Category Archives: Fleeting Time

Renaming The Boyhouse to The Sugar Shack, at least for today

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There is no question that I am not gifted artistically. I am a person who couldn’t, say, draw a car without having a car directly in front of her and even then it would be a strange, stickman-like car. Things that normal people might find easy are terrifyingly difficult to me, like gift wrapping or sewing a button on a pair of pants. Actually, the last time I attempted to sew a button on a pair of pants, I accidentally cut a hole in the butt and also ended up with a thick snarl of thread behind the button. When the kids were little, the kinds of crafts we did were things like “decorate this paper heart with stickers” or similar non-difficult ideas. I was always more of a “make your own playdough” mom, rather than the kind would would make pine cone reindeer, if you know what I mean. I know a number of women who have taken up things like knitting or crocheting or even cross-stitch as a way of relaxation, but to me that would be akin to checking myself into a rubber room. That adult colouring craze from a while back? No. I can’t.

So when I do something that requires hand-eye coordination and it actually does work out, it is viewed in this house as next thing to a miracle. Therefore, there was much excitement about this:

My husband came upstairs from his workout and said “My god, it’s actually a heart!”

I know, babe. I know.

We aren’t really Buy Each Other Gifts For Valentine’s Day people; fifty percent of us are allergic to flowers and pollen, I don’t really like having big boxes of chocolates to consume, and I have enough jewelry to last me a lifetime. To be honest, even before kids we didn’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day (except…well…you know…) but these days I just like to bake all the things for every commercial and non-commercial Hallmark and non-Hallmark holiday.

Sundays are a big cooking day for me; I usually bake some snacks (which last maybe a day or two in this house) and I always make a big Sunday dinner, complete with dessert. I decided I wanted to make a heart-shaped cake but my skills in this department are, as mentioned before, seriously lacking. So I used this tutorial from my friend Maija (HI MAIJA) which is so easy even I couldn’t mess it up. I thought about making a red velvet cake – I hadn’t made one since I helped a friend with a baby shower, and that baby is now going into kindergarten – but the excessive use of red food colouring is unappealing. Instead, I made a strawberry cake with a cream cheese icing, tinted just a little bit. It was a major hit, and very easy.

The most important thing here is to make sure your pans are the same size. Otherwise, super easy.

Have I mentioned that my grade seven student is super into the “Circles and Area” unit of math? Have I also ever mentioned that at one point in grade twelve I was known as the “Conics Goddess” for my mastery of the conics unit? I told my husband that and he was less impressed with my conics prowess than I would have hoped. I think his exact words were “That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard in my life.” Well, I never.

If I can do it, you can too!

I also made and frosted 112 sugar cookies. Why would I make so many, you ask? I really have no idea. I wanted to send some in to the grade six class, but the teacher suggested that since the class is conjoined with another, it would be better to either send in no treats or enough for both classes. Since I realized that my years at elementary school are rapidly coming to a close, I could not and would not send zero cookies. This is my last chance to send Valentine’s Day treats to school and I am going to go out on top I was thinking to myself in a crazy, semi-hormonal way. I had some dough in the freezer left over from Christmas, but with all the frenzy surrounding November and December this year, I hadn’t marked if it was a full batch or not. I made an entire full batch, and used the frozen dough which was, I soon realized, indeed a full batch. One hundred and twelve cookies.

I realized that I have been asked for this recipe many times, so I am going to put it here. I am not going to be modest, because it’s not my recipe, it’s actually my mom’s. They are the best goddamn sugar cookies you will ever have in your life. They were the best cookies when I was a kid, and my mom made these for us and our friends, and they are the best cookies now. They are the cookies that I always get complimented on. Ten-year-old boys have stopped me in the playground to ask me to send their mom the recipe. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE BEST COOKIE EVER. I make them at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and for school birthday treats in lieu of cupcakes. They are easy, foolproof, you can make them with your kids, and you can freeze the dough for up to six months. I make the dough ahead of time so I only have to roll it out when I’m baking.

