Family Time

..."When a family eats together, they make contact with each other. When contact is made, many messages are sent to each family member. Love, caring and support are communicated. This leads to a build up of a trusting family. This in turn communicates respect for the family unit and places importance on the relevance of family. And what follows is the increase of self-esteem in the family." (Focus on the Family)....

There is a member of my family who is a bit of an ontrol-cay eak-fray. It's sort of her defining feature, which is why I may have to lapse into my rusty Latin whenever I make reference to it: She's a freaking ath-may ofessor-pray, and if she knows I have a blog, she's obviously got the brains to find it, you'd think. Anyway, everyday she visits the Kraft Canada site, a reference place set up for those two-income families that have no time to do anything and are going nuts. All you have to do is name three ingredients you have in your cupboard, and presto, it digs up a recipe you can make for dinner. I went there once, but was feeling snarky so typed in:

1. Glass of Chianti
2. Fava beans
3. Human liver

"Sorry, we were unable to find a recipe with those items," the screen read after a totally sweet and endearing search. (Has any one person or thing EVER worked so hard to try and help me before, despite being so little deserving of aid?) (Answer: NO.)

I guess what I want you to glean from the above story is that we're not really the Plan-Our- Meals-Ahead-of-Time kind of people around here. So this morning, I was rather pleasantly surprised to see that Mr. IQ had actually thought about breakfast before he'd gone to bed last night and made a big pan of overnight French toast. High Intensity was beside herself with joy. Her breakfast diet consists almost exclusively of porridge, and I am VERY stingy with the brown sugar. Thus she lives in a state of almost constant sugar deprivation. The knowledge that she was going to have French toast for breakfast had her almost swooning with excitement.

Oh, it was such a nice and thoughtful idea. But choosing a hearty peasant bread fortified with the bold taste of caraway seeds and dill, and delicately blending it with sugar, eggs and a soupcon of vanilla was, most unfortunately, just not going to work. Not that I knew that when I eagerly took my first bite. Oh boy! French toast! Oh boy! Oh boy. Oh.... oh... oh, my holy good lord. It tasted bad. It tasted oh so terribly, horribly, unbelievably bad.

Now, Mr. IQ has a good sense of humour. He really does. Something in his eyes, however, told me that this was one of those mornings where his old humourous self had been replaced by someone who was not in the mood to have his caraway/dill-flavoured French toast criticized and rejected by anyone. This meant I was going to have to lie. I was going to have to lie to save his dignity. I was going to have to lie to save my life.

"Oh ma goo'neth," I said brightly, "thith ith weally goo'!'" I found talking and simultaneously not allowing the bolus of food to touch my taste buds again rather difficult, so I tried making a happy "wow-this- is-so-delicious" noise instead. Unfortunately, my "mmmmmm" came out sounding like a dying man's moan. There was no choice but to swallow. Ugh. There were at least twenty more bites to go. What was I going to do? Luckily, Baby Fangs was crawling around under the table, and I managed to get some of the larger pieces off my plate and into her unprotesting little mouth without him really noticing.

High Intensity, meanwhile, was totally freaking out. (She hasn't learned to read faces yet, a trait she's just going to have to learn if she hopes to stay alive around here.) "UGHGHGH!! THIS IS TERRIBLE!! I HATE THIS !! NOW I'M GOING TO STARVE TO DEATH!!!" she screamed. The disappointment was more than she could take. She collapsed over the table like she had been shot in the stomach. Then she burst into tears.

Like I said, Mr. IQ is usually a big, good-natured bear, but, um, not this morning. Howling with rage, he grabbed what was remaining in the pan, ran into the kitchen, and dumped the entire contents into the garbage. "I can't believe how ungrateful you all are!!" he shouted, "I'm never making breakfast again!!" He did not return to the dining room, and instead stomped off to take a shower. Note: He didn't eat more than one bite of his French toast either. I looked around the room, and broke out into a relieved sweat. With him gone, we would not have to pretend to eat any more of it. Quietly, I cleaned up the remains, and made... oatmeal. High Intensity ate hers in front of the TV watching Elmo, still whimpering a little. Mr. IQ sulkily ate his in front of the computer and I ate mine in the living room. Baby Fangs didn't have any. Instead, she found a secluded, dark corner and in her typically sweet, uncomplaining manner, silently spewed large chunks of caraway/dill French toast on to the floor and stared quizzically at the regurgitated remains.

