Category: Whining

Time vs money

I am SO tired of the commute, I’ve decided to buy a car.  Kat has one for sale and she said she would do the cv joint and the muffler for me if I buy the parts and I am very tempted.  It is not a particularly useful car, being, like the MR2, a two seater.  LTGW told me to buy a truck.  This was in the same week he told me I was wearing sensible shoes.  I ended up screaming “Want me to shave my head and start wearing overalls TOO” in the middle of the cafeteria, which certainly made Robof9 laugh.

Robof9 is leaving the Tiled Cell on the Hill later this month.  I am just punched out about that too.

The lights over my desk give me a headache every day.  My eyes are so tired by the time I go home I feel like I’m in a dissociative state.

The weather is cold and windy.  I heard what sounded like ice pellets pinging off my window at 3 am this morning.

Anyway, now that I know I’m getting a car I feel very bad at the same time I am feeling better.  It’s just that I can’t read, play games, watch video on my phone or do anything that doesn’t involve looking out the window to prevent motion sickness whenever I ride the bus.  I can spend two and one half hours a day commuting, or half an hour driving.  I’m 51 and I’ve only got so many hours left.  Translink is not bad for my part of the world, and it’s not their fault that there’s a fucking lake in between me and work.  I am tired of the asinine creature who takes up five seats on the bus with the rude way she occupies the front section.  I’m tired of the men who smell like pee and spilled stuff and the women who smell like air freshener.  I am tired of listening to phone conversations in a babel of languages; I am tired of hearing conversations that make me want to butt in and describe in detail the cognitive biases involved.  I am tired of fucking rude bus drivers (I’ve seen some good ones, but a couple of events in the last month have left me gobsmacked with disappointment and too disheartened to even complain.)  But I should commute because it’s better for the environment.  It would be better for the environment if I jumped off a bridge, too, but that is not in the cards.

The house is shifting on its foundations with the wind.

I want rainbows and unicorns and world peace, and I’m getting dying cats, blue relatives and friends, (this item deleted), (this item deleted), (this item deleted too, sigh), and a bunch of other stuff I can’t complain about.  Currently there are 18 items on the list; most of them I only wrote down so I could add one last item to the list & I FEEL REEAAALLY SHITTY about not being able to DO anything about the stuff that’s wrong.  Oh yeah, Mr. Cheerful Pants, I should just work on the stuff I CAN fix.  It’s all about reframing things.  Well how about I reframe this by breaking it over your head, how’s that work for you?

The only good thing that happened this week is that Mike showed the pictures he took of Rozo in the woods – nude.  Unbelievable.  All that hair, and her standing on a tree stump in Robert Burnaby Park looking like something shot out of a New Raphaelite wet dream.  There was one particular pic, her figleafed with hair, that I want to carry around with me in my wallet so I have something pleasant to look at when things really fuck up.

That’s not true, there was one other thing that happened this week.  I found a website with erotic photos and art that actually has about one in ten pics that I like.  I guess it’s yet another sign that I overshare that my first impulse was to email a couple of links to my daughter.  That’s not funny, it’s sick.

Jeff cheered me up by loaning the car to me yesterday – he stayed home with Gizmo.  I went and got treats after work to cheer us both up.

Now I’m going to do a Tarot reading.  The day can get worse any way it likes.

an open letter to Kash Heed

Dear Sir,

My initial reaction when I learned that the BC Liberals think it’s a good idea to axe the mandatory inquiry after a death in custody was, wow.  No more coroner’s inquests into government embarrassments.  Maybe articles like this will magically go away.

Then I thought, you know, just because I’m a tubby left leaning atheist with queer sympathies and anarchist tendencies doesn’t mean I have to even react to it.  After all, a 51 year old white woman who lives quietly in Burnaby (honestly, my neighbours probably wouldn’t even know I was here if my cats didn’t crap in their gardens, and if my brother’s car didn’t rumble in and out of here twice a day) doesn’t really need to put ‘death in custody’ on the top of her most feared methods of checking out.  I’d just pull out all of my priviliges and a harassed looking lawyer would show up and I’d waltz out of whatever misunderstanding had occurred.

