Author: Allegra

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

Can’t explain

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Gotta love that take, sorry lol.

7618 words. One kudo this morning. The Supernatural (2005) character Dean Winchester loves pie. There are over a hundred thousand #destiel fics on AO3; one thousand of them are about or include pie; one of them is mine, and it got a kudo. Food makes us all fools. REMEMBER THAT.

Russian forces are committing atrocities in Ukraine. Twitter IS FILLED TO THE BRIM WITH ATROCITY DENIERS THIS MORNING. Some of them are credentialed journalists. I’d weep, but I’m more inclined to send more money to Ukrainian anarchists serving at the front.

Susan Sontag had a few words for the people who claim that it’s the Ukrainians committing the atrocities. You know, in wartime civilians often take the opportunity to settle scores, but it’s by individuals, on individuals. That the Ukrainian army or any of its forces would do this – when they know they don’t HAVE TO? Russia brought 45000 body bags to the front – they weren’t for soldiers, they were to handle massacred civilians.

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German PHO’s are asking that all Ukrainian refugees be tested for AIDS and TB. That actually makes sense as long as it doesn’t turn into an excuse to refuse them entry.

Transnistria is denying that Russian troops are building up along its border with Ukraine. Satellites say what?

Poland, which has responded to white Ukrainians with open arms, has publicly stated that they’ll accept US Nukes on their soil. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, deputy prime minister of Poland, said so within the last 24.

Russian troops in Bucha massacred every Ukrainian man between 16 and 60 and then moved out of the town. Bucha, originally about the same size as Grande Prairie at 40000 people, had already seen most men of national service age leave to either train or rejoin units, so essentially they killed every man and boy who was either in a protected profession or too sick, disabled or unfit to serve. (Eugenics much). Total numbers will likely never be known, any more than Putin’s likely to stand trial at the Hague. Yes, some of those men were likely fighting in civvies, but it was either planned by the Russians or indisciplined troops and either way Putin’s gonna wear this.

 

don’t break the internet while I’m gone

7539 words, no kudos. Felt absolutely terrible yesterday until just before supper time, at which time I felt much better (I’m assuming it was food rumblies based on, er, throughput and truly remarkable pain) and I’ve felt better ever since. Got my prescriptions delivered and we paid our rent. I also fell for NO FEWER THAN three April fool’s jokes, I must have looked batty to my friends.

Ducreux self portrait of man yawning repurposed to say I'm off to bed you fuckers, don't break the internet while I'm gone.

For the first time since I stopped withdrawing money from what’s left of my retirement savings, the dollar amount has gone down. THANKS VLAD YOU ASSHOLE

Theo Moudakis of the Toronto Star made this thing:

Editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis/Toronto Star showing a man with his back to a wave cheering over a sandcastle Yay, Finally open for business again. The man looks remarkably like Doug Ford about to be drowned.

Okay so a little about Ukraine

Alex’s drawing in the correct colours.

It is reported that a swarm of bees killed 3 Russian soldiers. It’s propaganda, most likely, but great propaganda.

Just watched a two minute video of two technically sane but very risk-friendly Ukrainians driving through their EXTREMELY RECENTLY LIBERATED town, catching sniper fire from Russian stragglers, stopping in the middle of the street to talk to two pedestrians with much the same plan (we stuck our heads out to find out what’s going on in our own fucking town! sez they), saying fuckitifwediewedie, admiring the stuff that’s still burning, saying that Russians are evil cowards, and speaking so casually about being fired on you’d think they were entirely fearless. (Then one says, no expression in his voice, “I’m fucking losing it.”)

It’s being reported that Putin travels with a small army of doctors and that he has thyroid cancer. Once again propaganda, but it sure cheered up a lot of Ukrainians.

AND ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOTE

Pontifex HAS APOLOGIZED FOR THE HARM DONE TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES in what is now Canada BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

I fucking NEVER thought to live to see this day. The Indigenous delegation in Rome is in a state of mind you rarely see publicly. The generally expressed sentiment is that healing is now possible in a way that it simply was not before. I wept like a fool when I heard.

 

a tiny bit of slack

Jeff has accomplished much in his consulting work recently and he’s slacking off a wee bit, just enough for us to binge the most recently available season of ‘Shetland’ (with a seventh season coming in the fall of 2022.)

Us, heard calling at the screen at Season 6 so far: (more or less)

“Jesus, Sandy, don’t you ever do a vehicle check?”

“Sandy, fChrissakes.”

“Jesus, Sandy, try to be a little more subtle about committing career suicide.”

“Sandy, do you ever call for frikkin backup??”

“Aw Tosh you’re adorable when you make that face.”

“Go, Donny!”

