Category Archives: I love my friends

Bundle up, it’s summer!

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It seems our unbelievably mild winter and early, hot spring has melted into a typical Calgary summer: cool, rainy, grey, and windy, topped off with inexplicable daily thunderstorms. How can we get so many thunderstorms without daytime heat? I don’t know. In any case, looking on the bright side, I don’t have to worry about watering my garden. Yesterday we went for a family bike ride and the wind was so cold that I actually wished I had earmuffs on my bike helmet.

I’m taking this as a sign to take things easy today, to just spend some quiet indoor time with the kids. Well, “quiet.” I keep seeing recipes that are “beat the heat” this and “no-bake” that, and meanwhile I’m considering a marathon baking session today, wearing an apron over my wool sweater. Last week I faced my pastry fears and baked my very first pie.

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I don’t eat pie, but by all accounts it was excellent, despite being very, very ugly. Facing my fears via pie crust is the topic for a whole post in itself, however, so I shall not bore you with the details at the moment. I’ll bore you with them later!

One benefit of kind-of-crappy weather is that outdoor attractions are not at all busy, so the boys and I bundled up to go to the zoo last week. We even got to see the new baby gorilla, nursing and riding on her mother’s back. It’s very heartening to see babies in captivity doing well, and I laughed to see one of the males beating his chest to no one in particular and getting in the mother’s space, only to have her scamper away with the baby on her back. Every time the male came near her, she left, and if she could speak English I’m sure she would be saying Get away from me, you loser, and rolling her eyes. Finally he gave up and went to munch on some lettuce.

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Pants, sweater, a jacket…the perfect summer outfit!

In other exciting news, my husband and I are going to a concert on Thursday night. I haven’t been to a concert in over two decades, so it should be very fun. The kids are going to Camp Grandma for a couple of days, so the going will be very tough for them, I’m sure. It’s going to be non-stop goodies and marathon sessions of Simpsons’ Clue.

Remember when concert tickets were less than $20 apiece? I sure do, and I’m not one to lament times gone by but those were the days, were they not? My girlfriends and I saw tons of great shows all for the price of a few hours’ babysitting. Actually, now that I think of it, I made about $2/hour babysitting, so I guess those concert tickets were pretty hard-earned after all. But I am looking very much forward to this concert, and it is during Stampede so I’m contemplating what to wear. Will it be hot with all the people and (presumably) dancing? Or should I dress for the chilly weather outside? Should I put on layers, or will that be too risky in terms of losing clothing articles? I mean, there probably isn’t going to be a mosh pit or crowd surfing or anything at Zak Brown Band, but the fewer things to keep track of, the better.

Many years ago, I was at a concert at the university, when my friend’s boyfriend did some drunken crowd surfing, and ended up with one shoe, in the middle of winter. We looked and looked, to no avail. We even went back to the Economics Undergraduates Society office, where I was the president, and made drawings of shoes on pieces of foolscap, captioned “Have You Seen Me?” but we never did find that shoe. The guy had to walk/ hop through the snow to the designated driver’s car, with his soggy foot. I wonder if that was the last time I was at a concert.

What was the last concert you went to? What was the first? I don’t remember my last one but my first was INXS in 1988. Good times.

Online Friends: They’re Real and They’re Spectacular

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Thank you all for your very kind words, and for sending thoughts and prayers to Alison’s family. I was reflecting this weekend on the nature of online friendship, and how such friends are real – and spectacular! – and how wonderful it is to be part of a community that is not limited by geography.

So it was kind of funny timing that I saw one of my online friends had posted a piece that was a “Dear Mommy Blogger” post. I don’t particularly feel like linking to it, because while the message itself has some merit, the delivery is vicious, mean, and shaming. Allow me to give you a screen-shot snippet:

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It kind of made me laugh ruefully, because here I am, celebrating the relationships between bloggers and twitter-ers and such, and so happy about how the internet can bring people together from all over the continent, and feeling the loss of a friend and the warmth and love of other friends, and this woman wants me to know that our blogs fucking suck and nobody is reading my shit.