Then I thought, well, sheeeeit.  It’s not like the BC Liberals do 5/8ths of a listless denial about deaths in custody right NOW, so why should anybody care that they are legally mandating what’s happening in truth in the cold light of spring, 2010?

But won’t someone please think of the children?  I tried to think of how an appeal to the interests of children might get spun by the BC Liberals.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of children growing up in BC – and other places, thank goodness – who want to be po-po when they grow up.

They want the gun, the badge, the pulling prostitutes over and getting free blow jobs in cars.  They want the skittery way meth-high teenagers deke down alleyways just before the Tazer comes out.

I kid, I kid.  Really what people want when they grow up wanting to be cops is to be on the right side, to catch dirtbags, to jail pedophiles, to bust drunk drivers.  Nobody who wants to be a cop when they are little thinks about the mental hardships and physical perils of being po-po.

Right now all police departments are having a bitch of a time hiring.  The RCMP nationally is looking to hire 8000 newbies in the next five years to handle resignations and retirements.  Things are so bad that they are hiring – so I have heard – people with known mental illnesses.

So I guess one way of looking at it is that the BC Liberals are canning inquests into deaths in custody as a recruiting ploy.  Come and join our police forces, all those with barely concealed personality problems and contempt for minorities!  If you get a little enthusiastic with a scumbag and he or she dies, not only will you not lose your job, your badge or your benefits, you’ll never have to face the scorn of the public and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that it was all a tragic misunderstanding.

Good job, Kash, hope that works out for you and your somewhat tinted kinfolks in the years ahead.  Yeah, I know you were the first Indo-Canadian chief of police in Canadian History, and that you have a storied career.  I just have one last question to ask.  Given that the Chief Coroner in BC is a political appointment given to a retired cop, do you have your eyes on that job after your political career moves away from you?  Cause if the omnibus bill passes, the Chief Coroner’s job just got easier.  That’s what I call planning ahead.

Peace love and anarchy,

Allegra

Overwhelming feelings of depression resolve…

as soon as I have a migraine.  I must keep remembering that

I have atypical migraines

They are frequently preceded by days or weeks of feeling just dreadful

Because my migraines are atypical I don’t get standardized ‘signs’ for them

I can’t tell the difference between feeling depressed and being in the run up for a migraine

Afterwards it seems obvious.

So I got a migraine at work yesterday.  I couldn’t actually see properly for the best part of an hour, but fortunately if I turn my head sideways I can still see enough to type.  It resolved quite suddenly without pain, but I feel rather etiolated today.

It’s a good thing I’m used to this pattern; instead of throwing myself off a bridge I just wait, and strangely, one way or another, I feel better.

There was an incredible sun halo about an hour before sunset last night.  It’s been a heckuva week for atmospheric phenomena.

Whinging

I feel really antsy these days.  I’ve tried really hard to quit whining on the blog, because there’s simply nothing so illuminating and disheartening than going back three years and seeing that the events which exercised me so aren’t even memorable three years later.  Not always, and of course the really memorable stuff doesn’t necessarily make it to the blog if I think it might cause me legal hassles later.  So, a sampling of suitably comstocked whining: Continue reading Whinging

Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

I have lots and lots to complain about.  Like, lots.  But I’ve decided to save my best and purest bile for real live people instead of the intarboobs, and the saddest and teariest of complaints for other real live people, and the horrid consequences of brutal self-examination strictly to myself. Continue reading Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

I think I am going to have to invent a new category of wrong

This gentleman is trying to make his “Take a wild guess, do you think I’m white?” observations into news.  The part that got me was the notion that Jews are not sex offenders…. Anyway, leave off attempting to read this until you are feeling strong.  I want to see the data to support some of this crap, by gosh.

I’m going to have a Tshirt made up:

EVERYONE HAS COGNITIVE BIASES

Mine are cuter, smaller and rarer than yours.

