Freak of Nature

I love SO many things about the autumn.  It's cooler.  It's crisper. Leaves change colour.  My ass doesn't get heat rash.  I get to wear my stripey Victoria Secret Long Jane PJs with warm socks!

I want these pjs in EVERY colour!

We light fires in the family room - in the fireplace - we're not just going around willy-nilly setting fire to the sofa or anything.  I make stew in the crock pot and David and Rissa act as if I'm a freaking Cordon Bleu chef.  I can wear a wrap draped artistically around my shoulders overtop of a sweater and look all arty...  I get to drink hot chocolate in my Max Brenner mugs.

Hold this mug between your hands and I swear that you will get all squishy inside

I smooth gingersnap body lotion all over my body.   Which, some might say, I could wear year round, but there are spring/summer scents and autumn/winter scents and when the temperatures drop I crave those darker, more tasty scents.  Plus then David starts smelling me more and saying things like "OH MY GOD, you smell AMAZING!"  So basically, changing body lotions = MORE SEX!!! 

And yet, in the cooler seasons, David frequently says to me,  
"YOU ARE A FREAK OF NATURE!" 

When the temperature starts to drop outside, my circulatory system gets a bad case of Dissociative Identity Disorder.  It's 15 c, my lips are blue, my still as yet undiagnosed chest pain kicks in and David starts making me drink Scotch to force my wee arteries open. (Just the blended, not the single malt - I'm not a heathen.)  The other night I had to run myself a bath.  Apparently a scalding bath, because when David came to keep me company and stuck his feet in, he was pretty sure that the top layer of his skin had been boiled off.  To me, it was luke warm.

Could be my thyroid, could be my peri-menopause, whatever the reason, from September basically through to June, David is on constant "Is she having a heart attack/vascular failure"  alert and has my endocrinologist's number on speed dial.  Code Blue is how I think of it.  I go blue and David threatens to take me to the ER. After DOZENS of these trips where I am NOT having a heart attack or near death, it gets harder to convince me to go.

"I cannot keep wasting 4 hours at a time like this.  Next time I'm NOT going"

"Next time I will sling you over my shoulder and strap you to a gurney myself."

"Will not."

"Will too."

See, that's the trouble with chest pain.  Apparently, you're not allowed to ignore it.  So every time it happens, I have to then gauge whether or not I'm having any new or more severe symptoms, which becomes a little bit stressful.  And stress?  Well, stress exacerbates undiagnosed chest pain.  That fight or flight response seems to be a bit fucked in my body.  Bit of  Catch 22. I promised David that I'll pay attention and I will.  I am.  I have my nitro spray handy.  I can sip some scotch.  But I'm NOT going to let my freaky body stop me from enjoying the autumn and winter and early spring!

So bring on the extra sweaters and the woolen socks and I'll wear a freaking scarf and gloves inside so that I can enjoy these fantastic temperatures because I LOVE the autumn.  The crock pot is on with apple ginger porkloin simmering away, I'm going to snuggle under an afghan while making notes in my script (possibly with up to three cats on my lap), and I might just go make myself a hot chocolate RIGHT NOW!  :-)  'Cause you know what?  Autumn is freaking AWESOME!!

Neil Patrick Harris and Demon Poodles

Did I mention that Rissa doodles? 

Graphic novelist in the making?  Demon Poodle and her sidekick Bloody Bedlington Terrier?

***

This week we made pumpkin pie muffins/cupcakes for the bridal shower.  We covered them in cream cheese icing.

http://www.thecookbookcritic.com/archives/2005/10/pumpkin_muffins.html

Ours looked pretty much as good as these ones. 

"Cream cheese icing is my GOD.  I worship it," Rissa says while packing mini muffins into her lunch.

"Only two!  Take ONLY two!  Do NOT give me that look - you may have more when you get home from school."

Then, after school, she sits with more mini muffins.  She offers up a dramatic and satisfied sigh.

"Mummy I have an announcement to make.  I think... wait... no I am sure.  I'm getting married."

"Oh really, who is the lucky guy/girl?"

"Cream Cheese Icing.  The invitations are going out tomorrow.  We will marry and then I will EAT my spouse.  And when that doesn't work out, I'm going to marry his brother More Cream Cheese Icing. "


***


Rissa has a huge crush on Neil Patrick Harris.  Last year she watched him in a simulcast of the New York Philharmonic's concert staging of Sondheim's Company - that's how much crushes for him.

What Rissa loves most in life: babies and Neil Patrick Harris

"Mummy, I love NPH.  He is AWESOME.  And even though I know that nothing can ever come of it between us because he's gay, close to 40, married and has two kids, I don't care.  I shall always love him. For he shall always be AWESOME!"

