As promised, the other half: random facts about me
27) Chores I don’t mind doing:
--Dishes. I've had dishwashers for maybe two years of my life: three of them in total and they all broke within months. That's okay. There's something therapeutic about dish-doing. Meditative. The water feels good on my touch-starved skin.
--Laundry. I've done about 99.5% of the laundry in this house for 25 years. It's a lot easier than it may be for most since none of us here wear business attire, ever and folding? Waddat? You put the shirt on, stretch it over your capacious gut, and presto: Wrinkles removed. Almost like an iron.
--Lawnmowing. Now that I have a decent cordless electric mower, anyway. Before, with a cord, it was low-grade torture. The safety features on our old mower -- and you want those, if you're me -- meant wrangling the cord with one hand while clutching the handle of the mower unnaturally tightly and steering with the other.
--Winter driveway maintenance (most of the time). I have a small electric snowblower to handle mild to moderate snowfall. It's the winter version of the lawnmower: it makes my life much easier. But unless I've been seriously dumped on, I truly didn't mind manual mode. I can take a small measure of pride in that when I'm done, not only is the driveway and sidewalk clear, so is a chunk of the street. It thwarts the evil trickster plow god Snoki.
28) Chores I hate: Most of the rest of them, with special emphasis on litter, bathrooms, and anything on a handier man's honey-do list. Chore that goes BEYOND hatred: putting anything together. Eva does the heavy lifting on this, for which I em eternally grateful, but she'll ask me to hold something and...okay...how tight? If I feel it moving, am I supposed to let it move or not? Where EXACTLY do you need me to hold this? Guaranteed to put both of us in bad moods pretty much instantly.
29) Song currently in my head: Johnny Cash covering "Hurt".
30) Collections: Outside of my books, the only real collection I ever had consisted of between 200-250 dinky cars. All different makes: Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Corgi Jrs, Majorette....I miss them, honestly. The thing I'd WANT a collection of: strange and unusual clocks. My dad had a couple: a genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock, a Mexican souvenir clock where the 'pendulum' was a guy swinging a whip.
31) What humbles me: I'm no more special than anyone else. For every supposed quality I'm told I have, I can name you two qualities I should have but don't. My shitty vision and the disconnect between my eyes and my hands KEEP me humble. So does the sobering realization I've only ever been "good enough" in this house, nowhere else.
32) Memory from childhood: Camping in our 1970 Trailmaster tent trailer, first at Oastler Lake, then later at Grundy Lake. As a kid, it was a near weekly thing through the summer months. We'd go into Parry Sound first thing, see my Gramma Breadner and Aunt Dawna and Uncle Ted, among others, and stock up at Dominion, a grocery store that's long gone. Their slogan, painted on the back wall of the store, was "Mainly because of the meat". But for us the shopping list always included two things that scream childhood to me: that ten-pack of Kellogg's cereals in little box-bowls...and butter tarts.
33) Memory from my teenage years: Grade thirteen orchestra practice. My friend Jason spotting a spider on someone's violin and calling "Helen! There's a spider on your G string! .... Now it's crawling into your F hole!" I couldn't breathe for thirty seconds, I was laughing so hard.
34) Next big trip, at this rate, it's going to be Eva's and my 25th wedding anniversary trip next year. It was SUPPOSED to be to the Just for Laughs festival in Montréal, which I just found out has gone belly-up and won't be back. Son of a BEEYOTCH. EVERY time we plan something, it gets kiboshed. Either something expensive breaks and steals our trip money or festival organizers get wind we're coming and say "absolutely not".
We thought about taking the train -- or flying -- to Halifax, doing the Cabot trail, and training/flying home, but that is (a) crazy expensive and (b) very hard to plan. We are brainstorming alternatives. Agawa Canyon is high on the list. We'll see.
35) How I’d like to die: Instantly.
36) favourite pun: I gotta million of em. This one's courtesy Spider. For this, you need only know there's a book called SHARDIK, by the same man who gifted the world with WATERSHIP DOWN, and SHARDIK is about an empire ruled by the titular enormous, semi-mythical bear.
Now, the only way to become a knight in Shardik's empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot--but if you failed, Lord Shardik was likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw.
Even so, there were many applicants--for the peasantry were poor, and if a candidate failed for knighthood, his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels.
