Category Archives: everyday kimli

a division of labour

Posted in everyday kimli, relationship drama by

I try not to have any gaping holes in my How to Life database, but there is one area in which I am particularly weak: car stuff.

I don’t know anything about the inner workings of cars. I can make car go, I can get car juice, I know how to check fluids and what to do if they’re low. Beyond that is a vast foggy grey area of I dunno, and although I am somewhat ashamed to admit it, I don’t really WANT to know. I’m not a car person. I’m okay with that. I cannot be everywhere at once, people. I’m in dire need of assistance. (rise up!)

The Minibator was long overdue for service, and Ed decided some months ago that as the car is mine, I am responsible for maintenance and upkeep. This is fair. I get it. On the other hand, this toads the wet sprocket and I am petulantly stomping my foot (which hurts because my bones are all fucked down there): I don’t WANT to be responsible for my car. I’m dumb at car. They’re going to charge me for blinker fluid and a replacement 710 cover and an emergency flux capacitor dilation.

I KNOW that I should woman the fuck up and learn about this stuff so I’m not ignorant about the health and well-being of my car. It’s pathetic and downright insulting to play into the “stupid woman doesn’t know cars” stereotype and want someone else to deal with it on my behalf: willful ignorance is hideous on everyone, no matter the topic. I am not doing myself any favours by not knowing the difference between the air filter and damper valves. Suck it up, buttercup, and earn that “self-rescuing princess” shirt.

Except .. at what age are you finally allowed to say “you know what? I don’t have enough spoons to deal with this”? When can you acknowledge your privilege and let someone else deal with it for you? I know this isn’t an option everyone has, but I do have it – is it so bad to use it?

My counterargument is thus: while I am not a car person, Ed very much is. I recognize that the Mini is mine and I should concern myself with the upkeep, but I also know that there are a thousand other things that I deal with so Ed doesn’t have to: managing the household budget, ensuring all debts are paid (Lannister style), arranging all travel (even for trips I’m not going on), deciding our weekly menu, most of the cooking, laundry, gift-giving, our social calendar, and more. Given all that I manage in our lives on a daily basis, I would like to be able to hand all vehicle maintenance off to Ed and let HIM deal with it. He speaks their language. He has a way better idea of what is an actual concern vs what just sounds super alarming to someone who doesn’t know any better, and if a particular suggested service is really an upsell tactic vs a needed procedure to keep me from careening into fluffy baby ducks if I corner too fast.

The raging feminist in me wants to take my car by the horns (cars have horns, right?) and own the fuck out of it, but the realist in me knows that I have no time for or interest in car .. stuff. In exchange for making our lives run smoothly and be captured for data mining via the cloud-enabled products sprinkled throughout our house, I ask that he be in charge of cat poop and car poop. This seems fair to me, and outside my own qualms about the “you go girl” quotient of my request, I’d be a lot happier about the overall idea of car knowing I was just a particularly adorable onlooker (and as an added bonus, it won’t take 6 months of bugging me to get the oil change scheduled already).

Rising up is good. Rising up and delegating to someone else has to at least count for partial credit, right?

In other news, five years ago today I was in the hospital discovering that my heart was a lazy fucking slacker only working at 20% capacity. I’m much better now, I think! What do get your heart for a 5-year anniversary of still working? Is it chocolate? Please say it’s chocolate.

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$9.00 per day!

guided by voices

Posted in everyday kimli by

This article about people without an inner monologue has come up in several of my social circles today, and it reminded me of something I should probably get checked out: I hear voices. Inside my head. Voices that aren’t mine.

Back to the article for a second. I’ve always had an internal monologue, and it sounds exactly like my blog reads. You’re basically reading my inner thoughts right now. How embarrassing for you!

