Author: mydangblog

mydangbloghttps://educationalmentorship.wordpress.comMydangblog is a weekly humour blog--my weird perspective on the world and the people in it. Each essay is stand-alone--no chronological knowledge required, so feel free to go back to earlier posts. One of my favourites is...well, there's a lot to choose from. Read, enjoy, and keep coming back. New post every Sunday.
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Moving On, Thankfully

It’s been an absolute whirlwind of a week. Our daughter and her boyfriend had agreed with their landlord that if he could find a tenant by the end of August, they would move out early and not have to pay September rent, and live with us for a couple of months while they looked for work closer to home. Which was all fine and good, but the landlord called them on TUESDAY AFTERNOON to tell them he’d found a tenant. And so it began. First thing, finding a rental moving truck on the busiest end of the month/long weekend/students returning to university in Canada. After several calls and being told that nothing was available, we managed to get a truck in a city on the way to their apartment, which was around 4 hours away from us. Second thing, figuring out the driving—Ken would drive the truck back, Kate’s boyfriend would load up his vehicle with boxes, and Kate and I would drive her car back. We got to their place at 4 pm on Wednesday and started frantically packing. Ken and I had a hotel room for the night, and we got up early to go back and finish. By noon on Thursday, the entire place was cleared and Ken was on his way in the moving truck, having taken a head start since he would have to drive more slowly. I’m no use with heavy lifting thanks to my bad shoulder, so I spent the time packing up the kitchen and cleaning the apartment.

By 1 pm on Thursday, the landlord ( a very nice man) came, oohed and ahhed at how clean everything was (YOU’RE WELCOME, CHILDREN) and we were on our way. Or were we???

45 minutes outside of the city we’d just left, we were in heavy traffic when an alarm sounded…

Me: The car says it’s turned the air conditioning off because the engine is very hot!
Kate: Weird. I’m sure it’s fine. It’s a hot day and we’re just crawling along. Put down the windows.

2 minutes later…

Me: The car says the engine is overheating and to switch to idle!
Kate: We should pull over.

The car was toast. And there we were, alongside the busiest highway in Ontario, transport trucks zipping by, almost 4 hours from home. I called our roadside assistance:

Me: I need some help. Our car has broken down on the 401 West.
Dispatcher: We’ll send someone out. Under your plan, the driver can tow you up to 10 kilometres—every additional kilometre will be $4.50. He will be there in approximately 132 minutes.
Me: WHAT?

And this is when I went into full blown panic mode. And for me, that doesn’t mean freaking out externally—it means I go into complete silent shutdown. How the f*ck were we going to get home? I was too upset to even cry. Then I got a text message that the driver was on his way, and that he would actually be there in 30 minutes. We could track him in an app and sure enough, he arrived in under 30. When the driver, a really young guy, looked at the car, he shook his head and said he couldn’t tell what was wrong, like maybe we needed oil or maybe it could be more complicated, like a part. We checked the nearest garages on google maps, and they were all over 10km away. I’d resigned myself to paying the extra charge to get towed to a repair shop, Uber to a car rental, and do the 4 hour drive another day for the car, when suddenly the driver said, “Hey—if you call right now and ask to upgrade your plan to Premium, I can tow you all the way home if it’s under 320 km.” AND IT WAS 297.4 KM. I immediately called and paid for the upgrade, and we were on our way, Kate in the tow truck passenger seat and me in the back on a bench seat with no seatbelts, but he assured me that “it was safe.”

And you know what? It was a long drive but we had a great time. He stopped at a roadside service centre for a bathroom break and snacks, we made fun of personalized license plates that we saw on the road, and he played very cool techno music. He got us home in under 5 hours (the traffic going through Toronto was horrifying) and dropped us and the car at our literal door. I gave him a huge tip, rest assured, and then Kate and I both collapsed into the arms of our loved ones.

So while this post might not be as funny as usual, and maybe not even funny at all, it’s full of gratitude for the guy who drove us almost 300 kilometres and then had to drive back home himself. And yes, he said it was fine because he got paid by the hour, but he could have just towed us to a garage and left us there to figure it out. He didn’t, and for that I’m truly thankful.

