Category: Nature

Yeah, that about covers it for me.

Gold vs. Gold.

Equality is a chimera, but it must be encouraged to be real.

Bawled my eyes out this morning. I read of an encounter between a little autistic girl and a little Down’s syndrome girl in a restaurant.  The two girls ended up hugging and sitting together to eat their meal while their moms got kinda teary.  Honestly, if I didn’t personally know the woman who wrote it and could attest to her complete veracity, I would have sworn it was one of those darned feelgood stories that veer around the internet from time to time.  As it is I feel marginally better about human beings.

Jeff’s going to write a post about Gizmo.  It’s not much fun; Gizmo is not well.

ScaryClown went downtown with a buddy after the hockey game and he said that insane was the kindest way of putting it.  He’s also never seen so many drunken hot women.

I was 45 minutes late getting home last night because some ffffing idiots had a fender bender and didn’t move the cars down a side street to swap info.  Iggerunt putzes.

The weather is mild, mild, mild; I see forsythia everywhere, and there are already rhododendrons in bloom on the SFU hill.

I just gave more money to BCCLU, and they repaid me by defending the pro life group on the UBC campus.  Oh how hard it is to have higher moral standards than the people we disagree with.  In fact, I’m not sure it’s permanent.  I’ll go back to being a jerk now.

How???? by mentioning the Correction, yet again.

But then again, we need all kinds of brains to make a world.

Cat plus pig = cute picture

I warned you. Scanged from Reddit.

I checked my job card again and I don’t have to be at work today until one.  Full report upon my return.

Paul called me up yesterday and we went for a walk on the Quay and then we sang and played for a while – like a couple of hours, so it was a singing kind of day yesterday.  Also, balm to my wounded ego, he wanted to play along to a bunch of my tunes (he did the back up guitar for the recorded version of “Evening News” which I have always found quite tasty).

John’s six string Guild is a Man’s Freaking Guitar; the tips of my left hand fingers feel like I tried to stop a grinding wheel with them. And of course playing it without crying is hard to do sometimes; I’ll be messing with it and there will be a vertiginous sense of loss, and then it’s “Just keep playing, just keep playing.”

On the plus side I know how to play the rhythm mandolin for Two and Twenty Blues now, and the only solace as my fingers started to burn was that Paul was having a bear of a time with the guitar portion.  We played just the guitar and mando parts through about four times; Paul said it was all he could do to play the guitar part let alone sing on top of it. The mando and the guitar sound sweet together – the final result will be worth it.  We STILL don’t have a set list, but I suppose I shouldn’t whine, it’s all about the having fun, right?  Except it doesn’t sound bad, and I enjoy performing, during the brief spells when I’m not wanting to cocoon against the rain and the O Rim Pics.

After weeks of being impossible to keep in tune, the mandolin is finally behaving.  Turns out the problem is the hanger!  When I hang the mandolin up on the wall it promptly goes out of tune and stays that way.  However, when I put the mandolin in the case and hang THAT on the hanger, it behaves.  The guitar doesn’t behave like that at all.  I need new mando picks, all my old ones have wandered away, the little beggars.

After 8 months, Margot has finally figured out that when I pick her up I may just brush her, so she’s learned to scamper away at my approach.  If this keeps up I’m going to have to take her to a groomer and get her taken down to about an inch.

She really enjoys getting right behind Eddie when he’s eating and enthusiastically licking his butthole.  Eddie makes a series of loud and unhappy noises – mixed with eating sounds – but stands his ground.  The visual is really quite striking.  She never does that to Gizmo.  I guess there’s something really irresistable about Eddie’s butt, and if I ever said I wanted to come back as a cat, I take it all back now.  Really.

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.

That’s a weird coinkidink, holidays, Margot fur

Daughter Katie (Kathryn) is living with Kat (Kathleen) and Kashka (Polish diminutive of Katherine).  Weird, hunh?

