Category: Writing

Allegra feel like crap. For diagnosis, six tubes blood. Coyote woke me 4 am. Saw Just Lose It video. Further bulletins as required.

Here’s a simple hilarious picture from the Mt. St. Helens webcam. Interestingly enough, emails from ALL OVER the world asked if Mothra had moved into the neighbourhood….

Pictured is a young polar bear playing with a pumpkin stuffed with fish. His name is Cranbearry, and he likes swimming, trying new food and people watching.

In family news, Paul is heading to Courtenay next weekend to go hang out with family members, Keith is hoping to get to see his uncle Jeff but OF COURSE hasn’t phoned yet to make arrangements, and since I have to go to church on Sunday, I’m hanging about with Katie, who is mad at Matt again, and won’t say why. Young lerv! Paul is always taking it personally when I don’t go places, but I’m kinda stuck at the moment with commitments every Sunday until next June. The way I feel right now I’d like to quit at that point but I know the feeling will go away once I start feeling better again, whenever the hell that is.

Reconnected with an old CDS colleague – now that’s going back a t’ousand years – and he described a summer in hell; he checked into a psych ward and from the description of what was going on at that time it was really the only sane thing to do. I send a virtual fig to his psychiatrist… five separate psychoactives? That’s like getting a blue pill to remind you to take the yellow pill. I salute Dan in ON’s new career – he’s getting a PhD in Biology, and teaching. His little mischievous boys are now sporting mohawks and developing work avoidance strategies – entertaining that I posted that Mohawk picture just before getting that part of my buddy’s story. Time do fly.

I’m going to Katie’s parent teacher night tonight and taking her to the parole officer tomorrow at noon. Yessirree folks, parenting teens in these parlous times takes you into buildings you didn’t even know existed.

For those of you who don’t know, Katie was charged with assault last March – same day I had a root canal… ah, memories! Many interesting things have happened since them, but the legal sequelae linger on. So we’re off to see Natalie the Parole Officer tomorrow to get a whole bunch of stuff ‘splained to us. While Katie frequently thinks of assaulting people these days, she doesn’t actually think it’s cool to do it, and I think that’s perfectly appropriate. I mean, I can think of dozens of people I’d like to assault, starting with Charles Ng (with a deadly weapon) and Ann Coulter (with a peach pie, see previous blogs). But these will all remain in my imagination. Yes, I’m talking about it. And no, it’s not in keeping with Unitarian values. However, my truth is that I constantly struggle with the urge to slap people for various infractions of my own admittedly bizarre and fluid social code, and the fact that I hardly ever do slap people is a testament to my sanity and restraint in the face of tremendous temptation.

Keith has been following the Veep/Veep in law debate more closely than I. I refer you to Wonkette’s blog. The drinking game on her site was pretty funny; you would have been plastered within about ten minutes, according to those rules.

Spoke briefly to my girlfriend in TO the other morning. Once again, in defiance of my Unitarian values, I told her to put his goddamned crap on the back porch and tell him to come and get it. Or maybe she can start charging storage fees. The removing a box at a time BS is like water torture.

Wonder when my blood work will come back. Got the same venipuncturist as last time, to my great relief. She’s gotta be one of the best vampires in history, I’ve never had a problem with her.

Paul finally had the stew I made on the weekend and liked it. I also made lentil stew last night. And Two Frikking Batches of cinnamon rolls – the first batch (I had three, the kids made little chuffing noises and vanished the rest) must obviously have existed because the pan got dirty. I made a second just so Paul could have some. I also cleaned out some of the cupboards, which was what triggered the lentil stew – gotta rotate stock or you just end up throwing it out. Jumpin’ Jimmy Christmas, those were the DIRTIEST lentils I have ever seen. For enough lentils to make about two or three litres of stew, I cleaned out no fewer than twenty little bridgework destroying rocks, two twigs and half a dozen really weird looking pieces of what were obviously organic matter of some sort, provenance unknown. It took so long to clean that I went through three different cleaning methods, finally settling on pouring about a 100 ml at a time onto a white piece of paper and shoving things around until I’d pulled out all the ick. My advice is, don’t chew it. Just roll it around in your mouth. Cooked the lentils with a big ass cube of veggie soup base, two cinnamon sticks, a whack of fresh ground black pepper, half a dozen whole cloves of garlic, about 300 ml of four cheese tomato sauce that was lying around the fridge in a suggestive fashion, about a teaspoon of turmeric and the rest of the celery that was in the fridge. Turned out pretty good. The turmeric and spag sauce are more for colour than anything else – I find without some kind of colouring agent yellow lentils turn a sort of almost gray colour that I don’t really associate with food. And if you put in cinnamon sticks, it takes away that “almost dirt like” flavour. I should probably add something tart to it as well – I’ll check it out for lunch and see what else it needs.

