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Bumper Stickers and Big News!

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It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and because there is no semi-holiday that goes by uncelebrated by sugar cookies, I spent some time this morning cutting out round cookies. Heart-shaped cookies have been deemed too embarrassing for words, but round cookies? With bright pink buttercream and heart-shaped sprinkles? Perfectly acceptable. I was getting ready to frost them when I realized I was almost out of powdered sugar, so I popped over to the grocery store and was almost sidetracked by this:

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Fun Dip! They still make Fun Dip! I haven’t seen Fun Dip for decades! And this Fun Dip – it magically changes colours! I’m sure the child bringing in Fun Dip would be super-popular amongst peers, but perhaps less so amongst parents and teachers. I stuck with the cookies and they turned out nicely, even if a round cookie cutter seems to be an elusive item, necessitating the use of a small plastic cup instead.

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Speaking of things unseen for decades, yesterday Mark and I were walking home from the library, where he had cleaned out the entire section on children’s Greek mythology reference books, and I had picked up a delightful little read entitled “Fishbowl.” Slight digression: if you have the chance to read “Fishbowl,” do, because it is just wonderful. A truly fun read.

Anyway, we were walking home and parked along one of the side streets was a van, covered in bumper stickers. We stopped to look because one of us noticed the sticker saying “My Other Car Is A Dino-Bot” and I immediately regretted our decision. Along with “Oral Sex: The Best Last-Minute Gift” was a bumper sticker that I hadn’t seen since the early Eighties, at best: “Grass, Gas, or Ass: Nobody Rides For Free.” The sad thing is that this bumper sticker was not an old one from the Seventies; it was obviously newly purchased and affixed to the back of the van. In other words, you can still, somewhere, purchase a Gas, Grass, or Ass: Nobody Rides For Free bumper sticker. And here I thought hitchhiking was a thing of the past. I’ve never hitchhiked, and I most likely never will, but if I did, I probably would NOT want to take a ride from the person driving that van, especially with all the not-so-subtle messages plastered all over the back, Dino-Bot notwithstanding. Anyone who watched Silence of the Lambs in their formative years would feel the same way, I’m sure. One moment you are taking a ride from a person who encourages prostitution in exchange for a lift to the next town, the next moment you are in a giant hole in the ground being forced to lube up so some sicko can make a skin suit out of you.

I mean, maybe the owner is perfectly normal and just likes distasteful bumper stickers, but why take the chance?

In any case, Mark and I stood in awkward silence for a moment before heading for home and resuming our discussion about the twelve labours of Hercules.

Completely unrelated to any of the above, I have big news! After nearly nine years of yoga practice, I have decided to take yoga teacher training. I’m pretty excited about it! With the kids getting older, the timing just seemed right, so in April I will be starting my 200 hour program. My goal is to work with people with pain and limited flexibility/ mobility, and perhaps seniors. It’s been a while since I’ve been in school, so I fear I might be a bit like one of those mature students who asks all the questions and discusses the role of Life Experience and its Real World Implications. I’m like Grandpa Simpson! But maybe a bit more stylish.

KonMari FAIL

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Here’s a little tidbit about me that some people (read: my husband) find quite un-endearing: I have a really, really hard time spending money on non-essential items. What often happens in my house is that my husband will suggest a purchase, and no matter how minor, I rail against it. Spotify, for example. Why would we need Spotify, I argued passionately, We already have Sirius! Or the Roomba. We don’t need a Roomba, we have a vacuum!

Well, over the course of our marriage, my husband has learned to just make the purchase, which I subsequently fall in love with. Like, I cannot imagine how I actually did workouts before without Spotify. And Roomba? Roomba, as I’ve mentioned before, is now my favourite child. Everyone in the house talks about Roomba as if he is a living, breathing person who exists only to clean our floors. Great job, Roomba! we all say as Roomba whirrs around. Oh, Roomba, you got into the cords again! we will gently chide him as we see an extension cord pulled out from under the bed. Even Barkley has learned to live with Roomba, even though his tail was once almost vacuumed, causing him to now watch warily when the whirring starts.