Now, they are not vegan. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, remotely healthy. But these are TREATS. You could probably sub in coconut oil for butter and maybe aquafaba for egg replacement, but I don’t. They are for my kids, they love them as-is, and it’s nice to make a recipe that was my mom’s. One day I will say that this has been handed down over the generations, but I think I need at least one more generation to do that.

Nicole’s Mom’s Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

3 cups flour

Cream together sugar, butter, and vanilla. Add eggs and beat well. Mix in baking powder, salt, and flour.

Make the dough into a two or three balls, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least two hours. You could also freeze the dough for later use.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (or 325 if using convection oven) and line baking sheets with parchment paper. This is an important step! Don’t forget the parchment paper! Roll out chilled dough on a floured surface. Cut into shapes. Bake for ten minutes for the perfect, soft cookie.

When cooled, frost and decorate as desired. Since I am kind of lazy, I like to just spread a delicious buttercream on top and add sprinkles.

Nicole’s Buttercream Frosting

1/2 cup very soft butter

4 cups icing sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2-3 tablespoons milk

colour, if desired

Cream butter, then add icing sugar in 1/2 cup increments. Add vanilla. Add milk until desired consistency is reached. Whip it on high for a minute to get a really fluffy frosting. Enjoy!

 

Sweatin’ to the Oldies

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I was driving home from yoga on Tuesday when I heard on the radio that Southern Alberta is under an extreme cold warning; Calgary is NOT included in this warning. I looked at the dashboard and the temperature read minus 26. What does a city have to do to get an extreme cold warning around here?

It’s already started to warm up, thankfully, and the streets are merely a mess of mushy snow and frozen-over ridges, which is much better than the sheer ice/ snow piles that they were. This morning I decided to wrap up warmly and take Barkley to the dog park since it was minus 15, which is my personal cut-off. I regretted the decision upon arrival but powered through, because this fuzzy little face was so happy.

Who’s a good doggy? Barkley is! Barkley’s a good doggy!

The grade seven gym class, having completed the Dance Unit, with their foray into the Cadillac Ranch and Cotton Eyed Joe line dances, are now in the Cardiovascular Health unit. Yesterday they participated in Tai Bo. Tai Bo! With Billy Blanks! The general consensus was that the video used was “creepy.” Creepy or not, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall to see 12 and 13 year old kids doing Tai Bo.

I do not know how the curriculum is created, but it seems to have a very large Nineties push. I wonder if step aerobics will be next. Oh, how I loved step aerobics. I would probably still love step aerobics, given the chance. I remember going through the group workout schedule in university and being able to attend such classes as Step and Pump, Interval Step, and Boxercise. Those were the days, when I would don my sports bra, shorts, and – inexplicably – ball cap for a workout between actual academic classes.

I just now remembered why I wore a ball cap to work out in. It was because of my extremely layered Rachel haircut; it was impossible to keep the hair out of my face otherwise.

Continuing with the video workouts, perhaps Sweatin’ to the Oldies will have a chance to make a comeback. I earnestly, and without irony, like Richard Simmons. Although for these kids, “The Oldies” could be defined as anything between 1995-2005, songs which often seem to me as “just released.” Maybe he has a “twerking” workout. A twerkout, as it were.

Discovery: the entire collection of Sweatin’ to the Oldies is available on Amazon for $282.53, which seems like a lot, but there is only one left in stock, so I guess Amazon knows what it’s doing.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! Stay warm. xo

http://giphy.com/gifs/richard-simmons-rCSeweOMD0v2o

 

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl

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This morning I heard Copacabana on the way home from yoga, and it set the tone for my whole day. I have been doing the merengue and the cha-cha all day, humming about yellow feathers in my hair and a dress cut down to there. At least I know all the words to Copacabana, which makes it a little less crazy, unlike the time I had Fancy by Bobby Gentry stuck in my head. I only really knew the words Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down so I basically had that on repeat for a few days. I would much rather sing about the hottest spot north of Havana.

My friend and I were walking our dogs and talking about the vast amount of food our sons consume each week. We joked that food preparation, in a house with pre-teen and teenage boys, is the equivalent of a part-time job. Since I have the irritating personality trait of needing to empirically quantify any such claim, I actually started noting down how much time I actually do spend grocery shopping, planning and preparing meals, baking, doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. The number of hours I spend doing those things per week was actually astonishing and I wish I hadn’t had the urge to do the math.

