Month: March 2017

Monday, March27th, 2017 – Expecting Snow and Snow Jobs

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Monday, March 27th, 2017  —> -3˚C / +27˚F & it’s just beginning to snow in our little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 12:52 pm —

Trumpadelphia

– “Trumpadelphia” is the capital of the Trumpian Empire 😉 – The area is a wasteland – No, I wasn’t quite bored to death … –

— I can’t exactly call the above cropped screenshot from an old copy of Civilization IV —> “Inspired” —> { shrug } I could have messed with the ‘exposure’ to brighten it up a bit, but a place called ‘Trumpadephia’ probably should be a dark wasteland, don’t-cha think?

— Weird dreams – a gay couple was trying to tell a guy and his ‘gal’ to “tone it down” in public, one of them smacked his lips in disgust and tried to move the heterosexual guy’s hand up to the small of the woman’s back. Upon waking up, I thought the gay guys might have a point —> “You don’t want to see my boy friend and me groping each other in public, why should we have to endure watching you two ‘breeders’ do that in our faces?”

— Shrug — I didn’t get enough sleep — I’m in the twilight zone here —> Which might explain the following :

Agustus Caeser as Trump

– This cartoon image is “Augustus Caeser” from Civilization IV – Which might be what DJT wants to see when he looks in the mirror? – In all Canadian fairness – I never met the guy, so I don’t have a perfect grasp on what he’s like when not on camera – but his on screen persona doesn’t exactly inspire admiration for his compassion and humanity –

— And I believe the computer ‘game’ Civilization – in all its incarnations – is a propaganda tool whose mission is to convince the unwary that every other nation in this world is psychotic and wants to torture and kill you and do horrible things to your spouses and children. —> The real enemy is not hiding under your bed, or wearing protection from desert sun and sandstorms, it’s in plain sight —> Wearing General’s brass with ‘Scrambled Eggs’ on their hats —> Doing everything they can imagine to get you to surrender every little bit of your power to them.

— Sigh —, Not looking forward to 5 to ten centimeters of new white schnarr to shovel — { 2 to 4 inches? } Grumble grumble —

~~~~~ Jim

Sunday, March 26th, 2017 – Nice Day To Walk The Dog

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Sunday, March 26th, 2017  —> +3˚C / +37˚F —> Sunny and bright @ 6:37 pm in Atlantic Canada-

View from the Cul De Sac.

– This is the view looking back down our street from the ‘turn-around’ end of the Cul de Sac – Taken at 6:38 pm and not enhanced at all –

— Our dog was hoping against hope when I reached for my jacket and we got to take a walk up and down the street while the sun was still shining for a change. There were young humans to wag his tail at and slightly older humans to go say hello to. Of course he had to sniff every square millimeter up and down the street and stick his nose into several snow banks to try to figure out what scent they might be hiding. He ‘bonded’ with several driveways, rolled around in the snow and ice – and stared down his doggy girl-friend’s driveway with only a slight whimper when she didn’t show –

Snowmobile trail

– Snowmobile trail – with nearly broken trees forming an arch overhead. The trail is supposed to go all the way to a ‘smart centre’ shopping centre – but the one time in the summer that we went less than a hundred yards up the trail we found the way blocked by six inch deep or deeper puddles wider than the trail up there. –

— We did have a little bit of excitement – two snow-mobiles came revving and zooming out of the woods where there is a trail – Jassper didn’t know whether to wag his tail or growl and prepare to try to chase them – but they turned into driveways long before they came anywhere near us.

cul de sac in winter

-This is the cul-de-sac/turn-around – which might have too much snow for most ‘turn around’ events, unless you’re driving a small car or riding something with two or three wheels. –

— And he wanted to keep walking, go explore territory we haven’t looked at or sniffed yet – but I sent him an image of something to eat and he decided to head for home and whatever yummies he figured he earned by taking me for a walk. 🙂

— On the weird dream front – Yup, I had another one – I dreamed I was a senior citizen who was contacted by an investigative reporter. Then I was the reporter who was digging up information about a conspiracy involving virtually every bank and elected official on the municipal, county, state & federal levels to fleece senior citizens of their savings. The US Social Security Department was a major player that was in on this. “Free” bank accounts for seniors suddenly had wildly inflating fees for everything, including on-line balance checking – which had suddenly started costing one dollar for each on-line balance inquiry – then not just one dollar per inquiry by one dollar per account per inquiry — if the senior had three accounts- like maybe savings, checking and possibly a ‘CD’ or long term/high interest account – one inquiry to make sure those accounts hadn’t been hacked or emptied by criminals would cost three dollars for ten seconds of connection. – Seniors who complained became targeted by agencies that routinely found them incompetent and hustled them into locked-down nursing homes where all the food they ate was laced with drugs that quickly destroyed their short and long term memories. The seniors’ assets were then seized by the government to cover the cost of supporting them in their rapidly deteriorating vegetative state. The senior citizen I had interviewed registered a complaint with the police department and was arrested and ‘hauled’ in for questioning. I gave him a hacked smart phone so we could hear and record every word as a smirking detective walked into the locked interrogation room and threw down a pad of paper and a pencil, “We get people like you coming in here all the time with these wild tales, I tell you what, I want you to sit there and write down everything you remember about today, in order. And I want you to begin by writing, ‘As I stepped up to the plate this morning I knew I could hit one out of the park.’ The senior citizen gasped, “But today is January, nobody plays baseball in January.” —> “Do I look like I give a [ bleep ]? Now we can do this the hard way or you can do exactly as you’re told: Start writing, ‘This morning as I stepped up to the plate, I was sure I could hit one out of the park!” —> That’s where I woke up.

