Mammograms and Crocuses and My Ability To Misunderstand Basic Instructions

In what must be a new record for me, on Saturday Jake and I cleaned up the two warmest gardens in our yard. It’s so early! Most years everything is still frozen and snow-covered at this time of the year; believe me, I’m not saying that cannot still happen, but at the moment there is […]

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Beauty Products (and wine) Edition

This morning while I was driving to yoga, I noticed the moon. The sky was perfectly black and the moon looked exactly like an illustration in a children’s book: a perfectly golden crescent shape. When I left the shala, the sky was beginning to brighten. One of my favourite things about this time of year […]

Bumper Stickers and Big News!

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and because there is no semi-holiday that goes by uncelebrated by sugar cookies, I spent some time this morning cutting out round cookies. Heart-shaped cookies have been deemed too embarrassing for words, but round cookies? With bright pink buttercream and heart-shaped sprinkles? Perfectly acceptable. I was getting ready to frost them when […]

KonMari FAIL

Here’s a little tidbit about me that some people (read: my husband) find quite un-endearing: I have a really, really hard time spending money on non-essential items. What often happens in my house is that my husband will suggest a purchase, and no matter how minor, I rail against it. Spotify, for example. Why would […]

Choosing lip gloss is not my best quality.

I’m feeling a bit tired and blah today, and it’s only Tuesday. Thursday is usually Exhaustion Day, when I find myself waiting for the kids at karate and wondering if I’m going to make it or if I am just going to fall over from tiredness, but I feel like that today. It doesn’t really […]

I’ve got the power!

I know what you’ve all been wondering: How did Nicole survive the Great Power Outage of 2016? Did she have to resort to grinding her own seed wheat in a handheld coffee grinder? Did she have to feed hand-twisted hay sticks into her fireplace just to keep warm? Did she play a song on her […]

May all your blues be Monday. Or something.

It’s Blue Monday! Mercury’s in retrograde, it’s January, and today has been calculated to be the most depressing day of the year. Maybe no one should communicate at all today, JUST IN CASE. Well, blue is my favourite colour, and even if the algorithm has calculated it to be the saddest day of 2016, this […]