The Grinch

Our new neighbours moved in at the beginning of the month. Neighbours don't really register with us unless they annoy us (which most of them do, although there is a nice lady that walks her dog in booties and says hi to me, but then we don't share any walls with her). Our newest neighbour shares a back wall with us and we knew that something had changed because now we could hear a yappy little dog barking all the time.

Yappy dog scared the crap out of me the other day as I was walking to my car first thing in the morning. He came careening out of the bushes barking at the top of his lungs. (As an aside, for some reason I always type lunch instead of lungs which makes for some amusing sentences.) I am not a fan of yappy dogs at the best of times. I do not like noisy things (I make an exception for my husband, but not in the morning. Cordless headphones saved our marriage). If you know me at all, you know that I am not in any way a morning person and I do not react well to being startled, or even spoken to, before 8 a.m. (My old roommate and I used to communicate in grunts in the morning. It was good.) I nearly had heart failure. Stupid dog.

They had been moved in for less than a week when this monstrosity appeared:



Does it not seem a bit excessive to you?

I also hate people that are all moved in and settled and decorated immediately in a new place. It took Paul and I a year and a half to put up photos here. Not only do these people have everything decorated outside, but inside their tree is up and decorated and they have piney garland strung about the entire place. Our Christmas tree is out of storage and still in the box in our living room. The only reason it's out of storage is that we had to move it so maintenance could access the furnace.

I'm just waiting for one of the gazillion neighborhood dogs that pee absolutely everywhere to lift a leg on that giant inflatable snowman. I am clearly going to hell. (Why yes, I do answer to 'The Grinch'. Why do you ask?)

Doctor Panago

I had a strange experience today when I stopped by Panago. I walked in and the owner came up to the counter. Instead of starting out with "Hi." or "How are you doing?" or "What can I get for you?" he started with "You look tired." I wasn't exactly sure how to react to that, but I was tired, so I said so. While getting my order and taking my payment, he proceeded to tell me that I should take honey, a teaspoon full every morning, and that would solve my problem; I would be full of energy.

Funny, I didn't think that I ordered diagnosis and herbal remedy with my pizza.

Awesome

I had a bad day today. How very Monday of me.

It started with oversleeping, which is not that unusual for me. I rushed around and was out of the house in ten minutes, which is actually fairly impressive. I usually park in our parking stall and Paul parks on the street but for some reason we were reversed this weekend. As I crossed the strand of snowy hill to my car I noticed that the frost on my windows looked a bit weird, not like the other cars I had passed. Around on the drivers side everything looked fairly normal so I didn't really think anything of it.

As I opened the door, my right foot skidded forward in the loose snow just as the door was swinging past. The corner of the door caught me in the shin and cut my leg open, which was followed by cursing. I retrieved some kleenex from my bag and applied pressure until the cut stopped bleeding. It wasn't bad enough to require medical attention, most of it was shallow except the part where the corner of the door bit into my shin, but it scraped uncomfortably on my pants every time I moved. My day was off to an awesome start.

I started the car (always a frustrating endeavor with a 26 year old vehicle in Canadian winter) and got out to scrape the frost off my windows. When I got around to the rear passenger side window, I realized that the reason it looked funny was that someone had poured something orange down my windows and the side of the car. Awesome. It was sticky and gooey and nearly impossible to scrape off (Orange pop perhaps?). I decided that washing it was not a good plan since the cloth would likely just freeze to the car (and that would just look ridiculous) so I just scraped it as well as I could and hoped that I wouldn't need to make any lane changes to the right on my way to work.

I put the car into gear and set off...for roughly 3 inches before getting stuck. Awesome. I'm already late for work. I set to rocking the car, optimistic that I would be able to get free since I was parked on a hill and no one was in front of me. After much rocking and tire spinning I shot free and was finally on my way...until I turned onto 106th street directly behind a snow plow (stay back 8 metres!) Le sigh. 106th street is the only stretch of my drive that there is no alternate route until 63rd ave so my only option was to plod along behind the plow at a snails pace. I used that opportunity to call in to work to tell them I was going to be late and would miss my first meeting of the day.

