The Leaves, Dear God, The Leaves

I believe I can officially say that autumn is my least favorite time of year in this part of the world. Yes, I love the brisk temperatures and the glorious colors. But oh my God, The Leaves.

I don’t know why The Leaves are so abundant here. There are trees in Canada, after all. But perhaps given the climate, the trees seem denser, more packed with leaves than any trees I am familiar with. And so when The Leaves come down, it is almost suffocating. I have a 400-year-old sycamore in my backyard. I have a big huge maple in the front. They are MASSIVE. And when they drop their leaves, we are talking what seem like millions and millions of leaves.

The Leaves haunt my dreams. They fall down the chimney. They end up everywhere in the house. If it rains, they form a thick mat several inches thick that is almost impossible to rake. I am constantly sweeping and raking and sweeping and raking. I saw a snake slither out of The Leaves the other day. I have seen dead rodents in them. I dream I am drowning in the The Leaves. I dream they are alive. I am not a nightmare person, but The Leaves freak me the fuck out.

I am also tense about The Leaves and The Trimbles. Fucking Vern Trimble is out in his yard several times a day, raking them. He is an enemy of The Leaves, and I feel his judgment when I am only out, say, several times a week. He plucks stray leaves off his car constantly, and he’s parked under an oak. He is always, always on top of The Leaves. The Leaves are apparently his life for two months every autumn.

 

Life In A House Where The Animals Out-Number The People

 

Cat Massage

I just have one question: when did Anne Murray start kneading pussies?

 

I Rue The Day I Wanted Whiter Teeth

Hi all. I am in a dental high comedy these days, or at least that’s how my man friend is regarding it. Every day comes a text from a faraway land, begging me to send him a photo of my pure white donkey teeth.

Let me explain.

When I was a girl, I was a gymnast. At 17, I fell off the uneven parallel bars and cracked my two front teeth. Combined with the Pearl Drops experiment a  year or two earlier that went terribly wrong and stripped my teeth of their enamel, my chompers were hideous. So I got bonded fillings on the four front teeth. Only once or twice have they needed to be completely replaced.

Little did I know, however, that Canadian dentists are apparently world-renowned artistes on the bonded filling front. When I went to a dentist here and asked him to replace the fillings and to make them whiter, he flat out refused, saying it would be too hard to do and instead, he’d give me four porcelain veneers at $1,500 a tooth. That was more than I could afford, so I went to another dentist recommended to me by a neighbour.

Sure, Dr. Mancini said. I can EASILY replace those bonded fillings and give you a lovely new smile, and I’ll do all four for a thousand bucks. Great, was my reply!

 

Things That Are Pissing Me Off

I am going to have to go back and watch all the happy, pick-me-up movies you guys suggested in Tailfeather’s excellent post, because today people are pissing me off.

Things that annoyed the crap out of me today:

1. Another lost pair of expensive tweezers. I loved these ones and they were pricey. I had them ONE DAY and now they’ve vanished. Somewhere in this house, there is a black hole that sucks up my tweezers. And it is bugging my ass. Not to mention my brows.

2. People who come to town from back home whom I barely know but want to have dinner with me. I realize this makes me sound like an misanthropic C-word. But come on. We smiled and said hello on the streetcar maybe twice a year in Toronto. But now because you’re in town, I am supposed to give up a hard-earned weekend night of doing nothing to have dinner with you because I am the only person you know here? No. Just no. And please stop asking. If we didn’t go  out for dinner in Toronto, why would we go out here?

3. My firewood man. He called at noon to say he was coming at 4. He called at 4 to say he was coming at 6. He never showed, and turned his cellphone off. Piss off. I waited around all day, gazing longingly at my fireplace, telling it sweetly: “Don’t worry! Soon I will have wood and you will be roaring happily once more!” It’s just bad business not to show and then to turn off your cell, isn’t it?

4. My big dumb hound dog who refuses to go out in the rain and so has dropped a load twice in the basement on the new carpet. I have been kicking her out in the backyard because if you put her on her leash and try to make her walk, she just lies down, but she still seems to be saving up her business for the basement rec room. And because she’s not going out for walks, she is getting bored, and tonight ripped into a whole package of toilet paper, chewed on a bunch of rolls and made a big mess. It is hard to force a 55-pound hound dog to do something she doesn’t want to do, or to reason with her at all, or to punish her. She either hangs her head in shame, or wags her tail thinking you’re kidding. Cats, I must say, are a thousand times more dignified. They’d kill themselves in shame and horror if they shit on the carpet, they really would, and always go out in the rain to relieve themselves.

