Humour

The Bees’ Knees

Currently, Ken and I are on a cruise. It hasn’t been quite the experience we’d hoped for, due to sh*tty weather. The first sign of trouble was the night before we were supposed to leave and I got an email telling us that we were no longer going to Key West and Nassau because of “inclement weather—now we were going to Key West and Cozumel. When we arrived in Florida, it was pouring and windy but we were only there overnight. Once we got on the ship, the seas were super-rocky and by that night, our snorkelling excursion in Key West had been cancelled. But it was okay—we decided to just do the hop on/hop off trolley and see the town. The next morning , I woke up and turned on the ship’s navigation channel. It showed our ship going into Key West, doing a circle, then heading back out. Now, I’m not very good with maps but it seemed to me that a loop and a “high tail it out of there” wasn’t a great sign. And sure enough, about half an hour later, there was an announcement that it was too dangerous to try and dock in Key West so we were heading straight for Cozumel. But the announcement was only in the halls, and when we went for breakfast, it was amazing how many people were coming in with backpacks and whatnot, as if they were going ashore. The family next to us kept saying, “When do you think we’ll get to Key West?” and “How much longer will it be?” until I put them out of their misery and told them, “Never.”

But Ken and I were not deterred. After a full sea day of playing trivia and winning champagne and jewellery at the art auction raffle, we went to sleep excited about our excursion the next day to the Mayan ruins and the beach. Then things got even better when we got on the bus and our guide told us that we were also stopping at an extra destination—a tequila factory. And that was awesome because we had booked a trip to a rum factory in Nassau and I was very sad about missing it because if you know me at all you know I adore factories where alcohol is made.

Once we’d finished at the Mayan ruins, where we saw the cutest iguanas and a random anteater, we got back on the bus. We started chitchatting with the guide, Payo, and I said, “I’m excited about the next stop” and he replied, “Oh yes, the something something” and I said “Pardon?” and he said “The Bee Sanctuary” and I said, “…Pardon?!” because the way he said it, it still sounded kind of like Tequila Factory because of his very thick accent so I got my hopes up, but he said it again and there was no doubt that IT WAS BEES. Then he went back to the front of the bus.

Me: We’re going to a bee sanctuary?

Ken: Apparently.

Me: Do I have to touch the bees?

Ken: Probably not.

Me: Okay then.

Ken: You’re being surprisingly calm about this.

Me: I should have had the free tequila shot at the Mayan ruins when that dude offered it. Are these rescue bees or something? Do you think they’ll be aggressive?

But I needn’t have worried. They were tiny stingless bees and we never saw any of them. And there were market stands at the bee sanctuary that sold tequila so it all worked out in the end.

In other news, I’m absolutely thrilled to tell you that my new novel, Charybdis, is going to be published by UK publisher JC Studio Press, run by the amazing Jane Cornwell. Here’s a synopsis:

Charybdis takes place in two different time periods. In the present, Greta Randall, a graduate student in Waterloo, Ontario about to embark on a PhD., is determined to continue her research into an obscure Canadian poet and recluse, Louisa Duberger, hoping that she will uncover the mystery of Duberger’s life and work. In the second time period, beginning in the year 1891, Louisa Duberger herself chronicles the tragic events of her life in a secret diary that she keeps from her eighteenth birthday until her death at the age of 25. The two timelines converge in a suspenseful way when Greta meets Matthew Shepherd, who claims to be Louisa’s great-great-nephew, and who has secrets of his own that he would kill to protect, including the last entry of Louisa’s diary.

Look for it in late spring 2024!

Reading Is Fundeathmental; Exciting News

For over a year now, I’ve been tutoring a little girl who struggles with reading. Every week on a Thursday, I go over to her house and we spend an hour reading together, doing writing activities, and a variety of other things designed to improve both her reading and writing skills. She’s also in French Immersion, which for Canadians means that even though you’re not French and no one else in your family speaks French, you take most of your classes in French. So my little protégé not only struggles with reading in English but also reading in French. Luckily, I took French all through high school, right into university, I taught it when I was younger, and I can read it pretty well. And for the purpose of this post, I’ll call my little friend Samantha:

Me: Comment ça va aujourd’hui, Samantha?
Samantha: How do you know so much French?
Me: I studied it for a long time and I used to teach it to students just like you.
Samantha: YOU WERE A TEACHER??
Me: What did you think I used to do?
Samantha: I thought you worked in an antique store.
Me: What, like all my life?
Samantha: Well, you’re not that old.
Me: Très bien, ma chère.

