Author: Allegra

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

Quiet day

Ran the dishwasher and wrote 800 words and called a friend.

I’m thinking of a new fic with a bit of a twist. My English fanfic reader was BACK she even read the SF short story which is not finished. I should finish it, it has its moments. Normally I post finished stories only because my rage when I start a story on line and it isn’t finished is , the robot tale is the sole exception.

The #IvermectinInsurrection

They’re coming to town tomorrow, and I’m thinking of calling Keith and asking him what he thinks I should do about it.

A few more kudos this morning, always pleasant to wake up to. Still plugging away at a couple of stories.

Katie sent me a link to one of my favourite music videos and that cheered me up.

I sure hope I’m not getting polychondritis … every goddamned morning I wake up and my ears hurt. I mean it seems fairly obvious that I have some kind of weird stammering autoimmunity issues, with my hot joints and constant weird pains and blurpiness and ghastly overwrought pain and exhaustion response to any exercise but walking. Walking doesn’t present a problem 98 percent of the time.  I could also be the world’s most embarrassable hypochondriac. Oh well, off to the doc virtually on the 7th to get my HORDE OF SCRIPS renewed. Hopefully an adjustment, my blood pressure continues to be unacceptable despite the diuretics. Anyway I’m getting it in both ears, worse on the left.

Symptoms of relapsing polychondritis usually begin with the sudden onset of pain, tenderness and swelling of the cartilage of one or both ears. This inflammation may spread to the fleshy portion of the outer ear causing it to narrow. Attacks may last several days to weeks before subsiding.

 

from another website

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE SYMPTOMS?

Every RP patient is different – they may have some, but not all, of the following symptoms:

 

  • Ear pain, which may include swelling and redness check

  • Nose pain, which  may include swelling and redness check but nowhere near as bad

  • Throat pain, which may include change in voice, shortness of breath, dry cough nope or not much

  • Red, painful, swollen eyes not really; more likely familial dry eye and issues around blood sugar

  • Rib pain and tenderness fuck yeah all the gd time I’ve been complaining of it since my teens (literally whined about it until I got a free xray at the radiology dept I worked at and of course NADA)

  • Joint pain or swelling and this would be different from daily life how… KNEES, HANDS, ANKLES, TOES, HIPS, BACK, NECK, ELBOWS, BACK TO THE KNEES

  • General malaise, low grade fever yes to the former no to the latter

RIP Monica Vitti

Even though it’s a simply terrible movie, I loved Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise.

Suzanne should be all moved in to her new place. Still working on Mike to hire her as a cleaning specialist. And why not? they’re living 4 blocks away from each other now. I am so fucking happy she’s not on the other side of the bridge although I totally understand why it pained her to give up her beautiful little house with the stunning north shore views.

I’m about 2-5K from the end of the fanfic story with the BC flooding setting. Lots of kudos on the newly posted story last night.

I’m …. I don’t know how to describe it. Pandemic brain got me hard. I’m so ditzy, irritable and lazy I feel gross.

Gorgeous

 

Multum in parvo

(much in little)

Wordle got bought by the NY Times, so I’m not doing it anymore.

Still no letter for Auntie Mary. She’s owed one since October but I’m a bum.

Still processing the four of us getting together on Sunday. It was a lot of feels and it felt almost like group therapy, or more accurately, like the group meditations that we used to do through Beacon. I feel seen, and I listened with intent. I’ve said many times how amazing Jarmo is (he just is, okay, trust me) but Susanna is absolutely amazing and so kind, given her trials.

Thandiwe Newton reported as referring to Sean Penn as a jibbering fool made my morning (he was decrying the ‘feminization of men’ poor sod).  Sean Penn being a freehold scumbag is pretty much a given but her shade was a touch of perfection.

Rehearsed a tiny bit yesterday. Music has pretty much died inside me. I’m listening to music on line, but there’s no music inside me, and I read incoming emails about on line filking with no emotion at all and just delete them.

Pandemic brain is real. Jeff and I went out for food pickup yesterday and WE HAVE NEVER SEEN IN 35 MINUTES OF DRIVING SUCH AN ASSORTMENT OF CLUELESS AND ACTIVELY FUCKED UP DRIVERS. Broad flipping daylight, zero problems with traction and visibility, and drivers were all the words you use when you don’t want to say they’re mentally ill, chemically altered or just dgaf.

The DaVinci Drone

Straight outta Compton ruined by white people

Perdikomata

Above noted is a song by the Greek band Villagers of Ioannina City, a shoegaze/indie/folk band. The lyrics are a dreamy love song to ‘my partridge eyed one’.

 

 

like a poem

Just bragging about how I got wordle in three this morning. If any of you play wordle I am sorryunsorry. You can cheat if you like I won’t tell.

My heart is full of mixed emotions, but chiefly joy at seeing my friends, grieving and battered as they are. Ville’s death was the model of an unnecessary tragedy.

The RCMP who attended the scene were absolutely foul.

We spoke of many, many other things besides Ville’s death and Jarmo stood us all our meal, and the sauna was incredibly relaxing and I should not have drunk that beer, but I was feeling convivial.

I want you to imagine how honoured I was that me and Mike were literally the first people they’ve interacted with since he died.

Big hugs to My People.

