Category Archives: Embrace the Season

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The “Isn’t Nature Wonderful” Edition

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I have taught hundreds of yoga students over the years, and I don’t like to play favourites – as my dear friend Tara (HI TARA), who teaches kindergarten once said, they’re all my favourites. But if I am being completely honest, I will paraphrase George Orwell and say that some students are more favourite than others, and one of those was a woman in my senior’s class named Judy.

Judy was in her mid-eighties when she joined my class, and she became a most devoted student. I looked forward to seeing her every week because she embodied my entire Life Goals: she brimmed with positivity and light, she was always happy to be there, and when a new student would join she would go out of her way to talk to them and make them feel welcome. She would come to class with her lipstick on, wearing a cute little yoga outfit, and she’d always be a bit early to chat with me about her orchids, her garden, her life. I adored her, and more than that, I want to be her.

One day we were chatting: it was early April in Calgary, which can be nice sometimes, but often it is cold and snowy, and that is exactly what it was like that day. I mentioned to Judy the very hopeful news that I saw a rabbit that was brown; it had lost its winter coat, which meant that warmer weather was coming soon. “Oh,” she sighed with pure delight, “Isn’t nature wonderful?” Ever since that day, which was five years ago now, I have thought isn’t nature wonderful at least once a day, but now, in the spring, it’s more like a dozen times a day.

Every single morning when I’m out walking I notice something new; every morning the world is a little more green, the trees are a little more leafed out, and something new is blooming. Isn’t nature wonderful?

My whole life this week has been overtaken by a different type of nature: the yard is being landscaped. The end result will be so exciting: lush grass for Rex to roll in, big beautiful garden beds to be filled, and the colourful plants that will fill them. The journey to this result, however, is wild.

Within a day, our lawn was ripped up, giant piles of dirt taking its place. Every day there is immense progress, and I am very much looking forward to this journey’s end, a beautiful new yard. That’s a week or so away, though, and until then, I will just revel in the wonders of nature.

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The “Isn’t Nature Wonderful” Edition

Ready For Veggies

When my husband retired, I received an enormous amount of unsolicited advice about this event; most people I talked to spoke in worried tones about what my husband was going to do all day. I find this amusing because since the beginning of February I feel like I’ve hardly seen him. He’s been working on this:

Isn’t it amazing? He built the whole thing by himself: measuring and cutting wood, shovelling gravel and dirt, rototilling the ground, and putting up the fencing to keep out the deer. We are going to be very busy this weekend with all the planting. Stay tuned for many, many updates on the harvest.

What Did I Do Again

There are lots of details in my day to day life that I think I will never forget, but I do. I bought this five-year garden journal to keep track of when I plant, how the plants grow, and when everything is ready to be harvested. It has grid pages for planning, and lots of room for details about the varietals of the plants. For example, some of the raspberries need to be completely cut down in the fall, some in the spring, and some only need old wood pruning. There is zero way I am going to keep all of this straight without a written record.

World, Meet Friedrich

While we were at the garden centre, my husband noticed a display of gnomes. I love all gnomes but I really want one to speak to me in order to bring it into the fold. He held his hand over each gnome until I nodded, and now I have Friedrich.

Garden Fashion

My husband gave me this tee for Valentine’s Day, thinking that it would be the perfect gardening attire, what with all the gnomes.

It’s Asparagus Season, Bitches

Asparagus used to grow wild on this property, years ago, when they used a different irrigation method. It’s too dry for that to happen now, so I am just enjoying the asparagus at the grocery store.

All the local gardeners have warned against growing Brussels sprouts, because they are magnets for pest infestation, so, like the asparagus, I am consoling myself by purchasing bags of them at Costco. Would you believe that I’ve never roasted Brussels sprouts before? I have always enjoyed eating roasted Brussels sprouts – and my friend Sammi (HI SAMMI) always cooks them in her air fryer and my god, they are amazing – but I’ve never actually made them myself. Why? I have no idea. But I did this month and drizzled them with a balsamic glaze, and they were delicious.

