Kind of A Beautiful Moment

Posted on 2/19/2008 by cheesefairy

Yesterday, I was at my desk at work, helping the girl from HQ get her proverbial papers in a bundle for the week of meetings that are taking place here in Vancouver.

She’s a very nice girl. She does time-zones in her head and always says please and thank you. She wouldn’t let me lift so much as a ream of paper. “Look at you!” she kept saying, “You could have that baby at any minute!” (and a ream of paper is what’s going to push it out? I’ll have to remember to take one with me to the hospital in case things get stuck.)

“Wow,” she said, on her way back from the photocopier, I guess observing that co-worker A was still standing at my desk, chatting with me. “You guys sure are laid-back out here. I love it.”

“Really?” I said, and just then my phone rang. It was the mail room.

“Cheesefairy – there’s a parcel down here for you. UPS.”
“Oh, OK…”
“It’s…YOUR SHOES,” the mail room guy stage-whispered.
“Hey! My shoes are here!” I said, “I’ll be right there!” and hung up the phone.

The girl from HQ just looked at me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, “I have to go get them.”
“Sure,” she said.

“Laid back?” co-worker A was saying as I swept past them, “You think?”

ps: they are these shoes and they are every bit as delightful in person thank goodness because I do not want to have another parcel in my house that needs mailing sorry Sarah and family I swear you will get your Christmas presents eventually.

Posted in funny, shoes | 6 Comments

I’m Letting The Girl Who Doesn’t Construct Sentences Real Good Write This One While I Eat Ice Cream

Posted on 2/16/2008 by cheesefairy

Y’ever have that thing, with the words, where you talk and then you wish you hadn’t talked? But you can’t stop. Or you won’t stop. And it’s just not as clever as when the Beastie Boys do it.

Like, you’re at a grocery-store check-out and you make some stupid joke about the fact that the five dollar bill you just handed the cashier is dirty and she looks at you – or just past you – like you’re absolutely starkers (as in, mad, not naked).

Or you have a temper tantrum that would do your 20-month-old son proud (who knew – he’s mentoring ME!) because a computer doesn’t work the way it should. You yell and swear at it and then, a few minutes later, the rage is still boiling up and you don’t know why – you can’t argue with a computer and you can’t argue with a poorly constructed database, even if, especially if you know that’s what it is.

Everything is just dumb, stupid and wrong. And you can’t even be bothered to come up with other words for dumb, stupid and wrong. You can’t explain it right, anyway.

Like far-too-extensive Aphasia or something? Psychic aphasia?

Exhaustion. I think. Exhaustion and the moon and mercury in retrograde and the rain and yeah. I just can’t be so sour anymore. It’s too tiring, on top of being 31 weeks pregnant, to be mad at everyone for everything when really what I need is more sleep and I’m not going to get it for another let’s say year, optimistically, so I might as well come up with some coping strategies.

Five things that will result in better behavior from me:

1. The sun is coming out. This is good both because I like sun and because I won’t have to kick anyone’s ass who told me it was going to be sunny this weekend.

2. I now have a USB hub to attach to my laptop so that my wee music player will stop sapping poor laptop’s brain, causing aneurysms (catastrophic reboot daily!) every time I get halfway through loading an album.

3. We finally have a respectable selection of food in our house, after several weeks of living loaf-to-loaf. This means I can cook. Or at least have the option to not have chips for dinner more than twice a week. (ed. note: that sentence made my head hurt) Also, frozen strawberries were on sale.

4. The food items we have in the house include pineapple. And a new, aluminum cake pan that is not non-stick, meaning we now have more non-non stick pans in the house than non-stick pans.

5. Which, of course, means pineapple upside-down cake.

And where there’s cake, there’s peace and harmony. I hope you find yours, too.

Posted in babby, food, whiny | 4 Comments

It Continues

Posted on 2/15/2008 by cheesefairy

Me: So the meeting time we’ve settled on is 8 am pacific time
Her: Uh – what’s that in OUR time?
Me: ….
Her: ….
Me: That would be 11 am your time.
Her: Oh, OK.

Out of 7 people, the only person who asked me this question was the person in Ontario. The person in the maritimes? Did the math. The person in Manitoba? Likewise. It’s not that they’re stupid in Ontario. It’s that they’re used to having the meeting be in their time zone and everyone else can do the math. They’re used to being the Centre Of It All. It’s like the American tourists who would buy cheese from me with American dollars (I would do the exchange for them because they would say, “What’s the price in OUR money?”) and would get all indignant when I gave them their change in Canadian coins. “What am I supposed to do with this?” they would sniff. To my credit, I never once replied, “Try eating it and see what happens!”

Tropes & trisms, I know. But this week has been what the career counsellors call “challenging” and what I call “6 weeks to go if I make it that long!”

On Monday I renewed my driver’s license. And yesterday, I received the new license in the mail. That is possibly the fastest I have ever received anything in the mail. I guess they were so excited about my fabulous picture they couldn’t wait to send it. Or maybe they wanted to get it out of the office because it was crashing their computers.

Yesterday morning, on the bus, I saw two things that amused me.

First, I looked out the window and caught the eye of a medium-sized terrier in the passenger seat of a car. (please note: this does not count as car-pooling, even if your dog is wearing a seatbelt and fiddling with the radio.) The car’s seats were covered in leopard print and the dog was wearing a puffy camouflage jacket. He stared at me for a full minute, not barking, not agitating, just communicating “I am taken hostage by bad taste,” with his mortified brown eyes. And then they pulled away.

