Category Archives: raincoaster

No Answer

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What do I want to do? I want to add ten bucks to my Paypal account. What does that take? It seems I have to link a new bank account to my Paypal account, one which has money in it. Okay, how hard can this be?

Add in the debit card/account info as a credit card, which it also is. Success! But I can’t add money to the Paypal from a credit card, it seems, which is what I need to do, so now I have to add in the same information, but as a bank account instead of a credit card even though the information is the same. So, how do?

Add in the information. Click to accept the terms of service. Get a popup saying they have to contact me with a code to confirm. Okay, you have my email. BUT NOOOOO. It says “choose your options” and I have a bad feeling, like in the Call of Cthulhu RPG where basically everyone goes mad and dies, the question is how far you can get before it happens.

There is only one option on the drop-down, an option which freezes the blood in my veins.

“Accept a phone call.”

The crew at Skype and Paypal do this deliberately and watch you scream and cry through your webcam, don't they?

The crew at Skype and Paypal do this deliberately and watch you scream and cry through your webcam, don’t they?

Oh no. ANYTHING but that. But, again, I’m out of options. I really just want to add ten bucks to my Paypal. In for a penny, in for a grueling nightmare of phonetree fails.

It gets worse. The only number they have for me is Skype.

I open Skype on the computer. THIS VERSION OF SKYPE IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED CLICK HERE TO UPDATE…

UPDATE FAILED.

Seriously, feels.

Feels.

Because of course it did. It did so, in fact, several times in succession, so fuck that shit. I go to Skype.com because I remember from the last century that you can still use skype to make and receive calls at Skype.com.

<interlude in which I reset my Skype password three times, because the first two I tried had already been used FUGATES and FUMSFT, imagine that>

I am ready. I click “Call me” on Paypal. I get a retro-tech doo-doo-dooby doo-doo-doo ring tone, but try as I may, I cannot find anywhere to click to receive the call. Skype, it seems will allow me to receive calls, but just not answer them. Sixty seconds later, I get a voicemail, a plaintive female voice asking me, over and over, to put in the code they are showing on my paypal page. Oh, trust me, ma’am, I would if I could, but the tech gods are against us tonight and Microsoft is in retrograde.

They're in the house, we already covered this!

They’re in the house, we already covered this!

I go through this entire procedure twice more, and then I get the genius idea to get my phone, which is charging elsewhere, and open Skype on it, and pounce the instant it rings. And guess what? Paypal says, on my fourth try, “We are sorry we are unable to verify your account” and now that I can finally, FINALLY answer their goddam skype call, they won’t call me.

There’s a metaphor about dating in there somewhere.

So, I guess my Paypal account will just have to be underwater until I get a client, and they choose to pay via Paypal, and I complete the job and invoice and wait, or until Skype actually works, or until I dunno, until technology finally breaks us all and we go back to stone knives and bearskins.

So, how was YOUR Canada Day?

deadpool canadian heritage

This is a dermaroller. Not sure if the Spanish Inquisition had them.

The Terrifying Self-Care Experiment Begins!

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Blame Trinny Woodall.

This is a dermaroller. Not sure if the Spanish Inquisition had them.

This is a dermaroller. Not sure if the Spanish Inquisition had them.

This terrifying little object is called a dermaroller. Of course, as with any criminal, it has an alias: microneedler. What does it do? It needles you, microscopically. You roll it across your epidermis. God, I love honest, descriptive names. This particular one is plastic with titanium needles, the smallest size, 0.25mm needles, so it doesn’t really penetrate into the skin very far, so hopefully I won’t end up with a Kardashian-like face full of blood. They go up to 1mm, which should only be used on the body, never the face: I bought a full set, 0.25, 0.5, and 1, but it’s doubtful I’ll ever use the other two, since I’m so thin-skinned you can see all the veins through my hide, and my legs look like a map of the London tube. Oh, and if you’re into such things, this is made of metal wheels, not individual needles. If the goal is to irritate my skin, a wheel should work better than needles anyway, and it’s about $50 cheaper too.

