NaBloPoMo Day 15: Living Here

 I'm sorry for confusing you, Swistle - it was "one day to halfway", which is today, which is halfway, unless I've lost the plot again, which you could all be forgiven for suspecting.

Susan from the Pacific Northwest - I am so happy I get to keep calling her that because honestly it's just really fun to say in my head - said it's okay to keep calling her that because she loves living there. Isn't that nice to hear someone say? Do you think a lot of people feel that way about where they live? It made me consider whether I love living here, and what 'here' actually means. 

Ottawa? I don't love everything about Ottawa, but I really like a lot of things. It's bigger than the place I grew up in, which is good, and it's smaller than the place we moved from, which is also good. Living in Toronto was fun for a couple of years, but it felt more manageable to raise kids here. We have nice trails to walk on close by, a good art gallery and arts centre less than half an hour away. We have good hospitals, which resulted in my parents moving close by when the kids were toddlers which was just a dizzying piece of good fortune. 

Canada? I love Canada quite a lot. Not in a starry-eyed, rose-coloured glasses kind of way - we have a lot of things that badly need to be addressed. Sometimes I dream about moving to Finland or Sweden (or I did before the whole Covid thing). I try to embody a lot of the features Canada is generally known for - kindness, friendliness, open-mindedness, acceptance of many cultures. I used to love snow more than I do now. I could go on, but it's probably a subject that needs deeper thinking than a post halfway through NaBloPoMo is going to get. The biggest drawback is probably that Canada's really big, and stupid geography gets in the way of seeing my friends and other family enough. 

Ontario? Honestly, I feel a little wishy-washy about living in Ontario. Whenever I visit my BFF in Halifax I have to work hard to force myself to come back home - if I had a legit chance to live near the ocean I would take it in a heartbeat. I like Ontario because it's familiar, but I've visited every other province except P.E.I and Newfoundland and found admirable features in all of them. 

My house? It's a good house. It takes all the crap I throw at it with a fair amount of grace. It was a good place for the two of us to grow into the three of us and the four of us and a good place for the four of us to hunker down for the lockdown from March to August 2020. There's enough room for everyone to retreat to their own corners and the big family room for everyone to come together for Die Hard and Yahtzee and trash talk. The kitchen could be a little bigger. It doesn't have quite enough room for bookshelves, but I'm not sure any house would. Oh! Here's the after picture of the bookshelf with the CDs gone.

I like it. I keep gazing lovingly at it in the way I always do when I've newly arranged something. Then it eventually fades into the background, which is as good an argument as any for moving stuff around now and then. 

We also have really, really good neighbours (I have literally borrowed a cup of sugar from Yvonne - also tomato sauce and a shit-ton of margaritas), and can both drive to work in under ten minutes (I commuted from Hamilton to Burlington for a couple of years before we moved to Toronto and I hate anything that can remotely be called a 'commute' and never want to do it again). We can walk to all our best friends' places (and sometimes stumble drunkenly home), which is kind of a coincidence because we were all friends before we all lived in these houses. And it put us in the right baseball region for Angus to be on the team that went to the Little League World Series - when I think that we could have ended up playing for Kanata... *visceral shudder* (kidding. Kind of). It all adds up to a pretty good quality of life.

This was fun. Susan from the Pacific Northwest, you are a stellar addition to my blog world on so many levels. 

NaBloPoMo Day 14: Bizarre Bazaar Findings

I could say I'm one day to halfway done if stupid November didn't have thirty-one stupid days instead of thirty. 

I just took Lucy for a walk and got caught in the rain but up until then it's been a great week-end. Yesterday I got up and was about to plunge right back into Organizer Mode, and then I thought, wait, what if I just.... sit in a chair and read for a bit first? So I did. THEN I plunged back into Organizer Mode and got a bunch of stuff done and then Jody (HI JODY) came over and we chilled on the couch while Lucy jumped all over Jody and both Eve and Davis (Jody's daughter who is Eve's close friend who is at school in Montreal) FaceTimed us at basically the same time even though they didn't know we were together, so we had a lovely somewhat garbled four-way conversation. Then Jody went home and I accidentally stayed up until 2:30 a.m. in Organizer Mode (oops, Matt was right on the not sleeping, but at least I saw a people). 

Today Jody picked me up and we went to the last day this year of the One World Bazaar, which was crazy fun. We have this thing where Jody always has pants mints because she keeps them for Jack the Horse, and I frequently have bra mints because when I can't carry water while walking my mouth gets dry. We were in the first part of the bazaar and she got something out of her purse and found mints and she handed me one saying "do you want a mint? I promise it hasn't been in my pants", so some other people who went to the One World Bazaar today have a good story for their blog. 

