Category: Writing

Salmon for dinner again

Premade salad plus a big slab of the previously bbq’d salmon on a bed of baby spinach with mango salsa.  The new fish is in the freezer.

I’m in contact with an editor in Saanich and should meet her next week.

This data visualization of the earthquakes in Iceland is very interesting.

They just announced a dancing baby Groot doll, which is adorable.  Wish I could crochet, there’s an equally adorable pattern for it.

There were earthquakes in Chile and California and Turkey overnight.

Liberia’s health care system, never good after 14 years of civil war, has collapsed in the face of the Ebola crisis.  So many healthcare workers have died that even if the hospitals and clinics were open there’d be no caregivers. The official death toll is rising at the rate of about 15 per day with an upward trend, with about half of the reported cases resulting in death.  Even with Ebola if somebody keeps you hydrated and clean of your excreta you may survive.  You can’t find gloves; there’s civil unrest and food prices have jumped. WHO reports that since you can’t fly into West Africa any more it’s delaying the few health care professionals and supplies that are actually headed in the right direction.

Enough of that.

Now a couple of humorous safe for work pictures.

Looking for a wifi network?  

Something worn out?

 

 

Word count and then some

It wasn’t very inspired, but it doesn’t have to be.  It will have the crap edited out of it.

Jeff found a really good documentary about six crazy men reconstructing Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous voyage, narrated by Brian Cox.  We are quite enjoying it, but watching six metre waves come over that tiny ships’ boat makes our hearts leap up into our mouths.

Word count made yesterday.  I’m wanting fresh corn and other stuff – it is the best time of the year for food after all.

Everybody have a loving and productive day!

Today’s decrufting

Mostly today will be clothes and books. Katie needed her toesies dealt with (she don’t bend so good) so I gave her a mini-pedi, and then worried I’d taken too much off and called her. She said, “Aw, have you been worrying about it?” and I thought, well, no, but I was concerned.

Made word count and then some yesterday. I haven’t been practicing, but I’ll get busy today.

Jeff went fishing yesterday with his buddy Rob and caught a coho – we’re gonna barbecue and eat it today. Hm. I suppose I should see if I have to decap and gut it. (Just check, no thank god)

Charles Brackett’s Hollywood diary is about to be big news; he was Billy Wilder’s creative partner for more than a decade. He is alleged to have recorded Groucho Marx describing Victor Mature: “He looks like something the cathouse dragged in.” I suspect I will enjoy it. Anyway, here’s the article which brought the diary to my attention.

Thanks Jeff for brekkie.

Former rellies in law are encouraging me to move to northern BC. I am investigating, and may fly up there in September. There’s work, but sheesh the winters, and it would make getting to see the parents and grandbaby rather epic.

Back really hurts

I’m trying to do housework, but since bending hurts to the point I’m crying and any other position ‘just hurts’ I’m having a rough go.

Laundry is on. I remember seeing a one act play in Toronto once called Laundry and Bourbon. As I recollect it was extremely funny. Bob Desrosiers was one of the actors in the accompanying one act play, Lone Star, which was also very funny.

The Anne Elk Theory of Everything:

All great things start as small things and end as small things.

Wrote a couple of hundred words yesterday. Edited a couple of sections, which you should never do before you’re done, but I ran some tests on the manuscript, and it’s coming back completely infested with semi-colons AND sentences which start with and, which is a breathless and gormless way to commence a sentence. Rather than a very stern editing, I gaily removed semi-colons for half the day. Should you be required to bury me under a single symbol, make it a semi-colon; it’s the thumbprint of a talkative son of a bitch.

Nothing much to report

Katie came over yesterday; we went for a short walk and I gave her the last half of the banana bread, not that it would have survived until Jeff got here anyway. I read this article to her. We had a good talk about it.

I tried writing this morning but I’m too distracted and ‘off’. I’m also really feeling my back,

I found out there’s a company that will pick up take out and bring it to you, so maybe the next time Jeff and I have a craving for Switzerland Chicken we can get it that way. They’re also licenced to bring beer. Hey, I will be leaving the house today, don’t worry! I’m thinking of walking down to New Westminster and then taking the bus back to spare myself that hill.

