Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff DID...Touch 50 Throw Pillows

I DID accomplish some of my 50 x 50 goals and a faithful recitation of those accomplishments follows.

Pillow-touching

Of all of my 50 x 50 goals, touching 50 throw pillows was both the most whimsical and the first goal I accomplished, thanks to a visit to a gift shop with my very patient mother-in-law Patr and a trip the La-Z-Boy show room, where my brother and I were purchasing my father a retirement gift (sadly, it was not this lamp, the greatest gift anyone could ever receive). 

I think the compilation video I made of our Neighbour Who Hates Us blasting her music and car alarm is my greatest cinematic oeuvre, but this is a close second, particularly the song, which I have had in my head ever since.

Air-fryer uses

I added this to my 50 x 50 because I felt intimidated by this appliance and wanted to familiarize myself with its many virtues. Here is a pie chart of what I used it for (I learned how to make a pie chart in Google sheets JUST FOR THIS, you're welcome):

Obviously, zucchini fries are the big winner here, as they should be. To quote Jean-Ralphio Sapperstein, that snizz is straight-up deloyshus.

French

Jodi Ettenberg has a very engaging monthly newsletter of cool reads called Curious About Everything and if you don't already subscribe, you should. In one of her newsletters, she shared an article by Wesley Runnels called How I Learned French in 12 Months.

I'll probably do a separate post about the whole French thing, because I have a lot of blah blah to say about it (that's French for "yap yap"). Unlike Wesley Runnels, I did not press my balls against the French wall, but I did do 50 conversational French lessons with a lovely Québecoise woman on italki, I read 50 newspaper/magazine articles and I watched over 50 episodes of French TV (with French subtitles on, bien sûr, those motherfuckers talk so vite.) 

Dips in the pool

You'd think with a pool in your own fucking backyard, getting in 50 times over the course of a year wouldn't be much a challenge. But with work being INSANELY busy over the summer and the summer being kind of cold, there were a lot of days where, had I not made this a 50x50 goal, I'm sad to say that I would have chosen to stay dry. But I persevered! And swam 50 times in our backyard pool like the bourgeois shitbag I am.

The first dip was May 20 and the last was Oct 12, so to the one couple who said to us when we were building the pool: "You'll only use it for 2 months out of the year," I say:

via GIPHY

Board game plays

Time for another pie chart! 

We actually had 59 board games plays and yes, a lot of them were Wingspan BUT we did try several new ones and I did NOT have a multi-day hissy over losing any of them (unlike Gùgōng, a game I ... did not care for). Most liked new game this year: probably Earth. Least liked: Globetrotting, those fucking globes are so fussy.

New movies/TV shows

I enjoy watching new things but my true love is REWATCHING things, especially when I'm stressed out. The rules for this goal were:

• "New" means completely new, not just a new season of a show we already watch
  
  
• I didn't have to complete the season or series, one episode counted

I have a lot of opinions and recommendations after this year of brave viewing (I actually watched 83 new things!), but I'll save those for another post. I will say this though: if you aren't watching the game show The Floor, hosted by Rob Lowe, you should start.

Vegetarian Meals

Easier than I thought once I decided smoothies counted! I wish I could tell you that THIS year, I'm going to try and eat 50 VEGAN meals but I won't tell you that, because I don't want to do that.

5Km walks

The goal that started it all! I thought that doing one of these a week would get me to my 50 5kms with ease. And I felt like I WAS doing one a week. But I had 8 left to do in February, so that math isn't mathing. Anyway, I captured a few walks on IG, throwback to my first one:

I did a lot of walks in my own neighbourhood but the majority of them were with one or the other of my parents or my aunt Suki; they would drive 30 minutes to come pick up my non-driving ass and take me for a walk, like a special dog, and it was a DELIGHT.

It continues to be a delight, I did 6km with the folks on my actual 50th birthday and 10km with them last Friday and it's been Battlestar Sciatica ever since, getting old is hard.

In conclusion...

Basically, this 50 x 50 thing was a great way to gameify ageing and I am a genius for thinking of it. I feel like I started some good habits (walking, French lessons) and have some things to continue working on (new recipes, knitting...blogging). As for new goals for this year: my friend Sumc suggested that I upgrade the "pillow-touching" and just see how many ASSES I can touch before I get arrested. I dunno, that feels like more of a 60x60 thing, Sumc, but I'll keep you posted, unless the cops take my phone.

Creampuff...did not blog 50 times

I'm FIFTY!

ABJECT 50 x 50 FAILURES AND MY POOR EXCUSES FOR THEM

Meditation - 9 of 50

I do some kind of little workout 4-5 days a week. At least one of those workouts is generally yoga, where I finish up by sitting on my mat. What a great time to set my phone timer for 5 minutes and do a little meditation! NOPE.

