Category Archives: Schnarr

My Father was a Monster – With a pretty good sense of Humour – I’m left with PTSD & a handful of happy memories.

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Tuesday, June 25th, 2019 – +21˚C / +70˚F – sunny & bright with a deep blue sky @ 11:11 am  –

— “Not a poem” from my friend, Douglas Jay Otterson in the Ithaca, New York area —>

“My Father Was a Monster”

 

1.
He was everyone’s friend at family gatherings
But two swigs later his eyes could turn glassy
his huge strong arms swung violently through the air.
And his roar was as bad as his bite.We never knew what to expect
He was everybody’s friend at home in the kitchen
singing “Daddy’s little Girl” with a big smile on his face
and one of my sisters on his knee.
One slam of his fist on the kitchen table
rattled all the silverware in the house.I don’t think he physically hurt
any one of his daughters
But the psychological terror was always
one or two seconds away.I might have been thirteen years old
when somebody gave me a lockable diary
for Christmas or my birthday.
I kept it in a bureau drawer
under folded tee shirts
But somehow he found it and picked the lock-
-Got drunk at a family picnic and
called me an asshole in front of everybody,
quoted two lines from one of a hundred pages
-somewhere in the middle of the book, middle of the page –
That kind of betrayal never goes away

I started writing in French. And in code.

2.

P.T.S.D.
I was not the only one-
I had friends who would never want to be there
when their fathers came home.
Our babysitter – whose father worked with mine
surprised us one night when dad was working nights
and her father on another shift had just come home.

She’d run out her back door and across three back yards
then down someone’s driveway, maybe another hundred yards
-across a main road and knocked our door.
She was trembling when she asked my mother
if she could hide out with us
until her father simmered down.

We didn’t ask why her father might have been crazy mad-
maybe even not mad at her.
We let her in. And I got sent upstairs to mind my own business.
And her mother called several hours later and said her father had passed out drunk
and it was safe to come home.

I was just beginning to realize when my father was drunk
and when he wasn’t
when he gave me a twenty dollar bill one night and told me to get
whatever I needed.
I bought a pair of shoes that fit me better than the ones I had.

The next day he asked me where the new shoes came from
I was confused, I said, “You gave me the money last night -”
How much? Twenty dollars.
“You took advantage of me, pal-” he began
and he went on a verbal warpath that evening-
demanded the seven dollars change I gave my mother
-terrorized every one of his five kids and his wife.

He raised his hand to strike one of us several times,
but never did – not that evening –
One sister went upstairs crying and he ran up after her
We were terrified
Every nerve on edge
we listened and were ready to jump
and try to subdue a monster bigger than all of us together
if it sounded like he was about to slap or punch a girl-
not even half his size
We heard him using his soft, friendly voice –
“I would never do anything to hurt you-”

He hit my mother twice.
Both times she packed us up and spirited us out of the house.
The first time she had my aunt pick us up and drive us to Vermont,
to her mother and father.
Where my grandfather groped all three of my sisters
and spouted the strictest, straight-arrow, black and white
moralistic b.s. I ever heard.

A couple details are scrambled lately
but I think my uncle came and got me and brought me back home
where we sat with my father and he looked broken and lost
my father looked broken and lost.
I thought he was genuinely remorseful. (I was fifteen or sixteen years old)
He promised to be a better person.
He promised all kinds of things.
My uncle drove me back to Vermont.
We packed up and came back home.

His best behavior lasted two weeks.

Another incident. I was already in Vermont
working at my grandparents Motel, Restaurant and gas station
Running the gas station pretty much by myself at the age of nineteen
for ten dollars a week. (and room and board?)
I don’t know what happened
But my mother and the other four kids showed up and dug in to stay
The younger kids were enrolled in local schools
My mother worked as a waitress and sometimes ‘hostess’
at the restaurant where I was designated emergency fill in dishwasher.

I don’t know – maybe it was a month later
my father found out where they were and came up, got a room in the motel
and threatened to charge mom with kidnapping.
The local Congregational Minister sat and talked with mom and dad
and in the end
Mom broke down and believed him
once again,
believed he could change
believed he could be better.

So they went back home
And I went with them,
thinking maybe he’d be more apt to keep his promises
now that I was six foot three and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds
I got a job pumping gas.
That lasted a couple months,
until I came down with hepatitis

My favorite uncle came to see me and his jaw dropped
he later said I looked three quarters dead.

I was slowly getting better.
The doctor said it might take a couple more months
my father, working his part time job,
delivering oil in an area close enough so he could stop home
to use the facilities, et cetera,
stopped home mid morning and roared
That if I was still there when he got home from work
he’d pitch me out in the middle of the road
He said he knew I got hepatitis
so I could avoid working
and paying him rent.

Ya know, I know-
A lot of kids had it worse
A lot of kids had broken bones and worse

But what convinced me that I had PTSD
was not just the nightmares.
{ or other weird dreams, like the time
I dreamed he came charging up the stairs
to beat the ‘living cement’ out of me – again –
and I jumped out of my body –
I probably really had an astral projection-
I leaped through the roof and out into a starry winter night,
bare trees, cold wind-
I turned around and saw through the walls and saw my bedroom
in bright sunlight
with the bed made
and nobody in it –
If this wasn’t enough to scare me –
I knew that I had not completed the task
that God or one of the ArchAngels had assigned me –
I hadn’t written my books
and I snapped right back into my body,
it was still night, and nobody had run up the stairs
in a bloodlust
to beat up anybody.

I was amazed at how miraculously relaxed I felt }

I had several dreams in which my father fell asleep or died
while driving a family car
and I tried to climb out of the back seat, over him –
to get into the driver’s seat
and steer us to safety.

Most nightmares had invisible demons coming after me.

but worse than nightmares –
whenever he threatened me – or my mother,
or seemed on the verge of losing control
I had immediate visualizations of anything within reach
that I could use as a weapon
and a felt myself summon the adrenaline I’d need
to smash his skull or drive a knife into his jugular vein,
give him a karate inspired knuckle punch to the adams apple –

I somehow never lost control –
well- one time
a dog followed one of the kids into the house
they were petting him.
My father picked the dog up and
violently
threw the dog down the stairs
didn’t break any bones
but it yelped and ran like crazy to get away –
And as my father started screaming
“Who the Christ Jesus let that dog into the house?”
I jumped out of my room
with blood in my eyes and
was half a heartbeat away
from pushing my father down the stairs
At the last moment
I turned and smashed a hole two feet in diameter
in the sheet rock wall at the top of the stairs.
He didn’t hear the crash
as he was roaring and stomping down the stairs.

The next morning
he discovered the hole in the wall –
Asked my mother about it
she told him he came home drunk and he did it.
He’d already kicked and punched through a couple other walls
he believed her. (I think she only lied in life or death situations.)

Years later, working at the post office
seeing supervisors and managers bullying
powerless employees,
vandalizing post office property and blaming custodians
they wanted to get rid of any way they could-
lying on official documents and when, in the grievance process
they were confronted with evidence that they’d lied, they’d reply
“Management has the right to make comments.”

