Reality Bites

Sausage Fingers and I found ourselves in the rare position of having nothing to do in the middle of the day, on a school day and as is the way when you're out of practice, we were at a loss as to what to do with ourselves. I mean we had absolutely no obligations that day.  No contracts to tie off, no packing, no shipping, no paper signing, no selling possessions and with The Lish at daycare, it was like we'd turned back the clock 6 years so we decided to go see a movie like lovers in the Spring, 'cept it ain't Spring here in Ontario...and...oh you get the jist.

We settled on Shutter Island with Leo di Caprio, directed by Scorsese - a movie dream team.   And we were not disappointed.  In fact it gave us so much food for thought that afterwards, we kept missing our turn offs to get home, so engrossed in silent dissection were we, but we came to this conclusion: when reality bites, insanity isn't so bad.  Oh but it gets darker than that, however, in terms of detail, I can only really tell you what the trailer does without spoiling it for you. 

The story revolves around the chase for a prisoner who has escaped from a mental institute for the criminally insane.  Leo plays the US Marshall in charge of the case.  There is only one way on and off the island - by heavily guarded ferry.  The suspense is arresting and Leo is gorgeously disarming as a 1950s police officer.  Golly,  he really is a saucy bit of alright.  I always thought Leo had a face like a fish - eyes on the side of his head, but he's grown into those features since Who's Eating Gilbert Grape and what the hell, he is also a fine, fine actor.

All I will say is that Shutter Island does for insanity and psychiatry what Obama did for America.

Here's another reality that bit - I finally went to get my left foot X-rayed and look what they found (yes that's a broken 5th metatarsal):

The only good thing about this is that maybe I'll get wheeled to the front of the queue on Thursday when I check in to my flight home.

Full Circle

Day 2 at the in-law's house in Hamilton, Ontario - where it all began 2.5 years ago.  What a difference 2.5 years of uphill misery makes.  Ok, not 2.5 years maybe just 2.1 years because the last 5 months have indeed been very special.  But here I am once again.  However (and for obvious reasons) this time it feels very different. 

Yes, I'm going home in less than two weeks, that much I think everybody and their wife, and the wife's dog and the dog's fleas know.  But more than that, I have stuff to do that doesn't involve packing tape.  I have albums to review - 7 of the buggers before I leave these here shores - I owe it to the courageous artists that dare to live the dream.  Check out the most recent here.  I have also just come from a pedicure by someone I know (how about that? I know someone! in the burbs) who knows me well enough to want to tell me what's been going on in her life and I gratefully and engagingly listen.  Then I sit, alone with a book at a table in the adjoining vegetarian cafe while I wait for my nails to properly dry because I WALKED!  yes, I am currently waiting out my sentence in a town where interesting and useful places are walking distance and I really didn't feel lonely as has been the leitmotif of the last two years. No more do I need to feel the dread of the front door's beep at 6:30 AM signalling the departure of Sausage Fingers leaving for work as his movements trigger the alarm and the start of a long, lonely, unproductive and uninspiring day for me.  To be fair, that ended with Yoga - but never let the truth get in the way of a good moan.

Goodbye Oakville.  Hello life.  The house is empty as my heart! The shippers having come yesterday to take every last shred of evidence with them.   Cars? gone.  Unwanted furniture - 98% sold.  Really I couldn't have asked for a smoother ride of this transition (I'm touching wood here, cos it ain't over til it's over) and now it's time to sit out the next couple of weeks gracefully and respectfully...how am I doing?  Ok don't answer that.

So that's all I have to say for today.  Back to life, back to reality, back to the here and now, yeah!  Soul 2 Soul beat me to those lyrics and I couldn't have put it better myself anyway.

Even the dead must get on with the afterlife

I'm mid obssession.  I read The Lovely Bones last week and so of course I went to the library and got out everything Alice Sebold has written before and since.  I'm three quarters done with The Almost Moon (very very very dark read indeed) and tomorrow I will start Lucky - her memoir.  Yes, and I'm also packing, doing yoga, feeding the 5000 and promoting world peace.  All in a day's work.  I'm very good at compartmentalising my days - I'm a Virgo don't you know?

