Author: Diane Henders

Toilet Trepidation: Number Two

/ Diane Henders / 15 Comments

Warning:  If you have a weak stomach, don’t read this.  Come back next week instead.  I promise not to tell any gross stories then.

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Last week, I mentioned a few reasons for my troubled relationship with toilets.  I have more.

You may think that having to use an ancient outhouse in childhood would be enough to leave me with an antipathy toward outhouses.  Not so.  That came later.

When I was a teenager, I volunteered at a children’s summer camp in the Lake of the Woods area around Kenora, Ontario.  I’m not exactly sure why I did this, because kids in large numbers tend to make me run screaming.  Fortunately, I was the archery director, not a counsellor.  My only responsibility was to keep the archery equipment repaired and prevent the kids from shooting each other.  Or us.

One day, I was sitting with a few of the counsellors when a six-year-old dashed up to us, screaming the words of doom:  “Shawna’s down the biffy hole!”

A volley of sidelong glances between the camp staff, accompanied by mutters of, “Not MY kid.”

The unfortunate soul who was responsible for Shawna rushed to the scene of the disaster.  I heard about it later, and that was as close as I cared to come.

Apparently, Shawna had dropped a candy down the hole.  She wanted to see if she could see the candy.  Don’t ask me why.  The logic of kids eludes me.  But it was dark down there, so she got her flashlight.  Apparently Shawna had grip issues or something, because she dropped the flashlight as well.

Horrified that she’d lost her father’s new flashlight, she delegated one of her six-year-old friends to hold her by the ankles while she retrieved the flashlight.  Guess the other kid had grip issues, too.

On the up side, I think Shawna must have had a pretty good life since then.  Getting dropped head-first into a pile of shit is probably about the worst thing that’s going to happen in her lifetime.  Nice to get that out of the way early.

And speaking of getting things out of the way…

Many moons ago, I lived in residence at Tache Hall at the University of Manitoba.  Communal bathrooms were down the hall.  About once a week, I’d find an enormous mound cresting out of the water in the toilet bowl.  I’m not sure whether the Phantom Shitter didn’t know how to flush, or whether he/she was simply so proud of the pile that they wanted the rest of us to be able to admire it, too.

Or, what do I know?  Maybe it was a team effort.  There were some sick puppies living there.

I used to have a recurring dream.  In my dream, I needed to go to the bathroom.  But every bathroom I found had something terribly wrong with it.  I couldn’t find the toilets.  Or the toilets were overflowing.  Or the cubicle walls ended at knee-height.  Or I started to use the toilet and discovered that it was leaking all over me.  It was an utterly repulsive dream.

When I looked it up on a dream-interpretation site, it said toilets are symbolic of expressing or repressing emotions, or that these types of dreams might have indicated I was afraid of what people thought of me.  Or something.

I’m not so sure.

I think it was probably just a flashback.

Anybody else have that dream?

Toilet Trepidation: Number One

/ Diane Henders / 16 Comments

Warning:  This is a post about toilets and related, um, issues.  If you’re easily grossed out, stop reading now.
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I have an uneasy relationship with toilets.  I suspect I’m alone in this.

Most people probably don’t think about toilets much, unless they’re plumbers or poor souls engaged in a frantic search for facilities.  But all my life, I’ve been dogged by ambivalent relationships with toilets.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have indoor plumbing.  Our outhouse was of the deluxe variety: a two-holer, with one big hole and one little hole, side by side.  The tiny sliding window was real glass, and the wooden seat had been worn    satin-smooth by countless contacts with Henders bums since 1905.

At night and in the winter, we used a pail in the basement.  If you think this sounds revolting and unsanitary, you’re absolutely right.  But it was better than having an arctic gale whistling up the crack of your ass.  At forty below, exposed skin freezes in minutes.  Just sayin’.

When we eventually got a flush toilet, I was awed.  It was so white and fresh.  When you inevitably dropped something that splashed, your butt got sprinkled with clean water, not somebody else’s pee.  And it never filled up so that your backside dipped into the contents…

Sorry, I’ll stop now.

Anyway, the flush toilet was love at first sight, followed by a long interval of quiet but sincere appreciation.

