Could not have happened to a nicer guy

I don’t know if any of you have been following along after the career of Joe Arpaio, the meanest sheriff in the US.  He’s actually a full-bore sociopath, from what I can gather, whose office and cadre of patriotic meanies have been abusive towards pretty much anybody they could abuse while they had their guns strapped on.  The ACLU has had at least three motions in play at any given time against him for the last five years.  Here’s a timeline of his reign of terror, and I fail to see how you could call it anything else.  One that reaches into 2009 is here.

If ever there was a reason to distrust democracy, it’s in his person.  He’s been re-elected five times.

Anyway, a whole slew of emails which were supposed to have disappeared, to his advantage, have reappeared.  Now things will get interesting.

I’m recollecting several times a day the choir singing in church on Sunday.  It was so good I cried. Marcy told me after church she could see me grinning in the back as she addressed us… and well I know that feeling of what it is like to see a friendly face up there.

I am doing a lot better, although I wish the weather would decide it’s spring.  There are skunk cabbages in Lynn Valley now, so it is officially spring by my standards.

I took it pretty easy this weekend

But I still managed to get a few things done, namely, church, a church meeting, two loads of laundry, a couple of meals cooked, a tiny fraction of the digging for the garden, an audition, a nice long hot bath (mmmm).

I’m still feeling the pinched and weird effects of the ‘megrim’ but all things considered I feel pretty good. Today… there will be meetings.  I get to meet some of the folks from Chicagoland.  I hope they like biscotti.

Sunday miscellanea

Dug out one fifth of the garden yesterday, after an entertaining visit chez Tom and Peggy (Peggy was working) to borrow gardening tools and drop off the busted mandolin.  Anybody who has seen Tom’s garage knows how this is possible.  Paul accompanied me, and there was much mirth and mocking; personally I found the image of the concrete bags which had turned solid enough to form gun emplacement material very happy making.   Tom offered four substantial pieces of wood to frame the garden plot with (I am not turning down ten foot lengths of six by six treated aged cedar for this purpose).  I didn’t need a mattock, but it was so axe murder-y I had to borrow it.  Also, I now have a picture of myself cuddling a meter long spanner, this also being the kind of thing one finds lying about in Tom’s vicinity.  I was also thinking of asking him for sand as I was thinking of doing the potatoes grown in tires thing, but really I only have so much energy, and Jeff has already registered misgivings about my ability to keep up with a garden, which is only reasonable. I volunteered for various of Tom’s plans (mostly holding the ends of things, this being a requirement for most of Tom’s plans).  Tom and I also agreed to split a cartload of topsoil; Paul is going to investigate manure for his little garden plot.

I stopped digging after I twisted my knee.  It appears to be okay this morning, so back to the grind after church.  The dirt I’m pulling up is full of earthworms (also those nasty lawn chafer larvae, which I carefully threw onto the concrete so Margot could mishandle them).  Margot croaked in excitement when she saw the measuring tape.  So shiny ! So crinkly ! So making a wonderful noise as it disappeared into its hole !  She pounced on it but I was able to wrestle it away from her.

Great church meeting yesterday.  Various matters arose and I slept on them; I will be taking a decision later today.  It’s not particularly earth shattering.

It turns out the migraines were hormones.  As my career as a breeder staggers to a close, I suppose I’ll get this crap happening occasionally.  Grr, the mama bear said.  Grr.

When I was a kid I thought my dad was the coolest man who ever lived; he let us watch Laugh-In, he bought gouramis and lizards and four eyed fish (anableps anableps) and painted a stick man on the side of the house and he had a beard and he put up a geodesic dome in the backyard and he had trophies for shooting and he’d been in the Air Force and he could fix anything and he had a succession of unusual cars (Simca, anyone?  original Mini Minor?).  One of the many cool things about him was his taste in music.  (This is no longer the case.. he listens to Muzak now, but we all get old and tired, so I won’t repine).  I used to love it when he played the soundtrack from the early sixties show “Checkmate” – he had the soundtrack album – and it wasn’t until last night that I realized that the Johnny Williams who wrote that score (which is MADE OF OSSUM) is the same John Williams who wrote the Star Wars theme, and many many many others.  Prescient dude, mi papa.

Steak and eggs and coffee for breakfast.

Biscotti are on for the first bake…. I promised some to Tom this morning, and given his many kindnesses I’d better get on the stick.  Can you tell I’m feeling better?

Oh, my eyes

I am going to try to live screenless for the day.  Went home with a migraine yesterday.  I had the most appalling array and variety of symptoms.  Flashies, aphasia, feeling of impending doom, tingling and numbness, shooting pains, weakness, nausea (please, not the details), and now that wretched dissociative state that can go on for days. No headache or visuals, but I can’t spell and feel quite clumsly.  No, I didn’t do that on purpose.

However, that garden is going to get dug out this weekend no matter what.  I am gonna be a wreck, I suspeck.

Overwhelming feelings of depression resolve…

as soon as I have a migraine.  I must keep remembering that

I have atypical migraines

They are frequently preceded by days or weeks of feeling just dreadful

Because my migraines are atypical I don’t get standardized ‘signs’ for them

I can’t tell the difference between feeling depressed and being in the run up for a migraine

Afterwards it seems obvious.

So I got a migraine at work yesterday.  I couldn’t actually see properly for the best part of an hour, but fortunately if I turn my head sideways I can still see enough to type.  It resolved quite suddenly without pain, but I feel rather etiolated today.

It’s a good thing I’m used to this pattern; instead of throwing myself off a bridge I just wait, and strangely, one way or another, I feel better.

There was an incredible sun halo about an hour before sunset last night.  It’s been a heckuva week for atmospheric phenomena.

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.