Category Archives: Playtime

Money Honey

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I had a real Lemon, It’s Wednesday start to the week, but on Monday. At one point I thought it was time to start making dinner, and I looked at the clock; it was 12:30 pm.

Fortunately this state of affairs didn’t continue for the whole week; in fact, things improved exponentially. For one thing, we finished the puzzle!

Michelle (HI MICHELLE) had asked what I do with puzzles after I’m finished, and I disassemble them and put them back in their box, which in this case feels like an extreme case of non-attachment, like I am a monk making mandalas in the sand.

If you have been in a grocery store lately, or, indeed, alive in this world, then you will be well aware at the shocking price of literally everything. Recently at Costco I picked up a two-litre of olive oil that a mere six months ago cost $18.99; it is now selling for $32.99 which, I think we all can agree, is a startling increase in price. I do believe there is a global olive crop failure, cue the ominous climate music, but also? $32.99. My cooking just got way more expensive.

Olive oil isn’t the only item that has vastly increased in price, of course, because it seems like everything has with the strange exception of almonds and almond butter, which I am not going to question and instead will welcome with open arms. Come to me, almond products. In a non-food-related, but still very shocking topic, my favourite Maybelline mascara is now $14.99, as opposed to being well under ten dollars only a year ago. This is MAYBELLINE MASCARA. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a luxury brand. I go through at least one tube of mascara a month, so my already-unwieldly beauty budget is ever-increasing.

In my recent Ask Me Anything, Engie (HI ENGIE) asked an interesting question that I have been pondering for months now: What do you resent paying for? Because I am pedantic about semantics, I have been stuck on the word resent. I do not like paying such high prices for everyday items such as olive oil and mascara, but I cannot say I resent it.

Something I find mentally exhausting is the action of clicking on a link in a newsletter or a blog post, a link that looks interesting and exciting, only to find that it is behind a paywall. Similarly, I have in the past year subscribed to a number of Substack newsletters written by talented and interesting people, and recently I have noticed that only a paragraph or two will be available in the free subscription of the Substack, the rest reserved for paid subscriptions only.

I don’t resent this. I do believe that creators should be compensated for their work, and to that end, I do have a few subscriptions I pay for via Substack or Patreon, subscriptions that I value and that add to my life. However. I could not possibly afford to pay for every single Substack or Patreon membership for every creator that I enjoy; or, I suppose I could, but that would severely cut into my beauty budget, and I am unwilling to do that. I’m not cutting back on my mascara consumption, is what I am saying, and something has to give.

It’s frustrating, though, to get excited about reading something only to find out that one must pay to read that something, which is the point of a paid subscription, I know. I know how it works! It’s like old-school click bait, but with subscriptions. Creators have to eat too, and that olive oil isn’t going to pay for itself, but I just wanted to know what Val Monroe was going to recommend for undereye bags without having to pay $8 a month to find out.

To be honest, when it comes to undereye bags, the secret is probably to invent a time machine and to get completely new genetics, or to visit a plastic surgeon or dermatologist for some kind of injection or surgical intervention, or to quit the Friday night wine habit and get ten hours of sleep a night. None of these appeal.

Speaking of undereye bags, I made a grave mistake a few weeks ago. I was glancing at my Instagram when a sponsored reel popped up, regarding The Biggest Mistake Older Women Make When It Comes To Makeup, and dear readers, I watched the whole thing. I watched an entire reel on Instagram about the best way to deal with undereye bags and other signs of aging, and now my entire Instagram is flooded, absolutely flooded, with Makeup For Women Of A Certain Age.

It’s only a matter of time until I capitulate. This is how I ended up purchasing many pairs of my dearly beloved Mott and Bow jeans, and we all know that I am not made of stone, particularly when it comes to beauty products. I shall keep you all posted.

After a great deal of thought, I realized that although there is nothing in my life that I currently resent paying for, there is something that I resent having paid for, and that is twenty years of regular, frequent, professional hair colouring. The pandemic forced my hand, as it were, when it comes to boxed, at-home hair colour, and there might not be many things that I am grateful for, back in April 2020, but I absolutely am grateful for my foray into DIY hair colour. When I think about the massive amount of time, money, and energy I expended on getting my hair coloured when I could have been doing it myself, and what I could have been doing with that money instead, I do feel ridiculously resentful. My hair is no more damaged than when I was getting it done in a salon, and while I’m sure it’s not a perfect colour job, it is definitely more than good enough.