I finally arrived at work 35 minutes late. The working part of my day was not too bad since I was not on the schedule. Rather than spending my day on deskwork as planned, I ended up training the two new girls on diploma applications, which went alright. Part way through, one of them mentioned that the display on her phone was broken, so I thought we should exchange it with the empty desk's phone. I went to the empty desk, disconnected the phone cord and promptly dropped it behind the desk, into an extremely hard to access area. Excellent.

I gave the new girl the phone, found a metre stick and began fishing down between the desk and the cubicle wall for the lost phone cord. I was having trouble seeing so I pushed my head against the wall. That didn't do it so I thought maybe putting my eye down closer to the opening would help. I only had my left eye open as I slid my head down the cubicle wall until I was about 8 inches above the desk at which point I stabbed myself in my closed eye with a letter opener that had been, up until that point, been sitting unobtrusively pointy-end-up in a pencil cup on the desk. Un-f%$#ing-believable! (I was well beyond the bitter "Awesome." at this point. I have a huge eye phobia and am terrified of anything touching my eye, or anyone else's eye. I can't even watch anyone putting in contacts. Bleargh!)

At this point I was sure that my lower eyelid was bleeding and my eyeball hurt like a son of a biscuit so I went to check the damage in the mirror muttering, "Stabbed myself in the eye." at all of my co-workers who had heard me yell and were now staring at me, all popped out the top of their cubicles like gophers.

There is nothing that I'm quite so skilled at as embarrassing injuries. (Remind me to tell you about the time I knocked myself out with a cupboard facing. Seriously.) Luckily the damage to my eye was minimal and the pain soon subsided, although it still hurts to blink and my eye was nicely bloodshot.

By this point it was almost the end of the day. I finished up my work, blinking as seldom as possible, and grabbed a water bottle and paper towel to wash the orange pop residue from my car, which has been sitting in heated parking for the day. I was hoping that most of the pop would have melted off so that I could just rinse it down and be on my way. As I approached the car I realized that the windows were still the same smeary mess as when my car was all frozen in the morning. Closer inspection revealed that the reason my car was still so gooey was that it wasn't orange pop on my window. It was egg, which was now all baked on, shell and all. Awesome.

Car-pushing Season

Thanks to the excessive snowfall in this frigid Canadian city in the last while, I have spent a large portion of my time in the past few days pushing out stuck cars, including my own.

It started on Saturday night, when I left to go scrapbooking with my high school friends. Some jerk in a big truck parked a foot away from my front bumper on a hill. Who does that? Idiot. With the huge ruts and piles of loose snow in our area (the snow plows have trouble getting up the hill), it would have been bad enough to get out of that spot without the truck moron. (Incidentally, what is it about people who drive a truck/SUV in bad weather that causes them to drive like idiots? Seriously. Slow down a bit and maybe you won't skid out into that light standard. 'Four by' doesn't make you invincible.) At any rate, Paul came out and drove while I pushed (with assistance from a random jogger who stopped to help push then jogged off into the sunset) and I was soon on my way without hitting the truck (which he would have deserved but then I would have had Guilt. I know, I should be Catholic.)

After scrapbooking, Tara, Melissa and I all left at the same time, which was fortunate because they both needed pushing out. Melissa used to work in the bush with me and she's pretty good at getting unstuck. With just me pushing and her rocking the car we were able to get her on her way quite quickly.

Tara, however, is not a good driver. I think it maybe relates to her inability to navigate. Seriously, she can get lost while sitting still. We really should have had one of us drive her car out. Instead of rocking the car she just applied the gas and let the wheels spin and as soon as we got her moving she would crank the wheel to turn and immediately get stuck again. Every time we stopped we would have to keep getting her to straighten out her tires again. (I may sound frustrated but I actually wasn't. This is just the way Tara is. She knows she's not a good driver and takes instruction fairly well; we just didn't instruct her well enough.) It took almost 10 minutes and Jim had to come out and help us push before we could get her free. I stupidly did not wear my mittens to push and my hands were all frozen and disgusting. Luckily I was not stuck and all three of us were soon on our way. (I'm really sore today from pushing though.)

