October 2006

Halloween suckage

I haven't done trick or treat but once before. I have noticed, though, that they seem to start at 3:30 and finish by 6pm at sunset. So this year Dan's here and he wants to do trick or treat. He's bought a mask way back in september and he's all excited. Ok, I'll go along with that. We both get into it. He more than me in terms of costume but I get decorations and candy. We cancel the job accidentally booked for the afternoon so he can do it with me. I don't want to do it if I"m by myself because I really don't want to play door guard at all. I hate sitting waiting, watching. Drives me nuts.
So the day comes and we decorate. The place looks fantastic! Spider webs, pumpkins, a severed head hanging from the trees, even a skeleton with blinking red lights in his eyes behind his sunglasses. All goddamn day Dan's complaining that "it's cold, it's so cold, boy is it cold out." It's barely below freezing out there! Granted the wind is blowing hard enough to keep blowing out the jackolanterns but still! I finally just say "No, it's not that cold, definitely not cold enough to keep bitching about how cold it is!"
Time passes and nobody comes. Nobody. Nobody. We sit down to supper. Someone shows up. Of course. We finish supper and no further. I step out into the freezing wind and snow to look up and down the street. Then I see trick or treaters down the block, a pack of them. They're heading this way I think. I run and tell Dan it's show time. "I'm burnt out" he says to me. FROM WHAT???? I didn't want to do this shit in the first place and now you're bailing when it starts? Fer fuck's sake. So I sit there fuming in my bright orange suit and purple witch hat, itchy crap stuck to my face (aka makeup) and seeing people drive by, stop, keep driving, walk by, stop, turn away and keep walking.
So I say fuck it. I ask Dan to come help me pack it up. We're out there and THEN kids show up. Not a lot but enough to really interfere with packing up! We dish out candy in huge handfuls and then Dan tries to rush me with getting the skeleton, uncle bob, put away. Every five minutes he's "So should I get the skeleton now?" I'd repeat that it's last because we'll be in the back and i want the place dark and cleaned up so there won't be any kids showing up. Dan's comment? "Who cares about a few, so they show up and we're not there, so what." We finally get everything packed up and more kids show up as we're getting uncle bob, that is I"M getting him into his chair. Where's Dan when I want his help? Fuck if I know. Oh there he is, ready to grab and wrench the chair "he's light, I can take him myself" fast enough that bob falls out of his chair. Dan gives me shit for not putting him in right. I tell him yet again that I already told him that this thing is incredibly fragile. He grabs it again and the legs start to fall off because they'r ebeing tossed around. I haven't even had a chance to say "hey, you have to carry it this way to get it through the doors and someone holds the legs up so they don't bang the chair and let me shut the door and turn off the lights. I call out "hold on, his legs are falling off." He gets pissed and walks off, in front of all these kids coming up the walk! I dish out candy again and they go and I go inside and ask dan, will he shut off th elight and close the door for me?
I gently get bob down and awkwardly carry him by myself to the back, set him down, go inside and take care of the lights and door that Dan didn't do. I go out in the garage with bob, put him back. When I get back in I yell at Dan for his disappearing and temper tantrums. He just doesn't get it and leaves for work mad with me mad a him.
What is it with a man over a half century old that still has temper like a child? Goddamn. I am NOT going to do this shit again next year. Fucking blizzard out there and the kids won't come to my house because it's too scary? Fuck 'em, fuck the candy, fuck the bullshit. You can't decorate early because there's always a few little shits that steal and break your decorations.
Oh, and all this is MY fault because I was wrong about when the kids come out... It's my fault he loses his temper. Yahhhhh, right.

