Search Engine Junkie

January 20, 2016January 20, 2016 / Diane Henders / 68 Comments

I love hearing from my fans, and a recent letter asked whether the facts in my books came from my personal experience, and/or how much research I generally do. That gave me a rueful giggle, because it revealed yet another variety of my kryptonite.

First the short answers: ‘Mostly’; and ‘Lots’.

The auto-mechanic and home-renovation details come from hands-on experience, and Aydan’s wild motorcycle ride in Book 2 commemorates a few butt-puckering moments from riding an unfamiliar bike many years ago. The fight scenes are loosely based on real life, but they’re exaggerated all to hell (and I’ve been luckier than Aydan with my outcomes).

I love shooting, but I only kill paper targets. Art and food and music and computer-geekery are big parts of my life, too. Aydan’s athletic exploits have been adapted from my various adventures, particularly the falling-on-my-butt parts. (No comment on her other ‘adventures’ – that would give a whole new meaning to ‘hands-on experience’.) 😉

But the rest of it? The internet is my best friend and worst addiction – I research everything down to the tiniest detail. Just for laughs, here are about half of my search phrases from the last 7 days:

Slang for senior citizens¹
Do bees defecate²
Muhammad Ali
Can a laser burn through glass or mirror³
Infrared frequency ranges
What does your favourite flavour of ice cream say about your personality⁴
Xylophone
Bohemian waxwing
Festival of Lights Diwali
Elements associated with zodiac signs
Extranet
Female fertility
Jack Paar
Sarongs
Kitten heels
Batik
Dwarf hardy hibiscus
Plural possessive form of elk⁵
Particle physics hadron
Is physics plural⁶
Do bears hunt at night⁷
How long after death can a cadaver dog find a body⁸
How long before decomposition starts⁹
Most common size of men’s shoes¹⁰
Plural of penis¹¹
Baboon red bottom
Pheromones
Crowd control weapons
Flies sense of smell
Military slang Afghanistan
Surgery to replace missing fingers with toes
Do bears vomit¹²
Customs brokerage
Do people have unique electromagnetic fields¹³
Can getting hit in the testicles cause infertility¹⁴
Which substances are transparent to infrared
Walking with blade prosthetic legs
Hipster slang
Braking system on a Smart car
Lasers
Masers
DNA sequencing

For those of you who are speculating: Yes, it’s all related to Book 11, but don’t try to put it all together – I also use research to help me exclude ideas. (So don’t worry; none of the male characters are about to suffer a vicious blow to the nuts.)

And, because I know some of these search questions will stick like a brain-burr until you know the answers, here you go:

Gerries seems to be the current favourite (short for geriatrics), but geezers is still a top choice.
Yes, but they never dump inside the hive – they go on ‘cleansing flights’. If the weather has kept them inside for too long, it’s more like a strafing run with scatter bombs.
Yes, but if you had a cutting laser and a perfect reflection you’d be in trouble.
You’ll have to read Book 11 to find out.
Both elk’s and elks’ are acceptable.
Yes and no. It’s complicated. Kinda like physics.
Bears hunt anytime.
Cadaver dogs can even find bare bones.
Immediately, but the stinky phase starts anywhere from a few hours to a few days after death, depending on the heat and humidity of the environment.
10. No, seriously; ten is the most common men’s shoe size.
Both penises and penii are acceptable. (And that sentence just begs for a dirty joke.)
Yes, but rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, horses, and Japanese quail can’t vomit.
Unproven by science, but aura-readers say they can see the electromagnetic fields.
Yes, but it’s unlikely unless you suffer a complication like internal bleeding or torsion.

What oddball questions have you researched lately?

Missed It By That Much!

January 13, 2016October 2, 2018 / Diane Henders / 65 Comments

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

Usually I begin a post with a topic in mind and end up digressing all over the place, but today I thought I’d try something different: I’m going to begin with the digression and (hopefully) end up on topic.

…So the other day I stumbled across a movie recommendation for Cloudburst, starring Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. I rarely watch TV or movies, but the trailer looked good and I was in the mood for a movie. Better yet, it was available on Netflix.

And I loved it! The plot was a little thin and parts of it were preposterously unrealistic, but I didn’t care. The characters were irresistible, the acting was brilliant, and the dialogue left me rolling on the floor.

