Category: Urban living

delightful

after a somewhat jostled trip downtown (travelling during rush hour being a real commitment for me these days) I joined Tammy for a lovely meal at Homer and then a wonderful walking tour of “Forbidden Vancouver” which Tammy also underwrote. I took the stool so I could sit down whenever; Tammy used it as well.

Nothing like standing at the epicentre of a race riot to help you get a grip on things.

After we hung out and I looked at pics of her vacays to places like New Orleans at Christmas (lovely light displays at night) and Fiji – my god, the guest house was set in a spectacular garden – and Sydney.

Then I went home, took a taxi from Edmonds.

And, apart from Jeff accompanying me on food to D Roti Shak, which supplied all of our meals yesterday, and a couple of shows I SLEPT ALL DAY YESTERDAY.

Katie’s here! Brekky time

 

Later – life sucks but I have friends and furthermore leftovers

I just watched the spire of Notre Dame fall on twitter

 

I’m crying. Why wouldn’t I be.

This is a fucking tragedy, and it was all triggered by workmen. I’ll bet anything there were safety shortcuts forced onto them by the construction management company.

 

later…. 52 acres of primeval oak forest was taken down for the pillars

 

jesus

Egil’s a jackass

Since I can’t actually talk about anything that I really want to comment on regarding my week away (and I’m okay with that, for the most part) I’ll talk about the stuff I can talk about.

1. Egil’s a jackass. Read the Sagas of the Icelanders if you want to know why.
2. I do miss the physical place, Toronto, rather more than I expected to, and returning to Vancouver gave me a lot of strange feelings. I have to go past all my stomping grounds on the way out of town.
Or perhaps work is not all that exciting. I fucking hate it when workers don’t check their pagers and don’t call in to ask why they haven’t been paged in four hours.
3. I seem to have broken my fanfic addiction. Of course, I don’t feel like writing anything at the moment, but that will change once I have characters working in my head again. I think I learned what I needed to. I’ll finish the two projects at some point but I’m no longer worried about it.
4. U2 ON FRIDAY. I have something to look forward to!!!!
5. It was absolutely lovely to see all of the Jewish men walking up and down Bathurst as I took the bus out of town. I only saw Bubbies, no Zadies.
6. LOST MY CHEESE at a friend who keeps using the word gypsy. I’ve told her not to before, but this time I just slammed it down and then backed off. Yes there are American Roma who accept the word, but that’s on them; every person of Roma descent I know personally has specifically asked me never to use it and to call it out in people who use it, however the fuck they employ it.
7. The transit in Toronto is so superior to what we get in Vancouver that I’m really annoyed about it. Cheaper, better, faster. It took me less than two hours to get from Bathurst and Sheppard to the airport, on a Saturday. The airport express was just sitting there waiting for me. ALMOST got off at the wrong terminal but managed to leap back onto the same bus and save myself a lot of trouble.
8. The new front loading washer is quite nice, and very efficient. IT WAS ALSO DISGUSTINGLY FILTHY which as brOJeff says, you can fix, versus it being mechanically subpar.
9. NEVER FLYING AIR CANADA AGAIN. I know that flying passes gave me a bad feeling, but after the last experience trying to get out of Vancouver I know that is something I will never be obliged to go through again.
10. This is going to be a bit of a lean month, since I will not be paid for the time I took off. I’m okay with this but I may not be able to help people who need it.
11. Still having happy feelings about the beginning of the week when Little E talked to me again and walked up and down on me with his little hot feet.
12. Slept all but four hours of my time off today. I am almost recovered from my visit and travelling and the dryness; one of the reasons I was sleeping while I was gone so much is that my eyes were so dry I could hear them as I opened and shut them. I did use drops but that’s not always useful for long.
13. I think I’ll go in early and treat myself to a meal at Browns.
14. This means goodbye for now!

today’s non-events

Got into a beatdown with a bunch of one of the most self-righteous pot activists (like there’s another fucking kind) on twitter today.

