Monthly Archives: May 2011

Bo Derek Sings The Gambler

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Last Wednesday Mark got the all-clear from the doctor: no more pneumonia!  The second round of antibiotics worked, happily.  Sadly, less than two days later he caught his brother’s minor cold, and Friday night I lay awake, listening to him cough relentlessly.  Each thing I did for him – propping him up with pillows, giving him hard candies to suck on, administering sips of water – were completely ineffective until exhaustion took over and he finally fell asleep.  Not so me.  I stared at the ceiling thinking with great nostalgia about the two or three cough-free days.  Remember the night he didn’t cough?  That was great.  It didn’t help that I – with tremendously bad timing – had just reread Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, in which the main character dies of pneumonia.  The line “Her lungs were ravaged by pneumonia” kept running through my head, like my mind was actually a broken record.  Cough cough cough.

When I finally fell asleep I had a bizarre dream that I went to my hair appointment and my hair therapist put my hair in cornrows.  How exotic!  My little braids would blow in the wind, the beads clicking together softly.  I woke up completely disoriented, and then I actually did go to my hair appointment.  I did not get cornrows, but I did get two inches cut off, which is extreme and wild for me, although possibly not noticeable to the average person. 

I have a busy week of volunteer work ahead of me.  When Jake made a “hug book” for Mother’s Day, on the page describing what I like to do was written “My mom likes to bak and volntr.”  That is, bake and volunteer.  Depressingly enough, that pretty much sums up my life.  Over coffee, my best friend – a mother of four and former teacher – shook her head over my commitment to be the chair of the school council.  “Wow,” she said, “You are going to need a LOT of wine to get through that.”  Exactly.

On the upside to volunteering is that I was invited to our community Volunteer Appreciation Night, taking place next Friday.  I went last year, and ended up winning a giant set of French White Corningware, which I drunkenly walked home with.  A friend won a plaster lawn ornament in the shape of a bear cub lying on a log, and with that variety of door prizes there is NO WAY I am going to miss this night.  My husband, strangely enough, is not overly interested in attending with me, so instead I am going with a girlfriend.  After I RSVP’d, I received the information that this year, not only is there going to be a DJ and a dance, but there is going to be a karaoke machine!  Karaoke!  I promised my girlfriend I would not sing (although if The Gambler is available ALL BETS ARE OFF) but I am giddy with anticipation – who IS going to use the karaoke machine?  Will it be a hockey dad or a soccer mom?  Will it be someone on the community newsletter committee?  Will it be the sole elderly man in the Scrabble club?  I really cannot wait.

It reminds me of the Christmas party I attended at the economics department when I was a grad student there.  For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, there was a karaoke machine.  One of my professors sang an astonishingly terrible rendition of Me and Bobby McGee, and I was never able to look at him the same afterwards.  Who, at the Volunteer Appreciation Night, will be that person whom no one can look in the eye afterwards?  I really hope it’s not me.

If I have to, I can face anything! I am woman!

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I unclogged the gutters today!  I know I’ve written about this before, but every time I perform a job like that, I feel like raising my fist in the air and singing “I am strong – STRONG – I am invincible – INVINCIBLE – I am WOMAN.”  Hear me roar, I unclogged the gutters!

I unclogged the gutters because it’s been steady rain for days now, and I have the overwhelming urge to elbow everyone I see and say something like “Wet enough for you?” or perhaps “Anyone else feel like a duck?”, followed by a grim, humourless laugh.  Fortunately for everyone in my neighbourhood, the rain is slated to stop tonight, saving everyone from my idiocy.

My fierceness in gutter work is in sharp contrast to the other jobs I have done today, which include but are not limited to three loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and baking cupcakes.  Why was I baking cupcakes, one might ask?  It is for a birthday – the DOG’s birthday; because every birthday must be celebrated with cake, even if that cake is non-consumable by the birthday boy.

I also took the kids to get their hair cut at the neighbourhood Beaners, and after a long appointment with some junior, still-in-training stylists, I allowed them to play in the ballpit.  I try very hard to behave like a normal person when my kids play in one of those ballpits; I try not to squirt them with sanitizer every few seconds and I breathe deeply, consciously thinking of other things and not the squeamy little germs covering each and every ball.  I try not to think about Jake’s recent cold and Mark’s recent recovery from pneumonia; I try to let them enjoy this innocent, if gross, childhood pleasure.  Then, as I was at the counter paying for the haircuts, I noticed a woman at the ballpit, speaking very sharply.  I wondered if my kids were involved in whatever the issue was and walked over.  The boys stood in the ballpit, looking alarmed.  The woman was doing that counting thing you do with small children: “Come here Right Now.  One.  Two.  Three.  COME HERE.  HERE!  One.  Two.  Three.  COME HERE NOW.”  Finally she removed her own boots and stepped into the ballpit to extract the small girl.  She turned to the receptionist, who was trying to flag her down to tell her that her children were up for their appointments, and said that she was very sorry, but she had to leave, as her daughter had peed in the ballpit. 

Now, I did feel very sorry for this woman as she hauled her now-screaming daughter out of there.  I smiled sympathetically at her, unsure if I should make a reassuring comment or not, eventually opting for not.  As soon as she turned around I gestured to the boys to exit, discovering on doing so that their socks were soaked.  While I did feel a lot of sympathy about this, I also felt nauseated.  My kids were standing in someone else’s urine.

We went home and the boys changed their clothes and washed their hands and I ate a cupcake and drank some wine and IT DIDN’T HELP.  My kids were playing in a pee pit.  Maybe I need some more wine.  What do you think?

Beavers are very interesting animals.

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On our recent Victoria Day weekend road trip, we stopped for a break at the information centre in Golden, BC.  While my husband took the boys in to use the bathroom, I took the dog for a quick walk and potty break.
Query: why do I use the term “potty break” for a dog?  Answer regrettably unknown.
It should be noted that my husband is something of a soft touch.  It should also be noted that my children are currently obsessed with Canadian wild animals.  Mark, on seeing a photo of a big horned sheep, exclaimed “That’s my favourite horned mammal!”  So it should not be surprising that when I allowed the three of them to go unsupervised into an information centre which sells a wide variety of stuffed Canadian wild animals, the boys ended up with new toys in their possession.
Jake chose a moose:
That’s the new moose, named Moosie, in the front row centre.
Guess what Mark chose?

No, not the bald eagle.  No, not the wolf.  Not the
Vancouver Olympic mascots nor the tigers.

Here’s a close-up.

It’s a beaver!

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Beavers ARE fascinating animals, what with the dam building and beaver lodges and being the national animal of our fine country, but every time Mark informs me that he “loves beavers so much!” and that “beavers are so cool, aren’t they, Mom?” or that he is going to snuggle with his beaver, I die a little on the inside.  And by die, I mean die laughing.  Yesterday was his class’ library day, and he enthusiastically checked out a very informative non-fiction book all about beavers. 
I admire his teacher for keeping a straight face as he spews out his interesting beaver facts, or draws endless pictures of beavers, or expresses his passion for beavers.
It’s all about animals around here.  Mark, with his Grade One knowledge of endangered species, has been passing along his wealth of information to his brother, and let me just say this: it has not been especially well-received.  When Mark lovingly shared the Africa chapter from his new kid’s National Geographic Wild Animals Atlas with Jake, things went awry fairly quickly.  Minutes later, Jake was sobbing hysterically.  Upon further investigation, I discovered that Jake’s distress was stemming from the sad knowledge that hippos are endangered animals, hippos being his number-one favourite animal, to the extent that he believes that Foggy, the Calgary Zoo hippo, has a special bond with him and only him. 
“Foggy wiggled his ears at me!  He honked at me!”
We also celebrate Foggy’s birthday, which is only two days after Jake’s own.  Foggy is turning 46 this year, making him almost exactly 40 years older than Jake.  Foggy is much loved and on hearing that hippos are endangered, Jake immediately concluded that Foggy himself is knock knock knocking on heaven’s door, which he may be considering that he is one of the oldest hippos in North America.  As he sobbed about Foggy’s eventual demise and the fleeting nature of life in general, Mark added more fuel to the fire.  “Stop crying, Jake!  Tons of animals are endangered!  You know how you love elephants so much?  They’re totally endangered!  People kill them for their tusks!  They die!”  Jake: “ELEPHANTS TOOOOO?  NOOOOOOO!”
I find this kind of thing very trying.  While I am all for environmental awareness, I am not in favour of such transfers of information right before bedtime, which is when this display of brotherly love occurred.  Fortunately I was able to assure Jake that hippos in zoos live much longer than those in the wild – which is true – and that Foggy would probably live for many more years – which may or may not be true.  In any case, I sense a zoo trip in our very near future.

I-I-I-I’m Still Alive!

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So here it is, May 23, and we are still here.  I guess the rapture didn’t occur after all, or, if it did, I was seriously excluded.  I wore my special Judgment Day panties for nothing?  NOTHING?

I spent the weekend celebrating the birth of Queen Victoria by way of a road trip to visit my in-laws, and as of today I am on a cleanse because, let me tell you, no one needs to consume that much booze and ice cream over a sixty-five hour period.  HOO BOY.  Today we made the trip home in a record seven hours, as opposed to the usual eight-to-ten-depending-on-road-construction.  Here’s our little family secret for “making good time”: if you get on the road by 6:30 am, there will be very little in the way of traffic.  We like to get an early start, and theoretically, the children will be so tired from our waking them up an hour early that they will fall asleep in the car.  HA HA HA.  This almost never happens, but today, by some miracle, it did.  Mark and Jake both slept for ten and twenty minutes, respectively. 

They are good travellers though, despite their penchant for asking if we are almost there, even when it was explained five minutes ago that there are six more hours left of travel time. 

It was a lovely trip, and I am struck, as always, by how much nicer other places are than the city in which I reside.  There are many benefits to my home city – employment and standard of living topping the list – but climate and vegetation are not among them.  I came home to see that my beautiful, well-established clematis is not even up yet – Is it dead?  How? – which was a touch depressing given the sight of lilacs, fully in bloom and growing wild around the perimeter of my in-laws’ property.  

Ah, but the long weekend is over and now it’s back to the old grind.  Which, for me, means pretty much nothing.  The life of a lady of leisure!  I suppose it means groceries and running back and forth from the school, and also attacking a weird mountain of laundry, weird due to the fact that I actually DID laundry, twice, within my sixty-five hour vacation period, so I’m not totally sure where all this laundry is coming from.

Also for this week: I wasn’t going to bring this up due to the fact that it makes me sound like I’m going to slip on my heels and pearls and start vacuuming, but I have NEW SMALL APPLIANCES to play with.  Last week I got a food processor – my dreams have come true! – and today my new stand mixer, coffee maker, toaster, and microwave arrived!  I am so excited about them that my younger self probably wants to slap me in the face, enraged with my domesticity and housewifery.

What does one need to wear to the Rapture?

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So apparently the term “whale tail” is not as commonly known as I thought.  Here’s a snapshot from Wikipedia:

It’s just as classy as a pair of Daisy Dukes and a crop top.

Do you remember that scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin where Andy and Cal catch a glimpse of the salesgirl’s whale tail while she is working in the bookstore window?



Andy: There’s something wrong with her underpants.


Cal: Yeah, they’re not in my mouth.

Speaking of showing your underwear to the neighbourhood and possibly earning the reputation as the creepy lady across the street, did you know that the world is slated to end THIS WEEKEND?  I don’t know how I went this long without realizing that Saturday is Judgment Day and, also, the Rapture, which I had erroneously thought was the Apocalypse until a friend corrected me.  Despite my Lutheran upbringing, from which I have clearly lapsed, I am actually a little unsure of the difference between the apocalypse and the rapture, other than the presence or otherwise of the four horsemen.  So anyway, mark it on your calendars!  World ending Saturday.  No need to stock up on groceries this weekend.


I’ve always wondered: if you predict the world ending, as has been predicted many times before, do you feel silly after the world does not end?  I think I would.

