Category: Nature

Sundry and various

Yesterday I made the dough for biscotti, got the sign down and out the door on to Signfast’s truck and believe me that thing is AWKWARD to shift around, ran coffee through the Bunnomatic for the first time (it’s okay but we gotta make sure the sprayer is set right and we have to turn the machine on the instant we get in in the morning or we won’t have coffee for about half an hour or more), got the back fridge working with the help of my wee man. a temp sensor (which he says was located in the wrong place which is why the thing was rusted as a car on blocks), watched the amazing amount of foot traffic that goes by the store, learned that there is a coffee shop going in to the Community centre (which obviously made me sad), got a schoolin’ about what to do with the waste heat from the compressor which made me very thoughtful but means that the shop will be cooler in summer and warmer in winter, got proper knobs for the gas ovens, swept the shop, did all the dishes, made myself a sammy with the chicken breast from Grimms (I think we should order from them, their meat is really good), found out from the City of Burnaby that we do NOT in fact need a permit for our sign (I had been concerned), arranged other inspections or got them in train with the City, transferred some money into the biz account, got stuck in the worst…fucking…traffic ever while getting the last items out of Katie’s apartment, talked briefly to her former co-tenant Randy, who dished dirt on a friend’s drunken ass ex in a most entertaining fashion, found out that the Dandy Warhols are playing the Commodore June 22 AND IT’S A PLAY THROUGH OF THIRTEEN TALES FROM URBAN BOHEMIA one of my fave albums ever and I’m STOKED,  had an extremely emotional conversation with Jeff during which he was extremely supportive and calming (thank you, and bless you) and no I’m not going to talk about it on my blog, watched a couple of episodes of Third Watch, and watched Eddie bring in a baby mouse, which after a brief discussion about what to do with him (Izzy living here after all) Jeff put back outside much to Eddie’s disgust.  Candidly I shouldn’t even have suggested it because Izzy is a hand tamed snake and wild critters carry all kinds of interesting diseases. Day before yesterday learned about a Swedish sci fi show called Real Humans which is awesome even with subtitles and which I want to see the rest of soonish. Today I learned that Margot is turning into a dog.  She now circles once (forwards OR backwards, which is beyond words entertaining) before lying down, and she still comes to greet and say goodbye when we go places. Jeff got her to almost fetch the other day, and she chases the floppy flyer (fabric frisbee style thingee).

Today back into the shop to wait for the sign and work on various things that you can’t work on when all the shops are closed. Katie’s at her friends place in New West but I wasn’t expecting her to come home, she was partying with the buddies who have been so supportive to her this past year.

Apart from the church stuff, which I would like to chuck over a back fence, and the lawn, which needs mowing, I’ve never felt better.  I’m even recovered from the move.  And it doesn’t matter that my todo list looks as it does.  Gradatim, baby.

Hope switch located, turned back on

Paul didn’t even let me get twelve seconds into mah woeful tale before he said, walk first.  So we went to Deer Lake Park and saw:

 

  1. wood ducks x 3 plus mallards lazily walking along the path and grazing at the side
  2. hummingbirds x 2
  3. towhee
  4. the saddest crow in the world, behaving in a fashion I can only describe as inexplicable.  It sat on a sign, bowed its head and cooed sadly like a pigeon.  Repeatedly.  Like, so many times that Paul and I were starting to freak out.
  5. frisky squirrels, imports and natives
  6. many many skunk cabbabbages
  7. hardly any people, unsurprising given that every form of precipitation the lower mainland affords fell out of the sky earlier today.  There’s still unmelted snow on the front lawn in the shade.

But the sun came out and Paul received the Gift of Maple Bacon Muffins with great thanks.  Now I feel better, but this next week is gonna suck a large citrus fruit, and I must needs stay on task.

My heart feels like it’s being squeezed by two subway car doors

But that is usual when you get freaked out by your to do list.  Paul and the kids and Jeff and I feasted at Chong Lum Hin yesterday. Dim Sum!  Gung Hay Fat Choi!

Katie saw Warm Bodies and loved it.

Margot is still shedding so massively that I can take a teacup of compressed fur off her every day with NO VISIBLE EFFECT.

