Monotamy? Monogony? Kemo Sabe?

How To Keep Sex Interesting in Marriage

Tip #08: Role Play.
Wear your sleep mask; pretend you're the Lone Ranger.

Tip #13: Keep It Fresh.
Wear your flannel nightgown; pretend you're Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Tip #45: Mix Things Up.
Wear your apron; pretend you're Martha Stewart.

Tip #52: Try Something New.
Wear nothing to bed. Pretend you're you and he's him.
(Super trippy, eh?)

 (Who was that masked woman anyway?)

Helpful is the New Hunky

So about three weeks ago I reported to you that I was the proud new owner of two cases of wine, and - what's that? I said three before? Hmm, you must be mistaken, because surely I couldn't have consumed an entire case of wine already...

But that's beside the point: this week, I won another work prize draw! This time I came home with a pound of excellent coffee. Everything's coming up Frecklepelt! What really impresses me is how all these work prizes are geared toward my favourite vices. Coffee to get me going before 9am - wine to keep me going after that - man, I can't wait for the next draw! Carton of smokes and a hunky fireman for sure!

Those folks at the office, they really know how to keep a hedonist like myself coming back every Monday.

(And Wednesday...)

Hmm, DH seems to be objecting to the idea of "hunky fireman as vice". No, no, dear - you misunderstand - I just want someone to, uh... carry me around... over their shoulder... firemen do that, right? You see, I've been having this trouble with my, uh, knee, yeah knee, that makes it hard for me to get up the stairs sometimes after a bottle of wine, and a fireman could really help me out with that little problem. 'Cause that's, like, part of their training or something. Carrying middle-aged inebriated ladies up the stairs. They're good at that.

Which is why women like them. Hunky firemen. They're so... helpful.

Woman of Loose Morels

DH and I went morel hunting today out at a friend's place. Our friend hates mushrooms, so we assured her we could help out with the "fungal infestation" she said she was having trouble with on her property. (Sadly, she also has a wood paneling infestation, which was beyond our powers to address.) Turns out I'm a pretty good mushroom finder - must have picked that up at work or something - and we made out like bandits with probably two hundred bucks' worth of the gorgeous little wrinkly critters.

If you can call something that looks like a cross between a citrus reamer and a decomposing kitchen sponge "gorgeous". But I'm also pretty good at appreciating, er, "under-charismatic" plants - another little something I guess I picked up at work.

As I understand things, it's good manners to use a mesh collecting bag when hunting mushrooms. That way the mushrooms you're taking still get a kick at spreading their spores. (Hey, when you're that ugly you need all the help you can get.) I was feeling pretty altruistic about my role as wingman - "my friend Morley, he's a real fun guy" - until we got back to our car and noticed a faint yellowish tinge on her normally sleek black exterior.

Yellow? Yellow dust? What the heck?

Oh, wow. Pollen, and lots of it.

Come to think of it, probably spores, too.

I peered at our mushroom bag with new suspicion. My gawd. These things don't need my help. In fact, they've got so much to spare that they're indiscriminately blowing it over the whole of creation, Hyundai Sonatas and all. It's a regular chlorophorgy out there! Maybe even a plantgasm!

I shook my fist at the mushrooms. "Hey! You dirty bastards! My car is not that kind of girl, you hear me? I don't want no funny business on the ride home, alright?"

I can't prove anything, but I am sure they spored all over the back seat on the drive home. *sigh* Really, what can you expect from a bunch of loose morels like that?

Slacker

Today's post has been forsaken in favour of less productive activities, namely:

I call it "View from a Hammock." Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Lovely.

See you next week.

Maybe.

Booze Hound

My new lucky number is 04724338.

I'll admit it lacks a certain roll-off-the-tongue-ness when you're shooting craps at the casino, but there was this fundraising raffle at work and today, that very ticket number won me three cases of wine.

Ooooohhhhh yeaaaaahhhhhh.

