Sona si latine loqueris*

Sane ego te vocavi. forsitan capedictum tuum desit - I did call. Maybe your answering machine is broken

Semper idem - Always the same thing.

Amicule, deliciae, num is sum qui mentiar tibi? - Baby, sweetheart, would I lie to you?

Tum podem extulit horridulum - You are talking shit

Tintinnuntius meus sonat! - There goes my beeper!

Absum! - I'm outta here!

Spero nos familiares mansuros - I hope we'll still be friends

Ascendo tuum - Up yours

Te audire non possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure - I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear

Tu, rattus turpis! - You dirty rat!

Vacca foeda - Stupid cow Utinam barbari spatium proprium tuum invadant! - May barbarians invade your personal space!

Utinam coniurati te in foro interficiant! - May conspirators assassinate you in the mall!

*I don't speak Latin, but I can look it up on the internet. I'm good at that.

Don't let them bite

I spent Mother's Day in a way that is perhaps not typical.

My son was at his dad's place Saturday night, so I slept in (big time) and read Jane Eyre a bit and drank copious amounts of coffee and tried out my new bubble bath.

But then...

Gradually over the course of the morning, in emailing back and forth with my ex-husband about some little red itchy bumps I had noted on our son's skin a few days earlier, in watching lurid youtube videos and googling both sites and images for the keyword 'bedbugs' - I became paranoidally convinced that the house was infested.

This freaked me out and...

I spent the rest of the day in a frenzy of laundering every piece of fabric in the house, inspecting mattresses and boxsprings, vacuuming... and freaking out ever more.

I can't explain it - I didn't find any evidence of bedbugs, but the more I tore the place apart and laundered things, the more of a state I got into, and the more convinced I became that the little beasts were there and were somehow tricking me! I found one bug, which is not a bedbug, but I sealed it into a little plastic container to show to dad-of-son when he came for the drop-off, just because I felt that I needed someone else to say "Jen - this is not a bedbug".

Have I mentioned that I might have a bit of a phobic feeling when it comes to bugs? Not full-blown phobia, but several steps along that road. Bugs that suck your blood in the dead of night are kind of the ultimate horror. I started thinking about the vampire myths, I bet you anything that the concept of vampires is based on bed bugs, because, listen: leave you with tiny red puncture wounds (frequently in a line as they follow a vein), only come out at night and shun daylight, suck blood, invisible (practically) and difficult/impossible to eradicate...

Okay, denouement - dad-of-son brought pizza over and inspected all the mattresses, looked at the poor little bug in the container, said "Jen - this is not a bedbug. And I don't think you have them." My son took over the vacuuming and fastidiously vacuumed every crack, crevice and bit of fluff he could reach. I put the hot, freshly laundered sheets on the beds, and the three of us ate a huge pizza. Then we played some tunes and pretended we were flying in outer space.

I don't have bedbugs, my house is extraordinarily clean and smells of fresh laundry, my boy is soundly sleeping - and I'm happy. So I guess this was a happy mother's day!

Night Thoughts

Well, I keep swearing that I will get a good solid chunk of sleep every night.

However, that was before I discovered that people post entire tv shows to youtube. Hello, ANTM (Yes, guilty as charged).

And now... I have Qtv playing, an interview with Leonard Cohen. So far, he has talked about what he does when he comes home (change the lightbulbs), about starting a music career in his mid-thirties (inspiring!), about liking women's voices and finding his own voice disgusting, about writing songs, about death a few times... now they're talking about death some more.

I'm not thinking about death so much as housework. My house is a mess. I'm going through one of those periods of time when the task of cleaning my house seems to be beyond me. I have an oasis of orderliness in the kitchen and that's about it. In the rest of the house, I keep doing cleaning and the cleaning gets undone faster than I can reclean. Like I totally cleaned my bathroom and then a day later I looked in and saw a hockey helmet, three dinosaurs, telephone messages and other assorted effluvia that had washed up on my formerly pristine vanity.

hm - that's almost leonard cohenesque - 'I scrubbed at every surface/I thought my soul was clean/the mirror was a lecher/my vanity was pristine'

you know what? bedtime.

Signs of Spring

1. The smell of dogshit
2. Noisy ice on Dow's Lake
3. Red-winged blackbirds
4. Hating all my clothes
5. ...

Am I the only one who starts hating all my clothes in the spring?

I fought the law and...

Well, I didn't exactly fight the law, unless you consider forgetting to renew that sticker that goes on your license plate an act of aggression. Passive aggressive, maybe...

Last week was a bad week. I had an encounter with the Law that left me a trifle shaken - but thank god/dess, no poorer. The cop said he was in a good mood. A few days later, still wracking my brains because I could have sworn I did go in and get that sticker thingy, in fact, I had a distinct memory of going in to the office in Carleton Place in July (before my birthday, please note) to do so, I suddenly remembered the rest of the distinct memory, which was that because I had outstanding parking tickets in the City of Ottawa, which I could not pay from the Town of Carleton Place office, I did not end up renewing the registration that day.

So the moral of the story is - renew your registration, get your sticker, and if you don't have the right sticker on your license plate, don't drive around in front of cop cars, especially not if you are wearing a black skull cap. With a skull on it. And especially not if you have a large man in the passenger seat beside you who looks like a gangsta' in certain lights. (He's not a gangsta', he's the sweetest possible guy.) What can I say? I like to accessorize.

7 random and/or weird facts (yes, it's a meme)

I was tagged for this by Raino. I'm going along with it because of my basic good nature. And I've been meaning to post anyway...

These are the RULES:
1.Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2.Share 7 random and / or weird facts about yourself.
3.Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include the links to their blogs. 4.Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Do it ! It’s fun.

These are the FACTS:
1. I like being up late late late at night. Alone, with others, whatever, wherever. It might be pathological. It might be an addiction. An addiction to insomnia.
2. As a teenager, I was horse-crazy. But the last time I was on a horse was ... oh, ten years ago, maybe? And when I got off the horse, EVERY MUSCLE IN MY BODY ACHED. Each muscle ached with a little separate ache, so I learned about muscles that I didn't even know I had!
3. My phone is pink.
4. I like rainy days. I also like November.
5. Right now, as I type this, I am supposed to be doing something else. Shocking.
6. um, I'm having trouble thinking of something else...
7. I have no favourite colour.

Here's one more fact: One of these days, Elizabeth Riley will have a website and a myspace set up - it's in the works, thanks to the wonderful Carmel and the fabulous Mike.