Well, our neighbours are dead.

This isn’t a threat – in all honesty, I’m about as dangerous as a paper bag – I just think that the people who live one up and over from us are dead and starting to decompose.

Last night there was a smell. It didn’t bother me too much, but Ed seems to smell like my mother (not like that, think the other way) and freaked out about the stink. After a while, I could smell it too – it was a fishy stench quite unlike the “someone’s cooking” smell you get sometimes. Also, it was after 11 at night. Our bedroom smelled like rotting fish, and the smell was getting stronger by the minute. Ed tried to cover it up with incense and Febreze, thinking someone was just cooking a late night snack – but the smell didn’t go away, and soon overtook the anti-stink measures we put in place.

Ed is now “that guy”. As much as we give our neighbours cute nicknames, I am certain that others must do it too – and now Ed will be known as that weird guy who knocked on everyone’s door just before midnight to ask if they could smell that smell. On the plus side, he got a tour of our next door neighbour’s suite (they installed bidets!) and met some of the other people in our building. Unfortunately, he’s now the weird guy on the 3rd floor AND he never found the source of the smell.

We thought it started to fade, but I think we just got used to it and eventually we turned in (after Ed drove me fucking insane with his non-stop sniffing and complaining and searching and worrying and talking when all I wanted to do was read in peace). When we woke up this morning, everything seemed fine – no smell. Maybe it was a one time thing?

Except it wasn’t! The fishy smell came roaring back, even stronger than before. We had to do the unthinkable – ask the Troll to come into our suite and ask if she could smell it. I knew Ed wasn’t crazy and smelling phantom stinks, but maybe we were both oversensitive to it? The Troll came in (we laid out a trail of children to lead her into the stink zone), and she verified that she could also smell it and it was gross. Okay, then. It wasn’t just us.

We talked a bit about where the smell could be coming from, wondering about the upstairs people. It was then that she told us the people above the suite next door weren’t actually there – they moved in in October, then left for Hong Kong at the beginning of December and haven’t been seen since.

Okay, the spooky italics were for my own amusement, but WHAT IF:

• What if they never went to HK at all?
• What if a terrible accident and/or murder occurred upstairs?
• What if they’ve been rotting all this time and the decomposition has reached a point where it’s starting to leak into the suites below?
• WHAT IF THEY’RE DEAD AND OOZING CORPSE JUICE INTO MY BEDROOM??

That’s totally what happened, isn’t it: they’re dead, and it smells very bad.

It’s easy to dismiss me and think “Oh, that Kimli. She’s so crazy! Always overreacting to easily-explained things!”, but I keep thinking about the LAST time it smelled really, really bad in our apartment:

A masturbating hobo was found in our crawl space.

So, yeah. I’m a little paranoid when it comes to outrageously bad smells that have no easy answer.

This kind of stuff seems to happen to me an awful lot.

I don’t go to Starbucks very often, but when I do, I really enjoy my grande non-fat no-water no-foam 5-pump Chai.

I’m sorry.

I feel like an asshole every time I order it, even though it’s not THAT complicated and I’m always polite. Today I got a Red Velvet cupcake to go with it! I feel so very fancy (and soon, full of sugar) and like I should be wearing yoga pants and carrying a small dog in my purse.

I’m Canadian through and through – I feel terrible when I think I might be inconveniencing someone. For example, I have to give some feedback on Etsy and I want to make my displeasure known: I ordered an item on 12/21, and the seller wordlessly shipped it on 01/20 even after I had attempted inquiries. I finally had to dispute via Paypal, and the seller still didn’t say a word or answer any of my questions. The thing arrived today and it’s cute and all, but the lack of communication and the fact that she waited a MONTH before shipping my order makes me less than positive about the transaction. So, I should leave feedback as neutral or even negative – but I don’t want to. What if it makes them feel bad?? I don’t want to make someone feel bad, but I also don’t want to lie! There’s also the issue of retaliation – once I gave someone a neutral rating with my reason (same issue, didn’t ship order until 5 weeks later) and she responded by giving me NEGATIVE feedback (with no reason, so I hope it just makes her look stupid). It made me feel bad. I don’t like it!