Which, well. I realize that this is directed towards sponsored posts and brand ambassadors and the like, but really. If you’ve been reading the Boyhouse for any length of time, you will realize that I do not write sponsored posts in this space. I do like to give shout-outs to my friends’ companies, as well as to giant corporations, but I don’t get paid for it, nor do I want to. I have, however, written sponsored posts on other websites, and, as I said to Hannah (HI HANNAH), I’d probably sell my soul for a Lululemon sponsorship if it meant complimentary Wunder Unders and Tri-Y tops. If they threw in a Ta Ta Tamer? Well. I would welcome my new Luon overlords, is what I’m saying.

Anyway. People have a right to make money, and we may not like the way some people choose to earn, but there’s no need to be an asshole about it.

I might be slightly sensitive because I had a friend, a real-life, have-coffee-with, chat-with-often kind of friend, who dropped me after I started writing for the YMC website. She thought I was selling myself out, which is a ridiculous idea if you know how much website writers make. If I was really selling myself out, I’d do it for more money, you know? Or maybe I wouldn’t have left my job, all those years ago, in which I worked as a quantitative analyst for a large multinational corporation.

Ah well, we all have our issues, I suppose.

How was your weekend? We spent ours at my parents’ house; it was my mom’s birthday, and we had a lovely time. My husband took me on a 16.5 kilometer bike ride yesterday morning, and when we got back the kids wanted us all to go out together. The upshot was that I rode 23.5 kilometers, and it was the first ride of the season. It felt great until I got into the car this morning – MY BUM. Yoga felt awesome until I got to my seated postures. I felt like I needed a cushion or something. The good news is that my actual muscles aren’t sore, which I thought they might be. But my poor behind, I am telling you.

Also – this week marks the 30 year anniversary of Top Gun! We all know how I feel about that movie. Wait, you don’t? I wrote all about Life Lessons From Top Gun on Throwing It Back last year. Damn, that is a good movie. Talk to me, Goose.

On Friendship

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When I was young, I had penpals. Some of them were cabinmates from sleepaway camp; we’d pledge our undying friendship during the last campfire, and we’d swear to write each other until the following summer brought us together again. I was penpal with a distant cousin who lived in California; we shared the same name and were the same age, and when we finally met each other in person, it was like we had always been friends. We exchanged letters for years after that; I told her things I couldn’t tell my neighbourhood friends. I wrote another cousin several times a month; we went through our teenage angst together and wrote about first cars and boyfriends and parties that got out of hand. I went through piles of stamps monogrammed stationary, given to me by my grandmother every year. Grandma got letters from me too. I loved writing letters and I loved receiving letters, and any chance I got I would pull out that scented notepaper with my name and address across the top.

I don’t write letters anymore. My monogrammed stationary has been replaced by an avatar picture and a cover photo. My penpals are the women in my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and my blog roll. We bloggers like to tell everybody everything, and we chat not about first cars and boyfriends and parties, but about our families and our celebrity crushes and our wine consumption. We talk about makeup and exercise and recipes, we talk about movies and books. Some I have met once or twice, some I have never met. Some become the kind of friends who lift you up when you’re down, who you can always count on for friendship and counselling. If we were thirteen, we would cut our fingers and become blood sisters, and then we would write letters until the next time we could be together.

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I’ve been lucky enough to make connections – real connections – with women in every province in the country, and I’ve often dreamed of road-tripping across Canada, visiting those I know from Vancouver Island to PEI, from Southern Ontario to Flin Flon, Manitoba.

I was telling my husband about my dream of road-tripping, not only across Canada, but in the United States as well. When the boys fly the nest, I told him, we could drive all over the States and visit all my “penpals” who are scattered across the country. We’d visit Eryn in Washington State, Maggie in Oregon, and Mary and Terry in California. We’d see Sharon in Cincinnati and pop in to see Mike and Sandy in Michigan and Gretchen in Colorado. We’d see Kate and Leah in New Hampshire, Karen in Massachusetts and Cherie in Maine. We’d eat fresh vegetables at Trish’s farm in upstate New York, and go to Pennsylvania where we’d visit with Sarah and Sherri. In Maryland we’d see Steph and her family. We’d see the Washington monuments with Kimberly and have a coffee with Cara, hopefully when the cherry blossoms were in bloom. We’d spend ages at Liv’s in Georgia, exhausting her Southern hospitality and sipping bourbon, and we’d talk all the live long day about everything. We could see the goats and chickens at Stephanie’s in Alabama. We’d spend some time visiting my husband’s friends in Texas, but while we were there we would definitely make the time to go and see Alison.

