Monthly Archives: September 2009

here is some insult with your injury

Posted in everyday kimli, kitties by

Dear Kimli,

As a member of our PetCare Family we are privileged to have the opportunity to provide peace of mind for you and Sasha. You can rest assured that Sasha is protected from the high costs associated with unexpected and unforeseen medical treatments.

Blah blah blah we’re raising your rates blah bliggity blah

We look forward to continuing to enhance your special relationship with Sasha.

…

Oh, so many responses:

  • FUCK. YOU.
  • Peace of mind for me and my dead cat? Where do I sign?
  • I am interested in hearing how you plan to enhance the special relationship I have with the URN OF ASHES I have on my desk, and I would like to subscribe to your publication.
  • FUCK. YOU.
  • I’m eligible to enjoy a further 5% discount through your Microchip Registration Program? Excellent! I will endeavor to solder a chip to the dust and bone fragments, all that remain of my best friend ever, immediately so that we are adequately covered in case of unforeseen medical expenses.
  • FUCK YOU SO HARD

As you might be able to tell, I didn’t take the letter very well. There were tears. There may have been rage and Hulk Smashing. I’m pretty sure I swore loud enough to be heard in West Van. I was not a happy girl.

We’re dealing with it this morning, because in addition to the 2 months of insurance they’ve taken from my account, we’re supposed to get $100 to offset the cost of death. They owe ME money, not the other way around. Also, they suck. The vet says they’ve sent in the paperwork twice, but the insurance company says they never received it – so I’m sending it in myself. There WILL be justice for Sasha, or I will seriously cut a bitch and enjoy every second of it.

Fuckers.

bad ideas

Posted in everyday kimli, vroom vroom by

Things that are a bad idea:

  • A bigger-looking guy (think of your health!)
  • Riding a Honda Jazz (that scooter is too small for you!)
  • That was rented from BC Cycles (their scooters are notoriously poorly maintained!)
  • With a passenger (those are 1-person scooters!)
  • Heading north over the Lions Gate Bridge (you’ll be slow!)
  • During rush hour (everyone else will be fast!)
  • When it’s down to one lane (oh god no!)

.. everything on that list would otherwise be okay – maybe not the best idea, but okay – if the passenger wasn’t there. The Jazz is a 1-person bike, let alone 1 big guy and another body. They’ll be lucky to get 30km/h out of the scooter, and they’re (probably) scooter newbies, and they’re going against traffic (cars won’t be able to safely get around them) on a 3-lane bridge. Bad! I hope they’ll be okay.

Things are changing. I am trying to be upbeat about it because it’s no fun being sad when everyone else is excited, but sometimes it is tough. I will wax poetic later – I’m in training – but I have MANY THINGS TO SAY. I know, I know – you can’t wait.

Oh, one more thing that is a bad idea: answering a friend’s IM message about birth control while at work, in a training session, while your screen is currently being projected on the wall for everyone to see.

Oops.

portland is for good times

Posted in adventure, everyday kimli by

Ed and I have been together for 12 years; married for seven. After all that time, he knows that when I get cabin fever for some excitement – something that happens if I go more than one weekend without Adventure – it would behoove both of us to do Something Fun, and damn quickly before I literally have a tantrum. To this end, we (okay, I, but he wisely went along with it) decided to spend our anniversary weekend having an Adventure: we drove down to Portland, Oregon.

We stayed at the Inn @ Northrup Station, which is apparently in a super trendy neighbourhood. The hotel was super perfect – right on the street car line, close to a million things, quiet, funky, awesome. I would absolutely recommend that you stay there if you get a chance. There were giant jars of saltwater taffy everywhere!

mmm taffy

mmm taffy

Our trip was great. We arrived on Friday afternoon, and checked into our hotel just before 5pm. We chilled out for a bit, then went out to do a little shopping – relaxing trip or not, I was in a tax-free state and I had Grand Plans. I bought some Doc Marten boots and some sassy clothes, then we headed back to the hotel for some Adult Swim and sleep.

shiny!

shiny!

