BOYS AND GIRLS

by [Ezmy], age 10

Boys think they are tough

boys think they are rough

and the girls sit there and say

“oh really you think your so

tough and so rough. Well watch

this and they get up

and knock all the boys out

one by one!!!!

Things to note about this little gem:

*I’m not entirely sure what the significance of the spacing and lines is.

*I hadn’t really worked out punctuation yet. Or the difference between your and you’re.

*I clearly had a beef with the boys in my grade 5 class. And thought I could knock them out. Which is hilarious because I had (and indeed still have) the upper body strength of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

THE HIDDEN HELP

by [Ezmy] age 10

The golden leopard walked to the tree where his pretty mate sat. “Did you find anymore?” she asked. “Nothing,” he replied, “Looks like we are the only ones in the entire jungle.” A sudden rustle in the bust interrupted their conversation. “I couldn’t help over hearing your sad discussion,” a voice said an a male lion came walking out of the bush. He was a yellowish colour. A large golden brown mane covered its face almost completely. “You seem to be an endangered species,” he said, sitting down in front of them. “A what?” the startled leopard asked. “Oh my,” said the lion even more startled than the two leopards had been, “No wonder there aren’t any of your kind left. People don’t have you down on the endangered species list.” He looked at them sadly. “Just what is an endangered species list and how do you get on one?” asked the puzzled female leopard. (As they keep on talking I think I’ll tell you their names. The two golden leopards are Jack and Juanita. The lion’s name is Manly. Right now Manly is explaining a plan to Jack and Juanita. Manly’s plan is that Jack should go to the nearest building with a note tied around his neck. If people read the note they will know that his species is endangered.) When Jack left he found he was in a very difficult situation. He was doing something to help. He also realized it was getting very dark. When he finally reached the edge of the jungle he found it very hard to see because it was so dark. He could just make out the shape of a building. He was sure it hadn’t been there before but for all he cared it was what he was looking for. He walked to the door and scratched at it. A tall woman answered. Behind her stood a herd of wild animals. The woman took the note off of Jack’s neck and read: HELP! I’M ENDANGERED AND THE ONLY ONE OF MY KIND! PUT ME ON THE ENDANGERED LIST QUICK! And thats how the golden leopard became an endangered species.

Awesome. Things to note:

*Juanita was my favourite girl’s name when I was 10 because a girl in my dance studio, who I thought was just way too hot, had the same name.

*I had clearly discovered the joy of brackets. You mean I can plug asides into all of my stories? Random tangents? Excellent.

*I had no idea how animals got on the endangered species list. However, I was pretty sure that I could convince the reader to think that I did and further, that I thought they did, and therefore I didn’t need to be bothered with the details.

*My idealistic hippy stage started right about this age. It became my jaded, sarcastic hippy stage in my twenties (after passing through a brief, and likely very annoying whatever-I- do-what-I-want stage in my late teens/early twenties).

This box of stuff is just plain hilarious.

…stop going to bed with mascara on. Holy raccoon eyes batman. My dark circles are bad enough in the morning. I needn’t amplify them with leftover Maybelline.

Even at my hippy dippy-est, I wore mascara. I have an eco-friendly brand that I usually buy but I was given some Great Lash in a gift pack and can’t let it go to waste (I love Great Lash Blackest Black – why oh why is this mascara bad for the environment/little bunnies?). Mascara and earrings make me feel human and are therefore non-negotiables. Even when I first had Ewan and was sleeping 45 minutes each day and adjusting to crazy baby times, I still took 2 minutes each morning to pick out a set of studs that matched my pjs, and to apply mascara.

But even though I wear mascara every day, I forget that I have it on and wake up far too often with raccoon eyes. I’d love to be one of those women who remembers or gets around to washing her entire face every night. The most I do is moisturize because if I didn’t do that periodically, I’d look like a dinosaur. But I know that falling asleep with makeup on can wreck my eyes and age me prematurely. So I resolve to get it all off each night. Incidentally, I think A. will enjoy this one. Frequently waking up next to a wife who looks like she punched herself in the face probably isn’t the awesomest thing ever. Ah marriage.

“On summer hoidays I went golfing and played 18 holes I did very good you where suposed to get the lowest you could get I got 75, my sister got 76 and my brother got 80.”

