Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The 10th Anniversary Edition!

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This month marks the tenth anniversary of Nicole’s Favourite Things! A whole decade of writing about beauty products, clothes, food, and the occasional gadget. Two things: a) wow, I have been writing this blog for a very long time, and b) looking back at my very first Favourite Things, I still have all of those tops.

Ah, summer. I have been working very hard for this past year to really Embrace The Season, but here we are in my actual favourite season, so no hard work is needed. I love summer. I often idly wonder if I would actually miss seasonal changes if I lived somewhere like Maui, where it’s just one long summery paradisiacal day after another. Maybe I would? But it’s hard to imagine.

In my first Favourite Things, I expressed my love for summer clothes, and summery beauty products, and produce-heavy salads for dinner with berries for dessert. I still love all of those things and I probably always will! If I lived in a place where it was always summer, would I miss my sweaters and boots? Would I miss hearty winter meals and moisturizers for chapped skin and lips? Like I said, maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I am Embracing The Hell Out Of Summer. When it’s sunny and warm, I just want to be outside all day long, and feel mild resentment when I have to go indoors. I have been like this my whole life; maybe I’m solar powered.

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The 10th Anniversary Edition

Non-Psychologically-Scarring Skirts and No-Bra-Required Tank Tops

In honour of my first Favourite Things, I am going to talk about skirts with shorts attached and yoga tanks with built-in shelf bras. These are Enduring Favourite Things, and I have many of the same skirt and top but in different colours and patterns. What can I say, if it works, it works. Listen, living in Calgary there are, annually speaking, approximately 20 days total in which wearing light summery clothing is appropriate. That’s probably a high estimate, actually. The upside of this is that good summer clothing can last forever, as the chance to wear it out is limited. The moment the temperature rises above a certain point, which would probably be considered chilly for my Southern friends, I don a skirt. I think they are cute, and they are very practical with the shorts underneath; I never have to worry about accidentally psychologically scarring random passersby or, more likely, my own children when the wind picks up.

I also love a good yoga tank with a built-in shelf bra; this is a thing that works for me mainly because I am, how shall we say, not exactly overly gifted in the chestal region. I wear these year-round, as a layer mostly, but on warm days they can stand alone.

Talk To Me Goose

My love for Top Gun is well-known; I have loved it since I walked to the theatre with my cousins and older brother in Estevan, Saskatchewan, in the summer of 1986. To this day I remember my outfit on that sweltering prairie night: jeans and a pale pink, tie-dyed, off-the-shoulder short sleeved sweatshirt, despite the heat. I was smart enough by that time to realize that the one theatre in Estevan boasted air-conditioning, and let me tell you, they wanted you to know they had air-conditioning. It was always freezing, and if you were naive enough to wear summer clothing to an evening show, you would be blue by the time the movie ended. Anyway, back when Hannah, Allison, and I cowrote a fun nostalgic blog (HI HANNAH HI ALLISON), I wrote one of my favourite pieces ever, about Life Lessons From Top Gun.

All of which is to say I love Top Gun, and I love the NEW Top Gun as well. Do not ask me to tell you which one is “better.” That is an impossible choice akin to the one Sophie made, and I will not make it. In any case, my husband bought me this shirt, and I love it so much:

It must be worn with aviators. It’s a law.

Pedicures and Sandals

In the summer I swap my boots for sandals, but because I am 47, my sandals need to be of the utmost comfort. Who has the energy for painful footwear anymore? I have found Skechers sandals to be the cutest and most comfortable of all the sandals. These are my favourite, and they are good for walking too:

But I also love these sparkly slides, perfect for the days at the lake:

I have heels for the rare occasion that I need them:

I keep my feet groomed throughout the year; being a yoga teacher my feet are on display constantly, so regular pedicures are a must. I used to exclusively do my own pedicures, but there is the cutest little nail salon just down the street from me, and their prices are fabulous. With each pedicure they give a hot stone massage AND they exfoliate using orange slices, which I love. I still touch up my polish between pedicures, but I definitely go to the salon more frequently in the summer.

Lettuce Pray and Flower Power

There is a great line in Sorrow and Bliss, when the husband acquires a plot in the community garden, and he says that they will now be self-sufficient, in the area of lettuce. I feel seen. I am currently self-sufficient, in the area of kale, as we just had our third cutting. I’ve also had two cuttings of Romaine, and although my leaf lettuce has been very very slow to grow this year, I am expecting to be able to cut it next week. At least, I hope so. Harvest time! I get so much joy out of gardening, it’s unbelievable. It feels like a superpower: do you like this salad? I GREW IT MYSELF.

The first of the roses bloomed – I grow John Cabot climbing explorer roses, explorer roses being the only ones I think are sufficiently hardy to survive our winter temperature fluctuations. This is always exciting as the first one is quickly followed by a wall of blooms.

