Bibliomama

I'm a helpful person. It's just how I'm built. I like to help if I can. People seem to sense it - in the grocery store, at parking machines, parked at intersections (I have given directions more than once through two open car windows, before the light turns green). It's mostly a good thing. Occasionally it's not the greatest. Thursday afternoon I was at my group interview at Indigo. It was so much more fun than I thought it would be. It was a fun group of people and we all kind of clicked. The "team-building" exercises were silly rather than cheesy and made us all laugh and relax. The corporate schtick actually came across as fairly sincere. I thought it would all feel kind of fake and forced and it didn't. In the second half, we were split into groups and a small group of us were out on the floor. Our first assignment was to take five minutes to grab two items, come back and describe why we liked them. On my way to the sci-fi and fantasy secti

So we were flying to Calgary on Thursday. There was no connecting flight, so we were flying to Toronto first. Everything was going swimmingly - we got to the airport, got a primo parking place, checked our bags, got boarding passes, went through security, hung out in the lounge for a bit and then went down to the gate. As soon as we got to the gate, they started boarding us - we didn't even have to sit down. Matt said that was like winning airport bingo. We got on the plane. It was quick, of course. Just as we were touching down in Toronto, Eve said "this is my best flying day ever!" We shushed her. But it was too late. As we were boarding a flight to Calgary, we walked past a young man in a wheelchair who looked kind of out of it. After we sat down in our seats - in aisle 17 - we saw the young man being helped up the airplane aisle by a flight attendant. When I say 'helped' up the aisle, she wasn't just holding his arm - she was holding him from beh

Prompt 2: Tell a story about something interesting (anything!) that happened to you, but tell it in the form of an instruction manual. ***************** Step 1: Find yourself living in Toronto with your husband of a few months, working for a cool little independent bookstore, finally getting treatment for depression which will surely solve all of those problems in short order and forever (insert slightly bitter snort). Step 2: Figure things are going pretty well and it would be a good thing to find a way to give back to the community. Step 3: See an ad for PAL-Reading Services in the paper. Step 4: Feel struck to the core with the conviction that this was Meant To Be in every possible way - Blind People who are Tragically Denied the Joys of the Written Word (because you don't know Braille, or there aren't enough books in Braille, or something!), LET ME BE YOUR READER! Step 5: Go in for a short test. Be accepted with alacrity and praise despite a slight quibble ove

Do you ever play the 'bad news, good news' game with your personality flaws? You know: Sure, you procrastinate about putting things away, but on the bright side, when Christmas rolls around again the decorations are right here! Or, yes, maybe you watch too many movies, but consequently you never miss an entertainment question in Trivial Pursuit? I have my overnight sleep assessment at the hospital tonight. As if I'm not nervous enough about this already, I realized abruptly at around one o'clock this afternoon that my health card expired on my birthday back in June, and I still hadn't renewed it. I don't have a good excuse for this, so let me give you the pathetic one: my birthday is in the mid-June, which puts it smack in the middle of all the end-of-school craziness, and then it was summer, which, come on! Summer! Baseball! Travel! Drinking! Driving without a license! Yeah, I did manage to remedy that one, whereupon I discovered that my other excuse - that t

Anyone who comes here regularly knows about my love-hate relationship with baseball . Well, Eve's relationship with it is possibly even more tangled and conflicted. Admittedly, we stuck her in it the first year because Angus had been in it for a few years, he loved it, Matt was a coach and by this point we knew how it worked. I don't know that I can assess her ability with any kind of accuracy, considering my own ignorance, but I would say that, as far as skills go, she's a bit above average. There were girls on some of the teams that didn't get a hit the entire season, and she usually got a couple hits a game, except for the year that her coaches couldn't pitch for shit. She's not great at staying focused in the field, but when she gets the ball she generally knows what to do with it. She's by far never been the worst kid on the team. I do sort of admire that she's as enthusiastic as she is about the game despite the furor and public adulation and n

I was out running errands - library, grocery store to get stuff for a good field-trip lunch for tomorrow, because remember this little piece of hell manifested on earth ? I decided it wouldn't be fair not to experience the same unsanctified splendours with my younger child as well. That's not true, she actually brought the form home and begged me to sign it and send it back RIGHT AWAY because the first three Moms got to come and she was pretty sure no one else would send it back the very next day (uh, yeah, because NO ONE ELSE WANTS TO GO), so I did. Only afterwards did I realize it's an all-day deal again and it's supposed to be 35 freaking degrees out again and I have to ride on the bus. Again. Please god let the epi-pen chick not be in my group. ....and flowers for my Mom to plant in our front planter, which she does as a birthday gift for me. Of course last year she bought the flowers, which meant I appreciated the effort but hated most of the flowers. This year

There was an article in the Ottawa Citizen today about Kate the Duchess of Cambridge revealing the heretofore secret name of the royal couple's new dog to a child at a primary school she was visiting. They named the dog Lupo, which is the Italian word for wolf. I quote: "By choosing the Italian for wolf for a cocker spaniel -- not a large or particularly fierce breed -- the royal couple may be showing evidence of a sense of irony." Holy shit! Has anyone told the Queen?

