Equinox, escape plans, and a reflush in the garden
Another week gone by.
Happy fall! The equinox was this week and I was kinda thinking how I need to be a little bit better at being more in tune with nature. Not in a granola and Greenpeace sorta way, but in a paying attention sorta way.
Generally, the closest attention I pay is in terms of decorating for Halloween (and thus far this year, all I’ve done is my Spooky Town Lemax set-up; that might be all I ever bother doing this year) and Christmas and then removing it all in January. Then I guess I pay attention to the succession of bulbs blooming from late winter through to May, when the roses take over from the last of the tulips. After that, it’s kinda an amorphous blob.
Actually, even with those markers, it’s an amorphous blob.
I gotta fix that somehow. I guess in a way that was the idea with stitching the 8 sabbat pieces from The Primitive Hare (I mentioned finishing Yule last week and I’ve started Imbolc this week). I know a lot of other cross-stitchers do monthly pieces that they can swap out and they seem to be quite popular but really none of them jive with me and my aesthetic and my whole pagan vibe, other than the sabbat ones.
I guess I should get off my ass and design some, eh?
I also found myself following a few pagan and Druidic pages on Facebook (and even a couple that seem kinda Wiccan, which normally I still have my old LaVeyan disdain for) because they talk about different seasonal and natural markers and celebrations.
And I can’t really blame the ongoing lockdowns for this shit, because much as I despise all that bullshit Karen hysteria and busybodiness, I’ve pretty much been able to set my own schedule and do as I please whenever I please with no one to answer to for most of my adult life, and especially since my mother dropped dead 10 years ago and left me just enough money to not have to work the same sort of minimum wage job my other musician and artsy friends had to work.
For a while I guess I had a a rhythm due to the maQLu project. New EP every 6 months (normally tied to one of the sabbats), plus back then I did my weekly college radio show, etc. And then there were weekly open mics and 3 weekly podcasts when I was doing comedy the first time around. Plus always a bunch of friends’ events to punctuate the weeks.
Now? I live in the middle of nowhere and much of my life is digital. It’s not healthy.
In fact, I daresay that the maQLu project was a healthier life, as sooner or later I had to emerge to play a show or whatever, and while I did essentially live in my jam space—I’d get up at my family home in the suburbs in the middle of the afternoon, run an errand or two, proceed to the jam space, and stay there until 3 or 4 in the morning then return to the suburbs to sleep and shower—there was still more definition to it all. I’d leave at 9pm to go for a run on the Seawall, or to drive downtown to watch a friend’s band play, then go back and work some more.
(This is kinda turning into a rant about there being nothing to do for fun where I live now rather than a seasonal thing… but I guess punctuation in the flow of time is punctuation, whether it’s a gig or a holiday.)
Well, hopefully things will improve in 2022.
Because I’m leaving, as I’ve hinted before in several posts.
And one thing I decided this week, on the Equinox, actually, is that while I plan to make Los Angeles my new home base (ie, liquidate everything in Canada and buy a condo there), I also want to see a bit more of the world. My brother is relocating to Mexico (probably Guadalajara but he’s going to explore a bit before buying anything), and Mexico sounds awesome and a place I can spend up to 6 months per year in on a tourist visa (same as LA until/unless I get my green card). And there’s more to the world than just LA and Mexico, of course.
I had thought Phoenix would be the more rational US location, but then again, I always wanted to live in LA, and I know I can afford a condo there, especially on the East Side. And I have friends there. So, LA it is. If I hate it, I can sell and move elsewhere.
The exact timing is yet to be determined. In order to take all my shit there, I would need to show either that I own a property there (ie, snowbird, even with a tourist visa you can import your household goods and personal belongings so long as you own a property there or have a lease) or that I had my green card.
This makes it a little awkward as I need to sell here to afford to buy there, so there might be a few months of everything being in a storage locker here while I find a place, dunno, and I have to do more research, but I am determined to be an ex-pat by this time next year.
Or I might get a lease and move my shit that way and then look to buy once I’m there. We’ll see.
And yes, I get the hilarity of saying the year passes like an amorphous blob with no markers and then choosing to live somewhere that’s permanently hot and sunny with no actual seasons.