Oh journal entries. Man, did I hate journals in school. Which was a problem because I was unfortunate enough to be raised in The Era of Self-Esteem Promotion. Ugh. Every teacher I had from grade 3 to grade 10 tried to get me to write my secrets and feelings and troubles in a notebook that I was assured would only be read by them. Pfft. So in primary school, my response to this request was to write the mundane details of what I did in a day. In middle school I wrote equally bland paragraphs about the beach, my dog, or the colour of the sky at night. One teacher interpreted these paragraphs as me being sad and unnecessarily angsty; she went on to make it her life mission to get the sadness and angst out of me. Clearly she didn’t have teenagers; get the sadness and angst out of a 13 year old? Come on lady.

By highschool, my brain felt like it was going to cave in on itself every time the word ‘journal’ came up. I’m not the feelings type. I mean I have them, but I don’t usually like to talk about them. I’m not a hugger and while I support the idea of therapy, I’ve never met a therapist I haven’t wanted to punch in the face. That’s just me. Journals, especially forced journals, make me vomit. Time wasted that could be better spent reading, drawing, or in the case of highschool, smoking pot.

And before you say it, blogging is not journal-ing. Well, not in this case. Ezmy doesn’t journal. She rants and resolves.

…order a salad when she goes out for lunch today. Because this not-wearing-jeans thing is getting out of control. It’s raining out and I’m trying to decide whether I want to a) wear my too small jeans with one button undone, work extra hard to cover up remaining muffin top, not breath through lunch, and risk the second button bursting under the pressure or b) wear a skirt and boots, be able to breath through lunch, but risk being stupidly cold. Argh.

Salad for lunch today. Long walk with Budsie tonight and tomorrow. Running starts up again when A. returns. Enjoy your time here while it lasts, Last Ten Pounds. Your days are numbered…

…1) clean out her fridge and 2) clean out her pantry.

Yesterday was fridge day. It wasn’t pretty, let me tell you. Leftovers, like soaking beans, have a tendency to migrate to the back of the fridge. I assume that the ancient box of baking soda must have quite the personality because everyone seems to want to chill with him. Yesterday I found the following crowd of products making nice with Mr. B. Soda:

*scrambled eggs in a pie plate (?)

*a Ziploc container with what I suspect was a broccoli-based dish…I hope it was a broccoli-based dish…

*leftover vegan shephards pie (I was pissed about this. I love leftover vegan shephards pie and must have just forgotten about it…curses).

*salsa. Not the worst thing to find in your fridge until you realize that a) you can’t remember when you last purchased salsa and b) the lid is fused to the container.

*table cream. Table cream?? When and why did I buy table cream?

*something that resembled a leafy green. Kale perhaps?

*hummus that was still good (score!).

*a sad little half onion.

*something that had adjusted to the cold refrigerator climate by growing a woolly sweater…ugh.

Ick. But it’s all clean now. And just in time too – hot delivery guy will be bringing my groceries today! Woot!

Before he gets here, however, I need to clean out the pantry. There shouldn’t be any surprises here. The odd bag of stale grain or a dusty tin of beans perhaps. If I’m super lucky, I’ll find chocolate (I’m fantastic at hiding chocolate on myself – unless that chocolate is a chocolate almond. Impossible to hide chocolate almonds). Chocolate which I’ll have to eat in spite of my previous resolution. Why? Well it might go bad. Can’t have that.

And speaking of previous resolutions, stay tuned for posts concerning the pile of junk I’m still sorting through. I found a few drawings from kindergarten and stories from grade school that might just find themselves posted in the blogosphere…

Figure out how to work the fake fireplace.

Yeah, I started to do this but I can’t find the instructions. And honestly, I’m a little worried about burning the house down. Which I realize is unlikely with a fake fireplace, but I’m not taking any chances. This is a resolution that will happen once A. is back from NY.

So what to do instead?

Well, I could clean the junk up from in front of the fireplace….

Before you ask, that is not a Christmas tree. That is a fake tree that theoretically could be used as a Christmas tree but is currently being used as a place to keep toys while Budsie’s room is being painted. But that is a Valentine on the mantel. What? Budsie likes it.

