ACTUALLY I HAVE BEEN BUSY

 Being busy isn't usual in my household.  But there have been things planned and slowly being implemented.

Once again we are switching Monte's room...I type so easily.  And I am heading ahead with the house purge.  Our next tackle is the laundry room then the deck.  I have made this pretty simple, at least in my head.  If there isn't a logical place to put something it gets tossed, either into the garbage or a garbage bag for the diabetes peeps to pick up. Simple right?  Well I have tried this before and it never is a straight shot into two spots!

I have decided to hire a couple guys with a truck to haul junk and help move huge awkward stuff.  Monte can only do so much.  Other than large ticket items, I shan't be trying market place.  Deciding to actually use market place is a huge deterrent to getting down and getting dirty.  I always end up left with half my stuff and hating people.  Not worth the five bucks I might end up with after buying whatever it is for 250 bucks two years ago.  Not worth it at all.

Well now I can talk about something I haven't been able to in case April read this.  Her bachelorette shindig is happening as I speak.  Sixteen girls started the planning almost a year ago.  I purchased the decor and that is the sole extent of my involvement.  I chose not to go.  I am still recovering from the retreat.  Actually I am fine, it's my ears that are recovering.

  All kinds of crazy things are happening after much planning!  I am privy to the chat that all the girls are on and pictures are being put on it already.  April is just beaming!!!!  And lots of music and dancing and blindfold pinning the *ahem on the handsome  giant picture of a naked dude, drunk yoga and I do believe last nights gastric adventure was a massive involved charcuterie!!!  One picture was girls in a semi circle on chairs and couch...it was April and her four cousins!  All laughing and happy.

The Bach is in an amazing high end seven bed seven bath mansion on the island.  Aryn was bringing April.  Monte and I drove the hour and half to a fantastic, quite famous, British pub on their way to surprise April.  And she was surprised!!!!  It was so awesome to see her before her big weekend.  We had a wonderful couple of hours in that amazing pub.  The food, the decor, the location..all beautiful and worth the trip to get there.  And it was packed.  Monte and I got there first and got our names in and it was still over a half hour wait.  The only negative were the seats.  Grossly uncomfortable.  I had an oyster hot pot...delicious.

When I get myself collected later I will load some pics onto lappy and put them in the next post.  And probably some pics of the shenanigans going on at the moment!!!!

I now need to get my giant stinky dog up (he sleeps with me now on my rather small twin bed, fortunately for him I only use the top half of the bed as I sit back so there is room) and get him outside for morning ablutions.  Have a good between post and I will try to post sooner with pics.  TFL and TTYL

HOKEY DINAH!!!!

 Oh Lordy be!!!  Have you ever had a chat on messenger that involves over fourteen thirty somethings getting ready for a huge bachelorette party?  It is borderline crazy and astounding!!!

I have a generally very unbusy phone.  Once in a blue moon there is a non-spam phone call and even less are dings for texts.  There may be other stuff but the rest is silent.

But my fb messenger is going nuts.  We are getting closer to the date of the party and the messages are getting more frantic and fine tuned.  Eithne, bless her, kind of took over the overseer job and created a fantastic spreadsheet people could add to and somehow, in spite of having a two yr old and a not well husband and a full time job, keeps track of it all.  Crazy!!!!  All I can say, because April occasionally reads my blog, is they are going to have an absolute blast!  The things they have planned are stuff I have never heard of!!!  Just since I started typing this there have been five dings on messenger!!!  I love it!!  Some of it is soooo funny!!!

The last three days have been laundry days.  Holy Toledo!!!  One nice thing about having enough clothes to clothe every bum in Port (and that is saying something!!), not to mention, other than unmentionables, I wear the same thing for a week,  I rarely have to do laundry. 

 Have you ever been to the assisted living senior homes?  At meal times they have these massive giant baby type bibs they velcro around their necks. They hang down to the waist.  The minute I saw those suckers I knew I had to have them.  What a fantastic way to keep the front of your shirts clean, something I have never been able to do.  I happened to go to old people's handy aids section on an Asian website and voila! there they were!  And boy do they work!!!  My only complaint is the velcro at the back of the neck.  Jeez Louise...that stuff rips hair out of your head better than a set of clippers.  But the front of my shirts have never been so clean!

But now I have four massive loads of clothes, towels, duvets,  bibs and rugs and mats to wash.  And to top it off my laundry room is disgraceful.  It is so loaded with stuff I could throw up.  A great deal of it is Monte's. 

