-Thursday, March 12, 2009 (Larry’s Birthday)

-10˚C/+14˚F @ 5:49 am. windy (cold) (( television says the wind chill is -21˚C))

There’s a priest on the radio talking about the Anti-Christ. He says there will be a lot of miracles, then the Anti Christ takes credit for those miracles and calls all the world’s leaders together and has them all assassinated at once. Then the Masons try to take over the world. (Sorry- that’s where he lost me. It feels like somebody from the dark side is pretending to be an angel or archangel, feeding him a lot of visions that are plausible, maybe even True. but aufblasbarer wasserpark then the whole big picture has been saturated with b.s. and it shows in some of the wackier things the man is saying.)

shrugg-

—–Jim

-Wednesday Morning, March 11, 2009

+2˚C/+36˚F & raining @ 7:15 am (I fell asleep at the computer working on the photo to the right…. ooops)

That is Moe, looking intelligent or something, contemplating chewing on Cathi’s spider plant (actually between chomps). This is an angle I see a lot. Usually as he’s inches from my nose. I sometimes think he’s probably checking me out to see if I’m alive or not. I don’t know whether he would be upset or what if the answer was ‘not’.

To tell ya the truth, Moe is the hüpfburg mit rutsche sweetest cat I’ve ever known. I didn’t used to be a cat person. ehhhhh Moe sometimes acts like he thinks he’s a dog….

At any rate I survived Tuesday, I think-

And now I gotta put out the garbage.

-It’s supposed to get real windy and very cold in the very near future.

—–Jim

Tuesday, March 10, 2009. -5˚C/+23˚F @ 5:26 am.

For anybody who doesn’t know what ‘Schnarr’ is, or means-

Cathi was about to say, “Oh Shi-” when she noticed her (then eight year old) son in the room, bright eyed with expectation of hearing mom say a word he knew she wasn’t supposed to say. The ‘S’ word became ‘schnar!’

& That immediately became our favourite universal euphemism. Describing anything as ‘Schnarr’ usually meant we didn’t like it, didn’t want to do it, wished we could avoid it- thought it was comically ridiculous. (ridiculous became ‘re-dick-lee-ous’ for a while when the boy (who is hyper-lexic; reads above his level but doesn’t always understand what he’s read.) complained about something, using a word he thought he understood, but got the pronunciation wrong- or maybe just got creative with the pronunciation. He doesn’t read this blog. (I’m a dull, boring adult who almost certainly has nothing interesting to say.) If he read this he’d be furious. Or he might spend a lot of time and energy arguing that he never mispronounced anything. Is it a testosterone thing? Do all boys and men believe that if they shout loud gonfiabili enough or gesture menacingly enough- they can re-write history or brow-beat any adversary into accepting their (the shouter’s) version of whatever? =schnarr=

We had a behaviourist (they use a lot more ‘U’s in Canada than they do in the U.S.) tell us to pick our battles. Cathi often tells me I’m being mean when I try not to let him get away with bullying her.

We pushed to get help creating a support group for parents of kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Somebody created that group. We’re members, we just don’t get to most of the meetings… (Schnarr-)

Shrug- This is only brushing the surface of what real ‘Schnarr’ is or can do for you. I love the word. It really does sound re-dick-lee-ous, in a comical way. Like a lot of Yiddish words- But I think ‘Schnarr’ is more like an “Ymmp-ish” term. and that’s a whole nother story, but anyway. It’s 5:44 am I didn’t get enough sleep yesterday, I worked all night and I have a full day ahead of me- ()Schnarr!()

—–Jim (And then we realized that some people actually have ‘Schnar’ or even ‘Von Schnar’ for a name- oh no-we never meant to humiliate anybody in any way shape or form…)

-Monday, March 9th, 2009.

-6˚C/+22˚F & snowing lightly @ 8:30 am.

(Time to get the 12 year old to school, be right back.)

….I’m back. They had forecast 2-3 cm (centimeters) of snow (that’s like an inch or so) earlier and then revised it to closer to 5 centimeters. (2 inches?) And we’re just over the line into the weather map area that could possibly get 5-15 centimeters (15 cm would be almost 6 inches) The whole world is a nice clean white right now where it was a dirty grey-brown a while ago.

And I’ve been revising an old story in my head since I dropped the boy off at school.

He’s a tough kid to read, and he finds other giochi gonfiabili humans just as tough to read. He’s like facial- clues- challenged, can’t tell by looking at anybody what they’re feeling, what kind of messages they’re trying to convey with body language, or any of that.

So he was staring straight ahead as we drove toward the school. I asked him if he was psyching himself for a day at school or just zoning out.