Dara, a filk/fb acquaintance, has rewritten some of Yahoo’s code to make the email groups work properly again. This while making an album and renovating her kitchen. Gumption, SHE HAZ IT.

Tony Stewart ran over (accidentally or not) and killed a 20 year old man named Kevin Ward Jr at a racetrack last night. He’s apparently going to race again today, which I think is the height of cluelessness. This show must go on the sponsors are waiting shit has gotta stop. Unless you’re Weird Al Yankovic continuing to tour after his parents died, that was awesome.

I watched the news, and regular tv, last night. When did all commercials become so sexualized? Why is local news so boring? Then I watched something called 16×9 and just wanted to punch out walls for a while. The story was great but I was so mad it ruined my evening, I just ended up going to bed super early. Syngenta is evil!

Where’s my flying car

Bill and Brenda Sutton ask the question….

Tre and Battery came over yesterday and we laughed and talked and drank beer and broke out the pinball machines for the little guy. Very pleasant afternoon, and Jeff and I love that they never call first. We’re either here and happy to see them or away and sad we missed them. It’s like slipping back into another era, when it’s good that friends drop by.

In about twenty minutes we’re going to jump in the car and guh help us PAY for a movie. But 10 am on a Sunday sounds like the perfect way to avoid the crowds; Guardians of the Galaxy is supposed to finally be ‘the summer hit’. The fan reviews have been AWESOME. We shall see.

I am working on the novel still… it’s still fun after all.

Keith called yesterday (how good to hear his voice) to basically just check in. Happy sigh. If it wasn’t so oppressively sticky and hot, I’d say my life was a big old dream.

Continuing to love on Europe Central

This is the best novel I’ve read since the 40 rules of Love, and it’s a really really different book.  I am finding it enthralling reading. (Except for the typos, and there were a couple of doozies).  Historical characters – snared in conflicting loyalties and pushed to the snapping point time and time again, broken on the wheel of tyranny -command attention from every page.  Superlative.  His prose has the effortful grace of a bird of prey taking off.  He calls Hitler ‘the sleepwalker’.  Yesterday I watched a documentary on the death of Stalin for more background.

Hymn sing yesterday at Tom and Peggy’s was wonderful, and I took a cilantro salad based on the one Sandra taught me.  (oh god, the food she fed me…. it was amazing, stellar, eye popping, wonderful). Two bunches cilantro wash the hell out of them pick them over and chop.  One rinsed can kidney beans, make em yourself if you can. A cup of walnuts, broken up.  Rather more garlic than you would think necessary, minced.  Lemon juice all together maybe three tablespoons.  No salt, no pepper.  I’m also going to try this with parsley.

Jeff and Katie went to Wreck Beach yesterday.  I would have gone, but I put out my knee somehow and every time I go up and downstairs my eyebrows bob up and down and I puff and blow in a most elderly way.

I read mOm what I wrote in Madawaska and she laughed in all the right parts. Now on to more serious bits.  It can’t all be waltzes and comedy.

Library run

It has been yonks since I visited the library… I picked up two doorstops, one being the really excellent William T. Vollman novel Europe Central, which is an examination of totalitarianism as it affects the creative mind, set during the period just before and during WWII.  Some reviewer or other said you don’t read Vollman for the plot but for the individual sentences, and he was absolutely right.  Vollman is a powerfully strange individual, but his depiction of Kathe Kollwitz was so amazing I looked it up.  I am looking up much of what  he references on the internet and going to some strange and dark and eerie and interesting places.  He’s also, like Dunnett, a portrait painter and polymath and this impacts the work.  Good times.

I also picked up Part II of the Mark Twain autobiography, but the way it’s put together really sucks and it weighs 5 kilos if it weighs a gram, so I put that one down, even though some of the anecdotes are killer.

