Irritants

Here is the exact quote from Environment Canada regarding tomorrow's weather: "Flurries ending near noon then cloudy with 40 percent chance of flurries."

Uh, okay guys. Snow, then maybe some snow. It's a bit redundant, but we get it. It's really too bad that the weather is cooling off again because we had a thaw today and half of the ice in our driveway has melted. When the temperature drops tomorrow, those puddles will simply re-freeze into a sheet of ice much like the sheet of ice we had on the driveway yesterday, except that the new sheet of ice will be much newer and smoother and more slippery. There's not much to be done about it except being extra careful. So if you come visit us, that's fine, but watch your step!

We have a mantle in our living room. There is no fireplace there, but the beautiful woodwork of the original mantle remains. The place where the fireplace part used to be has been plastered over and wallpapered, and Mark is becoming obsessed with "doing something" with that flat square that covers the spot were a fire used to go.


He wants to put some sort of picture there. I'm not morally opposed to the idea, but I'm pretty sure that there's a 99.9% chance that it will look TACKY.

He went looking for pictures online the other day and every one of them made me cringe. I mean, it's just blank now. It's relatively benign and you can focus on the beautiful carved wood if you want to look over there. Putting a picture in the middle kind of reminds me of that gross artsy wallpaper from the 80s - you know the kind I'm talking about. It's a forest scene, or maybe a beach, and it's wallpaper, and it takes up one entire wall in a room.

AND IT'S TACKY.

I don't know. If he could find a picture that I could imagine putting in that spot without gritting my teeth, I'd do it. It's not that I particularly don't want to do it. I just can't imagine what would possibly look good there.

Okay, since we've just covered one of my recent pet peeves in this post, I thought I'd share one of Mark's with you as well.

Now, I have to say that Mark is a master of ambivalence. If he had a super power, his name would be Ambivalent Man. His favourite gesture is a shrug, and he never gets angry, and I mean never. I used to think that he was repressing everything, but over the years I slowly learned that he just doesn't mind things. That's just Mark.

That all changed recently when the world was introduced to Nadya Suleman. She's that lady in California who gave birth to a litter of eight babies (via in vitro fertilization), but oops, she already has six young children at home (also via in vitro fertilization), and oops, she's a single mom and oops, she couldn't even afford to feed the kids that she had before this latest little incident occurred.

She makes Mark angry. The fact that she was so incredibly selfish, crazy, and irresponsible makes him angry. The fact that she is getting international attention also makes him angry. Every day or so I'll find a new news story about her and tell him about it, just to see his reaction. Today Ms. Suleman launched her very own website to ask for donations from the public. I told Mark and he immediately started spouting a long series of vitriolic statements about what a stupid woman she is. I completely agree, but I'm surprised and amused by this display of emotion from him. I'm sure he'll comment on this post to say how stupid that woman is.

And he'd be right.