what’s up with that thang?

Posted in adventure, medical anomaly by

Here I go, here I go, here I go again –

Girls, what’s my weakness?

UV Rays.

Yesterday was the first fully glorious day in Actual Summer. The sun was shining, birds were singing, bees were trying to have sex with them (as is my understanding) .. so we went on a boat. We’ve rented wee speed boats in Horseshoe Bay multiple times before, and it’s always an amazing way to spend a few hours. We packed up snacks and drinks and Shan and took off on our usual route, stopping to say hello to seals and dream about living on a tiny island.

It was wonderful.

Less wonderful is how I managed to completely forget that a) the sun is hot and b) there was sunscreen in the snack bag that I really ought to have used. I burned my exposed parts to a deep, crispy red, and they all hurt like hell. According to the internet, I now have seven kinds of skin cancer caused by Sun Poisoning, all of which can be exacerbated by every single medication I’m on. I didn’t know that! Was I supposed to know that? Goddamnit, I don’t have time for this! I’m already broken!

This is why I can’t have nice things, like skin.

sure was pretty, though

sure was pretty out, though

 

 

kimli two shoes

Posted in z.assorted unsorted.z by

Things I did over my birthday weekend:

  • Wore TWO SHOES
  • Got rained out of the horse races
  • Had a last minute tea party instead!
  • Complete with Happy Meals
  • And mutton busting!
  • We told stories, bring Brad up to speed
  • The Big Penis Book came out
  • It was great
  • On Sunday I went to a drag show with my favourite Seattlites
  • Not just any drag show, but a MEGA drag show
  • It was amazing
  • I took a zillion pictures
  • Most of them sucked
  • But some turned out!
  • They are here
  • It was an excellent birthday weekend!

let’s have another round tonight

Posted in angst, fuuuuuuuu, i'm an astronaut by

Like every good tech company, the one I work for has a lot of swag. In addition to the usual range of t-shirts and stickers available to the public, there’s a series of limited edition, staff-only swag that gets handed out from time to time: bottle openers, beer koozies, flasks (so many flasks), growlers, martini shakers, kegs, beer bongs, jugs of moonshine, shot glasses, stomach pumps, etc. There’s a theme. Can you guess what it is?

As someone who doesn’t have an apparent drinking problem, I’m confused and annoyed by all the drinking-related items. To be fair, I’m confused and annoyed by almost everything – but honestly, it’s awkward being a non-drinker surrounded by a culture of binge drinking. I don’t get it. And I’m nearly always left out, because every event or celebration is centred around alcohol. Hit a milestone? Shotgun a beer! Building camaraderie? Ice someone! Team events? To the bar! Company outings? Booze is provided! And thirteen orders of fries, is that it here? WINE AND BEER!

That’s why, when I found a piece of company swag that I could actually use, I was excited. It’s a little reusable pouch with a first aid kit in it, and and someone who is frequently injured in stupid ways, I was happy to have a cute little safety kit to throw in my bag if I was feeling particularly perilous that day. During a fundraiser last week, the kits were available to purchase, so I bought a bunch to give to my friends and share my glee over having cute, usable swag.

I am so adorably naive!

Each kit contains:

  • Bandages! (super useful!)
  • An antibacterial wipe! (clean them germs!)
  • A vial of Blistex! (dry, chapped lips are unpleasant!)
  • Aspirin! (cures what ails ya!)
  • Breath mints! (not exactly medical, but thanks for thinking of my breath!)
  • A packet of Vitamin C drink powder (wait a second ..)

They’re not first aid kits. They’re hangover cure kits.

*sigh* At least the pouch it comes in is cute. If I find out you can dissolve the pouch in water to make emergency wine, though, I quit.

I promise I’m not straightedge, a teetotaler, or some freaky booze-eschewing evangelist. Drinking is fine. I even do it sometimes – in fact, just last month I had an alcohol. I don’t care if people drink. I’m simply struggling to find my place in a job that revolves around booze, and feel more left out than usual because I can’t relate. It’s by far the most difficult scenario I face in the tech world: not trying to navigate all that technology in spite of my uterus, but trying to advance in a culture that I can’t partake of.

pictured: one alcohol.

pictured: one alcohol.

