I’ve been writing in some capacity for almost 25 years, and I STILL haven’t figured out the art of making an unpleasant task sound completely awesome.  My new project at work is to build a company wiki from scratch (I have an unsettling feeling that my boss has many conversations that go “hey, that job sounds overwhelming and impossible – I know, we’ll give the project to Kimli!”), but I’m just driving the boat – other people get the glory of copying and pasting hundreds of HTML articles to the Sharepoint Wiki; an unholy crotch spawn of traditional Wiki markup and vomitous MSO code with a ham-handed WYSIWYG editor with the temperament of a cranky 3-year old coming down from a sugar high thrown in for good measure. It’s an arduous, unforgiving task – and I have to convince the other 103 employees in my company that doing it is not only mandatory, but super fun and fulfilling and will make them better lovers with enormous genitals that will be the envy of friend and foe alike. It must be done, though, and I can’t do it myself for a number of reasons; the most pressing being that I have exactly 24 days to deliver a complete, brand new employee manual written in the style of my blog but also containing the legal necessities to cover the organization in case of personnel misconduct. And I’m not allowed to swear.

Why me?

Oh, right – because I love this stuff, and I’m not happy unless I have huge challenges to tackle.

Better get started, then.

Ever since the dawn of Esther, I’ve hidden her disguise in plain sight – taped to the side of my desk. No one can predict emergencies, and I like to be prepared for anything. My coworkers find this absolutely hilarious – what do you mean, you have an emergency mustache? What situation could possibly arise that you would need such a thing? Kimli is so weird! and so on and so forth, with ODB (my old boss) taking particular delight in the hilarity of it all.

This has been going on for months – just shy of a year, actually.

And then today, this happened:

ODB: Do we have any coloured paper?

Me: I think we have some bright orange around here somewhere; leftover from the donut project.

ODB: No, I need some black paper. Any ideas?

Me: Nope, we have none .. what do you need black paper for, anyway?

ODB: For the Mexican Kaboozle* this afternoon! I think we should all MYOM – Make Your Own Mustache! We need black paper for mustaches!

Me: … mustaches, like THIS? *pulls out Esther’s mustache from the side of my desk* I KNEW having an Emergency Mustache would come in handy! You laughed at me, remember? But I am prepared – I already HAVE a mustache here, JUST IN CASE!

ODB: ………..……………………….

YEAH. SUCK IT. I WIN. EVERY WEIRD THING I DO AT THE OFFICE IS NOW JUSTIFIED FOREVER.

i am the one who is laughing now

I am so deliciously smug!

*: We have parties on the last Friday of every month – this month’s theme is Cinco de Mayo, hosted by one of the Ops teams. Last month was my team’s party, and we did the Office Space one. My work is awesome.

I am a simple creature; a creature of habit. When I find something I like – be it a colour or routine – I adopt it fully and make it mine. I rarely, if ever, variate from this path – why should I? I know what I like.

For instance, I like Diet Coke. I also like the fact that McDonald’s is running their annual summer drink promotion – all fountain drinks and iced coffees, any size, for only $1. I like that I live in a McDonald’s parking lot, because it means I can indulge my habit several times a day – which I DO. In fact, I go to “my” McDonald’s 5 or 6 times a week – not because I am trying to become the world’s fattiest Kimli, but because I really, really like $1 Diet Coke. I go there a lot, okay. I know all the drive through employees by sight, if not by name – and they know me too, because I guarantee I am the only funny-looking Asian on a black scooter dressed all in red who comes through every damn morning just for a large Diet Coke and nothing else. I am the Diet Coke girl. It’s what I do. I KNOW you know me; you chastise me when I don’t come around for a few days and ask where I’ve been.

So WHY would you think that I wanted a large COKE this morning? I have never, ever, EVER ordered Coke. Like polka-dotted clockwork, I am there every morning at 8:45am to get my large Diet Coke for $1.12. I have never deviated from this routine, and I never will. I need you to figure this out – see the pattern; grasp the modus operandi – and realize that I am there for Diet Coke, NEVER regular Coke. I need you to step it up. I need you to realize what I am there for, and give me the correct thing. PLEASE. I BEG you.

Get with it, McDonald’s Monica who works weekday morning shifts in drive thru. You make me shake my head in sadness and disbelief.

This is me yesterday afternoon at 4:

hairbrushes are for the weak

I’m not normally that pink, but you get the idea.

This is me at 10am this morning:

hair: i haz less of it

I cut off most of my hair yesterday because I was bored. Well, *I* didn’t cut it – Michelle at East Vanity Parlour did. But I told her to! So that counts, right?

