Archives for 2023

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Oooh, It’s October Edition

At the risk of sounding like an incredibly demented Little Miss Sunshine, I do not have a Least Favourite Month. I don’t have a Most Favourite Month either; I love April because it’s my birthday, and December because of Christmas, I love July and August because of the heat and summery vibes and I love […]

Let Me Eat Cake

One of the things I was most excited to do when I moved here was to restart cross-country skiing; I love it but, sadly, for one reason or another, have not skied in twenty years. Now that I don’t have children in school or classes to teach, I have been eager to restart, and because […]

Just Me Or Everyone

In beginning of The Blind Assassin, my favourite book of all time, there is a scene where octogenarian Iris is presenting an award at the local high school, watching the graduates file on stage. Up they trooped, solemn and radiant, in many sizes, all beautiful as only the young can be beautiful. Even the ugly […]

Gratitude and Grievance

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Yesterday my husband and I took a ten hour road trip to visit my parents. It was a gorgeous drive but I am a tiny bit tired; not, however, as tired as I was Saturday morning when I was woken up several times by a pack of howling coyotes in the vineyard. […]

Hairum Scarum

The thing about moving is that, once a person has moved, there is still so much paperwork to deal with, there are still so many decisions to make, and there is so very much to learn about the new environment. Moving across provinces, I am discovering, means that much time must be spent in a […]

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Wake Me Up When September…Wait, September Is Ending Edition

What a month September has been; oddly enough, it simultaneously feels like it flew by, and that it was three months long. We packed so much in, and now my already tenuous sense of time is completely warped. Everything already feels like it happened so long ago. Was it only three and a half weeks […]

A New Chapter

I was thinking a lot about the last chapter in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn this week, when Francie goes back and looks at her neighbourhood, wanting to remember it just as it was. This week I was in Calgary again, for forty hours, and it was so interesting to see it from new, non-resident […]