this was drawn from a reference photo of moe that was taken before we were married. it is one of my all time favourite photos of her.
and i THINK i have done an okay job of capturing exactly what i like about the photo in the drawing! 👍
moe
Tag Archives: moe
sigh… 🙄
moe has COVID… again… 😒 i probably do, too, but i haven’t tested, because i’m not doing anything until my sunday unicycle class, so if i’m still symptom-less then, i’ll test before going to class, and only go if i’m negative. moe tested before she left for work, this morning, and was negative, but she started noticing symptoms once she got to work, and tested again, with a positive result.
naturally, she found out that she’s sick on the last day before she has her weekend… and she has to cancel a mammogram and a massage tomorrow. 😒
i remember, in early 2020, before they found a vaccine, leading scientists and experts warned us that we had a pandemic on our hands, and that if EVERYONE wore a mask for a couple of months, without exceptions, we could get ahead of it… but #drumpf said that it would miraculously disappear, disbanded the federal pandemic response team, and started raving about hydroxychloroquine, and drinking bleach, and using infrared light inside the body, and enough people believed him that, here we are now, 4 years later, with hundreds of variants, and no end in sight… and i’ve got an extended family of neighbours, down the street, who STILL believe #drumpf’s lies! 😒
my famous wife! 😉👍👍
my famous wife and her famous friend… over whom i have been a massive fanboy for longer than monique has been alive… 😉
it’s already almost halfway through january… 😒
moe is going to orlando on saturday. we finished with the panto last weekend, and, yesterday, macque tested positive for COVID, which means that he likely was exposed at the panto. moe sez she’s going to wear her mask religiously, except for when she’s drinking water, but… i was potentially exposed to macque, and moe was potentially exposed to me, and nobody will know anything until she’s already in orlando. we’ve arranged for a puppy-sitter to take quill (the new puppy), so that i won’t have to deal with an un-trained seven-month-old puppy, which is a good thing, because i actually have a paying gig on saturday (the day moe leaves for orlando), in georgetown, and, with moe in orlando, a puppy would put a severe strain on my ability to perform successfully.
i harvested around 15 dried grams of wavy caps from my experimental mushroom patch, and, as far as i can tell, the mycelium has grown into the ground, which means a much higher possibility of more wavy caps, if not soon, at least next year. dare i say, this is a long-term project that appears to have gone right, for a change.
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blah blah, new year, new me, blah blah blah… 😒 i’ll tell you what: i’m going to do the best that i can NOT to kill myself this year, through direct or indirect action (indirect, in case you’re dense, refers to COVID or something like that). my “new years intention” (because “resolutions” are too restrictive) is less depression.
along those lines, i didn’t get a harvest from my “experimental” mushroom patch last year, but it has developed LOADS of mycelia… now, there’s no GUARANTEE that they’re “the right kind” of mycelia, and, until they start sprouting mushrooms, there will be no way to know for sure, but… it was three unplanted containers of sterile potting soil, covered with a thin layer of wood chips and straw, which i inoculated with mycelia LAST YEAR. i didn’t plant anything else in the containers, and, basically, i have left them alone for a year… apart from watering them occasionally, during the dry months last summer. i don’t KNOW that the mycelia i propagated is the one i’m looking at, but… well… there’s enough mycelia that all i had to do was disturb the top layer of wood chips SLIGHTLY to expose A LOT of mycelium… so there’s always hope…
however, even with auxiliary mushrooms from matrix genetix, the weather has been snowy/rainy/awful enough that it has been difficult to take as much mushrooms as i like, so i’ve been taking “microdoses” that i can’t perceive, but which smooth out the bumps to the point where i’m not snapping at people, complaining about everything, and being a complete recluse… but i’m still not particularly pleasant to be around. 😒
i’ve got to have my car serviced. i’ve been noticing a significant decrease in mileage for the past few months, i may need new tires, and, apparently there are “firmware upgrades” that are only available from the dealer. but the closest hyundai dealer is in renton, and i’ve pretty much burnt my bridges with the renton hyundai dealer years ago. there’s a dealer in auburn, with whom i haven’t burnt as many bridges, and there’s the dealer in puyallup where i bought the car, but this is sunday AND new year’s day, so i’m not even going to be able to call anyone about it until tomorrow. meanwhile, i’ve got to go to costco (tomorrow), and moe is leaving for a week in orlando on the 14th, which, coincidentally, is the same day thaddeus and i have our first paying gig of the year.
i got a “small” package, yesterday, of incense from one of the more reliable US distributors i deal with (“small” meaning only two kilos 😉), delivered by USPS, which was totally saturated, as though it had sat outside in the rain overnight, or something like that — which it certainly did not do outside of my house. 😠 only half a kilo of the two kilos of incense were damaged, and i have notified the shipper, but (once again) it is the new year, which means at least there won’t be anybody there until tomorrow, and i’m not sure there is anything that can be done about it, anyway. 😒
the moisture festival is happening. hooray(?). it’s going to be at the broadway performance hall, a “union shop” — meaning that there are going to be people not associated with the moisture festival doing things like managing the stage, moving sets, setting lights, operating spotlights and other suchlike stuff, and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. i’m kind of wondering how they’re going to deal with the fact that the bands are definitely not union organisations, but, at the same time, it’s for someone else to deal with. 😒 fortunately. 😒
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last saturday and sunday were the first four performances of the panto during the winter holiday season, in three years. the last time we actually had a panto performance during the holdiay season was in 2019. the panto has been performed at the oregon country fair, last summer, but i missed it because i got COVID19 less than 12 hours before i was scheduled to leave. 😒 it was really fun to perform in a group for an audience again, but i was also acutely reminded of all the “politicial” horseshit that surrounds working for a group of actors and musicians. i was asked to provide a “5 minute warning” which, after two tries, no less than the stage manager told me not to make that noise any longer (this was one of the people on the board of directors, a few years ago, who screwed up the process of printing the posters because she refused to understand how the pricing breaks work, and almost screwed with the process of having the banners created in 2019, because she thought that grommets were not going to be necessary, or some crap like that 😒). also, i was asked to provide two different “ratchet” sounds, but, after two performances, they decided that the quieter of the two (the one that i had actually bought specifically for this performance) was loud enough that the actor couldn’t be heard above it, which means, not only that they don’t have two different ratchet sounds, but, because of the fact that i’m having to “mute” the remaining ratchet, i can’t match the ratchet sounds to the actors actions as well, which is, i’m absolutely positive, going to be irritating and a cause for a “note” later on.
monday (yesterday) i had to get up and take moe’s CPAP machine to the company that made it, because it has been making a strange noise for 6 months or so, and they’ve JUST gotten around to calling her back and making an appointment… but when i got there, they told me that the machine was beyond its EOL, and they would replace it, except that they didn’t have any machines, and didn’t know where to get one. i said, “so, what are we talking about, here? days? weeks? months?” and their response was “i’m not sure”. 😒 i thought it was somewhat unusual for them to have such a blasé attitude about moe’s prescribed medical device, but i brought it home… and, some time between then (around noon) and 7:30, they called moe and said that they had found a machine, which i picked up this morning.
