Category: Writing

The weather simply couldn’t have been improved upon.  I was able to successfully navigate Mike through the Bridgeport to the Arthur Laing clusterfuck.  JESUS GOD THIS TOWN HAS SO MANY FUCKED UP INTERSECTIONS I hate it, I really do.

There was a strong (strong!) onshore breeze when we got there around 11. Got back to Geekhaus around 5:30. (Had a shower the INSTANT I got home, the beach was marginally more disgusting than usual.) I managed the stairs at Wreck going down with a couple of stops and stopped at least half a dozen times coming back up, as I was messing around with heat exhaustion (sweating then clammy, sweating then clammy) and my knees kept saying YOU SUCK.  I was fine once I got to the car. So glad I didn’t take Otto.

Cops busted two guys on the beach, and then left without putting them in cuffs.  I think the bustees argued successfully that if the cops were okay with both of them falling in cuffs on the stairs they were okay with going up the stairs, and the cops hate filling out paperwork so bustees were going to report to the cop shop later.  Or maybe not, it went on for the best part of an hour and really cast a pall on the beach since nobody could openly drink or smoke while they were there.

We got beers and a sammy.  God, I am so happy Mike has that beach shelter, I’da fried without it.  I did slather myself up with 50 sunblock and I am not burnt anywhere. My pubic symphisis doesn’t even hurt!  what marvels are all these new sciences!

Today I’m fine, yay orthotics (I am finally convinced.)  Tiny bit of pinching in my calves but I did all the stairsing at home to get the recycling and trash out and no problems.  Margot was so concerned about me doing the trash instead of Jeff that she very patiently supervised me.  Now she’s presenting her floofy tail and demanding skritches.

Buster is getting antsy.  Where is Jeff!? and I want to know too. Apparently the ferries are jammed this morning, he’s due home later today.

I will be attempting the Wreck Beach stairs today in my new orthotics so that should be painfully interesting. Mike’ll be by in a few minutes.

I practiced for hours on the mandolin today ( I was awake super early and then went back to bed.) I hope Mike’s packing the parlour guitar, I’m likely to be too clumsy to carry Otto plus my other junk.

Margot is purring next to me. She tried to watch videos with Buster yesterday but I sneezed and she ran away (she’s terrified and disgusted by sneezes which is funny since she sneezes herself all the time, snuffly wet sneezes, usually directly into Jeff’s face or ear.) Buster just ran into the room and he and Margot are having little kisses and bum sniffings all ’round.

I wrote 1500 words yesterday on a new story called “Relevant Criteria” about a medtech who’s got PTSD and his mysterious new girlfriend which is set in the “Cousins Letter” universe. Wow, I must be really desperate to avoid editing.

Jeff’s off to the Island, so I have a couple of days to be even lazier than I’ve been in the last six weeks. I intend to catch up on some reading and practice mandolin and prod some edits out of myself.

I’m off to get orthotics this afternoon and then to an Aboriginal Day celebration really close to the house.

RAMSAY BOLTON IS DEAD.  He’s fictional, but dayyam, took long enough.

Brekky this morning, for the first time in ages no coffee.  Very glad to have quit, finally, it’s bad for me.

Wow… I had no idea that learning Arabic was so hemmed ’round with problems with vocabulary and intelligibility. I’m interested today because Beacon picked up the Syrian refugee family it’s sponsoring from the airport yesterday.

 

 

 

So I am happy to be home.  In a few minutes I’m going to drive the rental car back.  Mike took me out to supper last night and we watched a bunch of hijabi women play beach volleyball from the balcony at Brooklyns. This was after a bunch of Punjabi guys were playing beach volleyball on the other court.

Vancouver is a really cool place, y’all.

Mike is planning a party for his birthday next month.

I was richly fortunate in being able to give Nita a ride to the ferry from Courtenay and thus had face time that I would have had no chance for prior to her nuptials.  She is one of the most wonderful and kind and intelligent people I know, and she cooked me Father’s day breakfast because I was playing gooseberry (Jan had left for work but I got up to hug her goodbye because she.is.awesome.

Breakfast as supplied by Nita (Jim helped, he can’t help himself) was home made refried black beans, mango salsa, chopped chives, gently warmed quinoa tortillas, crumbled goat cheese, perfectly ripe avocado slices and almost burned sunny side eggs, which I loved because every once in a while I really like chewy eggs.  I ate every single scrap on my plate and felt like life couldn’t be improved on. Then I got her to her appointment in Nanaimo with a princely two minutes to spare, and we just barely missed the ferry but that just meant I had another two hours to talk with her, what a shame, hunh? She is so beautiful she’s almost scary.

