I have the PERFECT idea for Dragon's Den!

WARNING: THERE IS TOO MUCH INFORMATION IN THIS POST.

Winter in Canada.  Cold, right?  In some places VERY COLD.  We're not even into ACTUAL winter yet and I can see the effects on my poor spouse.  We went for a walk on Friday night as the sun was going down and David was unprepared.  After our invigorating half hour walk we decided we needed an emergency warm-up bath.

So here's the thing... A guy's penis is pretty much his very own fleshy thermometer.  You guys out there know what I'm talking about.  You've all jumped into a cold lake at one point in your life and felt the penile effects (she types with knowing raised eyebrows) on what I'm sure is a 'better-than-average-sized' male organ.  A dude's testicles basically try to climb up into his pelvis for safety.  Really, the human penis's external nature is a BIG design flaw.  One hoof to the sack and you're down.  I'm not sure, evolutionarily speaking, why having it all out there in the open was a good thing.  But I digress...

Friday night.  We get home from our walk.  We've filled up the tub with near-scalding water.  (According to David, I have asbestos skin and what could boil a regular person, feels tepid to me.)  Teeth chattering, we've stripped off our clothes.  Poor David was blue.  Down there.

"Oh honey..." I commiserate.

He glanced down.  "I'm COLD!  I'm very cold."

"I know love."  I give him a salacious wink.  "Oh, I know that you're not in top form right now."  I immersed myself in the water.

Unwilling to boil his boys, David sat on the edge of the tub and dipped his feet in. The poor guy was shivering badly.  So I did what any helpful spouse would do, I warmed up my hands in the hot water and cupped them around his uh... manly bits.  The sound that David let out was a cross between eating the best chocolate in the world and well, a girl cupping her warm hands around one's manly bits.  He was happy.  His biology loosened everything up and he gave me a "SO THERE" glance with waggled eybrows.

"Told you I was just cold."

And that, my friends, is when I came up with the idea for the  CockMitt ® (patent pending).  Some variation on a sport cup with a heated malleable memory-foam-esque lining that would form to a man's very personal dimensions and ensure that he stayed warm in the winter months.  The PERFECT Christmas gift.  I'm already working on exterior cup options:

Ambushed in the change room!

By my own ass, no less.  It's the 3-way mirror's fault.  Feeling great about myself - finding that cute perfect-for-me dress - that I actually have the money in hand to pay for - I sashay my ass into the change room.  I cast off my clothes and as I'm turning around, I catch a glimpse of something in that 3-way mirror.

I was wearing a thong on account of the fact that the particular jeans I'd worn were tightish and I didn't want panty  lines.  This was not a sexy thong - I still wear the maternity thongs that have that nice wide waist-band - even though the last time I was pregant was almost 9 years ago.  They are fashioned from man-made fibres - they will survive the APOCALYPSE as long as I continue to wash them.  Which I do and have been ever since I bought the suckers.  I know how important it is to be wearing clean underwear...  Sorry, I got distracted by the thong...  The glimpse that I caught in the mirror was my bruised ass!  On either side of the thong bit that goes between your cheeks, I had deep blue bruises on my ass.  What the hell had I done to myself?  How could my ass be bruised? How does one even DO that?!?

I reach down to see if the bruises actually hurt and they are not actually bruises... it's ass lint.  I have blue ass lint from my jeans.  AND as if that wasn't depressing enough, as I haphazardly glance up, I can also see my back in the mirror.  Bulgy-bulgy-back-bulges around my bra.  Above it and below - made worse because I'm contorting my head around to view the ass lint damage.  I spin back to face front, but I'm in a 3-way mirror - and although I can no longer be horrified by the ass lint I can still see on both my right and left, bulgy-bulgy-back-bulges.   I have to jump to the side, out of the mirror's view and flatten myself against the wall NOT to see them. In the blind spot of the change room, I  struggle into that perfect-for-me dress.  I reach out with one leg and unfold the mirror's right side - then I do the same to the left side so there is now one large flat mirror in front of me.  I jump in front of the mirror - giving a heroic "HAH!"  And damn, don't I look fantastic in that dress! 

I learn something from my daughter every day.

For instance... according to my daughter, these are the signs for "Uterus Falling Out." 

Apparently last year, in Grade 7, Rissa and her friends figured it out so that they could torment the boys.  I don't know how accurate it is in ASL, but I'll be signing it myself from now on.  Above Rissa exhibits the commiserative face during the signing, but it can also be done with the angry face.

I jinxed it!

I should have known better than to post that I had an abundance of energy.  Those petty cold gods sure do love their schadenfreude.  Tuesday morning I awoke... no, strike that.  Who am I kidding? I never really woke up during the day.  Went back to bed for a couple of hours to see if I could re-boot, but when the 2nd alarm went off, it merely confirmed that I was in no way fit for work.   My voice drops an octave with a virus - all I have to do is say "Hello" on the phone and people know somethings up.  I'm either sick, or I've just had really great sex with a plugged nose.

I've been GO-GO-GO for so long that when I finally could see the light at the end of the tunnel... the train crashed.  This is a design flaw in our physiology.   Who builds something that does that?  A little bit less stress and the body collapses in on itself?  That's pretty fucked. 

My Mom always knew when I was really sick, because I would sleep.  I must really be sick. I have spent 17 of the last 24 hours sleeping.  This morning I remain entrenched in cotton-headed ninny-muggins-ness, but I can at least stand.  So now's the time when I get dressed and drag my sorry ass in to work.  Because that's what we do right?  We go into work.  We don't want to take the time to get well, because we can't afford it.  We would rather infect the entire office than lose a day's pay.  I might as well go up to everyone and lick them, no matter how much hand sanitizer I bathe in. Sorry folks!  This is all about me and my bottom line - your health is incidental.  Enjoy your complimentary surgical mask.