Food

Last night I fed Tom, Peggy, Ben, Paul, Keith and Jeff pork roast done with garlic, bacon and bay leaves (it made the house smell REALLY GOOD) and many, many vegetables, including beans and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes.  Katie and her housemates were invited, but Katie was already on tap to do shrimp and spinach canneloni that night so she turned me down with thanks.  It would have been an ‘add two leaves to the dining room table and where the hell are the chairs going to come from’ evening if they HAD come, so I don’t complain and I added some chairs to my want list.

Margot quacked like a duck for the folks.  She has a doctor’s appointment on Monday; she needs to be checked out for heart problems, which are quite common in Persians and don’t necessarily show up during the work up prior to neutering; her quacking and breathing issues may be normal Persian noisiness or it may be something more sinister.  She’s so placid, except when I’m brushing her, that she doesn’t appear to have any problems otherwise.  I keep telling myself that she’s like a kid… I get to look after her for a while, and then she’ll leave my life; I’m attached to her but I hope not too intransigent on the subject.  And it’s my own damn fault that I brought her into a household where it would be impossible to keep her as an indoor cat.  She gets FILTHY sometimes, having all that fun out in the rain and dirt.  If it’s really pouring she won’t go out, but light precip doesn’t seem to register.

Back to the Friday Feast.  I said to Ben, “There are two pinball machines downstairs.”  He said, “I’ve never played pinball in my life.”

shock,  horror!

We fixed that. Obviously he must play pinball before he goes to Hudson’s Hope.  (He got a job with Hydro).

After Tom Peggy and Ben went home, I decided I needed both air and exercise, and Paul and I wandered around the neighbourhood looking at the Christmas lights (Keith and Jeff were busy killing zombies in the trial version of Zombie Apocalypse). There are some spectacular displays, especially close to the school.  Then we came back after about half an hour and I picked up the guitar and composed another (what, another frakking tune, what the ???) song, which I think is going to be called “God Willing” and be about the immigration of my ancestors to Canada. No lyrics yet.  I know; for an atheist, I’m such a sucky accommodationist.  But you would be too if you had so many religious relatives, who also happened to be pleasant, intelligent and hard-working.

That’s the single biggest issue I have with the media atheists (I FLATLY REFUSE to use New Atheists.  That’s like calling people who are Christian NEW CHRISTIANS. Atheists are atheists, there’s nothing novel about them, and you can see their lineage throughout history from Epicurus forward.)  They are on the “All theists are stupid” train, whereas I am on the “All human beings have cognitive biases, and atheists may have at least one fewer than theists” train.  Also, many media atheists have the distinct advantage of not giving two shits what their religious relatives think of them, an advantage I don’t have.  It’s why I don’t give vent to some of my more shocking opinions (yes, hard to believe, isn’t it?  But much goes on behind my face that doesn’t come out in my blog).  I was a lot more venty when I started this blog, as I recollect.   I don’t usually go back into the old format portion of the blog unless I’m trying to figure out what happened in say, July of 2005.

Keith called up the optician’s office he was still working at on Saturday (he didn’t give that other job completely up, the wise soul) and hopefully he’ll be getting more hours later this month.  It’s hard to be a young person these days.

Today, AVATAR.  I am very stoked.  Now to check the hellacious mess that is the Translink site and plan my trip itinerary.

I so enjoy feeding people.  It makes me feel good, and that was a damned fine roast.  I miss the rosemary bush from the front of my old house.  A sprig of rosemary in the roasting pan would have made it even more wondrous.

snow

We got about an inch of fairly wet snow.  I’m going to put some shoes on and go deal with the worst of it so the mail carrier will continue to be happy with me.

I should REALLY work on music today, it’s just piling up higher and higher.  And I should get Denis’ (sure wish I knew whether he was a one n or two n Denis) life story transcribed.  And do banking.  Yup, I should definitely light a fire under myself today.

