Category Archives: Books

Vacation Reading: London and South Africa 2026

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Happy Canada Day, friends! I am celebrating by blocking off the afternoon to do nothing but read a book by a Canadian author, and will wear one of the three pieces of red clothing that I own. I am currently wearing an ancient red Tri-Y top, but it will be very sweaty before long.

Speaking of reading, I wanted to share my reading – and NOT reading – list from my recent trip to London and South Africa. Before my trip, I was chatting with my friend Nicole (HI NICOLE). She and I have had a monthly check-in since January 2018, and we’ve never missed a month, despite Covid, vacations, and a cross-province move. She is the person who best knows my reading taste, and she asked what I had loaded up my Kobo with. I cheerfully told her that it was mostly filled with random romances and other light-sounding books from the library and from the Kobo website; I had several very long flights and stopovers in my future, and I wanted the reading to be fluffy and fun.

And let me tell you, this was a mistake.

I’m the problem, hi, it’s me. Something I know about myself is that too many “light and fun” books in a row, and I start to become very unengaged with the tropey stories. I am also not a Spicy Romance girl; I find graphic sex scenes to be weirdly boring and, in the case of a few very descriptive anal ones, alarming. I have been known to inadvertently Kegel whilst reading them. I prefer a sexy, fade-to-black Closed Door Romance. I just don’t want to read about throbbing cocks penetrating wet pussies, I AM SORRY, BUT I DON’T.

Unrelated to spiciness, I plodded my way through The Friend Zone and Kitchen, and then I ran out of patience. I was in the midst of Ready or Not, which deals with a woman who gets accidentally pregnant from a one-night stand with a bartender, even though they used condoms, which, as we all know from sex ed and also from that stupid storyline of Ross and Rachel, are only 97% effective. Okay! But the pregnant woman is seemingly completely unaffected and unaware that her life is going to change, and starts a romance with her best friend’s brother, at which point I said ENOUGH. I started, and DNF’d, four more books IN A ROW: Book People, Strangers Tend To Tell Me Things, Exit Lane, And Then There Was You. I began to despair for myself as both a reader and as a writer.

Then something changed, and my reading life brightened up again. Thankfully! So here’s the low down on what I DID finish, the lows, the highs, and the in-betweens.

Vacation Reading: London and South Africa 2026

The Friend Zone. In my 20s, a friend told me she and her husband divorced because he wanted kids and she didn’t. “There’s no compromise,” she said. “It’s you have kids or you don’t.” That’s kind of the premise of this romance – a guy wants kids, a woman has extreme fibroids and maybe can’t, they never discuss it…you know what, this book is kind of dumb. But it was an easy read for travel and all’s well that ends well. Also, the author based it on her friend’s lived experience so…great for her, I guess? A meh read, kind of disappointing as I like this author generally.

Kitchen. This was a original little read about found family and the power of food to bring people together. I didn’t find it overly compelling or engaging, but it was short.

Why We Hate Cheap Things. Also titled, Why I Hate My Kobo Which Keeps Glitching So That I Read A Random Book In My London Hotel Room. But honestly, this WAS an interesting read about society’s devaluation of low-cost consumer goods, from pineapples, which once were extremely expensive and rare and are now frequently found on pizzas and in jello salads, to clothing. There was an entire series, with titles like Why We Will Marry The Wrong Person, but my Kobo started working again and we left London.

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife. Oh lordy did I need this refreshing little book after my string of DNF’s. This was very sweet, the definition of heart warming. After an elderly man dies, another is mistakenly taken for him – and as the dead man was a dementia patient, no one listens to his protests. Soon he assumes the nursing home life that the deceased had…and ends up with friends and family he never dreamed of. Just a fun, lovely little read.

Always Pack a Candle. This was fantastic. I very much enjoyed this memoir of a public health nurse who worked in the Williams Lake/ Cariboo region in BC in the 1960s. Thanks to Birchie (HI BIRCHIE) for the recommendation!

Hamnet. Late to the party but I loved, loved, loved this book! Maggie O’Farrell can WRITE, wow. This is such an incredibly loving and beautiful story about every mother’s worst imagining – the loss of her child. This is the kind of historical fiction that I love – often I dislike that genre, but this has beautiful writing, fascinating characters, and a rich story. I finished this on the plane and then thought I would watch the movie – and I lasted all of ten minutes before turning it off. Too soon? I don’t know.

Definitely a mixed bag of books, and my ongoing resolution to DNF more was definitely upheld. What are you reading these days, what have you DNF’d, tell me everything. xo

Food and Fashion

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Other than my new identity as a war history buff, shown by my love for The Rest is History, the podcasts I listen to are of the “light and fun” variety: modern etiquette, self-care, books – classic, contemporary, and Sweet Valley High – and my very favourite genre, two middle-aged women talking about life. I am completely uninterested in listening to anything heavy, upsetting, or depressing, other than, again, war history. What can I say, I contain multitudes. The last thing I want in a podcast is an evaluation of the US political situation, and so I never listen to the Ezra Klein Show, unless my friend SHU – who has her own delightful podcast, HI SHU – mentions one of his non-political episodes. The most recent one she mentioned featured the writer of the upcoming The Sensualist, a book of essays detailing the author’s love of pleasure. He talked about how life these days is geared towards efficiency and optimization, rather than the pursuit of pleasure and joy, and something pinged in me.

