Category: Music

Sick and weak with anxiety ain’t no way to start a work week

But yes, that’s where I am.  It’s performance evaluation week!

Let’s dig into the psychiatric attic, shall we!  I wrote the song Performance Evaluation when I was 24 years old.  In 30 years, my darlings, very little has changed.

 

He looks at me and says
I think you’ve got an attitude problem
“Who me?” “Yeah, you, you’ve got an attitude” x 2

“We’ll meet in two weeks time
To talk about performance issues”
“That’s fine.  Just get me out of here” x 2

Does this mean that I get to talk about some things
that have been on my mind
Like your temper tantrums and your drinking problem
Does this mean that I get to talk about some things
that have been on my mind
Like the underpaid shit work that you give us

Everywhere I look there’s people waking up and saying
Hey, this ain’t, this ain’t what I signed up for
Everywhere I look, there’s people waking up and saying
10 years I bust my butt, and now I get the door
10 years I bust my butt, and now I get the door.

 

 

Any day I don’t have to scrape or defog the car is a good one / Resolution list

Katie’s coworkers reacted to her new boots (she WORE THEM AT WORK for the last half of the shift, they is that comfy) with a gratifying display of jealousy, appreciation and WTF that her mOm would spend that much money on her.

Wednesday, probably, I go have dins with my old beau from the bike shop.  Looking forward to catching up with him.  It didn’t work out between us (he has a sweetie in Seattle, where have I heard THAT before) but I still appreciate him for his complete and blithe disregard for whatever is fashionable in favour of what he likes.

Check this out.  Laughed my ass off.  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/horoscoped/  It is a wordcloud of all the words in 22000 horoscopes, with A COMPLETELY GENERIC horoscope at the end.  So much for augury…..

Per the tarot reading which said I have so many, I have prepared my new years resolutions. Being ten in number, as recommended.

Remember to bring cans, rice and pasta for the food bank at least 3 out of 4 Food Bank Sundays.  I keep forgetting and it really feels bad.

Prep for taking on the duties of a Secretary at Beacon (I expect to be acclaimed, and still no Treasurer, bah).  Since this involves a lovely long lunch with Carol and Sue on my dime, I can’t imagine this one taking too long to tick off.

Lose 20 pounds by this time next year.  Awk, oh well.

Attend at least one Humanist meeting, even though there are two regular attendees whose smooth and seemingly impenetrable pomposity I would like to test a laser on.  Oh Allegra you are really doing them a favour aren’t you.

Attend at least one Lunch Bunch meeting.  It means I have to be on vacation or take a day off, but I have an evol plan for that.  It means connecting with some of the church elders, whom we do not have with us forever.  Their wisdom and humour is the reason I keep going back to church and yet I never socialize with them.  Wrongo me bucko, as they say.

Go to one open mic per month, except in January.  I plan to map out the ones closest to the house thanks to http://www.openmicvancouver.com/

Gather up all my homilies for publication.  Yeah, I know.  I will self-publish but it’s easy to do for cheap and I’m enjoying the notion of my mother having something to send her strict Christian relatives.

Monetize the web site.  Yes, start selling shit or advertising.  Seeing as how I will have to stop linking all over the web thanks to SOPA, I might as well start covering costs, cheap as they are.

Track the amount of time I spend watching TV (this, not the weight loss, is the real asskicker).

Get good or at least fun at making hats for cats and steampunk jewelry.  Cindy says she will tutah me.  Might even be a revenue stream, who knows.  It won’t be until I’ve recovered the $100 I’ve spent on supplies – I am keeping track.

And there you have it.  2012 will be all about connecting and creativity.  And hopefully some relief for my poor tubby knees.

Friday night & Saturday

Friday night Cindy took me out to dinner and then we came back here and sang and played.  I had given Paul a heads’ up that we were inbound and he was waiting for us.  We sang and played until midnight. Katie poked her head in for part of it and insisted her pop play Ramboing.  Yeah.

Yesterday I did NOTHING except run the dishwasher, watch a couple of episodes of Rome, run Katie in to work and a small amount of shopping.  Oh, and I made tea dyed cotton gloves and got steampunk findings  as part of my hat making plans.  Today, church, feeding Sue some lunch after church, and then an afternoon of real chores, as I’ve already had my day of rest.  Right now I’m going to work on songs.