Point form updates

  1. Katie got the job, she starts today at 9:30 am.  It is ONE 20 minute bus ride from her house.  Unless the traffic is bad, then it’s about half an hour.  Commuting in the GVRD is hellish, so Katie well knows what a good deal this is, especially since her last interview was in North Van.
  2. My emotions as a consequence may be best summarized as vigilate et orate.
  3. Miss Margot is being very grumpy about having her hair done.  I may have to haul her off to the “professial Persian hedge trimmers” and get her done, which I’d prefer not to as winter is coming.  I tried trimming her myself but her fur is so very fine that it slides through the guide without ever coming near the shears.
  4. My attempt at soup making (chicken with rice) had one heart stopping moment during which I accidentally added rather more paprika than I expected.  Once tasted, however, the soup declared itself happy, and even Keith had some.
  5. This house is not a dude ranch for misfits and unemployables.  The rest of this paragraph I deleted out of deference to the feelings of him what this is in regard to.
  6. It has never gotten quite warm or dry enough for me to cut the grass one last time before winter starts in earnest.  I will when I can.
  7. I have done some more unpacking, and found some bedding which I probably can’t use as it looks doublish as opposed to twinnish or queenish..  However, it’s pure cotton, so I’m thinking of giving it to Paul, if he can stand having something in screeching lilac stripes.
  8. I carved out a pumpkin in the shape of Lafayette’s face.  I’m thinking of cutting up a white sheet I found to make wee ghosties.
  9. Jeff has posted the pinball instructions AND the high scores list.  Let the high score smackdowns commence!
  10. Homicide Season Seven is OUT THERE.  But when Munch starts spouting off (again, again) about how the government is storing information on law abiding citizens, he sounds quite prescient.  The whole show happened before 9/11.
  11. There is biscotti dough in the fridge.
  12. I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart my mother, Unca Barry, Ontie Mary, and the other relatives who assisted with a newly published family project. Barry’s preface in particular choked me up… we can never know what really happened, but we can preserve and think about what we have left, and be grateful that our relatives left us something to go on.
  13. I am reading through the family letters of, and with respect to, Bootlegging Mary.  Long time readers of this blog will hazily recollect that I went to a family reunion and heard about a relative who ran a corner gas station in Saskatchewan (I am at a loss to understand HOW this could be a more Canuckistani reference) and was, possibly, likely, a bootlegger. I wrote a song for her and begged for more detail.  The wheels of family genealogy have ground slow and fine, and to my wonderment and edification, the letters have been translated and published.  Words cannot express my gratitude.  Now I’m reading what it was like between the two World Wars for my Mennonite kin back in olt contry, and I’m amazed and humbled at the crap they lived through – all the while trusting and praising God with an deep and consistent piety. (Even as they got into it hammer and tongs about a disputed legacy… may we all take suitable notice of this falling out, which had tragic consequences for some).  In one letter there is a third hand account (as it’s a letter to a relative from another relative about a third relative’s doings).  The recently married daughter walked through her mum and dad’s village with her husband, and every last person in the village was gone.  They had fled across the frozen river from Siberia to China, with nothing but transportation, food and clothing.  She had seen her father the night before, and while he looked downcast he hadn’t breathed a word of the flight to his daughter.
  14. She is alleged to have said, in describing what she did when she walked through her parents’ deserted house, “I took the cat in my arms and the guitar down from the wall.”  I got chills when I read that.  She went straight for the two things I would have dealt with first.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…..

It’s alive

So after I left Deb and Jim’s place (such a nice house, but of course like most homeowners they see it as a succession of chores) I drove to London.

It took me from 9 am until 7:15 to drive 506 kilometers.  It should have taken six hours, tops.  It took from 12:30 to 5:30 to drive from where the 115 meets the 401 to Guelph.  Words cannot describe my irritation; the combination of it being the Friday before the long weekend, the weather and the continuous construction along that stretch of road fixed it so that in the words of Dorothy Dunnett, I explored tedium to its petrified core.

I got to Oakridge in time to register, then went to the Greek Canadian Club and arranged to stay at a motel on Fanshawe Park Road called the Lighthouse.  At this gathering, there were 400 people… at least … and I didn’t recognize a single soul.  Not one.  Nobody, uhn-uh, personne.  I bought a zipper hoodie with the reunion logo on it for $20, not unreasonable.

