I’ve been sleeping a lot. I think I’m depressed again.

Last night I tried to watch the movie The Impossible and I lasted about 15 minutes before I fell asleep and drooled all over Blake’s belly. That was around 8pm. Then I got up at 4:30am for work and actually started early because my pancreas is bugging me (dunno why this time) and I wanted to go back to bed as soon as possible. So at 7:45am I went back to sleep and had the craziest dream about evil, pot smoking fairies that I wish I could remember and write down because it would have been fucking GOLD, very de Lint…

…FUCK. Blake’s aunt died and now we probably have to go to Militiagan for the week. FUCK FUCK FUCK. It’s not that I have anything AGAINST Militiagan, it’s that I really really hate working from another location. I’m also on the rag and Lunapads aren’t exactly travel-worthy. Ugh. This suuuuuuuuuuucks. (It’s not an aunt he was particularly close to or anything, I’d never even heard of her until today. She’s his cousins’ grama.)

UGH.

UGH.

UGH.

I can’t afford to pay for roaming on my phone right now either. :o( If I’m roaming, does playing Pocket Frogs count as data usage?

Now I’m in a shitty mood. I was in a perfectly fine mood until Blake messaged me with this. Now my dream is 100% out of my brain and into the ether because he made me think about real life things. FUCK.

…And the vice principal just called and Madison’s exam on Thursday is drama, which is a play, so she can’t make that one up so if we go, she’s staying home. This is fucking bullshit. Fuck this, I’m not going. If we can’t all go, I say we send flowers since it’s not even a close relative and call it a day. It’s not like we can afford to go anyway.

UGH.

BUT! My wonderful friend, Miss Manda Leigh, found me THESE gorgeous things on eBay just now, in my size, which Blake told me to purchase and have sent to his mom’s house (because they didn’t ship internationally). They are Doc Martens so you know they’re good and that they’ll fit perfectly. Behold:

I loves them.
I loves them so fucking much.
I could kick someone’s fucking ass in these.
I knew if I put it out there someone would see something awesome!
Crowd-sourcing FTW!

….And Blake and I have decided to just send flowers to the funeral home and call it a day. THANK GOD. This was getting complicated and stressful. I had to take 2 clonazepam just to answer the phone when the vice principal called who A) should have called Blake’s cell instead of our house, which is the # he left on her voicemail and B) who fucking told Madison about the funeral, who had NO IDEA, and so she texted Blake 300 times while he was in a meeting wondering who died. THANKS, VICE PRINCIPAL FUCKFACE. YOU’RE SWELL.

I have done so much screaming today my throat is literally sore, both from being extremely frustrated with life and also from being excited about shoes. Today is definitely a bittersweet day.

I’m really bummed about losing that dream. It was the kind of dream that was so good, so interesting, that you force yourself to go back to sleep to keep having it. And now it’s gone. Thanks a lot, universe.

Now I’m going to go find food and wrack my brain for dream details. Have a lovely day.

On Thursday I had a pretty crazy panic experience.

Blake and I went to the mall because I needed new shoes. Because the summer shoes I have are literally 15 years old and falling apart. I got them at Holman’s Shoes, which was an independent shoe store, in Uxbridge when Madison was less than a year old so I could go to an $80,000 wedding with my then-boyfriend.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Pardon the dog hair. Uh, we have dogs. They shed. Yadda yadda.

This is what my old shoes look like and if anyone has ever seen shoes like these online anywhere PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know. Since I only buy shoes every decade and a half, money is pretty much no object.

In case the photos are unclear, the soles are rubber with what used to be suede inside (where it says “marie claire 7″) and the upper part is leather.
I am obviously a size 7. (In this shoe, 7.5 in others.)

So anyway, the goal was to find the exact same kind of shoe at the mall. Except I hadn’t been in a shoe store in a really long time and I think the fact that in a shoe store sales people HAVE to help you and they’re pretty pushy about it threw me into full blown panic after about 3 stores with me being unable to breathe or even see properly and sweating profusely. We had to go to the food court where I sat in a chair and cried while tweeting fiercely and Blake got me dinner. I took like, 8 Ativan over the course of 20 minutes and composed myself and the search for shoes began again.

After looking at every shoe store in the mall, I found a pair in a shoe store that were “okay” but not the same but I needed shoes so I settled for them and we proceeded to go home. Payless Shoes happens to be across the road from the mall so I said to Blake that we should look there just in case and I actually found shoes there that were better than the $100 ones we’d just purchased for $20 and they’re…passable. I don’t like them, they’re not the same (have I ever mentioned that I really really don’t like change?), they’re too light and I feel like they don’t want to stay on my feet but I needed them so that’s what I got. Behold…

Since they were only $20, Blake said I could get this snazzy hat that I don’t have pictures of and he also said that we could keep looking for the same shoes as I had before so PLEASE, if you know of a place online that has shoes like my old ones, for the love of kittens and all that’s holy, let me know!!! I’m desperate!!!

So that was Thursday…

Then nothing happened until Saturday but due to the nature of what happened on Saturday and the fact that Madison probably wouldn’t appreciate me posting about it, I won’t say, but basically shit hit the fan pretty bigtime. Everything’s okay now though and we’re all one big happy family again and that’s all that matters.

Now I’m going to make steak and read the rest of my Walking Dead comics because guess what? It’s my day off and I don’t have to give a single fuck today!

OH! Speaking of not giving fucks, I am absolutely OBSESSED with this game on my phone called Pocket Frogs. Have you heard of it? IT IS SO STUPID. You catch and breed frogs. And sell them. And that’s basically the whole game. Here’s a screencap:

That screencap was taken a few days ago so I’m probably higher than level 5 now and I think I have 5 habitats, but it is SO addictive. I don’t even know why. If you play too and you know how to play together, let me know and we can send each other frogs!

Anyway, that’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop. I’m outta here!

Sunday was awesome. Definitely one of the best days of the year so far.

On Sunday morning, we left for The Sketchbook Project Tour in Toronto, in a gated off area of a neighbourhood called The Distillery District. It’s a fancy schmancy little area with a friggin’ Fluevog store (gooooooood I want these) and various other expensive little boutiques. This would be my first time there.

The Sketchbook Project Tour is exactly what it sounds like; the books of the participants of The Sketchbook Project 2012 are being taken on tour across the US of A and Toronto and then when it’s over, they’ll be permanently housed at the Brooklyn Art Library in NYC.