Many years later, ambivalence returned.  Our house has three toilets.  The plumber who originally installed them was clearly a moron.  The flanges that hold the toilet were all installed incorrectly, so every single one of them cracked.

For the uninitiated, this means that sewage leaks out at the base of the toilet.  Slowly.  Under the flooring, so you can’t see it.  So that by the time you discover it, the floor is rotten and reeking.  After all the repairing and replacing was finished, I wasn’t feeling quite so warm and fuzzy about flush toilets anymore.

Then came the radish debacle.

Food occasionally migrates to the back of our fridge to die.  When I discover it, I dispose of it according to its composition.  Anything liquid or squishy goes down the toilet.  My husband observed this process, but apparently failed to grasp the initial “classification of composition” phase.

So, the day he discovered decomposing radishes in the fridge, he flushed them.  Problem is, decomposing radishes aren’t liquid or squishy.  They’re firm and round, with a slimy outer shell.

They wedged themselves into the toilet trap and refused to move.  A plumber’s snake was useless, because it worked its way between the slippery spheres and dislodged nothing.  In the end, we had to remove the toilet (we’d had a lot of practice by then), and take it outside so we could turn it upside down and pull/shake the radishes free.

We were quite tired of removing and reinstalling toilets at that point, so we did what any self-respecting geeks would do:  we tested the system before reinstalling it.

We set the toilet upright on a couple of two-by-fours in the driveway, filled the tank, and flushed.  Just as our new neighbours went by.

They didn’t let us explain.  For some reason they still keep to themselves.  I don’t get it.

Any other toilet stories out there?

But wait, I have more.  Stay tuned for “Toilet Trepidation:  Number Two”, coming next week.  Not for the faint of heart.

Confessions of an Undercounter Lurker

/ Diane Henders / 18 Comments

I’m an ice cream addict, and my nephew recently offered to let me hide under the Dairy Queen counter so he could feed me any treats he’d made wrong.  Little did he know that lurking under counters is not a new activity for me.  (And I didn’t enlighten him.  There are some things a fifteen-year-old doesn’t need to know.)

If you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d spend a substantial amount of time on my knees under co-workers’ desks, I’d probably have slapped you.  And a few years later, I’d have had to apologize.  Because I ended up doing exactly that.

Wait a minute.  If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, not exactly that.  Jeez.

For a lot of years, the joke around the office was, “If you can’t find Diane, look under your desk”.  I was working as a network administrator, and I spent far too much time hunched under desks, connecting and disconnecting various computer-related plugs and cables.

Aside from the carnivorous dust bunnies, I didn’t mind having to crawl around on the floor frequently.  I hate dressing up, and it gave me an excuse to never wear a skirt to work (or any particularly nice clothes, for that matter).

And it was peaceful down there.  Nice and dark and quiet.  Sometimes it was tempting to just hole up for the day and spout incomprehensible technical jargon if challenged.  Kind of like a deranged techno-troglodyte:  “Back!  Back, I say!  Or I’ll ping your IP ‘til your CAT5 sizzles like an electrocuted snake!  I’ll FDISK your drive ‘til it can’t find its FAT with both hands!  RAM!  FAP!  Buwahahaha!”

I can’t understand why my coworkers always seemed… wary.

I’ve actually hidden under a desk to avoid people, too.  I prefer to call it “a clever strategic decision”, not “cowardice”, but you can form your own judgement.

I was hiding from my ex-husband.  Who had just encountered my brand-new boyfriend at the door to my house.  There was a dog and a bag of cherries involved.  Let’s just say it was complicated.

I couldn’t decide whether it would be worse to make an appearance and potentially exacerbate the situation, or to get caught huddling under my desk.  How do you explain hiding like a kid, when you’re thirty-three years old?  “Um, I just dropped something…”  Ten minutes ago, when the doorbell rang for the first time.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, I didn’t get caught, both the dog and the cherries ended up where they belonged, and both males departed unscathed, if not unruffled.  I like to think I made the right decision on that one.

I’m going to skip the Dairy Queen gig, though.  Wouldn’t want this undercounter thing to become a habit.

Any other lurkers out there?

Update:

As Charles points out in the comments, you can’t just leave a situation with an ex-husband, new boyfriend, a dog, and a bag of cherries without explanation.  So go for it.  Use your imagination, and drop your best explanation of “what *might* have been” in the comments below.  I’ll pick a winner next Wednesday and send out a (probably not so) magnificent prize.