Let The Spinning Wheel Turn

This week marks my two-year anniversary of the arrival of my Peloton! It was, without a doubt, my very favourite thing to come out of 2020. I know the bar is pretty low, but still. On the actual date of my first ride – which is this Sunday – I plan to revisit the same class I did then, a 45 minute disco ride with Leanne.

It has been a really fun way for me to increase my cardio fitness, and it is measurable: that first 45 minute ride, my output was 277. My usual output these days for a similar class is around 400. If you know, you know! Do you have a Peloton and want to be Peloton friends with me? If the answer to that is YES, my leaderboard name is NicoleBoyhouse.

Wistfulness and Avocados

I have two favourite links this month, both summery in their own way. The first is from my longtime, beautiful, smart, and all-round lovely bloggy friend Suzanne (HI SUZANNE). Suzanne wrote about how you can’t go home again, and the piece, like her, is beautiful, smart, and all-round lovely.

My other favourite link is from a newer blog friend, Jamie (HI JAMIE). Jamie wrote about toxic diet culture, body acceptance, taking up space, and avocados as a metaphor for our bodies. I love a good metaphor and I love a good avocado, but most of all I love her message, particularly in the summer when we are inundated with images of “beach bodies” and “bikini bodies” and what have you.

There’s so much to be grateful for in the summer, there is so much to love, but I particularly love and am grateful for YOU, my dear readers, for being here and for listening to a decade of Things that are my Favourite. xo

Cart Karma

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This is not new information, but I am a strong believer in karma. I really do think that our actions have reactions, and that we get back what we send into the world, for better or worse. How many times have I thought I’d never do THAT and then I find myself in that exact situation, doing exactly that which I have disparaged? The answer is many. Many, many times. I have also said or done things that I have regretted, and that negative karma came right back to bite me, many times in my life.

Related to karma, a subset of karma, if you will, is Cart Karma. I think there are two things most associated with me as a person: the song Landslide, and my incandescent rage at people who do not return shopping carts to the carrel. Well, incandescent rage might be extreme. It really depends on the time of the month and what else is going on in my life at the time; my feelings range from mild irritation to disgust to despair for all humanity to incandescent rage.

When I die, may that be many decades in the future, I want my obituary to request that in lieu of flowers or any kind of charitable donation, my final wish is for people to just return their carts to the carrel. If we all did this, the world would be a much, much better place.

Also, I want Landslide to play at my funeral.

My disgust for non-shopping-cart-returners is so well known that even people I don’t know well send me memes or articles about shopping carts. Last week my dear friend Hannah (HI HANNAH) sent me this article, and it was a Very Satisfying Read. As Hannah said, I love that science basically proved that some people are dicks. Listen, I have All The Empathy for young mothers who have screaming children and for whom every second counts and maybe, maybe, maybe sometimes that means that they don’t return their carts. I give those women a pass. But I think that those women are in the extreme minority, as per my observations in the field. In fact, I have never seen a person with screaming children leave their cart askew, but I believe that they exist.

Most of my shopping is done at Superstore which, happily for my mental state, employs coin-operated shopping carts. You had better believe that even the most dedicated non-shopping-cart-returner will take their cart back to the carrel to get their dollar. I mean, children could be melting down, bombs could be going off inside their car, a tornado could be touching down in the parking lot, and they would still retrieve their loonie. No one in the history of the world has ever not returned a coin-operated cart. I know we would all like to believe that we all naturally want to work together towards the Greater Good, but if parking lots are any indication, Adam Smith was right. We need the Invisible Hand of the coin-operated shopping cart in order to achieve the social benefits and public good of an organized parking lot. Without external financial motivators, all devolves into utter chaos and disorder. It might be disheartening, but it’s true.

My general grocery routine is to visit Superstore weekly, right at their opening time. As I have said, this is good for my mental state, even if Superstore is constantly going through weird and unexpected shortages, that may or may not be pandemic-related. An example very relevant to my life: it has been very hard to get popcorn lately; Boom Chicka Pop has all but disappeared from the shelves, and so I have resorted to Skinny Pop and the ridiculously and kind of offensively-named Lesser Evil. I know. I know. I probably brought the Boom Chicka Pop shortage on myself for purchasing such a stupid item that applies a moral valuation to food, which I am against on principle. But needs must, sometimes.

Every two or three weeks, right after my Superstore visit, I head to Costco which, happily, has an opening time exactly one hour after Superstore. The later I get to Costco, the more disorganized the parking lot is, so for my own psychological health I try to get there as close to nine as possible. But sometimes, it doesn’t happen.