Rob watched TSSIT and LOVED IT.  What’s not to love? Son also watched it and found it ‘adorable’.

Purim is coming.  In the words of the immortal Sean Haugh (a facebook friend of the libertarian/sf fan persuasion whom I have never met IRL).  (And you have to understand, I only friend non IRL people who are friends with at least six of my other friends).  “Purim is my favorite religious holiday bar none. A feast to celebrate the death of a tyrant, a religious service that comes with its own drinking game, and! the best cookies ever! Why Purim isn’t the biggest holiday on the calendar is beyond me.”

Here’s the Beacon Birthday Song lyrics!  Nobody from church reads my blog (thank GOOOOODDDDD) so I’m not giving anything away.

To think that it all started with committee work
These long years past
Some now here assembled came and did not shirk
And they had a blast
We are trying to help the world
All the little boys and girls
And the ones who aren’t sure which they are
Growing their theology
Becoming all that they can be
Knowing in their lives they’ll wander far
And Beacon will be part of who they are

All the controversies now seem very small
When we look back
It’s a miracle that we are here at all
With all that flack
Boards and staff in panoply
Ministers and homilies
Days when the presenter failed to show
Visits to the partner church
Pledges paid or in the lurch
Always wondering if we would grow
As if our wishing somehow made it so.

But it is no joke
To fight oppression’s yoke
Whether in the soul or in the street
What you think is true
Is shown in what you do
And sharing truth is really why we meet

Here’s to Beacon’s 30th, now raise a glass
And toast us proudly
Maybe all our dreams have not yet come to pass
Still we sing loudly
We can set up anywhere
Little but somehow we share
Knowing that our giving shows our love
The future holds its mystery
As we toast our history
And the peace that we’re all dreaming of
And the peace that we’re all dreaming of.

 

 

 

 

Lovely long chats

In the last week or two I have spoken on the phone to Lois and Terry and Bonnie and Carrie and Ron (an old family friend I probably don’t often mention) and Tammy and Dave the poet and my mother and the minister…. I keep forgetting what it’s like to really talk to somebody who knows me from when I was a pup.  And sometimes I am doing more listening than talking, but…. I believe there’s something about friendship which occasionally requires this ‘sacrifice’.  Tammy more than anybody I know makes me feel heard.  It is a most wonderful sensation, even if we are murder on each other as travelling companions, heavy sigh.  Carrie is being driven spare by repeating earthquakes and aftershocks and her moronic and supposedly no contact order former spouse.

Chalice circles start up again tonight.  There is homework, darn it and we have to COMMIT to going twice a month for four months.  It’s down at Sue’s place which is nice and close.  I hate that there is homework.  The free form chalice circles of yore worked a lot better for me.

Out to brekky with Jeff this am.  I am hoping to convince him to combine it with a trip to Thrifty’s first as there are tiresome holes in our larder, like eggs and cream for coffee and white sugar (we have brown but it just doesn’t cut it for certain kinds of baking).  Yes, he has agreed – as long as we don’t get anything frozen.

RGIII’s knee injury last night during the Seahawks Bengals game was just about the most disgusterpating thing I’ve ever seen lovingly replayed about a hundred times.  Blergh.

Between now and shopping and brekky, it’s JOB APPLICATING TIME!!!

KATIE was at CHURCH YESTIDDAY!  I haz a happy!  (Song went okay).  JEFF fixed KYLE’S COMPUTER.  I haz a happy!  I can’t get hold of the new bookkeeper!  I haz a panic attack!  TRE AND BATTERY dropped by for an impromptu visit and TRE PLAYED ON THE PINBALLS while BATTERY AND JEFF CHATTED!  Tre is three and really really enjoyed it, although Margot wishes him to the uttermost pit.  We haz a happy about dese tings!  EDDIE IS UPSET AT SOMETHING in the yard.  We haz a scaredy.  LIZ MCINTOSH FRIENDED ME ON G+.  Yay, my second oldest friend has gotten back in touch with me electronically.  I HAVE AN EVIL PLAN TO MAKE MONEY IF I CAN’T GET A JOB.  I can haz a scheming plot!   And so, from asterisk to asterisk, from ALL CAPS TO italicized, from call to call and packet to packet and cheque to cheque and cheek to cheek and from plug to drain, these are the expostulations of our lives.

