Category: Friends

video and audio

I found a tape of me and John singing, at a coffeehouse or something.  Don’t know how old it is.  He starts off singing Demon Java.  Jeff is going to transfer it into more easy media for me.

The house is a LOT more secure (good luck trying to kick the doors in) now that the locksmith has done his thing.

I forgot to mention that one of the really amazing things about the Cavalcade of Cheese on Tuesday was the soundtrack.  Patricia’s friends make AMAZING mix tapes.  I’m so old I still call them mix tapes.

Butter chicken, height-of-summer salad and rice pudding with strawberries and nectarines last night.  It was a darned good meal if I do say so.  Height-of-summer salad is purple onion, peppers of various colours, mango, and tomato, all chopped into even(ish) pieces in a raspberry dressing.  For the rice pudding, I cut up the fruit and briefly soaked it in rum, allspice and sugar, then turned it into the pudding and cooked it.  Jeff om-nom-nommed like a good thing.

Jeff predicted (but I note in my blog of April 29th that I don’t mention it was his idea) that NCIS LA would come to pass, and so it has. The new series debuts 22 September.

Here’s video of the Wednesday night fireworks.

so much is happening!

Or nothing, depending on how you look at it.

Last night I went to the opening fireworks (Canada) and it KICKED ASS.  The theme was the Wizard of Oz and they did an amazing job of synching up the fireworks, and the colours and patterns, to the music.  I recorded it on my dinky camera; looks like shite but at least I have a souvenir.

The ride downtown last night was difficult; the ride back was scary.  I am SO glad Keith came with me because he was the only thing preventing me from having a full on anxiety attack, so quiet and calm and martial artsish was he.  Suffice it to say that I came a micron from getting backwashed in bear spray.  I didn’t, but it was a near thing.  The cop presence was beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Vancouver. If this is what the future looks like, it can kiss my ass.  I was deaf after I got off the Skytrain – the noise level was incredible – and I had had to ask one particularly lungworthy native chick to kindly please stop yelling in my ear.  (“KAYLA YOU STUPID BITCH BRING ME THE CAMERA I WANNA SEE THE PICTURES!” over&over&over).

It was great to see Alex and Rob and get the benefit of their roof deck once more – unimpeded view and lovely company.  Darwin made little happy bird noises all the way through the display, which was civilized of him; Alex was concerned he might scream through the whole thing, having been so rudely awakened and hauled upstairs.  Alex put on a lovely spread as always.  Cheesy, cheesy goodness! Paté!

Today, I SLEPT IN.  I was supposed to be at Suzanne’s for 9 and woke up at 9:35.  What to do?  No change, no bus tickets; didn’t want to take a cab, so guess what, I rode.  (Thanks Keith for the tire pumping).  The trip there was a breeze, being almost all downhill, and the trip back I took in stages, stopping off to get foodicles for dinner for Jeff and me.  Thanks to Leeanne and Patricia for getting me more inclined to ride; I was amazed, given how out of shape I am, how good I feel now. I mean, I feel really good.

Anyway, Suzanne and I had a good old chinwag and caught up about  the kids and their various interesting life frolics, and then I found out she’s never been to Wreck Beach. This is an outrage!  I immediately called Mike and he agreed this is a problem we should immediately fix, like maybe tomorrow.  I will call her and give her a head’s up.

I rode (okay, that hill above Royal Ave I walked) home, stopping off at the bank and Joe’s Farm Market and Farm Town Meats, getting a mango, a tomato, a red pepper, and orange pepper and a purple onion, and also chicken breasts and pork chomps, and coconut milk for the rice, as when I called Jeff I offered him the option of bbq chomps or butter chicken, and he immediately said butter chicken.  That’s gonna be yummy.  I already made the salad, and as soon as I get off here I’m going to finish cleaning up the kitchen and maybe start running a load of laundry, and then I am going to rearrange my room so I can have all of my recording equipment and musical instruments out at once without difficulty.

I missed the locksmith by literally 7 minutes but that’s not too surprising given that he said he’d be by on Tuesday, and does today look like Tuesday to you?  A good tradesman is hard to find.

