Category: Writing

Hm. So Washington lost and the Packers won. It’s a wonderful omen… wonder if the GOP is superstitious? I am watching the election hysteria with the powerful calm of a woman with a good prescription (actually that’s not true, I’m not taking anything except vitamins these days). The hysteria at home continues apace. I’d repeat some of the conversations I’ve been having with my spouse, except that it would be abusive merely to report the truth.

I will own that there are times when our house resembles nothing so much as a junk store run by an elderly miser. I will admit that our yard looks like an outtake from a horror movie. I will even admit that I’m not the best housekeeper in the world. But Paul, I can’t do a damned thing about the ceiling height, so I’d appreciate it if you just dropped the subject; short of an explosion, which would be satisfying but temporary, there’s not much I can do about it.

There, that was dignified, and I didn’t even swear.

Must paint house. Slime green walls. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAh !!! can’t deal with the slime green walls any more. Must have fan in bathroom (actually a fan in both bathrooms would be nice, but one thing at a time, dear Goddess). Oh, and I mean fan in the sense of a rotating device for air, not a science fiction fan, although I can count at least three science fiction fans who can adorn my bathroom ANYtime.

I light a candle for Keith, the bus driver and my doctor, all of whom provided personal and substantial help when I had my arrhythmia yesterday. Paul thought I was cracking wise until he took my pulse. My heart was leaping around in my chest like a bass drum being kicked around by teens in army boots and a ‘roid rage. Finally settled down about 10 last night. I woke up a lot last night to check that I wasn’t dead yet and then went back to sleep. Paul sleeping peacefully next to me made that much easier. Now I’m going back to work, where my heart can be still and calm.

I should probably do something about that but when my doctor told me to drink ice water and I immediately felt better… like LOTS better… I figure it’s not even a little tiny heart attack. It’s more like…. middle age. Wish it hadn’t started on the bus though, I feel sorry for the woman who was sitting next to me while I rocked back and forth moaning, Ach, I’m gonna die, and I didn’t do the dishes.

Dreamed last night about a school, run by a married couple, who were trying to run the school and get an acrimonious divorce at the same time, and the school was in a very big house, and I dreamed seeing an old coworker from Montreal who was very underwhelmed at seeing me again, sigh. But her friend was a lot more civilized and bummed me a smoke. And we played with rainbow coloured box kites, and there was a big storeroom full of neat stuff.

I’m off coffee for the duration it can’t be doing anything good for those palpitations. Badaboom!

Pic was provided by Brother Jerome – second time he got it to bloom. Lexi is madly allergic to them, so if you’re reading this don’t start sneezing when you see the pic, just enjoy the glorious symmetry and strangeness of the inflorescence.

On a more troubled note….IT WAS SNOWING at the top of the hill this morning. Since I am no longer swearing on my blog, I cannot precisely express the wave of bilious fury which coursed through my body when my brain finally acknowledged that indeed, that white sloppy stuff pasting itself with such vigour to the bus windscreen was NOT Oobleck, but snow. I had the same realization as everyone on the bus, and we all went “EEEEWWWWWW!!!!” at about the same time and volume. There followed a spate of subdued profanity and the sound of umbrellas snapping open. By the way, in Scotland, that’s pronounced Aw Naw, Snaw!

The blessing of the animals went extremely well. People talked briefly and happily about their animals, living and dead, and I am very glad I didn’t bring my two in, even in picture form – there was plenty of action anyway. I light candles for Kira and Zeek! who are okay as companion animals go. There will never be another Bounce; all I can do is ask God for a cat that will sit in my lap as I type. About three people commented on my outfit – nothing negative. Jumping Jimmy Christmas, if I can wear this to church, maybe it’s too square for Fet Night? 1 down, 4 openings/closings to go.

Off to Stuporstore soon to pick up supplies. I really feel it when I don’t take my vitamins; missed them last night for some reason.

