Saffron

Saffron-coloured nasturtium.

Why did I say I wouldn't have to get used to the loaner car? Because I wanted to tempt fate, clearly. Before half past eight yesterday morning, the autobody shop had rung to say they would need to keep our car until Friday. Friday afternoon. I managed to not drive anywhere yesterday, today I had to stop being a weenie and get used to it. Still smells. Still over-revs the engine, grumble, grumble.

The weather has taken a turn for the seriously hot. Sunny and hot. And we have been watching 'Hot in Cleveland'. Lightweight, but funny.

The other night we watched, 'Never Let me Go', a British Movie with Carey Mulligan and one of the blokes from 'The Social Network'. Excellent, but my advice, don't watch before bedtime, unless you have some episodes of 'Hot in Cleveland' to take the creep-factor edge off.

Loaner

This morning I took the car into the auto repair shop to be fixed. Of course, I knew what was coming, the courtesy car, the loaner, the automatic. Nothing to be done about it.
The man in the rental place remarked on my accent.

'Ah, British,' he said.
'Yup,'
'I have a man in here yesterday, I ask him if he British, he say, 'no, Scottish,'
'Scottish is British,' say I.
'Yes! See, I know this! This is why I say British!' said he,
'Right,' I smiled,
'You see I know because I used to work for HSBC,'
'Ah. Actually in Hong Kong?'
'Aha! You see! Only a British person would know that HSBC, Bank of Hong Kong. But I'm from Philippines,'
'Ah, mmm.Good,'
We walk out to the loaner car.
'It's automatic I'm afraid,' he said.
'Yes, I knew it would be,'
'British people mostly drive standard,'
'Yep,'

And whilst he demonstrated to me the wonders of the Hyundai and how you couldn't turn the engine on unless it was in 'Park', and told me of all the countries in the world where they also drive standard, and why vehicles that need more power needed manual gear change, and how some lady friend of his had coped badly with an automatic, I somehow missed where he told me that the bloody control thingie that replaces the gear stick can only be changed from Park to anything else when you put your foot on the brake pedal.
But he was kind, and well-meaning.
And with an afternoon appointment looming, I spent a frantic quarter of an hour trying to get the control thingie to move until I put my foot on the brake out of sheer frustration, and loss of a clutch, and lo! It all magically changed. Or at least it allowed me to move it.

Fortunately, and rather bizarrely, the car, which incidentally stank of stale cigarette smoke, had Alberta number plates, which seemed to make some other drivers keep their distance, and others to tailgate me, presumably because they expected an Albertan driver to speed off at any second.

Later, when I was trying to prepare Cannelloni for supper, and found the pasta to be mouldy, I begged Kevin to drive us to Superstore rather than having the stress of driving it myself again today.

I suppose in the end I'd get used to the bloody thing, but I certainly don't want to.
And whilst I don't need to - well, I guess I won't.

Broomsticks

I was annoyed by Mormons this morning, who tried to suck me into their web of stupidity by pointing a Bible at me, open at a page of insane and potentially syphilitic ranting by some obscure Old Testament beardie. They persevered over Whisky's loud and frantic yapping, plus the wind whipping strands of dust right into the face of one of them, from the broom I had been using when they came along and interrupted me.
Witches ever had brooms.

'God has revealed Her purpose to me, and She wishes for more gender justice, please mind the steps on your way down,' I bade them.
They retreated with no further ado.

Across the road, the set of gardeners who insist on wearing coolie hats, were using a loud leaf blower to blow stuff, another job more efficiently done with a broom.

Yesterday, a kindly gent of my church proffered me a two page piece of tosh written by some unimaginative Irish priest about the King James Version of the Bible.

The tired old drivel followed the usual format, page 1, how important it was for people to have a Bible in English. Yes, yes, there is MAYBE some point to this, aside from the fact that at the time, a minuscule percentage of the populace could read. It could also be argued that had they not had the Bible in English, then perhaps the whole thing would have died a death and we'd all be happy Druids by now. It did, however, drive a nail into the coffin of compulsory Catholicism in Britain, so there is that positive.

Page two deals with how we would have missed out on such great works of the English language as Milton's 'Paradise Lost', 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and The Gettysburg Address.' Would we? Would we really? Methinks the Gettysburg Address would still have happened, it would simply have been different.
Had we never have had 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Pilgrim's Progress', would we be any the wiser? Would we be worse off? Were these works really worth the suppression of women, non-whites, homosexuals and Jews? Seriously?
It's easy peasy lemon squeezey to say, 'we wouldn't have had this or that,' but what about the things we MIGHT have had?

When the most phenomenal writing in the English language is now coming from women, who are, let us not forget, STILL oppressed, just not as totally as previous generations, might we not have had a Hilary Mantel, whose prose in my opinion is sublime, a Carol-Ann Duffy, a Margaret Atwood...I could write paragraphs of today's great English-language women writers, might we not have had them earlier? Of course, we'll never know, but it would seem to be a logical conclusion.

And this evening, this English-language woman writer will be attending writers' group after a couple of months' absence.
Tonight's venue is probably close enough for me to travel by broomstick.

Vision and Fuckery

On Wednesday, predictably, someone on the Skytrain station came and asked me a question in a manner that suggested we'd not only been friends for years, but had been travelling together for hours. I could easily tell she was from New Zealand,
'We're from New Zealand,' she said. I nodded. And very personable the woman was too, the man wore the same kind of shorts that Steve Irwin used to wear, but unlike the Croc Hunter, he said nothing.

I met up with my friend Danielle, in a small coffee shop on Ash Street, just off Broadway and it had quite the most lovely seating area at the back. I was never more taken by a coffee place, and now I wish I'd taken photos.

Friday was the last day of career planning and we watched a very dated video about being assertive. And it actually WAS a video. In spite of the 70s style clothes, hair and specs, the video itself was an absolutely perfect example of how to plan a lesson - or an instructional video. Equal numbers of women and men, equal positions, equal amount of time speaking. The problem was modelled, discussed, solved, and re-modelled. Good pacing, perfect length of time. Super-critic moi, was dead impressed.

We also made a vision board. This sounds like a totally dire exercise, and yet I found it incredibly interesting and felt I learnt something about myself from the exercise.
Overall, as well as having greatly enjoyed the past three weeks, it has been a personal voyage of discovery too, and I've met some fantastic people.

On the one hand, I now feel re-energised for my job search, on the other, now I have to get down to the hard work of re-writing my CV and applying for jobs.

It was depressing to read about Amy Winehouse's death. No doubt it was not only foretold, but writ large, still though, every death is a tragedy to the family members, and when talent like that is cut short, a loss to a wider audience.

The whole thing that has happened in Norway is beyond horrifying. What the fuck is wrong with people? I'm utterly, utterly at a loss to get my head round why someone thinks they have the right to take away the lives of not only innocent people, but people who are doing a damned fine job into the bargain. And then to claim to be a Christian. I feel as though something pure has been ripped open and its entrails scattered and trampled on.

To quote the now late Amy Winehouse, 'What kind of fuckery is this?'

The Boonies

My friend Lori used to talk about the Boonies, you’d ask her where something was and she’d say, ‘oh, out in the Boon Docks,’ as though it were a real place. Well I’m here although I’m not convinced it’s real. The normal laws that govern human behaviour and …well, traffic signs for example, are simply changed, or absent. There are boonie people circling the car, I’m wondering whether I’ve driven so far that I’m near the Thunderdome, I’m pretty sure Mad Max has been past a couple of times in an old reverse-pimped-out pickup.

