While I’m a little disappointed that I don’t get to make protest signs and sing songs about penguins in a fine piercing tenor, I AM pleased to note that my rambling phone call/voice mail to the City of North Vancouver had Some Results: the street got re-cleaned. When I got home last night, the glass was gone. Hooray! Civil obedience for the win!

In other news, I like my job. They let me do things like this:

the cubicle of horrors!

Spine-chilling exhibits include:

• The router that will not script!
• Inventory Variance!
• A 65MB Excel file that refuses to save!
• 48 hours of Training DVDs!
• CRM and Sharepoint!
• The On-Call Pager!
• Candy!

My work camera has no batteries, so you get a crappy phone picture to tide you over and I get to steal Wunderbars out of the bowl when no one is looking.

I am practicing being a home owner by complaining about city services.

Our streets get cleaned twice a week (which I think is ridiculous and stupid and if they ever raise taxes to pay for city crap I will be up in arms with protest signs and naked Flash Mobs), which is sometimes useful – like, say, when there’s been a rash of car break-ins and there’s broken glass everywhere. For the last three weeks, there’s been a huge pile of glass on the side of the road, but no one has done anything about it because hey, the street cleaners will come by and suck it all up.

Except that hasn’t happened. We assumed the cleaners didn’t come – they like to skip random days but still expect us to follow the parking signs in case they decide to show up – but this morning, I watched the street cleaner do it’s swirly sucking thing and miss the broken glass entirely.

Well, this sucks. I called up the city to complain – all it would take is a 10 degree twist of the steering wheel to the left, and the cleansing sucking would happen. I told two (highly disinterested) people my story, and was eventually forwarded to the voicemail of some sort of foreman. Whether he calls me back to hear my complaint remains to be seen, but I DEMAND JUSTICE SUCKING! Seriously, clean up the fucking glass already. My taxes pay your salary! You have to do what I want! Never mind that I live in an apartment and don’t pay property tax and routinely call upon the law only when it’s convenient for me – shut up and clean my streets!

Perhaps being an unreasonable crazy person isn’t all bad.

Official Thrill the World numbers from Saturday: 242 Vancouver zombies, $3100 raised for the Food Bank, 23,000+ zombies worldwide. Next year’s dance will be Saturday October 23rd at 9:30pm – join the horde of shivering undead!

I’m excited – I have all the pieces I need for my Halloween costume. I haven’t worn a real costume for non-zombie purposes in probably 20 years, so I am very excited about this. My costume has sound effects; it is that awesome. I’ll be wearing it to work on Friday for our Halloween Pie Day and hopefully on Saturday unless I go for warmth over awesome – which, at the moment, sounds mighty tempting: I AM FREEZING!

I wonder if anyone would notice if I set my desk on fire.

Then there are the days where I wonder if it’s just me and I’M the crazy one, not her.

Operation: Keep Us Out of Jail (by helping us come up with a down payment for our own place so we don’t end up killing our downstairs neighbours in an epic bloodbath of Texan power tool proportions) is complete, and we’re more than a little shocked and verklempt that it is so. Asking our parents for help was a last-ditch attempt; one we didn’t think had a hope in hell of working – but it did. Between Ed’s parents, my mom, and our meager savings, we now have enough money for a down payment. We’re officially officially looking for a place to buy, and it is a spastic dance of stress and constipation.

There were a variety of hoops Ed and I had to jump through to make things happen, including an uncomfortable full disclosure of our spending habits (YOU try explaining to your mother in law all those charges you have marked as “for science” without using the words “masturbatory aids for my amusement”). As well, Ed’s mom wanted to speak to my mom about this whole thing. This was worrisome for a variety of reasons, least of which is because my mother is crazy.

Unfortunately for me, she’s also crazy cunning. She is an expert at hiding the crazy to others, so when I tell stories about my mother’s bizarre ways and inability to communicate without going off on tangents about lottery tickets and people she doesn’t like, *I* look like the unstable one. We had warned Ed’s mom before she called, to let her know that my mom could be mean and weird and made little sense at the best of times. I was quite sad that I wouldn’t be in earshot of either woman to hear the call – if it was anything like the conversations I routinely had with my mom, it would be a feast of hilarity.

