Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff Wraps Up Another NaBloPoMo

I did it! 30 days! 30 posts! And they were all GOLD. Hahahahahahaaa

Huge thanks goes to Katr, for inspiring me with her heroism and being patient every day as I complained that I didn't know what to write about.

It's Katr's birthday today and darling - my gift to you is to not be blogging every day. YOU ARE WELCOME MY LOVE

Some excellent things have come out of this month of blogging revitalization:

1. I got caught up with awesome blogger and fellow NaBloPoMo-er Solitary Diner, from whom I stole some post ideas.
   
   
2. I made friends with a Fiona the Baby Hippo fan as rabid as myself (Hi Jennifer!)
   
   
3. I learned that one of my childhood friends is now a GI nurse and so next time I have a stomach explosion, she said I could message HER on Facebook instead of my gastritis prayer group!
   
   
4. I discovered that a LOT of people get email for other people thanks to Gmail letting you register email addresses with periods or dashes and then not recognizing periods or dashes.
   
   
5. I found out that when you mention Duolingo in a post, Duolingo will email you about your "great article" and ask you to put a link to Duolingo in your post (you're welcome, Igor from Duolingo).
   
   
6. I showed up for things that I said I would attend and inspired at least one other person to show up for something they might otherwise have blown off. So yeah, I'm a thought leader. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

This afternoon, we completed our holiday decor with a wreath from the UBC Botanical Garden:

 

Then took the dog for a romp in the rain:

And tonight, we celebrate the miracle of Katr's birth with much drinking and merriment! And then we will come home drunk and watch the reunion special of this season's Project Runway, because OMG THE TWINS.

Thanks to everyone who came to read my blog this month and to everyone who stroked my ego by telling me I should do it more. My intentions are so good, you guys.

I love you all and we'll see you next November!

Creampuff Misses her Dumb Games

Many years ago, Katr introduced me to an online game called Neopets and I became addicted. Basically, you have a virtual pet and...you have to feed it. You could play a bunch of weird mini-games to earn points to buy food to feed your pets and you could change your pet's outfit and you could battle your pets against other pets and you could have your own shop and you could have a house and decorate it with stuff you bought from shops. There was a lot of other stuff you could do to, but those are the things I mostly did.

This is my pet on the right, AdelinaVenus the Elephante.

I always miss Neopets this time of year, because for the month of December, they had an Advent Calendar in the snowy area of Neopia and you could visit it every day and get stuff.

I realize that I am 42, but this kind of thing still delights me.

I stopped playing Neopets several years ago, because it had changed hands a couple of times and became very glitchy and also, I recognized that I was spending waaaay more time on it than a person should.

I was game-free for awhile, until our friend Elai sucked us into a Facebook game called Pet Society. 

Pet Society was like Neopets Lite. VERY lite. It was more about shopping and decorating and adorning your pet, which I loved. It was a very popular game and I had many "Pet Society friends" on Facebook and we would just used each other for daily bonuses and everyone was fine with that arrangement.

Eventually, the creators realized they weren't making much money and they started to monetize the game and I will not lie to you guys, I DID pay a small amount of actual money to get non-actual items. My taste was exquisite. BEHOLD.

Indiana Jones themed week - although nothing was licensed of course, so it was Bindiana Bones.

The Boyal Bedding. My hat was the best.

 Bight at the Buseum.

 Had I known that they were going to shutter Pet Society with so little fanfare, I have taken screenshots of my countless other rooms, like the Barry Botter room and the room where it always snowed. GOD, I loved Pet Society. But it's gone.

I was briefly drawn into Castleville, but that thing just got too crazy and it wasn't fun any more, so I quit that.

Then I got sucked into Tiny Tower on the iPhone...and its companion game, Tiny Death Star...but after awhile, those both started to feel more like work then fun, so I gave them up too.

It's been a few years since I really got into one of these dumb games and I miss them a little bit. Katr and Drtr both have a couple of games that they both enjoy but they both like more complicated things. I'm a simple bear. Who wants a simple game.

