Is that a dirty book?

... asks Rissa as I pop open my e-reader.  "I'm asking, 'cause you mostly have dirty books on there, right?"

"Yes, there are mostly dirty books on this e-reader.  But this one hasn't gotten dirty yet."  I'm not a fan of Dickens when I'm winding down with a book.  Some good character development, some sex, some puns and I'm good.

"What's this one called?" she asks.

" Beautiful... something..."

"It's called Beautiful SOMETHING? That's a terrible title."  She leans back on the pillow and puts a lavender cat mask over her eyes to block out the reading light.

I explain. "No, it's just that on an e-reader - or at least my e-reader - they don't have the book title on the top of each page and you can't just turn the book over to confirm the title or even the author.  The book is one in a series and they all start with 'Beautiful.'  Beautiful Bastard, Beautiful Stranger.. HAH!  This one must then be Beautiful PLAYER."

"So basically you could just have some random title and it wouldn't even have to be sexy?"

"Possibly."

Rissa lets out a snort of laughter, the lavender cat becoming displaced momentarily.

"What?"

"I'm thinking of titles now.  Twenty questions with Irving."

"You're such a goof."

"The Lampshade of Destiny."

"Dude."

"Indigo the Bullfighter Meets the Marsupials."  She is vibrating now with laughter.

"You are so weird."

"Elbows and the Renaissance!!!  Or, or... if you have sentences within the dirty book they could be even weirder, 'She was fine until Marcel and his marionettes came to town'. "

She is silent for a moment and then starts convulsing with laughter.

"What?"

"I have to  ̶  " she stops.  "I have  to be able to do this without  ̶ "  She blows out calming air, but then loses it again and pitches into a fit of giggles.

"WHAT?!?"

" 'Linda never though that the limbo could be fun until she met Jean-Paul and his dog' !!!!!  BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAA!!!!"

I am snorting now too.  "How do you come up with this stuff?"

She cackles again.  "I have my thinking 'cat' on.  Get it?  I'm wearing the cat mask?  BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAA!!!!"

This is one of the many reasons why I love my child.

Quick! The kid isn't home - let's DO this!!!

Rissa was going to be gone for three whole nights.  David and I begin sharing the the waggling eyebrow looks, the suggestive head tilts, the...

"YOU GUYS!  I CAN TOTALLY SEE YOU DOING THAT!!!!"

"What?  Doing what?!?"

Rissa rolls her eyes.  But then gives us the I'm watching you look.

Surreptitiously now, I am trying to communicate with David all the places we will have sex during our childless days:  All the kitchen counters, the living room sofa, ottoman, possibly the Laz-y-Boy, the family room sofa, the bed in our room, the blanket box in our room, against the wall in our room, the bathroom floor...

David whispers in my ear, "You can be as loud as you want."  I blush.  Rissa dramatically points to her eyes and then us.

Noisy sex - the thing you can't have when there's another person in your home.  Though you may experience an earth-shattering orgasm that makes you want to scream, possibly yodel, joyously into the abyss - you just don't.  When Rissa was little it was because the last thing I wanted was for our toddler to come into our room and holler, "DADDY YOU'RE SQUISHING MUMMY!!!"  Now that she's a teenager, and remembering myself as a teenager,  I basically don't want her to vomit when she thinks of what could be instigating the sounds from our bedroom.

We are going to have three nights.  And by nights, I really mean three late afternoons, evenings and nights of sex.  I'm hyrdating, stretching, epiladying.. I am ready... Let's DO this!!!  David comes home from work.  His laptop bag is flung from his shoulder, he struts into the kitchen...

I'm on the sofa in the family room.  My entire body is disappointment, I have a hot water bottle across my abdomen.  "Batten down the hatches...thar she blows..."

"No.  Really?"  He sits on the arm of the sofa.   He's thinking now, I can practically see the cogs turning in his brain.  "Yeah... Yeah... we should have known this.  You've been craving chocolate and pretty frisky..."

