New Years fish

Happy New Year's Eve, all. The festive season never ends!

Joel and I have decided, in honor of this season of celebrating, of giving and receiving, that we would start feeding our fish again. I know, we're bad people, and we should never get a cat, let alone have children. There. I said it; now you don't have to.

It all started one day when I was walking by the fish tank, and all the fish rushed over to the side to greet me, which is what they do when they're hungry. They're like tiny, scaly puppies. So I went to feed them, but there were no tasty fish flakes. Joel decided that he was sick of having fish anyways, and that we should just let them die.

Weeks went by.

Months.

Two full months had passed, with the fish growing bizarrely transparent but never dying. Joel and I left for Sun Peaks, saying 'If they're still alive when we get back, then they're survivors, and we owe it to them to buy some food.'

Sure enough, they were still skulking around the tank when we returned, along with the 8000 progeny of that snail that died ages ago and whom I presume they were eating. So we bought some food and rationed out a bit so that they wouldn't gorge themselves and die (because now that we've spent $3 on a tin of fish food, we want to make sure we have fish around to eat it). The big one turned opaque before my very eyes, but the tiny ones were too dumb to find the flakes. Too dumb to eat = too dumb to live, I always say.

Happy end of 2007.

Things that I do now that I have free time

Wheee! Christmas is over!! I know, my Christmas was awesome and you're all totally jealous and wish you were me, but it was exhausting and by the end of it I was socialized out. Now I have nothing to do but lie around in my sweats and eat chips. I only put pants on for special ocasions, like when the guys came over last night to play TSN Sports Trivia while I got quietly drunk in the corner.

Our landlords brew their own wine, and its quite delicious. They also make an apple wine, which tastes like what I imagine moonshine tastes like.

It made sports-charades more interesting, at any rate.

Nifty gifties!!!

Alright, it's time for the ritualistic post-Christmas listing of the gifts.

Because I am a giant nerd, (on the way up to Sun Peaks, Joel mentioned something about mitochondria, at which point I chimed in with 'the powerhouse of the cell!' and then his whole family laughed and called us nerds), I got two books on grammar that I'm totally pumped about: the infinitely readable Eats, Shoots and Leaves and the as-yet unread Elements of Style. I also got an Eats, Shoots and Leaves daily calender for 2008. Bring on the orthopedic shoes. Speaking of books, in a wildly successful effort to be quirky and fun, my mom wrapped each of our gifts in hollowed-out books. You know the ones - you keep money in them, or your will, or a gun. Or, in this case, money and a Remember Darfur bracelet and a scarf/immigrant head-covering.

Don't we look Jewish? H'anyways, Joel's parents had already given us bruised asses for Christmas, but they threw in stockings (!!!) as well.

I was pumped. Fake tattoos, reindeer unds, a journal with my face on the front, Scrabble fridge magnets, kleenex, socks, gum...I can't even remember it all. Next year I'll take notes. Joel got me a spice rack, as per request, and then this crazy chopper that I used tonight to chop an whole onion in, like, 30 seconds. Also a Tupperware container with segmented parts, because I hate for my food to touch.
What with all the recent additions to both families (me and Mike to the Kruegers, Joel and Gillian to the Pletts), the kids just drew names this year instead of trying to buy gifts for everyone. Bekah got me a wickedawesome Planet Earth interactive DVD game, which Joel and I have a date to play later on tonight, and I will let you know how that goes. On the Krueger side, the gift came with a stipulation: there must be a creative element. You could make a card like Joel did for Mike, write a poem like I did for Tina, make the entire gift yourself like Tina did for Leah, or dress it up as a snowman, as Mike did for me.

What was in the snowman, you ask? This awesomecosy jacket that I wore on our late-evening White-Christmas snow walk.Yes, it is awesome that it snowed. Jane, I can hear you shaking your head, but I've only ever had one white Christmas, and that was the year I was in Europe and that's only because it started snowing in October and never stopped. And I was miserable and cold because I didn't own a jacket. Now I do.

As a side note, gambling seemed to be a pervasive theme, as first Joel, then Matt, and finally Mike received a handful of Scratch-n-Wins.

It kept them quiet for a while, anyways.

So that's my loot, and I'm pleased as punch. And as my gift to you, dear intarwebs, I will try and post more often. I make excuses for myself over the holiday season, but there are those of you out there who have the fortitude to post almost daily. I am not as awesome as you.

Merry day-after-boxing-day.