All this to say - if you have any suggestions for dumb games, I am ALL EARS. Like this tiny warthog.

Tiny warthog cooling off in a tiny mud puddle. pic.twitter.com/30bFK53UOS

— Surprising Nature (@suprisingnature) November 28, 2017

Creampuff Not a Pedorthist's Dream

It has not been a banner year for Creampuff's general physical well-being. And it all started in May. Inspired by the beautiful spring weather, I decided I would try to improve my general health by walking more.

I was walking Effie for about an hour, four or five days a week (don't freak out - Drtr, or one of her TWO SETS OF DOG WALKERS were walking her when I was not). I decided that I would try to work my way up to walking her 5km every time we went out and after a few weeks, we hit that goal and I was very proud of myself and felt great.

There was only one problem - my right foot hurt.

I've had plantar fasciitis on and off for years but it hadn't bothered me for ages and I'd somehow misplaced my old orthotics AND the boots they were in back in 2015. I tried stretching and did all the exercises they tell you to do and made sure I was wearing good shoes and occasionally took an ibuprofen, but I continued to walk and it continued to get worse, to the point where, every time I stood up, I would LURCH forward, like Frankenstein's monster, limping like an idiot and hanging on to furniture for dear life, until my foot warmed up enough for me to walk more normally.

After a few weeks of this, my left knee, tired of being lurched on to every time I tried to get up, said "FUCK YOU, FATTY" and also went out. So that put an end to my excellent 5km walks and also enabled me to shuffle sadly about for most of the summer. It was funny, because I had increased my endurance so much that I didn't get tired from walking but I could only do it real, real slow. 

I slowly healed, reduced my dog walking time and went and got a prescription for orthotics. And then my stomach said "FUCK YOU, FATTY" and I couldn't do much walking for almost a month because I would get dizzy from not eating. But you know what also happens when you're not eating? Your body starts to eat itself! Sure it fuckers up your metabolism, but it did lead to less pressure on my foot and I started to get excited about walking again. I just got back up to 5km per walk this week! But now my foot is hurting again.

So yesterday, I FINALLY got it together to go in for an orthotics appointment.

The last time I got orthotics, I put my feet in a box of foam at the chiropractor's and then, two weeks later, the orthotics arrived. THIS time, I had an hour long appointment with a professional pedorthist whose name rhymed with "Belson". 

Belson was so nice that I ended up not making a joke about how the first four letters in "pedorthist" are "pedo". He spent a lot of time looking at my feet on the floor, testing their range of motion on the exam table and repeatedly had to tell me to relax my feet, which was hard, because a) I don't like having my feet touched and b) I'm used to stretching my feet when they're touched, because that's what our yoga teachers always want us to do. 

"This big toe isn't as flexible as the left one," he noted.

"Oh yeah," I said, a memory surfacing like a magical porpoise, "I BROKE that toe doing a punch front off a springboard in 7th grade!"

Belson made a note.

"And there's a sort of bump here on the right side of the right foot."

"Holy shit," I said, as a memory narwhal joined the porpoise, "I BROKE that foot falling off a curb when I was 12! Man, you're like a palm reader. But for feet! A SOLE reader!"

Belson, to his credit, gave me an LOL.

After the foot exam, he wanted to watch me walk (because come on, who wouldn't?), so I paraded around the office as Belson analyzed my gait.

The results were not good.

"Well," he said, "I'm kind of surprised that it's your right foot that's hurting, because it's your left side that's really messed up. Your knees are a little hyperextended and then your heel...well, it's like every step, your heel slides out like - "

He did a move that looked like this: 

 I could NOT stop laughing. 

Belson 3D imaged my feet (THE FUTURE IS NOW) and I'm going to pick my orthotics in a couple of weeks. I am VERY excited at the prospect of being able to walk pain-free.

The dog is going to be EXHAUSTED.

 

Creampuff's Tanenbaum

I was so impressed with my fellow NaBloPoMo-er Solitary Diner, who got rid of her Christmas tree this year as part of her impressive decluttering efforts. Just as she was getting rid of her tree...we were buying a new one.

