Category: Sports

another quiet day

Made marinated tofu with bok choi and carrot over chow mein noodles. The marinade was malt vinegar, sesame oil, sugar, cayenne, garlic powder, veggie bouillon paste and soy sauce. Fried stuff up separately and then assembled it; it was too bland so I dumped in the marinade and after that it was quite tasty. Because Jeff is great he put it away when I forgot to. Forgot the ginger and onions because I’m a fool.

Watched the Super Bowl. If Rihanna wasn’t high as humans get, I’ll eat my shoe – her first live show in 7 years by all accounts. It was actually a pretty good game and Mahomes and Hurts were very entertaining to watch.

I hope you all have a lovely day. I’m going to continue to work away on the new uke, Argella.

18653 words.

More items off the list

I am continuing to feel much more chipper.  It wasn’t a super productive day, but I walked (really walked, not ambled) and got some social contact and the sun was a benison.

There’s a new game, Semantle. IT’S INSANE MAKING. Wordle is fun and brief and lively, but Semantle makes you understand you don’t understand English at all, and given that it is, “My bag, my thing, my evil specialty” it’s … Okay, here’s the link. Just don’t ever play the game, you will die of frustration. (suitably vexed voice, with shaken fists: CURSE YOU VIXY) —LATER LATER MUCH LATER I’m up to 3hundred and freakn 80 guesses on Semantle, I feel like me brains are leaking out my ears.

It’s supposed to be ass freezing cold tonight until Wednesday. I am not worried; I’ll have the warmth of VISITORS tonight yes that’s right Mike was supposed to come over for ‘za last night but he drank too much with sifu (sifu is master in Chinese martial arts)  and couldn’t manage it, so he’s coming over tonight.

Buster heals and complains about the door being locked.

Yesterday I ordered the bamboo charcoal smell-killers that have worked so well for us. (really helps with the damp smell in the downstairs john).  Why? As mentioned Mike got a right hand drive Delica (which I rode in for the first time when we went saunaing and dining with Jarmo and Susanna) and it’s unfortunately a Japanese vehicle which means it’s been smoked in. So I’ll give him three of those bamboo charcoal smell killers and that will keep the noxious effluvium down to a dull roar, hopefully. I ordered it from Rona and with the exchange and free shipping it’s about the same as if I ordered it from the US, so that worked.

Absolutely delightful walk in the park at Fraser Foreshore yesterday with Paul. I fed the chickadees from my hands for about ten minutes with Paul watching, most entertained; with what delicacy and firmness did they grasp my index finger as they rested a flashing moment to grab a sunflower seed. The sun was just blasting down and there was no wind, so we sat in the sun and basked for many long minutes in companionable silence. Everyone on the trail (except for those two fuckwits on mountain bikes who came through with a gopro and attitude and 90 dB of shitty club music at about 25 kph without a bell or shout) was practically giddy with joy at the warmth and sun, and even though it was the Sunday of a long holiday weekend (it’s ‘Family Day’ in BC) the trails weren’t too crowded. I masked, Paul didn’t.

Then we went back to KC Junction and I ate Keith’s leftovers, a superlative yellow lentil stew with heaps of veg and subtle, lightly heated spicing, and then we ate my choc rice pudding for dessert. (Keith enjoyed it with thanks.) Paul was much more interested in the borscht I brought (he really likes my borscht) and I realized why when I saw the sour cream container. But I can’t eat borscht two days running because anything with oxalic acid makes my kidney output scratchy so I ate lentils instead.

Keith’s loving his job… just loving it. He says it’s only a week and you can’t know for sure, and the pay is not great, but it’s work he can stand and he’s visibly in much better shape than even two weeks ago.

Katie was out with Ryker & Alex and some friends so I didn’t get to see her.

The Russians are claiming that the Ukrainians are ‘reacquiring nuclear weapons’ and I’m like wow, we can’t trust a fucking word you say now, can we.

Worst showing ever in terms of ratings for the Olympics. Why NBC keeps this boat anchor tied to its ass I have no idea. What if they held an Olympics and nobody wanted to broadcast it? That would be choice.

