we were expecting lunch

Jeff and I have been expecting lunch and the Keith who was going to make it, but I can only assume he’ll breeze in late or call in apology. In the meantime we had pastries delivered.  NYA HA HA HA HA HA HA

LATER: He’s fine, no huhu, and I’ve got a very nice lentil soup going so I didn’t miss much and I made cinnamon buns. That’s sort of Keith’s favourite thing that I make. Oh well he missed it, Jeff will be fine. Paul had a gerontology appointment this morning and something else happened and that cleaned Keith out for the day. I know how he feels. On the positive side there’s movement on a rental possibility.

excelsior or word to that effect

Helped Paul dejunk yesterday. Always painful for two people with ADD who lived together for a quarter of a century. Of course I was essentially dejunking JOHN’s stuff and when did he die exactly? Anyway, there was his photo book from his trip to Okinawa, the brown belt, the blue belt, a couple of his shirts, a whole bunch of his gloves. Everything but the photo book off to the Goodwill. Regular books, too. “Loving what is” ?? – rather that you weren’t there at all, actually. Recycled the notes for his Avionics course (I asked Paul to do that, I couldn’t face tossing so much of his work, but he’ll never need it again.) I found yet another one of John’s filk books, this one more tailored to group work, and absconded with that, also a watch that I don’t know works. I also found a first season DVD set of Rocky and Bullwinkle, that one will be a keeper for sure. Moved any toys or kid stuff into the appropriate place.

He expected me to mock him for how many self-help books he has. Oh, no honey. You fought to understand yourself your whole life.

Really felt like I’d helped. We went for a walk in the POURING, ASS FREEZING COLD RAIN and then continued the work and then I went home. I hope to have the energy to do my own dejunking today.

Wordle in 4 – shoulda been 3 – one top five score in Lumosity – 288 words on fic – absolutely no other labour performed because I was a tired piglet after my morning with the mouse turds and the ex husband and the finding of some of my stuff in with his….

Although I’m not a fan of the carceral state the prospect of Tht Fcking Gy being forced to deal with arrests and lawsuits and depositions for the rest of his (hopefully short) natural life does please me.

Someone wanted me to advice who’s my fave Star Wars character. There he is, Captain Carson Teva, played with affable steel by Canadian Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Anybody who weeps in sentimental gratitude when he’s given a chance to wear Biggs’ helmet from the original Star Wars deserves the role. (That’s not what he’s wearing in this photo btw.)

Off to Paul’s today

Going to help with packing and take us for a walk.

Wordle in 5, 1646 words on ‘The Instructor’ yesterday, with none expected today because of my errands. Lumosity one top score the rest abysmal dreck. I made myself coffee and toasted a sourdough muffin. I’m pretty well used to not keeping cream in the house any more, sigh; my liver has thanked me.

Bakhmut’s still under siege. Putin visited military headquarters in Kherson and Zelenskyy visited the front in Avdiivka.

China’s mediated the first progress in the Yemen war in years; Saudi Arabia and Iran may reopen embassies. Given that 60% of Yemeni deaths since 2015 are directly attributable to the war (via food insecurity and zero health care) and that a million people there have been affected by the cholera epidemic the faster peace comes the better and I don’t care who brokers it.

There’s a yummy beef and tomato and onions mix for wraps in the fridge and also a very nice lentil tofu stew. Sounds bland, but with turmeric, ginger, half a lime, cumin, black pepper, cayenne and plenty garlic it’s anything but. The tofu got cooked in a spice mix but it all ended up incorporated in the stew and it is quite yummy. A bit salty for the diet because for all the veggie ingredients leading one to think it’s vegan, I cooked it in chicken stock (I didn’t want it going bad in the fridge).

Twitter is being really weird and gross and they just took the bans off dead-naming trans people (using what they were named at birth rather than their chosen name for transition) and it’s OPEN SEASON on trans people in a way that was obvious enough before but is now a tidal wave of bigoted speech. Trust trans people to know their own gender enough that you do not need to question them about it.

seven percent of parents regret having children.

one percent of trans people regret transitioning.

