Category Archives: I am really 90

The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be. But she can still do anything good.

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It has been a long week. My husband was travelling for work, which made it feel even longer. All day Tuesday I thought it was Thursday, which was kind of distressing. Then the same thing happened on Wednesday; I was doing some work and I thought that’s strange, the computer’s date is off. March 9th is a Wednesday, and today is Thur…oh shit. By the time Thursday actually came around it was kind of anti-climatic.

Thursday was the Junior High Open House, and since my husband was not yet home, I took both boys, which means that one of them is now super excited for next year, and the other is wishing that he also was starting at the cool school with the Industrial Arts room and a cafeteria in September. Don’t wish your life away, boys, I want to say to them, but I also am caught up in the excitement of a school with three floors! And so much awesome stuff in it! Like a real, light-up score board in the gym! And a stage that will be used as a stage instead of a classroom because, unlike the elementary school they are currently attending, this school is not grossly overcrowded!

It does make me feel a bit long in the tooth, however. Junior High! Earlier in the week I went to the mall to pick up a baby gift and also some more of that Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Eye-Brightening Concentrate from Kiehl’s. As usual, the mall was filled with obviously-pregnant women and women with toddlers and women who fell into both camps. Maybe it was the contrast between their youthful radiance and glowing fecundity, maybe it’s just my old-crone-ness, but I bustled into Kiehl’s to grab my eye cream and the attendant came over to me right away with a I love a project! look on her face. “Oh,” she said, “You already know what you want. Okay, let me give you some samples I think you’ll like!”

Sure! I love samples. It wasn’t until I got home that I looked at them: three different wrinkle creams and one hand cream specifically designed for cracked, aging skin.

Cue the sad violin of doom. Not that I’m not going to try them, mind you. I need all the help I can get.

I was getting a pedicure today, a rare treat. As I chatted with the young esthetician, I mentioned something about my kids. “Oh!” she said, “Are they in high school or university?”

Now, I realize that it is perfectly possible for me to have high school and/or university aged children. I realize that many women my age do, in fact, have children of that age. I recently learned that my own cousin, who is only a few months older than me, is going to be a grandmother. So I know, I really do, that this is not in any way something terribly unusual or crazy.

But still. It actually felt a little odd telling her that my kids were in grades five and six and if she felt awkward at all about assuming that my children were possibly grown adults, she didn’t show it.

Well. Aging is a good thing, it really is. As the esthetician slipped on my sandals before applying polish, she complimented me on them and asked where I bought them. And that’s when I told her that I had purchased those sandals in 1997, for a post-graduate trip to Mexico with some girlfriends. She smiled and told me that those sandals were almost as old as she was!

It seems to be a conspiracy this week. It reminded me of the day I popped into the liquor store to pick up a bottle for a friend, and there, on the counter, were pre-packaged shooters that reminded me of my semi-nefarious youth. Butter Ripples! Fireballs! Sex on the Beach! Remember back in the day when you would go out dancing, probably wearing a bodysuit and high-waisted jeans, drinking vodka slimes, and some guy would buy you a Sex on the Beach? Or a Screaming Orgasm? Oh, those were the days. But I looked at the pre-packaged shooters and laughed a little. “Do people actually buy these?” I asked the guy at the counter. He smiled at me, and very gently said, “Well, the younger crowd does.”

I take your point, sir. I take your point.

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If you need a little boost, I suggest you watch this little video that my yoga teacher posted. We should all be more like Jessica! I can do anything good! Come on, repeat after me! I can do anything good!

Mammograms and Crocuses and My Ability To Misunderstand Basic Instructions

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In what must be a new record for me, on Saturday Jake and I cleaned up the two warmest gardens in our yard. It’s so early! Most years everything is still frozen and snow-covered at this time of the year; believe me, I’m not saying that cannot still happen, but at the moment there is no snow in my yard. Not even in the very coldest area of the yard. NO SNOW. In fact, yesterday I noticed that in the very warmest part of the yard, the crocuses Mark and I planted last fall are poking their little green shoots through.

