When Hanna Montana Is Possessed By Evil Forces


English: Hannah Montana aka Miley Cyrus on the...

English: Hannah Montana aka Miley Cyrus on the stage of Hannah Montana Tour Français : Hannah Montana alias Miley Cyrus sur la scéne de la tournée de Hannah Montana (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Several birthdays ago, Dee received one of those Hanna Montana barbie-like dolls. She was probably at the zenith of her Hanna love. She wore Hanna to school and to bed. She watched Hanna. She wondered “what would Hanna do”.

To be clear, she understood that Hanna was a fictional character and could distinguish her from Miley Cyrus, who she has never shown the slightest interest in. Dee just loved the idea of an “ordinary” girl with a secret identity that just happened to be completely outside the realm of what could possibly be considered normal. And she’s a sucker for slap-stick.

But, as is the fate of most dolls in our house, Hanna was rarely – if ever – played with. After her initial new novelty wore off, she was sentenced to life in the box of forgotten dolls.

Until this last Saturday.

Dee’s new BFF, Pai, was invited to sleep-over. Like most of Dee’s friends, past and present, she is enamoured of the dollhouse that Rob (aka Santa Claus) crafted for her several Christmas’s ago. It is a house of beauty, and it’s massive. Dee and her friends are only just able to see over it and it takes up a good deal of bedroom floor real estate.

In addition to the doll mansion, Dee’s amassed quite the impressive collection of Barbies and paraphernalia. The latter in no small part is thanks to Edie and Mick, who bequeathed her their late 80’s/early 90’s accessories of which many would be completely new and novel to Dee’s friends. Naturally, they all want to play Barbies, and it’s about the only time Dee herself will sit and play with her collection for literally hours on end. Dee is a cardboard box, scissors and Scotch tape kind of kid. Barbies don’t make her top ten list of ways to pass time. Unless her friends want to play.

At some point in the late afternoon, Hanna Montana was discovered and one of them noted that she seemed evil and perhaps even – alive with evil.

Thus came plan A. To catch Evil Hanna in the act of animation. And to this end, Steve Jobs came to the rescue.

Both girls are nearly as welded to their iPods as the average teen’s eyeballs and thumbs are ensnared by their smart phones. Hanna was left on the lower bunk caught in the cross-hairs of two lens with video rolling. If she moved, they would know.

But, both iPods mysteriously stopped filming after 12 seconds.

“There is no way that could have happened,” Dee told me later.

And Hanna, again quite mysteriously but certainly with sinister intent, flipped from her back to her tummy.

“She moved,” Pai said solemnly.

“She did,” was Dee’s saucer eyed concurrence.

Plan B was clearly needed, and this involved “caging” a now trussed up with ribbons Hanna in a mesh pop-up hamper. Surveillance was once again employed, and the girls went about their merry way.

Fast-forward to bed-time and despite the wicked Hanna’s lack of obvious escape attempts, neither girl felt able to sleep in security as long as the malevolent hunk of plastic molded by underpaid Chinese  was in the room.

A defcon level plan C was hatched on the fly and Rob and I, who were showering off the day’s asphalt roofing material, heard the patter and scurry of feet down the basement stairs. Mood killer that it was, I dried off, donned robe and went to assess.

I found the two of them in Dee’s play area and Pai was attempting to tie a cloth belt from an old swimsuit of mine around the play dishwasher while Dee perched on the mini-trampoline, clutching the stuffed bison she picked up in Yellowstone last summer holiday. A thin cloth ribbon tied around her wrist was looped around Pai’s waist.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

They both looked at me as though it should be plainly obvious to all but the most mentally defective.

“We can’t sleep with Hanna in the room,” Dee said. “So we are caging her down here.”

“I see,” I said, “and you are tied together why?”

“Stuffies will protect you from evil,” Dee explained. “So I am holding Bice and Pai is protected as long as she is tied to me.”

Which is what best friends do, selflessly risk corruption by unspeakably evil Mattel products while you have their backs.

“It won’t tie,” Pai piped up.

“Let me help,” I said.

Which is what Moms do, we humor children who have needlessly hyped themselves up to irrational levels of imaginary fear.

After Hanna was secured, I ushered the children back up to Dee’s bedroom and told them I’d check back when I came back up to bed for the night.

By this time, Rob was out of the shower and upstairs and I updated him of the latest in Hanna control to which he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“At least we have proof that they actually have imaginations,” he sighed as if that were the only lemonade that could be squeezed out of this mushroom cloud of escalating terror.

