I’m not sure Hennie will want to watch a Slovakian olympic hockey game with me ever again. I was a weird machine of random Marian Hossa facts the whole game. Did you know he was born in Stara Lubovna? We should name our kids that. Did you know his Dad used to be the head coach of the National hockey team? When he lived in Ottawa I totally knew where, in the Kanata Lakes, he lived. I wonder if his brother is playing…oh he is! Marcel is playing! Have you ever seen pics of his wife? She is stupid hot. Did I tell you about the time I was so obsessed with Marian Hossa that I tried to learn Slovakian? Dovidenia! God he’s a hot, hot man…

I found the best music channel on Slacker. It’s called Indie Coffee House but I don’t think that any of it is actually Indie, someone just though that would be a good title for the station. But it plays all the music that I listened to in England, enough relaxtronica for a lifetime. It churns out Zero 7, Massive Attack, Badly Drawn Boy, Air etc. I listen to it at work and also during my baths. But last bath, as I cozied into my bubbles and expensive bath salts the song switched and it switched to U2. I know, I know, you all love U2, especially the old stuff. But I don’t. It all reminds me of how much of a douche bag Bono is. How self righteous and ignorant that dude is. Whenever I hear his voice I think of how Stephen Lewis mentioned, at a lecture I heard him give at Carleton, that the red campaigns Bono started was more tokenism then actually helping. Like buy a $500 Armani bracelet and $2.75 will go to Africa. And I listen to anything Stephen Lewis says because he is my academic crush. Then Bono, most recently, went to South Africa where turmoil and hatred is ever present and he sang a traditional folk song for the audience, it was called “Kill the Boer.” To me that was the icing on the cake. He had all the media presence in the world and he did that. Invoking violence in a country where tension is already palpable. And he says he is friends with Mandela, because Mandela would never have done that dude. Then his next single to come out was called Sexy Boots…wtf Bono. So when I slipped into my bath of relaxation and U2 found it’s way into my hearing space I was pissed. I almost thought of sloshing out and putting my wet hand on the iPhone just to make it stop. I tried singing over top of it to drown out the sound. I thought about cutting of my ears and in true Bono fashion, donating them to a charity that probably only received a small portion of the ear. But I grit my teeth instead and vowed that this was my last U2 song I would ever hear if I could in anyway help it.

I get concerned sometime about what I teach my husband. I appreciate that he respects me enough to believe the info I give him but sometime I think that I power trip and tell him false information without even thinking. When he first started driving in Canada I mentioned to him that driving 20 km over the speed limit was totally acceptable. Well it was in my books. But he thought that by law, 20 km over was totally fine. He still to this day says he read that somewhere but I know for a fact that it was something I said. The other day when he was watching hockey he said there was only about 10, 000 hockey players in all of Austria and I replied that yeah, Austria was tiny. Like the size of South Africa or Winnipeg. Hennie just took it all in. Now I’m not sure how many of you are geography buffs but Winnipeg is not even remotely comparable in space to South Africa or Austria. I think I give permanent sarcastic information, almost like a tick, that I have no control over. Also when I was in South Africa I was trying to tell them you could fit a few South Africa’s into Ontario, that’s how small SA was. Well this is also not true I have learned. They are roughly the same size. Ontario is a bit bigger. But I feel like I have abused my responsibility of giving out proper information to foreigners and I am repenting. And THAT was your fun geography lesson for the day!

