Author: Allegra

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

Hymn to Cthulhu

Without its corruption, nothing can rot and be remade.

It is the wisdom of stars and the patience of aeons.

It is the power to return and master us at any time.

Before it science means nothing,

reason is a faithless servant,

and devouring disregard is our puniest allotment of punishment

as time slows to absorb the madness.

None dare approach it in its indifference,

let alone its wrath.

Before it gods go mad and flee;

none but we fear-raddled mites

upon its immense and glistening form

may approach the abyssal boredom of its majesty.

More candles

I light a candle for Carrie, who has left her fiancé of three years and is heading back to Ontario.

I light another candle for Unca Dave, who is coming to see me and Jeff on the weekend.

I light a candle for Mike, who hauled me off to Hastings Steam and Sauna last night and pummelled my right shoulder for a while, and so I feel physically a lot better this morning.  Emotionally (to quote Dunnett) I’m a stunned bird in the reeds.  Maybe a fresh cup of coffee will cheer me up.

I gotta tell ya, Hastings Steam and Sauna is a really nice sauna.  Designed and built by a FInn in the mists of time, each of the suites has a sauna room, a shower room and a front room with a couple of extremely utilitarian bed shelf thingees.  The music that is piped in is wonderful (last night it sounded like Exchange, Eno and Norah Jones) and has been every other time I’ve been there, and the only drawback was that we were in suite 2 when the street cleaner went by on Hastings and both Mike and I went bug-eyed trying to figure out what the hellacious noise was – the whole room was shaking and the tile made for really loud echoes.  The plus side was that the horrid fluorescent light in the front room of the suite had burned out so the room was lit by candles. Instant spa experience, just add paraffin.

There’s a hallway on the back of the suites which allows access to the employees.  You get 90 minutes in the suite but only an hour in the ‘wet’ rooms so the employees can clean after each use.

I light a candle for Hastings Steam and Sauna.  Highly recommended!

Love and loss

I’d like to light a candle for mOm.  She’s lost a lot of relatives, mostly to cancer, in the last little while.  That and the fall will tend to make you thoughtful, and sad.

Here’s another candle for my cousin Marianne.  I never met her, I only met her brother Rawd, but he was a sweetie, and Marianne was less than ten years older than me when she died.  She was also a really good person…. a mensch.  I’m going to ask mOm for permission to repost her obit.

Here’s one last candle to all those whose love has become loss.

“I’m eating bananas and cream” / Kopper and Katie here for dins

What a scoundrel I am.  I bait Kopper by telling her I’ll cook for her, and then switch and order Swiss Chalet.  We swapped notes on how exhausted we are, watched a little Planet Earth, ate dinner, and then I walked her to the bus.  Once she was at the Brentwood end of the 25 bus, now she’s at the Nanaimo end, but she’s still very close.

Then Katie’s cell phone rang and Katie said, “I’m eating bananas and cream.”  There was a pause, and then she said, a little more distinctly “I’m eating bananas and cream.”  There was a pause, and then she said, annoyed, and slightly louder “I’m eating bananas and cream.” There was long pause, and then she said, “I’m eating bananas and cream.” At this point I am no longer able to concentrate on so much of a syllable of what Kopper is saying, so I yell, “*****!  Tell Daxus to clean the ******* wax out of his ears!”  She said it twice after that.  It was all I could do not to roll around on the ground shrieking with laughter.  The inanity of teenage conversations never ceases to astound.

Transphobia

Quoted from today’s tyee.ca:

 

Ten Signs of Transphobia in Our Culture, by Christopher A. Shelley

 

  1. Denial that the problem exists in the first place. 

     

  2. Inability to distinguish between categories such as queer, gay, lesbian, and trans. 

     

  3. Lack of meaningful discussion in educational and workplace settings. 

     

  4. Anxiety over not being able to tell if a person is male or female. 

     

  5. Crude jokes directed towards trans people or with trans-related content. 

     

  6. Refusal to accept trans people as one’s own teacher, doctor, politician, dentist, etc. 

     

  7. Thinking that being trans is OK but also dismissing the idea of ever dating a transperson. 

     

  8. Reducing trans to being merely and solely a psychiatric category. 

     

  9. Trivialization and media spectacles centred on trans-ness as an object of ‘fascination.’ 

     

  10. Refusing the fundamental claims of transpeople as being genuinely mis-sexed.

 

Book launch for Transpeople: Repudiation, Trauma, Healing. Event begins at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 25, at Little Sister’s bookstore, 1238 Davie St., Vancouver. RSVP to awilson@utpress.utoronto.ca.