I bought a book last year and meant to participate but between being sick and dealing with nurses and doctor’s appointments and being in the hospital, surgery etc. I never wrote or drew a single line in my book. I still have it and I’ll use it at some point and after I do, I’ll send it to NYC to join the collection. My “class”, so to speak. But the kids finished their books and so did my mom and John so that’s why we went down, to check out everyone’s books and maybe find some cool ones on our own, too.

I hadn’t signed up this year because I’ve never finished a book and since I failed so hardcore last year, it just didn’t seem like a good use of money. However looking at all the finished sketchbooks on the tour, some of which were really cool…

(Click here to see a bigger version of this.)

…and having finished the Memoir Project a couple of months ago, I bought the sketchbook that is guaranteed to tour the northeast and paid for digitizing. I guess the project’s gotten big enough that they can only cart around so many books so they only guarantee your book will tour a specific area, which sucks if you have family and friends everywhere, but I understand why it has to be that way. It’s also a numbers game, if they get as many participants as they did last year, then all the books will go everywhere, but patterns show that’s not the case, that it grows every year, so that’s why they’re doing it this way.

I also got this book by the guys who created the Sketchbook Project:

It’s basically just a book of prompts. Some are really really good, some are pretty dumb, but I figure if I find myself still with an empty book in November (the deadline is January) I’ve got options. And part of me is actually really tempted to do the whole book from beginning to end IN the book. Because the pages are like this:

The very first page of the book asks you to decide if this is a sketchbook or if this is not a sketchbook. I’m thinking of ticking off “this is a sketchbook”. But I guess I should work on the little one before I get any grandiose ideas.

So we went to the Sketchbook Project “mobile library”, which is like a customized trailer, got our library cards and checked out “our people’s” books first since we hadn’t seen my mom’s yet and I didn’t think Blake saw the kids’. We also all participated in the on-site version of The 4×6 Exchange.  Then I tweeted, with one of the SBP Toronto hashtags, for people to tell me their names if they think I should check out their books. Then we went to this fancy restaurant called Mill St. Pub (I think) where everyone had a good time and after our meal, I checked my phone again and a few people had suggested I check out their books, so we went back to the mobile library and we checked out those books, which were all pretty cool and then we came home.

I dunno about anyone else in our party, but all the way home, I was buzzing. First, I was inspired as fuck. Second, that is the exact kind of “good day” I’m talking about that I want not just me, but our whole family, to have more of. I came home in such a good mood and it’s 2 days later and I’m still in a good mood. In fact, a few hours ago I had a REALLY good idea for a story, which is a rare occurrence. And I wrote it down in my sketchbook because that’s the paper I had laying around when the idea happened.

And so it begins…

Blake and Madison are passed out so I have no idea how last night went, but I did want to thank everyone who donated for the Relay For Life. You guys donated $1,025 and since Blake’s work is matching all donations, the total is actually $2,050! So THANK YOU!!!

FACT: There is NO SUCH THING as “subliminal advertising”.

- Sunny Crittenden, ca. 2001-2003

Yesterday was hell. Pure and utter hell. I worked in the morning and everything was fine and after work, I went back to bed and got up at like, 10:30am or so. In pancreatic pain. I’d had some discomfort on Sunday or  Monday so Blake picked me up some hydromorph contin and I started a really bland diet. Not quite the liquids-only diet you’re supposed to go on during a pancreatic attack but I barely ate anything between then and today.

Anyway, I woke up in pain and stumbled into my office to sit down, check e-mail etc. and I was just in way too much pain to even do that, so I took a hydromorph, pancreatic enzymes just in case they might help (they don’t usually but they won’t hurt me so there’s no harm in trying), Tylenol 1, ibuprofen and Gravol (anti-nauseant, so I didn’t throw the pills back up). Then I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge and stumbled back to bed.

I laid there for about 25 minutes in excruciating pain, hot and cold and sweaty and just feeling like I was dragged through an asshole backwards, when I had to get up to puke. Moving is the worst when I’m having an attack, just turning over in bed makes me want to die, like I can feel my guts touching my pancreas and it fucking hurts just having one organ slide against the other. I have no idea what organs are near what, all I know is that when my guts shift when I turn over in bed during an attack the pain is a million times worse than having a baby.

So I get up to puke and I’m hugging the bowl partially feeling like I have to puke and partially hoping I puke because maybe it’ll make me feel better (it won’t) but at the same time, I’m worried if my pills had enough time to do their thing before I barf them up.

Well, there were no pills in my vomit so that was good, but I puked so hard that I peed my pants. (TMI? TFB.) So I started crying and when I was finally done barfing, I rinsed my mouth and went back to the bedroom to put a new pair of underbums on. I didn’t bother with pants because I knew that next time I puked, it would just be the same scenario unless I was COMPLETELY empty beforehand which just isn’t possible because when you have to puke, you just have to puke. This peeing while puking thing is relatively new, it just started happening after I got home from the hospital last year. It’s just that while having a pancreatic attack, I vomit with such force that I can’t help it.  When I’m sick, like with a stomach flu or whatever, it doesn’t happen. Just during pancreatic attacks. I dunno why.

Without going into more detail than I need to because it’s really just more of the same, I spent all of yesterday in bed, only coming out of my room to throw up. I don’t remember Blake coming home. I remember at some point he got me a glass of ice water and my night time pills (and Gravol so I didn’t throw them up). I think that was around 7pm. Then I laid in bed some more and slept a bit, then I got up I think around 11pm because I finally felt sort of better and so I sat in my office and checked e-mail while Blake got ready for bed.

I woke up this morning still in pain, but nowhere near as bad as yesterday. And really, this attack was not as bad as any of the others so that’s encouraging I guess. The only thing I can point to as far as a cause is that on Tuesday, we had macaroni and cheese for dinner (like, baked macaroni and cheese with real cheese and milk, NOT Kraft Dinner) which I had leftovers from on Wednesday for dinner. This never used to be a trigger food but it’s been a possible factor for the last 2 attacks and this time I was really careful; I took 3 pancreatic enzymes each night. During the 2 attacks prior to yesterday, I did not take enzymes before/after the mac & cheese so this could be why those attacks were worse than this one. The other thing I’m thinking is that traditionally, Blake’s bought medium cheddar to make it and I asked him to start using old cheddar instead because I thought that’s what my mom and gr. grama used. And then mac & cheese becomes a trigger food.