Last night filking with Cindy and Tom and Peggy; tonight Birthday Celebration with Mike M and friends; tomorrow hymn sing, back at Tom and Peggy’s.  I just love singing Frobisher Bay with those folks. I took Peggy hazelnuts as a thank offering.

400 words on Tarot for Atheists yesterday.  If I ever get finished with the introduction it will be one of the strangest pieces of atheist literature ever written; I know I’m saying the right things in the worng way, and some of it simply has to be cut but like most writers I don’t edit myself worth a darn. Also practiced lots.

Keith double booked himself for his own birthday party a while back so Paul and Jeff watched Internet’s Own Boy without him, so there, and had barbq chikn.

Time to make pancakes, I promised Jeff.

A little piece of a story from somewhere else

In the beginning, there was nothing.  There was nothing to see, and nothing to see it with; there was nothing to feel, and nothing to feel it with.  We don’t know why the nothing turned into something.  We have asked science, and science tells us what might have happened, but we don’t know; nobody was there.

So when the nothing became the something that became the world we see, science measured and measured; science made equations and formulas; science thought of theories and hazarded hypotheses, but we can never know why the nothing became something.

Science is where the story stops.

That is the first beginning, but it is not the best one.

I will tell you the story, but if you believe it you are a fool.  Science tells us not to be foolish.  I will tell you the story, but if you disbelieve it, you are a fool.  Religion tell us that without a story, true or false, the people will wither away.  It is a story that keeps us rooted; it is a story that makes us real.

As I was saying, in the beginning, there was nothing.  Now the great thing about nothing, is that it’s very small.  It is also very large.  Nothing is like nothing else, and the reason it is like nothing else is that it doesn’t need a container.  Nothing, by definition, can’t have a container; if it had a container, it wouldn’t be nothing anymore.  It would be the space inside a container, but it wouldn’t be nothing.

That is why nothing is so hard for people to understand.  We all want the nothing to have a container, but it doesn’t.  It can’t even be contained by our minds.  That is why some people think the nothing is God; nothing, not even our minds, can contain it.

It was nothing for a very long time, without flaw, without a container, without being or thought or meaning; it tried and tried and tried to be the same, always being nothing, but it failed.  To be nothing is to be perfect; there is no flaw, no feeling, no reality.

How did nothing change into something?  My dear friend says it got bored.  I respect my friend very much, but I have to disagree; there was nothing to get bored, so that is not what happened.

I think that the nothing got bigger and bigger and bigger until it hit something, and the thing it hit was itself, and from that collision came everything we see.

Shhh, thinking.

Cognitive Bias illustrations.

How big is the solar system???

Came home from work yesterday, almost crying on the bus, overwhelmed by feelings of failure.  I should just suck it up.  I was looking at all of the other workers.  I’m one of about three white women on the bus.  Daily on the ride home I see exhausted men of every background in conspicuity vests, students and travellers coming back from the airport; drawn looking women from all over Asia speaking a dozen different languages as they (from the sounds of it) talk to their sisters or argue with their kids or check in with their husbands.  Most people play on their phones or listen to music.  I jerk back and forth, back and forth, my spine sliding first this way and that, and get off the bus sometimes barely able to step down, my back hurts so much.

Today I’ll be alone downstairs; the boss is working from home and if the phones decide to explode (the way you do when you can’t afford to spend a single minute on the phone) I’ll be hard pressed.  At least there’s leftover takeout in the fridge. And a stellar bunch of coworkers; they are darling and intelligent and it’s really been a privilege.  And that’s a factor in what makes me a leedle weepy, too.

I’m in town for the weekend (I’d better be, I’m doing coffee at church on Sunday) and then I’ll be off to Victoria with Katie as walk ons the first of the week.

Nothing feels right.  George calls to me, pats me with his social tentacle, and I’m too tired to focus to write; all I can do is BLORT this out in a parody of creativity.

 

 

Here I am at the end of another week

It is NOT as if time was crawling when I was unemployed, but now it’s going so fast I’m feeling like every second is a blur of paper.