I had to re-phrase that two or three times until he understood what I meant, the final question from me was something like ‘are you making yourself ready for a day in hell, I mean school? Or are you kind of like falling asleep as you stare straight ahead there?’ He said he was sort of falling asleep with his eyes open.

While he was getting out of the van, ready to look sad and schlog his way to his in door (which is around on the other side of the school from where I can leave him off) I said, “Okay- give them hell-“

And he looked at me and said, “Can I give them heaven? I don’t have much hell left-” and I was stunned.

-“Wow, that’s even better-” And I had to call Cathi at work and tell her about that as soon as I got home.

I’m still writing that story in my head-

And last night I conked out before I got to the phone to wish my friend a happy belated birthday. (how about a philosophical smiley face here?)

—–Jim

Sunday, March 8, 2009.

+2˚C/+36˚F @ 7:09 am.

I took the photo to the left about 20 minutes ago.

The train tracks are a couple hundred yards from our house here, you get so you hardly notice the noise most of the time.

But anyway, the snow is melting and the trees are at least thinking about budding and there might even be small patches of green here and there.

Cathi just brought the boy home from the weekend at his father’s and he’s arguing that she should have done his chores while he was not here.

And while I was typing the last line Cathi changed the channel from Flash Gordon (the new series) to something else, black and white gonfiabili world war ii  bombers dropping bombs on Europe which was not what she wanted to see, but- when I complained, she hit the back button on the teevee.

It’s a Sunday- I changed the clocks, including the internal clocks in all the computers at the studio and here we are… getting ready to try again to wish happy birthday to my friend in Vermont.

—–Jim

-I’ll have to go into the studio today and make sure all the clocks on all the computers are set correctly.

-But here is the Eastern Corner of our living room. The house is situated so the corners point to the compass points.

This was a couple hours ago. Cathi was half watching a movie from India about a royal love triangle and had just announced, “I’m watching a silly movie from India, it must be way past time to go to bed.” (She was also working on computer stuff on her laptop. We have at least half a dozen projects going on at once, including getting a dvd ready for a friend, editing a radio interview with Geneve Blue (who wrote “I Ching Jukebox”, a novel) several web pages, a couple custom graphics for web pages… and income tax returns (which seem to be much more complicated up here in Canada than anything I had to deal with in the states.) )

Paintings on the walls. the one to the left is a numbered Robert Bateman print. There’s too much glare to tell, but the subject is a spotted leopard reclining. We have a spotted and striped Bengal cat (newish breed, crossbred from asian leopard cats and domestic tabbies, their import was illegal in Connecticut last time I heard, because they thought they were a wild breed, cat sized cats, nothing like a tiger or cheetah or other exotic cat, but-) anyway, Cathi saw the print in a commercial gallery in a big shopping centre in Ottawa and had to get it. (Domino, whose birthday is March 4th, is a worrier, he worries about everything, he wanders around at night calling out to other cats that we can’t see in a trilling voice, sounding like “Moe- Moe- Merrrrrrrrroe! Merrrrrroe!” he is quite ambivalent about letting us pet him, he gets so happy he falls off the edges of whatever furniture he’s sitting on and then he has giochi gonfiabili trouble coping with the fact that he’s been clumbsy in front of humans (which every cat knows, are members of an inferior race of quasi sentient beings.) He spends a lot of time running away and hiding.

The painting to the right is one Cathi painted, “Bo” was a white long haired cat, an instigator, ring leader, and trouble maker, who weighed in at 32 pounds (which is huge for a cat). That makes him twice as big as Moe, our own orange instigator (who loves waiting until I’m almost asleep on the couch or in the recliner, then running across the room and jumping about five feet through the air to land on my poor unsuspecting belly. I’m thinking he secretly keeps track, giving himself a score that he calculates, based on how high I jump and how loudly I gasp.)

Another interesting thing in the top photo in this article/post- The Native American/First Nation drum, hanging from the light switch of the old old light fixture in the corner there, often thumps on it’s own. Cathi and I are pretty sure the thumping is caused by our ancestors and friends and guardian angels who have crossed over, announcing their presence, asking if it’s okay if they pay us a visit.

hmmmmmmm-

—–Jim

Sunday, March 8, 20009.

+1˚C/+34˚F @ 4:49 am.

This is probably the first of several current photos that I will post here in this blog.

Our “Four Car Garage”, photo taken yesterday, a grey day, with snow and wet asphalt apparent.

We probably got this house at a ‘reduced price’ because the real estate people listed it as a “Handy Man’s Dream”, mostly because of the garage workshop area where the previous owner supplimented his income by working on people’s cars. Potential buyers probably read that and thought the house was a Handy Man’s Special / Basket Case.

