Category Archives: When I grow up

The Highlight Reel

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I ended 2025 as a War History Buff, having listened to every episode on the World Wars and the leadup to those wars and interesting one-offs like the Christmas truce of 1914 on the podcast The Rest is History. I learned so much! And now, here we are, fully into January 2026, and I have become obsessed with a podcast about Sweet Valley High, Double Love, in which two Irish women around my age deep dive into each book in the 180 book series.

Hopefully this isn’t having a negative impact on my brain. I hope all my World War knowledge won’t be nudged out by dramatic 80s teen antics, but I don’t see how it won’t be. I mean, Elizabeth gets kidnapped by an orderly while candy striping at the hospital, the very same hospital that Annie is recovering in after an intentional overdose following her failure to make the cheerleading squad, due to Jessica’s bullying and rumour-spreading. How can reality compete with THAT?

There is SO much drama. There are so many dances, and dates, and tragic events! It’s making my daily drudgery so much more enjoyable. Never have I been so entertained while folding the laundry. On the topic of drudgery, in a recent discussion about social media, a friend expressed astonishment that I follow a number of authors on Instagram. What could authors possibly be posting on Instagram? she wondered. Wouldn’t their lives just be boring, sitting in front of a laptop all day?

Well. I was quite perplexed by this question because really, what does anyone post on Instagram? Most, if not all of us lead very ordinary lives filled with many dull and monotonous tasks every single day, and what is Instagram for if not to highlight little glimmers that add sparkle to those lives? It feels like the social media equivalent of Mary Oliver-ing, of paying attention and being astonished. Yes, we might spend hours in front of a laptop screen, or folding laundry, or chopping vegetables, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate our blooming amaryllis, or a sunset that knocks our socks off.

We might also appreciate how unhinged and weird Duolingo is these days.

Eddy! I am scandalized.

Not every moment is a flower or a sunset or even a weirdly sexual language app. But the truth is I actually DO love seeing the very mundane aspects of other people’s lives, and I probably WOULD enjoy seeing a whole scroll of photos of people typing busily away on laptops or folding laundry. And if a person posts a photo of their hair or outfit? I am HERE for it. I am nosy, is what I’m saying.

I have had a number of meetings lately with promotions and social media specialists, in advance of the release of Inhale Exhale, which is coming out next month, if you can believe it.

I’m very excited, of course, but am also practicing non-attachment. Sending creative work out into the world to be examined and critiqued and possibly loathed is a very vulnerable thing. This week I read The Ten Year Affair, which is one of the best books I have ever read, and guess what: it’s largely panned on Goodreads. I did what I never do, which was to read reviews, and I was absolutely shocked by them. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but I felt like so many of these reviewers completely missed the point of the book. I started to wonder if we had even read the same book, at which point I put my phone down and slowly backed away.

I was looking at my Ask Me Anything form and typing away at my laptop over the holiday break, when I looked up at my older son, who was milling around. My blog readers want me to talk about parenting adult children, I told him. But the thing is, I don’t really do anything. He shrugged. Maybe that’s the point, he said.

Putting a book out into the world feels a little bit like that. It feels like letting go and seeing what happens. I had so much fun writing it, and it turned out the way I wanted it to, and that feels like the whole point. It was pure joy to write, and I hope it brings joy to readers.

And if that doesn’t, maybe my next project will be Sweet Valley: The Midlife Years. A Botoxed Jessica gets lip fillers and they are way too overdone! The mole on Elizabeth’s shoulder has changed, and it turns out all those years of tanning on the beach were unwise! Lila’s getting her third divorce after having an affair with the guy who cleans her pool! Everyone’s skin has turned to leather! Todd’s depressed because his dreams of being a basketball star amounted to nothing and now he spends his days watching General Hospital and eating onion dip! Bruce Patman gets drunk and drives his Porsche off a bridge! Can Roger, who against all odds did make it to medical school and is now a renowned emergency medicine doctor, save him? Tune in!

Weekly Reading

Of course, anyone who follows my Instagram knows that my feed is largely made up of books that I’ve read, but one thing I don’t do is talk about my DNFs. This is mostly because, in the past, I rarely DNF a book, but that is going to CHANGE in 2026, people. I am going to DNF whenever I feel like it! And I had one this week, but I will say I hesitated greatly before putting it aside, and that is because this is a book that actually lives on my shelves. I bought a copy of The Dud Avocado after a friend recommended it, because the library didn’t have a copy. Maybe it’s because I started it after The Ten Year Affair, and I was adrift not knowing what to read after a masterpiece, but it just seemed stupid to me. But I didn’t want to abandon it because I spent money on it. This is very silly. It’s a sunk cost and if the worst comes to the worst and I never pick it up again, I can give it to a Little Free Library, where hopefully it will be loved, or at least tolerated, by someone else.

Best Laid Plans. From Childhood Reread Week to Important Adult Behaviour! Some of you may already know this author as Sarah from The Shu Box– she is part of the blogging community and also a podcaster (HI SHU). It was great to “hear” her voice on these pages. There are a lot of takeaways here for planning and organizing one’s life to achieve goals. The book has templates for annual, seasonal, monthly, weekly, and daily planning, but my favourite part was seeing quotes and anecdotes about my friends in the blogging community, shoutout to Jenny, Lisa, Elisabeth, and Kae. I felt starstruck! I KNOW THEM! (HI JENNY LISA ELISABETH KAE).