The guy with whom I had “My worst ever coffee date” attempted to contact me again.  The excuse was that he enjoyed talking to me. (He was fine on the phone and, uh, how shall I put it, how about enthusiastic and inconsiderate, and in legal terms, assaultive, in person.  In public.  I had to lie like a cheap rug to escape from his company.)  I thanked him for the sentiment and said, it wasn’t going to happen.  The response was happy holidays and ‘can’t blame me for trying lol’.  Honestly.   Now that I have a little distance I’m forcing myself to see it as yet more horrifying evidence that dating over 50 is hazardous to your health.  I whined to one of my coworkers afterwards (LTGW) and he fixed me with his unblinking stare and told me that he was sorry to hear I had such a horrific experience but that I need to ask more intelligent questions prior to dates.  After that conversation – which was very helpful – I swore a mighty oath to find more productive uses for my time than trying to date.  After all, I’ve got a concert to practice for.

 

In a Lonely Place

So….. Once upon a long time ago my favourite song was a song I couldn’t identify.  It was on a mix tape DJD made for me back when I was 50 pounds lighter and random menfolks still occasionally mentioned the fertility quotient of my ass rather than its powerful ability to block the sun.   I knew that it was a band called Joy Division.  When the movie about Joy Division. Control came out I got to hear it again in quad sound, which blew my lights out because that drum riff MAKES ME NUTS.  It’s so ominous and amazing. While I was googleriffing the song, which turned out to be called “In a Lonely Place” I read a Criterion Collection review of the movie “In a Lonely Place” and it sounded SO frickin’ awesome I asked Jeff to rent it.

It turned up scant days later and Jeff and I were BLOWN away.  I mean, apart from the soundtrack, which is standard ish 50’s swelling strings and stuff that doesn’t really fit the mood, the movie approaches perfection. Humphrey Bogart is so good in this movie it beggars description; Gloria Grahame is magnificent, and the script is so uniformly excellent…. just rent the damned thing and be amazed.  Oh, it’s Noir.  Very, very noir.

So that’s my In a Lonely Place story.  I’m not in a Lonely Place…. Katie’s here, and in about five minutes I’ll finish making brekkie for the three of us.

I am settled into my room at the Double Tree Worthington

Cindy will arrive shortly and go straight to sleep in my room. I will find something to do with myself while she kips and waits for her room to be ready – I am thinking I might like to go look at the enslaved animals, if only in remembrance of the other Ohio animals who didn’t make it.  Besides, they have bonobos, and I ain’t never seen any.  Or I could wander down to the “German Village” room (!?) and see if anybody is filking yet.  Or maybe I’ll say fuck it and go to Macy’s.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Starbucks coffee is nauseatingly bad.  They may be proud to serve it but I’m a fool to drink it.

Gadhafi’s STILL dead, sic semper tyrannis.

So far, except for the coffee, I am loving this hotel.  The staff are really, really professional, friendly and courteous.  Room was supposed to be non-smoking, when I bleated they fixed it without a hiccup.

Weather’s like Vancouver, but windy.

I got selected for ‘special screening’ yesterday.  O goody.  I also got yelled at by every single one of the ‘security theatre’ staff, to the point that I would say “Please don’t yell at me,” not that it helped.  Note to self – travel in slip-ons next time.

“Miles Vorkosigan’s” filk of Lady Miss Banjola’s “Wreck of the Crash” MUST GET LYRICS and sing for my pOp.

It’s about the legal repercussions of losing your hotel room key, and it, like the song it’s based on is bloody hilarious.  YES there was filking last night and it was still going on when I went to bed at midnight local time.

VCon roundup

VCon vignettes: Getting asked by a new to filk fan if we “Had any Star Trek songs?” causing Creede and Shaddyr and I to look at each other wildly and flip the book open to Banned From Argo. Great concert by Creede and Shaddyr and I ran through our OVFF song list which was also well received. Songwriting panel I was on was attended by two very shy teenaged girls. Larry Niven was EVERYWHERE; saw him in the hall, the filkroom, the art show, the dealer’s room. The very model of an affable and approachable GOH. Dropped ludicrous amounts of money on clothing, including a sick confection of a steampunk hat, two corsets, skirt, buffalo belted purse, froofy blouse and bi-coloured leather wrist band with steampunk details and an alien glass eye on the top. Outfit is supposed to cross filk, steampunk and Browncoat fandoms. Shout out to foxipher – can’t wait for Conflikt ! Shout out to Casey Wolf. Saw the Best Assassin’s Creed costume EVAR; anytime the wearer passed somebody in period costume he’d go into the ‘blend’ posture which caused me to howl with laughter. There were half a dozen excellent Dr. Whos, the best Stormtrooper costume I’ve been up close to, and there was one poor chica who was the living model for Venus and Mars and had to change her costume every two hours as a walking billboard. Which she very much resembled as she was wearing the tallest platforms imaginable outside a KISS concert. Ran into various former coworkers and friends and friends of friends and had some lovely conversations and some long overdue catching up. Also, given that VCon is a smallish Gencon with about 1000 members, the art room was nothing short of spectacular. There were at least 10 items I wanted to buy and even the stuff I didn’t like was well done. And my costume was so cool (I changed into it as I was buying it, to the amusement of the dealers) I had requests for pictures. No VCon for me today as I am opening church and have life maintenance. But even so I call it an unqualified success.

