Suzanne Craig-Whytock's Blog

It’s official–I am a hor. And no, that’s not a spelling error, and no, I didn’t hit my 60th birthday and decide to use my feminine wiles on an unsuspecting and soon-to-be appalled clientele–no, ‘hor’ is short for horologist. And what is a horologist? I hear you ask. Has Mydangblog suddenly earned a certification in the art of telling people that a random constellation assigned to their birth defines their character, and that I’ve started providing daily reports about very specific things that will happen to them–and the millions of other people also born in that month? Of course not–that would be insane. But I AM crazy–crazy for clocks. And if you know anything about me at all, you know that I’m obsessed with clocks. I have OCD, and I find great comfort in being surrounded by clocks, not sure why, because all the explanations on the interweb don’t seem to apply to me–I don’t have a fear of time passing, I don’t obsessively check the time, and I don’t compulsively count things. (I DO have what’s known as ‘magical thinking’ about clocks, but it only applies to the digital number 3:33, because at 3:33, the clock in our bedroom, which projects onto the ceiling, looks like 3 spaceships having a battle, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s usually around 3:30, so I wait until 3:33 to see the space battle, whisper Pew Pew! to myself, and it puts me back to sleep.)

At any rate, at last count, I have over 56 clocks scattered around the house, and only about a tenth of them actually keep time. But lately, I’ve had a run of luck.

First, if you recall, there was the antique mantel clock that I retrofitted with a battery pack–it runs like a dream and is currently sitting in pride of place in my bathroom. Then, 3 weeks ago, I came across a beautiful gingerbread clock at Value Village for only twenty dollars. It didn’t work, so I was planning on selling it in my antiques booth as ‘clock decor’. It was taking up room on the kitchen island so I brought it into the dining room. It stayed on the dining room table, dormant as a bear in winter, until I needed to clear the table. I put it at the back of the sideboard. A little while later, I could hear a faint sound, a sound that was both exhilarating and soothing at the same time. I approached carefully–the gingerbread clock was RUNNING!

Me: Ken!! Ken!! The clock is working!
Ken: What clock?
Me: Don’t come any closer! Tiptoe!

Of course, Ken completely disregarded my instructions and clunked his way into the dining room, but it was fine–the clock didn’t even seem to notice, and kept right on ticking. A few minutes later, it began to chime.

Ken: Is it really 8 o’clock already? It doesn’t seem that dark out…
Me: Shhh. Just give it some…time, hehe.

Despite my best efforts, the gingerbread clock loses about 20 minutes an hour, and chimes out random numbers, but that’s just fine because I GOT IT TO WORK.

And then, a few days ago, I was at the Mennonite Thrift Store (Mennonites dress like the American Amish, but they have cars and cellphones), and right by the till, there was an antique Sessions clock, just sitting there, as though it was waiting for me. It was very cheap, and there was a sign on it that said, “Pendulum package and key inside.” So I bought it, because who doesn’t need another clock, especially one that’s almost 150 years old?

I got it home and set it on the counter. It seemed to be a little overwound, so I took the back off and manually started the pendulum. I did this several times. Suddenly, the pendulum continued to sway back and forth, and the next thing I knew, the clock was chiming–and not only was it chiming, it was keeping THE CORRECT TIME. I kept it on the counter for two days, where it continued to keep perfect time. Then, Ken and I went out grocery shopping, and when we came back, IT HAD STOPPED. I almost cried. But I was never one to give up–I moved it to the dining room, the scene of my last success, and kept manually trying to restart it. Finally, I sprayed the innards with WD40–EUREKA. And now it sits on the dining room table, and we all tiptoe around it, and I’m scared to move it in case it stops again. Temperamental little b*tch. But it keeps perfect time.

And you’re probably now thinking, Isn’t this supposed to be a humour blog? This isn’t that funny, her going on about some stupid clock. But it IS funny. Because I’m a hor. A hor for clocks.