Two great, everyday pleasures in my life are eating and getting dressed. I recognise that the former can be fraught, especially for women; there is a lot of guilt and shame associated with pleasurable food, and I have devoted this, the second half of my life, to eliminating those feelings both in myself and others. What could be more boring and depressing than thinking constantly about optimising our diets, about macros and counting protein grams and shunning delicious things like dessert or wine? I refuse. This is not to say I’ve devolved into total hedonism with no thought to my physical health, on the contrary, I eat to nourish my body and my soul. I strongly believe that restriction leads to obsession, and that life needs to be worth living, and so indulging in joyful deliciousness is part of my life.

As for the latter, it’s no secret I love clothes. Sometimes I think of myself as one of my own childhood paper dolls, that I get to dress every single day, usually multiple times a day. I have curated my closet such that everything in it makes me happy and feel beautiful, and if it doesn’t, out it goes. I have no time left on this mortal coil to feel bad in my clothes.

And so this week I have combined my dear friend Suzanne’s Dinners This Week with Kae’s Daily Outfits (HI SUZANNE HI KAE), for Fashion and Food!

Every Day

On yet another podcast, author Elin Hildebrand described herself as “reliable and consistent,” and girl, same. Whatever I lack in other areas, I make up for in reliability and consistency; if I say I am going to do something, I will, and also, you could set a watch by my morning routine. I start, post-coffee, with my yoga practice, followed by my strength and cardio workout, and for that I wear one of my many, many Lululemon Tri-Y tops that I have amassed over the past nineteen years of daily yoga practice.

What can I say, they don’t wear out. I pair it with Lululemon cropped leggings. Every single day, for the past nineteen years.

I am a sweaty gal, so after that I need to change into a different outfit for my long Rex walk and my gardening session. At this time of year, that means a short-sleeved or sleeveless tee with a fresh pair of cropped leggings.

I wake up at 4:30, and I finish gardening around 10:30, so those two outfits get me through a large chunk of the day.

Sunday

It was Father’s Day, and my husband celebrated by grilling his own damn steak. He and the boys enjoyed that, along with roasted sweet potatoes and asparagus and fresh-from-the-garden kale Caesar that I made.

I always make a special dessert on Sunday, so I made my husband’s favourite: a frozen strawberry daiquiri pie with homemade magic shell.

I wore an outfit entirely from Mark’s, of “Work Wearhouse” fame. They are so much more than steel toed boots and hard hats, people! They also have my favourite Silver jeans and simple tees.

Also, I’m still wearing the ugly house sandals, which have been keeping my plantar fasciitis at bay.

Monday

Another outfit from Mark’s – they should sponsor me – and it’s perfect for a warm summer’s day.

My writing group meets on Mondays at 5:30, so we have a dinner that I prep earlier and can cook quickly, which almost always means stir-fry. This one includes tofu, cashews, and cilantro from the garden.

Tuesday

This is the hot weather uniform: a Lululemon skort and a tank top, this one from, again, Mark’s. Longtime readers will remember I had surgery on my varicose veins in 2011, and then, to the surprise of everyone, I started developing new ones several years ago. That’s very unusual, my doctor said. At one point in my life I would have been self-conscious about them, but now I’m all Get a good peek, city boy?

It was Big Fun Salad night, using Romaine and raspberries from the garden, plus homemade crusty bread.

Wednesday

I know for a fact I have had this outfit since at least 2015, if not earlier. Another Lulu skort – love them – and an Old Navy tank. I know we are all against fast fashion, and we should be wary of the environmental impacts of the textile industry, but I have no regrets about a tank that has lasted over 11 years.

Dinner was build-your-own pasta salad, in which I set out a variety of veggies and everyone can add what they like, including our first zucchini of the season. IT BEGINS.

Thursday

Another hot day, another Lulu skort, this one paired with a ruffly tank that I bought at Jacob, which went defunct in 2015, so I cannot even guess at its age. Also, oh happy day, Rex got groomed! He stayed clean for 35 minutes before going rolling and coming back covered in dust, with a tail full of dead grass and bits of spear grass in his face and ears.

Dinner was black bean soft tacos with garden lettuce and a vegan chipotle sauce I make.

Friday

Friday we had cooler weather and, thankfully, a bit of rain, so I wore another pair of Silver crops – Mark’s! – along with a Lulu tank under an Old Navy tee. The latter two I think of as “new” but I believe I bought them when I was teaching yoga in 2017.

Friday is my favourite day of the week, so I celebrate with my favourite dinner: Greek salad with pita and hummus. And wine! This Riesling from Tantalus has a 94 rating!

Saturday

This was a very unusual day because not only did I go out for lunch with my friend Sandi (HI SANDI), but I also went out for dinner with my husband! This never happens! But my son has a houseguest this weekend and they went out, so my husband and I went to the pub; I had a veggie burger and salad, with yam fries and happy hour wine.

I wore Lululemon City Sleek crops, a tee from the Gap, and a silk scarf from Cambodia.

It was a fun way to cap off a week of yumminess.

Weekly Reading

It’s Buzzy Book Week in the Boyhouse! Let’s see how the buzzy books of the summer stacked up.

Lake Effect. For very personal reasons, the last part of this book was extremely upsetting and triggering to me, such that I had to steel myself to finish the book. That is not the book’s fault, in fact, it is a testament to the story that I wanted to push through to finish, because up until that point I really loved it. It’s a story of two unhappy marriages that get blown apart by an affair, and that affair has ripple effects throughout the connected families and the community. It’s a really interesting examination of choices and their consequences, how secrets can be devastating, and, ultimately, the power of forgiveness. There is also a heavy “food is a love language” theme which really resonated with me. Like I said the end part was extremely hard for me but I hope it is not hard for you.

