Bibliomama

Pam and I hit the gym for our regular Wednesday ass-whupping (as in trying to whup them into shape, with variable results). I was still high as a kite on my failed Wonder Pills, so it must have been really fun for Pam. We were walking down the hallway to the change room and someone passed her and she said hi. Then she turned to me and said 'that's Natasha's Mom' and I said 'oh, I know her. I didn't even see her'. Must have been the keeping my eyes straight ahead so I wouldn't weave like a drunken monkey, much like asking Pam to drive in order to reduce the possibility of me killing a family of six on the way over. As we walked into the change room I said 'What's her name? Karen, right?' Pam said "uh, I think it's Kara', and I said, 'no, I'm pretty sure it's Karen. We had..oh wait, wrong Natasha. You don't even know the Natasha I'm talking about.' Pam laughed (she laughs a lot when she's around...

So, my magic bullet turned out not so magical. I think I may have mentioned that the last time I saw my doctor I was having fairly severe insomnia problems and a lot of headaches. She prescribed a mild antidepressant that was also a sleep aid and a migraine preventer. She may have also mentioned something about conferring magical Japanese-speaking abilities and the power to see through walls, I'm not sure. I was skeptical. I waited until my husband was back in town and it was near the week-end to try it, and I was prepared to wait out a few side effects. So a few days ago I started taking it at bedtime. The thing about sleeping pills, is that it's quite possible to find one that will, in fact, help you sleep, especially if you dial the dosage high enough. The problem is that, contrary and demanding creatures that we are, no sooner do we sleep a few hours than we're wanting to be awake, and functioning with a reasonable degree of coherence. On this count, most sl...

Regarding yesterday's post: yeah, the benches are uncomfortable and the 6 a.m. practices are a real drag... Hard to argue with that smile, though, am I right?

I just read this article in today's Ottawa Citizen. It touches on something that I can see becoming an issue in my family, and something to which I've given quite a bit of thought (yes, I did have to erase 'something I've given quite a bit of thought to'; I can't help it, my infinitives just WANT to be split. Occasionally I dangle a participle just for fun too - clearly I'm just no damned good). My husband played hockey. He was short, but fast, and played on competitive teams, which meant a lot of practices and a lot of tournaments away from home. His youngest brother was a really good figure skater, which meant thousands of dollars in equipment and coaching fees, and again, a lot of time at the rink. My middle brother-in-law? I'm not sure what he did besides being a quick-witted pain in the ass (sorry Eric) -- note to self, research posts before writing. My husband, obviously, married me. I had a sister. My sister played soccer for a few years ...

I stayed up way too late reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell -- holy crap. I spent the first few pages thinking I will never be able to finish reading this; the first section is one of those English-man-on-savage-Pacific-Island-in-late-eighteen-hundreds or anyway a long long time ago (I suck at history) and the dialect was nearly impenetrable. I pushed through and that section ends abruptly (mid-sentence, in fact) and a new section begins, years later before World War II. The book is made up of sections that are separate but linked by strange resonances, and it's utterly, utterly brilliant in a bleak, mournful, 'this is the way the world ends' kind of way. And I stayed up way too late reading it. Then I woke up at five a.m. with a screaming migraine. My husband gave me some Tylenol 1s before he left for Angus's obscenely early hockey game and told me to sleep in. A couple hours later I half woke up and heard the kids playing their new favourite game at the bot...

Last Sunday -- February 7th -- was Eve's seventh birthday. We had her party on Saturday. Her third birthday was at home (my husband made a castle out of a huge cardboard box that I painted, and all the girls dressed up as princesses). For the last three years we've had her birthday somewhere else -- a neighbourhood play gym, an art studio where they all painted t-shirts, and the place where Eve took gymnastics. Angus's birthday parties haven't been at home since he turned five, I think (the Space Birthday Party). I always used to say I was more comfortable in my own usual environment, but many people assured me that being off-site, with the preparation and clean-up left to someone else, was the way to go. And to an extent, this was true. Honestly, even after this party I don't think it's any less expensive to do it at home -- at least if you prove utterly ineffective at limiting the guest list, as I seem to. But there is something nice about welcoming yo...

I'm tired. I have a headache. I'm irredeemably blogcked (blog blocked -- has someone already made up that word? It seems to me like that word should have been made up a long time ago, but I've been told I don't exactly run on the same operating system as a lot of people that, if you want to be all conventional, you might call 'normal', so I can't be sure. I guess I could google it. What do you think a time-traveller from a hundred years ago would find weirder about today -- that we exercise for fun, or that we talk about 'googling' things several times a day?) It's February 18th. Crap, I was supposed to put clothing donations out for the Canadian Diabetes Association before eight o'clock this morning. I guess if they show up now I'll just grab the nearest pile of junk, shove it in a garbage bag and send them on their merry diabetic way. I will now dispense 18 random thoughts, because clearly today is not the day to try to achieve...