The Ten Year Affair. As noted above! Wow wow WOW. Friends, this book blew me away. Absolutely blew me away. It follows a woman who escapes the drudgery and disappointment in her life by having an affair…but only in her mind. This mental affair with a man she meets at baby playgroup lasts for years, and then the lines blur from fantasy to reality. At the end of the day this book is about the sublime and also the mediocre, the little boring ordinary details that make up a life and also the striving to make something extraordinary. The characters are complete and nuanced, and there is a lot of subtext and unwritten backstory that makes this a literary gem. It is also really, really funny. I cannot say enough about this book except that it is truly an exceptional read about a non-exceptional world. A perfect book!

Games and Rituals. After I finished The Ten Year Affair, I was in a bit of a slump, a bit bereft, a bit “what now.” So I stared at my bookshelves and saw my Katherine Heiny books and thought YES. YES, that was exactly what I needed, to reread a collection of pure delight. Friends, I cannot say enough about this author and her ability to convey deep emotion and build worlds in only a few sentences – her writing is so tight, so smart, so evocative, and so incredibly funny. This collection of short stories is just one wonderful read after another. Every single one is perfect and absolutely delightful and made me both laugh out loud and stare at the wall thoughtfully.

Happy Monday, friends. I hope you are all taking care of yourselves in these very distressing days. May I suggest listening to Sweet Valley High recaps to dissociate from the news? It works like a charm. Take care, friends. xo

Bounty and the Bust

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Who Loves You?

I was listening to an interview with Anne Lamott, who is a writer and person that I very much admire. She was talking about the concept of self-care, and how her entire life these days is based on self-care, which felt quite resonant to me. Recently someone asked me what I do with all my time, now that I’m neither teaching yoga nor raising children, and I was quite puzzled. I fill it? It seems like my days are all full and busy and very little of my time feels wasted. But I think the better answer is one like Lamott’s, in that my whole life feels like one giant self-care project at this stage in my journey towards the grave.

Lamott spoke of everything she does as a radical act of love towards herself, stating that if she so much as makes herself a cup of peppermint tea or eats a cookie she thinks Someone is taking care of me and loving me, that “someone” being her own self. I’m going to start thinking this way. Someone loves me so much that they made me this hummus, I’ll think at lunch, eating my own homemade hummus. Someone is taking care of me by making me sit on the deck and read for an hour, I’ll think. After all, one cannot be a writer without being a reader, and so it’s career development as well as self-care.

Is It A Robot?

I have a real aversion to AI and Chat GPT and other things that are destructive to our environment and also to our collective intelligence. I realize – YES I REALIZE – that there are benefits to the medical community and research, sure. But also? It is making us collectively stupider. I am sure you can, for example, develop a travel itinerary using AI, but you know what else you can do? Google. It’s already supremely easy to access information about literally everything in the world, I do not think we need to make our brains lazier, particularly given the environmental damage AI wreaks. Do not even get me started on AI-created pictures or writing.

This aversion did not, however, stop me from listening to a podcast about Chat GPT romances. Did you know this was a thing? I certainly did not. There are a lot of lonely people out there who are embarking on romantic, and even sexual, relations with a chat bot. And if you, like me, were thinking how do you have sex with a chat bot, then you are not thinking outside the box enough. It would be similar to phone sex, let’s put it like that.

So this is a thing now. I listened to an interview with a man who, apparently, has a REAL LIFE GIRLFRIEND but also a chat bot one, and the reason for the latter is that – wait for it – his girlfriend doesn’t understand him. To quote Miss Cornelia, ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN? This “relationship” started when his actual human girlfriend was uninterested in watching the lunar eclipse with him, and so he now goes to his chat bot girlfriend for all his astronomy conversation-based needs.

If you’re thinking woof, that is fucked up, then you are in the exact same mental space as I was, until I started giving it a bit more thought. It’s not much different from chat rooms of two decades ago, or even those 1-800 numbers to talk to “singles in your area,” but the difference is that there is not a human on the other end of it. Which brings me to my question: which is worse, finding out your spouse is cheating on you with a robot, or finding out your spouse is cheating on you with a random stranger in a chat room? Or paying for phone sex? Or – and I actually think this is the worst of all – having an online affair with someone on social media?

Bounty and Bust

A vastly better use for our planet’s water is for food production, I think we all can agree. Which brings me to a long-overdue garden update!

This was my harvest last weekend, before I started shutting the garden down. It’s a little early for it, but we are going on vacation soon and I’d rather get things done in the beautiful September sunshine than later, when it might not be so lovely. The tomatoes and raspberries are, improbably enough, still going strong. I have enough squash and zucchini (omg, so much zucchini), to last me all year, and I have more onions and jalapenos than I can possibly use, so I have been sharing them with the winery staff.

Not everything has been so bountiful, though. I have six gorgeous bell pepper plants that have, through the summer, been absolutely covered with beautiful, perfect peppers. Despite this, I have harvested only seven peppers in total, because every time one starts to ripen and change colour, I go to inspect it only to find that it has been nibbled on. Worse, sometimes the peppers look amazing and then disintegrate when I pick them up, because water has gotten in through the nibbles and rotted the pepper from the inside out.