New recipes - 12 of 50

I knew this was a stretch when I added it to the list. I add maybe 1 or 2 new recipes to my repertoire annually and they all have something in common: they're easy and I don't have to spend a lot of time touching raw meat. As much as I enjoy watching those elaborate multi-step cooking process videos (and I do, omg, I spent, like, 15 minutes watching some guy make 'short rib croquettes' last night) my cooking style is more Cordon Blaaarg than Cordon Bleu. Although I did make this pretty cake:

Out of the 12 new recipes I DID try, I will definitely keep making "zucchini fries" in the air fryer and probably also the chicken lentil soup recipe I found in the NYT (but only because I had to buy a 10-ton bag of lentils at the store).

Blogging - 15 of 50. But hey, it's 15 more than the previous 4 years combined, so that's something!

Some people are like "I HAVE to write! It's like BREATHING for me!" and to those people I say "Fuck all the way off." I love writing but for me, it takes a lot of effort. Work was INSANE for ALL of 2024 and when it stopped being insane, suddenly it seemed like the WORLD was insane and I found it hard to contemplate bitching about my shitty neighbour when I was too busy watching open-mouthed at the dumpster fire down south. Jesus. H. Christ.

No dessert days - 18 of 50

You'd think I could go one day per week without some kind of baked good, or chocolate, or refined sugar. You'd be incorrect. 

Hours of knitting - 25 of 50

"Oooo, we're halfway theeere, oooo-OO, knitting on a prayer!" Honestly, this could have gone worse, I haven't knit since March of 2020. This year, I knit a hat for an adorable baby (baby not shown)!!

And am still working on a slow, laborious project that I won't post about here because its intended recipient occasionally reads my blog. Although by the time I'm finished it, he probably will not remember that I posted about it! Because he will be 80 years old.

Books read - 37 of 50

The success of a goal like this depends on either having a lot of reading time (which I didn't for most of the year) or picking shorter books (which I also failed to do) but I do blame one book in particular for this failure and it's a French book called La Vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert (The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair).

As part of my French reeducation, I thought I should try reading a novel that was recommended on one of my French podcasts for intermediate French students. The podcast host said that it was a good choice because it was an engaging story that used pretty plain language but she did NOT mention how it was about a 30-something author's sexy romance with statutory rape of a 15 year old girl blaaaaaaaarg but by the time I figured that out, the girl turned up dead and I was hookez (that's French for hooked).

This book took me FOREVER to read. I couldn't figure out if I was just...très slow en français or if it was the biggest fucking book in Bookonia and I didn't know, because I was reading it on my Kindle? Well, I just looked it up and it was 863 fucking pages, so I'm not crazy. It took me nearly 2 months to get through it and it was a WILD RIDE, so many twists and turns and "that 15 year old came on to ME" bullshit.

Probably my favourite thing about reading this book was discussing it with my 30 year old conversational French teacher Rox, who remembered reading the book in her teens and thinking it was the EPITOME of ROMANCE and now she's like QU'EST CE C'EST THE FUCK WAS I THINKING? 

In my next post - my stunning 50x50 achievements, where I brag about completing several basic tasks!

 

 

 

 

Creampuff's Neighbour Who Hates Us Part III

Part I of the Neighbour Who Hates Us

Part II of the Neighbour Who Hates Us

It may surprise you to learn that I have a pathological need to be liked. Obviously, that ship had sailed with NWHU but part of what bothered me about her boom boxing was that other people in the neighbourhood might think that not ONLY were we the source of the loud construction noises (on weekdays only and never after 5pm but still), but we were also shitbags who like to blast our terrible music.

It seemed weird to go door-to-door and say "You know that super loud music that blasts from this general area intermittently on evenings and weekends? That's...not us. It's our neighbour, who is angry we're building a pool in our yard."

The car alarm thing, however, felt like more of an opening to tattle. After the first weekend, I planned to put together a noise complaint to send the city and, while I didn't go door-to-door, I did stop and talk to any neighbours I ran into while I was out walking Pumbaa. I told them who the source of the car alarm (and music) was and asked if I could include their addresses in my complaint.

This experience was very comforting, because everyone I spoke to was OUTRAGED on our behalf and most of them already disliked NWHU for various reasons.

Our nice neighbours on the other side were ready to go knock on her door but I told them they didn't want to get sucked into her vortex of fuckery.

The neighbours on the other side of NWHU rolled their eyes and were also shocked to learn that NWHU was the same woman who the whole neighbourhood hears screaming for her cat every night. (Sidenote about these neighbours, they are awesome and we have them over for boardgames sometimes! So thanks, NWHU.)

Then NWHU took a three-week break from her audio assault. Maybe someone else complained to her and she had a moment of sanity? Who can say?

I put a hold on my complaint-to-the-city plans. Because frankly, I wanted to just get the fucking pool done and when someone is acting this unhinged, you don't want to provoke them further. At the time, it was just music and the occasional car alarm but who fucking knows what else she would do?

