i do things!
Jul. 2nd, 2015 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhat a week, and it's not even over yet.
On Monday I got up too early to haul Chaos off to the vet yet again. When we'd brought him in for a checkup the vet noted a problematic tooth, and said it should come out, so we said "sure." We're using the same vet practice as when we lived downtown, but the good vet no longer works out of the downtown office and is instead usually out in West Van (a half-hour-plus bus ride from downtown), so it's kind of a haul to get the cat out there. Thankfully, for surgeries they provide a cat-taxi from the downtown office.
I got there about half an hour early, and then for various reasons the cat-taxi was late. So I let Chaos out of his cat-carrier to wander around the plaza outside the vet office. (He's old and slow and not hugely fond of the outdoors; there was next to no chance of him making a break for it.) He seemed to enjoy himself, between yelling at the windows and flopping around in the dirt & leaves.
He's home now and seems to be doing fine. Of course he's on twice as much painkiller as normal so that's not too surprising. He's also off dry food for a week. Normally we leave a bowl of dry food out for all-hours grazing, but that's had to be put away. This has two side effects. The first is that Chaos is actually hungry enough at breakfast-time to come get his breakfast and take his pill instead of having to be dragged out from under whichever bed. The second is that Kai is utterly convinced that Something Is Wrong, Monkey, There Is No Food, and has been telling us so for days now. *sigh* o, kitten.
We finally saw Mad Max on Tuesday. It sets what ought to be the minimum standard for several aspects of filmmaking: comprehensible fight scenes, characters with arcs, women (many women) with agency. I came away from it thinking, not "this is amazing," but "there is no good reason why everything else isn't at least this good."
We also had dinner with LJless Steph (not my awesome ex Steph, but the writer Steph) at a decent Mexican place, and then she and I did a write-in at which I came up with over a thousand words that got me to more or less the start of the scene I thought I was writing. That's a whole post in itself, though.
After that... okay, way back in 2009,tam_nonlinear invited us to DC Tribal Cafe, a monthly belly dance show, which was a lot of fun, and turned into something I/we went out to on a semiregular basis until we left DC. To quote myself from the time, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoy watching the dancers. Something about the flow of movement, and the energy, and the beat of the music. It's entrancing, and sexy in a way that's more "oh, nice" than "WANT," and it pulls me out of myself in a way that not much else does. We'd been looking halfheartedly for something similar in Vancouver, and E turned up a possibility awhile ago. So we caught one of their shows Tuesday night.
Part of the problem was the venue: it was hot and muggy and very loud and very crowded. Tribal Cafe was frequently loud and crowded, but not to such an extent, or with quite so many Gastown hipsters. ("Hipster" doesn't seem like quite the right word. West Coast yuppies, I guess.) Tribal Cafe was also small and intimate; this was 2-3x the size.
They started half an hour later than I'd thought, so we got to stand (later sit, afteruilos sharked us a couple of stools) around in the loud and warm for close to an hour. Then we had four acts: three dance sets and one contact juggler, which took about half an hour, and then a half hour intermission, and then another four sets for another half hour, and then done.
The contact juggler was pretty good. The dance itself was Not Tribal Cafe. It was closer to 'traditional' belly dance, I think; Belladonna and Mavi and company tended towards, I don't know, more industrial music for one thing. I lack the vocabulary to talk about the dancers and it's been, cripes, four years since I've seen them anyway. I can't tell if this troupe was just doing something different that I don't like as well, or if they actually weren't as good as I'd expected/hoped. Or maybe a little of both.
Regardless. I'm glad we went, even if it wasn't all I had wanted it to be. Maybe the next show we find will be better.
On Wednesday, for Canada Day, we had some folks over for games and potluck dinner and to watch the fireworks. A singular advantage of this apartment: it overlooks the Fraser river, which means it overlooks the fireworks barge, which means we had a perfect and uncrowded view of the festivities.
Watching fireworks from above is an odd and unsettling experience. I'm mostly used to looking down on seagulls as they fly past, but it was disorienting the first time. This just kept on being disorienting.
There was also a full (or nearly so) moon, which made for a spectacular backdrop. I highly recommend fireworks against a bright full moon if you can arrange it.
I tried taking a couple of pictures but they mostly looked like blurry dots.
Today I finished reading Samuel Delany's Babel-17, which is brilliant and everyone should read it. The most recent edition (from Vintage) also includes Delany's story "Empire Star," which is written by a character in Babel-17, and is either brilliant or stupid and I cannot decide which.
Also today there was ziplining, which wants its own rant. But I'm tired and this is quite long enough already. Tomorrow.