That’s My Name

Last Tuesday, I was in full recovery mode from our trip—jetlag was over, the unpacking was finally done (yes, I took my time, don’t judge me), and we were back to routine. I was at the computer, working on the new book that DarkWinter Press is releasing soon (a poetry collection titled Ever Striding Edge by the wonderful Paul Brookes, and you can see the gorgeous cover, created by wonderful artist Jane Cornwell, at the end of this post) and revising my own manuscript for Nomads of the Modern Wasteland after receiving a lot of feedback from both Kate and Ken. I decided to take a break, as one does, and peruse my social media. Lo and behold, there was a notification that I had received a comment on a vacation photo (I believe the photo was one of the whale tails from our excursion). I checked the comment and it was this:

Not only am I charming, but also attractive and stunning? Wow! I was almost sold on this guy but then he said: “You have the name with my late wife”? Do you mean to tell me, James Sam Gibson, that your dead wife was ALSO called Suzanne Craig-Whytock?! What kind of crazy coincidence is THAT? And how did it come to be? Your last name is Gibson, so wouldn’t she be Suzanne Craig-Gibson? Or did she take on the name, kind of a nom de plume, after reading about the semi-famous writer, Suzanne Craig-Whytock?

Donna Gibson: My darling James. I have come to a sudden decision. I hope you won’t think it too impetuous of me.
James Sam Gibson: My darling honeyboobookins. Whatever is it that you have decided? A new hairstyle perchance? I do love a good bob, as you are well aware.
Donna Gibson: Alas, no. Please gird your loins against that particular disappointment. The decision is regarding my name. I have recently come across a marvellous writer—a strange person yes, but someone with a wonderful way of words, nonetheless, a true inspiration. And thus, I will be changing my name from the somewhat mundane Donna Gibson to…SUZANNE CRAIG-WHYTOCK!!
James Sam Gibson: Oh my darling! What an incredible choice! And of course, when you die, I shall reach out to your namesake and attempt to rekindle our love with HER!
Donna Gibson: It is indeed a wise path to take. And now I must go and buy several clocks.
James Sam Gibson: But my darling turtledove, we already have a clock.
Donna Gibson/Suzanne Craig-Whytock: As a wise, charming, attractive, and stunning woman once told me, you can never have too many clocks.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I deleted the comment and blocked the troll. What is with these bot accounts anyway? If you knew anything at all about me, you’d know that if I was single,  “former military Christian widower” is the very last thing I’d ever be interested in. Now, if the profile said “Retired clockmaker and man about town with a penchant for designer handbags. Ask me which bathroom in my Victorian mansion is my favourite”, then you might have a shot.

In other news, I forgot to tell you that the weirdest thing about our cruise was that one of the lounges was booked every day for a “Private Function.” And that function was “KNITOPIA”. Yes, a very large number of passengers on the ship were there as part of a large knitting group. No, not a company that specialized in woollen textiles—an actual unrelated factum of knitters. While the rest of us were on shore excursions exploring Greenland, they were sitting in their windowless lounge knitting. While we were watching incredible Cirque du Soleil type shows, they were sitting in their windowless lounge knitting. While we were enjoying the social activities or watching the glassblowing in the Hot Glass Studio, they were sitting in their windowless lounge knitting. At one point, Ken and I were coming back from a fun game show in the Observation Lounge—it was after 10 pm, and as we went by the knitting lounge, there were about 50 people in it and they were all watching A KNITTING VIDEO and following along as the person in the video knitted one’d and purled two’d. I ask you—what the hell is the point of spending that kind of money on a cruise, if all you do is sit in a room and knit? And apparently, they had to pay EXTRA to reserve the lounge for 12 days. I actually saw one of them when we were in Greenland—she was sitting at a café table inside the local grocery store and SHE WAS KNITTING. Seriously—give me 10 grand and I will make your meals and turn down your bed every day while you knit in the comfort of your own home. And I’ll be charming and attractive and stunning while I do it.

Now available for pre-order!

Land Ho!

