One of the major perks of living in a nice hood is that garbage day can be pretty exciting. I was riding my bike home the other day and saw, what I thought, was a giant cat toy/castle. I went over for further inspection and thought, there is a possibility that this is some weird sex bench. Why would a cat toy apparatus have shag carpet on it. I wasn’t sure I was willing to gamble with that type of potential cleaning job for a thing my cat would probably ignore. Garbage day brings people out to the Glebe. On my way home from work I saw a guy with a holding thing/receptacle attached to his bike going through people’s tossed stuff scoring some decent material. My favourite garbage day story is when I was just about at my apartment and I saw a line of elderly people slowly walking down the street with their roller carts looking out for scores in the garbage. But there were enough of them that I definitely felt this was a planned outing. At some point their activity director had written Garbage Foraging Day Trip to the Glebe on a white board. May or may not include lunch, depending on what you find. Pretty industrious.

I had to run down to Shopper’s a couple nights ago as I realized my cat had run out of food and the vet was closed, so I couldn’t purchase his super fancy, expensive cat pate. On occasion, when feeling sassy, I spray some chemical nightmare, fancy smelling perfume on me at the entrance of Shoppers. On this occasion I spotted the perfume, Happy by Clinique, which I wore throughout high school (probably to desperately convince myself I was happy? I was not). As I was spraying it on myself, 2 shoppers employees (and their random friend) came to check up on me. I politely said no I was fine and started to turn away when one of them gave me a weird look. As I wondered if she was really that annoyed with me for sampling a tester I realized I was walking away with the giant silver lid for the perfume bottle. I laughed and went, ah right, won’t be needing that and then looked seriously at the three of them and said or maybe I needed it for my collection…Good recovery, you perfume top stealing weirdo. Thank god they laughed.

My first day of vacay I figured I’d relax at the parents and float in the pool sipping on prosecco. That night I was going to have a couple drinks with a friend in CP. My Mom asked how I was going to get home. Uber. How everyone gets home when there is no bus of any kind. Imagine my surprise to find out there is NO UBER IN THE VALLEY. There is a huge drinking culture there and no way to get home (except for like one cab who I think also deals drugs, but I’m speculating). There is a massive market there to be tapped people! I had to call DAD to get home. Or Mr. B to the other person I was with. It’s cool. I’m just a 33 year old pub crawling with my mate, who has to call my Dad (her former teacher) to get home. No biggie. When he walked into the bar we were at we were doing some girlie, sweet shot. #adulting

My car shit out, basically right at the start of my staycation. Murphy’s law. Let’s stay home and do fun day trips with the car, we will save money. Well fuck off. I took the car in today and left it. Walked half way back to my house (think Carling/Kirkwood to the Glebe), but was so covered in sweat that I decided to Uber home. I knew I only had enough space on the ol’ card for one Uber ride, so returning to pick up my car would be an adventure. My significant other thought I should just call a cab. A cab? How do I even do that? Do I punch numbers into my texting machine instead of letters? What about a bus? A bus? How do I know where they are going? I used to take buses after concerts when I was in high school, to get back to the park and ride and I believe twice we ended up at the airport when it was the bus’s last stop. I can easily organize myself on a tube or metro but busses, not so much.

Fuck it’s been humid. Like crazy humid. I walked about 15 minutes the other day in the early morning sun (from my mechanics because I don’t know how else to get around) and when I realized I was sweating from my inside elbow folds. When I got home my bra was soaked. I realized that perhaps the padding in my bra was for hot days just like this, so it can soak up all that sweat and make your boobs look bigger. Then I thought I should just use some soaker pads from the meat department at work, the same pads they use to soak up raw meat juice, just shove them into my bra and walk to my heart’s content. I think there could be a market for hot day breast soaker pads. From chicken breasts, to lady breasts, we keep you from sopping through? Ok the punchline could certainly use some work.

I went out for breakfast with a friend who was going on about short weather being the best. I haven’t owned shorts in years, I just wear like yoga pant capris. So when I found a pair of biker short shorts today I put them on to test them out. I texted her immediately to let her know that I had tried wearing shorts but after 3 steps my vagina ate them.

With the new season of Game of Thrones coming out, I knew I would need to commit to watching the previous season that I hadn’t seen yet. We had been putting it off because the Man had seen it and knew I would not recall anything from the previous seasons I had seen and it would drive him crazy. It was precisely what happened when we started it. I needed synopsis and clarification on every character that come onto the screen. It was like oh that guy from that movie I just saw at the Mayfair, Oh my god Snowdon is dead?, Dinklage! and yes, my favourite Beth of Targ! He just sat there shaking his head and I concurred that yes, watching this season with me would indeed be painful it might be best to do it on my own. Rude.