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It naturally follows that if a person has a hard time spending money on non-essential items, then that person should have – in theory – a fairly empty closet. Right? Well, it appears that clothing is essential and that I have far, far too much of it, if my exploding closet and drawers are any indication.

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The “yoga clothes and beach wear” portion of my closet.

The problem is that I like clothes, and I buy quality, long-lasting clothes, which means I have a lot of clothes. I mean, I have yoga pants from 2008 that still look fantastic, I have classic black dresses purchased between 2011-2014 that are always in style, and I have very well-cared for sweaters from the now-defunct but much loved Jacob.

Everyone has been talking about the KonMari method of tidying up; yesterday was a PD day and I was looking for a project, so I thought I would re-organize my closet. Although I am a very organized (read: anal) person in general, my closet was getting a little small and cluttered. Now, I knew the rules: if an item was used and brought joy, then it could stay. Otherwise, it would get purged.

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How much beach wear is too much beach wear, when one does not live anywhere near a beach?

Do you know, all of my clothing brings me joy?

Reader, I couldn’t bear to part with a thing yesterday. I regularly comb through my dressers whenever I get a phone call asking for clothing donations for this charity or that one, and I usually can gather a good solid garbage bag full. But perhaps I’ve gone to that well too often, or perhaps yesterday was the wrong day to go through my things, I don’t know. All I know is that after putting everything in a giant pile, I ended up neatly rolling everything up and putting it back in the closet. I found a couple of unused containers and I rolled each bikini piece together, Kondo-like. (Who needs fourteen bikinis, mostly black? I DO. I need ALL the black bikinis.)

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It’s marginally neater!

 

So that was a bit of a fail. Not only did I go through my closet, but I also cleaned out my dressers and the same thing occurred; I couldn’t bear to part with any items at all. Well, on the upside, everything is now neatly put away. On the downside, I still need to deal with my shoes and boots, and that, my friends, is going to be a test.

Choosing lip gloss is not my best quality.

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I’m feeling a bit tired and blah today, and it’s only Tuesday. Thursday is usually Exhaustion Day, when I find myself waiting for the kids at karate and wondering if I’m going to make it or if I am just going to fall over from tiredness, but I feel like that today. It doesn’t really bode well for the rest of the week.

I should be more perky, really, since January is almost done and it’s light at five o’clock now. The sun is up before 8:30 and it sets after 5:00, and that alone should be enough to give me some pep. Also, we’ve only had a few Very Cold Days; mostly the weather has been (relatively) mild for the entire month. But the sky is a dull, dull grey and my husband is out of town and I bought the wrong lip gloss; all is ashes.

My two favourite lip gloss colours have been discontinued, and it is distressing me more than it should. Ideally, I should be able to bounce back from this kind of thing, but for some reason I am now obsessed with finding an exact match to my two favourite glosses. This puts me in mind of a lipstick hoarding issue I had; I had purchased a bunch of dark lipstick on sale, and time ticked forward and suddenly, that dark colour no longer suited me. Instead of making me look perky and red-lipped, I looked like a papery-skinned old crone who was desperately holding on to the vestiges of youth, which is not a look I want to embrace. Anyway, I was left with several lipsticks of that shade, thanks to my hoarding/ sale purchasing. Never again would I waste money that way, I thought to myself.

Sadly, this has come back to haunt me. Since the discontinuation of my two favourite lip glosses, I have tried – and failed – to purchase a reasonable facsimile. There is a significant hurdle to face: sample lip glosses. I cannot even bear the thought of putting a sample lip gloss near my face – think of all the people who have touched it! – and yet just dabbing it on my wrist does nothing to tell me if this is a suitable colour or not. So I buy a lip gloss, hope for the best, and become immensely disappointed when it washes me out or, in the case of my latest purchase, is purple.