(Warning: Cloudburst contains geriatric lesbian kisses, lots of coarse language, and full-frontal male nudity.)

(P.S. to the warning: Naked men look funny when they run: flap-flap-flap-flap-flap-flap-flap…)

Sorry, where was I?

Oh, right; Netflix. I’ll get to the point now.

A few days later I got an ad for the upcoming Broadway shows here in Calgary. I enjoy the live shows, but they’re really expensive and it’s always a pain in the ass to get there, get parked, and then escape the madness of the parking lot after the show.

So, emboldened by my Netflix success, I decided to check for movie versions of the shows that were being offered. The first show was Kinky Boots (I admit I searched the title with trepidation – there are so many ways that could go wrong). But Netflix returned this:

Is there anything in these results that remotely resembles my search terms?

Disappointed, I searched for Newsies:

Okay, is the Netflix search utility just a random result generator?

The search results were so far off-base I couldn’t even figure out what tenuous connection Netflix thought they’d found. The only commonality I could spot was one vowel and one consonant.

The whole experience reminded me of how most automated systems totally miss the mark. The worst culprits are phone menu systems. For a while, our local phone provider’s system was so utterly useless that I was usually swearing a blue streak before I even made it to the third menu level. I dream of the day when computer systems develop the ability to identify what I’m saying even if it’s not one of the preset menu items:

“You said, ‘Fuck you, you pissant inanimate piece of ratshit’. I think you’re trying to select the ‘Fuck you’ menu item. Please choose from the following options: ‘In the kitchen with a candlestick’, ‘In the ballroom with a lead pipe’, ‘In the lounge with a pipe wrench’…”

Automated support systems aren’t much better. A while ago I was having email problems so I went to my web host’s page and started a service ticket with the subject line ‘Cannot send or receive email’. I jumped through all the usual flaming hoops and filled in every irrelevant blank they required including my shoe size and the date of my last mammogram, then optimistically clicked ‘Submit’.

Moments later, the following message appeared on the screen: “Thank you for submitting your support ticket. You will receive a response from our team via email.”

In the immortal words of Maxwell Smart: “Missed it by that much!”

Want Some Cheese With Your Kryptonite?

January 6, 2016 / Diane Henders / 61 Comments

Happy New Year! I missed you!

I thought I was doing myself a favour by taking a one-week vacation from blogging, but apparently if I want to retain my sanity I need to interact with people who don’t exist solely inside my head. (And if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll be justifiably horrified that this is my version of ‘sanity’.)

But sane or not, I’m grateful to all of you for taking the time to read and interact with me every week – thank you!

This is prime time for New Year’s resolutions, but (as usual) I haven’t made any. I’d love to pretend there’s some noble intellectual reason for that, but the sordid truth is that I avoid making resolutions because of my donkey DNA.

I’ve mentioned before that it forces me to respond to dares, but it also impels me to do the exact opposite to any resolution I make. The instant I resolve never to (fill in unhealthy habit here) or touch another bite of (fill in unhealthy food here), I’ll immediately seek out the prohibited food or activity and binge on it… even if I don’t really enjoy it. I swear I could renounce brussels sprouts and within a day I’d be sneaking away to pig out on them.

Okay, bad example. I could probably resist brussels sprouts, but everybody has their kryptonite: a substance that renders them weak and utterly helpless. I’ve already confessed my shameful addiction to hortiporn and my ongoing membership in Toolaholics Anonymous, so I won’t revisit those-

…Vegetables! Perfect vegetables and brilliant flowers, and the seeds are so cheap! And tools! Shiny beautiful wrenches and air tools and-

*shakes head and slaps own face vigorously*

Sorry. I’m back now.

You’d think two varieties of kryptonite would be enough, but no; I have several:

Ice cream – I’ll eat it any time of the day or night, even when it’s 30-below outside. I’d eat it for every meal if I didn’t know I’d gain so much weight that I wouldn’t fit in my car. And that would prevent me from going out to buy more ice cream, which would totally suck.
Cheese – Ditto. Any kind of cheese; or better still, all kinds. I’m particularly partial to stinky ‘robustly-flavoured’ varieties but I love them all, from mild to malodorous to mouldy.
Yarn and fabric – I don’t go into those stores anymore. Crossing their thresholds would violate the terms of my parole.
Camping/outdoor equipment – Show me anything from a Ka-bar knife to a kayak, and I’ll immediately begin to salivate. It’s pathetic.
Outdoor reference books – Want to identify a bird? I have seven bird books. Mushroom? Four volumes. Wildflower? Fish? Animal track? Turd? Yep, yep, yep, and yep! (Do you know how hard it is to find books on identifying animal scat? Sheesh.) And still, any time I travel to a new area I buy a flora and fauna reference book as a souvenir.
Potato chips – I can’t even have them in the house. At least not for longer than it takes me to snarf the entire family-sized bag.

