We just got back from a week-long vacation in San Francisco.
The timing on that is kind of weird – leaving December 13 and returning December 19, but it was nice to get away all the same. Also, it was really very nice to come back, to realize that I am kind of behind on this whole Christmas thing. It’s now December 23 and I’m putting the finishing touches on some home-made gifts while living in squalor, my house is a filthy mess of wood chips, empty suitcases and dirty laundry.
San Francisco is a nice city. Saying that is like saying “I like weekends” or “chocolate is tasty.” Everyone knows San Francisco is nice. It has a big orange bridge (“International Red” I learned from the guidebooks), a bunch of hills, and good shopping. We were lucky enough to be visiting family – hubby’s half-sister and her hubby rent an apartment there for a month each year – and so accommodations were inexpensive and we had built-in tour guides. The backyard of their apartment featured two lemon trees – a meyer lemon and a regular (?) lemon – so we had fresh lemons whenever we wanted. I was blown away. Not only were there lemon trees, there were lemons in DECEMBER. I picked one that was almost the size of my head.
We wandered around town. We saw and went up Coit Tower, went to Pier 39 and checked out the sea lions (Feist running in our heads the whole time), ate chowder on the waterfront, shopped on Fillmore street and Union Square, poked around Japantown, drove across the bridge four times, went to Muir woods and Muir beach, Sonoma (a good somnolent word for this horribly boring town), Monterey – to the Aquarium, Salinas to see hubby’s amazing 91 year-old aunt and her little dog too, Ocean Beach, Cliff House and the amazingly un-barricaded Sutro bath ruins. We had a typical-for-us whirlwind vacation. Our hosts thought a week was too short but in fact it was long enough.
I was impressed by the palm trees (they get me every time!) and the surfers. We definitely do not have surfers here in December.
I have to say: I thought experiencing Christmas stuff in a warm place would be weird, but it’s not, really. Those people have some crazy spirit. Many of the houses are decorated, Christmas music blasts in every business and everyone wishes you a ‘happy holidays!’ well mostly everybody – not that crazy old bitch in Sonoma who got mad at me for my chair placement in the bakery (I’m sending a hex her way and hope she has a terrible Christmas full of personal tragedy and financial misfortune) – but generally Christmas spirit there is almost more intense than it is here. Palm trees with Christmas lights on them are funny to me.
Rosie stayed with my parents/her grandparents, and they had a blast. I think both parties were sad when it came to an end. We were so happy to get back and to see her; while we were away I had to touch every dog I saw, I missed her so much. We came back early Sunday morning to a freezing cold northern weather blast, a cold house, and a lot of laundry.
So now it is Christmas. I hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday however/whatever you celebrate. As for me, I look forward to giving everyone my wee gifties and am planning to eat my own weight in Oma-food.
See you in the new year!
12/23/09
11/18/09
11/17/09
Getting to know all about you....
I have worked on a lot of projects over the past 4 and a half years – since I started this blog. You have all been thrilled by my accounts of things like planning our wedding, making shelving in the back room, the annual vegetable garden, terracing my front perennial beds, the cider-making, renovating the trailer, building a new deck, the siding on our house, purchasing and developing our waterfront land, getting a puppy, raising said puppy into a very nice (yet still crazy) two-year-old dog, and various knitting projects here and there. I am a project person, and have enjoyed the varied successes that have come along with each of these.
There remains one project that we have been working on for the past four years, which I’ve alluded to yet never described in any great detail. This involves something that we’ve attempted to build, but can never really get off the ground. It’s been in the planning stages for four years, and sacks of money have been invested into it, but still we haven’t met with any success. I will attempt to go into some detail without getting maudlin, but this project has been to build a family, and so far it’s the one thing that we’ve been completely unsuccessful at. Turns out it’s way easier to build a deck.
We’ve always wanted kids. I’m a kid-person who can often be found in the kid room at a party, being entertained by the under-3-foot set. When I was young I babysat, and man did I babysit; one summer there were 20 families in my area whose kids I babysat. Those kids are all driving and going to university now, and here I am with grey streaks in my hair, wondering how the heck it happened that my kid-friendly house hasn’t got any kids in it.
Lots of people that I read about start families in their mid-thirties, and they’re all like “I wanted to be sure that I was established in my career before I started my family.” Fair enough. I was the opposite. Until a year ago, I had jobs that made me crave a one-year slate-wiping maternity leave. I couldn’t wait to announce to someone “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be leaving for a year. Let somebody else have fun at my desk.” I can’t really account for why we waited so long, just that it took us 7 years to get established enough to be married: in the first year hubby moved to Thailand for six months. In the second, we were getting used to co-habiting and working out the kinks of job, bills, lifestyle, etc. In the third, we bought a house. In the fourth I guess we just sat around, and in the 5th I got a new job. It wasn’t until the 6th that we got engaged, and in the 7th we got married. I was never curious as to why I’d never even had a pregnancy scare in those 7 years, but that has since explained itself.
We started trying to have kids right away. I remember the anticipation and assuredness that I felt, that yes, we’d timed this one right and we’ve been married for two months and we are going to have a baby! How exciting! But life doesn’t work that way. I learned that if you wait that long to find out if you can get pregnant, you’re already a few years behind the eight ball if you find out that you can’t get pregnant.
After a year and a half of timing things just right and taking my temperature every day, and spitting on an ovulation ferning kit predictor thingy every morning and peeing on sticks of all kinds, with no results, my doctor referred us to the fertility clinic. So in our 9th year we met with the nice doctor there, who is a young asian man with an ok sense of humour. He subjected us to rounds and rounds of testing and more months of recording my temperatures before he decided that I don’t ovulate very consistently and hubby’s swimmers aren’t in peak condition. We just miss each other every time. It kind of figures. When asked what causes the lack of top-drawer sperm, he said that the only cause they have found so far is environmental pollutants, which build up in a body, emulate estrogen and do all kinds of other wacky things (and it's on the rise). Needless to say, hubby now uses herbal shampoo, soap, and doesn’t put his food in plastic containers. We have recently seen some improvement.
We went on a few rounds of Clomid, the second of which stimulated my ovaries so much I couldn’t walk comfortably or do my pants up all the way. Clomid was easy to take but tough to deal with. That was two summers ago - I think I wrote about it. After about 5 months (not consecutive) of Clomid, Dr. determined that that wasn’t likely to work either. I then took a break, as my resentment towards the clinic and the process had built up and my stress levels had risen – being told one appointment that I likely had PCOS and the next appointment that I did not, over and over again, made me beyond frustrated – so in our 10th year, I had to step back.
Which brings us to the present reality: we returned to the clinic early in 2009, and decided to give the Dr. the ‘go’ to do whatever it takes to have a kid. Tickety tock, in our 11th year. By May we were signing consent forms for IUI and IVF, and in July I was on my first round of injectible fertility drugs. They are a trip. Being a kind of science nerd (secretly), the process of giving myself the injections doesn’t bother me a bit. I got a kit containing a fun little pen-like syringe thing, and it comes with lots of needle heads, and alcohol pads, and I crank it to the right dose and just pop it right into my belly. That first month it sent me for a loop – I was tired all the time, cranky, woozy about an hour after the shot, and kind of forgetful, like I was in a fog. When in early August I went to the washroom and found out that it didn’t work, I was distraught.
The process isn’t really fun, for any of you who haven’t had the pleasure: for about two weeks, you inject every day, into your stomach or your thighs. Every other day, you go into the clinic in the morning for blood tests and an ultrasound (not the on-top-of-the-belly one you see in movies, either). They count and measure your egg follicles, and then you meet with the Doctor, who tells you what dose to continue with and when to come back. Towards the end, you go in for bloodwork every day. You have to wake up early because you live an hour away, and you are generally late for work each time. Also, the medication has to stay refrigerated so it’s really fun up at the lake, and you can’t travel anywhere because you have to go to the clinic every damn day. Oh and the medication is really expensive and my drug plan doesn't cover it. When you’re ready (meaning your follicles are big enough your estrogen levels have risen), they tell you to ‘trigger’, which means you use a different injectible medication to make you ovulate. Then you wait a day (phew, a day of respite, where you wake up at a normal time and don’t have to inject anything into yourself). Then you go into the clinic (hubby goes at 8am, I go at 11), his little guys get spun in a centrifuge so only the very best survive, and they use a catheter to put them inside your uterus. You wait 15 minutes then go back to work. You stop drinking wine and start making lots of jokes about 'eating for two.'
I’ve done this twice now (number two gave me nothing either), and am close to the ‘trigger’ of my third as I write this. My stomach is covered in bruises as I think I’ve been a bit more cavalier with the injections this cycle. It’s really pretty. I've had 16 needles in 10 days. They added a new step this round, which is apparently now common practice: progesterone suppositories, which sound superfun. I am to take those twice a day for two weeks once the procedure’s done. The bottle has to be disguised or stay hidden in the back of the drawer, as it says “INSERT INTO VAGINA TWICE DAILY” in big black letters and I don't want company finding it. Is that TMI? I am kind of blind to TMI these days, sorry. Also, it has a fun sticker on it that says ‘may cause dizziness’, illustrated with a fun confused-looking little character. This will be my excuse for doing a lot of sitting down over the next two weeks.
I have high hopes for this round ‘cause if it doesn’t work, we’re on to the big bad IVF in the new year. This whole thing has been a bit disruptive to the new job that I love and don’t really want to leave (a strange sensation I am experiencing for the first time), as nobody at work can have any idea what I’m cooking up in the background. I don’t exactly work at a daycare, and this beloved job is a contract.
All in all, it’s not something that brings me sadness on a daily basis. I am pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose that if this one doesn’t work and then IVF were to fail, then I would be despondent, but I’d probably just pull a Madonna and steal a kid from somewhere. I am at the point in my life that I could bond to a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. I make jokes about it, and will discuss the process with anyone who’s interested. I just don’t want anyone waiting on tenterhooks for me. I want it all to be a surprise when it finally happens, a miracle of life. There are many blogs dedicated to the fertility treatments and exploits of women who’ve been through much much more than I have, so if you’re really interested and want to hear more about this, then I advise you go to explore over there, because I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this blog.
In the meantime, Christmas is coming, and I wish I could tell you all about the knitting projects I’m working on, but THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU!
There remains one project that we have been working on for the past four years, which I’ve alluded to yet never described in any great detail. This involves something that we’ve attempted to build, but can never really get off the ground. It’s been in the planning stages for four years, and sacks of money have been invested into it, but still we haven’t met with any success. I will attempt to go into some detail without getting maudlin, but this project has been to build a family, and so far it’s the one thing that we’ve been completely unsuccessful at. Turns out it’s way easier to build a deck.
We’ve always wanted kids. I’m a kid-person who can often be found in the kid room at a party, being entertained by the under-3-foot set. When I was young I babysat, and man did I babysit; one summer there were 20 families in my area whose kids I babysat. Those kids are all driving and going to university now, and here I am with grey streaks in my hair, wondering how the heck it happened that my kid-friendly house hasn’t got any kids in it.
Lots of people that I read about start families in their mid-thirties, and they’re all like “I wanted to be sure that I was established in my career before I started my family.” Fair enough. I was the opposite. Until a year ago, I had jobs that made me crave a one-year slate-wiping maternity leave. I couldn’t wait to announce to someone “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be leaving for a year. Let somebody else have fun at my desk.” I can’t really account for why we waited so long, just that it took us 7 years to get established enough to be married: in the first year hubby moved to Thailand for six months. In the second, we were getting used to co-habiting and working out the kinks of job, bills, lifestyle, etc. In the third, we bought a house. In the fourth I guess we just sat around, and in the 5th I got a new job. It wasn’t until the 6th that we got engaged, and in the 7th we got married. I was never curious as to why I’d never even had a pregnancy scare in those 7 years, but that has since explained itself.
We started trying to have kids right away. I remember the anticipation and assuredness that I felt, that yes, we’d timed this one right and we’ve been married for two months and we are going to have a baby! How exciting! But life doesn’t work that way. I learned that if you wait that long to find out if you can get pregnant, you’re already a few years behind the eight ball if you find out that you can’t get pregnant.
After a year and a half of timing things just right and taking my temperature every day, and spitting on an ovulation ferning kit predictor thingy every morning and peeing on sticks of all kinds, with no results, my doctor referred us to the fertility clinic. So in our 9th year we met with the nice doctor there, who is a young asian man with an ok sense of humour. He subjected us to rounds and rounds of testing and more months of recording my temperatures before he decided that I don’t ovulate very consistently and hubby’s swimmers aren’t in peak condition. We just miss each other every time. It kind of figures. When asked what causes the lack of top-drawer sperm, he said that the only cause they have found so far is environmental pollutants, which build up in a body, emulate estrogen and do all kinds of other wacky things (and it's on the rise). Needless to say, hubby now uses herbal shampoo, soap, and doesn’t put his food in plastic containers. We have recently seen some improvement.
We went on a few rounds of Clomid, the second of which stimulated my ovaries so much I couldn’t walk comfortably or do my pants up all the way. Clomid was easy to take but tough to deal with. That was two summers ago - I think I wrote about it. After about 5 months (not consecutive) of Clomid, Dr. determined that that wasn’t likely to work either. I then took a break, as my resentment towards the clinic and the process had built up and my stress levels had risen – being told one appointment that I likely had PCOS and the next appointment that I did not, over and over again, made me beyond frustrated – so in our 10th year, I had to step back.
Which brings us to the present reality: we returned to the clinic early in 2009, and decided to give the Dr. the ‘go’ to do whatever it takes to have a kid. Tickety tock, in our 11th year. By May we were signing consent forms for IUI and IVF, and in July I was on my first round of injectible fertility drugs. They are a trip. Being a kind of science nerd (secretly), the process of giving myself the injections doesn’t bother me a bit. I got a kit containing a fun little pen-like syringe thing, and it comes with lots of needle heads, and alcohol pads, and I crank it to the right dose and just pop it right into my belly. That first month it sent me for a loop – I was tired all the time, cranky, woozy about an hour after the shot, and kind of forgetful, like I was in a fog. When in early August I went to the washroom and found out that it didn’t work, I was distraught.
