Category Archives: Moving On Up

Coming Into The Home Stretch

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With all the myriad changes going on in my life right now, I told a friend that I feel like I am having a Brazilian bikini wax, but the entire procedure is just one giant strip instead of many tiny, gentler strips. With everything happening all at once, I am doing my best to cope and to stay in the moment, while still soothing myself by thinking there will be a time after this.

HELP

My friend Allison (HI ALLISON) used that term many, many years ago to refer to chaperoning a field trip, and I have thought of it hundreds of thousands of times since then. This week was so busy and stressful, but ultimately very productive. The moving company is packing the majority of our house; for the extra amount of money added on to the expense of a long-haul move, it seemed very worth it. However, being in a house for twenty-three years means that we have accumulated things we really do not need or want anymore, and although I have been steadily clearing things out for the last few months, this week I really got into the weeds, so to speak. I tackled the crawl space.

Several years ago I really got into the crawl space and got rid of many things we no longer needed, but there was a stack of boxes in there that had not been touched since we had moved in twenty-three years ago. I refuse to just move boxes to put them in storage, so I ruthlessly went through each one, and although I am not wishing such a task on anyone, it was actually pretty fun. I found so many treasures! I also found a lot of junk and questionable items – did I really need to keep a giant box full of RSVP’s from our wedding? – but I was able to recycle most of it, donate some of it, and the rest was, sadly, relegated to the trash. It made me feel a little sad, especially after reading Unraveling last week, but there wasn’t another option for some of the completely unusable items. I mean, I guess there was the option of putting them back into boxes and then putting them into storage in the new house, since that seems to have been our line of thinking twenty-three years ago, but that felt like a slippery slope that would get me right back where I started from. Also, upon the event of my own demise, may that be many decades in the future, I do not want to leave my children with boxes full of useless junk, any more than I already will be.

The bane of my recent existence has been old text books. Between my husband and I, we have four degrees and probably thousands of dollars’ worth of old, now worthless textbooks. A few months ago I looked with horror at my shelves and shelves of textbooks that were not eligible for donation; no one wants outdated economics, econometrics, or statistics textbooks, despite the fact that not much really changes in those areas from year to year. The only thing to do was to recycle them by ripping out all the pages and throwing the bindings and covers into the trash. It was a big undertaking, so imagine my despair when I discovered in the crawl space an entire box full of my husband’s old textbooks that somehow did not make it onto our bookshelves. I set my younger son on the job of recycling them, along with myriad term papers and, strangely enough, a pile of papers from our wedding that included every single song the DJ had in his possession and every menu item the venue had to offer.

These, along with piles of cassette tapes – including mix tapes! – were a drag to deal with, but then I found some wonderful treasures, some of which I am keeping forever, and some of which just made me laugh. As a small backstory, I was six years old when Diana and Charles got married, and their engagement set off my lifelong obsession with the Queen of Hearts. I was not a child for whom it was difficult for relatives to think of Christmas gifts; anything and everything Princess Di was received with great enthusiasm. Soon my obsession included all women in the British Royal Family, including the Queen, with whom I share a birthday. My grandma had saved a lot of clippings and memorabilia from the Queen’s coronation and passed it along to me.

What fabulous treasures! Also, this candy box!

This is less awesome but it made me laugh and shudder at the same time.

I am keeping this forever:

In addition to “things I will keep forever” I found some postcards from friends circa 1989, including one that said “I hate it here and I hate everyone here and I want to come home” which, if that’s not teen angst I do not know what is. Much less angsty was a postcard from my sweet friend Elise (HI ELISE) from the bustling metropolis of Lethbridge:

I don’t know what is funnier, that I have kept this all these years or that I had it at all.

Should I have kept this? Perhaps to hang over my bed in the new bedroom?

