Aren’t points on credit cards bitter sweet? It’s like, holy shit we have $80 in PC Points! OMG what is the balance on our credit card if we have that many points?! Those points are not free! We suffer for them. Fucking credit cards.

I find my car has become depressing because of the music. Firstly, every time I heard Ike and Tina I would think domestic abuse. Then I shed a tear listening to Lou Reed’s Perfect Day because he had just died and now I’m sad about listening to INXS because Michael Hutchence offed himself many moons ago. It’s a sad sad car right now. But I have decided I have to turn it around. We shall overcome! Tina bounced back and made the most badass Buddhist comeback ever. Lou Reed had an amazing career and guess what society, people die of old age, it totally happens. And Michael, oh Michael. I like to think your death was accidental from some crazy autoerotic play that got out of hand. That you were not sad, but very very happy when it happened. This makes me feel better. Which is creepy….

Well I finally paid that fucking parking ticket I have previously ranted about. But I was badass, I paid it two days late. Take that authority!! I kind of wish the city of Ottawa would just remember my credit card the same way Amazon does. Like how they make it too easy to buy stupid things because you don’t have that step of manually putting in your credit card number which gives you that half a second longer to realize you don’t need an expensive, fancy grill pan, that you can just steal from your parents all the time. Yes, I wish it was that easy to pay off my bloody tickets so that I wouldn’t have that extra second to rage about paying the city for a ticket I may or may not deserve. Get it together city of Ottawa.

I am working so much and I guess obsessively washing my hands because of it that my hands looked diseased. There is skin flaking off everywhere, there are cuts and bruises all over them and quite often, just to be pretty, some dried blood. When I hand someone their latte I hope I am not adding some extra Angie sprinkles on the top. At least maybe there is some protein there. But every time I look down at my hands, this voice in my head yells “You will never be a hand model now. NEVER!” And then I realize it’s true, that is one job I can scratch off my wall of future job possibilities. So sad.

I told Hennie I thought we should get professional family Christmas portraits this year. But instead of having a family we would bring our computers and say “Greetings from Angie, Hennie, Lenova & Apple.” Because those are our babies right now. My sister suggested our cars. A family portrait of Hennie and I, the Honda & Yaris. I think it would be funny. Happy Holidays from Hennie, Angie, Peanut and Tina! (Tina is not the official name of my car yet, I am playing around with it)

I was telling Hennie the other day that there are people, possibly even people in our circle of friends, that believe we all have the right to bear arms. (Ok not our circle of friends, but more acquaintances). I new immediately that this is where he went because started laughing maniacally.

Somehow, miraculously, Hennie had some dental coverage from Algonquin and someone was kind enough to send us a cheque for $500!! Consequently, I decided this was the right time to tell Hennie, I was pretty sure I needed new shoes. And not cute, cheap shoes, like real, solid, expensive shoes for my very sad flat feet. Hurrah! New addition to the family, a red pair of Blundstones! I think Hennie thought I was kidding when I said they may be expensive but when he saw the bill he realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I was not exaggerating.

I know I should know what’s going on with computers, but seriously, I don’t get the hashtag thing at all. It’s even funnier when people say it because I think it makes them sound dumb, mainly because I don’t know what it is referring too. But the whole thing pisses me off. I’m on the toilet #peeing. What? I’m shopping #spending money I don’t have. I just don’t get it. Lot’s of snow!#wishIownedacarscraper. It is an internet mystery to me. For the next week I will try and use hashtag in a sentence just to sound like I know what I;m talking about and uber trendy. #willsoundsuperrelevant

Omg on the Charlie Hunnam International facebook group people are getting matching tattoos! I think I am part of a radical sect! The radical sect of the love for a blonde biker boy. It freaks me out. Matching tattoos! I thought I was hardcore super fan, but that shit is just crazy. I renounce my super fanness and pass it on to the tattooed crazies.

Have you ever noticed that the standard mug size is the perfect size for your phone to fit into. Like my mug on the floor is just waiting for me to perfectly drop my iphone right into it. I imagine this scenario happening every time I hold the mug and even remotely see my phone. The neurosis I live with is astounding.

