2007, we hardly knew ye

As I lay in bed last night desperately trying not to think of things so I could just fall asleep already, it occurred to me that a) my purple swirlie shirt did not make it back from the laundromat, and b) I did not do any sort of 2007 recap. Normally this would make me think even harder, but the Benedryl I had taken kicked in at that moment and I promptly fell asleep.

I solved the first mystery this morning – the shirt was buried under random pants and therefore did not make it to the ‘mat in the first place – but the second still weighed heavily on my befuddled mind. So, without further ado, I present to you 2007: A Year in Review.

2007 sucked.

It sucked a lot. I went through each month in my head and discovered horrible repressed memories, all of them to do with my former job. There were atrocities. There were tears of rage and disbelief. There were almost lawsuits! However, I am not allowed to talk about any of that anymore (seriously; this isn’t just some new chapter of self-restraint I’m showing here), so instead I will focus on the other things that happened in 2007.

People: Shan finally moved to Vancouver, we spent more time hanging out with Miranda and Reilly, Ali gave birth to River. Other babies were made, too – Marissa had Isaac, Heather made a Murrin, Sue had a Simon, and I know I am forgetting a few other babies because a frightening number of people I know had babies in 2007. Seriously people, what is with all the fertility? Scary.

Scooters: Everyone got scooters! It started with Reilly buying Sally, which made room for Oscar. Josh quickly followed up with his Ruckus; Miranda got a newer Honda Jazz, Shan opted to go Italia with her Piaggio Scarabeo, and Ed – after waiting for about 3 months – finally got his Dio. Our scooter gang has 6 people in it, and I cannot wait for spring to come around again so we can ride!

Accidents: I finally did end up in a hospital in 2007 after falling off Sally and dislocating my right shoulder in April. I’m mostly healed up; my left shoulder (likely wounded in the Great Fall of September ’07) is the one that’s been giving me the most grief. In 2007 I also gave up on wearing my Robot Feet altogether, and honestly, my feet have never felt so adequate. I can walk and everything! Mostly without buckets of horrible, debilitating pain! Sweet.

Angst: The alarming number of pregnancies led way to my having a minor crisis of the brain. Ed went back on his promise to me that I could have a pug, resulting in a great deal of resentment (go on, ask me if I’m over it yet), many tears, and no pug. Sasha got sick, losing more than half her body weight and shedding her ability to eat food that turns into poop instead of puke. That thing I can’t talk about.

Snails: I discovered our garden has SNAILS in it. I quickly became utterly obsessed with my slimy little friends, and spent a lot of time taking pictures of them. The absolute highlight of my Snail Year was this guy!

Miscellaneous: I went to CES ’07 to do commentary. Radio iTG was murdered by one of the founders. My mother sold her house and gave me an early inheritance, which was used to pay off all our debt. Ed and I celebrated our Five Slash Ten on Saltspring Island, and it was pretty damn awesome. I weaned myself off my brain medication with somewhat disastrous results but I’m feeling much better now thank you.

Hey look, I just found the list of goals I had for 2007. Let’s rehash and see how we did, shall we?

2007 Goals:

  • Buy a bicycle and use it – DONE, although more riding could have been done
  • Reduce our debt through any means necessary (cue ominous music) – DONE! The ominous music proved unnecessary; no one was harmed during the elimination of our debt!
  • Get a PUG! Pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug pug! – dot dot dot
  • Have something – anything – published in print and receive payment for my words – okay, this didn’t happen mostly because I suck
  • Save up for some new glasses – DONE! They are awesome.
  • Become even more fabulous – DONE! I am terrific.
  • Continue Operation: Fun – DONE, but there are a lot of things on the list that still need doing
  • Prepare myself for foot surgery – NOT DONE! My foot doctor sucks ass and forgets that I exist until my next broken bone then he makes all kinds of promises to look into treatment for me until I limp out the door and he forgets me all over again

Well then. I suppose I met most of my goals, and one of the ones I missed was entirely Ed’s fault. What should I be doing for 2008?

