Ugh. Talk about the housework that will never get done. Today is one of those days, and I’m only doing laundry and dishes, for pity’s sake.

The salt in our water softener ran out… sometime. I don’t know when. But sometime. Anyway, we NOTICED it two weeks ago, so I ordered a delivery of salt. It came today. I loaded it in the water softener, right up to the top, and set the softener to regenerate. An hour and a half or so after I started the regen, I loaded the dishwasher and headed upstairs to resume the laundry. As I walked by the basement, I could hear a mechanical hissing sound. It sounded like the water softener doing another regeneration. Its normally scheduled time is about 2:30 or so, I think, so that was reasonable. Besides, after being loaded with salt, I figured another regen wouldn’t hurt.

So, I started the washing machine filling with warm water to do a white load. I looked in before I dumped the soap in, and saw the water was all RUSTY. Brown and dirty looking. Thankfully, I hadn’t loaded in any clothes yet. And I thought, OH CRAP, THE DISHWASHER IS RUNNING. And it’s HALFWAY FINISHED. Oh shit, I thought, I’ll have to run that again. So I emptied the washer and refilled it. Cleaner, but still brownish. I refilled it again. Now it’s kind of yellowish, but still dirty. So I started it again, and I just walked away. Let it run empty. Because I don’t want to sit and fret.

So now, I have 4 or 5 loads of laundry left to do, and my washer is happily whirring away upstairs with nothing in it. And I’ll have to rerun this dishwasher to be sure all the brown crap is cleaned off the dishes.

But first, I am setting a reminder in my calendar to check the water softener again. Every 4 months.

Sigh. The summer is starting to wind down. I find myself feeling a bit of the melancholy that creeps up on me every year at this time.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the fall. Autumn is my favourite season, hands down. I love the colours as the leaves turn. I love the quiet as the summer rushing about comes to an end, especially up north. I love the smell of wood burning in the fireplace. I love that the days are warm but the nights are nice and cool. If we get a good, warm Indian Summer, all the better, because it’s like the summer warmth has decided to stay for awhile and with that, the summer clothes.

But I am a summer person at heart. I hate the cold with a blinding passion. As a kid, I stayed in through the winter. Hated the cold. I tell people one of the reasons that I got involved in volleyball was because it meant I could exercise but still stay indoors through the winter. So when the spring comes, I feel alive again. I get spring fever something awful. And then in summer, if everything is right and I have all the comforts of water to swim in and someplace cool to sleep, the hot days are wonderful. I spent my childhood outdoors in the summer from sunrise until sunset, swimming in the pool and suntanning and tumbling in the yard and just generally worshipping the sun. I went to camp and played volleyball out in the sun from dawn until dusk. If the world was perfect, I would still be doing all those things. Okay, maybe just the swimming and the sunning; I am too old for camp, and my back handspring-back tuck combination is long gone. But, we don’t have a pool, or a cottage by a lake that I can move to from May until October. So by default, I have come to love the fall.

But the end of summer brings about a peculiar bittersweet feeling just the same. Another summer has passed by. I did not spend as much time outside as I should have. I did not soak up all the warmth and do all the yard work and swim all day. I am one year removed from the kid by the pool. One step closer to the awful cold and snow and ice I hate so much.

I sometimes wonder if this is one of the reasons I have had such wanderlust all my life. The need to get away is always heavy in my chest. My father is very much the same. He says he joined the Air Force to see the world; he saw Flin Flon. But he has always hated the cold like me. He’s always yearning to go somewhere new, see something new. And those places are never, EVER cold. He doesn’t yearn, for example, to see Tuktoyaktuk or Iqaluit. He wants to go somewhere warm and sunny and, usually, by the water, like Portugal or Cuba or Spain. I totally understand that. If I could, I’d pack up BDH and the girls and move to Barbados or the Cayman Islands for a couple of years. Or even someplace temperate like New Zealand or Ireland, someplace without 2 feet of snow for 4 months of the year, someplace without freezing rain, someplace where the temperature rarely hits -15 degrees. But that will never happen. I chose to live with four homebodies, much as my father chose to live with a Winnipeg girl. Canada is in their bones.

And so, I feel a bit of a pang in my heart with the passing of summer. But it doesn’t take me long to get into the swing of things in the fall. Once the vegetables are in and the garden and all the summer tools are cleaned up, I am ready. With the first frosty morning, the sweaters are out, the cooking begins, and I settle in for a lovely autumn. It’s just letting go during these last few days that’s hard.