This consoled them, for truly it is written:
"For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you."
36.3333) I think I'll just let that sit up there a minute.,
36.6666) Isn't that awful? Isn't it GLORIOUS?
37) My favourite comedian deserves a HELL of lot more fame than he has. His name is Derek Edwards. His delivery is SO good. We've seen him once and we'll see him any time he gets within a four hour drive of here.
38) Lesson I learned that stuck with me: in grade five, I turned in an assignment four days late. My teacher gave me a 96% on it...and then subtracted 15% for every day tardy. I can still remember the huge 36%, circled in red. I don't think he let that affect my final grade...but I didn't know that at the time, and since then, I have never turned a single thing in late. Nor have I ever been late myself, barring circumstances utterly beyond my control.
39) Something I am always losing: I hate to admit it, but my glasses. They're $1300 or so and they SHOULD be in a case every night and I know that but it doesn't happen as often as it should. And when it doesn't, it's hell, because without them on there is almost no way to find them except by lucky touch. Seriously, folks: without these things on, this screen is completely unreadable more than eight inches from my eyeballs. I CAN'T SEE.
40) Something I wish I'd never lost: OMFG they're making these again! Mine was plastic. I just had an attack of YEARN. My ball clock was destroyed in a move and (pants like a lizard) want want want want want...
41) My most left wing belief: For some reason this is dismissed as hopeless idealism, beyond communism, but here you go: If something is necessary for life, it should be a crime to sell it at a profit.
I believe that with all my heart and CRINGE every time I hear somebody refer to "earning a living". What a fucked up statement people just ignore. If you're not making money for somebody else, why are you even alive? is what that says to me.
42) My most right wing belief: immigrants should (a) fill a need here; (b) obey all the laws and norms of our society and (c) shouldn't be here at all until there is infrastructure to support them. Note: I don't give a pig in a poke where they come from, what colour or gender or sexuality they are. I don't feel like this is too much to ask, but my left wing friends lambaste me as some kind of Trump supporter if I let that out.
43) My biggest flaw...now which of ten million should I choose here? Thank dog for the very few people in my world for whom I am good enough. But I think my biggest flaw is probably my aversion to turning play into work. Most people invert that and turn work into play. My mind refuses to think like that.
I have two things -- and only two -- I could ostensibly make a decent amount of money doing: writing or composing. Writing's easier--the putting words on the page part of it anyway. The rest of it? The full time job (UGH) MARKETING myself? The constant rejection? The need to write umpty-dozen hours every day just to keep money coming in (hopefully)? The knowledge that less than a hundredth of a percent of people actually live off their words?
I'm going back to bed.
44) Hottest temperature I've experienced: 39 with a 47 humidex. That's 102, feels like 117. Coldest: -48 (-54) with a windchill of -72 (-97).
45) Favourite stores:
Groceries: Costco, Sobeys
Clothing: Mark's Work Wearhouse, Pure Muskoka
Books: Bearly Used, Indigo
46) Products I would shill for:
Mr. Clean Magic Erasers
Dawn dishsoap
Hawkins Cheezies
Kawartha Lakes Dairy (Chapman's, too)
Mac computers
47) An expensive thing I bought that was worth every penny: The Sleep Number bed. No longer available in Canada, which really bites because we need a new bed. Our Sleep Number gave wonderful sleeps for many years.
48) Favourite game shows: The Price Is Right, Joker's Wild, Pitfall, Just Like Mom
49) Favourite card game: Cribbage (and reverse cribbage, where the goal is to amass as FEW points as possible...takes three times as long to play a game, but it's an absolute hoot. Knowing me I'll see the only 29 hand of my life in a game of reverse crib.)
50) Favourite hour of the day is in the middle of the night. Silence is golden and dark is dark.
51) The best sleep I ever had: that tent trailer I alluded to earlier. Rain outside pattering on the roof of the trailer. Blacker than midnight in an asshole. I think I may have spent that night dead.
52) Funniest things I have ever done: Judging from the reaction, and I've told this story before, but the time I was in a donut shop with my dad. I was maybe four, and I was trying to read every word I could see. The place was packed, as Canadian donut shops ALWAYS are, and thirty conversations magically fell silent at the same time that my piping four year old voice triumphantly announced: "OPEN! 24! WHORES!"
I can still hear the shocked laugher.
Thanks for reading.
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