SO, I’m gonna bite the bullet and try macaroni and cheese again maybe next week or the week after using medium cheddar, with enzymes, and see what happens. After an attack, I have to rest my pancreas as much as possible, hence the 2 week window. Macaroni and cheese being a trigger food is NOT COOL AT ALL. It is one of the only food that, up until now, I’m almost always in the mood for. I rarely get sick of it and when i can’t think of anything to eat, that’s my go-to staple. So it’s really going to suck if I can’t eat it anymore. :o/ Not like my fat ass needs it but, y’know…

Speaking of my fat ass, check out this slip that Blake bought me the other night. How gorgeous is that? I ordered the pink one so it would go with this sweater in the winter and I dunno what yet in the summer:

Unfortunately I’m not built like the model on the Free People site so wearing it as is, over top of anything bodycon or skin tight is sort of out of the question. I’m definitely going to have to try and find a white or pink skirt or something to wear underneath it, even with that sweater because the sweater doesn’t cover my bum. Unfortunately everything I own that would work for that purpose is black and that piece is too delicate for black. It needs white. I dunno, I’ll find something. There’s an ivory mini dress that would work on my Free People wishlist if anyone felt so inclined…. I wish I could get the slip in blue too, because this piece is literally my favourite of all their new stuff and blue’s more versatile but I went for the pink first because I suspected that it would sell out of my size first. I ordered a medium so neither colour has run out of my size yet, but the large in pink has sold out already so I suspect the medium’s not far away.

Anyway, I love it. :o)

On Wednesday we went to see my grama with the kids. She looked okay, better since the chemo is out of her system now. More alert, more “up”. I’m not sure how that is compared to her every day but she seemed to have enjoyed the visit and when we said we were going to leave because we had to have dinner and stuff, my grama said she’d pay for dinner and that we could eat there and take the leftovers home, so Stouffville Pizza was called and pizza was had.

At one point, my grama pulled me into her bedroom and handed me a basket of rubber smurfs and I said, “I can have these?” because I had told my mom a while back that if I had my pick of anything of my grama’s to have, it would be those and she said “just one” so this is the one I picked:

Meet painkiller addicted junkie artist smurf.

She also gave me a full-sized plush smurf, which honestly I had no interest in but she wanted me to have it so I took it anyway. I wanted the little rubber ones like the one above because when I was little, she collected them and they were my favourite thing to play with at her house, where I spent a lot of time. Smurfs were also our family’s mascot for the smash-up derby in Minden at Thanksgiving when I was little and we used to enter. There were usually smurfs painted on the car or a stuffed smurf crazy glued to the roof of it. I think I’ve already written about my grama and I going to Minden for Thanksgiving every year when I was tiny until I was about 13, but for those who don’t know, my grama’s next-door-neighbour and friend was Mike Baker, the son of Wes Baker, my son’s namesake. He bought property up north in a town called Minden and started building a house there by hand and every Thanksgiving weekend, on the Saturday, Minden has a smash-up derby. And as long as I can remember until I was maybe 12 or 13, Mike and our family would enter a car in the derby and I’m not sure if we usually won or not but I think we did. All I know is that in October in Minden in 1984 was VERY VERY cold. Now, thanks to global warming, it’s not so bad (and I’m so sure smash-up derbies are great for the environment!)

I remember being like, 3 years old and sitting in the backseat of my grama’s car in a full snowsuit in between heats, freezing my ass off while it lightly snowed. My grama had brought hot chocolate in a thermos and I remember being very very happy. Thanksgiving in Minden used to be the best holiday. My cousin Jeff who was maybe 2 or 3 years older than me I think came up with his mom, Eunice, and often his sister Janet, who would sometimes bring a friend or two as well. I think there were other kids there too but I don’t know who. Janet died the summer I was sick. I don’t know how she died, I just know that while I was in the hospital dying, so was she and obviously I’m here to tell about it and she’s not. Eunice used to babysit me so I was really close with Jeff and Janet when I was little.

During the first few years of going to Minden for Thanksgiving I think Mike only had a basement. I’m not even sure there was running water. Instead of getting turkey, we would have fried chicken, that I want to say was Dixie Lee, but I forget now. Eventually there was a whole house built, including a kitchen, so we’d have chicken on the Saturday, derby day, and my grama would make a turkey on the Sunday and then we’d come home Monday. Jeff and I would play our Gameboys together and all of us would go for walks in the bush. Once we dug up an oak tree and transplanted it to my grama’s house…which is now someone else’s house. :o/

For the derby, we would only enter one car but we’d have multiple drivers for the various heats. Mike drove; I remember my Uncle Bill driving, his son Billy eventually and also my Aunt Sandra’s husband John drove a couple of times. I think there were other people too but no one I really knew. Eunice may have even driven in it at one point, they had a “powder puff” heat just for the ladies (ugh) so she might have. I’m pretty sure my grama never did. I have no idea what my grampa was doing for all of those Thanksgivings because I don’t remember him being there. (He may have gone to my Aunt Judy’s  for T-giving because she did T-giving at her house up until my cousin Kim died.)

Anyway, I’m not sure how it got started, I should have asked her, but I think I remember my grampa getting her the small rubber smurfs that I used to play with when I was a kid, like the one above. I don’t know how they came packaged or if they came packaged at all. I’ve never seen any “out in the wild”, so to speak. Since I only got to pick one out of the two dozen she had, I thought that one was the most fitting for me. I played with junkie artist smurf the most when I was little. He was always married to Smurfette. (My grama never had a real Smurfette though. The one she had was a knock-off with green skin.) I didn’t marry a dude with green skin, but he does have a lot of tattoos and I did become an artist when I grew up, so that’s why I picked junkie artist smurf.

And I suppose this is a good segue into the next topic…the stupid Artist Studio Tour this fall.

We have decided to take moving off the table for now and work on getting our house ready to sell next spring. There aren’t any houses we like right now in the area where we’re looking and the idea of having our house on the market freaks me right the fuck out. Everything about moving freaks me right the fuck out. The good news is that the real estate agent who came to look at our house, said we could sell it for like, SIGNIFICANTLY more than we bought it for, especially after we do everything on the list, primarily re-doing the bathroom (re-drywalling one wall, installing a shower insert and fixing the plumbing behind the tub faucets because they leak), painting part of the one of the living room walls where it’s bare wood due to us putting in the new window, painting the trim of the house and potentially taking down the shutters on the front of the living room window and putting up ones that fit better because the shutters that are there now were put there for the floor-to-ceiling window that used to be there, but we replaced it with a waist-high bay window after Lucky broke the big one. The other thing is that we re-did our mortgage a couple of weeks ago and the bank manager lady said we’re eligible for a mortgage 3 times the size of the one we have now. Not that we’d buy a house that expensive but it’s nice to know that we can afford a century home with a bit of borrowing cushioning on top for added peace of mind.