There are rooms and rooms of cool artisan stuff and recycled glass stuff and stuff made out of wood and coconuts. There were also many, many wooden decorated ducks scattered throughout. 

Superhero Ducks:

This little dude who I came perilously close to bringing home with me:

Bride ducks. Santa ducks. 

Then this shelf of wooden figures, with the usual suspects.

More superheroes:

I just noticed the egg thing. Wtf?

Harry Potter, Groot:

And then a random....

...frog in a bikini.

I am exceedingly weak when it comes to carved soapstone figures, and I bought two of them and if you ask me I will post pictures of them tomorrow, but right now I'm sitting down and my knees hurt and I'm too lazy to go get them to photograph and also I'm not sure about posting pictures of them so close to the frog in a bikini, which I honestly find a tiny bit disturbing.

Then we got Thai food at one of the food stalls and came home and had lunch and then she helped me decide to get rid of more stuff and I bagged a bunch of stuff to give away on my Facebook giveaway group. Last night I looked at the bookshelves in the family room and realized there was an entire shelf full of CDs. I don't even think we have a CD player anymore. I asked on Facebook whether I should get rid of them. Not everyone was in the "do it, CDs are so last decade camp", but most people were. I kept a few just because of my sentimental attachment to the time I remember buying them or because someone gave them to me or because I wasn't sure the music would be easily findable online, but mostly I cleared out an ENTIRE SHELF and was giddy with the possibilities. 

Here is the before picture. After picture to come after I fiddle a little more.



I also took some photo boxes of the bottom shelf, but they might be going back on, not entirely sure. I'm in that annoying 'moving things from room to room and sometimes back again' stage of the whole enterprise - it's much more satisfying just shoveling shit out the door. 

Three days til Matt gets home, and I'm a little nervous about getting things to a presentable state - not because he'll be disapproving, just because it feels less annoying when I'm the only one living here. I don't work until Wednesday though, so if my body holds up I should be able to get a fair bit done. 

Happy Sunday! 

Edit: I posted this on Facebook and my friend Julie (HI JULIE) gently reminded me that November does, in fact, only have thirty days. Well, that shit's covered in the memory loss post, *shrug*.

NaBloPoMo Day...13?

Oops, I forgot to post. I will say this, Susan from the Pacific Northwest is a bloody genius (I promise I will just call you Susan after this).

Look at my brilliant new light bulb! Excuse the messy table, I am still sorting through stuff, which I can do effectively now because of my brilliant new lightbulb!

Also, my brilliant, hilarious niece who often texts me random brilliant, hilarious thoughts, sent me this:

NaBloPoMo Day 12: Pursuits Trivial and Tidy

 It was World Trivia Night - the second one we did virtually. I was initially bummed that I wasn't going to get to see my team and have our traditional table full of junk food and leftover Halloween candy, but today I finally felt cold for the first time since last spring and almost fell asleep reading before dinner, so I was actually kind of happy I didn't have to leave the house. The virtual ones are ten rounds of five questions each instead of ten questions which it always was before. The first couple of rounds were almost embarrassingly easy and we were like "c'mon, give us a bit of a challenge", and then bitterly regretted our hubris. We still did quite well - came in third, not even tied with like ten other teams, which is usually the case. 

The most entertaining aspect is that there's both a general chat and a table chat with just members of your own group, but whenever it changes from you zooming with your group to the presenter taking over your screen it defaults to the general chat. Inevitably some poor schmo ends up posting answers in the general chat. Someone named Jon did it early on until someone else commented "Jon ur a doofus". Some poor sap named Adrian tripped up multiple times, and when s/he finally stopped and the questions were getting hard, someone posted "could have used Adrian's help on that last round". 

I am six days into a major re-org and purge mission. Ten minutes after Matt left I emptied the linen closet and started chucking stuff down the stairs. It's killing my back because once I get going I don't want to sit down and lose momentum, and I know I have a short window before the area of my brain responsible for this frenetic need to declutter goes dark again. It's like my processing center just works completely differently for most of the year. I swear I went through the linen closet two months ago and there was literally nothing that didn't seem essential. This time? There are TOP SHEETS to my kids' linen sets. My kids don't USE top sheets. WHY AM I KEEPING THE TOP SHEETS? What is someone else going to do with only my top sheets? NOT MY PROBLEM, BUCKO.

In the family room we have one of those IKEA coffee tables that has six cubbies under the top surface. This seemed cute as fuck in the store, but it's really only cute if you only put one thing in each little cubby - otherwise it's just more crap that everyone can see. I have less tolerance for clutter than I did when I was younger, and I want the visible surfaces in my home to be less strewn with crap. However, I am still charmed by tiny beautiful things. Little robot charms. Tiny pictures of snowflakes drawn by three-year-old Eve. Bird stickers. I've decided that the answer is to get rid of as much as I can bear to and then aggressively containerize the rest. 

