Bibliomama

*checks calendar very carefully to make sure it is, in fact the last day of November, still isn't completely certain* I had plans to make this a really good post, with all my points researched and supported, and maybe a scatter plot with a very robust data set (that's a lie, also a Brooklyn Nine-Nine joke). But I was away from home from FOUR WHOLE NIGHTS and had to take off my CPAP last night because it was making my nose bleed, and didn't get much done today and it got dark really early and the thought of going out into the cold and dark for bar night (or anything) made me feel like crying, but I did, because whining about having all these stupid awesome friends who actually want to hang out with you at least once a week is dumb, and it was really fun (it always is once I drag my ass out) but now it's late-ish and I don't think this is going to come out as structured and effective as I was anticipating. I have had a general rule of thumb for arguing with people on ...

  The good part is I bought a couple of new things for her room and also brought her some stuff from home, and I remembered everything I wanted to bring and she loves it. The bad part is that I went through all the boxes the night before I was leaving looking for the tiny Christmas tree she always puts on her desk, and I was tired and sweaty and hurting my back and just as I opened the box and saw it..... I remembered that I bought her a three-foot pre-lit tree at Giant Tiger because I thought she probably had more floor space than surface space in her room, and she agreed. D'oh. 

I read this out to Zarah and Sophie and Eve while we were hanging out in the hotel room before bed, to great appreciation and amusement. Eve said "on the other hand, Marianna (her BFF who is in theatre school in British Columbia) sent a text to our group chat today that just said "Mime final tonight", so that's pretty awesome too."

"I'm going to see so many adorable little red-haired girls today." Eve said on Saturday. "I mean... two. But statistically I feel like that's a lot". We went and met Jean (my professor) and her granddaughter Fyfe, who has met Eve twice so far and is a big fan of hers. There was some swinging and some reading and some pretend tea-drinking (thankfully, since Eve hates real tea - I still laugh when I think about her expression as a child when she tried it for the first time and wondered why on earth anyone would put it in their mouth on purpose), and a round thing that looked like a doughnut but which was definitely NOT a doughnut, it was a BAGEL and then Fyfe had to go for a nap, so she picked some light reading So then we drove to Burlington to see my sister-in-law Laura and Lydia and Mitchell, my niece and nephew. There was more reading, and some colouring, and some walking down the street looking at Christmas decorations, and some running around in the back...

There was a time when I would have killed myself making sure I posted something every single day in November, even though I was driving a lot and visiting my YOUNGEST CHILD who lives FIVE HOURS AWAY NOW and only had my phone with which to ply my trade with fat clumsy fingers. That time is not now. I figure everyone will either forgive me or be glad not to have to muster yet another comment.  When I visit Eve I stay at a very basic, pretty cheap hotel very close to campus. I like getting a room on the very bottom floor because those rooms actually have two doors, one that opens right to the parking lot so I can back up, open the door and easily unload or load up all the shit I travel with - besides the fact that I'm usually bringing stuff for Eve (including Christmas decorations this time) and for my niece and nephew and anyone else I'm visiting, when I'm on a road trip and not a flight I tend to treat my car as a big purse, which means my crap does not lend itself to scoopi...

Yesterday I set out for a drive I’ve done many times, several of them in the past three months. I felt unaccountably anxious this time. I asked for good thoughts on Facebook and drove a little more slowly than usual. I stopped at the third rest stop (I usually stop at the second one. I don’t really know why. I felt slightly superstitious about changing the routine. I tried to convince my loopy sense of superstition that it was GOOD to change the routine, which makes no sense either). I checked my phone and had multiple kind responses to my good thoughts request and I felt better. I ate my hamburger while driving without spilling ketchup on my white t-shirt, which was also a positive.  I had been planning to stay alone at the hotel last night and see Eve today because she had school work to finish. She called when I was about an hour away and said screw that, she was coming to have a sleepover at the hotel. So I picked her up and we watched the season three finale of Rupaul’s Drag R...

I ended up skipping the chiropractor and book club tonight because I am exhausted and I didn't want to push myself before driving five hours tomorrow. I am trying to remember everything I want to bring for Eve and all the other people I'm seeing this week-end and still remember to pack underwear. I got home from work and thought about all the stuff I still had to do - pull out the Christmas decoration boxes and find some stuff to take down to Eve, get the presents ready for my niece and nephew, finish packing, bake cookies to take to Eve, etc. Instead I sat at the kitchen table untangling and organizing ornament hooks because I am very intelligent. There was a lone safety pin in the mix. I feel like I used to constantly need a safety pin and could never find one, and now I can't remember the last time I needed one. Why is that? Never mind, it will probably just make me sad. As for the other hatchling, a couple of days ago Angus was texting me at work in the morning saying h...

 I've been trying to decide if this post should come before or after my Trying Not to Be an Asshole to Assholes on the Internet Anymore post (I backslid a little last night, on a post that asked if people were nearly done their holiday shopping yet, which brought out the appallingly entitled Fake Christians with their 'what do you mean HOLIDAY shopping? Do you mean CHRISTMAS shopping?' bullshit.)  I follow a personal blog page on Facebook called Cranky Fat Feminist, which I love. It's not a private group and not moderated, so a lot of the posts get considerable flak from anti-feminist dickweasels. A while back she posted about a study involving twins that suggested strongly that dieting is neither a one-size-fits-all (weak laugh) solution to obesity nor a necessarily effective one - in fact, dieting may very well cause subsequent weight gain. It was just a post, not an article or an insistence that this was one hundred percent correct, but for people (like me) who think...