Before bed, I peeked in Dee’s room again to find both girls in the top bunk, ringed in by every stuffie Dee owned.

And, of course, I had to ask.

“Stuffies can be used as a force field,” Dee said.

“This way,” Pai continued, “if Hanna gets loose, she can’t get to us.”

“Good thinking. But if Hanna gets loose, tomorrow we are going to have Dad chop her up with the hatchet and burn her in the fire pit,” and with that I wished them pleasant non-Hanna dreams and went to bed.

I was reading when Rob slipped into the room, closing the door behind him and grinning like an evil Hanna Montana doll.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“You should have seen the looks on their faces when I asked them why Hanna Montana was sitting in the hallway.”

“Way to give them nightmares, Baby,” I told him. “I told them if the doll got loose in the night, you’d chop it up tomorrow.”

“What did they say to that?”

“Pai asked if she could chop the head off.”

The next morning found Hanna still secure and the girls decided that more permanent measures for her ultimate containment were in order. Armed with stuffies, they retrieved evil incarnate from the dishwasher and with only YouTube vids as their guide, they constructed a cage out of old pizza boxes and a drink carrier from A&W. An hour and a half, water-colours, and tape later, the Hanna was neutralized for good.

“We taped her arms and legs together and then taped her to the bottom of the cage,” Dee said. “She narrowed her eyes at us, but she can’t get out.”

Last night, Dee slept soundly, even though Hanna-bot was under the bed.

“I have Bice and as long as he is touching me I have a thin force field around me for protection.”

And so, once again, the power of little girls, stuffies and arts/crafts has vanquished the sinister forces of the world. Rest easy.

Dating While Widowed ….. and everyone has baggage


Young Widow

Young Widow (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“….. and everyone has baggage.”

I ran across this quote on a widow blog. It was written by a widow, lamenting/raging/venting after her second break up with a post-dead husband boyfriend. And the thing that struck me was the negativity of it. Which is odd because the idea behind the concept of “having baggage” is relatively common in our modern culture. Most people, at some point or other, will christen their histories with the term because they are frustrated and see the past as an obstacle to what they want right now.

It’s a curious way of framing things. After all, how can events that are chronologically behind you be blocking your future? Unless, like Lot’s wife, you are still looking back. In which case, the fact that you are tripping up shouldn’t come as a surprise. Walking backward is a good way to fall down.

After the question of “how soon is too soon to date again”, the problem of how to put away the past and not use it as a measuring stick in potential/new relationships is one of the bigger issues of dating again. Whether our late marriage was good, bad or ugly, any future significant other and the relationship formed deserves its own space where it is not judged by or compared to the late spouse and marriage.

Sure, everyone has “baggage”, but its less than helpful to label what is merely a chronology of events as such rather than simply calling it what it is – your history.

You have a history. It shaped you, taught you what you know for good and not so much good, and that is all that it is. The minute it becomes “baggage”; it’s time to rethink your readiness to date or to be in a serious relationship. Nothing good is likely to spring up from negative comparisons, blame and generally wishing your new someone was your now deceased someone, who has magically stopped being human and levitates in an photo-shopped state of romantic perfection. Constantly going back to “SoNso would never have x, y or z.” whether it’s just in your head, or worse, thrown out into the open spaces  at your new partner, is the teenaged emotional blackmail weapon of choice that adults should hesitate to pick up again.

Baggage is synonymous with issues. And still having active issues will, more often than not, hamper the development of a new relationship. It’s good to know what you want out of a relationships and what can’t be tolerated no matter how sexy, charming and good on paper someone is, but don’t confuse idealizing the past and the dead with a checklist for new love.

Love me/love my baggage?

Um, no.

Why should anyone have to sift through your issues in order to get to know you?

And why should anyone have to be your grief counselor or help you work through your bad relationship habits (the ones your late spouse let slide because you were both too young to know any better)?

The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t. If you are ready to date again, you are ready to be an adult who is honest with yourself about who you are and what might be a problem as you move on with your life. Seek real professional help if your “baggage” needs to be filed away under “past life”, but don’t expect someone else to carry it for you or accept being treated like crap because “… everyone has baggage”.

Everyone has a past – a history that often has bruised squishy spots in it – but no one but your mother has to “love you anyway”. If you want love, you have to earn it and part of that process is getting your history together rather than using it as an excuse.

