Things that go Bump

There’s a creature living in my vent. It makes little scratchy noises sometimes and scares the living daylights out of me. I’ve stopped sleeping in my room. I can’t deal with it. A few weeks ago it made me panic enough to run over my laptop trying to get away from it…me and my cracked screen are not happy. The problem is no one else has heard it and apparently there’s no way a creature could possibly live in my vents because it would need food to survive and living in a vent doesn’t allow for much eating. So I’m starting to feel a bit like a 6 year old with a monster under her bed. The easiest way to deal with this would be to shine a light down the vent to see what’s in there. But even the thought of having two beady eyes looking up at me has scared me enough to have me moving rooms. I used to like my room…until the creature claimed it.

Trois Choses

1. I have a real issue with getting rid of things. Recently I bought a new salt and pepper shaker set.

Ooo…nice and shiny I know. Slick and mohagany-like it’s pretty  much the dream of any salt and pepper shaker aficionado ESPECIALLY when compared to our old ones. I think the old set saw its best days round about the time I was still watching Sesame Street in my matching robot track suit (complete with stirrups of course). They are clear plastic monstrosities. That’s all I have to say about them. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I got these ones and put them on our kitchen counter next to our old ones and suddenly I couldn’t throw the old ones out. Just look at them! They’re so sad!

They may not be pretty…or clean (gross…I should’ve washed them before I let the world see the squalor in which I live!) but they got the job done. So for now they’re sitting on the bottom shelf of one of my kitchen cupboards. Le sigh.

2. My mom bought clementines.

Sunkist smiles? More like Sunkist puckers! Worst. Clementines. Ever.

3. On the same grocery trip my mom also bought a whole dozen of double eggs. Two yolks…in every SINGLE egg! Weird! I feel like I’m eating two eggs when I crack one AND they look like Ostrich eggs to boot.

As big as my palm. Nuts!

I’m blown away by everything today.

The Key to a Happy Breakfast

This morning I ate Golden Grahams for breakfast. This is typically dessert cereal for me. I usually eat it after dinner if I’m in need of something sweet…I find it’s perfect after dinner but sickeningly sweet for breakfast. Anywho, it’s been a few years since I found the perfect milk-to-cereal ratio…one where the cereal wouldn’t get soggy and the milk wouldn’t get malty. The quandary is this: your cereal can’t be too dry else it can seriously damage your palate (okay…maybe not YOUR palate but Golden Grahams have seriously damaged mine in the past), but if it’s soggy it reminds me too much of food that gets caught in the kitchen sink. But the key is this: (are you ready?) tip your bowl! THEN you get your milk on one side and your cereal on the other and you can mix the two in the middle…it solves all your problems AND you just look jaunty with a tipped bowl.

Is it sad that this is seriously what I was congratulating myself about on the way to work this morning?

7 Days

Moving home after a protracted absence is always a little strange. When away from home I filled my days with people I didn’t live with, trying to do new things every day, because my only obligation was to myself, I had no one to report to at the end of the day, no reason to be home early. Now that I’m back home I feel suffocated. It seems that I have an infinite number of things to fit into a very finite amount of time. Dance, school, work, family, friends, I feel the need to jam them all into the day. For a while it made me feel like I couldn’t do any of it. I didn’t want to let anything slip, but it occurs to me that the reason I feel so cornered is because how I see my time. 7 days in a week: Tuesdays and Wednesdays teaching dance, Friday rehearsals, Saturday teaching, Sundays with my niece. It’s a clock, it’s closed and there’s very little chance for change. Maybe I should stop seeing weeks as units I use to measure the months and just see the days ahead of me as days. OR maybe I should just break all the patterns.

A Slave to Mr. Quaker

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that I have 10 days left in this apartment and 14 sachets of instant oatmeal. So it figures that I should dig in…BUT oatmeal’s GROSS (I thought to myself). However, given that:

1. My bread went mouldy.

2. The last time I ate oatmeal I thought it was DELICIOUS….

It’s oatmealin’ time (I thought to myself). So instead of using one sachet, I used two because I thought…I’m hungry AND I have too many sachets of oatmeal….perfect! But it so was not perfect.