Outfit of the Month

I went to lunch with some girlfriends a few weeks ago, and it was a gorgeous day, perfect for just a light layer and some unlined tall boots. My boot collection is the reason I still love skinny jeans, despite them purportedly being very out of style. Also? I will be 49 in a couple of days, and I feel that my time for caring about what is in style is in the rearview mirror. Skinny jeans and tall boots for LIFE.

This long black sweater is from Lululemon, circa 2015. It’s a perfect sweater to wear out for lunch, but not really to wear around the house when anything practical is required, because the drapes and folds, while cute and fun, get in the way of everything. My friend Sammi, of air fryer Brussels sprouts fame, gave me that scarf for my birthday YEARS ago. In fact, I think Rex is the newest part of my outfit. Not that he was accessorizing me at lunch – there are many dog-friendly patio places around here, but the thought of taking my big galoompa to a restaurant is alarming – but he makes for a cute photo.

Speaking of cute photos, on our hike last Sunday I was trying to take photos of the flowers, when Rex snuck in front of me and sat down. I’m a flower! Take a picture of me! Well, who am I to say no?

Ah, nature. It really is wonderful. And so are you, dear friends. If you have any Favourites you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear all about them. xo

Theme Songs

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Spring Has Sprung, The Grass Is Riz

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

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

But Now They Only Block The Sun

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

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

Girl, Put Your Spotify On

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

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

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

Whoa Here She Comes

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

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

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

Weekly Reading

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

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

Sassy, Sea Breeze, Stationary, Smoking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Reading

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

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

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

A Tuesday In The Life

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Whenever I read a post about someone’s day to day life, I find myself fascinated. I would like to say that I am highly interested in the everyday mundanity we all experience as a whole, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the details that make our lives unique, and I am, it is true. I also, I think, am extremely nosy.

But I do love those posts and I often think of doing one myself, but then, as I am going through my day, I wonder is this interesting in any way? Well. I have never regretted recording tiny details of my life, as I often look back on posts fondly and with great nostalgia. Did I really spend precious minutes of my day doing Halloween crafts with the children? Did I really make playdough, go to the park, stand in the playground for hours, cut out pieces of milk cartons to make birdhouses? Did I really teach yoga, grocery shop for hours, spend inordinate amounts of time slicing up fruit? It’s so fun to see these snapshots, and so I offer you one of this past Tuesday, where I do grocery shop, but none of the other things apply.

4:10 am. I wake up – no need for an alarm – and toddle downstairs to the kitchen. The very first thing I do in the morning is start the coffeemaker, which I have filled and prepared the day before. Recently Elisabeth (HI ELISABETH) was talking about everyone’s favourite kitchen appliance, and no one was saying coffee maker. No one, that is, except me. No coffee, no prana, as they say, or, more truthfully, no coffee, someone is going to get stabbed. Anyway, first I start the coffee, then I drink water, perform my morning ablutions – brushing my teeth and hair, washing my face, and moisturizing (ALWAYS with SPF!!!) – and then I get dressed in my first of many, as Big Edie would say, costume changes. This one consists of a yoga tank, cropped leggings, and a tee. Here’s a little Nicole By The Numbers Fact: I drink around 4 litres of water a day, half of which happens before 10:00 am. Also before 10:00 am, circling back to my first point, I drink an entire pot of coffee. What can I say, I like my liquids. I also brush my teeth at least six times a day; even when I had a life in which I was out and about a lot, I would keep a travel toothbrush and paste in my bag. I like a minty-fresh mouthfeel for most of the day, what can I say. Back to the routine, where I am not going to detail every last toothbrushing and glass of water, so as to not bore my dear readers. Just know that those things are happening in the background. Anyway! At this point I let Rex out for snuggles and to feed him, and then open up my laptop. This is my designated blog-reading time. I might read one or two posts at some other time during the day, but this is when I get the majority of it done. If you’ve had an incoherent comment from me, likely it’s 4:45 and my coffee hasn’t activated my brain yet.

