I'm a Deaf vagabond currently living on Vancouver Island. Bicycles dominate my life, but I also make time for climbing, hiking, camping, and cats. And if I have time left over after all that, I write about it.
My arm has been engorged with the Pfizer vaccine. The process of getting vaccinated was remarkably similar to going to the polls. You get to follow arrows on the ground going from the ID verification clerk to the line-up before getting shown to a booth. You also get offered a sticker to declare yourself a good citizen!
Except, Elections Canada doesn’t expect their voters to wait fifteen minutes after voting before leaving the building in case of an allergy reaction. The mass jabbing was so deliciously fluid. Nobody had to wait long and all the vaccination booths seemed to always be occupied. The nurses had paddles that they held up when they were ready for the next victim: green for go, red for no, and yellow for brb potty break, probably.
Tragically, the two days that followed Saturday’s noble jab were sunshine-filled and fraught with nausea, with a side of a sore arm. Those were my two days off. Although, the twenty minutes of sun I didn’t miss out on, I got burnt.
First, I shall get you warmed up for what you’re about to see by sharing the objects of interest that were once in my possession. Instead of moving all this stuff across the country and back–or across the Strait of Georgia and back–they got Marie Kondo’d. I thanked these items for their service and disposed of them.
Bear in mind that most of these items were gifts rather than something I intentionally obtained. It does say a lot about how my friends perceive me, though.
3. A decapitated mummified head with its septum pierced. This was supposedly a prop in an episode of The X-Files. If you think you know which episode, please tell me.
I didn’t keep it for long because it reeked strongly of musty latex.
4. A leather snap cuff to wrap around the base of the nutsack. This scrotum belt had chains joined by a ring in the middle to support any weight one might want to attach.
I would love to explain this apparatus some more, except I don’t understand it even after owning it.
While no close-up photos exist, it makes a surprise appearance in the background of several photos.
Rather than suspend it from a body part, I suspended it from my ceiling and nestled one of my GIANTmicrobes in there. I believe Ulcer won the coveted spot in this testicle stretcher thingamajig.
5. Teeth from two people. Two friends thought, “I bet Laura would love to receive my teeth.”
They were wisdom teeth. Because most people get their wisdom teeth out before they hit their twenties, and this predated my digital camera days, I only have a remarkably poor-quality webcam photo of one of the sets.
6. 2L bottle of personal lubricant with a pump dispenser. I was re-stretching my ears and asked my roomie, Danica, if she had any lube I could use. She put this giant bottle in front of my bedroom door and told me, “It’s yours.”
I kept it on my bedside table, not caring whether it suggested that I had an arid no-no region.
7. Timk (the K is silent) the baby giant millipede who lived in a flaming igloo.
…in a tank. Timk (the K is silent) wasn’t a free-roaming millipede.
8. An Anne Geddes plushy with the face ripped out and replaced with Bob the Tomato from the Christian cartoon Veggie Tales.
Look at these teeny hands, perfect for grubbing coins out of the church collection plate.
9. The dresser seen in the background of the above photo:
The artwork on the sides and top weren’t better.
10. A dilapidated hospital wheelchair which I used when shit-posting online.
My makeshift computer chair.
11. An eight-gauge octopus hook with the barbed end ground off. Not notable until you learn of its odd origins.
(I had both items in my purse, yet the compact mirror was what the airport security deemed suspicious.)
It was one of the ten that was placed through my skin and suspended me from a ceiling when I was eighteen.
12. Two bright-coloured petticoats that I bought for no good reason. I wanted to be a person who wore petticoats. Instead, I was a person who kept petticoats stuffed in her Hungarian Narwhal dresser.
13. Five pounds of masking tape the size of a human head. My high school unknowingly funded this project; it grew as I carried this from class to class in my backpack until I developed lower back pain. Then, one weekend, I lugged it from Langley to my boyfriend’s place in North Vancouver. I think he was impressed?
Which brings me to the strangest thing I currently own:
The prize is not a panda that has overdosed on a power box next to an empty raspberry clamshell, Gorilla Tape packaging, a Manila envelope, a broken shoe rack, and a bowl stained with sauce.
I’ve had to order the prize online, so it might take a while before it arrives. The deadline for the Most Curious Curio Contest is for Sunday the 30th at 8:35 pm. Pacific Standard Time!
Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of the GPS (Garmin Edge 1030) I’ve owned for three years. Since it’s spent much of its existence mounted on Yann’s bike, I didn’t bother learning the function of its three buttons or how the interface worked. To my chagrin, it took about an hour of impatient fiddling and button-mashing before I finally got it to sync with my phone, a success marked by the creation of my Strava account. (I’d already written about this here.)
One of Strava’s appeals is the stalking functionality. This could be me:
It’s official: I’m a regular at Canadian Tire. I guess this is because I no longer have instant access to tools, 99% of which belonged to Yann. I’m surrounded by tools every day at work, so on my days off, my hands start shaking from withdrawal. I am slowly building my tool collection: pink, 75% smaller, and 200% more expensive, of course. Stainless steel and black rubber are so unladylike, ew.
My latest trip to obtain made-in-Asia goods from Canadian Tire was for L-brackets and screws to reinforce my fancy bedside table:
Ok, I lied: it isn’t fancy.
It’s a workaround for Ikea’s MALM bed frame, which has poorly thought-out full-length drawers on the sides. If I were to use a regular four-legged bedside table, I wouldn’t have access to my pants unless I move the table! And I can’t be Porky Pigging it. I also need a table to support my nightly hydration operation.
When I moved into my current place, this table had to be cut shorter because it blocked the bedroom door from swinging open. I can’t access the drawers on the other side of the bed either as that side is against the wall, which gives you an idea of how dinky my place is.
Now that I’d made this table functional and sturdy with the addition of L-brackets, I could concern myself with its presentation.
While I have a tool deficiency, I have a sizable collection of art supplies, including a bottle of pouring medium that I’d bought years ago for one project. If you know what you’re doing, the result can be something like this:
By u/MEKYAS23
I’d painted the wood black. My next plan was to turn the top into a psychedelic pool of colours!
Instead, I turned it into a puddle of despair. I’d tilted and rotated the surface to get even coverage. When this wasn’t happening, I poured more paint into the gaps. It got progressively uglier as I attempted to correct the mistakes.
squaremeat.com 