Despite how frustrating it can be to not be able to get around easily I quite like this time of year, which I call "Car-pushing season". I enjoy using my brain and my body together to solve problems (ie stuck car). I enjoy that random strangers will stop what they are doing to push me out, and that I'm able to return the favor (by pushing out other stuck cars, not by pushing over random strangers). It gives me a sense of community, of connectedness to all the other Canadians with stuck cars.

This is one of the common cultural threads that remains unacknowledged and underexamined. Stuck cars bring us closer together, either with the frustration it engenders or the satisfaction of prying a vehicle free from the ravening jaws of winter. It is a triumph over the cold and ultimately over evil. That makes us superheroes! I am Rocking Girl! This is Pushing Guy! There goes Kitty Litter Kid! He's Plow Man and she's Shovel Girl! Together we are The Car Extractors! (and fade to commercial).

Popovers, Hockey Pucks & Roast Beast

For most of my childhood, the main constant was the Sunday night "roast beast" dinner. We either had it at home with all the family there, Mom and Dad, Robyn and Jay and I, or we went to my Mom's parents' house, the English side of the family.

"Roast beast dinner" had variables and constants. There were always vegetables of some kind; if my mom was cooking it would be peas or corn or carrots or parsnips or sometimes brussel sprouts, all cooked to perfection and unadorned, but if Grandma was cooking it would be overdone peas in butter (bleh!). The constants were the roast beef itself, mashed potatoes, rich salty gravy and popovers

At this point, most people ask me what on earth a Popover is. They are more commonly known as Yorkshire Puddings, but in my family Yorkshire Pudding is made with the same recipe and poured into one big pan. The individual little cups of bready goodness are called "Popovers" if made properly, when they form a little cup and flip sideways in their muffin pan, or called "Hockey Pucks" if they are made incorrectly and come out slightly hard and quite flat (and occasionally very hard and very flat).

Popovers in the process of popping

It is quite a feeling of accomplishment the first time you get Popovers, avoiding the shame and ridicule of Hockey Puck. My Grandpa taught my Mom (his eldest daughter) the secrets to making perfect popovers and she taught me (her eldest daughter) in turn (I'm not going to spill all but the secrets include bacon grease, heated eggs, correct and ever changing temperatures, and impeccable timing). First you start out as a Popover Assistant, greasing the pans, pulling them in and out of the oven with precise timing to the imperious calls of the Popover Master, and tilting the bowl for the Master to scoop the precious last bits of batter into the piping hot pan. The Assistant is offered gradually increasing responsibility until one day the Master acts as the Assistant, which is the final test. If the result is Popovers, you graduate to the rank of Popover Master. If you get Hockey Pucks, you are benched for a while then sent back to training camp.

Pretty darn good Popovers coming out of the oven.

(Note the front left and rear right puddings that didn't pop. These were the last cups to have batter poured in and therefore were not warm enough to get the propper popover shape. )

I can't remember the first time I ever saw Popovers made, the first time I assisted, or how old I was when I graduated to Popover Master (maybe 14?). I do remember looking down at my first set of perfect popovers right before popping them out of the pan and the pride I felt when serving them to my family. I have made popovers for friends and boyfriends, my husband and my husband's family (which may be the only thing I have ever managed to do that impressed my father-in-law who is quite the cook. He said I made them "just like the little old English ladies do." A rare compliment indeed.) Since Paul and I were married I have begun training him as a Popover Assistant (although I'm not sure that we started young enough for him to ever graduate, that's okay though because he makes fabulous mashed potatoes) and you can bet our kids will receive the best in Popover training, watching my Mom and I in our intricate popover making dance that invariably leads to perfect popovers.