I had visions of her lying down in front of the water truck so that we couldn't fill the pool; or throwing something over the fence to damage the pool equipment. We already had security cameras in the back but we adjusted them to keep an eye on the fence line, just in case.

At the end of June, she fired up the boom box again, but things got extra fun at the beginning of July. One afternoon, our very gregarious and peace-loving hardscaper, Tyma, happened to be working on the "close to NWHU" edge of the upper patio and NWHU happened to come outside.

He made some comment about "we'll have to be good neighbours because we can now shake hands over this part of the fence" (no thanks!) and she went OFF on him about how we were horrible fucking neighbours and that she has no more fucking privacy and we were making a dusty mess, among other things apparently, I wasn't there and heard this second-hand from the stunned work crew.

I was like "Tyma, why did you engage? Don't engage!" but he's so nice and just wanted to fix things. So the next day, he went over and kindly offered to pressure wash her house and patio for free when the job was done.

This was a mistake.

She started screaming at him about how we weren't even allowed to have a pool, that it's against regulations. But she also apparently said horrible shit about us and his crew which he refused to repeat to me after the fact. Whatever she said to him made him so furious that he withdrew the offer, obviously, and told her that she wasn't a good person (this is a euphemism, I don't know the actual thing he said.)

Immediately after this incident, around 4:30pm, she set off her car alarm again, while peering through our fence at the front. Then set it off again at 4:37pm. Then again at 4:55pm. Then again at 5:01pm. Then she blasted her boom box from 5:30pm to 5:45pm. Then the car alarm again. Then her son came home and she stopped being bananas...until 12:15am, when she set off the car alarm again. Then the next morning (a Saturday), she boom-boxed from 7:25am until 8am, then a brief burst of car alarms. Then the boom box again later in the afternoon for about an hour.

All the other neighbours were texting me WTF and it was lovely neighbourhood-solidarity-building weekend. How delightful to have company in our disgruntlement. We both took a lot of pot gummies.

I guess NWHU's exhausting audio revenge schedule eventually caught up with her, so she took a break and turned instead to the internet, where she proceeded to leave 1-star Google reviews for both our pool contractors (who she'd never actually met or talked to) and our hardscaper.

This was a big deal, because both these folks have solid 5 star ratings on Google. Our pool contractor Lopo was in our yard when he got the call from his wife (and business partner) Mepo. I heard him say over the phone "1-star? Who is [Actual name of NWHU]?" and I was OMG THAT'S NWHU!! And he was like "What? What did *I* do??" HAHAHAHAHA

Fortunately, since NWHU wasn't an actual client, both Tyma and Lopo were able to get both reviews removed from the Googs but this swipe at their businesses made me even more furious than I thought possible.

I had a lot of revenge fantasies, you guys.

I am not going to write them down here, in case something happens to her at some point, I watch a lot of crime shows, but watch the video from my last post again and use your imagination.

Still. We was determined to keep a lid on our righteous fury until this happened:

The contractors were gone. The pool was filled. The landscaping was adorable. And we were fatly floating around with our beaver.

Once the work was completed, we heard nothing from NWHU for about 2 weeks. I wondered if, now that the work was done and we weren't having wild pool parties every night and the pool equipment wasn't loud, NWHU would say to herself "Oh, what a silly goose I have been. This IS fine." and leave us the fuck alone.

That dream died the night of August 14, 2023.

It was a Monday evening and it was a heat wave. We had invited our nice neighbours Cach (I take care of her chickens every summer!), her husband Scch and Scch's mom Noch (who's in her 80s and has dementia) over for a swim and a BBQ. They came over around 5pm and literally 5 minutes after they arrived, NWHU decided it was time to ruin the party.

She turned the boom box on so loud that the Bollywood music issuing from it was distorted.

Then she got her ladder and climbed up into her plum tree to harvest some plums, making sure most of her upper body was over the fence into our yard.

We and our guests all tried to carry on a conversation but we basically all had this look:

except for Noch, who's also pretty deaf, so she just savoured her red wine and enjoyed the vibes.

Once she'd gotten all her plums, NWHU started mowing her yard. Not the whole yard - just the part near our shared fence. This was extra hilarious, because I happened to know that her son had already mowed the lawn the day before.

Once she was done mowing, NWHU went inside, but left the radio on, now blaring a talk radio segment.

We all got out of the pool and the neighbours went home to change and grab their BBQ fixings. When they came back, the radio was still blaring. At this point, it had been two hours. So we did what white people do best:

We called the police.

(The non-emergency line, obviously.)

We had already had a convo with Central Saanich PD earlier in the summer, just to find out what recourse we had if NWHU escalated, so we already had a handy case number. And the great thing about living in a rural area is that the police actually show up pretty fast for a noise complaint.

