It's a Report!

It's a Report!

Birthday: 11:59pm, the evening of its due date
Birth Place: home office delivery
Size: mostly 8.5 x 11
Thud Factor: 295 adorable pages

Our Birth Story:
The proud parents are pleased to announce the arrival of their much-anticipated Deliverable. Immediately upon learning they were expecting a Deliverable, the couple gathered together ten of their closest colleagues to share in their journey. The couple wishes to extend their sincere thanks to everyone involved - we couldn't have done it without you!

It was a difficult labour, lasting approximately one year. Many tears were shed during this time, but the proud parents now couldn't be happier - they love their little Deliverable, typos and all, and in return, Deliverable is already contributing to supporting its parents. What a Wunderkind!

The couple is still together, and feel closer than ever before. Mom wonders whether she will ever fit into her pre-Deliverable jeans again, but Other Mom didn't love her for her looks anyway so no matter. The couple is presently enjoying some much-deserved time off, but say they expect to make more Reports together over the next 3, 5 and 10 years - if not more frequently!

Congratulations:
Report has all the staples and binder clips it needs, but if you wish to send a gift, the proud parents wouldn't say no to a congratulatory beverage. Or three.

Viva Lost Wages

I've never been to Las Vegas and to be honest, I have no real interest in ever going. Granted, people who go there seem to like it, but I'm of the mind that you already have to be the sort of person who goes to Vegas before you're ever inclined to be a person who goes to Vegas. I'm just going off of what I've heard from other Persons Who Go to Vegas, but I made up a bit of a quiz to see if I should go and the results suggest it's probably not a good idea: I'm too pragmatic to gamble. I don't care for Celine Dion. I'm biologically predisposed to be intolerant of heat and humidity. Despite what my family seems to think, I actually don't drink all that much. And, most of all, I don't like people, or crowds, or noise.

Let's be honest here: if I avoid going to the mall because it's too overstimulating, what are the chances I'm going to like Vegas? It is pretty much specially engineered to be not my cup of tea.

You know what's as much Vegas as someone like me can handle? Going to Costco. Costco is like Vegas for introverts. I mean, instead of an STI you come home with a twelve-pound block of Parmigiano Reggiano, but either way it's pretty tough to explain to your spouse what the hell you were thinking at the time.

It's never not-busy at Costco - it's somehow always crawling with people, and sure, they might not be quite as colourful as folks you'd see in Vegas, but the people watching is still pretty solid. (What is he going to do with two gallons of mustard? How many children do those people have?!) The lighting is intense and disconcerting. The roar of a thousand flatbed shopping carts, and dozens of children chanting, "Sam-PLE! Sam-PLE!" drowns out all rational thought. You are actually, literally trampled by old ladies stampeding the chicken cordon bleu samples table. The lineups challenge your will to live. Ultimately, you arrive back home with an empty wallet, a headache, and lingering psychological chills from your close brush with the rot of modern society.

Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't go to Disneyland, either.

Probably the one major difference between Costco and Vegas - aside from all the drugs and debauchery and ill-advised marriages officiated by Elvis impersonators, of course - is that no one is going to steal your purse in Costco. I mean, they'd have to abandon the hard-won spoils of their flatbed cart and stand in line at the door to get out - major disincentives.

Oh, but there's more to Vegas than even that! you say? I see your line of thought, and raise you: we have tickets to Cirque du Soleil in April, right here in Calgary. I'm taking the kids to Costco for a few samples first.

Full. Vegas. Experience.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Loosen Your Belt

Hey, remember that old Disney cartoon where Goofy is all calm and reasonable as a pedestrian but as soon as he gets behind the wheel he goes nutso? Well, I would never have accused DH of being entirely calm or reasonable, but I discovered this week that he is capable of a level of crazy I never knew existed. His heretofore unknown dark side is released from the bonds of conscience and loosed upon the world not by driving a car or drinking a potion, but rather by the mysterious force of an all-you-can-eat tropical resort buffet. For this reason, it shall be named "Buffadrian". And Buffadrian wants you to get his money's worth.

The kids found Buffadrian confusing and frightening. Most of their lives they've been subjected to constant reminders to eat their fruits and vegetables, but when they returned from the buffet line with nutritionally-balanced plates Buffadrian shook fistfuls of crab legs at them and growled through a mouthful of prime rib, "Why are you little idiots eating salad?! Stop that this instant and go get more animals!" Gravy frothed at the corners of his mouth. The kids glanced nervously at me - Ms. Eat Your Vegetables herself - then decided I was the least terrifying parent at the moment and scurried off to load up on meat.

