Me vs Cindy and the Bookfair

Just before Christmas, my daughter’s school had a brilliant idea and held a used book fair for the kids. Families were able to donate books (Yay, less stuff in my house!), and then set up just like a regular book fair, but prices were dirt-cheap and kids could go buy whatever they wanted for less than two dollars.

In an even more inspired move, kids were able to purchase books for their family members, and the teachers would help them wrap the books so the kids could give them as Christmas presents. (I’m truly impressed with our school and the creativity of the PAC we have!)

My impatient 6 year old couldn’t wait until Christmas to give us our books, so we got to unwrap them that afternoon. It was very cute.

She got her brother a book about cars, because he loves cars.

She got her dad book 4 of a sci-fi series, because he loves outer space.

She got me a book about a 15 year old girl who didn’t want to go to prom. She picked this particular book because it had a picture of shoes on the cover, and I love shoes.

This was adorable, and so I read it….plus she checked in daily to verify my progress.

And so, in order to justify the time I lost to this literary massacre, here is my book report: 

This is possibly the worst book I’ve read in the last 20 years. Wait no, I read Twilight.  But it was still bad. Really bad.

My mom gives me terrible books to read just so she can talk to me about how terrible the books were, and this was worse than any of those. I should pass this one on to her next, as apparently we’ve formed some kind of informal book club that chooses only shitty books on purpose.

The book is called Cindy Ella. Yes, it’s a really terrible modern play on Cinderella, complete with bitchy step sisters and a step mother who loves nothing more than binge shopping at high-end stores, and can’t understand why Cindy doesn’t. It’s about as shallow a book as you imagine it would be.

Our heroine, Cindy, makes herself feel better by watching 80’s cult classics, like 16 Candles….very original….and eating ice cream. She also writes a hugely unpopular letter to the editor of her school paper about how much prom sucks, in a school/city where going to prom is apparently more popular and important than the moon landing.

And of course she has a huge crush on the most popular boy in the school, because of course she does. Oh, and to make it current, her gay tutor helps dress her up in the end for a date with this hot guy who, as it unsurprisingly turns out, also has a huge crush on her and loved her anti-establishment point of view on prom.

Excuse me a moment, I have to go vomit.

The writing itself was dismal. I realize the 40+ year old writer was trying to channel a 15 year old girl, and hasn’t been that age for quite some time, but sweet lord it was a painful, awkward read.

The one thing I will say for it is that at least in the end the main character didn’t bend her morals or change her opinions just for the sake of a cute boy. Instead he didn’t go to the prom with her…..so that’s something, right?

I suppose in the end the whole experience could have been worse….I heard rumors that one kid unknowingly bought their unsuspecting parent a copy of 50 Shades Of Grey.

Which begs the question….who donates 50 Shades of Grey to an elementary school book fair???

Me vs Me Last Year

Since I've now celebrated a full year doing this whole writing thing, it seems like a good idea to look back and see what posts have been the most popular.

While I realize most people do this at either the end of the year, or immediately at the beginning of the next, I am running a bit late due to sick kids, time management issues, and basic procrastination. 

And so here are the posts that have been the most popular throughout 2015...  



Me vs The Churidar Kurta or How I Got Stuck in a Shirt

Me vs My Gender-Neutral Name 

Me vs Crossing the Border

Me vs Swimming

Me vs The Superbowl

Me vs The Never Ending Story

Me vs The Wedding or The Reason I Got Stuck in a Shirt


Thanks again for reading, and for the support in this adventure. It's been fun, and I hope to continue to find things entertaining enough to write about. :-)
Jamie 

Me vs Dinosaur Beans

Yesterday night, in a last ditch effort to save my 2 year old son from scurvy, I made up a song to get him to eat a vegetable. Specifically green beans. 

It went something like this:
Dinosaur beans, dinosaur beans
Gabe's gonna eat some dinosaur beans
Nom nom nom nom (while he ate one)
Gabe ate some dinosaur beans.

By some act of God, this inane song actually worked. I can't believe it did, but it did.  In fact it worked so well that he ate two helpings of beans, which was basically a new parenting high for me.
The drawback was that I had to sing this idiotic song for every. single. bean. 

By this point his sister decided that this was the most amusing thing she'd seen all day, and all but refused to eat her food until I sang the song for her too. This meant 20+ renditions of this irritating musical to get through a meal.

The resulting opera took most of the night, and suffice to say my dinosaur beans were a bit cold by the time I was allowed to take a moment to
consume them between performances. 

But he ate vegetables. I consider it a win. 

Me vs Shipping is Stupid

Congratulations! We made it through the Christmas season and into another year. Well done everyone!