It’s also the time where I read a poem before getting on my yoga mat, and I’m currently revisiting my favourite Mary Oliver collection. The baby redbirds, they don’t even know they have wings, and if you know, you know.

5:20 am. This is my time for yoga and meditation, interrupted only to say goodbye to my younger son, who starts work at 6.

6:15 am. Workout! On Tuesdays I do a little extra cardio, which means elliptical and Peloton, and I also do some stupid strength training for my stupid bones.

The gym! Nicole’s Cardio Corner is in the lower left corner.
All the weights, 90% of which I don’t use.

7:25 am. I look like this after a workout; not to be too gross, but you could wring my clothes out to make a solid puddle of sweat, so now it’s time to change my costume. Is this a function of all my liquid intake? Or do I need liquids because of my sweating problem? Who can say. I put on a non-sweaty yoga tank, full length yoga pants, a long-sleeved top, and my coat and light hikers, because it’s Rex’s favourite time of day – walkies! I puff on some face powder, swipe on some mascara and tinted lip balm, because I am a very vain person who does not leave the house with a bare face, even if it’s just to walk the dog. Tuesdays are the day I launder all the sheets, so I throw those in the washer before I leave. For today’s walk I decide to take us on a loop down to the lake, and to see the spring changes in this gorgeous weeping tree by a nearby pond. My son tells me that these trees may look pretty, but they are hell for the grounds crew at his golf course. Ah well, I neither am part of the grounds crew, nor do we have this kind of tree on our property, so I will enjoy it as such.

9:00 am. After our walk, it’s time for my smoothie; for anyone interested, it includes cashew milk and nut butter, a little cinnamon, a frozen banana, and about eight cups of spinach. Soon I’ll be using spinach from my new garden! I wash up the blender and the rest of the smoothie accoutrements; this will be the first of many times I do the dishes during the day. Yes, I do have a dishwasher, but I would never consider for a minute putting the blender in there, nor the plastic strainer I use to wash the spinach.

9:25 am. I put the sheets in the dryer, and throw a load of towels into the washer. Now it’s time to shower, moisturize (don’t forget the SPF!), put on makeup and clothes (Costume Change Number Three), and do my hair. I also give the bathroom a quick cleaning, put the sheets back on the beds (who has the energy to actually fold fitted sheets?), and go down to the garden to see what my husband is doing. He’s busy with landscape fabric and wood, and upon looking at the time, I hustle to the office for something very special.

10:45 am. It’s time to get ready for one of the highlights of my day – a writing date with Suzanne! (HI SUZANNE).

Rex is my everyday writing partner; he’s very helpful.

12:45 pm. After catching up with Suzanne, I manage to hit, and slightly surpass, my writing goal of 1000 words. The towels are done, so I fold them, and I go downstairs for lunch and hair supplements; I wash up the blender and smoothie accoutrements, AGAIN, and get ready for the next big thing on my list.

1:15 pm. It’s time for a Costco trip, and when I enter the store I experience an immediate sense of doom. There are people everywhere, the lineups are snaking all the way down the store, and it takes me several minutes to just work my way through the crowd to get to the aisles I need. I do manage it, and happily, by the time I finish my shopping the crowds have all dispersed and there is no lineup at all. Sometimes the Costco gods smile down at me. I think it was because I rescued an errant cart from the parking lot. I drive home, where both sons greet me – my younger son finishes work at 2, and my older son, whose university is close by, stopped by for dinner and to do his laundry. This is an unusual, but welcome surprise for a Tuesday. The boys bring the groceries in – my husband is still working on the garden – and I am faced with the overwhelming task of putting everything away.

3:15 pm. Everything is put away, and I start some dinner prep. I’m making Suzanne’s Fall Salad, with modifications, because it is a Suzanne kind of day; I spread out chickpeas on a tea towel to dry and candy some pecans. I take a break from food to brush Rex’s teeth and to give him his dental treat; while he’s outside chewing and probably rolling in the grass, preparing to bring the outside in, I chop up sweet potatoes and cook some quinoa, I make a maple-Dijon dressing for salad, and, for the guys, take some chicken out of the freezer to thaw. I prep the sweet potatoes, chickpeas, and quinoa to go into the oven, and I do the dishes. Again.