The Great Krueger Snowboarding Vacation

Hello friends! I have returned from my snowboarding (mis)adventure!!! No, I jokes, it was fun. But I can't sit on most of my ass. (These are my knees. I am a long way from posting pictures of my own ass on the Internets.)

I don't care who you are, you will spend most of your first day snowboarding on your ass or on your knees or scraping snow out of your eyes, and then you will spend your second day not snowboarding, because you will be unable to move. The toilet-paper-roll-holders in all of the bathrooms were situated so that you had to reach behind you just a bit, and so every time you peed you were reminded that your shoulders had no range of motion. Also that you had to use the towel rack and sink counter to lever yourself off the toilet, because you had lost the use of your thighs.

The Kruegers all pour plutonium on their cereal instead of milk, giving them freakish athletic powers. Joel was carving up the bunny hill like an old pro by the time the mountain closed. His younger sister, Tina, who is six feet of fabulousness, made snowboarding look like walking down the street (really sexy walking down the street), and what his older sister, Leah, lacks in skill she makes up for in total fearlessness. I am not...how you say...coordinated, so snowboarding was something of a stretch for me. I may have fallen at least thrice per run. Tina may have had to come cradle me and croon soothing things to me while I gulped for air after landing flat on my back. I may have called it a day about two hours before everyone else, and then gotten a ride back to our resort from a parks guy because I was to achy and whiny to make the ten-minute walk.

Luckily for me and my sheep-like tendency to do whatever everyone else is doing, only Tina and Mike are bad-ass-core enough to go out on two consecutive days. We spent the rest of our time marinating in the hot tub,

napping (wearing our berfday hoodies and cradling our berfday moccosins if it happened to be our berfday),

drinking wine and YouTube-ing all the Jim Gaffigan we could find (whose comedic stylings can be found here, here and here),

and inventing beauty products out of processed meats.

In short, it was the perfect vacation

Hiatus

Greets, all. I'm going to Sun Peaks for three days with the in-laws. I'm gonna learn to snowboard?

H'anyways, see you all soon.

A Christmas Anthem

Movies I Have Seen This Week
And Then What I Thought of Them
(to be sung to the tune of 'Angels We Have Heard on High)



We went to the theater
I Am Legend was a fright
Will Smith the last man on earth
Zombies hunting in the night
Soooooooolitude and siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilence
Remiiiiiiiiiiiinded me of Caaaaaaaaaaaastaway
Zombies scare me spitless
Willlllllllllllllll Smith is exxxxxxxxxxcellent
In eeeeeeverything he dooooooooes these days
This was no exceeee-eeeeption.



Care group had a movie day
Watched five movies in the den
Fountain was a weird-ass film
I would not see it again
Huuuuuuuuuuuuugh Jackman but nooooooooooooot as Wolverine
I dooooooooon't want anything to dooooooooooo with it
The chronology jumped all around
Theeeeeeeeeeere were bits set iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin the future
And biiiiiiiiits set in histoooooooooooooric times
But there was no fou-ountain.



Superbad was super-crude
But I've never laughed so hard
High school parties, cops and girls
And McLovin's ID card
If yoooooooooooooooou're offended byyyyyyyyyyyy the eff-word
And baaaaaaaaathroom humor and poooooooooootty talk
Maybe don't go see this
But iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit was hilarious and kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind of touching
Besiiiiiiiiiiiiides there was no nuuuuuuuuuuuuudity
So I was okay-ay with it



I am getting sick of this
So I'll just compress the rest
Hot Rod wasn't all that great
SNL not at its best
Staaaaaaaaaardust is suppooooooooooosed to be
The neeeeeeeeeeext Princess Bride but it's nooooooooooot as good
That's lots to live up to
Ameeeeeeeeeeeeerican Gangsters is stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill in theaters
And soooooooooooo we had it illeeeeeeeeeeeegally
And I fell asleep during it.

Seasons eatings.

Ok, I don't have loads of time, so this will mostly be pictures. Please keep your cheering to a minimum.

The theme of the A-A-A-Team gatherings these days seems to be holiday-appropriate activities. Funsies. So yesterday we (sans Mike, but avec spouses, but sans Paul's wee teething baby) gathered to make ourselves some gingerbread establishments. I was going to try to string these together in some sort of clever story with captions, but blogger posts them all as html tags now, and so I can't see what's what, so I wont (Note: I just figured out what I've been doing wrong, but I'm not going to go back and fix it now). Instead, know this:

Paul and Sylvia made a loverly ski lodge, but the roof started to seperate, and eventually came entirely undone. With a heavy amount of gross fake-icing, they were able to restore their lodge to its former glory. It had a rudolph-head-trophy mounted on the front. Also skiers. With skis. And poles. Bravo. Also, they built an old-fashioned gingershack out of graham crackers.

