Category Archives: Mind Songs

We’ve Got Fun and Games

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What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

A while ago, my husband’s friend went to see Guns and Roses in concert in Vancouver, which is at least a four hour drive from here, meaning that this was not just an evening out. It was a commitment. Concert tickets these days are not what they once were, and accommodations in Vancouver are also pricey, so I imagine it was not an inexpensive endeavour. It probably would have been worth it to this sixtysomething rocker, had the band played even one of their many, many hits. But no. Guns and Roses spent the entire concert playing all new material.

I can understand an artist wanting to share new work with the world; I am not sure I would want to continue doing the same thing over and over for four decades. I can understand that it would get tiring, as Elin Hildebrand said on her podcast about her annual Nantucket books, that people want the same thing every year, but make it different. And yet, I do feel that a band with such stature as Guns and Roses, who charges exorbitant fees and who has an extensive catalogue of excellent, much-loved music, should give the people what they want.

This is why I love cover bands. I ADORE a cover band. If we go somewhere and there is a cover band playing the hits, you can bet I am going to get that dance floor started. This past Friday my husband and I went to see The Hip Replacements, which is the very witty name of our local Tragically Hip cover band, and it was so much fun. I danced all night, got home late, and paid for it the next day with sore feet, a sore throat from singing, and general exhaustion due to my inability to sleep in no matter what time I go to bed. It was worth it!

But back to Guns and Roses. I always, always have a song stuck in my head at all times, but in the past few weeks I have had three on rotating repeat, for a variety of reasons.

Sweet Child of Mine

A few months ago I heard a piano version of Sweet Child of Mine, and I immediately purchased and downloaded the sheet music. What fun! And also, whoa nelly. Look at this key!

It’s a challenge, let’s put it that way, a challenge that is peppered with unusual C flats and tricky fingering. I’m working hard at learning all eight pages of it, the result of which is that the tune loops through my head many times a day. She’s got eyes of the bluest sky I’ll think as I roll out my yoga mat, looking at the morning breaking. Where do we go now I’ll hum as I look for something in the pantry.

Welcome To The Jungle

Sweet Child of Mine gives up its place in my brain every morning when I head down to the garden, at which time Welcome To The Jungle wedges its way in.

The tomatoes are going rogue.

My arms are completely covered in scratches from squeezing between the raspberries and the zucchinis. Wear sleeves! my husband says helpfully, forgetting that I am a perimenopausal woman working outdoors in the height of the Okanagan summer, and that wearing sleeves feels as comfortable as donning a medieval suit of armour.

You’re in the jungle, baby, you’re going to die! is something that inappropriately floats through my head as I serenely build the sand mandala that is weeding.

Patience

Those two songs have been in my head constantly, but a third popped in last week when I was at Costco. I don’t know if this is a seasonal fluctuation, but for the past few months every time I go into Costco I think it just can’t get worse than this and then, somehow, it does. Said woman, take it slow, it’ll work itself out fine, I mentally sang to myself while completely immobilized in the dry goods aisle, with unmoving carts before, beside, and behind me. All we need is just a little patience I thought, waiting for throngs of carts to move so I could exit the freezer aisle.

I congratulated myself on making it out without internal impotent rage, and then I saw this beside my car.

It takes so much more effort to wedge a cart’s front wheels up onto the median without destroying the vehicles around it, particularly since the carrel was mere steps away.

I wasn’t as bothered as I usually would be, because I was still pondering a very kind, but odd, compliment I had received at the pharmacy. The young fellow – I would place him in his late twenties – talked to me about my prescription and then said Oh, by the way, I love your hair! I responded with a grateful and enthusiastic thanks, to which he followed up with It’s so old-timey! Like a 1940s movie star.

Listen, I will take any compliment, no matter how strange. And I’ve always thought it would be wonderful to swan through life in soft focus like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Old-timey isn’t exactly a compliment I expected, but I will take what I can get, and just hope he didn’t mean Joan Crawford or Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.

Weekly Reading

The book flood continues!

One of these is a reread so technically, there is no need to panic about it. But still.

Luckily, I have had a lot of uninterrupted reading time this week; after the guys got back from Vancouver, my husband went camping with some buddies for a few days, and I camped out on the deck for hours every day with my trusty reading partner.

Laundry Love. I put this on my TBR five years ago – and then promptly forgot about it. It wasn’t until my friend Stephany (HI STEPHANY) mentioned this that I metaphorically slapped my forehead and took it from TBR to my library pile. And I know what you’re thinking: an entire book about LAUNDRY? Yes. Not only is it a delightful, joyful meditation on caring for our clothes, each other, and the planet, but it also contains everything you ever wanted to know about the act of laundry, including how-tos about washing wedding dresses, wool suits, and fur coats, in case anyone actually has their grandma’s furs. I don’t, obviously, but I still found it interesting, and also oddly inspirational.

Flashlight. My writing friend Jen (HI JEN) told me about this densely layered, nuanced, and complex novel about a father and daughter who disappear while walking along a beach in Japan. The daughter washes up ashore, alive, while the father does not. The story is so much more, and takes turns I was not expecting. I learned so much about the relations between Japan and Korea – both during and after World War II – as well as the relationship of North Korea to its neighbours and to the US. The three main characters all have trauma and are all incredibly, deeply unlikeable. The writing is so good that I felt physically uncomfortable reading about their fraught interactions with each other and with the world at large; there were a few times that I had to look away from the book, so awful do these people behave. The reading experience was immersive and compelling, and one of the adjacent characters was so completely delightful that it almost made up for the nastiness of the others. A really excellent book, so well-written and executed.

Upward Bound. I would term this book as autofiction; the story is about the clients and staff at Upward Bound, a day care program for adults with severe disabilities. The author himself is the first nonspeaking autistic graduate of UCLA, and I understand there is some controversy surrounding whether or not he actually wrote this book, or if his mother stepped in while he used Facilitated Communication. To be frank, I do not give a fuck if he literally wrote it or not, that is not the point. The point of this book is to bring humanity and understanding to an underserved population, a voice to the voiceless. And if his mother did write it? Well, it’s not much different from ghostwriting, is it? It’s a moving collection of chapters from different points of view, and I think it can only help bring compassion towards people who are very much othered in our society.