Samantha is in Grade 3 so I spend a lot of time looking for age-appropriate books, usually in thrift stores where you can get virtually brand-new readers for under two dollars. The other day, I thought I hit the jackpot when I discovered a book that was in both French AND English for young readers. The book was called George the Goldfish / Georges Le Poisson Rouge. I looked at the cover—it was a little boy looking lovingly at his goldfish. I opened the front cover and inside was a variety of pictures of the little boy doing a variety of activities with the goldfish: carrying him around in his bowl, playing while the fish watched, showing the fish his Hallowe’en costume (also a goldfish) and so on. The next page was a series of suggestions to parents and teachers on how to use the book to encourage reading in both languages as well as information about a picture dictionary and pronunciation key at the back. Then there was the title page with the little boy looking into the fishbowl lovingly and the fish looking back at him as lovingly as a fish can look. So I brought it with me last Thursday:

Me: Okay, Samantha, let’s get started. First read the English, then read the French at the bottom.
Samantha: Harry has a goldfish. His name is George. Harry a un poisson rouge. Il s’appelle Georges.
Me: That’s great. You have a really good accent. Keep going.
Samantha: George swims around and around in his bowl. Harry loves to watch him. Georges fait le tour de son…what’s that word?
Me: Sound it out.
Samantha: A..quar-um. Oh, aquarium, like a big fish tank. Harry adore le regarder.
Me: Excellent. Ready to turn the page?
Samantha (turns page): But one day, Harry’s goldfish—WHAT? THE GOLDFISH DIES??!!
Me (panics): Give me the book—what?! OH MY GOD.
Samantha (laughing): MOM! The tutor is making me read a book about death!

I started laughing hysterically too, a mixture of horror and absurdity, as she ran out of the room to show her mom. I followed along and we found her mom in the kitchen. I apologized profusely as her mom also started to laugh:

Me: I am SO sorry—I had no idea. I should have screened it more carefully. I just thought it was a nice story about a boy and his goldfish…
Samantha’s Mom (laughing): Until it wasn’t…hey, don’t worry about it. It’s all a part of life–or death.

Fortunately, everyone took it in good humour and Samantha wanted to read the rest of the book, which didn’t get any more light-hearted—in fact, there are lengthy descriptions in English AND French of Harry and his mom burying George in the garden and planting flowers on his grave and in what POSSIBLE world would you write a story for ages 3+ where the main character DIES ON PAGE 3?! And nowhere in the copious “parent notes” was there ANYTHING about this book dealing with the dark theme of the death of a beloved pet! It’s like the Old Yeller of 2023.

In other news, this past week, I was the featured writer on Susan Richardson’s amazing podcast A Thousand Shades Of Green. Susan is a poet extraordinaire and she also writes the blog Stories From The Edge Of Blindness, so having her choose me for this project and hearing her tremendous compliments regarding my writing really made my week. If you want to listen to her gorgeous voice reading my work, or the work of some other wonderful writers, you can find her podcast at floweringink.com

Weird Thoughts and Whatnot

On Friday night, I couldn’t sleep so I started composing this week’s blog post in my head. As you may recall, I’ve been seeing this acupuncturist/chiropractor type guy for my chronic shoulder pain, and I’d given up on the acupuncture on the grounds that lying on my stomach with needles in my back for an indeterminate amount of time was stressful. So a few weeks ago, I went and asked to resume shock wave therapy (which is NOT electroshock therapy, just to be clear—it’s a type of air-compressor driven jackhammer that’s theoretically supposed to break up the calcium in your tendons), and his response was “No problem, kid.” And let me just remind you that the acupuncturist/chiropractor type guy is probably in his early thirties if that, and I am a woman who is quite beyond middle age and in no way, shape, or form, a kid. (Slight tangent: as I was composing this in my head, I was calculating how old I would have to be if 58 was middle-aged and realized that there was NO WAY I would get to see 116 years old unless there was some kind of modern medical miracle that occurred during the next few years, and then I started calculating how much time I had left and the answer to that was BEST CASE SCENARIO 25-30 YEARS and then I freaked myself out at how short a time that seemed and then I had to wander the house in an existential panic until I could go back to bed. Second slight tangent: I have a very dear aunt who has always called me “kiddo” ever since I can remember, and that’s fine because she’s older than me and she’s family and also she reads my blog and I don’t want her to think I don’t like it when SHE calls me kiddo).

At any rate, I’ve become increasingly—I don’t know, it’s like a simultaneous combination of amused and annoyed—by his constant sobriquets and Peleton style encouragement:

“You did amazing today, kid!”
“You’re a trooper—great job!”
“Fantastic work today, milady!”

