Category: Health

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I feel weird.  Not sick, not sad, not stupid, but spacy.  A little out of sorts.  Not quite 100%,  Marginal.  I’ve been in prodrome for what feels like weeks now, so I’m wondering if I’ll erupt into a full scale migraine soon.  Or whether my trick of thinking happy thoughts will keep Mr. Megrim at bay.

I’ve had more hiccups in the last three weeks than I had in the previous ten years.  Whatever you do DON’T go to the intarwebs and type in “Differential diagnosis hiccups.”  You just don’t wanna go there.  Trust me.  Because now I know my hiccups are a sign that I’m about to expire of something grisly… or so I would think if daughter Katie hadn’t complained about having hiccups a lot lately.  Prob’ly something in the air.

bipolar children

Give me a fucking break. The  extension of the agri-militari-pharma-entertainment complex into family life marches on.

1.  Kids with behavioural problems are almost always a) malnourished b) badly parented and c) badly educated.  IMHO.  Some of them may have genuine mental health problems, but this shit does not happen in a vacuum.

2.  Let’s just medicate these problems so we don’t have to challenge the little snowflake parents, who get right pissed and litigious if somebody calls them a bad parent.

3.  Let’s just medicate these problems so we don’t prevent teachers from doing their jobs.  However they are defined these days.  On the basis of the ‘education’ my children received until they went to Purpose, I think high school teachers are in many (not all, but many) an unholy combo of jailer and propaganda peddler.

4.  Let’s just medicate these problems away because pills are cheaper than family counselling and don’t take as much time, which we need to spend in front of the television, imbibing messages that bad behaviour is good, up is down, and idiots make money every day by being idiots.

5.  Rinse, repeat.

6.  In twenty years, when all the kids that were medicated are obese, have diabetes, kidney failure and are still fucking nuts, open up a big can of class action lawsuits….

7…… Rinse, repeat.

Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

I have lots and lots to complain about.  Like, lots.  But I’ve decided to save my best and purest bile for real live people instead of the intarboobs, and the saddest and teariest of complaints for other real live people, and the horrid consequences of brutal self-examination strictly to myself. Continue reading Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

Food

Last night I fed Tom, Peggy, Ben, Paul, Keith and Jeff pork roast done with garlic, bacon and bay leaves (it made the house smell REALLY GOOD) and many, many vegetables, including beans and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes.  Katie and her housemates were invited, but Katie was already on tap to do shrimp and spinach canneloni that night so she turned me down with thanks.  It would have been an ‘add two leaves to the dining room table and where the hell are the chairs going to come from’ evening if they HAD come, so I don’t complain and I added some chairs to my want list.

Margot quacked like a duck for the folks.  She has a doctor’s appointment on Monday; she needs to be checked out for heart problems, which are quite common in Persians and don’t necessarily show up during the work up prior to neutering; her quacking and breathing issues may be normal Persian noisiness or it may be something more sinister.  She’s so placid, except when I’m brushing her, that she doesn’t appear to have any problems otherwise.  I keep telling myself that she’s like a kid… I get to look after her for a while, and then she’ll leave my life; I’m attached to her but I hope not too intransigent on the subject.  And it’s my own damn fault that I brought her into a household where it would be impossible to keep her as an indoor cat.  She gets FILTHY sometimes, having all that fun out in the rain and dirt.  If it’s really pouring she won’t go out, but light precip doesn’t seem to register.

Back to the Friday Feast.  I said to Ben, “There are two pinball machines downstairs.”  He said, “I’ve never played pinball in my life.”

shock,  horror!

We fixed that. Obviously he must play pinball before he goes to Hudson’s Hope.  (He got a job with Hydro).

After Tom Peggy and Ben went home, I decided I needed both air and exercise, and Paul and I wandered around the neighbourhood looking at the Christmas lights (Keith and Jeff were busy killing zombies in the trial version of Zombie Apocalypse). There are some spectacular displays, especially close to the school.  Then we came back after about half an hour and I picked up the guitar and composed another (what, another frakking tune, what the ???) song, which I think is going to be called “God Willing” and be about the immigration of my ancestors to Canada. No lyrics yet.  I know; for an atheist, I’m such a sucky accommodationist.  But you would be too if you had so many religious relatives, who also happened to be pleasant, intelligent and hard-working.

That’s the single biggest issue I have with the media atheists (I FLATLY REFUSE to use New Atheists.  That’s like calling people who are Christian NEW CHRISTIANS. Atheists are atheists, there’s nothing novel about them, and you can see their lineage throughout history from Epicurus forward.)  They are on the “All theists are stupid” train, whereas I am on the “All human beings have cognitive biases, and atheists may have at least one fewer than theists” train.  Also, many media atheists have the distinct advantage of not giving two shits what their religious relatives think of them, an advantage I don’t have.  It’s why I don’t give vent to some of my more shocking opinions (yes, hard to believe, isn’t it?  But much goes on behind my face that doesn’t come out in my blog).  I was a lot more venty when I started this blog, as I recollect.   I don’t usually go back into the old format portion of the blog unless I’m trying to figure out what happened in say, July of 2005.

Keith called up the optician’s office he was still working at on Saturday (he didn’t give that other job completely up, the wise soul) and hopefully he’ll be getting more hours later this month.  It’s hard to be a young person these days.

Today, AVATAR.  I am very stoked.  Now to check the hellacious mess that is the Translink site and plan my trip itinerary.

I so enjoy feeding people.  It makes me feel good, and that was a damned fine roast.  I miss the rosemary bush from the front of my old house.  A sprig of rosemary in the roasting pan would have made it even more wondrous.