So. That means we’re going to be living here in September. When the tour is. And I got the e-mail this week from Mike saying “hey guys, our meeting’s next week!” and I reeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaalllly don’t want to go. I don’t want to go because we decided during the last meeting that June 30th was the deadline to decide if you’re going to be in the tour or not and I’m sure that’ll be reiterated during the meeting. And the fact is, I don’t think I have $75 between then and now. I’ve been trying to be super good with paying down my credit card, which has me living on abou $50 per paycheque. This paycheque was only $45. And that’s the pits. I mean, the good news is that I don’t really like, NEED anything. The spending money I keep in my bank account after paying my credit card isn’t allotted to anything and it gets primarily spent on food. I suppose it wouldn’t be completely irresponsible to spend $75 on the tour since I’ll have gotten 3 paycheques this month so I guess I have a little more money to work with.

But still that’s $75 I highly doubt I’ll make back. Plus what I’m going to have to spend on business cards.

Speaking of business cards, as an aside, when I went to see my shrink last Thursday, Sue, the receptionist, for the second time, told me that my painting that I gave to my shrink and put in Touched By Fire this year that is on display at the mental health centre gets a lot of compliments and that people inquire about buying it all the time. And she asked me if I had any business cards that she could pass along when people comment on it. And I kinda hated that because I like to keep my shrink life and my internet life COMPLETELY separate. My shrink has next to zero idea of anything I do online. She knows I blog, but like, I don’t even think my shrink is on Facebook. She’s not very tech savvy, so the topic has never really come up in the 7 years I’ve been seeing her.

Well, my business cards are like ATCs (artist trading cards). On the front is a picture of a painted girl – several different styles because I use Moo and you can get as many designs on a pack of Moo cards as you want – and on the back is the URL to my Etsy shop, the URL to my main site and I think my e-mail address. I have both full-sized Moo cards and the mini ones, although I haven’t bought business cards in at least 5 years so I only had one full-sized business card, which I gave Sue, and about 5 or 6 mini cards.

I also felt compelled to tell Sue that the paintings take me about 2 or 3 weeks to make and because they’re so labour intensive, they’re kind of expensive. A lot of the people who go  to the mental health centre I do are on disability or Canada pension – fixed incomes – and I kinda wanted to give Sue a heads up because I don’t think the average clientele there can afford my paintings. If I wasn’t making them, I couldn’t afford them either. Hell, hardly any of the people who come to my site can seem to afford them either. I don’t think my prices are unreasonable, not for original paintings, as opposed to prints, because y’know, I’d love to make more than $2 an hour, but they are how much they are because my time, my ideas, my efforts are marketable commodities. I just suck at actually marketing them. (Truthfully I put zero effort into it though outside of my own site so that’s partially my own fault.)

So. Guild meeting on Wednesday and I pretty much have to make my decision to be in the tour or not by then. As far as anyone but Brian knows I’m in and I’ve said all along, I’m in, and now that we’re not moving I have less of an excuse to not do it.

I’m scared of being paired up with someone. I don’t have a public studio so I’ll be paired with someone who does. I’m really REALLY hoping I can display at the library because it’s only 2 minutes from our house and the kids can come in and out and Blake can come in and out and I can come in and out, but if I’m paired with someone out in the middle of nowhere, the kids can’t help and Blake will HAVE to stay with me the whole time. And I won’t be able to leave. If I get paired up with someone, they’re going to want to chat all day and chances are I’m not going to want to but I’ll feel obligated to because this person is opening their home to me to help me sell my work. And I don’t want to be rude, but that would cause me great anxiety. I hate the role of “guest”.

I’m scared of dealing with “the public”. I hate talking about 3 things: myself (go figure), sex (also go figure) and I hate talking about my work. People ask me questions all the time about my paintings and I have absolutely no idea what to tell them. Like, after Touched By Fire the lady who runs the organization behind it called me and asked if I had more work because there were a lot of people interested in it who were disappointed that the piece I put in the show this year wasn’t for sale. (Which was pretty stupid because all of my work is ON THEIR FUCKING SITE, supposedly “for sale” yet I’ve never been able to figure out how you actually buy anything on there and I’ve definitely never sold anything there.) So anyway, she calls me and asks me this and I give her the URL for my Etsy shop and then out of nowhere she asks, “what is your inspiration for these?” and I was completely dumbfounded because no one had ever asked me that before. My genius answer was “Toddlers & Tiaras“. Which is partially true. In the beginning, they just came out of my imagination, but then I started watching Toddlers & Tiaras and that show inspired me in 3 ways: 1. it made me come up with several dress styles, 2. it made me come up with several different hairstyles, hair colours and eye colours/eyeshadow colours and 3. the girls on that show is exactly whose bedroom walls I want to see my work on. Sadly, the show’s become pretty extreme in its views so I’ve stopped watching (and I watched half of an episode of Honey Boo Boo, which is also garbage) and my girls just come out of my imagination now, not really inspired by anything explainable. At least saying I was inspired by Toddlers & Tiaras has an quasi-interesting story behind it but telling someone that the scrapbooking aisles of Michael’s makes me damn near wet my pants is NOT what they want to hear. It’s the truth though! But it’s not one many can relate to so it’s a terrible answer for that question. I can’t even think of other potential things people might ask me because I’ve blocked past conversations out of my brain and thinking about it is practically panic-inducing. But I need to think about it, I need to be ready.  I need to have answers ready for questions like the inspiration one and other things they might ask. What would YOU ask an artist at a studio tour? Has there ever been anything you’ve ever wanted to ask me about my work but just never bothered? The more relevant questions you guys throw at me, the better prepared I think I’ll be. No rush though, the tour’s not until September.

I’m probably going to have to take the Saturday off of work. I work 9 hours on Saturdays. That’s a pretty huge chunk of change out of my paycheque that will not be replaced no matter how many paintings I sell (which I don’t anticipate to be many). If they do put me in the library though, I could be there from opening until I start work at 2pm and then Blake could stay there until it’s over at (I’m assuming because last year’s brochure doesn’t say when it starts or finishes) 6pm. Then I would be present all of Sunday.

