Wherein the Question of What to do with My Postpartum Shed Answers itself

Posted on 11/4/2006 by cheesefairy

Your own personal yeti
Someone who’s got big feet
Someone who’s sweet
Your own personal yeti
He’ll keep you warm at night
He’ll fight all your fights

Standing tall in the shower stall
Watching it fall
Who can I call?
It gathers ’round the drain
I scoop it up again

Months ago I was smug, you know
Ha ha ho!
Watch it grow!
Now it’s piling high
And all I do is cry

Your own personal yeti
He will hug you tight
Kiss you goodnight
Your own personal yeti
His rates are very cheap
His soul runs deep

Reach out and pet him
Reach out and pet him

Posted in music | 2 Comments

The Almonds: A Cautionary Tale

Posted on 11/3/2006 by cheesefairy

Our stupid (read: ancient and never cleaned) toaster oven has two settings: toast and kill. If you turn your back on it for three seconds, it will incinerate your food and then all the many fire alarms will go off and the baby will laugh, so that’s good, but the catt will hide and yes, that’s okay too, but it’s loud and plus, PLUS, then you don’t get to eat whatever you were cooking.

Last week what I was cooking was lunch which also happened to be the last two pieces of bread in the house with leftover refried beans smeared on them and cheese melted on top. The cheese was salvagable. I scooped it off with chips. Let us all thank God for chips and cheese, else my bones would rattle against one another in my clothing.

Two days ago my mom was here. In the time it took me to change a diaper (with 17,000 diapers under my belt it doesn’t take me very damn long these days) my tray of almonds, which I was toasting lightly and had JUST checked, given a shake and put back in the oven, had turned into so many charcoal almond briquettes. Cue the smoke, fire alarms, laughter, hiding, etc. I put the almonds outside on the concrete brick of the patio, muttering about how if I wanted a goddamn flame thrower in my kitchen I would have bought the KitchenAid Goddamn Flame Thrower but then editing the muttering because the people next door have children and I don’t get the impression these children hear swear words very often. (PLAYDATE!)

Then mom and I had coffee instead and went for a walk and bought some cookies and I forgot all about the almonds.

Yesterday, coming home from being out, I noticed the tray of almonds had been moved to atop the barbeque. Still, they were not sheltered by our patio roof, so were being rained upon. Hmmm, I thought. I should bring those in. But then I got to blowing my nose and at this end-of-the-cold stage, that can take a good 45 minutes, plus then Trombone decided to scream for the rest of the day so the almonds were forgotten.

This morning, after a long night of screaming and waking and thrashing and screaming and feeding and help I’m in a loop help help help

…I sat wearily on the couch staring at my coffee. Trombone was asleep, finally. 6:50 am. (Yes yesterday he got up at 7. No he has no discernable schedule, despite my best attempts.)

“The almonds,” I suddenly remembered.
“Wha?” SA said.
“Those damn almonds. They’re still out there.”
He kissed my forehead and patted my knee. “Yes, the almonds,” he said, in a way that I think I will find very comforting when I am 85 and yattering on about how the kids in the alley stole my Twizzlers and then I had to climb a tree but I only had one shoe and its laces were missing so I had to climb using just my hands and then a spider bit me.

Later in the day I had a look out the window and the almonds were now swimming in their toaster-oven tray in a rather deep pool of rainwater. A couple of leaves floated on the top. Pretty, I mumbled and made more coffee.

Tonight, when he came home, he carried the pan.
“I am bringing in your almonds,” he announced. “And also? It rained 2 inches today.”
“I don’t want them.”
“They’re not for you,” he explained patiently, “it’s so the strata council doesn’t make a motion that we have to pay extra fees because we leave almonds on our porch.”
“What about the squirrels?”
“They were BURNED!”
“The squirrels?”
“No, the damn almonds! Why would the squirrels want them?”
“Oh. To throw at the pigeons? They’re at war, you know.”

I think Trombone’s cold is over. He’s sleeping now. Tomorrow maybe I’ll try roasting almonds again.

