Category: Writing

Right now we’re arguing about what to do for Katie’s birthday. Do we want to see a movie? Eat slabs of dead cow? The horror, the horror. And I already got her a camera months ago so she’s not getting a Big Ticket Item. Hm. I didn’t get MY big ticket item for my birthday. Screw it, I’m buying an MP3 player. No, I should buy “durable kitchen ware”. Cleaning solution? Buckets of smack? I can’t even talk about what happened to me at the border coming back from Arlington because a) no one would believe me and b) I’d lose my job if they did. (2019 says I HAVE NO RECOLLECTION WHATSOEVER OF THIS EVENT) Life goes on in endless song above earth’s lamentation. Or some such. Hints at loose association for sure.  This morning I decided to read a meditation to Paul about breathing. It freaked him out. (You imagine breathing in and out tiny lions and firecrackers, among other things.) It’s out of a book called “Conceptual Blockbusters” which I highly recommend if you’re stuck anyplace (except in your car, although you could put the book under your back tire for traction, or better yet shred it) in your life. There are many fine suggestions and illustrations. Some of it is quite funny. Humor, as we all know (properly spelled humour) (as we all know) is key to problem solving. Although laughing at the guy with a gun in his hand is probably not a good idea. Has anyone else seen the picture of Bush and Clinton getting close while going through a door at the Clinton Library opening? I’m glad he’s taking the job of making fun of him onto himself, it’s easier that way. I’d post it but anybody can see it on Wonkette and I’m too lazy to post the attribution.

Deep breath. So my youngest child is 16 tomorrow. I could go at great length about how my little girl is all growed up etc etc but I will just breathe a thankful sigh that we’re all still alive after the crazyassed year we’ve been through. Off to the Parole officer today. Katie wrote a stupendous essay about why whacking people is a bad idea (whack as in ‘strike’ not as in ‘eliminate with a revolver’) and what she plans to do in future when people are talking like idiots in her vicinity. I was very pleased and I hope Natalie the Parole officer is happy with it too. Katie likes her.

If I won a lottery I’d pay off my mortgage, buy Beacon a building and go travelling to Bruges, land of beer and chocolate. I’d probably croak with a big dark beer in my hand and melted chocolate on my hands and mouth, but I’d be happy. Put my kids into university? Why, don’t they have to GRADUATE first?

My coworker in the States showed me a can of stuff that’s supposed to be for arthritis called “JOINT JUICE”, begging the question, “What the farce is in it?”

I have all kinds of plans of what I want to do today and of course Paul is making life difficult for me. He wants me to do this thing called work. This is my day off and if I want to sit at the computer all day it’s my right. Okay okay, I’m out of here. This line deleted because it’s verbally abusive. This one too. Okay, I’m cutting this line. Out with this line, obviously we’re raising the ante here. Bye all.

Not much to report. Paul shocked me silly by insisting that he had heard Rumsfeld had resigned. What ? and Wonkette slept through it? Don’t think so. So I googled it and all I could find was satire sites, all dreamily spoofing that he had resigned subsequent to watching Liar Liar with his grandson.

I had to tell him it was Powell who had resigned. Why couldn’t Condi have gone to be the Football Commish. That would have rocked!

I hear Kim Jong Il, in direct response to Team America, has started taking his pictures down in Korea and is no longer insisting on being referred to as the Dear Leader. Glad to hear that being savagely parodied by guys who went to school in Colorado, around the corner from Columbine, as it were, had such a salutory effect on him.

Just think about it, she said dreamily. Some people respond to life’s terrors by writing skits. Some blow things up real good. All depends on where you get your ammo, I suppose.

Hear that Russia is doing the arms build up thing. Had to rub my eyes twice when I saw that. You have to admit that the Russian mafia are definitely opportunists. Everybody knows the Russian mafia are running the country. They say they want mobile warheads, and they will get them. And drive them into downtown Essen and say Kindly Cough Up a Large Sum of Cash and we won’t nuke your town. No hard feelings about the Eastern Front though, this is strictly business. And Kursk? A tragedy, but now we want some money. Screw the terrorists… they want piddly things like uh, what you say, self-determination, to have the foot of the oppressor removed from their necks. Why not shoot to the top of the global food chain? If you have a nuke, who is going to put anything on your neck but flowers? Worked for the Americans in Iraq jim dandy.