But then, you see, Alison died this week.

Alison was one of my first friends on Twitter. She was a frequent commenter on this blog, and she wrote a blog herself, which I always enjoyed. She was a lovely, kind person who never had a bad thing to say about anyone. She was encouraging, she was positive, she loved talking about trends from our teen years, and she looked beautiful in bright colours. But she’s gone now, and I wish I had the chance to tell her that I valued our friendship. I wish, instead of talking about eye cream and tangerine tops, I had told her that she mattered to me, that she was a good friend, that I admired her.

I don’t think I ever did. So she will never know that her passing has left a gap in my life, and that I will miss her dearly.

After I turned forty, I realized that I needed to make more effort with people. We are all busy, we are all tired, we all have crazy schedules and hectic days. But as I told one of my dearest friends, if I can’t make time for one coffee a month with the girls in the neighbourhood, I need to re-examine my life. In six months I won’t remember what deadline I was working towards, but I will remember missing a friend’s birthday lunch. And just as I have strived to make more effort with the people I have the opportunity to see often, I am striving to make more effort to let the people I don’t get to see know what they mean to me.

When Alison passed, I was having drinks and laughs with my colleagues and friends in Toronto. I had spent the week prior to that busy, busy, busy. So busy I didn’t notice that I hadn’t heard from her in a few days.

Always make the time.

I care about you.

You are valued and you matter.

You will not be forgotten.

 

Watch out for the carnies.

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Do you ever look at the contents of other people’s grocery carts and wonder what they are going to do with those particular ingredients? I do, all the time. Not in a judgy way, obviously; I don’t care if someone has a cart filled with fruit chews and pork rinds. To each her own, I say. But I do often wonder if someone’s having a party or a barbeque, or if those frozen Dr. Oetker pizzas are actually good. Sometimes it’s obvious: tortilla chips, salsa, sour cream, onions, peppers, and cheddar, for example, means that all signs are pointing towards Nacho Night. I once saw my neighbour with an entire cart – and I mean THE ENTIRE CART – filled with store brand bacon. I could only imagine that it was either on sale or he really likes bacon, or both. Hopefully he has a chest freezer.

But the other day the fellow in front of me had dozens of cucumbers, 3 bags of green apples, at least ten bunches of kale, and some lemons. I wondered if he was on some kind of juice cleanse because really, who is going to chew their way through that many cucumbers? But then I saw that he also had stacks and stacks of Centsibles brand bologna and a few jars of Cheez Whiz. I was actually dying of curiosity because it was such study in opposites. Maybe he runs a lunch program AND he also really likes green juice? Maybe it’s nothing to do with green juice and he really likes kale salads along with this bologna and Cheez Whiz sandwiches? Well, we will never know now but I will always wonder.

People are so interesting, aren’t they? Everyone has a story. I was at Walmart buying my hayfever-ridden son some allergy medication, and there was a fellow standing in the aisle near the family planning section. He was wearing cut-off shorts and a tank top, despite the chilly day, and he was picking up and reading the back of every single lubricant on the shelf. Now, it’s been some time since I’ve bought lube, so I really don’t know what attributes make for the different brands, but this fellow was determined to make an educated decision. I picked up my packages of Reactine, did a little more shopping, and then I remembered I also needed some Motrin. Back I went to the pharmacy and he was still there, reading labels.

Well, if you’re going to spend money you may as well do your research, I suppose.