Tanya is thinking of dropping by with babby again today.  Happy me.  I have to be here for the rest of the day anyway, visitors would be so nice!

Wreck yesterday

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In the morning I loafed and lazed, squeezed in a grocery shop, and then reverted to dawdling and doodling; around 1 Mike came and fetched me in the convertible, and then we went down to New West to get Katie and Kashka.  (One half of the reality show girls).  Kashka is covered with ink from her ears to her ankles, including Betty Boop as a skeleton, which is freaky, because Betty Boop’s skull looks exactly how I would imagine Margot’s skull to look.

It was very pleasant on the beach.  There was a kicking breeze all day, and it was not from the usual angle, and pushed the incoming tide up the beach.

At first Mike tried to fly his approx 4 square meter kite but the breeze was so stiff he was getting dragged 10 and 15 meters down the beach, which I watched with the kind of chill consternation which is all you can muster when you’re feeling so mellow.  Then he tried smaller kites, which was much more successful, and provided us all with much in the way of aesthetics.

Liz, Kashka’s ex, joined us.  I’d met her when we were still living at the Augur Inn and really liked her; I still do.

As the tide came in (Mike always checks the tide tables and parked us WELL up the beach) the breeze shifted until it was straight onshore.  Surf’s up kids!  The girls were bobbing up and down in the waves several times – they’d come back out to warm up and then go back in.  I asked Katie if it was awkward to go the the beach with mom and she just laughed and said after ten years she was used to it.  And it’s been ten years since we started going as a family.

Odd, isn’t it?  I got in to waist height and let a couple of waves slam into me, because I wanted to say I had gone in and had some idea of the physical exhilaration of it all, but I’m 50, and the idea of trashing the bottoms of my feet and then having to climb all 407 stairs (counts vary!) had very little appeal, and at the end, the girls complained that their boobs had been thrown around so much they were all sore.  Mmmm… My kind of fun doesn’t have that kind of toll, but that’s just me being lazy again.  Also, Mike and Liz and Kashka and Katie all complained about how much salt water they swallowed.  Ick.

A man with t shirts and beaters went by; one showed a parody of a Starbucks logo with beers and WRECK BEACH instead of STARBUCKS, and the mermaid wearing sunglasses.  Kashka leaped up and said, “I want one!” so I obliged her.  I laughed, “All your mother’s many kindnesses to Katie are coming back for YOUR benefit, how annoyed Suzanne will be!”  But no probs, I’ll be seeing Suzanne later this week to catch up on the buzz.  Katie is living rent free at Kat and Kashka’s, so I am being politic.

I ate the best hotdog ever on the beach.  Those three jalapeños I added made for just the right amount of heat.

I wrote a song on Mike’s parlour Larrivée – no lyrics yet. Which reminds me I should pick up my guitar and make sure the tune is still there.   I believe so.

The GVRD but not the cops were on the beach.

All in all, it was a lovely, lovely day, and I got home around 7:45, very crisp around the edges. Tonight, off to see Patricia for the long promised Cavalcade of Cheese.

One thing and another

Yesterday… I mean apart from getting ZERO done on my life list, I had something resembling a perfect day.  I got to see my kids and Paul as we chatted about the job hunt for the kids (got some things straight). I got fed a yummy tortilla lunch which Paul and Keith and Katie assembled; later I did a kindness for someone which triggered him buying me sufficiency of beer for the nonce.  Happiness is a fridge full of Corona.

I got to visit with Tre.  Logos, but that’s one cute babby.  Battery and Tanya and Jeff and I laughed and chatted and had a very pleasant time while I got the grisly details of the birth, none of which are for public consumption.  The result, a calm but busy 6 week old who developmentally is a month ahead (REALLY strong), is what counts.

Margot couldn’t stand the lack of focus on her, and came into the livingroom to (very ladylike) hork up some grass, because the babby was being changed at the same time…

The weather, after a little overcast, was perfect all day.