I wonder if any of my farm relatives on the prairies will take me in when the balloon goes up. Better start getting in shape now. Farm work is hard work.

Managed to change rooms at the hotel, thank heavens, as the previous room had a permanent running water sound going right next to the headboard and the fridge ran non stop (empty fridges do). And the shower head came off in my hand.

By the command of my grandboss, I ate at Tokyo House last night. Excellent sushi (cut too thin by Vancouver standards) and the Kirin was FRESH. I don’t know where people get the idea that things are cheaper in the US; the tab came to quite a bit more than the equivalent meal would have cost in Vancouver. But the best part was the music. I have never been in a Japanese restaurant that played an acid jazz version of Dear Prudence. I remember thinking, hey I recognize that and then cudgeling my brains for about a minute trying to remember exactly which song it was. They also played Exchange, unless my ears cheated me, but a song I didn’t recognize, and mellow Ibizan club music. Never heard a mix like that before.

Next door is the Reader’s Choice bookstore, which is run by a simply wonderful woman. There were about a hundred books I wanted to buy, but I bought two six packs of American beer instead. Was tempted to buy the Hawaiian beer – I mean really, just for the novelty – but I went for decent local brews. Washington is home to some simply excellent brews, so I am looking forward to demolishing them in company later.

Yesterday colleague Al stood me and a couple of others to lunch, and the picture above is from that.

Just to round off my birthday, there was a documentary about the man I love to hate, Charles Ng, (and Leonard Lake). I have mentioned him in earlier blogs. I remember reading about him when I was a young and impressionable woman, and thinking, you know, if somebody handed me a gun and told me to execute him, I wouldn’t hate myself in the morning. I can’t say that about too many people. In fact, off the top of my head, I can’t think of anybody else… although I am sure I’ll hear suggestions now.

No, I don’t want to hurt any political figures, including the POTUS, for two reasons. He just pardoned a turkey and Dick Cheney scares me worse.

Greetings from the road. Ate at Obergs again – the finest dead cow west of Edmonton, in my experience, apart from what I make myself. Musical evening very fine but sparsely attended. Tom didn’t bring his six string Larrivee, curses, but Mike brought *his* so my nose got back on my face. Tori unable to attend due to school requirements. Curses. Rev Katie was there and unlimbered some lovely tunes, including ones I’d never heard before, and her wonderful autoharp which was IN TUNE o ye of little faith. I am glad her hockey game wasn’t happening that night or we’d have missed her. Yes, Rev Katie plays hockey. I can barely skate forwards and bruise if you breathe on me, so I am impressed.

Work was unholy today. Very hard to run a department on a 2/5ths complement of folks. Interesting accident that I was able to be there. Just don’t tell the border guards what I’m doing… I got a ten minute cross exam this morning, but when I pleaded a heart felt “I don’t know what the hell they want me there for sir” he let me go without looking at either my ID or my letter. Today, folks, I unpacked a little of that invisible knapsack of privilege. I guess it made a change for him from hassling coloured folks.

I shouldn’t talk about work. Had a LONG talk with one of the techs about the state of the universe, and I have to say I’m prejudiced…. I always think people are more intelligent when they agree with me, and vice versa. It doesn’t hurt if they are cute, too. Did I say that? I haven’t even been drinking!

The best part of the trip is the guilty pleasure of watching hotel TV. I come away from road trips absolutely flabbergasted at how amazingly stupid television is. I mean, I own a television and all, but I don’t have cable and at this rate never will. My daughter hates me for that, but in later times she’ll thank me for it. Tried calling home and got the answering machine. I know Keith’s at Karate, and I suppose I could call Katie on her cell; unless I miss my guess Paul is swimming and John is elsewhere, maybe at club. Sniff, my empty house.