This week has flown by; in fact, this month has flown by. Sunday is May, which frankly seems ridiculous. This whole week has been a whirlwind of work and yoga and to-do lists, and here it is Friday and I’m feeling DONE. We have some friends coming over for dinner tonight, which I’m very excited about. One is a vegan and let me tell you, it is VERY fun to cook for someone who is going to be as excited as I am about a cauliflower taco dish. I’m also making this dessert, which I haven’t made in so long I had to do some calculations to find out what eight ounces of chocolate is in cups (it’s about 1 1/4 cups, give or take).

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Yum!

It’s also my dear, dear friend Hannah’s birthday today. As a gift to her, I am re-posting this amazing photo of us with the third in our trio, Allison, at Blissdom in 2014.

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Aw, this photo brings back so many wonderful memories. And is a little creepy. Where did the carny come from? Well, it was a lentil-themed carnival, and we shall leave it at that.

Hannah sent me this post, which happens to sum up all my feelings about moths. “Just shudder until I died.” I laughed until I cried and my stomach hurt. I tried to read it to my husband, but I was laughing so hard that he just looked at me in a concerned and pitying sort of way that I stopped reading, and he went off to work, probably wondering about my mental stability.

Happy Friday to everyone, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! xoxo

Thumper’s mother was right.

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Last night was Orientation Night for my yoga teacher training and oh, you guys. You guys, I am so excited. I haven’t felt this way for YEARS. I remember picking up my university calendar to choose classes for each semester, and then I would go through the syllabus of each class and it never failed – NEVER FAILED – to thrill me. Everything about university was exciting for me; all the course outlines, all the new information, everything. Now I feel that same, beginning-of-the-school-year excitement, and I just can’t wait to get started. I’m taking it slow because, well, life, but for the next three months I’ll be studying anatomy, yoga spirituality, Ayurveda, and Sanskrit. YOU GUYS I AM SO EXCITED. It turns out I am the same keener nerd that I always was because even the thought of doing the pre-reading is thrilling to me.

I have to settle down a bit though, because I can feel my competitive, Type A nature coming out a teensy bit, in a I am going to CRUSH this kind of way, which is not a very yogic way of thinking. Hey, we are all works in progress, right? There’s nothing wrong with taking the course seriously since I really do want to teach afterwards. Not everyone who takes yoga teacher training actually wants to teach, which is cool. But teaching is in my ultimate plan, so I shall embrace my serious student nature.

Yesterday was an especially hectic day since I was on a field trip for the whole day with Mark’s class. We went to the Police Interpretive Centre and let me tell you, it was the best field trip I’ve ever been on by far. The leaders were engaging, the information was relevant and timely, and all of the displays were very interactive and interesting. I get to do it all over again next week with Jake’s class, and I am looking forward to it. Looking forward. To a field trip. That’s how good it was!

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They also had this sign in the washroom, and all I can say is “Strongly Agree.”

The morning featured a forensics lab, where the children were shown how detectives solve crimes using fingerprints, footprints, lasers, blood splatters, maggots versus flies, and composite sketches. It sounds a bit morbid but it was extremely well done and sensitive. The children also got to learn about the K9 unit, and I found out that they choose puppies based on how much a puppy loves a ball. If the puppy won’t give up a ball, or won’t stop looking for a ball, that is the puppy that they want in training. Each dog on the K9 unit had its own profile, and I loved looking at the random facts: favourite snack, favourite place to be scratched, favourite TV show (how do they know?), how often the dog is bathed.

The afternoon was all about online safety, bullying, and healthy relationships. Grade 5/6 is the perfect age for these discussions, in my opinion. There was a lot of discussion around this and also about making good decisions. The bullying unit had me thinking about an incident that happened a few years back to a colleague of mine. She had a similar Twitter handle to another woman, and they both had a similar blogging niche. This other woman – who had many thousands of followers – took umbrage that my colleague had the gall to have a similar name to her, and started writing terrible things about her. Her thousands of followers/ sheep started tweeting equally awful things and some were really scary. A few people were particularly threatening, in a “I hope I see that bitch at x convention so I can cut her” kind of way. It was quite terrifying and also unbelievable, that a grown woman would act this way about someone else on the internet.

