Monthly Archives: September 2025

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fall Follies Edition

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I was at the dog park last week, walking in my usual loop, when I passed by a man I see quite frequently. He’s probably in his 70s, and he has two dogs, one of them a very young puppy. This is against the rules – dogs less than four months are not permitted in the dog park – but I am not The Dog Park Rule Enforcer, so I usually just nod and smile. I was doing that, when he said Have you ever heard of grounding? I had my earbuds in, and wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly, so I politely paused my podcast, raised my eyebrows and tilted my head.

It’s when you stand on the ground with bare feet, facing the sun, he said, and of course I DO know that, but it was such an unexpected question from such an unexpected source. Oh yes, I have heard of th…I started to say as I looked down to see that he was indeed standing with his face to the sun, shoeless. Bare feet. In the dog park.

I blinked behind my sunglasses and then said You’re very brave to do that in the dog park! Brave? Or crazy? At that very moment, his puppy ran up to me to show me the sandal he had in his mouth, and then ran off again as the man admonished him to return it.

I kept walking.

By the time I left the park, ten minutes later, the man was still chasing the puppy, wearing only one sandal. Then I heard him call to someone that the puppy had left his sandal in the long grass and he couldn’t find it.

I hope he was able to disinfect his foot when he got home. Either that or amputate it.

I’m not saying that was one of my Favourite Things, it’s more of a PSA. If you want to ground, maybe don’t do it in a dog park.

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fall Follies Edition

Grapes of Wrath

Almost all of the grapes on the vineyard behind our house are for wine, but the four rows directly behind our house – which we own – are concords. Once those grapes ripen, the air smells like grape juice, and I cannot even begin to express how wonderful it is to walk outside and be hit by that delicious scent.

This past month, until the grapes were all harvested, I would just walk outside and pick a bunch to snack on. Just before the harvest, I snipped off three bowlfuls to enjoy for a little longer. I don’t think I will ever not love the ability to have such fresh fruit right outside my door!

A Pear Affair

Speaking of fresh fruit, the pear crop has been incredible this year as well. My son requested a pear cake for his birthday, and I was happy to oblige.

I used my friend Julie’s (HI JULIE) recipe, and I will note here that I cut the sugar in half, and it was plenty sweet that way. I followed the recipe exactly for the penuche frosting, and it made at least three times as much frosting as one could possibly pile onto the cake.

I have made this recipe before, but I hadn’t noted this down at all, so I don’t know WHAT happened. I do know that I ended up throwing out a lot of frosting, because what else could be done? I suppose I could have frozen it for later use a) when was that going to be, b) chances are I would forget it was there and then later have to chisel frozen penuche out of a container, and c) OMG IT WAS SO MUCH FROSTING. Anyway, the cake was delicious, but I have noted: cut sugar in half, make 1/3 the amount of frosting.

These Shoes Are Made For Walking

Back in my running days, I was very choosy about my footwear, and would spend quite a bit of money buying the fancy Asics Gel-what-have-you shoes. But when I stopped running, I started to buy less expensive shoes – the Skecher Go Walks. I don’t know why I thought I didn’t deserve expensive footwear anymore, particularly since I walk a minimum of five kilometres a day, often more, but that’s what happened. Even without all that walking, I STILL DESERVE DECENT FOOTWEAR.

A few weeks ago, my left foot started hurting, a lot. No problem! I had bought a pair of Skechers on sale and was just waiting for my other pair to wear out before taking them out of the box. I donned my new shoes, went for a walk, and was in pain by the end of it. Worse, the pain started in my heel, and ominous music started playing in my head. I know what heel pain means: planter fasciitis.

No! My feet are my fortune! Or, at least a very important part of me. I fretted and fretted, rolling my foot on yoga balls and massaging it and generally feeling kind of stressed about it. Not only am I on my feet for hours every day, we are going on a vacation that requires a GREAT DEAL OF WALKING very soon! I can’t not be able to walk!

My husband not-so-gently suggested I was being cheap and immediately found me a pair of Asics trail runners, appropriate for the gravelly and sometimes rocky trails that Rex and I favour.