Bridal Shower Sugar Coma

I was dead certain that the outline around the ice cream cone here  was twinkling, that's how stoned I am on sugar.

OYEESH.  So Amber's Adopted-Mom brought these peanut butter squares to Amber's bridal shower on the weekend.  I just ate the last one.  Since Saturday I've probably ingested maybe 6?  Okay it was closer to 8.  They were too sweet for Rissa and David, so the one person in the house who shouldn't have a lot of sugar ate them instead.  From what I gathered, the ingredients are:  possibly an entire jar of peanut butter, 2 cups of sugar and rolled oats.  I think.  I'm not sure, because I might actually be in a sugar coma right now and this is all a dream.   I'm all dopey and muzzy headed on account of the fact that my hypoglycemic bloodstream is full to the brim with all the simple carbohydrates that are in my system.  If David were home right now, he'd totally be getting lucky.  As it is, the shag rug in our study is looking like a really good place to have an impromptu nap. 

I hosted the shower and people were kind enough to bring along some food so that I didn't have to get completely psychotic with food prep.   There ended up being A LOT of food.  REALLY A LOT.  Thank God I didn't get a chance to make the egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off!  Plates of appetizers and treats were barely touched during the shower.  There were piles of leftovers.  And of course no one took anything home - except Brandy, because I strong-armed her into it.  See, she brought this amazing cheesy dip that  I knew that I would end up eating all by myself,  because Rissa and David wouldn't like it, and though this dip was astonishingly, 'make-a-girl-salivate' good, my arteries are re-clogging at the mere mention of it.  And now my fridge is full of bridal shower food.  Most of which I shouldn't eat, but it's in the fridge, just looking at me and beckoning with its little food fingers, showing a little food shoulder and making little food kissy noises at me.  I'm thinking this is probably a dream.  Plates of Nanaimo bars don't say "Take me.  Just take me!  You know you want me, come on you dirty little food whore, just take me!" do they?

When I was little I could eat almost anything and my body didn't even blink.   Cookies, cakes, breads, chips, pop - bring it on!  And now, I kind of want to hurl a bit because the peanut butter square is warring with the glass of soy milk that I drank to wash it down.  I'm hosting a Stag and Doe in a couple weeks.  I'd just better make sure that someone else takes those food leftovers with them.  I will avert my eyes, they can pack food into bags and take it all to their houses and they can war with food guilt, nausea and not getting anything done because they're high on sugar.

And I?  I am going to take a couple of Tums and NOT go make myself throw up, even though I know it would make me feel better.   See that?  Common sense right there.  Long after the fact, but I do still have it.  If I could just get it to come to the surface a little quicker when food addictions abound that'd be ever so helpful!

And that loud crash from the basement was...

My sewing box.  A big-ass toolbox containing every kind of sewing notion a gal could want.

Look!!  Extra storage in the roll-back top compartments - perfect for thread.

www.jandofabrics.com should totally pay me for this ad! 
Also, underneath all the crap in the bottom - there is a corset waiting to be re-boned. 
Sounds dirty right?

I had forgotten to close said box after grabbing needles, thread and big-ass snaps for Rissa's revamped duvet cover.*  I had also forgotten to chase the cats out of the craft room - hence the loud crash.  I headed downstairs in trepidation, to discover the ironing board overturned, my sewing toolbox face down on the floor and all of its contents strewn across the craft room.  My cats, Steve and Lola, were looking oh-so-innocently at the destruction they had recently wrought.  "Don't mind us here.  That box?  It must be on crack.  It just jumped off the ironing board all on its own."

Lola Ebola Virus

Steve

Needles, measuring tapes, thread, buttons, thimbles, piping, busks, hooks & eyes, boning, ribbon, pins, snaps, fringe, iron-on patches, stitch-witchery, bobbins, seam rippers, regular interfacing and... that white fabric marking pencil thingie... all on the floor.  And there I am, in my bare feet,  having miraculously managed to walk into the middle of the room without impaling myself on the hundreds of nearly invisible straight pins that had flown from the sewing box to the concrete floor and rag rug.  Frankly, I had forgotten that I even owned straight pins.  Any sewer worth her Brownie sewing badge knows to use only the coloured large-head pins, in case accidents like THIS happen.  I was lucky, the only thing I trod on were thimbles, hooks & eyes and the small thread spools.  Of course, all of which still have a pain-inducing level comparable to that of walking barefoot upon Lego.

Bobbins hold approximately 180 feet of thread.  Murphy's Law of Bobbins states: When a bobbin falls to the floor, it will always roll to the farthest point in the room, leaving at least half of its thread tangled behind it.  And unless it is cheap-ass thread you DO NOT just cut and run.  If you sew with Gutermann, you gather it up and wind it all back onto the bobbin patiently, grumbling and cursing to yourself, and in my case, threatening to take the cats' intestines and turning them into violin strings.