Seriously, I spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like this. It gives me a headache. Also giving me a headache: drama. I don’t have time for drama, and I am so not interested in it. Can’t we all just get along? Passive aggressiveness is so 1994.

I think that tonight I should not have to cook dinner.

Hey, my Formspring isn’t getting any love. Surely you want to know my remaining secrets! Ask them here!

Things I assume my upstairs neighbour was doing at 1:30am, based on the noise:

• Turn-Based Elephant Wrestling
• Standing on a chair and trying to kill a rodent by throwing a bowling ball at it
• Filming a slow-motion 1865 sex scene: throwing lead-lined clothing off piece by piece in a fit of snail-paced passion
• Being dismembered by a clumsy serial killer
• Drunken Olympic training featuring a medicine ball and an equally drunk sparring partner
• Passive-aggressive late night assholing

I’m somewhat sorry to announce that we’ve officially nicknamed a neighbour (The Troll doesn’t count; her bone-littered underground cave is not actually in our building): the tenant living above us shall henceforth be known as Stompy McElephant. I don’t know what she does – I personally think it has something to do with being the Hot Stepper – but it’s LOUD. She walks full of angry, and possibly wearing clogs. It sucks.

Ed tried to go up and talk to her about it, but she started vacuuming at the same instant he left and couldn’t be heard at the door. We met her daughter in the elevator the following evening and asked her about it – while they did install hardwood floors up there, they don’t do jumping jacks. We asked if they could make an effort to walk a little less emphatically, and the daughter was mortified and apologized and promised to talk to her mom. Problem solved!

.. for about 24 hours or so; then it was back to the caber tossing on the 4th floor.

Last night was the worst. I accidentally fell asleep really early and woke up dehydrated and uncomfortable at 11:30. I played some iPhone games for an hour to make myself sleepy, and turned back in just after 1am. I had just drifted off to a sleep filled with styrofoam glory holes (seriously, I had some raging homo dreams last night and they were confusing and great) when CRASH! One of the above listed scenarios happened. I fluffed my pillow and rolled over, getting comfortable again – then BOOM! Elephants! This happened several times – just as I’d start drifting again, KAPOW! ANAL INVADERS! I don’t know what the hell was happening up there, but it was fucking annoying and enough to startle me quite badly. As a result, I am tired and out of sorts this morning.

If this keeps up, Ed will have to go Have Words with Stompy McElephant and her angry lead shoes. In addition to literally shaking our walls the stomping gives me nasty flashbacks – I keep expecting my mother to come downstairs and yell at me nonsensically about something someone else did, then berate me for an hour before grounding me for 2 weeks. Is it possible to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my childhood? Where’s my ticker tape parade, man?

And to think – I got to pay the City of Vancouver $786.00 this morning just for fun! Being a home owner is AWESOME!

Okay, I’m working now. Watch me go!

Oh god! I’m working on Catastrophe Documentation for Dummies (what to do in case of a fire, power outage, etc), and my BossBoss gave me a copy of the company’s Disaster Recovery Plan to incorporate into my own work. My guide isn’t as high brow – it’s really for the night and weekend staff so they know who to call when shit goes down – but this other document is TERRIFYING! I’ve never had to create any kind of instructional manual that deals with actual death:

Level 7: Wide Area Destruction; Most Staff Incapacitated or Killed

• Remaining staff will ..
• Surviving executives will ..

I am absolutely traumatized by this. I started my morning in my usual happy-go-lucky way – tra la la, it’s Tuesday and I’m wearing ridiculous barrettes in my hair and I have a salad for lunch and some outrageously delicious cookies and oh look the sun is out and that girl is cute and there’s a bird and I have to pee and I like my shoes and BAM DEATH AND DESTRUCTION ALL UP IN MY FACE. This report should come with a warning or something: Makes You Confront Personal Mortality. I am distressed. I think I need to take a Mental Health Day to think about how I’m going to DIE in a FIERY PIT of MANGLED DATA CENTER, buried up to my adorable neck in SHARP POINTY ROUTERS.

