Category Archives: Schoolgirl Crushes

He’s gone.

Posted on by

Oh I, oh I, I’d better learn how to face it.


I love Hall and Oates.

So what did I do other than bake bread this weekend? Hold onto your hats: I went to Ikea. I think I’ve made it fairly clear that I’m not someone who particularly enjoys shopping, so I entered the store with my usual mix of trepidation and feelings of being overwhelmed. The thing is, I was overwhelmed and anxious through the trip, but I was also overcome with feelings of consumerism and dissatisfaction as I looked at their neat displays: did I need new drinking glasses, I wondered, or maybe some fancy napkins, or even a giant bubble shaped floor lamp? In the end I left with only one discretionary purchase: a mold for making heart-shaped ice cubes. The other, semi-non-discretionary purchases were of a very practical nature: a desk and shelving unit for our disaster of an office.

After lugging home our purchases, I promptly left for the evening, leaving my husband to swear and sweat and curse the Swedes and their complex, wordless instructions. I came home to find a new desk in the office! A miracle! What a lovely husband I have.

I spent a large amount of time cleaning out the horrors of our office, finding many bizarre and useless items, leaving me to wonder why I hadn’t thrown them out already. It shall remain a mystery. My husband uncovered an old tape case – remember tape cases? – filled with various cassettes and mixed tapes, some hilariously labeled “Party Mix” and one labeled with a distinctly feminine hand. Oh yes it was! A mixed tape from an old girlfriend.

Is there any woman out there who hasn’t made a mixed tape for a boyfriend? Ah, I remember those days with fondness. Mixed tapes were like an interpretive dance for a relationship; there were things that you wanted to say but couldn’t, and so you made a mix tape to show your feelings. Maybe if you were especially creative you could add some photos or something on the case. There was a special formula to a perfect mixed tape: a nice blend of peppy, popular music to show that you were a cool and fun girlfriend, but also some emotionally-charged ballads that you would hope that your boyfriend would interpret in just the right way. The making of the mixed tape would be filled with tension, and often tears, and the mixed tape itself would be heavy with meaning and, possibly, angst. Chances are the boyfriend would be like “Cool. A mixed tape. Thanks.” and then would probably tape over it with something he liked better. I guess with the advent of CD’s and whatnot, those days are long gone. Sigh.

Those days are gone, and I never did make a mixed tape for my husband, but as of today it is a mere nine days until our eighth anniversary! Eight years! Adding that to the four years of togetherness prior to our marriage, and we have been together twelve years! Twelve years of bliss, I might add, but that does makes me feel a teensy bit old. Not, however, as old as when I think of how long it has been since I labeled a mixed tape.

Warning! This post contains an obscene amount of name-dropping.

Posted on by

I saw Jim Cuddy on The Hour a couple of nights ago. Jim Cuddy. Sigh. Beck wrote a funny post about the potential husband material of certain Canadian TV stars and while I was hard-pressed to come up with any of those – Mark Critch? Nah. George Stroumboulopoulus? Nah. – I sure do have opinions about Canadian music stars. Jim Cuddy. I like to refer to him as “my boyfriend”. My husband really likes that too.

I actually met Jim Cuddy one year ago. My husband phoned me from work and said, in complete seriousness, “You wouldn’t really be interested in a gala dinner tomorrow night, would you?”. Now, believe me, BELIEVE ME, I do not attend gala dinners with any sort of regularity. Or at all. So of course I wanted to go. Then he revealed that his boss’ girlfriend’s firm had extra tickets. And it was an Olympic fund-raiser. And we would be sitting at a table with Sale and Pelletier. I immediately phoned my mother, “CanyoubabysittomorrowbecauseIamgoingtobeatatablewithSaleandPelletier!”

I watched Sale and Pelletier win the silver medal – later to be the gold medal – at a bar in Houston. There was one other Canadian girl there, also a figure skating fan, and when the scores were tallied a man leaned over to us and drawled, “Well girls, ah don’t know much ah-bout figure skating, but I think you Canadians were robbed”. I love Texans.

Anyway, at the gala we were enjoying a glass of wine when Rob’s boss’ girlfriend leaned over to me and said, “Hey, there goes Jim Cuddy. We should follow him and get our picture taken with him.” She was laughing but I’ve never been more serious. I grabbed her arm and we followed him, walking as quickly as possible without looking like actual stalkers. We followed him into a section where he was talking with Kelly Hrudy, who was hosting the event. Someone agreed to take our picture and here it is:


I love this picture. I am the absolute epitome of star-struck. You can almost see my thoughts, OMG, Jim Cuddy has his arm around me!!!! Meeeeeee!!!! The wine in my glass was vibrating like the puddle in Jurassic Park.

So that was a highlight. But truly the whole night was amazing. I enjoyed the delicious food and wine, alongside David Pelletier, who, it should be noted, is not the best tablemate as he is quiet to the point of surliness. I enjoyed the music (provided by JIM CUDDY). I looked around the room, and at least half of the people were working on their BlackBerries. Some were leaving to answer work-related phone calls. There I was, in the midst of a massively stressed-out crowd, a crowd which was there for duty but certainly not pleasure, and I was thrilled every second.