Before:

After:

All that wasted money! Well. I have not yet invented a time machine to go back and start colouring my hair at home at the beginning of the millennium, nor to change my DNA so as to not have undereye bags. One must leave the past in the past; we learn from history, lest it repeat itself.

Weekly Reading

Speaking of history!

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party. This is not typically the kind of book I reach for, but Engie (HI ENGIE) mentioned it with enthusiasm and it did sound fascinating: the author is distantly related to Sarah Graves, who with her family and brand new husband leave Illinois for the promised land – initially Oregon, but, fatefully, they decide to take a “short cut” and across the Sierra Nevada to California, joining up with the Donner Party. What a decision that was. The throughline for the book is “The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party” and “harrowing” feels like a real understatement. Something I have thought of a lot, after rereading the Little House books as an adult, is that there has to be something of hubris, plus the incredibly offensive “manifest destiny,” to just pack up your family and travel thousands of miles, destination unknown, really. Also, how bad are things at home that one must feel the need to do this? I guess it’s just the search for a better life, which is something we all want. Anyway, these people were all extremely ill-prepared for what was to come, although if they knew what was to come they’d probably have stayed home. First of all, they go against the recorded recommendation to never start their journey later than May 1, instead they left over three weeks later. They start running out of provisions as they trudge across the salt deserts of Utah, with no water and their oxen (the poor oxen, I felt for the animals in this book) just collapsing and dying. Animal lovers: there are some really difficult parts to read THE POOR OXEN, THEY DID NOT CHOOSE THIS LIFE. Truly, no one would have chosen what they did, particularly the poor children. And probably the women. Let’s face it, the men were making the decisions here.

Anyway, the party starts dropping their possessions – once considered necessities – to lighten the load for the dying oxen. Then they get stuck in the “shortcut” through the Sierra Nevada, getting snowed in, everyone starving to psychosis and, often, death. A small party – including Sarah – makes a break for it to get help, and of course they have no idea where they’re going or how to get there, and it’s honestly kind of a miracle they didn’t all die right there. They were essentially shoeless and naked, in the winter and deep snow, with no food, eating people as they died, which is also what was happening back at the base camp. Of the 87 people, 47 died, including Sarah’s husband, and most of them, um, get eaten by everyone else in order to survive.

Another thing I’ve thought of often due to my Little House consumption, and now this book, is how terrible it would be to be a widow in those times. A widow would be extremely vulnerable, with no way to earn money really, and she would be kind of a sitting duck for anyone who wanted to take a shot at her, so to speak. Anyway, this is a GRIM book but absolutely fascinating, and the story is told in a really compelling way, and despite the shockingly horrifying, one might even say HARROWING, subject matter, I really enjoyed reading it. What’s wrong with me?

The Rachel Incident. Listen, I know that a while ago I swore off books about twentysomething hot messes who drink too much and make bad choices BUT something compelled me to pick this up. The author is a podcaster who I enjoy very much and this book – about an Irish woman and her closeted best friend and housemate – is one of the most intensely satisfying books I have ever read in my life. It takes place in Cork in the height of the 2008-2010 recession, and I was emotionally invested in the characters from page one. It’s so well written and there is just so much in terms of layers and nuance, it’s fantastic.

It’s been an interesting and, ultimately, good week. I hosted a Galentine’s night on Saturday with some wonderful girlfriends; I will never cease to be grateful for the incredible women in my life, and this group has welcomed me into their circle with open arms. If you’re reading this, know that I am grateful for you too! Have a beautiful week, friends. xo

It’s Puzzling

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Happy Almost-Galentines Day to all my gals! And, I guess, a Happy Honorary Almost-Galentines Day to any guys who may be reading this. Are there any guys reading this? I have no idea, honestly.

It is tradition for me to bake heart-shaped items at this time of year; I will make cookies later in the week. I bake so much; along with cooking dinner, I feel like I spend a lot of time in the kitchen every day. I once tried to track my time for a week and before the first morning was over, I was so depressed I abandoned the whole thing. So much time in the kitchen.

