Halloweekend

A house in a nearby neighbourhood - points off for no severed limbs.

Confession: I'm a huge fan of Halloween. Even growing up, autumn was always my favourite season and having a holiday in there that celebrated (for us non-wiccans, at least) fake blood, scary movies and type II diabetes-driven fun? So. Boss. The Boy and I had some errands to run on Saturday so we decided to strap on some warm boots, pack an umbrella and head out into our neighbourhood to get 'er done. And got 'er did, we done.

It's our first year owning a house so we decided to buy some treats in case some little ones happen by this weekend. But a combination of the "Frankenstorm" (or, more accurately, as a friend on Facebook pointed out, Dr. Frankenstorm's Monster), the relative demographics of our neighbourhood (young singles and couples, few kids) and the area of town we live in (the lovely park near our house becomes decidedly more.. sexy at night) ensure that I will, once again, be single-handedly consuming 2 bags of Crispy Crunch mini-bars. A fate I shall suffer through with cheerful good will.

We had the best intentions to go to a party this year, as we usually do, and show off our amazing (read: hilarious to only us) costumes but lack of foresight in actually reading a package's contents led us to not having the correct supplies to properly complete them. So, at 8pm we did what any quick-thinking and highly-motivated young couple would do - we watched The Grudge, ate a bag of chips and drank ourselves to sleep.

Halloweekend!

For a great collection of people a million times smarter than us chuckleheads, here's an amazing collection of witty, funny and often just plain dedicated costumes. 

Christmas is Coming

Yes, folks, only 2 months until Christmas. And yes, I'm *that* person, thanks for wondering.

Basically, the only reason I'm excited about the gingerbread and jingle bells creeping into my local supermarket is because each day brings me closer to the possibility of this being in my boyfriend's parents' house. So. Happy.

Of course, it would only be a placeholder for the much-too-expensive-but-totally-worth-it this , but that's okay. That's what dreams are for.

Autumn-eroticism

A Fall treat, in that it will cause you to "fall" into a diabetic coma.

Man, are bloggers ever horny for autumn. The last pair of white denim cutoffs gets put into storage after Labour Day and .. bam. It begins: pictures of pugs dressed up as bumblebees, hipsters switching out their "mojito-inspired" cocktails for some kind of Mayan hot chocolate spice shit, reasonable, level-headed people manage to publish entire 500-word missives detailing their love of all things burnt orange and cinnamoned. Unreal. I mean, it makes sense - fall is the perfect time for plaid and wool blankets and layering and a million other things beloved by bloggers. Besides, at least in this part of the world, it's freaking pretty. But still, people. Get it together. It's like they're obsessed. It's almost as though the season is so damned beautiful that it makes someone lose their mind temporarily as they gaze upon the utter beauty that is the changing, forever marching passage of time as personified by Gaia, the spirit Mother who..

And what the hell is this? A "mum-kin"?! Why did I buy this??
(Please at least try to ignore the massive jug of wine in the background)

Okay. Guilty. I love the hell out of Autumn. It's totally the best and if I had any stick-with-it-ness or ability to craft you'd all be getting DIY tips on making ghost pillowcases and apple-honey oatmeal. Luckily for you, I'm lazy and talentless.

Lately, I've been thinking about what it will be like to live in a city that doesn't have such an obvious change of seasons. My work requires that I move around a bit every few years and, while I haven't had the pleasure yet, it's only a matter of time before I have to move on to (given my latitude, probably literally) greener pastures. And I don't know, man. People like to crap on this city (after living downtown for a few years I now know that can also be taken literally) but I think it's tops.

Beautiful enough to give you chest flushes
and butt tingles, am I right?

And I don't know what I'm going to do without that chill in the air, that feeling like things are quieting down, that smell of fire and slight decay and home cooking as I walk through the neighbourhood, leaves crunching satisfyingly beneath my moccasins as I..

.. must.. post... homemade.. scarecrow.. teapot.. DIY...

Phew! Okay, better.