Joel and I built a gingerbread cave for our gingerbread caveman and gingerbread cavewoman (who, incidentally, had a chocolate baby. I hear the mailman was chocolate...). There are dinosaurs roaming freely, completely ignorant of the new invention (fire) which allows the cavefamily to roast one of their own, rotisserie-style.

John over-reached himself, building an elaborate under-the-sea house which soon collapsed under its own weight. Again, several pounds of fake-icing later, he was able to re-establish structural integrity, about which he was rather smug.

The end.

A quick sum-up.

I know, right? November ends, and I think I can just fade off the blogging map. I actually meant to blog yesterday, for reals and all, but then I had to sleep in a little bit because I set my alarm but forgot to turn it on, and then I had to go to the gym because I can't stop eating these cookie-squares, and then my mom came all the way out from Burnaby to drive me six blocks to the Walmart, and then I had to make some cookies for a potluck, and then I had a study-date with Joel because we both have exams tomorrow, and then I had to go to my potluck and eat my cookies, and then I had to go to bed. So you see? I tried to fit you in, but it's been a madhouse.

Ok, since we last talked:

I've written three exams and a paper.

I've done a fair bit of unnecessary sobbing. I went into Burnaby on Friday to fete my sister (she is now illustriously 23), and she, Darren and I ended up watching an Extreme Makeover Home Edition marathon, with its cancer-children, and its community-minded single black women from the projects whose life-long-dream-homes in somewhere-not-the-projects get flooded and then burnt down and then looted, and Ty's perpetual look of concern (note: you can count how many deserving families Ty has held while they weep by counting his empathy-wrinkles). Also, a friend from school sent me this link. If this Italian-Scottish man-child gently lisping the lyrics 'Grant my last request, just let me hold you' doesn't bring a tear to your eye, then you either have a heart of stone, or you haven't got raging PMS.

I've been uber-crafting. I'm not scrap-booky, but a number of my friends are, and I can Christmas-bake any one of you into the ground (and I don't even have grandkids yet!). So we had a cookie-swap/card-making party, and I swapped three dozen of my best ginger snaps (recipe courtesy of one Marla Bishop) for three dozen other things, including these amazing chocolate-and-skor-bits-sitting-in-a-sugary-paste-spread-on-a-buttery-crust squares that I couldn't stop eating. I was going to post photos of both the cookie collection and the cards, but blogger is doing something...funny...and I can't. So imagine. And if I ever do post the picture of the cards, I won't tell you which design is mine, but it'll be the one with 'holidays' spelled wrong.

I spilled a good-sized splash of coffee on my crotch within the first five minutes of my chem final. The girl next to me just laughed and laughed...

Other than that, I've mostly just been sitting around in my robe, hunched over my textbooks and drinking endless cups of re-used-grounds coffee while my skin turns slowly grey. I have my last exam tomorrow, and my biggest fear is that there'll be a huge snowfall tonight and my exam will get pushed back a day or two, because I'm so psyched to be totally-and-completely done by tomorrow at 5:00.

That's all. Sorry for the long break. I did, to my credit, post on my bookblog during my real-blog haitus. OH YEAH! Speaking of my bookblog, I'm all the rage in Romania. I know you can't read that post, because it's in Romanian, but in short, this blogger (whose gender I haven't been able to determine) is all like 'Should I finish reading Gilead? I mean, it's really boring. Here's a link to another person who thought it was boring [that's where it links to my bookblog], so I think I wont finish it. Probably it'll be boring.' I know. Now I'm famous. AND I got, like, five extra hits on my bookblog that day. Awesome.

Take care, kids. Enjoy your intermittent snows!

They say domestic life is boring.

Ok, before ANY of you say ANYthing about how dangerous this was, and how badly I could have been hurt, Joel already said all those things you're thinking of saying, and I already thought them just after it happened, and besides, it's not like I did it on purpose.

I got my hand caught in the Kitchen Aide.

Why was my hand in the Kitchen Aide? Because it takes almost three whole seconds to turn it off and lower the bowl, so if you want to add something to what's inside, you either have to be prepared to lose those three seconds, or you have to add while the machine is working. And if what you want to add is something like flour, you can either use a measuring cup and get flour everywhere (because they don't really fit between the machine and the bowl if you haven't turned off the machine and lowered the bowl) or use your hand (because hands fit anywhere). But if 'hand' is the route you chose, you have to be focused and on the ball, because that machine doesn't stop for no one.