For one thing, I realize that this job is just going to get bigger and bigger for several years, and then, when the boys leave home, it is going to be gone, completely GONE, and I am going to be left in my empty kitchen, singing Landslide softly to myself while wondering what to do with all these cookies.

That, right there, is the reason I cannot wish away time, even if every single Tuesday I think to myself What? It’s only Tuesday? I don’t want to wish my life away. It’s already the end of January and life often feels like it’s a cartoon of pages flying off the calendar.

Anyway, with all the awful, terrifying, and disheartening things happening in the world, I am choosing to focus on my own backyard. There are lots of opportunities to make the world a better place, and as I said to my neighbour the other day, efforts that seem small in the grand scheme of things are actually not small at all to the people being helped. It’s a good reminder.

I am also focusing a bit on my literal backyard, because this happened:

 

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We have a huge backyard and when the kids were small they would spend hours out there, playing with Barkley and shooting water guns and running around. They are past that stage now, and I convinced my husband that a trampoline would be the cure for all that ails us.

tramapoline

It arrived in pieces on Friday and my husband and I spent four hours on Saturday putting it together. FOUR HOURS. It was well worth it though, since it has been fairly mild for the past couple of weeks. We’ve all enjoyed it so much already and I’m looking forward to summer, when our house can become the neighbourhood hangout. I’m sure my kitchen time will increase substantially with a group of teen boys in my backyard, but it will be well worth it.

Be well, friends. xo

If it’s not Scottish it’s crap.

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I have been browsing through a Facebook page for a brand-new, just-opened-in-November, Mexican resort. On the page are the sort of reviews one might expect: terribly bitter complaints about some small bit of incomplete construction or a delay in service on opening week, complaints about having to walk fifty steps from the pool in order to obtain nachos and margaritas, anger over the Teen Club being restricted to 13-17 year-old people when one’s son is 10 and wanted to enter said Teen Club to play video games, and extreme disappointment in the resort upholding a dress code for the fancy restaurants despite said dress code being clearly indicated on the website.

However, this morning I came across this glowing review:

“Our group has experienced many resorts and this is by far the best for me, lots to do…food is great, room service food is good, food at the restaurants is good, top shelf booze, pools are amazing. Put your anxiety and worries away, you’ll love it. If you need anything the brown shirt people will help you with almost anything to make your stay as enjoyable as possible.”

Ah yes, put your anxiety away because the brown shirt people are there.

I feel that this review could have been better worded.

Today was Parent-Teacher Interviews for the junior high, and believe me when I say that there is no injustice faced like that of a grade six student heading off to class with the knowledge that his brother is home for the day. Life, as we all know very well, is not fair. In an attempt to assuage these resentful feelings, I whipped up a batch of cherry muffins, to be eaten warm when the long-suffering sixth grader came home.

Small digression: I have, on many occasions, poked fun at my old copy of the Lutheran Ladies’ Family Favourites, particularly because of their truly astonishing variety of Meat and Macaroni Jello Salads – an actual section in the book – and also their head-tilting casserole recipes, such as Vera’s Wiener Pie. The latter is a melange of cream sauce, a variety of root vegetables, and a package of wieners and a pie crust. It is hard to take a recipe seriously when the main ingredient is a package of wieners, in an unspecified size and quantity. Well, it’s hard to take it seriously when the main ingredient is a package of wieners, period.

But I will tell you this much: when it comes to baked goods, the Lutheran Ladies do NOT fuck around. I have yet to try a muffin, square, slice, cookie, or sweet loaf that has not worked out well. The beleaguered sixth grader had gone through it and marked off every recipe he thought we should try out, and one of those was Cherry Muffins. I was all for it until I read the recipe; it was bizarrely complicated and involved immediate pan inversions. It seemed more like an upside down cake, in muffin form, and so I took Dorothy’s Basic Muffin, added some vanilla and a cup of frozen cherries and voila! Cherry muffins. They have been pronounced “great!” and so my work here is done.

