too much sun

Posted in everyday kimli by

We rented a boat in Horseshoe Bay today for a glorious afternoon on the water. I got a little too much sun, though, and burned my chest to a mild crisp.

When we got home, I flopped down onto the ground (as you do when you are an adult and also tired). My chest was stinging pretty badly from the sun, so in the interest of after-sun care, I asked Ed to get the aloe out of my bathroom. Still tired and quite happy with the floor, I got onto my knees, figuring it would be easier to apply the soothing lotion to my ample bosom from above. I looked up at Ed from the floor as he shook and manipulated the bottle until the sticky, warm cream came gushing out onto my tits:

ooh, yeah. give it to me. spread it all over.

ooh, yeah. give it to me. spread it all over.

Take care of yourself in the sun, kids.

that’s a first

Posted in everyday kimli by

I got home just before 11pm after being out on Lola for an evening. As I pulled into the alley behind my house, a black SUV stopped suddenly in front of me as I was about to go into the parkade. The driver unrolled his window and looked back, saying something. I thought he asked me a question, but I had earphones in – so I took them out, lifted up my helmet, and said “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“WHAT?”

“I said, what did you say?”

“I didn’t fucking say anything! Why, you want me to say something? Coz I’ll say something!”

“Buddy, I just thought you said something to me. Calm down.”

“Yeah fuck you you bitch, I’ll fucking say something if I want.”

“Okay there guy, you have a great night!”

*gets out of his car*

“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME CUNT”

“.. I said, “have a great night”. What is your problem?”

“FUCK YOU YOU BITCH YOU WANNA GO LET’S DO THIS”

“Yeah, no thanks. Fuck off.”

“ARGLE BARGLE FUCKING BITCH CUNT ON YOUR LITTLE SCOOTER FUCK YOU BLAH BLAH I HAVE A TINY PENIS AND I’M A BIIIIIG MAN BECAUSE I THREATEN WOMEN”

“Bye bye!”

*foams at mouth, yells at me some more. his kids get into the car; he was either picking them up from McD’s or the PNE*

I waited until the gate was fully closed, parked Lola, and went upstairs .. where I promptly burst into tears. I’ve had people try to run me over, people nearly kill me, people with rage issues clearly not happy a scooter was in front of their car .. but never, before tonight, has anyone actually gotten out of their vehicle to threaten me, let alone because I thought they had asked me a question.

That was an extremely shitty way to end an otherwise enjoyable evening. I am shaken. I wish I had gotten his plate number or taken a picture, but I was too shocked to do so.

People suck.

hello today

Posted in everyday kimli by

So far today I:

  • Remembered to take my pants off at work
  • Managed to get – and eat – lunch
  • Audited the ever-loving fuck out of my original audit, resulting in a MEGA AUDIT that is so compliant they’re inventing a new fancy acronym for it (I suggested “EFC” for “Extreme Fucking Compliance”)

I WIN! So far, I mean. I’m still getting a haircut in 75 minutes and plan to go swimming later tonight so those could turn out badly, but so far today I am rocking this Wednesday.

off-white privilege

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Last night we gave a lady hard poops.

(I’m on a roll today – it’s not even noon and I’ve already made two poop jokes on the internet)

A large group of friends went out for dinner last night to celebrate Renee’s birthday. After we stuffed ourselves silly, we walked back to where Ed and I had parked our bikes because I had forgotten to bring Renee’s present with me to dinner. While at the bikes, we did a number of civilly disobedient things, like:

  • Laugh at the travel cards from the previous post
  • Eat a lot of candy
  • Stand around talking and having a good time
  • Taking a group picture

While all these petty crimes were going on, a lady who looked very very constipated walked by our group and demanded to know why we were there. It was not enough we were parked there – we did not live in her building, so she told us to leave. As we weren’t doing anything untoward and she likely did not own the sidewalk, we declined her helpful suggestion. This made her angry, so she threatened to call the police. Knowing the most illegal thing any of us had done that day was to sit idly by my scooter at an expired meter, we cheerfully agreed that she should call the police. This made her angrier! She called someone on the phone, glaring at us fiercely the entire time as we carried on with our hilarious conversations and candy (there was so much candy).

