Creampuff Revolution

Oh Fuck I Missed a Day

Welp, I missed yesterday. I was going to sneakily write a post and back date it and PRETEND like I totally wrote a post yesterday but then I thought "Who cares?" You don't care. You just want me to be happy and follow my heart.

Creampuff #TBT

As I mentioned in my Sunday post, my cousin Caro has finished scanning almost all of my grandfather's huge collection of slides and, along with those stunning princess shots, little Roro makes a few more appearances.

In the spirit of #TBT, here are a few of my favourites:

This is me and my little brother Jaro.

Between the long skirt and the little knit cap, I feel like we look like kids in a polygamous cult. Jaro is saying "I don't think that guy is really The Prophet." and I'm saying "Shhh, Jaro. That's Satan talking."

I call this one "Rosemary's Baby".

What kind of creepy face am I making? I get a real "I done killt ma sister"/We Need to Talk about Kevin vibe from this photo. Rest assured that is a DOLL, not an actual baby. I ASSUME.

Here is me letting my dad know that NATURE. IS. THE. WORST.

And here is me ready to do some serious yardwork, with my sweet grandma hovering behind me to make sure I don't fall into the pond to the left.

I love the look on my face here, like "Listen. I know I'm a main event in your life. But I'm just an ordinary kid, just here to garden like everyone else. Although I am aware that I am ROCKING THIS SNOWSUIT"

I DONE KILLT MA SISTER

Creampuff Sittin' Pretty

No.

Creampuff Remembers That Last Election Day

We had a municipal election here in Vancouver on October 20. Katr and I are very diligent voters to begin with but a good friend of ours was running for city council, so we made sure to vote early and often. Hahaha just kidding, we just voted early, but we congratulated ourselves often (this is Katr's I Voted! sticker on the right - I put mine in my pocket and then found it after the election and it felt like it was too late to wear it on Oct 30).

The ballot for this year's election was very long. For example, there were 71 people running for city council and their names were not in alphabetical order on the ballot - the names on the ballot were in random order, so that Brinder Bains didn't have an advantage over Wei Qiao Zhang. But this made it tricky when you DID know who you wanted to vote for, because it was really fuckin' hard to find them.

Thanks to Plan Your Vote, and Katr, who actually did all the research and put the list together for me and sent it to my phone, I had my list of chosen candidates the mayoral, city council and school board races all ready to go when we got to the polls. I got my five foot long ballot from the volunteer and dragged it over to the "privacy booth" to begin the process. I filled in my choices for the mayoral, city council and park board candidates before getting to the school board candidates.

And that's when I saw it.

Mrs. Doubtfire was running for school board.

I had seen chalk graffiti on my morning walks saying "Mrs. Doubtfire scool board" and assumed it was just a joke. But apparently, it was NOT a joke. There was her name, right on the ballot.

And I REALLY REALLY wanted to vote for Mrs. Doubtfire.

A battle for my soul began in the voting booth. 

Devil: YOU HAVE TO. It's HILARIOUS.

Angel: Don't throw away your vote on a joke.

Devil: But come ONNNNN. It's for school boaaaaaard!! Who gives a shit about school board??? YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE KIDS.

Angel: I know people who have kids!

Devil: But it could be so crazy! Mrs. Doubtfire could really shake things up at the ol' VSB. It would be a non-stop thrill-ride of assaholic-ness! It would be like when Trump got el--- oh, wait, shit.

Angel: There it is.

Devil: Shut up.

It still took an Herculean effort to stick to my original list. But in the end, I cast my vote for an actual candidate with actual ideas about making the school board better blah blah blah BO-RING.

According to these election results, 5912 of my fellow Vancouverites couldn't resist voting for Mrs. Doubtfire - although she still finished last, unlike Rollergirl for mayor and Spike for city council, who both did pretty well.

After the election, I had a pang of regret - what if Mrs. Doubtfire wasn't a total joke? What if the candidate who ran as Mrs. Doubtfire actually had some great ideas but no money or name recognition and felt like running as Mrs. Doubtfire was their only way to stand out?

