Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

The Wonder Pets Save the Clematis

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June is such a busy and frantic month, and it seems like everyone is off their game just the teeniest bit.  Or is that just my house?  Hoo boy, the number of ridiculous arguments that have been going on around here is epic.  Epic, I tell you.  The children have been disagreeing about everything from, unseasonably enough, the appropriate way to carve a pumpkin to the question are haunted houses actually scary?  And if you think that seems relatively benign, I invite you to listen in on these conversations and the intensity of feeling that they generate.  I am all for letting them figure these things out for themselves – I mean, really, should I be intervening on the haunted house issue?  NO. – and so after one such intense disagreement I went into my bedroom with a giant basket of to-be-folded laundry, and not-so-quietly shut the door.  This in turn generated some commentary: “Is Mom in her room?  With the DOOR CLOSED?”  “I think she’s mad at us”.  By the time I emerged, the two of them were sitting together on the couch, watching Scooby Doo and discussing in a happier, more rational way, the role that ghosts play in our lives and in those who reside in haunted houses.  

I seem to be intent on making it busier by doing things that I want to avoid during the summer – like Costco shopping with children.  So yesterday I headed to Costco and found myself in my usual Costco-induced state of loathing and desperation about the state of society, but also excitement due to the availability of a giant box of ice cream sandwiches for $11.99.  Now to avoid eating the ice cream sandwiches. 

There is also much excitement on my street right now as we are all having our gas meters moved to the outside of our houses.  My own meter is being moved on Friday and I keep eyeing my neighbour’s houses to see what I can expect in terms of garden and yard damage.  I mean, they have to drill a hole in the foundation of my house.  I cannot imagine that my garden is going to escape unscathed.  I keep wondering if there is any way I can keep the garden intact, especially my clematis which is only three inches tall right now, thanks to the very long winter and very late and cold spring.  I suggested to my husband that I tearfully and with much eyelash batting talk to the workers to see if I could get them to be careful around the clematis.  I even started planning an appropriate outfit when my husband suggested that perhaps my methodology would seem more creepy and crazy flower lady, rather than the much more appealing damsel in distress.  I suppose I will just wait and see what happens.

This is my clematis in full bloom.  You can see why I want to save it!  Save the clematis!

The upside to having the meter moved is no more doorbell-ringing meter guys.  The guy that reads my meter has a habit of ringing my doorbell either just before I’m rushing out the door to get the kids to school OR just as I’m out of the shower and in my robe, at which point he asks me to please put the dog in another room, as I try not to flash him while collaring my fifty pound hysterical dog.  This has happened more times than I would like to admit and I didn’t even get any BEADS for it, for goodness’ sake.  No matter what happens, garden wise, I am looking forward to not having those awkward moments anymore.

It just doesn’t add up.

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I seem to have caught the boys’ cold, it is no one’s favourite time of the month, and the sky is dark grey and it’s chilly and rainy.  It’s like a trifecta of mildly depressing things.  Also mildly depressing is that I am repeating behaviours that I repeat every single June: I listen to the weather report which states that it will be chilly and rainy and also that the average temperature for this time of year is twenty degrees Celcius.  This throws me into a Hulk-like rage because that cannot be true.  The math does not work.  If the temperature is almost always in the low teens, then in order for the average to be twenty degrees, then there must be several days in which the temperature is much greater than twenty degrees.  This is how averages work.  This is how math works.  I want to see the data that goes into the calculation of this so-called average temperature and then I want to make my own calculations.  SHOW YOUR WORK, weather stations.

I have, on occasion, gone so far as to search for historical weather data, but then I have to take a deep breath and tell myself to dial down the crazy a little.  I mean, what am I trying to accomplish here?  If I did find out that the average temperature was fourteen, and not twenty degrees, would I phone all the local stations and scream “IN YOUR FACE” and then show them my calculations?  Would I burst onto the set where the meteorologist would be saying that we are living in the currently coldest major city in Canada, with the exception of Iqaluit, which isn’t exactly a cheering thought, and push said meteorologist out of the way shrieking that it is all a lie, we will never obtain an average temperature of twenty degrees?  And would the discovery of this information actually change anything, whereas I would suddenly be living in a warm and sunny city?

No, it would not.

