Underwear addict...

My name is Heather and I am an underwear addict.  I have over 67 pairs of underwear.  Which, when you looking at it from a less compulsive consumerist way, means that I can NOT do laundry for more than 2 months!!!

I counted them as I was trying to squirrel away the freshly laundered undergarments into my top right drawer in the walk-in closet.    I have 5 pairs of beige boycut briefs.  I have 8 pairs of white cotton boycut briefs.  Really, what it comes down to is that I have MANY boycut briefs in MANY different colours: pink, purple, turquoise, black, blue, raspberry & green, B&W patterned...  I have over 2 dozen thongs.  I have at least 3 pairs of 'Period Panties."  My cheeks runneth over with sexy panties -  the lace, the cheekinis, the ruffled.  And those are just the ones I have in my top right drawer in the closet.  In the top two drawers of the dresser, I have matching underwear sets, say 8 of them.  Okay, maybe 10.  Possibly 12.

How did this happen?  I mean really 10 should do me... should really do anyone.  7 pairs with 3 more emergency 'just-in-case-the-laundry-didn't-get-done-on-time' pairs.  And yet, when I try to sort through and edit my collection, it's like I have personal relationships with them all.  The white cotton ones with the lace feel great and are a perfect match for any of my vintage styled sleeping garments - especially the white cotton, pintuck-fronted, with the side pocket nightie that allows me to pretend that I'm in Pride and Prejudice.  The balconette and cheekini in turquoise drives David mad for the 15 seconds that it remains upon my person.   And the red panties?  Well, they're RED panties!!!

Why is it that the comfortable beige panies are not enough for me?  Am I that vain that my ass, hidden beneath several layers of clothing,  needs to be clad in the lingerie equivalent of precious gems?  Yes.  Yes I am.  Black thongs for darker clothing.  Beige panties for translucent clothing.  Sparkly blue to make David lose his mind.

Really it's good for a gal's psyche.  'Cause sometimes just knowing that you are wearing bright red lacy panties can get you through that bad day.  When you're ready to decapitate someone who doesn't understand social cues, who doesn't have two synapses to rub together, who wastes oxygen on the planet, you can always think, "My ass looks amazing right now," and sometimes, that, can be enough.

If men gave birth...

Had to share this video from the Netherlands... Two Dutch television hosts Dennis Storm and Valerio Zena offered to experience the pain of childbirth.  Of course their birthing experience didn't include vomiting, involuntary pooping/diarrhea, bursting facial blood vessels, having a 'taint' torn/sliced and then sutured after the fact... but good on them for being guinea pigs.

The Fabulous Lesbian Muffcrats...

This is how much David and Rissa love me.  They bought me THESE at our local charity shop!!

Aren't they the absolute best?!?  I think they're supposed to be be mice, but they look more like muskrats to me on account of their poufy head fur and long tails.  And then when I really looked at their attire - it struck me that the one in the tuxedo had a very feminine, tailored flair, what with the form-fitting vest and cravat and lace around her wrists.  And then I thought, what if these are two female muskrats... on their wedding day!?!  David and Rissa found me my very own diversity-affirming stuffed animals that I can place on my desk and adore EVERY SINGLE DAY!!  I have Fabulous Lesbian Muffcrats!!!  How great is that?!?  The only thing better?  If they were actual taxidermied muskrats.

Salsa counts as a vegetable right?

We're producing Peter Pan.*  I'm directing, David is the tech director and Rissa is dancing.  Sunday is our big rehearsal day.  Our family is at the rehearsal hall all day, which means that no one is home to prep dinner.  Which means that by the time we get home for dinner?  We have Resort Food.  As in the kind of food you RESORT to having when you simply don't have the energy to prepare anything healthy.

Last night?  NACHOS!  Rissa thinks she's died and gone to Heaven.

"Until the show opens we get to eat crappy food all the time, don't we?"

She has given me a list of foods that she thinks would be appropriate options for our Sunday dinners:

Kraft Dinner
Badly Breaded Chicken Nuggets
Frozen Pizza
Poutine
Pasta with canned Alfredo/Carbonara sauce.

If you see someone on the street in a simple carbohydrate/sodium coma?  That'd be me.

* Shameless plug - Peter Pan is playing in Port Hope, ON - the last weekend of February first weekend in March, 2013 

Winning the lottery wouldn't be enough...

