It’s book fair this week, and due to all the lovely women I’ve coerced into volunteering to help me, I do not even feel my usual high level of despair/ regret/ tension that I usually get prior to the event. I’m having a teensy bit of volunteer fatigue lately, and really, I have no one to blame but myself. I’m sure it will all feel worth it when my children have a copy of the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid in their hot little hands; although I loathe those books in no small way, they love them, and isn’t reading for pleasure one of those things we should be encouraging? Even though the characters are revolting and the plot lines a depressing view of society? I guess I shouldn’t be so uppity; I clearly recall reading all the Sweet Valley High books when I was in fifth grade. If there is anything that will give a girl a skewed and unrealistic view of high school, I believe it is the adventures of the Sweet Valley High gang and the inevitable self-questioning: am I an Elizabeth or a Jessica?
Does anyone still have those books? I kind of want to re-read them now.
In addition to the book fair, there are lots of exciting things going on at the school right now. For one thing, in celebration of the school’s fiftieth anniversary, there is going to be a very special assembly at which my children are going to be playing kazoos. Just go ahead and let that sink in for a minute. Kazoos. I’m of mixed emotions about this: gratitude that it’s not a medley of recorder music, undeniable curiosity about the nature of this performance, pride that the children will be involved in such an important milestone, and kazoos. Kazoos! Kazoos.
We had dinner guests this weekend, and so in preparation for this event I dropped the boys off at karate on Thursday evening to run to the liquor store. Normally I sit in the waiting room, reading and making notes and sometimes being sternly reminded by the caretaker to turn out the lights when I leave. I sweetly, yet emphatically, assure him that I always DO turn out the lights, to which he suspiciously makes reference to SOMEONE who is always leaving the lights on. It’s not me! I swear! In any event, on Thursday I peeled out of the parking lot to get to the liquor store and back within the short time frame. I will confess that I was worried I would run into traffic issues and would arrive late to pick up the children, who would be standing in the windy, freezing parking lot in only their uniforms since they insist on leaving their coats in the car, holding their giant bo staffs and frozen water bottles, and my only excuse would be that I was at the liquor store. Happily this did not come to pass.
While at the liquor store, I discovered something called “Skinnygirl White Cranberry Cosmos”, a premixed beverage. On a whim I picked it up, and decided to try it the night before our guests arrived. You know, to make sure it was appropriate for guests. Two glasses in and I was moments away from drunk dialing all my girlfriends to tell them how much I love them. And then my husband came home from work. I’m not even kidding, all this drunkenness happened before my husband came home from work. “I was having a cocktail while I made dinner!” I giggled aloud. “Hee hee, cocktail.”
All of which is to say, if you see such a bottle in the liquor store, buy it.
Category Archives: I love my friends
I’ve never been in a drunken stupor, but…
Here it is, Wednesday of time change week and not one complaint has passed my lips. Not one! My husband, in years past, has generally adopted the traditionally masculine attitude that my vehement feelings against the observation of Daylight Savings Time and the subsequent semi-annual fuck up amounts to Nicole Making A Big Deal Out Of Something Very Minor And Unimportant. Yesterday, however, he admitted he was feeling quite tired and out of sorts and maybe it was due to time change. At this admission, I feel vindicated.
My children have been just fine; I guess they’ve reached the age where an hour here or there is No Big Deal At All. However, I stand in solidarity with all you mothers out there who are dealing with hot crying messes every evening and wide awake little people at ungodly hours of the morning. I shall not rest until the country has caught up with Saskatchewan, which is miles and miles ahead of the rest of us for their refusal to adopt Daylight Savings Time and its abhorrent spring forward/ fall back rituals. Also, please feel free to give a verbal dressing down to the next person who says that DST is “for the farmers”. Bitch, please. Do you have any idea what time farmers get up in the morning? The actual clock has nothing to do with it, so shut up, goddammit. If I was that kind of person I’d allude to a conspiracy theory cooked up by people who want to keep mothers down by totally fucking up their children twice a year. But I’m not. Still: DOWN WITH TIME CHANGE.
Speaking of fucked up, how about that mayor of Toronto? Wowza, is that embarrassing. I mean, we’ve all done silly things under the influence of alcohol or excessive Girl Guide cookie consumption, but smoking crack? In a drunken stupor? Listen, we all know how I love my red wine, and my cosmopolitans, and my margaritas, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a drunken stupor in my life. I don’t like hangovers and I don’t like falling over. The closest I’ve come to that, lately, is becoming extraordinarily drunk at the Banff Springs Hotel with my husband and two people we met at the bar while listening to a blues guitarist. The couple was from Boston, and so they and my husband immediately bonded over the Patriots.
