Category: Church

Sundry & Various

I came home from work last night and Jeff had moved all of the boxes we moved on Sunday into the spare bedroom. I was a little off colour yesterday, I’m not precisely sure why, and I was very grateful not to have to physically move anything.  I’m still feeling ‘strange’ today but I think it’s yet another one of my ‘atypical’ migraines. Nothing like being told by a neurologist that you’re ‘atypical’…. as if I could be anything else.

In an explosion of efficiency and organization (his response when I said this, Ha!) Jeff has prepared a list of everything that needs to be done around here. We find the taps in the bathroom, both sets, to be a trial; the bathtub taps have a really unpleasant mushy feel as if you can never get them entirely open or shut; the vanity taps squeak in an astonishing way. He’s already fixed the kitchen tap, and he moved the freezer downstairs on the weekend and it’s now running (the landpeers said we could have a freezer in the laundry room and the downstairs neighbours can use it too if they like). Earlier in the week I finally passed along the box of coloured pencils to the little girl downstairs (whom I have heard but never seen…I gave them to her parents.) It felt weird to have hung on to some stuff of Katie’s for years after she’d stopped using it, and really good to give it to somebody who would use it. Now if I can just get rid of the rest of my crap, life would be a glorious thing.

Scratch made meatloaf and tater tots for dinner. Jeff bought commercial biscotti earlier this week and I laughed at him.

Spoke to Tom and Peggy last night. They will be coming early and leaving early for the party on Friday as they have another event to attend, but even seeing Peggy for two minutes would be lovely (mind you I am going to church for the next two Sundays to help with set up and take down so I’ll see her again soon). I also spoke to the Luddite and assured him that my friends and family would consider his sitting in a corner and reading a book for the entire duration of the party to be unworthy of comment or criticism, but I don’t think I managed to sell him on the idea of coming on Friday, and given that I haven’t laid eyes on him in the best part of a month… oh well. Saturday’s out as he has another engagement and I have to be out the door at hours ongodly for church on Sunday morning. Grr.

My mOm has FINALLY received the results of her followup tests, and everything looks fine. Having braced herself for bad news she’s feeling a little blah. Granny is now well enough to do her own shopping although she fatigues easily. When you’re pushing a century with a broom you’re allowed to get tired; I’m just amazed after her last horrid illness that she’s made the recovery she has, and I am thankful beyond words that my parents are doing such a great job of looking after her while she preserves what independence she can.

At some point I’m going to imitate Jeff and start making a list of the stuff I want to do around here, but I’m still in confusion and error mode, so it may be a while before I’m back on track.

I have a HUGE bolus of work to digest today after many weeks of prep, so I should get off this thing and go deal with it. Have a great day, everybody.

One last thing. I just read a restaurant review which contained the line “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I’d ordered thin slices of mole poached in Ovaltine.” Bleaugh!

Everything’s up to date in Kansas City

Including these signs recently welcoming George W. Bush.

The 25th anniversary of the church establishment dinner was yummy fun; I didn’t get there early enough to do the percussion thing.  On one hand I feel lousy for not doing what I said, or checking when I was supposed to be there; on the other hand I think I was miserably underrehearsed.  Public performing less than two months after you purchase an instrument seems the height of hubris.

I’m in a very strange mood.  I’ve come to the realization that there is something I keep doing which is really hurting my mental health, and I’m just trying to figure out how I stop doing it without going crazier than I was to start out with.  I think I’ll pour myself another cup of coffee, have a piece of the 85% cocoa chocolate the Luddite insisted on leaving here (“Oh, don’t worry, I have plenty at home”) and contemplate my options.  With any luck, daughter Katie will be joining me this afternoon.  The urge to kidnap her and do an intervention is urgent, but I think I can manage without doing anything dumb.

One of my LJ buddies was at the church dinner last night.  I was thinking, Gosh, we finally get to talk IRL! and then her daughter threw up and they had to leave.  For this, she commented wryly, I stuffed them all into their nice clothes (or words to that effect).