Yesteryear. Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate time travel as a literary device, and so I was a bit wary to pick up this, arguably the Book of the Summer, in which a tradwife influencer wakes up one morning to find herself living in the year 1855. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the “time travel” component was more original, creative, and, frankly, weird than anything I’ve read before. This debut author received an enormous book deal, and the film rights have already been snapped up for a huge financial number, and I can really see why: this story would be perfect as a film. As a statement and societal commentary, this is very sharp and smart, not surprising considering the author is an acclaimed and serious podcaster. As a literary experience, I found it a bit too on the nose and unbelievable to really become immersed. I also had a few quibbles with some editorial oversights – such as “her sewing needles clicked as she knitted,” a character is referred to as an “old maid” when she’s 30 and has five children – but these are small things. I found the story of the influencer’s journey to be the most interesting, and conceptually this book is a real allegory about social media, appearances, and extremist views about the evils of the world we live in. All in all I enjoyed the ride and I congratulate the author on her huge success.

It feels great to be back in the swing of things around here. I will be back with my vacation reading list later this week, and in the meantime, take care of yourselves, friends. xo

Maitri, Loving Kindness

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I try to incorporate maitri, or loving-kindness, into every aspect of my life, but I specifically do a maitri meditation a few times a week. This involves repeating the following four times: May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. Each time the mantra is repeated, the mind is to focus on different people, the first being someone who is easy to love, followed by someone who is difficult to love. After that, the focus is on oneself, and then the mantra is sent out to the universe at large.

Easy To Love: My Boys

In my Ask Me Anything, Christa (HI CHRISTA) asked Were you ever disappointed not to have a daughter? Thank you for such a deep and vulnerable question, Christa! The short answer is no. I was thrilled to have two boys, although I’m sure if I had two girls, or one of each, I would be equally thrilled. The interesting thing is that as soon as I knew I was pregnant, I was certain I was having a boy. Then when it was clear our second child was a boy, I was over the moon that I would have brothers. I feel extremely fortunate in that they are the best of friends, as well as being wonderful sons.

I wanted two children, and that is what I got, so I was and am perfectly content. I will say that I was asked frequently whether we were going to “try for a girl,” which is a question innocently meant but one that I found, and still find, very upsetting and offensive on a number of levels. Being the mother of those two boys has been the great joy of my life, and I would not change it for anything. They have grown into remarkable young men who are easy to love, and hence they are frequent recipients of the first maitri meditation.

Difficult To Love: A Sociopath

One of the best things about having an Ask Me Anything is the wide variety of questions. My dear friend Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) asked Have you ever met a sociopath in real life? Well, Suzanne, not only have I met one, but through the marriage of a close family member, I was related to one! Technically I still am. I cannot say more, because there are eyes everywhere, but suffice it to say that this person is the literal worst person I have ever met in my life: cruel, diabolical, and manipulative.

I have tried to focus on this person in the second part of the maitri meditation, but I have never been able to make it all the way through. I feel like if I ever do, I will have reached samadhi. Maybe then that person would cease to be a sociopath! Perhaps I should try harder.

Loving Myself

Exactly seven years ago this weekend, I suffered an immense and debilitating hip injury just two days before my first – and, as it turned out, last/ never – road race. It was the most physical pain I have ever experienced, and I had two unmedicated births. It took a long time to be able to merely move without extreme pain, and for many months afterwards, I couldn’t walk without a limp. Looking back, I can see very clearly that I brought this injury on myself through over-training and under-fueling. In the months before, many friends had commented on my physical appearance and I brushed them off, but now when I look at photos of myself, I can see what they were saying.

In addition to my training, I was teaching 10-12 yoga classes a week, and at every class I would remind my students to pay attention to their own bodies, to work within their own boundaries, to respect limitations and particularly pain. I was a hypocrite. I pushed myself past my own limits, for reasons that now seem stupid. My body tried to tell me quietly that it was too much, and then it finally forcibly shut down my training, forever, as it turned out.

I am a firm believer that we all need a balance of yin and yang in our lives, and if we don’t take enough yin, our bodies will force us to through exhaustion, illness, or, in my case, injury. I recently read something, with regards to injury, that said my body didn’t fail me, I failed my body, and that really resonated. I failed my body by not listening, I failed my body by letting my ego take over, I failed my body by not nourishing it properly or treating it with respect and gentleness.

I do not necessarily subscribe to the idea that every painful thing is a blessing in disguise, but in this case, it was. It just took me a while to see it. As Ma Ingalls says, there’s no great loss without some small gain, and in my case, I gained massive empathy for people with chronic pain; it’s exhausting and deflating. More than that, I was reminded that I need to treat myself with tenderness and loving-kindness. I treat myself the same way I would my dearest friend, I treat myself with as much love as I would a small child.

I gave up practicing Ashtanga second series for the primary one, with modifications to care for my hip. I did restart running eventually, but gave it up in the fall of 2022 in favour of long walks with Rex. One of my senior yoga students, back in 2019, asked about my limp and when I told him it was a running injury, he looked at me incredulously. Running. Running? Why would you run? he asked. What is wrong with walking briskly? What IS wrong with walking briskly? Nothing at all. In fact, I prefer it.

There are still Peloton rides and there is strength training, but there is also a lot of restorative yoga and gentle stretching. Most importantly, I nourish my body and soul with plenty of nutritious food and, of course, delicious treats. I won’t deprive myself. After all, would you tell this little girl she couldn’t have that cake?

I also meditate a lot, and I direct my maitri meditation towards myself, as I should. As we all should.

