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And still I have one frozen solid in the ground.

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A few weeks ago we had a mild spell. Actually I remember it well, it was the day of the fourteen hour power outage, and the kids were home all day, and it rained because it got up around eight degrees above zero. Anyway, it was warmer than usual, as a part of the mid February thaw that we always get at a random time in Feb, so I took the time to remove as many of the exterior Christmas lights as I could, that weren’t directly attached to the eaves on the house, which require a ladder, and would need me to move a bunch of stuff in the garage, which I didn’t want to do. Anyway, unwound the lights on the trees, removed the inflatables, and free standing light displays, and the wreathes that hang off the garage door, all in one spurt. Then tackled all of the cords on the ground, which is where I have my problem. All bar one came up without a hitch, but I have one twenty five foot extension cord with a one foot section frozen solid into the ground behind my steps with no way to get at it until it melts on it’s own. So we cleaned up, but I have one random yellow/orange cord hanging off the front porch because I am unable to remove it yet. Argh! However, today’s forecast is in the mid teens, so I will uncover the ice as best as I can without killing the ground cover shrub near it, and will attempt to pull it up and out of the ice today. I will make this attempt several times throughout the day if need be. We also have to watch for flooding in the back yard, but that’s it’s own issue.

Lazy Sunday is here, I wonder if we will watch a third film we haven’t seen yet? We watched the Mitchell’s vs. The robots, and the live action Dora the explorer film this weekend. I don’t know what else is out there that is for a whole family. I don’t know where or if we could find Sing 2, or something along those lines.

My wife and I have started to watch Parks and Rec in order starting from the very beginning. I didn’t realize; one, how short the first season was, two, how many times I had seen all of the episodes on tv recently without knowing it was season one, or in chronological order. Weird.

**Editor’s note: Got the cord out of the ground on the third attempt. Consistent sunshine and an average temperature of 14° Celcius helped to work the damn thing loose. Happy man! – 1:27pm.

“Even now as I stand here with you…”

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I feel off, somehow. I was drawn here, like a moth to a flame. I know this place, in an off-hand, buried in my former Gene’s kind of way.” Murmurs Katayna quietly.

She has been delivering an intensely personal and fractured monologue since shortly after taking on the appearance of the only living thing aboard the strangely familiar, yet alien vessel. From what Racquelle can gather from the repeating diatribe from the AI humanoid figure that erupted suddenly out of a room after a rather drastic interior design shift, is that ‘K’ or Kelvin whomever that is, was once a human, and a man at that.

Of approximately forty odd years of age, unmarried and worked mostly in isolation doing routine tasks between the external hull plates. On one of his three day duty rotations he went in between the hull plates to do a task, and all was well, came out on the other side and every single person, and many ship systems were dead or severely damaged.

His only option was to turn to the Edu Bots stored on the science and engineering decks so that K was to become knowledgeable enough to be able to fix many of the issues, but the ships course and trajectory were permanently fubar’d. He spent a life time alone here with only a few bots for company, until several decades later his body began to deteriorate and he was sequestered into a med pod, where K’s body had all the organic materials slowly swapped out for some of humanities earliest Nanotech. For reasons unknown K suspects the ship passed through worm holes and galaxy spanning electrical storms, where K awoke, realized he was now a sentient hive mind of nanobots, integrated itself into the vessel, and began consuming raw materials to expand and grow and rebuild the ship into a kind of living, breathing, machine-organic cyborg monstrosity.

Finally partitioning off a portion of itself to become an able bodied humanoid named Katayna. It is all very surreal, and more than a tad insane.

But what K can’t figure out is how it got back into Sol system. Katayna is trying to determine whether they were summoned here, or resolved into human space by chance. The resulting internal scans of logged data has taken a few days, and Katayna doesn’t seem to have been spared from the data processing power drain. Which is why she’s stuck in the monologue loop, while swaying gently in the hallway. Racquelle was faced with a decision, wait it out, try to trigger a loop ending response, search force hard restart button on the figure or die of thirst and/or starvation why K searched through petabytes of internal data, from the time and multi-dimensional travel it seems to have undergone after running screaming full tilt through the star systems.