You may notice that I’ve omitted beer, chocolate, and rare steaks from the list, but believe it or not, I can actually resist those if necessary. (Most of the time. And I reserve the right to define ‘necessary’.)

What’s your kryptonite?

A Very Vampire Solstice-mas

December 23, 2015October 2, 2018 / Diane Henders / 53 Comments

Woohoo! We’ve made it past the shortest day! I always feel better when we’re on the upswing and I know I’ll be getting more light every day. (As opposed to ‘getting lighter’, which I definitely won’t be doing unless I stop devouring Christmas goodies.)

The darkness of winter doesn’t bother Hubby, but then again, he’s basically a vampire – he’s just beginning to hit his stride around 10 PM every night. And he loathes garlic. (I haven’t dared to try holy water on him.)

I’d never make it as a vampire – I love daylight far too much. Though, come to think of it, I burn to a crisp in ten minutes or less when exposed to direct sunshine, so I actually may be part vampire. Hmmm…

Anyway, at least the snow brightens everything up and makes the most of the little daylight we have, and we light up the night as much as we can. This video pretty much describes us for the entire month of December.

Okay, we’re not quite that over-the-top – for one thing, our LED lights just aren’t that bright. But they make up for it with the splendour of quantity, since we can now power all 5000+ bulbs off one 20-amp breaker. And hey, at least the City of Calgary doesn’t have to switch over to nuclear backup when we turn them on.

I realize that solstice, Christmas, and blood-sucking soulless creatures aren’t usually combined in the same post, but this is what happens when I get a massive shortbread overdose. And it’s actually not too much of a stretch when you think about it. I’m sure we’ve all been at an office party where we’ve looked around at our blood-sucking soulless co-workers and shuddered.

And now that I’ve made the mental connection, I just can’t get this thought out of my mind:

vampire christmas

I figure one’s social skills would get pretty rusty if one spent all one’s time locked away from the rest of humanity, absorbed in one’s own nefarious schemes…

Wait, why are you looking at me like that? I’m talking about the vampires, not myself. I swear I’ve never fanged an eggnog carton… Okay, once; but there were mitigating circumstances.

Oh, and here’s another digression (what was in that shortbread?!?): Eggnog makes me laugh. Yes, it’s full of creamy spicy goodness and, if you’re lucky, enough Christmas spirits to make anyone laugh; but here in Canada all products have to be labelled in both our official languages. So one side of the carton says ‘Eggnog’ and the other says ‘Lait de poule’, which is the French version. The literal translation is ‘milk of hen’. Chicken milk. *giggles childishly*

As you can undoubtedly tell, I need a vacation (or possibly an intervention, but those are harder to arrange). So next week I’m giving myself the gift of some uninterrupted writing time on Book 11 – woohoo all over again! My next post will be on January 6, so I’ll look forward to ‘talking’ to you then.

Meanwhile, Hubby and I would like to send our very best wishes to everyone:

Joy to those who celebrate; comfort to those who mourn; and peace and abundance to all, now and in the New Year.

xmas tree

If you celebrate Christmas, we wish you a very merry one!

* * *

P.S. Another cause for ‘woohoo-ing’: I’ve finally finished my cover updates! Here’s the last one:

It’s A Dilemma…

December 16, 2015 / Diane Henders / 85 Comments

Sometimes I struggle with a bit of a dilemma. I’m not good at interpreting the subtleties of social interactions, so I’m never quite sure whether people are genuinely glad to see me or just being polite. It doesn’t help that I live in Canada, where we’re polite to even idiots and assholes. I never know which of those I am.

That makes reconnecting with long-lost acquaintances an iffy proposition. Any time I send out a friend request or a ‘let’s keep in touch’ note, I’m reminded of the old saying: “The ones you hope you’ll never hear from again are the ones who never lose your number.”