My sister called me this morning. In the course of conversation she mentioned that she was on the Indigo website ordering a book for her daughter when this book suddenly popped up in her sidebar. She couldn't remember precisely why she had intended to read it, but she ordered it anyway, and then she remembered that I had recommended it. This prompted me to look back in my posts for my review. And I couldn't find it. Agh! Full disclosure: I know the author, Ilana Stanger-Ross . Not intimately or since childhood or to pop over for tea (I wish), but she's good friends with my sister-in-law, and intimately tangled up in the genesis of this very blog (gasp!). It's true -- look at my very first post ever to verify. If you're thinking that the fact that I know her and like her makes me more likely to give the book a good review, you are so flat-out back-assward blind-drunk cousin-wed WRONG, that...well, refer back to my very first post ever again. Ilana's the first p...

I'm sad. And angry. And sincerely bewildered. It doesn't take a genius to look around at the world and realize that wealth and resources, luxury and leisure, and something as basic and intangible as old-fashioned good luck, are distributed with a wild and baffling inequality over the face of the earth. Logically, a large number of geographical, geo-political and historical forces are in play, but often the image of a large, simple child scattering gold with an unsteady hand flashes into my mind. What is it that makes it so that people who already have to scrounge for the most basic necessities of life are also situated in areas where earthquakes and tsunamis occur with disproportionate frequency? I love my children, and I appreciate more than I can say the fact that I am able to provide them with nutrition, shelter, and multiple other things that are more luxuries than necessities, but all the money I give to World Vision or the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders doesn'...

Eve had a great birthday party on Saturday (more on that later). On Sunday (her actual birthday) the little girl from next door (who had come to the birthday party an hour early at noon and went home at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday) came over again and they played with birthday presents for hours, rejecting all offers of food and completely ignoring or shooing away all the adults in their general vicinity. Then, around eight o'clock, Eve came into the family room, looked at Matt and said reproachfully, "you know Daddy, I think only three people said happy birthday to me today. And none of them were you." Angus went to a 'At Home on My Own' course on Saturday (to spare him the shrieky giggly joy of thirteen little girls painting aprons and baking monkey bread). They taught him a lot of logical, fairly obvious things that we probably had already told him, but somehow learning them in a classroom makes them seem more official. He came home with a certificate that Mat...

I'm currently up to my ass in birthday-party prep, so I'll just share Eve's dream from last night. She's been having a lot of nightmares lately, which often makes her afraid to go to sleep, and also lands her quite often in my bed at four a.m., so the fact that she had a funny dream was welcome news: "First I dreamed that I was in a world made of Lego, and I was made of Lego too! Then I dreamed that I was back in Madame Waterfall's class and... this is embarrassing and I don't want to say it... but I will because it's so funny...(whispering) we were studying on butts! (pause for long, breathless belly-laugh). And Madame Waterfall said there's never been anyone in the world who had a butt that was bigger than them. And then we went on a field trip -- to China!!! And we saw someone whose butt was bigger than them! And Madame Waterfall said 'I guess I stand corrected'." Sleep on that, friends.

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar There are certain things I've always been fastidious about. Some would say borderline obsessive-compulsive, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but I prefer to think of it as being fastidious. Actually I don't love the word fastidious. Actually the more I type it and think it, the more I dislike it. The t and the d are too close together, and there's something unseemly about those two i's. So let's call it... meticulous? ANYWAY... I've always washed my face several times a day, especially when I'm wearing glasses instead of contacts, because I hate feeling like my face is oily and my glasses are sliding down my nose. I take a shower in the morning and usually a quick one at night, sometimes to regulate my wonky body temperature before going to bed, sometimes just to rinse off the day. When I had Angus and was exhausted and insane for the first few weeks, I thought that might break the bedtime shower habit. It ...

I've totally run dry. Empty. Echoing, with a little layer of dust in the bottom. I feel like I'm doing everything half-assed this week, with the one bright spot being that, for the most part, I'm at least still trying to do it. I dragged myself to the gym Monday and today. Today, amusingly enough, almost everybody I saw come into the gym looked half asleep. My friend Pam was on the treadmill next to me, in a similar state of brain-lock, and at one point she tried to say 'if you live in an apartment' but instead she said 'if you live in a hot tub', which resulted in twin bouts of hysterical laughter that earned us a few dirty looks and almost sent us flying off our treadmills. Photo by Andrew Sardone Monday after working out I went down to get groceries. The plan was to work out, get what I needed for meals for the week and for Eve's birthday party on Saturday, go home and shower and go into the school library for the afternoon. And I needed canned ...