Too-Tired-To-Be-Surly Thursday

I'm tired of winter. I don't mind the cold all that much, but even that's annoying because I can't wear a winter coat in the car because I get too hot, so I just throw it in the backseat in case I get stranded somewhere (I'm heat-intolerant, not stupid) and wear a sweater, and strangers keep asking me where my coat is. And my hands get hot if I wear mittens too long, so I take them off and then my skin gets so dry my knuckles bleed because there's no moisture anywhere in the city. I went into Pennington's yesterday and was trying on a shirt and the lady knocked on the door and asked how I was doing and I said fine, except I'm afraid I might spontaneously combust from all the static. When she handed me my bill an actual spark flew between our hands.

I'm tired of all the stuff in my house. I keep cleaning and reorganizing and throwing stuff out and giving stuff away and I STILL can't get it to look the way I feel like it should look. When you walked in the door of the house I grew up in, if you looked around there were clean surfaces and well-placed furniture (ugly floral-patterned beige - it was the seventies, after all - but well-placed) and, I don't know, rake marks in the rug. It was neat and tidy. I don't think I've lived anywhere tidy since I moved out of that house. Why can't I achieve tidiness? Is tidiness just not my destiny?

I'm tired of my hair. For a while I had figured out what to get my stylist to do with it and it was pretty good - not great, but pretty good. Then either I stopped explaining it properly or she stopped understanding, or my hair underwent some weird middle-aged metamorphosis so it doesn't work anymore, and I'm a loser who can't do my hair again. I will never achieve a polished look. Granted, I was never going to work on Wall Street anyway, but I'd like to feel like if I DID want to work on Wall Street, it would be my lack of ambition or inability to do simple arithmetic or tendency to cry when yelled at that would hold me back, not my stupid hair.

I'm tired of wearing a bra. I don't like not wearing one either. I wish my boobs were removable. Yesterday I drove Angus to  school, then went to the eye doctor, then went grocery shopping, then came home and shoveled the driveway before going in, which meant I was still wearing a pretty bra. The pretty bra's underwire ends scraped the skin beside my underarms raw before I was finished (refer back to: I'm tired of winter/ no moisture anywhere in the city). I finished shoveling, went in, took off my bra, got the dog and took her outside to pee. The dog, who has whimpered and shivered and cried to go back in every single other time we take her outside, suddenly decided that OUTSIDE IS AWESOME and we should go prancing down the street and frolic in snowbanks and sniff chunks of dirty ice. Which was all well and good, except I thought we were just going out for a minute and now I was walking braless down the street towards my neighbours who were out shoveling their snow. And no, I wasn't wearing a jacket (refer back to: I'm tired of winter and never wear a winter coat). I explained to the dog that Anna and Elsa were frozen and not ready to be introduced to the neighbours and dragged her back home.

I'm tired of solo parenting. Only one more untidy, unpolished, polysporin-on-my-knuckles-and-armpits sleep before my husband gets home from Japan.

This Performance Totally Unenhanced

I'm drowning in stupid school assignments, and the puppy gets up at five or six and then she goes back to sleep but I usually don't, and Angus is on pitching rest because his elbow hurts and physio should help but he's worried and frustrated so I'm sad and frustrated. And he has an infected ingrown toenail and we had to get his kidneys checked because of the bloodwork because of his acne medication, and I had to take my dad for cataract surgery, so I've visited a goodly proportion of the hospitals and doctors' offices in this area recently. So I'm taking it a little bit easy right now, which I'm almost okay with. I got a fair bit done in the basement in January and anything major there is on hold, although sometimes I go down and do ten minutes of Swistle's little bit of something. Tonight I cleaned out a bag of Christmas gift bags, packaged them together and put all the wrapping paper in the now-empty long bag. Every few days I walk fairly slowly on the treadmill for half an hour. Eve and I went to a play that her friend had a small part in at Angus's school last week and it was fun.

My contacts keep giving me pink eye, which is kind of a first world problem, and I have new glasses that I like quite a bit, but I hate wearing glasses to work out and I'd like to have the option not to wear them occasionally when I'm dressing up. I have an appointment next week to investigate what the hell is up with that.

