Wherefore Art Thou?

Currently, Ken and I are sailing along the Rhine River on a river boat cruise. It’s certainly been an interesting experience so far. There are approximately 180 passengers on board, and a restaurant and lounge with 30 tables of 6, so exactly 180 seats. Which means you are FORCED to eat with strangers. I don’t like being in crowds at the best of times but it’s so much worse when you have no choice but to engage in small talk. And some of these passengers are people I would NEVER engage with in real life. Today at lunch, for example, we had to sit with an elderly couple and their daughter. When they invited us to pray with them before the meal came, we politely declined. That wasn’t the issue. The issue arose 5 minutes later when the praying lady started railing on about refugees being given US government money and how unfair it was, which seemed just a tad hypocritical. That left Ken and me pointedly ignoring her and pointedly pointing to things on the riverbank—“Ooh look, a factory!”—until she shut up.

But aside from having to smile tightly or attempt to ignore the many bigots on board, we HAVE had some lovely shore excursions. The other day we visited a palace in a city called Nijmegen where the artwork was incredible, in that I’ve never seen so many paintings of people who looked completely over it. In fact, I renamed the palace from Palais Het Loo to Palais What Fresh New Hell Is This? because of paintings like the following:

I’m not sure what’s happening here, and there were no titles on the artworks, but these people look absolutely done with whatever is going on.

Dude second left: I’m so sorry, my man, but the water is still water. No wine to be seen.

Dude in middle (presumably Jesus): Again? Are you freaking kidding me?! Come on, Dad—help a guy out!

Woman on right: FFS. I promised everyone a nice Chardonnay. You’re, like, the WORST caterer.

Dudes far right and left: Can you try again? We’re super thirsty and need to get this party started! Would it help if we prayed?

And then there was this lady—her portrait is gigantic, looms over one of the main bedrooms, and you know she’s looking at you like “Get the hell out of my house, peasant!”

It always amazes me that someone would go to all the trouble and time to have a portrait of themselves painted and have the artist make you look like you hate everyone and everything. I mean, it’s not like back in the day where you couldn’t smile because the exposure was so long that any wavering would make it blur—this lady could have just said, “Make me, an incredibly wealthy noblewoman with my own palace and literally nothing to worry about, look happy.”

And then, of course, we visited a Museum of Modern Art where, as is typical, you get to see amazing things, and then other things where you know you could legitimately done them yourself. For example:

These are shapes that are cut out of foam, spray painted black and stuck to the wall. I can’t remember the name of the piece—I think it might have been Ethereal Quantum Stardust or something equally bizarre but I just refer to it as the Penis Wall.

Then of course, there’s this stunning piece by Marcel Duchamps called Bicycle Stool. It’s a stool with a bicycle wheel mounted on it:

According to the plaque, Duchamps “declared it an artwork simply by the process of selecting it.” So with that in mind, here’s my sculpture, Table On Chair On Balcony, and someone better give me a sh*t load of money for it to pay for this cruise.

And if you don’t believe that I can make art just as good as some of these things, you can revisit my Paul Klee challenge where most readers thought MY painting was the real Klee, or you can wait until I’m home—I’ll be recreating another art piece and you can guess which is mine and which is in a national gallery. Until then, I’ll keep on sailing.

It’s Secret For A Reason

Working at a bookstore, especially around the holiday season, is really interesting. A lot of people come in looking for gifts, and personally, I think the gift of a book is pretty cool. On Friday morning, a customer asked for a book recommendation because they were participating in a Secret Santa gift exchange at work, and isn’t that the nicest thing? Or maybe not, depending on who you get as your Secret Santa and it reminded me of the most bizarre Secret Santa gift exchange I’ve ever been a part of. In fact, I’ve had more than my fair share of the short end of the Secret Santa stick–participating in this one left a bad taste in my mouth. Mostly because the things that I got tasted bad.

