Mea Culpa

Some people have been commenting that September was a 'bad month' for my blog. Some people seem to think that if they click onto my blog on their lunch hour and there's no new post I've been a 'bad friend' and a 'disappointment to humanity'. Some people may have stopped short in the parking lot at Zehr's and driven my seatbelt into my windpipe and then suggested that I should start blogging more regularly again if I 'know what's good for me'. Okay, I'm paraphrasing.

I had the most blissful, idyllic, big-sappy-smile-making week-end. On Thursday I drove to Oakville to see my friend Elaine who has an eleven-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl and a seven-month-old gestating little girl in her belly. She looks fabulous, particularly for someone who's clearly lost her mind (kidding! I'm kidding! It's the envy talking. Mostly.) We talked, we walked, we ate our way through the bakeries of downtown Oakville. We had Thai food with a hilarious server who set down the panang and informed us seriously that this curry was going to ruin us for all the other curries (which it pretty much did). We made fun of Elaine's husband's fish pants. We looked at a bunch of incredibly expensive organic bamboo baby stuff, including an armless sleeper/swaddler thing, which we thought was ingenious, and then realized that she could just cut the arms off a sleeper and sew the holes shut and start a college fund for the kid with the money she saved. We picked up the kids at school in my van because Holly really wanted to ride in it -- we asked Aidan if he wanted to come too instead of riding his skateboard home and he said "I guess" like he was really just doing it as a personal favour to us and not because he wanted to. Elaine's kids are scarily like my kids.

Then I drove to Barrie to see Zarah (who did take me to H&M before she started trash-talking about my blog laziness). We walked, we shopped, we ate. She congratulated me on no longer (hardly ever) wearing clothes that are way too big for me. She told me to try some eyeshadow. I said I hadn't worn eyeshadow since high school, when I would put it on and ask my sister if I was wearing too much and she would say "where is it?" I put some on and we went downtown for lunch with Zarah's friend Holly and at lunch Zarah said the eyeshadow looked nice and Holly looked at me and said "you're wearing eyeshadow?". So maybe not a great leap forward, but still. We were looking after a dog named Gemma, who is a mix of lab and collie and some other stuff, and was constantly trying to herd us onto the same floor and into the same room. By the last night I was there she refused to go out to pee unless both of us went with her. Zarah and I are clearly not the dominant bitches we've always thought ourselves to be.

Zarah's kids came back from their Dad's on Sunday a few hours before I had to leave. Sophie is about to turn six and little and adorable and looks like Cindy Lou Who. Alex is eight and smart and serious and I constantly try to crack him up and instead end up sounding like a jackass while he looks at me like I'm, well, a jackass, and yells "Mom! Allison's trying to make me be whimsical again! Make her stop!"

Now I'm home with my wonderful family and Angus says he missed me and he's not just saying that to make me feel good, and Eve fell asleep beside me while I was reading last night and my husband changed the sheets before I got home and none of them have started to piss me off again, so I'm in a very very nice place right now. Aside from my stupid reference work assignment with the stupid impossible-to-find facts about Canadian epidemiologists and the first settlers in Kelowna B.C. and the stupid labyrinthine MLA citations... no no no. Not going there yet, can't make me. I'm happy.