Another bonus of being at the library is that I would be able to take credit cards there. I can have my laptop hooked up with my Etsy shop open and if people liked a piece but only had a credit card, they could purchase it on Etsy, minus the postage, and I could just give it to them. Anywhere else, I would have to be cash only. Cheques bounce and people are hard to find after something like this so those are completely out of the question. (How do I tell people I won’t accept a cheque?? Cuz, that’s like saying you don’t trust them, which is true, I don’t, but you don’t want them to think that…)

A snag with the library is that I may not be able to hang anything on the walls. Which would be problematic since everything I make is to be hung on a wall.

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THIS. *panic*

The other thing is being involved. I don’t like going to the guild meetings because it’s almost painful how it’s one step forward, two steps back. At the same time, not only do I have nothing to contribute but I’m glad I don’t have anything to contribute because then you’re on the hook for something and that is crazy panic-inducing.

My work is going to be on display at the township office for all of August and I’m going to have tour guides in my display. That’s what I’ve committed to and that’s all my mental health can allow me to commit to. Hopefully that’s enough.

In about half an hour, Blake and Madison (and Blake’s friend Charissa) will be starting the Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay For Life. It starts at 7pm and ends at 7am and neither of them had a nap today. I told Blake that if he woke me up in the morning that I’d cut him, so he’s going to come home and sleep on the couch until I get up. I really wanted to go with them tonight to take pictures but I still feel like shit because of the whole pancreas deal, I’m on a crapload of hydromorph contin so I’m chemically dozy at the moment and probably couldn’t pull an all-nighter if I wanted to. Plus I work tomorrow and I figured I could sleep from 8am, when they would be getting home, until 2pm when I started work and would probably be okay until the end of my shift at 11pm but with this much morphine in my system and only 3 people on the team (the less people you have, the more time you have on the track and the less able I am to get home if necessary), I didn’t want to gamble on it. Also, it’s currently raining and is supposed to rain off & on all night. So yeah, I stayed home. However! If you would like to sponsor their poor soggy asses, you can click here to do so! I just reloaded the page and they have DOUBLED their donation goal since the other day when it was looking like they wouldn’t even meet it! Thanks, family and friends! Your donations mean a lot to us right now, especially since my grama’s really happy that we’re doing this (I say “we” like I’ve actually done anything other than trying to use social media to get donations. HINT HINT.)

Now I think I’m going to finally watch this TED Talk I’ve had open in another tab since 6am but never got a chance to watch until now. Then since all I’ve eaten and kept down in 3 days is a lone, single spring roll, I’m going to make a bagel sandwich for dinner, watch Magic Mike since Blake’s not here to make fun of me for watching it a second time (the 1st was in the theatre so it’s extra stupid), eat chips, read my book and go to bed.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Peace oot, homies!

PS. Mike, the guy who runs the artists’ guild, is a photographer who also does commercial fine art printing. I don’t have prices yet but he can take pics of my paintings that actually do them justice (in theory) and he can print giclees of them. Any size I want. So these are the questions:

- Most of my paintings are approx. 12 inches x 12 inches. How big should I offer the giclees?
- Open edition or limited edition?
- How much would you be willing to pay for a signed giclee print? Or would you be willing to buy one at all? If not, why not? (I ask because there are posters in my Zazzle shop that so far no one’s touched but a poster is a far cry from a signed, limited edition giclee.)
- Since each print would be too big to mail flat, I would have to use mailing tubes and those cost money. I haven’t priced them yet so I’m just guessing $4-$5 as a ballpark with double that for actual shipping costs. These costs are unavoidable so they obviously factor into the final price.
- Which current pieces of mine would you be interested in buying a print/prints from?

I just kinda want to get a feel for what people might want now that this is a possibility. I dunno if it’d even be worth it since I have no idea what he charges for taking pictures and like I said, no one’s bought the inexpensive posters from my Zazzle shop so I don’t even know if anyone would want these. I can tell you right now that a print would probably have to be about $40-$50 because I have to pay Mike to take proper pictures of them, whereas the posters, which are lesser quality obviously, are only around $20. The posters are nice though, I wouldn’t sell them if they were crappy, but a giclee is signed on archival fine art paper using archival dyes and is something you’d want to get framed, whereas with a $20 poster, it’s okay to just stick thumbtacks in the corners.

Anyway, lemme know your thoughts.

On Friday at like, 5pm or so, the hydro went out. Now some of you are probably thinking “what’s hydro?” because apparently this is a thing only known to Canadians and maybe even only to Canadians who live in this region, I dunno. But we get our hydro, our power, our electricity, from Niagara Falls. Or at least that’s how it’s always been explained to me and I’m way too lazy to google whether that’s factual or not – around here, we call it hydro.

While it was storming, Blake and I were at Wasaga Beach having lunch/dinner and the hydro didn’t go out there so we didn’t know about the outage until we got home.

So we waited and we waited and we waited and the hydro still wasn’t coming on and it was getting dark so we decided to go for a drive to Barrie so the kids could get something to eat and so Blake could charge his phone.

Then we came home and it was really boring and I may have shed actual first world problem tears, then we went to bed, had sexual relations with our nether regions, slept and woke up at ass o’clock, hopeful that Hydro One would have worked feverishly all night so I could check in on work and e-mail in the morning since I had been deprived for over 14 hours at this point – THE HORROR.

But nope, no hydro. Fucking bullshit. And my phone was down to 20% battery which would be precisely how much it would probably need for me to co-ordinate with everyone at work that I needed my shift covered because I had to work at 2pm. Was this going to be like that time when we had a 3 day blackout in most of the northern seaboard? Madison wondered this too. She remembered that time, which surprised me. I said I didn’t think so because other people had hydro in town and Hydro One’s app said last night that it only affected 36 homes.

Blake took us to Alma’s for breakfast because we couldn’t really cook anything due to the fact that we are not prepared for something like the zombie apocalypse, for example…Told Tonya of our woes…afterward we drove around to charge our phones some more and come up with a contingency plan. I had nothing. Blake had an emergency plan that would have worked but we had to leave the house by like, 1pm to make sure it would work so at 12:30pm, I was literally getting stuff together in a bag to take with me because it was going to be a long day…and then at around 1pm, the hydro came back on and I said praise be to Allah and all was good.

I checked my e-mail and my mom had replied to my e-mail and said it had been a tough week with my grama but that visiting a Monday or a Wednesday would be the best times because of who else is going to be there and honestly either day is just as easy for us so I replied back and long story short we’re going to visit my grama tomorrow.