The process isn’t really fun, for any of you who haven’t had the pleasure: for about two weeks, you inject every day, into your stomach or your thighs. Every other day, you go into the clinic in the morning for blood tests and an ultrasound (not the on-top-of-the-belly one you see in movies, either). They count and measure your egg follicles, and then you meet with the Doctor, who tells you what dose to continue with and when to come back. Towards the end, you go in for bloodwork every day. You have to wake up early because you live an hour away, and you are generally late for work each time. Also, the medication has to stay refrigerated so it’s really fun up at the lake, and you can’t travel anywhere because you have to go to the clinic every damn day. Oh and the medication is really expensive and my drug plan doesn't cover it. When you’re ready (meaning your follicles are big enough your estrogen levels have risen), they tell you to ‘trigger’, which means you use a different injectible medication to make you ovulate. Then you wait a day (phew, a day of respite, where you wake up at a normal time and don’t have to inject anything into yourself). Then you go into the clinic (hubby goes at 8am, I go at 11), his little guys get spun in a centrifuge so only the very best survive, and they use a catheter to put them inside your uterus. You wait 15 minutes then go back to work. You stop drinking wine and start making lots of jokes about 'eating for two.'
I’ve done this twice now (number two gave me nothing either), and am close to the ‘trigger’ of my third as I write this. My stomach is covered in bruises as I think I’ve been a bit more cavalier with the injections this cycle. It’s really pretty. I've had 16 needles in 10 days. They added a new step this round, which is apparently now common practice: progesterone suppositories, which sound superfun. I am to take those twice a day for two weeks once the procedure’s done. The bottle has to be disguised or stay hidden in the back of the drawer, as it says “INSERT INTO VAGINA TWICE DAILY” in big black letters and I don't want company finding it. Is that TMI? I am kind of blind to TMI these days, sorry. Also, it has a fun sticker on it that says ‘may cause dizziness’, illustrated with a fun confused-looking little character. This will be my excuse for doing a lot of sitting down over the next two weeks.
I have high hopes for this round ‘cause if it doesn’t work, we’re on to the big bad IVF in the new year. This whole thing has been a bit disruptive to the new job that I love and don’t really want to leave (a strange sensation I am experiencing for the first time), as nobody at work can have any idea what I’m cooking up in the background. I don’t exactly work at a daycare, and this beloved job is a contract.
All in all, it’s not something that brings me sadness on a daily basis. I am pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose that if this one doesn’t work and then IVF were to fail, then I would be despondent, but I’d probably just pull a Madonna and steal a kid from somewhere. I am at the point in my life that I could bond to a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. I make jokes about it, and will discuss the process with anyone who’s interested. I just don’t want anyone waiting on tenterhooks for me. I want it all to be a surprise when it finally happens, a miracle of life. There are many blogs dedicated to the fertility treatments and exploits of women who’ve been through much much more than I have, so if you’re really interested and want to hear more about this, then I advise you go to explore over there, because I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this blog.
In the meantime, Christmas is coming, and I wish I could tell you all about the knitting projects I’m working on, but THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU!
11/10/09
Better late than never
I’m a big liar and didn’t post pictures of my Halloween party last week like I said I would. It was a great success (I think) – in total 27 people showed up, the place looked great, and we had so much food that I never even remembered to crack into the boxes of frozen hors d’oeuvres I’d bought in a panic at 4:30 p.m. Now I look forward to enjoying hors d’oeuvres for dinner some night. 
People took the zombie theme and ran with it, even though dressing as a zombie wasn’t mandatory. We had a zombie fisherman (dear hubby), a zombie bride, a zombie fireman, a zombie barbarian, a zombie tinkerbell, a zombie doctor, a zombie cowboy, a zombie country girl and me, the zombie hostess.
We also had a mad doctor, a clown, a Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, a beautiful Wakefield lady, a man in a sari and pearls, his lady friend in a long Moroccan jacket (kind of a last-minute costume), a mummy, a Bolivian person (actually a Cuban person in a Bolivian hat), a spooky scarecrow, a Frida Kahlo, a man in a fur vest and bowler hat (maybe he was a zombie man in a fur vest and bowler hat?) an undertaker, a sex criminal, a pumpkin, a family of circus freaks (a bearded lady, a werewolf, a baby werewolf, and a ringleader) and I guess that about does it. There was dancing. At one point, we had 100% dance floor participation, as everyone contributed a semi-coordinated effort to Thriller, of course (zombie anthem).The next morning I was full of vim and vigour and got up at 7 a.m. and cleaned the house. I crashed around 2 or 3 but there’s nothing I love more than having a party and then, the next day, getting the house cleaner than it was before.
Now here we are at November 10th already. We visited the cottage construction site on Sunday and oh man, am I jealous. It is gorgeous. And expensive. The roof is on and it’s the talk of the lake. Once the windows go in it will truly be stunning. We moved our mini-kayaks into our trailer and tarped it up, and it’s pretty much ready for winter now – though Ben the builder still has to put a little roof over it. We may go up one more time once the windows are in the cottage, just to check it out.
I’m off tomorrow because government employees get to stay home on Remembrance Day. I have a day of medical interventions planned – at 7 a.m. I’m going to go and try to get a flu shot for the H1N1, because I’ve had rather a yucky case of asthma since I was 12 and any respiratory illnesses would be rather serious for me. Then I get to go to the fertility clinic and have another blood test and ultrasound. I hope to be home for 11, so I can clean my house and perhaps teach my neighbor how to knit. I am working on my Christmas knitting and making good progress, aided by the fact that a new yarn ‘warehouse’ opened up not too far from my workplace. There goes the neighborhood. On Friday I look forward to a visit from my cousin and her boyfriend, who I have not met, and who knows what the weekend will bring – perhaps I’ll try taking Rosie to the city again, if the weather’s nice.
No more parties for awhile. Our next big thing is a trip to San Francisco in a month, and then onto Christmas. Ah Christmas.
10/30/09
Two Halloween Revelations
Two things came to my attention this morning:
1. I have readers who are not related to me, and
2. There are other folks out there (adults) who are just as enthusiastic as me about Halloween.
So for all of you out there (relatives and non-relatives) who are glueing, sewing, painting, last-minute-craft-supply-shopping and figuring out how to wire your wigs into just the right shapes, I want you to know that I'm here for you, and we can have a virtual brag-fest right here. Send your pictures to me at gennyland(AT)yahoo.com and I will post them. In the meantime, here's some inspiration. Celebrity Halloween Costumes.
1. I have readers who are not related to me, and
2. There are other folks out there (adults) who are just as enthusiastic as me about Halloween.
So for all of you out there (relatives and non-relatives) who are glueing, sewing, painting, last-minute-craft-supply-shopping and figuring out how to wire your wigs into just the right shapes, I want you to know that I'm here for you, and we can have a virtual brag-fest right here. Send your pictures to me at gennyland(AT)yahoo.com and I will post them. In the meantime, here's some inspiration. Celebrity Halloween Costumes.
10/29/09
Halloween is for Grown-Ups
I am dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm around Halloween these days.
My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).
This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.
Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).
This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.
For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!
I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.
My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).
This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.
Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).
This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.
For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!
I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.
10/15/09
Pizza Night!
So evidently my mother now feels that she needs to make my lunch before I go to work and/or drive in to give it to me, to make sure that I get a healthy balanced meal every day and don’t waste my money. Sorry Mom, I didn’t mean to make you concerned. And today’s Moroccan vegetable soup and strip of baguette is delicious so please don’t start delivery just yet.
Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.
I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.
NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.
Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.
I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.
NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.
10/14/09
I buy food.
My husband and I have a somewhat unorthodox way of managing household expenses. More traditional folks have looked at our system and wondered why we go through all the trouble and not just do it their way, but for us, it works. What we do is, we save all receipts for things that are shared expenses; this category includes things like groceries (I buy most of them), gas (hubby buys most of it), bills (I pay them) and other incidental things like furniture or goo-gaws from garage sales or the occasional “hey I have no money in my wallet can I borrow 20 bucks?” Half of all of these amounts are written down into two columns – what I pay and what hubby pays – and every two weeks we ‘tally’ these two columns up, or balance them against each other. Since I have paid more things (mortgage, bills, etc) whatever he has paid for is put against this to come up with the amount that he owes me. Then he pays up through our shared account, which is really just a ‘bounce’ account.
This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.
Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.
And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.
I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!
I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.
I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.
I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.
This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.
Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.
And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.
I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!
I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.
I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.
I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.
9/25/09
Fall Obsession
Well fall is officially here, which I could have told you without even looking at the calendar. There’s a bite in the air, especially at night, and we know that even if it gets hot in the day, the sleeping will be cool and comfortable at night. The sumacs are electric red, if that's a colour. I think I have to bring in my peppers, pick the rest of my tomatoes, and plant my garlic this weekend.
We had a visitor yesterday – a rude houseguest who trampled the perennials in front of my deck, ate the apples off of my tree, took a big poop in front of my veggie garden, and then crushed my plume poppies on the way out of the yard. I think he had a rather large bottom, by the looks of things. Tonight we are going to go to Canadian Tire and buy one of these, because how many times have I thought that I wanted one over the last 7 years? Too many to count. I am looking forward to it; if we get good shots I will definitely share. Fun for home and cottage!
I was having this discussion with my sister-in-law today: it is fall and for some biological crazy reason, all I can think about is food. I am packing it on. I’m not alone in this so don’t get excited or anything, but fall is when the bear in me goes “get fat and hibernate.” Maybe if I kept my house warmer in winter, that urge would go away? I eat one thing and start thinking about the next. I feel like baking, even though I don’t specifically know what to make or how I’m going to eat it. I’ve started to crave stews and things with apples in them. She mentioned pumpkins and I went “oooh I haven’t even thought about pumpkins yet!” I want to buy some squash this weekend just for the sake of buying and having squash in my house. Is that ridiculous?
So this weekend, on top of cleaning the house and garden and preparing for more guests, I want to bake things with apples, buy a bunch of squash, buy organic garlic and plant it, pick the apples off of our trees to save them from the wildlife, and plan things to bake and experiment on with pumpkins this fall (pumpkin cinnamon buns? Pumpkin pasta? Pumpkin cookies?) Man I am hungry already. What time is lunch?
We had a visitor yesterday – a rude houseguest who trampled the perennials in front of my deck, ate the apples off of my tree, took a big poop in front of my veggie garden, and then crushed my plume poppies on the way out of the yard. I think he had a rather large bottom, by the looks of things. Tonight we are going to go to Canadian Tire and buy one of these, because how many times have I thought that I wanted one over the last 7 years? Too many to count. I am looking forward to it; if we get good shots I will definitely share. Fun for home and cottage!
I was having this discussion with my sister-in-law today: it is fall and for some biological crazy reason, all I can think about is food. I am packing it on. I’m not alone in this so don’t get excited or anything, but fall is when the bear in me goes “get fat and hibernate.” Maybe if I kept my house warmer in winter, that urge would go away? I eat one thing and start thinking about the next. I feel like baking, even though I don’t specifically know what to make or how I’m going to eat it. I’ve started to crave stews and things with apples in them. She mentioned pumpkins and I went “oooh I haven’t even thought about pumpkins yet!” I want to buy some squash this weekend just for the sake of buying and having squash in my house. Is that ridiculous?
So this weekend, on top of cleaning the house and garden and preparing for more guests, I want to bake things with apples, buy a bunch of squash, buy organic garlic and plant it, pick the apples off of our trees to save them from the wildlife, and plan things to bake and experiment on with pumpkins this fall (pumpkin cinnamon buns? Pumpkin pasta? Pumpkin cookies?) Man I am hungry already. What time is lunch?
9/22/09
Things I Hate.
Things that I find really oppressive right now are the following:
Fruit flies I am at war with fruit flies. I surmise that they are coming in through the screens in the kitchen windows, because right outside the kitchen is our apple orchard (two trees). There is a lot of fallen and rotting fruit, and I believe this is where the flies originate. The compost pail has now moved outside to the deck, which is for the best because it’s a breeding ground for fruit flies, though hubby insists on bringing it inside from time to time and enraging me. There are flies in and around the sink, and flies around our heads while we eat dinner. I bought a trap from Lee Valley Tools but I don’t know how many have fallen for it. They are wiley, those fruit flies.
Threatening wildlife, fattening up for winter Apparently this is the time of year when I have to really worry about fishers, coyotes, etc etc. Cats are starting to go missing, and we all know how I feel about that. My little fatty Sasha sticks close to home most of the time, but she’s started staying out later and later at night, and it makes me nervous. We’ve started enlisting Rosie to go out (on a leash) and find her in the dark.
My slow garden I have tomatoes, they’re just not red yet. I have picked a bunch, and want to bring them inside to ripen, but am terrified of encouraging the abovementioned fruit flies. Any ideas are welcome. I am still waiting on some potatoes (I planted them really late) and am still getting zucchini, but everything else is a wash. I got garlic (whoop, that’s the easiest thing) and onions, and potatoes (which were all floury and terrible), and four carrots which were purple, so I suspect my sister-in-law threw them out when she found them in the fridge. They were meant to be purple but she didn’t know that. I got one plum. At least we will have a wonderful apple harvest. Everything is a giant mess, as it always is at this time of year.
The onset of fall We’re unprepared for fall this year. We don’t have our firewood, let alone have it split and stacked and put away. We haven’t had our chimney cleaned. I haven’t cleaned out the garden. The grass is half-mowed, because our mower died. The car needs repairs, and we need to sell the Saturn station wagon that lives in our driveway which will get us peanuts I’m sure. We sold the blue truck (sniff) and will keep it to the Vibe for the winter, I think. We may need new winter tires (cha-ching). We haven’t done anything regarding our siding this year, though Stuart, our handyman guy, said he’d do it in the fall sometime. However, I haven’t painted any boards for it, and don’t even know how many we’ve got. The trailer is woefully unprepared for the winter onslaught, as we don’t think it can handle 4 feet of snow on top of it, and it’s definitely not mouse-or-water-tight, I’ve learned. I feel like I just pulled the garlic out of the garden and I need to think about weeding it and planting next year’s. I need to buy an extra month somehow. I am anxious just writing this out, and could really use a glass of wine.
