Five Thousand More of These and I Can Make a Jacket

I like to peel the skin off my feet. I used to peel from my big toes, as well as that fleshy underpart on the outer side of each foot, as well as sometime right in the centre of that front pad area. These were the areas I would sometimes get hard callousy skin that eventually got kind of itchy and bothered me. Instead of going to a pedicurist and having these areas sloughed off with professional tools, I would sit down with the spiky fold-out part of a nail clipper, create a starting cut, and start peeling.

My goal would be to peel off the largest single piece of skin possible without causing bleeding. Oftentimes, I would get carried away and end up bleeding anyway, and then my feet would hurt, and it would be difficult to walk, and I would have to wear bandaids for a few days. Like a perverse tribute to my ancestors who had their feet bound for reasons of perceived beauty.

Anyway, I have gradually phased out the peeling of foot skin in the past several years so that now, it's pretty much strictly toeskin peeling. Only the hard skin on the outer-under edge of each big toe. I had decided that peeling from the other parts and making them bloody was too painful, and so now I only peel the big toe, and only on occasions where the skin has gotten way too thick and hard for any sort of comfort, and only when Eric isn't looking.

Eric HATES when I do this. It grosses him out more than any other thing that I do. This includes popping all forms of pus-filled growth on either my own or his body/face, picking all forms of scabs on either my own or his body/face, and farting everywhere due to pregnancy. It's possible that the main reason he hates this particular habit is because I like to save the large pieces of toeskin as triumphant trophies, and I leave them lying about the condo. They sit and dry with each passing hour, turning into hard scratchy pieces of skin-sheet-rock. I leave them on the coffee table, on my nightstand and if he's really lucky, on his nightstand as a token of my love and esteem. He will get angry and loud, and gather up the toeskin sheets and flush them down the toilet, while I scrabble after him trying to pry them from his fingers, begging to be allowed to keep them for just one more week.

He has been so strict in the flushing of my toeskin, that I have taken to saving them in my pockets. Not any pocket in particular, just any pocket of what I happen to be wearing. This usually means the pockets of pyjama pants, pyjama tops, jeans, or the pockets bathrobes. And then I forget about them.

When Eric does my laundry, the pieces of toeskin will reconstitute in the washing machine, rehydrating into soft supple sheets of what could be the soft virgin skin from an innocent child. It's really quite lovely. Unfortunately, when Eric finds these large, soft, rehydrated sheets of skin, he gets ESPECIALLY grossed out and throws an otherwise even bigger fit than if it had just been on his nightstand.

Earlier today, I did a load of red and purple clothes. As I pulled them from the washing machine, out tumbled one of these pieces of reanimated toeskin. And not only had it been given new life, it had been DYED PURPLE!! It was one of the coolest things ever!!

Since Eric didn't sleep all last night and stayed up working, I've left them on his nightstand as a special present, to show him how much I love him. I think he's going to like them.

He shoots, he scores!

After copious amounts of the sexy sex, one of Eric's sperm have made it to my fallopian tubes where it invaded a brand new ovum, breaking down its barriers, thrusting its way inside, thereby creating life!! LIFE!!!

I'm pregnant!!

We're both extremely excited, and it's one of the reasons I was unable to perform on the blog for the past two months - every time I tried to sit down and write about anything, all I could think of were pregnancy-related tales. My friend Jennifer got married to my friend Christopher, and there were hilarious things that went down at that wedding, and I still couldn't bring myself to concentrate. But hopefully, this is the start of a new chapter...maybe once I get all this pregnancy gold out of my system, I'll be able to blog properly again. And so begins The Pregnancy: More Than You Need To Know.

Where Do Babies Come From?
Let's start at the very beginning; a very good place to start. This was a planned pregnancy. Eric and I had decided that we wanted to aim for an early-in-the-year baby so that it would have an edge at school in beating out the other kids. Even before conception, we were setting this child up for a life of high expectations and enormous pressure, resulting inevitably in disappointment and low self-worth. So in May, a week after my last menstrual period, which started on Sunday May 13, we started humping like animals twice a day.

For those of you who recall my last two blog posts, you will remember that I came down with a very nasty UTI just after this time period. That was a direct result of the aforementioned humping a la animals. I didn't look it up beforehand, so after sex, I would stuff tissues between my legs to keep the good stuff in, and then fall asleep like the lazy whore wife that I am. If it was the nighttime round of babymaking hump, I would sleep all night. If it was the morning/afternoon round of babymaking hump, I would sleep for an hour or two. This lack of peeing after sex twice a day for a week apparently caused my vagina to marinate in enough unsavoury juices to bestow upon me a mighty mighty UTI. I have subsequently learned that when attempting to get pregnant, one should lie down in a sperm-filled state for 10-15 minutes at most, and then get up and pee like any normal vagina-respecting woman.

After the many bouts of fever and sweating out in bed, and soaking my sheets like I had peed them up, I was convinced that even had there been a little fetus in my womb, it would have baked to death. Here's a nugget of help for you people who may require the use of disposable pregnancy tests: First Response stinks like a cheesedick! (not literally) You know the one? It has a commercial with a pretty healthy looking brunette who says "There is such a thing as being a little bit pregnant". That's total crap! First Response is supposed to detect the pregnancy hormone up to 3 days before your expected period or some crap like that. I took it the NIGHT BEFORE my expected period, mere hours really, and it told me negative. It looked me right in the face and showed me one pink line instead of two. So I assumed I wasn't pregnant, and I went to the pub and had me some sweet sweet alkyhall. The next day, I missed my period.

And the rest my friends, is history.

Morning Sickness
Zero, zip, nada! Our friends Lindsey and Jordan are two months more pregnant than we are, and from the sounds of it, Lindsey has been puking her innards out for months. She's experiencing aversions to various meats on a rotating basis, and barfs almost daily. I know nothing of Lindsey's pain, because my baby will eat anything. Just like mommy! Baby is a food slut.

Anal Sickness
Here is where the first trimester kicked me in the anus, literally. I was so constipated, I thought I would never poo normally again. I have never ever, in my entire life, experienced this kind of constipation before. My bowels seized up and simply decided to stop moving. Upon reflection, I'm not sure I can decide whether I would have wanted to trade in the constipation for the morning sickness. Pooing is one of the most joyous parts of my day, and while the universe handed me the most precious gift of all in the form of a child growing in my belly, it seems it took away something nearly equally close to my heart.

I noticed it just a couple days after I took a non-retarded pregnancy test (ClearBlue). I wasn't pooing! So when I went to see my family doctor, I mentioned it to her, and she said that it was a typical pregnancy thing. I was horrified. Most laxatives were out of the question, in case they induced labour and flushed out the baby. I went and stocked up on prunes and oranges and Benefibre. The prunes worked best, but I had to be careful; 3-4 prunes would bring out a non-stellar but passable poo. 6 prunes would give me farty farty diarrhea. The farty farty diarrhea would spray the inside of the toilet bowl with such force that it took a couple of flushes to clear it out.

Even so, the prunes were not the life line I had been hoping for. While it did cause me to poo, I noticed that my poo was about two days backed up. I like to purposely put markers in my poo. For example, I will intermittently eat things that will be identifiable in poo form, such as corn, or spicy food, or lots of spinach. This is so I can observe the turnover time for food to become poo in my system. From past experience, I know that the corn eaten at noon on Monday should appear by bedtime the same day, or worst case scenario, Tuesday morning. What I noticed was that the corn eaten on Monday would not appear until AT LEAST Wednesday, and only with the help of prunes. Without prunes, it wouldn't come out at all. While this was disturbing and frustrating, the worst part of this situation was that my poo became the STINKIEST POO EVER MADE!

I think that it makes sense that the longer poo has to fester in your intestines, the more it will break down and decompose, and the more it will get stinky. But SWEET LORD, the smells that came out of my body as the prune-induced poo exited my godforsaken anus were pure evil! Gone were the days when I could sit on the toilet with a book or magazine or supermarket flyer and slowly, leisurely enjoy my poo. Now I had to quickly sit and expel my gas and nasty unsatisfying little logs of poo, and then hold my breath, depriving my little one of any oxygen whatsoever while I wiped up my Bumhole of Satan, and flushed that accursed poo down. I would have thought that once the lid was down and the Poo of the Damned were riding their way down to Lake Ontario, I would be able to breath. But as I would exhale and start breathing normally while washing my hands, the smell would linger in the air, thick as smoke, assaulting my nostrils, causing me to literally choke and gag and dryheave as I soaped up and rinsed. One time, I even made a poo that smelled like farm animals.

