Ch-ch-ch-ha-ha-HA

When I was 10 years old, my family moved from Deep Cove to Chilliwack.

One of the things that made this move bearable for me was the fact that our new home had an in-ground pool. Sure, I was moving away from the forest and the ocean and the mountains -- not to mention my friends.

But hey! At least we were getting a nice pool.

A few weeks after we moved to our new home, my mom brought my brother and me to the local pool supply store to pick up some pool-cleaning chemicals. The man who worked there was obviously familiar with all the pool owners in the small town that was now our home, and since he'd never seen us before, he asked us where we lived.

My mom told him the name of our street. Grimacing, he responded, "Oh yeah -- the old Buchanan place. Where the kid drowned."

Turns out a group of neighbourhood kids had been playing hide-and-go-seek the year before, and one of them -- a three-year-old boy -- had crawled under the fence into what was soon to become our backyard, then had slipped and fallen into our pool, only to become trapped beneath its vinyl cover.

Just the kind of story you REALLY want to hear about your new home.

We were pretty freaked out... But not enough to stop swimming in our pool.

As I floated lazily in my innertube, or swam from one end to the other without taking a breath, the little dead boy would sometimes surface in my thoughts. I'd stare through the pool's clear depths and wonder how he must have felt in his last moments -- whether he'd known what was happening, if he'd screamed, and if so, if anyone had heard him.

Then I'd scramble out of the water and rub myself down so hard with a towel, I'd leave carpet burns on my skin.

Still, I'd thought the creepiness of it all was something I could deal with -- something that lent a certain gothic charm to an otherwise normal suburban home.

And then -- at the beginning of the summer I turned 12 -- I made the mistake of watching Friday the 13th.

You know... the pre-Jason original, the one with the psycho-killer mom who murders a bunch of innocent people in revenge for her son's death by DROWNING years before?

Yep. Didn't relate too much to THAT particular tale.

All of a sudden I began to take notice of the little dead boy's family (because yes, they did still live just a few houses down the street).

His older brother was just eight years old -- by the looks of it, still too small to go about stabbing people in their sleep. The mother was pleasant enough, and seemed far too busy chasing around her toddler daughter to entertain thoughts of bloody revenge.

But the father... He was big and seldom smiled. And he had a beard.

The facial hair clinched it. The man was a psycho killer, and he was out to murder my family.

That whole summer, I was afraid to stay in the house by myself. Every creak was a footstep, every breath of wind was the satisfied sigh of the hunter closing in for the kill.

(Of course, my pre-teen addiction to Stephen King novels didn't help.)

I tried to share my fears with my family, but they pooh-poohed my concerns and told me I was just imagining things. Which I was, of course. Logically, I understood that.

But logic didn't stop me from bolting out the front door whenever I heard the slightest unexplained noise coming from some other part of the house.

Even now, I can feel how my heart used to pound as I stood at the foot of our driveway and stared at our house, willing myself to believe there wasn't an angry bearded man with an axe hiding in the downstairs bathroom.

Eventually, I grew out of my fear. Grade seven finally began, I started spending more time with friends, and the inexplicable noises that had struck such terror into my heart fell mysteriously silent.

Then -- during the great ice storm of 1985 -- the pool's pipes cracked and broke. My parents never bothered to fix them. The pool fell into disrepair, eventually becoming home to countless frogs whose midnight croaking prevented my parents from sleeping.

Years later, while I was away at university, my parents decided to fill the pool with dirt and give it a proper burial. If you were to visit their house now, you'd never guess a killer pool lay concealed beneath the grass in their backyard.

Just like the pool, the terror it once spawned is still buried in my mind, lurking beneath the fertile soil of my imagination.

Except now that I'm a mother, it's not MY death that has the power to terrify me.

It's Milo's.

And suddenly, I feel a strange sense of sympathy for Mrs. Voorhees. Because the lengths I'd go to in order to protect my son from harm?

They don't bear thinking about.

Yoga and hangovers don't mix

On Wednesday night, I went out for dinner with my good friends from university, Liz and Tracy.

It all started out very civilized, with white wine and scintillating conversation about the joy of owning really cute shoes and how hard it is to find a hairdresser who really knows how to cut good layers.

But at some point in the evening I think we started to believe we were still in university, 15 years younger than we actually are. And before we knew it, we'd polished off a couple bottles of wine, several pints of beer, several more glasses of wines, and a few mojitos just to spice things up.

The last hour (or two?) of the evening is a complete blur.

I don't remember getting home. I think there may have been a cab involved -- although I could have been piggy-backed home by a hunchback and still be none the wiser.