The big day, for me and Rex at least, is one week TOMORROW. I can hardly believe it! I am actually looking forward to the unpacking-and-finding-homes-for-everything part, as opposed to the depressing why do we have so much stuff and are we actually swamp people part that I seem to be going through now. I am, as you all know, a person who thrives on neatness and organization and whoa, does my life feel like the opposite of that right now. Well, again, let’s repeat the mantra: there will be a time after this. And in the meantime, I am going to try to enjoy my last few days in the city that has been my heart and home for so many years.

Weekly Reading

Property. The best thing about this book, which concerns a woman married to an unsuccessful sugar plantation owner in the antebellum south, is that it’s short. The story is dull and every character is unlikeable at best, deplorable at worst.

Swipe Up For More! Oh wow, this book was absolutely fascinating to me! I think the entire influencer industry is so interesting: how it developed, how important it is to brands, and how many women have made so much money in it. This book mainly follows three big influencers, two of whom I have never heard of before: a momfluencer, a fashion influencer, and a unique and important fitfluencer. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately since the Food Heaven women posted their Burnout and Pivot series; being an influencer might just look like taking photos and videos, but it is a lot of work to be successful. Some of these women work upwards of 80 hours a week, and the work is just never done. Their whole life is on display for work, which is a really odd concept. Even odder – and ickier – is the world of the momfluencer, because it is her life as a mom and her own kids who are being used by brands for money. It brings up all sorts of ethical dilemmas: can your children be used in campaigns? What if you put the money away for them for their education, then is it okay? At what point do children have agency over their own lives and decisions? Is a sponsored trip to Disney a vacation or just more grind? The momfluencer in question has since – given that her older children have rebelled against posing for yet another photo or acting in yet another reel – slowed down her own work and campaigns, and wonders if her life as an influencer has deep and negative effects on her children (probably, the answer is yes). It’s an interesting thing to consider. I thought about this a lot when I was writing for YMC: a lot of my colleagues wrote about things like potty training and discipline, complete with photos, and even at the time it felt wrong for me to write about the kids in that way. For me personally, my kids are blog-adjacent but I don’t divulge much of their lives here because it’s their lives. I should note though that my kids actually enjoy when, say, a former yoga student of mine recognizes them “in the wild” from my Facebook posts, but I can imagine if I had a far-reaching platform in which they played a significant role, they might feel a lot different. Anyway, this was such a good read and really thought-provoking.

The Long Goodbye. This was an absolutely gorgeous memoir about a woman losing her mother, and the grieving process that followed. And I will say that I was 100% NOT in the right headspace to read about her mother dying at age 55 of metastatic colorectal cancer, so I cannot say I enjoyed it, but I appreciated the beauty and tenderness of the writing.

All right, friends, I am in the home stretch now. Back in the aforementioned grad school, another woman and I had the Rosie the Riveter poster in our office as a reminder that We Can Do It, and I have that Rosie the Riveter photo in my mind constantly these days. I feel like her, mascara, lipgloss and all. xo

Social Butterfly and Boxes, Boxes, Boxes

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Nothing motivates a person so much as having a firm deadline, am I right? The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of cleaning and decluttering, donating and packing, and squeezing in as many social visits as I possibly can. And speaking of motivation, nothing lights a fire with regards to actually scheduling social visits, as opposed to the old “we should get together sometime soon” like leaving the province. I feel very popular these days! A woman, who I had not seen since 2019, dropped by my house for a surprise visit, which is not my favourite, and said that even though we hadn’t seen each other in years, she’s sad that I’m leaving because she thought that I’d just always be here, in this house, anytime she wanted to see me. That made me feel less popular, and more boring and staid, although I guess I’m morphing into some unpredictable wild child, leaving the house I’ve been in for twenty-three years.

I think that old trope about friends coming into your life for a reason, season, or lifetime is very true. A couple of weeks ago we had friends over for dinner – our last dinner party in our house. These are friends that are more like family, friends for life; we regularly share meals and vacations, and we have that rare unicorn of a situation where the kids all get along AND the adults all get along. It seems with couple friends that this isn’t always the case, but all eight of us love each other and enjoy each other more and more with the passing years. I found a very special package of napkins that I had bought years ago and I thought why am I saving these, let’s use them!

