Category: Family

Continuing to love on Europe Central

This is the best novel I’ve read since the 40 rules of Love, and it’s a really really different book.  I am finding it enthralling reading. (Except for the typos, and there were a couple of doozies).  Historical characters – snared in conflicting loyalties and pushed to the snapping point time and time again, broken on the wheel of tyranny -command attention from every page.  Superlative.  His prose has the effortful grace of a bird of prey taking off.  He calls Hitler ‘the sleepwalker’.  Yesterday I watched a documentary on the death of Stalin for more background.

Hymn sing yesterday at Tom and Peggy’s was wonderful, and I took a cilantro salad based on the one Sandra taught me.  (oh god, the food she fed me…. it was amazing, stellar, eye popping, wonderful). Two bunches cilantro wash the hell out of them pick them over and chop.  One rinsed can kidney beans, make em yourself if you can. A cup of walnuts, broken up.  Rather more garlic than you would think necessary, minced.  Lemon juice all together maybe three tablespoons.  No salt, no pepper.  I’m also going to try this with parsley.

Jeff and Katie went to Wreck Beach yesterday.  I would have gone, but I put out my knee somehow and every time I go up and downstairs my eyebrows bob up and down and I puff and blow in a most elderly way.

I read mOm what I wrote in Madawaska and she laughed in all the right parts. Now on to more serious bits.  It can’t all be waltzes and comedy.

Library run

It has been yonks since I visited the library… I picked up two doorstops, one being the really excellent William T. Vollman novel Europe Central, which is an examination of totalitarianism as it affects the creative mind, set during the period just before and during WWII.  Some reviewer or other said you don’t read Vollman for the plot but for the individual sentences, and he was absolutely right.  Vollman is a powerfully strange individual, but his depiction of Kathe Kollwitz was so amazing I looked it up.  I am looking up much of what  he references on the internet and going to some strange and dark and eerie and interesting places.  He’s also, like Dunnett, a portrait painter and polymath and this impacts the work.  Good times.

I also picked up Part II of the Mark Twain autobiography, but the way it’s put together really sucks and it weighs 5 kilos if it weighs a gram, so I put that one down, even though some of the anecdotes are killer.

Last night filking with Cindy and Tom and Peggy; tonight Birthday Celebration with Mike M and friends; tomorrow hymn sing, back at Tom and Peggy’s.  I just love singing Frobisher Bay with those folks. I took Peggy hazelnuts as a thank offering.

400 words on Tarot for Atheists yesterday.  If I ever get finished with the introduction it will be one of the strangest pieces of atheist literature ever written; I know I’m saying the right things in the worng way, and some of it simply has to be cut but like most writers I don’t edit myself worth a darn. Also practiced lots.

Keith double booked himself for his own birthday party a while back so Paul and Jeff watched Internet’s Own Boy without him, so there, and had barbq chikn.

Time to make pancakes, I promised Jeff.

a reasonably satisfactory day

I got to hang with Katie and Paul, and it was lovely.  We ate on the deck overlooking the Fraser at Wild Rice at the Quay. I didn’t think much of the kangaroo buns (kangaroo meat is gamey) but the chicken wings were the best I’ve ever eaten, and the lamb gyoza and vegetarian spring rolls were esculent, and the gluten free chocolate cake served a la mode was nommers.  Prior to that I hung out with Suzanne (we ARE going to be joint grandmothers, so…) and that was also a most satisfactory visit. Prior to that I hung out with Katie and visited Village de Valeurs and picked up travelling clothes as I don’t have any summer weight pants or shorts.  Prior to that I took Jeff to breakfast.  It was a really really tasty day.  Also showed Otto off and practiced lots.

Today, laundry and packing for the trip east.

The Further Adventures of Keith as told by Keith

Work: Hey Keith, clean out the Fire Urchin tank.

Keith: Can do!

Work: Also, fyi, Fire Urchins are lethally toxic.