The concept is, you irritate your face and the cells scream for help, and the body responds by making and giving those cells new collagen, which has a magical youthifying effect, the way you shut up a screaming child by popping a bunch of popcorn and stuffing it down their throats.

What, you don’t do that?

Anyhoodle, in addition to building collagen to fight middle-aged sag and wrinkling, the tiny holes also work as conduits for anything you put ON your skin, which is why it’s so important that both your skin and your needles be completely clean before you start. Some tough people put something on their skin beforehand so the needle pushes it into the skin, even skin peeling agents like glycolic acid, which to me just seems deranged.

So tonight, after all my work was done and all my facebook fights were over, I put on some junky reality tv and cleaned my face, doused my microneedle with alcohol to sterilize it, waved it around for ten minutes until it was completely dry and clean, and then went to work.

Ten strokes in one direction, ten at right angles to that. All over the face, then repeat at a 45 degree angle. You’re not supposed to push on it, thank god, because the idea of actively pushing needles into my face is not something I could ever be super-psyched about. Then, after was done, I looked in the bathroom mirror.

I’ll spare you the 3am selfie in the filthy mirror (not mine), but trust me, it wasn’t pretty. I looked like I had a bad sunburn, and yes, there were a couple of red dots, very, very tiny red dots.

Nonetheless, she persisted.

I started with the serum, in this case The Ordinary serum called The Buffet, which is designed for people who can’t make up their minds, or just want everything in one serum, because by god, it has everything. It stung a bit, which is the lactic acid in it I suppose. Normally, it makes me a bit red, so tonight I should be incandescently red. Then, over that I put the Garnier night cream, Ultra-Lift Miracle Sleeping Cream, which certainly SOUNDS like it does something. It’s very soothing, I’ll say that for it.

This is a jade roller, but it's really only jadeite. Whaddaya expect for less than twenty bucks?

This is a jade roller, but it’s really only jadeite. Whaddaya expect for less than twenty bucks?

Then I took this device, a so-called jade roller, which is really a jadeITE roller, and rolled it back and forth the same as I’d rolled the dermaroller, but because it’s cool stone over rich lotion, it’s very soothing. This all done, I’m done for the night and will report back in the morning, god help me.

 

hello, yes, this is raincoaster

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hello yes this is raincoaster

hello yes this is raincoaster

So, it’s been awhile, no?

For those of you who’ve missed updates at the ol’ raincoaster blog, since the last time this blog was active I’ve:

  • Started and run Canada’s premier hacktivism and cyberwar news website, The Cryptosphere, currently on hiatus. During its active period it was linked to by sites all over the world including the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Newsweek, and more (although not any Canadian ones, which is weird). And I was quoted by Time magazine. So, that was nice.
  • Moved about twenty or thirty times, as I paired my burgeoning cyber-career with a sideline as a pet-sitter. After one too many cancellations, I started charging good money with 50% up front and non-refundable, and otherwise, this really couldn’t be a viable option. But the fact is, that’s a horrible way to live, always trying to line up gigs so you’re never homeless.
  • Been homeless for periods of time, because of the whole making-no-money-from-website thing, combined with pet-sitting gigs that didn’t line up. Thank god for good friends, that’s all I can say.
  • Moved back to Ottawa, god help me, to stay with a cousin who has a medical condition that means he should not live alone. The idea was, I rest up and recover from the gruelling life I’d been leading while doing him a favour. Didn’t quite work out that way.
  • Shortly after arrival, fell down an entire flight of stairs, landing on the back of my head and my elbow. The elbow shattered into gravel, so that gives you a rough idea of what my brain went through. My sister heard the fall, and investigated immediately; when she found me no more than three minutes after the fall, there was a pool of blood around me three feet in diameter. The medical team were quite surprised I didn’t die. Me too, considering…
  • Was examined in Emergency and told my elbow was not broken. Five weeks later, when I went back because it wasn’t healing as well as the rest of me, I found out that was false. It had been turned into what the bone doctor called “gravel”, and so they had to schedule me for surgery. I now have six inches of steel in that elbow, and even five months of physio will not allow me to straighten and lock that elbow, ever again. There goes my career in yoga.
  • Slowly recovered. The fall happened at the end of September 2016, and I literally don’t remember anything other than some of the hospital, until Halloween. I only have patchy memories of the next few months. It was June of the next year before I felt like myself again. I kept trying, and failing, to get back to work, and because even my capacity for self-awareness was damaged, I couldn’t understand why I was having difficulty.
  • Got laid off from Passcode, so was fully unemployed in a province where I didn’t officially exist and thus couldn’t get benefits.
  • Over months proved to the government not only that I existed, but that I was a Canadian citizen who had entered the country legally. Got, piece by piece, all of the identification I needed, so now if I want I can go get a driver’s license, only nobody here will let me borrow their car, so I’ll have to pay a driving school. So I need to make some money.
  • Started back to work, first at a content farm, which is unchallenging, but at least it’s steady, pays promptly, and covers my bills. Then got a gig with a new news site covering blockchain, and they’re very interested in my specialties of crime and social justice. And they pay TOP RATES. I’ve already got an assignment there, so I just need to get the email questions out and do the research and then bang an article into shape. Very excited about this.
  • Just tonight, had a tryout for a 9-5, M-F crime writing job. We’ll see how I do at this, but they already know my work and are keenly interested. It’s in the same time zone as Ottawa, so that works out well, and it’s a four month contract, which would give me enough of a cushion that when I go back to BC I wouldn’t need to scramble or feel desperate.
  • Speaking of which…