“What an excruciating way to die, bleugh, shudder!”

“She’s lying her ass off!”

“Textbook way to deal with someone with dementia.”

“His first emotional reaction to things is often wrong.”

“What a cow, what a total cow, she’s pure fucking evil.” <— yes I do still use gendered slurs, this one came out when I wasn’t looking.

“Duncan, you idiot, she’s winding you up.” <— yes idiot is a ableist slur. I am trying very hard to cut that one out but idiot, moron and cretin are still in rotation.

“Will you look at that view.” (every episode)

beautiful day for a pap smear

So I saw the doc, got a pap smear, had to wait an hour and a half. “Everything looks fine down there” what a relief eh.

Something odd came out of the overnight BP study. A couple of hours after I went to sleep that night my BP crashed and stayed there for about two hours. I mean crashed; literally so low that I’d be hospitalized. I guess I just have to be a weirdo. Otherwise the drugs seem to be doing their job and I’m not in Sky High About To Pop a Clog territory any more.

Jeff gave me a no-SMS-card phone so I have a calculator and alarm and game platform and I have now killed both of the chargers he loaned me so I have to replace them.

Got my meds re-upped – yet another change, this time because the drug is literally so old the drug company doesn’t want to make it in that formulation anymore, sounds like me. Anyway that’s set up and I should have enough prescriptions to cover me during an earthquake. I’ll be going off the inderal eventually. Very glad I’ve added vitamin c to the mix of pills I take every morning – as is often the case my teeth hurt less.

Today maybe I’ll get that bloodwork done, but it’s more likely because I have to go to the same building for my prescription,

Katie, Alex, Ryker and I are going to travel to Victoria at some point. This means that M&D have to re-jig their visiting from other relatives which I kinda feel bad about but it would have been hella worse if the unvaxxed baby breathed all over the immunocompromised elder, so at least everyone involved has consent. We’re also going to do RATs before we leave to ensure none of us are actively illin’.

I am not going to comment about the assault at the Oscars because as far as I can tell, with maybe one exception, every single white person whose comments I’ve seen has applied all the intersectionality of non-Euclidean geometry and all the nuance of a cast iron frying pan flung across the kitchen. Given that I am not the great white hope (sarcasm alert…. sarcasm & POOR CHOICE OF PHRASING alert) of contemporary anti-racism activities and thought, I won’t do better and therefore, if you want to know how I feel about it (I have three main points to make) you can ask me in person, and of your kindness, wear the rainsuit.

I am not going to comment as much about the Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. I’m against it; I continue to donate and send letters and whatnot in the background; Putin won’t give up until he’s dead or deposed; Canada is as involved as it reasonably can be and maybe even more so anyplace it can get away with it; Russia and India and China are now doing a pavane and in the end China will crush Russia. In terms of will, planning, execution and numbers, China can’t do anything else.

The suffering of the Ukrainian people, and the Russians dragged into this war by violent paranoid old bigots, is not imaginable by those not experiencing it; we uphold their courage and denounce the frauds who’ve started this terrible slaughter.

6646 words, still waiting on further oomph to finish it. Haven’t seen any kudos yet this morning. I got the wordle in 5 this morning, but it was a complete bear of a word.

 

 

Rob was here

One of Jeff’s oldest buddies came over for beer, ‘za and March Madness, and all was delightful. It had been so long since I’d seen him that I mistook him for the pizza delivery person, and of course this immediately makes me remember a Supernatural (2005) trope. He’s retired, and I’m so happy for him.

Current count 6620, two kudos overnight. Sad boys are sad right mOm (I’ve been sending her updates a day at a time so she knows what I’m talking about.)

Various things are annoying me this morning. I’m thinking “Should I vent my spleen? or should I just go about the tasks of daily living?” And you know what, I think I’ll just put it down.

 

 

stalled, but only for a minute

6102 words total on the story. Hope to get back into it today, still thinking about things.

2 kudos overnight.

Another sleepy day yesterday. Today I need bloodwork and tomorrow a doc appointment and upping on scrips; I’ll be walking over there when the lab opens.

Still thinking about Ryker and his magical little smiles and total body squirms.

Here’s the MP3 (acapella, natch)

of me singing the ‘Russian Major General’ filk posted previously. As mentioned previously the lyrics were written by @AndrejNkv who hails from Edinburgh.

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

What is this site and how do I:

What:

This is the personal website of Allegra Sloman. I’ve been doing it for almost two decades. It’s a public on line diary. I try to post every day and I’m generally feeling punk or travelling if I don’t post. KEEP SCROLLING FOR MORE

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

How:

Contact me? info  at  allegrasloman   dot   com.  If you send me a soliciting email it gets trashed.

Get a user account on this site? info   at    allegrasloman   dot com.