Then, hung out for a while not doing much of anything and Mike came by and took me and Keith and Jeff to the Richmond Night Market, where I bought nothing but REALLY GOOD kettle corn, and where I watched my beautiful son metamorphose into a steely eyed killer (there was a mini-midway, and he shot enough pins to get me a little purple bear (not exactly worth the five bucks he paid to play…. but I digress as usual and besides, Miss Margot is eviscerating it as I type, so its purpose has been revealed)) and after we drove away Mike took us to his cefu’s traditional chinese martial arts club (Mike corrected me, Jack is NOT his cefu, Galen is.  Men can be so STERN when you get things wrong) in an industrial park in Richmond (and boy, has he done a pile of work on that place to help Jack get ready) and then I got to watch the north shore skyline etched against a sunset sky while the wind whipped through my hair.  Ah, convertibles. And I cried a little bit, because I am so happy, and so grateful to be living here, surrounded by such loving friends and family. Side note, John Caspell trained with Jack.  Everything is deeply intertwingled.

When we got home, TrueBlood.  Not enough Eric; no Pam, not enough Jessica.  But considering what the first four episodes of the season were like, I am willing to cut some slack.

Can you tell I had a perfect day?

And today, instead of working, I’m going with daughter Katie and Mike to the beach.  My happiness is like a golden thread.

I would like to give special, extra, crunchy golden props to Jeff, who has been leaving the real for real audio of the Apollo 11 mission running for the last couple of days during waking hours.  It’s been an ongoing reminder of why I’m an atheist.

Until we saw the Earth rise over the moon, I don’t think the fundamental unity of human life, and its fragility, had ever been so starkly drawn.  And it wasn’t the Pope or Mohammad, peace be upon him, what got us there.

Satisfying day.

I have really and officially put Weekend’s Over to bed; now I’m trying to make Evening News sound like the way I sing it.  I was very pleased to see how much work I’d already done on that tune; now all I have to do is fix bars 56 through 70, which have both tune and timing issues, add the lyrics, and I can move that one over to the DONE pile.  I Must Admit it Troubles Me is SEVERELY pissing me off, I cannot figure out what time signature it’s in.  I am suspecting it’s in eight.  Two did not seem to work.  Neither four.  Not being able to read music, and having a severe mental block about learning, is a drip drag, mah friends.  Worked more on the atheist liturgy.

Paul came by yesterday with the Eskimo hunters (two pieces of felt art my mOm made 17 billion years ago which I got framed about 10 years ago and stayed at Planet Bachelor until I had walls for them) and also the sewing machine and sewing kit, and took away boxes for packing (he and Keith are moving in a couple of weeks to the apartment downstairs from them) and also a bunch of book donations for Value Village. Thank you Paul!

I went to my bedroom, inspected my underwear drawer for sacrificial offerings, and then went downstairs and measured Jeff’s coffee table.  Then I came back upstairs and cracked open the sewing kit, which can haz LOTS of Velcro.  I love sewing with Velcro.  I took out 5 feet of black nylon strap webbing (for a packsack project I never even started) sewed four inches of Velcro on either end, and then cut up a pair of navy tights and sewed seven pockets and made a remote caddy for Jeff.  It holds ALL the remotes for the downstairs system – all 6 of them – plus I made an extra pocket for the end so he could either put the wireless xbox controller in there or something else.  I phoned him, all excited, because once I’d done the measurements and visualized it, it took less than 20 minutes to do it, and I didn’t have to spend any money on the project because everything was already in the sewing kit.  Except why IS it that every time I borrow the sewing machine I have to wind a bobbin?  I’m not complaining, I kinda like doing that too.  Jeff laughed and told me to sew Holy Moly’s eyes back on if I was feeling so inspired.  So I did that too.

Holy Moly is a part of our childhood.  mOm made this pointy nosed mole cushiony thing with a multicoloured body and big brown and yellow eyes.  He must be 45 years old if he’s a day.  Anyway, Jeff ended up with him and he lives in the AV room, along with baby Cthulhu (from Lexi), Pirate Ducky (from Archie McPhee in Seattle), and Nautiloid (from mOm).  Various other stuffed animals mOm made are peering down from assorted vantage points in the house, including a blue baby heffalump and a knitted baby tiger.