I Look Great… Ouch!

/ Diane Henders / 11 Comments

Last week, an acquaintance told me, “You look ten years younger now than when I first met you!”  I basked in the glorious glow of the compliment until I realized that:

  • This meant I looked like shit three years ago; and
  • She didn’t mention how old I actually look now.  Only that I look younger than I did, which is not much comfort if I looked like a desiccated old bat three years ago.  So maybe I look like a dewy, well-hydrated old bat now.

The analytical mind isn’t always a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderful compliment.  I’m still basking in it.  I prefer to assume she meant it the way I took it:  “You look great!”

However.

When you were in your teens and twenties, did your friends ever say “You look great” when they ran into you by chance?  No, of course not.  Not unless you’d actually put on a dress and makeup for the first time in five years.  But that’s probably just me.  That’s not my point.

My point is, one day I’m schlepping along in my usual jeans and T-shirt.  Hair is what it always is.  No makeup, as usual.  I run into Bobby Jo from high school, and she squeals, “You look great!”

They’re the words of doom.  The beginning of the end.  They don’t mean “You look great”.  They mean “You look great for your age”.

That happened for the first time when I was in my late thirties, and it was a rude shock to realize that I was, in fact, aging whether I wanted to or not.  Although the alternative to getting older is… meh, not so appealing.

A decade or so later, I’ve (almost) accepted the fact that I’m middle-aged, and now I’m delighted to hear “You look great”.  Or any compliment, for that matter.  I write them down in a special file and save them.  I’d like to add “just kidding” so I don’t look too pathetic.  But then I’d be lying.

Just to rage against the dying of the light, I started working out seriously about four years ago.  Finally got back into shape, and popped for some professionally done bikini photos to prove it.  It’s amazing what some artful lighting and a good camera angle will do.  Not to mention sucking in my gut so hard the top of my head just about blew off.  I looked seriously constipated in a lot of the proofs.

But there were some good ones, too.  For a brief few minutes, I looked great, and it’s recorded for posterity.

I don’t like the word “aging”, so I’ve decided to not to use it.  I’m getting… um… experienced.  Seasoned.  Ripened.  Maturing like a bottle of fine wine.  (Why can’t I think of any non-food-related references?  Now I’m hungry.)

But at least I look great.  For my age.

I’m Canadian, I Swear

/ Diane Henders / 30 Comments

*F-BOMB ALERT* – CONTAINS (more) COARSE LANGUAGE (than usual)

Think I’ll get that printed on a T-shirt, along with a maple leaf.

Studies show (and I want to know who got paid for this one) that Canadians swear more than Americans, Brits, or Europeans.  We’re not merely foul-mouthed, we’re world-champion spewers of profanity and obscenity.

Unless we’re around people we don’t know.  Then we wouldn’t say shit if we had a mouthful of it.  ‘Cause, well, we’re polite, eh?  (Unless we’re rioting after hockey games, but that’s different.)

If I had a nickel for every time I said something vulgar, profane, or obscene in front of my friends, I could quit my job and live forever more on the proceeds.  But if I’m with strangers, I don’t swear.  There’s some bizarre internal filter that simply won’t let that language out.  Instead, it all gets saved up for the next time some fucking moron cuts me off in traffic.

I’m not the only one who does this, either.  The same study showed that it’s a Canadian trait to be restrained in public but a potty-mouth when with friends.  Guess they weren’t listening the day our Culture Minister publicly referred to Canadian television as “shit”.

This blog is an exception to the “not in front of strangers” rule.  We’re all friends here, right?  And I wouldn’t want the language in my books to come as a complete shock.  But still, I post the F-bomb alert.  Other bloggers just let ‘er rip, but I’m too… Canadian.

I’m not sure why we collectively possess such a deep well of profanity.  Maybe it’s because we’re trying so hard to be polite to every dipshit we meet that it just has to come out somewhere.

Maybe it’s the beaver jokes.  As you may know, the beaver is our national animal, causing no end of hilarity to those with dirty minds (which would be most of us).  It’s really hard to avoid a little coarse language under the circumstances.