the past couple of months i have been averaging about two incense orders a week. mind you, a lot of them have been for ONE BOX, but, at this point, i’ve stopped trying to get people to order more than one… if they want to pay twice as much (or more) for shipping, as they pay for one box of incense, it’s none of my business… or, i should say, it IS my business… which i would be driving away by telling them that it’s stupid to just order one box of incense. however, at this point, the price for a medium flat rate box is $17.05, my base rate for shipping is $16.50 (which is smaller than a medium flat rate box), and one box of incense is anywhere between $1.50 and $7.50 or so… it’s stupid… but it makes me money, so i’m not going to complain… after all, as far as i’ve been able to tell, i am the ONLY place they can get aparajita, or krishna puja 999 online… 🤷
the snow is mostly gone, but we’ve still got at least two more months of actual winter before things usually start getting back to normal, and despite what that “evangelical” preacher i saw a video of THIS MORNING says about “global warming doesn’t exist because it says so in the bible” (🤬), climate change has already had more than one negative effect on the environment around here, so i’m not going to hold my breath. it really astounds me that we are twenty years into the 21st century, and there are STILL people who believe in angels, demons, jeezis, and “de debbil”, but DO NOT accept the evidence of their own eyes concerning climate change, the economy, abortion, homelessness, health care, gay marriage… people in positions of authority whose word most other people treat with considerably more credibility than mine. 🗡🤬
weird genealogy
we got a whole bunch of new information about moe’s ancestors, and one family group caught my eye almost immediately: moe’s 4xgreat grandparents were related to each other…
the brother married into one family, the sister married into another family, they both produced children, who, then, married each other to produce one of moe’s 2xgreat grandfathers…
her 3x great grandparents were first cousins…
we don’t know, for sure, who the brother’s parents were, but they were born 15 years apart, in the same town, in the same county, in the same region of the netherlands, so the probability is fairly high… 🤣
grumble…
moe went to las vegas today. she’ll be back wednesday. the puppy went to stay with someone who is more able to handle a rambunctious puppy who doesn’t realise how big he is. i’m supposed to pick him up on wednesday, before i pick up moe at the airport. the other two dogs are “adults” (and know how to behave), but they are already concerned that moe is gone and won’t be back for a while. under ordinary circumstances, this would be a minor inconvenience, but because of the fact that the north american continent is experiencing YET ANOTHER COVID surge (thanks, republicunt anti-vax morons 🤬), airports are going to be especially dangerous, and vegas (as always) is going to be full of tourists from who-knows-where, who all think that COVID is no longer a concern, because our extremely NOT #drumpf president, joe biden, said that COVID is over. 🤬 and the ones who think joe biden lost the election are the ones who got us this far into the pandemic without any hope in sight, to begin with! 🤬
yeah, i know, it has been a couple months and i really need a mushroom break, but i can’t really take a break from the dogs, and i can’t really take two dogs on a 4-hour hike in the forest while i’m on mushrooms… moe could probably do it… she doesn’t take psychedelics that often, but it’s my impression that the part of her brain that speaks dog isn’t that affected by them. 😉
my stripe problems have vanished. i swiched from stripe to square, disabled the stripe plugin, and that’s the end of it. i’m actually NOT going to cancel my account right away, because i’ve still got 15 IOTM accounts to sell, and i’m really not motivated enough to figure out how to do that on square, in the middle of the run (so to speak). but it feels REALLY good to be quit of them.
VEWPRF/year-end stuff
i’m slowly rebuilding my music collection. today i added two tom zé albums, from the early 2000s, which are “no longer available” — meaning “the only place to find them is on discogs. one is an album i had pre-cloud-drive-disaster, called “Estudando o Pagode (Na Opereta Segregamulher e Amor)“. the other is one that “just happened” to be available from the same vendor, from two years earlier, in 2003, and it’s called “Imprensa Cantada“. both of them appear in several tom zé anthologies, but the original CDs have artwork that is NOT included in the anthologies, and, especially in the case of tom zé, the graphic artwork is almost as important as the musical artwork in the overall scheme of things. i should be getting another Gogol Bordello CD pretty soon, also
we’re giving away the last piece of ikea furniture that we own, that is NOT shelves, tomorrow… which should be interesting, as we currently have three days worth of snow on the ground, and only a few tire tracks of people driving past our house. it’s the king-size storage bed frame, which means that now we’ve got the adjustable bed frame on the 4-inch legs that it came with (rather than on the 2-inch legs, on top of the storage bed), no storage under the bed (currently), and no headboard (currently). the plan is to get some other form of storage, and a headboard… and, possibly a dresser and nightstand to replace the ones i inherited from my grandparents in 1980-something.
moe is getting “stem cell treatment” on her knees on thursday [UPDATE: WEDNESDAY!!] (hopefully the roads will have cleared enough by then that i can drive out of the neighbourhood). this is to (hopefully) “cure” her bum knees, which currently have no meniscus. if everything goes according to plan, this is going to create “new” padding between the bones in her knee. naturally, “insurance” won’t pay for it, and the only other option — total knee replacement — isn’t happening at the moment because the orthopedist that moe has been seeing is fat-phobic, and won’t operate until she’s lighter than she’s ever been in her adult life. 😒… so the (veterinary) clinic is paying for the whole procedure(!!). alledgedly, it’s going to be a couple of days of being “pretty out of it”, followed by a couple weeks of “light duty”, and then it will develop into an “up to 80% improvement”, which is A LOT better than where she’s been for the past few years.
i’ve managed to stay a lot more insulated from the standard xmas “celebration”, this year, but it’s primarily because of the pandemic, which doesn’t look like it’s going to be ending any time in the forseeable future, barring a miracle of some sort… and, as we all know, miracles that involve anti-vax mask-holes, and the right-wing, republican’t, fascist, white-supremacist IDIOTS that currently make up slightly less than HALF of the population of this gawd-forsaken wasteland, are, for all practical purposes, totally unheard-of… but, on the plus side, almost complete isolation for the second year in a row, has made it so that i have only had to listen to one, partial rendition of “feliz navidad” this year, so i can’t say that’s all bad.
and i got a theremin for xmas! 😎
then, on the other hand, there’s moe…
moe has added the “famous author” rôle to her ever expanding list of hats, since her (groundbreaking) book on animal behaviour came out. she’s been travelling, on average, once a month, to various different conventions and conferences, plugging her book and her “new” way of treating animals… which is, basically, “do unto others as you would have them do to you”, with modern branding.
but this whole COVID19 pandemic has put a wrench into the works, and all of the conferences at which she was scheduled to speak for the next 6 months cancelled, which left her with a significant gap in her income. never one to be put down for long, she and a few friends (all of whom had never done this before) decided that they were going to put on a virtual veterinary conference.
seems logical, right?
and, literally, EVERYBODY she talked to about this idea was in favour of it, to the point where she has major corporations paying for top-level speakers so that they can get a plug in the program. and when i say “top-level”, i mean, for example, monique got a call, out of the blue, from Temple Grandin, who had heard about her idea and wanted to help.
all this happened around the middle of march.
the virtual veterinary conference started today. moe is giving 4 hours of talks, as well as handling IT problems — they had an app built for the conference. the developers said they could easily handle 10,000 end users. the conference currently has just over 700 users and systems are blowing up EVERYWHERE. they estimate that 25% of registered users can’t login to see the conference live (they’ll have access to recorded content, so it’s not an entire loss, but…). fortunately, moe says all the presenters can log in, so the stuff will get recorded, but she also says that the developers’ solution to this was to “reschedule for next week”, which IS NOT going to happen with a conference that is already in progress…
so, it’s almost as though moe has gone away for the weekend, even though she’s right across the hall from me, at this very moment.
UPDATE: it’s now 2:30 pm, all the speakers have spoken for today (because they’re on eastern standard time), and they got off to a rocky start, but it got better, and they were able to do the second half of the show without a hitch.
tomorrow moe gets to be temple grandin’s “wing man”… 👍👍👍‼‼
snooo
it snowed pretty hard sunday night, so yesterday was a “snow day” for most of western washington. my personal opinion is that snow should stay up in the mountains, where it belongs, but that is, very likely, influenced very heavily by the fact that we lived in buffalo, new york, for five years, when i was a kid, where we experienced an average of 5 FEET of snow from approximately october to approximately may, EVERY, SINGLE, YEAR… 😕 today it was snowing and melting at the same time for a while, and it’s been really warm, but there has been very little disappearance of snow, in spite of everything. according to my weather gadget, it’s supposed to be rainy and even warmer tomorrow, so maybe it’ll go away. it’s extremely rare for snow to hang around more than a few days, around here, but the longer it does, the more annoyed i am with it.
moe went to orlando on saturday. she’ll be back tomorrow evening. rye has been a very good dog, but it’s evident that he’s annoyed that monique isn’t here. i’m going to bet that he’s also going to be annoyed when the puppy shows up, but only until he realises that it’ll want to play with him ALL THE TIME.
puppy new year
puppies are still alive, for the moment, although now they have come down with diarrhea, which the mother had two or three days ago, and it was suspected that the antibiotics were the culprit… now, it’s kind of suspicious that the puppies have it, because, either they got it from nursing off the mother, and/or it indicates that it might also be contagious… either way, i’m guessing, at this point, that the dog and 9 puppies are going to make it, and will all survive.
as expected, moe did not teach her classes new years’ day, and got home at around 4:00, after spending two days rescuing the puppies. no new years celebrations apart from steak night at akers’ acres which was over at about 8:00. i took a walk down to jovita park and back after that, which got me home about 9:30, and then it was just me and the old, deaf dogs who weren’t even scared of the copious fireworks that, predictably, went off more or less all night.
wonderful x2… ?
so the dog that was supposed to arrive by airplane this morning did not arrive, because it was too cold in boise, by one degree farenheit…
so moe drove to salem, leaving at 7:00 this morning, and won’t be back until tomorrow at the earliest. she says that she’s got to teach at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon, but, unless they can arrange for the bitch in salem that moe found out about last night, to fill in, i’m going to bet that moe’s 2:00 tomorrow afternoon obligation may slide.
