Me and Igor, we're like this...

If I were a horse, I'd have been taken out back and shot.    Or at least, that's what my parents always threatened to do when I was younger.

The limping started about a week and a half ago.  I blame 'Art.'  See, I'm in a show. I needed to get used to my costume before we moved to theatre.  It's the shoes' fault.  The shoes are kick-ass red.  They zip up at the back with these snazzy make-you-want-to-do-unmentionable-things-to-me straps that go around my ankles.  I am fierce in these shoes. The only thing I remember before the injury was that I zipped them up.  Yes folks - injury by zipping.   (How many men just winced?)  I had to convince my Achilles Tendons to fit into these fabulous shoes - you know, on account of the fact that I have such... well-defined... tendons.  I think maybe I convinced my right foot too hard - now it hurts to go downstairs.  And when I point my foot.  And when I flex it.  Strangely enough it doesn't hurt to just WALK on it.   But I do have quite a hitch in my get-along when I'm descending a staircase.

The incomparable Marty Feldman as Igor
and Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein
in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein

Last night... Injury by tucking in.  Bed time with the kid.  Me, exhausted, from packing up our office.  I flopped down on top of Rissa - not unlike a dolphin out of water.  Then, as I prepare to hug her, I moved my right arm along the top of the quilt - and something 'popped'.  Rissa didn't hear the pop - all she heard was the screaming the accompanied the pop.

"OH NO!!! NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO NOOOOOOOO!!!!  Oh CRAP!  CRAP!!!!"

"What?!?  What did you DO?!?"

"I think I just separated my shoulder."

"AGAIN?!?  Mummy!"

"I didn't do it on purpose!  I was just trying to hug you!"  I tentatively try the movements that usually hurt when I've injured my rotator cuff.  To the side - not terrible... To the front - a little more ouchy.

"Daddy!  You better come in here!  Mummy just hurt herself."

"AGAIN?!?"

"I am not as clumsy as... Would you help me up please?... as you think I am."

"Un-huh..."

"I'm NOT!"

David, enters with the Traumeel.   "Where does it hurt?"

"From my shoulder to my elbow..."

"Pardon me?"

"FROM MY STUPID SHOULDER TO MY STUPID ELBOW!!!"  I'm already starting to favour my right side.  The hunching has begun.

"How?  How do you do this to yourself?"

"My ligaments are weird.  I'm a dork."

"Yep."

"This is a different pain though, so I don't think that it's the rotator cuff this time.  That's good, right?"

David kisses me.  "I'm so glad that you're a glass half-full person."

Who are you wearing?

"Rissa, come look!!"  I yell.

"What?  What?"  She slides in the kitchen in her socked feet.

I point out the window.  "Look!  The snow is falling all in slow motion!  Isn't it beautiful??"

"OOOOOOOOH!  It's so pretty!"

(Given this year's snow ridiculous accumulation, I don't know how we can still be impressed, but there it is.)

"It looks so... so... sophisticated," she says.  "I feel like I'm not fancy enough to even watch it fall.  I should avert my eyes."

"Do you feel under-dressed?"

"I do."

"Shall we change into our ball gowns?"

"Oh, yes!  Let's."

It was one of those "little things" days.  I love those days.

The Human Whisperer

It was one of the worst days of my life. My friend Shannon had died. It was about 2 weeks after she'd had a successful stem cell transplant - her prognosis had been good. Except now she was dead. I almost threw up when her partner John told me, my knees threatened to buckle, white-knuckled fingers held the top of our kitchen island so that I wouldn't crumble. The rest of my day was bi-polar.  I'd be okay for a few minutes, but then I'd choke on sobs - I couldn't breathe. The pit of my stomach was roiling - my own internal hurricane - I kept swallowing bile.

We watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - a really bad choice when one of your best friends has just died. Life and death are so skewed in that film. I collapsed in bed at the end of the night - another crying jag - David smoothing his hands across my back - me trying to catch my breath - clutching for calm before the emotions slammed me again.

Our cat, Minuit, leapt onto the bed. She dropped a soft toy on my chest. It was part of a monster doll set - little plush pieces that velcroed together - you could add an arm or an extra eye, a tail or horns - like making your very own tribe of Wild Things.

"Honey," I said to her. "I can't.  I can't play right now." Minuit liked you to throw the toy and she'd fetch it for you - it was one of her favourite games. I took the toy away and stashed it in my bedside table.  David held me as I started to cry once more.

A few minutes later, Minuit dropped another piece on me.

"Minuit. No. I can't." That piece, too, ended up in the bedside table.

A few minutes later - another piece, and then, when I refused the throw that one, another...  and another... and another...

She didn't want to play. She was bringing me gifts. We were on the second floor, and every time I took a toy, she'd tromp two floors down to the basement - jump into the toy box to find a piece and she'd offer it to me. 