 I was amalgamating two of his boxes into one,   rapidly transferring all the stuff in one to the other.  I grabbed something soft, stopped and looked at it as I hauled it out of the box.  It was one of Smooch's discarded snake skins.  EEEEWWWWWW!!!  I love her but I do not want to handle her skin.  Creepy to the power of infinity.  (shovel list)

So there you go folks...another mundane post.  I need to start going out so crap can happen and I am either in the middle of it or at the very least, seeing it!  I did go to Nanaimo last week with Monte.  He and I had a fabulous time but for reasons I can't go into I had to come straight home.  For some of you the term sugar cane will explain a lot.  Sigh.

So that's it!  I will go out in the next day or two and hopefully see something worth telling you all about.  If nothing else I shall take some pics.  I don't have any good ones today to put here.  Have a good few days...TFL and TTYL 

 

REALLY LONG TIMES BETWEEN POSTS MEANS NOTHING HAS HAPPENED...NOTHING

 I am dead serious.  Nothing has happened.  It is one thirty in the night, I can't sleep, I am hungry, I am drinking an awesome double brew sugar free vanilla coffee from Mcd's that Monte brought back for me.  I am not sleepy yet (coffee doesn't affect me at all).  I have been thinking about anything whatsoever to write about and I can't think of nuttin'!.

One thing we did was finally, after months of talking about it we made Italian Wedding Soup.  It was very easy, time consuming, but easy.  I worked on the broth all day and it was delicious.  I put the ingredients into a bowl with the hamburger and made poor Ange mix it. Then using a melon baller she made tiny meatballs.  Meanwhile I had ordered the proper teeny pasta from Amazon CANADA, got out the big bag of spinach and voila! soup!!!  It was absolutely delicious but I can see it's really only as good as the broth ends up.

I have big fat chubalub arms, the kind one hides with long sleeves (like Oprah does...look next time you see her).  There is no way I can hide mine.  I hate long sleeves.  I can't function or think with long sleeves on.

The reason I mention this is I am really in need of getting an accurate blood pressure reading.  I can't use just any machine.  My giant upper arms preclude that.  I need the big boy cuffs that only doctors have.  I even asked at Life Labs the last time I was in there and they don't have them.  The regular ones add like twenty points to my numbers and severely cut the blood to my hands off.  And it super hurts.  The wrist ones are garbage.  They are totally unreliable.

Last time I saw the doctor, about last summer time, I found out my blood pressure had snuck up to one fifty over something.  Dammit!!! So she prescribed a weird drug that the tele dr. was upset I was taking.  I am already on three other ones to get my pressure down to one twenty over something. He said it would dehydrate me...no matter how much I drink. 

About a month after starting that pill, and I am not sure it has anything to do with this, I developed tinnitus in my left ear.  And it is loud!  And it is driving me crazy.  And my head pumps. I don't think it is caused by high pressure...it would be in both ears then I figure but I would like to get a doctor that knows what he/she is doing to get this under control.  But alas!  This is Canada.  That won't be happening anytime soon.  So if I have a stroke you will know why.

I haven't been eating really properly for the last while.  I was looking at the calendar and suddenly realized we are in the middle of March.  Crapadoodle!!!!  I need and planned to lose fifty pounds before the wedding May 24th!  Hokey Dinah!!!  I better get on it!!!  Twenty five pounds a month.  Hmmmmm....that is a lot of not eating.  I think I am too old and fat to shoot for that much.  Plus every pound you lose at my age adds another layer of crepey skin!!!

  Not that I really care.  I like, embrace, being older.  Some things have been a surprise though.  I don't age in my head.  Go figure. And I am not as sure on my feet, my voice won't let me sing anymore, my taste has changed drastically (probably because of all the meds I take...shovel list), I get very sleepy in the day but am wide awake at night, I packed my house to move, mostly by myself, seven years ago.  I could not do that now without a lot of sitting sessions. Things like that.  But overall I enjoy being older.  It is sure easier, socially, than when I was in my younger years.  I know EVERYTHING now and it makes convo with people a lot easier.  Lol!!!!

Well enough rambling.  Another goofy post.  My apologies.  Til next time...TFL & TTYL

'Age is an issue of mind over matter, if you don't mind, it doesn't matter.'  Mark Twain

this quote could be my life mantra!!!

THIS IS A BORING ONE...SORRY...AT LEAST IT AIN'T ABOUT TRUMP!!!

 Last night something extremely unimportant happened that got me thinking.  In my memory, which just happens to be super good still, lol, that something has happened only three times in my current memory.

