Category: Whining

Snowing and assfreezing cold

Work is, like, amazing.  I feel like I’m looking at the stars, and they’re just the little lights you get when you’ve hit a wall abrumptly (deliberate typo).  Yet everyone is so nice, and I feel so fortunate.

Katie is refusing to answer the phone or talk to me except a terse ‘alive’ on facebook. I have no idea if she even typed that message.  Some folks you can’t do favours for, so I’m going to do myself a favour and just ignore all of this. 

Ziva, how I love your heater.

I really, really need snow tires.  Not enough tread and too much slippery from cold road surfaces.

Some woman tried to kill me today

Blue Maxima, licence 338 TGG, pulled out onto 10th without looking. I swerved, a very alert human in the oncoming lane swerved, the alert human behind me didn’t run into me, and as for crashstyle, you couldn’t pass your hand through the gap she left. She pulled in front of me.  I followed her for ten blocks, watched her make TWO cell phone calls, pulled up next to her at 16th and 6th, and got a good look at her.  I wanted to follow her some more.  But I didn’t.  Folks at work are teasing me to call it in.  Why, so I can spend a f*cking day in court?  Puhleeze, Louise.  I have amazing reflexes for an old broad, and thank Darwin I had help.

If we had collided, we would have blocked a major traffic artery blocks from the turn off for the bridge.  And it wouldn’t have been my f(cking fault, for once.

Bullet (time) points

  • Migrainy
  • Talked to my mother last night
  • Very tired
  • Too much to do
  • Disorganized
  • Having hot flashes more or less continuously
  • My room is a disaster, although the clean clothes do outnumber the dirty ones
  • I actually cooked dinner last night – potato salad.  Jeff said there weren’t enough onions but that was because I was hoping Keith would eat it.
  • I am not going to Toronto for my vacation in November – I am staying here.  I’m taking Katie cross border shopping for her bday.
  • I am debating whether to cash out of all of my investments, because the end of the world is nigh
  • I am also debating whether or not to buy more musical instruments.  Because, you know, you can never have too many
  • Church continues to be interesting and challenging.  I have a meeting tonight.
  • Work continues to be interesting and challenging.  I have sworn a mighty oath to stop emailing people.  I have to relearn this over and over again.

Quinoa among other things

Ack.  Whoever said quinoa was easy to harvest was a lying bastard.  You have to strip the heads, roll the seed pods in your hands, soak the seeds and rinse them about a hundred times (must determine a method that doesn’t involve gallons of water).  They’ve finally come to the point that I can eat the seeds and they taste like raw food instead of a bitter chemical (saponin).  Now I can dry them, all three of them.  (Not true, there’s a meal’s worth in there, besides the seeds I’m saving.)  Anyway I need to know this for the story I’m writing, in my head.

It’s our problem free…. philosophy…..

Work is marginally better.

Another solid night of sleep, thank goodness.

My parents gave me the wrong freaking name

I shoulda been called Cassandra.

My whole life I’ve been predicting things that any sane person, looking at the evidence, could predict.  But for some reason the sane people don’t look at the evidence, and the crazy people make up their own.

I have too much work and not enough mojo, brains or skill to deal with it all.

I love Jeff.  He is being very supportive about an organization change I am working toward right now. 

My boss RULES.  I can count on his support.

Keith RULES.  He’s the second brown belt in the Caspell clan, as of this week!!!!   Welcome, third kyu!  (Bows).

Grr-thwack

Zombie walk this aft.  Katie K and I will meetup at the Art Gallery and drag our shambling carcasses down the parade route.  I can haz corn syrup and food colouring, and clothes to sacrifice. Oh yes, there will be pix.

Church meeting earlier this afternoon.  I’m an invited guest rather than a regularly scheduled attendee; I suspect I am the Katelijne Adorne of my crowd, and happy I am that there is precisely one reader of this blog who will get the reference.

Leo is whomping up Finnish pancakes in the kitchen.  Lawsy me, and there’s BACOM tooooo. Linda indulged me by watching the most recent Futurama episode with us last night, of which much internet woo, and I have to say “The Prisoner of Benda” is one of the best episodes ever and it’s FULL OF MATH.

Tomorrow, hymn sing at Tom and Peggy’s (ever so much more fun than it sounds, my irreligious pals).  I’m thinking about going into work and doing some documentation, but I bet I turn lazy and stay home and watch depressing movies instead.  Leo and Linda will head out sometime Sunday.

