As far as being humble goes, I really have no need for it. I’m awesome, and damn anyone who thinks otherwise. Yes, I truly enjoy being Kimli – it’s intensely amusing to be me, and I can only assume it’s just as great for those of you who get to be around me. I’m pretty perfect, actually. Completely fantastic in every way.

Except .. sometimes (like, twice in the last 30 years) I wish I was just a little less impetuous. Not much, mind you – just a little. A sliver. A speck. A tiny iota of being less hasty; the smallest modicum of prudence in my otherwise flawless presence. This would be a good thing, and could only serve to make me even more awesome than I am right now – and who wouldn’t want that? I’d get to be more awesome, and you would get to bask in the warm glow of all that is Kimli. It’s win win!

After brilliance struck with my parking idea on Monday, I immediately leapt into action: I signed up for a monthly parking pass, handed over my credit card and banking information, and canceled my current pass. It wasn’t until after I had done all this legwork that I came up for air and had a thought – was this something I could actually even do? Paying over $200/m for the option of parking the car if I didn’t want to scoot in to work was pretty dumb, so the only thing that would make this plan feasible would be the ability to park a second bike with my scooter for the same price. It’s a reasonable request – our two bikes take up less room than one car, and they’d generate a lot of goodwill and warm fuzzy feelings. They’d never turn that down, right? Of course I’d be able to do this! What a fantastic idea I had!

As it turns out, some places just don’t care about goodwill and warm fuzzy feelings (or turning down the harmless request of someone who will use the power of the internet to voice her displeasure in a witty, informative way). According to Metro Parking, it doesn’t matter if FIVE bikes can fit into one spot – they won’t allow multiple rides to share.

So, that’s that. I now have to jump through a thousand hoops to cancel the parking pass I signed up for with Metro, get a refund for the $68 they already charged me in signup fees, and monitor my accounts to make sure they don’t attempt to charge me for the parking I won’t be doing come May 1st. I also need to contact my current parking people to beg forgiveness and plead temporary insanity, and hope they’ll let me cancel the cancellation I sent in on Monday morning. So much backtracking; all of which could have been avoided if I had just been a tiny bit more prudent instead of jumping in blindly with my tits a-jigglin’.

I have excellent intentions, and most of the time my snap decisions to change the world work out just fine. Every once in a while though, it comes back to bite me in the ass. Like today. Ow, my ass.

Other than that, I’m pretty much perfect.

and famous. perfect and famous.

As I stood there in the cold, unforgiving rain, my skirt hiked up to dangerous levels and muttering venomous observations about the reputed sexual activity of no one in particular; a dirty hose in one hand and a rocket in the other, it suddenly dawned on me that I had no fucking idea what I was doing.

I don’t know how to check the air pressure on tires, or how to fill a tire with the right amount of air. I had Ed check Lola over the weekend and he said my tires were dangerously low, needing at least ten pounds of air per tire. He offered to do the filling for me, as I had plans that afternoon. I am not so much a feminist that I will not take advantage of a man willing to do my errands for me, so I gladly accepted his offer. There are some things I just don’t do, and dealing with tires is one of them (the other things I don’t do include Kraft Dinner, rimming, sneakers, and reality TV).

Unfortunately, a particularly fascinating NHL ’11 game or twenty came up and Ed forgot all about my tires. Fast forward to this morning, when a streak of stubbornness made it impossible for me to a) wake up on time and b) take transit to work – I was determined to ride today, because I am sick and fucking tired of not being able to scoot due to the rain. I am feeling some serious cabin fever from the lack of freedom, and I can’t take it anymore – so I rode into work, damning the rain and everything else around me. Since Ed didn’t put air in my tires, the job fell to me. No big deal – I’m an evolved and independent woman; proud and fierce and wholly capable. I can (in theory) make an entire new human being out of little more than a jelly sac and a teaspoon of man sauce; I should be able to put some damn air in my own tires. I don’t need a man! Hear me roar, and stuff!

Um, no. I had no fucking idea what I was doing. I think I got some air in the tires – the hose made a wooshing noise, and then the stick shot out further than it did before when I attached it to the nozzle somehow. This is all speculation, of course – for all I know, I actually removed air and now I’m riding even more dangerous than before. Who knew air and tires were so complicated? There ought to be a digital readout that tells you how much air you have and when you’re low. I ride a futurist triumph of form and function, and I demand that my scooter cater to my natural incompetence. Why should I have to LEARN? I want things or people to do these things for me!

Stupid tires. Stupid dirty hose. Stupid NHL ’11. I hate everything.