 

 

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The Tropics of Canada


Heat Wave (comics)

Heat Wave (comics) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One doesn’t normally associate the Great White North with wilting scorched-earth heatwaves, but it happens. Even the more northern edges of Canadian civilization experience sun blistering summer weather.

When I first moved to Alberta five years ago, my husband, Rob, assured me that summers were milder than the soggy aired Iowa sauna summers I was accustomed to hibernating out in my mostly climate controlled existence in Iowa.

Due to sinus issues and a hyper-active immune system, I hopped from one hermetically sealed zone to another from early April until sometime in October. My house, vehicle, the school I taught at, the grocery, the mall, Target – basically anywhere I frequented was chilled and dehumidified to a tolerable level.

But in this neck of Canada, things are different. Public spaces are likely to have a/c, but private homes aren’t. Our house, which was built over sixty years ago, is one such climate controlled free zone. After having a/c since 1997, I was unprepared for the transition back to the days of yore.

As a child, we had one window unit in our kitchen, which Dad only purchased the summer my younger sister DNOS suffered from some heat related malady that scared he and Mom enough to cave in on the a/c question a little bit. My family didn’t go the full central air route until I’d left home for university. So while my siblings began to lose their ability to tolerate heat, I was steadily building my heat tolerance muscles in the sweltering dorms of Iowa City. Though the apartments I would live in after had this or that wall unit, it was only enough to take the sweat off and not really enough to cool unless one was willing to remaining completely motionless.

It wasn’t until I bought my first home in 1997 that I had central air and I never looked back.

Perhaps because Rob promised me a cooler summer, the weather in 2007 was warmer and more humid than normal. In fact, July and August rolled one heat wave into another, pounding my sinuses and kicking up my faux asthma enough that my poor husband was apologizing to me almost daily for relocating me in the Canadian version of hell.

It was two summers later though that finally prompted him to invest in an air conditioner for the bedrooms, and a prolonged heat wave the summer after saw the purchase of two more window units and the trade up from unrefrigerated tent trailer to a/c equipped holiday trailer.

Still, no central air.

Our current ungodly hot wave of sun-baked oppression sent us packing to the holiday trailer to sleep and has spurred talk of “putting in central air when we replace the furnace next year”.

I have a love/hate thing with heat. My inner Iowa girl is offended by cool summers. If it’s July or August, it should be hot. There has to be something to differentiate summer from winter, spring and most of the fall up here. And I truly miss spring, which we don’t have despite what the calendar might say about it.

But, even though I don’t wilt like the native-born (and Dee, who has lost all tolerance for heat over the last five years), I react more vigorously to humidity than I used to. Something to do with the fact that for the most part, it is super dry here and I just am losing the little ability I had to cope in the first place. So, though I like warm and even very warm, the sinus swelling and pain that goes along with it, I can no longer deal with.

Which brings me back to conditioned air.

Rob spent all the last weekend plus foolishly risking heat stroke up on our roof. His sense of  reno timing is, as always, impeccably flawed. I don’t know how he does it, but he nearly always manages to pick the worst weather or time period for starting really big projects. It has to be a gift.

So there he was, roofing in 32C full on sunshine, which unbelievably was an improvement over the pouring rain of the weekend before which left our dining room and back porch drenched and dripping. Roofing meant no time to install the air conditioners and a retreat to the trailer each night because the upstairs was too hot to even draw a breath in let alone find a good night’s sleep.

Tuesday evening brought a bit of relief to the main floor when Rob designed a new window rig for the downstairs unit but even by Wednesday afternoon, it was still 24C on the main floor and stifling upstairs. Cooler temps are on next week’s horizon but the projection is for more heat and higher than normal temps as the summer wears on.

I don’t know that I am entirely sold on the reasons why the climates across the globe are shifting. A good explanation is likely still beyond our scientific capacity to explain and there is too much nonsense from either extreme end of the debate for anyone to be able to seriously assess the situation. Regardless, climate is changing and where it will finally settle is a question that is probably not knowable or even preventable at this point. The arguments are silly and pointless. It doesn’t matter why because we have no way to stop it anymore even if we understood the mechanisms causing it. Blame and denial aren’t helpful and anything that isn’t geared to preparing to adapt is a waste of time, money and effort.

Rob thinks that if we stay put we will eventually live in quite a moderate climate. And if by “moderate”, he means “like Iowa” then we might have to consider Nunavut someday.

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