Category: Whining

walk with Paul

We both wanted something fairly level and WE COULDN’T EVEN GET INTO THE FUCKING PARKING LOT FOR DEER LAKE PARK YESTERDAY

Drove by and there’s a bigass sign saying ‘PARKING LOT CLOSED’ and three non-masked non-social-distancing CoB employees flinging the sign around. I cursed quite a bit but what can you do, and I wasn’t trusting any of the pulloffs on Deer Lake Parkway – figuring for sure we’d get a ticket (meaning Paul would get a ticket) if I parked around the corner from the Willingdon and Deer Lake Parkway lot.

I drove (Paul lets me drive so I can stay current) to Robert Burnaby park instead and we walked around the ball park twice and then dropped me off back home.

I was, honestly, completely wiped afterward and literally slept for most of the day. Went to bed late, woke up at 5, feel super tacky and dehydrated so I should go take care of that.

Paul’s foot from when he hyperextended it is slowly healing.

I wore my mask (which I had washed, which I do every time I wear it) and Paul wore nothing.

Peggy says she may be ill with the thing, mildly, I really hope not.

AOC posted this on twitter this am

Image

 

Researcher finds that bad Phys Ed classes can ruin you for wanting to exercise for the rest of your life. My response on twitter:

I loved PE in public school, even though I was terrible at it, because I was kept engaged. Once I hit high school, I wanted to kill every PE teacher on earth and salt their graves.

Street sex worker talks about her job.

@_L1vY_ talks about (she’s a therapist) common symptoms under quarantine
Image
common sx
-Tiredness/Exhaustion
-Guilt (Esp: parents, productivity)
-Trouble saying ‘no’ to mtgs/interactions)
-Dissociation
-Hypervigilance
-Oversleep/Insomnia
-Forgetfulness/Loss of concentration
-DREAMS
She’s one of my fave people on twitter – humane, funny, despairing, a continuing thread of good sense and solid experience, also wackiness and perverse hope

16cm yup another six inches

that’s what’s forecast between now and Thursday night (it’s midnight Wednesday now.) We definitely need more salt,  but I’m not shovelling until 6 am. It’s East Burnaby so we’ll probably get 1.5 times the forecast.

mOm very kindly put cousin Laurel on the phone yesterday so I got to talk to her. There’s been a death on the inlaw side of the family and it coincided with the worst of the ferries and roads, so she’s had an adventure; this is also the week her husband turned seventy. Much sadness about the new normal. Supporting the recently bereaved is a beautiful challenge though.

Anyway, I woke up dizzy, a horrible feeling, got up and peed, sat up and now I don’t actually feel fine but I could probably go back to sleep. I should, I only got four and a half hours…. Read on line, I’m probably dehydrated or have low blood sugar…

No I did not go back to sleep I made coffee.

55073 HOTM

It’s been weeks, but every time I think about that piece of grafitti in Ultraviolet “Czirny fans get sick notes from their drug dealers” I crack up all over again. Czirny was a made up football team for Łódź which is pronounced wutsch.

View image on Twitter

the Duchess of Sussex is out and about – shown here at a women’s centre in Vancouver yesterday AND NOT WEARING A DRESS lawks

I MEAN IT’S WONDERFUL but TERRIBLE and EXPENSIVE like 10 million dollars of extra colonial expenditure and all we really care about in this household was her gig on the TV show Suits. I feel sorry for Harry, although not for his choice of bride.

Environment Canada says Howe Sound is going to get wind and snow something awful so it’s a good thing Laurel’s not travelling today.

 

HA HA HA HA STEFAN MOLYNEUX that unregenerate Nazi sockwad has been cut off from Mailchimp so his list of 70K asshole supporters is no longer his. LOLOLOLOL excuse me cough cough.

I sent mOm a couple of links about a former colleague….

LATER THAT MORNING

wanna drive?

Alex’ school’s closed. Katie is staying home. I did volunteer….

Later, around ten after seven

All the schools in the lower mainland are closed. There is not a snowball’s chance in a foundry that I could have made it to Victoria today without considerable horror.