Keith:…

-Five minutes later-

Keith: Ouch… uh oh.

Work: Oh you’re okay. The long spines aren’t toxic, just really painful. Are you having trouble breathing? No? Yup, you’re fine.

Keith: Working in an exotic fish store is fun!

Yeah, my brush with death for the day.

 

 

 

This is for Keith’s 28th birthday.  Love ya!

Millicent AB

Thank you SO MUCH to Paul for accompanying me to see Lois and Bob.  We had a wonderful time.

One of our adventures was pretty adventury and I won’t talk about it because no matter how I tried I’d just sound petty, but one of the days I was gone we went to Dinosaur Provincial Park, a world heritage site, and it was stupendous, spectacular, amazing.  We went to the Centrosaurus Bone Bed and Bone Bed Number 50 and saw an owl nest (no baby wols, although they had been spotted) and did NOT see a rattlesnake, phew, and walked where every honey coloured rock was a dinosaur bone.

We also went to Lake Newell where I got into a big argument with a Ring Billed  Gull (it was very funny, it kept flying back and squawking at me in an attempt to get the last squawk) and mostly we hung with dogs (Harley is a black lab and I LOVES HIM, I brushed him repeatedly and he loved on me right back…. and Lazzy is well, a terrier, and I watched the two of them play keepaway with a stick and I laughed until I HURT MY RIBS and the last day I was there Lazzy presented his belly for my approval and strokes) and people, and Bob cooked me an organic local beefsteak that brings tears to my eyes as I recollect it and we had Cambodian style food in Brooks and I admired how enormous the trees are that they planted 30 years back and enjoyed the comfy bed and quiet at night (except when somebody started spraying Roundup at dusk Thursday night, snarl) and really enjoyed the Nissan Maxima I rented and exclusively drove thanks for asking and OMG JULY 1ST.

We drove into Rosemary at dusk July 1st and set up chairs and blankies and watched a small town fireworks display.  It was neither cheesy nor short; it was one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen and I got to be really close to it.  It was a really sincerely trulio Canadian experience and it made me happy. A local country cover band was playing as we pulled up and they were good

Apart from how very hot I was for the second field trip at DPP (I got very tired of the field interpreter and spent a lot of time sitting in the bus) and the mosquitoes as we walked up to the Centrosaurus bone bed (black, ferocious, completely painless as they bit, and perfectly able to handle 30 degree C weather and 40 kph breezes) I enjoyed the entire trip.  Paul as always managed the travelling portion perfectly and all the getting thither and in and out of Calgary was slick.

I brought neither my computer nor my instruments and I brought no cameras.  I wanted memories, happy ones, and I am topped up currently.

It was SO GOOD TO SEE THEM.  I miss my inlaw rellies and I am glad to have sat in their kitchen and caught up with them.

The Good Lands

The good lands are any where the family is. I was in the badlands, walked among the dinosaurs, under the sentinel hoodoos.  I was in nature and the birds flew over me; I got into a very long and impassioned discussion with a seagull

As you all know, English is a language so deficient in terms of kinship that it is as if it has been strip-mined by capitalism. What do you call the former spouse with whom you occasionally travel and are fraternal with? What do you call former and longstanding inlaws, when you were never married to one of their siblings but had kids, mortgage, all that stuff? What do you call a longstanding family friend whose friendship and love demonstrated over time came to be part of the structure of your family? What do you call the relatives you stay in touch with after a really bad breakup?  How do you twist English, which despite its size is short on nuance, into words to which take the experiences of relationship and bind them into something useful and contemporary without being twee or clinical? How many of us have relationships which somehow aren’t important enough to have a word assigned to them and yet are everywhere once you start looking?

I call people who belong to my church my churchsiblings or churchsibs for short; we have us and our trust and our time and our food and our travails and our finances and our deaths and births and miraculous recoveries and dreadful runs of luck and kids who make the world finals and play in Junior A in common; we follow illness, divorce and mature student MAs and wonderful, hilarious children’s pageants with a wonderful sense of being in a large, complex and engrossing dance, which moves along in perfect time with all that is and yet is a very special subset of that Big Dance of which one can imperfectly say, That’s All Folks.

