Category: Domestic Life

Mommishness outbreak

Keith came over last night, in a rather unhappy state.  His unhappiness made me cry – I cry at the most ludicrous things these days, but I’m not inclined to feel shame about it – and I stuck to the issue, which was his state, not mine.

We reviewed his life situation for stressors. My very flat recital of them at one point made Keith laugh, which he hadn’t done since he arrived, and concluded with, “And if I know you, not a day goes by when you don’t think, “Is today the day I’m going to lose it?” And then he laughed loud and long and said, “Got it in one.”

His feelings are real and justified against his situation.  They are not to be mocked or bulldozed over.  I listened more than I talked. I provided advice, but after 10 minutes of mom time, one beer and the first hour of The Right Stuff he was much more regulated when he left.

I told him that he should think about going back to school.  He said, “I could teach.”

I was amazed.  He actually could, he explained it. I told him to apply ASAP. And to think about school in January.  He said, “There’s no money,” and I said, “Commit to a course of action and the means will appear.” Of course that means elders conferring regarding the means, but hey.  If people hadn’t helped me out financially for no good reason at certain points during my life I wouldn’t be in the pleasant position of getting to worry about my kids.

When he was born a friend paid for a full astrological natal chart.  The results: He is an old soul.  He’ll either be a great teacher or a petty criminal, specifically a drug dealer.

Since this was the first time anybody in the woowoo divination game had said anything negative in my experience, it kinda stuck with me. I mean who predicts that your kid will be a drug dealer? Given Keith’s abstemious and cautious nature, it’s probably one of the funniest arrows ventured at the future I’ve ever heard of.

sundry

Just in case you’re planning on being interrogated.

Rewatch of Burn Notice (god, I love that show) and ER (it’s a challenging show and I love it too). Thinking about a Homicide rewatch.

Anybody who can see the throughline between Burn Notice and what I’m currently writing …. yeah, it’s there. The supercompetent guy who’s so rarely at a loss. Also I’m rereading Niccolo. Some cross-contamination is inevitable.

Jeff took me to brekky, and after many hints I made banana bread yesterday, and did some laundry and practiced mandolin, and talked to Keith on the phone, and wrote 2000 words in two lots, first thing and around 3 pm.

Today I need to go for a walk quite desperately.  If I don’t hear from Paul I’ll probably take a trek over to David’s Market.

Thinking about chicken schnitzel later.  It’s cooled off so much that I’m thinking of more cooking and baking.  The summer fell off a Labour Day cliff by the feel of things.

Alex the wondergrand

I got to see Alex yesterday at his momma’s house (Katie is doing very well) and he smiled his face off to see me. Then I gave him my three pound barbell (after all, it SAYS Alex on the side) and he started lifting, bro, which was hilarious, (good form too, even funnier) and then he rolled it all over the floor and then he started dropping the sumbitch, more than once, and this look came over his face – every parent knows it – and after some kind and pleasant voiced persuasion (his mother doesn’t yell at him unless it’s life or death and Alex is more compliant than any child his age I’ve known, as he really really wants to keep his mother happy) Alex went back to rolling it across the floor.  He has learned to say ‘antenna’ which is very sweet.

He has crossed some kind of developmental barrier which allows him to consider things rather than assuming that it’s bad and he should proceed immediately to a-wailin’ and a-grizzlin’.  He didn’t even come close to even thinking about crying the entire time I was there.  The last month has also been amazing in terms of language development. It’s very clear that he understands virtually everything that’s said to him and his speech is becoming clear enough to understand.  I was out of the room and he was toddler-arguing with his mother so I called are you grumpy Alex? and he said, just like a teenager would, No!

No sign of being interested in toilet training.  For this summer camping trips were invented.

He played for a very long time with my Cat Alone app. BUG! BUDAFY!

“DO YOU WANT THE FINGER ALEX” is actually a question appropriate to the game. (If he presses on the magic finger that appears it vibrates and buzzes.)

No pictures. I have memories of a sunny faced toddler running like a fool all over his apartment while issuing sticky kisses and high fives. This from last summer, Prismafied, will have to do.

