But seriously.  I am procrastinating writing a up a case presentation for school because… here I make a confession… my work is currently so poor that watching the tapes of it actually causes my heart to stop beating.  (One cannot write up one’s session, including transcript, if one does not watch the fucking tape.  Obviously.)  It’s true.  I actually die from watching my work.  Die to death.

And can I also say this: it is unspeakably frustrating to know, let’s say, fifty units of knowledge about one’s field, but be only able to whip out and apply four when in front of an actual client.  I have this rather large gap between what I know and what I can do.  It makes me want to, I don’t know, fling myself off the balcony.  Or eat a steak.  Perhaps both?  “Oh my, this is delicious!” Splat!

So… instead of working on this write up, which will not write itself, ha ha, I am reading archives of a blog I like.  And contemplating a tub.  Husband has taken to tubbing with me, which is lovely, but does make it impossible to read.  Not only is it a little crowded in the tub now, but it is awfully distracting to have that cute bottom snuggled up right there (don’t judge, we’re married!).  So I have to have extra tubs, solo, to get in my quota of tub reading.

And to put off this work I should be doing.

There are few rules about this blog but one of them is that I shall not speak ill of my husband.  This is an easy rule to observe because both generally and specifically, he is a wonderful person, the sort of person who always knows the right thing to say and never complains about what I make for dinner.  Also he has very handsome feet and the most charming little bottom!  You should see it, it’s so nice!

Having said that, I am now forced to confess that, despite it all, he has, alas, feet of clay.  It’s something of a shock to discover your Adonis is really a person but there you have it - I’m a person too so we’re a good match.  At any rate, here is how I discovered his human frailty (and he will kill me for telling you this, but I can’t help myself):

This morning we were lounging on the sofa together, talking about buying a flat screen TV, which is something we do sometimes.  We were arranged such that his face was resting against my calf, surely a romantic position, when suddenly he narrowed his focus, discovered I haven’t shaved my legs in about a month, and uttered a totally spontaneous and involuntary “Ewwwwww!”

There are few things in life as crushing as having your romantic partner recoil in revulsion from your physical person.  If this has never happened to you, you can take my word for it: it blows.  It took about a minute for the full shame and horror to sink in, at which point I fled sobbing from the room, locked myself in the bathroom, and engaged in the most joyless round of leg-shaving ever in recorded history.

Many apologies were forthcoming - and no hard feelings maintained.  The comment was clearly not premeditated nor calculated to offend.  And I must agree, hairy legs are sort of gross on women, and to be surprised by them at close proximity is doubtless horrible.

Still, I think I’ll be shaving more often from now on.

I awoke to the stench of rotten.

In the hurly-burly of getting li’l blogo off to the airport early on Monday, then working a late shift Monday night (thus going straight to bed upon getting home), some innocently forgotten food items were left on the kitchen counter Sunday night.  They were left there with good intentions of a kitchen clean-up, good intentions that got lost paving the road to Hell.  This-morning (Tuesday), the food returned from Hell, sadder, and certainly not wiser.  More like, vengeful.

I should add that they had previously overstayed their welcome in the fridge by about a week. . .

Offender #1 was a quinoa and cashew sauce dish with cubed tofu.  Healthy healthy healthy!  Offender #2 was a garden variety salad.

The smell was astonishingly remniscient of an experience from summer camp at age 15.  At the end of the summer, I was helping clean up a kitchen.  Of course, this included taking out all the old garbage bags.  One of them unfortunately contained 30 pounds of forgotten, raw, t-bone steaks, dripping in their bloody juices, awash in maggots.  But that’s not what I noticed first.  I had innocently been attempting to tie off the top of the bag when a very unfortunate out-gassing occurred.  The stench-wave induced immediate nausea, and I had to run outside to avoid immediately vomiting.

The best part happened next.

Did I mention that this was a summer cadet camp?  For those who don’t know, the cadets are a paramilitary organization for teenagers, and yes, it’s very much a natural experiment in Lord of The Flies, except with shiny boots and starched collars.  So, I was naturally Ordered by my 17 year old Platoon Sergeant, drunk on his petty power, to go back in there and Get That Garbage!  I did, but not before getting rotten blood on my arms, starchy shirt, and shiny boots.