At the post office-
I never came close to bashing any skulls in-
but I did have to walk away and calm my breath
several times

It took me two years of
delivering newspapers
of an unethical publisher
in New York State –
Out – driving throw-away junkers
on a two hundred and fifty mile loop through three counties
away from supervisors and managers
making peanuts, actually losing money
as they double charged everybody that worked for them
and claimed I owed for more papers they never issued to me-

it took me two years of fresh air and sunshine
and wind and rain and driving snow
before I could think about idiotic post office supervisors
without imagining me in a dark foggy alley with a metal baseball bat
watching them approach, half drunk and bragging about how they
got to the Puerto Rican guy they didn’t like,
and got the African American custodian to resign for health reasons
when I was no longer there to protect them –

I would have loved to see the look on their eyes
when the cop they called to press charges against me
for smashing windshields and slashing tires on post office delivery vehicles
when the officer was a friend of the family and laughed in their faces,
“I know that man – he’s working for a newspaper three hundred miles from here-
and has been for three years now.”
This was somebody who’d listened to me ‘belly aching’ about the nonsense
those supervisors were pulling against innocent employees
And he only half believed me, thought I was exaggerating.
Until they tried to frame me for something
some other stressed out postal worker
or random pissed off customer
or slithering supervisor committed.

It took me at least another decade and a lot of yoga
to calm myself down to where my first thought-
when faced with slimy evil manipulating son of a guns –
was not, “yeah, the world is full of idiots”
wasn’t even, “Let it go – somebody will get even with someone like that –
don’t go to jail because you let him get to you.”
but an actual – “Be patient, God isn’t finished with a lot of us yet.”
or, “There really are two kinds of people on this planet-
Angels in Training and Angels in Trouble. –
And a lot of us have one foot in each camp –
And some of us are centipedes.”

3.
Sixty something years into this life
and I need to work on my delivery.
I fought the anger down
I no longer jump at the sound of brakes
I no longer spend half my life expecting a sucker punch
from a huge right hand.

He was six feet, two or three
When I was more like five foot nine
He weighed around three hundred pounds
when I was more like ninety nine pounds with my ribs showing

He’d often drop or misplace a pen
and start an inquisition with a roar –
“Who stole my pen and what did you do with it?”

a teenaged zit was dinner table conversation –
“What the Christ ya got growing out of your head?”
-he’d ask with a leering grin.

We moved from a project duplex
with paper thin walls and neighbors so close
you could spit out a window and hit their outside walls
We moved to a ‘nicer neighborhood’
where we could hear the large man across the street
roar at his wife with ‘f’ words I never heard
in the old ‘not so nice’ neighborhood.

So I figured every one within three hundred yards, maybe more
could hear every tirade – would know we kids could drive a saint to swear
could hear that my mother belonged in a luney bin,
Could probably wonder what the hell it meant to be told,
“You sound like someone with a paper asshole.”

The really scary part was –
He could be warm and affectionate
and even make sense
So there were times when I doubted my own sanity
and thought I might have judged him wrong
judged our whole situation wrong.

But then my middle sister reminded me of the time
He knocked me down in the back yard, knelt on my arms,
removed my glasses and pummeled my head with both fists
screaming, “Give me a knife, I’m gonna kill him. Get me a knife!”

And we never knew what set him off.

If we didn’t have a clue about some evil deed he was accusing us of –
we’d often hear, “Don’t play Mickey the Boo with me, pal-”
and maybe need to duck or get smashed
-so who the hell was Mickey the Boo? None of us knew.

4.
The woman I love probably saved me from an early grave
in more ways than one.
At a critical time in ‘my life’
she fell in love with my voice and one poem I wrote.

I told her I’d drive five hundred miles for a hug
and turn around and drive right back if she took one look and went, “ugh-”

I drove more than twelve hours across New York State Highways,
crossed the bridge – went through customs
remembered what she said, answered all the questions
and appreciated the young customs guy’s smile as he welcomed me to Canada.

I called from a convenience store, apologized for taking, what?
-maybe five hours longer than I’d expected that drive would take me?
We met through a locked and chained door
in a semi-public place.
-On a scale of one to ten – I felt like a three
and the first glimpse of her I got
I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s at least an eleven -‘
But we hugged and talked and
she didn’t send me right back home.

Now- it’s seventeen years and a couple months later
And I believe we have the best relationship of any couple
I’ve ever known or heard of.
Nobody’s perfect, but maybe our neuroses mesh
without exploding
And there are times when she’s actually said
she wondered why I stuck around
through a couple odd stretches
that I guess she thinks
would have sent anybody else packing –
and – man – I think I wonder how she puts up
with my ‘quirks and idiosyncrasies’ and outright failures –
I think I wonder about that at least twice a week.

But I found something this morning
I thought we’d used up long ago and I felt good about that
I showed it to her and wondered if she’d found it a put it where I’d find it
And when I asked her if she’d known it was there
She nearly lost her temper and said
she didn’t need to face an inquisition while she
was getting ready for work

I was stunned.
I’m not my father.
Do I sound like him
without meaning to?

Good Grief?

 

— Douglas J Otterson – June 25, 2019 —

After searching for a week – I found “Ghost” – Jon Snow’s Dire Wolf – ‘alive and well’ in the preview for Tomorrow Night’s episode –

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Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – +9˚C / +48˚F – greyish and ‘overcast’ ( cloudy ) @ 12:11 pm in Atlantic Canada –

photo of Survivors of The Long Night ready to burn the bodies of those that did not survive.

– It took me all week and probably ten minutes of pausing and reverse -pause-forward-pause- pause-wait- reverse- pause – AHA! to see what others saw last Sunday night in the USA after Game Of Thrones – Season 8 Episode 3 “The Long Night” gave us all PTSD relapses 😉 Ghost the Dire Wolf is in the above photo behind Samwell Tarly and Dany. { Right 4th of the photo } –

— “Ghost” the all white Dire Wolf – went galloping off beside Ser Jorah Mormont and the Dothraki horde as they charged off gallantly to face the White Walkers and their army of the dead.  After that initial charge we did not see Ghost again.

— I’m a fan of “Talk the Thrones” – which moved to the ringer dot com last year after HBO or who{m?}ever failed to bring them back for season 7. – And – After Mallory Rubin let us know she was worried about Ghost’s fate –  somebody texted her during their broadcast that they had seen Ghost in the preview/ teaser for episode 4. I tried most of the over night last Sunday into Monday – and couldn’t find that trailer/teaser/preview on HBO Canada up here in New Brunswick. – Then I found a couple different versions of the official trailer – or maybe what I found was that my computer skipped over subliminal very quick frames and showed Euron Greyjoy’s fleet at the beginning of one trailer and just a quick subliminal blip of that fleet in another. A trailer from a UK site was the most complete. I was able to see that the two ‘living’ dragons had both survived that insane battle but the rest of the ‘trailer’ flipped past so fast I could not see Ghost anywhere.