Foot pain – gone. Let this be a lesson for us all: cheap footwear is just not worth it. And this is also a lesson in why I didn’t do another no-shopping challenge! Sometimes needs must.

Progress Not Perfection

I read an interview in Cup of Jo, and as I was looking at the photos, I thought damn, that woman has great hair. Wouldn’t you know it, she happened to mention the hair product she uses: Living Proof’s Perfect Hair Day 5-in-1 Treatment.

I ordered some, thinking it would be a good item for travel, cutting down on the many products I usually use. And friends, it worked like a dream. A DREAM!

Not only that, but my hair still felt great the next day – without washing or adding more product.

Jane, Meet The Dollhouse

I have mentioned my friend Michelle’s incredible and uplifting blog before (HI MICHELLE), and in particular I have mentioned her absolutely delightful dollhouse. Every single post is more wonderful than the last – it just gets better and better. Well, I don’t know how she is going to top this one, because she obtained a Jane Austen doll. Jane Austen! With the gnomes in the dollhouse! I am surprised I didn’t spin right off this planet.

I’m not going to steal any photos from her, obviously – you’ll just have to go to look for yourself! But in honour of her, I wore (one of) my Jane Austen tees, which is also a Favourite Thing.

Outfit of the Month

This exact outfit has been an OOTM before, but since I am shopping my closet these days – with the exception of this month’s shoes! – I thought it deserved to shine.

Yesterday my husband and I were invited to a tour and tasting at a very fancy, architecturally incredible winery, and this was the perfect choice. Sorel boots for walking and standing, tights because wineries can be really cold, and my favourite lululemon t-shirt dress. Perfectly comfortable and cute!

And now, as alluded to, I am off on an adventure! I will be taking a blog break and will see you all on the other side. Take care of yourselves, friends. xo

Bounty and the Bust

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Who Loves You?

I was listening to an interview with Anne Lamott, who is a writer and person that I very much admire. She was talking about the concept of self-care, and how her entire life these days is based on self-care, which felt quite resonant to me. Recently someone asked me what I do with all my time, now that I’m neither teaching yoga nor raising children, and I was quite puzzled. I fill it? It seems like my days are all full and busy and very little of my time feels wasted. But I think the better answer is one like Lamott’s, in that my whole life feels like one giant self-care project at this stage in my journey towards the grave.

Lamott spoke of everything she does as a radical act of love towards herself, stating that if she so much as makes herself a cup of peppermint tea or eats a cookie she thinks Someone is taking care of me and loving me, that “someone” being her own self. I’m going to start thinking this way. Someone loves me so much that they made me this hummus, I’ll think at lunch, eating my own homemade hummus. Someone is taking care of me by making me sit on the deck and read for an hour, I’ll think. After all, one cannot be a writer without being a reader, and so it’s career development as well as self-care.

Is It A Robot?

I have a real aversion to AI and Chat GPT and other things that are destructive to our environment and also to our collective intelligence. I realize – YES I REALIZE – that there are benefits to the medical community and research, sure. But also? It is making us collectively stupider. I am sure you can, for example, develop a travel itinerary using AI, but you know what else you can do? Google. It’s already supremely easy to access information about literally everything in the world, I do not think we need to make our brains lazier, particularly given the environmental damage AI wreaks. Do not even get me started on AI-created pictures or writing.

This aversion did not, however, stop me from listening to a podcast about Chat GPT romances. Did you know this was a thing? I certainly did not. There are a lot of lonely people out there who are embarking on romantic, and even sexual, relations with a chat bot. And if you, like me, were thinking how do you have sex with a chat bot, then you are not thinking outside the box enough. It would be similar to phone sex, let’s put it like that.

So this is a thing now. I listened to an interview with a man who, apparently, has a REAL LIFE GIRLFRIEND but also a chat bot one, and the reason for the latter is that – wait for it – his girlfriend doesn’t understand him. To quote Miss Cornelia, ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN? This “relationship” started when his actual human girlfriend was uninterested in watching the lunar eclipse with him, and so he now goes to his chat bot girlfriend for all his astronomy conversation-based needs.