We are going to have a LOT of coming and going this holiday season.  Keith goes to Victoria from the 19th to the 23rd.  He comes back the same day as when me, Paul and Katie go to Victoria for Granny’s b’day party.  We stay overnight and then come back Christmas Eve so I can start cooking for the big Xmas dinner.  Then Jeff goes later that week.  And Alex and Darwin will be going at the same time… tis nuts, but that’s Xmas for ya.

Margot is coming with us.  I suspect that despite my pOp’s inability to understand why I took this completely useless animal on as a pet, that he will like her anyway. Many thanks to Paul for allowing me to use his car to transport her.  She’s not a big fan of car trips,

I punted her with a piece of furniture yesterday.  (Accidentally, I didn’t see her).  She just slid across the floor and neither mewed nor changed position.  She has no conception of the possibility that someone would harm her. She can spend 10 minutes being brushed, grousing the whole time, scratching at my hands and kicking like a baby with her back feet.  Any other cat would vanish afterwards, and she merely flops down on the floor in front of the bathroom door and glares at me.  She can try to bite me but she doesn’t have enough strength in her jaw to even break my skin.  This makes her behaviour with Eddie and Gizmo even more hilarious; she’s defenceless, except for the cute; why Eddie hasn’t given her a good thumping I have no conception.

I have picked her up three times in a row to keep brushing her, and she doesn’t run away.  I can’t say she knows she can’t keep up with her own fur, but she sure acts like it.

Should I start keeping her fur as an art project?  She makes a loonie sized tuft of fur twice a day.

Trading emails

My bro emails me as follows.

This is what Margot looks like to me all the time:

ಠ_ಠ

Concerned cat is concerned.

I email him back.

^    ^
O~O

is more accurate.

He emails me back….

Sez you.

_________________

The mailman was very happy I put down de-icer yesterday.  I try to do as I would be done by, with variable results.  This time it worked.

I can’t find my cell phone charger.  I have no idea what I did with the darned thing, which is rather anxiety making.  At the same time, I know it’s in the house, so I am not too worried.

My cousin Katherine had a b-day yesterday; facebutt lets you know when people on your friendslist are approaching their natal day, so I and many other people wished her a happy birthday.  Her userpic in facebook is a piece of anime art she did herself.  Talented lassie!

My mother also had a birthday recently.  She and pOp celebrated, in part, with a drive in the country, a family tradition to which I, alas, cannot subscribe, as I don’t have a car and I don’t have any friends or relatives in town willing to indulge me in my fondness for aimless carbon release.

Eddie crawled into my lap … twice … yesterday.  Gizmo, not to be outdown, followed me into the bathroom at one point and insisted on being brushed.  It amazes me; both of the cats have changed so much since Margot came along, and apart from the truly remarkable noises Eddie makes when Margot goggles at him unexpectedly, I’d say their behaviour has become more affectionate.  Now, if we could stop them from throwing up.  But in the words of Dr. Jane, the singing paleontologist (now Dr. James):

Cats they shed, and cats they throw up

Cats they defecate and spray (and they spray)

And I’m gonna be a multi millionaire

The day that I can make these products pay.

Hey, if you’re going to sing about cats, one should strive for accuracy with those, dare I say it, caterwauls.

News of note

Something in my house that I don’t own (Don’t you weep) is now finished.  I am back writing songs down again after taking a break.

Margot is cleaner.  I bathed her (again!) this morning.  I also applied conditioner, because she’s so staticky she’s attracting dirt like a CRT.  She is an indoor-outdoor cat, and they say you should never let Persians be indoor-outdoor cats because

  • They are purebreds and people will steal them (she’s chipped)
  • They get filthy laying about in the debris outside
  • They are none too smart and rather too docile

Unfortunately, the place has a cat door, so what can ya do?  Besides, she looks so cute chasing bugs in the backyard and galloping up the back deck stairs.

Speaking of stairs, I have installed the anti-skid tape on the basement stairs, and this should prevent all three cats and any relevant hoomins from skidding down those stairs asswise.  (All three cats have wiped out on the stairs).

I am glad I haven’t had the R John Caspell memorial signage made up yet because it must now include the words “And Cat Vomitarium” under “Memorial Pinball Parlour” because, like, you know, the cats enjoy throwing up on that blue carpet.