Speaking of mathematical discourse, I was endlessly amused by this post by Swistle, in which she a) references the Monty Hall problem, and b) discusses the ridiculous, yet nuclear hot button topics that married people fight about.  We all have those, don’t we?  The fights that ramp up to eleven out of ten immediately, but when we actually analyze those fights, they are actually incredibly stupid.

Now, my husband and I really don’t fight much.  Part of this is compatibility, but part of it is also the realization on both our sides that sometimes we can be difficult to live with.  Sometimes.  Especially, I should say, me.  I mean, my almost pathologically-insane method of rinsing dishes prior to loading them in the dishwasher alone probably puts me pretty high on the crazy scale.  My mother was over the other day and she actually backed away from the dishwasher, silently, as I agitated about the treatment of a knife recently used to spread peanut butter.  She is unlikely to ever try to load the dishwasher as a helpful favour ever again. 

Anyway, the biggest fight we ever had, and it was one that was the cause of much crying and door-slamming, by me, and much calm-but-annoyed-you-are-crazy commentary by my husband, was in 1999 and it was spurred by a – are you ready – Sex and the City episode.  The episode was the one where Mr. Big marries Natasha, Carrie uses the line “Your girl’s lovely, Hubble”, and at the end Carrie says how happy she is to be a wild horse running free, or something like that.  My husband’s reaction to this was, essentially, that Carrie was in some kind of denial and that she was unhappy being alone and just wanted to get married, which turned into a statement that all women wanted to get married.  My reaction was a very – VERY – strong disagreement to this attitude, which spiralled into door slamming and tears.  And we weren’t even married then!  Sex and the City, a fictional television show, was the cause of our biggest fight ever.  As I read Swistle’s post, I reminded my husband of that fight and we got into it all over again!  Carrie Bradshaw put a strain on our marriage.  As a social experiment, I should bring this up in twenty years and see if it elicits all the same reactions.

We have never fought about the Monty Hall problem, however, but I do remember getting into a very involved and impassioned discussion about it with some colleagues many years ago, although perhaps not so many as when the Sex and the City fight occurred.  The end result saw my colleagues and I using a random number generator and creating thousands of simulations to prove the result of the Monty Hall problem.  What can I say, we were a bunch of nerdy quantitative analysts and mathematical simulations were what we did every day.  In the end, we all agreed that sometimes the math doesn’t seem logical, but there it is.

Which is to say, I am NOT going to try to dig up historical weather data and calculate a mean.  I am not.

You put the meaning in my life! You’re the inspiration.

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I waitressed all through university, except for one unfortunate summer in which I worked as a beer girl, ultimately quitting when the requirement was for me to wear a Busch bathing suit to work.  Waitressing was not a bad way to make money for a student; the only problem was that by the end of several shifts in a row I pretty much hated the entire human race.  It got to the point where if one more person asked me for a free refill of diet coke, or complained that there was not enough salad dressing, or asked for three separate cheques and then left without leaving a tip, I was going to snap completely. 

Right now I feel the same way, but with regards to children.   

The book fair was fine, by the way.

Does it seem lately that we are all being inundated with inspirational quotes?  It seems like every time I turn around I’m receiving a quote about hope, and letting go to discover life’s meaning, and turning lemons into fucking lemonade.  Inspirational quotes are the email jokes of the recent age.  Remember how, with the advent of the email joke, our inboxes would be filled with lame jokes, and various urban legends, and pictures of kittens?  Now it seems like the day of that particular version of spammy emails is over and in its place are inspirational quotes. 

Don’t get me wrong: I do love a good quote: one of my favourites being from Mary Oliver “Watch, now, how I start my day in happiness, in kindness.”  I think about that every single morning and I swear it makes my day better.  Another of my favourites is from Desiderata, “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be careful.  Strive to be happy.”

But I came across a quote from the late Bob Ross, of “The Joy of Painting” fame.  Remember Bob Ross?  The guy with all the happy little trees?  Are you ready for this?  It is the most inspirational quote EVER.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe there’s a big old cloud that lives right there.
And he just sort of floats across the sky, and he’s got a friend that
lives right there. Clouds need friends too. We all need a friend.”

 
Anyone else suddenly have a case of the munchies? 

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.