Or maybe it’s our weather.  Let’s face it, when you live in a country where a third of the land mass has continuous permafrost, profanity seems like an unavoidable consequence.  In the southern areas, schools close when the temperature dips to -40 degrees Celsius.  If it’s only -38, well, suck it up, ya pansy-ass kids, and walk to the bus.  The swearing habit starts early here.

For those who aren’t familiar with Canada, I should mention that we do, in fact, have summer.  You can tell it’s summer when the grass turns a funny green colour, and enormous squadrons of mosquitoes attempt to carry you away if you venture outside.  But that only lasts about ten minutes, and then it’s back to fucking winter.

I’m exaggerating.  We actually do have other seasons on the prairies, called “goddamn hail again”, “holy shit, tornadoes”, and “sumbitch heat and humidity”.

Or, if we don’t know you:  “How about that weather, eh?”

Any other potty-mouths out there?  What are the seasons in your neck of the woods?

SpongeToffee GuiltyPants

/ Diane Henders / 7 Comments

I feel irrational guilt when dealing with authority figures.  I blame sponge toffee.

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the general stores used to carry slabs of it.  It was pure sugar whipped into foam and solidified to the brittle consistency of glass.  You could chew it into a hard, sticky pellet, or you could suck it and let its sharp edges lacerate your tongue.  To a child, it was pure, golden-brown heaven.

Unfortunately, that divine confection was responsible for the most traumatic discovery of my childhood:  the fact that it is possible to do something bad even when you’re not trying.

Don’t get me wrong, I was no stranger to doing naughty things in the full knowledge that I’d be in trouble for them later.  I was also a master of doing things that I was pretty sure would get me in trouble if I was caught, but they hadn’t been specifically itemized as “bad”, so they were a grey area.

But back to the sponge toffee.  I can’t remember how old I was.  I had been sent into the store to purchase something while my mother stayed in the car, probably tending to my baby sister.

I had “grown-up money” to buy “grown-up groceries”, and I was proud.  I selected whatever it was that I was supposed to buy and marched up to the counter, cash in hand.  And spotted the slabs of sponge toffee.  Five cents.  (Yeah, it really was that long ago.  Shut up.)

I bought the groceries, and I bought a piece of sponge toffee.

And I caught holy hell.

I couldn’t understand.  I’d bought it.  I hadn’t stolen it.  But apparently, using other people’s money to buy something for yourself was the same as stealing.  Who knew?  (So much for the concepts of mortgages and credit cards.)

I can’t remember for sure, but I doubt the consequences were particularly dire.  I probably had to pay back the nickel out of my ten-cent allowance, and I probably didn’t get to eat the toffee, but the lesson remained, written in letters of flame upon my soul.

Even when you think you’re not guilty, you are.

Which probably explains my reflexive “Oh, shit, what have I done?” reaction whenever I see a police car.

And don’t even get me started about the Canada Revenue Agency tax forms that require you to sign where it says “I certify that the information given on this return and in any documents attached is correct, complete, and fully discloses all my income.”  Just to really get my knickers in a twist, they add “It is a serious offence to make a false return”.

As if I wasn’t already suffused with anticipatory guilt.

What if I make a mistake without realizing it?  Or what if somebody else makes a mistake on a T-slip or one of the other “any documents attached”?  I’m guilty, guilty, guilty.

I don’t really enjoy sponge toffee anymore, either.

Anybody else with an overactive conscience?  Or am I just seriously messed up?  Or… is that not an “or” question?

Ride A Cowboy!

/ Diane Henders / 3 Comments

The Stampede is on in Calgary this week, so the medical clinics are bracing for the annual surge in syphilis cases.  No, I’m not making this up.

Forget your sensuous blues, your hard-pumping rock, and your suave, sophisticated classical music.  The true aphrodisiac is cowboy boots and country music.  Apparently, something about the Stampede just strips off your inhibitions, rolls them up in a ball, and kicks them under the seat, steaming up the windows and rocking the pick-me-up truck.

Except for those people who get direct economic benefit from the Stampede, like western-wear vendors and penicillin manufacturers, most Calgarians fall into one of two camps:  those who love the Stampede, and those who loathe it.