We can't have a real tree, much to Katr's chagrin, because I am a special snowflake who is allergic to nature. We bought our pre-lit faux tree back in 2003 and it served us well until the end of 2014, when it looked like this:

After attempts to relight this tree utterly failed, we gave it the old heave-ho and then, for two years, did not have a tree at all for two reasons, both of which appear conveniently in the following photo.

That's right - we had a little puppy and the house was stuffed with hundreds of shoeboxes. Last year, Effie probably could have handled the tree, but last year's Shoebox Project was the most successful yet and that meant that every inch of floor space was occupado. But, after five years of shoebox lurve, we're taking a break from it and that means we had room for a BRAND NEW TREE!! We decorated it yesterday.

It was so fun to see all of our ridiculous and pretty and super old ornaments come out of the boxes that Katr packed up so meticulously back in 2014. We have a lot of great ornaments from all stages of our lives, but probably my favourite is an ornament that I made in kindergarten, which my parents gifted to me when they moved and decided to go treeless.

It is made of pasta, beans and glue and it basically looks like a pool of vomit encased in a green ribbon. FEAST YOUR EYES.

I love that some crafty teacher put these materials together and thought "These are what memories are made of." And almost 40 years laters, that teacher was right.

Anyway, I thought there was going to be a point to this post, but I think it's just me bragging about having the time and space this year to put up a tree. SO FESTIVE!!

Question for the tree-having members of the class - what's the weirdest ornament on your tree this year?

Creampuff's Top Gift Suggestion for This Year

Back in 2012, I bought Katr a five year journal for Christmas. A five year journal is a little book with five years' worth of space to record a line or two about your day. I got Katr the Happiness Project Five Year Journal, because she'd enjoyed the book.

While she found the daily quotes about happiness kind of relentless and oppressive, ("QUIT TELLING ME HOW TO FEEL, BOOK!!") Katr still managed to write a little something in there every day and I thought "This is so COOL. I want one of these!"

So in 2013, I bought one for myself - the Jane-A-Day Five Year Journal. And every night, I write something in there.

Here's what a page from the journal looks like, if you're interested. You should all get one, they're super fun.

I have always wanted to keep a regular journal, but I'm obviously too lazy to blog regularly, I hate writing long hand and most of my digital journals just end up turning into wank fests (the angsty kind, not the kind you want to wank to). So the five year journal is PERFECT - I can record a few salient details about events or feelings or weird dreams or funny shit I might otherwise forget, and it takes me 2 minutes a day.

But the BEST part of the Five Year Journal is being able to look back over the previous years and see how things have changed, how things have totally NOT changed and the unconscious patterns you've developed in your life. It's sobering to see how much you obsess over the same things, year after year. It's fun to remember the little details of days from three years ago, when you tried a new recipe or had a really good phone conversation with your best friend. And it's hilarious when we make random plans with our friends and I'll notice the day before we get together that we'd gotten together on the same weekend the year before, or played the same game, or gone out to the same place, or bitched about the same things. 

It's also a great way to keep track of your first eggnog latte of the season every year. Because I do that. This year, for example, my first eggnog latte of the season was today.

I'm a little sad because I am on the last year of my Jane-a-Day Journal and I have to START FRESH next year. While it's kind of delightful to face a blank page, I'll miss re-reading the previous year's entries before recording the day's events. So here are a very few of my favourite five year journal things that I will have to start anew in 2018:

BEST COINCIDENCES:

July 26, 2013 - I happened to be in Calgary for a family reunion and my oldest childhood friend Chma came by and picked me up and I spent a lovely morning with her and her awesome kids at a splash park, drinking lattes. 

July 26, 2017 - The same date, FOUR YEARS LATER - Chma and her family happened to be in Vancouver, so I got to meet up with them and have lattes! I hadn't seen them in the intervening four years.

Oct 15, 2014 - I starting writing my play The Good Bride!