I guess she didn't know what else to do, given my bouts of hysterical sobbing. She was giving me the equivalent of dead mice - she wanted me to feel better. It went on for about half and hour. I found myself laughing and crying, with 23 monster toy pieces in the bedside table by the time she was done. Then, she lay beside me, pressed to my side - pumping her paws against my ribs to let me know that she was there.

So go ahead, try and tell me that cats are anti-social. You're wrong.

Where's the frickin' SNOOZE button?

I used to be a terrible sleeper.  Before I gave birth to progeny.  My brain wouldn't shut down.  If something woke me at 6:25 a.m. on a Saturday morning, no matter how tired my body was, I was incapable of returning to slumber.  Thoughts would careen from synapse to synapse.  Bits of songs,  lines from a play, whatever most occupied my waking moments, would sabatoge my rest.

Then I had Rissa.  After experiencing new-parent exhaustion, falling back to sleep wasn't an issue.  When I pushed through those 2 a.m. feedings, I found that I could sleep through anything. And as long as Rissa wasn't calling for me specifically in the middle of the night - I was good.  I could coast on that bleary-eyed mental fog,  my constant companion in those early years, and let David handle the middle of the night.  If Rissa was calling for me?  If she was whispering for me in the middle of the night?  I was up immediately.  That maternal protection gene is wicked fierce when it hits you.  But if David was there, I could tune out any noise. I could let him grab her and bring her to bed - I could sleep while I was nursing her.  I did.

Which means that for the last 13.5 years, apart from trips to the ER with croup and dealing with the hot flashes,  I've been pretty rested. And then, we signed the papers to buy the new house.  Which means that now?  My sleeping is completely ravaged.  If I wake up needing to pee before dawn - I'm screwed.  As soon as my eyes open, my natural inclination to obsess rules the rest of my body.

How are we going to convert the buffet to a vanity for the new bathroom?  Is the kitchen faucet a single hole or a three hole - we have no closeup pictures of the sink!!!  Do we have enough boxes for our books?   How much will we have to pay the electricians for their re-wiring job of the 3-way switch in the front hall - why haven't they invoiced us for that yet??  Where will the kitty litter boxes go in the new house?  "Where are you from Jesus, what do you want Jesus, TELL me!"

When David came down this morning, I'd already been up for hours.  "We're going to have to drug you, aren't we?"

"Either that or whack me on the head whenever you feel me stir in bed.  I'm willing to take on a concussion if I get more sleep.  What's your blunt instrument of choice?"

Shredding the Past

Boxes... and boxes... and still more boxes.  And there I was, on my ass in the Rec Room, sorting through them.  Boxes of books and fabric.  Boxes of craft supplies and more fabric.  Boxes of Tae Kwon Do equipment and MORE fabric.  And the mother lode of nostalgia... a box of letters.

Decades of correspondence in a bankers box.  Untouched letters, languishing in a box for the 8.5 years we've resided in our present home.  And before that, they languished in another box in our other two homes and before that, I carted them around in an old Cougar boot box until there were too many letters to fit into that box.  Letters, read once, then stacked in order from past to present - wrapped with elastics, now so aged  that the elastic is stuck to the paper and disintegrates if you touch it.

I sat amidst my paper equivalent to carbon dating.   Letters from childhood friends written on Care Bear cards with stickers of horses and kittens,

international penpal letters from France and Australia, letters from  high school friends (Bug, Skin, PJ and Cam),  notes from a "Secret Admirer," that had appeared in my locker first year university.   Love letters from old boyfriends.   Letters from my parents and grandparents, my Mom's best friend Vivien.  Cards and mementos from my friend Shannon who died unexpectedly in 2009.

A box full of forgotten history.  Glancing through, there were return address names that rang NO bells at all and yet I found an old napkin, from when I was 16, that I'd slipped to an older guy (he was probably all of 23) at the mall that said, "Dir Sir, you are incredibly handsome."  He'd returned it to me, having written on the other side, "Dear 'Madame' THANK YOU!" with a smiley face below.

I was prepared to shred it all.  I'd hefted the shredder down from the office when David demanded I eat lunch.  After eating though, I was going to bite the bullet and purge it all.

"I haven't looked at them for this long.  It'd take me months to read through everything and distinguish the good from the bad.  I don't have the time.  We don't have the space."

David shot me a glance.  "We can make space.  It's one box.  You've kept them.  They're part of your past.  One box isn't going to make a difference.  We can tuck it in under the stairs."

"Maybe..."  A weight lifted.  That felt better.  "Plus when I'm dead, and Rissa has to sort through them all, it'd probably be fun for her..."  I stopped.  

"What?"

"Nothing," I said, swallowing my last bite of grilled cheese.  "It's okay.  I'll just... I'll just..."  I ran back down to the basement.

Read.  Shred.  Read. Shred.  Read. Shhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrread.

"What are you doing?" asked David from his shop area.

