Jury Panel ...

... is nothing like this:







Well, no shit. It's at night and there isn't a jury. Why the hell did you think jury panel would be like Night Court? And did you really think Dan would be there?

Quiet, you.

No, if there was a sitcom about jury panel it would be of a waiting room where ... nothing happens. It's a room filled with of a couple hundred people, all bored out of their skull. Someone would turn the page of their book, someone else would cough, someone would get up to use the washroom and everyone would watch them walk by. (Cue the laugh track.) That said, it would still be more entertaining than any Chuck Lorre sitcom.

So far, none of us has seen the inside of a courtroom, with the exception of us all having watched the extremely dated 1982-ish era instructional video on our first day that explained how the court system worked. The only thing I paid attention to was the big hair and shoulder pads of the women in that video. So, in that sense, it has been a little bit like Night Court, in the Markie Post fashion department sense.

Sigh. Why can't civic duty come with wi-fi? Or magazines that were printed after 2002? Or cake? I'd take cake.

No shit.

Quiet, you.

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Guess Where I'm Going This Morning?

Think I have time to swing by a convenience store in the gay village to pick up a Playgirl? Because that's actually the craziest bit about Liz Lemon's Getting Out of Jury Duty character - she's a lady with a Playgirl.

It's not that I really want to get out of jury duty - it's something I've always thought could be a neat experience. But could the timing be any more crap? I'm self-employed and swamped with work, in the midst of selling my home and just recovering from a rather nasty bout of pneumonia AND bronchitis (yep).

But most importantly, Robert Pattinson is in my neighbourhood right now shooting a film and I should really be out there stalking him.

Ugh.

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The Reveal! Buy My Amazing Downtown Toronto Condo!

Our condo will officially be on the market today! Want to see what a few years of slow renovations and a few days of frantic cleaning will do to a place? Here are some pictures (and you know how I "joke" about living in an IKEA showroom? See if you can count all the IKEA stuff in these pictures. It's humiliating!).

Our entrance:

The loo:

The kitchen:

As you know, I find cupcakes a tad overrated, and so I went with a simple glazed donut display instead. It's as much a political statement on desserts and a show of my support of the pro-donut movement as it is a mouth-watering feature:

And while Patrick became rather enraged over the time I was wasting "doing that shit" gently questioned whether it was worth it, I also made sure the insides of our cupboards were enticing to the more investigative potential buyers:

The dining area:

The living room:

The den:

The boudoir:

Lovely, yes?

While we tried to neutralize the place as much as possible, there are still little hints of our personality here and there. I couldn't help it:

I'm just glad that it isn't customary to post pictures of the owners along with their property. Ours would NEVER sell. Over the last few days, I've been looking more and more like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Land's End dress and a pedophile pin. Can't envision that? Here you go; my MS Paint wizardry is at your service:

Kinda not kidding. You can't tell me there isn't a certain resemblance between KSM's tired I-hate-this-shit frown and the unhappy and bagged look I get now and again.

And that's on the days that I bothered to acknowledge that I was a female. Most of the time I wore a "working around the house" outfit that is about two degrees worse than what most people wear camping but one degree better than what most people wear to Walmart.

But I digress (imagine that).

Should you be a serious buyer looking for an updated, awesomely laid out 1 bedroom + den apartment with very reasonable condo fees in the most amazeballs neighbourhood in Toronto where the Financial District and the St. Lawrence Market meet, do contact my real estate agent and book an appointment!

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Her Fridge, My Fridge

My beloved former roommate Will used to describe things he was doing by likening the activity to a banshee. A sample sentence of this would be "Oh, I'm going to eat this like a banshee" or "I was sweating like a banshee trying to catch the streetcar." He'll probably kill me for using those real-life examples. Of course, it makes no sense to say these things, as a banshee is a screeching Irish ghost that wails when someone is about to die. They're not particularly known for gorging on cheese or perspiring through their shirts. (And if Will didn't want to kill me before, pretty sure he wants to now.)

But I can say with confidence that for the last few days, I have been cleaning like a banshee, moaning and howling as if I was going to die. My 50s Housewife Experiment, my mother's neat-freakisms and my rich Spanish and Portuguese heritage combined have failed to prepare me for the amount of work it would take to get our home presentation-worthy to put on the market. Depersonalizing, packing, decluttering, deep cleaning, moving furniture around, more deep cleaning based on what was revealed under said furniture, and then 'beautifying' took us a solid four days of dedicated work. I'll show you the pics of the result of this effort soon - probably tomorrow. All I have to say is that it had better be frigging worth it - I missed so much TV hanging out with friends because of this.

Since we've been so distracted with this banshee of a task, grocery shopping and cooking were nowhere on the radar. I honestly can't even tell you what I ate in the last few days as it was a total blur. I believe a sandwich artist was involved in at least one meal. And there were pretzels at one point. Maybe an apple.

The proof of this lack of food shopping can be found by looking in my fridge at the collection of edibles I like to call This Is Why You Have Acid Reflux:

So, condiments galore. Then assorted pickled peppers. And pickles. And Red Bull. And beer. And Pizza Pizza creamy garlic dipping sauce. And Parmesan cheese. Yup, all the food groups are well represented there. Before people come to look at our house I'm going to get a few things (oh, like, VEGETABLES) so that anyone who spots our fridge contents doesn't immediately think bad things about what our toilet encounters day in and day out.

And since it's 50s Housewife Experiment Anniversary Days, I'll naturally compare this to what the 50s housewife would have in her fridge, if you're to believe the May 1959 issue of Better Homes and Gardens:

This 1959 General Electric ad showcases all the great food you can store in it - like "MEATS", milk, cake, Coca Cola and a mystery bowl of something green and pink that you'll surely horrify your family with:

Any guesses? I'd like to believe that's just the design of her casserole dish, but I think we all know better by now, having experienced the wackiness that is 1950s cooking. I'm thinking it's a cabbage salad with frankfurters that is called something misrepresentative like "Deli Delight".

But even further down the ad is where the true WTF Gold lies:

Below the ridiculously large watermelon and below the (Strawberry? Ham? Strawberry and Ham?) mold is a fuck ton of dairy. 25 bottles - an incomprehensible amount for a family with a 15 cubic foot fridge. Did Little Johnny sneak a bottle of milk behind the school and now mom is going to teach him a lesson by making him drink a whole flat of them in one go? Is this some kind of sinister Hitchcockian message left by the milkman? I don't know, but if any family - and I don't care if you've bred like Duggars rabbits and have a boatload of children - drank that much dairy, I can guarantee you you'd all be bunged up. Like banshees.

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