4:05 pm. It’s a really beautiful day, so I decide to pop out on the deck to do a little reading and Duolingo while the chickpeas roast. I catch Rex in the act of rolling, which means I’ll be sweeping up later.

I read for a while, and Rex keeps me company. I’m reading My Last Innocent Year, which is excellent so far.

5:00 pm. Time for a musical interlude; I play the piano for a little bit while the sweet potatoes and quinoa are in the oven. My general rule is three songs, of any length or style, unless I’m learning something new. After that, I sweep the floor, I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

5:45 pm. I put the chicken in the air fryer, put the salad together, and slice the baguette. I also perform the very important job of filling the coffee maker for tomorrow. A few hours ago, my younger son, who was heading downstairs to work out, asked and answered his own question about what was for dinner, as he saw me prepping earlier. “Oh! The fun salad!” See how much joy Suzanne brings into my life? Dinner time is our time to catch up on everything that happened during the day; all our days are very different, so it’s a fun time. After dinner the guys do the dishes while I read for a little bit, before going upstairs for the final Costume Change of the day.

7:15 pm. I start my nighttime process; I put on pajamas, I brush and floss my teeth, I brush out my hair and apply a scalp serum from The Ordinary, I wash my face and apply retinol eye and night creams and foot lotion. Then I choose tomorrow’s workout outfit and take it to the bathroom downstairs, where I will start all over again tomorrow. I read on the couch for a little while, chatting with my husband as he watches TV. He worked for seven solid hours, laying landscape fabric and cutting wood for the fencing, and so he’s a bit tired.

8:30 pm. I’m tired! Time for bed. I head upstairs and nestle into my cozy bed, ready to start again tomorrow.

It’s April!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Reading

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

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

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

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

Gardeners and Flowers

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Before she was part of the Real Housewives franchise, Carole Radziwill wrote a really excellent memoir entitled What Remains, which I have read many times. There is a part in the book where she and her husband’s cousin, who is none other than JFK Jr (spoiler alert, everyone dies around her), have a discussion about marriage. They have a theory that in a successful marriage there is one Gardener and one Flower; it’s possible a marriage could work with two Gardeners, but never with two Flowers.

I have thought about this theory approximately one million times since first reading this book in 2006.

I am, of course, a literal Gardener; it’s almost actual gardening season around here, and we have SO much to do, to plan, to plant. But I have always believed that, in the Carole Radziwill and JFK Jr context, I am also a figurative Gardener. I am a nurturing, mother-hen type of person who likes to make sure loved ones are special and cared for. That said, my husband is not really a Flower, so I have always thought that we are one of those double-Gardener marriages.

Except sometimes, I think I am a Flower, or, at least, I’m turning into one.

The area in which my Flower-ness becomes most apparent is in travel, or more specifically, travel planning. I love to travel, I love to see new things and have new experiences. I love it all! What I don’t love, however, is dealing with the logistical details. I am capable of dealing with logistical details – I can and have in the past booked flights and hotels and activities – but I find it boring and tedious.

Someone who does not find it boring and tedious, and, in fact, who shines at travel planning is my husband. The man can spend hours researching places to go, things to see and do, and, importantly, how to physically get there. He loves doing it and so over the course of our marriage I have just stepped back to the point where I have ceded all control.

I am completely a Flower. We are now at the point where I only barely know not only our travel itineraries, but I also barely know where we are going. If anything, this attitude of just being along for the ride increases my enjoyment of travel exponentially. I’m like Rex going for a car ride; I’m just excited to be going somewhere, it doesn’t hardly matter where.

Now that my husband is retired and the kids are grown, we have so much flexibility for travel, and to that end we have a few big trips booked for this year, plus some smaller ones, and one of those is coming up this weekend. My husband and I are going to Las Vegas.