IT’S A VERY SUCCESSFUL SOCIO-MEDICAL PROCEDURE, quit second guessing trans people and spending all your chocolate coin attention on the ‘poor parents’ who have been ‘cheated’ of the ‘child they were meant to have’ BLEUCH I hate people who think like that NONE OF US FUCKING GET THE KID WE WANT we get the kid we get and whining about it is rude to everyone and makes you look like a gurning nithing. (gur-ning nye-ðing aka a facepulling poltroon)

I slept GREAT but not ENOUGH so I imagine I’ll be napping this afternoon.

So tempted to write Elizabeth Holmes in jail and mock the living shit out of her but better people have more claim to my time LOL. She honestly believed that people like her can’t go to jail well just ask Martha Stewart she did five months and is still proclaiming her innocence.

discussion of diseases

Morgellon’s, today… my response to a post

 

As someone with both the mental health and the physical promptings to end up a victim of this disease, let me tell you that there are three things that feed into this ailment:
You have to already be an anxious person, which is an easy problem to have.
You have to have sensations of insects crawling or digging in your skin, in particular locations, repetitively, which is easy to have if you’re working on diabetes or nervous system problems. One can also get it psychogenically.
You have to have little benign growths of the skin which when you pick at them seem to have filaments in them. They’re most likely keratoses of some kind.
Your anxiety makes you want to find a cause for the ‘formication’ (tactile hallucinations of insects crawling on you.) Then you start ‘really digging’ and you now are anxiously trying to get rid of your ‘bugs’.
When I’m lying in bed at night, feeling like I’m covered with crawling, biting insects, I remind myself that it isn’t real – it’s an artefact of my aging nervous system. Sometimes there’s a real insect in my bed, but they move – the places that my nervous system says I’m being bitten or crawled on DO NOT.
Please have sympathy for people with this ailment. It’s a bear to treat and it’s horrible to live with…. I have most of the symptoms but I don’t have the disease because I know I don’t have bugs.

 

 

Paul got eight bags of clothes out the door yesterday in preparation for packing. I am so proud of him I could explode. He still accused me of taking away his drivers licence and I didn’t get angry. I just walked him through what happened again and told him that he was doing the right thing.

You don’t stop loving people when they change – some people say you shouldn’t but that’s not right either. I’m having to change my behaviour and that’s okay, my parents modelled it for me. I know I’ll get downcast, upset, frustrated, sad. The work doesn’t care. And I wrote 850 words yesterday and it was glorious, and set like a pearl in the rest of my day.

better today

Although my Lumosity scores tanked. I mean really, do I have a brain at all. Wordle in 5. 281 words yesterday on TB.

I don’t spend much time talking about it on my blog, but my despair and anger over the reproductive health situation in the US is immense, and I don’t really think the republicans WANT to tank the US birth rate even more, but I think that’s what’s going to happen. It all smacks of religiosity and panic and eugenics, and I find it horrifying. Anyway, so many young women instead of using birth control will be using a gun instead – self-reports of women under 30 going for bilateral salpingectomies are skyrocketing on social media. Women are sharing the names of US doctors who will perform this no questions asked without consulting spouses…. Can’t force birth on a woman in that situation, unless you’re kidnapping her and implanting the fetuses of wealthy men, which I suppose is the next step for these fucking assholes. I’m long out of the game, but I ask you to spare a thought for the women of reproductive age in the family who are feeling all this socio-legal grinding on the pillars of their lives with more dread than I.

I don’t spend much time talking about it on my blog, but I’m still getting the occasional kudo on AO3 even though I locked down my account so it’s only available to members.

Had a really productive and helpful conversation on the phone with Keith yesterday.

I am going to drink some coffee and try to get a little more cheerful and fold my laundry.