I don't think Focus on the Family would be very pleased with us.

My First Post Written While Nursing a Hangover Ever

...she wrote a tad less enthusiastically...

So humiliated. If I didn't phone you, I sent you an email, and if I didn't email, I left a blog comment. I have no clue what I wrote but I'm sure it was all grammatically incorrect, full of spelling mistakes and very maudlin.

Getting drunk with access to technology is so embarrassing these days.

My First Post Written While Intoxicated EVER!!

....hic.....

WHoooooooooooooooooooooo, am I DRUNK!!!!!!!!

I know I make a lot of references to booze, but the reality is, I don't actually drink that much.

Proof: I am drunk on the bottle of wine my mother gave me LAST FALL!!!

As always, being drunk has filled me with lots of insightful wisdom (???!!!!!??), but my profoundness is beyond the scope of my humble little blog. So I'll just leave you with some memorable quotes from the evening.

Eight-year-old sister of High Intensity's Play Date Friend to her mother while climbing the stairs to look for her pants: "And you thought OUR house was a disaster, mom!"

Mr. IQ, after returning home from a twelve hour day at work and school: "You're drunk... and not that charming!"

Me, saying good-bye to Play Date's mother tonight at 10:17 PM, after ten hours of heavy Playdating: "Hey, come back soon, this has been FUN!!!!!!!"

Guilt, But Not Really

...sorry Mr. IQ...not that you ever really minded...

I don't know if it's my guilty conscience bugging me or what, but it seems like every time I read a blog these days, the writer in question is saying something nice about her little love partner. The Constant Whiner's husband was kind to her when she was recently ill; DoctorMama's husband is a mensch. And of course Heather CAN'T say anything crappy about Marcel -- he really IS perfect... and I'm posting a picture at the bottom of this page just to prove it. Just kidding, sadly, the image of his walnut-cracking adult buns will have to wait for another day... I can't find it, damn it.

A few weeks ago, I went on a quest to find a blog that contained complaints about a husband. It took a while, but finally I found one. Absolutely spellbound, I read in relieved fascination how TOM made this poor woman's life hell. He made her grumpy. He made her say things she regretted. He brought her down big time, and made the days difficult to get through. Good lord, he even made her retain water. "Wow, this TOM is a real asshole!" I thought happily, "Yay!"

Boo. It took me a while to figure out, because I'm not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it turned out TOM was a coy reference to her "Time Of the Month." Ooh, how cutsie. Barf.

Crap.

OK, so no-one else complains about their partner. This may seem like a pathetic attempt to employ some (not-so) clever sophistry to try to assuage my guilty feelings, but as far as I'm concerned, the fact that I complain about him is actually proof that things are pretty darn good. I mean, if I came home and found him prancing around in front of a mirror in a flowery bra and pair of silky drawers, it's not like I would run to the computer and start blogging about it. (Dear blog world, today I had the most terrible surprise...) In fact, if things were really awful, I don't think I would ever mention him at all. So you see? This proves that my complaints are TRIVIAL because I rant about them ALL THE TIME.

Last night before I went to sleep I gave Mr.IQ a jab in the ribs. "Hey, Sugartits," I said, "Does my blog piss you off?"

"Huuuugh? No...."

"When you think about it," I said, "it reflects badly on me, and not you at all."

"Uh huh."

"Because I've noticed no-one else does it. Complains about their partner. But no-one is perfect, I mean, all husbands have their little peccadilloes. But I'm the only one who actually whines about them. So it just means that I'm not very nice."

"Mmmmm."

"There's a big chunk of chocolate fudge in the fridge right now."

"Uhhhhh."

"That Internet girl you had a crush on has unlocked her site and she's posted nude pictures of herself there."

"Zzzzzzz..."



I don't think he's too concerned.

Happy Year of the Pig!

...we've been celebrating it around here for the last four years....

Ten years ago when I lived in South Korea, it was the Year of the Tiger, and no-one was reproducing if they could help it. Tigers are not nice people, apparently, and have a hard time finding mates. No-one wants to be married to one, I guess having a tiger in your bed isn't all it's cracked up to be. Aharharharhar, get it? Me neither. Anyway, most North Americans I knew thought it was ridiculous, and were not shy about expressing their very superior western opinions with regards to the Chinese zodiac.

