And so my Hard Knock Month has begun. Before I both dive into work and drive the other way, here are the highlights from my Sunday:

• BUBBLES!
• Drea’s cookies!
• Drea herself!
• Haggis the portly puppy!
• Various people of all sizes jumping into our bubbles!
• The most perfect Sunday afternoon ever spent at a park!
• Seeing the closing performance of RENT with Shan and Blayne!

It was an awesome day.

bubble wands are the greatest thing ever

tarantino directed this scene

by the power of grayskull

*bubble noises*

I am incredibly excited about today’s Bubble Picnic. I don’t care if no one else shows up (although who will eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?); I am fully prepared to fill the West End with colourful, awesome bubbles by myself:

i may have gone overboard

FUN! The picnic is pretty much an open invitation: If you’re in the GVA and have sleeves, you are welcome to stop by and blow. Look for the scooters in the parking lot and the short round girl giggling under all the bubbles: that’ll be me.

It’s going to be a busy day, which’ll be a nice contrast to yesterday’s pile of nothing. Shan and I are off to see RENT tonight – yes, again – for our third viewing. Tonight’s show is the closing performance, so we’ll have seen the opening night – a show in the middle – and the last performance. What can I say? I love RENT, and the Vancouver show has been wonderful. I think I’ve managed to convince a fair number of people to go see it both here and on Twitter, too. Hooray!

I’m off to make some sandwiches now! PB&J is excellent bubble eatin’.

It’s a little late in the game to worry about how I represent myself with my words, but here we are.

I’ve been contacted about potentially being interviewed for a magazine article about something I have a great deal of experience with: my vagina. The article isn’t about MY vagina per se, but about them in general and some of the metaphorical issues contained therein. I’m excited about this for a variety of reasons:

• It’s about a topic I have genuine passion (and therefore a lot of words) about
• Seeing my name in print gives me a boner
• It’s a Canadian thing
• I’ll get to share my vagina with the country and maybe the world
• Being able to say “my vagina is being interviewed” is so awesome and hilarious I can hardly stand it

I’ve been chatting with the author via email, and she said she would be reading my blog to get familiar with me and my experiences. Well, if I wasn’t nervous before, I sure as hell am now.

Every once in a while I try to step back and read through my blog posts with fresh eyes. I’m always curious as to what other people see when they read my words; if they paint a picture in their head of what I might be really like in person. How do I come across? Do I make a good impression? Would you hang out with me, or would you hide your children and silverware?

I didn’t start writing for other people, but that’s a big part of going public with my life. I really do write for myself – it’s cathartic and it keeps me sane – but I often forget that what I dangle out here can be just .. too much, some times. It doesn’t bother me (although it sometimes bugs Ed), mostly because I don’t think about the impact my words might have to anyone other than myself. It feels good to tell you guys things. Sure, sometimes there’s controversy – I know how upset some of you got when I said I hate Kraft Dinner – but I’m a real person, and not everything I think and say is innocuous or wholesome or politically correct 100% of the time. Human beings are waffly by nature. We don’t have PR teams keeping us in check.

Whenever someone tells me they’ve been reading my blog, I immediately think about what I’ve posted recently. What will they think? Did they come here because I reviewed opera and suddenly find themselves face to face with Fleshlights and gooey cheese fingers? It’s been over 8 years, and that momentary flash of panic I feel when someone says “hey, I read you!” is as strong as ever.

It’s just so weird being me. I am not at all afraid of sharing my vagina with the world, but I’m terrified that someone might read about my fear of sandwiches.

For the record, what you see is what you get. I’m a little quieter in person until I’m truly comfortable, but this is me. I’m inappropriate and cleavagey and I could go on for hours about things I feel really strongly about, both fun (scooters and video games) and righteous (marriage for all and abortions for some [miniature American flags for others]). I make grand leaps in logic and giggle at anything that could be even the slightest bit dirty. I say completely random things that make perfect sense in my head, forgetting that not everyone can see what goes on in here and how my shouting “we could put the broccoli in with the puppets!” fits in with the silent conversation I just had with myself. I talk like I write – complete with dashes; semicolons – and I try to keep it real. Weird, but real.

I think I just want people to like me, but not at the cost of my true self.

I’m working on my calendar for September, and I have serious doubts about my ability to survive. We’re rolling out a new internal system at work, and as the sole trainer and documentation person, it’s all on me: I have to train the entire company in the first three weeks of September. This is, of course, in addition to my three OTHER large projects that are rolling out in the same time frame. Oh, and each group I’m training will be using the system in a different way. Let the games begin!