Junk I am tired of dealing with all the junk in our house. I keep trying to encourage a clean up day (!! to make it sound fun) but we never seem to get rid of a satisfactory amount of stuff. All the empty spaces fill right back up again. This is why we need a cottage. I keep things around (old kitchen sink, old bottles, etc) because I have plans to put them in a cottage someday, but in the meantime you can’t hardly walk through our basement. This weekend I have to do the ol’ twice-annual clothing switch (summer to winter, boo hoo) and I really want to get hubby to do a major sort in his closet. We need to make space, because it’s getting a bit oppressive, and winter only makes that feeling worse.
However, all of this being said, I am a person with a can-do attitude (ha!) and this list of things that I hate now turns into a list of things to deal with:
- put up sticky traps for fruit flies.
- pick tomatoes, remaining potatoes and onions. Ripen them in a fruit-fly-free locale.
- Buy organic garlic and plant it for next year.
- Rip all the weeds and old plants out of the veggie garden.
- Pick apples.
- Order firewood.
- Split and stack firewood.
- Have chimney cleaned.
- Repair car.
- Sell Saturn.
- Call Stuart.
- Check winter tires.
- Winterize the trailer.
- Clean closets.
- Switch clothes summer/winter.
- Put junk away or throw it out.
I should just keep this list as a template, an annual to-do list, because these tasks are the same from year to year. Fall sucks.
Fruit flies I am at war with fruit flies. I surmise that they are coming in through the screens in the kitchen windows, because right outside the kitchen is our apple orchard (two trees). There is a lot of fallen and rotting fruit, and I believe this is where the flies originate. The compost pail has now moved outside to the deck, which is for the best because it’s a breeding ground for fruit flies, though hubby insists on bringing it inside from time to time and enraging me. There are flies in and around the sink, and flies around our heads while we eat dinner. I bought a trap from Lee Valley Tools but I don’t know how many have fallen for it. They are wiley, those fruit flies.
Threatening wildlife, fattening up for winter Apparently this is the time of year when I have to really worry about fishers, coyotes, etc etc. Cats are starting to go missing, and we all know how I feel about that. My little fatty Sasha sticks close to home most of the time, but she’s started staying out later and later at night, and it makes me nervous. We’ve started enlisting Rosie to go out (on a leash) and find her in the dark.
My slow garden I have tomatoes, they’re just not red yet. I have picked a bunch, and want to bring them inside to ripen, but am terrified of encouraging the abovementioned fruit flies. Any ideas are welcome. I am still waiting on some potatoes (I planted them really late) and am still getting zucchini, but everything else is a wash. I got garlic (whoop, that’s the easiest thing) and onions, and potatoes (which were all floury and terrible), and four carrots which were purple, so I suspect my sister-in-law threw them out when she found them in the fridge. They were meant to be purple but she didn’t know that. I got one plum. At least we will have a wonderful apple harvest. Everything is a giant mess, as it always is at this time of year.
The onset of fall We’re unprepared for fall this year. We don’t have our firewood, let alone have it split and stacked and put away. We haven’t had our chimney cleaned. I haven’t cleaned out the garden. The grass is half-mowed, because our mower died. The car needs repairs, and we need to sell the Saturn station wagon that lives in our driveway which will get us peanuts I’m sure. We sold the blue truck (sniff) and will keep it to the Vibe for the winter, I think. We may need new winter tires (cha-ching). We haven’t done anything regarding our siding this year, though Stuart, our handyman guy, said he’d do it in the fall sometime. However, I haven’t painted any boards for it, and don’t even know how many we’ve got. The trailer is woefully unprepared for the winter onslaught, as we don’t think it can handle 4 feet of snow on top of it, and it’s definitely not mouse-or-water-tight, I’ve learned. I feel like I just pulled the garlic out of the garden and I need to think about weeding it and planting next year’s. I need to buy an extra month somehow. I am anxious just writing this out, and could really use a glass of wine.
Junk I am tired of dealing with all the junk in our house. I keep trying to encourage a clean up day (!! to make it sound fun) but we never seem to get rid of a satisfactory amount of stuff. All the empty spaces fill right back up again. This is why we need a cottage. I keep things around (old kitchen sink, old bottles, etc) because I have plans to put them in a cottage someday, but in the meantime you can’t hardly walk through our basement. This weekend I have to do the ol’ twice-annual clothing switch (summer to winter, boo hoo) and I really want to get hubby to do a major sort in his closet. We need to make space, because it’s getting a bit oppressive, and winter only makes that feeling worse.
However, all of this being said, I am a person with a can-do attitude (ha!) and this list of things that I hate now turns into a list of things to deal with:
- put up sticky traps for fruit flies.
- pick tomatoes, remaining potatoes and onions. Ripen them in a fruit-fly-free locale.
- Buy organic garlic and plant it for next year.
- Rip all the weeds and old plants out of the veggie garden.
- Pick apples.
- Order firewood.
- Split and stack firewood.
- Have chimney cleaned.
- Repair car.
- Sell Saturn.
- Call Stuart.
- Check winter tires.
- Winterize the trailer.
- Clean closets.
- Switch clothes summer/winter.
- Put junk away or throw it out.
I should just keep this list as a template, an annual to-do list, because these tasks are the same from year to year. Fall sucks.
9/18/09
Things I Love
These are the things that I presently am really into:
Reading Reading is a funny thing to me. Either I do it 100% or not at all. I can go months and months without reading anything and then all of a sudden the dam bursts and I read three books in a week and will read while doing everything; going to the bathroom, cooking dinner, watching t.v. even.
Free decorating magazines My fertility clinic has a lot of decorating magazines. My hubby and I worked out that this is very savvy on their part: not only does the demographic match (usually thirty-somethings, many females, and most of the people I see in that clinic are fairly upwardly-mobile), but it’s a comforting subject to boot. Fashion magazines might make people feel even worse about themselves than they already do – infertility is a real punch to the gut for body image – and decorating magazines appeal to the nesting instinct that is zinging around that waiting room. Anyway, I pay the damn clinic so much money that I feel justified stealing their magazines, and have come away with two good ones in the past week. I also feel justified because I have a major project (a cottage) coming up so this is like R+D.
Kitchenalia There is this terrific store in Ottawa called Kitchenalia, which stocks really nice high-end and esoteric kitchenwares, but also a lot of antiques. The Austrians bought their kitchen table there. The little old man who runs it is super-nice and knowledgeable and he stocks a really wacky and eclectic mix of antiques. I just love it. I am going there now. There’s an orange table I’ve got my eye on. Edited to note that the table is $325 so it seems I won’t be buying it.
Rosie Rosie came in second in the photo contest. We didn’t get enough votes to win the spa package, which is fine, because it was enough to get her picture in the paper. We got 104 votes in the end. Rosie was very pleased. She has become such a lovely dog, you have no idea. We just finished 8 weeks of obedience and agility training with her and while she wouldn’t win any contests in either (come on people, it’s only 8 weeks), she can do all of the tricks, and doesn’t even hesitate on the teeter-totter, the bridge, the high jumps or the tunnel, which is her favorite. She is so smart. Lately her entire diet is apple-based, so her breath is always sweet and kiss-ready. I just wish I could bring her everywhere with me. If I ran Kitchenalia, as is my dream, she would totally come to work with me. Bull in a china shop anyone?
Bears We have bears in our neighborhood. It used to be an orchard, years and years ago, so there are apple trees everywhere. We find bear turds all over the roads, and bear prints in the mud, but they are so funny because they’re really well-fed in our area, and are therefore relatively non-threatening. All of the turds are like big piles of apple-pie filling. Rosie eats those too. We haven’t actually seen one in our parts yet but we go out looking every night, and one was huffing at my husband in the front yard (from a distance) around midnight a couple of weeks ago. That is a bit scary, but it adds an element of suspense to our days that keeps things lively. My new job as the car passenger is ‘bear-spotter’. So far I have seen only one.
Cottages I am all about cottages these days. I doodle floor plans, I research dock designs and materials, and I mostly just dream. It keeps me going, and will keep me going through the winter.
Reading Reading is a funny thing to me. Either I do it 100% or not at all. I can go months and months without reading anything and then all of a sudden the dam bursts and I read three books in a week and will read while doing everything; going to the bathroom, cooking dinner, watching t.v. even.
Free decorating magazines My fertility clinic has a lot of decorating magazines. My hubby and I worked out that this is very savvy on their part: not only does the demographic match (usually thirty-somethings, many females, and most of the people I see in that clinic are fairly upwardly-mobile), but it’s a comforting subject to boot. Fashion magazines might make people feel even worse about themselves than they already do – infertility is a real punch to the gut for body image – and decorating magazines appeal to the nesting instinct that is zinging around that waiting room. Anyway, I pay the damn clinic so much money that I feel justified stealing their magazines, and have come away with two good ones in the past week. I also feel justified because I have a major project (a cottage) coming up so this is like R+D.
Kitchenalia There is this terrific store in Ottawa called Kitchenalia, which stocks really nice high-end and esoteric kitchenwares, but also a lot of antiques. The Austrians bought their kitchen table there. The little old man who runs it is super-nice and knowledgeable and he stocks a really wacky and eclectic mix of antiques. I just love it. I am going there now. There’s an orange table I’ve got my eye on. Edited to note that the table is $325 so it seems I won’t be buying it.
Rosie Rosie came in second in the photo contest. We didn’t get enough votes to win the spa package, which is fine, because it was enough to get her picture in the paper. We got 104 votes in the end. Rosie was very pleased. She has become such a lovely dog, you have no idea. We just finished 8 weeks of obedience and agility training with her and while she wouldn’t win any contests in either (come on people, it’s only 8 weeks), she can do all of the tricks, and doesn’t even hesitate on the teeter-totter, the bridge, the high jumps or the tunnel, which is her favorite. She is so smart. Lately her entire diet is apple-based, so her breath is always sweet and kiss-ready. I just wish I could bring her everywhere with me. If I ran Kitchenalia, as is my dream, she would totally come to work with me. Bull in a china shop anyone?
Bears We have bears in our neighborhood. It used to be an orchard, years and years ago, so there are apple trees everywhere. We find bear turds all over the roads, and bear prints in the mud, but they are so funny because they’re really well-fed in our area, and are therefore relatively non-threatening. All of the turds are like big piles of apple-pie filling. Rosie eats those too. We haven’t actually seen one in our parts yet but we go out looking every night, and one was huffing at my husband in the front yard (from a distance) around midnight a couple of weeks ago. That is a bit scary, but it adds an element of suspense to our days that keeps things lively. My new job as the car passenger is ‘bear-spotter’. So far I have seen only one.
Cottages I am all about cottages these days. I doodle floor plans, I research dock designs and materials, and I mostly just dream. It keeps me going, and will keep me going through the winter.
9/16/09
Family Time
Gosh I don’t even remember the last time I wrote you. So much has happened in the meantime – all of August has passed us by, and nearly half of September – that I don’t think I can recount it in these pages.
Sorry. I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s affecting my writing style. I’m going all Jane Austen on your asses. I haven’t read the original, but this one’s much more exciting. I enjoy a Victorian comedy of manners so much more when it’s laden with gut-wrenching zombie-killing violence. It’s the love child of Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino.
In early August, back in what I like to call ‘the rainy season’, I hosted a BBQ party for my mother’s side of the family. It was a hoot, from what I remember. There was dancing. There was drinking. People fished and golfed and swam and one of our number even went zip-lining in the quarry. We had big plans to go on the aerial adventure at the Cavernes Lafleche aerial park but those sizeist bastards wouldn’t take anyone with hips larger than 42 inches. For those of you who are familiar with my family, there are very few among them with hips smaller than 42 inches. Thankfully this is balanced out – many of them (females, mostly) are six-footers. I am a shorty at 5’7 ½ (barefoot). What can those cave-people expect?
After that, we began preparations for the arrival of the Austrians. During this time, we didn’t really visit the land much, so when we finally went up with the Austrians we were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely first-floor and three walls standing where there once was only bush. I must admit to feeling a sense of accomplishment. While the majority of the actual work has been done by my brother, by builders and various other service-people (septic installation, laneway backhoe, etc), I feel like as a unit we’ve moved the project in its entirety along at a great pace in just a few months. It also just so happened that the arrival of the Austrians was timed perfectly so that they could watch their cottage being built.
Their visit was a bunch of fun. We went to the land. We swam, we boated, we kayaked (we bought kayaks!), we slept in the trailer, we drank beer from the bottom of the lake (warm beer!), we fished, I watched Rosie redundantly chase a loon, before she decided she was outmatched and gave up. I kayaked WITH Rosie, which was adorable even though nobody else even saw it. We went bowling. We went shopping, and I forced them to buy stuff for their cottage so progress could be made on things like bathroom and kitchen fixtures, when the time comes. My brother came over a lot, which was nice, and many decisions were made about construction details. I got a really great sense of what goes into building a cottage, so that I now feel better prepared to tackle our own when the time comes.
They stayed for two weeks. It was great fun and we all got along and Rosie behaved herself, but I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m still (four days later) setting the house to rights. I really look forward to the day when we will have side-by-side cottages, so we can play together, we can eat together if we want, we can visit for coffee, campfires, games, and then have quiet alone time when we want as well. My idea since the beginning that we should remain in seperate cottages was reinforced during this visit, so I feel better about the decision, even though it may seem frivolous from the outside. While we have many of the same tastes and interests, several factors would make it difficult to share: they have a lot more disposable income than us, so their standard for household things is higher. The budget for building their cottage is higher than ours will ever be. We will beg, borrow and steal whatever materials we can use, where they are thinking about buying fixtures in Italy and filling a shipping container to get them here. They were actually contemplating commissioning someone to build them a wooden bathtub, where I want a used tin farm tank as a shower stall. They are discussing having the visible steel i-beams in their living room be pierced with plasma-cut ovals where we would be happy with rough pine. They bought an antique dining table for $800, where I hope to use the table my Opa built. They don’t love kitsch as much as we do. They don’t like colour as much as we do. They don’t like spicy food as much as we do. We let our dog onto the furniture and they don’t. They don’t wear as many clothes as we do. I would hate to have my sister-in-law’s quality bed linens muddied by my dog’s filthy paws, or have anything petty like that become an issue between us. I think we have such a lovely relationship, the five of us, that this set-up will be absolutely perfect. If you feel like curry tonight, feel free to come over. Otherwise we will meet afterwards at the campfire, or for games and dessert. Quality, enjoyable, family time.