You won’t believe it, but I found another pumpkin out back. This one’s the size of a soccer ball. I think I’ll just eat it, after I take out the seeds.

And screw grass. I am going to grow pumpkins next year. Everywhere. Off of everything. Whole front yard. And sunflowers. Billions of dem. You will see. It will be a symphony of yellow and orange.

Katie was punking me, the little tad, so I am glad I didn’t unleash the full force of my squirrelly wrath. To get the full flavour of this cultural reference, go to illwillpress.com and listen to the squirrel sing about…. ten guesses, squirelly wrath.

I am now working on a routine about tattoos that move. This is because the technology for this is closer than you think and I believe that as a cultural commentator I need to prepare you for the notion that the next time you go down to the swirlpool at the rec centre there will be a guy with a pornographic and moving tattoo. Sitting next to you. You know, two skeletons having sex doggy style and the head keeps falling off the one on top, endlessly looping. (Thanks to Vampire Mamma for providing this image, big wink). It’ll be skeletons because then the guy can tell the cop They’re wrestling, ossifer. Honest. Okay, last bloody Halloween skullington etc reference this year. My children will be amused… yours, maybe not so much. And I can think of other tattoos that move, dogs that bark, devil girls that wink and angel wings that flap. Flags that wave, for those patriotic types. Motion capture of favorite artists dancing or singing or otherwise flailing about. And all run off your body’s electrical system. Yes, I know it sounds bizarre, but it’s CLOSER THAN YOU THINK! I’m going to get a scorpion that waves its front claws and then tries to sink its stinger into you. Hai! Ya harri hoy! Oi! Or maybe I won’t.

I am so lucky to have friends like Mike, because if I didn’t know him I would not have met people like Trent and Joe and Sue and Tori and Stephanie and her amazing mother Paddy and people like Morgan and Curtis and all the other people at the party last night. I drank mead for the first time last night. It was …. interesting. Not definitive though.

Didn’t make the Fetish Ball; my unindicted co-conspirators bailed due to illness. Frankly I was in collapsing mode myself – I think I was in bed by 8:30 last night.

My happy family illusion has been shattered, for reasons I won’t post, but one may infer what one likes from Katie not having slept here last night. I have already devised an appropriate punishment; it will require tremendous restraint and diplomacy on my part to make it effective, but the results will be worth it, if only for the grace that self-discipline brings.

Off today to church for the blessing of the animals. Although I will be striking myself from the church rolls as of New Years’ I will continue to support the church financially, mostly because after the sodding hard work of the search committee it would be a shame to lose Rev Katie. Also, I was due to open and close the church for the entire month of November, and so, and so, I will, because it’s a bear of a job, really it is, and one of my fave people at the church got stuck with doing twice as much opening and closing as she was supposed to (when her hubby was sick and she was antsy (justifiably so) about leaving him) and I can’t stand the idea of sticking somebody else with it since I just loathe doing it myself. See, the church doesn’t have its own building. We’re camped out at Place Maillardville, which is financially very easy to take but means that we don’t get taken SERIOUSLY. We don’t have a big spire with a revolving purple question mark, you see, so we don’t have visibility.

Saw my first misty blue aircraft parked out front the Air Canada hangar today. It’s pearlescent paint, just to add to the hardness to repair and expense of it all. It would be beautiful… if I couldn’t see it for what it is. Honestly, who comes up with this stuff? ARE they doing it so I can make fun of it, and WHEN will they stop? I’m running out of politely cruel comments, and my adoring public doesn’t seem to like it when I’m scatalogical. I read the review in the G&M review of books of yesterday of Robert Milton’s monomaniacally self-serving screed… it was praised. Very praised. And I will get it out of the library and read it, partly because I need something to prop up my blood pressure, and partly because I want to see if the ghostwriters were worth it. Paul just sighed when I told him about it. I think he’s at the load line for Robert Milton anything right about now.