Unbelievable, and yet believable. The anonymity of the internet is a weird thing. Just yesterday, a friend posted on Facebook about her child bringing home a great report card. Yay for good report cards, right? Well, no. Because there was a strange string of commentary about how report cards have no meaning and the world is going to be ruined by these children and their useless report cards. Wait, what? At what point do we think it’s okay to take someone’s celebration and shit all over it? We talk so much about bullying and behaviour of our children, but some people apparently transcend these social conventions. There is ONE response to someone’s good news, and that is congratulations. I am happy for you. If you cannot say that, then do not say anything at all.

Choosing lip gloss is not my best quality.

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I’m feeling a bit tired and blah today, and it’s only Tuesday. Thursday is usually Exhaustion Day, when I find myself waiting for the kids at karate and wondering if I’m going to make it or if I am just going to fall over from tiredness, but I feel like that today. It doesn’t really bode well for the rest of the week.

I should be more perky, really, since January is almost done and it’s light at five o’clock now. The sun is up before 8:30 and it sets after 5:00, and that alone should be enough to give me some pep. Also, we’ve only had a few Very Cold Days; mostly the weather has been (relatively) mild for the entire month. But the sky is a dull, dull grey and my husband is out of town and I bought the wrong lip gloss; all is ashes.

My two favourite lip gloss colours have been discontinued, and it is distressing me more than it should. Ideally, I should be able to bounce back from this kind of thing, but for some reason I am now obsessed with finding an exact match to my two favourite glosses. This puts me in mind of a lipstick hoarding issue I had; I had purchased a bunch of dark lipstick on sale, and time ticked forward and suddenly, that dark colour no longer suited me. Instead of making me look perky and red-lipped, I looked like a papery-skinned old crone who was desperately holding on to the vestiges of youth, which is not a look I want to embrace. Anyway, I was left with several lipsticks of that shade, thanks to my hoarding/ sale purchasing. Never again would I waste money that way, I thought to myself.

Sadly, this has come back to haunt me. Since the discontinuation of my two favourite lip glosses, I have tried – and failed – to purchase a reasonable facsimile. There is a significant hurdle to face: sample lip glosses. I cannot even bear the thought of putting a sample lip gloss near my face – think of all the people who have touched it! – and yet just dabbing it on my wrist does nothing to tell me if this is a suitable colour or not. So I buy a lip gloss, hope for the best, and become immensely disappointed when it washes me out or, in the case of my latest purchase, is purple.

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When the lip gloss itself started to fade, it left me with a purplish ring around the outside of my lips, like a 1986 lip liner. This feels like an immense waste of money, although, as Swistle says (HI SWISTLE), it is educational and will keep me from purchasing anything similar in the future. Which is true, but damn. I just want a perfect, non-glittery, sort-of-mocha, neutral toned lip gloss. IS THAT TOO MUCH TOO ASK? If I could hop on my super-awesome-time-travel machine, I would go back and buy out the entire line of those two lip gloss shades and hoard them until they became brittle, crusty bottles of goo.

Anyway. I had no intention of this being a post about my lip gloss angst. What I had meant to write about was how women are often very self-deprecating; I read two things today (HI LISA) (HI ALI) in which the writers talked about their inability to accept compliments and their difficulty in saying what they love about themselves, respectively. How that segued into lip gloss, I have no idea. However, I want to know – what do you love about yourself? I want you to brag a little – tell me what is the most awesome thing about you. Do you have fabulous hair, do you take amazing photographs, can you edit a paper like nobody’s business? Can you run a 10k, do you decorate cakes, can you sing really well? Do you know how to knit or can you change a tire? I want to know what you think your best qualities are. Don’t be shy – it will brighten up this dull January day. Tell me, please. xoxo

Just keep swimming…

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YOU GUYS. It’s been a whirlwind of activity around here. We took a four day weekend to see my in-laws’ over the Thanksgiving holidays, which was great, except that I had one day after returning home to get my bearings, and then leave for Toronto. I flew out of Calgary Wednesday morning, and then flew back home Thursday morning. I got home in time to make dinner and take the kids to karate, and now today I’m trying to catch up on laundry and prepare for a party I’m hosting at my house tomorrow night for forty people. I’m completely swampled, as a friend I used to work with and I would say. (HI CARMEN).