Weekly Reading

Awake. I picked up this book without any preconceptions; the author, I discovered, is pretty famous in evangelical circles, and when her marriage blew up due to infidelity on her husband’s part, she was “cancelled” by some of those circles. I found this book to be disjointed, dull, and the epitome of telling instead of showing, and I really should have DNF’d it. But, I had DNF’d the previous two books I had picked up prior to that, so I decided to push through. It was not worth the push, although I will say that her husband’s “voice to text” to his girlfriend in the middle of the night was a sign of someone begging to be caught. Also, that voice to text was “I just can’t quit you.” ARE WE IN BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, SIR? Ridiculous.

Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. I thought I would enjoy this collection of memoir-like essays about being a not-conventionally-pretty woman in appearance-obsessed Hollywood, but I was wrong. I did relate to the essay about bad hair days, but the rest were navel-gazing, self-indulgent, and grinding. It was written in 2014, so there is no excuse for all the loving anecdotes about her beloved friend Woody, as well as the multiple appearances of the word “retard.” This book made me like Keaton less and I wish I never read it.

The Blind Assassin. So, after two DNF’s in a row, and two books that I SHOULD have DNF’d, I needed a win. I needed a five-star. I pulled out my favourite book of all time, a book I have read many, many times before. My dear friend Lisa (HI LISA) had recently read this for the first time, and while she texted me about it, I became overcome with cravings to reread it. I sighed the sigh of pure happiness as I read “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” So starts this masterpiece, which is a story within a story within a story, and has the most incredibly beautiful, incredibly clever, incredibly symbolic, incredibly powerful writing of any book I have read. I think about it all the time; the characters, the plot, and certain lines are in my brain forever. It is a work of art and I love it immoderately.

My feelings on the podcaster who recommended The Idea of You as the Best Book Ever.

The final maitri meditation is toward the universe as a whole, and I am sending out those thoughts to all of you, as I take a blogging break. May you be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease. I will see you in a little while, friends. Take care. xo

The Sand Mandalas of Everyday Life

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Ever since he retired, my husband accompanies me to Costco almost every time I go. It’s like a standing, extremely non-sexy day date. We keep the magic alive, what can I say. Follow me for more marriage advice!

It IS nice to have the company, and to also have a witness to the absolute chaos that is shopping at the only Costco in a 200 kilometre radius. We were there a few weeks ago, and I learned an important lesson: the week before Mother’s Day rivals that of the one before Christmas. Evidently this has to do with the garden centre, and not because everyone is obtaining massive ingredients to put on a feast of sorts. Whatever the reason, both the parking lot and the warehouse could only be described as insane, with lineups to the cashiers snaking all the way down to the end of the store. Every aisle was crammed with people, and my husband suggested that we turn around and go home.

THERE’S NO TURNING BACK NOW.

I had a significantly large list to get through, and it would not improve by NOT shopping. Also, even with all evidence to the contrary, I had a weirdly optimistic feeling. There was a shopping cart with two wheels jammed into the meridian near our car, and we had rescued it rather than taking one from the carrel. I cannot save all the abandoned carts that litter the parking lots, but I saved that one. Also, who DOES that? It’s so much more work to jam half the cart onto the meridian than it is to just wheel it over to the carrel that is twenty steps away.

In any case, my optimistic feeling panned out. The shopping experience was somewhat hellish, to be sure. As we were finishing up, I told my husband I would just grab a few things from the produce section and meet him in the lineup. I started walking, holding my tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes, and then I kept walking. And walking. Where was he? The lineup had magically disappeared and he was preparing to put our items on the conveyor belt.

And that is called Cart Karma, and is why we rescue shopping carts.

In my not-so-recent Ask Me Anything, my friend Diane (HI DIANE) asked What are three things you consider yourself an expert on? As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I am less and less an expert on anything, and more of a lifelong learner, although I do consider myself pretty knowledgeable in the area of karma, both cart and regular.

Sometimes I think of my life as one giant sand mandala, the kind that Buddhist monks make and then destroy as a way of practicing non-attachment and impermanence, except instead of a beautiful divine palace, my sand mandala is a pantry full of groceries. It’s a thing of beauty. I love the feeling of having a stocked fridge and pantry, so full of fresh ingredients, destined to become delicious meals. But nothing lasts forever, and I know that in mere days the stock will deplete, only to lead to me heading to Superstore and Costco with grim determination to create the mandala again. Impermanence!

I also think I am an expert when it comes to the sand mandala that is actual dinner. For over two decades now, I have honed my skills in this area. I make a weekly menu plan, I grocery shop, and then I execute. I know dinner is a struggle for many families, so I don’t want to flex too much, but I enjoy cooking and everyone in this house enjoys eating my cooking.

But dinner truly is a beautiful sand mandala. There is a lot of preparation involved, and although I am the kind of cook who literally throws things together with only a that seems good thought, and definitely no recipe, it still is a labour, the product of which gets destroyed upon setting it on the table.

The ultimate sand mandala at this time of year, though, is weeding the garden. Can a person be an expert on weeding? I don’t know, but if so, I am one. I spend time almost every day weeding, with the understanding that the next day, I will be out there weeding again. There’s no end to the weeds, and although that can feel a bit Sisyphus-ish, it’s also very Zen. Impermanence, non-attachment, etcetera.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that it takes 10000 hours to become an expert on something, and if that is the case, then most of us are experts on things we didn’t plan or want to be. Like, am I now an expert on laundry? Washing dishes? Vacuuming the floor because someone fuzzy likes to go on adventures in the vineyard and tracks in acres of dry grass and other vegetation remnants?

It’s best to practice non-attachment in those areas as well. Clean laundry, dishes, and floors are all impermanent and, like Newman said about the mail, they never stop. But the brief time where the laundry is clean and folded, dishes are all put away, and the floor is gleaming, well. It’s beautiful, and it – like everything else – will not last.