Small side note: the aforementioned garden cleanup – consisting of cutting back dead foliage, most notably from the gigantic Siberian iris, the clematis, and the enormous ornamental sage – has never taken me less than two hours to accomplish. With Jake’s help, it was finished in 45 minutes. I am enjoying my competent and still-wanting-to-be-helpful preteen!

I’m telling you, this gorgeous weather has real mood-elevating qualities. It’s been a crazy long week – and it’s only Wednesday – and yet I feel like everything is rosy and wonderful. I am mere steps away from singing and soft-shoeing down the street like my life is an old-timey musical.

I had a mammogram on Monday; all is well, not to worry. This is my third – I get them annually ever since I found a lump when I was 38. Apparently, I just have really lumpy breasts, and the annual mammograms establish a baseline for this. I was pretty much a mess during my first mammogram, as you can imagine; basically I spent the entire test and follow-up breast ultrasound mentally choosing a wig, and wondering where one actually purchases wigs, and what I would look like in a wig. I think I obsessed about wigs so as to not think about what it would be like for my children growing up without me.

I had to do some deep breathing just typing that.

Anyway, as I said, all is FINE. Have you ever had a mammogram? Honestly, my first I had no idea what to expect, except that people had said it was very painful and uncomfortable. Truthfully, I do not find it to be particularly painful, although I suppose that varies from person to person, depending on what kind of lumps or breasts you have.

The one thing I wondered about was that, when you book the appointment, you are told to not wear any deodorant. I wondered for a long time why: was there something in the deodorant that reacted badly with the mammography machine and the results? Was it something with the aluminum in most deodorants? If I wore a natural deodorant would it make a difference? After all that wondering I finally asked, and the answer was much more practical than I had anticipated: when getting the test your armpit rests on the corner of the machine, and deodorant makes it too slippery to hold still long enough. This is also why they tell you not to use any body lotion; so that your breast won’t slip right out of the machine, which would be awkward and pretty difficult to get a good result.

I don’t need any help on the awkward front. The technician led me to the little change room and handed me a medical gown, and I SWEAR I thought she said it ties at the back. I put it on and it seemed weirdly difficult to tie; I wondered how less flexible patients even managed to do them up. Also the collar seemed weirdly snug, but at no point did I think that I had it on the wrong way.

mammogram

I feel sure I don’t need to tell the punchline to this story, which is that when the technician brought me into the exam room, she looked at me quizzically and said, “You know, I think most women find it more comfortable to tie those gowns in the front.” WELL NOW THAT SEEMS OBVIOUS. Of course, it was a bit moot by that point since I had to immediately disrobe anyway.

Other than (kind of unnecessarily) pointing out the obvious, the technician was nice but I missed the young girl I had last time, whose perky and vivacious demeanour reminded me so much of a 1980s aerobics instructor. “Okay, now we need to lift the breast in. Lift! Lift, and stay, stay, okay! Great job! Now the other breast. Lift! Little lift. Just a little more lift and…STAY. YES. Perfect! Great! Okay, moving on!” I half expected her to break out the Olivia Newton John CD and tell me to Get Physical.

May all your blues be Monday. Or something.

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It’s Blue Monday! Mercury’s in retrograde, it’s January, and today has been calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. Maybe no one should communicate at all today, JUST IN CASE.

Well, blue is my favourite colour, and even if the algorithm has calculated it to be the saddest day of 2016, this morning the sun came out and the sky is gloriously blue. It looks just beautiful against the snow, and the temperatures are warming up this week. This is great news because in my panic last week, I didn’t realize that the seven-hour power outage is scheduled for THIS Wednesday, instead of LAST Wednesday. Good news: I will have had a week to prepare. Bad news: I will have had a week to fret, because what if they make a mistake and the power NEVER comes back on? Then what? I’ll never have a decent smoothie again, that’s what!

