Eve's Room, Before and After

Before: aqua and purple, painted by my dad many years ago:

During:

After: Sherwin Williams Sockeye and Nearly Peach, painted by Eve, two weeks ago:

In Which I Suddenly Realize That I Am the Problem

I've been crap at jotting down things to write about which means I have nothing to write about and also that I clearly don't know myself at all. Let's talk about how I keep thinking that Eve is five instead of seventeen and assuming she can't do stuff when she most certainly can do stuff. I mean, I'm not necessarily the type of mom that tells her kids "you can do anything you want if you just believe in yourself!" (My friend Collette (HI COLLETTE) has a funny story about this that happened at her daughter's diving competition - the mom behind her said to her daughter "I KNEW you'd come in first if you just BELIEVED" - she came in first because she was the only one in her age class). I mean, I knew my kids were smart and I tried to teach them critical thinking and I figured they could do a lot of things, but not, like, fly (or even ride a bike, in Eve's case - sorry babe, my fault you were born without balance), or do magic, or ride a unicorn - wait, that's basically flying, I'm being repetitive.

I like to keep our expectations reasonable, is all I'm saying. The year before Angus's baseball team could qualify for the Little League World Series, my sister asked when it was so she could book time off at work. "Pfagh!" I laugh-snorted unattractively "they're not going to the Little League World Series. B.C. always wins. Don't bother booking time off for that." Well, they went to the Little League World Series and my sister had to drive all night to see one game and then go to work the day after on no sleep (no problem, not like being a pharmacist at a hospital chemo center requires alertness or anything) and I was not terribly popular.

Wait, this started as me trying to illustrate that I might coddle my kids a little and has somehow morphed into me being a loser who doesn't believe in her kids. And now I'm suddenly remembering that I didn't give baby Angus pretzels because they were a choking hazard, then sort of forgot about pretzels for three years and when he finally got pretzels as a four-year-old he looked at me like I was some kind of pretzel-hiding asshole. This is terrible! Hang on, I have to go tell Angus he actually can go to med school if he wants to. And maybe bring him some pretzels.

Anyway, Eve decided to repaint her room because we weren't doing Bluesfest. I thought we would make a playlist, crank the tunes and do it together i.e. I would do most of the work. Nuh-uh. My husband helped her move some furniture, but she taped, edged, and rolled on three coats of paint per wall (and it's a big room!). I was extremely impressed. I took her to IKEA to get her a few new things to match the new colours. The main thing she wanted was a tall set of drawers to go with her desk, which only has two little ones. We got to the self-serve warehouse, I tried to lift the box and said "shit, I can't lift this by myself, we'll have to find someone to help us." She raised her eyebrows at me, went and got a trolley and grabbed one end and waited for me to grab the other. Then she told ME not to hurt myself.

When we got to the car, I opened the hatch and told her to hold the cart while I slid the box out to where we could both grab it. She said "No! YOU hold!" Then we got home and she built the frigging thing herself. Last time I tried to build something from IKEA I had to get my husband to help me open the box.

She is salty that you can't tell how much work went into assembling each drawer when it's put together like this

I will post more pictures of Eve's room when we (I mean, she) gets it all put back together. And I guess I'll go buy one of those goddamned "reach for the moon" or whatever the hell posters, since clearly I am a serious impediment to soaring or envisioning or carpe-ing the goddamned diem.