A pair of popovers with butter, gravy and a sprinkle of salt.

It's no wonder this is my favorite meal.

Waiting on Pins and Needles (Mostly Needles)

Almost a year ago Paul got blood clots in his arms (if you want to read about it I have moved the posts over. You can read them at http://dorktasticoddments.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html and http://dorktasticoddments.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html).

Here is a brief summary for those of you too lazy to go read: Paul’s arm randomly got hugely swollen and red (we called it the “Emergency Sausage Arm”). We went to the hospital. He had a large clot in his shoulder area and a bunch of smaller clots down his bicep. Since then he’s been on blood thinners and has had a gijillion blood test both to make sure that his blood thinners are at the right level and to determine what caused the clot.

One of the bajillion blood tests that Paul had when he first got the clot tested the Antiphospholipid Antigen levels in his blood. High Antiphospholipid Antigen levels can cause clots, but do not necessarily cause clots (so it could have been a random clot or it could have been because of the high levels.) The high levels in turn can be caused by a number of things including, but not limited to, the following:
1) An undetected cancer (this option has now more or less been eliminated through further testing)
2) Antiphospholipid Syndrome - APS (also called Phospholipid Antibody Syndrome or Hughes Syndrome)
3) A virus
4) Random fluctuation

In January, when Paul had his clots, his AP levels were 25 (positive result), at his next test they were 18 (indeterminate result) and at his last test they were 8 (negative result). For comparison, a normal person has no antiphospholipid antigens in their blood at all. The gradual decrease likely means that the original result was not a random fluctuation, however it is good that the levels are dropping because it means that it is less likely he has APS. The hematologist was not confident enough that Paul was fine to take him off the blood thinners without further testing though. If his next test comes back negative or with no score at all, she will be relatively sure that the clot was caused by increased Antiphospholipid Antigen levels in his blood which were caused by a virus. That would mean that once the levels were low enough he could go off the blood thinners and he would likely never have a clot again. If the levels increase then there will be further testing and likely longer relationship with the blood thinners along with all of the consequences that brings.

Today Paul took his last blood test. It will take roughly five more weeks to get the results at which point he will have been on blood thinners for a full year; a year of increased risk of hemorrhaging and easy bruising, without carrying heavy things or playing hockey, but also without blood clots, stroke, blindness or heart attack. It seems a fair trade to me.

One of my greatest fears when we got married was that I would be widowed within the first year of marriage. (I know, I am a crazy person). We’ve successfully passed that threshold but we're not out of the woods yet. Until we get the results of his last tests, we will be waiting on pins and needles (mostly needles, he has to have blood tests on average twice a month) to find out if he is safe. Until then I will just hold him a little closer, hug him a little tighter and cherish the time we have together.

Songs of Jesus and Underpants

Every year my holiday season starts off officially with The Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols. Holiday music before this point causes me to hunch my shoulders protectively up around my ears and mutter in curmudgeonly tones, “It’s not even December yet! Why can’t they wait until after Halloween?”

Singing in, or attending, this concert has been my tradition since December of 1994, which was my first year in choir. At that time “Nine lessons” was held in the Old Arts Building of our university, more commonly known as Convocation Hall, or Con Hall. It’s a beautiful old building and the main hall features a pipe organ and balconies for we “choirs of angels” to sit on high in and sing to the audience below. In short, it is an awesome place to sing, although challenging, due to the distance between the tenor and bass sections and the conductor up on stage.

Unfortunately Con Hall does not feature much in the way of seating space for the audience. We spent years of jamming too many people into too small a hall (often breaking fire codes) and there was that one dreadful year when we sang three concerts in one night after a long day of school and, for some of us poor science students, lab exams (which, incidentally, left us pretty much unable to function for the next couple of days.) (As yet another of my endless aside (aside what, you may ask, since many of my entries are just a long series of asides) my husband and I met in this choir and had our wedding photos taken in the entrance to Con Hall.)