The only possible explanation is that it is a squirrel, and indeed, I have seen those little bastards zipping around the garden boxes. We have a tall deer fence, and there isn’t anything else that could be getting in. Squirrels! They have been my gardening nemesis since my Calgary days, when those assholes would merrily dig up all my plants for no good reason or chew all the wires on our outdoor Christmas decorations. One year, squirrels ate the entire hat off of a light-up wire snowman, and another year they dug up and ate all 150 fall bulbs that I had painstakingly planted. As we all know, the Eastern Grey Squirrel is not even native to Calgary, and I will tell you that once Barkley caught one and tried to kill it and I did not feel bad about it. Me! Animal loving me! I was like FUCK THAT SQUIRREL, GO BARKLEY.

Anyway, next year I shall sprinkle cayenne in my pepper beds to keep the (actually native) squirrels out. If that doesn’t work, I give up. I will just buy from the farm market.

The other bust was my fall planting of spinach and kale. I enthusiastically planted seeds in mid-August, like I did last year, and then we had warmer than normal temperatures. The heat stunted the germination process and now, a month later, I have only the smallest scatterings of seedlings. I suppose I could try again now, but as I said we are leaving for vacation soon and it feels like it will be a wasted effort.

Weekly Reading

Not a wasted effort? This week’s reading. One of these things is not like the others!

I Who Have Never Known Men. Rex’s face says it all. I read a dystopian novel and I liked it. I think it was because it is an entirely character-based novel that takes place entirely in the narrator’s head, the narrator who is not only unnamed to us, but unnamed at all. She is known as “the child,” as she was taken as a child to the underground bunker with thirty-nine women. One day a siren goes off and the guards disappear immediately. The women escape to discover they are all alone in the world, whatever world they are in. This book asks such interesting questions: what happens to a person brought up in isolation from the rest of the world, how does a person make sense of the world, what is the nature of hope and when is hope lost?

Bad Summer People. Do you love juicy, gossipy, scandalous stories about rich people behaving badly? Me too! This was so much fun to read; we start with the discovery of a dead body and then the story backtracks from there. There are multiple (read: SO MANY) points of view and characters, and I was here for every single one of them. What a ride! Also, I love the kind of intensity that something like a low-talent tennis tournament can bring about, that’s all I’m saying.

The Identicals. I recently started listening to Elin Hildebrand’s podcast Books, Beach, and Beyond, in which she – given her own star power – interviews absolute literary stars and talks to them about their writing process. Recently she mentioned that her books follow a formula and she does not deviate from this formula, and I have to say, when you’re right, you’re right. There is something SO lovely about reading a book which you KNOW will end happily, and as you read it, you can see those happy things taking shape. This is a book about estranged identical twins living on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and they basically trade places for the summer. Capers ensue, everything turns out perfectly, I loved it, the end. A perfectly lovely beach read that I read with the actual beach in view.

Today is the first day of fall! It’s fall, fuckfaces! And so it is the start of Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers, and also – in Canada only! – Decorative Gord Season.

I mean, that will never get old. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not. Let’s go! xo

Nifty, Fifty

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Today is my fiftieth birthday! I can finally say I’m Nifty and Fifty!

When I was very small, I had the thought process shared by many small children with regards to what “growing up” entailed. What do you want to be when you grow up is a ridiculous question to ask a three-or-four-year-old, and yet it’s incredibly common. I mean, preschoolers really do not have all the information with regards to career paths.

But when I was that age, I had a really firm idea about what I wanted to be when I grew up, and that was a flower.

I don’t think it’s that unusual for a small child to equate “growing up” with a species-shifting free-for-all. I loved flowers, therefore I wanted to be one. I wanted to be a pink daisy-like flower, my face would be in the centre, and my arms would be the leaves. I can still picture it, myself as a flower, bobbing along in the breeze.

I also remember exactly when this future flower plan came to a screeching halt. It was when I realized that flowers die in the winter. I remember crying hysterically about it; I was a very emotional and dramatic child, and so my complete devastation probably didn’t register much to my parents. I recall my dad saying but flowers come back in the spring, which made me cry harder. I would miss Christmas! I would be dead! When I was a flower! I’m sure my parents did not understand the depth of my sadness, because what adult would be like right, right, well I know you think you’re going to be a flower, but that’s not actually going to happen, so you won’t die every year and miss Christmas. They were probably more like oh my god why is this child crying again?

My dreams of becoming a flower evaporated into the ether, along with my tears.

When we moved here, my husband and I redid our wills to reflect the new province and property, and, because the children were now grown, to eliminate the guardianship clause in the case of our sudden demise that would leave them orphaned. As we spoke with the lawyer, she asked if we had any burial preferences, for when we shuffle off this mortal coil, and my husband was quite surprised that I did have a very strong opinion on this subject. I exuberantly informed the lawyer that I wanted to be composted and planted with a tree, which she dutifully wrote down.

I think it’s very important to have these strange and difficult conversations – open and honest communication is always the best – and so I informed the children of my plan, should I suddenly expire. Oh Mom, my older son said, That’s so great! You’ll be one step closer to achieving your childhood dream of becoming a flower!

It seems a little macabre to talk about my future demise, may it be many decades in the future, and also becoming human compost on my birthday of all days, and well, it is. But it also strangely brings me happiness to think that perhaps one day I’ll be one with the earth while my soul flutters around, hopefully inhabiting a bird or a butterfly, and not something that will immediately get squished, like a fly or mosquito.