Like most people, I have a “voice” inside my head that is how I process most information: anything processed by one of the 5 senses (that YOU know about) is narrated by this inner voice thing. It’s not necessarily a voice, but that’s a close word for it. However, I also have a wordless version of this that I assume is my intuition – sometimes I will look at something and immediately know. It’s like my brain makes rapid-fire shortcuts and leaps of logic that, thankfully, are almost always correct. This isn’t any kind of superpower, it’s like .. a heightened ability to troubleshoot rapidly. I assumed everyone’s brain was like this until I was like 35. I literally had to have someone tell me that no, I can do these things because I’m smart. Not THAT smart, obviously, but smart enough to figure out why your printer isn’t working. I am confident I will have a place of honour in the brave new world.

Lately – like, for the last year or so – I’ve been hearing voices. I should probably be alarmed about this, but I’m not – there is no demon dog telling me to kill people, no tiny angels or devils on my shoulder trying to influence me one way or the other. It’s not an intrusive thought, it’s just .. snippets of someone else’s train of thought. It’s like playing with a radio dial and hearing bits and pieces of another station’s content. I’ll be in bed, thinking my thinkie thoughts, when I’ll suddenly “hear” part of a sentence someone else’s voice entirely. The first few times it happened I was pretty weirded out, which I imagine is the normal response to hearing voices in your head. It’s become a common enough occurrence that I just go “huh. there it is again.” and continue on with my own dramatic monologuing.

It’s kind of hard to explain. Imagine you’re sitting on your couch, drinking a cup of tea and thinking about all the things you need to gather before you leave the house for the day. In the midst of these thoughts about the laundry, your keys, the package you need to return, longing for Angelica, missing your wife, you overhear a neighbour outside saying “I can’t wait for these tomatoes to come in!” .. except it’s inside your head. In someone else’s voice. Often, it’s not even a complete statement – it could be “then we went down to” or “if he’s not home by Tuesday” .. just random noise intermingled with your own train of thought. The voice is not familiar, and the thought is not a tangent or offshoot of your own.

So, that’s pretty weird. I shall handle it like I handle most other alarming things in my life: make fun of it, then ignore it completely! Haha I hear voices saying the most mundane shit possible! Who else but Kimli!

Seriously, who else? Is this a normal thing, or should I prepare a tinfoil hat?

everything is awful all the time

Posted in everyday kimli by

We moved to the middle of nowhere almost two years ago, but I’m still on the mailing list for our old neighbourhood because frankly I like seeing what is collectively up their butts this week. Any kind of change to the area, regardless of what it is, has been fought against. Social housing? Horrible. Craft beer store? God no. Dispensaries? THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Halfway house for troubled teens? No, not THOSE children! New rental buildings? Might attract the wrong kind of people! New condos? They’ll all own cars and want to park them! It’s a never-ending litany of creative complaining.

This week, they’re railing against a series of high-rises the city wants to build along Hastings, where all the run-down bridal stores currently are.

Actual complaint from a resident of the neighbourhood:

News tonight confirmed people living on busy streets have higher probability of major illnesses, Parkinson’s, cancer etc.

But city councillors of Vancouver want to build many towers all along Hastings, Broadway etc.

You can’t live there because they might get cancer. That’s a new one!

Oh, boomers. You’re so awful.

microdose

Posted in everyday kimli by

I’m microdosing my mother.

Wait, that sounds bad. I’m not microdosing her, I’m microdosing myself WITH her. Is that better?

Microdosing is taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs in the hopes of enhancing yourself without the full effect of the drug taking over. It’s claimed that this can “unlock” your brain, making you smarter or more creative or more able to concentrate. I have no real experience with this. My mother, crazy though she may be, is not a psychedelic drug, so it’s really nothing like microdosing whatsoever. I’m simply taking my mother in tiny doses. Just a little bit at a time. To build up immunity.

My mother is iocane powder.

I have a difficult time relating to my mother because she speaks in tangents and doesn’t understand a single aspect of my life outside of Ed and cats. We’re eerily similar in that aspect, although MY nonsensical rambling makes PERFECT sense and hers does not (shut up and let me have this).