Then I worked all day (and it was a good work day where I stayed on top of everything and was told I was doing a good job – YAY ME) and then we watched a previously-recorded SNL (Melissa McCarthy – awesome) and went to bed.

I forget what I did yesterday or the day before so nothing eventful must have happened except on Game of Thrones. Except I knew what was going to happen because I told Blake at the beginning of the season to tell me everything since I’m not all that invested in the show. What I found the most hilarious is how many unoriginal hacks made Billy Idol jokes right after it happened. I bet there’s going to be a Buzzfeed article or something of just tweets to that effect.

Speaking of unoriginal hacks, right now I’m reading And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini and I’m only 32 pages in and I already feel completely worthless as a writer. I loved The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, they were masterpieces, and to maintain that level in a third book, well, it just makes me feel like pure and utter shit because I’m still at 0/0 attempts to ever get anything published. Or even finished! But whatever, And the Mountains Echoed is pretty awesome so far. I highly recommend it (but read the other 2 first if you haven’t already).

Anyway, Wes is home, Madison will be shortly and she said she’d make me cookies because Madison is sometimes super awesome that way.

Oh, on Thursday we saw The Great Gatsby, which I liked a whole lot but not as much as Romeo + Juliet or Moulin Rouge. I downloaded the soundtrack on Friday morning and listened to it pretty much non-stop ever since until today and it grew on me but there were only a few songs I was married to enough to put in my “Random Shit” folder which is basically my default. I really like the Lana Del Ray song on the soundtrack, “Young and Beautiful”, but these lyrics almost completely ruin the song for me:

“All that grace, all that body,
All that face makes me wanna party.”

UGH. Just UGH.

I don’t know any of her other songs but that is terrible.

I’ve never read The Great Gatsby and probably never would for about a million and one reasons, the +1 being that it’s a really shitty love story.

And now Madison’s home so I’m gonna give her the 3rd degree to freak her out…peace!

Lilacs are the best smelling flower. We have a lilac bush in our backyard that I swear has never flowered before now because we’ve been gardening in the garden right beside it for at least 5 years now and I’ve never noticed it. And I love lilacs. Last year we noticed the ones along the side of the house for the first time and this year my baby one in the front is flowering for the first time. All 3 sets are different kinds. The ones at the side of the house are frilly and a very subtle purple. Almost white. The baby bush in the front yard is dark purple. The one in the backyard has petals (?) that are more defined and the backyard one has more scent than the ones at the side of the house.

Oh fuck it, I’ll go take pictures even though it’s crazy windy…

Okay so here’s the one in the backyard. I dunno what the little “petals” are actually called, they’re almost like little flowers themselves, but these ones are more well-defined than the others:

These ones are on the side of the house, see how they’re frillier than the one above? Also almost white, but not quite:

And this is the baby one in the front.

The ones in the backyard smell the strongest so I cut a bunch off the bush and they’re sitting on my desk. I have a fan in here that’s oscillating on the other side of the room and every few seconds it swivels toward the lilacs and blows the scent directly toward me. It’s lovely. Unfortunately cut lilacs don’t last very long or at least that’s been my experience. I’ve heard that you’re supposed to put sugar in the water, you’re supposed to cut their stems on a slant, you’re supposed to crush the ends of their stems…I didn’t do any of that because I’ve never found any of those things to actually work.

Last night we went out for dinner with Brian and I learned that sometimes when a product says it has “natural vanilla flavour” it’s actually an extract from the anal glands of beavers. I don’t know if I believe this, to be honest, but that is what I learned.

Alma’s is closed on Mondays (boooooo) so we went to Steeler’s and I got chicken fingers because you either get chicken fingers or a clubhouse sandwich at Steeler’s since that’s their best menu items and I didn’t feel like navigating a clubhouse while wearing the particular lipstick I was wearing. It’s long-lasting “14 hour” lipstick but I find that all goes to hell when you introduce any type of oil, like mayo, and I didn’t bring the lipstick with me to reapply because honestly, I’d forgotten I was wearing a face full of makeup until I saw my reflection in the window when we were going into the restaurant. Normally just bumming around Elmvale, I either don’t wear makeup at all or very little, but yesterday afternoon I was taking pictures of myself for this post because I dyed my hair “Atomic Turquoise” and of course, y’all would wanna see it.

Anyway, dinner, Steeler’s. After dinner Brian asked if we wanted to walk around the block, so we did and he and Blake talked about how they were the “last men” for many lesbians and that dancing at the gay bar is the best kind of dancing and I don’t even know what else, but what I noticed is that our town has a lot of lilac bushes which are all obviously in bloom right now. Huge bushes that have to be 60 or 70 years old. Or older. You even see them when you’re driving around in the most random places and I think “why would someone plant a lilac bush there?” I don’t think they’re naturally occurring but I could be wrong.

After we walked around the block, we ended up back at Brian’s house, which is where we parked, and we came in briefly while he got some comics that we’d lent him. We met his cats, Veronica and Beatrice, who are tiny little squirrely kitties compared to Pixel, our fatass.

Then we came home and watched Behind the Candelabra. I give it a B-. Acting was good, story was weak. There were certain things in the movie where I think they relied on the assumption that you knew about Liberace to begin with. I didn’t. I didn’t know until this movie that Liberace died of AIDS complications. He died when I was 8 and it just wasn’t on my radar. In fact, until the movie last night, I didn’t even know Liberace was alive during my lifetime. Anyway, I only watched the movie to see if Michael Douglas and Matt Damon could pull off a Brokeback Mountain and they did, it was all very natural. Granted, I have no idea how Michael Douglas’ performance was compared to the real Liberace, I just mean that I totally bought that he and Matt Damon were lovers. The best part of the movie was Rob Lowe. I dunno wtf they did to him but he/his character was amazing.

Just to get it out of the way, here’s the pics from yesterday…

I measured yesterday and my new hair that started growing back after it all started falling out when I was sick is now 8 inches long.
Also that is a terrible picture of me but I’m posting it anyway because I don’t think there are any other pics of me and Wes except for maybe when he was a baby.
I should have adjusted my f.stop so he’d be in focus but I just grabbed him as he came home from school.

The above pics were obviously taken with the good camera.
These ones were just taken with my webcam:

My roots are a liiiiiiittle green tinged because I used the bleach that came with Madison’s Splat dye rather than the stuff I usually use and the Splat bleach doesn’t bleach it super white like Garnier does.
It leaves a bit of yellow.
I didn’t think it would matter that much but it did!

Oh well.