So no drunken stupors for me, but I’ve done plenty of silly things after consuming one too many glasses of wine/ cosmopolitans/ margaritas.
1) I completed this Cosmo quiz and realized that the answer is “yes”.
2) At Blissdom Canada, I lay down on the hotel hallway and put both legs behind my head to show Allison and Hannah that I totally could. I blame Allison for being such a doll and bringing the peach daquiri mix and rum.
3) I bought hot pink yoga pants online.
4) I once danced the macarena in a Mexican bar wearing Daisy Duke shorts, high heeled sandals, and a crop top.
5) One Friday night when my husband was golfing, I live-tweeted my viewing of Top Gun. “Permission to fire, sir!” “Never fire unless fired upon.” GREAT advice.
6) I have, on numerous occasions, accidentally flashed my cleavage.
7) I was not drunk while making this gingerbread house! But the result was so depressing I had to comfort myself with a bottle of wine.
8) I was also not drunk in this photo! But I was fairly high on painkillers following varicose vein surgery. I was also super excited to eat the pretty fruit kabobs my friends had sent over.
9) I illegally brought drinks in glass containers down to the pool in Maui – in the dark! – and forced my dear, sweet friend Joanne to do the same. Everyone give some love to Joanne – she was my accomplice in illegal activities. And yet I look so INNOCENT.
10) I got pregnant! Hey, it was Stampede week. And then six to eight months later, I walked around looking like this:
All right STOP. Collaborate and listen.
My husband just phoned me to see if I was feeling somewhat normal, which I am, thank goodness. When he picked me up at the airport yesterday morning, I was running on four hours of sleep and had been a social butterfly all weekend. What would you do if you were at parties sponsored by Ontario wines? Would you not drink all the wine? Of course you would! And by “you” I mean “I”. What a fabulous and fun weekend. I learned something new about myself, something I had not realized before:
When Ice, Ice, Baby is playing, I will always do the running man.
It’s true. Just like I cannot listen to Bust A Move without obnoxiously rapping all the lyrics – she’s dressed in yellow, she says hello, come sit next to me you fine fellow – I cannot hear Ice, Ice, Baby without immediately breaking out the running man. I also discovered that I always want to join the conga line, and that I have a secret, show-offy wish for limbo contests. Sadly, no limbo contests manifested themselves this weekend.
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| Fine, I’ll have to just have my OWN limbo contest. |
I feel pretty great today, in part because I made it back to the yoga studio, where my teacher, upon adjusting me, said “Hmmm. Too much wine?” MAYBE. Maybe it was the meal of BBQ rice cakes one evening, followed by peach daquiris, I DON’T KNOW. But I’m back on the mat, back in the groove, and immediately inundated by School Council/ Parent Association/ Book Fair things. Just another day in the Boyhouse.
Big thanks to Erica Ehm and the Yummy Mummy Club for getting me to Blissdom. Meeting everyone at YMC who I’ve known for years but have never met in person was truly incredible. Every single person I met this weekend was warm, kind, and some kind of wonderful.
I LOVE writing for this woman! If you’re vegan, vegetarian, or just interested in the occasional meatless meal, you should check out my recipe blog over at Yummy Mummy Club, if you aren’t already.
Speaking of awesome recipes….
Julie van Rosendaal, a.k.a. Dinner with Julie, is an absolutely amazing person. So fun, so warm, so generous and kind. I’m thrilled to call her my friend! Also, we share a love of lentils.
Speaking of friends (and lentils?) this is my favourite picture from the weekend:
What a blast to hang out with Allison and Hannah, who indulged me in my running man/ disco dance moves. We laughed all weekend long. I met so many wonderful people this weekend, I cannot even begin to name them all, but suffice it to say every person I met exceeded my expectations of awesomeness.
But, all that pajama partying left me kind of tired, which is to say I really needed a cup (or five) of coffee this morning.
Cute mug, right?
That’s my post shower, OMG I NEED A COFFEE I’VE BEEN UP FOR THREE HOURS AND IT’S ONLY 7:30 face. I’m happy to have gone, happy to be home, and now I need to figure out how I’m going to manage the after-school hour for the upcoming book fair…anyone?
This episode brought to you by The Simpsons
Did you check the traplines? is a question that my husband and I have been asking each other since Saturday, like we’re old-timey settlers trading furs at the Hudson’s Bay Company for blankets and tobacco. Happily for us, the answer has been they are empty which is good for both my mental state and for the general atmosphere of the household. My friend Julie reminded me of the scene in Little Town on the Prairie, before the Ingalls get a cat, when Pa’s hair gets nibbled off by nesting mice. I did not need for her to remind me of that, because I had already thought of that, which made me feel like this, substituting the word “boogeyman” for the word “mouse”.