Weekly Reading

My reading count this week is bonkers, and almost entirely due to the fact that I read a total of three books on Mother’s Day alone. What can I say, other than yoga and walking the dog, I did nothing but read that day. I also had two DNF’s that I expected to love and did not: Still Life and Mornings In Jenin. You win some, you lose some.

Pick a Colour. This was an interesting little book, told from the point of view of a nail salon owner, who used to be a boxer. It’s a commentary on social status, power dynamics, and the road not taken. 

A Winter Book. My friend Laura (HI LAURA) suggested this book of short stories by a famed Finnish children’s author. These are auto-fiction, and span from the author’s childhood to her old age. My favourites were the episalatory variety, but all contain vast nature descriptions of the Finnish landscape, both within Helsinki and on the isolated island where she spent a lot of time.

The Bobbsey Twins and the Tagalong Giraffe. The book that spurred a lifelong desire to go on safari in Africa! I read this when I was seven, and for the past forty-four years I’ve been longing to go to Africa to see the animals. And I will be, soon! Now, will my adventure involve an orphaned baby giraffe named Crackers who I will accompany to a new herd of giraffes? Who can say? I hope so! 

The Things We Never Say. If you know me at all, you know how much I love Elizabeth Strout. She is an auto-buy author for me; I love everything she has ever written, and this, her latest, is no exception. It is an incredibly moving story of a high school history teacher who learns a secret that changes how he views his own life and the world at large. As he teaches the American Civil War to his students, he is faced with a country divided, and he learns that everyone has things they never say to anyone. It is a statement on loneliness, and how a person can be dreadfully alone even when surrounded by people. Strout’s writing is, as always, beautiful and precise and I loved reading every word of this.

Kokoro. It would be difficult to overstate how much this book moved me, how much it resonated with me, how seen I felt while reading it. I wanted to note down every phrase that was meaningful to me, but I quickly realized I would be soon transcribing the entire book. This book of Japanese wisdom for living a life of meaning and fulfilment, particularly for people in midlife, is incredible in every way. I think I had an out-of-body experience reading this. I think the lessons are for everyone, but particularly for those of us in our “back nine eras.” Thank you again to my friend Laura (HI LAURA) for bringing this book to my attention, and I will be immediately looking up everything this author has written.

I cannot BELIEVE I forgot to mention one of my favourite Canadian groups, in last week’s post: Blue Rodeo! Here I am with JIM CUDDY, at a 2008 Plates of Gold Olympics fundraiser. If I look starstruck, it’s because I was. Also in the photo was my husband’s colleague’s wife and Kelly Hrudy, both cut out to make it look like it’s just me and Jim Cuddy. I also got to meet Sale and Pelletier, which will mean a lot for you pairs skating fans out there.

We have had houseguests for an extended long weekend, and it feels just like a holiday. I’ve been flexing my dinner-making muscles, as well as my wine-drinking ones. I’d like to extend my sand mandala metaphor to include the latter, but I cannot think of how to do it. xo

Canadiana

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Our local library branch has pop-up, electronic advertisements for various events in town, and a few months ago, there was one for Weird Al. Weird Al! I don’t really think of Kelowna as a hotspot for concerts, but here we were. Some of you might be thinking Big deal, Weird Al is not a huge get but I was a little starstruck at the thought of the creator of Like A Surgeon and Pretty Fly For A Rabbi breathing the same air as me. I zipped home with plans to purchase tickets immediately, thinking it would be a pretty fun outing for me and my husband.

Well.

My plans quickly dissipated at the discovery that it would be approximately $700 at a minimum for the two of us to attend, which felt a little steep just to hear a live performance of Amish Paradise.

What was the first concert you attended? For me, it was INXS in 1988 for their Kick tour, and I believe the tickets were about $20. This Kicked off several years of concert-going on my part, and with one exception – Billy Joel in 1990 – the shows were all under $25, which was good, as my babysitting income was about $2.50 an hour at the time.

It will be news to no one that I have a song, if not in my heart, then definitely in my head at all times. I usually have a song in my heart too, but my brain is full of song lyrics from every genre in any decade. I am, as Spotify says, genre-fluid. I enjoy all kinds of music – almost anything can make me shimmy my shoulders and swing my hips, even while seated – and I associate many songs strongly with different eras of my life. My favourite genres are from the 70s: disco, yacht rock, soul and funk, as well as rock, but I am open to anything, and I most likely will be able to sing along to it, which tends to startle my husband. How do you remember that? he’ll ask when I sing anything from My Grandfather’s Clock to Parents Just Don’t Understand to Kryptonite.

For my birthday I was thinking of writing about all the songs that have meant a lot to me over the years, but then I realized that a) I could not narrow the list down to less than 200, and b) a massive list of songs felt boring to write and to read. Then I remembered that Rachael (HI RACHAEL) had asked me an interesting question on the Ask Me Anything I did back in December, which was Who are your favourite Canadian musicians/ groups?

First of all, I would like to shout out three out of four Gords for Canadian Decorative Gord Season:

Two of these Gords I saw in concert: the Barenaked Ladies for their Gordon tour, which I consider their best work. I have such great memories of it coming out when I was in high school; my friend Tracy (HI TRACY) and I would sing Hello City while we worked together in chemistry class. I was, I am embarrassed to tell you, nearly fifty years old before I realized that Hello City was about Halifax. Well, we are never too old to learn something new. The other Gord I saw was Gord Downey of the Tragically Hip. I think they take away your citizenship if you are a certain age and didn’t see the Hip in concert. It might be written in the Constitution, now that I think about it.

