Urban Drinking

Friday night was awesome.  After work a bunch of us headed to our secret location for sneakytinis.  Surprise of all surprises... the patio was open - first time for the season.  I think my favourite place to drink would be on a beach somewhere warm, second fave would be on a dock at a cottage on hot sunny July day and thirdly I think the best place to drink is outside, downtown outside.

There is something about the hustle and bustle of people moving around you heading off to catch trains, strange angles of sunlight bouncing off the metallic office towers, the pavement-smell, the urban-ness of people in office-ware.  More so, I like the way have drinks after-work downtown makes me feel both very grownup and jaunty and hip at the same time.

The our secret location had these rattan couches and chairs with throw pillows, close-to-the ground glass tables, glass partitions that separated us from the tourists and 905ers.   I felt a comfortable smugness as I lounged, sipping my lychee martini, engaging in witty banter with colleagues.  Who am I kidding, I was getting rip-snorting drunk whilst talking smack!

After an hour or so of half-priced martinis served by the most patient of socially ironic hipsters, we headed over to KI for dinner.  KI is also part of the Bay St. banker social scene that we may be part of only because of the proximity of our office.  It's a bit pricey but good value for this area of the city.

We spent over 4 hours eating sushi and drinking sake, Passion cocktails and beer.  How luxurious!
When all was said and done, we weren't quite done and so we ended up at a pub for a couple of beers.

The flip side to all this fun, and believe me it was fun, is that I was pretty much comatose for all of Saturday.   Children, street sale, art class, baseball game, an escaped kitty and general family life got in the way of my recovery.  Ouch.

So alas, I swear I will never do this again.  Ya.  What evs.

New Cleaning Lady

So I was very pleased with the work done by the new cleaning lady and her assistant.  Despite her assurances by email that she loved dogs, she took one look at Ruby and shit her fuckin pants.  Not that Ruby is big or anything but I assume now that "dog" to her is something much smaller and fluffier.  She seemed to have no problem with the cat.

It was a bit of a shit show when the crew arrived.  The night before, I had asked the Old Abusive Cleaning lady to return my house key.  She managed to arrive at the very moment that the new cleaning staff were arriving.  AWKWARD.  On top of that, Boozey Neighbour was standing on my lawn in her jammies trying to engage the new crew to clean her house on alternate weeks.  Back Story:  Boozey Neighbour had also employed Old Abusive Cleaning Lady in the past.  So she was caught with her pants down too.

People new to my world have asked me what was wrong with Old Abusive Cleaning Lady and why it didn't work out.    Here is a quick recap.  Old Abusive Cleaning Lady said the following things to me over the course of her career:

"You are too fat."
"You look pregnant all the time.  You have baby in there?"  (and for the record I didn't)
"Your husband travels too much for work.  I think he has a second family in New Jersey."
"You should be skinny for your husband."
"What's different about your boy? (Jack had gotten glasses) Oh, he got glasses.  That's too bad.  You try again for another son."
"It's dirty to let the dog on the couch.  I don't clean it because the dog sleeps on it."
"Why do you feed the dog organic cookies?  You love your dog more than your kid?"
"If I come and live in that cage (the dog's crate) will you feed me organic cookies?"  (She laughs hysterically)
"Your new kitchen is really nice, best one on the street.  But you got ripped off."

This is just a choice sampling of the abuse that I took over the years.  Why you may ask?  Because she was cheap and I was afraid of her.  How cheap?  Like $30 to clean your house CHEAP.

Things really started to unravel when she decided to let my kitten out of the house after I repeatedly told her that the cat was an indoor cat.  It was a terrifying 48 hours until we got Max back and too her credit, Old Abusive Cleaning lady did canvas the neighbourhood looking for him.  But it was never the same after that.

Weeks after, I was over at Boozey Neighbours house, getting drunk one night, of course and there was this other neighbour there whom I didn't know very well.  Second bottle of wine later, Boozey Neighbour asked me how things were going with Old Abusive Cleaning lady and if our relationship had been strained over the whole letting the cat outta the house thing.  (Boozey Neighbour was totally baiting me on this one, now that I think about it.)  Well that lit the match under my booze-induced rage flare up in which I called Old Abusive Cleaning lady every compounded swear in the book.  I even used the C word rather liberally.

Little did I realize that the other neighbour was good friends with Old Abusive Cleaning lady and they were known to go on power walks at night.  And as you can imagine, all this got back to her.  The next week she cancels her cleaning days with me and Boozey Neighbour due to a sore shoulder.  She never came back.  What evs.  I was so over her.

However, my pissy bathroom floor doesn't clean itself. So after four months of neglect and emergency touch ups jobs using Lysol Wipes, I asked my SIL if I could contact her cleaning lady.  And the rest is
history.  New cleaning lady is totally golden and the only insult hurled was her leaving me a note that said she had to charge me an extra hour because I had "sticky dust".  No fuckin kidding.  Who wouldn't after four months.

So hope springs eternal... blah blah blah and my house smells like Vim and Murphy's Oil and all is right in the world.  Fuck you Old Abusive Cleaning lady.

I'm back

but I feel like I never left.  I've been spending all my time on FB and occasionally on Twitter but nuthin has given me the sweet release like the ole blog.  Ya know what I mean.