I just gave Ontario my notice.

It’s been…sticky, humid, swarming with insects, sleeting, coated with ice, 90 minutes from downtown via bus on a good day, expensive, fattening, boring, Tory, racist, uncultured, and dull. And I’m leaving.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not really Ontario I hate, it’s just the extremely bland, suburban part of it that I’m marooned in that I hate. And I know BC isn’t perfect. Half of it is on fire right now.

But I know where I belong, and I know the places that call to my heart. I know that, when I sit on the bus in Vancouver, nobody moves away from me just because my hair is blue. I know that BC takes public transportation much more seriously than Ontario does. And god, the food is SO MUCH BETTER.

Also, my friends are there.

During my two years in Ontario I’ve made precisely 4 new friends, none of whom live in Ottawa. I’ve been deliberately avoiding social occasions, because I don’t want to form emotional ties to this place, and the plan has worked.

Two of those four new friends have offered me a pet-sitting gig over the Christmas holidays, right through to mid-January, and they’ve included: an offer to stay with them in December for free, three weeks of paid pet-sitting, and an airline ticket home to BC at the end of it. So, although I had hoped to be out of here sooner, I said yes. I’ll shift my stuff to The Sister’s basement at the end of November, bid my cousin adieu, and prepare to become a BCer again.

I’m gonna need more Gore-tex.

 

Happy Birthday Bruce, Lorrie, Isabel, Doady

Death as a Dinner Guest

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Happy Birthday Bruce, Lorrie, Isabel, Doady

Happy Birthday Bruce, Lorrie, Isabel, Doady

Today was a good day. A long, tiring day that started far too early for someone who usually falls asleep between 4 and 6 in the morning, but it was still a good day.

And a bad day.

A bittersweet day.

Today was the family birthday party for all the people whose birthday is this month.

One of them is dead. Well, that’s how it starts.

He wasn’t, I don’t think, when they ordered the cake. Dead. And when we picked up the cake, there were no musical notes on it, which WOULD NOT STAND for VARIOUS REASONS and my aunt Dinny immediately called over the chief baker and had some musical notes piped on it as had been the plan all along because my aunt Dinny always goes to the top and gets results fast. The musical notes will be important later; this is foreshadowing.

But yes, my awesome, kind, funny, warm Uncle Bruce had been very unwell for a very long time, and had been in and out of the hospital recently. On his last day he was at home, and his wife was booked to help at a dance, and he wouldn’t hear of her staying home with him. He was good. Go.

So she went.

When she got back, they chatted about the night, she made some tea for them both, and before she could give it to him, he collapsed. It was all over.