I am a complete non-gambler – I do not enjoy it in any way – but Las Vegas is just so much fun; this will be my fourth time going and I am very excited. Needless to say, I did none of the bookings and had nothing to say about the actual itinerary, other than to enthusiastically say “That sounds fun!” every time my husband brought up an idea. My husband has booked us a few shows, and other than that, I don’t know what we will be doing. It doesn’t matter! I’m just excited to go!

So clearly, I am a Flower.

One of my earliest memories is one of complete and utter emotional devastation upon learning that flowers die in the winter. To be fair, I was an incredibly sensitive and dramatic child and I probably experienced utter emotional devastation daily, if not more bi-hourly. However, I have a very clear memory of devastation about the fate of flora during the winter, winter being a very long season in Calgary. How or why this occurred to me, I don’t know, but I would guess that there was a book about seasons involved; I clearly remember my level of hysteria that my dad tried to quell by telling me that the flowers come back again in the spring. This was small comfort indeed, because of a Very Big Idea that Very Small Nicole had, and that is that when I grew up, I wanted to be a flower.

I was probably three, and so I had no concept of symbolism or anything else, and I obviously had only the most tenuous ideas about what constituted growing up. I genuinely thought it was an interspecies free-for-all, and that becoming an adult meant that you could literally morph into any kind of animal, vegetable, or mineral.

So you can imagine my devastation when I realized just how brief my life on this mortal coil would be after achieving adulthood. I guess I believed that my life would follow this rough trajectory: I would be a child, I would go to school, I would be grown up, I would immediately change from human to flower form, and then I would die. I would die in the winter, thus missing Christmas and a visit from Santa.

I don’t know at what point I realized that my anxiety about an instantaneous winter death was unfounded, but eventually I went on with my little human life, enjoying flowers for what they were and not as a mirror of my future self.

Weekly Reading

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good. This was an absolutely delightful little book of connected short stories about a murderous little old lady. It is very clever and quite hilarious. It is translated from the Swedish, so there are many wonderful Swedish tidbits in here, and one made me genuinely squeal out loud, thanks to Were You Raised By Wolves. Do you listen to that podcast? If not, why not? Do you hate joy? The podcast is a beam of light in this dark world. Anyway, there is a little line in this book about Christmas Eve, and one of the characters mentions that the “children will have watched Donald Duck.” I knew EXACTLY what they were referring to, thanks to Were You Raised By Wolves, and if you don’t know, look up their Kalle Anka episode. Obviously it involves Donald Duck, but it is so much more. It is PURE delight, and so is this book. 

Dual Citizens. In the past six months, I have been made aware of a conversation in the writing and publishing community about the role of prologues in novels, and the current thinking seems to be just DON’T. I didn’t really think about it too much prior to these past six months, but now I really notice when there is a prologue, and what, if any, value is added. And I will say that the prologue – and epilogue, for that matter – in this book not only does not add to the book, but they actively subtract from it, in my view. Particularly since there seems to be a strange discrepancy; in the prologue the character is going into labour at 38 weeks, but later in the book she is said to be “overdue.” So that actively took me out of what is otherwise a really wonderful story, with incredible writing and prose, about two sisters and their narcissistic, neglectful mother. There are some interesting character arcs and a message about understanding others as we gain life experience. Some of the imagery is a little heavy-handed and slightly unbelievable – sleeping with wolves, really? – but this is a really excellent character-driven novel. I guess we can excuse the prologue.

Is anyone else totally exhausted from the time change? I SURE AM. Other than “Lose A Precious Hour Of Sleep” day, it was a lovely weekend. We attended a surprise birthday party for my friend Joy (HI JOY) and, unrelated to that, I made another cake from Julie’s You Are Human And You Need Cake book, and I took Rex for a nice long Sunday morning hike. It was an attempt to change my attitude when I can’t change the circumstances, the circumstances being the ridiculous ritual of shifting the clocks hither and thither semi-annually for absolutely no reason. ANYWAY. This Flower is heading for bright lights and (relatively) late nights, and will see you on the other side. Take care, my beautiful flower friends. xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Leap Year Edition

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Happy Leap Year, everyone!