I'm currently 13 weeks pregnant, and I'm relieved (get it? Relieved? Haha...) to report that the constipation has dissipated. In fact, the drippy little plinky poos of yestermonth have been replaced by some of the largest poos I have EVER made! Earlier this week, I think it was Monday, I made an enormous poo, and I mean ENORMOUS. It was thick and luscious, but not too wet, and it came out easily with what appeared to be a force of its own. It wiped up clean, and it smelled like NOTHING!!

Farty McFartfart
I'm only just entering my second trimester right now, and this is my first pregnancy. As a result, I shouldn't be "showing" very much yet. My in laws seem to be looking forward to physical signs of my pregnancy, and are definitely on the lookout. More than once, I've had this conversation with my mom-in-law.

MIL: "Ooh! Is that a little bump I see?!"

Carol: "No, it's just gas."

I have so much gas, that usually by mid-afternoon, I look very very pregnant. My belly sits high and proud, giving all and sundry the distinct impression that I am great with child. In actuality, I am great with gas. Much much gas. My child is only just the size of a jumbo shrimp this week. It's no reason for me to look like there is a large balloon in my shirt.

In the past, I drew a strict line with passing gas. While Eric would liberally fart in bed and at mealtimes, I personally never felt comfortable tooting in his direct non-toilet related presence. If we were watching tv, and I felt some gas coming on, I would retire to a bathroom to release said gas. Eric came to believe that I was physically unable to fart unless I was on a toilet with my pants pulled down.

I am now so bloated that all bets are off, and if I can feel a fart, I will do it anywhere. I do it on the couch while watching tv. I do it on the couch while watching tv and eating. I do it in bed. I've lost all censorship abilities with my gas. I feel that if the gas is sufficient to make me look 7 months pregnant, then I really owe it to my body to just let it out whenever I can.

Two days ago, I cleaned out the cupboard under our ensuite sink. We had lots of bottles of stuff we don't use anymore, and the bandaid drawer needed organizing...stuff like that. Well, I sat down on the bathroom scale to tend to this chore, and sometime near the end of my cleaning, I stood up to get a plastic bag. When I came back, instead of sitting back down on the bathroom scale, I chose instead to squat down in front of the cupboard as my buttcheeks were feeling a little sore. As I settled into my squat, the longest, loudest, most obscenely sustained fart RIPPED out from between my buttcheeks. I squatted there, frozen in utter horrified curiosity, as this mighty mighty fart echoed against the bathroom walls and tiles. The force of this fart cannot be overestimated. I was wearing full bum underwear and pants. And as the fart continued to liberate itself from my bowels, I could feel the warmth of the forced air as it whooshed past my ankles. I could feel my fart on my ankles! And the best part? This fart smelled like nothing!! You could have pressed your face against my butt and wedged your nose between my cheeks and let this fart travel straight into your nasal passage, and I don't think you would have smelt anything except the Dove bodywash I used that morning.

In fact, none of my many many farts smell. I swear to god. If you don't believe me, come over and I will fart on you.

Hmm. In conclusion, I never really intended for this to become a poo post. But it seems it became a poo post of its own accord. Ah, this blog is like my child; it may not turn out the way I expect or intend, but it's perfect just the way it is and I love it. Poo on, my blog child. Poo on.

The Newlyweds Blog Game - Results!

Firstly, I know I said the results would be up by the end of last week. It turns out I suck pickled ass and I'm sorry that some of you had to wait for the results. Secondly, thank you to those of you who sent me threatening messages regarding the absence of said results. That was nice.

And now, the results:

Two weeks ago, I got a urinary tract infection. I'm quite sure that this infection was caused by the increased amount of sex-making that occurred this month, possibly brought on by the unbearable sexiness of my best friend Peggy's boyfriend, who we finally met at the end of May. There is no way of telling for sure, but no one can deny that Ryan is sexy to the max, and Eric for one was enthralled with his charms.

I chose to leave this UTI untreated; I had never had one before, and many of my friends had, and they just drank lots of cranberry juice and peed it out. Gloria, if you recall, was urinary tractally infected every week by her boyfriend's stinky cheesedick, and she got through without antibiotics. So I stocked up on lots of bottles of Ocean Spray 100% Pure Juice Cranberry, plus Gloria brought over her extensive stock of cranberry extract pills, plus some crazy Chinese herbs which looked like dried cat hair and baby rat droppings. She boiled these in water and made me drink the whole pot.

One week later, I experienced two days of intense abdominal pain, and decided something was amiss. Since it was Sunday, Eric called Telehealth at which point I got to describe the feeling in my bowels, stomach, vagina, as well as the state of my poo to a nice nurse. I enjoyed that experience immensely. Within an hour, I had me a prescription for antibiotics to treat my UTI that may have started down the path to a kidney infection. That same hour, the fevers started.

Amidst great throbbing headaches, I would suddenly feel freezing shivering cold, while my body temperature went up. I would put on two layers of winter pyjamas, with a hand towel laid against my skin at the front of my body, and one laid out on my back under the pyjamas. I would lie in bed under two down duvets and a big fleecy blanket made by my Aunt Angela, folded in half, with two large hot microwaved bean pouches in the blankets with me. I would pop two extra strength Advil and try to fall asleep.

The abdominal pain wouldn't go away no matter how I lay down:
Eric: "Just lie on your back, that's the best position"

But it didn't help:
Carol: "It hurts"

When I finally could fall asleep, I would wake up 30 minutes later with my clothes and towels drenched in sweat. Eric would come to help me:
Eric: "Let me take that off for you"

The towels would be hot and wet against my skin, and I wanted those taken out first:
Carol: "Oh my god, pull it out"

Eric would pull the towels out of my pyjamas and they would be hot and drenched in his hands:
Eric: "Oh baby, you're so wet"

Once the towels came out, all I could feel was how wet my sleeves and my pants were. The sweat was still dripping down my arms and legs and between my non-boobs, and I couldn't get the clothes off fast enough:
Carol: "Faster!! Faster!!"

Eric would take the drier parts of the clothes and wipe me down, to make sure the sweat didn't sit on my body:
Carol: "Wipe my bum, too"

Then he would bring out two more sets of winter pyjamas and bundle me back up before I got too cold. He also replaced the towels:
Carol: "I need another towel"

After I had sweat out two or three times like this, Eric would decide it was too many times, and that no matter how much he wiped me down, I wouldn't be clean enough to be comfortable:
Eric: "You have to shower again"

And he kept track of when I was supposed to take my antibiotics and fed me more Advil to help me battle the fevers and abdominal pain:
Eric: "Swallow it down baby"

And those, my friends, are the results of the Newlyweds Blog Game.

I have learned 3 things from this experience and I will end by sharing these with you:
1) The easy way to lose 4 pounds is to get yourself an infection and sweat out fevers in your sleep 12 times in a day and a half
2) The peeing-after-sex rule should be very stringently followed - never again will I pass out directly after orgasm like the oversatisfied whore wife that I am.
3) Dried Cat Hair Baby Rat Poo Tea will not cure a UTI, no matter what Gloria says

A Newlyweds Blog Game!

Here are some phrases exchanged by the sexy Prince Eric and I in the past few days. The game is this: What do they mean and what do they refer to?

(Also, if you know what they refer to - you know who you are - you can't play! If you do, I will cut you.)

And now, The Game:

Eric: "Just lie on your back, that's the best position"

Carol: "It hurts"

Eric: "Let me take that off for you"

Carol: "Oh my god, pull it out"

Eric: "Oh baby, you're so wet"

Carol: "Faster!! Faster!!"

Eric: "Swallow it down baby"

Carol: "I need another towel"

Eric: "You have to shower again"

Carol: "Wipe my bum, too"

A follow-up blog post will come by the end of the week. Happy playing!!

Carol Finds a New Snack

I had to write a new blog post, just to get the scary picture from the last post from being the first thing people see when they check the blog. The eyes! They burn my soul!!

I know I promised posts involving Egyptian poo and farts and smells and camels, but those are not for today. Today we talk about H&A Natural Bars.

I love H&A Natural Bars. They are sold in the concourse under the building where I work. They contain all natural ingredients, and unlike most granola bars, are not fried in oil. They are sweetened with honey and orange blossom water. They are thick and chewy and a little bit sticky, and feel substantial in my belly. They really hit the spot at 3:00pm, when I need a pick-me-up. They cost almost $2 each, and they are bleeding my (Eric's) wallet dry. They are made in Ottawa, so I feel like I am supporting the Canadian economy.

