Three years ago

I was at Potlatch in Seattle, a literary con, and I had a good time.

I bought a t shirt at Potlatch that I love and wear a lot. Tom Whitmore told me about this. Hearing that out of his own mouth was the high point ….

I just deleted the middle part of this post, about three hundred words, because there’s no point being honest.  It’s just me flailing about with words to no good end….

Back to Potlatch…That was the last time I saw Ulrika.  I talk to her online but I haven’t seen her IRL since then.

Everybody around me was crying or otherwise sad and visibly upset because Octavia Butler died abruptly and they all knew her and loved her and loved her work and they were very conscious of what a loss it was to the world.

So to honor a moment I had in my life, before everything changed and broke and turned to shit – because frankly, that’s how I feel and I’m tired of pretending I feel great, even if how lousy I feel is temporary, and to honor Octavia Butler I will link to the journal entry of another writer of color, link to something about SF, cultural appropriation, and how the culture we are raised in is a pernicious lie NO MATTER WHERE WE ARE. Minor quibble – spelling.

Kitties tell Jeff: All is forgiven; come home soon!

Yup, Jeff stayed out all night last night.  That’s the way things are in this crazy cuckoo world; you introduce your brother to your friends and the next thing you know he’s staying out all night with them (okay, Mike’s got a really comfy sofa).  I have this little thing called a job so I bailed on the festivities with Mike last night (it was awesome to see Heather) around 10 pm, got home about an hour later. Festivities included mighty tasty cilantro flavoured lasagna and at least two six packs of Lion Winter Ale, and I hung upside down like a bat in one of those found on tv devices for stretching out your back (mmm!) while everybody else played Buzz (laughing their heads off – I’m hanging upside down and smiling to myself as I listen to them), and Mike made me drag out his guitar (Jeff left the room) and I played The Evening News for some recently acquired friends of his.

Poor Jeff, he finds my singing unbelievably tedious.  So do Keith and Loki – it’s just a cross I have to bear for being so relaxed and creative, that I’m continually surrounded by men who hate what I do.  Makes me look forward to the days when it won’t be like this anymore, but that will come in the fullness of time, I suspect, along with a number of other of environmental shifts that I probably will have no control over whatever.

This morning around 3 the cats both started calling and running up and down the hallway. Normally they’d be bugging Jeff.  I just rolled over and ignored them until the alarm went off at 5:45.  Then I let them out and made coffee, and now I’ve got about ten minutes to stuff the rest of my morning activities into a nice bolus of output and get the hell out the door.  “I’ve got a little project I’ve been working on.”

As I stood sobbing over the pie crust

Yeah, I know, but I screwed up a double batch (Gimli glider error – I was converting measurements and dropped a decimal up) and I was damned if I was going to consign all that butter to the trash.  So I stood there (and no, I wasn’t sobbing, but I was some upset) and asked the pie crust dough what it needed, and it said BUTTER, so I added more, and now I can at least roll it out in big enough chunks to make apple tarts.  Which are baking.  Right now.  And you won’t get any, unless you come over in the next 30 seconds, cause sure as evolution and customized arboriculture made little Macintosh applies, Jeff’s going to pull a Zoidberg on the darned things and schloop them all up.

busy cooking

It was quite a weekend for cooking.  I made rum drops (cheap version of rum ball, and not super successful because I didn’t use powdered sugar), pork roast with the trimmings, massively unsuccessful pie crust, and apple filling for the pie crust.  I also made macaroni and cheese, and that was an unqualifiied success, and I also added sauce to the chick peas I cooked, so they are now officially yummy.

It is with some annoyance that I have made the determination that the skin goop I bought for forty dollars a tube always makes my skin break out, and the stuff I got for free from London Drugs, which has enough perfume in it to fell an ox, doesn’t.

Paul and Keith came over for dinner and we watched a really cool show about the four winged ancestor of birds.

How shall I rescue the pie crust?  I am at a loss.

Next one will be a hole in the wall

The sunset, annoyingly enough, didn’t cooperate, but the rest of yesterday evening was loads of fun.  I finally have a date for meeting Sammy (my date’s dog); that will be next Sunday afternoon.  I am going to secrete a couple of milkbones about my person and then I should do fine.

Horizons Restaurant is just as excellent as it ever was, and I will be thinking about the Arctic Char for a while – it was superlative.  By mutual consent, our next meal will be someplace much less classy.

I always did want to know how to wash my hair in space

And now I know.

A map of the grow ops in Toronto. The reason I’m posting this is because if you did the same map of Vancouver, you wouldn’t be able to read the street names.

I post this link as possibly being useful to my mother in generating pictures in collage format, you know, family history pictures.

I know we all have favourite charities, but this looks kinda useful.

David Byrne last night

Set list included

I Zimbra

Strange Overtones

One Fine Day

Help Me Somebody

Life During Wartime

Crosseyed and Painless

Take me to the River

Heaven

Born Under Punches

AND IT WAS GREAT.  Taking transit to the Queen Elizabeth Theater was easy and quick.

Now all I gotta do is stay out of the kitchen so I don’t eat or drink anything and thus don’t mess up my test results today.  Then I get the 5 suckered octopot that is a holter monitor off and get my bloodwork finished.  And then I’m going to come home and maybe do some domestic stuff (we are watching the microwave slowly die and may need to replace it) and then maybe Keith comes over with his friend A. the anime fan who is from Germany, and maybe they won’t come over because she’ll be all tuckered out from meeting her own rellies here in town.  They have met IRL and stayed in touch on line. Then I get ready for my date tonight, I’m taking him to Horizon and hopefully I won’t be late like I was last time and we’ll be able to watch the sunset from up on that hill, which on a fine day is really pretty.  In the middle there I will likely do some cooking – I’m thinking rum balls – and watching a movie – but on the other hand I’m thinking I want to get out of the movie phase and go back to reading books, so I’m also thinking a trip to the library, except I can’t find my stupid library card.

And I want my hat.  I misplaced my hat and I am going to see if I can get it back.

I love a sunny day

The sun has been out in Vancouver for days, the big dump of snow I gloomily forecast for the middle of February has failed to appear (Yay!!! I was wrong!), I got another date for Saturday night (this time I’m taking him to Horizons, my dime), I’m going to get a holter monitor this morning (and prob’ly half a dozen tubes of blood, blech), I’ll see David Byrne tonight with Jeff (Kopper indicated interest, note to self, talk to her before buying tix), Jeff and I watched the last half of Them (the CLASSIC giant insect fear film) and the new CSI and we ate curried chickpeas and brown rice for dinner.  I made pudding out of the leftover rice (I should probably get it off the back deck before the burglars get into it).

It’s now clear and cold in the city; there’s a skin of frost on the surfaces which will vanish with the sun.