I am getting such a kick out of this blog. In my other blog on Yahoo, there’s a lot of fun stuff to do, sure. But this is just a lot more creative. I get to use HTML. I have customizing options. I can change colours and backgrounds and add pages. But most of all… it’s MINE. I OWN it. Not that this is such a big deal, but I don’t like the idea of anyone else owning my words. Billy Bragg and his whole fight with MySpace made me think about it a bit more than I probably would have. Well, that and the Girl with a One Track Mind, who actually published a book of her blogging. Mind you, Billy Bragg is a professional singer, and the Girl with a One Track Mind writes a sex blog, so you know, their appeal is much more lucrative and commercial than anything I write. Still, ownership is important.

I used to see that sort of thing a lot when I was working. As a grunt in a training or tech writing role, you have to learn that you have NO ownership over anything you create. You have to separate yourself from the work. The company you work for owns it. And that’s sometimes hard. You create this stuff and you fight for how it looks and what it contains, and yet, ultimately, you really have no say. You have to let it go. For a lot of people, this is hard. Now mind you, I never thought of technical writing as creative. There’s no creativity or writing skill involved—just follow the template, adhere to the rules that tell you what to write and how. It’s not like there’s any creative thought involved, because it’s regimented and repetitive. Any dope could do it, if they know the rules. It’s not writing, it’s typing. At least when I created training materials, some creativity and flexibility was involved. Not much, but some. So I never really cared much about what I created in my job, other than for my own personal pride in a job well done.

But now, what I create, I own. I have freedom of content and language and style. I can write what I want and, provided it’s legal, I can post it. I can change colour or look and feel or style to suit my mood or what I am writing about, or for no reason other than because I feel like it. And that’s kind of nice.

Welcome to my new blog. See how smart BDH is? HE DID THIS. The plan worked, the plan worked! He’s the ONE, baby! He is supergenius! He is robot king of the monkey things!

I decided this morning that it was time to push myself a little. I needed to make a change and needed to do something to motivate myself. And so, I joined Weight Watchers Online.

I have been struggling with my weight ever since I stopped playing volleyball competitively — so, for about 10 years or so. It’s been hard — for years, I was able to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, because my body just burned the fuel so efficiently. But then I took a job that had me travelling for 5 years, and I did not get the workout every day that I once did. Now, I still am as hungry as I ever was, and the fuel just doesn’t get burned off because I am no longer crazy active and fit. Plus, I live with a man who has a huge appetite. He loves to eat. He eats a lot, and often. And I have no willpower, because I love to eat too, and so I eat right along with him.

Being overweight hurts. Mentally, spiritually, physically. My joints hurt. It hurts to climb stairs or play with the neighbourhood kids or sit down on the floor. My self-image hurts. My self-confidence hurts. I am ashamed of who I am and how I look. I don’t like to go out anymore because I feel fat or my clothes don’t fit well or, worst of all, I might see someone I knew before I was overweight. I hate, absolutely despise, pathologically fear, anyone getting a picture of me because of how I look. It’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s hard to dislike yourself so much. So I need a change.

I miss a lot of things about being fit — wearing cute clothes, feeling attractive, running, jumping. God, how I miss jumping.

You have to understand, when you are a volleyball player, jumping is a big, big part of your game. You jump hundreds of times in a day, sometimes thousands of times. And jumping was the one thing I did better than almost all my teammates or competitors. I jumped very, very high. Some people have dreams about flying — I dream about jumping really high in the air. I dream about hitting that point at the top of a jump where most people begin to come back down, only I never did — I just went higher. That delicious, weightless moment of hang time where you are suspended in air like magic. I just leap, and pause.

I miss dreaming about jumping.

So, I decided to do something to motivate myself to get some of that positive feeling back. Weight Watchers Online just gives me a place to track my progress, make myself accountable for what I eat and the exercise I do every day. I am anonymous, which really helps deal with the shame I feel about being overweight. No one knows what I weigh or what I eat or any of that. I feel motivated to eat better because I know I will have to keep track of it. I don’t have to mess with meetings or books or anything. I just log on, keep track of things, and go. If I need to, there’s a forum where I can make posts and meet others and talk about stuff.

It works really well for me. I did it a couple of years ago when I was getting married and had a dress to fit into and people were going to take pictures of me. I had the motivation and the energy and it was fun. So I am doing it again.