There’s even a drink recipe on the back.

Our older kids share a birthday – they are only two hours apart in age – but their youngest just celebrated her 17th, so I decided to make her a cake in her favourite flavours, peanut butter and chocolate. This is a cake I had made before, and, as an aside, my son reminded me that I had a goal to make every single cake in this book and I have only made two, so I need to get moving on that. In any case, I had made it before, so I was very confident in the final product.

And at this point I will say I am not a person who gets stressed about having dinner guests. I am generally a very relaxed hostess who just wants everyone to have a full glass of whatever they want, and the rest falls into place. I think I inherited this trait from my mother, who wouldn’t blink at having twenty people over for a meal and who I remember hosting many enormous holiday meals in a completely calm manner, including, when my brothers each got married, hosting fifteen and twenty-eight houseguests, respectively. When I was a kid, I could invite any friend over for any meal with zero notice, and she’d just ask me to go grab some more potatoes. So I tend to be pretty calm and I figure the food will be fine, and people are here to visit anyway.

But I did want the cake to be nice for our girl, and I was sure it would be. I was humming around the kitchen, and thought the cake was chilled and set enough to have the springform pan’s sides removed. At this point in the movie of my life, ominous music would start playing. I cheerfully removed the ring and, friends, it was a disaster. Immediately the top ganache started breaking apart and the weight of it made the fluffy filling, for lack of a better word, explode in a slow-motion manner. At that moment my husband came inside from checking the barbeque and I could only scream “The cake! The cake!” in the manner of that guy from Fantasy Island when he saw the plane. He hurried over and together we jammed the springform sides back on as the peanut butter filling spread everywhere. I was in a low-level state of Cake Panic. I never really worry about what I am serving my guests, for better or for worse, but I did have an image in my mind for my favourite girl, for our last of many dinners and visits in our house. After we had jammed the sides of the springform back on, I put it in the freezer, and this was the end result:

The birthday girl, bless her heart, thought it looked Really Cool That Way, Nicole, and it was honestly really delicious. I think the freezing actually improved the whole cake, all around, and I am going to remember that for next time. Freeze BEFORE removing the sides.

Speaking of my mom, I visited my parents for a couple of days and the guys joined in for the Canada Day holiday. I was reminded of a conversation my friend Tara (HI TARA) and I had, lo these many years ago, about visiting our parents. At the time we both had very tiny babies and equally tiny toddlers, and life felt as chaotic as that sounds. I recall mentioning to Tara taking the boys over to visit my parents and marvelling at their house as an oasis of peace, tidiness, and calm. It was like this whole other world, that wasn’t awash in diapers and toys and tears, and my mother would be calmly putting together a balanced meal, whereas I would have one child in the Baby Bjorn and another at my feet, trying to figure out how to cobble together a half-decent meal before the baby needed feeding and the toddler needed bedtime. Tara nodded and said “It’s like finding out how the other half lives,” and I felt that, again, at this time in my life, deeply as I was at my parents’ house this weekend. There aren’t boxes and donation piles everywhere! There are no endless to-do lists and balancing eating everything in the freezer and cupboards with are we running out of coffee, omg. I mean, this is what my front hallway has looked like for a week and a half, waiting for a donation pickup:

And the basement seems to have exploded:

But I had a great time at my parents’, even though one evening we were under a tornado warning. My mom and I popped over to my friend Merry’s lovely little store, original home of Salvadore the Gnome. Merry’s Mercantile carries giftware and clothing as well as a ton of wonderful vintage items, and one of the first things I saw was this:

GRIMACE! Is it a sign? I did not buy him, nor did I buy the cookbook by the 80s TV star Wok With Yan, although I was very tempted.