Oh, speaking of smoothies and related vegetables, I have a piece up at YMC about the high price of cauliflower. You know, no one wants to talk macroeconomics, but everyone wants to talk about cauliflower. Well, I tell you, they’ll pry those tiny $8 cauliflowers out of my cold dead hands before I give them up. My grandmother is probably turning in her grave, but a) I almost never go to Starbucks, b) I almost never eat out, c) we almost never have take-out, d) I WILL ENJOY MY EXPENSIVE CAULIFLOWER LIKE THE PRINCESS THAT I AM.

Gosh, we’ve become a spoiled, entitled society, haven’t we? Oh my god, the kale is like, not crisp at all. Ugh, what a rip-off. I feel like Louis C.K. but with vegetables. Let’s partake in the miracle of January avocados. We can have anything we want to eat at any time, we just have to pay for it. Sorry! But it’s true. There’s a trade-off for everything and in this case, it’s dolla dolla for your caula caula.

Not that I want to start living out the winter with nothing but sauerkraut the occasional piece of dried fruit like I’m a heroine in a Little House on the Prairie-esque drama, but I think you can see what I’m getting at.

In non-vegetable-related news, last Friday I chaperoned the last day of Mark’s field trip, and it was really fun. The kids learned all about stage fighting, so if anyone needs someone to be fake-choked, I am your Huckleberry. Related to this, the class is doing a unit on Greek mythology, so Mark is in his element. Next week they are having a fashion show, narrated in French, and Mark is dressing up in Greek fashion. This means that a few hours this weekend was devoted to the making of a cardboard-and-duct-tape sword and shield, along with a toga. I helped him make a toga out of an old sheet, and wondered if these skills would be used again some time down the road. Toga party!

Last week Barkley had a vet check-up and shots, and I will tell you this: I live in dread of the pet scale. Barkley likes his food, and at the vet clinic entrance is a huge poster that shows the decline in life expectancy for pets that are too fat. I try to watch his food, and buy low calorie dog treats, but he is what we might call curvy. I nervously had him sit on the scale…and he’s lost three pounds since last year! Three pounds! I practically did the Snoopy dance right there in the waiting room. He’s svelte! Or, as the vet says, “Still quite plump.”

Well then. He also needs dental scaling and that, along with my meeting this afternoon with the orthodontist to discuss Mark’s braces, is going to lead to financial wreck and ruin. Not really, but I might have to cut back on the cauliflower. Do me a favour: if I start jonesing for roast cauliflower, someone throw me a box of spinach or some other veggie methadone. xo

The mall in early November is glorious.

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Ahhhhhh. I JUST finished the last thing on my “to-do” list for the week – other than writing this post – and I feel the way you do when you’ve been on your feet wearing super high heels all day, and you get home, and you take them off. It feels exactly like that. Ahhhhhh.

This week has been very busy with deadlines – baking, photographing, and writing – and preparing for next week’s book fair. I was kind of running a bit behind on Wednesday, what with one thing and another, but I thought if I buckled down enough Wednesday afternoon, I would be back on track. Wednesday at 11:52, not 3 minutes before I was leaving the house to pick up the boys for lunch, I got a phone call from the school. It was one of my children, who said he wasn’t feeling well. On further questioning, it turns out that he had thrown up.

CUE OMINOUS MUSIC.

I immediately went into batten-down-the-hatch mode, recording when each subsequent barfing episode took place (only twice more), spraying doorknobs with bleach and washing my hands until they started to crack. So far – SO FAR – no one else has gotten it, and the sickie recovered very quickly, but my to-do list took a bit of a beating, which is why I feel so relieved to actually accomplish everything I needed to this week.

Plus, did I mention it’s book fair next week? A stomach flu is really going to cramp my style.

Today I went to the mall to do some Christmas shopping, and although I’m not one hundred percent done, I’m pretty close. Before you say how can that be on your to-do list this week, well, it is. For my own mental health I need to have my shopping done by mid-November. After mid-November, the mall turns into the seventh circle of hell, what with the parking lot road rage, and the crowds and the horrible people, and the completely defeated seasonal staff.

