The Arbolog |

I find that when you are packing to move, you often find reasons to get rid of things. It’s like shedding skin – if I am given the opportunity to make myself feel like I have a clean slate, I will do everything in my power to make that happen. And the more you do it, the easier it is to get rid of things that you otherwise would have held on to because there was no motivator to get rid of it.

I’ve been paring down here at Chez Arbo since we are packing to move, and nothing is sacred. I’ve passed on some of Kale’s clothes, some of his toys (including toys he still occasionally plays with but I can’t stand for various reasons), and just about anything I haven’t used or thought of in a year. Granted, there is some stuff that we haven’t used in a year for understandable reasons, like camping gear and snowshoes that we will pack up and move with us. But clothes not worn in a year? GONE. Shoes not worn in a year? GONE. Purses not used in a year? GONE. I don’t need it. I have so much stuff it’s simply ridiculous.

Stack o boxes

Another project I’m working on is ripping all of my CDs to our giant external hard drive. Theoretically, when we move I am buying a MacBook Pro and getting rid of our desktop PC. We have this giant sized external drive that we significantly under-utilize, and it’s my hope that by piling all of our music onto it, and then setting up a wireless home system where the external drive and printer live in a closet and we can both access them from whatever point in our house, then we have a built in stereo system. It’s a theory, and it’s likely I’m going to have to buy another component to make it all happen, but I’m tired of carrying around these plastic CDs that I rarely listen to, and I’m hoping that by having them on my computer, I will access them more frequently. And if I don’t, at least I don’t have a giant pile of plastic to house.

Stack o plastic

It’s starting to become much more real that we are MOVING (t-minus 20 days and counting, actually) and I’m starting to write lists, and overwhelm myself with what needs doing between now and then. I’ve ordered our new service for electricity and for internet, cable and phone (thanks Telus for making that dead simple – one phone call and no charge – hells yes customer service), I’m starting to call around with address changes.

I’m starting to see shades of long forgotten OCD habits – checking, double checking, methodical overanalysis, lying in bed awake at night composing lists. I hate moving but I love the scrubbed new and shiny sense of possibility that first week in your new house.

And I can’t wait for our house. Oh man. I cannot wait. Space! To! Move! Space! To! Play! Space! To! Enjoy! I love our house more with each passing day and I keep waiting for this buyer’s remorse I keep hearing about to set in.  SO far, nothing but excitement and thrilling happiness.

My dog turns 11 today. I adopted Mooki when she was a mere two and a half. Time flies. She was so skinny then and is now a much more square looking chubby sausage on toothpicks.

Mooface

Mooki has been significantly knocked down the totem pole at Chez Arbo since the arrival of one Mr. K. Pants, and while it was fairly evident that the Moobag was disappointed with this turn of events, she didn’t care *that* much because well, Mooki doesn’t care that much about anything. Except maybe cheese. She’s come around to Kale a bit – although slowly. These days it seems she has actually attempted play with Kale, and has given him a – gasp!- tiny bits of kissiness once in a while. Moo is not a kissy dog for the most part – which is fortunate as her breath is revolting -so little licks and tentative kisses are a surprise.

Moo is slower now, and I see time catching up with her. She likes her creature comforts and especially sleeping on beds surrounded by pillows, and occasionally we see a limpy leg after a long sleep in one position. She snores like a train more often than not these days. She sheds more than she ever has, and she’s stuck in her ways so steadfastly that I’m starting to think she is as stubborn as she is just to spite me. She thinks that the water in the designated water bowl is for suckers, and it is the algae-growing nastiness in the trough outside that she prefers to drink. She will ask to go out, and now, set in her ways, is more persistent and scratchy to be let back in instantaneously after a quick sip.

When Miss Mooklyn Pie dies, I will be very sad. Although it could be a long way off – shibas are known to regularly live to 17 – I see time making its mark on Mooki, slowly creeping across her fuzzy butt and settling into her bones, her eyes, her greying snoot.  I might complain about her and joke about her snootiness, but really, I will miss her dearly. Yesterday I actually reminded her that she would make a very lovely pair of slippers. Because she was being a snot to our neighbour’s dog. Again. Sigh. At least she is predictable.

Happy birthday Mooface.

