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

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 —

This Universe Has Many Levels.

Sunday, December 16th, 2018 — +1˚C / +33˚F — ‘clear’ & hinting at evening @ 4:41 pm

= = = = =

Okay, you are most likely reading this in the Material Universe. Many of you believe that this is the only universe there is.  If you can’t handle me telling you that you’re wrong, ‘log out’ of here and go somewhere else now.

The material universe is the lowest of several universes that are right here, right now.

“Above” the material universe there is the ‘Astral’ Universe. The Astral Universe is where we go when we’re dreaming. { That’t the most simple explanation. You also contact the Astral Universe when you are visualizing/imagining things, people, events etc. — }

The Astral Universe is many times larger than the material universe. The size differential has been compared to a hot air balloon and the basket below the hot air balloon in which passengers ride. The Astral Universe is the balloon and the basket is the material universe. The Astral Universe has also been called the Emotional Universe. The Material Universe can be called the Physical Universe. If and when you’re in the Astral Universe, you may be able to touch things and believe they are physical because they will be at the same ‘density’ as you are.

There are sections of the Astral Universe that are dark – where things are not that easy to see – This has been called the ‘lower’ astral universe or lower astral plane. ‘Mischievous’ or even downright ‘mean’ and ‘destructive’ and/or ‘negative’ beings like hanging out in the lower astral universe. You could enjoy yourselves down there, and feel pretty safe, or you could believe you are stuck in what some people who have experienced the least friendly citizens of the lower Astral Universe have described as ‘Hell’.

There are also lighter and brighter sections of the Astral Universe where ‘nicer’ beings tend to hang out and spend their time enjoying ‘life’ and the company of not so mean, or nasty individuals who either spend most of their time there – often between ‘lives’ in the material universe – or pop in and out as they dream. Some people who have been to the higher/lighter sections of the Astral Universe believe they have been in ‘Heaven’ – but this is not the Ultimate perfectly Bliss-Filled area that all evolving beings believe is the end of their journey through life or many lives.

Beyond the Astral Universe there is the Causal Universe. Again, the Causal Universe is much bigger than the Astral Universe – the size differential is again comparable to the size of a hot air balloon and its basket with the Causal Universe being the balloon this time and the Astral Universe being the comparative size of the basket. Where the Astral Universe is the realm of emotions – the Causal Universe is the realm of the higher intellect.

Do not be confused and believe that by higher intellect I mean this is something you can achieve by attending a decent university and training your brain just right. The higher intellect functions on a level where anything you imagine, you can manifest – if you want a river in a parched desert land you can ‘dream one up’ and have it become reality. Beings that have evolved to the level where they can live in the Causal Universe can manifest just about anything they desire. If you can imagine that the material and astral universes are the grammar schools and middle schools in the wider universes of education, we have to learn a lot of lessons on self control and discover what is most important in our lives and go through a lot of testing before we can graduate to the Causal Universe. A few really angry citizens of the Causal Universe could turn the place into hell if they believe they can and should set anyone and anything on fire who looks at them wrong or says something they’re not ready to hear. “Abandon all self-righteous delusions that anger is a good thing” before you apply for an upgrade to the Causal realms.

There is something beyond the Causal Universe, but we can’t get there from here. And those who have been there and come back to tell us that, yes, there is something ‘out there’ can’t or won’t tell us exactly what that is.

= = = = =

And while I’m at it –

Love!

Let me throw a bit about ‘Chakras’ into this mix.

Your Sexual Center or Chakra has been called the ‘Lowest’ chakra in the human body. This is a bit tricky because sexual engery is actually finer and functions at a higher level than most average humans experience in their day to day existance. This might explain why sex drive is such a motivating force down here in the material universe.

If you identify yourself as a purely sexual being, and if your attraction to others remains on the sexual level, one ‘romp in the hay’ will satisfy your attraction and you’ll want to move on to other attractions / other experiences.

Next up is the physical chakra – If the attraction between two individuals is purely physical, a little bit of aging may modify that attraction to the point where one or both idividuals will lose interest in each other and go looking for a younger partner or partners.

The ‘lower’ intellectual center or chakra is next up. If two individuals are attracted by each other’s intellect all it might take to break up that attraction is one person changing their mind about something the other person believes is important.

The next higher center or chakra is the lower emotional center. If an attraction between two people is emotional – that relationship has a 50/50 percent chance to last – we’ve crossed the line into long lasting relationships here.

Above the lower emotional center is a higher emotional center or chakra.

Above the higher emotional center there is a higher intellectual center or chakra.

Somewhere above the lower emotional center peeople become much more ‘spiritual’ in their outlook and their goals and aspirations.

If an attraction between two individuals comes from this spiritual area that many humans attain, then their connection will blow any obstacles that might try to keep those two people apart – out of the way, out of the water – and basically – their combined energies will move Heaven and Earth to bring those two people together.

= = = = =

How do you know what level you’re on in relation to the chakras?

When you’re fully involved with your sexual center your drives are purely sexual.

When you’re fully involved with your physical center you tend to want to relax and go to sleep and stay there.

When you’re fully engaged with your lower intellectual center you want to learn about things.

When you’re fully engaged with your lower emotional center you may want to satisfy your desires, sometimes in confused manners like over-eating, seeking over-stimulation through drugs or serial romantic encounters – or, if you’re lucky, you may seek to please and be pleased by the one person you are most committed to.

When you’re fully engaged with your higher emotional center you are filled with a sense of love and compassion – you want to nurture others and make their lives more comfortable, happier, and ‘better’.

When you become fully engaged with your higher intellectual center you are driven to know what exactly ‘God’ is and what God is all about. You will also understand that to know more and more about the ‘Divine’ you will want to share what you’ve already learned about ‘God’ and the ‘higher laws of Creation’.

= = = = =

This is probably enough for one article here.

— Namaste —

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

 

 

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

— 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….)

!

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This Earthly Life

Friday, September 15th, 2017

 

It all seemed so simple
While we basked in Heavenly Love
– Guided by the wisdom of Heavenly Beings

So of course we volunteered
to come back down to earth
To save those silly earthlings
that we cared so much about
From suffering all the pain and confusion
they so readily embraced
in their blindness
and ambition –

But the process of birth
wiped our memories completely
and left us defenseless
before those Shakespearean slings and arrows

We were target practice for everything
that only valued power
and saw love as weakness
wisdom as a hindrance to their fulfillment
which, of course, they could never achieve
anyway –
And then they blamed us for their
inability to become the sole
ruler of everything they see.

And when the ones we care about
turn and blame us for every little failure
in their lives
of course it hurts

If we were mindless
unfeeling
disconnected
automatons
It might not hurt at all

But we are, after all,
Angels in Training
And we feel every pain
we ever wanted to save
anyone else from ever feeling –

And down here
where the electro-magnetic currents
have intense and negative effects
on our ability to remember who we are
and why we’re here –
and, in effect, block out the sun of reason –
we’ve either got to trust
The Heart of the Universe
and the wisdom of whatever
we believe God might be
– to get us through this –

-intact?

— Jim Wellington 2017  { —> Copied onto a new page, titled “Personal Evolution” —> }

— Yesterday —

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