Category: Whining

while I still have power – no water

The pipes in our rental have frozen. I’ll waken Jeff in an hour to tell him if he’s not up by then. We are supposed to go shopping this morning before the icestorm starts.

Oh did I mention that?

this is what I posted on facebook:

 

Everyone in the lower mainland please read this. The atmospheric river last year was a simply terrifying event; now imagine an atmospheric river of half that volume BUT IT’S ALL FREEZING RAIN!!! This forecaster says we may get 36 hours of freezing rain totalling as much as 80 cm. Mark Madryga at Global is NOT arguing with him.
This will be one of the most messed up Christmases in the history of solh temexw. I beg of you all to stay home once the event commences, if you can.
Consequences: complete shutdown of all transit – air, ferry, ground. No ambulances. Fire/rescue hampered into immobility which means house fires may not be put out fast or well. Unless you have crampons and walking poles the outdoors will be extremely unsafe.
Be prepared to literally chop ice while freezing rain sticks to you, if you’re responsible for clearing sidewalks. I plan on using the edger to bust it up.
If you are required to drive over the period in question do not go anywhere without chains. If you don’t have chains now’s the time to buy them. TODAY.
***Cover your car*** if you park outdoors. ***charge your devices***, & charge anything that can charge devices.
Ice melter may not work all that well. You may need to apply sand or grit for traction instead.
LARGE ZONES OF THE LOWER MAINLAND WILL HAVE POWER OUTAGES (remember the Quebec ice storm in ’98? I was selling portable power equipment at the time so I sure do!) AND THE POWER OUTAGES WILL GO ON LONG ENOUGH TO KILL FRAIL ELDERLY AND DISABLED PEOPLE. So check on your neighbours if you feel safe to do so.
Outages (as in Quebec) may go on long enough that there will be no power at hospitals. They may go on long enough that the pumps for the dykes run out of fuel and fail in Richmond; flooding along the river in some places is likely, especially if drains get frozen over or clogged.
AFTER the storm there may be pockets of the lower mainland that don’t get power back for literally weeks. Hotels and motels will be jammed.
If you have a gas generator BUY FUEL NOW AND START IT UP TO MAKE SURE IT IS WORKING. Get a chain and a lock. One of the most memorable takeaways from the Quebec ice storm was that if you had a functioning generator, poltroons would steal it from your porch. If you have a woodstove or a safe fireplace that draws properly get some wood in. Get food you don’t have to cook into the house – even a flat of replacement meal shakes will be better than nothing.
I am so glad I’ll be able to stay home for this. Not everyone is as fortunate. If you have money to spare for the unhoused who will suffer tortures from this weather event, please do so.

weather chaos

Jeff and I are most assiduously staying the hell home in our coldass little rental, because the following is going on out there:

  1. folks sitting on the snowy tarmac of YVR. The de-icing crews apparently had all been working doubles and a lot of them went home; many crews are sick. The current record is 8 hours for smaller airlines that don’t have the deep pockets to advance their slot-time agendas
  2. we were EXPECTING this, all of this, and yet the snow response municipality by municipality, much like the police ‘services’ ahem, are patchy and also impacted by callouts from sick staff. New West cleared all of its roads by the time they said they would. Burnaby kinda kept up; Vancouver proper was a fucking disaster.
  3. in the old days, it was 8 to 10 inches of snow. These days it’s 25 cm. You would think a major Canadian metropolis would get out an’ plow er something, but it’s not good.
  4. TransLinkBC on twitter minutes ago (5:30) “Good morning, folks! Due to inclement weather, the transit system may be experiencing delays.” Like if that isn’t the single stupidest thing, stay home f’chrissakes, I’ve seen video of snowploughs pushing busses down Joffre. I mean unless you want to be standing in this freaking wind for an hour or two, stay home.
  5. Man skiing down Como Lake Road last night, just like how people got around during the Century storm in ’96 in Saanich/lower mainland and the Great Blizzard of ’71 in London and most of the northeast.
  6. More snow today and then bonechilling cold right into Christmas, so this natural phenomenon will remain here for most of a week.

Pity Katie; she has to both remove snow from her car and drive in this shit. At least once she’s out of the alley she’s on cleared roads.