I have been contemplating the idea of hobbies this week, thanks to an episode of my friend Stephany’s podcast, The Friendship Paradox (HI STEPHANY). The episode, talking about a variety of hobbies, had me down a semantic wormhole: if a hobby is something pleasurable to do in one’s free time, then is my whole life a hobby? If everything I do is a hobby, then is nothing a hobby?

I don’t consider baking a hobby, although I do enjoy it. Yoga and exercise might be considered hobbies, but to me they are daily life-affirming activities that are vital to my mental and emotional health, as well as to keep my physical body from crumbling and immobilizing. Are my daily walks a hobby? I do not consider them to be optional for myself or, more importantly, for Rex.

I just had A Moment, thinking of what life would be like if Rex DIDN’T get his 6 km of walking a day, lord have mercy.

Reading and writing, similarly, do not feel optional to me but I’m not making any money on either of them, so I suppose they would be considered hobbies as well.

One thing that absolutely is a hobby, and something I only do in the winter, is putting together a jigsaw puzzle. This is something my husband and I do together, except that he is very bossy and often takes over completely, which suits me if it’s a hard puzzle. I tend to like the puzzles that have a lot of little vignettes on them, which are easier to put together. We are working on one now that my older son gave me for Christmas, and friends, it is incredibly difficult.

My son knows I like easier puzzles but he also knows my deep love for QEII, so he gifted this to me. I told my husband to back off, in terms of her face and dress, and so he’s been working the boring rest of it. I did allow him to put together the scepter though.

But you guys, it is so hard! The purple cape is all slightly different shades of dark purple, and what makes it even harder is this:

Puzzle-loving friends will notice that all the pieces are the same general shape. It turns out that I look for shape a lot more than I look for colour; for a while I thought I’d have to get my husband to put the cape together, but I persisted, and finally finished it yesterday.

Weekly Reading

I have SO MUCH to say about the books I finished this week. Hold onto your reading hats!

Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction. Did you ever wonder if you were a Jessica or an Elizabeth? Or, god forbid, an Enid? Did you think that you would drive your blond, size-6, All-American self to school in your red Fiat Spider and date the star of the basketball team while editing the school newspaper? Did you think you’d sneak around on your boyfriend’s motorcycle, get into an accident, and switch personalities with your identical twin sister? If so, then 25% of this book is for you! In 1985 I asked for – and still have – a Sweet Valley High box set for Christmas and boy, did I love those books. I wish this whole book was a SVH recap but alas, it is not. It reads like a really long blog post, which is to say it’s a casual and easy read.

I don’t mind a blog post-like read for a topic like this; and speaking of such, I would like to take this opportunity to link to a series of Judy Blume recaps – Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Deenie – I wrote when I had a blog with my dear friends Hannah and Allison (HI HANNAH HI ALLISON), lo these nine years ago. Judy Blume is featured in Paperback Crush, but not a whole lot, since most of her books were written in the 70s.

Also featured in this book: the VC Andrews series. Who among us didn’t read Flowers In The Attic, horrifying ourselves with incredible tales of abuse and incest and poisoned doughnuts? What a ride those books were. I think I was probably about 11 when I read those books which, whoa. Imagine that happening these days.

Getting back to Paperback Crush: I enjoyed about half of it. I liked the nostalgia of those paperback romances geared towards tweens, written in the early 80s. I used to troll the racks at the library for them, and I remember a friend wasn’t allowed to read them because they weren’t “good books.” I thought then and I still think now that any books that kids will read are good books, and why specifically does society have a need to make girls and women feel shitty for liking things they like? Oh right, patriarchy. Anyway, as I said I only liked about half of this book because the other half was a deep dive into books I was too old to read, like the Babysitters Club and Goosebumps, basically anything written after 1987. Despite the very casual writing style – again, no shade, just facts – I enjoyed the nostalgia of this and recognized MANY covers (remember the Cheerleader series?). I am actually considering digging out my Sweet Valley collection and reading about Jessica’s tryst with a college age boy (THERE’S BEER AT THE PARTY).

