Be It Resolved That There Shall Be No Resolving

 My mood over the holiday has been generally good, especially compared to past years. I overdid it a bit on baking and cooking (no surprise) and bought too many presents, but not AS MANY too many as usual. I managed to stop before I crippled myself. I've slept pretty well except Saturday night, naturally, because Eve wanted me to take her to the mall on Sunday. We still had fun, but getting ready to go I felt like death, and it's a good thing she's cute and funny.

I will probably do a couple of Christmas wrap-up posts, but it was pretty nearly perfect. Family, friends, no life-threatening weather to prevent travel, kids are great. I had one bad day where I felt like I should be doing more, but I sat down with a book and the feeling went away.

Today I woke up and, as usual, suddenly realized what the fact that it is New Year's Eve actually means, even though I knew it was coming and we're having people over and I haven't known what day it was since before Christmas but kept track of the date.

My self esteem isn't great right now. I tried doing the 'look at all my friends who are brilliant and accomplished and wonderful, and if they want to be friends with me I must be a not-garbage person', but sometimes all that does is make me dwell on why I'm not more brilliant and accomplished. I've worked hard to get to a place where I can work a little to provide structure and contribute a little to my kids' education, and do that small job well. I still think sometimes about what it must be like to have a big job with big responsibilities, to have the satisfaction of figuring out how to solve difficult problems, to have the admiration of your peers. 

I often think randomly of people I knew in university and see if I can find them on social media or in the news. There was one woman doing her PhD when I was doing my masters - she was kind of pompous and arrogant and a little bit annoying. She's the freaking provost of a university a couple of hours away from me. Did I hope to find out that she was a failure living in a crack den? No, of course not. It's not the kind of job I would want anyway (not without being a whole different person) and being arrogant and officious probably helped her immensely and I'm sure she kicked ass.

Another girl who seemed effortlessly bewitching and mysterious (I heard her introduce herself to a guy as Josephine, but then her actual name was Sophie, and I don't know if they were doing a Napoleon thing or what, but it seemed movie-like and insanely cool.) She moved to my husband's home town to be a librarian affiliated with the university there, which could have been me in a different life, and she sounds humble and sweet in the article I found but she still wears black-framed glasses and a scarf and looks like she's from New York and what am I even DOING with my life? (I am not fishing for compliments here, just working through some stuff). 

Anyway, this is a long way of typing out what has been darting through my brain in split second intervals. Someone just posted a meme that said "what if instead of resolution we did revolutions and you just like yourself exactly the way you fucking are" and yes, it's a bit trite, but also actually revolutionary? 

It's fine. I'm fine. If I worked full time in some amazing job who would take my dad to the Retina Centre on a Tuesday? I guess I could just take a day off, shut up. 

I'm going to look at it like it's good to have room for improvement. If I was perfect it would be boring, right? Some people find my failures really entertaining. Being a hot mess is really an act of service to the people in my life.

I am so lucky and privileged, and I am always grateful, even when I'm complaining. This year is going to be hard for so many people. I'm going to cling to the good. Play the piano more. Remember how to cook. Write more. Get to the stupid bank so I can send my own etransfers instead of having to ask my husband. Try to be a helper. Actually I may have a goal to just set some goals, because I don't want to set myself up for failure and feel worse, but also I have ADD and if I don't write down any goals I literally forget them until I'm lying away in bed at night. 

Anyway. New Year. Hope there is some Happy. 

Cookie Carnage

 "Oh yes, I would LOVE to do that!" I chirped like an idiot when Suzanne suggested a blog cookie swap thing. Did I then remember to take some artful staged pictures of cookie prep and baking and display? Hahahahah no the fuck I of course did not. 

I did haphazardly shoot a pic of this measuring cup with some chocolate chips in it, beside a weird counter shadow.

We had people over Friday night and it was great fun and I made my first ever Christmas tree charcuterie thingy...

AND there were TWO cookie plates on the dining room table in the very next room, but did I photograph those? No I did not.