It is my sad duty to report that Katie and Daxus are dating again.  Hence the title of the post. I am keeping my mouth shut (apart from giving Suzanne and my mother a heads’ up, and Paul and I had a brief and eyerolling confab yesterday) and hoping that a cooler head prevails.  It’s too bad that her staying away from him was a condition of tenancy.  As of the end of this month she’s homeless – you read me? – and only Paul is prepared to take her in, as Jeff and I -after a brief and dispassionate strategy session – do not wish to borrow more grief than is already our portion.

Did I say recently how much I love and appreciate Jeff?  He really is Made of Awesome.

The quinoa is as tall as me and four cobs of corn have set on.  I let the peas go to seed.

busy tizzy

1.  Paul and kids over to watch latest True Blood.  Since I knew they were coming I went to Choices and got delicious om-nom-noms for them, like fresh bread and Dijon turkey and Avalon chocolate milk, which still comes in a glass bottle and is the best commercial chocolate milk in the known universe.  Even Paul had some and he stopped drinking cow’s milk years ago.  Damn, it’s fine!  Also edamame salad and fresh veg.

2.  Leo and Linda coming tonight…. can’t wait for them to meet kitties.

3.  Jeff biked to and from work yesterday… go Jeff. The last three 3 k involve about three hundred feet of elevation, so he was rather warm by the time he got back.  I took one look at him and asked him if he wanted some water.

4.  At church meeting last night (Nominating committee, my house) we had fun and got shiz done.  I was so happy to see everybody.  Now I have more work to do, even though an item came off my list!

5.  I’ll be doing a bed and breakfast thing in Bellingham in September but I don’t know which weekend.  I’ll be taking Katie for some CBS.  (Cross border shopping).  Clothing for women my size is more easily obtained Stateside.

6.  I’m helping train somebody at work, and as a consequence my house-fly strength attention span is even MORE truncated.  I’d like to thank her family for raising somebody so smart.  And she takes kick boxing classes, too.

7.  Keith was too – I don’t know – to check flickr for pictures of Animé Evolution, and when he said he didn’t know where pictures would be, I said, “You’re daft, check the flickrstream.”  Gosh all whacky, am I the only person in the world who knows how to use the internet, grump grump.  And there he was, in his costume.  Now I go looking for it and I can’t find it, but suffice it to say Keith made a GREAT Dr. McNinja. Grandparents are warmly encouraged to apply to him directly for photographs.

8.  Dropped by her workplace to see Lady Miss Banjola and inspect her tummy.  Yup, she’s knocked up.  She’s also artistically pale but I think she looks great.

9.  The spicy Thai beef salad yesterday was unbelievably yummy, but the transit time of 8 hours was accompanied by the burnination of a lifetime.  I can no longer eat hot peppers, unless I want multiple lashings of discomfort and abrupt departures from whatever conversation I’m engaged in at the time to flee for the house of ease.  It was worth it, but only just.  Ky can cook.

There’s more but I gotta go.

HOT, so hot

Between the heat and the hormones I had a very truncated night’s sleep last night.

I am very slowly getting organized around various church activities.  I requested a key (yes, if you have a joke about a church key, or redneck wrench, please insert here), dug into the website and confirmed commitments with those of the church who don’t have email.  I also commiserated with a sibling congregant about how married couples using the same email address is creepy (and f^ckyeah it IS creepy, especially when it means one of two things, that one spouse can read private correspondence to do with church matters or that one spouse is controlling the information spigot, and either way, EW!), and her response started with “Dude!” which just goes to show you which side of the digital divide I fall on.  I am attempting to get instructions and training for the sound system, if you can call that giant nexus of crap a sound system (and I don’t mean to beat up on the volunteer technicians because there are serious technical issues which will be neither easy nor cheap to resolve).

I rejoiced in learning (there had been hints, but now we know) that church start time has moved back to 10:30 am which is a) mostly the doing of the minister, who never gets any credit for having either brains or the welfare of the whole church in mind, which is bloody annoying for me as I find she has both and b) REALLY good news for the people who live in the hinterlands of our catchment area. Getting up at 8 to get to church is just plain horrid and you have to get up even earlier if you’re doing set up, so booyeah Rev Katie.