  • Get a goddamn job already
  • Ride my bicycle more
  • Scoot to Victoria; freak out the squares
  • Drive to San Francisco! This year’s vacation is (finally) my choice, and we’re going to stand in the shadow of the Golden Gate!
  • Get at least one tattoo – maybe 7!
  • Resolve the pug issue once and for all (cue this year’s ominous music)
  • Be more social
  • Eliminate the (admittedly very small, but still) amount of debt incurred since eliminating all our debt

2008 HAS to be better than 2007, or I just plain give up.

domestic zzzz

Yesterday in a fit of dissatisfaction I tore the apartment apart and put most of it back together.

The result: a re-arranged kitchen that allows me to have my mixer out and the crock pot not on Ed’s desk, and more room for chopping than I had before. I also took down the Christmas tree, moved the bicycles out of the spare room and back into the living room, gathered up two enormous bags of laundry to be taken into the ‘mat, and cleaned out the fridge.

Apparently, I am incredibly productive on two hours of sleep. Sure, I burst into frustrated tears at least twice, but I’m pretty pleased with the result. The living room needs to be handled tonight; most of the Christmas stuff is still in a pile behind my desk but I am confident that I can have this place looking organized again by tomorrow and then we can spend the weekend messing it up again.

I’m actually going to leave the house today, though. I have an interview this afternoon, we’re out of cat food, I want some more tiny ninjas, the laundry must be fetched, and I need to pick up some tasty bread to go with the stew currently crocking.

It’s a damn good thing it’s not nice outside, because when faced with all this disgustingly adult responsibility all I want to do is pack the car full of computers and clean underwear and drive off into the distance.

I need to start a countdown to spring, or something. I would much rather be out having adventures on my scooter than doing all this other stuff. Plus, I feel much more boring than usual and it’s giving me a complex. Where’s the fun? It’s not at the Laundromat, that’s for sure.

Wish me luck today! I still haven’t heard back from the other interview I had before Christmas, and I really kinda want that job so here’s hoping I get some sort of news either way soon because waiting is giving me wrinkles.

And ass marbles.

But mostly wrinkles.

like giving candy to strangers

There is way, way, way too much chocolate in this house.

I need to get rid of some of it. I’ll keep the super yummy, but there’s a lot of regular yummy that we honestly do not need. So, it has to go.

But what do I do with it?

I don’t want to throw it away because that’s wasteful and depressing. How do you give away candy when it isn’t Halloween? We have a huge assortment of mini chocolate bars plus a really big pile of individually wrapped candies and treats. Maybe I could put it in our “lobby” – it’s all sealed so there’s no danger of teh poisons, and people in our building seem to adore the crap I put downstairs for the taking. People like candy, right? It’s not like taking candy from a stranger; they won’t know it’s me! So, it should be fine. Take my candy!

I’ll give Ed some to take to work, but I think the rest is going down stairs for random consumption.

Okay, problem solved. Now if I could only find someone to come and drink all the little bits of alcohol remaining in the open bottles, I would be a happy Kimli.

here are many words

Welcome to the first second day of the rest of your life 2008.

And now that the holidays are over, welcome to the return of Delicious Juice Dot Posting More Than One Sentence at a Time. It was getting a little old, and felt sort of cheap and tawdry – I have more words than that. When did I become such a verbal pinchpenny?

Our Adventure was exhausting but fun. We had only one night in Victoria, and it was full of mom-errands and mom-mending. She’s still really sick with the bronchitis, so we did a bunch of things around town for her after our wee gift exchange. It was a nice visit, but it left no time to see Mike and Krista who were home from California for the holidays, or meet up with Lisa and have a long-overdue coffee. I have confidence these things will happen at some point, though.

Sunday morning saw us up bright and early to catch the ferry from Sidney to Anacortes, Washington. The sailing was 3 hours long, and I spent a lot of it trying to sleep in the car. My mom still hasn’t gotten around to getting a sofa bed, so I dread our visits because sleeping on the ancient leather love seat (complete with steel girders) is just brutal. I got about 3 hours of freezing cold and paranoid sleep, so I tried to catch up on the ferry. Sounds easy, except the car decks of Washington State ferries are much different than those of the BC Ferries by which I mostly mean they are much more open and therefore INSANELY UNBELIEVABLY BRUTALLY COLD. Rarely have I been as cold as I was down on that ferry deck, but I just didn’t have the energy to move so I slept what little I could, shivering madly beneath my pitiful and not-at-all-warm jacket. COLD.