I have done quite a bit less baking than usual, partly because Matt was away and I was doing all the other Christmas stuff, partly because I'm just slightly less willing to break my body and mind in order to achieve some mystical pinnacle of Christmas perfection this year.

Have baked for five years or more:

Toffee shortbreads/shortbread meltaways:

I found this recipe in a little magazine thing when I was organizing all my recipes years ago and I still have the pink magazine page on my fridge. My mom started making these in regular time and I was a little bitter about it because they are my Special Christmas cookies, but she uses margerine instead of butter which makes hers, in my opinion, very slightly inferior, so that's okay.

Salted Chocolate Toffee Pretzel Bark

Isn't it amazing how with the internet you can think "I'd kind of like to try making lemon-kumquat Brussels sprouts in a Balsamic-raisin reduction" and chances are someone will have tried and perfected a recipe for it? I looked at that bark that uses soda crackers as a base and thought "I kind of feel like it would be better with pretzels". And someone with a much finer kitchen sensibility than I had thought the same thing.

Made last year for the first time (I think), and am grateful to my last year's self for noting this down in a Google doc so I remembered to make this this year, because they are really really good, and quite easy to make:

Gingerbread cookie bars with white chocolate chips

Made for the past two or three years 

Chewy gingerbread cookies with lemon glaze (don't currently have a photo of because I made a batch and a half and then a double batch and they have all been swiftly dispatched)

Cream wafer sandwich cookies:

These are cool because they have a different flavour profile than most of everything else I make (which is various gingerbreads, various shortbreads and a few chocolate things). The wafers are almost not sweet enough to eat without the icing, which would be too sweet without the wafers. The first year I made them I used big cookie cutters and didn't roll the dough thin enough and the cookies were terrifying - like a hamburger, but cookie. Now I use smaller cookie cutters and still do not roll the dough out thin enough!

Make every few years when I remember it's a thing and have the bandwidth to do the three separate steps:

Millionaire's Shortbread.

Made this year for the first time:

Chocolate bark with stuff on top (crushed candy cane, toasted almost slices, chopped-up cookies)

Angus is home! I still have a shit-ton of stuff to wrap! I went to Farm Boy today and expected it to be way more busy and hostile but it was okay.

Picture of Angus in my family room in my very own house, Eve and Lucy being exceptionally photogenic and me and Margot and Suzie from Friday night, just steps away from some really picturesque cookie plates

Sister Act

So. Matt's long lost sister. 

This isn't a terribly uncommon thing for our generation - I was once at a Christmas party in a conversation group of four people, and three had discovered hitherto-unknown siblings existed, or their spouses had. We found this out when one woman said "I got my parents the Ancestry DNA kit for Christmas and I got a new brother!" The less-common aspect is that this is a full sibling - Matt's mom and dad had a baby before they got married, the baby (girl) was adopted and they subsequently had three boys. 

We'd known about her for a long time but had kind of given up on hearing from her. Then we heard from her. We were shook. There were emails. There was conferring. She could not have been more sensitive and kind about not wanting to cause any trauma or open up any wounds, meanwhile we were all like hell yeah, bring on the sister stuff. The three brothers did a zoom call with her from here (Ottawa), Edmonton, and Toronto, which is very close to where she also lives.  

Freaky stuff. My husband Matthew Adams, is one of three boys. Dara has three boys named Matthew, Adam, and Ben. 

Slightly freaky stuff: She was raised Jewish. Jeremy's wife is Jewish and two of Eve's very tight friend group are Jewish and they are very into Eve having a Jewish connection. Two of Eve's six housemates are also Jewish (more on this later). I am realizing this is not actually freaky, t's just kind of cool. 

The really really tragically sad part that I can't let myself think about too much is that Barb (my mother-in-law) never got to meet her. I did talk to her about it once, when she was here helping me wrangle the kids when Matt was away. I didn't know if she would want to talk about it, but turns out she had just been waiting for someone to ask. For a few reasons, chiefly that Barb died too fucking young (fuck fucking cancer in the face, sorry for the people who don't like swearing), the timing didn't quite work out.  