The people are like characters from Little Britain or French and Saunders. One, Jabba-like, has been sitting on a BC Hydro (electricity) box - it has a picture of a person falling back, a red zig-zag of lightning bisecting them. Another keeps striking a pose, carefully NOT looking at the car out of the corner of its eye(gender uncertain) and two more appear to be taking cats for walks. Beyond the frontiers of civilisation.

I'm happy to get out of Dodge, but wait! Getting out of the rabbit warren, where the houses are actually labelled 'Cluster X', I find that the road only goes in one direction! it's like a bad dream, it's like a story from Kafka. But as in some surreal film, I find a bizarrely placed Mexican restaurant, the restaurant almost at the end of the universe, and I can creatively use its car park to turn around in.

We stop half way back so that Laurence can call in at Krispy Kremes and I can go to the loo. In the Boonies, you probably have to trap your own doughnuts - but I didn't wait to find out.

Decisions

Today we learnt about how people make decisions - how WE make decisions. Some people accumulate information, some need to see a bigger picture and make decisions intuitively and some need the input of significant others.

In the afternoon, the sun came out and it became really hot, hotter still forecast for tomorrow.

We've been rather on the periphery of the whole Rebekah Brooks, News of the World phone-hacking scandal. I mean we've seen it play out, but we couldn't exactly say we have been in the fray.
There is, however, one question I would like answered. Is Rebekah Brooks actually Mick Hucknall? I think we should be told.

Took the car into ICBC - the Insurance Company of British Columbia - and the man who went into the back of my car had called it in and admitted responsibility. Good, good. That makes that part easier. The whole, having to organise it business is still annoying though.

One day, some future project, I would like to go to the Edinburgh Festival. I see that Marc Almond is appearing there this year. He is, annoyingly, the same age as me, and yet, despite two decades of severe drug abuse, looks younger.

Weather

Biblical weather yesterday - that's what Kevin had down at the Static, up here - a single clap of thunder and some serious rain.

When I awoke this morning, the sun was shining, and the birds were on Facebook. Or twittering or something, pretty loudly too. I cycled to church, without the ridiculousness of last week, Alex's bike is a lot more comfortable than the one I had to take before. When I came out, the sky had clouded over, and this afternoon we've had more rain.

In an odd mirroring of my last week's fender bender, Austen also sustained damage to the car, however, his was due to an encounter not with a driver who wasn't paying attention, but with a deer who....was not paying attention.

On TV, we've been watching 'Game of Thrones'. Apart from the unnecessary and gratuitous female nudity without which HBO seem not to be able to make a series, it has been quite addictive.

Wednesday's Child

Yesterday, my kids' grandfather on their father's side, died. It was fairly unexpected, he'd been taken into hospital last week - a fact my kids and their father found out via Facebook. He had quadruple bypass surgery, but didn't regain very much consciousness and then Alex found out that her grandfather had died - via Facebook. Yesterday I managed to track them down to a pub in Woking where sorrows were being drowned.
Then both kids and their dad were anxious to ensure that Laurence was sat down and told properly rather than find out the same way, and thus it was. He finds it difficult to process that type of information, the others want him to go back to the UK for the funeral - well, two funerals in that part of the family as it happens, but he's not feeling up for it, given where he is in recovery. I've told them I'm just presenting the options to him and not pressuring him either way and he felt that his dad had done the same thing on the phone.

So today, coming back from my Career Planning workshop, a truck went into the back of me. There are two lanes of traffic coming off this particular bridge, the Queensborough, the right-hand one goes towards Richmond, and this is the one I was in. A yellow works truck, two vehicles in front of me, slowed to a halt and so the line of traffic did too. I think everyone must have thought it was going to move on, because no-one tried to move over into the other lane, but eventually, it seemed like it was stopped for some purpose, so I waited until the traffic in the lefthand lane cleared, then signalled to change lanes, and started to move over. The vehicle behind me did the same, and as we started to move, then the humongous truck in front of us decided it would too, and since my options were, stop or be crushed, I opted for stop. The gent behind me didn't, however and thus, my rear..well, got ended. It's a pain to go through all the rigmarole that you then have to go through, made the more frustrating by it being someone else's fault, and it occurred to me, that even if you argued that more than one person was to blame, you get down to three drivers, the works truck, the goods truck and the construction truck behind me, all of which are being driven in a work situation and yet who pay no attention to other road users. Aggravating to say the least.

Then there's the whole ESTA debacle. Now normally, every three months, because I'm not a Canadian citizen, I have to go into secondary inspection, when crossing the border into the USA, and get a visa waiver. Now, the situation is changing and you have to go online and get the same ESTA authorisation that anyone travelling from Europe would have. Ok, so I was told by the people at NEXUS, to google ESTA. This I did, and came to a website called USA e services. Clearly the website set up by the US to deal with the authorisation. But no. It is a website that does the work for you and then charges you way above and beyond the $14 the US government want. But they don't tell you that. In fact, all I really needed to do, had I not been hoodwinked, and given my personal details to someone not in any way connected with the US government, was to go to the government's own website. So in fact, I should not have googled anything.
And what-ho! The BBC are already onto this scam, and have a report on it!

And full moon.

Team Colours

I was doing a survey for British Rail, and one of the questions had the red, italicised instruction 'tick all that apply' and the options were yes, or no.

The reception desk at the place where I do my course, is staffed by two very nice ladies, one of whom is Glaswegian. Not that this is in any way pertinent. There is also a glass vase there with slips of paper with thoughts for the day on them, some are, as every better than others, but the course members have become used to starting the day reading out the thoughts in the way that one sits around the Christmas dinner table and reads the mottoes out of the crackers.
One person came in this morning and gave us a thought for the day he'd heard elsewhere,
'Forgiveness is when you finally accept that things could never have been any other way.' And it was successful, because I'm still thinking about it.

Yesterday, we talked about barriers to employment and it is an astonishing thing. When I look around the room, I don't see a bunch of no-hopers, in fact, quite the opposite. Both my writers' group, and the church council, are groups of educated, intelligent people. This group of unemployed people are educated, intelligent, able to work as part of a team, have amazing personalities and are all people you could happily do a year-long course with. The course co-ordinator is spectacularly good at her job, every aspect of the job. So the barriers that keep all these people out of the workforce, are not only keeping them from making a living, us, I should say, but keeping companies, government organisations or whatever, from having some tremendous personality and talent. It kind of makes you want to knock some heads together somewhere.

Today, we were doing 'career cruising', so one of the participants suggested we all wear red, white and blue, these being of course (tchyeah, everyone knows this, right?) boating colours.
And everyone did.

A Snickety Start

A Lemony Snicket start to the day.

But let me start two days earlier.

The boy has had a relapse with the street drugs, the street drugs I didn't refer to earlier, but maybe now I can.
I have.
It took him a week to tell me, but fortunately, he told my friend R straight away and she said he must talk to us about it.
But as things sometimes do, several things have fallen into place over this. He has finally rung a support service we get as part of a benefits package from Kev's work, the anti-depressants the doctor has given him are starting to work, and we have found a support group for him. BUT....I didn't feel as though I could leave him this weekend. So Kev went to the Static on his own. Well, on his own with Whisky.

