An Un-Monday Tuesday

 Considering that my two main scheduled events were a doctor's appointment and flu and Covid shots, I had kind of a spectacular day. I went to bed early last night and got a pretty good sleep. The doctor's appointment was early and she was on time. I was a little nervous, but not hugely because I really like my doctor and she has a really good record for listening and trying stuff. I had a couple of things I wanted to ask about and they were both addressed really well, and I remembered to ask her for a new prescription for the orthotics I need to order, which meant I won't have to call and wait on the phone for an hour.

Adulting FTW

I also got smiled at by four old men in the waiting room. And I was walking out of the building and remembered that I had left my nice black cardigan on the chair in the doctor's office, exactly like I thought I was probably going to do when I hung it there, and as I turned around to go back, an assistant was walking out with it to find me.

My doctor's office has moved fairly recently - this was my first visit to the new office - and the new one is close to the main mall we always go to when we mall, which is not that often. But I ordered new Docs, thinking they were exactly the same style and size as the ones I have, and they were not, and I needed to return them. I judged that I had just enough time to get to the mall, return the boots, grab a couple of Christmas shopping things, and get to my vaccine appointment.

Returning the boots was quick and easy. Eve asked for pajama pants for Christmas and Victoria's Secret had a forty percent off everything sale, so I got her a really nice pair. I also got some Twisted Peppermint foaming soap for the powder room because I am behind on Tiny Secret Festive Season. Then grabbed a gift card for the child I'm shopping for in the community giving group.

I was on time almost to the minute for when I needed to leave for my vaccine appointment, but I really wanted a Mango Hurricane. I decided to throw caution to the winds and assume that they would still take me if I was a few minutes late - this is really, really unlike me. And because all the guardrails were off, I said "can I please have a small Mango Hurricane - actually, screw it, can I please have a large Mango Hurricane" - the lovely teenaged girl must have thought "oh, you're a wild woman."

So here I am, bopping through the mall, with my Booster Juice and my Bath and Body Works Christmas soap, like the whitest white girl who ever white girled. I got to my appointment five minutes late, and of course this only meant I had to wait a few minutes less than I would have. The pharmacist said I could do two in one arm or one in each, and I told him to just put them both in my left. The Covid shot went in fine and then the flu shot went in and I gasped and might have said what the fuck, and he burst out laughing and said ha ha, that's why I do the other one first. 

I wandered around the store for my required ten-minute wait, and picked up some Advil, some makeup, some chocolate and a couple of frozen pizzas. I went to the counter with a teetering pile, and the woman said "are we doing a bag?" and I said "no, I believe in myself!"

And she gave me nothing. Nothing! She broke the unbroken string of people treating me like a delightful gift in their day! 

Not gonna lie, it was a bit of a blow. I did not let it harsh my buzz.

Bits and Bobs

 I'm trying really hard not to use post titles like "I Think I Can, I Think I Can" or "Crawling to the Finish Line", because I know I'll go back to past Novembers and find the exact same post titles. Does anyone feel like they're finishing strong? I've felt pretty good from a blogging perspective this month this year, but I am running on fumes at this point.

I am also still reeling from Engie revealing that her library makes people go to a desk and show their card to an actual person to retrieve their holds. What? Why? At my library it's a few rows of shelves in the middle of the main room, and you just find your label - the first four letters of your last name and the last four letters of your library card - and take your books. The machine won't let you check out books that are on hold for someone else so that's not a concern - wait, Engie, do you have to go to a real person to check OUT your books too? Doesn't that just unnecessarily make more work for the library staff? Okay, obviously it's fine, I just really like to dart in and out of the library without anyone seeing or commenting on my pile of holds that can barely fit in my arm-span. What's it like for the rest of you? Am I making too big a thing out of this? It's quite possible I am.

When Angus was in a growth spurt, more than once he gallumphed up the stairs and bounced off both walls to the point that he knocked pictures off. I found this simultaneously infuriating and amusing. Today I chucked a giant package of Costco toilet paper onto the stairs and knocked off the Eve of those pictures where the letters are made out of objects found in the world - like this except mine was from a craft show and I'm a little crestfallen that you can get them on Amazon now - and the frame cracked. Matt has already repaired it once and thinks he can repair it again. Embarrassing, though - I don't even have a growth spurt to blame it on. Well, not one I want to admit to. 

What is Dubai chocolate and why is it suddenly everywhere?

