cheerful but lazy

Uh, yup, that’s me.

Temporary crown has not come off yet.

Timmy Ho’s yesterday morning, followed by Time Team… happy sigh.

Fed Paul over at his place yesterday – finished off the Salad Shirazi (finely chopped english cuke, couple tomatoes, fresh mint, fresh parsley, juice of one lemon, a little onion – absolutely amazing, who needs salt?), provided him with chicken curry and rice pudding. He ate it with gusto.

Keith seems to be doing okay. He had a tiny bit of Shirazi salad and Paul hoovered up his leftovers… lol. Keith’s thinking about going back to school. Obviously I am more than happy about this and will approve whatever he chooses to study. Also, offered him shelter/respite if the baby turns out to be colicky or has a bad turn and he needs a decent night of sleep for his own health.

Prior to that we went to Fraser Foreshore Glenlyon side. Paul and I have watched any number of herons do any number of things – shit on our windshield while we’re going down the 401 at 90 kph – make a left hand turn on final descent into an airport on Christmas Day – leap into the air in front of us while we’re bike commuting – FUCK THAT’S BIG – gain three meters in altitude instantly upon taking a massive dump after take off – but we never saw what we saw yesterday before.

The heron landed sideways. It looked like it was doing a sliding tap dance on the surface of the water, and then just flung out its wings and set down. The grace, the total coolth and control… fabulous. Just wonderful. Like Fred Astaire possessed its body for five seconds.

SO MANY BEES: bumbles, honey bees.

Nice people to talk to. and Dorgles.

Amazing, beautiful weather, not too hot in the sun or chilly in the shade. Tide was EXTREMELY low.

Only grit was MUCH NOISE from Parks workers and the local industries.

Today – laundry and a quick shopping expotition.

Tragedy in London

As far as I can tell I’m not reacting nearly as hard to the shot as I did the last time. There’s a hot raised spot on my arm but nothing like the last time.

I’m just so happy to be fully vaccinated. I CAN’T HURT SOMEONE UNINTENTIONALLY now. I can be disgusting and homicidal some other way I guess.

I have a new favourite dessert: cold home made rice pudding, done Jeff style (he prefers it more gooey than I do), with mascarpone layered on top and then home made chocolate sauce dribbled on top. I invented it last night and then promptly got up and ate another dish of it. LOL.  Possibly I should run the dishwasher now before everything gets too crusty.

The Muslim family killed by a 20 year old driver in London ONT …. I have few words.

– Salman Afzaal, 46 physiotherapist – Madiha Salman, 44 PhD student in Civil engineering – Yumna Salman, 15, grade 9 student – Fayez Salman, 9 – Grandmother, 74, family ‘pillar’

Struck down FOR WHAT REASON? Other than bigotry and hatred and ignorance.

 

I am sad … or is she

I have done something really dumb again and I don’t know what to do about it but wait until I can make phone calls in the morning.

I am how you say unhappy and remorseful and I’ve decided to add cheerfully deciding: it’s okay, I’m trying to get help.

Nothing in this life is certain in prospect. We’re lucky some of it is provable in retrospect, and predictable in some cases to some minimum standard. In this case, I already know what can happen.

I am staring at the screen, and thinking of how the new Finale software exports directly to MP3, which honestly I think is new from the version I purchased in 2019. Anyway it certainly made me feel excited when I was having a quick whip-round of the menus. I immediately got onto a really simple entry song, it’s in Am, Thorfinn’s Song has a couple of unnaturals in there, the little dears, but where I really went nuts was putting emphasis on certain notes. THEN, on playback, o my, and even better when you have the right instrument for the song selected! or group of instruments, but I’m just playing with a few violins at the mo.

I shall keep playing…

I’ve started writing down songs again

Finally got Finale running, haw haw, so I’ve started putting Thorfinn’s song (Standard of the Crow) into musical notation. I’ve got about a hundred songs to write down, and I’ll start fitfully posting songs over the rest of the year.

It was like air and water to see Katie yesterday.

I said to Jeff yesterday, “I’m in a good MOOD I just can’t get anything DONE.”

He’s not happy because Nürburgring was called on account of fog so there was virtually no night racing, which is what he *wants* to see.

