Tonight is a glorious night!  I received the mark for my first class as a master’s student: an A!  I am thrilled!  And, now I can stop waking up in the night panicking about my grade.  The only thing that still rattles me about this experience is that I forgot to put my name on one component I handed in - can you believe that? - but luckily the professor was able to match the piece to my name, so I got the marks for it after all.  Still, what a boneheaded thing to do.  Can you imagine how freaked out I’d be if I’d lost a third of my grade  because I didn’t put my name on something?  Sheesh!

Anyway, all is well.  I shall celebrate by soaking in the tub.  No calls for the next two hours please.

Today I bought some socks at Costco. Virgin socks are one of life’s great pleasures. I absolutely love the experience of putting on brand new socks, socks that have never been sweated on, or washed, or stuffed in a runner all day, or otherwise tainted. They are just soft (yet curiously firm) and fresh smelling and delightful. Only underwear comes close to being as enjoyable when new.

Our friend Esan occasionally waxes poetic about what he’d do if he were absurdly rich, and I must say that if anyone on Earth deserves to be absurdly rich, it’s Esan , because only he will truly appreciate it. One of Esan’s many plans is to create a roll of pants, a great big spool of fresh pants, from which you pull off a new pair to wear every day. At the end of the day, you just toss your jeans, because tomorrow you’ll get a fresh pair off the spool.

Personally, I like my jeans broken in, but the spool idea is sound. If I were absurdly rich, I would have a spool of socks. Every day I would just pull off two fresh socks, and experience the joy of the virgin sock forever. I would then turn the end of day used socks into some kind of modern art piece, or perhaps just mail them all, one pair a day, to my landlord who said we can’t get a dog. I think he’d like that.

Last night I put the final nail in the dog coffin.  Husband and I went to Metrotown (Metrobarf, we call it) and I bought some clothes with some of the money I’d set aside for buying the dog.  I’ve been diligently saving for over a month for the dog, since they are expensive, too expensive to just write a cheque for on buying day.  I’ve been very good about not going out, not buying things, not spending my budgeted money, and every week I made a trip to the bank to deposit my savings with a song in my heart: look, I just saved 10% of the cost of a dog!  Yippee!  Two days ago I found myself with a wad of savings and a landlord who said no.  So I shopped.

Anyway, I promise to stop going on and on about the damn dog after today.  The point is, spending some of those savings was really the final acknowledgment that I will not be buying a dog.  It really made it real.  Instead, I got some shirts and a pair of cutoff jean shorts.  They won’t love me back, but they also don’t need housebreaking.  I suppose that’s fair.

You know what I hate?  Those women who put lip liner on that is several shades darker than their lipstick.  Don’t they know it makes them look like clowns?  Honestly, if there was one makeup manouver that looks like utter shit on everyone who does it, this is it.  It’s worse than baby blue eyeshadow.  It’s worse than clumpy mascara.  It’s worse than goth eyeliner painted to look like an ankh at the corner of your eye.  Just stop it!

I think the theory is it creates lip “shadow” so your lips look fuller - like, the edges are darker because they’re super far receeded from the middle fleshy parts, which are huge and pillowy and sexy like Angelina Jolie’s.  Alas, the human eye is not so easily fooled, and you just look like you drew a circle around your mouth so horny drunk truckers with ten bucks to burn would know where to aim.

(See how pissy I get when I someone tells me no dog?)

I am officially in mourning over the no dog ruling.  I spent most of last night sniffling on the couch and staring into space, which appeared to trouble Husband, so I put some Law and Order on so my behaviour would seem more normal.  It’s perfectly normal to sniffle while staring at Lenny Brisco - come on, the dude is dead!  Mostly I was in disbelief, because, seriously, what landlord doesn’t want a creature that will never learn to say “I need the toilet!” living in his condo?  And how will I continue to function without a little mammal to love?

Finally I went to bed, and tossed and turned with guilt over the little puppy that I won’t be adopting, which will consequently suffer at the hands of a cruel adopter, who probably plans to make puppy stew when the dog turns two.  And poke the puppy in the eye several times a day.  What have I consigned my puppy to?  Suffering!  Deep suffering!  I felt just the way I did when I gave away my cats (because Husband is allergic), and had nightmares about abandoning them for about two years.

This morning was spent grumbling and angry,  and but now I’m becoming more resigned to the idea of no pet.  I guess now I won’t be needing those puppy training books.  And maybe I could love my quilt instead - I’ll give him the puppy’s provisional name (Otto von Bismarck), take him out to the yard several times a day to pee, go to the dog park with him to visit others of his kind, and whap him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when he leaves a turd on the floor.  Bad blanket, bad!  Also, since he’s pretty big, I’ll have to make sure to train him not to jump up when people come to the door.  Seriously, Otto the quilt is like seven feet tall.

Finally, our landlord got back to us: he’s standing firm on the no pet rule.  I am perhaps unreasonably upset.  I mean, it’s not the end of the world.  But I’m very disappointed.  I can see why the landlord wants no pets - how is he to know we aren’t going to get the biggest dog on planet Earth and then grind all his turds into the carpet?  Then again, how does he know we won’t do the same with Husband’s turds?  We might have to start, now that I no longer have a reason to make nice with the landlord.