As she spoke on the phone (undoubtedly to the very Chief of Police), several things happened:

  • Two volunteer community “police” walked by our group and completely ignored us
  • An elderly lady with a delightfully puffy dog walked by with her companion and allowed us all to pet her fluffy dog and was very sweet
  • The constipated woman went into her building but stood at the door watching our every move, including whipping out her phone to film our nefarious activity

The police never showed up, and we eventually dispersed – not because she was recording our criminal asses, but because we were actually in the midst of saying goodbye to one another (there were 11 of us, it takes a while) when she so rudely interrupted us. She filmed us for a good long while before giving up, but not before warning others in the building lobby about the no-good ruffians lurking on the sidewalk outside the building.

Just for fun, our group was made up of:

  • Web Applications Team Lead and Project Manager
  • Lead Catherine
  • Senior Administrative Assistant, Executive Office
  • Senior Technical Writer and Manager, Special Projects
  • Guy in Charge of #YVR
  • A Social Worker who does more good on a random Tuesday at 3pm than the rest of us do all year
  • Director of Ed, Sales and Analytics
  • A Technical CEO
  • Senior Procurement and Outfitting Manager
  • Mega DBA
  • Noah

Who’s bad?

We’re bad.

That woman must have had the hardest, angriest poops last night.

—

This seems like an appropriate place to acknowledge that although the woman was over the top in her anger and response (and to be truthful, we in our cheek and sass), we all benefited greatly from being mostly white upwardly mobile Canadians. Had we (well, they) been of colour, or in a city less Vancouver, it could have had a much different ending. I am uneasily grateful for this privilege.

manic pixie starter kit

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On a whim, I purchased something called an “Anywhere Travel Guide”. It’s a set of 75 cards for “discovering the unexpected, wherever your journey leads”. I thought maybe they could be a fun writing exercise while in London, for when I get tired of writing things like “omg London” “I’m never coming home” “I miss my cats”, etc.

I finally got around to opening the box of cards yesterday, and realized that I didn’t just buy a box of writing prompts – I bought a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Starter Kit.

Bring a book you love out on a walk. Leave sentences from the book wherever you go.

Someone thought this sounded all romantic and mysterious, but to me it’s just a logistical nightmare. Okay, here’s my favourite book. Now what? Do I also bring an xacto knife to cut passages out of the pages to leave around? Not only am I destroying a book, but I’m also littering. I could copy the sentences out by hand, but now I need to bring a notebook and pen and I’m still littering. And what happens if your favourite book isn’t full of romantic or vaguely inspirational passages? What if you have truly terrible taste in books?

“I don’t think I can. I’ve told you, on the one hand, the hunger — the thirst — that, deplorable creature that I am, I feel for you. And I think you can understand that, to an extent. Though” — he half-smiled — “as you are not addicted to any illegal substances, you probably can’t empathize completely.

“But…” His fingers touched my lips lightly, making me shiver again. “There are other hungers. Hungers I don’t even understand, that are foreign to me.”

Or worse still,

Jamie knows Adam always gets nervous before they head out to sea; he can tell by the way the man walks, the slight tremor in his hands, the hitch in his breath. It’s not that Adam is afraid of the ocean, the man just desperately does not want to get sick. He wants to participate, to feel the satisfaction of seeing one of his builds not screw up for once. He wants to cheer alongside Jamie as the rig they worked on for months performs just as it’s supposed to, to hug the man when it’s over, to hear the whispered words of praise the other man wouldn’t be caught dead saying to anyone else.

It’s a cute idea – sort of – but if you stop to actually think about everything involved, it becomes laughably convoluted and just plain rude. Don’t deface books. Don’t litter! And don’t ever, ever make me look up Mythbusters slash to prove a point EVER AGAIN.