Oct 15, 2015 - Was the first preview of The Good Bride at Northern Light Theatre!

REFERENCES I WAS SURE I WOULD REMEMBER THE FOLLOWING YEAR BUT NOW HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY MEANT

Feb 29, 2014 (not a date that actually occurred): "How I long for the clamour of the chestnut man."

Mar 21, 2015: "Thank you for your patience, fucky!"

May 28, 2015: "It is better to have a dead person in your house than someone from Pisa."

BEST ONE LINE ENTRIES

Jan 21, 2015: Tanya tied me to a chair during savasana today.

Oct 26, 2013: Stole neighbour's zucchini and lied about it HAVE NEVER FELT MORE ALIVE.

Nov 12, 2013: Clafoutis.

Jan 11, 2014: There's a wind warning in Vancouver - and another wind warning IN MY PANTS.

I have tried to foist the five year journal on a few folks over the years and I don't think any of them EVER used them. So many this idea is delightful only to me. But if you think it sounds fun, they're not too pricey and make a great stocking stuffer! YOU'RE WELCOME. And thank you for your patience, fucky.

 

Creampuff's Final Shar Pei Saturday...FOR NOW

If I go through the photos on my phone, 98% of them are from the dog. Even when we went to Mexico and I took a million photos of the amazing towel art Housekeeping left in our room every day, I still have a TON of photos of the dog on my phone from Drtr, who was dog/housesitting while we were away.

I love all the photos of the dog - derpy, tongue-out, foamy-faced, staring intently at her prey - but I have a special place in my heart for pictures where she's awake but has her eyes closed.

I love it because it looks like she's meditating.

Taking deep yoga breaths...

Or SMELLING THE SEA...

Naturally, being so zen is exhausting.

Good dog.

Creampuff Learns that Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Even though marriage is supposed to make you one flesh, sometimes you still disagree on what food to order in for dinner.

Every now and then, Katr has a strong craving for sushi. While I enjoy sushi, it's not my favourite meal. So sometimes, when Katr wants to order sushi and I am not recovering from a stomach explosion, I will seek my dinner elsewhere. Somewhere...dirtier. And that somewhere is...the A&W.

I don't eat a lot of fast food in general, but I am disgusting and enjoy it when I have it. We have two fast food joints within very easy walking distance (i.e. too close to feel that walking to get the fast food in any way mitigates the eating of the fast food). I would get McDonalds more often if Big Macs didn't trigger a condition I like to call "persistent ass hose". A&W is the lesser of the local evils and you can get a root beer float!

So one fine evening, Katr shared her strong urge for sushi and I, excited to have an excuse for onion rings, beetled off to the Dub.

It was a beautiful night and a few people were firing up their grills, so there was a lovely woodsmoke smell in the neighbourhood as I headed home, clutching my dirty dinner.

Usually I time things so that I arrive home with my hot garbage at the same time Katr's sushi is delivered but this time, I arrived home before the sushi man. I wanted my food to stay warm, so I put the bag in the warming drawer in the oven and turned the drawer on to "Low".

As we waited for the sushi to arrive, I noticed that the subtle smell of woodsmoke had drifted through the open window and mentioned it to Katr, who breathed deeply in appreciation.

A few minutes later, the smoke smell was...a little stronger.

"Hmm," I said to Katr, "I guess maybe the neighbours have jumped on the grill bandwagon."

"Well," Katr said, "they're out of town until next week, so..."

"Oh," I said. Then turned to look at the warming drawer. "You don't think..."

Katr went over and opened the warming drawer. And then stood back as a TOWER OF FLAME rose from my burning dinner. It was a real Backdraft moment.

 An aside: all this time, I thought the flame was in the oven proper and warm AIR was all that blew into the warming drawer. Apparently not. Apparently, the warming drawer has an open flame in it, you guys. And you what what burns real good? Yeah, it's paper.

As a pyrophobic, my first instinct was to abandon the house IMMEDIATELY. We had a good run! Adios, casa!

Katr, on the other hand, was cool as a cucumber.