In 1999 we (meaning the concert and all involved) moved to the Winspear centre downtown, a stunning new facility with both an amazing pipe organ that is purely a wonder to behold and acoustics that were to die for. Since leaving the choir, I have made sure to continue my tradition from the audience’s side. Attending the Nine Lessons concert without fail, I start off my Christmas season by singing pretty alto harmonies for ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, belting out ‘Joy to the World’ with as much enthusiasm as I can muster, mouthing the words to the gentle ‘God be with you’ and listing with rapt attention to the Toccata played masterfully on the pipe organ.

You would think that not being particularly religious would detract from my enjoyment of the concert, and from my enjoyment of Christmas carols in general, but this is not the case at all. I love the old traditional Christmas carols, particularly ones with good alto parts. My favorite is What Child Is This?” which I enjoy for many reasons including, but not limited to:
1) the gorgeous alto part tha t never fails to give me goose bumps and
2) the line “Nail! Spear! Shall pierce him through…” being sung in such a cheery manner cracks me up. I know, I’m a terrible heathen and will burn in hell, but at least I’ll be warm.

My least favorite is the ever repetitive “I Saw Three Ships” because the alto line sucks; you sing the same note over and over for half the song and then the rest is an annoyingly difficult harmony. By the above I mean my least favorite traditional carol. I have reserved special levels of hate for "Jingle Bell Rock" and anything performed by the Jingle Cats (which I just this moment realized was probably a play on Jungle Cats). I won't move on to other hated performers and recorders of bad carols for fear of a brawl breaking out in my blog.

There are also three relatively obscure carols that I not only know the lyrics for, but can sing Soprano, Alto and Tenor lines for are:
- ‘Coventry Carol’ (which contains the line ‘By By Lully, Lullay” and I have no clue what that means.),
- ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ (oddest line: “in the bleak midwinter, a stable place sufficed, the Lord God incarnate, Jesus Christ” with the reference to the manger rhymed with the son of God), and finally
- the 'Huron Carol', which confused our Kenyan assistant conductor to no end with its reference to the “mighty Gitchi Manitou” (On first read he thought it had something to do with underpants. It is officially the first Canadian Christmas carol, written in the mid-1600’s and most people take it as further proof that Canadians are weird. )

It’s Christmas time. Go celebrate or something, eh?

Wallace (& Brita Guilt)

Warning: I'm tired and this entry is about as ADD as it gets.

Today is my birthday; as my brother’s girlfriend put it, “my third annual 29th birthday”. Whatever. I’m not so hung up on my age that I care whether people know it or not, although Paul teases me about my age fairly constantly. That is the problem with marrying a younger man; they can be pests about your age.

The day was a bit humdrum and ho-hum (hum). I woke up with a headache, probably still recovering from the drunken Wild Thing the night before (get out of the gutter, it’s filthy in there! Go read my last entry.) Paul made me French toast, which was yummy even though he forgot to put the cheese on. Yes, cheese. My family is weird and we melt a cheese slice on our french toast then eat it with syrup. Yum! We went to Costco, came home and had pizza for dinner (again yum).

Devin and Jenna came over and we played Puerto Rico and Chez Greek, which were both new games to me and a lot of fun (I won Puerto Rico but I suspect that they may let me win because it was both my first time playing and my birthday). Jenna brought delightful healthy snacks and they gave me a bottle of ‘Ryan’s Cream’ (like Bailey’s) which we had in hot chocolate with marshmallows. The only bad part of the night, which also continues to be bad, is that I developed Brita guilt because I can apparently still talk with my mouth full of foot.