Summer camp is wholesome, and it gives memories for a lifetime, memories which roused me from my slumbers this morning.  In our time of living, we are vibrant, colourful, and varied.  In our decay, we are one.  Blogo has been gone for 23.5 hours, and I have already reverted to complete savagery.  At least there’s no rotten blood.  And no petty teen dictators.

Tonight was Husband’s poker night, playing in a tournament at a friend’s house.  I elected to stay home and read on the couch, which somehow turned into cleaning the bathrooms and the kitchen as well as reading on the couch - more productive but surely a waste of a quiet evening home alone?

In any case, I noticed a little while ago that it was getting later than is usual for Husband’s return, and in one of those otherwise unprompted instances of paranoia, I suddenly started to worry that something had happened to him.  Does this ever happen to you?  You become convinced, without any evidence, that your loved one has had some terrible fate befall them?  Of course I decided to just call him and check - and even as I reached for the phone I ran through in my mind what it could mean if he didn’t answer: car accident, mugging at the Skytrain gone wrong, etc.  And then I’d be widowed and miserable, consigned to a life of loneliness, doomed to never meet another partner who could enrich my life as Husband does and forever bitter about his amazing potential snuffed out too early.

It all sounds very silly now but I tell you, at the time, it was very compelling.  I could actually feel my heart rate increase!  (Seriously, does this happen to you or am I in need of therapy?)

But he did answer when I called, and he is thrilled because he won the game tonight, and everything is fine.

Today we sat through a three hour marathon meeting with a financial guy.  Oh my god, three hours is too long to do even fun things, never mind discussing index funds.  I was fine for the first hour because I can pretty much tolerate anything for one hour - and for the second hour, I was convinced we’d be finishing up at any second.  By the time we were deep into the third hour I had entered a state of despair and misery that not even a trip to the bathroom (for the variety, you know) could alleviate.  By the bitter end I had exhausted my repertoire of subtle hints that I wanted to leave (fiddling with my purse, shifting around a lot to show my physical discomfort, staring pointedly at my watch, tugging on Husband’s sleeve plaintively) and was ready to chew my own arm off to escape.

It’s not that I don’t want to know about my financial future.  Let’s all agree that retiring is good.  But can we also agree that THREE HOURS is too long to deal with it in one sitting?  It’s like trying to swallow a deer whole.  Unless you’re a python it’s just going to suck.  And speaking of food, the meeting started at ten and if I have to wait much beyond noon for my lunch I become beastly - so of course when we were finally set free, at one in the afternoon, I really didn’t know whether to rejoice or cry.  I was seriously cranky.  I’m getting mad just retelling it.

Investing is something I have resisted learning about because it’s desperately boring.  But it’s also incredibly important.  In my career I will probably never have a pension plan, and Husband is self employed so he has to plan his own retirement too.  We need to know how to invest wisely.  We also struggle with investing ethically - how to balance our desire for good returns with our desire to only fund (via investment) things we consider ethically acceptable. Among other considerations.

Anyway, just because it’s boring isn’t a good reason to remain ignorant.  Really, what we’re talking about is security and the ability to retire at some point.  That’s worth some boredom.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself during three hour meetings.

So I’ve been reading Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett.  The title is pretty self explanatory, but while it provides much information as to the book’s content, it fails to alert the reader in advance to how hard this book is!  Turns out there are a lot of very complex and difficult ideas and arguments about evolution, and some very smart people have thrown a lot of buns around over it, so when you’re reading a book that proposes to sort it all out from a philosophy of science perspective, things get sticky fast.  So, while I normally chew through a book in a day or two, this one is taking quite a bit of time.  I’m toting it all around with me to read when I have a spare moment, and this means that once in a while I put it down somewhere and forget that I’ve put it there.  It also means Husband has taken to calling Daniel Dennett my new boyfriend, since we’re always together (for the record, Mr Dennett is married, as am I, and in fact we have never met.)

With the preamble out of the way, we can progress to the story portion of this post.  Last night Husband woke me up in the way you never want your spouse to wake you: by shaking me urgently and whispering in my ear, “Listen!” Adrenaline took care of my sleepy fogginess and I strained to listen to what was surely the sound of home invading axe murderers.  And there is was:  Rustle rustle… rustle rustle!