Of course, if that happens, my next issue is somewhat moot. I am trying very hard to be a college dropout so I can complete my hilarious trinity of fail – didn’t graduate high school, diploma’d at one college, dropped out of another – but The System is making it really hard for me to be a shiftless bum (and let’s not even talk about the logistical nightmare of my plan to backpack around Europe for the summer). For starters, it would appear that my college has no email address. I’m trying to submit my Failure Papers, but I don’t know where they go. They have a form online, but it’s a PDF – you’re supposed to print it out and either snail mail or hand deliver it to the office. This is inconvenient at best, as the office keeps really crappy hours. All I want to do is drop out of college! Why must they make it so difficult? Obviously I cannot handle the difficult, or I wouldn’t be dropping out of school!

I’ve set up a Crafting Party for this weekend, and I am excited. I don’t think the supplies I’ve ordered will be here by then – I’m suddenly passionately in love with teardrop briolettes in gloroious colours, and I want to decorate my magnificent cleavage with ridiculously lush gems – but I’ve got some things I can tinker with until my pretties arrive. Also, Heather rented a button maker from Blim so I need to design some obscene buttons to make and share. Did I mention that I am excited? Drunken crafting sounds like so much fun!

flower factory bouquet

these delicious cakes are a lie

here are some orchids

.. and these are morchids

terlips.

these make my inner goth happy.

I love Hipstamatic.

click for big art

Here is my art. It is a nice art. It also contains the world’s least coherent sentence fragment:

But if the chewing in his armpit halts with the death of the snake, the surcease is unfelt.

What the hell does that mean? There is no way to make sense of it, and for that reason, it is awesome.

Go go art!

I’m not the tidiest of people, but there’s a method to my madness. I love my clutter and tiny toys and piles upon piles of small paper things, but it’s all useful and interesting and organized (not to mention potentially hazardous in an earthquake). I know I have a lot of stuff, but I do try to keep it somewhat under control – I spend a lot of time straightening my things to satisfy my need for the esthetically pleasing. I have a system, okay. Don’t mock my system, or I’ll cut you.

So it absolutely KILLS me to come into work and eyeball the chaos surrounding my desk – I’m seriously about one more 4’ high pile of discarded cardboard away from snapping and having an epic tantrum. I used to have an entire row of three cubicles to myself, but they brought in a temp and parked her in the station next to mine. She listens to horrible music and rambles at me – annoying , but I can deal – but OH MY GOD SHE’S SUCH A SLOB! I know the nature of the job leads to a lot of clutter, but this is INSANE. I’ve already (unsuccessfully) petitioned to get her moved to another desk, and have sent numerous messages to both her and the regular shipping person about piling equipment and miscellaneous shit around my desk. I have to actively crawl over piles of routers and cables and boxes just to find my seat, and it’s pissing me off. It’s a fire hazard. And those are just the work items – she also leaves her dirty sneakers under her desk and her personal stuff everywhere. The shoes just plain gross me out, and the rest of it is causing me untold amounts of angst. Fine, be messy – but stop being messy in my bubble. Your disgusting shoes have no place in my bubble.

Normally I would just slap her silly, but she’s the daughter of a co-worker. What’s the proper etiquette here? Am I doomed to a chaotic workplace for all eternity?

I am giving some serious thought to buying a button maker. They’re expensive – $300 for a good one – but I could make all the buttons I wanted. I could make Delicious Juice Dot Com buttons! I could send them to people! You want to wear my oranges on your person, don’t you?! I could have a great deal of fun with a button maker, I think. I could also get into trouble, which is frankly half the fun.

Must. Stop. Looking. At. Craft. Supplies. On. Etsy.