Our last Leap Year was in 2020, and thinking about it now, how strange that time was, having an extra day just ahead of being locked down and going through a global pandemic. When I look at my blog from February 2020, it is all very cheerful and clearly I had no idea what was about to occur. I also, it seems, did not mark the leap day in any way at all.

Well, I shall not make that mistake this year! I have had a really lovely month filled with good things, so why not extend it a day?

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Leap Year Edition

The E is for Environment

One of my favourite podcasts, Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend, has a new segment called Podcast Pals Product Picks, and as you can imagine, I am here for this kind of content. One of the guests talked about E Cloths, which to my mind means ELECTRONIC cloths, but the E in this case stands for Environment. Anyway, they are special microfibre cloths that use only water for cleaning, and by the time the podcast guest finished talking about the streak-free shines on all of his glass and stainless surfaces, I was scrambling to order them. Here, take my money. We have a lot of windows in this house, not to mention mirrors and my shiny lacquered Yamaha piano, and I am never able to get them really clean. I will THINK they are clean, and then the sunlight will come in a certain way, and I will feel the kind of despair that accompanies what one thinks is a job well done, but was actually wasted time and effort.

NO MORE!

Listen, I do not know what magic is involved here, but all I can say is that they really work. Apparently these cloths are somehow antibacterial and antimicrobial and require no extra cleaning supplies, but that is a bridge too far for me. I may use hippie cleaning products, but I still want to use cleaning products. I’m happy to shine my glass and stainless appliances with just water and E Cloths, but I’m not relying on them to, you know, wipe up food-related messes or clean the bathroom.

The Big Ass’k

I have been on a lifelong quest to be less dissatisfied with my hair, and I honestly don’t think I will ever actually love my hair. I have issues, is what I’m saying, for many reasons which I will not go into here so as to not bore and depress us all. Nora Ephron once said that not worrying about your hair anymore is the secret upside to being dead, and when I read that, I finally felt very seen in a way I never had before.

My lifelong quest means that I am always on the lookout for new hair products. I bought this Cake volumizing product on a whim, and also because it was called The Big Ass’k, and honestly, I feel that the name called to me. My anaconda don’t want none unless…

Anyway. I like this product a lot, it’s really great for non-shampoo days to add volume, and it smells fantastic.

Look at that shiny clean mirror!

Actual Cake

I think I bought Julie van Rosendaal’s cake cookbook back in January 2023, with the eventual resolution to make every recipe in the book. My younger son sternly reminded me of this resolution a couple of weeks ago, chastising me for falling down on my goals. To that end, I tried a recipe that I have been wanting to try since obtaining the book: the Jos Louis cake. I have never had a Jos Louis in my life, and neither had anyone in my family, so we could not compare this to the original. Mine was not as pretty as Julie’s, but wow, was it a delicious cake. It might be the best cake I’ve tried from that cookbook to date.

Now, I want to note that this is not a simple recipe. There are many steps and it takes a while to get assembled. Also, I have no idea how one would cover the cake in ganache without it spilling all over the sides of the platter, but no matter. As they say in Beauty and the Beast, true beauty is found within.

Let My Lust Open The Door

I have a new favourite podcast called Bad On Paper; the two lovely young hosts are authors who talk about their writing processes, as well as about books and life in general. This checks every box for me! For Valentine’s Day they had an episode about – wait for it – obscure erotica. One of the hosts talked about a book concerning a pansexual Abraham Lincoln who – again, wait for it – has a penis fight with the Emperor of Japan to see who will – wait for it – colonize the moon. I could not be less interested in such a storyline BUT the other author brought up a book called Unhinged: An Erotic Door Romance.

