The Long and Winding Staircase that Leads to my Bed

Bad combination: pregnancy brain, pregnancy body and a 3 level house. On the ground floor I think, “Brr, tile floor is chilly. I should go up to the bedroom and grab some socks.” By the time I get to the bedroom I’m puffing like a steam train and I can’t remember what I came up for. At least the bed is up there, in all its glory, glory, hallelujah. There is now enough room on each side of the bed so neither my nor Saint Aardvark’s belly is indecently molested when we get up and move around.

The move went as well as moves do. It happened. On Monday morning I had a voicemail message at work from our lawyers, saying, ooh, there’s one more piece of paper you have to sign! And I was all, like, Well, we LIVE there now so I guess it wasn’t that important. My shampoo is in the bathroom. I’ll sign your piece of paper when I feel like it.

On Saturday afternoon, an uneventful drive in our rental Sebring! brought us to New Westmizzle at 12:45 (45 minutes later than our legal possession time). As we walked up the path to our new home, I noticed that there was a barbeque on the patio.

Sadly, it was not a gift from the barbeque gods, but instead the barbeque of the guy who lived there before us. The former owner. The person who was supposed to be gone by 12 pm. The person we gave all that money to, sort of. There he was! half-assedly packing the last of his stuff and wiping down the counters in the kitchen with the enthusiasm of a 14 year old who listens to too much Korn and just discovered bongs. He was also the size of your average 14 year old boy. I’m just saying. The short man thing. I don’t make it up.

“Hey,” he said. (and I smelled beer on his breath. This did not please me. Where is my damn beer, little man?)
“Hey,” we said. (Our breath probably smelled like ANGRY FIRE.)
“So, I’m almost done,” he said. “Maybe another half hour?”
“There’s the storage locker too,” his buddy reminded him. His buddy looked like a hungover blues guitarist. He eyed my belly. My belly eyed him right back.
“Well,” said Saint Aardvark with that TONE that he uses with FUCKWITS, “our movers are coming in about an hour, so you’ll want to be gone by then.”
“Whoah,” said eejit #1, “you got MOVERS?”
“Yep,” I said, “We got movers.”

We determined that we would call him in half an hour. We went to the Most Depressing Mall In the Universe and walked around for half an hour; SA called him; we went back and moved in.

[The MDMItU has two floors. The bottom floor has stores like “Sweater Collection” and “Josie’s” (No! You have never heard of those two stores because this is the only place they exist, selling their strange polyester ladies’ outfits) and the top floor is basically an indoor walking track. There are lots of store windows, but no stores, it’s dark and there are people walking in circles.]

The second thing I did after making sure there were no left-over short man germs anywhere was sit in the bathtub to test that I could get in, sit comfortably and get out. This was a problem in the old apartment. The bathtub was too “u” shaped – stop laughing – and had no place upon which my hands could achieve purchase. Thusly, I slippily flopped around in the bathtub like the marine mammal of your choosing, moaning loudly and waiting for someone to care enough to bring in a winch.

The new bathtub is far more “upside down ‘n’ shaped” – there is TOO a difference – and so I am able to get in and out on my own and without any moaning or winching.

Then we ordered pizza and watched tv on the previous owner’s dollar since he had forgotten to cancel his cable. Apparently, there is quite a small-dog smuggling problem in the US. This woman? She bought her Pekeshitzupoo from a guy on a street corner in LA for $400? And then? The dog totally died two days later. Because it turned out it was smuggled from Mexico and it had a disease.

OK, so it makes sense that puppy smuggling should be against the law. But so should people who are stupid enough to give $400 to anyone on a street corner who does not provide DRUGS in return. I’ve thought about this (I have a new 45 minute commute to work!) and drugs are pretty much the only thing I would spend $400 on a street corner for.

In closing, now SA has the flu for his week off work, poor thing, and I’m back in the office, looking at the ends of my hair against my black t-shirt, thinking Damn. I need a haircut.


(first time using a dishwasher. no catts were harmed.)

Posted in babby, idiots, outside | 6 Comments

Phase Two: Learn Photoshop

This morning’s Globe and Mail displayed Pamela Anderson’s boobs on the front page to indicate that she had hosted the Juno Awards last night. My first reminder that I had been out of the office environment for a few days was when I could not stop myself from exclaiming, “Geezus! She could feed a sealer’s family for a week with those things!” *

Evidently I left my inside voice in my other pants.