in short

Posted in everyday kimli by
  • Ed’s birthday. Storm Crow Ale House. Critical Miss AND Critical Hit. Drunk!
  • Astronautalis show in Seattle. 10th one! Maaaaaay have done additional damage to my foot while dancing my tits off. Oops.
  • Excellent weekend in Seattle. Saw a play. With nudity! Bush AND dong. What a time to be alive.
  • Obsessed (like, Rent-style obsessed) with Hamilton. Spent last week learning about American revolution history. Cross-referenced soundtrack with Trouble Hunters (Astronautalis song about the Battle of Trenton, which is something I apparently now know about). Need to bone up on my Canadian history to balance out all this knowledge.
  • Ultrasound today. Heart exists, moves and stuff. Good?
  • Forthcoming birthday weekend shaping up to be insane for reasons that have nothing to do with my birthday.
  • Desire for drastic shake up has me in a funk. Compromises are being discussed.
  • Lola needs an engine rebuild. No idea where I’m going to get it done or how much it’ll cost. Bummed out.
  • Bought tickets to see the Book of Mormon in Vancouver in September with friends. Fun!
  • Accidentally bought an Xbox One. Not sure what to play on it.
  • Haven’t ruled out travel beyond October, but have started planning for the next two years out. Who needs to stay home? Not me.

Mostly content. Forget how to write in complete sentences. Tired of having a broken foot. Desperately need a haircut. Other than that, things are good.

FullSizeRender

new york things

Posted in adventure, international kimli by

I survived New York, broken foot and all!

I wasn’t able to update while we were gone because a) there was no free wifi at the hotel and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $70 for an essential service and b) too busy Doing Things to stop and write about them. We’re home now, so it’s time to play catch up.

Excluding travel time, we had four full days in New York to do whatever we wanted. I had a small but significant list of things I wanted to do, and we got through most of it – we’d have done more, but we were pretty seriously hampered by my broken bones. That being said, I was surprisingly mobile in that stupid boot, and it even came in handy several times.

In no particular order, here are the things we did:

  • Hung out in Times Square (which is really more of a rhombus) like gaping tourists, and quickly tired of dodging selfie sticks and people asking if we liked comedy
  • Went up the Empire State Building and took ten thousand pictures of a rainy New York at night
  • Thoroughly enjoyed the VIP experience at the ESB – seriously, we were fawned over. It was hilarious and expensive but I’m so glad I sprung for the no-lines pass.
  • Went to Rockerfeller Center and looked at it; ditto Radio City Music Hall
  • Snuck into the Metropolitan Museum of Art – we had stopped in to pee and look in the shops (museum shops are my favourite), and Ed found a back entrance into Egypt so we wandered around and saw awesome things. Normally I would feel bad about this, but the Met has a suggested donation of $25 per adult. You can pay less if you like, even if that isn’t acknowledged anywhere. And I spent more than that in the shop anyway, so it’s not like we saw art for free. It was just .. discounted.
  • Enjoyed street meat! I had the BEST HOT DOG EVER outside the Met.
  • Walked through Central Park multiple times! Our hotel was on the Upper West Side, just three blocks from the park. It was really nice out for park walkin’, and we hunted down a few statues I wanted to see. It’s very beautiful in there, and I named all the turtles I met. That is likely the reason our walks took a long time (as opposed to my slow hobbling), as there were a lot of turtles.
  • In addition to being close to the park, our hotel was also two blocks from a Shake Shack. Many shakes were shacked.
  • We walked half of Brooklyn Bridge and it was awesome
  • All the bus tours! Correctly guessing that I wouldn’t be able to walk as much as I normally do on vacation, I purchased 3-day bus tours for us. We did almost every tour (some more than once), including the boat cruise which was AMAZING. Neither of us had any idea how close it got to the Statue of Liberty and that it went under the Brooklyn Bridge, so we super enjoyed the cruise. The staff were fantastic, too – seeing that we were at the tail end of a full boatload and not wanting to have to stand at the railing with hundreds of others, they let Ed and I get on at the very start of the next sailing so we could snag railside seats at the front of the boat.
  • Someone suggested that we do the NBC Studio Tour, but we don’t really watch TV or have any kind of yearning for NBC programming. Instead, we paid to go to the top of Rockerfeller Center and marvel at the daytime views.
  • Due to my great distrust of stopovers in Toronto, we both traveled carry-on only. It was trying at times, and due to the lack of free space I decided not to visit the Nintendo Store. That will be saved for next time.
  • Many delicious meals with surprisingly sensible portion sizes, except for one meal that simply did not end (there were so many shrimp my stomach hurts just thinking about it)
  • The one yucky weather day was the day we decided to do the Empire State Building at 11pm, and it is cold as all heck when you are 86 floors above the city. I bought what I THOUGHT were leggings at Macy’s to protect my frosty box, but they turned out to be stupid pants instead. I wore one pair that evening, but returned them the next day. No pants for me, America. Nice try.
  • Took the night tour through Brooklyn, as narrated by a crazy man
  • Very briefly visited MoMA – they closed at 5:30 and we arrived after 4:30, so instead of paying $50USD to see art for an hour we looked at what wasn’t behind Art Guards and put it at the top of the list for next time
  • Ditto the Guggenheim – on my own I could spend days in museums, but they’re not Ed’s cup of tea (especially when they come with a giant price tag: we love you, London). Plus, they’re doing mega construction in the Guggenheim so half the place was closed off. Will go next time.