I’m finally back from our trip to Greenland and Iceland, and it was an amazing time. The food and room were excellent, the entertainment was top notch, and the shore excursions—wow! Greenland is incredible and the north of Iceland is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We went whale watching (saw 3 different humpbacks), toured around with locals, and renewed our wedding vows in a mass ceremony presided over by the ship’s captain. Overall, I couldn’t be happier. But of course, it wouldn’t be a mydangblog trip without some funny things to share as well, so today’s topic is Weird Signs That I Saw On My Trip:

This isn’t technically a sign–it was the name of the pilot boat that helped our ship get out of the bay in New Jersey. “Cape Fear” seemed like a very ominous name for a boat—personally, I prefer boat names like Boaty McBoatFace or Ship Of Fools, because they’re much less prophetic-sounding (I originally had Full Of Seamen but Ken said that wasn’t very PG-13, so I changed it. Sorry.). But we had nothing to fear—we said farewell to the Statue of Liberty under dark but beautiful skies and then we were on our way. (Also, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the other boat seems to be named Double Skin 27, and I don’t know why but that makes me think of serial killers).

The reason this sign is hysterically funny isn’t found on the sign itself. You’ll notice that from 1875 until 1903, the building was used as a Catholic School for Girls. Beginning in 2001, it became The Cotton Club. What you can’t see is that The Cotton Club is a STRIP CLUB. So it’s still a “school for girls”—just naked, naughty ones. The Sisters of Mercy must be rolling in their graves.

This one is just funny in its simplicity:

Tourist: Whose food is this?
Icelander: Is Moe’s Food.
Tourist: What kind of food is it?
Icelander: Sheep eyes and rotted shark.
Tourist: You eat that kind of thing here?!
Icelander: Já. Would you like some sour milk and fermented testicles?

Yes, according to our one tour guide, Icelanders eat a lot of strange food. About the rotted/fermented shark, she actually said, “It tastes like shit, but we love it.” I can’t really judge though—I’m Scottish, and people say the same thing about haggis. It also explains why the restaurant looks kind of like a dumpster. (And yes, I know that IS is short for Iceland, but seeing it on all kinds of signs made it incredibly funny and had me randomly pointing at things and yelling “Is souvenir shop, Is seal fur processing plant, Is waterfall”, and so on.)

This sign was outside the oldest bookstore in Iceland. I was pretty hyped by the whole “magical world” thing, and it set up some pretty high expectations, which were immediately dashed when we went inside to discover that there was NO magic at all. Just an Icelandic guy selling books, candles, and jam. Still, he was very nice, and the other people in our taxi van were super-jazzed by all the Icelandic refrigerator magnets. We did see an actual magician on the ship who performed in the theatre. He came into the audience to get a volunteer and before I knew it, he’d grabbed my hand and hauled me up in front of about 300 people. Normally, I would have been terrified that he was going to cut me in half or make me quack like a duck but I’d been drinking a lot of free champagne at the art auction, so I went along with it. Turned out to be just a card trick, but it was really cool and fun, and for days after, people would see me in the elevator and say, “Hey! You were the girl on stage” so he made me kind of famous in a cruise ship way.

But now we’re back, and I’m playing catch-up with everything that I missed over the last two weeks, because ship wifi is crappy, as anyone who has ever been on a cruise ship will tell you. Oh, they HAVE excellent wifi, but to get anything other than the basic connection, you have to pay an exorbitant cost. So when they asked if I wanted to upgrade, I just said, “All signs point to NO.”

Little Bits of Me

So it’s been an interesting and stressful week as Ken and I get ready to go on a trip—we’re finally going to Greenland, so next week I’ll be coming to you from a boat! Recently, I’ve picked up a few followers though, so I thought it was time to provide a little more information about the quirks of the mydangblog universe:

1) I talk to myself in the car. I know a lot of people do that. For me though, it’s mostly swearing, a lot of the time at myself, like, what the f*ck is wrong with you—you should have taken regional road 7 and you would have avoided all this stupid construction!! Because it’s Canada, and when we aren’t ass deep in snow, we’re ass deep in asphalt. But often, the self talk is more about animals. I have been known to whisper “A  fox, a fox!” to myself after seeing a little vulpine friend at the side of the road. And on Wednesday, I exclaimed, “No, fly faster!” as a vulture crossed in front of my windshield and narrowly escaped becoming ironic roadkill. Personally, I really like vultures, and I had no intention of having one splat itself against my car, making me responsible for its demise (If a vulture dies on the road, do all the other vultures have an ethical debate about whether to eat it or not?) Also, I talk all the time to animals that I see, like “Hey, cat!” or “Wait a second, you silly chippie!” when I’m driving, and that’s a whole lot better than giving the finger to other careless drivers (which I have also done).