Walk through the city while listening to music that you love. Let the words of the songs tell you stories about things that you pass by.

Makin’ my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass, and I’m homebound ..

Whisper a secret into the wind. Follow it as it flies away.

What. No. Why. Stop this at once.

Ask someone where to find something really strange.

Wanna see a dead body?

Collect voices. Dark, light, funny, sweet, whispering, slow, loud, soft. Imagine them as a choir.

STAND STILL I’m trying to collect your voice now where did I put my stabbing knife?

Choose a person on the street. Make this person your guide. Follow him/her for as long as possible.

Call home with your one phone call. Ask them to sell mother’s prized horse figurine collection to make your bail. Imagine your happy place during the cavity search.

Look behind you, look above you, look beneath you. These are your surroundings.

This is a word. People breathe oxygen. Cars go fast.

Run four steps, walk slowly for five steps, run ten steps, and turn around a corner. Stop suddenly and stand completely still.

When Joseph Gordon-Levitt catches up to you and asks what you’re doing, tell him you’re following the secret you whispered into the wind. Bask in his adoration as he openly admires your free spirit. Smile and count the polka-dots on your vintage lace chemise as he realizes you are from two different worlds and could never make it work. Skip away, promising to plant kisses in the dirt for him every spring on that hill you climbed together on the day you found out you were terminal.

Start running. Run for two blocks. Can you smell something?

You may want to take a shower.

Hide in different places throughout the day – under a chair, behind a wall, between some trees.

Get stuck. Die slowly when no one comes looking for you. Spend your final minutes on this mortal plane cursing the whimsy that led you to be trapped under this chair behind a wall between some trees.

—

The entire deck of cards is like this. There are more cards suggesting you leave things places, other asking you to pick things up off the street and mail them to someone, and a lot of talking to strangers. The entire deck isn’t completely useless – there are several things that might be legitimately fun to try, like picking a random restaurant and ordering the 3rd and 12th things off the menu or walking into any place and asking someone where their favourite place in the city is – but the vast majority of the prompts are complete 500 Days of Summer Paper Towns Breakfast at Tiffany’s Virgin Suicides Garden State MPDG bullshit. This isn’t to say that I am beyond doing random-ass things – quite the contrary – but I am not some slip of a caricature of a girl. I am a fierce, independent, anxiety-riddled weirdo. My quirks are not for you!

If you need me, I’ll be dancing with my cat in the centre of Times Square while wearing a dress made of tomorrow’s newspaper and dead roses.

be the most me

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Gill posted a link to this really good article about travel writing as a woman. I leave for my trip in 63 days, and while my trip isn’t really long enough to generate a book’s worth of content, I’m really looking forward to writing while I’m gone.

I’m aware that the writing I do isn’t travel-book-material – I couldn’t begin to tell you where to find the best martini in the city, or where the beef carpaccio is so thin and tender it melts on your tongue and leaves behind only a whispered promise of sun-drenched Tuesdays – but I’m pretty sure there’s no danger of my falling into the privileged white world of eating, praying, or loving. I haven’t fooled myself into thinking that anyone would read an entire book of my words. It’s a fun daydream to have, but at the end of the day, who am I writing this for? If it’s not ultimately for myself, then I’ve failed whatever vague and unknown goals I may have had.

I find myself torn between wanting to classify my trip as an attempt to find myself in 25 days or less, or laughing at the whole damn genre and just going with “vacation”. It’s true that I’m feeling a little lost and aimless these days – my health and inability to participate in life has affected me in ways I hadn’t expected – but I don’t know that this adventure is going to be the thing that makes everything come into focus. I’m excited as all hell to go, planning on getting out of my comfort zone as often as I’m able, and will be giddy with freedom and possibility the entire time. I could probably produce 400 eeee-heavy pages on my every thought during those weeks, but why? No one needs that.