😕 😞
wonderful
so, we’re getting a new puppy, which was born about a week ago. in the intervening week, the mother has gotten really sick, and moe has come to the rescue, because the woman whose dog it is was not prepared for anything so dramatic. it ends up that she is picking up another dog at the airport, who will have flown in from idaho, and going down to salem to deliver it. the dog that moe is picking up will “wet nurse” the puppies while the mother is recovering.
so, apart from tonight, which has a Bobs concert that has been planned for months, all other plans for NYE are out the window. i’m staying home with the older dogs, and moe is taking rye and this other dog and going to salem and who knows when they’re going to be back. tomorrow or sunday at the earliest. 😕
moe’s father and his piano
moe’s father died, suddenly, in late october. his funeral was last saturday. some would say “fortunately”, i had two panto performances that day, so i couldn’t go. however, one of the things that was an upshot of moe’s father dying was that moe inherited his piano. so, we now have a fairly decent spinnet piano in our house… or, rather, it will be a fairly decent spinnet piano when we get somebody in to fix the dead keys and clean out the bird-seed and spider-webs. in order to fit it in our house, we had to completely clear out the “office/guest-bedroom” which hasn’t been used as either for a couple of years. the office had a double bed, and a reclining chair that turns into a single bed, along with all of my inventory from hybrid elephant, most of my sound effects (i.e. the ones that i don’t have at the panto currently), a trombone, three trumpets, two soprano clarinets, an alto clarinet, a guitar, a whole bunch of home-made instruments, two huge bags of air-pillow packing materials, a cosco-sized bundle of paper towel rolls, three sleeping bags, and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. we got up fairly early yesterday, cleaned out the room and the hallway leading to it, and then we, along with moe’s step-brother, took delivery of a piano. also, because of the fact that it was superfluous, we freecycled the bed… and then we loaded up the back of moe’s step-brother’s truck and made a dump run with a bunch of brush and old lumber.
initially, i was hesitant about bringing the piano into our house, because i was under the impression that it was one of those upright pianos that you see in old western movies, that people stand, lean on, and put their glasses of beer on top of. this piano is actually about half that size. it’s about 3 feet tall, and 24 inches deep.
so, now, instead of an “office/guest-bedroom”, we have a “music room/guest-bedroom”. i’ve already moved in my bach trombone, my fender-rhodes piano, my DX-7, my E♭ tuba, my Sandviker’s Stradivarius musical saw, and my didjeriflute. the theory is that, eventually, that will be a place where we (meaning moe, too, whether she likes it or not! 😈) can go and IMMEDIATELY play music on a variety of instrumets, and the most preparation we might have to do is take an instrument out of its case. it will also be very beneficial for me, when i am transcribing music and need a keyboard. and, because my laptop is portable, i can easily use it to do all kinds of recording and editing and, using my DX-7 as a MIDI controller, i can even use my laptop as an instrument… 😎
whoosh
tomorrow i’m flying to santa rosa for a friends’ wedding. we’ll be back sunday. this will be the first time that both me and moe have travelled together on an airplane. moe has travelled by herself quite a bit, and i have travelled some, but we haven’t done so together until this weekend, when we are flying home from santa rosa, by way of portland.
before may of this year, i haven’t flown anywhere since i went to san francisco with the big bois with poise in 2012. before that, it was in 1998, when i flew to boston for training at software dot com, pre-openwave. it’s been a matter of choice, as well as the fact that i couldn’t have afforded it, even if i had wanted to travel somewhere.
so, since may, i have spent more time flying places than i have in almost 20 years.
i still can’t afford it, mostly. in spite of that, it’s kinda cool and kinda scary, especially since, this time, i will be transporting 500 corsage pins (in my checked luggage) for my "fellow travellers"… 😉
…
moe is sick… probably as sick as i have ever seen her… which is not to say that she gets sick very often, or very seriously, but still… 😨 (which is to say, U+1F628 FEARFUL FACE, if it doesn’t come through correctly). she’s going to get better… at least she SAYS she’s going to get better, but still…
i suppose this is the only time i’m going to have to update this in a while…
so the moisture festival starts this week. i’ve got a sancapators rehearsal on wednesday, and then i play with the sancapators on thursday. then i’ve got a fremont philharmonic rehearsal on saturday. then starting a week from wednesday i play, with snake suspenderz, one show each wednesday, thursday and friday, three shows saturday, two shows sunday and one show monday. then i’ve probably got a fremont phil rehearsal on saturday, april 4th, and on wednesday the 8th i start all over again, with the phil, one show each on wednesday, thursday and friday, three shows saturday, and two shows sunday. my recollection is that last year i got sick on one of the days that i played with the sancapators, and spent the rest of the festival recovering. i’m going to try to avoid that this year, if at all possible.
moe broke a tooth few weeks ago, while she was on her way to las vegas, and then she broke another tooth about a week later, which she had pulled about a week ago, which resulted in dry socket, a very painful condition that i would have preferred she NOT have to suffer. she went to the dentist today to get her crown made, for the original tooth she broke, and she’s got another appointment to have some other work done in a couple of weeks. it makes me really glad that i’ve got indestructable teeth (seriously, ever since i was a kid the dentists i have gone to have shooed me out of their office as quickly as possible so that they can get actual, paying customers in their chairs, and some have been rather obvious and rude about it), but i wish she didn’t have to go through all this, because i know how painful it can be. 😐
i splurged and bought a USB turntable that actually works (compared to the sony turntable that i had, which appeared to work, but didn’t, in some extremely significant ways that weren’t actually evident until almost the end of the project), and re-started on the process of rendering all of the remaining vinyl in the house (which is a surprisingly small amount at this point) into a digital format that can be played on “today’s” devices. i’m rendering the vinyl albums into .flac format, for burning onto CDs, .ogg format for playing on my desktop, and .mp3 format for playing on my phone and tablet… of course i’m also thinking of how this whole project can be monetized once i’m finished with my own projects, because i can’t be the only person with a hoard of obsolete but desirable music… 👿
some jehovah’s witlesses just came by our house. it’s the first active evangelisation attempt we’ve had on the house in a very long time. the last time i was taken off guard and actually took their line of drivel for a minute before i ejected them from the property, but this time i was alerted (thanks to zorah, who barks at anything that moves, so i had to be a little aware, as well), and i met the guy on the front porch and told him that i wasn’t interested in his drivel before he even had the chance to say anything. i went back in the house and, while i watched, four more people in a car drove up, so i went down to the driveway and said, very clearly and slowly, “Tina Chopp is God! Praise her OR DIE!!”… i suppose now they’re going to call the police on me, but it was worth it. 👿
by the way, this post is at least partially because my sister posted that she and her husband are “not very exciting people”… the reason you’re not very exciting people is because you don’t try hard enough… 😛
no, no… i’m really a luddite, really!
i got a used ipad today. i got it primarily so that i can start a limited usage of “social media” in order to keep me more abreast of what is actually happening in my social circle.
