A Nice Long Post About

Our New Bed.

I have never slept in a bed so lovely, so soft and firm and cartoon-cloud-like. (Because if it were a real cloud I would wake up soggy and polluted every morning and it would be so much easier to get out of it and get on with my day.) We bought it at Parker’s Mattress Factory on Broadway at Main St, where the sales staff did not offend us or follow us around or offer us coffee (other stores did…why? So we could spill it on the $2000 mattress and then have to buy it? hmm?) and also they were not Sleep Country and we wanted to prove that yes, you can buy a mattress anywhere else. Why? Because it’s a nice thing to do.

Parker’s makes their mattresses in their own factory in Vancouver and the man who sold us ours had the surname “Parker” which, even though he seemed kind of sour about his life, made us feel like we were at least paying for his dinner or something. Buy local, eat fresh, etc.

We bought the frame at Ikea because though there are lots of lovely, unique wood bed frames out there in the world, we didn’t have a quillion dollars to spend on the frame nor the 6 months it would take us to drive all over the lower mainland looking at everyone’s Buy & Sell ads up close.

Last Saturday, we put it all together. This took about as many hours as you might expect. We put the frame together in the bedroom but we did not measure the room beforehand (obvs. not so wise) or account for the fact that our bedroom door needs a few feet of space to open or close and now it doesn’t have those few feet anymore so it’s open all the time. (Wanna come over?) Our room actually is just the bed now. It’s kind of like a ship, sailing us to dreamy land every night & casting us ashore every morning into the cold November rain. Where it is hard to hold a candle.

Here is a shot of some lunatic on the street with a duck umbrella on a cold, wet November morning:

Nutbars in this city, I tell ya.

Anyway, after years on a futon and months on a two-mattress futon, Saint Aardvark, Seamus Sebang O’Harrigan and I are all very, very pleased with our bed.

See how the headboard is actually a bookshelf? That is especially handy now that we have no room for bedside tables.

Procrastination
I still have not re-potted my plant. However, it is still not fully dead, so I do not yet feel fully guilty.

Speaking of chocolate, yesterday Saint Aardvark brought home some peanut butter cups made by a chocolatier? About twice the size of your standard Reese cup & made with real dark chocolate. Oh my.

On November 1st I began participating in National Novel writing Month, which means I am to complete a novel by the end of November that must contain at least 50,000 words. Right now I am lazily treading water in the shallow end at 5,500 words, which is where I was last Sunday as well. I tell you this so that I will be shamed into working my tail off this week. And no, the bed is no excuse; I’ve been writing on the laptop.

My zombie eye!
Unfortunately there are no pictures of my zombie eye. I kept meaning to take one and then use it as the banner at the top of this page and title it “This is My Good Eye” because of the Soundgarden song “Searching with my Good Eye Closed” which begins with a demonic sounding Chris Cornell (probably) saying, “this…is my good eye. Do you hear a sheep?” I think I will go listen to Badmotorfinger right now. SUCH a good album.

Zombie Eye started in mid-September. One morning I woke up and my left eye was all red. Not inflamed or pus-y or crusty or weepy or any of the things google helpfully suggests when you search for “red eye”. (along with “brain tumour” and “crazy exploding eyeball disease – ha! you didn’t even know that EXISTED!”) Just bloodshot. I had not been doing cocaine, meth or even alcohol the night before, nor had I been smoking copious amounts of pot. No, I hadn’t been smoking pot at all, actually. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t itch, it was just red.

For a week or two I put Visine in it, which would clear the red for a while but soon it would return. There was a particularly angry red streak that looked like a lightning strike from the edge of my iris straight into the inner corner of my eye. It looked like I’d burst a blood vessel. Could Crazy Exploding Eyeball Disease be far behind?

We went to Saskatoon and Zombie Eye improved. The week after Saskatoon I woke up and it was way worse. It actually hurt a little so I went to my trusty walk-in clinic and saw an adorable 12 year old doctor. He suggested that it was either an inflammation or an infection. He further suggested I take magical ibuprofen, all hail its mighty name, 4 times a day. Because it was probably an inflammation. I did this for one day and the eye did clear up a little but you know, I just didn’t want to spoil the efficacy of magical ibuprofen (all hail, etc.) It’s the only drug that actually works for me and my tolerance for it is already pretty high, ever since last year’s KILL THE PAIN Medication Tour of my sinuses & surrounding tissues.