I went out to meet the cruiser and was momentarily struck dumb by the emergence of Constable Nick, who looked like he was straight out of a Hallmark romance. Imagine this guy in a patrol uniform.

As soon as Constable Nick got out of the car, he was like "Whoa. That's loud."

I brought him around the back and introduced him to Katr and the neighbours. He took a look around the table at our middle-aged asses and tipsy, sweet, 80 year old Noch and said drily, "This looks like a rager."

We gave him the background on NWHU. Her truck was still in the driveway, so I told him I ASSUMED she was home (although her son's car was gone, so it was possible she was out). He said "Be right back."

Constable Nick went next door. He rang the bell and knocked. Nothing.

He went around to the back. NWHU has stairs that lead from the ground up to her second floor balcony, so he went up there and knocked on the back door. Nothing.

And then...Constable Nick turned off the boom box.

I will not lie to you. It was one of the greatest moments of my adult life. 

A few minutes later, Constable Nick came back. He told us that he'd left a note on NWHUs' door, explaining what had happened (so she wouldn't think we'd been on her property) and told her to call him if she had any questions. He also gave us his card and said that if she starts it up again, he was on duty until 3am. Swoon.

Relieved and elated, we proceeded to enjoy the rest of the evening and just before our nice neighbours left, Katr got a call from Constable Nick.

He said that NWHU had called him and said [insert innocent high-pitched British voice] "Oh my stars, I was just out doing some yard work, listening to my favourite music, and then I had to go buy some camping supplies and silly me, I must have left the radio on!"

He said to her "Well, of course it's totally fine to listen to music while you're doing yard work. But if you are regularly playing your music extra loud in order to harass your neighbours...that's called "mischief". And you can be arrested."

Apparently she got real quiet and said "Well, that's not what's happening," and he said "Great! Have a good night."

And that, folks, was the last we heard from NWHU.

Thank you for going on this journey with me, everyone. Stay tuned for a brief epilogue to this story next time on "stories from last year that I'm just getting around to blogging now."

One more 50x50 Update

French podcasts listened to: 30

French articles read: 28

Episodes of French TV watched: 42

French lessons: 40

Blog posts: 13 hahaha definitely should have done a Part 4, this one should count as 2 posts, right?

Blog posts: 14

Creampuff's Neighbour Who Hates Us Part II

Part 1 of the neighbour who hates us

I remember the afternoon when the music started. It was Sunday, April 2nd, at around 4pm. Katr and I were in our dining room, playing a game of Wingspan, when we started to hear loud shitty death metal blasting from what seemed to be NWHU's house. It was a pleasant day and the windows were open. The music was so loud I could Shazam it from inside the house, but I wouldn’t, because it was so shitty.

I poked my head out the back door to see what was going on. Up on NWHU‘s balcony, she had a little boombox set up with the speakers pressed up against the balcony railing, pointed directly at our house.

I wrote down the time the music started, closed the window so we wouldn’t have to hear it and went back to playing. But I was shaking with fury. She tried to Noriega us in our own house! Also, it’s not like we are the only people who can hear this music. Literally everybody else in the neighbourhood was being blasted by death metal on a Sunday afternoon. For, as it turned out, three full hours. 

The tarps were one thing. This music blasting is really next level. Who does that? It was bananas. But when she didn't do it again for the rest of the month, I figured she had gotten it out of her system.

Speaking of the tarps: it turns out that anger tarps take a lot of maintenance. It was springtime on Vancouver Island and it was windy and rainy. At least once a week, she and her son had to be out in the yard, adjusting the tarps, trying to keep them from falling down or breaking the branches on the various trees she's tied the tarps to, so I was not surprised when, at the end of April, she gave up and removed them. 

I hoped she had taken them down because she was over it. But then I remembered that every spring, NWHU leaves for an entire month. I don’t know where she goes, maybe home to hell. But from the end of April to the end of May, we had a golden time. 

But as we all know, nothing gold can stay. Back to some boring details about the pool.

It turns out that the bylaws say that the WATER part of the pool has to be a minimum distance from the fence line but your pool decking can be right up against the fence. Guess where ours ended up? HA ha!

The proximity of the decking to the fence was a bit of a surprise to us too, but I think we wouldn't have worried about it if NWHU wasn't already SO FURIOUS about the pool.

I remember saying to Katr that when NWHU returned and saw the progress that had been made, she would completely lose her mind.

I...was correct.

(To be fair to NWHU, the way the pool deck was positioned along the fence, if you stand on the front edge of the pool deck, the fence is only waist high. If you wanted, you could stand on that corner and peer into her yard. This is the area we had promised to cover with privacy greenery, but I imagine that might have been hard to envision in the moment.)