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano. I love thinking about different paths our lives can take, and this book is all about that very thing. Rose is a woman who has never wanted children, and she’s always been clear about it. Her husband agrees, but then after they are married he changes his mind. This book goes through all different scenarios, a choose-your-own-adventure, if you will. I love books about marriage, particularly when there is strife, complication, and extramarital action. This book has it all and more, and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a very nuanced and powerful statement on what it is to be a woman in our society, the pressures and resentments, the difficulties and the joys. I especially like that the book is not laid out linearly, rather all the lives are scattered throughout the book, so it kept me very engaged, even through the initial scene about prenatal vitamins, a fight that is repeated throughout the book. Thanks to Lisa (HI LISA) for the recommendation!

I’m looking forward to a pretty normal summer week; more gardening, more reading, and a nice afternoon with the girls coming up! I hope you are all having a beautiful July so far. xo

Canadiana

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Our local library branch has pop-up, electronic advertisements for various events in town, and a few months ago, there was one for Weird Al. Weird Al! I don’t really think of Kelowna as a hotspot for concerts, but here we were. Some of you might be thinking Big deal, Weird Al is not a huge get but I was a little starstruck at the thought of the creator of Like A Surgeon and Pretty Fly For A Rabbi breathing the same air as me. I zipped home with plans to purchase tickets immediately, thinking it would be a pretty fun outing for me and my husband.

Well.

My plans quickly dissipated at the discovery that it would be approximately $700 at a minimum for the two of us to attend, which felt a little steep just to hear a live performance of Amish Paradise.

What was the first concert you attended? For me, it was INXS in 1988 for their Kick tour, and I believe the tickets were about $20. This Kicked off several years of concert-going on my part, and with one exception – Billy Joel in 1990 – the shows were all under $25, which was good, as my babysitting income was about $2.50 an hour at the time.

It will be news to no one that I have a song, if not in my heart, then definitely in my head at all times. I usually have a song in my heart too, but my brain is full of song lyrics from every genre in any decade. I am, as Spotify says, genre-fluid. I enjoy all kinds of music – almost anything can make me shimmy my shoulders and swing my hips, even while seated – and I associate many songs strongly with different eras of my life. My favourite genres are from the 70s: disco, yacht rock, soul and funk, as well as rock, but I am open to anything, and I most likely will be able to sing along to it, which tends to startle my husband. How do you remember that? he’ll ask when I sing anything from My Grandfather’s Clock to Parents Just Don’t Understand to Kryptonite.

For my birthday I was thinking of writing about all the songs that have meant a lot to me over the years, but then I realized that a) I could not narrow the list down to less than 200, and b) a massive list of songs felt boring to write and to read. Then I remembered that Rachael (HI RACHAEL) had asked me an interesting question on the Ask Me Anything I did back in December, which was Who are your favourite Canadian musicians/ groups?

First of all, I would like to shout out three out of four Gords for Canadian Decorative Gord Season:

Two of these Gords I saw in concert: the Barenaked Ladies for their Gordon tour, which I consider their best work. I have such great memories of it coming out when I was in high school; my friend Tracy (HI TRACY) and I would sing Hello City while we worked together in chemistry class. I was, I am embarrassed to tell you, nearly fifty years old before I realized that Hello City was about Halifax. Well, we are never too old to learn something new. The other Gord I saw was Gord Downey of the Tragically Hip. I think they take away your citizenship if you are a certain age and didn’t see the Hip in concert. It might be written in the Constitution, now that I think about it.

I don’t think a Gordon Lightfoot concert would be exactly bumping, but I love his music very much. Also, he’s dead. From that same era, I adore Joni Mitchell and the Guess Who. All three are national treasures, in my humble opinion. I also have a soft spot for Corey Hart, particularly because I wrote to his fan club and received a photocopied letter in return. Also, he filmed his Never Surrender video a mere 20 minutes away from our Calgary home.

I saw a number of Canadian music stars in concert back in the day, notably Alanis Morrisette for her Jagged Little Pill tour, and Tom Cochrane at a Canada Day music festival. This was pre- Life is a Highway, when his huge hit was the excellent Big League, which is SUCH a Canadian classic. Not many ways out of this cold Northern town, you work in the mill and get laid in the ground. And if you got a jump, it’ll be with the game. Oh, the dreams of hockey players of yore, hoping to be the next Fourth Gord. This was before youth hockey became A Thing, and anyone who knows Crazy Hockey Parents will know what I mean. My husband worked with a man who coached his kindergartener son’s Timbits hockey team. At the beginning of the season he cheerfully said that they were all there to have fun, after all, no one was going to the NHL. Several parents withdrew their kids from that team in protest of his attitude. THAT is what I mean. And as far as I know, none of them did go to the NHL. So.

Back in the 80s, after INXS I saw a few Canadian bands that would mean nothing to anyone not around in that time and place; notably 54-40 and the Grapes of Wrath. I have a couple of six-degrees of separation for both of those bands. The lead singer for 54-40 was the son-in-law of my junior high principal, which certainly made me look upon him with greater respect than a junior high principal typically gets from its student body.

As for the Grapes of Wrath, I had a titanic crush on guitarist Tom Hooper, to the point that my fourteen-year-old self would dream that we would one day meet and get married, and I would live in the magical place called Kelowna, from where the Grapes hailed. Life is funny; I DID marry a man from Kelowna and am now living in that magical place, and that man has friends who went to school with the entire band. As is probably typical, they were all high school misfits who absolutely hated their hometown, as evidenced in the song Backward Town. To be fair, Kelowna isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of anything. But still! It is a magical place where the flowering trees bloom in April.

When I was that angsty fourteen-year-old, I really thought that the kind of music a person listened to said something about the character of that person. I thought that people who enjoyed pop music were vapid and silly, while those who liked deep cuts of obscure bands were deep as the ocean. I mean, I dated a guy in part because he was really into obscure Depeche Mode tracks. Also, he wrote me a whole pile of bad poetry, typed it out, and presented it to me in a yellow duotang, which struck me as a very romantic gesture at the time.

Ah, the pretentiousness of youth. Popular music is popular for a reason, Young Nicole, and that is because it is FUN and also generally pleasing to listen to. These days, I think that the kind of music a person enjoys merely indicates that they enjoy that music, there is no character or moral assessment to be made. After all, I really like Nickleback.

