Hell is Other People

Apparently the scariest thing this year is the rainfall warning. Montreal actually postponed Halloween until Friday. Postponed. Halloween. A couple of people floated that in Ottawa, and while I thought it was not the best idea, I found the vitriol of the responses a little depressing.

I have trick or treated, and accompanied my kids trick-or-treating, in pretty much all weather. I grew up in Northern Ontario where costumed were always made big enough to go over a snowsuit. Sometimes it rains. Occasionally it's been crazy warm and we could walk around in costumes with no jackets. Once in Ottawa Eve and I went to a party in Greek goddess costumes and had to clean snow off the car when we got home.

And honestly, I think pouring rain is the worst. I feel bad for the kids and parents trudging around out there tonight. I was putting candy in one kid's pillow case and it was soaking wet and felt very unpleasant. I don't think postponing it would fix everything since it's supposed to rain and/or snow tomorrow too and something would just be lost in doing it a day late, but I'm not going to take some poor mom's head off just for suggesting it.

My husband has been travelling an even crazier amount the past few months, and Eve is in grade eleven with a bunch of science courses, so our time for Halloween decorating was minimal. I have carpal tunnel and weak hands and Eve is the good pumpkin designer and had three unit tests this week, but I managed to hollow one giant-ass pumpkin out last night and she carved it tonight just in time to plunk outside minutes in advance of the first trick-or-treater.

We did to go a Halloween party on Saturday. I was a sexy devil:

Just kidding, I was a devilled egg.

Suzie was a "this is your brain on drugs" ad, for those of a certain age who remember that. She's even more of an introvert than I am, so I entice her to come to the party by making us couples costumes.

Eve was Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I feel like the real highlight of the Halloween season was our Epic Pumpkin Patch Photo-Shoot:

When I was a teen-ager, we would do goofy poses and call them Sears Catalogue photos.

These kids have never seen a Sears Catalogue, but I feel like they've nailed it pretty well anyway.

It's really sad how I don't have kids that want to get pumpkins and paint them anymore.

Of course, there are fewer butterflies and kitty pumpkins, and more Joker, Youtuber and thong pumpkins. I'm okay with that.

These kids came over to hand out candy tonight. They talked all the way through a really good horror movie, and now they are watching in riveted silence something called Deadly Detention. I honest-to-god just heard a line of dialogue that went "All he wanted was to die hot - and he looks awful".

So there we go. It's 8:30, we have a buttload of candy left, and now we can all stop panicking about Halloween and start panicking about Christmas.

Adjustments

I was feeling especially fed-up with the sleep stuff, and a little aggrieved with the position my doctor has been taking. The thinking is that sleep aids don't go well with sleep apnea, because the last thing you want when you're having breathing stoppages is something that depresses your breathing even further. Which yeah, fair enough, thanks for not wanting my brain further deprived of oxygen, all to the good. The thing is, though, if I can't fall asleep or if I wake up after three hours, I end up taking off my mask, because the only thing more miserable than lying awake for hours is lying awake for hours with something affixed to your face. Eventually I get a few disturbed, gaspy hours, and it all ends up in SEVERE CRANKINESS.

So I decided to try an over-the-counter option and took Gravol for a few nights, and managed to sleep through with the machine working. I don't do it every night, but it's nice to have the option. 

I did realize that I've been working and walking pretty steadily since the beginning of September and my feet are still fairly functional. Considering that last year at this time I was just starting to feel the bone spur that made every step for eight months varying degrees of agony, this is a really nice thing that I should take a moment to feel grateful for. I bought a mid-range foot massager and I do stretches fairly religiously, and I have the good, close-by chiropodist as back-up. So maybe my stupid ill-made discount trash-ass feet will carry the rest of me around for a little longer after all. 

I have developed a small, fairly obvious kitchen hack that has made me very happy. Usually when baking cookies or biscuits or scones I want to make more than one batch. Trying to double a recipe, though, means I usually overload my mixer bowl, resulting in batter slopping over onto the counter and things getting unwieldy and stressful. Making one recipe after another seems cumbersome and makes me resentful, I want to just MAKE BISCUITS, not MAKE BISCUITS MULTIPLE TIMES when there are turgid medical dramas that aren't going to watch themselves, you know? My solution has usually been to make a one-and-a-half recipe instead, but I'm sure if you think about me doing mental math on the fly you can see what frequently goes wrong with this type of operation.