Walking around the gently swaying silver white humanoid body Racquelle notices that Katayna isn’t exactly naked, but nor is she clothed. Her bodies exterior looks to be made up of all kinds of panels, some with specular differences, and variations of the writhing, and wriggling nanotech lace that covers the ship itself, both internally and externally. The look is akin to a body suit with seams and waist accentuated by piping and oblique panels that soften the metallic hardness of her skin texture. It’s all very strange. As though a long lost man was trying to recapture what he felt femininity was via fashion. It’s not half bad, but it’s just a little off. At least she isn’t sporting a peekaboo bra, or breast armor plating. Racquelle smirks at the thought.

Speaking into the air Racquelle repeats herself for the thousandth time. “Katayna, can you hear me?” She waves a hand before the lolling eyes of the humanoid ai. “Are we being hailed by any other vessels or star bases?” She clicks her fingers by Katayna’s ear. “Are you receiving any broadcasts from UB313 or – I can’t believe I’m going to say this Torus Station or Earth?” She claps several times loudly. “Hello? Anybody else home?” She shouts, her voice echoing loudly down the long central hallway. “Well, if you need me I’m going in search of food and potable water!” She stands taking a long look at the swaying form of Katayna. Turning around in her spot she decides to tear a strip off of the hem of her shirt and places it on the floor, folded in the shape of an arrow. “I don’t have paper or a pen, and my communicator seems to be jammed, by you, so hopefully you’ll notice the sign here, or can hear me as I make my way around looking for food. Ok? I don’t know why I’m talking to you. I don’t know why I’m talking to myself. I can’t stop. Food. Food or water that’s the plan.” Was an angry wave Racquelle sets off on foot down the long central hall towards the center of the unknown vessel.

Part Twenty Seven: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

What a weird weekend.

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Due to a sudden onset of a child’s stomach bug we had a three day weekend, but I keep thinking today is Sunday, and that yesterday was Saturday, but in actuality we’re only in the morning hours of Saturday March 5th, 2022. I’m all discombobulated because of it. Though it was nice to have everyone home yesterday to play card games, board games and watch a family movie together, it wasn’t how I had been planning to spend the day. I had been building up my rest day for a few weeks, ever since I get heavily into the weeds on my In-Store signage projects and then the fairly large marketing audit report on top of that. So the day didn’t turn out how I expected it to, but it was awfully fun anyway, in an entirely different way, which is nice. With the kiddos home, an idea of a peaceful day withers on the vine, as they can only go so long in close proximity before they squabble and fight, and fists start to fly, and bad names get called. I will say this, they actively tried to separate rather than go at it full tilt as per usual. I’m blessed, as it were. Thank your lord for small miracles.

Given that the weather is suppose to swing quite heavily throughout spring in Ontario this year, we will venture out today to try one last family outdoor skate session. Tomorrow it’ll be plus fifteen, so everything will dissolve into slush before our eyes, and who knows if the flat pad of ice will survive until the next precipitous temperature drop, which will happen the day or two after the uptick. This wild swing reminds me of how hard it is to dress kids in May, where it’s only slightly above zero at eight am, and then in the early to mid twenties by three o’clock, and the kids are melting in their morning suitable clothing. Layers, zippered, easy to remove and re-add, layers. Breathable textiles, and multiple layers to be shed as the temperature rises. Then try to remember how many layers you used, and counting the articles of clothing as they come home to make sure you have everything for the next day.

