These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty I love listening to podcasts while doing menial household drudgery or slowly walking Barkley around the neighbourhood; it makes me actually look forward to doing dull things like folding the laundry or other mind-numbing tasks. I feel like I learn new things every day; I discovered the “We Didn’t […]
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The November Beauties Edition
November 18, 2021 by 28 Comments
I know many people loathe the month of November, but I do not. It’s generally a grey/ brown, chilly, windy month, true, but it has its own kind of beauty: We don’t all have to be flashy to be beautiful. November is also a good month for me because the first three weeks are the […]
Festivities Shift; Eighty-Five Weeks In
November 1, 2021 by 28 Comments
Hello November!! It was a brisk, wintry start to the weekend, so I wasn’t sure if we would even get any Trick-or-Treaters, but we ended up with an all-time high of 43, smashing our earlier record of 25. Maybe it was the decorations! We do have some candy left over, which some of us are […]
Eighteen Months of Pandemic Life, An Update; Seventy-Eight Weeks In
September 13, 2021 by 12 Comments
This week my younger son turns sixteen – SIXTEEN! – and so, officially, 75% of the Boyhouse will have had two pandemic birthdays. Well, if we include Barkley, 80%, but I don’t as his birthdays have been pretty much the same, pandemic or no. My son had a big celebratory dinner with his favourites, ribs […]
It’s A Conspiracy; Seventy-Seven Weeks In
September 6, 2021 by 18 Comments
I find anything to do with the 1918 influenza pandemic fascinating; in part because it ended, and that gives me hope, and in part because I realize that we also will be a footnote in history. This week I read the book Gilead – more on that later – and came across this passage: I […]
I’m Getting Older, Too; Seventy-Six Weeks In
August 30, 2021 by 6 Comments
On Friday night we had friends over for dinner, friends who we hadn’t seen for over a year, friends who are more like family, who we vacation with and our older sons share a birthday and are only a couple of hours apart, friends who, in the past decade, we would see every few months […]
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The “I Love My Garden” Edition
August 26, 2021 by 18 Comments
Well, as I write this it is 7 degrees Celsius and we had a huge hailstorm this weekend that mushed flat all my garden beds and flowers. Prior to this, with the heat and the no mosquitoes, I was thinking what was wrong with me all these years, Calgary is not so bad, look at […]
