Marathon Woman

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the dentist. I got a clean bill of health, as well as a few good show recommendations from my hygienist, the lovely Harmony (Unknown Number: The High School Catfish was as riveting and bizarre as she’d promised). “But,” the new dentist said to me, “you have some areas on two of your molars where the enamel is quite worn. You should make an appointment to get those patched.” At my look of panic, not having had ANY kind of dental procedure in years, he assured me, “You won’t need any freezing. I just have to rough up the surface a little and then apply a compound.” That sounded easy enough so I made the appointment.

On Thursday, I got to the dentist in plenty of time, and I sat in the waiting room listening to some random dude talking very loudly on his phone to someone about a woman who apparently wasn’t supposed to be in his apartment, but he KNEW she’d been there because he had set the thermostat to a sensible 72 degrees when he left and when he got back, the thermostat was now at 73 degrees, so it had to be her. Apparently, it was JUST LIKE HER to turn the heat up. The whole thing was befuddling–like why does she still have a key if her whimsical thermostat meddling is such a problem, and does she just go into his apartment, turn up the heat and then sit there for a while? But it was entertaining, and a good distraction from the fact that the dentist was running late.

When he finally came in, he greeted me as if we’d never met before, and greeted me thusly:

Dentist: How are you doing? Taking a break from work?
Me: (laughs): Oh no, I’m retired.
Dentist: You’re retired?! But you’re so young!
Me (foolishly thinking he was complimenting me): Oh, haha, I’m going to be 60 in a couple of weeks.
Dentist: I thought people in this country couldn’t retire until they turn 65. You’re so lucky! I’d love to be retired.
Assistant: Retired so young, yes, I’d like that too. Lucky you.

And I so badly wanted to say, “Lucky?! Do you think I won ‘retirement’ at poker, instead of working for over 30 years, paying almost half my salary into a pension plan, yet still having to work part-time to afford things like GOING TO THE DENTIST?!” But I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem like a good idea to antagonize someone who would shortly have his fingers in my mouth.

We were all quiet for a minute while I guess they were fantasizing about being retired, then the dentist asked the assistant, “What are we doing today? Ah, OK.” And then he said to me, who was lying prone with a stupid bib and plastic sunglasses on, “We’re just going to start with a little freezing” and I realized he was holding a needle, and I immediately said, very loudly, “NO.”

“Oh, it’s just to help with the pain,” he said. “We don’t want it to hurt, right?” And I responded by squeezing my lips shut and forcefully shaking my head, like a very small child refusing to eat beets or whatnot.

“You don’t want any freezing? But I have to drill into your teeth. It might not hurt THAT much but I can’t be sure.”

I stared at him, and said, “You told me I wouldn’t need any freezing. I don’t want to do this.”

He sighed. “I can try doing the drilling without the freezing. Just put your hand in the air if it hurts and you want to stop.”

And so he started drilling into my teeth. And it DID hurt. And I knew exactly how Dustin Hoffman felt as I waved my hand wildly in the air.

“A little sensitive, is it?” the dentist said. “Just a tiny bit more and we’ll be all done.” So I dug my fingernails into my palms until the drilling stopped, and he patched my stupid teeth with his stupid compound and I tried not to hit him when he stupidly said, “At least you don’t have to go back to work after this.”

And then I went to pay, and it cost $482 for a procedure that took less than 10 minutes from beginning to end. So at that rate, I guess he’ll be able to win retirement soon too.

In other, more pleasant news, here’s the miniature room that I made for my parents, who love classical music. I think it turned out pretty nicely, and there was no drilling involved.

Contest Winners; Quince-A-Rama

Contest Winners; Quince-A-Rama

First, I’m happy to say that several many of you guessed that the thing missing from my tiny room was indeed a clock! Well done, and now you will all be murdered in nefarious ways in my new comedy book Murder Most Novel about a young woman/aspiring author who becomes embroiled in an Agatha Christie style murder scenario. If you have a particular preference for your murder (poison, machete, bashed with a clock), let me know, and I’ll try to accommodate. You were all very clever, but I have to say that Anonymole’s poem/riddle/guess really took the day:

Dueling portraits invite conversation,
while the bird tweets its irritation.

Below, the blood bright Persian,
offsets the walls’ psilocybin excursions.

A Tiffany, a punch bowl, a violin,
speak of parties, a present left to atone for prior sins.

Yet the room exists in silence,
it enjoys no ticks, no tocks,

For nowhere amongst its fine refinements,
do we see a cherry clock.

So thank you, my friends. You all rose to the challenge and proved that you really do know me so well!