I thought about that the other night when I met up with some girlfriends, a couple of whom were former co-workers, and one of those was still at that firm. She talked to me a bit about my former workplace, and she was speaking a language which I recognized but hadn’t spoken in nearly six years. I was asked if I missed it, being at work. I thought about it, the ten hour days at a desk, the stress, the overtime, and at that gala dinner, the people who were so busy trying to juggle family and work that they couldn’t even enjoy food and wine and JIM CUDDY. I don’t miss it.
Me and David Pelletier. He looks really happy, probably because the gala was almost over.

The pediatric dentist is HOT

Posted on by

Was that me who was bragging about how well my children adjusted to the end of Daylight Savings? After only one day? I think in Greek mythology that would be known as hubris.

I am going to spare you the tearful, fighting-with-one’s-brother, collapsing into a teenage-angst-type-sulkiness details and instead talk about something pleasant. I took the kids to the dentist yesterday! Did I mention that their dentist happens to be quite attractive? Like, hot? I’m always somewhat surprised that the waiting room isn’t full of slavering moms in various stages of cougardom, with various degrees of cleavage showing. I myself dressed up to take the kids; by dressed up, I mean I wore my knee high boots with heels and my toffee lipstick, as opposed to the more neutral shell shade. And…we got there and were informed that the dentist was sick today, and would we mind seeing his colleague? His much older, unattractive colleague? Of course we didn’t mind.

Now, I had promised not to write about the “f” word until I actually get the “f” word, and I’m not going to, but I’m just going to say that if you go to the pediatric dentist and he is sick and every single toy and book that they use to distract kids and make the dentist’s office a happy place is being sterilized, and one dentist is doing the work of two dentists, well, you may be waiting a while doing low-tech games like I Spy and repeating silly rhymes over and over. Which is exactly what we did. And because I have boys, a lot of silly rhymes were of the gross bodily function theme. Anyway, the checkup itself went just fine, despite the fact that every time we go there seems to be at least one child being ax-murdered in the background. At least that is what it sounds like. But now that I’ve written that down, it will probably be my child doing the child-from-The-Exorcist impression next time – because that is called hubris.

Weekend Update

Posted on by

1. I purchased 250 candies for Halloween, and lovingly made up twenty little gift bags with an assortment of goodies. If we got more than twenty trick-or-treaters, I thought, I would just give out the mini chocolate bars and bags of Sour Kids separately. The boys headed out to trick-or-treat and I stayed home to hand out candy, happily watching a recording of John Cusack (hubba hubba) on Jay Leno. I waited. And waited. I started to feel like some sad little debutante waiting for her date, who had obviously stood her up for a better option. (“He cometh not”, she said.) In the end I had two trick-or-treaters and now I have a plethora of candy with no home. Since trick-or-treaters were in short supply on our block, you can probably imagine the volume of candy amassed by my little pirate and dinosaur, who, technically, was an Allosaurus, not a T-Rex, because he was living in the Jurassic period, whereas the T-Rex lived in the Cretaceous period, just so you know. In addition, two very lovely neighbours actually went out and purchased special large treats just for them! Very kind, especially the neighbour who gave them candy popcorn, which the children have generously shared with me.

2. Another neighbour suggested that kids were not trick-or-treating much this year due to the swine flu, either because they had contracted it or because their parents were wary of them contracting it. If this is true, it is the last straw for me. I have reached saturation point with regards to information about the swine flu. This may or may not include helpful emails from certain people which detail that a) if you contract the flu, we are all going to die, or, alternately, b) if you get the flu shot, we are all going to die. I will write about the flu only if and when I or my family contracts the flu, and then I will simply whine about my symptoms, and NOT about conspiracy theories regarding the government, the pharmaceutical companies, and the sellers of hand sanitizers. I bet you are looking forward to that.

3. In years past, I dreaded the end of Daylight Savings Time, and not just because shortly it will be completely dark at 4:30 pm. I had the kind of children who would wake up at the exact same time every day no matter what time they went to bed, and it would take about a week – a cranky, sleep-deprived week – to adjust to the new time. There is something psychologically very bad about having a toddler wide awake at 4:58 am. “How did your kids do with the time change?” I blearily asked a mom at a playgroup, who subsequently looked at me like I was a little slow on the uptake. “Fine,” she said, “I just put them to bed an hour later and then they slept an hour later.” I looked at her, slack-jawed, like that was the most unbelievable, incredible piece of information I had ever received. But, huzzah! I am now part of that demographic! I put my kids to bed later, and they wake up later! It’s a miracle! They are not waking up at ungodly hours and morphing into crazed, sleep-deprived little goblins! And as a result, I am not a crazed, sleep-deprived, mid-thirties goblin! Hooray indeed.