My pumpkin, my lonely pumpkin, is about the size of a basketball now. I’m actually going to have a homegrown pumpkin for Halloween.

Back to fruit fly control and cleaning out kitchen cupboards. Can’t sit here blogging forever.

I can barely open my eyes – they squeak – and I feel like a barrel set in concrete, but other than that I am fine. Emotionally I mean. Katie and I had a very pleasant and low key day yesterday, killing fruitflies, doing laundry, making stew, doing a small shop. Nothing too taxing.

Now I have to do a bit of a clean as a bunch of people are descending on the house tonight – including Joe, whom I haven’t seen in donkey’s years, and his relatively new girlfriend, whom I haven’t yet met, and Mike and his friend Victoria, whom I have also not yet met. Then we’re going to sit around and sing and play, and at some point Paul and Keith will turn up from Victoria.

In a couple of hours I will take the bus over to Peggy’s and get a lift into church. We are starting something new at church, we’ll be singing for about twenty minutes as people file in. Peggy is apparently bringing her bass. I wonder which of his delectable guitars Tom will bring in. Anyway, there’s no way I’m walking over there, I am just barely mobile as it is.

Pokey broke his leash yesterday but Katie, who had been minding him, watched the whole proceeding and gave chase. Pokey surrendered without a fight.

Just reread Barry Broadfoot’s the Pioneer Years, and you know what? If civilization collapses, so will I. I simply do not have the gumption required to live in a world without push button appliances. My ancestors would disown me.

Speaking of which, my mother has, in email tones of highest excitement, announced that more ugly relative pictures are inbound from a cousins’ cousin over the hill a piece. These are of relatives she does not currently have photos of (stop the presses). The problem with all the early photos is that the word “Cheese” had not yet been correlated to photography, so in addition to all looking like they’d been beaten with an ugly stick, they all make marshwiggles look cheerful. My greatgrandmother in particular looks like the before picture in a turn of the century hemorrhoid ad. I know she was hard working, pious and an excellent mother and helpmeet, but honest to god, I’d give anything to have a picture of her smiling, and if we ever get a functioning time machine, that’s going on my List of Things to Do.

I am probably going to get an earful from my mother about making fun of her hobby. I am not making fun of genealogy. How else would I have learned that one of my close relatives is a street person? Or that a whole bunch of my close kin died in a house fire as young children while the parents had stepped over to the neighbours? I am making fun of family portraits, and if I didn’t know I’d mortify my father and grandmother (not to mention myself – I look like HELL), I’d post to this website the single funniest family candid ever shot (thanks Katie, I think).

And I am going to the family reunion in 2005, Inshallah, so I can witness whatever happens at family reunions which are heavily populated by Mennonites – don’t imagine there’s much point to ordering in a keg and (this part deleted) – and eat a lot of really excellent food. So it’s not like I don’t support my mother’s obsession, it’s just that I thank the nine gods of Clusium each day that cousin Lexi volunteered for the task in the next generation. Phew.

Picture is of a baby elephant born at Whipsnade Zoo. Whipsnade Zoo was where Gerald Durrell got his start, so I was thinking of him when I grabbed this picture. Damn, it’s cute! Do you want to know what Katie said when she saw it? She said, AWWWWW, I wanna see Dumbo and our copy is trashed!

One last thing. Rawstory.com has a picture of George W.’s back at the debate, and it looks like he was wired. He needs a better ventriloquist. Or as the first commenter to the story wryly put it, did we need PROOF that he’s a remote controlled robot? I’m sure he’s a very nice man in person.

I am pleased to report, that for this Sunday at least, the size of the youth group went up 50%, from two to three.

Katie is talking to Kai on the phone. Matt hasn’t phoned in 5 days and they are discussing how they will abuse him. Fortunately she is just blowing off steam. It’s too bad, really, he seemed like such a nice guy. I said she should wait until he’s explained himself, but she’s justing waiting to see him again so she can dump him.

I’m glad I’m not young anymore.

Woke from a very detailed and bizarre dream; my family and I had just moved to an island in the Pacific and were just straightening out issues like refrigeration and getting along with the neighbours when all of a sudden a dirty great typhoon blew up. I walked into a terrible wind and watched two and three story waves crashing over the headland and realized that where we were was not more than a couple of feet higher than that. We felt paralyzed. There was no point in making preparations; we were going to either drown or get pulverized or some particularly unpleasant combination of the two; we had heard on the radio that the people who were supposed to evacuate us were concentrating on a place with more people and less hazardous conditions. I fell to my knees – more or less because I was too scared to stand – and prayed to God not for a miracle but for the fortitude to bear the next few hours. I can still hear the wind noise. The dream started on a nice balmy day and rapidly deteriorated. At one point I looked up and identically shaped ragged clouds were going by counter to the breeze on the ground at about 100k – not exactly what you’d call calm conditions. Very intense and detailed dream.