Posted in food, trombone | 4 Comments

Mama Did A Bad, Bad Thing

Posted on 11/2/2006 by cheesefairy

I wish I could play the noise for you. The noise he was making when he woke up this morning at 7am, 10 seconds after the front door closed on SA and just as I was leisurely rolling towards my bathrobe. [I am a fool. One hour earlier, I thought, the smart thing would be to get up now. Even though I’m tired. Let’s face it – I am always going to be tired and if I get up NOW, I can have coffee and breakfast and some time alone. My precious. Time. Alone. Are you guessing that I fell back asleep? You are a Smart Monkey. (TM) And I? Am a fool.]

The noise, anyway, is amazing. It’s more than a whine but less than a cry. It’s like if Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 was being quartered by a table saw. (And what a world that would be.) It’s like if Enrique Inglesias was being parallel-parked upon by a 16-year-old myopic (sans glasses) driving his dad’s pickup truck. Standard transmission pickup truck. Standard transmission pickup truck with leaking coolant.

Where was I?

Now that I think about it, I know I don’t have to play the noise for you – and not because I just evoked it with my stunningly accurate similies but because a lot of you of you have children of your own and have heard the noise firsthand. And those of you who don’t have children probably have a partner or have had a partner who doesn’t do Sick well. Notice how non-gender-specific I’m being? Some say that men are worse at Sick than women, but as that is not the case in our house, I won’t say it. Around here, I am the moany, grumpy one who calls from the couch for more soup, no, not that kind of soup the GOOD KIND, what do you mean we don’t have any, dammit my life SUCKS! Partly this is because I don’t interact well with most OTC cold remedies (and some prescription ones, too – hey, if this blog is ever in an accident, be sure & tell the paramedics I’m allergic to penicillin) so I remain staunchly unmedicated through my illnesses. On the bright side, I’m convinced that this both helps me get better faster and makes me a goddamned hero.

This was about the kid, wasn’t it. Mr. Snots-a-lot. Sir Wheezy.

After a couple of days wondering if he was going to get the cold I’m almost done with (just at the hacking-up-a-kidney stage now) and that Saint Aardvark has just started, this morning the answer was clear. Y-E-S-S-I-R-E-E-M-A-M-A-C-I-T-A was spelled out in snot on his bedroom wall. No! I had no idea he called me that! A little creepy, I agree. So we came downstairs. I made oatmeal for my breakfast and he continued to make the Noise. I jollied about, offering him toys, vitamin D, (cherry flavoured elixer!) diaper changes, my breast, my other breast, songs of beauty, songs of despair; nothing doing. While he sat on my lap as I ate my oatmeal, the screen of the laptop caught his eye and suddenly, the Noise stopped.

What did I do next?

You bet. I put him in his carseat & lambkin a safe distance from the TV and turned on the PBS. I am a kids’ tv virgin, so the show about the bedbugs kind of freaked me out a little (also it took me far too long to figure out that their friend, “J. Edgar” is a vacuum. also, isn’t that a dangerous kind of friend for a bedbug to have?) but the Noise stopped. For 45 minutes (then Barney came on DEAR GOD I know it was hip to hate on Barney like 10 years ago but I ONLY JUST see what you all meant) it stopped and then he was tired so he nursed and went to sleep. Trombone, not Barney. Ewww!

It had never occurred to me to turn the tv on as a distraction. And I don’t plan to make a habit of it but ’round these parts when you’re sick and it’s raining outside? You get to watch TV in your pyjamas. Especially if it makes you forget to make that noise.

Posted in television, trombone | 8 Comments

Smells like Freedom

Posted on 11/1/2006 by cheesefairy

Sometimes, in the early part of the day, a faint smell licks out from within a building I’m passing. It’s not the smell of one thing but of many: fried onions, cigarette smoke, old carpet. I can almost touch the stickiness of last night’s beer on plastic-topped tables, can almost see the barflies adjusting their sports coats for the stagger home at 2 am. I hear too-loud laughter and pockets of change jingling as patrons play the jukebox, the pulltabs and make pay-phone calls from the dark hallway that also houses the bathrooms, where one toilet is always blocked.