As those of you of Scottish heritage will no doubt know, this Wednesday was Robbie Burns Day. Actually, I forget it every year, and am reminded by my father, who texted me to wish me a Happy Robbie Burns Day. Since I was chaperoning a field trip to the Astrophysics Observatory with fifty-seven fifth-and-sixth graders, which was an interesting and informative trip but sadly involved over ninety minutes on an overheated and stinky school bus, sitting beside a student who had little to no concept of personal space, I did think my dad’s suggestion of a dram of single malt did not seem amiss. However, the day passed mostly unmarked, since I do not actually like Scotch. It tastes like burning.

However, I did consider my Scottish heritage as I was faced with the unmistakable fact that my life has been greatly improved by three small things: a vegetable peeler, garlic press, and spatula. I purchased all three of those things, at the absolutely lowest cost, in the late Nineties, when I moved out of my parents’ house. For the most part, these humble kitchen items were a lesson in You Get What You Pay For, as the blade often popped off of the handle of the vegetable peeler, the garlic press was mediocre at best and the white, probably-carcinogenic enamel had started to chip off, and the spatula? Well, the spatula was fine but after nearly twenty years of use the rubber had cracked, rendering it fairly useless.

My mother, probably at the end of her rope watching me with my substandard equipment, bought me a new peeler and garlic press and people, PEOPLE. The difference is obscene. I feel like a super-fancy lady, peeling even butternut squash with ease and using the reverse-action to get the weird garlic remnants out of the press. It’s the most luxurious thing and I had the sad realization that I could have done this earlier, I could have purchased these items years ago and thus would have been living my best life.

And the spatula? For less than four dollars, I am now living the life of luxury, spatula-wise. Things are scraped out of mixing bowls with ease, the last tiny bits of cashew cheese are easily removed from the Vitamix. I feel like I’ve entered into a new era: my post-crappy-kitchen-utensils era. I am now looking around the kitchen for items that I bought on the cheap for my first apartment and maybe, MAYBE by next Robbie Burns Day I will replace them.

I’m still half-Scottish, you know.

Howard/ Nicole The Duck

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One benefit of keeping an old school blog for the past eight years is that I can easily see patterns in my own life. For example, every single fall I feel like I’m careening off the rails a little bit, in terms of busyness, and yes, we are all busy and tired and whatnot, no one wants to hear about how busy we are, but it is nice to see a pattern and recognize that I feel this way every year.

In related news, October is almost over, and I feel like it should still be mid-September. But no. Sometimes I feel like I’m a duck, gracefully gliding through the water on the pond, but what is not visible to the eye is my pair of little feet-flippers going like mad, just to keep gracefully gliding.

All is good, it is, even though I have bags under my eyes that require their own postal code. Several months ago I wrote something for YMC called “Confessions of a Pulled-Together Mom” and I braced myself for the blow-back. I was expecting trolls to come out of the woodwork to criticize my vanity at the expense of neglecting my children, but I only really received one such comment. The rest were more of the “me too” variety, which was completely surprising. On discussing it with the YMC Editor-in-Chief, I realized that this generation of young moms is much more comfortable with the concept of self-care than MY generation. This is a very very good thing. When I had babies, lo those many years ago, it wasn’t the done thing to admit that you showered every day, put on makeup, and blow-dried your hair. Back when my kids were babies, many of my peers were into that martyr thing: I was so busy I didn’t brush my teeth all weekend, and I haven’t had a shower for days. Hygiene, oral and otherwise, was frequently scorned because my generation seemed to be made up of High Powered Career Girls Who Are Now Putting 100% Energy Into Child-Rearing And Have No Time To Spare On Vanities. Not everyone felt that way, of course, but motherhood did feel a bit like a Project back then. I mean, I had a book – which I have since donated – about how to raise smarter babies, and another one that was all about brain-enriching and sensory-stimulating activities to do with your baby. Such activities included making a pulley system for teddy bears, to illustrate cause-and-effect, and the concept of impermanence. And I actually did those activities. Now, thinking about how my children enjoy such things as Grand Theft Auto and jokes about farting and people getting hit in the testicles, I cannot help but smile at my younger, optimistic self.

