- I’m annoyed at my mom and she knows it.

- Blake’s having issues with his mom and I don’t even know what’s going on now.

- I’ve been playing a lot of Warcraft. New guilds are exciting. I’m playing a new faction, more or less, so a lot of the game is still new to me. I only played Horde a few times and always with a clone of the same character. Belf/shadow priest/Endometria. At least 3 times. But only to like, level 2 tops 2 times and late 30′s once. I made a million toons that I got to 10 or 15 when I played Warcraft before, but they were Alliance and I think Alliance is a lot easier, at least to get around. I feel completely lost, Horde-side. We’re playing on a PvP server, which, to the people reading this who don’t play WoW, means “player vs player” and most people, including me, find it harder to level a toon to the 70′s or 80′s, especially if you rely on soloing (playing alone) for most of your play time because there are people who are 10 million times more skilled than your average world monster or creature you have to kill, trying to gank your ass and camp it. Camping it means that they wait for you to resurrect yourself so they can do it again…and again….and again.

Word from my high level guildmates who are starting to have to go in the “flagged” areas to do their questing, this server appears to be more Alliance than Horde, meaning we’re outnumbered, which sucks and intimidates me. I don’t know if our server name is an Alliance name or a Horde name, but last time Blake & I  played on a PvE server (except for The Cotton Pwnies days) with an Alliance name and Alliance definitely outnumbered the Horde the whole time. Soooo, I fear that maybe we picked an Alliance named server to play Horde on and that there are enough geeks who know the difference and choose their factions accordingly and our PvP time is going to be a losing battle. I figure though, regardless of that, we’re getting to the point where everyone’s really close to 20 (the level you more or less have to quest in flagged areas)  and if we group quest, we’ll all have a better survival rate and get picked on less frequently.

We use a program called Ventrillo that allows us to speak to our guildmates (who are logged in) using a headset, which will also help (if people start using it, which I’m bad for too because I just really don’t like talking, so I just listen and type instead).

Last night we ran our first guild instance/dungeon, which took longer than it should have, but for the first time any of us had ever played together, I think we did a pretty good job. Some of our guildmates have been doing random PUG (pick up group) instances without us, to get gear I guess, but a few of us (Stephy/hunter, her husband K (holy priest – so heals), Warcorp (tankadin), me (face melter) & Blake (troll shaman, mon) waited to do it together and I think that’s awesome. I can’t wait to do harder stuff with these guys, like instances that take a whole Saturday and bosses that actually need strategy and MORE DOTS to take down. :oD K did a really good job of telling us where to go so we didn’t get lost. (Which I found impressive because I didn’t know where the hell we were half the time because I’d only even done Wailing Caverns like, once, and we didn’t finish it.)

I kinda think it’s funny that we’re playing in a Camwhores guild. Some companies have their softball teams, we have our WoW guild!

- I have the shits and have been up since 6am. This means I’m probably going to sleep most of the day since I don’t think we went to bed until about 12:45am. Oops.

- Tonight is my first yoga class and I’m terrified. Blake doesn’t even know how long the class is and he says that it’s Hatha yoga, whatever that means. Probably the only 3 things I’m going to accomplish today is looking up what that means, having a shower and sleeping. Especially since I believe it’s supposed to rain all day, or at least threatening to. The rest of the time will be spent being neurotic, or more to the point, sitting on WoW just chatting with people while I wait for an herb supplier in Silvermoon City spawn herbs that I can then sell to other people on the Auction House for a ridiculous amount of gold. (The economy on this server is absolutely fucked.)

- My friends in Oregon, Robert and Robin Peate, are like, having a baby as I type this, at home! I just think that’s so exciting and while I know updating LJ or Facebook isn’t or shouldn’t be high on the priority list during this time, I can’t help but refresh anyway.

- I have not touched a paintbrush in at least a week. Nothing is finished. Nothing is close to finished except for my sign, and I don’t care. Can’t say when I’ll pick up a paintbrush again. Maybe when we have good movies to watch while I paint. Maybe not until the novelty of WoW wears off. Really, I should be painting and then while things dry play WoW, but I’m still working on my productivity management system.

- My front garden has bachelor’s buttons galore but no cosmos yet and the “new” part at the bottom of the garden is taking it’s sweet time growing in. Veggie garden is leaving me unimpressed. My tomato plants are finally thriving and next weekend we have to tie the plants to the cages. My peppers are piddly in comparison and I’m worried we’re not going to get a very big yield there. Lettuce is starting to poke its head up and I’m thinking we may have planted the seeds too deep. Maybe I worry too much. None of the herbs are showing life but the garden’s full of weeds and I don’t know what’s good plant from bad so until things start growing and looking like the pictures on the seed packs, I’m not sending the kids out to weed. The beans are growing like crazy, as are the peas, which needed a stake/string trellis to grow up like, last weekend but obviously we had to do other things. The carrots are showing no signs of life. Neither are the onions.

Anyway, when there’s anything interesting to take pictures of, I’ll do so. Right now both gardens are pretty unimpressive, but I’m learning a lot just by watching, like plant lettuce shallowly and maybe skip the peppers next year.

- Our neighbour to the right, who owns the bar in town, has a for sale sign on his front lawn. So does Wayne & Judy’s old house to the left of us. And the empty lot next to that house has a for sale sign too. That only leaves us and the old lady on the corner in our little section of the road who aren’t for sale. I’m hoping a developer or someone wants all that space and offers us crazy money for our house so we can move. Hey, it could happen!

- I’ve been severely neglecting Twitter.

- I’ve been reading Eat, Pray, Love and am ashamed to report that I’m actually liking it so far. I didn’t want to like it, being basically an “Oprah book”, but I can’t help it, I do. I read the Oprah Biography by Kitty Kelley and I’ll probably never be able to see Oprah the same way again. That was a good read too.

- I was supposed to do a show on Camwhores last night but my vagina started bleeding on Sunday night so that kinda put a damper on things and I had to cancel. I’m still bleeding and just not really in the mood to be on cam, so the show’s been put off indefinitely. I was supposed to bleed all month, which is traditionally what happens, but this month I only bled for 3 days and then a bit of light light light spotting sporadically until yesterday. I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I take my 7 day break from the pill, which will be in 3 days. Anyway, I plan on hanging out on Camwhores for a bit after I post this, if anyone else is around. I won’t be updating my cam, but I’ll sit & chat for a bit.

And I guess that’s really all I have to say at the moment. Things are busy and hectic and complicated but we’re having fun being nerds at the same time and things should calm down once the kids are out of school for the summer.

And Blake took a picture of me planting beans.

There are two rows of beans because they are “royal burgundy” beans, which are purple when raw but turn green when you cook them. They’re HYPERCOLOUR beans!

There’s a joke about Blake and a hoe here but I’m too tired to be that witty at the moment.

I may attempt homemade pesto…it’s just basil, pine nuts & garlic, right?

Two rows of leaf lettuce, the colour of which is one of my favourites. I’ll take pics when it starts growing.
(Obviously.)

Green onions for stir-fry. :o)

Oregano for spaghetti sauce.

Parsley to make me fart.

Lots & lots of sugar snap peas because Madison and I love them. We have to wait until next paycheque to buy some lattice for them to climb on. Theoretically the peas will be the first thing ready (in July).

Carrots were also planted but the picture of their headstone was blurry because I took it upside down as not to step on any of our rows.

Blake & I planted all the seeds while the kids played with toads and the dogs lounged under a tree. The last time all 4 (well, 6?) of us were in our backyard together was the summer before Wayne & Judy moved in. It felt GOOD being out there. In PEACE.

My arms are soooooo sore from mixing all that dirt yesterday and now I’m all sleepy from being out in the sun.
I need to find a non-greasy sunscreen for my face. Leah sent me one once that I really liked but it expired and I threw it out and now I forget what it was. :o/

When we came in, I had a shower so I’m all squeaky clean.

I just finished making a huuuuuge salad with romaine lettuce, Campari tomatoes, English cucumbers, sweet yellow, orange and red peppers, snow peas, baby carrots and little cubes of mozzarella cheese. I’m having shishkabobs as my main dinner and Blake & the kids are having BBQ’d chicken.

So we’re gonna eat until we feel like exploding, while watching the pre-LOST finale show, watch the finale and then get our sleepy asses into bed under nice clean sheets.

Today has been a good day.
:o)

Regardless, this weekend my mom & John came up to give us a badly needed new mattress (ours had springs sticking out of it) and a new couch & chair which can only be described as “interesting”. The couch is a fold-out bed, so between Madison’s trundle bed, the futon in my office and now this fold-out bed, we’re good to party whenever the need arises. Here are the couch & chair:

See? Interesting. Our living room has absolutely no colour scheme or decor of any kind so these pieces fit right in. Also all we had in there before was a loveseat & chair that were both falling apart, so now we have more seating.

