Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto
This plant – Beebalm – is very easy to grow. It blooms in late June to early July and keeps blooming right until frost. The leaves are scented and can be made into a tea similar to that of Earl Grey tea.
Want to Join Green Thumb Sundays? Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.
If you’ve come here for the Saturday Photo Hunt I’m sorry to say that I don’t have anything that really suits the theme of Doors … but if allowed this entry might work as it came through my DOOR early Tuesday morning:
Found: Tuesday morning in our enclosed front porch – one pair of well used running shoes.
Lost: My husbands nice white running shoes that he usually uses for his work as a porter at the hospital.
Priceless: The look on my husbands face when he realized the shoes above were left as a replacement for his stolen shoes.
On Tuesday morning, as I was upstairs getting ready to go and see my family Doctor about my knee that I could still barely put any weight on, my husband came up the the stairs to talk to me.
“Baby, don’t get upset.” he said.
“Upset? About what?” I replied.
“I can’t find my shoes. You know the ones I wear to work?”
He’d worked on Monday and he was tired when he returned. Could he have put his shoes in the back porch? worn them downstairs to the basement when he got home? Nope, he looked everywhere. They were gone.
He proceeded to tell me “Someone must have come into our front porch in the night or early this morning and took my shoes.” Shaking his head at the thought.
“What do you mean someone came in and took your shoes?” I asked.
“Well, you see, they left their old huge dirty ones that they were wearing.” he replied.
I went downstairs to see the shoes, and there inside my front porch were the shoes pictured above. Well worn, very dirty, crushed heel area. Yuck. There were sitting as you see them in front of one of the chairs were have inside the porch. A pile of our other shoes were nearby.
The person, probably a homeless, or perhaps someone that was recently released from the hospital (as in one of the psych patients maybe), must have been wandering around on the street and for some reason decided to enter our enclosed front porch. They tried on all the running shoes that we have out there and left the remains in a pile. It must have seemed like a shoe store to the person. Lucky find for him, unlucky for my husband.
My husband I both wear the same size shoe. He’s a short and I’m tall and somehow we both pretty much have the same sized feet. How rare is that anyway? His feet are wider than mine though, so we don’t trade shoes very often. Actually he’s not really allowed to wear mine as he stretches them out. Besides going back to the whole cross dressing memories that I have of and ex I don’t really want to see Chris wearing my shoes, at least not my heels.
I’m counting this as one more unlucky thing that has happened to us this month. Could have been worse I suppose. Chris has had those shoes for over 6 months and they were starting to wear a little with all the walking he does for work anyway. Besides, if I remember correctly we got them at an manufacture outlet so the price was inexpensive too. Unfortunately he needs new shoes now. Anyone know of any deals in the Toronto area?
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Now we are off to Ottawa. One of my Aunts is celebrating her 80th birthday and her family is throwing a surprise party for her. I haven’t been back to Ottawa, my home town, since finishing things up there after my mothers death in 2003. It might be a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster of a weekend.
The drive takes between 4 and 4.5 hours, depending on traffic and how fast we go. Unfortunately, with my knee, which happens to be a tiny bit better but still very sore and extremely swollen, our ride might take longer if it acts up and we end up having to stop a few times so I can stretch my legs.
The party is at 2 pm! It’s 7 a.m. now, so I guess we’d better get started. Oh we’re going through a heat wave here. It’s supposed to be 32 C (89.6 F) but with the humidty it will feel like 40 Celsius (104 F). Did I tell ya we DON’T have air-conditioning in our car? It broke last year and we didn’t fix it, well we tried but it didn’t work. So … it’s going to be a long hot sticky drive. We’ll do the same thing and experience the same conditions sometime tomorrow as we return home.
My Green Thumb Sunday post will be up sometime Sunday afternoon when I return!
1…. There’s probably more cons than pros to being a lefty, but I try to turn the cons into pros as often as I can take for example:
2…. Eating with others at a table – be it round, square or rectangle. Many lefties eat with the fork in the right hand and knife in the left but I use them the “correct way” fork in left, knife in right. But being a lefty it’s my left arm that’s moving the most and when I sit next to right handed people we bump elbows. A lot. How to turn this into a pro? Tell the waiter/ waitress or host that you are a lefty and ask to sit at an outer left hand corner of the table. You might even get to sit at the head or foot of the table if you mention that you are a lefty. The pro is that you end up with more room than many of the other dinners. I haven’t thought of any solutions for round table dinning except to try not to sit at one.
3…. Lefties usually write with the paper slanted to the right. School desks made for right handed students were a big problem – very hard to use if you are a lefty. Luckily I’m not in school anymore so I very rarely encounter “right handed” desks.
4…. I do have a problem when I sit at other peoples computers or use the computers at work. They are usually set up for right handed people. Most of the time I just have to move the mouse, but sometimes I can’t because the mouse cord is too short. Other times the whole set up is too difficult for me to use- the angle of the monitor is wrong, and or the keyboard is placed in a difficult to use place.
5…. Scissors! My first memory of using scissors is in kindergarten. I think it was my adventures with scissors that made me realize as a kid that I was just a little bit different from most of the other kids. I can remember how sore those little scissors made my hand feel when I tried to cut the construction paper. My inner thumb and outer index finger would end up blistered if I did a lot of cutting – and that still happens if I can’t find left handed scissors when I need a pair. Since I’m the chief scissor user in the house all of the scissors are left handed. Poor Chris.
6…. A lot of tools and kitchen appliances are difficult or even dangerous for lefties to use. Knives that are serrated only on one side often do a poor job in the hands of a lefty. I have a special bread slicing knife that my sister gave me as a gift but I can’t use it at all. Potato peelers, manual canopeners, even pitza cutters are tedious to use. Yes many of these items are made for lefties now but they can be hard to find and more often than not are more expensive.