I was thinking of that the other day while I was writing the letter to go in our Christmas cards. Normal people probably don’t worry about stuff like this, but ever since I became a writer I’ve been cautious about mentioning my career. I never know how people will react.

When I was an interior designer (*shudders*) or a draftsperson or a computer geek, people outside my profession usually responded one of two ways when I told them what I did for a living: They either nodded and changed the subject to something that actually interested them, or they pounced on me and tried to get free services.

But when I say I’m a fiction writer, the reactions are alarmingly varied. I still get “Ho-hum; well, how about that weather we’re having?” That’s okay.

The ‘pounce’ reaction translates to “Hey, I have a great idea for a novel! I’ll give you a ten-second snapshot of my idea, and you can spend the next six solid months sweating blood while you plan it, write it, edit it, proof it, and publish it; and then we can share the profits 50/50!”

Um… no.

It’s the third type of reaction that makes me reticent about dropping the ‘writer’ bombshell: Their eyes dilate and they break out in a fine dew of perspiration while they back away in squeamish embarrassment as though they’d just caught me smiling and humming with my hand down my pants.

Or worse, their eyes dilate and they start sweating, but they’re coming at me as if they’re hoping I’ll start smiling and humming with my hand down my pants. Then they whisper, “Do you write porn?”

It’s a fair question; it’s just that sweaty wide-eyed people with no sense of personal space really creep me out…

Anyhow, back to the Christmas cards. This year I decided to reconnect with my Grade 12 English teacher. He was a very cool guy back in 1982, and I’ve always wondered how things turned out for him. I also owe him a debt of gratitude for convincing me that English class wasn’t a dead loss, and for having the courage to share his love for poetry with a bunch of hormone-ridden country-bumpkin teenagers.

So I sent him a card, and when he graciously responded I wrote him an email thanking him for laying the groundwork for my writing career. It should’ve been a pleasant, stress-free interaction, right?

But all the while, I was visualizing this:

(That wasn’t how he reacted… Or maybe he was just too polite to show it… You see my dilemma?)

P.S. Thanks, Mr. C. You’re still a very cool guy!

A Mashup Of (Mostly) Food

December 9, 2015 / Diane Henders / 63 Comments

(Don’t worry, it’s safe to read this. I promise it’s not about gross squished food.)

I’m a little scattered this week. Between my usual writing schedule, my cover updates (only one more to go, woohoo!), the production of the Never Say Spy audiobook (up to Chapter 39 and sounding great), and the busy round of Christmas cards and baking and extra social activities, my brain just doesn’t seem to want to disgorge any sort of organized blog post.

So what the hell, why fight it? Here’s a mashup up of some goodies that have caught my eye and tweaked my sense of humour lately:

You may recall that I mentioned OBSL in a post a few years ago. At the time, I created that acronym to describe my hypothetical Optimum Beer Saturation Level: That perfect point of intoxication at which I become a deadly 8-ball player. When I wrote that post I assumed that I was (as usual) full of shit.

Little did I know that greater minds than mine were busily proving me right. In fact, a recent study shows that there is an OBSL, and it occurs where your blood-alcohol level is 0.075. Unfortunately for my hypothesis, they weren’t testing for 8-ball skill; instead they were focusing on the OBSL as it relates to creativity. And shortly after science delivered its verdict, some brilliant marketers capitalized on it. Voilà! The Problem Solver: A beer that comes with a creativity scale on the side. Dang, I could’ve used some of that stuff when I started writing this post…

And speaking of happy discoveries involving my favourite foods, science has come through yet again with a discovery that turns peanut butter into… wait for it… diamonds! Apparently it’s messy, but it works. (It was also just a publicity stunt. It seems peanut butter isn’t an optimum diamond-producing substance. Go figure.)

Unfortunately, though, the news from food scientists isn’t all good. The latest studies indicate that comfort foods can actually be depressing. Bummer. Now I need to go and eat a bowl of ice cream.

Moving on from science to silliness (though still food-related), here are a few fortune cookie predictions I could have done without:

“You learn from your mistakes. You will learn a lot today.” – Great, just great.

“Your true love will show himself to you under the moonlight.” – Uh… okay, so my true love is a deranged flasher. Will there be criminal charges or jail time associated with this?