2) I like pillows. Last week, we had a family party, and there were some guests who hadn’t been in our house for a while, so I took them on a tour as one does when one owns a 1906 monstrosity with a secret library room. At one point, someone, I can’t remember who, said, “Wow, you have a lot of pillows on your bed.” And I was like, “I guess,” and then I counted, and Ken and I have THIRTEEN pillows on the bed. Only 5 are decorative—the rest are there to support various limbs, provide a visible barrier for the dog, and allow for the hitting of someone (KEN) who snores like a banshee. I don’t care. First, I love my pillows to the point where I will be taking one on vacation with me even if it means I can’t have extra shoes in my suitcase, and second, I’m a grown-ass woman so I can have as many pillows as I want on my bed. Fight me.

3) My bedroom ceiling is a galactic battle. Last year, Ken and I were in the attic and we found, in a bin, a digital clock radio alarm that projects the time ONTO THE CEILING. This is amazing in and of itself, because I never have to guess the time now when I wake up in the middle of the night because of Ken snoring. But the best part, like the ABSOLUTE BEST, is that at a certain time, the numbers look like Star Wars is taking place on my ceiling and that time is 3:33. And for some reason, I regularly wake up between 3 and 3:30 so I wait just a little longer, I can see the battle because the 3s look kind of like Starfighters and the blinking colon looks like lasers being fired, and every time I see it, it makes me inexplicably happy and then I say “Pew Pew” and I can go back to sleep. (Did you know that if you have an iPhone and you text the words Pew Pew to someone else with an iPhone, it will send them cool lasers and stuff? Try it—it’s amazing.)

4) I love stickers. Recently, I not only got the actual stickers to put on my humour book to show that it was longlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour, but I just got in the mail a bunch of stickers from my good friend Thomas Slatin. She writes a great blog which you can find here and also does photography, and her stickers are awesome, so thank you Thomas—I love them!

“Come for the laughter, stay for the lunacy.” That’s me. And now I’m on a boat!

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 25th”. 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 25th, 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.

Happy anniversary, Ken! It’s been 34 wonderful years and here’s to at least 34 more!

Tiny Me

It’s been another crafty week at the mydangblog household. First, you may remember the peel and stick wallpaper that Ken and I used to create the illusion of a bookcase door which leads to our secret library? Well, it’s not much of an illusion when it starts to fall off the panel attached to the door (as if the illusion wasn’t already problematic based on the size, and worse, the bizarre titles of the books on the peel and stick bookcase—Dawn Fly Stuff is still my favourite and you can read about all the rest in a previous post called Lost In Translation). But my tremendous disappointment at the less than sticky stickers was relieved when Ken said, “I have a great idea—I’ll get some trim and moulding and tack it all down with actual wood that looks like a bookshelf.” And that’s what he did. It looks even better than it did before the books all started to fall off, especially since the giant fake candle sconces in the middle are now hidden. But of course, the trim had to all be painted the same colour. Which I volunteered to do before I realized that I would have to use painter’s tape to protect the books in EVERY SINGLE SQUARE. It took me 3 minutes to paint the trim. It took me OVER AN HOUR to tape it all up. Still, at the end of the whole process, I think it looks even more realistic than it did before, and the stickers so far are staying stuck.

And then, because I was in A MOOD, I decided to tackle my new miniature room, and for the record, let me just clarify that it’s a miniature room, NOT A DOLL HOUSE because that’s a road that, as much as I’d love to go down, is also a rabbit hole that I may never emerge from. But last week, before we went to that awards banquet, I made Ken stop at an antique market up north because I had seen a Facebook post from one of their vendors who specializes in miniatures. Not only him, as it turns out—this place is the MECCA for tiny things and I was super-excited by what I bought, I mean, I got a cute little HARP among other things. I’d been thinking about it all for several days and rearranging things on the counter and looking for ephemera and whatnot, so after our secret library door success, Ken built me a box and I started the room. It turned out even better than I’d hoped and I’m so happy with it. Ken took a look when I was finished though:

Me: What do you think?
Ken (silently calculating): There are 3 clocks in this room.
Me: Of course there are 3 clocks. How else will Tiny Me know what time it is?
Ken: None of the clocks work.
Me: Tiny Me is aware, KEN. Time is a construct.
Ken: That…doesn’t make any sense.
Me: It’s my room—Tiny Me can have as many clocks as she wants!
Ken: Okay, Susab.

