Creampuff Revolution

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!)

Creampuff Read the Whole Anne of Green Gables Series Out Loud to her Wife

Every now and then, Katr and I like to pretend we live in Regency times, when the only entertainment of a evening was:

• Losing at whist;
  
  
• Listening to someone play the pianoforte and sing in a wispy voice;
  
  
• Bitching about how, after a day of riding on horseback, your quads were too stiff to really get a good squat going over the chamberpot at night; and
  
  
• Reading aloud.

Sometimes we read a new book but more often, one of us will choose one of our old favourites that the other one hasn't read.

So when Katr mentioned that the whole Anne of Green Gables series was super-cheap on Kindle, I suggested we read them aloud, because Katr's only ever read the first book (and, of course, been forced to watch the original Megan Follows mini-series and the second mini-series but not the third one because it's the fucking worst, if you want to write YOUR OWN FUCKING STORY about the First World War, KEVIN SULLIVAN, where at one point Anne rescues an war orphan while DRESSED AS A NUN, just WRITE YOUR OWN THING, don't fucking ruin Anne!!)

Before you ask, I have not watched "Anne with an E".

I hadn't read the series in its entirety for several years, so this was a real treat for me and to Katr's credit, she did not sleep through most of it, although I almost called our marriage when I discovered that she'd given both Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea only 4 out of 5 stars HOW ARE WE EVEN TOGETHER

Brief thoughts on each book below. Apologies if the book covers look janky wherever you're reading this. For some reason, even though it's 2024, formatting photos in Typepad is even more painful than formatting photos in Word, once again, I PAY FOR THIS BLOGGING PLATFORM.

Anne of Green Gables

You really get why this book was a hit in 1908. Anne is just effer-fucking-vescent. So capable and yet, such a fuck-up. So unintentionally funny. So dramatic and so lovable. So clearly a huge lez. Also, as I approach my crone-hood, I really got into Marilla (not in a sex way, I just appreciated her curmudgeonliness-masking-deep-feelings vibes a lot more). We both cried when Matthew died.

 

 

Anne of Avonlea

We genuinely LOL'd at several of Anne's misadventures in this one (the cow! the blue hall!) and Davy is hilarious. But also, was Anne, like...a LITTLE too into Paul Irving? Was it creepy? Also, his "rock people" shtick always bored the hell out of me, imagine something more interesting PAUL. Also, I remember reading the part where Diana promises Anne she'd never love another girl as much as she loves Anne and then the part where Diana gets engaged to Fred and being like "WHAT"

 

 

Anne of the Island

OMG Anne's last night with dying Ruby Gillis, I could barely get through it. The WEEPING. We also laughed at Mrs. Lynde saying Jane Andrews' engagement ring was so big "it looked like a plaster on Jane's fat paw." Jane's Fat Paw is a great name for my band. I love that Anne gets to have a non-Gilbert romance with hot, boring Roy Gardner but am bummed that her fling wasn't with Philippa Gordon, because she may be flighty but you KNOW Philippa would be a great lay, just, like, so enthusiastic.

 

 

Anne of Windy Poplars

It's real hard to say "Little Elizabeth" out loud a bunch of times. Anne's accidental triumph over the Pringles has always been one of the most satisfying storylines, imo. I also love the part where the aunts get rid of the cat Dusty Miller because they think Rebecca Dew genuinely hates him and Rebecca Dew LOSES HER SHIT AND QUITS

 

 

Anne's House of Dreams

One of my top three Anne books, thanks to the Leslie Moore plotline, which made Katr gasp in surprise at the appropriate times. Always enjoy the endless descriptions of how hot Leslie is, just SO hot but obviously tragic and pissy. Man-hating Miss Cornelia is hilarious. I remembered how pissed I was at Captain Jim for bringing Dick Moore home from Cuba, like, JUST LEAVE HIM THERE JIM. Reading the end of the book where Anne was worried about some "tribe" "overrunning" and ruining the house of dreams when she and Gilbert were going move out was weird, like, was that some kind of anti-immigrant rant? Calm down, Anne!

