On Tuesday September 12th, I'm going to get up at 6:00 am, I'm going to haul my sorry ass to an ice rink where I'm going to put on a too tight licra full body leotard which Dave likes to wear and run around in more than I do, then I'm going to put on a bunch of gear and some skates and then I'm going to be tortured by coach Ariana who for the next hour will scream things like 'your legs are just meat, lower, faster, faster, lower" You are probably wondering what kind of gladiatorial undertaking this is. Well it's speedskating of course. And that person you see on the left there. That is absolutely not me.

I started skating about 12 years ago as an adult. An old adult. An old adult who couldn't skate. For the first four years I skated in the kids group, which was much longer than any of the other adults who started and then moved on to the adult group almost immediately. It's the sissy thing. I speedskate but I'm afraid to go fast. When I get to the start line I look at my coach with steely eyes and say daring things like "I'm going to skate as slowly as I possibly can" not to get a reaction but because this really is my plan.

Being in the kids group had its drawbacks. No kid wants to be partnered with an adult. Especially a slow adult. So whenever we had to team up it was me and whatever geekie kids were not picked because they were slow, untalented or just not cool.

I met Derek this way. He was 12. I was 36. He was overweight. I wobbled on my skates. His ankles caved out. Mine caved in. So we teamed up to do some laps one behind the other and with any luck one of us would pass the other and then the next person would take over the lead.

The first time we teamed up I took the lead. After a couple of laps I heard grunting and groaning you know weird human noises you don't want to hear. Uh, ow argghh uh crap...oi ahhh. When I turned and looked Derek had ice chips melting down his cheeks and in his eyes. He was soaking wet. I asked him what happened. He looked at me and said its you...you keep chipping the ice and it's flying in my face. Really. Uh huh. Sorry. Yeah. Really. I am. Does everyone do this. Uh no. Then we started to kill ourselves laughing. We roared. Two sissies killing themselves like SCHOOLGIRLS.

The next time Derek showed up for practice he had glasses on. Very cool glasses. The kind the pros wear. He stood beside me. When it was time to pick partners we didn't have to wait around. He was always my partner after that.

Anyways, I don't know where Derek is. He quit. But its cool being friends with someone who is 24 years younger than you and who isn't a relative. We had some wicked laughs. I'm in the adult group now (barely). My partner's name is Agatha. She is 75 years old and she's still faster than me. But that's another story.


To get more info on this fun sport visit: BC Speedskating Association

For all on-line marketing/business and/or blog geeks who also happen to like books and tap dancing, a very smart girl called Monique has a great site that offers all kinds of information on all of the above. She recently gave a seminar at SFU and has generously downloaded her notes for those of us wanting to be a part of the revolution but are still lost. Like me. As a sissy revolutions aren't that easy. So go check it out: somisguided.com

Hello. My name is Tessa and I am a sissy. Sometimes you know something about yourself and you deny it. Sometimes you just don't know. In this case I really know this for sure. One of my favourite sporting activities is to chase Dave around the house, wrestle him to the ground, pin his arms above his head and yell, "You will pay. You will pay." He looks at me bemused, maybe a little frightened and asks where I got the cheezy line from. Well I got it from the only movie I've seen recently and my favourite movie A History of Violence. Those are moments when I feel empowered and not so sissyish. But really I'm a sissy. I'll give you some good solid sissy examples: one of the games I play with Reub is called Mother Theresa where I put a towel on his head which makes him look like Mother Theresa, then I scream Mother Theresa repeatedly while grabbing the ball and throwing it some place while blinding him with the holy towel. Dave's games are called things like Drug Trafficking, or Kill the Squirrel, or Eat the Little Dog, or let's do Drugs. Another example is if I see a dog while walking, it doesn't matter who is beside me I'll put them between me and the dog. It doesn't matter if its my mother, sister, child or Dave they go between me and the threat. The good thing is that it happens so fast they don't even realize they've been strategically placed CLOSER to danger.

Wikipedia says sissy is the shortened pejorative term for sister. Why am I surprised? To call a man or boy a sissy is to infer that he is like a sister or sissy. Basically a cowardly pussy. Etymology aside, I stand bravely by my cowardly ways. Don't come to me if you need saving. I'm likely to freeze while you burn or get run over. I won't deep sea dive or jump out of airplanes and I have no long term or short term plans on changing. Like Cato, I will continue my surprise wrestling attacks on Dave and continue to scream, " You'll pay. You'll pay."

Well, well, well. Who would have guessed it. Wayne Rooney and I are on the same team and its not Manchester United! ? It's called Sleep Neurosis. A friend of mine sent me a link to an article in The Guardian where Rooney talked about his sleep habits in a new autobiography entitled, My Story So Far. It turns out that young Rooney can't get to sleep without a vacuum cleaner on or baring that a hair dryer or television set. " I not only like to have the TV and light on to help me sleep but also a vacuum cleaner. Failing that, a fan or hairdryer will do. I've ruined so many hairdryers by letting them burn out. So far I haven't set fire to anything. " Unlike Rooney, I haven't quite graduated to vacuum cleaners yet (give me time) but I do travel everywhere with a handy little portable fan that generates enough white noise to lull me into a state of possible sleep. That and a bag of uber impenetrable earplugs and a set of ear muffs and I'm ready to catch some good zzzzzsss. I don't remember when my sleep neurosis began but I do remember buying a pack of gum and feeling some kind of relief when I realized I could chew on it all night long and somehow I found that soothing. That was right after I gave up on sleeping pills so that may have been an act of desperation. When I travelled to Calgary with my friend Diane to attend speedskating camp we shared a room at the dorm. She was shocked when I pulled out my sleep accoutrement. Unable to sleep with my fan on which she deemed 'too noisy'(what does she know???) I was obliged to going back to rabid nocturnal gum chewing to survive the trip. When I met Dave I decided to abandon both the earplugs (how unromantic AND the fan (how weird). I knew I had met my soul mate when on our second sleepover he stared at the ceiling, sighed and said " I sure wish I had my fan here." How great is that! Next date he brought over his fan which has been with us ever since. Thank god for Wayne Rooney. The Sleep Weirdos have finally been outed.