As usual, I forgot to take a 'before' photo, in very Un-Swistle-like fashion (HI SWISTLE), but trust me, this is a vast improvement. In one of the cubbies, I found this:

It's my first workbook from when I started my library tech diploma in 200...6? With the encouraging stickers that the kids made for me that read "Mommys cool!", "I love Mommy!", "my mom has bruwn hare" and what should be "my mom likes blue", just in case you thought they were documenting my experiences licking a psychedelic toad or something. Okay wait, a psychedelic toad is just regular boring toad-coloured? We had a stuffed toad that was blue and green and I thought it was the play version of a psychedelic toad. Why would anyone lick a toad that just looks like a regular toad? I mean why would anyone lick a toad anyway, but I thought for sure it would be because it was funky coloured. Anyway, I recycled the book but kept the stickers. They're in a box.

Then I went through the bookshelves out in the living room. Sometimes when I'm going through old stuff I feel embarrassed and condemnatory of younger me for accumulating so much useless crap. Sometimes it's more like a fun archaeological dig, trying to puzzle out the culture and psychology of an earlier civilization. I found a couple of elaborate coffee-table type books that I bought when I worked at the bookstore in Toronto, because when they were being returned we could buy them at forty percent off, and a lot of them I've never really taken the time to go through carefully. At least I'll have something to do when the couch-sitting area of my brain takes over again. 

Day 11

I always miss Matt's grandfather particularly keenly today. We used to really like taking him and Nana to the Legion on Remembrance Day. 

It's been unseasonably warm and sunny this week, until today, when it was suddenly cold and windy and bleak. Feels kind of appropriate. 

That Time I Lost It Over Eve Not Texting Me Back

Okay, Susan from the Pacific Northwest, if you're still around I am bowing to your superior luminary prowess and I have ordered some hopefully-bright-enough bulbs for the new fixture. Will report back. 

Today for your viewing pleasure, we have The Mystery of the Missing Daughter. 

When Angus moved away, I was sad but I didn't worry about him much. He was ready to go, he settled in well, I heard from him once a week or so, and that was fine. Eve, on the other hand, FaceTimes me  most days and has since she's been away, which is great. I usually let her call me when she has time because she has a busier schedule. This has the bonus effect of not letting me think "why isn't she calling/texting me back?", and inferring that it's because she's sick or injured or dead, which I almost never do, but when I do, I do it hard. Because I'm used to talking to her every day, if a day goes by and I DON'T hear from her, sometimes I wonder why. Even with Angus, once in a while - when he and his girlfriend broke up, I felt bad that he felt bad, but I also felt bad that I had no one to text "hey sweetie, is my son alive?" when he didn't get back to me for a day or so and my serenity went walkabout.

So a few weeks into the term, Eve was supposed to do a digital/media detox for a class, for twenty-four hours. This didn't just mean no screens - it meant no reading. She didn't even know if she could go to the cafeteria because there would be signs there, or how she would know what time it was. I said that sounded extreme, and she should just do whatever worked for her. She was planning to start at seven on a Saturday night and try to go for as long as she could. I was out for dinner with a group on the Saturday night when she tried to FaceTime me, so I went out to the parking lot to talk to her and say goodnight. 

The next night at around seven, I texted her and said "hey baby! Did you do it? Whether you did it or not, I love you."

Nothing.

Fifteen minutes later I texted "Can you text me that you're alive when you can because I thought you'd be back on by now." Then I went to get Matt to talk me down. He said "she's fine, she's with her friends or doing homework, do not text her again".

Which, yeah, fine, very sensible. Except no, not fine, not sensible, she was going to be desperate to get back on her phone even if she was with friends or doing homework, and when she turned her phone back on she would see my text so WHY WASN'T SHE SEEING MY TEXT. 

I texted her "I'm sorry. This is the bad part of being so connected. I feel like I should be able to contact you instantly. Okay. You're fine. I'm fine." But I wasn't fine. I was in an extreme spiral of "she should be back on her phone why isn't she back on her phone if something went wrong someone would call me right, maybe they're about to call me right now, maybe she went for a walk in the woods to digitally detox and broke her leg, it's past twenty-four hours, how could she have her phone off for MORE than twenty-four hours". I tried to convince myself that everything was fine, then I didn't want to convince myself that everything was fine, because it's generally when everything is fine that you get blindsided by bad stuff. Finally I messaged Jody (HI JODY) and she talked me down a little more because sometimes you need to hear something from someone other than your husband. But I still wasn't okay.

