Category: Family

Last 24 hours

Skating was wonderful, although I have a blister half an inch across on my calf.  Then, I wrote a song.  I went outside for a second and got inspired and came right back in and sang it into the mp3 recorder.  Slept.  Wrote another song.  Got up.  (Particularly pleased with this most amazing piece of multi tasking, what with the lying in bed and thinking up songs).  Got dressed, and did not realize until I had left the house that not one piece of my clothing was on speaking terms with the next.  Girls, I looked like I had slithered through six closets and only wore what stuck.  Went to church.  Witnessed the single cutest moment I’ve ever seen after a very entertaining and well received children’s pageant.  I’m not going to try to describe it, but I hope there are pictures. Got a phone call from ScaryClown and went to a late lunch with him AND dragged him back here for Primer (neither he nor Keith had seen it, from which you may infer that my gorgeous, vivid, witty and perceptive son is here) and classic Warner Brothers cartoons.

Snow has been falling off and on since church got out.

I swept up straw from the manger this morning.

I had a day with my peeps… Jeff ate his late repast with gusto …. boys killing pixels in the basement.  Beautiful and people-filled day, with music ringing in my ears.  One of the songs I wrote is “Christmas in Vancouver” which is a very Accommodationist-wing-of-contemporary-atheism-anti-hymn, and the other is “Load On”.  The latter is a very Band-ish tune meant to be played trad instrument, light percussion and at least four voices.  Okay, that’s how I hear it in my head.  It’s from Deadwood, when Sol goes to back Bullock’s play with that tomfool popgun his girlfriend Trixie loaned him.  And, like one might reasonably expect, gets shot for his pains.  The song is about Sol loaded up on laudanum before, during and after the extraction of the bullet, and the stuff he raves about while he’s wrecked.  I know, isn’t that the damnedest thing to get an instant song about?  I had sung my song about Al Swearengen earlier in the evening and it made me think about Deadwood, so I guess I was primed for it.  I still can’t believe how fast it came on.

I have a quiet happiness inside me which corresponds to chocolate chip pecan cookies.  Happy Xmas to all reasonable people, in the very broadest humanistic terms and without reference to goshes, I mean gods.

Holy ^%$! Batman

Debbie forwards this gem from the nation’s capital.  There’s more than enough **** to go around in this story.  Calling something a blowback makes it sound like a rough breeze, not feces at high pressure.

I had an amazing morning with Katie here, doing tech support and getting out of her way so she could work on her song. The tech support was trying to find cabling and making sure the inputs were set to record properly in Garageband.  Later in the day, my date, alas, was overcome by weariness from his exertions feasting a friend the previous night at a birthday bash, and cried off… this after texting me at 8:10 this morning that he was just going to sleep.   People nowadays have no idea how to pace themselves (this of course will cause Patricia to burst out laughing when she sees it, since she knows what an utter lightweight I am when it comes to weekend excesses.)  I sang “The Weekend’s Over” to myself, which cheered me immensely, and then worked my way through “Freedom”, “Wish it was Mine” (how I love that song, and the mad crush that prompted it), and about half a dozen other songs.  Seeing Katie with my guitar in her hands this morning nearly made me hyperventilate with excitement and glee.   I got her to visit this site for strummable guitar chords (which makes songwriting so much easier)  After she left (her dad walked her home), I sat down with the piles of sound equipment I got out for her this morning (the USB midi input cable for the Casio keyboard, the mucho expensivo mic which Katie found since I had no clue where the damned thing was, the second best set of headphones, the Kaossilator and associated cables, the laptop of course) and made gamenoise1, and that’s only a fraction of the extremely cool music I composed today. Getting more callouses on my fingers, seeing both my kids and writing tunes have put me in a very happy mood… and I didn’t cook dinner, I ordered pizza and then made Jeff pay for it.  Tra la la.  Oh, and I watched the boys kill zombies, because of course, Elferd Ito is in the house.  (L4D2, Left for dead 2, bad pun.)

When dinosaurs roamed the earth

… and I lived in Ottawa, somebody came door to door asking my parents what they thought about contemporary television.  My parents said they hated Disney stuff because parents were characterized as idiots, and preferred The Addams Family because the parents were actually parents, and there was love and affection and mutual support in the household.  Further to that theme, a little somethin’somethin’ from the intarwebs.  Happy Saturday, nautilus3 and Loki!

Angry and perturbed turns into meh, and then huh, and then te he.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday angry and perturbed, but as is typical for me, once I figured out what to do about it, I quit being angry and perturbed.  Continue reading Angry and perturbed turns into meh, and then huh, and then te he.

Various kinds of news

Jeff took me out for wiener schnitzel at Balkan House yesterday.  It is a truly superior meal.  For the price you cannot beat it.

I have reduced my beer consumption a great deal… but that will get fixed tonight.  Today Katie is 21 and I’m taking her to Drink in New West with a bunch of her friends.  I don’t think I’ll stay too late, drinking with your children’s friends is like saying you don’t have friends of your own.  At least it’s one bus ride home, for both of us.

My brain turned to mush when This Guy called and said school stuff will prevent him from seeing me this weekend, but then my brain started functioning again as I went into planning mode.  Hopefully I’ll see him some time early next week. Cue the evil grin.

According to twitter world famous Canadian writers message each other all the time about incredibly trivial stuff (for example the slug post from yesterday started as a tweet from Margaret Atwood), Nathan Fillion is having a bromance with Seamus Dever (co-star on Castle), and Dita Von Teese just ordered a “thanksgiving in a box” from the American Store in Paris.  These little peeps into other people’s lives are kinda cool, actually.  It’s interesting to see which celebrities ‘get’ twitter and which don’t.