Hennie and I again tried to pick something to watch on Netflix. It went horribly as usual. Hennie would flip through the titles too slowly, he would consider each one and read the description of the movie, which for me is totally unnecessary. I can tell by the first word of the description, the first second of the trailer or the movie poster what exactly is the reason I don’t need to watch it. So after about 20 minutes of me explaining every little reason why I didn’t want to watch each movie I started yelling out the one word reason why I wouldn’t be interested in watching that particular movie. Aliens! Surfing! Nicholas Cage with shoulder length hair! That girl! Tom Cruise! Robots!

I found the Best of Queen red album in my back of cassettes. Wow does that ever take me back! That was my first cd as a kid and listened to it all the time, sang it all the time and choreographed every song. I made up the words to many of the songs as a kid and today, just realized, I never did learn the proper words. “You’ve got to give me sights I’ve never seen, like the diaper that stinks every time.” Or “She keeps Moey and Chantelle in a pretty cabinet.” “She’s a killer queen, gutted with a lazer beam, dynamite with lace so green.” I actually have no idea what the actual words are (except for Moet & Chandon)but that does not stop me from singing them as loud as I can.

When my car is cold the tape plays quicker which makes an already pretty high up there Freddie Mercury sound like the chipmunks on crack.

One thing about house sitting in this house in the country is that I always assume we are isolated and alone on the property. Which is why, while I waited for my laundry to dry in the sun, I carried on with my naked Sunday, until it became a bit cold and then I downgraded to no-pants-Sunday. I was standing at the stove, cooking lunch when I noticed a car coming up the driveway and saw a hunter in the front seat (bright orange, can’t miss those “camo” dudes). I freaked out because this house is all windows. As I raced to find a pair of pants I saw two hunters in the back walking across the yard. Omg. I was surrounded. I felt like a deer with no pants on, caught in the headlights. The house we look after allows hunters to hunt here which, as a vegetarian kind of destroys me. Like when I am having my cup of coffee, looking out the back window at the family of deer munching away peacefully and then one of them gets shot. It kinda ruins my day. But now I have been a peep show, of pant-less fun to the people that are murdering big Bambi’s in the back. Good times.  

I also decided it was drink-as-much-coffee-as-humanely-possible-Sunday. I told Hennie at around 4pm that if I died of a heart attack he had full permission to tour the world and tell people the evils of caffeine. But if I didn’t die, I would probably do it all over again tomorrow.  

I am part of a Facebook group called ‘Charlie Hunnam International’ and it basically just fills my newsfeed with pictures of this actor. I wake up and I’m thinking, what’s the news on FB today, woah shirtless picture of Charlie, good news! Then at lunch when I check to see what’s happenening, more Charlie Hunnam photos or maybe even a collage that someone has creepily made in their spare time. It was getting a bit much until something really odd started happening, people started turning to the group for support for their problems. So now it’s shirtless pic of Charlie Hunnam, followed my, “I had a nervous breakdown this week but I know I have support from Charlie’s Angels so I am back up and running” and a ton of people like it and wish her well! It’s actually kind of hilarious. I was telling Hennie it should be called “Charlie Hunnam International Support group for women.” It’s endlessly amusing with a side of dirty, hot man pictures.  

I was in line a Starbucks drive through a little while ago and the car’s license plate was RAPN JP. I wonder who thought that was an okay license plate. Like there was no way one could look at it and go, wow, raping JP, that’s not okay. I remember Bumper Stumpers, I was pretty good at it and that plate, my friends, could go either way. Ontario disallows so many peoples license plates like HUGEBTCH, NICENUTS, GOFKRSLF, KOOOOGAR, FECALMTR and my favourite, GODSQWAD. but no, Raping JP is totally fine.  

My Dad saw a truck with the bumper sticker “Sons of Lanarky” on it. I must know who these people are. That. Is. Amazing. I wonder if they have a secret gang of big trucks out there in Lanark Highlands. They probably don’t shoot people but deer and they probably do get their guns from people who think they are Irish (but actually fifth generation, once removed). I wonder if they have like nerdy re-creations of the show like all the civil war nerd fans do. I have a Gemma costume!! 

I just sat in the Carlingwood food court for half an hour listening to a woman tell her friend about how she married her cousin…true story…then I watched two people trying to find the bathroom but without looking up from their phones. They were confused, couldn’t take the time to look at the signs, instead asked someone which was hilarious because they were literally standing inside the washrooms. Tip-Carlingwood is the best place to people watch ever. 

I’m so paranoid about all the hunters in our backyard. I nervously run to the car wondering if I will get shot. I look both ways and try to look as little like a deer as I can while sprinting to my car. I am especially nervous if I am wearing all brown. No fancy head bands for me, they could look like antlers. I was so stressed out one day my Mother told me to get a bright orange vest for walking the 10 feet to the car. 