7…. I have left handed pruners for my gardening but I had to special order the kind that I wanted and they cost about $20 more than the right handed model of the same kind.
8…. Only left handed people are in their Right mind. Have you heard that one before? The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side controls the left side of the body. So I’m in my right mind … maybe, well sometimes.
9…. Being right minded, it’s said that left handed people are more creative than many right handers. I am creative, well at least I think so. I like to draw, and I used to do a lot of graphic arts, my husband who is a muscian says I have a good singing voice so I guess I can sing. I enjoy photography but I’m not sure that I’d call that a talent just yet, however I am working on it.
10…. Studies have indicated that left handed people have a higher incidence of autoimmune disorders – inflammatory bowel disease (Ulcerative colitis, crohns), Arthritis, lupus … Unfortunately I’m one of the lefties with Crohns.
11…. Toilet paper. You don’t realize how important toilet paper placement is until you are left handed and the toilet paper is to the far right and perhaps set up so that the paper comes from the back of the roll (under). It’s hard to use that way. We have to use our right hand to get it, and for me the rolls that are set up so that the paper comes from under the roll – usually at the back of the dispenser or against the wall are the hardest to get at.
12…. Pens that have ink in them that doesn’t dry almost immediately when it’s put to paper are a royal pain too. Lefties end up smearing what they’ve written or end up with ink on the outside of their hand.
13…. I guess another pro of being left handed is that we learn to adapt to situations easily. We have to – we live in a right handed world and we need to use our right hands probably far more often than most right handed people have to use their left.
Bonus – A con. It’s hard for right handed people to teach lefties things that are “very” right handed. Things like knitting for example … some people have tried to teach me in the past but they ended up confusing both themselves and me in the process. My husband has been supposed to teach me guitar for over a decade now but he’s hesitant since I’m left handed. Maybe someday he’ll teach me the right handed way and I’ll figure out how to do it left handed on my own. Back to kindergarten – I can remember a teacher trying to teach me to tie my shoes – even that can be hard for a righty to teach a lefty.
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It seems that men have always had some strange sort of fascination for my bathing suits, and a strong desire to get into them. Well some men anyway.
By in them, I literally mean IN them. Oh yes I do!
I remember back when I was dating this guy named Michael. We had an on again, off again kind of relationship. Actually he traveled around a lot because he was trying to start a music career so we sometimes went months without seeing each other, but he’d always show up again eventually.
I can’t remember what exactly I liked about him, but I do remember what I didn’t like. He was the kind of guy that would suggest going out to dinner or to a movie and never ended up having his wallet with him when it came time to pay the bill. Yeah, that kind.
One of the last times that I saw him he’d just come back into town, from God knows where, and ended up at my door sometime late in the evening. He had no place to stay and wanted to rekindle some of the old sparks I guess. I must have let him stay over and then went to work the next day, or else I went out for some reason and left him alone in my apartment, long enough for him to have started exploring and going through my drawers and closets.
Whatever the reason I was out, I did eventually come home. I found him in my bedroom. I walked in to say hello and to ask him what he was doing and I was greeted with the most unexpected display!
He was standing there dressed in one of my one piece bathing suits!
I was shocked!
He was fascinated, happy, and more than a little bit excited. I, however, wasn’t the least bit excited by the view of him prancing around in my bathing suit that was stretched to the limit on his muscular and hairy body.
Total turn off!
Then to top it off … he pulled out one of my skirts – a pink one, and put that on too while I stood in utter amazement unable to utter a word.
Needless to say the skirt didn’t do anything for me either. Perhaps another colour might have done the trick? … but no, a hot pink mini and a tight black bathing suit and hairy chest was just so not my thing.
As he was reaching for another one of my clothing items – another skirt, a dress, a piece of lingerie? I can’t remember now, I was attempting to get him out of my bedroom and out the door. I was successful in removing him from the premises.
To this day I have no idea if he was taking advantage of a secret indulgence to wear womens clothing while I was away, or if he had been planning to surprise me and hopefully get me turned on by the jaw dropping display of him in my swimwear.
The next time he showed up at my door, perhaps a year later, Chris answered. I believe Michael stayed for less than 5 minutes and has never been back since.
After that last meeting I was fairly certain that I would never encounter another man that wanted to get into my bathing suit again … well, at least in the wrong, the oh so very wrong, kind of way, that is.
That was not to be. I was the one who was wrong.
Saturday night, as I sat by the Hot tub tending my wounded knee and glaring at my husband frolicking around in the water in an alcohol induced euphoria, I decided to pull out my bikini to show the hot tubbers that I really had been prepared to join them this time round. The last time I ended up at a hot tub party was just under a month ago, only I didn’t know they had a hot tub, and coax as they might, nothing would induce me into getting into the tub that night and showing off my in need of a shave legs! See, If I’d known, I would have been ready … but no way was I baring my legs that night.
As I pulled out my purple bikini bottom and waved it in the air, my brother in law, who the hot tubbers had also been relentlessly trying to coax into the tub, declared that he’d be happy to borrow my bikini and get in.
I made that bikini disappear so fast you would have thought I’d waved a magic wand or did an “I dream of Jeanie” nod of my head. They were gone, never, never to be seen again by my brother-in-law!
Now, women in mens clothing? Sometimes that’s cute. However men in womens clothing is NOT cute, at least not if they are trying to turn on their girlfriend. Then again, they’ve come out with Manties now, so maybe I’m wrong about the whole guy wearing feminine clothing being a turn off for women?
What do the women say? Ever walked in and found your boyfriend or spouse trying on your more feminine clothing items? Turn on or turn off?
Men, don’t feel excluded, I’d love to hear your take on this topic too … any secret desires to wear your ladies bikini or lingerie? Speak up.