I was also tempted to buy a bandanna for Rex that stated “I’m the reason we can’t have nice things,” but, as appropriate as that is, I did not because I figured he would probably, ironically enough, destroy it. Merry did mention she had one last garden gnome who needed a home, and the last time I heard that phrase I ended up with a 95 pound ball of love, so of course I took the gnome home, although he’s going to be in a box for a little while. There will be a time after this! At one point boxes will not be my life, and Gustaf the Gnome will be presiding over a garden patch.

Weekly Reading

Tuesday Nights In 1980. This was a really good book about the NYC art scene in 1980, which is something I do not know much about. It deals with an art critic who has a special ability to see the world in colours and flavours, a fledgling artist from Argentina who is about to hit the big time, and a woman from Idaho who is trying to life the artist life in the gritty city. It took some turns I really did not expect, and is a compelling story about, thematically enough, chosen and blood family.

Unraveling. I think Jamie (HI JAMIE) had recommended this book, and to be honest, the premise did not sound promising. Starting in 2020, the author decides to write about making a sweater from scratch, and I do mean from scratch. She learns how to shear a sheep and does so, then washes, cards, and spins the wool. She makes her own natural dyes and colours the yarn, finally knitting it into a sweater. Pandemic projects, am I right? But the point was to show how much labour goes into the making of a sweater, and it was honestly fascinating. The book takes many sidebars to show just how much traditional labour – generally women’s – went into the making of textiles and clothing. The most fascinating example was one I had heard before, which is that the most valuable item on a Viking ship was the sail. The amount of labour that went into one sail is estimated to be two women-years of work. In medieval times, women of all classes would spend the majority of their time spinning and weaving, and the word spinster meant a woman untethered by husband or children, who could spend extra time doing these very important and valuable jobs. Having a spinster in the house was not a burden but instead was valuable. The book also goes into the absolute environmental disaster that is our textile and clothing industry, and questions why we think so much about what we put into our bodies, but not at all about what we put ON them, from an ecological point of view. Once you know this, you really can’t un-know it, and I have been thinking a lot about the impact our consumer choices have on this world. It’s really shameful and we have to do better as a whole and as individuals. I’ll be thinking about this for a while. This was a really thoughtful, interesting, well-researched and well-written book.

Now that I’m back from “where the other half lives” I need to get back to reality. Back to boxes and everything else, and I hope you all have a much-less hectic and stressful week than the one I am facing. Be well, friends! xo

Back In The Day

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Interprovincial Woman of Mystery

I did not realize how mysterious and secretive I have been with regards to my new city, and it certainly isn’t a mystery or a secret: this Calgary Girl is going to morph into an Okanagan Girl. We are moving to Kelowna, BC, which is in the heart of Western Canada’s fruit and wine country, and is also home to the world famous Ogopogo!

My husband grew up in Kelowna, and hilariously recalls a friends’ family who claimed to have seen the Ogopogo themselves, while boating on the lake. This made them briefly locally famous, as they were on the six o’clock news talking about seeing the creature in the wake of the boat. It is probable that this exposure on the news gave their family business a much-wanted boost, which seems very quaint now. Remember the days when one would wait until the six o’clock news to find out something that happened in the world, and if you missed it, you had to wait another five hours or even until the paper was delivered the next day to catch up? And if you knew someone who was on the news, or maybe you yourself were interviewed for a human interest segment or breaking story, it was an incredibly exciting and special thing? Now we just all have social media and, perhaps, blogs or newsletters, and anyone across the globe can know minutia of our lives at any given time, but then, well, then an alleged Ogopogo sighting meant the six o’clock news and could be discussed lo these forty years later.

Whether or not the Ogopogo exists in reality – it exists in all our hearts, I’m sure – this is where I will be hanging my hat, so to speak. Or, stacking my boxes. Ernie (HI ERNIE) guessed correctly that our vacation home will now be our home; it is a beautiful house in a beautiful place, and you can all expect many stories as I get settled into my new life.