Buffadrian turned his deranged gaze to my plate - more vegetables! Buns! In fact, no meat at all! "Oh, shut up," I said preemptively, "I'm saving myself for dessert." Buffadrian's mental buffet ledger, however, accounts only for transactions made in cash, credit and animal protein. He rolled his eyes dramatically and sighed - never mind that I went on to eat a fish fillet and a cool half-dozen mini desserts, I was just one more person he would have to eat for this night.

But that was a challenge Buffadrian was willing to tackle.

Unfortunately for DH, this was a decision made by Buffadrian yet suffered by himself, beginning just as soon as the siren song of the buffet had released its hold on his personality. Later that night when he asked the family, "Why did you make me eat so much?" - while he cradled his distended belly and rocked in pain - he genuinely seemed to mean why did we, personally, by the act of clearly not eating enough buffet, directly force him to make up for our collective shortfall by eating All The Things?

I patted his Food Baby and smiled, knowing that there would be a breakfast buffet the next morning and that I would soon be the proud progenitor of twins.

Her Dimples, So Merry!

After Novemberance Day, people really seem to get in the holiday mood. They start shopping, decorating, sending out greeting cards over a month early (hi, April!), and generally sortof freaking out. Small talk invariably turns to "preparedness" - "What are your holiday plans?" "Are you ready for Christmas?" "How is your planning coming along?" Like there's a war or a zombie apocalypse brewing rather than a mid-winter calorie-and-booze fest.

I'm generally pretty organized, so most years when people start asking those kinds of things I first carefully gauge their level of panic to decide whether or not I should tell them I finished prepping back in October. By the end of November, I'm typically left with the tasks of walking my long-completed stack of holiday cards to the mailbox and setting up a tree. (Then writing about the tree.) Easy!

This year, those folks can go ahead and hate me for a different reason entirely: this year, I'm not planning anything at all. Sure, I'll take my stack of cards to the mailbox this weekend (yup, they're already done), but other than that, nada. Instead, I'm taking the family on a tropical beach vacation.

Because I paid for the trip back in February, this has lifted the holiday planning burden from my shoulders for the entire year - there has been no stocking up on stocking stuffers, no buying an extra of anything "just in case", no warehousing of baking supplies. Why bother? We're not going to be here! This is shaping up to be the single most stress-free holiday season I have ever experienced. 

And speaking of shaping up, I know lots of folks (okay, women) who count down the weeks to their tropical beach vacations with a punishing schedule of salads and gym visits so they can lose "those last five pounds" or "look hot in a bikini". Ironically, witnessing this phenomenon has also lifted a holiday planning burden from my shoulders, one that I didn't even know I had - I am so far, so light-years away from a bikini body that there is no point in even bothering with the pretense of the gym in the coming weeks. Sure, pass the cookie tin, 'cause why the hell not? And what is this "base tan" you speak of, anyway? Turns out, I don't have to do anything to prepare for this vacation. I worked hard, I earned it, I'm going to darn well enjoy it, and no "last eighty pounds" are going to stand in my way!

Sure, I'll be hitting the gym and the salad bar again come January. But for now, it's Mele Kalikimaka to all and to all a good night.

LoBotany? BoNotomy?

Hey, whaddya get when you put twelve botanists in a room and make them decide how to group line items in a budget?

You think I'm going to give a punchline now but I'm not, 'cause it's not funny. It's an actual thing that actually happened. To me. And what you get is the very definition of hell, plus the slow and creeping fear that you must not be a very good botanist because you don't really give a shit about whether the phone bill gets slotted under Administration or Communication, yet all these other botanists seem to care. A lot.

Deep breaths. You're a good botanist. You're a good botanist. You're just a shitty accountant is all. Yeah, that's what. Just go home and read about sedges and you'll be totally legit again.

So I read about some sedges for a while, then got bored and decided to do some baking (still good! sedges are just boring to read!) and realized in looking at my recipe collection that I actually taxonomize the bejeebus out of everything in life so I must be okay after all. I have rigorous and complex systems for recipe organization, Halloween candy sorting, sock drawer arrangement - you name it, I identify it, label it, and stuff it in a category. I just *occasionally* see the need to back on up a level and call a few relatively similar things all "cookies" in effort to stem the madness.  

I even taxonomize my relationships. I have, for instance, Close Friends, Old Friends, Neighbour Friends, Work Friends, Facebook Friends, LinkedIn Friends, Other Classroom Parent Friends, Frenemies, People I Don't Actually Know But I See Often Enough To Awkwardly Acknowledge and Talk To Friends, Favourite Relatives, Less Favourite Relatives, Plain Weird Relatives, Relatives I Don't Actually Know At All But You Somehow Do So I Will Awkwardly Explain How I Don't Know Them, Work Nemeses, Work Sisters, a Work Dad (a new one, since my old one retired), and even a Work Husband or three. Occasionally, I see perfectly good reason to back on up a level and not let people know precisely which branch of the "Relatives" tree they're on. (Suddenly starts to sound like wise management instead of poor accounting, doesn't it?)

