1. Gus is still limping but the Hip Action that we give her for the limping/arthritis when she doesn’t barf it up is working really well. She takes it twice a day most days. If she barfs it up it is only once and sometimes she refuses to eat two.
2. Gus loves strawberries. We just discovered that they are like catnip to her. But we have not allowed her to eat any, she goes crazy nutters when we take them out of the fridge.
3. Adam and I got an early Anniversary gift from his Grandmother it was a cook-book which means she stuck with tradition. Awesome. And then a couple days later we both got birthday gifts in the mail and they were shirts and one of them I LOVE I have worn it three times already and it got me thinking about the post I wrote on the ‘Grandma Shirts’ and how Adam wanted to wear his crab shirt from his Grandma, my GMIL. I discovered looking through our honeymoon photos on flickr that he wore it a lot while we were on it and since I wrote it I have been feeling guilty not wanting it to come across as if I don’t appreiate her and what she sends us because of course some of it is total Grandma stuff, she is his Grandma but she pays me the most attention of anyone in Adam’s family other than Adam so I love her a lot and really appreiate everything she sends us, Adam can always use new work shirts anyway.
4. My breasts have almost stopped lactating. Shit, I remember telling Jared at Blogstock that if I got drunk enough that I’d show him. Thankfully I did not get drunk enough. He brought it up man. The switch from Risperidone to Seroquel has gone rather well and I’ve been able to drop my overall dosage of medication by a minimal amount but an amount none the less. It was in fact the Risperidone causing the prolactin increase as all of my blood work and CT Scan came back normal. I still have to go for one more blood test to re-test my prolactin levels, I am sure they will still be higher than normal but not as high as to cause anymore concern.
5. I am not 100% sure how I feel about Guitar Hero Encore Rocks the 80s I have finished easy level and medium level and five stared all the songs. You get five gold stars if you get 100% in this one too which rules but also sucks for me because I totally OCD out HAVING TO HAVE 100% ON EVERY SONG!!!!!! I haven’t attempted hard level yet but plan to today. I think once I venture into hard level I will have a better idea of how I feel about it. I guess in a way I expected to know more of the songs than I do, that is sort of bothering me. But as usual with this kick ass series of games even the songs I don’t know I found already growing on me when I went back to play the game on easy.
6. I finished reading Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs yesterday and absolutely LOVED IT. I have seen the movie twice and also LOVE the movie, I also own the movie. Now I want to read the rest of his books. Which I’m sure I will do. Now, I am reading Shopaholic & Baby by Sophie Kinsella because I have some heavy books coming up on my reading list and also just as I enjoy mindless movies on occasion Sophie Kinsella does make for some perfect mindless summer reading.
7. Tonight we are going to watch the Vancouver Canadians play some baseball. I have never been to a baseball game in my life, should be good times. I won the tickets through Rebecca and her participation in the 24 hour Blog-a-thon. When she wrote that she was going to be giving away tickets I knew at that moment I was going to win them and became worried that people would think it was rigged. It was not rigged I do not even like baseball. Adam does and it is his birthday on Monday so it is perfect and technically half of my donation was from Adam SO regardless of how you look at it we won far and square.

This photo was taken last July, says my flickr. There was less than two months to go until our wedding, and I was stressed. I would venture a guess that I weighed around 112ish. I know when I went home for my dress fitting almost a month to the day of this photo I was worried that my dress would be to big but I weighed myself at my parents place and found that I wasn’t as skeletor as I thought I was. I was eating like mad around this time as well because I was afraid of my dress literally falling off at the wedding. When I had been measured for it, it was January 2006 and I was carrying some winter weight and did not see it again until the beginning of August when I was stressed to the absolute max and thin like my early 20’s thin, or in a major depression thin.