Committed labour unrest last week, again, but this time properly. I got an email from my adopted younger brother Jerome (him what I took to my mother and said, “I stand in sibling relationship to this man, please bless him”) and hooked up a buddy of his who was recently laid off from “an interesting high tech start up here in Vancouver” with the hiring authority inside the company, neatly bypassing our …. um…. how do I put this accurately but kindly…. VERY BUSY HR department. That covers it without blowing my cover, if you know what I mean. Hope he gets hired. He owes me a beer if he does. And so does a certain program manager, come to think of it. I know I don’t talk about work much, but I felt this was a mild enough anecdote to share. God knows I don’t want to share the latest REAL piece of humour out of the office. One of these days… hey Glen, you reading this? One of these days my webmeister will pound some new ways of having a blog into my head and I’ll have a private area, members only, where the deserving and the undeserving alike, and all those who have ever bought me beer, will be able to view the pictures that I dare not publicly post, like the photoshopped company sign which is a freaking MASTERPIECE. You, know the kind where people look at it, howl laughing and then say, frowning, Some people have WAY too much free time. And I’ll post all my routines there, and all the naked pictures of me. It’ll be swell. No, not RECENT naked pictures. The art shots, the black and white pix, I had taken when I was 21. I can only think of two people who might conceivably be interested in recent naked pictures of me, and they can just ASK me if they want to see them, since they live in Vancouver. I know at least one person who’s going to ask me NOT to give him the password… you know who you are.

Had to scrape a very thick layer of frost off the car this am. Very glad I got Keith to harvest old smiley face for me yesterday. You have to admit, that’s one cute punkin. The colour is actually a very saturated yellow – it’s a heritage pumpkin, designed to be eaten and not carved, so the flesh is about 8 centimetres thick. I held the knife up and said, Oh Pumpkin Carving Spirits, guide my knife. Look what happened! Anyway, when I finished with this pumpkin, I was irresistably reminded of my brother Jeff, and I can’t for the life of me think why. It just reminds me of him. It doesn’t look like him at all – Jeff has a much nicer complexion, for starters – but something about the expression is just, I don’t know, Jeff like. Maybe my mother will explain it to me.

Shooooot, gotta get cookies out of oven. Okay, next batch is in. Yup, this batch is for coffee after church. Chocolate chip pecan cookies….. perfectly cooked. That lovely crunchy, about two minutes before they start to burn doneness. The pecans exploding with crunchy nutty goodness. The premium grade dark chocolate chips. REAL BUTTER. Yes indeed. Can’t you feel your arteries clogging? You know you can.

I have no idea where this fake sign is from but it’s funny as phoque.

Yeh, whatever. Went to a small party last night, in my Matrix gear (it’s gonna be self-propelled by the time I quit wearing it this weekend). There were a whole bunch of YOUNG PEOPLE there. You know, adults between 20 and 30!!!! I got so excited I forgot how to use the washroom.

What can you say to people who don’t know who Lenny Bruce is!? Well, if you’re really evil you quote his routines without attribution, but I’m not that evil. Yet.

There was a young man there WHO BROUGHT A GUITAR HE HAD MADE. What a swwwwweeeet instrument. There was another guy there who used to live in Calgary before he decided he really liked Vancouver. C’mon, you know you have to.

Anyway, over the din of the rest of the party we sang and played for a while until Paul tugged me out of there. Home and in bed by 12:20. Ah, to be old!

Anyway, Paul left me with a thought for a routine this morning. A funny incident, by the way Paul, is not a routine. A routine has a beginning, middle and end. But it got the mojo going, and I was thinking of “Embarrassing things that have happened at work.” Or just plain embarrassing things, like the time my bra disassembled while I was dancing with Lashkar. (It was just about as funny as it sounds.) I am so happy, I haven’t even looked at the news yet. I have, however, made more chocolate chip pecan cookies. That and one of Keith’s underpowered cups of coffee should get me going for the day. I have people to offend, small animals to abuse, and dishes to wash. I’m a very busy woman!