Once you get that wrenchingly sad fact out of the way, it's all kind of wonderful. Eve said "my cousin count has gone up by fifty percent!" The new cousins have never HAD cousins, so this is exceedingly trippy for them. Eve met two of them at Jeremy and Laura's just before she came home. She and Ben connected on Instagram, and she was a bit surprised that they had zero mutuals given that they are both in fourth year university in the same province. She came home and her housemate (one of the Jewish ones) had TWENTY-ONE mutuals with him. And she knew about Dara because her friend (also named Dara) knows her. Six degrees of Kevin Kosher-Beef-Bacon, I guess. 

What does this do to the birth order stuff? This summer we were going out to a party and Matt had to fly out early the next day for a work trip. I told him he shouldn't drink too much and reminded him he hadn't packed yet, and he said "get off my back, I'm not the oldest anymore, I'm an out-of-control middle child". 

Eve says that Matt told her about the sister existing years ago. When this all went down, it was a few days before Matt and I were going to go to Ithaca for Angus's grad school commencement. Eve said "has anyone told Angus?" and Matt said "I dunno" and Eve said "well then no one has, dumbass". Eve and I Facetimed him because we didn't want to spring it on him on graduation weekend and I didn't want Matt to have to NOT talk about it either. I said "uh, so, there's a family thing that we should tell you" and he looked a bit alarmed and Eve said "oh for god's sake, you're making it sound terrible - Nana Barb and Mike had a baby and it got adopted and now she's gotten in touch." Angus was like "uh, is dad okay? Okay, cool."

Good then.

As far as I know, she's met Matt's dad, Barb's sister Kate, Matt's cousin Mary, Barb's widower Bill, Jeremy and Laura and the kids, Matt, and now my daughter (not me yet NOT THAT I AM BITTER, I was super close to jumping in the car and driving five hours for the mini-family-reunion Saturday except I had just done that drive the weekend before and Christmas LIVES ON THE BACKS OF MOTHERS).

Eve said the two cousins she met are really nice. She's only aggrieved about the fact that Mitchie, the littlest cousin, is really a man's man, so Eve loves him so much but he only had eyes for Ben.

It is SO WEIRD. I keep thinking of the time my friend Suzie, whose ex-husband went to Thailand and got a girlfriend who he then married - when their two daughters were getting ready to go to Thailand for the wedding Suzie said "I'm sure this woman's parents are overjoyed about meeting their adult, white grandchildren". 

But come on - we could all have wandered around the world (just one province, actually) our whole lives never connecting, never knowing anything about each other. I have no idea where I stand on the afterlife, but I really hope Barb is happy about this, because she would have loved it beyond all description. And Dara - welcome to the family. We are extremely weird but also kind of awesome. Some of us are hard to get off the phone, others are a bit too enthusiastic about fennel, and do not mention anything about World War II around (redacted). But we'll have your back. 

Visions of ... Well

 Suzanne's cookie post, along with Nicole's comment about her boys decorating gingerbread cookies, happily reminded me of Eve's cookie-decorating sessions in years past - she might actually be home early enough to do another one this year! When she gets home on the 22nd it doesn't leave a lot of time.

She's writing her last exam... huh, right now maybe, and she's been a little punchy in the last couple of 
Facetimes. "I just want to sit on my bed in my room decorated with little lights and do a CRAFT, I want to do a CRAFT, I don't care about viruses anymore!" "The Arts and Science department asked Dr. Clark to post an encouraging message for us before exams, and do you know what he said? 'Study hard, good luck'? No. 'It's about the learning, not the marks?' No. He said 'you are marvellous, the gods are waiting to delight in you.' What the heck. Isn't that pervy? I don't want to be delighted in. They're gods, they're my superiors, that's a boundary I don't want to cross."

I think this was the first time I posted about her decorating cookies - Matt was also away for a long stretch before Christmas that year. I had kids to shepherd and it was just before Angus was driving, so it was a lot, although my hands worked more reliably, so there was that. 