So, I turned 60 this past week. It was not a particularly momentous day, as the family had thrown me a party on the Saturday before, and it was wonderful. But on my actual birthday, which was Tuesday, I was once again in a high school classroom. At least this time I wasn’t presenting and the students pretty much ignored me, so that was nice. And then Ken took me out to a fancy restaurant for a steak dinner, and came back home to the most incredible caramel cheesecake with toffee sauce, made by Kate’s lovely boyfriend Max, and it was the best cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. 60 years old isn’t bad, I guess–I can’t do a cartwheel anymore but I get discounts at the thrift store now. The hair on my head no longer grows as fast as the hair on my lip…but on the positive side, the hair on my legs hardly grows at all. So as my dad would say, “What you lose on the roundabout, you save on the swings.” He’s Scottish, so he has a lot of weird sayings, but no one knows what they mean. At any rate, it was all very nice, and I was thinking about other birthdays and found this throwback to 2014–my first birthday post about the best card I’ve ever gotten. So here it is, just for you:

Specific types of birthday cards are a tradition in my family. My parents always buy me cards with beautiful messages on them, and I always appreciate the sentiments, because they are from the heart, and I love my parents tremendously. My aunts, on the other hand, endeavour to find the funniest cards possible, which are also from the heart, albeit another area of the heart, and I also love them tremendously. This past weekend, my family threw me an early birthday party, and one of my aunts gave me the BEST birthday card ever.

I share it with you now, so that you can copy and paste it into any card you want (don’t tell the copyright police). I opened it up and this is what it said:

• Okay, I’m not sure this will work, but let’s try it.
• Act like you’re reading something personal that I wrote in your card.
• After a couple of seconds, laugh as though I wrote something very funny. In fact, tilt your head back when you laugh so it looks extremely funny.
• Now nod your head as though I wrote something very serious and heartfelt. Maybe touch your heart and exhale, but don’t make it look forced.
• Okay, now close the card, look at me with sincere gratitude, and mouth the words “thank you”.

So I followed the directions, and you wouldn’t believe the reaction. Everyone was like “What?!! What did it say?!!” Then I passed it around the room and other people followed the directions too (an Oscar to my brother, who has a PhD and it’s not even for acting!), until everyone who hadn’t read it was freaking out. Try it for yourself—it’s better than “pin the tail on the donkey”, that’s for sure.

The other tradition with cards that we’ve developed as a family is to give someone a card that has nothing to do with the occasion, but to doctor it up to fit. This year, Kate gave me the best one that any member of the family has ever done, and I laughed my head off when I read it (and just for the record, Waiting For Godot is a fantastic play, KATE):

She definitely inherited my sense of humour. Anyway, it’s been a great birthday week–last night, Ken invited our friends and neighbours for cake and snacks and it was the best night. I feel like a very lucky old woman.

I don’t know if you, like me, suffer from social anxiety and if yours, like mine, has gotten worse as you’ve gotten older. Things that I used to do without much stress are now sometimes quite daunting, and I’m constantly forcing myself, it seems, to do things that exacerbate it. For example, this week, I was asked to speak to a group of 45 high school students about being a writer and publisher. Remember, I was a high school teacher for over twenty-five years, so this shouldn’t have been a difficult task. But I’ve been OUT of the classroom for several years, and while I THOUGHT it would be fine, the night before I was wracked with nerves. To make it worse, the morning of the presentation, all the highways were closed due to an accident, and then I also had to worry about finding a way to this school, which was about 45 minutes from my house, and did I mention that I had VOLUNTEERED to do this?

I did make it to the school on time, and then I waited in the library, trying to set up my PowerPoint with the help of the school tech until the bell rang, and all these 16 year-olds came in to see me, and you can imagine how incredibly excited they were to hear all about writing and publishing from a 60 year-old woman. It was the usual suspects: a majority of the kids were fairly apathetic and looked bored for most of the time I was speaking, two boys spent the first half of the presentation giggling and whispering to each other until I laughed at them and told them they were being distracting, and the rest were polite enough not to be rude. And then there was a group of kids near the front, mostly girls and a couple of boys, who were engaged and seemed like they were enjoying my “journey as a writer, publisher, and radio host”, and it was very nice, especially at the end when I raffled off two of my books and the winners seemed genuinely happy about getting them and asked me to sign them. BUT. There was this one girl in particular, a girl who smiled and nodded encouragingly as I went through the presentation, who laughed at my dumb jokes with what seemed like sincere appreciation, and clapped heartily for me at the end, presenting me with a thank-you card on behalf of the group. And that one young woman—she made all the difference. I don’t know her name, or anything about her, except that I wish her all good things in her life, and I’m grateful to her.

And now, in other news, here is the best marketing strategy I’ve ever seen.