It happened in a previous workplace many years ago (long before I worked at the secret agency). We pulled names—I got someone I knew quite well, but I didn’t know who had MY name, which apparently is all part of the ‘fun’. I’d never done a Secret Santa before, and I was really excited about finding things for MY person that matched what she had put on her list of likes and dislikes. On my list, I had put the following: under “likes”, I listed the colours black and purple, hot chocolate, white wine, any kind of book (but preferably funny), and a couple of other things which I can’t remember now. I wasn’t being demanding—this was all in accordance with the instructions, as in “colours you like to wear, food you like to eat, alcohol you like to drink”, etc. On my dislikes, I simply put dark chocolate and coffee. I also mentioned that I was unable to eat gluten.

That weekend, I went shopping for my person, and was thrilled to find a handknit scarf, a book of short stories, a little box of specialty teas, and a couple of other things she said she liked, all staying fairly well within the $10 budget. I had a bottle of wine for her Friday gift which put me slightly over, but hey, it was Christmas, and it was apparently a tradition for the last day’s gift to be alcohol. On Monday, the first day, I got there early and put my recipient’s first gift in her mailbox with a cute note. There was nothing in MY mailbox. (I should probably clarify at this point that MY Secret Santa was NOT the same person that I was giving gifts too.) By lunch, there was still nothing in my mailbox. Partway, through the afternoon though, I was downstairs, and I saw something sticking out of my mailslot. I reached in and was a little dumbfounded—it was a single, crumpled package of hot chocolate with a broken candy cane scotchtaped to it. It looked like it had been shoved into the mailbox rather hastily. Well, it was the thought that counted, and it was hot chocolate that I liked. In fact, I had an ENTIRE BOX OF THE EXACT SAME HOT CHOCOLATE PACKAGES on my office desk. There was no note—but it was only the first day. Maybe the rest of the week would prove to be more Santa-y and cute. Despite my optimism, I was a little let down:

Tuesday: A small package of two pieces of VERY dark chocolate. The box said, “Compliments of Jackson Triggs”. That isn’t a person’s name—it’s a winery. I’ve been there; they give out those chocolates when you buy their wine. I couldn’t eat the chocolate, but it occurred to me that if I was getting old chocolate from a winery, perhaps there was a bottle of well-aged wine not far behind. I gave the chocolate to a colleague who reported that it was ‘rather stale’. So maybe REALLY well-aged wine. Still no note.

Wednesday: Partway through the afternoon, I discovered what seemed to be a single Christmas placemat, rolled up and secured with an elastic band, in my mailbox. It looked as if it had been used previously, judging from its wrinkled aspect and what appeared to be a gravy stain on the corner. Oh well, I could toss it in the laundry and then use it…somewhere. Still no note.

Thursday: A small bag of coffee, such as you might find in a hotel room. It occurred to me that maybe my Secret Santa had recently gone on a wine tour and had stayed at a cheap hotel. Well, my parents drink coffee—I could always give it to them.

At this point, I started wondering who exactly my Secret Santa was. At first, I had a very stereotypical thought that it had to be a man, given the lack of cutesy notes, and the apparent indifference to my list of like and dislikes. But then I remembered the last time that Ken had been a Secret Santa, and the way he went above and beyond to make his recipient feel special. I knew it had to be someone from a different department—if you’ve read this blog in the early days, you’ll know that the people I worked directly with in my previous workplace were very unpleasant. (If it was one of them, it would have gone something like this:

Colleague: This is for you.
Me: A lump of cold poison. Thanks?
Colleague: Are you being sarcastic? Oh my god, could you TRY to be a little nicer? You’re so passive-aggressive!
Me: But you gave me cold poison.
Colleague: I don’t believe you. Just wait until I tell EVERYONE how you just acted.

Two days later:

Mediator: I’ve asked you here today because you hurt Bob’s feelings over your “I don’t like cold poison” attitude. You should try to be less authoritative and kinder.
Me: But he gave me cold poison and then told the rest of our colleagues that he was hoping it would make me very sick.
Bob: You don’t want to be Facebook friends with me. You’re so mean. If Steve had given you cold poison, you would have been nice to him.
Me: What?! That doesn’t even make any—
Mediator: I think you need to respect Bob’s social boundaries and not provoke him. Now let’s hug it out.
Me: Oh my God, I can’t even.)