My favourite H&A Natural Bar is the Seed Bar. Seed Bars contain pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, honey, orange blossom water, and lemon juice. And that is all!! That is literally the entire ingredient list!

Discover H&A Natural Bars today.

Delilah knows how to pick 'em

A few weeks ago, my old roommate Delilah got dumped. It was a painful dump (haha!) not because she was in love with the guy and he was "The One", but because she didn't really like him in the first place, and was only keeping him around for convenience. So of course, when our boy Lyle decided they weren't right for each other and ended it, she was upset.

What I love about other people's breakups is that once the relationships are through, all bets are off, and secrets come pouring out like diarrhea from a corpse. What I PARTICULARLY love about the end of THIS relationship, is that I already had enough reasons to be thoroughly convinced that any friend of mine shouldn't be dating this guy, and then it got horrendously, exponentially, gleefully worse. And now, two lists:

Reasons Why I Think You Should Not Date Lyle:
1) He didn't get Delilah a birthday present, and she paid for her own birthday dinner. And we are in our late 20's.

2) He expected her to pay for everything, all the time. He is a mooch. And we are in our late 20's.

3) He didn't open doors, and didn't see why he should. This point can be debated; with gender equality as a springboard, many people feel that men shouldn't have to open doors for women if women are going to make a big fuss about being able to vote, and go to work. I don't care what anybody says, guys will still get points for opening doors for their women regardless of gender equality. It's the same way girls will still get points for baking cookies naked, then bringing their men cold beers while they watch TV.

4) He has uncool tattoos. In what is probably the lamest tattoo story ever, Lyle has a tattoo of the roman numeral VII somewhere on his god-forsaken body. Why? Because he thinks the number 7 is cool. And every seven years, he plans to get another number 7 tattooed somewhere. That's like me saying "I like the letter R, I'm going to get it in different fonts all over my body!"

5) He was not originally friends with us, and he came to our home twice, and I made large amounts of food for him each time (not naked - I don't need points that badly). Not once did he even bring so much as a bottle of wine or a bunch of grapes. The first time it happened, we overlooked it. The second time it happened we had made a full dinner, plus an afternoon full of snacks, Eric and I looked askance at one another and thought "Hmmm". But when he went so far as to request a homemade chocolate cake for his "next visit", we stopped inviting him over. Obviously, he was raised by bears in a cave.

Reasons Why I Think You Should Not Date Lyle - Insider's Edition:
1) He has a hairy penis shaft. Like, not just normal pubic hair at the base of his penis, but actual forests of hair growing about halfway up the ACTUAL SHAFT. And once, he shaved it, and then it grew back stubbly, and then Delilah was the unwilling owner of an exfoliated vagina.

2) He is not circumcised, and does not regularly pull back his foreskin to clean underneath. The bears must not have shown him how.

Does anyone know what smegma is? I literally did not even know this word before now. It's also referred to as "dick cheese", or "shaft yogurt", or "prickorino romano". Much to my horror, I learned that smegma is a mammalian secretion, a combination of exfoliated epithelial cells, transudated skin oils, moisture, and bacteria that can accumulate under the foreskin of males. And if allowed to accumulate, will stink.

Lyle maintains a large malodorous accumulation of shaft yogurt under his uncircumcised foreskin. Delilah could SMELL it. She never went down on him because the STANK of his genitals made her dryheave. And he did not see a problem with this. In hindsight, it's not surprising that Delilah got a urinary tract infection every time he came to visit.

3) His penis is deformed. The uncircumcised foreskin, due to unknown circumstances, is actually permanently fused to his glans. So even had he felt the compulsion to pull it back and clean underneath, he would not have been able to pull it back all the way. Our theory is that the dick cheese buildup got so intense in his childhood, that it just became a part of his body, forming a bridge of solidified cheesy stank, connecting his foreskin to his mushroom cap.

4) And finally, he once paid a whore to have sex with his hairy deformed dick of cheese. Seriously, he once went out, and paid an actual prostitute to take his oozing fused prickly shaft into her disease-ridden tunnel. Which is so many levels of dirty, I can't even wrap my head around it. I mean, I've known people who have slept with some dirty people. I personally know some dirty people themselves. But none of those people, to my knowledge, have ever gone out and paid for the use of a professional splooge receptacle.

Apparently, he was in Europe with a friend, and his friend wanted to go see strippers. But this wasn't a normal stripclub, no. This was a stripclub with PACKAGES. Something along the lines of:

Package A: a drink and admission
Package B: a drink, admission, and a lapdance
Package C: a drink, admission, a lapdance, and a 10-minute penetrative humping session with an in-house whore, and a complimentary towel for your use

The friend opted out of Package C, and stuck with Package B. But upon learning that Package C only cost 20% more than Package B, Lyle decided this was a deal too good to pass up, and he asked his friend to wait outside as he contracted all forms of European V.D. as his own special souvenir.

I will end with a haiku expressing my feelings about how Delilah should not be allowed to make decisions for herself:

Del, your judgement sucks
Oozing cheese dick poisons you
Shudder shudder, barf

I am the worst blogger ever

It's been nearly a month and a half since my last post. I am the worst blogger ever, and I understand that I've likely lost most of my audience. You've all turned your backs in disgust and dismay, and found new things to read in order to fill your time and that gaping pus-weeping void in your soul. That void which until now I had hoped to straddle with my large thighs and poo. But here I am, on my knees, begging you to come back and read my blog again. Because I swear this time I'll try harder. I'll make it work. I need you. You have to understand, I had one very very good reason for my absence It was a force greater than both you or I, one that could not be denied.

You see, a month and a half ago, I joined Facebook. Facebook is my Allah. I pray to Facebook five times a day or more, and it has given meaning to my life. I can't stay away from it, it brings me so much joy. Find me on Facebook, I'm listed under Carol Johnston.

Anyway, I wanted to write something quick in here, and express my intent to maintain this blog at the rate you have come to expect. I wanted to apologize. And there is lots to catch up on!

Here are some coming attractions in the life of newlyweds:

• Carol quits her job; regains part of soul
• Eric is regularly touched by a magical man
• Trip to Paris
• Trip to Egypt
• Cheese in Paris
• Falafel in Egypt
• Poo in Paris
• Poo in Egypt
• Farts in Egypt
• Smells of Egypt
• My new heavy periods and super absorbancy tampons
• Muslim mens in Egypt
• Camels
• A poo story I heard in Egypt

Please stay tuned, I need you.

I'm a bad blogger

I know how long it's been - it's almost a full month since my last post. I'm very very sorry. I realize that I promised just a few months ago that this would never happen again. Sometimes I lie...flat on my back! Zing!

What does that even mean? I don't know. I think it has to do with sex.

Anyway, I am here to update you on the happenings in the last month. I will try to be as brief yet thorough as possible.

Happy Birthday To Me
On Saturday February 10th, I turned 27. For the past few years, birthdays have been a bleak affair. The year I turned 21, I had been dating Eric for two weeks. He sent me flowers, got me a little beanie lion, and topped it all off with an "over the hill" card. I almost started crying on the spot. Then he propositioned me for sex, and when I suggested we hold off, he told me he wasn't into commitment, just wanted the sex, and wasn't planning on staying with me long term. All I have to say to that is "HAHA!! SUCKA!!!!"

Last year, I turned 26 while 26 pounds overweight. There was some poetic tragedy in that, and I spent two weeks on the couch crying, as Eric invited over a steady stream of visitors to watch me wail about how I was old and had accomplished nothing. It was shameful and humiliating.

This year, we were determined not to let my birthday suck. After all, 27 is the youngest I am ever going to be for the rest of my life! So we booked an all-inclusive trip to Varadero Cuba, with big plans to lie on the beach for a week and drink slushy slushy rum. Five days before our departure, I came down with a nasty nasty flu! I even got a note from my doctor saying I should stay at home all week and not go to work. So I spent the week, flat on my back - zing! - hoping that I would get better for my birthday.

As it turned out, my fever was under control, but I was still sneezing and coughing up liquid boogers and phlegm constantly. I was That Woman on the airplane, who wouldn't shut up with the nasty sick noises. And then I was That Woman on the beach who had to sit up to cough out her viscera every few minutes. And then I was That Woman by the pool who sneezed into her towel at regular intervals and made it wet with boogers. But by the middle of the week, I was feeling mostly better, with only the occasional coughing fit to alarm and annoy fellow travellers.