But I digress. The only negative comments I had from that Pulled-Together piece were that, in the photos, I didn’t appear to be wearing makeup at all. I had several such comments, and I was taken aback by it a little, because YOU GUYS, if you could see me without makeup. HOO BOY. In particular, today, when I have eye bags under my eye bags, well. I promised my husband I wouldn’t post any more unflattering photos of myself on this blog, but you can see a few here and here. And those are from two years ago, so as you can probably imagine, I have aged somewhat since then. Anyway, I love the thought that some people think I’m all au naturel when really, the opposite is true.

eyebags

Eyebags with a side of grey roots.

Speaking of oral hygiene, a few months back there was some kind of expose about Big Dental and the Flossing Conspiracy. Did you know we’ve all been conned into thinking that flossing is beneficial, when in fact there has been almost no empirical evidence to suggest that it prevents cavities and gum disease? Quick, everyone burn your dental floss!

Just like that, but with floss.

Fun fact: I had that fish without a bicycle poster on my office wall when I was in grad school, along with a copy of the Feminist Manifesto.

Anyway, I think I’ll keep my floss, since I’m not a fan of having decaying bits of food between my teeth, studies be damned.

There have also been a number of studies saying that vitamin supplements are essentially useless, and you may as well set your money – along with your dental floss – on fire. Well, I will say this: you will tear my bottles of vitamins out of my cold, dead hands. Especially my Vitamin D, since it has been grey and gloomy and foggy here like you wouldn’t believe. Yesterday my friend and I were walking our dogs at the off-leash, and it was so foggy we could barely see twenty feet in front of us. It was very eerie, like something in a horror film. Maybe it’s just the lead up to Halloween (YOU GUYS, HALLOWEEN IS ON MONDAY! MONDAY!) but it was really creepy.

On that note, I have things I need to cross off my to-do list, and if I start talking about my love for vitamin supplements, or how virtuous I feel because I haven’t yet bought and eaten several boxes of Halloween candy, I’ll be here until the cows (or children) come home. Signing off, xoxo.

New (School) Year, New Me

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I have that autumnal Back To School Energy right now, that feeling that it’s A New Year, And A New You, and I’m brimming with goals and things to do and filling my days up with Productive Activities And Work-Related Things. Either it’s a coping mechanism for the house being dead quiet all day and my birds flying the nest, or it’s just a natural part of my yearly cycle; whichever it is, it’s a good feeling to Cross Things Off The Lists.

I am almost done Kondo-ing the entire house! I only have the kids’ schoolwork and artwork bins to take care of – things that probably should wait until AFTER the first week of school, because EMOTIONS – and I probably should take care of the storage room filled with old paint cans and, apparently, shoe boxes. Well, the paint cans can go to the firehall, and I think we can all agree that this will be a very pleasant task indeed, although not as pleasant as when the kids were small and the firefighters would kindly let them sit in the truck and give them fire safety colouring books. There’s a big, big difference in being an early-thirties mom with two adorable little boys, and being a forty-one year old woman lugging paint cans by herself. I mean, they probably aren’t going to give me the tour or let me sit in the truck.

That reminds me, I really should clean out the schoolwork bins sooner rather than later, because when Jake was in preschool I chaperoned the field trip to the firehall. I rarely volunteered for field trips, and so that probably indicates my feelings about the firehall. Anyway, the firefighters challenged two of the parents to a race, to see who could put on the firefighter’s outfit the fastest. Is it called an outfit? I don’t know. You know what I mean – the boots, overall pants, coat, helmet and everything. I was chosen to be one of those parents. Somewhere in one of those bins is a photo the preschool teacher sent me, of me in the firefighter outfit with Jake.

I should probably mention that I won the race. It was against the lone father who decided to chaperone. IN YOUR FACE, STEVE.

(His name may or may not have been Steve. It’s actually killing me that I can’t remember his name.)