It rained all Saturday morning, so we hung out and waited for the rain to go away. It lifted at noon, so we hopped the streetcar and wandered around Portland. We did a ton of awesome stuff on Saturday – lunch at a haunted pizza parlor, video games, Powell’s, Voodoo Donuts, Stumptown Coffee, the Saturday Market – our feet hurt. We sat to rest our feet at the waterfront, and were simultaneously hit with a bizarre sense of déjà vu – we’d been here before. It wasn’t our first trip to Portland, but we’d never been down to the waterfront before – so why did we recognize our surroundings?

Ed had a memory of doing jumps through the park and I remembered parking my car in the hideout to save the game, and we figured it out – Grand Theft Auto 3. The part of town we were in was accurately represented in Liberty City to the point where we recognized where we were based on a game neither of us had touched in 6 years. Hah!

up up down down left right left right b a start

up up down down left right left right b a start

That evening we had dinner at Casa del Matador around the corner from the hotel. The food was awesome – I had a pomegranate margarita – but it was admittedly a little hard to enjoy because of the drunken, aging party girl sitting next to us. She and her party were there when we arrived and still drinking when we left, and each time she would sober up a little it got quieter – then someone would order shots, and her volume and obnoxiousness would go through the roof again. There’s nothing sadder than an aging bar star, and she made me really glad I’ve never been into that scene.

okay!

okay!

We awoke fairly early on Sunday and got ready to check out. I was sad, because I’d love to spend some quality time in Portland (with my scooter) – but we’ll be back. Not knowing what to do but knowing I should stay out of Powell’s Books for the sake of my ability to pay rent this month, we decided to take the streetcar for the entire route and see the city that way. It was a nice ride until the hobo got on – he was smelly – and we got to see a lot of the city and the university. After the streetcar trip, we got back into the Mazdabator and hit the road after a couple of stops at Trader Joe’s for trail mix and Target for all the socks in the world.

Our ride home was uneventful save for two incidents. We stopped for lunch in the fake Vancouver, and went to Burgerville because it is crazy delicious. After we ate lunch I treated myself to a blackberry sundae, because their ice cream is amazing. The overly attentive lobby boy made the sundae for me, but there was an .. incident.

if i had a houseboat i could live here

if i had a houseboat i could live here

When applying the whipped cream to the sundae, the nozzle malfunctioned. Apparently when this happens, it is not advisable to apply more pressure to it in the hopes that something comes out – because when something DOES come out, it’ll explode with great force and spray cream everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

I received a face full of cream from a strange man. I was too surprised to do much more than laugh, but I was covered in it – the whipped cream shot out with amazing force and covered the wall, the cooler, the ceiling, the guy, and me. All the employees rushed to my aid because I was laughing too hard to do anything for myself – I had a gaggle of people surrounding me trying to get whipped cream out of my hair and off my clothes. It was hilarious and sticky, and you could see everyone struggling mightily to keep the innuendos under check. The sundae guy was relieved that I found it so funny, and he thanked me multiple times for being such a good sport – what else would I have done; it was clearly an accident and also it was hysterical. I am pretty sure these things only happen to me – I am a magnet for creamy surprises.

cute yet spooky.

cute yet spooky.

The drive to the border was boring, but when we got to the truck crossing there were a million cars trying to get into Canada. I convinced Ed it was a good idea to go to the Duty Free store, where I stocked up on clearance Clinique and bought myself some expensive perfume as a reward for bypassing over an hour of traffic. We crossed the border without incident, and made it home by 8:30 last night.

Today is our actual anniversary, and we have the day off. We’re going to buy ourselves a Playstation 3 with the contents of the Puggy Bank (Katamari Forever comes out tomorrow !!), be shot by Miranda and Reilly, and maybe go out for dinner later. All good things that require me to wear pants, so I should really get going already.