All I know is that when I woke up yesterday morning, there was a trail of clothing leading from the bathroom at the back of the house all the way to the door of my bedroom.

And I was still drunk.

Staying home from work wasn't an option -- I had an article to write for the weekly newsletter, and its deadline was set in stone. So I somehow managed to stumble my way to the Skytrain and get to the office (only half an hour late). Then I did something I haven't done for YEARS -- I tried to soak up the remains of my alcohol buzz with a greasy, greasy breakfast from A&W.

And then I tried to write.

Do you know hard it is to write coherently when your head feels like it's home to a swarm of angry bees?

When lunchtime rolled around, I decided to take a break from my drunken writer's block hell and clear my brain by taking part in the weekly yoga class I'd signed up for. (It's pretty sweet -- a yoga instructor actually comes to our office and does the class right there.)

Well. You know how they say that yoga helps rid your body of all the toxins and negative energy blockages in your body? After the previous night's debauchery, my body was apparently in serious need of some purging.

Halfway through the class, in the middle of "downward-facing dog," the nausea surfaced with a vengeance. I was able to make it to the end of class -- barely -- but as soon as we'd all said "namaaste" to each other, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I stumbled as quickly as I could to the four-stall public bathroom -- and then gaped in horror as one of my coworkers insisted on coming into the bathroom WITH ME.

And so -- with no other options available to me -- I surrendered all dignity and puked up every last morsel of my greasy, greasy breakfast, as my coworker listened on in horror.

(The sound of a flushing toilet can only drown out so much...)

She was kind enough to offer me a cracker afterwards, which I declined. I didn't have the strength to tell her that I was a. not dying, b. the author of my own misery, and c. actually feeling better now that I no longer had a belly full of toxic fast food.

However, I'm pretty sure that when I return to work on Tuesday, fully half the women there are going to think I'm pregnant.

Nope, ladies. Not pregnant. Just stupid.

All cleansing no beer make Erin go crazy

So my 12-day cleanse is over and I SURVIVED!

And all I have to say right now is this: "BEEEER! Unnnnnngh."

(I'm on my second.)

It's times like this that I worry about how much I have in common with Homer Simpson...



Happy Friday night, all...

All right, enough with the lovey dovey stuff

It's time to talk crap again.

As part of this cleanse I'm doing, I've had to cut all yeast out of my diet. Last night, I began to wonder why. Why is yeast so bad? What has it ever done to be shunned and denigrated so?

I decided to go online and search for answers.

And then I got sidetracked and stumbled across this site.

(Warning: not for those who have weak stomachs or have recently eaten. Or who suffer from nightmares.)

YIKES. I thought MY cleanse was thorough. I never knew such... things could come out of the human body (without said human body being sliced open, that is).

It kind of makes me want to keep on doing this cleanse forever, to ensure I never have one of those monstrous "mucoid plaques" growing inside me.

... Though given all the trans-fatty foods I've eaten over the years (curse you, Pringles potato chips!) a mucoid plaque could be incubating inside me -- and you! -- RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE.

Cue the Twilight Zone theme...

What a load of crap

I'm currently doing my first herbal cleanse. (The Wild Rose one, for those who care about such things.)

Right before every breakfast and dinner, I squirt 30 drops of brown liquid into a glass and then use it to wash back six foul-smelling pills.

And then I wait...

... until my belly tells me it's time for the first of many, many trips to the bathroom that day.

Oh. So THAT'S why they call them cleanses. My insides have been scrubbed so bare, you could probably eat off them.

(All together now: ewwwww.)

I will say this: I've had more energy every day for the past 11 days than I've in months. Instead of fighting the urge to collapse each night at 8:00 p.m -- then feeling like I've just emerged from a four-year coma when the alarm goes off each morning -- I'm like the Energizer Bunny.

I spring out of bed at 5:00 each morning thinking, "Yeah! Yoga!" and have to force myself to go to bed at 10:30 or later, just because I know I'll be getting up in 6 1/2 short hours and sleeping is what a sane person would probably do in my situation.

(OK so 10:30 might not seem very late to those of you who don't have a two-year-old and don't get out of bed at 5:00 IN THE MORNING. But it is. Trust me.)

However... Part of me questions whether the increase in energy is worth the pain of going without wheat, sugar, and dairy. And who knew how much I loved yeast and all things fermented! Already I'm salivating over everything I'm planning to eat and drink on Friday when this 12-day cleanse is finally over.

Basically, all the things that made me so darned toxic in the first place.

Crap.