Category: Grandson goo

Laundry, Buster training, writing

10608 words. Haven’t checked for kudos yet, snicker. Okay, now I have, and it’s just the one.

Buster trained so hard this morning, and was so weird yesterday morning, that I honestly don’t know what to make of him. And while the communication board has shipped, I can’t get tracking data because they want me to have a cell phone to download the shipping app onto.

jesus parkour christ, seriously?

Yes, I know it’s 4-20. But every day is that for me, so celebrating it seems foolish.

 

a repeat, but a good one

The Plateau

I went walking with Jim and Jan, a long time ago, and ‘prisma’ed’ the above photo…

 

Ryker

Katie provided me with a little light therapy yesterday. It’s stupid to say that a baby is the light of a house. I mean, I loved my own kids with a fierceness that scared me – and one can argue that it isn’t love, more like an accumulation of shared experiences that starts before birth and is dependent on hormones – and Ryker’s ability to make an entire room smile is thus explained.

But he’s a remarkably pleasant human being; not perfect, but perfect for a baby, so that twenty second period as he gazes at you until he recognizes you as part of ‘my people’ is always fraught. And then he smiles, and wiggles, and the world is better for a fragile second.

No kudos. I’m going to try to write, later, but right now all I can think of is a roast beef slider and coffee to start my day.

We’re watching episode three of Raised By Wolves (just started) and Jeff says, “As I get older I hate religion more and more.”

I understand this sentiment very well, but said, “I believe my experience has given me a better understanding of its consolations and benefits,” and Jeff acknowledged that I probably had a more useful take. But that said, the pure misogyny, life or death control over minor children and social control of  everyone else involved forced on us by religions makes the whole enterprise suspect. Even Unitarians do evil.

Know well that I love you all, and I’d feel that way even if Christianity didn’t put that as a requirement on us that even atheists feel through repeated ‘lessons’. After all, you signed up for this blog, or wandered into it by accident. So here, have a blessing.

In purple handwritten font: have a blessedly free from religion day!

another lovely day

Briefly:

a shopping expotition; the longest walk Paul and I have done in months; a lovely meal at Phó Edmonds.

Re: the shopping expotition DO NOT LIKE SHOPPING WITH NO MASKS but at least it’s an environment in which one does not experience harassment for wearing one, so that’s a plus. Also, we go first thing in the morning and we don’t both go in. It’s annoying that we can’t get the Ritter Sport MINT chockie square any more but they support the Russian invasion, so NOPE.

Jeff made sliced roast beef sliders for a snack in the evening, they were so good.

Midmorning Paul called and wanted to go for a walk, and it was an exquisite day, so Paul said he wanted a change of scene and to go back to Deer Lake Park. I wanted to go in case the snakes were out. It took quite a while to remember where the hell we’d seen them before but after scrambling up the bank I remembered… and then in my triumph I stomped too close to where the little beggars were and three of them all raced off back into their den. Biggest was maybe 16 inches, the rest smaller, all garter snakes.

The brilliant yellow of the skunk cabbage was everywhere in the low lying parts, and the birds were making a wonderful racket. Too early for frogs, no interesting mammals.

After, I had the number 32 at the Phó Edmonds (it was absolutely succulent, and the egg was perfect – and I don’t know how they make the vinaigrette for the carrots but damn that was good too) and Paul had a wrap and an order of their really nice spring rolls. We tried to go to Mezze, the relatively new Uyghur restaurant first, but they don’t open until 4 (and stay open until 8 – I have to assume that they do a roaring catering trade!)

The rest of the day I was quite lazy because hey I walked 2.5 km (we rested plenty)

No kudos, word count now 8131 so yes, I also wrote yesterday.

I spoke to Katie and she approved the pics, so….

Yes, that is the debris from a Mickey D’s brekky that Katie had delivered so my mother got exposed to her first egg mcfuffin and apple pie and hash browns and my father got a mocha and an apple pie for breakfast. For reasons best known to themselves they sent an additional pancake breakfast and that got et, too. I have to say that McDonald’s coffee has achieved an unlikely inversion of glory. From having the worst coffee of any chain, it’s now damned close to being the best and it’s definitely on a par or even better than Timmy Ho’s. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there you go.

I have to respond to the jury duty summons that appeared in the mail on Tuesday. GRRR GRRR. I’ve been joking about appearing at the summons half naked (I’ll get arrested even if it’s legal) or declaring that it’s MST land! and the justice apparatus has no legitimacy here! but I think I’ll just get a note from my doctor saying that I have holes caused by strokes in my cerebellum and I’m not fit for service.

stalled, but only for a minute

6102 words total on the story. Hope to get back into it today, still thinking about things.

