So I was just minding my own business the other night, watching my children wrestle over the television remote while I surfed the net looking for randomly odd things to pin on Pinterest when I heard the sweetest sound of all.

The ping of my email announcing I had something new to read.

I’ll admit it, I still get excited over new unread email. I mean you never know what is going to be waiting for you there, in your shiny Internet mailbox. Will it be the promises of an all new, incredibly powerful penile enhancer or will it be a proposal from a African prince who has a weak grasp on the English language who needs you to rescue his Kingdom from evil overlords all by depositing your life’s saving into his bank account, but no worries, he’ll pay you back with interest and kittens as well as make you a Knight of the throne. Or something like that.

More often than not it’s email spam lovingly forwarded from a naive family member (cough*my sister*cough) or some lame joke I first read in 1998 that a different family member is just now discovering (cough*Boo*cough).

But every now and then I get gems such as this:

RM:
I really enjoyed your Valentine’s Day story, but that image of crap on a cracker has kind of stuck with me.

I mean I can see it and smell it and I’m seriously in danger of tasting it.

Would you please repent?
Thanks,

(Name Redacted to Protect the Moronic) from Alaska

To be honest, I didn’t really know whether to laugh or to be sketched out. I decided to choose the latter and figured my wisest course of action would be to ban his IP from commenting on my blog. For the remainder of time.

However that would take knowing his IP and I couldn’t find one.

But then I had a light bulb moment! Ding! and realized I could match the time code of the email to the IP tracker in my blog analytics. (I knew programs like Google Analytics, Statcounter, etc…were for more than inducing crushing despair at realizing no one reads my blog anymore. Except weirdos in Alaska, apparently.)

Yep.

I was right.

There this person was.

And just like he said, my analytics reported that my new friend was indeed Sarah Palin’s neighbour. (Well, okay, the program didn’t say that. For all I know, my new friend could be that Levy dork’s neighbour.)

I also noted I had a fairly high amount of traffic from Transylvania of all places. I thought only Dracula lived there. Who knew?

As I dug, I noticed that my new friend had a long and storied history of visiting me. I figured my new friend must like checking in to see if I was in the process of cleaning up my language and start the repenting process.

I mean I know that’s why my husband keeps reading my blog.

And that’s when I noticed that my new friend wasn’t just reading my blog from the newest igloo on the block. My new friend was actually using a computer with a trackable IP.

Huh. Looks like I found the one employer who hasn’t banned my blog from the work place environment. I wonder if I could get someone up there to talk to someone down here about making sure my blog is available for my husband’s place of work. I know my husband would enjoy being able to show all his employees and employers exactly who he is married to.

Ok, probably not. Whatever.

Still.

My new friend was quite clearly using government equipment to be, well, creepy.

Busted!

So here’s the deal my new friend whose name shall remain redacted unless you continue to creep me out, I’m very sorry that you are kind of a freak.

Worse, I’m really, really sorry that you spent an ungodly amount of time downloading my image off of my blog than I cared to count. I’m even sorrier to think about what in God’s green earth you are doing with your hard drive filled with my face.

Very very sorry.

I don’t want to get anyone fired and I certainly don’t want to shame anyone.

But you did ask me to repent.

And everyone knows repentance starts with admitting your sins and asking for forgiveness. And crap on a cracker, if that ain’t exactly what I’m doing here. So that’s what I’ll be spending my days doing from now on.

Repenting.

Right after I talk to my banker about saving some African prince and investing in penile enhancers.

So remember how once upon a time, we had a ridiculously ugly couch that my children slashed with knives and the dogs puked on and how I was so very tired of furniture which looked better out on my lawn than in my house that I stupidly allowed my husband to purchase a leather couch with no wifely supervision?

And now, in my small living room there sits an oversized, overstuffed, hideously coloured sectional couch. A new couch that may actually look worse than the original piece of crap we were trying to replace.

So ya. I still have that couch. And 18 months later it is still ugly. And slightly uncomfortable, although that just may be my broken down old back screaming at me and not an actual reflection of this monstrous couch. Everything is uncomfortable when your back is not bendy.

My husband insists I’ve been not so passively aggressively punishing him ever since he bought that ugly couch. Of course, I will absolutely admit (and have already) to punishing him when I purchased my chair. But in my defense, this is a chair worthy of purchasing. It is beautiful. It is comfortable. It scares my aging father and small children alike.

It is the BEST. CHAIR. EVER.

I love this chair. It makes me happy. As long as no one is sitting in it. Because if you are sitting in the chair then I can’t appreciate the fully awesome power of its upholstery. This chair isn’t furniture. It’s art.

My husband calls it the bane of his existence.

Whatever. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

But after purchasing my chair to make up for his couch, things reached a stale mate. I no longer felt the need to adjust the balance of the furniture scales because in my mind they were fully balanced.

And really, who ever wins in a furniture war? Besides me, that is?

But Boo, he is convinced I’m out to get him with my decorating tastes. In his twisted mind, I’ve got nothing better to do than think of new and creative ways to torture him with tchotchkes and knick-knacks and colour schemes.

If I didn’t know better I’d tell him he needs to adjust his tin foil hat.