Weekly Reading

Is This A Cry For Help? CANADIAN AUTHOR ALERT! This author also wrote the wonderful Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which I read in 2021 and loved. I love libraries, and not just because they lend us books; they are also safe public spaces that run important programs for all different people, they allow access to the internet, and they are inclusive spaces. This book centres on a librarian who is just back from having a mental health crisis due to the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend. As she looks back on her time with him, she begins to deal with a small but vocal group of people who are calling for book bans and who believe the library has an “agenda.” Yes, its agenda is to be inclusive and to help the public. Anyway. This was a very good read and I enjoyed it so much.

The Rom-Commers. This is a rom-com about two screenwriters writing a rom-com. Cute, right? Well, Katherine Center’s brand is a cute rom-com with some serious tragic backstories, and this is no exception. One person is recovering from cancer, the other is the caretaker for her disabled father, who is FIFTY FIVE YEARS OLD. If you’re keeping track, that’s two books I’ve finished in less than four days in which the romantic lead is a caretaker for her fifty-something parent. Small digression here: this is part of the reason I wrote Inhale Exhale, because there are very few romances that feature people in the fifty-plus demographic. WE LIKE TO GET RAILED TOO, YOU KNOW. Some of us, despite our advanced ages, are not in need of caretaking and are totally DTF. Maybe even more so than before, because our children are grown and we have the house to ourselves, I hope my own sons are not reading this. Anyway. Back to the book at hand. It was pretty silly and contrived, but it was a fast and easy read, which can be a nice distraction from the whole…international situation.

The End of My Life is Killing Me. In June 2020 this author had a cough, and went for a Covid test. She found out she had stage four metastatic lung cancer. The book is a collection of essays about that time and the years after, dealing with treatment, the US health insurance system, weird public perceptions about lung cancer (hint: it’s victim-blamey), and well-meaning friends who suggest things like juicing and positive thinking as curative measures. Honestly, this was pretty dull and grinding, although there were a few interesting observations.

Thanks Rachael for the fun question; I realized there are a few questions I never answered, and I will do so post-haste. In the meantime, here are some of the many flowering trees that have been blooming these past four weeks. I wish you could smell them! You’ll have to believe me. xo

Theme Songs

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Spring Has Sprung, The Grass Is Riz

Picture it: it’s 5:10 on a random weekday morning. My son and I are in the kitchen, silently but companionably together. I am drinking coffee and typing, and he is drinking his breakfast smoothie and staring off into space. Suddenly, I hear something I haven’t heard for a long time: birds chirping.

There are birds everywhere here in the winter; every day I see countless ducks and very scary Canada geese on my walks, there are families of quail cutely scurrying around our yard, there are magpies and hawks flying overhead and little chickadees darting around, there is even a bald eagle that I will sometimes see near the lake. There is no shortage of bird life, but last week was the first time this year that I heard the birds chirping in the early morning. I listened to them while I finished my coffee and rolled out my yoga mat, and then I watched the sky brighten into morning, and it felt very Mary Oliver.

But Now They Only Block The Sun

I always have a song running through my head, although it’s never a birdsong. Last week I had Jump by the Pointer Sisters stuck in my head for days. Days! And there are not a whole lot of lyrics involved in that song, and so my brain kept saying “Jump in! And feel my touch. Jump! You want to taste my KISSES in the NIGHT then” over and over, including, weirdly, the key change. This was a weird and sudden change from the song that was in my head previously, which was Total Eclipse of the Heart, thanks to astrological current events, but not the Bonnie Tyler version, the version from the Old School wedding scene.

The eclipse itself was a non-event for me; we aren’t in the path of totality, but even if we were, it was so cloudy and overcast that I didn’t see the sun all day. Clouds got in my way, people.

Girl, Put Your Spotify On

“Hey Mom,” my older son said the other day, “You know all those old hippies who left Spotify for moral reasons? They’re back!” I knew exactly what he was talking about, because Both Sides Now and Carey suddenly reappeared on my favourite Nicole Karaoke playlist. I have no judgement about this, only gratitude, as a) we all have a price and everyone needs to put food on the table, and b) I have no other way of listening to music anymore, and I really did miss Joni Mitchell.

As mentioned last week, I have been awash in nostalgia lately, and one of the things I was thinking about was how my – and all of our – music listening habits have changed over the years. There are many things to miss about the past, but I do not miss paying $20 for a CD to listen to one or two songs. We have a family subscription to premium Spotify, and so I listen to anything I want, all the time.

The only problem is that if Spotify ever goes down, I am going to be at a total loss. I have no backup. I have hundreds of hours of music and podcasts downloaded, I have mood mixes and workout We still have some CDs; they actually survived my purging and the move, but I do not know why. I have no way to play them, even if I did want to listen to all of Hall and Oates greatest hits. No shade to Hall and Oates, obviously.

Whoa Here She Comes

I thought I had shared this story numerous times, and perhaps I have, but I cannot find anything in the archives to indicate it, so I shall share it again. Many years ago my husband and I were hosting a dinner party. The guests were his work colleagues and their wives, and after several bottles of wine we pounced upon a topic of much interest to me, and that is that if you were to have a theme song that would play every time you entered the room, in the manner of Darth Vader, what would your theme song be? My husband chose Welcome To The Jungle and one of his colleagues went with Gangsta’s Paradise; the company that they worked for was quite a formal and conservative one, which made their answers all the more amusing. I imagined Slash’s wild guitar riff screaming as my husband entered a board room in his suit, and Coolio’s beats playing as his colleague swiped his card key to access the 33rd floor. One woman suggested Lose Yourself, which would be a great entry song for anyone, really. My choice was Maneater, and to this day every time I hear the start to that song, I lift my head a little higher and strut a little more. My song! I think, as if it’s actually happening, as if suddenly the world over hears Maneater every time they are in my vicinity.

We had a dinner conversation about this the other day, and my younger son said that he’d put a lot of thought into this very question over the years, and his theme song of choice is Come Out And Play. I agreed that it was perfect; my older son chose Pretty Fly For A White Guy, but was now questioning this, because could we really have two Offspring songs in the same family? My feeling was that it would be natural for two brothers, especially those that are close, to have songs from the same band, particularly since those songs exactly suit each of their very different personalities. The conversation got quite involved and a little heated, as if this is something that is really happening, that we are really living in a world in which music automatically starts playing each time someone encounters us.

Rex is indifferent to music, it seems, and I had unimaginatively assigned him Who Let The Dogs Out, but I think the more appropriate song is Are You Ready For This?