Rental car is a Toyota Matrix. I really like the dash and the comfort level, but Jumping Jimmy Christmas, it’s like lashing a slug to make the slanty pedal achieve anything. This is counterweighed by BRUTAL BRAKES. I damned near snapped my head off its stalk the first time I applied the brakes coming out of the parking lot at Budget. Drive down was brutal as well, rain and truck backwash making the I5 an unpleasant bit of road. Seeing as how for all the other trips I’ve ever taken down here the weather has always been wonderful, I can’t complain. I just edited out a rather hilarious typo.

I’m here for another two days and then a couple of days off.

A cautionary tale from my erstwhile colleague…. don’t mess with the man! It never would have occurred to me, but this seems only fair….

As you may know a few months ago my wife wife’s purse was stolen at a restaurant. Well, in the purse was my cell phone. Thank God that the purse only had $15 and my cell phone. Although, (I did take the precaution of replacing) the locks on my house and car. In the 20 minutes before I cancelled the phone, the thief called 14 people. Now he was a great thief in the fact he/she could lift a purse in a busy restaurant without anyone noticing, but he/she should know never to make an outbound call on a stolen phone. When I got my bill, I recorded the numbers he/she called. Using the internet, I found the name associated with many of the numbers called. The police did not care. (editors note … dja figure?) So— I knew that a call from a pay phone from the transit stop shows up on call display as Ottawa Transit. The plan was to call the numbers stating that I worked for transit and that we found a notebook with the list of names and numbers— Well seemed good, but everyone I called only seemed to speak Spanish—My plan failed— Then I looked at one of the calls to the Northern US. The lady seem older, perhaps mother or aunt. Now what were chances that crime runs in the family? (Editor’s note… dja figure) I called US INS. They have been looking for the family for 2 yrs to deport for theft etc—I may never find who stole my phone but I got their mother (or aunt) deported.

 

So anyway, from the perspective of 2019 I find this story horrifying, but I’m leaving it here as a reminder that I am a work in progress and it’s my duty not to hide my darkness. I would never laugh at this story now. I would probably say nothing or remonstrate with J. And I never mentioned it in my blog but he was married at the time – still is as far as I know – to an Indigenous woman so there’s a whole extra layer of wtf for you.

I’m heading off to the other office today so I’ll have to blog from the hotel. Hoping to connect with Alan and Janice for something resembling a birthday celebration. Apparently the power is off everywhere in Burnaby but here. More later.

a work in progress

Don’t know quite how to describe Leo’s relationship to me. He gave me my first guitar; he has always stood in uncle relationship to me…. anyway, this is his eldest son standing proud with his 4th Dan blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do. Congratulations John!

2019 says he’s married and has adorable rug rats. Happy happy my family can never be too big.

I have left in one reference to Love Bush. If somebody wants me to make the effort to love George W. Bush, no problem. I don’t need to bash George W. Bush, and in future I won’t. I’ll just quote him. That should be sufficient. This will meet the requirements of polite discourse without any rancour.

Oh, did anybody read about OBL getting permission from some Saudi religious person to nuke the US? I wonder if Ashcroft quit so he wouldn’t get blamed for it. I understand from my technically oriented friends that it’s actually harder than it looks to make a nuke go off. What is more likely in a terrorist scenario is a conventional bomb in an inconvenient location going off while jacketed with some trifling quantity of plutonium. What a world.

I’ll be showing Bowling for Columbine to the youth group tonight. I am very much looking forward to a couple of the segments I enjoyed the most the first time I watched it. I am also going to be printing out the names of the people who were killed so we can memorialize them.

Lil’ Kate has agreed to help clean up, then she’s going to Larry’s funeral. Sigh.

An acquaintance of hers killed herself about six months ago, and her last MSM message to her friend was a request to wear bright colours at the funeral. Apparently Larry is going to be in an open casket. This is really harsh, there was substantial head trauma; but Katie will be there with adult friends as well as Samantha, and I’ll talk to her about it when she gets home. I’ve only been to one open casket funeral in my life, that of my former father-in-law. I’m not convinced they are barbaric, but they are difficult to manage in a world that really dodges death as much as this one. Apparently the person responsible was a young man who was changing lanes in an intersection, and apparently charges have been laid for vehicular manslaughter or whatever the equivalent is if that’s not the right legal term. What a world.