Paul always overfills our Brita pitcher and then when I come along after and try to pour a glass of water it pours out the top and invariably onto my sock, soaking it. (If you’ve ever seem me with wet socks, you really never want to see it again. I loathe wet feet. When I worked in the bush my partner would do anything to keep my feet dry. My extremities are temperamental (you’ll meet my hair later)). So Paul was pouring water and it was slopping all over the place so of course I went on and on about what happens when you over fill the pitcher and ‘see isn’t it a pain’ and all that and after a couple of minutes I finally realized that he hadn’t filled the pitcher, one of our guests had, which was actually quite nice and not required and they were probably not familiar with both the peculiarities of the Brita pitcher and my anal retentive properties in that particular area (which Paul is now quite well versed in). So now, every time I pour myself a glass of water from the Brita pitcher, I have Brita guilt. I would have made a very good Catholic.

The best part of my birthday was Wallace. I actually got Wallace more than a week before my birthday because I NEVER get early birthday presents. They’re almost always late either because my birthday was forgotten or everyone was too busy in the pre-Christmas foofera (yes, I typed fooferah but I have no idea how to spell it.Neither does word though, so tough luck.). (Note: for the record, Paul never forgets my birthday. He just occasionally forgets when we got married despite the fact that it is on not one but two cross-stitches in our kitchen.) Anyway, I was going out of town the weekend before my birthday and when I got home from dance class on the Thursday night before my departure, Paul handed me a gift (actually a gift bag stuffed with socks. He is weird). After extracting the many socks, the bag held…a 30G iPod. I promptly named him Wallace to match our new laptop Gromit, on which (on whom looks wrong) I am composing this entry while (I really wanted to put whilst) reclining comfortably on my bed.

I have wanted an iPod for a very, very long time and have been holding out until the ones that are big enough to hold photos come down in price. Apparently I’d been annoying Paul all year because every time I saw one I would tell him that I wanted an iPod. My sister and brother and my brother’s girlfriend all went in together to get it for me. Paul let me buy it an iSkin to protect Wallace on my trip. When I arrived at the meeting place for our trip, Sarah gave me an FM transmitter for Wallace!

Most of you don’t really comprehend what an exciting combination of gifts this is. My car is a 1980 Volvo station wagon named Stanley. He has a push button am/fm radio and that’s it. The reception on the radio is quite poor, which is particularly painful on long trips (I once drove him to the south end of Utah in July, which is both not recommended and a story for another day.) At any rate, for the first time in my 14 years of driving, I could have music of my own selection in my vehicle. This was a red letter day, let me tell you. (Now I have to look up what that really means and where it came from. I am a crazy person, I tell you. Look at all the crazy! Apparently it’s from old calendars on which the holidays were marked in red. Alright then, let’s have a holiday; Karen finally has music in the car! This is cause for celebration!)

It’s amazing the impact Wallace has had on my life, in particular on my mornings. I detest talk radio (which is why the best gift I have ever bought Paul is a pair of wireless headphones so that he can listen to talk radio in the morning without causing me to become homicidal. Really it was a gift for me. Don’t you worry, I bought him several.) This means that I normally drive in to work in silence and haven’t actually spoken yet by the time I have arrived at work. More than once I have discovered upon my arrival that I was suffering from complete laryngitis. Now I drive to work singing along with Wallace’s tunes. I arrive (somewhat) cheerful and generally with full voice. I am perfectly capable yelling “Asshole!” after an idiot driver and continuing cheerfully with my sing-along where before I would have stewed about idiot drivers all the way to work and arrived grouchy with an acid stomach. I’m sure that my co-workers are appreciating Wallace just as much as I do.

I’m a Wiener!

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo - http://www.nanowrimo.org/) runs every year in November. The basic idea is that many people say “one day I’m going to write a novel” but they never quite manage to even start. If a person is given set parameters, an arbitrary goal, and license to throw quality out the window and replace it with quantity, they will be able to say “Last year I wrote a novel” (even if they can’t say “Last year I wrote a good novel”). The parameters are to write a 50,000 word novel between 12:00 a.m. November 1st and 11:59 pm November 30th. If you personally write a 50,000 word novel from scratch in that time span, you win (or as Paul would say, "You’re a weiner").