This is September 2006, I remember knowing I was underweight but being pretty happy with my body for 29, the wedding was over my dress did not fall off, it had fit perfectly. I ended up getting really sick when we returned from Mexico and also fell into a seriously bad black hole of depression. Winter came and I packed away the bathing suits and settled into marriage. Even though I was depressed which means I would normally be losing weight due to anxiety, I didn’t have a lot of anxiety I was just horribly depressed and doing absolutely nothing that didn’t involve the couch. I was basically leaving the house once a week for my shrink sessions and that was about it. And before I knew it I weighed 130 pounds.

This was taken yesterday. To be honest my second time in a bikini this year as I had gone to tan the day before with a girlfriend for a bit, but got better photos yesterday. In June I wrote this post on some of my feelings on my weight and the great weight debate in general and was in a space were I did not feel attractive AT ALL. I started to run and work out on the ball in my apartment, I expressed in the post that I was dreading putting on a bikini this year. Last month I did an interview for Eating Disorder Talk and mentioned I felt I needed to lose another five to ten pounds. Seeing this photo I realize that Adam was right, I was seeing a deluded image in the mirror. I do not in fact need to lose any weight. Yes, I need some toning but I look a lot better than I thought I did. For 30 I’m pretty happy actually. I did manage to sneak in a weighing of myself last week at a friends place and I’m around 125lbs so technically I’m still underweight for my height and age. I’m going to stop complaining about my body now because I’ve likely been driving Adam insane. But your eyes play tricks on you; the camera pressed up into a mirror doesn’t lie. Unless I’m in a state where I am not mentally healthy I don’t really want to look like I did in my early to middle twenties anymore. I would still like to get rid of my millions of chins and have bigger boobs but those are just dreams.

For my birthday this year Spockette gave me a bag with Johnny Cash on it, I carry it a lot. It is the perfect size and fits all of my crap. Coming down the elevator at my shrinks office one Friday a man standing next to me started to chuckle and then said who is that on your bag. Johnny Cash I replied in a curt voice.

Really, that is Johnny Cash, are you a fan, do you listen to him? [No, I just carry a bag with his image on it] He asked me this as he gave me the full up and down pervert look, so as I answered yes I lifted my left hand displaying my wedding band while I pretended to scratch my head hoping he would see it and realize how obvious I was being and stop talking to me. Nope.

The elevator stopped at the bottom and I went to step off when I heard him still talking to me as I walked off, that Johnny Cash he said, I love him, great songs, he has great lyrics, that Walk the Line song. I never looked at him in the face I just nodded and gave a little unhuh.

Really? So you LOVE Johnny Cash but you don’t recognize one of his most infamous photos, [distorted in the picture I took of my bag] and you obviously are not that familiar with his music when you say something like ‘that Walk the Line song’. Sounds to me like he just saw the movie.

‘YOU CAN’T WALK NO LINE!’

I have not fixed all of my archives or categories yet since I moved over to Word Press so I have no idea where my awesome elevator story where some dude was all ARE THOSE MANOLOS to me when I had one of my many pairs of awesome shoes on- they weren’t cheap but they weren’t Manolos. Because I don’t work down town anymore I am not in many elevators which means I normally get to avoid this huge pet peeve of random men/people talking to me but it still happens.

Keira-Anne did a post called ‘The Ten Commandments’ last week mentioning random strangers talking to her as well, I know it is common but seriously does any man really believe he can pick up a women in an elevator? And do you honestly think I want your opinion on anything be it the weather, my shoes, you may just be a friendly person but I, unless I know you or want to know you am generally not. That isn’t 100% true though because I get asked for directions a lot, confuses me greatly because I don’t see myself as approachable but there must be something about me, I don’t know, but I am always nice to people who ask me for directions. And when I am on the sea wall running I do the head nod, half smile at the runners so maybe I am not all bad. I guess when it comes right down to it, it is just certain situations and ’scenes’ in the city that make me go instant ice queen.

sometimes its hard to give gifts when nothing will do except the exact perfect one that this person has to have. some people i think are like me and take these things way too yahoo seriously and super personal. for those of us who dont like decision making the gift can even not get gave, but those events usually coincide with the climax of a focussed stress and whos in a giving mood when youre fighting with yourself. thinking about all this made me start to pick at the constitution of my hyper Santaness.

