Maybe next time I should just braid it...

WARNING: This post is about girly bits

David was away all last week.  So on Friday, I wanted to spiff up for his return.  You know, wash and style the hair, shave the legs, groom the girly bits.  I wanted to be all smooth and nice smelling - although frankly after a week of sleeping on his own, a female orangutan in bed with him may well have been enough to get his motor running.

The shower went off without a hitch.  I emerged squeaky clean with nicely shaved legs. Gingersnap body lotion liberally spread over my limbs had me wanting to take me to bed.  Then I got down to the real business - the talcum powder and female weed whacker (Epilady) came out.  I always feel like the Epilady needs to be started with a pull start, like a chain saw.  Ring-duh-ding-ding-ding...

Anyone else notice that half these designs are unsymmetrical?!?

There was a time when 'bikini line' actually meant 'bikini line.'  That time has passed. Due to peri-menopause's mad grip on my hormones, the 'must be groomed' area now really stretches from c-section scar to... knee.  In fact, I AM the female orangutan.  After a week apart from your loved one, you want to look good... everywhere.  I'm never completely bare down there, but I do like to keep the shop tidy.  The talcum powder came out to smooth the skin and I went to work.

Upper thigh, actual bikini line, always goes first.  It's never problematic, you don't have to bend yourself in half to get a good view of the area.  Then it's the back of the legs, which, yes, I could just shave, but I'm prone to razor burn and then I'd be all bumpy and I'd have to do it way more often than the once a month it tends to get done now.   After the easy bits, it's time for the most challenging of female grooming.  Inner, inner thigh and upper, upper, back of the thigh.  Both areas come very close to being mistaken for delicate tissue without actually being internal organs. One has to use a cautious hand with the weed whacker in these areas.

Friday night, my hand slipped.  One second I was blithely denuding my inner, inner thigh, and the next I was desperately trying to pry the teeth of the Epilady off my turkey bum.

"Mother-f*!#ing Satan tool!"

I had to rip the cord out of the wall to stop the motor, but before I managed that Herculean feat, the machine had torn through the remains of my perineum, bounced off my labia and grabbed onto my upper thigh. I'm pretty sure that I then went into shock. When I finally looked down, I saw that I had road rash on my hooha and as an added plus, a bald patch.

I had just wanted to look good and now I needed Polysporin and an ice pack.  And some Band-Aids. And folks?  No matter how sexy you try to say it, "Hey there handsome, want to remove my Band-Aids??"  does not really set the romantic mood.  Thank God I'm good at misdirection, is all I'm saying.

Condoms +

"He may only touch your boobs if he is doing it with two separate Swiffers held from the length of their poles."

My daughter is now of an age where there's a real possibility that dudes will be touching her boobs.  She has a boyfriend (whom I adore), but he's still a teenaged boy with all the attending testosterone.  He's going to want to touch her boobs.   Hell, I'm her Mom and I want to touch her boobs.  That sounded wrong didn't it?  Oh God, I'm going to turn into that Grandma from Sixteen Candles!  I'm going to be feeling up my granddaughters.  It's just that new boobs are the antithesis of 45 year old, having nursed one's young, boobs.  There's a level of visual fascination there.  Mine haven't been like that in SOOOOO long.

Is it wrong of me to want my daughter to wear a mask that makes her look like Quasimodo?  Convince her to walk with a limp, talk in a terrifying accent?  Just until university. Knowing that she's holding hands?  Totally cool with that.  It's adorable.  I hear that she's being kissed goodbye on the doorstep and I have a moment of commiserative joy, of me going "Awwwwwwww."  Then I remember what it was like to be having those first kisses.  And then I remember what happens when you start to feel tingly.  When there's pressure to let him to second base and then to third and then he wants to slide home...

"You need to tell me when you start getting tingly.  Seriously. 'Cause then you need to be on the pill. Along with the condoms.  You cannot use condoms alone as birth control.  You can't!!!  It has to be Condoms +.  Condoms + spermicidal foam.  Condoms + the patch.  Condoms + an IUD!!!  And if he gets an orgasm, you get one too!!"

I'm facing the battleground folks.  I have a teenaged daughter.  From now until she leaves home, we're standing guard against teen pregnancy. There are those parents who will just forbid sex, or ignore the possibility that their kids will be having it, but I remember what it was like being 16 and feeling tingly.  I remember.  Sex is a biological imperative for boys, and though some parents don't want to admit it, girls too.  It's what we want to do - as a species.  To turn a blind eye to that fact is insane.  You might as well deny climate change.  12-15 years from now I will be ready to be a grandmother.  Until then, I will stand armed with a fireplace poker, ready to disable any sperm provider that wants to knock up my daughter.

I'm not being euphemistic.  It's a promise.

A sucker for snow

I woke up this morning and saw this in my backyard:

Then out the kitchen window, looking east:

And from our front window:

I know that there are naysayers out there, who hate the snow, who grumble and pout at the first sight of it, but I'm not one of them.  I love the first real snowfall.  Second and third snowfalls too.  The sixth and seventh ain't bad either.  I LOVE them.  Waking up to new fallen snow makes me happy. 

You know why?  Because it immediately brings out the 5 year old in me, filled with wonder and awe and the possibility of a snow day. That fresh snow, topping the pines, decorating the junipers... it's a moment of natural perfection.   White and clean - looking like a real-life Christmas card just from frozen precipitation. It makes me want to grab a toboggan and rush to the Catholic high school's track and giggle and shriek my way down to the bottom of the hills that surround it.  Let me have that.  Let me enjoy the moment before the +1 this afternoon turns the beautiful white into slushy grey and brown and has me yelling at family members to make sure to clean their feet off outside.

Carpe freaking nix folks - it's Canada, we're Canadians and winter is here!