5. My fucking landlord. For three weeks my washing machine has been malfunctioning. They sent a repairman who couldn’t fix it and told me they’d get back to me the next day. Nothing, and they don’t return my calls or e-mails. Doing one load of  laundry takes about five hours because the digital controls are malfunctioning and the machine automatically turns off after 10 minutes. This is pissing me off and making me crazy.

That’s it for me today! What’s pissing all of you off?

 

Just What I Need, Another Reason To Be Lazy

Something strange has happened to me very quickly since moving to America. I can no longer tolerate the cold. In one year, I have become one of those wimps who starts shivering and puts on a sweater when it gets under 70 degrees Fahrenheit … that’s 20 degrees for you Canadians. On the flip side, however, I can happily endure a weeks-long heatwave with just ceiling fans. I barely turned the AC on all summer and instead lolled around in 100-degree temperatures feeling like Blanche Dubois, negligees, gin and tonics and the odd popsicle keeping me cool.

And now Blanche is wearing eight layers of fleece and plans not to move her ass away from the big brick fireplace in her living room until the next heatwave comes along.

Tomorrow it is supposed to get cold here, and by cold, I mean the brutally frigid temperature of 45 degrees — that’s about eight degrees for the Canucks.

I have been lighting fires since I got a few pieces of firewood yesterday, but I am fretting because the terrible cold is approaching and I need more. So when I walk Dolly through the foresty parks and streets here, I have been gathering small sticks and branches. Tomorrow, I am ordering a whole cord of firewood to be delivered to the house and I swear I will rarely leave this couch over the next six months. Surely to God I won’t be expected to brave anything close to freezing, will I? What do you think I am? CANADIAN?

I can’t express how happy it makes me to have a wood-burning fireplace. My last rental had only gas fireplaces, and those are like fake hooters, if you ask me. Insultingly fraudulent. The last time I lived anywhere with a wood-burning fireplace was my childhood home, so I couldn’t be more thrilled.

And it’s just what I need, by the way — another reason to park my ass on the couch. At least now I have a lazy hound dog who will be joining me, an equally shivery teenaged boy and two warmth-addicted house cats.

 

I Have An American Dog

And this is her. She is from a shelter in rural Virginia. Doesn’t she look like she just stepped off the set of “Deliverance?” And yet she’s a big silly doofus. We named her Dolly because it’s just such a ridiculously appropriate name for the goofball. She is respectful of my cats to an almost humiliating degree; she literally bows down to them when they walk by. Even they seem embarrassed for her. They tell me she is six, but I think she’s younger given the goofy puppy behaviour she’s been exhibiting in the three days since we’ve had her.

To whit:

1. She has totally ripped through a brand-new box of Tampax, apparently just for entertainment purposes, and strewn them all over the house.
2. She has huge feet that she trips over.
3. When you take her for a walk and you want to go in the opposite direction from where she wants to go, she just lies down on the pavement and rolls over on her back.
4. Ditto when she runs into kids. She melts into the pavement in bliss.
5. She is a hog who is obsessed with food. Tonight I caught her practically inside the dishwasher licking plates and utensils. I have also twice caught her on her hind legs trying to get stuff off the counter. She succeeded once and had a bag of coffee in her jaws that I pried out.

In short, she is a funny hound dog who makes us laugh. Even the cats seem amused by her, and they’ve never been around a dog. Dolly just gives up a big mellow goof vibe, despite what sounds like a hard life — heartworm infection, a hunter who mistreated her, a burn mark on her side, a miserable rural life. She’s living on Easy Street now.

 

Scrabble Demon

For many months now, I have been playing online Scrabble with an agent of Satan. Around here, she’s known as M. In my world, she’s known as M is for Motherfucker.

The woman is a Scrabble demon. We have probably played 500 games over the past several months; I have won about 10 of them (including one six-game winning streak that briefly plunged M into a depression which only served to make her stronger and meaner). For the vast majority of our games, I have been ahead until the last turn or two. Then she calmly puts down a Q or a Z on a triple-letter score with some word I’d never heard of and I am left sputtering and cursing at the computer.

