Bibliomama

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 ...

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...

Yasmine and Amina from Oxford, England. Brenna from Peterborough, Ontario. Big snake.  He was local.

That is what last week felt like. We all know I don't travel willingly or well.  I like my bed, and reliable Western toilets.  I'm suspicious of many foreign foods (unlike my husband, who, as my children never tire of reminding everyone, ate a shrimp that was recently dead enough to hop on the back of his tongue).  I have difficult and temperamental hair.  And I don't really mind the cold or the snow that much. So yeah, I'm the kind of ingrate that, when her husband says "let's go somewhere hot and do nothing for a week in January" whines, "do we HAVE to?"  Because I'm awesome like that. I never know what I think about vacation travel to other countries.  It wasn't something that most people I knew did while I was growing up.  We went to Disney a couple of times, but other than that we just went to Saskatchewan and hung out on the various farms every summer.  One boy I knew went to Mexico in grade six and that seemed impossib...

Scene: our third night in our hotel room at the Coconut Bay Resort in St. Lucia.  Two double beds, girls in one, boys in the other.  Darkness, cane toads singing, fan spinning lazily overhead. Angus: What are we going to do tomorrow? Me: Same thing we do every day, Pinky - try to take over the world ! Angus: I'm really not crazy about going to sleep hearing my mother quoting The Brain. Me: Would you rather I go back to I'm Sexy and I Know it? Angus: FINE, fine, we'll take over the world.

I don't know how the hell all you people get your yearly review posts up before New Year's Eve - aren't you busy cleaning up from Christmas and watching bad movies and reading a million books, hoovering up the potato chip crumbs from the bottoms of the bags and staying in your pajamas until the last possible minute before getting dressed to go next door on New Year's Eve?  No?  Besides, isn't it a tiny bit irresponsible to review a year when it hasn't fully finished?  What if something happened in that last twenty-four hours that changed EVERYTHING?  Won't YOU all look silly having to tack on postscripts to your prematurely done posts then?   I'm stealing Hannah's format for this post because, well, I liked it.  If she'd waited a couple of days to post it, I wouldn't have been able to - ha HA! 1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?   Ziplining , along with various other traipsing around among tree-tops stuff at the...