— I tried to surf in to any between program trailers I could find on HBO Canada and that was a waste of time. So When GOT s8e3 came on at 5 am here this morning on ‘HBO Canada West’ I watched it for probably the tenth time in 6 days and was able to notice a couple split second flashes of things I missed in the first 9 viewings –

Close up of the top photo

– Extreme closeup – from a non-4K television monitor – and this is what I got – but if you can’t find Ghost in the top photo you may be able to see him here. –

— I think Bran may be remote viewing me here – this closeup is so unclear that most details are lost, but there’s the Dire Wolf. { Yay! }

— && I better post this before I start to worry that maybe the Northerners and what’s left to the Dragon Queen’s army are in for an even more horrendous battle in the south. After they saved the continent from the undead – will the evil, power-crazy, unethical slimeballs in the south be able to hang on to their evil empire after all?

— Not quite a spoiler —> We’ve heard hints that we should watch episode 5 on the largest screen we can.

— Yay?

~~~~~ Jim

New Year – Progress?

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– Thursday Morning, January 10th, 2019 —> -2˚C / +28˚F —> dark & snowing very lightly around Fredericton New Brunswick @ 2:34 am –

Jessicka by night.

– “Jessicka by Night” –

— {{{ Jessicka was a main female character in my NaNoWriMo novel last year –  which still needs a bit of ‘fleshing out’. Her father was the head of a university’s psychology department and he grumbled at their family dinners about ‘non scientific’ ‘Morons’ who filled people’s heads with nonsense about life after death when the truth was obvious to him that the human brain manufactured fantasies like near-death experiences because the average member of ‘the great unwashed’ couldn’t face the ‘truth’ that there was no god, there was no after-life and their pitiful little egos would simply cease to function when their heart stopped pumping and their physical brains shut down. Her mother was a nurse with a warm, nurturing nature, who quietly muttered things like, “Never tell your father I said so, but I believe his ‘scientific approach’ is full of holes – he dismisses anything that does not support his pre-judged attitude on any subject. I rather think the human mind only functions when it is open to possibilities that have not been satisfactorily been dis-proven – and I rather call myself a militant agnostic: ‘I don’t know and he doesn’t either.’-” In the opening chapters of the novel Jessicka goes through a nightmarish experience that could shatter the sanity of almost anyone, and as she is nursing the man who saved her from a hellish death, she feels stinging tears as he describes the near death experiences he has as he’s in and out of a coma. She thinks he’s dying and his dreams and visions just might be the product of a dying human mind trying to shield itself from the truth. }}}

 

— Meanwhile, here on Earth, In case you haven’t been paying attention:

  • U.S. Presidink Donald J Trump appears to be trying to exploit something of a mole hill he wants everybody to believe is one hell of a mountain as he’s tantrum-ing over getting his border wall between Mexico and the U.S.A. { One night we get a news story about drug lords and other nasty people tunneling hundreds of yards beneath border check points to sneak their guns and drugs and killer henchmen into the USA and the next night Donald J Trump is trying to make everybody believe that if they give him 5.7 billion US dollars to build his wall – everybody will be able to sleep well at night – safe and sound and secure —> Until the people who love keeping everyone else in a state of anxiety so they can be easily manipulated into surrendering their constitutional rights and forking over the ‘hard earned dollars’  that jerks like Trump claim they are trying to take back from the ‘tax and spend liberals’ and put into the pockets of the fine, upstanding { ‘White’ } working people. } —> { but – do you have any evidence that all the ‘major tax cuts’ the conservative, republican types have pushed through in the last hundred years or so have put any real money into the pockets and bank accounts of anybody but the filthy rich ‘robber barons’? }
    • & in the realm of G.M.O’s : where nobody came right out and mentioned “Monstanto” :
  • In ‘main-stream’ morning news up here in Canada – on a CBC morning News programme – ‘Information Morning’ on the radio and through the internet – ‘New Brunswick First’ on television – A doctor with no apparent political agenda – talking about the various trials and tribulations of health care in Canada and answering questions about food allergies versus food intolerances – fielded one called-in or emailed-in question with, “Well – for one thing – you should avoid high-fructose corn syrup altogether if you can, it’s no good for anybody.” – implying that high fructose corn syrup caused a lot of gastrointestinal discomfort that many patients believed were caused by some kind of food allergy they couldn’t quite figure out.
  • But then again today, on another programme on the same CBC radio station, another Doctor – & this one sounded to me like he ‘drank the cool-aid’ – responded to a negative comment about Genetically Modified Organisms with, “But what you people don’t understand is: There are a hell of a lot of people on this planet and we have to do something to step up the production of food because our resources have their limits.” —> What this guy missed – or ignored – was all the verifiable research that Genetically Modified seeds have proven to deliver much less harvested food than the ‘old-fashioned’ non-modified, non-proprietary, non-poisonous, { idiotic } seeds that Monsanto sells to unwary farmers who then discover they can’t afford to constantly buy those high-priced seeds every year and the seeds they try to save from the crops they’ve planted and harvested have been ‘scientifically treated’ not to grow.

— I think that’s all the pain I can handle for one morning.

— Time for an extended chorus of “When will they every learn? When will they Ehhhhh-ehhhh-verrrr learn?”

 

~~~~~ Namasté —

~~~~~ Jim

 

From 1993

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Christmas Day, 2018 —> -9˚C / +15˚F – quiet with clear skies @ 4:30 pm as the sun is getting ready to set in Atlantic Canada –

Christmas Morning Sun Rise

– Sunrise – A little after 8:45 am this morning –

— Cathi found a notebook of mine from 1993 –

Who Am I ?

 

I believed

I was the electric silence

that nearly rang inside

and all around my head

-the magnet pull

in my heart

-the questions I held

to the heavens

-the answers I starved

and thirsted for

-the promise to listen

for those answers

-the welling within my

chest

– which reached

through darkness

-and promised to do

the best I could

until I knew

which name

God would call me by –

 

– december 18, 1993

 

 

~~~~~ Jim

“Psychic Photographs” – Evidence of Life Most of us Don’t See?

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— Sunday, September 9th, 2018 —  +11˚C / +52˚F – dark & slightly cloudy @ 8:19 pm —

— Below is one page from our website before we discovered and began to use WordPress :


Aerendel Logo

Haunted Arnprior

These are images that Cathi and I got when we took photos and are not retouched.

• The Gillies Mansion:

Gillies House in 2005

— Cathi took this photo in April of 2005. There was nobody visible when she took it. We both had a feeling there was someone there, I had the impression there was a woman inside, behind one of the windows. We didn’t get a really good look at this photo until almost a year later. What do you see to the left of the chimney, in front of the house?

Gillies house April, 2005

Enlarged slightly.

Spooky Photo

— Now, this one showed up (not through the viewfinder or the digital window of the camera) after I tried to take a photo of Christmas season lights and the mist rising from the distant waterfall (locally called the “weir”). At first I thought I’d captured some fog rising from a storm drain – but then I looked and… no storm drain, no cars had gone by and I had not just exhaled, I held my breath to steady the camera. Then I started noticing what looks like eyes in this photo. And, when I showed it Cathi, and then others, they saw more and more figures in the white stuff. I think this is the most clear photo of whatever this white stuff is that I’ve seen yet, (saw a photo of something that somebody thought was a poltergeist on line a short time ago, but that was blurry and I didn’t see anything much in it….)

!

Special Notices

Radio: Coast to Coast AM

Yahoo Groups Sign In Page

Um, Let’s see… I’m always looking for more things to go here.