One of the realities I face leading up to this magical time of year (besides weight gain) is that I don't live near a mall or any reasonable shopping venue. This means I have to be organized (gag) and plan well enough ahead to get presents ordered and shipped to my mecca of wintery wilderness. Challenge accepted. 


What's this? A package arrived for me. I don't remember ordering anything this big....

 Lots of wrapping. Maybe it's fragile.

What the everloving fuck? Batteries!? Some unfathomably stupid person looked at this tiny set of batteries and thought yeah, lets totally waste this box on something that could go in an envelope, and we should charge the customer 32 times what is reasonable to send it to them. Yeah, do that. 

Assholes.

Me vs Big Snarly Cats

You may have noticed over the last year or so, that I take exception to a rather large number of the resident population of animals in the area where I live. I’ve touched upon my disdain for the local road lemmings (deer), the mice, the spiders, and the bear (although I can’t really hold it responsible for wanting my delicious food waste), and I just want to put it out there that I don’t hate animals.

If I lived by the ocean, nothing would give me more joy than to watch whales and dolphins jump in the waves. I could watch river otters play for hours. They make me think of little cats…..except they like the water, aren’t nearly as pretentious, and are generally bigger than cats, ….but that time my cat fell in the bathtub, he did roll around a lot, which was kind of otter-like.  

Not cougars, but they still have
sharp bits

I like house cats. I have two, and despite waking me up at all hours to receive love, walking over my pillow with their cat litter paws, and meowing in front of my kids doors in the morning because they’ve figured out that I will leap out of bed to feed them so the kids don’t wake up, they’re lovely. I even like the resident marmots, and their less portly relatives the ground squirrels, despite the ankle-breaking holes they dig all over the yard. Being a ground squirrel is what I imagine being on amphetamines must be like…hyper alert, running everywhere, and yelling (chirping, but I envision it as yelling) at anything that comes near you.  

But, and I’m sure many will agree with me here, I don’t like cougars. It’s not even actual cougars that I dislike, but more their desire to eat people (read: me) that they every so often display. I realize that this isn’t terribly common, and there are a lot of other nasty things out there that can end me, but I’ve had cats that bite me a lot and it hurts like fucking hell, so I don’t think getting eaten by a much larger cat would be any improvement.

Cougars eat meat, and I’m meat. This is pretty straightforward.

Bears, being the other large animal of concern out here, will eat meat as well, but I picture them as more open to food that doesn’t fight or run much, like berry bushes and logs filled with bugs. This being said, don’t go out of your way to piss them off by giving them a hug (it’s a bear-hug in name only), or try for a selfie with a grizzly (It happens. Morons.), but in general, I’m just not as worried about them. This is probably due to the fact that bears don’t really try to hide. They bumble along making an ungodly amount of noise and eat whatever is easiest to get. Mostly my garbage. Cougars, however, stalk you, because they are motherfucking lions.  

Mountain lions.

Basically it’s like we’re in Africa being stalked by regular lions, but these ones have an extra vector: they can hide in trees and jump down on your unsuspecting head. That’s freaky shit when you’re out in the woods trying to enjoy nature.

Not a guard dog, but at least he's pretty

In response to this threat (real or imagined) I got a dog. I thought that he would offer some protection, or at least warning when it comes to these apex predators in the area, however I am not convinced he actually does.  While he sticks to me like glue inside the house, the jackass takes off the moment the door is opened and returns hours later with a deer bone from a stash he found months ago. And the last time he encountered a bear on a walk, he completely failed to notice it, and he generally won’t go outside right now because it’s cold. Not a terribly useful protector.

This brings me to a hiking trip I was a part of on Vancouver Island a few years ago. A couple of hours into the hike our group came across a sign that warned hikers to stay in groups of 3 or more, as cougars were in the area and would stalk you if you were alone. Our group was had about 10 hikers, no problem. Unfortunately the 10 of us were split into three separate groups: The fast people, the slow people, and the middle person: me. I was my own group. Of one. Which, for those keeping score, is less than 3. This immediately made the cougar warning the scariest sign I’ve ever seen.

Happily I didn’t die, though I don’t know if it’s because there were no cougars around that day, or because I was talking in three different voices so any cougar in the area would think “Hey, there’s a group of 3 happening down there. Maybe next time”. Yeah, that’s right, I’m that awesome.

The strangest part of this paranoia I have about cougars is that unlike the deer whom I would happily see eradicated from the town limits (they can go live in the forest, not in the DQ parking lot), I don’t actually want cougars to be killed; I just don’t want them near me or my family. The sad part, and back to the idiotic deer again, is that the cougars come into the town because of the deer, and then have to be put down because they pose a threat. I really wish this didn’t happen, because despite the Jamie-eating capabilities of these animals, they are beautiful. In pictures. That were not taken by me.

So to summarize, deer suck, cougars are pretty, and I would like to avoid being eaten.