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Dressy Sweatpants and Mom Jeans; Thirty-Two Weeks In

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I absolutely appreciate when companies know their customers; I love when businesses see an opportunity and seize it, particularly this year. It’s a Read The Room kind of thing; find out what the people want and give it to them.

Which is why I find it endlessly entertaining, the advertisements that I have been getting on Facebook lately. It is almost exclusively Peloton gear followed by a company that is making something called “Dressy Sweatpants” or “Dressy Leggings.” It feels very yin-yang to me. It’s the season to move! alongside Why people love the Dressy Sweatpant! Leggings, but Dressy! You guys. I’m all about comfort in our own homes, but let’s face facts here: there is nothing dressy about sweatpants. We can add all the ruching we like but they are still, ultimately, sweatpants.

This is absolutely not a criticism of sweatpants; after all, I am a woman who wears yoga pants at least five days a week. I wear yoga tanks with built-in shelf bras almost daily, to the point that it feels weird to wear a regular bra. I am all about being comfortable in our clothes and in our own skin, but we don’t need to make believe that the clothes we love and wear are something that they are not. Dress pants are dress pants. Sweatpants are sweatpants. IT IS OKAY TO BE WHO WE ARE, AND THAT EXTENDS TO PANTS.

Wow, I have feelings about this.

I was rummaging in my legwarmer drawer and discovered an unopened package of black control-top pantyhose. Pantyhose, you guys. Like, to wear with a dress. I stared at it like it was a relic from another time, which, let’s face it, it is. I tried not to think of my closetful of beautiful (black) dresses; when will they be worn again? Who knows. And heels! Well, it’s best to put that thought away for a while.

Why, you may ask, was I rummaging in my legwarmer drawer? First of all, yes, I have an entire drawer devoted to legwarmers, and that is because I live on Planet Hoth, apparently. Calgary is a city that takes mean-reversion, with respect to temperatures, very seriously; the gorgeous fall weather has completely turned to the depths of winter. As a brief aside, it was minus 18 yesterday morning when I went to the car wash, to help out my husband who was going to put on my winter tires. I filled the car with gas while I was there and I am not exaggerating: it took nearly twenty minutes to fill the tank. Twenty minutes! I kept looking at the numbers moving so slowly, and I would go into the station to tell the attendant that there was something wrong. “It must be because of the cold,” he told me, which, well. It’s Calgary. Minus 18, while unpleasant, is not unusual, and I have filled my car in much colder temperatures. However, there was nothing to be done about it as I’d already prepaid. I tried to be zen and just drink my travel mug of coffee and scroll through my phone, thinking this is what I’d be doing anyway, at home, but meanwhile, I was freezing and wondering if there was a It’s Going To Blow kind of emergency going on with the pump.

Last week was my husband’s birthday and he took the day off work; our original plan was to go hiking in the mountains, but the black ice and blowing snow on the highway deterred us. We ended up in a provincial park in the foothills, and the minus 13 windchill meant that we had the whole park to ourselves! We ended up hiking 8 km in gusting wind and snow, but I am trying to embrace my Nordic ancestry with the mantra there’s no bad weather, just bad clothes and hence, legwarmers. Well, legwarmers and many other layers too.

Circling back to companies and businesses, I have been getting many, many texts lately from Garage, a store I have never shopped at in my life. How did they get my number? Was it sold to them by some other store? I have no idea, but I am amused at their constant texts to me about buying the coolest mom jeans. The Coolest Mom Jeans. I have much to say about this, but mostly: Wrong Audience.

Do any moms – and the group to which I am referring is my own mid-forties age group – actually wear Mom Jeans? I mean technically, we are moms, and so our jeans are mom jeans, but as I am sure you know, I am referring to the high-waisted, pleated front jeans that were ubiquitous in the early nineties. I think there is some kind of Fashion Law that states if you wore something in high school, and the style comes around again – like it has with these specific, high-waisted, loose-fitting, fitted-ankle jeans – then you should not wear it again. Not that I need a Fashion Law to tell me what to do. It’s not a thing that is going to happen anyway.

Remember when the Blue Jays won the World Series? I was rocking the Mom Jeans back then, although at the time they were just Jeans.

I’m not sure anything in this photo could be more “early nineties” if it tried. Pirate blouse! Mom jeans! Spiral permed hair! Evian water! The home decor!

Anyway, thank you very much, Garage, but I am not revisiting my erstwhile youth.

It occurs to me that, since I don’t know anyone at all in the Mom category who wears Mom Jeans, perhaps they should be renamed Grandma Jeans as I think that style is more of my OWN mother’s generation.

Unless – UNLESS – the younger generation of moms are all wearing these jeans. This just occurred to me right now. All of my mom friends are in their forties, but we are the Old Moms. The Young Moms, for all I know, could be rocking these. Meanwhile, I am living in yoga pants and long sweaters and am being marketed “dressy sweatpants” and “leggings, but dressy.” That is, when I’m not getting texts about the latest Mom Jeans.

On another note, this week Le Chateau announced that they are closing their doors; Canadian women of a certain age sighed with nostalgic sadness on hearing that. Le Chateau was where I spent my hard-earned babysitting and Pizza Hut money; I saved up to buy a pair of red plaid hot pants – HOT PANTS – and wore them with black tights, a turtleneck, and a blazer for my first day of Grade Eleven, at a new school. I don’t often wish that we had cell phones when I was in high school, but I wish I had a photo of that outfit. Instead, I will leave you with this classic, from a class trip to Italy:

That was the same blazer I started the year with, sweetly paired with jeans – high waisted and belted, I am sure – and a floral crop top. Ah, the spirit of youth.

Pandemic Reading

I am not going to pan this book entirely because it had a nice underlying theme – be who you are, accept other people for who they are – and it had great descriptions of clothing and society in 1950s New York, Miami, and Havana. However, the plot line was ridiculous and the book itself was very silly.

I like to read popular books to see what the hype is all about, and this one was decent – but ultimately unsatisfying and disappointing. It could have been so much more, but wasn’t.

This was very fun; it’s a contemporary Bengali classic and a translation, which I always find interesting. Three generations of Bengali women, with a little reincarnation thrown in…quite fun and, despite the name, light.

Happy Halloween week, everyone! The decorative gourds are getting mushy and there is too much snow to put up the gravestones and crosses, but who knows! Anything can happen. Don’t forget that Saturday is a Blue Moon AND it’s time change, so let’s take a deep breath and have a treat or two.

She Died The Way She Lived, Standing In Line At Costco; Thirty and Thirty-One Weeks In

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I am not the type of person to talk about dreams or analyze dreams, but last night I dreamt I had a black cat, which I bathed, and subsequently the cat turned white. Then, as its fur dried, it went from white to grey, and back to black. The whole time, the cat was cuddling me and putting on a bejeweled collar with its own paws so I could photograph the miraculous colour change, but people kept stopping by and visiting and I never had a chance to take the pictures.

I’m not going to go into a what does it all mean thing, but a) I do not have a cat and never have had a cat, and b) I don’t know much about cats but I do know that one would never bath one in a bathtub without suffering massive bodily harm. Also, cats cannot put on their own, albeit adorable, bejeweled collars.

What does it all mean, what are we doing with our wild and precious lives.

Well. The last two weeks were “short weeks” but in the manner of such felt a bit long. I think it’s because I had two travel days, one on either side of Thanksgiving, and the week before the holiday my husband was out of town, meaning that I was solo parenting and preparing for travel all by my lonesome. Although, let’s face it, travel preparations ALWAYS are my domain; part of this is my own control-freak-about-packing nature, and part is just, well, nature.

We were gone such a short time but I found that the grocery situation was pretty bad by the time Wednesday – my typical Grocery Day – came around, and so I found myself this week at both Costco and Superstore. At this point in the pandemic, I feel like I have the mental and physical strength to accomplish this kind of epic grocery shopping without my week going off the rails. My friend Mo (HI MO) had mentioned that, the Friday before Thanksgiving, she had experienced a lineup-outside-of-Costco that we hadn’t seen in months, but I figured it was a Thanksgiving thing.

Indeed, there was no lineup to get into Costco, but it was crazily busy inside. It made me slightly concerned, in a are we panic-buying again? kind of way. As an answer to that, I am NOT panic-buying but I definitely have a very well-stocked pantry and I am not going to let the base levels get down too low, if you know what I’m saying.

When I finished my shopping I started towards the checkout…and then realized that I didn’t have far to go.

That line went from the checkout to almost the bakery, so pretty much the length of the store. Specifically, it went to the aisle that houses both Christmas and Halloween decorations.

As an aside, I realized that the end of September is a magical time where Halloween candy sits alongside Advent calendars and Christmas-themed chocolates in Superstore. What an age we live in.

Just to confirm that yes, that was indeed the line to check out and not just a bunch of people randomly stationary in a line-like formation, I asked the older lady at what appeared to be the end. “Yes, it is, but I’m waiting for my daughter and she has another cart, a whole other cart, and she is coming back.” she replied in an alarmed kind of way, as if I would explode or something knowing that another cart was going to be in front of me. I mean, it’s Costco. People have two carts all the time. I smiled and nodded, and then realized we are all wearing masks so maybe she couldn’t tell I was smiling, and then replied, okay, great in a cheerful, I Totally Understand kind of way.

After a few minutes, some line movement, and more dithering, the lady turned to me. “I’ll go get her, my daughter, she’s in the clothes I think,” the lady said, as if I was going to aggressively report her to the Costco authorities if the cart didn’t materialize immediately. “Can you watch my cart?”

Of course, I replied, and the lady bustled into the clothing section, at which point the line started moving in a big way. Well, it seemed like a big way since we are all six feet away from each other but perhaps it was just two or three carts moving.

In normal times, I would have just simply moved the lady’s cart forward without thinking about it. However, it is not normal times and I was momentarily paralyzed. I mean, is it OKAY to touch someone else’s stuff? What is the protocol here? Meanwhile, the gap between the lady’s cart and the line was getting big and there were many, many people behind me. Would my paralysis cause a road-rage-like episode in Costco?

Still no sign of the lady, and probably only a minute or two had passed, but that is a LONG time in Costco world. I took a breath and pushed her cart forward, while simultaneously pulling my cart behind me.

Side note: do you know how hard that is? It was a feat of strength that should be reserved for Festivus.

We had moved up SIGNIFICANTLY, after no small effort on my part to Keep Things Moving, by the time the lady returned, with her daughter. I quickly used my hand sanitizer and no one seemed put out that I had touched a cart that wasn’t mine. I’m actually not sure the lady even noticed we had moved, although we had moved up all the way to the candy and gum aisle. Maybe she thought that is where she had left it, maybe she thought the cart magically rolled itself to its new position, who knows.

The line that was daunting was actually not bad as they had a fellow at the front directing traffic, pointing people over to specific lineups which, in my humble opinion, is a brilliant idea and should be adopted by every single large grocery store forever.

I chatted with the lady behind me about how busy it was, and she postulated that it was because it was payday, so maybe that is the explanation, rather than pandemic panic shopping. We will see and in the meantime, I might not shop on the 15th and 30th of the month.

Pandemic Reading

With a long weekend and, well, snow, I have gotten a lot of reading done over the past two weeks!

This was one of the best books I have read in a long time, and I had just picked it up on a whim at the library, because I liked the cover. Don’t you love when that happens? This is a collection of short stories about people from Croatia – refugees and immigrants, mostly living in Canada. The author herself lives in Edmonton; it’s always fun to read about familiar places.

I really liked this; I like Elizabeth Strout so much. It wasn’t my favourite of hers, but it was very thought-provoking and, in the manner of Elizabeth Strout, beautifully written.

This was very well-done, a real page-turner, but the material is very disturbing and upsetting. That is my warning: if you are NOT easily upset, then this is a very excellent read. It deals with a Nigerian refugee and a British woman and how their worlds collide.

This was a reread for me; it is delightful and wonderful and I highly recommend it. It’s about the dwellers of an apartment building during one hour period in a day. I love stories that show how interconnected we all are, even when we don’t realize it. Plus, the author lives in Calgary!

This was an extremely silly book. If you are in the mood for something strangely long, but very fluffy and silly, this is it. A relationship advice columnist and a top-notch divorce lawyer meet; both of them have sworn off relationships but, well. I’m sure you can figure out the rest.

I did like this book, I did. But I am going to issue a major trigger warning here: disturbing content. It follows three women and deals with arranged marriage, Hindu and Indian culture, adoption, infertility, and depression.

Since I inadvertently reread Durable Goods, I thought I should purposefully reread the sequel. You know, I really like Elizabeth Berg. I like her character development, I like her style. This was a very sweet and satisfying book, which was just what I needed.

These photos were from a sweet hike we did at Thanksgiving; the area had been devastated by forest fires back in 2003 and it was interesting to hike around the burnt trees and new growth. Plus, waterfalls! DO go chasing waterfalls and have a beautiful week, everyone! xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Thanksgiving Edition

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With the Thanksgiving weekend, the amazing streak of weather has ended, leaving us with mostly bare trees and, well, some snow. I’m not sad, though; I knew the streak would end and I’m just happy, in a We’ll Always Have Paris kind of way.

“You do realize, this is what it’s like in the rest of the world?” a student said to me last week as I marvelled at the fact that we still had leaves on the trees in October. Leaves! On the trees! In October! The rest of the world is lucky, because this is a rare and precious GIFT in Calgary. Normally, we have a hard freeze in early September, followed by a gusting windstorm, which typically means that we have bare trees from September through to May. Wow, writing that down is a bit depressing. Anyway, NOT THIS YEAR.

Finally I understand what all you fall-crazy people are talking about. Usually fall is just a precursor to the long winter ahead, but NOT THIS YEAR. Any year that winter doesn’t start in September, well, that’s one less month of winter. Every day, every single day of this pandemic, I have been spending a lot of time outside, walking and/or running. The past six weeks, with glorious sunshine and warm temperatures, each walk has felt like a beautiful gift and I find myself humming look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now.

Last week I went for an early morning 6 km before dropping the kids at school; I watched the sun come up and brighten the sky. When I started the run it was dark and drizzly, and when I was finishing, I saw a double rainbow.

If there is one thing that this pandemic has taught me, it is to appreciate every little thing that there is to appreciate. As Ma Ingalls always said, usually when the crop failed or they were almost literally starving or freezing to death, there’s no great loss without some small gain. Many things have been lost in this pandemic, but I am determined to keep my eyes open for all gains.

And it was Thanksgiving this weekend! So I think it is appropriate to write…

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Thanksgiving Edition

The Reno

One year ago, we started our renovation of our vacation place, which was my husband’s grandmother’s house. I am incredibly thankful for it for many reasons – reliably flushing toilet! functional kitchen! – but mostly, it has given us a beautiful place to stay in order to safely visit my mother-in-law. The aforementioned functional kitchen also means that I was able to roast a bunch of vegetables and chickpeas, and make a big salad, and contribute to the Thanksgiving dinner that I otherwise would have had almost nothing to eat at. After eating a plate of peas and carrots last year, and then later sneaking into the kitchen to scarf down peanut butter toast in secret, this is a huge gift.

My contribution!

Also, it has a perfect place for me to drink my coffee and smoothies at, while reading.

Fall Colours

A few weeks ago we visited my parents for my dad’s birthday, and I have never seen such colours at that time of the year. Am I turning into a Fall Person? What’s next? Pumpkin spice lattes? (answer: no).

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

This never gets old; a friend pointed out it was written ELEVEN years ago and wow, sometimes it seems like life is one of those fast-forward cartoons of pages tearing off of calendars. Anyway, the Co-Op had an assortment of decorative gourds, white pumpkins, and, of course, the regular kind. They were also selling bags of assorted decorative gourds but it turns out I have Real Opinions on decorative gourds and so carefully chose each one carefully from the bin.

There is a competition in the neighbourhood between my husband and a younger guy down the street, when it comes to seasonal decorations. As I was walking the dog, the young upstart asked me where OUR Halloween decorations were, as his have been up for two weeks already. Game on, shit is getting real this weekend. In the meantime, my decorative gourd display is the best motherfucking decorative gourd display on our street, DEAL WITH IT.

My dear friend Taryn (HI TARYN) gave me this sweet thing, so I can celebrate Decorative Gourd Season year-round. IT IS ALWAYS DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON IN THE BOYHOUSE NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Grapes and Apples, Oh My

I know, I know, I just wrote about apples, but the season is full-on and I’m gorging. My mother-in-law saved me this “small amount” of Sheraton grapes from harvest a couple of weeks ago and my younger son and I tried our best to eat them all on the long weekend. We failed.

Typical conversation with my mother-in-law:

Her: Do you want me to save you some grapes?

Me: Sure! Just a small amount, you know, a few bunches would be great.

Her: sets aside ten pounds, thinking that is a small amount appropriate for one to two people to eat in three days

If I had one more day, I could have finished them. Alas.

My New Running Pants

To be honest, now that there is snow on the ground I’m going to be taking my running workouts back to the treadmill, but these funky new pants from Lululemon are my new favourite and have extended my season outside. They have pockets! And lots of support! And sweat vents! And I’m colourful like a speedy peacock!

Seasonal Masks

It all started when my older son mentioned he wanted a Halloween style mask; my friend Liana (HI LIANA) mentioned her friend Maria. She had made some masks that I had bought back in the summer, and it turns out she had just got some seasonal fabric for Halloween and Christmas. Well, and I had to get some adorable llama and birdie ones, just because.

Thank You For Being A Friend

In the spirit of gratitude, I want to extend my thanks to you, dear reader, for indulging me by reading this blog. My goodness, it has been TWELVE YEARS. Thank you for being a friend. xo

Mask courtesy of my friend Michelle (HI MICHELLE)!

Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse; Twenty-Nine Weeks In

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Two incredible things of note happened this week: I got excused from jury duty, and my son shaved off his moustache.

I am a woman who believes strongly in body autonomy, and that everyone should be able to express themselves via personal style, and yet. Yet I am happy that he – voluntarily, I hasten to point out – is no longer moustachioed.

As for jury duty, well, I do not think I need to say more. My grandmother, apparently, had wanted to serve on jury duty for her entire life and wasn’t called until she was in palliative care. Sorry, Grandma! I’m pretty relieved. I said to my husband that actually, I wouldn’t mind jury duty if I a) had nothing else to do, and b) it wasn’t a grisly or horrifying trial like a murder or assault, but something “nice.” What, you may ask, would be a “nice” trial? That I do not know. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I implore you to find this sparkly unicorn guilty of horn theft because, as you will see, SHE IS BUT A HORSE.

In any case, no jury duty and no moustache: everything’s coming up Milhouse!

Also this week I finally had my annual mammogram. All the diagnostics centres were closed for a few months in the spring, and it took me several weeks of calling and being on hold to book this appointment, back in July. I know many of you aren’t eligible to get mammograms until you are 50, but my requisition forms state “lumpy and dense” and so I go annually, and have for several years. Lumpy and dense. The feminine mystique stands to take a bit of a beating here.

Medical masks are mandatory at the diagnostics centre, as opposed to cloth ones, and as soon as I was out of the building I switched to my cloth one because this is where I am at, now, that I feel unfashionable without a mask that goes with my outfit. I have leveled up.

My sons wear masks all day long to school, and even when walking home after school, if they are walking with friends. My older son went so far as to say that he actually thinks “people look more attractive with masks,” and both sons have said to me, separately, that even when the pandemic is over, they will still wear masks in certain situations to avoid breathing in other people’s germs and to keep other people from getting sick. After all, my younger son said to me, I have all these masks, I might as well use them.

Is this Stockholm Syndrome?

I was talking to my friend Nicole (HI NICOLE) about this, and she said she hopes to see a cultural shift, in which we are not, as a society, constantly pressured to be in public while ill. This is an excellent point. Nicole is a professor and I confessed to her that while I was in university, I showed up to countless classes and exams sick, due to the stressful possibility of missing key concepts or getting a poor grade. If you recall, missing exams meant that you really needed a doctor’s note to be excused or rescheduled, and who among us goes to the doctor for the common cold? I clearly remember writing a third-or-fourth year final and using up an entire purse package of tissues while I coughed and sneezed and blew my nose. Who even knows how many people I would have passed that cold on to. Even think about pre-pandemic commercials for cold and flu medication, that advertised dosing up because no one can afford to take a sick day, least of all mothers who are busily Doing It All.

Well, maybe there will be a shift. The thought of just doping ourselves up to alleviate cold and flu symptoms and then going about our day-to-day lives seems so antiquated right now, just like being indoors in a public place without a (fashionably coordinated) mask or shaking someone’s hand.

Pandemic Reading

This, this was the palate cleanser I needed after all my heavy books last week. Perfectly fluffy and lovely, two best friends pretend to be engaged to each other, but then feelings get involved. I bet you would never guess the ending.

I cannot believe I made it this long in life without reading Virginia Woolf. Sure, I read A Room of One’s Own, or an annotated version thereof, in university, but nothing else. Until now! This was a really incredible read, although in all honesty it took me a few pages to get used to the stream-of-consciousness style of writing. The details and the theme of interconnectedness really spoke to me. Also of note: Mrs. Dalloway is described as having heart issues, in need of daily rests, and having grown very thin and pale since her illness, her illness being the Spanish flu. The other thing of note is that Septimus is suffering from what was known as shell shock, which was a topic in the book about trauma I just read, The Body Keeps The Score. Very interesting, and there are some great Downton Abbey-like party descriptions, which I am HERE FOR.

Oh, this book. This book really resonated with me as a yoga practitioner and teacher, and a longtime cardio enthusiast. Particularly after my hip injury, I find that I am constantly filled with gratitude and joy that I can move without pain; running, walking, biking, I feel is a pure gift now. However, there were many parts that made me very, very sad: for example, talking about the feeling of community and collective joy that comes with group exercise in person, and the sound of synchronized breathing that comes with a flow yoga class when we are all together. Well. We are lucky to be so connected in a virtual way, and able to be together while apart, I must keep that in mind. I’m sure Mrs. Dalloway would have had a grave sense of isolation and loneliness while almost dying from the Spanish flu and would have given anything for the kind of connectivity we have now.

Happy October! It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is this weekend already. I hope you all have a beautiful week; I will be practicing gratitude and thankfulness. Particularly about no jury duty and a clean-shaven face. xo

One More For The Road; Twenty-Eight Weeks In

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As anyone who knows me is aware, I always have a song stuck in my head. Always. I like to think of it as the Soundtrack of My Life. The last few months, I have had snippets of the Hamilton soundtrack stuck in my head, and not just the big ones like Here comes the general! or Helplessssssssss or I’m not throwing away my! shot! but random lines from random songs. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night suddenly thinking Angelicaaaa, ELIIIIza, and Peggy. The Schuyler Sisters! or, horribly, We have resorted to eating our horses. ON REPEAT. This has been going on for months, no matter what else I have listened to during the day.

Then, suddenly, last week I woke up with – of all things – the Lido Shuffle going through my head. How or why this happened I cannot say, but I slid into my car singing to myself one more for the roooooaaaad, turned on the ignition, and THE LIDO SHUFFLE WAS PLAYING ON THE RADIO.

The station I listen to most of the time is Sirius 70s on 7, and I was driving to teach at the community centre the other day when The Coward of the County came on. I don’t want to flex on you people, but I’m a bit of a savant when it comes to song lyrics. This is particularly true with anything I may have heard often in my youth, and my parents were big Kenny Rogers On Vinyl people. All of which is to say, although I hadn’t heard The Coward of the County for at least thirty years, I automatically sang along.

You know how there are songs that you know all the words to, but have never really given them much thought? That was me. As I sang my way through the song, I startled myself. Have you LISTENED to those lyrics? It is an incredibly violent song. Gang rape! Murder! Probable execution TIMES TWO. All sang in a kindly, lovely, Kenny Rogers voice. I had a Moment, not unlike when I discovered that Ring Around The Rosy was all about dying from the plague. Why is this tune so cheerful and the subject matter so grisly.

We have Sonos speakers all through the house and the kitchen ones are what are utilized for when dinner is being prepared, eaten, and cleaned up after. Last Sunday I had Soul Classics playing, and after dinner I retired to the couch to read while my husband and younger son cleaned up the kitchen. My older son went downstairs to finish some homework, and as I picked up my book, I could hear the distinct, but faint, sound of Blue Rodeo’s Try. At the same time, I could hear, much louder, Soul Classics from the kitchen. The window was open so I stepped outside to see if Try was coming from outside. It disappeared. I called down to my son to see if he was blasting Blue Rodeo while studying. What? What’s Blue Rodeo? So, no. I asked my husband if he could hear it. What? No. I walked into the kitchen and, indeed, all I could hear was Signed, Sealed, Delivered. No Blue Rodeo. Back to the couch. Oh, baby you try. Tryyyyyy.

This was more than having a song stuck in my head, this was music that I could hear and, apparently, I was the only one hearing it.

Isn’t that a sign of something? I was honestly starting to get worried. I can hear music that no one else can. Then, I noticed something flash on the TV; my husband, in an attempt not to see anything about the Patriots game he was recording to watch in its entirety after dinner, had flipped the channel to a music one, and had turned the sound way down…but not apparently to zero. I was hearing the very soft music on the speaker beside the couch.

Well, that was a relief.

Also a relief; I had my first salon visit in over six months. Here’s the Before, During, and After:

I know what you’re going to say: it’s dark. Mmmhmmm. It’s actually way darker than I like; my hair therapist had changed colour lines and warned me that my usual colour might need “tweaking” and here we are. This dark colour is very similar to my “birth” colour (as opposed to “natural” as my natural colour is grey-white), which I haven’t seen in 25 years or so. Honestly, I find it startling every time I look in the mirror.

Well, as my friend Monique (HI MONIQUE) said, colour fades over time and I colour every four weeks or so; this is a temporary thing. It’s not like I just got a face tattoo or anything. Who knows, maybe I’ll grow to like it, but in any case, I have four boxes of Garnier in my cupboard from when they were on sale at Superstore for $4.99. Also, the cut made it feel so much healthier and bouncier, which should get me through the next six months or so.

Pandemic Reading

What happens when a father’s dying wish is for his family to sit shiva for him? A lot. This was a mixture of Wow, That’s Sad, and Horrified Laughing Out Loud, and I Didn’t Predict The End. In other words, worth a read. According to my Instagram friends, this was made into a movie.

A baby girl is abandoned at the YMCA. I am going to tell you that this is a beautifully written book, not unlike Room, wherein if you start it, you need to finish it for the message of hope and love. HOWEVER, like Room, it is extremely upsetting and disturbing and difficult to read. There’s your caveat.

Speaking of difficult to read, I picked this up as it was written by a friend’s sister-in-law. It deals with the death of the author’s sister and best friend – the sister, suffering from extreme mental illness commits suicide, and the best friend succumbs to cancer. It’s a very raw and emotional read.

Whew, after all those books of death and despair, I’m going to read something very very light. I will let you know what exactly I’m reading next week. xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fall Fruit and Fashion Edition

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It has been one of those “Lemon, it’s Tuesday” kind of weeks, for no particular reason. Nothing has been happening out of the ordinary, which, these days, ordinary is kind of extraordinary, but there has been nothing I can put my finger on to indicate why this week has felt extra long and strange. All I know is that I’ve been mentally a day ahead of the actual day every day this week.

Hooray, it’s Friday! I have big wine-and-Greek-salad plans tonight, and my husband and I are watching the final episode of the first season of Ozark – late to the party, I know, but I’m terrible at committing to actually watching a show. He’s been asking me to watch it with him for over a year, and I guess I’ve capitulated. We have been watching one or two episodes on weekends ONLY because I find it pretty disturbing to my sleep cycle.

Also hooray, we have been having the most BEAUTIFUL September. It’s really a crap shoot around here; September can be brutally cold and snowy, but this year it has been absolutely warm and gorgeous, with only a couple of frosty mornings. The fall colours are in full swing, and as I said to a gentleman I passed on my walk the other day, any September without snow on the ground is a great September.

Anyway, it is almost the end of September, and I promised myself I would keep my monthly Favourite Things going all through this pandemic – although “pandemic” now feels like “forever” or “this is life now.” In other words, it’s time for…

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Fall Fruit and Fashion Edition

Before I get to my Favourite Things, I am going to introduce you to Barkley’s new Favourite Thing. First, some background. Out here on the prairies, what passes for fruit is the pathetic cousin of the glorious apple, known as the crabapple. There are crabapple trees everywhere and although some intrepid souls actually harvest those sour little things and add ten pounds of sugar to them to make them into a jar of semi-palatable jelly, mostly they just litter lawns as people desperately try to give them away before raking them up and putting them in their green compost bins.

Our next-door neighbour has a crabapple in his back yard, and squirrels are constantly picking them up, eating small amounts of them, and then dropping them in OUR back yard, underneath our stand of spruce trees. For Barkley, this is like a mix between Christmas morning and winning big in Vegas. For weeks now, he has been mysteriously missing from sight in the yard, only to emerge from the trees with an apple in his mouth.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to my husband that Barkley was smellier than usual, but other than terrible gas that would have us all opening the windows, he was fine. That was when we discovered the Apple Bonanza, which happens every year but I seem to forget about it/ block it out.

He’s eating so many apples that he’s actually gaining weight, and although we do have to keep his weight down for arthritis reasons, I don’t have the heart OR the time and inclination to run outside, duck under the trees, and clean up any stray apples every time Barkley goes outside. Well, he’s twelve, and might as well get some enjoyment out of the fall, and in any case, apple season will be over soon, the snow will be here, and winter will have us all pining for these colourful, albeit smelly days.

These Apples Are Delicious; As A Matter Of Fact They Are, She Said

All of which is to say, it’s Apple Season in the Boyhouse too! It officially started Wednesday when there were a few expensive Macintosh and Honeycrisp apples at Superstore. I LIVE for Macintosh season, and although the selection was poor and the cost was $2.39 per pound, I bought a few. I was a LITTLE salty when the lady across the street told me later that day that the Co-Op around the corner had Macs for sale for $0.99 per pound; the sale had been going on for the entire week and was OVER by the time I got there. I could have been eating not only Macs for a week, but $0.99 per pound Macs for a week! Time AND money lost.

Well, we can’t live in the past, and in any case, I am eating them now. Some of you might view Apple Season as the time to make pies and crisps and applesauce, but as you know, for me, that is a grievous waste of an apple. I shall gorge until the season is over.

This apple was so good I almost cried.

Pears, Plums, and Nectarines

Some of you in warmer climates – I’m looking at you, Gigi and Suz (HI GIGI HI SUZ) – might not think of these as fall fruits, but here, if I obtain a fruit in September, it’s a fall fruit. I bought nectarines three weeks ago and they were so delicious, I almost didn’t buy them again, for fear they wouldn’t be as good. I’m glad I DID buy them because now they aren’t available. Plums are my husband’s favourites, so I’m adding them here even though they aren’t mine.

Pears. PEARS. I love pears and I only eat them at this time of year because I find them gravely disappointing any other time. The only problem, as I see it, is that we have to buy them so green, and then they all ripen at once. I mean, it’s not really a PROBLEM, per se, more of a pear-binge. With four fruit-hungry people in the house, they don’t last long.

Pears, I find, are not unlike avocados in that they take a while to ripen and then you have to strike while the iron is hot. Again, this isn’t really a problem.

The Middle-Aged Woman Look (Scarves, Sweaters, Flats, and Boots)

A few years ago, a woman I know said – and not in a friendly way, but in a disparaging, nasty kind of way – that the way you know a woman has hit middle age is that she starts wearing a lot of scarves and flats. The woman went on to say that SHE embraces her heels and low-cut tops and honestly, good for her. You do you, lady.

However, I love flats and I love scarves and there is a very limited time of year here that one can actually wear a scarf and a sweater and call it a day. I mean, you still can, but while outside the wind is often so powerful that scarves either unwrap themselves or threaten to strangle you, and a sweater is insufficient for the chill. Lately though, we have had a few days where it HAS been still and mild enough to go out with a sweater and scarf and pretend that we are living in a glorious climate and not one in which we are waiting for the other (flat) shoe to drop.

God, I love a good scarf. I think they are so pretty and snuggly. I haven’t reached the Nora Ephron stage in which I feel “bad about my neck” although sometimes, when I see photos, I do think my neck looks like a weirdly striated tree trunk.

I’ve embraced the long swirly drapey sweater look for a while now, and I find – and this is a topic for another day, a big topic – I love them even more because they smooth out the, how shall I say this, softening of my abdomen. But as I say, that is a big topic for another day, how perimenopause affects your body no matter what.

As for flats, I used to be a die-hard wedge heel girl, but now I just feel more comfortable, fast, and getting-my-steps-in with flats. I do still have a few low-heeled boots, but for the most part, my shoes are pretty flat. I have reached the stage in life where shoe comfort has taken precedence over shoe style. I guess that is because, god willing, I am now middle-aged.

Actually, I hope to live to 100, so I’ve got five years to go before I hope to be in TRUE middle age, but I don’t want to tempt fate.

Those are my favourite September things, what are yours? xo

Bizarre Even For These Days; Twenty-Seven Weeks In

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This has been a bit of a bizarre week, starting with a phone call cancelling an appointment due to an unbelievably scary accident, happily segueing to a midweek birthday, followed by a letter summoning me to jury duty, and then finishing with a pre-dawn visit from the fire department due to our carbon monoxide detector going off. Happily, there was no carbon monoxide leak, the screaming detector was, apparently, at the end of its life span. Thanks for letting us know so dramatically, carbon monoxide detector! Your replacement has been installed.

I was scheduled to get my hair cut this week for the first time in six months, and when I heard the voice mail from my hair therapist’s colleague advising that she needed to rebook my appointment, the first thing I thought was She’s Got Covid. During the brief greetings I waited to hear the words, only to listen instead to the awful details of my hair therapist’s husband’s accident that entailed airlifting, and intensive care, all in another province, and with the usual difficulties around Covid protocol, after which the colleague cheerfully said, “So I have to rebook your cut and colour!” At that point, it seemed like the least important thing ever, and I told her so, as she pencilled me in for later this week. “Wow, thanks for being so understanding, you’re being so GOOD about this!” the colleague said in a voice that made me wonder: what are OTHER people doing? Are other people NOT being understanding? What is happening to our society?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say something that might be strongly disagreed with: this pandemic has been GREAT for my hair. I know! I know. For one thing, as we all know, I’ve been colouring at home and saving so much time and money, it is not even to be believed. I picked up a couple more boxes of Garnier at Superstore and they were on sale for $4.99 each, plus I got PC Points; more about points later. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents, people. The other part about the pandemic is that after not cutting my hair for six months, it has grown out beautifully. Pro tip: if you want to grow out your hair, stop cutting it. It’s true that I need a trim, as the ends are pretty dry and damaged, but I love the length. A while back I wondered if I should grow it out or not, and the decision, like so many others, was taken out of my hands.

The above were taken at the end of February and the middle of March, so you can see that my hair was above my shoulders at the time. This is from the weekend:

With mask-wearing and yoga teaching, I have my hair in a bun a lot, and it’s so much easier to put it up with the extra length; in other words, I don’t need twenty bobby pins to hold it in place. I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of my good friend Denise (HI DENISE) who gets a professional colour semi-annually, and my friend Nicole (HI NICOLE) who gets a cut the on that same schedule.

In addition to my long, not-exactly-luscious-but-definitely-convenient Covid hair, I have developed Efficiency Skills when it comes to grocery shopping. I have never before received so many Gifts With Purchase as I have during this pandemic, and I am just now, twenty-seven weeks into this, that I am calming down about Buying All The Things. There are not many shortages of food or other necessities, and so I have finally relaxed about having backups of staples such as pasta or flour. ONE backup is all that is necessary, although I still have three bags of flour in my pantry purchased in the spring, which should get me through to Christmas at least.

I was at Superstore for my weekly shop, and you know how there are some employees who are REALLY good and dedicated when it comes to their jobs? I appreciate that so much. I remember when I waitressed in university, a customer said to me “You must really love your job! You’re always smiling!” I agreed, although I did NOT love my job. I mean, have you ever worked in a restaurant? It’s hard. Smiling was just part of the job. So, I really appreciate when others, no matter what their job is, embrace it, which is why I felt lucky to have the most cheerful cashier ever this week, who exclaimed over the quality of my produce, like I actually grew it myself and didn’t just pick items from a bin. “Do you collect PC Points?” she asked and I scanned my app for her. “You can use your points when you shop to get good deals, and don’t forget to check back every Thursday for your new offers!” I paused for a moment, imagining a world in which I did NOT spend time figuring out the offer algorithm, and subsequently making my weekly list based on when I was most likely to get points and for what items, and what I would get points for the following week, a world in which I did NOT wake up Thursday mornings and think, yay, it’s PC Points day!, a world in which I did NOT text my husband excitedly to tell him my points balance. Instead, I just nodded and said “Yes, you bet!” God bless that cheerful employee. I’m going to seek her line out next week.

As a runner, I always smile in solidarity when I see other runners in the street or pathways, even when not running myself, which probably means that I am perceived as the Crazy Smiley Lady much of the time. Well, I have become appreciative of a good smile, since we are masked so much of the time. Anyway, I was out walking Barkley, doing our forty-minutes-to-go-merely-two-kilometres pace, and I saw a young man running on the street perpendicular to me. I slowed our already-not-exactly-super-sonic-speed so that he could pass with lots of room, when I noticed something odd: he was not wearing shoes. He was perfectly clad in what I would call Real Runner Wear: a tidy ball cap, a sweat-wicking sleeveless tee, and running shorts. All that was missing was shoes. And socks. I watched him go up the street, making great pace, occasionally looking at his smart watch and occasionally brushing gravel and debris off his feet. What even. What is happening here.

So it has been a surreal week, more so than normal, but there was delicious cake, and some good books, and a smokey but lovely long walk with a friend.

Pandemic Reading

As soon as I finished this I went to the library app and bookmarked all of Emma Straub’s other books; this was SO good. Again, the slice-of-life book is the type I love best, and this had to do with adult sibling-and-parent relationships, families, and finding love.

My longtime friend Tracy (HI TRACY) recommended this book and it is FASCINATING. From Vietnam vets to survivors of child abuse, this book examines how trauma changes our brains and also our physiological makeup and also explores different therapeutic approaches to working with traumatized people.

Well, hello to Monday and I’m looking forward to what will hopefully be a less bizarre week. Take care, stay well. xo