Wrote another no-lyrics song at Mike’s last night.  With a capo, can you credit it?  He asked me “how do you do that?” and I said, “Well I’m using mandolin chord forms and messing about on the guitar, but even I was surprised how fast it came out – I hardly touch a guitar at all these days unless I’m at Mike’s.

I told somebody this weekend that I’m the world’s most cheerful depressed person, and then I started thinking about a comic to go with that, and wished I could draw.

Right now, however, I just feel cheerful.

This song was sung at Gerhard’s memorial service.

From the menu:

ATLAS BOUILLABAISSE
ling cod, mussels, Manila clams, oysters, prawns, crab & salmon in a lemon fennel tomato broth with toasted garlic focaccia bread

I have rarely eaten as fine a meal as Jim and Jan treated me to last night. The Atlas Café in Courtenay serves superlative food. Then we went and got growlers of Gladstone beer. I wish I could find work here!

Made blooberry pancakes for mOm and pOp this am.  I’ve had so much enjoyment from the bird watching. Very sad about many of the plants in the greenhouse dying though.

 

 

I have learned that a cousin’s husband has died during the time I’ve got the car rented, so I’ll be going to the service in Comox on Saturday.  Currently I’m thinking about coming home Sunday.

1/10th of the edits to the second book done.  It’s very very very rough sledding even with mOm’s help.

Never heard back from Avis, have no idea when I can get a car today.

Went to Ivy’s tea at church yesterday and took K, but she realized that she needed to be home, so she returned there.  Her dog waited by Jeff’s car.  I hadn’t realized she went everywhere in the car with her people and now K’s mum has passed and there’s no driving happening and she misses car rides.  Poor critter is not getting out for walks as much as she needs to either; she walks off leash but I had to put her on a leash since I knew she wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to me.

Anyway, the tea was absolutely delightful and I saw Rob, Tom, Peggy and sundry others and picked up coffee and chocolate.

I don’t want a dawg. Picking up warm dogshit is gross gross gross.

 

Anyway, although cinnamon buns happened yesterday, as did laundry and a few other things, it was mostly taken up with somebody else’s emotional crisis.  Jeff, mOm and Tammy know about it, and I’ve got *plenty* to say, but it is not fit for public consumption and I’m just going to have to sit with all the feelings I have right now.

Prime Suspect is proving quite enjoyable. Otley, played by Tom Bell, once heckled the Prince of Wales at an awards dinner and almost scuppered his acting career in the process.

I have cleaned out the kitchen window over the sink and am contemplating another set of curtains.  I really want to put up tie-dye curtains but I can’t see Jeff going for that. Next maybe Mylar to keep the sun out.  As I posted on facebook:

Since I no longer have succulents growing in the kitchen window over the sink, I took down the wretchedly filthy gauze curtains and hand washed them and hung them outside, and removed a dead solar lantern, dust collecting glassware, godnoze how many dead wasps, about a jillion bread ties, and numbers of small, useless and unidentified broken bits of crap.

*Sound familiar?*

I have only decluttered half a kilo of junk but the difference to the kitchen is quite striking. Now I am contemplating the hole where the curtains came out and thinking I want to put up summer and winter weight curtains, gauze for winter for maximum light, and something made of ceramic for the summer, because that window gets like a blast furnace.

 

So yesterday I accomplished neither breakfast out nor cinnamon buns, but there’s always today.

I did call a former church sibling. Her mother died very abruptly after a month long illness and I’ll say she has big problems and no cope right now. We were on the phone for about an hour.  At the end of it I realized that I’m not actually doing very badly. At all. And that I really, really feel for her.

Canadian style dustup with landpeer yesterday. Nothing to speak of publicly.

Started watching Prime Suspect, and did *we* stay up past our bedtimes? Yes we did.

Today something something cinnamon buns. Apparently the recipes in the breadmaker manual (we replaced the old one it DIED) need to be adjusted for Canadian content because our flour is different, so I’m not holding out much hope that the buns will be awesome, but they will be buns. My unboxing experience was okay, let’s see how the (jenndurd slur alert) sumb*itch runs.

Goddamnit, I want to go out for breakfast. Who’s with me?

 

 

The only thing that will fix this mood is travel, as I am well aware from past meshuggas.  I have an appointment this Friday, finally looking after a lingering and semi-permanent health issue, but after that I’m tempted to rent a car and disappear for a week into the wilds of the Island.