Let’s circle back to Cart Karma. Cart Karma, for those unfamiliar with the concept I have been broaching lo these many years, is that if you rescue a stranded cart from the parking lot, you will have a great shopping experience. I know it’s just one cart among many, but like the story of the child throwing starfish back into the sea, you might not be able to save them all but you can save THIS one. I remind myself of that every shopping trip, as I look in despair at all the carts stranded in parking spaces and awkwardly shoved onto the medians. I can save this one. It can feel overwhelming, but every cart we save makes a difference.

A few weeks ago, this is what I saw:

Even for Costco, this was a new low. You will notice in the background a cart in the parking space: that’s standard. But this, this is in the middle of the ROADWAY where people DRIVE. People driving into the parking lot would have to maneuver their cars around it, and I am not going to live in that kind of world. There were many unsaved carts to choose from but I chose this one. NOT ON MY WATCH, PEOPLE.

I saved that cart and I had a great shopping experience: no lineups, no crowds in the famously-crowded produce section, almond butter at a much-lower price than normal which is notable because everything else is much-higher, and my favourite dried strawberries were available. Dried strawberries are only available a couple times a year, and so even though I am trying not to overstock my pantry, I stocked up. (My husband, later, looked at the receipt with puzzlement. “You spent $58 on strawberries? What…kind of strawberries?” For the record, it was six bags of strawberries and that should last me a solid six months.)

Let us compare that shopping trip to the one before that. I don’t know, I was just exhausted to start out with. It took over ten minutes to just get into the parking lot, as the lineup for the gas station – selling gas at a ten cent discount – snaked through the entrances and precluded anyone from pulling in. By the time I got into the parking lot, with a trunk full of perishable and frozen items from Superstore, I just felt defeated. Faced with all the carts, I slipped into despair for all of humanity, and I couldn’t pull myself up enough to save a cart. I felt like the weight of the world was on my cart-saving shoulders, and I just couldn’t. I walked past all the many stranded carts (pick me, Nicole, pick me!) and took one from the lineup at the entry.

And I had a Very Poor Shopping Experience. Proof! Cart karma works! There were no berries in the produce section, there was no lemon juice – did anyone else notice the blip in Real Lemon supply? – and the lineups were insane. I also had a very strange run-in with a man while I was in the lineup.

It happened when I had been in line for at least eight minutes, and I was next up at the cashier. I was standing the requisite six feet back, giving the fellow in front of me plenty of room to unload. My phone pinged with a text, and I glanced down to look at it. I could hear the man behind me say, somewhat aggressively, “Move your CAAAART.”

Startled, I turned back to look at him, my eyes wide. He gave me a quick smile and said “You know, like that Ikea commercial! Move the caaaaar!” He laughed, like it was a joke, giving me a hand signal that is the Universal Sign of “Go, go.”

Two things: the Ikea commercial in reference is “Get the caaaaaar!” not “Move the caaaaaar!” and also, the fellow in front of me was still unloading and we are in a point in time where we do not crowd other people or bump their legs with our carts. What a time to be alive. Still startled, I nodded politely, and moved my cart forward less than one inch, in the Universal Sign of “I acknowledge your statement, but I shall not acquiesce to your request in any meaningful way.”

This was when I realized that my Cart Karma was lacking, and I had to do something to change it. I turned around and said, in the sweetest possible voice, “You know what, why don’t you go ahead of me? You have so few things and I have so many.” Let me tell you, the look on this gentleman’s face, this person who had behaved rudely but tried to pretend he hadn’t, was worth the price of admission. It was the picture of shock. I insisted he unload, as I moved my cart backwards. He thanked me several times as he unloaded, thanking me again as he wheeled his cart away. I smiled behind my mask, thinking about heaping coals of kindness on my enemy’s head.

It was worth the extra few minutes; by the time I got back to the parking lot I was in a gloriously good mood, despite my lack of lemon juice, and I made every green light on the way home.

Weekly Reading

Sorrow and Bliss. This was a very intense and moving book about a woman living with a hereditary mental illness; the author note states that this is a fictional mental illness, and it is referred to in the book as ____. I found this book compellingly readable and extraordinarily written, but I’m not going to across-the-board recommend it due to trigger warnings all over the place, notably suicide and pregnancy loss. If you’re okay with these topics though, I think you’ll like it. Ultimately, it’s a hopeful book, although it’s a bit of a roller coaster. It really shows how mental illness affects everyone involved, and I found my emotions were all over the place when I read it.

Heating and Cooling. Sometimes I am just blown away by talent, and this was one of those times. This woman can WRITE. I am always amazed at the depth that someone can write, in very few words. I say this after I wrote 1500 words about shopping carts. This book though. It’s a collection of “micro memoirs,” some of which are only a paragraph or two long, and the author conveys a novel’s worth of thought into each one. Absolutely incredible.