So, all I had to do this morning was to cycle to church, which, considering I used to cycle four miles to Mayhem every day, should not have been a challenge. I would take Alex's bike, and Kevin had pumped up the tyres.
HOWEVER....and typing this I feel foolish. I couldn't get the kick stand to go down. I even sat on the floor and tried to wrench it manually, but sans result. SO I undid the bolt and took it off.
Ok, result.
Nope. Then, the mudguard was loose and scraping against the tyre. So I tied it back. But however tightly I tied the thing, it kept coming back down.
Nil desperandum, there was a back-up plan. I would take Kev's bike. I needed to lower the seat, because I couldn't sit on it and still reach the peddles, but it has a quick-release catch, so no problemo. Yeah, right, no problemo if you had the strength of Thor. So that wasn't working for me.
But there are back-up bikes! Neither are in working order...except that Kevin has fixed one, and I hoiked it down from the rack. Seat too high again, but this time easily lowered with some WD40 and a spanner.
It was by no means a comfortable ride, and the gears are semi-stuck in a really high gear, but I got there in time to grubbily shake hands with a few people.

While I was doing all this, I was thinking, 'a few years back, (quite a few), I might have thought, "now this is a situation where I do need a man",' but the truth is, it was simply a situation where I needed someone more competent than me and in the end, I got there anyway.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

So, unrelated to that, The Brompton Mix, Ben's band, have had a great review in an online magazine, Apple Juice.
Nice one.

And, although I've posted this on Facebook, it's so good, I'm going to put the link up here too. Nineteen percent calling Beyonce out on 'Run the World'.

This is a long video, 50 minutes I think, but it is a fascinating review of new research on how negative stereotypes affect career choice. It is amazing how subtle some of the factors are.

TGIF

Hah! Friday has a different meaning when you're doing something outside of the home.
Yesterday we did an exercise about one of the Myers-Briggs components. These are personality traits as applied to the workplace. It was one of those lightbulb experiences.

One thing with all of the tests about personality and preferences is that we all have years of experience that have given us skills so that we often work in a way that overrides out natural ways of working. Several of us realised at the same time that we may have a natural tendency towards approaching something perceptively, but that at work, we would kick into a more logical mode. I think this is something it's important to understand before starting the tests.

Today, we did an activity to determine our transferable skills, it turns out I have a lot, although I feel that knowing what your transferable skills are doesn't necessarily get you anywhere, BUT....I shall not judge.

This afternoon, we watched an inspiring video, although, aside from some beautiful photography of the Tasmanian landscape, I didn't feel that inspired. Or, inspired at all in fact. It was decidedly uninspiring, and difficult to read my book with the lights off. Other people were though, so I just think I need to be prepared in case something like this happens again.

I'm looking forward to lying in tomorrow morning - I feel like a grown-up again.

Signs

Signs I saw today - on the Doctor's surgery (I kid you not) 'walk in's welcome'. On the florist's next to the doc's 'flowers for bar and hat mitzvahs'. Yup. And in the corridor that leads to the loos in the shopping mall where the offices of the career planning people are, 'service penetration prohibited'. Phew.

Today we did personality stuff. Interesting. In some ways, it's the stuff that goes on in between the stuff we do that is the most revealing. An example. Yesterday we did an activity to find out our values. Most people put appearance and popularity last. One man said that we don't value appearance because none of us has to really worry about it.
At lunchtime, I managed to spill balsamic vinegar salad dressing on my light-coloured top, couldn't remove it with a wet wipe, and then was pre-occupied with it all afternoon.
I learnt that lesson alright.

People-watching is fascinating. Some people you can see are just ordinary people that have fallen off the bus through no fault of their own, and simply can't get back on. Some, you realise, would never catch it in the first place. And some genuinely have gone as far as they can go on that particular bus and need to work out which one to catch next.

And now it's hot, quite, quite hot.

Victim Blaming

So, at the career planning today, we had a team activity. We were told a story, illustrated with a map, and then given a question to answer.

The story was as follows.

A woman and her abusive husband, live with their two children, on one side of a river. The woman has a man friend on the other side of the river. She goes to visit him and then finds she doesn't have enough money to pay for the ferry back. The friend has no money to give her. The ferry captain says if she can't pay, she can't take the ferry. There are piranha in the river. There is a bridge, but it is 'guarded' by a bandit who is known to shoot people. She takes the bridge and gets shot.
The question is, who is most responsible?

The group I was in, went into another room, and one man and I immediately said, without any collaboration, 'it's obvious! It's the bandit!'.
The others said, 'it's the woman's fault.'
'But that's the same as when a woman is blamed for 'getting herself raped','
'Oh, yes!' said one other man, 'you're right, it is like that, I get it,'
Another man said, 'oh but all sorts of people are responsible,' and the first man said,
'Well, there are contributing factors, but you can't argue that the bandit isn't responsible,'
'Oh,' said man three, 'yes, contributing factors, I like that, no, you're right.'
The two other women in the group still felt the woman was responsible, but actually couldn't argue with the conclusion.

The other group all felt the woman was responsible. They had various reasons for blaming the victim, she shouldn't have left home, she shouldn't have tried to get back, she shouldn't have left home without enough money to get back, and she knew the bandit shoots people.

It worries me. It illustrated a couple of things to me, one was that not everything can be decided by consensus, because sometimes, there is just a right answer and a wrong one. Secondly, that good leadership is essential to good decisions. This was demonstrated because of this conversation with a woman from the other group.

'I think it was the woman's fault,' she said, 'because I think about my sport of roller derby. I know that an opponent is going to go all out to win, so if she injures me, well, I knew the risk,'
'But this isn't the same situation,' said I, 'to use your analogy, if the opponent deliberately killed you, then it wouldn't be your fault, because when you go into the game, you might accept the risk of injury, but you don't agree to be killed,'
'Oh,' she said, 'you're right,yes, that's true.'

Victim blaming is wrong, and it is always wrong. Sometimes people do things that put them in risky situations, but ultimately, when one person deliberately takes an action against another person that deprives that person of their life, or dignity, or control over their own body, that is simply wrong and in many cases, illegal.

The Return of the Non-Native

Back.
We had a lovely week and a bit, Laurence was with us for the first weekend and was supposed to be with us for the second, but the wheel fell off the wagon to some extent.
The weather at each end, each weekend, was spectacular, but during the week - a bit of a curate's egg.

Whisky, the little sea-dog, got to ride in his trailer behind Kevin's bike, along the seafront, romp on the beach, and do a bit of whitewater kayaking. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but there was a bit of white on the waves.

I read books and we watched films.
We watched the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film, 'Paul' - brilliant, funny and referential. Superb. 'Red Riding Hood' - excellently atmospheric. 'The Lovely Bones'. Sadly, that was complete shit. And finally, 'Red', which was, if not extraordinarily engaging, at least not disengaging and only sent one of us to sleep, although, on reflection, the one of us was Kev, and it takes a LOT to send him to sleep.

Books. I had a fabulous book week. The first one was 'The Other side of the Bridge' by Mary Lawson, a Canadian author and a damned fine read. The second one was 'Secret Daughter' by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, a good story woven around the horrors and delights of India. But the last one was an absolute page turner and superbly written. 'Mistress of the Art of Death' by Ariana Franklin. Totally satisfying, gripping, historically fascinating and just generally utterly enjoyable.