She is quiet and stealthy in her play, except when it comes time to gloat, but that’s mostly because I’ve been swearing at her for the previous 10 plays, knowing full well every game that she is plotting, scheming, lying in wait to kick my ass once again in the 11th hour. My common names for her are as follows: Whore. Bitch. Hosebeast. Ho. Fuckhead. Hookerface. Miserable fuckface. Satan. Evil!!! Evil!!!

Occassionally, she speaks, like towards the end of the game last night. The exchange went something like this:

M: Do something! You’ve screwed up the board again!

Me: I screwed up the board? You screwed up the board with your stupid MULE and your stupid LANE! And SUQ? What the hell is that?

M: How about your ISM? What the hell was that???

Me: ISM opened up a triple-word for you, you ungrateful hag. What did SUQ do for me?

M: You wasted an S! You could have had SUQ too!

Me: Hey, lady, how about for once you open the board up, huh? What, you need to BEAT MY ASS A FEW MORE TIMES? Thousands of wins haven’t been enough for you?

That was met with dead silence. I knew it was a terrible sign. Although I had 10 points on her in my final play, once again the wily Scrabble demon beat my ass down.

M haunts my dreams with her stealthy Scrabble ways. Because of the time difference, I often go to bed thinking I’ve got the game in the bag, only to wake up the next morning, while she’s still sleeping peacefully on the West Coast, to find she’s fucked me yet again.

I have threatened to fly there and rough her up, but she only giggles. In short, this Dark Scrabble Queen cannot be defeated. You have been warned.

p.s. The above photo was posted for no other reason except that it’s hilarious.

 

Why Do D.C. Men Like Showing Off Their Man-Boobs?

I have noticed a weird thing about this city — men always run with their shirts off. In the summer, I noticed it a lot, more than I have ever noticed it in any other place in the world. Along the Mall, on the leafy trails of Rock Creek Park, along the tidal basin — men running shirtless.

You would think a pent-up old cougar like me wouldn’t mind such a thing. But in fact, it annoys me. Firstly, not all runners are built like Calvin Klein underwear models and should be showing it off — some have pasty, jiggly, hairy man boobs. Secondly, it’s autumn now, not that warm anymore, so put a bloody shirt on. It is 62 degrees here today and some guy just ran past my house shirtless and I almost heckled him: “Nobody wants to see that!!!”

But mostly it’s the inequality that burns me. If women manage to run during a heatwave wearing a shirt, then men should do it as well.

 

My Life With The Trimbles: Normal People Save The Day

So despite my gentle protestations, the Trimbles insisted on having a “welcome to the hood” party for me and my poor frightened son this weekend. After Vern’s attempts to recruit the boy into his evangelical cult, we were both kind of weirded out and pissed off as the day of the party dawned. Because of the party, I couldn’t work up the nerve to phone up the Trimbles the night before and tell Vern to back off on his recruitment efforts.

But we went anyway, and thankfully, the party was filled with normal people who seemed well aware that the Trimbles were freaks. There were many raised eyebrows and as one women left, she took me aside, told me she wanted to have us over for dinner and whispered: “We’re not church people!”

There were liberals who worked for non-profit anti-poverty organizations!!! A former NPR journalist who now works for a sustainable energy lobby group! A guy who works revising tax policy for low-income Americans at the Commerce Department! A huge extended family of Orthodox Jews who were pro-health-care reform! A 91-year-old African-American man and his wife who were born in Mississippi, survived segregation and talked about how much it meant to them to see Obama win the presidency as Vern twitched visibly. There was someone whose family lives in Alaska — a real Sarah Palin-despiser who had actually met her and reported she was even dumber and crazier in person than she was in public. Again with the Vern Twitch!

But the best part was this huge gaggle of Jewish little girls who were ooohing and aaaahing over my red open-toe pumps. Could they try them on, they wanted to know as their mothers chuckled? Did I have other shoes like that, they asked? What about stilettoes, they asked? Could they come over and look at all my shoes, they pleaded??

I agreed, and we marched across the street, me with about 15 girls ranging in age from four to 13, and they went nuts when they saw my shoes. I ended up giving away about six pairs because they were so cute, I couldn’t resist, and told them they could come over any time and play dress up with my shoes and outfits and jewellery.

All in all, a successful party. Now I just have to muster up the nerve to tell Vern to back off next time he asks my son to go to church again.