This was the next year, which I found very enjoyable. I know there was at least one more session, because I remember her making the Abominable Snowman from the Rudolph Christmas special, but I can't find it. 

Tonight Matt's picking her up and taking her to my brother-in-law's house for a mini-family-Christmas thing, and I am jealous, because I love Jeremy and Laura and the kids and Matt's aunt and her husband who I also adore are going to be there and Eve is going to meet Matt's long-lost sister before I do, and long-lost sister is going to see Eve before I do, and it's all awesome but I have FOMO (is everyone up-to-date on the long lost sister situation? I feel like I must have talked about it, but maybe not?)

Update: Eve has met two long-lost cousins also, and they are all very nice but it is extremely trippy. 

I haven't felt up to wrapping or baking yet, but yesterday I read on the couch with classical music on on the basis of fake-serenity-until-you-make-it. Then I cleaned out the tupperware cupboard so when I start needing tupperware for cookies it won't all fall out and make me cry, and then I put pictures into the collage frame I'm giving a friend. And I walked Lucy and it was cold as balls but pretty. Right now I have gingerbread cookies baking and I'm watching scary movies. Scary Christmas movies, because I am weird but in a seasonally appropriate way. 

I DID Go!

 Remember how I was all anxious about a five-hour drive in uncertain northern-ish Ontario weather? Part of my hesitation was that I had had BIG FEELINGS about people who had heedlessly traveled during an extreme weather warning a few days earlier and been stuck in their cars for up to 48 hours, while people STILL kept asking for updates on weather conditions for following days when they intended to travel on the Ontario Storm Facebook group - not people who were first responders or people who needed to get to work, just people who didn't want to change their plans. I really really did not want to put myself in the position of acting like people like them and being judged by people like me. 

Well, I very conscientiously stocked the car with water and snacks and candles and matches and blankets and coats and tall boats and mittens. And then naturally the drive was completely uneventful weather-wise. The visibility was slightly less-than-ideal for the last hour on Thursday BECAUSE THE SUN WAS TOO BRIGHT. 

So I had left super early because I had a dinner reservation for seven with my professor, but then the drive was totally normal so I was two and a half hours early, and Eve is really slammed right now with end-of-term stuff, but I went to her house and she brought her computer down to the living room and we hung out, and then one by one her lovely housemates started joining us and it was really nice. I went to get Wendy's for everyone who was home, and when I got back we realized Camille had been hiding in her attic room, but Wendy's had magically given us an extra hamburger so we gave it to her. Then Jayden came in having fallen off her bike, and there was a judicious mix of sympathy and 'why the eff were you biking, it's winter now', and she doesn't eat Wendy's anyway.

I had a wonderful dinner and conversation with my prof and went to my hotel. Matt always makes my reservation because he has a shit ton of hotel points, and then he makes sure to put my name on the reservation. Once when I went in ahead of him the man at the desk said I could check in anyway as long as I had I.D. with the same address on it, so this time he didn't bother/ forgot. It turned out that it was a bit of an issue, and the woman at the desk asked if I could give him a quick call which was an issue since he was in Shanghai. So then she just asked me his phone number and email and let me in anyway. Once I was in the room I texted him quickly that apparently we should keep doing it, and he called me because he was not, in fact, in Shanghai yet, but driving from Seattle to Vancouver (where he would catch his flight to Shanghai) and had just realized that he was about to be caught in traffic related to Taylor Swift's last concert in her tour. 

I got some sleep and then got up to drive the hour and a half to Zarah's. Matt had warned me not to get over-confident because she lives in the snow belt and the drive could be dicey. It was not. Clearly I was bullet-proof this week-end. 

I got to Zarah's house, which is old and beautiful and sparely decorated and full of soothing neutrals, and it's not something I'm able to achieve in my own living space, but it's so lovely to spend time in.

We generally hit the mall one day (principally for Lululemon for the boys) and then walk downtown for the cute little local stores the other day. 