I have only three words: Buzz buzz, baby.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the dentist. I got a clean bill of health, as well as a few good show recommendations from my hygienist, the lovely Harmony (Unknown Number: The High School Catfish was as riveting and bizarre as she’d promised). “But,” the new dentist said to me, “you have some areas on two of your molars where the enamel is quite worn. You should make an appointment to get those patched.” At my look of panic, not having had ANY kind of dental procedure in years, he assured me, “You won’t need any freezing. I just have to rough up the surface a little and then apply a compound.” That sounded easy enough so I made the appointment.

On Thursday, I got to the dentist in plenty of time, and I sat in the waiting room listening to some random dude talking very loudly on his phone to someone about a woman who apparently wasn’t supposed to be in his apartment, but he KNEW she’d been there because he had set the thermostat to a sensible 72 degrees when he left and when he got back, the thermostat was now at 73 degrees, so it had to be her. Apparently, it was JUST LIKE HER to turn the heat up. The whole thing was befuddling–like why does she still have a key if her whimsical thermostat meddling is such a problem, and does she just go into his apartment, turn up the heat and then sit there for a while? But it was entertaining, and a good distraction from the fact that the dentist was running late.

When he finally came in, he greeted me as if we’d never met before, and greeted me thusly:

Dentist: How are you doing? Taking a break from work?
Me: (laughs): Oh no, I’m retired.
Dentist: You’re retired?! But you’re so young!
Me (foolishly thinking he was complimenting me): Oh, haha, I’m going to be 60 in a couple of weeks.
Dentist: I thought people in this country couldn’t retire until they turn 65. You’re so lucky! I’d love to be retired.
Assistant: Retired so young, yes, I’d like that too. Lucky you.

And I so badly wanted to say, “Lucky?! Do you think I won ‘retirement’ at poker, instead of working for over 30 years, paying almost half my salary into a pension plan, yet still having to work part-time to afford things like GOING TO THE DENTIST?!” But I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem like a good idea to antagonize someone who would shortly have his fingers in my mouth.

We were all quiet for a minute while I guess they were fantasizing about being retired, then the dentist asked the assistant, “What are we doing today? Ah, OK.” And then he said to me, who was lying prone with a stupid bib and plastic sunglasses on, “We’re just going to start with a little freezing” and I realized he was holding a needle, and I immediately said, very loudly, “NO.”

“Oh, it’s just to help with the pain,” he said. “We don’t want it to hurt, right?” And I responded by squeezing my lips shut and forcefully shaking my head, like a very small child refusing to eat beets or whatnot.

“You don’t want any freezing? But I have to drill into your teeth. It might not hurt THAT much but I can’t be sure.”

I stared at him, and said, “You told me I wouldn’t need any freezing. I don’t want to do this.”

He sighed. “I can try doing the drilling without the freezing. Just put your hand in the air if it hurts and you want to stop.”

And so he started drilling into my teeth. And it DID hurt. And I knew exactly how Dustin Hoffman felt as I waved my hand wildly in the air.

“A little sensitive, is it?” the dentist said. “Just a tiny bit more and we’ll be all done.” So I dug my fingernails into my palms until the drilling stopped, and he patched my stupid teeth with his stupid compound and I tried not to hit him when he stupidly said, “At least you don’t have to go back to work after this.”

And then I went to pay, and it cost $482 for a procedure that took less than 10 minutes from beginning to end. So at that rate, I guess he’ll be able to win retirement soon too.

In other, more pleasant news, here’s the miniature room that I made for my parents, who love classical music. I think it turned out pretty nicely, and there was no drilling involved.

My car, the Chevy Sonic Turbo, recently turned 12 years old. I’ve had it for 10 years myself, and together we’ve enjoyed a decade of driving. I love my car, but the one thing that drives me crazy, and I’ve discussed this before, is the fact that the hands-free calling is very archaic. There are a lot of commands to go through, and it has a terrible time recognizing simple names like ‘Ken’. As a result, I changed ‘Ken’ to ‘Kenneth’ in my contacts list, but even still, it invariably asked me, “Did you say ‘Kenneth’? as if I have some thick accent that makes my requests indiscernible. But then on Friday, this happened. I was driving back from the bank in another town, but I’d stopped off at the Restore Store, and wanted to let Ken know about the cool lamp I found. I hit the call button on my steering wheel:

Car Lady (because it’s a female voice): Ready.
Me: Call.
Car Lady: Call. Using ‘Suzanne’s phone’. Please say the name or number to call.
Me: Kenneth.
Car Lady: Did you say ‘Jeff Goldblum’?
Me: What?
Car Lady: Pardon?
Me: ???
Car Lady: Please say a command.
Me: Call!
Car Lady: Call. Using ‘Suzanne’s phone’. Please say the name and number to call.
Me: Kenneth!
Car Lady: OK. Calling ‘Jeff Goldblum’ using ‘Suzanne’s phone’.
Me: What the f*ck?! (hangs up)

I sat there for a minute, not sure what to do. Jeff Goldblum? Then I realized that years before, I had received a link to get text messages from Jeff Goldblum, which I thought at the time might be a scam. I had received an initial text from him that said this:

Which is exactly what someone who WASN’T Jeff Goldblum would say, am I right? At any rate, Jeff Goldblum really WAS in my contacts list, but that didn’t explain why my car phone lady was trying to get me to call him. Was it a sign from the universe? But I didn’t want to talk to Jeff Goldblum, I wanted to talk to Ken, although I’m sure Jeff Goldblum would have been breathlessly ecstatic over my lamp find, if the way he acts in most of his movies is any indication. I pressed the car phone button on my steering wheel again:

Car Lady: Ready.
Me: Call.
Car Lady: Call using ‘Suzanne’s phone’. Please say the name or number to call.
Me: Kenneth!!
Car Lady: Did you say ‘Jeff Goldblum’?
Me: No, you stupid woman! Kenneth!! Kenneth!!
Car Lady: OK, calling ‘Kenneth’.

The whole situation was so bizarre that I decided to investigate. And you know what? It turns out that the text number IS actually Jeff Goldblum. Here’s a link to his Facebook video from November 2019 announcing that if you set his number, 310-620-6558, as a contact, he would text you with updates about his career: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=529097061000888 But I guess he got bored very quickly of the whole thing, because I haven’t had a message from him since 2022. Yes, I got ghosted by Jeff Goldblum. And I’d gotten over it, years ago, so thanks Car Phone Lady for re-opening that wound.

Speaking of wounds, Ken once again managed to almost lose a digit on the table saw. This time it was his thumb. And this time, I was a little less sympathetic—I mean, the first time, it’s a terrible accident; the second time, it’s more like, “WHAT DID YOU DO?? WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT WAITING FOR THE BLADE TO STOP SPINNING?! Even the doctor at the hospital (who had sewn him up last time) asked, “Is this ‘weaponized incompetence’? (which is where you do something so very badly that no one asks you to do it again) to which I replied, “I didn’t ask him to build a shed! He WANTED to do it!” and the doctor said, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about him,” and I said, “Are you referring to the way you’re stitching up his thumb? Because yes, I’m hoping we never have to ask you to do this again,” and we all laughed. Except for Ken, who was grimacing in pain.

In other news, last week, I had a lot of people ask for pictures of my cute boots, so here they are:

Adorable, yes? Jeff Goldblum would love them.

As you may remember, Ken and I recently took a trip out East. What was the purpose of the trip, you ask? To see the colours, of course. I’m not sure if people in other countries do this, but in Canada, we will literally drive hundreds of kilometres to see the fall colours and ooh and ahh over the reds, oranges, and yellows, where once it was only green. So I don’t know if it’s something peculiar to Canadians, but here, it’s considered completely normal to drive around all day taking pictures of trees in the fall. So that’s what Ken and I did a week and a half ago, having spent a lot of money to fly to another province and rent a car. Then immediately after we came back home, OUR colours had started to change, and we could see them for free. This of course means any time we go out, we have to plan a country route, and I drive so that Ken can take pictures like these:

In other news, I had to have an ultrasound guided needle biopsy on my swollen and painful collarbone joint. But I’m not going to talk about THAT as much as this:

Nurse: So I’ve just checked and these gloves and bandages are latex-free—oh my gosh, I love your boots!
Me: Thanks! I just got them!
Nurse: They’re adorable!
Ultrasound technician (walks into the room): What’s adorable? Oh, those boots! They have embroidery on them!
Me: I know! It’s the first time I’ve worn them!

And we all oohed and ahhed over my boots like they were the fall colours until the surgeon came in. He, on the other hand (or foot), was not impressed by my boots, if the way he stabbed me full of lidocaine was any indication.