Last night Blake and I went to Michael’s to buy art supplies. We were supposed to hit Curry’s too, but they (stupidly) closed at 6pm and Blake didn’t get out of work in time for us to go. But whatever, we went to Michael’s where I bought a whole whack of what I call “sticky bindi jewels” because that’s mostly what I use them for (also necklaces) because they were on sale, 2 jars of varnish because I was down to my last jar, 3 bottles of white pearl paint, the set of 12 glitter flakes that I wanted (decided to forgo the other sets of glitter because when I really looked at them, I just didn’t like them), 2 bottles of glitter (blue sapphire and purple sapphire) and a whole bunch of scrapbook paper that was on clearance. I got several pink papers, determined to find one that doesn’t turn orange when I apply varnish because nothing I make leaves this house without at least 2 coats of varnish.

Then today during his lunch, Blake’s going to go to Curry’s and get me 9 canvases (12 x 12), acrylic glazing liquid and silver & gold pens, which I use for signing my work.

After all’s said & done, I will have completely spent all the money I made from the sale of “Love Fairy” the other day. I didn’t even get myself Starbucks this time, I just needed art supplies.

I think my next project is going to be a turquoise version of “Love Fairy”, using the tinsel glitter I have in that colour. I should be working on my “Go Bananas” cheerleader, which has been in my bedroom ready to go for months, but I still haven’t totally figured out how I’m going to do her so I think the idea needs to stew a little bit more before I go there.

I was going to buy a few art supplies and buy the dress that I wanted but when I went to order it, it said it was currently unavailable so I bought art supplies instead but now I see it IS available and now I have no money. Godammit! Hopefully I’ll sell another painting soon so I can order it and have it in time for The Square Foot show, which I believe is in July. (Edit: I just called Blake and he told me to order it and I can pay him back when I sell my next painting. Hopefully that won’t be too long because I hate owing money to anyone, especially Blake.)

And I guess the only other news I have to report is that my neighbours, Wayne & Judy, will be moving this weekend. What sucks is that we’re going to be outside using the sod cutter to get my front garden in shape for seeding the weekend after and it’s going to be awkward watching them move their stuff out. I plan on giving them a card wishing them happiness in their new home. Blake says that’ll just piss them off more, but y’know what? I can’t control what other people do, I can only control what I do and that’s what I want to do.

So that’s that.

I hope everyone reading this is having a wonderful day and I’m sure I’ll post again soon!

Two of the tips were to eat locally grown foods and to buy produce when it’s in season. So the first thing I wondered was, how in the hell am I supposed to know what’s locally grown and what’s in season? I mean, I live in Ontario, Canada, what could possibly be “in season” in the dead of February when there’s 4 feet of snow on the ground? And another thing is that, just as an example, the only grocery store in our town, the entire time I’ve lived here, has never once had locally grown strawberries in July, when they’re in season, despite the fact that we live within 3 km of several strawberry farms. Every strawberry I’ve ever seen in that store has come from California, same with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries.

Anyway, we have these really annoying commercials on TV in the summer about Ontario farming with this really horrible jingle that goes, “Good things gro-o-ow, in Ontariooo!” and as soon as the thoughts above entered my head, I thought “durrrr” and Googled “Foodland Ontario”, which is like, the government “brand” for produce in this province and lo & behold, on their website is a chart as to which produce is in season during which months. So I bookmarked that, right next to my bookmark for the grocery store flyer and this family is going to make a concerted effort to only buy produce when it’s in season. If I want a BLT in February? Well that’s just too damn bad, I have to wait until March. Since it’s all grown in-province, that’s killing two birds with one stone.

Another tip from the movie is to grow your own vegetables, which as I’ve mentioned, we’ll be doing for the first time this summer. I bought enough beans, for example, that my intention is to have 4 rows total, 1 for us to eat during the summer and 3 for freezing. That won’t do us for the whole winter, but that’s just how much land I have to work with and considering that we’re doing the garden this year for financial reasons every little bit helps.

As for meat…well, we’re still going to have to rely on the grocery store for that because the organic food store in town is just too cost prohibitive. I already don’t eat chicken, though the rest of the family does and the only time I eat ground beef is in spaghetti sauce, which I’m going to stop doing, even though the rest of the family uses it to make hamburgers out of. Our dinners are still mostly meat-based, but gradually our meat portions have been decreasing and our veggie portions have been increasing, so that’s good, and we also have at least one meatless dinner per week.

We’re not gonna save the world and we’re not exactly models of nutrition, but I know we’re doing better than most of the people we know in that we’re actually doing something. Compared to say, 5 years ago, we’ve gotten a lot better as we’ve learned to do better and we’ll continue to do better.

And that’s really all I have to say about food today.

Sometime this week I’ll start taking pics of my grow-op and make my first official Keep Off The Lawn post. Right now on the living room windowsill I have cherry tomatoes, bobcat tomatoes, green peppers and purple peppers starting in beer cups. Some of them are getting too big for their Saran Wrap hats already while others haven’t even sprouted, so tonight when I replace their hats with clear plastic cups, I’m going to reseed the ones that haven’t sprouted yet because I have a feeling they’re not going to. Also, I noticed today that my daffodils are up and there are tons of little crocuses and tulips out front that I have to take pictures of before they get decimated in 2 weeks by the sod cutter. Somehow grass has overtaken about half of the front garden so next paycheque we’ll be renting the sod cutter to get rid of it so I can plant my wildflower seeds in May.

Next week is Gogol Bordello which means that also next week I’m going to be quitting smoking…again. It’s like my dad says, you just gotta keep quitting. When you start up again, if you start up again, you just have to quit again because every time you quit, that’s at least a few months worth of smokes that you won’t be smoking. I’m hoping that this time it’ll be permanent and Blake & I have decided on some things to make it permanent, namely, we’re not going to become friends with anyone who smokes until we’re both several years in the clear as far as being nonsmokers. Since we’re not friends with Wayne & Judy anymore and since they’re moving May 1st (*happydance*) and since none of our current friends smoke, there will be no temptation for me to smoke and no opportunity. As I know I mentioned when I quit last time, Wayne & Judy would practically put cigarettes in my mouth and light them for me (Blake too) and it was impossible to say no because they just won’t take “no” for an answer and they don’t respect the fact that you’ve either quit or are trying to quit. Instead, they would sit there and every 5 minutes say, “are you suuuuuure you don’t want a smoke? The pack’s right there, just help yourself,” or Wayne would toss you a smoke and say, “here just smoke it, I know you want to” and things like that. Then if you still found the willpower to say no, Wayne would sit there and basically tell you why you’re an idiot for quitting, how it won’t make a difference and how if you die of cancer, that’s just what God has in store for you, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it so you might as well enjoy your smokes while you wait.

So with Wayne & Judy out of the picture (our other neighbour doesn’t smoke), there will be no pressure and no opportunity to smoke unless I suddenly develop the courage to walk to the store myself and go get a pack, which would never happen. The fact is, unlike other attempts to quit, I actually want to quit, it’s my decision, not a decision being made for me. And I’d love to say that it’s for health reasons and while that’s partly it (I’ve developed asthma and it would be idiotic to ask the doctor for Ventolin rather than just quitting), it’s mostly financial. As a condition of me starting to smoke again last summer, I had to start paying for them myself and in the beginning that was fine because I was only smoking 2 packs a week. Since then it’s escalated to almost a pack a day and I just don’t make that much money and more to the point, the bit of money that I do make, I don’t want to waste all of it on basically nothing, not when I’m desperately in need of canvases and I’m quickly depleting my supply of the more expensive art supplies like gel medium, Weathered Wood and acrylic glazing liquid which are each about $12-15 a bottle and therefore (to me) expensive to replace. A pack of 3 canvases is about $25, also, again to me, expensive to replenish and I just started working on my last one yesterday.

So, it’s time to quit. Hopefully for good. I’ve decided to do it the day after Gogol Bordello because Gogol Bordello has me stressed out of my mind and I’m going to be around smokers that night, plus my mom that afternoon. Before I go to bed Tuesday night, I’ll be breaking and flushing all of the cigarettes I have left and that’ll be it. I’m not worried about it being hard, it’s not like I haven’t done this before, I know the first 3 days are going to be monstrous, but after that it just gets easier and I’m going to stock up on Skittles and Starbursts beforehand so I have something to occupy my mouth throughout the first week. (Insert lame and obvious oral sex joke here.)