see, these days most of the people i know communicate with each other through facebook. they use mailing lists and forums a lot less frequently than they used to, and pretty much never use their telephones for, you know, actual phone calls. but i’ve been adamant about facebook, particularly. i have over 200 individual links to articles about the overt evil done in the name of facebook, i refuse to become another data point on their graph of suckers and sheeple, and, so far, i have resisted the numerous temptations i have had, over the years, to join the book of farce.
but i also have a cat, named Frank Zappa, who has become a minor celebrity among my wife’s ever expanding circle of friends, and people have been clamouring to get frankie a facebook account, so this is a good compromise: i get to keep my actual computers free of the scourge, i don’t have to share anything that is actually mine, and i’ll have access to all of the community organisation that slipped past me before…
and i’ll also have a place to play Luxuria Superbia, which i bought about a year ago because i thought it would work on my phone, but it doesn’t…
moe
moe went to las vegas yesterday, to speak at a veterinary conference. while she was on the plane, yesterday, she broke a tooth. this morning, she went to an emergency dental clinic, where they performed a root canal…
fortunately, her speaking engagement doesn’t start until tomorrow, but even so, i can just imagine that speaking while still under the influence of powerful pain-reducing drugs will be a tricky business, at best.
things just can’t be simple, ever… 😛
WOOOO!!!
MY sweetie was chosen to be the 2015 Veterinary Technician of The Year at the national conference in florida! WOOOO!!! 😀
woo!
my sweetie has become one of the country’s leading experts on animal behaviour… 😎
this is entry #9771
moe has gone to portland, because her mom had surgery on the wrist that she broke over here. she went into surgery at 7:30 this morning and just got home about an hour ago. there was some considerable ranting about the “bedside manner” of the surgeon which came out of moe’s mouth, but because of the fact that our cell phone connection wasn’t that good, i didn’t completely understand most of it… which is probably a good thing, considering moe’s skepticism about doctors in general. she’s not as bad as the PHBFH, but she has more reason to be wary, because she actually works with doctors and knows how spaced out they can be…
i’ve got a rehearsal that i have to leave for in about half an hour. moe will, presumably, come home some time before or around the time i get home, which will be around 10:00 pm or so.
saturday was the seventh anniversary of the birth of this blog, which is older than the blog that i came from (livejournal) when i gave that up… and i still believe in bacchus’ first rule of internet — ultimately, why i gave up livejournal — which is that anything worth doing on internet is worth doing on a domain that you own and over which you have control.
bluh
i was up until 1:30 this morning… i had a snake suspenderz gig at a benefit for the moisture festival, which didn’t get out until 10:00, which meant that i didn’t get home until about 11:30, and then i spent 2½ hours preparing and uploading a bunch of files for a guy from the moisture festival… i probably didn’t have to stay up that late, but it took me a while to realise that, despite the fact that my computer said that they uploaded almost instantly, they were actually taking a considerable amount of time to upload (because they were actually fairly large files), and i deleted them and started over several times because it was late and i didn’t realise that, in reality, they weren’t uploading instantly.
there were a bunch of chautauquans at the gig last night: stephan freelan (formerly freeman) was the stage manager, and nanda was there — all five of them this time (there were only four of them when we performed on vashon last week). there were a lot more folks there, but stephan and nanda are the only ones whose names i can reliably remember…
moe has been in spokane since wednesday… alledgedly, this is the last of her travelling out of town for a while (she claims that she doesn’t have to travel again until january), which, if it’s true, would be a very good thing indeed.
moe on the bill
moe on the bill at the national veterinary conference in kansas city, missouri, this weekend! woo hoo! my wife is a nationally recognised animal behaviour specialist! 😎
wump
we now have four completed performances of the panto under our belts. it’s going surprisingly well, considering that it’s only the first weekend. our houses have been sparse, but energetic, and i’ve actually got to the point where i’m playing more than 75% of the notes on the piece with which i’ve been having the most difficulty, i.e. the piece that is in the normally-totally-okay key of E♭, but because of the fact that it re-focuses my attention on the two fingers of my right hand (middle and ring fingers) which are the LEAST under my control, since my injury, it is a real challenge… but it’s getting better, because we’re only four performances into the run and i’m already playing >75% of the notes correctly, so i’ll probably have it after a few more performances.
i got out of the palladium shortly after the last performance of the day concluded, and was home by 6:00 pm, when i discovered that i had left my computer glasses at the palladium, so now i’m sitting as far away from the screen as possible, but not so far away that i can’t see the letters i am typing… sasha has my glasses, and i plan on retreiving them tomorrow, but it’s really frustrating typing and reading what i type without my reading glasses… getting old is a drag, sometimes…
moe’s father is in the hospital, and his wife is in montana (or some place like that) helping moe’s half-brother’s wife who has had premature twins recently — the deeper i dive in to the pool, the more moe’s family is like a television situation comedy gone horribly, and irretrievably wrong, really… but my family is not much better, despite (or, because of) the fact that i haven’t communicated with any of them for more than 5 minutes or so in thirty years… but that is a different story, entirely. in any event, moe’s father has nobody else to care for him, and the last i heard, the hospital was giving him a 50% chance, so moe has taken an emergency trip to portland to whip some doctors into shape and get her father’s wife back from wherever it is that she is, so that moe doesn’t have to do it any longer. end result is that i am here taking care of frank, zorah, the parrots and snake on my own, while moe is in portland for an indeterminate period of time.
wonderful… just in time for the holidays… 😐
alone again…
i just got back from a week at the oregon country fair, where i was alone because my sweetie had to stay home with the pets, but the trade off is that, now, i am home with the pets while moe is at some veterinary conference in chicago.
while the weather is much cooler and nicer here than it is in illinois, i would rather be with my sweetie. 🙁
update
i’ve digitised 2½ cassettes by pliny. i don’t get to post any more of them until i get permission from him, ’cause apparently he’s paranoid. oh well… 😎
i’ve got a component-stereo cassette player on freecycle, but i’ve got one person who has expressed interest, so it’s probably already taken.
i’ve got a snake suspenderz performance at a rehab center in burien. it’s a private party, which means that i’ll be paid for it, but i don’t remember how much at this point. it doesn’t really matter anyway, ’cause i’m playing and they’re paying me. 😎
moe and i are going to a performance by ezra in honour of The PHBFH on the 17th. the place is TBA, still, but ezra sez we’re going to get notified by email before the performance, so we can be where it is. i haven’t seen The PHBFH since ezra graduated from college, which was a few years ago, but i’ve never actually talked with him about his mother, so this should be an interesting performance.
the 26th has a performance by the BSSB, but i’ll probably post before then.
oh, i’ve also got another colonoscopy scheduled on the 7th of june, and another snake suspenderz performance on the 14th of june at cafe racer.
also, moe brought home a dead hummingbird… it’s sad that it’s dead, but at the same time, it’s probably the only time i’m going to get to hold a hummingbird in my hand…
moe went to florida for 8 days. i am at home with the doggies. i have a gig tonight, but apart from that, i’m relatively free, if anyone wants to do something… i have a meeting with den some time next week, allegedly, and i’ve got at least one recording session with the players/philharmonic some time soon… once again “alledgedly”…
my friend rick, who i helped move out of his storage locker a few months ago, wasn’t feeling well yesterday, and asked me for a ride to the doctor’s office, and then from there to the hospital, where he checked in for a few days. i haven’t been to valley medical for a while, and i have never been to the new emergency room that they built a couple of years ago. it was interesting to be back at the hospital where i underwent brain surgery, but it was only interesting because it was someone else, and not me…
also, at least part of the reason why i keep doing this is because things change, sometimes dramatically, between when i first hear about it, and when it actually happens. this years’ changes include the fact that snake suspenderz has been tapped for a house-band appearance, and there’s also the possibility of our performing for the volunteer party, as well. i still REALLY wonder what’s going on with the moisture festival, and REALLY wonder why RB is apparently booking acts again (it was my impression that tim had taken that over last year, because of “complaints” about RB’s scheduling fiascos), but i have gone, once again, from wanting to boycott the moisture festival, to probably being okay with it… but, once again, i’m fairly sure that the panto will eclipse the moisture festival as being the most highly paid gig i participate in all year, which was not what i expected to happen with the “world class” comedy/varieté venue in which i have been performing ever since it started, TEN YEARS AGO… 😐
so…
this weekend is the start of four weeks of panto performances. tickets are selling out quickly, but if you’re in the area, we are still accepting “friends and family” for the 15th december performances. tickets are available brown paper tickets, and if you choose the 15th performance and enter the code mushy peas you’ll be getting in for no cost.