The Ladybones and Katie’s two salon heads are arranged above the hutch in the living room.  If you don’t like severed heads… don’t look up! There’s a little shrine to John in the living room; the embroidered dragon has his earrings sitting in front of it.

The locksmith showed up and we are going to get new strikeplates for the doors, get a new door handle for the back door and of course this is not being paid for by the landlord, but while the deadbolts are okay the doors are trash from having been repeatedly kicked in (oh joy) so they need the reinforcement.  Then we’ll get the alarm system activated, but we figured there was no point activating the alarm when the doors were such a disaster.

What else happened yesterday…. Mike asked what I was doing that evening, and I said, “Feeding you!” and so I fed him and then called Keith to get over.  While I was prepping for and cleaning up after dinner Mike played guitar.  So nice – and he’s learning new tunes!  and then we re-watched Trueblood 3 and 4, neither of which Mike had seen.  Episode three is SO much fun.

I am thinking of doing something I haven’t done for years…. go to a movie by myself.  Harry Potter’s at the Dolphin at 1 pm.  If I get enough work done this morning I will go.

Pondfilk

Pondfilk / John’s memorial was great.  A neighbourhood stranger wandered in with his daughter and picked up the guitar and started singing Wish You Were Here and THAT was the point I had to flee.  I like two people singing that.  One of them is me, and the other is Mike, and this guy’s version was raucous and came close to being guitar abuse.

I wandered around the pond, talking to Katie on my cell phone, and cherishing the tech that allows me to do that, and all the men and women who maintain the network… because I could BE there for her while she was crying and unhappy about her life.  I told her to quit worrying so hard about finding a job.  To tell her to stop feeling bad about Dax – who has another girlfriend named Kayla now – is pointless, so I didn’t try that.  And I talked to her for 45 minutes.

My Unca Dave is going back for more radiation therapy in Kelowna next month.  He had a health blowout that sounded, and was, very scary, and I got the description from his own mouth yesterday in a phone conversation.  I chaffed him – people who are quite sick get sick of being treated with a pall of frightened solicitude, so I decided to be bracing, rather than go all, There There on him. 

Paul turned up at Pondside about 7 and we sang and played and talked until about 11, when I hauled him out of  there pleading exhaustion (no, it was some guy playing Wish You Were Here with no delicacy or spirit of overwhelmed longing).  Thank you mOm for putting up with both of us.

Breakfast (porridge and decaf coffee with skim milk and no sugar) has been consumed, and now Paul and I will turn to the great Stack of John’s Books and try to make some sense of them.

Carrie and her spouse John attended, it was lovely to meet John.  They are headed back up to Telegraph Creek soon.  She seems to think I’ll be going up there, but alas, unless I fly most of the way, or somebody gives me a ride in an extremely comfortable vehicle, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell.  The wine was awesome!

Douglas sang Bigfoot.  I updated John’s memorial site… the man who wrote, and taught John, “Hit them in the Bottom Line” Alan O’Dean, was there so I got the skinny on that song and by the blessings of reason, did we make a loud singing noise on the choruses.  Or Chori, as Douglas would say.  Also found out that the Mother Nature song was written by the Berrymans.

It will be sad to see them go.  With John dead, Juliana has little reason to stay in Victoria; she’ll be heading off to Columbus OH sometime later this year.  They have purchased a house there.  They’ll need somebody to stay in the house but she’s hoping to arrange that through church. 

I missed Tom and Peggy by minutes.  Sigh. Her bass on Tapioca is always something to look forward to.

The Devon Rexes, especially Sugar, previously shown on this blog, were in fine form, as was John’s erstwhile cat, Vincent.

Anyway, apart from a little residual sadness from talking to Katie, who really is having a rough go of it if her facebook posts are anything to go by, I am in a really happy, centered place.  So I guess I can be more or less guaranteed that something interesting and challenging is about to happen… cause you know, it never lasts.

Fluttery

I am feeling a bit fluttery about Miss Margot’s operation today.  She has a strong heart (Persians sometimes run to heart trouble) and her pre-op screen came back okay, but I’m still unhappy, and listening to her cry for her lost dinner and breakfast is making me sad.  Wait til she comes home reeking of anaesthetic, loopy as all get out, while the boys gather round goggling at her.  They’ll be happy to have her so subdued …. And so will the rest of us, she’s about to go into heat. (Noiser, more affectionate and really anxious to go out).