A wist comes over me and I want to pound on the door where the smell came from until someone lets me in, lets me sit, lets me drink the day away with friends. I remember every single afternoon, evening and night spent in the many neighbourhood bars we used to frequent; I remember the guy with the knife and the guy with the broken bottle, the order of the songs on all of the jukeboxes and the cost of a pint of dark or light, what night was karaoke night and what night was very bad cover band night.

I’m not an alcoholic. My love of a good bar has to do with its sense of community, its inclusiveness – notice I said good bar not nightclub or Ultralounge (incidentally, did you see that reporter’s HAIR?) – and the way anyone can walk in, sit down and have a beer next to anyone else. Probably, the two will end up having a conversation. And then the two becomes three and pretty soon you’re a whole section. And when you win $500 at the pulltabs, you really DO buy a round for the bar, even though you’ve never seen some of those people before.

And if you had the same experience on a bus, it might be creepy. But in a bar it’s OK because everyone is equal at the bar. (Well, except that cute young girls often get free drinks. Hell, sometimes they even just get MONEY to buy themselves drinks. But that’s a whole other topic. Let’s not interrupt this happy traipsing.)

When I was pregnant, I didn’t have smell aversions like some women do. (Except to the catt food.) Everything smelled normal but in the last few months I did experience a strange attraction to clean smells like other peoples’ laundry and bars of soap. When one of my most annoying co-workers surprise-hugged me goodbye on my last day at work, all I could think was “Mm. Smells So Clean.” I also developed an affinity for rubber smells like the parking garage under our building and Canadian Tire. (True. All that going on about buying a shower head? That was just so I could spend more time at Canadian Tire, inhaling the sweet aroma of motor oil, air mattresses and tiny camp stoves and fingering my wads of Canadian Tire money like a pregnant, fake-drug dealer.)

It was while I was pregnant that we moved to our current neighbourhood; a place where either you can still smoke in bars or they don’t have enough money to paint and replace their carpets because the smell I described in the first paragraph? It’s everywhere. Now, I would have expected that my unusual attraction to bars of Ivory would have made the stale beer & cigarette smell turn my stomach. But, as was evidenced by Saint Aardvark having to drag me by the hair up 6th Ave. while I sniffed doorways like a horny pomeranian, there is room in my nose’s heart for both the smells of cleanliness and filth. (And tires. My nose’s heart is more vast than anyone could have guessed.)

These days, when I pass the Royal Canadian Legion #2 (meat draw!) on my morning walk, I smell the bar and feel a little tug at my nostalgion. Someday, I say to its dark windows (it is, after all, usually 10 am), someday we will drink you in.

Posted in outside | 2 Comments

I Just Work Better With Rules, That’s All

Posted on 11/1/2006 by cheesefairy

To keep myself honest through NaBloPoMo, I have thoughtfully crafted the following:

1. Post every day. Posting more than once a day is allowed, but not encouraged, as one should not like to sap one’s already overtaxed mojo.
2. The post may not have as its focus a link to another site. Reference to other sites is allowable for inspiration/citation/afterthought.
3. Readers may suggest topics for posts. If there is something you have always wondered about me, g’head and ask. I reserve the right to ignore your suggestions and questions if they make me uncomfortable. If I use your suggestion I will mail you something nice.
4. The post must be at least one paragraph long. The paragrah should not be only one sentence, but this is more a plea for mercy than a rule.
5. The post may contain images, but there must be one paragraph of text for each image. No catt pictures. Baby pictures allowed, else I risk grandparental ire.
6. The post must have a title.
7. The post’s title cannot be “post XX” where “XX” is the day of the month or the number of the post.
8. The post’s title cannot be something like “Another Stupid Post” or “Is it December Yet?” Respect the process, bitch.
9. Rules of grammar and spelling are not to be adhered to. You are typing with one hand, probably your left! You are right-handed. Just get the damn post out!
10. The post must be published between midnight and midnight, pacific standard time.
11. This post counts. (see you tomorrow, suckahs!)

Posted in bloggity! | 1 Comment