if you’re not in the area… tough luck. 😉
i played my sousaphone last month for the first time in around a year, and it went fairly well… now, the difficult part, is getting back to playing a C tuba. i thought it was going to be an easy transition, because i went from C to B♭ without any difficulty at all, but the difficult part is going back to C. i played the music for the panto reasonably well this summer, but, despite the fact that i played my B♭ sousaphone last month, for one day, remembering the C fingerings is a REAL problem… 😐
and it makes it that much worse that the panto starts this weekend, and goes for four weeks… presumably, i’ll be playing the parts reasonably well by the time it’s done, but — of course — by that time, it’ll be too late. 😐
moe graduated from college on saturday — summa cum laude — and her parents are coming for her reception, which is on the same day that the panto opens, so i’m going not going to be able to make it, but i’m not particularly disappointed, as it will be a party with a whole bunch of people i don’t know, plus monique’s parents.
okay
moe has gone to southern oregon for the national sheep-dog handling finals — yes, we have not one, but two championship-quality dogs in this house, thanks, in part, to moe, who is the dog-whisperer to dog-whisperers… 😎 (and that guy who is “The Dog Whisperer” really doesn’t know what he’s talking about most of the time… really… you should hear moe rant about how cesar milan is wrecking dogs, when she gets to ranting about him)
but, of course, the down side to all of this, is that moe is gone for a week, and i have to stay here, because i have a performance on saturday and it would be too far to drive back from klamath falls for, especially since we’d either have to take both cars, or i would have to drive from klamath falls to seattle for a 2 hour performance, and then drive back to klamath falls to pick up moe and her dogs and gear… which would be especially important since we just bought a trailer/pop-up-tent/RV-like-thing, and that isn’t going anywhere without a vehicle to tow it.
so, the upshot of the whole deal is that i am alone for a week, with an ancient, decrepit dog, two ancient, decrepit cats, a bird (who is neither ancient nor decrepit), and an ancient, decrepit snake… i guess, since i am verging on ancient and decrepit myself, i’m in good company, but i would really prefer it if i was with moe, or she was with me… there’s nobody but stanley to talk to, and, while some of the things he says are definitely amusing, he doesn’t always respond the way a human being would…
the performance is with the sousa band, at Festa Italiana, and they’re probably going to feed us… which is always the right thing to do for musicians that you hire to come and play for your party… 😉
apart from that, i’m still going back-and-forth with the incense guy from india. everything was going as expected until he quoted me a price that is essentially what i charge my retail customers for what would essentially be a wholesale purchace. when i responded, he didn’t come back with an answer for a few days, and then, this morning, he came back with a response in which he, basically, offered me the same incense for a quarter of the price, but only if i order more than a certain amount of it… which i would do, but i don’t want to seem too eager, because i know that if i can put him off long enough, the price has a very good probability of going down even further… and if not, it will also give me time to build up my bank account to the point where i can actually afford to buy a whole pile of incense from india… 😎
i still haven’t gone out to busk with my didjeri-flute/delay/amp setup yet, but i have been out busking with my tuba at least twice in the past week. a couple of days ago, i went out to the ballard sunday market, ostensibly to play with hobbit, but as we were getting set up, we were joined by julie b. who plays “delicious violin” (really, it says so on her cute little business card), who hobbit knows from the pike place market… and with a very little prompting from hobbit, we played quite acceptably, got a couple of inquiries about whether or not we were available for house parties(!) and made some generous tips for playing for a little less than 2 hours… i get the impression that, with a little more prompting, we could either add a violin to snake suspenderz (on a more-or-less temporary basis) or we could simply bill Accidental Rhino as a separate band and have twice as many gigs… either way is fine with me.
pe(s)ts…
moe is in the bedroom, watching sheep dog videos on her smart phone. one of the videos that she was watching had a whole bunch of whistling (which is how sheep dog trainers communicate with their dogs).
stanley, who is at the opposite end of the house from moe and her whistling sheep-dog videos, suddenly took great interest, listening to the whistling… it was faint, hardly audible to me, who was about halfway between moe and stanley, but stanley was listening intently…
not long afterwards, stanley started whistling exactly the same whistles that were in moe’s sheep-dog video…
fortunately, the whistles were used by someone from another country, and are not the same whistles moe uses to communicate with her dogs, otherwise there would be a distinct probability of mass confusion and anarchy among the sheep-dogs in our house.
stuff
moe has gone to san diego for a week, to attend a veterinary assistants conference… which means i have all four dogs to myself for a week… fun…
i don’t mind the dogs as long as someone else takes care of them most of the time (i was raised around dogs from a very early age), but i’ve never liked taking care of them that much… and, with a dog who is a little more than a year old and still very much a puppy (apart from the fact that he is a border collie and currently stands an inch and a half taller than his mother), and another, ancient and decrepit dog who likes to bark, suddenly and loudly, at nothing, for no very obvious reasons, my patience is being severely tried, and moe has only been gone for two days…
i have two gigs on sunday (again), one with the ballard sedentary sousa band (at the ballard locks, at 2:00 pm), and one with snake suspenderz (on mercer island, at 7:00 pm), which means that i’m going to be gone for longer than rye’s bladder will hold out, so moe arranged for some friends to come over and give the doggies some “relief” in the evening… which is absolutely okay with me, given the circumstances.
i had the windows in my car tinted the other day, which is very good, because now, when people are “just walking by” my car, on sunday, instead of being able to look in the car and see my new, fancy tuba in the back, they won’t be able to see anything… however, in the process of applying the tinting film, the guy broke the passenger side rear window… or something, it worked the last time i tried it, but i haven’t used it since i bought the car, which is when i “tested it out” the last time. my impression is that when the previous owner pulled off the not-professionally-installed (i.e. defective) window tinting film, it left a whole bunch of residue which, subsequently, gummed up the motor… anyway, they couldn’t tint that window, because it wouldn’t go up and down, so i took it over to edgewood tire last night, and had them “cut the cable and insert a wooden wedge” to make the window “go up and down” — sort of — but, because of the fact that it was held in place with a wooden wedge, there would have been no point in locking the door, or (for that matter) tinting the windows in the first place, so i ponied up another $250 to fix the window, which leaves me with very little money… but money has been coming in at a surprisingly high rate recently… not very large quantities (with one significant exception), but frequently enough that i’m not too worried about how little money is in my hybrid elephant account at the moment… 😉
lambies! 8)
twin lambs! 8)
these are ewe lambs, so they won’t be eaten…
mmm… lamb… s!
monique’s sheep are lambing. we have three on the ground and another coming out as i am writing this… 20 more to go… 8)
moe is gone
moe is in alberta for a week, videotaping a sheep dog guru. the border collies went with her, and i’ve got the rest of the pets… two dogs, three cats, a snake and a bird…
so…
i expended A LOT of spoons last weekend, because it was the solstice festival, and snake suspenderz played both days, apart from the caravan on friday. i’ve uploaded a whole bunch of pictures, which i haven’t yet got all sorted out, so there’s very likely going to be more pictures uploaded eventually. of course, the fremont “solstice” festival actually didn’t occur on the solstice (something for which i’m sure our ancient ancestors would decry with loud voices), but that’s because us “modern” folks have to get up and go to work on monday… a tradition which, despite the fact that it recently included me, i have never been able to figure out…
but today is especially important, because it is also our 13th wedding anniversary, which means, traditionally, i’m supposed to give my sweetie lace – which would be nice and i’m sure she would appreciate it, but it’s also impractical and i’m not sure she’d ever use it for anything… the “modern traditional” gift is textiles, and we just got a new bed-spread recently (with zebra stripes), but i’m not sure what other textile items we actually need at this point – i’m sure clothes are on the list, but i’d really rather give my sweetie something more romantic than clothes…
and i’m more convinced than ever that the decision to get married was one of the smartest decisions i have ever made in my life, but that’s only because of the fact that i decided to get married to moe, and not someone else.