About half-way though my year there, a Canadian who was about as stupid as they come arrived at my school. Her first sentence to me was, "Hi, what's your name, what's your sign?"

"Uh, Whippersnapper? I'm a... Leo?" I said.

"Oh," she snarled. And for the rest of our time together, she barely spoke to me. She was a Virgo, and apparently us Leos and Virgos don't get along so well together. Like oil and vinegar, Bailey's and vodka and a Chinese/Italian restaurant that problematically names itself Chittily (it went under, sur-prise!), lions and virgins clash. That was certainly true in our case. I sure couldn't stand HER, that's for certain.

Leos are supposed to be bossy, headstrong things, the kind of people who enter a room and TAKE OVER. Being almost six feet tall, you might think that was true of me, but, um, SO NOT, I'm shy, dude. (Unless I'm in my classroom and Billy is talking through my lesson on carbon bonds. Then WATCH OUT.) A long time ago, during a prolonged and worrisome period of unemployment, my own mother suggested, and only in a half-joking way, that I pursue a career in the S and M field. As she so delicately phrased it, when I put on a pair of tall, leather boots I assume an Ilsa of Auschwitz look that could prove profitable with the corporate CEO crowd who enjoy being forced to lick toilet seats in their spare time. But, uh, no thanks. My birthday may fall in the summer, but deep at heart, I'm an Aquarius. At least, that's what I tell zodiac freaks now, when they ask.

I mention all this because the Chinese New Year, for reasons mentioned above, always makes me reminisce about my year in the Orient, and that idiot who refused to speak to me because our signs clashed. That's why I actually paused on the Horoscope page of Saturday's Globe and Mail yesterday to see what it had to say about us obnoxious, vain, overbearing lions. It said:

Partners and colleagues have been rather demanding of late and if there are any simmering tensions they are likely to come to the boil this weekend. You may feel justified in losing your temper but you will gain more in the long-term if you stay calm. You cannot afford to lose your head.

Well, I have been trying to stay calm. I've been trying to stay calm for the entire four years we've lived in this house. "Simmering tensions??" I've been placed in a pot and slow-cooked into a gluey, miserable, gelatinous wreck of a human who can barely remember a time when life was cool and tidy and I danced through days with grace and ease. Because of THIS!

And THIS!


Arghh, and THIS!!!!!



No. No, I'm NOT going to show you pictures of our basement and garage, you nosy bunch of peeping toms! I have some pride left, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Pride, maybe, but not much left with regards to mental well-being. Basically, I think I've really snapped. Our "clearing-out-the- office-so-we-can-go-on-and-lead- normal-lives" project has transformed our home from just an ordinary squalid hovel to Chaos Central, a place that fills my heart with sadness and despair every time I walk through the door. I post the above pictures so that you can understand, if not totally relate to, my plight. (None of you would be stupid enough to allow your house to get this out of hand, I am certain.) I've tried to explain to him that I am actually VERY easy-going: Most women could never stand this, not for one second, and would have told him to get out and take all of his lousy junk with him A LONG TIME AGO. But everything I say just falls on deaf ears, and my complaints are dismissed as those of a common nag. I recently whined about my situation to a friend of mine (male) who said, "But Whippersnapper, you knew he was a slob and a pack rat from the beginning." Meaning, "You knew what you were getting into, suck it up babe." I guess he has a point, but the reality is, things lose their charm after you've lived with them for a while. My father, with his strong Scandinavian accent, charmed the pants off my mom (literally, I guess, ugh!) by making pronunciation gaffs in words like "locomotive" (he always stressed the second syllable, making it sound like a laxative.) 40 years later, however, "charmed" would be the last word you would use to describe my mom's reaction when he mispronounces a word, let me tell you.

***

Doo dee doo, now that I've vented about him, I've got to go and find him so he can help me post the above pictures. I already know what he'll do. He'll read this, say worriedly, "But now everyone will think I'm a big slob," shake his good-natured head sorrowfully, and then post the pictures. 'Cause in his own special, disorganized way, he is a VERY nice guy.

PS: Regarding the graffiti on the boxes: High Intensity's name is NOT really Violet.

Three Things, Totally Unrelated

...it's supposed to be +4 C on Sunday, and so help me, I've got my bathing suit ready...