Buy a book? leanpub.com/upsun

Read a book for free? https://allegrasloman.com/midnite-moving-co/

Check out my music? Search on Song-a-day or check on ‘pages’ for Portfolio.

 

 

Low energy day

Once again, another day of being tired. I felt dizzy after we got back from the store (didn’t last long, but my balance was shot all day) and after watching a Time Team with Jeff I went back upstairs and …. slept until supper time? I mean I woke up around midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep so more sleep was in order, and I just had a normal night of sleep and feel fine, but that was weird. Fortunately Jeff had both lots of work and lots of squeaky squeaky time (March Madness) to watch.

The little tweety birds have a series of songs and dances that they do to encourage me to put down more seeds. (Juncos and chipping sparrows.) Bought peanuts yesterday for the corbies. They made what I put out disappear in a real hurry.

I mentioned that I ordered a Fluent Pet starter board which will ‘allow’ Buster to talk and they emailed me a 36 page starter guide to read before the six buttons and the panels they sit on get here. I think Jeff is quite dubious, but I am really looking forward to it.

No work on the story because I slept all day but much pondering – the next convo is going to be hard to set up and write so that it flows correctly. One lead character is being an asshole to cover how traumatized they are and the other lead character’s about to drop the hammer and explain (kindly, firmly) that ‘your trauma doesn’t suddenly give you an all access asshole pass’….. Four kudos overnight. The gal who’s reading all my stuff on AO3 is, as promised, reading all my stuff. Squee.

Alex is coming for a sleepover tonight. I’m thinking of doing things a leedle differently than normal but mOm I’ll be trying to give you a call before bedtime tonight so you get to hear his voice. Tomorrow, bouncing around the lazy river at the community centre with my grandsons and co-grandma and Mamabear.

Fuck Ginni Thomas, I hope she goes to hell through a cenote-style sinkhole appearing in the goddamned floor. Stories all over the internet about what a great *** she is.

Despite everything that’s wrong with me yesterday I wrote A NEW INTRO for Gelis and Niccolo (I cannot let go of that song) – one that uses fingerpicking style rather than hammered guitar – and I’m thrilled with it because it just came to me in a lightning flash and there’s a really wonderful rhythmic change that makes me feel like I am, you know, a musician with a little flair, a little showpersonship.

Vyshyvanka are about to get reaaaaallly popular. I predict it. They are the Ukrainian national shirt. Go to Etsy and look it up for examples. The black shirt with buff and gold embroidery made me DIE OF WANT.

Here’s a photo that is really hard to interpret because none of us speak or read Russian. Here we go:

So there we have some bog standard Russian iconography from the days of the Soviet Union. This looks not particularly rude in anyone’s terms, it’s a hammer and sickle with the words “Mow” “and” “Hammer” BUT according to Alexey at Meduza, it’s an extremely sophisticated visual pun.

Why? because ‘Reap’ (aka ‘mow’) is Russian slang for DODGE THE DRAFT and ‘Hammer’ is Russian slang for IGNORE DRAFT NOTICES. So this means that the iconography of the former Soviet Union is now UNIVERSALLY ESTABLISHED as a symbol for draft dodging, inside Russia, and that is to my mind so fucking hilarious I want everyone who reads my blog to know about it!

There’s also a joke going around (not in Russia) that the reason the current war symbol is a ‘Z’ is that, thanks to Russian Engineering, the other two arms of the swastika fell off.

this is Mariupol:

schlep today

Yesterday we had a houseful, but it’s all people inside our bubble: Suzanne the Baby Whisperer, Alex the Tube Shot Master, Ryker the teething baby who still managed to be only cry for ten minutes or less, and Katie the magnificent. She came over at the end of Suzanne’s cleaning tenure and we had a simply lovely time. Alex played that xBox game with the crashing cars, and Ryker cried because he was teething and was calmed fairly readily by Suzanne. (Also by me, but survey says Suzanne is a marvel for that).

No writing yesterday because there were people here from 10 am to 5 pm and I took a break. Too early (as I type) for kudos.

I keep opening the fridge door to marvel at how clean and empty it is. Also that nothing DEAD wafts with all the delicacy of a hippo at a wallow through the house as soon as you open the door.

Suzanne vacuumed in the guest room; we determined that it had been just under a decade since someone vacuumed in there (it was a very amusing conversation). She also made the bed god bless her, I’d put everything on the bed so she could vacuum, snicker.

hey mOm I got Jeff to take a picture of me in my Oodie with Ryker (it was cold in the house) so ask him to send it to you also Jeff could you send it to me.

Three whole kudos this morning; all the same person. She started reading my fics two days ago and is working her way through them all by the look of things.