted me.  I walked out into the road and said what I always say when I get too close to a critter; “Evening, brother skunk,” as I have heard that if you project civility animals are less likely to attack you.  Skunks sure have an odd gait.

Every night at 5:45, about three to four thousand crows gather around the Keg on Willingdon.  The sky is sometimes black with them.  I am going to try to get pictures tonight.

I hope everybody has a simply splendid day, and a nice weekend.

Three years ago

I was at Potlatch in Seattle, a literary con, and I had a good time.

I bought a t shirt at Potlatch that I love and wear a lot. Tom Whitmore told me about this. Hearing that out of his own mouth was the high point ….

I just deleted the middle part of this post, about three hundred words, because there’s no point being honest.  It’s just me flailing about with words to no good end….

Back to Potlatch…That was the last time I saw Ulrika.  I talk to her online but I haven’t seen her IRL since then.

Everybody around me was crying or otherwise sad and visibly upset because Octavia Butler died abruptly and they all knew her and loved her and loved her work and they were very conscious of what a loss it was to the world.

So to honor a moment I had in my life, before everything changed and broke and turned to shit – because frankly, that’s how I feel and I’m tired of pretending I feel great, even if how lousy I feel is temporary, and to honor Octavia Butler I will link to the journal entry of another writer of color, link to something about SF, cultural appropriation, and how the culture we are raised in is a pernicious lie NO MATTER WHERE WE ARE. Minor quibble – spelling.

Kitties tell Jeff: All is forgiven; come home soon!

Yup, Jeff stayed out all night last night.  That’s the way things are in this crazy cuckoo world; you introduce your brother to your friends and the next thing you know he’s staying out all night with them (okay, Mike’s got a really comfy sofa).  I have this little thing called a job so I bailed on the festivities with Mike last night (it was awesome to see Heather) around 10 pm, got home about an hour later. Festivities included mighty tasty cilantro flavoured lasagna and at least two six packs of Lion Winter Ale, and I hung upside down like a bat in one of those found on tv devices for stretching out your back (mmm!) while everybody else played Buzz (laughing their heads off – I’m hanging upside down and smiling to myself as I listen to them), and Mike made me drag out his guitar (Jeff left the room) and I played The Evening News for some recently acquired friends of his.

Poor Jeff, he finds my singing unbelievably tedious.  So do Keith and Loki – it’s just a cross I have to bear for being so relaxed and creative, that I’m continually surrounded by men who hate what I do.  Makes me look forward to the days when it won’t be like this anymore, but that will come in the fullness of time, I suspect, along with a number of other of environmental shifts that I probably will have no control over whatever.

This morning around 3 the cats both started calling and running up and down the hallway. Normally they’d be bugging Jeff.  I just rolled over and ignored them until the alarm went off at 5:45.  Then I let them out and made coffee, and now I’ve got about ten minutes to stuff the rest of my morning activities into a nice bolus of output and get the hell out the door.  “I’ve got a little project I’ve been working on.”

As I stood sobbing over the pie crust

Yeah, I know, but I screwed up a double batch (Gimli glider error – I was converting measurements and dropped a decimal up) and I was damned if I was going to consign all that butter to the trash.  So I stood there (and no, I wasn’t sobbing, but I was some upset) and asked the pie crust dough what it needed, and it said BUTTER, so I added more, and now I can at least roll it out in big enough chunks to make apple tarts.  Which are baking.  Right now.  And you won’t get any, unless you come over in the next 30 seconds, cause sure as evolution and customized arboriculture made little Macintosh applies, Jeff’s going to pull a Zoidberg on the darned things and schloop them all up.