Category: Domestic Life

May you find what you seek

In some cultures, that’s considered a curse.  Anyway, to the point; I am looking up stuff on Afghanistan and Persia (now Iran) because I am following information about Rumi.  Accidentally I land on the wikipedia page of the anti-Rumi, which contains a bunch of 14th Century dirty jokes.  They are at the bottom of the page, you’ve been warned, etc.  One of the jokes is so disgusting it could cheerfully be used by people who hate Muslims as propaganda.

We are watching Ken Burn’s Jazz, and it is uniformly excellent.  I wish I could have watched it with John, too.

Off to the library today.  I have a couple of other errands to run.

My request to have assistance in developing anti-racism curriculum is in the newsletter for church.

I can only wonder what my uncle, who got a PhD in Fluorine Chemistry, would make of this website mocking PhD subjects.

Loki lowkey Christmas

Showed the shop on Christmas day AND Boxing day.  It will be a Syncretic Agnostic Festive Miracle if I sell the place, but I’m okay with what happens.  Everything changes. Failure hasn’t killed me yet.

As part of our Syncretic Agnostic Festive Season, we acquired Chinese Food, watched documentaries and SGA, and bought zero presents, sent zero cards.  I did go to a Christmas Eve service which was about the advent and deliverance of joy, love, peace and hope, framed by the story of the Christ child and Mary.  (Joseph always gets left out… I’m gonna make a sermon for him some day).

One of the best things about filk is that if you change the lyrics to be less sexist nobody will comment.  I say this looking at Uplift, a wonderful song written in 1999, but it contains Mankind.  I will sing it as Humans.  All will be well.

I’ve already blasted through the second hand book Tammy gave me for Christmas.  It’s called The Forty Rules of Love, and I cried BUCKETS while I was reading it, but it is about the love between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and it is a very wonderful and sad story.  In the end, Rumi is a poet, but everyone around him paid a high price for it.

Poetry doesn’t come from nowhere; for me it is language reaching through my emotions to a page; to the release and abandonment of expressing a feeling in the most charged and delicate way possible.  Poetry is like the sprite that forms above a massive thunderstorm.  So brief, so beautiful, and invisible unless you are looking RIGHT AT IT when it happens. She who has not seen will say it doesn’t exist.  She who has seen will pummel words and rhythms, grasp at floating down, weave spider silk and daydreams, stare at bones, bond with discards, trace the impression of a car tire in tar, build launching pads of paper and foil. Her dissatisfaction is the human eternal, embroidered with a great ‘Ah!”

Lumosity, mando practice, paperwork.  That is at least part of my day.

Church today was great

A good service, enlivened by Rev Deb’s inclusion of both Thomas King and George Carlin.  Plus, Beatles, and Dark of Winter, my favourite hymn as sung by the choir.  Paul, bless him, is back from his gig in Seattle and gave me a lift to and likewise fro. I sent him forth with chicken breast for sandwiches, my homemade pickled beets (which he adores) and a frozen soup by way of thanks (also he gave me one of his very chiropractic hugs, which by damn I needed!)

Wrote about 750 words on Midnite Moving today.

Practiced HARD this morning.  It’s getting close!

Found Keith’s 300$ sunglasses in the couch downstairs.  Phoned him immediately and was he glad!

No walkies today.  Still a bit nasty underfoot out there.  Not like Toronto, though, it’s a freaking mess there.

A*****e McF*****t stood me up for the meet at the shop.  Sorry, I’m not in the mood to be charitable.  Jeff knows the whole tale and concurs.

Totally took down some asshat on twitter going on about vaccination.  The article he linked to said that vaccinations have something to do with infant mortality in the US.  ( well they do, just not negatively). The high infant mortality rate in the US has more to do with institutionalized racism and unevenly distributed prenatal care than vaccination, and anybody who says different doesn’t know a FUCKING THING about epidemiology, obstetrics, and forty years of data drawing a line between race and good — or poor — health outcomes.  Given that the twitter account is ostensibly an anti racism media site, I unloaded very hard.  I do not want persons of colour to put their kids at risk believing this bullshit because ‘da man’ makes bad vaccines.  HEAVY HEAVY SIGH.