I may soon figure out how to imbed a MySQL data base type forum that only okayed subscribers can comment on and put that in here somewhere.

Cat Woman
“Cat Woman”
by Marie Buchfink
(I want to give her a link
 from here, as soon as I find
out where to link it to.)

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— Yesterday —

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Thursday — September 22nd, 2016 — 13°C / 55°F — Dark Damp & Cooler in Atlantic Canada @9:23 pm —

— I have no idea why the latest WordPress UpDate decided this blog should default to an italics font— But I did manage to change it – The “Cambria” font looks fantastic in some blogs but not so hot in this one – hmmmm-?

Ganesh

Ganesh – He was here in one update, then disappeared, and now he’s back.

— Yesterday, All I wanted to do was sit down and work on the novel I’m writing. I’ve been ‘on a roll’ – This is something I began in 1987 – after discovering the world of doing things ‘on-line’. I was part of the SFRT  – Speculative Fiction Round Table  on GEnie – General Electric’s venture into moving to the next step toward what became the internet. General Electric want to make money from this venture. Using that ‘service’ cost something like six dollars an  hour after 6 pm and before 8 am on Weekdays. the prime time rate was more like eighteen dollars an hour. weekends and holidays were also six bucks an hour.

— Writers’ Workshops are a great place to get yourself inspired. What I liked was tapping into everybody else’s ideas. What excited and inspired them. Whether they were producing masterpieces or nothing at all. The obvious stuff didn’t matter. Nobody was going to listen to read part of a chapter or your latest poem, or whatever – and tell you exactly what you had to do to make a million dollars with your ‘masterpiece’. They may tell you that they hate the way anybody still writes anything that includes words that end in ‘ing’. They may tell you that what you’re doing sucks because it concentrates on one little area of life that they don’t want to bother with. They may try to tell you that nothing you ever do will be good enough, because somebody’s already told that to them, about whatever they were doing and in their hurt, they want to hurt others. But somewhere in the mix, between the nonsense and non sequiturs – something happens. In the world of imagination, someone lights a spark and someone else gives it a candle and maybe a third person moves that candle to somewhere that shows you something that you might never have thought about, or points your toward something in the realm of imagination and ideas that fires you up for weeks, even months at a time. Think about this – most people who have written a novel, or any other book, have spent at least a year working on that novel, ( or  whatever ) might have changed details that drove them to distraction five or six different ways, or more, and stuck with it, finished it, did some editing, rearranged some plot elements, believed in their story line and the finished product enough to bring it somebody who might read the first ten words and laugh in their face. They might send or bring their story to dozens of editors and publishers, received dozens of humiliating rejections, and then found somebody who took a chance – and then, not every book that is finished, gets edited and even published reaches more than a handful of readers. Somebody’s imagined ‘best seller’ might only sell to friends and relatives- or might be way ahead of its time and disappear into oblivion only to be ‘discovered’ decades later, maybe after the writer left this world – temporarily or permanently? Left and come back? Left voluntarily or left kicking and screaming – devastated by disease or fell asleep and never woke up again?

— Yeah, so the story I was writing in 1987 hit a brick wall, I didn’t know where to go with it. But I never gave up on it. Sometime in the middle of this August I found a file on a hard drive I haven’t visited in a while and thought, yeah – this story needs to be finished, but I’m not too crazy about this part, or that part or the way it started going off in that direction, or whatever – So I started re-writing from the beginning. I looked up a bunch of things, Word Processor on one screen, browser in another, looking up movies that were playing in various months during the time the story took place – what kind of cars were new that year? What colours did those cars come in? Did they have cup holders that year or did they come later?

— I was over 102,000 words into the re-write- on page 219 using a 14 point Cambria font. ( it just looked ‘right’ ) & like I said, all I wanted to do is move the story along some. — But — I never did get to that story yesterday.

— & Here’s a bit of yesterday’s time line.

— 7:30 am – Checked email, groaned a bit, shook  my head a couple times – followed one link and was just distracted enough so when I got up and left the ‘office’ to see and talk with the love of my life before she left for work, she was already gone. I poured a cup of coffee, made some toast, buttered and jellied it, ate it, went back into the office, sat down, listened to the morning news, which was coming to me through a CBC web site on a mac computer beside the one the bulk of my novel is growing in- /sitting on? The ads coming in to the browser froze that browser, I had to force quit out and start back up again. And then, just after 8:30, in the middle of an interview I was interested in –

— 8:33 am – lost power. no electricity came into the house to power the computer I need to be working if I’m going to write and/or continue writing that story. Now power to the television or radio either. Grrr

— 9:33 – ish am – I called Cathi on a cell phone to tell her we had no electricity. She hinted that she was having a weird day too. Mercury was still retrograding around, proud of itself. I tried resting, lying on the bed. That didn’t work. A while later I needed to get up and go into the washroom.

— 10:00 am -ish – power came back through our electricity lines when I was coming back into the bedroom from the washroom. It was time to feed the pets. and reset a couple clocks, like the one on the microwave, which needed to be set before I could ‘nuke’ a cup of lukewarm coffee. I restarted a couple computers, wanted to take some photos from a digital camera and work on them on the computer that is mostly email and photos, with a little bit of ‘lite’ blogging going on now and then. Then I walked around, let the dog back inside after he wanted to go out and bark at any dogs walking their humans up and down the road he can see from his dog ‘run’ – fenced off area. I think I ‘nuked’ myself some instant oatmeal, then ate it, probably drank some nuked/reheated coffee.

11:00 + something – When I sat down to seriously get with messing around with digital photographs, I discovered the browser was frozen. Then, not just the browser, but the whole computer was frozen. I sighed, pushed the button, turned it off, waited a minute or so and told it to ‘reboot’. The computer took longer than usual to come back to life.

—> 11:30 -ish, am. I discovered the computer did not boot from the large ( 1 terrabyte ) usual external hard drive, it booted from the smaller, interior drive. The external drive did not ‘show up’ on the desktop like it should have. This could either have been a weird part of a routine, it may have been slow to come up online – or it could have been a problem – the blackout might have killed it. So I tested it, moved it over to another computer, plugged it in, turned it on, nothing happened. I’ve had problems with externals drive that have gone to sleep before. When they go to sleep, especially in the past after upgrading the operating system or something like that- updates can be a problem. The trick when they happens is to move the firewire cable to its other ‘home’ connect it with the computer off, turn the external hard drive on, and immediately turn the computer on. When the computer finds the sleeping hard drive it magically wakes it up and everything is fine. It just wanted to see me act like I might scream and throw things or sit down and cry. Okay, tried everything. Nothing worked. It might work in a different enclosure. Maybe something went ‘kerfloowie’ in the enclosure. I plugged in another, similar enclosure that houses two older partitions with Mac OS X 10.4.12 (I think-) for starting up older computers that can’t handle any newer operating systems. Those partitions showed up, no problem, okay, so I opened up both enclosures and swapped the one that was giving me problems into the enclosure that worked fine with the older operating system hard drive w/ partitions. plugged it in, turned it on, turned on a computer, — twiddled my thumbs a bit, and nope- nothing shows up. check inside the ‘About This Mac’ routine, click ‘Get more info’ to check the system profiler select firewire and there’s the problem : “Unknown device” It’s either fried or its connection got scrambled. Okay, time to grit teeth – Back up the 1.5 terrabyte drive with the older system on it. Then erase that drive, make sure it gets the GUID schnarr so it can start a freakin stupid intel mac – install the stinkin operating system, then migrate the stuff that is a year old so none of the wedding photos from two of my cameras and one of Cathi’s, wedding videos from my flip cam and Cathi’s Nikon, And the wedding photos etc are something that takes eight hours to down load, and I don’t know how long it takes to work on them because I was halfway through that and had spent another eight hours doing that grrrrrr-

— Ack! I begin the automated backup the hard drive process, it gets about an hour into that and craps out, says “The file “Moe” is too long and contains characters that are not compatible with this computer-” um — “WHAAAAAAATTTTTT?” So I tried again, “This backup attempt of yours contains backed up and non backed up files- so you can’t back it up-” [ which is utter b.s. ] “WWWHHHHAAAAAAAATTTTTTT?” so I gotta go through the whole process of copying every file onto its nice warm and friendly backup home MANUALLY? one at a time?