I made a seafood chowder.  There are a million ways to make it and I have done quite a few times in my life.  But last night was different.  Most my chowders, don't panic I am not going to go into detail about how I make it, I did some things a little differently.  And when it was complete I grabbed a spoon for the final test taste.  And it stopped me dead in my tracks.  It was magnificent!!!  Like I mean noticeably crazy delicious.  Not normal delicious but insanely abnormally delicious.  I couldn't believe my tastebuds.

And later I got thinking about that moment of complete surprise.  And it has happened only two other times that I can remember.  One was in Parksville at a Vietnamese restaurant.  I had ordered pho of course and the first bite of the broth shocked me...and saddened me.  I knew I would never ever be able to duplicate that magical flavour in a million years of trying.  I have eaten a lot of pho in my time but that one was utterly amazing.

  And the other time was years ago in Bamfield. I had made my signature (hahaha) salmon burgers.  I had made them lots of times and I thought I had done exactly the same thing again.  But when I took that first bite I again stopped in dead chew!  It was beyond amazing and to this day I have no idea why it was different.  I just know it was.  It reminds me of taking pictures and when you are dumping them onto the computer, every now and then a certain picture will astound you, unexpectedly.  I love it!!!

Well now I am hungry.  I just reread the above...I wrote it yesterday.  So I am signing off and I am going to go heat up a cheesy smokie and stick it on a fork and gingerly eat it.  TFL and TTYL

A FEW DAYS AGO MONTE ORDERED A TAKEOUT MEAL FROM SMITTY'S.  PART OF THE ORDER WAS MINI DONUTS.  NOW JUDGING BY THE PICTURE YOU MIGHT THINK THEY ARE CHOCOLATE.  NO. THEY ARE NOT.  THEY ARE BURNT.  CAN YOU IMAGINE A CHEF PACKING UP THE DINNER AND ACTUALLY INCLUDING THESE?

DINNER FAIL

 Well dinner tonite was a giant fail.  It cost a lot and it was a ton of pick ass work.  I am not happy.

In the night I was awake and got thinking about making spaghetti but using ground sausage instead of ground beef.  Well, like thoughts in the night are want to do they grew into what ended up being a monster, a big fat miserable fail monster.

Now in my defence, I have never used ground sausage, or spiced ground pork.  I have a lot of tail end veggies in the fridge so I can add those.  Shredded carrots, shredded cabbage, celery, mushrooms, onion, half rotten giant tomatoes (lots left of them after you cut the mouldy parts out).  And brilliant idea of all ideas, apples.  Some of that I did have to buy.

So I fired up my lappy and made a delivery list on my Walmart site.  I decided seven apples would probably do it.  I added a container of cherry tomatoes for good measure. Plus why not try out a can or two of diced and spiced tomato for a change. Chose a nine o'clock  am delivery.  Gave me time to get all those things ready and possibly in the crock pot.

So the groceries arrived right on time.  I gathered all my fridge stuff and organized the grocery stuff.  I chopped, and whizzed in my chopper, and peeled and diced, opened cans, halved the mushrooms...got all that started.  Popped two pounds of ground spiced pork into a frying pan to get browned before adding to the veg.  I got all that prepped, cooking and first seasoning on the go....in a big pot on the stove...way too much for the crock pot.  Now it was time to get the apples ready.  Seven of them.  Cosmic crisps.

I have one of those segment making corer thingies.  So the first thing I did was core and segment seven apples.  Next I cut each segment into three chunks and threw them into the now simmering pot.  I added the final seasonings, brown sugar, bovril, fresh chopped basil and balsamic vinegar.  Precook test taste was really good.  

So the obligatory hours later it was dinner time.  I heated up the konjak noodles (shitty but almost zero carbs) and we dished up.  It was awful.  The spaghetti sauce was not too bad but the apples just ruined it.  They were simply lumps of tasteless mush and skin.  No flavour left in them at all.  And not only that it made the sauce watery.  Dammit!!!!

There was only one thing I could do.  Get the apple out of the spaghetti and tossed in the garbage and cook the sauce down some.  

Math time.  Seven apples cut into eight wedges, each wedge cut into three.  Seven times eight time three...that is a freaking 168 pieces of apple in a six quart casserole dish.  I got one of those squeezy things, tongs, and picked every damned one of those loser apple pieces out.  Every single one.  Now I decide..do I keep the sauce and freeze it or just toss it now instead of later. 

This was a good reminder to not dream up ideas in the middle of the night.  Several years ago I had to stop myself from watching info commercials at two in the am.  I bought five hundred bucks worth of invection elements.  Never opened the boxes and ended up giving them to someone that could actually use them.  That part felt good.  The five hundred buck loss not so much.