I know habits are very hard to break. I have several habits I have tried to break and have either not successfully broken or have found really really really difficult to break. There are two that were much easier than I expected them to be. The first one was leaving only one space after a period instead of two. I was finally convinced that since I was no longer typing with a manual typewriter there was no reason for the second space. I though it was going to take forever to learn the change. It wasn't hard at all. The other one was not scrolling on my phone in bed when I wake up anymore. I have a weird relationship with sleep and I really never wake up feeling rested, and a few months or a couple of years back I started looking at my phone thinking it might be a nice way to wake up gradually ("oof", Eve winced when I told her this, "rookie mistake.") It was not. It was just an earlier start to doom-scrolling, and my hands would go numb, and I would be even more frustrated with myself by the time I got up. So I decided to stop and just... did. I still scroll more than I would like, but at least I've pushed it later in the day?

Two down, four hundred and ninety thousand to go.

Someone named Julie2343 who sounds like she should be a bot but is not suggested I read The Correspondent on my post about sending postcards - just finished it! I love a good epistolary novel. I love the word epistolary. I don't love the word epistle, though. Not sure if it's the way it sounds or my religious trauma. I'm tired. 

Raise a Reader? You Can Try

In the summer I had dinner with a friend I was extremely close with in grad school, touched base with when I got to Ottawa, and then fell out of touch with and hadn't seen since Eve was about four, so, a long time. It was amazing - actually never mind, I'll do a whole post on that later. But she has two daughters and neither of them are readers and she said she had kind of a hard time with it until one of them had to say cool it, you're making me feel bad and it's not going to change anything.

I'm not sure how I would have felt if neither of my kids was a reader. I know it's a big part of my personality. I loved children's books and had a collection before I even had kids, and reading to them every day was really fun. Eve moved smoothly into chapter books and is definitely what you would consider a reader. With Angus I read one entire Percy Jackson book with him, and it was great, but after Diary of a Wimpy Kid his reading fell off and it didn't really bother me. During one camping trip a few years ago he pilfered my stack of books and took one and since then has been asking me to give him books for Christmas. I think he still only reads a lot on vacation, but that's fine. Would it have bothered me if neither of them read? I honestly don't know.

I am constantly getting frustrated with myself for not being able to lay hands on old pictures - I started organizing all of them last year and then put the mess away for Christmas and then got horrifically depressed in January and here we are again. Anyway, years ago I took a picture at brunch of Angus leaned over a Harry Potter book intently while absently stabbing at pancakes with his other hand and sent it to his grade three teacher saying 'job well done!' I mentioned this to someone a few weeks later and he said indignantly "she SHOWED THE WHOLE CLASS", but he hadn't mentioned it before then so it can't have scarred him that badly. 

I did love the way Eve and her friends talked about our book-stuffed house. I took Eve and a friend to meet the teacher night in middle school because the other mom was busy, and the friend said to their English teacher "their house has books EVERYWHERE. Eve goes into her mom's room and asks for a book and she just GRABS one out of a pile!" She left out that there are so many books there's no room for anything else to be put away properly, so also a win. 

Eve and I like a lot of the same books, and sharing books with her has been kind of magical. We buddy read some of her books in undergrad, I never have trouble finding books to give her for Christmas, and now she recommends books to me, which is a bit trippy. I gave her my old ipad last year and she got into borrowing library ebooks and loved it because then she could turn off her lights except for the little fairy lights and read in the dark and be cozy. 

We both love Miriam Toews, and she has had the weirdest good luck with finding used Toews books on sale at new bookstores. This is the latest one - is it not just stupidly beautiful? It looks like her lamp and the Coach purse I got her for her birthday last year. 

Last week she told me she was going to put a real actual paper book on hold (I guess she wants to be more like Sarah too) and then sent me this picture. We were on Facetime and I said it gave me a tiny bit of a weird feeling seeing her last name, which is different from mine, on the label. 

I'm also a bit jealous that she has an A name so will also be right at the beginning of the holds, rather than an M name which is always, always on the bottom shelf. Have you tried picking up seven books from the bottom shelf? It is inelegant, to say the least. ALSO Also, it's an Olga Tokarczuk book that she is now reading before me. Is that even allowed? 