Weekly Reading

The Berlin Stories. Continuing on my nostalgia streak, and prompted in part by last week’s reading of The Women In The Castle, I dug out my old copy of The Berlin Stories, which was written in the 1930s, based on Christopher Isherwood’s time in that city. I first read this in 1994, if the stamp from the university used bookstore can be believed, and it was for a German history course I took, which was hands down one of the best elective courses I took in university. In 1994, though, a lot of this book was lost on me, and I have found now with more life experience (“my thesis is on life experience”) that I was fully able to appreciate this book, which requires a LOT of “between the lines” reading. It is a fascinating book on so many levels. If you don’t know, which I did not know in 1994, Berlin during the Weimar Republic was a city of personal freedom and expression, and a haven for what is now known as the LGBTQ+ community, of which, of course, Isherwood was a part of. In all of Europe, Berlin was open, welcoming, and accepting, and most of the book is about the people who Isherwood met and knew at the time. The cast of characters is wild and really shows what life was like at that time: from poverty due to the massive inflation to earned and unearned wealth, from showgirls and prostitutes to bartenders and yodelers, from expats to hustlers, this book really runs the gamut. Throughout the book are brief and passing references to political changes and the Nazis, and then near the end, those changes really ramp up in a pretty terrifying way. One of the most chilling anecdotes concerns a Jewish man whose family owns a very successful department store; he dies of “heart failure,” and there is a line about how there has been a lot of heart failure in Germany lately, hearts are known to fail when there is a bullet put through them. The book ends in 1932, and the last thirty pages or so are absolutely terrifying, not in the least because there are some really uncomfortable parallels that could be drawn between this period of time and the present. Listen, we all know I’m not an alarmist, or a politically dramatic person, but it is undeniable.

Woof, that is a pretty bleak note to end on, so I will tell you that I just had the loveliest weekend – it’s been warm and beautiful, and we hosted a barbeque to celebrate my upcoming birthday. What could be better than friends, wine, and cupcakes? Nothing, that’s what. xo

Sassy, Sea Breeze, Stationary, Smoking

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This week I read, and was completely absorbed by, a book that was set in 1998, and I think that is the reason I have been awash in nostalgia. I don’t know what you were doing in 1998, but I was in grad school, taking step aerobics classes, and crushing it during Name That Tune night at the graduate students’ lounge.

I was so good at that game back then, and I could still crush it now, probably, provided all the tunes would be pre-Y2K (remember Y2K?). Disco? I can get down on it. 1970s folk or classic or mellow rock? Take it easy. Anything with a synthesizer, guitar riff, or drum solo? Yes. Grunge, country, pop, rap, techno beats? I can name it all. But I’m pretty hit and miss once we get into the 2000s, and I’m much more miss than hit when it comes to anything at all from the past decade; unless it was featured on the Peloton, I probably haven’t heard it.

There is a Peloton instructor who frequently teaches 80s themed rides, in which she always says that she admires us Gen Xers, who left the house with only “keys and a dream.” It’s true; if you wanted to meet someone at a bar, you just had to use your home phone to call their home phone, and then hope for the best. You had to look up places on a map, and if someone failed to meet up with you, then they failed to meet up with you, and that was the end of the story. You might find out later what happened, or you might not, but in any case, there was no way at all to track down a person. Or hardly any way. I remember when I worked as a waitress, sometimes I would get a phone call for a person desperate to get a message across to another person who was ostensibly in the restaurant, waiting. I would walk through the restaurant, looking for a person of the description provided for me. Are you Cheryl? You are? Dave’s going to be late.

In 1998, I had had an email address for about a year, and mostly I was the recipient of really stupid jokes, chain letters, or erroneous information about how antiperspirants caused cancer. It’s not unlike social media, to be totally honest. I did use it in a pen pal kind of way, though, to keep in touch with people who had moved away.

I still use email in this way for my former yoga students; one octogenarian lady in particular sends me very long emails about my old classes and all the people in them, and I send her long emails back about my life now. There are gaps of a week or more between our emails, which makes it feel like those long-gone pen pal days; she even starts every email with “thank you for your long letter,” which I love.

I was always a person who had a lot of pretty stationary and a lot of pen pals; I would write to my cousin Nikki in California (HI NIKKI), and most of these letters were about boys we liked and our summer vacations. I wrote to all my camp friends; if there is anything more intense and bonding than a week of summer camp when you’re thirteen, I don’t know what it is. I kept up that correspondence for years, even if I never saw that person again.

It reminded me a lot of something I heard about on a podcast recently, about what the hosts called “Little While Friends,” people you have an experience with or are friends with for just a little while, but you end up having them on your social media forever. Around 2010 or so, any time I met someone new, I would end up adding them as a friend on Facebook, which means that a solid percentage of my Facebook feed is made up of people I barely know, but I feel like I know, because I have experienced their entire life journeys over the years. I know about their kids, and their divorces, and their remarriages, and an alarming amount about their dietary and fitness odysseys.

That said, I do love Facebook, there’s no better way to keep in touch with people from my past and present, people who I feel warmly about simply because we have shared life experiences. Some of those life experiences are less savoury than others, but they are what makes us who we are.

My friend Jen (HI JEN) sent me that photo, circa 1992, which made me think of a meme I saw lately, about our high school signature scents: mine was cigarettes and Vanilla Fields perfume. I haven’t smoked anything in well over three decades, and I feel low-level shame that I ever smoked at all, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who carried perfume and mints after hanging out at the smoke doors at school. Isn’t it crazy that there WERE smoke doors?

Does anyone else remember butane curling irons? It says a lot that we didn’t accidentally light ourselves on fire, with all the smoking and excessive hairspray that was necessary for those weird hairstyles of that time. And beyond that, some of us were bringing butane curling irons to school – not me, but I coveted one. I had to make do with scrunching my hair in the girls’ washroom and spraying it with Aussie Sprunch Spray, then setting it with Salon Selectives. Given that I always had a lighter with me, it’s incredible I didn’t just combust right there. It’s probably good that I never had a butane curling iron.

I just discovered, upon googling, that butane curling irons are still in existence!

