We Wangzilla-Pinduccis are a delicious bunch:

NOM ON ED

*bleat*

Our weekend in Victoria was actually a great time – the weather on Saturday was gorgeous, and we spent it all outside. The highlight of the afternoon was definitely the Petting Zoo at Beacon Hill Park – apparently, I am extremely delicious to baby goats. I made many friends at the zoo while fending off my dress, sweater, buttons, bag, phone, necklace, sunglasses and hair from being eaten; goats were all around me up in my business and it was awesome. One goat in particular, Wall-E, looooooved me – he would jump on my back and snorfle at my neck, and kept coming back for attention (and to eat my pieces). Eventually, he did the cutest thing ever – climbed up into my lap and FELL ASLEEP ON ME:

ignore the boobs; look at the goat

He slept like that for at least 15 minutes before I had to set him down (he was heavy and slidey), but it was hard to let him go because OMG ADORABLE. I want to love all the animals, all the time. LOVE.

Speaking of loving animals, I should have some new cats to feature that need homes – adopt them! Adopt them now! Watch this space for more heartbreaking pictures of orphaned cats.

Also, I’ve made a Big Life Decision that I will inevitably share here shortly.

Happy rainy Monday!

It’s probably psychosomatic, but coming to Victoria always makes me tired. Like, asleep at 8pm tired. It never used to be this way – these are my old stomping grounds, and I distinctly remember stomping all through the night and into the wee hours of the morning. I’m not nearly old enough to be one of Victoria’s many elderly, so there is absolutely no excuse for dozing my way through yet another visit home. Last night as I was lamenting my lack of energy, I grew angry at the apathy of it all – so I dragged Ed outside for some fresh air in the Minibator.

We ended up on Dallas Rd (as was often the case while cruising in my mother’s purloined Hyundai Pony). There were two enormous cruise ships in dock, so we stopped at Ogden Point to gawk at these floating cities (and to familiarize ourselves with where humanity will inevitably end up living when we melt all the ice caps and the oceans rise up to reclaim the land). We stopped at the Breakwater to enjoy the smells of my misspent youth, parked at Clover Point and totally made out while a creepy man in a van watched, and looked for ghosts at the Victoria Golf Club. I wanted to stop at Ross Bay Cemetery, but Ed declined so I showed him my favourite stupid prank – driving through the stretch of road through the golf course with the car’s headlights turned off. That bit of road is completely unlit, so passing through the supposedly lady-haunted valley in complete darkness is spooky as hell (if a ridiculous thing to do).

Our ride took us through Uplands to gawk at the estates, where we saw a ghost bunny. I drove us up Mt. Tolmie to look out at the city, and then I had to pee so we went back to my mom’s place. I felt much better after our nighttime drive – sure, we didn’t find ourselves at a party making out with strangers or on Douglas St loitering in front of the many 7-11s, but that’s okay. I went Outside and wasn’t asleep at 9pm, so it was a victory for me.

I am up early (it’s almost impossible to sleep here, so when I finally doze off around 4am I tend to stay asleep for a while), so I am going to take advantage of the day and go downtown to see what’s changed. Tonight we’re going out for dinner with mom, and then I plan to Go Outside again: I want to wander the Inner Harbour and Government St like a tourist. Outside! It is pretty super!

I am in an abusive relationship with a bagel.

Tim Hortons (whom I’ve partially forgiven for the Router Fiasco that was my entire life several years ago, mostly for the sake of convenience) has a Various-Cheese-and-Jalapeño-Bagel that KICKS MY ASS. I don’t know why – as half a brown person, jalapeños are not spicy to me – yet every time I eat one of these things, I find myself in a significant amount of discomfort and glee. Sure, I could just not eat them, but they are mighty delicious (if a little burny). I just wish I knew why my mouth hole finds them so very spicy, when all other jalapeños are mild like kittens dancing on my tongue. Still, the burning is much better than the alternative of “no breakfast”, as I can rarely get outside for lunch these days. I am busy. Beyond busy. Working 12 hour days busy. Burny bagels are the fuel that allow me to stagger home at night!

Ed and I are off to Victoria tomorrow, for a long (long, long, long) overdue visit to see my mother. I did a solo trip in mid-January to delivery frilly underthings, but we haven’t been over as a unit since November or so. It’s not that I don’t want to see my crazy mother, but the expense of it all – not including gas or incidentals, it costs us $165.80 for a return trip to the island – fucking gets my panties in a knot. It feels like throwing money away, and that enrages me. It’s so bad that’s actually cheaper to take the ferry between Sidney and Anacortes WA, and just drive back through the states. I was actually hoping we could do that this weekend, but I’m not the only one who’s thought of it – the reservations for the noon sailing from Sidney are full, and cars start lining up at 8am to get on that boat. If we missed the sailing, we’d be waiting until 5:55pm for the next boat and I just don’t want to do that.