But for reconnecting, not so much.  Went back to the motel and decided to patronize ‘The Black Pearl’ a watering hole attached thereto, run by a married couple and their hot and hotter daughters.  The place is the size of two big living rooms back to back, and the place is closing in two weeks because the owners of the motel did not renew the lease.

It was the last Karaoke Night at the Black Pearl the next night.  I filed this away, in case the dinner dance out at the Western Fair building was a write off.

It was.  I came, I ate (I’d paid for the fucking meal, after all) I greeted Barb, the one person there I recognized, and my god wasn’t she just the picture of a nicely done up middle aged lady, including having maintained her girlish figure.  I drank one disgusting vodka plus sugar water which made me feel like hurling, and immediately drove back to the Black Pearl, where I grabbed a seat at the bar and watched the set up and singing.  There was a guy who channeled Frank Sinatra.  There was a guy with a voice… well, I told him to his face that if Tom Waits gargled a bucket of gravel before a gig, he’d sound like that.  Since he didn’t know who Tom Waits was this meant nothing to him, but the guy standing beside me spit out his drink.

I drank four beers, sang two songs, went to bed.  Or tried to.  About ten songs have tried to land on me in the last little while (car trips); I wrote out lyrics for one and the rough sketch of the melody for the other, and then worked on the homily a little.

Drove by the old place on Oakridge Drive.  The two maple trees are still in the front yard; everything else is different.

Drove by Sue’s old place.  It didn’t look any different except the trim is a different colour.

Drove by University Hospital.  It has nice new signs that look expensive and are very high off the ground.

Drove by where the Golden Pheasant Motel was, the first place I stayed when my family moved to London.  It isn’t there any more. There’s a lot of nice new houses.

Drove down Dundas Street and said hello to ‘the strip’.

Drove past Tak Sun.

Drove past where the Three Little Pigs used to be.  It’s still a family restaurant.

Drove past Jeff’s old place on Oxford.

Drove past where I used to live when I was working at the hospital.  I moved out of my parents’ place the day of the Jonestown massacre.  A fair piece back.

I passed Windermere but I didn’t go up that road.  I would have gotten very nostalgic and weepy.  I learned to play guitar in the married students quarters when I lived with my parents and they were going to Western.

Had tea and a lovely visit with Phyllis.  She is grimly determined to keep as much of her mobility as she can, but it hurts.  She is still as keenly intelligent and interested in the world as it goes by as ever she was; nobody just meeting her would give her 85. She looks 20 years younger than that to me.  Her cat Smokey is ADORABLE and allowed me to fondle him rather a lot more than most cats will on first acquaintance.  I miss MY little furball rather a lot.

Stopped at the Husky on the 401 for steak and eggs and now I’m safely ensconced at Catherine and Colin’s.

My, something sounds like a blowtorch.  I must go investigate.

Very poopy day

My day was not all that great.  Paul came over and intuited that, the weather being so grisly (or drismal, as Donna H has remarked) it was a pho day.  So lunch was good and it was good to see a friendly face, but after he dropped me off back home …

My tummy has been upset, undoubtedly over the prospect of travelling, and when I sat down to do an itinerary the horrible thought occurred that I had Bitten Off More Than I can Chew.  Especially in ten days, with two days of air travel and who knows how much driving.  I am really not looking forward to it.  I thought about airports, and how aesthetic they are; sitting on the tarmac in the pouring rain for two hours while they find the luggage of somebody who didn’t show up for the flight; sitting on the tarmac in the dark while somebody removes thumb a from orifice b; getting stranded by global events; running out of money; and the whole doom spiral of horror.

So I am not leaving tomorrow morning.  I should visualize the fun I’m going to have, but all I can think about are the horrors of travelling and all the shit which may befall me.  And, candidly, some of my visits are duty visits and I’m not looking forward to them; fortunately the hardest visit is one to somebody who never, ever reads my blog, yay.