This Might Make You Grimace

Speaking of quaint things like the days with a non-24-hour-news-cycle, I heard something incredibly disturbing recently that will resonate with all of us who grew up in North America in the 80s. It has to do with the McDonaldland characters. Now, growing up, we were not a family who really ate McDonalds food – we were more Dairy Queen people, or, for extremely fancy occasions, Swiss Chalet patrons – but I did not live under a rock, and I did attend many a birthday party at McDonalds, so I was well aware of all the characters in the McDonaldland universe. Most of these characters made sense to my childhood brain: a clown, a mayor whose head was an actual cheeseburger, giant sentient French fries, a crazed criminal who craved hamburgers. And then there was Grimace, a giant purple puff who, I guess, liked milkshakes a lot. His existence didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but he was cute, and that counts for pretty much everything for a young girl in 1982 who loved everything Muppets, Smurfs, and anything else that was cute but didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

This week, this very week, I learned that Grimace – that amiable purple puffball – was modeled after a taste bud.

Words cannot describe my revulsion at this discovery. Imagine the actual board meeting of creative executives coming up with this idea. I know what will bring the kids in! Listen, kids love a cuddly creature. You know those bumps on your tongue that allow you to differentiate multiple flavours? Hear me out. A cuddly lovable creature that IS one of those bumps. Upon seeing the expressions on the faces after this idea was on the giant piece of paper on the easel, used for brainstorming: YES. And we shall name it Grimace.

I mean, I have so many questions. First of all, how was such an idea conceived? I can only imagine that the McDonalds advertising creative dropped LSD one night and spent the subsequent twelve hours staring into the mirror at his own tongue, waking up the next day with the feeling of mind expansion and the idea that yes, a giant sentient taste bud could be a beloved character in the McDonaldland universe. Not only was this idea conceived, but it was also approved. It was approved! By, I am assuming, high level creative marketing executives. Going back to the board meeting where the executives were all grimacing from the grossness of making a mascot based on a gustatory cell, which would, appropriately, be named Grimace, someone in that meeting, someone very high up on the McDonalds marketing ladder championed this and approved it for mass consumption.

What a world we lived in, back in the 80s.

Wool of Fortune

I loved Wheel of Fortune back in the 80s, and I am sure I would love it now if I ever remembered that it still exists and that I can indeed watch it. Or, more accurately, that I wasn’t halfway to coma-land after dinner, which is Reading Time for me and Watching Shows about Gold Mining in the North Time for my husband. Something that I learned recently is that Vanna White, glorious co-host of our beloved game show for the past forty years, is an avid knitter. Ms. White loves her fibre art and in fact, has an entire Vanna White-branded yarn.

This amazes me. If I were asked what Vanna White’s most-loved hobby was, I am not sure I would come up with knitting if I had one hundred guesses. I told my husband and he thought it would take a thousand guesses. In any case, I am charmed by this and mentioned it to my yoga ladies a few weeks ago, and one of them said she was not surprised as it is well known that Ms. White makes her own clothes. What. I am pretty sure she doesn’t make the clothing that she wears on Wheel of Fortune, as there always seems to be a clothing sponsor mentioned at the end of each show, or so I remember, but I like to think about her knitting herself a sweater to slip on with a cute little skirt she whipped up on her Singer. Or maybe just popping over to Fabricland to see what’s new.

Someone once asked me why I read so many memoirs, including celebrity memoirs, and it is because of things like this. I am endlessly curious about other people’s lives, particularly the minutia of other people’s lives, and knowing that Vanna White is a knitter and sewer makes me love her even more. Also, you never hear anything bad about Vanna White so I am assuming she is an angel on this earth, doing good and lighting up letters.