Jeff has just left with Miss Margot.  There was a flaw in my cunning plan… I didn’t give him my credit card to pay for it all, so I think I will just go there at the end of the day and Jeff can drive us both home.  Continue reading Fluttery

Wasn’t that a party….

So, anyway, I had a faboosh time at the going away bash last night, and yes, there was a rainbow.  There was also a cement mixer, purchased by RobbieBaum, but I know what happens when you mix Baileys with something sour.  It curdles, resembles vomit, and makes the recipient unhappy.  Drunk as I was, I looked at it, realized I was going to have limey tinged cheese curds appear in my mouth, and didn’t even change my facial expression, causing me to uplevel to a new platform of coolth.  Nobody wanted to believe that I wasn’t disgusted.  I wasn’t.  It’s all about managing expectations, yanno?

Here’s my good-bye email:

11 Commandments for an Enthusiastic Team

1) Help each other be right – not wrong.
2) Look for ways to make new ideas work – not for reasons they can’t.
3) If in doubt – check it out! Don’t make negative assumptions about each other.
4) Help each other win and take pride in each other’s victories.
5) Speak positively about each other and about your team at every opportunity.
6) Maintain a positive mental attitude no matter what the circumstances.
7) Act with initiative and courage as if it all depends on you.
8) Do everything with enthusiasm – it’s contagious
9) Whatever you want – give it away.
10) Don’t lose faith – never give up
11) HAVE FUN!

A long vanished Sales VP gave me that list, and I’ve tried to live by it.

As I survey 12 years of employment at Xantrex, I have a LOT of happy memories…. And not so happy ones…and downright bizarre memories.

The time a customer told me, “Lady, your hold music would make a dog eat her puppies…”

Walking around the office and seeing Valentines I handed out 5 years ago still tacked up over people’s desks….

Sitting around a campfire on Gabriola at the old Statpower company camping trip….

People screaming in delight when it was November and I started baking biscotti again….

Forcing a CEO to buy me beer after I invited myself along for a team building exercise…. (now THAT was satisfying….)

Going through a team building exercise during which all of the people on the team reviewed the ‘challenge’ and then turned as one person to the smartest person on the team and said with one voice, “You do it!” (No it wasn’t me, it was an engineer).  It was like being back in high school.

Fires…. Power outages…. Ludicrous, inhuman weather… getting really good help from the first aid people (who rock, incidentally).

Having a coworker come through on an orientation tour with a new HR person, and when asked, “Do you know this person?” saying, truthfully, “Well yeah, I’ve seen him naked.”  (Long story, and not anywhere near as dirty as it sounds….)

A lot of really amazing customer interactions… because really, without customers, Xantrex doesn’t exist.    And some of customers are very smart, and very nice, and they shared a lot of good information with me.

“When are we doing a product rationalization?”

The time a customer said “Do the fans on your inverters exhaust or intake?”  And running to a certain person who is still working at Xantrex for help.  And he said, and I quote, “We used to suck, but now we blow.”  And I ran back to my desk and told the customer that –  he laughed his head off.  We weren’t recording Customer Service calls in those days….  Too bad, that would have been a keeper!

Neckrubs!

Taking care of my ‘internal customers’ at Xantrex.  Because we’re not in this alone…..

Trying really hard to be a good coworker.  For those of you for whom this was not a reality, my abject apologies and a hope that you won’t take my lapses personally.  For those of you I didn’t get a chance to get to know…. We were part of the same team.  We served together, and that counts for a lot.

I’m taking a year off paid employment to ‘pursue creative interests’.  Yeah, I know, it’s lame, but it’s also true.  I lost a close family member at the beginning of May, and it made me re-assess my life in a way that I hope none of you have to go through anytime soon.  When the year is over, I’ll be back in the work force, hopefully with a lot of items scratched off my ‘bucket list’… as in, things I wanted to do before I die.  But not at Xantrex, unless you guys are crazy enough to want me back!