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There were castor bean and nightshade plants on the walk back to the car.  New West, it’ll kill ya.

Ray Donovan was awesome, Dark Matter was okay I guess (fave continues to be 5, played by Jodelle Ferland), Killjoys is ramping up with great scripts and performances and then Keith and Paul came over yesterday to watch the Sugar episode of Addicted to Pleasure, and that was very nice.

Ghostbusters is still on at the International Village Cineplex. I should have gone last night but whatever.

I bought a battery backup for my phone (since you can’t actually replace the battery on a One S, god strake them in thayre tendre partes) and then, in a sudden blinding flash of You Know the MacBook is Doomed Since the Interior goes to 84 degrees C every time you run video and components will inevitably blow you fool! I purchased a replacement in the form of a MacBook Air, from London Thugs. I backed up the old one, Time machined the new one, everything took an hour and worked perfectly (except having to enter brOJeff’s ludicrously lengthy wifi password three times, o well) and now I have a computer with twice the power, half the weight, three times the storage and a much faster video processor. Everything I need to work transferred over without difficulty including Scrivener and Finale, the two really big ones for creative work. I’d like to publicly thank Jeff for providing the backup drive.  All part of adulting….

No I can’t afford it.  But I definitely can’t afford not to, so there you go.

 

Fairly busy weekend

Today it’ll be cleaning, then hanging with Mike, then brunch with this dude I met at Lorraine’s birthday gathering at the track (which, as I think I mentioned, was a truly awesome event). He makes brunch once a month as a fundraiser / can gatherer for the Food Bank and pics from previous events showing people from 6 months to 65 years old cheerfully consuming pamcakes in a sunny kitchen are tremendously appealing. Also it will be super easy to get to on transit, always a consideration.

There will be laundry and editing in there too someplace.

Then Monday, Leo and Linda. YAY!

walkies

Ran into Kirsten at Deer Lake Park yesterday.  Her sister has a three legged dog too, which is very kind of them both.  Keith and Paul were accompanying me.  We saw a coyote as we entered the park which makes all the people who ignored us because they were wearing headsets rather amusing in a sick way.  Hey, we tried to tell them but they just wouldn’t listen.

After I got back I mowed the whatever it is that’s growing on the property.  It is no longer grass in the front yard, and the mere act of turning the mower around created immense divots in what’s left of the turf. The back isn’t so bad but it doesn’t get so dry (we never water). The house is a tear down, so we’re never going to get new sod. C’est la vie.

I got the orthotics, and twice crossed the Pattullo Bridge, which is under construction and an amply proportioned clusterfuck at the best of times. WHILE I was trying to get across the mofo’ing bridge northbound, a guy leaned out of his truck and said in a heavy Arabic accent “I give you three thousand dollars cash right now for your car” and I casually explained that it wasn’t going to happen, and he started upping the bid, reaching five thousand, leading me to explain that it a) it wasna my car and b) it was not for sale for any price. Then the traffic shifted and I stopped having to deal with him. Wish I’d taken the camera, Jeff might have been entertained by the convo.  Entertainingly, these convos always happen more in the summer.

Went and got beer and groceries and a few treats, and we ate store chicken, home made salad and corn on the cob for dinner.

Forgot to mention that we saw a grouse by the side of the road when we went up Mt Washington last week.

I will be adjusting to the orthotics by wearing them about two hours a day until I’m completely used to them. They feel pretty comfortable but I’ll know better how they are later.

Watched Eye in the Sky and Wave. Very much enjoyed both movies, but I liked Wave more since it is a classic style disaster movie, leaving no trope unturned, but effectively and non-cheesily played out.

 

 

10879 word count

Not making fantastic progress, but I washed dishes and put the now clean front hall mat and upstairs sofa cover back down, got out of the house to feed Ayesha and get deodorant and laundry deterg and  – chocolate – which I have stashed somewhere in the house so Jeff and I don’t devour it.

I can’t find the power supply and connector cables for the other external drive Jeff loaned me.  I don’t know what the hell happened to them but they are not in my room.  I never would have thrown them out but Jeff assures me they were all together.  It’s very annoying, and now I have to figure out how to get replacements.