Ann Coulter has done it again. Love her or hate her, Coulter's talent for stirring controversy is irrefutable. Just when you think you've recovered from the last bit of egregious venom, she comes out with another jaw-dropping observation. It makes you wonder if Ann isn't the brainchild of some evil book marketing department designed to sell more books. If I didn't already know the ins and outs of how publishing marketing departments work I would say that this might be true. Instead, I think this is just Ann. This time Coulter accuses Bill Clinton of being a latent homosexual. I don't have any particular love for Bill Clinton and neither do I care if he is gay or not but her logic is so hazardous that it is tantamount to saying that 2 + 2 + 2 = 196. In Coulter's exchange with Donny Deutsch she equates rampant promiscuity (Bill's) with bathhouse behaviour (homosexual?) which she then equals to narcissism which naturally means that he is a homosexual. Huh? If making twisted pernicious leaps in logic is how you sell books than maybe Ann is on to something: http://www.wonkette.com/politics/ann-coulter/coulter-comes-out-against-gay-clinton-marriage-189845.php

Here we have Olive: Nickname: Olive Bin Laden. Bin for short. Personality Type: Mercurial. Not a word I use normally but suits Bin perfectly. Dave says Bin has a wider range of moods than most cats, ranging from mad to madder, to mad as hell to furious. I think that pretty much covers it especially since we’ve had to put her on a diet. The diet consists of simply trying to feed her less with fewer treats since she’s gained about 50 pounds since we moved here in March. This is the kind of stuff Bin does on a fairly regular basis. Last night we woke up to a noise in the kitchen. We got up to find Bin dragging a bag of dog bones across the kitchen floor en route to her lair. Cat number 2 who isn’t inclined towards this kind of naughtiness, simply watched from her safe place around the island in the kitchen, no doubt hoping Olive might drop a bone along the way. Then yesterday we came home to find hamburger buns ripped into with a trail of crumbs leading once again directly to Olive's lair. Olive, exhausted from her foraging, lay napping on the balcony, her considerable orb glowing in the sunlight. Because I’ve had her from day one I love her in spite of her flaws. I’m the mother with the rotten hideous child nobody likes. Dave, on the other hand, doesn’t understand the Olive love affair. Every day he asks the same thing. It goes like this: Exactly what is Olive good for? She has a one track mind on food and doesn’t think twice about re-routing the salmon from your fork to her furry black lipped little mouth. She bullies those closest to her, striking wherever she can. She is an opportunist of the worst kind and yet is fearful of strangers and weird noises. She pees beside the kitty litter and doesn’t clean her bum ever. She doesn’t give a second thought to walking off with a side of salmon, a pack of fresh bagles or licking the butter pot clean. (Something of a social hazard for your more fastidious dinner guests who generally don’t like to see cat tongue marks on the butter destined for their dinner rolls!) Neither does she think twice about cuffing an unsuspecting Reub in the leg or head. And yet this very same coward, like most bullies, can't take the heat when its turns on her. Any noise or person entering our home sends her scurrying to her lair, she growls at people who come close to her and often spends days sleeping in her lair. Depressed. So really there isn’t a lot to like here much less love. Blind love doesn’t make me impervious to her faults. Yet….yet….there is something about Olive that IS lovable. It’s definitely not her breathe because that stinks like hell but she has the most amazingly soft fur. She also has coal rimmed green eyes and she’s very racoonesque which might explain the personality issues. When she was a kitten she used to like to curl around my neck. Unfortunately she’s too big now and it hurts my back. She also has a great meow. A bit insistent…occasionally bitchy especially when it preceeds a right hook to my ankle but also plaintive and haunting and just plain damn cute. Serious inquiries only, welcome here.

So the other very cute picture posted of Reub is pretty much a big lie because he rarely looks this perky. His name may be Reub but he could also easily be called 'one big depressed dog'. This picture here is what Dave and I witness each and every day of our lives. Gets much worse when we leave him at home BY HIMSELF. If a dog could throw himself over a balcony, he would. In fact, the other day I thought he had. I looked for him every where and finally thought. Crap. He's done it. He's jumped but it turns out I left him outside the front door by mistake when I was bringing in the groceries. When I finally figured out that he hadn't offed himself I opened the door and Reub was sitting right there looking up, wagging his depressed tail (rare occurence). Perhaps shunning is uplifting in some weird way much like near death experiences get the adrenalin running. On the other hand, I don't want you to think he's a complete drama case because he can be lifted out of his state of near chronic malaise, like when you give him a bone, or if you say things like 'one' which Dave has trained him to bark wildly at or maybe if you take him swimming. But often if we take him to the park 'to play' his idea of 'playing' is to fetch the ball and then lie down and have a nap. He'd be happy if we had a wheel barrow to carry him back to the car in. In fact, when we take him for a 'walk' he more often than not heads straight for the car where he sits and waits until he realizes we're serious about the walk part and that he's not going to be driven around which is what he really wants.