*Back to Rissa's re-vamped duvet cover, which started this whole debacle.   It wasn't a duvet cover at all, but rather a somewhat quilted comforter.  A huge, honkin', bigger than queen-size, but not quite king-sized comforter that was too big to be washed in my washing machine, but really needed to be washed, because it had blood on it from when David stubbed his toe one night and bled all over it when he was getting Rissa settled into bed.  (breath)  Not wanting to spend the money on dry cleaning nor on a new comforter/duvet cover,  I got it into my head that I would open the sucker up and take out the haphazard stitching that held the quilting batting in place so that I could then wash it.  You know how sometimes you start a job thinking that it will be a simple feat, but then it turns out that you've now wasted  SEVERAL hours of your time and energy and would have been better off just running to Zellers and buying two sheets and sewing them together to make a duvet cover, except that you're already SEVERAL hours into the project and can't stop or all that time will have been for naught?  This was one of those times.  By the time I finally got all the stitching out and washed the cover and ironed on the stitch witchery and had to find 8 snaps (only 4 of which matched), it was two day's later.  And as soon as Rissa put it on her bed, all the snaps opened and the quilting batting escaped, which means I need to buy many more snaps or at least sew a bag for the quilting, which would kind of be like a duvet cover for INSIDE the duvet cover, which is cuckoo-bananas.  Yes, I am THAT stubborn and cheap.

Stoned on Chocolate

Yep, I'm thinking exactly what you think I'm thinking!

I went to SOMA with Margo and Jon.  For the uninitiated, SOMA is a  Chocolatemaker in  Toronto's Distillery District.  What they serve?  SEX in cacao form.

Porn for foodies

It's pretty much always an expedition verging on the indecent.  I frequently feel as if I've been caught having sex in public while enjoying SOMA's delicacies,  and yet I revel in the exhibitionism of the act.  Today I had multiple mouthgasms - at least three of them.  The Bergamot, the Douglas Fir and the Passionfruit w/ Coconut truffles.  OH.  SWEET. MOTHER.  Not to mention the few spoonfuls of the salted caramel gelato that I stole from Jon that made me stop talking (quite the feat) for at least a good 30 seconds while I took the time to catch my breath.  Then, before I left, the Fleur de Sel Caramel...

Fleur de Sel Caramel is on the right... just remembering it right now... I need a sec...

 
This is chocolate that makes a girl clench... DEEP DOWN INSIDE.  If you're not a chocolate person, you might not understand the thrill it poses, but for those of you who are...  and if you live ANYWHERE close to Toronto...  GO.  Savour each and every bite.  Sip water, or enjoy fruity gelato in between bites, to cleanse your palate before the next morsel has you falling to your knees calling the Chocolatier Master/Mistress, willing to sell your body for the next hit.  I'm not really even hyperbolizing here folks - it is THAT GOOD.

The three of us walked out, completely stoned on chocolate.  I could feel it behind my eyes, that dopey, post-sex, wanting to snuggle under the duvet until spring, kind of feeling.  I'll warn you, it ain't cheap, but it is totally worth it and gives a girl almost as much punch as the Hitachi Magic Wand.  Seriously.

Yes Sir, that's my baby...

Rissa is at the piano.  Surreptitiously, I watch from the kitchen.  She sings as she plays Adele's Someone Like You  - she's been working out the chords with David.  How she can sing and play at the same time mystifies me.  Her lovely soprano drifts across the room, she has perfect piano posture - she is stunningly beautiful.  I find myself in awe of this person whom David and I created.  Then she notices me watching her... and she turns into a velociraptor and starts growling the song and banging on the keys with her little raptor arms and her head.

Sometimes in a lull in the conversation at the dinner table, Rissa will play a trumpet voluntary with her navel.

Or this...

Rissa, nearly choking on laughter in bed.  "You know sometimes when you're talking, and spit from the back of your throat squirts out?  That just happened to me!"

"So Mummy, you know how I'm playing this Sims game with cats and dogs?"

"There are cats and dogs who play Sims games?  Those are some smart mammals..."

"NO!  The characters are cats and dogs.  I am on the cats' side."

"Right.  Okay.  I'm with you now."

"Well in the game, you can do tasks to build up points and stuff.  So I just spent the last 1/2 hour... (she's so excited she can barely speak) ...WEEDING!!"


We're saying goodnight - it gets a little sloppy somewhere between the regular kiss and the butterfly kisses...  Rissa nearly ends up in hysterics.

"Why are you laughing so much?"  I ask.