If you’re thinking woof, that is fucked up, then you are in the exact same mental space as I was, until I started giving it a bit more thought. It’s not much different from chat rooms of two decades ago, or even those 1-800 numbers to talk to “singles in your area,” but the difference is that there is not a human on the other end of it. Which brings me to my question: which is worse, finding out your spouse is cheating on you with a robot, or finding out your spouse is cheating on you with a random stranger in a chat room? Or paying for phone sex? Or – and I actually think this is the worst of all – having an online affair with someone on social media?

Bounty and Bust

A vastly better use for our planet’s water is for food production, I think we all can agree. Which brings me to a long-overdue garden update!

This was my harvest last weekend, before I started shutting the garden down. It’s a little early for it, but we are going on vacation soon and I’d rather get things done in the beautiful September sunshine than later, when it might not be so lovely. The tomatoes and raspberries are, improbably enough, still going strong. I have enough squash and zucchini (omg, so much zucchini), to last me all year, and I have more onions and jalapenos than I can possibly use, so I have been sharing them with the winery staff.

Not everything has been so bountiful, though. I have six gorgeous bell pepper plants that have, through the summer, been absolutely covered with beautiful, perfect peppers. Despite this, I have harvested only seven peppers in total, because every time one starts to ripen and change colour, I go to inspect it only to find that it has been nibbled on. Worse, sometimes the peppers look amazing and then disintegrate when I pick them up, because water has gotten in through the nibbles and rotted the pepper from the inside out.

The only possible explanation is that it is a squirrel, and indeed, I have seen those little bastards zipping around the garden boxes. We have a tall deer fence, and there isn’t anything else that could be getting in. Squirrels! They have been my gardening nemesis since my Calgary days, when those assholes would merrily dig up all my plants for no good reason or chew all the wires on our outdoor Christmas decorations. One year, squirrels ate the entire hat off of a light-up wire snowman, and another year they dug up and ate all 150 fall bulbs that I had painstakingly planted. As we all know, the Eastern Grey Squirrel is not even native to Calgary, and I will tell you that once Barkley caught one and tried to kill it and I did not feel bad about it. Me! Animal loving me! I was like FUCK THAT SQUIRREL, GO BARKLEY.

Anyway, next year I shall sprinkle cayenne in my pepper beds to keep the (actually native) squirrels out. If that doesn’t work, I give up. I will just buy from the farm market.

The other bust was my fall planting of spinach and kale. I enthusiastically planted seeds in mid-August, like I did last year, and then we had warmer than normal temperatures. The heat stunted the germination process and now, a month later, I have only the smallest scatterings of seedlings. I suppose I could try again now, but as I said we are leaving for vacation soon and it feels like it will be a wasted effort.

Weekly Reading

Not a wasted effort? This week’s reading. One of these things is not like the others!

I Who Have Never Known Men. Rex’s face says it all. I read a dystopian novel and I liked it. I think it was because it is an entirely character-based novel that takes place entirely in the narrator’s head, the narrator who is not only unnamed to us, but unnamed at all. She is known as “the child,” as she was taken as a child to the underground bunker with thirty-nine women. One day a siren goes off and the guards disappear immediately. The women escape to discover they are all alone in the world, whatever world they are in. This book asks such interesting questions: what happens to a person brought up in isolation from the rest of the world, how does a person make sense of the world, what is the nature of hope and when is hope lost?

Bad Summer People. Do you love juicy, gossipy, scandalous stories about rich people behaving badly? Me too! This was so much fun to read; we start with the discovery of a dead body and then the story backtracks from there. There are multiple (read: SO MANY) points of view and characters, and I was here for every single one of them. What a ride! Also, I love the kind of intensity that something like a low-talent tennis tournament can bring about, that’s all I’m saying.

The Identicals. I recently started listening to Elin Hildebrand’s podcast Books, Beach, and Beyond, in which she – given her own star power – interviews absolute literary stars and talks to them about their writing process. Recently she mentioned that her books follow a formula and she does not deviate from this formula, and I have to say, when you’re right, you’re right. There is something SO lovely about reading a book which you KNOW will end happily, and as you read it, you can see those happy things taking shape. This is a book about estranged identical twins living on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and they basically trade places for the summer. Capers ensue, everything turns out perfectly, I loved it, the end. A perfectly lovely beach read that I read with the actual beach in view.