The more I dwell on it, the angrier I get. I should just suck it up – get through this visit, and I’m off the hook for a little while. Plus, there’s London to look forward to. I know that’s a hundred times more expensive than going to Victoria, but it’s something *I* choose to do – it’s not an obligation, which makes all the difference in the world. Fuck obligations, unless they’re cheap and all the fun. Expensive and some of the fun is not good enough. I WANT ALL THE FUN.

Okay, enough ranting. I have many, many words to cross out and then new, better words to write down in mustard yellow. ONWARD!

A play in one act:

Ed, after delivering me a cookie (because my project document reached 100 pages and I thought I deserved one): You’ve got some make up under your eye there.
Me: *rubbing face under eye*
Ed: Nope, still there *pokes me in the face where my makeup has strayed outside the lines*
Me: *rubbing harder* ow .. maybe I’ll just go look in the mirror.
Ed: OK!
Me: *looks in mirror* *laughs wildly* *makes reference to Oscar Wilde book*

.. yeah, it wasn’t smeared makeup under my eye – they were deep, dark circles accompanied by a fine set of luggage. My “look 30 until I’m 60” Asian Card must have gone through the wash or something, because I am kind of haggard this morning. Stop looking at my portrait, people. It’s where all my sins and misdeeds go, and by exposing the picture to the light you’re aging me needlessly and I DO NOT CARE FOR IT.

I may need some sleep and several gallons of water.

It’s a well-known fact that while Apple offers free engraving on devices ordered through their online store, you’re censored in what you can have engraved – for example, they won’t do swear words or anything referencing drugs, stealing music, jailbreaking, and more. It’s not a huge deal – if you really want to have “I fuck like a cocaine pirate” engraved on your device, you can just take it to a kiosk and have it done separately. You could also try to disguise your filthy words in other languages, use hex or binary, or replace vowels with symbols (simple k-rAd speak isn’t enough – “sh1t” won’t go through but “sh!+” might) .. but that just seems like a lot of work to me.

It was far easier to just use taboo words from 17th century Scandinavia:

slat·tern   [slat-ern] noun
1. a slovenly, untidy woman or girl.
2. a slut; harlot.

Take that, censorship! Kimli: 1, Apple: all my money!

Heeee.

My Tuesday has been a Benny Hill-style comedy of errors: traffic jams, misdirections, roads that don’t go where they’re supposed to, and a pharmacist trying to kill me. I knew I was in for a bad day by the time 9:30am rolled around, but I still held out hope that the day would simmer down now and I wouldn’t find myself being chased by Keystone Cops all around my living room as a cat ran away with my bra.

Of all the stupid things that have gone wrong today, I’m most annoyed at the pharmacist who wasn’t smarter than me. I am generally a self-sufficient person; able to make enormous leaps of logic in the blink of an eye – but sometimes it’s nice to encounter people whose career path is dedicated to ensuring I don’t die in a tragic yet hilarious accident. Pharmacology is a perfect example of an area in which I expect people to be smarter than me – they’re in charge of ALL THE DRUGS, and it is not at all reassuring to me if someone in charge of ALL THE DRUGS can’t spot a glaringly obvious lapse in medicinal logic.

My one dose of cure for my crazies is made up of two pills: 150mg of sanity, and 37.5mg of sanity. This dose of 187.5mg of sanity is a bit of a pain in the ass, but one that works for me because I just have to be a special fucking snowflake at all times. It also means that instead of one prescription for one pill I take once a day, I get two prescriptions for two pills. Fine, whatever. I get my medication in 90-day doses so I don’t have to really think about it, and when I get home I dump all the pills into one container for easy popping and then I ignore it all until I can see the bottom of the pill container and put plans in motion to get more drugs.