So for now I'm trying to enjoy every moment of "fall-ness", every blessed apple-cider soaked ounce of it all. Especially because it comes on the heels of a new place to decorate and a new roomie to share walks and pumpkin carving and beef stews with. And we will cherish these moments because I suspect the real reason anyone could ever dislike Autumn is because it runs into the hellmouth that is Winter. And then? Ain't no amount of Arctic prints or fair trade hot cocoa that's gonna save you. You will sneeze and shiver and regret your way right into April, child.

The Blog of Lost Things

I'm an incorrigible loser.

Yuck it up, chuckleheads - but it's true. Ever since I was in short pants (I love that saying like I love short pants) I am always losing things. I have gone through a record 14 debit cards, lost countless pieces of jewellery, and misplaced enough single gloves to unknowingly supply a Michael Jackson impersonator convention. I am also a grown adult, so I'm constantly frustrated that I can't seem to kick this habit.

I remember vividly the day my mom bought me a pair of shoes from Kiddie Kobbler, the whimsically misspelled store for children's shoes just around the corner from our house. I was wholly enamored with these pink, blue and yellow sneakers that I'd fallen in love with. Velcroed and gorgeous in their canvassed splendor, I begged to have them. My mom hemmed and hawed - my gut says they cost $40 with tax, which was a lot for us back then, especially for something I'd outgrow. Somehow my begging worked and she relented. I loved my shoes to death.

Until, like, 2 weeks later when I lost one on the way home.

I know, I know, how the hell does a person lose *one* shoe on the walk home? I dunno, but I did it. My teacher and I retraced my steps, we checked the lost and found, we scoured my bag and desk and classroom- nothing. My mother was massively disappointed in me and declared "I'm never buying you $40 shoes ever again." And she didn't. In fact, my guilt was so great that I, personally, never spent more than $40 on a pair of shoes or boots until I was 20 years old.

But life-long trauma aside, things are just things. They can be replaced, nothing's permanent anyway, blahblahblahYOLO, so mostly I get over these moments of ineptitude after a few swears and a healthy dose of self-recrimination. The exception to this is when I lose memories.

I mean that not in an early-onset dementia, "The Notebook" type-way but when I lose things like emails, keepsakes and, most especially, pictures. Then the anatomy of that loss is much more heart-wrenching.

A few weeks ago I lost my phone. I'm usually good about hanging on to phones.* More often than not I replace them because they just stop working either due to mechanical error or personal idiocy (pro tip: don't put your phone in the same purse as a bottle of water). After said water bottle incident (to henceforth be ever known as "watergate") I was forced to purchase a new phone at the beginning of this year. I decided to go a little crazy and get myself a smartphone. I loved my smartphone. It amused me on long bus rides, gave me precise maps and directions during the dozens of times I got lost, and allowed me to exact virtual punishment upon my life-long nemeses - green pigs who chuckle when I throw birds at them. And one of the best parts about it was an 8 megapixel camera, effectively replacing my point-and-shoot Canon for day-to-day shots. This became especially true once Instagram was released for Android. Because I have a penchant for taking pictures of myself drinking Starbucks in 1973. Yes, I loved my little camera-ready smartphone. I think you can see where this is going.

A few weekends ago I went shopping with my sister. We bought a lot of produce for her canning experiments (canning is the new knitting for hipsters. I'm okay with that because I like pickles better than hats.), flowers for my front step, stuff for the house, etc, etc. We were laden down. I stopped into a department store bathroom for a second to do my dirty, sinful business.

Afterwards, packages bursting, we headed onto the bus. I pulled out my phone to check the time and... no I didn't. I rummaged through my purse for a minute or two, finally asking my sister to call my phone. No ring. No buzz. No phone. As I was only a short ride home, I dumped off my stuff and then called the department store's number. They saw no phone. The lost and found? No phone. I realize now I should have just gotten back on that bus, ridden it downtown and walked back into that bathroom stall myself. But it was late, I was tired and, as is the cause of most of my problems, I was lazy. Who would want a phone with a broken screen? (did I mention I'm also careless? I'm also careless). The city is safe and quiet- who would take it? Well, someone did, I guess, because I never did find it. I don't even know if I left it in the washroom or whether I put it down somewhere else. All I knew is that it was gone, and I was upset. My incredible luck with things working out for the best was not working for me that day. It was over.