Why now? Well, for one thing, if I plan on getting pregnant, it would be nice to shed a few pounds first, so I am not starting from a disadvantage health-wise. I want to build a better baby. Second, if I DO ever have kids, I want there to be some record of me, that I existed, that I was real — and my fear of having pictures taken doesn’t help that. So I want to feel better about myself so I can have some pictures of me. But mostly, I just want to like myself again. I want to like how I look and feel good about myself and not hurt all the time.

And I want to dream about jumping again.

Okay, I have never been a fan of going to the grocery store. I hate the badly behaved children, the pushy women in a rush, the carts shaped like cars that block the entire aisle. I’ve never been good when there are so many obnoxious people confined in one place, combined with driving something. But since I am now the domestic goddess, I have come to terms with the necessity of going there. And really, my grocery store is not bad — clean, bright, usually quiet in the mornings when I go in. So I am learning to get all Zen about grocery shopping.

However, in recent weeks, it has become the grocery store of the surreal.

First off, what kind of a meat counter runs out of steaks — filets, in this instance — right before the weekend? Every Friday I go in to pick up two filets for our Friday night steak-and-baked-potatoes-just-like-down-home dinner. And more often then not, they have none. Now, is it WISE to run out of steaks before a weekend when a) everyone is home and barbecuing and 2) most people go grocery shopping? Perhaps the teens behind the counter do not know what a filet actually IS? Perhaps they can’t be arsed to actually go into the locker and see that they actually DO have more? I do not know.

Then, there are the old people. On Tuesday mornings, a city bus full of old folks — I call it the Oldsmobile — pulls up and brings the oldies in from a local nursing home to do their weekly shopping. Now, this is very sweet, except for when you are trying to get your shopping done and are used to driving in the fast lane, and suddenly everything grinds to a halt, like someone doing 80 in the fast lane on the 401. But I am usually patient with them, and try to be pleasant and helpful. And then, there was the old couple last week.

I was at the dairy case, getting some milk. There was a cute old couple there, anywhere between 150 and 400 years old, looking like they just fell off a charm bracelet. They were getting some milk as well. I put my milk in my cart, and pushed it behind them and started to walk away. Suddenly, I hear one of them — I think it was the woman, due to the proximity — rip the loudest FART I have ever heard. Certainly the loudest one I’ve ever heard in a public place full of, well, the public. I almost stopped dead in my tracks. But then fear of imminent stench drove me into the baby aisle. Perhaps getting old is a license to fart without inpunity, I don’t know.

Then today, I went in to get my groceries as usual. Up ahead I see two biker dudes. Shopping together. Chatting about house stuff. With a ROTTWEILER PUPPY in the baby seat of the shopping cart. Okay, so we have Gay Biker Couple bringing their Baby out grocery shopping with them. It was like watching the Village People buy bread. It was very odd. Junior was well behaved though, but STILL. A puppy in a grocery store? And to top it all off, one of Junior’s daddies was eating a box of butter tarts as he shopped. I hate people who eat stuff without buying it. That’s worse than the bringing in the puppy, as far as I am concerned.

And so, I have decided, if suddenly aliens come to earth and need to get their groceries and bring along the Rockettes to do a number and even bring John Cusack with them into the Ultra, I will not be surprised. But they sure as hell better not crack open a bag of two-bite brownies before they pay for them. Because that’s just WRONG.

Holy. Effing. Crap. There are no words to sufficiently describe the ugly that is a humid summer here in southern Ontario. Hot and humid, followed by sticky and smog. It’s nasty. At 8:00 AM when we returned from our walk this morning, it was 27 degrees, with a humidex of 39. AT 8 AM.

When we walked out onto the porch this morning, it was like walking into a bathroom after someone has just had a really hot shower. By the time we were 15 minutes into the walk, my hair was wet. By 30 minutes in, my clothes were wet and clinging to me. By the time I returned to the porch again, I couldn’t see through the sweat dripping into my eyes.

But as sure as I live and breathe, there is nothing, NOTHING I tell you, more delicious than walking into air conditioning after 45 minutes in that kind of humidity.

Yes, I know the typical Canadian joke about the weather is that we all say “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!” Yeah, yeah. But there’s a good reason why. I mean, this is CANADA, for the love of dog. It’s supposed to be 4 seasons of seasonable weather, yes? Sure, we get lots of snow in the winter, so I suppose that this is summer’s equivalent to buttloads of snow in the middle of February. But somehow, that’s more tolerable than this. You can dress for the cold and the snow, and you can stay indoors. But with the humidity, you can’t get more naked than naked.

I need to win the lottery. First order of business: pay off some IVF debt. (Of course.) But the SECOND order of business? Put in a POOL. And then upgrade the air conditioning.