Bibliomama

 "How are you doing all this posting?", asked Ernie? I DON'T KNOW, ERNIE. How did you manage to comment every day? Thank you fervently and gratefully and effusively, people who commented, although I know in my heart or hearts that even if you started out charmed by the daily missives, by the end you must have been muttering "oh great, another fucking Allison Post".  What I SHOULD do, what I mean to do every November, is write mostly in the morning, write a few posts on days when I have more time and schedule them, and leave the evening for either polishing or commenting on other people's posts. What I ACTUALLY do is almost always leave it until the very last thing and then slouch to the computer with very bad grace to bang something out resentfully. And because I talk a lot about myself and my current mood here, this often just leads to a bunch of posts starting out with "UGGGGGHHHH, why did I think this was a good ideaaaaaa, *whale noises* (this is wha...

 I guess first you should read this ? Honestly, when I found out I was pregnant the second time (and I knew this time, I KNEW - I had felt my ovaries fizzing like champagne and the midwife said "you got a positive result that early?", and I put a pregnancy test box with a blue pawprint on it on the stairs for when my husband got home), I thought I had probably used up all my luck on that first really good baby. Not that I thought this one would be bad, but surely it would refuse to sleep, or cry all the time, or dislike me obviously from day one. I could say that maybe she was meant for someone else, someone who deserved a break from the universe, but she was so clearly meant to be mine.  My relationship with my mom was difficult. Neither of us was really wrong, we just really didn't get each other. She did the best she could, and I did not make it easy. Eve is like me in all the ways that make that relationship not just good, but FUN, and she is better than me in the wa...

We're in that weird Christmas shoulder season where today feels slightly too soon to start decorating but I can't decide exactly how long I should wait, and inevitably I will feel like I waited too long when I do start.  I was downstairs sorting baby clothes (oh yes, I have decided to go through all the bins of baby clothes and wash them all and sort them so they're better organized, which is great except it's really highlighting that I have kept a lot, like a lot, like a really indefensible amount, of baby clothes, which I could kind of ignore when I had a few bins stashed here and a couple of boxes stashed there) and flipping through photos and stacking up numerous pairs of Angus's old pajama pants to give away, and was suddenly exhausted and discouraged and wondering if I'm fooling myself that if I keep up with this, next year everything will be orderly and we will be able to find things and maybe even Christmas won't be insane because I'll know where...

 I am unaccountably cranky today. I do often in November have a fairly drastic downturn in mood and energy around four o'clock, which was just when we were leaving for dinner with my parents. It hasn't affected me too badly yet this month, so I should be grateful, which I probably will be when I get done being cranky.  Surly Sunday is alliteration. Usually I do Surly Thursday which is -- assonance? Consonance? Neither, quite, and I should know this, fuck. I had raspberries and blackberries with vanilla yogurt for breakfast, which was delicious. I have had a berry seed stuck between my two back left lower molars all day, which is driving me slowly mad. I have flossed. I have picked. I have swished. I have chewed gum. I think there may be nothing left for it but to pull out the power drill.  I spent some time in the back storage area today. Against the back wall of the house there are big built-in shelves - four levels. Then there is an Ikea set of metal shelves - I hate th...

So big, in fact, that I traveled ahead in time yesterday to November 28th (what the heck, me yesterday?) I took my mom to her ultrasound appointment at the butt-crack of dawn today. It was a beautiful day, it was a nice drive and nice to see the sun coming up, and my mom made me tea, and I left Lucy at home. So everything was great, except for the fact that the medical imaging place we always go to was designed and is run by some actually evil disciple of Satan or Elon Musk. My mom was told to be there at a time ten minutes after it opened, according to their hours online and on her requisition. When she got there there was a line, with an older woman with a cane at the front of it. The doors still weren't open. The woman with the cane banged on the door, and a snippy person came and said they would not be opening the door until fifteen minutes AFTER their stated opening time. Wut? This should not be a thing. Seniors standing in line outside in November (it was unseasonably warm to...