Three ladies over the age of 70 each got out their cell phones and compared them with one another at the coffee shop today. One lady asked the other if her phone got the news? It did, the other lady replied. Then she asked if it had the photo on it? And the video? It did! It was so funny to see these old ladies comparing their smart phones! And then it made me ashamed of my 95 year old Grandma who could bake a lemon loaf while standing on her head, but does not own a cell phone. Get with the times Grandma! You would LOVE Facebook. Well for the first bit, then it would get annoying and your news feed would get clogged with shirtless pictures of hot actors all the time and it would just be a stupid, mind numbing distraction from your lemon loaf which is probably burnt by now.  

Ben and I just road tripped down to Peterborough to the Retirement home he used to work at, to help with their Christmas Bazaar. On the way down, we pass a giant fishing lodge and Ben yells out, “Do you know what anglers are??” I reply that yes, they are fisherman. He yells, “holy shit I just figured that out a couple days ago, how come no one ever told me?! I was trying to figure out what they are angling, or what angle they were talking about!” Classic.  

I just realized what the worst thing is about the Christmas season. It’s Michael Buble. He is everywhere! Completely unavoidable. He follows you around while you are shopping, he finds you at work, he is on the radio, tv and the internet. I would skip Christmas this year, build a yurt, wear permanent ear plugs and maybe, just maybe I could avoid the Buble Christmas trauma.  

Tip- cassette tape cases make excellent scrapers when stuck in a winter snow before you had any forethought to buy a real scraper for the car. Thanks Tina. Life skill. 

I have turned into a pyromaniac and I completely blame the wood stove in our house we are staying at. I want to burn everything. I look forward to finding non-glossy magazines so I can burn them. I have started hoarding newspapers from my work. I burn every receipt and piece of junk mail I ever get. I have even started removing things from their cardboard package so I can burn then. I wonder if Hennie realizes where his cereal boxes keep going. 

Um Carrie Underwood plays Maria on the NBC version of Sound of Music?? That is wrong. That is so wrong. NO ONE CAN PLAY MARIA LIKE JULIE ANDREWS. Except me of course and I am shocked they didn’t ask and instead went with a country singer?! Fuck that. Table flip. 

Uh hey The Voice. Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley? Umm I’m pretty sure that song is written by my good friend Leonard Cohen. Just sayin’

God bless you Janet, God bless you. You heeded my cry of Tina Turner torture and brought me the ultimate gift, a sack full of cassettes. And no, not just any cassettes, amazing ones, including the Trainspotting soundtrack!! Only my favourite movie of all time. I was greeted with the warm, floating, dream-like song and immediately placed it as Ewan swimming through the worst toilet is Scotland to retrieve his heroine he had had shoved up his arse earlier. I used to know the movie line for line. I once spit out so many lines from the movie, word for word, that a a young man from the Isle of Skye Scotland asked me to marry him. I questioned his level of commitment. I have been a super fan for a long time. When I lived in Scotland I even went to the shop where Ewan gives Spud a pep talk about trying hard to get the job he is about to be interviewed for but not trying too hard or else he might get it. It’s just the best movie ever. Back to Janet! Thank you for bringing a bit of heroine class to my auto Janet, you rock my world!  

I had an old moment yesterday. Like I am definitely getting old. I took the kid I work with to get winter boots at Bayshore. She chose these ankle high gangster carpenter boots that looked retarded to me. (Timberlands?) I sat there saying they were the most impractical winter boots I had ever seen! Was she new to Canada? Had she seen how deep the snow gets? Are these boot even waterproof? Were they even meant for cold weather? And at the last harassing question, I realized, not only was I making a scene in Foot Locker and embarrassing my kid, but I had just turned into my Dad. I had flashbacks to all the cute boots I ever wanted even though they were impractical, stupid and possibly not waterproof. The difference was, I lost those arguments. I went home with knee high, most chunky, practical, built-for-a-yeti lined boots that tended to match my neon purple coat *shakes head in shame*. Needless to say, I decided to back off my kid and let her learn her own lessons. Like when she loses both feet to hypothermia and she can no longer walk, she can’t tell me I didn’t warn her.  