I'm in a squirrelly reading place; once Lucy's in her crate I can only read on the ipad because if the light is on she won't go to sleep (thank god I didn't get a dog before I had an ipad), and I feel completely daunted by the prospect of reading anything weighty, so I keep reading short stories and YA even though I said I was going to take a break from YA, but I HAVE A BABY DOG AND WE'RE IN NUCLEAR WINTER OVER HERE SO SHUT UP OKAY? Although please learn from my mistakes and do not, under any circumstances, start THIS particular YA train wreck. It sucks you in with a gorgeous cover and an interest-piquing premise and ends in a hot mess.

Anyway, tonight we managed to have dinner together at the table, then we were in the family room while Angus was icing his elbow watching Sportscenter and Matt was reading the paper and I was trying to get the dog to fetch her ball and Eve was reading the second City of Ember book on the couch. She would glance up periodically at the tv, as they were doing a piece on Alex Rodriguez and his use of performance-enhancing drugs. At one point a date span was flashed onscreen, as well as a front page with the headline "Regrets: He Has a Few". Eve burst out "that's so mean! He just died, and he was only, like, sixteen!" To which we all replied, "Huh?" And she said "it said 1996-2000". And Matt said "that was his career, not his lifespan, and you need to check your facts AND your math."

Dear February: Whatever you need to take to improve this performance, PLEASE DO IT FORTHWITH.

Oil Changes and Attitude Adjustments

I saw this great tweet the other day:

I agree. Those stereotypes are offensive and often untrue. What do you do, then, if you're a woman who is not, in fact, a terribly confident driver or a whiz at long division, sine waves and completing the square? I'm still not the stereotype - I don't weave all over the road, I don't run over things with gay abandon, I don't generally run into things (apart from that one unfortunate incident with the signpost and the back bumper, but my husband was away, I was short on sleep and it wouldn't have cracked off if it wasn't so cold, THE REPAIR MAN SAID IT, shut up). My kids know not to come to me with their math homework, but it's not because I'm too pretty or that I think numbers are dumb - math just doesn't happen to be an area I excel in. Sorry, an area in which I excel (I AM supposed to be not bad at this word business). I just accept, I guess, that I CAN drive and do math (sort of ), I just enjoy other things more.

When I started taking vehicles in for servicing, I was always kind of embarrassed and tense about not really knowing anything. And then one day I thought FUCK it - who cares? I'm paying them to know this stuff FOR me. I think it would be awesome to be a woman and know all about cars. I think it's quite possible that a guy would find it hot if a woman knew a lot about cars. I personally find it a little hot if a woman knows about cars. I'm just not that woman. I don't know how an internal combustion engine works. I don't even know if cars HAVE internal combustion engines, 'internal combustion engine' is just a phrase floating around in my head. I also don't know what a catalytic converter is, or how a Geiger counter works, although some of the women at my World Trivia Night table did (and yeah, it was a little hot).

So now when I need an oil change or something, I show up, I park my car somewhere, I go in and say this is what I'm here for, where should I go? And they tell me exactly where to put the car, and then I sit in a comfortable chair and read or drink tea with Pam until the car is ready, and then I pay them and say thank-you and drive away.

Today I had to go get winter tires put on the Rav 4. Pam was working, so I was all by myself. I drove in the way they told me to, then got out and the woman (who knew a lot about cars) at the service desk asked me if our winter tires were on rims. I didn't know. Then she asked me something else about other parts, and I said look, I know nothing except that my husband said we negotiated the winter tire installation as part of the lease. She said no problem, how about we check the cargo space in your trunk? Now, until last week I had no idea that we HAD such a thing, but thanks to the incident with the FUSB, I at least didn't end up looking at her blankly and then having her have to show me the little pull tab in the trunk that lifts up to reveal the storage space. We opened it up, and she said "oh, what's that plastic bag?" I pulled it out and she said "ma'am, I believe we've found your nuts."

Then we made out on the hood. Okay, no we didn't, but what can I say, I like a woman who knows her way around my cargo space.

Surly Tuesday: I'll Complain About the Snow if I Bloody Well Feel Like It

To everyone on Facebook saying "quit whining about the snow, it happens every year, you should be ready for it by now" - FUCK OFF. Unless you're someone I know and like, because I haven't bothered to go back and check who actually said it. If I know and like you - sod off (I'm sufficiently fired up that you still get some kind of expletive containing an 'off' directed at you, but we're still friends).