Then I got a big sunburn, and have been peeling since we got back. Right now the patch above my yoohoo is flaking. Cuba, you are good times.

Jamie Fraser Is My Newest Obsession
While in Cuba, I read a book that Eric's aunt Sandra gave me for Christmas. Sandra is a poet/writer/tv producer/superstar and she gives me the best books. This one was called Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. What a HELL of a book. Nothing like the incest-ridden perversions of yesteryear, this book was a shining beacon of action-adventure-historical-fiction-scifi-romance. It had wars and time travel and sword fights and huge castles and lairds and spies and gay rape and flogging and witchcraft and murder and the hottest most heart wrenching sex ever. And I've read my share of sex, let me tell you. These sex scenes fill you with yearning.

The man of the book is a tall, gorgeous Scottish highlander named Jamie Fraser, and I am fully in love and in lust with this man. I have no greater passion in my life. I have added him to my list of men for whom I would leave Eric without a thought. He's in the top three. Everyone needs to go out and read this book. It has changed my life. Let it change yours.

Let it change yours.

Chinese New Year Sucks My Married Butt
The weekend we returned from Cuba, it was Chinese New Year. Growing up, Chinese New Year was like a second Christmas. But instead of presents, we would get pure unadulterated cash. The loot came in red paper envelopes, and served to make us rich little bastards for the rest of the year.

The two happiest moments in the life of a Chinese kid born in the 80's occurred when
1) The government got rid of the one-dollar bills and replaced them with loonies. This meant that in every red envelope, there would be a MINIMUM of $2!!
2) The government got rid of the two-dollar bills and replaced them with toonies. This meant that in every red envelope, there would be a MINIMUM of $5!!

At one point, we heard a rumour that they were going to do away with the $5 bill as well, and replace THAT with a coin. My brother and I almost shit ourselves thinking of the possibilities. But that never came to pass. I count it as one of my life's biggest disappointments.

Then I got married. This is the biggest bum deal in the all of Chinese history. Once you get married, you stop collecting the Chinese New Year Cash Settlements. All the grownups (except your parents) cross you off their lists, and laugh maniacally into their siu mai. Not only that, you are now responsible for GIVING AWAY money to all your younger relatives. You make your own lists, and the unmarried children in your family laugh maniacally into their cha siu bao.

This was the second year Eric and I had to prepare stacks of $5 in red envelopes, and give them away. This is possibly the biggest motivation for us to start having babies. So we can collect through them while they are still too young to know what's going on. We plan to steal their money. Every Chinese parent does it. Not one feels ashamed. Every Chinese kid is outraged when they're old enough to learn what's been happening. Not one gets compensation.

We are a sneaky race.

I Got a Yeast Infection Anyway
Remember how my doctor said that antibiotics wouldn't help my flu (obviously) and would only give me a yeast infection on top of everything else? Well I got one anyway. Canesten 3-Day is what my doctor tells me to use for that, and it's quite convenient. I just really hate how the next day, I'll be at work, and the dissolved pill will start running out of me, and I can feel it coming out, and it's all pasty and gritty in my underpants, and makes it feel slimey when I wipe after going to the washroom.

Just Can't Get Enough
Something happened with my hormones, and I can't get enough of the sexy sex. This might be how it feels to be a teenage boy, because I can't concentrate on much of anything, and I'm practically useless in most settings where I'm not engaging in the sex. You would think that this has improved and spiced up our marriage, but it has actually served to add a lot of stress and violent expectation. My vibrator is working overtime, Eric can't keep up with demand, and we've already had two big fights over the lack of service (and the fact that Eric doesn't do me the way Jamie Fraser would), causing me to angrily banish him to the second bedroom. Two nights this happened.

If you think I sound unreasonable, then eff you!! I will rape you!!

We're Not Trying To Have a Baby
There are rumours going around that we're "trying". I just want to put this out there - we are not "trying". We're just "practicing". And while we're on the topic again, we're not "practicing" "enough".

How do I like my eggs in the morning? Unfertilized! Ba-dum boom!

I will end with a long-overdue haiku.

How to write a poem
When topics are so varied?
This will not be great

Stealth

I'm very sick at the moment. My doctor says that antibiotics won't do me, since it's a flu, and in addition to not helping, antibiotics will probably just give me a yeast infection. I don't want a yeast infection. I've been passed out in bed for the past three days, and I'm hoping very hard that I'll get better by Saturday, because that's a) my birthday and b) the day we leave for Cuba (for my birthday).

Earlier tonight, I was lying on the couch, coughing my lungs out and watching American Idol. Eric walked past and farted.

Carol: "Did you just fart?"

Eric: "No...I made a fart sound."

Carol: "...with your butt?"

Eric: "No...with...my mouth."


(Eric just now: "I DIDN'T FART!! I MADE A FART SOUND!! WITH MY MOUTH!!! DON'T BLOG THAT!!!!")

Feel Dirty

**This post is descriptive and gross, but it is not about poo**

I am reading the worst book right now. It's called Wideacre by Philippa Gregory. Don't read it. Or you know, read it and share my feelings. That would be nice too.

I love Philippa Gregory, she wrote The Other Boleyn Girl, a very popular retelling of the Anne Boleyn fiasco through the eyes of her sister Mary. It's sexy, it's enchanting, it's propelling, it's a great great read. She's also written other books that all take place surrounding The Other Boleyn Girl, about Katherine of Aragon, and Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth I...while not as good as TOBG, I still enjoyed each one immensely and would read them again. Which is a good and economical idea because I own them.

So I thought I would check out some other books by this author, not from the Tudor England era, and I found the Wideacre trilogy. I went and bought all three books, and they were on my big "Books For Carol To Read" pile. I finally got around to starting it. I was eager to get into the story, because it was a period piece, about a girl in Georgian England, and how she loves her home and the land, and she fights to stay there despite the land being entailed to her older brother who has no knack for being a squire, but that's the law. There's supposed to be love and lust and murder and betrayal. Wonderful things, all.

This book is savagely raping my mind.

The murder and betrayal? It's pretty horrible. So far, she's murdered and betrayed her father, and then this guy she was banging when she was 14. Actually, what happened was that she was angry with her father, and so she told her bang-buddy that he could kill him. And so he does. And then she got angry at him for doing that, so she murdered him herself. Or at least, she THOUGHT she did, but it turns out he escaped, bloodied and broken, and is presumably out there plotting his revenge. That's all generally disturbing and kind of creepy.

Okay.

The love and lust? It's with her BROTHER!! She's having sex with her BROTHER!!! Her BROTHER is inserting his PENIS into her VAGINA and EJACULATING in it!!!!!! The whole deal is now that her father is dead, Wideacre has been entailed to her brother, and he's the new squire. And she's obsessed with the land, so she starts lusting after him. And he's kind of a big pervert who likes to be beaten and whipped, and gets off on pain. And he lusts after her too. And so they start having hot and heavy incest sex, and she has his baby! Unbeknownst to everyone, she tricks his wife into adopting the baby and pretending its hers, and then her brother tries to end the sex. And so she puts together an S&M room, and leads him there and dominates him until he's sobbing with lust! She whips him until he bleeds, and then she gets on him and bounces on him till he's about to come, and then she gets off and SLAPS his penis and CUTS it with her ring, so that his sperm sprays out all mixed with his blood on his stomach.

SO SICK!! The last thing I read was their mother accidentally walking into the parlour while he was humping and grunting on her, and so some shit is about to go down. The last thing you want if you're being humped by your brother is for your mother to walk in and see his pasty white buttcheeks flexing so he can put his brother-rod into your sister-hole.

I can't handle this book. It's making me ill. I can read really fast, and usually a book will last me one or two evenings. If I drag it out a lot, and only read 20 minutes before bed or something, I can make it last a week. But I am loathe to read further in this book, and so it has put a complete stall on my reading schedule. I can't decide whether I should just stop the book altogether and burn it along with the remaining two books in the trilogy, or if I should just push through the nasty incest and horrible patricide and predictable matricide, and just finish the damn thing.

I will now end with a beseeching haiku.

Brother sister love

Shouldn't involve genitals

Don't put that in there

This is going somewhere

When I was in grade 8, our school took us on a trip to Quebec City. It cost maybe $150, maybe $250 per student...I can't be sure anymore. But I remember I was very excited to go. There was a big buildup to the trip, and we did fundraising by selling very large boxes of microwave popcorn. I remember when the shipment of the popcorn came in, we stored it in a supply closet on the main floor of the school, and when you walked past the supply closet, you would be hit with the unmistakable aroma of fake salty microwave popcorn butter. As a bright-eyed eager beaver and Student Council Vice President (coming in second to Kim Russell who blew me out of the water with her KFC - Kim For Council campaign, but ahead of Kevin Poon who was a very good friend and extremely well-respected brainer who walked to the high school to take grade 9 math every day), I actually think that I participated in the distribution of the popcorn boxes after school.