My health and brain are much improved but FUCK it is cold in the house. I may bake today just for the heat.

Resipiscence

I got a haircut yesterday. Kimiko is in fine fine form.

If you don’t want to hear me whining about my health, ignore the rest of this.

I was going to walk from Bbombshell to New West Station and the taxi stand affixed thereunto, and I literally couldn’t. I collapsed in a chair and asked the kindly receptionist to call me a cab. I couldn’t walk that distance. This is very depressing because it’s literally two city blocks. A cane wouldn’t have helped; my legs were literally Not Working. My guts kept grinding away, to no avail.

Got home, took my temperature. Normal. Had a hot bath to relax my abdomen because I was SO messed up and experiencing diffuse abdominal pain. When I got home, I was crying because not being able to walk a quarter of a mile is one of those “You’re more likely to die in the next six months” kinda things and I’m freaked out. Stairs were a trial. After a delay I check my blood pressure, which is low, like not even low normal, just low (am I bleeding internally? What in the everlovin’ farce is this?)

Over the course of the afternoon I perked up. I felt well enough to finally run my bed linens through the laundry. Not well enough to make my bed, hope to do that this morning.

The abdominal pain differential diagnosis goes on for miles and miles. I’m still avoiding caffeine and hard food, and I’ve reduced how much I eat to nothing.

I am quite dehydrated. I just don’t experience thirst …. at all. I was forcing myself to drink lime Bubly all day but that’s part of my esophagus problem so I stopped. If you take a litre out of how much you drink every day — and I can’t drink caffeine and keep forgetting to make myself peppermint tea.

Anyway, I’m wondering if I’m recovered enough to go shopping today. We shall see. All of this grot I’m experiencing could just be the diuretic and me getting used to each other, once again, we shall see. I will go to the ER if I have symptoms that warrant it.

lovely day of being communicative sometimes

I got two restaurant meals. Paul took me and Keith out for a delayed birthday supper and also to get out of the house so Katie could have some birthday joy in their absence. (He also paid for a takeout schnitzel meal for Jeff, who was too mired in work to go!) Keith talked continuously throughout. Paul literally did not say a word during the entire meal except “Do you want more wine.” (I had Stella, I don’t drink wine). I tried to get a word in edgewise and it was like whizzing into the wind, so I stopped. I’m buying a fucking chess clock, see if I don’t. It was quite disheartening and I can see why Katie wanted them both out of the house.

Anyway, Keith went to church yesterday (he’s networking in process of looking for work) and he spent a goodly amount of time during his peroration at dinner describing what advice he’d give to the church about growing the congregation and I’m like SILENTLY: DO YOU THINK WE DID NOT ADDRESS AND ENGAGE WITH ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS WHILE I WAS ON THE BOARD OF THE CHURCH AND OTHERWISE ACTIVE and DO YOU THINK I AM UNAWARE OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHALLENGES and DO YOU THINK I AM UNAWARE THAT ALL PEOPLE BORN AFTER 1985 ARE BROKE or IN DEBT PAST THEIR EYEBALLS. Keith waving off any comments I made did not impact my digestion, fortunately. He wasn’t interested in my insight and thinks he can wander up and tinker. (He’s already friends with one of the church elders because of his work with Philosopher’s Café.) I put 15 years in. eyeroll. I managed to get his attention with my review of Black Adam, so I guess I misspoke when I said I didn’t get a word in edgewise.

Spoke on the phone with Sue Sparlin who will be 80 in January and is a credentialled TV actor excuse me and it was a lovely chat. I also spoke twice briefly with Peggy but she was on a call for the first call and I was out the door for the second call so I’ll try to arrange something today.

Read a Dowker poem to my mOm yesterday or a fraction thereof. It’s bad, (the urge to do that, not the poem) I shouldn’t have; best bet is to loan her the book so she can read and absorb without having to run it through a phone call. It was so good to hear her voice.

Today, laundry, dishes and hopefully I get some writing and practicing in before I leave the house to go hang with Suzanne (caring for Ryker) and the gang.

COLD SCHNITZEL FOR BREAKFAST is AWESOME.

