Some people run with scissors, but that isn’t nearly hardcore enough for me – I defy safety and common sense by riding my scooter, without a helmet, while carrying scissors IN MY MOUTH*.

Oh yeah.

I’m the man.

I had several errands to run today, all with a connective tissue theme of making other people happy. One of the errands was to pick up the goodbye cake I ordered for our office assistant, who left the company today. I ordered a cake from Cupcakes, mostly because their website is fantastic – you can build the cake online from all available options, and the price is right there for you to see as you go. Plus, I know their goods are delicious and pretty AND I didn’t have to actually talk to anyone on the phone because I hate that.

Knowing that driving my car into the office for the sole purpose of fetching a cake would be a $40 endeavor, I opted to just take my scooter. After all, it’s just a cake and Lola’s bucket holds a surprising amount of stuff – it should be a snap!

Behold the snap:

I VASTLY underestimated the size of a 13″ cake, and there was no way it was going to fit in Lola’s bucket. It was also far too large to fit on the floorboard, which was Plan B. There was no one I could call for help, so I made an Executive Decision: the cake would go on the back of my two-person seat, and I would use gravity and sheer will to keep it in place. The Cupcake Girl was beside herself with hilarity and concern that anyone would be so ridiculous to attempt this, and was worried about the cake. She offered to get some string and came back with ribbon, tying the box down to my bars. It was precarious and risky and I spent the entire time terrified that I would crash and lose the cake or sit back too far and crush it with my mighty scooter armour, BUT! The Cupcake Girl’s ribbon and my extreme caution prevailed, and the cake arrived at my office in one delicious and huge piece:

Everything worked out perfectly, and I got to have delicious cake AND a hilarious story to go along with it. Today is a good day!

*: I do not advocate riding a scooter without a helmet, carrying scissors in your mouth, or any combination of the two – it was a desperate situation and the ride was about 100 feet. Normally I’d never do either of those things, and you really shouldn’t either.

A shapeless canvas sack is not a good way to transport liquid. I thought I’d save you the hassle and let you know – you’re welcome.

I’ve been riding Lola to work for the past week, and it’s been glorious. Yesterday and today in particular were really nice, and I truly hope this is a sign that the sunny, gorgeous springs we’re used to are here to stay. The riding has been great, but something seemed off somehow – and today I realized what that was.

Lola is missing her rainbow legwarmers!

She’s naked without them! I took them off last winter when I stopped riding for the year – they needed a good hard laundering as they were beyond filthy. I need to fix this, and soon. She looks so wrong without the rainbows! Lola is due for a bath, so I’ll wash her up this weekend and make her all pretty for the new riding season. It’s a silly thing, but I’m looking forward to it – I love how my scooter looks when she’s clean and gorgeous and silly.

*yawn*

hooray!

Today I am cheery.

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