Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Oh, it was so good to see baby Alex today. He was in wonderful shape, running and playing and being cooperative and stubborn in pretty much equal doses. Paul fed me and the kids and Alex and we had a quite jolly get together. Keith has set up a meditation room, and I approve.
I have a really bad case of dyspepsia that’s lasted 24 hours now. I may be breaking out Tums before this is over
I didn’t write at all yesterday but that’s because I was too busy napping and getting fed and irrigated. I am now awaiting brekky at Mike’s place, having consumed my morning cawfay. Mike took yesterday off, which is good because he was feeling crappy.
Starting to feel healthier now that I’m not welded into my beddy bye. You can make neck muscles either seize or hypertrophy and that affects your carotid arteries which is not to put too fine a point on it hard on your brain. Immediate result my low level migraine crap has more or less stopped, yay.
This was the view from Taverna Greka yesterday.
86927 is the current word count. What it will look like after editing – generally things get shorter – is anyone’s guess.
Went to see Otto – my friend, not my mandolin – for coffee yesterday. He has hopes, having lost the lease on his ceramics studio, to getting another one in Port Coquitlam and I really hope so because it’s only two minutes from a kiln and he’d have 24-7 access to it. He gave me a lift home. It was very wet yesterday and I walked down to Coming Home Café and got wet from my crotch to the ground; the rain was coming in sideways under the umbrella. Fortunately with my current temperature control issues I merely felt pleasantly cool.
Working in clay, boy howdy. If I feel like getting up in the middle of the night to write (at my grandfather’s desk – you will all be happy to know that I am no longer writing or internetting in bed, guh — but I am allowing myself to read in bed) it’s easy to do. I stumble across the room, fire up my brand new ceramic heater because by gadfrey it’s chilly in here and then I write, or pretend to. Right now rather than pretending to I’m going to get up and get the coffee I forgot to bring upstairs when I went downstairs to practice.
ZEEEE! but first a few words about our sponsors, the cats. (Sorry, I’ll hack my feet off and eat them before I insert sound effects in my blog, so the ZEEEE! was an attempt to jam in some old-fashioned imaginary radio magic. Okay, it didn’t work but goddamnit I tried.)
MAN the cats love the new regime of warm and cold wet cat food in a seemingly endless supply. They are used to one can every two months and the rest of the time they are on kibble; and solid snax. Buster now does the leap in the air and clap his paws together almost every time I give him the snackies, except about once in ten he’ll roll on the carpet and with one slitted eye commanding my compliance direct me to just drop it now, there’s a good chap. This is usually when I try to snack him up midday, when he’s normally up a cat tree and out cold.
He is so cute when he sleeps on the couch downstairs. Sometimes nobody but Jeff will do, and Jeff obligingly holds himself so as accommodate whatever bizarre assemblage of furry cubist limbs Buster’s arranged himself into this time. Other times he Wants Mama’s Skritches and I become increasingly deranged in my attempts to scratch his chin while Jeff looks on with alarm. He extends all his limbs like Nijinsky, flops around with so little regard for feline dignity that it seems clear his early socialization was with very good tempered dogs, and cares not for what you squeeze or touch, almost as if he’s in some kind of neurological state of pleasant inebriation.
Margot is shedding like crazy. I had noticed that stressed cats do this, but this is like the February snow storm of cat fur came early, and I am disgust.
FML, back to work. Or not. WHo is it tHat mesSAges me? I hear the ting ting that I’ve gotten a message. Forget message get coffee. ARGHH TOO MANY DECISIONS.
We had lots of it all. No goblins though, I couldn’t handle candy dispersal.
Margot is missing the lower fang that was abscessed but she is MUCH better today. She is very much enjoying how much soft food she’s getting but I’m not cause that stuff REEKS.
288 words yesterday.
A tropical storm has formed in the Pacific which is headed straight to Yemen. Current forecasts indicate that four to five times the annual rainfall will come down in a 48 hour period; given that Yemen is one of the most vile places to live in the world on any number of scales, (yes, the people have a tradition of hospitality, it’s true) and suffering from a multi-faceted insurgency, messed over by Saudi handouts, jammed with internal refugees, I suspect many people are going to be wiped out in flash floods both financially and literally.
Those weird trees in Socotra may come down. I have the weirdest ideas about what is important.
Not enough production to send stuff off to mOm, but some, anyway. Had the worst burger in many years at Anny’s. I SHOULD HAVE HAD THE PUTIN. I mean poutine. I mean the smoked meat sammie. Anything but what I ate.
The food was not cooked with love.
I shouldn’t complain, a friend took me out to dinner.
MY WRITING DESK IS SET UP. Yay? The wireless barely works there, and yet it’s less than two metres from where I usually surf.
Happy Halloween for those who care. I’m not participating this year. It’s the new Grinch look on me, what do you think?
I was too worried about Margot, who is recovering nicely, to do more. Lovely walk and lunch and music and Margot fetching with Paul in the afternoon while it wasn’t raining.
Jeff had an encounter with a skunk this morning when he went to fetch Margot soft food. Fortunately his kindness was not rewarded with a (E )-2-butene-1-thiol and 3-methyl-1-butanethiol cocktail.
I’ve already written some this morning, so that makes me happy.