So that’s that.

This weekend I was ridiculously productive. On Friday I finished “Ooh La La“, as I posted about, and Saturday & Sunday I worked on what I’m calling my “silly painting” for right now…because it’s a silly idea and I don’t even know why I’m doing it…and started a 3rd which is going to use the pink tinsel glitter I posted about the other day and which is going to have a fairy on it, although that’s as far as I’ve worked it through.

Something I have to say though, is that I am absolutely in love with these little storage cups I bought from Stockade when I bought paint last month. They’re the same kind of plastic cups you get coleslaw in when you get takeout, look:

I custom mix a lot of my paint colours and all of my glitter mixes and when I do so, I often have excess paint leftover that I’ve never really found anywhere to put. I tried plastic pill bottles because god knows I have a million of them, but they’re not air tight so the paint would just eventually dry out. Prior to that, I was just letting the paint go to waste, but with these little containers, I can store the it and use it for other things. In the picture, the top container is full of black glitter mixed with water and acrylic glazing liquid, the pink ones are metallic pink that I mixed this weekend, the blue is pearlized turquoise that I used for “Ooh La La”‘s eyeshadow and the purple is purple glitter mixed with acrylic glazing liquid to make sort of a paste that I used as eyeshadow on the “silly painting” I’m working on now. It doesn’t look like it in the picture, but the two pinks are actually two different colours, one’s a lot lighter than the other. One will be used for splatters while the other one will be used for hair. I should have put a coin in the picture so you could see how big the containers are. Each one holds about 3/4 of an ounce of liquid.

Anyway, they’re awesome, although a bit expensive for what they are, and you can get them here. If anyone knows where to get these cheaper and in bigger quantities, please let me know. I’m assuming you can find them on restaurant wholesale sites but they probably have minimum orders and really all I want is these cups.

Well, Blake’s going to be home soon, my paint is now dry, so I’m going to get back to working on these paintings before dinner. I hope everyone has had a good Monday and I’m sure I’ll blabber at you some more tomorrow.

Blake is currently at my mom’s boyfriend’s cottage dropping the kids off for March Break and I’m pretty much sitting here waiting for him to come home because I want to watch movies and work on my ACEOs, but we usually watch movies together because…well, because we only watch movies in my office and I’m always in my office and if I’m not watching the TV, I don’t like it on while I’m doing other stuff, so if I watch a movie without Blake, there’s a good chance he’ll never see it unless I liked it enough to watch it twice. (Which is often the case, I love movies, but not always.)

Right now we have Pandorum and The Hurt Locker to watch, plus Friday night’s Caprica, which I can’t watch without him. The Hurt Locker I probably could because it’s a war movie and he doesn’t like those, but I don’t know when he’ll be home and I think it’s too late to start a movie right now because he’d walk in partway through and not be able to pick up what’s going on, necessarily.

SO COMPLICATED, I know.

So instead of doing what I want to be doing, I’m writing a blog post about basically nothing…or at least that’s how I’m going into it.

I was just thinking though, because Blake’s with my mom and John right now, about my mom and John getting married. I have absolutely no idea how their relationship is (which is weird because historically, I would), so I don’t even know if marriage would be a possibility, but for a moment there I had a flash of a summer wedding and in it, I was sitting in a seat in the middle of “the bride’s side”, away from the rest of my family, and I was happy. It’s lame, I know, but I like John and I like his son Chris and I’m really rooting for him and my mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I just like who she is and who she’s become since she’s been with him. And I think she’s been good for him too, from what I understand. He makes art now, really really beautiful art, and from what I’ve been told, that was my mom’s influence. And the best part of him making art is that they sell their art together. For the first time in like EVER, my mom finally has an honest to god partner in crime and I think that’s fucking awesome. With my step-dad and Keith, I could never envision my mother growing old with either of them, and my bio-dad was obviously a bust, but with John I can totally see it and the whole idea of it just makes me so happy I could cry. In fact, I kind of am.

I don’t really talk to my mom that much anymore, not like we used to (we used to talk on the phone for several hours a day, every day), but I wonder about her moods when she’s with John. My mother’s kind of infamous for being self-deprecating and moody and kind of a bitch (I come by it honestly…) and all my life she’s been prone to bouts of intense, crippling depression, but now, at least on the surface, that seems to be less of a problem now that she’s with John.

I’m kind of morbid though. I often worry about my mother dying of cancer, both because it’s in my family but also because she’s been smoking for a bazillion years and her own father died of esophageal (holy crap, I spelled that right on the first try!) cancer due to smoking. Sometimes when I’m just sitting here by myself, I think about taking John aside one day and asking him, “are you going to look after her when she finds out she has cancer?” because I think if the answer to that is no, he needs to go. But I think the answer would be “yes”. He so obviously loves the shit out of my mother that I really do think that, whether they get married or not (since my mother has often said she has no desire to get married again), this is a “forever thing”.

And that makes me happy.

So I’ll stop being sappy about my mother now…I’m sure it’s revolting. It’s just hard to explain how our relationship is. Whether we talk every day or not, whether she’s with someone or not, whether I’m living with her or not, until I got married myself, it’s always felt like my mom & I against the world to some degree or another and it feels good to detach in a positive way, with positive results for both of us. Like I said, it’s hard to explain.

In other news, I guess I should talk publicly about something else that’s happening in my life. Wayne & Judy, our neighbours, and Blake & I, are no longer friends. Due to reasons that I don’t believe should be public knowledge, I started trying to detach myself from them as sort of a New Year’s resolution because I just couldn’t abide by some of the things they were doing anymore and because the relationship was becoming more and more parasitic.

At the end of February, I got fed up with some of the stuff that was happening next door and I unloaded some of it in a protected, friends only post on Live Journal. Unfortunately I came to find that there is at least one person on my Live Journal friends list who doesn’t like me very much and who decided to find Judy’s daughter Ashley on my Facebook friends list (which was public, unbeknownst to me) and paste my post into a message to her. Wayne & Judy happened to be dropping Ashley off in Toronto when this message was sent and Ashley printed them off a copy.

That night Judy came to my house, wouldn’t listen to a word I said and made it quite clear that we were no longer friends. Honestly, I don’t blame her for that, I probably would have felt the same way. She & Wayne have every right to be mad at me for saying some of the things I said, especially when I called them stupid and that I wished they would move, which is what Judy mostly seemed to be upset by.

I took precautions to make sure I didn’t hurt anyone with my post and someone circumvented that in a malicious way that hurt not me, not Blake – because realistically we were trying to detach from Wayne & Judy anyway – but 4 people who were strangers to them and didn’t deserve that: Wayne, Judy, Ashley and inadvertently Judy’s 9 year old daughter Courtney as well.

Yes, I take partial blame for the incident because I was the one who wrote the words and I was the one who added this malicious person whose identity I don’t know to my Live Journal friends list because I used to have a policy where if someone added me, I’d just add them back and that has resulted in a rather large friends list, but one I thought I could trust considering that most of the people who are on it have been on it for several years. It’s been a very rare occurrence over the last several years that I would add anyone new, unless they were vouched for by someone I trust.

Regardless, I put the bulk of the blame on the person who sent Ashley the post because what I did was venting to my friends, which everyone on planet Earth does, whereas what the person did who sent Ashley the post was flat out trying to be malicious toward me, but they ultimately ended up being malicious to 4 people they don’t know from Adam. I went out of my way to try not to hurt anyone, and this person went out of their way to try and hurt someone, not even bothering to think about collateral damage. (Or maybe they did, in which case they’re an even bigger douchebag.)

Since Judy would only let me look at the printout for a few seconds, I’m not even sure if what they saw was what I actually wrote. For all I know, this malicious person threw in a few extra jabs or put other words in my mouth. Since I printed out the post myself so Madison could read it and know what was going on, I know it’s 3 pages long (in Word) and what Judy had in her hand was also 3 pages long. However, Judy’s copy had more text on the 3rd page than I had in the copy I printed out, so I’m really wondering if the person who did this didn’t add some of their own flavour to it. Not being friends with Wayne & Judy anymore, I’ll never know. What I do know, however, is that the person who did this did not include the comments on the post, which would have been the proper, fair thing to do. Had they have done that, Wayne, Judy & Ashley would have seen that there were some damning comments that I disagreed with and thus, didn’t reply to. The only ones I replied to were the ones that concerned a fairly minor matter pertaining to Wayne & Judy and something they were already aware of my opinion on.