Observations about New York:

  • I don’t think I could live there
  • It’s nice to know a place exists that is more expensive than London
  • I would definitely visit again
  • I enjoyed the city and like it a lot, but I don’t like like it
  • So that’s good to know – I really do love London, and am not fickle
  • American Airlines blows
  • I took a lot of pictures
  • Feel free to browse through them
  • I’ll inevitably post some when I run out of things to say
  • I am glad to be home

eat a dick, gravity

Posted in broken kimli by

Accident-Free for 0 Days

I fell off Lola this morning. No real damage done to anything other than my ego, but I’m a wee bit bloody and will start to bruise soon. Poor Lola has some shiny new scratches on her right side, which one of the worst parts of all of this. If I were the kind of person who equated owning things with motherhood, I would say that I am a bad scooter mom. Fortunately, I am not that kind of person.

The bruises and scrapes are bad, but I feel pretty awful about this for a lot of other reasons that I will now list for you here:

  • It vindicates the people who told me I couldn’t ride my scooter with a broken foot, even though it totally doesn’t. I drove to work one day last week, and it fucking sucked – the Minibator is standard, and operating the clutch with my broken booted foot was just a terrible idea all over the place. When riding my scooter and not falling off it, my left foot doesn’t touch the ground. Lola is automatic AND I’ve always used my right foot as my balancing foot. Today’s fall was a stupid miscalculation on my part that would have happened even if I wasn’t broken.
  • I’m on vacation as of 5pm. I’ve been working from home a lot lately because of the aforementioned broken foot, but I had planned on being in the office today to take care of some things and put in some face time before I take off on international adventures.
  • I had a hot dinner date tonight that I now have to postpone because sore and broken and generally out of sorts and sad
  • There were two important errands I wanted to run today
  • I am a walking disaster

I’m very excited about adventure, but today is made of suck.

Oh well. At least my bandages are cute.

 

when she was good

Posted in everyday kimli by

I am trying REALLY HARD to be good. Seriously! I wear my stupid boot (which is a whole universe better than the stupid cast) all the time, except when I’m sleeping. The doctor* said “stay off your foot”, so I am – using my stupid crutches as much as possible, beseeching Ed to fetch me things, and just generally being prone and pathetic at all times. It is tiring.

Unfortunately, Ed’s out of town for the next few days, so I’m on my own. While I’m still wearing my stupid boot, I’ve set the crutches aside because I can’t carry things while using them, and I need my hands to feed the cats and myself and get Diet Coke and ice cubes. I’ve been carefully stumping about the house, trying very hard not to break myself any further for ulterior reasons.

Did I ever tell you about the last time I had to wear an aircast? I probably did, because I tell the internet everything – but to make a long story short, I gave myself a stress fracture in Dallas and had to wear an aircast to heal it up, which then caused a stress fracture in my other foot so I had to switch the boot for a while which re-fucked my other foot and so on. It was a fun time for all, what with my being constantly broken. Had we stayed in Alberta, I would have eventually had surgery to replace my broken bones with steel rods of foot justice, but we moved to BC and the new foot doctor fucked me up in a hundred shiny new ways instead.

The tiny bit of walking around yesterday with the aircast on my left foot made my right foot hurt in a horribly familiar way.

I have a bad feeling about this.

I’m still going to wear my boot, but I have to remember to wear a shoe on my right foot to balance me out a little. Hopefully, if I can keep this unsanitary game (the carpets hate me which is fine because I hate them) up for a while longer, my bones will be okay enough to handle New York in eight days. I’m arranging for the majority of our time there to be spent on tour buses, will wear my boot and rest when I need to, and when I get home I will sit in one spot and not move until September.

Yes I’m justifying this all in my head and I know it’s dumb, but I’ve got an Adventure planned and no mere broken bone will keep me from Adventure. I’ll just have to be careful, and dial it back a little – maybe skip the midnight run through Central Park. Maybe.