My husband has been pretty busy these days, lots of regular stuff plus doing little things around the house like repainting the bathroom after filling giant holes in the wall. The contractors installed towel racks but didn’t use wall studs, and after four years one finally gave way, leaving gaping holes in the drywall. Luckily my husband is a handy kind of guy, but it still took a lot of work and a couple of trips to Rona and Home Depot to get new towel hooks. All of which is to say, I decided that I would take the car in to get an oil change, which is something – BLUE JOB – that he would normally do.

I know, I know, it’s totally retro of me to refer to vehicle maintenance as a Blue Job, but that’s the way it is in this house. I am totally cool with it.

Some of you may remember what happened the last time I took the car for an oil change, but this time, I thought, would be different. For one thing, there’s no nail bar at this dealership. For another, this dealership doesn’t require appointments but instead prides itself on quick oil changes. Or, express lubes.

expresslube

It sounds so dirty!

Anyway, my husband had informed me that there would be no charge, something about included with extended warranty, blah blah blah car stuff blah blah. When I got there, I confirmed this with the fellow who checked me in, and after Looking It Up In The System, he said that indeed, there would be no charge. Yay! I went to the waiting room to stare at the tropical fish tank, read Do Your OM Thing, and admire the chutzpah of a woman wearing the absolutely most colourful floor-length caftan I had ever seen.

You can probably guess the punchline here. When the lady at the service desk called me over, she charged me, and informed me that our two remaining free oil changes would not be free after all, for reasons which remain mysterious. I never know what to do in situations like this. I should probably be more assertive, and squeaky-wheel-ish, but I guess I’m not. When it comes to vehicle maintenance, I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to deal with things. I would have called my husband at work, but I knew he was on a conference call. So I paid it, went home, and texted my husband.

A livid phone call to the service manager, which I was not party to, has resulted in the admittance that the woman at the counter had made a mistake, a credit at the dealership, and much annoyance on my part. Why. WHY does dealing with vehicle stuff have to be so fraught for me? Why do I have no confidence in myself when it comes to cars? When am I going to figure out how to open the hood of my minivan? These are all very good questions and perhaps, in my quest for Kondo-ing everything, New Year, New Me, and reorganizing my life, I should work on this. Personal growth, the automobile edition.

Game of Thrones Syndrome

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So here we are, the first day back at school. It’s a BIG day; one of my kids is in junior high now, and the other is finishing his last year at our much-loved elementary school.

Or maybe

The kids are more like this:

But for the most part, all is roses and happiness and only slight disappointment over the assignation of option classes that were not overly desired.

For the most part, it does feel good to be back into the swing of things. I am not generally a huge fan of fall, mostly because I love summer, and because fall in this part of the world is a brief interlude before the long, long winter sets in.

Speaking of which, my husband and I watched the Netflix series The Get Down, which deals with kids in the Bronx in the 1970s. If you are a fan of hip-hop, rap, or disco music, I highly recommend this series. I am a fan of all three genres, and so I really enjoyed it.

Well, I mostly enjoyed it. A lot of the time I kept saying to my husband that I thought something awful was going to happen. Was their apartment building going to burn down? Was someone going to get shot on the subway? Was everyone going to meet the end in the most tragic way possible? I kept worrying and worrying as I watched the show, in an awkward, unsettled way. My husband was feeling the same way, and when the series ended on a happy note, I couldn’t figure out why I was stressed out watching a cheerful television series in which the young people are not the problem, they are the solution.

It is what my husband and I have dubbed “Game of Thrones Syndrome.”

Watching Game of Thrones has conditioned me to expect the absolute worst outcome in everything. Sure, that girl is singing beautifully, but someone is probably going to cut all their throats like in the Red Wedding. That kid who has the bootlegged tape of another MC? He’s probably going to have his penis cut off and mailed to his loved ones. Those two are romantically involved? Someone is probably going to poison one of them and then put the other secretly on a boat, floating down the Hudson River.

Anyway, I’m determined to enjoy fall – even if it is so very brief and is only a harbinger of WINTER IS COMING – and so this morning I dug out my tall boots, my scarves, and my long black flowy sweaters. I am eagerly anticipating the return of the Macintosh apples, and crunchy leaves and blue skies, but you can keep your pumpkin spiced anything. Blergh. That stuff is nasty.