Sundry and various

Paul was back from his flying visit to Seattle, and promptly invited himself over for dinner.  This gave me a chance to break out the lean ground beef from Farmtown, and that is officially that, folks; I am NEVER buying lean ground beef from Superstore again, it’s chock full of gristle and tastes like drek.  I made spaghetti and asparagus.

Garbage day today. Maybe I’ll do something novel and empty the trash in my room.  I haven’t for about 6 months – I scarcely ever use it.  Which sort of accounts for how my room looks right now.  No pictures available.  My camera is broken. My mandolin is still broken.  Candidly, I’m broken too, but nobody cares and you have to keep moving or the clowns will get you.

Jeff and Keith nearly killed me when I mentioned I’d seen a clip from last night’s NCIS.  Keith in particular got pretty scary.  Of course, the more they freak out about spoilers, the more they encourage me to do it… Which caused them to freak out even more about my perceived character flaws.  No, I just can’t ask them, “Can’t you take a joke?” because, uh, they can’t.  It’s a good thing I can take death threats with such good humour.  I take that back. Keith was just threatening to punch me repeatedly in the face.  Which likely wouldn’t have killed me, but very likely would have gotten blood on the new IKEA chesterfield, and resulted in a hospital trip.  Such a nice boy.

Yesterday I saw the BIGGEST EFFING RAINBOW since I came back from the tropics.  It was horizon to horizon, double, and BRILLIANT.  I had already been put into that goofy, happy mood I get in when I see pretty things from the bus, due to the underlit clouds being so very Hollywoodesque, and then got off the bus and involuntarily let out a, “Whoa ho HO!” when I saw it.

I wore my seabluegreen tighdigh tights yesterday.  The sex toy pink ones I will save for a Friday.

Scotiabank Visa barfed on my card yesterday.  I tried paying for something and it went hunh?  So I’ll just cancel the card.  I only need one anyway, and ‘need’ isn’t exactly the right word.  Hard to go internet shopping without one.

Miss Margot curled up next to Gizmo on the loveseat last night.  She keeps trying to sniff him.  (She keeps rimming Eddie while he’s eating – I really should get video of that some time, the sound effects are most droll).  Gizmo is mostly sleeping these days. He got very sucky with Paul last night and Paul, who is aware of his condition, was only too happy to oblige.

Paul brought a killer quinoa tabbouleh over to add to the meal.

Katie wanted to know about my childbirth experiences yesterday.  I told her I was in labour with her for 6 hours.  Six really hard intense and painful hours, although the afterpains were worse with her than the labour, strangely enough.  She wanted to know because the girls were talking about babies. Yes, I know they are women, but still, so young.

Eddie needs his nails clipped again.  So does Margot.  They are currently having a standoff in the door of my bedroom. Eddie is making his protesting noise.

I am to the point where I’m pretending I don’t have a to do list.  My February blahs came late this year, no doubt thanks to the Olympox.  Which turned out so much better than expected; I certainly watched more of it live than I expected to.

I’d sleep for a week if I could find a comfy enough bed.  I’d like to turn off the world and just sleep and sleep and sleep, and instead, in twenty minutes I’ll be showered and brushed and brushed and changed – clean underwear!  clean clothes! –  and standing at a bus stop.

Yup, I’m blue.  The best part is knowing that lots of people care about me and will help.  The worst part is knowing that none of the help will help, and that worse yet is coming, and no one knows what the worse will look like.  All I have to do is live through it, and eventually, I won’t even have to worry about living through it, nature having taken its course.

There.  Seven hundred and fifty words, all more or less off the top of my head.  There may be typos, there may be TMI, but by god, I can cross that off my imaginary list.

Yeah, that about covers it for me.

Gold vs. Gold.

Equality is a chimera, but it must be encouraged to be real.

Bawled my eyes out this morning. I read of an encounter between a little autistic girl and a little Down’s syndrome girl in a restaurant.  The two girls ended up hugging and sitting together to eat their meal while their moms got kinda teary.  Honestly, if I didn’t personally know the woman who wrote it and could attest to her complete veracity, I would have sworn it was one of those darned feelgood stories that veer around the internet from time to time.  As it is I feel marginally better about human beings.

Jeff’s going to write a post about Gizmo.  It’s not much fun; Gizmo is not well.

ScaryClown went downtown with a buddy after the hockey game and he said that insane was the kindest way of putting it.  He’s also never seen so many drunken hot women.