~~~~~ Jim

Wednesday, March 22, 2017 – Snowy Anniversary

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Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017 —> -5˚C / +22˚F & Clear @ 7:45 am —> -4˚C / +24˚F & Snowing @ 7:50 am in Atlantic Canada —> my & Cathi’s 15th Anniversary 🙂 & Cousin Debi Borden-Miller’s Birthday 🙂 —

Snow streaks.

– Ten minutes to 8 am – Snow streaks barely visible in this photograph as the precipitation was just beginning here on the North Side – two minutes after somebody on the radio said it was snowing on the south side, but clear on the north side of Fredericton. 🙂 –

— After a couple days of warming temperatures { Yesterday reached +10˚C / +50˚F } today’s forecast is for snow, possibly mixing with rain and ice pellets, then turning to all snow again as the temperature drops – ‘they’ expect we might get 5 to 10 centimeters/2 to 4 inches of snow and significant wind blowing it all around. There is a blizzard warning north and east of here. Overnight they expect wind chills of -22˚C / -8˚F —> { ‘Brrrrrrr’ }

— Today Cathi’s and my anniversary. We’ve been an item for fifteen years. 🙂 & as hinted above it is coincidentally my cousin, Debi’s Birthday. 🙂

— We’ve been battling colds/allergies/some kind of bacterial or ‘other’ bug attacks during the last couple months. 🙁

— Yesterday was a morning of wild & crazy dreams { I’ll probably add them below } But I think I need to pop something a bit more positive in here right now:

Deer viewed through plastic.

– Our human eyes adjust through this more easily than the camera captures it – There are two deer about twelve to fourteen feet away from this window on the hill out there –

— We have plastic insulating our porch windows – & in Cathi’s ‘Zen Corner’ here we have a lot of plants that spend their summers outside and winters inside cheering us up with green in the corner where we hung a momento from our glass blowing classes when we lived in Arnprior. I almost thought this photo wasn’t quite good enough to post here, but I liked the photo I want to add below – which is a bit fuzzy, and the reason it is fuzzy is I had to shoot it through the plastic in a spot that looked fairly clear but turned out not to be as clear as I thought. These deer are a bit more jumpy than some of our ‘regulars’ and I did not have a lot of time to set up a better shot, could not go outside and expect them not to run away-