Bad Poetry

Bad Poetry

After foreplay made of doggerel
Rhymes of death
There was a progression to free verse
And for two whole lines
Probably stolen, unawares
From someone else
The poet reached the empyrean
Domain of mediocrity
Before nodding off into a bowl of blancmange
And suffocating

I’m eating the blancmange.
One must grasp what one can
From a troubled world.

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

Get enough sleep and it’s amazing

I am well rested, and in an hour or so will be off to the brekky place with Katie and possibly brO.

Mike’s at Trent’s ManCaveâ„¢ finishing off the Mustang so he can get it back on the road. I was hoping to see him tomorrow but scuffed knuckles come first. He told me he bought a looper and now I’m mad chuffed to see it. His forearms were so sore they were in spasm the last time I saw him, poor guy.

Started watching the UK show Coroner, really liking it! the coroner/cop investigative team is very well done.

Some woman on reddit wants to know Am I The Asshole for breaking up with a man who admitted he had sex with sheep. My comment : How do you explain to a man with that kind of interior landscape that the real issue is not that he 3x interfered w/ sheep, (although “pick a gif for squick”), but that he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of informed consent, which would make any real life they had a mess.

If he was serious about never doing it again he shoulda kept his muttonhole shut.

I will try to work on Cuffs some more today but I need some kind of narrative hook that doesn’t involved 7 point fucking three billion dollars in money laundering. The fact that my novel has now collided with reality is fucking me up.

Was looking for a weapon from my Scythian heritage (the first blue eyed red heads!!!) and found this tasty store.

4800 words in one day

Which I can’t share, heavy sigh, although parts of it are quite hilarious.

Supposedly going to Victoria this weekend, I just… don’t want to move. Plus those fuckers at BC Ferries messed up the strakes on one of the Spirit class vessels and so the entire Van-Vic run is screwed up.

The scotch broom is blooming so my eyes are a scratchy mess of goo and debris.

I am not all right. I made the mistake of looking at job ads, and I can’t stop crying. Or maybe that’s my body trying to get the allergens out.

  1. I already applied to this job. They are going through candidates really fast. I don’t want to work there.
  2. I was going to apply to this job but they put something in the ad to make it obvious they want an attractive woman under 30.
  3. I was going to apply to this job but they said, “we treat people like family” and that’s FUCKING HORRIBLE under capitalism, financial and emotional exploitation no thanks
  4. This company is a known scam, I don’t even have to look it up.
  5. This company wants to pay the minimum wage to someone with 10 years’ experience.

I could go on.

But I won’t. I hate the fucking world right now, and it’s indifferent right back.

thinking back

this time last year I had weird migraines and I’m wondering if the pollen has anything to do with this mildly dissociative feeling. I remember having almost no appetite, too,  also have a walloping nasty case of metatarsalgia and jesus fucknuts does it hurt when I like, put my left foot down and try to put weight on it. Then the pain stops, and you think miracolo but four steps later it’s OMG I CAN SWEAT THROUGH MY EYELIDS IN PAIN how novel, how artistic how I’M GOING TO GO LIE DOWN NOW.

The phone repair guy never showed up, the newb who entered the ticket cancelled it by backing out without checking a couple of boxes, which is — SUBOpTIMAL (insert audio of Kevin Sorbo yelling DISAPPOINTED in this location)

Yeah Jeff’s dealing with it, and other whacked out stuff that is happening across his demesne at the moment.

 

 

long stupid rant, please ignore

A couple of days ago, Misha Collins, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki got on social media to announce that the TV show Supernatural is ending next season (season 15, over 320 episodes) and the finale of all finales will thus be next season – their choice, most likely. A couple of them had been crying, which doesn’t bother me, I’d be crying too if I moved along from the best job I’d ever had even if it was my choice.

Inside the fandom, for the show, there is a substantial chonk of LGBT and straight cisgirl fans who absolutely love on the idea of a romance between Castiel the angel, who appeared season 4, and Dean the Hunter, who, along with his brother Sam the Hunter, carries the show week to week.