Twitter antifa (canuck division) is rooting around in rural Ontario to find the names of the people who are hiding the convoyancers. So far some son of a sea cook in Embrun who’s the best friend of the mayor there is one of them. LOL they can hide but six months from now the knock will come. Remember they’re still knocking on doors from the Jan 6 rebellion in the US, it’s not like the cops work faster in Canuckistan.

I’m an abolitionist; if they could all be referred to restorative justice and be filling planters and picking up garbage in Centretown for the next two years instead of paying fines and going to jail I WOULD BE HAPPY. Especially if they had to wear a PLEASE DON’T FEED THE HONKIES sign around their necks while they were doing it, but that’s not nice, I know it.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but if they reboot Futurama without the voice acting talents of John DiMaggio I won’t watch it, even out of whatever is left of my curiosity.

Side note to mOm. The Metformin did it again this morning, fortunately I know how this goes and I had plans in place and managed to deal with it all promptly. What a life.

 

 

 

 

Tea and toast

Woke up just after three after a restful sleep. Three kudos on my dashboard this morning. Always fun to see what people are reading. Another person has subscribed to my mailchimp account for UPSUN as well. In addition I logged into dreamwidth (the ‘replacement’ for live journal for people who don’t want all their data stolen by the Russians) because I really wanted to read something one of my filk buddies has posted and …. I hadn’t posted since 2018. uff dah. I posted. It was sad having to mention that Tom had died.

Worked on the fanfic a bit, not much. In the portion I just wrote one of the brothers is teasing the other about his new relationship and I very much enjoyed writing that because one of the great wellsprings of Supernatural fanfic is the abiding love (and shittalk) between the bros… it’s very easy to write the shittalk because they are constantly teasing each other (and would die for each other).

Still not experiencing hunger and thirst properly. It’s very strange to be forcing myself to eat, unless it’s something sweet.

The wind is gusting hard and it makes the plastic siding creak in an alarming way.

Ryker’s got a mucousy cold, poor wee tyke. Alex is a snot factory whether he has a cold or not. Just sayin’.

Had to shovel again; the lack of walkway salt was mitigated by the fact that it started raining and melting, so we didn’t get freezing rain. Lawks that was one big raccoon we got through the property night before last though, HUGE pawprints.

It’s very pleasant to no longer be required to run a heater all night in my room. It’s quite pleasant in the house now.

Well, I boiled water but I haven’t made tea, and the toast is still waiting for my work, so time for some foodicles and to start my day. FIRST TASK. Wrestling my weighted blanket back into its cover. This will literally take me half an hour as it’s like a USB cable. First you attach the WRONG zipper, and then you attach the RIGHT ONE, IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, and then omg maybe THIS will work. Heavy sigh. Still haven’t put all my clothes away.

This morning my twitter feed is full of: Trans people commenting (still) on Matrix Resurrections, including the best tweet sized appreciation of it I’ve seen so far; disabled people saying CAN YOU PLEASE STOP TRYING TO KILL US BY NOT WEARING MASKS AND SHITTY POLICY; Glenn Greenwald, may the great Parent of the Universe buy him a fucking clue, saying how twitter doesn’t have the right to eject people from its platform cause free speech, when it’s already been established that it really isn’t. He’s defending Marjorie, by the way. Candidly, clownbag is too kind for that man.

The Cincinnati Beagles won the division (over KC). We did not see that coming. It was a weird game with some patently ugly and bad calls. I mean, how many times is it possible to repeat 4th down?

@ElSangito:

i understand finding matrix 4’s lack of subtlety grating but i would never wanna use metaphors again either if the metaphorical allegory i wrote before got co-opted by far right patriarchal fascists whose whole thing is to eradicate my entire people

 

 

Letters, writing, practice, things to do

Wrote two letters, one to mOm and one to tOm, lol. Haven’t posted them yet. One of them has a fake get well card in it (SORRY TO HEAR YOU’RE FUCKIN’ POORLY it says) and the other has a snowflake which if you look very carefully is extremely non standard although it is roughly hexagonal. (There’s a very funny and extremely accidental design in the middle.)