Tomorrow I am going to Leave the House. I’ve been cooped up in here for what feels like months, so I am going to shower and put on clothes and go to the office like a normal person and it’s going to be weird and exhausting but I’m starting to go all Gollum here, so it’s time.

Plus, there may or may not be three whole mails waiting for me.

*Every doctor I’ve seen at the Lions Gate Hospital has been this swarthy dreamboat soap opera person – what’s up with that. It’s weird. Stop being so handsome.

hey man, i got what you need

Posted in angst, everyday kimli by

have you ever wanted something
so badly
that it possessed your body and your soul
through the night and through the day
until you finally get it
and then you realize that it wasn’t what you wanted after all
and then those selfsame sickly little thoughts
now go and attach themselves to something
or somebody
new
and the whole goddamn thing starts all over again

This isn’t entirely appropriate though, because we didn’t get it. And we didn’t not get it. Basically, we never got to the getting stage and now I am sad.

Ed is sick and I have a broken foot and we’re leaving for New York in two weeks and our realtor is in Paris, so we thought it was a great time to try and buy a townhouse. I stumbled upon a listing and we accidentally went to the open house and I unintentionally fell in love with the place – almost 1500 square feet, three floors, backing onto a forest, within our price range, beautifully renovated, a ton of amenities. It was perfect. I didn’t think we’d actually stand a chance of getting it, because housing in Vancouver is utterly fucked up and even though we could afford the asking price, if there was any sort of bidding war we’d be out in the first round – but that didn’t stop me from daydreaming about three bedrooms and forests and no truck routes or crosswalk signals. It’s not like I was planning on moving, because our chances were so infinitesimally ridiculously small. I expected we’d bid, we’d be immediately outbid, and I would pout but be fine with it.

What I DIDN’T expect was our being unable to get to the bidding stage at all, based on mortgage rules and realistic numbers and my good friend the CMHC, who’s already screwed me out of my dream home once so why not make it twice. All the sadness and hopelessness of the initial buying process came flooding back, because while my brain and heart were totally prepared to lose a bidding war, I wasn’t prepared to hear we can’t do it for other (valid, I guess, but I am not the numbers person in this so to me it’s just things being utterly stupid and mean) reasons. I’m wallowing in hopelessness regarding the Vancouver housing market and convinced we’ll never ever be able to upgrade. On the flip side, it’s more ammo for Plan B (get the fuck out of Vancouver altogether and move overseas).

I am sad. And “Dusk” by The The is a phenomenal album, even 23 years later.

cast me off into exile

Posted in everyday kimli by

This was entirely unexpected yet totally expected at the same time.

First off, I’m fine. It’s not as bad as it looks – just a broken foot.

How’d this happen? Well, I’ve kind of been a bad girl. My left foot has been bothering me since before Barcelona, and I know enough about the anatomy of my feet to know it was likely a stress fracture. Armed with that knowledge, I promptly did absolutely nothing. I walked on it, hopped around like a kangaroo, jumped when commanded to do so by the House of Pain (ooh, irony), and basically lived my life ignoring the fact that there was an ever-increasing amount of pain radiating from my left foot at all times.

This past week was really bad. I couldn’t put any weight on my foot without wincing in pain, and relaxing my foot in any way made me make very undignified whimpering noises, if not outright agonized cries. You’d think I’d finally be smart enough to see a doctor, but nope – that is not how we do things around here, young lady. It wasn’t until this afternoon when I tripped in the samosa shop, both stubbing and landing heavily on my damaged foot, that the pain finally made me cry actual tears. Taking my tears as a sign, we went to the ER and five long, long, LONG hours later, here I am with a foot that graduated from stress fracture to full-on real fracture.

knee high casts, so hot right now

I may not be in the cast or on crutches forever – I have to see an orthopaedic guy who will determine my fate. The cast is a bit of overkill, but the doc decided it was necessary when he learned I have a history of a) stress fractures, and b) making really bad decisions. I wasn’t at all confident I could keep an air cast on, so I get one that can’t be removed. It’s like putting a cone on a dog. This is my cone. It is weird.

Also, crutches suck. Hopefully I can get the OK to work from home next week – if not, I’ll need to leave for the office soon. If I’m lucky, I’ll get there by Tuesday if I start now.

I’m pretty pissed that I’m gonna have to miss tomorrow’s piñata making class, though. I’ve been looking forward to that for weeks.