 I keep going to title this post and realizing that I have almost certainly used every title that crosses my mind - "Crawling to the Finish Line": "I Think I Can, I Think I Can": Holy Fuck I Do Not Feel Like Blogging Tonight" - at this precise period in NaBloPoMos Past.  I just realized that I didn't tell you about my teeth-cleaning experience on Tuesday. I also just realized that the bag of McIntosh apples I bought after that teeth-cleaning experience is still sitting on the table unopened and I'm afraid the precious, precious Macs will rot, so I had to lean over awkwardly and tear it open and spread out the apples before proceeding. It was a very bad experience. It may have been my worse teeth-cleaning experience ever. I wanted to ask the hygienist if she had just wandered in off the street, tied up the actual hygienist and stuffed her (or him) in a closet and then grabbed a plaque scraper and waited for the next unwitting victim (me) to happen by.  S...

 I spent most of the day in the basement again and almost forgot to post before going upstairs to read before bed. This just reminded me of when I was pregnant with Angus and the basement was being finished. Matt would go down there in the evenings and every now and then I'd need him for something and I would yell for him (because I was enormous and lazy) and he couldn't hear me and of course this was pre-cell-phone so I couldn't even (ridiculously) text him. This would make me unreasoningly angry, and I started calling him (only half-jokingly) the basement troll. Well who's the troll now, bitches? I bring my ipad down so I can play a tv show while I'm wandering around sorting and dusting and moving and gasping in a horrified manner (mummified spider, which is absolutely nothing compared to what Hannah (HI HANNAH) found in her garage, but still, it was big. And crunchy.) Yesterday I started playing the new Addams Family show Wednesday on Netflix, but then stopped it...

 Today I was feeling a little Novemberish for a bit, even though I've had a really nice week after a really great week-end. I started sounding the depths of our basement storage space behind the laundry room, for which I had to brace myself because I was at a point in the process where a lot of areas of the house had started to look much better, and this was going to mean plunging wholeheartedly into chaos again for a bit. The most I've done back there is take out the Christmas decorations and put them back for many years. You know how in archaeology you have to dig through successive layers to go back further in time? It's time for me to go more Paleozoic.  I don't think I ever posted the pictures from when we took my parents to Mont Tremblant in October. My mom had been feeling pretty down about not being able to travel for the last couple of years, and Matt had hotel points.  "It's not The Westin," he corrected me, "It's LE Westin". We cou...

My husband came home from work yesterday complaining that, although he's never been particularly organized, he had good enough recall to make up for it, but now that he's getting older and things at work are getting more and more crazy, his system (or lack thereof) is not working as well. He said he's at the stage where he recognizes this but isn't yet prepared to do anything about it, which is something I respect and understand. I've never been particularly well organized either, and I lose things quite often. Now that I'm increasingly convinced that I have ADD, this makes a little more sense, and I've put a few things in place that make it not quite as bad - I keep receipts in the top drawer of the dresser by the entrance, and it's been quite a while since I've needed a receipt to return something and not been able to find it (this used to happen ALL THE TIME). The receipts do eventually overflow and I have to go through them and throw out the old ...

 I took some time to comment on some blogs before writing this, which was a mistake because in the course of commenting I have run out of steam entirely. On the bright side, I am not staring down the barrel of Thanksgiving (once again, American friends, I salute and admire you, I don't know how you do it.) While at the cottage on the weekend I got a text from my drug store reminding me to pick up my prescription, and giving me a date until which it would be held, which seemed a little weird because I've never been given a cut-off date before. Then I realized a previous text had said that I had failed to pick up my previous prescription which was now no longer being held. Okay. This is new. Our drug store has gotten really busy - every time I go in to pick up a prescription, there are baskets and baskets of little white bags lined up against the counter. This also seems to have resulted in some pretty poor customer service, which generally has the result that I declare to myself...

 So I was trying to post just from my phone yesterday from Collette's cottage and neither I nor my phone were entirely successful, it seems.  Every November we go for a girls' overnight at Collette's Dad's cottage, about an hour and a half away. We go for lunch at the place next to the giant magical Narnia store. Then we go to the giant Narnia store, which just keeps going and going, and where you can buy fancy soap and lotion, old-fashioned chocolates and fruitcake,  Really expensive shoes and boots, really expensive, ugly-ass Ugg flip-flops (why?),  Le Creuset cookware and bougie kitchen gadgets, (I almost bought that because I always just use coconut oil, and then I looked at the ingredients and it's basically...coconut oil), and this abomination, which Collette professes to like but I think she just buys it so she won't have to share (just kidding, she actually likes it, the freak. She's not even Finnish. Wth?), We usually do some Christmas shopping (I a...