The Last Story of Mina Lee. And with that, my streak of incredible books came to a thudding halt. This wasn’t terrible. But neither was it particularly good. It had so much potential – a first generation Korean woman explores her late mother’s stories and life, discovering secrets and finally coming to understand her. It had potential but ultimately fell flat for me.

Also something that sadly fell flat for me? The Elvis movie. I wanted to LOVE it, and it was interesting enough but way too long and with not enough music or details about Elvis’ life. There was SO much detail about Colonel Parker, who was essentially criminal, and I guess that was the point of the movie. But I wanted more Elvis and Priscilla! I will have to look out my old, falling-apart edition of Elvis and Me, I guess. Have a beautiful week, friends! Save a cart! xo

Five For Friday: Nature, New Things, and No Soliciting

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  • New Dishes. I have a very loose, “let’s see how this goes” goal of making one new thing for dinner each week, or, trying one new recipe. These are two different things as I am notoriously poor at following recipes when it comes to dinners. I am essentially one of those people who I loathed when I worked at YMC, a person who changes pretty much every element in a recipe, and then comments on that recipe, but without the commenting part. So, I guess not at all like a person I loathed. In any case, this week’s new recipe was cold quinoa salad with lots of veggies and edamame, a Thai-inspired dressing, and crispy chickpeas and lentils. If you’ve never had crispy lentils, I recommend it: I tossed some drained and rinsed canned lentils in olive oil, salt, and pepper and roasted them at 400 convection for about 20 minutes; they are small little things so I wasn’t sure how long to do it, and I checked on them every five minutes. My whole family loved it, I repeat, my family of meat-lovers LOVED THE LENTILS. I normally dislike leftovers and never eat them, but I put aside a small container for myself, as it was a perfect lunch to take on our hike the next day.
  • The Path Sometimes Taken. I also have a loose goal to go to the mountains More Often, which is about as loose a goal as one can get. Yesterday the boys and I hiked around Stewart Canyon which is about seven kilometres and not as much elevation as I typically like in a hike, but it was a lovely day. Once we reached the end of the trail, there was a small path with a sign that said “Warning: Path Ahead Not Maintained,” so of course, we took it to see what would happen. What happened is that we had to climb over many fallen trees until we got to the point where the path was completely blocked, at which point we turned back and ate the afore-mentioned lunch.
  • There’s A Sign, Read It. Speaking of signs, we have a No Soliciting one on our mailbox. At least ten years ago, but probably more, our doorbell stopped working. I asked my husband, who is very handy and who has repaired many, many things in our house over the past 22 years, to please NOT fix it. At the time, I was home alone most days, and the only people ringing the doorbell were door-to-door solicitors, and I am never going to want to save money on my heating bills or purchase a paper copy of the Calgary Herald. If I was having company, I’d watch for people at the door, and all my friends know to knock, anyway. This was great for a time – it’s pretty easy to not answer the door when there’s no doorbell – but then solicitors started knocking. Can I just say the best thing about 2020 was that door-to-door soliciting stopped? Anyway, sometime in 2021 it restarted, which is when we put the sign on our mailbox, which is directly beside our door. Yesterday I was relaxing after our hike, reading, and I heard a very loud knock at the door. I looked up, thinking it was a delivery and wondering what we had delivered, when I saw a man looking in the window at me reading in my chair. I could see he had a lanyard and a Telus uniform, and I just knew, the way you know about a good melon, that he was here to talk to me about changing internet service providers. I opened the door, and as soon as he greeted me, I said “I have a No Soliciting sign, and I ask that you please respect it.” I said it pleasantly and politely, with my face arranged in a pleasant and polite way, and then I shut the door. I could see him lift up his hands and shake his head in a what’s with this woman kind of way and I will tell you, I was VERY annoyed. This is the second such interaction in as many weeks. The first was a fellow with no lanyard and no uniform who told me he was selling “organic meat and seafood,” which a) ew, b) I eat neither meat nor seafood, not that he would know that, c) who sells MEAT door-to-door, d) we are in land-locked Alberta, SEAFOOD, really, e) this sounds like a scam, and f) I HAVE A NO SOLICITING SIGN ON MY DOOR. I could have pointed out any of those things but I went with f. Anyway, after yesterday’s interaction I found myself unaccountably enraged. I mean, over-the-top, screaming-into-the-void enraged. I immediately texted my very good friend and neighbour Taryn (HI TARYN) and asked her if I was overreacting. She very gently said that I had every right to feel that way but also, perhaps, my emotions were near the surface as I didn’t have a fuzzy companion by my side when I opened the door. She was 100% right, of course. I went into the garden to calm down a little.
  • Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz. I have been spending a lot of time in my garden this week; Tuesday was a particularly low and sad day, but I found it healing to watch the giant fat bumblebees buzzing around. They seem to love the flowers just below the kitchen window, and I could watch them forever, collecting their pollen, as busy and purposeful as can be. The first of my daylilies are blooming, my roses are just about to, and my columbines are putting on a glorious show. This weekend I will have my THIRD cutting of kale, which is the upside to this very cool and rainy start to the summer. It’s maybe not great for the rest of the garden, but I have a tiny little pepper on one of my plants, so there’s hope.

