Within A Month!

The other day, I was out doing errands. I must have gone to three different plazas to buy things from at least 2 stores at each one. At some point, I realized that whenever I took a step, it sounded like one of my flipflops was making a shuffling/scraping sound. I figured it was just the asphalt, but eventually, it started to trigger my misophonia, so I got to the car, and looked at the bottom of my shoe. Stuck to the underside of my flipflop was a bright neon green sticky note. It was slightly crumpled up. I unfolded it, and it said: “One month from July 25^th”. That was all.

And I was like, what kind of message from the universe is THIS??!! I didn’t know whether I should be feeling optimistic or terrified. And I have an entire month to wonder about this and anticipate either the best, or the WORST August 25 in existence. According to my google calendar, that’s a Sunday, and so far, I have nothing on. I plan to keep it that way. On August 25^th, you’ll find me huddled under the covers in my bedroom, listening for the sound of a fuselage that has snapped off an airplane and is heading for my roof. Why? Because my bedroom is the safest place I can think of to be, but I’ve also seen Donnie Darko, and I’m the Queen of Worst Case Scenarios.

Then I also thought about the person who WROTE the note, and what wonderful or terrible thing they were anticipating when they scribbled down this dire, and very vague prediction. Because if it was supposed to be a reminder, it’s a sh*tty one:

The phone rings…

Person 1: Where the hell are you?!

Person 2: In bed, why?

Person 1: Because it’s August 25! THE 25TH! One month to the day we first met! I’m standing here surrounded by 80 of our closest friends and family and you’re a no-show! Your parents are FURIOUS.

Person 2: My parents are there?!

Person 1: Who do you think paid for the whole thing?? Your dad keeps telling everyone that you’d forget your own name if it wasn’t written on your forehead.

Person 2: Yeah, that tattoo really hurt.

Person 1: Did you even try to remember? Did you write it down?!

Person 2: I put it on a sticky note…but then I lost the note.

Person 2: The wedding is off, BOB! (hangs up)

Person 1: Dang.

Personally, I can’t remember to do things I wrote down TWO days ago, let alone thirty. In fact, earlier this week, Ken asked me if I had anything on in the morning because he remembered I’d written something on the calendar in the kitchen. I looked and it said, “Clock.” And I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant (although I certainly had high hopes), until I looked at my google calendar where I had typed in Chuck. Chuck is our travel agent and I was supposed to see him that morning. I was minorly let down because Chuck is, obviously and sadly, not a clock.

Anyway, the days will keep counting down until August 25. I’m sure there’s a wonderfully spooky story in there somewhere, just waiting to be told, but first I have to get through the next month. And if you don’t hear from me that Sunday, you’ll know why…

Mydangblog and the Blustery Day

For most of this week, I’ve had a song stuck in my head. I get that a lot and sometimes for more than a week, thanks to my particular brand of OCD, where a random song will start to loop and I can’t stop it, to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s still playing. I wrote about this previously (check out It’s Toxic for more), and it usually happens when I’m very stressed. And what is the song, you ask? It’s The Rain, Rain, Rain, Came Down, Down, Down from the Disney feature Winnie The Pooh and the Blustery Day. In the story, it rains so much that Piglet and Pooh are flooded out of their homes, and I don’t know why anyone would think that was adorable and totally appropriate for small children. I remember watching it as a small child myself and being very afraid for Piglet. Of course, back then I couldn’t swim, so I assumed anyone surrounded by water would just drown.

And why do you have that particular song stuck in your head, you ask? Because last week, I was beset—nay, besieged, by torrential rain wherever I went. It started last Sunday when I did a book fair at a town not far from here. It was an outdoor event, so Ken and I loaded up the table, chairs, and the canopy/tent we’d gotten cheap off Facebook Marketplace. It was a sweltering day and we were both exhausted by the time we got the tent up, having forgotten how it all went together and taking extra long in the full sun for the debacle. No sooner had the event started, and people arrived, when the skies took an ominous turn. Ken had left by this point, wanting to go home and mow the lawn, and he called me to say that he was halfway home and it was teeming down. Then the thunder started. Then the downpour came. I threw tarps over everything then spent the next hour hanging on to my cheap-ass tent for dear life as the wind threatened to turn it into a parasail. I got soaked to the skin and only sold one book the entire afternoon.

Then, on Monday, as we kept getting shower after shower, I got worried about the basement. It’s a partial basement and crawlspace and it’s always a little damp but we have a dehumidifier that keeps things under control. On Tuesday morning though, the skies opened and we got rain like we’ve never seen rain before. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the sump pump running endlessly. So I opened the basement door to take a peek. There was a small river running across the basement floor, and I just about lost my mind:

Me: Ken! There’s water everywhere!
Ken: It’ll be ok. The sump pump isn’t broken this time.
Me: What if the power goes off?!
Ken: Then we’re screwed.
Me: OMG, the house is going to collapse!
Ken: The house has been standing for almost 120 years. It will be fine. We just need to—

And that’s when the song started. It’s been playing in my head as we mopped, as we shopvac’d, as I fretted, and as Ken put down hydraulic cement.

Luckily, the hydraulic cement seems to have done the trick for the time being, until we can get someone in to take a proper look. But they’re all busy right now because a lot of other people got a lot more water in than we did and sustained a heck of a lot more damage, one of the advantages of us having a creepy basement that I’m pretty sure is haunted so we don’t keep anything down there that a ghost would like. And the upside? I’ve been singing the rain song wrong all these years, as I found out when I watched the YouTube video just now, so now my brain can do it right. And the rain, rain, rain, came down, down, down…

It’s Puzzling, Isn’t It?

Ken and I love to do jigsaw puzzles. We usually have one going in the kitchen where we can take a minute and pop in a few pieces between other work. I find it relaxing and I think there’s proven evidence that you get a little dopamine rush when a piece clicks. But sometimes I wonder about the people who design them, like what choices are they making with the illustrations? Case in point, last week, we got a new Charles Wysocki puzzle. Charles Wysocki was an American painter who specialized in “primitive Americana”. If you’ve ever done a Wysocki puzzle, you know it heavily features this idyllic view of late 1800s towns with a LOT of American flags everywhere, and as a Canadian, I find this weird, because I’ve never done a Canadian puzzle covered in OUR flag, but sometimes there are also clocks, so it all evens out. This week, though, I opened up the new puzzle and looked at the poster, excited to discover that all the buildings were antique stores and curiosity shops. “Oh, wow!” I said to Ken. “Look at all the cool stuff in the windows of these antique stores!” He agreed that it was going to be a lot of fun, considering we have an antique business ourselves, and I started to build the frame. But then I looked closer and something dawned on me: the painting the puzzle was based on represented life in the 1800s, and all the people were wearing old-timey clothes and driving horses and buggies so NONE OF THE THINGS IN THE WINDOWS WOULD BE ANTIQUES! The stuff in the stores were things that those people would have used every single day and probably thought were modern conveniences, like the railroad lantern, the ironstone china, and the coffee grinder. If they wanted to be truly authentic and antique, shouldn’t the stores have sarcophaguses or suit of armour at least? So unless this town is one of those places where actors are all dressed up and pretend to be pioneers for the tourists, it’s seriously out of whack.

And it reminded me of the time that I started working on a Dowdle puzzle, which are based on the work of a different American artist, Eric Dowdle. This one was of Peggy’s Cove in Canada, which is strange considering he was from Utah, but it does explain the presence of a random Mountie standing by a flagpole, like that’s just what Mounties do all the time or whatnot. I started to piece the edge together as one does and immediately discovered that one of the pieces was all chewed up and distorted, like a dog had eaten it and spat (or sh*t) it back out. Oh well, I thought, at least it’s not missing, because I HATE when a puzzle has a missing piece, and I think I’ve written about suspecting Atlas of stealing puzzle pieces before. But it got worse. See, there are a lot of tiny human (?) figures in the puzzle, and as I started to pull them out, it became clear that the artist who designed it was, perhaps, really more into horror stories than pastoral scenes of a harbour town.

Like, OK, it’s bad enough that there are 4 dudes in three-piece suits and fedoras standing on a rock looking like they all want to talk to me about Jesus, and numerous people are hoisting giant lobsters in the air and swinging them around like that’s a completely normal activity (and maybe it is in Peggy’s Cove–I’m going there in August so I’ll keep you posted) but then, in the background, there’s this guy:

What the absolute f*ck is this guy doing, crawling out over a rock towards you like that girl from The Ring?! You don’t notice him at first, because there’s so much else going on, what with all the proselytizing and lobster waving, but once you do, HE’S ALL YOU SEE. And then suddenly it seems like maybe instead of an idyllic fishing village, this is a zombie town, and all the figures are now ominous and the lobsters are screaming for help. In the poster that came with the puzzle, he appeared to be wearing large, weird mittens on his hands, and I really didn’t want to find the rest of him in case he came to life and started crawling over the back of my couch.

So anyway, I’ll keep doing my Wysocki–I just won’t look too closely at the horses’ eyes, just in case they’re devil horses or something, because you never know…

Signs of (Bathroom) Trouble

Last weekend, Ken and I went to the book launch for one of my DarkWinter Press authors. It was a wonderful time—great audience, beautiful venue, and I think she sold a lot of books. It’s the second time I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a DarkWinter author’s book launch and I hope I can keep doing it! But right before the book launch, Ken and I decided to stop off at his old high school, which is in a town near the book launch venue, because they were having a homecoming afternoon.

It was very busy, with a lot of people in attendance because the school serves the small town it’s in plus all of the surrounding area. Still, Ken managed to find a few friends and spent some time catching up (and when I say ‘spent some time’ I mean YOU MADE US LATE TO THE LAUNCH KEN) but it was nice for him to see some of the guys he hung around with when he was a teenager. Right before we left, I needed to use the bathroom and I found one in the main hall. It said ‘Gender Neutral Washroom – Students’, which I thought was very nice, so I went in and used the facilities, but when I tried to wash my hands, I couldn’t get the faucet to work. This happens to me sometimes and it serves to reinforce my belief that I am really a ghost, even though Ken tells me he can see me most of the time. Anyway, I also have OCD (yes, a ghost with OCD—I haunt your house by cleaning it) so I needed to find somewhere to wash my hands and lo and behold, right next to the Gender Neutral student washroom was another door that said, ‘Gender Neutral Washroom – Staff’. So I went in there, and it turns out that the problem was not me being invisible again but that the faucets were NOT in fact motion activated and had a very small handle which needed to be turned. A few blessed seconds later, hands clean, I turned to leave and saw a very strange sign on the wall by the toilet which said this (see below for what it says if you can’t read the image):

In regular print: “If you have digestive issues, please go see a doctor.”

Then in large print: “Otherwise, it is expected that you will clean the toilet after an episode of diarrhea.”

And then in very small print: “Nobody else wants to be part of your bathroom issues.”

I stood there for a minute pondering this. I reread it, then took a picture of it. Later, I was talking to Ken and Kate about it and showed them the picture:

Kate: It makes sense. Why should the custodian have to clean it up?
Me: That’s not the point. The point is this—THERE IS A SIGN. That means it’s happened MORE THAN ONCE!
Kate: Oh right!
Me: It’s the same logic as warning labels on appliances. If it says, “Do not use this hair straightener on your eyelashes” it’s because at least one person has done it! So the question is, how often has ‘an episode of diarrhea’ been such an issue that someone posted an actual warning sign?!
Kate (laughs): Yeah, whoever made the sign was fed up, like, ‘We’re all sick of your shit, Frank.’
Me: And the sign is LAMINATED. Like, just in case it needs to be wiped down.
All: EWWW.

And I can tell you right now, having worked in a high school for many years that the sign was probably written by one of the female English teachers directed towards one of the male gym teachers and you can literally feel the animosity coming off it despite how restrained it is, like what she really wanted to say was ‘Here’s a newsflash, FRANK—if your system can’t handle the constant barrage of burritos and beer, give us all a break from your sewage shower and eat some roughage. And if I ever see you waltzing out of this Gender Neutral space after your explosive diarrhea has rendered it uninhabitable again, I will personally shove a toilet brush up your—”

You can imagine the rest.