Deer having breakfast in early morning sunshine/

– Just after daybreak/sunrise on March 10th – I had been worried because we hadn’t seen any deer coming around for a while, but here these two were 🙂 – & Yeah, sorry it’s a bit fuzzy, I had to shoot through plastic that wasn’t as clear as I thought it was –

— & Re: Yesterday’s weird dreams – I looked in a mirror and saw a shorter man with a rounder head than me, blond hair and a slightly darker blond beard looking back at me. The shock did not wake me up. I moved back and watched him get ready for bed in a university dorm room ( a private room, as he looked older than most undergraduates – I thought he might be a post grad student with a stipend and monitor duties in one of the dorms. ) Just before he was able to climb into bed he got an emergency call from his sister – she and her boyfriend were at the local hospital’s emergency room – her boyfriend’s father had a heart attack and she’d just watched her boyfriend’s car being towed away. So the Grad Student got dressed, fired up his ten year old pickup truck – and went to the rescue. At the hospital the boyfriend was distraught and had written down his license plate number, the car’s make, model & year – etc. and asked the grad student’s sister to go to the police department – report the car stolen and see if she could get it back. — At the darkened police station the sister asked her brother to stay close but thought she might have better luck on her own. She went to the station’s door, it was locked, there was a sign over a button and a speaker that said, “Push Button After Hours”. She pushed the button. A scratchy voice asked if this was an emergency. She replied that her boyfriend’s father had a heart attack they’d gone to the hospital and his car disappeared. The authoritative scratchy voice asked if the car had been left running. She replied, “No – and I had the presence of mind to make sure we had the keys and the doors were all locked.” She then volunteered the make, model, year, colour and license plate number. The unseen police officer cleared his throat and said, ‘- wait a second -‘ – and came back a couple minutes later, “That vehicle was towed away for having parked in a spot clearly marked “Reserved for Emergency Room Physicians only, all other will be towed at owner’s expense – To get the vehicle back you need to pay a one hundred dollar ticket and then go to the impound yard with the receipt where you’ll have to pay the towing fee which is usually at least a hundred and fifty dollars.” – She blurted out, “I don’t have that kind of money -” The police voice responded, “We can’t process it now anyway, you’ll have to come back during normal business hours. – And by the way, if you came in that pickup out there, it is parked in a clearly marked ‘no parking’ spot and has had its license plate photographed, you will be receiving a ticket in the mail and will have to pay another fifty dollars for that.” — The sister returned to the pickup, told the grad student what the voice had told her. The grad student got out of his truck, took several photos with his cell phone camera to prove that there was no, “No Parking” sign anywhere in sight and growled toward the station, “I will fight this.” — They went back to the hospital – The boyfriend met them at the door. He said his father was in emergency surgery and he had been told that due to insurance and security issues he could not wait in the waiting room at that time of night and should go home, they had his cell phone number ans could call him when the surgery was over. The grad student drove them to a motel where he used his credit card to get them a room for the night and said he had to get some rest – there was an important test in the morning – —> Back at the dorm – he discovered a car with a “Marine Corps” bumper sticker in his assigned parking place, had to park in a “Visitors Only!” Parking space, wrote a note explaining who he was and that somebody had parked in his space and taped the note in his window. — After he opened his room’s door and turned his light on an angry voice bellowed, “Shut off the f***ing