Come ON I smoke, but I don’t smoke and blow smoke in the faces of the allergic and the elderly, and they’re announcing it’s their RIGHT, because this is VANCOUVER, home of TOLERANCE. Yeah I’ll believe that when Canada gives back the unceded lands, you unregenerate failure of logic. I’m like a homophobe for harshing their mellow. Srsly. Got accused of equivalency to homophobia for objecting to people dousing the entire west end in pot smoke for their stupid fucking 420 festival (which leaves heaps of trash mounded everywhere and they’re all cryface because they didn’t get a fucking permit.) F*ck me!

I realized that when you put asterisks in f*cking swearwords you’re putting a leedle asshole right in the meedle of the word and since when you’re swearing there’s usually an asshole involved, it’s mesmerizingly poifect.

I love Buster, he’s an amazing cat. And he loves me too, I know it. I don’t think Miss Margot cares if I live or die, but Buster does.

My latest piece of fanfic smut has more than five hundred likes (it’s cute and hot, so there)

I’ve written a BDSM scene in the same ‘verse but I’m not happy with it yet. I had to put in about 200 words about how the scene is ‘necessary but non-consensual’ which kinda blows (or not!) since scenes need consent if they’re to resonate with me writing, at all. So it’s like “We’ve talked about this – I hate it when you want me (and need me) to top you but I’m s’posed to read your mind – and topping when you’re angry at your partner is a bad bad bad idea” followed by “Do what ya gotta, man, just hit me really hard.” Oh, and there are minor children in the house while this sh*t’s going down, just to make it even more like real life, and our heroes must deal with the domestic consequences of Daddies fighting. I LOVE A CHALLENGE. After all, continuing to have interesting sex after kids *is* a continuing challenge in real life. People want carefree smut? they can look elsewhere; to me smut always has a cost. Who bears it depends on who’s being responsible, or not.

Not that anybody wants to know, but I’m really not into any of those behaviours in real life. Nagging at volume is sort of where I max out, ask any of my exes.

Continuing to have the poly life discussion with someone. It’s painful. Really painful. I feel like I have my nose up again a particularly interesting window. I can smell bread baking. But no. G*ddamned heteronormative uncommunicative bushwah (on their end, not mine.) But at the same time there’s NO F*CKING POINT to becoming an elder if you don’t understand that real life takes time, opportunities for growth don’t wait, and if you don’t consider who’s going to be impacted by your decisions, your years, your grey hairs and and your learning means squat. I am still 22 in some corner of my persona, for my enthusiasms still have all the joy of my youth; I just can’t write everyone affected by my behaviour out of the script any more. I do from time to time, but not all the time.

Fortunately, since I’m pushing 60 with a broom, I can contemplate my greed like the gorram caged bear that it is. Still here, but not running the show.

Katie is still having a rough time and she and Alex are both sick again.

I am not having a rough time. I feel pretty good, all things considered. I have another two weeks of full time work. If that changes, I’ll deal with it. I actually have a plan to deal with it that I think will make almost everyone happy, at least temporarily.

Rogue One is a fucking fantastic movie. Getting eaten by Disney was the best thing that ever happened to the franchise.

Now to check if my money transfer has come through.

I really like a .38

It’s a .38 special for me, thanks.  Fits my hand and my accuracy is good.  Menfolks had fun too.  65 bucks poorer, I emerged.

Today I have a 30 year old child.  WITAF???

Dallas.  Black mens’ names.  Grief and rage.

This is what I’m doing about it.