The only person within earshot was co-worker A. We proceeded to discuss at length how best Pamela could use her huge assets (boobs) to help the innocent baby seals whilst keeping her big detriment (mouth) shut. And both of us agreed that the funniest image ever would be Pamela in warm (not fur) clothing, schlepping across the ice, two baby harp seals (white fuzzy ones of course) attached to each nipple.

*And by feed for a week, I don’t mean strictly in the breastfeeding sense, since as far as I know Pamela is not currently lactating, nor am I certain that one CAN breastfeed with boobage that has suffered so much augmentation. I mean, are those nipples actually connected to anything anymore? However, I’m sure that if she auctioned off the contents of said boobage, she could earn enough money to offset the costs a ban on sealing would inflict on the people of the east coast.

Posted in outside | 1 Comment

Phase One: Complete Annihilation of Crows

Yesterday all our precious stuff went to a storage locker, moved efficiently by two young men, one of whom apparently looked like Joel Plaskett of the Joel Plaskett Emergency. (How have I never heard of this band? They’re pretty good. Like Sloan kinda, crossed with Kathleen Edwards, based on the one track I just listened to. [Do you like how I’m name-checking Cancon now to make up for never having heard of the Joel Plaskett Emergency? Smoove, no?])

Anyway, SA tells me this is all the case and there’s really no reason to go all no-trusty on his ass at this point. I was at work all day yesterday and today. I’m wondering how someone so undernourished and shempy could move our apartment more than a couple of inches without stopping for a Jolt Cola and a cigarette, but – again – apparently (I haven’t been by to inspect things…) the apartment is empty and our stuff is safe in the Mizzle.

Mom cooked delicious stew for dinner last night and then she even watched America’s Next Top Model with me, though her lip was curled with disdain the whole time. The two of us razzing the whiny idiot Gina resulted in Gina finally being ousted. No I’m not linking to Gina. I hate Gina. And now, who said positive thinking never resulted in a positive result? No one, that’s who.

I had forgotten about the crows that sit cawing on the power lines outside my old bedroom window in the family homestead. This morning at 5 am I remembered how when I was a teenager and last sleeping in that room, I would lie awake at 5 am, fantasizing about removing the screens from the windows and shooting at the crows with a pellet gun. What are they on about? They sit there, inches away from one another, cawing like people new to the technology shout on their cell phones. “HI! I’M ON MY CELL PHONE! I’M ON THE BUS! THERE ARE LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE ON THE BUS! THAT WOMAN IS STARING AT ME! SHE HAS BAD HAIR! WHY IS SHE STARING AT ME I WONDER?”

Can crows really have that much to talk about, every morning, in the same place? Maybe they’re playing bingo. Or it’s like a crow version of The View. Those women sound like crows too sometimes. And I’m not linking to them, either.

I am suddenly struck that I could keep babbling here for hours. So, uh, go look at Sarah and Michael’s gorgeous babies. And then maybe watch some videos by The Darkness. One of those things might be just what you need.

Posted in music, outside, television | 7 Comments

Right From the Start

Who knew Steven Seagal had a blues band? Raise your hand. It’s true. And they will be playing in Richmond, at the River Rock Casino. What is the pull at the River Rock Casino? First Air Supply, then a quick one-two punch of Chilliwack and Trooper earlier this year and then I heard on the radio this weekend that Lyle Lovett is playing there. I don’t WANT to go to the River Rock Casino but its siren call may be too much. As it was for Steven Seagal and Thunderbox.

Thunderbox? Seriously? OK.

In other news, remember how a week from Friday we were going to be moving? Oh, my ducklings, it was not to be.

Top tip re: buying your own place to live. When preparing to go into a situation where you have to make an offer on a property you like, have all your information ready. There’s the obvious information like: how much money can we spend without sacrificing our addiction to cheese and How much do we really like this place – “hell, yeah,” “fuck, yeah,” or “sweet Thunderbox, I can’t live without it, yeah.” Then there are small, seemingly trivial bits of information which can become important because you will have to commit to something called a Possession Date. This is the day you can move into your new home. You will probably have to commit to this date a month or two in advance, while you are sweating, doing math, deciding on the scale of house love, it may be your birthday and you may also be pregnant. (Well, it’s possible.) You will have to write this date in stone on a legal document and then work your world around it. Think hard about this. The Possession Date will come. Will you be ready?