I took these gonfiabili photos before we went to the local builders’ supply place in town to show the guy what we’re thinking of doing and get as good an idea as we could about what we would need and how much it would cost.

We want to insulate and finish the second story here, which is currently wide open, unfinished, you can see the underside of the steel roof.

We’re thinking this would be a wonderful place for Cathi to have an artist’s studio and we could also have office space where I could be writing, doing radio stuff, recording video… doing lots of stuff….

I mean it looks like pure potential.

Yum.

Let’s see how this looks, and see if I have to write another couple paragraphs to make it look right, or not.

—–Jim

+6˚C/+43˚F @4:37 pm, Saturday, March 7, 2009.

-Jassper, the puppy horse seen walking Cathi at a beach on warmer days last summer, took me for a walk down by the Madawaska River, just north of the area where this morning’s photo was taken.

We met a German Shepard-Husky mix named Kenobe (Like Obi Wan of star wars fame) and we stepped off to the side while a snow mobile pulling a snow trailer full of what looked like logs and other camp site stuff noisily zoomed past us.

Jassper was okay with the snow mobile. I’m hoping the guy didn’t go out onto the ‘lake’/Ottawa River (that’s the Ottawa River/Chats Lake behind Cathi and the dog in the summer photo). It’s getting to be the time of year when at least one snow mobile and rider goes through the ice somewhere within 25 kilometres of here.

Maybe now it’s time for me to rant about the economy.

General Motors.

Last year I was sitting in the Jeep-Dodge-Chrysler dealer’s Service Area waiting room while the mechanics and technicians gave our 2005 Jeep Liberty its periodic check up. An older guy sitting beside me related some of his adventures in auto mechanics. (He’d put a car together from spare parts of several different makes and giochi gonfiabili models and years and the Motor Vehicle people didn’t know what to put on the registration when he went to have it inspected and registered.)

He also told me he’d been a GM Mechanic for several years and had been sent to a big pep talk meeting with corporate big shots showing off a few of their latest innovations.

When they showed him (and his group) a plastic engine part he looked worried and said, “That makes no sense- the damned thing’s going to wear out too fast, they were always made of regular metal before-”

His observation angered the big shot who snarled back, “Do you like your job? Do you want to keep working? We’re paying people two million dollars a year to come up with ideas like this so the parts do wear out so the customers have to come in and get their vehicles serviced-”

The mechanic was stunned, shocked, and apparently never got over that. He shook his head as he told me.

-Seems like basic dishonesty to me, misleading marketing practices, manipulation, betrayal of the public trust.

-So now General Motors is hurting and crying for help.

-I think General Motors should be temporarily nationalized. Fire everybody in management and turn it over to the unions. Give them a deadline, tell them to try to come up with the most reliable, least expensive, most versatile vehicles they know how to build, and see what they come up with. If this fails, try something else.

-But give the people who know what they’re doing, and don’t know how to cheat and manipulate their customers, a chance.

See what they come up with.

—rantingly yours,

—–Jim

Saturday- March 7, 2009.

+3˚C/+37˚F @ 9:33 a.m. in Arnprior.

The scene to the left was taken after one of the first snows of the season in late autumn/early winter of 2008.

The ‘Weir’ is a rounded dam on the Madawaska River near where it flows into the Ottawa River at a wide section also referred to as “Chats Lake”.

‘Les chats’ means ‘the cats’ in French. Chats Lake may have been named for wild cats seen in the area by early ‘voyageurs’ or explorers. Or it may have referred to sharp rocks just beneath the surface of the ‘lake’ that some compared to cats’ claws.

Or it may have been named ‘Chats Lake’ for some castillo hinchable entirely different reason that no one remembers correctly.

At any rate, This is an early winter photo shot from a park like area beside the Madawaska River, looking South over the weir. There is an island to the left, out of the shot, from where the fire department launches its Canada Day (July 1st) fireworks.

Maybe soon, I should post a bit of a map here.

—–Jim

Friday, March 6th, 2009.

-3˚C / +27˚F @ 5:08 a.m. & we’ve had freezing rain over night, not a lot, just enough to make everything slippery & mess up windshields big time.

Jassper, the graduate, (wearing his vehicle harness, not a tuxedo) with most of Cathi visible in this photograph, grinning along with him.

This was last year (2008) I forget exactly when-

Now let’s see- I was thinking about saying something political a few minutes ago, but I went completely brain dead when I sat down to type here. (Maybe “brain dud” would be more like it.) But anyway, I’m going to add a ‘politix’ category to stuff I’m posting here. And that is probably the most parque acuatico hinchable political statement I’m about to make in this installment.

yayyyyy?

—–Jim