 

Anne of Ingleside

Not my favourite Anne book but this time, because I am older, I enjoyed the last few chapters where it seems like Anne is starting perimenopause and fucking hates everyone and everything. A few hilarious fat hate moments in here too, man, LM Montgomery really hated the fats. Also, I had forgotten the whole shithead Jenny Penny saga where Di's sleepover at the dirty, gross Penny house is so upsetting that she pretends to be dead so the Pennys will drag her unconscious body back to Ingleside under cover of darkness and dump her on the porch.

 

 

Rainbow Valley (or RainBLOW Valley, as I call it, because it blows)

I think this is the Anne book I have read the least and for good reason - Anne is hardly in it and it's mainly about the minister's poor, scraggly, ditto-eating kids, who are cute and all but whatever, who cares, more Anne please. I did LOL at Mary Vance chasing Rilla through the village with a dried codfish but also, I kind of hate her and also I hate Ellen West, just let your sister get fucking married, you selfish B, OH, Norman Douglas comes back around and then YOU want to break YOUR stupid no-marrying pact after screwing Rosemary over FUCK YOU ELLEN

Obviously things turn out fine but still. FU Ellen.

Also, Mary Vance says the N-word.

 

Rilla of Ingleside

Is "'Yeth,' said Rilla." the best final line of any book ever? Indeed.

Probably my favourite of the Anne books, aside from the original Anne, and it was fun to read it aloud to Katr, who put up with my crying through all the Dog Monday parts. It would have been wild to read this when it came out, just a few years after the war, and be all like "Oh yeah, Black Sunday, that sucked so hard." I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats and speaking of cats OMG BRUCE MEREDITH, that whole kitten-drowning to bring Jem back thing was VERY DISTURBING and everyone was just like "Aw, Bruce, what a beautiful sacrifice." and not "Get this kid to a shrink NOW."

 

And now, a 50x50 update:
Dips in the pool: 3
French lessons: 17
Books read: 8
Hours of knitting: 5
Vegetarian meals: 27 (I'm counting breakfast smoothies, shut up)

Creampuff Recap, Part 6 of 6: The Unpackening

Okay, it's been a few weeks and we all thought this series was over, and it is, mostly. But after the packing and the selling and the buying and the moving, moving, moving, comes the unpacking.

The flatpack TV stand we ordered came without hardware but that didn't stop us from setting up the TV immediately, because priorities.

Work was crazy busy and as you may recall from earlier posts, we had a lot of stuff and a whole new house to put the stuff in and it all felt a little overwhelming.

Plus, we made the horrifying discovery that while our stuff was in storage with the moving company, there was some kind of water incident and several boxes of our things were ruined and moldy.

But it's okay, the moving company totally reimbursed us HAHAHAHAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING THEY BASICALLY SAID FUCK YOU AND YOUR IRREPLACEABLE PERSONAL ITEMS, LIKE THE BOOK YOU GAVE KATR ON YOUR FIRST DATE THAT YOU WROTE A CUTE NOTE IN, IT'S ALL LOST IN TIME LIKE TEARS IN RAIN

I LOVED the actual movers but due to the ruination of our things and no recourse, I do not recommend this moving company. I'm not going to say their name but it rhymes with "Berguson Boving & Borage".

I DO, however, recommend Hour Movers in Victoria, they did all our local moves and were AWESOME.

Anyway. So we had a lot of stuff to unpack and a bunch of moldy garbage. Then Katr found Barb and Alejandra from Victoria Organizers.

Like Debbie and Richard who helped us pack, Barb and Alejandra helped us unpack AND organized a lot of our shit AND took away the recycling and trash. And they made it look so easy.

They started with the kitchen.

And did some of their best work in the "hobby room", where Katr's enormous board game collection lives, if you don't count the 30 or so that are in our office.

The whole time they were here I felt like a hippo watching a couple of hummingbirds creating order out of chaos and I wanted to get in on the action, so I put myself in charge of organizing our giant walk-in closet.

I gathered all of our clothes and shoes and such and piled them on our bed, which turned out to be a genius move because otherwise, we would have been stepping over piles of clothes I would "get to, Jesus, get OFF my JOCK" for days.

I know this clothes pile looks like a lot of clothes and you know what, it IS, way more than I thought either of us have but keep in mind that creampuff clothes are also large and take up a lot of space.

And then, came the worst part of organizing: thinking, planning, bending and doing. Here's my side:

And Katr's side, this closet is HUGE, I actually do little workouts in here.

Did you think it would look sexier than this when it was done? Me too but whatever, I need to lie down.

