How bad days become brilliant.

Last Saturday we were having a house showing. Our house isn't even on the market, but our former real estate agent will send city folks to see our place every now and again if they want a massive century home that takes 4 hours to clean. Prepping one's house for a showing has to be amongst the things I despise most in life. David always states: "We will not do anything special, the house isn't on the market, they'll just have to cut us some slack."

I just can't. It has to be more than clean, more than just tidy. It has to look pretty. It has to be inviting.  It has to say "Look, aren't I a beautiful home? Wouldn't you want to live here?" I can't 'haphazard' it before a house showing - I CAN'T!  I 'touch-up paint' the freaking kitchen cupboards, I fold my visible sweaters in the walk-in closet, if putting a sprig of parsley in the kitty litter was a sign of clean kitty litter, I'd do that. Having a house showing stresses me the fuck out.

Which is why, when I was tidying our bedroom and noticed that David's t-shirt drawer in the dresser wouldn't close, it made me mental. With slumping shoulders I pulled the drawer out to look inside the dresser to see if there were internal reasons why the sucker wouldn't close.  I looked at the back of the drawer and saw that the floral drawer liner paper that I'd placed in it years ago was askew and was bunching out the back of the drawer.  I tugged on it once and the freaking drawer fell apart on me!  Its antique bottom fell completely out. Panicking, I clutched the drawer's contents to my chest. Thousands of t-shirts against my bosom with no fucking clue as to how to just shove them back into the drawer and then cram said drawer in the dresser and pretend that nothing had happened, because stupid-ass strangers were going to be coming to our house in mere fucking minutes!! Rage welled within me; angry tears on the periphery.  I dropped the drawer onto the floor and began adjusting those fucking t-shirts.

A glint of something caught my eye. A silver chain. Its appearance caused me to literally catch my breath. There, amidst the well-worn cottons of my spouse, was part of my broken heart. A coloured glass pendant on a chain, my most treasured gift from my late friend Shannon. Strike that. Not 'late.'  Dead.  Shannon is dead and although she was often 'late' in life (a fact she, herself, would freely admit), calling her 'late' in death seems to homogenize her dying.  Sugar-coating it doesn't help, she is dead.  Missing her is a part of my life.

I had been searching for the pendant for months when I had assumed our cat Lola had stolen it (I think I might have to report my cat to Interpol). Lola must have pushed it off the dresser into the slightly open drawer beneath. The pendant's reappearance, at any time would have been a happy discovery, but at this particular moment, it was miraculous. My impending tears of rage did a complete 180 and I found myself laughing and crying in complete and utter joy.  I fastened that chain around my neck, feeling the weight of the pendant against my chest, and recognizing that a piece of my heart, missing for months, was now once again present.

My craptastic morning turned ecstatic in an instant. Me... so stressed and anal about tidying up the house, so worried about shit that nobody cares about... If I hadn't cared, that pendant would still be in that drawer, lying in wait until we eventually moved from this house and David had to finally go through those t-shirts. And although I would have greeted his discovery of the pendant, probably years from now, with spectacular joy, I'm glad that I found it myself, and I'm glad that I found it in juxtaposition of doing stupid-ass tidying up. Little things can and do mean a lot. I have definitive proof.

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?