Probably my favourite incident during this period was one evening when I was in the kitchen, looked out the window and saw NWHU on a ladder slowly lowering an extended measuring tape over the fence into our yard.

I opened the window and yelled "NWHU, DO YOU WANT TO JUST COME OVER TO MEASURE?" and she called back "No, this is fine!" HAHAHAHAHAHA

The next day, she took a bunch of photos over the fence and our masons called her a Karen.

Armed with her measurements and photos, NWHU called her city councillor. She called the mayor. She called the local building inspector and his boss and his boss's boss.

We received a notice from the chief inspector of the city that we were going to have to have an inspection from the city's chief bylaw officer to make sure that everything was aligned with all the permits we'd received and all the bylaws.

This was obviously stressful for a lot of reasons; shit had PROGRESSED, so now there was no way to move the pool if it turned out the fence line was not the property line (although short of getting a survey done, which she would have to pay for and we knew she wouldn't, because she's cheap, there was no way to 100% disprove that the fence line wasn't the property line and also, they built the fence around this big tree that's in both our yards, which seems like a weird thing to do if that's not the property line BUT I DIGRESS).

She also accused us of raising the grade of our yard higher than the bylaw limit of four feet. Fortunately, this wasn't an issue because we'd dug into the high part of the yard, so the pool deck was just matching the current grade of the yard.

The chief bylaw officer sent our local building inspector out to inspect the pool and report back to her. We knew this guy, because he was the same guy who had already signed off on the previous two inspections. He rolled his eyes as he described the stink that was being made at City Hall by NWHU. Apparently she was well known to them, thanks to her fighting the development that went behind us a couple of years ago. He assured us that short of hiring a lawyer to dispute where the property line was, there was nothing she could do about this pool. Because we had followed all the rules. And because we and our pool contractors are not idiots.

He wished us luck with NWHU. 

(Sidenote: in the middle of all this...Pumbaa went blind! So we were all pretty fucking stressed out.)

Once it became clear that we were not going to bow to her demands and she had no legal recourse because the city was all "this is fine", NWHU returned to her audio terrorism. We started to take videos every time she blasted her boombox at us. Although I have to say, she did switch up the radio stations frequently and I did Shazam a few good songs. 

Then one morning, just after 5:30 AM, which I happen to know is the time NWHU's son leaves for his daily sports team practice, a car alarm went off. It sounded like it was in our yard. It went off for about a minute and then shut off. Then about 15 to 20 minutes later, it went off again.

At this point, I would put nothing past NWHU. I took my phone and busted out the front door in my pyjamas and took a video of her big truck parked as closely as possible to our house with all its lights and alarms going off.

Over the course of that weekend, she set her own car alarm off seven more times, once at midnight, ripping us from sleep and filling me with so much fury, I could not get back to sleep for two hours.

I did a lot of microdosing during this period, just to keep from constantly screaming.

I thought I could do this in two parts but I was wrong, sorry, there will be a third part. Stayed tuned for the thrilling conclusion but also, here is a supercut of some of NWHU's greatest hits.

And for those following along, a 50x50 update:

Books read: 23 

Air fryer uses: 35

No-dessert days: 10 (hahahahahaha)

Vegetarian meals: 49

Meditating but not while in bed: 9

Creampuff's Neighbour Who Hates Us Part 1

As I mentioned in my plum duff post, we have a Neighbour Who Hates Us (NWHU). But it wasn't always so.

When I first met this neighbour, she was quite pleasant and friendly. Probably about our age, British, often busy around her property, where she lives with her university-aged son. She has an adorable cat.

We had nice chats in the driveway or when we met putting out the recycling but I soon noticed that, as our British friend Past would say, NWHU was "one of nature's whingers."

She works from home a lot because her manager at work is just "a terrible person". She tried to sue the city when the development behind all our homes went up (about a year before we moved in). There was always something annoying her but it wasn't us, so things were fine.

We sponsored her son's rowing team; he shovelled our driveway when it snowed - and then she did it once when he couldn't. I baked cookies and brought her a bottle of wine that first Christmas. Good times.

So what went wrong?

Part of the appeal of the house we bought was that the yard was big enough to accomplish what for both of us has been a life-long dream: having a pool.

Did we feel like bourgeois shitbags for installing a pool? Sure. But did that stop us from starting the pool-building process even before we actually moved into the house? No, it did not. We met our wonderful pool contractors in January of 2022 but because they were insanely busy, we didn't break ground on the pool until March of 2023.

The pool did not come as a surprise to NWHU. I mentioned it the first day we met. She remarked on the large parts of the pool sitting next to our garage when she was over shovelling. But she never asked us anything specific about it in the 14 months before we started building, even when we had to take down a large tree in our yard (which I warned her about, because it was noisy) or when I texted to tell her work was beginning the next day.