A lot of things happen every year. We get colds. We get stomach bugs. I get seasonal depression. I have a snow brush in my car that has the head on the wrong way - perpendicular to the handle instead of parallel, like a toothbrush, which means that it's been designed by some disciple of Satan to pull snow down on me instead of brushing it away anywhere useful, WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN MAKE THIS KIND OF SNOW BRUSH AND OFFER IT FOR SALE??? I claim my right to complain about all of these in a timely and spirited fashion (just ask my husband, the hapless buyer of the aforementioned FUSB (Fucking Useless Snow Brush).

Complaining is one of the pleasures and comforts of life. Everybody has shit going on. Just because somebody else's shit isn't the particular kind of shit that gets to you doesn't mean you get to tell them to shut up about it (without being considered a big jerk). In certain very specific cases - say, someone very very rich is on their yacht being waited on hand and foot, with their loving and faithful spouse by their side, surrounded by their four beautiful children whom they had no trouble conceiving, and they complain that their gold lamé bikini is chafing? Maybe, MAYBE, you should tell them to take a breath and re-evaluate. Otherwise? Cork it.

I think of complaining as vaguely akin to perspiring when it's hot. You perspire, and then a breeze or a fan blows on the perspiration and cools you off so you don't die of spontaneous combustion or something. Similarly, something crappy happens, you complain, friends offer sympathy and commiseration and you don't explode or sink into a boggy mire of despondence. It's a time-honoured tradition.

I get that it's not cool if someone does nothing but complain, especially if there are things they could do to improve their situation. I get that perspective is sometimes useful and that other people often have it much worse. But in the full flush of that cold, or stomach bug, or seasonal depression, or first day driving in the snow with clenched fists and knotted stomach, how much of a percentage of a fuck do I give about perspective? A VERY, VERY LOW FUCK PERCENTAGE.

Moving to Hawaii isn't a viable option for many people who live in places with long, cold winters. Our jobs and families are here. Some of us look really bad in bikinis. And we love where we live, despite the fact that for a good chunk of the year it feels like the outside is trying to kill us (come ON, that thing where Mother Nature drifts down a gorgeous soft white fleecy blanket of snow, and then drops the temperature fifteen degrees so everything turns sharp and chunky and if you slip and fall you might stab yourself in the jugular? That is a HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT) . So we stay, and occasionally we complain. Lord help you if you try to stop us.

Some things that happened in September

School started. My kids wore this on their first day.

I wanted Eve to wear this.

But I didn't insist on it. I feel pretty good about that.

Three week-ends ago, we went to our friends' cottage. There was a difference of opinion on whether or not it was still swimming weather.

My son was allowed in the knife-throwing gang even though he didn't wear the requisite navy blue hoodie. 

He also took a sharp left turn in the backpack department. He told me which website to go to, picked a black one, then suddenly said "no, wait - get that one". The colour is called "Coral Peaches Wild At Heart". And he uses it every day. 

When the kids went back to school, I started trying to organize some stuff around the house. First, I tackled the cookbook cabinet.

I could have sworn that we'd only lived here since 1999, but apparently I was wrong - clearly we moved in sometime during the 1950s.

Seriously?

What if you don't care about making it attractive? Even LESS of a limit?

I could have sworn I blogged about the time in the spring when I came home from the one goddamned time I was out when my mom delivered Eve home after school, only to realize that this meant my mom went downstairs into my laundry room to put the frozen fruit she had brought me from Costco in the freezer. 

Unless you have a mother like mine, and a freezer like mine in a laundry room like mine, you can't possibly understand the terror this struck into my heart. I looked at Eve and she nodded sympathetically and said " 'the ice around the sides is THIS THICK. You can't even MOVE the basket! This hasn't been defrosted in YEARS'. I think you're going to be getting a call."

So I defrosted that motherfucker like....a motherfucker. 

...leading to one of my most-liked Facebook statuses of all time.

Two week-ends ago, we went to Toronto for a reunion of the weird little class my husband was with in his high school semester at the Ontario Science Centre. We drove down Friday, and we were supposed to check into our hotel and then immediately leave for a restaurant downtown. I was tired. We got to the hotel and I saw this:

Then I rechecked the agenda and saw that the evening's activities were supposed to include board games. I pecked my husband on the cheek, grabbed a double handful of Michael Marshall Smith and ordered room service. It was blissful.

The next day we went to the Science Centre and hung out and had dinner with a bunch of fun, goofy, geeky, hyper-intelligent people. 

(several of whom also had very nice racks).

On the Sunday, we were at a brunch at my husband's former girlfriend's house (not as awkward as it sounds). At one point, we were joking about how we both always forget our anniversary. Someone asked when it was. I said "September 21st". We kept talking for a moment, and then I said "it's totally September 21st today, isn't it" and she said "It is, but I was going to be cool about it."

