Month: November 2023

Decorating 101010101

As I may have mentioned, Ken and I have been doing a little preliminary house hunting with an eye towards downsizing. The perfect house slipped through our fingers a couple of weeks ago—the owners had accepted an offer literally hours before we went to see it—and since then, it’s been slim pickings. But the whole adventure has given me food for thought regarding our own de-cluttering since it’s become very apparent that some people, when they put their house on the market, just don’t give a sh*t. The other day, we went to see a place, older and even bigger than our own house, but at a price point significantly lower. The pictures on the online listing showed a LOT of Christmas decorations but the house had been on the market for a while and we just assumed the photos were from last year. Then we went to see it in person. The photos were NOT from last year. To say the owner of the house is a Christmas fanatic would be an understatement—there were fully decorated Christmas trees in every room, garlands draping over every surface, and more Santas, elves, stockings, and other Christmas paraphernalia than I’ve ever seen, even in a store that only sells Christmas sh*t. And the icing on the cake? In the dining room, under the fully decorated Christmas tree, were wrapped presents. Hundreds of wrapped presents. I’m the kind of person who’s still trying to buy gifts on Christmas Eve, and this lady has all of her shopping done mid-November?! I didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified, and I haven’t even mentioned the outrageous number of dead, stuffed animals that decorated every room–there was a giant fish mounted on the wall above the headboard in each of the bedrooms, and a flock of taxidermied geese in the foyer. And yes, the geese were draped with Christmas garlands. Ken was looking quite happy about the whole situation, considering he’s the one who really needs to Marie Kondo his crap, but I didn’t want to give him any ideas, so I said to our agent, “I can see why you said it was important to scale back on extraneous stuff. I guess this person didn’t listen.” And then we both looked pointedly at Ken. Ultimately, we all agreed that it was very difficult to get a sense of the house or the space with so much distraction, and it made my own decorating taste seem minimal by comparison.

And I do have a very distinct decorating style, which I like to call Oscar Wilde In The Haus, which is like when a gay Victorian poet has designed your decor:

My Office
Oscar Wilde’s Office

Which makes it even more weird (is weird even the right word?) that I recently got this ad from Wayfair with the caption “Your home makeover starts here.”

What exactly am I remaking my home over to? The f*cking Vatican? In which case, I need a LOT more stuff in my house because I’ve been to the Vatican and it is just PACKED, kind of like that Christmas house but with Jesus instead of Santa and taxidermied priests instead of geese. Could you imagine having a cardboard Pope as your aesthetic “statement piece”?

Guest: Is that–?
Me: Pope Francis? Yes.
Guest: Why is he–?
Me: Standing in the corner of the living room? He’s just hanging out. Do you want a blessing?
Guest: No, just a drink. I mean, that’s okay, right?
Me: Is the Pope Catholic?
Guest: Uh…I don’t know much about religion.
Me: Me neither. But I like his outfit. It matches the drapes.

At any rate, I’ve eschewed His Holiness as a decorating motif. I think I’m more of a “giant cardboard cutout of RuPaul” kind of gal. At least, that’s what Oscar Wilde would have picked.

He Has A Cute Earring

The other day, my phone rang. I looked at the screen and gasped. “Someone is calling me from Russia!”

Ken: What?
Me: From Russia!
Ken: Prussia?
Me: No! Should I answer?
Ken: Answer what?

And there are two notable things about this whole conversation. First, that I was very panicked. You may or may not remember, but I’ve written extensively in the past about my complicated history with Russia, which began when I mocked them about experimenting with head transplants and then realized that someone from Russia was reading my blog and maybe it was the KGB, and ended when I jokingly offered them some of my body parts for research if they left me alone (at the time, most of the body parts I was willing to part with weren’t very functional so the joke would have been on them). That was the last that I had any Russian readers, according to the WordPress map anyway, and I thought I was in the clear. But now…had they found out about my laser eye surgery? My vision is currently better than 20/20 which makes my eyes a hot commodity. Were they calling in their chit? So I summoned up my courage and answered the phone:

Me: …Hello?
Guy on the other end: Good afternoon, how are you today?
Me: You don’t sound Russian.
Guy: What?
Me: It says you’re calling me from Russia, but you don’t sound Russian.
Guy: I’m not understanding.
Me (emphatically): My phone says you’re calling me from Russia. ARE YOU IN RUSSIA?
Guy: I’m calling to offer you a very special offer on duct cleaning.
Me: How are you going to clean my ducts from Russia? Do you even accept Canadian money or do I have to pay in rubles?
Guy: I…I am not understanding.
Me: Must be a bad connection. Do svidaniya.
Ken: Who was that?
Me: A Russian duct cleaner.
Ken: Ducks?

Which leads me to the second thing. Ken has terrible hearing. He refuses to admit it, but he doesn’t hear half of what I say, and he ignores a lot of the other half. Here’s an example: when he was sick a few weeks ago, I got the thermometer for him so we could see if he had a fever. He put the thermometer in his ear and left it there.

Me: What are you doing? You can take it out now.
Ken: Are you sure?
Me: It beeped.
Ken: I didn’t hear any beeping.
Me: IT BEEPED RIGHT IN YOUR EAR.

And he still wouldn’t admit that he has a hearing problem. But then this past Friday, we went to get the mail, and the only things in our mailbox were letters from TWO different companies offering him a free hearing test.

Me: I think they’re on to you. Maybe it’s time to see how much hearing you’ve lost.
Ken: I didn’t lose it. I just stopped wearing it.
Me: Wearing what?
Ken: An earring. Are you deaf?
Me: Haha. Very a-cute.

I’m A Barbie Girl

Last week at work, some of the younger staff decided to dress up for Hallowe’en, and I, never passing by an opportunity to wear a costume, agreed to participate. The theme was Star Trek, but since I didn’t have anything remotely Spock-y, I scoured the closets until I discovered the blonde wig that I had worn in the past to impersonate Taylor Swift. I didn’t actually want to dress AS Taylor Swift, since I’m not that angsty and don’t wear my heart on my sleeve (although that would have been an awesome costume idea in retrospect—blonde wig, red dress, anatomically correct plastic heart tied to my arm oozing fake blood), so I did the next obvious thing. I decided to go as Barbie. But not just ANY Barbie—mostly because I don’t own anything pink. But Ken had a fedora, and I had a vest, so I decided to go as Barbie-Heimer. It was, I admit, decidedly weak when compared to other Barbie-Heimer costumes I’ve seen on the internet, but I thought it was cute. And at work on Hallowe’en, I got a lot of compliments. At a certain point, I stopped calling myself Barbie-Heimer (because most people were confused and didn’t get the reference) and started calling myself the One Of A Kind Barbie, and customers were like, “Oh, that’s adorable.” And I was. Or at least I thought I was.

Close to lunch, a customer I know slightly came in and she was all excited. “The Goodwill up the street has Louis Vuitton handbags! I just bought one, and they have more!” My heart leapt, because as you may or may not know, I am currently obsessed with LV bags since the little fake one I had mysteriously disappeared. I asked my 23-year-old boss if I could take lunch early and I raced over to the Goodwill. Sure enough, there were two Louis Vuitton handbags (replicas, of course) in the showcase for like 25 bucks each, so I took both and lined up to pay. The girl who had gotten them out of the showcase for me looked like she was in her late teens/early twenties, and she was wearing gothic makeup and some kind of spiderwebby costume under her smock:

Me: I like your costume.
Girl: What costume?
Me: Oh nothing. I’m Barbie!
Girl (looks me up and down): No.
Me: You don’t think so?
Girl: Noooo.
Me: I was going for a kind of Barbie/Oppenheimer vibe…
Girl: Hmmm. Ok, maybe.

And while many people might have been offended or upset, I thought it was hilarious and laughed about it all the way back to work, clutching my new fake Louis Vuitton handbags. When I brought them home, I told Ken the story:

Ken: She’s nuts. You look just like a Barbie doll.
Me: I know, right?
Ken: And you’re going to sell the purses, right?
Me: What? No way! Barbie needs designer bags, KEN.