I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but this took me almost six hours. Barb and Alejandra did most of the rest of the house -- AND THE SHED OUTDOORS -- in the same amount of time. Showboating.

I loved them. And if you live in the Greater Victoria area, you will too.

Now that we were all moved in, we could focus on some other home improvement projects. Here's a sneak peek at the biggest one.

And as a special treat, here is a video that Katr accidentally shot in slow motion of me pretending the Christmas tree box is a wang. It's over a minute long, you can pretty much get it from the first 15 seconds.

A long overdue 50x50 update:
Vegetarian meals: 17
5km walks: 10
Board game plays: 8
French lessons: 7
Blog posts: 7 (pitiful)

Things Creampuff Misses (and Doesn't Miss) About Vancouver

Taking a break from long form content this week because we're live-streaming TED and my brain is full, here are some lists:

Things Creampuff Misses About Vancouver

• Our hilarious, awesome friends
• The neighbourhood characters, especially the twins, Dwayne and Dwight, who borrowed and returned $20 every month
• All fabulous dog walkers who've put up with our crazy shar peis (particularly the good folks at Bronte Pet Services)
• Pizza Pzazz 
• The Skytrain
• Not having to bag your compost
• The Licorice Parlour on Commercial
• Sidewalks
• Our Little Free Library
• Swiss Chalet (apparently it's gone now, probably because we left)
• Trout Lake
• Granville Island Market
• Walkability
• Seeing the mountains every day (they have 'em here, I just see them a lot less often)
• Ogenki Sushi

Things Creampuff Doesn't Miss About Vancouver (or rather, living in *our* place in Vancouver, most of these aren't Vancouver's fault)

• Skunks
• Being part of a strata
• Cleaning human turds off the rock in front of our Little Free Library
• Finding a jug of hydrochloric acid tucked into our cedars
• Driving downtown (that's Katr, as you all know, I drive only with my mind)
• People stealing our geraniums/basil/rosemary, like, just ripping the whole plants out of the planters
• The guy who moved in after our upstairs neighbour Sivo sold her place and his roommates who partied until 3am all the time
• Having to get up at the crack of dawn's ass to take the ferry to Victoria

And now, a select 50x50 update:

• French podcasts listened to: 7
• Vegetarian meals: 6
• Books finished: 4
• New recipes tried: 1
• Pillows touched: still 16, I haven't been to anyone else's house in weeks

Creampuff Recap Part 5 of ?: The Movening

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

We had a house!!!! But we couldn't get into it until the end of January! And it was the end of November! That's a long time to live in a van down by the river. And Katr's brother Drtr was coming up for a month over the holidays for the first time since COVID began and we were excited to see him.

Also, while Katr and I work from home, we're not like those remote workers on stock photos who can perch on a barstool and peck at their laptop while sipping a macchiato and looking hot (unless by hot, you mean sweaty and mad). Katr and I both have pretty specific work needs, so wherever we were staying had to accommodate our work set up, i.e. our two big-ass office chairs and our dual screen monitor/laptop situation.

And it had to be pet-friendly, because, once again, fourth time in a row, we'd adopted an unkennel-able dog.

So when the movers came, they took *most* of our stuff, but I had conned my brother Jaro and father Biro into renting a U-Haul van in Victoria, bringing it over on the ferry, loading up our "interim stuff" and driving it back to Victoria. Because FAMILY. We stored a bunch of this stuff in my parents' walk-out basement and then headed over to invade my Aunt Suki's.

My very kind and generous Aunt Suki had offered to take us in for the two weeks until Drtr arrived and it was an EXTREMELY soft place to land. This woman completely rearranged her upstairs AND gave up her room so that we could set up our office and sleep in a glorious king bed (she moved down to her lovely guest suite, a sanctuary which Pumbaa immediately violated). She allowed Pumbaa to frolic in her awesome yard, seen here from our "office" window.

Suki introduced us to her many fabulous friends. She put up with our loud conference calls. And she wrote out a MENU and cooked us gourmet meals EVERY DAY. A truly five-star experience, HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

I don't have a photo of her during this time but this pic of her spice drawer should give you an idea of the kind of goddess Suki is.

When Drtr arrived, we reluctantly decamped from the luxury and pampering of Suki's for an Air BnB in Esquimalt that Drtr affectionately dubbed "the murder house".