My long-awaited food processor arrived this weekend, in a very large box.  Jake immediately staked his claim on the box, which he named “Boxy”.  Or maybe “Boxie”.  In any case, Boxy has become part of his daily life.  He’s putting toys in it, rearranging its location, and spending hours a day sitting in Boxy.  This is all fine with me.  However, a game has emerged, and it essentially consists of Jake climbing into Boxy, closing the top, and calling to me.  Then, I am supposed to act surprised because Jake is not in the room; instead there is just a giant food processor box.  Failure to play along is not an option.  Along with this game is much one-sided conversation about the various Hero Factory characters that are inside of Boxy, which one I like best, and all of their different attributes. 


Here is my dilemma: on the one hand, there is less than six weeks left of school, then my afternoons with Jake will be over forever, as he starts Grade One in the fall.  I should be cherishing all of these moments.  One day, perhaps, he will not want to share every detail of his life with me.  But on the other hand, I think my eardrums are going to burst from so much loudly punctuated conversation.  “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, can I tell you something MOM?  MOM?  Did you know that Furno MOM?  Did you know that Furno is very powerful MOM?  MOM?  Guess what MOM?  I have a Breez 2.0 in my MOM?  Mom, can I tell you something MOM?”  Two and a half hours of this constant stream of consciousness and I am a broken shell of a woman. 

Yesterday after an afternoon based entirely on Jake’s talking and my planting actual flowers to go with my metaphorical mind-flowers – my thoughts are my seeds!  Jake’s just sharing his life with me! – we went to pick up Mark after school.  Mark played with one of his friends on the playground for a while, then came up to me and indignantly accused me of never listening to him, ever.  I thought sadly that maybe, given the afternoon’s events and my possible exploded eardrum, I was tuning out everything my children were saying, and I bent down to listen to what he had to say, which was, somewhat anticlimactically, “There was a ladybug on the slide.”


He went on to say that he and his friend were trying to rescue it, because if someone killed a ladybug, then Jesus’ mother would be angry.  I was completely startled by this revelation, and said that I didn’t know about Jesus’ mother, but I would be sad if a ladybug was killed, as they are very helpful bugs.  Mark nodded solemnly, and said “I guess both my mom AND Jesus’ mom would not like anyone to kill a ladybug.”

Comparing me, the creepy lady showing her whale tail in a modern day Mrs. Robinson-type way to the young neighbour to Mary, Mother of God seems a little heretical.  Maybe I should be concerned about this weekend.

A New Kind of Groundhog Day!

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Friday evening my husband came home late from his golf game to find me on the couch in my pajamas, halfway through both a bottle of wine and the pilot episode of NYPD Blue.  “Hi sweetie,” I said happily, as if I hadn’t seen this episode many times before, “Sipowicz got shot!  Oooh, look: You tell Alphonse Giardella that John Kelly is looking for him.  JOHN KELLY.”  Which is to say, it’s the start of a new season: golf season.  Every golf season I opportunistically support my husband in his endeavours on the golf course so I can delve into my box sets of NYPD Blue. 
I then slept for nine and a half hours, since Mark’s cough has subsided significantly.  After this epic sleep I looked at my suddenly well rested face in the mirror and decided that I could not live another minute in my orange haired state, applied the temporary colour, and instantly boosted my own self worth.
My glowing feelings from rest and a non-orange hair colour were only exacerbated by the sunshine and suddenly seasonal temperatures.  It was so sunny and seasonal, in fact, that my neighbour appeared in all his shirtless glory to mow his lawn. 
A friend posted a cute quote the other day: “Your mind is a garden, your thoughts the seeds; you can plant flowers, or you can plant weeds.”  Brilliant, in its own saccharine way!  I read that and thought, YES.  I am going to plant a fucking ROSE GARDEN.  And I am, people, I am.
So when I saw my neighbour, clad only in red cutoff sweatpants, backwards baseball cap, and gigantic running shoes, I thought: ROSES.  It occurred to me that his shirtless appearance is Groundhog Day-like in nature; not like the Bill Murray movie, although I do seem to comment about his man boobs every single year.  No, I thought that he is like a groundhog himself, because when he emerges from his house with his lawn mower and his shorts, he is ushering in a new season, the season of sunshine and happiness and also golf and NYPD Blue box sets.  So I cheer him, my groundhoggy, shirtless neighbour. 
It also does not escape my attention that I am a complete hypocrite.  If he looked like, let’s say, Mark Wahlberg or even that Old Spice guy, I would not dream of complaining.  So, in the interest of not judging someone based on appearance, which is a very non-yogic and distasteful thing to do, I am going to applaud his tremendous self confidence and his prediction of a lovely spring.
Also, I am not faultless in inadvertent overexposure.  The other day I was bent over, gardening in the front yard, and I stood up and saw the young, awkward, twenty-ish fellow across the street standing beside his car, staring at me.  I smiled and waved and he said hello in a quick and strange way, before getting in his car and driving off quickly.  I thought not much of it, until I saw my reflection in the front window.  Two words: whale tail.  So I’m not really bringing up the classy in the neighbourhood. 
Roses, people.  Let’s plant some flowers.