I am making stupid mistakes and good catches at work.  I hope it averages out to continued employment.  You just don’t get a team like this every day… everybody is so civilized and hardworking (compared to me).  I could whine about the variability of it, but that’s what food is like.  Prices go up and down in the cycle of the seasons and nothing stays the same.

One of my fave coworkers is off in her homeland visiting rellies. I miss her because she is one of the most intelligent and yet sunny tempered individuals I have recently met. (I keep wanting to introduce her to my son, which would be grossly inappropriate in so many ways). I miss her because the most administrative portion of her job fell to me in her absence and it’s fussy and important.  So, nervous.

I am going to work on crochet and forgiveness this weekend; along with some stuff I should have attended to ages ago.  Although I am tired all the time, certain kinds of energy I didn’t have last fall have come back into my life.

I am having better communication with people I am intimate with, and that makes me calmer.  I don’t feel like everybody should be able to read my mind any more.  I know I can be a sore trial as a friend sometimes, when I’m not expansive and entertaining.

Jeff loaned me the vehicle yesterday.  I got home much faster than usual and it made a big difference to my mood all day.  I am very grateful, especially since it did inconvenience him.

Keith is apparently hiking off to Edmonton in mid May.  I will miss him, but he’s at the point in his life when he’s going to take off and adventure, and that’s good.

I learned from Katie that the baby will take her last name.  That was a calming bit of news.  I had lunch with her on Sunday as I was checking out.  It was a blessing to see her.  She’s still not showing; yet the ultrasound shows what looks to be a very robust looking kiddo.

Rob W phoned last night and we talked writing.  I don’t know what makes me an expert, except that I do more of it.  Volume is not necessarily a good aspect of production – think farts and you’ll know what I mean.  And yet it is by writing crap that we open the channels to the good stuff.

Well, off to find clothes and bus tickets and get out the door.  Boss lady is back today and much activity is in store.

Cuppa Joe serves the best hot chocolate in the city.  Srsly.

Edwardian hotels

So… the Arundel Mansion Hotel is awesome, but there are few things you need to know before you book in.

1.  YOU WILL NEED EARPLUGS.  They are supplied, but it’s noisy down here.

2.  You should probably bring an extension cord if you want to charge anything in your room overnight.

3.  If you are scared to operate an elevator which is roughly the same vintage as a Boer War survivor, don’t come, or stay on the lower floors and use the stairs.  The elevator is not automatic and it makes unearthly noises as it moves.  It is, however a complete delight. I love it.

4.  You WILL have to wash just about everything you need in the kitchen before you use it.  You are at the mercy of the housekeeping standards of the previous tenant, and the previous tenant didn’t even rinse the f*cking percolator.  I was employed for about ten minutes in the effort to restore it to some semblance of food safety.

5.  A claw footed tub is beautiful, but the surface finish may not meet your standards for cleanability.

6.  The wifi is not wonky, but it is slow.

7.  It is simply not possible to keep a place of this vintage to the cleanliness standards of modern hotels (such as they are, since everybody knows what happens if you turn a UV light on in a hotel room.)  That said, the linens and bedding are completely clean.

8.  It’s a sketchy neighbourhood, but I’ve never felt threatened.  If drug deals in the parking lot below (the one with the vintage Rolls Royce…) skeeve you out, you won’t like it.

9.  There is lots of food of varying kinds and quality and easy transportation and nice walks and touristy stuff close by.  The Keg, alas, is closed – there’s some kind of structural problem.

TL;DR – If you’re OCD, have no personal qualities such as adaptability, a sense of history and equanimity, and expect South Korean style internet access, you will hate it.  If history, quirkiness and creativity appeal to you, this is like a steampunk luxury indoor camping experience, and I love it, and I will be back.  Keith and Paul loved it.

 

A friend came over for coffee in the morning, and Paul and Keith took me to supper at the Heritage, and I wrote 1500 words in the middle, which is much less than I’d hoped and much more than I’ve done recently.  I pronounce myself pleased.  I’m gonna take video of the elevator  – it is a TRIP.