oh dear, may have just found my first grey hair...   D:

telling myself it is just a really really blond highlight, you know, from all the sunshine we've had this February....

will have Greg pick through my head like a monkey this weekend to ascertain if it is indeed a grey hair or not... while I weep quietly.

IT BEGINS! Eleanor Abernathy becomes Crazy Cat Lady



OMFG@$&?!%!SONOFA....!!! Rrrr!

A week later and I am still waiting for lab results that are supposed to take 24hrs to report. Maybe today the hopeless and jaw-grindingly idiotic receptionist will finally admit that she has lost them and I will get to do this all over again!!

It takes 3 appointments every time I need my bloodwork done: one appointment with the doc to get my requisition form, one appointment at the lab for the actual bloodwork, and another appointment with the doc to pick up my results. Like I've got nothing else to do during the day, you know besides school, a full-time job (at which I have been pulling over-time every week), and a two-hour bus commute to and from downtown. (And of course, eating, sleeping, and maybe a quick shower, but those are luxuries which I have pretty much given up on by now.)

It's hard enough to squeeze all those appointments in once in a month, and I am hanging on by a very thin thread. If I have to do it all over again because some stupid twit can't take a report out of a fax machine and place it in the appropriate file folder there is a definite possibility that I will finally and completely lose my shit.

The Waiting Game

January was the month of waiting. I feel like I spent the whole month holding my breath; patience as an extreme sport. Some of it panned out, some did not.

We finally moved into our house on the 29th. And we love it. It was exhausting and there is still a lot of work to be done. I managed to make it seven days without a functional shower in my home and didn't have a complete freak-out. Indoor plumbing is a beautiful thing. And I just figured out how to hang - and did hang - the rest of the curtains yesterday. (I guess an efficient way to introduce myself to the neighborhood was to live in a house with no curtains - although they might have gotten the wrong idea.) The house needs more than a bit of TLC but we are very happy there. And so are the cats. We all get some space to spread out.

I also (finally!) started my first online course on the 26th. It is hard to carve out the time and taking me longer to go through each unit than I thought it would (chalk that up to 9.5 hrs of work every day, a 2 hr/day bus commute, and a new house) but it feels good to at least be started. My brain is going to have to get back into school mode. It has been a while.

It is all a little bittersweet, an account of there being a couple of other things I was really working at/hoping for this month, that just never came to fruition. I guess you win some, you lose some (or some trite expression about timing).

I meant to take one last picture of Yard Toilet before we left the old place and I just never got around to it. Fortunately, (fortunately??), it was the same contractors working on these bathrooms so we had lots of new old toilets hanging around this place.

JuicyFruit makes me want to vomit!

So, a lady in the elevator behind me today was the loudest gum-chewer I have ever heard.

What made it even worse was that she started up a conversation with the person next to her while continuing the gum-chewing. I couldn’t see her (thank goodness) but just the sounds coming out of this woman’s mouth - the squishing and squelching and chewing and talking with this gob of gum rolling around and the saliva building up at the corners of her lips.... *shudder*

DIS-GUS-TING!  

I don’t know how the other person was able to carry on a conversation in the midst of this grotesque display.  

I hate gum. It completely grosses me out. I hate the feeling that there is something in your mouth and you can chew and chew and chew but it never goes away. It makes me want to gag just thinking about it. Its like a rubbery chew-toy for people. I hate that it makes people’s breath a too-strong smell that’s either like toothpaste or like a flavour.  Why would any adult want to smell like grape punch? And your car should smell like winter-green, not your tongue! Blech!

But that could just be my own personal neuroses. Here’s a reason that everyone can relate to: Why is it rude to talk and chew when there is food in your mouth but not gum? Its still talking, its still chewing! Its still me seeing something being rolled around on your tongue and squished between your teeth!

I could barf right now.

I was actually on Stephen Harper's side today. More defending Canada, please!

I have sort of purposely been ignoring my blog lately. I have a lot to talk about, its just nothing that can be publicly announced right now. Its hard to have a lot of stuff swirling around in my head and not be able to express it. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, something I can talk about that is really becoming a bee in my bonnett is this outcry from "environmentalists" and certain loud-mouthed celebrities (who think being famous somehow makes their opinions worth hearing, even though they got famous by reading words and ideas from scripts somebody else has written) about Canada's filthy natural resources.

Besides the virulent campaign against Keystone (thanks for wimping out on that one, Obama) and Gateway (Kevin Bacon? Really??), 16x9 recently did a laughably one-sided, completely unsubstantiated "exposé" on the dangerous effects of fracking and the negative effect Canada's oil and gas industry is having on ourselves and our environment. And that one really pissed me off. Safety standards in Canada today are the best they've ever been. And do people actually think they can reasonably argue that it is better to get oil from the Middle East than from Canada? Yeah, we'll threaten nuclear war with Iran over it, but a pipeline from Canada? No, that's just dangerous! I couldn't get over how irresponsible it was of a Canadian program to visciously lampoon Canadian resources, especially in the midst of such ill-informed protest and blustery complaining from our neighbours to the south.

The fact is, all Canadians benefit from the Canadian oil and gas industry; it would be ignorant and irresponsible to argue otherwise, and only acts as fodder for those in opposition: "See! Even Canadians don't like Canadian oil and gas!"

I think, if 16x9 really had those concientious citizen's best interests in mind, they should have spent the last segment of the show educating them on how to grow their own lettuce, carve a bicycle out of wood, and make yarn from wool to knit some long-johns for those cold winter nights. And that goes for anyone else who thinks Canada's incredible resources are dirty and unimportant.

UPDATE:
Okay so pretty much immediately after I publish this post I see on the news there was an explosion in Innisfail today. Apparently they were fracking too close to an oil drilling site and the pressure caused the well to blow up. Oh boy. Obviously there are some problems here too. But its still safer and cheaper than oil from the Middle East!

I'm thinking maybe people want the benefits they perceive they would get from controversial things (war, manufacturing using what basically amounts to slave-labour at factories in developing countries, oil and other resources) but they don't want them going down on home turf. Out of sight, out of mind? Hm.