 

Missions accomplished

  1. If I am accompanying Paul anywhere in future, unless we’re evac’ing from a fire, we are not taking the gd stairs. If I watch him fall down those curving steps at Royal City Square because he literally has damage to the reflex to put his hands up when he falls, not only will I be filling out forms for a year (nb this is family joke of long standing and has nothing to do with the seriousness of the event) I’ll be traumatized for the rest of my life.
  2. He looked at his blood pressure and said, “That’s not so bad,” to which my response was, “You’re teetering on the edge of a hypertensive crisis. Last November I had blood pressure like that and went to RCH.” His answer to this was to blame the coffee he drank this morning.
  3. The name for the inability to be able to recognize that you have an attested and duly diagnosed legitimate medical condition is anosognosia aka our old friend Annis O’Nose-ya and Christ alive but it’s swift becoming a walking stick among my words.
  4. Paul set himself two tasks today. When I called him to say YOU HAVE TASKS, which I am supposed to accompany you on, he blanked. But he figured it out fast enough, and I got him over here this morning before Suzanne arrived. He handed his phone over to Jeff, who did what he has long been expected to do, and fixed the problem with kind words, and then I disappeared Paul to the aforementioned mall.
  5. The store he remembered was gone. I took no offence to this at all, since it had vanished between today and the last time I was in the mall, probably a good six months ago. I mean, I’ve been into the Save-On and the Wal-Mart (the former much more than the latter) which butt onto the western end of the mall, but I don’t normally go into the mall, which is very distinguished by how, apart from the retail staff, I’m often the youngest person in view. Not to put to fine a point on it, I turned 64 this week. I felt like a mere stripling, actually.
  6. He had to poop. Took a while. Quite a while.
  7. While we were feeling sad about how nobody seemed to have what he needed, I had to poop. I was somewhat more expeditious but I fucking near ripped some plumbing out of the sink when it assaulted me. They put the DRYER AND THE FAUCET ON THE SAME THREE PRONGED CHROME OBJECT and since the ‘signage’ consisted of a teeny stamped-in logo about the size of your finger end, and which disappeared in the reflection created by direct sunlight coming into the fucking bathroom, I had no idea that I was about to stick my hand under what I thought was an automatic faucet only to get an F1 tornado blowing the remnants of someone else’s experiment in handwashing up my nose. The fact I didn’t scream blue murder should earn me a laurel in itself.
  8. Anyway, that mall is distinguished by how indistinguishable it is from other malls, and has like forty cell phone kiosks. We visited them all. We went to the Source, and Telus and Rogers and the rest of the row of cell phone kiosks, looking for an LG accessory. Please note: LG shutdown its smartphone division in 2021. Trust capitalism to orphan Paul’s tech. Finally, at a kiosk that hadn’t opened at 10 am, there was a cherubic Desi kid (he was 25, tops, short and round-faced and long-lashed and cheerful) and he said, “Come around, other side,” and found everything Paul needed (a new phone case and a new screen, which he did a skilled job of applying) and now Paul’s phone may survive a while longer. Paul was ecstatic and we got the hell out of that mall. Driving in that parking garage is one of the Stations of the Cross for New Westminster, stg (swear to god).
  9. It freaking near killed me not to go into the Purdy’s but I knew that it would be something I’d regret and I ate half a chocolate bar yesterday anyway. It was my gd birthday, I HAVE NO RAGRETS… This is a movie reference. I have never seen the movie, but I know about this image. This is the curse of thEE INTarwEBz
  10. No Ragrets Tattoo
  11. Paul almost fell down the stairs heading back to the car. I watched him in real time forget and then remember how to walk downstairs. He should not be living on the second story of a building. It’s moments like this when I understand why Katie is occasionally flashing on terrified. If you don’t live with him or interact with him it’s invisible.
  12. Paul is almost to the point of not being able to use a bank card any more. The last half dozen transactions I witnessed have been characterized by errors caused by him stabbing the keypad at random. If he hadn’t been coached by our Desi vendor it mighta got lengthy.
  13. All our missions accomplished we scarpered, I drove Paul home (we’d gotten enough WALKING going up and down the mall to POOP so I felt fine about skipping a walk outdoors).
  14. We were masked for the duration.

walkies

Jeff frowns, swings closed

Jeff and I went for a little walk in the gorgeous sunshine yesterday afternoon. Jeff said that he should go for a walk and I said, “I’m going to stagger up the stairs, stagger up the hill to the park and stagger back again,” and he thought I was joking; he joined me after watching me put my shoes on. This is the same park at the start of the pandemic; the logo has all washed off that hoodie but the hoodie remains.