I think you'd be surprised what three cases of wine can do for your social life. My Popularity Index reached an all-time high today! I mean, it's always pretty stratospheric, what with the baked goods and the glorious hair and all, but if I were publicly-traded, today would be the day you'd kick your own ass for not buying shares in me. I have drinking dates well into the foreseeable future! And not only does three cases of wine greatly improve one's social standing, but I also have a feeling it's going to go a long way toward taking the edge off, like, the rest of the year for me.

As soon as I got home, DH and I spread all the bottles out on the kitchen floor and developed a complex algorithm for sorting them involving country of origin, year, varietal, and label cuteness. It was like some kind of awesome grown-up Halloween where the people actually care enough about their loot to afford it an appropriate level of respect in their sorting decisions. No crappy "chocolate; not-chocolate" system for us! I felt so vindicated!

The kids quietly shared a bowl of popcorn for supper and watched us haggling over an appropriate sorting schematic. Every so often we'd shout, "Now THIS is how it's DONE, kids!" and laugh maniacally.

After a couple of hours of intensive sorting, re-sorting, revising the taxonomy, and calling each others' credentials and methodologies into question, we had created thirty-five individual piles based on our carefully selected criteria [patent pending]. (We would have had thirty-six, but we drank one.)

*aaaaaahhhhhhh* Best. Halloween. Ever.

Late-Successional Salad

I hate diets. They're always trying to make you eat salad, which I hate even more than diets. It's not even that salad in itself is all that bad, it's just that - since I've spent more or less my entire adult life on a diet - I've grown to seriously resent having to eat the shit. It just doesn't rev my reward centres the way a hunk of good chocolate can, and - evolutionarily speaking - that's gotta say something.

Trouble is, if you think about it long enough you realize that damn near everything is actually salad. And let me tell you: with about fifteen years of adult (i.e., dieting) life on the clock, I've had a lot of time to think about it. Case in point:

Casseroles? Stir frys? Ain't nuthin' but hot salads.

Sandwiches? Wraps? You haven't mixed 'em well enough.

Soups? Smoothies? Uh, you mixed 'em too much.

In addition to being generally unpalatable, given the advanced civilization we live in, salad is actually something of an embarrassment - it's just a pile of ingredients! Half the time they haven't even been cooked! Dude, humans discovered fire about a zillion years ago - why the hell are we still serving up plates of uncooked foliage? If someone asked you for a masterpiece would you give them a can of paint?

Of course not.

Here at the top of the food chain, all I'm asking is for someone else to do the work of turning those ingredients into something more delectable and calorically-dense. Steak, for instance. Or cheesecake. Now there's the masterpiece I had in mind!

Thanks, Vincent van Cow - keep up the great work!

I Got a Nikon Camera...

Give someone a dollar and they eat for a day; give someone a grand or so and they drop it on lenses and stand around all day talking about how they're photographers.

This is a classic logic error: although all photographers are people with cameras, it does not necessarily follow that all people with cameras are photographers. Seems like everyone and their uncle fancies themselves a photographer these days. Hey, guess what? It's not that hard anymore. Point; click; repeat a zillion times because digital memory is cheap and essentially limitless. It's like those monkeys that wrote those plays: if you do anything often enough it's bound to come up Shakespeare sometimes.

The next time someone tells me they're a photographer, instead of just letting my eyes glaze over with extreme apathy I'm throwing down the ultimate photographic gauntlet: take a good picture of my toddler. After all, toddler photography is a lot like wildlife photography, except your subject is more recalcitrant than a grizzly bear in early spring, faster than a hummingbird on amphetamines, and dirtier than, like, a wombat or something rolled in dirt. And then maybe rolled a little more in more dirt, just for good measure.

Wait, what's that? You got a clear shot? Of my child? Holding still? And smiling?

Awww, too bad he has a giant boog dangling from his left nostril. You lose the challenge. Hey, maybe you should hire some monkeys to help you out for next time - I hear they're into photography.