Hello my SF fans, check out this science news. It’s an article from the Asia Times about how we as a species have figured out how to jam photons together to make matter. You need a dirty great laser….

good news

I’m eligible for my second vax as of Monday

MORE GOOD NEWS

Paul has had his second jab! he did what he said he was going to do which was go to the vaccination centre at the end of the day and ask if they had any jabs left over. So he’s fully vaccinated!!! yay modern medicine.

What do you call feeling wiped out after your vaxx PFIZERS ON STUN lol

AND

I made mac and cheese and Katie came by for a brief visit and I gave her some to take home. SHE ATE IT mOm SHE ATE IT.

Also she’s walking okay, and she took time off, and it’s just one of those things and we should all be glad she was wearing her Dickie’s!! (Heavy work jeans).

questions you needn’t answer

1. Just how incompetent IS the security guard at Lux?¹
2. What are the odds that a crow four kilometres away from my house that behaves familiar with me is actually one of the crows I feed from the deck?
3. Is there any market for a book about a single 2.5 km walk in Burnaby?
4. Is “I’m glad you’re okay?” the appropriate response to learning from one of your children that they nearly died in a workplace accident?²
5. Is their spouse being willing to show you the pictures of the aftermath in any way going to ameliorate the emotions arising from question 4?
6. Is Horgan going to cancel Site C? Will direct action be required?
7. What will be the consequences of the demographic crash? (triggered by the pandemic – but likely to continue due to the strange reluctance of the titans of industry to lobby for legislation to help manufacture the workers of the future.)
8. What does Mutual Aid mean to you?
9. If I asked you to be a pallbearer, what would you do? (This is actually a trick question. The correct answer is, remind me that I’m going to be cremated.)
10. Are Indigenous scientists going to save the world?³
11. Are Dominionists going to kill it?
12. Does the body still know best?

  1. in order for this to mean anything you have to know it refers to the fictional L.A. nightclub in the fictional show Lucifer, which is having an absolute WE DON’T CARE ABOUT NARRATIVE final season. I do not know whose fanfic this all is, but the implications are quite interesting.
  2. Katie has some spectacular bruises. She’s not taking questions at this time.
  3. As far as I can see yesss

Wat Tyler has a few words

WAT TYLER SEZ: Ah you good people, things cannot go well in England until all property is in common and there are neither serfs nor gentlemeN but one united people. How ill they behave to us! For what reason do they hold us in bondage? Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve. And what can they show or what reason can they give, why they should be more masters than ourselves. The lords claim to be more lords than we are rests only on their power to force us to labour and produce in order that they may spend.

beautiful walk at Fraser Foreshore

Saw an eagle roosting in a tree overlooking Sto:lo

saw our first Western Swallowtail of the season

nearly died of cottonwood fluff

Saw a heron in the same place as the last time, fishing

Saw a pileated woodpecker flying from tree to tree

the woods were full of thrushes and towhees

We got really close to a crow

Lots of widdy dogs

Quite a mix of people with masks and without – I was without.

Afterwards we went back to Paul’s and Keith fed us pita and veggies and roast chickpeas. I loaned Paul my three-guitar floor stand to encourage him to play more. kMike came home before I left so I got to talk to him, but I missed Katie.

At home, Jeff prepped and fired up the air conditioner and I’m sure we had a much more pleasant sleep.

Tiny amount of practicing (I’m working on my hammered guitar skills) and writing.

 

Donald Trump’s month old blog scrubbed from internet – news

well I don’t have much going for me but I’ve managed to keep a blog running almost two hundred times longer than Donald Jerkwaddle Trump

 

And on a completely different subject, every time Disney does something really repellent, especially around gay people, I snark my ass off, because I have a bunch of hellagay friends who come within a c-hair of worshipping Disney and it’s just… so….wrong, but if I say something I’m peeing on someone’s fandom, etc so here’s me not making an ass of myself on social media but the five people who read this blog KNOW WHAT I THINK

busy day planned

Let’s see what comes of it. (LATER….around 5 pm)  VERY FUNNY you widgeon….. it got too hot to move around 10 am) I did manage to download Finale again and get it running (which was easy, since this version of it didn’t have stuff deleted from it by accident by me.) Also, I took Jeff to breakfast and that used all my energy (climbed the stairs at Westminster Quay) but it was absolutely wonderful and the weather was lovely and the server cheery and even the little kid at the next table only squawked for a couple of minutes and the tugboats and other working boats plying their trade up and down Sto:lo were ever so engaging.))