Last week-end we went to Port Sydney for my husband's cousins wedding. We got home and my husband left for North Carolina and I got a cold and tonight I was making Angus's strawberry/blueberry smoothie for the morning and spilled the most extravagant purply-red spill all over the entire freaking kitchen (Angus said "I'll have toast"). And this week-end I am going to Blissdom, which will be wonderful, as soon as I get less sniffly and do some laundry so I have enough clean underwear to be blissful. There will be Hannah, and Nicole, and lentils (mixed somewhat bizarrely with carnivals), and if there are board games, well, I can always go read in my room.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to wash the blueberries off my feet. 

Things To Do While Camping When It's Too Cold To Swim

Go on the Dunes Walk

Pose with your friends on top of a sand dune

Embrace your friend warmly on top of a sand dune

No wait, that's not what they're doing...

Okay, try to throw your friend OFF the sand dune

...then drop him

...and run away

Climb a tree. On a dune

Do bunny ears. On yourself. Because YOLO

Sit your ass down because Collette says to sit your ass down until someone takes your picture. Possibly related: climbing sand dunes is really freaking hard

Realize you have no idea where the path is and begin to feel like a pack of exiled Egyptians with no manna in sight

Find your way back to the parking lot with no small measure of relief and empty a good part of the dunes out of your shoes

Go to the movies

Photo bomb your daughter...

...repeatedly

Build sand castles

Spend quality time with a book and some popcorn

by a campfire

Play games

 

(Not me, to be clear. Trying to learn cribbage always makes me wonder why people don't read more)

Snuggle a dog. For companionship AND warmth

Have a tomahawk-throwing contest, because what could go wrong? (Angus started kicking dirt around saying "I need a mound")

Have a nap

Play volleyball without a net

Collapse in hilarity watching the "how many teenagers does it take to set up a volleyball net" game

Collapse in further hilarity upon realizing that, instead of volleyball, the teenagers are going to try to play badminton

...in very high winds

...which is really, really hard

Swim anyway

Camping Report

So last week, we went camping. Car camping, which camping purists would dispute as real camping, and there were comfort stations (which Eve said was a really prissy term for a stone building with a toilet) and showers, BUT we slept in a tent instead of spending the day and then driving to a hotel, like this time and the time before. Of course, since this was the first time we booked a site (and were actually going to use it - we booked one last year, but something came up), we cursed the forecast, and I fully expected that our friends would yank us from our vehicle and sacrifice us to the weather gods the minute we got there. The weather wasn't great, but it threatened rain more than it rained, and we had a great time anyway.

Things I Didn't Hate That I Totally Thought I Would Hate:

1) Sleeping in a tent. The last time I slept in a tent was twenty or so years ago, on a canoe trip with Matt's lab group - he didn't actually come because he was writing his thesis. I was on a pitifully thin piece of foam in Matt's stupid compact sleeping bag that I could barely fit my boobs in, sunburned and sore from paddling all day, so it was basically seven or eight hours of misery. People have been telling me for years that the air mattresses they have now are more comfortable than you'd expect. I would nod and smile and think "you're tripping, but that's okay, I'll never have to find out for sure." Well, guess what? These air mattresses, at least, are WAY more comfortable than I expected (not sponsored). I love that you don't have to foot-pump them, I love that they blow up fast, and when I got into the tent and crawled onto it, it didn't make me feel like a whale flopping onto a waterbed, which is how I'd kind of envisioned it. We also had Roots sleeping bags, I don't know why, Matt went to Canadian Tire for everything last year and must have been drawn in by the fetching ochre shade of all the boxes. Anyway, they were really comfortable too. I didn't sleep all that well anyway, because I generally don't when I'm away from home, but even when I was lying awake I was perfectly comfortable and content, listening to the waves crashing all the way from the beach.

2) Using an outhouse. We were slightly far from the comfort station, so in the middle of the night or when you were hanging at someone's site, the outhouse was much closer. I had thought beforehand that I would walk any distance at any time of the day or night to avoid the outhouse, but enh - I'm lazy.

3) Not shaving anything for three and a half days. It might have actually been too cold for body hair to grow.