As a palate cleanser….Cute temporary tattoos!

Off to show the shop and fetch some library books

Today I rehearsed for an hour, including patter, did a chunk of my physio exercises, gave myself a facial and a nice long shower, and now to do other Useful Things.

Stay safe in the snow!  There have been two fatal accidents along Canada Way in the last two weeks, although excessive speed mixed with heaping handfuls of stupid probably had more to do with it than weather.

Another no show

Person of interest didn’t show.  I’m supposed to be meeting with someone else this weekend re the cafe.  It’s a numbers game, I have to be patient, etc.

Eddie is basically not coming up the stairs at all these days.  He lives in Jeff’s bathroom closet, only coming out to eat and drink and use the litter pan.  He’s painfully thin and his hair is coming out in patches and sometimes when he looks at me I get the feeling he’s trying to figure out who I am, then he lets me pet him, calls softly and sadly, and goes back to his hidey hole.  Every once in a long while he tries to jump up on something and loses his balance. Since he is still eating and drinking and taking his meds, we’re in a state of watchful waiting but also premonitory sadness.

I’m hoping to score a flu shot today, if I can gird up my loins to get there.  Also to pick up the colour printer from Paul’s place and also to do a bunch of other errandy type things.

Customer surveys can be hazardous to your marriage. (picture of a hotel survey)

 

cold and snow

Triple amputee zombie pranks Walmart shopper.

Santa Cthulhu.

Blasted through the last of season 1 Miss Fisher last night. I have a new crush. Nathan Page gets an expression on his face when he’s looking at Essie Davis which is extremely gratifying.  Also, as I poked around the internet for more details about him everything I read about him made me think he’s probably a pretty solid customer, with extremely nice legs.

It was midnight before I was in bed… I’m trying to reset my sleep habits; going to bed at 7 is awkward.

Still no repair on internet or furnace.  Re the internet, it’s working right now but will probably quit at some point later today, and as for the furnace, there’s no record that the ducts have been cleaned since Mulroney was Prime Minister (bleaugh).

Keith posted this GEM to facebook yesterday:  I have a long distance relationship with reality, but it’s terribly awkward when we meet face to face.  Given the scansion I think it’s a Keith original.

 

No show

Oh my screaming g’s the Detroit Philly game. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Six inches of snow on the camera crew and half the football disappears when you put it down. When the player rooted double handsful of snow out of his face mask I howled.

Furnace is broken, internet is spotty.  Working right now, but who knows later.  It’s been like this for days now.

We’re at the end of Season 4 for Burn Notice and Jeff has declared a short moratorium.  That’s okay, because I’m currently thrilling to the amazing dress sense of the lovely Phryne Fisher of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.  It’s very much in the Foyle’s War category of murder mysteries, except Australian and Phryne is a SLUTTTT! A cheerful, unapologetic and unambiguous one (but sex scenes are strictly decorous and mostly off screen).  She drives a Hispano Suiza! She has a gold plated pistol, which never seems to have any ammo! She is awesome.  So until I get Michael Westen back, probably about a week from now, I’ll have to watch Farscape and Miss Fisher instead.

Person to see the shop yesterday didn’t show.  Somebody else called, I’m showing it Tuesday.

David Simon (of the Wire) talkin”bout capitalizm.

I am thinking of going to the shooting range the next time Keith and Rob go.

I know I spend a lot of time whining, but I am really happy to be alive, and I’m writing and practicing every day, and there’s food in the fridge, and my friends love me, and my cat is cheerfully indifferent to me unless I’m crinkling packaging.

