Quirks

Everyone has quirks. My family seems to have been blessed by the quirk fairy. *Mila* has a few. I think sometimes her's fester into OCD. My personal fave of *Mila's* is the eating of frozen foods. When she was a baby I used to let her teethe on a frozen facecloth. I learned this special little trick from a friend of mine who teethed his Labradors that way. The frozen facecloths soon were discarded and she moved onto real food. French fries were her all time favourite and soon it was frozen peas, frozen carrots, frozen baby corn. In fact, I went to visit my brother in Muskoka and we had 4 employees at the local big box grocery store searching high and low for frozen baby corn as she couldn't eat the kind from a can! Good lord, no! All barfing aside, I forced everyone outside for fresh air and exercise today and when we returned I snuck a mug of warm stale coffee upstairs and *Mila*? She chose a nice cold bowl of frozen peas and carrots while she donned her tanktop and skirt (bare legs and all). Hello! This is still Canada girl. No matter how mild these Southern Ontario winters are, it is still winter and you, young lady, barfed all over the couch, staircase, powder room, the dog and your mother just last night. Yes, you!

Now, the dog's quirk is how she HAS to sleep on cushions. Not like any ordinary dog would. She refuses to sleep on her Zellers bed that I searched for at 3 different Zellers stores during their sale event on pet products. So that I didn't have to pay $100 at the local Pet-o-Rama-Llama, only to find out it was stuffed with dead puppies. Uggh! Michael Vick deserves a smack for laughing at that. Suma finds herself on top of cushions. Piles of cushions. Today, I found her seated smartly beside the vacuum cleaner (the one she despises the most) on top of 3 pillows. All nice black pillows that instantly are attracted to her white belly hairs. EEEK! Get off the pillows. I had the vacuum plugged in to freak her out even more. It's like I spend all this time decorating and cleaning only to have a kid drop frozen peas on the floor and a dog deposit hair on the pillows. Which leads us into my quirk...

You guessed it, the placement of large scary objects on the furniture to deter the canine from co-habitating with us like a human. That's what *Mila* specifically told her the day before yesterday when germs did not prevent her mouth from its usual diarrhea. "Suma, get off the couch. Don't you know that the furniture is for humans? And you are not a human!" Yes, my quirk is to place chairs, tables, vacuums, and including, but not limited to baskets of Barbies. Really, anything large I can find on top of soft furniture items.

And now for *Steve*. His crime? Well, it's right here. More explicitly, this would be his affinity for becoming addicted very quickly to new collections. Not a bad thing at all. But we have boxes of Sci-Fi books that rival that of TomKat all for the purpose of being an online collector and purveyor of Sci-Fi sequels. I guess geekville is on the internet, so he's got the right venue. Now, he's decided to collectively put together ideas to romanticize the world with a Sentimental Gesture Revolution. Which leads us to Quirk #2. When do I get to receive these sentimental gestures?

signed, the willow