One thing that I wish was still in existence, or, at least, that I had kept some of my copies, is Sassy magazine. Sassy was, and remains, the best magazine for teen girls, because it treated them like actual intelligent humans. One of the most impactful articles I ever read in my young life was the one that they put out to explain the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm, an event that, naturally, caused me much stress and anxiety. This article detailed the war from all viewpoints, including the Iraqi people and, separately, Saddam Hussein. It was the first time I had ever read anything that showed anything other than a North American point of view, and it was absolutely eye-opening and formative, and made me realize that things were not always black and white, and that what I read in our media was not always the whole story.

In addition to increasing my information about the world around me, Sassy was instrumental in the creation of my skin care and beauty routines. Unfortunately, the girls of the 80s and 90s were sadly misled. Much has been said about the “Sephora Teens” of today, with their Drunk Elephant products and their anti-aging serum usage at age 17, but I think they have the right idea. After all, where they are moisturizing and pampering, we were scouring our poor faces with St. Ives Apricot Scrub, followed by the sting of Sea Breeze astringent; it’s no wonder we were plagued with acne and redness. Suz (HI SUZ) reminded me of that weird little product, the Buf Puf, which we used for EXTRA exfoliation, and we should all be in awe that we didn’t erase our faces altogether. Maybe this was the precursor to today’s Instagram filters, where girls and women filter so much that facial features become obliterated. We were just trying to obliterate our faces physically, rather than digitally. Or maybe that was what we were doing with those deep cleansing mud masks that would dry and crack on our dear little faces, leaving trails of whitish dust in our wake.

Weekly Reading

My Last Innocent Year. Wow, wow, WOW! I loved this book so much, I don’t even know where to begin. It is an exquisitely but sparsely written novel about a young woman in her senior year of college who enters into a relationship with a visiting professor. Tale as old as time, right? WRONG. This was just so well done, and so real, that I did something I haven’t done since I read (and loved) Girls They Write Songs About: I slowed down the last few chapters because I didn’t want it to be over. It’s set in 1998, which, coincidentally, is when I was in grad school, and so this book gave me all the nostalgic feelings. It was just so resonant of a time in my life which was brief, but felt like an age, when it was all about small classes and big camaraderie, hard work and thesis writing, and also parties and romantic interludes, when we all were on a first-name basis with all our professors and knew a lot about their personal lives, which seems wild now. This book, though. The time period details are spot on. 1998 was also when Monica Lewinsky was in the news, which I have a lot to say about, but I will keep it to this quote from the book: “Monica had become every girl’s worst nightmare, the equivalent of having your seventh-grade diary read over the school loudspeaker or walking into class with a period stain on your pants. We identified with her, which should have made us kinder but instead made us mean.” This book resonated with me so much and made me wonder about paths not taken; every single character is so well developed and complex. I wish I could go back in time before I had read it, so I could have the pleasure of reading it again for the first time. This will be a reread for me in the future, I am sure.

The Women In The Castle. When I first read this book in 2018, I really enjoyed it and found it incredibly thought-provoking in terms of divisiveness between people in society. I don’t know if you remember 2018, but it was KIND of a divisive time? I saw this at the library (in large print, no less!) and thought I could do with a reread. After all, since my first reading we went through a pandemic, which has to be THE most divisive time in my memory, and also, here we are, deep sigh. I will say I enjoyed this book as much or even more than before, maybe because I knew what was coming. I will also say that, generally speaking, I think historical fiction is one of the hardest types of book to get right: the language and dialogue is tricky, and it’s often overwhelmingly difficult not to insert modern sensibilities into the past. BUT this book does an excellent job on both fronts – it can be a little “explainy” at times, but I think it’s really well done. It’s about three German women and their families who come together right at the end of WWII, through the efforts of Marianne, the widow of a member of the German Resistance. She brings in the other two women, both ostensibly widows of the Resistance, to help care for them and their families. This book really shows how people can contain multitudes, how complex humans and society can be, how people can get swept up and find themselves in places they cannot fathom, and, most of all, how interconnected we all are, and how we are all responsible for one another.

Well, it’s been a fun trip down memory lane this week; this week is going to be full of lovely things like a trip to the garden centre, lots of writing, and, most exciting, not one but two events with my lovely girlfriends. I hope you all have a beautiful week ahead of you. xo

Wrapped, Rapped, Rapt

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Last Friday I woke up to the lightest dusting of SNOW, and people, I do not think I have ever been so excited by such a meteorological event. The first snow, IN DECEMBER! This is incredible to me, and also it felt so special and festive, even if it didn’t even cover the grass and disappeared by mid-morning. It snowed lightly throughout the weekend, though, so I may be able to use my new skis very soon!

I spent many hours last week grocery shopping and wrapping gifts and packing parcels to be mailed. So many hours, people. Any week that I visit Costco AND Superstore is going to feel exhausting, in the grocery shopping department, but whoa nelly. I think I’ve mentioned before that the Kelowna Costco is the busiest in Canada and second-busiest in North America, right behind the one in Maui. How they measure this I do not know, but having visited both many times I believe it. In any case, this past week it seemed worse than usual, in that it was almost impossible to move the cart as there were people literally everywhere, and then the lineup went two-thirds of the length of the store. She died the way she lived, standing in line at Costco. On the plus side, I had a nice conversation with two ladies, one with regards to the giant stuffed bear in her cart. Have you seen those? One bear fills an entire cart and costs $150; she was telling me that it was for her grandchildren but that she kind of wanted to keep it for herself. This was extremely understandable. “Touch it!” she said to me a little intensely, but I did as she said.

The other lady was also very intense, about the role of ingredient substitutes such as artificial sweeteners or keto-friendly bread in our society. I didn’t disagree with her opinions – after all, I myself am not a fan of those or meat substitutes – but her level of disapproval was, shall we say, heightened. Costco shopping can be a fraught time, emotions run high.

I generally like all manner of holiday-related jobs, such as baking or treat-making or decorating or what have you, but there is one festive job that is at the very bottom of my list, and that is gift-wrapping. I strongly dislike gift-wrapping, possibly because I am so abjectly terrible at it. I might be the worst gift-wrapper over the age of five. I don’t know why I am so bad, but I am: I’m always cutting the paper too big or too small, and then I am trying to either repair the gaping strip where the ends don’t meet or, alternately, folding up huge wads of paper on the sides. There is no in-between. I use far too much tape and somehow I always manage to tape strands of my own hair onto the gift itself; perhaps the stress of wrapping makes my hair fall out, I don’t know. And this is if the gift is in a box, which is the best-case scenario. If it’s irregularly shaped, forget about it. You might be thinking to yourself gift bags exist, which, indeed they do, but we are tear-open-the-gift-wrap people around here, and I also have four rolls of Costco wrapping paper purchased years ago and I still haven’t used them up. I might take them to my grave at this rate, the grave I’m working myself into by standing in line buying such things as giant rolls of Costco wrapping paper.

