Bibliomama

So Matt was running around printing out passport forms and gathering needed information and signatures yesterday to get passport renewals for himself and the kids - I'm on a different cycle, and I said I was happy to take the kids' forms in but he's taking Angus to Florida next week-end for a baseball showcase so he said he might as well just do them all. We thought we had everything squared away, and he left this morning to go to the passport office. As I was getting ready to leave for the gym, he swept back into the house on an immense wave of irritation, having gotten to the part where the preliminary person scans your documents and been informed that Angus is now an adult and needed the longer form filled out. Which is annoying, particularly since neither of us had noticed that that fact is mentioned in writing right at the top of all the passport forms, and reading is kind of supposed to be my thing - it's nice that Matt didn't mention that, now that I think ...

So I was all droopy and restless about what to read before Thanksgiving. I decided to reread something good, and went on the library website to see what I could get instantly as an ebook, so I started searching the names of my favourite authors. So kind of funny thing about this author. I read this really cool science fiction book ages ago - it was called Only Forward and it was by Michael Marshall Smith, who I'd never heard of before. It was sort of part Blade Runner, part noir detective story and I really liked it. He only had a couple of other science fiction books, and I'm not sure if I even read them, although I meant to. Years went by. I had a kid. That kid broke his leg while I was pregnant with a second kid. It was a stressful time. My parents came to help out and sent me out for a night of coffee shop and book store therapy. I came across this paperback mystery. Do you ever pick up a book, read the title and synopsis and just feel like it's going to be really ...

Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird , and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages. As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging ...

Last week-end Eve and I and my parents drove down to London to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family (the boys stayed home because Angus was writing SATs Saturday here in town). This week-end I drove down to Waterloo with some friends to go to an Oktoberfest event with friends that had moved there in the summer (Matt went to Watertown with Angus for baseball - Eve had music camp at school and found it inexpressibly amusing that Matt and I were both going to places that had Water in the name. She's weird). Both week-ends were great, except I'm getting worse and worse at staying at other people's houses. It's never been my favourite thing. I'm a weird guest. I use a lot of ice. I need a lot of showers. I hate getting up in the morning in a strange place. And I'm used to keeping my house a few degrees above a walk-in refrigerator's temperature and this fall has been unseasonably warm, so I was melting for close to the entire time. I don't know ...