Bibliomama

So Sunday was Blogging Out Loud Ottawa  at the Writers Festival , probably the last one ever. I'm kind of sad that there's no chance Lynn will be emailing me to say "I'm so sorry, but you have to read at BOLO again" next year. I wore my new Docs because I wore my old Docs the very first time I read, and it seemed like a full-circle kind of thing. I had brunch with a group of people so fabulous that I kept pinching myself and everybody else just to confirm that I wasn't dreaming, until everyone said stop pinching me or I will pelt you with Tater Tots. Photo credit Jennifer Bennett And here's a really bad photo of my cute dress.  I got to the venue and saw even more fabulous people and I thought I might actually be in heaven, except a few key people were missing. Also, in the one picture of me reading I look as big as a house (not inaccurate, but sobering). But I kind of like this picture of me laughing at Joe Boughner 's hilariousness. ...

So we're in Mexico over March Break. We could just laze around by the pool, do a little snorkeling, eat, drink, laugh, and call it done.  Instead, a small cohort among us, notably including my husband, signs us up for a day-long excursion that will include, in aforesaid husband's words "a bunch of cool stuff". Okay. Sure. Fine. So we drag ourselves out of bed at stupid o'clock on our second full day there and walk up to the lobby to get on a bus where a very personable young man named Javier details our activities for the day, which sound pretty cool, except... "Okay, his English is really good but he does have a bit of an accent... he didn't say rappelling, did he? Surely you would have told me if there was rappelling involved. Why are you looking at me like that? IS THERE RAPPELLING IN MY NEAR FUTURE?" There was. Down, down, down into the deep dark. It was kind of cool, once I got through "I'm going to kill my husb...

I feel like crap today. I'm tired and everything hurts and I feel like I have no excuse for feeling the way I do. Then I watched a medical show where a depressed man said he had no excuse for feeling sad and Oliver Platt said "you don't need an excuse, you're a human being" and it made me sob. My friends have all said awesome comforting things, and I walked Lucy and cooked stuff and helped Angus with an essay and rounded up some volunteers for the book fair, and I don't feel like blogging but I don't want to not blog for two weeks again, so here, have some random pictures from our March Break vacation in Mexico.  These were all over our resort. There was some spirited debate about what they were, which would have gone on much longer in the days before Facebook. They're called coatis or coatimundi, and they're member of the raccoon family. The kids all wanted to bring one home.  Every time someone called security for our little block of ...

So I seem to have slid into a little bout of Blog Paralysis after that one short and tasteless post-holiday... post. It was Christmas. Then I got sick. Then we went away. Then we came back. And here I am. In April. How about a diverting little anecdote about how dumb my parents are? The house was getting cleaned today, which makes Lucy lose her mind and act like an asshole, so I took her for a walk over to my parents' place, intending to leave her there while I ran errands until our cleaner was gone. I had said I would be there around eleven, and I was a little late, so I'm pretty sure my mom and dad didn't expressly pose themselves to look like a couple of seventy-somethings who had totally taken leave of their senses, but I can't be sure, since I came in just as they were trying to drag their old barbecue DOWN THE STAIRS of their deck into their back yard BY THEMSELVES. So after I told them off for being insane and reckless, we had to get a hammer to pound off t...