2 kudos overnight.

Another sleepy day yesterday. Today I need bloodwork and tomorrow a doc appointment and upping on scrips; I’ll be walking over there when the lab opens.

Still thinking about Ryker and his magical little smiles and total body squirms.

Here’s the MP3 (acapella, natch)

of me singing the ‘Russian Major General’ filk posted previously. As mentioned previously the lyrics were written by @AndrejNkv who hails from Edinburgh.

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

wonderful couple of hours in the pool with Alex

Ryker was with his pop. It was just a lovely time. Suzanne came late but she was having A DAY so no problem.

Total 2721 words… sent the first lot off to mOm who I think is quite pleased that I’m writing mystery romance without leaning on the TV characters quite so hard. Omar is a nice guy with a terrible step family and ‘Brad’ or whatever the hell his name is, is kind of a piece of work. I have to story logic my way through the first porny bit (now kisssss lol) and that’s going to take at least another 1000, mebbe 1500 words. We’ll see if I’m this productive tomorrow.

Now to finish off my Big Star Sammy.

rethunk

I think I understand why those little girls were gawking at him. Usually you see babies in formal settings and you don’t get to see all of their little bodies except for a negligible reusable pool diaper (they go in the wash). So they were gawking because they normally didn’t get close to babies this close to being naked, and so tiny, and so obviously having a good time even though he was tiny (he’s seventeen pounds, you know — the size of a fat cat) and he’s just so robust and engaged now, it’s just remarkable how he looks at everything.

I get the really distinct feeling that he has a much better memory for faces than most babies his age. Did I rave like this about Alex? I was so worried about him for the first little while, and a little put out but not enough to be an asshole about how long it took for him to warm up to me. Ryker is definitely enlarging and augmenting my grandmotherly experiences, and Alex is every day a new kind of entertaining thought process or turn of phrase.

mOm I hope you understand that when Ryker sees you he will already know that you’re his relative. If he’s old enough to know from words that’s one thing but if he saw you now I think he’d recognize your bones and return your smile.

I would like to read a newspaper headline through your breast

Said the mammogram technician. Anyway, I have booked one for May, and it’s relatively local, so all is good.

Why isn't there a more comfortable mammogram procedure? - Harvard Health

Yesterday I did two loads of laundry, and thanks to Suzanne the bathrooms are shiny again. She’s settling into her new apartment at Kingsway and Gilley (SOOOO CLOSE) and is probably going to get Alex for an overnight soon, when her apartment’s all shoved back into corners. Katie helped her assemble all her computer-y stuff like a boss.

Slept FANTASTIC. Went to sleep just after 8, woke up around 4. I may not nap tidday, boys!!!

Jeff bought me a burger and shake from Wet Spot, and it was fantastic.

I am very close to being finished writing Mary’s letter but I think it should be at least another couple of pages longer.

No kudos this morning… what a sap I am. One must be motivated from the inside.

Recent uproars on the internet:

person 1 – I ain’t taking my shoes off in your skanky ass house cause your floors are heinous and I don’t give a shit about your cultural constructs appears magically on line. THERE ARE OPINIONS

(this is all part of the editors in NA on line venues looking for ways to shit on Asian people during the Olympics, how rude)

person 2 – I ain’t putting up with your skanky ass shoes in my house because you fucking people walk through broken glass and dogshit and then march all over my new laminate floors and you laugh when I point out the scratches

person 3 – (allegra) I brought orthotic slippers to help me keep my feet warm and keep my balance, if you prevent me from wearing my indoor slippers you’re an ableist fuck and I ain’t enterin’ your skanky ass house (I didn’t actually say this, I never found a venue, so here it is on my own site) and if your floors actually are dirty I won’t fucking care but if there is a shrine in the house of course I’ll take my fucking slippers off do you think I’m a clod, deaf to the songs of the gods?

Vocabulary review: skanky – cheap, dirty, slutty, low-rent, low-class; – ass – added for emphasis.

Got a comment hijacked by a comment bot on Reddit this morning. Didn’t even notice until someone picked it out of the crap pile for me. It’s one of the funniest lines I ever wrote so of course some witless algorithm steals it.

Jeff and I are continuing to enjoy Peacemaker (it is rude, it is funny, it is freaky, it is scary) and Leverage (well written, clips along, very very formulaic and light hearted, which compared to the grimdark we watch most of the rest of the time is GOOD).

Have some Ice from Iceland to go along with today’s fog. It was 5 degrees and rain blowing horizontal, if you wonder why it’s so dull, almost four years ago, May 2018.

a day

So much social interaction, my goodness!

Went to Katie’s to watch babby while she cleaned and changed lightbulbs.