Can I tell you how much aggravation I endure due to having to keep track of every item of my kids possessions, and both their indoor & outdoor clothing. Toys, books, socks, hats, gloves, mitts, boots, shoes, water shoes, running shoes, indoor school shoes, fancy dress shoes, rain boots, winter boots, wellington for out in the farm field boots, all weather jackets, snow pants, long johns, face masks, helmets, dolls, doll clothes, favourite spoons & plates… the list is endless, and they move, discard, and then swap allegiance to their ‘favourite’ toy on a semi-daily basis. It could lead one to absolute madness. Try to keep that favourite pair of jammies washed, and ready for bed time. Where’s my sweater. No the other white fluffy, cloud face sweater!!! Wah-wah-wah! Ugh. Some days it can feel like altogether too much. But you know what, if they listened to me and put their sweaters in their rooms when they take them off, and throw the dirty clothes in the hamper, rather than bury it under a pile of toys, I can wash it, and you’d know where it was. So we didn’t have to have a five alarm tantrum when they can’t find the item they all of a sudden have based their entire personality on that day.

I’d also love it if my kids could describe a toy, or article of clothing like a regular human being who understands colours, shapes, sizes and how to describe actual things that occur in our reality. Telling me how the item makes you feel, doesn’t help me search through the laundry pile for the item. Describing a t-shirt as though it was a night gown also doesn’t help. These kids. I could go mental. Heavens above! But we trudge on through, and make things work as best we can.

Woken up in the middle of the night,

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By a vomiting child. At least this time they made it to the bathroom prior to expelling the contents of their guts. Hit the floor, the wall trim, the door, toilet exterior and inside the toilet too. Bath mats were afflicted by splash back and over spray aswell. Easy clean up this time around, thankfully. Tile is much nicer to me in the wee hours of the night, as compared to shag carpet or fuzzy deep tuft floor rugs, mattresses, duvets & pillows. A win for me!

Today everyone is home from school, as we can’t send pukey children and siblings to school. So card games, puppet shows, board games and movies abound! I had other plans for today, but I got my work finished ahead of schedule, and I need some stress free time away from a computer. So I plugged into my phone to write about it! Ha. People, so silly.

On a high note, it is Friday, it is now March. The sun sets a little later, the sky is blue, and the sun is shining. Hope to start Maple Syruping in the coming weeks, which means fresh air, manning the fire under the evaporator, and hauling sap out of the woods. My eldest loves to pull the ice out of the buckets, which helps reduce the amount of water to boil off the sap, thus taking slightly less time to complete the forty to one reduction of sap to syrup. We don’t get involved in the filtration and final boil portion of the syrup schtick. I do bulk work, and leave the finesse stuff to our resident experts. If I remember to, I’ll do up a devoted post about it, with some photos and insight into (what I know of) the process.

Boiler- evaporator set up from a few years ago.

All the best to you out there!

What a Gods be damned day.

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Just shy of six hours spent with tech support to fix an Adobe issue that spanned Apple Support, Norton Antivirus and the titular character Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app. One wouldn’t let the other communicate, tech’s deleted stuff, got pushed from one serviceman to another, dropped by Apple Support, and then my lone east indian saviour from Adobe Tech support got me going again, five hours and fifty some odd minutes later. My back aches, my insides hurt, my nerves are frazzled and I’m annoyed as fuck. But First World Problems right!? Couldn’t do any work for six hours, and I feel like trash.

Technology, gotta love it, and hate the shit out of it. Glad I had given myself a grace day, so I didn’t feel like puking my guts out over the lost productivity. That folks is why I push to do more than I can on any given day, because you just don’t know if things are going to get fucky.

I had plans for doing something fun today. On the plus side two clients paid me today, so that was fantastic, and positive aspect to my day.

Seeing my business grind to a halt over a single, yet compounding issue really gave me pause today. I’m not looking forward to having to update my machines in the coming years. Fingers crossed!

Jeepers Crimony!

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Woah! What a crazy week this has been already, and it’s only mid-day on Wednesday. Lots going on with the work front.

