Bibliomama

I'm not actually feeling surly today, or not much. I did take Eve to get a flu shot at a Rexall pharmacy where there was one pharmacist and one counter-person working, and then spend an hour or so in Loblaws, so the surliness opportunities were multiform, but I imagine I'm feeling like a lot of other people: happy and grateful about my life and sad and dispirited about some stuff that's happened to other people. Also, wishing that Nan hadn't told me about how doing NaBloPoMo killed her first blog, and, naturally, still pissed off about the cancellation of Firefly. Still, I'd hate to disappoint anyone who came here in search of surliness, so let me just send out a pinch of snark to that woman on Twitter today who tweeted "Really? No one has experienced this?" I was concerned that someone needed help with a problem, and also curious because geez, if there's one thing the internet has done for all of us is to show us that there is almost NOTHING you can...

Because I'm feeling a little stuck for words, and I found this restorative today, I present: three-year-old Eve peeling a Christmas orange.

Eve is fairly mature for an almost-ten-year-old. She expresses herself pretty well and has a reasonably extensive vocabulary. For this reason, I sometimes forget that she is, in fact, only nine years old and sometimes she doesn't catch all the nuances of a given situation. Usually it's not hard to figure out when she gets confused, because she huffs out "This is too confusing!" and flounces away, but sometimes she doesn't say anything and it's only much later that it becomes clear that she was completely in the dark. Case in point: The final Harry Potter movie. Angus was going to the premiere with a friend and the friend's little brother was going so she begged us to take her too even though she hadn't read all the books or had them read to her. So we did. She said she liked it. Then later she was talking about the scene where Snape is watching his memories in the pensieve and he remembers finding Harry's mother dead after Voldemort kills her. It...

It's been a while since we had a good Esso episode around here. But last night I took Angus to the chiropractor and on the way home he asked what we were having for dinner. I had been out all day and I was feeling lazy, so I didn't actually want to make the pizza that I had bought the pizza toppings for, but I knew we had naan bread in the freezer that I could use for pizza crust. So I said "naan pizzas". He said "so what are we having?" I looked at him quizzically and said "what did I just say?" and he said "well if it's not pizza, what is it?" Then we picked up Eve at my Mom's and had the same conversation, until I finally spelled it out: "NOT n-o-n pizzas, n-a-a-n pizzas!" They liked them. Eve now calls them anti-pizzas. Then in the middle of the night, my husband having wandered his restless legs off somewhere else already, Angus came in and said he'd had a really bad nightmare and crawled in with me. Matt, ...

We had a weird Sunday. We were supposed to go get a Christmas tree, but it was raining so we put it off. Then Angus remembered he had a design and tech project and tried to call the boy whose house the table was being built at and couldn't get hold of him and there was a big freak-out over whether the project was being done without him and he was upset and we were upset and it was a whole big thing. Then we heard from the boy's Mom (who's my friend) and she said they thought Angus was busy with baseball on the week-end so two of the group were building the table and Angus and the fourth person were going to write up the project so it was all fine. Which was good, but obviously there was a lack of organization and clear communication that needed to be rectified, and there were leftover unsettled feelings. We were coming off a month of Matt traveling a lot and Angus playing a crazy amount of sports and my fun-with-drugs experience. So at five o'clock I called an emergen...

I was driving Angus to school on Friday. It was -18 with the windchill. We stopped at a red light out around the corner, which put us right in front of two girls he knew waiting at the bus stop. I said "should we offer them a ride?" He said "NO!" I said "why the hell not? It's freezing out." He said "It would be too weird! Stop looking at them!" I said screw you and rolled down his window and asked them if they wanted a ride. They giggled and said no thank-you. I rolled up the window and said "Great. I'm an embarrassing mother all around. My work here is done." A few days ago I found a sheet of paper on the dining room table with Angus's name on it. It looked like a sheet of questions that he was answering in order to describe himself. I asked him if we needed to do anything with it and he said I could just recycle it, but I put it on the kitchen table beside my computer so I could look at the rest of it when I had time be...