We have spent almost the past year looking for a missing cord for our video camera so we could watch our South Africa videos on the TV. Yesterday Hennie realized that the cord was in the bag the whole time but we were trying to put it into the wrong thing on the camera. We are amazing. So we watched them. It’s always terrifying to watch and/or listen to yourself on camera. Firstly, the night I introduced everyone to Florida Track Suits (Jager, Sour Puss and Red Bull) I turned into a pirate. I have never heard such trucker swearing ever. I couldn’t believe, around my husband’s conservative, religious family, that I had sworn in that manner. It was kind of hilarious. I wondered if I sounded like that all the time and just didn’t realize it. Then our videos from the National Park made me consider a career at National Geographic. We had amazing shots of zebras, monkeys, lions, giraffes, cheetahs and more. But they all were accompanied by my commentary as well. “Omg I am videotaping the lion, fuck….fuck….fuck this is amazing…shit…holy shit there is another lion…Hi Poppa lion…Hennie get back into the car…shit” or “wow I was excited to see giraffes but these are weird looking dudes, they look like aliens…those nubs on their head are weird…shit…” But seriously, it’s some great footage. I hope to edit it someday, put some cheezy music on the background and share for all to see.

I love hearing slogans that are obviously translated. I was watching some Olympic hockey and I noticed at centre ice it said “Hot. Cool. Yours. Russia.” What the fuck Russia? What does that even mean. I totally don’t understand what this is about. Like, check out our temperatures and then we will offer ourselves to the world. Russia. I imagine a bunch of old men smoking in the Kremlin thinking ya perfect, we will mention some almost opposite temperatures then try to sound friendly, almost flirty. Good try guys. I spent the rest of the game trying to figure out this little mistranslated Russian puzzle. It reminded me a lot of Quebec’s most recent slogan which is obviously an awesome translation as well. “Quebec Providing Emotions since 1534.” All I could imagine were people with silver platters walking around Quebec handing out emotions. You get happy, you get confused, you get angry…Providing emotions? What? SO awesome.

This blog post is dedicated to a pretty kick-ass lil’ lady I have had the pleasure of hanging out with over the past few months. All the very best to you and your new life in Toronto! And Happy 18th Birthday!

Road trip to Montreal! Ben and I went in one car while everyone else went in another. Ben pumped his tunes and we we participated in some friendly sibling competition. First we had a dance off (yes while one of us drove), then sang, then rapping and finally, as things always end, a hand in the mouth competition. I had my fist three quarters into my mouth when a cop car flew in front of us with it’s lights on. I pictured us getting pulled over, each of us with our hands fully inserted into out mouths. Like we knew the biggest secret ever but we were keeping a lid on it. Like we had a car full of drugs or WMDs and couldn’t trust ourselves not to say anything. Like we had escaped from a mental institution and a hand in mouth competition was just totally normal. The cop ended up pulling the car over in front of us and not us. Thank god, we thought, that would have seriously disrupted the competition.

Road Trip # 2! Because of some extreme staff shortages I volunteered to drive the kid I have been working with, home to Toronto. She was turning 18 and free from group homes forever. I felt honoured to be the one driving her out into the real world. The whole trip was a celebration of a kid becoming an adult, of sweet, sweet freedom and it was wonderful. I even let my kid DJ the event. She told me she was putting on EDM. I asked what that meant. Electronic dance music, duh! But wasn’t all dance music electronic? What a redundant acronym. She shook her head at me like she couldn’t believe I had the brain power to function on a daily basis. After a few songs I realized something was missing. Like this music can’t really be enjoyed without alcohol and or drugs. But I can’t say that to my kid. Then she said it. And I quietly agreed.

Then she switched to uplifting/sad songs. We both cried our faces off listening to Time of Your Life while driving beside a frozen Silver Lake. She wanted me to listen to the lyrics of the saddest rap song she had ever heard too. After a few minutes she asked what I thought of the song, I admitted, like the secret adult I feared I was becoming, that I had no idea what the rapper had been saying the whole time. He spoke fast, had a lisp and was not enunciating to my standard. She found me some old people rap I could recognize like DMX, Eminem, Fifty Cent and the Notorious BIG. She was equally impressed that I had an iPhone loaded with Kanye and Kid Cudi (thanks Ben for telling me about those artists, I never listen to them but they make my music playlist way more badass).