  1.  Here is How To Make a Police Complaint in BC.
  2.  I (time will tell) gave money to BLM:Van
  3.  I am not forgetting that EVEN THOUGH Canada still has a ‘racial problem’ regarding black people, (most seriously in Toronto and Nova Scotia, but definitely elsewhere) first and foremost settlers have a FIRST NATIONS racial problem, and so I continue my anti-racism work around Land:Language:People which is my short form construction of the work that needs to happen for a more equitable and intelligent sharing of the land we call home with the peoples who lived here first. (The number of FN activists who want all settlers (‘whites’) gone is vanishingly small compared to those who want to kill the Indian Act, formalize their borders and do something about clean water, sound education and health care for their peoples.)
  4. My antiracism work is being quoted and passed around on social media.  I don’t even care if it’s attributed to me if it helps push the peanut.
  5. I am calling out famous white people on social media when they say something racist, while owning my involvement/complicity with racial systems and institutions. One finger points forward, the other three point back.
  6. I’m leaving racist family members out of this work.  It’s mostly for me, and other people who want to pry the lid off their unwitting selves.  I make no excuses and I take comfort in what POC activists have said to me on the subject of having racist relatives. Intersectionality has many dead ends.
  7. I don’t drag my poor dead ex-husband to any street parties hoping for anti-racism cookies.  It’s just a variant of the “some of my best friends…” argument and did I mention he’s dead? Since he can’t defend himself or me, I’ll leave him in the peace of his grave, and spare his bereaved family the notion that some white clownbag married to one of their relatives 30 odd years ago is trying to score points from prior association with him. This will be the last time I mention him in this context, since I prefer to think of him listening to art rock and writing poetry and being settled in a chair with cats draped all over him and making wry comments, than sighing heavily while delivering Negroes 101, as he was forced to do many times during our brief (2 year) marriage.

Current count 5813

What an amazing 57th birthday I had!!

I ate a meal I didn’t cook for brekky (left over Desi Turka chicken tikka masala with rice pulao), I ate a meal I didn’t cook for lunch, for Jeff feasted me at Switzerland Chicken, and I ate a meal I didn’t cook for dinner, as Mike feasted me with pan fried oysters and new potatoes.

We watched all the rest of Black Sails more or less because we couldn’t help ourselves.  Then I watched the season 3 teaser trailer just to drive myself nuts; god willing and the crick don’t rise I’ll have more in January around Conflikt time.

I brushed and degunked Margot and avoided being killed on the stairs by Buster.  My rapid increase in wordcount you can tell for yourself and I shipped off some new stuff to mOm.

I got phone calls wishing me a happy birthday from Mike, Katie, my mOm and ewishes from Patricia and DJD. Absolutely nobody on facebook wished me a happy birthday.  258 facebook friends and you get a prompt for friends’ birthdays, but not a sausage (hey I needed the message about social media not being as important as my flesh and blood friends…)

I slept over at Mike’s so we had just enough to drink to be festive but not to drive, and I do not feel muzzy headed this morning so I think I titrated the dose properly.  ASBACK BRANDY BE GREAT YO. Tecate Beer tastes like a man complaining of an unhappy marriage.  I shall not drink that beer again. I even wrote 185 more words last night while I was here.  It was a particularly writing sort of day.

I got prezzies! A foot soaker tub and a headrest pillow for air travel.  SO HAPPY and so very unexpected, but I’m not too old to appreciate it.

I wrote a letter to my MP and ran a load of laundry and backed up my documents.

am I not awesome!?

Lots of writing yummy food and yes I know I am a big kid. And we’ll feast again on Katie’s bday on Friday, yay!

Weather’s the pits and the wind’s going to come up but I’m snug where I am and it’s wonderful. Vitamin D and probiotics make me a better person.

 

OH AND ONE LAST THING. I have an interview with a job agency on Wednesday.  Just came right out of the blue.  Isn’t that a perfect thing to happen on my birthday?  Nothing likely will come of it but you never know, and I got all those nice new work clothes from EShakti, and nicer bras and underwear too over the last six months so if I DID get a job I wouldn’t be going O M F G what do I wear tomorrow. So really, a spectacular day.

While I’m all bubbly and babbly….

TOBY STEPHENS PULLS HIS BEARD AND IT MAKES ME HAPPY gratuitous Black Sails reference. Especially since it’s really his beard, and did you know he’s Maggie Smith’s younger son, and married to that Plowman actress who played Sarah/Osiris for 4 seasons on SG1?  Screw Kevin Bacon SG1 is where the connections really fly.

Justice for Cindy Gladue

I am very sore today because merely standing triggers my pelvis pain to the point where I drag both my feet.  Also, Paul very efficiently tricked me into mowing the back lawn, so I was really, really sore by the time I was done. 2.0 hours on the cpap – keep forgetting to put the mask back on.