Now I saw something online, and I don’t know when it was from, or if it’s legit, but it appears to show an older Texas man(accent gives it away) in front of some Russian reconnaissance vehicles talking about invading Ukraine with the Russian ‘liberators’. And I have to stop and ask myself, is this real? have the GQP gone full turn as hard as possible into mentally ill territory? Is it a send up? I don’t know, that’s why I won’t link to it, but JESUS MAHONEY AND JOSEP! That’s some ri-fucking-diculous bull shit right there, I tell you what. Looney tunes.

But I’m working my way through 218 pie charts, and my body is growing weary of it today. Should finish by evening tomorrow, then I can proof my pages and wait for the last two assets to come my way.

What treasures lie at the 77th meridian?

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Just imagine what’s down there between the North Pole across the Arctic Ocean, North America, the Atlantic Ocean and hang a left at Albuguergue. Such mystery, much wow.

Not going to lie, besides building a hundred plus pie charts in the next few days, and a 3D rendering of an instore install item, I won’t be doing much of anything. Well, beyond resting my wrists and stretching my back every so often that is. I’m nearing 2/3 rds done, so I’m on track, but the last 16 blocks of data are big, unwieldy and looking to break my spirit on the daily. *Editor’s note: have blocked in all 108 pages with 190 pie charts left to build, place and populate with figures..

Like I said, big and unwieldy. Chat when I’m not so pressed for time!

The 76’ers are off and away!

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Who knows they could be, I don’t follow the NBA much beyond the occasional goings on of the Toronto Raptors, and that is half hearted at best. A fair weather fan, would describe my involvement with sports teams. I can watch whole Blue Jay games if I’m there in person, or the house is empty, but I couldn’t watch all 162 games from a single season, even if I bounced around and followed multiple teams on hot streaks.

Going to be a busy, busy week. Had to take some time to rest my wrist and get out with my girls. Skated again! Fell again. On my damn knees this time. Argh, getting older and less limber sucks. However, have used the new skates three times now, which was more than I figured I’d get out of them this year. So, that’s a stroke for the win column. Two falls, a day apart is a stroke or two for the fail column.

So it’s Monday, and almost March. The winds have been blustery and frigid the last few days. Are these the last echoes of the coldest months or something else?

Day 75! Woah. That’s like a milestone or somethin’.

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Early start on this weeks paid work project. Hoping to get through the first forty or so pages before Monday morning. Still going to be a challenging week even with a forty page head start! That’s pretty insane. But it pays well, and I’ll have two more after this one is done coming to round out my spring.

So Day 75! I’m happy to report I had a tiny spurt of creativity last night while watching Hacksaw Ridge on tv. I worked hard in the morning, and went skating (where I fell on my left elbow) ouch! But had a great time in the blustery icy winds. I dressed accordingly and was thus richly rewarded. A hard fall on my elbow and shoulder when I caught an edge, but, as I said, well padded in warm winter clothes, so beyond the pain of the bump, no real damage done. But these forties, they keep on coming with the physical disadvantages! For real. Makes me question my desire to down hill ski or snowboard any more. Perhaps a shift to only cross country skiing could save me from potential calamity! Plus – exercise and loud music!

Ten pages left to reach today’s goal, so I’ll leave you all to what’s left of your Sunday.

“Do you know why I asked you come here Ms. Darla?”

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“Hm. Do you have some terrible inkling for what I might have in store you for?” The doctor asks through his surgical mask. He isn’t facing Darla whom is strapped down onto an icy cold metallic gurney. His attention elsewhere as he is looking over his personal hand written notes and diagrams tapped up to a wall in his private surgical bay. The drawings are gruesome but are also the product of someone with artistic talent, and more than a little flair.

