Category Archives: Books

The Bear Necessities

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There are so many ways in which Younger Nicole would not recognize Current Nicole, and one of those ways has to do with animal care; specifically, I am now a person who brushes her dog’s teeth. Fourteen years with Barkley and it would have never occurred to me to have a tiny toothbrush and a tube of beef-flavoured paste; I just gave him a Greenie and called it a day. About six months ago, the vet told me that Rex had a fairly significant case of gingivitis and plaque buildup, particularly for a dog who was only TWO, and it seemed my Greenie routine was just not cutting it anymore. And so, every day in the late afternoon I brush his teeth using encouraging words like look at you, you’re so good, yay, and then I send him outside with a special dental treat to chew on. It’s pretty much the only time during the day he’s not within six feet of me for more than five minutes. He’s known as Mom’s Bodyguard for a reason, people, and that reason is that he doesn’t want me out of his sight for a moment, whether that be to shower or to refill a glass.

Last week he was out with his dental treat and I suddenly heard barking, which was very unusual, and the bark itself was very strange. I went on the deck to see what was up and lo and behold, not a hundred feet from me and just beside my mother-in-law’s yard was a huge black bear.

Well! That will get the heart pumping. I got Rex inside the house, and phoned my mother-in-law, who didn’t answer her cell or her landline. Finally when I saw the bear was gone I sent my son over to tell her the news. It turns out that she had been moving the sprinkler on her lawn, not fifty feet from the bear, but out of my sightline, completely unaware of the furry existence. I found the whole thing a bit stressful but after some REM Y REM, I came to the following conclusions: a) bear sightings are commonplace in this area, and will only be more so due to the fires, b) with all these sightings there have been exactly zero bear attacks on people or dogs over the years, and c) at this time of year bears are really only interested in maintaining and increasing their zaftig figures, so the likelihood of a bear turning away from the grapes to maul my dog is near zero, if not actually zero. We may have to revise c) in the spring, but let’s live in the present. Also, Rex was smart enough to stay near the house, rather than bounding over to see if there was a new friend who came to visit, which has been my worry since last fall, when my mother-in-law continuously sent a slew of texts with bear photos from the neighbourhood. Am I going to be living in the actual wilderness? I would think to myself, looking out the window to see Rex wandering through the fenced yard in my suburban oasis.

I have two very vivid, fearful memories from my early childhood, and the first is looking at a motion lamp my grandparents had that depicted a forest fire, like this one. I oscillated between fascination and fear, looking at that lamp, which I think we can all agree is a little bit weird. Home decor that showcases the devastation of a forest fire? I mean, it’s yet another reason I won’t watch Bambi. When I was in the first grade, there was a visit from firefighters who told us all about fire safety, and one, probably well-meaning but misguided firefighter casually mentioned that we all needed to have a exit plan in case of fire, since every single person will be involved in a fire in their lifetime. EVERY ONE OF US. Pro-tip: never tell a child something like this, particularly one with a vivid imagination. I spent many nights lying awake, planning the fire escape route from our bungalow, wondering when, exactly, I would need to put this plan in place. In my six-year-old mind, this fire safety visit meant that we were all going to die in a fiery inferno, perhaps soon, and thus began my lifelong fear of fire. With the exception of birthday candles, I will not light a candle in my house, so help me god. A few of the yoga studios I taught at had little tea lights burning all the time, and I would immediately extinguish them before starting class, so worried was I that someone would catch fire during a vinyasa. This fear wasn’t completely unfounded as once a woman came in to the lobby and the fringes of her scarf grazed a candle as she nonchalantly removed her boots, eliciting a very non-zen shriek from me, behind the desk, as I pummeled her scarf on the table.

The second fearful memory is very fuzzy, literally and figuratively, and has to do with a movie that must have been on television playing in the background while I dressed up my paper dolls, wondering if I could pair those heels with this skirt, or if flats would be better. This movie, which I have since deduced must have been the 1976 film Grizzly, featured a rampaging, human-eating grizzly bear. I would never have watched an entire non-Muppet-or-animated film as a child, but I clearly recall viewing a scene in which a woman and child were hiding in a cabin, ostensibly believing themselves safe from becoming dinner, when a bear claw slid underneath the cabin door. I’m sure it ended in their deaths, but at that point I stopped watching and just started screaming hysterically, probably to my long-suffering mother’s exhausted chagrin. Wasn’t she just playing with her paper dolls a second ago? That scene is so indelible in my mind that when I saw it again while babysitting years later, again on a background television, I gasped out loud and went to check on my tiny sleeping charge, just in case a grizzly slid its claw under the door to break it down, without my knowledge.

The rational, lived-the-vast-majority-of-my-life-outside-the-Rockies me knows there is a big difference between black bears and grizzlies, particularly Jaws, But Make It Bears, fictional kind of grizzlies. Chances are that our visitor is more Baloo than Murder Bear or Governor General Award-Winning Soft Porn Bear, but still.

As an aside: once again, what was happening in the Canadian literature world in 1976?

Anyway. Isn’t it funny that within only six weeks in my new environment, I have faced not one but two of my greatest childhood fears? If, as the lululemon shopping bag says, we should do one thing every day that scares us, I guess I am living my best life just existing here. What’s next? Is someone going to force feed me celery with peanut butter and raisins? I hope not. If anyone is going to eat Ants on a Log, it had better be our Baloo, and involve actual ants on an actual log.

Weekly Reading

An Unquiet Mind. This is a memoir of a woman who has her PhD in psychiatry…and suffers deeply from psychiatric illness. She is what is now known as bipolar disorder but she refers to as manic depressive illness (this was written in 1995). In fact, there is a whole section where she argues against the term bipolar. Anyway, she describes her psychotic breaks, her experience with lithium, and the ethics of treating psychiatric patients when one has a very serious, potentially debilitating mental illness. Some parts are fascinating, others really dragged for me, but mostly I thought it was an educational look into a first-person account of such an illness.

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls. I posed this question on Instagram to my fellow Sedaris fans: after reading Happy Go Lucky, do you find your rereading of his old essays to be…disturbing? What I mean is, any essay that mentions his father, I see it through a completely different lens, and believe me, even before Happy Go Lucky I found it weird that his father would walk around pants-less constantly, and comment on his daughter’s appearances. Anyway, I thought I’d reread this collection and I enjoyed it significantly less than before, and not just because it contains a few fictional essays, which I tend to dislike due to their over-the-top mean-spiritedness. A friend who had gone to one of his readings responded to my question, and said that you could see his mean-spiritedness come out in his interactions with his fans and with book signings, mental note, never go to a Sedaris book signing. Don’t get me wrong, the essays that hit really hit, and I did find myself laughing out loud at times. It was just less than before and had me wondering if I would feel this way about all his essays.

Calypso. I had to try it. I had to see if I would have the same reaction and I did not. I still love this collection, and the parts about his family – specifically his father and his sister Tiffany, who died by suicide – are moving and nuanced and thoughtful. This has always been my favourite collection and I’m glad it held up for me.