In the same spirit, she wouldn’t hear of keeping his name off the cake. Bruce wouldn’t miss a party, particularly not a party where he’s the guest of honour! My family is one that takes party obligations very seriously; people practice for things like being the guest of honour, and making their initial “what I’ve been up to in the last six months” remarks.

Partying is serious business.

Partying is, in fact, the family business at Uncle Bruce and Aunt Donnie’s house, as well as their preferred activity: always an enthusiastic and talented musician, once he retired from his job as a genetic technician at the Experimental Farm, Bruce made music his full time gig. How good was he? Well, lots of Canadian people go to Ireland. How many get paid to go to Ireland to teach Celtic fiddling to the people who invented it?

That good.

And Donnie was always by his side, with a pot of tea and a sheaf of papers and often with a phone at her ear, running their road show with an efficiency that would be the envy of any nation’s chief executive even if it often looked like an octopus in a hurricane and felt like that to those suddenly caught up in it unprepared. And when they decorated the house for Christmas, you’d never seen more holly on more gilded fiddle ornaments. Joy and music and family with their four boys were where they lived, and South March was only the place where this glorious galaxy happened to intersect with Planet Earth.

So, in many ways including being named on the cake, Bruce was indeed at the party.

Cal was also at the party.

Cal liked my tee shirt: the one that says “Ain’t no party like a Gatsby party cuz a Gatsby party don’t stop until two people are dead and everyone is disenchanted with the Jazz Age as a whole.” In retrospect, I should not have worn that tee shirt.

Today is the first day Cal and I ever met; he’s married to a second cousin from a side of the family that my mother never spoke to, so we didn’t speak to them either. But Cal was charming and sat across from me at lunch, and he and his wife Gail gave me a birthday card with actual cash money in it (that’s how you know you’re still Kid Generation, even if you’re middle-aged) for my birthday, even though they’d never laid eyes on me before either, which was very nice of them. Cal had high cheekbones and bright blue eyes and excellent posture, and he was a sweet, low-key gentleman with a good sense of humour and was not in the least phased by the presence of my pinko politicking, purple-haired self as many gentlemen of A Certain Age are. We joked across the table about my shirt and all the hippies in BC and many other things besides, and listened to all the family stories, and stood up and sat down over and over for many, many family photos, and then it was time to go, so we all went.

Cal died on the way home from the party.

I expect that, wherever they are, Bruce is showing him around and introducing him to people, because that’s what Bruce would do, and since Martin Landau and George Romero died on the same day as Bruce, and Kenneth J. Lane died on the same day as Cal, they are probably having an amazing (and well-dressed) party right now.

Agrees, Yoda does.

Yet — GASP — Another Blog Post!

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Two in a week! I know, right? 

Here’s my first week with ID and medical coverage and what am I doing about it? Nothing whatsoever, that’s what I’m doing about it.

On the plus side, I have a TON of experience at this shit. On the minus side, I have a tooth that has basically been infected for the last year, on and off, plus swollen glands and an overdue cancer survivor check, which anyone must admit is an inauspicious conjunction. So I’ve got to get off my ass/buttular parts and on the road to getting an actual doctor’s appointment, which I literally forget how to do.

I’m serious. The last time I had a doctor’s appointment was like Three Cher Faces ago, and the Kardashians had not been invented yet, except the one toadying to OJ Simpson. So I have to find a doctor, I guess, and then make an appointment. No, first I have to dig through the welfare website, because I think I read that they cover dental stuff if you’re on benefits, which I am, and that would be huge. And I can do that now, which is long past doctors’ offices closing time, so brb.

Back. Wow, there are an unconscionable number of 404’s on that government website. No excuse for that shit, people. #BlameManagement. Anyhoodle it does look like dental is covered if there’s pain and/or infection and/or there sure as shit is.

Okay, email to one human being at the hospital with the cancer centre has been sent, asking for pointers to the right person to talk to. So that’s step one and step two down. Whew, this whole efficiency thing is exhausting!

The next paperwork step is taxes. You can imagine how much I’m looking forward to that. Taxes, cancer, and tooth extractions.

Life. A cabaret, it is.

Agrees, Yoda does.

Agrees, Yoda does.