So the first time I made pumpkin scones this fall, I just got out double the bowls and measured everything out for a double batch at the same time but in different bowls. Then I combined the first two bowls, rolled out and baked, combined the next two bowls, rolled and baked and it felt easy and efficient and I put in the right amount of eggs AND baking soda. I wonder if Nicole (HI NICOLE) the Super Boss Baker already does this. Nicole, do you do this? Does everybody do this? I feel like everybody either already does this or will think it's insane, because I'm neurotic, BUT I'm also older and less insecure, so I don't actually care anymore, I feel like it's a genius solution for me. 

Finally -- pants. In addition to my many, many other issues, I have major sensory issues around clothing. The first time I put a turtleneck on little Angus and he made a choking noise, I knew beyond a doubt that he was my kid (not that I'd had any real doubts previously, but I was unconscious when he came out, so...) I stopped wearing jeans for years because they felt like they were strangling my waist. I started again when they started making them with stretch fabric, but I only buy them big enough so I can pull them on without undoing the zipper or buttons. This works if I get the size exactly right, so they're loose but not too loose, you know? Because I also don't like belts - what's the point if your pants don't strangle your waist but some piece of leather is digging into your flesh? 

Then I bought a new pair of jeans and wore them when we were visiting Angus at Elmira. I went down the hallway to get some ice, and on the way back to the room had a major wardrobe malfunction while both hands were holding the ice bucket. Fortunately the hallway was empty, but clearly things could not continue in this manner. 

I revisited the belt issue. I considered that it was possibly less that all belts were evil than that, perhaps, I had bought a belt at Army-Navy Surplus that wasn't quite long enough and didn't have enough holes in it but looked cool and then tried to make it work. 

So I bought a nice long belt with double holes punched all the way to the end. And I did it up just tight enough that my pants didn't fall down but the belt didn't dig into my back when I sat down. Much. 

Or maybe I'll just stick with leggings. There's a limit to how many tricks an old dog can learn. 

Surly Thursday Reboot

It's been a while since I did a Surly Thursday post, which would be great if it meant I was turning out a whole bunch of NON-Surly Thursday posts. Which I have not been.

SLEEP: I can't fucking sleep. I will be reading my book and my eyes will be literally closing, and I put the book down, put on my CPAP mask, turn off the light and ..... twitchy legs, too hot, too cold, need socks on, need socks off, ad infinitem. It is wretched. I am terrified to take anything before bed if I have a headache or any other kind of pain in case it makes the restless leg thing worse. I am taking magnesium and iron, which are supposed to help, but I suspect this may just be a case of peri-menopausitis, in which case let me reiterate, fuck perimenopause in its raggedy punk ass.

RAIN: It's been gross the last couple of days, which is not a big deal, I have an umbrella, but I swear to god, four drops of rain and everybody in this city loses the ability to not drive like an asshole. Four-way stop? Fairly straightforward, except if it's raining apparently all the normal rules cease to apply and we're all supposed to rock-paper-scissors it or something. Some entitled jackass parked on the side of the street blocking the crosswalk across from Eve's school waiting for his kid. When I tried to go around him to park on the side street where the non-entitled people go to wait for their kids, he honked at me. I think I nearly ruptured my throat yelling expletives at him.

GERMS: Generally I conceded that teachers have a way rougher job than I do - most kids like coming to the library and will behave just to not lose the privilege, and I get more variety. However, the teachers only hang out with one or two classes' worth of germs a day. I get ALL of them. Nothing like having a kid sneeze on a book just before handing it to you to check out. This makes me appreciate Hannah (HI HANNAH) all the more.

I'm reading an entry in a British mystery series that I follow lackadaisically. It takes place in Spilling in England. Along with Flushing, I have to ask - are these not terrible, terrible things to name a place? They make me just think everything there must be... damp. Every time the place is named in the book, I cringe.

Today I got to substitute in the library at the elementary school my kids attended. Some of their old teachers came in to say hi. I knew where everything went. It's four minutes from my house. It was wonderful. Wait, I've lost my surliness. Oh, actually they didn't have a proper time sheet so I had to use the wrong one and hope it would go through all right, and I probably won't get paid, which is BULLSHIT.