I was 45 minutes late getting home last night because some ffffing idiots had a fender bender and didn’t move the cars down a side street to swap info.  Iggerunt putzes.

The weather is mild, mild, mild; I see forsythia everywhere, and there are already rhododendrons in bloom on the SFU hill.

I just gave more money to BCCLU, and they repaid me by defending the pro life group on the UBC campus.  Oh how hard it is to have higher moral standards than the people we disagree with.  In fact, I’m not sure it’s permanent.  I’ll go back to being a jerk now.

How???? by mentioning the Correction, yet again.

But then again, we need all kinds of brains to make a world.

Mt Laundry has been conquered

Yeah, but that’s not what everybody will be talking about at work.  Sitting down to watch the amazing US-Canada gold medal game yesterday I knew the Canadians would win, but it was a nailbiter there for a while.

Foreigners who have covered 17 Olympics say that when it comes to public drinking at the Olympics, there is no second place.  On that basis I am very very very glad I never went downtown.

Watched Zombieland.  It’s got Sean of the Dead in a headlock for the title of the best Zomcom.  Woody Harrelson is fantastic, and I really liked Abigail Breslin, even if her character nearly gets everybody killed.

The start of the thing before the thing.

Here are the lyrics and here is the song that Katie likes the most these days.  Safe for work and utterly charming.  Katie says the song is about insomnia….  speaking of which she cured her insomnia.  She quit eating sugar.

My chance to dig out the garden plot was yesterday afternoon and it corresponded with the hockey game.  Sigh.

Not a productive day

Yesterday turned into DOWN TIME. I hung out with Katie and Keith; Katie did some very much needed body work on me; I avoided cooking anything (I’ve gone off cooking, which is kinda odd), did a little desultory cleaning and vacuuming, but mostly I loafed and lazed and watched BSG.

I also looked at stamps from 1888.  I looked at part of Granny’s collection, and wow, the aviation themed stamps alone are wild.  But the American postage due stamp from 1888 immediately made me go to the Story Place.

I have swithered over the decision not to go downtown for the afternoon, and I think that I want to be consistent about it.  I have avoided personally taking part in any of the real time Olympic stuff, or going downtown for the duration, and I can’t see changing that.  I could have watched the torch go by at work, and I was a real pill in telling people why I didn’t want to go.  It isn’t just laziness.  It’s a personal distaste for large drunken crowds hemmed in by the largest police presence in Vancouver since the riot at the Hyatt.  So I guess I’ll miss all of the Olympic spark and I guess I may live to regret it, but I doubt it.

I light a candle for all sufferers of depression.

I’m not even going to make a list for today.  I’m just going to be very happy to be alive, do some singing, watch a trifling, unimportant hockey game and get to church.   I laughed like a drain when I saw the minister mention that since church starts at the ungodly hour of 9:30, nobody has the excuse not to come to church because of the gold medal hockey game.  Finland got the bronze.

Slovakia 2, Canada 3

Yes, we watched the game last night; ScaryClown came over and we drank beer and ate pizza and nearly bounced off the couch with the tension during the incredible last 10 minutes of the game.

I light a candle for the victims of the quake in Chile.  It’s a geologically active time.

Talking to Chipper on the phone; using my brand new used vacuum cleaner from Granny on the filthy upstairs floors, bathing kitty, digging a couple of holes in the back yard for dirt to go in, putting John’s songs on an mp3 player, getting my camera repaired…. church tomorrow.  Lots of stuff on this weekend, lots of work, lots of laundry.

Whinging

I feel really antsy these days.  I’ve tried really hard to quit whining on the blog, because there’s simply nothing so illuminating and disheartening than going back three years and seeing that the events which exercised me so aren’t even memorable three years later.  Not always, and of course the really memorable stuff doesn’t necessarily make it to the blog if I think it might cause me legal hassles later.  So, a sampling of suitably comstocked whining: Continue reading Whinging

You will note that the blog is having issues

I lost my post from Sunday, and the comments added themselves to the next post.  Jeff and I are monitoring it, but we had a talk this morning and we think it’s a user error (that would be, uh, me) combined with wireless issues, possibly.