The bus I was on had an ad for a carpet cleaning process? solution? called Chemdry. The text of the ad read: “They laughed at us when we said we were starting our own carpet cleaning business. Who’s laughing now!”

The image in the ad was of a big, tropical ocean with a small boat off in one corner and in the other, a man and a woman, both wearing jeans and t-shirts, straddling a palm tree that hovered at a dangerous-looking 90 degrees over the water. Despite this seemingly desperate situation, they were both looking at the camera, smiling with an insane sort of glee.

I think, dear folks, that your friends are still laughing at you because you made your millions at carpet cleaning and then spent it all on your own tropical island but forgot to buy groceries or a manservant and your cell phones don’t work and your boat is way out there but these are shark-infested waters so you’re trying to get back to it using this victim of a tropical storm but it’s just not long enough. Meanwhile, you’re really sick of each other and each of you thought the other was bringing the “desert island disks” so you have no music.

Oh and I am laughing too. So, thank you.

Posted in funny, idiots, public transit, whiny | 2 Comments

You Know, Like, Philosophically Far Away

Posted on 2/12/2008 by cheesefairy

While I may be skilled at setting arbitrary deadlines, apparently as I enter my 35th year of life, I am still as suckass as ever at actually meeting them. Somewhere in the blur that was yesterday, following not enough sleep, a frustrating, overlong commute and a series of people Up In My Business all day, I decided that getting to 1,000 posts by my birthday was not as important as saving my own sanity and going to bed by 9 pm, not to mention saving you all having to pore through 5 posts about really boring shit.

Besides, yesterday was Saint Aardvark’s birthday (he is STILL 2 years older than me, dammit. I am running as fast as I can!) and we had cake to eat after Trombone had gone to bed. 12 cupcakes, plus the cake I stayed up way too late for, plus the cake my mom made in a heart shape for us. (When I was a kid I always wanted a heart-shaped cake so one year she bought a pan and has been using the heck out of it ever since.)

There may be something to the whole “refined sugar makes you batshit insane” theory. (I am guessing this is a theory? It sounds like one.) Wee Trombone had barely a lick of icing off SA’s finger and spent the next hour being a royal pain in the ass. Granted, he had a cold over the weekend and mondays are tough all over.

So – no more chocolate icing for Trombone. Me, I can handle it. My gestational diabetes tests came back negative so I can eat all the chocolate I want and hang the expense.

Here’s something to consider if you live in British Columbia. I work in the regional office of a national corporation. Today, my poor, beleagured Co-worker A had the following conversation with someone at Headquarters, which is located in the wilds of the centre of Canada, after receiving a terribly marked-up copy of a document he had created. The HQ representative seemed to think the document was quite awful. Naturally, Co-worker A disagreed and I am firmly on his side.

Co-worker A: …okay so should I make the [ridiculous] edits to the document or will you do it?
HQ: Hmmmm, well… could you do it? I’ve already spent an hour working on these revisions
Co-worker A, incredulous because NO WAY IN HELL: …an hour?
HQ: Yeah, seems like I always have to re-do stuff we get from BC. I guess it’s because you’re so far away.

Discuss.

Posted in food, funny, idiots | 6 Comments

I am Waiting for a Cake To Bake or I Would Be In Bed By Now

Posted on 2/10/2008 by cheesefairy

In the time that I have been spending making chocolate cupcakes (successful!) and chocolate cake in a loaf pan (still cooking!) I have developed a theory explaining the problem with the Grammy awards (and awards shows in general.)

You see, there is a special enclave in Karznukclimac where the treasured gnomes of the outer Karznukclimac alps gather to plan awards shows and because they grew up without proper socialization, their gnome sensibilities are very delicate and no one has the heart to tell them they are a little too Celine Dion playing the suburban casino, a little too glitter-on-your-pancakes-on-a-monday-morning. I am thinking, though, that all gnomes gotta grow up sometime. What would Dr. Phil say? Dr. Phil would tell the gnomes to thicken their skins and get over it. Maybe, gnomes, there could be fewer guests at the Grammy’s (think “quality” not “quantity”) and then you wouldn’t have to contrive idiotic ways to get 15 people on stage at a time.

Here’s how we started off this evening:

Alicia Keys: great singer.
Frank Sinatra: great singer.
Alicia Keys + Frank Sinatra (dead) = too much, gnomes. Too much.

Foo Fighters: I like them.
+ Some orchestra: Sounds like a nice orchestra
+ Former Led Zeppelin member conducting the orchestra: OK….
+ Random winner who gets to sit on stage and smell Dave Grohl’s pits: Um.

Could you have stopped back at the Foo Fighters part? The screaming. I like the screaming.

PS: Dave Grohl has crossed a line from dirty-sexy to just dirty and I am sad.

No, there’s MORE!

The Beatles: yeah yeah greatest band whatever.
+ Some movie about The Beatles: apparently very successful.
+ Cirque du Soleil: not to my taste
= circus people with umbrellas on their heads riding unicycles to movie-inspired Beatles music.

Also, in case you missed it, Fergie is shorter than Ringo Starr.

Also also, I think Kanye West is the honourary king of the gnomes of the outer Karznukclimac alps. With his jacket scrolling blinking lights, his white sunglasses and his shaved head proclaiming “MAMA” (I think – all I could see is MA), he is definitely the idiot / child / genius we are not allowed to take aside and make over. Maybe his next album could be called “I am my own worst parody.”

Mercifully little Nickelback, though. That particular hell seems to have passed. Time to check the cake again while I listen to Alicia Keys duet with John “I’m not boring, you are” Mayer on big balls guitar solo.

…oh, thank god. Good night.

Posted in music, television | 2 Comments