Photobooth is this incredibly puerile utility on a Mac/food

You just sit there and make goofy faces and take pictures of yourself in a random, blissfully self-centred way, on your MOTHER’S COMPUTER, when you KNOW she blogs!?  Like I never did that.  It’s an unflattering eye, though.

I had a brief and bloody battle with myself, but I owe it to the world to post this picture.  The other five pictures Katie took have seductive beauty and offhand exhaustion, and one of THE WORST CASES of Milton Berle mouth, ever. But you shall never see them, ho ho!

You may perhaps be wondering why the hell I speak in such detail of my meals.  As stated in the raison d’etre of this blog, I write for my mother, and she is continuously wonderstruck and pleased that her abiding distaste, which accompanies her essential competence, for cooking, has not passed to me, and that I actually cook.  Yeah, I get tired every once in a while, but I always climb back on the horse.

This is what I mades for dinner.  Leftover pork roast with sauerkraut.  Oh, life’s hard.  Salad with salt, pepper, half a teaspoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, about a heaping tablespoon of finely chopped red onion, one whole Early Girl tomato, organically grown by Paul’s neighbour, and one whole finely chopped red pepper. Damn, it was fine.  And I made homemade gravy and the first yorkshire pudding I’ve made in many a long year.  Damn, that was fine too! Wrong sized pan but I’ll fix it next time…. or double the recipe.  What you can do with eggs, sir, what you can do with them!

Katie finished her homework and watched some NCIS and then left.

I’m feeding Kopper tomorrow.

Katie back

I am feeling underslept, which is odd because it was lights out just after 9 last night.  Katie and I are drinking fresh coffee and contemplating the week ahead.  Katie’s going in early to rearrange her locker.  Let us contemplate the wonder and romance of this amazing factoid.

Keith was here last night and we had an NCIS blowout, yet again.  GRRR.  The episode I was most looking forward to, in which Ziva loses her heart to a guy dying of thallium poisoning, had spooky pause and pixelation problems. After some messing about Jeff got it to play but I was pouty there for a while.  I guess I am now officially spoiled rotten; I was raised to believe that I deserve to live with a tech support god who will instantly solve all of my wiring, small weapons and silicon problems with a cheery “Next time don’t smash all of the buttons in rapid succession and then pitch the remote through the window, m’kay?”  I’m living with Jeff so my delusion continues unabated.  How he puts up with me can be summed up in one simple, heartfelt phrase: “Supper’s ready!”

I drop things a lot too, which gets Jeff twitching.  He has this way of appearing, silently and instantaneously, like a cartoon character, eyes wide, to ask, “What was THAT?” while I recover my scattered kitchen implements from the floor, muttering, “Sorry, sorry,” while he patiently informs me that we have downstairs neighbours.  I’m going to have to learn not to cackle when I’m listening to stuff in the morning on headphones, but I can’t help it, I’m a born cackler.

I fed Keith and Jeff pork roast, sauerkraut and ‘other veg’ last night, and I would have fed Paul but he wanted to go home and nap.  Thank you for taking me shopping!  Thank you Keith for the 10% discount!  Their cats are driving them buggo, especially Zeek!, who is having noise management problems.

There’s lotso fun on the inertnets these days:

Me too, pal, me too. (link removed for safety)

Do you feel like an imposter?

Jeff’s cats have been going nuts, running up and down and crying like little buggers. I suspect earthquakes.

I have a friend who actually talks like this. He doesn’t read this blog, thank heavens.

No kiddums.  I try to have a calm looking blog. Then again…..

GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY Okay, I’m not guilty of all of them, but my preoccupations have made my blogs boring as paste these last few weeks.  I am trying to go for excitement and novelty, and end up eating in front of the tv, which no matter how you dress it up is still catatonia inducing.

Remarkable story about the trek from belief to atheism.