Bankrupted by the Bulk Barn

They all seem so innocent.  Those plexi-glassed bins, with their silver scoops.  The aisle with its spices and herbs - the colourful cake sprinkles.  The plastic bags with their attending labelling closures.   The cute little golf pencils, to label the afore-mentioned closures.  A little of this, a little of that...

"Ooooooh.... plantain chips!  I LOVE plantain chips.  Aztec hot chocolate?  That's a must-have!"

Then you get to the cash and you find out that the 18 small items in your shopping basket, which don't even fill half the basket, total (attending ominous music) ...

$89.21  

"I'm sorry?  The total is WHAT?!?  Is the coloured sugar actually coloured cocaine??  This is less than ONE bag of food!!  $89.21?!?"

When you finally have that receipt in your hands, you are a crazy person.  You are the wife of a suspected philandering husband.  Your eyes flash over the totals.  Is this really stevia sweetener or is it diamond dust? What's that charge??  I just spent $6.78 for a scant cup and a half of white chocolate chips?!?

You've got to know your shit at the Bulk Barn.  The gluten free section??  HAH!  Gluten-free all purpose flour, pre-mixed, is 83¢  per 100 grams.  If you buy the individual ingredients separately and just mix it together at home?  32¢  per 100 grams.  And yet, it's still a billion times more expensive than regular flour.

And then add to that, the emergency mid-afternoon sugar-crash snacks that you buy, which, if you could just eat a chocolate bar instead, you could grab at the freaking Dollarama, and you'd spend less than 5 dollars on a week's worth of mid-day sustenance to stabilize your wayward blood sugar.  But no, you're at the Bulk Barn with their chrome impulse-buy shelves at the front cash. Those chrome shelves filled with Lara Bars and Luna bars and everything else that's so healthful and fucking pretentious... gluten free, dairy free, egg free, soy free, non GMO, vegan, kosher... and they cost between $1.79 and a gazillion dollars per bar, but sweet glucose index, you're eating healthy.

I come back from the Bulk Barn and I have to shift funds from one bank account to another to cover the impending shortage.  No seriously.  Sunday after I was at Bulk Barn - I had to move money around.  On the plus side?  I do have miniature muffin wrappers with adorable gingerbread men on them sure to elicit "Aren't they adorable?" murmurs at our holiday tea this year.

Chihuahua in my pants

Friday night.  Bedtime.  Rissa wriggles spasmodically under her blankets.

"I've got something in my pants!"

Sigh.  "What do you have in your pants?"

"A sliver or something!"

"A sliver?  How can you have a sliver?"

"I don't know, maybe from the dance studio."

Stalling.  She is stalling the bedtime process.

"Just ignore it."

"Ignore it?!?  ... IGNORE it?!?  If I had a Chihuahua in my pants would you tell me to just IGNORE it?  Would you tell me to worry about it in the morning?!?"

"WHAT?"

"Seriously, what if it was a... cannibalistic Chihuahua...?"

"WHAT?"

"If it was a cannibalistic Chihuahua...  and there was... was...  say a Golden Retriever... NO!  A GREAT DANE down there too..."

"You're telling me that there is now a Chihuahua and a Golden Retriever AND a Great Dane in your pants?"

"No, only a cannibalistic Chihuahua and a Great Dane - I needed complete opposite dogs to make an example.  Plus, after I said the word 'cannibalistic' I realized that the chihuahua couldn't be attacking me, I had to have another dog down there for it to attack."

"So you have a Chihuahua and a Great Dane in your pants?"

She then rolls her eyes at me.  "Of course not, but if I DID, you would just want me not to worry about them in my pants?"

Face palm.

In lieu of writing...

I am posting this... and so usher in the beginning of the holiday season...   Merry Christmas!

(Who knew that Kmart had it in 'em?)

My husband's so mean...

"Just rip it out!!  Please," I begged.

"Oh, love, I can't," said David.

"Yes, yes, you can!  Just take a spoon, or your thumb, or a FREAKING NAIL FILE, and pop out my eye.  Scramble it if you have to, but get it out!!!  Any of those will hurt less than the invisible railroad spike that is presently stabbing through my eye socket."

"I can't do that.  But I can get you a cold pack to put on your neck.  Did you take your drugs?"

"I took my drugs," I whimpered, pushing the heel of my hand into the cavity below my right eyebrow, desperately trying to remove the pressure.  "I took as many drugs as I can without damaging my liver.  They haven't kicked in yet.  Why haven't they kicked in yet??  Could you just knock me out please?  Just coldcock me upside the head and..."

"I'm not going to knock you out," David, holding my hand under the blankets.

"How about sawing my head off?  That'd do it..."

"Nope, not going to happen."

"WHY NOT?!?"

"Because I like your head.  And I like your eye.  Sure, you'd rock an eye patch for a while, but talking to one-eyed pirate version of you would get old pretty fast."  He gently squeezed my hand as I quietly sobbed.

Trepanation, by Herbert List 1944

"How about you drill a hole, just a small hole, in my head and we put in a wee pressure valve thingie??  You know, bring back the ancient art of trepanation," I suggested in a sultry tone, but I couldn't be too flirty with this appeal on account of the fact that I couldn't even open my eyes, because even the light from the night light was too bright, and my seduction really comes from my eyes.  And my boobs.  I arched my back a bit, hoping that the boobs might do the job on their own.

"No."

"You know how they have tornado sirens?  Maybe they could develop an early-warning system for barometric pressure shifts.  Like 20 minutes before it happens, the weather service could send out emergency emails to all those migraine sufferers who want to kill themselves when it shifts from extreme high pressure to extreme low pressure.  Then we could all dope ourselves up with our maximum drug dosage, before the pain has us suicidal.  Can we start a petition for that?"

"That, I will do for you."