Wondering

Why it is that on June the 11th I can still see my breath in the air when I leave the apartment in the morning?
One of these days Vancouver... Wham! Bam! Straight to the moon!

Sunday in Vancouver

Yesterday I had lunch in the same restaurant as this person, (she did not really look like an alien), watched a triathlon from the sidelines, and learned how to properly drink whiskey so that it doesn't burn your mouth.

When we show you around Vancouver, we pull out all the stops.

All in the fold

Hello Internet! I have been busy. Sick and busy. Sick because I’ve been busy – you know how it goes. And I have been neglectful. Oh my goodness where did May go? But enough! This is my website until I get around to building myself a new one, and I feel like telling a story if you feel like reading one.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. Possibly because I’ve been stalking dooce’s site since I found out SHE WAS WALKING AROUND VANCOUVER FOR FIVE DAYS WHILE I WAS IN BLOODY WHISTLER and she keeps making references like this one which make me want to cry because that store is where we bought all the stuff to make our wedding invitations and I LOVE IT TOO! And maybe we would be friends now if I hadn’t been working in Whistler that weekend… unaware…

But enough of the crazy. What really made me think of this story was this post, and the reference to putting underwear in the freezer. And here it is:

TM puts his socks into strange little balls. I don’t mean he balls up his dirty socks – he does that too sometimes – I mean when he’s folding laundry, his socks get sort of smushed into each other to make clean-sock-balls. I don’t understand this, but I’ve accepted it, and when I remember, attempt to make the smushy-clean-sock-balls out of his socks myself. He apparently can’t bring himself to actually wear them otherwise, and if I do the balls wrong, if I fold them simply the way that normal people do, he promptly redoes them for me. This is okay, and I’ve even come to develop a certain appreciation for what the sock-balls bring to our equation.

For instance, TM learned to juggle using his sock balls back when we were roommates in university, until I went out and found him real juggling balls. I figured if he was going to stick with this new found affinity he might as well look slightly less bizarre. See, even then I was encouraging his talents.

Sock balls also make excellent ammo. They won’t really hurt anyone, or break anything. You should probably know, though, that they also won’t really do so well at turning off an over head light once you’re already in bed and would rather throw things at the wall over and over than get up again. In our house, it’s 10 points every time you can hit TM in the head with a sock ball. 0 points for my head though.

Laundry folding invariably turns into a sock-ball fight. Actually, for two mature people into their second quarter century of life, you may be surprised how much throwing of things goes on at our place. Like that time that TM’s dad accidentally threw a coaster out the window of our 16^th floor apartment. He didn’t get the 10 points he was aiming for, but this was much funnier.

Anyway, there was one particularly grueling and extended sock-ball fight (I don’t give up very easily once you start me going) that ended up with TM stealing and hiding a pair of my socks (semi-balled) so that I would stop throwing them. Or maybe to distract me with something new. I hunted all over the apartment and couldn’t find them, even with TM’s hints of warmer/colder. I couldn’t understand why everywhere I went he was always saying “colder.” I presumed he was just lying, until he finally said “You’re getting really, really cold,” and I found my socks in the freezer.

Well! Then TM, naively assuming the war was over, went to the bathroom.

And I stuck HIS socks in the freezer.

And then we went to bed and I forgot about them.

We have a great tendency to forget things in our freezer. I don’t think we’re alone in this. Anyone who’s ever been 16 years old can probably tell you what happens to carbonated alcoholic beverages when you stick them in the freezer to chill and then forget about them. The freezer is kind of one of those out-of-sight-out-of-mind deals, and I bet if I randomly opened any of your freezers right now, I could find something, way in the far reaches, that you wouldn’t recognize or remember ever putting in there.

And so it will come as no shock to you, that some weeks ago we HAD put a beer in our freezer and forgotten about it. We forgot about it for DAYS, until we opened the freezer again for some reason and oh my goodness – there’s BEER ALL OVER EVERYTHING. And like any other normal person, we lamented, grabbed what we wanted out of the freezer, cleaned the frozen beer off of that one item, and closed the door again. We would deal with THAT later.

Except, well, we didn’t. We again forgot the beer was there. So when I stuck TM’s socks in the freezer, socks that were nice and warm out of the dryer, and left them there for days until he finally opened the freezer door and found them (and oh, I laughed so hard), what had before been a nice clean sock ball, was now a sock ball that had melted the beer in the freezer, absorbed it, refrozen, and become stuck to the package of peas.

And that is why, dear Internet, I will be buying TM socks for Christmas for the rest of my life. Not because I can’t think of anything better, or because that’s the sort of present one typically buys one’s husband, but because the welfare of TM’s socks is henceforth solely my responsibility.

Upon witnessing me spill orange water from the lid of the pasta sauce pot all over the stove

TM: Oh spilly AH, you spill everything. Wherever there is liquid to be spilled, you will spill it; wherever something can be overturned, you will be the one to turn it; whenever -

AH: How about blood? I could spill some blood.