In other other news, I’m currently doing a book event, sitting outside a book store with my books, smiling at people and hoping they buy one. And it would be so nice except I’m in a mall right across from a seating area, and there are these two old Muppets who’ve been there all morning and haven’t stopped loudly complaining to each other about anything and everything the entire time. Seriously, Statler and Waldorf—go the f*ck home, or at least buy a book! Maybe I should show THEM my new boots…

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to thank my wonderful publisher Jane Cornwell of Jane’s Studio Press for nominating me for a Pushcart Prize for my short story “Mr. Death Comes To Town.” It’s a real honour to be nominated, especially for a story about a character that is near and dear to my heart and has appeared not only in both my short story collections, Feasting Upon The Bones and Dark Nocturnes, but is also featured in my novel The Devil You Know. If you’d like to know more about Mr. Death, aka Mort Sterven, you can get either of my short story collections here:

Feasting Upon The Bones

Dark Nocturnes

And now, on with the show…in which I respond to spam comments on my website:

1) Buy Adderall online

I don’t need to. I am my own speed. Have you not met me?

2) Buy weed online

I don’t need to. I live in Canada, dumbass. I can go to the strip mall and get all the weed I want. Also, my neighbour has two weed plants that rival my quince bush in size, which explains why I keep thinking I smell skunk in the backyard.

3) Buy African grey parrots for adoption

Why am I paying to adopt a parrot? Also, does it swear? If not, I have no interest…unless I can teach it to swear.

4) Great article

Thank you, ‘Benefits of CBD’. I didn’t reference CBD in my last post, but it’s nice to know that you’re following along.

5) i am a child who lacks knowledge but i always read your website. This website is very helpful in doing various homework that i do. i like your website.

Apparently your lack of knowledge resides in the realm of capitalization. Silly child.

6) Wonderful

Thank you, ‘RVs For Sale In Your Area’. I am.

7) On Monday, my sister and I went to the market to buy cakes and it would take 1 hour to travel from home to the market. During the trip, I watched content on this site which was very useful and entertaining.

You drove an hour to buy cake?! Is this some kind of weird math problem, like if my sister drove one hour to buy cake and I spent an hour watching a blog post, who wasted the most time? Also, how did you ‘watch’ my content? I literally just write what comes into my head. Wait…are you in my head? Do you have cake?

8) when I came home from school my uncle and I went to the city and would buy clothes at the biggest clothes shop in my city, from school to the mall selling clothes it would take 3 hours, while waiting for the trip I felt bored and finally I remembered this blog which can entertain me while traveling

Dude, you put the cake girl to shame. 3 hours?! No wonder you were bored. Tell your uncle to get a dvd player for his van or whatnot. Then you can watch my favourite movie Alien Vs. Predator. That one’s a banger.

9) 1 week ago I tried to go to a lake to clean it and let the fish live in peace and comfort, and that’s when I found this blog which helped me refresh my life.

That’s me—doing my best for the environment and refreshing all the fish.

10) 3 days ago I tried to find pleasure by going to the beach and feeling the sea breeze, but then I felt very comfortable because there are several things that make life more enjoyable, namely this blog to read.

Based on the number of you who are going to the beach to feel the sea breeze and then making your life more enjoyable by reading this blog (27 of you to be exact), I really think you should start a beach volleyball club and stop bothering me.

11) I went to a city 3 days ago with my partner and there I saw an inn that was exactly the same as the blog I read, and I finally read this blog again to make sure and it turned out to be true I was very happy.

My blog is an INN?! You need to hook up with that ‘Buy weed online’ dude—you’re smoking the wrong stuff.

12) Wow, it’s really amazing, finally I found information that presents unique news and is very interesting for me to read while drinking coffee.

How dare you?! If you know anything about me at all, you know I hate coffee. Blocked!

13) 7 days ago I went to a place to get various kinds of pleasure which started from seeing this special blog

I am NOT a porn site. Get your pleasure somewhere else, you pervert.

14) 1 week ago I tried to get some inspiration by fishing in the middle of the deep and wide ocean to get lots of valuable experience, and in the end I saw this blog which is very special for my entertainment.

So you were fishing in the middle of the ocean, and then you saw my blog? Dude, who’s your cellphone provider?! I need to get in on this—I can’t even get a signal on Township Road 2.

15) In the evening my friend and I decided to go hang out with my friends at a cafe and in the middle of that I opened my cellphone and started reading this very constructive blog.