There are also Supernatural fans who write fanfic in the A/B/O universe (don’t look, it’s a concourse of poorly realized paraphilias and it’s even worse when you realize that (never mind, just more fandom bs) and I have read precisely one decently written A/B/O fic so I know it’s possible but Jesus it’s GROSS) and write explicitly incestuous fic (it’s called Wincest, and I haven’t even let my eyes roam over one of them, thanks).

Neither of these two things are supported by the show; Destiel, which is the mashup of the names of Dean and Castiel, while not supported word for word in script canon, is teased at, at least once a season, all through the show. I won’t go into the list of specific callouts as to there being romance in the air, just go to the Dean/Castiel page on Superwiki, where it’s all laid out in prim detail.

It’s my belief that the show would rather kill one of the characters than let any of them wander off into the sunset, encoupled. From a strictly ‘whose body is this’ standpoint, there’s no longer any squick about who Castiel’s vessel is, which removed a lot of the hassles about a canonical romance. But

 

it doesn’t fit the show. And Castiel, although he can be briefly physically affectionate, has not been represented as a sexual being, at least not successfully.

So yeah, I’ll write fanfic because it looks like love, romance and lifetime commitment to me. But anybody who thinks Destiel is gonna be canon is a fucking idiot, because the lead actor, the gold standard of a richly successful franchise, is happy with how things are.

The queer-baiting will continue until you make your own art, folx. (Definition of queer-baiting on the page linked to above.)

the baggage retrieval system at Brexit

This week has been researching billionaires so I can kill them in fiction, worrying about Brexit (the isotopes for cancer treatment in Britain aren’t made there and so I’m thinking about having cancer and learning that your politicians are TRYING TO KILL YOU after your own body had a go at you), trying to gird my mental loiny-woinies up to edit that fecking homily, having the shit scared out of me by a ‘worst anchor drops ever’ youtube video (Russians have the best ones), seeing Spiderman:Into the SpiderVerse and blowing my brains on ALL THE COLOURS, talking myself out of buying Jeff brekkie by making it instead (walnut and apricot bread make rilly nice French toast), worrying about Alex and his future on a stressed-out planet even though he’s doing fine and adapting well to the weighted blanket at the moment, avoiding buying a hurdy gurdy (it wasn’t tuned and the crank was not trued up with the playing surface on the wheel MOANING COWS rather than pirate music), more or less getting enough sleep and feeling like I’m not, and generally coming out of the funk I’ve been in. Also playing with this.

Shit’s still bogus, but I’m not.

blanky part le deux

Success! I slept an additional 2 hours with the blankie, garnering almost 7 hours of (almost) uninterrupted sleep. I think Katie will be pleased when I hand it over to her this morning for non-destructive testing on Alex.

This is me 30 seconds before I found the box on my step. This is the weather their delivery company dealt with. We got two inches of dense, slippery af snow pounding down over about four hours, then it abruptly stopped and a watery sun came out and said oops.

When that snow all turned to water at once, that was an interesting moment.

Katie took me to breakfast – it’s a grey day, but much warmer and the snow’s off the walkway.

Stanley Donen is dead. The man who directed Charade is gone. But here he is being fucking amazing in 1997.

calm before storm

some unhappy predictions.

Irma the Hurricane is going to stall over south Florida the way Harvey stalled over the Gulf Coast.

By what even atheists are going to describe as a miracle, Miami will not get a direct hit as Irma will veer at the last moment. Evacuation screws ups will kill more people than the blow.

Cuba will not have any fatalities despite a direct strike. Those people know how to do civil defence against hurricanes, people.

The Leeward Islands will just get to figuring out how many people died before José hits, although José won’t be as bad.

José is going to violently change direction and scrape up the coast, causing ludicrous storm surges.

Mar-a-Lago will escape and Trump will thank god.

If Mar-a-Lago doesn’t escape Trump will spend the first federal funds on fixing it.

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.