I wrote this in my notebook over a rather lavishly irrigated lunch yesterday.  I went to the rally, which was triggered by this.  As is my custom, I did a square search count of the crowd. It was never fewer than a hundred people and swelled to 150 around 11 am.  Knowing that we were gathered in 20 cities across Canada (including Saint John’s NFLD, where it was ass freezing cold and blowing snow) made me very proud.  And sore, as I mentioned.  I am going to pick up another one of those mini-chairs from Lee Valley, I simply cannot stand for an hour and a half without problems.

So I was angry when I wrote this.  I am still angry, but it’s the quiet, smoldering kind.

Edited for errors in usage and kindness Feb. 20 2021, the day I learned Bradley Barton is going to jail.

April 2, 2015 unceded Coastal Salish land. MST LAND

Canada is the kind of country where a sex trade worker deserves to die for being a sex trade worker.  If she’s Indigenous, and ‘somehow’ ends up with an 11 inch stab wound which is paraded through the courtroom in a specimen jar in a grotesque parody of a ceremonial object, she had it coming.  Somehow the fact that a misogynistic piece of sh*t named Bradley Barton murdered her in a drunken stupor gets dropped from the equation, and he left the trial a free man.

I’ve been angry at the Canada ‘justice’ system before. Lots.  But I don’t normally get off my ass to protest.

Cindy Gladue did not deserve to die.

She didn’t get justice.

Her children and her family and loved ones did not get justice.

I am enraged that Cindy Gladue and her 1200 and counting indigenous sisters are being treated by the justice ‘shitstem’ as entirely disposable human refuse.  The UN has asked Canada to investigate.  Harper says it isn’t even on his radar.

F*CK THIS RACIST SEXIST ENTIRELY HORSESH*T SYSTEM.

It’s gotta come down.

Let it come down.

With unity of purpose and steel in our veins, let us BRING IT DOWN.

There were 150 of us in front of the Courthouse yesterday. Indigenous and white and mixed and ‘other’.  We were men and women and non-binary and children. We wept and drummed and sang and screamed our disappointment and anger that Indigenous lives are forced to be so far from justice, or even its prospect or possibility.

Justice for Cindy Gladue.

When the kids were little…

Paul and I took them to a rally at the Morgentaler Clinic after it was firebombed. Catherine had told me many times, as had John, that the cops LIE about how many people attend rallies.  I stood on the base of a lamp post and did a square count to determine that there were at least a thousand people there; the papers the next day said gee whiz there were maybe 200 people.

I told the kids about it too.  They lie.  That’s what I told them.  The cops and the papers lie.

Anyway, when you have your OWN FRIKKIN’ DRONE…. you can tell the papers and the MSM where to shove it.

Fall colours are currently perfect in Ontario.  I wish I could see them.

 

 

Angry decrufting

I keep finding things to irritate me in the pile of papers. I found an angry note saying “Find cheaper telecom rassenfrassen!” but unless I want to ditch having the internet on my phone at all I will be stuck with paying between 60 and 75 dollars a month. So I can play 2048 on my phone and download books? Sheesh. At least Bell Mobility only kept me on hold for four minutes and the person who answered the phone wasn’t struggling to speak intelligibly.

I need some of this. Mildly unsafe language.

Well, it’s not my novel, but it’s writing

So, there’s an essay competition.  I wrote it, and now I think why the hell would I submit it even if I thought I could win…?  I have my own bully pulpit, thx.  The essay prize was a thousand dollars, but when I realized that all my good portraits of myself died with the last hard drive, that fixed it.  And so….

 

Why me? Why Vancouver?

For almost ten years, my husband’s request to be transferred to Vancouver by his employer sat in some HR equivalent of development hell.  Nothing happened, and given the desirability of the posting and Paul’s place in the line, nothing was expected to.  Then, three weeks after our family followed his employment from Montréal to Toronto, he got word to report for work in Vancouver in 72 hours’ time.

And he smiled.  He’d applied for three weeks of vacation at exactly the same time, and couldn’t be forced to start work until it was finished. Thus began our family’s transition.