Rewind back about 10 months to a WalMart in Victoria (yes I bought dinnerware from WalMart), instead of buying actual bowls, I thought it would be fun to buy fruit bowls…they were tiny…so tiny in fact that you can’t fit a cup of water and 2 sachets of oatmeal in one. Anyway, I pop the bowl in the microwave. At some point in the middle of the microwaving I realized I should probably scoop some of the oatmeal out of there to prevent spillage. EXCEPT I really didn’t want to do it..because semi-cooked oatmeal looks uncannily like baby throw up (gag)…I had to remind myself that if it was really baby throw up it wouldn’t smell like artificial apples and cinnamon. I put the bowl back in the microwave, and 15 seconds later, despite my best efforts there’s an…(you guessed it) oatmeal explosion. This is when I realized it’s taken me 12 minutes to make a bowl of instant oatmeal. And THEN I realized I really don’t like oatmeal. Yet I’ve been spending the last 25 minutes eating it. Gross. I KNEW I hated oatmeal for a reason.

Is it hard to believe that my biggest concern in the world is quickly congealing quaker oats?

Whatevs–Over Achiever

W: I’m still drafting…I’ve written like 12,000 words in the last 3 days!

Me: I just drank like a litre of chocolate milk!

…I think grad school’s making my brain soft.

Lilja (contd.)

…No he’s not having another baby. (yet).

Even before she was born Lilja, (previously known as Brownspot) made my decisions for me. I thought Ottawa would be close enough but a whole 16 days into her existence I’ve decided this is much too far. How could I not think that? I’ve spent two days with her and I miss it all. Her tiny little fingernails, her misty newborn eyes, her head flailing, her scowl (or as we call it, her default face), her contented smirk, even that mental image of poop coming out of her. 450km is way too far.

The Big Lame

I’ve been holding off writing anything substantial till I could put it all in words. There’s been kind of a delicious monotony to my life. Every morning I take the same bus to work. I see the same people on the bus. I get off at the same stop in front of my building and then I (along with all my bus buddies) jay walk to get to our building. Inevitably I will chuckle to myself about how a bunch of federal employees are in clear violation of a by-law and then I’ll blindly fish for my ID badge, wave to security, get off the elevator on the 6th floor and take the stairs up to the 12th. Take off my coat, check my email, and start reading about oceans. And then I’d get off work, take the same bus back to Ottawa, come home and kill my evening with friends or alone (which sounds like variation but really…it’s the same people, the same food, the same place) and come hell or high water be in bed by 10. Somewhere in all this monotony has been the most disruption I’ve felt in a long time. This is the first time I’ve had a real 9-5, and I must say, I hate it. I don’t hate my job…I quite enjoy it actually. But what do you do with yourself when you’re done your day?! Well I’ll tell you what I do. I think. About everything. I suppose it would be more useful for me to use my time to learn a language or better myself in some way shape or form but no…I sit and brood like a fourteen year old girl. Really I couldn’t even tell you what it is I think about…but you could name pretty much scenario and I would likely have a full flowchart of possibilities coming from it (think nuclear holocaust, the only surviving creatures are purple elephants and they’re out to kill me…what will I do?! (don’t you wish you could see that flowchart?)) I get that I’m in that weird transition-y place where everything feels really monumental (I’m NOT a girl and not yet a woman!) AND I get that I have time to spare AND I even get that some of this is necessary…I had a point to this sentence. Well anyway…point is that it’s lame.

C’est la vie. If loving my kids is lame, then I guess I’m just a big lame.

Lilja

8 pounds, 10 ounces and absolutely gorgeous.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Musical Brussel Sprouts

I haven’t written for lack of things to write about. It’s actually the opposite…so many things to write about that I usually forget them by the end of the day. New job, new city, new living arrangements–although in many ways the last one is just never suitable to write about…ever…shudder. So anyway, given all these new things in my life, I would of course choose to talk about something completely unrelated. At work (where I do important things all day long), I recently discovered that listening to music prevents me from going deaf from the silence. So I’ve been listening to a lot of music. After I exhausted my ipod selection I turned to Youtube to listen to a wide variety of music. Towards the end of the day I settled into something that some 5 years ago I never would’ve thought I would listen out of my own volition. (I think I created too much suspense here). It’s Carnatic music. I love it. It reminds me of family, of rasam, of falling asleep in the music shows my parents forced me to go to and of car rides to places I didn’t want to go (I see a pattern here…). Most startling to me is that it sounds beautiful. Where before I heard a cacophony of screeches on the violin accompanied by singers who I felt drew out the songs on purpose just to prolong the concert, now all I hear is a blend of harmony and rhythm tied neatly together with a string of memories that I’m lucky enough to have. I’m grateful that my parents forced me to listen to what I considered the audio equivalent of brussel sprouts growing up, and I’m so grateful that somehow it rooted itself in my brain.