A quick note about Monte.  Life with him can be a rollercoaster but I gotta say..he is amazing right now.  Of course he still has his autistic quirks but he is calm and funny and busy.  He seems to be back visiting his friends and soon he will be able to get out hiking with Floppy again.  He is the most interesting person.  Right now he is reading The Art of War to me and it sparks some interesting convos.

That is it for today.  It isn't even three am yet.  I gotta stop waking up in the night.  By three pm I am wiped out.  It's taco Tuesday today.  I must not be sleepy beyond control in the afternoon, got dinner to make!!!  TFL and TTYL

AFTER PICKING OUT ALL THAT APPLE AND PUTTING THE WHOLE THING OUTSIDE (IT WOULDN'T FIT IN THE FRIDGE) I WAS HUNGRY.  THIS IS MY ACTUAL SUPPER I ATE

DEAPPLED SPAGHETTI SAUCE

168 PIECES OF APPLE

THRIFT STORE ANGST

 I have issues with thrift stores.  In Kamloops my mom was being moved from a nice little apartment in a senior establishment to another one...a more appointed, less self sufficient apartment.  As such my two siblings and myself and Spod cleared out her place, made a few boxes to go to her next place and lots of boxes to go to a thrift store.  All of the stuff we didn't trash was deemed good stuff.  And there it was. 

 I didn't realize that thrift stores are NOT grateful to get stuff.  I didn't realize that thrift stores mistakenly dubbed our stuff as 'garage sale rejects'.  Now let me make it clear I am not talking about the diabetes people.  They are awesome.  Not only do they pick up the stuff, but they take everything.

We took that stuff to at least two very unwelcoming thrift places and were rejected right out of them.  We then drove straight to the dump and threw it all out along with what we had deemed trash when we cleared her place out.

  I did keep a box of dead Bob's stuff for his kids.  He did a lot of writing and drawing and letter writing.  I kept very personal things like his wallet and pictures.  I let his kids, who lived in the states and the Kooteneys, know I had a box of his stuff.  I never heard from them so Monte, Spod and I took it up a logging road here and burnt it all.

We live in what is basically a very poor town.  Work is hard to find.  There are an extraordinary amount of fellow citizens on disability.  As such we have a number of thrift stores...the usual...Sally Ann, Hospital thrift, Bread of Life etc...  Thank goodness we don't have a very overpriced  Value Village.

Anyway, in Ange's and my endeavour to purge this house, we made ten boxes of food.  Good stuff.  Canned soups, cereals, pastas, giant tin of ground coffee, a massive jar of mayonnaise, cake mixes, bisquick, etc...all date checked.  Monte hauled it all out to the van and off he went.  I must admit I didn't have the best feelings as he disappeared down the street.  

About fifteen min. later he phones me.  They won't take it unless we double check the expiry dates.  It is done he says.  Well they wanted it done again.

Now I don't like to think this but here is a giant young man, torn raggedy sweater, many chains around his neck, knife hanging off his belt and a fedora type black hat on his head who just maybe didn't present your average household donator.. Very cute for a musician, scary for fat old Sally Ann worker.  According to Monte she was very rude and unfriendly.  "Get out of there!" I immediately said.

So the next day Monte made the executive decision to try the Bread of Life.  They aren't actually a formal thrift store.  They are more of a food bank, feed the real down and outers, type of place.  They welcomed him with open arms and smiles and joy.  He told them that they had all been double checked for dates and he was believed.  What a difference!  That is the place we shall be dealing with from now on!!

We had an earthquake!!!  I was hiding out in my bedroom while the housekeeper polished up my house.  I heard a rattling, turned off my tv and sure enough, my blinds were rattling.  Then stopped.  I bet that was an earthquake I said to myself.

Two minutes later my phone rings and it was April.  It was so bad there that she had to catch a little dog going nuts and go stand in the outside door doorway.  A few minutes later Aryn called.  She and Bradley were under the kitchen table.  Holy Cow!!!!!  I think their third floor cement place would be okay, but April's?  Not so much.  That decrepit old piece of crap is either going to fall apart from something or burn to the ground.  April was worried the roof would cave in.  Anyway it was exciting!

Well today's task is to fill two giant garbage bags of stuff for the diabetes truck to pick up.  My bag is going to be full of shoes and closet clothes.  I am going to make room in my roomy but stuffed closet.  All my ugly sweaters, long sleeved stuff, goofy idea outfits I have never, and never will wear,  fancy clothes that I will never get to ever wear again...no cruising in my future, shirts with rude sayings that offend me now that I am out of my ribald years and entered my respectable old age years.  Sad but true.