My granny is still in a lot of pain, but they found painkillers that work.  I light a candle for her, and for the heroic amount of care she’s been getting from her two sons and daughtersinlaw. It makes me shudder to think what old age is like when we have no children, loved ones, or adoptive family to help us.

I light a candle for the folks who went to Nancy’s memorial service yesterday. I hope everybody stayed cheerful and full of happy memories.  The grinding hard work of sorting the estate out – I light a big phalanx of candles for that heavy chore.

I made biscotti.

Off to meditate on mental health now.

Church this am

LOTS OF SINGING.  This is a goooood thing, especially around Christmas.  The vein of gossip at church this morning was solid gold, with hinted deposits of platinum and neodymium.  Let’s just say that if you hear me snickering with nothing in sight worth laughing at, it is because my thoughts, so recently dark and sad, have been transformed into joy, mirth and mild self-derision at my not having faith in my long term prospects for happiness.  I really do carry happiness, sanity, and the ability to assist others in their pursuit of happiness and sanity, around with me. If I am occasionally self-serving in this regard, it’s only because I wasn’t crazy to begin with.  As daughter Katie remarked, I am right more often than I am wrong, but I need more patience in waiting for results.
And I’m working on a new song… the chorus runs

Be wary

Be wary

Be wary of the fury of a patient man…

Weekend wrap up.

I can’t believe Pukka Orchestra didn’t make this list.

– this list will be food for arguments for the next dozens of years.

The church supper went great – as we are a caravan of faith at the moment, with no settled home (besides the Gathering Place), I now have dishes from the banquet to do. Fortunately I have a dishwasher ;). I also performed The Tapioca Song. The Beacon Home Companion was even better than last year, and that’s saying something. Don Hauka is a genius… There, I said it! And everybody else was wonderful too… Derek’s antics as “The Chalice” (the Unitarian Superhero) were wonderful as always.

Sometime today I will be getting the Quicktime version of the Tapioca Song video, and THEN I’ll post it to Youtube. Stay tuned, as they say. Katie K saw it yesterday and pronounced herself entertained.

Katie has moved back in with Paul and Keith and now is a resident of Planet Bachelor. She has her own bathroom too, the lucky stiff. I suspect she will greatly appreciate her new digs.  Her boyfriend… for such he is, still, alas, has a couple of three inch souvenirs from the cop dogs who took him down last week.  He has sworn to mend his ways.  And I’m going to lose forty pounds by Christmas.  I have seen Katie’s new tattoo, or at least the start of it.  It is a foot long snake wrapped around a heart.  (Fanboys note… it’s modelled after Katchoo’s tat from Strangers in Paradise)
On a happier note…. last night the four of us (me Paul Keith & Kate) did something we hadn’t done in the best part of a year. We watched a movie together! Cats crawled all over us purring happily! It was Les Misérables with Liam Neeson. I had to extend my booking on the car and then *&$^ forgot that I had to put gas in it, and then *&$*&! forgot to get a receipt so had to dash back for it. Didn’t get home until almost two. My weekend has thus far been enlivened by the existence of the progressive lenses perched on my nose. Driving was, as they say, interesting. I suppose I could have extended the booking and driven out to Richmond to participate in filking at VCon but not even the prospect of vixy and Tony performing her stellar “Mal’s Song” could make me want to drive out there. I’ll get a report in the fullness of time from Tom and Peggy.  Vcon of course has been rendered more interesting, at least in terms of GETTING there, by that 82 year old dude flying his plane into a building three blocks from the Con hotel….
My apartment is a disaster but unfortunately, as I was trying to wind down from my yesterday in the wee sma’s this morning, I picked up Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and, well, like that. I’m not sure how much housework I’ll be doing today. Especially since my laundry’s done. At first the book annoyed the snot out of me, and now I can’t put it down. There’s one of the most succinct arguments for atheism I’ve ever seen in it. Hey, this is fair use, isn’t it?

From Chapter VIII of the Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, 1980. Thecla, a courtesan, speaks:

“One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past – they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

As soon as I hear from the videographer, I’m going to head off to RCH to visit somebody from work who’s in hospital, unless she’s home already, in which case I’ll try to call her.