Very pleasant day here in Lotusland. Woke to a world so covered in dew that it was quite amazing; and a dead rat on the back deck. When the condensation burned off it was a glorious fall day, so glorious that I had to do yard work. I’ve had a pretty slack day. Dishes, laundry, leaf raking (Keith did 2/3rds of it mind you) and it was a couple of hours and many wheelbarrow loads, hanging with Katie and her friend Samantha briefly, making a trip to the bank and Rona and the Twist with Paul. Reading a bit more “Love for Sale” which is virtually impossible to read sequentially. It’s like a, oh, I don’t know, one of those bathroom reader books but, like, a scholarly/literary one? Weird. And I can’t deal with the cover. A naked white woman being tended by a clothed black woman. (Olympia by Manet, which is a really cool painting, but I don’t think belonged on the cover.)

I would like to publicly announce that Erica Williams is a goddess.

2019 says – who is Erica Williams? I have no frickin’ idear

I’m giving a sermon at Beacon December 5. The person who was originally scheduled was unavailable. So I have the opening paragraphs of the sermon, during which I will studiously quote Hewitt, as he is the capo di tutte capi around these parts in terms of being a Unitarian Elder Statesman.

After that I’m stuck, but that might have something to do with having to stop and do three Tarot readings. Two for the girls, one for me. Will I go back to Beacon? King of Cups staring me in the face. Very funny, little cards.

An interesting thing about Rev Hewitt is, of all the human beings I’ve ever been in the same room with, he’s the one with the voice timbre most closely resembling that of Walter Cronkite. I remember being simply mesmerized (when I was a wee tad, obliviously) by anything Cronkite announced or narrated. He narrated a “peep into the future” show called The 21st Century, and I used to love watching that program because there was all this neat tech stuff and this amazing amazing narration. So I sit and listen to a Rev Hewitt sermon and I literally don’t hear a word he says, I’m so enchanted with how he’s saying it.

I light a candle for Yassir Arafat. If Allah indeed is Lord and rules this ball of mud it will go hard for him, I fear.

Paul said we’re going out to dinner (I had not actually been thinking of going out and had started food happening) so off the the four of us and Unca Dave go to The Grand Buffet. Don’t ask about the shrimp, at least while Katie’s in earshot. Everything else was really good except the sushi.

I said to John after we got back, in the course of a conversation, “I’m open to change” and he said “I’m even open to spare change.” So of course I had to run upstairs and write it down. I’m sure it’s been done, but it sure sounded funny at the time.

I found the song I wrote when Carmen killed himself. I remember thinking at the time that it was a really good song, but I’d never record it because it might be interpreted, falsely, to encourage people to kill themselves. And it might be interpreted the wrong way by people who were a lot closer to Carmen than I. The living need to be respected more than the dead.

I hear that Mike is moving closer, first to Coquitlam and then to Burnaby. This means, and you can feel the jelly wobble when I say this, that a hot tub is migrating back into my future. Mind you, hot tubs do not (affect English accent) migrate, per se, but if you have six or eight strapping lads you’ll do well enough. (Okay, back to Anglo Canadian). This hot tub is a place where I have spent many happy hours, frolicking with kids, getting various portions of my anatomy massaged, and drinking beer during a snowfall. A man has levitated back into that hot tub after falling out of it – and he never touched the ground. I remember Stephanie talking about horses, crazy ex husbands and the various practical arts she has mastered over the course of a very willful life; she gave a lot of sound advice, and I prospered when I took most of it. Those days have gone, but access to the hot tub, thankfully, has not.