Since then, Zombie Eye has gone away for a week or two and then reappeared for a week or two. It doesn’t appear to be related to anything. It’s there (or not) whether I get lots of or no sleep; whether I sleep with the window open or closed; whether I watch tv or use my computer or read a book. It doesn’t itch, it doesn’t hurt, it’s just fecking ugly. In fact, I’ve decided it’s my ugly side. I can scare people into doing my bidding by closing my right eye and staring with the left. I refer to it, by turns, as Evil Cheesefairy, Mal Occhio, Zombie Eye and The Bane of my Existence.

Now, I realize that having a Zombie Eye is no excuse for not writing in th’cheeseblog for so long but I thought I would tell you all about it anyway.

To cleanse the palate, here is a photo of my ducks in their halloween costumes:

The TV – It’s Too Much!
Since we acquired our personal television recording device and have been able to set it to record things without consulting us, I have been spoiled into not thinking too much about what day it is, what show might be on or what I should be dropping everything to watch. Every few evenings, when I’m not volunteering or in bed by 8:30, I park on the couch (which, is it just me? has become much more uncomfortable in the past week) and catch up on all the TV from the week. Yii. Thus, my brain is a soup of theme songs, snappy dialogue, bizarre medical cases and dull competitions.

I could only stomach one episode of Martha Stewart’s Apprentice. The contestants were boring like The Donald’s contestants. The tasks were inane like The Donald’s tasks. But Martha is no competition, freak-show-wise, for The Donald. On her Apprentice show, she’s all…Nice! Come on – everyone knows she’s a tough boss. There was a made-for-TV movie about her. She’s nasty! Wouldn’t it have been exhilarating for her to be herself for once? She has two other shows where she is nice. Her Apprentice show could have been very cathartic. But someone opted to portray her as flowery & genteel. Because she’s a woman, I guess? Because she’s a woman she can’t even say “You’re fired,” or “You Suck, go home,” she has to buffer the message and say, “You just don’t fit in” and then write a handwritten note to the loser contestant. We truly are the fairer sex, aren’t we. Gag Me.

Thanks to the advanced techology of the personal television recording device, I can skip most of The Donald’s Apprentice. I feel better about it only taking 20 minutes to watch. Everyone is super annoying and a couple of times I was actually angered by a certain contestant to the point of glaring at him with my Zombie Eye. The following week? That contestant was fired. Fear Me.

America’s Next Top Model is going to London next week! Can’t wait to hear them all talk in fake British accents. Unfortunately, drunken, ballsy Lisa has not yet had her emotional breakdown/through. Everyone hates her except the judges & VIPs she meets every week. I don’t know – can a contestant win if she is universally hated by the other contestants? I guess so – though someone should really tell Tyra so Tyra and Lisa can have their heart-to-heart. Maybe Lisa will get really drunk on mini-wine on the plane to London and Tyra will realize that she is just crazy enough to be a supermodel!

My girl, Nik, is dull as paste and has no fierceness about her at all. I don’t care what happens to any of these people. Long may they run.

But I am In Love with Grey’s Anatomy, the new hospital dramedy on Sunday nights. Sandra Oh as a truly cruel & smart & bitter resident, true romance between pretty, shallow blonde people, crazy life-saving and moving life lessons. I have been brought to tears more than once while watching this show. I am hoping George Clooney will make a guest appearance. Grey’s Anatomy is set in Seattle; isn’t that where George and Juliana settled with their babies? Those babies must be, what, 6 now? Come on, give me George!

There is also Da Vinci’s City Hall which, so far, lacks a bit of the punch that Da Vinci’s Inquest had; perhaps because there are fewer dead bodies and more dialogue that reminds me of my day job. But it’s nice to see Mr. Da Vinci again. And he has an assistant with very beautiful hair.

Procrastination, Part 2
The key to this entry was the bit about the November Novel. Now look at the length of this post. Proof that I can put ANYTHING off if I set my mind to it.

Off to write fiction.
And buy some socks.
And make macaroni and cheese.