“You have an unusual equipment for success; use it properly.” – I guess if I was a guy, I’d know exactly what to do with my unusual equipment, but under the circumstances I’m just not sure how to interpret this.

“Wisdom is on her way to you.” – This one might be intended to encourage, but for me it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the cartoon about the guy reading a fortune that says ‘Big things are coming your way’ just as a grand piano drops from the sky above him. Wisdom sounds like a good thing in theory, but it seems to me that the phrasing is a little ominous.

I’ll leave you with a cartoon that sums up my attitude when things get as hectic as they are now. And hey, it’s food-related, too!

* * *

P.S. Here’s Book 8’s new cover, with many thanks to John R. for arranging my great truck-driving adventure and letting me photograph his truck:

They’re Watching Me

December 2, 2015 / Diane Henders / 40 Comments

My last illusion of privacy has been shattered. I knew government agencies watch us online and our phone companies track our whereabouts and aliens (or possibly my friends) are monitoring my bathroom habits… but I could always depend on the utter cluelessness of spammers.

Back in the good old days, I could count on getting all sorts of random and irrelevant spam promising to enlarge body parts I don’t even possess or to deposit vast sums of money in my bank account. (Who knew there were that many dead millionaires in Nigeria?)

But no more. Lately the spammers have been getting so uncannily accurate, I can’t help thinking they’re watching me.

Case in point: A few years ago I posted A Dave By Any Other Name, in which I noted that I spent several years of my office life christened Dave. Imagine my surprise when I received this email a while ago:

They got my name right in the subject line… and then they addressed me as “Mr. Dave”.

At the time, I dismissed it as a bizarre coincidence. What are the chances, right? But lately I’ve been receiving spam that makes me think the spammers are actually paying attention… and they have a twisted sense of humour.

For example, they send me ads for food and recipes and then follow up with ads for the ‘20-Minute Flat Belly Workout’.

And a few days after I researched insanely expensive women’s shoes for my fashion-conscious character Nichele, I received an email kindly offering me ‘red arses’. That may seem completely unrelated, but wait: The designer brand I researched was Louboutin. Their signature design feature is red soles… or red ‘bottoms’. Obviously my creative spammer was using a slightly less refined translation program to produce ‘red arses’.

(Or maybe I’m completely off-base with the Louboutin theory and the spammer in question actually has a baboon fetish, in which case I don’t really want to know.)

Anyway, they’ve apparently figured out that I’m a writer, because I get popup ads like this one:

Ummm… Isn’t that a spelling correction?

Last time I checked, misspelling ‘grammar’ wasn’t a grammatical error, but I’m willing to overlook that technicality. After all, there are larger issues at stake: the fact that the spammers are now collaborating.

The ones who know I’m a writer must be sharing information with the ones who know I love to eat. The result was this email gem:

“Imagine losing pound after pound by doing literary nothing!”

I’m not quite sure how to do literary nothing. I guess as a literary-type person, theoretically any ‘nothing’ I do would be literary nothing; but I can’t help thinking there must be more to it than that.

Maybe I have to sit staring at a blank page and steadfastly resist the urge to write. Or perhaps ‘literary nothing’ is the act of spewing pages of pointless drivel, in which case I should be losing pound after pound just from writing this blog.

But at least they’re onboard with my sense of humour, and they’re generous with their jokes. They gave me this one with no strings attached, not even a spammy link:

“Have you heard about the Scottish drag queen? He wore pants.”

I guess I’ll get used to the idea that they’re watching me. And (unlike the government and the phone company) at least the spammers give me some laughs. 😀

Guilty!

November 25, 2015November 24, 2015 / Diane Henders / 34 Comments

Yesterday I was out for a walk when I came upon a fire truck parked by the curb. There was clearly no emergency; the truck wasn’t running and there were no flashing lights. So naturally I watched for firemen as I got closer. After all, what red-blooded woman wouldn’t take advantage of a gratuitous gawk?

Just as I came abreast of the truck, the firemen returned from a nearby shop: Four tall handsome guys in crisp navy-blue uniforms. They smiled at me. One even said hi.

My heart should have gone ‘pit-a-pat’, right?

Wrong.