The friendships, the unparalleled learning experience and the opportunity to serve our customers — all this has been humbling and character building.  I’ve worked here more  than a third of my adult life…. I will never forget Xantrex and you can bet I’ll be by to say hi, and re-acquaint myself with Chris’ cooking in our ‘caf’.  Yes, Andy, I paid my tab.

I’d like to thank Tanya, Frozan, Cris, and Andy N (my immediate teammates and boss) for being awesome, and ALL the CS techs whether in Renewable or Mobile for their long-suffering assistance…. You’ve all been great.  I’d like to thank the equally long-suffering bunch of folks I’ve eaten lunch with so many times over the last few years (Ryan S, Scott, Trevor, Peter A., John A., Francis K., and Hardeep).  Sorry about all those anecdotes that made it impossible for you to finish what you were eating.  A special shout out to Patricia O’Connor and Mike McG for their helpfulness.

I’ll be seeing some of you at the Golf Course for beverages later….

My apologies to anybody I missed… it wasn’t deliberate….

I can be reached at allegra.sloman@gmail.com if anybody wants to get hold of me. Goodbye, and take good care of each other and the customers!

All the best,

allegra

Like I didn’t have enough planned

I told Tom and Peggy and Paul last night that I wanted to learn every song John used to sing.  They obliged by teaching me two; one was Careless by Nancy Freeman which turns out to be super easy and frikkin awesome, and the other is way harder, because Dave and Tracy’s Gentle Arms of Eden (which I also long to parody, may the Goddess strake me privily) is played at breakneck speed with chord changes to match.  My finger tips have almost completely calloused up again.  It’s like they learned how to get calloused when I was young (I took up guitar at 11) and now when I return to it they get busy.

My embroidered dragon has been located; John’s shirts and his superhero cape have gone back to Lady Miss Banjola, who startled the living mucus outta me by the sudden dramatic change in her appearance.  Yes, she has allowed her sister the hair stylist to apply yellow and orange to selected portions of what’s grown back of her hair, and she looks fabulous, and I mean it.  If I could change my hair like that and look that fabulous I would – well, I’d probably be south of 30, for starters.  I immediately wanted to run out and do the same thing, which is how I frequently feel when Lady Miss B does something… you know, the OOOO SHINY response.

Off to church now.  Keith was over at Jeff’s last night… Katie and Paul and I stayed at Planet Bachelor (singing in the evening and church in the morning = I didn’t want to go home). Katie is in good shape – we played cribbage yesterday, and because she learned to play from Doug and Elly, she whipped our butts.

Dax’ car got struck TWICE by other cars, in the last two days; one was a hit and run, t-boned at a red light.  I will now maintain a discrete silence.

Singing and playing for two hours completely re-set my brain.  And the sun is shining the way it did when I was young, before anything ever hurt me.

Still alive

Yet more people have found out about my planned departure and it’s as if it’s the ‘end of an error’ is making people really freeked out.  I don’t want to freak people out. I just want my life back.  Yes, I know it looks like I have a life from my blog, I’m forever doing exciting or at least utterly bizarre things, meeting strange life forms and having thinky-thotz, but I’d like a more interesting life still, and I want to be able to say I did something besides work.  Like create. Continue reading Still alive

Quit my job yesterday

June 19th is my last day.  I’m walking down the road to Jericho Beach Tuesday night and thinking “This is nuts.  How much more pondering do I have to do to know I don’t want to be doing this anymore?”  I phoned Katie and told her, and she provided consoling words.  Then I turned the corner and there was the biggest rainbow I’ve ever seen.  I’d post the pics but rainbows need a good photographer and a hefty lens, neither of which I had.  Then I enjoyed the show at Jericho (Brighter Lights Thicker Glasses, and I can’t recommend them enough) with Peggy (after playing John’s Song and That Godforsaken Hellhole I Call Home), and then came home and told myself I’d sleep on it.  And I did, and I went to my brother and said, “I’m quitting my job today,” and he said “Great!” and then I went in and told NewBoss and then everybody in the building knew and I had a stream of miserable engineers and unhappy techs come by and ask if it was true.