We’re Going To Have A Problem Here

I usually listen to 70s on 7 in the car, shoutout to Suz (HI SUZ), my fellow 70s on 7 aficionado, but sometimes I’ll flip channels to 80s on 8, 90s on 9, and Pop 2K. And what I am going to say probably circles back to my dislike for books with f*ck in the title – JUST SAY FUCK OR DON’T – but a minor pet peeve of mine is when songs are radio edited. I know. I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me, I already know that there is a reason for this, that we are protecting the ears of the youth of North America, if I want to hear unedited hard core hip hop I can listen to the Rock the Bells channel, I KNOW. But it still bothers me to hear a little bleep or a whoosh or what have you. This is mostly a problem with Pop 2K – it certainly isn’t on 70s on 7 – and some songs are so edited that there are barely any lyrics at all. I’m looking at you, Eminem.

I was in the car and The Real Slim Shady came on and I realized that the word “clitoris” was edited out, but the line about being cannibals who cut other people open like cantaloupes was not. As I said, I don’t like radio edits at all, but why would a mention of a body part be edited, but not a grossly violent act? Well, I guess because it’s a woman’s body part, living in the patriarchy, etcetera.

Omg you guys, what if someone created a mascot based on a clitoris? If it could happen for a taste bud it could happen for a clitoris! Maybe this has already happened, how much do we know really about the California Raisins?

Weekly Reading

Beauty Sick. I picked this up because Val Monroe mentioned it in her excellent newsletter, How Not To Fuck Up Your Face. It’s a well-researched, well-written book about the toxicity of the beauty industry and media; it was published in 2017 so I would say none of the ideas in here are new or astounding, but it’s a good read nonetheless. It got me thinking about the messages we were all bombarded with, growing up, and how we can change that for the next generation of girls.

We Are Not From Here. Stephany (HI STEPHANY) recommended this and I’m glad she did! It’s a moving account of three teens fleeing gang violence in Guatemala for the US. They travel on La Bestia, the dangerous train across Mexico, then on foot towards the border. It’s fiction but is based on the horrific real-life stories of children travelling on their own, hoping for compassion and safety. It’s a YA novel, which I didn’t know going in, and I find lately, at 48, I really empathize with the parents in YA novels. After all, the children are younger than my youngest, which is a sad and despairing thought. How lucky I feel to be born where I was and to not face such deadly decisions. 

The Summer Place. This author is hit or miss with me, but this was definitely a hit! What a romp this was, with multiple viewpoints and characters, massive family drama, scandalous secrets, and a heartwarming ending. This takes place during the pandemic and shows the fissures that developed in families through being disconnected or being TOO connected – i.e., what happened during lockdown when everyone was together ALL THE TIME. I was nodding along constantly. Anyway, this was a very fun read with interconnected characters and stories, and I loved it. A couple of interesting notes about the matriarch of the story: she made a ton of money in the 80s because she had written and sold the movie rights to a couple of books. The matriarch wanted to be a “serious” writer, but she ended up being a “commercial” one, and I wondered if that was the author’s actual lived experience. Another note, and this was fun to read after The Paper Palace, which also took place in Cape Cod, is that the matriarch, who is Jewish, discusses the original WASPy owners of summer homes. She describes the homes as falling apart cottages with owners who throw parties with “oceans of booze and only Ritz crackers and supermarket cheddar to eat” AND THIS IS EXACTLY THE DESCRIPTION IN THE PAPER PALACE. The supermarket cheddar stood out as a detail. I am not a part of the Cape Cod summer community so I wondered – is this a thing? Anyway, I loved this book, it was such a fun summery read.

Here we are, in the last week of June, ALREADY! The first of my daylilies is in bloom, the weather has moderated itself, there are boxes everywhere, and I have been busily trying to see as many people as possible before the big move. I’m heading to my parents’ for a few days for the Canada Day holiday, so it’s going to be a busy and social week for me. I hope you all have a beautiful week. xo

Don’t Worry About A Thing Because Every Little Thing Is Going To Be All Right

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Let Your Love Flow Like A Mountain Stream

Last week I was channeling Miley Cyrus, this week I am all about Bob Marley. It’s been a very busy, very productive week, and – to also channel Melissa Manchester – I think we can make it.