I missed the DD celebration yesterday. I am not sad, I don’t feel sad. I am somewhat immobilized though.

Russians out of Kherson. They’re starting to put anti tank cement blocks on their side of the border, which triggered Finnish Twitter to do a most pointed and technical takedown of how insanely useless it all was. (Altho the discussion was in Finnish you can translate tweets on the fly and man the Finns were just shaking their heads, it was wonderful. There were also comments that since it WAS useless, some oligarch musta got paid for it, ten times what it’s all worth. Lovely.)

Supposedly the new washer will come in the downstairs back door around 11 am today. No movement on the tree, not that I’d expect it on Sunday.

 

by aquilegiaformosa on tumblr
guys we’re not being cringe to keep out the twitter users. we’re being cringe to keep out the ALGORITHMS, the CAPITALISTS, the INFLUENCERS. twitter users are welcome as long as they agree this site is UNMARKETABLE

In other words become ungovernable by being someone you can’t make money from…. by being cringe. You know who’s cringe ? autistic people, by virtue of the intensity of their many hobby horses.

I prefer to be ungovernable by having my own website, that nobody ever looks at, but which will be invaluable to my family after I’m dead. That’s how things work. It’s the longitudinal and continuous energy of it, not the content, necessarily.

Worked on yet another fanfic, “Special Deputy on the Run” yesterday.  I’ve poked into the file for Part II but I think I added 36 words.

The amount of shit kicking Zibethicus (my name for Elon, means muskrat) has taken on the internet is amazing. In a few short weeks he’s scorched his fortune, facing a lawsuit for over 50 billion dollars from a former investor choked that he essentially stole shares from Tesla, received the brickbats of the commentariat and been held up as a model of everything not to do in business. Every time he says so much as boo on twitter hundreds of thousands of people tell him he’s a fucking idiot; it’s glorious, but not enough to get a twitter account.

Continuing counts in the US election still trend Biden’s way. They didn’t poll people who never voted LOL__  so many pundits have tender buttskin hanging out on this that another public spirited activity on twitter these days is going through the pundits’s last two weeks of salty prognostications and retweeting it, saying things like THIS AGED LIKE MILK or DO YOU SUPPOSE YOU WILL EVER BE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT AS THE SPECTRUM FOR YOUR POLITICS etc etc.

It is GLORIOUS and marvellous in our eyes. The night show hosts are having a field day.

Mitch McConnell, easily one of the most corrupt and disgusting politicians in American history, is not Senate GOP Leader any more, and rumblings are someone is going to grab his 15 year old perch in the Senate. The people who are candidates in replacing him aren’t as likely to be as competent at either whipping votes or stealing anything they can reach.

We are about six episodes into Farscape. Every episode is weirder than the next. Truly bizarre show.

Virtually every pediatric ICU in the country is at double capacity. There are so many sick children that you cannot buy children’s aspirin in this country right now.

Spoke to Tammy on the phone the other day, she called. She confirmed that she’s coming at Christmas and I’m seeing her on Boxing Day.

 

we actually phoned pOp

So we got to wish him the best of the day, which it sounds like he had. Any day he can get in the Camaro and drive to the Place of the Rural Pollinators with his sweetie is a good one.

Ordered curried shrimp and rice from D Roti Shak yesterday. DOD it’s so good and as usual it arrived more or less as I clicked on Door Dash to order it. Jeff got a chick’n roti.

Keith came by and fetched the frozen food we’ve been keeping for his household. He didn’t hang around obvs; it had to go back home.

Buster trained HARD this morning, good kitty.

Kyiv still facing blackouts as the Ukrainian grid totters under Russian attacks.