I’m going to write whatever comes out, and you’ll get random updates about what went on around me. There will be swearing. I might get lost. Maybe I’ll find myself on the cliffs of Dover. I’ll definitely get too close to the edge and will try hard not to fall off. I’ll take a train to another country and maybe retrace my steps to the Eiffel Tower dildo I regret not buying the last time I was in Paris. I’ll hang out on bridges and wonder about the things that brought me to that place at that time. I’m going to be the best and most Kimli I can possibly be, and see what happens. That’s enough, right? It’s gonna have to be.

welcome to kimterest

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Hey, parents! Looking for a fun, easy craft project for your kids this summer? You’ve come to .. well, not the right place but more like the temporarily SFW place. This is never the right place to come for good kid-friendly content of any sort. That being said, I made a thing and I thought it would be super fun for little kids, so I’m sharing it even though I really must stress that I am not normally crafty OR kid-friendly in any way.

Make a Fabulous Glitter Parasol!

You’ll need:

  • A paper parasol. These can be found in your local Chinatown gift stores. Look or ask for paper ones, which’ll come in many colours and sizes and sometimes patterned. I used plain white parasols, but this would work well on any colour and look pretty cool over a pattern too. These can range from $2-3 for small ones, up to $10+ for umbrella-sized one. I bought medium-sized ones that would be perfect for a kid, and they were $5 each.
  • Glitter Glue! Hit up a dollar store and grab big bottles of glitter glue in many colours. Don’t forget to get gold and silver, because they look super awesome. Skip the small bottles, the bigger ones (125ml/4oz) are way better. Some craft stores even sell chunky glitter glue with big pieces or shapes! Glitter is the best.
my glitter was plain and less fabulous than this. i am calling for a do-over.

my glitter was plain and less fabulous than this. i am calling for a do-over.

  • Foam Brushes! You can get an assorted pack of 5-10 foam brushes at the dollar store. Easy to use and washable and they work out to like a dime each, so who cares.
your personal foam guy is not needed, for once

your personal foam guy is not needed, for once

That’s really about it. You may want to lay some paper down on your table so stuff doesn’t get destroyed, but that’s up to you. Glitter glue is washable, so it scrubs off pretty easy – ask me how I know.

Make Stuff

  • Squirt piles of glitter glue onto plates or small bowls. With your umbrella either open or closed, dab your brush into some glue and start painting. The paper will darken as you paint and may get soggy, but will firm up again when the glue dries. It dries clear!
  • Go nuts! Paint as little or as much glitter onto your umbrella as you want. Because you’re painting paper suspended between sticks, don’t use too much force with your strokes. If things are getting too wet, let that section of umbrella dry for a bit and move onto another part.
  • Using the foam brushes is great for all-over glittering, but you can do fancy stuff, too. Squirt the glue straight from the bottle onto your umbrella in circles or shapes. Do this last, because this will need some time to set and dry. You can leave the glue as is from the bottle, or use your fingers to smoosh it around in your desired pattern.
  • When your umbrella is complete, open it completely and set it aside to dry. We left ours overnight (they were pretty damn soggy), and this is how they looked the next day:
FullSizeRender-8


sparkle sparkle

FullSizeRender-6

:D

industry professionals hard at work

industry professionals hard at work

FullSizeRender (2)

glitter is hard to photograph. this is a tiny cute umbrella, but the overall glitter wash turned out great.

FullSizeRender (1)

close up of the blue glitter

FullSizeRender

silver!

My co-workers and I painted these up, because we are terrible adults. It was really easy and fun though, so I figured that if a bunch of software engineers could do it, then it’d make a great afternoon craft project for kids. It’s relatively inexpensive, delightfully messy, easy to clean up, and you get a fabulous parasol out of it for sassy sun shade. What’s not to love?

If anyone actually tries this, I’d love to see what you make! Hit me up in the comments!

Now, if you need me, I will be disco-glitter-awesome in the park.

details.

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Time to put on my ranty panties!

My boss messaged me this afternoon, asking if I was working from home. I am, and I’ve gotten a lot done! It was an odd thing to ask – his official policy is “work from Rome if you want, just get the work done” – so I asked him what was up. Apparently, someone “noticed” that I hadn’t been in the office “all week” and “brought it to his attention”, so he just wanted to make sure I was still alive.

