Bibliomama

I'm tired of winter. I don't mind the cold all that much, but even that's annoying because I can't wear a winter coat in the car because I get too hot, so I just throw it in the backseat in case I get stranded somewhere (I'm heat-intolerant, not stupid) and wear a sweater, and strangers keep asking me where my coat is. And my hands get hot if I wear mittens too long, so I take them off and then my skin gets so dry my knuckles bleed because there's no moisture anywhere in the city. I went into Pennington's yesterday and was trying on a shirt and the lady knocked on the door and asked how I was doing and I said fine, except I'm afraid I might spontaneously combust from all the static. When she handed me my bill an actual spark flew between our hands. I'm tired of all the stuff in my house. I keep cleaning and reorganizing and throwing stuff out and giving stuff away and I STILL can't get it to look the way I feel like it should look. When you wal

I'm drowning in stupid school assignments, and the puppy gets up at five or six and then she goes back to sleep but I usually don't, and Angus is on pitching rest because his elbow hurts and physio should help but he's worried and frustrated so I'm sad and frustrated. And he has an infected ingrown toenail and we had to get his kidneys checked because of the bloodwork because of his acne medication, and I had to take my dad for cataract surgery, so I've visited a goodly proportion of the hospitals and doctors' offices in this area recently. So I'm taking it a little bit easy right now, which I'm almost okay with. I got a fair bit done in the basement in January and anything major there is on hold, although sometimes I go down and do ten minutes of Swistle's little bit of something . Tonight I cleaned out a bag of Christmas gift bags, packaged them together and put all the wrapping paper in the now-empty long bag. Every few days I walk fairly slowly o

I saw this great tweet the other day: I agree. Those stereotypes are offensive and often untrue. What do you do, then, if you're a woman who is not, in fact, a terribly confident driver or a whiz at long division, sine waves and completing the square? I'm still not the stereotype - I don't weave all over the road, I don't run over things with gay abandon, I don't generally run into things (apart from that one unfortunate incident with the signpost and the back bumper, but my husband was away, I was short on sleep and it wouldn't have cracked off if it wasn't so cold, THE REPAIR MAN SAID IT, shut up). My kids know not to come to me with their math homework, but it's not because I'm too pretty or that I think numbers are dumb - math just doesn't happen to be an area I excel in. Sorry, an area in which I excel (I AM supposed to be not bad at this word business). I just accept, I guess, that I CAN drive and do math (sort of ), I just enjoy othe

To everyone on Facebook saying "quit whining about the snow, it happens every year, you should be ready for it by now" - FUCK OFF. Unless you're someone I know and like, because I haven't bothered to go back and check who actually said it. If I know and like you - sod off (I'm sufficiently fired up that you still get some kind of expletive containing an 'off' directed at you, but we're still friends). A lot of things happen every year. We get colds. We get stomach bugs. I get seasonal depression. I have a snow brush in my car that has the head on the wrong way - perpendicular to the handle instead of parallel, like a toothbrush, which means that it's been designed by some disciple of Satan to pull snow down on me instead of brushing it away anywhere useful, WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN MAKE THIS KIND OF SNOW BRUSH AND OFFER IT FOR SALE??? I claim my right to complain about all of these in a timely and spirited fashion (just ask my husband, the hapless b

School started. My kids wore this on their first day. I wanted Eve to wear this. But I didn't insist on it. I feel pretty good about that. Three week-ends ago, we went to our friends' cottage. There was a difference of opinion on whether or not it was still swimming weather. My son was allowed in the knife-throwing gang even though he didn't wear the requisite navy blue hoodie.  He also took a sharp left turn in the backpack department. He told me which website to go to, picked a black one, then suddenly said "no, wait - get that one". The colour is called "Coral Peaches Wild At Heart". And he uses it every day.  When the kids went back to school, I started trying to organize some stuff around the house. First, I tackled the cookbook cabinet. I could have sworn that we'd only lived here since 1999, but apparently I was wrong - clearly we moved in sometime during the 1950s. Seriously? W hat if you don

Go on the Dunes Walk Pose with your friends on top of a sand dune Embrace your friend warmly on top of a sand dune No wait, that's not what they're doing... Okay, try to throw your friend OFF the sand dune ...then drop him ...and run away Climb a tree. On a dune Do bunny ears. On yourself. Because YOLO Sit your ass down because Collette says to sit your ass down until someone takes your picture. Possibly related: climbing sand dunes is really freaking hard Realize you have no idea where the path is and begin to feel like a pack of exiled Egyptians with no manna in sight Find your way back to the parking lot with no small measure of relief and empty a good part of the dunes out of your shoes Go to the movies Photo bomb your daughter... ...repeatedly Build sand castles Spend quality time with a book and some popcorn by a campfire Play games   (Not me, to be clear. Trying to learn cribbage always makes me w

So last week, we went camping. Car camping, which camping purists would dispute as real camping, and there were comfort stations (which Eve said was a really prissy term for a stone building with a toilet) and showers, BUT we slept in a tent instead of spending the day and then driving to a hotel, like this time and the time before . Of course, since this was the first time we booked a site (and were actually going to use it - we booked one last year, but something came up ), we cursed the forecast, and I fully expected that our friends would yank us from our vehicle and sacrifice us to the weather gods the minute we got there. The weather wasn't great, but it threatened rain more than it rained, and we had a great time anyway. Things I Didn't Hate That I Totally Thought I Would Hate: 1) Sleeping in a tent. The last time I slept in a tent was twenty or so years ago, on a canoe trip with Matt's lab group - he didn't actually come because he was writing his thesis.

We have some friends who moved to Australia this summer, so this is their first snow-less Christmas season. They profess to be overjoyed at this. Which I don't disbelieve at all, but I can't really empathize. We had quite a bit of snow on Wednesday, and it was windy and cold and I had to take the kids to the dentist and I slid through one intersection and it was a pain in the ass parking and slopping in there with our boots and everything... and I was just ludicrously happy. Today it took me and Eve half an hour to walk home from the bus stop, which is just at the end of the street. She flung herself at every snowbank, slid belly down onto driveways, climbed the highest ones and bellowed that she was the queen of the castle and, well, you know what that makes me, but it was still enjoyable. I'm convinced that part of my depression in November was that we didn't have a proper fall. It rained so much that there just weren't enough of those clear, sweet, sharp days w

I WAS thinking more along the lines of a gentle snowfall of fat, white flakes on a day so still you could hear every flake land... NOT so much for 60-kilometre winds and 15 centimetres on dentist-appointment day... BUT I did ask for it. Here's to you, Amber -- hope it's balmy in your area today (I almost said 'around your parts' but that seemed rude). Guess I'll get out the Christmas cards. Happy Wednesday.