There are few things more terrifying than becoming convinced in the middle of the night while in a sleepy fog (because let’s face it, adrenaline really isn’t enough to knock you into a state of cognitive clarity at four a.m.) that you are about to be slaughtered by strangers in search of drug money.  I was contemplating my impending grim fate in this state of terror when Husband, who I freely admit is smarter than I am, suddenly sat up, leaned forward, and picked something up off the end of the bed.

A book.  Left in the open position at the foot of the bed, and with pages rustling in the wind created by the fan we run at night to provide sleep-enhancing white noise.

And because when you’ve been scared in the night the most important thing is to assign blame, I said, accusatorily: “Did you leave a book on the bed!?”

In my defense Husband is prone to leaving things on the bed and I have a neurosis about it - nothing can be put on the bed.  I have very strict rules about this.  So statistically speaking, there was every probability that the offending article was his.  But alas, that was not the case.

Husband responded: “Daniel C. Dennett!”  It was, in fact, my book.  I must have put it there shortly before going to bed.

We had a giggle about it, and then indulged in an amusing fantasy of Daniel Dennett (who looks a great deal like Santa Claus) being actually present in the room, crouched at the foot of the bed and rustling the pages of his book at us in the dark.

Anyway, I am really learning a lot from this book.  It is, as I say, not an easy read.  But certainly a worthwhile one!  And when this one is finished I have another waiting in the wings….

When I was young, I would occasionally find myself home alone for the weekend with my mom.  My dad was an avid golfer and skiier who took many weekend trips to indulge in these hobbies; sometimes I would elect to stay home rather than join him, and it was these times when he was away that I had my best experiences of domesticity.

My mother would first clean the house - Dad being something of a tornado of debris, she generally allowed things to be messy when he was home, a decision based I believe on an acknowledgment of reality.  But with him gone, everything could be put to order and expected to stay that way.  With the house clean, she moved on to puttering: baking, sewing, and painting being her chief occupations when the house was to herself. I was mainly an observer here; my mother and I were not friends while I was growing up, and though we didn’t argue, we simply had very little to do with one another.  Yet I loved these times when it was just the two of us at home.  We didn’t talk much, and I didn’t share in performing her hobbies with her, but somehow there was a feeling of relaxation and contentment and coziness that could only occur under these particular circumstances.  I loved it.

Now I see much of her in me.  When Husband leaves home for a few days, I too make a thorough cleaning my first order of business.  Then I sew or cook or read - putter, in other words.  And I get that feeling of contentment, though when I am home alone I sometimes wish to have someone to share it with.

This weekend, Husband had four days off work.  We stuck close to home, other than two day trip drives.  I did my cleaning and ordering and cooking and reading and sewing - and it was perfect.  We achieved just the right balance of independence and interdependence, socializing and staying in, relaxing and doing things.  We had some serious talks but also laughed a great deal.  And I have realized that this is the best feeling I know: contentment, in my home, with my beloved husband, as we carry out daily occupations at a leisurely pace.

And that is what motivates me to be a home maker, insofar as I perform those tasks.  It’s not that I like cleaning the bathroom, or even necessarily that I love the cleanness of the result (though that is very good) - it’s an emotional experience of peace and warmth that requires order and recreational industry to manifest.

Yesterday was one of those complicated, sad, difficult days that I can’t talk about here.  The only thing good that came of it was the feeling of connection to Husband, who as it turns out can crack me up even when I’m in distress and getting sick *and* hungry all at the same time.  I can’t say enough about how much my quality of life and happiness are increased by his presence.

Side note: we tried to go out for dinner last night, and had our first total veg flop.  We went to Nick’s Spaghetti House, which I fond memories of, but it turns out there is not a single vegeterian option on the menu!  All the pastas are meat sauced.  It was very hard to leave the delicious smelling restaurant in search of something else.  Of course the dinner we ended up having was a disappointment.

Today I might post a recipe since I’m going to be making one of my favourite soups of all time (fennel and white bean), but first I have to whip myself into a cooking frenzy because I am actually sick and my energy is poo poo.  If I end up reading on the couch all day, I guess I could post pictures of that instead.

Husband and I like to take drives, so yesterday that’s just what we did.  We started at home (Vancouver), and then took a drive through West Vancouver, which was my first time going there.  Husband was nearly incapacitated by my comment, made innocently and without a trace of irony, that I thought it would be perfectly acceptable for us to buy a place in West Van some day (humour explained for non-natives: this is the rich part of the city, peopled by uber snobs who drive Maseratis and stare down their noses disapprovingly at mere plebes like me).  It would be like saying, Gee dear, I guess I could see my way to living in Trump Palace, if I had to.

