Grey Hairs, and the Things That Cause Them

This morning D made us a nice breakfast of french toast and sausage. Okay, the sausage had been cooked the day before, but the french toast was fresh and excellent. We were sitting there happily masticating when suddenly I cocked my head at a sound the bunnies were making, turned back to look at D and saw a look of unabashed glee on her face. She grinned impishly at me, gestured, and announced happily "You're going grey!"

Gee, thanks.

The woman rushed to the washroom, grabbed her tweezers, and plucked out the offending hair to show me. And the one beside it. I think she was making room for more grey hairs, so that she wouldn't be alone in aging. I fully expect to wake up some day to find her plucking hairs on my head in order to promote the advance of grey onto my scalp.

At least now when people point out the male pattern baldness that's also creeping its way onto my head, I can justify it by pointing out the grey hair as well.

I have reasons for going grey, however. I think this blog itself stands as testiment to one of the main reason; a short, maniacal reason that plagues me daily, but to whom I am shackled. There are other reasons.

One of our big stresses at the moment is attempting to rid ourselves of our apartment. We had to close very quickly on our new home and were unfortunately still in lease for our apartment, a lease from which it is proving extremely difficult to extricate ourselves. We've resorted to posting ads on Kijiji, and we get lots of replies to these ads, but so far no one has actually taken the damnable thing off our hands.

Many of the replies cause me considerable anguish. I've taken care to state quite specifically several points. Firstly, the rent includes heat and water. No pets are allowed. The apartment is available immediately. The apartment is located close to Bayers and Connaught. These are the sorts of replies I mainly get:

"Is this apartment still available?"
"Pets allowed? Y/N?"
"Where is the apartment?"
"I have a cat. Is this okay?"
"When is the apartment available?"
"Can you tell me where the apartment is?"
"What's included in the rent?"
"Does the rent include power? Heat?"
"I was wondering about the apartment."

The last one's my goddamned favourite. I cleaned up the grammar a bit to make the responder not sound like such a complete and total moron, but I have to ask: WHAT were you wondering about the apartment? Did you want to know if it's green, or inhabited by magical fairy bugbears who will give you cookies if you learn how to dance? Can you host key parties and invite your drunken leprous biker friends? TELL ME!!! It's like human beings have lost the capacity to read whole sentences. They see I have an ad, that it's for a two bedroom apartment, and read no further. Is it that difficult to go over the whole text of the ad? In its entirety it is shorter than this paragraph has been!

I weep for these people. It must be difficult for them to get through life. It goes some way to explaining Haligonian drivers, though. They see the big red octagonal sign in front of them, try to read it, get tired after "STO" and figure whatever it says it can't possibly apply to them and so drive right on through. They even seem to have trouble reading the colours of street lights, as though they can't be bothered to investigate anything that's flashy and colourful that won't also help them increase their penis size (although, to be fair to these people, they probably read "increase their pen" and think "Yeah, mine's running outta ink; why not?")

I'm also concerned about the kids across the street. The ones who appear to have passed puberty but haven't quite hit the stage of not-being-assholes. There's quite a large cluster of them, and they gather right at the entrance to the public housing across from us on their bikes like an imitation biker gang, yelling loudly into the night and wrecking any street signs that come within reach. I wonder if they walk around all day swinging their arms, and the moment they touch something solid decide that it needs to be vandalized in some way. If I can give them any kudos, it would be that they seem to be racially inclusive, so as a gang of misfits they are very accepting. Fantastic. Now we can have hope that in the future, people of all colours and shapes can get together in harmony to smash beer bottles and set off firecrackers that detonate like car bombs in the early morning hours.

The young boy who lives in the house behind us just got his first bike and is learning to ride it with training wheels. I wonder if his parents have made a mistake. The jackals across the street probably see him as a future member. Their only requirement appears to be the ability to not fall off a bike, and it's not a particularly strict requirement anyway.

My lawn continues to grow. At this point it's claimed our patio set. I can still see the top of the table, but had to dig to find one of the chairs. Halifax weather is uncooperative when it comes to lawn mowing. We haven't seen the sun for a week and a half.

D just told me the other day there could be earwigs in our laundry, after having hung it up to "dry" in the rain.