This week, and for the following two, I am on a course for Career Planning. Today was most enjoyable, I discovered that I need to be many things and only need to spend another ten years at university to do any of them. Still, I was both impressed and depressed at the general educational level of the group and the fact that there was a very similar set of values shared by most. Basically, if you are environmentally aware, are up to your ears in degrees and are concerned about social injustices, you're probably in that group.

On Holiday

At the Static. Be Back Later.

Joining the Dots

So what's everyone talking about in beautiful British Columbia? The tax known as HST. Wow, how fab and fun. Yeah, no.
So here's what happened.
We start off, as you know, with a shit system. Yes, I know shit isn't an adjective, but bear with me. You never know the actual price of anything because it's always quoted before tax. Yeah, I know, don't ask.
Now, onto the goods and services, there used to be added two taxes, GST and PST, and between them, these added up to 12%. The Provincial Government decided to go for a new streamlined system which replaced these with just one tax called HST. HST was 12%. So, no biggie, you would THINK.
Wrong!
In comes rent-a-mob in the form of some clapped out old has-been who jumped up and down and told everyone they were being shafted. Instead of everyone just ignoring him, they get all aeriated and the leader of the Provincial government who introduced it, Mr Gordon Campbell, is forced to resign. Yep, that's what politicians fall on over here, people missing the point entirely, unlike in Britain, where they get ousted for more important reasons, like having ginger hair, or speaking with a Welsh or Scottish accent.

Still not getting it? Nope, it is incomprehensible. The new tax, being basically the same as the old tax, has caused us to have a referendum, and for people to start talking a load of old bollocks about how it's a bad tax. But these people are seriously confused.

Firstly, the leader of rent-a-mob, let's just call him BVZ, has been simply talking bullshit and pulling figures out of the air, also making them up. This YouTube video, which Gail pointed me at the other day, takes the stupidity apart.

But back to the simplicity about the whole nonsense, the HST is applied slightly differently on some goods and services from the previous two taxes. So what some people seem to be bizarrely unable to see, is that the tax itself is irrelevant. It is no different from the previous two taxes, it is the applications of that tax they should be focussing on. Application, not function.
Egads.

But then, the same thing happened a couple of days ago. Kevin was reading an article which came up with the term 'benevolent sexism'. Utter stupidity, based on the same inability to take in and process information.
So where is the blockage?
Sexism is discrimination on grounds of gender, just as racism is discrimination on grounds of race.
So what is discrimination? Aha - here's the short circuit.
There are two dictionary definitions of the word.

From the OED:-
"

discriminate

Pronunciation:/dɪˈskrɪmɪneɪt/

verb

[no object]

• 1 recognize a distinction; differentiate:babies can discriminate between different facial expressions
• [with object] perceive or constitute the difference in or between:features that discriminate this species from other gastropods
• 2 make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race , sex, or age:existing employment policies discriminate against women

Thus, somewhere, someone has failed to read to the end, someone has not noticed that one definition, is relevant in this context and one isn't. One does not end in an -ism, and one does.
You cannot have a benevolent prejudice in treatment in different categories of people.
Having made one almighty error, the writer apparently went on to list a couple of practices which were intensely sexist, with a bunch of others which were, in fact, not.

No joined-up thinking you see.

Obsessively Boring

Firstly, and possibly most obsessively, I meant to say a tiny bit more about 'Thor'.
Thor's hammer seemed to be emblazoned with a Celtic trinity. This seems odd, since the Celts and Brythonic Britons were constantly battling the Saxons and Norse invaders. In the film, the Norse trickster, Loki, is shown as the (adopted) son of Odin, which kind of works in the film, and yet is annoying in that he wasn't in Norse Mythology. But of course, as long as one doesn't actually believe in the Norse Gods, one can play fast and loose with their relationships, characters and even powers, but exactly that - as long as one doesn't believe in them. Well, but I do personally spend a lot of time reading about Celtic legends and then use them in my own writing as I see fit. I suppose I would never see fit to change parentage because it is part of the character itself. I might meddle with the story, but not the character.

Ok, so secondly, I have been reading about and then the work of, a Californian Feminist, Hugo Schwyzer. And from there, I have been led to the website of a Vancouver-based group, The Feminist Media Collective. There is an exceptionally well-written and argued blog on the site. I listened to their radio broadcast on Monday and it was an interesting piece about the de-criminalisation or otherwise, of prostitution.

Hummus is very filling.

The sun has been shining fora few days now, and it is noticeably warmer, but mercifully, not so warm that I have had to have the air-conditioning on in either house or car.

I dreamt about Anne last night. Every time someone important in my life has died, I have always had this same kind of dream. I know the person is dead, but there they are, and I can talk to them and interact with them, all the time knowing they are dead. I hugged Anne and was surprised how solid she felt.

I had an appointment in New Westminster today. The thing about New West is that many of the roads are called (Number) Street or (Number) Avenue. The streets go one way and the avenues another, it's confusing and a person might easily get lost because they went along a street when they were supposed to be on an avenue, this did indeed happen to me and has done several times before. Oh well. I found the place in the nick of time.

The Male Side

On Friday, I went to look through my friend Anne's books. I did get a bit distressed as I neared her house, but then I saw the signs for a local Realtor, Randy Mann, and this seriously and eye-wateringly un-distressed me. I can't decide whether his name is more amusing than my friend's union person - Brother Moist. Difficult. Perhaps they're both the same person, after all, one could follow after the other.

Thursday, Laurence and I went to see 'Thor (3D)'. Excellent film, I greatly enjoyed this, Laurence, not so much I feel.

I'm currently reading 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver. It was slow to engage me, but now that I'm into it, it has me in its grip. My sons continue to educate me on the continent where I spent my very earliest years. The Congo, however, seems harsh even for Africa. Bible bashing preachers can be even harsher though.

Ecce Vancouver

On the full moon that was Wednesday, the finals of the Stanley Cup were played out in Vancouver, and the Canucks lost. But gracious in defeat. It goes without saying that I hadn't actually watched a game, but it has been as impossible for my sports filter to cope as with Pompey and football, so I know that there has been a lot of foul play, and much of it has gone unchallenged.

After the game was the riot, orchestrated by people who came into Vancouver specially for that purpose. Arseholes. Our friend Steve, who was at the game, said that the crowd cheered the winners, most stayed to witness their celebration, in contrast to the way the Canucks were treated when they were playing away from home.

On the streets, families were told to leave the city before the game had ended, individuals tried to stop the vandalism, bars and restaurants closed because Molotov cocktails were being served outside.

But in the morning - the glory. The people, children included, just went out there and cleared and cleaned up the city.

Ecce Vancouver.

Squirrel

Hmm. Squirrels. In spite of their real place in the batting order, their being rather less-intelligent rats, they are pretty cute and fluffy. Annoying, however.

I had suspected in the autumn that they were stealing my bulbs, eating them no doubt, and most certainly fewer came up than I had expected. Now I have identified one of the mystery plants in my balcony boxes, and I pulled this little batch of baby oak trees from just one container. Yep, squirrels bury acorns and then can't remember where they've put them.