To keep my sanity, I’ve been visiting my mother in quick bursts. I dropped in on Monday afternoon to deliver some things I brought over from the mainland. Last night, we went for dinner with her neighbour/friend, and tonight mom and I are going shopping. Small doses. I can do this. Just a tiny bit at a time.

 

you can’t go home again

Posted in everyday kimli by

but when you do, everything looks weird and gives you belly pangs. Also, construction. So much construction.

I’m in Victoria for the week, cat-sitting for Friend Sue. I’m staying at her place while I sit on her cat, which is win-win because the cat has someone to simultaneously distrust and beg for attention, and I can work from Sue’s living room because there is internet. Add in some ice cubes and running water, and I am fully self-sustaining. I’m also playing Good Daughter and getting some mom visits in while I’m here, so in between sitting on Sue’s cat while she alternates between purring and hissing at me, I am being a productive January monkey.

Coming home to Victoria always gives me such weird feelings. There are so many memories attached to this place, and the overall bittersweet sense of longing clashes heavily with my free-wheeling “family is for suckers” nature. It makes me all thinky and introspective and tired (although that might just be the geriatric air quality here). I keep wanting to come to Victoria and have a Good Time complete with laughing and cupcakes and maybe some sparklers, but it never seems to turn out like that – I mostly just get sad, with an impending sense of duty. I’ve never quite figured out why that is, as no one really expects anything of me. Am I expecting it of myself? That I’ll suddenly wake up one morning and look forward to spending an extended period of time with my mother without turning into a petulant 14-year-old? One of these days I will surely become an adult about this, right?

It’s not going to happen this trip, though.

If you’ll excuse me, I have a cat to sit on.

i hope you had the decade of your life

Posted in adventure, everyday kimli by

Lots of memes going around about this decade ending in X days, asking what you’ve done in that time. Ten years is a solid chunk of your life, and this decade saw me go from my 30s to my 40s in several million blinks of an eye. I stopped blogging daily somewhere in the middle of the decade, so large parts of my life have not been dutifully documented for prosperity’s sake – this will inevitably come back to bite me in the ass when I am super old(er) and someone says “hey, what did you do on August 15th in 2017?” and I don’t know because the only thing I have to go off of is an Instagram post of a picture of 10-year-old Kimli holding a pigeon. That is not helpful. Why did I stop blogging? This is terrible.

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don’t call it a comeback

Posted in everyday kimli by

I am supposed to be in Nara, feeding tame deer and watching a fierce mochi pounding. Here are some thoughts I am having as I am not doing those things:

  • It’s nice outside
  • I really hate scooting Highway 99
  • I need gloves
  • I have gloves!
  • I sure wish I hadn’t dropped that glove
  • I need gloves on a string
  • Arby’s
  • My right hand is fucking freezing

I went for a scooter ride while Ed is having quality time with one of his Mikes. He has a lot of them.

Okay, roast beef sandwich time.

more waffles than waffle house

Posted in adventure, angst, everyday kimli, international kimli by

I have had more metaphorical waffles in the last three days than I’ve ever had in my life. Here are some of the things I am waffling between like it’s a goddamn sport:

  • I’m totally fine with being at home!
  • No wait, I am filled with angst and sadness!
  • Let’s go to Vegas for a few days to keep ourselves entertained!
  • Vegas is not Japan and I don’t gamble or drink so wtf why Vegas!
  • We can rebook the trip for next month!
  • It’ll be a rushed, truncated version of our original trip and that will not be as satisfying!
  • New York?
  • New York!
  • But I would have had New York ANYWAY, so I’m still missing out!
  • Did we make the right decision in cancelling?
  • Everyone else is going ahead with their Japan plans!
  • The pictures of all the flooding look awful, and a lot of infrastructure is still shut down
  • But I am so miserable being at home!