But, we are happily mouse free, I say confidently and hopefully, and not at all in a traumatized way. I spotted a dead mouse in our backyard, and envisioned Barkley eating the dead mouse, and me having to deal with the aftermath of such a situation, and I went inside to talk to the boys. Boys, your mother is having a nervous breakdown. Mark, after assessing the situation, asked for me to fetch him the large shovel out of the shed, and then neatly picked the mousey corpse up and threw it out into the alley where a “car would flatten it”. I wasn’t entirely pleased with this conclusion, but I was pleased enough to not have to deal with it one way or another that I baked some chocolate chip cookies for him and Jake to take to school for snack for the remainder of the week.
Tomorrow I’m heading to Toronto for the Blissdom Canada conference, and boy, am I excited. I’m especially excited because I’ve gotten all of my to-do items done, and also we have the vermin situation under control. These are equally exciting to me. I’ve been working hard to cross all of those things off the list, and at some point I was behaving exactly like this. I was a bit worried since a) this is the longest I will have ever been away from the children, yes I KNOW they are eight and nine years old, and b) I’ve never been away from the children during the school year. We all know things are much simpler in the summer, when there are no scholastic nor activity schedules to navigate. IT’S GOING TO BE FINE, I say to myself. What’s the worst that could happen? And then I come up with some strange worst-case scenario that makes me think I should just go ahead and open a bottle of wine.
The kids have had colds, and then my husband – who was possibly a wee bit run down due to work pressures and also sobbing hysterical wife pressures – came down with the cold, but in massive form, so that he basically looked like this, minus the sandwich. I have been so worried about getting sick before my very first blogging conference, and meeting all these people, that I have been sleeping over NINE HOURS A NIGHT and consuming possibly toxic levels of Vitamin C. Also oil of oregano, so much so that it’s not even gross to me anymore. Happily and knock on wood, I seem to have escaped the worst of it, only dealing with a tickly throat and fatigue.
But! I’m all packed (including a baggie full of Vitamin C packets, along with Advil Cold and Sinus JUST IN CASE) and for once I feel that I’ve packed just the right amount of clothing. Shoes, however. I have four pairs of shoes packed, not including the boots that I will be wearing on the plane, nor the fabulous hippo slipper-socks bought for the occasion. What is wrong with me? How can I possibly feel that FIVE PAIR OF FOOTWEAR is appropriate for a Thursday to Sunday trip? Well, there is no going back now! Tomorrow morning I’m going to be taking my well-heeled (literally, shoes, see what I did there?) self on the plane. And I’m going to read a book the whole way! And not think about what I’m making for dinner! Well, I MIGHT think about what I’m making for Sunday dinner….
Life Lessons from the Eighties
Two things happened in the last couple of days that have got me thinking about aging and hairstyles and beauty in general. First, I was at a reunion on Saturday night with people I went to school with for grades 1-10, and the most popular comment of the night was You haven’t changed a bit! This is a very kind, though untrue, thing to say. I believe the sentiment behind it is not that a person hasn’t changed but that a person hasn’t aged. Which is also untrue – everyone ages, some gracefully, some not – but is a very kindhearted sentiment all the same.
The second thing is that a friend posted a photo of me on Facebook, a photo dating back to the late eighties. I was thirteen in that photo, and I was reminded that we all go through very awkward stages in our lives. I was also reminded that the trend back then was to wear one’s bangs vertically, with enough hairspray to make a solid and unmovable wall. Possibly my circle of friends was singlehandedly responsible for climate change, given our penchant for Salon Selectives.
My first instinct on seeing this photo was unparalleled horror – I felt I must untag myself from that train wreck immediately; I’m pretty vain and I was not flattered by this picture. Upon further reflection though, I feel that embracing our awkward stages is an important part of our development as people. After all, one must be an ugly duckling before one becomes a swan, am I right? One must be veiled in a cocoon prior to blossoming as a butterfly. Etc.