Since Jim complimented by quilt, I feel compelled to show a few more pictures, even though it’s not totally finished yet. So, without further ado, here is my quilt spread out on the living room floor. Note the ruffly white edge, which is really just the backing (an old sheet) that hasn’t been tidily sewn up yet:

Here is the quilt with our Ikea chair visible, to give you a sense of scale. It’s supposed to be queen sized, though my sewing leaves something to be desired and I think it’s a bit smaller than that, but still, I love it like a retarded child:

And finally, a close up of the top so you can see the pattern. The colours are more vibrant in real life, but for some reason the picture kind of washes them out. It’s a very bold, bright pattern. You might be able to see some of the actual quiling, which runs in trapezoids around the basic nine-block unit (look at the yellow squares, and you’ll see the quilting stitches there). The big white stitches are there to hold the three layers of the quilt together (top, cotton batting, and old sheet backing) until it’s been all sewn together. Then I will remove those white stitches:

I’m working on my quilt again.  Now I’m actually quilting - sewing the layers together.  This has got to be my longest craft project ever, and the most ambitious.  I started this quilt over a year ago in Halifax.  At that time, I was doing all the stitching by hand (no sewing machine).  I cannot describe how much freakin’ work that was.  I had to quit because of chronic wrist pain, unfortunately.  So the quilt project stalled for a long time.  But this Christmas Husband got me a sewing machine, and since then I have had great bursts of productivity.  Now I’m in the home stretch - quilting the damn thing, then the border, and then I am done.  It’s far from perfect but I’m pretty proud of it anyway - this whole thing started as fat quarters of fabric, then it became a million tiny pieces of cut up fabric, then stitched together squares, then a sewn quilt top, stretched across the floor, tacked, and finally, now almost a quilt.  And when this is done I already have another project in mind…

Today was most productive.  The first thing I did was sleep until eleven, which I haven’t done since I was about fourteen.  The cause of this excessive sleep was the fact that last night I stayed up until after 2am, which I never do.  I am world famous for my ability to drop whatever I’m doing and go to bed as soon as it hits 10:30.  I’m a relentless early to bedder.  And always have been.  As a child, I would put myself to bed by 9 every night, without so much as a word from my parents.  Husband is the night owl around here, as he usually stays up until 1am or later, but last night for some mysterious reason he went to bed early.  Faced with the prospect of a house with no awake occupants in it after 11pm, I realized that it was a dirty job but someone had to do it, so I stayed up.

Anyway, after dragging myself out of bed at 11, I proceeded to do the dishes, finish my paper due tomorrow, and read more puppy literature.  Husband and I then went out for a burrito (lunch) and supplies for the poker game tonight.  I like to provide a veggie plate because it’s more nutritious than chips, and also as a vegetarian it is my secret ninja mission to convert everyone else to vegetarianism, through the provision of tasty poker snacks.  I have also cleaned up the living room and kitchen.  And I made a trip to Home Depot to get supplies for replanting my houseplants.  Since it’s spring, they need to be upgraded to bigger pots and have some fresh soil added.  I also bought fertilizer.  Soon I will have the biggest plants in the world, right here in my living room!

Now I’m off to make the aforementioned veggie plate and to clear the dining table for cards.  We use the dining table as our communal desk, so right now it’s full of laptops and papers and empty diet Dr Pepper cans.  And, curiously enough, about fifteen hairbands.

Now that I have gone on and on about cheating and my mental illness related to babies, I thought it would be a good time to talk about something positive: my husband.

My husband is a tremendous person. I have profound respect for him that I feel every day. He’s had much to overcome in his life, and he’s the most honest and self searching man I know. He refuses to hide behind his neuroses, choosing instead to attack them head on. His ongoing project is himself, and I know at least part of his motivation is me and our marriage.

He is also a genius. Husband taught himself calculus one weekend simply because he had nothing else to do, and then, this week, he developed a new corner of poker theory after only playing poker for a few months. He just sat down with a graphing calculator, some simulator models online, a bunch of graph paper, and made a calculus based contribution to the theory of poker. For fun. Because he is a genius! And because we’re both intellectual types, we have the best conversations together, wherein we sort out the problems of the world, or sometimes the problems in poker theory.

And he works hard in an extremely taxing job, which means I get to go to grad school and not subsist on Mr Noodles the entire time.

We like the same movies and the same pasttimes (road trips, beer, hockey, vegetarianism, reading, napping, foot rubs). He tolerates my addiction to Law and Order, and I tolerate his addiction to online poker. We talk on the phone while he’s at work almost every day. He still calls me to tell me when he’s on the way home, and I get all excited and happy that he’s coming back to me after hours and hours away. He tucks me in if I go to bed first, and has actually developed a repertiore of tucks depending upon my mood and whether I’m sick or not. We have a peaceful, loving household.

He’s also impossible. Whenever he changes the toilet paper roll, it goes on backwards. He is chronically tardy. He doesn’t like dark beer. Drifts of paperwork follow behind him like a trail. And if I forget to put out a bath mat he won’t go get one himself, leaving a puddle on the bathroom floor after he showers that I am sure to step in, in socks.

But he’s all mine, and I love all the parts of him. This is real love, honest love, that knows about and accepts the quirks and flaws along with the good things. I love my husband as a whole person, a complicated and sometimes irrational person, who is still capable of surprising me, and always makes me happy.

I love you Muffin!