Ed promised me this week would be better than last, but my breakfast of a sausage biscuit from McDonald’s was missing a key ingredient – the sausage. What kind of week could I possibly have if, less than two hours into my Monday, I’ve already been deprived of sausage? I shudder to think. And I want sausage, damnit.

I try really hard not to complain about the weather, because I knew what I was in for when I decided I had to live in Vancouver – yes, it rains, and most of the time it’s not that bad. Things could always be worse; Calgary got hit with a huge snowstorm over the weekend .. but okay, ENOUGH with the rain. I can’t ride my scooter, I’m very grumpy all the time, and I want to do outdoor things in the sunshine. At least, I think I do – I can’t really remember what sunshine is. I think it was yellow? Maybe it smelled like cookies? I have sunglasses. I’d like to use them some day.

I’ve decided it would be an awesome thing to pay lots of money for parking; just over double what I currently pay. I’ve been crunching some numbers, see, and even though my parking is “only” $105 a month, we actually pay a great deal more than that. Ed usually rides to work when the damn sun is out, at a rate of $7.50 a day. Sometimes we drive – errands to run, fun things to attend, large unwieldy objects heading to and fro – which costs $15-$20 a day. And even if I ride every day and Ed takes the bus, he still has to buy tickets ($22 a week). All of that is a lot of money, to the point that paying $205 + taxes per month for parking is the lesser of two evils. I’m actually trying to work out some sneaky details that would allow us to park either the car or one/two scooters in our spot, giving us options for transportation. There’s nothing I hate more than paying to park the car when I already pay monthly for my scooter, so this would eliminate that double payment and make things easier when I inevitably have to go to Costco to pick up 90 sandwiches at the last damn minute.

Of course, this is all great in theory. I filled out the paperwork and made several balls start rolling this morning, but I don’t know if I can actually do this – see, I’ve never seen a motorcycle or scooter in the lot at all. There’s no signage saying it’s not allowed, but what if that’s an unwritten rule? What if they don’t allow me to do my super-awesome plan of one car or two scooters? What if they laugh at me and call me names? I need to talk to someone at the parking office and explain away my brilliant idea; somehow getting two tags for the price of one – but our scooters are small! You can fit 5 of us in one spot! My idea costs them nothing and generates goodwill for all of mankind (or just me; I’m that delusional)! WHY WON’T THEY LET ME DO IT?!

Jerks.

Oh wait, I haven’t asked yet. Here’s hoping they’re not jerks.

If this doesn’t work, I’m just going to relocate us to San Francisco; home of the $.25/h, 10-hour limit motorcycle parking.

I actually had a big April Fool’s prank planned at work – since I was going to be working late Thursday night to prepare for the intranet launch, I had planned to remove all my things from my desk. Every toy, picture, sticker, action figure, haunted portrait, and framed print of the guy who isn’t my father (it’s Hunter S. Thompson; everyone asks if it’s my dad for some reason) would be removed and replaced with nothing/actual work/a steaming cup of coffee. I was going to dress completely normal for today, and have my team act as though nothing was amiss. It would have been mildly amusing, but after yesterday’s catastrophe I was in no mood for fooling so I didn’t bother.

Still, I like to show SOME effort on this prankster holiday – so I’ve been walking around the office with this:

Lame, but surprisingly effective – everyone who’s seen it so far as done a double take and asked what the fuck. At work, I’m more known for my non-stop Diet Coke consumption than I am for my cleavage (mostly because it’d be highly inappropriate to say anything about it, but I dress the same at work as I do the rest of the time so it’s kind of booby around here), so this is as effectively shocking as my showing up to an event wearing a turtleneck and sneakers. I am sufficiently amused.

So, you know that “build an intranet” project that I’ve been working on since January? The one that’s supposed to launch tomorrow at 9am?

Yeeeeah, our backup server is corrupting the SQL databases. We have to rebuild, from scratch.

I am seriously, seriously bummed out about this. It’s no one’s fault, and I feel bad that other people feel bad for me – THEY didn’t let me down, Microsoft did. I hate Sharepoint, and this is doing little to bring out the love – “something” went wrong, and as a result, three months of work are about to be reformatted and rebuilt from nothing (not even ashes).

This sucks.

This is the first project I’ve had under my new boss, and I feel like I’m a colossal fuck up for failing to deliver on time (especially at the 11th fucking hour – everything was FINE on Tuesday; the “something” broke sometime Tuesday night/Wednesday morning). Even worse; the intranet was my main KPI this quarter and my inability to deliver a functional product means I failed my objective. That means no bonus, but even worse, all our KPIs are tied together and if one person drops the intranet-shaped ball, the entire team’s score goes down. My failure could directly affect my team’s bonus, and THAT FUCKING BLOWS.