Two days into the dig, I got an angry text from NWHU. Highlights included:

1. Why was the pool so close to HER yard (instead of in the MIDDLE of our yard, so that both sets of neighbours were "equally inconvenienced" by its existence)?

2. The pool equipment would be noisy.

3. The pool might leak and flood her property.

4. She wouldn't have any privacy. Because of the pool. In OUR yard.

5. She and her son are upset by this whole thing.

I'm not someone who thrives on confrontation, so I found this pretty upsetting. But setting aside her tone, I could understand some of her concerns. So, after consulting with Katr, I sent back a friendly but firm text. Highlights included:

1. The placement of the pool makes the most sense with our yard layout and it's within the allowable distance from the fence line.

2. I hate noise too! Our contractor assured us that the pool equipment would be the quietest available, well below the allowable noise level in our area.

3. It's a steel and concrete frame and a vinyl liner and it's dug into a hill so if there WAS, GODDESS FORBID, a leak, it would flood our property, not yours so...you're good.

4. Uh...no one wants to look in your yard, lady. But there will be landscaping for extra privacy for ALL of us.

5. Pretty sure your son doesn't give a wet shit. Maybe he would like having friendly neighbours with a pool, just saying (this was internal monologue only).

She IMMEDIATELY fired back a text, ignoring my explanations and said that our pool contractors were too focused on OUR needs and were not considering the neighbours. She finished up by saying that this was a kind, respectful neighbourhood and that we must move our pool at least 15 feet from our shared fence.

I wasn't really sure...how to respond to this.

Like, it's not like these guys showed up and started digging. It had taken us 14 months to get to this place. There had been months of planning, and official engineering reports and permits. Plus, at this point, the hole was already dug. The steel frame had already been assembled in the hole.

Moving the pool now would require getting new plans drawn up, new permits, generally a huge delay and an equally huge cost.

And also...not to be a B but...IT'S OUR FUCKING YARD.

While I overfunctioned at a level detectable from space, Katr had the brilliant idea of getting in touch with the previous owners of our house (a young, active couple with two young children) to see if they had any tips for dealing with an angry NWHU.

We texted them and explained the situation, and they had some illuminating things to say. Apparently, NWHU had been in various neighbour feuds in the past, some of which I knew about (the development behind us) and some of which I didn’t, such as a dust-up she got into the neighbours on her other side about cutting down trees in their yard.

In the end, the former owners told us that we may have to be the bigger people in the situation, although they also reminded us that it was our yard and we should do what we want. In closing, they said that NWHU was lucky to have us as neighbours because when they lived here, they had a hot tub pump that was "loud as hell" and they "partied constantly" hahahahaha (I believe it, they had an OUTDOOR TV!)

Fearful that NWHU might have some sort of legal recourse to getting our build shut down, we then double-checked with our pool contractors to make sure that we were in indeed within the limits of the permit for building the pool (we were). They told us that if we REALLY wanted to, we could move the pool a foot or two away further over the fence, but that would necessitate another day of digging and moving the steel frame. They were clearly used to people freaking out during pool builds, and it was extremely calming to talk to them.

So.

Since I had answered NWHU's first text reasonably and with all the information she was actually looking for and addressing all concerns carefully and reasonably, and since the second text was basically calling us shitheads, in the end, we decided not to respond at all, the greatest flex there is. It was extremely satisfying.

The next day, as digging continued to progress for the backfill that would go in around the pool, I heard a great laughing from the guys outdoors. I looked out the kitchen window to see that NWHU had begun to hang a ragtag series of tarps along her fence line. Because...privacy.

Privacy side note: I feel I should point out here that we are the only rancher surrounded by two-story houses. Literally all of our neighbours can see directly into our yard from their second story, windows or balconies. Also, our yard has a slope, so if you walk up the slope to the back of the yard, we also can see into most everybody’s yard just by lifting our head near the fence. So it’s not like she has complete bubble of total privacy that’s been viciously pierced by where the pool is.

We texted the old owners about the tarps and they laughed. "Oh yeah," they said, "The tarps! She put those up when the other neighbour did some landscaping along their fence line that she did not like. And put them at the back when the new construction was behind her house."

Personally, I found the tarps to be a great solution. She didn’t have to worry about our trades looking into her yard. I didn’t have to see her fuck face. We started referring to her as "Our Lady of the Tarps" and I figured that once the digging was done, we'd all just carry on with possibly a bit more of a chill between us.

The end. HAHAHAHAHAHA OMG JUST KIDDING THINGS GOT SO WEIRD YOU GUYS STAY TUNED

And now, a long-overdue 50x50 update:

French lessons: 38

Boardgame plays: 24

5km walks: 27

Hours of knitting: 16

Dips in the pool: 50!!!!!

Creampuff's Plum Duff

Our neighbour who hates us (stay tuned for THAT story) has an enormous plum tree in her yard.

