October 1, 2011
A friend has endured a terrible accident.
All week I’ve been pondering how such could befall a delightful, kind and decent person and yet the most relentlessly nasty amongst us only ever seem to stub their toes and thrive?
I am presently agnostic, so have no faith to be shaken. My head remains shaken.
September 28, 2011
I am upping the woodwork ante! I am making a 7-foot-table. Except there’s already a minor problem. I may have miscalculated the legs as it’s looking like a fairly stumpy affair. However, and this is the big however, I am taking my ambition to a new height and attempting to build a box for the table frame.
How else can you build a table? I hear you ask. Well I was going to fling my hook at it and resort to simple L brackets to attach the legs, but when faced with the bendy looking 79 cent L bracket and my 7 foot lumber, well the lumber pleaded not to spend its life wiggling at the hips.
How and ever the 64cm height measurement may be another of my impeded numerical readings.
Then there’s the challenge of building it in the 100 sq foot we inhabit.
*
At the hardware shop I compared scars with two very damaged males.
One had essentially lost the use of his little finger, the other had sliced across the tendon in his thumb. My saw decorated forefinger was well but the daisy among these hardcore injuries. The thumb man, a carpenter, had faired much better than the little finger man. The thumb man had acquired his damage in his work, a story about some form of knife that slipped while he was (insert vague up and down motions). The little finger man severed his tendon he said from glass. I assumed it must be some industrial sized piece of glass he had been cutting. Mais non, as we traded stories, he was in fact holding an ordinary household glass which took and shattered in his hand. Astonishing damage the average glass can do. I am sworn off them.
September 28, 2011
We had these past days a blustery weather event, with 2 wind warnings. I have never seen the title Wind Warning 2 on a wind warning so must try to figure out if it’s a higher class of wind warning. I was so consumed paying attention to the said bluster and drenching that I have little to report. This is the problem with past-casting rather than forecasting. What I am actually interested in capturing would be “right-in-the-middle” of it descriptions. But working life and feeding the chickens prevails over such indulgences.
The colour of the day during the storms was fascinating. Above the wallpaper paste pulpy usual, but yesterday my small male was unwell so I dispatched to fetch him various medicaments and during my journey was quite overcome by the beauty to be found in the moodiness that the weather was creating. There’s a fresh aroma that comes from those storms that reminds me so much of the West of Ireland, where the wind maintains a permanent rhapsody approx 11.5 months of the year. I am often astonished at the predicted wind speeds the forecast shows for the region my mother lives in and how her house remains upright. Thank Christ for stone, I suppose.
September 26, 2011
My affection for the Fraser River grows after spending supper with an exquisite view of it. Nearly a 180 degree view, above it. I always enjoy the sight of industry along it in our increasing sanitized condo-fied city where everything has become so developer and real estate-led. Sometimes I wonder what will happen if there are no commercial/industrial zoned lands, if they all become rezoned for savvy condo developers. I get this top heavy picture of people housed in high rises and no jobs underneath to pay for them.
BC rivers keep popping up in the various novels I’ve been reading, mainly as industrial intersections and entry points to industry. (Sometimes just passing mentions of their geographic positioning) I enjoy these working river depictions.
*
Ken Loach was interviewed on BBC this week about the London Riots. He made some apt points about the rioters being described (appallingly in my opinion) by British politicians as a “feral underclass”, he described them as working class youth with no work.
September 25, 2011
More lonely, melancholic males popping up in forgotten BC fiction. This from Bertrand W Sinclair’s Hidden Places (1922) which just succeeded in putting me to sleep (I was tired admittedly). This book contains some of the worst weather descriptions in Vancouver’s literary history…. I’ll save you from them and offer these melancholic male rumblings instead.
“He walked slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had yet come upon him. It differed from that strange feeling of terror which had taken him unaware the night before. He had fallen easy prey then to the black shadows of forlornness. ”
“He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge, depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which lay in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying drabness. Yet he must go on living.”
“Here in this pushing seaport town, among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. “
My favourite line in the novel thus far is
“There was no stove and there had never been a stove.”
*
Many of Bertrand W Sinclair’s novels are available to read online via Gutenberg, contrary to what the Georgia Straight article asserted this week. I wish writers would check google rather than just accepting the prevailing view. Sinclair’s first wife B M Bower also wrote 57 novels. (Westerns, I understand)
September 24, 2011
Extraordinary and very, very rare story. Only a few documented cases of this (*):
* There have been about 200 cited cases[1] worldwide over a period of around 300 years.
September 23, 2011
Muggy, muggy weather event. 79 percent humidity today. I never recall such weather at this time of the year in my recent history of paying attention to such things!
I had a DH Lawrence moment of … is this Consumption?! Ought one to reach for the thermometer ?! Ice cubes? Scotch? Kit kat?