Tag Archives: theft

Orgies, Meth Labs and Theft: How To Properly Welcome a Babysitter

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Dear Stacy,

Thank you so much for coming over to watch our son, it’s been so long since my husband and I have had a care-free evening alone. To make your night easier, we thought we should let you know a couple of things. First off, the heroin is kept in the cupboard above the fridge. It’s difficult to reach but you know how it is; if the heroin is on the counter, no one wants to finish their dinner. You’re welcome to help yourself.

 

If you decide to host an orgy, please use the living room rather than the dining room. Not only is the living room larger, and thus can accommodate more bodies, but the dark patterned flooring hides stains well. Most importantly though, the rug in the living room is much plusher and therefore easier on the bottom of whomever ends up on the bottom.

 

For run-of-the-mill, just your boyfriend sex, our bed is best. The bedroom set in the guest room was my grandmother’s and may not stand up to vigorous activity. Remember- safety first!

 

The valuables are hidden in a ventilation duct above our TV in the basement. I suggest Kijiji over the city’s buy and sell Facebook pages, items fetch higher prices there. Be sure to really extend your arm into the vent so you don’t miss the antique silverware.

 

For the purposes of a meth lab, the rec room strikes the ideal balance between ventilation and secrecy. It’s location around the back of the house hides the room from the street and a bush partially obscures the window. In addition, the kitchen fan is only a couple feet away, rendering it the perfect place for you to re-enact “Breaking Bad”.

 

Great news! We just got home internet which should simplify the set-up of a prostitution ring, as I’ve heard that pimps have moved off the street and online. The password to our network is dirtsquirrel1.

 

That should prepare you for every possibility tonight except if you decide to start a cult, in which case, my apologies, I should have left more chips and dip.
Thanks so much, we’ll be back around ten.

I Stole a Bike, So the Police Called My Mom

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Not my actual Mom thankfully, the police telephoned Tasia* the mother of the family I’m staying with. Had the police telephoned my real mother in Ontario, she would have told them to keep me in jail for a couple of nights then refused to pay my bail. My mother believes in natural consequences and doing hard time.

Getting back to my story, in the small Quebecois town where I’m currently living, the preferred method of transportation is biking. Thus at the beginning of the immersion program, all of the students dutifully marched to the house of a man who owns sixty some odd bicycles. Tragically he does not believe in repairing his stock, instead he gives a ten percent discount if the breaks don’t work and the advice to “be careful on hills”. The proprietor maintains that having a bicycle is the most important thing, regardless of whether it sounds like a maraca filled with screws when you peddle or if it fits.

Proprietor “A perfect fit! It’s a good bike” (Photo Credit : circusnospin.blogspot.com)

Proprietor “A perfect fit! It’s a good bike” (Photo Credit : circusnospin.blogspot.com)

 

For the second time during my stay here, I had to return my bike to him to receive a new inner tube. Instead of staying while he completed the repair, I asked whether I could borrow another bicycle for the day. He said “yes”. Having seen a tall guy hunched over a bike for a ten year old, looking like the bear in the picture above minus the fur, I quickly grabbed the nearest two wheeler and stated “This one works” before the owner could choose a bike for me.

 

Owner “Ah yes, a good size, you are small, the bike is small. Be careful on hills” (Photo Credit : www.dropthebeatonit.com)

Owner “Ah yes, a good size, you are small, the bike is small. Be careful on hills” (Photo Credit : http://www.dropthebeatonit.com)

The bike ended up being much too large, I flew back to the house of my host family, doing an impression of a starfish the whole way with my legs fully extended to reach the pedals and my flimsy pipecleaner arms stretched as far as they could go so my fingers just grazed the handlebars. Toppling sideways off of the enormous bicycle, I walked up the stairs to the house. Tasia, the mother of my host family greeted me “The bike owner just called. He accidently lent you his son’s bicycle. You have to return it.”

I have no doubt that had the bicycle owner not reached my host, the police would have been the next call. “One of the girls staying with Tasia took my son’s bicycle. I can’t reach Tasia, go find her.” It’s a small town, there’s not a whole lot else the police force has to do.

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of people who chose not to hand me over to the fuzz.

Reeling

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I’m still feeling lost. Although that’s not unexpected when you lose a part of yourself. My netbook held my work but it was also my connection to the world. The place where I could show my reality to everyone else, explain my point of view and talk about my thoughts.

Rarely in my life do I feel that I am being perceived for who I am, but through my writing, I could be myself. Like most writers, I live in my head, the same rules and laws do not apply in my mind and the expectations are different. Through blogging and typing on my little writing machine, I could build bridges between the two places; the world and my head. Even if I didn’t publish a piece, often I would share it with family members or friends, reading my work aloud when we were together.

In that quick moment, when a stranger sped away from my car with my computer in his hands, the link between myself and the world was severed. Effectively a flamethrower had been taken to the bridges I had carefully built. All of those thoughts that were so jumbled in my head but clear on the page were gone. I’m still trying to make sense of it.

*I wrote this a couple of days ago. After publishing my last post I was so touched by the outpouring of support from friends, family and readers. Between the many kind words and the passage of time, I am feeling a little better than when I penned the above words. Thank you so much to everyone who “Liked” my last post, left a comment, called or emailed to offer comfort. It was sincerely appreciated.

Loss and Lost

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Normally I do my best to create paragraphs that fit together and have a bit of humour added in. They’re written a safe distance from my true self, never venturing towards the rambling, disjointed, personal words which I put in my journal. I know bloggers can be that personal but I’ve never been comfortable with it. However, occasionally events happen that leave you so confused and hurt that only disjointed, personal sentence fragments are left.

My netbook was stolen this week. On Monday an anonymous man on a bicycle swiped my little writing machine from my car. I know this because I was shown the footage form the security cameras. On that computer was my nearly edited book and every piece of writing I had produced for the last three and a half years.

I mourned. I’m still mourning, every word that I didn’t put out to the world, all of the ideas that I kept in there for myself, the book that I had almost finished editing. All of it gone.

These past couple of days I tried to put words together, to push myself through the pain of my loss and be a clown but I couldn’t. There weren’t any words, I couldn’t find a place to start.

I’m sad and disappointed and angry at myself for leaving the possession I love most because it has so much of me in it, in a place where it could be taken. I’m frustrated that I never actually followed through with backing up my words on Google Drive or a separate device.

Part of me is glad though, that I thought to release my work to the greater world, that I put so much of what I loved and was proud of, up for the internet to see. That all of those words are still there.Eventually, when the initial pain of my loss has worn off, I know I will be more grateful for this and recognize how much content was saved in my one hundred and fifty posts. But for now, all I can see are the files I had yet to edit, the words I sweated over but hadn’t published, and all of the pieces I wrote just to write them. Those are the only paragraphs in my head at this moment.