Friends, this is going to sound like the most Out There, Hippie Shit ever, but I made a bit of a mental shift and suddenly, things started magically clicking. Maybe they would have clicked anyway! Maybe this is just a weird coincidence! Maybe our minds have nothing to do with what happens in our lives BUT early last week I was doing my yoga practice and throughout my sun salutations I kept thinking this is what my life is, this is my life, and then as I moved on to standing postures I thought I choose how to respond, and I accept this life and THEN throughout my seated vinyasa and closing I thought of the line in Desiderata, whether or not it is unclear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. I finished my practice, feeling peaceful and zen, and then everything started falling into place. Can that really be a coincidence? Maybe. But also? Maybe not.

My husband and older son drove a truckload of boxes and household items, including all our artwork, to our new house this weekend, leaving only nails and picture hangers, plus an incredible amount of dust on the walls. Did you know that the walls behind your pictures and artwork get very dusty? They do! In any case, I was absolutely astounded by the sheer amount of things my husband squeezed into his truck, and am now feeling much, much better about the move in general and what happens if everything doesn’t fit into the moving van in particular. I also have phoned the moving company not once, but twice, and they have been nothing but wonderfully reassuring, even in the face of my incredibly panicked, probably stupid questions. One such question? How do they make it fit? The women on the phone did not give me an answer like “lube, obvs,” or “that’s what she said” although I kind of wish they did. Instead, they explained, over and over, that the movers were essentially professional Tetris players, and after seeing what my husband – not a professional Tetris player – fit into his regular truck I am definitely feeling more confident.

We are also in the process of donating and selling cheaply a lot of items in the house, which means I was using our neighbourhood Buy Nothing group a lot, and you all know how that goes. My heart strings are pulled by stories of breakups and divorce and children needing items, and when I reach out to those people to arrange for a pickup or drop off? Crickets, they are chirping. I had reached my this is not worth it breaking point, and less than an hour after that the Diabetes Association called to see if I had any donations to be picked up. YES PLEASE, and also, the universe is unfolding as it should, om.

Doctor Doctor Give Me The News

I had two appointments in this past week with two different doctors, and at each appointment I ended up getting into a long, completely non-medical-related conversation. These conversations went on so long that I started to worry about other patients, and if their appointments would be delayed. I kept trying to close off the conversations with a smile and nod, and then they just kept going. What is it about me? I am a chatty person for sure, but there is something about me that seems to encourage long, in-depth conversations with random people, which, don’t get me wrong, I love, but also what about your other patients, you guys?

To illustrate the completely unrelated, non-medical nature of these conversations, one of the doctors talked to me about Snowmobile Culture In Rural Saskatchewan and his Love For Ice Fishing, which led to Bush Parties of Our Youth and Cruising Main Street As A Saturday Night Activity. This conversation was after my regularly-scheduled Pap smear, in which we also discussed Nicole’s Cervix: It’s In An Unusual Spot Which Is Why This Is So Awkward, a conversation we have every single time I get my Pap.

Doctor: I’m so sorry, this must be painful for you.

Me: I’m fine.

Doctor: I’m not! I’m sweating here.

Me: *starts laughing while the speculum is searching in vain for my elusive cervix, makes everything actually painful and even more awkward*

The conversation with the second doctor was my fault entirely. I noticed a photo of a much-younger him crossing a finish line, with a neon sign saying the time was 11 hours and 35 minutes. I asked the doctor if that was an Ironman he competed in, as I couldn’t imagine what else it could be, which started a very long discussion about how it was his first of three, segueing into How The Pandemic Changed Our Exercise Routines, which led to an involved discussion about my love for Peloton and his love of swimming pools and how devastating it was when they closed in 2020, and concluded with his suggestion that I myself compete in an Ironman before I turn fifty. Sir. I think you have grossly overestimated my interest and abilities, flattering as that is. Also flattering is that this doctor informed me that I am the “healthiest person he’s seen in years” and was definitively able to rule out MS as a cause for my constantly-going-numb left foot. Unfortunately, there is no telling why this happens and has happened for five years now, but a diagnosis of Definitely Not MS is really happy news.

