The Week

As far as blogging goes, I'm currently feeling a bit like I've been following my thinner, in-better-shape friends to a lot of fitness classes lately and now I'm lying on the kitchen floor with a broomstick wondering if I should try to poke the Advil off the top of the fridge or the cookies from the cupboard shelf first. 

This is a slight exaggeration. I was in a bit of a blogging rut - could go for weeks without blogging, was finding most of the people on my blogroll had disappeared and was wondering if I should pack the whole thing in. And then I found a couple of people through NaBloPoMo a couple of years ago and found a couple of people through other blogs and it's felt like a thrilling resurgence - there's something so heartwarming and energizing about having a community, and being able to riff on other people's posts and feed on their vigor. 

But man, some of you people are beasts, and I am going to have to pace myself, or, I don't know, do keyboard workouts or something (I hurt my shoulder doing the yoga that is supposed to help my shoulder stop hurting this week - I am a delicate flower).

It was a good week, on balance. Weird from the being-married point of view, given that my husband was away for a week, quarantined himself for a week, and is currently in sunny Vietnam, while yesterday brought hours of blowing wet snow and slush build-up to Canada's capital yesterday. It's a work trip, totally justified, and I have no kids to wrangle solo at this point so I really have nothing to complain about, but I still rather feel like telling him where to shove his banh-mi.

Working hard, or just taunting your wife? 

Whyyyyyyy

Work was pretty good. I made a couple of wardrobe miscalculations - I wore a top that could only be termed a blouse on Monday, thinking that it was gauzy enough that it wouldn't be too warm, but then realized it had zero breathability. On Thursday I wore a dress with tights, which I don't recall being a big problem before but by the end of the day the tights felt like slimy sweaty leg-wrappers. 

My classes were all really fun. I have two grade six classes on Wednesday that are almost freakishly lovely - they all say thank-you, they tell me to have a good day, they compliment my hair, they thank me profusely when I help them find a book. The grade two class I read two on Thursdays is doing a unit on fractured fairy tale so we read Prince Cinders, a gender-swapped Cinderella where Cinders is a scrawny hairless prince with big, hairy brothers, and the fairy godmother is a dirty fairy who manages to make a tiny car that Cinders has to use as a one-foot skateboard, the suit for the ball is a swimsuit, and when he tries to make Cinders 'big and hairy', he turns him into a gorilla. There was much shrieking laughter and merriment. 

The kids are good. As an internship for credit in his Master's program, Angus is acting as pitching coach for his former baseball team at Elmira College. The team is in a growing year, and has struggled, particularly since Angus pretty much WAS their pitching in his senior year last year, but they've won a few games, and a notable victory was their first-ever no-hitter. 

He is the tallest coach

Eve went to a very terrible Engineering musical one night last week and a very good Arts and Science Musical (ArtSpy, hee hee), and also had the Arts and Science formal and two midterms and a doctor's appointment for a recurring rash she's been dealing with, and we FaceTimed on multiple occasions and she didn't cry ONCE. 

Did you catch that Suz and I were doing the SAME PUZZLE at the SAME TIME? I am simultaneously willing to accept that this is not statistically significant and also insistent that you all join in me in finding this an utterly shocking and delightful coincidence. 

Then I did this one. 

Now I'm doing this one. I've only blown my curfew and stayed up until two a.m. and had to hobble away from the table once. It is incredibly beautiful and also very, very difficult, and I am uncertain about in which proportions it is calming my anxiety or stoking my obsessive tendencies. I should probably not be allowed to puzzle when my husband isn't home and can't tell me to go to bed. Well, sometimes he texts me to go to bed, but that's easier to ignore (just stick some more bun cha in your gob and leave me to my visual-spatial improvement activies, bucko).