Partay

I had a lovely time at the party last night, and stayed up WAY past my bedtime.  I wasn’t out of bed this morning until after 8, can you credit it?

Katie and Jessica D came by and fixed my hair and makeup.  I looked fabulous and no, no pictures.  I will try to reproduce the glamorization of Allegra at some point, but Mike was appropriately startled at the massive change to my appearance. I have finally gotten over my (grrr) feelings of unhappiness about him perming his hair, but I guess that was just me wanting things to stay the same forever, which, oddly enough, they don’t.

Sometime today Dr Filk is going to show up, and I have to vote, and I need to get some yummy foodicles for the party on Sunday.  La la….

Jeff went through HELL trying to return the trailer to U-Haul yesterday.  Did you know the franchisees, while they are not supposed to, can refuse to take items back on a WHIM?  It bit a good chunk out of the day to find someplace and then help the woman who ran the place get the trailer into the parking lot.  What a life!

Waffles this morning… now I am going to make a list and then get to Famous Foods and completely flip out anyway.

More when I have somethin’ else to report.  Oh, I’m SO looking forward to the party.

wow. Just wow.

When I was a kid, one of the MANY MANY cool things my folks did (4 eyed fish… lizards…. growing cacti whose flowers smelled like rotting meat …. the time they freaked out the survey gal at the door by saying the Addams family were the most functional family on TV … letting me watch Laugh-In … building a geodesic dome in the back yard in an evening …. painting a stick man on the side of the house …. signing absence notes to the school M. Mouse….. raising me atheist …. playing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Moody Blues as well as Oscar Brand, Bob Newhart, Spike Jones and Shelley Berman and opera and light classical music and having silent movie nights in the basement so I was exposed to Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Kops when I was very little and helpless…. yeah, you wonder how I turned out the way ah did?) was paint this stuff on the windows in the bathroom so they didn’t have to hang curtains and the light still came through.

The blog of a 90 year old and some pictures.

A ninety-year old woman’s blog.

Pics I took yesterday.  ScaryClown took me to lunch and we admired the amanita together.  The other pic is the view from my window, which I am about to lose because my beautiful company is moving me again for reasons I would LOVE to publicly limn, but will maintain a discreet silence on.

Flu shot today, gotta wear short sleeves.

Master Jeff is in da house

Eddie and Gizmo celebrated his return by running up and down the hallway in an attempt to mimic the percussive qualities of army boots on wooden floors.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop with the ghetto slang.  I know there are many things that are seriously wrong with me…that seems to be pretty minor, all things considered.

That goshdarned full moon, which was fan-dancing with the clouds when I was standing on the ‘train platform last night!  I went to Brentwood Mall under its malign influence and bought matching earrings, bag, shoes and hairband (?!) and then bought, yeesh, makeup and got taught, in a very luxurious and unhurried way, how to apply it.  I’d say something about lipstick on a pig at this point, but I suspect nautilus3 is rather sensitive on that subject, for two reasons; one, the pig is her totem animal and she’s not one for mocking them, and two, when she was a high powered executive with 600 full time equivalents reporting to her (didn’t know that, eh, thought she was just a nice old lady, did ya?) lipstick was the only makeup she wore.  I wish I’d stayed and gotten my toes done but I’ll see if I can do that tonight.

mOm and pOp told OnSpec to send me a free copy of the their mag, and for bedtime reading (I hardly ever read a book these days, such is the pull of one phosphor dot screen or another) I read halfway through it.  Apart from thinking that the writing style of all the contributors remarkably similar, I really enjoyed it, and I think I will subscribe.  When you pick up a mag and DON’T think at any point, why’n’earth did they publish this, that’s a good sign.  I even liked the poetry, which is either a sign of necrosis of the brain or quality, you pick.

Off to a party tonight (thus the matching shoes, bag, earrings, hairband), and I will look fabulous in my outfit.  I even depilated, which is either a sign of the apocalypse or that I’ll be exposing more of my surface area than is normally the case, you pick.  Daughter Katie’s supposed to turn up and fix my hair, but after a lot of fussing around last night (Jeff would have been harrumphing had he been here, I was in the facility so long) I think I can do it myself if she bails. At least she’s okay.  I grouse, but I worry ’bout that kid. She’s moving back in with her pop and Keith and I for one am thrilled.

Tomorrow, I go shopping at Famous Foods in the AM and then ScaryClown comes over in the PM and we’ll have a documentary fest and I think I’ll cook up some yummy food.  He has to leave early (after supper) because he’s due to get up at hours ungodly on Sunday to get to the airport to fly to Providence, where he intends at some point to climb in a taxi or round up a sympathetic coworker (it’s a biz trip) and get driven out to HP Lovecraft’s grave.

This, like everything else in my mind, dovetails neatly with other family news; the parental units have commissioned a metal sculpture of one of the Old Ones.  It is disguised as a cephalopod, but those in the know will be aware that it is actually (dah dah duhhn!) something otherworldly.