I’m thinking of the word breadrellies.  Can you tell what kind of relatives those would be?

 

Side trip

Although I am still going to Ontario later in July I’m actually leaving with Paul to go see Bob and Lois for three days this morning.

Since it won’t be confirmed space I’ll not be taking Otto, which will be strange…  We’re flying into Calgary and I’ve booked us a car.

I may be too busy to post or somewhere I don’t have easy access so I may just be doing mini posts.

Margot is washing herself right outside my door.  I can hear her little grunts of effort and concentration.  She sounds like a little pig sometimes.  Other times, like a duck.

Katie sent me a link to these two lovely women dancing.

 

A better day

I was having a truly dreadful day, and then Paul called.  When he came over, he didn’t come in the house (I heard the door go, but not his voice) so I went out and looked for him.  He was RAKING GRASS.  After the Epic Mowing of Keith, there was rather a lot of it; Paul claimed he needed it to dry out his compost.  I got him a bag and he absconded with it, yay, thank you.

Then Paul took me for a tour around Deer Lake in a canoe, which was lovely and just the right amount of exercise for my shoulder, and then I bought some beer and watched soccer and a wonderful movie which I highly recommend, Calvary with Brian Gleeson.  It’s a downer but it’s a very interesting and lively downer.  I had never considered what it would be like to be an honest and kindly priest in a town full of previously abused and atheistic parishioners, but it would really suck. And, lots of Irish scenery.

I slept MUCH better last night, surprise, surprise.

 

Farmers Market

After five years we’ve finally gotten to the Burnaby Farmers market.

The radishes are so yummy and crunchily perfect. We came away with pork chops, potatoes, blueberry pie, radishes, carrots, artisanal chocolate (lemon basil OMnomG), snickerdoodles and egg bread. Brilliant, brilliant sunny day in the lower mainland, full of wonderful things to do.

Iran and Argentina are going at it for the World Cup; there was a hilarious joke on the internet this morning which I repeat here for your amusement; “What’s the difference between England and a tea bag?”  “?” “The tea bag stays in the Cup longer.”  Seeing has how my grandad played for the Sons of England futbol club in Saskatoon back in the day, I should prob’ly have more respect.  But no, I really don’t.

It is a strikingly gorgeous day.  I am still feeling the effects of Keith coming over here and helping with the lawn, because a) he just melted me with maternal pride, and b) it really needed to be done and c) I did the weed whipping and my shoulder hurt afterwards but more in a “Ha you used it” not “OMG I’m dying” kinda way.

Dog listens to music.

Sang froid, hot butt

The sang froid is her – she rocks the uneven bars.

The hot butt is me after Paul’s delayed family Indian dinner at Best Quality Sweets on Main St.  I am suffering today, although I didn’t yesterday.  Yes, it’s Too Much Information.  I told Jeff he should be happy there were no leftovers for him or he’d be suffering too.  I noticed neither of the kids put their hands up for the check, but since neither of them read my blog, they won’t feel the rebuke.  For 60 bucks including tip we ate like ogres.  This is a lacto vegetarian restaurant.  The mango lassi was suPERB, the chai tea kinda whatever with weird spice sludge at the end.  I ate so much I had no room for Indian sweets for dessert, which is FULL.

I am about ready to quit being a Unitarian, having reached my load line on denominational bullshit. I won’t of course, it’s just all part of my engagement with the faith.  Nothing’s perfect, including me, and if people want to nice me to death, I can always back away before that last soft word turns into a killing blow.  Also, I am one moody individual, so I just need the mood to die back and I’ll be fine.  A foolish consistency is what’s asked of us when we believe that organized religion is necessary or even possible.