4) Not showering before bed. I'm neurotic. I'm a creature of habit. I get hot a lot. I thought it would be really uncomfortable to either hike to the comfort station before bed or go to bed without showering. We set up a basin on the end of our picnic table and I'd just wash my face and splash freezing cold water over a few other parts before bed, and it was all good. I know it's stupid, but this was huge for me.

Things I Kind of Did Hate:

1) Washing dishes in cold water. Matt did most all of the cooking, and I would try to help with the dishes, but only if he'd heat up water. All that slimy stuff in a tub of cold water? Barf.

2) Not being able to find things. We had to keep all the food in the van (more on this later) and our clothes too because our tent was only big enough for the beds and my CPAP and a watermelon, and Matt had packed the van and kept reorganizing things, so every time I was looking for chairs or towels or a can opener or ham,  I was digging through the van yelling at Matt "which cooler?" or "which bag?"

Things I Hated That I Didn't Think I Would Hate:

1) Getting drunk in the dark. I figured I would get over most of my bedtime concerns by just drinking excessively every night. But then, the first night especially, I realized that it would be dark, and it would be hard enough to get around and find stuff WITHOUT being additionally incapacitated. I did get over this somewhat by the time we left.

Things I Loved that I Always Love:

1) The campfire. There are very few times when I can just sit still without reading or folding laundry or straightening stuff or fiddling around on a computer. If I'm staring at water or fire, I'm good. Surrounded by people I like, trading silly stories, funny one-liners and idle thoughts? Even better. I even ate a toasted marshmallow, which I don't usually like, and it was really good.

2) The beach. Even in the cold.

3) The drive-in. We go every year (on Carload Thursday) and we were afraid it might be rained out this time, but the weather was perfect for it - no bugs. We wrapped up in sleeping bags and watched Guardians of the Galaxy which kicked tons of ass. Bonus - our plentiful nutritionally valueless camping snacks were within arm's reach in the back of the van (as long as Matt was there to tell us what they were beside or under).

The bus is the ticket booth!

4) Hanging with these clowns. It's always a kick.

I WENT CAMPING, you guys! This gets me out of trying new stuff for at least half a decade, right?

May Require Seasoning

We have some friends who moved to Australia this summer, so this is their first snow-less Christmas season. They profess to be overjoyed at this. Which I don't disbelieve at all, but I can't really empathize. We had quite a bit of snow on Wednesday, and it was windy and cold and I had to take the kids to the dentist and I slid through one intersection and it was a pain in the ass parking and slopping in there with our boots and everything... and I was just ludicrously happy. Today it took me and Eve half an hour to walk home from the bus stop, which is just at the end of the street. She flung herself at every snowbank, slid belly down onto driveways, climbed the highest ones and bellowed that she was the queen of the castle and, well, you know what that makes me, but it was still enjoyable.

I'm convinced that part of my depression in November was that we didn't have a proper fall. It rained so much that there just weren't enough of those clear, sweet, sharp days where the air is clean and colours seem brighter. I think I need the seasons to change.

This makes me wonder, though, what would happen if I moved somewhere where seasons didn't change, where the weather was more or less the same all the time. Would I be a different person? Would my crazy roller-coaster bumper-car moods smooth out? Can seasonal affective disorder even exist where there are no seasons? And if this was the case, if I would be sailing a less turbulent emotional sea, would that be something I would want?

One of the things I really liked about The Cellist of Sarajevo was that it made me understand how people can love a place, a homeland, so much that they won't leave it, even when staying means they live under the most stifling, deprived, terrifying conditions imaginable. I guess this also explains why people refuse to leave their home even when their are no jobs available.

Few people actually get the chance to determine their ideal place to live and then live there. The people who consider it important enough to do this no matter what are often courageous and admirable. They're not like me, though. I don't know that this is the perfect place for me to live. It aggravates my allergies. It's humid in the summer. The whole language-rights debate spikes my blood pressure on a regular basis. But the seasons change, my husband has a good job, my kids go to a great school, and we have some wonderful friends. I don't know if we'll stay here forever. But for now, I'm happy enough, icy winds, big snowbanks and all.

Wordless Wednesdays: Be Careful What You Wish For

I WAS thinking more along the lines of a gentle snowfall of fat, white flakes on a day so still you could hear every flake land...


NOT so much for 60-kilometre winds and 15 centimetres on dentist-appointment day...

BUT I did ask for it. Here's to you, Amber -- hope it's balmy in your area today (I almost said 'around your parts' but that seemed rude). Guess I'll get out the Christmas cards.

Happy Wednesday.