Last night I realized I only had enough sanity for three more days, so I dug up my prescription info and pressed some magic buttons to get more. I picked up my meds today after work, and that’s when everything WENT TO HELL ALL OVER: because all my meds were in one container, I forgot that there were actually two different kinds in there and that I had two prescriptions, not one. I only refilled one, picked it up, and went on my merry way – and this is why I’m so pissed off, because it says right on the fucking bottle TAKE 187.5MG OF SANITY DAILY YOU FUCKING CRAZY PERSON. Any pharmacist smarter than me – and that should be fucking ALL OF THEM – should have noticed they were only providing me with 150mg of sanity, looked into my drug history, and seen an additional refill for the missing 37.5mg. Then they should have ASKED ME ABOUT IT, because they are my pharmacist and making sure people don’t kill themselves by taking their meds wrong is kind of their job. If they had looked and put the clues together and mentioned it to me, I would have went OH SHIT YOU ARE RIGHT PLZ REFILL THE OTHER ONE TOO I WILL WAIT THANK YOU SO MUCH I AM DUMB and then I would have went home with ALL my meds and I wouldn’t be abusing the capslock on my laptop right now.

But NO.

That DID NOT HAPPEN.

So now I have to call in the refill and go to the store again to pick up the rest of my damn meds, which will cost me way too fucking much money.

.. which is also part of the problem, because my – Ed’s, actually – benefits are fucked up thanks to his new company, and the usual 90% coverage was denied because that isn’t our drug plan any more.

Oh, and let’s not mention that to you at all until you’re at the till and your purchase comes to $150 instead of the $60 you were expecting and there’s a huge line now and you really have to pee so you’re just going to have to pay for the fucking thing and hope to hell it can be sorted out later.

GODDAMNIT PHARMACIST STOP BEING SO FUCKING USELESS

I AM ANNOYED

LOOK AT ALL THESE CAPITAL LETTERS

Also, the novelty of driving to Langley each day has worn off and I will be really glad to a) go back to taking the bus downtown to work and b) not be in Langley anymore and c) not work 12-hour days as of Thursday.

I wrote an angry letter to the store, taking them to task for not being smarter than me. I wonder if I’ll hear back from them.

I’m in Langley!

It smells like outdoors and it is hot!

Hooray for variety!

(seriously, I don’t have time to write – I’m at an off-site meeting!)

It’s been a long week around these parts. I’ve been struggling lately with a lot of deep, loomy things: self-image, the inevitable and unwelcome reality of getting older, indignent rage, the loss of self (I miss being relevant) – y’know, good time stuff. It’s left me quiet and melancholy, which I frankly don’t have time for. Summer is finally here, I’m delightfully busy at work, and planning for our London trip has started. I don’t need or want to be sad or angry, but I’m kind of both at the moment. It’s stupid. Where’s the unsubscribe button?

This pretty much sums up how I’m feeling these days:

It was a busy long weekend; one I’m not yet recovered from. I got my haircut and brows waxed on Friday, henna’d my hair on Saturday (while reading horrible books), played a lot of Diablo 3. Things were kind of lazy and pantless until Sunday, which is just how I like it (and how I’m quite seriously counting down the seconds until I can go home tonight to continue my life of pantless leisure), but eventually the siren song of the grocery store won out: I needed supplies for Heather’s birthday SBBQ. Full up of meat and gummies, we went home for a whirlwind afternoon of dip preparation before dragging Josh and Shan up a mountain later that evening: it was Canada Day, and there were fireworks to behold from far, far away:

boom

kerplowie

Not shown: 7 mosquito bites and the wicked black lung I got from the second-hand smoke. Thanks for sharing, assholes. I wasn’t there for the fresh mountain air, or anything.

Monday was the stat in lieu of Canada Day, and it was a busy one. We were supposed to be going to a SBBQ at Josh and Shan’s place, in honour of Heather’s birthday (which is today – go wish her a happy day), but the weather wasn’t playing along. Rather than move the party to a pub, I suggested we hold it at SPARTA instead. All important parties agreed, and just like that I went from spending an afternoon out to hosting 18-ish people in our house for the evening. I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, but I leapt out of bed and started cleaning. Luckily, the house wasn’t THAT bad – no matter how much Ed complains about the horrible filth we live in, it really only takes us a couple of hours to do a deep clean. We were ready for guests by 1pm, and more importantly, ready for the delivery of the secret cake:

apparently, daleks are chocolate inside

Hooray for surprises! The cake was made by Candice of Love Your Cake, and was completely delicious. Between the awesome cake and the disturbing amounts of food people brought over, everyone was stuffed into oblivion and beyond – I don’t think I want to look at another piece of meat, let alone put it in my mouth.The weekend festivities led to an extremely slow start to my morning, but the week has officially started rolling again – it helps that the week is almost half over already, thanks to the Monday off. Still, I need a great big squishy nap to sleep off all the cake I ate.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HEATHER! WE LOVE YOU!

Sleeping now.