I’m very mad at myself for not being a SQL psychic and somehow fixing this before it happened.

There are three very small silver linings in all of this:

1. I poured my soul out to Ed via email, and he brought me flowers!
2. The flowers came with a dirty, dirty card!
3. We have to rebuild the server from nothing, so this time we can turn on Kerberos which means authenticated feeds will work properly instead of my complicated and crappy workaround!

I really, really hate feeling like a failure, even if I get pretty flowers of out it.

these are the official "sharepoint fucking sucks" flowers

the p ALWAYS stands for penis

At least I have enough time to make a fun header for our team site 4.0:

.. sorta.

The storage room our condo building was broken into on Sunday, and the would-be thieves snipped the lock holes off a series of lockers and started rummaging. They were looking for power tools and other small things that could easily be sold; things that most people wouldn’t keep in their homes but store in the basement where people rarely go. I don’t know how long they were down there, but they managed to do quite a bit of damage – rumour has it the floor was littered with castrated lock parts that had been tossed aside.

The bad men (likely Aquaman’s henchmen) amassed a small collection of valuable tools; enough that they couldn’t carry them all away easily. Solution: find a suitcase to put them in, then wheel off into the night. Our storage locker was ripe for picking, as there was a big suitcase front and center in the cage – so they snipped our lock hole and tried to get in.

Unfortunately for the henchmen, we had TWO locks on our cage – a combo lock on the bottom, and an intricately strung bicycle lock looped through the top of the unit. It was impossible to snip enough wires to get the second lock removed, so the sneaky sneakersons had to pry our locker door open just enough to get my suitcase out and also Ed’s impact wrench for good measure. They then filled the suitcase with all their ill-gotten goods, and .. well, the going theory is that they were disturbed mid-heist and had to abandon the crime scene with nothing to show for it. I know better, though:

no camera filter in the world can make this thing look attractive

The suitcase they stole out of our storage locker is mine, and it just happens to be a pink and purple train wreck of stripes and polka dots. There is no power in the universe that can make that suitcase inconspicuous (or not utterly fey), and that’s just how I like it. I don’t believe the thieves were interrupted in their stealing at all. I think they got as far as rummaging through everyone’s storage unit, collecting all the sellable pieces, loading up the suitcase .. and they just couldn’t do it. If you’re trying to get away nice and clean with a whole lot of loot, carrying said loot in the World’s Ugliest Suitcase is not the best way to go about it. Thieves, 0 – Kimli’s idea of hilarious, 1.

Thank you to everyone who left a comment here/on Twitter/on Facebook about my 10-year bloggiversary! You are all awesome, and your words made me smile all day (when I wasn’t foaming at the mouth over Sharepoint).

Are you an Instagram addict like I am? (if so, add me: kimli) My favourite photo gear shop, Photojojo, put together an awesome list of ways to use Instagram, including the genius Inkstagram – a site that allows you to view your feed, ‘like’ images, add comments, and more. I’ve been waiting for Instagram to add this functionality since day 1, but someone has beat them to it and did an awesome job. Check out the post on Photojojo for sure; I had no idea most of this was available (you can buy prints of your images! hell yes!) and only serves to make Instagram even better as a go-to tool for picture fun. Love it!

If I survive this Sharepoint rollout, I’m getting a tattoo to celebrate.

Welcome to DeeAy.com, my very own little ego trip on the world wide web.

What did I do today? Fuck ass all, that’s what. Don’t take my random profanity to mean that I fucked asses all day – oh, no – that would be too easy. I drove RakE to work, I ate some breakfast, I wrote some stuff, I masturbated to my newly-purchased smut. Oh, I’m sorry .. was that too much information?

Isn’t that just too bad?

My website’s been up for less than an hour, and already I’m talking about masturbation. Raise your hand if you’re really surprised.

I’ve been writing for Delicious Juice Dot Com (nee DeeAy.com) for 10 years today. It’s made me laugh, cry, punch things, and dance shamelessly around western North America. My blog has seen me through multiple moves, jobs, tattoos, and friends. There’s been sickness and healing, love and death, temper tantrums and startling realizations. I managed to keep some – but not many – secrets, and I went so far beyond the realm of “too much information” I’m releasing my own perfume next year. I made surprisingly few enemies, too many friends to count, and talked at great length about the state of my vagina (314 times and counting). For the last ten years I’ve been an unsponsored (no one will have me), uncensored daily blogger – and while the last few months have felt as though I was limping towards an unseen finish line, this isn’t the end. I still have so very much more to say.