The host said, “If you’re wondering ‘Is this a book about a woman who fucks her door?’ well, you’d be right!” and at that moment, I knew I had to read it. After all, let’s never forget I read the Governor General Award-winning book Bear about a woman entering into a sexual relationship with a bear – and not, as my son asked, a big hairy gay guy, an actual bear. Upshot of that, for those of you who don’t remember, bears give great oral but are maybe not so good with intercourse. Or, as I like to say now, intercoursing. Anyhoo, back to the door. This little piece of door-related erotica was well worth the $1.30 on Kindle plus the 45 minutes it took to read. I mean, not to spoil anything, but this is no ordinary door. It was made from wood from a tree that – wait for it – Zeus, Greek god, fucked. You read that right! Zeus Harvey Weinsteined an oak tree and bam, we have a sentient – and, apparently sexy – door. More spoilers! The door can sometimes take on a human form! Sexiness ensues!

But wait, there’s more!

The host of the podcast mentioned that Squeak, erotica having to do with balloon animals, was her second choice in books, and, hilariously high off of the image of a doorknob wearing a condom, I bought it on Kindle for another $1.30. Sadly, this one was disappointing. I mean, it wasn’t really entertaining to read, it was just mostly confusing. There’s a three-way? And two of them are partially balloon animals? But they maybe also turned the woman into a balloon animal by having sex with her? But I’m not sure? In a different kind of universe? I really don’t know, but it only took me about 25 minutes to read so it wasn’t a huge investment or anything. Funny thing to note: the author is clearly using a pseudonym, but there is a real photo of her and a description that she lives with her husband, seven cats, and two dogs in North Carolina and you know what, I like this level of author detail. I also appreciate her level of creativity because doors and balloon animals are not items that I have ever thought of in a sexual way before, but now I’m looking at my doors for a little too long. They seem to be getting uncomfortable.

Girl, Put Your Snowshoes On

Let me tell you, the best thing about having a retired, active husband – other than afternoon delight wherein I pretend he is a door – is the willingness to do fun things any day of the week, and the best thing about having my specific retired, active husband is that he likes to buy accessories for us to do such things. In the fall he bought us snowshoes, which I frankly thought would be a waste of money. After all, we had just bought cross-country skis. This is probably why the snowfall has been so low this year, I’m sorry, everyone. Anyway, after kind of a hectic month of not doing anything winter sport related, we decided to give the snowshoes a whirl last week, and let me tell you, I am obsessed.

It’s hiking in the mountains, but with snow!

If it wasn’t a 45 minute drive to get to snow, I would snowshoe every single day, this is how much I love it.

Outfit of the Month

I had a real Ladies Who Lunch experience with my girlfriends a few weeks ago; we went for a nice lunch downtown and then poked around in various expensive boutiques in the area. When we walked into one store called, appropriately enough, The Little Boutique, I had no intention on purchasing anything. I was just along for the ride; the clothes all seemed pretty expensive and nothing seemed to call out to me. That is, of course, until I saw a soft, drapey black sweater on the sale rack.

One might argue that I needed another drapey black sweater like I needed another leg, but I felt the material and it was so incredibly soft. It was also originally priced at $509.

I mean, who would pay that? Not me, but it was marked down to $119, which is still a lot for a sweater I did not need. But then it was 25% off of that price, and you know what, I am not made of stone. $85 for a sweater that was originally $509? Who could say no to that? NOT ME.

Something has been happening to my body lately that is just out of my control. I am in great shape, I am strong and flexible and healthy, and I am also losing my waistline. It is just…disappearing. Where is it going? I don’t know. I am developing the menopausal woman’s waistline, which is to say no waistline at all. My torso is turning into a rectangle; this is a fact, and it’s one that I have come to accept, and so having a long, drapey sweater that skims that rectangle? Yes. I’ll take it.

I debuted The Expensive Sweater at my Galentine’s party, paired with my old faithful Lululemon City Sleek pants, which have been on the Favourite Things many times already; they are actual pants that feel like yoga pants. What could be better? Other than getting an expensive sweater for 16% of the original price, of course.

I hope you all had a wonderful February full of lovely things – if you’d like to tell me about them, I’m all ears. xo