I think a few grey hairs are just the beginning.

Her Ass is Grass

I know it's been a LOOOONG time since I've posted. For those of you who care, or somehow don't know, I moved to Nova Scotia about a year and a half back. Because everyone told me facebook was the place to be, I started using it. Something facebook lacks, however, is the unadulterated capacity to RANT LIKE A MANIAC!!!

It's something I feel the need to do right now. I have a feeling, nearly a premonition, that I will feel the need to do it more and more often.

Why? Two words. Home ownership.

Let's get this straight: I love D to pieces. I trust her implicitly and would travel to Hades and back for her (although because I'm stupid, I'd probably look behind me and she'd turn into a pillar of salt or something, so it likely wouldn't be an effective rescue).

We recently purchased a home. That's right. I now own a home with my lovely common law spouse. Lovely. I have to keep saying that to myself. Not bugnuts crazy. Not strap her to a gurney and inject her with valium insane. Lovely. Yes.

If I don't remind myself of that at least every 47 seconds, I get a bit twitchy.

So a bit of background. We had a birthday party for me back in April. Ah, April, when I was young and innocent, carefree and unencumbered by looming financial cliffs. I made a nice meal for my friends, had them all over for drinks, went and sang some karaoke, then came home to my patiently waiting hangover. That's not a metaphor for D. I really did have a hangover. The next day, around noon, we both woke up fresh as daisies soaked in turpentine.

We had no plans for the day, but we decided we wanted to do something that wouldn't cost us any money. "Let's go look at open houses!" D declared. "It's free, and we can get an idea of what's in our price range." This wasn't completely out of the blue since we had been saving for our down payment, but hadn't the funds quite yet.

A tip for those of you with spouses of the female persuasion: If your spouse suggests doing something that will not cost money, get out your wallet and take her to the movies, dinner, or buy her a box of frigging chocolate for all I care, otherwise you'll end up spending a LOT more. Like a couple hundred thousand more.

Long story short we found the house we really wanted to buy, scraped together the funds for our downpayment primarily by prevailing upon the generosity of our parents, put an offer down, applied for the mortgage, and yadda yadda yadda, we were homeowners. We moved in June 1st.

Okay, that's about 47 seconds. Lovely. She's lovely.

My parents recently came to visit and ended up spending most of their trip helping us with various projects around the house. We finished the risers on the basement stairs, mounted a live wire into a junction box in the kitchen, put up a clothesline, painted the kitchen cupboards, and I even tried my hand at carpentry assembling a table on which to mount the microwave. It turned out nicely. We bid them farewell after about a week, a week in which my mom tried to pay for everything (luckily D is sneaky and managed to field the waitresses and clerks for most of the times my mom tried to pay). However, my mom threatened to transfer me money for a lawnmower.

To be clear, I needed a lawnmower. Desperately. My lawn was -Who am I kidding? Was? My lawn IS- a foot and a half tall. I could hide hobbits in my lawn. First home, remember? I was surprised I needed to purchase a fire extinguisher, let alone a lawnmower.

So my mom followed through on her threat and we went to buy a lawnmower.

D and I have apparently quite differing interpretations of what that word means.

When I think lawnmower, I think a gigantic gas hog with blades that rotate at eleven billion miles a second, belching smoke and reducing my lawn to mulch in 13 seconds flat.

When D thinks lawnmower, she thinks an itsy bitsy eco-friendly push mower that requires the strength of ten men each of whom is at least twice my size to get it to devour even a foot of grass.

Because I'm a gentleman and a scholar, guess which one we got?

I just spent the last hour "mowing" the front lawn. It still looks like most of the haircuts my dad gave me. The only muscles I can still use are in my fingers and my eyes. I'm glad my fingers still work because it allows me to gesture in very particular ways at the lawnmower (and the lawn, as it's not entirely blameless).

My only consolation is that D said I look very sexy mowing the lawn. Yes. Thank you. I'm sure I will make just as sexy a corpse when I'm felled by my pending heart attack.

At least in my eulogy they'll be able to say I was eco-friendly. Yay.

Have I said she's lovely lately? I feel a twitch coming on.