sunday evening tiles

So here I am in a flooring store amusing myself with my laptop. Forty years ago that statement would have meant something much less innocuous... Hard to imagine that this computer couldn't exist and back then a 286mhz super computer took up a whole block four stories high! Astounding power in this little notebook computer, truly mind blowing, and yet so ordinary. What a miraculous age it is!
Dan is huffing and puffing over straight lines and perfect corners on the floor over thataway _>> He's a perfectionist. It really slows him down but also guarantees he's always employed. Better slow and sure than fast and empty.
Above us little webcams painted into the walls watch closely, I'm told they include speakers so the big kahuna can listen in too. Kinda sensible but also kinda creepy. His store! Frankly I'd do the same. From what I can see there are only two and they have limited viewing range, only enough to encourage honesty. We wouldn't have been up to anything anyway. Heh. I can't dance naked with all those windows up front! Assuming I'd do such a thing. Hee hee.
Tiles on the floor. He's doing layout. I just went through a few stacks and picked out the damaged ones. Not much for me to do, I'll probably read a book soon. Not having i'net access slows me down on the computer, LOL. I would watch a movie but I think Dan needs the music playing that's playing. I want hand lotion. ~sigh~
Ok, I'm going to go read. I got this book called Crones Don't Whine.
It's pretty much about growing old more gracefully and I'm getting old enough to pay mind to such things

a tiny magic.

I got these lovely prayer beads. They broke. I restrung them on wire. They broke again anyway. My mother suggested it was a "message" and I hotly rejected the notion. A bit too uncomfortable for me! Today I bought a tibetan brass pendant that is a powerful symbol and hung it on a ribbon. It fell off. Curiously enough, the ribbon was neither broken nor untied and the ring from which it had been hung was tightly closed and intact. Completely mysterious, and possibly the first real magic event I've seen. Something that defies logic or rules of reality. Ok, so there's a message. So I thought on it as I pedalled home, asked and pondered. I'm not to wear these things. I can have them. I can use them, but they are not jewellery. It's a hard thing to accept though. Hard to accept that I'm not somehow inherently spiritually connected or special. I am not special or mystical, enlightened or wise. I am only one more suburban middle aged woman. Hard to accept yet important. After all, there's nothing wrong with being just another person in a crowd. It doesn't matter and there's no shame in it. You don't have to be "someone" to count. You don't need any special talents or purpose either. Still, I'd like to matter more. I'd like to be someone who does something that matters. I suppose everyone would like that. I shall have to let this rest in my heart and wait for my magic opportunity to rise above my petty selfishness I guess. For now I shall wear necklaces, not prayer beads. But it'll be awhile before I stop wanting to protest this lesson. You know though, it's pretty special that this magic happened to me. It really was a tiny miracle, the thing falling off the ribbon with no way it could have fallen off! I mean, it really was hanging there, I'd worn it nearly a half hour already! Pretty special, if not what we normally expect our first undeniably magical event to be.

dream

I dreamt I was a little girl sightseeing with my step family in a small town. I didn't like what they were going to see and wanted to see the authentic town instead so I ran off, my step father shouting at me. As I wandered what seemed a forlorn and abandoned town I debated the relative danger of my act in my adult mind. I thought it was pretty safe in terms of not getting lost in such a small place but realized that due to pedophilia not even such a small town was really a safe place for a little girl on her own.
I wandered and eventually entered a building wherein I found a ghastly hallowe'en display of taxidermy and plastic arranged artfully so that it was quite frightening. I examined here and there, chills and thrills coursing through me, then finally exited the building, feeling satisfied I'd gotten a better visit than my family who did the tourist route.

migrating

I'm migrating to a new PC. Not just any new PC, no, but in fact a whole other computer, a laptop! I'm setting the old one as household server, gradually removing the apps that aren't used in that capacity and moving them, "migrating" to this laptop. I just now got thingamablog migrated and got the ftp working so I can easily update my blog from anywhere that I have i'net connection.
This is a tablet pc, the kind where you write on the screen in tablet mode, but it also acts like a regular laptop. Just that you can flip the screen around and close it window up then take a stylus out of it's hole in the body and use the stylus as a mouse, drawing, and writing tool. It has speech and writing recognition and you can input text by writing into the special window for recognition.
I haven't trained the speech recognition yet because it's probably a lot of work and I've been working at installing and setup still. So here's my blog entry from the new machine!
You can watch this youtube video to see it:

horror movie idea

Doubtless it's been done but here's my thoughts.