More Hornblower. g’DAMN but David Warner plays such an amazing villain; in this case a Hero Gone Bad with opioids and drink, and possibly early onset dementia. Jeff and I were so thrilled that the movie/episode started with a flashback and there was no trial. (Believe that Jeff and I have made clear how we feel about courtroom episodes except for Good Wife). Now we’re shuddering because chances are the next episode will be nothing BUT a trial. Here’s hoping.

Most recent stats show one in ten americans over 65 has dementia and 22% have cognitive decline. Source: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IRVING MEDICAL CENTER October 24 press release

one quarter of the Canadian population is immigrants. Source: Statscan via CBC October 26. With climate change and other issues I think their predictions for the future are sadly out of whack, but that number will definitely rise no matter who’s rattling and jimmying the population model.

of course Indigenous people count those numbers differently, and I mean no disrespect. Population stats for Inuit, Métis and Indigenous peoples shown here.

Another chunk of the Epic of Gilgamesh has been discovered, to the joy and wonderment of archaeologists. The joke going around the internet is that our anonymous scribe from ancient times ‘dropped a new chapter’ before George RR Martin coughed up another Winds of Winter book (What Game of Thrones was based on.) If you know, you know, and if you don’t, we still have more Gilgamesh.

so happy for the rain we’ve been getting. We’re about to get a flood more, but nothing like last November.

Just heard the foghorn blow FIVE TIMES blasting up the hill. Guess it’s foggy on the Fraser.

 

This showed up on facebutt this am:

I entitle this picture I FART IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION.

Alex and Ryker at the park Oct 2022 also you get to see which of my apps is open

Hey, feel like vomiting in disgust? look who’s back. …at a tough on crime hoedown. Good to know wife murderers are allus welcome.

And just for laughs here’s my stats from AO3 yesterday sometime. I’ve posted more than 36 stories since 2017. I deleted some; total is currently 36.

Because Rishi Sunak is a horse’s ass, (and a fucking rich horse’s ass, to be sure) he didn’t acknowledge Larry the Cat as the UK’s new PM went to Number 10 Downing Street for the first time. Larry made no comment after regarding this untoward snub.

 

New poem – the sieve

This is not a suicide note:
I’d bang on my brother’s door and waken him
rather than leave him my corpse ***on purpose***
ew, I mean, ew

my consciousness wrote the suicide note to you
but the smelly part is still here

I know that my procession
through these eroded markers
was foretold
but the weeping was tiresome
and I had no patience with the acidic streams
for – did you know – your tears become more basic
over the course of the day, and it’s 2 am here

I pull a stray hair out of my mouth and continue
in the present tense
<<< fly back and forth
destroyers of narrative >>>
I cry as if I could be cleansed
rather than imprisoned
behind bars of vapour

quit potchkying around and write this damned thing

it is my salute to those I love who live still
and everything they taught me, all of which
I will take with me to my niche
in the columbarium
for everything I’ve learned is nothing
compared to what is coming
it’s the brutal and the lucky
who will live
another sieve for humanity

I passed through one, today
Most days I don’t know
how close I came

but I do today

two whole errands

well three with the cat food

we left the house two whole times yesterday and at four o’clock I said something along the lines of being an old crock who can’t deal with errands

6392 words on Part II

New song in the works. I left it for a day and it was still there when I went back, and it’s also completely different to what I normally do (guitar base). I think it’s going to be a song about the dead, for Halloweeeeeen but I don’t know for sure.

This morning on facebook our dear friend Jan from the Junction showed a picture of an egg salad sandwich from a gas station which had an expiry date of OCTOBER 23 today is thE 14TH do you think egg salad lasts that long? I don’t. Bleaurgh. Futurama meme check. (A truck stop egg salad sandwich causes the character Fry on Futurama to er…. see the episode Parasites Lost,  it has much hilarity.

While making a pit stop at an interstellar truck stop, Fry buys and eats an extremely old egg salad sandwich from a vending machine in the restroom. On returning to Earth, Fry and Bender are assigned the task of fixing the plasma fusion boiler, which promptly explodes. Bender is not damaged, but Fry is impaled by a large pipe. Despite the severity of the injury, Fry’s damaged body repairs itself in seconds and the subsequent medical examination reveals to the Planet Express crew that Fry is infested with microscopic worms from the egg salad.)