Another mystery plant in amongst my flowers, has turned out to be spinach. No problems with that one, the more, the better. I have moved them to where the spinach grows.

Meanwhile, rocket, which is not going great guns where I've actually planted it, has self seeded by the side of the garage door, and a mighty, robust plant it is too. So flourishing is it, that it blocked the garage door's sensor earlier this evening.

Still, squirrels eh? Rubbish at hide-and-seek, fab as gardeners.

Elephant Day

Saturday was a blue elephant day. I think I may have spoken of the blue elephant before - once, when I was in Germany with a school party, one of them lost their passport and we had to go to the British Embassy to retrieve it. Of course, we had to take the whole seventy of them. We parked not far from the Brandenburger Tor, and two of us went off to get the passport, whilst the other teachers stayed on the bus with the kids.
When we got back, they said they'd seen a blue elephant, and some people had given them free samples of coca cola. All this turned out to be true, they even had a picture of the blue elephant. The sky itself was endlessly blue, and so it all sticks in my mind as a surreal day set against an azure sky.

When I got up on Saturday morning, it was warm and moderately sunny, but snow appeared to be drifting through the sky, twirling and gently falling to earth. It was Cottonwood fluff, and very late in the season to be released.

I had to go to the NEXUS office at the border, and as I drove along H street, speed limit 25mph, a dog appeared and ran along behind the car for a way. It looked well-cared for and had a collar, but there was no owner in tow. Later, as I drove back, it had reached the main road intersection, and was sniffing cars as they stopped at the traffic lights. Impossible for anyone to get out however, without causing an accident.

A road sign read, 'Ped Xing'. Living where we do, and not concentrating, I wondered why there was a Chinese person's name on a road sign, before my brain clicked on again, and I realised it was short for 'Pedestrian Crossing'. It certainly seemed to be nowhere near one.

Another sign, this time by the side of the road, promised 'Camp Wood'. I wouldn't think wood could be particularly camp, but life constantly surprises me.

Paling into Insignificance

I'm finding the whole Margaret Thatcher / Sarah Palin stand-off really quite entertaining. There are just so many angles.

Firstly, there is the fact that medically, Thatcher is suffering from actual dementia, whereas Palin is simply demented.

Secondly, because of this, the whole, 'have my people speak to your people' thing takes on a new dimension. Thatcher has 'a circle', she has 'allies' and as such, they can say what they really think. And they really think that Palers is nuts, so that's what they have said. They really think that it would 'belittle' Thatch, or 'Margaret' as they call her, to meet Palers. They talk about 'the level Margaret punches at', and Palin is beneath that level. Frankly, I have to admire this circle of friends, because they are REALLY getting under the skin of the ludicrous-right wing of the USA, whilst showing that as right-wingers themselves, they consider there to be a serious right wing to US American politics, but Sarah Palin simply isn't it.

Thirdly, there is the very entertaining aspect that comes from the fact that Thatch can't actually speak for herself. Rush Limbaugh for example, blames, not Lady Thatcher, but her friends and the Guardian, because he knows Thatch from her glory days, and she would NOT behave like this. Which has led to this superb quote from Andrew Sullivan, of The Dish Blog,

""As usual, the tired old bigoted comedian Rush Limbaugh took offence that anyone could call Sarah Palin 'nuts,' even though she is quite obviously a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and her grip on reality is, shall we say, tenuous. And as usual, Limbaugh blamed it on the left, ie the Guardian's Wintour/Watt blog.

"What he doesn't understand is that Palin's nutsiness is not a partisan matter in Britain, or anywhere else in the world. It is an obvious truth marvelled at by all. Palin's emergence as a serious figure in American politics has made the country a laughing stock across the world. The idea that a stateswoman like Thatcher, in advanced dementia, would be used by such a crackpot is simply unseemly." "

Give it up Palers, you've been out nut-jobbied.

Just Not Cricket

The German man who lives opposite the Schloss, has been irritating the hell out of me all day. He has been power washing the pavement outside his house since about mid-morning. The equipment he is using seems to have its own generator, and generators make an annoying noise, constant, continuous, but annoying. But aside from that, aside from the ridiculous amounts of energy and water that he has consumed in this project...wtf? Are people now not allowed to walk on the pavement? May birds not crap on it? I mean it's nice when it has a bit of a sweep to get rid of the dead leaves and fag buts, but this looks as though it has been whitewashed. You can just about see it through the hanging basket, gleaming across the road.

Vancouver and its surrounding area, has gone home early. Yes, in the way that WC Fields once said, 'I went to Philadelphia once, but it was closed,' if you came to Vancouver tonight, it would be closed. Well, obviously apart from the annoying pavement washing that continues across the road.
What, you might wonder, would close Vancouver. Well, duh, hockey of course. The Canucks are in the finals of the playoffs and the temperature may be cool on the ice, but it's rising throughout the city.

Back in Blighty however, it is cricket that's getting fans all hot under the collar, and not without cause. The Surrey Cricket Club have outraged male and female fans alike by deciding to use 'walk-on girls' for one of their matches. And you might well wonder what a walk-on girl is. It is just that, a girl, or more likely woman, who wears a lot of make-up and potentially not much else, although this seems to be up for debate, and who walks the guests or players, or some important male people...on. And then she walks off. So a bit like an armed guard, or a nurse in a mental hospital only less useful, unless you consider glamour to be an important function.

A Weekend

We had a weekend. The two of us, together. And the weather conspired to be super duper too.
Luvly.
We cycled, (a reasonably long way, with Whisky in the puppy trailer)we kayaked, we ate outdoors and we had a fire. I swam. We stayed outside all evening because it was just warm and wonderful.

The interwebs however, conspired against us. This wouldn't maybe have mattered but for the fact that it did manage to deliver us a voicemail that was important and needed answering, and it allowed me one outward e-mail and then that was my lot.
Ah well.
It were still a luverly weekend.

Via the F-Word blog, I see that writer and Nobel winner VS Naipaul thinks no female writer his match. Right. Clearly he simply can't read. But the interesting thing about this article is that at least the first batch of comments I read, were intelligent and anti-misogynistic.

I loved this story yesterday. Brigitte Marcelle, who had been working as a page for the Canadian Parliament, walked in, wearing her uniform, and holding a placard that read, 'Stop Harper'. What backbone!

TV, as I've said, is sparse. Not such a drag when the days are sunny and long. This evening I watched Criminal Intent, which seems to have popped back up out of nowhere.
I was reminded of the difference between the words father and mother when used as verbs. If you say someone fathered a child, it means they supplied the sperm, if you say someone mothered a child, it means they looked after them in a warm and loving way.
One of the characters said of another,
'He has Irish Alzheimer's, he forgets everything but the grudges.'

The Wrong Insomniac

It seems impossible that on Wednesday I felt better. Physically I did I suppose, Thursday, I was a wreck, emotionally. I suppose I hit a really big wave and succumbed.

And yet, although yesterday started early, it started well. One of the residents of our strata complex, let's call him Doris, has been illegally parking his taxi for...well, ever really. He has had warnings, he has been aggressive to his neighbours, he has had fines, which he doesn't pay, and the situation had to be dealt with. For two days running, Kevin, on the request of the Strata Council, had put a notice to tow on his car, then called the towing company.

