Fall fashion is for fall.

As much as I love to look good, there are several reasons why I've sort of always peered into the world of fashion from the sidelines.  It's fun to explore every so often, but it's not what makes me tick, you know?  Now that the trees are starting to bloom and there are pretty little tulips in my garden, I've been alerted to one of the reasons that I will never be on the cutting edge of fashion.  Here it is.  Spring is just too important to me, and I refuse to skip over it.  In fact, fashion asks me not just to skip over it for summer's sake, but in the name of fall.  That, my fashiony friends, is simply too much to ask.  Every April, just as I am finally waking up for the year, seeing things more clearly, breathing more deeply, admiring nature's pastels, I am bombarded with browns and tweeds and leathers and this year, of all things, FURS.  I understand, maybe, that somewhere in southern California or Hawaii, these things are ok - maybe even exciting - considering the lack of seasonal variation.  As a Canadian, however, I profoundly object.  I might go so far as to say that I am offended.  Maybe even violated.  All winter, I wait patiently while I gradually all but disappear into white walls, growing more bear-like in size as my metabolism hibernates in a cave of occasional SAD.  In the throes of winter, the summer selections on the runways mock me more than comfort me.  "Hahaha," they laugh, "maybe you can wear me if you lose at least 10 pounds and Toronto GETS a summer this year!" (Apparently, expert senior forecaster with AccuWeather.com, Joe *actual name* Bastardi, was right last year when he said that 2009 was shaping up to be "the year without a summer").  All this considered, it's no surprise that fashion just doesn't excite me.  They're already working two seasons ahead of the game; couldn't the fashion designers of the world all just agree to kick it up a notch and focus on creating the looks for one year from now? That way, in April, I'd be seeing what will be hot next April.  And there would be no danger of me cheating and wearing next year's looks this year because nobody but the exclusive designers will have had a chance to make any of those clothes yet.  Plus, I'd be too busy actually enjoying the weather to worry about it.  Who's game?

tersec, screte, creste, streec, ...

There comes a point in everyone's life when it becomes important to identify the little things that you do that no longer serve you and to stop doing those things as quickly as possible.  I've long since passed that point, and am still living with a scrambled up little secret.  I am a compulsive boggle player.  Specifically (to further embarrass myself), the Facebook application of boggle they call Scramble.  There it is!! It feels good to announce that to the world.  In my case, I'm not sure that habit ever actually served me in the first place, but it sure has been fun.  There's just something about the thrill of knowing there are hundreds of little words hidden in that board, waiting for someone eagle-eyed and astute and wordsy to find them all.      It's also a convenient way for me to feel that I'm somehow accomplishing something important, like a hundred times a day.  Unfortunately, as my husband likes to remind me when I'm sitting at the computer at 2:00 a.m., fighting my eye twitch to just win one more round, I'm not really accomplishing anything important at all.  Those not-so-gentle reminders are harsh, but I suppose they're necessary.  I'm not sure anyone other than me cares that I'm the #1 top scramble player out of all my scramble-playing friends.  Or that I often place 1st when I compete against other anonymous shlums in those sad cyber-rooms where all of us boggle dorks get together and flex our word muscles.  Anyway, now that it's out in the open, I'm not entirely sure what will happen.  Is this my first step in moving on to more productive ways to spend whatever free time I now have?  Maybe.  Honestly, though, I am hoping that you will read this and decide that you would immediately like to challenge me to a game of scramble.  Go on, you know you want to.

I'm sick and miserable.  It's perhaps the warmest April 1st on record ever in this city, and I've been holed up in my house just trying to get through the day.  My illness, oddly enough, started with a crook in my neck.  It actually shouldn't be that odd to me, since the giving out of random (crucial) body parts is traditionally what alerts me to the fact that something is about to go terribly wrong with the state of my health.  You'd think that being pressed into a semi-permanent "L" shape from crippling back pain would be the worst of whatever ails me, but there's always some other surprise lurking around the corner.  I rationalize that it's my body's way of making sure that I actually take the rest that I'm going to need to get through the storm and emerge healthy. The last time my back went out like that, it turned out I was pregnant.

Anyway, neck pain is dreadful.  It's like there's a sinister little string of nerve linking your neck to EVERY SINGLE muscle in your upper body, and any time you move anything above your wrist, the pain shoots up like a surprise bolt of lightning.

I am such a hurtbag.