In other news, I’ve been very busy because it’s one of my favourite times of year—the quince is finally ripe. Many years ago, we had a pear tree on our property which started to die. But as it did, another plant sprouted from its base, and that plant was a quince bush. Apparently, quince have hardier roots than some pear species so they’re often grafted onto quince. And while I missed the pear, I soon realized the (labour-intensive) joy that is the quince fruit. They are rock hard and can’t be eaten as is, but if you cook them first, they turn a delightful pink colour and taste amazing. Every year, I become super-home-maker-y and produce several batches of jam as well as some wonderful quince crumble. Of course, I always have more quince than I need so I can sell off the rest to quince lovers in the area and make some money to fund my miniature obsession.

In other other news, I also completed a miniature outdoor courtyard. I think it’s very cute but I’m at the point where I don’t quite know what to do with all these miniatures—maybe I can throw them in with the quince, like “Buy some quince, get a miniature room for free”. It’s a vicious/delicious circle.

Read For Filth; A Mini Challenge

One of the things that I do as a writer, something I simultaneously love AND hate, is live readings. While it’s a wonderful experience to share your work with an appreciative audience, at the same time, I spend days beforehand worrying and stressing about it. What will I read? How long do I have? What if someone reads something similar to me right before it’s my turn? Also, I write some pretty dark stuff and I always have to preface a live reading with “this is fiction” or “my parents are really lovely people” or “I have never killed anyone…that I’m aware of” or “Why are there small children here?!” I’ve had a couple of really awful readings in the past, like the time that I was invited to an online poetry reading. I don’t usually read my own poetry and don’t consider myself a poet, but I DID have a poem that I was quite proud of. It was about the nature of time, and how doing something kind in the moment led me to avoid getting hit by a deer on the road later by about 10 seconds, the same 10 seconds I didn’t take to think about being kind earlier. But then the person before me told the audience a horribly tragic story about a family member who’d been hit and killed in a deer/car accident, which left me scrambling for another poem to read. And then there was the time that I was invited to a reading and wasn’t told until I got there that the theme was love. And I was like, have you even read ANY of my work? Because most of my writing is VERY dark. I didn’t feel too bad though, because the woman before me read a story where the two “lovers” are murdered in a very gory way by a vengeful ghost, and it made my selection seem tame by comparison. Then last weekend, I was at a horror writing conference and I was asked to read. “Perfect,” I thought. “Finally an audience who can appreciate some of my darker stories.” So I picked a couple of short stories that I NEVER read aloud because they are VERY violent. I got up to the podium and began. When I got to a particularly gruesome point in the story, I looked at the audience and stopped reading. “Wow,” I said. “I’d forgotten how nasty this was.” Everybody laughed, but it was that kind of uncomfortable laughter where you want to be supportive of the person who’s just bombing. I’m pretty sure that was all in my head, because when I’d finished the second piece, there was a lot of applause and some people came to buy my book. But still. I guess the problem is that I tend to overthink things. I mean, if you ask me to do a reading, you should know ahead of time exactly what you’re in for.

The last two readings I’ve done though, have been from my humour collection. I didn’t think anyone but me would GET me, but apparently they do, and both times, instead of having to apologize in advance, I just read and people laugh ( and buy even more of my books). Which made me realize that my audiences ARE responding appropriately. They laugh when I’m funny, and scream and cry when I’m scary. Mission accomplished.

The other thing I did this week was (almost finish) my new miniature dining room. I don’t know why I love doing these things so much, and I don’t know whether it’s going to lead to me being a full-blown dollhouse person, but it makes me happy. And here’s a challenge–take a look at the room and if you can identify the one thing that’s still missing (because remember, I said “almost finished”), that will cement you as one of the people who know me the best (Anonymole, I’m looking at you), and I will name a character in my next murder story after you.

Also, the other day, I yelled at a crow. Why? Because it wouldn’t stop cawing and I was trying to write. So I went to the door, opened it, and yelled, “Shut the f*ck up, would you?!” And the crow stopped cawing. Another mission accomplished. And that dead mouse on my porch? Who knows where it came from…

Kit and Ka-glue-dle

Right now, I’m covered in white glue and seething with anger. Why, you ask? Because—and I should have known better—I bought another miniature kit from Amazon, and this one is a veritable nightmare. It looked so adorable on the website—a 2 story apartment with a four poster bed, a grand piano, vintage accessories INCLUDING a desk made from a cast iron sewing machine base, and best of all—an UNDERWOOD TYPEWRITER. And then the kit came. And once again, the instructions were incomprehensible, having been reverse engineered into English from Chinese.

