Category: Whining

Off to Paul’s today

Going to help with packing and take us for a walk.

Wordle in 5, 1646 words on ‘The Instructor’ yesterday, with none expected today because of my errands. Lumosity one top score the rest abysmal dreck. I made myself coffee and toasted a sourdough muffin. I’m pretty well used to not keeping cream in the house any more, sigh; my liver has thanked me.

Bakhmut’s still under siege. Putin visited military headquarters in Kherson and Zelenskyy visited the front in Avdiivka.

China’s mediated the first progress in the Yemen war in years; Saudi Arabia and Iran may reopen embassies. Given that 60% of Yemeni deaths since 2015 are directly attributable to the war (via food insecurity and zero health care) and that a million people there have been affected by the cholera epidemic the faster peace comes the better and I don’t care who brokers it.

There’s a yummy beef and tomato and onions mix for wraps in the fridge and also a very nice lentil tofu stew. Sounds bland, but with turmeric, ginger, half a lime, cumin, black pepper, cayenne and plenty garlic it’s anything but. The tofu got cooked in a spice mix but it all ended up incorporated in the stew and it is quite yummy. A bit salty for the diet because for all the veggie ingredients leading one to think it’s vegan, I cooked it in chicken stock (I didn’t want it going bad in the fridge).

Twitter is being really weird and gross and they just took the bans off dead-naming trans people (using what they were named at birth rather than their chosen name for transition) and it’s OPEN SEASON on trans people in a way that was obvious enough before but is now a tidal wave of bigoted speech. Trust trans people to know their own gender enough that you do not need to question them about it.

seven percent of parents regret having children.

one percent of trans people regret transitioning.

IT’S A VERY SUCCESSFUL SOCIO-MEDICAL PROCEDURE, quit second guessing trans people and spending all your chocolate coin attention on the ‘poor parents’ who have been ‘cheated’ of the ‘child they were meant to have’ BLEUCH I hate people who think like that NONE OF US FUCKING GET THE KID WE WANT we get the kid we get and whining about it is rude to everyone and makes you look like a gurning nithing. (gur-ning nye-ðing aka a facepulling poltroon)

I slept GREAT but not ENOUGH so I imagine I’ll be napping this afternoon.

So tempted to write Elizabeth Holmes in jail and mock the living shit out of her but better people have more claim to my time LOL. She honestly believed that people like her can’t go to jail well just ask Martha Stewart she did five months and is still proclaiming her innocence.

Murphy

In other news, Murphy the male bald eagle who wanted to be a DAD SO MUCH that he incubated a rock, has been given a (sadly) orphaned eaglet and he is a) feeding him and b) bonding with him, and it’s actually one of the few things giving me hope right now. How oft we struggle to be what we truly are.

In other news, an extremely endangered hellbender that was raised in a reintroduction facility has fathered a new generation (he was tagged before he was released into the wild). The scientists involved in the project are gleeful and so am I, for them, to have evidence that hellbenders raised by humans can be successfully reintroduced.

In other news I am going to try really hard to have a good day. Off to church with Keith this morning; perhaps today’s the day I’ll be able to restrain myself from verbally assaulting someone who’s harmless.

In other news Renaissance Books is for sale – it’s been a fixture in my neighbourhood since I moved here and I don’t imagine it will survive – they may have trouble selling it. I couldn’t find anything I wanted when I was in there last (it’s right next door to the Bohemian) so I bought two very pretty cards and I’m going to send them to my mOm and my ontie, with a letter inside.

In other news This Is What It’s Like to look for an apartment. LOOK AT THOSE FUCKING PRICES.

rents

I am still recovering from the family meeting yesterday. The drop dead date is they have to be out by 1 August BUT there’s no formal paperwork from Brian the landpeer yet. Neither of the downstairs tenants are apparently being evicted. The hot water heating system is still in disrepair.

I have never seen Keith this low and Paul is doing his best to stay positive by not really engaging all that much. They can’t afford housing unless they live together and I don’t think it would be good for either of them. Keith is under the impression that wherever he ends up he’ll be able to afford running a car.