because I'm trying not to eat too much.  I find that if I sit quietly on the couch and watch TV, or sit at the computer and don't get up, I don't eat too much.  If I move around the house at all, food starts jumping into my mouth.  It's true!  I'm helpless!  Carbalicious stuff and chocolate hurls itself right at my head and if I don't want to end up seriously injured I have to open my mouth in self-defense.  It's rough. January hasn't gotten me too far down yet.  I started a new library tech course called Subject Analysis and Classification.  My instructor immediately informed us that this was one of the most challenging courses in the curriculum, and the most difficult to learn online, and we were all absolutely going to feel VERY CONFUSED AND FRUSTRATED at the beginning, if not for the entire duration.  She stopped just short of saying, you might as well just go eat ice cream and watch Luther and flush any thoughts of having a marketable skill again

We met a really nice family from Peterborough a few days into our trip.  They had a boy and a girl, in reverse order from ours, but Eric was only two years younger than Angus which was fine for water sliding and getting cheeseburgers and playing ball in the pool, and we all know how Eve feels about "people who are older than me that aren't my brother".  Mike -- the dad --  was funny and friendly and has a job similar to Matt's, and  Ashley -- the Mom --  was forty and had a perfect bikini body and I STILL liked her - that's how nice she was. We still had a lot of  family time, but we'd usually meet up with these people for a beach walk in the afternoon, the kids would run off to get cotton candy or go on the water slide or the lazy river, and we'd hang out and play pool and challenge the bar staff to come up with new and exciting drink combinations in the evenings. There were two poolside barbecue nights - one was a Caribbean night and one was Western

It's December twelfth and today I went out wearing a t-shirt. First I was wearing a sweater, but then I got too hot. This is not right. It's December. We need snow. We have a Christmas tree and decorations up and it's dark at four-thirty ANYWAY, so I'm with the kids on this one -- we want snow. Of course, the likelihood is that if it was gray and snowy I would be headachy and miserable, and if I had to shovel out the driveway to get the kids to school every day this week while I'm solo parenting, I would not be impressed. While instead, I got multiple Christmas and household errands done today and felt happy. But it's almost Christmas and it's kind of sad to think we won't have a white one. So I guess you could say I'm a little sad that I'm happy, but also a little happy that I'm sad. And people wonder why I'm always so tired.

Warning: there will be ickiness in this post. I have allergies. Hardcore, nasty, year-round allergies. This started around the time I turned thirty and started having babies (which is kind of cool, because as with so many other things, I can blame the children). I use Nasonex daily, but I frequently also have to take an allergy pill. My doctor suggested a couple of years ago that I also use Hydrasense to flush out my sinuses. I did use it for a while, and then a friend told me that I should get a neti pot instead for nasal irrigation (or nasal douche , as the Wikipedia article says - join me in an adolescent giggle at the word douche , won't you?), because it's a lot cheaper than buying Hydrasense, which is really freaking expensive. So I did. I suck at the neti pot. Hydrasense, while being really freaking expensive, has a fairly long, skinny nozzle that you can jack right up into your nostril to fire that stream of salty water into your sinuses. My neti pot has

My husband and I are about as far apart on the spectrum of believing our kids when they say or think they are sick as you can get. My instinct is always to believe them without question, keep them home from school, tuck them in bed and worry that they're suffering from bubonic plague or the like. His instinct is to declare that they're - maybe not faking, but certainly exaggerating, or just psyching themselves out, because Angus in particular has a very nervous stomach - and send them to school or make them play baseball or hockey and hope for the best.  The general perversity of things being what they are, both of us turn out to be wrong at least half the time. I still maintain that my way is better, because would you rather feel like a bit of an ass when you keep the kid home and within two hours s/he is running circles around you, pulling down the curtains, demanding video game time and a tenth cookie, or LOOK like a giant ass when your kid barfs in the middle of the clas

...and just like that it turned into a bad blogging week. I've heard that some bloggers schedule their posts. Or have days when they post and days they take off. Pshaw, I say when I hear that. I don't need schedules. I don't need deadlines. Of course, I always say the same thing about weight-loss centres and creative writing groups -- who needs 'em? I know what I need to do. I don't need a group - groups are for pussies!. I just need to harness the fearsome power of my mind and will and it shall be done! And have I published a novel or lost thirty pounds? Shut up. Angus's baseball team got to play two games this week. Eve's played one and then her Thursday game was cancelled the very moment they were walking out the door (as Eve tells it "I got my stuff on, but then my tights under my baseball pants were too hot, so I took them off, got my bat, and my helmet, and we were going out the door, and Daddy pulled out his phone and looked at it and