  • Reliable? Or “Reliable?” This sign is on my running route and it cracks me up every time I pass it.

Happy Friday, friends! xo

Summer: It Begins

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Thank you everyone for your kind words and love on Barkley’s passing. I miss him dreadfully and the house feels so strange, like something’s missing. Probably because something is missing. Because I did a lot of the Dog Care and Maintenance, I am finding myself automatically going to do things – check the water dish, mop up around the water dish, let the dog out, take him for a walk – and then stopping, realizing. It’s a very strange and sad feeling.

This past week was the first week of summer, as the boys had finished exams on the 20th and 22nd of June. We had some beautiful warm days interspersed with cold, incredibly wet and rainy days, which isn’t atypical but it does increase appreciation for sunshine. One of the warm days was Monday, and that was a very lucky thing as I had some very special company that day: relatives from California were road-tripping through Calgary and they were stopping by for lunch.

My cousin Nikki (HI NIKKI) and I are the same age, and we were pen pals back in the late 80s and 90s. Did you ever have pen pals? I had a number of them and several years ago I found a box full of correspondence. What a treasure. It seems like such a strange notion now: we would write letters, asking each other questions and telling anecdotes about our lives, and then a month or six weeks later, we would get a response. Now, of course, we can get instantaneous responses and feedback on photos, we can ask a question and feel piqued if someone leaves us on “read.” But there is something so special about written correspondence. I wrote to so many people that I would get stationary every Christmas and birthday, and at one point I even had monogrammed stationary, courtesy of my grandma, who was a recipient of many letters and who had a vested interest in my stationary supplies.

Nikki and I hadn’t seen each other for nearly thirty years, which seems crazy. I was thrilled that the day was warm and beautiful as there were sixteen people, and my house is small but my backyard is big. Two days after this, I was driving to the grocery store and the heavens opened. Just getting from my car to the store, my jeans were soaked and my shoes squelched for the entire trip. I was very thankful, despite my gross discomfort, that the rain didn’t decide to come on Monday.

We went up to the lake for the long weekend to visit my parents, as per our Canada Day tradition. It wasn’t warm, by a long shot, but it was Warm Enough, and it was sunny, so we spent the day on the boat, and the boys went paddleboarding a few times.

I am trying to do more Fun and Interesting Things, YOLO and all that, and so I told the boys that if they jumped into the water – which, I will tell you, is not warm by any stretch of the imagination at any time, but especially this year with the long winter and cold spring – I would too. Here’s my face when they both jumped:

Well, a promise is a promise, Lieutenant Dan.

It was, I will say, refreshing.

We bustled to make hay/ get all our fun outdoor activities done while the sun shone, and then later that night as we played dice, the heavens opened, again, and almost four inches of rain fell throughout the evening and night. A good lesson to seize the moment, I guess, and also a good reason to pour another glass of wine.

Weekly Reading

Girl Gone Viral. This is second in the Modern Love series, and it’s a cute bit of fluff; a romance between a wealthy woman and her bodyguard. I have now read all three – and you do not have to read them in order, I certainly didn’t – and I think the series gets better as it goes on, which is a bit rare, I think. Don’t get me wrong, it’s mind candy, but it’s cute mind candy.

The Maid. I am by no means a book snob – see above! – but it is very rare that I feel that a “buzzy” book lives up to the hype. This one sure did! I loved this story about a non-neurotypical woman working as a maid in a hotel. She finds a dead body, and becomes central to the investigation. Part whodunnit, part treatise on friendship, family, and the differences that make up the world, it’s a really great read. I didn’t want to put it down, and I was incredibly charmed by the smart writing and the complex character development.

Euphoria. This was such a fascinating and complex novel, inspired by real events in the life of Margaret Mead. It follows three anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s, and there are so many layers to the plot and characters, but in such subtle ways. I love that, I don’t like being “hit over the head” with details; I love when authors explore plot points in a way that makes you think. In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night last night, and thought “ohhhhh, that’s what happened.” I will be thinking about this for a while.

Our first week of summer was certainly marked with deep sadness, and today is supposed to be another cold and rainy day, but we are grabbing every moment of sunshine we get. I hope you have sunshine, wherever you are. xo

Goodbye, Barkley

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As many of you know, on Thursday we said goodbye to Barkley. Thank you to all of you who have already reached out to me with kind words and love; I read every single word and I appreciate each and every one of you.

