Secret Library

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.

Lost In Translation

You may remember that Ken and I recently turned part of our house into a space for a Writer’s Retreat and it turned out beautifully. But the one thing I really wanted, the secret library door, had proven to be logistically not possible. The weight of the books alone would make the door possibly pull off its hinges, and other options, like buying books and cutting them down so only the spines were attached was financially not feasible. But then I was on Amazon and saw this amazing wallpaper/sticker type deal that looked like books on a shelf and was long enough that it could be simply stuck to the door, giving the illusion of a bookshelf that would hide the entrance to the library/writing room. I ordered it and it arrived last week. It was in a long tube, so I unrolled it. You may be shocked to learn that it wasn’t quite what I expected.

Me: Those books are REALLY big, like bigger than what a book should be.
Ken: They didn’t look that big in the Amazon picture.
Me: I don’t know if this is going to fool anyone.
Ken: I can always put molding on it to make it seem like there are real shelves…

Some of the books had plain spines, but some of them had titles. And then I started looking closely at the book titles…

Me: What kind of book title is this? ‘Tales Of Homeopathic Gherkin’?!
Ken: This one says, ‘Conquest and Mushroom’. I don’t think these are real books.
Me: I’m inclined to agree.

The titles of the books were all, with one exception, absolutely bizarre, like someone had taken perfectly normal book titles and then translated them into another language, and then translated them back, like the way the movie Twister was translated into Run! Run! Cloudzilla! in Chinese . The one exception was King of Darkness, which could very well be someone’s take on Lord of the Flies or Dracula or something like that. But I thought, just in case anyone asked, that I should have a synopsis of each of these books so that we wouldn’t take any flack for our cheap and obviously reverse-translated weird-ass secret library wall. So here are the books that grace the entrance to the writing retreat, and here’s what they’re about:

1) Tales of Homeopathic Gherkin

This charming collection of stories focuses on a young man in a bit of a pickle after eschewing traditional medicine in favour of herbal remedies. That is, until he comes across Sally Zucchini, an Italian naturopath who shows him the joys of a good brine bath. It’s a truly ‘dill’-ightful read.

2) Brave Slipper

Brave Slipper is the story of ‘the other slipper’—the one Prince Charming DIDN’T try to jam on Cinderella’s foot. Alone and bereft of her partner, the crystalline orphan embarks on a rescue mission to save her sibling from being ground up, melted, and turned into a bong.

3) Conquest and Mushroom

Speaking of bongs, this fun romp centres on a troop of conquistadors who experience a group hallucination after imbibing some homeopathic fungi. Believing that they are now famous disco dancers, they take the world by storm with their ‘hustle’.

4) Spell Ingredients

I-N-G-R-E-D-I-E-N-T-S

5) Dawn Fly Stuff

In the vein of Apocalypse Now, this intense war retrospective was made famous by the line, “There’s nothing like the smell of RAID in the morning.”

6) Sapphire of Magical Sniper

Raised in a small village on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, Steve The Sorcerer finds fame when he discovers the Holy Sapphire of Sparta. Using its magical powers to destroy his enemies, mostly other two-bit magicians and by destroy, we mean reveal how they do their card tricks, Steve becomes known as the Magical Sniper (and also, ‘that dick, Steve’). Until the Sapphire is stolen by his arch-nemesis, Vlad the Impersonator, a pseudo-magician slash ventriloquist who hides the precious gemstone in his dummy, also named Steve. When Steve goes missing (the dummy, not the dick), the whole world of magic is in an uproar. Will Steve be found in time to help Vlad get on Canada’s Got Talent? Stay tuned!

7) 2037

The year is 2037. Suzanne finally has her secret library room…

A Colourful Little Number

You may remember me telling you that in December, I submitted my humour book What Any Normal Person Would Do to a fairly prestigious competition, The Leacock Medal for Humour. I was worried that my books wouldn’t be received by the deadline, since I’d decided so late in the year to submit, but I got notified that they’d made it safely into the hands of the judges. As part of the competition, every entrant gets put on the website along with the title of their submission, a headshot, and a biography. My headshot was really cute, featuring me wearing a black leather vest just to give me a little bit of a bad-ass vibe. I know I probably don’t stand a chance because Rick Mercer published ANOTHER book last year, and there are quite a few other famous Canadian humourists from huge publishing houses on the list. But still, I was excited to see myself on the website. I went there last week and called up the list. I scanned. I scanned. I continued scanning, but I wasn’t worried because I assumed that since it wasn’t in any kind of alphabetical order that I could discern, then it must be in the order that submissions were received. And then finally, I found myself:

Me: OMG. You won’t guess where I am on the list!
Ken: At the very top.
Me: I love how supportive you are, but no!
Ken: Where are you then?
Me: Number 69!!

And it just seemed so damned appropriate that a weirdo like me with the most absurd sense of humour would be NUMBER 69. I laughed my ass off and then I did what any normal person would do—I posted it on Facebook. And it’s a credit to my friends that only ONE person even remarked upon it. I had 88 likes and 39 comments and NONE of them aside from the first person mentioned it at all! I mean, the congratulations were wonderful, but I hadn’t posted it to brag or anything—I just thought it was outrageously funny, and then I felt dumb because no one else did, and then I was worried that I might have offended people and they were too nice to say anything about it. But then I went to get a tattoo and I was telling my tattoo artist about the whole thing:

Me: And I’m on the list…at number 69.
Tattoo Guy: WHAT? Bwah haha! That’s hilarious! Of all the numbers to get, you had to get the dirtiest one!
Me (relieved): I know, right?!
Tattoo Guy: Well, now you’ve got to win.

So yeah. That’s me. Number 69. I feel like I’ve already won.

In other news, Ken and I are still hard at work on transforming one of our bedrooms into a secret library room with the idea of turning the whole back part of the house (bedroom, secret library, and private bathroom) into a Writer’s Retreat that we can rent out. We’ve been doing it on a dime, getting furniture and accessories second-hand and so far haven’t been scammed like we were initially. We got a gorgeous leather loveseat from a lady for fifty bucks on the condition that we also took the sofa, which was badly damaged. But the dump was on our way home, and if you know anything about me, you know I LOVE the dump. But sadly, this was the kind of dump where they watch you ALL THE TIME to make sure you don’t take anything that other people have dumped. How fair is that? Then we finally got the loveseat home only to discover, after Ken and our neighbour made several attempts, that it was too big to go up the stairs. So now, I have a gorgeous leather loveseat in my office on the main floor and my green leather couch is in the new secret library. I hope people appreciate my sacrifice.