As with everything I write, I stand by my words, I don’t regret writing them and I don’t feel guilty that Wayne & Judy read them because I didn’t do anything wrong, the person who sent my post to Ashley did, and I certainly didn’t misrepresent them in any way. If anything, I held back in that post and I’ve been holding back in regards to them for a very long time.

What I do regret is my past policy of being trusting enough to add just about anyone to my Live Journal friends list and that is a mistake I won’t be repeating again. There’s no way to know who the person is who betrayed my trust and if I cut my friends list, chances are I wouldn’t remove the person who did this and that would make for one smug hater, so that’s not what I’m going to do. In fact, I’m not going to do anything but continue to be me and do what I do  and I’ve made my Facebook friends list not public. I suggest everyone else do the same, because really, why should strangers even have access to that list of people anyway? To change yours, go to “Account” on the top right of your Facebook page and play with the privacy settings. You may find that a lot of them, due to Facebook changing some things a few months ago, are not how you had them set originally and you may want to rectify that. Another way to make your Facebook friends list not public is by going to your profile and look at where your friends are displayed. There is a pencil icon there and if you click it, there’s the option to uncheck the part that says “show friends list to everyone” and if you uncheck that, your friends list will be visible only to those already on your friends list.

So that’s currently what’s happening in my life right now, or at least one of the bigger things. It’s unfortunate that Wayne & Judy are in the process of losing their house because their mortgager is selling it out from under them (which I guess can happen when your mortgage is held by a person rather than a bank, depending on your contract – which they broke anyway, but that’s a whole other thing) but I’m glad that they’ll be moving soon, not because of what’s happened between us, but because as I said in the beginning, our relationship with them was becoming more and more parasitic and we were trying to detach from them before all of this blew up anyway.

Truthfully, I think their mortgager is going to have a hard time making any kind of profit on that house as it’s badly in need of some expensive work, like the kitchen needs to be redone pretty much from scratch, but he seems pretty committed to selling so who knows what’s going to happen. Blake & I’s theory is that the mortgager was waiting until the spring to evict Wayne & Judy because we think it might be illegal to evict someone in the winter.  Either way, we’re hoping it happens sooner rather than later because it’s going to make for a really uncomfortable spring & summer when they’re on their deck drinking beer every spare second they have and their deck overlooks both our front yard and back yard, giving us absolutely zero privacy from these people.

Even prior to us becoming friends, I was scared to do anything in my garden in case they started talking to me (which happened constantly) and now I’m back at square one in that regard, unless the mortgager evicts soon.

What else? Well, there’s one thing in the works that I’m not going to write about because apparently there are people out there who would like to sabotage my life, but if/when it happens, you’ll know about it.

I guess the only other news is that last week or the week before, I ordered the seeds for the vegetable garden Blake and I decided we were going to do this year. This house came with a vegetable garden already, which is about 12-14 feet wide by about 4 & a half, maybe 5 feet long. We’d talked about doing veggies before but ultimately it came down to money, time and energy that we didn’t have so we couldn’t do it. The garden, since it’s been unused for the past 5 years, is completely full of weeds and will need at least a day’s worth of digging to become usable and Blake’s committed to helping me do this, so I ordered the seeds and when they come, a lot of them will be started indoors because apparently some of them need to be.

I don’t know anything about growing vegetables or even if we have enough room for everything I ordered, but I figured I’d just approach this like I approached the front yard garden: trial & error. Here’s what I ordered:

Royal Burgundy Beans (2 packets of seeds)
These beans are cool because they’re purple when they’re raw, but they turn green when they’re cooked. They also grow in a bush rather than a vine, so I won’t need to stake them.

Napoli Carrots (1 packet of seeds)
I just picked these ones because they sounded the yummiest when I was looking through the Vesey’s catalogue. I only got one packet of seeds because each packet had something like 1000 seeds or something and I figured 1000 seeds would mean 1000 carrots and we don’t need that many!

Thunder Cucumbers (1 packet of seeds)
Again, I just picked these ones because of the write-up about them in the catalogue. Apparently they’re resistant to most of the things cucumbers have problems with, so that’s mostly why I chose them, but I also chose them because they looked the most like the cucumbers I buy in the store. I’m worried that we won’t have room for these because I’ve seen how cucumbers grow and it seems like they need a lot of room, but I figured I could plant them along the top of the garden and let them grow out onto the 2 feet of grass between the garden and the house and that we could just lift the vines if Blake needed to mow the lawn there.

Simpson Elite Lettuce (2 packets)
We at a lot of salads in the summer and I’ve grown this before, in the front garden. It’s a leaf lettuce and if you want a salad, you just go out to the garden, cut off as much as you need and you’re good to go!

Parade Green Onions (1 packet)
We use green onions a lot, from stir fry to garlic pasta to spaghetti sauce, so I figured I’d try growing them.

Super Sugar Snap Peas (1 seed packet)
These are Madison and I’s favourite but they’re so expensive to get from the grocery store. Growing your own means that they’ll be ready to eat in July and from what I remember about peas, they don’t grow continuously throughout the season, so at least we’ll have all the peas we can eat in July! Madison and I just eat them, pod & all, but they can also be thrown in stir fry too if we get sick of eating them. I think these will need to be staked.

Fat & Sassy Peppers (1 seed packet)
These are just red & green sweet peppers and will need to be started indoors. As long as I cut them up for them, the kids love eating peppers raw and Blake likes to put them in salad, so I figured they would be worth the trouble. (I hate peppers with a passion.) I think these will need to be staked too.

Purple Star Peppers (1 seed packet)
Just sweet peppers that happen to be purple. I thought the kids would get a kick out of them so I figured we’d do half a row of the normal ones above and half a row of these ones. These’ll need to be started indoors as soon as the seeds arrive and will need to be staked as well. (Where do you even buy stakes? The garden centre at Wal*Mart should have those, right?)

Bobcat Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I picked these because their write up and picture in the catalogue sounded the yummiest. I debated a lot on whether or not to start tomatoes from seed or just to buy plants from the garden centre, but in the end seeds won out because they’re cheaper and I can easily just start them indoors and make my own plants that’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. These will have to be staked too, I’m pretty sure.

Sugary Cherry Tomatoes (1 seed packet)
I love cherry tomatoes in salads, they’re like, my favourite part (well, that and the cheese chunks I throw in salads), so we had to grow these. Again, I could have gotten plants from the garden centre, but seeds were cheaper than plants would be and I have enough room to start the peppers and tomatoes this month so they’ll be ready for planting at the end of May. I’m pretty sure these ones will have to be staked too, once they get big enough, although I grew similar tomatoes last year in pots on my porch and didn’t stake them, so I’m not sure. The ones I grew last year were on a vine, I don’t know how these ones grow.

Luckily, Veseys sends you a growing guide when you order veggie seeds from them and that’ll tell me everything I need to know about all of this stuff. Again, I’m a bit worried about space, but I think with proper planning we should be okay and if all else fails, I can just grow the tomatoes in containers on the porch as long as I fertilize them well. I’ll have to invest in some containers though, as what I have will be too small, except for one pot.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the veggie garden this year. I love the idea of growing your own food and while we spent $50 on seeds, I know we’ll end up saving a lot of money in the long run from not buying produce at the grocery store.

Annnnnd I was going to start writing about my front yard garden but y’know what? This is really really long and I’ll do that when the seeds for THAT get here.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

The show also told the story of another woman from New York who drove drunk with seven 11-year-old girls in the car. She lost control of the car, rolling it several times, critically injuring two of the girls and killing another (the other girls came out of it with minor injuries).

Oprah’s point was that apparently in the US, women driving drunk has risen 30% since 1998, although she offered no real reason as to why.

One of the guests was a woman who was celebrating her two year sobriety after hiding her alcoholism from her husband for well over a year.

The whole episode had my mind spinning as alcoholism is something I’m very sensitive to having grown up with alcoholics and then somehow befriending a few in my adult life. I’ve known and do know the kind that hides it, the kind that tries to hide it and fails and the kind that just doesn’t give a fuck.

My grampa Wes was an alcoholic. He wasn’t technically my grampa, but in my life, he took the place of one. He lived on a farm next door to my grama, where I lived when I was a little kid and where I visited almost every weekend , every PA day, the Xmas holidays and every March Break for the bulk of my childhood. Since she was busy running her store most of the time I either spent my days with my great grama who lived upstairs or at Wes’ house playing with the animals.

The only person it was a secret to that Wes was an alcoholic was me. For the most part I grew up thinking he was just really really fun. I mean, he let me take new kittens and puppies by the box full to my grama’s with me to play with for the day, or let me spend the day in the barn playing with the bunnies or the baby chicks. Or sometimes we’d go to town or go to the corner store, buy junk food and watch “wrasslin’” for the afternoon. It wouldn’t be until I was about 10 or 11 that I understood what an alcoholic was or that he was one.