Strange Sally Diamond. Within the first paragraph, I assumed that Sally Diamond was a woman with autism: she pretends she is deaf so as to not speak to people, she has no friends and lives in isolation with her father, she has trouble finding nuance and reading social cues, she pulls her hair and screams when she is upset. She is excellent when it comes to following directions, which is how she obtains sudden notoriety: her father had always jokingly said that when he died, he should just be put out with the trash, and that is exactly what Sally does. The resulting media storm brings to light her upsetting early life, and we as the reader discover that her antisocial personality was in fact the result of a horrific trauma in her early years, in addition to a lifetime of being somewhat of a psychological experiment at the hands of her father. This absolutely horrifying, sickening trauma is the subject of a secondary point of view, and we see dual lives and timelines.

As an aside, this made me think of Gabor Mate and his book about neurodivergence and traumatic or otherwise adverse childhood experiences. It brings up an interesting and unsettling idea regarding causation of neurodivergent-appearing behaviours, and I don’t know how I feel about that. If we follow the idea that early childhood experiences can imprint for a lifetime, well, that can both explain things and also put a heavy weight on parental responsibilities. Anyway. LET’S MOVE ON.

Two things can be true at the same time: first, I could not read this book fast enough. It has been a long time since I was this invested in a plot, even given the extremely disturbing subject matter. The second thing is that I found the writing style to be very clunky and lacking in nuance and subtlety, particularly the dialogue, particularly in the secondary point of view. This book really suffers from a “tell” instead of a “show” which I don’t like. However, as I said to my friend Nicole (HI NICOLE), if the book was better written, I would have had insane nightmares due to the terrifying backstory. As it was, well, it was just a book – I never forgot it was a story, I never got completely immersed – and so I slept just fine. The plot really moved, and it was a compelling read, despite the writing.

I noticed this beaver dam in progress on my walk the other day – I guess some other creatures are busy with their non-hobbies too. I hope you all have a lovely, heart-filled week of love and light and chocolate! xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fancy Was My Name Edition

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A few weeks ago, we were having dinner and Fancy came on, via the Nicole’s Karaoke playlist, which sparked a discussion with regards to the mother-daughter relationship between Fancy and her mother. Well, she basically prostituted her daughter, I said, to which my son answered, What do you expect? She named her daughter Fancy. Obviously she didn’t think she’d grow up to be a lawyer.

One of my Favourite Things in the world is having Responsible Adult Children. Recently Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) asked what has, so far, been the best age when it comes to children, and I have thought about this a lot. I think I suffer from recency bias because if you asked me at any time in my children’s lives what the best age is, I would say, with great enthusiasm, this one! I loved babies and toddlers, I loved preschool and elementary school, and I loved – and am still loving – the teen years; yes, even the awkward junior high years. I’ve loved all the ages and stages and I think I just enjoy my children more and more as the years go on, as I see them grow and change and become more and more the people they have always been, but more awesome.

So there is probably some recency bias here, but wow, do I love my kids being Responsible Adults. My husband and I went away to Secrets Maroma in Mexico for a week; we have, over the years, gone away together several times, but never for very long, because when the kids were younger there were just so many logistics to account for, plus the typical motherly guilt about leaving the children behind. But now we have very few constraints and my younger son wasn’t working last week, so we left him to be in charge of the house and also Rex, which is no small task, given that he has Very High Needs when it comes to exercise and general affection. He drove us to the airport at 5:00 am, and picked us up in the middle of the night (read: 9:00 pm); I came home to a perfectly clean house – albeit one with an empty refrigerator, because he cooked all his own meals for the week – a happy dog, and no laundry to do except for the myriad bikinis and sundresses crammed into my carryon.

