Nocturnal snacks.

Looky, looky, it’s my new cookie jar:

It cost me a short detour to work. Although not as frequent as in James Bay, people in Victoria generally like to leave trash disguised as freebies curbside. Before the owl cookie jar, last non-trash freebie I claimed was six seasons of House MD. Or so I thought until I watched a few episodes and decided I’d outgrown that show.

Although the jar has a 60s vibe, the Abbott sticker on its underside rules it out as a vintage item. Since I don’t bake enough cookies at a time to justify having a dedicated cookie container, I’m looking for suggestions for what to store in it.

Ideas:

• the crushed bones of my enemies
• notes of affirmation
• bits and bobs
• quicksand
• owl pellets
• cash, so that I can sincerely refer to it as one of my valuables

This freebie somewhat offsets the recent death of my handheld vacuum cleaner. In the eight years I’ve had it, it’s sucked up all types of bugs, a selection of dead skin, a medley of crumbs, and assorted detritus. It did well, and I’m not mad over its longevity. If it were possible to open up the body, I’d attempt to fix it. I’m still riding high from my successful repair of the zig-zag stitch setting on my sewing machine!

Side note: Victoria has a store that only sells vacuum cleaners, All Victoria Vacuums. As far as drug fronts go, it’s more convincing than the lampshade shop.

Posting more frequently is one of the goals I have for this year. Sometimes, I’ll go for a long time without posting because I don’t think I have enough content. In reality, there’s no minimum character requirement for a post. If I want to share a picture of Klaus with the internet and nothing else, so be it. And, sometimes, it will be nonsense.

These were my New Year’s Resolutions from 2019:

1. Get a miniature dairy cow and learn to make my own cheese.
2. Become a life coach. Take my team all the way to the championship.
3. Turn one of the living room windows into a sunroom extension, for the cats. Specifically for Bubble.
4. Invent a new flavour.
5. Become a respected handbag designer. (As opposed to a disgraced one.)
6. Trade my miniature dairy cow, for a miniature diary cow, which is a cow that I can record my thoughts and feelings on.
7. Sell my life story, which I’ve written on the diary cow, to a film producer who will then cast the cow to play the part of me. This cow will go on to become much more successful than me, but I’d be okay with it. After all, I’d have my handbag line.
8. Redesign the Canadian banknotes, and if I have the time, the Euro also. (The Queen gets to stay on the Canadian $20 bill, but her hair is now in a ponytail.)
9. Solve the world’s problems one by one by popularizing various hashtags and posting photos of myself making the peace sign.

My sister sent me a text yesterday wishing me a Happy New Year while I was showing Jordi something on my phone.

“Jent?” Jordi asked.

Jent is a nickname my sister accidentally gave herself as a kid because she couldn’t pronounce Jennifer. I think she can say her name now, but I can’t know for certain because I’m deaf. I’m never sure I’m pronouncing anything correctly! That led to asking Jordi which letters or words he noticed I struggled with.

“C. Because you’re never really sure if it has an S or a K sound.”

Effective yesterday, I’m no longer pronouncing scene as “skeen”.

In a separate conversation with Zoée, we discussed linguistic oddities unique to deaf people. For some, the greeting “Happy New Year!” is the whole name of the holiday. I’ve been asked, “What are your Happy New Year plans?”

Zoée noted how some deaf folks use “interesting” when they mean “interested”.

“Would you like to come to my Happy New Year party?”

“Yes, I am interesting.”

Good! We like interesting people!

In ASL, though, there is no difference between the signs for interested and interesting. We understand what is being conveyed based on context and facial expressions. It’s understandable how that error came to become commonplace; however, the origin of adding a second adjective to the holiday is less clear to me. I envy their optimism, though.

In Québec, I observed a linguistic quirk specific to hearing Francophones: “Fuck top” instead of “Fucked up”.

Hearing Anglophones have their own idiosyncrasies too! How many people do you think made “loosing weight” their New Year’s resolution when they “should of” aimed to learn the difference between “your” and “you’re”?

Writing is not a skill many people have. I’m not even confident it’s a skill I have, but I enjoy it. Cat pictures, cookie jar content ideas, a list of fake New Year’s resolutions, the occasional grammatical error, and general nonsense. This blog has it all!