Obviously it is Chinese. I can tell you it is solid wood and I am currently cleaning it. I doubt it is very old but it is probably worth between 400-600. I saw a similar item on Ruby Lane for 12,500… I won’t hold my breath. I will post a picture when it is clean and in the living room.
I’ve had relatives and former employers who took their kids to Africa for a few years (in 1977 and 1989) and couldn’t imagine how cool it would travel as a child. I came close, my father worked in the defense department for Canadian and US projects and it took him to Germany amongst other places. However he left the army and took a job with Air France developing the navigation systems on the Concorde. Unfortunately, my brother and I always stayed behind.
Jon Poskowitz from MarieLynn on Vimeo.
Dorian Doc Paskowitz, his wife and nine children lived on various beaches in the US in a 24 foot camper. Together they lived a surfer life style. The Paskowitz Family proved that America may be running out of frontiers but it hasn’t run out of frontiersman. Jon made the documentary.
Usually when I fall down I get back up, dust myself off and keep on going. I have been blessed by a body that will not break. Never broke a bone, not even when I was pinned in between two cars 4 years ago. However, what is chipped, dislocated and torn hurts like hell and I have yet to find someone who will listen.
My chiropractor is great but she is prevented by law from actually helping me with my ailments other than forcing stuff back into place when it becomes all crooked and I lose mobility. I have asked my parents for help so I can see my chiropractor more often. Maybe that will help me gain enough mobility to start fighting for my health again. Right now all mobility goes to work and child and there is not enough to go around.
There are many laws in my province that prevent me (and many others) from getting competent medical care. One of them is a law that prevents the hiring of immigrant doctors and nurses who have not passed the French test to the government’s satisfaction. A Romanian friend tried for 3 years to continue her nurse career here but eventually gave up. I know that on top of having the experience and credential, she was a fantastic person and knew well enough French to do the job because we talked in French so she could practice. She is now in New Jersey. I miss her 
This means that in Quebec there are not enough doctors to care for people in this province. If you figure in the incompetence factor of doctors and their staff, this means that it is almost impossible to get medical care. I have met 2 competent doctors (urgentologists) in the past 10 years of being in Montreal. The other 8 were absolutely useless and quite negligent. But as I am not actually paying for care to the actual doctor, I will likely get a “go fuck yourself!” if I complain. In fact I can name two doctors for whom this is the standard greeting upon entering the consultation. Competent doctors are really saddened by this too.
I’d rather work on getting help but it is soooooo annoying to have to deal with so many people who are “just doing their job” without any concern for anything else that happens around them. When you tell them about the disconnects between every steps of the process their eyes just glaze over. I was supposed to have a CT-Scan (2nd one) but I ran into an administrative stack of shit. The doctor’s office swears they sent the prescription for the second CT-Scan by fax. The Hospital (across the street) swears that they did not get it. I will never get a second CT-Scan because each side is doing their job, which is swear that they did their job. If one side tries to fix the problem it means they are admitting to doing something wrong and that’s would be way worse than me dying from the lump growing in my abdomen.
In those cases I usually use the “sad sit in” peaceful method. It work okay but it is very time consuming for someone who is in pain and late on every single contract. I recently was able to guilt an archivist into giving me my first CT-Scan results. Of course it only revealed that my doctor was a dumbass (or maybe he did not even read it.) The results from my first CT-Scan is “there is a lump. Lump is not a hernia it seems. Get a ultrasound instead.” Negligence is not the same thing as imcompetence but it leads to the same results.
I do not have a doctor anymore (he is obviously too old to read and spent most of the year in the hospital himself. I tried for a while to find an OBGYN. I have one from when I was pregnant but he is negligent too. One was recommended to me by a friend but the receptionist always tells me her book is full and she has no book to write down anything more unless I try again in 3 months. She too is just doing her job. I have not talked to a competent doctor in a long time (except my daughter’s doctor who is a vocal system critic) so you have to understand that I am not sure if there are any.
Sometimes I fantasize that a prince comes in and flies me on his private jet to the Mayo Clinic for one of them thorough physicals from ultra competent world-renowned doctors that rich and “important people” get in the US.
Nevertheless…
I had a great week last week. It was a high pain week but I took meetings, did networking and jotted down a lot of ideas in the little productive time I had but I am late on everything. I am very self-conscious of my affect when I am in pain. I know people hate sulkers so I try really hard to not show it. I did a lot of social work but little computer work.
Today I see I am losing the use of my left arm.
My associates are pissed at me. They don’t actually know I am sick but I will likely just resign. Sucks because I have put in a whole year of work and I will have nothing to show for it, again… There has to be a job out there that I can do to support myself as I watch every bit of my body slowly die.
