Vitamin Deficiency And Carpet Inspections

It's Hang Out With Shanan Week! Or at least it's a week in which I hang out with Shanan more than usual.


This is Shanan buying produce from Heliotrope at the Regina Farmers' Market.

She's all up on the vegetarianism and how to do it well, and, because she's been at it half her life, she's a little walking encyclopedia of nutritional know-how, which is how we ended up talking about vitamin B12 deficiency.

She started listing symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency, and I started realizing that all those times I thought HOLY CRAP, I AM GOING TO DIE over the last year, I was probably wrong.


I wish I had seen what he did with that creepy doll sticking out of his banjo case.

I mean, I am going to die, and nothing is going to stop this anxiety-ridden insomniac from sitting bolt upright in bed at two in the morning and shouting PALINODE, I AM GOING TO DIE. That's one of my favourite activities right after making melted crayon shavings and pill bottle brooches for my mom and right before sunset walks on the beach.

(Here's a weird aside that has almost nothing to do with the above paragraph, except that the above paragraph reminded me of summer camp, which is where a camp counsellor unsuccessfully tried to teach me how to use a bow and arrow: Geena Davis vied for a spot on the United States Olympic archery team for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. True fact.)


Sacred Earth has the best soaps ever. You should have some.

Anyway, Shanan helped me to realize that I'm probably not going to die, at least right away. Heart palpitations, confusion and memory loss, constipation, depression, dizziness and trouble maintaining balance, fatigue, numbness in my hands, pale skin, and my sore tongue are not all colluding to seal my fate as worm food. I could, in all likelihood, have a vitamin B12 deficiency.


Summer!

I actually have a blood test requisition form in my purse that my doctor gave me so that I can have my iron and B12 levels tested. I will get that done in order to make sure that this is, indeed, what is up with me, but I am waiting for a time when it seems convenient to fast and forego caffeinated beverages.


A mail carrier! At work! The strike is over!

Wait.

Did I just tell you that I feel like crap and lie awake nights worrying about my imminent death and then say that actually getting tested for what might be wrong with me is inconvenient?

I'm an idiot. Or I was an idiot. Now I have seen the folly of my ways. I'll go in tomorrow.


Tangerine celebrated its first birthday!

In the meantime, I bought some time-release B12 vitamins. They're pink. They make me feel proactive.


Shanan's face missed the party memo.

Take a moment to laugh too long and too loud about how sad Shanan looks behind the party cupcake.


This photo has managed to insinuate a 1970s porn flavour into itself with a strong Dacron sidenote. Dirk Diggler, anyone?

Sometimes a bottle of pop is just a bottle of pop.


This pink is cuh-razy.

I've been having these highly detailed dreams in which I am invited over to the homes of famous female bloggers, and I spend my entire visit in each home trying to covertly inspect the undersides of their carpets. I peel back the top layer, which is anything from a practical berber to an antique Persian, I pick at the padding beneath, and I investigate the quality of the floorboards.

In one blogger's home, I kept picking bits of blue underlay from beneath a throw rug, and I was trying to hide the evidence inside a delicious martini slushie my hostess had made.


This is a roasted red pepper tart.

And sometimes carpet is just carpet, right?


The tangerine icing on these cupcakes had just enough butter in it to make me pat my muffin top fondly and secretly give it the pet name "Butter".

Party cupcakes!

Sweet Dreams

I have developed this cold that has put all of my nerves on this grating edge. Each movement makes it feel as though they are scraping against each other, squealing steel on asphalt. This aching has robbed me of sleep for the past two nights, aided by a cat who likes to lie on her back and walk around upside down under the bed with her claws in the mattress, so I have turned to melatonin to knock me into that good sleep.

I still have not slept very well, but I did succeed in being thrown into these childish dreams about the Palinode committing great, romantic gestures.

He brings me gigantic balloons the size of sheep that squeak together and bouy him along several inches above the floor of a candy-floss pink mall. He cradles my head in his lap and tucks my hair behind my ear again and again for hours while he tells me stories of his adventures from his life before me that involve something about ships on the wind. We press our foreheads together, and I listen to the slow sighing of his breath in a field on a summer evening.

I had a friend once who always smiled sweetly and talked about Buddhism and went on personal growth retreats who had violent nightmares when she took melatonin. Her dreams were so horrific that they plagued her for months afterward. I, a person who has decidedly settled into her mid-January crankiness and high suspicion of her fellow humans, get to experience soft-focus candy-dromes populated with balloons and cuddles.

I woke up in a sticky patch of drool this afternoon believing that I must have married the sweetest, schmoopiest, cuddly-wuddliest man in the whole wide world with cherries on top. And then the pain kicked in again. Damn.

Screw this virus! All hail melatonin!

I have to run, because I took a melatonin capsule at the beginning of this post, and I have a date with unicorns and fluffy kittens and perhaps some skipping to do with the Palinode through a froth of bubbles. Nighty night.

Infinite Summer, A Sushi Spectacular, Reality Television, And Jeans Caliente

First: I have decided to take part in Infinite Summer, a reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest that starts on June 21st and ends on September 22nd. I have had a beast of a time sticking it out to the end of any book in the last several years, so reading one thousand pages from one tome is either going to be an exercise in stick-to-it-iveness or an exercise in self-flagellation. Let's hope my better half wins.

Second: The Palinode and I are going out for all-you-can-eat sushi in half an hour with Saviabella and Superstar, and I cannot believe how much I have been looking forward to this all day. I've rationed out minimal portions of food, just enough to keep myself going really, so that I can absolutely gorge myself on seaweed, salmon, tuna, avocado, rice, gyoza, and miso soup. I don't plan on leaving until salmon starts extruding itself through my nostrils. You are so envious that the Palinode gets to be married to me and not you.

Third: I've never been a fan of the genre that is reality television, but I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here has had it's teeth in me until tonight. Janice Dickinson is such a freaking nutbar. I can't even figure out how her brain works at all. Every time she opens her mouth to speak, all these words come out that barely relate to the reality everyone else is experiencing. Also? She is the most disgusting person to watch eat. She just jams food into her gob and smacks away like an old bovine. Just this second, though, I found out that I am once again free from the clutches of reality television. They just voted Janice Dickinson off the show. I'm gonna miss her. I think she's been body-snatched.

Fourth: Last night, I dreamed that I was lost in a college dorm where there was apparently some heavy partying going on. I had nearly found a way out through the hallways crowded with falling down drunk frat boys when I accidentally rolled a miniature bee between my fingers and experienced my first bee sting. Within moments, I became disoriented, and I realized that the college kids weren't drinking. They had all been stung and were suffering the toxic effects. I knew that I needed to get help in case these stings were deadly, but I really had to pee, so I tried to use the one available bathroom. The toilets were clogged and overflowing, rendering them completely unusable. The next thing I knew, a giant Ugandan mountain gorilla had grabbed me and dragged me down the hall where he threw me into a dark closet with a communal crap bucket in it. I decided that there was no way in hell I was going to use a communal crap bucket in a dark closet with a bunch of fucked up college kids, even if a giant Ugandan mountain gorilla wanted me to, so I went to a store and ordered jeans caliente with a twist of lime. They made my butt look awesome.