"Hand me the lid from that pot," she said calmly as I rocketed fatly around, opening doors and fanning under the ultra-sensitive smoke detector, "and maybe a damp cloth."

I handed her the lid and then was like, "How wet should the cloth be? Should I get the hose and just flood the whole kitchen?"

Katr, getting the fire under control, "Not too wet, baby. I'm TRYING TO SAVE YOUR DINNER [EMPHASIS MINE]."

After a few dicey seconds of lidding the fire, Katr managed to not only keep the conflagration from consuming our home, but also save my Teen Burger Combo.

It tasted deliciously of campfire.

I like to think that I'm "good in a crisis", but I'm just not. You know who is? The woman who married me. THANK FUCK.

Katr - I love you and your calm response to fire. NEVER LEAVE ME. 

 

Creampuff Identity Crisis

When I first started blogging, I loved the anonymous nature of it, because I was a mean person and I looked forward to using my blog to say mean things about people anonymously.

But then it occurred to me that I might want some people to actually read my blog and if I was anonymous, my friends wouldn't know I was blogging. I had to make a choice; be a dick and blog in obscurity, or not be a dick and have readers. 

I think I made the right choice, because I am a lot less mean now. I think about other peoples' feelings and shit. This has spread to my other social media as well, where I don't passive aggressively vague-book or sub-tweet the way that I'm SURE I would have if I hadn't started blogging non-anonymously first. Blogging helped me evolve into a more thoughtful and compassionate human being, is what I'm saying.

Anyway - all this talk of non-anonymity is just background for this post, which is about my real name: Rosemary Rowe.

Phew. Now you know.

I LOVE my name and think it was a bold choice on my parents' part to go with the alliteration. I also, for many years, thought it was unique. I'd certainly never met any other Rosemarys. And how many Rosemary Rowes could there BE in the world??

It turns out, there are A LOT. And for some reason, they don't know their own fucking gmail address. How do I know this? Because they keep using mine.

My gmail address is my full name [at] gmail.com. No one else has that email address. But the other Rosemarys keep either giving it out (and never getting the subsequent emails, because I get them), or their friends/colleagues/lawyers/family can't remember their actual email address.

I get Rosemary Rowe in Dublin's email the most: I've gotten her plane tickets, her son Philip's wedding invite list (full names and addresses), her son's wedding photos, her birthday party pictures (one of which is the picture at the top of the post), financial portfolio information from her stock brokers and a three day travel log from her Uncle Mike when he and the wife visited the Vatican. I actually have Dublin Rosemary's work email address now, so that I can forward her whatever weird shit I get that is clearly meant for her.

A Rosemary Rowe in Minnesota was invited to a Bible Study by her friend Susan, because the Lord had laid it on Susan's heart to help Rosemary avoid a divorce by becoming a more submissive wife. You can imagine how I was DYING to impersonate THAT Rosemary, but it seemed like Susan and Rosemary were co-workers, so I knew I couldn't get away with it, so I had to email Susan back. Then Susan sent me the Bible study homework, just in case. Thanks, Susan.

Rosemary Rowe in New South Wales had a few books out from the Sutherland Shire Library that were due soon (plus she had requested Gnomeo and Juliet, which was in!). I didn't want her to get a fine, so I contacted the library.

Rosemary Rowe in Miami recently started using Rainbow Cleaning Service, who send out, like, three reminder emails whenever there's a cleaning scheduled. "Hey Rainbow guys," I emailed them, "this isn't the right email!" They continued to email me relentlessly and after contacting them three times, I just sent all their stuff to spam.

One of the Rosemarys signed me up for Duolingo. I briefly thought I might try to learn Spanish, since I was getting emails about it every ding dong day. Finally those reminders ceased and then either that Rosemary Rowe or another one signed me up for Duolingo again, but this time German.