In Victoria

Movies: Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii;

Children of Men

and we got half way through a CHERRY print of Robinson Crusoe on Mars

GRRR there was something wrong with the actual DVD; it stopped in the middle of a closeup on Mona’s face.

Yesterday, in church, bad puns broke out. It was very, very bad, mostly because Lady Miss Banjola and Dr Filk were not there to raise the insanity to ever higher levels.

Now I’m going to see if I can drag my bro out to breakfast. Nope – he’s made me oatmeal. Then the food shop….
The trip here started repulsive and got better and better; the weather was so much more clement it was very pleasant to stand it in while waiting briefly for Jeff. When I left my place at SFU it was howling a gale and slanting rain, and I lost my bus pass on the ground, and so missed the first bus retracing my steps to see what the hell I had done with it. I found it right out front of my apartment building (thank guh) and then spent three hours alternately waiting for a bus and riding one. It’s an $85 cab ride to the ferry terminal from my place (I did it once, partly to see how much it cost and partly because I was feeling quite worn out) but I don’t think I’ll be that self indulgent again if I can help it.
Jeff’s kitties are doing famously. They were both sitting in the window of the computer room this morning intently looking at something of cat interest.

Homily went well (see Thanksgiving…)

and now I am off to Victoria for a while, back Thursday night.  I will probably not be posting nearly as much, so try to stay out of trouble while I’m gone.  If you can’t at least have the decency to invent a new kind of trouble.

I light a candle for Daughter Katie, whose niece Sapphire has been stolen by the Ministry.  I light a candle for everyone involved, including the heartless pricks whose idea of a good time is scoop a baby after tossing the mother into handcuffs the Friday before a long holiday weekend.  The child in question was NOT AT RISK.  The parents are young and stupid and to put it vaguely but tellingly “multiply diagnosed”, but Sapphire is not being physically or emotionally abused, she’s entirely on target for growth and developmental milestones, and Katie got to watch this go down, and it’s not turning her into ‘a better citizen’ if compliance and unquestioning patriotism is the desired end state.

Okay, NOW I’m going to Victoria.

Fight the power and may God rain down judgment on the Ministry.

God is a capricious lover

Sometimes you text him twenty times and he doesn’t answer and sometimes he expects you to do all the work and sometimes he comes on so big and so mean.  Other times he seems way more interested in other girls, and right in front of you.  Sometimes he comments that you really aren’t doing it for him anymore.

Okay, lightning will strike me but hopefully after I deliver my homily this morning.

Why would somebody ask for ‘more ranting’?

Tonight I would like to rant about the lack of menstruation rituals in our culture. Tonight I’m going to take the man’s view, as the woman’s view about it isn’t nearly transgressive enough for me ce soir la. Jeez, where’s an accent grave when I need one…
If I was a man, I would want rituals and predictive patterns in young women’s lives that preserved their fertility for their true purpose, namely, making babies with me and not with other men. Having some kind of ceremony where it was drilled into the girl’s head that she had one shot at the childbearing game and if she slept with the wrong guy it was game the fuck over would be useful if my strategy for access to childbearing women meant I was employed and civil. Mind you, if my strategy is to just rape the shit out of her and hope for a lucky plug, it’s still better than if she was really trying to save it for the right guy. Her body may betray her and pop an egg for me. I’d be the ‘wrong guy’ – but I’d still be first. Now, the sperm competition theory of fucking, which holds that guys enjoy sharing girls because if you’re second (or later) you come way harder (your sperm will ‘wash away’ that of your, uh, competitor/buddy), so if you let your buddy go first, because you don’t really care if you get her pregnant, and you’d prefer to come harder because of your wiring, you’ve more or less dropped out of the discussion about breeding. You’ve actually given some consideration to the notion, which is why you’re wearing a condom while all of these shenanigans are going on. I mean, it’s still rape, but there’s a different angle. You get it now? All different styles of thinking about ‘the breeding thing’ lead to different results in terms of how it affects the woman’s life. Oh, sorry, I’ve gone back into the women’s way of thinking about this, ‘scuse me all to hell.