I Got Nothing

​

Friday

 Struggling a bit with pain and infirmity at the moment. I got new running shoes but my knee is still really painful, so I am getting assessed for new orthotics and buying new boots also, which I would have done at some point anyway, but now I'm doing it not knowing if it will even fix things. I'm also having an issue with my ulnar nerve, which means the outside edge of my left arm and hand are inflamed. This means it's an issue trying to handle books and walk around the library, which, bluntly, sucks.

I got in to see my massage therapist yesterday and she went to town on my legs. I could feel that the muscles around my left knee were looser after. Later in the day I felt really achy and almost drunk, without having consumed alcohol or taken an accidental triple dose of any of my meds (I checked). It's possible it was just a reaction to the intensity of the massage and maybe a delayed reaction from the harrowing drive last Sunday, which I've kind of been waiting for. Since then I've just been really, really tired, and I just remembered that my doctor emailed me that my iron and B12 were low and she had sent some supplements to the pharmacy for me. Did the pharmacy notify me of this? They did not. Did I remember to ask about them when I was just there picking up prescriptions? I did not. I've also been alone in the house for almost two weeks exactly, which tends to make me feel a bit odd by the end.

To balance out the whining, an anecdote from after my massage, when I was driving around doing errands. There's an amazing woman in my neighbourhood who does outreach with unhoused people and collects donations of various kinds for the bags she hands out - packaged snacks, clean socks, blankets, etc. Last year in honour of Nicole's Tiny Secret Festive Season, I gave away Christmas soaps and little decorations on my Facebook community giving group. This was fun, but with the state of things this year I thought I would consciously collect more useful donations to drop off at this woman's donation point which is near my Wednesday school. On the way out to my massage I grabbed a pair of warm socks and mittens I had put aside, and then picked up some snacks while I was grocery shopping and bagged it all together.

It was bright and sunny, which was doubly noticeable because the sun hasn't been out for so long. As I drove into the townhouse complex and parked, there was a bright ray of sun directly on my windshield. I could see a dumpster in the space between two units. Then I thought I could see someone bent over going through the dumpster. This seemed like a horrifying thing to happen upon, although I did think I could just offer them my bag of food and mittens and socks. Then I realized no one was actually standing beside the dumpster but.... dear God, was someone IN the dumpster? But not struggling and not dead, because wasn't that an arm lolling out, with the fingers wiggling in a leisurely manner? 

No, it was not a person in the dumpster (thank fuck). It was a squirrel hanging full-length out of the dumpster preparing to jump down, which looked like an arm. It finally went, which broke the illusion. Then it took off before I could even offer it a mitten or a pepperoni stick. Rude. 

In Which I Try to Be More Like Sarah

 Oh stop laughing, I know I'm nothing like Sarah. What I am is still in my Year of Pillaging the Library on the Regular, which I started after Sarah read the newest Kate Alice Marshall book before I even knew it was a thing, and she said she researched new books and tried to be the first in the hold line, and I thought 'damn, why am I not doing that', and I realized I was shying away from anything I had to physically go to the library for, and then realized this was dumb, so started haunting the New Arrivals lists and putting a million books on hold, with predictable results...

Apologies for the longest run-on sentence ever. Anyway, it's been insane and also delicious. I go to the library every Wednesday after my afternoon school, and return two or three books and pick up seven or ten new ones. Every couple of days I check my account so I know the order I have to read them in - what's overdue first, what's coming due next, what has people waiting for it, etc. I haven't had to return anything without reading it, and I haven't kept anything for more than 21 days overdue (which is when my account gets suspended until I return it). In the past this has stressed me out a bit, but right now it's very enjoyable, it feels like a well-ordered process, and well ordered processes are few and far between in my life.

If I was feeling at all like this was a weird, inadvisable thing to do, I read an article or post recently - dammit, I did not bookmark it and cannot find it - where a librarian was saying 'Borrow all the books! Borrow them even if you don't think you'll read them! Give them a vacation from the library!' It's one of those screamingly obvious things I still needed to be reminded of - more books being borrowed looks better for funding requests. If a book isn't borrowed, it risks being weeded. So yes, I am bringing these books home and letting them sit beside and on top of books they usually don't associate with, and this is all right and good. 

Book dance party!

It's been a thing of joy. I feel like I'm bathing in beautiful words and sentences, with brilliant metaphors and allusions and synecdoches splashing up over the edges and blooping me in the face.