Anyway, one of the best things about having a newly-retired husband is that I can delegate such jobs to him, and he is happy to do them. I can’t outsource all my wrapping to him, though, which means all the gifts directed to him will be a jumble of wrapping paper and tape.

I don’t know how you get through the various drudgeries of your day, like gift-wrapping, but I mostly listen to music or podcasts. Spotify Wrapped came out this week and it turns out that I, as my friend Nicole said (HI NICOLE), am an actual teenager.

You guys. I am in the TOP ONE PERCENT OF SPOTIFY LISTENERS. Now, in my defense I did spend many hours this year packing and cleaning and moving and unpacking, but still. 93,784 minutes is a lot of minutes. My peak day was July 18, which checks out. That was moving day and I drove eight hours listening to podcasts, then spent another couple of hours unpacking the car and organizing things, so 643 minutes sounded about right.

I’m always a bit surprised when Spotify Wrapped comes out, to see what my top song was. For several years running it was, inexplicably, Midnight Train to Georgia, but this year it was Dog and Butterfly by Heart. Who could have guessed? Certainly not me.

The interesting thing about my top artists is that Wilson Phillips made it in there. There is only one song that I listen to of theirs, and that is Hold On. I feel like that says a lot about my mental state for the first half of the year. I had no idea I listened to that much TLC, but otherwise, I’m not terribly surprised.

I seem to be missing something in my brain – probably because it’s filled up with song lyrics – that allows me to create any kind of visual art. If, for example, you asked me to draw a car or a dog, I would be completely unable to. It would almost seem as if I had never in my life seen a car or a dog, but had only received a verbal description. Here’s a…tire? A dog has…a tail? It’s really bad and probably somewhat related to my inability to wrap gifts with any kind of normalcy. This past weekend we went to a party and I was asked to bring a veggie plate. My beautiful friend Sammi (HI SAMMI) sent me a few photos of Christmassy veggie plates, to see if I wanted to try to recreate one. I was a little nervous – as I said, this is not my forte – but after looking at the photos, and with strong encouragement from my husband, who suggested I try the absolute easiest one, I did it!

My husband, thankfully, made the star. I know I’ve seen a star shape but…?

Weekly Reading

I had a DNF this week; it was I Have Some Questions For You. I had started reading the e-book in September, and it just wasn’t captivating me, and I ended up not finishing it by the time it was due back at the library; I put it back on hold and thought I would finish it later. Well, it came in this past week and after another chapter or two I thought life is too short and I cannot waste any more time on this. This could be because I had just finished the below book.

The Invitation. By the time I got to this book, I was on a four-book meh streak. I thought this might break the streak; it’s a story about a woman in a loveless marriage having a one-night stand, and then the two lovers being inadvertently thrown together on a yacht in 1950s. Friends, it did not break the streak. Five meh books in a row.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Finally! The streak of meh books was broken! Thank god. I don’t think I could have taken another one (my DNF was right before this one). Anyway, I loved this author’s earlier book, Keep Moving. I read it in the thick of the pandemic and whoa nelly, did it ever resonate. What I didn’t know (or maybe I forgot?) is that she wrote Keep Moving while going through an absolutely terrible divorce, and this book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is about that divorce. Her prose is absolutely gorgeous and can I just say that a toxic marriage and dreadful divorce make for very good writing material – as one of her friends said, at least you’re a writer so all this material isn’t wasted. Isn’t that a silver lining? I love dark humour and I loved this book. 

Shelley: Also Known As Shirley. I first read this book in 1987; I was at my grandparents’ house, bored, and helped myself to my grandma’s paperback collection in the basement. I had never seen or heard of any movie Shelley Winters had been in, and in fact I didn’t even know who Shelley Winters WAS. But I have always been interested in women’s and girls’ stories only, and this was one of the few books about a woman. Well! You can see how many times I read this book over the years, because it completely fell apart. I haven’t read it for a long time though, and so I thought I’d revisit it to see how it holds up. IT HOLDS UP! This is one juicy autobiography, and wow, did she ever live an interesting life! As a child she lived in tenements in Brooklyn; when she was about nine her father’s haberdashery shop burned down and he went to prison in Sing Sing for arson. It was a wrongful conviction, so he got out after about a year but sunk into a deep depression. By the time Shelley (then Shirley) was 14 she dropped out of school, got her working papers, and organized a strike at the Woolworth’s she worked at, which led to all the Woolworth’s in the five boroughs being unionized! She became a model, acted in Broadway and off-Broadway plays, was discovered by Harry Cohn and ended up in Hollywood. Oh, and she got married to a man who was in the air force. He came home from the war and they got divorced, and this all happened by the time she was NINETEEN. If that wasn’t enough, she had so many interesting friendships and affairs, going on a publicity tour to Europe while engaged to a costar, and ended up meeting and marrying Italy’s biggest star, Vittorio Gassman while she was there. Later they had an absolutely explosive divorce while starring in an Italian film. This book HAS IT ALL. Wow, what a fun, star-studded read!

I know I talk about Costco with exasperation a lot, but here’s where it pays off: it’s kalette season again! I consider myself to be an unpaid Kalette Influencer; if you see them, just know that they are a life-changing vegetable that is here for a good time, not a long time. So have a good time, the kalettes won’t shine every day! xo

Miley and Me

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The other day I woke up with No Scrubs stuck in my head; this isn’t an entirely strange thing, as I do like that song, and hear it fairly often on one of my playlists. What was strange, though, was how tenacious it was. All through my morning yoga practice I kept hearing hanging off the passenger side of his best friend’s ride over and over. A scrub is a guy who can’t get no love from ME. Then I took a Peloton ride and the very last class was No Scrubs, and it started to feel surreal. After that there was no getting away from it; I wondered if this would be like the time I had the Lido Shuffle stuck in my head for days, and kept hearing it on the radio, and is this is how it starts, the descent into madness.