So, no, definitely not an immediate colleague. Which only left around 60 people. Guess I was going to have to wait for Friday. Then Friday came and went, with nothing in my mailbox. Other people were ooh-ing and aw-ing over their gifts—alcohol mostly, by the looks of the smiles on their faces. I felt sad and a little neglected. But on Monday morning, I went to my mail box, and lo and behold, there was a little bottle with a note attached to it! My Secret Santa hadn’t forgotten me after all. I put my reading glasses on. The note said, “Enjoy!” Then I looked at the bottle carefully. It said “Margarita Mix”. I asked the person next to me, “What is this?” and he replied, “Oh, you add it to tequila to make a Margarita. They attach them to the necks of the tequila bottles at the liquor store as an added bonus. It tastes really good.”

“Do you want it?” I asked.
“Sure! Thanks!” he replied. “Merry Christmas!”

I never did find out who my Secret Santa was, but I learned a valuable lesson, based on my colleague’s reaction to the Margarita mix–it’s better to give than to receive.

A Loo Like No Other

So Ken and I are currently travelling across the Atlantic on a large boat, the Queen Mary 2 to be precise. We’re on our way to the UK to visit family with my parents. Currently, Ken is driving me crazy by suggesting things I can write (“tell them you hate jazz”) because he’s too cheap to pay for the wifi plan and he is bored. “God help you if you were ever locked in the bathroom with me,” he just opined. And yes, that would be horrible. Not because of Ken, who has stopped talking about his tendency to flatulate in small spaces when he realized I was writing everything he said down, but because the bathroom in our stateroom, while frustratingly typical in that the flush mechanism is BEHIND the toilet lid, forcing you to TOUCH the lid in order to flush the toilet, is extremely small and very strange. Here’s a photograph:

I’m not certain what the builders of this ship thought people would be doing in the bathroom but it’s set up like a weird bar. Not only is there the strange, prerequisite metal toilet paper cover that makes a perfect place to put your cocktail, but above that, there’s an ashtray, and mounted on the door, there’s a bottle opener. So what? I’m sitting on the can drinking beer and having a smoke, waiting for the disco to start in the shower? Ken has interrupted to remind me to tell you that “we met Seth”. Who is Seth? I have no idea. Apparently he works remotely and is doing a global cruise. Anyway, I’ve given Ken a ball of wool to bat around and amuse himself with while I finish this post in the theatre where we’re waiting for a show to start. The theatre, fortunately, is bigger than our bathroom but without the ashtrays, bottle openers, and potential disco dancing. Or Seth.

Sailing The High Seas

About 10 years ago, I took a cruise on the Norwegian Star. The whole trip was insane and chaotic, and I wrote about it back then. Currently I’m on my second cruise with Norwegian and guess what? The more things change, the more they stay the same. In between 10 years ago and now, Ken and I have taken other cruises with other cruise lines and I stupidly assumed that Norwegian would have improved their practice at least a little. But yet they have not. Now, this isn’t a rant or complaint post; to be honest, the quirkiness of this ship is more hilarious than anything. So here are the top 5 bizarre things you get when you sail Norwegian:

1) Regardless of how many months in advance the crew knows the exact time and circumstances of the embarkation, they always act completely taken by surprise. I got an email literally 2 months ago that the sail time had been changed to 8 pm. At 5:45 we went to the restaurant for dinner. We had a reservation. The whole serving staff was in full panic mode because only 1 bar per floor was allowed to open if the ship was in port. It took twenty minutes to get my wine and the waiter said, “We’re all overwhelmed right now because after the shipwide safety drill, everyone came.” It’s a ship carrying over 2000 people—are they not used to having full restaurants?! We boarded at our SCHEDULED time of 1:30 and none of the rooms were ready until after 3, as if they had NO IDEA that passengers would be coming on board. There were people sitting in hallways surrounded by luggage, just waiting to be let into their rooms because everything else was also closed.