Barkley died exactly one month after his fourteenth birthday, and because of his age I was prepared for him to go. What I was not prepared for was the rapidity at which things progressed. Thursday morning at 6:30 am I woke him up as usual and fed him breakfast; I noticed that he went up and down the stairs to go outside with relative ease. He ate with gusto, as he always did. Around 8:00 I was having a cup of coffee in the kitchen when I heard a thump. He had collapsed. By 10:30 he was gone and I will tell you that that was the longest two and a half hours of my life.

That was a terrible morning and I don’t want to go through anything like that ever again, not even in my mind to relive on the blog. Instead, I am going to show you photos of Barkley through the years. He brought so much joy to our lives, and there is and always will be a huge fuzzy hole in our hearts.

We love you, Barkley. I hope you’re eating unlimited treats and chasing squirrels.

A Hair Affair

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I had a haircut last week, which is an infrequent enough occurrence that it merits a mention. It’s hard for me to believe that, pre-2020, I had a professional cut and colour every five to six weeks. Looking back, it feels like that was a grievous waste of time and money. I remember asking long-haired friends, mid-2020, how frequently they cut their hair and the average answer was, at best, two to three times a YEAR. This was eye-opening for me, to say the least.

It sounds silly, but the realization, back in April 2020, that I could easily and effectively colour my own hair was incredibly empowering and life-changing. I know, I know. But I had been going to a salon for colour for over two decades at that point, so I really didn’t know how great home hair colour is, how easy it is to apply, not to mention the massive savings of time and money. I mean, a box of Garnier is about 5% the cost of a salon visit, and I don’t need to book off an entire afternoon to refresh my colour; I can do it whenever my roots start to irritate me, which is every four weeks at the very most.

This brings me to what I have been wanting to say for the past eighteen months or so, and that is that I have been going to a new hair salon. This is the fourth time I have had my hair cut by this very lovely young woman, and I have never been happier with my hair. She is incredibly patient and doesn’t say a word about the state of my ends, which, with 5-6 months between cuts, are quite scraggly and dry. She shows me exactly how much she is going to cut off, and then she does it, without any surprises. She doesn’t lecture me on colouring my own hair, even if I have roots showing. She DOES tell me I should wear my hair down more, to cut down on breakage, but I accept her professional opinion while not generally adhering to it.

I am very happy with this new salon, but I feel low-level embarrassment and shame about leaving my old salon, which brings me to the question: how do you break up with your hair stylist?

Typically, if you are unhappy with or outgrow a service or a consumer good, you simply just stop patronizing or purchasing it. If you have a poor experience with a restaurant, you just stop going to that restaurant. If you outgrow or change so that the goods you consume no longer suit you, it’s easy to just stop purchasing them. This is just part of life, if it wasn’t, we would all still be using Aussie Scrunch Spray in our spiral permed hair and wearing Lip Smackers and using Wet & Wild nail polish, we’d be reading Sassy magazine and shopping at Mariposa, and yes I know that some of these things are no longer in existence. Nonetheless! Change is part of life, and we have power as consumers to vote with our dollars and feet.

But I think we can all agree that changing hair stylists is Another Thing Altogether. The relationship between a woman and her hair stylist is an intimate one and is based on trust that is built up over the years. No other service is quite so intimate, except perhaps estheticians that work on the bikini line. I mean, the woman who does my euphemistically-named Bikini Plus body sugaring sees me completely naked from the waist down, and has me put my legs in positions that would make me blush if I wasn’t basically dead inside when it comes to Intimate Esthetics. Other than the long-suffering Body Sugar Woman, the hair stylist holds the title for Most Intimate.

I was with my previous hair stylist for nineteen years, which, at the time that I last saw her, was almost as long as I had been married. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but when I last saw her in September 2020, my visit left so much to be desired, and was so disappointing on a number of levels, that I felt I needed to start the search for a new stylist. My hair, which I had been growing out, was shorter than I wanted, my layers, which I had been growing out with the help from that same stylist since December 2018, were more pronounced, and the colour was way darker than anything I had ever had before. This wasn’t the first time I had been disappointed by my cut and colour, but it was the first time I had been disappointed after I realized that I could easily colour my own hair for a fraction of the cost, and that long hair just doesn’t need to be trimmed that often.

It has taken me this long to actually write about it, which really says something about my feelings. This brings me back to the original question: what would you do? I will tell you what I did do, and I feel Low Level Shame about it, and that is that I just stopped going to her. I didn’t make another appointment. When I received a text from her, I didn’t respond.

Did I ghost her?

I feel like I DID, but yet, what was to be done? As I said, if I was disappointed in the service of a restaurant, or even a nail salon, I would just patronize another establishment. But after nineteen years, I disappeared without a trace, and I feel weird about it to this day.

