Me vs Voluntarily Living Without Amenitites

Every summer, for most of my childhood, our family would go camping for two weeks in the Okanagan. As an adult, taking my family camping, I've come to realize that these were some of the most spectacularly organized camps of my life; really, of anyone's life. My mother is the most tidy, coordinated, and organized camper of all time.

Now I can also run a camping trip; I've been doing it my whole life. I've slept on the ground under a shitty tarp at a Guiding camp while bugs crawled across my not-sleeping face (don't do this, it's terrible, and I got zero actual sleep), to tenting in thunderstorms with racoons running black ops missions to gain access to your sleeping quarters (also terrible, also no sleep).  I've been trailer camping (Please don't mistake this with a large modern trailer; mine is very tiny and old, and a lot of things in it don't work), and I've been camping in the rain more times than I care to count. 

The current tiny trailer

I've gone on school camping trips with my very own cast of mean girls, one of whom forgot her sleeping bag. She thought I should share mine. I did not. She also didn't think that eating ketchup chips in the tent in a known and very active bear area was a problem. It turned out not to have been a problem that one night, but the risk alone! I kind of wished one had eaten her. She would have been so much better for it.

But at no time in my life would anyone ever accuse me of being half as organized a camper as my mom. It causes me an absurd amount of stress getting packed up; it takes me days to do, and I never forget less than 4 items. Two of which are generally critical (see below). 

And I've certainly never pulled off a two week trip to anywhere. The most I've managed is 10 days, and by the end we had devolved into eating out at least one meal a day because I couldn't get it together for long enough to coherently plan 3 complete meals. It almost resulted in a reenactment of Lord of the Flies.

And if only food disorganization was my greatest fail....

Two years ago we went camping with some people from work.  I'm confident this trip led to some concerns about my mental faculties, which were already up for debate based on an earlier instance where we'd shown up to a campfire party without shoes for our toddler.  (and while this has led to ongoing hassling, it did serve to keep an otherwise busy toddler confined to a chair so I always knew where he was...maybe less of a problem than originally thought, hmmmm)

I also have mad skills when it
comes to adding thumbs to pictures  

We pulled up with our tent trailer and parked beside their Taj Mahal-ish trailers (some size envy on my part), and reached for the crank to creakily, shakily raise the beast. Guess what we didn't have. Yeah. That.  So with otherwise no way to raise the trailer, Husband unhooked it, turned around, and drove back home to get the missing link.  

A few hours, and some harassment about our pathetic camping skills later, the trailer went up. In an effort to redeem myself with a gourmet meal (see here as an indication of my cooking skillz), I went inside to fill up a pot of water to get dinner going. It was at roughly this point I discovered that the antifreeze we put in to discourage the pipes from bursting, was now discouraging us from using the water.  I swear we cleaned that tank out multiple times before heading out, and yet the water was completely unusable. 

(Pro tip: even if you don't use the hot water in the trailer, the son of a bitch hot water tank will still fuck with your water supply and contaminate your regular tank. The more you know 🌠 )

In normal circumstances, no water would be fine. I've only had a trailer for a few years, and part of camping for me has always been lugging water jugs down to the faucet to fill up.  This, along with washing dishes, is why parents bring kids camping, right?  It's just part of their job description. Well, because we were in a forestry camp, there was no running water. We had to rely on the kindness of those around us for our water needs for the rest of the trip. I felt like Oliver Twist: Please sir, may I have some more?

This did very little to improve my standing as a competent camper.  Although at least this time I remembered shoes. 

So, before I ramble into the realm of TL;DR, I'll wrap this up saying that while I've done a lot of camping, my technique leaves a bit to be desired. I can promise that I will be sticking to the shorter camping trips until I've developed the necessary skill level required to attempt anything longer.  And so help me, I'll make sure to pack some
damn shoes. 

Me vs The Dark Rabbit Hole of YouTube

For years I avoided letting my kids watch traditional tv commercials for toys. It was wonderful, and significantly cut down on the levels of "IwantitIwantitIwantit" ringing out through my house every time a commercial break occurred. Praise Netflix.

But then, one day, my oldest discovered toy demonstration videos on YouTube.

If you haven't experienced these (and it is an experience), please allow me a moment to explain the joy. The whole show is basically a diabetes inducing, off camera voice of an adult who is all too excited to open and play with shitty kid toys on camera.

WOW IT'S A TINY PUPPY! SHE JUST LOOKS ADOOOOOOOOORABLE! OH ISN'T THAT SWEET, SHE COMES WITH A RABID FOAMING MOUTH ACCESSORY! IT JUST CLIPS RIGHT IN LIKE THAT. OH THAT'S JUST SUCH A GREAT IDEA! ISN'T SHE JUST THE CUTEST! MAYBE THE NEXT PACKAGE WILL INCLUDE THE TINY MAULED CHILD THAT GOES WITH BABY CUJO. I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!

Vomit.

So basically, some genius asshole has figured out that by opening toys and playing with them on camera, complete with irritating high pitched voices, you can get MILLIONS OF HITS on YouTube. There are entire channels devoted to this perfect example of humanity failing. It boggles the mind, and yet on some level, I wish I'd figured it out first and capitalized the shit out of that.