I don’t really think that will be possible and it’s just horrible. Everything Keith has managed to accomplish in his life is being clawed away from him by the economy and his disabilities.

Rents have gone up 15 to 30 percent in a single year in Burnaby. They’ve been offered temporary refuge here IF THEY CAN’T FIND SOMETHING ELSE but it will have to be very temporary as Jeff is not keen to live with both strapping guys in this tiny house when Jeff and I have matching schedules for sleep and they REALLY DO NOT. To say that I am not keen on living with them either is one way of putting it. Paul was a hard man to live with for a long time before I left him and Keith, although he’s nice as pie to me these days, can be waspish. Not saying I can’t, just that I really want them to find their own place and I feel like I can’t get off this train and there’s a stench of inevitability in there with the class war and tough family dynamic and I feel ineffectual and without hope.

At the meeting yesterday we took a little break and Keith said that Paul couldn’t read the words on his computer screen.

I’m sad.

I’m renting a storage space for July 1. That’s another $450 people, and we have to pay it because we don’t have stable housing for our family, and if the furnace quits I’ll be using it too.

apology accepted

Jeez I could have gotten this over days ago. C. has been kind enough to hear and accept my apology and did not consider my considerable display of ill temper enough to make her hate me…

Don’t know what I did to deserve this life.

Shipped off 1450 words to mOm this morning after an 850 word day, thank you very much.

The brilliant sunshine is so wonderful. I just popped the back door to let the late afternoon sun and air flush the house.

Paul took me to lunch after we took EIGHT BAGS of mostly clothes (I did a quick peruse to ensure it’s stuff he can lose) to Value Village. Next time per his specific request they’ll go to the Sally Ann at the bottom of the hill. I can’t talk him out of it, that’s fine, he’s entitled to his preferences.

May I be conducted to hell

with ‘certain parties’ as my escort.

That was without a doubt (music aside) the most bland and unobjectionable spring festival service I’ve ever been to. There were many mitigating factors so I won’t linger but A. bless her came up to me afterward and said there was entiiiiirely too much God in that service and I could not but agree. Of course if you’re going to suck up to the three remaining and three closeted theists in the group, Easter’s the time to pull da bunny fum da sack. The bunny in this case being a fantastical holy-ish trinity of Reb Jeshua, Ramadan and the seder. I remind myself of mitigating factors and turn to

HOW I GOTS MISTOOK FOR A MAN TODAY while wearing a dress

and earrings that matched my

tights that matched my

decorative scarf in pretty colours that my mother made, and I haven’t worn all those things together in likely a decade at this point, probably church the last time too…. L. greeted me most sweetly and kindly but I was somewhat reserved as I had just put my mask on and my – you know – social anxiety spikes when I’m indoors and masked however ecstatic I am to see various people.

I digress to think about what happens to middle aged women wearing face masks. Bigots don’t want people wearing face masks because they want to be able to ‘clock’ you. You are assigned a gender at birth and wherever you migrate on your gender journey, most people want to believe they can tell and understand when presenting and presumed gender at birth don’t line up. But that doesn’t actually have any bearing on the reason I was mistook for a man…. I be somewhat digressing again, the thing, the evil thing I do for effect.

So I sing tenor now among other things (I recently checked my vocal range and …) and Keith got asked if he was the one providing the harmony. LOLOLOL I was literally as gender presenting as I can physically manage at this point and MY VOICE gave me away as a man, hiding behind a mask I MEAN LITERALLY folks for those who understand …. .