I'm not 100% sure why Drtr called it the murder house but I AM 100% sure that it was DISGUSTING. The first night, I spilled some water on the carpeted stairs and when I paper-towelled up the spill, the paper towel was covered in HAIR. Pretty much any time you cooked or used the toaster, the smoke alarm would go off. Between the decor and the lack of cleanliness, it was like living at grandma's house but like...grandma's not doing too good.

It was a spacious two bedroom but in the primary bedroom bed had a rickety queen that was not safe for multiple creampuffs. So I spent the month sleeping on a pile of four foam mattresses I had borrowed from my parents. Let me tell you, nothing makes you feel more alive in your late forties than waking up having to whiz real bad and knowing that first, you have to roll fatly off your mattress-pile and push your way up onto your feet like a drunken toddler (the worst kind of toddler).

We had some lovely family togetherness time with Drtr and I have to say, the murder house was in a GREAT location, practically ocean-front, so Pumbaa and I had some epic walks, except for the week when it was frozen solid and so slippery that I woke everyone on the block screeching "Don't pull mummy! DON'T PULL MUMMY!" at Pumbaa whenever we crossed the street.

My fondest memory of the murder house is probably the evening the fire alarm went off. Not the smoke alarm, which, to be fair, did its actual job the day that we brought some groceries in and a bag got left on the glass cooktop and somehow the cooktop dial got turned on and I was in the other room like "Smells like something's burning" and I go back to the kitchen and there was a big ol' plastic bag and pints of ice cream fire, which I promptly left Katr and Drtr to deal with because of my smoke alarm noise issues HAHAHA I AM TAKEN, LADIES.

The smoke alarm was bad enough but it was nothing compared the *fire* alarm for the whole townhouse complex. It was loud like when a firetruck drives by you with the sirens blaring but then stops inside your fucking house. I had myself and the dog out the door in seconds and Drtr and Katr were kind enough not to point out later that I basically left them to die A SECOND TIME.

It was freezing and apparently the fire alarm system had frozen in the "on" position, so it was a couple of hours before the firefighters could get it to shut off. And they warned that it might come on again. HA ha!

It DID come on again, this time at about 1 a.m. But I was ready. I had taken a pot gummy, made some makeshift earplugs out of torn-apart, wadded-up tampons and was wearing my noise-canceling headphones, huddled on my mattress pile. This time, it was turned off much faster. But I basically never slept again until we moved out of that place a week later.

After Drtr left, we still had three weeks until move-in and I wanted my aunt to still love me, so we found a third rental. This place was much nicer and had a little fenced yard for Pumbaa, plus it was close to a beach featuring whatever the fuck this is:

And some great walks around UVic.

Once again, there was a rickety queen bed but this time, the bedroom was too small, so I slept on my mattress pile out in the hall, really regretting that we'd never gotten into dom/sub stuff because then at least sleeping on my pallet on the floor outside milady's door would be sexy.

And then, one glorious day, it was time. To move in. To our NEW HOUSE!!! Woooo!

To recap, in order to get to this point, we'd had to hire movers 6 times:
1. Moving stuff for staging
2. Moving our Vancouver stuff to storage
3. Moving our interim stuff from Vancouver to Victoria (this was the heroic U-Haul adventure)
4. Moving our interim stuff from Suki's to the murder house
5. Moving our interim stuff from the murder house to Octopus Beach house
6. Moving our interim stuff from OBH to our house
7. Moving the rest of our stuff from Vancouver storage to our house

All this to say...we are never moving again.

And now, a select 50x50 update:

• 5km walks: 6
• French lessons: 4
• Board game plays: 2
• Air fryer uses: 4
• Hours of knitting: 2

 

Creampuff Recap Part 4 of ?: The Findening

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

We both spent a lot of time looking at the real estate listings but I think it's fair to say that I HAUNTED the listings ALL DAY like it was my job while Katr did her actual job and then would look at the listings on her lunch break or after work or when I pestered her to look at something, because I had been obsessing over it for the whole 20 minutes she was on a conference call and had to talk about it RIGHT AWAY NOW TALK NOW PLEASE

Our real estate listing system let you "favourite" a property so you could obsess about it more efficiently or "delete" a property that you knew for sure you weren't interested in. We favourited several houses that we either liked but couldn't afford, or that we thought *might* work with a lot of renos that we couldn't afford to do unless they dropped the price, or that we were interested in seeing how much they eventually went for (since nearly every house was going for hundreds of thousands over asking, blaaaaaaaaaarg.)