light.” The student responded, “Get the eff out of my bed.” A muscular guy with a marine corps tattoo sat up in bed, “You get the couch, roomy, I get the bed.” The student responded, “Look around – there is no couch, this is my room, get the hell out,” he looked at his digital clock and it said 4:44 am, “How the hell did you get in here anyway?” — “I had to get an effing security guard to let me in – we couldn’t find the guy who’s supposed be here to deal with shit like this-” —> “I’m that guy, That’s why this is the only single bed room in the building, Now get the hell out of here-” The marine stood up, was at least six inches taller than the grad student and his chest and arms were twice as wide as the grad student – “You want to fight about this, asshole?” — This was interrupted by the marine’s alarm clock going off at 4:45 am. The marine snapped into action, jumped out of bed, ripped the blankets off, pulled the sheets into a very tight ‘bounce a quarter off it’ configuration, folded the blankets up and placed them in a precisely measured spot a the foot of the bed, pulled on his pants and grabbed his toothbrush, “Where’s the effing bathroom?” —> “Out in the hall, second door on the right, the one with the sign that says, “Bathroom” and had the blue and white picture of a stick figure wearing pants.” —> The Marine glared at the grad student, pointed to the bed, said, “Don’t even effing think about touching that effing rack,” and stormed out of the room. —> The grad student locked the door, pulled a chain across and locked a dead bolt in place besides the regular lock.  – He dove onto the bed and passed out. —> Seconds later, somebody tried the door. That somebody then pounded on the door, loud enough to wake up half the people on that floor of the dorm, “You open this effing door – Marine!” —> The grad student gave the door the finger. There were two crashes, on the second crash the door was kicked off its hinges. A huge drill Sargent bellowed,  “Snap to attention, Marine – you know better than to lock me out!” The grad student looked up at the Sargent, “Do I look like a marine?” —> The Sargent grabbed the grad student by the hair on his head and yanked him out of bed, “You will speak only when spoken to! – You will address me as “Sir! Yes Sir,”! You will stand at attention, and you better know you are in a world of shit, marine!” —> “I am not a marine, you are in the wrong room!” The Sargent kicked the grad student in the ribs, punched him in the belly – knocked him against a wall, screamed, “You will stand at attention, you will address me as ‘Sir, Yes Sir!’ and you will speak only when spoken to!” — “You are in the wrong room, And you are on candid camera!” the grad student pointed – “Every room in this building has motion activated security cameras since a woman on the second floor was raped in her own room last year. I will press charges!”  — The Sargent glanced at his clipboard, glanced at the number on the door, and was about to scream again when two security officers fought their way to the front of the crowd that had gathered at the door. One of them yelled, “Your marine had the wrong building. He gave you the wrong information,” and held up a piece of paper to prove it. The grad student croaked weakly, “Get his name, rank and serial number and as many witnesses as you can and let them know the Marine Corps will pay for the new door -” *** I then faded out, thought I was the grad student, passing out from internal injuries — and woke up with sore ribs and cramps in my stomach. To be honest, I went to bed with sore ribs on my right side – but I woke up with sore ribs on both sides, the Sargent had kicked the grad student on the left side. —> After Cathi went to work, I went back to bed and had several quick episodes in which I fell in and out of sleep so quickly I hardly felt like I had enough time to fall asleep – but when I ‘woke up’ seconds after ‘falling asleep’ I woke up from having very mundane conversations with odd groups of people in places I didn’t recognize, some inside, some on busy city streets, the last one looked like it was in a cafeteria.