There. I feel better.

Look All Around, Nothing but Blue Sky

That is a picture of Zarah's daughter Sophie at Bluesfest, taken by Zarah who was napping on a blanket and wanted to take a picture of the blue sky. I don't really know what to blog about this week and I came across this picture.

We weren't crazy about the Bluesfest lineup this year - there was really no one that we were dying to see, but we were still fine going out to listen to music in the outside. Plus, since there was no one we were fanatical about, we could chill on chairs and blankets and not get beat up in the crowd. Plus, there is always the grilled cheese food truck.

This reminds me of another funny food story, which takes us all the way away from Bluesfest but whatever, I'll circle back around later. This was in August when Collette and I were going to our friends' cottage for the week-end. We were driving one of the owners because the other owner was picking up her son at work and coming a little later. The cottage is about two hours away, and there's a Wendy's an hour and a half away that we often stop at - their dog actually wakes up and looks around for french fries at that point in the drive.

So Collette and I went in and she ordered a bacon deluxe with no ketchup and I ordered a single with cheese, no tomato and onion. The young guy working at the counter was really nice, we both commented on it - when he put Collette's burger down she said "no ketchup, right?" and he said "you got it". We got back in the car and our friend was now driving so we could eat. 

Collette unwrapped her burger and said "oh for god's sake, did I not say no ketchup TWICE?" I said "yep. Wouldn't it be funny if my burger had tomato and onion on it?" and then I unwrapped it and SURE ENOUGH. And we huffed and puffed and expletived and demanded that the car be turned around so we could go fuck some shit up (we were joking, we were not going to ruin some poor high school kids' day over a botched hamburger order, settle down). Then I looked down and said "oh, uh.... does your hamburger have bacon on it? Because, uh, mine does, and it wasn't supposed to...."

And then we howled with laughter and I had to eat the bacon deluxe because Collette was already halfway through my single with cheese. It could have used some ketchup.

I Am Reading Too Many Books At the Same Time Again

I've been having a bit of trouble maintaining a good reading focus lately. I'm not sure whether it's perimenopause or too much electronics use or - most likely - a combination of both. When I'm reading on my ipad, not only do Twitter and Facebook notifications float across my screen, but if I think of something I wanted to know or if something I read touches off a string of associations - and when doesn't it? - it's way too easy to click away and look up the name or phrase or reference I'm thinking of. Further, if I force myself NOT to look it up right then, the likelihood that I will remember it later is very low. So I could stop and just make a note to look it up later, but then I'd still be interrupting my reading. You see my dilemma.

Sometimes this kind of fuzziness leads to me starting multiple books in search of something that will hold my attention better, but I don't think that's actually the case this time. I usually read in the rough order of: something with a deadline, i.e. book club book, borrowed book, library book expiring soon; library ebooks that can't be renewed; library books that can be renewed; books I own. I keep telling myself to stop borrowing library books until I finish my pile of books that I own, and I keep not doing that.

So. The last book I finished was Exhalation, a book of short stories by Ted Chiang (who wrote The Story of Your Life, an amazing short story which was made into the movie Arrival). It was excellent. I moved it up in my queue because it was a library ebook that only had a few days left before it expired. Before that I was reading a library ebook that still had a couple of weeks left - An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green, brother of John Green whose books I adore. I don't have a really good read on it so far, but it's fast-paced and enjoyable. The funniest thing is that it revolves around giant mysterious statues that appear around the world, and the first girl to discover them and become the public face of their reception calls the first statue "Carl", which then becomes the name of all the statues. This vividly recalled to me the many times I would walk Eve home from school in the winter when she was five and six and seven, me trudging along the sidewalk or road, her in her blue snowsuit scrambling over snowbanks and climbing up on people's snow-piled lawns. She talked non-stop, to me or to herself or to the trees in her path. She called all the trees Carl.