Everything is better with USB:

USB 2.0 and 0 calories

This is just awkward, though:

it's so clunky now

I admit it – my boobs are cybernetic:

i charge them nightly otherwise i have no cleavage

Gotta go – lunch time.

this explains why my muffin was $24.99

Vancouver is very smelly today. My commute to work was full of feathers as I was stuck behind, between, and downwind of not one but THREE Chicken Death Trucks. I hate those things – I feel terrible for the chickens, guilty for finding them delicious, repulsed by the smell, and thoroughly depressed if I spend too much time thinking about their fate. I prefer to imagine my food coming from magical meat trees, so no animals have to suffer so that I might be nourished. I should probably be a vegetarian, but I’m honest enough to know that I’m simply too lazy (and I really, really like meat).

So hey, you know my Heart Shaped Blox? They’re proving to be kind of really popular – so much so that they’re now available in a friggin’ retail store. You can buy Heart Shaped Blox at Favourite in Lonsdale Quay! How cool is that? I’ve never officially been for sale before! It’s all thanks to Heather, who was wearing her necklace when she stopped into the store last week – the owner asked her about it, and Heather set up a meeting for me to peddle my wares. Heather is officially my craft agent, and between her, Donna and Sam, I am a busy LEGO lass.

I’ll be at Car Free Day on June 19th with Blim, so come by and check out the new colours. I’m also working on a website to keep track of the pieces I have – the plan is to come up with an online ordering system that allows you to choose your own colour combinations. Red hearts are all fine and good, but what if you want bright red and black? Yellow and white? Blue and green, to support the Canucks? I can totally do that. Email me at kimli at delicious juice dot com if you’re interested, or sit tight and wait for the website. I have COLOURS! Hooray!

I need to do some cram crafting, STAT!

I had been looking forward to visiting Havana for a long time, and on Thursday – Shan’s birthday – we took our day trip into Cuba. It was a guided tour, which I wouldn’t normally enjoy – but except for the times when my head hurt and I wished the talking man would not talk quite so much, I was really glad for the information. I didn’t know anything about the city, after all, and I wouldn’t have learned anything beyond “hey, pretty buildings” if not for the guide. Still, when I go back, I’m going to pull a Darren and arrange an escape from the group so I can spend a night or two in the city on my own, because Havana. Is. Amazing.

I loved the city – there’s so much history there! Vancouver is just an embryo compared to Havana. There’s even a section called “Old Havana”, so you know it’s really, really old. Wikipedia says it was founded in 1519, so the city is almost 500 years old. That’s old! 125? Not old! Even New Havana is older than Vancouver, and therefore not filled with hideous but useful towers and skyscrapers. I am not a fan of Vancouver’s “everything is new and shiny” style of architecture; it’s one of the reasons I would live in Seattle if I could – so it was completely awesome to wander the streets and alleys of Old Havana and marvel at the gorgeous history of it all.

Unfortunately, Ed and Josh didn’t make the trip into town with us: Ed was feeling really sick and didn’t think he could make it through the bus ride. I was (really really) disappointed, but I didn’t want to let it sour my fun because I had been looking forward to it for so long. I left him to his own devices at the resort, and we were off: a visit to the rum museum, a walking tour through Old Havana, lunch, a bus tour of New Havana, a tour of a cigar factory, and a trip to a market so we could spread our capitalist wealth around a little. I like all of those things, so you can guess how excited I was to be off on a bona fide Adventure with a bold neon 96pt capital A.

It might be because I’m full of tacos or because I want to keep some of the trip inside my head, but I don’t really have the words to go through the 900+ pictures I took. So, you should just look at some of them instead. They are pretty. There are more Cuban pictures up on my Flickrs, but these are of the city that is amazing and you should go there if you can. In fact, you should come with me. I’m going around the same time next year. Start saving!

If I had been thinking, I’d have added this follow up picture to my hideous post below. Still, better late than never:

it's a pre-rapture miracle!

It’s a little dry, but there seems to be no permanent scarring from the horrible blistering. Hooray! The Lesbian Tattoo lives on!

I was religious with the sunscreen in Cuba, to the point where I was coating my teeth with it JUST IN CASE. That didn’t help my right shoulder though, which both Ed and I somehow missed on Tuesday. Of course, this was the area that was directly in the sun for about 9 hours solid on Tuesday, and was burned to an ever-loving crisp.

I can’t remember the last time I had a sunburn – I’m an anti-social nerd with gothic leanings; I don’t go out in the sun if I can get away with it. Unfortunately, I burned my right shoulder to dangerous levels and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Putting clothing on or off was a nightmare, as was sleeping. It hurt! I was bright red! None of this is any good at all!