Today is the first day of fall! It’s fall, fuckfaces! And so it is the start of Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers, and also – in Canada only! – Decorative Gord Season.

I mean, that will never get old. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not. Let’s go! xo

The Great Judy Blume Re-read

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Thank you all for your lovely and thoughtful comments on Monday’s post about Using The Good Things/ Driving The Ferrari. I feel inspired anew to revel in the things I love and to pass along the things I don’t. Writing it, I thought of the Mary Oliver poem “Storage.”

There’s no one like Mary Oliver. Well, there’s no one like anyone, I guess, but I was trying to segue to there’s no one like Judy Blume. I alluded in Monday’s post to a fun reading project I undertook last week, and that project was a binge of Judy Blume.

To be honest, it all started in February of this year, when I was in Mexico and had a few Judy Blume books on my Kobo. I quickly reread five of her YA books in short succession, and I talked about how brilliant she is at connecting with issues that are important to young people. My dear friend Maya (HI MAYA) sent me some more titles for my birthday, but then I had so many library holds come in, I put them to the side.

Because we are going on vacation soon, I have been pausing most of my library holds so that nothing will come in while I am gone. I got a little overly enthusiastic at hitting the pause button, though, so I didn’t have a whole lot to read. In other words, it was the perfect time to browse my own shelf.

Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. This is one of the titles that Maya had sent me, and it was a really interesting reread. What I remembered from my youth was that this was the book that introduced me to the concept of erections and wet dreams. Nine-year-old me was very confused, particularly with the wording “I felt myself get hard.” What did that mean, I wondered? I went from confusion to horror when I learned what it meant, and realized that this could be happening all around me, all the time. And wet dreams? What kind of a horror show is this? But revisiting this as an adult, I found the story is so much more than just Boner Talk. It’s about class structures, wealth, and, most of all, anxiety. It follows Tony, a seventh-grade boy from a working class Italian family in New Jersey; the family goes from barely making ends meet to being rich, rich, rich. They move to Long Island where Tony’s anxiety goes through the roof, presenting as terrible stomach pains that eventually land him in the hospital. It’s a really interesting story, and I feel like the tagline should be More Than Just Boners.

In The Unlikely Event. I read this in 2017 when it first came out and I had remembered liking it a lot. It is an adult book and it’s based on true events that Judy Blume lived through in the early 50s. In her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, three planes crashed over a four month period, and this book details those crashes and how it affected people in the town. I did NOT like this very much on the reread. There are SO many characters, and it is told in the third person omniscient, and so I found it very tedious and without a lot of the emotionality and character development that I love in a book.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. The classic! I loved it then and I love it now. This is not my first adult reread of Margaret; in fact, my friends Allison, Hannah, and I (HI ALLISON HI HANNAH) wrote a collaborative blog about our respective youths, and I not only reread this classic, but I RECAPPED IT CHAPTER BY CHAPTER. You can read my recap posts here, here, and here if you are interested. Just like with Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, as a young girl I focused on the first-bra-first-period aspect of Margaret, but as an adult I see that it is so much more than that. It’s about religion, fitting in, and finding peace with God in your own personal way. There’s also a lot about friendship, body image, and insecurities. This is well worth the reread! (Yes, this was from the library, but it was actually IN the library and so I didn’t have to put it on hold).

Deenie. This book is my all-time Judy Blume favourite. I pulled out my well-worn copy of the story of a beautiful young girl with scoliosis, who has to wear a brace all day every day. I also recapped this one, and you can read those posts here, here, here, and here. It’s interesting; usually when I reread books from my youth I find I have a lot more sympathy for the parents than I did as a child, but NOT THIS TIME. Deenie’s mother is still terrible.

What a fun little project this was! Of the eight books I’ve read so far in September, seven of them were rereads, six of them total delights. Did you love Judy Blume as much as I did? What was your favourite? Tell me everything. xo

Pulling The Ferrari Out Of The Garage

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Several months ago I listened to a podcast interview of a man who, with the exception of his car and the possessions he had hastily packed into it, lost everything in the Los Angeles fires. He was remarkably sanguine about the situation, saying that although his house and everything in it burned to the ground, he was actually looking forward to collecting the insurance money and starting over again, somewhere less expensive, where he could continue to work remotely.