My kids made an adorable video of them singing happy birthday to my husband on Angus's ipod touch, since he's in California this week and his birthday was on Monday. I can't figure out how to get it on here, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it's adorable. You likely wouldn't find it as adorable as a video of your own kids singing happy birthday to your own husband in California, because apparently everyone else with kids is deluded by DNA and years of evolution into thinking that their kids are cuter than mine. After he called home the first time, I told the kids that Daddy had used a bad word when talking about the hotel he was staying in. They giggled. I asked them if they wanted to hear what it was. They beamed happily and nodded. I said it quietly. A little later, Eve was talking about rockets and suddenly she said "but I probably shouldn't say it". I asked her what the heck she was talking about and she said "you k

I'm cranky. Not in general. Today was a pretty good day. The kids had dentist appointments first thing. I was going to cancel them because the kids have only been back at school a week since missing a week, and Eve was sick half of last week, but then I was thinking about what I was going to say to the receptionist when I called -- should I go into the whole 'they just missed a week of school right after Christmas, and I don't know if I want them to miss another couple of hours right now', or should I say my daughter was sick and my husband was in France so there wasn't anyone to take Angus if Eve stayed home from school, or should I make up a field trip... it got so complicated I decided it would be simpler to just go to the fucking appointment. Then I dropped the kids off at school. Well, Angus I dropped off. Eve I walked through the school out the back to the portable, then realized there was no one in the portable, then went back to the office where we

On Sunday I woke up in the Hotel Indigo. No, this isn't the story of how I downed a bottle of quaaludes and a fifth of Jack Daniels and had a little desperate fifties housewife interlude (what the hell are quaaludes when they're in my medicine cabinet?). I was at the tail end of a smashing girls' week-end with four of my amazing friends from high school (should have been five but Sheila was having pregnancy complications and couldn't travel, which SUCKS beyond belief, not least because she is the driest of dry wits and she would have complimented the sweet lychee liqueur beautifully). The forecast had been dire, but my friend Anne Marie assured me that outside was just a little cloudy and threatening rain. Then Patti came back from her run and after we chipped the ice off of her she said 'it's freezing rain'. Fuck. So then we had breakfast because if you're going to subsequently risk your life and your academic future you might as well be full of th

So Monday night we went to a Christmas party. I was really freakin' tired from the week-end (more on that later. Yes, we're going to work backwards because then maybe I will get back to the first part of the week-end, which was magical), but the party was fun. My friend Collette usually hosts now, since we all had so many damned kids and they all got so damned big, and she has the biggest house so we don't have to be reminded of how many damnably large children we've all produced the whole time we're there. We all had a great time at the party and then we came home. Then the kids got their pajamas on and they were reading in my room for a few minutes before going to bed. I went into my room and Angus was lying on my bed with no socks on so I decided to take a look at this wart he's had on the bottom of his foot for a while because Matt had mentioned that he thought it was starting to bother him. So I lifted up his foot and looked at the bottom of it. The

Things are bad. Things are really bad. Oh, that's inaccurate. Things are fine. Things are great. I'm bad though. I feel like I've slipped sideways just enough to not fit properly in my life. I can look down on it from the outside and see that it's a good life, but when I'm back inside it I can't feel it on my skin. I went for a great walk today. Eve was home sick but Matt was working from home so I walked over to the drug store and grocery store for inhalers and lettuce and salad dressing and berries and kleenex. It was warm but not sweltering, I didn't think of it as manadatory exercise so I walked at a comfortable pace and looked at people's flowers. I left my ipod behind and looked around at stuff (there are stores in that plaza I never knew were there). I came home and looked over the first part of my new course, which is another point I'm not terribly impressed with myself on. I always thought if I went back to school I would just pu

It would be somewhat inaccurate to say that today doesn't suck. Angus went back to school, still hacking up a lung periodically, but declaring that he feels fine. Eve has been an unhappy, warm-ish, snotty little heap on the couch all day (except when I asked her if she wanted me to put in Planet 51 or Fantastic Mr. Fox for her, and she stuck her head up and declared "Avatar!") and my throat feels like someone has flaming-arrowed a proclamation of doom to it. On the upside, I did manage to narrowly avoid spraying a bunch of Fantastik with Bleach into my load of darks, after I grabbed it thinking it was Spray Shout. You know those laundry labels that say 'remove promptly from dryer?' Don't they just make you laugh with quiet indulgent affection? Oh yes, you dear little sweater/skirt/delicate lacy slip, I leave everything else crumpled and forlorn in the dryer all night or all day or all the whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it because I tend to throw laundry in

Okay, I did bolt my oatmeal down before dashing out of the house this morning, so they weren't strictly speaking all before breakfast. Midway through the second term of school, my kids' school does something called student-led conferences instead of parent teacher interviews (well I dunno, maybe the parents with really bad kids still have to have an interview. Kidding, just kidding!) You go in and they present a portfolio of their work and talk about what things they could have done better on and what things they're particularly proud of. If the kid is nine and a boy, he probably does most of it in a rapid, barely audible monotone and if the kid is seven and a girl she probably does it in a very loud and animated fashion, with frequent punctuating bursts of laughter. It's all very enjoyable. Stupid thing number one: I was in a hurry this morning, but I'm trying to eat well right now so I was determined to have my oatmeal and blueberries at eight-ish rather