The mall in early November is a very pleasant place to be. The feeling is festive and happy. People smile. The clerks and cashiers have not hit the “I hate everyone” wall that everyone who has ever worked in customer service hits. Some of the stores play Christmas music, but many are still on the regular radio stations, which had me humming along to “Brian Wilson” this morning. “I love this song!” I said to the sweet young thing at one store. “It reminds me of being sixteen again.” She blinked a couple of times, probably a little unsure what to say – maybe wow, that’s a long time ago, or, my mom likes this song too! – but she just smiled and said, “I like it too!” Bless you, child.

I have reached the stage in my life where, when asked by the cashier at Bath and Body Works if someone had helped me with my selections, I reply “Oh yes, that cute little girl with the blonde hair! She was very helpful.” CUTE LITTLE GIRL. She was probably twenty if she was a day and I just referred to her as a “little girl.” I think I’ve turned into my own grandmother, and next thing you know I’ll be asking for Isotoner slippers for Christmas.

I saw the sweetest thing today. I was behind an elderly couple on the escalator at The Bay, and the old man groped his (presumably, although not positively) wife’s bum. She smiled at him and said – wait for it – “Oh, YOU.”

I was so close to either dying from the cuteness or high-fiving both of them, but, of course, I did neither. It just made me so happy, and I hope it makes you happy too. Have a great weekend everyone!

Is this day thermal-spray-worthy? Probably not.

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Remember the Seinfeld episode where the contraceptive sponge was discontinued, and Elaine stocked up on them but had to screen each of her potential sexual partners to ensure that they were worthy of a sponge? I’m having that issue right now, but with hair products.

I haven’t written a “Nicole’s Favourite Things” in a while, but I wish I had sung the praises of Abba’s Thermal Styling Spray, because I’ve been using it for years. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. This is the single greatest styling product of all time, but when I was in the salon a few weeks ago, my hair therapist mentioned that there seemed to be a Problem With The Supplier and she thought it might be Discontinued. She mentioned it to me with some degree of urgency, and said she was looking into Alternatives But Had Yet To Find A Good One.

Panic At The Disco.

I have one bottle in my possession, and I am hoarding it like nobody’s business. I’m now wondering what occasions will be important enough for me to use it. Coffee with the girls? Volunteering at the school? Visit with the in-laws? Good-looking plumber coming over to fix my kitchen tap?

The answer is “none of the above.” I’ve been only using some kind of flexible hold spritzer that I got at the drugstore as a stop gap measure. I’m not sure what occasion will warrant me using the thermal spray, but I sure hope that my hair therapist finds a good alternative soon, or it will be a lifetime of merely-adequate hair days.

Speaking of hair, I was at Costco the other day, and the man who checks the carts and receipts at the exit gave me a big wink and a smile. He was sixty-plus, with a friendly face. “Red hair is my favourite,” he said to me, “And I love yours!” Well, I thanked him very much, to which he responded, with a nudge and raised eyebrows, “I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s all natural.” People, I was moments away from making a “carpet and curtains” joke, when my “inappropriate” siren went off. Note to self: making a ribald joke about matching the carpet to the nearly-retired cart-checker at Costco is inadvisable. Instead, I responded with a laugh and a comment about the feistiness being natural, anyway.

The whole reason I was in Costco, besides getting frozen fruit, was to look for sheets. You know how there are some areas of your life that you just find yourself being overly frugal? That’s me with sheets. I may have enough yoga wear to clothe the entire studio on any given day, but when it comes to sheets, ours were so old and had been laundered so many times that they were literally starting to fall apart. The edges of the sheets and pillowcases were frayed, and the sheets themselves were getting worn to threads. And yet, I kept thinking to myself, they’re still good. They’re fine, really.

Long, boring, and completely “who gives a shit” story short, I bought some new sheets and they have been life affirming. Every night I say to my husband, “Look at the sheets! Aren’t they glorious! They’ve changed my life!” And because he’s a patient man, he nods and says “Go to sleep now, you’re starting to not make sense.”