A few minutes later, Matt came upstairs and said he wanted to make it clear that he wasn't totally sanguine over the fact that we couldn't reach her either. I appreciated both the effort to reassure me and the admission that I wasn't the only one overreacting. 

I had taken my phone off silent mode, and it pinged several times with messages from people that I briefly loathed completely unfairly, simply by virtue of the fact that they weren't my daughter.

And then of course it pinged again and it was Eve and she said "omg I'm so sorry I'm fine. I started at like 8 last night and people convinced me not to cheat so I just got out". And I apologized for completely squandering my chance to handle the situation with any semblance of grace and restraint, and she texted "You've been so chill the last few weeks, I didn't know you would even worry" and I said "I WAS FAKING IT". And then she called me and she had had the most fabulous day with a group of other students doing the detox -- they walked to the Botanical Gardens and played volleyball, then walked back to campus and played ultimate frisbee, and she'd petted a really cute dog and done thirty thousand steps and couldn't feel her feet and everything was great.

There are no big lessons here. Sometimes bad shit happens. Sometimes I worry about things I can't control. Worrying doesn't make bad shit not happen, but I can't just not worry. But I don't worry all the time, and I haven't flipped out since, so one freak-out every ten weeks or so isn't totally unmanageable. Also, my daughter managed to keep her phone totally off for MORE than twenty-four hours. 

Soothing picture of calm waters

NaBloPoMo Day 9: Bidding a Fond Farewell to the Tattered Remnants of My Powers of Recall

 Remember that time I forgot to buy Staples AT STAPLES? I do, although I expect I won't for much longer, given the present state of things.

Yesterday I made a giant pulled pork roast in the crock pot. I texted one friend that I could drop some off for her (single mom with busy job and school-aged kids). She said she'd swing by after work. She did. I gave her the pulled pork. Right after she left, I opened the garage and saw the boxed-up snowman decoration that I've been meaning to give her for the kids since LAST CHRISTMAS. She was ON MY FRONT STEP, three feet away from it, and yet...

Then Jody (HI JODY) came to pick me up to go to IKEA again. I haven't been to IKEA more than once every two years forever and now we practically have a standing weekly date because our daughters moved out and we have houses to rearrange and make more storage efficient, plus, cheap meatballs. We went to IKEA and then The Linen Chest , where Jody stuck her face in a candle at the cash and said it smelled good, and then I looked at it and naturally the description was in both official languages (it's a candle/c'est une bougie) and I said, with far more enthusiasm than originality, "look at that bougie candle" and then we realized it cost A HUNDRED AND FORTY-THREE DOLLARS - it really WAS a bougie candle. 

Then we went to Indigo because Jody needed Hanukkah candles. They usually have good stocking stuffers too, and I don't know if you know the Indigo Faux Fur Throw Christmas tradition, but it's basically that they have these ludicrously fuzzy blankets that come in a couple of basic colours and then new colours every year, and they're ridiculously overpriced at 80 dollars, but if you spend fifty bucks on anything else you can buy them for the only moderately overpriced thirty dollars or so. The joke in our family is that we frequently say we don't need anymore Indigo faux fur throws, and yet every time the sales person begins asking "and since you've spent fifty dollars or more, are you interested in one of our throws..." I am powerless to say anything but "yes!" Everyone has one on their bed, there are three on the upstairs couch, one on the downstairs couch, and Lucy has her own - it sits on the end of the couch where she sleeps, and occasionally someone else will use it and she sits there and stares them down until they give it up or at least share (I am clear on the vicious irony of me calling anyone else bougie, just so you know). I also give them as presents because who doesn't like getting a fuzzy blanket in Dusty Rose or Snowfall or Midnight or Emerald? 

Then Jody brought me home and came INSIDE MY HOUSE to help me pimp out my couch with the new cushions and the Brand New Indigo Faux Fur throw I had just bought to go with the other two. She was in my house. I had a container of pulled pork in the fridge for her. Did I give it to her? Reader, I did not.

Today I went to work and did work stuff and then I went to Shoppers Drug Mart for a couple of things and then the grocery store and the bakery. Then I realized that I had been in the drugstore, where my prescription that is supposed to help my legs stop being restless so I can get some fucking sleep and stop forgetting shit was waiting. Did I pick it up? Reader, obviously I fucking did not.

I'm getting pretty good at the attendance process at school. I only had to print out the administration list twice before it was ready for the binder - sometimes it's five or six times. Clearly there's some kind of Law of Conservation of Remembering Shit in play here, so I can get my work done but I have to be really careful not to leave the house without pants.

Yours in perimenopausal exasperation,

Allison