Monday, June 29, 2009

Who Lives on Drury Lane?

There exists in my mind - as I suspect there does in everyone's - a certain hierarchy of household chores. Face it, some chores just feel better than others. For instance, I don't mind folding laundry, but I despise putting the clean and folded product away. And vacuuming, total barf. Ooh, and making the bed - that seems more futile than just about anything in the world - I can cling to the faint delusional hope that no one will leave slime trails on my sparkly clean windows tomorrow, but I know for a fact someone is going to muss up the bed tonight.

If you're lucky, the person with whom you're sharing a home has a hierarchy that runs more or less opposite yours, so while s/he's picking dead gnats out of the light fixtures and you're degreasing the range hood, you're both able to be thinking, 'Hehehe, suck-ah'.

Fortunately for me, DH actually doesn't mind vacuuming, and he can't fathom how anyone could happily crawl into a tangled disaster of a bed every night, so things work out pretty well for us.

Except when it comes to baking.

In my mind, Little Red Hen fully held the moral high ground. I'm not exactly grinding the wheat here, but I did do the baking and damned if I am going to wash the muffin pans after all that work.

DH hates washing the muffin pans. His man-brains instinctually grasp the Little Red Hen-ness of his wanting to partake of the muffins, however, so he grudgingly upholds his end of the unspoken bargain.

If you want to know a little secret, I sometimes bake muffins when I'm pissed at DH just so I can enjoy his not enjoying washing the muffin pans. "M'mm, I made your favourite, honey! Too bad we were out of paper liners!" Admittedly it's a pretty elaborate sting operation, but it makes the relationship work, you know?

Things could be worse for him, though. My ex-husband adhered to no such moral standards as cleaning the muffin pans, so my options for revenge were never so subtle as, say, buttoning all his shirts to the top so he couldn't pull them off the hangers. So I cleaned the toilet with his toothbrush.

The divorce is finalized now, so I can tell you that much.

The rest you'll have to buy me a couple of drinks to hear.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Satisfy Your Epicuriosity

I like to cook. Perhaps more accurately, I like to eat, and cooking results in food for me to eat. Better still, I'm actually a pretty good cook, which means I get to eat delicious food. Everyone wins!

Now, if I could just massage my own back my life would be complete.

But I digress.

I also like to try new recipes. "Try new recipes" is a perennial fave of mine when it comes to making New Year's resolutions. (It's in direct conflict with the also-perennial "lose some weight", but I figure this gives me a 50:50 chance of living up to at least one of my resolutions.) So I like to surf recipe websites and magazines and cookbooks, always keeping an eye out for something new. I even snagged a few promising titles from the library a couple of weeks ago.

Have I ever mentioned that DH has a bit of a food fetish?

As soon as I got those suckers home from the library, he tucked them under his arm and scuttled off to his happy place. Was gone for hours. Practically needed a smoke afterward.

But what really tipped me off was his wholesale and rather gruff rejection of the ones without pictures. Cookbooks without pictures are frowned upon in my home.

He is not, I suspect, reading them for the articles.


But then, who can blame him? The glossy full-page spreads, artfully arranged, styled and airbrushed to perfection - just
look at those incredible (chicken) breasts... ooh, baby, you can almost taste those (sticky) buns... m'mm, don't you just want to dip your meat in that special sauce...

Kneading. Greasing. Grinding. Pounding! Stuffing!

Hope they don't mind a few pages stuck together. You know, from all that cooking.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Even My Socks are Down

Spring is here, and I just can't help but pen a little ode for the season:

You've kept me snuggly and warm all winter, and I won't deny I like the way you riffle gently in the breeze, and even hold my socks up, but it is high time for me to move on. It is time to embrace the new season, and bid adieu to the old: it is time to wax my legs.

More accurately, to pay someone else to do it for me.

It must be some sort of perverse cosmic joke that every single aesthetician in Calgary is Vietnamese. Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of having someone pour hot wax on my limbs and rip it off in the first place, but to have the tiniest, most hair-free and naturally flawless people on earth do it is just adding insult to injury.

'Oooh, you have so many stretch mark! What happen?' *
rip*
'Um, thanks for noticing. I had two kids.'
'Oh. I gain fifty-two pound with my youngest baby and I have no stretch mark. Did doctor say what wrong with you?' *
rip*
'Just my, uh, genetics I guess.'
'Oh.' *
rip*

At this point she was kind enough to change the subject to lighten the mood a bit:

'Ha ha, look at this! So much hair on the strip! I have to use lots of strip for you.'

Ha. Ha ha ha. Yes, I suffer from a unique confluence of unfortunately hairy genetics, coupled with a rather large expanse of thigh.
Lots of strip for me, thanks. My ancestors had to stay warm in the winter. Naturally I didn't say that, not because I didn't want to, but because Mary was already telling me how she doesn't grow leg hair - none at all. Or arm hair, or underarm hair, or facial hair. And she didn't mention it, but I'll bet you a nickel she doesn't grow the occasional obscenely long Scottish eyebrow hair, either.

And
then I had to ask her to please wax my toe hair before she finished.

And at the end of it all, injury upon heaping frigging injury, I did not get to wish her a friendly 'fuck you!' as I walked out the door. Instead, I left Mary a huge tip. Because I am sincerely hopeful that silence can be bought.