Author: Allegra

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

itinerarying

I got hold of Jan; she’ll be the first person I see in TO, and then over to Catherine’s place, where I will definitely play with drums until I’m really happy (she enumerated her percussion instruments until I was a very curious girl) and then to the Nataraj to eat with Sandy and Dowker, and then crashing at Catherine’s.  Then on to Tammy’s, and uh, whatever awaits me there, which is probably singing and playing and at least the prospect of a hot tub (hey, I can dream).  Then, ya, hanging out and watching really bad girly movies, oh joy at the prospect.  Like, I may watch Pride and Prejudice aGAIN, it being the best girly movie of all frikkin time.  Then at LEAST 12 hours sleep, and damned be the soul that stands between me and sleep in that most desperate hour.  Oh, and before I go to sleep, enough fluids to keep me hydrated for 12 hours of sleep. This is not always an easy balance to strike when you don’t want to have to get up to whiz.  I wonder if anybody has ever done scientific studies on this.  In my mind, I have just become a public benefactor, navigating rivers never before studied, which will shift into desert in the blink of an eye. I would like some scientist to invent a TABLE which would show me, on the basis of my bladder, age, sex, weight, and any other relevent genes, how much water I should drink before I go to sleep each night.  But that’s just me raving about a world which will never be.

I distributed Valentines at work today. It was more fun than swimming, but less fun than sex.  At least I got to be upright, the one position which doesn’t actively hurt these days.  Oh yeah, I said, I wouldn’t complain about my back.  On to the next improbability.  Katie is nowhere in evidence.  She slept here last night and has since moved along.  I don’t phone her these days.  If she has a problem either the police will call or she will.  This allows me to sleep in a timely fashion.  It sounds callous to the point of bloodlessness, but I’m okay with that.
I have discovered how to arrange two hot water bottles in such a fashion as to provide a reasonable heat-source facsimile of a healthy human male. I am sure I am not the only person who has ever figured this out.  I remember seeing a comic about that when I was a kid.

My parents had R Crumb comics.  Dr. Filk has Harold Hedd comics (which are like da GIVIN’ER Canuckistani BOMB).  I very much enjoyed Art Spiegelman’s Maus; had a major major stopover at Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, and now I’m a Neil Gaiman fan.  But to mention Gaiman without mentioning Michael Zulli, who limned the archetypal Death and Delirium, that would be wrong. And there are SO many other amazing illustrators for Sandman, but I’m partial to Zulli.  Something about the way he does hair.

Anyway, the world is looking like a whole heap of fun right now.

Printing out the Valentines

I am almost but not quite overcome by the excitement of my upcoming trip.

Still haven’t got hold of everybody.  This VOIP line is messed up, or nobody in Toronto has an answering machine, or I don’t have the correct numbers.  Or possibly there’s another explanation, but it’s odd, for sure.  Guess I’ll just have to sit in Tammy’s hot tub the whole time, woe is me!!! with a side of snickering.
I am almost, but not quite finished this year’s batch of Valentines.  I am hoping to curry them (courier them???) over to my cow-irkers at the sales & CS meeting, so they can take them to my US cow-irkers later.  The meeting which, once again, I was not invited to attend…. and every year it’s the same thing.  I get all pretend pouty ’cause I wasn’t invited, and then afterwards the participants describe their boredom, frustration and lack of pumped upness in Cecil B. DeMille scale terms. So really it’s good.  And I’m still thrashing my way through a nasty project at work, so it’ll be nice and peaceful while I finish up preparatory to my trip.

Oh dod

Three frrrriiiicking years til the Winter Olympics.  Ain’t it charmin’ to have something so great to look forward to?  And I can’t really complain because I didn’t actively try to do anything to stop it.  Worse, it’s helping prop up the value of the house….

Mac and cheese

I taught Keith how to make home made macaroni and cheese.  I asked him to boil up some noodles and he did – rather a lot of them – and he watched me assemble the dish, but now, strangely enough, it’s almost all gone.  This time I cooked it in the dutch oven, and man, what a difference the little crunchy bits at the edges made to the flavour.

Katie didn’t come home last night.  However, I know where she is.

Update

I have got “The Weekend’s Over” which is the scurrilous song I wrote for ScaryClown’s b-day, in the mail to mOm, and I am just finishing up Wish it was mine.  Blues is hard to write down, man  – it is meant to be SUNG not written down in musical notation.  Katie came home to collect her work duds and listen to me play it (I’ve been playing mando for hours today, my fingees are aflame) and she loved it.  Which was nice; she said that should be the next one I record.  It’s going to be a while before I have the money for that kind of thing, but I will definitely be doing it soon.  Every time I teach myself a new chord I end up writing another song.

Even nicer than Katie’s appreciation was her acknowledgment that Dax was being difficult.  The actual words she used were not exactly difficult, but you get the general idear.

I still have tons of Valentines to do – I may have to do some more tomorrow.

Yech I really did not need to see that pic

Okay, thanks to the Internet, I now understand the references to the Goatse man.  If you don’t already understand the reference, don’t bother looking it up, and this means YOU, mOm, and if you do get it, you can have a good laugh on me.

ScaryClown emailed me a link to an author about quality.  I burst out laughing when I read the email and replied (enjoying my advanced age for the first time in MONTHS) “Hey, I read that book in 1988.”  Yes, I am referring to the venerable Quality is Free by Philip Crosby, which I read, as I recollect, when I was working at either the law firm or at CDS.  Anyway, it was when God was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth.  It had a very powerful effect on my thinking about how to run a company, and of course I keep finding it in company libraries and in people’s personal collections, and I always laugh when I see it.

It’s like church.  It’s the same message, over and over again.  It’s no surprise that Philip Crosby is a committed Christian, and that his message hums along like a sermon.

Oh, for the purposes of clarity, and to scotch the notion that I’m being sarcastic when I refer to a committed Christian…..  There are committed Christians, and there’s everybody else.  Committed Christians are people who have accepted the yoke of the Lord and make their lives their witness.  They try to love, and they try not to judge.  Everybody else has decided that Christ wears jackboots, and is going to come and kick the shit outta everybody they don’t personally like.  I have yet to meet a Christian who didn’t fall into one of those two categories.  The first kind of Christian I have no issues with.  I’m looking forward to taunting the other kind of Christian in the lake of fire.

As for there being contradictions in the Bible, which really gets my goatse, something bizarre occurred to me recently, and I thought I’d share it.  There are contradictions in my own DNA…. Ain’t nothing whole and perfect, except maybe an idea.