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Showing posts from January, 2022

Books Read in 2021: Four-Star Fantasy

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 It's been a bit of a miserable week-end within the bounds of my body and mind. On the plus side, I did get a brief respite from my January headache, and I thought the Gabapentin headache prophylaxis might be kicking in. Then an absolute destroying angel of a migraine came in like a wrecking ball on Friday (the temperature see-sawing between -6 and -26 sure the fuck isn't helping) and comes roaring back every time my migraine pill protection wanes. Add to that the danger of rage stroking out every time I read some new atrocity committed by the so-called Freedom Convoy - harassing teenaged fast-food workers! Defacing the Terry Fox statue! Dancing on the war memorial! Impeding the movement of ambulances! Honking all night outside the homes of people trying to sleep! Threatening the staff at the Sheperds of Good Hope HOMELESS SHELTER into giving them free food, even though they've raised 6 millions dollars through GoFundMe! They've mostly been gridlocking downtown, but the

Books Read in 2021: Four-Star Horror

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I talked to Eve last night after Matt went a few rounds with her and her calculus homework. She was feeling overwhelmed with in-person classes starting next week and I had just given a prime pep talk the day before and it was late and I didn't do my best work. Today she called and she was excited about a biology lecture on Cystic Fibrosis tomorrow, and they had a really cool guest speaker in Indigenous Studies and calculus still sucks but in a funny, dramatic kind of way ("you have to understand, trig identities were, like, the absolute hellishly worst thing in grade 12 calculus, and integrals are this terrible, absolutely alien concept, and now THEY'VE PUT TRIG IDENTITIES INTO INTEGRALS, they might as well just write 'Fuck you Eve Adams' under every problem"), and basically I am back to when the kids were babies and I thought every bad day meant that everything would be bad forever. Do I never learn? It's possible that I never learn.  Someone recommended

Books Read in 2021: Four-Star Mystery

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So we have this to look forward to in Ottawa this week-end. I have no idea how it's actually going to shake out - I mean, I feel like they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer showing up to protest government rules when there's no one in Parliament, but they have big fucking trucks and I have concerns about them blocking emergency vehicles and bringing the downtown to a standstill - mostly because a lot of them have said that's exactly what they want to do. I live solidly in suburbia and the likelihood is that the most it will amount to for me is inconvenience. But I feel a towering rage at the stupidity and selfishness on display here, in the name of some nebulous notion of 'freedom'. And naturally a number of far right players have glommed on to an opportunity for mayhem, and naturally a bunch of Conservative MPs are cheerfully and cluelessly voicing their support anyway, because it might make Justin Trudeau look bad.  I feel like I should have something