We put everything we owned in a truck trailer — including the vintage motorcycle and sidecar that Paul later sold so we could buy a house – and sent it on its way. We grabbed the kids and the cat and flew to Victoria and dropped the kids off with the grandparents, and then we spent two weeks lining up a car, a place to live and schooling and drivers licences,

We laboured in that little golden slot of weather that we get sometimes in late October, when the days are deliciously crisp and cool, the air smells wonderful, and the sun on the mountains makes you think you’re living in a fantasy novel.

We wondered why there was a bird we could only hear at intersections.  We said Gag-lard-ee and Anna-kiss and locals choked on polite laughter. We found a house (after consulting an earthquake map for the safest locales) and got the kids settled, and began a love affair with Vancouver that continues to this day.

I can’t speak for the rest of my family, since time has kept us in the same city but no longer under one roof, but the shape and texture and beauty of the city has come to mean home as no other place ever has.  Memories bubble up.

The turbaned Sikhs teasing the waitress to bring them chopsticks in the Chinese restaurant, “What are we, uncivilized?” The silent explosion of flowering shrubs each spring, the lilacs, the rhodos and the cherries. The way people leave their Diwali lights up until Christmas. The Babel of accents and voices on the transit; the kindnesses I have experienced on the two occasions I’ve had car trouble and strangers appeared out of nowhere with cell phones. The ‘four o’clock stripe’ at sunset in the winter, just about the only time you can reliably see the sun. The hundreds of kilometres of lovely places to walk and ride; the hills that nearly gut you in the summer and cause articulated buses to splay out like drunks in the winter.

Watching my son do Winter Karate Training on Jericho Beach, marching in his gi into the water; paddling among the herons on the Pitt River, and then nearly dying of the effort required to get back to the dock when the tide was making.  Sunsets and sunrises of transfixing beauty.  Dealing with raccoons, skunks, coyotes, deer and bears, and once, the authorities had to tranquilize a cougar, mere blocks from the house.  Running into herons in every part of the city.  Once I startled one as I came around a corner on my bicycle and nearly fell off as a six food wingspan abruptly flung wide in front of me. The stairs at Wreck Beach and the 60’s vibe that greets you at the bottom.  Sadness at the ancient trees wrecked by a storm in Stanley Park; joy to see the statue of Lord Stanley the first time and read the beautiful words inscribed on it.  Asking Headwater to come play on the back deck for my brother’s birthday, and what an amazing concert that was.

 

There are things I’ve learned to dislike about Vancouver, but complaints are cheap.  I’ve learned to love my splendid city, to want to know more about her and the people who were here before the settlers came.  It was a happy accident that brought me here, and I’ll be staying here as long as I can.  Vancouver has given me a church community I cherish, co-workers whom I now consider my closest friends, and music and love and really phenomenal craft beer in abundance.

 

It seems strange to have been born on one coast only to find my heart’s home on the other, but Vancouver is a place that has taught me to respect the playful grip coincidence has on any human life.

Sang froid, hot butt

The sang froid is her – she rocks the uneven bars.

The hot butt is me after Paul’s delayed family Indian dinner at Best Quality Sweets on Main St.  I am suffering today, although I didn’t yesterday.  Yes, it’s Too Much Information.  I told Jeff he should be happy there were no leftovers for him or he’d be suffering too.  I noticed neither of the kids put their hands up for the check, but since neither of them read my blog, they won’t feel the rebuke.  For 60 bucks including tip we ate like ogres.  This is a lacto vegetarian restaurant.  The mango lassi was suPERB, the chai tea kinda whatever with weird spice sludge at the end.  I ate so much I had no room for Indian sweets for dessert, which is FULL.

I am about ready to quit being a Unitarian, having reached my load line on denominational bullshit. I won’t of course, it’s just all part of my engagement with the faith.  Nothing’s perfect, including me, and if people want to nice me to death, I can always back away before that last soft word turns into a killing blow.  Also, I am one moody individual, so I just need the mood to die back and I’ll be fine.  A foolish consistency is what’s asked of us when we believe that organized religion is necessary or even possible.

