scotchneat.ca

So they’re cleaning out the water mains at work so we had no coffee/tea or water today (though they did bring in bottled water) and I had to go buy Timmies (which in a plaza right beside us so I’m hoping whatever drugs they put in the coffee are also good for killing rust and sediment) this morning and I didn’t get my after-lunch coffee.

It was very discombobulating.

A friend of mine moved to China with her family a few weeks ago. Before she left, we talked about her setting up a blog so that she can keep in touch with friends and family in Canada and Sweden.

We were talking today and I asked about the blog, and she told me that she hasn’t been able to get one set up. No access to Wordpress, Blogger, Blogspot…or Twitter, Facebook …

I mean, I knew that the government of China blocks Internet content, but it made it more real. And then I got indignant on behalf of the 1,325,639,982 people or so that are there and effectively gagged. They have no right to blog. Just think about all of us who can jump on and blog about our electric ass, or our cat, or our thoughts on healthcare. They can’t do that. They can’t read what we read, or have the opportunity to know what we know. That’s deplorable. This is the same week that Obama hailed China as an economic partner (with no strings attached to human rights abuses).

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If you want to know how to get around it, btw, sounds like the best approach is to create a blog account outside of the country and these use a POP connection to email in your entries. I’ve offered my friend some help to do just that.

Yes, this is the second post in a row about poop. One of the great gifts to literature is Who Pooped On My Head? Plot is pretty simple: it’s a mole, with poop on his head, and he wants to know who did it. If you’re really good, you can also collect them in different languages – I have a copy in Hungarian!

Interesting. The current official title is The Story of the Little Mole in Search of Whodunit according to Amazon (Why? What person doesn’t like to say the word “poop”?)

Okay, I went looking for a picture of the Who Pooped on My Head? cover and there all The Story of the Little Mole in Search of Whodunit. OMG, maybe this is like 1984, and they’re revising history and sanitizing the language! I’m appalled. Just google “Werner Holzwarth” for images and you’ll see what I mean. Or maybe I dreamed the fact that it was ever called Who Pooped on My Head? Oooh. Maybe it’s like The Crying of Lot 49, and I actually saw an ersatz copy of the book which reveals a underground society of mole enthusiast mail carriers.

Who Pooped on My Head?

Anyway, that is all by way of explanation because I have found a critter who poops on its OWN head. It’s actually in my garden eatin’ mai asiatic lilies. I present the “Lily Leaf Beetle”:

courtesy of Odonal's Nurseries

See that black crap on the larvae on the left? That’s its POOP. Which it carries on its HEAD. Apparently, it’s a defense mechanism. I have to say that if I were a larvae-eating wasp, I’d have second thoughts.

In case you wondering how to get rid of the poop-beetle, the experts seem to think that Neem Oil will do the trick. I will let you know if it works.

Little bastards.

I was walking into the house and I felt something sudden and wet on my foot. I looked down in time to see a moth of some sort flying away from the scene of the crime.

The “substance” was kind of wet yellow-ish. Could this be moth poop? I asked google, and apparently this guy got pooped on by a moth, and it looks suspiciously similar.

I guess if something goes in, it must come out …somewhere. Foot wash – check.

I was out watering my sod last night, and there were three tween girls shrieking and giggling in a circle on the grassy boulevard in front of my neighbour’s house.

Turns out they had just witnessed a chipumkicide in the street. Not wanting to leave the “body” on the road, they used some paper to fling onto my neighbour’s boulevard, and now were suffering pangs of guilt for leaving it there, so they wanted it back on the street, but at the curb.

Having survived the bravery of the first move, they were having serious second thoughts about a second one – “I might get the rabies”, “You just touched it, so you can touch it again!” Shriek! Squee!

When I turned around and shut my eyes, it was almost like I was at a Jonas brothers concert.

Is anyone else creeped out by the latest set of Cheese commercials? For those of you not in Canada, each one features a child staring at a plate of washed out, unappealing food (like dessicated peas or something). It all looks like it takes place in some Eastern European village where the children have been replaced by slack-eyed pod people.

The tagline is “all you need is a little imagination”, and then the pod-child pictures a little dancing man made of cheese who jigs on the side of the plate and then offers to feed them. The music is kind of haunting 40s stuff and the little dancing men look seem more like evil sprites than reassuring cheese happy people.

The whole thing really creeps me out.

I finally made it to the dentist. The mission was to replace 2 fillings that were about 35 years old or so – the old “it’s gonna kill you” lead or aluminum things or something. I got the young turk who nattered on about his niece and nephew while he got the needle, the big frakkin’ needle, ready to put in my MOUTH.

I think I’ve noted before that I’m not BFF with dentists at the best of times (*cough* I might have hit one one time *cough*).

He said that the one on my right side “is a big sucker”, so there was no way I could do it without freezing. So I had the needle. Correction. THREE needles. And they hurt; I’m not even gonna lie.

The little one went okay, other than the smell of burning lead as he was drilling. That was really palatable. But then on the other side, with the “big one”, he needed some extra tools, like a freakin’ Borg instrument to prop open my mouth or clamp my tooth to my jaw or something, that I looked like this:

Marilyn/scotchneat at the dentist

Okay, maybe not quite that, but it was pretty close, and I had on those bigass glasses that you have to wear so that you don’t get your own spit and/or lead fillings in your eyes.

The damn freezing didn’t wear off until about 8pm, which is about 5 hours of feeling like my teeth were stones and my lips were the size of a peach.

This has done nothing to improve my relationship with dentists.

Me: Hello, I need to reschedule my dental appointment that was supposed to be tomorrow. I have a head cold.

Receptionist: Oh, we don’t worry about that. The dentist has gloves on.

Me: Yeah, except I can’t breathe through my nose.

Receptionist: Like I said, the dentist has gloves on.

Me: Right. But I can’t breathe through my nose, and let’s say the dentist has his hands in my mouth, so how exactly am I getting air in? Besides, if there’s freezing, then there could be an incident and I wouldn’t know about it.

Receptionist: Like what kind of incident?

Me: Um, well, like snot dripping down or something.

Receptionist: We can reschedule to 2 weeks from now – will that work?

Me: Yes. That will be fine.

This is a crisis of enormous proportions! According to some reports, Canada will have fewer brands of scotch available in 2009.

Apparently stock is being diverted to emerging big markets like China, Russia and India. And we’re not talking about some of those tasty but relatively obscure labels either. How about no Lagavulin? Oban? Talisker for the pity of Mordechai Richler! Oh, and Johnny Walker Green label, but that is really no great loss to the palate.

So if you haven’t got my holiday gift yet, I have room on my shelves! I need rations!

About a week ago, I was shovelling a very small amount of snow and I twisted one way and the muscles between my shoulder blades twisted another, and oh, excruciating muscle spasm.

I was doing okay for the rest of the week until this morning. I got up okay and grabbed a shower and then I got the bright idea of putting on a sweater that required raising my arms above my head and then all hell tightened up. I apologize profusely to all of those men that I’ve made fun of because they couldn’t stand straight or sit down because some unknown force had tied a knot in one of the big muscles that allow you to do stuff, like move. Particularly the lieutenant who has been known to take concalls while lying flat on his desk.

At one point I was trying to feed the cat without being able to stand up straight or pull or push anything with only one side, bent over like a crone. There was some swearing.

Have you ever tried to stretch the muscles between your shoulder blades? They’re not easy to get to. I’ve taken some aspirin and got out the heating pad, but I’m thinking that this is the first time in a long time that a massage partner would be really nice right about now.