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When the lip gloss itself started to fade, it left me with a purplish ring around the outside of my lips, like a 1986 lip liner. This feels like an immense waste of money, although, as Swistle says (HI SWISTLE), it is educational and will keep me from purchasing anything similar in the future. Which is true, but damn. I just want a perfect, non-glittery, sort-of-mocha, neutral toned lip gloss. IS THAT TOO MUCH TOO ASK? If I could hop on my super-awesome-time-travel machine, I would go back and buy out the entire line of those two lip gloss shades and hoard them until they became brittle, crusty bottles of goo.

Anyway. I had no intention of this being a post about my lip gloss angst. What I had meant to write about was how women are often very self-deprecating; I read two things today (HI LISA) (HI ALI) in which the writers talked about their inability to accept compliments and their difficulty in saying what they love about themselves, respectively. How that segued into lip gloss, I have no idea. However, I want to know – what do you love about yourself? I want you to brag a little – tell me what is the most awesome thing about you. Do you have fabulous hair, do you take amazing photographs, can you edit a paper like nobody’s business? Can you run a 10k, do you decorate cakes, can you sing really well? Do you know how to knit or can you change a tire? I want to know what you think your best qualities are. Don’t be shy – it will brighten up this dull January day. Tell me, please. xoxo

I’ve got the power!

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I know what you’ve all been wondering: How did Nicole survive the Great Power Outage of 2016? Did she have to resort to grinding her own seed wheat in a handheld coffee grinder? Did she have to feed hand-twisted hay sticks into her fireplace just to keep warm? Did she play a song on her fiddle to keep her spirits up?

Answer: none of the above. Her coffee grinder is electric, her fireplace is gas and the pilot light has been unlit since 2005, and she has no fiddle, nor does she know how to play one.

I will tell you this, while switching back into the first person, that a power outage is not all that bad when you know it’s coming. First thing in the morning, I cranked the heat up from its usual 19 degrees to 23 so that by the time I left to take the kids to school, I was sweating. By the time the power went back on the temperature had only dipped to 18, so I call that a win. I spent most of the day running errands, walking the dog, and taking Mark to the orthodontist, so I wasn’t stuck in my dark and cooling-down house all day. My friend Janet (HI JANET) had tipped me off that Jugo Juice makes kale smoothies so I didn’t even have to go without.

The kids and I had lunch at the food court, where I had my smoothie and they enjoyed chicken fingers and fries, and I spent some time surreptitiously eavesdropping on the many teenage conversations around me. I forgot that the mall is essentially a teen hangout, especially at lunch and especially at a mall that is across the street from a high school and two junior highs. MY WORD THE DRAMA. Dylannnnn did you get me a doughnut? Fuck you, Dylannnnn kiss my asssssss I wanted a doughnuttttt. No, I think she still likes you, she’s just mad that you were talking to Jaden. Ugghhhhhh he’s so GROSS don’t talk with your MOUTH FULL GODDDDDD.

The power went back on half an hour before it was scheduled to, which was nice, since the backup battery of the carbon monoxide detector had died and the beeping was making me feel like I was going to lose my mind. I couldn’t figure out how to stop it, so basically every time it went off Barkley and I looked at each other, distressed. But the power was restored before I had completely descended into insanity, so all’s well that ends well.

I was a little worried that all was not well, though; as I was preparing to go to the School Council/ Parent Association meeting – that I was NOT chairing, thank you god – Jake called from downstairs saying that the computer wouldn’t turn on. And it was true; the power bar was plugged in, everything else was working, but the desk top – on which ALL my work, photos, writing, etc., was saved – was not turning on. Nothing, no sound, no fan, nothing.

Cue panic attack.

I called a computer repair company and told the technician my story. He thought it could be a damaged power supply – despite my surge protector – or possibly a fried motherboard. MOTHERFUCKER. I made an appointment with him and then did some deep breathing to calm down. Less than one hour later, the computer magically turned on. I felt like Cousin Eddie: “It’s the damnedest thing. She falls in a well, eyes go cross. A mule kicks her, they go back to normal. I don’t know.” I had to cancel the appointment, citing the “suddenly working and everything’s fine” thing, feeling slightly like I’m a drama queen who just made up a computer issue for fun.