My heart went ‘thud’, my gaze skittered guiltily to the ground, and I couldn’t even choke out a ‘hi’ in return before I rushed away, hoping my brisk stride telegraphed ‘I’m in a hurry to take care of some very important business’ and not ‘I just committed a crime and I’m fleeing the scene’.

It was the damn uniforms that got me. If they’d been in their fire-fighting gear, my biggest worry would have been hiding the drool on my chin. But I have such severe issues with uniformed authority figures that even Customs border guards and rent-a-cops give me the willies.

The mere sight of a police car makes my palms sweat and my pulse pound. Uniformed officers by the side of the road? Massive adrenaline spike. And I absolutely hate it when a police car follows me in traffic. I’m ten times more likely to commit a traffic infraction just out of sheer nervousness. I was driving home one night when I spotted two guys in reflective vests beside the road, and I nearly stroked out before I realized they were just city workers dealing with a blocked storm drain.

It’s a silly reaction, and I know better. I have friends who are police officers. They’re nice guys. They don’t loom over me waiting for me to break the law.

I have no idea why police uniforms freak me out. I’m the most law-abiding person I know. I drive as close to the speed limit as humanly possible (which, in Calgary, makes me the slowest thing on the road). If I get incorrect change or find an extra deposit in my bank account, I return the money immediately. Hell, once I found a $20 bill blowing around a mall parking lot, and I dropped it off at the Lost and Found. What a chump!

But apparently I have a massive guilt complex.

Maybe the roots lie in the sponge toffee trauma I suffered in childhood, or maybe it’s because I spend quite a bit of my time planning crimes for my novels so I have a knee-jerk ‘uh-oh’ reaction to police. Heaven help me if anybody ever develops a machine that can sense a person’s feelings of guilt. I’ll end up in jail for crimes I didn’t even know existed.

Still, I feel badly about snubbing those nice firemen. Maybe I should bake some cookies and drop them off at the local firehall to apologize.

But they might have a uniformed guy at the front desk…

Do you think they’d find it odd if I left a bag of cookies outside the door and called it in from an untraceable phone?

* * *

P.S. My best friend from university days is visiting me this week, so I’ll be slower to respond to comments than usual. Your comments mean a lot to me, though, and I’ll look forward to ‘talking’ to you as soon as I get a chance. 🙂

P.P.S. Another new cover is ready! Here’s Book 7:

A Blast From The Past

November 18, 2015November 18, 2015 / Diane Henders / 43 Comments

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I’d risked life and limb by cleaning out the fridge and reorganizing my bin of plastic containers. Well, pshaw. That was nothing.

Emboldened by my survival of Trial By Crisper Drawer, I foolishly bravely went where no man has gone before (or at least not for several years). Yes, I tackled our basement storage room.

I’m not kidding when I say no man has gone there. I swear, for the past few years Hubby never got closer than the doorway, from where he simply tossed stuff onto the heap. (I may be exaggerating. He might have waded into the shallow end and carefully balanced stuff on the heap.)

I wasn’t much better, though. I ventured slightly deeper into the morass to retrieve my canning jars and restock the shelves with this summer’s harvest, but the chaos struck such fear into my heart that I fled as soon as I could.

But no more. It’s all tidy now.

The last time we organized that room, we unearthed gems like a box of clothes containing briefs Hubby must have worn in junior high. They were small enough to fit a Ken doll, and the elastic crumbled to powder when stretched. But this time we found nothing like that… and I had great fun reacquainting myself with some treasures from long ago.

Very long ago.

Case in point: My baby book, in which my long-suffering mother penned a few revealing statements: “Stopped screaming at 2 months…” and then, “At 8 months, Diane was a real good little girl for 4 days in succession.” Later she noted, “I got tired of scolding and spanking so we tipped the chairs on their sides to keep Diane off the table.”

My Grade One report card tactfully states: “Diane is a very good student. She has a very independent little spirit which sometimes creates problems for her, but I have no doubt that she will work things out in her own way very well.”

Which of these siblings looks most likely to get into mischief?

More treasures included the teddy bear I got at 18 months old. (This was actually my second Teddy. Apparently I ate the first one. No wonder I had colic.)

Teddy then and now. He’s been through quite a few surgeries, but he’s still in one piece.

Then there was my Mickey Mouse T-shirt from a family trip to Disney World when I was a young teen. I actually considered squeezing into this just for laughs, but decided not to subject you to the retina-searing sight of me crammed into a too-small T-shirt.