I have also, as of the last board meeting, gotten the okay to revive Chalice circles.  Go Allegra.  I really like small group ministry, especially when it consists of:

Meeting – checking in – lighting candles for joys and concerns – meditating – closing song – eating – socializing!

Now to consult Jeff about dates.

Church is going to eat my brain for the next two years; I know it.  Now I have to pace myself.

It’s true we’ve had a lot of departures in the last six months but sometimes the big trees gotta come down to let the little shrubs closer to the light.

New gal started at work yesterday – I think I’m going to like her.  Her uptake curve on new technology is impressive.

Mark October 16 on the calendar, we’re going to have a Social Justice Open Mic at church.

Cool runnings

Yesterday I made a run for Wal-Mart (first time in 8 years) to get coolant for Lady Miss T at work.  She said she’d overheated on that bloody great Gaglardi hill so I said, “let us go to your car and check your coolant!” and like, there wasn’t any.  Her brother, who is, like, the anti-Jeff, had told her he’d checked the coolant and he dinnnnt.  Lie or mistake, it was pretty typical.   I looked at her and said, “You are not moving this car.  Let us go talk to beautiful Bossie and see if I can’t get a hall pass.”  You may infer from the fact that it took me 40 minutes from door to door that my observation of the speed limit during this excursion was notional and inconsistent.  SFU to Lougheed Mall and back, including a purchase….yeah.

Day before yesterday, I had a brief and hormonally truncated visit to Paul and Keith’s (Paul said something innocuous and I burst into tears and ran away, aren’t I special, but at least Paul and Keith had the decency to shrug it off) and while I, tears still drying on my face and clutching my mandolin, was escaping to my car, Paul’s brand new neighbour said something that stopped me in my tracks.  She said, “I like your purple car”, and her male companion (actually her daughter’s agent) said, “Yeah, that’s a 94 Ford Probe GT and I think that’s the version with the special paint. I’ve owned four Probes, they are my favourite car.”  AN HOUR LATER I pried myself away.  Much restored, I went on my way home.

The weekend’s over

Well, this was certainly a movie rich weekend.  Besides Inception and the inevitable True Blood episode, there was Growing Op and Numb, both hilarious Canadian films with American TV stars thrown in for extra visibility.  The notion of the guy who plays Hodges on CSI playing the paterfamilias of a marijuana farm in the suburbs is brain bending, and he delivers one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in a movie… no, really.  Ask Keith, he was there. Definitely worth seeing. both of them.  Both of them had F8CKING AMAZING soundtracks.  Seriously.

We got the mower back from the lawnmower place (unfixed, may they achieve decomposition in a quiet place) and Jeff mowed the lawn while I edged things and watered the peas and quinoa and whacked weeds.

This weekend we also managed to get Granny’s stamps to the dealer, so between the weed whacking and carrying all the boxes upstairs my back is unbelievably sore.

I read Plantinga’s Breviary of Sin, which Ontie Mary gave me last I was in Victoria.  Very Christian but brilliantly written and very quotable.

I’ve started taking my musical instruments to work so I can practice at lunch.  I am now practicing every day, and I have the callouses to prove it.

Lightning – the Diving Horse.

Elementary, my dear particle

Oh, great. Now we have to rewrite physics AGAIN.

From the same site… Here, have an electric blue worm.

When palaeontologists drink….

Added Book of Eli to the list of movies watched.  Visually awesome, flawed in plot.  Every time I see one of these movies I think… where’s the goddamned food coming from?

Took off work early yesterday to get a massage…. since nobody I actually see on a regular basis is providing one.  Depressing, but there’s divorced life for you.  It’s either pay for it or go without.  Woke up this morning with tingling and numbness in my left hand as a direct consequence of the massage, but everything else feels better.   Massage dude gave me some stretches and reminded me to breathe.  I was testy with him, I admit it.

Memorial service en masse tomorrow.  I’m leaving for the 7 o’clock ferry, we’ll see what everybody else does. I messaged everybody else to either be here at 6 am or find another ride.  I’ll be bringing musical instruments.

I am off to work early to make up for lost time yesterday.

20 parrot tricks in 2 minutes. Just like it sounds.

It’s bloody hot here now.  We go from having the heat on to the air conditioning, it’s truly remarkable.