Category Archives: Books

More Weeding, More Reading

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This is probably a strange thing to admit, because I know that generally it is a task that is dreaded and disliked, but I actually kind of love weeding. Like the laundry, or cleaning the kitchen, or really cleaning anything at all in my house (I’m currently looking with a side-eye at my fuzzy companion, due to whom we never have clean floors for more than thirty minutes), the weeding is never done. It reminds me so much of Newman’s meltdown about the mail, how it never stops. That’s how it is with weeding, the weeds just keep coming and coming.

But maybe that’s what I like about it, that there is always something that needs tending. I also find weeding to be very meditative; typically when I’m performing dull, repetitive tasks I listen to podcasts or music, but when I weed I leave my phone and earbuds in the house, and it’s just me and the weeds, with the sounds of the outdoors around me. There’s something so calming about feeling the warmth of the sun with my hands in the dirt. It’s absolutely a meditation.

This week I found myself meditating a lot on friendship, and the role of social media in our lives. I have been reminding myself of the platitude that friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. What is interesting to me is how social media has changed that in some ways; people who we lose touch with decades ago can come back into our life via the miracle that is social media.

I think of one of the closing lines of Desiderata nearly every day: With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. This sentiment could easily be manipulated to be applied to social media: With all its sham, fakery, and advertisements, it is still a beautiful thing. So many incredible people have come back into my life and I have met so many people on social media channels who make my life richer and more interesting.

In a way, it’s changed the for a lifetime part of the platitude, because although I might not be intimate with my childhood best friends or my group from junior high, I still feel like I know them. I know their children’s names and what they look like, and sometimes I even know what they are eating for dinner or where they are travelling to. I love that. It’s an incredible way to stay connected, and I don’t think that I would be connected with these people were it not for social media.

I fully understand the pitfalls of social media, of course, but as a woman my age I’m pretty much over comparing my life to anyone else’s. I like to celebrate when others are celebrating, I want to commiserate when others are sad or in mourning, and I really do like to see what other people are eating for dinner. I know that mindless scrolling can be not only a waste of time, but also detrimental to my attention span and general wellness, and so I apply boundaries to my Instagramming and Facebooking and I stick to them.

There is one part of social media that I fall prey to, though, and that is the advertising. Wow, am I a soft touch. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I have purchased – and, I hasten to add, absolutely loved – at least three products that were marketed to me on Instagram, and although I don’t buy a lot of things, I definitely look at the advertising reels and think about them intensely. You should see my algorithm, you guys. It’s almost entirely makeup and skincare for “the older woman,” plus shapewear. The other evening I was glancing at my feed and I accidentally mused out loud Miracle Balm, hmm, do I need Miracle Balm? The responses from the men in the house was immediate and emphatic.

My younger son: NO.

My husband: What? How many products do you already use every day? Forty? You don’t need forty-one.

My older son: You can’t stop the forward march of time, Mom.

Well, they are probably right, other than my husband’s conjecture about the number of products I use. I don’t know exactly how many I use, it depends on the day, but surely it’s less than forty. Surely. In any case, it’s true, you can’t stop the forward march of time. No matter how miraculous the balm.

Weekly Reading

There are two things I wanted to tell you before I get to the two very excellent and entertaining books that I read this week. The first is that I guest-posted over on Engie’s blog (HI ENGIE), and I talked about twenty favourite books that I have each read at least three times. Technically there are twenty-two, since I slipped Heidi and Deenie in at the end. Anyway, I wrote it a few weeks ago but since I was travelling, I wasn’t able to link up. Here it is, I hope you enjoy!

The second thing I wanted to say – and this is notable since I rarely do it – is that I DNFed a book this week. I have been trying to do this more, as I have a tendency to push through with books I am not enjoying, which is a waste of time, really. A woman in my writing group had strongly recommended a Japanese series, the first of which was Before The Coffee Gets Cold. She was so enthusiastic that I just put it on hold without looking up what it was about. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was all about time-travel; longtime readers will remember how I loathe time-travel as a literary device. I started it all the same, slogging through the first forty pages, and then I remembered my resolution to DNF if I am not enjoying a book. Freedom!

After I Do. Friends, I could not put down this book about a young married couple who fall out of love. It was one of the most intensely readable books I have had in a while! It was all about the little quirks that we have that are endearing, but maybe on a day to day basis become really irritating to our partners, and vice versa. It’s also about how small resentments (think: arguments about where the car is parked) can become fury-inducing, and how a lack of communication can tank a relationship. I mean, who among us hasn’t felt Hulk-level rage at something ridiculous like a toilet paper roll not being put in the recycle but instead left on the bathroom counter for all eternity? Anyway, this couple takes a year separation to see if their marriage can be saved, it’s a circuitous route that struck me as odd, but such a satisfying and engrossing read. I was so invested in these characters. Interesting note: this was written in 2014, and the author has gone on to have massive success. I have read a few of her very popular books and I didn’t enjoy them half as much as I did this. 

Happiness Falls. I don’t know what I thought this book would be like, but it wasn’t this – and I LOVED IT. What an incredibly written book with such a unique and original voice. A father goes missing and the only one who has clues to this is his autistic, non-speaking fourteen year old son. The rest of the family, along with the police, try to piece together what happened and if the son is at all to blame. As a side note, the father has been researching the notion of happiness, trying to quantify it in terms of baselines – if you come in from a cold, rainy day and warm up, you’re happier than if you never left the house, for example. It’s given me lots of fascinating things to think about. If you read this, be sure to read the author’s note on how she came up with the idea, because it’s very interesting.

Don’t worry, I won’t be exclusively writing about weeding for the next five months. OR WILL I? Will weeding become my new grocery shopping, in terms of blog topics? Stay tuned! xo

Weeding, Flowers, and Semi-Mindful Consumption

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I discovered another, only slightly-distressing but still inconvenient victim of the Big Move this past week, with all the weeding I have been doing – hours and hours of weeding, people – and that is my trusty old nail brush. I had the cutest little nail brush in the shape of a foot – and the foot shape itself was a little pumice – that dates back to the early 2000s, and, if memory serves me correctly, was in a gift box of Body Shop items related to foot care, including what I thought was discontinued, but is only rebranded, peppermint foot lotion.

Slight digression: has anyone else noticed the rebranding and repackaging of Cover Girl items? Cover Girl has really upped its game; the packaging is so sleek and pretty now, and they have a whole new “clean” line as well. I kind of dislike the “clean” labelling because it implies anything else I put on my face is mud collected from the off-leash dog park, but my beloved Aunty C swears by their new line of clean mascaras, and I feel that is a notable recommendation, albeit not one I have personally tried. I’m a Maybelline Surreal Falsies girl, as we all know.

Anyway, back to the nail brush. I have no idea if, in my stressful packing of last year, I threw it out, or if it is just another lost item, not as soul-destroying as the bookmarks, but annoying nonetheless. I think it must be the former, because nothing else bathroom-related is missing – THAT I KNOW OF – and who is to say what my mental state was at the time? I was probably singing along to Miley Cyrus’ The Climb and crying while I packed the bathroom, so it’s perfectly possible that it hit the trash. It was somewhat stained from the time my younger son had to stain his woodworking project at home and hence used it to scrub off the chocolate-brown wood stain all over his hands, so maybe I just tossed it.

Well, when you need a nail brush, you need a nail brush, and although I generally wear gloves while gardening, I somehow still get dirt underneath my nails, which is not a look I am going for. I am trying to Consume Mindfully these days and avoid unnecessary purchases, keeping in mind that my husband will leave me and my mother will disown me if I ever do a No-Shopping Year again. I chalked this up as a Highly Necessary Item and immediately ordered one, along with some new protein powder.

Late last year, both Engie and Elisabeth (HI ENGIE HI ELISABETH) recorded their beauty expenditures, in relation to what is known as the Beauty Tax, whereas the average (American) woman spends $877 on her appearance annually, whereas her male counterpart spends $592. I was completely shocked by those numbers because I blow them out of the water. My health and beauty expenditures vary wildly from month-to-month, depending on what runs out or if my pricey hair supplements have shipped, but let me tell you, as of this moment in time I am way, way, WAY over the annual average, and it’s only mid-May. The reason I even bring this up is that protein powder expenditures are “supposed” to be included in the total, which I think is stupid, as to me this is an important way to bump up my protein for my overall health, not a beauty product. Although, now that I’ve typed that out, I guess health does affect beauty, particularly hair and skin, so FINE I WILL INCLUDE THE PROTEIN POWDER. Be right back, I have to go update my spreadsheet.

In terms of Mindful Consumption, I have been really trying to use up what I have before I purchase more of any particular item, whether it be a beauty product or anything for the household like, say, chickpeas. Of course, that makes me a little anxious because as of Friday I was down to the last can of chickpeas and I used it up to make hummus, which means no more chickpeas until grocery day. This is a stressful situation to be in. What if I want to put roasted chickpeas on something? What then? I guess I would have to suffer through until Wednesday. Other than that, this is working fairly well, except that I somehow currently have seventeen bottles of Bath and Body Works lotion. Am I inadvertently hoarding? Well, I won’t buy ANY more, at least until I’m down to three or four.

I did decide to Mindfully Purge my underwear and sock drawer. It’s a strange cognitive dissonance that I can happily add one more black top to my many, many drawers full of black tops, but I have a total block when it comes to buying new socks, panties, or – and especially – bras. After a ten-minute interval in which I a) could see the state of my pedicure through my worn-out socks, b) put my (clean) fingernail through the lace in a pair of panties and ripped it nearly in half, and c) examined myself in the mirror to see that my bra cups gaped so much that I could literally stuff my worn-out socks in there, like I was a character in a Judy Blume book, I decided enough was enough. ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH. I ruthlessly went through everything and then REPLACED all the worn and ill-fitting items, including three new bras. We all know my weird laziness when it comes to buying new bras, and here I am! I’m a new woman! One who isn’t wearing socks with holes in them or bras that are in need of stuffing.

On the topic of clothing, I love looking at what other people are wearing, not just for events, but for regular day-to-day living. I think you can tell a lot about a person and what kind of day they are having by what they are wearing at the grocery store, an outing to which is a huge part of my day-to-day life (only two days until more chickpeas). I love seeing elderly ladies all dressed up in slacks and blouses, with their hair done and lipstick on, and I also love seeing young moms with their messy buns, frazzled faces, washable outfits, and carts full of small people and Goldfish crackers. I love seeing people in their pajama pants, with a I Don’t Give A Fuck About Your Societal Rules look on their faces. There’s something invigorating about a person who will NOT conform to the Pajamas Are For Home canon.

The other day I passed a young man in the cereal aisle; he was wearing a ribbed white tank top, low riding jeans, and a pukka shell necklace. He also had a moustache and a mullet, and I reminded myself that I had not travelled back in time, young men are often in mullets and moustaches these days. I was marvelling about this to myself, wondering if I lived to 100 how many returns of the mullet I would see in my lifetime, when I found myself next to an older man, who was notable only for a scowl on his face and a t-shirt that read “I Tested Positive For Freedom,” which was embellished with a maple leaf.

Well. Fashion is there to make a statement, and that man certainly was, but what I couldn’t help but think was you’re still wearing that in 2024? Aren’t we done this by now? He was older, but there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t live another 15 or 20 years, and I wondered if he would still be wearing it then, and what, if any, the public reaction would be. Perhaps I’m overthinking this, perhaps it was just the first shirt he grabbed when he got dressed that morning. Perhaps he, like me, is trying to Consume Mindfully and did not see any reason not to wear a perfectly serviceable t-shirt, one with no visible rents or stains. Or perhaps he really wants everyone to know his particular outlook on life. I typically smile at or chat with everyone I encounter at the grocery store, but you know what, I just picked up the oatmeal from the shelf we were both looking at, and swerved around him silently.

Weekly Reading

I Was Told There Would Be Cake. I heard this woman speak on a podcast a few months ago, and immediately put her new memoir on hold. I mentioned this to Bijoux (HI BIJOUX) who told me that the author also had a book of essays, from around 2008. It was so enjoyable and fun, and gave me good nostalgia for life in my twenties.

The Interestings. My favourite kind of book is a character-driven book, and this is definitely that. I became very invested in the lives of the six – plus a husband – people who become friends at summer camp, and whose lives diverge fairly widely after they become adults. I love thinking about the roads that we take in our lives, how things change as we age, and this book is all about that. This is a very real book about the ordinariness of life, and how secrets and lies and bad decisions can haunt people for years. There is a lot in this book about envy, and how it can be poisonous, but also how we all have our burdens to bear, no matter what our lives look like from the outside.

Just in case you all were wondering, I did get almost caught up on weeding yesterday morning, when it suddenly and dramatically started to pour rain. By the time it stopped I was all showered and made up and did not feel like getting grubby all over again, so hopefully I will get caught up this morning. Although in the afternoon I had a cup of tea and the teabag said “The difference between a flower and a weed is a judgement,” and I will say, I felt judged myself. Judged by my own teabag.

Mostly, though, I am excited about the garden and about all the irises that are currently blooming.

Rex is excited about the grass.

May we all have such joy and excitement on a daily basis! xo

Five For Friday: The Three Province Tour Reading List Edition

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I’ve been home for only five days and yet it seems as though my trip is already a dimly-remembered thing of the past. It’s so strange how that happens. It doesn’t take me long to get back into the rhythm of things, but it does take a lot of effort to catch up on life after a week away. There’s just so much to do! The groceries, the laundry, the weeding, my god, the weeding. Three weeks of weeds is a lot of weeds, friends.

I managed to get some reading done, with all the hours on the plane and in airports, and in the occasional downtime in the evening. I have to say that it is a very eclectic mix of books – a dense nonfiction looking at the polarization of society, a second-chance romance, a thriller (I know! Me! Reading a thriller!), a very long novel about the Partition of India, and a YA book.

Doppelganger. In the social media world and beyond, Naomi Klein has been confused with Naomi Wolf for years – both are radical writers of import named Naomi, after all. And I will say two things: first, I had confused Naomi Klein with Norma Klein, who wrote that YA book Sunshine back in the 70s. (Me: Oh wow, I loved that book! Also me: wait, that’s NOT by Naomi Klein?) (Also, I can understand the mix-up, I always get John Irving confused with John Grisham). Second, in the 90s I really loved Naomi Wolf’s writing – her Beauty Myth and Promiscuities were very formative for me. I was disappointed when she started to go off the rails; I think it was Fire With Fire that I stopped really reading or paying attention to her, and then she had a real fact-checking issue with her book Outrages. By then, she was off my radar.
She really went off the rails during Covid and this book focuses a lot about that – the polarity and divisions in our world. This was a fascinating, balanced, dense, well-researched book about the polarity of our world and the notion of doppelgängers. It goes to Nazi Germany and Canadian Indigenous culture, to autism and the treatment of people who think differently. There’s so much here, too much for me even to recap – it’s all balanced and compassionate too. A very thought-provoking, intelligent, fascinating read.

Every Summer After. I love reading Canadian novels and it’s neat reading one set in Ontario when I was actually in Ontario! Okay, I was on Lake Ontario, not Ontario’s lake country but still. This was a pretty cute second-chance romance; I didn’t love it due to the plot twist, which felt really weird and off-putting to me, but I enjoyed it well enough.

The Last Word. I don’t read thrillers very often but this was a ride! I’m not well versed in this genre but it seems to me that this was super creative and original. I think the moral of the story is…think before you give a book a one star rating? Anyway, it was very fun and there were so many twists and unexpected turns. I didn’t love the graphic violence or stressful “Will the dog be okay?” moments but I’m a baby for that kind of stuff, I think people who enjoy thrillers will like this a lot, because I did even with all that.

What The Body Remembers. If you, like me, enjoy a lot of symbolism in character portrayals, then you are going to really enjoy this book about the Partition and the ensuing horror and chaos that came with it. India is a country rich with culture and this book showed me a different perspective than I have read before – that of a Sikh family. It focuses mainly on two women, a junior and a senior wife, but it also encompasses the political and social changes of that time. Married to a wealthy landowner who is also an engineer working with the British government, Satya has failed to do the one thing she is supposed to do: have a baby, or more accurately, a son. Roop is brought in as junior wife to do just that; she visualizes herself as being a loved younger sister to Satya, and as you can imagine, this does not happen. I wished there was a “cast of characters” at the beginning of the book to keep all the characters straight – there are just so many and they are referred to by different names and nicknames, and it’s hard to figure out who is related to whom and how. It’s kind of chaotic, but I guess that is in keeping with the theme of the book.

The Statistical Probability of Love A First Sight. I don’t typically read YA anymore, because I am 49 and mostly I identify with the parents in such books. But someone (who WAS it? Was it you?) recommended this and oh, what a sweet, cute little book it was! Totally heartwarming and cute story about a pair of teens meeting on a plane on their way to the UK, where the protagonist is going to her father’s second wedding.

Happy long weekend to my fellow Canadians, and happy regular weekend to everyone else! In true May long fashion, it’s cool and rainy today. Will I still be weeding? Yes, I will. Have you read anything good lately? I currently have SIX library books on my side table and three more that need to be picked up this weekend, so I guess if I’m not weeding, I’m reading! xo

Miner Miner Forty Niner

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Yesterday was my birthday, and I turned 49. My last birthday in my forties! I have really loved my forties, and I hope this last year before I can say that I’m nifty and fifty will be just as great.

I love birthdays. This isn’t news to anyone who has known me even tangentially – I love my birthday, of course, but I love everyone else’s too. I mean, it was the day you arrived on the planet (and blinking, stepped into the sun). I hope we all have THAT song running through our heads now. Mind songs aside, birthdays are a wonderful time to celebrate people for just existing; you don’t need to do anything, you just need to be here.

I get more ponderous about life than I typically do around my birthday, which is to say very ponderous indeed. Years ago, in one of my senior yoga classes, a student said something about how this aging thing is for the birds, and another countered with at least we’re on this side of the grass. I would say that not being dead is a pretty excellent part of aging; that sounds sarcastic, but just last week I heard that a very beloved and popular yoga teacher in Calgary passed away at age 52. This is just one more example in a long line of examples of people I know whose lives have been cut too short, and I for one will never not be grateful for just being here.

I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the interviewer said something that really stuck with me: When we say “I don’t feel old,” what we are saying in essence is “I don’t feel irrelevant,” or “I don’t feel invisible.” The language that we use around aging is absolutely fascinating to me, and I thought about this all week. Our culture uses very positive language around youth, and negative language around aging – “antiaging” products to obtain a “youthful” glow, for example – and I don’t want to subscribe to that. Let’s put a little pin in that for now.

Something that is very interesting to me is how we ascribe a certain look to a certain age; for example, one will frequently hear the refrain “She doesn’t look X years old” or “She doesn’t look a day over X.” But how do we know what X looks like? There are just so many variables. Let us never forget that Rue McClanahan was 51 when she played Blanche on The Golden Girls. So who is to say how old someone looks? There are no rules anymore.

A key characteristic of being young is being unaware of the beauty that is present in ourselves, merely by being young. It is a fact of life that one does not realize just how beautiful they are simply by possessing that special glow of youth; instead, we realize it much later, at some point in the future. We are just so socialized to be constantly unhappy with our physical appearance: our weight, skin, hair, clothes, and features are all subject to criticism and are a source of deep unhappiness. How many of us were satisfied with our looks at 16, 18, 22? I would say probably none. And yet, and YET we were all beautiful, in the way that the young are always beautiful, and in twenty years we will be looking at photos of ourselves as we are right now, thinking how young and beautiful we look. I mean, why wait the 20 years? Why not appreciate ourselves right this minute?

I have been having a bit of an epiphany over the past several months; I have tried to condition myself to really lean in to the physical signs of aging. After all, I’m in a different life stage, no different from when I was pregnant and was constantly fascinated by and in admiration of my own body. Now I’m just on the other side of the fecundity spectrum, and why should that not be a time of fascination and admiration? Have I started developing jowls, and do I have loose skin under my chin that can only be described as a wattle? Yes. But short of surgery, there is nothing to be done about it, so why not appreciate my kind of melting face? Sure, I’m discovering why ladies of a certain age prefer elastic-waisted pants due to my figure becoming rectangular, and sure, my neck is rivaling Nora Ephron’s, but this is my stage of life, and I am just going to lean all the way in. Look at my beautiful grey roots!

Okay, maybe I’m not leaning THAT far in. I’m still going to colour my hair. I’m still going to use my retinol creams, my products to prevent hair thinning, all my makeup. But the point is I’m on the right side of the grass, and I’m not going to waste one more moment of my wild and precious life being unhappy with my looks.

A few months ago, someone – with, I’m sure, the best of intentions – told me, very helpfully, that every Thursday at Shopper’s Drug Mart is Seniors’ Day, and I could therefore receive a 20% discount on all purchases. I am not exactly sure what my facial expression looked like, but the person quickly said not to worry, the definition of senior is someone over 55, not 65. Now listen, there is nothing stigmatizing about being over 55, but a person wants to actually BE over 55 to be assumed that they are over 55, even for those of us working on our positive language around aging. It took me a moment, but I managed to say that I was not actually eligible for this discount, and then the conversation took what can only be described as a weird and awkward turn: they started to guess my age, going backward from 54. I stopped them when they got to 51 and said I was 48, at which point they said “Oh wow, really?”

So.

Maybe that’s when my epiphany started. Because believe you me, this conversation was not at all pleasant to me at the time, but looking back on it, it’s pretty funny. It’s also interesting, circling back to stigmatizing language, and how we assign an age a person looks versus the age that they are. This is what 49 looks like!

It looks different for everybody, of course – one woman’s 49 is another woman’s 55, evidently – but I for one am celebrating another turn around the sun.

Weekly Reading

The Whispers. I could NOT put this book down. Wow, what an incredibly told, compelling story about a child who suffers an accident and his mother who feels intense guilt about that accident. There are so many twists and surprises, and an intense, gloriously satisfying ending. This book is a real statement on the incredible complexities of motherhood, about neighbourhoods and relationships. I read and enjoyed this author’s first book, The Push, but let me tell you, this book leaves that one in the dust. It is SO well done and I am obsessed with it. What a ride!

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I’m very mixed. On the one hand, the author’s research and intelligent points about time – how it’s measured, what is a clock and where did it come from, how do we utilize our time – are impressive. On the other hand, the writing style is very thick and tedious to me. It was a drag to read, honestly, and I don’t feel like what I got out of it was worth the time it took to read this. It was a slog.

Pete and Alice In Maine. When I heard this premise, I thought “Lucy By The Sea!” But friends, this is definitely not Lucy By The Sea, even if it is a story of a couple whose marriage is in trouble who flee New York with their two young children to their summer house in Maine, in early 2020. Now. A couple of things. It is a very real portrayal of the actual things people went through – children suddenly isolated from their friends, the inability to get toilet paper, the massive fear and sudden loathing of other people who are not behaving in the same way we are. So it is very realistic, except for the dialogue, which is ridiculously unnatural. Ridiculously. Every time a character spoke, it took me out of the story. The characters are all completely unlikeable – maybe a commentary on how people were at that time, I don’t know. The social commentary is pretty heavy-handed too. The ending is ambiguous which I usually like, but in this case it just seemed abrupt and strange. All in all, not an enjoyable reading experience for me, but who knows, maybe it will work for you.

I had a really wonderful birthday; we planted the garden, with the exception of tomatoes and peppers, I had a nice morning hike with Rex, and then the guys and I went out for dinner, coming back home for an epically delicious cake afterwards. I am so lucky.

In other news, I am taking a bloggy break for a couple of weeks, and when I’m back I will have lots of adventures to share with you! I look forward to catching up with all of you then, and so for now, take care of yourselves, my beautiful friends. xo

Theme Songs

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Spring Has Sprung, The Grass Is Riz

Picture it: it’s 5:10 on a random weekday morning. My son and I are in the kitchen, silently but companionably together. I am drinking coffee and typing, and he is drinking his breakfast smoothie and staring off into space. Suddenly, I hear something I haven’t heard for a long time: birds chirping.

There are birds everywhere here in the winter; every day I see countless ducks and very scary Canada geese on my walks, there are families of quail cutely scurrying around our yard, there are magpies and hawks flying overhead and little chickadees darting around, there is even a bald eagle that I will sometimes see near the lake. There is no shortage of bird life, but last week was the first time this year that I heard the birds chirping in the early morning. I listened to them while I finished my coffee and rolled out my yoga mat, and then I watched the sky brighten into morning, and it felt very Mary Oliver.

But Now They Only Block The Sun

I always have a song running through my head, although it’s never a birdsong. Last week I had Jump by the Pointer Sisters stuck in my head for days. Days! And there are not a whole lot of lyrics involved in that song, and so my brain kept saying “Jump in! And feel my touch. Jump! You want to taste my KISSES in the NIGHT then” over and over, including, weirdly, the key change. This was a weird and sudden change from the song that was in my head previously, which was Total Eclipse of the Heart, thanks to astrological current events, but not the Bonnie Tyler version, the version from the Old School wedding scene.

The eclipse itself was a non-event for me; we aren’t in the path of totality, but even if we were, it was so cloudy and overcast that I didn’t see the sun all day. Clouds got in my way, people.

Girl, Put Your Spotify On

“Hey Mom,” my older son said the other day, “You know all those old hippies who left Spotify for moral reasons? They’re back!” I knew exactly what he was talking about, because Both Sides Now and Carey suddenly reappeared on my favourite Nicole Karaoke playlist. I have no judgement about this, only gratitude, as a) we all have a price and everyone needs to put food on the table, and b) I have no other way of listening to music anymore, and I really did miss Joni Mitchell.

As mentioned last week, I have been awash in nostalgia lately, and one of the things I was thinking about was how my – and all of our – music listening habits have changed over the years. There are many things to miss about the past, but I do not miss paying $20 for a CD to listen to one or two songs. We have a family subscription to premium Spotify, and so I listen to anything I want, all the time.

The only problem is that if Spotify ever goes down, I am going to be at a total loss. I have no backup. I have hundreds of hours of music and podcasts downloaded, I have mood mixes and workout We still have some CDs; they actually survived my purging and the move, but I do not know why. I have no way to play them, even if I did want to listen to all of Hall and Oates greatest hits. No shade to Hall and Oates, obviously.

Whoa Here She Comes

I thought I had shared this story numerous times, and perhaps I have, but I cannot find anything in the archives to indicate it, so I shall share it again. Many years ago my husband and I were hosting a dinner party. The guests were his work colleagues and their wives, and after several bottles of wine we pounced upon a topic of much interest to me, and that is that if you were to have a theme song that would play every time you entered the room, in the manner of Darth Vader, what would your theme song be? My husband chose Welcome To The Jungle and one of his colleagues went with Gangsta’s Paradise; the company that they worked for was quite a formal and conservative one, which made their answers all the more amusing. I imagined Slash’s wild guitar riff screaming as my husband entered a board room in his suit, and Coolio’s beats playing as his colleague swiped his card key to access the 33rd floor. One woman suggested Lose Yourself, which would be a great entry song for anyone, really. My choice was Maneater, and to this day every time I hear the start to that song, I lift my head a little higher and strut a little more. My song! I think, as if it’s actually happening, as if suddenly the world over hears Maneater every time they are in my vicinity.

We had a dinner conversation about this the other day, and my younger son said that he’d put a lot of thought into this very question over the years, and his theme song of choice is Come Out And Play. I agreed that it was perfect; my older son chose Pretty Fly For A White Guy, but was now questioning this, because could we really have two Offspring songs in the same family? My feeling was that it would be natural for two brothers, especially those that are close, to have songs from the same band, particularly since those songs exactly suit each of their very different personalities. The conversation got quite involved and a little heated, as if this is something that is really happening, that we are really living in a world in which music automatically starts playing each time someone encounters us.

Rex is indifferent to music, it seems, and I had unimaginatively assigned him Who Let The Dogs Out, but I think the more appropriate song is Are You Ready For This?

Weekly Reading

The Berlin Stories. Continuing on my nostalgia streak, and prompted in part by last week’s reading of The Women In The Castle, I dug out my old copy of The Berlin Stories, which was written in the 1930s, based on Christopher Isherwood’s time in that city. I first read this in 1994, if the stamp from the university used bookstore can be believed, and it was for a German history course I took, which was hands down one of the best elective courses I took in university. In 1994, though, a lot of this book was lost on me, and I have found now with more life experience (“my thesis is on life experience”) that I was fully able to appreciate this book, which requires a LOT of “between the lines” reading. It is a fascinating book on so many levels. If you don’t know, which I did not know in 1994, Berlin during the Weimar Republic was a city of personal freedom and expression, and a haven for what is now known as the LGBTQ+ community, of which, of course, Isherwood was a part of. In all of Europe, Berlin was open, welcoming, and accepting, and most of the book is about the people who Isherwood met and knew at the time. The cast of characters is wild and really shows what life was like at that time: from poverty due to the massive inflation to earned and unearned wealth, from showgirls and prostitutes to bartenders and yodelers, from expats to hustlers, this book really runs the gamut. Throughout the book are brief and passing references to political changes and the Nazis, and then near the end, those changes really ramp up in a pretty terrifying way. One of the most chilling anecdotes concerns a Jewish man whose family owns a very successful department store; he dies of “heart failure,” and there is a line about how there has been a lot of heart failure in Germany lately, hearts are known to fail when there is a bullet put through them. The book ends in 1932, and the last thirty pages or so are absolutely terrifying, not in the least because there are some really uncomfortable parallels that could be drawn between this period of time and the present. Listen, we all know I’m not an alarmist, or a politically dramatic person, but it is undeniable.

Woof, that is a pretty bleak note to end on, so I will tell you that I just had the loveliest weekend – it’s been warm and beautiful, and we hosted a barbeque to celebrate my upcoming birthday. What could be better than friends, wine, and cupcakes? Nothing, that’s what. xo

Sassy, Sea Breeze, Stationary, Smoking

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This week I read, and was completely absorbed by, a book that was set in 1998, and I think that is the reason I have been awash in nostalgia. I don’t know what you were doing in 1998, but I was in grad school, taking step aerobics classes, and crushing it during Name That Tune night at the graduate students’ lounge.

I was so good at that game back then, and I could still crush it now, probably, provided all the tunes would be pre-Y2K (remember Y2K?). Disco? I can get down on it. 1970s folk or classic or mellow rock? Take it easy. Anything with a synthesizer, guitar riff, or drum solo? Yes. Grunge, country, pop, rap, techno beats? I can name it all. But I’m pretty hit and miss once we get into the 2000s, and I’m much more miss than hit when it comes to anything at all from the past decade; unless it was featured on the Peloton, I probably haven’t heard it.

There is a Peloton instructor who frequently teaches 80s themed rides, in which she always says that she admires us Gen Xers, who left the house with only “keys and a dream.” It’s true; if you wanted to meet someone at a bar, you just had to use your home phone to call their home phone, and then hope for the best. You had to look up places on a map, and if someone failed to meet up with you, then they failed to meet up with you, and that was the end of the story. You might find out later what happened, or you might not, but in any case, there was no way at all to track down a person. Or hardly any way. I remember when I worked as a waitress, sometimes I would get a phone call for a person desperate to get a message across to another person who was ostensibly in the restaurant, waiting. I would walk through the restaurant, looking for a person of the description provided for me. Are you Cheryl? You are? Dave’s going to be late.

In 1998, I had had an email address for about a year, and mostly I was the recipient of really stupid jokes, chain letters, or erroneous information about how antiperspirants caused cancer. It’s not unlike social media, to be totally honest. I did use it in a pen pal kind of way, though, to keep in touch with people who had moved away.

I still use email in this way for my former yoga students; one octogenarian lady in particular sends me very long emails about my old classes and all the people in them, and I send her long emails back about my life now. There are gaps of a week or more between our emails, which makes it feel like those long-gone pen pal days; she even starts every email with “thank you for your long letter,” which I love.

I was always a person who had a lot of pretty stationary and a lot of pen pals; I would write to my cousin Nikki in California (HI NIKKI), and most of these letters were about boys we liked and our summer vacations. I wrote to all my camp friends; if there is anything more intense and bonding than a week of summer camp when you’re thirteen, I don’t know what it is. I kept up that correspondence for years, even if I never saw that person again.

It reminded me a lot of something I heard about on a podcast recently, about what the hosts called “Little While Friends,” people you have an experience with or are friends with for just a little while, but you end up having them on your social media forever. Around 2010 or so, any time I met someone new, I would end up adding them as a friend on Facebook, which means that a solid percentage of my Facebook feed is made up of people I barely know, but I feel like I know, because I have experienced their entire life journeys over the years. I know about their kids, and their divorces, and their remarriages, and an alarming amount about their dietary and fitness odysseys.

That said, I do love Facebook, there’s no better way to keep in touch with people from my past and present, people who I feel warmly about simply because we have shared life experiences. Some of those life experiences are less savoury than others, but they are what makes us who we are.

My friend Jen (HI JEN) sent me that photo, circa 1992, which made me think of a meme I saw lately, about our high school signature scents: mine was cigarettes and Vanilla Fields perfume. I haven’t smoked anything in well over three decades, and I feel low-level shame that I ever smoked at all, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who carried perfume and mints after hanging out at the smoke doors at school. Isn’t it crazy that there WERE smoke doors?

Does anyone else remember butane curling irons? It says a lot that we didn’t accidentally light ourselves on fire, with all the smoking and excessive hairspray that was necessary for those weird hairstyles of that time. And beyond that, some of us were bringing butane curling irons to school – not me, but I coveted one. I had to make do with scrunching my hair in the girls’ washroom and spraying it with Aussie Sprunch Spray, then setting it with Salon Selectives. Given that I always had a lighter with me, it’s incredible I didn’t just combust right there. It’s probably good that I never had a butane curling iron.

I just discovered, upon googling, that butane curling irons are still in existence!

One thing that I wish was still in existence, or, at least, that I had kept some of my copies, is Sassy magazine. Sassy was, and remains, the best magazine for teen girls, because it treated them like actual intelligent humans. One of the most impactful articles I ever read in my young life was the one that they put out to explain the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm, an event that, naturally, caused me much stress and anxiety. This article detailed the war from all viewpoints, including the Iraqi people and, separately, Saddam Hussein. It was the first time I had ever read anything that showed anything other than a North American point of view, and it was absolutely eye-opening and formative, and made me realize that things were not always black and white, and that what I read in our media was not always the whole story.

In addition to increasing my information about the world around me, Sassy was instrumental in the creation of my skin care and beauty routines. Unfortunately, the girls of the 80s and 90s were sadly misled. Much has been said about the “Sephora Teens” of today, with their Drunk Elephant products and their anti-aging serum usage at age 17, but I think they have the right idea. After all, where they are moisturizing and pampering, we were scouring our poor faces with St. Ives Apricot Scrub, followed by the sting of Sea Breeze astringent; it’s no wonder we were plagued with acne and redness. Suz (HI SUZ) reminded me of that weird little product, the Buf Puf, which we used for EXTRA exfoliation, and we should all be in awe that we didn’t erase our faces altogether. Maybe this was the precursor to today’s Instagram filters, where girls and women filter so much that facial features become obliterated. We were just trying to obliterate our faces physically, rather than digitally. Or maybe that was what we were doing with those deep cleansing mud masks that would dry and crack on our dear little faces, leaving trails of whitish dust in our wake.

Weekly Reading

My Last Innocent Year. Wow, wow, WOW! I loved this book so much, I don’t even know where to begin. It is an exquisitely but sparsely written novel about a young woman in her senior year of college who enters into a relationship with a visiting professor. Tale as old as time, right? WRONG. This was just so well done, and so real, that I did something I haven’t done since I read (and loved) Girls They Write Songs About: I slowed down the last few chapters because I didn’t want it to be over. It’s set in 1998, which, coincidentally, is when I was in grad school, and so this book gave me all the nostalgic feelings. It was just so resonant of a time in my life which was brief, but felt like an age, when it was all about small classes and big camaraderie, hard work and thesis writing, and also parties and romantic interludes, when we all were on a first-name basis with all our professors and knew a lot about their personal lives, which seems wild now. This book, though. The time period details are spot on. 1998 was also when Monica Lewinsky was in the news, which I have a lot to say about, but I will keep it to this quote from the book: “Monica had become every girl’s worst nightmare, the equivalent of having your seventh-grade diary read over the school loudspeaker or walking into class with a period stain on your pants. We identified with her, which should have made us kinder but instead made us mean.” This book resonated with me so much and made me wonder about paths not taken; every single character is so well developed and complex. I wish I could go back in time before I had read it, so I could have the pleasure of reading it again for the first time. This will be a reread for me in the future, I am sure.

The Women In The Castle. When I first read this book in 2018, I really enjoyed it and found it incredibly thought-provoking in terms of divisiveness between people in society. I don’t know if you remember 2018, but it was KIND of a divisive time? I saw this at the library (in large print, no less!) and thought I could do with a reread. After all, since my first reading we went through a pandemic, which has to be THE most divisive time in my memory, and also, here we are, deep sigh. I will say I enjoyed this book as much or even more than before, maybe because I knew what was coming. I will also say that, generally speaking, I think historical fiction is one of the hardest types of book to get right: the language and dialogue is tricky, and it’s often overwhelmingly difficult not to insert modern sensibilities into the past. BUT this book does an excellent job on both fronts – it can be a little “explainy” at times, but I think it’s really well done. It’s about three German women and their families who come together right at the end of WWII, through the efforts of Marianne, the widow of a member of the German Resistance. She brings in the other two women, both ostensibly widows of the Resistance, to help care for them and their families. This book really shows how people can contain multitudes, how complex humans and society can be, how people can get swept up and find themselves in places they cannot fathom, and, most of all, how interconnected we all are, and how we are all responsible for one another.

Well, it’s been a fun trip down memory lane this week; this week is going to be full of lovely things like a trip to the garden centre, lots of writing, and, most exciting, not one but two events with my lovely girlfriends. I hope you all have a beautiful week ahead of you. xo

It’s April!

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It’s April! It’s not even an April Fool’s joke, it’s actually April. I do not know what it was, but, as I mentioned before, March felt like it was three months long; not in a bad way, this is not a complaint, but it seemed to stretch on and on. Maybe it was because we had a short trip mid-month, who can say. All I know is that it is April, my birthday month!

I don’t play favourites with months, because I anthropomorphize everything and I don’t want to hurt any months’ feelings, but I love April. I especially love it here, because GUESS WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY SPRING! I had a weird seasonal cognitive dissonance back in October and November; I felt like it was September during those months, and now I feel like it should be May or June. My mind is on its own strange Daylight Savings-esque journey; my mind is falling back in fall and springing forward in spring, but instead of an hour, it’s months. Forty-eight years in the Canadian prairies, forty-six of which were in Calgary, have conditioned me to never let my guard down in April, because snow can easily continue into late May. But here, that is unheard of, and so I am in full-on garden preparation mode.

This is our new veggie garden, do you love it? I am so excited about it. My husband has been working nonstop on this project for over a month now; he built all the garden boxes and brought in many loads of dirt, he rototilled the flat part, and last Friday, he rented an auger and he and my son drilled holes to put up a giant fence, very necessary in this place where the wildlife roam and eat everything.

I cannot wait to start planting. One of the boxes we are reserving for my mother-in-law, who has been starting her own tomato plants from seeds that she saves from the previous year’s tomatoes, something which she has done for decades now. The rest of the boxes are going to be filled with cherry tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers – my Greek salad garden! – spinach and kale and lettuces, and so many herbs. The flat part will be a berry patch, plus there’s room for some squash. I’m planning butternut, zucchini, and pumpkin. I’ve only ever grown zucchini, so I’m quite excited to try something new.

A friend very sweetly said that, given our over-the-top vegetable consumption, we would be saving so much money on our grocery bills, and while I agreed with that in principle, I also thought of the expense of the wood, and the drainage rock, and the soil, and the new miter saw to cut the wood, and the new rototiller. Will the garden pay for itself? Not in our lifetime, Clifford. However, there is nothing like eating fresh vegetables grown in one’s own garden, and seasoning one’s meals with one’s own herbs, to make a person feel like Ma Ingalls. An incredibly spoiled and privileged Ma Ingalls, but Ma Ingalls nonetheless.

The veggie garden isn’t the only thing we are undertaking; we are also overhauling the grass and having giant flower beds put in. We are actually consulting with a garden designer who specializes in this area, and who is well-versed in the problem of deer, and also knowledgeable about drought-tolerant plants. She has some really great ideas and I can’t wait; the gnomes are anxious to get outside into their natural habitat.

Salvadore is so bored with manifestos in general.
Slider and Fernando, looking out toward the window, wishing they were outside.

If it were up to me, I would have no grass at all, just one giant garden, but having a nice lawn is very important to my husband, and having a lawn, not necessarily a nice one, but an existent one, is important to Rex. He needs somewhere to roll around in so that he can track grass and leaves all over the house, after all. The grass around our house is just a complete mess from the construction; it’s patchy and bumpy and still has some gravel in it. But! In six short weeks from now, Rex will be rolling around in soft, green, all new grass; he will be chewing sticks in it and leaving little shards everywhere, and my husband will be happily mowing up those shards along with the grass.

Is this going to become a gardening blog? Maybe! Well, probably not, but you can certainly expect many, many plant-related updates in the months to come.

Weekly Reading

How To Be A Better Person. As many of you know, I like to read a little inspiring something something right before my yoga practice; typically this means poetry, but at the start of this year I thought I’d try something else – a reread of a book that was already on my shelf. I met Kate Hanley in 2014 at the Blissdom Canada conference (bring back blogging conferences, except instead of panels about how to monetize, let’s just have parties and cozy chats, who’s in?), and in 2017 she very kindly sent me both of her newly-published books to be reviewed. I haven’t read either of them since that time, and I thought it was time to revisit. This is a lovely little book with helpful ideas on how to make small changes to improve your life and the world around you. It’s so interesting, I had made many notations in this book about things I felt were very important, when I read it in 2017. Some of these resonated seven years later, and some didn’t. Interesting how life changes and evolves. 

Tropical Attire Encouraged (And Other Phrases That Scare Me). If you don’t know by now that Alison Rosen’s podcast is one of my favourites, well, then, you haven’t been listening to me! It’s a delight and so is this entertaining book of short essays. The fifth anniversary edition has five new essays, the remainder were written around 2012-14 I think? It’s a fun trip down memory lane (skinny jeans!) (I’m still wearing them). Fans of the show will love this.

None Of This Is True. I have been learning a lot lately about the craft of writing, and one of the keys to a successful novel – particularly a psychological thriller! – is to “plant curiosity seeds” and then “water them” throughout the book, so that readers are interested to see the plant in full bloom, so to speak. This author is really excellent at that; even though psychological thrillers are not generally a genre I reach for, I was hooked from the beginning and dying to know what was going on. I think this was a pretty good read; I had a few issues with a couple of the reveals and details, which I shall obviously not go into here because I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but this was a solid, engaging read. I liked the lead up to the climax better than the actual denouement itself, which I found a little flat, but, as I said, a very compelling read.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and even if it doesn’t feel like spring – hello, I love you, Calgary friends! – I hope you have a little spring in your step and sunshine in your heart. And maybe some chocolate? Do you have an Easter candy preference? I sure do; it’s Cadbury Mini-Eggs or NOTHING. Nothing, I say! Well, probably I would eat something else, but there is something amazing about those little shells. And aren’t these nests so cute? Happy April, everyone. xo