In Quebec City, I roomed with Nina Nayar, Karen Gaettens, and Jenn Rees. I think the third girl was Jenn Rees. I'm fairly certain. In any case, our room was one of the best, it was huge, and very very comfortable. My mother bought me a black purse that converted to a fanny pack, so that I could safely store the $50 she had given me for spending money. I remember that one night we went to have a nice dinner, and Nina ordered fettuccine alfredo, which is one of her favourites. But there was egg in the dish, maybe in the noodles. And Nina is allergic to eggs, it makes her tongue super itchy. That's why every year for her birthday, her mom would make ice cream cupcakes. So she sadly couldn't eat her dinner. After dinner, I got a tea with milk and sugar.

I got a caricature drawing of myself in Quebec City. It was the first comical caricature I had ever had, and I got hooked. I would later go on to have caricatures drawn of myself in any city I visited where I could find caricaturists. This particular drawing turned out to be the most racist one I would acquire. I had tiny slanty eyes, and huge - nay, gargantuan buck teeth, and the only thing that caused it to resemble me were the glasses and the little mole-freckle I have on my upper lip. The drawing also depicted saggy breasts and large saggy hips. I was only 13, and I was very skinny, with no boobs to speak of. But I loved the drawing...I had long since developed the ability to laugh at myself. Aware of my awkwardness, I wanted to be the first to laugh, because that way no one could make me feel bad.

On the bus ride home, Liz Reynolds got sick on the bus and threw up in the coach toilet. (I'm quite sure that this was the trip - there was another trip we took in grade 7 to Ottawa, and that could have been the actual vomit incident, but I am fairly confident that it was the grade 8 trip to Quebec City when this occurred). Liz Reynolds would go on to become the first of my friends to lose her virginity. She had sex with Steve Potter in grade 9. It was all very gleefully shocking, and I clearly remember her telling me that they knew they were young, but it "just felt right". I also remember that Bon Jovi's Always was their song. Maybe two months later, the relationship had degenerated, and it was "all about the sex". So they broke up. Liz owned a cream coloured sweater that I always admired.

The smell of Liz's puke on that grade 8 (or 7) day was really terrible. It was several degrees beyond sick, and I'm surprised that no one else started yakking in response to this odour. It's all the worst things you can imagine about the smell of vomit, times a hundred, because you're on a bus for 6 hours driving home from Quebec City. Plus you're only 13, and the days of puking weekly on a university building after 20 drinks at Alfie's and humping some horny dude on the dance floor who tried to put his hands in your pants while you gyrated in his face were still far in the future. The smell of the hot sticky vomit in that stuffy cramped coach was beyond anything I had experienced before. And I was trapped.

Everyone else on the bus agreed, and some of the girls got out their aerosol cans of some cheap underage whore fragrance. This was the kind of thing you can buy at Shopper's Drug Mart for maybe $4. I want to call it "Malibu"-something, but I can't say for sure, because my strict classy Chinese mother would never in a million years let me buy something so trashy. As much as I wished that she would. The girls emptied their pre-teen stripperwhore fragrance cans into the air in an attempt to mask the odour, while poor Liz sat on the floor of the coach with her head between her knees.

The result was a sickly sweet tropical perfume smell, with strong, occasionally overpowering under notes of vomit. It was a sickly sweet tropical vomit smell. The perfume smell was a relief, but the vomit smell underneath could not be ignored, because you KNEW it was vomit. The entire ordeal lasted for a good long time, and the scars are still on my soul.

Okay, this is where I was going with this:

I didn't have to go the washroom all morning today. Usually I'll go about twice in the the morning, and one of these trips will involve poopie. But today, nothing came down the pipes until after I had eaten my lunch. This is unusual, but no matter. The important thing was that stuff was indeed moving. I walked down the hall to the washroom and pushed open the door.

THE WASHROOM SMELLED LIKE MALIBU-SOMETHING AND LIZ REYNOLDS' VOMIT.

The nasty smell hung in the air like a thick moist cloud, and as the odour met my nostrils, all these vivid memories of that Quebec City trip came rushing back to me, and suddenly I was a 13 year old girl again sitting on a bus trying not to breathe in the stench surrounding me.

The assault left me so disoriented, I didn't even think to turn around and use another washroom. I confusedly found a stall and went in and lined the seat with tissue, and sat down. I sat, pushing and waiting desperately for the smell of my own feces to travel up to my violated olfactory area. When it hit me, the relief that flooded through my body made the blood rush to my head. I was gratefully sucking in lungfuls of my poo smell, just to avoid the nightmare smell of Liz Reynolds' vomit.

Of course, as my pooing came to an end, the Malibu vomit smell came pushing back in, persistent, insistent, and all-pervasive. I held my breath and wiped my bumbum and pulled up my pants, and flushed the toilet and ran out and washed my hands, and staggered towards the washroom door. Upon stepping out into the hallway, my stomach gave a great great lurch, and I stood there gagging and coughing, trying to expel the malodorous gases from my poor besieged body.

It was horrible. Horrible.

I don't have anything else to say. I'm physically and emotionally drained.

Hold me.

Conversations at Bedtime

Eric and I were snuggling down for bed last night. He lay on his back and I cuddled my head into his shoulder, slinging my arm over his midsection. He had one arm behind his head, the other around my shoulders. Eric clearly was feeling lazy and tired. I clearly had the closest access to his crotchal area.

Eric: "Adjust my balls...pull them to the left..."

Carol: (pauses...adjusts balls...pulls to the left...)

Eric: "Ahhhhhhhhhh okay. That's what I want to do all the time."

Carol: "...pull them to the left?"

Eric: "No, move my balls around...all over the place...constantly..."

Carol: "....."

Eric: "Having a ballsac is so annoying. Balls."

Carol: "....."

Eric: "....."

Carol: "This is so going to be blogged."

Eric: "...yeah it is."

I will now end with a balls inspired haiku.

Testicular sac

Grab the scrotum, pull it good

O futility!

Obligatory Post-Holiday Post

I hate it when this happens, when I neglect to post for so long out of sheer laziness that I don't even know how to address the entire fiasco of the holiday or anything that has taken place. I know I bring it on myself. But here we go...

1) The holidays actually weren't so bad
I luckily don't have anything in the calibre of the trainwreck holiday tales of my contemporaries. Tales of torrid sobbing and mobs with pitchforks...not my bag this year! We spent Christmas Eve with my family, Christmas Day with Eric's family, and New Year's Eve with some friends from university. I gots me stinking drunk at the Annual Cooledge Christmas Spectacular, and was too drunk to make the trip back home to North York, thereby requiring Eric to drive me to my mommy's house at 1:30am, calling on my cell to make her wake up and come unlock the deadbolt, then taking off all my clothes and throwing up in her washroom. Other than that, I have not much to say here. Great families, great gifts, great food. Whoo-hoo!

2) The coming and going of the High Definition Boxing Day Purchase
We went to Best Buy on Boxing Day, thinking we'd check out the great savings, and talked ourselves into buying a 40" Samsung LCD HDTV. It was very exciting, and it wouldn't even fit into our car! We had to drive our car to Eric's house, and pick up his family's minivan, then Eric and his dad went and go the TV and brought it back to our condo, then they came back to get me, and later that evening we set it up.

Unfortunately, a flat screen LCD HDTV looks like ass unless you have a high definition cable feed, and high definition monster cables, and a progressive scan dvd player. And since the sound quality on LCD televisions are notoriously bad, you also need a new surround sound system. Eric was sad and disillusioned, and we took the tv back and returned it. Which in restrospect is quite awesome because now it's like we have $2000 of extra money.

3) So much sex
For some unknown magical holiday reason, the sex occurred every day. Every single day. It was like old times, back at Queen's! I actually think that Eric wrote to Santa, and that's what he asked for. It creeped me out, but I felt compelled, and I couldn't stop.

4) Costco rape
Why do we keep going back to Costco? Last week we went to buy a single big box of Swiffer dry refill cloths. We left with $65 worth of Swiffer dry refill cloths and Ziploc freezer bags. How does this happen??