Three thousand words to go! That’s for the second book. Then ALL THE DENOUMENTS BAYBEE. I have made big messes and now they must be fixed.
Fifteen hundred or so yesterday. How would you like a Sixer to turn up on your 21st floor balcony? Well, if you had just had a family meal where your stepmother excoriated you for two hours about how you were the stupidest woman alive for not finding a way of making money out of Sixers WHEN YOU MET THEM AND HOW STUPID ARE YOU ANYWAY maybe you’d greet them more cheerfully than you running around in a nightie might suggest.
Besides, everyone trusts Michel. He does what he says and stays out of stuff that isn’t his business. Or does he? Only time will tell…
Gave Katie a driving lesson the other day, one of the advantages of Paul leaving me the car.
It is always good to be able to help friends and family. I made sure Keith and Paul had a meal prepped in their fridge (cannelloni cilantro almond & onion salad plus Singapore style noodles I’d picked up earlier) and picked them up at Edmonds after their trip to Toronto/London (yes, Paul met up with Carrie and Keith, bless him, poked his head in on The Vampire Family, which makes me very, very happy) and handed over the car. Of course if it hadn’t been on a night of the full moon I wouldn’t have been awake, but them’s the breaks, and they broke the right way.
Three loads of laundry yesterday. Practiced mandolin already this morning. Poor Margot doesn’t know she’s going back to the vet tomorrow but she’s obviously suffering, poor lamb. I put her favourite rug in the wash just now along with the upstairs sofa cover, since various babies and cats have been yielding up their valuable inner resources onto them both of late.
I didn’t know that Jean Webster had published anything beside Dear Enemy and Daddy-Long-Legs so I’m going to be checking out the other books on Gutenberg today. It annoys me that she died so young in childbirth; she should have lived to be a hundred.
I’m off to feed Ayesha.
Margot is having her teeth cleaned and her abscess drained on Thursday. I didn’t even know she had anything wrong with her until the vet pointed it out last week.
Took Katie driving yesterday. She’s going to be a fine driver but needs the practice. I had a super brief encounter with Alex; it takes him a while to warm up to me but he was smiling and running and kicking a ball to me within minutes. As usual I made no attempt to pick him up.
592 words yesterday on a subject dear to my heart.
932 words today. Off to feed Ayesha.
I managed to go back to bed and wake up around 8 but I feel blerllghly or some analog of that word.
Paul has loaned me his car while he and Keith are in London ON. I will go get some groceries shortly.
A couple of hundred words. I really feel like I’m getting my money’s worth from this toothpaste tube.
I’ve been walking in the lovely October sunshine – more walkies with Paul yesterday afternoon at the Quay, plus yummy tortilla soup, and then more writing, just a drib around 100 words but very promising. Any interactions between Michel and Theo are always welcome, and this one promises to amuse while advancing Theo’s new goal in life. Most of the characters have been approaching me and asking me to stop giving them dialogue they wouldn’t actually say.
New addition to the Blogroll, Eclectic Explorations.
I think I have thought my way out of the box. The writing box. We shall see.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Yes, WHY would I ask you to watch this remarkable 16 minute video…. Well, it’s like a 16 minute preview of the election campaign. Everybody thinks Justin Trudeau is a lightweight going into the fight. Watch and be unintentionally impressed. This is a fight for charity. There are SO many interesting little tidbits in this fight and in the commentary and byplay, I will be watching it again for sure. I knew about it and Shirley on fb already told me to watch it but Mike showed it last night.
Pork chops, cannelloni beans and onions in the crockpot for supper – I took a bunch over to Mike for dins. (It was SUPER TASTY) He had beer! Also, the pummelling – my shoulders are MUCH better this morning.
Magnanimous in victory, unrepentant in defeat. That’s how I hope to be in any contest.
Super weird dreams. There was a WALL OF COMIC BOOKS. and the teenager had to be told we could not escape across the desert with all of them. AND I had to wash dishes first, while everybody else messed off to play with the Van de Graaf Generator. The great big sparky thing, not the noted prog rock band from the 60’s and 70’s which reformed in this millennium and occasionally still plays.
Hurricane Patricia is exceeding strong and is going to beat up parts of the US. It’s already registering off the charts for windspeed. The last time something this big made landfall 6300 people died in the Philippines although to be fair if the authorities had taken the NOAA warnings and those of their own weather scientists seriously and done the math regarding the storm surge there would have been fewer dead.
I am covered in powdered sugar. I walked back in the cool predawn and grabbed a couple of croissants for me and Jeff for brekky.
Took Miss Margot yesterday to get her shots and a brief checkup. She HATES ME TODAY and she has a tooth abscess I have to get dealt with. Also, she DOES have fleas but not too bad.
I think I am working on a new tune. I’ll get back to you on that.
108 words. Go to the ant thou sluggard.
Feeling migrainous so off for a walk.
I had the curried potatoes, and chickpeas over pigeon peas and rice with a couple of Red Stripes, and Paul had shrimp curry over same, and one Red Stripe.
We walked there and back – a bit more than 2 k roundtrip. There’s a nice little restaurant row there. It was Wednesday, so Spring Garden, the newish Chinese restaurant on 12th south of 10th Avenue, is closed. Otherwise I would have been thinking Dim Sum.
Anyhoo, 247 words today, all on the backyard scene.