my first move is always to give a person what i think they want. after all, giving is supposed to be a selfless act, right? so what then if i take a glee derivative from the act? that surely must mean that the act is selfish. i too often feel like i am trying to show the recipient how clever i am for knowing and perceiving them soo well that they didnt even know that they wanted the gift but instantaneously they realize its what they wanted all along and the gift makes everything perfect. this dog and pony show is largely due to the fact that those recovering self-loathers like mee is are not easily convinced of their own worth, and must employ every resource within their facility to prove this out beyond any reasonable doubts. this is a hard one to beat.

now, with persistence, many of us the like mees make it through past that first barracade, no more paralysis, no siree. to get there we have to persuade ourselves that we are worth a hundred bucks, and whammy we are confronted with what we want and what we think were supposed to. this is a new feature weve never seen before and honestly its confusing as heck when you get to it on account of the lesson we were sposed to learn was that we ARE valuable and all special and of course worth that hundred bucks at least and therefore should feel not guilty about meeting the needs of the self in place of the otherses. at first you dont believe it but thats why its first you do it anyways and it feels uncomfortable to beat the band but you do it cause you must and there its done and that cant be changed any longer. so heres where i think the gift giver who is meelike exports what we wants to step away from the old pattern of the pleasing of the others. tho this is progress, again, this product is misguided usually. the new territory is bewildering. we didnt have the discourse of this before to act into, and now we are learning the mannerisms of value. this is always a weird way to learn and completely backwards but it is surmountable.

now as you might imagine, the final stage ive been leading up to with all this beeyess holds the key to the universe and you will never ever burn another piece of toast as long as you live and so forth. so what do you give when you cant give what you think they want and you cant give what you want them to have you have to give them the thing that you never thought of and are holey moley spontaneously realizing its the thing what youve always wanted to give all along. im pretty sure that once you make it around the block safely you can see that all you are really capable of giving is yourself and that its enough to be a good gift the one they really and also realy wanted and in fact is all that they will need. once you buy into that i guarantee you can go into any bank and flop yourself up on the counter and whoevers at that tellers gonna count you out a full hundred and youll take it cause its yours.

happy 30fth birthday chokeroo. i love you like mrs butterworbs. im your man.

On Saturday morning an invitation came in on Facebook for my girlfriend Bonny’s birthday. Every year we have our birthdays two days apart. I generally go out for her birthday. But this year I realized I had nothing to wear. But not only did I have nothing to wear nothing I own fits so I couldn’t even pretend to pull off an outfit and I also did not want to wear what I am going to wear for my birthday which will still fit because it was a bit big before.

Having issues with fit is nothing new to me. But in the last seven or so years I have gone from being a size zero and weighing between 100 and 108 lbs to now weighing close to 130 lbs. Due to the stress brought on by our wedding I was very small again when we got married, around 115 lbs. Since the wedding I have gone through A LOT of mental shit but in a lot of ways am feeling comfortable in my life like never before and also being on three medications for depression I’ve put on close to another 15 lbs. Basically when I would fluctuate back and forth between too thin and 115 lbs I could make my closet work there was a enough variety. But now that I have passed 120 lbs other than t-shirts and my size medium underwear nothing fits. This would be perfect if only underwear were considered short shorts and it was a tiny bit warmer here year round. I have been living in yoga pants and track pants, they stretch.

