Bibliomama

Dear Loblaws: Just wanted to thank you for another thrill-filled adventure at the self check-out station today. I know, I know - it's my own fault. Every time I go there I tell myself I will never, under any circumstances, use the self check-out station again because saving a few minutes is not worth the resultant blood pressure spike/rage-induced headache/visions of death and destruction. But then the next time, there are barely any cashiers on (why would there be, when you have these marvels of technology to replace them?) and long lineups of cranky people, and, well, it's kind of like childbirth or aerobics; I forget the magnitude of the pain, and I think 'maybe it won't be so bad this time'. Because I'm a fucking moron. It tells me to put my re-usable bags on the platform, so I do. It says press DONE when I'm, you know, done, so I do. Then it tells me that the large item I'm trying to scan needs to be scanned by the cashier. Except I didn't t...

It was really far from the school, just like that other one - over an hour on the bus. BUT I was sitting with this really nice woman who moved here from Edmonton last year and we talked about books and teachers and working for the government and the time flew by. We were in the second seat from the front, so there was a nice breeze but not a 60mph wind whipping my hair into a Medusa-like frenzy. The weather forecast was 35 degrees with the humidex, with possible thunderstorms. BUT it didn't feel that hot or humid, and the whole place was shaded, and the weather was perfect and beautiful and it didn't rain. We were going to someplace called MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre,  which I was led to believe was a kind of conservation area, and we were told to bring bug repellent, so I was envisioning swampy ickiness swarming with frogs and mosquitoes. One woman at book club said, with great portent, "I've always managed to be unavailable for that one", and I ...

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 ...

The last time I was at Chapters, I looked at a book in the biography section that struck me as interesting, so I got it from the library. It was called Your Voice in My Head and the author was Emma Forrest. As soon as I started reading it, I realized I had read an article in the paper, a few months or a year ago, about the author and the book. The article went into a fair bit of detail about an affair the author had had with Colin Farrell. Also, there was a picture and her hair was awesome. Well, I thought, I'm never going to read THAT book. Sigh. From Goodreads: Emma Forrest, an English journalist, was twenty-two and living in America when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. A modern day fairy tale of New York,  Your Voice in My Head  is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In a voice unlike any other, Emma Forrest explores depression and mania, but also the beauty of love—and the heartbreak of loss. It was...

I could have done a 'Wordless Wednesday': I was just at the grocery store and I passed a big display of bags of popcorn. There was kettle corn, which we don't like because it's too sweet, and aged cheddar popcorn, which we like but I didn't buy it, and then there was BACON RANCH popcorn. And at the bottom of the bag it says "ALL NATURAL". And I HAD a camera, because I was just at school to watch Eve's class perform their mini-plays (in Eve's she was a speeding, red-light flouting, car-stealing maniac who then mouths off to a policeman, and she was a little too convincing for comfort if you ask me), and as I walked past the display I thought I should really take a picture of the popcorn and then blog it with the caption 'there is nothing natural about this'. But I didn't. Here's a picture, if you really need one. Eve being a delinquent: I thought of doing an "I Wonder Wednesday". You know what I wonder? When a ...

Oh look, one pitiful post this week - possibly a new low? It's been a strange week. Matt was in China (that was not the strange part. That was fairly normal, which suddenly seems a little strange, but whatever). Monday was beautiful and sunny. Pam and I went down to Dow's Lake to walk around looking at tulips and saying things like 'ooh, nice tulips'. Then Pam took a picture of me that made it obvious that 1) I've gained some weight over the past year or so and 2) When I try to suck in my gut it makes it look like I'm trying to stick out my boobs, possibly in two different directions. On the up side, my hair wasn't bad. Monday night Eve had baseball (they won) but she was already starting to get sniffly and Tuesday she stayed home from school with a bad cold. Her nose was running, but the worst cold symptom she gets is that her eyes tear up horribly. When she was young this was terrible, because she didn't understand that it was just happening be...

Eve stayed home sick today. I seem to have this weird problem where I regress back to when she was two years old and sick, and I would have to spend all day cuddling, consoling, entertaining, making her drink and helping her blow her nose (you know how kids can't blow their noses for shit? She would blow through her mouth with a TOTALLY CONVINCING noise and I was convinced she was a snot-expelling genius, until my husband clued me in. Whatever. She was a fake-nose-blowing-prodigy). At this point, she really requires almost no attention. She reads, watches tv, blows her nose on her own (kind of pathetically, actually, since she doesn't feel the need to fake the noise any more). I could easily go about my business - write stuff, clean stuff, organize stuff - but instead I wander around aimlessly asking her if she needs anything and getting nothing done. At least she's entertaining. She was lying on the couch and I was enjoying the novelty of having The Wizards of Waverly Pl...

I keep trying to blog but being thwarted. It's Angus's birthday on Sunday but Matt's leaving for China or Estonia or wherever-the-fuck tomorrow night so Angus has three friends over for Laserquest and a sleepover tonight. I had to bake a cake. Here's the cake: Is that not freaking awesome? Here's where I got the idea. It's double awesome because it looks impressive on the outside and yet the actual iced cake can be a bloody mess, which iced cakes INVARIABLY ARE when I make them. I was short one KitKat, so those slightly different lumpy things over there are Reese sticks. Because even when something's dead simple, count on me to find a way to bugger it up. Then I had to take a picture of the cake. Then I tried to load the pictures from the memory card onto my computer and it did that thing where it said I had to reformat the card to use it, which would erase all the pictures, including the ones from Eve's birthday party, which, granted, was in Feb...