Meine frau ist noch besser als die meisten anderen frauen!
translate if you don’t understand.
beach
we went to the beach for three days of doing nothing except exactly what we wanted, when we wanted to do it. here are pictures:
this was right outside our back window.
the feature, of course, was Rye, also known as “sheep dog in training”…
(more photos by clicking)
one of quite a number of shots i took that wasn’t one or more dogs looking somewhere else, or the shot being interrupted by moe, or other things…
the week then continued with my trip to a concert by The Residents, which will go in another post, later on. 8)
see? this is what i was talking about…
moe and i are on vacation, in ocean park, north of long beach. we are about a block away from the beach and i am on someone’s unsecured wireless network, so i’ll keep this brief. having a great time, but i don’t wish anybody except moe was here, and she’s here, so…8)
pictures later.
bleh-ckup
now that’s out of the way…
i renewed my membership in the fremont sunday market this morning. the probability is high that i will be going to the FSM the first sunday of next month, but there’s nothing firmed up yet.
i did my business taxes today, and for the 10th year in a row, i have not had to pay any business taxes, which may seem like it’s a good thing until you realise that my business has been essentially failing ever since it started. at the same time, i made $1,200 in 2010, compared to $1,000 in 2009, and even though i had fewer sales, the total amount is approximately equal to my 2008 income, so at least i’ve been failing consistently well.
the second puppy potluck was last night. moe’s co-worker, a guy called flash, got his car well and truly stuck in the mud on the other side of our driveway and we had to call a tow truck to winch him out. fortunately, someone gave moe a membership in AAA for xmas, so instead of pissing everybody off and being a royal waste of time, we all joked and laughed about flash’s typical muddy exploits while we waited for the (free) tow-truck winch expert who removed flash and his car from our driveway without any problems. after the potluck, moe and i went bowling with the rest of her coworkers – flash showed up late, because he was stuck in the mud. 😉 because of the fact that i was intensely stiff and sore, i didn’t do any bowling, but i made up for it by devouring their catered dinner because doc C. was paying for it… 😉
i was stiff and sore because i spent friday doing something that i have been talking about for a couple of months, which was clearing the unwanted bric-a-brac out of the loft of the workshop. i started by carrying ⅘ of the stuff that was in the loft out of the loft, sorting through most of it, and then returning the remainder to the loft – which means about 50 trips up and down the ladder with heavy, bulky stuff. i now have a pile of freecycle and/or craigslist stuff (the DVDs are just the tip of the iceberg), and a bunch of stuff that’s either going in the trash or directly to the dump. i’ve also got enough space for a person to comfortably sleep in the loft, now. 🙂 i’m getting really impatient with the DVDs, however, and i may take them to seattle tomorrow and see what i can get for them at that used movie place on the corner of first and stewart.
but i’m still feeling the effects of over-exerting myself
another enjoyable evening at chumleighland
so ¾ of Snake Suspenderz went out to Cholmondleigh-land (his actual site is here, but he’s got some sort of infernal device on his site that keeps crashing my new version of firefox – konqueror does okay, however, which makes me wonder what is really the problem). all in all, a quite enjoyable evening, although the hippie ineptitude factor seemed to be working overtime: we were consistently running late, and it wasn’t until 10:00 or so that we managed to get the live show over and start on the films. i managed to be able to break moe away from her homework and brought her along as well, which made the evening all the more enjoyable. we were joined on stage by the inimitable master payne and, of course, the reverend himself, although he didn’t “ascend a stairway of machetes, barefoot” because somebody ripped off all his machetes, so instead he walked a pathway of broken glass, barefoot. since the last time i was there, he has actually finished the rail-pup (a self-propelled closed-circut railway) which was even more fun in the dark – you’d be barreling along blindly, cranking to beat the band, and the track would suddenly curve and you’d be riding on two wheels trying not to fall over… not like the last time i was there, when the track wasn’t finished yet, and if you didn’t watch where you were going, you’d plunge off the end of the track into the undergrowth…
chumleigh and i have been doing what we do, more or less, for 35 years or so: in 1978 i was playing with a dixieland band, and we were playing for the last official “Fat Tuesday” celebration in seattle. unbeknownst to us (at the time), there had been a major riot in pioneer square the night before, so there were mounted police in riot gear everywhere, and most everyone else was sticking to the edges of pioneer square, and acting very dodgy, and here we were, this small band of incredibly young musicians playing happy music in the square, very surreal. then this guy came up to us and introduced himself as reverend chumleigh, and wondered if we had a job or worked anywhere, and offered us a job playing at the alligator palace in la conner. i was the only person that had graduated from high school at the time, but i didn’t know where la conner was, and ended up in bellingham. i didn’t actually meet him again until much, much later, in 2008. in the mean time, i worked as a fish packer, a migrant farm worker, a typesetter, spent two years in a tech school, and then worked as a musical instrument repair technician, as a typesetter (again) and as a computer geek before i had a brain injury and realised that what i really wanted to be doing all along was music, whereas chumleigh was playing with the flying karamazov brothers, being involved with the beginnings of the oregon country fair, and building a reputation as one of the biggest names in vaudeville…
definitely makes me wonder what would have happened to me if i had known where la conner was, back in ’78…
ETA: in poking around, looking for links to the alligator palace, i found this article from Frog Hospital, about fishtown, a place that i visited in the early 1980s, and another article, about robert sund, whose cabin i stayed in the first time i visited fishtown… which, while it doesn’t have much about chumleigh, brings back a whole bunch of memories…
lucy
moe’s latest dog, lucy, is an outstanding shepherd dog (she’s a border collie), and moe wants to breed her. lucy is in heat, and according to moe’s tests, she’ll be ovulating within the next three days or so, so she is leaving tomorrow to go to the ranch where the dog lucy is being bred to lives… she’s transporting adolescents across state lines for immoral purposes… wonderful… 😉
final scores for the NADAC national championships
email from moe: “We missed 3rd place by 0.76 of 1 point. Total scores were between 680-700 after 8 rounds… and it came down to less than 1 point. That’s a competetive 8″ class”
so, zora is almost the third fastest dog in north america and canada: less than 1 point separate her from the third place winner… 🙂
my guess is that there will be additional information on moe’s blog eventually.
NADAC 2010 National Championship
zora took 4th place over all and made 2 mistakes in 12 runs… and she was the smallest dog in her class by a lot.
😀 ☺☺ 😀
more from wyoming
they made it into the finals!!! 😀
i don’t know how accurate that clock is, or how it synchronises with the “official” clock, but moe said that the worst she can do at this point is the FOURTH FASTEST DOG IN THE COUNTRY, which is nothing to sneeze at. 😀
update from wyoming…
ZORA IS IN THE FINALS!! WOO HOO!! 😀
Rockit-Doggie™ Takes Off!