I seem to have had some sort of premonition about all this, because I had booked off some vacation time months ago in preparation for various exciting things (PAX and our anniversary). As a result, I somehow managed to wrangle myself a month that has not one 5-day work week in it. Ha! Take that, productivity!

I’m fairly optimistic about the entire thing. I’ll feel even more so once my training presentations are done, but I’m working on that as we speak (I love you, alt-tab). I choose to be upbeat about the whole thing – it would be really easy to whine and bitch about it, but I do so love a challenge and man oh man will I have a(nother) excellent point to bring up when I discuss my missing raise with HR. More chickens, please, or the CRM gets it.

Plus, there are so many good times coming up! Ed and I are going to PAX this year, and we’ll be leaving on Friday the 4th. I’m taking the 3rd and 4th off to relax and get ready – I had originally planned to leave for Seattle on Wednesday night, but a) that is too early and b) I need relaxing time, not “impose myself on the Suttles” time. The following Monday is a holiday as well, so there’s another 4-day week. Hah!

September 21st is our 7th anniversary, and since we didn’t do anything last year because Ed was in Edmonton, we’re taking a mini-trip this time. We both have the Friday/Monday off, and we’re driving to Portland on the 18th and staying here – I can’t wait! I loved Portland when we passed through it on our way back from San Francisco; this time we get to explore the city for a few days and stay at what looks like an awesome hotel. WHEE! International humping!

By the time everything is done for Phase 1, it’ll be time for us to fly to Edmonton for Thanksgiving for 5 days or so: just long enough for me to recover and stuff myself silly with donairs before it all starts again for Phase 2.

Oh boy do I ever need more chickens.

Dale McG of Vancouver, BC!

I pulled all the names off the page and randomized them all, and Dale’s name came up to the top. Yay Dale! If you cannot or wish to not fulfill your duties as Miss America the prize winner, it will be sent to the runner up. Send me a message on Facebook with your contact info, and I’ll get your Mystery Box o’ Love in the mail this week!

This is so much fun. Delicious Juice Box o’ Love: Anniversary Edition is coming in September! :D

It’s funny. Of all the things I COULD be famous for – blogging, casting, my loose relationship with gravity, public indecency, my vagina, righteous indignation – I find that I am, in actuality, famous for ice.

I woke up in an extreme funk this morning. I slept poorly and late, my feet have been hurting non-stop for days, I’m stuck on a puzzle in Professor Layton, and everything just sucks. I tried to jazz up the funk a little with sparkly blue and Texan hair, but I just feel silly instead of fabulous and it’s not doing anything to improve my mood at all.

I was almost to work when I realized I didn’t have any cash on me, meaning I’d have to go without breakfast (doable) and Diet Coke (absolutely not doable) until I could get out of the office (rarely doable). At the last minute I decided to stop at the Chevron on Georgia to use the ATM and also get my morning fix of the good stuff. I knew this gas station had both Diet Coke and an ice dispenser, because it was the nearest source of ice from my last Space Station – I used to be a fixture in there, buying drinks and filling my enormous cup with ice several times a day.

As soon as I opened the door, I almost fell over in shock – I was greeted with some serious enthusiasm and mild scolding for not being around for the last two years. The Pump Guy and Counter Girl that work the morning shift were always super friendly, and they remembered me for both my scooter and my Diet Coke/ice cube habit. There’s something very nice about being warmly remembered and missed, even for something as silly as that. It completely lifted my spirits. It’s awesome being famous, even if my 15 minutes is doled out in 2-second increments.

Today is the day I’ll be picking a winner for the Delicious Juice Box o’ Fun! I’ll be doing a random draw at 1pm – the only time I’m free, according to my calendar – so you have until then to become a fan of Delicious Juice Dot Com on Facebook. I’m hoping to make this a recurring thing, because I love sending random presents to people. This month’s Box o’ Fun has some pretty silly things in addition to the awesome Voltron print, and I sort of have a plan for next month’s Box already. FUN! It’s like postcards, only three dimensional!

Okay, off to my next meeting.

I’ve been betrayed, and I don’t much care for it.

One of my (many, outlandish, weird) dreams is to live in a float home. I can see no downside to living on the water – you’re on the WATER, it’s different, you don’t pay for land, you live on a square boat, you can float away from irritating neighbours, it’s so much cheaper than stupid boring land-locked property – I really, really want to live on a float home. I’ve wanted this for years, and I fully plan on retiring in Victoria, living at Fisherman’s Wharf in my float home with my scooter and my pug and my cats and my computers, feeding the seals and scaring away the seagulls and shaking my broom at nosy tourists who get too close to my awesome float home.

i would wear slightly less purple

Ed is not only standing in my way, he is using DECEPTION and LIES and my FEAR OF POOP against me in an attempt to keep me from being completely awesome.