The sage green tiles of the operating room glisten with moisture as the large overhead drum lights buzz loudly in the quiet theater. The quality of the light is a brilliant, nearly pristine blue white. Darla has to squint to make out the shape of the doctor across the room from her. But the starkness of the paper stands out against the darkness of the rough hewn rock walls above the green tiles. Massive double doors swing gently as the air circulates constantly through some whisper quiet hepa filter units. The air tastes astringent, like bleach residue and quat sanitizer spray mixed together. It tastes thickly on her tongue and sticks cloyingly in her throat. The center of the floor, directly under Darla and her gurney is a sloped polished cement floor that terminates in a large drain grill that occasionally gurgles and burps as the base UB313 tilts and rotates under its orbital stresses.

A panicked and afraid Darla can’t turn her head more than a few inches or move any of her limbs at all, the tight straps are biting into her flesh sharply with every twitch and tug. Her heart is thumping in her chest, and her breaths come in ragged bursts. “Well aren’t you the excitable type.” Quips the doctor as he turns away from his notes, pushing his glasses up his nose with a single finger. “Not to worry Darla. I’m not going to operate, but you see I have other needs of you. No- no, not those kind either, I’m afraid.” He chuckles leering over Darla’s nude figure writhing on the gurney. Leaning towards her he picks up a needle from a tray covered by a blue cloth. “No, even I have my limits. Apparently I can’t just kill all of my Risk Assessors in one fell swoop. Your friend Trevor is quite right, I do need the processing power which the Oracle network soaks up.” He says jovially. With a quick and practiced motion he swabs her arm and plunges in a syringe attached to a tube and collection bag. ” I need it to feed my babies. I know everyone thinks I’m mental and that I don’t believe it Nanobots or Nanotech, but the truth is, those are artificial. More machine dependencies. No!” He shouts angrily.”Here, with what I’ve learned, with the experiments I’ve cultivated. I have harnessed uniquely natural energies to power my beasties. My darlings, my lovelies. No-no, for you I just need plasma, some platelets, and various other minor ingredients which my standing army has trouble processing in abundance. I had hoped i would have the time to help them so that they could synthesize the remaining items better, but not to worry! A little prick, a pinch and a squeeze and you’ll be back to your desk in no time.” Laughs doctor Jang heartily. Pulling his mask down around his chin, he circles the gurney to stand at Darla’s head. Bending at the hip he Whispers into her ears, so softly she can barely hear him. “Do you want to know why I’ve exposed you? Left you nothing to hide behind? Showing me just how afraid of me you are?” His breath a soft caress of her cheek. “Because I get off on it.”

“Come on Darla, are you being serious right now? We’ve all had to take turns donating blood, why would he put you in the surgical bay naked for what amounts to a blood drive. That’s insane. Just tell us where you were, and why you’re three hours late for your shift?” Quips the short, fat man with a ridiculous moustache. “I just fucking told you why, Ricky!” Screams Darla as she shakes and trembles at her desk. “Yeah, well… un-fucking-likely, am I right!?” Snivels Ricky in response. “Oh, your buddy Trevor left you a note on your desk. He wouldn’t let me read it, said it was for your eyes only. Technically I’m not your boss per se, but I’ve been here like three weeks more than you, so… you know. I kinda am.” He trills weakly turning back to his own work station, leaving a very upset Darla sitting alone in her cramped office. Slamming the door shut after Ricky leaves, Darla crumples into her chair with hot salty tears streaming down her cheeks. After a brief period of tremors she sniffles, rubs her eyes with her palms and finds a small envelope sealed with black wax tucked in beside her computer terminal. “Where does he get all this shit?” Darla mumbles to herself, looking over the black wax seal, and the rough off white paper envelope. Using her finger nail to pick the wax seal off whole, she pulls out the slip of folded paper and unfurls it. The rough hand made paper smells like lavender, and is rough to the touch under her fingers. Her fingers make an audible scrape as she runs her nail over the textured paper. Two words are scribbled in the center of the slip of paper, along with a red blob. Pulling her desk lamp over towards her, she flips on the dim bulb to reveal what it says.

The blob at the center looks like a bloody finger print, and the note reads “We’re fucked!”.

Part Twenty Six: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.