One of the American Rosemary Rowes used my gmail address as her Apple ID, which caused a very confusing several minutes for me, as I wondered if someone was trying to hack my Apple account and spend my precious gift card stash. Nooooooo! Fortunately, it seemed to be just another case of a Rosemary Rowe not knowing her own gmail address. It must have taken her awhile to figure it out, because it happened a second time about a week later. I trust she has sorted her shit out by now.

Today, one of the Rosemary Rowes signed me up for Groupon. I'm sure she's wondering where the hell her verification email is. Rosemary - I have it. 

I get it when someone emails their Rosemary Rowe using the wrong address - probably they don't remember that it's RosemaryLRowe, or RosemaryRowe43. But when the actual Rosemary Rowe signs up for something and puts their own email address in wrong...that concerns me. Rosemarys - get it together, chicks!

Now, there are other Rosemary Rowes for whom I do not get emails but whom I know exist, thanks to Google alerts. There's a famous Rosemary Rowe,  an elderly British author who writes quite gripping historical fiction murder mysteries (I do occasionally get fan mail for her). There's a Rosemary Rowe who is a councillor on the South Hams District Council (she's quoted in her local papers quite often).

On the darker side, there's a Rosemary Rowe who was murdered in Australia in 2010 by a guy who was obsessed with her daughter (whom he also murdered); and another Rosemary Rowe in Tasmania got stabbed by her husband a bunch of times while she was driving, after admitting that she'd had an affair (he's in jail now and she's still kickin').

You guys - Rosemary Rowes are busy people with a lot going on.

I also had one really sweet experience, where this girl wrote me that her mom's name was Rosemary Rowe and her mom had died. She was missing her mom, so she googled her name and found me. She said it was nice to know that there was someone out there with her mom's name who was being alive and funny. I will not lie, you guys...I cried. I wrote her back a nice note and that was that, but I think about her a lot.

 One of my many dreams is to make a documentary called "The Other Rosemarys" and track down a bunch of these ladies and go to their countries and just talk to them about what their lives are like. Though I imagine such a documentary would be interesting only to me and other people named Rosemary Rowe. Fortunately, as I have established, it would have a large, built-in audience. Because we are EVERYWHERE.

 

 

Creampuff Encouragement

Sometimes as an artiste, it's easy to get discouraged when your artistic endeavours are less successful than you would like. You send out your work several times a year to places that often do not even confirm receipt. You get rejected over and over again for that grant or that theatre season or that workshop you're dying to be a part of. You start to doubt whether your stuff is any good and you wonder if you should just not bother at all.

And then...you see this trailer.

For a movie.

That is real.

I suppose that a trailer like this could fill you with rage that someone spent actual money making this.

But I choose to take the glass half full approach. Which is that if total garbage like this can get made, with KRIS FUCKIN' KRISTOFFERSON as the voice of the ghost dog, then there is hope for ALL of us. ALL OF US!!!!!!!

Thank you, Best Friend from Heaven. THANK YOU.

 

Creampuff Only Knit One Other Thing This Year

I only got my shit together to write two posts this year before NaBloPoMo - one about how it kept fucking snowing and one about my knitting.

Well, I'm embarrassed to say that it's been six months and I have knit ONE THING THAT WHOLE TIME.

Here it is.

This is Saroyan. I've wanted to knit this for YEARS, because it looked easy (it was), yet cool and also, it was named after Dr. Camille Saroyan from the show BONES, which was a great show to knit to because they talk a lot and you can look at your knitting when the corpse falls apart disgustingly.

The yarn is aran silky merino in the Fading Leaves in Fog colourway, by my favourite yarn purveyor, Sundara Yarn. I used almost two full skeins for this project, which is great, because now I have room for the two new skeins of Sundara that I ordered this week! HA ha!

Now, I rarely post photos of my shitty knitting before the intended recipient has received their gift, but in this case, the intended recipient is on vacation in Mexico and FOR SURE won't read this before she gets home to find Saroyan waiting for her, because she's drunk and in the ocean, as she should be.

Up next...I am making more fingerless mitts for Kate! And this is the Iceland Lagoon chunky merino that I ordered from Sundara, so get ready for something fluffy as fuck in 2022.