I’M ON TO YOU, BUDDY.

We did take a cursory look at the float homes in North Vancouver, and asked some questions to the friendly guy sitting on his dock drinking beer. He told us about living on a dock and Ed asked stupid practical questions while I was busy rearranging furniture in my head. We wandered the dock for a bit, then headed back to our scooters where Ed began his Campaign of Lies to make me think that living in a float home is out of the question.

He went on about the moorage fees (in the thousands!) and the kind of people who might live in float homes (unsavory types!) and our inability to block out our neighbours (we’d be trapped!) [this makes no sense] and the hazards of living on a floating platform (rough seas would make things unstable! You would fall out the window!) and worst of all: life with a septic tank.

There’s no indoor plumbing in a float home, so you would have to deal with tanks to hold your nasty business and you would have to manually transport those tanks and empty them yourself and clean them out with a toothbrush and you’d be covered in yuck and it would smell and –

This basically stopped me cold. I don’t WANT to deal with nasty things. I could never live on a float home! I refuse to be wrist-deep in human waste every week!

Josh found an ad for this house, which I’ve already looked at and have been coveting for some time. We talked about float homes (awesome) and the people who are stopping us from living in float homes (Ed and Shan) and I mentioned that it would totally suck to have to deal with the septic tanks on a weekly basis.

Then Josh told me that there are companies that you hire to do that sort of thing for you, and it’s a quarterly thing, and there are no toothbrushes or rubber gloves involved.

WELL.

Ed is a filthy liar! He tried to use my paralyzing fear of poop against me to change my mind about living in a float home! That’s HORRIBLE!

I am going to go out and BUY THIS FLOAT HOME TODAY OUT OF SPITE!

Ed is mean.

not shown: me, living here

how awesome would this be

beware this man: he is mean

I’m a force to be reckoned with – when I’m so frustrated I want to punch babies, I DRAW ANGRY FACES ON THE WHITEBOARD.

Oh yeah.

Bitches better step off ‘fore I bust out the whole damn pack of markers. I be drawin’ angry faces in multiple colours all up in their bidness, punk.

It’s Offensive Tuesday, in which I am offensive many times before 9am. A sample:

Jim says:
got a call for a job interview. Ready to jump this ship I think.
so yknow, pray and whatnot.
Kimli says:
you know me and jesus
we’re like this: 8=====D~~~~~ ( . Y . )

Yeah. Ascii dicks and blasphemy go really well with my slab of breakfast sausage.

OH I think I’ve just found a new title for my autobiography! Ascii Dicks and Blasphemy: The Story of Kimli

You’d read that, wouldn’t you?

I’m rambling to myself (and therefore the entire internet) because I do not want to get started on my enormous pile of work. Yesterday was a craptastic shit storm of a day, and today is forecasted to be about the same. There were heated emotions and the aforementioned whiteboard graffiti. DOOM!

Well, time to send out an email that will undoubtedly be ill-received.

It’s a very Vespa morning ‘round these parts:

pretty!

I couldn’t resist parking Lola next to the other two and taking a picture. Aren’t we pretty? In a delicious case of art imitating life, I am clearly larger and gother than the other two – as well as much more powerful. I will crush you all! Tremble before me as you cast your eyes downward to meet my tiny gaze!

Clearly I should not be in any position of power whatsoever, lest my ranking go to my head and I make my minions dance for my amusement. No one told the bosses at work, though – the new organization chart came out today, and my name is WAY up there. POWER! Okay, I have no minions of my own and my name tucked off to the side in a way that looks a little “executive assistant” for my liking, but I am on the same line as national managers so that’s something. Yes, I am placing too much importance on this. Let me have my fun; it’s so very rare that I actually appear on org charts at all.

For a weekend without plans, we were awfully busy. Friday night included near-death by Chrysler; Saturday was a late brunch at Raglan’s and the Farmer’s Market at Lonsdale Quay, followed by an evening scoot to the Richmond Night Market, and Sunday was an exercise in losing my scooter keys, bubbles, and a delicious meal.

I love the Richmond Night Market. We ate food on sticks – pork dim sum thingies and candied tomatoes – and I tried a Marshmallow Pocket because I had no idea what it was. Turns out a Marshmallow Pocket is a marshmallow wrapped in a wonton wrapper with chocolate chips, then deep fried until crispy. The ‘mallow melts on the inside, and you end up with a crunchy gooey disaster that has no right being that delicious. Plus, they called them Marshies. Awesome! After stuffing ourselves silly (and running into Heather and Christopher, which was great – we need to hang out with them more), we wandered the aisles. I bought false eyelashes and designer knock-offs; Shan bought many earrings; we both bought stripey socks. We managed to wander the entire thing, but we were all exhausted at the end of it and glad to escape the confines of Richmond.