I did a little research and found a Q&A that the Georgia Straight did with all of the school board candidates. Here's a snippet:

Question 4: What’s your position on school closures?

MrsD: I have not ruled out shutting down schools. If we shut down some schools those buildings could be used for housing as incentives to attract and recruit human resources and otherwise combat the unaffordability underlying so many of the board's problems. It may not be the most popular answer to this question, but in the end which is more traumatic to students, teachers, and their families? In the last legal election, I was the only candidate to not promise not to shut down schools. Several of those candidates have now openly admitted that they were incompetent.

So no, I'm okay with my choice. Although I AM a little disappointed that I didn't vote for Sophia Cherryse Kaur Kaiser for mayor:

"I live in the utter udder bliss of my Milky Way Universal breast vortex. Pure bliss in the 13th vibration vibrating my quantum signature oom (11v) my genetics DNA Logos Word (10v) which becomes my consciousness (9v) of every breath I've ever breathed."

TOTES, amirite? 

Anyway, the last time there was a big election in the U.S., me, Katr and Drtr ate a lot of chocolate and drank a lot of booze as we watched shit get waaaaay too real. In the interim, we discovered pot brownies, so that happened first thing this morning, because we couldn't face a whole day of exit polls, voter suppression and stomach-churning anxiety unmedicated. 

America - we are thinking of you!! You can do this!

 

Creampuff Asks the Eternal Question - When Calls The Heart?

Now, I know you all think of me as an urban sophisticate with high brow taste, but I have a confession to make. Sometimes, I enjoy watching something silly and comforting on TV.

Something where you don't have to think too much or keep track of too many characters or have complex feelings or ask a lot of questions about if plot points are "realistic".

In a recent quest to expand our silly and comforting TV repertoire, Katr and I tried to relive our childhood by watching Little House on the Prairie. 

It turns out that in the '70s, it was customary to stretch about 20 minutes worth of story into an hour of TV, so for every actual "thing that happens", there is an endless series of shots of Pa walking or riding horses, shirtless in high-waisted pants, the wind rippling through his washed-once-a-week hair, like he's in a prairie music video, trying to flush out sexy prairie dogs. We gave up after about a season. We want a show to be silly and comforting, not BORING WE HAVE STANDARDS.

After giving up on Little House, we were still primed for sweet ass prairie goodness, but with better outfits and that's when we started watching When Calls the Heart on Netflix.

When Calls the Heart is a Hallmark Channel show. Lori Loughlin is in it, so that's probably all you need to know.

When Calls the Heart is set in a mining town where there has been a mining accident recently and most of the men in the town were killed in the mine. If this set-up sounds familiar, it's also the premise of another Western-themed show on Netflix called Godless. 

In the previews, I feel they sold Godless as an "all the dudes in this town were killed in a mining accident and now women run the town wocka wocka" kind of romp with a little Three Amigos-style peril at the end. But IN REALITY, it was mainly about a violent conflict between two dudes and there was a lot of sexual violence and it was really fucking disturbing in several parts. Only my love of Merritt Weaver and my faith in screenwriter Scott Frank kept me watching until the very satisfying conclusion. It was neither silly nor comforting.

Anyway, back to When Calls the Heart. In When Calls the Heart, big city rich girl Elizabeth Thatcher travels to the frontier to teach school to winsome ragamuffins in the tiny town of Coal Valley. Pampered Elizabeth knows a lot of book learnin' but doesn't know how to light a stove or cook, so she burns a lot of things, including the house she's supposed to live in, so she has to move in with Lori Loughlin.

There's a super hot Mountie in town - Jack - and in the first episode, he discovers that he's been assigned to this boring backwater instead of exciting Cape Fullerton because Elizabeth's rich dad wanted a Mountie in town to protect his little girl. Jack is SUPER PISSED about this and blames Elizabeth. Naturally, they fall in lurve.