I felt like I looked nice this morning – I’ve been using a new shampoo and conditioner that is improving my poor heat-and-colour-damaged hair, and before you tell me to be proactive and stop damaging my hair with heat and colour, well, not going to happen in this lifetime. I’m going to go to my grave with heat and colour damaged hair; likely it will be that orangey-red skimpy hair seen on women of a certain age, paired with bright lipstick bleeding into my liplines. No matter. I felt good this morning. This is what I looked like this today before school dropoff, forehead and undereye lines and all:
Compare and contrast with this photo, from the same era as the one posted on Facebook:
Good gracious. Although those glasses are probably popular in the hipster community right now, I feel that nothing but improvement can come from that time period in my life. In other words, I want to have changed and aged. I want to look different than I did back then, for many reasons. For one, I didn’t know how to pluck my eyebrows back then and so I went through many years with Martin Scorcese-style brows:
Those are SOME eyebrows. What I’m saying here, people, is that we should EMBRACE the aging process because the vast, vast majority of us look much better now than we did as teenagers. You know the old saying that a woman at twenty has the face she’s born with, and a woman at forty has the face she deserves? I feel like hugging all the young teenage girls I know and telling them that it gets better, it really does, and one day you will look back at your eyebrows and bad skin and cringe-worthy hair and your horrible fashion decisions and you will feel like you have improved immensely with age, like wine.
Speaking of cringe-worthy hair, I have had emotional issues about my hair for my entire life. My entire life I believed that I had uniquely awful hair. In fact, I had such insecurity about my hair at such a young age that I took to wearing wigs that were lying around:
In answer to the inevitable question, no, I do not know whose wig that was. I just know that I rocked it out.
Looking back at photos I realize that my hair, while not quite shampoo-commercial worthy, was really no worse than anyone else’s, hardened bangs and spiral perms not withstanding. Well, maybe it was worse for a brief period in 1985:
I don’t know either. Sadly, this Toni home perm was a turning point in my life, hairstyle wise, since before that the majority of my young life was marked by a variation on the Dorothy Hamill style cut which I hated with a passion:
I always wanted long, long hair, and I briefly achieved this between the ages of seven and eight:
Notes: I am reading Little Town on the Prairie, and probably dying with excitement at the old-timey romance, and also – EYEBROWS. For some reason, shortly after I rocked out a pink frilly puffed sleeve dress, I allowed my hair to be cut short yet again, only to grown out and home permed a few short years later.
There are lessons to be learned here: a) although I was horrified at finding a photo of myself and three girlfriends and our collectively spiral permed and sprayed hair sitting on Santa’s lap on Facebook, such photos keep us humble, b) we become the people we are through the mistakes we make, notably in the hair department, c) youth is a time of experimentation, also notably in the hair department, d) AGE IS OUR FRIEND.
Let’s all agree to stop saying you haven’t changed, and instead say you’re beautiful. Because it’s true – the beauty inside us shines through, and only gets better and better. Plus, as we age, we learn important life lessons such as how to wield tweezers properly and that perms are not a good idea, and also that hair clips and earrings should never match one’s lipstick. Age before beauty? Age IS beauty.
More, More, More
Has it been a weirdly long week? Not a bad week, but a long week? On Tuesday I told Mark that he had better get his library books together for school, to which he answered that library was on Thursday. I knew that but honestly thought it was Thursday. Wednesday I was planning for Friday, which I thought was the next day. The fact that it’s the third of May is not helping matters either; I feel like I’m in a weird time warp in which I don’t have any idea what day, month, or year it is. I realized this morning that there is only seven weeks left of school, which was shocking. Time is slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, my kids are getting older and I’m getting older too, and the cat’s in the cradle with the silver spoon.
Speaking of getting older, I received – completely unsolicited – a copy of More magazine in the mail. More! The magazine for mature women. I was very startled to see it in my mailbox, with my name and address on it, being I didn’t subscribe to it. I realized this must be some kind of promotional item; perhaps since I actually have a subscription to the mature suburban Canadian women’s magazine Canadian Living I am actually on some kind of mailing list. For mature women. More magazine! I scoffed a bit, picked it up, and then realized that I really am this demographic now. Much more so than, say, Cosmopolitan. Not that I’ve read Cosmo in years – I know all the sexy tricks, Cosmo. I don’t need any more lists. – but it is a little startling when you realize that you’re more More than Cosmo, is all I’m saying.
Anyway. It’s Friday. I’ve been busy in the kitchen all morning, preparing for some girlfriends to taste test some new recipes. I’ve also been doing a little bit of taste testing myself, in other words, I’m feeling a bit FULL. There’s not much that I love more than preparing desserts and appetizers for my open-minded girlfriends, while singing along to the station that plays all the ballads from the 1970s. Cause I’m easy…I’m easy like Sunday morning.
Segueing right into the eighties, I was heading into the grocery store (because where else do I go?) and I saw this amazing license plate.