Eddie is feeling a bit better – his appetite has returned – but he’s now hiding in Jeff’s bathroom cupboard a good chunk of the time.

I have half completed my first of two new homilies (March 9 and May 11, or perhaps the other way around) and intend to have a completed draft of the first by the end of the week. mOm I should have a bit off to you shortly.

The Alberta government has tabled legislation that will prevent public sector union employees from even TALKING about striking.  What unutterable bullshit! My prairie populist ancestors are whirling in their graves like a rotisserie set on stun.

Yay, Natalie Reed is blogging again. She is a queer trans blogger living in Vancouver and she can write like a m*****-******* riot.

I just walked 3.5 kilometres doing errands

I paid for Katie’s storage (and it’s great I won’t have to do that much longer), I mailed my application to be a busker at the post office, and I turned in my plates for my car insurance refund.  It isn’t much, but the last two days represent the first time money has come into the house that my fOlks didn’t give me in many moons. I did take the bus for 2.4 k up the hill from the insurance co to the storage co., but given how my feet are singing and how that is about a 300 foot elevation gain I am not really beating myself up over it.

I am now pleasantly weary and thinking about the next thing on my to do list.

And hoping it doesn’t actually involve, you know, standing up.

 

This is a very rude and funny commentary website on how top heavy webdesign is these days.

walking every day

My healthy habits attempts continue, much assisted by the weather.  It is fricking gorgeous.  I am walking every day.  It’s going to hurt no matter what I do, so I may as well stay mobile.  I’m also ramping up my weight bearing exercises.  I can pretty much move my right arm where it’s supposed to go, with assistance, but the strength is lacking and so I’m spending a lot more time doing the physio exercises.

I stood in line for a long time today at a government agency, where I was served by a very nice young man after the tedious wait, and took a bus back from Metrotown.  In my continuing efforts to spoil Jeff rotten I picked up some croissants.  And cookies.

Dishwasher’s burbling away.

Katie is employed! She starts work today.  I am pleased. Now hopefully her brother will stop grinding her about looking for work; I don’t think he has a clue how hard it is out there right now.  I heard from an employment agency today, but I don’t expect much to come of it.

Beautiful but windy

Katie’s all perky because various job interviews are going well. I am very happy about this and hope she finds work remunerative and suitable to her one goal right now, which is to be back in her own apartment.  I must say, it will be a cold day in hell before she supports another man.  Or so she says, I hope she carries through.

Foyle’s War on Netflix is a wonderful show, Jeff and I are very much enjoying it. No swearing, decorous violence, great dialogue, sweet vehicles, and history all wrapped up nicely with the superlative Michael Kitchen at the helm.  He is GORGEOUS but in a very low key Oh So English way.

Streptococcus salivarus, I salute you!  It is the probiotic that turned my bad into glad, digestion wise.

Mouse traps have yielded nothing; we are moving on to sticky traps today, damnit.

Practiced 45 minutes today.

Yesterday was gorgeous but WINDY.  As I contemplate the lawn, which has now grown tall and fallen over, I keep hoping the Goat Man will pass by.  But he never does.

Ziva’s in Craigslist, priced for quick sale.

The wit and wisdom of imaginary creatures

 

In this case, Raylan Givens.

I don’t feel very well so I’ll be sticking close to home today. Yesterday I went to physio and walked back with what felt like (and fell onto the ground.. twice..) 30 pounds of groceries.  But it was good to have fresh veggies and oddly nothing got broken or smashed.

I have learned my memory is crappy and I’m glad, I tell you.  But even people with good memories make stuff up.

A satisfactory day so far

Jeff helped me set mousetraps at the shop.  Sigh.  But he got breakfast, so that was good!

Dishwasher is running, Jeff is downstairs catching up on feetsball on the PVR.

I’m posting my resume every place I can think of.

Later on we’ll watch some more Foyle’s War, maybe I’ll go protest something, and I will definitely eat steak.  So a satisfactory day in prospect.