Oh I knew he drank, but I never thought drinking was a problem. I just thought it was something that adults did, although to be perfectly honest I wasn’t really sure why.

I can’t remember for sure if I was 11 or 12, but Saturday in the summer, Wes and I went to the Stouffville Sales Barns where he purchased a few flats of chicks. (On Saturdays you could go there and farmers would buy and sell animals. You still can.) He put them in the back of his pick-up truck and on our way out of town, he stopped in at what my grama called “the In & Out Store”, which was her name for the liquor store and bought…y’know, to this day I’m not even sure what he drank. Probably whiskey or rye, because I recall it being amber-coloured. Anyway, in Ontario there’s the LCBO, which is the liquor store and The Beer Store, both government run and the only place you can buy alcohol. Wes was a regular at the liquor store and I’d even been with him when he was refused service, so that means I was definitely with him on more than one occasion where he was already drunk when he walked through their doors because that’s why they refuse service (although I didn’t know that at the time). And yes, we had to drive to get there.

Anyway, on this Saturday he bought 3 or 4 flats of chicks and as I said, he put them in the back of his pickup truck, he stopped off at the liquor store and then we went back to his house. When we got there, Wes’ friend George, who was an enabler to the highest degree and who often got Wes drunk and would take advantage of him monetarily, was waiting for us. I went to the barn to play with the bunnies, the chicks were left in the back of the truck, which was parked in the shade of the house, and the men went inside to start drinking.

By the time I came back from the barn, George had left (I didn’t like him, he was smarmy) and Wes was at the kitchen table drinking. When I came inside, I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and we talked about stuff while he got progressively drunker. After he was well plastered, he decided that he’d better get the chicks into the barn, so he stood up and promptly fell damn near flat on his face. I laughed, I was a kid and thought it was funny. I helped him up and helped him get outside where he fell AGAIN, this time right into the lilac bush. And that’s where he stayed because after I tried to help him back up several times and we laughed at his behaviour, he passed out cold and I couldn’t wake him up. I even kicked him as hard as I could right in the ass and he just gave me shit for it, rolled over and stayed passed out.

By now it was the afternoon and the truck was no longer in the shade. I was scared. I was scared that Wes was sick or something and I was scared that the chicks were going to die in the back of the truck and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t lift a flat of chicks by myself and get them in the barn. It would take me forever to take a few at a time and carry them to the coop. (We’re talking like, easily 1000 chicks here.)

In a panic, I called my grama at her store and explained the situation. It was almost closing time for her anyway, so she locked up early and headed over to Wes’ house, which was maybe a 4 minute walk. Together we each took an end of one of the flats of chicks and one by one we took them into the barn where I released them where they were supposed to go and got them water. I remember not knowing what kind of food they should eat so I didn’t feed them, but so many of them were so overheated that I would have to pick them up, splash water on them and put their beaks into the water dish where they’d finally drink. I remember having to go find more water dishes because there were so many chicks and they were all so dehydrated that they were trampling all over each other and making everyone’s water dirty.

Once the chicks were looked after, my grama told me to show her where Wes was, so I brought her over to the lilac bush and she kicked him. I told her I’d tried that. Wes kinda stirred a bit and looked up and my grama said something to him about the chicks being put away, called him a “stupid ass” and then said she was leaving him there. Then we went home where alcoholism was finally explained to me. I’d known what drunk adults were like, but I never knew it could be a problem.

Looking back at my childhood with Wes, I can’t help but think of how truly fucked up it was. My grama would routinely let me get in the truck with him to go up to the store even though he had clearly been drinking. He used to drive up to the store (about a 3 minute drive) not on the road, but on the shoulder and I learned later that the reason he did this was because it was only illegal to drive on the road if you were drunk. I don’t know if that was true at the time or not, but it’s certainly not true now, as my alcoholic neighbour has explained to me several times (more on that in a bit). Everyone knew Wes was drunk a good portion of the time, but they let me hang out with him anyway. I don’t know why that is. (And really, I guess that part doesn’t matter, it never did me any harm except that one scary day with the chicks. The driving part I really question though.)

Wes’ wife, Maggie, was an alcoholic too, but I don’t ever recall her driving and she died when I was about 10 or 11. I don’t know if it was related to her drinking or not, but I’m fairly certain Wes’ death was. Wes died when I was in grade 8, right before my birthday, of a stroke. From what I recall being told, they don’t know if he had a stroke and fell down the stairs or if he fell down the stairs and had a stroke, but his son Mikey found him there, assumed he was drunk and started giving him shit while trying to get him up. Wes being Wes, I’m pretty certain that whatever the case may be, he probably wasn’t sober when the stroke occurred. He was alive when the ambulance came and they took him to a hospital in Toronto. I wasn’t allowed to go see him because my mom didn’t want me remembering him “like that” (I guess he was pretty messed up) but he died a few days later.

My great grama on my grampa’s side was an alcoholic as well, which probably sounds remote to most of you reading this, but keep in mind that my mother had me when she was 15 and as such, I grew up with two of my great gramas. I didn’t learn that my Grama Crittenden was an alcoholic until I was a teenager though because we didn’t really go see her very often but usually when we did, she was drunk. I never really thought anything of it though, because we only really ever saw her at family reunions and at a Crittenden family reunion usually the only people who are actually sober are the kids and sometimes even that’s not the case. I don’t know if my great grama’s partner, Frank, was an alcoholic too, but it seems pretty likely and for sure her late husband was. They don’t know if he drank because he was depressed or if he was depressed because he drank, but either way, he committed suicide by taking a shotgun to his head. My Grama Crittenden lived to be 86, I believe, and died of old age. (Although I think that’s relative; who’s to say how long she might have lived if she wasn’t an alcoholic?)

My step-dad IS an alcoholic. He wasn’t one when I was growing up, it was a gradual thing that happened over time because he was depressed, hated his life and couldn’t find any other way to cope. It started out innocently enough, just a beer here or there, then it became one small drink after work to “unwind”, until finally it became, “no, I can’t drive you to your friends house, I’ve been drinking” (by 7pm) or “no, I can’t pick you up from the party, I’ve had too much to drink”. My step-dad started by only buying a mickey once a week, then a 26er and now from what I understand, he buys the big bottle. I guess the plus side to this is that at least he doesn’t drive? Or at least he didn’t drive after a few drinks as of 6 years ago when I stopped speaking to him, I can’t say for certain if that’s still the case now.

My ex’s father who I used to live with was also an alcoholic and the last I heard, he still was, although he did remain sober for a few years a few years ago when he was driving truck for a living. He was, like my step-dad, a high-functioning alcoholic in that he held down a job, the same job he’d had for 20 years, and didn’t drive drunk, but their family was overburdened by financial trouble, the root of which seemed to be a lot of get rich quick schemes and a lot of beer. Darrell also tended to be a very violent, mean drunk whose behaviour heavily contributed to his wife’s mental breakdown and subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia (not that he CAUSED the schizophrenia, that’s not possible, but his actions served as the catalyst for it surfacing). When she moved out and was in and out of the hospital because of her illness, Darrell took on boarders to help pay the bills who he would get drunk and harass, both physically and mentally. Then his wife moved back in and he started harassing her more and more until she ended up in the hospital again and her family wouldn’t allow her to go back to him. Then his mentally unstable (yet brilliant) sister, Donna, moved in with her boyfriend and he physically and emotionally harassed both of them too, all while drunk.

It is because of these people (and a few more I won’t tell you about because this is already getting really long) that I rarely drink. I went through a phase in my teens where I drank all the time, mostly because I could (I was unsupervised and had all these adults willing to buy it for me, plus there was one restaurant in town that would serve me if I was with my Aunt) and right after Madison was born, because I’d just turned 19 (legal drinking age here) I went to the bar a whole lot (but didn’t often get drunk, mostly because I couldn’t afford to). And of course when I was working for Scratching Post there was a lot of drinking as well, but I’ve never kept alcohol in my home. At least not on purpose. Sometimes people come over and bring alcohol with them and then leave whatever’s left here, so that’s sometimes in the very highest cupboard above the stove, but more often than not, I’ve dumped it out after people have left unless there’s a lot left in the bottle. There’s one Mike’s Hard Lemonade in my fridge right now that’s been there since at least September, if not before that and it’ll probably stay there until the summer. I get drunk maybe twice a year and I only drink to get drunk because I see no other reason to.