Thinking this morning…

Yeah when I just-about-mortally-wounded one of the MCs in ‘UPSUN – Sweep Off Those Waves’ my beta reader (my mother) said, ‘BUT SHE GETS BETTER RIGHT?’ and there I was forced to invent a whole new branch of alien medicine to fix her….and yes I am aware how ableist this is. Ableism is proving to be tougher to eradicate in my thought processes than racism and heteronormativity. And she’s not fixed. When someone commits an act of misogynistic terror on you, you don’t just ‘get better’.

 

but everything is going great

 

 

 

yah, that blog post heading is a line from one of my songs.

the line before it is: Sure, the world is sliding into a pit. That’s from “The Evening News” which I wrote in Montréal and is generally considered to be one of my finest tunes (the guy I took the music course from and Paul both agree).

Suzanne dropped by yesterday with a sunflower in one hand (currently brightening the kitchen) and a beige lace tablecloth (now on Granny’s dining room table) in the other and she picked up the camera set from her dead friend Richard since I couldn’t sell it on Craigslist … and so it doesn’t matter when she shows up she brings a little happiness.

I’m still thinking about Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I think the jumping spiders are just about the cutest animated critters I’ve ever seen. I just loved that movie.

Buster seems completely healed up. When I think how much blood was on him when he showed up on the 8th it seems miraculous.

My mood isn’t bad but I don’t really feel like moving. Practiced yesterday, sent some words to mOm (which reminds me, 6012 words on part II). Watched Sharpe’s Rifles (the first Sharpe) yesterday; Jeff dl’d a simple wonderful copy. The music though is gross. Electric guitar and French horn need a lighter hand than either of the men credited with the music could supply.

I’m supposed to get Alex on Friday.

Candles up for Jessica’s (Katie’s best friend’s) dad, who’s languishing at RCH with MRSA and he can’t get his heart operated on until he throws the infection, minimum two weeks. Katie’s liable to burst into tears at the thought; he’s been a kindly hardworking lovely human for more than half her life and she’s terrified he’ll die.

Thinking about Foreshore Restaurant for Brekky.

 

who was in the yard

I could hear stuff getting moved around but I can’t tell whose yard the noise was really in. Half expecting to see Paul’s canoe gone when the daylight arrives.

Jeff got sammiches for supper, they were nommy. Turns out that the corned beef on rye being terrible was just that one time, it was fabulous last night.

Particulates still moderately crappy today.

Heard from Mike; he’s hoping to get some shit done and drop by later today. I’m hoping  it’s nice enough to drink beer and eat burgers on the back deck.

No sign of Buster. Jeff keeps checking up on him and he’ll probably end up at the vet.

I’m semi-participating in Jeff’s SG-1 rewatch. I keep singing to myself while doing it (I wrote A LOT OF FILK SONGS FOR THAT FANDOM Y’ALL) but not aloud, Jeff does not favour me bursting into song while I’m sitting right next to him.

5217 words on Part II, got my guitar and mandolin and ukulele practice in as well. Got the tablecloth down on the living room table again, thanks Suzanne for pitching it in the wash.

Kerch Strait Bridge blowed up (in part) the day after Putin’s birthday – I thought it was the day of, but no, so I’m issuing a correction, mOm. Constructed in 2016 after the First Ukraine War as the dirty-colonial-resource-extraction-megaproject-thumbprint of the New Russian Empire, (V Putin Proprietor), the bridge was the longest in Europe, a technical triumph and a hated symbol throughout Ukraine of Russia’s aggression.

Fixing it is going to be interesting; the Russians didn’t have anyone shooting at them during the construction the first time but they will not have any such assurance as they try to reconstruct, and they have to, because they can’t pull cherries and grain and other stolen agricultural products out of the countryside if they don’t.  (Crimean agriculture despite everything had a bumper crop this year.) Anyway, expect more stuff to blow up. The Russians have got one lane (with crazy amounts of security) on the car side going, or will soon, but the rail line is apparently going to be tougher.

Ukrainian authorities are openly mocking the Russians on social media…. it’s savage and entirely deserved. An example of press coverage. Obviously someone knew about this destruction way in advance if they planned a stamp.