I am sure there was a complicated journey to get to that place of peace, I am sure he had some mourning and grieving and anger, but I was impressed by this attitude. I am not sure if I would ever get there myself, should I find myself in that kind of situation. But he said that he and his wife, who also works remotely, had no children and at the end of the day, where would their possessions go anyway? The only thing – the only thing! – his wife was sad about was the loss of the family Bible that had recorded births, deaths, and marriages for generations.

But then, he said, what would have happened to it anyway, after they died? The best case scenario, he said, was that eventually that Bible would end up in a secondhand shop, hopefully found by someone who placed value on old books.

Well.

I related this story over dinner and my sons both seemed to think this was a completely normal and reasonable thought process, and maybe it was. We all learned that lesson, my older son said, when we moved. We got rid of something and five minutes later we forgot we ever had it.

I don’t know if that’s depressing or uplifting, but I do think there’s some truth there. What WILL happen to all of our stuff upon our demise? Will anyone want my gnomes? My books? My non-blooming Christmas cactus? Who’s to say. I do know that when we were cleaning out my grandma’s apartment, twenty-five years ago, my cousin handed me yet another dollar store tchotchke and said gravely This is why you should never give your grandma knickknacks for every birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day. It’s true. Whereas she treasured these gifts from her grandchildren, none of her grandchildren wanted anything to do with the little ceramic unicorns or, in my case, inexpensive brooches from Sears.

I’m not a minimalist, certainly, and I do have some things from both of my grandmas that I value deeply: my framed Desiderata, some old books, a stack of magazines featuring Princess Diana, a piano stool, and an entire set of Lavender Rose china, which I brought out on Friday for an afternoon fondue party with the girls.

The truth is that although I don’t bust out the fancy china very often, I am not a believer in saving things for special occasions. Years ago my friend Swistle (HI SWISTLE) wrote about family heirlooms that literally never got used and spent decades in boxes in order to “save” them. That post affected me deeply, honestly, because what do we have stuff for if we are never going to use it? Swistle wrote “It WOULD be sad if an irreplaceable 1940s plate got broken, it WOULD. But I’m looking at the two possibilities: (1) using the dishes many, many times and enjoying them each time, and ending up with a set that has a few missing/chipped pieces, or (2) never using the dishes, and ending up with a perfect set. That we never see. Because it is in a box.” I don’t think I could possibly add to that.

I think there is a mentality, particularly with people of a certain generation, to want to preserve and keep things because they lived through a time where possessions were so precious and of such great value. I am sure we all had an older relative who covered all the furniture in those clear plastic covers; no seat was comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, but at least the upholstery was preserved! Gorgeous wooden tables covered with ugly wipeable tablecloths, lampshades with the cellophane still on them, all the blinds closed so that nothing fades from the sunlight. Guest towels that would get you killed if you used them, ditto the flower-shaped fancy soaps in the powder room. Whole rooms that no one could go into, lest they become polluted by the people entering in. All of these beautiful things that took a lifetime to amass, and that were, at best, rarely used and never enjoyed, due to the worry that they would get “ruined.”

My friend Elisabeth (HI ELISABETH) just wrote about this on her Patreon: fancy candles, special clothes, handmade quilts all going unused so as to not ruin them. It breaks my heart a little bit; what is the point of having possessions if they never get used? Especially since – and this is also mildly heartbreaking – there is a strong possibility that no one will want them later. I mean, I cannot imagine my sons will ever want my grandma’s china. It’s possible, I suppose, but not probable. The same goes for the stack of Princess Diana magazines; chances are they will end up in the recycling when I shuffle off this mortal coil to join her, may that be many decades in the future. And I would never blame them, I don’t want them saddled with boxes of things that were mine but that they have no interest in.

Listening to the man who lost everything in the fires really sparked something in me; I love my home and all the things in it, I have so many treasures and beautiful art and special things. I would be devastated to lose them. It reinforces my determination to appreciate and use all of them. As my friend Liv (HI LIV) used to say when I’d talk about using Grandma’s china, Pull the Ferrari out of the garage!