"I remember when I was little and I tried to kiss you in the front hall - a big wet sloppy kiss with my tongue.  You asked me what I was doing and I said, 'I'm kissing you like Daddy does.' "


"Mummy, you know who would be a FANTASTIC superhero?

"No, who?"

"A NUN Superhero.  'Cause you know that crucifix belt thingie that nuns have with all the beads and stuff?"

"Uh-huh...?"

"She could totally whip that around and leave the sign of the cross on the criminals' faces!"


And tonight, just before dinner...
"Wait!  Wait!  I need to put on my bag!"  Then she arrives, clad in her ballet leotard, tights and a blue recycling bag which she has turned into a ginormous bib, by cutting holes for her head and arms.  "What?  I don't want to get stew on my tights!"

David looks at her, obviously impressed "That's quite ingenious."

Rissa shakes her head dismissively. "This one isn't as fancy as the one I took to school last year.  That one was a clear bag and I wrote "Rissa's Pomegranate Bag" on it... in red Sharpie - you know... (she is obviously excited at this part)...  to coordinate with the pomegranate JUICE when I was eating pomegranates..."

This is my daughter.  There is no one else on the planet like her, no one even comes close.  The joy of being her mother is something for which I am thankful EVERY SINGLE DAY.

What I did for fun in the 70s...

Brace yourself.  I'm about to wax nostalgic.  I grew up in Winnipeg.  Twice.  Once between the ages of 3 & 8 and then again between the ages of  15-18.  My Dad was Air Force.  He was a navigator.  He 'told the pilots where to go' is how he used to put it.   We lived off of Ness Avenue in PMQs.  (Private Married Quarters)  We weren't technically ON BASE, but we were pretty frickin' adjacent to it.

We moved to Conway Street when I was four, I think.  Memories from before the age of eight are all sort of ... fuzzy.  I've had a head injury... okay three... I've had three head injuries. 

Ticky Tacky Houses as contracted by the Canadian Forces.  I think mine might have been the yellow one.

Now one of the great things about Winnipeg, is that there were back alleys.  Any garages were to the rear of the properties, which made for tidy front yards without cars cluttering the scenery.   No fences anywhere - as a kid you could basically run rampant through everyone's yard ... so we did. 

This was the time of playing outside until the streetlights came on.  The time when your Mom would say "If you can't hear me call you for dinner, you're too far away!"  You pal'ed  around with a gang of kids, all Air Force brats, all your parents knew each other so you couldn't get away with anything. Because this was also the time, when the parent of your best friend would grab you by the arm (or ear) and march you back over to your house and tell your parents what you did.

I took swimming lessons at the St. James Assiniboine Pool.  We walked from our house on Conway across the western stretch of the Assiniboine Golf Course in the dead of winter.  The golf course didn't have fences back then either.  It was like trekking across the tundra to get to the pool  I arrived cold and exhausted and I departed cold and exhausted. I want to say that those lessons were late at night, but really, I think it was just after school and it was winter and already dark at 4:00 p.m.  My mother would do her best to dry my hair underneath the hand dryers and then would throw  me back into my snowsuit, with an extra hat AND my hood.  I remember the bone-chilling wind driving across that golf course as we walked for what seemed like hours to get back home in the dark.  In actuality, it was probably all of 8 minutes.  I thought I would die on that walk home - I was so cold.  To this day, swimming at ANY time of the year is not my favourite of activities.  (It's sort of a coup for David and Rissa to get me into Lake Ontario - now a mere 8 minute walk from my present house.)

I remember skating  on the duck pond at Assiniboine Park.  Sunday afternoons, cold air, blue sky, white snowbanks and evergreens.  Mom would have thermoses of hot chocolate and maybe some fresh-baked cookies.  My feet would practically drop off from near-frostbite, but I never wanted to leave.  I just wanted to skate and skate and skate.

Winnipeg in the summer was a different thing altogether. Prairie HOT.  A blessedly DRY heat, not like what you can get in Ontario.  Running around barefoot - ALL summer long. That was the best.   Kids' feet must have some asbestos-like quality to them, you can walk on gravel, hot pavement and never seem affected.  Apart from a stubbed toe here and there, you're good to go.  Who needed shoes??  They were so limiting!  When it got REALLY hot, I'd go play in the back alley.    The heat of the sun would soften up all the tar used to seal the cracks on the road and it would bubble up.  And thank God I wasn't wearing shoes, because if I'd had shoes on, I would not be able to pop the tar bubbles with my big toes.  I could spend hours going up and down my back alley popping tar bubbles.  Then I'd go to another back alley, and another - all within PMQs and all within the range of my mother's voice - in case it was anywhere near dinner time.