I don’t think a Gordon Lightfoot concert would be exactly bumping, but I love his music very much. Also, he’s dead. From that same era, I adore Joni Mitchell and the Guess Who. All three are national treasures, in my humble opinion. I also have a soft spot for Corey Hart, particularly because I wrote to his fan club and received a photocopied letter in return. Also, he filmed his Never Surrender video a mere 20 minutes away from our Calgary home.

I saw a number of Canadian music stars in concert back in the day, notably Alanis Morrisette for her Jagged Little Pill tour, and Tom Cochrane at a Canada Day music festival. This was pre- Life is a Highway, when his huge hit was the excellent Big League, which is SUCH a Canadian classic. Not many ways out of this cold Northern town, you work in the mill and get laid in the ground. And if you got a jump, it’ll be with the game. Oh, the dreams of hockey players of yore, hoping to be the next Fourth Gord. This was before youth hockey became A Thing, and anyone who knows Crazy Hockey Parents will know what I mean. My husband worked with a man who coached his kindergartener son’s Timbits hockey team. At the beginning of the season he cheerfully said that they were all there to have fun, after all, no one was going to the NHL. Several parents withdrew their kids from that team in protest of his attitude. THAT is what I mean. And as far as I know, none of them did go to the NHL. So.

Back in the 80s, after INXS I saw a few Canadian bands that would mean nothing to anyone not around in that time and place; notably 54-40 and the Grapes of Wrath. I have a couple of six-degrees of separation for both of those bands. The lead singer for 54-40 was the son-in-law of my junior high principal, which certainly made me look upon him with greater respect than a junior high principal typically gets from its student body.

As for the Grapes of Wrath, I had a titanic crush on guitarist Tom Hooper, to the point that my fourteen-year-old self would dream that we would one day meet and get married, and I would live in the magical place called Kelowna, from where the Grapes hailed. Life is funny; I DID marry a man from Kelowna and am now living in that magical place, and that man has friends who went to school with the entire band. As is probably typical, they were all high school misfits who absolutely hated their hometown, as evidenced in the song Backward Town. To be fair, Kelowna isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of anything. But still! It is a magical place where the flowering trees bloom in April.

When I was that angsty fourteen-year-old, I really thought that the kind of music a person listened to said something about the character of that person. I thought that people who enjoyed pop music were vapid and silly, while those who liked deep cuts of obscure bands were deep as the ocean. I mean, I dated a guy in part because he was really into obscure Depeche Mode tracks. Also, he wrote me a whole pile of bad poetry, typed it out, and presented it to me in a yellow duotang, which struck me as a very romantic gesture at the time.

Ah, the pretentiousness of youth. Popular music is popular for a reason, Young Nicole, and that is because it is FUN and also generally pleasing to listen to. These days, I think that the kind of music a person enjoys merely indicates that they enjoy that music, there is no character or moral assessment to be made. After all, I really like Nickleback.

Weekly Reading

Is This A Cry For Help? CANADIAN AUTHOR ALERT! This author also wrote the wonderful Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which I read in 2021 and loved. I love libraries, and not just because they lend us books; they are also safe public spaces that run important programs for all different people, they allow access to the internet, and they are inclusive spaces. This book centres on a librarian who is just back from having a mental health crisis due to the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend. As she looks back on her time with him, she begins to deal with a small but vocal group of people who are calling for book bans and who believe the library has an “agenda.” Yes, its agenda is to be inclusive and to help the public. Anyway. This was a very good read and I enjoyed it so much.

The Rom-Commers. This is a rom-com about two screenwriters writing a rom-com. Cute, right? Well, Katherine Center’s brand is a cute rom-com with some serious tragic backstories, and this is no exception. One person is recovering from cancer, the other is the caretaker for her disabled father, who is FIFTY FIVE YEARS OLD. If you’re keeping track, that’s two books I’ve finished in less than four days in which the romantic lead is a caretaker for her fifty-something parent. Small digression here: this is part of the reason I wrote Inhale Exhale, because there are very few romances that feature people in the fifty-plus demographic. WE LIKE TO GET RAILED TOO, YOU KNOW. Some of us, despite our advanced ages, are not in need of caretaking and are totally DTF. Maybe even more so than before, because our children are grown and we have the house to ourselves, I hope my own sons are not reading this. Anyway. Back to the book at hand. It was pretty silly and contrived, but it was a fast and easy read, which can be a nice distraction from the whole…international situation.

The End of My Life is Killing Me. In June 2020 this author had a cough, and went for a Covid test. She found out she had stage four metastatic lung cancer. The book is a collection of essays about that time and the years after, dealing with treatment, the US health insurance system, weird public perceptions about lung cancer (hint: it’s victim-blamey), and well-meaning friends who suggest things like juicing and positive thinking as curative measures. Honestly, this was pretty dull and grinding, although there were a few interesting observations.

Thanks Rachael for the fun question; I realized there are a few questions I never answered, and I will do so post-haste. In the meantime, here are some of the many flowering trees that have been blooming these past four weeks. I wish you could smell them! You’ll have to believe me. xo

Scentsitive

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Last week I channeled my inner teen and headed for the mall. As a side note, I mentally capitalize The Mall as there is but one in this city. Upon entering, I was immediately and pleasantly assaulted by the scent of Cinnzeo, which seems to be the modern answer to Cinnabon. It’s nice that, although physical stores are in decline, some things are still the same.