2) There are 31 bars and restaurants on the ship and just 4 stores—a duty free place that only sells hard liquor and cigarettes, a jewelry store that has champagne events every night as a ploy to get you drunk and convince you to buy fake diamonds, a “beauty” store, and a gift shop where you can buy Norwegian cruise line souvenirs. I’ve been on ships before with entire decks devoted to high end boutiques, clothes, and other goodies. The only thing taking up a whole deck on this ship is the casino.

3) There 24 elevators and 13 of them are perpetually stuck on either deck 6 or 16. You might as well take the stairs and considering how small the elevators are and how many people are willing to cram themselves into one, it’s probably safer.

4) You have to reserve tickets for every show and there’s a warning that you can’t save seats for other people. That seems harsh but if you’ve seen the number of passengers who put their sh*t on deck chairs or lounge chairs and hold them all day while they’re in one of the many restaurants or bars, you can understand why.

5) They have people stationed at each entrance to the main breakfast buffet whose only job is to stand by a bank of sinks, shake a tambourine and sing, “If you’re happy and you know it, wash your hands.” And the most frightening thing is that the majority of people ignore them. There’s also a terrifying trio of women who travel around the restaurant and recite in unison at every table, “Blueberry muffins, nummy nummy. Start your day with something yummy.” If you want to split a muffin with someone, they immediately scream “Sharing is caring!” And you’re not allowed to throw the muffins at them.

6) Every day, they do a trivia competition in the main atrium. It starts every day at exactly 12 noon and it’s run by the Assistant Cruise Director. At exactly 12:05 each day, the trivia competition is interrupted by an announcement from his boss, the Cruise Director, telling us all about the social events of the day. And he knows he’s interrupting because he says, every time, “Sorry to interrupt the trivia…” Could he make his announcement at a different time? Of course. Could the trivia happen at a different time? One would imagine. Yet… There are no prizes anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference.

Even though the wifi sucks and I had to write this entire thing on my phone, on the upside, the food is good, the beds are comfy, and the scenery is gorgeous. Nummy nummy.

Creative Wednesday: Interview with Willow Croft

Last week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Willow Croft on her fabulous blog Willow Croft, Bringer of Storms and Nightmares. Her questions were really fun and it gave me a chance to think of some mydangblog style answers. So if you’d like to read it, here it is! https://willowcroft.blog/2021/09/24/five-things-friday-mini-interview-with-author-suzanne-craig-whytock/

In other news, today is my last day of work at the secret agency. Yesterday was my retirement party and it was the best retirement party I’ve ever been to, even if it hadn’t been for me. I’ll miss being a secret agent, mostly I’ll miss working with such amazing people.

Creative Wednesday – Titles, Talk, and Tipples

A couple of Fridays ago, I sat down with my friend, Jude Matulich-Hall, for the inaugural episode of her new video series Titles, Talk and Tipples. It was a lot of fun–we talked about writing, our upcoming books, and a lot of other things while drinking some very nice wine. There are two parts and here is the first if you’d care to watch it:

There IS a second part, which I MIGHT post next week but by that point, we had both been ‘tippling’ pretty hard, there was a lot of giggling, and my vocabulary had deviated to the singular adjective ‘incredible’. I used it a LOT. Still, it was an excellent time and Jude is a very gracious host, even when she’s tipsy.

Friday Surprise

I know it seems like I’m always asking people to do this, but I just received a surprise email telling me that my Author Spotlight (Suzanne Craig-Whytock) has been nominated for Publication of the Month over at Spillwords Press. The deal is the same as last time: if you vote for me and let me know, I’ll use your name in an upcoming short story or novel. I’ll really do it—if you don’t believe me, wait until my new short story collection Feasting Upon The Bones comes out this summer (Potters Grove Press). A lot of your names are in it!
You can vote for me here: https://spillwords.com/vote/

Bad Omens

Last Sunday afternoon, our new neighbours contacted us, wondering if we wanted to go kayaking with them. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so Ken and I agreed. We launched at one bridge outside of town, with the intention of getting out at the next bridge which, by car, was less than two minutes away. It was a gorgeous day, and after paddling for ABOUT AN HOUR, I said, “Hey, how long is this going to take?” because my shoulder was still not 100% despite the 4 shock wave treatments I’d had. And let me clarify for everyone right now that it’s NOT electroshock—it’s sound waves and has nothing to do with my brain at all, although if it did, I might have been able to think twice about a kayak trip that looked like it would take half an hour as the crow flies, but in fact took over two hours as the river meanders.