Wednesday, whilst I was clearing the kitchen, I saw Doris driving his car out at 09.10. I saw the tow truck turn up at 09.25. The tow truck then had to leave because Doris's car wasn't there, it turned right, the driver waited for a couple of minutes, and then drove off. As soon as he or she drove off, Doris reappeared from the left, so clearly it was all a game of cat and mouse.

But Doris was playing his game with the wrong insomniac. At four on Thursday, Kevin was wide awake. He called the towing company. He waited for the towing company. He watched as they towed Doris's taxi away.
And then he came back to bed and dealt with his work e-mail, sending a message to his line manager, who was astonished later on, to have received an e-mail timestamped 04.30.
Still, if you are awake at 4 o'clock, you might as well make it count.

Feeling Groovy

At least, spades better than yesterday, which all in all seemed to be my worst day.

Flaming June.

So, Canada Post are poised to go on strike, at the one time when I am actually WAITING for a piece of mail which will mean I can then send one, and all of this is time sensitive.
And they really do seem unrealistic in their demands when I compare them with the great Royal Mail postal workers, and at a time when snail mail is at an all time low - which has been pointed out to them.
And really, we're in a recession, this is not the time to strike.

The whole 'killer cucumber' deal is not by any means funny, and yet, I can't help thinking how difficult it was to find any kind of veggies in Germany, especially ones that didn't begin with the letter K.
Still, I don't understand why farmers in Germany hasn't learnt from the experience of their sisters and brothers in California with the whole spinach e-coli thing from only a couple of years ago. Furthermore, it begs the question, what are German farmers feeding their cattle? Cattle that are fed corn instead of grass, have 80% more e-coli bacteria in their digestive tract, but why would this happen in Europe?

I'm feeling less groovy as the day wears on.

Summer may not yet have arrived, but summer TV has - ie sweet Fanny Adams on. Last night we watched the old Simon Schama 'History of Britain', the episode about the 14th Century, which has to rate as possibly the least enjoyable century to live in. Black Death, witch burnings because they were blamed for the Black Death, more Black Death, and the now fully grown ten-year old king getting all out of control and then quelling the Peasants Revolt, which, admittedly, was itself quite out of control.
Still, the upside of the Black Death was an end to serfdom, and if you survived it, you may have made out like a bandit in the inheritance game.

Britain has had the driest spring in over a 100 years or since 1990, depending on where you are, BC has had the wettest since records began. Such a pity we can't share weather a bit more.

In my garden, the onions are so far coming up a-plenty, enough for a whole tour-de-France I feel, but the spuds, not so much, and even the tommies, whilst numerous, are somewhat stunted so far. Be we are promised (threatened?) a long,hot summer, so they could rally.

I have finished another good read, 'Lyrics Alley' by Leila Aboulela. Seems like if you want to get something published these days, it'd better be about Africa. Lyrics Alley was set in Egypt and the Sudan, interesting stuff, I won't deny it. Now I have 'The Memory of Love' by Aminatta Forna, which is about Sierra Leone.
Good stuff.

Now I'm going to fade.

Hot and Cross

On Saturday, I spent all day in the Cathedral. This annoyed me and ultimately made me ill. It was too hot and it was airless and the seats were very hard, although that last one may not have contributed to the sore throat, fever and achyness, headache and fiery sinuses.

The morning's speaker was a woman from Kentucky, a very slick, polished speaker. The trouble was, what she was saying started my decline into anger, I feel.

She was speaking to us about parish finances.
On the one hand, she told us basically not to fret about the money we didn't have, 'the resources God hasn't given us', but to use wisely what we did have and to spend the time we save, praying and being nice to people. And you know what, if you say that in a smooth, Kentucky accent, it doesn't sound stupid for a few seconds, a bit like how Kenneth on 30 Rock can say bizarre things in an oh-so, 'this is really quite normal' way.

On the other hand, she told us we should be 'tithing'. Everyone should tithe.
'Wait!' I hear you cry, 'I remember this from history lessons, didn't they do that in the Middle Ages before taxes were formally introduced. And then taxes were formally introduced?'
Of course, good memory.
She (the very large woman from Kentucky who was dressed in bright yellow like the sun), explained to us how Jacob invented it. Mmm..interesting. She entirely left out the intervening four thousand years or however long it is since Jacob, during which time much of the world developed many systems based on the Christian Faith, which is now so deeply embedded no-one actually believes it's there, and one of those systems is taxation.

So then she showed us a little filmed sketch about a family going to a church where tithing isn't practised - ie most. The family had to fish out their dollar notes and credit cards at each stage. Oh my, how much easier would it be if we simply introduced a system of taxation, I mean tithing, was supposed to be the message. However to my now sore and cynical mind it said,
'Why are we going to church? Let's not bother, it's too much hassle, let's just go and do something that isn't so annoying.'

In the afternoon, which lasted over three hours, three hours during which time we were encouraged to go downstairs and finish off the food - the food being in fact, cakes leftover from first thing in the morning, because no lunch is provided, and unless you happened to be on the end of a row, it was nigh on impossible to get out anyway, we all wriggled around on our hard wooden chairs until close of play.

There were the Resolutions, this is really what we were there for, except one man, same as last year, wasted our time by trying to get us to 'direct' the Bishop to play nicely with the homophobes.
We didn't.
But one of the people who felt obliged to stand up and give her opinion on the subject told us that she's learnt from this morning's speaker that homosexual people hadn't been given the resources by God to have sex with the opposite gender, therefore they were not to blame. She actually said that, I promise you.

And the finances.
So, as well as running our own churches, which finances I can assure you are very tight, we have to contribute towards the pomp and circumstance that is the diocesan machinery. Part of that is paying for the event we were attending. Ok, so more foot shooting.

All well and good if you are being paid to be there, or could take time off in lieu, but the majority of us were simply giving up our own time for free, so aside from not providing lunch, and keeping us pinned in uncomfortable chairs, there was unnecessary time-wasting.

A man was there from the Lutheran church, 'observing'. A very dull man who simply told us what he'd seen, because we, obviously, didn't know what had happened. He actually made a joke about the word 'trenchant' because he'd been asked by the bish to make some trenchant observations, as though this was a most unusual word. Clearly he confused trenchant with banal.

Then, there was a woman whose job it was to thank everyone by name. Oh, not those of us who were there voluntarily, no, well, fortunately, but everyone who was there, just doing their job or receiving some kind of honorarium. I know, right?

I was pissed off by the end of it, when they stood up to sing another hymn I ran to the toilet and escaped, my head was pounding and I needed air and I was starting to question everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING.

Now of course, I am sacrificing my third day because it's the second day I've been ill.
And I'm grumpy as all get out.

After the Storm

And after the storm,
Run and run as the rains come
And I'll look up,
On my knees and out of luck, I'll look up.....

M (Bozo5) and I spent part of the afternoon sitting on a low wall in the sunshine, shooting the breeze. Certainly unplanned, we met at our friend Anne's house to go through some of her writing, but her daughter must have been delayed. I think maybe Anne arranged it like that, M and I have spent so many hours talking Oxygen levels, BP and heart rate (all meaning way more to him than to me) around a hospital bed, fearful, tearful, that just to sit on that wall, with the sun shining down on us, and Anne's old basement suite to our backs, was like taking a deep breath.

An Indian lady shuffled back and forth a couple of times, and the smell of skunk washed over us every so often.