Another alarming thing happened while I was listening to the rap music that I could actually understand…I started making making Mom face whenever the lyrics were sexually explicit or became offensive. I would scrunch up my face and do short side to side head shakes just like my Mom when she had to listen to Ben and I converse with our intense pirate swearing. Me! The same person who initially became friends with her husband because we both knew all the lyrics the Ballad of Chasey Lain, a seriously smutty song by the Bloodhound gang! I got so pissed off with myself for being so lame that I tried not to move my face at all when the next vocal hurdle arrived. I think at that point I started making more constipated face but it was an improvement. I felt like I was one step away from wearing eighties Mom jeans and I was stressed about it. I even made horrendous Mom music mistakes like when she put on PitBull and I asked if it was PitDog? Like, I should know better. We were listening to Justin Timberlake’s Holy Grail and there was a line, which I was positive said “I just can’t get your goat.” She heard it too. I had once had a music teacher yell at me and say “Don’t get my goat!” At the time I looked around wondering where the goat was and how I had attempted to get it but now I realize it’s just a weird, stupid saying. Then she thought it was “I just can’t get your coat” which makes sense because the next line says, “the next day you’re so cold.” We felt confident in that line until we googled it and it turned out to be “I just can’t crack your code.” The coat one made way more sense Justin, please consider consulting us and not Jay-Z before your next album.

I have crazy dance music on my phone from when I lived in England that she just loved. We were dancing so hard the car was shaking. I was driving so my only dance moves were striking a pose, there’s nothing to it, VOGUE & the robot. We were killing it with car moves when we realized a car full of dudes next to us were dancing with us. For the next few kms they tried to hang out with us…on the 401…dancing…while driving 120 km/h. I felt like I was 16 again.

We belted out so many Whitney Houston songs that by the time we got to Toronto my voice was permanently damaged.

Driving home was less exciting. My legs always start to hurt. Mainly because I refuse to use cruise control. I’m already a pretty distracted driver. I can do a million things while driving, so if I don’t even have to pay attention to the gas pedal I fear that I will forget I am driving all together and start reading or napping or something.

I passed the giant apple thing and was shocked to see the apple pies sold count at 8, 783, 294. It ended in 4. This made me want to go in, buy two pies and wait for them to change it to a six. Why were they not rounding? Why did the single pie matter? Who was the OCD go getter that suggested being that accurate? I contemplated this and stressed out about this until the next service station.

Just as I was arriving back into CP my favourite Soundgarden song came on, Outshined. I had never heard this line before but it made me terribly happy, “I’m looking California but feeling Minnesota.” I decided I would use that in a sentence before the end of the week and maybe even mix it up, maybe on a bad hair day I would look Minnesota. SO awesome. I remembered that one time I was in a band for 10 minutes we covered a few Soundgarden songs. I still want to start a Soundgarden, female led, cover band. And also an Aretha Franklin cover band. I think they could be the same band. And I just totally blew your mind.

I guess I’m getting old when I watch a smutty sex scene in a show I am watching and all I can think about is how straight the guy’s spine is. Wow! What I wouldn’t give to that have that perfect spine. I’m not sure when skeletal parts of the body became sexy for me but that’s not cool at all.

Hennie came home from work the other day to tell me he’s had a customer comment on watching his ass. He had, indeed, been sexually harassed at work. I actually felt a bit okay about it, knowing it wasn’t just the women that have to deal with it. I mean, it’s never okay, but I’m just glad men and women are going through the struggle together. And how come customers in restaurants think they can say whatever they want? I remember when I was working at an Irish pub in town and I was up on the bar cleaning the shelves the liquor was on. One of the old farts at the bar asked if he started waving around money if I would take my clothes off. The other old fart sitting at the bar, my Dad, quickly pointed out to him that I was his daughter. The other guy looked pretty ashamed, finished his beer and left. Good times. I got so used to sexual harassment from bartending in the UK and then Canada I couldn’t even tell the difference between a compliment or harassment. It all came back to me, just after graduating university, when my boss at my first (and only) big girl, salary job asked me if he could touch my ass. I thought, yup, that, my friends, is slightly beyond complimentary. But no worries, I handled it like a pro, I laughed and told him to fuck off. My boss! Ha!