—> Time Line for everything that followed:

—> 10:45 pm – Backing up everything manually is finally finished.

——> 10:46 pm Begin erasing, reformatting and installing Mac OS X 10.6 on larger of two partitions.

—> 11:00 (+ something) pm Connect to iMac with good stuff & same operating system – restart iMac holding down the correct key to put it into ‘Terminal Mode’ and select the right hard drive to copy from, begin the migration process:

—> 11:15 -ish pm, Begin!

—> 2:15 am —> “[estimated] 45 minutes remaining”

—> 2:30 am —> “2 hours, 35 minutes remaining”  { “AAAaaaaaaa!” }

—> 2:40 am —> “Transferring Applications Folder” —> No estimate of how long this might take —

—> 2:42 am —> “About 3 hours, 15 minutes remaining”

—> 2:45 am —> “About 54 Minutes remaining”

—> 2:50 am —> “… 45 minutes….”

—> 2:53 am —> “… 29 minutes …”

—>2:56 am —> ” … 38 Minutes… ”

—> 3:13 am —> ” … 4 minutes … ”

—> 3:17 am —> ” … Less than 1 Minute … ”

—> 3:18 am —> ” … less than 1 minute … ”

—> 3:19 am —> ” … l/t 1 minute … ”

—> 3:20 am —> ” … l/t 1 Minute …”

——> 3:21 am ——> “Click Here to Restart Computer ” —> Click!

—>3:25 am —> “Checking for New Software Udates…”

—> 3:41 am —> “Restart after updates…”  Click!

—> Daylight! —> “September 22nd, 2016 and you still have a pants load of snarr to do before you can think about getting back to the photos – and then maybe you’ll be able to get back to your novel — bwa hahahahahaha! I lied – ” -Alzo Spraque l’ordinatuer – And I’m so tired I don’t a chips if anything’s spelled right.

— “Sleep? What a concept -” — Gary [“Scarf”] Gray —

— I did get some sleep, stumbled around in a trance – sat down at the computer at 7:30 am and discovered that several things were still not right, it’s telling me to reinstall iTunes. It’s told me that ‘Google Chrome does not support this ancient piece of shit – wtf is the matter wit U? – U moron!” The version of iPhoto won’t work. I check for updates and hey, “We have another two hours worth of updates for you, kid!” My brain feels like crying at the thought of playing any silly computer games to pass the time while that computer is updating / getting its act back together.

—> um —? Noon-ish? —> updates worked, but now the iPhoto app is the ‘upgrade’ that makes you go through three extra steps to move what you could have moved with a mouse or track ball and an easy ‘drag and drop’ But W.T.F. – load photos from one camera anyway.

—> 3 pm —> “Oh hell with this, time to install the OS on the smaller, half a terrabyte partition.” Fire up the  install disk start up when I’m done, do not migrate anything right off, make sure it works first –

—> 4 pm —> So Speaketh  the Computer,  “Oops, no iPhoto – Oops iTunes is configured wrong, please re-install —> ooops, iTunes is configured wrong, please Re-Install! —> I SAID! iTunes is fupped up, reload the fupping thing! // to which I replied “I reinstalled the bloody thing 4 times, restarted the fupping computer 4 times and it’s still futched up? —> Moving right along —>

—> 4:30 pm —> Migrating “Renard The Third” and “Z-Schnarr The Second” —> ” … About 17 hours and 38 Minutes Remaining …”

—> 5:10 pm —> ” … 6 hours, 21 minutes remaining … ”

—> 8:10 pm —> 6 hours, 24 minutes remaining —> Walked the dog.

—> 8:45 pm –>- “4 hours 33 minutes remaining” Watched the Black List on PVR

—> 11:15 pm —> “49 minutes remaining”

 

—> 12:45 am Friday, 23 September, 2016 —> “Restart—”

—> 1:30 am —> updates loaded —> “Restart—>”

—> 1:35 am —> Updates didn’t do anything —> “Restart —>” —> “Oh, you wanted me to actually install those updates? well just who do you think you are to tell a computer what to do?”

—> 1:45 am —> Computer restarted. looks okay, good night.

—> 4:45 am —> visit washroom, check on computer. it’s still there- fire up iPhoto —> load 646 photos from camera (two years worth of saved photos on the SD card) –

—> 5:53 am —> check out iTunes. “iTunes is not configured correctly, please reinstall—>” Reinstalled four times? Nothing works. log out, relog into top User on this partition. Reload iTunes there? doesn’t work. Reload the workhorse user? click on iTunes, = “Oh, you wanted me to start up? Why didn’t you say so?”

—> 6:30 am —> Your system does not support Firefox, you can’t load it. WWHHAAAAAAAATTTT?

—> 6:35 move firefox from top user to workhorse –  it works – do search for older versions of firefox using safari – hey, only their latest piece of poo-poo won’t work with this vintage operating system The install OS DVD gave us a version that did work – stick your tongue -out at anybody who worships at the altar of planned obsolescence. Dance around and smile at nearby statue of Ganesh.

—> 7:30 am —> wake up Cathi, “What time do you want to get up for work?” — “But it’s Saturday!” — “No, it’s Friday—” Now that’s gotta be the worst ….”

—> 7:45 am -ish —> Cathi’s out the door. The dog wants to go outside. It’s raining. But he wants to go outside.

—>7:55 am —> The dog says “Boof!” half heartedly, but twice – I open the door. It’s pouring rain, I can’t see the dog anywhere, I call him. A big happy very wet black Lab comes bounding from where he was barking at some small animal way the heck in the back corner of his ‘run’ — I dry him off with an old towel, he is deliriously happy for the rub. And the attention. He gets a small treat.