And so on. And it would be awesome and cool if I actually DID anything aside from lying on my stomach and counting to 600 very slowly until he comes back to take the needles out; otherwise it just seems like hollow praise. But then last week, I arrived just as he was coming out of his treatment room and he greeted me thusly: “Uh oh, here comes trouble!”

I looked behind me to see who he was talking to, but it became quickly apparent that IT WAS ME. Me? Trouble?! Does he not know me at all? As we all know, I don’t have a single real bad-ass bone in my body! But then, at this point in the mental composition of this blog post in my bed, I started to fall asleep, and dreamed that I was writing about a couple who made cute pet videos and in one of them, a cat got mad at a dog for sniffing her, and the caption in the video read, “Stop touching my genitalia with your nose!” and then it occurred to me both in the dream and as I began to wake up again that the word “genitalia” doesn’t sound anything at all like what it is; in fact, it sounds like an old-fashioned word for something very festive, like if you said that “the whole regiment was decked out in their best genitalia” or “the halls were festooned with merry genitalia” or whatnot. And the whole thing was so funny when I pictured it that I laughed out loud, and Ken rolled over and muttered, “What?” and I said, “You’re snoring again” and he went back to sleep while I kept silently giggling just like a little kid and maybe my acupuncturist/chiropractor guy is right about me being trouble.

Did you say trouble?

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.

Plastic Not So Fantastic

Last weekend, Ken and I took advantage of the warm fall weather and made a lovely barbecued steak dinner, with roast potatoes and Caesar salad. I was almost finished eating when something caught in my throat. I started to cough but no matter what I did, I couldn’t dislodge it. I figured it was a peppercorn from the sauce and that I would swallow it eventually. It was still bothering me later that night and I started to poke around with my toothbrush—luckily I don’t have a sensitive gag reflex—but I couldn’t feel anything. I tried looking in the mirror but I couldn’t see anything either. I woke up the next morning and it still felt like something was stuck in the back of my throat. And to make things worse, I had a terrible headache and my allergies had kicked into high gear. I was super stuffed up and my face felt swollen. This went on all weekend, and then on Monday morning, I was getting ready for work. I felt another terrible tickle in my throat, coughed hard, and then I felt something in my mouth. I reached in, pulled it out…AND IT WAS A PIECE OF PLASTIC. Like, a piece of plastic you might find in the packaging, say, of a Caesar salad kit. I put it on the tip of my finger to better examine it. It was kind of twisted, and weird, and as I simultaneously went to reach for my reading glasses and yelled for Ken, the damn thing fell off the top of my finger and disappeared.

Ken: What’s wrong?
Me: I… there was…aw f*ck! I was going to show you the piece of plastic that was stuck in my throat but it vanished.
Ken: Plastic? Seriously?
Me: Well, I’d show you and prove it but it flew off my finger and disappeared.
Ken: Suuuure, honey. Let me know if you find it. Are you feeling better now?
Me (mentally taking stock of my feelings and being pleasantly surprised): Yes, I am—it doesn’t feel like I have anything in my throat anymore.

And not only that, my allergies began to calm down—by the end of the day, I was completely back to normal. Normal enough, anyway. But having a piece of plastic embedded in the back of your throat isn’t something I recommend.

In other news, Ken and I are toying with the idea of selling our house and downsizing, so we had a real estate friend come through the other night to tell us what we might need to do to get the house ready for showing, i.e. what furniture and objets d’art would have to be removed. It went as well as expected:

Real Estate Agent: The kitchen seems fine, except for that table by the door.
Me: But that’s the table I use for my purse…
REA: Can you use something else? And what about this trunk and random leather doctor’s bag in the corner?
Me: Well, it’s an “arrangement” but I was planning on selling it–it doesn’t serve any real purpose aside from being pretty, I suppose…

In the family room:

Ken: What about this wall of paintings? A little too much?
Me: Shut up, KEN.
REA: No, artwork is fine…are those ALL Paris?
Ken: Sigh. Yes. They’re all Paris.
Me: It’s a “theme”. Just wait until she sees all the Lego in your bathroom, KEN.
REA: Lego in the bathroom?
Ken: I’m not allowed to decorate with plastic anywhere else in the house.
Me: Don’t talk to me about plastic right now, KEN.

Playing Possum

Things are relatively back to normal around here. Ken recovered, having a very mild case of the ‘vid and I never did get it, mostly because I’m convinced that I had covid already at the end of January 2020—right before everything started to get shut down. I was incredibly sick back then and lost my sense of taste, so I’m convinced that I had OG covid, which has made me immune to all these new strains, plus I’ve had all my boosters. Plus plus, Ken has the immune system of a big baby:

Me: I didn’t get covid from you because I have a kick-ass immune system.
Ken: You didn’t get covid because you weren’t in the direct line of fire of that woman at the art auction who sounded like she was dying.
Me: I was sitting next to you! AND I LIVE WITH YOU!