That really grinds my gears.

Yes, I’m working from home. I’ve got the blessing of both my boss and my boss boss to do so when needed, which I appreciate because I do need to often. I’m in the office each week for at least three days, but work from home the rest of the time for reasons both medical and productivity related (you try editing articles when surrounded by howler monkeys). I do know this is a privilege I’ve been given, and I don’t abuse it. When I work from home, I am both available and visible – more so than when I’m in the office, actually – and today in particular, I’ve been making noise in at least half dozen work related tools.

If my bosses are okay with where I am, why is it anyone else’s business to inquire as to why they can’t see me in meatspace? I don’t like feeling obligated to share every single medical issue that keeps me at home, but if I have to, I will:

The smoke from the fires happening all around Vancouver is making breathing really difficult for me. In fact, I’ve been coughing non-stop since Friday. The coughing makes me throw up. In addition, I am presently virally compromised with some sort of throat grossness that is not an infection. I am potentially contagious, and have been at home to protect people from me, and me from people. I took a vacation day on Friday to go away for the weekend, but instead stayed in town being sick, so there’s that. Also, the air is really dry. For the last two nights in a row, I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with catastrophic nosebleeds that go on for 30 minutes or so. Gross, bloody things are coming out of my face. One of the chunks had tentacles. I named him Martin! He’s really disgusting, but I’ve almost come to terms with the fact that my periods have been replaced by geysers of blood erupting from my nose. I say “almost”, because I generally try to take care of all my fun party tricks at the same time, and so will often throw up while dealing with my nose. Funny story: last week I threw up the baked potato I ate for dinner, in the sink. Some of the potato didn’t go down the sink as much as I had hoped, and was actually stuck in the fancy drain stopper thing. Not only did it stop other things from going down the drain, it was collecting matter like nose blood and pieces of Martin. All that lovely stuff was starting to rot in the sink, which made things smell really bad .. which then made me throw up even more, when I discovered what the smell was! Haha! Anyway, due to my sore throat virus, my difficulty breathing, the overall lack of sleep I’m getting, the sore muscles from throwing up, and startling amount of blood loss, I’ve been working from home. If you really wanted to know why I wasn’t in the office, you could have just asked – I’m always very forthcoming with the disgusting details of my life. I probably would have made it a little less gross for you, but since you didn’t ask me directly and instead went to my boss and made me feel as though people perceive me as someone who doesn’t do any work because I can’t always be seen in three dimensions, you can have the whole story.

Today is my one year anniversary, too. Me and Martin are there in spirit.

 

 

gone viral

Posted in medical anomaly by

I’ve had a sore throat for 5 days. I thought it was caused by whatever the precursor to Korean Fan Death is, but when it didn’t let up I booked an appointment with a clinic. I was mostly in “wait and see” mode, but the online doctor requested I go see someone in meat space because she interpreted my blood results as my body trying to fight something off that likely wasn’t related to my slacker heart. Tired of not being able to swallow without making faces, I caved and booked myself in for a prodding.

The appointment was an epic shit show from the beginning. I hate walk-in clinics, but they’re my only real option in cases like this (even though we all know how well that worked out for me when I was trying to diagnose why I couldn’t breathe). Luckily, the clinic I use has an online appointment system so you can skip the wait. I booked myself an appointment last night, but when I arrived, I was told the doctor I was supposed to see wasn’t even in today, and there was an hour wait to see anyone. I was pretty furious at this, because I didn’t exactly want to sit in a crowded waiting room full of sick people – it’s why I used the goddamn booking system in the first place – but I didn’t have much of a choice: my sore throat had progressed in alarming and disgusting ways. I sighed, and took a seat to begin my wait.

.. and that was when an elderly Japanese lady asked me when my baby was due.

