garbled transmissions:

first, my newest favourite AND a great e.e. cummings bit here. ah, the glory of a new wonderful webcomic.

i came home from work early today; got the dizzies: disturbing. drank lots of water and went to bed. ate salad. drank more water. did a few light things. read more from red mars, which i finally started (after staring at it on my "reading" shelf for months and months). i feel better but still not great. happily, tomorrow is my day off, so i can go for a walk in the river valley, and maybe make those cookies i've been promising myself all week.

the queen is out of town, visiting the family and such. it's been interesting to have him gone and me not be in a state of chaos, for whatever reason. gee, what do i do with my time? as it turns out, get slightly depressed. oh, the freedom.

olive, of course, has been much more affectionate with her major rival in affections and bed space being conveniently absent, although this is still her outside season, so the cuddle sessions are intense, but brief.

i feel a sense of peace having moved into a place i pay rent. i can call it mine like i haven't been able to since i moved out of gnome home 1 to housesit. i can put some things in my own storage basement. i can collect my nerdy old mysteries out of boxes and display them. one roommate has moved in (scarlett is definitely her moniker). she seems friendly, high-spirited, a breath of prairie fresh air. the main roommate of the house is still out of town; part of a building team putting up a strawbale cabin. she came back in and cleaned a bunch of stuff up, which made it feel less like living in a broken museum and more like a place i wanted to help keep clean.

anyway, i really just wanted to share the webcomic, and kind of dredged my brain for useless info to fill out the rest of the post. happy weekend to those of you in the weekend world.

missteps in feminism

damn. you know when you're reading something that's opening your eyes to a whole new perspective, and hand in hand with that is the realization that you've been 'taken' by a facile trend, a mass-delusion? it doesn't take away the nice things that you found there, but it colours everything that happened to you in a dangerous new shade.

like when you casually learn that the person who was being awfully nice to you has a habit of hitting on insecure single people.... and you're like "oh that's me". you end up separating the goodness you felt from the actual bigger experience, or you lose the feeling altogether and end up bitter and taken advantage of. but for god's sake, don't pretend you can still have that experience now. now that you know what else is going on.

not that my experience was that drastic. this 'bitch' article (which i was led to via mimi smartypants' blog post) totally got me. i really enjoyed reading eat, pray, love and didn't even stop to think about how much money and privilege was required to make the book happen. all i thought was that elizabeth gilbert was lucky. but i resonate strongly with the ideas that a) self-help for women has become awfully expensive and; b) it still reinforces that there's something wrong with us. we need to fix ourselves? last time i checked, "being me" wasn't on the list of major injustices being perpetrated on the planet right now. i think what i need to do is remember that.

just as i remember that someone being nice to me doesn't make them a nice person. someone being nice to everyone (well, except really mean people) is what makes them a nice person.

subtlety, eggs and ham

my first day off since moving in that i was able to spend at home. quite by accident, too. the original plans were to go out to the folks' place, an hour out of town, for my mom's husband's fiftieth birthday. i wanted to go with the queen, but he had to work again on his only day off. my sis helped me plan another ride, but then other people's plans changed and suddenly they showed up at my place two hours early. two very important hours early, that i was spending finalizing an annual report thingie that had to be delivered tomorrow for the non-profit i volunteer with. specifically, i needed to finish the thing and send it for the quickest approval period in the world (24 hours) before i delivered it to interested parties. they had worked on the majority of it with me, so i wasn't feeling too bad about leaving it late, but i did feel strongly that i needed to give them at least a token amount of time to register any feedback. and the party wasn't going to return me until after six this evening. i really needed to get it done.

which meant i couldn't go. so i scrambled and got the food and card i was going to bring, sent them off with my sis, tucked the bathrobe back around me and went back to work. one of three moments a year where i wish i drove. so often it has no impact on my life. today it did.

given the freedom of time, however, i finished the report and caught up on that orgainzation's email. i cleaned and tidied, finished small tasks, retrieved almost all of the last of my stuff from the good witch's house, and am now less behind on my walrus reading. one of those days where the tasks are all little and accomplishing them feels immensely satisfying. i think it's all in the details, somehow. when i feel happy about the tiny bits of lace-edges in life, that's when i feel the most... well, harmonious, i guess.

another non-book i read today: the original radioscripts for the hitchiker's guide. they were great. there are characters in the radio that never show up in any other format. also, marvin gets some good airplay. he has great one-liners (that link leads to book quotes, but you get the idea).

food: berries, specifically. little farm strawberries that remind you grocery strawberries are more straw than berry, because these are the real thing: melt in your mouth succulent love. wild saskatoons, tart and tiny. blueberries til you can't blueberry no more, with cream and just by the mouthful. bring it on.

a wandering drum

it's a good day. listening to my "gems" playlist (songs i stumble over while ploughing the field of music that i want to keep track of but am not sure how. once a song reaches ten plays, it gets put on another list (these playlists are exhaustive and based on artists, moods, actions, common themes, genres...) and/or deleted from the gems list. i find this a good way to keep track of needles in the haystack of itunes/my memory. also, it allows me to built intricate trees of playlists (none of which don't quite fit the moment, allowing me to start yet another). in reality, i haven't been very active in my nerdy music-land since i began house-sitting in november. and i don't feel called there now. but i do miss listening to my music. eight hours of music at work has tipped the scales in favour of silence after work.

also. i have an accordion! eee! it's a bass 120 "camillo", which near as i can discover is a kind of acordion made by guerrini for a canadian company in the sixties and maybe seventies. i am learning these keys (as well as the piano ones on the other end) and can haltingly, with long pauses, play "mary had a little lamb". it's very exciting.

i am settling into gnome home three. slowly. i ventured into the kitchen the other day.