5) ShinyPants
We finally - FINALLY - got to see my best friend and erstwhile lover Peggy for the first time in one and a half years! I love Peggy, I absolutely LOVE her. And to my soul damaging loving jealous horror, that bitch got skinny! She's an intern in hospitals all over New York City. Along with her hot intern boyfriend. They're Grey's Anatomy, they do rounds and see patients and operate on people together. I asked her if they have sex in the oncall room, but she said that no they didn't...but on occasion they go out to the parking lot for "breaks" in the car. But I digress. That bitch got skinny!! A diet of coffee and no sleep has made her shrink into this tiny curvy sexy bombshell, but with unshrunken boobs. I'm going to convince her to go into plastics, and then when she's got her own clinic, I'm going get her to make me look like her.

6) There is no item 6
I wrote the number "6" down and then couldn't think of anything to put in it. So that's the end of the post. I will try never to let such a long break occur again.

This is what's wrong with me

** To family members who have complained, friends of family members who I don't even know who have complained, and anybody who doesn't generally like to hear about the poo: This post involves my vagina. Stop reading now if this is something that will upset you. Thank you, and quit yer whining.**

I've called in sick for three days now. This isn't really cause for weeping, as my job sucks my soul out of my ass and makes me eat it again through my nose. But I really feel like total shit. My pain is twofold:

1) I Have Some Kind of Virus-y Cold
My body is achey, and I have sneezes and coughs, and much yellow phlegm. My tummy is not overly tolerant, and I also have some slimy slippery diarrhea and gas. I have a perma-headache. This was worse yesterday, and I spent most of the day on the couch watching CSI Miami and feeling sorry for myself. Today, the sneezes are fewer, and the diarrhea is better. The headache is however still kicking my ass. This is the first part.

2) My Vagina is Broken
Eric and I made the sex on Sunday. Nothing overly adventurous, longer than usual but not by much. Nothing was dry or chafey. A fine time was enjoyed by all. I experienced a burning sensation afterwards, but thought nothing of it, as Eric's semen is apparently poison to me, and this burning has occurred before. I sat on the couch moaning and glaring at Eric for the next couple hours, then let it go.

The following morning, after I had already emailed in sick at work due to the cold, I got up to hawk up phlegm and go pee. The feeling of burning ripping searing pain that shot up through my vagina as the stream of urine passed through into the toilet was indescribable! But I will try.

It felt as though someone was taking a rusty saw, and was attempting to widen my vagina with long hard trembling strokes. But before they started sawing, they had taken some gasoline and doused my labia with it, as well as the saw. Then they lit the saw on fire. Then they started sawing.

Before I had gone pee, nothing felt wrong, but after going pee, my poor vagina burned and burned and stung and hurt all day! I called Eric at work and sobbed at him,

Carol: "You ass!! You big sonofawhore!! What kind of STD did you give me, you lying cheating piece of puss-ridden dickface?!! You broke my vagina!!!"

Eric: "Honey, I didn't give you an STD! Call your doctor..."

Carol: "NO!! I'm just going to sit here and DIE!!!"

In an attempt to relieve the pain, my vagina is creating some kind of slippery lubricant, I think to relieve the friction as I attempt to walk from point A to point B. Unfortunately, this lubricant stings all the time. I have found that if I shower and gently cleanse the area with a mild soap, then I can wash it off, and it doesn't sting as much all the time. Which is good. Except that the slippery lubricant also appears to act as a shield for when I pee. For when I've washed off the stinging lubricant, it burns like the ninth circle of hell when I pee (as opposed to the sixth or seventh circle). It's a lose-lose situation.

Also, since I had a virus-y cold thing, I was ravenous and thirsty all the time. But I wanted to avoid drinking any water, so I wouldn't have to endure the torture of urination. This in turn made me dizzy and gave me huge huge headaches. It's been a shitty few days.

And I'm never making the sex with Eric and his killer sperm again.

The Musings in My Mind

1) I like over-microwaved food. I like to zap the shizit out of my food before I eat it. I'm not sure if this is normal. Eric just microwaves his food until it is pleasantly on the hot side of warm, and then he munches away. I usually double his microwave time and then am unable to touch my food for the next 5 minutes at least. But this is the way I like it, for the following reasons:

1. If I am microwaving it, it is probably leftovers, and by heating it up to near-volcanic temperatures, I will kill as much bacteria as possible. This makes me feel safe.
2. I enjoy the nasty chewy crust of dark mass that inevitably forms on the edges and corners of your food when you overmicrowave something like pasta with cheese ie: lasagna. It is salty and unidentifiable and strangely satisfying.
3. I feel that superheating will improve the flavour of my food.

I made a pan of lasagna on Wednesday, and we've been eating it ever since. We got four meals out of it, two lunches and two dinners. For my first lunch lasagna, I took it to the office microwave and set it on high for 4 minutes. It came out sizzling and smoldering, with delicious black chewy crusty edges. But later that night, when I got home and microwaved my dinner portion of lasagna, I used our fancy Panasonic "Sensor Reheat" option. This option usually overheats the food wonderfully. But this time, my lasagna was not mouth-burningly hot, it was just meh-warm, ESPECIALLY in the middle. Plus there were no dark chewy edges and corners. So I put it back in the microwave for a manual 2 minutes on high. Then it burned my tongue.

This is what I think happened: I think that the smoldering cheese on top of the lasagna got hot and melty really quickly. And it sent up heat signals for the "sensor" in the microwave. So therefore, before the body of my lasagna was sufficiently heated to near-volcanic temperatures, the cheese had already sent up enough heat signals that the microwave assumed that it had done its job. Which it hadn't. But the important thing is that now I know for next time, so I can override the sensor crap with my own manual 4 minutes on high.

2) My morning number two time has moved up. I used to go at around 10:30am, every morning. It was a convenient time to take a break. But recently, I've been going sometime between 8:30am and 9:30am. I wonder what is going on?

So this morning, I made a very decent poo. I had eaten one and a half oranges last night. This poo kept its shape quite well, and looked like a healthy snake. I'm not sure what kind of snake, but a plump one, with decent length. The actual poo may not have been a continuous snake, but once I threw the toilet paper in, you couldn't really tell where it broke up in the middle parts.

And then I started thinking of Buffy episodes, specifically of the ones where nightmares come true, or where alternate universes' rules come into play in their own universe. And I started thinking if something strange were to happen like that to me, how gross would it be if I went to the washroom one morning at 9:00am-ish, made a poo that looked like a healthy snake, and then as I was admiring it in the bowl, it came to life and attacked me? A snake of feces! And it would be trying to bite my face with it's poo-teeth, and it would leave poo-marks all over my clothes, like Mr Hanky the Christmas Poo. And I would understandably start screaming, and the poo-snake's head would dart into my mouth and try to stab my tongue with its poo-teeth. And I would try to beat it away, and then I would smush it and it would get all over me, and then I would be covered in poo, with no good explanation of how it happened. I think that would suck a lot.

3) I wake up in the middle of the night to go pee almost every night. The reason is probably because I drink water before going to bed. I know that if I want to avoid going pee in the middle of the night, then I should perhaps consider not drinking water before I go to bed. But I read an article once that said that if I was dehydrated, it would affect the quality of my sleep. So I make sure to drink water before bed. This works out because I'm usually thirsty before bed anyway, which I take to be an indication that I could be dehydrated in the first place.

I usually check the clock when I get up to go pee. On average, it's 2:30am-3:30am. I wake up at 6:00am, so this is a reasonable intermission in my sleep.

But what I hate is when I get to bed late, and then I get up having to pee, and I find that it's 5:50am, and there exists 10 minutes until the alarm is due to go off. This is the worst possible occurance, and it inevitably puts me in a terrible mood. I really really hate when that happens, it makes me angry just thinking about it.

4) Do I love Eric because he's wonderful? Or is he wonderful because I love him? Is he the sweet invention of a lover's dream? Or is he really as wonderful as he seems?

5) I used to be quite nice looking. I would go so far as to say that I was "cute and pretty", possibly even "cute and sexy", depending on what I was wearing. But since I've gained this weight, I'm quite sure that I've traversed through the lands of "cute and pretty" and "cute and sexy" to "plump and pleasant". I'm still pleasing to the eye overall, but "plump and pleasant" is definitely a more accurate label. I'm not sure I've made my peace with that yet. It may really be time to go back to the gym, because I was hoping I wouldn't hit "plump and pleasant" until my 60's. I enjoy being a girl, I'll have to try harder to maintain my girlish figure, rather than proceed to a matronly girth so quickly. Noted to self.