Happy anniversary, Ed! You are a Good Egg.

nah nah nah nahnahnahnah katamari damacy

nah nah nah nahnahnahnah katamari damacy

immigration

Posted in everyday kimli by

I’ve never attempted to immigrate to another country before, but if someone could tell me how to move to Portland, that would be super.

I LOVE it here. It feels like a hip, funky version of home. I’m as Canadian as they come, but I would drop almost everything to be able to live and work in Portland.

Our hotel is amazing. We’ve found ourselves in the Suite of Kings – there’re two TVs! Wacky. Without knowing, I booked us into the uber trendy part of town, right on the street car line. Today we took it to the Pearl District and walked in a random direction. Evidently we picked a good way to walk, because we’ve had pizza at Old Town Pizza, donuts at Voodoo, coffee at Stumptown, wandered through the Saturday Market, and Ed had to use a crowbar to pry me out of Powell’s Books. We’ve only been outside for 4 hours, but we’ve seen so much and it is all awesome.

I want to move here. Portland needs technical writers, right?

eureka

Posted in adventure, angst, everyday kimli by

I’ve figured it out!

I know why I’ve spent the last two weeks being angsty and melodramatic and much, much less talkative than usual! It was really bothering me that my inner monologue couldn’t even come up with a decent reason for my non-stop sour mood to the point where I couldn’t even write about it – there was badness, it was huge, yet no words would come out to explain away the melancholy. That’s really unlike me – I have a soliloquy for every damn situation – but I figured it was one of a dozen or so reasons I had to be down in the proverbial dumps.

It’s not, though. The first half of this month has been uncharacteristically shitty for me, and it’s NOT because of any of the following things:

  • The impending end of summer
  • My near-death experience by a) frat boys, b) a truck, or c) the aporkalypse
  • The ambitious yet utterly insane work calendar I set up for myself
  • My missing self-esteem
  • Cheddar puking on every single thing on my desk yesterday morning
  • Having to skip 7 or 8 Fun Things because I was too sick to go outside
  • Missing my friends because of the hamtrax and uncooperative schedules
  • Being absent from work for 3 unplanned days, forcing me to cram 9 days of work into 4
  • An insensitive husband making dumb comments about my appearance
  • Being out of Diet Coke

It’s none of those. Yes, they’ve all negatively affected me one way or another, but I’ve gotten pretty good at shrugging these things off and continuing my Life’s Work of being ridiculous – but not this time, and I’ve finally figured out why.

Four years ago today, my dad selfishly decided he was done with life and succumbed to his advanced age and raging stomach cancer. I miss my dad, and every year around this time I am filled with sadness and guilt at his death. The very fact that I am sad leads to another sad – while it’s perfectly natural for me to miss my father and be upset at his passing, if I were to be perfectly honest with myself I would have to admit that I am TOTALLY CHOKED a) that he died at all and b) that September is now a sad month for me when it used to be filled with awesome.

I love September. There’s so much going on – long weekends, gorgeous days, pretty colours, cozy sweaters, parties, BBQs, super fun events, killer sales on school supplies. It’s usually a month of happiness, too – anniversaries and happy times and celebrating the fact that we made it another year without killing each other. All good things.

Then, right in the middle of it all, is a giant behemoth of sad. My dad passed away on September 18th, and while his death remains suspicious in my mind – 91 year old men don’t suddenly contract cancer just like that and then die – every year I struggle with balancing my natural September delight with sadness and missing my dad. Every year before now I’ve been completely conscious of the Deathiversary, and appropriately angst-ridden – but this year, while it didn’t slip my mind, I’ve been dealing with swine flus and work and a dozen other things that have weighed heavily in my brain juices. My dad is always on my mind – I’ve finally been able to put his memory into Happy House, whereas Sasha still lives in the Burst into Random Tears Condo – but THIS September, I tried to bury the Deathiversary in Other Things, and clearly failed miserably.

Strangely, I feel much better now. I miss my dad – hell, I’ll always miss my dad – but this month has been really, really weird for me and it’s just a relief to realize WHY. And now that I know why, I can deal with it and get back to normal (for me anyway; it involves glitter and stripper shoes).

