This must be a terrible time to be a bookkeeper, accountant, or tax prep person. Especially in the prairies. I’ve heard horror stories from our auditor at work of people showing up on their doorstep with a couple of ExMas orange boxes and a garbage bag full of “receipts”, handing
Continue readingAuthor: cenobyte
centre of the universe: Don’t Look!
This morning on my way to work, I was part of a traffic stop/diversion by city police doing a sweep for lapsed licenses/registrations. It went smoothly and I was in and out in about five minutes. The officers who were checking my deets noted my phone mounted to my windscreen/dash
Continue readingcentre of the universe: The People Upstairs
The house was old; the house was big – bigger in fact than it had ever been. Not much happened upstairs, in the attic, because the attic was full of dust and discarded building supplies, crumbling plaster and lath, and so many spiders. It wasn’t that the upstairs had never
Continue readingcentre of the universe: The Kids Are Alright
This is what it is to have children: When The Captain was just only three, we took him to see Monsters, Inc.. His da was concerned it would be Too Scary for him, but I was confident it’d be okay. A little bit scary is good for you, I always
Continue readingcentre of the universe: This Blessed Thing
This is a Very Long Post. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity. About how it may change as we age, as we emerge into our society, as we redefine ourselves, as we learn more about who we are or about who we were meant to be. This will
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Karaoke and Grief
Here’s the thing: I don’t remember how it came about but we were at a football game and in one end zone there was a stage. Supposedly for the half time show, because it would be irresponsible to just leave a whole stage in the end zone during play. //Irresponsible//.
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Bring Out Yer Band! *clang* Bring Out Yer Band! *clang*
When you learn music, your hemispheres fire off together, and since you’re not just sitting there listening to a lecture, you’re also doing some fine motor function (and/or gross motor function if you’re on percussion or canon), a bunch of those lobes are on fire too.
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Small Kindnesses
When my mom died, we asked people to bring rocks (she liked this Jewish tradition of remembrance) to put in a basket in her memory. Some folk painted rocks, some folks brought little ceramic knickknacks and gewgaws, others brought rocks from their gardens or farms, or maybe just from out
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Displacement
When I was in high school, I had a friend whose family home was just a few blocks from mine. Three generations of their family had lived there, which, to me, was wild. Nobody in my family had lived in the same house (or even on the same land) as
Continue readingcentre of the universe: School’s Out
I was going to make this big ranty post about the SK provincial government’s attitude toward education, citing the absolute farce of our premier scolding school divisions for instituting or increasing school fees for parents while at the same time his government has been underfunding primary and secondary education (and
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Burnt Out
I woke yesterday, or maybe the day before, and heard the Radio Doctor (as in, the physician who is often interviewed on radio, and not the person who repairs ailing radios. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter; radio repair is a noble profession. It’s just that in this
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Iskocēs Tipiskak: A Spark in the Dark – Book Review
Have you ever had one of those experiences where something comes at you out of the dark and ends up being a pleasant surprise? A time where you weren’t expecting anything but something happened anyway? Or when a complete stranger found you and you ended up kind of grokking each
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Who puts the ‘D’ in….”Dystopia”?
Okay first, right off the hop, let me just say that yes, like a twelve-year-old, I have been snickering at the question “who puts the ‘D’ in ‘Dystopia’”. Dystopian fiction used to be among my favourite genres …styles… of fiction. I still do love me a well-crafted dystopian tale, but
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Separate and Distinct?
The Premier of this province has been bumbling around, talking about how his party wants to create a distinct “nation within a nation” in Saskatchewan, and that they want to somehow create a more autonomous province. There’s media out there today about how a good chunk of folks who live
Continue readingcentre of the universe: The Kids are Alright
It started out fairly inocuously; Kid the Younger and their paramour, a few friends we haven’t seen in a while, and a few of KtY & P’s friends just hanging out and watching movies, playing games. Some of us were upstairs in my childhood home and some of us were
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Foot Fish and Fetishes
The beach sand was hot; it felt good on the bottom of my feet. Felt like it was scouring off layers of thick, dead heel flesh; the heat in it permeated my skin and warmed and released the striated muscles and tendons. Phalanges, metatarsals, cuneiforms and cuboid, calcaneus et al.,
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Feast
I dreamed a dream of a place I’ve dreamed before. A small house on the riverbank, the street-facing portion obscured by what once was a barn and now looked to be a shop. In the Before-dream this then-barn was a labyrinth of pipes and steam and ruddy, greasy water puddles.
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Caymanaymans
I had just returned from some kind of an RPG convention where we’d been camping and doing LARP outdoors when it was nice and playing tabletop games indoors when it wasn’t. The Convention was way down Stateside somewhere but not Indianapolis. Like, we’re talking Louisiana or Georgia or something. I
Continue readingcentre of the universe: The Freehouse Caper
I dreamed a dream of games, of gatherings and a labyrinth. I dreamed of sport and game and speeches from the Summer King. He was old, handsome, tired, his power waning. The Winter King was still just a boy but the hunger in him, the desire shining in his eyes,
Continue readingcentre of the universe: Just Keep Stabbin’
I used to be the sort of person who could walk into a clinic, slap myself down in a chair, and have the ghoulish blood collectors therein remove as much of the red as they needed. I donated blood on a regular basis; I never had a problem with blood
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