So here is a cross section of a day in my life at the moment: mornings are for packing, fretting and barking at my husband (and the occasional Yoga gig) but after lunch the world turns rose petal coloured.  I legitimately stop everything and just be.  One of the things I enjoy doing while I'm just being is reading.  It's as serious a hobby to me as hockey is to 14 year old Canadian boys and their fathers.

I can read a book in an afternoon if it has grabbed me in the right way at the right time.  I did that with Carrie Fisher's biography Wishful Drinking - which I highly recommend if you're into sardonic, malignant humour.  She has mastered the art of understatement and loves to swear which is a bonus if you're a secret potty mouth like me.  Of course, I've read all of her fiction too - one after the other.  I go through unhealthy co-dependent periods with the local library where I will literally rock from foot to foot, like a junkie, at the check-out desk until a 'hold' (a reserved book) comes in.

- But you said it would be in today.
- Sorry ma'am I would never have said that - we don't know when holds come in.
- Will it be here tomorrow?
- Ma'am, I really don't know.
- Ok - I'll come back tomorrow.

The Lovely Bones is the story of a girl who watches her family cope with her murder from the 'other side'. It's such a brilliant premise.  I can't wait to watch the film.  I don't want to spoil it for you so I'm not going to tell you what happens; whether the killer is caught, whether the young girl makes contact with her family from beyond, nothing.  I will tell you that it is not a book for someone who has been recently bereaved because the overriding message is that life goes on, the living have to move on and so do the dead.

This was not a big surprise to me since I've had a long time to get to grips with loss, but it did still 'get' me and yet at the same time, it was kind of comforting to have it confirmed (it may be fictional but it read like the truth to me) that yes, the departed do visit - often at first but then not so much and eventually I imagine really never (N.B - I'm starting from the assumption that you believe in an afterlife - if you don't you'll still like the book in more of a Hollywood way) because it means that 'life' goes on for them too.

I don't want to spook you but I know my mum (who I lost 15 years ago) comes and sits next to me every now and again but I also know there are long periods when I don't feel her at all.  I've come to accept this though at first it made me a little angry.  Yet shortly after she died, I physically begged her never to show herself because I was a big scaredy cat and with the wild imagination of an only child, I envisioned a visit from the dead as being so heart stoppingly horrific, I preferred the alternative - never to see her sweet face or hear her dulcit tones again, but as the years passed, I got braver. 

Soon we developed a 'special' friendship - the sort that would no doubt get me locked up in a padded cell under any other circumstances - consisting of unannounced gentle visits.  The best way I can explain these visits is to say that the energy in the room changes - she has a unique vibe to me.  We'll hug it out or just watch Coronation Street for a minute and then she's gone.  I'm afraid these little visits will have to do me until we meet again on the same plane - but as The Gladiator says to his dead wife and son- "Soon, but not just yet".

Anyway, see what good literature can do for a girl?  After Alice, I think I might get a little obssessed with knitting as I've just completed a stirrup leg warmer and it really doesn't look that bad.  You tell me:

I mean, it took me 3 months but I think I'm ready for the left leg.

In which I trust my instincts and hope they've matured since the last time I did this

We move out of the house next week. The worst of the packing is over.  There is really only giving, selling and throwing out to do with the rest being picked up by the shippers in just over a week.  The cars will also be gone and we will have come full circle as we move back into our in-laws' house just as we did on October 2nd 2007.  We leave just as we arrived - though we are very very different people now than we were then. I feel a bit like Frodo Baggins on his return to The Shire.  I know I, we, and my life will never be the same after this. I see London differently, I see friends differently and I look at life in a way I only pretended to before.  I will be unrecognizable to those who know me and I may take some getting used to but that is a journey for them to take.  I'm well into my stride and pacing for the next of many laps.

I honestly don't know whether it's all the yoga and meditation or if my experience here has caused a total loss of emotion or if I've simply just been through the most important learning experience of my life, but I don't feel anything at all about leaving, or even more to the point about going home to a place I seemingly missed with all my heart.  To be honest, while occasionally I have mixed 'emotions' if you can call them that, about going home to London - for the most part - I have nothing but an overriding feeling of neutrality about the whole exercise.   The calm that follows the storm that preceeds the storm?

