In beginning of The Blind Assassin, my favourite book of all time, there is a scene where octogenarian Iris is presenting an award at the local high school, watching the graduates file on stage. Up they trooped, solemn and radiant, in many sizes, all beautiful as only the young can be beautiful. Even the ugly […]
Gratitude and Grievance
October 9, 2023 by 54 Comments
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Yesterday my husband and I took a ten hour road trip to visit my parents. It was a gorgeous drive but I am a tiny bit tired; not, however, as tired as I was Saturday morning when I was woken up several times by a pack of howling coyotes in the vineyard. […]
Hairum Scarum
October 2, 2023 by 62 Comments
The thing about moving is that, once a person has moved, there is still so much paperwork to deal with, there are still so many decisions to make, and there is so very much to learn about the new environment. Moving across provinces, I am discovering, means that much time must be spent in a […]
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Wake Me Up When September…Wait, September Is Ending Edition
September 28, 2023 by 49 Comments
What a month September has been; oddly enough, it simultaneously feels like it flew by, and that it was three months long. We packed so much in, and now my already tenuous sense of time is completely warped. Everything already feels like it happened so long ago. Was it only three and a half weeks […]
A New Chapter
September 25, 2023 by 55 Comments
I was thinking a lot about the last chapter in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn this week, when Francie goes back and looks at her neighbourhood, wanting to remember it just as it was. This week I was in Calgary again, for forty hours, and it was so interesting to see it from new, non-resident […]
Dog and (Social) Butterfly
September 18, 2023 by 59 Comments
Although I have seen all of the Feuding Dog Park Men separately a few times, I have not seen them all together since The Incident, and I’m able to give them a nod and closed-lip Mona Lisa smile without being drawn into conversation with any of them. I did, however, get knocked off my feet […]
A Grave Mistake
September 11, 2023 by 55 Comments
There are few graver mistakes in the acquisition of comestibles than visiting Costco on the Tuesday after a holiday Monday. It is a mistake I made this past week. How I could have possibly made such an error in judgement is beyond my comprehension entirely. Did I have a brain lapse? Did I forget how […]
