Enjoy the creamy emollient lather on baby, bath, beach, body, dentures, deoderant, shaving & aftershave.

As you faithful followers may recall, last year I had an amazing epiphany in my Eco-criticism class and started taking baths in an icecream pail. As most of you probably don't know, I stopped doing that as soon as I moved back home because it is eerily, unnaturally, inhumanly cold in my house most of the time and I just couldn't handle 10 minutes of splashing luke-warm water on my freezing body in a drafty bathroom.

I recently went back to the ol' 1-gallon showering method, for several reasons: one, it is so gloriously hot in Winnipeg right now that even my house is warm enough to bathe in; but mostly, two: a friend of mine has stopped using shampoo and conditioner* and I hate her for being more eco-friendly than me.

This is what I do all day...

I feel I have dazzled you with my wits long enough, so today I will dazzle you with my day-job skillz instead. I am now famous for my ability to draw tiny little cartoon faces out of chocolate and put them on cupcakes. It's all just tracing, but when people look at it they say "wow" and when I tell them how I do it they look at my blankly like I'm trying to explain how to replace the a-v joints on a steering column*.

So annywayys admire my handywork.

oh, what, this again?

Now that I'm trying to write more regularly again, I can't help but notice that I'm failing miserably. So now I must revert to the age-old excuse that my life is too boring to write about. Want to hear about my bike-ride home in the rain today? Neither do I. It was marvelous, but that's besides the point. So read this post and pretend that I'm saying something of substance here. Something profound. Something hilarious. Something that actually exists.

In the good future days...

I often dream of the time when I become a famous novelist who lives entirely off of her earnings from creative endeavours*, and how I will have an amazing assistant whose life is made better simply by being in mine.

The general dream is that this assistant will be exactly like me except bad at writing, so that she won't pull an Eve Harrington on me (don't worry if you don't get this reference; my assistant will explain it to you!). I would pay her an exceptionally high salary for an assistant, which would make her like me, and would allow her to borrow outfits from my lavishly stylish closet whenever she chooses, which would make her love me, and she would constantly be telling people what a great employer I am. In exchange, she would be really good at all the things I am not good at, such as making coffee, cooking omelettes that remain in omelette form, finding good music to write to,  preventing me from writing in marking pen all over my body, walking in high-heeled shoes without having ankle pain (a tip she'd pass on to me, of course) and understanding how twitter works.

Summer Lesson #4: Never borrow books from anyone you want to remain friends with.

I'm reading a book right now that was lent to me by a friend who is a one of those people. You know those people, the sort of people who cannot read a book once the spine of it has been broken, the sort of people who have can't be friends with someone who dog-ears pages*. These people are the true Book Enthusiasts among us, because they care just as much about the state of the book itself as they do about the story the book holds. Me, I am not a book enthusiast. I don't care if the pages of the book I'm reading have been replaced with bits of used toilet paper, because it's the story I'm after. And because I don't care, I am terrified by the people who do care, because a Book Enthusiast will inevitably be someone whom I a) want to be friends with and b) has a pristine collection of books I really want to read and can't find at the library.

Lesson #3: Always define your terms, or you might end up insinuating your girlfriend dresses like a slutty referee in her spare time.

When I was in grade 12, I had the misguided notion that I needed an extracurricular activity and I chose debating. I chose debating because 1) my english teacher loved me and loved debating and wanted these things to go together and I enjoy being adored, and 2) my friend (the one I showered with bits of shark skeleton) and I had once gone to a debate where the winner was a particularly attractive fast talking young man and we both agreed that we were more likely to get laid if we were exactly like him. This led to the most horrible debating experience I've ever had, where it was our job to define the term 'violence' and we managed to form a loophole where rape and spousal abuse were not included in the term 'violence' and ended up having to debate in favour of sexual assault.

Summer Lesson #2: Don't believe anything you learned in grade 5 biology.

When I was 10, my family moved to a reservation in South Dakota for a 3-year term with Habitat for Humanity, and I was enrolled in a Catholic school there. I've never actually asked my parents why they decided on Catholic school; I can only assume that it was because the other alternative was a public school of some notoriety*. I had never realized that my brand of Christianity was not the only one, and so from the moment I entered Religion class and was handed a rosary, I started learning all sorts of things I had not bargained for.