But the worst part was that EVERYTHING had to be built from scratch. Therein lies the problem. I have never been known for my manual dexterity. I have very large hands and enough arthritis that they just don’t work very well. In order to build this kit, I have to manipulate pieces of balsa wood so thin and tiny that I’ve already broken several parts. LUCKILY…there is white glue to put it all back together. Oh, not the glue that came with the kit—that was dried solid—but good old Lepage’s white glue. I gave up early on trying to be accurate with my glue spurting, and now I just layer it on everywhere. It dries clear, which is the only good thing about it, aside from the fact that it eventually sticks things together. So I glue a bunch of stair treads, hold them in my fingers until they’re fairly stable, and then try to pry my hands off without pulling apart the stuff I’ve just glued. And I’m not always successful, so then it’s back to SQUARE F*CKING ONE. Pardon my language, but the typewriter? The one I was so jazzed about? It’s literally half an inch wide and it took TWENTY-TWO pieces of miniscule balsa wood to construct! You heard me—TWENTY-TWO. And don’t get me even started on the stupid grand piano. I would have given up days ago (and it’s been days…many, many days) but if you know me at all, you know I’m no quitter. I will complete this monstrosity, right down to the ridiculous lamp that requires me to glue 8 pieces of plastic and two pieces of metal together, or my name isn’t Player One. The only thing I refuse to do is the insane wireframed eyeglasses that are supposed to sit on the paper feather that I had to carefully cut out (and then locate once it landed on the kitchen floor, and that was eighteen minutes of my life I’m NEVER getting back), because I can’t even see it with my OWN glasses. I hate it. I hate it so much. But I will glue-fully triumph…and then I will throw it onto our firepit and watch it burn like the hellspawn it is.

In other news, Ilana, my favourite cat, is back living with us while the kids are home. And she continues to be completely adorable, as you can tell from the picture below, and is slowly getting over her fear of Atlas, who loves her SO much that he wants to be near her all the time. Sadly, she does not reciprocate his affection. Still, it’s such a joy every morning when she comes running to see me (and my bag of kitty treats) and lets me pet her to my heart’s content…with my glue-y hands.

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.

It’s The Little Things Part 2; Online Launch Party for Charybdis!

The link to the online launch party for Charybdis is at the end of this post, so if you don’t want any humorous content first, you can skip right down to the end, but trust me, you’ll be missing some hilarious sh*t.

Anyway, it’s been another quiet week with a couple of notable exceptions. First…THAT BUG IS BACK. Yes, I woke up on Tuesday morning to another notification that there had been movement detected on my kitchen camera at 2 o’clock in the morning, and yes, it was that same bug. How long do house centipedes LIVE? Is this guy the Methuselah of insects?! And what the hell is he eating?! I looked it up and according to the google, house centipedes eat OTHER ANTHROPODS, which is so cannibalistic and creepy but then again, I’m not surprised that something that looks like the alien in ALIEN eats insect flesh. But then the article I read went on to say that if you have frequent sightings of house centipedes, “this indicates that some prey arthropod is in abundance, and may signify a greater problem than the presence of the centipedes” and OH MY GOD DOES THIS MEAN THERE ARE MORE FREAKY INSECTS IN MY HOUSE?!! Then again, the sighting hasn’t been “frequent”—it’s only the one leggy dude waving at us like “Hey, just haunting your kitchen AND your dreams” so hopefully he’ll run out of food soon.

But the other thing is that I’ve definitely gone down the rabbit hole of miniatures, because a couple of weeks ago, I was at the antique market and I found a bag of vintage dollhouse furniture and a tiny voice in my head whispered, “Buy it. You know you want it. You can do something cool with it.” So I DID buy it and then it sat on the breakfast room table for 2 weeks until Ken whispered, “I can build you a box to put this doll furniture in” which he did. And suddenly, I became a fanatical miniaturist, and I created an entire “Antique Store Office Sanctuary” which now I want to live in and if I could only shrink myself down to 1/12” size, I would totally do it, just to live in my tiny room. Here it is, and I adore it so much:

The Persian rug is actually a mouse pad and I got all the tiny books from Amazon. I already had the Antique storefront from some wall art that I cut apart, and the wallpaper came from a book that I had bought years ago full of William Morris style wrapping paper that I podged on, and I had the trim and created the ‘paintings’ and HOLY SH*T I’m becoming obsessed and I really want to make more miniature rooms, but we all know what happened with the clock fixation, am I right?

In other news, I’m over 8 chapters into my new book “Nomads of the Modern Wasteland”, which centres on a group of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic future, woven together by the poetry of TS Eliot. It’s actually going to be a novella, which is a mini book, so that tracks.

Also, the book launch for Charybdis is on May 26th in person, but if you’re a friend of mine who’d like to celebrate with me but you have NO WAY of coming to Ontario, Canada, my publisher has very graciously set up an online celebration for June 1 and you can register here–it’s FREE!: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/charybdis-by-suzanne-craig-whytock-launch-party-tickets-884105522417?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1