Apparently, it wasn’t. Ed’s mom claims my mother was gracious, lovely, had nothing but good things to say about the two of us, and it was her idea to go halfsies on the amount. I had to ask if she was actually speaking to the right person – this was the woman who blamed me for everything wrong with the world, and still says things like “I’ll buy you a car if you lose 40 pounds” – lovely and gracious? Saying good things about me? The hell?

So once again, my wily mother has made it seem as though *I* am the one who is off-kilter and needs warning labels, instead of the other way around. Don’t get me wrong – I’m beyond grateful to both parental sides for the support they’re giving us – but sometimes it feels as though I’m in an episode of the Twilight Zone and they’re going to cart me away while I scream about peeing in buckets as Rod Serling looks on gravely before advising the audience to question their surroundings – can you truly believe what you perceive to be real, or have you taken an endless detour into: the Twilight Zone?

Hey, we’re buying a house. Party at our eventual place!

terrifying!

My only regret in buying a Fleshlight for Ed is that I now don’t have an excuse to buy THIS.

For the love of Stan, someone please buy one and take pictures. Hell, I’M tempted to buy one and take pictures. This is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen on the internet since .. since .. well, in ages. I am torn between hysteria and disdain. Oh my god, this is so scornfully funny!

Seriously, I want one. It would go AWESOME on my shelf of gay porn.

That was one hell of a weekend.

I spent most of Friday night at the Vancouver Art Gallery, with the Thrill the World team. I wasn’t dancing, but I took pictures of the performances and got to check out Fuse while wearing a fancy “media” badge. I felt so hilariously official! Fuse is pretty crazy – I hadn’t realized it was such a hot event – and I’d be down for going again.

Saturday was the big day – zombies! I hadn’t thought about what I was going to wear until literally the last second, when I realized that my favourite dress was never going to be worn in public again – unless I covered it in blood. Shan and I usually try to have some sort of theme going when we zomb it up, and this year my theme was “Kimli died at some point during the summer but no one told her and she’s on her scooter anyway”. I wore what was essentially my favourite summer outfit, except a little worse for wear. Add a liberal amount of makeup in the wrong places, mess up the hair, and I’m good to go.

We had over 230 zombies dancing this year, a huge jump in numbers over last year’s 69. It was a ton of fun, and we raised over $3000 for the Vancouver Food Bank. Woo! So many people came out for pictures – it was great seeing everyone, even if I was busy running around trying to keep the undead in line. Check Flickr and Facebook for pictures – Ed took some great ones – and start practicing for next year.

Sunday felt weird without being covered in blood, but Ed and I met up with MJ, Realtor to the Stars, and went looking at property. We saw 6 places, but none of them were quite right. One was *almost* perfect and we’re still trying to make it work in our heads, and another one I could see working but Ed was scared off by the disastrous people currently living in the suite. Others were not right at all – why is there a SINK in the bedroom closet?! – but we will keep looking. It is exciting!

We were full of good intentions and really looking forward to the BBQ at Darren’s house Sunday evening, but by 4pm the rest of my weekend had caught up to me and I was dead to the world. We took a raincheque, and instead spent a quiet evening inside. It was a good night for it – neither of us really wanted to go back out into the wind and rain – but I feel bad for missing the fun.

That will be fixed shortly, though – it’s HALLOWEEN WEEK and there are many nefarious plans afoot. Also, I’m gonna blow some shit up. It’ll be awesome.

My day is going to look like this:

.. times several hundred.

5:30pm. Roundhouse Community Center in Yaletown. Look for the undead.

We’ll be waiting for you.

I’m a big fan of tag lines, and since the dawn of time I’ve been using “squeeze my head for delicious juice” – it was my thing long before the blog or the URL or the big-budget porn flick. I’m a particularly juicy individual, so the line fits me well. People have been squeezing my head for some time now, and I’m okay with that – better my head than my boobs (at least until I know you better).

I have an affinity for juice-related things because they remind me of my website. Silly or not, it’s led me to some pretty cool things, like this:

noooooo orange boy

I bought the print a couple weeks ago from my favourite online store, and it arrived yesterday. It is AWESOME. I’m going to frame it this weekend and hang it above my desk – it’ll look awesome with the Penny Arcade print and the scooter painting Cynthia did.