Just before I started reading that, Indigo put five dollars in Plum points in my account. I decided to order a book by a woman, since I've been trying to read more books by women (for obvious reasons, I hope). I ended up ordering three books ("how much was it again? FIVE dollars?" Eve asked, somewhat unkindly): Wait Til You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unforth - honestly, can't even remember how I came across it  but the first three stories have been excellent; Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers - Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle because it sounded insanely cool and also extremely rage-provoking and talks about horror books and movies, and the first bit has been wonderful (and also rage-provoking, naturally). One of my favourite quotes so far: "The Babylonian Talmud states that 'if a menstrating woman passes between two men, if it is at the beginning of her period she will kill one of them' (I added a note saying "maybe he told her she'd be prettier if she smiled"); and Tender, a book of short stories by Sofia Samatar, a Somali-American educator, poet, and writer (because I'm also trying to read more books by black women). The first story is called Selkie Stories Are for Losers, and the first line bit reads "I hate selkie stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said 'What's this?' and you never saw your mom again." I trust you'll agree I chose well.

Before the lovely afternoon I spent getting to know those three books, I was reading three OTHER books on my Kindle. One was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, which I pre-ordered and waited for impatiently, and it is awesome - time-travelly and badass woman-ful and I think kind of gay - but it's very dense and I'm enjoying reading it very slowly. Two was Tide of Stone by Kaaron Warren - I've read a few of her short stories and they are devastatingly good and very much not for the faint of heart. This is also extremely original and inventive and laden with doom and dread, but there is very little narrative energy, so again I'm reading it slowly. Three is The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales edited by Dominik Parisien. So far I've read a fantastic Little Red Riding Hood retelling by Seanan McGuire, a story by Karin Tidbeck that completely turns fairy tale logic upside down and a version of Hansel and Gretel by Daryl Gregory that is both howlingly funny and extremely moving and has a ton of drugs in it.

But right now I am concentrating solely on finishing The Idiot by Elif Batuman for book club, which would normally have been last night, but we're down a member so we're not starting until October this year, which, given the way this month has gone is kind of a relief.

I can't remember who picked this book and I didn't know much about it going in. The first thirty or so pages didn't leave me impressed. I couldn't tell if it was a memoir or fiction, and it just seemed to be a journally account of a young woman's first year at Harvard with a lot of so what-type moments. The next hundred pages won me over to an extent - there was a bunch of fun linguistic stuff: "In linguistics class, we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale – albeit without morphemes. By studying where the poles were, and what morphemes got lost, you could figure out where the morphemes were stored". There were a few laugh-out-loud moments: "The whole week was depressing. I spent nine hours of it shivering, wrapped in the Gogolian coat, through a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. At some point I thought I had grown a lump in my thigh, but it turned out to be a tangerine – it had fallen through a hole in the pocket and ended up trapped in the lining".

There were also a couple of clunky lines that reminded me of things that I wrote in college and considered terribly profound: at one point she looks at a bunch of people in a pool learning how to scuba dive and thinks "how did all those people know that they wanted to learn how to scuba dive?" Ugggghhhh. Also, she's falling in love with another student through a series of incredibly pretentious email exchanges which just make me want to warn her that he will have the worst man-colds imaginable and won't ever change a diaper. So I'm not all in, but it's diverting enough. 

So obviously my reading life is completely out of control, but I'm happy and excited about all of it, and will share many more morphemes presently.

Colour Your World

Every time I think about blogging, I have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Why do I consistently find ways to avoid something that's really good for me, something that I do fairly well, something that I can literally do sitting on my ass in my kitchen, something that can easily take under half an hour? 

The preceding question could fairly equally be applied to playing the piano (big piece of furniture one room over, somehow turns invisible when I walk past) and exercising (not the sitting on my ass part, but you get me.). I would almost certainly feel better if I did these things far more regularly. Why do I not do them? Do I hate myself? 

Anyways. To just lay out a little of the stuff whirling around in my mind lately. Painting the main floor walls. When we moved in here, I was determined that we weren't going to have walls that were builder's white. I wanted colour, deeply saturated, more than one. We painted the family room a medium blue, the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room an orangey terra cotta, and the entrance a deep green. I wished slightly that the family room blue was darker and the entrance green was more sage than kelly, but on the whole I was happy (it turns out, sort of weirdly, that the entrance was the exact green of East Nepean Little League, which launched Angus on a few fairly amazing adventures, so that's kind of neat). A few years later we repainted the family room a sort of café au lait. I wished we had extended that colour into the kitchen (in my mind we did, and I'm shocked every time I rediscover that the kitchen is still yellow), but again, I was happy. 