I’m no Ma Ingalls, I’ll tell you that much. But if Ma Ingalls had electricity and access to small appliances, she’d probably love this:

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Ice cream!

It all started when we were at a Ukrainian Christmas celebration, and our hostess had made her own ice cream. She pointed out that most “ice cream” is now called “frozen dessert,” and one thing led to another and suddenly my husband ordered me this beauty. I’m especially excited since non-dairy ice cream is ridiculously expensive, and now I can make my own! Today I’m making a classic vanilla for the boys, as a test run. The only issue here is that my family is ridiculously spoiled. I know, I know, pot and kettle, yada yada yada. BUT THEY ARE. Since I make so many things from scratch they won’t even eat certain store bought items. Case in point: a few weeks ago I bought some hummus.

Husband: What is this hummus?

Me: I bought it at Costco.

Husband: It’s terrible!

Me: It’s not bad. I’m eating it.

Husband: Ugh, I can’t eat this stuff. It’s terrible. It’s SWEET or something.

Mark, grabbing a pita, completely oblivious to the conversation: Mom, where’s the hummus?

Me: It’s right there.

Mark: Ew. I don’t want that. Where’s YOUR hummus?

They proceeded to eat their pitas completely dry, rather than eat the non-homemade-hummus.

Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s a slippery slope, but fortunately making one’s own ice cream is a pretty fun slippery slope to be on.

May all your blues be Monday. Or something.

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It’s Blue Monday! Mercury’s in retrograde, it’s January, and today has been calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. Maybe no one should communicate at all today, JUST IN CASE.

Well, blue is my favourite colour, and even if the algorithm has calculated it to be the saddest day of 2016, this morning the sun came out and the sky is gloriously blue. It looks just beautiful against the snow, and the temperatures are warming up this week. This is great news because in my panic last week, I didn’t realize that the seven-hour power outage is scheduled for THIS Wednesday, instead of LAST Wednesday. Good news: I will have had a week to prepare. Bad news: I will have had a week to fret, because what if they make a mistake and the power NEVER comes back on? Then what? I’ll never have a decent smoothie again, that’s what!

Oh, speaking of smoothies and related vegetables, I have a piece up at YMC about the high price of cauliflower. You know, no one wants to talk macroeconomics, but everyone wants to talk about cauliflower. Well, I tell you, they’ll pry those tiny $8 cauliflowers out of my cold dead hands before I give them up. My grandmother is probably turning in her grave, but a) I almost never go to Starbucks, b) I almost never eat out, c) we almost never have take-out, d) I WILL ENJOY MY EXPENSIVE CAULIFLOWER LIKE THE PRINCESS THAT I AM.

Gosh, we’ve become a spoiled, entitled society, haven’t we? Oh my god, the kale is like, not crisp at all. Ugh, what a rip-off. I feel like Louis C.K. but with vegetables. Let’s partake in the miracle of January avocados. We can have anything we want to eat at any time, we just have to pay for it. Sorry! But it’s true. There’s a trade-off for everything and in this case, it’s dolla dolla for your caula caula.

Not that I want to start living out the winter with nothing but sauerkraut the occasional piece of dried fruit like I’m a heroine in a Little House on the Prairie-esque drama, but I think you can see what I’m getting at.

In non-vegetable-related news, last Friday I chaperoned the last day of Mark’s field trip, and it was really fun. The kids learned all about stage fighting, so if anyone needs someone to be fake-choked, I am your Huckleberry. Related to this, the class is doing a unit on Greek mythology, so Mark is in his element. Next week they are having a fashion show, narrated in French, and Mark is dressing up in Greek fashion. This means that a few hours this weekend was devoted to the making of a cardboard-and-duct-tape sword and shield, along with a toga. I helped him make a toga out of an old sheet, and wondered if these skills would be used again some time down the road. Toga party!

Last week Barkley had a vet check-up and shots, and I will tell you this: I live in dread of the pet scale. Barkley likes his food, and at the vet clinic entrance is a huge poster that shows the decline in life expectancy for pets that are too fat. I try to watch his food, and buy low calorie dog treats, but he is what we might call curvy. I nervously had him sit on the scale…and he’s lost three pounds since last year! Three pounds! I practically did the Snoopy dance right there in the waiting room. He’s svelte! Or, as the vet says, “Still quite plump.”