While there is an elephant-sized shitload to do once I get there - I'm just not really phased by it at all.  I mean, I don't see any of it as a huge inconvenience, just like I didn't see what the big deal was with coming to Canada in the first place and I'm wondering whether alarm bells should be ringing, since coming to Canada turned out to be such a ground to air disaster.  And because I can't help myself, I am secretly analyzing - this is against the rules of Zen - the differences between the two moves.  I have come to this conclusion - while the move to Canada never felt great - the move back to the UK does, but only in a 'it doesn't feel not great' way. 

I can't put my finger on why I feel like this exactly; why I'm not excited to the point of nervous collapse, calling recruiters and yoga studios and estate agents - which is what the old version of me would do but I get this sense of it being pointless until I am there, in situ.  Maybe I'm at the age where you don't get excited anymore and then I think...bullshit - I always get excited about fun stuff.  Misery me blames my experience here and truthfully, I do believe that having to interact with a bunch of anal retentives (I'm talking at the bureaucratic and business level) has somewhat dulled my ability to get happy about little things but my goodness what would my life be if it wasn't for the little things ...so no I won't accept that.   No doubt the truth will out eventually but I do feel as if I'm on the precipice of something as opposed to nothing.  I do feel I'm being given a second chance, another second chance.  I guess time will tell.
Let's just hope my instincts have improved since 2007.

Step aside James Earl Jones

I taught my first full hot Hatha class on Friday.  I arrived 2 hours early just in case I wasn't feeling pressured enough but there were a lot of chores involved in preparing for the first class of the day.  Atmospherics cannot be rushed.  There are candles and incense to light, green tea to replenish, studios to air, re-heat and refresh and music to select.  I wanted it all to be perfect (if you don't count the fractured foot and H1N1 flu-like symptoms.)

I woke up feeling terrible after the obligatory worse-night-of-the-week sleep (of course), looking like I'd just survived a small to medium car crash, with a ruddy great red welt on my right eye and a nostril area that glowed with rawness - I mean I looked anything but healthy and here was I preaching to the great unchilled?  I didn't think so.  Let's just say I wasn't feeling particularly confident.  BUT.  I knew the series (the Hatha series) and as long as I didn't get that wrong, the rest, I hoped would be optional extras.  However none of this even mattered to me - I had a much bigger problem to overcome.

When I was the merest of girls at school, I played the recorder for the school 'orchestra' which consisted of well, a bunch of recorder players.  We'd be wheeled out for all school events from carol singing to parent evening and every time, no matter how rehearsed we were, I would suffer the most crippling stage fright.  It was usually so bad, I'd be lucky to make it past the first couple of bars.  I was reknowed for it and in fact became the reason people turned up; to see Conde fuck it up.

In fact my nickname was Shaky - as in Shakin' Stevens.  I never disappointed but I kept right on with it up until my senior year in primary school and after that graduated to piano and clarinete at high school and finally drums when I was 18, naturally....

I never ever failed a music exam EVER but the examiners always commented on my 'arresting' technique (cardiac arresting).  Eventually I discovered boys and that was the end of my music career.  Now I write about it with much understanding and appreciation since I really do know that it takes balls of steel to get up and perform (however bad you are).

Fast-forward 20 years; by now I've lost the endearing qualities of youth and I'm standing in front of 17 fee paying yogis all in need of a great workout and do you know what?  Not an ounce of nerves, not a quiver, not a shake, not a bumbled word.  Nothing.  It flowed, despite not being able to demonstrate - I found I'd become somewhat of an accomplished orator and apart from the pigeon stretch, everyone followed my verbal cues with ease.  Who'da thunk it?

I just pummelled through 75 minutes of flowing, testing Hatha and contrary to feeling relief, perhaps a little acomplished and a teeny bit smug (as I always imagined I might feel) at the end, I instead felt humble and grateful.  Honestly, I was simply touched by the amount of faith people put in me as an instructor.  I mean, I didn't announce the fact that my body was broken or that I could no more get into Warrior I pose than I could walk down a flight of steps without the aid of a railing but it was obvious I was not in tip top shape and yet they stayed.

The class had indeed worked hard, (perhaps due to the fact I'd ever so slightly overheated the room, ahem) but nevertheless I felt like treating them to a well earned 5 minute guided meditation which I sort of cobbled from all the best meditations I've ever had. I found myself using nature's imagery to transport everyone to a place of deep relaxation - least I hoped that is what was happening.  I mean, I was on a roll here with the talking thing. 