Also happy news is that we have a date for the medical procedure for the recently-mentioned health issue, and that date is BEFORE we move. Now, this is the Canadian health care system so anything can happen, but as of now we have a date, we don’t have to think about going back and forth between provinces, and I am just so goddamn grateful.

This Is The End, Beautiful Friend

I wonder if all the community centre’s recent HVAC woes have helped me come to terms with saying goodbye to my beloved yoga classes. I taught my last two classes this week, and I felt very at peace with it. I expected to be very emotional and teary but I wasn’t; I was just happy that I was able to spend so many years at this place, getting to know all my wonderful students. They were so lovely, giving cards and notes and gifts and baking, and only one student burst into tears, which made it easier on me.

Many people have asked if I will teach yoga in my new city, and the answer is I don’t really know. I probably could, and I have a few ideas, but the yoga industry, such as it is, is very different from when I started teaching, what with so many studios closing after and during the pandemic. I advertised to the Calgary yoga community to take over my classes, and my inbox instantly exploded, and each interested potential teacher was incredibly qualified. There are just so many teachers competing for not very many classes, and I feel like the same is true for my new city. It might be time for a pivot!

School’s Out FOREVER

Speaking of pivots, my younger son has his last exam tomorrow, which means we are DONE with the public school system! I am no longer a Mother of School Aged Children, instead I am a Mother of Semi-Functioning Adults. Landslide to infinity.

Weekly Reading

Hold My Girl. Friends, I want so badly to champion every single book written by female Canadian authors, I really really do. I want to tell you to read and support all of them. But this book, well. I didn’t HATE it. I read it to the end because I was invested enough in the story to want to see how it turns out. And on the positive side, it did provoke some interesting thoughts about what makes a parent: is it biology, is it nurture, and is love like a pie that is finite or is it ever-expanding the more people we let in? So the concept – about an IVF mixup that led to two women discovering that the babies they had (one late-term miscarriage, one healthy birth) were not, biologically speaking, their babies – is interesting. The execution, however, was lacking. The story itself is cliched in every way, trite, and the dialogue stilted. And there are so many parts that I thought what, that would never happen, like how the women’s eggs were purposefully switched by the nurse who was a friend of one of the women (what, why), and the doctor revealed the name of each woman to the other without legal representation (what, how) that I just lost the thread a bit. Anyway, it’s fine but I hate that I can’t be more enthusiastic about it.

Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies. I am not a person who is bothered in the least by swearing, generally, but I have a history of strongly disliking books that have a bleeped out F*ck in the title. If you can’t just say Fuck then just don’t say it, you know? I’m looking at you, Mark Manson and Caroline Dooner. Yes, I know this is a publishing thing but I stand by my anti-f*ck stance. I feel similarly when people use the word “effing” or “fricking.” Say it or don’t say it. And I also had a moment in the first few pages where I thought oh no, I am way too old for this as the author describes waking up in a hungover haze after her 25th birthday when she drunk-dialed her therapist and, although she doesn’t remember it, said she had nothing to live for. But I had heard her interviewed on a podcast and she seemed really lovely, so I gave the book a chance and I am SO glad I did. I really loved this book, which is part memoir, part self-help, part enthusiastic cheerleader. Yes, some of the self-help did not in the least apply to the stage of life I find myself in, but the rest of it was just so cheering, so affirming, and the author herself does so many things that I do personally – make your bed every day, treat yourself in small ways every day, don’t hang out with people who make you feel terrible – that I wondered could I write a book like this? It was truly joyful to read, and I am looking forward to reading her latest.

I am feeling energized and optimistic for the week ahead, like the universe is unfolding as it should. I hope you all have a wonderful week. xo