So mOm, did I make you laugh really hard on the phone tonight, or what?

Back to the subject at hand. Women should have menstruation rites so that they actually have two whole chunks of time to think about fertility without having to do any work. That is, in part, what rituals are all about. It’s about the whole “stop working and start thinking” thing that has made humanity what it is. Having enough excess capacity in your life to be able to stop and think is what makes for civil life. Having the spare time to develop morality makes morality. Leisure, in short, makes ethical life possible. But don’t worry, in the end it’s all about sex. Yeehaw. Hurry hurry love.
Did I ever say why it was I refer to my mother as mOm? It’s because when I spell her title that way, it is the “Kilroy was here” or “Clem” sign. See his hands, on either side of his head? Te he. But I also do it because of where I got the idea of it, pOp – which is a clown face with a big nose in the middle. Squint and you’ll see.

Craigslist to the rescue…. Monty Python trumpet blast.

It is with some satisfaction that I report that I have met a really cool guy from Craigslist.  He meets every single one of the criteria I set myself out to find (including that he’s into being less lonely, not more married).  Urbane, intelligent, musical, accomplished, well travelled and an excellent communicator. I’ve come up with a blog nickname for him, but in keeping with my “Learn to be more respectful of others, you great sow” vow, I’ll run it by him before I start using it.

And I got enough sleep, and the balance board I bought is doing great things for my back.

I’m swithering about going to Jericho.  I still feel like some kind of crud is holding over from the weekend, trying to find a part of me to land on so I’m not sure about the wisdom of yet another late night during the week.  In addition I have a project breathing heavily in my ear about its completion, due on Thanksgiving.

This will be the first homily I’ve written that I didn’t read aloud obsessively to Paul (or Dr. Filk) for the week prior to the service, and I find that I’m missing that. You just never know what you’re going to miss when you bail on 25 years of marriage.  Many of the things I thought would hurt, haven’t, and vice versa.  It floors me, and stuns my mother, that I miss cooking.  mOm would probably say, And I miss Root Canal! And I miss Income Tax!  And I miss Halitosis! and I miss WWII!

Bizaaaaarrre.

So instead of showing my transit pass when I got on the bus at the ungodly hour of 8:10 (am, on a Sunday morning? puhleeze) I had to pull out my mandolin and play it. I got through the first 3 verses of Buy Me A Beer before somebody else got on the bus.

Then, when I got to church, Tom got ‘that look’ in his eye and started playing “Buy me a Beer” so we ENDED UP SINGING IT in the ingathering at church, which still strikes me as being a “take your glasses off and clean them thoughtfully” moment. And I had banjo, twelve string, six string, piano, vocal AND stand up bass accompaniment. Long live the Masticating Ungulates! (The band formerly known as MU).

Very good to see Lady Miss Banjola on her pins agin. Afterwards, Dim Sum.

One of my friends, speaking to me on the phone the other night, said, “Well I know how you are from your blog, but how are you REALLY!?” You asked for it.

1. My back hurts all the time, but I don’t complain about it because it’s BORING.

2. I really wish I was having more sex with the people I want to be having sex with. Quality is not the issue. I don’t talk about that shit here – mostly because just reading this paragraph made my mother’s face screw up really hard. And Parental Strength Mental Bleach is v. difficult to find.

3. No matter how hard I try, I can’t forgive somebody I really shouldn’t be wasting any emotional time and space on. I will keep trying. It’s hard.

4. I wish someone would come along and kick my ass about my songs, as in getting them written down.

5. I need to eat more vegetables, and no, this does not loop back to item 2.

6. After years of being told I’m not a team player and that I’ve got problems with anger, I’ve learned that neither of those things are true. I’m actually a happy person; I rarely get angry about anything any more. Emotionally abusive relationships have subtle and lingering effects.

7. I know I have to lose weight for my health and longevity. It’s an ongoing irritant.

8. I haven’t had a cigarette in just over a week.

There’s more, but that hits the high notes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch the “Happy Feet” part of King of Jazz again.