I try not to ask people to come out of the woodwork too often, but if you’ve ever felt anything – anger, amusement, disgust, outrage, love, confusion, a boner – at anything I’ve ever written, I’d really love it if you said hi today of all days.

Having a blog on this level of personal is the ultimate in self-involved endeavors, but I’ve grown very, very fond of this piece of the internet. I feel silly for being proud of this thing; for making it ten years without missing more than a day or two at a time – just think of what I might have been able to accomplish had I put that energy towards something useful – but damn that’s a lot of my life spread out on the internet like a sticky, crusty quilt. I am quite impressed with myself. I think I might deserve some ice cream.

Saying “here’s to ten more years” seems more like a threat than a toast, but I can’t wait to see what kind of crazy old lady I’m going to become. I hope I’ll always want to write about it, and I hope someone out there will care.

Thanks, y’all.

Kimli

The rest of me is far from perfect, but I am just vain enough to truly appreciate the fact that I do not have cankles.

It’s nice to have at least one thing on my person that I think is okay.

What’s your “go to” body part when the rest of you feels like crap?

That was a gourmet weekend in every sense of the word.

We arose ridiculously early on Saturday morning, fetched Josh and Shan (this was much easier when they lived 20 feet from us), and were off: it was time to go to Seattle. We made excellent time over the border thanks to Ed’s sneaky sneaking, and arrived at our destination within 3 minutes of my estimate (I am gooooood): River’s 4th birthday party.

A suburban house stuffed to the gills with well-to-do parents and excited children dressed like princesses: I was totally in my element. My sarcasm is in jest though; Doug and Ali threw an awesome party for River and as she is my favourite small human, I was honoured to be a fellow princess for her. We all donned the appropriate head wear and settled in for an afternoon of royalty:

Getting a flying hug from a random small child the instant I walked in the door probably helped a little, though. She was very cute, even if I have no idea who she was.

River’s birthday cake was amazing, and one of the best I’ve tasted:

Not to be outdone, we gave River some additional cakes for her birthday:

We hung out with the birthday girl and her family for the afternoon, then departed for our next adventure. We didn’t want to impose on Ali’s weekend what with the party and other family in town, so we opted to get a couple hotel rooms. I was perfectly willing to settle for near-squalor, but Ed instead found a great deal at a swanky-ass hotel in Bellevue: a king-sized deluxe room, free parking, and $100 gift certificate to the equally swanky-ass mall next door. Pretending to be far fancier than we really are, we checked into the hotel and enjoyed the things that rich people enjoy on a regular basis: valets, concierge service, confusing high-tech elevators and berry water:

We enjoyed our fancy rooms for a few minutes, and then we were off: we had gift certificates to spend! $100 doesn’t go very far in a mall where all the stores are named after people, but we managed to find a few things to buy. An iPad 2 wasn’t in the cards – I visited three Apple stores in one day, and struck out each time – but I did get a cover for my eventual iPad2 and a new case for my phone. We also visited an awesome store that had fancy oils and vinegars on TAP, and tasted almost everything in the store – Shan came away with a bottle of white truffle oil, whereas I fell in love with the strawberry balsamic. I couldn’t pass up a stop in the Sanrio store for some ridiculousness, and many Gold Toe Socks were purchased. Our favourite thing in the mall was a bit of a surprise, though:

A Microsoft store! What the hell? It seems as though Microsoft got tired of Apple being the darling in their back yard, so they set up a store front of their own. It was HUGE, and jam-packed with people. The similarities to an Apple Store were immediately apparent: big tables with products laid out for you to try, a counter offering technical assistance, hip people in colourful t-shirts working the floor. We laughed at the whole thing the entire time we were in the store, thinking that Microsoft was being pretty sad with their try-hard copycat store .. until we ended up in the Apple store, three doors down.

IT WAS SO DRAB! After being in the Microsoft store, the Apple store looked awful – it looked like a washed out relic from another era that no one had taken pity on and brought into the 21st century. There was nothing different or remarkable about the store; it was the typical Apple white and silver and equally busy with people mobbing the blue-shirted employees – but after the vibrant and fun atmosphere of Microsoft, Apple just didn’t measure up. Suddenly, the first store didn’t look so sad after all – it was downright warm and inviting when next to the sterile aloof coolness of Apple. It’s absolutely worth a look if you’re ever in Bellevue.

I still want an iPad 2, though.

By this time the birthday cake and fancy cheeses had worn off, and we were hungry. I wanted to take Josh and Shan to Lunchbox Laboratory, home of the ridiculously good burgers. We met Mike and Michelle (Doug’s brother and his incredibly awesome girlfriend) there for a late night dinner, which was delicious and enjoyed by all.

From there, it was off to the Ookla House, where Mike and Michelle were staying while their place underwent repairs. The house is in West Vancouver, and has an unbelievable view of downtown Seattle:

We got a tour of the beautiful house, including the secrets – it was built in the 30s, and retains all the old school awesomeness with the necessities upgraded for our futuristic times. Also, there was a lot of booze:

i drank them all coz i'm a baller

Mike is somewhat of a connoisseur, and showed us his collection of fancy alcohols that I cannot drink at all. The others could and did, so I once again wore the chauffeur hat to be the designated driver of the stars. I don’t mind; I love showing off my ability to navigate Seattle based on nothing but vague memories of places I might have been before and it was a really nice night out; perfect for a drive over floating bridges.

Pleasantly pickled and/or sober, we settled into the living room to check out Mike and Michelle’s 3D TV. We’d never seen one in action before, so we all donned the glasses (which sadly are not red and blue anymore) and watched IMAX Deep Sea 3D; getting eaten by sharks and watching coral reef jizz into the ocean. It was really cool, but I don’t think I could watch a lot of 3D TV – the film was 40 minutes long and my eyes were bugging out by the end of it, and while 3D porn sounds hilarious in theory, I’m likely the only one who would get anything out of it (pure hilarity). It was awesome hanging out with Mike and Michelle, as we don’t see them often enough – they’re both a lot of fun, so hopefully we can hang with them more this summer.

It was after midnight by the time we left, and we were exhausted from our incredibly full day. I drove us safely back to Bellevue, and we crashed out in the luxury of fancy hotel times with plans to reconvene in the lobby at 11 am. We had a wonderful sleep – I want a king sized bed; diagonal sleeping is the best – and were mostly refreshed for Day 2 of our Seattle Weekend. We loaded up the the car and made another quick trip to the mall (they get iPad2 stock daily, but I missed out again – they only had 32GB Verizon units available) before heading downtown: it was time to visit Built Burger!

Ed and I have been enamored with Built Burger since Doug and Ali introduced us last year, but this was our first time visiting the restaurant for brunch. We’d been talking them up to Josh and Shan for the better part of a year, so I was really excited to go. We had some pretty high expectations from the place, and they didn’t disappoint at all – our meal just reaffirmed our love for BB, and I was delighted that Josh and Shan enjoyed it as well. I was a little worried that my plan would be shot down when I suggested we visit two burger joints in 14 hours, but my insistence that they were very different proved to be the key – the meals we had at both places were amazing and very different, and we will definitely be back to get our meat on.

We spent some time walking off our meal around Pioneer Square, marveling at the beauty of Seattle’s old buildings and bemoaning the Vancouver style of “destroy the old, build something new” – I love, love, love old brick buildings and really appreciate the fact that a lot of cities know how spectacular they are:

pioneer square is awesome

Shan really wanted to see more of Seattle, so we headed to the University District to drive through the campus. We hadn’t intended to stop, until we spied a field lined with cherry blossoms in full bloom and really had no choice in the matter:

Josh, Shan and I all cursed our lack of real cameras; having decided to travel light and only use our iPhones. It’s probably for the best, as we’d likely still be there if we had our DSLRs on us. Our hearts full of spring and fanciful thoughts, we needed to pee pretty badly and went down to the University Village for smoothies and a bathroom break. From there, it was off to an REI for Josh (he bought things that went beep), and a “quick” stop at the Seattle Outlets. I didn’t really do much shopping; my feet were in a lot of pain at that point and I barely limped my way to pretzels, but we managed to find a few things and hit the road back to Canada at almost 7pm. Unfortunately, so did everyone else – when we arrived at the Pacific Crossing, the wait was over 2 hours to get back home. In the name of desperate urination, we skipped many cars to go to the Duty Free store where they had bathrooms, cheap alcohol, and dozens of people looking for a bargain. It was insane in there, but we stuck it out and got some booze to bring back to Canada. We made it through the border with no problems and drove home; dropping Josh and Shan off and arriving at SPARTA a hair before 11pm. We had been gone for only 39 hours in total, but we crammed a hell of a lot of fun into that time – excellent company, beautiful scenery, impossibly delicious food and new shoes – it was a good, good weekend.

work that hose, boys