The first year we lived here, I don't think it fruited because I feel that even *I*, whose ironic nickname is "Sherlock Rose", would have noticed a shit ton of plums falling on our lawn, if only because Pumbaa would have tried to eat them.

The second year, there were plums but not a CRAZY amount of plums and also, she now hated us, so I didn't bother to pick them and just let the few that were on our side of the fence fall into the garden, until our landscaper pointed out that they might attract rodentia, at which point I gathered them up and composted them.

This year...there are a crazy amount of plums. And, unlike last year, several heavily laden branches are fully in our yard. And I tasted one and it was pretty good.

I wanted to pick the plums. They were on our side. They were inaccessible to her even if she got on a ladder and leaned over the fence. If I didn't pick them, they would just fall and rot in the garden. One could argue they were our plums.

Even if the law might be on our side, I didn't want to pick the plums while our neighbour who hates us was home. The tree is adjacent to her back balcony, where she occasionally hangs out.

We reached a détente after the events of last year and I didn't want to spoil the delicate peace by shaking her own plum tree in her face.

I kept poking my head out the front door, like a fucking gopher popping out of its burrow, to check if her truck was in her driveway (no one uses their garages for their cars here except for us, it's so weird).

Is it plum time yet? How about now? OMG LADY, JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE FOR 15 MINUTES.

Our neighbour who hates us often works from home (because, I learned before she hated us, she doesn't get along with her co-workers, HAHAHAHAHAHA THE FLAG IS SO RED THO) But she's an active person who goes out and does things, so I was sure I'd be able to find a time when she was gone to get my hands on those plums.

It took 4 days.

I had just finished my French lesson, where I told my teacher the whole story about the neighbour who hates us (gripping, apparently, even in my halting French, we went overtime) and I poked my plum gopher head out the front door and saw that she had finally left the premises.

"It's PLUM TIME, BITCHES!" I yelled at Katr as I cruised through the living room on my way out the back. "Good luck!" she called after me.

I grabbed a bucket, almost died vaulting over the garden Pumbaa-barrier into the bunny grass and made it to the heavily laden tree. Ripe? Not ripe? Basically, if it wasn't actively rotting, it went into the bucket. The bucket was almost full when I heard her balcony door open.

Fuck! Fuck!

Then I heard her 20 year old son's voice, calling for their cat who likes to come drink out of our bird bath and shit beneath the magnolia. I knew that if he saw what I was doing, he wouldn't say anything TO me but he seems like a narc.

Fortunately, I was mostly done and the tree's canopy covered me until I could emerge in a different part of the garden, using my prodigious bulk to hide my bucket of purloined plums.

Guys. I got a bucket of plums.

It was a lot of plums, guys.

What the fuck am I going to do with all these plums?

I wanted to make a plum duff, because it sounds fun and rhymes with "Creampuff" but I looked up the recipe and the first ingredient was "suet."

So I started with this plum almond cake.

It was a TINY bit over done on the bottom but otherwise very moist and tasty, light, not too sweet.

A couple of days after the great plum heist, Katr noticed something weird about the plum tree -- one of the branches was broken. I took a closer look and saw that TWO of the branches were broken, which kind of explains why so much of the tree was practically in our yard.

"You should take a photo and text her," said Katr, a normal person who is nice.

"Counterpoint," I said, "I do NOT text her, we wait until winter when all the leaves fall off and she notices it herself."

"No," said Katr, "because we are people who do the right thing."

Sigh.

So I took some photos of the broken part of the tree, as far away as I could so that she wouldn't accuse me of taking pictures of HER YARD, and sent them to her and her son with a friendly "Heads up, your tree is fucked up, you might not be able to see it from your side" note and she actually responded "Thx", so Katr, you are probably right AGAIN, shut up.

And now, another scintillating 50x50 update:
New recipes: 5 (includes that plum cake!)
Vegetarian meals: 39
Board game plays: 17
5KM walks: 20
Blog posts: 11

Creampuff's Cautionary ChatGPT Tale

Now that it’s here, I think I feel the same way about AI as most everyone else does. In the macro, I wanted to make our lives easier and not kill us all. In the micro, I want it to make my job easier but not actually take my job.

I'm a late adopter who's married to, and works with, an early adopter. So when ChatGPT first became available and they all said AI was SPECIFICALLY going to decimate people in my line of work (marketing), I decided to really impress Katr and sign up for an OpenAI account. Sort of a combo "Look, I'm trying new things!" and "keep your enemies closer" tactic, because Katr - and robots - respect that.

The first task I prompted ChatGPT to do was to write me a multiple choice trivia question about Formula One driving.

It said "Sure!" and wrote me a multiple choice trivia question about which F1 driver had won the most World Championships. The answer was Lewis Hamilton.

I've heard of Lewis Hamilton so I thought "This seems right." But I knew the people answering this question would FLIP THEIR SHIT if the answer was wrong, so I decided to double check ChatGPT's work.