I realize this isn’t necessarily the definition of an alcoholic, but I believe that if you drink every single day and you’re unhappy the days you don’t have alcohol, then you are one. My “alcoholic scale” doesn’t count people who have a glass of wine with dinner or even a beer or maybe even two after work and really, my “scale” isn’t so much a scale at all, but the fact that, having grown up around so many different types of alcohol abusers, I know one when I see one and I’ve seen plenty. And y’know what else? In my experience, the people who get the most offended if you use the word “alcoholic” in reference to them almost always are one. If they aren’t one, they want to know why you think so and are concerned that you feel that way. If they get angry, it’s because they know it’s true and now they know you know it’s true too.

I don’t drink or keep alcohol in my home not because I’m holier than thou and don’t think people should drink, I do it because I know I’m predisposed to having a problem with it due to both nature and nurture and man, I have enough problems.

I said up there somewhere that my neighbour told me that driving on the side of the road wouldn’t save you from a DUI now as it may have when Wes was doing it and the reason he knows this is because of how he got his first DUI. Apparently he was walking home from either a bar or a party, I believe in the winter, and because it was cold and he was so drunk he just wanted to sleep, he got in his car and put the key in the ignition and turned the car on to turn on the heat. Then once the car was warm, he turned it off and fell asleep. He woke up to “tap tap tap” on the driver’s side window and it was a cop. The cop told him to get out of the car and made him do a sobriety test which he obviously failed and because he had the key in the ignition, he was charged with…not DUI, but something in the same vein where the car’s not actually moving but you were close enough that it was a chargeable offense. So if he could be charged with that, without the car even being on or being driven, then my grampa Wes couldn’t get away with driving drunk on the shoulder like he did when I was a kid.

Wayne, my neighbour, told Blake and I repeatedly that if we were ever in a situation like that and a cop tapped on your window, to get out of the car and throw your keys as far as you can because then, according to him, you can’t be charged with anything.

I doubt very much that either Blake or I would ever be in that situation, but every time Wayne’s told us the story, I’ve always thought about Wes driving down the shoulder of the road to avoid a DUI. And then while watching Oprah today, I thought about every alcoholic I’ve ever known and just how lucky I really was that Wes didn’t accidentally kill me and that I didn’t grow up to be one too.

Like I said, I’ve got enough problems.

Yesterday or the day before, Blake had a troll on his Cubeless blog and the troll said, “Grab yourself a job instead of claiming agoraphobia of convenience which seems to kick in every time you have to go shopping, but lifts when there’s an art show or a concert you absolutely have to attend because you’re ‘creative’.” And that wasn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks where people questioned my agoraphobia. At a forum I frequent, there’s a thread in a secret forum called “Reasons to feel good” and when our Gogol Bordello tickets came, I posted the picture of me holding them up to the cam in that thread and a couple of people said “wait, don’t you have agoraphobia?”

And that’s the thing. Agoraphobia isn’t a cut & dry thing. It’s different for each person. In my case, I can’t go anywhere by myself and there are certain places, like grocery stores, that I avoid because they give me anxiety to the point of panic attacks whether Blake’s with me or not. And in the case of the grocery store, yes, Blake does the groceries and it’s not so much because I can’t (well, since I haven’t done it so long and have next to zero concept of money anymore it would cause a problem anyway) but it’s simply a case of, “why make it a family outing when Blake can just go in, get what we need and come home”? Since I can’t go by myself, and I don’t have a car even if I could, that’s the way things have to be and the way things are. In case I wasn’t clear, when it comes to groceries, why take 4 people to the store, which over-complicates things, when Blake can just go in, get what we need, not go over budget, not impulse buy, and be home in half the time it would take us if all 4 of us went. Plus, if all 4 of us went, there’s a very good chance that I would have a panic attack and would require medication (Ativan) to first get there and some more to actually stay there.

As for art shows, well, that’s actually a laughable thing. I’ve only ever been to one art show in my life and it was Touched By Fire, which is put on by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. If anyone’s going to understand my idiosyncrasies at such an event, it’s going to be those people, or at least that was my logic behind going. Being in the city (Toronto) makes me very very nervous and the night of that art show, I must have taken at least 4 Ativans. But the thing was, I was totally fine at the show and I actually questioned this after the fact the next time I saw my shrink. I wanted to know how come I was totally fine at that show, yet I can’t go to Wal*Mart or even the art supply stores by myself and she said that it’s because at an art show, I have a defined role, I’m an artist, and therefore there’s guidelines as to how to act which are comfortable to me because I can easily play that role for that is what I am. I mean, I wasn’t totally fine at the show, when Gayle Cutler wanted me to do a commission, Blake had to navigate the business end of things because that’s not a role I’m comfortable with. While he did that, I hid in the bathroom. Literally.

And as far as concerts, well gee, the last concert I went to was either System of a Down or Metallica, I can’t remember and both of those shows were at least 7 or 8 years ago. With Metallica, I almost didn’t go because I had a meltdown half an hour before we had to leave. I ended up going to the show in my pajamas after Blake spent 45 minutes talking me into going. With Gogol Bordello, they are my favourite band right now and there are certain experiences where I know I’d have regrets if I didn’t go and this show is one of them because Gogol Bordello doesn’t come to Toronto very often. As I said when I posted the picture of the tickets, I have roughly 2 months to psych myself into going. A normal person wouldn’t have to do that. And even when I do go, I’m going to have to be chowing down clonazepam (klonopin) and Ativan like there’s no tomorrow. I won’t be in the pit. I’ll probably be way at the back, away from people. I’ll also be with Blake and our two best friends so I’ll have like, a circle of protection, which helps. Going to this show is not going to be an easy thing for me at all and actually another aspect of this endeavor is that when I posted the pictures of the concert tickets on that forum that I frequent, one of the members there, whom I’ve known for many years and who lives in Toronto, asked me if I wanted to get a drink and meet up before the show, to which I replied “hellz no” because that is completely outside of my comfort zone, especially when going to the show is going to be hard enough as it is. I am already losing sleep over this show because I don’t know what to wear – and it’s 2 months away.

I don’t know what to wear because where I’m at right now as far as weight loss is that I don’t fit into my “normal” clothes just yet and my “fat clothes” are now too big. Chances are, I’m going to have to buy something to wear to the show and since we’re not particularly made of money that stresses me out.

And as far as meeting this person I know from the forum I frequent well, the thing is, I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to meet people from the internet anymore with very few exceptions and the reason for that is because…I’ve met roughly 200 people from the internet in the last 12 years and during the last several encounters, I’ve realized that people sometimes don’t want to meet me to actually meet me, they want to judge me to see whether I’m the same in person as I am online (which I am) but more than that, they want to be able to tell people that they met me because it gives them cool points or something in our respective circles. I’m a notch on a belt and I’m not cool with that.

The fact of the matter is, I have agoraphobia. It’s not a phobia of convenience as Blake’s troll implied, it just presents itself in a certain way where I can go certain places and do certain things, but quite often those things take a lot of planning, a trip to my shrink, psychiatric medications and a lot of preparation.

I left the house the first week of January to see Avatar. I was supposed to go to a baby shower in Toronto at the end of January but I couldn’t deal with going to a place with a bunch of people I didn’t know so I didn’t go. Seeing Avatar in January was the only time I left my house that month. In the first week of February I went to my doctor to get a new prescription and in the second week of February, I went to my shrink appointment. In the middle of February, I went with Blake to the grocery store for about 5 minutes. And that’s it. I left the house 3 times in February. Now it’s March. I went to the doctor’s tonight to get a pap smear and chances are, that’ll be my only outing for the month of March. A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact places and the amount of times they left the house in any given month, but I can because it’s such a rare occurrence and since they are such rare occurrences, I mark these outings down on my calendar. Again, a normal person wouldn’t do that.

Last spring, when I took a walk down the Trans-Canada Trail by my house to take pictures, that was the first time in about 6 & a half years that I went anywhere by myself. Last spring I tested my agoraphobic limits with mixed success. When I went to one of the local restaurants to have breakfast all by myself, I was so freaked out by the situation that I didn’t leave the house for a month. Last spring & summer, Lucky and I checked the mail and mailed things in the middle of the night and that was a huge deal. All of these things can easily be searched on this blog under “agoraphobia” for those who are interested.

My agoraphobia is compounded during the fall and winter by Seasonal Affective Disorder. I simply do not leave the house unless I absolutely have to during this time. In the spring & summer, that’s when I go back at it with the immersion therapy, although truth be told, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve mostly given up on that because at this point I have zero motivation for trying to get better. I live in a shitty little town with nothing in it and nowhere to go and I have no car. I don’t think I can get better here. I’m not sure where I could get better exactly, but here ain’t it.