When I first saw our house, I dismissed it almost immediately for the following reason:

We *had* expanded our search as far north as Sidney but mainly because the inventory in Victoria was SO LOW and we were dying to see MOAR LISTINGS, even if we knew we didn't want to live that far away from Victoria. The whole point of moving to the Island was to be closer to family. We certainly weren't going to entertain buying a place in Saanichton. I mean...but were we though? The layout is so great and the yard...

but no. NO. Too far away.

I didn't talk to Katr about it. I just deleted it.

But I kept thinking about it.

After another week of scant new listings and insane prices and rejected offers, I wanted to see the house again. I had memorized the address (weird). I figured out how to "undelete" it from our listings. It was still available (a miracle in that market). I took another look.

It was...kind of perfect. Rancher. 3 bed, 2.5 bath. Huge fenced yard. A *tiny* bit dated in certain areas but definitely move-in ready.

Nice floors. The formal living room could be our office...and the primary bedroom had enough room for this Game of Thrones-ass bed.

What a passion pit!

But no. NO IT WAS TOO FAR NO

I deleted it again.

A week later (and about a week before we had to move), I could not stop thinking about it. Its walkability score was pretty shitty, sure. But it was only 30 minute drive to my family...just 10 minutes over my requirement. And it WAS my requirement...Katr was more flexible about the location.

Was I rejecting the perfect house just because of an extra 10 minutes? Could this really be...THE ONE??

I undeleted it. It was STILL AVAILABLE (after nearly 3 weeks on the market? Why??)

"Katr," I said. "I keep coming back to this one."

Katr took a look and said, "I'm calling Jane."

Jane took us on the tour of the house via FaceTime. Everything about it seemed...fuckin' great. We waited until she was out in the backyard, away from the sellers' realtor, to get the full goods.

"Why is it still available, Jane?" I asked. "What's wrong with it?? Is there a smell? Is it next to a methamphetamine dispensary staffed by juggalos?"

"Well, no, the house is a gem," she said, "it has pretty much everything on your wish list and it's in great shape. It's just that it's...on East Saanich Road."

Aside: East Saanich Road is a two-lane road that sees a fair bit of traffic on week days. It's not a shipping route, so there aren't a lot of heavy trucks going by. But if you're looking for a "tranquil rural oasis", you would probably dismiss this area. Which means most people did.

"It's kind of a busy road," she says over FaceTime from the backyard, "a lot of people wouldn't even consider it. But you know, there's a huge laurel hedge in front, so it feels quite private. And back here in the yard, you don't really hear it."

"I'm sorry," I said, "We live in East Van. I can't hear you over the guy screaming WHORE! FUCKING WHORE! into his cellphone as the Skytrain screams by."

"Point taken. Are we...interested?"

Katr looked at me. I looked at Katr. Uh...YES.

The house had been on the market for 3 WHOLE WEEKS and there were no other offers. Obviously. Because it was our house. Thus, we found ourselves in the unexpected and delightful position of being able to...NEGOTIATE. Like a NORMAL SALE.

The sellers wanted a February move-out day and we wanted an earlier one, due to having to leave our Vancouver pad in less than a week. So we cleverly offered under asking, so that when they came back saying that they'd only take asking, we could say "Sure but then GET OUT by the end of January! And we want a house inspection!" "And a MOVE OUT CLEAN!" I shouted into the phone, really feeling myself.

They said yes to all of it and we closed on the house 2 days before the movers showed up to take the rest of our stuff. HA ha!! We bought a house!! Without ever actually seeing it in person, because that was the vibe in November of 2021!! Wooooo!!

But wait...where are we going to live for the next two months?

And now, a select 50x50 update:

Vegetarian meals: 3
Hours of knitting: 1
Books finished: 1 (embarrassing)
French tv episodes watched: 3
Walks that are not 5km but are at least 30 minutes and do not include the dog: 4

Creampuff Recap Part 3 of ?: The Panicking

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

So. We sold our townhouse. Half our stuff was in storage. We had 60 days before we legally had to vacate for the other lesbians. It was time for some high quality real estate pr0n.

