Bibliomama

 I started to answer the question at the end of Engie 's last post (it's probably  definitely not the last post anymore because she blogs Every Freaking Day, HOW does one do such a thing, I do it in November and it nearly kills me, I am agog) and then realized it would be an unfeasibly long comment but a decent-length blog post. Speaking of Engie (did I mention she blogs, like, a LOT), on this post about the word 'hat', and how it appears in a lot of books (and a bunch of other hat-related stuff), I said that since I read a lot of children's books I was not surprised to find that 'hat' occurs a lot in books, and mentioned one of my favourite children's book authors, Jon Klassen , (look at that, he's Canadian, I was unaware). Klassen writes beautifully twisted books about animals stealing other animals' hats, and reaping the consequences thereof, and also books about animals finding hats, and I don't know what put the hat-bee in his bonnet (se

 As if the long weekend hadn't already reached peak awesome, Angus had been cajoled into flying to Miami for a week with two high school friends who just graduated, and he was flying out of the Toronto airport on Tuesday morning which meant he would be an hour and a half from where we were on Monday. So instead of going home Monday, Matt (the platinum-level hotel member guy) got us a hotel room by the airport for Monday night so we could hang out with Angus for the evening. I hadn't seen him since Christmas, so this was really nice. He's been pretty much kicking ass at adulting, but we figured out that he was not terribly well versed in the whole "flying with liquids" thing, and as a result, he ended up flying to Miami with the tiny bottle of Oil of Olay from my toiletries bag while I came home to Ottawa with his giant bottle of Cetaphil moisturizer. While we were in the elevator going down to the restaurant I tried to take a selfie, and Matt was in the wrong plac

 On the Sunday of the long weekend, we put all the various groups of people together. First Matt and I drove an hour or so away to see my nephew's rowing competition. We were really happy to get to go to one of his events, since our various siblings have watched a LOT of baseball in support of our kid.  It was a hilariously poorly organized event - Timothy had only found out the night before that he had a hotel room. We didn't know where to park, we didn't know where to stand, but we were there, and we saw boats with people in them, and we were happy.  Then we brought the big kids over to Jeremy and Laura's house for a giant Indian food feast. I love how these pictures kind of sketch out the mingling of the groups. (I feel like Lydia is rocking big " BBC Dad's daughter Marion " energy in this next one): My sister-in-law Sarah and I were admiring some of the artwork on the walls. There was one in particular that we kept getting stuck on what the caption mea

 So we left Eve and her friends to their own devices on Saturday for some family time. Matt's youngest brother and his wife are doctors who live close to where Eve goes to school (Laura actually works right at the university on some days). Matt's middle brother and his wife and their kids are professors who live in Alberta, a couple of provinces away, but are on sabbatical and living roughly halfway between us and the other brother, so we wanted to capitalize on this to have a rare three-brothers meeting.  On my side of the family it's just my sister and me, and our kids are like four stair steps - 23, 22, 20, 18. They were great friends and it was wonderful having them grow up together, but it did mean that once they were all grown there were no more littles. So I am fairly self-congratulatory about the fact that I had the good sense to marry a man with younger brothers who would have kids at nicely staggered intervals. Eric (middle brother) and Sarah have Timothy (17) and

 We had the most glorious May long weekend involving a confluence of several groups of awesome people. I can't help thinking this is going to be quite boring for anyone who isn't me, but I want it in my memories and thinking about it makes me happy. Eve has been in Hamilton alone in her student house doing organic chemistry and some kind of biology (I keep asking her and resolving to remember what kind of biology and she tells me and I immediately forget again) in extremely compressed fashion. On her second day in the house, some asshole barged in (right after her landlord had left, so the door was unlocked for five minutes) doing the whole "my computer says my phone is in your house" scam. I think men often rely on women's desire to be agreeable for this, and they use it to roam around your house seeing if there's anything worth stealing. Fortunately Eve doesn't have a huge desire to be agreeable, particularly to men, so she said "get out" and s

 I've been trying to lean hard into "isn't it great that my winter depression lifted, ha ha, life is so good, things are happening, summer, whoo-hoo", and well, no. Or the thing where I don't blog until I feel better, but also no. I am feeling kind of crappy and (consequently, maybe?) crappy about myself. I am more tired than I should be, and my back hurts and all my shoes are lacerating my heels even when they didn't before, and my allergies are terrible so I feel sort of sick all the time, and I also really hate my hair and can't figure out when to get it done, and things are just hard, and that's okay to say, right? I need the air pressure on my CPAP adjusted, further to my sleep study from last June. This has not been able to happen yet because my machine is the first one I got ten years ago, and when I went in for it to be adjusted it wouldn't take the adjustment. The machine is under a recall, so I'm supposed to be getting a new one, but