Why I think Jeff is a genius

Jeff’s tenancy with me has consisted in part of him going away and thinking for a spell when I say things like “Why can’t we have the internet on the big screen?” and “We have to many fucking remotes; when you go out of town I can’t even reliably turn the TV on; can you fix that?” mostly to prevent himself from saying something mean to me about how I’m too dumb to understand the two page instruction set he laboriously wrote, AND updated at least twice.  Jeff produces good documentation and I am dumb as a brick; these two facts are incontrovertable.  With respect to the “Why can’t we have the internet on the big screen?” question he had to do a ton of stuff and set up another computer to make it happen.  SO I get to go skipping through life asking why things don’t happen to my liking and he gets to spend hours of challenging labour AND money making it happen.  I don’t know which is worse, that I keep thinking I can get away with it, or that he just quietly goes away and does it without presenting me with an itemized bill.  On the other hand, I do cook around here.

His latest act of genius has been to bow to the inevitable.  I am indeed TOO STUPID to handle more than one remote, but universal remotes almost universally suck.  After lengthy study of the problem, he purchased a universal remote and then spent a goodly number of hours programming it to withstand the depredations not only of myself but of my son, who can be a complete ass when borrowing media.  Sorry son, it’s true.  Of course if you get hit by a car I’m going to regret this, just like I regretted my daily description of cleaning John’s apartment when he moved out immediately after he got killed in an accident, but I don’t go back and oubliette that shit because that’s just lame.  I would rather be complicated, messy and inconsistent, because, er, that’s how I am….  But the truth keeps on being the truth even when you could have picked a better moment for the reveal.

Jeff has not only programmed the remote so I can do whatever I want to do with the tv and the Xbox and the monitor, he’s SET THE AVERAGE AUDIO LEVELS.  So if you’re going back and forth between media you don’t get blown out of your seat if you land in the middle of a tv commercial.  That, friends, is true genius.  And he’s always finding new ways to tweak the remote.  Go tech!

Today is Mother’s Day.  I’m opening at church (and if I’m not, I’ll help….) and then assisting with a Mother’s Day tea.  I decided I couldn’t deal with making soup so I baked a whole salmon and made cinnamon buns.  Jeff doesn’t know I plan on making more, but I do; it’s mean to fill the house with the supercharged smell of home baking and then say oops, you can’t have any.  (Actually I let him eat a couple: “I have good news and bad news.  These are the best cinnamon buns I ever made, and the rest are going to church.”)

Yesterday I did laundry and played Buzz ALL DAY.  I do not play Buzz every day, but I had four separate guitar playing sessions yesterday and I LOVE HOW THAT GUITAR SOUNDS OMG OMNOMNOM.  Also yesterday watched chunks of Canucks game and laughed at Margot for watching Nascar again.  She really likes Darlington, and why not.  My shopping trip yesterday consisted of propane and guitar strings, because the g string ALWAYS breaks on a 12 string; I bought two whole sets and spares.  I talked to Neil Douglas about effects pedals and he laughed and asked me why I’d bother.  I s’pose.

I managed to cut the grass last weekend but I have no fucking clue when I’ll get to do it again because the sky continues to dump precip at an unholy and quite soggy-making rate.

After church, the Horde will descend and I am hoping to barbecue some MORE salmon.

Did I mention that I think my brother is a genius?

Last day….

It was sad to be in that building for the last day.  I moved into that building many years before I started this blog, and now a new and exciting chapter starts (and I’m much closer to Brian C, Tom U, and numbers of other former coworkers who are now at a company ‘across the hall’ so to speak).