 

 

 

 

very foggy

It’s a spooky foggy morning out here in east Burnaby.

Jeff’s coming home from Victoria today.  The cats sure make a lot of noise when they go up and down the stairs; I keep thinking it’s something that weighs 200 pounds, but it’s just a cat.  Not nice when you’re in the house alone.

I was in bed by nine last night and slept through the ball drop.

I called the minister to wish her a happy new year.  She was going to be ordained from our church this year but her dad’s coming to the end of his life and she’s helping her mother.  Sounds like they are doing everything right and bringing him home.

Margot really really hates firecrackers.  She was sitting next to me breathing hard and wincing every time something went off.

I suspect 2013 will be the weirdest year ever.

 

 

 

 

Things ta do

I have already applied for two jobs and it’s just gone 6 am.

I will continue to look, however.  I’m supposed to hear back about the job in New West today.  Hope I do, it’s a fifteen minute bus ride.

Kitchen clean up.

STACKS of church paperwork, but I have been given an energy boost by positive interactions at church yesterday.

Laundry…. the continuing saga.

Trying to figure out a mandolin part for the keeping bears happy song.  Or a guitar part, but I hear mandolin.

Justin Timberlake clogs.  In a movie, not a drain. 

Margot was running around the house doing the crazy cat thing.  Since she’s never done this before, she’s now laid up in the cat hotel in the corner of the living room and breathing with an astonishing stertorousness.

I need to find out what those folks are doing with my tax returns.

xmas cards

Almost 20 stamped, addressed and ready to go.  I concentrated on people at church who don’t come often and people I wanted to thank for their presence in my lives, including people I normally only interact with on facebook or elsewhere on the Internet.

also, mOm when you see this can I have mailing addys for Greg and Tracy, ontie Mary and Uncas Barry and Gary, as well as Phyllis?  I can’t find my mailing list from years past…..

Despite everything – unemployment, the weather, and other things one shouldn’t publicly relate – I’m in a really good mood.  I got a ‘wretched chore’ off my list yesterday and everything balanced to the penny, so I’m a happy happy girl.  Also, I went to London Drugs yesterday looking for Blue Heron Coffee and couldn’t find it.  Now normally I’d lose my shit and panic, but old age is causing me to do things like (literally, in this case) step back and look more carefully.  THEY CHANGED THE EFFING PACKAGING.  grr.  So then I looked, and there they were, for 8.99 A PACKAGE.  Normal price 14.99, normal discount and London Drugs 11.99.  I bought 5.  Glad I went! And if anybody from church is reading this, this is why I don’t buy coffee at church.  Plus I hate Spitfire Longbottom with a passion, it tastes like mud a Komodo dragon got busy in.

Also I dropped off more receipts at the accountants and I may actually get my taxes up to date, and I found the perfect gift for Jeff, which I have no intention of buying – it’s coasters made of Antarctic maps.  Jeff’s on a really serious “READ ALL THE BOOKS ABOUT ANTARCTICA” kick; he’s relating all the best anecdotes.

I still have to go to Surrey, but maybe I’ll combine it with another errand. A leathery or musical errand.  Or maybe I’ll just grimly go straight to my errand and come back.  Thinking about my mortality doesn’t please me, and thinking that my final resting place is going to be a funerary park in Surrey about blows my tiny mind.  Paul was so sweet – when I told him I was getting the cremation ‘package’ I bought back in 95 transferred to the Lower Mainland he asked if he needed to pay for it (there’s room for two in that niche, haw haw), and I said, “Considering we had a joint checking account in those days, uh, no…. you already did.”  And besides the separation agreement says we no longer owe each other anything, although I keep thinking I want to break into his apartment and steal the damned rug we bought on Pender Island.  I LERV DAT TING.

Margot is still playing “Go Home Fly You’re Drunk” in the kitchen.  I don’t know where all these sleepy, weaving, falling down flies are coming from, but even so they’re more than a match for Miss Margot.