You can see why Hallmark Channel enthusiasts love this show. The "issues" they tackle on When Calls the Heart are generally things like "wacky misunderstandings between will-they-or-won't-they couples", "education is important - even for GIRLS!", startling revelations like "You're MARRIED?" or "You were in PRISON?" and the occasional gang of outlaws passing through town who somehow manage to worm their way into the hearts of characters of the fairer sex and then get caught in dramatic fashion by Mountie Jack and one-time-Mountie-and-now-who-knows-what-the-hell-he's-up-to Bill, seen here drinking milk with Lori Loughlin.

It's ridiculous and we can't stop watching it. And I'll admit, the show has one other claim on my affections.

There's a character on When Calls the Heart named Rosemary LeVeaux. She's a very dramatic actress who vastly overestimates her own talents and is blissfully unaware of how annoying she is but in the end, she also has a heart of gold. Because it's a Hallmark show and you either have a heart of gold or a heart of coal and get caught doing crime and then Mountie Jack takes you to the pokey, where you get stared at by his basset hound Rip.

As I mentioned in one of my posts last year, my name is not nearly as unique as I'd like it to be. Actually meeting another Rosemary in person is a rare thing; seeing a character named Rosemary on a TV show is even more rare.

In fact, I don't think it's ever happened to me before, except for sort of in the Pound Puppy animated series, where there was a character named Nosemarie, and she was a dog and the one summer of my life that I had to deal with mean boys, the mean boys called me Nosemarie, so that wasn't great.

It was annoying when Rosemary showed up on When Calls the Heart, because her character was just there to throw a wrench into the burgeoning romance of Mountie Jack Thornton and big city rich girl turned small town frontier schoolteacher Elizabeth Thatcher. Spoiler alert: her plans to lure Jack away from Elizabeth fail but she sticks around to pester the town at large instead of just its Mountie. Gradually - very gradually - she becomes SLIGHTLY more endearing and as she stays on in the town, all the characters go from calling her Miss LeVeaux to calling her Rosemary. And I can't. Get. Enough.

Every time someone says "Rosemary" on the show, it's like my ears perk up. Like I'm a dog and I know my name. And my name is Rosemary.

A few episodes ago, every time someone said "Rosemary", I started whispering "Rosemary" to myself. And I have kept doing it. Kind of delightedly. Every time.

When Calls the Heart is definitely a problematic fave, you guys, I get it. Until the Season 4 Christmas special, everyone is SUPER white and we certainly never discuss whose land we're all mining and sawmilling and Mountie-ing on. Obviously, everyone is a proud heterosexual. There are some nice girl power moments that do not in any way threaten the patriarchy. And, for my history buffs, the fact that GROWN WOMEN WEAR THEIR HAIR DOWN IN 1910 is a constant source of fury. Jesus Christ, Lori Loughlin, you are RUNNING a CAFE. Keep your hair out of my shepherd's pie, FFS!

But still.

Rosemary.

 

Creampuff a Little Late for Hallowe'en

Someone asked me recently what my favourite Hallowe'en costume was when I was a kid.

At first, I just laughed, because I could not remember a costume that I wore during my Alberta childhood that wasn't ruined by having to wear a parka over it. COME ON, ALBERTA.

After some reflection, though, I had to answer that my favourite costume was probably the princess costume my mom made for me when I was in kindergarten.

I fucking LIVED for that thing. It was sparkly. There was a cape. It was long and flowy and pouffy and perfect.

In December of 2015, my awesome cousin Caro took it upon himself to begin scanning our grandfather's prodigious collection of slides and put them up on Dropbox for the fam to check out. There were several boxes. But Caro is a man of infinite patience.

Over the years, Caro has uploaded some super cool photos. There were some sweet travel shots from my grandparents' various trips to Europe in the '60s and '70s, but there were also a number of family shots from the '50s and early '80s. Last week, he uploaded the final batch.

I looked at all of the travel shots in this latest round, but then I got distracted, so I didn't finish going through some of the final folders.