So the most terrible thing EVER happened yesterday. I had spent the better part of the day watching Homeland. Someone had told me season 4 was coming out soon so I decided to google it to see if that was true. AND THE SPOILER THAT THEN PROCEEDED TO HIT ME IN THE FACE WAS CATASTROPHIC! The interweb is such a spoil sport! It happened to me more then once with Sons of Anarchy that I would be doing some extra super fan research on the actors when it it would just blurt out that they die in an episode. DAMMIT! So ya, one of the main characters dies in Homeland at the end of the current season I’m watching. Bloody great. First world problems…

I also watched an episode of Homeland online which had not been edited properly which was so much fun. A young guy’s voice did voice over for an old guy and when they were supposed to be looking at the sight where an explosion had taken place, they just showed a green screen with the word “crater” on it. Boy was that fun. I felt like I was getting the real deal. Like I was practically directing it. So the night after watching way too much Homeland I dreamt all night I was chasing terrorists and reporting all the developments to the Humm. That’s right, our local arts newspaper. I was reporting terrorist activity to the Humm.

I was totally horrified at the gym today when a young guy next to me hopped up onto the treadmill and started running crazy fast. I knew I had the horrified look on my face too. I wanted to yell BE CAREFUL! THE TREADMILL ALWAYS WINS! IT IS A MACHINE AND YOU ARE A HUMAN! YOU ARE RUNNING TOO FAST!! I have been slightly terrified of running on treadmills ever since I had “The treadmill accident” at home. Everyone remembers it. I was running on the treadmill in my flannel pink doughnuts and coffee pajamas when my foot caught the side and I lost my balance. It would have been just like every other Funniest Home Video if I had just flown off the back but instead I had put the treadmill up against the wall. I pinned myself between the treadmill and the wall while the treadmill kept going, burning holes in to my pjs and eventually burning my skin. I screamed and I my Dad RAN down the stairs (the only time I have ever seen my Dad run) to save me from the vicious attack. I sometimes feel like a treadmill war vet. Like I should educate the young people these days on the terrors of treadmills and what it was like to survive a treadmill attack. The nightmares I had! But instead I just horrified faced the guy next to me the whole time, waiting with baited breathe until he lost his footing and flew across the gym. But he didn’t. And I was shocked…and slightly disappointed.

Well we have hit a new low in our gypsy house sitting life. We kept saying, wow we are getting so much better at this moving thing and then something happened. We started acquiring ridiculous things that are now “necessary” in our lives. I travel with expensive bath salts for one, which is heavy and stupid. But even more then that we travel with a blender and now, to top it all off, an espresso maker. This makes us the worst homeless people ever. Hennie was helping me load the car for the move when he asked if he could put something on the passenger seat of my car. I explained to him, as I exited the house, holding my new espresso maker much like a new baby, that the front seat was reserved. And as I put a seat belt around the espresso maker I felt like we were no longer gypsy, homeless travelers but yuppy, homeless douche bags with two cars, two iPhones and some pricey appliances. Yup, this happened.  

Toronto road trip! Road tripped down to the gift show for work on Sunday. I packed too many nice clothes in my suitcase for the show, so I would pretend to look professional but ended up going straight there which had me talking to new suppliers in my pajamas. Serious fail.  After settling into our hotel that had a different name from what it was called on Expedia and letters missing from the sign with the wrong name on it, we ordered in food. It was a snow storm and we needed pad thai ASAP! After 1 hour and no food we started panicking. I started drinking soda so it would fill my stomach and I nawed on my emergency veggie burger I had packed that morning. After two hours I started making screaming throat noises as my hungry stomach tried to eat the rest of my body. All my boss could hear was “I’M NOT GOING TO MAKE IT!” for the last half hour of the wait. 