In addition to my regular crazy rants about my kids and annoying smelly people on the subway, I have considered some new categories for my resurrected blog.  Here are some ideas, tell me which ones fill you with intrigue and desire to return:

• Weird cab drivers
• Hobo watching at lunch (now that the weather is nice)
• Mystery turds I find on the floor upstairs
• The attitude of my new cleaning lady
• Drinking escapades with Boozey Neighbour and related yoga classes
• I found my iphone....
• Neighbourhood politics and social experiments
• Inappropriate behaviour at work
• Insomnia and other things I take pills for
• Pet Hoarding
• Shoe Hoarding
• Subversive Cross-stitch and assorted crafts that I rip off from Etsy
• Etsy
• Stuff I find in the washing machine
• Girl crushes (heart currently held by Selena Gomez)
• Cute geekery and stuff about Star Wars
• Scarborough & Amsterdam 
• Recreational use of Pot in my neighbourhood
• Bad things that I click on when surfing at work
• Sam's Baby-Male pattern baldness
• Nailpolish and how awesome it is
• Shoppers Drug Mart and how awesome it is
• Shows and movies that I am really into but forget all the characters names 
• Renovating my house
• Cutting my cat's nails

This is really just the short list.  I want to be in bed by 11 pm so I can get a good start on my insomnia.

Please stay tuned.  Please return.  Remember that I love you.

What's in a name?

For as long as I can remember, my mom made up nicknames for various family, friends, enemies and neighbours. It's not as mean spirited as it sounds. It's just something we did. And we all had nicknames for each other too.

I recently asked her when this habit originated. She replied that she'd been doing it as long as she could remember and that her father (my papa) had always had nicknames for the people in his life. Some of them are so hilarious. I wonder if it's a Newfie thing?

Anyway, here is an incomplete list of my mother's nicknames:

Pidgeon Man/Heartattack (As kids, we couldn't call him Heartattack because that was disrespectful, so we called him by his other alias because he kept a coop full of homing pidgeons in his backyard.)

Beer Man (He worked at the Beer Store for 40 years and always appeared to be a bit of a lush.)

Duck (Over-sized lady on our street that waddled.)

Duck's Son (Obvious relation to Duck)

Bela Lugosi (Creepy old lady of undetermined Eastern European nationality who smelled like cabbage and always wore boots and a kerchief.

Leek Lady (Another old lady of unspecified Eastern Bloc origins who would give my mom a grocery bag of leeks from her garden every time she saw her.

Egg Lady (Long before in-vitro fertilization became common place, this woman who belonged to our tennis club, always talked about her IVF treatments. She always had an update on the quantity of eggs in her womb.

Stubby (Short dude across the street.)

Mopey (Neighbour whose name rhymes with this and consequently is a bit on the sour side.)

Court Report (A mentally-challenged teenager who used to come over to our house all the time and give my Dad updates on what was happening at the local tennis courts. He rode a tricked up 10-speed and looked a helluva lot like Napoleon Dynamite.

Lady Jane (An effeminate teenager who liked to braid my hair.)

Crazy Helen (A complete nutter who lived on our street that used to walk around barefoot in the snow.)

Silly (A neighbour with a Mike Tyson-esque high-pitched voice and a penchant for wearing pointy Italian loafers.)

Nina Ballerina (A rather large woman named Nina who was very unlikely to ever be a ballerina.)

Durty Dag (Another neighbour, this one an Italian New Jersey house wife. She hated her husband's dog and would throw a shit fit when it got into the house. She was often heard screaming, "Get that durty dag outta my kitchen!")

Photographer (A nosey guy across the street who always appeared outta nowhere when anything was happening - akin to the paparazzi.)

The Russians (My mom's cousins who would show up unexpected and in great numbers at any time of day and night.)

You can't even imagine what we call each other!

Get on with it, America!

I'm so sick (no pun intended) of listening to the American pundits debate Obama's healthcare reform. For god's sake people! Just accept it!

An update on my hair

The clumps seem to have gotten greater in size and number. James pulled a grouping the size of a squirrel out from under the couch. Sam had a hunk the size of a hamster attached to his clammy foot after bouncing around in the Jolly Jumper. Ruby was grossed out at the gerbil-sized hair ball that was stuck to her bone. Eeeeek!

In pursuit of being hirsute

One of the many things that "they" don't tell you about childbirth and life thereafter is the fact that after you have the baby, most of your hair falls out.

At around 3 months post-partum, the shedding began. At first it was just a little extra hair in my brush and a larger clump in the shower drain. Now that I'm in the fourth month, it's coming out in clumps. It's so bad that the entire bathroom floor is covered in my hair. I found several tresses wrapped around Sam's little fingers. Jack's toy helicopter has a whole hunk wound around it's rotor. And I can't count the hunks that have recently appeared in the lint catcher in my dryer.

I feel like my hair is at half its usual bushiness.

For those of you that don't me, I have an immense brunette mane of hair. It's frizzy or curly depending on the humidity and it now reaches the middle of my back. My luv-lee hairdresser, Dean at the Lid Lounge always comments on the girth of my mop as he usually thins it out manually with his razor. But there is no need for artificial thinning techniques now. Mother Nature has decided to bless me with this 'natural' process of de-forestation.

So here I sit in a pile of my own locks. I wonder if I should put them in the recycling bin or whether I should make a wig for my baldy newborn, Sam.