TM: I'll go now.

Enjoying the Ride

I'm sitting here looking at this dashboard screen, and I don't even really know where to start.

Okay, okay, I know. Have you all seen Working Girl? (Not to be confused with Working Girls.) You know, the quintessential Harrison Ford/ Melanie Griffith movie where the unnoticed, underpaid, underappreciated office assistant gets herself into some risky business, and for a while it looks like she might just end up unemployed on Staten Island, but it all turns out okay in the end because she’s sleeping with Harrison Ford, and as everyone knows, that’s magic.

Wow, I just censored myself so bad right there.

Anyway, you know that scene at the end? Where she realizes that the office with the door that closes and the incredible view out over the city is hers, and she puts her feet up and picks up her phone to call Joan Cusack, and then that totally inspirational Carly Simon song (click the button beside the title to preview) starts playing and you get this almost irresistible urge to deck yourself out in shoulder pads and pumps? That one?

Well, you may not believe this, but I HAVE THAT OFFICE.

No jokes. With the door and everything. It has a view that looks out over mountains and water and Canada Place Vancouver. There are hooks on the walls where I need to hang things. Like maybe diplomas. Except I won’t be hanging diplomas – I’ll be hanging a mirror so that I can check that I don’t have anything hanging out of my nose before I go to meetings. That will be much more useful.

I also have the job to match the office, an almost giddy sense of elevated responsibility, control of all communications activities in a fairly high profile provincial organization, and the eminently relieving feeling that I’ve got everything back on track. I do not have shoulder pads.

Most of you know that I spent the last year or so in a job that was increasingly doing me no favours. I left it on the 13th of March. Before I left I was worried I was making the wrong decision. I’m not naturally a risk taker. As soon as I left I knew it was the right thing to do.

Today I sat down next to TM and explained my current good mood. I can’t really remember the last time that I felt like this. I have been really happy in Vancouver. But I have to admit that those periods of happiness were never sustained. My good moods were tainted by the knowledge that something would eventually happen to spoil them. And I promise that’s not self-determinism.

This mood isn’t. This mood is free and insouciant. I feel like everything is moving forward and this mood can and will be sustained. Everything I’m doing, and I’m doing so much, seems to me to be carried along by its own momentum. It feels effortless. I’m sad to say I’d forgotten what that was like. I’m glad to say it’s back.

Auto-Im-Mutiny

Yesterday I declared myself to be ill. I wrapped a scarf around my neck, pulled a blanket over myself on the couch and allowed TM to take over all dinner prep, and pampering etc. (Not that I DON'T let him tend to me when I'm not ill, but lately, as he's been spending almost every free moment studying for four GIANT exams that are coming up in the middle of April, and since I have an inordinate amount of free moments and have no such demands, I have been taking responsibility for most of the domestic goings-on around here, which I feel is only fair.)

Back to my being ill. Because I'm not ill per se. I have actually been going through a fairly stressful week for one who is unemployed. Simply because for the past week I have been in discussions to become EMployed, and my own obsessive nature causes this to be the subject that occupies my mind in every waking hour (and some unwaking).

Still though, this stress isn't the direct reason for my "illness," but it is the indirect cause. You see, when I get stressed out, my body attacks itself, and I get ulcers. Not stomach ulcers, thank god (although with the amount of ibuprofen I'm taking at the moment for pain management it's not an impossibility), but canker sores. Lots and lots of canker sores. So many that I can't eat solid food any more. So many that the glands in my neck have swollen. So many that I haven't slept more than 4 hours together in the last three days. So many that when I get up in the morning, it hurts to speak.

Yesterday, I finally steeled myself, picked up the flashlight, and investigated the inside of my mouth. Not only do I have one on the inside of each cheek, right above where my wisdom teeth can make painful contact with them every time I close my mouth, I also have three (THREE!) on one side of my tongue, in a neat little line, where I vaguely remember accidentally biting myself on the weekend.

I have NEVER had canker sores this bad. They are completely incapacitating my ability for activity or rational thought. And so yesterday I decided to just act like I'm sick with a cold. I will be spending today drinking fluids, including copious amounts of lemon, ginger and honey, trying to rest, and trying above all to destress my system.

Thankfully, a call should come in this morning which will at least put an end to any doubt I'm in about my employment status. I have a feeling that might go a long way towards clearing these things up.

Um, hi, hello, excuse me?

It's snowing right now. Snowing. Giant, fluffy, golf-ball-sized snowflakes, snowing. In Vancouver, British Columbia, snowing, on the 28th of March. My hibisicus is wilting before my eyes, shrinking back into itself in utter horror.

Yesterday, the sky hurled hail the size of peas at us for a while.

The day before that the hail was the size of marbles, and exploded when it hit the pavement.

There was thunder. There's never any thunder here.

I'm sorry, but I have no choice but to send you all here.