.. and so on, and so forth. No new developments on the Refund Saga, but a thousand piecemeal suggestions have come and gone in the last three days. I keep changing my mind. Yesterday, I wanted to go to Vegas. Later that evening, Operation New York was a go. This morning, I wanted to make late November work for a shorter Japan trip. After doing the dishes, I decided on requesting a compromise for travel in 2020. I’d like to say my last (excellent) suggestion is the best one and will definitely be what we do going forward, but I’d said that at least half a dozen times in the last 72 hours. I no longer know what the fuck, because the fuck keeps changing. I am a soggy, gluten-free waffle made out of quinoa and squash. I am a poor approximation of food.

We do have plans to go to New York in early November. It was going to be a working trip – fly in, work during the day, then explore at night like Tourist Batman. One suggestion I had early on was to instead take time off while we’re in NY, making it a real trip instead of one where we work out of someone else’s house for a few days so we don’t use up vacation time. This is actually a really good idea, and one we’re probably going to go ahead with. New York is a fun city, we’d get to have some daytime adventures and food, and it’s ultimately less time off work than Japan would have been (I don’t have paid vacation, so everything I do is carefully balanced with “how much is this going to cost me”). Win win, right?

Mostly, yes. I’m still a little angsty, because I would have had New York (albeit on a lesser scale) ANYWAY, so I’m still out the whole of a vacation to Japan. I thought on this a little bit while jamming forks into the dishwasher, and realized I could maybe use the situation to my advantage. See, our trip to Japan was to have been 10 days. This never really sat right with me, because it seems like a really long way to go for less than 2 weeks, but Ed uncharacteristically put his foot down and insisted we take a slightly shorter trip than I like. I agreed at the time, because let’s face it, Japan was international trip #4 of 6 in 2019 alone so sure, I could give up a few days. I want a longer trip though, so I suggested another compromise on top of the other 50 compromises we’ve both made over the weekend: I will stop attempting to cram a do-over Japan trip into our rapidly dwindling 2019 and be satisfied with upgrading New York from Working Trip to Actual Vacation, in exchange for a minimum of two full weeks in Japan in 2020.

This was agreed to. We hugged on it. It’s the plan at the moment and I like it, but it will probably change 7 more times before we get anything resolved with the airline regarding our unused tickets for last week.

I am so good at compromise, you guys!

I’ve been slowly unpacking my suitcase, and it is very sad times. I’ve been hitting the pumpkin pie a little harder than usual to help me get through it. Thank god for whipped cream.

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taking lsd before crossing the brooklyn bridge: check

everything is terrible

Posted in everyday kimli, international kimli by

I’m sure there’s some sort of interesting psychological reason behind my feeling like I must always apologize before complaining, but I’m not really in the mood to examine the science behind my emotions .. so I’ll just jump right into the justification: I know things could be so much worse and I feel awful for complaining, BUT.

I’m so, so, so sad. We are supposed to be in Japan right now for our vacation – not a working vacation, not a few days tacked onto the end of work trip, but an actual vacation, with hotels and spending money and tickets to see things. I’d been planning this trip since at least January – the flights were booked in March, hotels and train routes researched, half a million things scheduled and arranged and paid in advance – and we were supposed to have left yesterday, to fly into Haneda Airport. We didn’t go. And instead of being unable to sleep at 2am in Tokyo, I’m sitting at my desk trying to care about work and being awfully fatalistic about every little thing that comes my way.

The night before we were supposed to leave – literally 16 hours before our flight departed – we got wind (harrr) of Super Typhoon Hagibis bearing down on Japan, effectively shutting the country down for at least the weekend (and possibly longer, depending on the amount of damage the storm does). It’s not traditionally typhoon season in Japan (I researched this!), but Hagibis started out as a tropical storm that quickly grew into a Serious Situation faster than anyone thought possible, bypassing the “typhoon” title and going right into “Super Typhoon”. Windows are boarded up, store shelves are empty, hatches have been battened, and all flights and rail service has been cancelled for October 12 (with warnings that the cancellations may continue into the 13th and beyond). The Rugby World Cup and Japanese Grand Prix have cancelled games and races this weekend. The entire country is planning for Bad Times Ahead.