At the cottaaaaage. (Please watch Baroness Von Sketch show immediately for cottage reference). Through some amazing luck we managed to book a cottage in the valley this weekend after we had pretty much giving up because everything was booked or crazy expensive. I feel like there are a thousand people with cottages they don’t use all the time so it feels weird to rent one because people should just share the bloody thing. If I had one I would let people rock out there whenever we weren’t. No maybe I would rent it out to make money – dammit!

Anyways, everyone knows I am no city girl but when we packed up the car to go to the cottage for 2 nights, it looked like we were moving all of our earthy belongings in the world. I wondered how we got to this point. Sure we needed lot’s of bags of chips, no carbs be damned…it’s the cottaaaaage. We also needed enough booze that we would never run out…it’s the cottaaaaaage. We also brought our own pillows, enough TP that if the diarrhoea apocalypse happened, we would survive, our own pour over coffee gadget because I refuse to use a Keurig (I swear I am not a snob!) and only important vitamins to maintain our cottage life health facade…at the cottaaaage. I also stopped at Strawberry Blonde Bakery on the way out of town, my favourite special occasion gluten free treat. I bought 2 scones and a doughnut for my cottage breakfasts but ate all of them before we even got there (we skipped lunch?). I also demanded we make smores which got a little stupid when the only places we picked up groceries were Whole Foods and Farm Boy. I, of course, required gluten free graham crackers so I bought that at WF but I figured on the way out of town I would pick up garbage no name marshmallows and cheap ass Hershey chocolate (the way God intended a smore to be made). But we ran out of time and went to Farm Boy and bought artisan square marshmallows (that obviously had a lower heat threshold than regular marshmallows) and fancy Farm Boy Callebaut chocolate. Sure I could make a fire in the woods without any effort because I’m a fucking Girl Guide people, but here I was with the most snobby of smore ingredients, I felt embarrassed. Then our Saturday guests said it was the best fucking smore they had ever had and everything was ok. We all laughed our asses off at these gentrified marshmallows jizzing all over us as we tried to make the final product. Good times.

I forgot about mosquitos. I have this romantic, completely scrubbed clean view of the country as being this tranquil, magic place that is beautiful and perfect. Within 3 minutes of being in the cottage I looked down to see a giant welt on my leg. I had already got my first mosquito bite and we had not even put down our bags yet. I also forget about country folk. I used to totally the shun the valley local. I was never a valley gal that drove a truck, or bought smokes for her Dad at Beckers or drove an ATV or loved to Ski Doo. I was the only person in my group of friends ALWAYS that had never listened to country music. I was not related to anyone else that lived in the valley (unheard of) and my parents were not born there (not even born in Ontario!). So I never understood the country folk but as I sat there on the back deck of this cottage listening to a group of ol’ lads, each with their individual cooler next to them full of Bud Lights, discussing, what it sounded like was, politics with the thickest valley accent you could put on, I felt a warmth in the cockles of my soul. Sure my family was not from the valley, but the valley life I knew. And I appreciated its sincerity and its simplicity. My Man noted that I told everyone I met while cottaging that I was from Almonte and it oddly made us immediate friends. If you are from the valley you are trustworthy. We met the lady who was renting us the cottage and after a minute of talking she said we seemed very trustworthy and she was great at reading people and then I told her I was from Almonte and she just laughed and handed us the keys because she knew everything would be fine. Their is a valley badge of honour, you will be trusted, you will work hard, you will not take shit for granted, you can drive any vehicle you encounter because you have been driving since you were 14 and you can probably survive at least one night in the wilderness because you camped, lived in the woods or was a girl guide (or all 3 in my case). I used to be a bit embarrassed or awkward about my small town roots but I gave grown to love and respect it as a badge of honour. So eff ya valley – keep on shinin’ eh!

I have booked my vacation for the summer! And when I mean booked vacation, I mean I am taking an unheard of 9 days off in a row. No major plans yet except for trying my absolute best not to think about work for 9 WHOLE DAYS! In the spirit of budgeting, this is what it’s come down to – we either buy my dream vacuum or we go to Wonderland. I shit you not. These are the dilemmas I face. I feel like this is fairly representative of my life. But alas, no decision needed to be made, the car crapped out. So instead of wonderland I bought a ball bearing or something or other. Lame.