I’m firmly in the “Love the Stampede” category.  No, it’s not because I partake in the randy rodeo.  It’s because during the ten days of the Calgary Stampede (inexplicably referred to as “Stampede Week”), the entire atmosphere of the city changes.

All the suited-up, buttoned-down businesspeople vanish from the downtown core, to be replaced by swaggering folks in western boots, shirts, and faded jeans.  The smell of horseshit and pancake syrup floats on the air, and country music blares from every restaurant and lounge, regardless of its musical orientation prior to Stampede Week.  Bales, rough wooden fences, and hand-daubed signs drawling, “Howdy” crowd the lobbies of the sleek highrise office buildings.

Every morning, there’s a free pancake breakfast somewhere.  Just go downtown at 7:30 in the morning, listen for the music, and follow the smell of bacon and syrup.  Every afternoon, there are dozens of Stampede parties.  No need to follow your nose; you can hear them from across town and navigate toward them by following the trail of inebriated cowboy wannabes staggering along whooping, “Yaaaa-hoooo!”.

Some suggestions for safe Stampeding:

  • Don’t stand close to anybody in an enclosed space.  You’ll get drunk just from the fumes wafting off them.
  • Don’t light a match, either.  One of the staple foods at Stampede parties is baked beans.  Flammable fumes abound.
  • Use protection.  Or, if you really want the gift that keeps on giving, try http://www.plentyofsyph.com/.

Stampede strips away food inhibitions, too.  Fifty-one weeks out of the year, the thought of eating a corn dog makes me gag.  During Stampede week, I salivate uncontrollably at the mere thought.

Also, after dedicated research, I have determined that there is, in fact, no upper limit to the number of mini-doughnuts I’m capable of eating at one sitting during Stampede. A couple of years ago, I topped out at twenty-five, but that was only because the bag was empty.  If there had been more, I would’ve eaten them.

If your tastes are a little more adventurous, there’s a bar down on 10th Avenue where you can eat prairie oysters.  (For the uninitiated, prairie oysters are bull testicles.  Or… ex-bulls’ testicles, I guess.)  Mmmm-mmm good!

And the midway vendors vie each year to offer the newest, oddest foods.  A few years ago, it was deep-fried Coke.  I haven’t been down to the grounds yet this year, but I hear they have deep-fried Pop-Tarts.

Hell, those aren’t new.  You can find them after any Stampede party.  Just follow the sound of hiccups and look for the Daisy Dukes.

It’s Stampede time!  Save a horse, ride a cowboy!  Yaaa-hooo!

Camping’s Out

/ Diane Henders / 8 Comments

The long weekend is over, and I’m sitting at my desk, scratching the mosquito bites on my butt.  No, I wasn’t having that much fun out in the bush.  The little suckers were ferocious this weekend, and they bit right through my jeans.

We used to camp almost every long weekend.  Get a bunch of people together, grab a few adjoining sites at a campground in the mountains, and pitch a tent village.  The site in the middle was designated the “main” site, where all the cooking and socializing took place.

If we forgot to pack some critical piece of camping gear, there was always somebody in the group who’d lend us theirs.  The sites on either side provided a buffer zone between us and the other yahoos in the campground.  We sat around the campfire swigging cold beer and shooting the shit in the evenings while the mountains glowed around us.  Occasional bursts of laughter rose from other campsites, but the echoing silence of the Rockies always lay in the background, almost a presence in itself.

As we got older, though, the attraction waned.  The other yahoos in the campground got, well, yahooier.  (Honest.  Parks Canada backs us up on this one.  It has nothing to do with our age.)  The parks started to charge fees for a fire permit and a tiny bundle of soggy firewood.  The campgrounds were so teeming with humanity that the sites got packed closer and closer together, until the neighbours were only a few feet away.  We all attempted to “enjoy nature” while radios blared and children screamed and dogs barked and passing cars raised clouds of gravel dust that settled on us in a layer resembling the ash from Pompeii.

And driving the TransCanada Highway between Calgary and the Rockies was like taking part in a gong-show amateur hour at Race City Speedway.  By the time I made it home from my “relaxing” weekend in the mountains, my shoulders were up around my ears and my language was melting the steering wheel.

So one long weekend, we just… didn’t go.

It was quieter and less crowded in the city.  Everybody else was out there in the campgrounds searching for the elusive “wilderness experience”.  A few years later, we bought a tiny piece of treed property in the country, and we’ve been enjoying our own private wilderness ever since.