This is my current favourite photograph. Georg Scharf is a frickin genius; although this pic is dramatic, most of the others in his folder are also amazing in their own way.

First let me get something out of the way, given what’s going on on the INTARWEBZ.

Had a nice long chat with Dave yesterday but all I can remember is ‘do a little editing every day’ and ‘David Mitchell’.  I’ll be working my way through the last two books I bought and didn’t read first, I think, before I tackle Mitchell.  I’m still recovering from Europe Central, f’goshsakes.

Mike’s out of town this week.  Words cannot describe the corporate cluster that is happening, but nothing I say will help the customer, so I won’t provide details.

THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING when it was learned that mOm has recovered sufficiently to rejoin pOp for trips in the Camaro.  World is good.

I am thinking of learning traditional weaving.  There’s a class tonight. Of course it’s a toetall feckin’ hassle to get there, but that’s Vancouver for you, car or not. But if I don’t get out of the house and learn something new I think my brain will break.

Jeff reports a simply hilarious encounter with a spider yesterday. I am hoping he’ll tell the story in the comments, I don’t want to steal his thunder but I was howling, so I hope he shares.

I’ll be heading off to the library (Tommy Douglas) today to check this out.

I will ask them if they’d like me to donate a copy of Scrivener. They probably don’t but then again they have Macs, which were in part supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which makes me laugh quite heartily.

I made chicken schnitzel yesterday. It was very very yummy. I took a picture of it and then realized I was being a jerk.

 

 

Did a shop with Jeff. It had been days since there was any butterfat in the house, and I was feeling droopy. First thing in the morning is the right time.

Spent the afternoon at Mike Beach. Literally stared at clouds for two hours while drinking beer, occasionally watching eagles courting (presaged by an incredible rise in the noise of crows and flickers and followed by a grim silence which lasted about ten minutes until the songbirds lit it up again.) I introduced Mike to the ethnically exotic wonder that is Freybe Liquid Spam (oh, sorry, it’s actually Fine Liver Sausage but I sold it as Liquid Spam because I’ve seen Mike eat Spam) and the taste sensation that is applewood smoked cheddar and the cracker God himself lays out for faspa (hazelnut cranberry) . After he fed me rilly good Japanese food at Makoto on Rumble. I departed somewhat from my normal ordering habits and had Tuna and Salmon Don and Agedashu. By 730 I could no longer keep my eyes open and begged leave to go home.

OMG I just came to the realization that Margot is telling time again. It’s been a week since her last bowl of wet food.

We ‘give her the can’ once a week, and Buster of course ends up eating most of it but for a minute there she is really happy. I wasn’t here so Jeff gave it last week. This week I plumb forgot.

So… this morning around 2 am Margot comes downstairs (I was restless and slept on the IKEA couch, which I did very well, actually) and stands about half a metre off the port beam and SCREAMS:

AAAAAAOOOOH!

AAAAAAAOOOH!

AAAAAAAOOOH!

in what I can only describe as a commanding tone. Not aggrieved, not upset, just GET TO IT, handfinger.

I woke up fast enough to be discomfited and, having identified the source of the ungodly racket, returned at once to the snoring embrace of Styx. Which I rilly don’t think was her desired outcome, but I will give it to her as soon as I’m done here.

RANT COMMENCES

YOU KNOW WHAT I DON’T FEEL LIKE RANTING TODAY.

Anyway, I was going to rant about my use of accents in the novels I just wrote and the point I was trying to make about how English speaking humans assumed that George was smarter than Michel because Michel speaks English with a heavy Montréalais accent and George speaks this Mid-Atlantic, sort of Eastern European-inflected English that sounds like he had an expensive education and lived all over the world.

And I was going to rant about how I try to write how I talk when I’m writing in my own blog, and so I find myself stealing – stealing – stealing – imitating – nope, stealing – over and over and over again from the tropes, accents, cultural touchstones, dozens and church amens of American Black culture.

It’s how I talk. Jeff is not quite used to how I speak in a cartoon voice pretty much all of the time (and that’s the other place I steal from, WB and Tex Avery cartoons) but I have to stop doing it.

I don’t know if I can. It’s like hoping it won’t rain. It will eventually. You hope it won’t happen when it’s inconvenient.

The part of racist self-examination that contains cultural appropriation is not fun to drag into the light. And that’s all I can say about this tiny portion of the cognitive load I’m carrying right now.