There were two specific reasons I was mall-shopping, and the first was that I was picking up my free bag of truffles from the new Lindt store. I had signed up for their special rewards program specifically to get free chocolates during my birthday month. They didn’t have strawberry or mint, but I did try a new fudge swirl. The lack of strawberry has been a low-key grievance in my house. I am never mad at either of my sons, but a year or so ago my younger son ate the last dark chocolate strawberry truffle that I had been saving, post-Galentines Day 2025, and I have never let him forget it. That flavour is hard to find and indeed, I have not seen it since early 2025. Remember when you ate the last dark chocolate strawberry and I never found it again? I’ll ask him, to which he responds that I never actually told him I was saving it and also it was in the basket with all the other Lindt truffles that were NOT being saved for a future, special occasion, known only to me.

Is it too much to ask that he reads my mind?

The second reason I was going to the mall was to buy a birthday gift for my mother. I had brought her a gift from Cambodia but I wanted to supplement that with her favourite vanilla-scented body lotion from Bath and Body Works. While I was there, I thought I would purchase a few lotions for myself. I don’t wear perfume, but I do like to choose a different scented body lotion based on my mood and that day’s activities.

I was approached with an offer of help by one of the salespeople, an extremely friendly and jolly woman around my age, with a haircut that can only be described as “fun.” I didn’t really need help, but I do like chatting with salespeople, particularly at a place like Bath and Body Works, where there is no commission. And although I have my favourite scents, I always like sniffing new ones. Every favourite scent was once a stranger, as no one says.

But it was so odd. Every time I reached for one of my favourites, the woman shook her head gravely. No, she’d say. You don’t want THAT one. Then she would steer me over to something very rose-forward and floral, and insist that it was perfect for me. I would nod, politely, and then go back and grab the my favourites, the scents that she insisted were Too Much. Oh, she would say, her lavender spikes bobbing slightly, her eyebrows raised. You…LIKE that? Hmm. And then she would start to steer me towards the vile-smelling peach lotions.

It’s not like I require agreement from customer service personnel on my personal scent choices, or that I fear their judgement, but it was awkward.

I wonder what her feeling was when she left work that day. I wonder if she went home and bemoaned the difficulty of working with customers who just would not listen to her. I wonder if I seemed like the exact right person for Peach Blossom or Rose Garden, and it was disappointing that I refused to be the person she wanted me to be.

Weekly Reading

This Is Not About Us. An ill-timed, crowd-pleasing apple cake brought to a septuagenarian’s funeral spurs a years-long feud between the sisters of the deceased, and that’s how this absolute delight of a book begins. I laughed so much throughout this gem; I could totally see similar things happening in my own family. What can I say, if you have a large extended family, there is never a shortage of drama! The book unfolds in vignettes, each one focusing on different branches of the family. If you are looking for a thick plot, this is not for you, but if you are looking for a wonderful slice of a family’s life with compelling and relatable characters, look no further! I loved every sentence! Interestingly, the author wrote the incredible Isola – which I also loved – but the two books could not be more different.

Say You’ll Remember Me. This was a perfect book for a road trip: easy to read, not complicated, happy ending. What more do you need? Two people fall madly in love but live far apart – can a long distance romance work? She is caring for a mother with dementia, he has a brand new veterinary practice and tons of debt. Can they make it work? Spoiler alert: of course they can. I liked how this book portrayed financial realities and also the difficulty of being a caregiver (note: mother with dementia is three years older than I am, lord have mercy). Please note the page about returning shopping carts.

Our road trip was a lot of fun. My mom enjoyed her gifts, including the apparently divisive vanilla scented lotions. Vanilla? You want vaNILLA? the fun-haired woman said to me, like I was stating a preference for BO mixed with skunk. We had a good time all around, plus, the snowstorms, cold weather, and gale-force winds took a break, and we had lovely warm temperatures. There was a lot of snow in the mountain passes, but the roads were clear and the driving was smooth.

It looks like a perfect week for gardening, we have lots of sunshine ahead of us. May the Fourth be with you, friends! xo

Pencil Marks

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My husband works out every day in the mid-to-late morning, and he uses our extensive speaker system rather than headphones, which means I can frequently hear what music he’s working out to. Instead of a carefully-curated, peppy and motivating playlist like the one I use, he just has a playlist of “songs that he likes,” which can lead to what I think is an eclectic soundtrack for weight lifting. I find it amusing, for the most part; a Taylor Swift song might follow Enter Sandman, and then we could suddenly be thrown into early-2000s hip-hop, after which is Crazy Train. But the other day the song Buy Dirt came on. I went downstairs and, upon seeing my crying self, my husband turned off the music.

He had the same level of baffled bewilderment as when I talked about White Wine in the Sun, as well as when we watched a recent Joni Mitchell tribute and Both Sides Now was performed. I just don’t get why it makes you so sad, he said. It’s a song about…clouds?

My whole life, I have been very emotionally moved by music, very frequently to tears, and not always are those songs obviously wrenching to others. Some are – Landslide, for example – but others, like Is Somebody Singing or Miley Cyrus’ The Climb can destroy me emotionally because of specific memories associated with them. Usually I can hear at least a few lines or maybe an entire verse of my own personal tear-jerking songs before welling up, but I didn’t even make it to “chasing dollar” in Buy Dirt. I don’t even know if I made it to the lyrics, honestly, before dissolving.

A few days later, when he watched me emotionally decompensate just thinking about the song in our silent house, my Man of Action deleted it from his playlist. I’m sick of it anyway, he said, but I really know he just didn’t want me to accidentally hear it.