Here comes the sun (doo-doo-doo-doo...)

Fall Back is my favourite time of year EVER.  To have forgotten to set your clock back on Saturday night  and then have the unexpected epiphany Sunday morning that you can sleep in the extra hour?  And then there's the following Monday!  That day where your body wakes up feeling refreshed, recharged and ready to tackle the work week - it puts me in a state of near-Nirvana.

6:30 this morning I DIDN'T CARE that the cats were whining, it didn't bother me that they were jockeying for position on the bed, ON ME.  For the first time in weeks, I wasn't exhausted.  I came downstairs at 6:45 and the sun was up!  Sweet merciful deities it was up!!  It wasn't dark out - the photosynthesis converted those solar rays into undiluted energy....  Energy for ME.  MY ENERGY.  On a Monday freaking morning.  It never happens.

So I have this proposal.  25-hour days.  'Cause that's all it really took to have me back on track.  Just that extra hour.  If I could just have that hour every day - life would equalize.  I would be a better person.  I'd have more patience, humour and grace.  If there were 25 hours in a day, I could descend a set of stairs like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, I would have the self-possession of Katharine Hepburn, the flexibility of Esther Williams.  I have that ONE day a year.  It's today - the Monday after Fall Back day.    If you cross my path today, just watch... Watch how I glide through the day, watch my smile, see my beatific glow... Revel with me on the day after Fall Back.  I cannot guarantee that tomorrow the after-effects will still be with me.  Get the best version of Heather while you can.

Halloween Hangover



Apparently The Nightmare Before Christmas is much to old to garner immediate recognition.
  Oh God, I just Googled it - 19-freaking-93!!! That is 20 years ago!  HOLY CRAP!
  No wonder I wasn't recognized.  Plus, I was missing some stitched-back-together
 scars when I went to work in the morning.

It was a dark and stormy night in Southern Ontario.  We had maybe a half dozen brave visitors come to our door.  Adorable first-timers. Little pink kitty cats and lop-eared bunnies. "You will be the first house that she came to on her first ever Halloween."  Good thing I wasn't dressed as a zombie.

What with there not being a lot of visitors, that box of a zillion miniature candy bars ended up just sitting there, it's brightly coloured wrappers emitting a siren call.


Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein

Every single year.  Every single year I say that it won't happen again. Thing is?  Those wee little candy bars?  Well, they're so... wee.  They look so innocent, so harmless, so... not going to make you want to throw up.  I'm 45 freaking years old and I went to bed early - medicated with Gravol - with a tummy ache and questionable GI fortitude.  Next year.  Next year we will give out gift cards to Bulk Barn.  Or raisins.  How many packages of crappy raisins would a gal have to eat to make herself sick?

Netflix is making me emotionally unstable.

Netflix has made me healthier.  Well, Netflix and the tablet whereby I can view Netflix, has made me healthier.  I take my collapsible treadmill out of the closet in our study, pop on a TV show, hit the START button and go.  Minimum 30 minutes a day of guaranteed walking and that's on top of my walking back and forth to work.  My cardio capacity is fan-freaking-tastic.

My emotional stability, however, has been completely fucked by Netflix.  Way back when, before the advent of DVD sets, you used to be able to ramp up to an obsession.  Over the course of years you would become addicted and could develop a healthy relationship with a TV show.  The first clue for me should have been when David and I mainlined the first season of Kiefer Sutherland's 24 in a period of 48 hours when it showed up at Blockbuster video.  Blockbuster has since died, but Netflix's on-demand streaming of television series is sending me 'round the bend.

Watching television on Netflix is akin to starting a tumultuous love affair.  Scratch that.  Love affair is too tame.  Full-On Bacchanalian Orgy would be more accurate.  Netflix is following Alice down the Rabbit Hole. I watched the entire 3rd season of The United States of Tara by Wednesday of this week.

All this, after I get home from work.  Eight of those episodes were watched on Wednesday alone.  Why??  Because I could.  They were right there, Netflix lets you know that the next episode will load automatically in 15 seconds, you don't even have to touch the remote to get your next hit!  15 seconds!?!   I can't wait for those 15 seconds.  I had to know what was happening to Tara right now!!  I had to know what Dr. Hattarus was doing to help her.  I had to know if Marshall would be okay, if Kate would make it as a flight attendant, if Charmaine would gain some fucking perspective, if Max could take any more.

All that concentrated time has convinced me that I have an emotional connection to them.  I care so much.  And not in that patient wanting-to-see-what-happens-to-Daphne-and-Niles way.  With Netflix you don't allow yourself the time to process information over the course of a week.  Watching a series on Netflix is meeting, falling in love, and being cruelly dumped within a weekend.  If you choose to watch shows with the truly fucked up characters, your hold on reality becomes tenuous.  The realization that a particular show only had three seasons, or two seasons without some sort of satisfying conclusion, like say BBC's The Hour - can send you searching for consolation chocolate and a cocktail.  Escapism on this grand a scale has never been so attainable and potentially damaging.  Unless you're doing crack.

David watched the last two episodes of USOT with me last night after having previously viewed only the ender of Season 2.  He was horrified.  But for him it was a perspective shift.  "Whenever I think that you're crazy - I will remember this moment.  You are not that crazy."    That alone, makes today's emotional fallout worth bearing.