Stair components cut and primed. Tomorrow insulation and stairs, both. Sounds like a lot of work will be happening here, tra la la I’ll be at work. The railing is off already, so it’s REALLY disorienting going down those stairs now. Somebody wrote a bit about a coffee table – Shelley Newman (I think) and I want to do something about the back stairs. My back stairs are very independent minded. They wish to secede from the back of the house, and they’re talking the nails into coming loose and joining their glorious Confederacy. Not only are they hostile to the house, they are vicious when approached. You do not want to walk on these stairs. They are not flat, and tip forward in fact, to the point where you’re contemplating whether it might be the better part of valour to just sit down. Maybe scooch down the stairs on your butt, so as to not break your skull, or more likely, your wrists. These are the stairs that will get their wish, and they will be like a vile spirit exorcised; the magicians I live with and am related to will make them trouble me no more. In their place, a brilliant shining white stair, so bright that I must needs turn my eyes away from the awful chatoyancy. Yup, that’s what a little carpentry can do for ya. I’m a lucky goil.

I came home from work last night and the holes in my kitchen ceiling had been filled. Unca Dave and Paul have been bery bery busy trying to get everything organized for insulating the attic (very necessary given what’s happening to fuel prices) and the back steps.

Katie was at Sam’s last night but (omg!) phoned to let me know, leaving a message on the machine as I was likely out cold when she called. Very foggy this morning, but it will likely burn off.

Board meeting last night was quite productive but they sure have a lot of work in front of them and it will be interesting to see if they can fill the gap between the canvass and the budget AND buy a building. It’s been an interesting exercise, and it doesn’t help that the folks selling the church building are flatly refusing to put a price on it. We shall see what is and isn’t too rich for the congregational blood. I abstained from discussion seeing as how I won’t be around to live with the consequences.

I hope everybody has a peaceful Remembrance Day, and I pray for the living and the dead of Fallujah, the Ivory Coast, and the 30 or so other hotspots in the world today.

It’s official. Yassir Arafat is now Schroedinger’s Cat. He is, and he is not; he is on the cusp of being and not being. He is alive, and he’s dead, sometimes on the same Yahoo.com news page if my reading of a Fark post does not deceive me.

Unca Dave got here last night and he and Paul have an exceedingly ambitious plan of attack on various aspects of the house, including insulating the roof and replacing the back stairs; anybody who’s actually USED the back stairs will be thrilled at this news because the stairs seem to be sentient; they act as if they want to toss you ten feet onto a concrete slab, generally when the weather is inclement.

Katie seems to be okay, just really tired. She announced at supper last night (which we took in at the excellent Chong Lum Hin) that she intends to sleep all day today. Man, I wish I could do the same, but I have to write FAQ’s and do stock checks today. I may go in to work tomorrow… we’ll see (it’s a holiday in BC). Keith just looks tired and he’s been unusually quiet. Larry’s funeral is now on Friday.

Katie doesn’t have to go to court again, the probation officer phoned back and we have an appointment on the 19th. That’s all for now.

I was moved to call Paul today and tell him he was my sweetie and he said, well, it’s a normal day 4 (the last day of his rotation) and I said, How so? and he said, well I tried to get into the company truck this morning and the door came off in my hand. So that was what his day was like. Of course he had this TONE to his voice, like what else can you expect, and I just laughed.

My daysign was the coyote pair that we frequently see at the office, trotting down the hill. One is very mangy and the other is quite healthy and looks bulkier, although that’s perhaps because it doesn’t have all the hair missing from its shoulders to its tail. They walk as if they own the joint. It’s very funny. And of course nobody noticed but me.

Lunch was this extremely bizarre philly sandwich. Am I alone in thinking that a slice of meat you could read a headline through topped with some strange amalgamation of sliced peppers, cheesy weirdness and canned gravy is not really a philly? The bun was good. I continue to be underwhelmed by the cafeteria, but I suppose if it vanished I’d be underwhelmed about that too. The coffee is still good.

I now have a calendar on my website. As far as I can tell, anybody in the universe can edit it. Go ahead and be funny or useful, but if you are scatalogical, slanderous, libellous or mean-spirited I’ll delete it. And then take it off. This actually has the potential to be both useful and funny, so let’s roll. My email address mysteriously disappeared – it’s info@allegrasloman.com if anybody cares.

2019 sez yeah that didn’t last.