From my blog archives:
January
CAA is GOD. But tow trucks are expensive.
David Beckham is actually a nice dude.
My old math teacher is famous.
February
Being self-employed as a transcriber is possibly the worst job to have.
The best way to apply for a job is by mail.
Bridesmaids' dresses are overrated.
Dental emergencies in -40 weather are to be avoided at all costs.
Slapshots hurt a lot.
Tow trucks are expensive. Did I already mention that?
March
Universities who email you rejections are universities not worth attending.
Never get a discount flight to take you across the country - you will see more of the country than you ever wished.
Oregon is the best state there is, and Portland, OR, is the best city in the world.
Drinking beer in an old-fashioned movie theatre is a really cool experience.
Dancing after accomplishing something tremendous is a good idea.
April
Thesis defenses are not so bad, really, but the comedown is a bitch.
I love playing with dogs all day.
May
Being stalked by a crazy person is an interesting experience.
Facebook is Facecrack - although I have since recovered.
I am a marketing genius - and people should realize that.
June
Dogs can respond to CPR.
The Big Nickel is a myth.
Packing is not so bad if you're OCD.
The SENS RULE!
July
Moving is not so bad if you're OCD.
August
Short women mess with my concept of the universe.
I will never have a roommate again who isn't Andy.
September
Peekapugs are weird mofos.
Not going to school is weird.
October
Martin Gerber can pronounce SCOOPIES.
I will never succeed as a dog groomer.
November
Star Trek Voyageur is the best show on television.
Rogers is inept.
Domesticity is a really easy rut into which to fall.
Time flies . . .
December
Weevils are tough nuts to crack. Or tough beetles to kill - whatever. They're a pain.
Being single - even if only temporarily - blows goats.
Not playing hockey any more isn't so bad after all.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
2007 IN REVIEW
1. What did you do in 2007 that you'd never done before?
Moved in with My Man.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Yes?
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope, but give it a few months.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Oscar Peterson.
5. What countries did you visit?
USA only.
6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?
A welcome letter from U of Calgary.
7. What date from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Going to see the Sens beat New Jersey in the playoffs. Heckling Brodeur from close proximity. It was delicious.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Becoming a BAMA.
9. What was your biggest failure?
Not getting in to PhD school the first time around.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Plantar fasciitis sucks my ass-mar.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Snow tires for the Pie.
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
The staff at the store - what a refreshing concept!
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Kira's, probably. Damn her father.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Snow tires and Christmas.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Moving house.
16. What song will always remind you of 2007?
Business Time by Flight of the Conchordes - again, camping.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. Happier or sadder?
Happier.
ii. Thinner or fatter?
Thinner. According to the Pie I'm losing boob.
iii. richer or poorer?
Poorer. Gotta love working only 30 hours a week.
18. What do you wish you'd done more often?
Saved money and eaten less junk.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Spent money and eaten junk.
20. How many one-night stands?
None. I behave myself.
21. What was your favourite TV program?
The Tudors.
22. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Some of my customers . . . some other people a little closer to home . . .
23. What was the best book you read?
The Time Traveller's Wife.
24. What was your greatest musical discovery?
That I have rediscovered my dislike of top 40 and Ottawa radio.
25. What did you want and not get?
To win the lottery.
26. What was your favourite film of this year?
Hot Fuzz, though I know I saw something better.
27. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I spent my 25th birthday on the road in the mountains, on my way to the seashore in Oregon.
28. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Same old, I should think.
29. What kept you sane?
Andy. As always.
30. Who did you miss?
My peeps.
31. Who was the best new person you met?
Amanda and Duke.
32. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006:
Don't sweat the small stuff.
Further New Year's Revelations to follow. Stay tuned.
My house still looks like a volcano erupted in it, but that's because it's been Christmas and we haven't had a chance to clean up in a while.
Pictures to follow in the next few days . . .
My house looks like a very small volcano erupted in it. All around the edges, in the cracks, holes, and under the radiators, I have spewed a fine gray ash-like dust. It's supposed to work completely in 48 hours.
We shall see.
So the pest control places all want to come by and see - I don't think my landlord is willing to pay for that.
However, Andy knows of a poison that you can spray into cracks that ants (and hopefully weevils) get stuck to their feet and take back to the nest, where they kill everything. I've asked my mother-in-law what it's called and where to get it, and then I will give this information to Angela and she will get it for me.
I'm not going to do much more weevil warring in the next little while, because I don't want to mess with too many chemicals at Christmas. The dogs are coming for dinner tomorrow, so I need to mop up my Raid droppings. Thida's kids will also probably show up at some point, and my floor is an ideal place to play, so I don't want anything getting into their little systems. In addition, the last thing I want to do is go crawling around the floor spraying poison when I'm supposed to be baking cookies, preparing for houseguests, dinner parties . . .
So that's the new strategy. Don't tell the weevils.
I came home and surveyed the damage. It's like they all crawled out of their holes to die in agony on my floor. I swept them up and I'm keeping them in a ziploc bag to see how many I can get. Some of them are still alive, meaning they were immune to the Raid, but we shall see what happens in the next little while.