It was only 2 or 3 days later when I'd stopped my daily calls to the store that I realized the true loss I'd suffered. Over 800 photos and dozens of videos were stored on that little piece of technology, and I'd downloaded only a fraction. Thank GOD I downloaded the ones from my friend's wedding in Ohio and our following trip to New York City. I almost hyperventilated for a second when I thought I'd lost those.

But as the days went by I would stop and remember another photo that had been lost to my ineptitude- my family's trip to Syracuse, while not exactly magical, was hilarious and I cringed remembering my insistence that there was "no need to take a camera - I [had] my phone!" I felt/feel so stupid. I had a thousand opportunities to, as the philosopher Juvenile observed, Back That Thang Up. But I didn't, and I have no one to blame but myself. It's like when I let an email account from my youth lapse and lost all the emails from when I was 17 years old. Okay.. maybe that's a blessing in disguise but when I realized that I'd lost the email from Producer/Director Tom Fontana when he posted my song parody based on his show, Oz, on his website big fat tears rolled down my cheeks. I know you can't take it with you but I'm an emotional packrat. I keep love letters, postcards, inside joke scribblings, stuffed animals - you name it, I'll throw it in a box and forget about it for a year or two. And when these things are taken away from me, I panic, devastated that I now have to rely on my faulty brain to remember these things, my memory-joggers completely gone. I'm like Obama without a teleprompter - zing! Politics!

And I watched enough Hoarders to know that purging is good but when it's done without my consent, it feels so terrible. I react to it about as well as the Hoarders do when the little blonde psychiatrists come to clean up their mountains of adult diapers and chipped china plates.

I'd like to say I've learned something from this most recent loss, and I think I have. I backed up all my digital photos from 2007-2010 on my aging laptop on a USB stick. I'll do the others soon, I promise. I'm going to put more photos in facebook albums instead of just thinking I should. I'm going to print photos from my phone now that technology is sufficiently amazing. Pictures are nothing if not shared. And I'll try to include more photos here, if I can - in fact, the blog post about saying goodbye to my old apartment now contains the only remaining photos from that evening.

And hopefully, I'll try to be preemptively less lazy. Pay attention when I'm putting things down, go back and look for things if I do misplace them. Because with all the poutine I plan on eating in my life, my heart won't always be able to withstand these crushing events forever.

* save for the first one I ever got, a little Nokia brick that I promptly lost less than 24 hours after getting it, prompting a huge freakout (I remember instantly recalling the lost shoes, in fact) until its discovery in an easy chair at work the next day.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome, Come on in.

I've been posting in the cone of silence for the past 6 weeks or so, not telling anyone about this blog's existence, testing things out, seeing if I still like doing this. And it turns out, I do. So I'm opening the door a crack to see if anyone else is interested in my navel gazing.

So, if you're an old reader of mine, welcome! And if you're an obscure German luxury bag knock-off company... slightly less of a welcome but thanks for your strange, spammy comments.

And now back to Dance Moms.

Big City Girls You Make the Rocking World go 'Round

Things have been pretty crazy around here lately. Work usually slows down in the summer and then slowly picks up in the fall but not this year. Nope, this year has been a crazy roller coaster ride complete with vomit.

Okay, not really vomit.

So, in retrospect, this past weekend was not ideal for a getaway - work has been a steady special brand of insane and little things needed to be done around the house. But I'd booked the trip almost 2 months in advance so nothing doing, I headed to the big city.

There are a lot of things you can say against working a 9-5 job- it's tiring, it's a monotonous routine, it doesn't leave enough free time, it's inflexible, etc. etc. But having the ability to take paid time off, guilt-free, with enough money to do some shopping *and* pay for a little sister's fancy meal? Well, that goes firmly in the "pro" column. I feel very lucky.