 I'm not surly today, just really tired (pretty much zero sleep after the Cottage Girls Night of Awesome on Saturday and slept last night, but it wasn't enough, and my work day was super-gnarly today). This post  from nine years ago was in my Facebook memories and made me both smile and miss Pam and my bonkers little girl who is now my bonkers big girl who doesn't live with me anymore (at least not in the winter time). I mean, look at the little smunchkin. One thing that I've learned and found surprising since I started working in the school office is that apparently a lot of kids show up late to school every day. Part of my attendance duties include noting down all the lates, and I've been doing this somehow assuming that the copious number of late students had something to do with Covid. Then I looked up one day and said "hang on, are this many kids late every day ALL THE TIME?" and Heather said yep, pretty much. I try really hard not to judge people whe...

Yesterday was our annual Cottage Girls' Night (we had to skip last year, obviously), where we go to Collette's cottage an hour or so away, have lunch and do Christmas shopping in the nearby town and then settle in for a night of mild debauchery and board games.  We played this one - I exploded every time, but also had one of my greatest game victories ever. Collette kept playing the card that meant I had to hold out my cards for her to take one, blindly. She wanted my Defuse card (because it defuses the exploding kitten), and three times in a row I put it in the same spot, to the extreme right of my hand, and she missed it every time. Then I told her about it so she could call me a bitch, as was her right. We played this one - One question was which complex a psychiatrist said Nixon suffered from, and I said persecution complex but then talked myself out of it, and it was the right answer. SO annoying when that happens.  We played this one - It became increasingly obvious t...

 I just read Swistle's post about (among other things) Christmas cards and realized that it's November 19th and I could conceivably start writing Christmas cards right now or very soon. Last year I sent out a record number because I figured it was a rough time for a lot of us and happy mail would be a good thing. I put out a call on social media for anyone who wanted one to give me their address. I sent Christmas cards back to artisans that I ordered from through the online craft show (one was named Creepy Christine and that was too fun NOT to address a card to).  I've gone through several permutations of how I do cards. I used to write at least a small paragraph in every single card. As time and hand strength became more scarce, that became unsustainable. I didn't want to do a one-letter-fits-all thing, so then I typed up messages and printed them out. That was kind of a pain in the butt too. I like it when people get photo cards printed, but I'm not even close to...

 Remember my tiny awesome little former prof? The one who's Eve's department head now? I was emailing with her about my visit next week-end and she told me that she had just run into Eve on campus and said "when I said 'only 3 1/2 weeks of term left!' she made an expression that looked just like you!" I was FaceTiming with Matt who was in San Jose and he said he wondered what expression it was and I said I was pretty sure I knew. Then Eve FaceTimed me to tell me about the same interaction and I said "was it this expression?" and made a face and she said "yes! That was it!"   Angus came home at Christmas during his first year at his liberal arts college and asked me if I had seen Chi-raq , which was "a movie based on Lysistrata ". I said "no, I...wait, you know what Lysistrata is?" Eve is being introduced to a lot of Classical literature in her first year too, and although she's generally been more into reading and wr...

I came across a suggestion somewhere on social media - I don't remember exactly where - that in the upcoming year everyone consider volunteering 1-2 hours monthly to a cause they care about. It's only .0027% of the year! Everyone can donate that much time, right?  I mean, it sounds like a brilliant idea, but is it realistic? Are most organizations going to be happy with people saying they'd like to volunteer one hour every thirty days? Is that going to be useful or efficient or helpful? It annoyed me because it seemed like - not toxic positivity, exactly, but all chipper and chirpy about something that sounds good on the surface but not so much if you think about it for any length of time. I already work much less than full-time, and that's awkward in itself - many people seem to find it kind of weird, and assume I would take full-time work if I could get it. So many volunteer organizations are desperate for help - how easy would it be to do a couple hours and then eith...

 I've got nothing much tonight. I'm tired and having a pain flare and feeling a tiny bit of self-pity  - only a bit, because I had dinner with Jody (HI JODY) and her sort-of step-mother-in-law (HI B.T.), both of whom I adore, and we ordered breaded cauliflower bites and most of them looked like little Accidental Dongs (dammit Jody, why didn't you tell me to take a picture?) so we could literally say "eat a bowl of dicks" and then do it and they were delicious. My husband is due home late tonight after ten days, so Lucy might stop crapping on the stairs every night in protest, and I won't have to deliver her to my parents' place for babysitting before I go limp around the school all day. It will still be Darkest November and it's supposed to rain all day, but -- no, I've got nothing for that, that sucks.  Let's all regroup and meet back here tomorrow, okay? In the meantime, have a.... picture of Eve's friend Alison with her headless but shar...

 While trying to decide what to title a post about breakfast, I remembered that there was a book years ago called Much Depends on Dinner. I assumed it was a cookbook, but it turns out it's more of a historical/anthropological book about how and what people eat. I also came across this delightful quote from it: “In Athol Fugard’s play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at the play’s opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.” ―  Margaret Visser,  Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal What prompted this post was that I was toasting an English muffin. As it browned in the toaster I thought about how I always forget about how awesome toast is until I make toast again. I almost titled the post "Toast is The Quarterback", but that seemed even more obscure ...