Seriously? And when you looked up, had all of your friends left for a party because they knew you were more interested in your phone than hanging out with them? JFC, get a life.

There are literally THOUSANDS of comments like these that automatically get routed to my Trash folder on a daily basis. Most of them are from someone, or many someones, named ‘bokep’ and when I looked up what that meant, it’s Indonesian for PORN. So thank you, PORNBOTS for clogging up my comments with your weird families, friends, and outings to the beach, the mall, the village, the coffeshop, the lake, and all the other places you go to read my blog. What an incredible fanbase.

This past week, Ken and I went out to the East coast of Canada. Travelling within your own country is great—no worries about currency exchanges, border security, or paying exorbitant amounts for cell phone plans. We decided to rent a car, visit friends, and then drive the Cabot Trail. It’s the perfect time of year to do it because the fall colours are just stunning. And doing so much driving gave Ken and I a lot of opportunities to have very important conversations.

Me: The other day, I got an Amazon delivery and I was about to throw away the box, but I didn’t.

Ken: Because it was a good box?

Me: Obviously. We’ve officially reached the age where we keep empty cardboard boxes because they’re good boxes, not because we actually need them.

Ken: They always end up coming in handy—that’s a guarantee.

And we realized that it’s not just boxes…

Gift bags: You know the ones I mean—not too big, not too small, holiday-neutral but fancy enough for any occasion. Even better if the gift tag hasn’t been written on. If you know anything about me at all, you’ll know I have the gift wrapping skills of a five -year-old (actually most five-year-olds can wrap a present better than I can) so gift bags and tissue paper are my go to. And anytime I get a nice one, someone else in the family gets it back.

Wood: Ken does a lot of woodworking and wood can be expensive so we have no issue grabbing a piece of wood off the side of the road to use later.

Me: Ooh, stop! There’s a lovely pallet at the end of that driveway there!

Ken: Nice! I see a coffee table in our future!

We actually did make a coffee table out of a wood pallet once which I sold it for $75 bucks pure profit. The one thing I never nagged Ken about cleaning up is his woodpile. Even if Ken has no plan for any of it at the moment, it’s still all good wood and might come in handy later. And you can scoff, but he’s almost finished the new little cabin he’s building me and he did it all with his late dad’s “good wood” as well as our own finds and offcuts. The other day, we went by a dumpster and found several pieces of good wood that I might do something with—or not, but at least I have the wood.

Bubble Wrap: Who in their right mind ever throws away a piece of bubble wrap? That stuff is like gold. If you don’t use it, you can pop it. It’s multi-purpose.

Envelopes: I don’t do it often, but I have been known to keep a good envelope. They go with the loose Christmas cards I have stored in the dining room closet. And there’s nothing like the satisfaction of matching an envelope with a card…

I’m finding it really hard to concentrate because I’m in the airport waiting at our gate and there’s a woman talking very loudly on her cell phone to someone and apparently she has 120 oat cakes in her carry-on and just got a tattoo in Halifax with “the best line work she’s ever seen” but she can’t show it to the person she’s Face-Timing with because it’s on the inside of her thigh. But we’ll be home soon, so it’s all good. Also, Happy Thanksgiving!

For the last year at least, I’ve had a swollen sternoclavicular joint, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s the joint at the end of your collarbone in the middle of your chest. No one can figure out why it’s swollen, and it’s extremely painful, so I was sent to see a neurologist who ordered an MRI. When the hospital called to schedule it, they told me not to wear any metal and asked me if I had any metal in my body. I ran through a mental catalogue, at which point, after having made a detour into a delightful reverie about becoming a human forklift, I determined that I was metal-free. I had carefully considered the surgeries I’d had over the years, and I assumed if a surgeon had left any metal in me, I would know it by now and therefore could enter the MRI tunnel without any worries.

I was WRONG. I am FULL OF METAL.