I really don’t give a shit what size you are when your body starts to change in a not so sexy way in your opinion or you put on weight it is hard to stomach and I’m having a lot of trouble looking at my body in the mirror and not saying horrid things about it. When I was a youngin’ I was picked on CONSTANTLY for being ‘too thin’. I was called every name in the book. I had no tits, I somehow always had a butt on me though. But kids are relentless and I almost got beat up once for saying that my jeans would fit some girl because they were size six and huge on me because big baggy pants were in and I just meant they’d fit her, she thought I was calling her fat and sent a posse of fists out after me. I have spent my life mostly choosing to stay out of weight conversations unless they are one on one because being the ‘thin’ one no matter what you say, it is wrong. I have never understood why people used to always feel comfortable spewing out “you are so thin”, “you are so skinny” and thinking it was a compliment. I’m sorry but this is NO different than walking up to someone who is fat and saying “oh my god, you are so fat!” I would never do that so don’t fucking comment on my weight. Although I have never been anorexic or bulimic, you don’t know me you have no idea what sort of keeping weight on issues I might have nor do I know if you have some kind of problems keeping you fat. Being too thin even without the stereotypical things people assume when they see you is JUST as unhealthy as being over weight, there are many other reasons a person on the thin side could have problems keeping weight on if they want to which there always were with me. The intensity of my anxiety can cause me to drop 10 lbs in a week. NOT HEALTHY.

Now, to be honest until recently I was very arrogant about my body and used to think it was pretty hot, as I was told it was many ‘good’ things once I hit my twenty’s, I’d go so far as to say there was no way I would ever lose my natural six pack even when I wasn’t working out. I was always well aware of when I was too thin due to my depression though, it was still a double edged sword. When I was too thin and I knew it was due to depression and people made comments about it, I played it off, knowing there was nothing I could do, but it made me feel like shit, on display, singled out and disliked JUST because I was thin. When I was eating two burgers a day and receiving the same comments and knew I wasn’t too thin it still made me feel like shit but I flaunted it to hide my insecurities because when you are viewed as a ‘hot body’ by males and ‘too thin’ by women and not a whole person for a large portion of your life your self perception gets warped and your values in relation to why people like you became shaded and you can get lost in offering yourself to people in ways you never normally would just to be accepted.

Because I have been feeling so negative about my shape and flabby belly and thigh skin I have started to work out and run again but running is at the mercy of my knee. This is the first year in my life I am dreading putting on a bathing suit.

Due to having one pair of jeans I can wear, but are still too tight in the waist, I thought there would be SOMETHING to wear ‘out’ but after trying on pairs of pants after pairs of pants and just NOTHING fitting, I was feeling worse and worse, I started crying, Adam gave me a hug. But then I dug into a bag of clothes where I knew there was a pair of pants that I bought when I was little miss corporate girl and got them a size too big and tried them on, they’re a size 6 and were still too small but they would do. I had to take them in for emergency same day hemming. Now for a shirt. Again nothing, everything I used to wear out was too short too tight or too bar star for my age. It was raining harder than cats and dogs but we hoofed it to The Bay after tearing the closet completly apart and found a kick ass shirt I love. I don’t feel any better about my body, but I had a good evening and my shirt looked sweet.

I obviously have to learn to accept my new size which I KNOW when I am in my rational mind is not fat but disliking my body is new to me, and having a closet and dresser FULL of clothes that don’t fit, I just don’t care what size you are it is depressing.

Sometimes I am a crap housewife and I don’t clean for a few days in a row and the kitchen gets messy which sucks because I don’t do the cooking so then we end up eating out because I have guilt and don’t want Adam in there if I’ve been neglecting my job. This is the only job I’ve ever had that I don’t have to worry about getting fired from and sometimes I think I may take it for granted a little BUT I make up for it in other ways I promise I do. I did take a good number of beer bottles out to the alley for the homeless yesterday that were taking up too much counter space and there was already a dude out there about to leave so I said “HEY do you want these?” He did. I used to always take all my stuff to the Salvation Army. Not empties but old shit I didn’t use, old clothes, basically the regular crap you give. I hate it when I get rid of stuff and then want it back, I do that a lot. But now I give everything to the alley. It isn’t to be lazy either. Why have someone selling it when there are people in my alley who need it NOW and I don’t need it.