Those are words to live by. Use the fancy dishes, drink the expensive wine, eat the good chocolates, wear the silk top or the cashmere sweater or the sexy shoes! Dry your hands on the guest towels after washing them with the specialty soaps! Open up the blinds and let the sunshine in, even if the flooring and upholstery fades because of it!

In a way it reminded me of a show from years ago – maybe it was Ally McBeal? I don’t remember, honestly – in which a character talked about her tricks to keeping her skin young-looking and wrinkle-free: keep facial expressions to a minimum, don’t laugh, and stay out of the sun. Talk about living as grimly as possible! There is such a thing as sunscreen! I suppose it would keep the face pretty youthful; I wouldn’t know, since I resemble the crypt keeper these days, but I’d rather have that than a lifetime of no facial expressions.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? It’s just as ridiculous as having a houseful of things that never get used.

Weekly Reading

I embarked on a Very Special Reading Project this week, which I will write about in a separate post later this week, so I just have one book to talk about today.

Sandwich. I read this last year but wanted to refresh myself since Catherine Newman’s new book, Wreck, is coming out next month and it centres around the family in Sandwich. I love this book. I love the thoughts on menopause, women and their reproductive lives, empty nests, aging parents, marriage, all of it. As you know from last week, I am a Catherine Newman Superfan, and I really love this one.

Speaking of Sandwich Life, today is a very special day – my younger son turns 20! Two decades of joy.

I hope you all have a joyful week – pull those Ferraris out of the garage! Put your (sunscreened) faces to the sun! Pop the champagne! Whatever you’re saving for a special day – today is a special day! xo

If I Had A Billion Dollars

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If you had asked me one month ago what I have in common with Mike Vrabel, head coach of the New England Patriots, I would have stared into space for a moment before responding that we are both humans living on the planet at the same time, but nothing else. That was before my husband, a longtime Patriots fan, sent me a reel in which Mike Vrabel was asked what, outside of football, makes him nuts. His response was twofold: able-bodied people who park in handicapped zones, and PEOPLE WHO LEAVE THEIR SHOPPING CARTS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PARKING LOT. Mike Vrabel, I salute you. He went so far as to say he actually confronts those people and wishes that he had a car boot to immobilize their vehicles.

Never have I felt so seen, particularly by a football coach.

Earlier in the summer I found myself reading about a certain multibillionaire who rented out Venice for his $50 million dollar wedding, and at the time I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I have so many feelings about the current distribution of extreme wealth in general and this wedding in particular, none of them positive, and I am sure you can well imagine.

But I couldn’t help thinking what I would do personally in the extremely unlikely event that I attain such massive wealth. I find it fascinating to think that, if I had a net worth of $224 billion dollars, I could give away 99.7% of it and still be a billionaire. I could give away 99.9% of it and still be fabulously rich. I could bring clean water everywhere, I could end food insecurity, I could house the unhoused, I could END DEATH BY TUBERCULOSIS. I could do all those things and still have money to fly business class everywhere I want to go.

It’s an interesting thought experiment: what would I do differently, had I so much wealth? Let’s say, in the manner of Steve Martin with his holiday wish for world peace, that I’ve already given away 99.7% of this theoretical wealth and made an enormous positive impact on the world, let’s say I’ve already bought a house for each of my children, let’s say I had a billion dollars and I had to – HAD TO – spend it on myself. What would I do?

For something that is in all likelihood never going to happen, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I love my home and wouldn’t want to buy a different one, or a vacation house, and I wouldn’t want a new car or even a new piano. I wouldn’t travel more than I do but, as I said, I would definitely fly business class only.

I came up with an idea that I felt was absolutely brilliant, and I raised the topic at the dinner table. My family immediately and without hesitation conjectured that I would a) hire a chauffeur and b) employ a personal chef.

Well, damn. I do want those things! So I guess I have three things I want, the third being my own personal busker. If I was insanely wealthy I would hire a busker to follow me around, anticipating my moods and playing all my favourite songs.

To say my husband and sons were unimpressed with this idea would be an understatement.

I stand by it, though. Can you imagine how fun that would be? The soundtrack of my life brought to life!