No concert

I was supposed to go to a concert at Massey Hall last night and didn’t. I gave Paul the ticket I bought for him. I’ll hear about the concert today I guess. My anxiety was so bad I just couldn’t face it. I deliberately tried to do something that didn’t involve a lot of travel or an unfamiliar venue, and I just …. couldn’t. I think I’ll give up trying unless it’s filking with locals.

I spend a ton of money on the tickets too. I just couldn’t go. At least Paul did.

Posting the ‘stuck’ story today, it’s finally done. Clocked in just under 9 K words. Yes mOm I will forward the link.

My UK fan is taking a break, but two other people left kudos on my most recent story. (Which is funny, it’s one of the funniest I’ve ever written actually.)

that wasn’t four hours

I got to help a girlfriend, hang with my daughter, make faces at my grandson and get out of the house. I also got to see that cool house in Surrey Suzanne was living at. THE VIEW OF THE NORTH SHORE MOUNTAINS AS THE FOG MELTED AWAY oh my heart. Apparently Keith is going to help Suzanne with her move.

It wasn’t four hours but we did get shit done and she’s got other helpers coming.

By posting this pic on my blog I’m ensuring I’ll be first against the wall when the Chinese walk whistling into Vancouver…. it’s the SS Olympic Bloodbath.

Just said in a reddit comment I HOPE YOUR CLIENT SUES YOUR ASS CLEAN OFF YOUR BODY. lol

My UK fan worked her way through another two stories last night. The consistency is really getting to me.

 

helping

Suzanne is moving to the the neighbourhood and I volunteered to help. I know I have zero stamina so she’s getting four hours and then I’m cutting out. Katie’s with Ryker and about to come pick me up. I shall report back in due course.

From L.M. Sacasas’ the Accelerated Life blog

The following is from the Translator’s Preface to the English edition of Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. (The translator is Jonathan Trejo-Mathys.):

A further weighty obstacle to the realization of any ethical life project lies in the way individuals are increasingly caught in an ever denser web of deadlines required by the various social spheres (‘subsystems’) in which they participate: work, family, (school and sports activities of children), church, credit systems (i.e., loan payment due dates), energy systems (utility bills), communications systems (Internet and cell phone bills), etc. The requirement of synchronizing and managing this complicated mesh of imperatives places one under the imperious control of a systematically induced ‘urgency of the fixed-term’ (Luhmann). In practice, the surprising—and ethically disastrous—result is that individuals’ reflective value and preference orderings are not (and tendentially cannot) be reflected in their actions. As Luhmann explains, ‘the division of time and value judgments can no longer be separated. The priority of deadlines flips over into a primacy of deadlines, into an evaluative choiceworthiness that is not in line with the rest of the values that one otherwise professes …. Tasks that are always at a disadvantage must in the end be devalued and ranked as less important in order to reconcile fate and meaning. Thus a restructuring of the order of values can result simply from time problems.’

People compelled to continually defer the activities they value most in order to meet an endless and multiplying stream of pressing deadlines inevitably become haunted by the feeling expressed in the trenchant bon mot of Ödön von Horváth cited by Rosa: ‘I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him.’

I made a post you can’t see

about my health troubles yesterday because whoo ee that’s a new symptom and I don’t like it. BP a little high, no surprise there. Also, maybe the chocolate was moldy, that probably didn’t help.

Absolutely gorgeous day yesterday, all breathing spring and brilliant sun after FOUR FUCKING DAYS OF FOG – psychologically that was yucky, folks. We took a brief walk and it was lovely.

I can hear Jeff doing the trash for today’s pickup and then we’ll go …

The callous, selfish and uncaring crowd of truckers trying to wake up Canada by making sure as many disabled people die of COVID as possible has claimed that they have 11000 trucks in their convoy on twitter. Given that the Guinness Book of Records says the longest truck convoy in history was in Egypt a few years back and was just under 500 trucks, and given that all the photos they’re showing are actually of BREXIT JFC folks are ya high? The mockery they’re facing is heartwarming.

Today we schlep. I don’t feel scared doing shopping at 7 in the morning. It’s four furtive middle aged men, two stockers, one cashier and four personal shoppers, plus the counter gals in the deli and bakery. That’s it. It’s not many people in that big box. And I have an N95 or two.

Wordle in 5 this morning – 21 straight wins (which means nothing, I’m just participating in a global phenomenon is all.)

I continue to be asymptotically close to finishing the damned airport story, it’s reminding me of that Toronto divorce court judge in the 60s who used to yell GET HER IN BED, GET HER IN BED at the lawyer if he was taking too long proving adultery. YES I AM TRYING TO GET THEM IN BED, RELAX. I’m not really writing porn any more, it’s all HEA M/M AU Destiel.

I have more than 35K karma points on reddit. I got a thousand points just yesterday by telling a young person she is a champ …..and the mother of the bride is not playing in the consensus reality portion of the program.

My UK fan has gamely read another 25,000 words in three of my stories on Archive of Our Own last night. She is literally working her way through my entire posted oeuvre (the story about rescuing kittens was the most recent, but then there was the one about the masturbation club (way more fluffy than it sounds, I know that sounds real unlikely, and the one about the vet who moves in next door to the baker) – almost makes me want to post something just so she has something new. I’m glad she’s providing such innocent evidence of her enjoyment, and I hope she messages me at some point, she’s like my biggest fan at this point. Anyway, I am thinking that I will post them all here over the next year, but under a password, so if people want to read them they can. As Paul used to say all the goddamned time, People who like that sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like.

Finished the pho broth. It was so salty, maybe that’s what messed me up.