Anyway, we’d been on the water for a little while and it was very peaceful. Suddenly around the bend, we saw a giant bird. It was a green heron, sitting on the bank. As we got closer, Ken tried to get a picture of it, but it took off, flapping its giant wings. We were sad, but not too much farther upstream, there was another green heron. And then a blue heron. And then a WHITE ONE. And what I had forgotten is that herons are not so much a breathtaking natural wonder but a very bad omen. Once, many years ago when I was still teaching, I had a department head who was an earth mother type. She and her husband had just installed a huge pond in their backyard, and stocked it with very large and expensive koi fish. One morning, she came into our office, breathless with excitement.

“I looked out my kitchen window,” she said to all of us gathered around, “and there, shrouded in the morning mist, stood a heron. It was so majestic and wonderful!” (We were English teachers and talked like this all the time).

“Oh!” said a young ingenue. “I just looked it up and herons are a sign of good fortune and progress. Lucky you!”

Everyone mooned about the heron, all of us wishing we had one too. But then the next morning, our leader returned, dejected.

“What’s wrong?” we asked.

“The heron ate all my koi,” she replied tearfully.

So herons are basically harbingers of doom, and if I’d remembered that at the time, I would have paid more attention to the obviously dire message that the string of heron sightings was meant to convey and I wouldn’t have found myself caught up on rocks in a section of rapids, with my kayak rapidly filling up WITH said rapids, screaming to Ken for help. We managed to tip my kayak and drain most of the river out of it right then and there, but the water was moving so fast that I lost my balance several times, causing both my flipflops to come off, leaving me hopping around barefoot on very sharp rocks. I spent the rest of the trip, which took ANOTHER HOUR, sitting in 4 inches of water sans shoes. Still, the weather was charming and the company was good, despite the herons and their pall of ill fortune.

And I would have been well to have remembered that on Wednesday, when I turned from my desk and caught a glimpse of something strange on our front porch railing. From where I was sitting, it looked like a large animal hunched over. My tolerance for things has become remarkably low since the lockdown started so my first reaction was, “What the f*ck is on my porch at 9 o’clock in the morning?!” I was additionally trepidatious, having already been terrorized the day before by a psychotic squirrel that had slammed spreadeagled into the window inches from my head during a meeting, causing me to jump and shriek, which in turn caused my team to jump and yell, “What’s happening?! Should we call 911? Qu’est ce qui se passe? Appelle la police!” And then I had to explain that it was only a squirrel. Outside.

So I very cautiously crept to the front door and peeked out the window to see A HERON perched on my railing. I still hadn’t put two and two together with the bad luck and whatnot, so I was like, “Cool!” I texted Ken: Come down quietly—there’s a heron on the porch.

Slight tangent: Ken and I have always owned houses with two stories, and because I don’t want to damage my voice by constantly yelling up at him, and because Ken has terrible hearing (Ken: No, I don’t! Me: What? I can’t hear you.) we’ve always had either an intercom system, two-way radios, or other means of communication between floors because—and you may be surprised to hear this—I talk a lot. Luckily now we can just text each other.

Ken tiptoed downstairs and we were both amazed at this giant bird just sitting there. We got some pictures before it suddenly spread its massive wings and took off. But then I remembered those ill-fated koi from many years ago and insisted that we go out and check our small pond to make sure the goldfish were still intact. They were. But as we were patrolling the garden, we found a tiny mourning dove with a broken wing in the bushes right below the heron’s perch. After doing some research, we discovered that herons will also attack and eat smaller birds, which explains why it was hovering like a f*cking vulture on my porch railing. Ken called a rehabilitation centre for wildlife in the next town over, and drove the dove there. We haven’t heard if it survived, but I hope so.

Long story short, herons are assholes.