They say that if you want to keep a friend, you shouldn't talk about religion or politics, and those are mostly what we did talk about for the whole time we were there. Maybe if you want to test a friendship - sometimes to destruction - those are exactly what you should talk about.

Politically, we probably have common idealogical ground, but to an outsider it would surely seem that as far as religion goes, we are at opposite ends, and yet when it comes down to it, very little separates our views.

And no tears. Until on my way back, when I stopped at Shoppers' Drug Mart, that thing that happens so frequently, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of someone who reminded me of my friend and my heart dropped like a stone.

"There will come a time you'll see,
With no more tears,
And love will not break your heart,
But dismiss your fears,
Get over your hill and see,
What you find there
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair."

Alex and the Pirates

Wild goose chase to get hold of Alex and wish her a happy birthday. I phoned her brother and sister-in-law's house and spoke to pirates. Pirates and a ballerina, but no Alex. I phoned her friends' house in London, but no-one seemed to be there.
Ah well.
In many ways it was worth it to speak to the pirates and the ballerina.


Happy Birthday my darling girl!

Pouring

Quite an odd weekend really. Four days without Kevin and Whisky, four days of weird weather, and in the middle of it, going to see my friend in the nursing home where I see her every week, only this time, she was dead.
She was well protected though. From the walls, the Hindu god Shiva smiled beatifically at her, over her bed a First Nations catcher of dreams or spirits or bad vibes, and cedar at the window, I presume to heal her. Muslims were coming later to perform some kind of last rites type deal, and tomorrow there's a three hour requiem mass. Unless it turns out that Judaism is after all the one true religion, I think she's pretty much covered.

Tuesday evening the funeral rites began. The 'Wake' turned out to have little in common with an actual Wake. It was more of an audience. The deceased lay in her casket at the front of the room, and people spoke about her, then there were snacks, but Kevin and I ducked out at that point. I had feared this, feared my own inability to consign my friend to 'memory', read-only. And feared the unscripted bit, where people are invited to come up and speak. I've experienced this before, and people do feel they have to speak, even when they have nothing to say, nothing can go on indefinitely. But it was tolerable. The family had done an amazing job of organisation, truly amazing.

This morning was the Mass. The original e-mail had advertised 'Full Catholic Mass, 11.00 - 14.00.' (Probably didn't say 14.00, but hey, why not upgrade?) Thus, again, I feared, this time feared a three hour requiem mass. In fact the Mass was over in under an hour, and then snacks.
But I had forgotten the extent to which unreconstructed Catholicism batters innocence with patriarchy. I felt dirty, unclean. Everything was male, feudal. Lord, Lord, Lord. Male priest, male servers, ten (yes, ten) pale-skinned, reddish-bearded Apostles and Caucasian crucified Jesus. Mary, mid-brown haired, fair Mary, the token female.
The priest claimed to, but in truth did not know Anne. And he then 'reminded' us that only practising Catholics could take communion, which in any case was swift, the line being given just a wafer, no kneeling, no gentle words, no wine, just wafer, move, wafer, move.
The family are lovely people, they and my friend deserved better, but hey, that's what she signed them up for.

When I got back, I received an e-mail from someone I used to work with, informing me that a co-worker had died last night. A friend. Not a close friend like Anne, but a woman I liked and valued.

And it's raining again. It never rains, but it pours.

21st May 2011

Today would have been my mum's 86th birthday.

Today my dear friend Anne died, aged 81.

I hope they'll hang out together.

Thank-you Michael for the photo.

Stray Bar

Yesterday, when I phoned the cable company to complain, a message informed me that 'an asiant would be available soon,' I listened twice to make sure I hadn't made it up.

Last week, on the Sunshine Coast, north of Vancouver, a small dog fell from the sky. It fell onto an Old Folks home, my weren't they surprised. It seems the dog had been taken by a bird of prey, presumably an eagle, I can't see that anything smaller could carry a dog, and then dropped. And before that, it had been either a stray, or horribly neglected. It's nails had grown round and into its pads and its teeth were decayed. Poor thing. Added to that the claw marks and broken ribs, and it definitely needs some TLC.

Pu-Pu and the Hat

Ye gods and little fishes, it has been a long and frustrating day, with a few twists of weird for flavouring.

The weather, for the ooh, third day in a row methinks, was glorious, a good-to-be-alive day, an oh-what-an-amazing-place-to-live day. Whisky and I had errands in Steveston, so I took him for a walk by the river whence Mount Baker can be seen in all its majesty.

After lunch however, things started to stall. Firstly, the internet was being flaky. Sometimes when this happens, a simple reboot will suffice. Sadly, the computer decided it didn't want to come to life again until Kevin had come home and sprinkled magic engineering dust on it and said abracadabra a few times. Hmmm...I really do him an injustice there, since that makes it sound easy. Anyway, resurrection did eventually take place.

In the park, Whisky saw his friends Toby and Newton, and another dog whose name is, I am told, Pu-Pu. Pu-Pu's owner was sitting on the grass wearing his 'should-have-gone-to Specsaver' glasses and one of those hats that look like a small umbrella that attaches to the head. In camouflage green.
Yesterday, there were 8 dogs and their owners, all speaking Cantonese, except moi of course, it made me wonder whether Whisky were the only dog who doesn't speak it, is he disadvantaged as dogs go?

On the way back, a boy racer in a penis extension car with the windows down was driving too fast and erratically, as they usually do, yet incongruously, the music blaring from the stereo was Nessun Dorma.

But back to today, the day that kept on giving. I took Kevin and Whisky to the Static, and our usual 45 minute journey took two hours, a semi had ploughed into the median on the freeway, so we did a mighty long stretch in first gear. Gaagh.

On the way home, I arrived in Blaine just in time for the longest train I've ever seen to be rolling along the track that crosses the main road. It looked as though it comprised all the leftover bits and pieces that were lying around in the train yard at the end of the day.

Back on the 99 on the Canadian side, late night road works were going on, the smell of skunk, mixed with tarmac, as though a steamroller had mowed one down.

And so to bed.
Goodnight.
Mwaah.

Zowie

According to Andre and Jeremy, who e-mail me regularly,thank-you lads, Uganda has caved to global pressure and abandoned its evil bill that would have allowed homosexuality to be seen as a crime, and one punishable by death. Excellent news.

I do have a fair amount of religion in my life. Religious arguments for life after death are unconvincing, and utterly dependent not on logic, but a sort of 'get out of gaol free' card known as Faith.
In short, the arguments don't work, you just have to believe it's so.
And there's a lot of motivation for believing that it is so. It's almost impossible to contemplate our own cessation, or that of people - and for some, animals, we love. And it is this that speaks to me at the moment. When I go and visit my friend Anne, I simply cannot believe that just because her body is giving up, that Anne will cease to be. The past two weeks, she has been ill again. Last week, mostly asleep, but whenever she did wake up, she was immediately Anne.

Ever wondered what happened to Zowie Bowie? Seriously, you never wondered? Well, according to a copy of The Week, that I recouped from Alex's recycling bin, he changed his name to Duncan Jones at the age of 18 and has been leading a perfectly normal life, well, granted he's a film director, but that aside, normal.

Monkeys, Zeitungen, Stupidity

Haha! At last! Blogger has been 'read only' for two days.