The next day I chose a Peloton ride that had a No Scrubs-free playlist, but it turns out that I am becoming unhinged anyway, as I got all choked up singing along to Miley Cyrus’ The Climb. There’s always going to be another mountain, I’m always going to want to make it move, it’s always going to be an uphill battle…at which point my singing voice started cracking and I started rapidly blinking back tears. To MILEY CYRUS.

Well, things have felt a little Uphill Battle-ish lately. Every morning I wake up with renewed positivity and optimism, and just as soon as I cross a few Stressful Things off my list, five more Stressful Things take their place. This past week a very unexpected, fairly serious health issue popped up in the Boyhouse, which is causing me considerable worry, as we are moving next month, and this needs to be taken care of prior to that. We are not just moving house, but moving provinces, and let me tell you that I absolutely love the Canadian universal health care system for the most part, but it can be hard to get things in a very timely manner, and inter-provincial health care is not ideal. Switching provincial care and finding new providers is going to be a Big Deal, but I’m trying to keep my head up and take things step by step.

This move is something that’s been in the works for a while, and although I have had some emotional ups and downs about it, I am definitely looking forward to being settled into my new home. In the interim, however, everything feels like chaos. I am not a person who Does Well With Change, in fact, I’m kind of the opposite, and everything is changing at once. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It’s like ripping off a giant bandaid, or getting a Brazilian wax all in one strip. OUCH, but also, it isn’t dragging things out, I guess.

Anyway. Things will get done. In not too long, I will be on the other side of this. On the huge plus side, my son had his second dental surgery this week and it went really well. It went so well that I had a few moments of regret that the first went so badly, but we cannot change the past, people. He and I spent an afternoon watching Forrest Gump, and because I am currently an emotional wreck, I spent much of it blinking rapidly and swallowing hard. We both agreed that the best parts of the movie were the Vietnam scenes and the friendship between Forrest and Lieutenant Dan, and that the music, as the kids say, slaps.

One thing I am very much looking forward to in my new home is gardening. The growing season is solidly four months longer than it is in Calgary, and this winter is going to be all about planning and designing my new beds. The trick will be to keep Rex out of them, which takes some doing. Incredibly, after a winter of being sat on and walked on – Get out of the garden! I said countless times this winter, only to be answered with a look of innocence before slowly trampling the beds on his way out – my Siberian irises are in full, gorgeous bloom. On the other hand, Rex seemed to have killed my creeping Jenny in the hosta garden. Who knew one could kill creeping Jenny? I thought it would survive nuclear fallout, but apparently, it cannot survive a winter with Rex.

Weekly Reading

Foreverland: On The Divine Tedium of Marriage. It’s interesting how sometimes a book will come into your life at just the right time, and will resonate with you so strongly that you might look around, wondering if someone is actually inside your house. Or your head. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of essays that is so honest, so candid, and yet so funny and self-deprecating as this. It’s divided into four sections that can be described as courtship and engagement, wedding and early parenthood, house, home, and parenting older kids, and, finally, bumps in the road, including dissatisfaction, illness, and the pandemic. I cannot even describe how much I related to so much of this book, even for things that happened long ago; it has been a very long time since I had a newborn, but her description of the feeling that the baby was an actual part of her body and when she was separated from the baby, it felt like she was literally missing an organ was so exactly what I too experienced. It is a rare book that makes a person feel completely seen and less alone, but this absolutely did. It’s really a beautiful, yet brutally honest, look at so many facets of marriage and life, and I loved it.

Funny You Should Ask. I read most of this in waiting rooms so I think I was a bit distracted and found this book a bit hard to get into. It’s a nice light romance about a journalist who interviews a movie star and then they meet again ten years later for another interview. The interview skyrocketed her to fame, it started a bunch of rumours, I don’t know, it was fine. I liked it just fine but didn’t love it. Apparently this book went viral on TikTok, so my meh reaction could be just me.

The Paper Palace. Wow, this was a really incredible book. On the surface, it’s about a woman who has just had a clandestine encounter with her oldest friend, and now she’s faced with the choice: leave her marriage and her much-loved husband and children, or stay and figure out how to deal with the fallout. One might think, as I did initially, if she loved her husband so much, why the affair? This book delves into the past fifty years, and how it affected a twenty-four hour period. It’s filled with secrets, and horror, and love; it shows the butterfly effect of single actions, and the connections between us. It is so well written and the descriptive writing is beautiful. I had no idea what was going to happen or how it was going to end, and it’s the kind of book that leaves you wondering and wanting more. I really loved it.

This week felt so long, but I am, Monday morning once again, filled with renewed positivity and optimism to tackle the ever-growing To Do list. Happily, my skin care routine is working and I look fantastic.

I hope you all have a beautiful, uncomplicated week. xo

Two Christmas Miracles; Ninety-Two Weeks In

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Here we are, in the homestretch to the Festive Finish Line, and I have not one, but TWO Christmas miracles to tell you about. Cue the hype-up music – are you ready for this?

Christmas Miracle Number One: Costco

Last week I was due for a Costco trip, and during this Pandemic At The Disco, I have gotten into the habit of combining that with my weekly Superstore trip, so that I hit Superstore at or around opening at eight, and then Costco at or around opening at nine. To say I was not looking forward to this would be an understatement: it’s always a physically exhausting activity, but it was also minus 20 and there was snow on the ground, which makes parking lot cart maneuvering extremely difficult.

I dropped the kids at school and zipped over to Superstore; there were numerous weirdly empty shelves, and those empty shelves seemed extremely random and unrelated to each other or any Weird World Events. With Superstore, it’s a tossup whether or not there is a Pandemic Shortage or just Superstore Weirdness. For example, there were some imported rice and noodles, but no eggs. There were tons of fresh greens, but only two kinds of apples. Other than that, the trip was without incident, unless you count the side-eyes I got from humming and grooving to the store’s Christmas music. What? The best way to spread Christmas cheer is by singing loud for all to hear, not that I was actually singing – no one needs to hear that – but still, I was doing my part for society. If you don’t want me to cart-dance to Last Christmas, then don’t PLAY Last Christmas, Superstore.

One of the side-eyes I got was from the cashier, and I smiled and told her that I love that song. She replied, somewhat grumpily, that she had been listening to it since November 15. So have I, but by choice I didn’t say, because there really is a difference between listening to songs on repeat by one’s own volition or not, as evidenced by the many, many times I heard Werewolves of London back in my university waitressing days. I get it, is what I’m saying.

