Christmas lights, statuettes, and the Malahat
Well, last week I mentioned setting up the trees, this week I’ve actually decorated them.
But I made that a separate post, so never mind.
It’s one of those things where before I do it, I don’t feel like getting it done, but once it’s done, I’m glad I did it and I really enjoy looking at the decorations.
Which is kinda where I’m at with the outdoor lights – I was supposed to get those done this week but didn’t get around to it. And I kinda don’t feel like it, but I know once I do, I’ll enjoy the lights for at least 6 weeks before I take them down.
So it’s worth it, I’m just lazy.
And I know I can just get it done bit by bit. Tomorrow’s forecast is supposed to be clear, ditto Tuesday’s, so I can definitely get the backyard done between the two of those, and maybe the front, too.
Besides, it’s gonna piss rain for a week solid come Wednesday, and while I have often put lights up in the rain, it sucks.
So… anyway, I talked myself into starting with the outside lights this evening. I’d left a bunch up in the gazebo and the hedge adjacent to it last year, so I just had to haul the end over and plug them into one of the timers.
Goddamn gazebo lights are mostly dead. Grrr…
They don’t make the damn LEDs the way they used to. I have some strings that I know are more than 10 years old because I used to use them for mood lighting in the old jam space starting in 2011 and they were a few years old already. They’re indestructible with not a single light out, despite having been used outside over and over again.
But the newer ones crap out at anything. All the lights on the gazebo were brand new last winter and I left them up thinking it was better than letting them get knocked about going up and down each year. Nonetheless, they’re mostly out.
Other strands were fixed by my dad last winter and a couple of them were perfect when I put them up tonight around the covered patio… for 5 minutes before crapping out.
Sigh…
Well, any strings that don’t work are getting discarded at the end of this Christmas season. I’m not taking defective lights with me when I move… even if that means I only take the old ones from the jam space.
Oh well. I’ll get the rest up tomorrow and Tuesday.
If I can find the rest of my damn outside timers.
In the meantime, this is what I’ve got going, at least on the covered patio:
What else?
I mentioned last week I was thinking of ordering more Lemax, but so far I’ve talked myself out of it.
Besides, money spent on Lemax is money not spent on altar statuettes, lol…
This week both Athena and Aphrodite arrived, direct from Greece.
(Athena pictured here on my downstairs desk, but she actually lives in the upstairs office.)
(Aphrodite pictured here on the edge of the altar in the upstairs office.)
In another couple weeks I should be receiving Hestia and Tyche/Fortuna, also direct from Greece.
I’d also like to order a few more to have on hand, but certainly when I need a representation of a deity on my altar but haven’t got a statuette, I’ve been able to find creative solutions.
Lastly, I’ve been feeling a little trapped this week as Monday’s crazy rainstorm washed out a chunk of the Malahat highway down to Victoria, where I usually run my bigger errands. I actually hadn’t realized this on Tuesday afternoon when I thought I’d head down, only to get stuck in the traffic jam. Fortunately I was only in it for 15 minutes before I managed to get into a rare left turn lane to be able to pull out of the parking lot of the traffic jam and into the parking lot of the Malahat Chalet so I could turn around and head home.
Some were stuck there for hours, though, as there was only one passable lane and even that was mostly closed with the construction crews fixing things, then letting alternating traffic pass one way at a time for a few minutes before working again.
Y’know, there’s one of those electronic signs over the highway on the way down, and yes, it did say “Essential travel only”.
Here’s the thing: for the last year and a half, that sign has almost always spewed some version of “essential travel only” because of the Karens and their sniffles and irrational media-induced fears.
So… naturally, this means I ignored that sign… other than muttering some vulgarities about the head Gestapo Karen of this province and what she could do with her dictates and kept driving.
Stupid cunts have been crying wolf on that sorta thing for so long now that they’ve made that phrase meaningless. Some sort of “ROAD DAMAGED” or “ROAD CLOSED DUE TO FLOOD” instead of “ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY” might have been helpful.
And of course when I got home and looked it up on Twitter, there were a bunch of retards shrieking about how the people stuck on the highway deserved it because of supposedly being selfish and not staying home and blah blah blah “essential” etc…
Go fuck yourself. Seriously.
I wonder how many of them were there because, like me, they’ve learned to ignore the constant crying wolf from that sign because it’s been being misused for 2 years by the stupid Karens.
And the reality is what someone else said on Twitter: this is typical Canadian decades of neglecting infrastructure upgrades. In just about any country in Europe, the Malahat would have been replaced with a 4-lane tunnel 40 years ago.
And don’t get me started on the horrors of Abbotsford being flooded. Also entirely preventable and also typical of Canadian neglect.
Some excerpts from comments/rants in a thread with a friend who lives not far from Abbotsford:
Shit like this makes me so fucking angry.
Canada is (or at least it should be, based on resources) one of the richest countries on earth. With high taxes and therefore lots of money they can spend. And they piss it away on garbage and on trying to look cool to ingrates and people who don’t give a fuck.