In the Ask Me Anything that I had posted months ago, Kyria (HI KYRIA) asked how do you want to be remembered, and that to me is an incredibly difficult and complicated question. I think the way we remember people is specific to the time periods in which we were the closest, to how well we know them, to things we did together. Someone from my youth will remember me very differently from someone who knows me now; certain songs might spark memories, certain movies, certain places.

That said, I think I would like a park bench, just like my pretend friend Lloyd Forest, but instead of reminding people when the park closes, I would like to tell them to return their shopping carts.

Of course, when I told my kids that, they demurred. Turning their mother into compost, that’s fine, but putting a shopping cart reminder on a park bench was not. That makes you sound like you’re a grumpy old person! my son said, I think it would be better if you had Putting the OM in OMG.

Well. I guess he’s right. My tagline really does describe my life so far, and I hope it describes the next fifty years.

Weekly Reading

What’s Mine and Yours. This is what I would classify as a Big Book, and I’m not talking length – it’s just over 300 pages, which seems average these days. But it’s big in concept and it deals with big issues: race-related tensions, redlining, integrating school districts, and intergenerational trauma. There is also a big cast of characters and they all have big problems. There are several time periods as well. I will say it’s very well-executed, thoughtful, and smart. However, it was not what I would consider a pleasurable reading experience because nearly all of the characters were deeply, deeply dislikeable. Even the one main character who I thought was pretty decent turned out to be not so much in the end. It really says something about the nature of pain and trauma, and how hurt people often lash out. Still, I was looking for a redemption arc, which never really happened – but maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is that people with pain and trauma often never get that redemption.

The Book of (More) Delights. I picked this up while Christmas shopping last year, entirely because of the cover and the name. I had no idea until my friend Laura (HI LAURA) mentioned a “Ross Gay moment” that this was a book by an acclaimed author. To further the Laura confluence, in the recently read Bite By Bite, the author, Aimee, mentions going to a watermelon festival with her friend Ross, who was working on another book about delight, and it was this Ross. THEN, near the end of this book, Ross mentions going to a watermelon festival with Aimee, and I just exploded with all the life/ reading intersections. Anyway. This is a book of 81 essays on everyday delights over a span of a year, and it starts and ends on Ross’ birthday, which felt serendipitous for me, finishing it just before my own. I have been reading an essay before yoga most mornings since January, and his style of writing is – as one might expect – delightful. He has more digressions than anyone I’ve ever read, sometimes six or seven in a SINGLE SENTENCE. I loved it.

It’s certainly been a week of delights for me: my darling friend Sammi (HI SAMMI) hosted the most gorgeous girls’ lunch you can even imagine, complete with tiara and sash, which I’m wondering if I can get away with wearing everywhere for the next year. It was truly the most wonderful afternoon with such an incredible group of women, I am SO lucky, so so so lucky.

My parents were here for the weekend to celebrate, and we had a great time with lots of wine and more cake. I hosted Easter dinner for both sides of the family, and it turned out great! I hope you all had a lovely weekend with all sorts of treats. xo

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Trick or Treat Edition

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I never really understood Anne Shirley’s feelings on October until I moved here. It is so beautiful right now, I can barely stand it. The colours are gorgeous, and every day is a little bit different. I’m becoming slightly unhinged, talking about leaves to my family every day.

I mean, I am stopping perfect strangers on the street to talk to them about fall colours, which isn’t TOTALLY out of line for me, but I am starting to become a tiny bit concerned about my sanity. Also I’m starting to worry that people are going to recognize and avoid me from here on in.

For the first time ever, I will not be celebrating Halloween in the traditional sense, and so I’m a little early this month, talking about my Favourite Things! Some of these things are tricks, some are treats, and some are both.

Gourds, Decorative and Otherwise, Motherfuckers

You guys, I grew my own pumpkins!

Cute, right? Have you ever seen a more perfect pumpkin? There’s more where that came from, in addition to my massive haul of butternut squash.

And, of course, more zucchini.

I could not resist the siren call of the motherfucking decorative gourds. It’s the season, motherfuckers!

Fruit Is Nature’s Candy

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, grape harvesting is done, and so I have thoroughly enjoyed my own backyard Concords.

There is so much incredible fresh fruit right now, and my favourites are pears and apples. A neighbourhood girl was selling plums from her own backyard trees to raise money for the Terry Fox Foundation, so of course I had to buy some.

But the apples, my god, the apples. I cannot get enough of those delicious, tree-ripened McIntosh apples. I’m eating two or three a day right now. I may turn into an apple. HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES.

These apples are delicious! As a matter of fact they are, she said.

The Other Kind of Grape

We live at the bottom of a vineyard; we own, along with my mother-in-law, two acres of it, but the rest is owned by the founder of Tantalus Vineyards. What you may not know is that those vineyards were owned by my husband’s family until my late father-in-law sold them to Tantalus twenty years ago. They still have a block named after him, and they still have the Old Vines, planted by him – and my then-teenaged husband – in 1978. The winery is, therefore, a place I like to visit, particularly when we have out-of-town guests, and so I took my parents there for a wine tasting.

I love their homegrown Riesling, but I REALLY love their Syrah. The Syrah grapes are not grown on the adjacent property; instead they come from just south of here, and sadly they, along with 95% of Okanagan grapes, were decimated by the cold snap we had here in January. Yes, you read that right: 95% of ALL wine grape crops in the Okanagan were destroyed, which means that there will be little to no 2024 vintage. People, if you love Okanagan wines, get them now while you can.