The criteria for our new place included:

• Room for a 2-fat-person home office
• A big enough primary bedroom for two fat queens in a king bed
• A fenced yard, ideally with enough room to one day put in a pool
• A garage to park our 2006 Saturn Vue, Chloe (after 11 years of street parking, she deserved it)
• No more than a 20 minute drive from the fam
• Walkable to amenities, because I STILL DON'T DRIVE I KNOW I KNOW

Inventory was low, gang, and prices were high as fuck and time was ticking down to "homeless o'clock" real fast. We expanded the location. We upped our budget.

Every day we'd scour the listings, desperately trying to make fetch happen with any house that remotely fit our criteria and budget, even if the house was in the middle of the highway or had big boulders in the basement. (This isn't the one we saw but it was VERY SIMILAR.)

"It's near the grocery store!" we'd say "So what if there's a sinkhole in the yard, it'll be fun for Pumbaa!"

Work continued to be busy and actually going to Victoria to look at houses was tricky, timing-wise, but we finally booked a date with our realtor Jane to tour some contenders. The day before we were leaving, she called and said every house we'd planned to look at had already sold. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA blaaaaaarg 60 days tho

Thank goodness Jane was happy to FaceTime us through several houses. We love online shopping but there's nothing like having an actual human there to get a real sense of a place. We learned a lot during this process, such as:

• If your realtor takes one step in and says "This place smells like old people," don't buy the house.
  
  
• If the owner took out a wall and put in a support beam HIMSELF, without a permit, don't buy the house.
  
  
• If your realtor opens a closet and there's unexplained ductwork made of cardboard in there, don't buy the house.
  
  
• If the shower is so small that when your slim realtor gets into it, she says "Oh shit" and has trouble getting out, don't buy the house.
  
  
• If there's already a pool (yay!) but the property also includes a huge, abandoned-looking machinist shop and your realtor asks "What's in there?" and the other realtor makes this face:

Don't buy the house.

We put an offer on one house (the house in the picture at the top of this post) but wanted a home inspection (this was the support beam house, but in our defence, the layout was great and it was close to a mall).

The realtor used our offer to get the other buyers to up THEIR offer and they didn't ask for a home inspection or any other conditions, so they got it (I creeped this house while I was writing this post and it was sold again less than a year later for about $100,000 less than our rival buyers paid for it so hahaha SUCK IT.)

After more weeks of surfing the listings, we fell HARD for another house. The realtor video is still up, if you want to feast your eyes on this house we didn't get.

This one was a reach for us. To have ANY chance to get this place, we'd have to stretch to the barfy-times tippy-top of our budget. "If you really want this house," said Jane, "You could write a letter."

Letter-writing isn't really a thing here. And the idea of writing a cringe-y "please sell me your house in my budget, I feel a deep connection with your sunken living room" letter mades me want to scream pantsless while setting things on fire but we really wanted this house.

So I turned to my BFF Padu, because he and his partner Macr had not only written such a letter (it's a more common practice in Ontario) but had received such a letter when they bought a new house and sold their old house the previous spring and he kindly supplied me with both. I synthesized the two letters, added some personal details and a pic of our one-eyed rescue sharpei ("She was in a shelter in Korea for 18 months! She'd be so happy in your beautiful yard! BAAAARF I HATE MYSELF") and we made the offer.

Our realtor called and said "They loved your letter. But they have another offer. They want to know if you can go any higher."

We DEEPLY could not. So we didn't get the house.

But we found out later that the other offer was OVER $100,000 MORE THAN OURS and they still checked with us before going with the other offer! That's the power of the letter, gang.

We were about two weeks away from our move-out date. It was already November. Jane suggested maybe finding somewhere to rent in the interim. "There will be more on the market in the spring," she said soothingly, "your perfect place just isn't ready for you yet."

But the thing is...it WAS. And I had actually already seen it.

And now, a select 50X50 update:

5km walks: 3
French lessons: 2
Air fryer uses: 0
Meditation sessions but not while in bed trying to fall asleep: 1
Blog posts: 4

Creampuff Recap Part 2 of ?: The Packening

Part 1 is here.

Once we'd decided to move, things happened very quickly. Like, within a few days. We called our realtor, MJ, who came over and told us what all we needed to put in storage for staging and it turns out, it was half the fucking house.