My mom thought that this project would slake my desire to build right away, but it’s done the opposite – I can’t wait to start. I think we’ll get a move on next spring, start by plotting it out, and putting in a septic. I am jealous.
Sorry. I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s affecting my writing style. I’m going all Jane Austen on your asses. I haven’t read the original, but this one’s much more exciting. I enjoy a Victorian comedy of manners so much more when it’s laden with gut-wrenching zombie-killing violence. It’s the love child of Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino.
In early August, back in what I like to call ‘the rainy season’, I hosted a BBQ party for my mother’s side of the family. It was a hoot, from what I remember. There was dancing. There was drinking. People fished and golfed and swam and one of our number even went zip-lining in the quarry. We had big plans to go on the aerial adventure at the Cavernes Lafleche aerial park but those sizeist bastards wouldn’t take anyone with hips larger than 42 inches. For those of you who are familiar with my family, there are very few among them with hips smaller than 42 inches. Thankfully this is balanced out – many of them (females, mostly) are six-footers. I am a shorty at 5’7 ½ (barefoot). What can those cave-people expect?
After that, we began preparations for the arrival of the Austrians. During this time, we didn’t really visit the land much, so when we finally went up with the Austrians we were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely first-floor and three walls standing where there once was only bush. I must admit to feeling a sense of accomplishment. While the majority of the actual work has been done by my brother, by builders and various other service-people (septic installation, laneway backhoe, etc), I feel like as a unit we’ve moved the project in its entirety along at a great pace in just a few months. It also just so happened that the arrival of the Austrians was timed perfectly so that they could watch their cottage being built.
Their visit was a bunch of fun. We went to the land. We swam, we boated, we kayaked (we bought kayaks!), we slept in the trailer, we drank beer from the bottom of the lake (warm beer!), we fished, I watched Rosie redundantly chase a loon, before she decided she was outmatched and gave up. I kayaked WITH Rosie, which was adorable even though nobody else even saw it. We went bowling. We went shopping, and I forced them to buy stuff for their cottage so progress could be made on things like bathroom and kitchen fixtures, when the time comes. My brother came over a lot, which was nice, and many decisions were made about construction details. I got a really great sense of what goes into building a cottage, so that I now feel better prepared to tackle our own when the time comes.
They stayed for two weeks. It was great fun and we all got along and Rosie behaved herself, but I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m still (four days later) setting the house to rights. I really look forward to the day when we will have side-by-side cottages, so we can play together, we can eat together if we want, we can visit for coffee, campfires, games, and then have quiet alone time when we want as well. My idea since the beginning that we should remain in seperate cottages was reinforced during this visit, so I feel better about the decision, even though it may seem frivolous from the outside. While we have many of the same tastes and interests, several factors would make it difficult to share: they have a lot more disposable income than us, so their standard for household things is higher. The budget for building their cottage is higher than ours will ever be. We will beg, borrow and steal whatever materials we can use, where they are thinking about buying fixtures in Italy and filling a shipping container to get them here. They were actually contemplating commissioning someone to build them a wooden bathtub, where I want a used tin farm tank as a shower stall. They are discussing having the visible steel i-beams in their living room be pierced with plasma-cut ovals where we would be happy with rough pine. They bought an antique dining table for $800, where I hope to use the table my Opa built. They don’t love kitsch as much as we do. They don’t like colour as much as we do. They don’t like spicy food as much as we do. We let our dog onto the furniture and they don’t. They don’t wear as many clothes as we do. I would hate to have my sister-in-law’s quality bed linens muddied by my dog’s filthy paws, or have anything petty like that become an issue between us. I think we have such a lovely relationship, the five of us, that this set-up will be absolutely perfect. If you feel like curry tonight, feel free to come over. Otherwise we will meet afterwards at the campfire, or for games and dessert. Quality, enjoyable, family time.
My mom thought that this project would slake my desire to build right away, but it’s done the opposite – I can’t wait to start. I think we’ll get a move on next spring, start by plotting it out, and putting in a septic. I am jealous.
8/20/09
If I Had 200 Million Dollars
If I won the Italian mega-lottery, these are top ten things I would do:
1. Quit my job. No offense, colleagues, but when I'm sitting on an egg that big, I see no need to heed the alarm clock every morning. If I have to have a job, I adore the one I’ve got, but I’m not super ambitious so if I don’t have to have one I’ll be off like a whore’s pajamas. I’m not a person who would lie on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day, fanning myself while my man-servants fetch me mint juleps and piña coladas; I would be busy each and every day, building things, making things, traveling, socializing. OK maybe not that last one. I won’t be a lazy rich person, just one with few external demands on my time.
2. Have a larger house built. My house is terrific. I love it to death – we bought it when I was 26, we were both broke, and it was like a palace to us. However, when we have houseguests everything in the house has to kind of jenga around a bit, as we have limited space. If we ever have kids, we will have to forego houseguests, or relegate them to the basement. If we have more than one kid, they will be sharing a bedroom. Admittedly it’s a really large bedroom but still, I am hoping for either two girls or two boys. Said larger house will be timber-frame or log, on a huge piece of land, too, on a private road, with a gate, because humans irritate the crap out of me. We would have a separate garage and an enormous vegetable garden to which I would dedicate all my time between May and October. We would also have an orchard where I would grow perfect apple trees, grapes (for wine, duh) plums, pears and lots of cherries. We would build a big giant log fence – really tasteful and attractive – and hide all of our junk behind it because every house has a junk pile.
3. Invest in help. I would like to have a live-in housekeeper, who would be dedicated to pet-hair-removal, floor washing, kitchen cleaning, and ironing (this could be a full-time job), and a handyman on call. I would have the new house professionally landscaped, or hardscaped so I can do the gardens myself.
4. Build a tasteful cottage with tons of glass, pale wood, solar panels, and a bad-ass dock. On 31-Mile Lake.
5. Buy a pied-à-terre in Austria. My in-laws (well brother-in-law + family) live in Graz, and it’s the most gorgeous town. We would go there for a month or two every winter and just ski the alps, eat strudel and shop. I would pay to have my fear of flying miraculously cleared up, or just pay for drugs to knock me out. Rosie would fly on her own when pet airways decides to develop service to Europe.
6. Get a few more dogs. Part of my huge property would be fenced, so the dogs could play all day long, and we would have a giant bed so they could all sleep with us. Rosie would be queen, and would get to pick out all the other dogs. With 200 million do you think I could afford to have Rosie cloned? In which case, we’d have Rosies running around for all eternity.
7. Give cash to my family. Sorry this is number 7 – I meant for it to be higher up there but all the shopping got more tempting. I’d give you all a wad, pay off your mortgages and other debts, get you fancy cars, buy you some fancy cheeses etc. Maybe we would all go on vacation to our pied-à-terre in Austria some winter. Also you could all buy really fancy shoes. My immediate family would live on our huge acreage, so we would have a compound that’s guarded against the world. My dad would have a workshop for all his crazy projects on one end of the compound, and my brother would have a state-of-the-art garage for his projects on the extreme other end of the compound, and they would each have their own set of tools so nobody would have to borrow anything from anybody. My mother would have a posh sewing room with a terrific view but she wouldn’t ever have to sew anything she didn’t want to. She could lay on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day if she so desired. My brothers-and-sisters-in-law-and-nephew would have a fund set up so they would never have to pay to visit us again.
8. Open up a shop. For something to do, I would open up my own shop. Maybe. I’d sell homewares that are both new (chosen very carefully through my travels) and stuff culled from garage sales and fixed up, etc. Rosie would come to work with me every day and be the shop mascot. I’d hire super reliable help to work whenever I don’t feel like it. Secretly they’d be irritated by me and my erratic hours and my jumpy dog but they wouldn’t be able to show it because I’d be the rich boss-lady – not a tyrant, just powerful – and because they’d be the only retail employees in town with a health plan. I wouldn’t worry too much about the profits, because I have 200 million dollars.
9. Pay to have kids. ‘Nuff said. Wait I’m already doing this.
10. Give to charity. I would give a lot of money to the Humane Society, local no-kill animal shelters, and cancer research. I would set up a fund to help people pay for veterinary treatments for their pets and for a free spay and neuter program in my area. I would set up a turtle rescue operation that works to save slow-moving turtles from being hit by cars during mating season.
So basically I want to become a kooky Martha Stewart. With this list, I am also hoping that there will be enough money left over (100 mil or so) that I can hire a trusted advisor (I already know someone so I'm ready) and set up some investments that will allow me to live off the interest for the rest of my life. I don’t want to eat caviar for breakfast, but neither do I want to worry about money ever again. I don’t think this is too much to ask.
Oh and a footnote: we've entered Rosie in a photo contest and we're rallying the vote, so if you feel like moseying on over to their site and voting, we're #8. Go Rosie! http://lowdownonline.com/photo-contest-aug/
1. Quit my job. No offense, colleagues, but when I'm sitting on an egg that big, I see no need to heed the alarm clock every morning. If I have to have a job, I adore the one I’ve got, but I’m not super ambitious so if I don’t have to have one I’ll be off like a whore’s pajamas. I’m not a person who would lie on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day, fanning myself while my man-servants fetch me mint juleps and piña coladas; I would be busy each and every day, building things, making things, traveling, socializing. OK maybe not that last one. I won’t be a lazy rich person, just one with few external demands on my time.
2. Have a larger house built. My house is terrific. I love it to death – we bought it when I was 26, we were both broke, and it was like a palace to us. However, when we have houseguests everything in the house has to kind of jenga around a bit, as we have limited space. If we ever have kids, we will have to forego houseguests, or relegate them to the basement. If we have more than one kid, they will be sharing a bedroom. Admittedly it’s a really large bedroom but still, I am hoping for either two girls or two boys. Said larger house will be timber-frame or log, on a huge piece of land, too, on a private road, with a gate, because humans irritate the crap out of me. We would have a separate garage and an enormous vegetable garden to which I would dedicate all my time between May and October. We would also have an orchard where I would grow perfect apple trees, grapes (for wine, duh) plums, pears and lots of cherries. We would build a big giant log fence – really tasteful and attractive – and hide all of our junk behind it because every house has a junk pile.
3. Invest in help. I would like to have a live-in housekeeper, who would be dedicated to pet-hair-removal, floor washing, kitchen cleaning, and ironing (this could be a full-time job), and a handyman on call. I would have the new house professionally landscaped, or hardscaped so I can do the gardens myself.
4. Build a tasteful cottage with tons of glass, pale wood, solar panels, and a bad-ass dock. On 31-Mile Lake.
5. Buy a pied-à-terre in Austria. My in-laws (well brother-in-law + family) live in Graz, and it’s the most gorgeous town. We would go there for a month or two every winter and just ski the alps, eat strudel and shop. I would pay to have my fear of flying miraculously cleared up, or just pay for drugs to knock me out. Rosie would fly on her own when pet airways decides to develop service to Europe.
6. Get a few more dogs. Part of my huge property would be fenced, so the dogs could play all day long, and we would have a giant bed so they could all sleep with us. Rosie would be queen, and would get to pick out all the other dogs. With 200 million do you think I could afford to have Rosie cloned? In which case, we’d have Rosies running around for all eternity.
7. Give cash to my family. Sorry this is number 7 – I meant for it to be higher up there but all the shopping got more tempting. I’d give you all a wad, pay off your mortgages and other debts, get you fancy cars, buy you some fancy cheeses etc. Maybe we would all go on vacation to our pied-à-terre in Austria some winter. Also you could all buy really fancy shoes. My immediate family would live on our huge acreage, so we would have a compound that’s guarded against the world. My dad would have a workshop for all his crazy projects on one end of the compound, and my brother would have a state-of-the-art garage for his projects on the extreme other end of the compound, and they would each have their own set of tools so nobody would have to borrow anything from anybody. My mother would have a posh sewing room with a terrific view but she wouldn’t ever have to sew anything she didn’t want to. She could lay on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day if she so desired. My brothers-and-sisters-in-law-and-nephew would have a fund set up so they would never have to pay to visit us again.
8. Open up a shop. For something to do, I would open up my own shop. Maybe. I’d sell homewares that are both new (chosen very carefully through my travels) and stuff culled from garage sales and fixed up, etc. Rosie would come to work with me every day and be the shop mascot. I’d hire super reliable help to work whenever I don’t feel like it. Secretly they’d be irritated by me and my erratic hours and my jumpy dog but they wouldn’t be able to show it because I’d be the rich boss-lady – not a tyrant, just powerful – and because they’d be the only retail employees in town with a health plan. I wouldn’t worry too much about the profits, because I have 200 million dollars.
9. Pay to have kids. ‘Nuff said. Wait I’m already doing this.
10. Give to charity. I would give a lot of money to the Humane Society, local no-kill animal shelters, and cancer research. I would set up a fund to help people pay for veterinary treatments for their pets and for a free spay and neuter program in my area. I would set up a turtle rescue operation that works to save slow-moving turtles from being hit by cars during mating season.
So basically I want to become a kooky Martha Stewart. With this list, I am also hoping that there will be enough money left over (100 mil or so) that I can hire a trusted advisor (I already know someone so I'm ready) and set up some investments that will allow me to live off the interest for the rest of my life. I don’t want to eat caviar for breakfast, but neither do I want to worry about money ever again. I don’t think this is too much to ask.
Oh and a footnote: we've entered Rosie in a photo contest and we're rallying the vote, so if you feel like moseying on over to their site and voting, we're #8. Go Rosie! http://lowdownonline.com/photo-contest-aug/
8/4/09
How I spent my summer vacation
OK I’m back. Once again, I departed on a summer vacation with a list of things to do as long as my arm, and once again, I did many of them but not all. I return to the land of the living with the homestead in good order, ready for a happy onslaught of company at next weekend’s family reunion.
I would like to share a few things with you all. The first one is a phenomenon I like to call ‘Vacation Hair.’ My once-fabulous haircut, dubbed the Bonjour Baby! by my hilarious hairdresser Azra, went through the vacation hair translation machine and came out comme ça:
What people at work don’t know about me is that I often wander the earth looking like that. If they ran into me in my town one day, while they were enjoying a day of sightseeing or something else genteel, and I was running into town for a jug of milk or something, they would not have stopped to chat. They would likely not have recognized me.