***********Bonus Game***********

Identify the three Broadway songs mentioned or alluded to in this blog post, and the shows from whence they came.

Porketta!

Eric and I decided to go to Sudbury this past weekend. Because we lack the ability to think smart thoughts. Who goes to Sudbury in November? The answer is: no one. No one goes to Sudbury in November. According to my friend Patti who works (and lives) in Sudbury, November is the ugly month. She assured us that any other month of the year, Sudbury is lovely. In any case we visited in November, and had a hoot of a time.

Two noteworthy events:

Eric Is Horrible at Humdingers
Patti bought Cranium Turbo Edition on Friday, so we played it all weekend. The first time we played, we teamed up in couples, Patti with her boyfriend Colin, and I with my husby Eric. Cranium Turbo Edition has the added feature of Turbo Cards, where you have to try to complete three of any type of question instead of just one. My favourite is Humdinger, where they give you a song, and you have to hum or whistle it for your team to guess. I'm really awesome at Humdinger.

I got a card on a Turbo round:
Jingle Bells
White Christmas
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

I had this one in the bag!

Patti: ReadyOkayGo! (starts the timer)
Carol: Hmm-Hmm-HMM, Hmm-Hmm-HMM! (Jingle bells, jingle bells...)
Eric: Oh! Uhh.....dashing....through the snow?
Carol: (incredulous) HMM-HMM-HMM, HMM-HMM-HMM! Hmm-Hmm-Hmmm Hm-Hmm! (jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way!)
Eric: Uhhh......sleigh ride?

I decided to skip Jingle Bells.

Carol: Hmmm-Hm-Hm-Hm-Hm-Hmmm-Hm-Hmm! (I'm dreaming of a white Christmas!)
Eric: Oh! Uhhh.....hmm hmmm hmm....ahhh.....
Carol: Oh my god!
Patti: No talking!!!!!

I moved on...

Carol: Hm-Hm-H-H-Hm-Hm-Hm-H-Hm. Hm-Hm-Hmm-H-Hmm-H-H-Hm (Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful)
Eric: Oh! OH!!! The.....weather......outside is frightful?
Carol: HMM-HMM-HMM!! HMM-HMM-HMM!! HMM-HMM-HMM!! (LET IT SNOW!! LET IT SNOW!! LET IT SNOW!!)
Eric: Uhh.....delightful....Christmas.....Christ was born....
Carol: HMM-HMM-HMM!! HMM-HMM-HMM!! HMM-HMM-HMM!! (LET IT SNOW!! LET IT SNOW!! LET IT SNOW!!)
Timer: Bzzzzzzz
Carol: I HATE YOU!!!

Pork Bingo
On Saturday, Patti and Colin took us to a dive bar somewhere in the bowels of Sudbury for Porketta! I was very excited for Porketta, as she had told me about it. Essentially, you play bingo, but instead of normal bingo cards, everyone gets laminated sheets with three playing cards on it, for $2/round. And you wait to see if any of your three cards are called. When all three of your cards have been called, you win! Instead of shouting "BINGO!" you shout "PORKETTA!!" And then you win a pound of pork. I would like to say that again. AND THEN YOU WIN A POUND OF PORK. They literally weigh out a pound of greasy rolled roast pork, and then you eat it! This is literally the best bingo idea ever!

Patti's friends got to the bar a half hour early, but already the tables were full of old wizened Sudbury people, waiting for the pork madness to begin. So they were relegated to the pool table. By the time we arrived, Porketta was in full swing, and Patti's old roommate had already won two pounds of pork! They passed that around, and on our first round playing, Eric shouted "PORKETTA!!" and he won a pound too! I have never loved him so much as I did at that moment.

My porketta card sucked ass. I won nothing. But Patti won twice, so within our little group of four, we won three pounds of pork. Within the entire pool table of young people, we won seven pounds of pork in total! We gorged ourselves on greasy spiced pork, and consumed alcoholic beverages as befitted a dive bar. Then, our bellies distended with pork meat, we piled back into the car and went back to Colin's house to play more Cranium Turbo Edition.

Unfortunately, the following day as Eric and I were about half an hour into the three and a half hour drive back to Toronto, I got a very severe tummy ache. I cannot overexaggerate the severity of this stomach pain. Eric pulled over at a log cabin restaurant on the side of the road where I had extreme explosive porketta diarhhea. I call it porkahhrea.

Thank you, Sudbury.

Carol and Eric Fight Battle with Costco

We bought a paper shredder at Staples on the weekend. We were sorting through papers and things and needed to destroy documents containing sensitive information. So we went out to Staples and spent about $80 on a paper shredder, plus $1 donation to the Special Olympics. They actually had a couple Special Olympics kids there, running around clumsily and yelling things, so you felt like an ass if you didn't donate the dollar.

Turns out the paper shredder sucked huge. Don't buy ArmorID paper shredders. They are loud and ineffective. They could compete in the Special Olympics of paper shredders, if you know what I mean.

So yesterday, Eric picked me up from work, and we drove up to Markham to return the craptastic paper shredder. We decided to pop into Office Depot and Costco to check out alternative paper shredders as well. Office Depot had nothing good. But Costco! Costco had an awesome paper shredder, for $52-ish! It shreds up to 10 pages at once, plus credit cards. My mom has a similar model, and hers shreds cds. I don't know if this will shred cds. But in any case, it's an awesome paper shredder. So we grabbed one and we were on our way.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52
Total: $52

Then Eric said "Let's walk around a bit, I want to get some orange juice." I knew this would be trouble. Within two seconds of walking out of the aisle with the paper shredder, we saw an endcap display with all-purpose wine glasses. Eric and I have two sets of gorgeous and expensive Reidel wine glasses. One set of chardonnay glasses and one set of burgundy glasses. They cost hundreds of dollars, and we're obsessed with them. But we don't trust anyone to use them. It's all part of the obsession. So Eric wanted to get these wine glasses - they were supposedly for both red and white wine, there were 8 in a box, and the best part, they cost $18.99 for the whole set! This is fantastic. So he grabbed one and we were on our way.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52
1 Case Red/White Wine Glasses: $18.99
Total: $70.99

Then we passed by the books section. The thirteenth book in the Series of Unfortunate Events books had come out, so Costco had in stock a box set of all thirteen books! I had been wanting to buy up this set for a couple years now, but had held off thinking that a complete box set would probably come at a better price. The books look very entertaining! Eric said that if I didn't get it now, I might well regret it later. I had no choice. Eric had to go and get a buggy. We loaded the paper shredder, wine glasses, and the giant box of hardcover books into the buggy, and we were on our way.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52
1 Case Red/White Wine Glasses: $18.99
Lemony Snicket Box Set: $114
Total: $184.99

Three metres later, we walked by the dvd section. Eric paused and made a case for buying TWO boxes of wine glasses. He had obviously been pondering. After all, they were a great price, and it would come in handy when we had more than 8 people at the condo drinking wine. That's some pretty good logic right there. So he jogged back to the display to get another case of wine glasses. While he was gone, I glanced at the dvds. The Little Mermaid Special Edition 2-Disc DVD set was RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! I snatched one up, and held it up for Eric to see when he came back with the wine glasses. He looked at it, gasped, and said okay well I guess we have to get that! I love Eric, he's awesome. Into the buggy it went, and we were on our way.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52
2 Cases Red/White Wine Glasses: $37.98
Lemony Snicket Box Set: $114
The Little Mermaid DVD: $23.98
Total: $227.96

On the way to the refridgerator section, we resisted Christmas cards, display snowmen, 4-packs of Guylian chocolates, and giant Toblerone bars. As Eric went to look for the orange juice, I wandered into the Italian/Greek refridgerated foods section and found a big jar of anchovies - for under $6!!! We had eaten some amazing anchovy antipasti in Rome. I wanted more of the anchovy action! Into the buggy it went with the case of four Tropicana orange juice boxes.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52.00
2 Cases Red/White Wine Glasses: $37.98
Lemony Snicket Box Set: $114.00
The Little Mermaid DVD: $23.98
Italian Anchovies: $5.67
Tropicana Box of 4: $11.99
Total: $245.62

As we made our way up to the cash registers, miserable with no self control, I stiffened my resolve. I don't need all this! It's the end of the month, we have bills to pay, Costco sucks and doesn't accept any credit card other than Amex. We shouldn't be spending the cash! I stopped the buggy and turned to Eric. "We don't need all of this." Eric looked at me in surprise. And then slowly, he said "Okay....what don't we need?" Together, we decided we didn't need two boxes of wine glasses. 16 wine glasses is a lot, and we don't even know if they'll really be any good. The second box of wine glasses came out of the buggy. Then I finally blurted out "I don't think I need the books!" Eric searched my forlorn face carefully. "Are you sure, honey?" I nodded. I could ask his sister Haley to borrow them. She had all of them. I'm uncomfortable with this in general, as I hate lending out my books, and thus do not like to borrow books from other people. But do I need a $114 box set of hardcover children's books? Perhaps not. Eric ceremoniously lifted the box set from the buggy, and took it back to the books section.