I am about to have a flurry of engagements – today feeding Ayesha plus hanging with the American Thanksgiving blowout at Tom and Peggy’s (they have a cross border Christmas Cookie fest every year because they have TWO OVENS.) Supper with Mike.  A visit with Alexander somewhere in there. Sunday afternoon hanging out with Janice L and her roomie.

Thus the deodorant.  It’s actually an odorant, but everyone calls it deodorant.

I’ve actually written 180 more words this morning, let’s see where this chapter goes.

 

Lotza words

Fifteen hundred or so yesterday. How would you like a Sixer to turn up on your 21st floor balcony? Well, if you had just had a family meal where your stepmother excoriated you for two hours about how you were the stupidest woman alive for not finding a way of making money out of Sixers WHEN YOU MET THEM AND HOW STUPID ARE YOU ANYWAY maybe you’d greet them more cheerfully than you running around in a nightie might suggest.

Besides, everyone trusts Michel.  He does what he says and stays out of stuff that isn’t his business. Or does he?  Only time will tell…

Gave Katie a driving lesson the other day, one of the advantages of Paul leaving me the car.

It is always good to be able to help friends and family.  I made sure Keith and Paul had a meal prepped in their fridge (cannelloni cilantro almond & onion salad plus Singapore style noodles I’d picked up earlier) and picked them up at Edmonds after their trip to Toronto/London (yes, Paul met up with Carrie and Keith, bless him, poked his head in on The Vampire Family, which makes me very, very happy)  and handed over the car.  Of course if it hadn’t been on a night of the full moon I wouldn’t have been awake, but them’s the breaks, and they broke the right way.

Three loads of laundry yesterday.  Practiced mandolin already this morning. Poor Margot doesn’t know she’s going back to the vet tomorrow but she’s obviously suffering, poor lamb.  I put her favourite rug in the wash just now along with the upstairs sofa cover, since various babies and cats have been yielding up their valuable inner resources onto them both of late.

I didn’t know that Jean Webster had published anything beside Dear Enemy and Daddy-Long-Legs so I’m going to be checking out the other books on Gutenberg today.  It annoys me that she died so young in childbirth; she should have lived to be a hundred.

 

Domestic blitz

Yesterday I emptied the dishwasher, prepped raw veggies, baked buns and cookies and turned down offers of exercise.

I also spoke to Keith’s counsellor on the phone hoping to help straighten out this communication thing we have (not) going on. That went well.

AND I SAW BABY ALEX.  Also baby Ellie, who is so food positive that she makes me howl and her mama Jessica obviously. There is nothing in the world like pulling food from the oven and taking it to your grandson to eat.  Everybody was in a really good mood.

John Caspell would have been 64 years old today.

Woo hoo, 15 words

Also did a mockup of the cover for the first novel and sent it around to various folks, most of whom have responded favourably.

I did an immense amount of laundry yesterday and I haven’t finished putting it all away so that is where my spoons will go today.

Very nice walk with Jeff early yesterday morning as we went to IHOP, So a total of 3 k walked yesterday.  As is normal I didn’t start feeling it until coming up that damned hill.

NDP candidate canvasser wanted me to put up a lawn sign, and I respectfully refused.

Laundry and Season 5

I’m reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which weighs in at a hefty 800 pages, so I’m taking it slow and marking up my mother’s copy (with her permission). He argues that human society is less violent overall than it used to be and the Enlightenment (including novels, woo hoo and yes I’m truncating one tiny part of his overall argument scandalously) is largely the root cause of the drop in the death rate due to violence (current outbreaks of horror notwithstanding).

I’m finding it very persuasive, learning a great deal, and it’s filling me with lots of thinky thoughts.

There are those who argue that he’s full of it (including a really head scratching review by John Gray in Prospect which includes having at the argument by mocking Pinker’s excessive use of statistics, which I find an appalling thing for a public intellectual to do, but whatever.)

