Bibliomama

I'm indulging in a little self-sympathy. Not self-pity; I know a lot of people are dealing with a lot of crap at any given time in the world and my life, from the outside AND the inside, is really quite nice. But I saw the sleep doctor a couple of days ago, and he went over the readout from my overnight sleep study with me, and by all appearances I have gotten very little 'useful' sleep over the past thirty years or so. I stop breathing multiple times a minute. There are four stages of sleep and before they gave me the mask and the CPAP machine I never made it past the second. Even when I feel like asleep, I'm often not, or not in any kind of healthy, meaningful, refreshing way. So I'm just taking a moment to feel some sympathy for that me that spent so much time wondering why I could never wake up in the morning. Why I couldn't just get up and have breakfast and go about my day normally, rather than sleeping until the last possible second in order to be ready...

"For two traumatic days, Livvy Higgs is besieged by a series of small heart attacks while the ghost of her younger self leads her back through a past devastated by lies and secrets. The story opens in Halifax in 2009, travels back to the French Shore of Newfoundland during the mid-thirties and the heyday of the Maritime shipping industry, makes its way to wartorn Halifax during the battle of the Atlantic in World War II, then leaps ahead to the bedside of the elder Livvy. Caught between a troubled past, and her present and worsening living conditions, Livvy is forced to pick apart the lies and secrets told by her greedy, prideful father, Durwin Higgs, who judges her a failure, and her formidable Grandmother Creed, who has mysteriously aligned herself with Livvy's father, despite their mutual hatred. Tending to Livvy during her illness is her young next-door neighbour, Gen, a single mother and social-work student. Overnight, a violent scene embroils the two in each other'...

First of all, smooshes and kisses to everyone who shared their own stories of official-document-related failures. I have to apologize to my husband for getting irate whenever he answers one of my own laments about my personal flaws with a consoling statement that starts with "if it makes you feel any better" and ends with his own or someone else's defects or missteps. I frequently bark something like "do you really think I'm so small and petty a person that someone else's screw-up will make me feel better about my own?" Well, friends, it turns out that I AM PRECISELY THAT SMALL AND PETTY A PERSON. So I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening making supper, hanging with the kids and cleaning out another shelf of the downstairs storage closet (related: somebody remind me never to buy glue sticks again EVER). Then I packed my overnight bag and hugged the kids good-bye - Eve was very unhappy about this whole state of affairs (join the club). I left mys...

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...

I should have paid closer attention to the description of this book before I accepted a copy to review. Bob Harris sounded like a character with some interesting stories to tell, which he is. However, I would never have taken a copy if I'd seen that it was billed as 'creative non-fiction'. I have a problem with creative non-fiction. Well, I don't have a problem with non-fiction writing being creative, I have a problem with 'creative non-fiction' as a genre, since it seems to indicate to me that an author is saying "I want to write something that is non-fiction until I feel like making stuff up, and then it will be partly fictional non-fiction". I guess this is better than the authors who claim that they are writing non-fiction and then make parts up without admitting it, but still... I don't see the point. If you want to write fiction, write fiction. If you want to write non-fiction, stick to the facts and use your writing to make it creative. ...

My husband's away for a couple of days. The kids were being all cute yesterday. Angus's homework was tangrams - turns out making squares out of triangles and parallelograms is not one of his strengths or mine. Eve's homework was assigning gender to French nouns. Eve is very visual and has a good spatial sense, and Angus has flipped a few French dictionary leaves in his time - at one point I looked over and they had traded homework. I tried not to dwell on the ethical implications. After homework and piano practice, Eve had about a half hour before bed, so I said she could watch TV in the living room. Instead, she went downstairs where Angus was playing video games and he turned off his game and they watched TV and wrestled. The heartwarming music of their laughter led me to make the exceedingly stupid mistake of agreeing to a family sleepover. Actually, any time Angus still wants to do a family sleepover I get all mushy and amnesiac and I succumb to the Hallmarkness of t...

Pam and I went to the Folk Festiva l on a whim last night. Well, to be accurate, I developed a sudden folk festival whim and Pam enabled it. This is why I love Pam. How can anyone live without someone who will do this kind of thing at the last minute? And drive? And deal with her routine-loving son who WASN'T EXPECTING her to go out last night just so I wouldn't have to feel like a dork going all alone? I always wonder about those people who are walking around the folk festival in tie-dyed bell bottoms or flower-strewn sarongs or asymmetrical fringed garments. They always look so RIGHT and, by comparison, I always feel like a penguin in a flock of starlings. But do these people dress like that all the time, or do they just happen to always have the exact right folk-festival garb in their closet when it rolls around? Do they look right at the folk festival and whacky everywhere else? Is the folk festival the one time they get to wander among their people and feel at home? We...

I'm just going to have to jump in here with something inconsequential or it's entirely possible that I will never blog again. When I was in New York at BlogHer12 with Marilyn (HI MARILYN), at one point I was going through my swag bag and found a little mini fan sort of like this that had come from the Chrysler party. The bottom had fallen off and the batteries had come out, so I took it out and tried to put it back together. I couldn't see the latch properly where I was standing, so I went over by the lamp, right beside Marilyn who was on her bed looking at her phone, so she could only see what I was doing out of the corner of her eye. Suddenly she recoiled and said "what are you DOING?" I indicated that her reaction was somewhat out of proportion to what I was, in fact doing... and then I realized that when she saw me, in her peripheral vision fiddling with the fan, she actually thought I was fiddling with  this, which we also both had in our bags. And she ...

I was getting tired of looking at that pitiful political protest post (ha - try saying that three times fast). Both my laptop and my motivation are having some work done. I'll be back.