As a side note, Last Christmas will always have my heart (I gave you my heart), but this year I’ve also been auditorily addicted to N’Sync’s Merry Christmas Happy Holidays, Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas, and Kelly Clarkson’s Underneath The Tree. It’s an interesting mashup, what goes on in my head.

In any case, I got what I needed at Superstore, loaded up the car, and headed over to Costco.

Costco, ten days before Christmas. I blasted the 70s on 7 channel, singing loudly, like a football player listening to In The Air Tonight before a big game. I was literally hyping myself up, thinking I’ve shopped here in spring 2020, I’ve made it through the Great Toilet Paper and Flour Shortage of 2020, DO YOUR WORST, COSTCO, COME AT ME, BITCH.

Costco:

I will tell you this: I haven’t seen Costco like that since 2019. It was so quiet, the shelves were full of everything that I needed (and more, it is Costco after all). I was in and out in half an hour, and, I don’t know if it was just because it was so early in the day, but there were no stray carts in the parking lot. IT WAS A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.

Christmas Miracle Number Two: The Dryer

I got home from my epic grocery trip, still in disbelief over the ease at which I procured said groceries, and started unloading and unpacking the car. While doing so, I thought I would pop the clothes from the washer into the dryer; I took the time to hang the delicates to dry – mostly a few sweaters and some yoga clothes and sports bras – and then pressed the start button.

Nothing happened.

I stood there motionless for a moment, and then started pressing the button with increasing force and rapidity, like I was in a hurry waiting for an elevator; I knew that it was useless to do so and yet I was powerless to stop myself. Needless to say, nothing continued to happen.

My immediate thought was this is karma. I was JUST complaining about how much time I spend doing laundry, this is the universe’s way of reminding me of the incredibly blessed life I lead. NEVER COMPLAIN. My second thought was thank god it was the dryer. I mean, of all appliances to go, the dryer is the easiest one to live without. Clothes can be hung to dry. I have many friends in the neighbourhood who would certainly let me use their dryer if needed. Laundromats exist. Also, the day before I had laundered all the flannel sheets, so it was very lucky that it didn’t break down at that time; that would have been tricky to deal with. As it was, I used everything I could think of in the basement to hang the wet clothes on: I filled our drying rack, then moved on to my son’s music stand, the barbell weight stand, and the small step ladder. I would have gone to Walmart and cleaned out their supply of drying racks, but my husband stopped me. He thought he could solve the problem.

Here’s the thing about the Pandemic and The Way The Pandemic Has Affected My Brain: I just assumed that I would be living without a dryer indefinitely. Well, I guess I don’t have a dryer now, better go buy some drying racks. Can you blame me? There’s so much buzz about the supply chain, I just assumed there was no supply. My husband phoned and left a message with a local repairman; I put on my snow pants and went for a walk, secretly vowing to go buy many drying racks on my return. While I was out, my husband texted me to say that the repairman was on his way.

What?

I had no idea that a repairman coming that same day was even an option, but John the Repairman was there when I got back. After calling around, he said there were parts locally available and he would return on Friday to fix the problem. “The only problem is I can’t test the motor,” he said, “But that’s a rare problem. If the motor’s gone, it’s a thousand-dollar fix.”

Cue ominous music.

Friday morning John the Repairman came back, and within fifteen minutes came to report that the worst indeed came to the worst: the motor was dead. We decided not to fix our ten-year-old dryer, I gave John the Repairman a bag of Christmas treats, and he left. I started another small load of laundry, hanging the clothes to dry, while my husband looked at the Lowes’ website.

THERE WERE MANY DRYERS IN STOCK AND AVAILABLE.

Still, I didn’t quite believe it. The next day my husband and son went out and returned with a brand-new dryer in the truck. They recruited my older son in helping to maneuver it down our narrow basement stairs, unhooked the old dryer, loaded it on the truck, and within the hour I had a working dryer. Am I living in an actual Christmas movie? IT IS A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.

It is also a reminder of how lucky I am. I feel like I should never complain about anything ever again. Especially about anything food related: I don’t want karma to come back and take my fridge or freezer or stove. I briefly had a I’m so tired of making dinner feeling and then snapped out of it. DON’T THINK SUCH THOUGHTS, NICOLE, THE UNIVERSE IS LISTENING.

For the last several years, we use this cute wooden Advent calendar as a Gratitude Calendar: every day we each write one good thing about our day on a slip of paper, and then on New Year’s Eve, we read all of them. I feel like all of my remaining days I should write I have working appliances, thank you, Universe, I have working appliances.

Pandemic Reading

This week I finished the Giller Prize shortlist, and just in time for all my library holds to un-pause and start streaming in.

On the right is the completed pile of Giller Prize shortlisted books, loaned to me by my friend Marion (HI MARION), the left is the pile of library books, and in the middle is the book that I have been reading by bits and pieces for months.

On to this week’s reading!

The Listeners. Based on the description, I would have NEVER picked up this book, but I’m glad I did as I think it’s important to expand my mind and read different things once in a while. That said, I did not love this book, but I did appreciate it for the excellent writing and interesting storyline. A woman hears a strange humming noise; it keeps her up at night, causes migraines and nosebleeds, and no one else can hear it – until one of her students mentions it. She finds a group, all of whom can hear the noise, and things start to fall apart. This is a book that draws parallels to conspiracy theories and cults, and is really incredibly interesting. There are a few parts that jump from one place to another, which makes it a bit tricky to follow, but on the whole this is really well written.

What Strange Paradise. This was the winner of the Giller Prize, and I can see why: it’s exquisitely written and quite timely in terms of subject matter. A migrant boat full of refugees is washed up on the shore of a Greek island, and there is only one survivor: a young Syrian boy. This is very moving, and obviously, given the subject matter, tragically sad.

The Holiday Swap. This is a Hallmark holiday movie in book form, and I am 100% here for it. It has everything: identical twins – one a glamourous TV host, one a homebody running the family bakery – who switch places for a week, an idyllic, snowy, mountain-town setting, romantic interests in the local firefighter and a physician’s assistant, delicious baked goods, a rescue dog, and a cat named Gateau. There are some twists and turns but, naturally, everything works out in the end. This was just a lovely, light, fun read, especially after my string of Very Heavy Books.

I wish you all a very happy holiday season! I hope you can find light, love, and laughter. And maybe some puzzles, games, and delicious treats as well. xo