Swag wag, peacock-style

Ok, ok, ok, I have to brag about some gloriously fab swag I picked up at the post office today. You are going to HATE me you'll be so jealous!

This drop-dead gorgeous scarf, brooch and journal all came in a trés sweet gift-wrapped box, along with a luxe note with the same peacock theme, from dear, adorable Jenny over at The Modest Peacock. (This is where you click on the link, say hi and give her a follow). I'm not exaggerating when I say Jenny is adorable – she really is a pink-buffed cutie, but she's also a tough chick who has endured a lot in her short lifetime and still maintains a positive, cheerful attitude that a lot of us curmudgeons could learn from.

Thank you so much for the gifts, Jenny. The scarf is as warm and snuggly as it looks (I wore it at my cold old desk all afternoon) and I love, love that peacock bling!

Now go give her a follow. Go on ... rumour has it she has another giveaway in the works ...

Update

My ass fit!

Will my ass fit?

Will my ass fit in an airplane seat?

Since we're flying out to Edmonton tomorrow morning, I am reminded of that Dodge Ram pick-up truck commercial where one redneck asks the other redneck "does that thing have a Hemi?" and the driver of the truck says, "You're about to find out."

I guess I'm about to find out.

What if it doesn't? Dear lord, can you imagine having to ask for another seat, or one of those seat belt expander-thingeys, and causing a fuss, all because my ass and the Goodyear Blimp are second cousins?

I tried to do a little research, googling "Will my ass fit in an airplane seat?" but didn't get a satisfactory reply, but boy-oh-boy, those images I DID get will forever be retinally burned.

What I'd like to do is find the seat measurements and then measure my ass. Anyone know how wide the seats are in Westjet's economy section? Anyone want to measure my ass? Dave's not here to help ...

I'm really nervous about this. Not about the flying itself, just about the ass-thing.

I was thinking that my ass squeezes into movie theatre and hockey arena seats – surely airplane seats aren't too much narrower, are they?

Are they? Any frequent flyer folks know the answer to this? Should I bring an ass-horn? Crisco? Any suggestions?

I'm an addict and it's all my mother's fault

Of COURSE I blame my mother. My addiction is totally her fault. Not in an esoteric blame-the-mother-for-everything kind of way, but in a real "Cathy you should play jellies" way. She might as well have started me on heroin.

My name is Cathy Olliffe-Webster and I am a fecking jellies addict. No, not Jell-O. (Who in their right mind is addicted to Jell-O? Other than those kids in Bill Cosby's Jell-O tree, which is plain weird if you ask me, a grown man with a backyard full of trees with kids in 'em.) Jellies. As in "the jellies," aka Candy Crush Saga or something on Facebook.

She told me about them a few months ago because she needed her FB friends to play the game and give her more lives. She was like a junkie, my lovely, otherwise elegant mother, with this jellie gleam in her eye. (If she looked like that on The Walking Dead, she'd get a shovel to the head, and I say that in the nicest of all possible ways, Mom.)

"I am NOT playing that jellie game," I told her. "I know what I'm like. It'll take over my life."

"Just play it for a little while," she wheedled. "Just long enough to help out the woman who was in labour with you for 48 and a half long, painful, excruciating hours."

OK, forget about The Walking Dead look – at this point she looked more like Puss 'n Boots on Shrek.

At first I ignored her. "Just say no to jellies" is my motto. But Dave couldn't. "I can't believe you won't help our your own mother," he said, turning the computer on to Facebook.

"DON'T DO IT," I screamed. But he went down to the basement by himself, figuratively, and started playing The Jellies.

Next thing I knew, I was a Jellies Widow. Every spare chance he had, Dave was on the computer playing The Jellies. After a week or so of that he needed something stronger so he was on to some Pyramid Solitaire game, and then he was rescuing pets and planting crops in Farmville and I was a lonely, lonely woman. I'd lost my mother and my husband to the addiction. You'd think it would be enough incentive to stay clear, but I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. After all, it looked stupid. So one day I started with The Jellies, just an experiment you understand. I was only going to try it. Just once. Just ... once ....

It's hopeless, now. I've got jellie tracks all up and down my arms. I ignore my husband, my children, my blog, my writing – everything that ever meant anything to me. I am not interested in anything other than The Jellies, the beautiful Jellies ...

Depends are the best way to get maximum time with The Jellies. I don't need to eat. Caffeine is injected in an IV and I haven't slept in four days. My Precious Jellies. My Precious ...

January camping: done!

January 19, 2013. As you probably know, Dave and I are rabid campers. Last year we camped in all but four months of the year. In 2013 we vowed to camp in every one. That resolution is a little harder to keep in the winter months when most campgrounds are closed, so we decided to camp in our backyard, in a tent. Friends have asked us why on earth we chose a tent when we have a perfectly comfortable trailer outside, but where's the challenge in a trailer that has a furnace? The whole point is to find adventure! And we've always wondered it it was possible to stay warm in a tent during the deepest darkest nights of Canadian winter.

Ben, our singing cat, watched us with bemused interest.

The weather forecast was weird, to say the least. It rained most of the day and only started to snow about four o'clock in the afternoon, when it was time to set up. We started with a blue tarp hung from one of our cedar trees. 

There were wind warnings that night so we held the tarp down with wood from our woodpile. We also used tent pegs to keep the tarp in place. This was trickier than it sounds, because the ground was (and still is) frozen solid. Dave used a cordless drill to make holes in the icy ground for the pegs. The tarp itself was meant to be a shield from the wind and the rain/snow mix that was coming down.

When the tarp was up, we placed another tarp on the ground, followed by cardboard, followed by the tent. (Ermagherd, that tent stunk. It had been in storage for years and had the delightful fragrance of must.) We laid a thick blanket on the bottom of the tent, followed by two mattresses from our trailer and sleeping bags. Then we made a "tarp sandwich" (two tarps with a blanket in between) and laid it on top of the tent. You need to have some sort of insulation between your warm breath and the cold outdoors, otherwise you have condensation dripping inside the tent and all over you. 

It was looking pretty cosy inside!

Our trailer mattresses. So soft! My old carcass can't take sleeping on the cold, hard ground.

Bedtime! Dave snuggles in. It was actually HOT inside that tent. I kicked off my sleeping bag and laid on top of it without any covers until the middle of the night, when Dave covered me up.

Doesn't that look awesome? It was really snowing by bedtime.  Sometime during the night we got a thunderstorm. I didn't hear a thing – when I sleep, I'm dead to the world, but Dave said it was wicked and it was all everybody was talking about on Facebook the next day.

Not bad, eh? The light from the woodshed made our impromptu house look as warm as it felt.

Bedtime! That's me looking all scary and weird in the harsh shadows thrown by our flashlight. Mere minutes after this was taken I fell fast asleep. Dave had some things on his mind that night, however, and he laid awake for hours. Finally at about 4 a.m. he woke me up to say he was going inside to try and get some shut-eye. "You can stay out here if you want," he said. I was like, NO, I am not staying out in the yard by myself in a thunder-snowstorm! So I toddled in the door behind him. It was warm as toast in there - the only thing I'd do different next time is buy a tent that doesn't stink. It took me all day to wash all the sleeping bags and pillows that got stunk up!