I did practice my mandolin (I can has F major?), and I did sort some papers, and I did a shop, but mostly I sat about staring off into space, thinking despairing thoughts about the musical, or sleeping.  Ah, winter.

Today I am going to go into work a bit early and see if my computer, etc., are where they are supposed to be and functioning.  Moves really do suck and they do narsty things to productivity.  And then our new squid overlords, er, owners as per the regulatory approvals which have recently come in, will come in and change everything again, but that probably won’t be for months.

I light a candle for Dr Filk’s healing – he’s had tooth issues and we all know what a big owie that can be.  I light a candle for the peace of all beings.  And I leave you with this excerpt from Dr. Filk’s last missive:

In other news the fall folk season is under way. Played at the Sooke Folk Music Society last night, and shared the occasion with six Kenyan exchange students who did traditional Kikuyu song-and-dance. The highlight for me was a contemporary trad number honoring the heroes of the Mau Mau uprising, in which the performers mimed machine-gunning the audience!

Ah, Kultur!

Ow ow ow part 435

Get your war on has something to say about making rape victims pay for their own rape kits.  Jeff sent me this.

Speaking as somebody who accompanied a woman for a post rape exam, I say right the **** on.  I personally have never been raped.  That’s luck and smarts, but mostly luck.  (Note – the rape victim commented afterwards that the rape exam was in some ways harsher than the rape.  I was horrified.  Her response was, “I was drunk when I was assaulted, and I was sober for the exam.”)

I think I have to take a walk now….

A death in the family / a dream

Carrie reports that her doggie Mabel has crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  In response, all I could do was forward a copy of a Hallmark card poem that was on a card Lois (Paul’s youngest sister, a woman of uncommon charm, wit and sensitivity) sent me when Bounce died.  If I had any clue who to credit this to, I would, but it’s copyright Hallmark Cards, card S81-4, and I post it because out of all the things you can say to a person whose animal just died, this poem does it the best I know of so far:

They will not go quietly,
the pets who’ve shared our lives.
In subtle ways they let us know
their spirit still survives.
Old habits still can make us
think we hear them at the door
Or step back when we drop
a tasty morsel on the floor
Our feet still go around the place
the food dish used to be,
and, sometimes, coming home at night,
we miss them terribly.
And although time may bring new friends
and a new food dish to fill,
That one place in our hearts
belongs to them….
and always will.

Last night I dreamed I was supposed to meet up with some people, and I trusted somebody else to get my bag.  We got off the train (not the Skytrain, the subway in Toronto) and poof, no bag and everybody looking hangdog.  I said, **** this noise, got back on the next train, figured out where to cross sides so I got on the train I’d just gotten off, and at the end of the car there was a big pile of unattended gym bags, and the first one I opened had my bag in it.  There are a lot of messages in this dream, and on the whole I’m pleased with it.

Up at 4 – it’s now almost six and I’m about to pull cheese scones out of the oven.  The aroma is now well-nigh overpowering.  I put the last of the fresh basil in them.  Sigh.  It’s winter in Vancouver.  The overcast has started, and it won’t lighten up until April.  Time to hunker down and do some healthy baking.  I found a recipe for home made power bars the other week and I should dig it out and start making them.  And as for unhealthy baking, maybe this is the year I commercialize my biscotti?  I’ve had lots of people tell me they’d pay for them.

Scamp

Mr. Music’s dog deserves his own post.  A border terrier, he possesses a very pronounced personality, he’s smarter than most people, and PRETTY.  His coat is such a subtle combination of every colour from cream to dark cloud gray that I could stare at it for hours. When I walked into the apartment (a masterpiece of restrained visual energy, complete with an OMG afghan his mother knitted and some half finished half mannequins which are decorated with everything from decoupage to glued on jewels – one of them has a compartment carved out of her tummy which has a toy violin in it) all I could see were the balls.  There are like a hundred tennis balls in the apartment; Scamp can’t seem to make up his mind which one he likes best.

He still has his puppy dog bed and refuses to sleep in anything else (except when he sleeps on his master’s bed of COURSE) and when he crashed out briefly (border terriers are ENERGETIC creatures) with his head hanging out he was so cute I got all squirmy.