It was a really incredible week, and a perfectly indulgent one. We met up with friends, relaxed, ate and drank and soaked up the sun and played in the Caribbean. I have zero complaints; no notes. I do have many Favourite Things, though, so without further ado:

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fancy Was My Name Edition

Life In Front Of The Curtain

The incredible vacation started out on the flight. We had splurged on premium seats and friends, I do not think I can ever go back to economy. I can’t! I won’t! Well, I will – we have a few upcoming flights that are not premium – but as god is my witness, I will never go economy again if I can help it. Flying in general feels like a tedious exercise in maximum discomfort, but flying premium? Oh la la. I felt a Mad Men-level of glamour, like it was the 1960s and everyone was dressed up for a fabulous flying experience. I mean, they served us actual meals on actual crockery and drinks in actual glasses; we got snack packs and offers of booze, refreshing hot towels, and the exclusive use of the premium bathroom. On a practical note, my circulation and varicose vein issues are pretty bad, even with my full-length, medical grade, “nude” compression stockings, and with the roomy seats and legroom I was able to stretch out quite a bit. Also, our flight was ninety minutes delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and I think I might have died, or at the very least, been incredibly annoyed at having to sit in a cramped economy seat for an extra hour and a half on top of the over six hours of flying. As it was, I just chilled out and read, sipping from my complimentary water bottle. Ten out of ten, would recommend.

Here’s Your One Chance, Fancy, Don’t Let Me Down

We have been to many of the Secrets/ Dreams resorts in the past, and they are all really great. This one, however, was beyond everything I could have imagined. Every single detail was pure luxury. The rooms were beautiful, the pool areas were stunning, the service was incredible in every way; I have often thought that all-inclusive resorts are a bit like a fancy summer camp for adults, because it’s so easy to meet people and there are fun activities people can partake in, pretty much every hour of the day. My preferred activities were reading by the pool, cooling off in the pool, and swimming in the gorgeous turquoise Caribbean Sea. I did, however, partake in Spanish lessons one morning.

Hablo Espanol

I have been learning Spanish via Duolingo for a while; 702 days, to be exact. My son got me started on it – he’s learning Japanese – and every week we go on our Friends Quest together to maintain our positions in the Diamond League. Anyway, I felt like I had learned a lot, but I don’t have any friends to speak Spanish with, face to face, with the exception of my husband’s colleague’s wife, who very patiently, and with great encouragement, spoke with me at his retirement party in September.

Therefore, I was a little nervous to attempt to converse with actual people; practicing on an app is one thing, actually speaking is another. I was worried that I would use the wrong word or phrasing, I worried I’d use the wrong verb conjugation. Then, just before we left I had a pedicure, and the esthetician, who spoke little English, had a brief conversation with me about the weather; at that moment I realized that I would never judge someone learning English for using the wrong grammar or conjugating a verb incorrectly, so it stood to reason that the same would go for me, speaking Spanish.

I was right! Also, I was amazed at how well I could carry a conversation; I could understand everything being said to me, and even when it took me a moment to formulate a response, I could still formulate the response. Now, I probably have the conversational ability of a preschooler (I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK SPANISH WITH YOU PLEASE) but it was so great to be able to practice. My Spanish lesson at the resort was fun and also enlightening; the teacher informed me that, in Mexico, one should never say estoy caliente, because that doesn’t mean I’m hot, it means I’m horny. This, I felt, was excellent information to have.

The Sharks Like It

After discovering that this invention was the highest valuation on Shark Tank, my husband bought us LARQ water bottles. The cap contains a special UV light that kills bacteria and there are two modes: regular, and “adventure.” I wanted to use fewer plastic water bottles, which are ubiquitous at these resorts, and so I was excited to give this a go. Now, there are two things to note: a) the concierges warned against drinking the tap water in the rooms, and b) there must be a big filtration system somewhere on the resort because there are a lot of fruits and vegetables, not to mention ice in drinks and jugs of water in restaurants. I did not know about a) until I had filled this bottle from the tap, and drank from it, at least four times. I didn’t get sick so I guess it works.

While I was by the pool, I asked one of the bartenders if I could have water to fill my bottle, thinking that he would just fill it from a tap behind the bar, but instead he just opened up a couple of plastic bottles and poured them in. That was a little discouraging, but then I discovered a bottle filler NEAR the bar. I’m sure it was filtered just fine, but still I used my little UV light, feeling like a well-hydrated rock star.

I got some kind of mystery marks on the bottle, which I THINK came from a travel-size black plastic tissue pack that melted in the heat, but happily, after an application of baking soda paste with a Scrub Daddy, they have since disappeared.