In case you’re confused, ‘Susab’ was the name on my place card at the awards banquet we went to. So to recap—they spelled my last name wrong on the press release, they had ‘Susan’ on the seating chart, and then ‘Susab’ on the place card. No wonder I didn’t win—they didn’t even know who I was! I should have just told them to use Tiny Me.

I Detect Another Mystery Show

Right now, as in Saturday morning which is when I usually write this, I’m a little distracted because I’m getting ready to go to the big banquet for that literary award I was longlisted for. I already know that I didn’t win, but there’s a roast beef dinner–need I say more? I’ve never been to a big literary banquet and I’m very nervous, like what if I drink too much and pull a Kanye by rushing the stage and insisting that Margaret Atwood should have won? (Narrator’s Voice: Update: She did not rush the stage. But she DID address a man in line at the bar with “You look familiar–is your name Jerry?” to which he gave her a strange look, muttered, “No, it’s Steve. I need to go get some water” and hurried away. And not long after, she was mortified when ‘Steve’ got up on stage because it turns out he was the HOST of the gala and also a VERY well-known Canadian comedian but in her defence, Steve is mostly ON THE RADIO). So in honour of my anxiety (which proved to be a valid concern), I present to you a throwback to a post I made a few years ago, which appropriately follows up on my Midsomer Murders expose. Hope you enjoy! (Also, at the end of this, there’s a link to a radio show I recently did, so also enjoy!)

Once, I was bored and there was nothing good on TV, so I decided to watch a rerun of a show whose title had intrigued me for a long time: “Houdini and Doyle.” From what I understood, it was about a detective duo at the turn of the century, and I love detective shows. One of my all time favourites is the updated version of Sherlock Holmes called Elementary, starring the irascible Johnny Lee Miller, and Lucy Liu as Watson. I also adore Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC version of Sherlock, which I’ve rewatched several times on Netflix, so I thought I’d give Houdini and Doyle a whirl. All I knew is that Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-American magician, and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the Scottish author of the Sherlock Holmes series, among other things. I love magic and I love Victorian Scottish fiction writers (albeit a very small group) and I had high hopes for its ability to keep me happily occupied for the next hour. Unfortunately, the TV show was—and I’m being polite here—absolute sh*t. Here are my main complaints:

  • The plot was ridiculous. This episode took place in a town where everyone except the local doctor and a little girl suddenly died. People were just lying on the streets in their period costumes, or keeled over their dinners of mutton and ale. Even the dogs were dead. And so were the mice—I know this because Houdini pointed out a nest of dead mice under a porch in a very obvious way in order to prove—well, I’m not actually sure what he was trying to prove. Houdini and Doyle eventually decided that everyone died due to a large cloud of carbon dioxide which had escaped from a nearby mine and which had asphyxiated the entire town. And as convoluted as that all sounds, it wasn’t even the ridiculous part. The most illogical part of the whole thing was their explanation regarding the survival of the doctor and the little girl. I was hoping beyond hope that since the show revolved around a famous magician that there might actually be a supernatural or magic-y rationale, like they were both alien mutants with cosmic lung capacity, or immune to the biological weapon that the government was experimenting with or something cool, but no. The doctor was in bed having a nap, and the little girl was sick and was also in bed. Therefore, they were BELOW the gas cloud and escaped its nefarious and deadly clutches. At which point, I yelled at the TV, “WHAT ABOUT THE DEAD MICE UNDER THE PORCH?! ? WHAT ABOUT THE DOGS? ARE YOU SERIOUSLY TELLING ME THAT ALL THE DEAD DOGS WERE TALLER THAN THAT KID’S BED?!”
  • It made even less sense later, when having “solved” the first mystery, Houdini and Doyle then prevented the assassination of the President of the United States at a hotel because they had found a note with the words “King Edward” on it, and after thinking it was about killing the King, they realized it was the name of a hotel and got there just in time. All in one episode of 45 minutes (not counting all the commercials).
  • There were no magic tricks AT ALL. Considering the show stars one of the most famous American magicians of all time, there was a surprising LACK of magic-type stuff. Not even a f*cking card trick. They should have had Houdini in a locked closet, tied up with padlocked chains, racing against time to escape and thwart the assassination. Instead, he just knocked the gun out of the guy’s hand. Boring.
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish, yet he spoke with an English accent. Yes, they sound different. The English always sound like they’re trying to knight you, and the Scottish always sound like they’re mad at you, thusly:
    English: I hereby dub thee Lady Mydangblog. You may rise.
    Scottish: Och, you’ve a new fancy name ‘n all! Gie up, lassy!!
    But Doyle was always like “Good Heavens! What the devil happened here, my good man?” instead of “Whit? Awae wi’ ye, numptie!” Yes, I know that the actual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was well-educated and spoke the “Queen’s English”, but it would have added something to the show if he’d used spicy phrases and unintelligible dialect. The plot didn’t make any sense, so why should the dialogue?
  • Houdini sounded Canadian and the whole show had a distinctly Canadian feel ie: it was kind of amateur-ish, like Murdoch Mysteries, where a Canadian detective in the 1890s “uses radical forensic techniques of the time, including fingerprints and trace evidence, to solve gruesome murders” (imdb) along with his partner, female coroner Dr. Julie Ogden (yes, a female coroner in the 1890s–very realistic). I wasn’t sure WHY I felt like Houdini and Doyle was so Canadian, then I googled it, and it turns out that the show “has Canadian producers and comes from the same production company as Murdoch Mysteries.” Mystery solved.
  • Last, throughout the show, Houdini kept insisting that you always know when you’re dreaming because “You can’t read in your dreams.” This is patently untrue. I read things all the time in my dreams, words that I’ve written, stories, poems, social media posts, and whatnot. I don’t always remember them when I wake up, but I READ them, so maybe I’m just more magical than Houdini.

Anyway, in keeping with the current trend of unrealistic detective/magician duos like Houdini and Doyle, I came up with a couple of my own.

1) “What The Dickens!”: This show stars Charles Dickens and David Copperfield, played respectively by Gerard Butler and Keanu Reeves, because why the hell not? In the show, Dickens has time-travelled to the future and meets American magician David Copperfield. Together, they investigate the disappearance of many large buildings and monuments, and battle their arch-nemesis Uriah Heep, played by Dick Van Dyke, who is as immortal as any supervillain. After they’ve solved every mystery (turns out it was Copperfield all along), Dickens returns to his own time and writes a very long novel called “David Copperfield” where he makes a LOT of stuff up, (he got paid by the word, after all) but leaves out the detective/magic part because he doesn’t want his heirs to get sued by Copperfield in the future for revealing his magical techniques.

2) “Fitzgerald and Wife”: In keeping with the fine tradition of married couple detectives, this show features F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Every week, they are presented with a new mystery which they fail to solve because they are too drunk.

3) “Robbie and Doug”: This is a Canadian reality show starring famous author Robertson Davies, who almost won a Nobel prize, and Doug Henning, a Canadian magician who ran for Parliament as a candidate for the ‘Natural Law Party’, which believes that all the problems in the world can be solved by learning the art of “yogic flying”. In the show, Davies just grumbles a lot about everything in an unintelligible dialect because he’s 90 years old and Scottish, and Henning solves all the crimes by flying around and meditating. The show is cancelled when viewers discovered that Henning isn’t REALLY flying—it’s only special effects. Yogic flying is actually just bouncing in a lotus position, and everyone knows you can’t solve crimes by bouncing unless you’re Tigger.

As a side note, I know that neither F. Scott or Zelda were magicians, but I liked the concept too much to leave it out on THAT technicality.

Also, if you’re interested in hearing me read from my OWN gothic thriller/mystery Charybdis, as well as from my new work in progress Nomads of the Modern Wasteland, I was recently featured on the radio show Reader’s Delight, hosted by the lovely Jody Swannell. You can listen to it here: https://radiowaterloo.ca/episode-vi-of-readers-delight/