Bibliomama

We've gone over a week without a new Covid-related catastrophe, although I did lose much of last week to a days-long migraine (the temperature's up! it's down! It's balmy on Friday! It's brisk on Saturday! My head is a football being gleefully punted around between pressure systems). Angus's college is probably online until the end of this term - they almost got to go back, but then the cases spiked in the surrounding county. Eve is in the last couple weeks of the first quadmester - less formally, at the 'trigonometry is ASS' mile marker in math and learning how much water different living things add to their pee in Biology. Last week she explained to me how the PCR Covid test worked in terms that even I could understand, so I sent her teacher a Starbucks gift card.  Both Eve and I have hit a bad run of insomnia. I used to have prescribed sleeping pills but since I got the sleep apnea diagnosis (thirty years late, not that I'm still bitter) they don&

 So Angus texted us this the other night: So I had a minor heart attack. Then he texted this: So naturally I disowned the little shit.  Taking Eve to get tested was easier than I expected, considering we had been hearing about five-hour lineups at testing centers in Ottawa. We called a place a little further out at nine a.m. and got a window of between eleven and twelve. She was supposed to be in school, but for math she is able to follow in online if she can't be there, so she was listening to the lesson on her phone as we drove.  We found the place and parked.  It was a community center and the parking lot was surrounded by little apartment buildings, so we sat for a a bit while Eve's class was on a break looking at how people decorated their little entrances or balcony railings - window boxes, a line of inukshuks, patio lights. Then a truck pulled up with a really cute dog hanging out the window, so we squealed at him for a while. Then we talked about nonsense. At one point

 I spent the afternoon driving around doing errands, looking at pretty fall trees and listening to Blue Rodeo. I spent nearly a year listening almost exclusively to the Hamilton and Waitress soundtracks in the car and generally I regret nothing, but recently I've started feeling like I was cheating on all the other music, so I started letting my phone play a random mix of songs. This is highly entertaining, since we still have a family iTunes account, which means all of my music, all of the music we used to play for the kids, and all of Angus's music are combined. A random selection is apt to feature Ingrid Michaelson, Sara Bareilles, The Wiggles, David Bowie, Juice WRLD and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, leading to text conversations like this: Anyway, Blue Rodeo was good medicine today, particularly "I see a world so tired and scared of living on the edge too long" (also gratifying to see the 'u' in "Rose-Coloured Glasses", fuck you Google Chrome). So

 So my dad had a good night on the couch, and we got him a walker and got him upstairs the next day. Then our friend Chris came - he was the best man at our wedding and we hadn't seen him for a couple of years. We had a great night, had several drinks, went to bed with our cellphones off, and in the morning realized my mom had called at 3 a.m. because my dad was vomiting blood. We have a landline, and she knows that, but for whatever reason she didn't think to call it, and honestly it was probably for the best because she called the ambulance and there wasn't much we could have done at that point anyway.  So we waited again - we all walked over to my mom's and picked plums, actually, because they have a plum tree that was overloaded and it was a simple thing that we could get done while waiting -  and eventually they called and said I could go in, but because he had gastro symptoms the Covid protocol had been tripped, so I would have to wear full PPE to be with him. Whi