I've got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, I've got whozits and whatzits galore

Moving can teach you a lot of things. Other than maybe a birth or death, it's one of the most stressful events imaginable. It can be a real test, not only of romantic and familial relationships but also (in my case)of the tensile strength of a frayed bungee cord strung around a Billy bookcase inside my dad's Hyundai. But so far, we've survived. Almost no disagreements, seamless blending of schedules, minimal amount of things broken in transit.

We moved in 2 weeks ago and slowly the place is looking less like an episode of "Hoarders: Buried Alive" and more like the IKEA showroom it was born to be. Or at least the "after" of a milder episode of "Trading Spaces". It's The Boy's first place and my first time not either living alone or with someone who shares my last name so it's been an adjustment for sure. But we're a good team. He takes out the garbage, I do most of the cooking. He does the laundry, I fold it. He buys gummi worms instead of the tomatoes and pasta I sent him out for, I make gummi worm primavera. Win-win all around.

The one thing that has surprised us though.. is how damn much stuff we own. Like.. it's unreal, yo. I came from a 660 sq. ft. apartment and he came from a 120 sq. ft room. And yet together we have a staggering 5000 sq ft of stuff*.

I remember when I first moved into my place I did so with just two trips in a panel van. And one of those loads was just my family's stuff that they'd graciously given me- a sectional couch, beanbag chair, tables, curtains, chairs, etc. So, basically, one van's worth was all it took to take everything that belonged to me to my new apartment. I was the modern-day equivalent of a hobo with his bindle. Fast forward 2 years or so and for the two of us it took two loads in a 17-FOOT TRUCK and even then we weren't done with it all. It took a whole other DAY of moving things back and forth in the aforementioned Hyundai before we were even close. The only reason we finished moving when we did is because we literally had to hand the keys back to my landlord when the weekend was done. Otherwise I'd still be moving the occasional colander and Visa statement over by hand.

Our "basement" (read: crawlspace/dungeon/Miss Trunchbull's "chokey") was sort of a non-starter when we first looked at the place. I was the only one who could stand fully erect in it, it tended to get a little damp when it rained or the snow thawed, and it was completely unfinished, home to only our furnace and a few cans of paint (and two hula hoops but that's neither here nor there). "We'll put a few boxes in the basement," we reasoned, "if it turns out we need the space." Well, there are no fewer than 10 boxes down there now, as well as a microwave stand, three tables, 6 chairs, a dress rack with winter coats on it and a desk. I looked at a house tour on Apartment Therapy where the owners talked about their "Jesus Room", so nicknamed because it died for the sins of all the other rooms. This is absolutely true of the crawlspace and every time I shovel something else into its depths I shake my head and say a silent prayer for all it's done so the rest of the house may live in peace.

So, now we're down to the last ten boxes or so and this is where fun goes to die. I affectionately call them the "bullshit boxes" and they're full to the brim with nonsense. Inside jokes, loose buttons, foreign currency, post-it notes, fancy bookmarks, old receipts, nonsense, bullshit, nonsense. They are my second-least favourite things in the WORLD right now (after coriander) and I groan every time I look at them. I'm thisclose to just putting them down in the basement and waving the white flag but I feel like I'm SOCLOSE to being organized. I have a "thing" for tiny houses and even though mine, at 1000 sq ft, doesn't really count, I feel like they inspire me to do so much with what I have. This house was a do-over, a chance to fix the design laziness I experienced with my last apartment. And we can't really make it look the way we want it to without throwing out some stuff. As an emotional packrat, this terrifies me, but it's also empowering. How much can I live without? How much can I give away without it even affecting me? How much do I need to be happy? Probably much less than I think I do.

So we unpack and we divide, and we give away and we cull. And little by little, it's becoming a place owned by a nerdy couple with a penchant for fart jokes and not by dozens of boxes of nonsense, bullshit, nonsense.

*math done by Theatre grad. May not be accurate.