Who the fuck are we to fly into a country in the middle of a natural disaster and expect to be entertained? Personal safety aside, I can’t justify that level of entitlement. Ed and I armed ourselves with cats and blankets and made some fast decisions: we cancelled our trip. We didn’t know if our flight would even make it off the ground, and we weren’t comfortable with just waiting around to see. And even if it did, what then? We land in Tokyo and will either be trapped in the airport if trains have already shut down, or we’d get to our hotel and be unable to leave. That isn’t what I want out of a vacation, and I don’t want people to have to cater to me while concerned for their homes and lives .. so we got on the phone and started making calls. First up was Expedia, who understood the situation and got us full, immediate refunds for the pre-paid and technically non-refundable hotel bookings. I contacted our pet sitter to cancel the week, cancelled our parking reservation, and looked into the other things I had obsessively planned. The biggest hurdle was going to be the flight reservation, but we were unable to do anything about it because all the call centres were closed.

The following morning, we gathered in the living room to continue the Cancellation Spree. Unfortunately, this is where everything went to (even more) shit: the flights were booked partially with reward miles and partially cash. We had to contact the agency we used to redeem the miles, who tried in vain to contact the airline (their lines were crazy jammed for some reason) but ultimately had to give up when she couldn’t get through after an hour. Without the airline’s authorization, the agency could not issue us a refund, full stop. We had her cancel the fights, and she advised us to contact the airline ourselves after the storm had passed to see if we could get their authorization for the refund. Without it, we’re boned. Hooray!

The airline’s website does acknowledge that shit’s all fucky thanks to the typhoon, so their website says that people should call from the 15th onward to talk about refunds. That’s good! They specifically call out flights that were disrupted on the 11th, 12th, and 13th. That’s .. good? That’s the catch, though: our flight was on the 10th, and landed on the evening of the 11th. Does that qualify in their refund timeline? Also complicating matters: our flight DID LEAVE. It departed YVR at 1640, and landed in HND at 1833. We technically could have flown to Tokyo without issue, and just had to deal with that little super typhoon thing while there.

That’s where I sit right now. I have no idea if we’ll be refunded for our flights or not, or if they’ll stick to the rules and say nope, sorry. Without that information, I can’t reschedule us for anything else. At the moment, I could rebook us on the same flight to Tokyo for next Thursday, try to find new hotels in Tokyo and Kyoto, and cross my fingers that the country isn’t hit too badly by the typhoon, but I need to wait to see if we’ll get the refund or at least credit for the flights, or potentially be out another $2k. Our JR Rail passes are another issue: they’re good for three months past the issue date, which means have to be used by November 15th or returned before that date for an 80% refund. By the time I get this information, it’ll likely be too expensive to book the flight for two days out, and the 17th is the only other day we could possibly leave for this trip. I am in limbo, which is the place I hate most in the world (even more than Calgary). I am super sad and laden with the unknowns. I am freezing my ass off at work instead of being on vacation. We have no food in the house, no Thanksgiving plans, and no idea what we’re going to do next. EVERYTHING IS THE WORST EVER.

Oh, and the landscapers destroyed my Tower of London poppy and took the shattered pieces. It was in our yard as a tribute to my grandfather’s service in WW1. It’s literally irreplaceable – they sold the poppies from the original exhibit, and they’re all gone. Ed discovered the destruction yesterday morning, which just added to the overall assessment that the universe is garbage. All of the things are made of suck.

I feel like a brat for being so upset over a ruined vacation. I know it’s not the end of the world. I know I’ll probably get to go to Japan again, even if I have to wait until next year. I know I travel a lot, and if I have to miss one trip out of a dozen, boo hoo for me. But .. I was really looking forward to this trip. I’d spent the last 6 months being excited for yesterday, and in the course of an hour, everything went to hell. I am sad.

Back to work, I guess.

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it me.