Apparently Putin’s so desperate for actionable intelligence that he’s authorized hacking into Ukrainian coffee shops’ security cameras.  Eye…. roll….

amusement

how is it, the elderly woman remarked, that all she did was volunteer to print the agenda and take minutes and somehow she ended up with most of the action items. So the family meeting happened, there were no children present, and I got most of the action items. This seemed to be an arrangement that everyone was happy with.

This morning I need to contact Keith and find out if we’re coordinating a trip to church or he’s going by himself.

I know I got things done yesterday (I came home from the meeting with a whole cooked chicken and chocolate ice cream and I’m pretty sure I emptied the dishwasher) but it all fades in my memory thanks to the emotional challenge of the meeting. I so feel for Paul! but Katie and Keith get a round of applause for what they’ve been doing, which is facing up to the housing disaster in their immediate future.

Keith and Paul DO NOT WANT to break the household up. A replacement apartment or dwelling to take them is at least fifteen hundred dollars more than what they have and what they have is steps from untenable anyway. Katie’s been carrying more than her portion of the rent and pretty much all the groceries since she moved in – and she MADE ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS AND DID MOST OF THE PACKING FOR THE LAST MOVE –  and she needs a break from being the pack mule. Katie can’t help but want to since she’s exhausted and wants to concentrate on her boys. She and Dax have decided not to live together until they have a few more things sorted out and that’s very mature of them. (But it will happen eventually is the hoped for outcome….)

And of course my mood was altered even further when I heard Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” for the first time yesterday and cried and cried and cried because I couldn’t stop. It’s about the experience of having dementia from the inside and it is at once one of the bleakest and most sympathetic songs I ever heard, breathing past her cthonic voice and the simple piano accompaniment.

Oh well. Off to do some of the things I promised I would do. And it’s not like I didn’t see it coming. Ask for the minutes, get the hours, I say.

Jeff and I are very much wishing to thank Dave D for his recommendation of “Endeavour” because we just consumed the first series with happiness. It’s quite a period piece (early 60s) and the scripts are thoughtful and not peppered with 21st c neologisms.

Ordinary Monday

The UConn Huskies won it all at ‘Squeaky-Squeaky Time’ which is how we refer to March Madness.

Two best of scores in Lumosity, Wordle in 3 and it only took 20 seconds, and I think I wrote two words yesterday.

Since I was up at 1 after going to bed at the regular time, I napped quite extensively. Got a coffee in my belleh right now and I’m about to label some of the family history books mOm sent us and then take them to their new home downstairs since I poached the shelf they were in for my own room.

We ordered fish for supper. It was really good.

Ran the dishwasher, emptied and refilled it, also did me a load of laundry so I am ONCE AGAIN CAUGHT UP …. can you fathom it.

For Trotsky Tuesday, enjoy: A rebellion.

A reminder that I wouldn’t have my current crop of grandchildren if Paul’s Great grandmother hadn’t refused to get on the Titanic.

Today I’m off to Caspell Junction in the morning to make travel arrangements for Jim’s Celebration of Life and talk about the garage sale. I’ll either take Paul for a walk or we’ll run errands somewhere in there. Moar Later.

 

 

recycling

I read on reddit that a great way to deal with paper if you don’t want to shred it (Jeff has a shredder but I have A LOT OF PAPER TO SHRED) is to turn it into papier mâché and yup, that works – I experimented with 20 year old tax returns yesterday.

Happy Easter for those who celebrate! Reread (or read, lol) my King Jesus homily if you’re in the mood.

Continue reading recycling

busy day yesterday

I did my normal morning stuff and then communicated a bunch with Katie. I got a couple of rental applications queried and took what I’d printed out over to her to fill it out (I checked her work) and provided all the stamps and envelopes and put it in the mailbox for her. It was lovely to interact with her because she was un-surrounded by children and could complete a thought. It was sad to interact with her because she once again has to pack up her entire life and move on and can look forward to a lot of domestic strife in the meantime. Anyway I was helping her look for coops inside a three km radius, so that kept me busy part of the day.

Continue reading busy day yesterday

fix fix fix

Got three pieces of ‘finding a place to live’ mail into the post box today for Katie, picked up a few treats on the way home.