I did something HUGE. It actually cut into my dishes/cleaning time because I had to drop it off. I lent a hard cover book without the cover to a friend that I JUST got in the mail and I have not read. It is a girly book, Shopaholic and Baby, a great fluff summer beach book. I opened it, the fresh new sound a hard cover makes when you open it creeped out from the bind and the smell of untouched pages filled my nostrils. Heaven. This is a big step in trust for me. I do not like lending books. Really I don’ t like lending anything. I have to like you more than a little. It made sense for me though because it arrived when I had JUST started Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald and it is almost 600 pages long.

Also, while I’m just spewing out random shit which I guess is what I normally do here ?? Hmmm. I wanted to let you know that we finally watched Snakes on a Plane. Some of you know that snakes are the animal that scares me the very mostest of all things that scare me on earth. But yet crocodiles and alligators are my favorite animal. I don’t try to make sense of it either. Snakes on a Plane ruled. It had insanely bad dialogue, bad acting, a ridiculous plot, one snake that was so big there was NO WAY they could have even gotten it on the plane and as IF it fit in that bin that the rest of the snakes came from. I screamed out loud a couple of times. SPOILER: There is one part where a snake bites this chicks tit, right on her nipple, only thing that could have made it better is if her implant exploded.

I gotta go do dishes because eating MacDonald’s makes you fat.

Eight days till I’m 30.

So with the Canucks moving on in the Stanley Cup Playoffs more teams’ players are off to work on their golf games and tomorrow we start playing Anaheim which means Adam and I get to wear our ‘helmets’ a little longer maybe even a lot longer. I really enjoy Marty Turco as a goalie but unfortunately he plays for the wrong team. I was first attracted to him as a player because his Dallas Stars Goalie Mask RULES. But now I actually like him as a goalie period. See you next season Turco.

I don’t know if it is just because we have watched so many shit movies lately but we watched Blood Diamond on the weekend and I LOVED it. I was very worried because I knew it was long and I was worried about Leo, I am not a Jennifer Connelly fan unless I am watching Labyrinth but I love Djimon Hounsou. Leo believe it or not in my opinion pulled the South African accent off extremely well and I even forgot it was him a couple times. It didn’t seem as long as it was. I find Leo really touch and go in films sometimes I love him and sometimes I can�t stand him.

For the other movie we watched I made up a Jeopardy question.

This 1987 movie loosely based on a novel written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman stars both the 38th Governor of Minnesota Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura and the 38th Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What is�..

It was a RAD movie; I can’t believe I had never seen it. The dancing scenes were choreographed by Paula Abdul. Bloody Awesome. It is one of Adam’s favorite movies. A preview for some new movie I can’t remember the name of with ten prisoners on the run from whatever reminded Adam of his love for it and he went out and scored it at the local video shop.

I am happy to report that our Guitar Hero One set has arrived so we now have two guitars and both games. Life does not get much sweeter. I am jealous that the X-Box 360 version has more songs. THAT IS NOT FAIR! I was a little disappointed when I got 100% on a few of the Guitar Hero One songs and there was NOT FIVE GOLD STARS! Only five stars. I have not failed a song yet but there is no practice mode, I am very glad the new one has a practice mode because I LICK at hammer-ons and pull-offs and on the first one you pretty much have to be able to do them to five star them. Playing together, battling, playing in co-operative mode and each having our own guitars makes us so very happy. I can’t wait to have couples over for Guitar Hero parties.

Eww that sounds terrible like I’m old and married and only hang out with married or couplely people or something.

Yesterday something truly amazing happened in the life of this here Housewife Extraordinaire. I discovered something so spectacular while it was happening I could not believe I had never done it before but then I could believe it because I hate washing pots.

Pots are such a pain in the ass. They are big and awkward and even if you rinse them right when you use them they still have stains or you miss something. Sometimes all the pots in the whole apartment are dirty because I hate washing them so much I strike out against them and they sit there laughing at me because THEY KNOW the longer I leave them the harder they are to clean. Stupid pots.

I always wash the pots last because my disdain for them runs so deep. But by the time I am through all the other dishes I generally look at the pots and just think- next time, I’ll wash them next time, if Adam needs one he can wash it he is stronger and can wash one faster anyway- I find any excuse possible to leave them. If I could send them out to be cleaned, I would.