Work was very busy and having to spend all our spare time packing seemed overwhelming.

That's where Debbie and Richard came in.

Folks, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: there are people out there in the world who LIKE TO ORGANIZE THINGS. And you can PAY THEM to help you.

I like things to BE ORGANIZED but I don't care to DO the organizing myself, because I am impulsive and indecisive and lack confidence in my own judgement, qualities which make me QUITE A CATCH and which have also intensified during this hallowed time of perimenopause.

So Katr found Debbie and Richard to help us pack and organize our stuff for storage. They were like magical Energizer bunnies in masks, packing Frog Boxes full of our books and games and kitchen shit and art and putting aside stuff for donation.

If you'd been to our home in Vancouver, I don't think you would have called it overly cluttered. It's not like we were hoarders. But once we started packing up, that place was like a fucking clown car, shit coming out of cupboards and from under beds and behind appliances just endlessly.

This process took us collectively 3 full days. And we had to call FrogBox and have them deliver more boxes. (I told MJ she should take a picture of the boxes for the listing, just to prove how much storage this place had. She declined.)

Debbie was very efficient and sort of put up with our jokes but Richard's other job was as a drag butler. That's right. He's a butler who takes care of drag performers. So he was used to dealing with fussy queens and also had a pleasingly courtly manner while he waited for me to make a determination about, say, where my Grade 7 drama trophy should go. That man was truly doing god's work.

Movers came and took all the boxes and probably a quarter of our furniture and put it in storage. We had a few minor repairs done, and some painting touch-ups by Jason from Port City Painting, HIGHLY RECOMMEND HIM. And then...it was time.

The house went on the market near the end of September. Surprisingly, you can still see the listing here. The photography made it look VERY BRIGHT, in reality it had more a "cozy cave" vibe.

In times gone by, we might have been able to find a house we liked BEFORE closing the sale of our place and either make our buying conditional on our selling or do something called "bridge financing", but not in the hectic market of September 2021, when it was considered outré to ask for a home inspection and très gauche to merely offer "asking". So we had to fully sell our house before we could afford to buy a new place.

This fact did not stop us from looking at the listings constantly and then becoming heartbroken when something we liked was bought within 48 hours. So we were thrilled when, after less than a week on the market, we got a good offer on the townhouse. "They're lesbians," MJ told us, "and they've really tipped their negotiating hand because they told me that finding this place was FATE. Apparently the street address is the same as their wedding date!" Oh lesbians...never change.

The other lesbians agreed to a 60-day closing, which we were sure would be ample time to find a new place in Victoria. Right? That's two whole months! No problem.

And now, a select 50x50 update:

• 5km walks: 2
• French podcasts listened to: 3
• "No dessert" days: 2 (white-knuckling that shit, tbh)
• Hours of knitting: 0
• Board game plays: 1

Creampuff's Year of 50 x 50

Bless me Father, for I have sinned...it's been 1,180 days since my last blog post on December 9, 2020.

I could make a lot of excuses about why I've let this blog languish for 3 years but honestly, who gives a wet shit? Few things annoy me more than people who blog about their blogging. Suffice to say I'm back at it now. Because today, I turn 49!!

Honestly, I'm thrilled to be 49. A lot of people don't make it this far. But I confess that 50 feels a little...daunting.

I thought that coming up with fun, slightly-self-improving things I could accomplish before I turned 50 would make it feel like even more of an achievement. A levelling up. A sort of "gamifying ageing", if you will.

My initial plan was to make a list of 50 things that I would do 50 times this year but you know what's a lot of things?

50.

This 50x50 idea is supposed to be aspirational but also realistic and also fun.

As of now, I only have 18 things and one of those things is "touch 50 pillows". But another one of those things is "write 50 blog posts", so here we are. I STILL PAY MONEY FOR THIS BLOG. It's not like it's some free thing that I stopped doing. It's like a gym membership that I never use.

So get ready for a year's worth of posts on such scintillating topics such as:

• We moved to Vancouver Island in 2021!
• Our dog Pumbaa!
• Trying to re-learn French!
• Being afraid of my air fryer!
• We put in a pool!
• Cults!
• How many pillows I've touched so far (6)!

Looking forward to this year of stepping into my wisdom (and not into piles of horse shit, we moved to a rural area).