Ten days or so ago, I mentioned my travel plans and party plans and my day-to-day work to a friend, saying I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and exhausted by it all. She said that when she feels overwhelmed by life, she thinks of Dory: Just Keep Swimming. So until everything is cleaned up Sunday afternoon, that is my motto: just keep swimming. Yesterday when I got home I was so tired that it seemed too much to fill out Mark’s swim forms for school; holding a pen seemed like an effort that I didn’t want to make, but I just kept swimming. Like a shark, if I stop, I will die. Or, to be less dramatic, not want to get up off the couch ever again.

Oh, but the trips were very very good. My in-laws are well, and I ended up taking home about forty pounds of apples, in addition to the ones my dear mother-in-law had sent to me via Greyhound bus a few weeks ago. We are apple-licious around here. I mostly have McIntosh apples because they are my favourite, and I just smiled and nodded when my mother-in-law sang praises of my beloved Macs: they are perfect for pie and applesauce, she said. Ha! Pie and applesauce my foot. I’ll be eating every one of these apples, just the way nature intended, and I won’t even have to share because no one else really likes McIntosh apples. Not to mention that apple pie is an abomination, in my humble opinion.

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Apple bottom!

The trip to Toronto was great too. It just so happened that the annual Yummy Mummy Club meeting was the same day as the deciding game for the Blue Jays, and the meeting room was right beside this:

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The CN Tower!

Very exciting! When the Blue Jays won, you could hear the “woo-ing” from the streets, and when our meeting/ party was finished near midnight, there were still many fans wobbling around. On my flight to Toronto, I was sitting next to a young man who was heading out for the game. He was very nice and as we chatted I mentioned how exciting it was when the Blue Jays won the World Series. It turned out that during that exciting time in baseball, he wasn’t yet born.

All that celebrating must have been something, because the next day our flight was delayed since our co-pilot had called in sick. I BET YOU’RE REALLY SICK, BUDDY. We were sitting on the plane for quite a while, waiting for the replacement to make his way through the gigantic Toronto airport.

As an aside, Calgary is a city of over 1.1 million people, and yet I felt like a complete country bumpkin as I made my way through the terminal. My sweet friend and YMC colleague Katja (HI KATJA) had very kindly offered to pick me up at the airport and drive me to the meeting with Jeni (HI JENI) the Editor-in-Chief, who is also a wonderful friend. I stopped off after deplaning, to wash up and fix my makeup and brush my teeth, assuming that I would be able to just pop outside to meet her. I ended up walking twenty minutes through the terminal, weaving in and out of the throng of people, up and down stairs. Fortunately I was not late to meet her, but I did feel silly that I didn’t realize how big the airport (that I’ve been to twice before) is. I was just happy I was wearing low heels, and counted it as my steps for the day.

Anyway, as we waited for the replacement co-pilot, I wondered how the flight was going to go. The flight was completely full and there were quite a lot of the “under two” set. The couple beside me had with them little Arlo, who was a twenty-three-month-old butterball. He was just adorable, but the wait was going on and on and I hoped – for the parents’ sake, not mine, I couldn’t care less about crying babies so long as they’re not my own – that he would be okay. Things weren’t looking promising at first, because he was HOT but he did NOT want to take his sweater off. In fact, taking his sweater off was the WORST THING EVER. But being HOT was also THE WORST THING EVER. Arlo had a snack and then slept on his mother’s chest for a while, and after that he was just fine.

Toddlers, am I right? So cute and yet so exhausting. He showed me his trains, and his Thomas lift-the-flap book, and he told me about feeding ducks and that they quacked at him, and I almost died of the cuteness. He even sat on my lap for a few minutes to look out the window. He also spent a lot of time running down the aisle with one of his parents in tow, which reminded me of how physically draining it is to have a toddler, not to mention how physically draining it is to TRAVEL with one. I’m drained enough this week!

All of which is to say I’ve got to go keep swimming, at least for another 48 hours. Wish me luck!