And that’s the thing, which I don’t know if it’s part of the phobia or what, but 95% of the time I’m okay with not leaving the house. I stopped fantasizing about a different life a long time ago.

Also, part of agoraphobia is that quite often, as is the case with me, the person has a hard time letting people in to their homes. It’s not just about leaving one’s home. Having people in my house is a very hard thing for me to do. At Xmas time the neighbours offered to watch my dogs for me so we didn’t have to bring them up North with us, but i couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have people in my home when I wasn’t there. And even when I am here, if people are going to come over, we all make a mad dash for the cleaning supplies because I don’t want people judging me by our home, which isn’t exactly the nicest home to begin with. A babysitter being here so Blake and I can go out? Unheard of. My kids have only been babysat in our home by our friends Alex & Ronny and my mother. When the neighbours watch the kids, the kids go over there. Hiring a babysitter, like a teenager or whatever, simply wouldn’t happen.

I think my agoraphobia started in two ways: 1) I’m pretty sure that whenever I left the house when we lived above my grandma’s furniture store, she came into the apartment and snooped. That made me so mental that I stopped leaving the house so she couldn’t do that and that’s why I can’t have people in my house when I’m not there now. 2) When Blake moved in and had to give back his car, he took over mine and it was just easier for him to get groceries on the way home from work than for me to go do it after he came home and I have access to a car. Since we lived in the middle of nowhere, there was nowhere for me to go, especially without a car. And this lasted years until it became habit and then became phobia.

But long long long before that there were signs that this was just part of my natural state. When I was 15 and living with my boyfriend at the time’s parents, I rarely left the house then too. I would go to check the mail which meant walking about 20 feet from the house and I would do so in my pajamas at 2:30am. Sometimes I’d go to my Aunt’s house in town, which was about a 15 minute walk, but again, I’d only do it at night and most of the time in my pajamas.

I know when I absolutely have to, I can leave the house, kick ass and take names. When Zulu got hit by the car, I didn’t even think about it, I got in the car with the cop who stopped to help, with Zulu in the back seat and I dealt with the vet by myself and went back home with the cop while Blake was on his way to the vet’s to take care of the rest. When it was just Madison and I in our apartment in Uxbridge, I only had a bar fridge and I’d load Madison up in her stroller and we’d do groceries every day. When I was in college, I dealt with Madison going to daycare and drove myself to Toronto every single day because in all of the above scenarios, what choice did I have?

If Blake died tomorrow, I’m fairly confident that we’d all be okay and that I could get shit done. (Don’t get me wrong, Blake dying would suck, but life does go on, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to be driven to school.)

As things stand though, as I said, there’s little motivation for me to get better. There’s nothing in the outside world for me except these rare situations like an art show, a movie or a concert and I do all of the above extremely seldom.

As I said in the beginning, agoraphobia is not a cut & dry thing. It affects everyone differently. Yes, there are similarities in every agoraphobic patient, but they all have to be treated on a case-by-case basis. I’ve just explained how my case presents itself and it is my hope that I won’t have to do it again.

The last few days have been phenomenal for me. First, on Sunday my country won gold for hockey and the game was unbelievable, one of the greatest games I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I told Blake at the beginning of the Olympics that if Canada’s men took gold, he wouldn’t be able to stop me from ordering myself a Team Canada jersey, which I’ve always wanted. So, minutes after Sidney Crosby scored the final goal in overtime that gave Canada the win, I whipped out my credit card and ordered my Team Canada jersey. I wanted a medium, which is the same size as my Leafs jersey, but Blake wanted to be able to wear it too so I got a large.

Then on Monday, it was my birthday, which was pretty low-key. Blake got me Y the Last Man books 6, 7 and 8, so I spent the day reading those and eating half of a McCain’s chocolate cake. (I also did a show that afternoon, which is available in the archives, although it’s nothing spectacular.) My mom sent me a card in the mail with a $25 gift card to Michael’s (an art supply store) and on his way home, Blake asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner, but I felt too sick to eat anything (I’m just getting over a stomach flu) so I told him I’d take a raincheque on that for another night. And that was pretty much my whole birthday.

But then YESTERDAY was like, an extension of my birthday where many good things happened. It started off not so good, as I was awoken by my dogs freaking out because someone was knocking at the door. I tried to ignore them but they kept freaking out so I got up and by the time I did, whoever was knocking was gone and there was a DHL post-it on the door saying that they’d try again tomorrow (today) to make their delivery. Since DHL is an international shipping company, I knew the package they were delivering was contraband from Cuba that our friend Drew had sent to us when he was on vacation there since he couldn’t send Cuban stuff to his home in MI. I signed the post-it saying that they could leave the package at the door and stuck it back on the door and put one of the large magnets we have on our door so it wouldn’t blow away.

After that, my neighbours called and asked me to come over, so I did and we sat & chatted for a couple of hours. They gave me a birthday card with a scratch off ticket inside for my birthday and that was cool. Then I came back home and made myself eggs and watched the movie Private Benjamin, which I’d never seen before and now that I’ve seen it, I cannot for the life of me figure out how or why Goldie Hawn won an OSCAR for that role because she was as Goldie as she’s ever been in any other movie I’ve ever seen her in. It must have been a slow year that year.

While I watched the movie, I renewed a couple of domains I own and registered a new one (my youngest sister’s name), and then I put in my order with Vesey’s for the seeds for the veggie garden we’re going to have this year. Our house came with a veggie garden already “built” in the backyard that’s about 14 feet by maybe 6 or 7 feet and bordered by railway ties. I ordered Royal Burgundy Beans, which are a bush bean that is purple, but when you cook them, they turn green and for that reason, they’re a big hit with the kids. I also ordered napoli carrots, thunder cucumbers, simpson elite leaf lettuce, parade green onions, super sugar snap peas, fat & sassy green peppers, purple star peppers (that are sweet peppers that are PURPLE and look lovely in salads), bobcat tomatoes and sugary cherry tomatoes. Truth be told, I’m not sure the garden’s big enough for all of that stuff, but I’ve never had a veggie garden before so I’m kind of going by trial & error. Mostly I’m worried about the cucumbers because I think vines need a lot of room to grow, but I figure if I plant them along the top of the garden they can drape over the 3 feet of lawn between the garden and the house and we just won’t mow there or we’ll move the vines when we mow and then put them back. And as I do every year, the whole gardening experience will be documented on my site.

After I ordered the veggie seeds, the movie was over and I took a nap which I was rudely awakened from by the dogs freaking out again because my kids were talking to other kids in our driveway.

When I finally got out of bed, after the kids had come inside, there was an Amazon package sitting on my desk that Madison told me had been sitting against the front door when they came home. So I opened it and inside was all kinds of birthday presents from a friend, including Dragon Age Origins which I’ve been wanting to play since it was released.

After I opened the Amazon package, I sent a thank you to the person who sent all of it and after it was sent and my browser came back to my inbox, there was an e-mail from Vancouver 2010 telling me that my Team Canada jersey had shipped and that it should be here in a few days. Score!

Shortly after that, Blake called me on his way home and I asked him if I could have my belated birthday dinner and he said yes, so I asked him to bring me home an assorted sub from Mr. Sub, because I had full intentions of installing Dragon Age as soon as I got off the phone with him and a sub is an easy meal to eat at the computer. See? Always thinkin’ ahead.

Well, I got distracted by Madison, who had sprained her toe and required drugs because she was in pain. Her toe looked horrific, it was so purple it was almost black, but she could move it, so at least it wasn’t broken. She said she sprained it when she fell at recess. Soooooo I drugged her and she went to bed.

Then Blake came home and I began installing Dragon Age, which I played for about 5 hours and then I went to bed.

Annnnnnnnnd now you’re up to date with the past couple of days of my life. :o)

(Don’t even ask me what he was doing with his tongue, I have no idea. o_O)

Wayne discussing the finer points of his “Third Degree” hot sauce:

Wayne….doing I don’t even know what, but at the end I took a drink, he made me laugh and I subsequently spit it out all over the dog who was at my feet so that’s when I put the video camera away:

I’m sure gonna miss that fucker when they move. :o/

First of all, I’m menstruating, which is always fun and because I’m menstruating I’m taking insane amounts of codeine which has made me extremely constipated and I know that’s probably TMI but I don’t fucking care. The stool softeners? They are ineffective and I’m cranky because I literally have something up my ass. Aren’t you glad I shared?