I feel so grown-up. I have ART! Fancy!

Speaking of ART – I’ll be at FUSE at the Vancouver Art Gallery tonight, hanging with the zombies. I’m only an emergency  dancer tonight – I’m really there to take pictures – but the TTW folks will be throughout the evening. It’s good practice, because tomorrow is the big day: Thrill the World is happening at 5:30 in Yaletown (Roundhouse Community Center), so you should come check out one or the other – or both!

Time to eat work-sanctioned pizza.

I had a Wardrobe Malfunction this morning, but of the worst possible kind – one that had me stuck IN my clothing, and completely covered up. The zipper tab on my favourite hoodie is missing, and while I was able to do the zipper all the way up to protect my taters on the scooter ride in, I wasn’t able to undo it when I had arrived. The horror! A shred of decency, on my person! Terrible. It took 20 minutes and a pair of scissors, but I was finally able to free my chest from the shackles of oppression and dignity. I will never do this hoodie up again.

I often joke about being naked, but when I’m in the safety of my own home, I’m not kidding– the clothes come off within 5 minutes of my arrival, no matter what time of year it is. I just don’t like wearing clothes at home. I prefer being pantless, regardless of how fabulous those pants might be.

My constant nudity leads to a lot of awkward situations: scrambling for clothing when someone knocks at the door, having to hide when the pizza is delivered, friends warning me before dropping by. Problematic, too, are the windows – we have large windows that look out over our street, and the blinds are always open. Ed warns me when I stop to stretch in front of them, oblivious to the threat of prying eyes – but do I cover up or run away in shame? Of course not. I’m naked and comfortable, and why are they looking in our windows anyway? Jerks.

That’s why I’m secretly afraid that something like this is going to happen:

Man Charged After Making Coffee Naked

SPRINGFIELD, Va. – A Springfield, Virginia man is facing an indecent exposure charge after a passerby spotted the man naked in his kitchen and reported it to police.

This story is fantastically stupid, and I am fairly certain it wouldn’t happen in Canada (or any country except the US – seriously, why are you guys so uptight) – but that doesn’t mean I am not waiting for that knock at the door from the police, telling me someone has complained about my inappropriate nudity and that I’ve corrupted the minds and appetites of many. They’ll haul me off to jail, not giving me time to put on clothing. It’ll make the front page news – my wobbly naked bits flailing about for all the world to see – and before I know it, my burgeoning political empire will crumble into ruins; all because I like a gentle breeze on my naked cooter.

Life is hard.

3:30 in the morning is not all it’s cracked up to be. Early hurts my tummy!

The office is slowly starting to come to life, but when I arrived at 5 it was utterly deserted. I was a little spooked by that, as there should have been at least one guy working the night shift – turns out he was out grabbing a food, and showed up shortly after. Still, it was a little eerie. I should have brought protection.

I’m full of caffeine and TimBits (which could explain the belly ache), but my eyes are sandy and I really, really want to be in bed. I’m heading home as soon as the launch is stable, but when has any big rollout ever been successful on the first go? I may be here for years.

It’s so dark out there.

Ed and I are officially trying to buy a place. Believe it or not, we’ve given this a lot of thought – we’re tired of Aquaman and his never-ending crime spree, tired of our car being hit by Admiral Ackbar, tired of our neighbours (especially those jerks in #5). We seriously looked into moving elsewhere and continuing to rent, but the idea didn’t really appeal to us – we’d have to almost double the amount of rent we pay currently, and for what? At the end of the day, you’ve really got nothing.

Neither of us had given much thought to owning property before. We thought it was the unattainable dream; something fancy people did but certainly not happy little nerds like us. We honestly thought that we’d be cool with renting forever – it was cheap, we could live with the minor inconveniences, Drunk Bettie is always hilarious, and having Josh and Shan downstairs was all kinds of awesome.

Then all at once, our friends decided renting was lame and also that they hate living near us.