I try to think about it in terms of my yoga classes. If someone stopped coming to class, would I want them to tell me why? I would if the answer was that the time was no longer convenient, or they moved and the drive was too far, or anything else that was beyond my control. But if the answer was that they hated my teaching style or my voice or my personality, well, then, I probably would not want to know. I think I’d rather just be ghosted.

Weekly Reading

After my run of cancer memoirs and death memoirs and serious non-fiction, I decided to migrate some available titles that were on my For Later list to my Hold List, and they came in mid-week, which turned out to be perfect timing.

How To Pronounce Knife. Oh wow, I absolutely LOVED this collection of short stories! Each story is about a Lao refugee and the immigrant experience, and each is from a completely unique point of view. Every story is captivating, compelling, and incredibly moving. I didn’t want to put it down and I didn’t want it to end. It’s been a while since that happened. Thanks to Allison (HI ALLISON) for the recommendation.

The Inner Life of Animals. This was a wonderfully interesting read about animals and their lives. Ravens mate for life, there have been documented inter species adoptions, and goats are quite the disciplinarians. It was a delight to read, animal lovers will adore it. There is a small section on moths, which are, as we know from last week, not my favourite creatures, but I am trying to look at them in a different light now. I’M GROWING AS A PERSON. Relatedly, there is an anthill in my backyard and I discovered it when I went to weed one of the garden beds, and when I say “discovered,” I mean I stepped on it and I had ants swarming sockless feet and bare legs. I tried to brush them off and they swarmed my arms and got inside my gardening gloves. It was, shall we say, unpleasant. Instinctively, I am sad to say, I thought about going into the house and boiling a kettle of water to pour on the hill, but then I stopped: that seemed like an unnecessarily cruel action given that they were just doing what they are supposed to do. I mean, if they were in my house it would be a different story, but they were as far away from the house as could possibly be, and so I thought live and let live and just went on with my weeding, from another, far-away-from-the-ant-hill angle.

The Right Swipe. This was a cute and kind of smutty piece of brain candy. The creator of a dating app meets an ex-football player who is the nephew of a dating website owner…there are twists and turns but of course it ends the way it should, for a light romance. Fun fact: I never remember if it’s swipe right or swipe left if you like someone – dating apps were way before my time, but now I’ll remember (right is the right one). This is part of the Modern Love series, and I read the third one last summer (First Comes Like). Each book is a separate entity, so there is no need to read them in order, which is good, because I didn’t.

Yours Cheerfully. This was a delightful and charming sequel to the delightful and charming Dear Mrs Bird; a plucky young magazine correspondent befriends women working at a munitions factory during WWII. The problem is many women are mothers…and childcare is hard to find. How can they support the war effort and care for the children? It’s a wonderful read with a real women-supporting-women theme. Imagine everyone pulling together for a common goal? IMAGINE. I read the first half of this on Friday, a dark, cold, rainy day on which Roe v Wade was overturned, meaning our nearest neighbours lost fundamental rights and agency over their own bodies, and I kept thinking of these themes. There was a line in the book that said “some women want to support women, and some women don’t,” and boy, isn’t that the truth. Anyway, it was a wonderfully uplifting book for a very sad weekend.

The news seems to get worse every day, so I will leave you these images of Barkley, apparently playing hide and seek with me. Stay strong, my friends. xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Operation Fancy Lady Edition

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About a month ago, I was able to watch my son perform at his school in a student-run short production. This production was the first on-stage production since before the pandemic, so I was pretty excited. As I waited for fifteen minutes after the production for my son to finish the stage cleanup, I chatted with others who were waiting for the same reason. I talked to my son afterward: I met L’s parents and R’s mom, oh, and I met S’s dad and stepmom and introduced them to G’s mom…He looked at me curiously. “How did you meet all those people? Did you just go up to them and ask them if they had a kid in the play?” Yes! That’s exactly what I did.

A few years back I heard the term Extroverted Introvert, and I felt seen. I am technically an introvert; I need my alone time to recharge, but I love being around other people, and I love meeting new people. If you are having a party, and you need Mixer People, give me a call. There’s nothing I love more at a party than circulating through the room and talking to everyone: I love new people and I love seeing familiar faces, and I would probably talk to a chair if it had a picture of a smiley face on it. This is why I was very excited to join my husband for a night in Banff at a conference his company was hosting; there was a reception, and a dinner, and I was ALL IN. This was my first Real Social Event since before the pandemic; I have really missed having these kinds of events to meet people.

I discovered, after meeting other spouses, that most of them were there for both nights of the conference, whereas I only drove out for one, and so I felt a little regretful. But no matter! It was held at the Banff Springs, which is a very special place. This was my THIRD time to the Springs in the past six months, so I think that makes me a Very Fancy Lady.