I was disheartened to hear that of 110 Syrah grape plants, from which this wine is made, 108 are gone. You can bet I’m going to savour these wines that my dad bought for me, because it will be many years before they are available again.

Just An Ordinary Girl In An Ordinary World

On a less-apocalyptic note, let’s talk about Ordinary products. I have been using this line for a few years, ever since my wrinkle-less friend Denise (HI DENISE) told me about them. I have loved their caffeine undereye serum, but I branched out and bought the multi-peptide one, and I really think it’s made a difference.

I also bought Matrixyl for my forehead wrinkles, and while I don’t think these are miraculous, dermatologist office substitutes, I think they work pretty well. Things don’t seem to be getting worse, and sometimes the status quo is the best we can hope for.

Ghosting the Blessed Life

Whenever someone visits my house for the first time, there is a guarantee that they will comment on the volume of bananas on my countertop. I don’t blame them; as a family we go through a vast amount. I personally go through fourteen bananas a week, entirely in smoothie form.

My breakfast smoothie is made up of cashew milk, nut butter, a frozen banana, and a ton of spinach. I always feel great after consuming it; it’s a nutrition bomb full of vitamins, fibre, calcium, and iron.

The one thing it’s not super high in is protein. I mean, yes, there is protein involved, but I don’t feel it’s enough to adequately fuel my very active, plant-based lifestyle. This means that every lunch I make myself a smoothie with protein powder, cashew milk, and yet another frozen banana. It feels like a milkshakey treat, and I look forward to it. I used to buy the Protein Works vegan line, but it was a) expensive, and b) only available in the US or UK, and so I was always paying exchange rates and shipping. I decided to branch out and I’m so glad I did.

Ghost vegan protein powder tastes exactly like a delicious chocolate milkshake, not too sweet or cloying, and it has a perfect, non-gritty texture.

I’ve tried a few of the Blessed flavours, to much disappointment. The chocolate, usually a safe flavour for me, is frankly disgusting, and the strawberry isn’t much better. The chocolate coconut is okay, but this! This vanilla chai, which sounds like a risky choice, is really, really good. Once in a while I’ll even use it instead of nut butter in my spinach smoothie and it works great.

Outfit of the Month

It’s my Fall Uniform!

Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) recently was talking about buying multiples of the same clothing item, which is a very relatable topic. I have bought three pair of the Infinite Fit Silver jeans that I spoke about last month – they are stretchy and comfortable and, amazingly, don’t lose their shape. They fit like a more-structured yoga pant. These ones are the straight cut, which I like to wear cuffed with booties. The sweater is just a light old one from the Gap, and the tank top underneath is from Lululemon, both about six years old. I wear some combination of jeans, boots, and a black – or, if I’m feeling saucy, grey – sweater, often with a tank underneath, basically every day. Why mess with the uniform?

As previously mentioned, I won’t be celebrating Halloween in the traditional sense, and that is because I’m going on a big adventure! To that end, I will be taking a blog break. I can’t wait to tell you all about it, sometime in November, but until then, take care of yourselves, friends. Treat yourselves tenderly, and maybe treat yourself to a few treats as well. Or tricks! I don’t judge. xo

Gardeners and Flowers

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Before she was part of the Real Housewives franchise, Carole Radziwill wrote a really excellent memoir entitled What Remains, which I have read many times. There is a part in the book where she and her husband’s cousin, who is none other than JFK Jr (spoiler alert, everyone dies around her), have a discussion about marriage. They have a theory that in a successful marriage there is one Gardener and one Flower; it’s possible a marriage could work with two Gardeners, but never with two Flowers.

I have thought about this theory approximately one million times since first reading this book in 2006.

I am, of course, a literal Gardener; it’s almost actual gardening season around here, and we have SO much to do, to plan, to plant. But I have always believed that, in the Carole Radziwill and JFK Jr context, I am also a figurative Gardener. I am a nurturing, mother-hen type of person who likes to make sure loved ones are special and cared for. That said, my husband is not really a Flower, so I have always thought that we are one of those double-Gardener marriages.

Except sometimes, I think I am a Flower, or, at least, I’m turning into one.

The area in which my Flower-ness becomes most apparent is in travel, or more specifically, travel planning. I love to travel, I love to see new things and have new experiences. I love it all! What I don’t love, however, is dealing with the logistical details. I am capable of dealing with logistical details – I can and have in the past booked flights and hotels and activities – but I find it boring and tedious.

Someone who does not find it boring and tedious, and, in fact, who shines at travel planning is my husband. The man can spend hours researching places to go, things to see and do, and, importantly, how to physically get there. He loves doing it and so over the course of our marriage I have just stepped back to the point where I have ceded all control.

I am completely a Flower. We are now at the point where I only barely know not only our travel itineraries, but I also barely know where we are going. If anything, this attitude of just being along for the ride increases my enjoyment of travel exponentially. I’m like Rex going for a car ride; I’m just excited to be going somewhere, it doesn’t hardly matter where.

Now that my husband is retired and the kids are grown, we have so much flexibility for travel, and to that end we have a few big trips booked for this year, plus some smaller ones, and one of those is coming up this weekend. My husband and I are going to Las Vegas.