I am NOT a nice person.  I’m nice to my my mother, but so what?  Even the guy who kept two women as sex slaves was nice to his mother.  It’s not a good test…. What I want more than anything else is to keep all my bad behaviours and still be categorized as nice, and that’s when the crazy train really starts to pick up speed.  Woo woo!

Speaking of train whistles, I ran across this article which made me very happy.   My room is at a sonic collection point for train noise (it hits the neighbour’s house, bounces against the garage and then slams into my window) so even though the whistles are 2.5 kilometres away sometimes I feel like I am right on Columbia St.  If NW Council can make it stop I’ll do handsprings.  Mentally of course, I couldn’t even do that when I was little.

There’s a new species of waterbear, from Antarctica.  How sweet is that?

My symphysis pubis spasmed in sympathy.  Ow ow ow ow ow.

 

 

 

Sad news from Detroit

A man left a loaded rifle under his bed, and his four year old granddaughter found it and shot and killed a four year old boy, her cousin.

I’m sorry for all the close relatives and that little child most of all.

Leaving a loaded gun on the floor with children present is criminal negligence and the man responsible will have to live with being personally responsible for the death of his kin for the rest of his life. Having a loaded gun in a neighborhood with 1 – 2 hour police response times is not criminal negligence. Poor people don’t often get to choose where they live.

If the NRA was running kickstarters to buy gun safety equipment for poor people I’d believe their responsible gun ownership bs. As it is they have a constituency – the gun manufacturers – whom they serve with every bit of suction they can muster.

My Yellow Cab review

On December 24, 2013 at around 9:30 in the morning, Driver 10 picked me up from the stand at Granville and Georgia. I gave him the address and he didn’t know where it was. He HANDED ME HIS PHONE TO TYPE THE ADDRESS INTO THE GPS. With a rising sense of WTF, I did so. Then he proceeded to drive down the street looking at his phone. By the time we got to the bridge I was frantic. I told him, first in a calm voice, and then in my ‘yelling at the kids voice’, “What you are doing is unsafe and illegal. Please pull over, confirm your route, and continue.” I must have said this four times. He told me I didn’t have any Christmas spirit, and I repeated my request. Yes, I was yelling, but that’s what you do when somebody is being unsafe and thinking it’s okay.

He said, “Get out of my ****** cab you *****.” He stopped the cab and I got out. Another cab driver from another company appeared out of nowhere and got me safely to my destination, all the while apologizing, as if it was his fault somehow.

Under normal circumstances I would wait for a call back from the Manager, but I left an urgent message that day and another this morning, and the Vancouver Taxi Association complaint line voicemail is full (wonder why, snicker). I’ve been taking cabs in this town for almost 20 years and I’ve never experienced anything like this. The driver was not safe to drive, and should be disciplined at the very least. Something tells me nothing will come of this, but at least I have warned others.

Explain to me why….

Keystone XL needs to run a pipeline through my city when we’ll be able to make fuel from algae?

This is funny even though the circumstances are not?  (Kingston fire picture).

Sabotaging birth control isn’t already a crime in the US?  It’s certainly a whopping great tort, even if there’s no criminal law on the books….

Anybody is surprised fewer kids are driving?  Between making a conscious decision not to contribute to pollution and the crappy economy, it all makes sense to me.  Both of my kids were well into their 20’s before they even started learning how, whereas I was 17 and wild to have my license.

Anybody wants to argue about what colour Santa is (when he’s an imaginary figure largely promoted by the Coca-Cola company) Link goes to retro Afro American Christmas cards, some of which are the ‘essence’ of charming.

When I no longer have a car, I can finally get a decal which adequately represents my tribble of a cat?

Science news keeps saying that a new species has been ‘discovered’ when the indigenous population knew they were there the whole time?  This is really annoying; saying it’s received a Latin name is different than “New Discovery.”

I didn’t know that Diana Cooper once referred to Winston Churchill as looking like the good little pig who built his house of bricks?

This is even a thing?  (Fundraiser to make a headset that reads dog thoughts which sounds like BS as yet).

Losing three traffic wardens causes chaos in Aberystwyth? It reads like an Onion article.

More judges don’t use their hearts as well as their brains in sentencing?

I didn’t start watching Call the Midwife until yesterday?