I liken the inability to see the drop in violence (how many people per 100000 die due to murder and intra and interstate violence, which has dropped substantially since 1800) to what’s going on with alcohol consumption. There is still lots of alcohol being sold, lots of alcohol being consumed and lots of alcohol involved in premature death. But there’s less drinking and driving causing death than there was when I was a kid, because behaviours have changed, and children learn not to drink and drive as part of their education.

Alcohol, like violence, is still here and there’s still too much of it, but education and opprobrium continue to work their harm reducing wiles.

 

Also, the quality drop from Season 4 to Season 5 in The West Wing is like being flung from a cliff.

Also, I did 5 loads of laundry yesterday including the kitchen rugs, ran the dishwasher and swept the kitchen floor, which really needed it.

MR2 is still in the Krankenhaus waiting for parts.  He is leaking coolant.

No words yesterday but I’m comfortable with that.

The Giant Squid has Not

Cake, Pudding and Cheese are the three alien babies who named themselves after food because food is always popular among humans.  Apex predators aren’t supposed to name themselves after food, that is just wrong, but some of the babies have names like Doofus (“Nobody will be afraid of an alien named Doofus” and Etazonia (which is a variant of États-Uni, so one of the kids named herself after the United States, which is also pretty bizarre.)  They have briefly shown up at a family reunion – just long enough to mention that they’ve been rehearsing, and to sing a three part version of “The Giant Squid has Not” – with animations, sound effects, and stage business – on their way to a gig on the Island.  So I didn’t really write 500 words yesterday, it was 500 less the words I quoted from Brooke’s song, which was just the first verse. Hey, their dad’s a filk fan, and why the hell not.  I’m going to write about what I know, right? bwa ha, ha ha.

Some of the babies were named by their mother and their mother’s current squeeze (Kima and Michel are a very cute couple.)  But when you’re having 175 babies at once some of them get away on you before you can name them.  Hey, it was an accident.  It’s hard to do something right when you’ve never done it before and there’s no precedent.

Jeff, who is a life-saver, got treats yesterday AND got malware off my Mac, which is very very happy making.

Margot jumped up onto the sofa to say hi yesterday and accept skritches when we were watching some tv… She rarely does this when both of us are there.  Buster is usually sitting on my side of the sofa and I must threaten him with the Giant Setting Bum of Allegra which usually means that Jeff rescues him from being crushed milliseconds before he gets mashed into the cushion because he is unconcerned by impending doom.  He is the least ready-to-take-offense-or-be-frightened cat I’ve ever met.

Hell on Wheels continues to entertain, the new Patrick Stewart sitcom (Blunt Talk) is uneven but when funny EXCRUCIATINGLY so, Brent Spiner shows up in a guest slot that will make all the fans go squee, and if you don’t want to watch Walter Blunt /Patrick Stewart down three Ambien when he was expecting three Provigil while sucking back marijuana edibles like an East Burnaby ‘hood rat and washing them down with scotch, you shouldn’t watch it. Jeff and I were both very entertained by the opening shot.  Patrick Stewart doesn’t just have a bald head, he has an ICONIC bald head.

It seems clear that a new generation of comedy writers is taking on the half hour sitcom format and making it new.  Grace and Frankie, the Brink and Blunt Talk (and bunches of others we haven’t seen because we’re not fans of the writers or stars) are sophisticated, funny, humane, well-acted, written and directed and they move like screwball comedies on rails.

Did you know that JFK was accidentally shot by his own security detail?  Many things about the shooting now make much more sense in the light of this new theory.

The Mr. Robot season finale didn’t air because some content was too similar to a shooting in the US which happened during the same news cycle, so they had to can it — we’ll see it later.  And props to the show runners and network for giving it a rest.  The fans will wait.  The Rick and Morty was okay, there were some good laughs and Keith David as a voice actor is always worth the listen.

also.

Almost every single episode of West Wing that we’re watching is pulling its news from CURRENT headlines – and the show’s been off the air almost a decade.  Sometimes the overlaps are so freaky that Jeff just look at each other all o,O like what the HELL man.  Last night it was ‘we’re really close to curing cancer’ and it was so similar to the recent news it was surreal. And people torching AME churches and school shootings, it’s all…. yeah.