I’m thinking of posting a song a day for a year. I have written enough songs to do that. It would be a horrific thing to take on, but I’m never going to be BETTER at singing and playing, now’s the time to do it if at all. I await a sign from the ancestors that this is a good idea. I will commence in January if I hear back from them.

Romain Grosjean has given his first interview since the crash. It’s remarkable for a couple of things, apart from his sunny gratitude for making it through one of the most horrifying and spectacular crashes in F1 history with no more than burns on his hands and ankles. One is that he admits that he was wrong to whinge about the “Halo” when it was instituted in 2018; the other is that he completely normalizes how YOU SHOULD GET PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP AFTER TRAUMA. None of this shit about gutting it out. He was weeping in the rescue car after the accident (he was burned and had broken several bones) and thank you Romain for being a human being and not endorsing toxic masculinity or trying to hide that when bad shit happens, humans need help. Also, he is one of the few humans to have survived a 53G impact and he crawled 18 seconds later (they’re trained to detach from plugs and harness in 9 seconds) from the FIREBALL of wreckage with a broken foot (the doc didn’t want him to walk but he thought it was important for the fans that he get to the rescue car under his own power and MAN WAS HE RIGHT because our relief when we saw him emerge from that inferno cannot be limned in words). Yay Halo.

@prisonculture sez CYNICISM ISN’T GENERATIVE

Weigh in

I hadn’t weighed myself in a while, but my clothes were getting tighter, so I was delighted to see from the scale this morning that the weight I lost after I broke my shoulder has stayed off.  Now I’m getting ridiculous amounts of exercise, since I have to walk a minimum of 2 kilometres a day through terrain plus two sets of transit stairs just to get to work, so I expect the weight will stay off.  My hips and back are better; my knees and feet are shouting things ungodly at me.  I’m sleeping better and staying up later.

Jeff has commented that he’s getting interesting pings from various muscle groups now that he’s back exercising regularly with his new rowing machine.  One of these days I’ll check it out but I’m never wearing shoes when I’m downstairs…

Many hugs to Jeff for letting me borrow the car yesterday after my phone freaked out and I ended up being late getting out the door in consequence … I brought home some treats.

The family that ________s together…. 

In one of those bizarre coincidences, I mentioned the cave of Chauvet in my last homily, and until she broke her ankle, our speaker this Sunday was to be a woman taking as her text Werner Herzog’s unbelievably amazing Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Since she can’t do it, we’re subbing in three church members talking about their creative paths, and I helped one of them since he was being put to it on short notice and he said he was feeling apprehensive and I gave him some advice.  He appeared happy to get it (my enthusiasm is a substitute for skill sometimes) and I await with pleasure how he will deal with the creative challenge of a minihom. So I would have enjoyed the booked homily and will definitely enjoy the substitute homily, and that’s pretty much how she goes at church.  Which reminds me, I should scare up a ride.

Benedict Cumberbatch will be taking on Hamlet in 2015, live somewhere in England.  Sigh.

Currently watching: Archer Vice (interesting, but no longer quite as funny), Rick and Morty (most recent show? the last two minutes took me to an unanticipated height of awesome), Justified (Boyd Crowder, how you do blow things up!), Downton Abbey, NCIS, NCIS Body Count, CSI, Person of Interest, Castle, plus the occasional Frontline and 60 Minutes.  I’ve pretty much given up on White Collar, mostly because those whackdoodles at Netflix don’t appear to want to stream it to my profile, and Jeff’s burned out on Burn Notice (ha!) although I still want to finish the show.  Person of Interest continues to be the show that Jeff and I are most likely to halt on the PVR so we can talk about the issues they are raising.  It’s a show that demands close attention and thought, and Root walked the dog Bear last episode.

Jeff is trying to get caught up on March Madness, otherwise known as the Squeaky Squeaky show from the sound of all those basketball shoes squeaking on those nice wood floors.

I wonder if two zone bus passes are available yet?  I’ll need one of those.  I do think longingly of getting a car, but I’ll be better off in at at least three ways without one.

Happy Friday to you all!  The port strike is over, although the drivers are still plenty choked.