I had many things I wanted to do yesterday, but had to battle my inner sloth before anything could be done. I desperately wanted to lounge around all day without pants on, but I needed to do things. Productivity eventually won out over sheer laziness, and we left the house to run a few important errands: replacing a dead 16GB SD card, finally getting new ice cube trays, getting a week’s worth of Diet Coke (8L), and buying every bubble apparatus I could lay my hands on for next Sunday’s Bubble Picnic in the Park.

I had a surprisingly difficult time finding bubble things, but what I was able to get will do very nicely indeed. I have a large arsenal of bubble things, so those who are unable to bring bubbles to the picnic will still be able to play. Hooray!

Ed and I crashed Josh and Shan’s dinner plans, and we had a lovely communal dinner: steak, garlic shrimp, BBQ’d corn, and blackberry apple pie with ice cream for dessert. It was completely awesome, and we got to use up some of the meats in our freezer. Deliciousness! We haven’t done a dinner like that in some time, and it was nice. I love that we’ve been living a floor apart for over two years now but aren’t sick of each other in the slightest – having great friends in the same building makes for many good times.

In fact, it makes for SO many good times that both couples are waffling on the idea of moving. We all want to move away from our street, but the thought of living in different buildings is a sad one. We *like* having people we trust so close by. Other people are dumb.

Last night I mentioned we should just look for a whole duplex for sale, then go in together on it and each buy one half. We’ve all been looking at other properties longingly, and the epic crime on the street last night (drunken domestic disturbance complete with hands-on-guns-RCMP and doors being kicked in and people in handcuffs) only makes other places – basically anywhere that isn’t our block – look all that much more appealing.

This week is going to suck. I need to go earn that fancy org chart position of mine – too bad it doesn’t come with any extra chickens.

SO. GOOD.

If ever I thought browsing through eBay was a bad idea, Etsy takes that bad idea and pumps it full of puppies and candy then shotguns a can of Red Bull and wraps everything up in a green and purple paisley print and sticks it in my back pocket for later consumption like some kind of shrimp sandwich for secret eating from Ikea on a day when the meatballs are looking scaly and the lady in the hairnet is skimping on the dingleberries.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Right, Etsy.

I use Etsy a lot. I’ve purchased awesome custom-made clothing, jewellery, art, crafting utensils – you name it, and someone on Etsy is selling it beautifully made and unique. Sometimes I get bored and look around for random keywords, and end up buying fantastic things I didn’t know existed. Just yesterday I had a craving for pretty little briolettes in happy colours, so I hunted around and bought myself two necklaces full of glee and pretty pretty beads. Hooray!

A while ago, I had an idea to search for Transformer items on Etsy. I found a lot of t-shirts (yawn) and some strange pillowcases, and the most amazing little cartoon prints done by Dave Perillo. They arrived a little while ago, and I immediately framed and hung them above my desk:

love, love, love the trucker hat

Check out Dave’s blog; it’s full of awesome things that he ought to make available in his Etsy store so I can buy them (this is a hint; I’m hoping he is wise in the ways of Google-Fu and finds this post).

When I got the prints in the mail, I squealed and did a little dance. Not only are the prints SUPER FRIGGIN COOL, but he also sent me a bonus: a wee print of Voltron, done in the same style! Heeee! Extra things are awesome!

This is where you come in. If I ever were to be a full-disclosure kind of person (because I have so many secrets I haven’t written about, being as private as I am and all), I would have to admit that I am not a Voltron fan. I never watched Voltron (there was no room in my heart for additional robots), and was never into it at all. In fact, if the print didn’t have “Voltron” writen on the bottom, I wouldn’t have known what it was. What can I say – I’m a one-robot-race kind of girl, and my loyalties ring strong and true.

The Voltron drawing IS awesome though, and it deserves to be displayed and adored by someone who will truly appreciate it. With this in mind, I will give Dave’s Voltron print and a box full of random things of my choosing (and if you’ve ever actually met me or seen my desk, you will know that I am the QUEEN OF RANDOM – there’s no telling what you might end up with) to one hapless lucky person. Free things! AWESOME things! What do you have to lose?

On Wednesday the 26th, I will draw a random person to receive the official Delicious Juice Dot Com Box o’ Love. There’s a catch, though: you have to be a fan of Delicious Juice Dot Com on Facebook to be entered in the drawing. Pretend you like me, and win neat things. Yes, it’s bribery – but bribery takes two, people. Help me out here.

when i'm rich and famous, i'm going to buy every blindbox toy in the world