Still feel like scrap but no sense complaining.

Dealt with our fruit fly situation a la Hoover this am, while Lexi and Katie looked on in amusement. Katie forgot she was supposed to be going to work out and so sat up swearing and assembled her crap in short order. Wish I’d known, I’d been up for about an hour and could have spared her the embarrassment.

Paul and Keith off to Victoria for the weekend. Paul is finding the course challenging, but that’s good; it’s even better knowing he can handle it.

So Kerry won the debate. Or is winning the spinmeister’s brannigan subsequent to the debate. Jumpin’ Jimmy Christmas, I thought all he had to do to win the debate was to stay conscious. And what’s all this about >Kerry< flip flopping on Iraq? If you look at a time line on the Iraqi handoff, as envisioned at the commencement of the war, a certain Chalabi character, whom Bush was relying on to keep the peace after the troops pulled out (yeah sure) was in there earlier as the big saviour. Maybe they should have picked someone who couldn’t speak English, I don’t know. The guy was a frikkin Iranian agent, American sleepers! Wake up! Bush is a traitor! While he was playing shell games with the gay marriage ban and No Child Left Behind, he pillaged the treasury, handed off incredible chunks of your child’s future to Halliburton, and took more vacation time than any president in almost 100 years!! He’s using your Christianity and your sense of personal responsibility as a plaything, and you’re thanking him for it! It’s like the American Right is an abused wife, going back again and again, because the kissing and making up is so nice and “He says he’ll never hit me again!” That’s the level of self-deception we’re talking ’bout here. The people who can see it are disgusted – they want to kidnap her, or give her a shake – but she’s not ready to leave yet. When will she be ready to leave????

Pic is my granny. Or maybe something else, I can’t pick it until I’ve actually hit send, which is just one of those things you learn to live with.

This is a Tiffany window from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, ON, Phyllis’ church. I have seen it in person and it is magnificent.

Due to the service provider changeover, there was no frikkin coffee at work this morning! You should have heard the p*ssing and moaning! Finally a bunch of the new folks rushed around and got coffee happening on the separate floors. Fortunately, I have a friend named Tom, useful, intelligent, handsome, inventive Tom U., who by prior arrangement provided coffee at 8:20 this morning. As a special treat he gave me half of a sticky bun. Life is worth living.

Which reminds me, last night Katie said that the only good thing about winter is that I will start making cinnamon buns again.

I just deleted about ten paragraphs detailing my aches and pains, as they would be of no interest to anyone but me and would be actively embarrassing later. So I will announce to an uncaring world that I have no idea who won the debate, although I’m sure Wonkette will get her digs in, and that I think Eminem’s new song Just Lose It is one of the funniest and catchiest things I’ve heard in ages. The man’s a clown.

I imagine I’ll be blogging more over the next week as I have the week off. On the other hand, I may just go to bed for a week, the idea has polled very well in the target market. Paul’s off to Victoria for his course on the 7 pm ferry, I’m off to work; musical evening on Sunday for those interested. Mike may bring his new friend Victoria. We shall see. My mother had to have the Diebold ads explained to her. Don’t you wish you could live in her world? A world in which I didn’t have to know what Diebold was would be a truly cool thing. A guy went surfing with a whale the other day. Is this another sign of the apocalypse, or just a sign that juvenile whales are as playful and easily confused as other juvenile mammals? Paul’s mother turns 80 today. I think… or maybe it’s the 6th. Anyway, she’s more on the ball than I am, and has the advantage of knowing when her birthday is. Happy birthday Phyllis! Katie is learning how to do massage; might have something to do with how screwed up her shoulders and hands are (trading work). Her boyfriend has been sick and not at school. Her word for the subject is GRRRR. Writing is hard work, especially when you haven’t done any in years, so opineth Kate. Keith was very happy that his dad picked him up from Karate last night – nice to know people will do little things to care for you. I’m so bagged I can’t believe I still have an 8 hour shift to haul before I can collapse. Oh well, I’m off to the doc on Monday.

This is from the political humour centre on about.com. That’s a dangerous site, by the way…. there’s a LOT of stuff there.

 

PS about.com is now dotdash and basically doesn’t exist anymore (2019)

Jelly babies – planes up for sale at YVR. Yes, that is a very large building.

This cat is one of the most stunning I have ever seen. She’s as soft as a plush toy and quite self possessed. When I followed the “how to take a picture of animals” instructions and got down on her level she decided to investigate, and I quite like the expression on her face. She lives in Courtenay with my aunt and uncle; I got her name but in the really persistent brain fog it didn’t stick. That’s Mary’s head I managed to truncate in the background.