I am a complete non-gambler – I do not enjoy it in any way – but Las Vegas is just so much fun; this will be my fourth time going and I am very excited. Needless to say, I did none of the bookings and had nothing to say about the actual itinerary, other than to enthusiastically say “That sounds fun!” every time my husband brought up an idea. My husband has booked us a few shows, and other than that, I don’t know what we will be doing. It doesn’t matter! I’m just excited to go!

So clearly, I am a Flower.

One of my earliest memories is one of complete and utter emotional devastation upon learning that flowers die in the winter. To be fair, I was an incredibly sensitive and dramatic child and I probably experienced utter emotional devastation daily, if not more bi-hourly. However, I have a very clear memory of devastation about the fate of flora during the winter, winter being a very long season in Calgary. How or why this occurred to me, I don’t know, but I would guess that there was a book about seasons involved; I clearly remember my level of hysteria that my dad tried to quell by telling me that the flowers come back again in the spring. This was small comfort indeed, because of a Very Big Idea that Very Small Nicole had, and that is that when I grew up, I wanted to be a flower.

I was probably three, and so I had no concept of symbolism or anything else, and I obviously had only the most tenuous ideas about what constituted growing up. I genuinely thought it was an interspecies free-for-all, and that becoming an adult meant that you could literally morph into any kind of animal, vegetable, or mineral.

So you can imagine my devastation when I realized just how brief my life on this mortal coil would be after achieving adulthood. I guess I believed that my life would follow this rough trajectory: I would be a child, I would go to school, I would be grown up, I would immediately change from human to flower form, and then I would die. I would die in the winter, thus missing Christmas and a visit from Santa.

I don’t know at what point I realized that my anxiety about an instantaneous winter death was unfounded, but eventually I went on with my little human life, enjoying flowers for what they were and not as a mirror of my future self.

Weekly Reading

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good. This was an absolutely delightful little book of connected short stories about a murderous little old lady. It is very clever and quite hilarious. It is translated from the Swedish, so there are many wonderful Swedish tidbits in here, and one made me genuinely squeal out loud, thanks to Were You Raised By Wolves. Do you listen to that podcast? If not, why not? Do you hate joy? The podcast is a beam of light in this dark world. Anyway, there is a little line in this book about Christmas Eve, and one of the characters mentions that the “children will have watched Donald Duck.” I knew EXACTLY what they were referring to, thanks to Were You Raised By Wolves, and if you don’t know, look up their Kalle Anka episode. Obviously it involves Donald Duck, but it is so much more. It is PURE delight, and so is this book. 

Dual Citizens. In the past six months, I have been made aware of a conversation in the writing and publishing community about the role of prologues in novels, and the current thinking seems to be just DON’T. I didn’t really think about it too much prior to these past six months, but now I really notice when there is a prologue, and what, if any, value is added. And I will say that the prologue – and epilogue, for that matter – in this book not only does not add to the book, but they actively subtract from it, in my view. Particularly since there seems to be a strange discrepancy; in the prologue the character is going into labour at 38 weeks, but later in the book she is said to be “overdue.” So that actively took me out of what is otherwise a really wonderful story, with incredible writing and prose, about two sisters and their narcissistic, neglectful mother. There are some interesting character arcs and a message about understanding others as we gain life experience. Some of the imagery is a little heavy-handed and slightly unbelievable – sleeping with wolves, really? – but this is a really excellent character-driven novel. I guess we can excuse the prologue.

Is anyone else totally exhausted from the time change? I SURE AM. Other than “Lose A Precious Hour Of Sleep” day, it was a lovely weekend. We attended a surprise birthday party for my friend Joy (HI JOY) and, unrelated to that, I made another cake from Julie’s You Are Human And You Need Cake book, and I took Rex for a nice long Sunday morning hike. It was an attempt to change my attitude when I can’t change the circumstances, the circumstances being the ridiculous ritual of shifting the clocks hither and thither semi-annually for absolutely no reason. ANYWAY. This Flower is heading for bright lights and (relatively) late nights, and will see you on the other side. Take care, my beautiful flower friends. xo

Five For Friday: The Ask Me Anything Edition

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Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for my Ask Me Anything! Today I have quite a variety to answer; I love how different these all are.