Lately, I suddenly feel a strong need to have fewer and calmer colours. I go and visit Zarah, who gets to make all the decorating decisions for herself since her cheating-ass husband left, and I sit reading among the soothing neutrals and the understated decor that flows naturally from room to room and feel a kind of tranquillity I almost never do at home. I think of a blogger I used to read who was pregnant after the stillbirth of her first baby, and she was repainting her kitchen and living room from a gorgeous range of saffron and honey and amber - like a Middle Eastern spice market - to white and off-white. I thought she was nuts. I loved the old colours. I didn't understand how different experiences and states of mind can result in just really wanting to be surrounded by different colours.

I followed Rachel Held Evans on Twitter. I own one of her books, haven't yet read it, but she seemed like a really remarkable person (her Twitter bio begins with "Doubt-filled believer", which really resonates with me). Fairly soon before she died far too young, she was tweeting about painting a new house, or maybe repainting her house. She said she loved warm, rich colours like yellow, orange and red, that she "hated every sad, gray page of the Pottery Barn catalog". I smiled, because I remembered thinking the exact same thing. That she never got to redecorate her house, or reach the age when she would long for soothing neutrals, if she ever would, is absolutely in the minutest of minutiae in the vast tragedy of her death for her family and friends and followers. But I still think of it, and it makes looking at paint chips and trying out simulation programs seem freighted with privilege and implications, and makes it seem both less and more important than it actually is.

Is this rather a lot to lay on a few buckets of Kendall Charcoal, Balboa Mist or Metropolitan Gray? Why yes, it well may be. I'm at a time in my life, and in the life of the world, where almost everything sets off a cascade of thoughts about privilege and mortality. Our days are not unlimited. So I'm going to do my best to write more - here at least once a week, and if I fall off the wagon, feel free to call me on it. And I will drag my recalcitrant ass to the gym (buckle up, Pammy, we're going back in). And I will play my stupid piano. And I will try very hard not to procrastinate too much on clearing out some junk and painting my house some happy colours that are perfect for this point in my journey. 

Apparently My Brain Thinks Size Doesn't Matter

I have a bit of a bad habit, when buying things online, of not paying attention to measurements. Height. Weight. Quantity. I have no good excuse - I feel like there's something slightly wrong with my processing ability on computer screens, so I feel like I'm reading everything over and over but somehow I still manage to miss things, but I have no proof of this. Maybe I'm just careless. It's usually not a huge problem. I ordered a ceramic house and a little vase from artist friends online and both were surprisingly, adorably tiny when they arrived. No problem, they were still lovely.

I had a doors and windows calendar that I really liked last year, so I ordered the new version this year. Turns out it was, um, not full-sized. Eve killed herself laughing at my tiny calendar. The day squares were a little smaller, but I still made it work. It doesn't match my picture in size like the other one did, but oh well.

Near the end of the school year, I was exhausted. I was still recovering from a winter of sickness and pain, working in a hot library with years of yuck oozing out of the old carpets was making me feel somewhat unwell, and we were all crawling to the finish line. Matt was away for a few days and instead of going out for groceries and dog food, I indulged in grocery delivery for only the second time ever and ordered dog food from Amazon, although I usually support our neighbourhood independent-owned pet store. I ordered Lucy's regular food and a bag of the oral care stuff, which is her regular food but in giant pellets which are harder to chew so good for her teeth, and which she for some reason thinks is a fantastic treat even though, like I said, still her regular food. The oral care stuff seemed a little expensive, but Matt had only recently discovered it so I didn't know what it should cost, and we only give her a couple of pieces a day, so I thought maybe that's why it was more expensive.

The package was delivered and Eve opened it in the dining room and yelled for me to come look, again killing herself laughing.

So. Oops.

"We only give her four pieces a day!" Eve said. On the bright side, we won't run out of food before we run out of dog. And when my lovely neighbour needs to borrow dog food for her chocolate Lab, I have the perfect solution.

I'd like to say that I learned my lesson, at least for a while.

But later that week, I realized we were out of envelopes.