The problem with cleaning the junk away from the fireplace is that I have nowhere to put it. It’s the last remaining pile of stuff from my mum’s house; Frenchie brought it with him a couple of days ago. It’s full of things like old report cards, newspaper clippings, my babybook, and some terrible sketches I did back in highschool. I should probably just toss most of it. But instead I think the catch-up resolution will be to sort through it, find the good stuff, and get rid of the rest. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Fix the pepper grinder. We got these spiffy salt and pepper grinders for our wedding and the other day (read: three weeks ago), the top of the pepper grinder snapped in half. Clearly we were grinding our pepper too hard *snicker*.

I never knew how much fresh ground pepper A. and I go through until our supply was cut off. It’s kind of amazing it’s taken this long to fix this. Well, it would be amazing if my supreme laziness hadn’t already been established. Anyway, I want to make macaroni and cheese tonight and this dish is just not complete without pepper. So here we go:

Step one: lay out the pieces of broken pepper grinder

*pictured here with Edmund who is STILL ALIVE!

Step two: inspect two halves to figure out where the best place to apply Krazy glue is

Step three: find Krazy glue

Step four: glue finger to one half of broken pepper grinder. GODDAMNIT. Every single time I use this damn glue. HOW!?

Step five: once glue has dried, fill grinder with pepper again

Step six: test out grinder on table. BREAK GRINDER AGAIN!!

Step seven: curse the makers of Krazy glue and their claim that it works on everything. My theory? Krazy glue only works on skin.

Sigh. Well, time to buy a new pepper grinder.

…wash out the baby bottles in the evening. Nothing worse than waking up and realizing that you have to clean a bottle out before you can feed the kid. Not that Budsie cares. He’s not fussy in the morning (really, he’s not fussy at all) and is quite happy to jump or roll around on the floor while I fumble with dishsoap and rubber gloves. But for my own sanity, these should be done the night before because dishes before coffee is just a bad idea. And yes, I realize that if I was still breastfeeding, I wouldn’t have these difficulties. I would however have massive boob wounds from the now six chompers residing in my boy’s mouth. I’m confident I made the right decision here.

So I’ve been out of commission for the last couple of days because my step dad, Frenchie, was in town for a quick visit. Lovely to have him here – he babysat Budsie last night, allowing me to have a couple of pints with the lovely LG. He also made us some assorted pies and soup. The fridge and freezer are now stocked! Woot. Mum and Frenchie are moving out to O-town in the next few months and while I’m slightly weirded out by the thought of living near parents again (first time since I left home back in 1998), I’m more than a little excited about the prospect of regular pie. Nom!

Anyway, so yes out of commission. And suddenly falling behind on everything – writing projects and resolutions and what have you. So today is Catch Up Wednesday. I have a guest post to finish off for KiC and another for BOFS. I have some work to do on another project – more on this soon. I have laundry to do and a kitchen to clean. And, in addition to the bottle resolution, I will try for two more and write about my successes/failures tonight. One is to learn how to work our electric fireplace. The other is to superglue our pepper grinder back together. Quite the day! More coffee needed.

…clean out her purse. Every time I go to purchase something, I can feel the people in line behind me glaring at me as I rummage through this bag trying to find my Air Miles card or debit card or what have you. It’s really getting out of hand. Have a looksie:

So having my spiffy NY mittens in there is necessary because of the weather. Not necessary? The three gloves that are underneath that wallet (one pair, one random…curses). The pretty pink lip gloss has NEVER been used because the colour is terrible for me. No idea how it ended up in the purse instead of the bin. The wallet is an obvious disaster, full of receipts for purchases from 200 years ago. Oh and that hair elastic? Yeah, this is what my hair looks like:

aaaaand this is what it looked like about 4 months ago:

Right, so the purse needs to be cleaned out. That’s tonight’s task.

Yesterday’s resolution wasn’t posted because sexy AB was in town for a visit. Originally this visit was supposed to include another sexy Wallace Woman, MF. But MF came down with the flu. Boo! Good times were still had – any weekend with sexy AB is a wicked good time, usually full of Guinness, picky food, wine, shopping, wine, chocolate. But a full on Women of Wallace reunion is way overdue. Soon!

Anyway, yesterday’s resolution was simple: replace Brita filter. I’m terrible at remembering this and then I wake up one day and my water tastes all silty. Ick. I have one of those little plastic calendars on the side of my Brita but I always forget about it too. Well no more! At least not this year. I resolve to replace the damn filter before drinking sand. Exciting, no? :P

Off to watch some HIMYM reruns and type-ity type type.