Ryker was extremely baby-like and basically didn’t cry for five hours. He smiled at me like HOLY CRAP what a funny face you have, and he kept time when I sang the Monty Python theme. Do babies that young keep time? Apparently so. It felt unbelievably good to hold him, and I realized I was holding him to tell mOm about it afterwards. He’s MUCH stronger than when he was born. Remarkable what an Exceedingly Mellow Dude™ he is. We talked. Katie made spinach salad with soft goat cheese for lunch, DMAN it was good I had seconds. Suzanne came over and cleaned, and it was just lovely to talk to her (we’ll see her again on Thursday). (Paul went to his volunteer job.)

Keith drove me home and came by and hung out with Jeff, and he also did a bit of shopping for us so I have salad fixings again.

I have this really faint memory that I actually wrote a review of the Sparks show I saw in 1975 but finding it will be something.

Tea and toast

Woke up just after three after a restful sleep. Three kudos on my dashboard this morning. Always fun to see what people are reading. Another person has subscribed to my mailchimp account for UPSUN as well. In addition I logged into dreamwidth (the ‘replacement’ for live journal for people who don’t want all their data stolen by the Russians) because I really wanted to read something one of my filk buddies has posted and …. I hadn’t posted since 2018. uff dah. I posted. It was sad having to mention that Tom had died.

Worked on the fanfic a bit, not much. In the portion I just wrote one of the brothers is teasing the other about his new relationship and I very much enjoyed writing that because one of the great wellsprings of Supernatural fanfic is the abiding love (and shittalk) between the bros… it’s very easy to write the shittalk because they are constantly teasing each other (and would die for each other).

Still not experiencing hunger and thirst properly. It’s very strange to be forcing myself to eat, unless it’s something sweet.

The wind is gusting hard and it makes the plastic siding creak in an alarming way.

Ryker’s got a mucousy cold, poor wee tyke. Alex is a snot factory whether he has a cold or not. Just sayin’.

Had to shovel again; the lack of walkway salt was mitigated by the fact that it started raining and melting, so we didn’t get freezing rain. Lawks that was one big raccoon we got through the property night before last though, HUGE pawprints.

It’s very pleasant to no longer be required to run a heater all night in my room. It’s quite pleasant in the house now.

Well, I boiled water but I haven’t made tea, and the toast is still waiting for my work, so time for some foodicles and to start my day. FIRST TASK. Wrestling my weighted blanket back into its cover. This will literally take me half an hour as it’s like a USB cable. First you attach the WRONG zipper, and then you attach the RIGHT ONE, IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, and then omg maybe THIS will work. Heavy sigh. Still haven’t put all my clothes away.

This morning my twitter feed is full of: Trans people commenting (still) on Matrix Resurrections, including the best tweet sized appreciation of it I’ve seen so far; disabled people saying CAN YOU PLEASE STOP TRYING TO KILL US BY NOT WEARING MASKS AND SHITTY POLICY; Glenn Greenwald, may the great Parent of the Universe buy him a fucking clue, saying how twitter doesn’t have the right to eject people from its platform cause free speech, when it’s already been established that it really isn’t. He’s defending Marjorie, by the way. Candidly, clownbag is too kind for that man.

The Cincinnati Beagles won the division (over KC). We did not see that coming. It was a weird game with some patently ugly and bad calls. I mean, how many times is it possible to repeat 4th down?

@ElSangito:

i understand finding matrix 4’s lack of subtlety grating but i would never wanna use metaphors again either if the metaphorical allegory i wrote before got co-opted by far right patriarchal fascists whose whole thing is to eradicate my entire people

 

 

sleep of the dead

These pics were selected by Alex.

Alex sleeps so hard it’s quite significant. I just got up, ran a load of laundry and wandered lonely as a large fuzzy hoodie through the house looking for my laptop, which of course I already brought downstairs to the guest room.

Last night Alex consumed his dinner, drew monsters, played Xenon pinball, brushed his teeth, played Burnout under Jeff’s watchful supervision on the xBox (it’s a game where you deliberately crash into things with your car), played the same video on his tablet until he crashed at which point I pulled his tablet out of his hand and stashed it somewhere safe.. When he was going between games he asked Jeff, “Are the mechanics the same?” and I almost fell off the spare sofa.

It’s to early to waken him so I’m listening to him making faint breathing noises. If I panicked because he was making no breath sounds at all and did a pulse check that’s just the gramma in me.

We got another 6-10 cm of the solid end of the water cycle and more apparently on the way. The videos of carnage and lack of snow removal on reddit vancouver are telling.

Melting grammas note:

he says Ryker is ‘a really good baby’.