Yesterday, I spent a whole load of time sitting in the car in neutral and moving forward in no higher than first gear. In front of me, a sticker on the back of a car warned that said car contained little monkeys. I really would like to know whether any research has been done to find out if the whole 'baby on board' sticker phenomenon has made any difference at all to the way people drive. It just seems to me that anyone would drive as carefully as they could all the time, and if you're an arsehole driver, would this sticker suddenly transform you?

This week has seen the sudden rise to fame of a little known Orthodox Jewish newspaper, die Tzitung, by virtue of its having shown the now iconic picture of President Obama's inner circle watching the take-down of Osama bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton photoshopped out. The other amazing phenomenon is that the comments on the Jewish Techs' blog, where the story has been discussed, are so incredibly sane. One points out that this sect of Jews are 'our (their) crazies' - well we all have plenty of those, don't we? Another asks, why, if the picture of Ms. Clinton is so offensive, would they print the picture at all. Another points to another Orthodox Jewish newspaper, where a picture of Bibi Netanyahu's government, was printed with the faces of the two female ministers replaced with male faces. Quite bizarre.
Of course, the assumption is that Hillary's picture was omitted because merely showing a picture of a woman inflames the passions of men beyond endurance, and they shouldn't have to endure, natch, but my theory is that they couldn't show the horror on her face.

A 'for goodness' sake get over it' story also had mostly sane comments. Parents (white, privileged) at a school in the city of Burnaby, protested when the Principal wanted to add a clause to their anti-bullying policy, prohibiting bullying on grounds of homosexuality. One problem for them is that it marginalises heterosexuality.
'Heterosexuality cannot be marginalised,' says one commentator, since it is considered the norm and therefore dominant. Exactly.
But no-one's standing for this nonsense anyway. The students want the clause in, and say that the parents can butt out, they don't go to the school, and the Principal says he doesn't care how many people protest, he wants to be able to sleep at night knowing that he's done whatever he can to prevent discrimination.
Plus, do these parents want their kids not to be able to get on buses, as happened when the Little Flower Academy discriminated against a teacher in a same-sex relationship?

Give Us This Day.....

Our Daily Red.
Happy Birthday Sleepy, bottoms up to you!

So, we have a bit of bother at the Schloss. It involves Laurence, but I can't blog about it, though I'm fine to share details with anyone who e-mails.
Anyhoo, suffice to say, it has been and will continue to take up a fair amount of our time, energy, sleep, and peace of mind.
There have also been some rather odd coincidences, spooky stuff, however nothing so far that tops the 'Bruce' word verification when I commented on Raymond's blog when Anne was at death's door. (Bruce, Raymond, Anne and I were all part of the same writers' group and Bruce died).

I now get e-mails from an e-card company, and I thought it rather over the top that this week they have Osama bin Laden cards - until I saw the message, 'All I want is a job where my existence is as politely ignored as bin Laden's was in Pakistan'. Chortle.

The office where I got the oximeter rang up to ask for it back (I returned it bright and early last Friday), then they rang back and apologised for the previous message. It was someone else entirely they were supposed to ring. I'm guessing the results won't be waiting for me at the doc's tomorrow.

I've just read 'The Island' by Victoria Hislop. Interesting premiss, and horrifying. Until 1957, the island of Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete, was a leper colony, and the story follows the lives of two members of a family who develop leprosy and are exiled on diagnosis, leaving behind the people they love, with no hope of return.

Frightful Upstart

So, this morning, on the CBC news, so our equivalent of the BBC, the newscaster asks a young woman of 20 who has just been voted in as an MP, whether this made her frightful. Good grief. No shame, no shame.

Then Laurence showed me a You Tube video of his company, and the owners were being interviewed.
'This is a new, upstart company,' says the incompetent interviewer. I'd have slugged her for that. Well, not really, but I'd have wanted to.

Tonight, I have to sleep attached to an oximeter, this is a machine which will determine whether I have sleep apnoea. I figure it can only determine that if I can sleep while attached to it, otherwise, it'll be one long apnoea.
We'll see.

The Fire

Yesterday evening, when Kevin took Whisky out for his pre-bedtime pee, he noticed what looked like a huge bonfire behind the houses opposite us. In a manner of speaking it was. From the upstairs window we could see that some buildings not too far from where we live, were on fire. The Fire Brigade were already there, and thereby hangs a tale, because they had warned that if these particular wooden-framed buildings went up, they had been built too high for their water cannons to reach.

And unlike in any TV programme, where person A rings person B and tells them to turn on the TV and lo! They are just in time to see the exact news item their friend wanted them to see, we turned on the local news just in time to miss the item, and then the cable provider went down, followed by the power across the street.

This morning, there were lumps of smouldering charcoal in the dog park, and more significantly, on the path that runs behind the houses - this path being on the edge of peat bog. This afternoon, Cambie Road, where the fire happened, was still blocked off and guarded by police vans. The scene of the fire was still smoking.

This evening, the larger pieces of charcoal debris had been trampled and spread about.
Ahead of us we could see Whisky's friend Peanut going for a drag. Other dogs walk, or saunter, sniffing everything around, Peanut, small, but not accessory small, and certainly not an overweight dog, simply lies down and refuses to move,so that she has to be dragged along.

Since I've lived in this city, there have been some remarkable and spectacular fires, one caused by a small plane, piloted by a man with a known heart condition, ploughing into a block of flats in the centre of Richmond. Another, caused by a small plane ploughing into some buildings behind Ikea. This one seems to have no small aeroplane involvement.

This morning I visited my friend Anne. She was waiting for the doctor to come, as she has had a bad and rather rough sounding cough since Easter. The male doctor arrived, sadly, as I suspected, one of my own countryfolk, and in spite of his North of England accent, was as condescending as only we southerners can be. My friend wanted to query the dosage of one of her meds. He went and fetched the report that came with her from the hospital. My friend and I were sitting in chairs facing each other and he was standing to the side, but between us. He opened the report and turned to me,
'Can she read this?' he asked,
'Better than I can,' I replied.
It reminded me of the old BBC radio programme for people with disabilities. It was called, 'Does he Take Sugar?' because that's the way people with disabilities are often treated.
To be fair to him, many of his patients there are...well, not all there, but still, my friend is sharp as a tack and could run rings around him with anything involving words.

Beltane

...was yesterday. And a very good Beltane it was, warm and sunny enough to put my plants out, and since today it is raining, yet still warm, they look fairly happy for the time being.

The death of Osama bin Laden finds me oddly elated. I wonder who'll play him in the film? Probably Jake Gyllenhaal. This is quite the coup though, and I hope it'll go some way towards pacifying President Obama's detractors. Here is a President who doesn't waver when it comes to protecting his people, but who will honour the dead, giving a Muslim funeral service followed by burial within the time frame demanded by the dead man's faith.
I do feel (personally) let down by Pakistan though. They have not acted honourably in all of this and I don't think we should let them play in the Test Match until they've shown us how sorry they are. Maybe they could stand in the corner too.

Yesterday's sermon from visiting priest Lois, was very good. She talked about the importance of 'Doubting Thomas', who wanted proof. She emphasised how vital it was to question and to come out of our comfort zones, and she quoted Frederick Douglas, 'They want rain without thunder and lightning.' Lovely.
Personally, I like rain, but thunder and lightning are a great bonus.