I follow Stephen Harper; all his tweets ever do is say exactly what he is doing at a certain time.  It’s like a GPS for the PM.  Never any opinions expressed… just where he is.  I know what John would say about that if he was still alive….

A number of celebrities (referred to by Perez Hilton as celebutards) are already in train to be sued by people they have (while high as f*****g kites if the internal textual evidence is to be believed) slandered.  Other celebrities somehow think that misspelling every second word and sounding like an ignorant, lazy, disloyal chenozzle is, too use the parlance of happier times, cool.  As a single example, Courtney Love.

Other celebs, like Weird Al Yankovic, tweet stuff like this, as of twelve minutes ago…


Didn’t see anybody famous sitting in First Class. If this plane crashes, I am TOTALLY getting the headline!

Which you have to admit is kinda hilarious, spelled correctly, and provides insight into how he thinks.

John Cleese’s tweets are alternately content laden “I am here with so and so” and funny.  Bruce Sterling is always going off about exotic locales in Europa – but this morning he linked to a Pop Mechanics article about Robert Heinlein’s house.  William Gibson passes along Amazon reviews from his wife (who must be one of the funniest women who ever lived, if her taste is anything to go by).  So yes, I’m enjoying twitter.

Anyway, I’m off to a church meeting.  Everybody, as you were.

It is with sadness and relief that I relate my woeful tidings

Uncle Dave died this morning.  I will always hold him in my heart as a vibrant, somewhat ornery, disciplined, fun, rational person, whom it was an honour to know and a deeper honour to be family with.  I see him sitting on the back deck at the Augur Inn, back on 2nd St, laughing and talking and eating and smoking his pipe after a hard day arguing with the walls, or the flooring, or mudding, mudding, mudding.  Remember the time he and Paul tried to set fire to the house? … yeah, it’s funny now.   I’d be in the kitchen, listening to him and Paul laughing uproariously, and thinking how very happy I was.  That’s the image I will hold. So many anecdotes, about his travels, his time with the Princess Pats, his time on the boat in Australia.

I light a candle for Alyssa and D. and the girls, Paige and Chloe.  I am thankful beyond words that he died at home with his loved ones around him and I so feel for Alyssa, who took herself to the end of her strength to perform this last office of love.  I didn’t cry on the phone with mOm this morning, but I’m sure as hell crying now.

I had breakfast over at Paul and Keith’s so I was there when Jeff called me, and now Paul and Keith know too.  I just called Katie.  It’s not like the world is so full of good human beings that we can suffer the loss of one without impact……

Paul and Keith are back today

kira REALLY misses them.

(Cat and Parrot video.)  When they are little I just eat them.  When they’re big, they’re kinda hawt.

I sometimes wish I could make money out of my fetishes, but then I read things like this and decide to stick with regular paid employment.

This story about Libyan freedom fighters, Gadhafi’s kid (Saif al Islam al Gadhafi) and a challenge to the moral leadership of al-Qaeda is remarkable, if true.

In a Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber says I don’t mean to be crude, but it appears that testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: f*** it or kill it. Perhaps that is true, but I would add three items to that list: “Be First” and “Be Best” and “Submit your will to no one else”.  That is certainly how I have seen testosterone, properly utilized, play out in a man’s life.

On this Remembrance Day, let us remember the fallen dead, the falling dead, in all the past, present and future wars.  As the candles are lit, as the hiss of the wicks and the warm smell of beeswax fills the shrine, remember the dead.

Holy cow and other comments.

I didn’t realize it until I went to the translink.ca site this morning, but I am now One Bus Ride from church.  I walk out to the Kingsway, get on the 112, and it takes me straight to church.

This makes me very, very happy, and probably means I’ll be doing a lot more church stuff.  I mean, it’s right there!  No more not going to church because I want a lift!

Later on today I am going to go off to a Tim Horton’s and – yet again – see if a guy I’ve talked to on the phone a couple of times is going to actually show.  I don’t think Timmy Ho’s has wireless, though.  I may bring a small mending project just to keep myself out of trouble.

Lady Miss Banjola was robbed at gunpoint the other day – at work I hasten to add.  She’s fine; she is one of these people who does not get upset about the normal things people get upset about.  Exciting times we live in.

My unca Dave is not eating very much, but he talked to mOm on the phone for a while the other day, and it’s little things like that that keep us going.

Keith and Paul are off to see Lois at some point.  I imagine somebody will tell me eventually exactly when I am supposed to feed the Kira critter.

Margot has abrumptly (sorry, this was a word emitted by one of the Xantrex overlords some years ago, and I liked it so much I kept it) decided to quit washing her rear end.  I will give her a day or so to smarten up and then it’s off to the groomer to get all her butt hair shaved off.  I tried shaving it but my clippers are anaemic to the point of mollescence and I’m terrified to cut her fur with scissors.

Busy day

Today I am going to go and see a music teacher who lives close by to see if I can take lessons; then I’m going up to my old workplace for lunch; then I’m going to Surrey for a while, and then I should be home for supper.  This is the most I’ve been on transit since the fireworks last summer.

Last night Tom and Peggy and Paul and Keith came over for broiled pork chop, cauliflower and home made cheese sauce, salad, cole slaw, corn and garlic bread.  Dessert was fresh fruit and pecan torte. It was all nommers.  Then we sang and played for a while.

I light a candle for everybody killed and injured at Fort Hood yesterday.   I am sure there will be an uptick in attacks on furrin brown people as a consequence.  I light a candle for the man who thought he could made a contribution to world peace by slaughtering his fellow soldiers.  It’s just so grisly, and so wrong.