& I don’t mean to boast, but this life of mine gives me the most perfect moments of clarity and solidarity. I’ve been gender non-conforming all my life. I have no problem with my assigned whatever-as-normative, but I keep having little moments like that, and it pleases me. It’s not just the autism that makes me gender divergent; there’s something in me, neither brain nor frame, that makes me other than ‘woman’. Not 100%. Sure, able to do the madonna thing, co nursing your children how hard core. But I am not 100% woman, and I was like that before having Keith literally

And then I fucked it up totally by going off in a classic autistic meltdown with C. May I be conducted to hell. Which was where we came in. But somehow, you know,

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I DIGRESS

Peggy was there and fled as someone else arrived, but I don’t know if the two events were connected so she just might have felt like walking home. I’m going to call her. Maybe she just got sick of the service. As far as I could tell they were still getting people drifting in at half time, including a previously called minister.  (Love what she’s done with her hair.) Rob W was there and sat next to me during the service. In case anyone in the audio radiance thinks there’s anything between us, he told me I was too fat when I approached him after Paul and I broke up and I’ve only gotten fatter since, and I’ve reached the age when perfect isolation from romantic relationships is accompanied by nearly perfect peace. Had a few words with Rose, Marilyn, collected a hug from John, and it was all good. Even with me being a complete ass I still feel better, and Keith bless him dragged me out in good time AND I mailed a letter on the way home. Cast your bread upon the waters (it was a letter to the landlord asking if she had any vacancies this summer), and may Christ and his sanctified angels come to your aid in terms of finding food for delivery in this town today….. I reject McDonalds on this Holy Sunday.

amusement

how is it, the elderly woman remarked, that all she did was volunteer to print the agenda and take minutes and somehow she ended up with most of the action items. So the family meeting happened, there were no children present, and I got most of the action items. This seemed to be an arrangement that everyone was happy with.

This morning I need to contact Keith and find out if we’re coordinating a trip to church or he’s going by himself.

I know I got things done yesterday (I came home from the meeting with a whole cooked chicken and chocolate ice cream and I’m pretty sure I emptied the dishwasher) but it all fades in my memory thanks to the emotional challenge of the meeting. I so feel for Paul! but Katie and Keith get a round of applause for what they’ve been doing, which is facing up to the housing disaster in their immediate future.

Keith and Paul DO NOT WANT to break the household up. A replacement apartment or dwelling to take them is at least fifteen hundred dollars more than what they have and what they have is steps from untenable anyway. Katie’s been carrying more than her portion of the rent and pretty much all the groceries since she moved in – and she MADE ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS AND DID MOST OF THE PACKING FOR THE LAST MOVE –  and she needs a break from being the pack mule. Katie can’t help but want to since she’s exhausted and wants to concentrate on her boys. She and Dax have decided not to live together until they have a few more things sorted out and that’s very mature of them. (But it will happen eventually is the hoped for outcome….)

And of course my mood was altered even further when I heard Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” for the first time yesterday and cried and cried and cried because I couldn’t stop. It’s about the experience of having dementia from the inside and it is at once one of the bleakest and most sympathetic songs I ever heard, breathing past her cthonic voice and the simple piano accompaniment.

Oh well. Off to do some of the things I promised I would do. And it’s not like I didn’t see it coming. Ask for the minutes, get the hours, I say.

Jeff and I are very much wishing to thank Dave D for his recommendation of “Endeavour” because we just consumed the first series with happiness. It’s quite a period piece (early 60s) and the scripts are thoughtful and not peppered with 21st c neologisms.

pleasant times

Lovely indoor walk with Paul yesterday at Lougheed. He seems very beaten down and oppressed by his illness but cheered up for the walk. It always cheers folks up to eat, so we got some lo mai gai, which was particularly fine in comparison with previous outings, and there was a lone har gaw in there because they were out of enough lo mai gai to fulfil my order, and the hot and sour soup was as good as I ever remember it being there. We went to Cobb’s but I didn’t buy treats, just spongy crusty white bread which is my kryptonite for stuff I’m s’posed to lay off for my liver.

Continue reading pleasant times

finished ‘Prehistorian’

mOm do tell Ontie Mary that I finished reading the book she gave me. Absolutely loved it. V. Gordon Childe was an incredible original, reminiscent in many ways in his antiestablishment and decidedly leftist views to our dear and now passed Prof. Mick Aston; he excavated Skara Brae (although he was dead wrong about the dating, it’s Neolithic not Iron Age) and systematized many aspects of modern archaeology we now take for granted. He read a dozen languages and couldn’t pronounce any of them for shite. He was so confirmed in his view that older archaeologists were a fucking plague on the profession that when he turned sixty five he returned to Australia, land of his birth, said goodbye to remaining family and friends, put his affairs in order, went for a walk and jumped off a cliff.