I had been excited to watch the Grammy’s that night for no reason at all because they weren’t exciting and after an hour I switched the channel only to find out later that that’s when all the fun stuff happened. Ringo’s song reminded me of a nursing home sing-along. And Beyonce had opened with a ridiculous song that had lasted, I swear, over a fucking hour. It was boring, had no melody and was really just background noise for her grinding a chair…and then her husband. The pad thai that eventually came was terrible. The end.

The next day we drove through some serious polar vortex inspired snow squalls on our way to Collingwood. After hours of knuckle clenching driving (I played on my phone, I was not actually driving) a sign from God appeared, he had sent his angels down to rescue us from the road (or urge us to take a break). We were about to drive through Creemore. Creemore!! I started screaming like I was about to meet the cast of Sons of Anarchy and started rambling on about how this was the Mecca for craft beer brewers and beer lovers alike. As I shakily walked into the brewery they asked if we wanted to join a tour as they handed us samples of beer. I almost cried. I was home. This was my homeland and they were welcoming me with open arms. To make a long story short I left with beer glasses and t-shirts and decided that that day was the greatest day ever.  

We stopped in the next town for coffee and food. The town was called Stayner. The name did not sit well with me. It was gross. I turned to my boss and said, you know what Bill did to Monica? He Stayn(dh)er. I felt bad for everyone in that little town with a name that reminded me of ejaculation. Poor Stayner. 

When we got to our hotel in Collingwood I ran to my room yelling that it was time for Homeland! HOMELAND! The next morning my boss said she hadn’t slept well and I said I hadn’t either. Well it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t sleep but it had more to do with the fact that there are terrorists in America and I for one am stressed out about it but also terribly concerned for Claire Danes mental health. Yes, I had watched Homeland until the wee hours of the morning. Dammit! When we were scheduled to leave Collingwood we found out all the roads were closed except for one. Quick! We must make our exit before they decide to close that one too! We settled on a radio station called “The Beach” the voice of Georgian Bay that played Backstreet Boys and Rod Stewart. Lame 101. It was perfect for some more white out driving (I didn’t do the driving here either). We finally got onto some big 4 series highway around Barrie when the traffic came to a dead stop. After about twenty minutes I told my boss that I had had to pee like half an hour ago and didn’t want to say anything but now I really had to go. I told her I KNEW I should have invested in adult diapers for this trip, because it was times like this that would lead me into a total bladder panic meltdown. I started, in my head, planning how I would pee next to the road, in a snowbank, with a million parked cars watching me. I started crazily searching Twitter and other news feeds to find out what the fuck was stopping us from getting to the next toilet. And finally, after 45 minutes we started moving. We spotted a sign for a rest stop and I almost cried. Then we saw it was closed and there wasn’t one for quite awhile and I almost cried again, but for a different reason. We made it home in one piece and I didn’t pee myself. Hurrah!

So I have started scanning for jobs in the city as Hennie and I are making the leap from homeless gypsies from the boonies to actually having a place this summer and we have decided to move into Ottawa. I know! You are all shocked! Here is the thing. We are still young. There is still hope for us finding big kid jobs and actually thriving. This will probably not happen in Almonte. Almonte, I love you, but I need something bigger. Size matters, you know? Anyways, after a few days of casual job scanning, just to see what was out there one of the job search sites sent me a list of jobs recommended just for me. How thoughtful! The first one was a funeral home worker…I thought, wow, this job search site doesn’t know me at all?! What makes them think I can keep a straight face for that long? Or not crack terribly inappropriate jokes and terribly inopportune times? Why would they think I would like to be around dead people? That I could resist putting funny make-up on the deaceased? This job recommendation list is broken but it will, I imagine, keep me thoroughly amused for days to come.