Search Me

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately, and my go-to is always Google. I mean, it’s not like I can walk into a public library and take out a stack of books, although if you know anything about me and my OCD hygiene issues, you’ll know I never touch library books anyway, especially after one of my friends told me about how bedbugs can live in library books and she puts them in the freezer for 48 hours before reading them. Google is the best for finding out stuff: Firefox is obsolete, Edge is boring AF, and Bing is Satan’s search engine, which, in retrospect, might have been appropriate. Also, there are no annoying ads on Google, although you DO get ads everywhere else related to every site you visit. It amazes me that there are people who believe that bizarre conspiracy theory about Bill Gates tracking you through microchips in vaccines when Google already knows everything about you simply based on your clicks. Once, I looked at an ad for wigs, and every site I go to now has ads for wigs. Last week I posted about kittens and now Kate Spade wants to sell me earrings shaped like kittens. And two days ago, I filled in an online request for a quote from a kitchen painting company and now my gmail keeps filling up with ads for Benjamin Moore and kitchen renos. If those conspiracy theorists were really smart, they’d stop using computers all together and share their dumbassery through Morse code instead of becoming anti-vaxxers.

Anyway, I recently completed writing my first non-Young Adult novel, called The Seventh Devil, and I had to do a lot of research at different points in the plot. And then I heard that the government monitors certain topics and I got really worried that maybe I’d raised some red flags. Here is a list of things I searched for recently—tell me if you think I should be concerned:

1) What happens when you mix salt and vinegar together?
2) How corrosive is hydrochloric acid?
3) Is it illegal to make hydrochloric acid?
4) What acid is stronger than hydrochloric acid?
5) Is it illegal to buy sulphuric acid?
6) Where in Canada can I buy sulphuric acid?
7) What type of container is best for transporting sulphuric acid?
8) What acids are more deadly than sulphuric acid?
9) What does carbon tetrachloride do?
10) How does phosphine gas kill you?
11) How do you exorcise a demon?
12) What Latin phrases are best for exorcisms?
13) How do I know if my house is possessed by a demon?
14) Why does my puppy lick the carpet?
15) Is my puppy possessed by a demon?
16) What is the largest swamp in Ontario?
17) How long does it take a body to decompose in a swamp?
18) Does the government track my Google searches?
19) What kind of vehicles do government agents drive?
20)If you see a wifi called Surveillance Van 3, is it real or a joke?
21) Does stress cause hiccups?

Demon Dog

Then last week, I e-transferred Kate some money for her tuition, and just for fun, I put “Thanks for the launch codes” in the message line. Yeah, I agree—I think I should be worried.

But research is important though–I learned this the hard way many years ago in university when I was doing an English Lit/Film degree. I was tasked with presenting the filmmaker Stan Brakhage to the class, so I read everything I could about him. Remember, this was in the days before Netflix, Youtube or even the internet, so I DID in fact have to go to a library. From everything I studied, the man was a genius, but there was no way I could actually see any of his films. Then, on the day of my presentation, my film professor, a wonderfully enthusiastic and eccentric man, came up to me and breathlessly announced that he’d secured a 16mm copy of Brakhage’s masterpiece, “Dog Star Man Part III” which he would play on the screen behind me while I spoke. I was thrilled too—the lights went down, the film began, and I started telling the class all about the film and how Brakhage was “obsessed with vision, and tried to capture the three dimensions of the senses…he wanted the viewer to see in a fresh way, to disregard social conventions of seeing—” and then I realized that some people in the class were laughing and some people seemed shocked, so I looked over my shoulder at the film playing behind me and there was a gigantic nipple in the middle of the screen, and then a close-up of what looked like someone peeing, and I’ve never been so mortified and so happy to be in a dark room in my life. I literally stopped my presentation and just said, “Well. That’s so interesting,” and then we all watched as it got even more porn-y and my professor launched into a treatise on Brakhage’s ‘instinctive qualities’ and his ‘incredible technique’, and he was so ecstatic about the whole thing that he didn’t even notice that I hadn’t said another word and I got an A anyway (note that his comment below was “a brief but pithy statement not only of Brakhage but also his context”). And if you want to see “Dog Star Man” for yourself, you can just google it.