Sometime in late February we got a Walmart delivery to the back basement door and didn’t notice. It got et by critters. Jeff phoned Walmart. We can now recycle the rotting order from the back deck. There was a child’s playhouse in there too, I guess Ryker is getting it. Jeff and I feel terrible about it. I’m going to make a weatherproof sign for the back door so hopefully it never happens again, because this is twice in a year.

There’s something very contentment-making about friending an old boyfriend on facebook and …. he’s acting like an old friend without being nosy. Not whatever it is that young men are supposed to have turned into. Age has its consolations, youth its horrors.

Today Keith comes over to fix us a vegetarian lunch. I roasted some beast yesterday (three veg nuked). It was edible but far from choice. Didn’t stop me and Jeff from piling it down, however, and horseradish sauce covers a multitude of sins.

1974 words on Instructor, no progress on TB.

Lumosity was a bust today. Wordle in 4. The word was tough, quite literally.

 

 

sunshine

Got a couple of turns around the park in yesterday.

Suzanne came, cleaned and departed. We had the back door wide open most of the time she was here and it really felt wonderful, a ginyouwine spring clean. Should have seen Suzanne’s face when I told her that Daxus and I had had an adult conversation about something of import to both of us. (And that I ran away with my tail between my legs, yes I did, but it’s all good.)

Still feel empty and irritable but nothing like earlier this week. Jeff has news on the client front that I’ll let him share when he’s ready.

We’re rewatching Zone Blanche and my very parasocial love affair with the adjutant known as “Nounours” (Teddy Bear, which he is) is renewed.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/13a885350d42e08383550b11382a7ced/5c31f4593020b6e5-68/s400x600/11c41aefd2bc867d9d0365ea1630e2563fc1e02e.gifv

abovenoted is a tyrannosaurus on a skateboard

Apparently Keith and Paul are off to the States this weekend.

Laundry and fridge duty today I fear.

“Margaret’s Hope” tea from Great Wall Tea tastes like frikkin soap.

(later) I just got off the phone from North York General Hospital and Dave’s been admitted. He’s in room 334 on 3 North. He’s in isolation but I’m hoping to contact him later today as he was asleep just now.

I swore I’d never get on an airplane again. I may break my vow.

 

today’s reason to cry

I’m fighting a viral infection according to my bloodwork – let’s just say it came as a complete surprise since no fever, no cough, no real symptoms except gut raunch and I can’t really relate that to illness thanks to how weird my gut has always been – and my liver and kidneys are not working properly. The kidneys part I’m not worried about since I was dehydrated for literally the first time in weeks, but the liver enzymes are worrying.

I’m taking steps but I’m just messed up right now. One of my few consolations is food. I just want to die. (This is what is known as an exaggeration for effect. I want a cessation of effort regarding nourishing food, which is different.)

Keith was here and cooked and fed us beef and bean chili and it continues to be nom. I made biscotti. They turned out excellent, but texturally quite different to what I’m used to since I added the butter to the flour and not the eggs. I now have to get them out of my house before I hurt myself eating half a batch. That should not be a problem. Keith has warned me not to just leave them where Paul can find them; like me he has a hard time not motoring through them.

wotta burst

22648 words, Wordle in four when it SHOULDA BEEN TWO. Two top fives in Lumosity.

Yesterday I put off getting out the door for errands too long. Jeff got embroiled in a work issue and was no longer in a position to offer me a ride. I did a cognition check, decided that if I was literally going to be driving two blocks and back again I COULD DO THIS THING so I went to Burnaby Square and I got my damned meds and I got my blood work did (as always the vampire women at Lifelabs gave THE PERFECT STICK) and EKG (COLD AND RIPITTY SKIN COMING OFF) and I peed in the container (prob’ly not enough, I was dehydrated all day yesterday) and confirmed it would all be read before next Tuesday’s doc appointment.