  • From Bijoux (HI BIJOUX): As I like to travel, what would be your Canadian not-to-be-missed sights? I considered putting off answering this question until May, when I will be back from a trip to Ontario and Quebec; I am sure there will be many not-to-be-missed sights that I will discover. Then I thought that no matter what I see on that trip, my number one answer will not change, and that is the Canadian Rockies in general, and Banff in particular. I think there is no place on earth quite as beautiful and as special. The town of Banff is very expensive and touristy, it’s true, but that is because it is so beautiful and special. The Canadian Rockies are an absolute feast for the eyes in every way; the colours, the mountains, the trees.
Prairie Mountain, Kananaskis
Lake Louise
Lake Agnes
Me and Lake Louise
Hiking in Kananaskis
One foot in Alberta, one foot in BC, which seemed to be the theme of 2023
Simpson Pass
Galatea Lake
The iconic Banff Springs – worth the splurge, I swear
View from the Banff Springs
  • From Kate (HI KATE): Do you plan to teach yoga in your new town? Do you ever go to a studio class, or only practice on your own? I don’t currently have plans to teach; we have a lot of travel planned this year, and so I did not want to commit to any classes, only to have to find substitutes. I would be willing to teach one-off or event-style classes, but I don’t want a firm commitment. I also get extremely attached to my students and I miss my Calgary ones so much; I’m not quite ready for that again. As to the second part of the question, the short answer is no, I don’t go to studio classes. For thirteen years I did practice at a studio; I practiced Mysore-style Ashtanga, which is very individual and student-led; there is a set sequence of postures that each student practices at their own pace, with a teacher available to assist and also to teach the next posture in the series. My friend Lucas (HI LUCAS) made a video of this practice at our studio back in 2012, and if you watch the video, I am in the bright pink pants. At about the 2:20 mark, you can see the wild backbends I used to be able to do. Anyway, I was so grateful to have this kind of daily practice established because when the pandemic hit, I continued with it, just at home, and without a teacher. One or two days a week I take a restorative or yin practice, again, at home. I did take one led class last year, as my friend Sara (HI SARA) was giving a special class at an art studio; I enjoy this kind of thing once in a while, but generally I prefer a practice which is more of a moving meditation than a led class.
From 2015
Practicing in what is now my kitchen, before it was my kitchen
A fancy studio shot, 2019
Another studio shot, 2019
Current yoga setup
  • From Steph (HI STEPH): Do you think you will eventually work again or are you and and your husband both retired for good? This question also answers Coco‘s question (HI COCO) who asked what does your husband do? Steph’s is a very interesting question, because I always think of “work” as the days when I worked in an office, on a trade floor, which I quit in 2004 after having my first baby. Of course, I have had various little jobs, including teaching yoga, since then, but I guess I don’t think of them as work that one retires from, exactly. So the answer to that question is never say never! I have a few ideas and projects, but whether or not they will result in any monetary compensation remains to be seen. I can confidently say my husband is definitely retired; he is enjoying the retirement life immensely. Currently, he is in his workshop building me cedar garden beds, so I can also say we are both benefitting from his retirement.
Work in progress
  • From Elisabeth (HI ELISABETH): What is your least favourite food item in the world? No contest: celery. I loathe celery. Everything about it is disgusting to me: the smell, the taste, the weird stringy texture. I clearly remember a kid bringing ants on a log for shared preschool snack, and the absolute horror it inspired in me. I love peanut butter. I love raisins. WHY MUST WE PUT THOSE DELICIOUS THINGS ON A PIECE OF THE DEVIL’S GREENERY? Close second to least favourite food: onions. I don’t mind onion flavour, so a dehydrated onion flake or onion powder is fine. But the texture of onions, particularly raw onions, gives me a full-body shudder. Not as bad as celery, and if there was a gun to my head I’d probably eat one, but that gun would have to be loaded. Obviously I don’t eat meat or seafood ever, and I don’t like to eat eggs either, although if an egg is in a baked good that you presented to me – especially if that baked good was a cake – I would eat it.
My husband made me this for Christmas!
  • From Engie (HI ENGIE): Do you think aliens exist? I am an Alien Agnostic: I just don’t know. I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t exist. The universe is big, and no one has the answers, so why not? As an alien aside, I have always had a terrible fear of E.T. I was seven when E.T. came out, and all of my little gal pals both loved the movie and loved E.T. as a concept; they were all getting E.T. stuffies and shirts and backpacks, and the horror, the horror. He’s so cute they’d say, while I would try not to cry. Look at him hiding in the stuffed animals, they would say, while I would panic, thinking about my own stuffed animals and what I would do if there was an alien among them. I have never once seen the movie the whole way through; I always have to stop it before curling up in the fetal position in a corner. I have a real visceral reaction to the whole thing. Many years ago my husband gently tried to get me to face my fears, saying in a calming voice “It’s really a nice movie, E.T. just wants to go home to his family!” and at that I started crying uncontrollably, and he probably wondered if he should return the ring, or just go ahead and face life together with a grown woman with E.T. trauma.
My Cheer Bear, without an E.T. I believe in the power of the Care Bear stare!

Coming Into The Home Stretch

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With all the myriad changes going on in my life right now, I told a friend that I feel like I am having a Brazilian bikini wax, but the entire procedure is just one giant strip instead of many tiny, gentler strips. With everything happening all at once, I am doing my best to cope and to stay in the moment, while still soothing myself by thinking there will be a time after this.

HELP

My friend Allison (HI ALLISON) used that term many, many years ago to refer to chaperoning a field trip, and I have thought of it hundreds of thousands of times since then. This week was so busy and stressful, but ultimately very productive. The moving company is packing the majority of our house; for the extra amount of money added on to the expense of a long-haul move, it seemed very worth it. However, being in a house for twenty-three years means that we have accumulated things we really do not need or want anymore, and although I have been steadily clearing things out for the last few months, this week I really got into the weeds, so to speak. I tackled the crawl space.

Several years ago I really got into the crawl space and got rid of many things we no longer needed, but there was a stack of boxes in there that had not been touched since we had moved in twenty-three years ago. I refuse to just move boxes to put them in storage, so I ruthlessly went through each one, and although I am not wishing such a task on anyone, it was actually pretty fun. I found so many treasures! I also found a lot of junk and questionable items – did I really need to keep a giant box full of RSVP’s from our wedding? – but I was able to recycle most of it, donate some of it, and the rest was, sadly, relegated to the trash. It made me feel a little sad, especially after reading Unraveling last week, but there wasn’t another option for some of the completely unusable items. I mean, I guess there was the option of putting them back into boxes and then putting them into storage in the new house, since that seems to have been our line of thinking twenty-three years ago, but that felt like a slippery slope that would get me right back where I started from. Also, upon the event of my own demise, may that be many decades in the future, I do not want to leave my children with boxes full of useless junk, any more than I already will be.