And last night, my brother Jaro sent me an email with the subject line "Have you ever been happier?" and this picture of me. In my favourite costume. Of ALL TIME:

My poor mom. She worked SO hard to not aggressively gender me as a kid but at every turn, I was like "Make with the frills, bitch!"

If you look closely though, I AM wearing a pair of lesbian overalls under the princess ensemble. Because on some level, I must have known the crinoline wouldn't last.

I was also a master horsewoman.

Creampuff Enjoys This Year's First Shar Pei Saturday

I realize that Shar Pei Saturday is a bit of a NaBloPoMo cop-out but I'm sure we all need a breather from my relentless bon mots.

But IF NOT, you should know that my blogging friend Solitary Diner is also attempting NaBloPoMo again this year and she is a thoughtful, funny, interesting delight of a human, PLUS, Anthony Bourdain replied to one of her tweets one time, so she is already WAAAAY cooler than I. Definitely check out her blog, okay, no pressure SD.

It feels kind of nutso how the last three years with Effie have raced by. We've gone from this sweet little wrinkle:

to this total fuckin' bad-ass:

FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME

Here she is with her handsome ride or die pal, Opie, just takin' a breather before they resume their wrasslin':

 

Good dogs.

Creampuff's Just Waiting for the FBI to Call

I joined Twitter years ago and stopped paying attention to it soon after because it seemed dumb.

But there were so many funny jokes about Trump that I got back into Twitter early in 2016 (or, as I now think of it, The Time Before) and now that everything is terrible all the time, I can't look away.

While, on the one hand, Twitter is a horrible cesspool of unpunched Nazis and abuse, there are also myriad learning opportunities when you follow different communities and it's fucking delightful.

I was already following Fat Twitter, Lesbian Twitter and Leftist Comedian Twitter, but since I got back into it, I've learned A LOT from following Black Twitter, Indigenous Twitter and Disabled Twitter.

And, for those really rough times, there's Cute Dog Twitter. 

One of my favourite things about the Twits is that sometimes, cool people you love follow you back, probably by accident. My favourite Twitterer is author Sandra Newman, whose Twitter stream is filled with amazing non sequiturs and cutting political commentary and crazy tales about her life and when SHE followed ME, I thought I might explode with sheer nerdly joy. 

 Sometimes, though, I get followed by people even more glamorous than Sandra Newman:

Pretty sure that's legit.

Anyway, this week while I was scrolling through cute dogs and voter suppression outrage, I noticed a name that was trending - "Jacob Wohl". The name sounded vaguely familiar, so I did a little clickin'.

If you missed the whole "Jacob Wohl 'masterminding' a plot to frame Robert Mueller for sexual assault thing", Colbert can help you out.

I read up on Wohl's super asstastic attempt to smear Robert Mueller and enjoyed some hilarious tweets about his extreme ineptitude  - but something about his rodentia-adjacent face also pinged my memory. HOW did I know about this guy before this whole thing happened?

OH RIGHT.

About a year ago, I tweeted something with an ironic #MAGA hashtag. But you know who doesn't always get irony? People who unironically use #MAGA hashtags. So Jacob Wohl, currently the subject of an FBI investigation for being a total dipshit, followed me on Twitter.

JEALOUS?? My friends sure were.

As I recall, it took about a week for him to unfollow me but I don't think it was because he realized I was a pinko lesbian - it was because I didn't follow him back. So FBI, if you're listening - and I know you are - I did not invite Jacob Wohl to follow me and all I know about him is that my friend Sith said he was a "notorious douche".

I'll let you guys know if I get called to testify.

In other Twitter-related news, I'm thinking about starting a Twitter-based match-making service! Because these two folks who follow me seem PERFECT FOR EACH OTHER:

Creampuff Invites You to Join Her For The One Month Per Year That She Deigns to Blog

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HI GUYS!!

Welp, it’s fucking November again and I have to say, I REALLY thought I was going to blog more this year and MORE THAN ONCE I was like “Ooo, I could blog about this event/photo/super deep thought I’m having” and did I? Fuck no.

Welcome to NaBloPoMo 2018!