I've asked a few of my Work Husbands whether they categorize people in similar ways (e.g., Work Wives) and the answer is, invariably, no. This could be a personality thing, a botany thing, a gender thing - I don't know for sure, but it does suggest the individual inhabiting the monotypic genus "DH" is likely to take issue with my Work Husband category. Don't worry, dear - the Work Husband category is a benign one, characterized by an abundance of bickering and a lack of sex. Just like being married! It's those darn work boyfriends you have to worry about.

Of course, I don't have any of those...

Handy Dandy

I always admire the skill and creativity that go into set design, especially in smaller venues where talented folks do so much with the limited space available. Really, it's one of my favourite things about live theatre. I was admiring aloud the set of a play DH and I were attending this past weekend when he turned to me and said, "You know, I always thought set design was something I would like to get into one day."

Well.

DH and I have known each other for over thirteen years, and while I accepted a lot of false advertising and bravado from him in the early days of our relationship - yeah, yeah, I'm sure he did likewise - I feel this kind of posturing is frankly silly around someone who has known you for so long. Maybe it was the low-grade headache I'd had all day, maybe it was his treading on my status in the relationship as 'the creative one', or maybe it was the threat to my financial stability that would be posed by such a suicidal career change on DH's part - whatever the reason, I couldn't let this one slide:

"But dear, you're neither handy nor artistic. That doesn't seem like a very good fit."

"Yeah, I'm handy."

* * *
You've heard that old adage about work, the sortof Venn diagram cum Catch-22 between cost, speed and quality, where you can pick only two of the three qualities? Years of household chores and minor home renovations have highlighted what amounts to nothing less than a fundamental difference of opinion between us on what constitutes "good enough". I am the sort of person who will happily shell out for quality and timeliness, while DH and his old buddies, Fast and Cheap, have preemptively smothered Quality in its sleep and ridden off into the sunset on Half-Assed Trail. Usually drunk.

Being a naturally skeptical person, I'm constantly reserving judgement for the peer-reviewed evidence of a given claim. So maybe DH is handy, it's just that, in thirteen-plus years, the evidence I have seen suggests that "set design" is pretty much to DH as "swimsuit model" is to me.

* * *
We stared awhile at one another across the Gulf of Mutual Incomprehension. (You what? You think what? Who are you?)

"Oh," I finally said. "Right." And texted myself a great idea for a blog post. Because creative one.

Whingey Smurf

Hey, everyone! Guess what this is!

Gotcha, you perverts! It's not a Smurf penis at all. It's a neti pot spout:



You know, one of those things people use to flush their sinuses out. Sounds like utter quackery, I know, but apparently daily nasal enemas are a legitimate treatment for some kinds of chronic nose troubles. Which I don't suffer from myself so I can't give you any examples.

But *someone* in my house does have chronic nose troubles. (Actually, more than one someone in my house might, but I don't think a neti pot is going to help Small Fry keep his exploratory instincts at bay.) Let's call this someone... ummm... Smadrian. To protect his privacy. Yesterday, Smadrian got his first neti pot - it was prescribed by his physician.

But let's back up a bit. Ever dealt with One of Those People who clearly don't have enough perspective on life? Like, mountain-out-of-molehill people, or have-never-had-a-day's-troubles people, or men, like, in general? Well, Smadrian happens to be the latter sort of person. And it is this rather fundamental characteristic of his being that results in an inherent lack of perspective in some crucial matters. He has never, for instance, given birth, had intravenous medication, had an epidural, been catheterized (all four of which sometimes occur simultaneously, in my experience), been examined with the aid of a speculum, been regularly bombarded by the amorous advances of certain fleshy male appendages... y'know, those sorts of things. Invasive sorts of things. Here are images of some those things - please take a moment to compare them to the comparatively innocuous neti spout pictured above.

Wait a minute, what the hell is THAT?

Whose lousy idea was this anyway?

WHERE do you want to put that?!

In what I view as a direct result of never having been "invaded" in his life, Smadrian is terrified of using his neti pot. Terrified. He actually yelled at me for talking about using the neti pot, which is why I decided to write this story. I mean, hide his name in this story.

I had only this to say:

All. The places. You have wished to insert your penis over the years, and you are afraid of a wee little Smurf dick resting near your nostril and gently flushing your sinuses with a small quantity of sterile saline solution?

Woman up, you giant wuss.