Bibliomama

 I'm in a crap place physically. This is not that unusual for me in winter. I have autoimmune issues and am basically strung more tightly than a cheap violin. I try to exercise and stretch enough to not let things get too bad, but exercising in the winter - or just walking Lucy in the winter, or just walking at all in the winter - affects my gait, which goes right to my lower back and jacks everything up and then exercising actually makes it all WORSE, which is VERY ANNOYING. Anyway. I feel a little bit like I can either devote myself full time to not being in pain, or I can work and live my life and be in pain. This happens every winter and I go to a terrible, dark place and think that everything will be terrible forever, and today I remembered that I always think this and then things are not, in fact, terrible forever.  As my good friend who faithfully records positive stuff on Facebook daily often says, Nevertheless, Good Things: February 22:  We went curling. We were ...

  I stole this graphic from San (or possible someone else), please let me know if I'm going down for plagiarism. February 15 - my athletic-trainer son gave me a stretch that immediately made my knee feel much better - our education dollars at work! And Collette came over for a scary movie (Cuckoo - very good, freakin' weird). February 16 - On my eighth husbandless day, Collette invited me over for their Sunday night family dinner. Really good turkey and mashed potatoes and green beans and carrots and corn and really bad Brussels sprouts. This was square in the middle of our three-day snowstorm, so she also sent her son over to shovel me out first. She said he could come home with me too in case the plow had gone by and my driveway was blocked, but I thought we had done enough volunteering of other people for one day, so I chanced it. My street was nearly impassable, but on the plus side this meant the plow had not gone by, so there was no plow row. February 17 - It was Family D...

 This kind of fig , since I've made this post title inscrutable to anyone not in the FIG club.  It's been a bit of a tough week. I'm in the middle of a two-and-a-half-week husbandless stretch, on the heels of a six-month period when he's been gone about half the time. I'd like to think that I am a strong independent woman, but little parts of my body and brain and house and car keep catching fire or shutting down, and I am feeling demoralized and incompetent. An incomplete list of fuckery includes 27 cm of snow over three days - friend's son and neighbour and Sam the Plow Guy all helped, but I tried to shovel a bit more than I could handle, which made my lower back and tweaked knee worse, a badly cut finger due to my own stupidity (don't ask - at least it's not on the middle finger I need to put in my contact this time), a dead car battery twice, a clogged sink, and a worsening sense of dread and gloom. I've had issues with my knee in the past, but i...

 I have been reminded what FIG is meant to stand for, which is Finding Joy in Gratitude. I have come to like and admire Elisabeth enormously, so I am going to overlook her rather egregious erasure of a major word like JOY in the service of a more appealing acronym. I mean, I get it: Fresh Figs has more of a ring than, say, Let's All Fdance a Fjig, or A Cruise of the Norwegian Fjigs. So I will fall in line. February 8 - A nice sunny walk with Lucy, and a picture that captures a blep in the wild - Our annual Valentine's Day Dinner: Guys Cook. Matt's green soup, wedge salad on a skewer and steak frites bites, Dave's shrimp linguine, Mark's cod cake, crab cake and scallop cake with sauces, Tony's quarter duck festive special (that's a Swiss Chalet reference, for the Americans among you), and Michael's I forgot to ask which kind of cake but it was amazing. One of the highlights of the night was Michael insisting on consuming every bit of the monstrous wedge o...

I usually try to have these reviews done by the end of January, which I realize is already late. But in the spirit of my radical self-acceptance endeavour for this winter, I am telling myself it is FINE. Husband is off on his Rome-to-Bali trip - eleven flights over the next 17 days. We're supposed to get 30-40 cm of snow Wednesday night and Thursday. Last time he went away we had snow coming also. When we get blizzarded when he's away I usually use the Touchplow app if I'm not able to stay ahead of the shoveling - I don't mind shoveling, but with the state of my back and my hands I'm not able to stay ahead of the big snow dumps right now. I couldn't sign into the app and I was a bit concerned, and then I gave my head a shake and googled "Ottawa one-time snow removal" - and lo, a veritable plethora of services appeared. Somewhat surprisingly, the very first one I came across didn't appear on the list of 8 best - go figure that something called Plow ...