The biggest undertaking of my two-week vacation was to build railings onto my new deck. I had the crazy plan to use cedar and galvanized steel cable, and people doubted me (I’m not naming names) but I think it turned out ok for a home-made jobbie. Even the guy who built my deck was impressed, and is off to go put steel cables on HIS railings, the copycat. So I present to you a visual tour of my railing installation project:
There were several underlying themes to my holidays: the rain (almost every single day), the hair (see above), some medical experiments (no animals were involved), lots of cleaning, which made absolutely zero difference ‘cause the house is still a mess, and I am now convinced that Rosie speaks English. Well, understands English – more work is required to get her to speak it. We spent so much time together, she’s probably jonesing as badly as I am right now. At least I hope she is. She’s probably catching up on her sleep. We spent all of our time together, as she became like my little shadow, following me from room to room, sleeping wherever I was working. We spent good quality time together, me and Rosie, and we are now closer than we’ve ever been. I now officially love her TOO MUCH.
I went to the land with my brother and the septic folks to talk about my BIL’s cottage, I went to the land for the afternoon with my girlfriend Fiona and Rosie, and we went this past weekend for the first overnight stay at our cozy cottage. We had our neighbor friends up on Saturday with their dogs and we had a lovely time, basking in the first really nice day in a long time. We floated on air mattresses, ate chocolate chip cookies, and then when they left hubby and I took Rosie fishing. She’s not a good fisherman, Rosie. She thrashes around in the boat. She threatens to jump in the water at all times. It’s so not relaxing. Eric still managed to catch two fish, one of which became the dinner that we ate at 10:45 pm (damn campfire cooking!) in our trailer, by the light of two tealights. We learned that we need to improve the lighting in our trailer.
Sunday a.m. we built a little deck off of the front of our trailer, using pre-cut boards taken from our old deck at home. A little bit of recycling DIY. Another fun swim (Rosie has the air mattress all figured out now. She rides it on her own, all four paws up, standing on it. I have now purchased her a boogie board so fun pictures will come, I am sure of it.) and then home for a day of normalcy before the back-to-work bug hit.
I would like to share a few things with you all. The first one is a phenomenon I like to call ‘Vacation Hair.’ My once-fabulous haircut, dubbed the Bonjour Baby! by my hilarious hairdresser Azra, went through the vacation hair translation machine and came out comme ça:
What people at work don’t know about me is that I often wander the earth looking like that. If they ran into me in my town one day, while they were enjoying a day of sightseeing or something else genteel, and I was running into town for a jug of milk or something, they would not have stopped to chat. They would likely not have recognized me.The biggest undertaking of my two-week vacation was to build railings onto my new deck. I had the crazy plan to use cedar and galvanized steel cable, and people doubted me (I’m not naming names) but I think it turned out ok for a home-made jobbie. Even the guy who built my deck was impressed, and is off to go put steel cables on HIS railings, the copycat. So I present to you a visual tour of my railing installation project:
There were several underlying themes to my holidays: the rain (almost every single day), the hair (see above), some medical experiments (no animals were involved), lots of cleaning, which made absolutely zero difference ‘cause the house is still a mess, and I am now convinced that Rosie speaks English. Well, understands English – more work is required to get her to speak it. We spent so much time together, she’s probably jonesing as badly as I am right now. At least I hope she is. She’s probably catching up on her sleep. We spent all of our time together, as she became like my little shadow, following me from room to room, sleeping wherever I was working. We spent good quality time together, me and Rosie, and we are now closer than we’ve ever been. I now officially love her TOO MUCH.
I went to the land with my brother and the septic folks to talk about my BIL’s cottage, I went to the land for the afternoon with my girlfriend Fiona and Rosie, and we went this past weekend for the first overnight stay at our cozy cottage. We had our neighbor friends up on Saturday with their dogs and we had a lovely time, basking in the first really nice day in a long time. We floated on air mattresses, ate chocolate chip cookies, and then when they left hubby and I took Rosie fishing. She’s not a good fisherman, Rosie. She thrashes around in the boat. She threatens to jump in the water at all times. It’s so not relaxing. Eric still managed to catch two fish, one of which became the dinner that we ate at 10:45 pm (damn campfire cooking!) in our trailer, by the light of two tealights. We learned that we need to improve the lighting in our trailer.
Sunday a.m. we built a little deck off of the front of our trailer, using pre-cut boards taken from our old deck at home. A little bit of recycling DIY. Another fun swim (Rosie has the air mattress all figured out now. She rides it on her own, all four paws up, standing on it. I have now purchased her a boogie board so fun pictures will come, I am sure of it.) and then home for a day of normalcy before the back-to-work bug hit.
All that surfing makes her sleepy.
I should be in that photo, spooning her and smooching her ears!
And now, I am back at work. I have a bit of a tan. I feel like a caged wild animal, but at least my hair has been tamed.
And now, I am back at work. I have a bit of a tan. I feel like a caged wild animal, but at least my hair has been tamed.
7/17/09
SuperMom
A long long time ago, I publicly stated my intention to slipcover my couch. I had this fantasy that I was going to simply buy 18 metres of fabric (according to my measurements), measure it out, and make a slipcover, using my very basic sewing skills. The couch body is still in very good shape but 10 years of regular use, in a fully-sunny room, with an assortment of cats and one gregarious dog, took its toll on its fabric shell.
Well that did not happen. Life is busy, I hate sewing, and priorities got shifted around. We re-tiled the kitchen, had a deck built, finished the trailer, cleared a lot, had a laneway put in, etc. etc and our poor little couch (actually not so little) sat there throughout, getting holier and more and more grungy. I have been afraid to wash the cushion covers in fear that they would disintegrate in the washer, so they were getting a bit gamey. The stuffing was popping out of them and the middle cushion was held shut with safety pins, a victim of the last time I tried to wash it. I’d taken to covering it with various jaunty tablecloths to ‘freshen it up’ and hide the injuries. It was overdue for a re-haul.
Enter my mother, who started fabric shopping for me in my absence. She is a seamstress/dressmaker/fabric expert/designer by trade, and informed me that she would take on the project. I was saved.
We hit the mondo fabric shop in town last Saturday, where we found not one but two options for a slipcover. The first was ok, the colour was not perfect, but it was really sturdy and the price was right at 10 bucks a yard. The second was the absolute perfect colour, but twice as expensive and not as tough. We went with the former - $10 a yard enabled me to justify buying a really gorgeous contrasting fabric for cushion covers. At the cutting table we learned that though the chart said we’d need 13 yards to cover a sofa like ours, the roll only had 9.5 on it. We decided to take it anyway; it was extra-wide and Mom said she’d make it work.
And make it work she did. I got a call at work informing me that she’d finished cutting it all out, and had ONE INCH of fabric left. Hubby calculated that to be a 99.7% efficiency rate.
And now, not even one week later, I have a new couch. The colour (as it turns out) is more than perfect, and goes with everything else in my living room. Behold:
Well that did not happen. Life is busy, I hate sewing, and priorities got shifted around. We re-tiled the kitchen, had a deck built, finished the trailer, cleared a lot, had a laneway put in, etc. etc and our poor little couch (actually not so little) sat there throughout, getting holier and more and more grungy. I have been afraid to wash the cushion covers in fear that they would disintegrate in the washer, so they were getting a bit gamey. The stuffing was popping out of them and the middle cushion was held shut with safety pins, a victim of the last time I tried to wash it. I’d taken to covering it with various jaunty tablecloths to ‘freshen it up’ and hide the injuries. It was overdue for a re-haul.
Enter my mother, who started fabric shopping for me in my absence. She is a seamstress/dressmaker/fabric expert/designer by trade, and informed me that she would take on the project. I was saved.
We hit the mondo fabric shop in town last Saturday, where we found not one but two options for a slipcover. The first was ok, the colour was not perfect, but it was really sturdy and the price was right at 10 bucks a yard. The second was the absolute perfect colour, but twice as expensive and not as tough. We went with the former - $10 a yard enabled me to justify buying a really gorgeous contrasting fabric for cushion covers. At the cutting table we learned that though the chart said we’d need 13 yards to cover a sofa like ours, the roll only had 9.5 on it. We decided to take it anyway; it was extra-wide and Mom said she’d make it work.
And make it work she did. I got a call at work informing me that she’d finished cutting it all out, and had ONE INCH of fabric left. Hubby calculated that to be a 99.7% efficiency rate.
And now, not even one week later, I have a new couch. The colour (as it turns out) is more than perfect, and goes with everything else in my living room. Behold:
Is this not the most beautiful couch arm?
My mom is a wizard. She could teach a class at Hogworts.
In honour of this most recent and resounding success, I thought I might highlight some of her other major successes. She is good at everything she touches, my mother, which is tough to live up to but damn handy to have around. And I wasn’t going to make my own wedding dress:
How many hours of hand-beading did that take, mom? Like 100 or so? How much bad t.v. did you have to endure while working on that puppy?
Her skills have plenty of industrial applications too. My brother recently needed his free dirtbike pants to fit, but since they were free they were the wrong size – way too small. Mom added sporty swooping panels of tough fabric, cut out of an old hockey bag, and now you can’t even tell that they weren’t bought that way at the store. Also, she made an awning for their boat. Hemp curtains for my living room. Slipcovers for my easy chairs. My ski pants. My cousin’s wedding dress, my other cousin’s wedding dress, my cousin on the other side’s wedding dress, my aunt’s wedding dress, my girlfriend’s maid-of-honour dress (sight unseen – she sent in the measurements. It fit perfectly) and the wedding, prom and bridesmaid dresses of nearly everyone in our area. At my prom, four or five people had dresses made by my mom. She had her own line of clothes for awhile too, and once in a while a coworker would turn up wearing one of her pieces, or I’d see one walking down the street.
I would feel like the next-generation-failure, but I take heart in focusing on the few things that I can do better than her. There aren’t many – she cooks better, she knits better, she bakes better, she reads tons of books, my dog is nuts about her, she can build things, she makes great potatoes, she cuts hair, and even though she’s 25 years older she’s way hotter than I am – but I think I have her topped in three departments: the first is pottery. And only because I have been at it longer. If she’d taken four full rounds of pottery classes she’d probably have made an ornate bathtub by now. The second is computers. I am by necessity better with computers than she is but I suspect she’s catching up (hi mom!) The third is…. um…….maybe there isn’t a third. Finding tiny things? I’m good at that. Skiing maybe?
I guess the one disadvantage of being good at everything is that everyone always asks you to do stuff for them. Whether overtly or passive-aggressively, which is my preferred method. By simply NOT slip covering my couch, and forcing her to look at its grubby, slouchy, hole-covered, faded shell, I subtly maneuvered her into doing something about it. Sneaky eh?
Anyway, I have a supermom. Me and Alexis Stewart should get together and commiserate. Alexis, if you’re reading this, call me. I know how you feel.
Not that your own moms aren’t all great, but I know that you are all secretly a bit jealous. Hands off! She’s mine.
7/13/09
The weekends, from here on out
I’ve had to adjust my lifestyle. I am a person who is not super-fond of change, so I find myself struggling to come to grips with certain lifestyle shifts that have been necessary of late. I have major issues. Right now they are:
- now that we are at the lake every weekend, when the hell am I supposed to do my laundry?
- Now that I have to pack a cooler every weekend, what do I eat for lunch?
I am not used to confronting these kinds of questions. To the first, my solution has so far been to do a load or two every weeknight evening, but the wardrobe’s been a bit disjointed as a result. We find ourselves having to wear either all white or all black, or all bright colours. Hubby’s solution has been to drag out some of his clothes from the olden days and so one day last week he went to work looking like a gigolo. I was sleepy in the morning and didn’t catch it until he picked me up at 5:30 p.m. That shirt is now going into the ironing basket and never coming out.
It has also resulted in my forgetting that I have a load in the washer that needs to go in the dryer, so several times this week I’ve gone to the basement to discover a dank, soggy load of laundry in the washer left over from the night before that doesn’t smell so hot, and has to be re-washed. This is what happens when you start doing laundry at 10 p.m.
The answer to the second question is not so simple. I am not a fan of sandwiches per se, and I find lunch kind of a stressful meal to prepare. Breakfast is easy: eggs, bread, bacon, done. Cereal and milk? Done. Oatmeal, water, and a microwave? Done. Dinner is more complex but a bit more creative, and it’s not unreasonable to fire up the stove/campfire/BBQ to cook a meal at dinnertime, planned around one central meat item.
But lunch? I resent cooking at lunch, so it has to be something cold and easy to prepare. Salads require a lot of ingredients and don’t always travel well, and don’t fill up a man who’s been working in the bush with a chainsaw. Sandwiches require luncheon meats, the majority of which I find kind of disgusting, and the right blend of condiments and toppings that don’t make your bread soggy. To really avoid sogginess you have to bring all the ingredients in the cooler separately, which requires packing them all up individually in space-hogging containers. And then there’s the fact that I don’t love sandwiches. They’re too limp and bready or something. I can handle a bun, but I don’t keep buns in the house (I don’t know why) so it always requires a trip to the store. See? Lunch is fraught. I prefer to snack and snack and snack in the middle of the day but hubby loves a lunch. Last night we had a ‘serious’ conversation about how he doesn’t feel like we can adequately share our love because we don’t enjoy eating sandwiches together. “I wish that you loved sandwiches as I do. Then we could eat them together and truly feel united.”
At least now when we go up to the land I have a nice spot to prepare said sandwiches. Behold:
It’s difficult because so far, she doesn’t wear shoes (though I have my eye on these. Just kidding . They're more expensive than mine.) so she can’t take them off when she comes inside and she tracks dirt all over the place. I took that lovely picture of the kitchen knowing that the dirty futon in the background is my new reality. Luckily it’s pretty sandy all around the trailer so unless it’s wet out, the dirt brushes off easily, but the floor ends up being kind of grubby all the time. Next weekend we are building a deck out front of the trailer so there will be an added level of distance between dirty feet and trailer floor. I need to also keep a foot-washing bucket handy by the door, because I don’t want dirty feet in the beds.
We haven’t yet slept in the trailer overnight (what is WITH this summer?), but I will surely report back when we do. I took a nap but that doesn't count. So far, we have only gone up for the day, to enjoy the front yard:
- now that we are at the lake every weekend, when the hell am I supposed to do my laundry?
- Now that I have to pack a cooler every weekend, what do I eat for lunch?
I am not used to confronting these kinds of questions. To the first, my solution has so far been to do a load or two every weeknight evening, but the wardrobe’s been a bit disjointed as a result. We find ourselves having to wear either all white or all black, or all bright colours. Hubby’s solution has been to drag out some of his clothes from the olden days and so one day last week he went to work looking like a gigolo. I was sleepy in the morning and didn’t catch it until he picked me up at 5:30 p.m. That shirt is now going into the ironing basket and never coming out.
It has also resulted in my forgetting that I have a load in the washer that needs to go in the dryer, so several times this week I’ve gone to the basement to discover a dank, soggy load of laundry in the washer left over from the night before that doesn’t smell so hot, and has to be re-washed. This is what happens when you start doing laundry at 10 p.m.
The answer to the second question is not so simple. I am not a fan of sandwiches per se, and I find lunch kind of a stressful meal to prepare. Breakfast is easy: eggs, bread, bacon, done. Cereal and milk? Done. Oatmeal, water, and a microwave? Done. Dinner is more complex but a bit more creative, and it’s not unreasonable to fire up the stove/campfire/BBQ to cook a meal at dinnertime, planned around one central meat item.
But lunch? I resent cooking at lunch, so it has to be something cold and easy to prepare. Salads require a lot of ingredients and don’t always travel well, and don’t fill up a man who’s been working in the bush with a chainsaw. Sandwiches require luncheon meats, the majority of which I find kind of disgusting, and the right blend of condiments and toppings that don’t make your bread soggy. To really avoid sogginess you have to bring all the ingredients in the cooler separately, which requires packing them all up individually in space-hogging containers. And then there’s the fact that I don’t love sandwiches. They’re too limp and bready or something. I can handle a bun, but I don’t keep buns in the house (I don’t know why) so it always requires a trip to the store. See? Lunch is fraught. I prefer to snack and snack and snack in the middle of the day but hubby loves a lunch. Last night we had a ‘serious’ conversation about how he doesn’t feel like we can adequately share our love because we don’t enjoy eating sandwiches together. “I wish that you loved sandwiches as I do. Then we could eat them together and truly feel united.”
At least now when we go up to the land I have a nice spot to prepare said sandwiches. Behold:
And then when we eat lunch, we are very civilized:
Rosie also enjoys the trailer.
It’s difficult because so far, she doesn’t wear shoes (though I have my eye on these. Just kidding . They're more expensive than mine.) so she can’t take them off when she comes inside and she tracks dirt all over the place. I took that lovely picture of the kitchen knowing that the dirty futon in the background is my new reality. Luckily it’s pretty sandy all around the trailer so unless it’s wet out, the dirt brushes off easily, but the floor ends up being kind of grubby all the time. Next weekend we are building a deck out front of the trailer so there will be an added level of distance between dirty feet and trailer floor. I need to also keep a foot-washing bucket handy by the door, because I don’t want dirty feet in the beds. 
We haven’t yet slept in the trailer overnight (what is WITH this summer?), but I will surely report back when we do. I took a nap but that doesn't count. So far, we have only gone up for the day, to enjoy the front yard:
6/23/09
The Open Window is More Interesting.
Last night I had the good fortune of getting a ride home with my brother and his girlfriend. It’s not that I dislike riding home with hubby, it’s just that it’s always late, and getting home at 5:30 is a real luxury that I could get used to very quickly.
Alas it was like 48 degrees in my house when I got there. It was so hot, poor Rosie was being very still, lurking in the shadows. I immediately threw all the windows wide open and set up a fan in the back-est darkest room, and we decided to just lay low for a bit.
I turned on the t.v. because I never do that. I thought “I am going to watch all those shows that I don’t get to watch when hubby’s here because he’d rather watch documentaries/nature shows/the news 3 times in a row.” I turned on the t.v. and Rosie and I plopped onto the futon and we watched t.v. Rosie is injured and that’s enough excuse for me.
Wow is t.v. ever bad these days. In my normal life, when hubby’s around and it’s not the middle of summer, I generally only tune in for a handful of shows: Tuesday nights we’d watch Flight of the Conchords for a half-hour, Wednesdays I’ll watch like 4 episodes in a row of At the End of My Leash where an annoying but effective dog-trainer guy works with all these families, usually completely irritating, to rehabilitate their dogs/themselves. It’s my guilty pleasure. He thinks he’s Cesar Milan but he’s so totally Calgary. I like the dogs though, and Rosie enjoys it.
On Thursdays we settle in with our pizza dinner (home-made! It’s not as bad as it sounds!) and allow ourselves to watch 3 hours solid of television. We start with My Name is Earl, not our favorite favorite but we’ll miss it anyway, then move to whatever they’ve got on next, which most recently was the excellent Parks and Recreation featuring the excellent Amy Poehler. Then we slide into The Office and cap it off with 30 Rock. Following that hilarity, we use The National as our chill-out room. Usually I knock off at about 10:30, once I’ve seen the top stories.
But it's summer now, and last night I flipped the channels, desperately looking for something to watch. I started with ET Canada where I learned all I never wanted to know about celebrities for the day, and then I went over to HGTV, where I watched perky real estate agents try to help people look for homes. A fellow named ‘Cheyne’ (pronounced ‘Shane’) who was also a falconer was looking for his first home, with great expectations. His mother carried a small dog with her wherever she went and was convinced she could negotiate $50k off the asking price. A young married couple, the husband of which was in a rock band, were looking to move out of the tour bus and into an apartment (!)… but with the bandmates. That’s an understanding wife. As she squealed, upon seeing her fully decorated new bedroom, “it’s just like a hotel!” and caught myself yelling “BECAUSE IT’S GOT NONE OF YOUR DAMN STUFF IN IT!” I realized I needed to turn off the t.v.
These days, if the options are watching snotty NYC Prep school kids being horrid, watching snotty airheads in L.A., watching irritating ‘celebrities’ survive in the jungle, watching people compete in talent shows, watching the evidence of peoples’ bad financial or relationship decisions, or watching real estate agents try to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear, I think I might just throw the t.v. set out the window and enjoy the breeze.
Alas it was like 48 degrees in my house when I got there. It was so hot, poor Rosie was being very still, lurking in the shadows. I immediately threw all the windows wide open and set up a fan in the back-est darkest room, and we decided to just lay low for a bit.
I turned on the t.v. because I never do that. I thought “I am going to watch all those shows that I don’t get to watch when hubby’s here because he’d rather watch documentaries/nature shows/the news 3 times in a row.” I turned on the t.v. and Rosie and I plopped onto the futon and we watched t.v. Rosie is injured and that’s enough excuse for me.
Wow is t.v. ever bad these days. In my normal life, when hubby’s around and it’s not the middle of summer, I generally only tune in for a handful of shows: Tuesday nights we’d watch Flight of the Conchords for a half-hour, Wednesdays I’ll watch like 4 episodes in a row of At the End of My Leash where an annoying but effective dog-trainer guy works with all these families, usually completely irritating, to rehabilitate their dogs/themselves. It’s my guilty pleasure. He thinks he’s Cesar Milan but he’s so totally Calgary. I like the dogs though, and Rosie enjoys it.
On Thursdays we settle in with our pizza dinner (home-made! It’s not as bad as it sounds!) and allow ourselves to watch 3 hours solid of television. We start with My Name is Earl, not our favorite favorite but we’ll miss it anyway, then move to whatever they’ve got on next, which most recently was the excellent Parks and Recreation featuring the excellent Amy Poehler. Then we slide into The Office and cap it off with 30 Rock. Following that hilarity, we use The National as our chill-out room. Usually I knock off at about 10:30, once I’ve seen the top stories.
But it's summer now, and last night I flipped the channels, desperately looking for something to watch. I started with ET Canada where I learned all I never wanted to know about celebrities for the day, and then I went over to HGTV, where I watched perky real estate agents try to help people look for homes. A fellow named ‘Cheyne’ (pronounced ‘Shane’) who was also a falconer was looking for his first home, with great expectations. His mother carried a small dog with her wherever she went and was convinced she could negotiate $50k off the asking price. A young married couple, the husband of which was in a rock band, were looking to move out of the tour bus and into an apartment (!)… but with the bandmates. That’s an understanding wife. As she squealed, upon seeing her fully decorated new bedroom, “it’s just like a hotel!” and caught myself yelling “BECAUSE IT’S GOT NONE OF YOUR DAMN STUFF IN IT!” I realized I needed to turn off the t.v.
These days, if the options are watching snotty NYC Prep school kids being horrid, watching snotty airheads in L.A., watching irritating ‘celebrities’ survive in the jungle, watching people compete in talent shows, watching the evidence of peoples’ bad financial or relationship decisions, or watching real estate agents try to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear, I think I might just throw the t.v. set out the window and enjoy the breeze.
6/22/09
OK Summer, It's ON.
This weekend our little family was bitch-slapped by mother nature. It was nothing that we should ring alarm bells about I don’t think, but someone flicked the ‘summer’ switch and we were immediately inflicted with all summer concerns.
Saturday we went up to the land to check out our new laneway. It was momentous – we were finally able to DRIVE into our lot. What a great feeling. However, when we parked the truck and got out, we realized the side-effect of taking a backhoe to black earth in the deep forest in June – the place is a wall of blackflies and mosquitos. The laneway is a bit messy but give it a few weeks and the edges will start to grow back and cover up the mess. We need to cut down a few more (dead and scruffy) trees to get the air moving in there, to ward off the insect army.
We first headed down to the waterfront and I took the first swim in my own lake. It felt marvelous – the water was the perfect temperature, the bottom felt ok, it was nice and shallow and Rosie had the time of her life, running back and forth through the water, swimming around in circles and chasing sticks. She swam for about an hour solid. She and hubby swam down the shoreline and then back up the shoreline, while I stayed behind with the loppers and clipped down the crappy little trees that made the beach inaccessible. I didn’t cut them all down – just the ones blocking our beach and the ones blocking the access point for our future dock. The beach is now sunny and passable. I call it a beach but really it’s a sandy strip about 2 feet wide – 4 at its widest.
Then we tried to measure out BIL’s cottage footprint, based on plans he sent us Friday night. I think we did an ok job, but we were rushed, as the dog was being eaten alive. No joke, her eyes are still surrounded by little bumps. Luckily the bites don’t seem to irritate her the way they irritate me, but it still makes me sad to see her with flies stuck to her eyes. I think that footprint will need to be re-measured so he doesn’t end up with a wonky cottage.
Sunday we took off and headed north, to 31-mile lake, to spend the day with my family. My parents launched their boat for the season, so it was the first day ‘on the lake’ for all of us. We got out of the car at the boat launch and Rosie went running into the water to frolic as she usually does, but I heard her yelp, and saw her hobble out of the water in such pain that she didn’t want to stand up. She just lay in the dirt holding her paw up and looking at me, whimpering. All I saw when I examined it was a raised swollen bump that appeared to be rasped or scratched – no blood, no nothing. Anyway, when we got to the island 40 minutes later she appeared to feel better but then got worse, and even though her brother was there, she didn’t really run and play. Swimming felt ok (the water was pretty chilly and it’s low-impact, and probably cleans it out a bit) so we swam and swam, around the island. She must have gone around the island four full times. She spent the rest of the time huddled up on the dock or in the boat, shaking a bit, covered in a towel, giving us the sad eyes. He paw wasn’t looking any better – between the toes it was all puffy and red, but still no blood.
So far, our leading theory as to what happened in the water is that she was nipped ever-so-slightly by a ticked-off snapping turtle. When we returned to the parking lot at the end of the day, our theory was reinforced by the lot full of snapping-turtle tracks, and areas dug up in search of a nesting site, which had all happened while we were out for the day. There was a busy snapping turtle in the hood, and it was feeling a bit defensive. I think Rosie accidentally paddled it while it was lurking in the mud, and it nipped her between the toes – obviously it didn’t get a good shot at her thank god, or else she’d be down a toe today. For once I’m happy Rosie is always moving.
She slept all the way home and last evening appeared to be feeling a bit better – she was walking on it limping a bit, and using it to stabilize her bone while chewing. This morning her body no longer felt hot, and wasn’t panting anymore, but the paw was still swollen so my mom’s taking her to the vet this afternoon to check it out. I want to see if we can give her any painkillers.
It was an on-and-off cloudy day, and while we were all on the island enjoying ourselves, all of a sudden the wind whipped up and it started to rain. It poured, but we all got into my parents’ boat and pulled the cover over us just in time. We were cozy in there, with 6 humans and 2 (large) dogs, curled up, listening to the radio and having some cocktails. The weather got beautiful again quickly once the rain passed, and we all ended up going home burnt to a damn crisp. We are all red today. Those cloudy days are sneaky!
Anyway, stay tuned for the next part of the turtle-bitten dog saga. My heart breaks for Rosie, who didn’t have much fun at all yesterday. Between the bugs, the turtles, the rain, the sunburns, and the knee I bashed on a rock while swimming, we were walloped by summer this weekend and going back to work feels a bit like sweet relief. The deck guy is at our place, the trailer’s almost finished, and I have high hopes for July and August.
Saturday we went up to the land to check out our new laneway. It was momentous – we were finally able to DRIVE into our lot. What a great feeling. However, when we parked the truck and got out, we realized the side-effect of taking a backhoe to black earth in the deep forest in June – the place is a wall of blackflies and mosquitos. The laneway is a bit messy but give it a few weeks and the edges will start to grow back and cover up the mess. We need to cut down a few more (dead and scruffy) trees to get the air moving in there, to ward off the insect army.
We first headed down to the waterfront and I took the first swim in my own lake. It felt marvelous – the water was the perfect temperature, the bottom felt ok, it was nice and shallow and Rosie had the time of her life, running back and forth through the water, swimming around in circles and chasing sticks. She swam for about an hour solid. She and hubby swam down the shoreline and then back up the shoreline, while I stayed behind with the loppers and clipped down the crappy little trees that made the beach inaccessible. I didn’t cut them all down – just the ones blocking our beach and the ones blocking the access point for our future dock. The beach is now sunny and passable. I call it a beach but really it’s a sandy strip about 2 feet wide – 4 at its widest.
Then we tried to measure out BIL’s cottage footprint, based on plans he sent us Friday night. I think we did an ok job, but we were rushed, as the dog was being eaten alive. No joke, her eyes are still surrounded by little bumps. Luckily the bites don’t seem to irritate her the way they irritate me, but it still makes me sad to see her with flies stuck to her eyes. I think that footprint will need to be re-measured so he doesn’t end up with a wonky cottage.
Sunday we took off and headed north, to 31-mile lake, to spend the day with my family. My parents launched their boat for the season, so it was the first day ‘on the lake’ for all of us. We got out of the car at the boat launch and Rosie went running into the water to frolic as she usually does, but I heard her yelp, and saw her hobble out of the water in such pain that she didn’t want to stand up. She just lay in the dirt holding her paw up and looking at me, whimpering. All I saw when I examined it was a raised swollen bump that appeared to be rasped or scratched – no blood, no nothing. Anyway, when we got to the island 40 minutes later she appeared to feel better but then got worse, and even though her brother was there, she didn’t really run and play. Swimming felt ok (the water was pretty chilly and it’s low-impact, and probably cleans it out a bit) so we swam and swam, around the island. She must have gone around the island four full times. She spent the rest of the time huddled up on the dock or in the boat, shaking a bit, covered in a towel, giving us the sad eyes. He paw wasn’t looking any better – between the toes it was all puffy and red, but still no blood.
So far, our leading theory as to what happened in the water is that she was nipped ever-so-slightly by a ticked-off snapping turtle. When we returned to the parking lot at the end of the day, our theory was reinforced by the lot full of snapping-turtle tracks, and areas dug up in search of a nesting site, which had all happened while we were out for the day. There was a busy snapping turtle in the hood, and it was feeling a bit defensive. I think Rosie accidentally paddled it while it was lurking in the mud, and it nipped her between the toes – obviously it didn’t get a good shot at her thank god, or else she’d be down a toe today. For once I’m happy Rosie is always moving.
She slept all the way home and last evening appeared to be feeling a bit better – she was walking on it limping a bit, and using it to stabilize her bone while chewing. This morning her body no longer felt hot, and wasn’t panting anymore, but the paw was still swollen so my mom’s taking her to the vet this afternoon to check it out. I want to see if we can give her any painkillers.
It was an on-and-off cloudy day, and while we were all on the island enjoying ourselves, all of a sudden the wind whipped up and it started to rain. It poured, but we all got into my parents’ boat and pulled the cover over us just in time. We were cozy in there, with 6 humans and 2 (large) dogs, curled up, listening to the radio and having some cocktails. The weather got beautiful again quickly once the rain passed, and we all ended up going home burnt to a damn crisp. We are all red today. Those cloudy days are sneaky!
Anyway, stay tuned for the next part of the turtle-bitten dog saga. My heart breaks for Rosie, who didn’t have much fun at all yesterday. Between the bugs, the turtles, the rain, the sunburns, and the knee I bashed on a rock while swimming, we were walloped by summer this weekend and going back to work feels a bit like sweet relief. The deck guy is at our place, the trailer’s almost finished, and I have high hopes for July and August.
6/12/09
Letting Go
Hubby and I were on our way into work this morning and the conversation turned to comedy. He’d seen Carol Burnett on TV last night and was reminded of how hilarious she is, and how much her brand of humour works to this day, even though comedy in general has changed. I told him that I have come to the point in my life where I can admit that I really love comedy. I seriously love it. I am totally comfortable saying that I don’t really like dramas. Where some folks might think that indicates a kind of shallowness or lack of intellectual rigour, I am now 33 years old and I don’t like dramas. Lofty Oscar-winning movies like Doubt or The Reader sound like boring dirges to me, exercises in emotional manipulation. Give me Judd Apatow any day. I’ll take Seth Rogan over Sean Penn please.
We got to talking about all those arty movies that film students and people in their early 20s love or love to talk about. I did genuinely enjoy many of them. I’ve seen much of Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre, I’ve seen Brazil, I’ve seen many Peter Greenaway movies. But the time in my life for such things has passed. I’ve let go of the intellectual poseur that I once maybe aspired to be – I no longer have anything to prove.
That made me think of all the other things that I have let go. Not including my ass (ha ha see? comedy). I have let go of aspirations that I might one day become a jeweler. I enjoyed making jewelry when the time was right, and I really love having that knowledge under my belt and may one day take a course or something just for fun. But I don’t think I’ll invest any more money in tools or other supplies, because I have realized that I don’t have it in me anymore to focus on it. I am putting it on the back burner. Maybe not letting go completely, but not putting pressure on myself to pursue it anymore.
I am letting go of the idea that I will travel the world. I thought about that question in detail one day, and got rigorous with myself in deciding on the places that I’m actually interested in. I made a list. I mean no offense to anyone and I’m sure glad other people are doing it, but in all honesty, I have zero interest in traveling to China, Russia, South America, Africa, Japan and most of the rest of Asia. I’d go to India on a free ticket, but I wouldn’t pursue it. This may make me less interesting in the eyes of some folks, but I had to get honest with myself and pare down the list, because I am at my roots a homebody. Also I hate flying. Now I can really focus on a short list of places that I would really like to see or revisit: Scandinavia, Thailand, the Yukon/Northwest Territories, Italy, and more of Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, which are places with real relevance to my life. So freeing.
I am letting go of some hobbies, because frankly I am overbooked in terms of interest and commitments. I am letting go of the idea of myself as ‘photographer’, because I realize I’m not that good at it and I don’t have the brain energy or focus (ha) to learn all about all the camera settings. I am a point-and-shooter and whatever success I’ve had in the past has been a fluke. I’ll learn to use what I’ve got but nobody should expect a career out of me. Also my sister-in-law is so much better at it that I will defer to her for all photographic needs.
Soon I will let go of home decorating, because I hope that at some point in the near future, it’ll just be done. Once I do this and this and that and this and that other thing….I am taking the pressure off of myself to be a terrific cheese maker, and will instead make easy cheese when the situation calls for it and I really feel like it, like in the summer when the basil and tomatoes are ripe and I can make a quick mozza, and sprinkle it all with fresh ground pepper and balsamic vinegar. Very do-able.
I’m letting go of the idea that I’ll someday be able to grow all of my own produce. Realistically, I have a job, and so am out of the house for 11 hours a day. I’m not a farmer. Also realistically, I live north of Ottawa in zone 4.5/5 and our growing season is not that long. I already got realistic with myself this year and decided not to grow things that are difficult or that I don’t actually love eating (radishes, beets, cantaloupe). One day I will let go of the grow-op too, because I know that I can find organic tomato and pepper seedlings somewhere if I look hard enough and it’ll be worth the time and energy to just pay for them. Also I am lazy – full disclosure. I have tons of enthusiasm for the garden in May and June but come late July and August, things start to become quite neglected in there. When pestilence hits, I’m all like “whatever.”
I am not ambitious. I have come to realize this about myself. I have a great job, am financially comfortable, and I’ll be happy to stay at this level for a really long time. I am not one to climb the ladder and I don't have my eye on anyone else's job. I squeezed my way into the job that I love, and hope that I get to keep it when my term is up in two years, but aside from that I don’t have any more need for power, money, additional responsibility, etc. I hope to become a happy and knowledgeable lifer.
I’m letting go of the idea that I’m young. I’m trying now to focus on not being an awkward middle-aged person. I find it sometimes hard to relate to my much-younger coworkers, and sometimes find myself feeling old and weird and square. Questions like “is that your boyfriend?” sound much weirder coming from someone ten years older than you.
I’ve let go of the idea that I am hip to new music. I have zero idea what all the kids are listening to these days. I just think they should all get out into the sun and eat a cheeseburger and stop wearing their hair so that it looks like it’s on backwards. I stick with my old friends – the Beastie Boys, Beck – all of whom are comfortably middle-aged (I think the Beastie Boys are actually approaching 50) and have picked up a few new ones along the way, but I do not by any means have my finger on any kind of pulse anymore. If it comes to my local bar, I might go see it but other than that I no longer go to see bands at bars and clubs or feel that desire to NEVER MISS ANYTHING. I haven’t bought a music magazine in 5 years.
I’ve let go of the idea of myself as a cat person. I am officially through my cat phase. I still have a cat – Sasha – and I love her dearly, but it’s not the same anymore; the term ‘Crazy cat Lady’ no longer applies. Turns out I was only obsessed with certain cats. When offers of free cats come my way, my gut reaction is “nonononono.” I’ve marked it in memoriam, I’ve moved past it, and now I’m fully committed to being a dog person. Dogs are hilarious and It’s better for the aforementioned ass.
I'm mostly letting go of high heels. I wear orthotics people! From now on it's platforms or kitten heels, but stilettos are no longer my speed.
All of this housecleaning might be indicative of a mid-life crisis, but I really feel like I’m in a simplification phase. Life is busy, the projects have gotten larger, and I’m at a crossroads in terms of family planning etc., so something had to give. I think it’s healthy to do this kind of analysis once or twice a decade.
We got to talking about all those arty movies that film students and people in their early 20s love or love to talk about. I did genuinely enjoy many of them. I’ve seen much of Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre, I’ve seen Brazil, I’ve seen many Peter Greenaway movies. But the time in my life for such things has passed. I’ve let go of the intellectual poseur that I once maybe aspired to be – I no longer have anything to prove.
That made me think of all the other things that I have let go. Not including my ass (ha ha see? comedy). I have let go of aspirations that I might one day become a jeweler. I enjoyed making jewelry when the time was right, and I really love having that knowledge under my belt and may one day take a course or something just for fun. But I don’t think I’ll invest any more money in tools or other supplies, because I have realized that I don’t have it in me anymore to focus on it. I am putting it on the back burner. Maybe not letting go completely, but not putting pressure on myself to pursue it anymore.
I am letting go of the idea that I will travel the world. I thought about that question in detail one day, and got rigorous with myself in deciding on the places that I’m actually interested in. I made a list. I mean no offense to anyone and I’m sure glad other people are doing it, but in all honesty, I have zero interest in traveling to China, Russia, South America, Africa, Japan and most of the rest of Asia. I’d go to India on a free ticket, but I wouldn’t pursue it. This may make me less interesting in the eyes of some folks, but I had to get honest with myself and pare down the list, because I am at my roots a homebody. Also I hate flying. Now I can really focus on a short list of places that I would really like to see or revisit: Scandinavia, Thailand, the Yukon/Northwest Territories, Italy, and more of Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, which are places with real relevance to my life. So freeing.
I am letting go of some hobbies, because frankly I am overbooked in terms of interest and commitments. I am letting go of the idea of myself as ‘photographer’, because I realize I’m not that good at it and I don’t have the brain energy or focus (ha) to learn all about all the camera settings. I am a point-and-shooter and whatever success I’ve had in the past has been a fluke. I’ll learn to use what I’ve got but nobody should expect a career out of me. Also my sister-in-law is so much better at it that I will defer to her for all photographic needs.
Soon I will let go of home decorating, because I hope that at some point in the near future, it’ll just be done. Once I do this and this and that and this and that other thing….I am taking the pressure off of myself to be a terrific cheese maker, and will instead make easy cheese when the situation calls for it and I really feel like it, like in the summer when the basil and tomatoes are ripe and I can make a quick mozza, and sprinkle it all with fresh ground pepper and balsamic vinegar. Very do-able.
I’m letting go of the idea that I’ll someday be able to grow all of my own produce. Realistically, I have a job, and so am out of the house for 11 hours a day. I’m not a farmer. Also realistically, I live north of Ottawa in zone 4.5/5 and our growing season is not that long. I already got realistic with myself this year and decided not to grow things that are difficult or that I don’t actually love eating (radishes, beets, cantaloupe). One day I will let go of the grow-op too, because I know that I can find organic tomato and pepper seedlings somewhere if I look hard enough and it’ll be worth the time and energy to just pay for them. Also I am lazy – full disclosure. I have tons of enthusiasm for the garden in May and June but come late July and August, things start to become quite neglected in there. When pestilence hits, I’m all like “whatever.”
I am not ambitious. I have come to realize this about myself. I have a great job, am financially comfortable, and I’ll be happy to stay at this level for a really long time. I am not one to climb the ladder and I don't have my eye on anyone else's job. I squeezed my way into the job that I love, and hope that I get to keep it when my term is up in two years, but aside from that I don’t have any more need for power, money, additional responsibility, etc. I hope to become a happy and knowledgeable lifer.
I’m letting go of the idea that I’m young. I’m trying now to focus on not being an awkward middle-aged person. I find it sometimes hard to relate to my much-younger coworkers, and sometimes find myself feeling old and weird and square. Questions like “is that your boyfriend?” sound much weirder coming from someone ten years older than you.
I’ve let go of the idea that I am hip to new music. I have zero idea what all the kids are listening to these days. I just think they should all get out into the sun and eat a cheeseburger and stop wearing their hair so that it looks like it’s on backwards. I stick with my old friends – the Beastie Boys, Beck – all of whom are comfortably middle-aged (I think the Beastie Boys are actually approaching 50) and have picked up a few new ones along the way, but I do not by any means have my finger on any kind of pulse anymore. If it comes to my local bar, I might go see it but other than that I no longer go to see bands at bars and clubs or feel that desire to NEVER MISS ANYTHING. I haven’t bought a music magazine in 5 years.
I’ve let go of the idea of myself as a cat person. I am officially through my cat phase. I still have a cat – Sasha – and I love her dearly, but it’s not the same anymore; the term ‘Crazy cat Lady’ no longer applies. Turns out I was only obsessed with certain cats. When offers of free cats come my way, my gut reaction is “nonononono.” I’ve marked it in memoriam, I’ve moved past it, and now I’m fully committed to being a dog person. Dogs are hilarious and It’s better for the aforementioned ass.
I'm mostly letting go of high heels. I wear orthotics people! From now on it's platforms or kitten heels, but stilettos are no longer my speed.
All of this housecleaning might be indicative of a mid-life crisis, but I really feel like I’m in a simplification phase. Life is busy, the projects have gotten larger, and I’m at a crossroads in terms of family planning etc., so something had to give. I think it’s healthy to do this kind of analysis once or twice a decade.
6/2/09
My Town
My town is funny.
Long a refuge for disenchanted city folks and people who run at a slightly different speed, my little town is unique in that in many ways it’s a rural small town, where everyone knows each other and who they’re sleeping with, and yet it’s a half-hour out of the city, so the lifestyle is sustainable in that you can hold down a decent job while living ‘away from it all’. It’s a haven for industries such as yoga and pottery studios, organic mushroom farming, watercolour painting, shiatsu massage and dog-sledding. It has for several decades been happy home to a large gay and lesbian population. There’s ‘Hippie’s Custom Tattoos’ right beside the pizza place, which serves the best pizza on earth, and features one called the ‘Magic Mushroom.’ It's a great place to visit if you need your chakras realigned. Why, just this morning I got a copy of the daily email newsletter with the following public service announcement:
Kripalu yoga is cancelled this Tuesday, June 2nd due to the demystification of channelling happening in the space.
There are literally about 15 yoga classes happening in my village at any given time.
All of this lives side-by-side and in relative harmony with the local population of hunters and fisherman, wood-cutters and dudes with ATVs and snowmobiles. Many of them are one and the same (i.e. fishermen who do pottery or yoga). Our local bar (one of two rockin’ local bars) is owned by a music impresario, who has brought in acts such as the Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy, Danny Michel, and Buck 65. The music they feature has a contemporary-folk and world beat focus and is normally of really high quality, and bands reportedly love playing the venue, whose stage sits right in front of a picture window looking out over the dark river and the mountains. On the off nights, I’m pretty sure the bar still has a ‘Dart Night’ and the old local dudes hold up the bar while drinking their quarts of beer with tiny little glasses. There is a pool table and usually a hockey game on the t.v., and the owner’s dog walks around freely among the crowd. In the winter it’s not uncommon to see the parking lot filled with ski-doos, and in the fall, sometimes the trucks in the lot have deer strapped to their roofs. The other local bar is owned by a local band, and is always hopping. Last saturday there was a horse tied up to the patio, and last night someone pulled up in a backhoe. You can bring in a picture of your dog and they will put it on the dog-wall with everyone else's dogs.
When we bought our new car, the wonderful Pontiac Vibe (the ‘Viberator’) I called up Richard at the local dealership and pretty much said “hey Richard we need a car, do you have any cheap Vibes?” When I couldn’t make up my mind about it, they just held it for me until I was ready to commit. When I call they jokingly answer the phone with “whaddya want?” or some other old-man phone-answering joke because they can see my name come up on the screen. There’s some yuks about my dad to get out of the way before we can do business, and they are always very accommodating with regards to my schedule, or loaner cars.
There are some notable gaps in the economy of our town, which some brave individual should fill some day (not me). I believe an art supply shop, maybe one that sells fabric and yarn as well, and could bring in specialty items like clay for the potters, would do really well. We don’t have a gas station – are we the only town on earth without a gas station? The only take-out around is pizza; I’m not complaining, because our local pizza is earth-shatteringly good, but sometimes I have a hankering for Chinese. A tackle shop and/or marina could do well, since our town is on a river and is surrounded by cottage country; some genius could combine this with the gas station and start raking in the cash. Unfortunately, it’s tough to make a go of it and I’ve seen a lot of businesses start up and then fail almost immediately. They’re doomed before they open their doors. The place nearly shuts down in winter, so if it’s a tourist-driven business, they have to know what they’re getting into before committing.
The government of Québec insists that signage in our town be posted in French only, or French-first-and-bigger, but nobody who actually lives there cares much. Those things matter more in other towns. When those laws came out, local retailers started posting their specials in Ukranian, Thai, Swedish, just to piss off the man. Visitors are usually tourists from all over, and they don’t much care either I don't think, though I’m sure the cottagers visiting from Ontario and from the states would prefer that their cashiers at the grocery store speak at least a bit of English. It’s just economics. We’re a border town and the lines get fuzzy. In our town, English folks speak a bit of French and French folks speak a bit of English and generally everything is copasetic until an election comes along and some politician 'from away' jams a stick in our spokes.
Anyway, that is my ode to my town. I have lived there since I was two years old, interrupted by only one short sojourn in the city when I first moved in with hubby, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else on the planet. Someone asked me the other day “what’s it like actually being from here?” and I couldn’t answer the question. It’s paradise, obviously, and it’s funny, and sad when negative changes or conflicts happen, and interesting to meet the people who come through, stay awhile, then move on. It’s the only place I know.
Long a refuge for disenchanted city folks and people who run at a slightly different speed, my little town is unique in that in many ways it’s a rural small town, where everyone knows each other and who they’re sleeping with, and yet it’s a half-hour out of the city, so the lifestyle is sustainable in that you can hold down a decent job while living ‘away from it all’. It’s a haven for industries such as yoga and pottery studios, organic mushroom farming, watercolour painting, shiatsu massage and dog-sledding. It has for several decades been happy home to a large gay and lesbian population. There’s ‘Hippie’s Custom Tattoos’ right beside the pizza place, which serves the best pizza on earth, and features one called the ‘Magic Mushroom.’ It's a great place to visit if you need your chakras realigned. Why, just this morning I got a copy of the daily email newsletter with the following public service announcement:
Kripalu yoga is cancelled this Tuesday, June 2nd due to the demystification of channelling happening in the space.
There are literally about 15 yoga classes happening in my village at any given time.
All of this lives side-by-side and in relative harmony with the local population of hunters and fisherman, wood-cutters and dudes with ATVs and snowmobiles. Many of them are one and the same (i.e. fishermen who do pottery or yoga). Our local bar (one of two rockin’ local bars) is owned by a music impresario, who has brought in acts such as the Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy, Danny Michel, and Buck 65. The music they feature has a contemporary-folk and world beat focus and is normally of really high quality, and bands reportedly love playing the venue, whose stage sits right in front of a picture window looking out over the dark river and the mountains. On the off nights, I’m pretty sure the bar still has a ‘Dart Night’ and the old local dudes hold up the bar while drinking their quarts of beer with tiny little glasses. There is a pool table and usually a hockey game on the t.v., and the owner’s dog walks around freely among the crowd. In the winter it’s not uncommon to see the parking lot filled with ski-doos, and in the fall, sometimes the trucks in the lot have deer strapped to their roofs. The other local bar is owned by a local band, and is always hopping. Last saturday there was a horse tied up to the patio, and last night someone pulled up in a backhoe. You can bring in a picture of your dog and they will put it on the dog-wall with everyone else's dogs.
When we bought our new car, the wonderful Pontiac Vibe (the ‘Viberator’) I called up Richard at the local dealership and pretty much said “hey Richard we need a car, do you have any cheap Vibes?” When I couldn’t make up my mind about it, they just held it for me until I was ready to commit. When I call they jokingly answer the phone with “whaddya want?” or some other old-man phone-answering joke because they can see my name come up on the screen. There’s some yuks about my dad to get out of the way before we can do business, and they are always very accommodating with regards to my schedule, or loaner cars.
There are some notable gaps in the economy of our town, which some brave individual should fill some day (not me). I believe an art supply shop, maybe one that sells fabric and yarn as well, and could bring in specialty items like clay for the potters, would do really well. We don’t have a gas station – are we the only town on earth without a gas station? The only take-out around is pizza; I’m not complaining, because our local pizza is earth-shatteringly good, but sometimes I have a hankering for Chinese. A tackle shop and/or marina could do well, since our town is on a river and is surrounded by cottage country; some genius could combine this with the gas station and start raking in the cash. Unfortunately, it’s tough to make a go of it and I’ve seen a lot of businesses start up and then fail almost immediately. They’re doomed before they open their doors. The place nearly shuts down in winter, so if it’s a tourist-driven business, they have to know what they’re getting into before committing.
The government of Québec insists that signage in our town be posted in French only, or French-first-and-bigger, but nobody who actually lives there cares much. Those things matter more in other towns. When those laws came out, local retailers started posting their specials in Ukranian, Thai, Swedish, just to piss off the man. Visitors are usually tourists from all over, and they don’t much care either I don't think, though I’m sure the cottagers visiting from Ontario and from the states would prefer that their cashiers at the grocery store speak at least a bit of English. It’s just economics. We’re a border town and the lines get fuzzy. In our town, English folks speak a bit of French and French folks speak a bit of English and generally everything is copasetic until an election comes along and some politician 'from away' jams a stick in our spokes.
Anyway, that is my ode to my town. I have lived there since I was two years old, interrupted by only one short sojourn in the city when I first moved in with hubby, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else on the planet. Someone asked me the other day “what’s it like actually being from here?” and I couldn’t answer the question. It’s paradise, obviously, and it’s funny, and sad when negative changes or conflicts happen, and interesting to meet the people who come through, stay awhile, then move on. It’s the only place I know.
5/28/09
Victory Weekend
It has taken me until now to recover from what has been one of the most foot-intensive weekends I can remember.
Friday night we met up with some friends who were visiting from Toronto. They have 4 kids, and the two eldest girls were in a synchronized swimming competition. We met at their hotel and walked downtown to a restaurant, then walked back, but I had been unprepared for the walking and was wearing inappropriate footwear. I got myself a nice blister which bled all over the back of my shoe. Nice eh?
The next morning we were up with the robins to head into town once more for the Great Glebe Garage Sale. I think I have illustrated in this site before the importance of this event in our household. This year we brought my mom, who made us yummy breakfast sandwiches for proteiny fortification, and it was a very good year. Between us we purchased the following items:
- a really really old first aid cabinet, which will eventually go in our cottage;
- a very cool yellow lamp – I don’t yet know where it will live. I have a rather large lamp collection already;
- Martha Stewart’s “How to Decorate”, 1996 edition;
- A pair of never-worn brown wedge-heel sandals, Nine West, for $8;
- A tiny metal train (engine, two cars and caboose), total 3 inches long, for 50 cents;
- An enamel pail with a handle, which came from a real ghost town in Saskatchewan, apparently (ghosts use buckets? I wonder what for?);
- A chemical toilet for our trailer – brand new, never used – which we were going to have to buy anyway but we got it for $40 (less than half price);
- A beautiful ceramic bed pan;
- A painting – paint by numbers – that hubby paid a dollar for. A woman came up to him later on and said she’d nearly mugged him for it, but offered him $20 for it instead. He didn’t accept;
- Two board games, for the trailer;
- A dinner party game called “Deadly Vacation” which we will play at the electricity-less cottage some dark and stormy night;
- Flippers;
- An ‘O Canada’ ceramic hotplate, featuring the coat of arms’ of all Canadian provinces, for my BIL’s cottage (ha ha we are going to decorate it for him);
- A cooking pot with a lid, for the trailer;
- A chrome kettle, for the trailer;
- Never-used thermal insoles (free);
- Two backpacks (ask hubby why – he collects backpacks like I collect lamps);
- A beautiful new collar for Rosie (pale purple with black polka-dots). She looks like she’s going to a party.
Friday night we met up with some friends who were visiting from Toronto. They have 4 kids, and the two eldest girls were in a synchronized swimming competition. We met at their hotel and walked downtown to a restaurant, then walked back, but I had been unprepared for the walking and was wearing inappropriate footwear. I got myself a nice blister which bled all over the back of my shoe. Nice eh?
The next morning we were up with the robins to head into town once more for the Great Glebe Garage Sale. I think I have illustrated in this site before the importance of this event in our household. This year we brought my mom, who made us yummy breakfast sandwiches for proteiny fortification, and it was a very good year. Between us we purchased the following items:
- a really really old first aid cabinet, which will eventually go in our cottage;
- a very cool yellow lamp – I don’t yet know where it will live. I have a rather large lamp collection already;
- Martha Stewart’s “How to Decorate”, 1996 edition;
- A pair of never-worn brown wedge-heel sandals, Nine West, for $8;
- A tiny metal train (engine, two cars and caboose), total 3 inches long, for 50 cents;
- An enamel pail with a handle, which came from a real ghost town in Saskatchewan, apparently (ghosts use buckets? I wonder what for?);
- A chemical toilet for our trailer – brand new, never used – which we were going to have to buy anyway but we got it for $40 (less than half price);
- A beautiful ceramic bed pan;
- A painting – paint by numbers – that hubby paid a dollar for. A woman came up to him later on and said she’d nearly mugged him for it, but offered him $20 for it instead. He didn’t accept;
- Two board games, for the trailer;
- A dinner party game called “Deadly Vacation” which we will play at the electricity-less cottage some dark and stormy night;
- Flippers;
- An ‘O Canada’ ceramic hotplate, featuring the coat of arms’ of all Canadian provinces, for my BIL’s cottage (ha ha we are going to decorate it for him);
- A cooking pot with a lid, for the trailer;
- A chrome kettle, for the trailer;
- Never-used thermal insoles (free);
- Two backpacks (ask hubby why – he collects backpacks like I collect lamps);
- A beautiful new collar for Rosie (pale purple with black polka-dots). She looks like she’s going to a party.
Hubby making off with his loot. He likes to walk out front to keep an eye out for bargains.
And notable things we did NOT purchase include:
- plants of any kind
- fishing things of any kind
- dishes for the trailer
- dog toys
I think we showed great restraint. I’m not sure how much hubby spent (more because I made him buy the high-ticket items), but I got away with only spending $39. I also petted about 1,200 friendly dogs. That’s a fun day in my book.
As you can see, I even took pictures. Here’s a view down one of the streets:
At the Great Glebe Garage Sale, the pedestrian is always right. And here’s a series of shots I call “Garage Sale Tragedies” ™:
Kitty's found a new place to hide.
No comment (The Strangler).
Sleeping Beauty (The Strangler part deux).
We were home by one but we weren’t sure whether or not the Toronto friends would be coming to our place for dinner, so while hubby drove up to our land to discuss the laneway with the backhoe guy, I stayed home and cleaned the crap out of our house. It felt good but two days later it was filthy again. Le sigh. By Saturday evening I was pretty spent.
Sunday hubby went fishing and I stayed home and painted the trailer with my mom. I got most of the trailer covered with the first coat, but I didn’t buy the best-quality paint and I fear it could go to 3 coats. It’s a really crappy painting job too – lots of tiny areas that require a brush, lots of rough spots to cover, lots of gaps to fill. Totally miserable. Anyway, I will keep on trucking and painting my little heart out.
Then Sunday night we went to the local bar (the most excellent Black Sheep Inn) and checked out SoCalled, a klezmer-rapper I went to high school with. It was an excellent show and I actually danced, and drank a bit too much wine, and Monday morning my feet AND my head hurt.
If every weekend were like that I don’t think I’d have any feet left.
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