When we finally docked, there was an unexpected border crossing. We had surrendered our passports for swipin’ on the Sidney side, but once in the US they stopped each and every car for a physical inspection by cranky men with guns and flashlights. This took a very long time. Our cranky man tried to trip us up in our glaring, homeland-security-affecting lie – why did we claim to live in Vancouver, yet entered the US from Victoria? DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN! He grudgingly accepted our explanation, and we were finally allowed to drive through exotic downtown Anacortes and make our way to Seattle.

And, we did. We found Doug and Ali’s new house (which is gorgeous) without a problem, and settled in for an evening of visitin’. Mexican food was consumed and it was delicious with the exception of the ceviche, a normally fantastic dish but in this instance had clearly been left to marinate in the lime juice of the potent yet undead. The strength of the lime was unbelievable, rendering the whole thing sadly inedible. Boo! Ali and I ran out to run some party errands, then we settled in for a very cozy evening in the very large house.

Monday had Ed, Laura (the imported babysitter) and I taking a trip into Seattle itself to visit the wonder that is Archie McPhee’s. Ali had to work, so we were tasked with showing Laura around a little. I also had a fat wad of Ali-cash and a list of things to get at Archie’s – we were making goodie bags for the party. I had way too much fun picking out party stuff. After many large bags of goodness, it was time for my traditional visit to University Village where I used some mom-money to get all girlie with my bad self and also pick up a tablecloth for the party. Laden with goods, we headed back to the house in Kenmore to prepare the goodie bags and make with the pretty.

It is here that I must take a moment to let Carla, Ali’s nanny, know that I am not nearly as stupid as I appeared to be when we met. I don’t know that she’ll read this, but I am confident that Ali can pass on the message. During our initial howdy do, I let it slip that I didn’t watch TV or movies because, as I so elegantly stated, “I don’t have the attention span and I’m kind of stupid”. Carla Batman’d her way to an immediate conclusion that I must not read either, if I can’t sit through moving pictures on the talkie box, but obviously that is far from the truth. We assured her I can, in fact, read quite well, but attention was then turned to other things and the matter was dropped (until now). Carla! Please note that I am not dumb! You just met me and I didn’t feel it was a good idea to make you worry for River’s safety by going into my long-winded and complicated reasoning behind my no-movie-watchie ways! Our initial exchange bothered me from the get-go, so this is my do-over: hello, I am Kimli from Canada, and I am truly awesome in every way.

There.

The party was many good times, not in the least because Josh and Shan decided at the 11th hour (seriously, I got the head’s up they were coming around 11:30 that morning) to come to Seattle even though they had just returned from Texas about 9 hours previous. Yay! They showed up around 6:30 after enjoying a very easy border crossing. Drinking was done (not by me), “special” brownies were eaten (again not by me because I think Ed ate them all – he’s probably still stoned), and many many hours of Rock Band were played. I would like to take this opportunity to gloat that I didn’t completely suck horribly at drumming and actually did quite well, AND I managed to get over my ironic fear of microphones and do some singing to score 100% on “Dani California”. Yay for me! See above re: truly awesome!

We awoke sometime on New Year’s Day a little blurry-eyed (and in Ed’s case, still out of it) but happy. It was a good New Year’s Eve spent among friends. After breakfast we packed up our respective vehicles and gravy-trained it back to the completely deserted border, arriving home at 5pm. GOOD TIMES!

So, anyone know where I can find Rock Band for the 360 in Vancouver? Want! We have a 4-person band ready to go!

Oh, and staying up until 5am finishing Trace Memory was probably not the smartest way to start the second day of 2008, but the half-finished story end was totally worth it. At least the game was free.

Yay for home!

Now, someone hire me.