Mooki’s birthday is a bittersweet day, as it is also the anniversary of Dad’s death in 2006. I’ve talked about my dad before, and last year at this time I also wrote a post about him, and while I’m not trying to make this some sort of blog memorialization project where every year I tell you about how sad I am to have lost my dad, I am making a point of thinking of Dad today. I ran across some files the other day (as I’ve spent a great deal of time going through boxes of crap in an attempt to downsize) and I found the copy of Dad’s service record from the Navy. More than ever I know that my Dad was a good man, but reading snippets of a life before I existed fascinates me. He wasn’t just “Dad”, he was so much more than that. As a parent now, the understanding of how invisible you become has hit home.  Today, however, I am remembering one specific event from my teen years:

I used to be involved in youth theatre. I was one of the older kids and I had a fantastic memory for lines, so I regularly got handed long winded roles in plays, like narrators, or fairy godmothers, or wicked witches. Disclosure: I secretly miss community theatre and it’s my hope that one day I can return to community theatre and let the inner showoff back out of the box she is living in.

At one point in grade 10? 11? 12?  I was involved in a production of Aladdin, that was written in a singsong rhyme-y verse interpretation of the classic story. Rhyme scheme was the highly effective A-B-C-B and it was a complete cinch to memorize because of it. And my job was Scheherazade and I was telling the story of ourhero, that scamp Aladdin. I sat on a little stool on the stage apron during the actual action and would narrate in-between scenes.  I got decked out in this horrendous pink and gold billowy 60’s harem suit.  I think my mom still has this suit somewhere in her tickle trunk and I will give $40 to someone who could actually fit it. Some volunteer mother slathered my eyelids with turquoise blue eye shadow and used spirit glue gum to adorn my temples with rhinestones. I walked out onto stage under a spotlight against the black curtain and I spoke my opening lines. I flubbed a bit here and there, out of nervousness more than anything, but I did a fairly passable job and the audience clapped nicely after my opening monologue.

After the show, my dad presented me with a rose and was teary because coming to my play had made him see just how absent he’d been from my life. As a snot faced teenager, I was merely embarrassed.

Here’s to you, Dad. I still miss you and love you.

Just some disclosure off the top: I have not been paid or asked to write this review. I bought a Diva Cup from my local London Drugs for $39.99 about three years ago. You can buy one too, if you want.

Okay, first of all, I have been waffling on writing this review. Funny, I can tell you all about childbirth and breastfeeding and baby poop and ulcerative colitis and whatever else. But menstruation is taboo, more than anything else. Girls tend to think that menstruation is something you don’t really talk about, and although my mom was awesome when my period started and got me a starter pack of all the standard available goodies out there and was happy to show me how to use them or tell me anything I wanted to know about how it all worked, I know I’m not alone when I say I don’t really talk about my monthly cycle with many people outside of my husband, my midwife,  my doctor, and perhaps my closest friends. Because really, does anyone actually want to hear about it? Meh, not really.

Don’t want to know what I use to deal with my period? Then stop now, and go check out this awesome site about eating locally.

The Diva Cup is one of a number of kinds of menstrual cup – There’s the Moon Cup, The Keeper (a latex rubber version), and Lunette (not yet approved for sale in Canada, although silicone already is) and probably others I don’t know about.

I ended up buying it because I had it suggested to me to try by a friend,  and then noticed it at the store, and read the box and decided to give it a whirl. I bought myself the size 2 (there are two sizes) because of my age, and the same size is appropriate to me postnatal as well. At the time, I was not even pregnant. I tried it once or twice when I did not have my period to attempt to get the hang of it, wasn’t thrilled enough to try again, put it back under my sink and promptly forgot all about it. A menstrual cup is designed for collecting the flow, and hanging on to it until you get a chance to dump it. It’s not absorbent, and is, in fact, a silicone cup, that looks similar to an egg cup, with a stem on the end (for grasping).

Diva Cup

Fast forward to this past few months, where I’m more than ever trying to reduce my impact on the world and am looking at my lady bits in a way I did not look at them before I had a child. I flat our care more about what’s going on inside me. Before, menstruation was a function. Now, I see it as a purpose.

I have started reading all sorts of alarming info out there on the intarnets, some of it pretty well researched seemingly from the house of non-crazy [that link is a PDF to an interesting report written by Canadian nutritionist Meghan Telpner] and  and a lot of it flat out false (no, tampons do not contain asbestos). And although the Canadian Cancer Society states that you cannot get cancer from using tampons, there are many people who swear they are toxic to your body on many levels and there is tonnes of anecdotal evidence to support that. But for me, I started feeling guilty about using tampons because they aren’t doing the earth any favours. I’m rethinking the use of tampons and pads from a disposable angle – I am so sick of throwing money literally down the toilet and without truly grasping the consequences of where it goes, and what happens to it when it gets there.