All of this was before I knew about Mike Vrabel, though. So now I have a fourth thing I would do if I had a billion dollars to burn: I would hire a Mike Vrabel-sized man to go with me everywhere, in my personally chauffeured car, to confront shopping cart and disabled spot violators, and to use car boots with impunity.

My fantasy expenditures are now getting unwieldy. I’m imagining myself with my personal chauffeur, chef, busker, and Mike Vrabel all going to Superstore to fetch ingredients for the week. I might have to get a bigger car in this scenario. And maybe a second house just to shelter all of my employees. And do I want one busker or two? Or more? I want to be a good employer and maybe I’d have to have these guys work in shifts so they can rest a little between sets. Ah, the stresses of being a make-believe billionaire. First I’d have to save the world, and then I’d have to figure out the sleeping situation of my staff.

Weekly Reading

The Thing Around Your Neck. Oh, this author is so talented! I loved this collection of short stories about Nigeria and its people, gorgeous and brilliant slices of life. There is such a variety of points of view and even a few stories written in the second person. I loved every story.

We All Want Impossible Things. I first read this in 2022 and decided, after hearing Catherine Newman interviewed on a podcast, that it deserved a reread. I have read and loved everything Newman has written, since her days as a Babycentre blogger, when my oldest was a baby. She inspired me to start my own blog! I really love this book about a woman caring for her best friends in her last weeks of life. It’s about grief but so much more than that – it’s about love and friendship and the complicated beauty of hospice. Newman has a new book coming out next month and I cannot wait!

Single, Carefree, Mellow. I read this in 2021; I loved it then, and I love it now. Katherine Heiny is a gift to the world, and this collection of short stories is brilliant and hilarious and thoughtful and witty, and is everything I want in a book. A few of the short stories have the same characters, which is delightful in every way, and every one of the stories is a little slice of life with the most wonderful characters you can imagine. And so funny, she is SO funny. One of my favourite lines in the book – although basically the whole book is my favourite – “She collects garden gnomes…You had an affair with someone who collects garden gnomes.” I laughed until I cried.

I had such a fun and busy week filled with friends, and I am looking forward to more of the same this week. I also received a mock-up of my book cover design, and I cannot WAIT to share it with you. So many people have very kindly asked about details regarding its release, and I don’t have those details yet but believe me, the Boyhouse readers will be the first to know! Take care this week, friends. xo

Detoxing In Ovaries

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Happy September, everyone! Can you believe it?

We have been having the most gorgeous weather; the days are summery and hot, but the early mornings are cooler and lovely, perfect for walking and for wearing t-shirts. I considered a photo project featuring all seventy-six of my tees, but a) that sounds boring, and b) I would almost certainly lose interest after the second day. You’ll just have to imagine them all.

The weather is also perfect for gardening. Friends, I cannot even describe my tomato situation. I harvested my first tomatoes on June 25, and it has been an avalanche of ruby globes since then. I thought the zucchini situation last year was out of control, but that was before 2025, The Year of the Tomato. For at least a month I have been picking at least a big bowl of cherry tomatoes, plus 7-15 Romas, every single day. I am drowning in tomatoes, I texted my friend Sandi (HI SANDI).

Autocorrect, in its wisdom, changed it to I am detoxing in ovaries.

I am going to victim-blame myself by saying that I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but it just occurred to me this very second that maybe there IS some kind of “detox diet” for “ovary cleansing” that involves a lot of tomatoes. Is there such a thing? I don’t want to check, my algorithm is weird enough as it is.

In any case, one cannot live on tomatoes (or ovaries) alone – OR CAN WE? No, probably we can’t – and so I found myself, as I do every week, at the grocery store.

I love peeking into other shoppers’ carts. I feel like it is a vignette of a life, or at least a hint into that person’s weekend plans, as evidenced by the woman who had six bottles of wine, a sheet cake, and at least ten family-sized bags of potato chips. Madam, I salute you, and can I join?

I almost always get into a semi-involved conversation regarding cart contents with other shoppers, and sometimes those conversations are life-changing. For example, one long exchange in the Covid Era led me to abandon almond milk forever and embrace cashew. Another woman told me gravely, and without substantiating evidence, that one should never purchase Boom Chicka Pop from Superstore, only Costco, and since we were at the former, I felt like this was a stealth information operation. I didn’t even have any in my cart, and so how or why we embarked on that topic, I do not know. Maybe she was a mystic.