I made my very 'last in my life' shirt purchases last week. Theyarrived yesterday.  I shall get old and die before they are worn out.  I have worn all my current shirts since our house burnt down in March 2003.  That is 22 years.  If I live another 22 years I would be 95.  No thank you. Being a Queenager is tough enough.  I wouldn't mind 82 but 95 is pushing it.  Getting old is too slow and painful.  But worst of all is you have to constantly ask for help and be a burden on people.  Oh I know there are those few old people out there that are like the freaking energizer bunny, but most of us are NOT that!!!  By 82 I will be ready to surrender and go bug Bill out there somewhere.

Jeez!!!  How did we get from thrift stores to dying?  This sort of thing kind of happens when you get older and that rainbow bridge isn't a distant thought anymore.  Hahaha!!!!!

Thats it for today.  I hope you are all happy out there.  You sure do me a lot of good!  I thank you for letting me use you all as a cathartic dumping ground!  I love you all and come visit me anytime at all.  TFL and TTYL  

THROWBACK POST DEC. 30 2010 (ONE TIME ONLY)

Oh Lord, Give Me StrengthWe have dogs. A big one and a little one. I am not a dog person but even I know that you don't feed dogs people food. All sorts of awful things happen when you feed them people food. They get sick. They get runny diarrhoea. They become fixated on food and lose their desire to be normal dogs. They die. All sorts of awful things can happen.

This knowledge makes no difference whatsoever to Bill. For years and years, through several dogs, Bill has been told, nagged, yelled at, lectured and beseeched to not feed the dogs people food. But in spite of obvious consequences, he seems to be totally unable to exercise self-discipline and refrain from tossing inappropriate tidbits to them. On one famous (in the immediate family anyway) occasion a few years ago, he fed one of our dogs twelve chocolate cupcakes. When I found out, fairly soon after the feast, I tied the dog up on our deck as per the normal routine and with payback purpose in mind, I moved a lot of lumber, tools and bricks in to the same corner as the dog. By the time that poor dog was through, there wasn't much of the building supplies that wasn't coated in a fine layer of excrement. And, because of what was under the deck, it couldn't be simply hosed off. Bill had to carry every piece down to the back and hose it off there. And our poor dog recently died from kidney failure. Think there is a connection? Now, no matter what Bill has done or not done, any episode of poo in our house is his responsibility. He has to clean messes up off the floor, he has to pick up poo outside, he has to clean our little hairy dog if poo sticks to her.

Yesterday morning both dogs were put out to do their morning ablutions. Molly, the little hairy one, stayed out way way longer than her normal routine. Finally I called her in. As she came up the sidewalk she would stop every few steps, hunch up then drag her butt a ways on the ground. She would then walk a few more steps, stop, hunch up and drag her butt. She finally arrived at the door and upon inspection there was the evidence that she had been eating something she shouldn't have. Nicely glued all over her ass was....well....you can guess. I hollered for Bill. Bill didn't come. So I scooped her up and holding her at arms length I went in search of him. I found him in the bathroom, stark nekkid and about to get into the shower. I simply handed the dog over to a surprised Bill and exited the bathroom. No words were necessary. After a few minutes I heard Bill go into the kitchen and back into the bathroom. I was busy so I didn't pay much attention.

After some time I was kind of wondering what was happening in there, I opened the door and peeked in. No Bill. No Molly. What??? So I stepped into the bathroom, gingerly pulled the shower curtain aside a little and OH MY GOD!! There was Bill, facing the shower, holding Molly, ass side up under a pounding stream of hot water. He would swish her this way. Then he would swish her that way. Then he would kind of bounce her up and down. She looked positively terrified. I quickly left the bathroom, shaking my head.

I retreated to the kitchen and proceeded to do the dishes. After a few minutes i happened to glance down the hall just as the bathroom door opened and a very wet dog was fired out into the hallway, door shutting quickly behind her. For one stunned moment she just stood there blinking, Then suddenly she shook herself vigorously, hunched her back, then plopped her ass on the floor and started to drag her ass, again. Behind her was a little brown trail. I dashed over, scooped her up, flipped her upside down and, yes, there was the evidence. All the shower did was make it mushier and messier. Jeez!!! I also noticed that a lot of hair had been hacked off her back end. I grabbed her towel and wrapped her up and went back into the bathroom. And, yes, sitting right there on the counter were my good kitchen scissors, the ones we use for opening food bags, cutting green onions, snipping beans etc... And they were covered. One more item for the dog bag.

After he was dressed, Bill took her to Doggie Sudz and had her washed. It would just be a whole lot easier for dog and all to not feed her people food.