It IS a moving song, but I was much more emotionally fragile than I have been in a long while, for a few reasons. Typically every month before my period, I have a day or two of fatigue and disrupted sleep, a couple of hot flashes and an elevated resting heart rate. This month, I have had to date fourteen solid days of that with no period in sight, plus a very upsetting new symptom I had never had before: no appetite. This lasted for days. Not only did I have no appetite, but I had revulsion for food. I love food! I love to eat! I am, like Andy Sipowicz, an enthusiastic eater! But there I was, pushing my pasta around my bowl like a picky child, asking if it tasted weird to anyone else. This lack of appetite was accompanied by an intense, constant, and unquenchable thirst, to the point that I started googling am I diabetic, signs of kidney disease, and is HRT right for me?

This was reason number one for my emotional fragility: I was running on days of poor sleep, a racing heart rate, and almost no food, with a bloated and extended torso from all the water I was gulping down. Not to mention the hormones! Or, lack thereof, I guess.

But there was another reason I was fragile, and that is that my older son left on Saturday for an eight-week solo backpacking trip around Central and Eastern Europe. I am truly so happy for him; we encouraged him in this, and he planned it all so well. It’s something I really wish I had done at his age, and I think it will be such a great learning and growing experience for him. He’s seeing the world! The birdy is really flying far!

But the truth about it, it all goes by real quick. Every single month we all marvel that it’s a new month, how did that happen, time goes so fast, it’s almost May, can you believe it. My god, time really does go by real quick. My son is off seeing the world, all by himself. This feels like a whole new era, and it’s a wonderful new era, but the pages are flying off the calendar at cartoonish speeds.

I have loved every single age and stage my sons have gone through, every one of them. (Even when we were thirteen? my younger son asked. Yes. Maybe even especially then! I have so much love for the growth and expansion of those early teen years.) I am so proud of them; I can barely believe my good fortune. Sometimes I feel like I will literally explode, I love them so much. I will literally explode and all that will be left of me will be a pile of heart-shaped confetti.

When I was a kid I loved the book Jane of Lantern Hill, and I remember reading the part where Jane asks her mother if they could ever stop time. At the time, I thought that was absurd, why would anyone want to do that? I couldn’t get older fast enough. I wanted to be grown, to be autonomous, to be on to the next thing.

Well. I don’t want to stop time, but it all goes by real quick.

I have had some tests and I am confident my doctor, who is a brilliant and progressive young woman, will have some solutions for my physical self. In the meantime, the present moment is what we have, and so I will be over here, sweatily appreciating it. Thank you, body, for bringing me this far in life. Thank you for being a wonderland that is doing miraculous things as my estrogen plummets the depths of the ocean. Thank you, deodorants, for existing. Thank you, modern world, for giving me washing machines to wash my extremely sweaty jammies every day and for the clean tap water that I can gulp down to compensate for this excessive perspiration.

My son has landed safely in Europe to start his adventure. My best friend Tara (HI TARA), whose eldest daughter has travelled solo extensively, texted me with the uplifting message that we raised our children to be independent, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they are. We did! Look at them fly!

Watch their pencil marks and the grass in the yard all grow up.

Weekly Reading

Simple Abundance. My dear friend Michelle (HI MICHELLE) had mentioned this book to me last year, and I decided to start reading the short daily essays on my birthday over the next year. It was a really lovely, uplifting experience. I think it probably would have been a bit better had I started in January as the book intends – each month builds on the months before – but it was still a wonderful reminder to look at the simple things in life and take joy in them.

Wilderness Tips. his is a reread, but it’s been a while! There are some really great stories in this collection, and in my current state of mind I was particularly moved by the last paragraphs in the last story, Hack Wednesday.

When The Cranes Fly South. DO YOU WANT TO READ A SUPER SAD BOOK THAT WILL MAKE YOU STARE OFF INTO THE DISTANCE FOR A LONG TIME? This is the book for you! In retrospect, maybe not the best choice for this past, emotionally fragile week. Wow, it’s sad. An elderly man, whose wife is now in dementia care, lives alone with his elkhound dog, and has home care come in four times a day (this is Sweden, and such things are realities! Yay Sweden). His son, quite rationally and reasonably, thinks that the giant dog is really too much for the situation. After all, the old man sleeps most of the day, the dog gets very little exercise, and he’s worried the old man will fall when he’s taking the dog out. Very reasonable and rational. But also, the dog is the man’s main companion and great love. As the man snoozes the day away, he dreams about his long life; his loving mother and kind of awful dad, his move to Northern Sweden as a young man, meeting his best friend and his wife, and his son’s childhood. It is a very moving story about breaking cycles, new generations, love, and what matters in life. Fun fact: this is translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies, and that was the name of one of my great-grandmas!

Zero-Sum. Before he left, my older son was telling us about his Managerial Economics course, and – as my husband and I both have Masters in Economics – I was extremely interested. It sounded like Managerial Economics was similar to Industrial Economics that I took back in 1996 or 1997. In any case, game theory featured heavily, which was very exciting to me. And then, my library holds came in and Zero-Sum was one of them! It was like my very own Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Anyway, I have never before read Joyce Carol Oates, which seems like a grave omission. Every short story in this collection contains a zero-sum game, and it is absolutely fascinating and almost breathtaking in its literary creativity. The writing is just so smart, and every story is such a brilliant and interesting topic. Some of the stories were a bit dystopian/ horror based for me, but most of them were diabolically good.

I am going on my own, much less exotic adventure this week: a road trip to visit my parents. That is, if the weather-warning level spring snowstorms stop for a couple of days. Hopefully there won’t be any avalanches! In the meantime, take care of yourselves and I’ll see you next week – when it will be May. Can you believe it? xo