.. I’d be red and cursing my clothing straps a thousand times over before I’d redo what came next:

behold the right shoulder of the damned

The burn was bad enough, but then it fucking BLISTERED. The whites – just the whites – of my lesbian tattoo blistered horribly, and was painful and hideous and terrible. It was disgusting – my shoulder looked like a monster from a B-movie with a surprisingly large makeup budget. The above picture was taken on Thursday evening and doesn’t come close to showing how awful it looked, let alone how much it hurt. I was quite scared that I had ruined my tattoo forever and would come away from Cuba with this permanent lumpiness on my shoulder, but the blisters – while numerous and gross – eventually disappeared (or popped, but I am NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT) and the skin flaked and peeled. It’s still uncomfortable, but it’s mostly just itchy – it feels like a new tattoo in the middle of healing, and I have to moisturize it nightly so it doesn’t get all tight and scaly. All my panicking was for not, but I was truly lost – I’d never burned and blistered like this, no one in our group had either, I couldn’t check the internet thoroughly for information, and there was no one I could go to and ask. I’m glad it turned out okay, but I never want to go through that again. I will take a regular old sunburn anytime, thanks. Blisters are disgusting.

I joked about the fact that I had no Diet Coke for over a week, but some quick math told me that I drank 2L of the delicious stuff the afternoon we got back from Cuba – I missed it, okay. I survived without it and didn’t complain at all, but it would take nothing short of a miracle to keep me off the stuff when I got home.

There WAS Coke available at the resort – they had some cans for sale in the gift shop, along with some Sprite. No Diet though, and I hate the taste of regular Coke so I ignored it. What’s a poor addicted girl to do?

Cuba is not without a national soft drink – everyone drinks tuKola:

this is what you get when you ask for coke or cola

It’s .. not bad. I mostly missed the fizzy bite of pop, so I would ask for a cola at dinner. It took a bit to figure out that diet cola simply wasn’t available in the restaurants; they were bringing me regular cola regardless of what I asked for. In retrospect, I’m enormously glad because THIS tasted like ABSOLUTE ASS:

"dietetica" is apparently spanish for UNGODLY EVIL IN MY MOUTH

I assumed that Cubans would have access to aspartame, which was foolish of me. They had their OWN non-sugar methods of flavouring things; a combination of three different sweeteners all with ominous names like “Sweetener 953”. Diet tuKola is fucking HEINOUS. I couldn’t come close to finishing the can; it sat in our room until the day we left and it made me hiss every time I passed it. It’s horrible. It’s an abomination. Never. Again.

I mostly drank water at the resort – a necessity, because it was very hot and I’ve HAD heatstroke with no desire at all to return. Shan stole me a lime on Day 2 so I could flavour my water, and I would troll the buffet several times a day and relieve them of their lime supply. I made use of dehydrated lemon packets and even some Crystal Light drink tubes I brought from home when I couldn’t find any limes to steal. Then, of course, there was the rum:

7 year havana club

young coconuts have sour water; adding rum did not make it tasty

i learned that i do not get drunk off pina coladas, at ALL

this, however, is another story - the mulata completely did me in and i got very drunk very quickly

The Pina Colada was the drink of choice last week, being delicious and baffling – it didn’t matter how many I drank; I would not get drunk. That was all fine and good, but I was drinking so much more than I ever do and not feeling the effects so it was time to step things up. I tried a bunch of different drinks – the Mary Pickford (rum, pineapple juice, maraschino, grenadine), the Rosa de Something or Other (rum, coconut milk, grenadine), and my ultimate doom: the Mulata (rum, creme de cacoa, lemon slush). I had grown used to not being drunk regardless of the number of drinks I had, so I downed three delicious Mulatas in rapid succession – and was amazed to find myself quite unable to walk or talk or make any sense. That night was an early one for me; I passed out right after dinner in a drunken stupor. I don’t feel so bad as it was my ONLY drunken stupor the whole trip, but damn. That be some crazy powerful drink.

Finally, I was thrilled to see Diet Coke on the plane’s drink cart on the way home. I eagerly asked for it, only to be served ..

what.

Coke Light is a curious cross between Diet Coke and Coke Zero, and tastes nothing like Diet Coke. Stranger still was the can, which came from the Belgium Coke Plant and was all weird and German:

seriously, what.

It was not my drink. I did not like it. Resigned, I had more water (and then had to pee 80 times) – but I would make up for my liquid indiscretions the instant I was through customs, and then some.

When we go back – and we WILL go back – I will be drunk ALL THE TIME off my new favourite drink, the Mulata. If I had access to a lemon slush machine at home, I’d drink them all the time. Delicious!

And that’s how I survived a week without Diet Coke while in Cuba!

Ed has a new game: Screen Cap the PVR!

WOOOOO

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I am amused!