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Operation Fancy Lady Edition

Three Outfits

I wanted to make sure I was comfortable for the 75 minute drive to the Springs; Banff can be very unpredictable in terms of weather so I needed layers, and I wanted those layers to look cute since I assumed I would meet people upon arrival.

I want to talk about these pants. These pants are officially a Favourite Thing, and I have them in a few colours. They are from lululemon and they are structured, with a button and zipper, but they feel like yoga pants. They are literally the most comfortable pants I own, and I love them. I added cute Skecher flats, a plain tee, a super-long swoopy sweater, and a scarf. It was a perfect driving outfit, but also perfect for wandering around the hotel, meeting my husband’s colleagues and customers, and having a glass of wine at the bar, where I ended up talking to many people who were not involved in my husband’s conference, but who were from as far away as Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia. When I meet people like that I feel like I need to be an Ambassador For Canada, and I end up saying things like Welcome To Our Beautiful Country, and giving tourism advice.

After being a self-appointed Canadian Ambassador, I went to get dressed for the fancy dinner. I bought this dress for a Christmas party in 2018, and have worn it maybe once since. It is from the now-defunct Le Chateau, and is a stretchy sheath dress underneath a big drapey part, which makes it comfortable AND flattering. The heels are decidedly NOT my comfy Skechers, and by the end of the night my feet were very sore, but needs must sometimes.

The next morning my husband went golfing with customers, and I decided to go for a walk to Bow Falls and downtown Banff before I had to check out. I put my great-for-walking Skechers on my very sore feet and layered up.

The weather was pretty unsettled, with really low-lying cloud and a few sprinkles of rain, so I was happy to have packed this jacket, also from lululemon. It’s lined and waterproof, and the hood zips up really nicely in case of gusty wind.

Here is a photo of Bow Falls, which is crazier than normal because of all the rain that we have had of late, as well as the usual seasonal snowmelt:

I guess in terms of Favourite Things, being in the mountains is one of them. This is maybe the very best thing about living in Calgary, the proximity to the Rockies.

Sheertex

Unless it’s the middle of summer, or I am on a hot and sunny vacation, I do not like being bare-legged while wearing dresses. There are three reasons for this: a) I get cold, b) I have Reynaud’s Syndrome which means my legs are generally an unattractive shade of purplish-blue, and c) I have very unsightly varicose veins. Longtime readers may recall I had my varicose veins stripped back in 2011, and that painful procedure was supposed to be the end of it, but alas, I have since developed new ones and my doctor says there is nothing to be done, as I am obviously prone to it and if they strip any more veins, I am going to have Massive Circulation Issues.

Our local Pharmasave advertised that they were carrying Sheertex hosiery; I have had a few occasions in the past month where I would be wearing a dress and wanted to wear pantyhose, and so I looked into Sheertex. I will tell you now, I almost fainted when I saw the price tag. However, in the long run I think it will pay off, as these are supposed to be indestructible.

How many pairs of pantyhose have I thrown out in my lifetime after only one wear, sometimes even less than that, because I put a fingernail through them while putting them on, or snagged them on a bracelet, or got a run from bumping into a table? I shudder to think of the money down the drain. Anyway, the cost of these is insane, but supposedly they should last me a very long time. So far I’ve worn them four times, and they still look perfect, and that’s AFTER I took off my shoes and walked around in my stocking feet at the Banff Springs, after having several drinks and standing around in heels for hours.

Cover Girl Outlast

I have to thank Gigi (HI GIGI) for the recommendation of Cover Girl Outlast lipstick. Gigi said that she used it and it lasted all day, even with mask wearing and eating. I was skeptical, so I took photos of myself for a day wearing it, applying it only in the morning and not reapplying during the day.

8:00 am. In the Superstore parking lot with freshly applied Outlast.

12:30 pm. After a morning of grocery shopping and mask wearing, drinking several glasses of water and a smoothie, eating a fruit salad, and brushing my teeth, the lipstick still looks perfect without a reapplication!

3:00 pm. This is after taking the boys to their optometry appointment. Lip colour is still there – after masking too – but it’s starting to fade.

7:00 pm. This is after dinner, water, and flossing and brushing my teeth. Eleven hours of wear, no reapplication; I am not going to throw out all my other lipsticks but I feel like I could. Other lipsticks, you can JUST GO HOME. This stuff is amazing, thanks Gigi for the recommendation!

Favourite Link of the Month: The Sugar Thief

This has nothing to do with being a Fancy Lady, but I read The Sugar Thief by Laura Bray (HI LAURA) and have thought about it intermittently ever since. It’s just an absolute delight. Laura is not a new blogger, but she is new to me, and her writing is wonderful. Go check it out!

Happy Pride Month! Those are my Favourite Things this month: what are yours? Tell me everything. xo