My reluctance to buy new sheets is probably related to my reluctance to throw out the one-centimetre-square piece of soap in the soap dish, because I can still wash my hands with it if I lather hard enough. I know. I know. I blame my mother, whose ability to repurpose freezer bags is legendary.

An obstacle is an unrecognized opportunity.

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I’ve come a long way throughout the years, and I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes. A person who never made a mistake is a person who never tried anything new was displayed on the wall of Jake’s old classroom, and I think that’s inspirational. I regularly tell my children that mistakes are learning opportunities, and that we become better as we learn from them.

All of which is to say that I do not shop at Costco without a list anymore. In fact, I go through my pantry and cupboards and make a very specific list, and I do not deviate from that list. If I don’t have vanilla extract on the list, I don’t buy it; the fact is I will not need to buy it for some time, since I have several Costco-sized bottles in my pantry as we speak.

Learning opportunities.

The last time I really went off the list, to my own detriment, was when I purchased a giant double-pack of plastic wrap. I rarely use plastic wrap, and I certainly did not need a gigantic double-pack. I purchased that double-pack in late 2013 and I JUST opened it a few weeks ago. Sadly, the quality of the plastic wrap is terrible, so I am doomed to decades of using crappy plastic wrap, since there is no way in hell I am going to throw it out. I will probably go to my grave with this plastic wrap still in my pantry. My great-grandchildren will come to clean out my apartment in the senior’s complex and they will look at the plastic wrap with wonder. What did Grandma think she was going to do with all that plastic wrap? Then they will take it upon themselves to use it up, and I just hope that it doesn’t have crazy monkey-paw powers.

Anyway, last week I went to Costco with my list in hand, and right at the door, right there, was a huge display of flower bulbs. As though struck by lightning, I stopped my giant cart in front of the display with wide eyes and palpable excitement. BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS BULBS was going through my head to the tune of that old Meow Mix commercial. I literally could not move. People were steering their carts around me probably wondering what just happened to that insane looking woman by the bulb display.

Now, bulbs were not on my list. I didn’t even know that bulbs were an option. I decided to make an exception to my rule and dithered for several minutes between the varieties of tulips, daffodils, hyanciths, and crocuses before finally settling on a mix of apricot and deep purple tulips, and a variety pack of yellow, purple, and variegated crocuses. After putting them in my cart, I had to pull over by the watch display and regroup. I felt the way a toddler must feel when fed a package of gummy bears, brought into Toys R Us, and told to choose two things. I felt slightly unglued and totally unfocused, and I had to read my list several times just to become in a normal Costco-shopping state again. After some time, I felt equal to the task, and went looking for the tamari almonds.

When I got home I immediately texted my husband to tell him I bought a total of fifty tulips and eighty crocuses; my mother then phoned and I told her of my exciting day. She asked, quite reasonably, where I was planning to put one hundred and thirty bulbs in my already-full gardens.

As they say in Pinterest’s inspirational quotes and public school classrooms, an obstacle is often an unrecognized opportunity. A stepping stone, if you will. The weather last Saturday turned out to be beautiful and warm, and so Mark and I spent a few hours digging around my perennials and shrubs, looking for spaces. One such unrecognized opportunity was my hosta garden. The kitchen window faces this garden, and during July, August, and even, sometimes, September, this garden is a thing of beauty: giant variegated leaves, a dogwood and a giant spirea shrub, colourful impatiens, and an inukshuk made from large rocks collected at my husband’s childhood home.

At all other times of the year, however, it’s a depressingly dull strip of dirt with leafless shrubs and the inukshuk standing all alone in the soil.

It is especially depressing in May, because all the other plants and shrubs, in their sunny locales throughout the yard, are green and lovely and in some cases, even blooming. If I’m lucky, there might be a half inch of hosta growth poking out of the ground and the beginning of leaves on the spirea. Since I spent most of my time in the kitchen, staring out at this barren wasteland of a north-facing garden, I really wanted to change it somehow.