I am not writing much here but I am making things move. I seem inspired by the sun that is coming out and the flowers that are sprouting all over the garden.
This week I did a bit of whistle blowing in one of the world’s largest corporations using information for people who live on opposite sides of the world. The culprit is neither of the parties but a different one in the middle who is using fear and intimidation to steal from some of the world’s poorest people in a immigration scam that just blows my mind. Sure it’s a juicy story but the media is not competent enough to pick the important issues it raises and would turn it into a story that sells paper based on the lowest common denominator’s fears and xenophobia. It is only a juicy story if the super huge company does not investigate the problem and fix it immediately. I have only ever encountered very professional and forthright people there, I really respect them for having a separate corporate entity in my country and having WAY higher social responsibility and standards in Canada than in the USA. I have no reason to suspect that their total horror upon learning of this scam is a facade. I have even written a suggestion on preventing this from happening in the future. It is unbelievably simple to implement however, it may encounter political barriers from old hats who resist corporate transparency.
I am specifically doing this for a friend I have known for almost 20 years. All he wants is for his sweetheart to find her way to him through legal immigration channels. Neither care where they wind up in the world in the end, they just want to be together. He is a paraplegic political refugee and as such feels stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to getting out there and making a change. He is even legally prevented from contributing his hard earned scientific brilliance and academic feats by doing something as simple as WORKING. I want to show him that it is not money that prevents people from taking on big projects. I am a huge plan where he is concerned but for the moment I rack my brain to think who I will call upon to make it happen and how. Maybe it will be as simple as asking YOU random people on the Internet to help us and not some Gazillionnaire with unlimited power, money and technology.
But for now, my reward is doing something absolutely pointless today!
moar funny pictures
Tags: advocacy, Friends, immigration, LOLCat, scam, whistleblowing
All work and no knitting has made me cranky and uninspired. I took some time in the past few days to knit some more and spent most of the day today spring cleaning. I have a million things to code and bill but sincerely, I cannot concentrate anymore after 4-5 days of coding 14 hours straight.
The previous owner planted tulips and I think they are migrating everywhere. The backyard is kind of a surprise garden with things popping up every day. I found rhubarb. I love rhubarb!
This week I watched all episodes of Damages. I just had to know what would happen next… or previously, or you know what I mean. I highly recommend this show to everyone.
Nice to see Glenn Close reprise the role of Madame de Merteuil!
Here’s a video of my kitty eating cat nip.
I have acquired so many vintage knitting books that I thought I would post them on a new blog.
http://vintage-knitting.turn-style.com/
I already have too many blogs but it would be quasi-impossible to put hundreds of vintage knitting posts in here and categorize them perfectly. This is the personal journal with the impossible to remember URL and rambling posts about everything and nothing.
Recently my ex brought me two stacks of letters that I had put away in our daughter’s closet. They are only a small portion of the letters I have received over the years. I also have tons of postcards.
When I was 13 for some reason my mom wrote me off as a failure and trying to accomplish anything after that was pretty much useless so I stayed in my room. I could have used the Internet back then but it was 1984! I passed the time by watching music videos on my 14 inch TV. I then figured out that by hooking cable into my radio I would get stations from Montreal and beyond (Hello CHOM FM and better yet RFI!)
I spent a lot of time writing to my many pen pals. The hottest commodity around were stamps. Back then they were in the low 30 cent range so any time I had a bit over 3 bucks I would buy stamps. With that I could send 5 letters. Noticing that this was important to me, my mother started intercepting the letters so I had the letters sent to my friend’s house. Over the course of 10 years I had dozens of pen pals.
Around 1990 my dad gave me a computer (8088) and my brother gave me a 28K modem. I quickly landed on Fidonet. I started exchanging letters with my new friends behind the quickly crumbling iron curtain in USSR, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. We couldn’t send pictures to each other back then but the text would only take a few days to get from Moscow to Quebec City. The oldest e-mail (node-to-node) beat snail mail by a long shot.
I read first hand accounts of the Romanian Revolution, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the arrival of the first 56k modem in Sophia, Bulgaria. Some of my Fidonet friends I have found again and added to my Facebook. Some of my buddies just couldn’t believe that I had dozens of contacts from Cardiff to Vladivostok but I always thought it was the most normal thing in the world and it did direct my choice of career in the end.