It seemed to happen in an instant, but over the course of a weekend all our friends had meetings and brokers and agreements and approvals for mortgages. This made Ed and I pause – if they could get a mortgage, couldn’t we? After all, we make similar amounts of chickens and we don’t have much debt. Rates are low, all the signage says – I don’t know what that means, but maybe we should look into this some more.

So, we did. We met with a sexy mortgage broker whom I have seen without pants, and he crunched some numbers but good. End result: Ed and I qualify for a hilariously high mortgage and now we can go out and buy a house (or a condo/townhouse, which is what we’re looking for – fuck lawns). Hooray!

Except now we need to come up with a down payment, and it somehow turned into a never-ending lecture about sacrifice and responsibility and how we are total failures as adults (which, duh, have you met me?) and I am so tired of it all I’m thinking about living in the car out of spite.

We don’t have $20,000 in twonies in my puggy bank. I know, I know – total failure as an adult – but it’s true. We DO have the money tucked away in RRSPs, though. Awesome! Let’s get started!

Yeah, because things are totally that easy for us.

For reasons we can’t quite track down, the RRSP is of the Locked-In variety and we can’t touch it until we retire. Sure, when we hit 55 and if we have a valid reason, we can take out SOME of it – but the rest stays put until you are 65. The only exception is made for people with terminal illnesses and/or if you are literally starving and going to be out on the street within 24 hours unless you can find some cash, neither of which apply to us. So, we’re boned. Boned!

We’re looking at other solutions, including the time-honoured act of begging mommy and daddy for a loan. I steeled myself with a shot of Drano and called my mother, which went about as well as can be expected – I am a horrible child and the reason that cancer exists and no one will ever love me and I am a complete and utter failure as a human being and ..  she’ll think about it. Ed asked his parents, which went a little better (although not without some agonizing discussions about our frivolous lifestyle) – but at the moment, we’re in limbo. We’re throwing all our extra cash into a Down Payment Fund and cutting back on as much as we can, but bills still need to be paid and we still need to eat. There isn’t really a hell of a lot we can cut out of our budget – regardless of what our parents think, we don’t actually live that extravagant a life. I’ve already cut back on my video games almost 90% from last year, we don’t drink, we buy our whores in Family Packs at Costco, I rarely buy new vehicles on a whim – what more can we do? Okay, we’ll eat out less. I’ll buy Mystery Meat instead of Grade A Beef. No more Sephora sprees, and it wouldn’t kill me to limit my champagne baths to once a month instead of weekly. All of these are good decisions, but none of it will help us get to $20K before the HST hits.

Normally there would be no sense of urgency about this, but there is. We’ve been in this situation once before, where we were thinking about buying – but at the time, $175000 for a townhouse seemed outrageous, and also I hated Calgary. A very short time later, that $175K property was selling for $380K – oops. There are four things driving us to buy sooner rather than later:

• Rates are really stinkin’ low and they can’t get much lower
• The Olympics could create a housing boom and we’d price ourselves out of the market
• The upcoming HST will increase the price of a new home by thousands
• If I have to pay to replace our car windows one more time I am going to snap and cut a bitch

I’m really stressed out about all of this, and we’re not even beyond the “curiously looking” stage. I’m also tired of hearing about sacrifice – it’s all about giving things up and forcing hardship upon yourselves to feel as though you’ve truly earned it, apparently. Except .. no one is looking at this through MY eyes. Sacrifice isn’t always giving up material goods or self-flagellation – in order for this whole “buying a house” thing to work, I have to give up something much more important to me:

*dramatic pause*

I am giving up MY FREEDOM.

I mean it. If I sign all the papers and commit to paying off a mortgage, I will officially no longer be allowed to run away. Even when things are going awesome with Ed (as they are now), I still harbor a secret desire to run away to exotic locations and see what lies over that hill. If we buy a place, I will be more married than ever before. I don’t see it as being “stuck”, since it’s something I want – but I certainly won’t be able to flee when the fancy strikes. As silly as it sounds, this is really important to me. I won’t be able to run away, and that’s the biggest sacrifice I can think of – but it doesn’t count, because it’s not a tangible thing.

Seriously though, how much do we suck for not having $20K sitting around? We are pathetic.

Building myself a fort out of couch cushions never sounded so good.