Many thanks to Tori for throwing the bash, and I’d attribute your roommate but I haven’t the faintest how to spell her name. And a big say hey to the woman who’s been on a liquid diet for the last 14 days. She called it a cleanse… Amazing! I couldn’t last a day on such a diet.

Here is a random image of Paul’s family.

 

This is me in my Matrix costume. Yes, those are real sai, but they are practice sai. How I enjoyed stalking through the engineering department today!

Mrs. Greenhouse’s acquisition career began as a Department of the Army Procurement Intern with the Directorate of Contracting, Fort Hood, Texas. Subsequently, she served in the following positions: Supervisor, Contract Pricing/Contract Administration, Dynalectron Corporation, Aerospace Operations Division; Assistant Contract Administrator, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Board; Procurement Advisor to the Commander, U.S. Army Materiel Command-Europe; Director of Contracting, Carlisle Barracks, PA; Procurement Analyst, Integrated Procurement System, U.S. Army Materiel Command; Procurement Advisor to Program Executive Officer, Standard Army Management Information Systems; Chief, Analysis and Evaluation Office, Office of the Director of Information Systems for Command, Control, Communications and Computers; Deputy for Armaments and Munitions and concurrently Acting Deputy for Telecommunications and Computers, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Procurement); and her recent appointment as Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mrs. Greenhouse was named one of the Outstanding Young Women of America in 1975. She is a former Vice President of the Heidelberg-Ramstein Chapter of the National Contract Management Association, a member of the Project Management Institute, the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association, and served on the Board of Directors of the Defense Systems Management College Alumni Association. Mrs. Greenhouse is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps and she has achieved Level III Acquisition Professional Certifications in three areas: Contracting, Program Management and Communications-Computer Systems.

She is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Southern University with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. She holds a Master of Science, Business Management from University Central Texas, a Master of Science, Engineering Management from George Washington University, and a Master of Science in National Resources Strategy from the National Defense University. She is a graduate of the Defense Systems Management College’s Program Management Course, a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and the Senior Acquisition Course.

Mrs. Bunnatine Greenhouse is married and has three adult children.

And she’s a whistleblower. Check it out now, http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/10/28/halliburton/index.html

As soon as I saw her name, I thought, This Is Not a Caucasian person. So I Googled her image, scanged her bio, and I am asking my readers to connect the dots. This middle aged, well educated, black woman is about to receive a hellstorm of publicity, most of it bad, and I offer prayers for her wellbeing and that of her family. May God have mercy on us and all who wish Halliburton to like, you know, account for itself and the hole it’s made in the US budget.

Katie is really angry with herself. She goes out with friends, doesn’t drink anything, and loses her wallet. She’s freaking because it has her phone number on it. I said if it’s a problem, we’ll change our phone number. You lost your bus pass – 2 days left, big whoop – your Gocard, costs 15 bucks, big whoop. The photos you lost are more of a pain. You have no money in your account so your bank card is no biggee and you lost no passports, SIN cards, or your health card, which are the real buggers to replace.

Me, I’m good. Tried to get John to cowrite a comedy routine with me last night, but he lay on the floor and pleaded – more or less – to allowed to drift into a vegetative state. So I let him. I did ask him to choose among the available options what he wished to complain about most, and he said that he was having a hard time choosing. After all, isn’t comedy about complaining?

We actually got a good view of the Skydragon eating the Moon last night. It was a good night to buy Halloween makeup. Every year I wrack my brains wondering what I’ll give out in lieu of candy, and this year I trekked down to the dollar store and bought glow in the dark animals, and some non glow in the dark animals, and some stickers. I mean, they’ll eat the candy and every kid in the lower mainland except the ones whose parents are abusive will be cracking off heartstopping and criminal sugar farts for a week, but eventually the smell will go away…. and they will remember the crazy woman in the snakeskin Matrix outfit who gave them a glow in the dark kitty. Or dinosaur. I got a variety.