I love you, dad, and I miss you. You suck for being dead, but I’m glad you’re in a better place. Look after Sasha for me, and don’t let her eat your chicken.

Ed and I are off to Portland for a mini anniversary trip. I will buy things, he will tell me I’m pretty until I tell him to shut up, and hopefully when we return on Monday I will be in a much better frame of mind. I’m more or less already there, but I think getting out of the country will be good for me (if only for the tax-free shopping and beer at 7-11).

Sorry for being out of sorts, but I’m better now.

look at my angst

Posted in angst by

I has angst.

For various reasons I am far too lazy to type out on my phone, I am experiencing a great deal of angst. Normally I would be all mysterious and poetic and probably bust out some kind of obscure pop culture reference, but seriously? Fuck and shit and piss and maybe even fuck ass cunt fart nipple shit whore.

I feel really, really unattractive. Actually, it’s a little more than that – I feel pointless. Like, why bother. Dressing up, wearing make up, trying to look cute – what’s the point? It’s just me under there, after all, and no one cares.

So, yeah. Angst. Anyone want to have a pity party? I’ll be the one in the unwashed sweats.

Wait, I don’t own sweats. I need to go buy some sweats. Ugly ones, to match how I feel.

wanted: group of friends willing to commit crimes

Posted in everyday kimli by

Why are so many movies based on unstable people knowing what you did last summer?

I was glad to see that Sorority Row had finally opened in theatres, because it would mean a sharp decline in the number of times I had to watch the trailer during commercial breaks. Over the weekend while I was bored and sick, I spent some time looking up the spoilers for the movie mostly just to see who the killer was and if they changed the plot from the original version (yes, brilliance of this caliber was a remake). There was nothing particularly shocking or interesting about it all – the plot was basically a cookie cutter of teen slasher flicks from the 90’s:

  • A group of friends do something terrible by accident
  • The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake (which is always a body) is clearly the most logical thing to do
  • The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
  • Just when they think they’ve gotten away with it, they start receiving messages from the dead person threatening to tell people what they did
  • Almost everyone ends up dead in complicated and gory ways
  • It’s not the dead person after all; they’re dead
  • Oh here is a convoluted reason that the killer – who is loosely connected to the dead person in the first place – slaughtered the group in the name of crazy unstable man justice instead of, you know, doing almost anything else

DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Seriously, are there really that many groups of friends who accidentally kill someone and decide to keep the secret instead of telling authorities? Would they not know by now that this is just a really bad idea and will inevitably end with a fish hook in the back of the skull? Maybe I was just a really boring teenager, but my horrible scandals would have gone a lot differently:

  • I borrow my mom’s car to take a group of friends to the beach
  • There’s no drugs or alcohol or teenage sex romping, just animated discussions about comic books and Super Big Gulps
  • I’m busy laughing at a terrible joke when I back the car into a cement post, denting the bumper
  • The group collectively thinks that hiding the mistake is clearly the most logical thing to do – we pop the dent out and use nail polish to fill in the scuff marks
  • The group dynamic changes with the BURDEN of GUILT
  • I start receiving ominous text messages seemingly sent by the bumper threatening to tell my mother what I did
  • No one ends up dead or stabbed through the face with a machete
  • It turns out the threatening messages are a viral marketing campaign from an auto body shop and my heightened sense of guilt made it seem as though I were being stalked by a shadowy unstable person (or gecko) in a rain slicker
  • My mother never finds out I dented her bumper
  • … OR DOES SHE???

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN I smell a sequel

As much as I wish my teenage angst bullshit had a body count, there’s just no scandal there. They’ll never make a teen slasher flick about my life, and that’s one regret I’m just going to have to live with forever. *sigh*

I never get to have any fun.

illicit mushrooms

Posted in nerd by

I’m illicit!

More than usual, even!