Well then. He also needs dental scaling and that, along with my meeting this afternoon with the orthodontist to discuss Mark’s braces, is going to lead to financial wreck and ruin. Not really, but I might have to cut back on the cauliflower. Do me a favour: if I start jonesing for roast cauliflower, someone throw me a box of spinach or some other veggie methadone. xo

Panic at the (Electricity-Free) Disco

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Here I was, calmly going about my day, when I heard someone drop something in the mailbox. Hmmm…the mail is early today, I thought, and if my life was a (admittedly very boring) made-for-TV movie, some kind of ominous music would be playing. The soundtrack would then circle to the crazy-sounding, straight-to-the-asylum middle bars of A Day In The Life when I started reading the piece of paper that had been stuck in my mailbox.

People, the electric company is doing maintenance work on a generator in my neighbourhood, and the power is going to be off between 9 and 4 tomorrow. Seven hours with no electricity or heat; for a person who works from home, this is a nightmare on par with the one I have where I’m endlessly folding laundry and then I turn around and there is another, unfolded pile to be done.

Clearly, I would have been a terrible pioneer or settler, because the slightest hardship or inconvenience gives me a Panic At The Disco feeling. How will I make a smoothie tomorrow, I thought worriedly, like the spoiled princess that I am. Why couldn’t this happen during book fair, I thought, as if maybe the electric company was doing this strictly to inconvenience me.

Oh well. I was very productive today prior to this notice, and I have been utilizing our electrical appliances like crazy. I baked brownies and mini-muffins today, and let me just give a shout-out to my friend and YMC colleague Gwen, over at Delightful Adventures. I had been meaning to try her Vegan Gluten Free Gingerbread Loaf, but with regular gluten-full flour, and today I gave it a go. In addition to changing the flour, I also subbed in brown sugar and grapeseed oil, realized that I didn’t have cloves nor all-spice, and then decided to make it into mini-muffins instead of a loaf. In short, I was like one of those awful recipe commenters who say “This was terrible; I changed everything in the recipe and it didn’t work.” Except, it turned out awesome! I’m sure the original must be delicious too; check out Delightful Adventures if you love recipes and gorgeous food photography.

Like Jake’s class did last month, Mark’s class is on a week-long field trip. Unlike Jake’s class, which toured the Board of Education buildings and got to do thrilling things like discuss community collaboration and education funding and sit in on a school board trustee meeting, Mark’s class is actually doing something fun. They are at the Arts Commons, and they are making Greek masks, writing plays, and learning stage-fighting. Methinks Jake’s class got the short end of the stick. Mark’s “partner class” – the one they collaborate with most often – is on a similar field trip, in which they get to focus on Healthy Living. Games, physical activities, and making pizzas is on their agenda, which made me feel even more sorry for Jake’s class. I mean, the highlight for the entire class was seeing the fish tank in the indoor garden. I should point out that these field trips are assigned to the classes, and are not chosen by the teachers or the school – the school board runs them and it is considered a privilege to go. However. Fish tank viewing is not equal to learning to stage fight or making pizza.

Well. Life, as we know, is not always fair, and meanwhile when the power is out tomorrow I think I’ll take Jake out for lunch. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to go to the mall food court for lunch, which has never happened before in the history of his school experience; the mall food court being the epitome of fine dining for a ten-year-old boy.

Speaking of the mall, my mother was in town yesterday and we had a little visit and quick shopping trip. The trip to the mall reminded me why I almost exclusively shop online. People, the Old Navy is a hellhole. A yard sale set up by Mary Ingalls would be better organized. If I took everything out of my drawers and closet and piled it up on my bed, it would look somewhat like the Old Navy displays. It was a bit soul-sucking, but they had a table of boys’ t-shirts advertised for $5 each – discount taken at register! – and my mother chose one for each boy. Do I even need to tell the punch line to this? The discount was NOT taken at the register, and I left feeling like Old Navy Customer Service Has Gone To The Dogs. This $10 in Old Navy Cash feels like blood money, or at least bloody irritation money.