I have mentioned here that I sometimes regret the first time I set a reading goal on Goodreads, because it sometimes gets weirdly in my head, but now that I've done it I can't make myself not do it. I sometimes consult Eve on what she thinks my goal should be - only sometimes, because I often like to pick odd numbers like 111 or 99 or 103, and she hates those - she likes round numbers and multiples of five. She usually sets her goal around 20, like this year, so she suggested that I set mine at 120, seeing as I'm not trying to do a master's degree in biochemistry - so I did. Then her housemate Zoe was over at our house - Zoe is fearsomely goal-oriented and competent and I kind of think she should be running the country. When I mentioned that I was shooting for 120 books because Eve was going for 20, she burst out laughing, and we finally figured out that she misunderstood and thought I was flexing on Eve rather than following her suggestion. 

Due to the whole 'emptying two library shelves every week or so' thing, I was coming up on my goal fast by the beginning of September. I don't know if anyone else does this, but I usually try to make my first book of the year special in some way - it's always a Frances Hardinge book if there's a new one, or something that is auspicious in some way. I try to do the same thing for the book that brings me to my goal. But then I was transcribing book notes - I used to use sticky notes or book darts to mark passages I wanted to remember, but that got really unwieldy, so now I take a screenshot if it's on my ipad or take a picture if it's a paper book, and then I type them up when I have time. I usually write the title of the book on the screenshot or take a picture of the book cover, but sometimes I forget and I come to a passage and have no idea what the book is. I look at successive passages, I rack my brains, and then I google, which usually works if there are names, and sometimes does not and I have to live with the mystery. This time I was able to find out what the book was, but when I looked in Goodreads I had not marked it as Currently Reading or Finished. And when I did so now, I was suddenly at my goal, which was a bit anticlimactic. 

I am coming up on the point where I am going to have to self-defensively suspend all my holds, given that I have returned three or four books and retrieved eight to ten books on hold the past two Wednesdays. I've never been one to blame a bartender for continuing to serve drinks to a drunk person, but I did look at the holds shelf this afternoon and for a second I imagined myself complaining "I was over-served!"

This is a finite experiment. I have books on my shelves at home and on my Kindle that I have been ignoring. This isn't sustainable. I have a measly two kids and half a job and I own zero pairs of barrel jeans and I do NOT look adorable in leopard print and I, sadly, am no Sarah.

I do wipe my bathroom down every morning before I leave, though. 

In Which I Try to Be More Like Jenny

 By running? Like, at all, at any speed, for any distance? Hahahahahahahaha hahahahaha.

No.

I did try to start running a few years ago. Wait, no, many many years ago. I didn't hate it. I mean, not as much as I thought I would. But my knee started complaining hard early on. My friend told me to go to  The Running Room because they would do whatever they could to help you keep running. They didn't, really, just listened to what I was feeling and said "yeah, that's probably not great." My knee clicked audibly while I was walking up stairs for years, and is the first one to start showing signs of arthritis now, so along with the whole problem of my boobs threatening to give me a concussion, that means running isn't going to happen.

But I did finally look up Caroline Girvan's Dead Bug workout (which I'm pretty sure I saw mentioned on Jenny's blog first, although I can't find the reference now).

What a great name, right? It's not a Skinny Girl anything, it's not a Beach Body thing, it's literally what I feel like while working out. And I've been really looking for a good core strength workout because I always feel so crooked and it feels like any improvement in my core would help. 

Can I do it with weights yet? Nope. Can I even finish it every time (it is very short)? Uh-uh. I do it until my sciatica starts pinging and then I stop. But it feels like a really good combination of effective and difficult-but-not-punishingly-so. Sweat drips off me while I do it. I usually do yoga first and then put it in at the end, or do it after my walk. 

I've read multiple articles lately about how important strength training is as we age, for maintaining metabolic rate and muscle mass, increasing mitochondrial function and stimulating the creation of new, healthy mitochondria ("For fuck's sake, now I have to worry about my mitochondria?" my friend Nat said, and yeah, relatable). I was in a good gym routine including weights before Covid, but I haven't been able to get back to working out off-site. Fortunately there were some things that I was already doing, and I'm trying to add in more. The Dead Bug workout I can do on my back, so it doesn't hurt my bad knee or my bad hands.

Thank-you Jenny! I guess I would slightly rather be reminded of you while running on a seaside path with the wind in my hair rather than wiggling on the floor like an overturned cockroach, but we work with the tools we are given!