Here’s the reading:

2 Wands, 10 Wands, 5 Swords, King of Swords, the Hanged Man, Queen of Swords, 4 Wands, the Chariot, 10 Pentacles, Ace of Wands.

Despite all the sharp edges and blunt instruments, this is a good reading. You are a successful person with many burdens, and not an immediate prospect of putting all those burdens down. The 5 of Swords is a plea to either quit banging your head against the wall(!) or to guard against false pride, which I don’t think obtains in this case, though you should heed the warning. Who else could he be but the King of Swords, who is (in this case) “justice” without compassion? What else could the series of events represent but a sacrifice, emblemized by the Hanged Man? And who could you be but the Queen of Swords, sorrowing but sure to love again? The way those three cards were in sequence reminded me of what I love about the Tarot, the slashing economy of the images.

Happily the next card is the 4 of Wands; you will find yourself in a celebratory and peaceful and successful place. I looked to see the Chariot in this layout, and was not disappointed. It is two fold – it is a literal and figurative card. It’s about the car (a matter of some concern) and it’s about the embattled situation you find yourself in (controlling your impulses).

Your hopes and fears are exemplified by the 9 of Pentacles – the only money card in the layout. She is the gracious lady of the manor, her impulses well under control, her wealth and comfort and refinement obvious. Finally the Ace of Wands, a card of immense creative power.

Expect a flowering of creativity after a period of retrenchment and grief. The signs are favourable. Do not look for romance now – there are other concerns closer to hand.

CLUETRAIN

You don’t have to believe any of this… but I am a signatory of the Cluetrain Manifesto, because I actually believe most of this.

Markets are conversations.

Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.

Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Companies attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

Bombastic boasts—”We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ”—do not constitute a position.

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what’s really going on inside the company.

Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own “downsizing initiatives” taught us to ask the question: “Loyalty? What’s that?”

Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can’t be “picked up” at some tony conference.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

But first, they must belong to a community.

Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

The community of discourse is the market.

Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.

When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.

Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

We’re also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

As markets, as workers, we wonder why you’re not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what’s that got to do with us?

Maybe you’re impressing your investors. Maybe you’re impressing Wall Street. You’re not impressing us.

If you don’t impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don’t they understand this? If they did, they wouldn’t let you talk that way.

Your tired notions of “the market” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.

We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we’d be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

You’re too busy “doing business” to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we’ll come back later. Maybe.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

Don’t worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it’s not the only thing on your mind.

Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

Your product broke. Why? We’d like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We’d like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she’s not in?

We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?

When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.

When we’re not busy being your “target market,” many of us are your people. We’d rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing’s job.

We’d like it if you got what’s going on here. That’d be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we’re holding our breath.

We have better things to do than worry about whether you’ll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

We have real power and we know it. If you don’t quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.

Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. (Note, okay, this is old.) Why can’t they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

We’re both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they’re really just an annoyance. We know they’re coming down. We’re going to work from both sides to take them down.

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

The road trip was exceptionally fine, with the exceptions hereafter noted; Granny, Mum, Auntie Mary, Aunt Diane, Jim, Jan, Carly, Jackie and Barry all came to the sermon and appeared to enjoy it; sloth and pride again took first and second for sins Unitarians consider their most besetting; and I will post a couple of pics.

Since a description of my digestive system’s aberrations during the trip up would be amusing but not uplifting, I will omit them; suffice to say those present were moved to be sympathetic, especially when I got a soaker coming back to the car from my impromptu commune with nature. Which reminds me, I still haven’t cleaned my shoes properly.

Paul claims I have previously had visual disturbances without headache with migraine – I certainly got them big time last night on the way back from the ferry but they were substantially cleared by the time I drove home. And yes, I shouldn’t have been driving while I was having visual disturbances, but Paul was too tired to drive.

Came home to find the lawns mowed, the kitchen immaculate, and the children asleep in their beds. Apart from screeching WHO ARE YOU and WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY BABIES, there was nothing to do but collapse.

Defining moment of my weekend: My mother falling on her knees in a Unitarian church, not in a sudden attack of religious feeling, but to inspect the altar hangings. Without question, the Comox Valley Unitarian Fellowship has the finest altar hangings it has ever been my privilege to see, and I am NOT posting a picture, first because hauling out a camera like a frikkin tourist is NOT on, and second because you’ll just have to go and see it. I suspect it’s one of those things that would be VERY hard to take a good picture of. Kids are now up and getting ready – I should clean my shoes and get out of here as well.

Foggy as the dickens this morning. Pics are possibly of the hyla, the ‘jelly babies’ or multicoloured aircraft outside the Air Canada Hangar at YVR, a detail of my rug, Jackie’s cats, and maybe musical evenings. It’ll be a hodgepodge.