So I got my hand crushed against the side of the bowl by the pastry hook, which sounds delicate but isn't, and really all that happened was my middle finger swelled and will turn purple in about a week, long after it's done hurting, and my first two fingers are kind of stiff today, but it could have been waaaay worse. It was one of those moments when you're glad no one is around, because you know that you're not that hurt and that in, like, five minutes, you'll be fine, but it hurts that much that you're nearly in hysterics, and also, you're mad. It's like when you stub your toe: you're in pain, AND you're furious with a table leg.

Also, I hadn't let go of the handful of flour before the whole crushing thing happened, so when I whipped my crumpled fist out of the bowl, flour went everywhere. Also, I lost precious time cradling my hand and whimpering. So...foiled on two counts.

Life imitating art.

Ok, so I'm writing this paper on Frankenstein, right? And I accidentally have a coffee at, like, 9:00 last night, so I'm up until 2:00 working on this paper, because I figure if you're not sleeping, you may as well be doing something. Nothing is worse than lying there, knowing that you aren't resting and you aren't accomplishing anything. So I go to bed at 2:00, and I have this dream that I'm a crime-fighter of some sort. And we're looking for this eight-foot criminal. So I'm at home (even though I'm a crime-fighter now, we still live in the tiniest basement suite) in the kitchen, and in walks my dad...except that he's EIGHT FEET TALL and has a bolt sticking out of his neck. And it's Frankenstein, right? Wearing a mask of my dad's face! And so he comes over and grabs me by the shoulders, and I scream, only it's in a dream so I'm all like 'Garblargh!' but I kind of do it out loud so I wake myself up, and *whew* none of it was real. But my heart is pounding, so I reach over to Joel's side of the bed, and it's empty!!!! So I kind of scream for real this time, because I know he came to bed last night and didn't fall asleep on the couch, but then I check the alarm clock and it's 7:15 and time to get up and then I hear Joel stomping around in the kitchen in a totally non-Frankensteinian manner.

Terrifying, no?

Fixed.

I know, right? November is totally over, and yet here I am, ready to tell you about my day. Don't get too excited, internets. I have a paper I'm supposed to be working on, and you're just a hair more interesting. Also, I just spent three hours being told what to do by a tiny person who CAN'T EVEN TALK, and I need to decompress.

Ok, so Jared is my favorite baby (no offense to the rest of you who have babies, but I don't know them) and his parents were at a wedding today, so I got to cure my baby-fever by hanging out with him for the afternoon. Now, it's one thing to hang out with a baby at care group, say, when his parents are right there and if he gets tired of you, you can just hand him over. It's another thing entirely to know that you have him until they get back, and that your only hope is to make him forget that they exist. Which is fine, because babies have goldfish memories. They're all 'Nooooo! Don't leave me, daddy! If you walk out that door, we are so over! Oh, I am so abandoned! My life is so - hey! Something I can put in my mouth!'

So, awesome. However, this means that you can't say 'mama' or 'dada,' you can't sing the songs mama and dada usually sing to them, you can't go anywhere near the door, because that's where mama and dada were seen last, and you must, above all else, keep them from crying because once they start, you can't rely on their golfish memory anymore. They'll be all like 'Maaaaaaaaaaama! Oh, woe is me! Wherefore art thou, mama? Where...wha? Oh, good, a cookie. Wait...this cookie tastes like tears. Salty, wretched tears! My tears! Why was I...oh yes. Maaaaaaaaaaaama!'

So Jared and I are in the office, which is the furthest from the offending front door, and I'm letting him bang on the computer keyboard and chuck my water bottle on to the floor so that I can pick it up for him so that he can chuck it again and I'm blowing raspberries into his neck-fat to make him laugh, and we're having a great time, and then every so often the door will catch his eye, and his brows will come together, and his upper lip will curl, and he'll look at me all 'I'm about to cry. What are you going to do, hotshot?' to which I of course respond 'uh...here. Chew on my cell phone for a bit. It has flashing lights.'

So no, I don't need to have babies for a bit. They're really needy and demanding, and I'm not sure I can out-shout one of them. But as proof that Jared and I really had fun, and that he wasn't alternately weeping into his whiskey and back-handing me the whole time, here he is smiling.

It's because I let him eat whatever he digs out of there.