How much did we go into debt for the Olympics in 72, 88, and 2010? How much have we spent on foreign aid? Love ya, Bono, but if you want my tax money for your pet projects you best come here and earn it in person… (Note: I actually said something far more vulgar in the actual FB comment, lol…)
I know, outdated reference, but remember how often Paul Martin was shilling foreign aid projects to have a chance to be photographed with Irish Jesus in the 90s so the media would say he was cool?
How much money is wasted on bullshit indoctrination in the supposed education system and frivolous “health care”, never mind putting the economy into a tailspin for 2 years and then bribing people to not work with our own fucking money?
And the one thing the government is supposed to do with our goddamn tax dollars… THE ONE JOB!!!!… has been ignored because it wasn’t a sexy photo op.
First priority ought to be infrastructure. Sorry for all the dipshits with women’s studies and international relations degrees, go get a job at McDonald’s instead of a make-work gig with the feds. Fuck off.
And now thousands of innocent people will suffer, and there will be a blow to the food supply from all the soon-to-be dead cows and chickens and pigs, etc.
…
Not that the Malahat issue compares, just that it’s born out of the same incompetence.
There’s 2 ways down to Victoria from where I live. The Malahat is down to 1 lane each way in some spots because muh park, and it can be a foggy death trap at times.
The scenic route is out on the Pacific Coast and takes about 4 hours, and it is also currently impassable because of a washout that took the whole thing out at Jordan River (might be back to a single lane intermittently as of this afternoon, dunno).
But there’s logging roads that are decently high running smack down the middle, all they have to do is pave it and add barriers, but they’ve refused to even consider that for decades.
And don’t get me started on the enviro-cockblocking. I love trees and animals too, but human safety is more important and the enviro-loons are mostly funded by depopulation death cultists who want to take us all back to pre-industrial revolution ways of living.
We have technology and can use it to solve our problems AND protect nature, but naw… why do a silly thing like that?
…
Yeah, and God forbid [transportation/traffic congestion] ever improve because you shouldn’t be driving cars, you should take transit to save the earth.
Oh, some of y’all are buying electric cars? Well, fuck you anyway. You should come live in a 300 sq ft sky box and walk to your shitty job. Besides, stop hogging all the hydro power, we need to save that so we can sell it at a premium to those suckers in Cali.
(Speaking of which, my brother always raves about how awesome it is to drive in LA, lol… yeah, there’s congestion, but apparently nowhere near as shitty as in Vancouver… did the ‘tards actually knock down the Georgia viaduct yet? More of that “you should all walk or bike to work horseshit. They’re all insane.)
Oh, some of y’all have solar panels to charge your own car? We hate you anyway.
(Don’t even get me started on how we should be using nuclear power and it’s actually far cleaner than the other options, including hydro… lol… not that nuclear power would have prevented the current flood, but the sort of forward thinking and logic that would have flipped off the Karens who believe their TVs enough to hate it would have also maybe resulted in better infrastructure maintenance and updates like dikes and floodwater mitigation.)
So… yeah…
And then yesterday I dragged my lazy ass to Superstore to fetch some groceries, as I usually do on a Friday afternoon (well, usually it’s Walmart).
It was pretty chill, and while I noticed some blank spots in a few of the shelves, for the most part it was fine, and the only thing I couldn’t locate was chicken strips. Oh well.
I did notice the same pack of eye of round roasts that I normally buy to chop up into steaks that used to be $18 for two decent sized chunks and then in the last year or so it’s been $35 is now $51.
I didn’t bother getting it because I have enough beef in my freezer, but of course thousands of cows and chickens were drowned in the Abbotsford flood and that will be another throat-punch to the food supply chain and inflation.
Thanks, Karen, very cool.
There was an older gentleman who noticed I politely waited my turn a few feet back to get my milk until someone else got hers and moved on. He told me he’d tried to come and get groceries on Tuesday and couldn’t get to the milk fridges because access was blocked… because that’s how far back the line-up for the check-outs reached with all the people panic-buying and hoarding. He gave up and came back on Friday, and things had calmed considerably.
I’ve heard similar things from friends in the Vancouver area.
Now, I’m well-stocked and have been for a year, but I did it a bit at a time over the course of a couple months last summer and then just made sure to replace things as I used them up. Panic buying now is dumb.
Also, from what I hear from my nephew, the press is back to their old tricks drumming up stories about panic buying. Why? Because they’re scum and because they want to scare normies into thinking everyone is panic buying so they start panic buying and thus the media reports are intended to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
That’s what caused the great toilet paper shortage of 2020, after all: the media told people to panic and make sure they had enough, then the memes started on social media, and people then actually did panic and start hoarding it all.
In my town, I guess that crap worked on Tuesday but it was normal again on Friday. Sounds like the press is still trying to freak people out on the mainland, though.
Anyway, I could rant more, but suffice to say that people suck, and the ones in the media and the government suck the most, followed by those who listen to those assholes.
Sigh… anyway, let’s wrap up with a couple pics. I didn’t get around to getting outside and taking pics during the day, but there’s not much of interest in the garden anyway.
Instead, here’s a few pics from around the house:
