Villainous Notions

Last week, I bought a footstool. It was dark cheap wood and had dark tapestry fabric on the top, but the lid lifted for storage and it was only 5 bucks, so I got to thinking that I would paint the wood grey and re-upholster the top. Which I did, and the paint looked lovely (aside from the transfer I may or may not have put on slightly off-centre—see picture at the end). The problem was that the fabric on the underside looked choppy and unprofessional no matter how much I tried to trim it, but then I had an idea. I rummaged through my basket of sewing notions—well, it’s not so much a basket as an empty Quality Street tin—and found something that just might resolve the issue:

Notice the name of the manufacturer? Obviously kismet.

Me: Do you think this would work?
Ken: What is it?
Me: According to the packet, it’s Rick Rack.
Ken: Maybe…
Me: No, you’re right. The colour is all wrong. However, RickRack would make a great name for a James Bond villain.

Cue naughty fantasy sequence (and if you’re a little prudish, you might want to skip this one)…

M: Double-Oh-Seven, we need you. Apparently, RickRack has abducted Pussy Galore!
Bond: Pussy Galore? Again?! Well, Pussy is delightful. I can see why he keeps coming back for more.
M: Intercept RickRack before he gets to the Upper Holstery Islands and deliver Pussy to us, James.
Bond: I’m shaken, not stirred by this turn of events.

Some time later, on a cargo ship off the coast of the Upper Holstery Islands…

RickRack: Ah, Mr. Bond, I’ve been expecting you.
Bond: Release Pussy Galore, RickRack! There’s nowhere you can run.
RickRack: I’m never gonna give her up. I’m never gonna let her down.
Bond: Did—did you just Rickroll me?
RickRack: No, I RickRACKED you, Mr. Bond. But you can have her. To be honest, I’m not particularly fond of Pussy. I only kidnapped her to lure you to the Upper Holsteries.
Bond: But why, RickRack?
RickRack: Because…because I’m in love with you, James. Is there a chance for us?
Bond: Have you actually SEEN any of my movies?
RickRack: Sigh. I’m never gonna give you up—
Bond: Just stop. Come on, Pussy.
Pussy Galore: Oh James, thank you for saving me!
Bond: Enough of the small talk. We need to hurry—I have a date with Holly Goodhead later and no one misses a date with Goodhead!

And all I can do at this point is apologize for my giggly thirteen-year-old imagination, but in my defense:
a) I was going to include a scene with Bond and Q discussing a missile launcher that was extremely euphemistic but even I know when enough is enough and b) I’m not the one who named the Bond girls things like Miss Goodthighs, Chew Me, Xenia Onatopp, Holly Goodhead, Plenty O’Toole, and Pussy Galore. That was a DIFFERENT giggly thirteen-year-old.

Getting Freaked-y With It

Before I begin, I’d just like to say a huge thank you to Sally Georgina Cronin of Smorgasbord Blog Magazine for featuring my latest novel Charybdis and one of the excellent reviews it’s received. I really appreciate it and you can read it here! And now on to the lunacy.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Facebook Marketplace lately, looking for cool miniatures to use for my tiny rooms. Here’s the latest room that I made:

It’s in our guest bedroom and it IS our guest bedroom (or at least a close approximation), which makes me feel so meta. Or mini-meta as the case may be. I can’t seem to control the Marketplace algorithm though—I want it to show me all the miniature things, but once—JUST ONCE—I clicked on an ad for a mobile home and my ‘suggested for you’ feed is literally all mobile homes, campers, and tiny homes. Is the universe telling me to downsize?

At any rate, I’ve seen a few really strange ads in the past couple of weeks. This person who posted this one REALLY wanted to make sure that people understood exactly what it was:

And of course, my first instinct was to immediately message with “Is this a bag for a man? I would like to purchase it for my husband, as he is a man.” Why would anyone be THAT worried about the gender of the person potentially buying their bag? Anytime I post anything, my main concern is that people don’t ask stupid questions like, “Where are you located?” when I clearly state in the ad EXACTLY where I’m located.

While the above ad is weird in its own way, this next ad freaked me out. One would think that when one was trying to rent a private room, that the picture would be OF the room, not of some dude giving off a definite serial killer vibe. Of course, the ad says there are 18 more pictures but I was too scared to look. Also, I put the bar over his eyes to protect his identity, but they were HAUNTED.

And I don’t know where this room is, but I wouldn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to discover it’s not actually PRIVATE after all.

Finally, if you think the last ad was freaky, what the hell is this one?

Is it The Blair Witch Barbie? If you’re trying to sell a doll, why would you pose it FACING the wall? I mean, I know Hallowe’en is coming, but then shouldn’t the picture be more like this:

And speaking of bizarre things that will freak you out, yesterday I went over to the local fall fair. It’s a typical fall fair with competitions in different categories like best quilt, antique stumper, largest pumpkin, and whatnot. And there’s also a school competition where the students at the local public school are given categories of their own to enter. I was having a lovely time checking out the paintings, best popsicle stick structure and so on, and then I came across this:

Maybe the guy who thought that category up is the same one with the room for rent…

The Keys To Happiness

(Here’s a little throwback from a several years ago):

A few days ago, I was in the kitchen and I happened to look up at the really cute key holder on the wall that I’d made out of an old breadboard and antique keys to hold not-antique keys. My brow furrowed. “Ken!” I called. “Did you put all those keys on that lanyard and hang it on the key holder?”

Ken (yells back): Yes
Me: Well, what are they all for?
Ken: I don’t know.
Me: If you don’t know what they’re for, why did you put them all on the lanyard? Where did they all come from?
Ken: They were all just hanging on different hooks on the key board so I put them together.
Me: But you don’t know what they’re for.
Ken: Correct.
Me: So if you don’t know what they’re for, and we don’t use them, why didn’t you just throw them away?! What are you, some kind of key hoarder?
Ken: I am NOT a hoarder. They’re just nice keys and you never know when you might need one.

This is me holding the lanyard up to Ken and demanding to know what they’re for. In the picture, I have transformed into an angry elderly man and the lanyard is a two-dollar macrame plant holder, which is just about as useful as a multitude of mysterious keys.

There were 18 keys. We have 4 doors that require keys, so you’d think at least one of them would have fit at least one of the doors. You would, however, be incorrect. I took the systematic approach, and by that I mean at first, I carried all the keys around and tried them in the doors, but there were so many keys and doors that I lost track and couldn’t remember which ones I’d experimented with. So I took them all off the lanyard and lay them out on the counter in a straight line. Then Kate came in and identified three that were for the lab at her former university from several years ago (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, apparently), which left 15 keys. I tried each key in each door and you know what happened? Again, none of them fit any door in our house.

Me: This is f*cking bullsh*t.
Ken: You sound like that guy at the brewery the other day.

And here’s a fun tangent. The other day, Ken and I went on a roadtrip to our antiques booth, and on the way back, we decided to stop for lunch at a local brewery that had outside seating. There was a foursome at the next picnic table, and we couldn’t help but overhear their conversation, which was an absolute cornucopia of epithets (and for the purpose of this conversation, I will be transcribing the swearing verbatim so there will be no asterisks):

Sweary Dude: If you fucking go to Scotland, they don’t fucking say ‘yes’ there. They say fucking ‘aye’.
Woman: Really?
SD: Fucking right. So you better be fucking prepared because they say ‘aye’ a fucking lot. And I was fucking talking to Pete the other day, that fucking German guy…

So Ken and I discussed the use of the word f*ck and what parts of speech it could be substituted for: noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition…

Ken: Can you use it as a pronoun?
Me: Only if you say f*cker. Like ‘F*cker ordered another beer.’ It can also be used as an interjection. Do you remember Schoolhouse Rocks?

And that led us down a rabbit hole of 1970s animated linguistic cartoons, culminating in Ken’s favourite, Mr. Morton, which is about predicates: “Mr. Morton talked to his cat (‘Hey Cat, you look good’), Mr. Morton talked.” Because Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, he does. At the end of the song, Mr. Morton gets the girl, Pearl, and they get predicately married. It’s very sweet, and there is not a single use of the word f*ck in the entire cartoon, as one would hope.

At any rate, I myself was quite sweary after putting 15 keys into 4 separate locks and discovering that none of them opened any door in my house.

Ken: Maybe they were for other locks, like ones we’ve replaced.
Me: We’ve lived here for 21 years. We’ve replaced the locks on ALL the doors. Why do we have 21-year old keys??!!
Ken: We could make a craft with them.
Me: Or we could throw them away. The last craft we made with keys is still sitting in our antiques booth because no one wants NEW KEYS.

So I threw them all away. But you just know that next week, we’re going to find a padlock or something that we hadn’t even thought of, and now we won’t have a key for it, or one of you will be like “Here’s a cool thing you can do with new keys” but now they’re gone. F*ck! That’s an interjection.

Make Alignments Great Again

Before I start, I’d like to just express my eternal and deeply felt gratitude to the wonderful Susan Richardson of Flowering Ink’s Stories from the Edge of Blindness, and most importantly for today’s purpose, the podcast A Thousand Shades of Green. Many weeks ago, Susan undertook to feature my short story collection Dark Nocturnes on her podcast for Story Sessions. She has faithfully, tirelessly, and brilliantly read every story in the collection, all 32 of them, over the last few weeks, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. She finished yesterday with the final story, Mr. Death Goes To Market, and like the rest of her readings, it was phenomenal. If you’d like to hear Susan basically turn my collection into a fantastic audiobook, you can hear her read each story by going here: https://athousandshadesofgreen.com/story-sessions/ And if you like what you hear, leave a comment or a review, or even buy Dark Nocturnes for yourself–here’s the link!:

http://a-fwd.com/asin=B0DY8B6C1K

And now on with the inanity. A couple of weeks ago, my car was making some awful noises so I took it to my mechanic. Turns out all the tie rods were worn out, which explained why my cute little Sonic was creaking and groaning like my joints in the morning, only I’m almost 60 and my car’s only 12. I got what amounted to basically a new front end “but,” my mechanic said, “you’ll need a wheel alignment and we don’t have the rack to do it here.”

So I asked around and got a recommendation for a place up the road. The afternoon before my appointment, I decided to go there and see A) where exactly it was and B) to see if I could drop off the car later that day instead of first thing the next morning, because I’m retired and I don’t go anywhere early if I can help it.

When I saw the sign for the business, I had an uncomfortable revelation—the long laneway led to a “community farm”, which was occupied by people, part of a religious cult, who live communally in large barrack-type buildings on several acres. And the mechanics were apparently part of the cult. I’d never been there, but let me tell you, it was incredibly eerie, and not because of all the zealots. No, the place was completely deserted—no adults, no children, even in the summertime–literally no one. I found out later that over time, most of them had left. Or died, based on the creepy cemetery they had on the property.

I couldn’t see anyone, and the garage looked deserted too, so I drove around the back—just in time to see an elderly man taking a piss against some bushes. Like, do religious cults not have BATHROOMS? He looked at me as if he couldn’t imagine why I was there. I explained, staying IN the car, and was told yes, I could drop the car off later. I wasn’t thrilled but Ken came with me after dinner to make sure there were no more urinary shenanigans.

Then, the next day we went to pick the car up. We walked into the office and there was a guy sitting there on the phone. Sitting on a shelf above him like some kind of weirdass trophy was a bright red “Make America Great Again” ball cap. And while this might be de rigeur in America, I live IN CANADA. So it was very f*cking off-putting, and why wasn’t I surprised that a business run by members of a religious cult would be displaying something like that? And then he had the nerve to tell me that they couldn’t get my wheels completely aligned because there might be something wrong with one of my tires. And I so badly wanted to say, “Then keep it and FIX it” but at that point, all I wanted to do was hightail it out of his Stephen King-esque MAGA Christ Cult Compound. Needless to say I won’t be going back there anytime soon. And I really hope they get their plumbing fixed.