Okay.  Anyway.  We made a brief detour to check out lighthouse park, which is where well scrubbed and clean looking West Vancouver dogs go to run around with their equally clean owners:

I took a picture of this plaque not because I’m particularly interested in Captain Vancouver, but because of the special attention paid to the birth of the first white child born here.  West Vancouver’s snobbiness has a pedigree reaching back to the first whiteys I guess (fourth paragraph):

Then we went to Whistler, future home of the winter Olympics and also a haven of snobbiness.  By the time we got there it was three in the afternoon and I hadn’t had any lunch yet, so I was beastly.  And so was this nifty scultpure of skulls!  (Sorry for the bad segue.):

Whistler is actually quite nice, and thus ends the nice portion of our driving day, because we just kept heading north and let me tell you, there is nothing up there but little butt towns full of houses with cars in the yards and not much else.  We drove up to Lilloett, then on to Lytton, Boston Bar, and then looped back through Hope to Chilliwack and finally home.

The towns are ghastly but the landscape is spectacular, but alas I only got bad pictures of it because, as I say, no one lives up  there and clearly highway maintenance is neither prioritized nor, perhaps, possible.  Long chunks of the road are right up against obvious avalanche and slide prone banks.  You can tell because a) there are signs saying so and b) there are rocks littering the road that plainly came from the slide bank on the left.  On the right is a steep cliff down the mountains into nothing.  So there’s nowhere to stop and even if there were, you don’t want to loiter where avalanches happen!  This is a long way of saying this is the best picture I got.  Sorry.

This was one of the very few areas where they put up a barrier between the highway and the cliff.  The river was beautiful and so are the mountains - but holy shit the highway is scary.  In places it’s one lane for both direction (as in, you have to share the lane with people coming the other way!) - but because it’s the fucking BC mountains the road is twisted like a corkscrew and you can see about four metres in front of the car.  If someone was actually coming the other way, the Sprite Car (and us) would be paste.  Why was it only one lane, you ask?  Because the other lanes were all covered in rock slide material!  Ha!  Ha!  Nervous laugh!

They may be living in poverty ridden and ugly little butt towns, but the people of non-population-corridor BC are fucking hardcore.  And seriously, it is so beautiful up there it takes your breath away.  Canada is in general very sparsely populated once you get about two hundred kilometres from the USA border, and it has a vast and rugged beauty that is startling when you’re used to the ugliness of the city.

Anyway, from rich West Van to poor Boston Bar and points in between, we had about a ten hour drive through some fantastic terrain.  And despite driving all day we stayed in a rather small little corner of the province, which I must say is really enormous.

Okay.  There’s more driving on the schedule today so I need to jet.  I mean drive.  See ya!

Husband has a new job that requires his presence in the office by 8am.  They might as well just roast him alive every morning because he deeply and truly hates mornings.

(Aside: For four years Husband has been bitching about his terrible sleeping problems - and for four years, I have been trying to share my wisdom as a life long insomniac and get him on a sleep schedule.  But would he have any of it?  Nooooo!  No, Husband is a special snowflake who couldn’t possibly benefit from a sleep hygiene routine like the rest of the insomniacs.  It wouldn’t even be worth it to try.  Clearly I just don’t understand how serious his problem is.  Now that he has this insanely early job, he is forced to obey a schedule and guess what?  He’s sleeping much better and even adjusting to the early mornings.  The other day he said to me, “Hey, my sleeping is getting way better on this schedule!” like it was totally a surprise.  I’m not saying he loves mornings, I’m just saying he should have listened to me four years ago because I! Was! So! Right!)

Anyway… this morning we pad out of the bedroom like a pair of squinty moles and in this state of fuzzy semi-blindness, Husband wanders over to the cupboard for a cereal bowl and suddenly freezes, and yells, “Aaaugh, the garbage is leaking! And I’m standing in it!”

There is liquid garbage goo all over my kitchen floor (and Husband’s socks).  Before 8am.  While I am still a mole.  The horror!

So I got the joy of taking out the trash and scrubbing the kitchen floor at the crack of freakin’ dawn this morning.

It’s almost enough to erase the joy of watching The Dark Knight last night.  Almost.