My shoulders slump.  "But we have three days!!!  We were going to have sex everywhere!!!"  I swallow my ibuprofen.

He sits beside me and drops a light kiss on my lips.  He smooths the hair off my face.  "I guess," he whispers, kissing me again, but not so lightly this time.  "I guess we're just going to have to get creative." His eyes meet mine and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

"Creative?" I gasp.  (After almost 19 years of sex with this man, he still makes me gasp.)

"VERY creative."  He cracks his knuckles, waggling his eyebrows.

I snort.  He kisses me again.

"Dinner now or later?" he asks.

"Later."

Welcome home my lovelies!

It took 15 years, but I have finally done it!  I have replenished the shoe cache that I had before Rissa was born.  Pre-Rissa I had a... I'm not going to call it a shoe fetish, 'cause it wasn't like I was humping them or anything...  instead I'll call it a shoe... fascination.

I had a good 75 pairs of shoes.  Every colour in the ROYGBIV spectrum, kitten heels, wedges, stillettos, boots, leather, suede, floral... I was a happily-shod girl.  Then, when I was dumb enough to gain 50 lbs while pregnant, my feet, the actual ligaments in my feet loosened and then SPREAD.  (Seriously, DON'T gain 50  lbs when you're pregnant - not even if your midwife says 'Some women need 15 lbs to grow a healthy baby and some women need 60." She is wrong - you don't need that much weight to grow a healthy baby - it will take you four years to lose it.)  All my lovely shoes no longer fit me.  There was no possible way that I could regain what was now lost to me.  After-pregnancy, I had to buy shoes at least a 1/2 size too large or specialty shoes in a D width.  The cost was going to be astronomical.  It could not be warranted. 

But now, after a decade and a half of shopping only when items were on sale, of scouring the Value Villages and thrift stores, I am finally back to where I have the perfect pair of shoes to go with those pants, or that skirt, or that dress.  I have the knee-high boots that make David salivate.  I have comfortable sneakers that fit the width of my post-pregnancy dew beaters.

These shoes will not bring about world peace, they will not help educate my daughter, they will not support my spirituality.  My plum, heeled Mary Janes have no greater purpose than making me happy when I see them and perhaps giving my stems a little shape.  I'm not saying it's the best $11.99 I've ever spent... but comes pretty close.   

Blackmailed into Good Health

WARNING: I USE BAD WORDS IN THIS POST

Fuck peri-menopause. FUCK IT!!!  I do my best, I really do, I try to find the silver fucking lining to pretty much everything, but COME ON!!!

I am sitting here drenched as I type.  Because why?  Because I had fucking Chinese food!  Apparently MSG can trigger hot flashes.  The same way that too much salt can trigger hot flashes. The same way that caffeine can trigger hot flashes.  The same way that alcohol can trigger hot flashes.

I have become a tea-fucking-totaler, a crunchy granola enthusiast, a purveyor of vegetables, not out of choice, not because it's the healthful thing to do, but rather because if I don't - IF I DON'T - I will spontaneously combust... sometimes several times in a night.  I feel like Fawkes, the fucking Phoenix!

"Just kill me," I beg Rissa and David

"Oh love, are you hot?" asks David.

"Am I hot?  AM I HOT?!?  Feel beneath my breasts!"  I lift up my tank top, exposing my unencumbered tatas.   "You could deep fry tempura under here!!!"

Rissa averts her gaze.  "Whoa!!  Boobs!!  Maternal boobs!!"

I do my best not to burst into tears.  I would punch at the air, but the ineffectual movement would just make me hotter.

"Would you like a cool drink?"

"I would love an ice-cold chocolate fucking martini, but I can't have one because if I do, my insides will turn molten and I will DIE!!!"

"How about an ice pack?" David suggests helpfully.

An ice pack!!!  Oh sweet Jesus, we have ice packs!!!  I stagger down the stairs to the deep freeze, David's voice calls out behind me "I would have gotten them for you love..."

An angels' chorus greets me as I open the deep freeze - I weep at the beauty I find therein.