Crocuses are the answer! If all goes well, in May I should have about sixty yellow, purple, and variegated crocuses popping up in the garden, hopefully bridging the gap between snow melt and post-frost planting time. It’s something to look forward to, since there was frost on the grass and roof this morning and it definitely feels like WINTER IS COMING. But for now, I’ll just enjoy the fall and try not to think about it too much.

Tulips

Tulips2

Zucchini Fest 2015

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Remember in Gone With The Wind, when Scarlett has a recurring dream in which she is running and running through mist and fog, looking for something, something that will make her happy? And then she finds herself actually running through mist and fog and she realizes – finally – that the key to her happiness has been right in front of her this whole time, that Rhett has always loved her and now in a Saint-Paul-On-The-Way-To-Damascus burst of understanding, she loves him too. And then she tells him, that the dream has come true and she knows what she’s looking for, and he’s moved on and is all “I don’t give a damn?”

Ah, to have such dramatic and interpretive dreams. My dreams are so dull that they make Bert from Sesame Street looks like a wild adventurer. About half the time, I dream that I’m folding laundry. Last night I dreamt that I was going through a giant stack of mail, sorting it into piles: recycle, shred, and file. Even in my dreams I’m bored. What this says about me, I don’t know, because I don’t find my life to be particularly dull, but my dream life would make anyone long for pigeons and paperclips, just to vary things a little.

Today is a moon day, so I didn’t practice yoga. Instead, I decided to make today Zucchini Fest 2015 in the Boyhouse. My mother-in-law had given me her usual Excessive Number of Zucchinis, and so I made a quadruple batch of dill pickle zucchini chips (recipe here) and two loaves of double chocolate zucchini loaf (recipe here) and grated and froze 3 cups for later use. I also set aside two more zucchinis for roasting/ grilling on the weekend and that, my friends, will be the end of the Excessive Number of Zucchinis.

After Zucchini Fest 2015, I took Barkley for a very long walk, as part of my Increased Cardiovascular Exercise To Combat My Shrunken Pants regime. While we were walking I noticed a sign in a bus shelter for one of those insurance companies that deals with older people. Usually those signs are kind of cute and deal with things like “were you at Woodstock” or “did you have a beehive hairdo” and state that if so, you qualify for lower insurance rates.

This sign read, IF YOUR “OTHER CAR” HAS A SIREN ON TOP, YOU ARE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR AUTO INSURANCE.

What? At first I wondered if they were catering to first responders or the police, but it was a “grey power” type of company, which leads me to believe, alarmingly, that they are catering to people who RIDE in ambulances on the regular.

Who came up with that advertising campaign? If you keep having heart attacks, call us for your insurance needs. If you are near death, you shouldn’t be paying full price for insurance. I am going to go out on a limb here, and say that if you are nearing the end of a long, full life, maybe you shouldn’t be driving at all. If you have had a lot of ambulance rides because of your advanced age, possibly you should not be behind the wheel. Hey, look on the bright side – that way, your auto insurance will be zero!

I live in a senior heavy neighbourhood, and while I love my elderly neighbours, walking in the Co-Op parking lot is terrifying. I do not even attempt to walk NEAR the giant Cadillacs and Lincolns that MIGHT be backing up, because the drivers seem to be fairly indifferent to things like “shoulder checking” and “looking behind while in reverse.” Eh, those things are just not for me. In my day, we just backed up, and we liked it that way.

Speaking of shopping, yesterday the boys and I went to Costco, and while I was not at all surprised to see the plethora of Halloween costumes and decorations, there were CHRISTMAS TREES AND DECORATIONS ON DISPLAY. I’m all for early shopping and being prepared, but that seems excessive even for me. It’s AUGUST. Sadly, there were no Back to School displays, but I guess I must be a few months late on that. Maybe they do Back to School when school is still in session. All I’m saying is that I’ll be looking forward to Valentines’ chocolates coming out next month.