And how did I arrive at this horrifying conclusion? Well, I recently had an upper chest X-ray as a precursor to the MRI, and on Thursday, I was able to access the report through the radiology clinic dashboard. It was pretty humdrum, and I was getting more than a little miffed once again at the liberal use of the term “unremarkable” (although I was pleased to note that my lungs are apparently “well-aerated”) when it said this: Cholecystectomy clips noted. I was like “What the f*ck is a chole-thingy?” so I googled it, and it’s when you have your gall bladder removed, and I did that about 20 years ago. I realize I’ve just made it sound like I reached into my own abdominal cavity and pulled it out myself, and if that did indeed happen, you will note that I would have accompanied the pulling out of my gall bladder with a flourish and the words Abracadabra, but a surgeon did it, and he was a terrible magician. And I KNOW this because in the same way that a terrible magician would accidentally sit on the top hat and kill his rabbit, this person left METAL CLIPS inside my body. I’ve been setting off the airport security alarms for years and telling them it was MY BELT when, in fact, I am a human IED.

According to my research, there are different kinds of clips for this—some dissolve and some are permanent, but the issue is that no one even asked me if I wanted to become a cyborg, and normally I would have said YES, but in this case, there’s no upside—I mean, it’s nothing AT ALL like having forklift arms, and I was initially very upset (not to mention worried that an MRI might dislodge them, and then I would be slowly stabbed to death from the inside while I was in the MRI machine), but then I remembered the latest Suicide Squad movie. There was a variety of new characters, including a guy called Polka Dot Man, who could shoot polka dots out of his body and eviscerate people with them. Polka dots are a stupid weapon, but you know what’s not? METAL CLIPS. So now I’m going to write to James Gunn and suggest that, if he ever does another Suicide Squad movie (doubtful because both versions received terrible ratings), there should be a new character introduced. Her name is Heavy Metal and her superpower is shooting sharp pieces of steel out of her body:

Criminal: Who the hell are you?!
Heavy Metal: My name is Heavy Metal, loser.
Criminal: You look rather unremarkable to me.
Heavy Metal: Prepare to die.

Last week, I bought a footstool. It was dark cheap wood and had dark tapestry fabric on the top, but the lid lifted for storage and it was only 5 bucks, so I got to thinking that I would paint the wood grey and re-upholster the top. Which I did, and the paint looked lovely (aside from the transfer I may or may not have put on slightly off-centre—see picture at the end). The problem was that the fabric on the underside looked choppy and unprofessional no matter how much I tried to trim it, but then I had an idea. I rummaged through my basket of sewing notions—well, it’s not so much a basket as an empty Quality Street tin—and found something that just might resolve the issue:

Notice the name of the manufacturer? Obviously kismet.

Me: Do you think this would work?
Ken: What is it?
Me: According to the packet, it’s Rick Rack.
Ken: Maybe…
Me: No, you’re right. The colour is all wrong. However, RickRack would make a great name for a James Bond villain.

Cue naughty fantasy sequence (and if you’re a little prudish, you might want to skip this one)…

M: Double-Oh-Seven, we need you. Apparently, RickRack has abducted Pussy Galore!
Bond: Pussy Galore? Again?! Well, Pussy is delightful. I can see why he keeps coming back for more.
M: Intercept RickRack before he gets to the Upper Holstery Islands and deliver Pussy to us, James.
Bond: I’m shaken, not stirred by this turn of events.

Some time later, on a cargo ship off the coast of the Upper Holstery Islands…

RickRack: Ah, Mr. Bond, I’ve been expecting you.
Bond: Release Pussy Galore, RickRack! There’s nowhere you can run.
RickRack: I’m never gonna give her up. I’m never gonna let her down.
Bond: Did—did you just Rickroll me?
RickRack: No, I RickRACKED you, Mr. Bond. But you can have her. To be honest, I’m not particularly fond of Pussy. I only kidnapped her to lure you to the Upper Holsteries.
Bond: But why, RickRack?
RickRack: Because…because I’m in love with you, James. Is there a chance for us?
Bond: Have you actually SEEN any of my movies?
RickRack: Sigh. I’m never gonna give you up—
Bond: Just stop. Come on, Pussy.
Pussy Galore: Oh James, thank you for saving me!
Bond: Enough of the small talk. We need to hurry—I have a date with Holly Goodhead later and no one misses a date with Goodhead!

And all I can do at this point is apologize for my giggly thirteen-year-old imagination, but in my defense:
a) I was going to include a scene with Bond and Q discussing a missile launcher that was extremely euphemistic but even I know when enough is enough and b) I’m not the one who named the Bond girls things like Miss Goodthighs, Chew Me, Xenia Onatopp, Holly Goodhead, Plenty O’Toole, and Pussy Galore. That was a DIFFERENT giggly thirteen-year-old.