The bane of my recent existence has been old text books. Between my husband and I, we have four degrees and probably thousands of dollars’ worth of old, now worthless textbooks. A few months ago I looked with horror at my shelves and shelves of textbooks that were not eligible for donation; no one wants outdated economics, econometrics, or statistics textbooks, despite the fact that not much really changes in those areas from year to year. The only thing to do was to recycle them by ripping out all the pages and throwing the bindings and covers into the trash. It was a big undertaking, so imagine my despair when I discovered in the crawl space an entire box full of my husband’s old textbooks that somehow did not make it onto our bookshelves. I set my younger son on the job of recycling them, along with myriad term papers and, strangely enough, a pile of papers from our wedding that included every single song the DJ had in his possession and every menu item the venue had to offer.

These, along with piles of cassette tapes – including mix tapes! – were a drag to deal with, but then I found some wonderful treasures, some of which I am keeping forever, and some of which just made me laugh. As a small backstory, I was six years old when Diana and Charles got married, and their engagement set off my lifelong obsession with the Queen of Hearts. I was not a child for whom it was difficult for relatives to think of Christmas gifts; anything and everything Princess Di was received with great enthusiasm. Soon my obsession included all women in the British Royal Family, including the Queen, with whom I share a birthday. My grandma had saved a lot of clippings and memorabilia from the Queen’s coronation and passed it along to me.

What fabulous treasures! Also, this candy box!

This is less awesome but it made me laugh and shudder at the same time.

I am keeping this forever:

In addition to “things I will keep forever” I found some postcards from friends circa 1989, including one that said “I hate it here and I hate everyone here and I want to come home” which, if that’s not teen angst I do not know what is. Much less angsty was a postcard from my sweet friend Elise (HI ELISE) from the bustling metropolis of Lethbridge:

I don’t know what is funnier, that I have kept this all these years or that I had it at all.

Should I have kept this? Perhaps to hang over my bed in the new bedroom?

The big day, for me and Rex at least, is one week TOMORROW. I can hardly believe it! I am actually looking forward to the unpacking-and-finding-homes-for-everything part, as opposed to the depressing why do we have so much stuff and are we actually swamp people part that I seem to be going through now. I am, as you all know, a person who thrives on neatness and organization and whoa, does my life feel like the opposite of that right now. Well, again, let’s repeat the mantra: there will be a time after this. And in the meantime, I am going to try to enjoy my last few days in the city that has been my heart and home for so many years.

Weekly Reading

Property. The best thing about this book, which concerns a woman married to an unsuccessful sugar plantation owner in the antebellum south, is that it’s short. The story is dull and every character is unlikeable at best, deplorable at worst.

Swipe Up For More! Oh wow, this book was absolutely fascinating to me! I think the entire influencer industry is so interesting: how it developed, how important it is to brands, and how many women have made so much money in it. This book mainly follows three big influencers, two of whom I have never heard of before: a momfluencer, a fashion influencer, and a unique and important fitfluencer. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately since the Food Heaven women posted their Burnout and Pivot series; being an influencer might just look like taking photos and videos, but it is a lot of work to be successful. Some of these women work upwards of 80 hours a week, and the work is just never done. Their whole life is on display for work, which is a really odd concept. Even odder – and ickier – is the world of the momfluencer, because it is her life as a mom and her own kids who are being used by brands for money. It brings up all sorts of ethical dilemmas: can your children be used in campaigns? What if you put the money away for them for their education, then is it okay? At what point do children have agency over their own lives and decisions? Is a sponsored trip to Disney a vacation or just more grind? The momfluencer in question has since – given that her older children have rebelled against posing for yet another photo or acting in yet another reel – slowed down her own work and campaigns, and wonders if her life as an influencer has deep and negative effects on her children (probably, the answer is yes). It’s an interesting thing to consider. I thought about this a lot when I was writing for YMC: a lot of my colleagues wrote about things like potty training and discipline, complete with photos, and even at the time it felt wrong for me to write about the kids in that way. For me personally, my kids are blog-adjacent but I don’t divulge much of their lives here because it’s their lives. I should note though that my kids actually enjoy when, say, a former yoga student of mine recognizes them “in the wild” from my Facebook posts, but I can imagine if I had a far-reaching platform in which they played a significant role, they might feel a lot different. Anyway, this was such a good read and really thought-provoking.

The Long Goodbye. This was an absolutely gorgeous memoir about a woman losing her mother, and the grieving process that followed. And I will say that I was 100% NOT in the right headspace to read about her mother dying at age 55 of metastatic colorectal cancer, so I cannot say I enjoyed it, but I appreciated the beauty and tenderness of the writing.

All right, friends, I am in the home stretch now. Back in the aforementioned grad school, another woman and I had the Rosie the Riveter poster in our office as a reminder that We Can Do It, and I have that Rosie the Riveter photo in my mind constantly these days. I feel like her, mascara, lipgloss and all. xo