The Menopause corner at Blueberry Moon

Then we find a Netflix series to binge (Man on the Inside, highly recommend), or a movie (Bros and Fortune Feimster's new Netflix comedy show - very funny), or do a puzzle (Artsy Cats - I was really bad this time, I just sat there staring at pieces and did about one-seventh while Zarah motored through the rest). We don't really drink, sometimes we do share a weed pen and then are shocked when one of us gets Covid and the other one doesn't (no one got Covid this time. I didn't even get sick after one kid coughed full in my face at the Scholastic Book Fair viewing time on Wednesday. See? Bulletproof). 

Also, she has a cat instead of a dog, so it's kind of a fun change of pace. Inej doesn't jump on my face demanding to be walked, but Lucy doesn't sit on my puzzle or interpose herself between me and my Ipad. The best part was when Zarah described how Inej demands to play hide and seek, then runs to the living room and 'hides' under the chair with her butt sticking out, and while she was telling this story THE CAT DID THE VERY THING she was describing. The stark reverse of when you say your cat or dog or kid does this hilarious thing and then the cat/dog/kid naturally refuses to do it ever.

I

I also volunteered to help her set up her tree, despite lacking any kind of skill or confidence in this area. I figured she'd know what to do and I would just be a second set of hands. This was not quite how it shook out. It was the same as our new tree - three pieces that theoretically snap together in less than five minutes. She put one piece in the stand, then tried to put the second piece into the first, but it wouldn't slide in. I said I thought she had put the middle piece in first because it was skinnier than the piece she had. So we switched them. But the second piece still woudn't go in. It seemed like every piece should have a pointed end and a round end, but the middle piece seemed to have two pointed ends.

We fretted. We fumed. I suggested that she phone a male friend, knowing that Eve would call this a betrayal of feminism. I would have called Matt but he was in Shanghai for real now. Maybe. We kept futilely jabbing the second piece at the first piece and then setting it down and being angry. I googled it and found one guy who said he was sure the shape of the pole had changed while it was in storage, which sounded extremely dumb and also very plausible. 

I asked about how it had been put together in the past and Zarah wielded the second piece again and said "just like THIS, when Alex does it it goes click click..." -- the second piece slides smoothly and fully into the first" -- "....click". We just stared at it for a second and then killed ourselves laughing. Alex is tall, so he probably had it aligned properly from above, and we are not, so we probably had it slightly crooked so it wouldn't go in. 

You know that quote about the definition of insanity being trying the same thing and expecting a different result? I try the same thing and get a different result often enough that either this quote is wrong or I am... actually insane? 

It was all perfectly perfect, and then the drive home was also fine, and then the next day my friend Kerry drove home from the same area and had to stop and de-ice every hour, so it was also remarkably fortunate. And then I came home and there were many, many fun plans in November and I was a little burned out and overwhelmed, and when I got home I was extremely tired but also happy and grateful that it all went well, and by comparison the Christmas stuff feels almost calm and relaxing (I'm sure that will wear off any minute). Matt flies back into Toronto on Friday evening and is going to hang with his brother until Monday so he can bring Eve home because her exams finish early this year (yay!). I need to start baking. I just took Lucy for a walk and we had two days of rain and now it's very cold and the rain is frozen and I had to inch down my street to avoid falling and cracking my head open. Hope I'm still bulletproof.

That Time I Bent the Weather to my Will

I am in a STATE

 Is anyone still surprised by the news that my husband is away for the first two weeks of December and I am grumpy about it? I feel like I've told everyone I know multiple times, so probably not. 

We got the tree, and we got the tree up! On November 29th! Earliest ever! I love the lights and the remote and it's beautiful.

I started putting a few ornaments on it, thinking I would just leave the kids' and family's special ornaments for when both kids are home and we put on Die Hard and decorate the tree and do the family photo shoot. 