—> 8:15 am —> I fire up a couple programs. Everything seems to be working fine. software update wants to load a security update and a couple other things. —>yeah, go ahead. It wants to restart —> “Knock yerself out-”

—> 8:45 —> updates loaded & installed, Computer Restarted, Fire up the Mail program. —> Mail wants to use your login keychain. —> What login keychain, there never has been a login keychain. —> Wong answer, Mail wants to use your login keychain, please enter your password now. —> drop dead, get outta here —> instead of disappearing in a cloud of acrid smoke, the mail program pops up and looks around bright eyed and bushy tailed and says, “What’s new?” —> so I load about a dozen email accounts. two of them don’t like their passwords. I go into the living room, tell the laptop it’s December 31st, 2037 @ 11:11 pm and send myself a message. The mail app has a nervous breakdown. The malware program says hey wait, I haven’t had an update in 20 something years! the laptop freezes. —> I push the button, kill the laptop, smile at our very handsome and newly clean dog, then start the computer back up. —> programs that I shut off before the laptop had it’s nervous breakdown pop back up and hog all the desktop RAM. —> I shut them down. —> The mail program springs back to life and sends email message from the year 2037 – after I had told the time and date app to set itself automatically, —just before the laptop’s nervous breakdown.

—> 10:00 am —> the cat goes crazy thinking I’ll never feed him again. —> you keep that up, maybe I won’t —> feed the pets, and not to each other, that would be too messy to clean up before Cathi gets home.

—> Noon-ish —> Okay, most of the important programs I’ve tested work fine. —> a couple of them have anxiety attacks on startup and tell me I need to enter their login keychain passwords. I tell them to eff off and they fall to their knees in tears, beg me for a password. I tell them to eff off again and the programs say, “Oh, you want me to startup? why didn’t you say so?”

—> DreamWeaver CS3 thinks all my html files are in Chinese characters. I will be damned before I’ll click on any of them to see what just might happen.

—> iPhoto the happy correct version is sleepy and complains that it doesn’t want to download no 646 photos, but it goes ahead and downloads them anyway and then smiles and says, “See? Ain’t I amazing?” and I say, stick around, I got another three or four hundred photos to upload from two other cameras, and then there’s the video – but flip-share should handle that-

—> the ftp program whines and complains and wants its login keychain password, but after half a dozen “Cancel” clicks it pops up, yawns and says, “Good morning, what can you do for me today?”

—> Firefox is working fine, thank you. Google Chrome is off in a corner abusing itself. Good, I don’t need no stupid Google Chrome.

—> it’s Friday, September 23rd, 2016 – Mercury stopped retrograding yesterday and is now dancing forward across the sky. Bruce Springsteen’s trying to catch up to me in the age department. But I’ve got two weeks more under my belt than he does, and I still like Born to Run and a couple radio stations are playing happy birfday mini concerts of his stuff and then saying it’s his birfday, so Appah Hoopey Bruce!

—> it’s 11°C / 51°F and “overcast” here in this delirious little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 1:35 pm and if they dropped the bomb on me right now I’d deflate their silly egoes and laugh them to death.

Another interpretation of Ganesh.

Here’s another view or interpretation of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. My favourite Ganesh moment was when I was cleaning a haunted building, chanting to myself and realized Ganesh was dancing beside me. Apparently – He liked the chant -(It couldn’t have been my voice – nahhhhhh-)

—> And Ganesh is smiling at me from H.J. d’Aerendel’s last posting – Life is good. for at least the next thirty seconds or so —? Right?

— Schnarr! — 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

 

Fun With Geo-Magnetic Storms?

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Thursday – September 22, 2016 — 20°C / 67°F – & Kind of Grey & Cloudy 4:46 pm in Atlantic Canada —

‘Fun with geo-magnetic storms’ is something like ‘Fun with Mercury Retrograde’ – For the last four or five days people have been more ‘on edge’ than usual. Many people who are usually easy-going and friendly have been ready to ‘bite people’s heads off at the drop of a hat’ –  Last night I read something – on a facebook page no less – that may have shed some light on why people are walking around feeling like human time bombs. (Eek?)

Solar storms that kick huge magnetic  storms out into our cute little neighbourhood  in this material universe, have the ability to scramble human beings’ state of mind. According to ‘Starfire Tor’ – if you’re on facebook, go to her real page, not the ‘fan page’ – funny things happen along with these ‘storms’. Funny ‘sheesh’ not ‘Funny – that’s a good one’ or ‘LOL’ or “LMAO” or ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ – happy bursts of mirth?

Cosmic good guys and cosmic bad guys are apparently able to use solar mass ejections and solar magnetic anomalies which cause geo-magnetic misadventures – to try to ‘correct’ events that humans on the earth at this time may or may not deserve. If you can understand ‘Karma’ as ‘Your thoughts attract consequences’ or ‘good and bad deeds attract good and bad consequences’ / – If you kick the universe, you get kicked back. If you hug the universe, you get hugged in return. –

Look out, I’m about to open the door to parallel world theories and treat them as if they are true. Somebody told me that a big part of the reason that the US political scene is so squirrelly this year is the ‘fact’ that somebody else was supposed to be running for president of the U.S. of A. – but the ‘bad guys’  threw in a monkey wrench and hurled a nuclear bomb somewhere on earth and the Angelic good guys tried to fix that. But trying to fix things on that scale has unforeseen consequences. whoever the sane candidate for U.S. President was or is – He or she is not in the running – not in this parallel –

There may be zillions of possible parallel dimensions out there where you are living your life in your body with your dna – and maybe a few things are different there – Maybe Charlie Brown ran to the red haired girl and gave her a big hug and a kiss and she fell madly in love with him and the Peanuts comic strip was a colossal flop.

Somebody told us that there is a nearby parallel world where MK Ultra victim Sirhan Sirhan was nowhere near Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The guy in the security uniform did not step up behind Bobby and shoot him in the back of the head while glassy eyed, hypnotized, Sirhan Sirhan aimed a gun at nothing and pulled the trigger, giving the real assassin the distraction he needed to put that bullet in Bobby’s brain. In that world RFK was not assassinated, ran for President and was elected, reformed the Federal Reserve Banking system and avoided all kinds of ‘economic fit hits the shan’ nonsense that bankrupted thousands of honest Americans and put all kinds of ‘taxpayer dollars’ in the ‘beedy grastards’/ “Banksters” hands in this world. That parallel dimension is doing fine, thank you. The greedy idiots who are trying their damnedest to control everything in this messed up parallel dimension are out of luck there.

Why aren’t we there? Why aren’t we in any one of a gazillion parallel lives that may be a lot more fun than this one? You may have married the wrong person in that world. You may have married the right person and lost them to an insane accident. He or she may have stepped backward when the wedding photographer asked him or her to so and a space lab chose that micro milli second to fall out of the sky and landed on his or her head. (“ooops”?) – Your favourite, most reliable friend in this life may have had a weird vitamin deficiency over there and become a pathological liar, or been raped as a child and became a sociopath? The possibilities are supposed to be endless. Be careful what you wish for – you might get what you wanted, but jumping up and down in celebration, you may have slipped and hit your head, and developed total freaking amnesia – or stepped on a banana peel, landed wrong and become a paraplegic –

This is confusing. If we’re the ‘main’ Parallel Universe / Parallel Dimension and something horrifically bad happens – does a new Dimension suddenly burst into being and uncountable angelic beings ‘slide’ vast numbers of us from the bad place to the nearly identical – new ‘good place’- ? I began to write a story once, um, thirty years ago? – Something like that – A guy going through a divorce went to a party with his co-workers near the end of May – up here in the northern latitudes – A really cute cousin of a best friend at that party developed a wicked headache and needed a real aspirin when the only stuff they had at the house the party was at was either tylenol or advil, or that other non-aspirin snar. He said he had aspirin at his house and the cute woman said she needs it so bad she’s gotta go with him.