Guitar stand and saffron and kindergarten table and chairs to Caspell Junction (three generations of our family served, thank you Granny Rivett); pie plates back to Peggy’s; chocolate chips for chocolate chip pecan cookies (some won’t have pecans, for Jeff), need some veg, need to make another dentist appointment, hope to re-download Finale since it’s hopelessly buggered and I need it running again, need to figure out what I’m replacing this laptop with since it’s showing signs of age (the ‘A’ key is a hopeless splodge and the period key is joining it and it’s starting to get really hot when it’s charging; probably I need to replace the battery but I think I should get a jump on things and replace the unit), maybe possibly getting my speakers set up in the spare room/music room downstairs, practicing – I haven’t been, that much,  load of dishes, actually deleting all the Scrivener files that don’t have anything in them, putting the unfinished fanfics (there must be a dozen by now) in the same place and in rank order for being finished, and maybe, just maybe, a beer on the back deck when all the running around is done.

So happy to see a friend

Jeff and Mike and I – having all had our first vaccinations although Mike wasn’t quite to the two week point yet – sat out on the back deck day before yesterday in the glorious sunshine and I pointed out one of the crows I freed (Curvebeak, he’s the most obvious one). I’m feeding them to the end of June until they crop off their babies. I’ll feed crows through the breeding season next year too.

We drank beer and talked in a low key way about various unimportant things, and Mike pulled out his Cordoba half-size nylon string and played some Paul Simon, and some soundtrack from Skyrim, and that really beautiful theme song from that Cantonese language gangster show (I actually have him singing it in a digital file here someplace).

He’s given up on cheap 3d printers. I’m very glad of that. As he said you don’t calibrate a hammer.

He left some beef soup and I traded him for the pork and barley soup I made the other day. IT was aMAZing to hang with a friend.

There’s still plenty of mac n cheese, and roasted veggies too, we have good food choices at the moment.

Monday’s news: The trip to the endodontist was nominal. I was really worried about it but it was fine on the day. I’m not even sore in that tooth, although I did what the receptionist said and took painkillers before the freezing was out.

wip The Hermit

The Hermit

This person is holding up a light for those lost on the mountain, and possibly offering hospitality, although I don’t see how hospitality is possible, when she’s obviously standing on a patch of ice the size of a dinner platter. This is a card for the non-conforming person, the non-neurotypical person, who may in their own way be sociable but just not immediately, or not in the same room with you.

For people who don’t enjoy being touched; for people who are so easily made angry, or frightened, or despairing, that they avoid contact with other human beings. For people who are sociable but whose mode of being causes discomfort to the inhumane.

Aesthetic aside: The Hermit gives away Colman’s training as a backdrop painter. There is not a breath of wind; therefore one possible interpretation is that we are on a metaphorical stage, a different level of existence.

Or else we’re very high.

(Alan Tudyk K2SO voice: Very, very high.)

Yes, this is the weed card. (If you want to read Judaism into it because of the Star of David hidden in the lamp, you can, but the longer iconographic tradition for Judaism is the menorah, which has the distinct advantage of not being associated with various genocides; sadly there’s nothing like it in the Rider Waite tarot illustrations, unless you squint very hard at the 5 of Pentacles.)

Close examination of the image yields a starting discovery; that is not an old man. It is a non-binary person wearing a prop beard. Don’t believe me? Check out the Ten of Pentacles. Colman knew how to paint old with a few telling lines. This is not an oversight. The Tarot is full of casual gender-swapping. If you really think you know what’s underneath those clothes, you may be wrong.

Isolation because you’re not the same as other people. This is a person holding up the light of their own truth. This is also a card for actors, who wear the skin of someone they are not, and scale heights of emotion in challenging ways.

one massive ball

Part of genocide is thinking that one Indigenous person from x point in Canada is like an Indigenous person from y point.

After all these years CBC still thinks that ‘the Indigenous community’ is a convenient monolithic block. It speaks with one voice, sees with one eye, dances with one foot, etc etc. Please don’t roll up Indigenous communities in one mass for your own convenience.

This is me in response to the CBC talking about ‘the Indigenous community’ response to finding 215 murdered children in Kamloops.