Before we bought our beautiful heritage house, we had a meeting with the bank where they looked at our debt ratio.   I was depressed.  I was sure that we wouldn't be able to afford the house.  But then, miracles of miracles, the bank said yes we could.

The bank lied.

In the 70s?  My family lived in Nova Scotia and we'd buy a lottery ticket where the grand prize was $100,000.  It was SO MUCH money!  We would spend hours and hours dreaming as a family about what we would do with those winnings.  The trips we we take, the cars we'd buy, the pool we'd install.  If we won $100, 000 now, it would only pay off a third of our debt.   If we were to win the Early-Bird draw from one of those Home Lotteries?  We would still owe money to the bank.

The bank says, "Here, have a credit line!  Here, have another credit line!"

We say, "Are you sure we can afford all this?"

The bank says, "We are completely sure!"

The bank are lying bastards.

They talk about the benefits of home ownership.  You're not throwing money into a black hole of rent - you have 'equity' in your home - it's an investment.  What they don't talk about?  Is the fact that you'll never have disposable income again once you own a house.  Maintenance on a house is expensive.   And maintenance on a century home?  Forget about it!  There's a reason they are called money pits. 

We are so fucking house poor.  Every job?  Costs at least $1000. Minimum.  And when you're in a heritage home or even heritage district, you can't just go the economical way.  The Heritage Committee can't tell you what you can do to the inside of your home, but they are fascists about the outside.  If we were to replace or repair our windows to satisfy the Heritage Committee?  It would be about $1000, per window.  We have 37 windows - not including the basement windows.

You don't think about this when you fall in love with a house.  You are seduced by the butler's pantry and servants' staircase and claw footed bathtub and sloped ceilings in the attic.  You salivate over the wood-burning fireplace and transomed windows.  You don't think about the fact that it will take, according to the rate at which we are paying down our debt now (which is the 'one step forward, 3 steps back' ratio), 75 years to pay off our debt.  I just did the math.  I'll be 119 when I'm debt free at this rate.  Not a problem!  The women in my family are long lived. We'll pay it all off and then we'll be able to afford that trip to Disney - with the grandkids, great grandkids and possibly great grandkids.  It'll be a helluva party!

Hippalicious...

I am an archer.   My arms stretch in opposing directions, pulling the nylon.  But unlike the Olympic bulls-eye 229 feet away, my target is closer.  The nylon/spandex thong in my hands is pulled near-to-tearing so that I may circumnavigate my hips. I'm Magellan!

Boy shorts don't cause this problem.  Boy shorts squoosh everything into their containing fabric.  Thongs don't have enough fabric to do that, hence the stretching.  I mean, sure, I could lose 20 lbs so that I didn't have these hippalicious bits, but the odds of that happening?  Pretty small.

It's just part of the morning routine.  You know...  You brush your teeth, you scrape all the coaty bits off your tongue, you re-adjust your bra straps annnnnd.... you stretch your thong.    Then after you put your bra on, you make sure your nipples are pointing in the same direction and you tuck your back pudge into the bra band.

There was a time when being hippalicious was not an issue... When I was 12 maybe... nope!  Not even then.  It was when I was 10... 'Cause the spring when I was 11?  I stole money from my parents and went to the Tasty Twirl and had ice cream  every day until I was caught and grounded for the entire rest of the summer.  My diet of high fructose corn syrup, proved to be my downfall.  Basically my criminal activity from age 11 has haunted me for 33 years.  Crime does NOT pay.

Six Degrees of Separation.. according to Rissa

At the dinner table:

I say to David, "You know what Will Smith movie we should see again?  Six Degrees of Separation..." 

"Six degrees?"  Rissa looks perplexed.

"Yes, it's a phrase that talks about the interconnectedness of..."

"That's like this big."  (She holds her fingers apart by this much, indicating the angle.)  "That's wee."

"Yes it is pretty small," David and I agree.  "There was this movie with Will Smith when he was much younger..."

Rissa isn't paying attention.  She's looking at her fingers.  "It's really only this big.  (Her eyebrows are down around her nose now.)  Seriously.  We've been doing this stuff in math.  It is only this big.  I can get my protractor and show you."

She's going to get her protractor?  "Where did you come from?" I ask - thinking that the math gene really must have skipped a generation.

"I'm smart.  In my brain." 

In other news... Rissa was unimpressed when when we then told her about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.  She felt we were doing a disservice to math.