She’s at the house by herself; Alex is off to Suzanne’s and Ryker’s with his da. She was heavily engaged with the laundry when I arrived but took a break to fill out some paperwork for a coop.

Now that I’ve actually expended some effort on the problem for today, I have done my best for my family and that is enough for now, and I can eat my candy bar and watch TV knowing that I am not a complete lazy bumme.

Garage sale?

I will try to help out as I can with the housing situation with the kids but good god. My mind is just whirling. And it could be me and Jeff in a minute, so it’s really making me into a VAST vat of STEW. (Keith whomped up some of his thyme flavoured stew yesterday. My only contribution was washing the spuds. I tried the Beyond Meat burger but texturally it just doesn’t do it, I prefer it in chili.)

But I can’t DO anything. Not at the moment. I must find other things to do than stew. I did talk to Paul about a garage sale and he seemed glad of the offer of help.

Oreo shoulder surfed on me yesterday THREE TIMES. Purring ferociously the entire time. She did it long enough that Paul took a picture but I haven’t received it yet because I had to text it to Katie using Paul’s phone and she’s a little thrawn at the moment.

Alex has bright dyed red hair now. He loves it.

The last of the laundry is dry but not put away – this last load was almost entirely mismatched socks LOL. I can stop buy socks if I have enough of them, and pretty soon I will.

Leftover palak paneer for breakfast; cooked pork chomps, taters, broccoli, mushrooms and carrots for supper last night. Should be some sign of my mental state coming home yesterday that I didn’t think to consult with Jeff, who had already eaten… Today marinated ginger tofu with beansprouts and rice vermicelli in some kind sauce. And I got to eat that half melon.

Only 1 top score in Lumosity (again, tanking scores…) and the only writing yesterday was social media and an attempt to make a poem out of a several years old and quite expired to do list.

Trans Day of Visibility today. There’s a rally at Grandview Park at 3:30.

pleasant times

Lovely indoor walk with Paul yesterday at Lougheed. He seems very beaten down and oppressed by his illness but cheered up for the walk. It always cheers folks up to eat, so we got some lo mai gai, which was particularly fine in comparison with previous outings, and there was a lone har gaw in there because they were out of enough lo mai gai to fulfil my order, and the hot and sour soup was as good as I ever remember it being there. We went to Cobb’s but I didn’t buy treats, just spongy crusty white bread which is my kryptonite for stuff I’m s’posed to lay off for my liver.

Continue reading pleasant times

goodness I slept late

I have no idea how that happened. (10 mg THC lozenge rolls tiny cartoon eyes). Alex is still passed out but he’s stirring so he’ll be up soon. I will not be partaking for the sake of my fatty liver, but we’ll go to Tim Hortons and get treats plus orange juice for Alex.

Sent the ‘Gamer Uncle’ photo to Suzanne, who said bwa ha ha and advised me of such by return email. Keith is working very hard to be a good rellie to Suzanne, and it’s working because she adores him (most especially for his efforts with Ryker – who, just in case anyone hasn’t been paying attention, also adores Keith – and his being committed to cooking her gluten free.)

Battle Cats, Alex’s latest game, has very compelling music… so compelling that Alex feels compelled to sing along with it (he misses like one note in a hundred, so that makes me feel good too.)

 

Scales on a moth wing from a microphotography contest
Scales on a moth wing, Alex’s new desktop pic.

Wordle in three HURRRAAHHH, Lumosity no top scores, 2242 words on Instructor, 23321 words on T.B.

Errybuddy have a good day yall.

little bit of everything day

Yesterday I got a key to the Junction FINALEMENT jfc and did a teeny bit of child care coverage while Keith had to run errands and then we put away the groceries that were delivered and Rob W was in the middle of moving and took a two teacup restorative break and we caught up.

Later me and Jeff and Mike watched Frank Grillo and Beau Knapp in Little Dixie, an unapologetically violent and cynical movie with a happy ending.

Today FILKING at Peggy’s

22847 TB, 835 words on new fic.

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