If that doesn’t immediately make your day just a little bit brighter, then I don’t know what will. That is the single greatest license plate/ car combination ever, better even than 1Bruce1 or HotCarl. I wondered who owned this fantastic vehicle; perhaps a sexy, hirsute, moustachioed man. I was not at all disappointed when the owner approached:
I kid. I did not see the owner, mostly because I felt it might be weird and stalker-ish to stand at the car waiting for someone to bring out their groceries. I did keep looking for Hawaiian shirts in the Co-Op, but alas, none were to be found.
I have only ever seen one episode of Magnum PI. I know! You would think that I would be more up on that, but you would be wrong. I’m sure there are reruns playing somewhere but I seem to be too busy these days watching and re-watching Mad Men episodes and making Tom and Lorenzo-like notes on the fashions. How did Betty become so frumpy? Is Megan wearing hair extensions? Is it weird to have a crush on Henry Francis? He’s wearing a Christmas sweater! What is WRONG with me?
But back to Magnum. My husband watched it a lot in the eighties, and every time he hears Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight he says “Best. Magnum. Ever.” Then he explains the plot to me and I think it sounds interesting and maybe I should watch it, and then I end up wondering if I could wear a gypsy scarf as a headband like Megan did that one time or would that look weird. So I will probably go through my entire life without actually watching Magnum PI but still enjoying photos like this:
Remember back in the day when men didn’t shave and/ or wax their chests?
Somewhere hidden in a family album is a photograph of my mother in the late eighties, standing next to a life size cardboard cutout of Tom Selleck. If I didn’t think my mother would disown me I would blow it up and frame it, or at least post it here. However, I like to maintain good relations with my mother and so I will leave that photo where it lies. My mother is a big fan of the moustachioed man, given her penchant for Tom Selleck and the famously stached Sam Elliot. But I shall not make fun of her mature women fantasies because I picked up a copy of People at my hair salon and flipped to the men who were deemed to be “Sexy at (fill in the age decade)”. I realized that the only appealing demographic was the Sexy at Fifty category. HENRY FRANCIS? I guess I am ready for More magazine after all.
It’s not easy being green.
I was digging through my bottom dresser drawer on the weekend and found a little bag containing a number of cards, including a Blockbuster Video membership card. How long has that been there? There was also a Northwest Airlines World Perks card I had from my working-girl-business-travel era, which was some time ago. Clearly I need to clean out my drawers more often. At least I didn’t find any maternity pantyhose, like I did last time.
In case you missed it, it was my birthday on the weekend! Best weekend ever, I tell you. My mom made me a cake and my husband went out and bought me a case of wine, including a very nice bottle of Amarone that we shared while watching my new copy of Les Miserables, which as you may know I’ve been wanting to see for…well…for as long as it’s been out, I guess. It was a great movie, and I restrained myself from singing along to the entire score. I am only human though, and occasionally I would slip out with a Who am I? 2-4-6-0-1! which is when my husband would wander downstairs to see how the boys were doing on their video game or into the kitchen to fetch me more wine. Good husband!
The boys gave me a new yoga outfit, which I proudly wore on Sunday morning, negating the Shala’s need for lights:
I felt a bit like a walking glo-stick or lime popsicle, but in a good way. I kind of love it. And hey, my birthday is right before Earth Day and right after Pot Day, so wearing green seems like a great idea.
Other things I love:
1) We have finally finished reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. I have been reading it to the boys at bedtime for the past couple of months and believe me when I say this: I cannot think of another series of books that I have so loathed. The kids loved it, mind you, but I felt that it was the lamest, most mean-spirited series in the history of time. It pushed so many buttons for me and reminded me of why I hated the tween years. Obviously I am not the target audience but in any case I’m ecstatic it’s all over. Next up: Charlotte’s Web! Hooray! No one knew that a little grey spider played the biggest part. No one was with her when she died. Wah. Poor Charlotte.
2) 31 Inanimate Objects With Secret Inner Lives. The gherkin!
3) 14 Engagement Photos. Although, the train track picture is giving me heart palpitations. DON’T PLAY ON THE TRACKS!
4) Mad Men. I am really enjoying this season, especially the swingy fashion of the late sixties. If I could get away with wearing minidresses, go-go boots, false eyelashes and white lipstick every day I would. If I wouldn’t look like death with white lipstick, that is. And if it wouldn’t look strange to wear false eyelashes, minidresses and go-go boots to the school, dog park or grocery store, which are my three main destinations.
I think it’s almost time for another Nicole’s Favourite Things, now that the temperatures are actually ABOVE freezing and little green things are starting to poke out of the ground. Watch for it in the coming days! Spring! Finally! Things feel grand. xoxo
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Thanks everyone for playing along for my giveaway. Justine was the big winner! Congratulations Justine – something fun will be on your way, just as soon as I get to the post office.