I stammered that I wasn’t pregnant, and I know the lady felt pretty terrible about asking me, but it still took all my willpower not to cry in the waiting room. The tears welled up several times, but I held fast onto my towering anger at being in this situation at all to keep them at bay. Finally, my name was called, and I was whisked away to see a doctor for a total of 96 seconds.

She looked at my throat and took my temperature, and came up with a verdict of virus. It’s not the Return of Strep, which is good – I was more than a little terrified that the cycle of slowly dying aloud was going to start all over again – but other than that, everything sucks. There are no drugs they can give me for this. I’m just supposed to wait it out, but in the meantime, I’m in pain and am sad down to my very bones. We’re supposed to be leaving for Seattle in an hour or so, but I don’t know that I should go – technically I’m contagious AND have a weakened immune system, both of which point to a sequestering. I could get other people sick. Other people could make me sicker. But .. I’ll miss Ali’s birthday and partying with people and having fun. I don’t know what I should do.

I’ve never before been asked if I was pregnant, and MAN does that sting. I made it home before collapsing in a puddle of tears, and now I am literally sobbing into some cheesecake. It is perhaps a little clichéd and counter-productive, but if there was ever a time that called for cheesecake, this is it. I am a sad, sad Kimli.

oh, you

Posted in medical anomaly by

In British Columbia, there’s a website called myehealth.ca that allows you to view your test results before you see a doctor. It’s pretty cool, and leads to a lot of Googling to find out exactly what you’re dying of. I had blood drawn yesterday in an attempt to find out why I’m so damned itchy (going on 8 months now, it’s getting worse, and it’s spreading), but before I had even viewed my results I was having an excellent time:

I forgot my password. No big deal, that’s what password reset functions are for. Submitted my email address, got the recovery link, opened it. Website wants me to verify my identity by answering a security question.

“What year did you graduate high school?”

Okay, that’s simple enough. Enter the year, and click OK.

“Incorrect, please try again.”

Well, shit. There’s only one answer to this question, and I know I didn’t enter it wrong. What could it be?

Hmm .. I wonder.

“What year did you graduate high school?”

I typed in “I didn’t”, and pressed enter.

“Thank you! Please enter a new password.”

Past me is fucking hilarious!

I’ve been trying to keep myself away from my blog, because I’m not very much fun to be around at the moment. “I’m itchy” seems like such a small thing, but when it’s a third of your body, intensely uncomfortable, and nothing gives you relief .. well, you’d be pretty cranky too. A great man once roared at the top of the stairs “I’M AT MY LIMIT! I’M AT MY LIMIT!”, and that’s me right now. I’m quite figuratively at my wit’s end, and have sobbed myself to sleep more times in the last few weeks than I’d like to admit. I’m hoping that my blood will show that I’m full of bees or something, but I’m far more terrified that it’s not going to show ANYTHING and I’ll be told that nothing can be done to ease my extreme discomfort. I think people who avoid going to the doctor generally fall into one of two categories – those who are afraid something will be discovered, and those who are afraid nothing will corroborate their symptoms. I’m in that second camp. Don’t tell me my itching is nothing, I have dozens of bloody welts that beg to differ.

I still have some Googling to do, but so far my blood says I have too much potassium, slight lipemia, and high C Reactive Protein sensitivity. I also have a high white blood cell count, a teensy bit more RDW than the norm, too many monocytes AND lymphocytes, extra neutrophils, and too much ferritin. I have no idea what any of that means, but the internet tells me all those things could be elevated due to …….. a viral infection. Which is what I have in my heart. So yep, that checks out.

A running theory about my itchiness (other than the penicillin allergy) is that it’s just my body overproducing in response to all the bad shit going down. I’m not a doctor, but those results seem to lean heavily in that direction. Unfortunately, that’s the diagnosis I’m most afraid of because I don’t know what, if anything, can be done to make my cells stfu and calm their tiny cell tits already. Antihistamines do jack shit, so this isn’t a traditional allergy. I dunno what it is. Perhaps I will let someone who can actually read those results tell me what the dilly is, instead of wildly gesticulating about my fate.

So itchy.

How’s by you?