Oh yay. According to Mr. IQ, CBC radio ran a "Debunking All Them Winter Myths" series last week, and going for a half-naked jaunt down the street does NOT burn off calories at a faster rate than, say, walking in circles around the dining room table like the Bronte sisters used to do. Arghh. You know what this means, don't you, (she typed semi-hysterically), it means that it's official, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOOD ABOUT LIVING IN THIS FROZEN HELLHOLE AT ALL. NOTHING, NADA, ZIPPO and if I stay here for one more winter, I'M GOING TO DIE.

So we're going to have to move.

The problem is selling the house. We'll need a good ad, of course, so I've been working on one.

Four bedroom house for sale. No, you CANNOT go into the basement. And get the hell away from that office! Auughgh, don't open the kitchen cupboards! That looked like it hurt. Say, check out those hardwood floors! And the cute ornamental fireplace!

Within pleasant walking distance of charming comfort women and cozy crack dens. Cheerful yellow DO NOT CROSS police ribbons add a colourful, festive feel to the neighbourhood.

Serious inquiries only.

I'll never get out of here.

Not only am I cold, but I appear to have developed yet another physical abnormality to add to my general feeling of malaise. No, I don't suddenly have a tiny penis growing out of my armpit, nor have I sprouted a third buttock. But on the weekend I discovered a tiny hair growing from the bottom of my left eyelid and poking straight into my eyeball like a needle. Holy crap, did it HURT. I performed the necessary operation with a pair of scissors and a quart of gin for company, but now I'm scared I'm destined for a lifetime of eyelid hair removal, in addition to my 'stache maintenance. Jeez, I didn't know old age would mean all this extra hairiness.

Hey! I went over to my parents for dinner tonight, and after the main course, my mom presented me with an assortment of delicious cheese. "Have you been to Superstore?" she asked, "they've got a lot of really good cheese sales on right now..."

Feeling Scroogey

....what IS the equivalent Bah Humbug expression for St. Valentine's Day ANYWAY?....

I'll be honest. I think Valentine's Day is stupid. What's more, I don't even think men and women should be allowed to live together, at least not to the point where familiarity starts breeding things (and I don't mean small children.) I'll probably change my mind again in a few days when I've calmed down, but unfortunately I was recently traumatized by an event that has burned a hole in my delicate and fragile psyche, and it has left me scarred people, absolutely scarred. It happened a few days ago, when I strolled innocently into the bathroom. There he was, That Guy... sitting on the pot, pants down around his ankles and (ugh, I can hardly write it) contentedly reading from a copy of.... Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics. Stunned, I stared at him, and he stared at me. Red Alert! Red Alert! my brain screamed, nothing good here, get away, get away! Slowly I backed off as one would from a rabid dog or a knife-wielding Crazy Man with underpants on his head. Five minutes later the bathroom door opened and he silently emerged and disappeared into the office. We haven't spoken of it since. But both of us know things have irrevocably changed, and we can never go back.


I know you may be thinking, "English Eccentrics? What's the big deal?" I can't really explain, and that's just the thing: You'd have to live with him for a while to truly understand. I'll simply try to summarize my unhappy feelings by saying, jeez.. couldn't he have been sitting there with a copy of Playboy or Naughty Schoolgirl Hussies or something more... NORMAL?? **sigh** It's just so.... weird.

Actually, my antipathy towards the Day o' Love may well have deep-seated genetic origins, and the reason I say this is because I suspect old High Intensity may have inherited them. Precious angel! She sat at the dining room table tonight, all innocence and sweetness, making her Valentine's Day cards for her classmates and shouting things like, "Ronald! I HATE Ronald! Why do I have to make a card for RONALD?!" The affection I felt for her as she spouted off stuff like that knew no bounds. I don't know, something about a misanthropic four-year-old just warms the cockles of your heart.

Okay, now you're all shocked. Look, from what she's told me, Ronald IS a jerk. Anyway, here's the card she made for him. Great, isn't it? Look out, Hallmark, that's all I can say.



Happy Valentine's Day, all you lovers.

One Paragraph Post , Plus Addendum in Form of Irritated Growl

...or Winter on the Canadian Prairies...Couldn't we just go and piss off North Korea or something so they could bomb us out of our misery?...