Same Time Next Summer. I really loved this author’s first book, so I was really disappointed with this one. I guess it’s the premise that I really disliked: woman goes back to her childhood summer home with her fiance, runs into “the one that got away,” The One being the guy she dated in high school. Maybe it’s because I just cannot relate; all of the relationships of my youth blew up so spectacularly that I could never fathom ever speaking to any of them again, let alone rekindling lost love. So I didn’t love the storyline and I didn’t love the weird little twists, and I especially didn’t like the fiance painted as the Stiff Wrong Guy who had Serious Opinions on things like wedding invitations and what kind of cake to serve. Show me a guy who has a real vision of what colour of napkins should be used at a wedding reception and I’ll show you a wedding planner. Anyway, your mileage may vary but I thought this was a very silly and trite romance, albeit a quick and easy read.

It’s been a very exciting week at the Boyhouse: my younger son started a full-time job last Monday, my husband came home from two weeks away, and my older son moved into residence at university. All wonderful things, and I’m looking forward to a busy week ahead. But first: enjoying a beautiful Labour Day! I hope you all are having a lovely long weekend. xo

How Come No One Else’s Chair Is Doing This

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In addition to thousands and thousands of song lyrics, my head is filled with quotes from various movies and television shows. Rarely these days do I watch a movie or television, or if I do, the plots or lines don’t stick with me, so most of these quotes are from popular culture dating back to the 80s and 90s. These quotes will pop into my head randomly, depending on the circumstances.

Whenever I feel like my internal emotional state does not match what is happening with the rest of the world, I instantly think of Groundskeeper Willie on a mechanical bull, saying “Ach! How come no one else’s chair is doing this?”

This is how I felt this past week, like everyone else has been sedately enjoying their beverages on regular chairs, and I am flailing around on a mechanical bull. And I want to point out that in no way am I a catastrophic thinker; I tend to be optimistic and feel that Everything Will Work Out, with, apparently, one exception, and that exception is possible interruptions to my children’s education.

I think perhaps I have some kind of low-level PTSD from school cancellations during the pandemic. I know many people did not mind online, at-home schooling, and some people even enjoyed it and saw their children thrive, but for our family, it was terribly detrimental and I still cannot think about that time without feeling fluttery panic in my chest. Just remembering the initial closing of the schools, which was something that I never before considered even a remote possibility, has me in full Riding The Mechanical Bull Mode.

Last Sunday my husband drove to Calgary, where he needed to be for two weeks for work. This is the longest we have been apart for the entirety of our marriage, but originally that was not going to be the case. The initial plan was that he would drive out, and then fly home to help my older son move to the university dorms this past weekend, and then fly back to Calgary for this coming week. This did not happen for two reasons, and the first was that due to the fires, most flights were grounded or cancelled, and we weren’t sure if he would be able to make it either here or back, and we didn’t want him stranded one way or the other. The second reason is that my son’s move-in date was postponed, again, due to the fires.

We had paid extra for our son to move in a week early, and then to participate in a special orientation week for first-year students. It looked like a lot of fun, and we really wanted him to have that experience, so it was very disappointing to discover that the week was cancelled and his move-in date postponed to this coming weekend. Do not get me wrong: I am happy to have him at home for an extra week and I realize that there are many worse things in the world than missing out on what is essentially a fun and fairly frivolous experience, but on hearing about the cancellation I immediately found myself on the mechanical bull. Everyone in the house, including my son, took this disappointment in stride, but I started thinking what if the university never opens back up, what if the fires just keep going and going, what if the whole university burns to the ground, what if he has to do online learning, what if after this whole gap year and his hard work to get into this program it is all for nothing, all for nothing, all for nothing, how come no one else’s chair is doing this.

Well. It’s fine. IT IS FINE. All signs point to a university start date eight days from now, and a single day of orientation, and it’s going to be FINE. Of all the disasters in the world this doesn’t even register on the disaster scale, it’s like trying to weigh a half cup of flour on a bathroom scale, it is miniscule. And yet.

My friend Hannah (HI HANNAH) sent me information on how wildfire smoke can affect not just a person’s physical, but also their mental health, and that really explained a lot, not just with me and my university panic, but with people I observed around me this past week. Mostly that consisted of people I see daily on the walking path and at the dog park, and let me stress that the vast majority of those people are absolutely lovely. However, there are some people who are, for lack of a better word, total weirdos.

These men – and they are all men – are constantly bad-mouthing other people and dogs to me and, I assume, other innocent bystanders. The feeling I get is a very unpleasant one of being recruited to take their respective sides, the likes of which I haven’t felt since my days as chair of the School Council/ Parent Association, when I would be pulled into multiple directions for such controversial and impassioned topics as Fun Lunch: Who Is In Charge, and Fresh Fruit Fridays: Yes or No. I do not like hearing from strange men that the black French bulldog is aggressive or that the brown mutt named Rigsby is out of control, even if those things do appear to be true.

I try to keep to myself, which, as we all know, really goes against my natural instincts. I can only assume that this weird five-way feud has been taking place since the beginning of time. I have definitely noticed that the dogs in question are sometimes poorly behaved and show aggressive tendencies, but because Rex has taken on the role of Big Friendly Buffoon in the dog park, no one bothers him, and I keep a smiley, but cool, distance from these men.

Last week in the height of the smoke, I entered the dog park and one of the usual men came right up to me and said, loudly, “Watch out for that German shepherd, he’s attacking ALL THE DOGS.” I looked at the German shepherd, who was calmly sniffing a tree, and his owner nearby who clearly overheard this, and I just nodded and said “Okay, thanks,” putting my earbuds in and walking the loop while Rex bounded around like the clown he is. While I was admiring Rex’s run-and-barrel-roll routine, I heard shouting and swearing, culminating in threats to get the fuck out of here before I make you wish you had. What. I watched this out of the corner of my eye, thinking that I was actually going to witness a physical brawl. The upshot of all of this was that the German shepherd owner allegedly did not scoop after his dog, and that person in question retorted that his dog had not defecated so there was no need to scoop, and a third person announced that he filmed the entire thing on his phone, including the allegedly defecating dog, and that he was going to send the video in to the local news station. Gross. I leashed up Rex and left the dog park.

I have not seen the Feuding Fellows since, and I did mention this upsetting altercation to a very nice woman at the park later in the week. “Ugh,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I know who you’re talking about. THOSE GUYS.” I had thought perhaps tempers were frayed and that could be blamed on the smoke and the negative impact it has on everyone’s mental and emotional well-being, but it appears they are just regular assholes.

Weekly Reading

This week’s reading is brought to you by Elizabeth Strout!

Anything Is Possible. The follow up to My Name Is Lucy Barton is a dive into all the people’s lives in the stories from the first book. It’s an incredible peek into family life, secrets, classism, and connections. I love it. It’s a reread for me and another book that I get more out of each time I read it.

Oh William! The third of the Lucy books, and this one deals with her relationship with her former husband. These books are so compelling to me, and so compassionate. This is another reread for me, but so worthwhile. I love how Strout writes about secrets and reveals character traits in such subtle ways. Gorgeous.

Lucy By The Sea. Finally! The reason for the rereads! I received this for Christmas and wanted to reread all the previous books before starting on it – I really recommend doing this, it is an excellent reading experience. This book delves into the pandemic and all the political and social things that happened during that time. Like all the books, it is about love and family, class and divides in society, and crossing those lines. This book did a great job of illustrating how we all felt during those early days of the pandemic: the feeling of things not being real, the inability to take in the news, the boredom and tedium of life when we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. This was moving and emotional, and included characters from her other books, as Lucy and William experience lockdown in Maine. 

It’s the last week of August! I can hardly believe it. What a blur this summer has been. I am crossing my fingers and sitting in lotus for a smooth week ahead, and I hope you all have a good one as well. xo

Playing The Fiddle

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What a crazy weekend it has been. The wind really picked up on Friday and the wildfire spread very quickly. We are safe, and hopefully will continue that way, but it’s quite terrifying to be in the midst of a state of emergency, with friends being evacuated and the world being shrouded in smoke. The wind did calm, which helped with firefighting efforts, but the situation is still dire.

It’s an incredibly weird feeling to know that there is panic and tragedy going on right on one’s doorstep, but being completely unable to do anything about it except to wait. In fact, the best thing to do is to just patiently wait at home, to see if any friends need a landing spot, and to not put strain on any public resources. It has a bit of a Fiddle While Rome Burns feeling, literally, not unlike when Calgary had the floods in 2013, or even the early days of the pandemic, when we all just stayed home, refreshing news feeds and texting friends to check in. Also not unlike those times, I distracted myself with baking.

On a lighter subject, let’s talk about something that happened last week, pre-fire.

The bookmarks are still missing. I briefly had a huge surge of hope and optimism, but those hopes have been dashed. Dashed, people. I think the time has come for me to accept this and move on with my life.

The surge of hope came with the discovery of some missing sweaters. To set the stage, I unpacked all of my clothes and organized all my closet and drawers over four weeks ago and I noticed that a few of my very favourite sweaters were not with any of the primary bedroom boxes. I had brought all of my workout clothes and summer outfits in two giant suitcases when I drove out with Rex, but my myriad sweaters and dresses were left in my closet for the movers to pack. Because we were so short of storage in the old house, I kept all my sweaters in rectangular collapsible bags, and stacked them all up on a shelf in my closet. Like Baa Baa Black Sheep, there were three giant bags full, and if I hadn’t organized them that way, the sweaters would have all tumbled down constantly and it would have been impossible to find the one I was looking for. I realized, four weeks ago, that I only had two bags.

It was very curious. All the boxes were unpacked, and that sweater bag was nowhere to be found. The only boxes I hadn’t looked in were the ones in the shed that contained garden implements and my husband’s tools, and I could not imagine the movers would have packed them in those boxes. I started wondering if indeed I DID have three bags, or if in a fit of purging I donated all those sweaters. I didn’t THINK I had, since they were my heaviest, warmest, most favourite winter sweaters, but I couldn’t say for sure. In other words, I was gaslighting myself.

After all, if not with all the clothing, where could they possibly be?

Finally I decided enough was enough. Surely I didn’t donate that giant cozy cardigan that feels like a bathrobe or the expensive-but-dressy swoopy black sweater from lululemon? Surely not! Did I think that because I had one black turtleneck I didn’t need a second one? That does not seem like me, but I DID donate a lot of clothes. I went back and forth with this line of thinking until finally I recruited my older son to come with me to the shed to look in the unlooked-in boxes and to reach where I couldn’t.

Well, I was correct. They were not in with the gardening implements or tools and neither, sadly, were the bookmarks. But as my son peered around the corner, he said “Hey, there is a bag of sweaters on the floor!” and lo, there it was, on the absolutely filthy shed floor, my bag of sweaters. How or why it was there no one can say, and I think it is safe to say that this mystery will never be solved, but I was thrilled. At that moment, the moment my son reached over a box to grab the sweaters, I looked up and there, scurrying up the shelving unit not three feet away from my face, was a mouse.

You know how I feel about mice residing in places that I also reside. I think I entered a fugue state.

Technically I know I do not reside in the shed that houses tools and tractors. Technically I know that on a two-acre property there are going to be mice in a shed that houses tools and tractors. But this was three feet from my face and, my son casually noted, there was a hole in the sweater bag.

It is very possible that the hole was the result of the material ripping while it was somehow dumped onto the floor of the shed. Maybe it was even probable. However, given the circumstances, my soul briefly left my body and my body left the shed.

I had my son take each sweater out individually and shake it vigorously, then flatten it on the grass. We, or, rather, he then checked all the pockets and shook them out again. When we were satisfied there were no stowaways, I immediately threw all the sweaters into the washing machine, hoping to god that this wouldn’t result in my discovery of any mouse corpses, and if there was, I planned to ask my mother-in-law to deal with them. Dead animals faze her not in the slightest, and in fact she had just told me a story about how she personally dealt with a fawn corpse in her yard not all that many years ago. Happily, her services were not needed.

Finding the sweaters made me think that maybe something similar happened to the bookmarks. After all, if an entire large bag of sweaters could somehow end up on the floor of the shed, then anything could happen. We scoured the shed, I opened and went through all the tool and garden implement boxes again, I even checked each and every suitcase on my husband’s suggestion (Him: maybe you put them in one of the outer pockets? Me: OMG MAYBE! *five minutes later, silent and dejected*).

Well. It’s really time for me to move on. After all, people have lost houses very close to me, me losing a bag of bookmarks feels like Embarrassingly Small Potatoes. I’m not even sure that in the grand scheme of things, they could even be considered potatoes. It’s more like losing a single grain of sand on the beach. In fact, I feel a bit ashamed that I have been sad about such a thing when there is so much tragic loss around here. Perspective, it’s a thing.

Weekly Reading

Bel Canto. Late to the party but WOW, did I love this book about a hostage taking gone…right? This is an absolutely beautiful story about hostages and their captors, and how they ended up creating a world of beauty and wonder together, how they went on living their lives as a little community. It is so subtly hilarious and the writing is witty and gorgeous; the characters are all so incredibly loveable and fun. There is the translator who is used by everyone and who learned Swedish from watching subtitled films and so his knowledge of the country is “somewhat dark.” There is the opera singer who everyone is in love with, the country’s Vice President in whose house the hostage taking takes place, and so he takes on the role of host looking after his houseguests. There is the French diplomat who becomes the house cook, the long-suffering General whose shingles keeps flaring up, the Japanese businessman for whom the original party was thrown for and who is an opera and chess aficionado, and the man from the Red Cross who is in charge of the negotiations. This book is incredibly moving and the end, while it should be obvious what happens, was such a shock to me. Back in April 2020, on one of my many daily walks (what else did we do then?), I ran into a neighbourhood acquaintance and she mentioned this as her favourite book. I put it on my list, but the libraries were closed, and so I forgot about it. I am SO glad I read this, it’s absolutely an incredible piece of writing.

And Then There Were None. Murder mystery isn’t my usual genre but my son just read this and insisted I give it a try – and he was right! Ten people are invited to an island, and each one disappears one by one. It’s so good and it kept me guessing until the very end!

My Name Is Lucy Barton. God, I love this book. This is the fourth time I’ve read this and every time I read it I am moved anew. I find as I get older I understand it in different ways. What a gorgeous, moving, complicated book about love and life. It’s so powerful and yet simple. I received Lucy By The Sea for Christmas and have decided to read all the Lucy books again, before starting the newest. What a pleasure to do so. After all, I don’t have a library card yet – I was hoping to try last week with two pieces of mail and my passport, and if that’s not enough, I don’t know what, but with the fires I decided to stay home – and so I’m going back and rereading my shelf.

I hope things settle down this week; even without the fire situation things are a little bit crazy around here. More on that to come, and in the meantime, take care of yourselves. xo

Same But Different

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Very often, I think about all of us in the world, how we are all going about our lives in ways that are both the same and vastly different. Isn’t it incredible, in this big small world, that we are all bustling along, working away, caring for ourselves and our families and our pets, sneaking in bursts of joy in the day, and it’s all the same but also different?

I try not to be ethnocentric, or, more accurately, Nicolecentric, but sometimes I am surprised to discover that friends do boring, everyday things so very differently than I. It’s not like I think my methods are better or worse than anyone else’s, but they are different, I am discovering. I think sometimes there can be moral value judgement placed on how women do things – how often we do laundry, how often do we clean the bathroom, what are we making for dinner – but I’m not interested in any of that. One thing is as good as another, in my books. All the same, I wanted to talk about things I have noticed lately that we all do, but in different ways.

By The Book

My husband asked why I even have cookbooks because I never use them, or if I do use them, it is to wildly change the recipe. This is an exaggeration but only a little one; I don’t think there is any recipe I use regularly that I have not adapted or changed in some way. I’m like the irritating people who used to write in when I was working at YMC, who would say ridiculous things like: I made the chickpea dish you posted but I didn’t have chickpeas so I subbed ground beef, and I didn’t have lemon for the sauce so I used Worcestershire, and instead of parsley I used lettuce. It was terrible, I give zero stars to this recipe. Although, I’m not exactly like that, I like all the dishes I make, no notes. Even recipes for baked goods get the Nicole treatment – shave off some sugar, double the vanilla, let’s add chocolate chips! – and so all my cookbooks have my writing all over them, noting changes. I guess I think of cookbooks as aspirational jumping-off points, rather than, you know, something to use to make dinner.

Before we moved, I committed the cardinal sin of buying something new and extra to pack – two new cookbooks. I think I was having some kind of emotional crisis. My thinking was along the lines that we were going to be in a new house, in a new province, living a new life, with a half empty nest, and it was time to shake up the weekly meal plan. There seemed no need to have a pita pizza night when it would be just me and my husband, and there was no need to make extra pita pizzas for school lunches. So I bought two cookbooks and one of them sounded so promising, called Mandy’s Gourmet Salads. Mandy’s is, apparently, a famous salad and bowl place in Montreal, and I thought, what could be better? Well. This is the most ridiculous cookbook I have ever seen. Each recipe refers to at least one, but usually more, additional recipe on a different page, and then THAT recipe refers to another recipe. As an example, I wanted to make a peanut Thai noodle dish, and the recipe referred to another page for a spicy tofu recipe, and to another page for the chili lime dressing. When I got to the dressing page, the first item in the chili lime dressing recipe referred to ANOTHER recipe as the base for that dressing, and then THAT base recipe referred to another recipe for sesame syrup reduction, at which point I slammed the book shut and decided just to Free Bird it, deeply regretting wasting money on a cookbook when I was just going to make something up anyway. And this bird you cannot change.

Oh, I’m Dishwashing My Life Away

Someone recently asked me, when I mentioned washing dishes for the fifth time in a day, why I didn’t just get a dishwasher. I do indeed have a dishwasher and I do indeed use the dishwasher, but only for plates, silverware, and glassware, which is honestly only a small percentage of the items that need to be washed in the kitchen each day. I hand wash pots, pans, the food processor, the Vitamix, mixing bowls, and all the related cooking accoutrements. I suppose I could put some of those in the dishwasher, but they all take up a lot of room which would necessitate running the dishwasher several times a day, which seems wasteful.

When we were in planning stages of the house, the designer strongly recommended a large single sink to my husband, who relayed this information to me, was clearly not prepared for my outsized, passionate feelings about a double sink. He may have physically backed up slightly. I need a double sink to survive, is what I am saying, which is why Diane’s (HI DIANE) recent post about her dishwasher breaking, and her stopper-less single sink, gave me secondhand dishwashing anxiety. I have a very specific way of washing dishes: I fill the left sink with hot soapy water, and use the right sink to rinse out dishes BEFORE they go into the hot soapy water, because it harshes my kitchen mellow to have food particles or grease in the dishwater. I like clean dish water, what can I say. If I’m really in the zone I can rinse the washed-and-soapy dishes with hot running water, and allow that hot running water to also rinse the dirty dishes in the right sink, which feels like a virtuous water conservation project. If a pot is really gross, I will use a scrubber and the rinse water to clean it out BEFORE it goes into the hot soapy water. All the clean dishes get piled up on the dish rack and there they stay until they are dry, or dry enough, to put away. Growing up, my job was always to dry dishes, and there is not a household job I loathe more than that, no, not even scrubbing toilets; as god is my witness I shall never dry dishes again. Well, sometimes I do if I’m desperate, and when the kids clean the kitchen after dinner one of them will dry dishes, to prevent the inevitable tumbling down of the tower of dishes piled in the rack. They do not seem to have my dish-drying aversion.

This is controversial, but I never put a plate in the dishwasher without rinsing it first. I pile all the plates and cutlery into the dirty dishwater, after pots and pans are washed, and give each item a quick swipe with the scrub brush before loading the dishwasher. “So, you wash the dishes BEFORE they go into the dishwasher?” my mother asked me with her eyebrows in her hairline. No, I rinse them; if I washed them I would use the clean dishwater. My friend Dom (HI DOM) straight up told me that this methodology is a) insane and b) would, over time, result in a subpar performance by my dishwasher. Nevertheless, I am who I am and I shall not be deterred.

Girl, Wash Your Face

Speaking of washing things, if we were playing Never Have I Ever, I would say used a washcloth to wash my face. I use my hands, and so does my entire family; not to be insular, but I never really thought about it any other way until I read this by Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) and this by Engie (HI ENGIE) and realized that a large percentage of people are Team Washcloth. I have just never considered a washcloth as an option, and I probably never will, because the way I wash my face works just fine for me. A washcloth seems too rough for my skin and always has, although that doesn’t explain my early-teen usage of St Ives Apricot Scrub. I think that product could remove rust from a wheel well.

When I admitted that, while I own a couple of washcloths, they are never used for their intended purpose, I felt kind of exotic, fielding questions about washing my face with my hands, like I just landed here from Mars and humans were wondering how Martians perform their daily ablutions. Are you wondering how, exactly I wash my face? No? Are you thinking Nicole, this is the weirdest and most boring topic you have ever written about, and I just read a thousand words about how you wash dishes and hate cookbooks, so that is saying something? Well, we didn’t come this far just to get this far, people. Strap in, friends, we are going for a wild ride.

Here are the necessary items that guarantee success: a fresh hand towel for patting the old visage dry post-washing, Dove bar soap, Neutrogena cleanser.

Also necessary: tying back my hair and, when applicable, pushing up sleeves. No one wants to go to bed with wet jammie wrists, not that this is a concern with summer jammies.

First step: wet hands, work up a small lather with the Dove bar, and then splash the soapy water on the face, massaging gently to loosen the layers of makeup and sunscreen from the day, paying special attention to the eyes. I gently rub my eyelashes until I no longer feel mascara, but instead look like a crazed raccoon.

Next step: rinse hands and then work a dollop of Neutrogena cleanser into a lather, apply to face, massaging gently for a minute or so.

Last step: rinse, and then pat dry with the clean towel. I don’t like to put my face into a used towel, so I have many hand towels that I have under the sink for single use, like the princess that I am. This can also be used to wipe up any errant water sprays if need be.

Now I’m ready for my many serums and night creams!

Weekly Reading

Before I get into what I did read this week, I am going to tell you about a DNF. It is very rare for me not to finish a book, but the Menopause Reset made it onto the short list. How or why this ended up on my Kobo, I know not; maybe someone recommended it, maybe the Kobo algorithm recommended it, maybe I heard the author on a podcast and liked her, who can say. Well. The very first sentence is something like “Are you tired of not being able to lose weight?” and I thought, NO. Not only am I not interested, I am not even interested in reading even tangentially about weight loss. But I pushed through the first two chapters before abandoning ship. It was not well written, for one thing, although I have read worse-written books. The first two chapters talked about how great the author’s life was until menopause hit, and then there were SO MANY HOT FLASHES, YOU GUYS. Then she outlined how she took charge of her menopause, and mainly, it seems, that was accomplished through the keto diet, intermittent fasting, and detoxing. Again, none of these things are of interest to me but I may have still read it, had she not revealed that she did not believe in medication utilization for depression and anxiety. I myself do not suffer depression nor anxiety, but I have friends who do and medication literally saved their lives. Listen, I will grudgingly tolerate this attitude from Tom Cruise, because Maverick, but I will not read this kind of bullshit from another woman. DEE EN EFF.

A Living Remedy. This is a memoir about a woman losing both of her parents; I had also read her memoir about being adopted and the search for her birth parents, and I will say that this book was a much more compelling read. She discusses her father’s death from complications from untreated diabetes, and what stood out to me is the absolute disaster that it is for people without health insurance to become sick in the United States. I am no Smug Canadian here, because our health care system is far from perfect (ask me about finding a new doctor! Or wait lists!) but I think the absolute last thing a sick person should be doing is worrying about costs of treatment and if those costs are going to push a person into bankruptcy, which is exactly what happened in this book. Her working poor parents had no health insurance, and her dad became sicker and sicker, until he went to a doctor and discovered he lost 90% of his kidney function. His treatment, plus her mother’s bills from cancer treatment, meant that they had to declare bankruptcy. For some reason, they didn’t qualify for Medicare or disability insurance either. I think it is an absolute travesty. Recently I listened to the Hooked on Life podcast where one of their guests discussed his own journey with cancer and said that what is never talked about is the crippling depression that happens AFTER treatment; this man had lost his home, his job, everything. Anyway, this book is about more than just that, it also shows a beautiful and loving relationship between the author and her mother. Her mother died of cancer during the early part of the pandemic; the author could not be with her mother when she passed, and it made me so sad to remember that very terrible time. So many deaths that would have been so lonely. This book is definitely worth a read but, clearly, heavy reading material. 

If you, like me, are also fascinated by the myriad ways we experience the boring and mundane minutia of life, feel free to share! Are you Team Washcloth or Team Hands? Do you also have weird and absolutely rigid ways of doing the dishes? Do you hate drying them? How do you feel about recipes? Tell me everything. xo

Acclimatizing

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Are You Feeling Hot! Hot! Hot!

Since I got here, it has been one beautiful day after another; summer here is absolutely gorgeous. If I had even one day like this in Calgary – warm and sunny, windless and without storms – I would be frantically spending every possible second outside, carpe diem, not wanting to waste a beautiful day. Weather there is always so volatile – one of my girlfriends texted me last week to say it was 13 degrees and pouring rain – so I’m ever so grateful to be living in a place where I can predict what the day will bring. Summer weather in the summer, what a novel concept!

I was a bit concerned, moving here, how Rex would do in the heat. He’s definitely a cold-weather dog, and I was worried that the temperatures would be too hot for him, but so far it has not been a problem. I walk him at 8:00 at the latest, and our walking route is a beautiful trail that is almost entirely shaded. It winds along a creek, which he enjoys drinking from and also is the reason his white paws are completely grubby all the time now. Attached to this path is an offleash park, which is also shaded and has water taps, bowls, and kiddie pools. It also had, one day, Rex’s doppelgänger.

As an aside, one of the first days I was at the offleash a very attractive young man was chatting with me and told me not to worry about the water in the bowls, he had just filled them, adding, ominously, You know, I don’t trust the old water, because of that woman. Wait, what woman? I told him I just moved here and he explained that there was a woman who would came to dog parks, with no dog, and poisoned the water in the bowls. Several dogs got sick and one actually DIED. I listened to this story with wide, horrified eyes, and was reminded of my days at the playground, how the young mothers would warily eye men without children, sitting on the benches. In any case, now that Rex has discovered the giant water bowl that is in the creek, he is completely uninterested in the water at the offleash.

I do love our morning walk route, but I have had to adjust to driving to get to the trail, rather than just strolling out the door, as I was used to doing. The first morning I was here I decided I WOULD walk to the trail; it was only about two kilometres, and I had used it as a running route before, so I was sure it would be just fine. Well. I had grossly misjudged how stressful it would be to walk down a busy road with no sidewalks, only a bike lane, with an enormous and excited dog bounding around, while cars zipped past. It took all my strength to keep the leash short and Rex on the inside, which backfired completely when he excitedly discovered not only a dead raccoon, but several squashed birds, at which point my soul briefly left my body. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like driving five minutes was such a hardship to be avoided.

International Costco Woman of Mystery

I have been slowly getting used to the grocery stores here. Sure, Superstore is Superstore, and Costco is Costco, but there are differences from what I’m used to. I think the biggest difference is that because Kelowna is just over a tenth of the size of Calgary, there is only one of each of those stores, and hence they are very busy. I made the mistake of going to Costco on a day that was a bit cooler and overcast – but still, temperature-wise, would have been considered a hot day in Calgary – and it was INSANE. It reminded me of the Costco in Maui, and just writing that makes me feel like I am a fancy world-Costco-traveller. Nicole: The International Costco Woman of Mystery could be the name of my memoir. Anyway, the layout was the same as the one in Maui and opposite of that in Calgary, which made it tricky to find everything on my list, and also it was so busy as to be almost impossible to maneuver through the aisles. It was literal bumper-to-bumper cart traffic. Perhaps it will be easier when tourist season is over.

The biggest difference for me, grocery-wise, is Superstore. It’s not just the layout, it’s the actual products that are available. Calgary in general and the part of the city in which I lived in particular is much more multicultural than here, and so the international foods aisle was always a cornucopia of fun and interesting items. Here, this is not the case. A quarter of the international aisle is filled with British products, like spotted dick, which I am not in the market for, culinary or otherwise, and the selection of Asian, Indian, and African items is pretty limited. I’m finding it hard to find noodles I like, is what I’m saying.

Hi Neighbourino

Probably the largest adjustment I have had to make has to do with my next-door neighbour. Before I get into that, a little context: my husband grew up on his family-owned vineyard, and about twenty years ago his family sold it and the attached winery, keeping two acres of it. The house in which we are living was originally his grandparents’; we added a second floor to it and took the existing house down to the studs, renovating it completely. It is such an incredibly fortunate thing to be able to live in a beautiful new house on a vineyard, overlooking the lake and the city. Every morning I wake up and look out the windows and feel so very lucky.

There is one thing that I feel you should know, and I’m mentioning it in a very casual, value-neutral way, and that is that there is another house on this two acre property, and that house belongs to my mother-in-law. While you absorb that information, I will hasten to assure you that my mother-in-law and I have a good relationship, albeit one that has been cultivated long-distance over the past twenty-five years. She is not one of those women who think that No One Is Good Enough For Her Precious Son; in fact, she thinks everything I do and every decision I make is Just Wonderful, Dear, which is lovely and, I think, rare. She is not a person who insists on having every meal together; in fact, I can’t even remember the last time we had a dinner together, it might have been Thanksgiving 2020.

But still, living next door is a lot different from twice-or-thrice annual visits, and so this is an adjustment to be sure, mostly a mental one. My main concern is maintaining boundaries and protecting personal privacy, for both of us, and mostly it’s been fine. We had an open and honest conversation about this prior to the move, which was INCREDIBLY difficult for me, because I don’t know how you grew up in the 80s and 90s, but open and honest conversation was not part of the story for me. In any case, there have been a few gentle bumps, but mostly it’s been fairly smooth sailing.

Bye Bye Birdie

In eighteen days, my older son is moving on campus for his first year at university. He’s so excited, and I’m so excited for him, and also, landslide. The university is close to us, so this feels like a very soft landing, but it’s still going to be a big change. In the meantime, I’m really cherishing having four faces at the dinner table. When he was working shift work this past year, I found myself thinking that the nights he was home for dinner was a real treat; this past month I feel spoiled having both the boys here all the time. What I am going to say is nothing new or original or earth-shattering, but I just love my boys so much; I am so proud of them both and I think they are incredible people, and I can hardly believe my luck that the universe gave them to me. It’s been so wonderful having them both here this summer, and of course it’s going to change very soon, and, like everything else, I will adjust to the changes. All you who have been through this know what it is.

I’m going to miss my son’s bartending skills; check out this mango margarita!

Weekly Reading

First of all, thank you all for your very kind comments of understanding and stories of hope, with regards to Bookmarkgate. So far they have not been recovered, but there are some boxes with garage items and gardening implements that I have not yet gone through, and although I’m not very hopeful, I’m not COMPLETELY hopeless. It’s more like 90% hopeless, as opposed to 100% before your lovely comments. We hosted our first dinner party this weekend and my sweet friend Sammi (HI SAMMI) brought me bookmarks as a housewarming, to “tide me over until the others were found.” I have such lovely friends!

Prep. When I was a kid I was obsessed with the idea of boarding school. It just seemed so fun and cool. Is it just me or does everyone think this? Anyway, this book is a very realistic portrait of a girl from Indiana who goes to a New England boarding school on scholarship; it shows her evolution from freshman to senior, and I really liked it. It showed an insular and privileged world, with all the angst of a teen in the 90s. I thought it was such a true picture of what it was to be a teen at that time, albeit in a very different life than the one I had.

Here we are at the end of a long weekend, and I hope yours was great. Have a lovely week, everyone! xo

Books, Books, Books: Moving Reading 2023

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I have to tell you that I had a tiny bit of a breakdown this week. Well, maybe more than tiny, and it was book-related. The first thing that happened is that I discovered it will be a couple of months before I can get a library card here, as I do not yet have official documentation for my new address. I was more upset than one should be to discover this, possibly due to that time of the month looming, possibly due to the comedown from months of stress, possibly due to everything being new and different. The librarian told me she couldn’t give me a card, and I was blinking back tears about it all day.

But you know me, I rallied, thinking that at least I held onto my CPL account on my Libby app, so I can get e-books, and I have hundreds of books on the shelves in my new spare room:

I cheerfully thought, well, I’ll take this opportunity to read my new copy of Lucy By The Sea, and why not reread the whole series while I’m at it? Maybe I’ll reread all of Jane Austen, in order of publication? I haven’t read my favourite Diary of a Provincial Lady for a while! Maybe I’ll read that. I was feeling very pleased with this idea, and my husband had just finished moving some furniture around in the downstairs gaming area, so I was able to access the cupboard on the TV stand. I had put a large ziploc bag full of my bookmarks in that cupboard before moving; when I opened it I made the sad discovery that the other things that were in that cupboard were still there, but my bookmarks were gone. A search of the house and all other pieces of furniture, including the garbage, was undertaken, all for naught. Everything is unpacked and the bookmarks are not here.

At this point, you’re probably thinking who cares about bookmarks? But while I have become unsentimental about many things, my bookmarks were not among them. I had handmade bookmarks from a friend’s daughter, and I would swap them out seasonally and thematically – I just got teary eyed again, thinking what am I going to do for Tiny Secret Festive Season when I don’t have my Christmas bookmarks – I had bookmarks created by and gifted to me by my yoga students as a memory of them, I had bookmarks from my days as the Book Fair Lady, and, saddest of all, I had bookmarks made by my children with markers and drawings on them. To say that I was upset by the loss of this bag is a vast understatement. I cried for hours. I cried so hard my stomach started to feel nauseous. I cried so much that my whole body ached and I felt like I had a terrible hangover.

Well. There’s no solution to this problem, except trying to practice non-attachment. Things are just things, but this is a sad thing, and in the meantime, let’s cheer ourselves up by talking about the books that got me through the week before the move up until yesterday. Let’s put the R in REM Y REM, am I right?

Moving Reading

The Sun and Her Flowers. There are some really beautiful and uplifting poems in this collection, but I think I would have liked this much more had I read it as a younger woman. Much of it deals with healing from bad relationships, and becoming stronger. It’s not my stage of life but still, I enjoy this very talented young poet.

The Story of Us. This is a sweet and very big hearted book about a Filipino woman coming to Canada as a nanny, but eventually caring for an elderly trans woman who is an Alzheimer’s patient. It’s all about family – biological and chosen – and understanding one another. The author is Canadian, which I love, and the novel’s pony of view is from that of the caregiver’s unborn child, which is very original. Some of the dialogue and prose is a bit stilted and is clearly written to make a statement and to promote the author’s agenda, which leaves me mixed. On the one hand, it is cool in that I completely support her agenda and love that books are written in a normalizing way about queer and transgender people, but from a literary standpoint, it is not my favourite. Despite that I enjoyed this very much, and found the characters to be so warm and lovely and engaging, and the relationship that developed through caregiver and patient to be incredibly heartwarming.

Romantic Comedy. Before I tell you how I loved this delightful, fun, and witty romance, a confession. I almost didn’t read this. There has been a lot of buzz around it, but I saw the author’s name and thought no thank you. In case you hadn’t noticed, at least 95% of the books I read are by female authors; it’s not that I NEVER read a male author or NEVER enjoy a male author, but it’s rare and infrequent. What can I say, I like the ladies. This is particularly true for fiction. But then I was in the library and I saw it on the New and Notable shelf; I flipped it over and saw the author’s picture – she’s a woman! Joke’s on me. Anyway, you know how you will sometimes see gorgeous movie or music star women with kind of shlubby guys (i.e., Johansson and Jost) but you do not ever see the gender flip of that? That is what this book is about. A SNL-style writer helps a male pop star with his sketches for the show, and inadvertently insults him by insinuating he would only hook up with models fifteen years his junior. They reconnect via email during the summer of 2020, and I am here for it. It’s really funny and sweet, and has some great messaging in it; the writing is top-notch and it’s just such a great romance novel! It turns out I am also here for a good pandemic side-story if it’s done well. The details about starting a relationship during the early stages of the pandemic, and what life was like (DOOMSCROLLING 4EVER) were spot on.

The Myth of Normal. Four years ago I read When The Body Says No by this author, and it was just fascinating to me, the connection between the mind and the body, the idea that mental and emotional trauma could manifest as physical illness. This book is much more of the same, delving into chronic illness as well as addiction, and the intergenerational causes of such things. It skates a very tricky line; it’s hard to write about how stress, personality traits, and traumatic or semi-traumatic experiences can lead to chronic illness without making it sound victim blaming, but the author (mostly) manages to do that. He writes with a lot of compassion about how our personalities can be shaped by adverse experiences and societal pressures, which can lead to illness or pain. It’s a fascinating book BUT warning, for anyone going through, say, a STRESSFUL PERIOD LIKE MOVING, it can be a wee bit triggering. Or, you know, if your husband has been in an incredibly stressful job for five and a half years and has multiple health issues. Also? If you are a parent, I would highly recommend skipping the chapters on parenting and how it shapes our children UNLESS you want to be haunted by the time you were so exhausted you left the baby to cry it out for a while to see if they’d fall asleep and then they DID, which apparently means the baby gave up and will be searching their whole life for someone to soothe and comfort them. Also, if you didn’t feed them on demand. Or didn’t breastfeed until they weaned themselves. Sure, societal pressures could be at play but probably you have destroyed their sense of autonomy and self-worth forever. Pardon me while I go do some breathing exercises. I kid, I kid. If you are interested in this subject, this is a very comprehensive, compassionate, and fascinating book just, maybe read with a grain of salt? Or a shaker full?

The Urgent Life. I heard this author on a podcast and I was so taken by her that I had to read her book. Um. Well? I had to check several times to see if this was actually the same person, because the book was not at all what I thought it was. I’m not saying it’s not good – it’s well-written and very interesting – but it wasn’t at all what I thought it would be about. It is a memoir about her husband dying, which I knew happened, but what I didn’t know is that they had been separated for four years at that point, they had lost a baby, and her father, a hard-core patriarch, moved in with them – while married – into their tiny New York apartment not once, but twice. Everyone in this book sounds pretty unlikeable, except for the (spoiler alert) new girlfriend who, at the end of the book, gets totally shafted. So, I don’t know what else to say. If you’re reading this, go in with different expectations than I did, I guess?

Love and Trouble. I thought I would love this. A book of essays by a forty-something woman looking back on her youth? Sign me up! But the execution and theme were so dull and repetitive, and her stories of her hyper-sexualized, wayward youth and mountains of poor decisions did not make for good reading. A couple of the essays I thought were okay, but that’s about it.

You Think It, I’ll Say It. After a slumpish couple of books, I was so happy to read this gem! You know I love a short story, and these are really great – complicated, unreliable narrators, variety of stories and settings. I’m so glad I started reading this talented author! This was so good!

Violeta. This book is the history of Chile from 1920-2020, as told by one woman. She was born in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1920, and died in the early days of the COVID pandemic of 2020. This is a translation, which might explain the awkward and stilted dialogue. It’s a very long book that drags a lot, but I’m still glad I read it as I knew very little about Chile, and I like seeing history through a human lens. Still. Long. Draggy. Be warned! This is the only book ever that I had expire on my Kobo, and I had to wait for it to come available again to finish it, which I somewhat toyed with NOT doing. It could be the move, but it was a hard one for me to get through.

Glow In The F*cking Dark. You know how I feel about the asterisk in f*cking. YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT! Just SAY it or don’t, but don’t ADD THE ASTERISK! So, you know there must be a reason I overstepped my deep, deep dislike for the fuck asterisk – it’s similar to my dislike of male authors, it has to be a really good reason that I’ll read a male author, like maybe he’s David Sedaris or something – and that reason is twofold. One, I really enjoyed this woman’s first book Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies (I KNOW), and two, I heard her speak on a podcast and discovered that her working title was simply Glow In The Dark, no F*cking involved, but her agent insisted, to the author’s dismay, that it was her “brand.” I get this. Anyway, all that said, I really did enjoy this book that is a sequel to her re-parenting Lilies book; similarly it’s a memoir mixed with self-help, and it’s very lovely and uplifting with a lot of practical advice. I also love that her epigraph was a quote from Rumi that I love: “We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking has always been within.” I love that, and that’s the theme of the book – you are a star – A FUCKING STAR, I SAID IT, NO ASTERISK – and as such, you should glow and light the way for others.

There, I’m all caught up! My boys keep telling me my bookmarks will turn up, and I want to believe this, but how is it possible when we have unpacked everything and searched everywhere? On that note, it’s time for me to put the M and Y into REM Y REM, and to wish you all a wonderful long weekend (it is the long weekend, isn’t it? Time has lost its meaning even more than before.) xo

Coming Into The Home Stretch

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With all the myriad changes going on in my life right now, I told a friend that I feel like I am having a Brazilian bikini wax, but the entire procedure is just one giant strip instead of many tiny, gentler strips. With everything happening all at once, I am doing my best to cope and to stay in the moment, while still soothing myself by thinking there will be a time after this.

HELP

My friend Allison (HI ALLISON) used that term many, many years ago to refer to chaperoning a field trip, and I have thought of it hundreds of thousands of times since then. This week was so busy and stressful, but ultimately very productive. The moving company is packing the majority of our house; for the extra amount of money added on to the expense of a long-haul move, it seemed very worth it. However, being in a house for twenty-three years means that we have accumulated things we really do not need or want anymore, and although I have been steadily clearing things out for the last few months, this week I really got into the weeds, so to speak. I tackled the crawl space.

Several years ago I really got into the crawl space and got rid of many things we no longer needed, but there was a stack of boxes in there that had not been touched since we had moved in twenty-three years ago. I refuse to just move boxes to put them in storage, so I ruthlessly went through each one, and although I am not wishing such a task on anyone, it was actually pretty fun. I found so many treasures! I also found a lot of junk and questionable items – did I really need to keep a giant box full of RSVP’s from our wedding? – but I was able to recycle most of it, donate some of it, and the rest was, sadly, relegated to the trash. It made me feel a little sad, especially after reading Unraveling last week, but there wasn’t another option for some of the completely unusable items. I mean, I guess there was the option of putting them back into boxes and then putting them into storage in the new house, since that seems to have been our line of thinking twenty-three years ago, but that felt like a slippery slope that would get me right back where I started from. Also, upon the event of my own demise, may that be many decades in the future, I do not want to leave my children with boxes full of useless junk, any more than I already will be.

The bane of my recent existence has been old text books. Between my husband and I, we have four degrees and probably thousands of dollars’ worth of old, now worthless textbooks. A few months ago I looked with horror at my shelves and shelves of textbooks that were not eligible for donation; no one wants outdated economics, econometrics, or statistics textbooks, despite the fact that not much really changes in those areas from year to year. The only thing to do was to recycle them by ripping out all the pages and throwing the bindings and covers into the trash. It was a big undertaking, so imagine my despair when I discovered in the crawl space an entire box full of my husband’s old textbooks that somehow did not make it onto our bookshelves. I set my younger son on the job of recycling them, along with myriad term papers and, strangely enough, a pile of papers from our wedding that included every single song the DJ had in his possession and every menu item the venue had to offer.

These, along with piles of cassette tapes – including mix tapes! – were a drag to deal with, but then I found some wonderful treasures, some of which I am keeping forever, and some of which just made me laugh. As a small backstory, I was six years old when Diana and Charles got married, and their engagement set off my lifelong obsession with the Queen of Hearts. I was not a child for whom it was difficult for relatives to think of Christmas gifts; anything and everything Princess Di was received with great enthusiasm. Soon my obsession included all women in the British Royal Family, including the Queen, with whom I share a birthday. My grandma had saved a lot of clippings and memorabilia from the Queen’s coronation and passed it along to me.

What fabulous treasures! Also, this candy box!

This is less awesome but it made me laugh and shudder at the same time.

I am keeping this forever:

In addition to “things I will keep forever” I found some postcards from friends circa 1989, including one that said “I hate it here and I hate everyone here and I want to come home” which, if that’s not teen angst I do not know what is. Much less angsty was a postcard from my sweet friend Elise (HI ELISE) from the bustling metropolis of Lethbridge:

I don’t know what is funnier, that I have kept this all these years or that I had it at all.

Should I have kept this? Perhaps to hang over my bed in the new bedroom?

The big day, for me and Rex at least, is one week TOMORROW. I can hardly believe it! I am actually looking forward to the unpacking-and-finding-homes-for-everything part, as opposed to the depressing why do we have so much stuff and are we actually swamp people part that I seem to be going through now. I am, as you all know, a person who thrives on neatness and organization and whoa, does my life feel like the opposite of that right now. Well, again, let’s repeat the mantra: there will be a time after this. And in the meantime, I am going to try to enjoy my last few days in the city that has been my heart and home for so many years.

Weekly Reading

Property. The best thing about this book, which concerns a woman married to an unsuccessful sugar plantation owner in the antebellum south, is that it’s short. The story is dull and every character is unlikeable at best, deplorable at worst.

Swipe Up For More! Oh wow, this book was absolutely fascinating to me! I think the entire influencer industry is so interesting: how it developed, how important it is to brands, and how many women have made so much money in it. This book mainly follows three big influencers, two of whom I have never heard of before: a momfluencer, a fashion influencer, and a unique and important fitfluencer. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately since the Food Heaven women posted their Burnout and Pivot series; being an influencer might just look like taking photos and videos, but it is a lot of work to be successful. Some of these women work upwards of 80 hours a week, and the work is just never done. Their whole life is on display for work, which is a really odd concept. Even odder – and ickier – is the world of the momfluencer, because it is her life as a mom and her own kids who are being used by brands for money. It brings up all sorts of ethical dilemmas: can your children be used in campaigns? What if you put the money away for them for their education, then is it okay? At what point do children have agency over their own lives and decisions? Is a sponsored trip to Disney a vacation or just more grind? The momfluencer in question has since – given that her older children have rebelled against posing for yet another photo or acting in yet another reel – slowed down her own work and campaigns, and wonders if her life as an influencer has deep and negative effects on her children (probably, the answer is yes). It’s an interesting thing to consider. I thought about this a lot when I was writing for YMC: a lot of my colleagues wrote about things like potty training and discipline, complete with photos, and even at the time it felt wrong for me to write about the kids in that way. For me personally, my kids are blog-adjacent but I don’t divulge much of their lives here because it’s their lives. I should note though that my kids actually enjoy when, say, a former yoga student of mine recognizes them “in the wild” from my Facebook posts, but I can imagine if I had a far-reaching platform in which they played a significant role, they might feel a lot different. Anyway, this was such a good read and really thought-provoking.

The Long Goodbye. This was an absolutely gorgeous memoir about a woman losing her mother, and the grieving process that followed. And I will say that I was 100% NOT in the right headspace to read about her mother dying at age 55 of metastatic colorectal cancer, so I cannot say I enjoyed it, but I appreciated the beauty and tenderness of the writing.

All right, friends, I am in the home stretch now. Back in the aforementioned grad school, another woman and I had the Rosie the Riveter poster in our office as a reminder that We Can Do It, and I have that Rosie the Riveter photo in my mind constantly these days. I feel like her, mascara, lipgloss and all. xo