I’m trying hard to find usable alternatives to more or less everything that reeks of consumptive earth dissing, so in my RSS reader these days is stuff like the Glenbrook Zero Waste Challenge, a local group trying to reduce their waste. They put me on to the folks over at the Clean Bin Project, who’ve recently completed a documentary about their project and are cycling across Canada promoting it (hey, Canadian friends, they are looking for places to show their movie. Help them out – check out the trailer, it’s awesome and I can’t wait till they are back in town and we here in New West can watch their documentary.) One of the items Jen at the Clean Bin Project blogs about is the menstrual cup. In her (and my) case, we’re talking about the Diva Cup.

So, seeing the mention for the Diva Cup a while back gave me enough drive to dig it out and give it another shot.

It took me a few tries at insertion despite pretty decent instructions. It feels WEIRD the first few times because the Diva Cup is not designed to go way up inside you like a tampon. It sits more or less at the end of your inner workings so that you can simply reach and grasp that stem with your fingers when it’s time to remove it. Remember, it’s catching the blood, not soaking it up. You are shooting for a horizontal lie rather than a vertical one. Womens’ bits are shaped somewhat like a vase with the small end closest to the real world and so to get the Cup past the smaller neck of the vaginal opening, you fold the cup into quarters and let it pop open once inside. That took a few tries too – figuring out the knack of getting it to pop open at all. I kept having to go in and retrieve it and realign the mark I was shooting for. Also, one complaint? I wish the instructions made mention of potentially pulling at pubic hair. Not everyone grows hair in the same spots, according to my esthetician, but I apparently grow hair in a spot that gets a bit pulled when inserting the Diva Cup. Now that I know that it’s a no longer an issue, but the first time I discovered it, it wasn’t in a way I’d like to repeat.

I also felt the stem of the Diva Cup a bit the first few times while wearing it but now, after a few cycles, I can still notice it only if I try. But it’s a different way of thinking. When you insert a tampon, it’s a no brainer – insert tab a into slot b and you generally do not feel a thing. But I stopped and thought about it. The first few times I used a tampon at 15? I remember it feeling like a giant sub sandwich between my legs.

I practiced with my Diva Cup a half dozen times or so when I did not have my period so that inserting and removing would be simpler and less foreign to me come period time, with the added complication of blood. I recommend doing that as well. You’re going to get intimately involved with what your “output” feels like, so start on a non-period day and get over yourself.

And speaking of blood? What do you do with it? Well, this is how I deal with it, not everyone likely uses the same method. While seated on the toilet, I remove the Diva Cup by grasping the stem, pulling it out sideways, and then once it breaks suction, I tilt it DOWN and let what is collected drain straight into the toilet. Afterward, I wash the Diva Cup in my sink and then clean myself up and then reinsert. Then, when I get up to wash my hands, I give the sink a rinse too. It’s blood. It’s not poison. You can buy Diva Wash, a mild soap, to use on your Cup and your bits, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Because the Diva Cup is made of silicone, you can boil it to give it a good cleaning, and so at the end of my period I do just that. Then it lives in its little fabric sack until the next time. I envision custom made cases on Etsy as soon as I can get my sewing machine back up and running after we move as nothing draws attention to a little fabric bag more than DIVA printed all over a bright purple background. Discreet? No.

You can wear thew Diva Cup over night, and you’ll need to empty it about once every 12 hours or so. The normal entire amount of blood you will shed in your period is 4 ounces (on average, some people it may be more or less!). The Diva Cup can hold one ounce. The chances of leaking because you’ve filled it are slim.

My periods last about 4 days, and at 5-8 tampons a day (we’ll take 6 as an average) I have already saved about 50 tampons from using the Diva Cup.  Yeah. No kidding. 50 tampons is more than what’s in the average sized box. And I’ve barely been using this thing! Do the math on a year. Whether you are talking about the money you’ve saved, the bleached cotton you have not used, or the tampons you have not flushed down the toilet, 50 tampons is HUGE and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Many users also pair their Diva Cups with reusable panty liners. LunaPads are one example, but you can also sew your own.