Last week a lady was behind me in line and I smiled at her, ready to engage in conversation, at which point she looked away quickly and took out her phone. It was a gentle rebuff, so I turned away, but not without checking out the contents of her cart, which consisted only of three 4L containers of sour cream, a bakery box of 18 chocolate chip cookies, and a leopard-print blouse.

Oh, the variety of things one can purchase at Superstore! I’m sure the contents of my own cart would be semi-interesting to someone as nosy as I am; at the very least, someone ALWAYS comments on the volume of bananas I purchase each week. But I found myself dying of curiosity – what does one do with so much sour cream? That amount can’t possibly be for condiment use only! Or can it? What recipe could require 12 litres of sour cream? Is this for a food truck? I have all the questions and no answers, but I hope the woman enjoyed her cookies and is wearing the leopard-print blouse with aplomb.

Weekly Reading

What a great week of reading I had! Winners all around.

Everything Is Tuberculosis. Everything I ever knew about tuberculosis, I learned from Alice Munro stories, the Bronte sisters, a variety of Victorian novels, and Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday in Tombstone. I found this book, which dives into the infection that kills 1.25 MILLION people annually – yes, today – incredibly fascinating and also incredibly depressing. The author traces the fascinating history of this incredibly long-standing infection, showing how society’s view of it has changed dramatically. At one point it was considered the INHERITED disease of artists and poets, romantically claiming that as one’s body succumbed to “consumption,” one’s soul and mind expanded. Tuberculosis also influenced fashion and beauty standards, as the wasted, thin bodies of women would be paired with alabaster skin, rosy fevered cheeks, and wide glittering eyes. It reminded me of the “heroin chic” of the 90s. Interestingly, once it was discovered not to be an inherited disease but a contagious bacteria, TB’s PR took a dive, going from the disease of the upper class to that of poverty. And that it is, it is an infection that can be dormant until something like trauma, stress, malnutrition, and general impoverished circumstances hit. To this day it is a pandemic, one that could be prevented and helped but is not, due to general greed and lack of caring about things that are not in our faces. I started reading this on the same day I listened to Trolleyology -the science of ethics – on the Ologies podcast, and I can’t help conflating the two and the ethics around not stopping a preventable pandemic. And listen, caveat emptor: I loved this but I would never recommend this to germaphobes or anyone with any kind of health-related anxiety.

Audition. I loved this absolutely wild, mind-bender of a book, the likes of which I have never read before. This was one of the most original books I have ever experienced. It is made up of two parts with all of the exact same characters, same narrator, same point of view, but completely different narratives. I don’t even know how to describe it except that it is an exquisitely written character study of a woman’s life in two incredibly different realities. It could be interpreted in any number of ways but I think it shows the different paths a life can take, and a choice that can force one of those paths to be true. There’s lots of symbolism with regards to marriage, motherhood, and reproductive choices, and I would put another caveat emptor here: this isn’t a book for someone who wants a firm plot, lots of backstory and answers, and a logical timeline. It IS for someone who loves character books, little clues as to symbolic thoughts, and gorgeous writing.

Maggie; Or A Man and A Woman Walk Into A Bar. This was such a beautiful, delightful book about two non-beautiful, non-delightful topics: divorce and cancer. A woman receives a cancer diagnosis shortly after her husband tells her he is having an affair and is leaving her. She names her tumour Maggie, after the Other Woman. It sounds grim and it is – there are two young children involved, the affair comes out of nowhere, her mother died of the same cancer – but it is also strangely joyful and absolutely gorgeous to read. I loved it.

I hope you are all enjoying your long weekend, friends.

Typically there is not much difference for me with regards to long weekends – every weekend is a long weekend and no weekend is a long weekend – but we have had my older son here to stay for a couple of days while his roommate has houseguests and before classes start up again. My younger son started his new job working in the vineyard, so there has been a lot of excitement around here. September is such a Fresh Start Feeling month, even when there’s no Fresh Start for me personally. Have a beautiful week, everyone! xo