Animal, most notably raccoon, stories were going all over that group, so I had to share. And this was what I said:
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Tellulah was about three or four months old when I was diagnosed with apnea (I stop breathing in my sleep) and received my CPAP machine, which is essentially a machine which pumps air through a mask into my nose to keep my throat open so I don’t stop breathing. It have a small hole at the front of the mask to let exhaled air out. I start wearing this thing, and I’m trying to fall asleep, which is hard enough at the best of times, but now I’ve got alien gear all over my face, when Tellulah walks up to me, and starts sucking air out of the hole in the front of the mask. Slurp! Slurp! Slurp! I just about bust a gut laughing.
I have to add that I’ve never seen a possum in my life. I live in the frozen north – Canada. I’ve spent most of my life living in places that can only be described as having winter for more than half the year. I’ve seen -60 on more occasions than I can remember, and yes, I have had a cord hanging out the front of my car (although we do tuck it in for the summer) to plug the car in over night. I was born in the middle of a cold snap, with windchill so cold that exposed flesh froze in a matter of seconds, and have had more blizzards on my birthday than I could conceive of counting. Yup, no possums up here. Mind you, no spiders either. They don’t last winters. But we do have mosquitoes that are so large you can hear them from ten feet. No jokes. And the black flies bite chunks out of a person, and yes, they do leave scars.
Oh, yeah, this is way more than you need to know. You want to know about winter, I can tell you just about anything. And yes, I have been dog sledding. I have tobogganed and made snow angels in every month of the year, just not in the same year. My sister lived in a place so remote there’s no highway – except in the winter when the river freezes. It’s close to the arctic circle, and when I visited her there last summer, we had no night. Sun didn’t set. They finally had to turn on the dining room lights at about 11:30 pm when the sun dipped into the horizon, but other than that, it was bright bright bright for the other 22 hours of the day. That’s how far north we were.
This isn’t my conventional introduction, but it’ll have to do. For now.
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