I spent yesterday working at the second Indie I Do, and it was awesome. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and the day was not without some personal triumphs:

• I got an awesome hair thingie (apparently called a “fascinator”, says the internet) from Melanie of A Farmers Daughter. She was at the show last year, and I totally regretted not buying the piece I was drooling over during the day. She was back for year 2, so I finally got a pretty feathery thing to wear during special occasions and/or a Tuesday. This isn’t the exact piece I got, but it’s close and it is completely awesome.
• Orgasm via cupcake is not only possible; it’s the only logical response when eating a Coco Cake cupcake. I had a Lemon Frill cupcake, and it was obscenely delicious. I’m trying to think of an excuse to place an order with her – my birthday is almost 5 months away, and that is clearly too long to wait for frosted ecstasy.
• Since last year, I’ve started carrying two wallets – and at the end of the day, I still had both of them. My goal of “don’t lose my wallet at Indie I Do” was achieved with fantastic success. At this rate, I won’t have any reason to be blackmailed by creepy half-witted criminals at all!
• After the show, a large group of us went out for sushi at Tomokazu on Broadway. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a reservation and the restaurant had no room to seat our party of 10 – unless we could guarantee we’d be done by 7:30, so the group with the foresight we lacked could be seated. That gave us just under one hour to eat ourselves stupid, as none of us had eaten all day because of the show. We were up for the challenge – but was the kitchen?

  Never underestimate the power of TURBO SUSHI – we ordered off the all-you-can-eat menu for ten people in two enormous rounds, yet we couldn’t eat quickly enough to keep up with the never-ending stream of deliciousness coming from the multiple servers. We stopped eating well before we had to leave, and food was STILL coming our way. I don’t even like sushi, and I still managed to eat my fill – Turbo Sushi means business. It is not for the weak.

• I was the Swag Bag Bitch for Indie I Do, so I got to see all the awesome things the vendors contributed to the goodie bags. Among the coveted favourite was a flower pin made by Chelsea of Pretty Lulu Design – she makes gorgeous clutches out of silk and fanciness. Miranda bought one yesterday and it is fabulous. I have a serious weakness for a) things I can put on my head and b) crafted flower pins, so I squealed when I saw what Chelsea had made – hooray for pretty things!
• East Vanity Parlour blew everyone away with their saucy contribution to the show, and I’m more than a little in love with their burlesque girls:

Saturday was a good day. Today, not so much – my tongue hurts, I am cooking up an Anger Ham, and I’m thinking about taking a blog  break. This update shouldn’t have taken me 5 hours to write – something’s wrong. Maybe I should go figure out what.

I love online diagnostic tools. I have a very minor redness on my left eyelid that I’m treating with steroids, but I thought I’d look it up to see what the various self-help tools said my condition might be:

• Measles
• Conjunctivitis
• Chickenpox
• HIV infection
• Atopic dermatitis
• Bacterial meningitis
• Syphillis
• Trauma to epithelium

.. IT’S JUST A MINOR RASH, PEOPLE! I am fairly certain I don’t have HIV or the measles any sort of apocalyptic syphilis! In fact, I already know WHY my eyelid is red – my left eye waters like a sumbitch, and the salty eye juices flow up instead of down so my eyelid is almost always wet. The skin up there is delicate and unappreciative of the constant backward tears, so it’s irritated. No big deal. I have topical ointments for when my skin freaks out in the winter, and they should take care of this too – I just can’t wear my beloved green eye goo until it goes away. In the meantime, you probably shouldn’t lick my left eye – but honest, I don’t have meningitis or epiheliatic traumas. It’s okay to touch me.

I am up far too early on a Saturday morning because it’s Indie I Do day! Come on by Heritage Hall on Main Street to see some of the awesome!

Co-Worker: You’ve given me the best Valentine’s Day present EVER!
Me: Just don’t tell your girlfriend; that could get awkward.
Co-Worker: Oh it’s okay – you’ve already given me syphilis and herpes.
Brand New Department Manager: Pardon ME?!

*snort*

Oh, and I successfully negotiated Co-Worker’s release – he’s been held hostage by provisioning pirates for the last 9 months, but in two weeks we will pay their ransom of gold bullion and sheep and get him back to friendlier waters. At least, that’s the plan. There’s always a chance for treachery to be afoot.