It's a little bit different decorating a tree with so many lights. I feel like the ornaments have to be balanced quite well or it looks weird. Are there too many lights? Do I need to buy three dozen uniformly shaped and sized ornaments? No, I am NOT going to complain about my beautiful new tree, I will figure it out!

(You see what I mean though, right?)

Then yesterday on my day off, I realized I didn't really have anything else yet, and it was already December 3rd, and my whole thing about trying not to leave it all until December 1st is that it never actually happens on December 1st, and then before you know it it's December 5th, and why do all this shit if it's only going to be up for a couple of weeks? But oops, my big strong husband has fled the jurisdiction. So I carried a bunch of boxes up from downstairs and basically put everything else out, and then some. I had sorted everything better than usual, so it wasn't that hard. It looks like Christmas threw up in my house now, but I'm alone and I need all the frigging festivity I can get. Tuesdays have been a little weird for me lately. I get a burst of energy in the morning and early afternoon, do house stuff and walk and yoga, and then theoretically should feel happy and satisfied and ready to do some reading and resting, but it gets dark really early and I just feel weird and worried. 

I am supposed to drive to Hamilton tomorrow to see Eve and my professor for the evening, and then head to Barrie (about an hour from Hamilton) for my annual weekend with Zarah (HI ZARAH). So naturally the weather has been engaging in fifteen kinds of fuckery and I have no idea what to do. Last week there was major catastrophic weather north of where I'm going. Today there are snow squall warnings along my route. Tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to be just uncertain enough that not going will feel maybe overly cautious and going will be stressful. I really want to go. Eve needs a hug and some food to get her through the last week. I love my Zarah weekend. But obviously I don't want to be dumb and unsafe about it. 

Matt thinks that at this rate tomorrow will be doable but slow and messy. I was driving myself nuts going around in circles about it, so I've decided that if that stays the same, I'm going to go. I will have an emergency bag in the car, I just got my snow tires on, I will take it slow and the route is a major highway that's never that far from a rest stop or a town where I can find shelter if I need to stop. 

We were supposed to get a lot of snow today here. It was snowing pretty heavily on my drive in to work, but right now it's just a barely perceptible snowfall. Still looks like we could get around 12 cm. 

So anyway. I'm a little bit lonely, a little bit restless, a little bit burned out and overwhelmed, I miss my kids, I miss my kids being little at Christmas, I can't figure out how to feed myself without eating too little or too much (cooking for one makes the same mess as cooking for one AND I have to cook it AND clean it up myself), and I am bad with uncertainty. But I am surrounded by pretty lights, I MIGHT be hugging my kid and my best friend soon OR I will have a restful weekend surrounded by  my pretty lights, and I think this is the soonest I've ever blogged again after finishing NaBloPoMo.

In sum... uh, I got nothing. 

That's a Wrap

  It's that time in the party where everyone has had a wonderful time, but now the hour is late, the wood cabin incense is almost empty

people are wearing chip clips on their nipples 

and Dungeons and Dragons underwear on their heads

or using the ottoman trays as cod pieces

Or sitting on top of other people

(okay, as it turns out, by 'people' I mostly mean 'Dave')

and the remaining revelers straggle homeward at 2:38 a.m.

Our friends' annual Christmas party was early this year for various reasons, and at first it seemed too early and felt weird and awkward. But of course it was a wonderful time, and a good way to get the Christmas season started, and kind of perfect that it was on the last day of NaBloPoMo. We've been incredibly fortunate in our real-life friends, and I've been equally grateful to walk with all of you here this month. We walked every day in October with Elisabeth! We posted every day in November with San! Maybe for December we should hahahahahaha jk, somebody punch me in the face if I ever suggest an everyday activity for December that isn't just surviving. 

Yesterday was cold but clear, but today we got some snow. 

We just had my parents over for Vietnamese, and I drove them home and looked at the Christmas lights. My mother suggested I should maybe not wear flip-flops since there was snow on the ground, which was a solid point. I am puttering while watching Snakes on a Plane (I guess I should switch to more seasonal fare) and then I'm going to get in bed with a book and a dog.

Peace out, friends.