And then I felt really bad because I had MADE Ken go to the art auction on the cruise ship on the grounds that ‘it would be fun and also there is free champagne’. So we went, neither of us having any intention of buying overpriced art. Just like I went to all the jewelry events even though I had no intention of buying any overpriced jewelry. But again, there was FREE CHAMPAGNE. And yes, Ken and I both had beverage packages so we didn’t have to pay for any alcohol, but isn’t there something about ‘free champagne’ that just draws you in every time? The art auction was hilarious because it wasn’t really an auction at all. I’m used to antique auctions where the auctioneer is one of those guys with the incredible patter and it’s worth going just for the excitement. But the cruise ship auctioneer was very obviously not schooled in auction patter and the auction went like this:

Art Lady: This painting by this guy who did a lot of trees is valued at $111 000. Do I hear $50 000? No? All right Marco, put it back in the gallery. Now it’s time for the mystery painting! It is also trees, but it’s by a different guy and THAT’S the mystery!

The most expensive thing I saw get bought was a resin pig. It went for $3000 and everyone in the audience cheered and clapped for the guy, who was super-old and with a very young blonde woman that Ken insisted was his daughter. He assumed that because she called the old guy “Daddy” and I was like “Dude, you’re so naïve.”

At any rate, we sat through the auction next to a woman wearing a mask who kept taking off the mask to cough phlegmatically and blow her nose noisily then either fell asleep or died, but I’m not sure which, because we left right after the resin pig.

And things finally got back to normal and everything was good and covid-free until three nights ago, when Atlas ran in the bedroom and immediately jumped up on the bed and wouldn’t look at me…

Me: Hey bud—OMG WHAT IS THAT SMELL?!! KEN!!!

Yes, he got sprayed by a skunk AGAIN. That’s five times in the last three months. Luckily, Ken has a very good de-skunk concoction and we got Atlas before it had really soaked in. So Ken set up the live trap, and on Saturday morning, he called me outside:

Ken: There’s something in the trap.
Me: Is it the skunk? Please let it be the skunk!
Ken: Nope. But it’s very pissed off.

It was a possum. And it was the most annoyed and embarrassed possum I’ve ever seen, like it couldn’t believe it fell for the old peanut butter and cat food trick. But we like possums and they don’t stink, so we opened the trap and left it alone to make its way back to its possum home. Safe travels, little guy, and if you see the skunk, tell him how good that peanut butter and cat food tasted.

Positively Negative…For Now

Well, we’re back from our trip. The second last day was my favourite, I think, mostly because we toured around Halifax in an ‘amphibious vehicle’, which is to say that our tour bus turned into a boat at a certain point and we literally drove down a ramp into the water and then we were floating and it was supercool. I’ve done that once before, many years ago, but it wasn’t made clear to me that the bus BECAME a boat—I thought we were changing vehicles halfway through, so imagine my terror as we headed straight off the pier into the water. But this time I was ready, and I really enjoyed it. Overall, the cruise was pretty good—at least the food, wine, and destinations were great. It was just the crew that was chaotic, like tiny animated characters in an old-time video game just zipping around without any seeming purpose and bumping into walls and getting stuck and whatnot. The last day was pretty exhausting, having to get up at 7 am, eat a quick breakfast, and then wait to get called for our airport transfer. Once we were off the boat, Norwegian basically washed their hands of us and we had to find the bus to the airport on our own. We eventually did, and then had to battle all the other passengers who were equally desperate to get away from the ship and had NO F*CKING IDEA HOW TO LINE UP, CAUSING INCREDIBLE PANIC AND DISORDER WHEN THE BUSES FINALLY ARRIVED.

At any rate, we arrived home later that day, and Atlas was very pleased to see us; in fact, he stood up, put his paws on my shoulder and then licked my neck and face, something he has never done before, and it was very sweet. And sloppy. We unpacked, I did a little prep for the presentation I was doing the next night at the local library on writing, and then we went to bed. The next morning, I woke up and Ken was already downstairs. When he came up, he looked terrible.

Me: What’s wrong?
Ken: I was up all night with a fever.
Me: Oh f*ck.

So I gave him a covid test and guess what? IT WAS POSITIVE. Which meant I had to cancel my presentation, cancel work on Saturday, and pretty much spent the next few days taking care of him. Fortunately, we’ve both had all our boosters so he’s not as sick as he could have been. I tested negative, and so far, I still am, fingers crossed.