I'd Rather Have Five Minutes of Wonderful Than a Lifetime of Nothing Special

A couple of weeks ago I went over to my friend Kerry's (HI KERRY) house for a socially-distanced movie date, after we got talking about Steel Magnolias. While I was there I told her my Steel Magnolias origin story. I was in first-year university and my boyfriend broke up with me. It had been my first serious relationship and we had dated for years at home and then he went to university the year before I did. I didn't exactly go to the same place because of him - I went with my best friend, and it was a great school for the program I wanted, and I have no regrets - but I didn't exactly NOT go there because of him either. I was devastated. I didn't know what to do with myself. After dinner, I left my residence and just started wandering around. I went to the chapel and sat down and realized I really wasn't very religious anymore, and even if I was this seemed like a really embarrassing problem to go to any deity with. I wandered towards the woods trail and then realized that would be extra stupid in the dark (yes, I did briefly flirt with pulling a Bella-in-Twilight and disappearing into the forest for days without food or water, but my ex wasn't a vampire or still in love with me, I don't like bugs, and I would have gotten over my sadness-related lack of hunger within a few hours. Plus it really wasn't a very big forest). I finally walked into the little downtown and eventually passed the tiny one-screen movie theatre and Steel Magnolias was playing. I don't think I knew anything about it. I had just enough money in change in my jacket pocket to get in - it was five or six dollars. It was the perfect refuge for a couple of hours, and I had the wettest, grossest, most cathartic ugly cry ever. Then I went back to residence and my roommate and friends were panicking that I'd been gone for so long and I felt like kind of an asshole.

Anyway, it holds up. It is sweet and funny and heartbreaking and in my Top Ten of All Time (I say, not really knowing what the other nine are because any time I try to think of it I can't remember any movies I've ever seen. Can I name nine other movies I love without googling? A Room With a View. Gattaca. Cinema Paradiso. Ummmmmm. Three? THREE? That's the best I can do? For fuck's sake. Oh, what's that South African one about the aliens? Station Nine? Plan Nine? Geez, life is hard without Google, especially in perimenopause.)

I'm going to try to move on and see if any other movies come to me, It's still really freaking hot, even at night. My stand fan in my room stopped working, so I ordered another one, but I couldn't get the same one, and the one I replaced it with isn't great. I have a bad habit of getting rid of things and forgetting to note the name of them so I can get the same one. A couple of years ago we got a ceiling fan and Matt installed it and then it didn't work, so he took it down and we've had a hole in the ceiling ever since. We finally decided to order another one, and I carefully researched which ones were highly rated. It came and he installed it way more quickly than I expected. I walked in and said "oh, looks great, is it on low?" and he said "no, that's as high as it goes". I blinked and he said "I think it's rated highly because it's so quiet". Like, excuse me? It's a FUCKING FAN, should it not be rated on it's, ya know, FAN-NESS? My old fan sounded like a jet engine and I LOVED IT. Anyway, my loving husband saved the day by then ordering vent covers with little fans in them. So I still need two fans going PLUS the AC, but now I'm not suffocatingly hot every night.

Terminator two! I freaking love Sarah Connor.

Die Hard. Toy Story.

DISTRICT, it's DISTRICT Nine. Right? Maybe?

I invited my parents over for dinner partly because I thought they'd like to go somewhere that wasn't their house or the grocery store during seniors' hours (or, full disclosure, the liquor store), and partly to force me to clean. I was somewhat less than impressed with my brilliant plan the day before when I was trying to do a months' worth of organizing and cleaning in a day, and it wasn't perfect because Eve is redoing her room and we're still sort of moving things around from when we got the new couches, but having my parents over was really nice and I can now walk through the living room/dining room area without experiencing extreme clutter-related stress and self-loathing.

Moonstruck!

I've taken my disposable cloth bags grocery shopping a couple of times, understanding that I would pack my own groceries which I was before the pandemic anyway. Now it feels a little more panicky though, because grocery shopping is so much more fraught and I really hate to hold up the line - and panicking in a mask is super not fun. Not sure what the answer is, because I also hate bringing home another whack of plastic bags every time I go.

Up. The first ten minutes of Up constitutes one of the best movie love stories of all time, fight me.

How many is that? That's nine. Am I a fake fan? Clearly I don't have a well-established Top Ten Favourite Movies. What I do have is an embarrassingly rambly blog post and a sneaking suspicion that I just said Cinema Paradiso to sound sophisticated. Oh well.

Twelve Monkeys!