100925, 17:10:07 pdt
100925 17:10:08 pdt
100925 later in the evening
hey, check this out…
NADAC 2010 Agility Championships LIVE STREAM!!
zora ran that course in sixty seconds flat, with one error for this morning’s run (making her 5th place). moe said that she hasn’t gotten her score for the second run, but overall she said that zora is in third place.
update from wyoming
round 1 winner: zora! 😀
moe, pe(s)ts & other stuff
moe and zora the papillon have gone to wyoming for the national dog agility championships. they took lucy the psychotic border collie with them, and i’m holding down the fort with the two “old” dogs… and three cats, a snake and a bird. stanley the bird is chattering, and the dog who can hear (magick) is hiding under my desk, because that’s about as far away from stanley as she can get. the dog who can’t hear (paddy) is asleep behind me.
i hope moe does well at the championship. i asked her what sort of chance there was of zora winning some sort of prize, and she said that she’ll be happy if she qualifies for the finals. i don’t know what that means, but i still hope that zora wins some sort of prize… being the owner of a dog that is a national champion is about as close as i’m ever going to get to having that sort of fame myself…
i was entertained by the cats entertaining themselves with a squeeky catnip mouse. there is definitely going to have to be two or three more of those hanging around, because kitty chaos was definitely enjoyable to watch, although they gave up too quickly, because it very quickly developed to the point where one of them was hogging the mouse and wouldn’t let the others play.
i am no longer sick, but i am not completely well yet. i was about 95% yesterday, and i would say that it’s crept up to 96% or 97% today. my guess is that getting old means that i don’t recover as quickly from being sick, or that i notice the things that aren’t quite normal more than i did when i was younger, or – most likely – a combination of the two, but whatever it is, i find that after i’ve been sick, the period between my actual sickness and when i have recovered fully, really sucks: i want to do stuff, like grade and/or scrape the driveway, but it requires so much effort that i can’t do a practical amount of work before i’m completely exhausted and have to rest for a couple of hours before i can even think about doing more… plus my ears are alternately plugged up, or not, and my nose is alternately plugged up, or not – i burned a stick of incense on my desk, not more than an arm’s length away from my nose, and i couldn’t smell anything… and taking something like “day-quil” makes the symptoms go away, but it doesn’t make me able to smell, and it gives the world this kind of foggy semi-euphoria that interferes with my thinking…
Enter turtle here
monique flew away to atlanta this morning. she’ll be back in a week. when i returned from dropping her off at the airport, i discovered an epson media projector that wasn’t here yesterday, sitting on the kitchen counter. i hope it wasn’t supposed to go to atlanta with monique, ’cause if it was, it didn’t. of course i tried to call her, but she has her phone turned off so that the wireless signal won’t “interfere” with the airplane electronics.
the doggles are all upset and wary about the change in their circumstances this morning. they all got up at about the normal time, but instead of what usually happens on tuesday, none of them got to ride in the car, they got breakfast from me, and not from monique, and they’re all currently at home. i’m gonna guess that around 7:30 or so this evening, they’re going to start worrying and fussing about the fact that she hasn’t come home yet, and that there will be a good deal of dogs staring out the front window and barking when they think they hear someone driving up the driveway. magick just had some fairly substantial dental work done yesterday, so there’s going to be a change in her afternoons for a while (she has to take medication twice a day), and that on top of monique’s being gone are going to put her even further out on the edge than she normally is.
i made arrangements with a friend to give me a ride up to burien imports, to pick up my car, so i won’t have to ride my bike for an hour, take two busses and then ride my bike for another 45 minutes to get there. i’m hoping that it will not need further repair for a while, but i’m not gonna hold my breath, because my regular mechanic told me that a car of that age and make is notorious for needing constant, sometimes expensive repair. i still haven’t heard from the lady confirming my dropping out of the great peninsula future festival, but i got confirmation yesterday for fresh paint, in spite of the fact that this year’s car is a different car than it was last year.
ETA: i got home with ganesha the car and parked it in the sun… the rear view mirror fell off… 😐 it never ends…
okay, i’m here…
i am totally exhausted from SACBO and surrounding festivities, and i’ve been pretty depressed most of the day (the morning after blues?), but i’m slowly coming around. it rained pretty much all day sunday, and there was at least a bracing dampness to the air all day saturday when it wasn’t actually raining. fortunately it cleared up for the actual parade, because i was very clear about the fact that if it was raining, all of my expensive electronic music production gear was going to stay in its respective boxes, which would have definitely put a cramp on our part of the parade. i didn’t vend sunday, but lack of motivation was only part of the reason. now that i’m fairly confident that the transmission on ganesha the car version two is going to last at least a year (because that’s how long the warranty on the new transmission that i bought for it lasts), i can turn my attention to the leak in the pressurised engine coolant system which causes the car to run really hot when it’s not on the freeway, smell funny, and requires engine coolant about every 4 days to a week. it’s annoying that i’ve had to put so much money into this free car to get it working reliably. about the most fun i had at SACBO was watching the doughnut jousting that evolved over the course of sunday afternoon. the crowds were really light because of the rain, but we were determined to make the best of it, which resulted in a couple of microphone stands and some coat hangers becoming targets on which were placed yesterday’s doughnuts, which were the target of jousters on bicycles, unicycles, wheelchairs, and pretty much anything else, armed with pool cues. i spent time with people that i only see once a year (mostly), was part of the centrepiece of the whole parade, and i was inducted into a secret society, the less said about which the better. fremont phil rehearsal tonight, BSSB rehearsal tomorrow, players rehearsal wednesday, LBG rehearsal thursday, BBWP rehearsal friday…
moe was at a sheepdog trial all weekend, and she won! she got a 92, and the person who came in second (who is also moe’s mentor and friend diane) got an 88. i’ll let her tell the story, but we’re all pretty proud of moe and her doggie. 🙂 also, today is our 12th wedding anniversary.
how paddy the dog scared me out of my mind
paddy and zorah were snuffling around under the parrot tree yesterday about 8:00 pm, and i turned around and told them to leave it, whereupon paddy backed up, and did something to her left hind leg… who knows what it was that she did, but the results were immediately evident: she started yelping and crying, and peed all over herself, and trying to run around, but not being able to because her left hind leg wouldn’t work.
of course, i tried to call monique immediately, but what with having to deal with a thrashing, peeing, hysterical dog, and the fact that all this came up so suddenly that it took me totally off guard, i was having difficulty finding moe’s phone number in my cell phone. when i finally got her number, she wasn’t answering. i left her a frantic, probably incomprehensible message and immediately (well, as immediately as was possible, considering how freaked out i was) tried the second “animal emergency” number i have, micah. he said that he was just texting moe a few minutes ago, and said that he would try to get in touch with her. next, i called the restaurant where she was eating dinner with a friend, but their phone was unattended, probably because they were busy…
all this time i have been dealing with this frantic, crying dog who is trying to get away from her left hind leg because it’s causing her so much pain. as you can imagine, it was affecting me as well.
i called the third “animal emergency” number, evan, moe’s “boss” (although, if the truth were really out there, moe’s the one who runs the show: if it weren’t for her, moe’s “boss” wouldn’t have a clue how the business runs), and he was home. i described, as best i could what with paddy screaming, what was happening, and he told me that he would meet me at the clinic. i grabbed some blankets to put in the car, which meant that i had to leave paddy for a moment, and when i came back, she was nowhere to be found! i called her, but she was not in the living room. i couldn’t imagine how she managed to walk at all, but i eventually found her in the bedroom closet. i put zorah and stanley in their kennels and carried paddy down to the car and then monique called.
i brought her up to speed and simultaneously realised that i had locked myself out of the house 😯 in my rush to get help, so i actually had to break into the house to get my keys before i could go anywhere.
when i did, of course, that means a 30 to 45 minute trip to the clinic, but at that point i was operating on autopilot. i did notice that the “Check Engine Coolant” light was lit on the dashboard, but it didn’t matter as much as getting help for my doggie.
when i got to the clinic, moe was already there with another technician, and i left them to examine her while i went and had the heart attack that i had postponed while the emergency was in progress.
according to moe, she thinks that paddy somehow dislocated her hip, because she said that when she was examining her, she poked her thumb way down into the space where there was supposed to be the head of her femur, and then the joint reduced with a clank… i took moe’s car to get gas and when i came back, evan had showed up, and paddy was walking more-or-less normally by 10:30 or so, but it’s obvious that she’s feeling less than normal. we’re supposed to carry her up and down stairs, and she’s not allowed to jump up on the couch or the bed for a while (months? weeks? moe knows).
bleep
the past three days have been spent going through just my inventory of incense with the price gun labeler, individually pricing all of my incense. i plan on doing the same thing for the murtis as well, but they will only take a couple of hours. now i won’t have to fumble with a huge sheaf of papers when someone asks me how much something is, and i will charge the correct price for the things for which i can’t find the prices.
i got the flyers that i had printed for Edgewood Tire & Complete Auto Repair today. that’s another easy $200. i also got the paint pens that i’ve been waiting on, so either tomorrow or sunday i’m going to start working on Ganesha The Car Version 2.
moe and i are going to start the “cook once a month” thing again… tomorrow, i think. i was really happy with cooking once a month for the few months we tried it last year, but about october or so we didn’t do it, and are only just resuming the practice. for those of you who don’t know, it involves planning ahead to have a dozen or so recipes that you’ll make, buying a whole bunch of groceries, and spending an entire day doing nothing but cooking, packaging and freezing individual meal-sized portions for the entire month. it is a massively cheap way to do it, because you can buy a lot of the groceries at costco (we ended up spending about $300 a month, and that was with a couple of times going out to fancy restaurants), and it has the added benefit of freeing up time every other day of the following month that would have been used cooking for that day. quiche is among my favourites. and lentil soup. and now that we’ve got a medium sized freezer with new hinges (!!), we’ve even got a place to keep it all instead of having to limit how much we make because we only had a tiny freezer. 8)
Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – enough said. Cory Doctorow is God!