Here Comes The Sun(screen)

Just like (hopefully?) I will never go back to economy seats, I will (absolutely!) never go back to checking luggage. Generally it’s not too difficult for me to pack carryon only, but the one thing that is tricky is ensuring I have enough sunscreen. On our trip to Maui last year, I just purchased a lot of sunscreen on the island, but I didn’t want to do that here because omg, do you know what a bottle of sunscreen costs in a Secrets resort? FIFTY-EIGHT US DOLLARS. With the exchange rate and tax, we are looking at almost a hundred dollars for a measly bottle of Banana Boat.

But sunscreen we must have, and there are only so many travel-size bottles one can squeeze into the regulation one-litre bags, especially when one needs to take hair products, makeup, and night cream. It was serendipitous that I came across these solid Neutrogena stick sunscreens, which do not count as liquid, obviously, because they are solid. Bonus for the fishies in the sea, it’s mineral.

Some of you may remember my lament last year about mineral sunscreen and the white cast it leaves on the skin, and this one, despite being “Ultra Sheer,” is no exception. However, it works really, really well, as evidenced by the little spots of sunburn on my knees and breasts where I obviously missed with my application.

Welcome To Margaritaville, Population: Me

My husband’s birthday is in October; we went out for dinner to celebrate. Since that day, I have made dinner every single night. Every. Single. Night. So what I’m saying is that I was very excited to partake in unlimited food items that I had absolutely no hand in preparing. The food at the resort was so incredible, so vast in variety and so well-prepared and fresh, and, in comparison with other resorts, the plant-based offerings were Off The Chart. I couldn’t even begin to believe my luck. I’m used to very limited options, and so I was amazed at all the delicious vegetarian and vegan food available. At breakfast there was CHIA PUDDING. And little waffles made with almond milk. And incredible fresh fruit. And made-to-order smoothies. Lunches had me plowing through vast amounts of lentil and chickpea salads, and chips and guacamole; so much guacamole, friends. There were fresh berries and caramelized pumpkin seeds, there was every dessert you could imagine, and every dinner was more delicious than the last.

Of course there were also mango margaritas by the pool!

Probably it’s good to only have gone a week, my liver may have exploded in protest if we stayed longer. But oh! So delicious.

Outfit of the Month

I know, I know, I KNOW that we are all trying to avoid fast fashion. I really am. But also? I am not made of stone, and I found this dress at Old Navy last summer for ten dollars. That is TEN CANADIAN DOLLARS, which is essentially free for my American friends. What price my morals? I know. Anyway, I keep all my clothing for many years, to the chagrin of my husband, and so I’ll probably have this cute dress for decades. The sandals are old Skechers, but I think I need to retire them. I think these sandals are a half size too small. A few times after a big dinner and lots of wine, I had to walk barefoot back to the room as my swollen feet exploded out of their strappy cages in the heat and humidity. Probably that is not an ideal thing to do, but I’m still here, with intact feet, so I guess it worked out fine. I’m in the market for dressy new sandals, is what I’m saying.

This week of rest and relaxation was exactly what I needed after such a hectic and stressful year. I feel so rested and ready to take on anything. Up first: figuring out how to make my own caramelized pumpkin seeds, and finding new sandals. 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