Yesterday I said all I was going to do was dye my hair and paint my toenails and if I succeeded at those two things then it was a productive day. Mission accomplished.

Tomorrow I have to go see my shrink. As per usual I don’t really know what to talk to her about. I’m going to ask her if Rick’s back yet. He went on leave “for personal reasons” in Feb. or March and they said he’d be gone 6 weeks so he should be back. I didn’t want to get started with another caseworker unless I knew he wasn’t coming back. Honestly now that we’re moving, I don’t even know if I want a caseworker at all because it just seems so pointless if I’m going to be starting from scratch in a new area after we move. Part of the reason I stopped driving was because I didn’t know any of the roads or where anything was and now I know a little bit so that’s why I tried driving again, but when we move it’s going to be the same thing as when we moved here, I won’t know the roads or where anything is.

Also I’m not so much sold on Beaverton anymore. I don’t think the grocery store there is 24 hours, which is a big thing for me, and my mom and John are complaining constantly that nothing’s open past 5pm, not even most of the restaurants. It does have a movie theatre but with only 1 screen and I think it only shows one movie at a time. About the only thing it has going for it is that my mom’s there, I like the school district and it has pretty houses. This is the one we’re looking at right now. Or hoping to look at. I think our real estate agent is getting sick of showing us houses when our house isn’t ready to sell yet. Blake touched up the paint in the kitchen this weekend and we’ve contacted another contractor about redoing the bathroom since the one who came out to see the bathroom doesn’t like to reply to e-mails and is pretty much a write-off.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of to write about and Wes is going to be home from school soon so I guess I’ll just stop writing now! BYE!

PS. Blake and Madison are $180 short of their fundraising goal for the Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay For Life! Click here to sponsor them!

“Agoraphobe” is not a word. I’m not really sure why but it’s not in the dictionary and I’ve never heard a mental health professional use it. Also did you know that it’s NOT pronounced a-gore-a-pho-bee-ah? It’s actually pronounced aggro-pho-bee-ah, go figure, but I’ve literally only heard my shrink and dictionary pronunciation guides say it that way. In movies and on TV they always say it THE WAY IT FUCKING MAKES SENSE TO.

Right now it’s 2:25pm. I don’t know what time it’ll be by the time you read this but right now it’s 2:25pm and I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to leave the house since about 11am. Initially the plan was to walk into town at noon to go to Alma’s Cafe and have fries and gravy for lunch. The walk would have taken me about 10 minutes. Maybe 12. Not 15. I have $22 in my bank account but I can’t use my bank card because Madison lost it so I’d have to put fries and gravy and a pop – about $6.50 with tip, I’m guessing (but I’m bad at guessing these things) – on Visa.

I’m trying to think of a good analogy for my thought process on days like today but I can’t really think of one. Maybe you can if I explain it well enough.

The idea always seems so simple.

1. Walk into town. (Issue: construction workers everywhere.)

2. Go to Alma’s where I’ve been 50 times. (Easy peasy.)

3. Order fries and gravy which I’ve had there probably half of those times. (Difficulty level depends on who’s there and who’s working.)

4. Eat. (Not an issue. Used to be an issue; I used to be scared that people were watching me eat and thinking that someone as fat as me shouldn’t be eating whatever it is I’m eating. Now there are no fucks to give. Hoes gotta eat too.[Bonus points if you get that reference.])

5. Pay. (Big issue. Who pays for fries and gravy with a credit card? It’s almost literally the cheapest thing on the menu. They’re going to think I can’t afford to eat. And the tip. What if I don’t put in enough? What if I put in too much? Less of a deal, obviously, but then what if they expect big tips all the time?)

6. Walk home. (Issue: construction workers everywhere.)

And see this right here is why Twitter is a much better medium for me sometimes because I get instant feedback. I get an instant cheering section. I get an instant influx of troubleshooting and ideas. Now that it’s 2:43pm I’ve already decided not to go but if I’d have tweeted about my issues all day instead of doing other things, I may have gone.

Now that it’s 2:44pm, I can’t go because it’ll take me 12 minutes to walk there, 5 minutes for the waitress to come to my table after I sit down, 12 minutes to get my food, 15 minutes (?) to eat, 6 minutes to pay. That’s 50 minutes which has me exiting Alma’s at 3:35pm. The kids get out of school at 3:20pm which means I’m going to be sharing the walk home with a bunch of obnoxious grade schoolers. I think Madison gets out of school at 3:35 and it would be awesome to be able to text her and tell her to walk home with me but she has a job after school walking her art teacher’s daughter from the elementary school to the high school and she often doesn’t get to leave until 4pm because the kid wants to play or be annoying or whatever.

Anyway, let’s get back to the beginning. I started my day at 4:30am. I forget what I did between 4:30am and 5am when I started work, besides check e-mail, but since today is Thursday I only had to work until 7am so as soon as my shift was done, I went back to bed. I woke up at 8:45-ish, looked at the clock, turned over and went back to sleep. At 9:20am I heard Madison in the hallway having a fit about something which was weird because Madison should have been at school but she was home sick yesterday so maybe she stayed home again today. No, she slept in. By like, an hour and a half. And she was freaking out on the phone to her father so he could call her in late since I was sleeping. What she was really freaking out over though was her french project had to be presented today and she slept through her allotted morning computer time so she couldn’t print out her story. Blake was still driving to work so he couldn’t edit her permissions so long story short, I woke up, edited her permissions so she could print out her story, which she did but she took so long STRAIGHTENING HER ALREADY STRAIGHT HAIR which is totally what you do when you’re almost 2 HOURS late for school, that she missed french class and will have to present another day. (This probably won’t affect her mark.)

So that was my morning. Madison was out of the house by 10am and walked to school in the rain.

The rain ended around 11am and that’s when I got this fries & gravy idea stuck in my head. I wish I knew where these ideas came from because they are really fucking stressful and I’ve already had a really really terrible mental health week.

So I have to psych myself up for leaving the house by myself (and other times with other people, but not as often and not to the same extent) so my gameplan was to wash my hair and give myself an hour to work up the courage to first get dressed and pack my bag and then walk past all those construction workers. I wasn’t completely committed to this plan though, which is why I did not take any clonazepam/klonopin. I probably should have because that’s what it’s there for. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I was afraid of wasting it by taking some and then not going, especially when I feel like the stuff is becoming less and less effective.