And so both my children will watch these visual atrocities for as long as you let them. My mornings are filled with shrill idiots extolling the virtues of the latest plastic toy that will eventually jam my vacuum cleaner, which is broken only by my children plaintively asking to go to Toys R Us while the next video loads.

OH MY GOODNESS, IT'S A TINY BABY SHITS-A-LOT! HE'S SO CUTE! WOW! I JUST LOOOOOOOVE HIM. LOOK AT HIS TINY ANUS AND PERFECTLY SCULPTED FAKE HAIR! WHAT A LITTLE TREASURE! LET'S OPEN THE NEXT MYSTERY BAG! OMG IT'S A TINY BOTTLE TO FEED HIM WATER SO IT LOOKS LIKE HE HAS REAL BABY DIARRHOEA! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!


Help me.

Me vs Culinary Excellence

I've never been an amazing cook. I'm not the worst, but I'm also not likely to be offered a spot on Hell's Kitchen. Generally speaking though, I don't like being yelled at, so I don't feel any particular sting of rejection on this point.  

My food is basically fine.  It's consistently edible, and I don't believe I've caused any cases of food poisoning, but it's not gourmet by anyone's standards. That said, if it was gourmet, my kids would have starved by now, as they subsist entirely on a diet of peanut butter, ketchup, kraft dinner, and soy sauce (or as they call it: soil sauce).

And it's not that I'm completely incapable of food preparation; I just don't enjoy doing it.  When my husband used to live overseas, he and his family had a full time cook. This sounds magical to me. Rainbows and unicorns dancing on my dinner plate. It also makes the fact that he occasionally also had cobras in the kitchen almost reasonable, because fuck it, I'd never be in there. I suppose I'd need a cook that moonlighted as a snake charmer. 

What bothers me most about cooking is that you can't just make one amazing meal, drop the mike, and exit stage left to thunderous applause. You have to cook every. single. day, and there are very few things in this world that I want to do that frequently. Cooking is certainly not one of them. 

My current distaste (<-- good pun) for cooking began at a young age.  I was in home ec in grade 7 with a close friend. We made some great food. Muffins, apple sauce, and specifically pizza dough from scratch. It was amazing. I was so thrilled with how good it was that I though I would make this shit at home, because I was the best pizza dough maker ever!

As you can imagine, when I tried to recreate this masterpiece at home for my hungry family that had no alternative food source prepared, it turned out to be the culinary equivalent of a dumpster fire.  It was so inedible, that the best we could do was make some half hearted attempt to rescue what few toppings hadn't been enveloped into the doughy slime. There wasn't much to salvage. I knew hunger and shame that night. 

This properly explains my relationship
with both noodles and snakes

It was at roughly this point that I made the uncomfortable realization that I was not the reason I was passing home economics. Had I been left to my own devices, I would probably have failed. My friend was a good cook. I was not. 

And to drive the point home just a little harder, I also lit a bowl of Mr. Noodles on fire in the microwave that year. In the home ec classroom. In front of my teacher. Like a boss.
That day I also knew shame. And hunger. 

Me vs An Unconventional Hair Treatment

Here's a bit of advice I feel like I should pass on; consider it a PSA of sorts:

No matter how much you don't feel washing your hair tonight, do not substitute a real shampooing with dry shampoo. It's not the same.

More importantly, if you ignore this warning, leaving apathy and human inertia to dictate your level of personal hygiene, please at least use a quality dry shampoo. Do not, for example, substitute with a dry shampoo designed for dogs because that is all you currently have on hand.

While dry shampoo for dogs does a passable job of making sure my wet dog smells a little less like a vile combination of damp moss and old deer carcass, it made my hair smell like a wet dog. And to add insult to injury, it had the audacity to do nothing to improve the overall look of my hair or act as a stop-gap between actual washings.

This was not the easy fix that hair commercials everywhere promised me (slow-mo hair flick)....that said, maybe I'd have done better watching dog groomers commercials instead?

Me vs The Guy Who Didn't Like My Hair

Today I had one of the strangest client encounters I've ever had while at work. It went like this....

A man walked in to the office. Let's call him Dick. It's appropriate.

Me: Hi, can I help you?
Dick: Yes, you can comb your hair.

What I should have said: Why don't you go comb your face?

What I actually said after recovering from my wide eyed, quizzical-dog head tilt:  *extremely awkward laugh* But can I help you with anything? *stumbles blindly through rest of encounter, but otherwise survives until he finally fucking leaves*

I'm absolute shit at confrontation, and I just didn't see that one coming. He was completely deadpan and I still have literally no idea if he was trying to be clever (I really don't have a good example of how this could be construed as clever...) or if he was just a complete waste of breathable air.

It's important to note here that my hair was in a bun, and that he had the follicular equivalent of a dead cat on his head.  I get that not everyone loves the wild colours I've grown so fond of, but seriously, I do try to maintain a pretty high level of overall hair maintenance. And in any case, he didn't seem concerned with the colour....but instead with how much I brushed it? Which he could tell from the tidy professional bun I was sporting?  I'm still so confused.

You sir, are an asshole.