I got back in the car and decided that Jeff, after bringing treats home various times of late which perked me some considerable, needed to have something treat-like so I went to M&M Meats and bought two chookity pop pies, one lazzyggna, one breaded shrimpity thing, and a box of mini creamitypuffs. We had cream puffs and shrimps for supper, WE RAGRET NUFFINK, especially when we contemplate the amusement this will prompt in our elders….. On the way out of the M&M’s at The Royal Square Mall (not the Royal City Centre, which is also in New Westminster 2 km away) IT HAILED.

I thought it was graupel, but it was round, and it beaned me, and stung my little head. I thought, OW and put the food in the back seat and then ran over to Sally’s and grabbed more emory boards since Jeff is continually frowning over how snaggy my fingernails are any time I hand him something. After pricing meshuggas (I am sorry, but I didn’t mean to reenact the entire drugstore scene from ‘What’s Up Doc’ (“How much is it without the …”) while out for a shopping jaunt – they tried to charge me $43.95 for an emory board and I’m, like, haaannnh???) I paid the 6 bucks total for my self-care order (I’m just trying to meet MINIMALLY APPROVED GIRLY STANDARDS THOU MISERABLE GODS OF GENDER CONFORMITY BOOOO) I went outside, received the continued icy blessing of hail-strikes on my bean, and departed for home; the hail stopped before I even left the parking lot of the mall.

Stopped watching Station Eleven. Any time an episode ends with two small girl children appearing to voluntarily blow themselves up killing a family member at the behest of a post-apocalyptic prophet I am going to fucking check out because I am already well aware of the extent to which #notallmen will destroy things to assert control over them and would prefer not to have the point made in the story with shrapnel-laced chunks of what should have been the carriers of our future.

Jessica Wildfire’s most recent post is one of the hardest and most necessary things I’ve read lately. You don’t have to read it and I’m not linking to it because it’s very very bleak, but you can search for it under her name and ‘Behavioural Sink’ on substack. It confirms in me that Keith laboriously helping to build community in his own way IS the way out. We must all community build or die. We find what we can do for that community and we build it. It also explains why reddit is full of straight women who’ve stopped dating….

 

Cold and windy

Buster finds that weather a sore trial. Checked ventusky and the swells travelling down the coast from Haida Gwaii to Mexico are the same size as current Antarctic storms….

19946 words.

Started watching the spy/dramatized historical show ‘A Spy among Friends’ with Damien Lewis, Guy Pearce and Anna Maxwell Martin, all actors we enjoy. I quite liked the script but the ‘jumping around timelines to keep it interesting’ overdid it and a couple of times we were scrambling to figure out where we were and what year it was supposed to be. That will not stop us from watching it.

I need to go for a walk today. At the absolute minimum I need to get out of the house for more than fetching delivery from the stoop.

Still snickering about Joe Biden going for a stroll in Kyiv. He was an asshole for crushing the railway strike – as events in East Palestine show – but damn he had to be brave to take that walk. Right before Putie’s all staff meeting, er, address to the nation. He must have been incandescent with rage. LOL.

Officially old, got my pension letter from service Canada.

Perhaps I should pop over to Caspell Junction.

 

 

bathtub dive and Alex pickup

I just found out you can sing into the extra soundhole on this Riversong ukulele and get absolutely wild harmonic effects. Also, yesterday I learned THE ORIGINAL LYRICS to the ‘2 & 20 Blues’ and they completely change the tone of the song. I shall herewith demonstrate: The very first line is “There’s evil men in this DOGGONE town” but the way my ex (and Dr Filk) taught it was ‘GODDAMN’ and that really changes things. First is worldweary, second is angry, and the song is resigned, not angry. The very last line is “You may say that I’m wrong but you know I FEEL all right.” I was taught ‘I’LL BE’. The singer is OKAY IN THE PRESENT, not sometime in the future. But right now! The song’s about grabbing life where and when you can, not hoping you’ll be happy sometime.

Thank you for attending this bathtub dive into 2 & 20 Blues by Linda Morrison, pressed 1981.

Continue reading bathtub dive and Alex pickup