I went into the bathroom and peed and in doing so I spotted the empty box of hair dye that Madison left open on the counter. After peeing, I went to pick up the box to recycle it and that’s when I realized it wasn’t empty. Splat dye comes with bleach AND dye but Madison hated the bleaching process when we did it the first two times to lighten her hair enough to take the turquoise dye so much that she refuses to ever bleach her hair again. Since then  we’ve bought 4 boxes of Splat dye where the bleach wasn’t used. So I started looking at my roots in the mirror, made worse by the fact that I hadn’t washed my hair in a while, and decided that bleaching my hair would be a wonderful way to pass the time since I had to wash my hair either way and by not bleaching it today, I was only prolonging my awful combination of about 3/4 of an inch of ash blonde roots, then light pink that faded down the length of my hair to pure white (which actually looks really cool when the effect first starts but looks like hell after about a month) by at least 3 days.

I slapped on the bleach, set a timer and internetted while also going through the steps of leaving the house over and over in my head. I knew that once I was dressed and I was standing on the sidewalk I wouldn’t turn back, but it’s getting on the sidewalk that’s the main problem. Once I’m to the park a block from my house, my anxiety goes from 100% to a manageable 60% and that’s when I’d usually pop 2 Ativan under my tongue to bring it down further.

When my hair was ready to rinse, it was about 11:45am and I was starting to panic because my self-imposed deadline was only 15 minutes away and because my hair was wet (and I have a hair dryer, I just don’t use it for hair because my hair’s damaged enough), I wouldn’t be able to leave. But if I’m being completely honest, that was probably an excuse. The truth is that I bleached my hair to begin with to set up this situation. If I’d have just washed my hair, my hair would have been mostly dry by noon and I wouldn’t have had an excuse not to leave. I sabotage myself like this all the time and it’s like I have two people inside me, one who wants to go and one who doesn’t want to go and the asshole one is constantly being an asshole to ruin the other guy’s good time. It’s not like a CONSCIOUSLY thought “hey if I bleach my hair at 11am I won’t be able to go by noon”, this shit just happens.

So I was upset that I wouldn’t be able to leave by noon which causes more stress because now you’re a FAILURE.

I sat here and cried a little bit and then started the “it’s not too late to go” line of thinking (oh sure, NOW I take the clonazepam because writing this post is stressing me the fuck out). So I extended by deadline to 1pm. If I left by 1pm I would be home by 2:05pm, roughly. Hell, I could leave as late as 2:15pm and be well home by the time the kids even got out of school.

But that saboteur in my brain started working on me pretty hard, which you only really realize in hindsight, and I decided that my simple idea needed to be expanded upon. I decided that maybe I’d see if Brian wanted to go get fries & gravy too.

Maybe you already see why this was probably the worst thought I could have had today…

Brian is a new friend who I don’t really know all that well but I thought that since I didn’t get that sick feeling in my stomach when I was alone with him for 5 minutes, maybe I could be alone with him for 20 minutes. And get fries & gravy, which, is not without precedent. Last week Brian – who is a cartoonist – had a table set up at Jack’s On Queen, the comic book shop in town, and was drawing comics there so Blake and I went in to see how he was doing. It was the end of the day so I proposed that we go across the street to Alma’s for fries & gravy. So we did and we had a lovely time.

Anyway, I took my simple plan, best illustrated with a straight piece of string, and turned it into a cat’s cradle.

The plan now was more like this:

1. Contact Brian and see if he’d want to go. (Anxiety 110% because I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone but my own family to do anything with me ever. I don’t have friendS, plural, I have like, A friend (hi Alex! Okay Ronny & Deanna too) and I’ve never asked her to do anything with me without Blake. Also I’ve known her for 8 years so you can’t even compare her to Brian. I haven’t had a friend who lived in the same town as me since high school. Rejection wouldn’t have bothered me, then I just go back to my simple plan. But what happens if he can’t leave for an hour or whatever and that wrecks my whole window of opportunity? I can’t really be like “hey do you want to do this thing?” and then be like, “nope, sorry, can’t. Crazy.”)

2. If he wanted to go, walk to Brian’s house. (Issue: construction workers everywhere. Possible complication: what if he’s not ready?)

3. Talk about random stuff on the way to Alma’s. (But what? Is it rude to ask someone what meds they’re on? I mean that completely seriously.)

4. Go to Alma’s. (Easy.)

5. Order. (Harder in front of a stranger.)

6. Talk about random stuff while we wait for our food. (But what?)

7. Eat. (Now an issue because now I’m not only eating in front of a stranger but I have to also keep talking to them and what happens if he finishes first because I’m a slow eater? Or what happens if I finish first?)

8. Pay. (Still a big issue for all the same reasons, amplified by the fact that now there will be TWO people watching me use the debit machine/putting fries & gravy on Visa.)

9. Walk Brian home. (And what if we run out of things to talk about?)

10. Walk to my house. (Construction workers.)

I am SO raw. I am a very very raw person. What I mean by that is that my moods and emotions are always just below the surface and they are fierce in either direction. It is SO easy to make me cry. I’m convinced most of the time that even the people who claim to like me probably really hate me. Even my body is sensitive. I wear hoodies in the summer so there’s more insulation between me and the rest of the world because certain textures will make me want to crawl out of my skin. I avoid socks like the plague because I haaaaaaaaaaaate how they feel. (Although I have THE BEST pair of knit socks an LJ friend made me a few years ago that I love in the winter.)

Anyway, I’m losing focus here because Wes just came home…I just feel like I need to take so many classes to learn how to do simple things. No one laughs when you’ve been in an accident and need physical therapy to learn how to walk again but people sure think you’re weak and pathetic if you have to go to therapy to learn how to function in society.

I basically tortured myself all day and now I feel like an absolute failure. I suppose I could try again tomorrow. And at least this time I’d be starting with clean hair. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Last post for today so before I go any further….

Blake and Madison are raising funds for the Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay For Life, along with their friend Charissa and they could sure use some donations, or, if you happen to work at Telus Barrie, they could also use some team members. The relay is on June 7th from 7pm-7am and someone from the team has to keep moving the entire time, which could be pretty difficult with only 3 team members. My mom and her friend are thinking of joining the team. ANyway, you can donate here and it would be greatly appreciated!

The rest of this post is about Madison’s pepper garden. Madison is obsessed with peppers. Like bell peppers. She thinks they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. So in March, she decided to spend some of her allowance on pepper seeds and she started some plants on the window sill. Since this last weekend was May Two-Four, when it’s traditionally safe to plant, Madison put her seedlings in the ground and I took pictures. Nothing spectacular. I did get a couple of cute pictures of Hoover though.