Then it was over and people towelled off, thanked me...THANKED ME!!! and slowly filed out.  And then a young man approaches me and I'm all ready to say 'you're welcome' and 'it's a pleasure' when he says:

- Do you know Richard Attemborough? - he asked

- Sure I do, he narrates the Planet Earth series - I replied

- Well, you're like the female Richard Attemborough.

I knew Yoga was the right choice.  So it's goodnight from Cloud 9 and I'll see ya all again soon.

Binging and purging

Okay - I apologise.  That last post was vitriolic.  Welcome to PMT.  Anyway - the hormones are in remission for today so here is a post that doesn't involve being mean.

I apologise for not being around for a while but I've come down with a very bad cold that has manifested as a hacking and painful cough.  I hope you don't get it.  It ain't pretty.  I've been blowing my nose so much, my nostrils are red raw.  I look a sorry state, splutttering and dripping bougars all over my sleeves and I'm doing my best to avoid public places that use strip halogen lighting as it makes me look like a crack addict. 

I feel I'm over the worst of it though and not a moment too soon since tomorrow I teach my very first Hot Hatha class - and I mean all alone, just me, the whole hour.  Well, I hope not just me, since that wouldn't really be much fun.  I hope a handful of people turn up.  I'm really very much looking forward to it but can't help thinking there is a coded message in a.) spraining/fracturing my foot a day before I take part in the yoga fund raiser for Haiti where I am forced to teach only a couple of seated postures and b.) getting this stinking, crippling cold just a few days before my real debut.

For now I will look at it as a blessing in disguise.  I believe the pain in my foot and throat will distract from any nerves I may be feeling....I hope.  I've been practicing at home most mornings, talking to an imaginary class (so what's new) like a proper mental patient - I mean whole dry runs, counting breaths and everything.  It's equal parts heart-warming and pathetic. 

In between role-playing yoga teacher and hacking up a lung, I've been absolutely ruthless with packing.  Only the essentials have made it onto the pallette bound for the UK;  Maybe a couple of sentimental mementos but outside of that I come very close to Dick Wittington with his hankerchief of worldly goods on a stick.

If I'd been just a little more organized I could have made 'millions'* through mum-to-mum sales but these will go to Goodwill now. The nipper will most likely get very confused at daycare as of tomorrow since I donated most of her 'baby' toys to them.  The art of psychological warfare begins. 

"What do you mean, you don't like peas?  If you don't eat your peas teddy goes to daycare, to be pawed over by everyone. And I'm not even kidding." 

To be fair she had almost outgrown it all.  We'll have a ball replacing it all in London care of the sausage fingered destroyer of all man made thing's first wage! :)

Talking of the destroyer - he's done a great job selling the big ticket items.  His car is gone, coffee tables, writing bureaux, sofa beds - you name it he's on the case with Kijiji.  And he's been having lots of fun by the sounds of it. I have not been able to let him help pack because he only has to look at something and it collapses.  So he pedals and I sort.  He binges and I purge. 

He has no idea what moving entails.  I realized that when he sauntered home with a roll of bubble wrap that wouldn't stretch around a coffee cup and tape that wouldn't hold wrapping paper together.  Still, I didn't marry him for his shipping skills I suppose.

The house is upside down - boxes everywhere and there is a sense of organized chaos. Sausage boy is in his element.  He can legitimately leave things strewn about and I will let him have his fun because he will never have this freedom again.  Gone is the spare bedroom in London for him to use as a clothing jungle jim; gone are the 2.5 bathrooms.  In London, we'll have to make do with one and I don't want to gross you out but by the time Jim Jamalicious get round to cleaning his sink, it takes industrial drain unblocker.  This will not be allowed in the UK.   Gone also, in a way, is the room to move - so we will have to become a nice, compact, neat, nuclear family just like God intended.  For now, I watch (in amazement) at how suffocatingly messy the boy is in the secure knowledge his days living like Stig of the Dump are numbered.

And now, I'm off to change into my combat gear as I need to make it through the obstacle course to the TV room by 6:30 or Coronation Street loses out to The BackYardigans.

*by millions I mean about $150 :)

They're Here...

The crazies are back. The bad bad hormones that lie dormant in my pituitary for ooh at least 5 days of the month are back to rape and pillage all things unfortunate enough to stray into shot. Animal, mineral or vegetable - nothing is safe. I think this is the worst of the 3 worst weeks in a month's cycle. To my horror and contrary to what the good Doctor tells me, I'm getting worse with age, not better. Try as I might with pills, potions and abstention from all the great things God has given woman like chocolate, wine, shopping and complex carbohydrates, I still get hit by a tsunami of Stalin like disparagement with the world around me that starts a day after my period ends and ends a day before it comes round again . And I've yet to experience the menopause. I'm hoping to be 'out' for that one.


Despite hobbling through Yoga today and taking an extra long nidra meditation, I still managed to tell customer services for a wireless service provider, that its cellphone service was 'Expensive, crap and stuck in the dark ages' and for that reason I wished to cancel my contract. I didn't stop there, no I went on to say that I wanted to cut all ties and never have the scourge of a red bill polluting my post box again. That the 21st century started a decade ago and though their company still has 25 years before that milestone to catch up on, this call would hopefully serve as a good masterclass.

The real reason for cancelling of course is that I'm leaving Canada but the bad people in my head wouldn't let me say this and be done. The bad people smelled blood.

"Can I interest you in an online promotion for female circumcision?" asks the gormless rep - or something like that. I was by this point pacing the kitchen with flames shooting out of my eyes. I had put away my sense of hearing a long time before.

"No, you can interest me with terminating my contract and getting the hell out of my life, you mindless cretin and if you read another question from your script, I shall hang up and you can strip for the fucking money , cos you won't get it from me. I'm asking to give you money and you're making it hard. You utter moron."

Then thinking about it because pre-menstrual tension likes to toy with us, I added by way of a waiver: "Not you personally - you're not a moron obviously, the company as a whole is." Brilliant.

So now I'm extolling stories about being unable to pay for anything, much less a cellphone bill with the world's most arrogant provider (opinion based on personal experience) - put your lawyers away, we are entitled to an opinion, past March 4th BECAUSE I'M LEAVING THE COUNTRY ON THAT DAY. And do you know what he says? The man obviously has a deathwish:

"I'm afraid we won't be able to send you your last bill until March 6th."

"But I leave on March 4th."

"Well I'm afraid we still won't be able to send you your-"

"You can't override the system to pre-bill me so that you, the world's most backward cellphone service provider get its money from a customer who has been honest enough to call and explain they won't be here past March 4th?" I interrupt and from the tone of his voice I can only imagine the boy is now taking the call from under his desk.

"That's correct." Not, 'that's right' which is what normal people would say but 'that's correct' because now comes the part of the conversation where he gets to pedant me and I get to do this:
"Well, Tray - that is your name isn't it? (No ma’am, it's Justin) Do you really want to pendant someone who if from the birthplace of Pedantry? Do you really? Well, take a seat then. Let me see if I have this straight."

And so I commenced a soliloquy of monumentally monotonous proportions exacting the sense in sending a bill to a person who has been kind and honest enough to explain they won't be there after a certain date. Furthermore, they wish said customer to bear the brunt of the system's inability to pre-bill; to shoulder the blame in the form of a court summons for non-payment due to the rigidity of their computing system.

"So you see, Tray," by this point - he was on speaker and I'd made myself a cucumber sandwich and an earl grey tea, "You put me in an impossible position and so I advise you to accept that this final bill will appear in your ledger as unpaid until the earth swallows my brittle bones and you come to the inevitable conclusion that you should have billed me when you got the chance."

"Would you be interested in registering with us online and that way you can pay it from wherever it is you are?"

"No, Tray, I would not."

For the sake of mankind, and I use the term loosely where I live, I ought to hide in the basement until March 4th but I have to go to the piggy supermarket to get a few essentials and I'm dreading it because if you think scripted customer service representatives are trying....god help the cash monkeys at Sobeys if something fucks up and right now even the humblest rap on the door from a neighbour bearing cookies would upset the balance.

"Cookies? You mean to say you come over, trampling a messy path to my doorstep to give me stale leftover, egg flavoured rocks so that you can appear to be the good kind neighbour and pester us about babysitting The Lish again - you ham fisted wench?"

"No, I just made these fresh for your little one who I know likes them."
"Really, well unless you are prepared to pay the dental bill you can stick your cookies where the snow doesn't blow."

Ah, I hate myself on days like these. Only 15 more to go. Sausage man had better practice silence for the next little while if he knows what's good for him and you think he would, but I suspect he won't.

Drum roll please

Packing day approaches with the pitiless step of a Greek tragedy.  I can't bear it.  I've run out of excuses and in two days time I will have to face up to the fact that my life for the next week will comprise bubble wrap, masking tape and cardboard. Normally this would herald the start of a ferociously creative afternoon making crocodiles and castles with The Lish but alas, not this time.  This is about putting things back in its box.  I imagine once I start, I won't stop.  I'm a bit like that .  The all or nothing girl; flawless foundation perfectionist one day, baggy trackpanted slattern the next.  I'm like that woman in Seinfeld who only looks good in a certain light. I scrub up well (I wish I could say it just takes a slash of red lipstick) but god love me, I can look like hell in no time at all.  Heroin chic was based on me -  caught on camera sometime in the late 80s, out on a Sunday morning running to the newsagents for the Sunday Times and a carton of orange juice.

The Sunday Times, especially the Magazine - how I have missed you.  Ironically I really hope to be too busy to read you but as I have promised myself and practice daily with Yoga Nidra, I live only for today these days, usually in the realm of fantasy but, you know, baby steps and all that.

The flights are booked, the first two week's accommodation also.  I will have my work cut out for me looking for a more permanent arrangement but luckily I know London like the snack aisle at the local supermarket so I already know more or less (to the street) where I will (and won't) be looking.  Actually none of that really phases me.  More than all of that (including finding the sea cucumber a place at a school) more urgent than that even, is the fact that I have two years of Euroculture and London street cred to catch up on.

For example, last time I looked, a clothes store called River Island was the opposite of cool.  It was the place you shopped if you were having a midlife crisis.   It was also the place I bought my mother the first ever Christmas present with my own money.  It was an emerald green satin blouse.  Hideous when I think about it.  A ruddy great bow at the collar completing the Bozo the Clown look, but my mother was ecstatic to receive it.  She wore it often bless her.  I remember packing it into a bin liner to give to a charity shop 12 years after she died.  It was tough but it had to go.

Now it turns out the same store has emerged a leader in the cool stakes, ousting, some would say the like of TopShop.  I cannot afford to make faux pas like this if I wish to be taken seriously in media circles the likes of which I very much hope to join again - like a grain of sand in a giant oystershell. 

As you can see, I really don't have much of interest to write about today (this apparently doesn't stop me).

Must dash.  The bedtime routine beckons and I'm out of vino!

My Left Foot

Look at this:

 - no, it's not a foot I stole from the morgue, it's my left hoof.  If you look closely, it's green. It should look like this:

 but it doesn't because I fractured it ...dancing. 

This is the precursor to breaking a hip in old age. It's practice for those fragile days I'm sure.  Hopefully this won't lead to a swift death like so many broken hips do (wonder why that is?) though there are days when a swift death doesn't seem that big of a deal.  No, but I jest, I wouldn't want to leave my little sea cucumber all alone with the sausage fingered destroyer of all man made things.  Don't get me wrong, he is Daddy Cool but a girl needs her mum.

Already The Lish, who is 3 gets coy when I mention a certain boy's name from daycare.  Are girls born like this? because the sausage merchant will tell you I'm about as romantically minded as a Pogo Dog on a paper plate at the Rockton fair.  So today, when I dropped the nipper off at daycare I decided to do some investigative research.  I asked the teacher who, let's call him...Chip (solid North American name)  was?  Immediately her eyes widen, indicating that my spawn has great taste.  Turns out he is a Kinder - older then her (she's only a senior), a sugar daddy if you will who comes from good stock by all accounts.  I walked out filled with Mother's Pride.

Lishy, I said, you will go far.  You may not know how to spell your name - but if you keep choosing 'em like this? you won't need to. 

Anyway, I thought about my own choices in life and for the most part, while there are some episodes I would really rather got taped over - I'm ok with them.  As a medium once said, I am a sum of everything that came before and more importantly, I wouldn't be who I am - the person I've become - the person I rather like now who knows a few people who also rather like her, just as she is and because of all she has been, said and done.  So, bring it on Chip. 