"So I found this erotic story that, uh... Tim wrote me..."

He raised his eyebrows.  "You did huh?"

"Yeah..."   Shhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrread.  I was blushing.

"That good huh?"

"Yep..."  Shhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrread. "I'm thinking that reading erotica where one's mother figures prominently, might not be quite the nostalgic experience Rissa would be hoping for upon my death."  Shhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrread.

"You might be right."

I glanced through the other letters.  They were innocuous enough - slightly titillating, but not downright graphic.   Proclaimed affection - even love - my romantic past in ink.  That, I thought, she might want a glimpse into.  Hell, I do to.  Maybe next weekend, I'll sit down with a pot of tea or a good single malt and dive into my past.

What's happening to our Tupperware?

I must have a symbiotic worm hole in my house.  I swear to God that for every lost sock in the dryer, a Tupperware container also disappears.  I could earn a doctorate in this area.  I'm going to get a grant for the next phase of my thesis.

We have a billion Tupperware lids - all stacked in the island drawer - they must be going at it like rabbits in there.   I always check the fridge when we seem low on containers, and sometimes there are the science experiments in the back of the fridge, but that still doesn't explain the multitude of extra lids residing in the drawer.  We haven't been doing any house painting which usually takes up containers.  And let's face it, you can't really take a sandwich container without a lid unless you want a stale sandwich for lunch. 

Are gremlins in our house destroying just the containers?  For gremlin fun?  Are they dancing madly upon them as we sleep - cracking the questionably recyclable plastic - leaving us with only the lids -  which are freaking useless?? Strike that, not useless.  I have an artist friend, Lisa, who does eco-art.  She can take bread tags and create lighting shades for twinkle lights.  She has salvaged copper wire and bicycle wheels and made a freaking Korean Dragon.

Dragon, 2005,  Lisa Brunetta

So I'm going to send her all my old lids - she'll know what to do with them.  She'll create art, it will be astounding.

And I?  I will take my ass to the No Frills and purchase my biennial replacement containers.  WAIT!    WAIT!   GPS chips!!  We could put in wee little GPS chips...  create another layer of plastic on top - like a skin graft, but a plastic graft - which would allow them to still be washed, but would have them programmed so when you asked a family member if they knew where the containers were and they said no, you could say "AH-HAH!" and dance around calling them a liar, when you found said missing containers unde their bed. The technology's not quite there yet, but I feel confident that, within the next year or so, I could perfect it.  I will be having my IPO in 2015.  Who's in?

My ass is not happy.

We are on the hunt for a sofa bed.  On account of the fact that our new house does not have a guest room.  As Canadians, we need to be able to offer extreme-weather lodgings.  It's in the Canadian Manifesto.  Or it would be if Canada had a Manifesto.

My Mom took great pride in emphatically stating that we could sleep 22 people in our house.  We were military - you never knew who might stop by.  We had more sofa beds and guest beds than your average bear. It's a badge of family honour for me.  A tradition.   I need to be able to find space for 22 people to sleep in my new home.  My new, 1500 sq. foot home with NO guest room.  David's already started devising plans to jerry-rig some beds from an alternate dimension.  Patent pending.

I am determined to be able to sleep at least two.  At the very least we need a sofa bed to take care of overnight guests.  All I want is a functioning sofa bed that is actually comfortable to sit on.  Okay, a functioning sofa bed, comfortable to sit on and that doesn't look like crap.  Is that so much to ask?  Is it?  Not a fricking futon on a pine frame - I'm 45 years old - not a first year Arts student.  Not something that feels like you're balancing your derriere on concrete.  Something with a modicum of style that can accommodate overnight guests.  It's like searching out the Holy Freaking Grail.

I have been trying out sofa beds for weeks now.  My ass going from shop to shop to shop.  Kind of like Goldilocks, but with no "just right" in sight. 

This has nothing to do with the post,
but when I was trying to find a good Goldilocks
illustration I got distracted.

They're ALL too hard.  All of them.  You can look all you want online, but you cannot buy a sofa without letting your ass feel it. So we've been trolling the furniture shops.  We find the exact model that we like, that our asses enjoy - ask if it comes in a sofa bed - and the salesperson won't meet our eyes when they say "Yes."  Because they know.  They know that somewhere in the fabrication of inexpensive sofa beds, (Because, let's face it, we are NOT going to spend $3,000 on a piece of furniture.  EVER), that the base and ass cushions are injected with some sort of concrete polymer that ensures that one would rather sit on the floor than on this piece of furniture masquerading as comfortable. 

I'm desperately trying to find an alternative to IKEA here folks.  I'd love to shop local and support the little guy, but those damned Swedes with their good prices and relatively comfortable pieces and delivery are calling to me.  "Ve huv sofas end matchink sofa beds end cumfy chayerrs - ull vith slip cuverrs...  Cooom to de Scandinavian siede Headder!"  Oh God, it may be too late!