The only good thing about the weather being so damn miserably cold for so damn miserably long is that if you DO pig out on some, oh, I don't know, defrosted discount Brie for example, (it really DOES freeze rather well, incidentally), all you have to do to get rid of that horrible "ooooh, I really did it to myself this time" feeling, is take a quick, inadequately-dressed stroll to the end of the street and back. Your body goes, Holy Crap, it's FREEZING out here, metabolize, METABOLIZE! and voila! Excess calories burned off, and without any ridiculous 45 minute workout on the exercise machine. The only obstacle is summing up the will power to get your butt out there. Which is what I'm trying to do right now. Unfortunately, Mr. IQ has fiddled with the computer, and now every ten minutes or so this little bubbly thing looms up obnoxiously and tells me the current temperature, which is very discouraging. I suppose if you lived in Palm Springs, this would be a welcome, indeed smugly charming feature that you would wish to install to remind yourself that you are living where the rest of the world, especially all those stupid, half-frozen Canadians, would wish to live. However living, as we do, in this ridiculous, frozen hellhole, why the heck would I wish to be reminded that it is -31 C out there every TEN #$@%8$%#! MINUTES????? Is he CRAZY???

Garrgh.

I Love The World at Six

...news hour, news hour, rah rah rah...

A lot of people say that they don't watch, listen or read the news because it is too depressing. In the last few weeks, though, I've found quite the opposite to be true. All I hear seems to confirm that I am NOT in fact as crazy, weird or slobby as I could be, and that can only be good news. Case in point:

1. When I first became aware of Mr IQ's little Internet crush, I certainly never strapped on a diaper, packed a bag with an assortment of lethal weapons, and headed off to Oxford to do some damage. Now, that's REALLY weird.

2. Apparently Robert Pickton is claiming he has no clue how a bucket with a head floating in it came to be found in his home. As a friend of mine said, "You know, I've let my housekeeping get a little out of hand before, but, um, not to the point where I would have failed to notice a severed head in a bucket lying about..." Yah! Yah! I'm not THAT disorganized!!

Actually, it's pretty bad around here, to the point where we have managed to misplace both of our cordless phones. We've whistled and shouted and called them by name, but alas, they appear to be gone so Mr. IQ went down to the basement the other day and hauled up one of his (eight) rotary dial phones. (Oh yay. I can write another "Great Things About Living With a Pack Rat" list, she wrote dejectedly.) We can't get our messages now, but I still kind of like it. The ring is so cheezy and retro -- every time someone calls I feel like I'm in a 70s cop show and I half expect a macho voice to tell me to meet someone at Joe's Bar to pick up "the package." What I'm trying to say is that running for the phone these days makes me feel like I'm in an episode of the Rockford Files. Fun, eh, aren't you jealous of my life?

The mothers of the world are driving me absolutely nuts. Every time someone with a baby sees me with Baby Fangs, I'm accosted and interrogated on what she has "accomplished." They wait impatiently for me to finish mumbling, "well, she sure is pooping a lot more these days..." before breathlessly running down the list of everything their kid can do (which is always A LOT.) One mother I actually know was obnoxious enough to slow down the car, roll down her window (it was -37 C out), sing out, "Baby Annoying Genius is cah-raw-ling!" and then drive away without so much as offering to give me a lift. As I trudged home to my concrete pillar of a baby (she just started crawling this week, but on that day, she wasn't even close to getting off her launching pad) I decided I'd HAD ENOUGH. So now when I see a mother heading my way to have the Comparison Chat (I can always tell, they look crazy, absolutely crazy) I give Fangsie a good jab in the ribs; not enough to hurt her, but just enough to sort of piss her off. This makes her scowl, and bare all her teeth and I'll tell you, this absolutely stops these women cold in their tracks. They pause, just long enough to shoot me a look of respect, and then scurry off, surreptitiously glancing at my chest to check for blood stains. Ha! I win! 'Cause at the end of the day, it's all about who would survive the dog eat dog world that would accompany global destruction and the ensuing breakdown of society, and in that department, my baby totally rules. Cuz no one would mess with da Fangs, ya know what I'm saying?

High Intensity is having a hard time in nursery school: A bunch of girls are being really mean to her. So I'm going over to the school on Monday to beat those girls up talk to the teacher. She's only four years old for goodness sakes, she's way too young to have to be going through this. And it's kind of breaking my heart. My baby. Why does life have to be so wretched and mean sometimes?

The Competition

...this post lacks a certain credibility, for reasons that will be made clear at the end... but I swear she DID (DOES) exist...