☻☺
i have been digging through mounds of PHP code recently, looking for <hr> tags and not finding them, and figuring out ways to make links disappear and stuff like that for the past couple of days. i believe i may have actually put the finishing touches on the sedentary sousa web site, but i’m not going to post it until i get approval from the boss lady.
moe’s friend holly is staying with us for a couple of nights. i don’t know her very well, but she and moe are good friends from way back.
picture
link dump ? for a change
now that i’m finished frantically trying to put out a raging forest fire with a watering sprinkler (for the moment, anyway), i’ve got the time to post a whole bunch of things that i’ve been reading recently, that make me go everything from “hmmm” to “AARGH! *#%&!!?!”…
first up, in the “AARGH! *#%&!!?!” category, Religious Tefillin Prompts Scare On Plane – the way i see it, a 17-year-old jewish kid was putting on his tefillin (“phylacteries“, for the uninitiated) in preparation for morning prayer, while at the same time, one of the flight attendents, who thought he was a terrorist, diverted the plane, where he was met by clown homeland security and a bomb squad. there’s so many levels of stupid here… my mind boggles… 😐
continuing to boggle my mind, in more ways than one, Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network – more evidence (as if we needed it, which apparently we do) that the creationists are wrong… in more ways than one.
which brings me to the fact the following symbol, a full colon followed by a dash::–is called “dog’s bollocks” by typographers (much in the same way that the name for the symbol that represents “the artist formerly known as ‘Prince'” is called “bruce” by typographers: they’ve got to have something brief to call it), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. the interesting part is when someone delves into The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary… it just goes to prove that you can read the dictionary and find vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons. the only thing remaining is to see how long it will be before the L33T kiddies figure it out and start using it themselves…
there’s a rare (she’s been spending all of her free time studying these days) post from moe, about her new birthday present – yes, another dog. we are now, once again, officially a four-dog family. and the new one is obsessed with staring at the cats, in order to try to get them to move… it’s really funny… or frustrating, depending on whether or not lucy’s been at home all day.
and finally, this evening, Man Stuck In No-Man’s Land – a story from right around here… and it’s from the onion. it’s good to see the onion doesn’t ignore the little people… 🙂
another day
another day without moe… one less day until i see her again… how much like an old teenage love song do i sound at this point…
i put a handle and feet on my saw case today. i went to a shoe and luggage repair place that was inhabited by a couple of old korean folks. i said i needed a handle for my instrument case – something that i could see that they had in their display case – and the old lady said that she had to see the case, so she could pick out the right handle. so i pulled out the saw case and she was so non-plussed by it that she had to roust the repair guy from his bunker. he spoke even less english than the old lady, pretty much restricting his communication to a series of meaningful grunts and two word responses, which were apparently in some language other than english. i don’t know for sure that they were korean, but there was an ancient (1970s era) calendar for a korean christian church on the wall. the repair guy came out, took one look at the case, and immediately started rooting around in a box on the floor from which he produced the feet, then went over to the display case and pulled out a handle from a pile of miscellaneous parts, and proceded back to his bunker with the old lady on his heels. there was a lot of talking, mostly from the old lady (the old guy preferring his grunts and two-word answers to pretty much everything she said) for about 10 minutes, and then the old lady came out and said that they couldn’t figure out what to charge me because they don’t usually sell these things. i suggested $15, which sounded good to her.
and the saw case really did need a handle. instead of being a large, unwieldy object with no handles, it’s got a standard instrument case handle in exactly the right place. when i placed it next to my trombone and trumpet cases, i realised that “real” cases have rounded edges, and the saw case currently has rough square edges, but that’s easy enough to fix.
goe mont fumby
moe went to her annual conference in florida today. she will be back in two weeks. by then i hope to have a new shower stall where we currently have a broken, non-functioning garden tub. a guy just came around to size it up and give me an estimate. the guy the other day said that he would do it for around $700, which is about what i expected. i’ve got another guy coming on monday to size it up for an estimate, and then we’ll get down to the business of actually doing it.
i got a trackback from the guy who is blogging about the guy who ripped me off and his arguments about why it seems that i am the one who ripped him off. he’s got an entertaining story, but it’s basically wrong from beginning to end. i would correspond more with him, but it’s pointless, so i have decided that he’s not worth it. basically, the way i see it, i’ve got dated, hard artwork from 1975 – 1993 that proves i am the originator of the font, and he’s got a bunch of interesting stories about other commercial, shareware and hand-made fonts from 1995 on, that seem to match. we’ll see how far he can get with that.
also, Art Clokey died… too many cool people have been dying during the past couple of years. stop it.
heat wave!!!!1
oh. my. GAWD it’s been hot the past few days!! we’ve shattered old heat records three days in a row! three nights ago the lowest the temperature got was 69, which shattered the old record (set in the 1950s, i think), and then two nights ago the lowest it got was 71, and last night the lowest was 72. yesterday it was almost 120 in olympia, and i, personally, saw a reader board in des moines that said 103. needless to say, i’ve been keeping the computers turned off most of the time, and only doing email once a day for the past few days. it’s slightly less hot today, but still, the weather report says that it’s going to hit 99 later this afternoon, so as soon as this is done, i’m turning the computer off again. it’s the end of the world or something. it’s just WAY too hot!
in other news, i paid off the roofers today to the tune of almost $9,000, i got a date set for building a workshop(!!!) on 18th august, and the guy is coming over for a site check today. also moe and i are going to doe bay, camping in one of their yurts, the 9th through the 13th, and we get to pay ½ price because we’re “friends and family” now… 8) another really good reason why, in spite of the gawdawful heat, this is a very good place to live indeed.
too many spoons this weekend
so i went white water rafting on saturday. it started with getting up at zero dark thirty so that i could leave at 6:30 to get to st. fred’s house by 8:00. then it was breakfast at st. fred’s (bacon, eggs and hashbrowns, thanks to st. gordy) and off to cashmere, which is where the party ended. then it was getting all geared up, wet-suit, PFD (personal floatation device) and paddle, whereupon we were bussed west of leavenworth, about 14 miles up river to where we put in. it was way better than the last time i went, primarily because i didn’t actually fall in the water – although i had a hand, literally, in rescuing the guy in front of me (howard? steve?) when he fell in. once we got out, there was a barbecue, and then the ride home, which was fairly quiet because we were too tired to talk much. it was fun, but i used up way too many spoons, which meant that instead of being efficient and mowing the lawn yesterday, i slept most of the day.
moe didn’t go with us white water rafting because she had an agility trial saturday and sunday. it was cool for her, too, because in two days, two of her dogs earned their NATCH (North American Agility Trial Champion). one of the dogs, magick, had been trying for her NATCH for several months, but the other one, zorah, just breezed right through it, which was exciting, even if i wasn’t there to see it. so we went out to dinner last night to celebrate.
i got two T-shirts, on saturday, from T-shirt Hell (where the bad t-shirts go) that say “Tuba Hero”. i have a rehearsal later this evening and i intend on wearing one of them, just to see how many people notice. i’m also going to mow the lawn dandelions this morning, hopefully before it gets too hot.