Well, I’m off to prepare for the coming apocalypse/ power outage, and fret that all our food is going to go bad. Fortunately for my comfort, it’s not going to be terribly cold tomorrow. Unfortunately for my food, if the power is off for longer than anticipated, my giant weekend grocery shop will be all for naught.

Heyyyyyyy Macarena.

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You guys, Christie Brinkley is turning 62 next month. 62! And yes, this should seem unsurprising given that the Age of the Supermodels was the Eighties, and the Eighties were three decades ago but my point is, have you seen a photo of Christie Brinkley lately? Google one right now, I’ll wait. Or, better yet, here’s an Instagram photo from a few months back. My god, forget the eye cream, I need something stronger. Is there any way to completely rid myself of Bitchy Resting Face? I’ll take any advice that I can get.

Oh well, it’s not like my face is my fortune, or that an awesomely talented musician wrote a song about me or anything (that I know of) so I guess I’ll make peace with my non-Christie-Brinkley-appearance. But still, DAMN.

Time just flies by, doesn’t it? Today I learned that 2016 is the year that the Macarena turns 20. Somewhere there exists a photo of me – in cut-off denim shirts and a red crop top – doing the Macarena in a bar in Mexico. I cannot find the photo but I do have a photo of me in that same outfit, drinking a margarita:

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That hair, though.

Other songs that turn twenty this year include Champagne Supernova, Killing Me Softly, and No Diggity, if you want to shake your head in disbelief about the Flight of Time.

The Flight of Time felt more like a crawl this week, though. The first week back to regular routines and schedules always feels a bit strange. Technically it was a short week, since the kids had Monday off of school, but I had booked them in for an orthodontist check-up first thing in the morning. I had expected just a “we’ll see you in six months” appointment, and that is what happened for Jake. Mark, however, has lost his last baby tooth and braces are imminent. He had moulds made and X-ray imaging done, and so it feels like I’m entering a new era; The Orthodontia Years. Or, since he’s expected to have them less than two years, The Orthodontia Months. Teenage angst is not far off! Sunrise, sunset.

A nice aspect of this orthodontist’s office is that the kids get to spin a wheel, similar to a slot machine, and then they receive a prize. It’s like a graduated version of crappy dentist office prizes; Jake got two free cookies from Cookies by George, and Mark got a gift card to Kernels. Enjoy the popcorn while you can, buddy! Since it was a day off, after the (unexpectedly long) appointment we went to the mall to collect their prizes. “Isn’t it great we get this free stuff?” the kids asked, and I refrained from pointing out that “included” is not the same as “free.”

Since we were at the mall anyway, me and my dark undereye bags decided to go into the Kiehl’s store. I love the Kiehl’s store. It feels like I’m really Doing Something Important, what with the sales associates standing around in white lab coats, and their brisk business-like attitude. There’s no hippie-dippiness going on around here. You have a problem. They have a solution. I ended up purchasing something called “Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Eye-Brightening Concentrate” which isn’t something that succinctly rolls off your tongue, but it describes exactly what I want in an eye cream.

I tried to take a photo of my undereye bags for a “before” shot, but the result was so depressing I’m not sure I can post it. I mean, really. I drink a ton of water. I eat well. I exercise. I get about seven hours of sleep a night, and more on weekends. Why, then, do I look like an extra in the Thriller video? No wonder no one knew what I was dressed up as for Halloween – my undereye bags are like extra-large undereye Samsonites.

TGI Friday, am I right? Does anyone have plans for the weekend? I am still working my way through Game of Thrones, and I’m now in the third season – i.e., I am losing my will to live. The problem with binge-watching these shows is that they take over one’s subconscious. I remember this feeling with Breaking Bad; too many episodes in a row and I started to feel sweaty and shaky and have weird dreams. Those weird dreams were NOTHING compared to Game of Thrones-inspired dreams. HOO BOY.