It turns out that Louis Hamilton has won 7 World Championships! But you know what? So has Michael Schumacher. They're tied. And there was zero mention of it in this trivia question.

So I went back to ChatGPT and said "Hey, can you please modify the question to indicate that in fact there are two people who are tied for most World Championship wins?"

ChatGPT said "Of course!" and then rewrote the exact same question and then in the the answer wrote "It's Louis Hamilton, who by the way is also tied with this other guy."

This is the point where I understood that I probably should not use ChatGPT for anything factual. You know what it's great at? Bad puns and emojis. The emojis!! It throws shit in there that that I did not even know existed! AI has taken my emoji game to the next level. ⛲🏟️🪐

Something else that ChatGPT is very good at is helping with simple tasks, like reformatting documents. So last week, Katr and I were working on a project where we were creating a list of Olympic athletes, along with a few fun facts about them, such as how many Olympic Games they had attended, their most recent notable result, and a personal fact, like they play the trombone.

We were doing this list in a spreadsheet. But when we had to get it translated into French, we had to reformat it from a spreadsheet into Word, because Translation will not work from a spreadsheet.

So rather than ask one of our overtaxed team members to take on this tedious task, Katr asked ChatGPT to do it. 

The desired format was very straightforward:
Name of athlete
Number of games attended
Notable result recent
Fun personal fact

ChatGPT made fast work of this. AI FTW! We did a quick scan of the resulting document to make sure it was formatted correctly and sent it off to Translation.

When the document came back from Translation, I had to spend a lot of time painstakingly editing down the French, because our pithy English "Santiago 2023: Silver in men's team foil" got translated as "Santiago 2023 : il a remporté l'argent à l'épreuve masculine de fleuret par équipes". So it took me a day to get to page 2 of the document.

I was using the English from the spreadsheet and the French from Translation. The next athlete on my spreadsheet was named François. Let’s say his last name was Cotton. Next on the list in the French document was the name François Lamontagne.

This was confusing. But I thought "Hey, there are a lot of moving parts in this project. Maybe this guy changed his name and Katr updated it in this document but not in the original spreadsheet?"

So I continued with François, comparing the French to the English version in the spreadsheet.

EN: First Olympic Games
FR: First Olympic Games.
Check.

EN: Currently ranked fifth in the world
FR: Canadian team’s top scoring player in mixed sabre.
WAIT.

EN: B.A. in Engineering.
FR: Previously competed in figure skating.

WHAT.

THE.

FUCK.

I continued reading down to the next athlete on the list. The name was unfamiliar. I looked back at our spreadsheet. And found the name did not exist there.

Neither did the next 11 names in the Translation document.

With growing horror, I started to grok what had happened.

Somehow, in the midst of reformatting a spreadsheet to a Word doc, ChatGPT had created 11 COMPLETELY FAKE athletes, complete with Games information, competition information and personal facts and, in the process, had DELETED SIX ACTUAL ATHLETES and their information from the list.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are some of the fake athletes ChatGPT created instead of just moving our actual athletes from a spreadsheet to Word:

Gina Daniels
First Olympic games
Represented Canada at 2019 Pan Am Games
Hobbies: photography, reading

Ivan Kojevnikov
First Olympic games
Won Bronze at 2023 European Championships
Studying computer science at UBC

Janet Lin
First Olympic games
Scored the winning goal at 2023 World Cup
Dream job: astronaut

Jesse Holman
First Olympic games
Named MVP at 2023 Nationals
Also plays the piano

Jessica Rodriguez
First Olympic games
Double Silver medallist at 2023 Pan Am Games
Speaks three languages

John Barnes
First Olympic games
Bronze at 2023 World Athletics Championships
Holds national record for javelin throw

Jordan Smith
First Olympic games
Won Gold at 2023 Nationals
Nickname: Jordo

I’ve obviously heard about ChatGPT just making shit up. The most well-known story is probably about that lawyer who got ChatGPT to write a brief and ChatGPT made up a bunch of law cases that didn’t exist. And obviously my experience with trivia question it made me leery of asking it to do any kind of factual research.

But reformatting a spreadsheet into a Word doc doesn't seem like the kind of request that would cause ChatGPT to "freestyle". So I’m sharing this story because it’s both funny and terrifying and because I know some of you out there like to use ChatGPT for these kinds of simple tasks and you assume that it's not going to fuck you. But it WILL.

So I'm taking a stand. We can’t trust the machines. We’re going to have to keep doing our own fucking jobs, guys. And, as our colleague Brhu says when we're trying to figure out if an image looks AI generated: "Check the fingers."

And now, a 50x50 update:
Dips in the pool: 16
French lessons: 25
Books read: 11
Air fryer uses: 12
Pillows touched: 45 (almost there!)