But here’s the thing. I’ve got years worth of evidence to prove to him that I’ve always had a bizarre decorating palate. Only he was too distracted by my cute face and small arse to notice.

What does it say about him that he’s just now noticing my taste for the bizarre? (Let’s gloss over what it’s saying about the size of my bum, shall we?)

I mean, when we first started dating my entire bedroom was a shrine to Elton John and John Wayne. I was 16. I surrounded myself with images of an arthritic cowboy and a flamboyant queen. The only thing that would have made my room any cooler was if I could have gotten my hands on some life sized statues of my boys and posed them together.

And then there was the time I hung my husband’s taxidermied deer head over our headboard and wrapped Christmas lights around its antlers. Because I needed a night light.

I’m not a stranger to strange. Which means, neither is my husband since we’ve been together for so darn long.

I mean he didn’t blink when he came home to find this in our bathroom:

What else was I supposed to do with an empty Crystal Head vodka bottle? 

Nor did he twitch when the UPS man delivered this:

My brother likes my cookie jar. Because he has taste.

Okay, so he did dig in his heels when he walked in the door and saw these staring back at him, but I can only presume he was only upset about them because he wanted to purchase them as a gift for me and I went and stole his thunder:

There is nothing weird about paper mache animal busts hanging over an ugly couch. Nothing at all.

But he also freaked out when I put up a crucifix made of dead people’s faces, a plaster statue of a dead Chicken Little and put an actual alligator head in my living room. And yet, I’m positive he’d miss them all if they disappeared. Just like I know he’d miss the creepy little tribal statue I keep at the front door, the bong I bought in Mexico because I thought it would look awesome on our dresser (and IT DOES) and the collection of human teeth I have framed in our closet. (It’s not weird. It’s our kids’ baby teeth. I’m not completely creepy. Sheesh.)

He’s even grown fond of the dead gopher earrings I like to wear on our date nights.

I still think I need a dead bird head necklace to match my earrings, Boo.

Okay, maybe fond is too strong a word.

Still. I think I’ve proven my point. My tastes, albeit strange, have always been so.

Which is why, I want it on record that my latest purchase which was delivered earlier today, was not in any way, an attempt to annoy or anger him.

I just figured the spot above the flat screen television he bought even though I asked him not to because our old television worked just fine, looked a little empty.

So Boo, when you come home and see this staring back at you every time you go to turn on the television, just know I was filling a decorating hole.

I’d have hung a real moose head above the television, but damn, those suckers are BIG.

Just think of how awesome he’s going to look wearing a Santa’s hat during the holidays.

And maybe be grateful that I couldn’t find a life sized statues of Elton John and John Wayne to bring home. Because I totally looked for them.

This year, my husband and I declared us miserable old fuddy duddies and refused to make any plans for New Year’s eve.

Oh fine. For the sake of honesty and accuracy I’ll amend that statement so that my husband doesn’t have a coronary.

This year *I* declared my husband and myself miserable old fuddy duddies and refused to accept any of the plans my husband tried to make to ring in the new year.

For one stinking year, I just wanted to sit home in my pajamas, watch a marathon of Criminal Minds, and do absolutely nothing. I didn’t have it in me to dress up, go out or host a get together. I wanted to start 2012 quietly. I just wasn’t in the mood to play.

My husband and my teens, however, weren’t completely on board with my lack of plans or enthusiasm. They were itching to go out and it wasn’t long before both of my teens had arranged to go over to a friend’s house for an impromptu slumber party to ring out the year.

My husband volunteered to drive them over to their friend’s house because he is friendly with the dad. Fine. Whatever. Go abandon me for wilder pursuits. Go enjoy your night of merriment and frivolity because I am going to enjoy holding the remote control and changing the channel whenever I feel like it, I muttered back at them as they fled our house.

I was just happy to be home, with my Criminal Minds and my television remote.

An hour or so later, my husband came back from dropping the kids off and when he walked through the door and looked at me, he stopped short.

“Um, what have you been doing since I left Tanis?”

I looked at him blankly and waggled the remote. “Nothing. Watching television. Why”

“Um, have you noticed anything unusual about your face today? Looked in a mirror recently?”

“Well, I showered early and I looked fine then. But I think I’m getting an eye twitch. Why? Do I have spinach in my teeth?” I asked as I hopped up to look in the mirror hanging in our foyer.

And then I saw what was clearly freaking my husband out.

My right eye was swollen.

“Weird.”

“Totally. But I guess that explains the twitchy feeling and why it kinda hurts to waggle my eyebrows,” I murmured as I examined my face.

The next morning, my eye was so swollen it was almost sealed shut.

The morning after that, it looked like I was growing myself a third eye.

It’s been awesome. Awesomely grotesque.

I mean I’m used to my face looking like this:

Except lately I refuse to wear my contacts and my hair is blazingly red so I probably look more like this:

Except of course when I’m playing with my computer. Then I tend to look like this:

I like to take weird pictures of myself and randomly send them to family and friends. It freaks them out every time.

But today, on day five, my face looks like this:

I mean, it’s not quite normal but clearly there is no third eye growing like there was a few days ago, so I suppose that’s progress.

So basically I wrote this post just to show you all that my eyelid is swollen, I’m still in my bathrobe and clearly I need a shower and some make up.

Awesome.

Carry on then.