Taming your Tatas...

Two is so much better than one!  Double the sports bra - 1/4 the bounce.

Okay ladies.  If you have ANY more than a B cup and you do ANY sort of exercise that has you moving faster than a saunter, you need to wear the appropriate sports bra.  Hell, wear TWO sports bras.  AT THE SAME TIME.  OVER TOP OF EACH OTHER.  Unless you are aiming for breasts that settle around your navel, in which case, keep doing what you're doing - by Christmas you'll have met your goal.   Good for you!

I go to the Y.  I ride the recumbent cycle.  As I pedal my ass off, I have a view of the treadmills and elliptical machines and there are WAY too many ladies out there who are WAY too under-supported in their breastal region.  Frankly, I'm surprised that more of them aren't leaving the building with black eyes from those breasts just a-flapping and ba-doinking all over the place.  I watch these gals and MY upper chest muscles hurt.  Please ladies, strap your girls down - I promise it'll serve you well.  I PROMISE.

I recognize that not everyone can afford the fancy schmancy sports bras that will offer Total Tata Support (TTS).  But we can all afford the cheap-ass sports bras.  Just buy them a size smaller and wear two of them!  I'm a D cup and I wear the tightest possible sports bras - ON TOP OF EACH OTHER.  The ones that accentuate my armpit and back pudge and leave nasty dermatographia (those lines that you get on your skin when clothes are too tight or your pillow is too wrinkly).   But you know what?  When I go for a fitting at Victoria's Secret, the salesgirls are astounded that not only  did I breastfeed my daugther, but that my boobs belong to a gal who's 44.  No, the girls aren't as firm as once they was, but they are at least in the same general area at which they started.

And by the by... In regular bras?  Your nipples?  They should be aiming OUT, not DOWN.  So heft your girls up, using those adjustment straps, OWN your curves and bask in the beauty that is you.  You have boobs.  Treat them well and they'll stay relatively where they're supposed to and not become something to tuck into the top of your pants.

DOGGIE Boob Scarf as seen in The Regretsy Christmas Special Featuring JACK the PUG
http://www.etsy.com/shop/boobsRus?ref=shop_sugg

Multi-Breasted Female of Galaxy NGC 1512

Previous post from Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Praise be to every deity in the universe!!!  After a week of insomnia - I slept through the night!!  Halle-freakin-lulljah!! (insert angels' chorus here)  

There's been a heat/humidity wave in Southern Ontario.  A direct result of this is my morphing into the biggest belligerent bitchy bitch in several galaxies.  (I think there's a multi-breasted female in Galaxy NGC 1512 that could give me a run for my money, but really with 22 breasts and a fashion history in her neck of the woods that hasn't allowed for brassieres, you could fully understand her bitchiness.)

Home to the Papilla-Multi-Praeclarus People - a shout out to Big Bessie! (From HubbleSite)

My period is due any day as well.  And not to become a cliched 'female' type who blames moods on her hormonal cycle, but WHAT THE POOH DUDE?!?  It's like I'm losing my mind a little bit more every day.  And I KNOW that I am, and I'm freaking helpless to stop the journey into The Hell of Irrationality.

Yesterday, I burst into tears when David asked me to go down to the beach.  I knew that I should get out of our stifling house, but also knew that I would then have to attempt to thrust my clammy sweaty body into a bathing suit.   (sidebar - I'm NOT a beach person to begin with.  I burn very easily, even with sunblock 9000 on, and I don't like getting wet.)

Sniffing back tears, I went upstairs and started the process.  I stripped off my now-sodden cotton clothing and then forced my sticky flesh into my one-piece bathing suit.  In retrospect, I could have put on my impetuously purchased pin-up girl bikini, (Rissa said "Mummy it looks GREAT!) but my mind was WAY skewed to self-loathing at this point, and no way was my fish-belly white stomach going to be put on view for Victoria Beach.  Instead, I opted for the one piece with attending melon-coloured overskirt.  Imagine if you will - a sausage casing trying to accommodate way too many fleshy bits.  Still in too precarious an emotional state, crying behind my half closed door, I could not see the humour in the situation.  NOW - this morning I do, but last evening at 4:42 p.m. NOTHING WAS FUNNY.

Determined not to give in to the hormones, I waded into Lake Ontario.  I was going to be the well-adjusted wife and mother.  I was going to participate in a family activity.  It was cold.  Not just a little bit cold - but the kind of cold where men's testicles crawl back up into their body cavities - or so David told me.  My legs ached from the temperature.  But I persevered.  I was in the water and I was wet and I was almost enjoying myself.  After about 30 seconds in the water, David looked over at me.  "Your lips are blue."  "Probably," I answered.  It was invigorating though.  The surf was all wavy which is a lot fun - even in hypothermic water temperatures.  After about 3.5 minutes David made me leave the water.  I was okay to stay and be wet even, but I guess my colour looked a little off and I was all goose-pimply and shivery and I didn't have the presence of mind to lie when he asked "Are you having chest pain?"  "Just a, uh, little bit."  If I were more petite, he would have scooped me up into his arms in a romantic gesture and carried me to the beach.  As it was, he threw an arm around my waist and dragged me out, wrapped me in a towel and told me to stay put while he went back in to make sure that Rissa and her friend didn't drown in the waves.

There I was on the beach - in 30+ degree heat and sun, clutching my white terry towel around me, teeth chattering.  He had been right.  It was good to get out of the house.  I was no longer hot.   My mood was vastly improved.  A brush with death will do that for a girl.

My version of 'Jazz Hands'

I provide my mother's friends with entertainment.   They love to hear stories of my outrageous life.  Oh that Heather.  The actress.  The writer.  The extrovert.  They love to hear stories of...

• My slapping of strangers.  "If you do that again, I'm giving you full warning, I will slap you."  He did it.  I slapped him.
  
• My unique style of parenting.   "Mummy I don't HAVE to be a lesbian do I?" Rissa has said.    "Of course not sweetie.  It would just make life so much easier for your father and me.  Just until university.  Wait until after university and then you can date whomever you want - boy OR girl.  Hey!  Look at that girl.  She's very cute.  Hook up with her, she won't get you pregnant."
  
  
• My getting my nosed pierced. Wow.  Bad idea. For me.  For other people, a fantastic idea, and it looks all sassy and trendy and cool, but I changed the ring too quickly to a prettier one - had a perpetually irritated nose for months until I removed it.
   
• My having a talisman of rowan berries tattooed on my lower back, to ward off possible ghosts in my home.  It's not a tramp stamp - it's too low for that.  What would a lower equivalent be? Something that people only get to see if I'm full-on naked?  Preen Scene? Signed Behind?  Fetching Etching?  Tart Art?  Tail Grail?
   
• My being a surrogate for a gay couple. That's worth a WHOLE other post.

According to my mother's friends I am ENTERTAINING.

A few years back, Mom was gearing up for her annual weekend with her girlfriends.  They'd been going away together every year for 2 decades at that point.  Mom and I were walking from a restaurant through the Wal-Mart parking lot.

"You haven't done anything interesting lately," she complained.  "What am I going to tell the girls?"

"Are you kidding?" I said.  "In a week's time I'm having a tummy tuck.*  Is that not enough to keep them occupied?" 

"Yes, but the tummy tuck is not happening until AFTER the weekend.  I've got nothing to tell them NOW."

So I whipped off my top and walked in my bra in the WalMark parking lot.  "There," I said.  Will that do?"

*
So... the tummy tuck.  I had one.  I blogged about it in ALL ITS GORY DETAIL.

theskinnyonmytummytuck.blogspot.ca

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.