The night we made the offer on our townhouse, we allowed our agent to suggest that our possession date should be April 1st, because, as she reasonably put it, “you’ll have to leave your apartment on the 1st.” That made sense to us. Only 2 weeks later, after signing paperwork, getting a mortgage, hiring a lawyer, hiring movers and giving our notice to our landlord, did we remember that when we moved IN to our apartment, it was Halloween. What day is Halloween? The last day of the month. Is it the first day of the month? No, it is not.

Our landlord confirmed that we would need to vacate our apartment by noon on March 31st, leaving us 24 whole hours to hitchike to the new place…oh wait, but we already had movers. Maybe they could just drive realllllly slowly?

But it was OK. We checked with our movers, movers we had used when we moved into our apartment on Halloween 1.5 years ago, movers who had, in the interim, really screwed a co-worker of mine (after I recommended them to her) but whom we still deemed trustworthy having pronounced the co-worker the crazypants in this particular situation, and our movers said, “Yeah, no problem; we’ll park the truck with your stuff in it, overnight, in a location of your choice and you can even padlock it with your own lock and then we’ll pick up the truck the following day and deliver it to your new place after noon. Sure. Dude. Of course.”

We relaxed.

We packed.

We cleaned.

It’s a damn good thing we did all those things.

This past Friday (the 24th), SA called the movers to confirm the location of our truck’s overnight parking spot (my parents’ place) and that we could padlock it ourselves and that we were still on for the 31st/1st.

I listened to the following half of a telephone conversation from bed, where I was resting up from the walk home from work.

“Hi Mover Guy, this is SA, just calling to confirm our move on the 31st.”
“Actually, it’s NOON, not 1 pm, but yes.”
“OK, and we can park the truck in Burnaby, at my in-law’s place?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Well that’s a little different than what you said 3 weeks ago.”
“No offense to you or your men, but I am a little bothered by the fact that our stuff will be in a truck with someone else’s stuff and that we can’t park the truck where we want.”
“That’s not the problem, the problem is that you’ve changed your story since we last spoke. Also, it’s all the stuff we own. We just want to be sure it’s safe.”
“Don’t you think it’s unlikely that we will find other movers ONE WEEK from the end of the month?”
“Let me discuss this with my wife and I’ll call you back later tonight.”

When he found me, I was hiding under the bed with the catt, rocking gently from side to side.

“So,” he said.
“Argghhhhhh!” I said, “Should have listened to Co-worker G! She wasn’t crazy! HE’S the one who’s crazy! INSTITUTION!”
“Yeah, anyway,” he said, “apparently they’ve taken another overnight job. And they have to park the truck in their own lot, but they’ll divide our stuff from the other peoples’ stuff with mattresses. Oh! And one of his guys will sleep in the truck to keep it safe.”
“No!” I said.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“Is he insane?” I said.
“He told me if I didn’t trust him, I could cancel the job and find another mover. He also said he thought there had been tension between us from the start.”
“…”
“He really said that.”
“Well, have you been sleeping with him?”
“…”
“Or did he maybe ASK you to and you said no? You know you shouldn’t cavort with movers. They’re very needy.”

In another hour and a half, despite it being Friday at 6:30 pm, we had hired new movers for the 29th and the 1st, booked a storage locker to hold all our things in the interim, confirmed with my parents that we could camp at their place for 3 nights instead of 1 and ordered pizza. Online! You can order super greasy disgusting Pizza Hut pizza online! I love living in this world.

Then we called Crazy Mover back.
“We won’t be requiring your services,” said SA with just a slight edge to his voice.
“No, we won’t.”
“Thank YOU. Goodbye.”

“What’d he say,” I said.
“He said, ‘Oh, man, really?'” SA said.
“You broke his heart, you know that.”
“Yeah, I know.”

Posted in idiots, music | 8 Comments

My First Meme!

“Housed in an attractive console, the perfect blend of size, power and features.”

Now, does this sentence describe ME? Or something else.

No really, what do you think?

Oh fine. This sentence was found in the Corporate Express catalogue and it describes the Powershred Model c-220/C-220C.

Here, you do it too! I took it from Arwen.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Here, I am making my own meme. It goes:

1. Note the current time.
2. Note the date one week from today.
3. Describe in a rhyming couplet what you will be doing at exactly this time next week.

Up to my ears in crap I will be
then to New Westmizzle for SA and me!

Posted in | 2 Comments