Now that some decent games are finally being released for the DS after almost 9 months of horrible offerings, my pre-orders are starting to come in. Last week while I was sick I received a call from my favourite EB, telling me my copy of Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story was in and I could pick it up any time. Hooray! I called Ed and asked if he would do the honours, as I was feverish and housebound. I texted him a permission slip (EB takes pre-orders seriously it seems and has given Ed shit for picking up my stuff in the past) and he grabbed the game for me that night.

I’ve been playing it for the last few days, and it’s pretty cool. I’m enjoying it more than I did Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, even though the story makes about as much sense – it’s cute and engaging, and almost exactly what I needed to pass the time while sick.

Yesterday I was determined to leave the house for a while, as I hadn’t been further than the sidewalk since Tuesday. We didn’t do anything exciting – went to the mall so I could buy a new keyboard and some packaging material, and I traded in a few games (4 crappy/finished DS titles) for a copy of Little Big Planet (for the PS3 I don’t have yet). I got to talking about upcoming DS titles with the guy behind the counter (known as Band Guy, because he’s in a band) and he mentioned that he was looking forward to the Mario and Luigi RPG and Scribblenauts. I expressed confusion, because the M&L is already out – I have it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hallucinate it like I did everything else.

Turns out that Nintendo pushed the street date back by a couple days but the store didn’t find out until the next morning – AFTER they had sold one copy. That one copy sold was to Ed, and for the time being, I’m the only person who has the game. Do you want to touch me? It’s okay; you can touch me.

This means I can get in many hours of M&L:BIS before I get my sweaty little hands on Scribblenauts on Wednesday (launches tomorrow; we’re always a day late up here). Also, there is a rooster hat involved. I will be beyond disappointed if I do not get my rooster hat.

ROOSTER. HAT.

No, I am not better yet.

squeeze my head for delirious juice

Posted in everyday kimli by

another day another hour another handful of pills
i can’t tear open these blister packs
another edit on the page of my never ending ills
i forget my name in the dead of the night
i keep tumbling down down down down
the box car tells me that it’s alright
if i can wake up, it’s likely i didn’t drown

this fever is making me rhyme
i don’t normally think in verse
this swine flu better kill me soon
prose is bad; country rock is so much worse

i’ll probably recover and put this week all behind me
another pebble in my nylon bag of tricks
it’s day six and i’m all out of the words that define me
i don’t know the usernames of the nerds that i licked
media frenzy says i could die now but i don’t believe it
i’m perilous but this isn’t enough
my end will come with a ridiculous display
an octopus, tuesday morning, two pine trees and marshmallow fluff

it’s alive?

Posted in everyday kimli, medical anomaly by

This is the longest I’ve been able to sit up since Tuesday. I am not entirely sure I am not hallucinating this – am I real? Are you? When I think words they appear on the screen, so clearly this can’t be real. Awesome; I’m hallucinating a blog post. Welcome to Delirious Juice Dot Com!

HAH the idiot girl downstairs who keeps trying to smoke out her windows and getting caught and in shit is now standing in a bathrobe on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. Suck it, bitch. This is a no smoking building. I only wish it was raining.

When I cough, pieces of my lungs come up. They are gross and spongy. I do not like it. My whole body hurts, but less than yesterday – yesterday was not a good day. Today I am slightly more alive, but not by much.

I’m so dirty. I wonder if I could manage a shower later.

Ed skipped a business trip to stay home with me. I feel terrible about this, but I’d have done the same for him. Apparently I need adult supervision when I’m in the throes of horrible death flu – yesterday I had a screaming freak out because something went POP! and then I panicked because it was late and no one was around. I missed a really important phone call because I was so out of it, and since Tuesday I’ve watched 15 hours of CSI yet don’t have the foggiest idea how to commit the perfect murder. This flu sucks ass.

I am so not looking forward to work on Monday – I’ve effectively fucked my entire month because of this, and I haven’t got a clue how to get my schedule back on track. Of all the rotten times to get sick ..

I will be glad when I am better and not mostly dead. At least my chills seem to have subsided; for the first time since Tuesday night I am neither too hot nor too cold. It’s a small win, but I’ll take it.