Crisis has hit the House of Whippersnapper!! Mr. IQ has fallen for another woman!! That's right, some pretentious, neurotic American attending Oxford University has stolen his bastard, two-timing heart!

Things have been a little tense around here lately, because, as you know, I have been spending the days holed up alone with the kids. Sometimes I sneak in here and check out a few blogs, but mostly there is no real opportunity to sit down and really catch up on everyone. When I finally get the two of them to bed, and have the whole house to myself, guess who waltzes through the door and demands immediate computer rights? Oh, you know it. Him. I have to sneak in when he's in the bathroom and quickly check in on DoctorMama (who I'm too lazy to link right now, but she's over there on the left.) In other words, my blogging habit has become furtive, and feels slightly illegal. Yet I must do it, or I become shaky and miserable. I might as well take up heroin.

Anyway, because my computer time is so limited, you can imagine that when HE is hogging it, I am never far away, hovering always on the periphery and suspiciously making sure he does not stray from the task at hand. Naturally then, me knickers got into a wee bit of a knot when he began visiting this one particular blog site a little more than I deemed appropriate for someone who had "ten thousand papers due immediately."

"What the hell?" I exclaimed the 738th time I saw Alice in Wonderland pictures pop up on the computer screen. "Why are you THERE again?" "There" being the Lewis Carrol-inspired blog page of some lovely, long haired girl half my age that I (that's right, I) stumbled upon last December.

"No reason," he said, blushing, and hastily left the site. I stared at the blank screen and then at him. The true meaning of it all hit me with hurricane force.

"My goodness," I said slowly, "you've got a crush on her, don't you?"

"Oh, hell, yeah," he said, grinning sheepishly.

People, I just cannot compete. She takes dreamy pictures of herself staring up into the clouds, and actually displays them on her site. (Every shot taken of me since 2001 has me glaring into the camera with a "get that damn camera out of my face before I punch you in the stomach" expression.) She appears to speak German and French in addition to her native English. I can say "fart" in Korean, and that's about it. ("Pong-goo" -- great, isn't it?) She is a feminist, post-modernist, intellectual scholar. I am a crappy little high school teacher on maternity leave who doesn't even know what post-modernism means. (Does it have something to do with those weird movies that have creepy, mute people peeing into concrete milk cartons?) She ends her solipsistic, whiny rants cynical, yet strangely provocative posts with phrases like, "fuck you, I'm anarchy!" I only drop F bombs when driven to it by several days of housebound despair.

Later: HA HA HA, I just went to her site to link her, and she's made it accessible only to her friends!! Cut off, buddy, COLD TURKEY for you!! (I wonder if she suspected that she was being stalked???)

And later still: In retrospect, it's probably just as well she has cut herself off from all strangers. It's probably against the laws of blog etiquette to link another blog to make fun of it. So I'm very grateful that fate prevented me from being a jerk. Having said that, I must confess I'm rather sorry you can't see her site, and her picture... they were... something else.

Good Things About Living with a Pack Rat, Part II

...sigh...

As you know from last day's post, the weather has gotten miserably cold again, and I have (once again) spent the last few days cooped up in the house with two small children and lots and lots and lots of stuff. 90% of the crap is books, absolutely ridiculous when you consider that we're not even particularly smart people. No great leaps of brilliance are coming out of this house, that's for sure, except for possibly Baby Fangs: Her glass-shattering, nipple-piercing, eardrum destroying shriek, mastered just in time for the shut-in, must surely must indicate vocal precociousness of some kind or another. Anyway, whenever Mr. IQ comes waltzing home with a new book, my line is always, "Well, we could use a book or two around this place to make us look smart or something." It was funny once. Now I say it in a warbling voice, brushing back tears.

Once again, though, my cheery optimism and unfailing good humour will see me though this. And to help keep me focused on the sunny (albeit frigid) side of life, I've come up with a few more great things about living a pack-rat.

1. Last summer, CBC ran that Ulysses challenge, where every Canadian was supposed to spend the only two good weather months of the year slogging through James Joyce's 1000+ page classic. Although I was doubtful I could do it, I nevertheless spent the better part of three days hunting through all our stupid piles and shelves and mountains of books trying to find our copy of the damn thing. I couldn't find it in time , but I DID stumble upon an old copy of Finnegan's Wake by the same author and flipping through the pages I found a FIFTY DOLLAR BILL!!! Guess what we used it for? A trip to the thrift store, and MORE BOOKS!!! Ha ha ha!!(light tinkly laughter with only a slight, shrill edge to it.)

2. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Thus being house proud is definitely a one-way ticket to the deepest pits of hell for ALL ETERNITY!! And despite my many failings, no one could accuse me of having a swelled head about this place! Too much pack rat crap strewn everywhere!! When the doorbell rings, we all fall into panic mode, and run around like crazy closing doors. We also have to frantically search for Mr. IQ's pants. (Calm down, he has his boxers on.) It's very mortifying. In the summer I can avoid having anyone see this place by saying, "Oh, the weather's too nice to be indoors!!" But when the temperature is -40 C (which is what it was yesterday, today we're apparently going to be spoiled with a balmy -37 C) well, it's a little rude to leave 'em standing on the doorstep. What's worse, I wonder? Being known as a rude, unsociable SOB, or as a slobby stasher of stuff? I wonder. Anyway, I'm not going to hell, because I am not proud! (More laughter: HAHAHA! A slight neurotic tinge to the chuckles can be detected now.)

3. Well, we all know that driving cars contributes to the world's carbon emission problem. So by not driving the car ... blah, blah blah... less greenhouse gases.... blah blah .... virtuous, clean-living lifestyle... blah blah... I'm better than you, because you were in a car today... blah blah blah..blah blah....blah..wah...wagh...waah... wah... waaaaaaaaaahh... WAAAAAAAGHHHHGHHHHH!!!!!!! (Choking, guttural sobs. Translation: Severely distressed. Send help immediately.)

BY THE WAY: Check out the time that I am posting this. Yes, that is accurate, I have totally been shut off from the computer for days now, and, truthfully, this whole month has been a bit of a disaster, computer-time wise. To get unlimited, undisturbed access I have to sneak down in the middle of the night illicitly, like I'm off to buy crack. Grrrrr, I'll explain next time.

I's Gots Da Blues

....there's another draft written, but, my God is it a bunch of maudlin crap, even in her low state, the blogger was not stupid enough to press the PUBLISH button...

I've noticed something about my brain chemistry when the temperatures plunge into the frigid zone. I lose all ability to do, well, anything. Anything good, that is. It's not SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, it's FINTGOOTHAD, or, Fuck, I Need To Get Out Of The House Affective Disorder. Basically, I've been imprisoned in this hole for three days, and oh, crap, am I going crazy.

The long-winded explanation is locked away in a draft that is tucked away safely, and will never see the light of blog day. In brief, I will tell you that:

1) Because the pack rat has filled our garage with crap, we have been forced to park the car on the street. For those who have not spent a winter suffering on the bald prairie, I will spell out for you that this means disaster, because without a garage, you cannot plug in your car and keep the battery warm. So as I type, our frosty little Tercel is sitting out by the curb, a motionless hunk of useless metal, because OF COURSE IT WILL NOT START WHEN THE TEMPERATURE HAS HIT ABSOLUTE ZERO OUTSIDE AND IT'S NOT FREAKING PLUGGED IN.

2) We have actually had access to two vehicles for the last few weeks because Mr. IQ's parents are in Mexico and they left their van with us. This was excellent for me, because it meant that during the dark days of January, I could actually go places without having to swaddle up old Baby Fangs like she was a chunk of pork in a deep-fried Chinese dumpling.

3) Yes. Yes, I have wanted to kill Mr. Zero IQ for effectively sabotaging my one means of getting out of house during this latest cold snap. You just cannot walk to a bus stop with a small baby when it is this cold, no matter how well she is dressed. And yes, I have imagined a lot of scenarios where I deal effectively with my rage. The best one has him returning home, and I'm waiting for him at the door with a martini in one hand, and a large, shiny ax in the other. "Welcome back, darling!" I say. WHACK WHACK WHACK.

Basically I've spent the last three days stuck inside, and it has NOT been good for my mental health. All day alone with two kids and good old Mr. Bladder Infection, and, frankly, he hasn't been that great company. Dr. High Intensity has been trying to cure my condition by slamming fluffy stuffed animals into my abdomen, and then asking if I feel better. "Oh, much better," I tell her and then I go upstairs and change my pants.

Laffs, laffs, laffs.