Also making me cranky is the fact that my site has been down for a lot of this week and while that’s not really a huge deal since I x-post everything to Live Journal anyway and haven’t had a whole lot to say, it really sucks because my e-mail is on the same server as my site, so when my site’s down, it probably means I have no e-mail either. So my apologies if you’ve left comments on LJ or have sent me e-mail this week and I haven’t replied, I haven’t been getting my LJ notifications (obviously) and while I’ve been trying my best, it’s hard to remember who I’ve replied to and where so again, I’m sorry. Some people have asked about my host as they’ve seen me bitching about this all week on Twitter and I’m hosted by my friend Kevin, who is the co-owner of Camwhores.com, and he hosts me for free so I try not to complain. It’s not his fault the server took a shit this week and I know he’s been working extra hard trying to fix it, so when I complain, I’m not complaining about my hosting provider, Kevin is great and I love him, I’m just bitching because I’m bitching.

And speaking of my site, in the last 30 days I’ve had almost 3,000 unique visitors , which is actually a record since I began keeping stats just over a year ago. So hello new people! My name is Sunny and I’m not nearly as whiny or insane as I probably sound in this post. If you’d like to know more about me, there’s a page for that and while I update my site usually once a week or so, I update my Live Journal just about every day so if you’re bored, you might want to check that out too. Anonymous comments are turned off on my Live Journal because some people are pricks and while comments are moderated on my site, I’ll approve and reply to just about all of them as long as you’re not being an asshole. I’m done with giving assholes a forum, there are an infinite number of sites on the internet to be an asshole on, take The Forum [NSFW] for example, and I just don’t need to put up with them here.

Anyway…

This week Blake and I watched the movie Precious, but Blake reviewed it for Buttercup and his article will be going up tonight at around 1am so I won’t say anything about it other than I liked it and I agree with Blake’s assessment of the film.

Also this week I worked on my ATCs a bit and just about had a coronary because I spent hours and hours and hours meticulously drawing and shading miniature versions of my girls and then I used a Micron Pigma pen (02) to outline their mouths and noses so I’d be able to see them after I painted their faces with a flesh colour. I do this on my regular sized girls every time and didn’t figure it would be a problem. BUT IT WAS. A HUGE problem. I went to paint their faces with the flesh colour and the ink fucking RAN! That has never happened to me before and these pens are supposed to be waterproof and archival so WTF? So I stopped painting faces with the second girl and decided to let the ink “cure” over night and when I tried painting their faces the next day, everything was totally fine. I ruined 2 of 8, which sucks because I worked really hard on them, but at least I didn’t ruin the whole batch. Currently they’re still sitting on my desk with freshly painted eyes and faces awaiting hair colour and dresses. Truthfully, I haven’t kept working on them because I got distracted by another project…

This other project…well, I don’t really want to talk about it too much because I always do that (I suck at keeping things secret) and because I always do that and give too much away, I self-sabotage and never finish anything. Here’s the gist: I had a dream on Monday that was so vivid and so surreal that as soon as my eyes opened I flew out of bed and just began writing down every detail I could remember. Then that afternoon I fleshed it out a bit more and when Blake got home I showed him my scrawls to see what he thought and he thought it was brilliant, which was reassuring because I never know if my ideas are brilliant or stupid.  I thought about the story over the next couple of days, slightly intimidated by it but Blake threatened that if I didn’t write it, he would, and he wouldn’t do as good of a job as I would because I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes in the dream and for some reason, I think this is a story that needs to be told. I think it’s a story that’s never been told before, but then again, I’m not exactly well read so I could be talking out my ass there. Anyway, yesterday I actually started writing the thing and somehow, in the span of a couple of hours, I had 10 pages typed out, today I added 4 more and this story, that was only supposed to be a “short story” is turning into a novella. Honestly, I don’t know where it’s coming from but it’s a refreshing feeling and I’m enjoying the writing process more than I’ve enjoyed writing in a long time. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it when it’s done, but I’m trying not to worry about that and just fucking write the thing.

So often I sabotage myself by, like I said, explaining a project so much on here that I feel like I’ve completed the project or that just having the idea “out there” is enough for me. And I often get caught up in my fear of success. As much as people accuse me of being an attention whore, the opposite is actually true. I fear the spotlight like nobody’s business and when it comes to creative work, writing in particular, I fear criticism and thus I don’t often put very much out for critics. Even as I write this story, there’s this little negative voice in the back of my head telling me how much it sucks or how implausible the story is or how flimsy my characters are and all kinds of wonderful things like that. And it’s one thing for my own inner critic to say these things, but it’s a whole other thing for other people to say them. Since I’ve never really put anything out there for that kind of scrutiny (and yes, I realize that I put myself “out there” constantly with my site and my cam and all that, this is different) I don’t know how I’d deal with it and a fear of the unknown suddenly surfaces.

But right now all the story is, is 14 pages on my MacBook that no one’s seen but Blake and until it’s finished, that’s all it will be.

This week I also taught Wayne & Judy how to use Facebook, to the best of my ability. Right now they can’t afford internet but they have a wireless card in their computer so Blake built a booster on our wireless router and set them up with the password for the network so they have internet…some of the time. Most of the time they don’t get a signal, but this week they’ve actually had a strong signal for some reason and thus, they’ve been calling me every day to show them how to do things on the Facebook accounts I set up for them last week. Today Judy was asking me how to play FarmVille because a few of her friends sent her FarmVille gifts and since I have that application blocked on my own Facebook, I didn’t really know what to tell her. She also called me yesterday afternoon to tell me that she figured out how to comment on people’s status messages, which I thought was cute because she was so proud of herself for figuring it out.

This weekend I plan on going over there and if they have a strong enough signal, I’m going to set them up with FireFox, add all of the bookmark tabs that they’ll ever need and delete their shortcuts for Internet Explorer altogether. Yes, I realize Chrome is the new big thing but I haven’t used it myself yet and I want them to quit clicking on stupid pop up ads that tell them they have a virus, causing them to freak out and call me. Oh and I changed all of their homepages (they have 3 profiles on Windows, one for Wayne, one for Judy and one for Courtney) to Google so now how they get to Facebook is by typing “www.Facebook.com” INTO Google and going to the first search result. *headdesk* I don’t really blame them though, their Internet Explorer has/had so many toolbars on it for some reason that it had 3 possible inputs for a url and no doubt they chose the wrong one many many times. I got rid of the Ask Jeeves one, but since I don’t use IE and haven’t in many many years, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of the others and it’s difficult to tweak anything when they’re over your shoulder asking what you’re doing every 30 seconds. So, setting them up with FireFox and breaking their IE habit seems like the best thing to do. I also set them up with Gmail accounts and I’m going to try and get them in the habit of checking their e-mail as often as they check their Facebook so they understand how Facebook’s e-mail notifications work. Instead of Google, I’ll probably make Gmail their homepages for that reason.

I’m not a very patient person and my patience in teaching them how to use the internet is surprising even myself.

This week I got a call from the mental health clinic saying that they wanted to set me up with an appointment for another doctor who I think is a nutritionist or something. Are nutritionists doctors? This woman has “Dr.” in front of her last name and she runs a metabolic sumpin-er-other clinic where I see my shrink and I requested to get in on that when a spot opened up because the meds they had me on has slowed down my metabolism and while I’m still eating my eggs every day to help boost my metabolism, progress has been slow and this clinic is all about how to switch your metabolism around and lose weight. Apparently it’s 6 or 8 weeks and it’s in a group setting (oh yay) once a week in the afternoons. I’m assuming the new group starts in the new year and my appointment with this new doctor is on the 29th.

Before I called them back, I checked with Blake to make sure he was okay with using his days off to take me to this thing and he was, so I called and made the appointment with the new doctor. I guess she’ll like, assess me or something, I have no idea. Maybe there’s even a chance I can’t get into the clinic because I’m not fat enough. I don’t know how these things work.

And speaking of mental health…since some folks have been asking…no I have not been driving anywhere. I have not been doing my immersion therapy. I have not been checking the mail. I have also been neglecting my light therapy and had a really bad day earlier this week, so starting Monday the lightbox is going back on my desk and I’m going to start using it again. As for immersion therapy…I’m just done with it. I don’t even care anymore. I can go places, like with Blake or even with Judy, and be okay. I haven’t had a panic attack in public since the spring and I think I’ve made all the progress I’m going to make right now. I have zero desire to drive the car, in fact I hate the car and the mere thought of driving, so fuck it, I’m done. Maybe I’ll pick it up again in the spring, maybe I won’t. I’ve decided that in the end it simply doesn’t matter and that I’m fine where I am. So that’s that.

Anyway, this is a really long fucking post about basically nothing so I’m going to end it here and get back to work on my story.

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