I know that all I really need to do for the nipper is love her truly, madly, deeply.  Outside of that, life is for living and she will have to make her own way, as I realise I did.  No regrets.  I hope to be here for her to a ripe old age (as long as I don't break any hips) for when the going gets a little rough, but if I'm not, she will be fine. The shitty end of fine for a while, then ok and finally really ok.

Christ, has Tim Horton's laced my coffee with gin this morning? Let me re-read the contraindications of the anti-inflammatories.  Speak soon, unless I fall and break a hip.

Strange Days

I've been thinking too much and not listening enough.  I know I have all the answers but the monkey mind will not stop long enough for me to take stock.  However, take stock, I must especially since the past few days have been some of the most stressful so far. 

First, I fracture my foot - the left metatarsal of the small phalange on the eve of my first ever yoga teaching experience, which took place on Saturday.  Experience was the right word.   I'm sure the class never realized there were THAT many seated postures in Yoga.  :)

The following Monday, I hobble over to pay my father-in-law's place of work a solicited visit to find that time was of the essence.   Not exactly how I'd pictured the last visit to his office with the nipper.  Then, to add to the grimness of the already unsavoury situation, I find I've been ticketed for parking too close to an intersection. Despite the swelling and the pain in my foot, I pace the distance and find it takes more than 20 steps to reach said intersection.  I don't know what kind of rules you have here in Canada but if that is too close to an intersection, Hamilton's Parking Division must be MINTED, cos Canadians in the suburbs don't walk 20 steps anywhere, if they can help it.

I then find out how much it is going to cost me to get out of the mortgage early.  I balk at the thought and continue to do so. I think about defaulting on some contracts just to change it up a little: be the screwer not the screwee, but that is not my style.  I decide to suck it all up.  And at the same time I have had the best week ever in terms of social engagements - which ironically due to the timing of it all makes me sad. 


Add to these miniature (by comparison) irritations, I find out that my bank in Spain has decided to reinvest a lump sum of money I had with them and now need (desperately need) into a financial product I have not been consulted about - which would lock that money away for god knows how long.  This  has been the cause of more than a week's worth of nocturnal torment over how on earth to deal with such Goliath affront from 5000 miles away and 6 hours time difference. 
 
After a string of calls and e-mails (all unanswered) and many wide awake nights wracking my brain as to how best I could possibly fight this injustice, the jim jam king comes home with a list of all the bank's directors' names, none of which would like to hear of a scandal of this sort; I mean taking a customer's money without asking and doing what you feel like with is has got to be illegal, right? 
 
Having worked for many years in PR, I know TV stations (especially Spanish ones) love a good David and Goliath scandal. Likewise, being a PR veteran, I also know it will be a long shot. Nonetheless, I start to formulate a plan that involves directly asking the fat cats to help me understand a policy where a branch of an internationally respected bank can take an investor's money and choose willy nilly what to do with it without even attempting to contact the investor for permission. 
 
It was all beginning to tax me to the extent that I found myself falling into a terrible routine of taking long restless naps during the day and as a result achieving next to nothing. 
 
Then last night, in mid self torment - I felt my brain short circuit and fade to black. It feels like the moment meditation takes a seat and makes itself comfortable in the mind.  I surrendered.  I was exhausted.  Slowly new thoughts emerged and they were of Dax Shepard's firm abs.  In this calm dreamy state , the words - 'use the names' came to me. This morning, I was like a woman possessed.  I checked my e-mail with the same churning dread of the past week and a half.  No e-mail from the bank.  So in a short and polite e-mail, I informed said elusive bank executive that I would be passing on both his response and more importantly lack thereof to the bank's fat cats, a threat I had made before - but this time, I mentioned the names. In less than a minute came a reply.
 
"Your money has been reinbursed and we await further instruction."  No apology.  No complaints from me, yet.  March 5th will be a day this bank executive would do well to take off as I will be the first person he deals with for the last time.
 
I'd like to thank my husband and Dax Shepard's abs.
 
Anyhow, suddenly like the sun burning through a heavy morning mist - the outlook feels remarkably brighter.  Coming as it does at the end of a catalogue of disasters, it feels great to be alive again.