I’m really trying to commit to making church a better experience for everybody, so I loaned my Kaossilator to one of the youngsters on Sunday.  He stopped being bored, instantly, and I helped solidify Beacon’s reputation for musicality…

Work yesterday was excellent; managed to straighten some things out and resolve an outstanding customer issue to his satisfaction and mine.  Also closed some cases, always a good thing.  My open case load is approximately 70 right now, but in real terms it’s less than twenty actionable cases.  I have to leave a lot open or they disappear from my consciousness as requiring action.

I think the worst of the software issues is resolved, but the phone system still drops out when I go on break or work offline.  The really weird part is that it can do this IN THE MIDDLE OF A CALL.  The screen goes dark and I’m still talking to the customer… say wha?

Singing didn’t happen on Sunday – too many people cancelled out on the jam.

Now, coffee and a shower, not necessarily in that order.  Hope everybody has a glorious day and gets out in the sunshine.

I need to make a new list.

Jeff is a genius.  The bicycle pump I thought I broke just needed adjustment, the vacuum cleaner from Granny works perfectly (the missing bit was hiding in plain sight) and he helped me with my blog AND picking up the freezer order.  Happy sigh.

Paul and I walked in Deer Lake Park on Sunday and I saw my first turtle of the season.  Yay!

(Repost) It is with amusement and pride that I announce

(Update: Found the missing post, restored it and reposted this one which was wiped out when I restored the previously missing one. This won’t be on the final exam. — Jeff)

That the Celebration of Life will be called:

I’m Not Dead Yet

A celebration of the very much alive Denis Probst

I have lots of reasons to be pleased about this, but no explanations.

That which does not kill you makes you stronger

Did you ever hear such BS?  It amazes me that expressions like this can exist.

Yesterday was a simply glorious day – I policed up the patio area, swept the back stairs which had accumulated a lot of debris, ran a couple of loads of laundry, got to the place where I buy floral essences so I could make my perfume (I was almost out…), ordered frozen meat because the freezer is empty, and then went in and paid for it and picked up a couple of other items, picked up some treats so they’d be ready when Jeff and Paul got back, bought laundry supplies, dropped by Katie’s place and tossed some of said laundry supplies onto her deck (o look it’s raining soap!), practiced guitar for the housefilk which I ended up not going to because I reacted to something Paul did by going into sniper mode but I’ll cheerfully take the responsibility for it all because I got to talk to uh, someone, about it who put it all in perspective with a few well chosen words, put Margot out in the back yard so she could play with the squirrels, brushed her half a dozen times and still got masses of fur from her, helped Paul and Jeff move boxes and furniture into the house, cleaned the kitchen, cashed all the cheques I had lying around (I had four hundred dollars in cheques lying around, some dating to November for cry eye), ran the dishwasher and unloaded it, bought & replaced the battery in the kitchen timer, got rid of all the previous tenants’ mail by marking it return to sender and putting back in the mail, gave money to the BCCLA, wrote out my next installment of my church pledge AND put it in my purse, encouraged Katie to message her dad to ensure that the furniture she wanted got offloaded directly into her house, changed the sheets in the guest room and prepped it for the influx of new boxes, bought bus tickets AND put them in my purse, emptied the ashtray on the back deck, greeted the season’s first fly as it zoomed through the back door, aired out the house, paid bills, got the date set for Denis’ Celebration of Life (which I am thinking of entitling “I’m not dead yet and I’m not THAT nice” in keeping with his express wishes) and in the middle of the day I got out of the house yet again so I could sit on Shay’s deck with her and Suzanne and Rita and just chill while watching the incredible view for an hour. Shay got a gig with Comedy Courage, so she’s going to be helping mentally ill people learn standup, a GREAT idea.  The day wouldn’t have gone so smoothly if I hadn’t borrowed Paul’s car, for which I thank him.

Now I’m going to drive Jeff to Budget to drop off the truck and then go to church.  With luck I’ll remember to hand over my pledge check.  Before I drive Jeff over, chocolate chip waffles, coffee and deli smoked bacon.  There is nothing bacon can’t fix.  I wonder how soon I will be eating transgenic bacon… apparently the first transgenic pig has been approved for market in Canada.  Strange days we be living in.  Oh, and singing tonight with Orange You Glad.

Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

I have lots and lots to complain about.  Like, lots.  But I’ve decided to save my best and purest bile for real live people instead of the intarboobs, and the saddest and teariest of complaints for other real live people, and the horrid consequences of brutal self-examination strictly to myself. Continue reading Miss Crankypants sits in her corner