Yesterday while doing my wifely duties I looked at those pots. All of them, the whole set and thought fuck it, maybe I’ll wash them first instead of in my obsessive compulsive ORDER of glasses, mugs, then small plates then bowls, (silverware can be washed at any point before I change the water over) at this point I generally do a water change over and it is onto big plates anything else NOT pots and not super dirty like say the juice jug or the pasta strainer and THEN I wash the pots. We have a grill as well, I can’t even go there. Anyway, I washed the pots first and then I changed the water over and started on the glasses and it was LIKE the pots did not even exist it was AWESOME. BUT I still hate pots.

This post has been brought to you by ‘Lagostina’ pots.

Last night we had ice cream cake from Dairy Queen because it was our six month wedding anniversary and we are still married. YAY! Adam got home late from work but still surprised me with the cake and we had to watch 24 on pacific standard time at 9:00pm instead of eastern time at 6pm like we normally do and that was rough because I can hardly stay awake till 9pm. NERD. And now I can hardly even remember what happened in the episode except the President got blown up. He may be dead he may not be I didn’t watch to see what was coming next week I am trying to pull away from doing that because it ruins it. I got cold ice cream chest pains from the cake but other than that it was awesome. I didn’t even have any of my own wedding cake, I don’t know why I just didn’t and the bloody thing cost $250.00 dollars but they left it in the sun and apparently it tasted like gum or something anyway so maybe it is better I didn’t taste it. Assholes I asked them like a million times to get it out of the sun.

Last year for the Oscars Adam was working in Kelowna and I was alone recovering from my ass surgery so I watched the Oscars in my designer Betsey Johnson dress and heels and felt all sexy and shit. I went to bed before they were over.

This year we printed Ballots and filled them out earlier in the day. That is just so awesome that you can print them right off the Oscars’ website! Who knew?

Adam decided to dress up in a suit and when he was out at the corner store getting milk I threw on my wedding dress ‘cept I couldn’t get it done up because I’ve packed on some sweet pounds in EXACTLY six months TODAY and because I am still sick when we finally got it done up when I’d cough we heard wee ripping sounds so I had to take it off. I was going for more of a ball gown feeling for this year’s show but it didn’t work out.

We’d seen quite a few of the nominated films and performances- I was really looking forward to them this year if for nothing more than Ellen. I loved it when she gave Martin Scorsese a script and then Clint Eastwood wanted one too but all he got was a lousy photo. That was funny.

Ryan Gosling looked fantastic representing for Canada. Half Nelson is a kick ass movie if you haven’t seen it. His nomination reminded me of Edward Norton’s second nomination for American History X in that it was a fantastic performance, you knew he wasn’t going to take it, but both performances are MUST SEEEEEEEEEE and both men can still do no wrong in my eyes. Acting wise HOLY I’m married, although I did remind Adam that my innocent crush on Ryan Gosling started in 2001 when he did The Believer which therefore predates him. OBVIOUSLY I love Adam the mostest.

The show was way too long and Cameron Diaz looked stupid. Kirsten Dunst takes the worst dressed EVER award. Abigail Breslin at age 10 looked more mature than Dunst at age 24. Al Gore rocked it out hard and Leo looked like a man. I seriously thought Jennifer Hudson’s right boob was going to explode out of her dress when she was singing, it scared me and I found it distracting. But there was part of me hoping it would bust free as well.

In the end Adam and I tied with 14 of 24 categories correct. I was trailing for a while but caught up because Adam had Babel picked for the big awards and he didn’t even like it whereas I had The Departed for the big ones and cleaned up. I really wanted Mark Wahlberg to take Best Supporting Actor he was hilarious in The Departed but Alan Arkin was also fantastic in Little Miss Sunshine so I was happy to see him win.

If it were up to me Ellen would now host every year, just with less makeup on, I loved her outfits and her hair but was not a fan of her makeup it was a little too girly for my taste.