On Monday I got up too early to haul Chaos off to the vet yet again. When we'd brought him in for a checkup the vet noted a problematic tooth, and said it should come out, so we said "sure." We're using the same vet practice as when we lived downtown, but the good vet no longer works out of the downtown office and is instead usually out in West Van (a half-hour-plus bus ride from downtown), so it's kind of a haul to get the cat out there. Thankfully, for surgeries they provide a cat-taxi from the downtown office.
I got there about half an hour early, and then for various reasons the cat-taxi was late. So I let Chaos out of his cat-carrier to wander around the plaza outside the vet office. (He's old and slow and not hugely fond of the outdoors; there was next to no chance of him making a break for it.) He seemed to enjoy himself, between yelling at the windows and flopping around in the dirt & leaves.
He's home now and seems to be doing fine. Of course he's on twice as much painkiller as normal so that's not too surprising. He's also off dry food for a week. Normally we leave a bowl of dry food out for all-hours grazing, but that's had to be put away. This has two side effects. The first is that Chaos is actually hungry enough at breakfast-time to come get his breakfast and take his pill instead of having to be dragged out from under whichever bed. The second is that Kai is utterly convinced that Something Is Wrong, Monkey, There Is No Food, and has been telling us so for days now. *sigh* o, kitten.
We finally saw Mad Max on Tuesday. It sets what ought to be the minimum standard for several aspects of filmmaking: comprehensible fight scenes, characters with arcs, women (many women) with agency. I came away from it thinking, not "this is amazing," but "there is no good reason why everything else isn't at least this good."
We also had dinner with LJless Steph (not my awesome ex Steph, but the writer Steph) at a decent Mexican place, and then she and I did a write-in at which I came up with over a thousand words that got me to more or less the start of the scene I thought I was writing. That's a whole post in itself, though.
After that... okay, way back in 2009,
tam_nonlinear invited us to DC Tribal Cafe, a monthly belly dance show, which was a lot of fun, and turned into something I/we went out to on a semiregular basis until we left DC. To quote myself from the time, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoy watching the dancers. Something about the flow of movement, and the energy, and the beat of the music. It's entrancing, and sexy in a way that's more "oh, nice" than "WANT," and it pulls me out of myself in a way that not much else does. We'd been looking halfheartedly for something similar in Vancouver, and E turned up a possibility awhile ago. So we caught one of their shows Tuesday night.Part of the problem was the venue: it was hot and muggy and very loud and very crowded. Tribal Cafe was frequently loud and crowded, but not to such an extent, or with quite so many Gastown hipsters. ("Hipster" doesn't seem like quite the right word. West Coast yuppies, I guess.) Tribal Cafe was also small and intimate; this was 2-3x the size.
They started half an hour later than I'd thought, so we got to stand (later sit, after
uilos sharked us a couple of stools) around in the loud and warm for close to an hour. Then we had four acts: three dance sets and one contact juggler, which took about half an hour, and then a half hour intermission, and then another four sets for another half hour, and then done.The contact juggler was pretty good. The dance itself was Not Tribal Cafe. It was closer to 'traditional' belly dance, I think; Belladonna and Mavi and company tended towards, I don't know, more industrial music for one thing. I lack the vocabulary to talk about the dancers and it's been, cripes, four years since I've seen them anyway. I can't tell if this troupe was just doing something different that I don't like as well, or if they actually weren't as good as I'd expected/hoped. Or maybe a little of both.
Regardless. I'm glad we went, even if it wasn't all I had wanted it to be. Maybe the next show we find will be better.
On Wednesday, for Canada Day, we had some folks over for games and potluck dinner and to watch the fireworks. A singular advantage of this apartment: it overlooks the Fraser river, which means it overlooks the fireworks barge, which means we had a perfect and uncrowded view of the festivities.
Watching fireworks from above is an odd and unsettling experience. I'm mostly used to looking down on seagulls as they fly past, but it was disorienting the first time. This just kept on being disorienting.
There was also a full (or nearly so) moon, which made for a spectacular backdrop. I highly recommend fireworks against a bright full moon if you can arrange it.
I tried taking a couple of pictures but they mostly looked like blurry dots.
Today I finished reading Samuel Delany's Babel-17, which is brilliant and everyone should read it. The most recent edition (from Vintage) also includes Delany's story "Empire Star," which is written by a character in Babel-17, and is either brilliant or stupid and I cannot decide which.
Also today there was ziplining, which wants its own rant. But I'm tired and this is quite long enough already. Tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-04 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-05 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-03 04:34 pm (UTC)Glad to hear that Chaos is doing well.
So cool that you're able to meet up with Steph to write sometimes!
Do fireworks look different from above? Or is the disorientation just from height? (Or something else?)
Thanks for the book rec. I shall now hunt that up to read.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-04 12:26 am (UTC)Pretty much all of Delany is worth your time: he manages to be both thinky and compulsively readable.