Half Way To Comatose

When you work from home you have a lot of leeway with everyday stuff, you didn't use to have. Sure, it can be a gigantic recipe for laziness, but it can also be more productive and relaxed than sitting in an office, avoiding your boss and throwing pencils at the ceiling tiles.

You can make your own hours for one thing, which for me are afternoons and evenings, when I'm most productive. This leaves mornings for drinking coffee, treadmilling my face off, showering, and drinking coffee by the sea.

Plus, working from home means you can work in your pajamas if you feel like it (I do not, this is a lame activity). You can stream playlists all day long and play with your collection of Funko Pop toys. You can also have a nice, evening glass of wine on your desk if that floats your boat, although, sadly, I usually don't in case I have to drive somewhere, because I take sudden urges to just GO and everyone knows, sudden urges must be obeyed. The following photo is the result of a sudden urge the other night.

Then one day you wake up and start to realize that you haven't left the house in four days and even then it was only because you ran out of food and wine and had no other choice but go out or expire from lack of sustenance. Plus you look like a feral child and haven't had a haircut in eleven months and have worn nothing but jeans every day for the last half year, and almost no make up.

Then you realize, eff it, you're actually okay with that.

An Update: Nothing is Happening

This week's been sweaty. And showery. Because one, logically must follow the other or else you'll stank up the environment with your fumes. Allegedly.

I've been putting my new treadmill to work. Every day I've worked out and I'm feeling stronger already. The first day, my running shoes conspired to try and strip the skin off my heels, but I was ready for that shenanigans with double socks and band aids. You have to get up pretty early to get ME, shoes. So good to get back to it though. Now to get that old fitness level back!

Other than this I've been enjoying casually swearing at rampant tourists and people playing that infuriating pokemon game, who think it's perfectly reasonable to be wandering in front of my car like lobotomized turkeys. Alternately I am calming myself down by looking for whales at my favourite look out point while filling my innards with coffee. Whales and tourists. Two non-complementary opposites when relating to my psyche. Part of that sentence was redundant, but I think we'll all live.

When not indulging in the two above activities I've been not sleeping (I'm pretty much an Olympic grade champion at this) and working strange hours, wearing out my Wacom tablet (note: Need new nibs) on new designs.

To summarize: running, designing, coffee, tourists, whales. I really should have led with that.

Scattered

I live on an international border, so I usually have both American and Canadian cash on me at any given time, just because. In the immediate regions on both sides of the border you can generally spend either currency, and so sometimes it all becomes a big blur in my cluttered little brain. And my wallet.

Sometimes I'm paying for parking, and the machines in my city only take local currency. I'll stand cursing at the smug little metal jackwagon, which is insolently spitting coins right back at me, then realize I've tried to squeeze in one measly U.S. quarter instead of a Canadian one and it's having a bitchfit. They're barely indistinguishable in appearance and size but the machine? IT ALWAYS KNOWS. And it always happens when I only have the exact change, therefore, I wind up a quarter short and either have to move or use my credit card for a two dollar ticket. Gah. FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS, am I right?

I already feel better having ranted about this highly important event.

I just bought a new treadmill and I'm stoked. It's been two - almost three - years since I last ran and I miss it.

I should point out, I hate running. Let me put it into context for you. 

Take Tom Jones. Infamous for inducing people's moms everywhere, into a panty-soaking mass of hysteria. Tom's fans love Tom so much they will hurl said gross panties at him on stage, faint all over the place, and defend him to the death with their all-encompassing adoration. If you were to take all that mom-generated passion, put it in a cocktail shaker, shake it up violently, clone it seventeen times, and pour it into a giant cosmic container, you STILL would not have the amount of passion strong enough to equal my passionate hatred for running.

But I do like the way I feel after I run, so I am excited to get back into being a wobbly, shaky, sweaty, sweary mess - albeit one whose jeans fit better! - four times a week. If nothing else I'll get to listen to some new podcasts or music. And maybe it will render me too tired to yell at the assholic dickweeds in their gigantic, tiny-wanger-compensating, pick-up trucks, who keep trying to illegally park in our 'residential only' parking outside the house, and who keep backing into my tiny car like it's not there. 

MAYBE...

Hope you all had a good July 4th/Canada Day/weekendy summer thing!

Fuck Off Britain

I have only two things to say today.

1) Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, David Cameron, you giant bag of dicks.

and:

2) There must be some sort of brain disease spreading in the UK that has rendered so many people idiots. You people have no idea what you've done.

That's all. I am so fucking disappointed in my homeland. If I still lived there I'd move. Obviously not to mainland Europe though, so thanks for limiting the freedom we used to have, asshats.