Firstly, it's inspired by true news. A quiet family suburb near montreal has been the scene of four grisly murder-suicides in the last decade or so. The first was a robbery, second was a schizophrenic son taking out his parents, third was a father taking out not only his children and wife but extended family, and this last is a father and his wife and kids.

I'd switch the order. First I'd have the schizo boy and then his crazy ghost makes the robber go nuts and then after, he gets stronger and gets a dad to take out his family, finally strong enough to make a man take out his entire kin. In this last one, a cousin or aunt or nephew or other related person would be the hero. He'd research the murder, learn of the past murders (allowing for grisly flashbacks) and then start seeing signs in himself, or she'd see it in her husband. Said hero/heroine would enlist the help of an occult expert of the opposite gender allowing for the stereotypical cute couple heroes that drive the evil away. Lots of dead pets could spice up the current action while flashbacks could keep the blood flowing on the rest of the murders.

yah I know, it's mean to the mentally ill to portray one as a murdering evil demon ghost. In fact, he could have originally gone schizo because he's possessed by a murdering demon! Oh yes, this could be a trippy movie. Wish I had the connections to sell the idea and actually get something out of it. But I don't and maybe posting it on the web will at least let my idea have life even if it's birth won't do anything for me. Assuming anyone ever read it...

Joni

Did you leave for money? Did you leave for fame?
Did you leave here honey to make yourself a name?
Now you cry you miss it, this land of endless sky.
You cry about the river and the clouds that soar so high.
Pure white snow reflects starlight loudly,
Sparkling clean and heaping proudly.
Winter lives with fiersome force
A cold so raw your voice gets hoarse.
We only get summer to appreciate winter, of course.
With trees that etch charcoal on the sky.
A sky so blue it'll make you high.
The trees here are proud. They go naked, for crying out loud!
You went down south to sing your song;
Opened your mouth to cry so long.
Now you wish you had a river to skate away on.
We have your river, it's you that's gone.

wake up and smell the coffee

Dan is pitching fits this morning. He has a bad relationship with coffee pots. It's partly because he's not carefully observant enough in the little day-to-day things. Additionally he takes things so seriously when they do happen that he blows up all over the thing like freaking out has some purpose. He thinks it's important. So this morning he's throwing shit around, coffee grounds all over the dishes in the rack and busted the coffee perker (but not the glass carafe, oddly enough.) I'm not sure if it's repairable or not but it looks like we have to buy yet another fucking coffee pot that doesn't meet his highness's standards. There's coffee all over the floor and the dumbass is again trying to use paper towel to clean up when there's rag towels enough to dry a horse around here. So there's soggy drenched paper towel around too. What's wrong with his head that he grabs paper still? I guess he just doesn't know better after years of being part of the american commercial dream.

Madison avenue has destroyed a whole culture and turned an entire nation into dependant morons. They don't know how to do anything without buying the latest *new* bullshit from TV and using it according to directions. Said bullshit is never as effective as the way granny used to do it but granny never taught mom and she never taught this generation because they were all working too hard in the office and worrying about teasing their hair and painting their nails. Besides, isn't housework too lowly for such exhalted persons? Yet housework still needs doing, only now, nobody knows how. It's a terrible thing.

Dan's rages. Well they're like mine only more frequent I guess. I think I'm further along on the maturity scale actually. More aware of how petty the shit really is and more willing to chill out and say "hey, ok, this sucks, I'll accept it. I wish he'd get there sooner. I think my sprite is messing with him. I wish he wouldn't but I think he might be. Either because it's a whole lot of fun, or maybe he figures Dan can learn to be more accepting too. I dunno. I'm not the boss of the sprite, he's his own faery and could, frankly, be a lot meaner than this. He has the power anyway. He isn't mean, mind you, and I'd rather put up with these things than lose his helpful magic in my life. He is extremely worth having around.

I think Dan busted the coffee pot though, Busted the part on top. I dunno if it can be fixed or not. Maybe he needs to switch to a manual filter pot, the kind where you pour kettle loads of water on top.

Ok, done venting.