On the way – what should have been a five minute drive became a nightmare as a freak blizzard exploded and dumped six inches of intensely blowing snow in half an hour and showed no likelihood of letting up. The ‘hero’ gets the woman to his house and discovers that the front yard is under six to eight inches of intense snow storm and the back yard is idyllic, warm and sunny. He gives the woman the aspirin, before she even swallows it, she’s all better, they go out back, walk around the house and everything’s fine, but his car isn’t there, and the front door is locked, his key won’t fit. They walk around back and the door they left unlocked is still unlocked, they go inside. Halfway through the house the woman is again incapacitated by the wicked migraine. They can see his car, but they can’t get to it without spending over an hour shoveling. The phone line is dead, electric lines have blown down from utility poles and are sparking on the street. She passes out, he carries her to the bedroom closest to the back door and sits there, stays with her until he passes out, wakes up and the storm is over. She’s awake, but weak and just wants to rest.  He walks to the front of his house and there is no snow visible anywhere, but his car isn’t there either. – That’s as far as I got, what I had planned was – in the next few days they discover that many of the people they knew are not around and nobody else remembers them. It seems like all their most loving, forgiving, altruistic friends and acquaintances are still around, but the short-tempered, conniving, manipulating &/or power-hungry types are all gone.

In my plans for the end of the book, a Native American / First Nations medicine man tells them the wold split in two and ‘all the good ones are here and life is good – all the not so good ones are in the other place, and they are running out of food, they have no electricity or even water. Very bad storms have made it impossible for them to go anywhere and get what they need – they are in real trouble.’

So – that’s my weird take on parallel lives, time shifts and the “WTF is going on here?” weirdness of the past few days.

— If this makes sense to you, we may all be in trouble, or we may be about to step through a door that wasn’t there yesterday and discover paradise where we never thought to look for it, right under our noses.

 

~~~~~ Jim

#BlackLivesMatter

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Friday, July 8th, 2016 — 15°C / 59°F – Very Grey & Cloudy — ‘It’ rained earlier in Atlantic Canada @ 12:38 pm — It’s Alex’s Birthday 🙂 —

Very Young Smoke Tree Sapling.

Our happy little Smoke Tree – this morning at about 11:30 Atlantic Time.

If the above “Smoke Tree” sapling was the only ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ in our lives lately we’d probably be a lot more happier and a lot more relaxed.

— I made the mistake of listening to the news last night before I went to bed and tried to sleep.

— After 2 days of young black men being shot and killed by policemen in the country I was born in and grew up in [ one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – The other in Minnesota ( Just in case you’re reading this in some distant future or purposefully cut yourself off from ‘main stream media’ and never heard of this before right now this minute – ) ] A peaceful demonstration in Dallas, Texas was winding down and people were heading home when at least two ‘snipers’ opened fire and killed at least 5 policemen, wounded at least 6 others and also wounded a couple of civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. One shooter, ‘heavily armed with an assault-type rifle’ & barricaded on the second floor of a parking garage, shouted at police that the end was near and he wanted ‘to kill as many white people as he could, especially cops’. He also told them there were bombs planted all around the building he was in and all around Dallas. So the police tried to talk to him. I believe this ended when an ‘armed robot’ ‘neutralized’ the ‘target’.

— Before I saw video of apprehensive police trying to remain behind cover while they were peering into the parking garage, I saw a very amateur cell phone video of another shooter – this shooter was on the street, standing against a square pillar beneath an overhanging part of another building – at least I don’t think it was the parking garage – This guy knew what he was doing, I believe one commentator said he obviously had combat training. He sprayed a couple bursts of bullets around and then checked his back and looked around, and when he had the attention of several policemen, he began aiming more carefully. We have to take the photographer’s word for the rest of this paragraph – He did not get this on camera: One policeman came up behind the shooter, behind another pillar, moved to where he had a good shot and shot three times, hit the shooter once in the back. The unphased shooter turned and moved. I don’t know whether he feigned in one direction and moved in the other, but he got behind the officer on his blind side and shot him, then stood over the fallen policeman and shot him ‘3 or 4 times’ “Execution Style” And escaped around the corner. He was reportedly captured alive a little later.

— One of the demonstrators who was walking around in ‘camo’ shirt and pants (& I didn’t see his feet) and had what looked like an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, pointed straight down at the sidewalk – had his photo circulated by the Dallas Police as a ‘Person Of Interest’. He reportedly ‘turned himself in’ [ why does no one say, ‘He voluntarily went to the police station’? ] — & The last I heard about him was that he was not a suspect. He was probably a law-abiding citizen, exercising his rights to “Open Carry” – a relatively new law in Texas. I never heard the arguments for and/or against that law before it passed, I am still up here in Canada. – My best guess would be that the Texas Legislature came to the conclusion that law-abiding citizens with ‘Open Carry’ firearms permits would more likely discourage violent criminals from attacking somewhere or someone they most likely believed would be an easy target, someone who could not defend themselves with ‘deadly force’.

— People up here in Canada argue along the lines that they believe they are safer living in a country where it is not very easy for anyone to get a firearm – where almost nobody would be walking around armed and ready to shoot ‘at the drop of a hat’. One person commented, that the shooter who was on the sidewalk and ‘executed the police officer’ most likely was wearing really good body armor – “Yeah, wow, see? Everybody should have access to that kind of stuff – ”  implying, “Then nobody would ever be safe anywhere.”

— This morning I heard on a talk show that originated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – That a lot of celebrity black people were posting and tweeting #BlackLivesMatter material, some of them short and quick, others longer and with obvious deep thought and level-headed feeling behind them. One commentator wondered why there weren’t a lot of white people talking, posting, tweeting and in other ways communicating that they agree with the idea that “Black Lives Matter”. Canada is not perfect, but it is quite a bit more open-minded about race relations, and doesn’t have the same level of deep undercurrents of white supremacy and racial hatred that I saw, heard and felt, even in New England, where I spent most of my life before I fell in love with a Canadian and moved up here.

— But let me go on record as a ‘white guy’ who believes that Black Lives Matter, as a matter of fact, I believe that All Lives Matter – And I thought that would include everybody – Red, Yellow, Black, Brown, and White humans –  And any grey or green or other colours of the rainbow any human like races we haven’t seen or known about officially and/or unofficially here on planet Earth. & I also firmly believe that non human lives matter too: plants, animals – anything else that might be alive whether we recognize their sentience or not. I might never be able to convince a cat to become a vegetarian, or prove to an alligator that it might be more fun to make friends with any animal (or human?) it sees as a potential lunch than eat it – but I’m serious. All lives matter. This opinion never makes me the most popular person in any group of friends, but I don’t run around screaming or pontificating that I believe that everybody and every thing has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I think I would like to wake up in a universe where everybody has just realized that life would be a lot better for everybody if we all realized that those who believe a different philosophy, are attracted to people and ideas and emotions that ‘we’ can’t understand, embrace or endorse, belong to a religion ‘we’ don’t follow, belong to a race ‘we’ do not belong to, live in a country whose politics seem to be opposite those of ‘our’ country’s — are not a threat to us. — Everybody out there has something to offer that you would probably value if you could see a little deeper beneath the surface of things.

— Right now I’m thinking that if some string pulling, manipulating, evil master mind wanted to create a race war, he [ most likely ‘he’ – or a group of nasty, like-minded ‘he’s ] is moving his plan along rather well this week. Ya think?

— “Love Anyway – “

~~~~~ Jim

And We’re still getting stuff done –

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Sunday, July 12th, 2015 -(24˚C / 75˚F – Sunny & Pleasant in the shade, but hot in the sun @ 9:23 am in Atlantic Canada )-

Cathi with a hammer when we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy - err - build next.