— I often have vivid dreams, even lucid dreams – The one above happened quickly, events flying into one another – like part of it was somebody’s vivid memory – but this was all more vivid than most.

— sigh, That should be more than enough —,

~~~~~ Jim

 

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017 – It Could Have Been Worse

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Wednesday, March 15th, 2017  —>  ‘-0˚C’ / +31˚F & Cloudy @ 3:30 pm in Atlantic Canada —> On The Ides Of March?

Open Porch Door on Blizzard Droppings.

– That’s about a foot of wickedly blown snow just before 6 am – It hadn’t started raining yet. –

— The above is the view through the open porch door just before 6 am, Just before I started out to deal with blizzard droppings – The plow had not been by yet – We didn’t have a three foot high – eight foot wide mountain of snow at the end of the driveway, ‘Yet’ – { Schnarr } —

— For the first twenty minutes I was outside shoveling, the weather was changing every couple of minutes from the tick tick tick of ‘ice pellets’ { sleet? } to snow again and back and forth several times before it began to develop into that wonderful freezing rain schnarr. The snow was hard to shovel to begin with, the top eight inches or so were hard packed and probably could have been cut into pretty good blocks, the kind we saw the people of the far north { who we’d been taught to call ‘Eskimos’ } build their igloos out of in a television ‘documentary’ when we were kids and believed everything that adults told us. — I shoveled for about 45 minutes and needed a break, as I had only been able to shovel a path one shovel wide from the porch door to the beginning of the nice freakin mountain the schnarr plow brought us a couple minutes after I started shoveling.  { Schnarr } —

- Blue Driveway after 20 hours of shoveling.

– 8:30 am – It was snowing very fine ‘flakes’ [ Flurries ] and the world was blue when I took a break and took a photo. And, strangely enough, it came out blue. –

— After Cathi got dressed we went out and shoveled together for two hours before I took the above photo. We got rid of most of that foot and a half high { after I had already trimmed about a foot off the top, after having cut through the first two feet wide section closer to the street – of the three feet high ‘gift’ from the snow plow. } Together we shoveled for almost three hours before she gave up and called work and said she brought her files home just in case and would work on those from home, we still couldn’t get the van out –

— After another break { Cathi had started working on her files – I had the break } we dug the snow blower out of the shed and it started, but it didn’t want to stay running – it would run for a minute or so and sputter and shut down. This went on way past the time when I would have given up on my own, but Cathi was depending on me so I kept going. We moved the van up and over to try to get behind and around it. – Then the snow blower flatly refused to keep running. I checked the gas level for the third time, shrugged and added the last of our gasoline to what was in the tank, then had to try three times to get the danged thing to start, but when it started it was much happier than it had been before. So I went back in and disturbed Cathi and told her I’d blown about as much snow as I could – The rest was on top of at least a foot of ice from before this latest storm. She took a look and said, ‘Yeah, okay – That’s good enough.’ and got back to her work files. She thought maybe one of us had put the wrong gas into the snowblower the last time we filled it. { Wrong = the stuff that was part water – that she drained before we bought a new gas can and filled that with new gas and hoped that would work – and then had help from our neighbour’s son-in-law to actually get the thing working 🙂 }

Cathi working from home on her lap top.

– This is Cathi working from home at 2:10 pm today. –

— The storm on February 13th gave this area ’80 centimeters’ – that’s like two and a third feet in human terms. – This one gave us just under a foot, but gave most of that in a big hurry, where the last storm hung around quite a while.

Adjusted shot of the driveway at 8:30 am.

– & This is adjusted just a bit { ‘lightened’ } to show just how weirdly slice-able this snow was. – And this – again – was around 8:30 am, after two hours of shoveling, and about an hour before we gave up on the idea that we could get the van out of the driveway to get Cathi to work in her office. –

— During one of my breaks – I dealt with some sharp muscle pain by doing some Yoga relaxation stuff – which worked better than usual. { Obviously, if I’m still alive to tell you about it – }

— Sigh, So the dog was really disappointed that we didn’t need his help clearing the driveway and slammed his hockey puck / silver bowl down loudly a couple of times to drive that point home. But a little bit of a treat went a long way and he still wags his tail when he sees us, so all is not lost. We’ve been forgiven one more time. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017 – Anticipating a foot of snow tonight.