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

Five For Friday: The Smoky Eye Edition

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  • There are terrible wildfires north of us, and we have been experiencing immensely smoky air and extremely poor air quality. It has improved a bit over the week, but Tuesday was an absolute low point. We had intense, gusting winds and being outside felt exactly like having smoke blown in my face, but at 80 km/ hr. Smoke in the air is pretty common here in late August, but in mid-May it feels weirdly apocalyptic, unsettling, and scary on so many levels. The sky looks cloudy and foggy, but it’s neither cloud nor fog, it’s smoke. There are many more important and urgent issues at hand, obviously, but selfishly and superficially I have to say that a) it is so disappointing to come to the end of a long winter only to be faced with dreadful smoke that really cuts into the pleasures of being outside in nice weather, and b) my hair smells. When I bend over and my hair goes into my face, I think something stinks in here, and then I realize that something is my own hair. My hair smells exactly the way it would after coming home from the bar from a night of dancing and drinking vodka slimes out of little jugs. I guess this is specifically a problem of Youth In The Nineties, because no one smokes in bars anymore. Or really, at all.
It looks like cloud and mist, but it’s smoke
  • On that note, remember going to bars and dancing all night? I heard the song Strike It Up the other day and was instantly transported to the dance floor at the Fox and Firkin. I was talking to my boys about this, and how if you met a guy in the bar you would maybe exchange information by writing your home number on a piece of paper or napkin, or maybe on your own hand. Nowadays, the youths just exchange their socials, which really cuts down on the awkwardness of having your dad answer the phone or your brother saying that you couldn’t come to the phone because you were in the bathroom.
OMG how embarrassing
  • Speaking of the Nineties, the other day I remembered General Foods International Coffees, which I thought was the height of elegant home coffee solutions. French Vanilla! Cafe Vienna! Suisse Mocha! And all you needed was a tin of the powder and some hot water. I remember thinking, back in the day, that it was so exciting to actually go to a coffee shop and order a cappuccino, as they were not as ubiquitous as they are now. It was a super-fancy treat to be able to do that, and these days it could not be more run-of-the-mill. I mean, there is nothing you can do at Starbucks to make it feel like an exotic treat, no matter how many syrups or shots or non-dairy milks you use. Nothing these days compares to a cappuccino in the early Nineties. The absolute peak of my coffee excitement was when I was in Europe for a school trip in grade 11, and I had a cappuccino in Rome. At the time I couldn’t imagine life getting better than that.
Post-cappuccino excitement
  • There is an election going on in our province, and there is a woman who is running in the riding where I teach yoga by the name of Jenny Yeremiy. Every single time I see her signs – which is every time I drive to the community centre – I think, giggling, “JEREMY YEREMY?” and then I remind myself that it is JENNY, not Jeremy. This is the sort of thing I think might happen to a normal person ONCE, but it happens to me every time I see a sign, and there are probably five signs from the time I enter the community until I get to the centre, and then back again. So ten times, twice a week, I think JEREMY YEREMY, and giggle. I would blame this on the smoke’s effect on my brain but it’s been happening for weeks now and also, at this time last year, the community was advertising a night of food trucks. Taste the Trucks! the signs said cheerfully, and every single time I would think “Taste the Tricks?” and picture men with their tongues hanging out of their mouths while looking lustily at attractive sex workers. Although, technically, I think a trick is the man in this situation, this is still a thing that happened in my brain for weeks. Too long, didn’t read, I think something is broken in my brain. My son was on the couch post-surgery, blearily flipping through Disney Plus, and I saw a show with a picture of a Storm Trooper. “Bad Bitch?” I said to my son, “That’s a weird thing to have on Disney Plus!” He looked at me tiredly and said “Mom, it’s Bad BATCH.”
In the parking lot, giggling about Jeremy Yeremy
  • Speaking of tricks, in the book Easy Beauty, there is a scene near the end that I have not stopped thinking about since I read it last week. The author and her son and husband were going to a magic show at the park, at the husband’s behest. The son – who was about seven – kept loudly making statements about how he was not impressed with the magician, how he knew exactly how the trick was performed, and then detailing HOW the trick WAS performed. There’s a secret compartment, the magician has something up her sleeve, etcetera. The husband kept asking him to be quiet and then, of course, the punch line is that the magician did something incredible – she made a stuffed rabbit disappear, collapsed the box she had put the rabbit in, and a live rabbit was in her hands. The little boy was, finally, in awe. What bothered me about this entire scene was that prior to this final trick the author kept high-fiving and praising her son for being so smart! So cynical! No magic show was going to fool him! All the while, other people exist, and were there to hear this little boy brattily talk about the lameness of the magic tricks, while his mother praised him for this behaviour. The woman’s husband kept begging them to stop, because it was disruptive and bothering other people, but the woman proudly KEPT GOING. I obviously wasn’t there. I have no skin in this game. People parent in many different ways. AND YET. I am so bothered by this rude behaviour, that affects me not in the least, I cannot even. I CANNOT EVEN.
Rex cannot even either. He’s in a constant state of wonder.

It’s a holiday weekend around here and I am desperately hoping for the smoke to dissipate and for the north to get sheets of rain. We are heading up a little north ourselves, to celebrate my mom’s birthday. I hope you all have a festive, non-smoky weekend. xo