I am NOT a nice person.  I’m nice to my my mother, but so what?  Even the guy who kept two women as sex slaves was nice to his mother.  It’s not a good test…. What I want more than anything else is to keep all my bad behaviours and still be categorized as nice, and that’s when the crazy train really starts to pick up speed.  Woo woo!

Speaking of train whistles, I ran across this article which made me very happy.   My room is at a sonic collection point for train noise (it hits the neighbour’s house, bounces against the garage and then slams into my window) so even though the whistles are 2.5 kilometres away sometimes I feel like I am right on Columbia St.  If NW Council can make it stop I’ll do handsprings.  Mentally of course, I couldn’t even do that when I was little.

There’s a new species of waterbear, from Antarctica.  How sweet is that?

My symphysis pubis spasmed in sympathy.  Ow ow ow ow ow.

 

 

 

For a couple of people

I struggle with wanting you all the time, so please don’t mistake my silence for indifference. It’s just I have to hold myself back because I feel too much. Too often. Too wildly out of my control.
–Tina Tran, “My words don’t say much at all”

Katie quoted John Hiatt on facebook this morning, that’s never a good sign.  I hope she’s okay.

Today I am going to look at the clock and wonder why I’m awake.  Then I’ll check the moon phases and understand that the moon is doing it….

I’m probably going to Ontario 1st week of July or thereabouts.  Depends on my teeth situation. And employment situation, but it’s going to take months for the right job to pop up, so patience is good.

No responses from any job applications yet, but that’s really no surprise.

Haven’t had the chance to go ramble and look at salamanders up at SFU as planned earlier this week.

I’ve started taking vitamin D again.

Pork chops for breakfast!

Well of course you are

Katie posted on facebook today that she is feeling fat.

 

no duh

Of course you are.  You’re expecting!

Jeff got Ableton 9 working on my PC laptop and I’ll be playing with it today.  The idea of just being able to SING into a computer and get a midi file out the other end is amazing.  We shall see. Also it’s on sale… it’s actually dropped enough in price that I can THINK about buying it.

 

Racism

My inner racist got taken for a thorough run this morning, when I received a barely literate and yet pun-enlivened email from the Taxi company subsequent to my angry complaint.

I can’t repeat it because that would be racist.  (Oh look, a really bad pun, which ties into the race of the person writing it, of which the person writing it is COMPLETELY unaware).  But the temptation to be a smart ass and recount the whole epistolary extravaganza is almost killing me.  I sent it to someone who won’t judge me, just so we can both appreciate it.  The thing about racism is that you think you’re doing a good job of fighting it and you turn out to be kidding yourself.  Again.  I’ll have to meditate on this one a good long while.

Lovely time in Victoria, I return refreshed and ready to attack the job market again.

I don’t think my dad is ever going to ask what is bothering me again though… although I’m thrilled to recount that he has now heard Lemming’s Twofer.

 

 

 

In Victoria

But first, a picture of a bear.  Sick moves, brah.

It’s a little overcast here in Victoria this morning but we know that it’s quite temporary.  Soon the sun will be out and it will be quite pleasant.

There is much going on beneath the surface.  We shall see what comes up from the depths in the next few weeks. A great discontent is in me.

The view from the sunroom in Victoria is even more magnificent than normal.  White wisteria is 10 metres up a Douglas fir overhanging the yard; the new paving stones and plant shelving is very handsome.  The deck has been completely redone and as a consequence no longer feels rickety, which is always a good thing.

The Anas hummingbirds have been putting on quite a show for us, zooming around and making quite unnatural noises.  Right now there’s a nuthatch hanging upside down at the suet feeder.

Katie and I are heading back tomorrow and I’m just so grateful, so very grateful, that I have two intelligent and kindly parents to go and visit.  So many people have none, or the ones they have are neither intelligent nor kindly.

I am looking forward to seeing Lexi tomorrow for a crochet lesson. I found my contact with the meetup folks who tat, etc., to be most unsatisfactory (and expensive, in a number of different ways).