Oh my gosh, the kid in the line up ahead of me at London Drugs last night. He cut one that brought tears to my eyes.

Still haven’t asked John if I can take Sai into work tomorrow as part of my costume. I did take the glow in the dark kitty who most closely resembles Pokey and stick him up on a bookshelf downstairs last night. Looks really cool when you turn the light off.

Updated the makeup routine this morning.

Dreamed last night that I was taking a night flight, harbor to harbor, from Pender Island to Vancouver, and the pilot was nuts and buzzed a fishing boat and snapped something off.

I am really glad I started taking vitamins agin. I don’t know which of them is responsible, but the horrible eye dryness has stopped and the pain in the fleshy part of my neck is gone and I’m getting a lot more out of my daily period of inadvertent unconsciousness. And I’m way sharper at work. For a while there I thought I was going nuts, but it was just a dietary deficiency. There are times I wish I could get everything into one pill, but it would likely be the size of a dust bunny and about as easy to choke down. If anybody cares, I can post my regimen.

Everything around here is peaceful. I know it can’t last but it makes me happy.

Katie asked a ‘no question’ question of the Tarot two nights ago. 6 Major Arcana; the Fool, High Priestess, Chariot, Justice, the Tower and the Moon. I did tell her that from the placement, the Fool was the most important of the six. Like, quit caring about what people think.

Learned from Lexi yesterday that the drunk that hit them was not charged. Miata sustained 20K in damage and the perpetrator walks? How about NOT DRIVING WITH DUE CARE AND ATTENTION. Jumping Jimenez Cucaracha! If I write any more, I will be start swearing, and I’ve decided to stop swearing in my blog. I’ll save that for the stage, and real life.

Much love to the deserving… later….

So I got canvassed last night. I really like Elaine S., she’s a very no nonsense individual. And I explained to her – not to her satisfaction – why I’m leaving again and she said she wasn’t happy about it but she would respect my decision.

Paul says that I just don’t do well in groups, and he’s absolutely right. I think one of the reasons we hang out together is because we both don’t do well in groups, but for different reasons. Paul thinks that everybody in the group should work as hard as he does and takes it as a personal affront when they don’t (and of course they rarely do). And I just want to be the boss, and get really crabby when I’m not. But I’m not entirely sure it’s a character defect, necessarily, I think it’s more likely my brain chemistry. Being high functioning autistic is a trial when you really CAN pass for normal! Anybody who spends any time with me knows I am severely abnormal, but it’s amazing how many people want to say things like “I’m eccentric!” Believe me, if you had my brain chemistry, you’d be freaking eccentric too. Of course, once you learn how you’re supposed to be when you’re behaving properly, you know when you’re deviating from the norm and it feels uncomfortable. Then on a beautiful fall day you realize HEY it’s okay. I’m not normal. Not only am I not normal, it’s my job to be abnormal in such a fashion that other people feel safe to be abnormal too. And to look at the definitions and restrictions on human behaviour which are just plain weird. And to have a darned good laugh at them. They exist for a reason, but do any of us remember what that reason is? I gotta go, I’ve got pecan chocolate chip cookies in the oven, and I just remembered why the batter for the first batch tasted odd. No vanilla! Must amend rest of dough. And write a comedy routine about what happens in cooking when there’s not enough vanilla. And in life. Oh boy. Think about vanilla. Vanilla beans. Vanilla ice cream. Vanilla sex.

Here’s a pic of Mt St Helens from today now the sun has come out. There is very little gas and very little seismic activity. However there’s lava building up at some stupid rate per day, something like 2 million cubic yards. I’m rubbing my eyes and wondering if that’s true, but the lava dome keeps rising and it’s really warm over there. If you google mt St helens webcam you’ll end up at the site and they give the blurb on current conditions. So no, it isn’t going to explode. It’s just going to be interesting but not a threat to human life. I mean unless you’re a nutbar and have to go take a look. Oops, melted my rappelling tools. Zorch!