In any case, I’m also not ruling out a possibility I considered last year: Ireland for a couple months each summer. Specifically, County Kerry, where my ancestors are from, or somewhere in the Gaeltacht a little further north.
Knowing what I know about the taxes and all that shit, I wouldn’t want to be there more than that each year, and I might not even want to buy any place there if I’m not going to be there at least 5 months a year, but I could still go and rent somewhere for 2-3 months, then spend my fall and winter in LA and 3-4 months in Mexico.
Ireland would also be a good jumping off point for exploring Europe.
Here’s the thing: I can afford it, my problem is inertia and having never done this before, but it’s time.
And another thing: Karens be fucked in the ass with a red-hot poker (and I don’t mean the flower of that name), because a week from Tuesday I can fly anywhere I fucking want in the world.
(Yes, there are some places where I can’t go, still locked down even for the double-jabbed, but who the fuck wants to go to a prison colony like Australia these days anyway? And fuck New Zealand as well.)
So… the decluttering and purging shall continue and plans shall be made. I expect to be in Los Angeles in February and I may well be in Ireland in June before returning to Los Angeles for the fall and settling in.
And even with “settling in,” from now on I want to plan to take more trips. I swore when I moved here to Vancouver Island that I was going to take an annual trip somewhere big like Hawaii or Mexico or England or Japan or Greece, and also take smaller road trips a couple times a year.
Yes, the lockdowns fucked that all up, but what was my excuse in 2017-2019?
So, even though I will be settling in LA, I want to be exploring a little further afield as well. Getting out of Vancouver was supposed to make my world bigger, not smaller.
And frankly, even if by some impossible miracle the PPC had won the Canadian election in a landslide on Monday, I’d still be leaving.
Well… that sure was a long rant, but there ya go.
So what was I doing aside from scheming this week?
Well, I grabbed a few things that had been languishing at Dad’s house (because I need to purge my crap from there, too), and I found something that’s been on my Amazon wish list for a couple years, but which I haven’t bought because it’s out of print and copies are far too expensive:
How expensive, you ask?
Woo hoo! That book is, of course, coming with me to LA.
What else… the seeds I planted last week have started to sprout, not that they look like much yet:
I’m not sure if those are lettuce or mustard greens or kale, but I have some of all of those coming up.
I’ve written two more character interview scripts for the prequels or whatever you want to call them for the web series, and I should be starting to record audio on those soon. The first 5 are already written, and I hope to finish the other 3 scripts this coming week.
I’ve also ordered a couple Barbie cars for the series. One is a white 1986 Barbie Ferrari, which I need for a voiceover shot for Sally’s interview, wherein we hear Sally insisting something never happened and as she does, the scene cuts to showing that something absolutely happened and happened in the Barbie Ferrari.
I also ordered a 2000-ish Barbie VW Beetle, which would be the assistant engineer’s errand car… actually, let’s say it belongs to one of the strippers, but the assistant engineer/flunky is allowed to borrow it for errands.
It’s yellow and has peeling-off flower stickers on it, but I think I will either paint it with flowers (like, fully paint it) or put bigger flower stickers all over it.
I still want to find a silver Porsche for the main character’s car, but I don’t think I have anything requiring his Porsche til later in the series… well, there is a scene in a montage in Episode 2 where he’s getting a blowjob in his Porsche, but I was kinda thinking of making all montages illustrations and not actual footage (because I need a montage in the first episode showing planes being snowed in and flights cancelled, and I am not building a goddamn airport for that one montage, but I can draw that shit…).
Anyway, 2 cars down and on the way.
What else… I wrote a couple more blogs this week, one about a car that’s a bit too big for Barbie, and one with all my crafting stuff this week, which I figured I’d make into a weekly Friday blog post instead of having it all in here.
Once upon a time a few years ago when I was doing Flosstube and all, I had a specific blog just for crafts, but then I stopped updating it and it kinda got hacked and I just deleted it, I think.
So, might as well have it on here for the once a week I’d actually update that info.
Lastly, let’s have some garden pics. We’re starting to get a bit more in terms of flowers again, going into the last hurrah of color before it all turns to greens and browns for months.