Royal Paper Shredder: $52.00
1 Case Red/White Wine Glasses: $18.99
The Little Mermaid DVD: $23.98
Italian Anchovies: $5.67
Tropicana Box of 4: $11.99
Total: $112.63

WOW! I was so proud of us. We had managed to cut our Costco bill by nearly half, just seconds from check-out! We had fought Costco, and while we may not have dominated, we were also not raped.

Of course, later that night, Eric opened up the wine glasses and was so impressed with them that we decided we would go back maybe today and pick up another box. And I did some research online, and found that the Lemony Snicket books were actually a pretty good price at Costco, and maybe I do want them after all...my kids might like to read them in the future. So we might be going back to get them as well.

Damn you, Costco.

That's Amore!

Setting the Scene
I’m sitting on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic. There are two ditzy, materialistic, middle-aged Canadian-Italian women from Etobicoke in the seats behind us who think they are still young. They are loud and I hate them. The seats are uncomfortable and I didn’t buy the $5 headset, so I can’t hear the dialogue on the shitty Keanu Reeves movie that is playing on the shitty television screens. I’m sick of playing Tetris on my Nintendo DS. I have no book, because I only packed four, and I finished them all earlier this week. I have mosquito bites on my arms and neck, my skin is dry and flaky, my mouth tastes gross. My hair is starting to feel greasy and is clinging to my neck. With five and a half hours left to go on this flight, I have nothing to do and can’t sleep. So I’m composing a blog post that I can upload as soon as I get home. Yay blog post! Now you'll know why the if the post is impatient-sounding. I'm in airplane hell.

Why I Haven’t Posted in Three Effing Weeks
We’ve been on vacay in Italy for two weeks! And the week previous to the trip, I had nothing. Okay, this isn’t true, I totally had a thing, the hair thing. But I was too busy trying to pack for Italy. If this makes me suck, then I’m sorry. Please keep reading!

The Hair Thing – In Brief
I was sick of my seriously long hobo hair. I went to get it cut. Bitch cut it way shorter than I told her too. Will be seeking new hairdresser soon. Am now ugly. Uglier.

LUSTY ITALIAN GETAWAY
So! Down to juicy bloggy business! The husbo and I set off on a Contiki tour exactly two weeks ago. It was an itinerary called Simply Italy. There were about 35 people on the tour, some were cool, some were not cool, and we ended up roughly divvying up into rough cliques, much like high school.

Okay, I must pause for a second. I thought long and hard about how to approach this blog post. If there’s one thing I find horribly boring, it’s people’s travel blogs. There are a few notable exceptions. But for the most part, they’re bad. Sorry, people with travel blogs. But you suck-o.

I’m not going to tell you everything I saw, because that can pretty much be summed up like this: “I saw some big-ass cathedrals, and some big-ass ruins, and some big-ass important pieces of big-ass art. It was all big-ass amazing, and my life has been enriched and my perception of the world has been big-ass changed forever. That reminds me, I still have a big ass.”

So apart from all that, here’s the other stuff:

I Revealed Too Much Information
Being the only married couple in the group, Eric and I were socially overlooked in the beginning. For about two hours. For all you Contiki people reading this, don't try to deny it. You were friendly, but assumed that we would be bland, and probably wondering if we would share private kisses awkwardly in front of you when you didn’t want to see that kind of domestic intimacy, thereby spoiling any kind of partay mood. Then I started exposing private details, and everything shifted into normal focus: people laughed at my stories, and pitied Eric who obviously seemed uncomfortable but resigned to the sharing of said stories. Welcome to our married life! It's like a car crash. You can't help looking and listening, but you know you shouldn't. These were some of the things I revealed during the course of the trip:

• Good Wife/Bad Wife a.k.a. Eric Loves Figure Skating and Carol is a Bitch in the Morning
• Eric Pukes in Carol’s Mouth in Cuba
• Carol Waxes Her Yoohoo/Eric Trims His Entire Body
• Frequency and Satisfaction-Rating of Poopies Made on the Trip
• Eric Has a Big McBumhole
• Sometimes When We Do the Sex, I Just Lie There
• We Pop Each Others’ Body Pimples
• Eric Only Asked Me Out To Get Laid
• Eric Dumped Me To Get Laid By Other People
• Eric Failed To Get Laid By Other People But Did Make Out With a Large Girl With B.O. In An Alley
• Eric Won’t Let Me Put Things In His Ass

I Made Out With An Aussie
Everyone makes out with an Aussie when they go to Europe. And now, I have too! Her name is Lucy, and she’s a great kisser. Eric was passed out at the time, and Lucy herself doesn’t remember it. I later found out that Lucy threw up afterwards. But it was good. Lucy’s hot. I was less hot, I was wearing my glow-in-the-dark flannel jammies with the sheep on it, and I had my hair tied up on top of my head so that it stuck straight up. It's possible this is the reason she puked off the side of her bed following the Cana-Aussie lesbian tongue action. But the important thing is that I molested her over my husband’s unconscious body, and she was totally digging it.

Eric Can’t Do Accents
There were two people on the tour who did the best accents ever. Tara from Sacramento was a tiny little hot powerhouse who was completely hilarious, and Jim from LA was an uber-deep musician. They hooked up on the second night and totally stole our couple’s thunder. But it was cool, because they could do accents – Tara especially. She could imitate everyone, and she would act it out too…so when she quoted her oddly silent Brazilian roommate, it turned into a one-woman side-splitting comedy act that made me want to shit my pants.

I can’t really do accents. I can sort of do a really poor English accent, and then everything else I try comes out sounding like a Chinese accent. It’s really kind of embarrassing.

After the tour ended, Eric and I secretly tried to practice Tara and Jim’s Mexican accents. I could kind of do it. Eric couldn’t.

Carol: “Eeef dees eess torchurr, chayne mee too da waal!”
Eric: “Haha! Yeah! If this is torture, chain me to the wall!”
Carol: “You’re still not doing it.”

All Homeless Italians are Cripples and Amputees
This is really just an observation. But they are. It started with a few men with exposed stumps in the place of arms, sitting in some doorways, mumbling something incoherent in Italian (I suppose it could have been coherent to Italians, but it was not to me. I speak not the Italian tongue). Then there was a man limping around in a church courtyard, making humming and clicking noises. Eric's guess is that he was mute, and didn't have the use of one leg. But the best (worst) one was one woman with no legs, pushing herself along the ground on a skateboard and wailing. We thought she was a dog at first. It was really creepy, and it makes me wonder how they all lost their limbs. I actually secretly wonder if they did it on purpose to make more money on the streets. They gave me a new appreciation of the regular homeless people in Toronto.

And most importantly...
My Best Poo
I pooed every single day in Italy. In fact, sometimes I pooed twice! And they were mostly excellent poos, poos that I would be delighted to dump out every day forever. But the best poo was in Capri. I hadn't gone to the washroom all day, and it was mid-afternoon. I had to go pee really badly, so we found a public washroom in Anacapri. It cost 0,50 euro to use this washroom which was clean and smelled okay, and had soft toilet paper. I made giant pillows with the toilet paper to line the seat, then I sat down and revelled in a zen-like stream of urine. Then at the tail end of the pee, there came a sudden swift and powerful push from my rectum and a firm, solid, satisfying load of poo came rushing out of my bowels like a giant cobra exiting its snake-hole. The poo just came and came and came, as I sat in horrified delight at this unexpected and aggressive move by my intestines. When I got up and looked in the toilet, I saw the most beautiful coil of fecal matter piled up high and proud in the bowl. I had bemoaned the folly of European toilets, and the way the holes are so deep that you can never see how much poo you've made. This toilet was no different, but my incredible - nay - death-defying bowel movement had risen above all such hindrances and was displayed there in all its glory. The best part was that it only took two wipes with the soft toilet paper to clean my bum, and then I was on my way.

And that, my friends, is truly amore.