This year, somewhere near 80,000 people worldwide signed up to take the challenge. Roughly 30% of those who started their novel finished it in the allotted time. Some people are insane and wrote double, triple or quadruple the goal. Like last year, I crossed the finish line with roughly an hour to spare (Procrastinators of the world unite...maybe tomorrow!)

This year, writers around the world logged upwards of 982 million words in the month of November. That's almost a billion bits of creative beauty (or garbage) worldwide. My little piece of the world made a hefty contribution of upwards of five and a half million words and 74 of our 173 participant "won", a 43% win rate. (Stats compiled from official NaNo website data.) This gives me a nice little warm glow as I had the pleasure and pain of being in charge of our area (along with my good friend SarahJanet). Since this was her fourth year of being in charge, I'm not sure how much I contributed, but I'm pretty sure it was....some.

Our TGIO party (Thank God It's Over) was on Saturday, and I actually had quite a good time. For the first time ever, I read an excerpt from my novel. Since I am completely incapable of speaking in any sort of accent (I speak French quite fluently and I can't even do a French accent) I got Paul to read the part of my British main character. I also sang Karaoke, which I normally don't do because of my microphone phobia (I just hate being amplified.) I sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" with SarahJanet, "Tainted Love" all by myself (after crashing and burning at Steppenwolfe's "Magic Carpet Ride"), and then finished off the night with the worlds worst drunken rendition of "Wild Thing" which I thought was the Tone Loc version but was actually the more traditional version by The Troggs. It was drunkenly dreadful. That song should not be on a karaoke playlist anywhere.

I leave you with TGIO photos.

SarahJanet and I two fisting it. She appears to be ahead of me, as usual.

Kiyoshi rocking the air guitar.

Crazy Train air guitar solo.

Wolfy Jeebus the headbanging hair-gnome.

Sarah and Patrick "Had the time of [their] life."

The Lift! (She is killing herself laughing in this photo but didn't drop him.)

We flailed our arms about in the back row to indicate the time was up for each excerpt

(and my time is up for this excerpt. Flail!)

Dorktastic Oddments

Dork: a person who is deemed 'quirky', 'different', or 'eccentric' by others.

Fantastic: exceptionally good.


Dorktastic: exceptionally quirky and eccentric in a good way.

Oddments: a motley assortment of things, an oddity.


Dorktastic Oddments: a motley assortment of exceptionally quirky and eccentric things. In a good way.

It seems that every year around this time I have an Internet Identity Crisis (IIC). Three years ago I was Canoegirl. Last year I settled on "The Schaapsher Chronicles" for all of three days before deciding that I was both too easy to find and that the title was a bit too pretentious. Then, after a brief internet poll, I decided to change myself to "Some People Juggle Geese" (Funny but true) in honor of Firefly's Hoban Washburn. Well, the shine quickly wore off and I never really felt quite at home there. When you google "Some People Juggle Geese" you get a bajillion Firefly sites, and while I didn't really want to be singled out, I didn't like feeling quite so lost in the shuffle.

Yet again, a new year rolled around, a new Holidailies came along to inspire me, and yet again the identity crisis set in. It's so hard to encapsulate your identity into a few short words. Captain Cheese? Too specific. Back to Canoegirl? Not really me so much any more (although I am the half-owner of a beautiful new canoe now). "The Anti-Pineapple"? Again, too specific. The Volvo Pimp? Been there, done that. Woodenshoes? That only reflects my paternal heritage. I apparently need to be Captain Dutch Canoe Cheese Volvo Pimp hold the Pineapple. No, thank you.

I toyed briefly with just Dorktastic, because I felt that really defined me in a lot of ways but again, if you google Dorktastic you get a quintillion pages. Dorktastic Oddments is where I have settled and it might just manage to be broad enough for it to feel like home without being too restrictive and excluding other elements of my personality.

A motley assortment of exceptionally quirky and eccentric things. In a good way. Yup, that's me.