 

Not really into sports…

I’ve actually started a super non sekrit project “10 arguments for the abolition of the NFL”, but I suspect I’d have better luck championing indignities to human remains in terms of how the internet would respond if I published it. I do watch sports, but I do not follow the ‘rules’ and it’s largely to keep my brother company. If the officiating at the NFL is as bad in the post season as it was this year, he has threatened to give up on the NFL entirely. I watch NASCAR for two reasons – it makes me want to either write or practice in rebellion against it, and because Margot looks hilarious watching it. (Little head whips round and round). The only other thing we watch is soccer, because it takes a lot of what I consider genuine athleticism and is relatively concussion free. Go Barca!

Sundry and various

I had cold chard salad with two pieces of cut up bacon for brekky this morning, plus coffee.  I am currently in love with chard, it makes my digestion very happy.  Then I read that it’s terrible for my body because it is full of oxalates.  Oh well, guess I’ll drink a gallon of water today to keep my kidneys happy.

Sad face for the Philippines; it’s very wet there and 22 people have already drowned in weather related incidents.  Sad face for New Zealand; one of the bigger volcanoes is about to let go.  Sad face the Canadian Olympic Women’s Soccer Team, the ref was an oversized Foley catheter style moron of an incompetence rarely seen EVEN IN INTERNATIONAL SOCCER, which is ludicrously bad.  Sad face for the kitties.  We had to lock the cat door again, so they may egress but not ingress.

Happy face for Dog Swims With Dolphins.

Just left a message for Chipper to find out how her weekend went – it was supposed to be the best revenue this summer and I am hoping it wasn’t a disaster.

I can hear flickers outside my window.

Marvin Hamlisch has passed away.

Hope everyone has a lovely day.

 

 

 

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?

A Date, among other things

Jeff tells me I am unusually buoyant, to keep trying after so many hilarious (and occasionally creepy, like the guy who put his head in my lap on the Skytrain after I’d told him to bugger off, but I digress) disasters.  I suppose last night gave me a demonstration as to why maintaining a positive attitude is what a person needs to do.  I sure enjoyed myself last night.  It was a cup of coffee & a walk to the salamander pond (they showed up last night, and zow, but there are a lot of them.)   I drove home with the cheerful sensation one gets when one has had a date, enjoyed it, and arranged a second one.  I don’t have his permission to write about him, so I’ll leave it at that.  No, I lie.  He is the single most pleasant person I’ve met in ages – now I’ll shut up.  I have a head cold…. so attractive.

Work is interesting and challenging these days.  I found out that my not having completed a course at work (they have on line courses) rolls up on a report visible to my grandboss and great grandboss.  Never have I felt so motivated to finish something.  Time to get in the car, gas up and get going on it.

The Netherlands-Denmark World Cup game had one of the most amazing saves I’ve ever seen.  It was spectacular.  I can’t find a single mention of it anywhere in any of the sports news and I’m not competent enough to describe it or even remember the defender’s name. (UPDATE.  I changed my search criteria and got “Poulsen’s spectacular sliding save”).  It was one of the Danish players.  I’m thinking of changing my blog topic header to “Soccer, the sport that makes the words “Nil Nil” work as a sentence”.

Damn the vuvuzelas, they make watching the game with anything like true enjoyment virtually impossible.  The BBC is trying to figure out how to strip the noise from the feed.  Go to it, ladies and gentlemen.

The quinoa is two inches tall and the peas have started to sprout.  Everything else is being eaten to the ground by slugs as soon as it pokes its head up.

Margot sits outside Jeff’s door and meows up a storm.  She really does prefer him to me, mostly because he’s home a bit more, feeds her in the mornings more than I do, and he doesn’t brush her.  Sometimes she begs for the brush if she sees it – other times she struggles and complains.  I never know in advance what I’m going to get.

Jeff cut the lawn, after asking me pointedly this morning when the bag and frame for the lawnmower are coming in to the store where I ordered it.  It’s going to be at least another week, which is annoying.  Anyway, thanks Jeff!  It was pretty long.

Be good, all y’all.