To sum up: go buy yourself one of these or order it online. Menstrual cups are likely  going to be the norm very soon as more and more people realize it is not icky and  it saves money, the environment and our bodies. Practice until you feel like it’s not a big deal. Then clear out some of that space under your bathroom sink for something you really love, like a cocoa butter body scrub or a sea salt bath soak, and stop flushing your money down the toilet.

Here at the Arbolog, we work hard to try and practice reducing, reusing, refusing, and repairing before we get to recycling, because as far as I am concerned, the jury is out on whether recycling really does lower my carbon footprint. To that end, I’ve spent a long time finding people capable of repairing things. When you live in an area for a long time, you tend to build up a list of  go-to people that can repair things that need repairing. I’ve found that nine times out of ten, it actually costs me more to repair stuff than it would to buy a new, cheap item, but I’m personally trying hard to buy higher quality items that are worth repairing. I also like being able to say “Ooh, I got someone for that” and pass on the info. Makes me feel like I’m in the know. Disclosure: no one has paid me or asked me to write this.

Shoes:

I bought a pair of higher quality Birkenstock knockoffs from a well known local shoe store back when I was pregnant. I have since blown through the sole and into the cork, so I had the soles replaced. The shoes cost me $110. The repair was $40. Now I am working my way through the suede footbed and need to replace that.

I also have a favorite pair of Portuguese made leather shoes that I bought in some fancy pants West Vancouver shoe store. They were having a “last pairs” sale and since I’m a size 6, there generally isn’t much for me at clearance sales. But I lucked out and a pair of Eject shoes that normally retailed for $290 was a mere $99. I bought them, and wore them more or less daily when I was still a full time office worker, and scuffed my way through the sole. I had the soles replaced on those as well, but I haven’t been wearing them as often. See also: Mom Uniform.  I don’t need office appropriate shoes anymore. The repair was well done, however, and cost me only $50. These shoes are about 5 years old and I will wear them until they fall off my feet.

My go-to place for shoes is New West Cobbler.

Jewelry Purchase and Repair:

A few years ago, instead of dropping a hint, I emailed Ross a direct link to a series of Citizen Eco-Drive watches and said “for my birthday gift”.  Like a smart husband, Ross didn’t question it, and went directly to a local jeweler and bought the one he felt I’d like the most (he was right). A few years after that, Ross proposed to me and so we went to the same jeweler to get my engagement ring made, Ross’ wedding band made, and my wedding band ordered to match. This past Christmas, I bought Ross an Eco-Drive watch as well from the same jeweler. You could say we are impressed with their customer service and prices. I walk in there and they hold their hands out and automatically scrub my rings while I shop. They all know my name and the name of our son. I like that. I recently had the crystal replaced on my watch, and had them unbend the crown that I bent when I caught it on the dresser while putting away laundry (Little known fact: laundry is a full contact sport, apparently).  Total bill for the repair: $61. On a $200 watch that I have worn every single day for 4? 5? years, that’s not too terribly bad. It’s good as new.

Our go-to jeweler is Cartwright Jewelers.

Hemming and Alterations:

HI, my name is Jen and I am five feet tall. Pretty much every single pair of pants I own needs to be hemmed, and I have recently discovered how nicely things can fit if I have the waist taken in as well. I had my wedding dress custom made for me by an incredible local designer and I wish she made custom clothing and did alternations and hemming. However, I have recently discovered Genie’s Stitch in the otherwise lackluster Royal City Centre. Hemming a pair of pants is generally overnight and it a whopping $7. Boo-ya. I doubt her name is Genie – it’s probably more like Jelena or Gordana, but I don’t care. It’s 100% pure awesome.

My go-to tailor is Genie’s Stitch.

Dog Grooming:

I have a dog whose a bit of a snot when it comes to nail trimming. She doesn’t like other dogs, she’s set in her ways, and if she really wants to get your attention she will emit a noise that makes you think she is being pulled apart (google “shiba scream”). it is truly awful and completely embarrassing. When I first moved to the neighbourhood I’m in now, I wandered over to Hair of the Dog on 12th Street, where friendly and sweet Barb picked Mooki up, popped her up on the groom table, and chatted with me while effortlessly trimming Mooki’s nails. She laughed at the noise Mooki made, and it didn’t faze her one bit. Dog grooming is something you don’t get into unless you are comfortable and like dogs. Barb is so comfortable around them that neurotic dog owner (me) was comfortable too. I’ve written about Hair of the Dog before. I still stand behind every word, two years later.

Our dog groomer is Hair of the Dog.