I have never traveled beyond North America but I have never felt disconnected from the rest of the world and I am surprised how many tourists (and immigrants) I have met who cannot believe I know so many specific details about their country or hometown. There is a huge misconception that the world is big. It isn’t because many of my foreign pals and I are only removed by one person whom we both know well or have met randomly. These will wind up in a scrap book 
There is one thing that I love more than drafting things, it’s crafting code. As it turns out my conversion from corporate consultant to Friendly Webmaster is starting to pay off with a steady stream of work to fix technical issues and customize WordPress. I am bewildered by the diversity of my clients. Some are solopreneurs, but I also have hobby bloggers, authors, advertising executives, makers of custom motorcycle parts and other artists.
Nevertheless, I have been knitting a bit. Last week was still too cold outside to just sit there and knit but I have to take a few knitting breaks this week. Here is my scarf base. I say base because I intend to bead and sequin parts of it when it is done. It is knit straight on a multiples of 6 plus 2 stitches with cbf every 4 rows. I tried many combinations but kept getting confused. I knit while watching TV so I can’t work on something too complex.
There are surprise flowers sprouting up all around the house. I have no idea what is in this garden so I cleaned the flower beds and will observe what pops up. Marie-Tangerine chose sunflowers, salad and cat grass for her garden. We can get the rest when I have defined a garden for her. We made bird feeders out of soda bottles but the birds haven’t taken to them yet. I bought a compost bin! I am quite sad that my yard is full of renovation crap from last fall. It will all have to be moved to the curb. So much crap has been piled there in the past 8 months that the grass is gone on 6×6 patch next to my driveway.
The Ferrari is out and it will likely be sold by next winter so I will have room for my bicycles and future glass bead studio (emphasis on the word future). But that garage is d-i-n-g-y and will need such a thorough cleanup! But next on the renovation list is the roof and second story floors. After that I can settle in my room upstairs and put more effort into finding that roommate!
Oh and a weird kitty just for good measure.
Hex Was Born With An Extra Set Of Lower Legs
COOPER CITY (CBS4) ― Hex the kitty was born hexed.The adorable 6 week old kitten was born with 6 legs.
Doctors at the Animal Medical Center at Cooper City say Hex was born with and extra set of hind lets, duplication of part of his intestine and two colons; both of which are functional. The vets speculate that Hex possibly had a Siamese twin that never fully developed
The vets say Hex will need surgery to remove the duplicate lower legs and intestinal surgery to remove the part of the colon which is duplicated.
The surgery needed to remove Hex’s duplicate hind legs will cost anywhere from $2400 to $3000. Hex’s family say that amount is going to be difficult for them to manage.
Hex’s vets have set up a charitable fund to help pay for Hex’s surgery. Anyone wishing to donate should make checks payable to:
Veterinary Specialists of South Florida Charitable Fund
Checks should then be mailed to:
VETERINARY SPECIALISTS OF SOUTH FLORIDA
9410 Stirling Road
Cooper City, Florida. 33024(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Tags: garden, Knitting, renovations
On Monday morning Marie-Tangerine lost an unfair fight with a discarded bedroom set. We were curious to see if the end tables were still there but other neighbors got to them first and re-piled everything wrong. She walked away with a huge scrape on her thigh which has since turned into a blue rectangle. About an hour later I went from the second floor to the first floor in only one step, gravity took care of the rest. Of course I had to brace my fall with the left arm and popped my back out of place yet again. It was only 8:30 AM and it was shaping up to be a really bad day. But we made due and napped together for most of the afternoon. Now I feel halfway okay but I am not going out again until Friday afternoon when Marie-Tangerine and I will go to see the butterflies at the Botanical Garden. I hope it’s sunny, it makes them more active.
Tags: accident
I have been busy with webmastering requests in the past few weeks. I started am still tweaking my website. This weekend I got a bit distracted and created a few new blogs. I have become a quick WordPress installer!
I created a new blog about Vintage Knitting. I didn’t want to flood my Flickr with all the pictures so instead I will be publishing them in an orderly manner. Hopefully a VERY orderly manner.
This is my attempt at using WordPress to categorize things in a way that everything is cross-referenced using categories and tags. Hardest part was finding a theme that could handle the content structure (emphasis on pages with sub-pages.) It is not the theme I wanted at all but it will do until I debug my own (Which looks swell in Firefox but dies in Internet Explorer like a lot of themes out there.)
As you can see, I am still trying various plugins for review on my Friendly Webmaster Blog. There are always a few plugins that promise what I need but what do I do when none deliver?!
Last bit of news. I am on a short list for a book of ornament designs. I have 1 month to pitch my projects. This is for a holiday book but since I don’t do bright green and red, I will stick to white. I think white ornaments really stand out in a tree.