Climbing The Walls

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not very athletic. I only run if something is chasing me, although my idea of exercise HAS evolved from drinking wine while peddling a recumbent cycle to taking a brisk walk with the dog. It’s brisk because it’s the only way I can keep up with him—he’s currently terrible on a leash. He already knows the word ‘Walk’ and goes out of his mind with joy when he hears it to the point that you can barely get the leash attached to his collar before he’s out the door and gone. I’ve tried all kinds of things to calm him down but nothing works:

Me: Heel!
Atlas: Heal what? I’m fine.
Me: NO, stay by my heel.
Atlas: Then I’ll miss that awesome telephone pole. Also, there might be some squirrel sh*t that I have to smell. Ooh, a butterfly—come on!!

Cookies don’t work—well, they work until he’s swallowed them, and then he’s right back to strangling himself with his collar. He WILL sit at the corner, long enough to earn a ‘good boy’, then he laughs and dashes away, dragging me behind him. At 5 months old and 40 pounds, he’s hard to control but at least I’m getting my cardio in. Once everything opens up, I’m definitely taking him for obedience classes, mostly because he’s been trying to drink my wine when I’m not looking.

Anyway, aside from my daily race around the block, I don’t do anything too strenuous, so the other day when Kate asked, “Hey, do you want to go rock climbing with me?” my first instinct was to say “Yes”, because I love hanging out with her, and my second instinct was to whisper to Ken, “My god, what have I done?” He whispered back, “Just climb the kiddie wall—you’ll be fine.” I found some old exercise gear in a drawer, put on some running shoes, and we set out. I should mention that my daughter has her own rock-climbing shoes, so that should tell you exactly what the differential is between us in terms of rock climbing acumen. We got to the facility and walked in. It was huge, with walls of grips going up twenty feet at least, surrounded by 2-foot-thick mats. “Where are the ropes?” I asked. “Why isn’t anyone got a rope around their waist?” Kate informed me that this was ‘bouldering’ which is basically free climbing, so there went my dream of just swinging casually from a rope like a trapeze performer (also in this dream, I’m holding a glass of wine. It was a nice dream). We got up to the counter where we were met by a perky young woman.

Perky Young Woman: Hi! Is this your first time bouldering?
Me: Yes.
PYW: OK, let’s go over some safety guidelines. First, do you know how to fall?
Me: I think so, but I generally tend to avoid it, so I’m probably not an expert or anything.
PYW: OK, well the important thing is to keep your arms crossed over your chest. Don’t stick them out or you might break something.
Me: Exactly how much falling is going to be involved here?
PYW: Haha! Also, don’t touch the ceiling or any of the ductwork when you get to the top.
Me: You’re very optimistic about that possibility.
PYW: Haha! The walls range in difficulty from Beginner to Really Super Hard Crazy Advanced. (*Note: she didn’t actually say ‘Really Super Hard Crazy Advanced’, but I can’t remember the actual name and that’s what it looked like.)
Me: Just point me at the kiddie wall.
PYW: Hahahaha! We don’t have one of those.

Meanwhile, Kate had already chalked up her hands and was raring to go on a course that was on a backwards leaning incline (see pic 1). She directed me to a VB section of wall, which is to say Very Beginner, which I regarded dubiously. “How do I start?” She showed me and then said, “You try it.” I put one toe of my rental shoe on a grip, grabbed a handhold, and was immediately immobilized. I looked to her for help, but she was halfway up another wall, kind of like Spiderwoman. “Keep going, Mom!” she called out as she scaled the wall like a professional. I persevered and managed to make it up the course, which was straight up and had substantial handholds (see pic 2). Still, I made it to the top, about 15 feet up, and got a little excited until I realized that I had to climb back down. I might have looked like a gecko but at least I didn’t fall (see pic 3). I ended up doing a couple of other sections—one was even slightly harder than Beginner, as Kate cheered me on, and then I spent the rest of the time proudly watching her. The next morning when I woke up, I was only slightly screaming from the pain in my arms. And I can’t wait to do it again.