Lucky I didn’t try to wear this. Poor Mickey would never be the same.

My memorabilia box also disgorged my UMZOO Pub T-shirt from university days, my Bob Seger concert T-shirt, a corsage from my Grade 12 grad, and medals and ribbons for everything from track meets to wins at the Carman Fair to archery competitions.

I’m still proud of these two.

(The Award of Excellence came from the ParticipACTION program ‘way back in 1973, and the silver medal was from the archery team event at the Championship of the Americas in 2003. Yes, I realize 30 years is a lo-o-o-ng hiatus between awards. On the up side, it’s a manageable precedent – I don’t have to try for another one for 18 years or so.)

I also have every single letter and card anybody ever sent me. From Grade One valentines to angst-ridden teenage confessions to the latest Christmas letter, I’ve got ’em all. So if you ever wrote to me, beware. I have potential blackmail material.

Finding my school pictures was scariest, though. This, above all, convinces me my parents must truly have loved me. After all the misery I caused as a baby, I turned into this… and they still let me live:

The 1970s were not kind to me. Note the massive zit, dead-centre of my forehead.

The best thing about all this memorabilia is that it’s useless crap to everyone but me, and when I’m pushing up daisies it can go the landfill and never be missed.

But while I’m here, I like to dig it out every now and then… and it always makes me smile. 🙂

What’s your most treasured keepsake?

* * *

P.S. Another book cover is finished! This is the new look for Book 6:

A Mix Of New Feces

November 4, 2015 / Diane Henders / 36 Comments

When I read the headline “Liberal cabinet expected to be a mix of new feces”, it seemed like the perfect title for this post. I’ve had some oddball items burbling around in my mind for a while, so this is a perfect opportunity to mix them up and erm… eliminate them.

As you’ve undoubtedly guessed by now, I had misread another headline. The actual title was “Liberal cabinet expected to be a mix of new faces”. We just had an election here, so the article was about the shakeups in cabinet. But ‘new feces’ pretty much sums up how I feel about politicians and our party system in general. Same shit, different pile. Or maybe it’s ‘different shit, same pile’, but you know what I mean.

However, since Miss Manners says discussions of politics and religion are to be avoided in polite company, that’s all the political crap I’ll mention here (because you know my blog is always suitable for polite company).

‘Moving’ right along…

Speaking of headlines, I saw an article a few days ago discussing the merger between Pfizer (makers of Viagra) and Allergan (makers of Botox). At first glance it seemed like a bit of a conflict, since Viagra gets things going while Botox makes them stop. But on second thought, it actually makes perfect sense: used properly, either of them will take the wrinkles out.

And speaking of the little soldier, my friend Chris sent me this link a while ago: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3050334/a-condom-package-that-youll-just-know-is-the-right-size-for-you along with the note, “Must be a blog in here somewhere”. And yes; yes there is!

I think the concept of ‘sizing by grip’ is brilliant in its simplicity, not to mention the exquisite tact of making the largest and smallest sizes the same colour so the checkout clerks might not notice at a glance if a guy’s buying the ‘teeny-weenie’ size. I hope Guan-Hao-Pan’s innovation catches on; if for no other reason than to finally put to rest the giggle-worthy discrepancies in public condom dispensers. Am I the only one who’s ever noticed that in men’s washrooms¹, the condoms are all ‘Magnum’ or ‘Extra-Large’, but in women’s washrooms, they’re ‘Slim Fit’? Sorry, boys, we’re onto you. Stand closer; it’s shorter than you think.

Neatly combining the topics of unlikely mergers and amorous encounters, I recently discovered that Crimestoppers is taking advantage of the hottest literary trend by branching out into erotica. Don’t believe me? Check out the photo I snapped last week of a Crimestoppers poster in a grocery store in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. (Note: This is pretty kinky stuff, so read with caution.)

Dear Crimestoppers: Please proofread your posters more carefully.

There’s a whole new career awaiting the person who penned that little gem. Literally, a whole new career. Because after a few more slip-ups like that, their current career will be down the toilet.

And that’s all the poop for this week.

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¹Yes, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in men’s washrooms, but it’s not what you think. Explanation here.

P.S. Another cover update finished! Here’s the new look for Book 5: How Spy I Am: