Category: Uncategorized

What I’ve been up to

I have completed another section of “the difficulties”.  I find Jericho Beach a most inspiring locale – I may go down there for a day sometime and just sit around and write.

I am adjusting rather better to the shift in workload and priorities.  The customers are being kind as I learn, and my predecessor (he went to a different department) kinder yet.  The new hire accepted and agreed to start July 30th o frabjous day.
I will be heading out for a family dinner with Mike M tonight after I go talk to Paul.

I reread Lilith’s Brood, the Oankali stories by Octavia Butler.

I’m taking a little break from Patrick O’Brian.

My back hurts constantly these days, and my foot is very numb.  Walking helps, as does sitting on the posture ball at work.  I’m having a lot of trouble finding a comfortable sleeping position.

I have been sad for the last couple of days, not so much this morning, thanks to KatieK, a friend of mine whom I invited over for dinner and an earflapping last night.  Those of you familiar with my family’s folkways will know that this is a chat, live and in person, usually unattended by males (or they flee, brows furrowed, into quieter and darker corners, while the womenfolk screech and flap and gabble.)  Anyway, she’s been through what I was through, but worse and darker and different, of course, but she doesn’t waste more than a breath on self-pity before she gets up again and starts assessing her life for the possibilities of happiness.  She’s berloody amazing and I intend to see more of her.
I just wrote two paragraphs about my emotional state, and they were so self-pitying and morose that I’ve done my readers a favour and deleted them.  Someday I’ll look back on this time in my life, shake my head and laugh.  But that time is not now, and it’s not a good time to be writing about it.  Had I the pen of Elizabeth Smart, perhaps, perhaps.

And then, of course, the phone rings, and it’s Keith announcing that he’s picked me up the latest Harry Potter book, and despite the rain and fog, the sun has come out again.

I think I’ll call my mother.

Self-indulgence in nostalgia

No one who comes here will ever want to watch this video. I’m putting it here so I can find it again.  I would like Keith to see it (and Kate too).  I fell in love with this girl; there are definitely flashes of brilliance in this self indulgent, heavily edited, stream of consciousness video.  I’m really having a lot of nostalgic moments these days so it’s interesting to compare my nostalgia with that of a contemporary young woman.

Also a friend forwarded a really nostalgic email recently, all about what it was like growing up in the fifties.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies so the stuff I get nostalgic about is a little different… but I remember being nine years old and allowed to wander around the neighbourhood (in daylight hours) with a punk stick and about $5 worth of firecrackers, which was a ****load of fireworks in those days.  Man, them was some good times.

Bad week for a vacation

The weather has not been great this week.

I light a candle for the people in my circle of acquaintance who are feeling suicidal right now.  Hang in there!

At a friend’s urging, I watched What the Bleep do we Know.  It was in spots really entertaining, but I preferred Mindwalk, which covered a lot of the same ground.  Also, when one of the people being interviewed turned out to be a medium channelling a star-being, Ramtha, and another one of them was a sex scandal star, I was getting steady pings from the baloney detector.  This whole create your own reality thing is great, but I have a couple of comments.

Clipper ships did not exist during the time of Columbus.  The story about the First Nations of the Caribbean “not being able to see the ships” – nice story, but bogus.  That was actually the point where I got lost.  I will watch Marlee Matlin in practically anything, and I enjoyed her performance, and the special effects were fun.  But, and this is a big but, quantum physics as we (and I mean we in the sense of a small number of human beings) currently understand it does not change anything about the world.  It doesn’t.  It may make certain kinds of technology or cosmology possible, but it will do dick all about the mess the world is in or feed anything actionable into the hopper of possible solutions.
You can say – as they frequently did, in the film – that we’re all deeply intertwingled “We are One”, and intention is everything.  Then they wisely pull out the rug, and take it all away by saying our minds keep us separate because of addictions, and if your intention isn’t perfect you can’t manifest a better reality or the reality will be flawed by your lapses in intention.   We are one hundred percent responsible for our own reality.  Ka ching.  I don’t mind the notion of personal responsibility, but a) you have to be in a position to think about that responsibility and b) you are issued at birth a number of possibilities, none of which have anything to do with responsibility or intention, and which directly impact your ability to be able to even form these ideas.  Whenever I see people twittering on about intention, I feel like showing wards full of AIDS babies and starving children in camps overtop of their words so we can see how incredibly egocentric and lacking in compassion the whole “You can create your own reality” shtick is.  And talking about addictions??  Christ, there are times when I think that we aren’t “meaning” machines as much as we are “stimulus response” machines.
Now, I don’t know a damned thing about philosophy – I leave the heavy lifting to the experts – so I stick pretty close to Allegra’s Law; everything about human beings points back to breeding rights and the acquisition of entitlements which allow you to extend, control, contribute to or benefit from your kinship network.  Evolution is conservative, imperfect and slow, and there’s chunks of the human genome which no longer appear to point to breeding and extension of kinship networks.  But when I look hard enough I can see the connection, thanks to books like the Third Chimpanzee and Sex, Time and Power.
I dream of being a perfect and enlightened being.  Then I wake up and worry about my kids.  So be it.

Well, that was fast

Joined Crackbook yesterday around 4 o’clock and I have 17 friends already, all of whom I have met in real time BUT if you took out my coworkers I’d be friendless as a Grandview Highway squeegee kid.  I’m trying to get at least one virtual facebook person (hopefully the amazing dude in Belize) by the end of the week.  Collect them all.  I’m counting down to the first p!ss!ng match, personally, ah one, and ah two.
Keith is here, me happy.  Katie will come by to work on homework later on today.  Around 4 I’m going over to L.E.’s place to hang… SO looking forward to it, she has lots of lovely family news and will be doing her one woman show in Toronto (the Joseph Workman theatre…) in September, yahoo.  She’s my recovery Gurutrix.

Missed the Meenies

I was supposed to go yesterday to see the Blue Meenies at the John B Pub in Coquitlam, but somehow I got really antisocial and didn’t go.  Yesterday was a day remarkably unproductive of forward progress with any activities except that today I am feeling better than I have in ages, my bills are all paid, the garbage is out, I’ve finished the 5th O’Brian book (The Fortune of War) and I ate at home twice – remarkably, because there’s no denying I’ve been eating out a lot.

Mike was over and loaded the computer up with goodies and ate dinner here; we had planned to go to the B but he jammed and homework called him home.  I know it’s really anti-social, but I’m to the point that I’m really preferring interacting with people in real-time one on one.  I just feel overwhelmed, except at work, that seems to be a different case.  Any rate, Mike’s out of his place in Burnaby due to the elderly plumbing at his apartment, so he’s back with his folks.  This just means that every evening he has three dogs and a cat to take for a walk, because Winky walks right around the block with his dogs…. I have posted the best pic ever of animal companions previously, showing Winky, Tasha, Spud and Mila all basking in the sunshine in Mike’s folk’s front yard.
I now have access to a really remarkable internet radio station.  The music on it was so good that I literally slept on the living room sofa so I could continue to listen to it in my sleep…. then I realized that this was not too intelligent on a number of levels and crawled back into bed long about 3:45 am.  Now it’s off to get my hairs cut.

extremely remiss….

Cousin Gerald reports that Brayden has taken his first step. I refer to this as the ‘life as we know it is now over phase’ – even more so than when the kid comes home, because at least at that point he stays where you put him….. So I learned of this milestone yestreen but forgot to post…

Also, CG sent pix of my dad’s mum when she was young and my gosh she was a pretty thing with a gorgeous smile. Another family photo shows CG as a young child with a passel of relatives. I have to say that my Dad’s side of the family definitely had more in the way of looks than my mum’s – no offense, Mumsie? – and what with Paul’s input the kids at least dodged ugliness.

Garage better

I removed the last of my junk from the garage, we killed about ninety billion spiders, and shoved all of Paul’s stuff to one side – Alex leading the charge. Alex did the sweeping. What a difference….. There’s still stuff to do like wipe down the cupboards but you can actually see the garage…
And then
And then
And then
PIE…. She made Lemon Meringue Pie FROM SCRATCH and fed it to me and Paul. Yummy. Then we got all the additional crap (like, I am now overgross weight for this apartment by about 100 pounds) into my apartment and I let Alex get back to her busy life. THEN a lovely phone call from brother Jerome asking me to a bar b que and then another lovely phone call from LE and Doug and we did a lot of catching up and she’s going to be in VICTORIA for a good part of July, so I am already plotting and planning in hopes she can be connected with various people in Victoria.

Life is awesome, the weather is stunning, and I’ve set up a table and chair so that when it’s not so blazing on the deck I can sit out with my little computer and tap away….

I know I should subtext the weather with – here’s hoping no floods. I have a good feeling about this year, I think we may dodge it this time…..

And Keith got accepted. Honestly, I could live on that for a week.

Oh, and I worked on the upstairs bathroom at the Augur Inn too while I was waiting for Paul and Alex.

Oh, and Keith accidentally left the Commodore (late in the series O’Brian) for me so … later!

More District 13

So…. MomCat, Kitty Kate excaped before I could make her call you, but she showed up crying and left cheerful (or cheerfullyer) after I poured 1 chocolate ice cream cone, one screwdriver and two European hot dogs into her, and she and Keith and I watched District 13 again, and she dropped off her birth registration so I can do some paperwork.

Today I go to Augur Inn (yerm) and Clean. And Vacuum. And sign the listing agreement and watch the sign go up on the front lawn. Around one Alex will show up and help us with the garage, which is the second or third to last horror show (the sheds will have to be rearranged and swept out. I am thinking we should leave the lawnmower, etc.

I went to sleep before 10 pm last night. Every time Keith comes over I go to bed early; it’s either that or stay up and listen to him kill zombies. Mind you, I was a very tired girl when I got home yesterday. Keith didn’t bring me any more O’Brian… I can’t really complain because I haven’t had an hour that didn’t involve work, transit, sleep or the Augur Inn since – okay, Friday night – but I’ve been working pretty steady. My vacation (June 20 to July 2 inclusive) canNOT come fast enough.

I am still glowing from Keith’s news; Katie was very happy to hear it too. Ah….