it's odd moving into a house where lots has gone down and everyone's gone. it's a weird feeling. not displacement, but something akin to watching a movie where the character stumble blindly toward something you yourself can see, except actually you aren't watching the scene, you're just looking at the empty set afterward. the tipped over glass, the soiled napkin, the open door.

piecing together the story, as we've done for centuries - how we boost our success hunting by being able to "tell the story" of the tracks in the snow; deduce what has happened and where to go next. not just in hunting; forensic science (except forensic science is probably slower. not like the well-funded, lightning-quick labs with sexy, well-dressed scientists on late-night tv).

put humpty dumpty back together again. there is that draw. to solve, resolve.

the next town over

two words: ness creek.

such a lovely festival. we drove out with a mutual friend, fieldofdreams, who was on incredibly stellar behaviour. such a ray of sunshine fieldofdreams can be. the queen was excited; he and fieldofdreams had gone to the festival last year, and we were all meeting up with a lovely family that the queen counts among his closest friends - they were at north country too. this time their girls were coming.

we got to the site so late, it had closed, something i find amazing for a festival. so we turned around and drove down a long scary road to a lake, and camped there. in the morning, the queen and i got up and went swimming on a quiet beach. the water was fantastic - cool, quiet, tingly, clean.

i love rural environments because they still have dragonflies. i saw two little bluets mating on our tent. i sat and watched them for a while; poised, frozen but for tiny, occasional pulsations. fascinating.

we went back to the festival and found our pals camped in a far back corner near the drum circle. the festival is pretty folk-based and surprisingly chill. although my idea of chill was no doubt coloured by my sleeping through the nights. and napping a lot in the day. there was some great napping.

i heard a hauntingly beautiful accordion during one of my naps. not the kind of hauntingly beautiful that makes you think of unrequited ghostly love. just a bittersweet little ditty from a soul who's seen too much sadness today. every day.

like all things, the festival was a long, epic moment and then it was over and we were packing up the livingroom. on the way back across the border, the fuel pump "went". on some trips i've been on, this would have meant an expensive tow or being stranded until some garage could haul it in, order the part, etcetera. but the queen just sighed, unpacked the gear, opened up the back and fiddled around with some wires and some pliers. then repacked the gear and started the car and we came home. during my sighing and murmurs of manly heroes (wearing barrettes in his hair the whole time, might i add) he confessed it had taken a lot longer to fix the first time, on last summer's trip up to the northwest territories.

we saw foxes and the cutest little skunk. no bears at the festival, though previous years had told tales. and the milky way was milky. i miss this. this outdoor world reminds me of all kinds of wonder. sharing it with the queen brings me happiness.

whoops, forgot i left the blog so long. usually the happier i am, the less often i write. this is something i want to change.

so i've been happy. the queen and i had a deep and meaningful make-up to our deep and epic fight. it was a sad fight, but i think we pulled something good out of it. for me, i am happy that i was able to share my anger and hurt without bailing entirely. usually i'm kind of an all or nothing person, insofar that i accept, accept, accept until i break and then i'm gone. so it was good to rise to the occasion and defend the kind of relationship i want to have, while not tossing away the relationship in front of me. we sorted out the trauma, and then spoke to the underlying causes of the stress that led to the fight. we sorted out what we each needed.

and then the relationship in front of me took definitive steps in a lovely direction.

other tidbits: work has been busy and fulfilling. had supper with my parents and the queen last night and was rewarded with a pretty pleasant evening. currently listening to harry belafonte. moved four houses down, from one side of the gnome complex to the other. my new room has two windows that meet at the corner. they provide a view of a lot of trees, and the cobbled-together shed in the backyard of the frat house, which we have dubbed so because it is usually rented to a bunch of university students who do things like make a snowman in the front yard and give it a coke bottle full of cigarette butts as a nose.

i am listening to the rain. i heard a pigeon's flight today and it sounded beautiful.

roll, roll, roll your boat...

what to say, what to say. the queen and i had a pretty epic disagreement; one spawned by distance, previous troubles not fully laid to rest, a delay in sharing and old-fashioned miscommunication.

it was pretty rocky, explosive. can't say we don't have the passion part.

he took off, cooled down. i, after just having done this whole anger/hurt thing, feel pretty tired.

i still don't really know how i feel about our most recent volatile contact. i am relieved that the queen was able to sort out some things he would like to change about his own behaviour in order to better serve his needs. if he follows through with what he intends, there will likely be more peace both inside and around him. his epiphanies are his own, and i won't go into them here.

it just sapped me. all that emotion, so hard, so fast. it went through me and hit all the tender spots. it feels like a train went through me. someone else's train. but i cared, which made it sort of like my own train. in hindsight, which i desperately need more of, it can probably become one of those turning points.

if we turn. neither of us feel terribly confident about our ability to maintain long-term relationships. we both want to try, but we both have issues with the statistics on long-term relationships. we both have issues with each other's pasts and what we'll each become. there is uncertainty here.

it's strange to feel bred to fail, and experienced in failure, yet drawn to try. drawn to the light. is it the end of the tunnel or a fiery pit of doom? stay tuned and watch me not be able to tell the difference!

in household news, the lovelies return from oregon tonight so i am back at the house of the good witch. who has decided that for emotional health reasons, she needs to live alone unless the person she lives with is closer to her and more committed to a long-term stay. which totally makes sense and i knew i probably wouldn't stay here too long. still, it sucks to go pay rent somewhere. bookstores don't pay, i haven't had a raise since i got there last fall.

so i talked to one of the gnomes who just had some serious house-breaking, and needs new roommates. i can pay come the middle of the month, and olive and i can move into the only remaining gnome home (3) that we haven't lived in yet. so that will be happening in the next couple of weeks. welcome home. again.

this too shall pass, but what shall replace it?