I hear there are fire bans and liquor bans in the national park campgrounds now.  I know it’s no fun to lie awake at night wondering if your neighbours are going to burn down the forest (and you) with their giant conflagration.  Obnoxious drunks bellowing at the tops of their lungs at three o’clock in the morning are vastly overrated.

But at the same time, I feel sad that a lot of people won’t have the opportunity to look up at the alpenglow and laugh around a campfire with some cold beer and good friends.  It’s really too bad that the sins of the few have once again resulted in a loss of freedom for the many.

Eh, sonny, let me tell you about the good old days…

Sigh.

Evil Pizza

/ Diane Henders / 8 Comments

The other day, my husband came to the table with some startling news:  research has shown that potato chips are the world’s most fattening food.

He assured me that this conclusion was the result of a highly reputable study, conducted with a very large number of participants, over a number of years, and their data was carefully recorded and analyzed and normalized and blah, blah, blah.

It’s official.  Potato chips are the devil.

I greeted this revelation with the awe and respect that it deserved:  “No shit, Sherlock.  Take a highly porous substance of dubious nutritional value, slice it thinly to maximize its surface area, and immerse it in pure fat.  Eat.  Gain weight.  Duh.”

But after reflection, I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t think potato chips are the true culprit in the epidemic of obesity.

Personally, I blame pizza.

Why?  Well, potato chips haven’t changed much over the course of my lifetime.  Except for some new flavours, they’re still pretty much what they always were.

Pizza, on the other hand, has been mutating like a malevolent virus, with the clear intention of fattening us all up.  I’m not sure who’s behind this vicious plot.  Maybe the pizza joints are all secretly owned by big pharmaceutical companies.

Here’s how I see it:

That’s it.  Pizza is evil.

But so, so tasty…

Mmmmm…

Must eat pizza now…

Update:  Yes, I drew the cartoon myself.  Yay, stick people!

Oh, Shift!

/ Diane Henders / 12 Comments

A few years ago, Dave (one of my trainers) was writing a workbook.  He proof-read it and passed it over to me.  I proof-read it.  Then I got thirty copies printed up and delivered them to him the night before the class.

He met me at the door, looking slightly nervous.  “Uh, there’s a typo in the workbook,” he began.

I shrugged.  “Whatever.  We’ll fix it in the next batch.”

“Um, okay, but…”

He was relatively new to my company, and we were still in the getting-to-know-you stage.  He looked me square in the eye.  “If you were typing the word ‘shift’, which letter would you absolutely not want to leave out?”

Sure enough, we were instructing our students to shit-click.  I laughed all the way home, then decided that perhaps not everyone would share my puerile sense of humour.  I called Dave back and got him to hand-print a little bitty ‘f’ in each workbook.

My brother’s keyboard actually looks like this.  It’s something about the way he types.  The wear pattern on my keyboard is different, but I’d love to be able to really, truly, shit-click.  And it seems to me that if you use a computer for any amount of time at all, a “Shit” key is not only appropriate, but practically necessary.

Some of my best memories involve typos.  Back in the dark days of my interior design career, I spent a lot of time writing technical specifications, and I also checked specs that other people had written.  I caught lots of typos, but my favourite was the spec that demanded a “certified horney man”.

Hell, I thought they all came that way.  There’s actually a certification for that?  Who does the testing?

Needless to say, the spec was duly modified to read “journeyman”, as it was intended.  But I still think it would’ve been fun to send it out and see what we got.

I also had an unfortunate tendency to discuss “tenant turkey packages”.  These were actually “turnkey” packages (for tenants moving into a new commercial space), but it got to the point where I couldn’t tell if I was seeing “turnkey” and reading “turkey” or vice versa.  And the accompanying mental picture was truly disturbing.

And while we’re in that, er, area…  Try sending out a proposal to redesign your client’s pubic areas.  See how fast you get a response.  I’m not even going to get into all the double-entendres associated with that.  It really is too bad that “public” is so easy to mistype, but it certainly makes for some interesting conversations.

Speaking of mistyping, my blasphemous fingers also insist on addressing my friend Chris as “Christ”.

What’s your favourite typo story?