I come back upstairs looking like the beginnings of a bad BDSM scene.  I have small packs around my ankles and wrists with a larger one strapped around my neck.  I place myself in front of the oscillating fan to dry off my hot flash sweat.

"Better?" asks David.

"I don't have adequate words.  I want to start a charity that will give these to my sisters throughout the world.  SISTERS!!! SISTERS I WILL HELP YOU ALL!!!"

David and Rissa exchange a look.  "It's possible she might be hallucinating right now."

The House Hippo...

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!" from Rissa downstairs.

"What?  What is it?"  I bolt to the top of the stairs.

"This!  JUST. LOOK. AT. THESE. PICTURES!"

"What are you looking at!?!" 

"I signed up for the House Hippo Instagram feed..."

Oh thank God... She hadn't found any of those pictures...

House Hippos AKA Skinny Pigs AKA Hairless Guinea Pigs.  She has been obsessed ever since she discovered them at our local Buskers Fest's Crazy Creatures booth.  It was love at first sight.

"GAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!  It's SO CUTE!!!"

Even I have to admit that I dig them.  I mean, what's not to love?  They're like naked mole rats but so much cuter.

She devoted several hours one afternoon to finding house hippo names for a pet she will probably not have until she's in university.

Boys	Girls
Cédrique	Aurelia
Ignatius	Helena
Lysander	Hermia
Demitrius	Bambina
Constantine	Celeste
Aloysius	Edna
Wolfgang	Wilhelmina
Remus	Maude
Sirius	Harriet
Bartholomew
Bram
Elwood
Paco
Tom
Inigo (Montoya)

    


















By reading her list of names you can glean pretty much all of her media influences:  A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harry Potter, The Incredibles, The Blues Brothers, Love Actually, Studio 60, clowning, cartoons... My favourite: Inigo with (Montoya) in brackets because you know that although she would call it Inigo she would be thinking Montoya in brackets 100% of the time.

Summertime Bitch

Heat and hormones don't mix.  I get mean in the heat.  You know when you can hear yourself losing it?  When vitriolic tones spill from your lips and you don't even want to be around you?   That's me in the dog days of summer.  The rest of the year I do my best to be a kind person.  I open doors.  I use my pleases and thank-yous...  I actually mean them.  When there's a heat wave?  My kindness evaporates and I want to murder fluffy bunnies.

Swollen ankles and feet.  Sweaty shins.  Pressure on my chest.  The urge to weep because of the afore-mentioned...   Crabby, whiny, petulant - and that's with me not even voicing 3/4 of the things that I wan to say.

Random person says, "I just love this heat!"    I think, "I would love to see your decapitated, iced head on a platter providing me with the Popsicle that I so badly need right now."

Random person says, "Enjoy it while it's here!  This is Canada..."  I think, "Are you a fucking moron?   Environment Canada has told people to stay indoors so that they'd don't DIE!  This is not a perk!!"

Random person says, "It's shorts and skirt weather!"  I think, "FUCK YOU AND YOUR THIGH GAP!!!  I have literally stopped while walking down a busy sidewalk, grabbed the purse sized medicated Gold Bond powder stashed within my messenger bag, lifted my skirts and powdered my inner thighs IN PUBLIC to stop the rubbed-raw skin from KILLING me."

This may be why David makes me so many cocktails in the summer.

Come the Zombie Apocalypse...

Sitting naked on the side of the bathtub.  Legs out over the edge.  Wet hair dripping into the tub.  Humming "Smoke on the Water" to myself.

David stops on his way to the bedroom.  "Are you okay?"

"Yeah.  Yeah, I'm fine."

His eyebrows low on his forehead.  "Why are you sitting there like that?"

"I'm conditioning my hair."

"Oh..."  He turns to leave... "You can't do that in the shower?"

"Oh I can.  I just don't want to waste water.  This is deep conditioning.  I'm doing this for seven minutes.  Come the zombie apocalypse, we're going to have to know how to conserve water.  I'm practicing."

David nods sagely.  "Good plan.  As you were."