I am planning on taking ScaryClown to Gadget House at some point and asking my parents to adopt him as a grandson, or possibly a nephew.  The idea of going on a road trip with ScaryClown alternately makes me blanch, giggle and furrow my brow.

Then, Sunday, my 50th birthday. It simply wouldn’t BE my birthday if I wasn’t importing guests, so Dr Filk has, with my warm thanks, agreed to come across the pond – Lady Miss Banjola, who will likely also attend, is requiring his presence for further practice, rehearsal, and scoffing, teasing and saying, You’re Fired repeatedly. All perfectly standard.  It should be a small and convivial crewe.  (Also with any luck Darwin the Alert and Lexi the Not-So-Alert-as-Darwin will attend.)  I’m gonna have an acoustic bass in my living room.  Let joy be unrefined!  Oh, yes, there will be filk.

I just opened a card from my folks, which reads “Thank you for the special gift of being our daughter.  Happy half century!”  Gosh, (scuffs toes) couldn’t have done it without yuz. PS thanks for the terabyte drive pOp.  Jeff and I are considering what uses to put it to…..

I won’t be here for Elly’s performance…

But maybe some of you will be…

Shining a Light on Disability

What is mental illness? Is it a chemical imbalance? Can we get over it? In her
fast-paced, one-woman play Now Who’s Crazy Now?, Elly Litvak candidly
brings her own personal experience living with and recovering from a serious
mental illness to the stage. The play is a highly entertaining and educational
piece, with a message of hope for recovery for everyone. 

Sunday, November 30, 2008, 7.00 pm

Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver
Norman Rothstein Theatre

Tickets: $20.00 and $12.00 for students, seniors. (Ticket subsidies available).
Call Debbie Havusha, Special Needs Coordinator, at 604.257.5151 for more info

Humour is ever so much better than violence

Prop 8 takes one in the goolies.

The cats, each in his own way, mourn Jeff’s absence; one by pissing copiously all over the chair he normally occupies in the kitchen, I’ve already Feliway’d it, and the other by voluntarily sitting in my lap for the first time in six months.  Gizmo was sitting in my lap when Eddie started howling piteously at the back door (the wind is rattling the doors and windows) so I had to stand up and push him off my lap.  He sat in the kitchen doorway, tail switching and with a miffed look.  He let Eddie have a cuff on the way by for good measure.

Biscotti has occurred

I don’t think I have quite enough data points to do a video yet, but I have a script and some of the pictures necessary to made a how to make biscotti video.  This is a hard bloody kitchen to film in.  Maybe I should be making biscotti someplace else, and evil thoughts come to the surface. I’m sure there are LOTS of people who would just HATE IT if I came to their house and made biscotti and left them there.  Yup; maybe I have a career as a biscotti fairy, setting up in people’s houses as they are expecting the open house to sell it.  I should contact stagers and ask if they have an opening.

The economic news continues to be confusing and dreary.

It was so nice to see Keith yesterday.  We watched Pitter Patter, the fourth episode of the Singing Detective.  I know it’s a really hard series to watch, and that the incessant racism and misogyny is a trial, but the stuff Dennis Potter does to narrative is a marvel for a writer to watch.  Anyway, Keith left to go see Katie, who for reasons of her own decided to go see her dad rather than me.  I ‘spect that has something to do with me asking her to, like, sort through her stuff while she’s here.  I’ll give her until mid-December and then I will simply haul all of her crap out of here and take it to the storage locker.  In the meantime I’m going to bag it all; her clothes smell like smoke even when they are clean and she hasn’t been living here in ages.

It’s very nice to have yummy food in the fridge to take to work for lunch (orangey coconut brown rice with mushrooms and bacon, leftover roast beef and chicken and bok choy stir fry).

Less than two weeks before I go to France.  Kinda puts the next little while in perspective.  I have a list…..

My list for today

Biscotti – the making of.  INCLUDING videoing the process and putting it on Youtube.

Putting away my laundry, blech.

Vacuuming my room.

Finding a cenotaph (yes, in this rain) and doing what I have never done in my adult life, which is honour the Canadian dead of various foreign wars.  After considering my options (thank you, Miss 604!) I’ve decided that by far the easiest to transit to is the Victory Square Cenotaph, in the shadow of which I changed into my Scientology protesting clothes, making it dovetail neatly with other aspects of my misspent life.  It’ll get me out of the house, anyway.

Messing around some more with the Garage Band software.  I’m now working on something that sounds like an explosion in a calliope factory.

In other news, a lot of scrap metal is radioactive, and it ends up in recycled products.  Get your Geigers running!

In other news, the Phoenix Mars lander is dead.  RIP little guy, you were the best of your kind!

In other news, Jeff is off to Victoria for a few days and I will be back at work tomorrow.  Excelsior!