Hair Raising

My hair just keeps getting longer and longer, which...well, I'm told that's what hair does, don't think I'm unaware, it's just that it seems to do it way more regularly than I'd like. Sometimes it's okay on the longer side and it feels good to swish around all free and easy, like a ginger hippy princess.

Some days I wake up having slept just right and I look like I have cool, effortless beach waves and hey, check me out, I just woke up looking this awesome. These days happen about as often as you catch a glimpse of a porcine figure with wings floating past your window.

On the other hand, most days I wake up looking like Janis Joplin on a bender, with a head full of bees.

But as discussed ad nauseum for years  now, I never seem able to get a good haircut anywhere. I've tried. So. Many. Times. And I should probably point out, it's not the haircut that's bad usually, so much as my ability to wear it or style it myself without looking like I did it with a snow blower and too much enthusiasm. That's good and well when you're twenty and everyone's like "Check out that chick with the crazy hair, she must be COOL!" Nowadays it's more, "Jesus, check out that obvious cat lady who got dressed in the dark and probably has a family consisting purely of mannequins that she keeps in her basement!"  That and frightening small children in the supermarket.

Which, when you think about it, is the one up side to all this.

However, it's not the look I'm going for. The trouble is I hate safe, boring soccer mom kind of hair cuts, that's not me. I want to walk in there and go, 'give me funky rock chick hair only a little more age appropriate so I don't look like a total asshole.' But somehow I never do as I'm pathetic and inarticulate.

I'm also trying to partially grow out my fringe  a bit (that's 'bangs' to you American folks) and I don't know about you ladies out there, if you've ever tried this, but I'd put it right up near the top of my "Sharp Things I'd Rather Impale Myself On Than Do" list, right after "Licking Donald Trump".

It's such an unfulfilling, labourious, esteem-sucking nightmare. In my opinion anyone attempting this should be allowed to just not leave the house for nine months till it's rectified itself or your head's imploded, and during that time people should bring you all the food/wine/chocolate/tequila you require until it's safe to go out in public once more.

At least I have coffee again.

I'm Decaffeinated

The last couple of days I've been a wholly un-caffeinated mess, since the coffee maker decided it no longer wished to provide me with my life-inducing morning coffee, for no reason other than it is an asshole. Thing isn't even a year old, it was just like, "Oh did you want coffee? Sucks to be you."

Eat a bag of dicks, Oster coffee maker.

So I'm sitting here cursing to myself and waiting for the nice courier man from Amazon to bring me a new one sometime today because Amazon Prime is awesome. And I'm un-caffeinated, I may have mentioned it. It's not pretty. I've been talking to inanimate objects and cursing at my plants.

I could drive the mile or so to Starbucks (let's face it, I could walk but hell, I'm too lazy today to even contemplate that, and my knee hurts probably because it requires caffeine to function) but the Purolator guy's sure to show up the second I leave the house and that would mean me being un-caffeinated for another day and it's for the absolute benefit of humankind that that does not happen.

It sort of takes the shine off of getting up in the morning when there's no delicious, fragrant cup of "awake juice" waiting for me and making the kitchen smell like heaven. Sigh.

I know, it's just hard to be me.

I also realized yesterday that I've lived 100 feet from the ocean for almost a year now and I've still yet to put my feet in it. What the hell? How are you guys today?

What I Did Last Summer

Last summer I moved half way across the country, from the flat, huge-skied, sun-baked prairies, to the more humid and manageable climate of the coast.

This was a pleasant and welcome event in my life, and my ancient Chevy, Victor (because yes he has a name, shut up) handled the 1500 mile trip over flat plains and sharp, steep mountains, with ease, probably thrilled at the dizzying prospect of no longer having to start when it's minus 30 something out, or broil in the hot, prairie, summer sun.

So one day in July I tossed some choice driving playlists on my old iPod, loaded up my car, and hit the road.

I discovered long ago that playlists are key, to making any long trip palatable, particularly if said playlists include endless opportunities to sing like your life depends on it, loudly and with gusto. And particularly if you're driving 1500 plus miles alone in the car, as I was - well alone except for my plants, all of whom, I have on trusted authority, appreciate my melodious screechings. And, let me tell you, there was one particularly enthusiastic rendering of "I Will Survive" that will keep them happy for a long, long time.

Moving to our current city was like being picked up and plopped down on another planet.  After the flat, apocalyptic winter that characterized our last home - the five months every year of icy blanched landscapes and wearing all the sweaters in my drawer simultaneously, had rendered me almost completely devoid of visual stimulation. Finding myself here, near the ocean, surrounded by mild winters and sunny summers, outdoor cafes and markets, beautiful landscapes and blue skies, was a bit like I imagined a totally color blind person might feel if suddenly presented with the ability to see full spectrum color.

Or a Donald Trump supporter if he suddenly tripped and hit his head on a rock and woke up seeing sense.