See my photos here and here. The specks that look like dirt are, in fact, weevils.
So I showed Angela, my landlord, the weevils this morning. I even presented her with a bag of about 30 of them that I picked up in 10 minutes last night.
She is, to say the least, very surprised at the situation (neither she nor her mother have weevils), and is a little dubious at my supposition that they're coming through the walls and radiator. She has given me some Raid, which I am in the process of testing in my pantry.
My job, because my English is better, is to find out what these creatures are and what it will take to get rid of them. Calling pest control is useless, because they just want to come and see for themselves and charge millions of dollars. So I am taking the academic approach and I have emailed professors from three universities across North America.
The first attack has been laid. More tactical information is needed before the next assault wave can take place.
So now we wait.
What is the life span of a wheat weevil?
The weevil count is still high. I investigated one of my taped up holes. Some are still getting through, so I need to perfect my seal; however, there were several stuck under the tape, so I know that this hole was one of the access points.
HOWEVER.
There are still lots of weevils elsewhere: Greg's bathroom, the living room . . . and I know these suckers don't move that quickly, so there have to be other holes.
And of course there are other holes. My house is full of them.
I'd rather not go the chemical route and spray the Raid.
Anyone know a nice low-chemical spray for bugs?
Here's something interesting: I have weevils in my house. Wheat weevils, to be precise. Innocuous looking little blighters, slow moving, helpless when flipped over, and about the size of a flax seed. In fact, when I find most of them, they are on their backs, like they did it to themselves. They remind me of teeny tiny rhinoceri with balance issues.
The thing is, I have no idea how they got here nor why they appear to be almost everywhere in my house. According to the internet, they feed on grains, but, while I have found several in my pantry cupboard, I haven't found any in my food - and all my baking stuff, flour, oats, etc., is sealed.
I noticed them a few weeks ago, I think, and dismissed them as some sort of mite or random beetle in escaping from the snow. But now they're proliferating in my house and I don't know what they're eating or where they're coming from. And they're in every room, not just the kitchen. For someone who moves that slowly, it must take an awfully long time to travel to all corners of the 1500 square foot apartment. Just now, one of them is slowly plodding up my living room wall. I will squish him in a minute - he won't get far.
So that is my conundrum: a weevil infestation. With no root cause, and no damage, either. Very interesting . . .
***ADDENDUM***
Out of curiosity, I have just cleared out the cleaning supplies from the bottom of my pantry, as that is where the major concentration of weevils is coming from. There are piles of what looks like some sort of grain that I do not own on the floor, and several wiring holes drilled into the walls. These are extremely large holes, unnecessarily so (which also confirms my reservations about having my landlord fix things in my apartment - I'm a much better handyman).
I plan to vacuum up what weevils I can, then seal the holes I can see with tape. My guess is the little boogers are coming up through the walls from my landlord's pantry, which is directly below mine.
Ah.
Stay tuned.
All right folks, as of tomorrow night, I will be a single woman until December 21st.
Andy's headed to Montreal for a meeting and office Christmas party, and then to Markham for two weeks for training on some newfangled PVR monitoring system.
So I'm relying on you folks to keep me company - I will cook for you if you keep me from killing my erstwhile roommate.
Also I have a lot of holiday cookies to bake in the coming weeks, so if you help me you can lick the spoon . . .
So recently I've been finding it harder to go to hockey.
I don't have my own car, for one thing, so every Saturday I had to go to my parents' house and get the car, bring it back, load it up, and head out to the east end. It was really a lot of trouble. Especially if I worked first, and then I was often too tired to play. Not to mention that with my feet troubles I was getting tired a lot more easily these days.
To add to that, every game we would have less and less girls, and really less and less people. So in addition to being tired after working, having pain in my feet, I would have to play with very few people (that means very few breaks), and less girls, which means I would have to try super hard to beat them and never do it - I haven't scored a real goal in AGES.
Plus, with school trips planned for January, and with everyone's social calendar being centred on Saturdays, there's a lot of times I just can't make it out for a game.
So I emailed Alan the other day, to let him know that I wouldn't be able to make it out as much for the second half of the season. I just couldn't commit, with all those factors in consideration.
So he emailed me back today and told me that it might be a good idea for me to "pull the plug" on hockey, and that he understood how I felt. Then he told me that, because of the whole people-not-coming thing, he was suspending our coed games, and that, after some revision, our "league" would restart as male only, because it wasn't fair to the girls to have to struggle against so many boys (what started as a women's team adopted boys because of lack of players - this year we had three girls - only two regulars - and 12 boys).
So that's it - my team that I learned to play with and got better with has dissolved, officially. It's kind of sad because we had so much fun, but in the past year it's been politics and health issues (I'm not the only gimp on the team), so it hasn't been working out and we've known it. So I'm not that upset, but it's still sad that such a huge chapter of my life is over.
I wonder what the rec hockey is like in Calgary . . . ?