Ken on the left, me on the right

So you were right, ‘Mole, my friend—cruise ships really are a hotbed of bacteria. But the upside to all this (aside from having a readymade blog topic) is that it’s quince season and the quince on the bushes in my backyard are ready to go. It was a bumper crop this year, so I’ve spent the last couple of days making quince jam, quince crumble, quince juice (which is what you get after you poach the quince to get it ready for cooking). Quince is labour-intensive, more so than any other fruit in existence I think, but it’s worth it in the end. I have so much quince that I posted it for sale on Facebook Marketplace which obviously meant fielding stupid questions from people who don’t read ads and want to know where I live (it’s in the ad) and how much the quince is (it’s in the ad) and do I deliver? (no, I am NOT bringing quince to your house—I picked it for you so if you want it, get your ass over here).

So wish me luck—I’m usually a positive person but right now, I really need to stay negative.

Leggo My Lego; Another New Release Announcement!

I can already tell there’s a piece missing.

The other day I realized that we have approximately 547 pounds of Lego in the house. It’s in bins in the attic, bags in the guest room, totes in the closet…and why, I hear you ask, do you have so much goddamn Lego? Because not only is Ken obsessed with it, and has kept all the Lego ever created since he was a child, but Kate also accrued a sizable collection of Lego kits when she was younger. Even I, myself, although I hate to admit it, became a little fixated on Harry Potter Lego in the early 2000s. Wow, I also hear you say—isn’t all of that Lego worth a lot of money? Well, it would be, if it wasn’t all scattered around the house in bins, bags, and totes. I had a plan, a very clever plan I thought, to just put it all in ziplocks and sell it to one of the toy vendors at the market for a flat cost and then give the money to Kate since most of the Lego was either hers or bestowed up her as part of her inheritance to begin with, but when I broached the idea with my 23 year-old boss, he was horrified:

Boss: But you could make so much more money if you just put it together and sold the completed kits!
Me: Do I look like I have twenty-three years to deal with this?
Boss: But you said you had all the manuals—how hard can it be?

So I thought, what the heck—I’m pretty good at building stuff, and if I could make Kate a lot more cash by completing some of the models, then I’d give it a whirl. And you know what? It was almost f*cking impossible. Every bin I pulled down from the attic contained half a build, and I was running back and forth, trying to find the rest of the pieces, which had magically ended up in a number of completely different bins. Luckily, I had several bags of ‘extra’ parts—at least I hope they’re extra and not part of yet another Lego kit that I’ll never be able to finish. At one point, I spent a literal half hour looking for a long grey piece with 2 rows of 12 little knobs and I never did find it. 60 000 pieces of Lego and not a f*cking sign of it. And it’s not like the old days when I was a kid and the bricks were primary colours and 5 basic shapes—now most of the kits come with like a thousand unique accessory pieces in a variety of colours and if you don’t have them, you can’t substitute anything else to complete a set. Ultimately, I managed to finish a bunch of space alien-type Exoforce (?) kits, some cars and trucks, a few Star Wars spacecraft, and a couple of other things, and then I packed the rest of it up for another day, a day far into the future when Kate is rich and doesn’t need my Lego blood money.

And then there’s this ad for…well, is this what we’re calling them now? But I do love the use of quotation marks:

Mousetrap Update: I didn’t find it in any of the Lego bins. Also, I took apart the skirting around our kitchen island and looked under it, but the mousetrap wasn’t there either. Nor was it in the space between the stove and the counter. We have now looked in every conceivable spot that an errant mousetrap could find itself, and I’m stymied. Also peeved. Also a little freaked out, like did someone break into our house, see the mousetrap on the floor and steal it, along with my second favourite purse and a small makeup bag that were also in that kitchen and that I’m also missing?

One last update: As the Editor of DarkWinter Press, I’m thrilled to announce our release of Cecilia Kennedy’s new short story collection Twenty-Four-Hour Shift: Dark Tales from on and off the Clock! Here’s a synopsis—it’s now available on Amazon and you can purchase either the paperback or Kindle edition by clicking here!

“Punch in your time card to begin the shift. The twenty-four dark tales of short fiction in this collection explore the unsettling things that might linger on and off the clock. Here, you’ll find short stories of work-related haunts and happenings, from the truly sinister (a human-vending machine restaurant), to horror-comedy (a photo shoot with possessed bunnies). But in the hours in between, it can’t be forgotten that the roles played as parents, co-workers, and friends are no ordinary side hustle. That work never ends. And the work shift? Well, that’s the thing that makes you peek over your shoulder and ask, “What just moved?” But you have to clock in to find out.“