Cathi clowning with a hammer Thursday after we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy – err – build next.

— We got a few things done on Friday – I woke up early and felt like doing stuff with our pallets – but I thought the neighbours might not appreciate me banging things apart or swearing at nails that would not let go at 5 am, so I waited for the clock to tick itself into a more reasonable hour.

— Then I discovered that my graphics/workhorse computer was blowing up faster and/or earlier than it was on Thursday. Every little thing I tried to do with blogging or surfing earned me a “Firefox is Not Responding” message. And I’ve got this annoying problem-solving mentality – I have to try o fix things, or at least understand what is going wrong when they’re breaking down. Too many times lately I’m coming to the conclusion that accelerated planned obsolescence is at the bottom of things. (“Grrrrrrrrr-“)

— And Cathi, when she got up, said she was determined to go swimming at least once on her week off, so I finished what should have taken 5 minutes in just under half an hour and we went out, stopped off at a pharmacy with lots of other good things for sale and got an 18 & 1/2 litre jug of spring water for our cooler/dispenser – then went to the Lake, where an awful lot of other people had the same idea Cathi did – She jumped in and out of the lake, swam around a bit, smiled, and decided that under the crowded conditions, that was enough. We stopped off at a hardware store and a dollar store on the way home, got a couple small things and I went back into fix-it mode until I nearly made myself sick not getting anywhere. So I conked out for a couple hours.

— & When I got up again I decided that, instead of making myself sick over the computer’s distress, I’d wander around in a daze trying to un-clutter the ‘office’ here. I found a couple things, like needle-nosed pliers that have been hiding from me for a couple months, lost the bottle of windex about a dozen times and felt like I was getting somewhere.

pallets

This is a ‘Before’ shot, from – I think – last Monday – the 6th – On Thursday we took apart the three-tiered pallet shelving thing, that was probably used for selling plants during the spring -get-your-garden-going- season. What we have in its place are three pallets and some interesting ‘one by somethings’ that would make interesting paneling, or something like that-

— Saturday. I woke up early again and twiddled my thumbs and de-cluttered until around ten a.m., then zoomed off to my favourite hardware & building supply store, bought one 4x4x8 piece of lumber to change a bit of the configuration of the desk I am typing on right now – I’m using my MacBook to write this as the workhorse is still not feeling well. But, anyway – Cathi had been up all night writing and listening to Coast to Coast AM, so I did not make a lot of noise with my power miter saw and let her sleep. And by the time she got up I was falling asleep at the keyboards here, not typing anything worth writing home about, but –  So I needed a nap, and when I opened my eyes it was after 10 pm And there was a nice bowl of spaghetti in the micro wave waiting for me, and it was still almost hot. 🙂

— And then I went down into the basement and cut my pretty new 4×4 into 3 nice, solid legs for this desk here. 🙂 – Worried the cat, I think every time I start building things he’s afraid I’m going to build him a cat prison, or even worse, put up a couple doors where they shouldn’t be, because everybody knows, a closed door is just not acceptable to any cat on this planet.

— I needed Cathi’s help to remove the (temporary for almost 2 years) rolling printer stand out from under the end of the desk while I placed the three new 4×4 legs and let the desktop down to rest on them – &, because the desktop became slightly warped (to match my personality?) (no- because the rolling printer stand was an inch too high) I went and found a piece of thick, healthy cardboard to ‘shim’ one corner of the desk until it warps back into shape.

— And, when the desk was looking better I had to drive Cathi into a worried state as I moved stuff around in the ‘office’ and had to wheel a couple things out and around the corner into the bedroom. She was afraid I wouldn’t get the un-cluttering clutter out of the bedroom before it was time for her to rest and recharge her beautiful self. 🙂 But I somehow, even though I was in the depths of mind numbing what-do-I-do-next syndrome complicated by everywhere-I-look-there’s-something-else-I-should-be-dealing-with syndrome – got things done, and cleared the stuff I had to move into the bedroom for a couple hours out of there amd back into here. So I don’t know – I might have uncluttered about one fourth of this room, at least below the height of five feet – some of the shelves might still be in distress – and I have a lot more to do, like, what the bleep am I going to do with all the books and stuff that should be within reach but this room isn’t big enough??? — Shrug — I took a ‘before’ and a couple ‘during’ snapshots, but we’re not finished, so I can’t post an ‘after’ shot yet –

Dog in a crate in a van whose seats were hiding.

Jassper, deliriously happy, even if he is in a crate, on September 12th, 2013 – When we went to pick him up at the kennel where he had to stay for a couple days while we were moving. Poor dog thought we were sick of him and he would have to spend the rest of his life in a dog jail, unwanted and abandoned. 🙁 – Oh, There was a heck of a downpour just before we went out to pick up the animals. But we couldn’t let that stop us.

So, yeah, the ‘office’ is starting to look like I might yet whip it into shape, even if there is a new obstacle course between me and the door – And I had to deal with pets who were afraid they’d starve to death if I was a couple minutes late in feeding them this morning, so it is now, 11:43 am – 2 hours and twenty minutes after I started this. & It will probably take a couple more minutes to check the spelling and do a bit of proof reading, so, have a wonderful Sunday, both you people who will probably read most of this. 😉

~~~~~ Jim

We Got Stuff Done Yesterday-

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Friday, July 10th, 2015 -( 26°C / 79°F with another weather station in town reporting 32°C which would be more like 89.6°F- Sunny and oppresive here in Atlantic Canada @ 3:30 pm )-

Woman posing with hammer and cordless power screwdiver near a project she just saw completed.

Cathi was going to screw four pallets together to build her fenced in compost heap, but the power screwdriver quickly ran out of juice. I came to the rescue with a hammer and some nails, but she deserves credit for this- we had to trim back at least two pallets to get the shorter heights to match, but she found out about people using throw away pallets for all kinds of beautiful and wonderful things. 🙂

Pallets hiding behind steel shed.

We’ve grabbed a few pallets -with the blessings of local businesses- to begin Cathi’s ambitious projects with, not enough to suit me, but enough to worry her that the neighbours might complain about the mess in our yard here. we try to hide most of it behind the steel shed.

— And the internet is giving me doo doo today, so I will keep this short. We got things done and Cathi was happy about that. We have more to do, and today she wants to go jump in a lake. If the 32°C /90°F thermometer is right, she probably has the right idea. 🙂

Woman cleaning up after a bit of work.

We are making progress with taking apart multi pallet units and getting ready to build things.

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