We packed up the desks about noon and then went to Joey’s Coquitlam for lunch; then I drove Dustin back to the office, picked up some cleanser and a vase that had been left there, wandered back to my old desk to say goodbye, picked up the yogurt that I’d left in the fridge, and felt a surge of unhappiness.  Then I got home, struggled with the fucking lawnmower for quite a while, said fuck it and did the weed-whacking instead, and then went back, gave it a mighty heave and got the lawnmower running.  Then I finished the lawn.  Since the back lawn grass was wet as a baby’s diaper the exercise provided was kind of extreme; mowing the front yard left me exposed to the sun to the point I thought I’d pass out.

Sweating like a pig, I brushed myself down and then went and got my new stickers for the car (having thoughtfully changed my coverage to include the kids), fetched beer as per Jeff’s request, taste tested a new vodka cooler (cranberry lime) and upon making the discovery that unlike every other cooler I’ve ever had, it wasn’t disgustingly sweet, I purchased some.

Then I planted some seedlings and discovered an ant colony in our compost pile.

I was supposed to go to Tom and Peggy’s to practice, but after the exertions of the day I couldn’t move.  I eventually recovered to the point of cooking toasted ham’n’eggers and collapsed for good around nine without even looking at my computer.

Impossibilium ain’t just a song

Canadian scientists plus international cooperation FOR THE WIN.

Hmph. Listening to “The Future’s so Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” on a day like today on the way in…. wrongness, somehowerother.

Lovely time re chicken dinner at the ‘Villeans last night and then singing filk and other stuff. I HEART HEART HEART that 12 string of Tom’s and Peggy expressed surprise that I can actually play a 12 string now.  Didn’t mention that my left fumb now feels crabby.

Peter A at work has come back from another vacay with his lady wife, and once again they have brought me a tshirt, this time a flaming dragon from Tintagel.  This word will set off a long happy sigh in my parental units….

Mike got a phone interview.  He has passed the first gate… will he slay the dragon?

I KNOW TWO PEOPLE IN PERSON who have been omnominated for Hugos.  Ay!

In The Correction news…. Aughh.

Sundry and various

Call centers in Indian jails, this should work out well.

One Life to Live and All My Children will be cancelled. And replaced by a celebrity cooking show.  Hey women and shift workers!  Stay home and get fat, it’s not like you do any good to our advertisers otherwise.

Why would narrowed neck circulation have anything to do with MS?  But apparently it does.

Get your hands off that peen, or, what eXACTly are you testing for?  BC cancels controversial test of young offenders which involves handling young men’s junk.

If you’re a cop and get involved with drugs… you can collect two paychecks!  Mind you you’re not reporting the second one, but o well.  Woot!

Teachers in BC get a say over class size and composition. This is very good news for BC kids and parents, not to mention the teachers.  If you’ve ever taught a kindergarten class which is 1/3 ESL and has two special needs kids and is 30 students (not making this up, I have a friend who was in this spot) you’ll know what I mean.  Just getting them to line up for the can is a challenge!

I don’t get it. Can somebody explain to me why this is funny?

I’m impressed!  Ba-dum kish!

Katie’s only been here two nights and already I am fidgetty.  9 pm last night she leaves, says she’ll be back late, doesn’t show, doesn’t text.  Is she in a ditch? Did she crash at Kashka’s? Is she where she probably is?  And why’n fuck do I care? (Apart from how, every time she doesn’t come home, I have to rehearse what I’ll say to the cops if they come to my door?)

I blearily and wearily looked out my back door this morning, and thought, “Spring and Vancouver… no longer BFFs?”  There’s like half an inch of hoarfrost on things.  I knew at the end of March we’d get more snow because I could smell it.  Sounds stupid, but it’s true.  Now I can’t smell the end of it.  Snow tires will remain on car until further notice.

The move at work is getting closer.  Sure would like to know when we’re getting training on the new phone system and how it interacts with the call center software, but I’ve been assured there will be training.

Our CEO is leaving, and our new CEO is younger and French.  Rumour has it he’s moving to Vancouver.  I’ve met him the once, and apart from observing that he has a George Hamilton grade tan and a sense of humour, I have no comment.

The cats have been extremely rangy.  Margot in particular has been up in Eddie’s grill.  Eddie came for a nice long hug last night.

I played Buzz for about half an hour last night.  He’s going to be my bed time snack.  He’s so quiet when unplugged, but he sounds great.  I was thinking of dragging the amp into my bedroom, and just said screw it and brought Buzz in.

I can hear Margot laboriously licking herself on the basement stairs.