Friday the 13th, and Privilege Problems

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I just realized, now, that it is Friday the 13th!  Maybe that explains things, and by things I mean my state of crossness and irritability, although I really think that my attitude is more likely attributed to my lack of sleep and excessive worry due to my son having pneumonia, rather than the date.  I have been extremely irritable and plagued with what I refer to as Privilege Problems.  Don’t worry!  I’m not about to complain that my personal chef has been using just too much asiago, or that my housekeeper has been cleaning the bathroom so frequently that she is going through an excessive amount of cleanser, or that my stylist keeps putting me in Michael Kors, when I just want vintage, dammit!  I just mean that I have been having problems that are not actually problems, but are instead irritants that seem exceedingly important, but really are not.
Nicole’s List of Not-Really-Problems
1)      It is two weeks until my next scheduled hair appointment, and yet my hair looks and feels like straw.  Orange straw.  I have an emergency box of temporary hair colour in my bathroom cupboard but can I actually use it with only two weeks to go until my appointment?  I don’t know.  I can’t decide.  I am going to see my in-laws next week, and I don’t really want to see them with straw-like, orange hair, but is it silly and/or bad for one’s hair to apply temporary colour two weeks before permanent colour?  I JUST DON’T KNOW.  I could dither about this all day long, but fortunately I have other things to think about.  Such as avoiding breakouts prior to next week. 
2)      A few weeks ago my husband had the snow tires taken off the car, and today he asked if I would take it in to get the tires retorqued.  This was completely unreasonable, given that, other than filling it with gas, car issues are HIS department.  I do not deal well with car issues, even ones as innocuous as getting the tires retorqued.  I have been known to burst into tears when the “washer fluid low” light comes on.  I cannot, and have never been able to open the hood on my car.  I did take the car in but felt tremendously resentful for the entire day.
3)      My kids are going to be in the same class next year.  This actually seems like it might be a real problem.  Due to the school board’s budget cuts, the class that Mark was supposed to be in was eliminated, and instead they are going to be together in a Grade 1-2 split class.  My options are to a) suck it up, b) place Jake in the Montessori Grade 1 class (our school has a Montessori stream along with the regular program), or c) switch schools.  Neither b nor c seem like viable options to me, so I guess I’m going with suck it up, buttercup.
To counteract my irritability, I am going to list off all of the happy things from the past couple of days.
Nicole’s List of Happy Things, Complete With Pictures
1)      I planted a few very hardy plants!  They look pretty and it was so lovely to dig in the dirt again after such a long, long winter.
Does it look like Mark is saying “That’s what she said?”  Or is it just me?
Flowers!
This is what happens when I ask them to look at me and smile.  It does not go well.
2)      The new dog groomer did a great job on Barkley, and was less expensive than our old groomer.  The consult wasn’t even something weird, like I had imagined, although on the topic of the dog’s face, the groomer asked if I would like for him to have a moustache.  I laughed, but realized quickly that this was not a joke.  Um, no thanks.
3)      Mark is coughing much less, thanks to the miracle that is antibiotics.  I may – MAY – even get some sleep tonight.  Then I will surely be less bitchy and irritable.  Surely.