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Tuesday, March 14th, 2017 —> -12˚C / +10˚F & ‘Brrrrr’ @ 9:25 am in Atlantic Canada —> Either today is or yesterday was Dana Delaney’s Birthday —

Sunrise lookin toward Candada Street.

– This was sunrise last Monday – There’s gonna be another foot of snow blowin’ around at sunrise tomorrow — Schnarr 😉 —

— Ack, Our cat looked so weird a couple days ago and was so uncharacteristically lethargic, I thought I was going to watch him die after he gasped and crawled up on my chest. { This guy is definitely a drama queen cat – } That sucked the life out of me, it was like all the funerals I couldn’t get to and the fact that I couldn’t fly out to Alaska to be with my mother during her last couple weeks in this life multiplied on each other and blew my nervous system all to bleep — {{ Ya know? I think ‘Bleep’ is fifty miles beyond hell? }} {{{ Schnarr 🙁 }}}

— So today, with the forecast being aimed at us heavily over the past three or four days, I’m almost shaking inside, like my interior has become a nervous electric hologram of blizzard-ness. That feels something like being burnt out – three quarters brain dead from too much caffeine and unable to sleep even thought your brain cells have all shut down one by one and you’re almost on the edge of shivering and/or shaking with anxiety that makes absolutely no sense to you the whole time you’re shaking through it? The weather man says we should make sure we shovel the blizzard away as soon as we can because after the foot of snow hits us in a quick and dirty “Womp!” we’ll get freezing drizzle and then rain, and then a blast of cold to freeze it all again. It’s like Climate Change Act Two and/or life in the Fredericton Area, circa 2017. —

Snow plus fog = blah.

– This was a couple Saturdays ago – Foggy afternoon with snow melt revealing strata of dirt and blahhhh –

— The world is getting weird – The government up here has this intensely problematic ‘improvement’ on financial software that is so effed-up some government employees haven’t been paid for six months and more? — Others have been told they were paid too much and they can either pay it all back right now this minute or face the kind of legal trouble that could cost them their jobs. And it should go without saying that the ones who haven’t been paid are getting very nasty notices about not paying their bills? — The program is called “Phoenix”? — & The thing is, it almost looks like a deliberate plot devised by nasty, evil, greedy s.o.b.-s to fleece their employees. & It feels like a hangover from the Harper days { when the program was developed? } & when mean-spirited, vitriolic snar sprang from the mouths of political attack dogs { and even the prime minister got his evil looks and middle school name calling done in front of cameras in time for the the evening news. }. The Conservatives and their camp followers up here made, “I know you are, but what am I?” – sound positively mature and enlightened. I saw more back stabbing and people with a tiny bit of authority extorting as much money from anyone who looked slightly vulnerable up here than I imagined anybody had the ‘gumption’ to attempt – and they got away with it. Example: Federal employee caught between two agencies, in an ‘Acting’ position – trouble shooting esoteric software upgrades that were painfully obviously needed to calculate fees etc. on inter-agency transactions. Neither agency wanted to pay the employee, whose input was crucial – this person knew how very complicated transactions with all sorts of legal implications that take at least six years to learn – that most of the employee’s supervisors couldn’t figure out if they had Albert Einstein for an advisor – So they sent the employee a bill for the acting pay. For the GROSS acting pay – & when they paid it in the first place they took out more taxes than anybody in the USA pays – So the employee was told to pay back one and a half times what was received to begin with – or take the chance of losing their job – and then had to listen to a supervisor bragging about how he screwed an employee out of their rightful pay. This was just before the Harper ‘government’ closed down 9 Veterans Affairs offices in the middle of a PTSD & Veterans committing suicide crisis. The Minister of Veterans Affairs handed the Prime Minister { Harper } one of those oversized checks for $ One Billion Canadian dollars in savings on the news that night – which raised the ire of the veterans up here to the point where they got the Minister to resign in shame and started a highly vocal movement during the next Federal Election called “Anyone but Conservatives” – but nobody rallied to aid of the employees who were being systematically raped out of their rightful wages. —   Grrrrr! —

Jassper 'helping' Cathi with her computing.

– Jassper reading over Cathi’s shoulder? as she works on her her laptop –

— A little too much dog help? Should we tell him Cathi is perfectly capable of proof reading her own stuff? Nahhh – whenever we talk to him, Jassper thinks that means it’s time to eat something.

— Sigh –

— “Burnt out in Atlantic Canada” —,

~~~~~ Jim