On the way home I told my kid we were going to learn about local, successful women on our next outing. She needed to see independent women doing it for themselves. Ya feminism! She looked totally shocked to hear that word. She said she wasn’t a feminist. I looked at her and stole the lines from the Caitlin Moran book “How to be a Woman,” 

a) Do you have a vagina? and

b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.” 

As soon as she got home, she announced to the house she was now a feminist. I felt like I changed the world that night. Let feminism no longer be a bad word with our youth! Lady power! We also decided instead of saying vagina we would change it to “bergina” a la Family Guy episode where Meg visits a discount gyno and that’s what he calls it. Good times! Bringing comedy to feminism! 

So, believe it or not, there seem to be some down sides to losing weight. I have spent years searching high and low finding amazing and outrageous big clothes and am pretty proud of my finds. The problem is, I can no longer wear them. They now look like bedsheets on me, which is not cool. Secondly, I caught myself in the mirror yesterday with the oddest shaped breasts I had ever seen. What the? And I realized my bra was imploding due to lack of boob. Now this is especially not cool. I specifically had a pep talk with my body before this all started, I said the chins can go, also the hips and ass, but please, for the love of god, Betty and Veronica can stay. I have grown quite attached to them and we are a happy family. Please let them stay. The only plus side to seeing Betty and Veronica shrink is that it just happened to coincide with the new Victoria Secret opening in Ottawa. Oh darn I guess I will have to check it out.  

Omg I found out what Victoria’s Secret it!! I went in because my bra was way to big for me and went up a cup size! Their secret is to make you think you have bigger boobs then you do! Well played Victoria, well played.

Is everyone excited? It’s almost the season!! The season to make jokes out of our credit card bills and fret over money…the reason for the season….debt! We are starting on a particularly precarious note this year, after buying an old car that needed some work, Hennie starting school and then having the audacity to have a tooth removed! Hennie, I think that was your Christmas present. Fentanol and Percocets are all you are getting for Xmas this year. You are not getting your two front teeth for Christmas this year, you lost an expensive, infected molar. Merry Christmas! I must reign in my spending this year!! I say that every year but for some reason I lose all control at Christmas. I go over our set family budgets, I buy multiple things for people even though I have finished their gifts, I then give it to other family members to give to those people because I have bought too much. I get commercialism amnesia, capitalism dependence issues, shopping impulse control problems. And on top of that, I stress out over all of that and then turn to my good old friend, retail therapy to get me through. I literally could write a whole DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders) based on what I deal with just around Christmas. Except I would make them all fun like when my Grandma says OCDC for OCD or FibroMalaysia for Fibromyalgia. Anyways, the point of this rant. This year, I must perma talk myself down from my spending ledge and stay focussed. I will constantly repeat to myself how I should not be supporting such a commercial holiday to the extreme, how I should not be a crazy capitalist consumer and how my family deserves cheap presents, ha ha just kidding on that last one. 

Back to the Trainspotting soundtrack, Lou Reed’s Perfect Day now feels like the saddest song ever. I mean it was always a bit surreal and dark but now it’s sad! RIP Lou. You are wonderful.

Underworld’s Born Slippy might just be the most fun song ever. It has been one of my fave songs for as long as I can remember. My favourite memory of it is when I lived in on the Cornish coast of England, in a trailer, surrounded by all my trailer living fellow travelers. A diverse mix of Aussies, South Africans, Canadian and Brits that ended up on the hippie coast of England and it was, by far, the most fun summer ever. Parties, drinking, shitty cars, living in trailers, debauchery (I’m just going to stop there)…it coincidentally coincided with going to the hospital for my alcohol poisoning debacle! Silly teenager. Anyways, we decided to do a field trip to the surfer, hippie town of New Quay to go out clubbing. We got to the club, waited for the inspiration to dance and mingle to take over and just as we entered the dance floor that song starts. It feels like a warm blanket of a techno enveloping me in a foreign country. It felt like all my time researching traveling to the UK was paying off at that exact moment. Like I was at the exact right spot to be at the time in my life. It was the craziest feeling ever, it may have been helped by the amount we had consumed, but it was still amazing. I have never had that feeling again. Anyways, we spent the rest of the night dancing like there was no tomorrow. Argh but there ended up being a tomorrow and it felt yucky! 

Hennie’s 5 year anniversary of being in Canada is today!! 5 years!! We got married, have not got divorced, have been to South Africa twice and have no kids….winning! And Hennie can apply for his Citizenship soon too! Hazaa!