Why?  Because John died.  I knew, after Brian C. quit, that something very fundamental was gone and not coming back.  I knew I was not giving it my best.  And time’s winged chariot is outside my front door honking.  I have an immense list of stuff I want to do and no energy or heart to do it as long as I’m working full time.

Daughter Katie came over last night so I could help her with her job hunt.  I fed her and Jeff chicken thighs in mixed herbs and bouillon, peas, asparagus and tater tots.  Mike came over.

While they were here, Miss Margot jumped up on the keyboards that I have negligently and sloppily left in the living room, and I turned them on, and then Jeff coaxed her into walking up and down the keyboard a couple of times. Katie and I knew, and Jeff and Mike did not, that the keyboard splits and is percussion sounds on the left and piano on the right.  So we were laughing – I laughed until I was gasping for air, and we were all crying and hooting in a most unseemly manner – because she walked to one end of the keyboard sounding like she was trying to compose the climactic piano music for an artistic horror film from the sixties – and then she parked her butt on two keys and just sat there, eyeing us with something resembling resentment and puzzlement, her butt making a chord the whole while, for at least a minute, possibly longer, while Jeff tried everything to get her to walk up the keys.  Then Mike did something that got her attention, and she walked toward the other end, writing a very beautiful and unusual song as she did so, and I ran to get the camera, and all I got was her walking on some percussion and dismounting with a “Bam-dum KISH!” exactly like she was finishing off a comedy sketch.  It’s not long enough to post and the light level is very low, and I’m SCREAMING with laughter and shaking the camera.  I wish I could have gotten the whole thing, it was just about the most amazing thing I’ve seen lately. And it happened in my living room.  Katie, wiping her eyes, said that was the hardest she’d laughed in a very long time.  Miss Margot is a really remarkable animal.  I mean, a cat who eats oatmeal?

You know, if I quit my job, I could train Margot, the clown cat.  I wonder if I can get a false nose fitted for her.  No, some ideas are better left unrealized. Hey, I DID quit my job! But taking a year to train a clown cat, THAT has income possibilities.  I should set the house up for camera operation in every room.  Oh, Jeff!?  Wifi webcam throughout the house?  I know Miss Margot won’t be little and cute forever.

I need a root canal. I hope I can make it through the weekend.  The poison from the abscess is affecting my jaw and tongue.

old in laws / que l’on continue

Carrie called last night.  She’s way the hell and gone up in Telegraph Creek, but she’s going to try to make it to the memorial service.  She never got my email and found out from my blog (Gott in Himmel) and had basically been crying for days.    We were young and pretty together; our first children were born within three days of each other; we both loved John although we had damned strange ways of showing it sometimes.  Carrie was married to John for a couple of years and she did date him twice after they broke up.  I had issues with Carrie, sure, but that was a quarter century ago, and now we get along fine, and her last visit was delightful.  I know for a fact Paul would love to see her, or whatever emotion you can feel when you’re alternately numb, bleak and limitlessly sad.

Paul and I and the kids had supper together and then Paul and I just cried for a while.  Keith and Kate are both grieving in their own way but grimly sticking to their schoolwork.  Katie says she’ll be in better shape after the memorial… I hope so. Keith is talking to his dad about it, not me, which I think is a good thing.  There’s no timetable or cut sheet for grief.

I had John’s Fender resonator out of the case last night.  It was in tune… in E minor.

Paul is remembering that the last time he spent time with his brother they played guitars.  They hadn’t been alone together and playing guitars in more years than Paul could remember.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

You can read my Mother’s Day homily if you feel like it… it’s the most topical thing I have lying around the site. I remember reading portions of it aloud to John while I was working on it. I remember a lot.

The song for John is more or less finished.  In the song I pretend to be John, commenting on his own funeral.  Paul came by late last night and I woke up from my exhausted, tear stained sleep to feel him giving me a hug, so of course I just started crying again and recited the lyrics to him.  He was quiet for so long afterwards I thought he’d gone to sleep.  We talked for a bit and he took Keith home.

Yesterday was the worst.  The floodgates opened, and I’m crying again now as I type. I’ve got to get up and start doing something, anything.