Everybody drive safe this weekend.  There may be flash floods and overwhelmed streams and sewers may make for trouble in low lying areas. We’re still going to be on water restrictions.

Mike has returned from South Africa, the single most brutal business trip he’s ever been on, and Jarmo had his last day yesterday at Evilcorp.  Mike took me to supper last night.  Just for future reference, the steak sandwich special for 10 bucks on Thursday night is totally worth it; best beef for the price I’ve had in ages.

 

Out for a walk

Paul and I went for a walk in Oakalla yesterday. I got very hot and sweaty.  Then I did a quick tour around the liquor store and got some fruits and veg and coffee cream from the grocery store.

The fires in Washington state are causing real hardships.  The firefighters haven’t gotten a break in ages, and may take until the rains come in the fall for it all to be put out, which is ghastly. Hydro electric production is being affected.  The entire province of Alberta has health warnings for the smoke and the tourism jewels like Banff are a mess because you can’t even see across the valley.

Ninety-seven words yesterday.  I am not feeling very good about the edits but this too is temporary.

a visit

Woke at 4:34 with a bug crawling on me.  Sigh.  I’m sure I have a mild case of RLS because I very often get ‘the crawlies’ but my crawlies don’t move, and bugs do, so that’s how I tell the difference when lying in bed at night.

I’m getting a new mattress.  This one is shite.  I don’t feel like spending any money.

Patricia and I got together downtown to (briefly) discuss my potential job application but mostly to drink a few sophisticated beverages, in the jungle that is the café at the VAG (no fewer than 4 species of bird and mammal came through).  We scored the best seats in the house. She asked to look at baby pictures.  I am extraordinarily proud of Alex (also Katie, who is doing a more than creditable parenting job under circumstances that are more difficult than what I experienced), but I don’t spend a lot of time talking about him, because his accomplishments have more to do with the quality of his vocalizations and his digestive processes than anything grownups consider remarkable.

Our server, Claire, a charming woman, talked to us a while about how people freak out about there being animals and she’s like, duh, it’s outside with 25 years worth of very dense foliage and food, and if you see mice there’s no rats, so whatevs.  Her attitude was very bracing, and damn us if we didn’t use the last of the pita to tempt Sir Sparrow and the Sire de Mousey.  And Patricia said something so complimentary I ain’t repeating it,  but it’s one of those things I’m going to be pulling out and mentally burnishing every once in a while for the next couple of weeks any time I have the Thrumps.

After two beers (Sunsetter Summer I b’lieve, and normally I LOATHE wheat bears and they give me an immediate headache but this was delicious and carried no such freight) and some hummus it was aff hame, except I said at Granville (exaggerating somewhat) CRYFACE O WHY IS IT I MUST LEAVE YOU MY FRIEND I WISH TO CONTINUE BEVERAGING.

I pointed to the nearest pub, and she had a better idea (she lives blocks away) and we went to a very nice bar called Uva, with extremely loud music (I need to find a bar downtown with music at a comfy level) and exceptionally nice washrooms and kindly servers, and I had a Raven, because I don’t get to go to Jericho Folk any more because they stopped (rent and exhaustion trending upward as I recollect) and that was the only place I ever drank it.  It was very, very good, even better than I remember although that might have more to do with how often the beer taps were cleaned at the Galley than anything else, because it was in a bottle.

So we chatted a while longer and I went home. Very pleasant to discuss the interface of domestic life with contemporary feminism, and on that subject I need make no further public remarks.

And now Jeff’s up and there’s tons on the PVR and it’s another smoking hot day in Vancouver and we are going to a family picnic tonight, yay! Also, it’s a resumé day, and I know better than to try to write more than one kind of fiction on resumé day.  I have the job description to hand, which will make things easier.

Writing will commence after the family picnic.  I am sure of it.  I was a little underfriended, and by the time I’ve done catching up with my dear ones I’ll be much closer to having a full tank.  Thank you Mike, Patricia and Alex for that!!

MUST EAT.