Zarah’s House Which is House Goals

Except that last thing, that freaks me out

Day 4

Heartbreakingly beautiful fall day to drive four hours and fifty minutes to Hamilton, arrive in the hotel parking lot at the exact same time as Zarah who was coming from a whole other city, wash my face and change clothes in ten minutes, pick up Eve and head to campus for my professor’s retirement reception (where Eve was the only current student invited), then take Eve out for dinner (with crayons). Now hanging with Zarah for the rest of the weekend. 

Day 3

 I had to take a break from de-crapifying today because my back is done - usually it's okay when I get up and gets gradually worse as the day goes on, so when it hurts when I get up it's not good. 

Anyway, have a shot of my piano, which used to have a pile of cloth masks, a dozen defunct pairs of sunglasses and a bunch of photographs piled on it.

Also, everyone saying that they want to do this, if you have kids still living at home or work full time, DO NOT EVEN TRY IT. My kids are gone and I work extremely part time and it's still really fucking difficult. Plus I'm trying to blog every day. As I said to my friend Hannah (HI HANNAH), "I just keep reminding myself that it doesn't have to get done well, it just has to get done". Of course, it doesn't even HAVE to get done. This is all self-imposed! I am in a hell of my own making! 

Okay, that's being dramatic. It's not hell. I'm starting to really enjoy the de-crapifying. For the pleasure of so much less clutter in my visual field, for the satisfaction of having places for more things and more things in their place (not "everything", it's NEVER going to be 'everything'), for all the things I'm finding that I thought I might never see again. I am a little worried that when I get back from Hamilton the impulse will have fled. I hope not. 

I should schedule posts for when I’m away this weekend. Or just post a weird selection of pictures on the fly and have you make of them what you will,

A is for Angus

 Because well, duh. My Alpha baby (who is SO not an Alpha male, which thank all the gods), the one who made me a mom. 

I never try to write dedicated posts about my kids because I suck at them. I am bad at sentimentality (ask my husband), and of course everyone thinks their kids are special and wonderful. So I'll just tell you some things about him.

He is kind. When he was two years old he would get me a pillow for my back when I sat down on the floor to play with him. When he started playing hockey, the first time he knocked a kid down, he skated over and tried to help him up (in all fairness, he did get over this impulse quickly). 

He is witty. At three-thirty or so, I was usually in the kitchen when I heard the front door open, and I would always yell "which kid" because they got home at slightly different times. Once he yelled back "the slightly dumber somewhat more athletic one". I texted to show him I got a shirt with baseball stuff on it once and said 'I got a new shirt' but there was a lag before the picture posted and he replied 'I would hope so, once in a while'. 

He is smart. In grade ten he got the highest mark in geography, which resulted in him getting to meet MICHAEL PALIN, which was of course wasted on him and he didn't even mention it until we saw it in the community paper. He graduated from high school and university with top honours while playing a lot of baseball (although there were kids who did hockey AND baseball, and I don't know how that is even possible with anyone in the family keeping any degree of insanity - I remember one playoff baseball game where some kids would slide into home and keep running and land in the backseat of the family car to be driven at breakneck speed to hockey tryouts). 

He is humble, sometimes annoyingly so. He led his baseball team to the Little League World Series. He was chosen to attend the Man Up city workshop, an initiative aimed at combating toxic masculinity, and the letter we got specifically said it was because he was a leader in his school community. When I met one of Eve's friends and he found out who her brother was, he looked at me in awe and said 'you gave birth to ANGUS?' And then once when Matt was telling him that he could do something because of his leadership qualities Angus said 'Dad, you're crazy - no one sees me as a leader'. Dork.

He is a dope. Matt texted him a job opening with the Toronto Blue Jays and Angus said "wow, looks right up my alley. How the heck did you find it?" Matt said "I googled MLB jobs". (I just realized I am using quotation marks and inverted commas inconsistently and with no rhyme or reason. I'm too lazy to go back and fix it). There was the time he showed up to have lunch with us at the hotel the day before his graduation and realized he was too hungover to come to lunch so had a nap in our hotel room instead. And then started the gathering that night with a shot of limoncello. 

This was my Facebook status update when Angus left for school after Christmas holidays his first year away at school: "Matt and I took a hands-off approach to Angus getting his shit together to go back today (he got picked up by a teammate fairly early this morning). A hands-off you're-old-enough we-trust-you (even though you had friends over until midnight) approach... This was a mistake." (He left an immense pile of stuff behind, including a glove and two bats. While returning to the school he SPECIFICALLY WENT TO TO PLAY BASEBALL).

And, well, this.

He is a pretty okay dude to have around (ish. In a 'far away being independent and forging his own path' kind of way) and I love him immensely.

I'm Not Ready

 I never am, am I? Let's take a look at past November 1st posts. Oh look, last November 1st my mood was "unremittingly hideous". Two years ago I just posted a picture of a bare, frozen shrub. I believe the words "mired in suckitude" have been uttered. 

Should I stop trying to make NaBloPoMo happen? Is it never going to happen? (Eve and I recently saw the Mean Girls musical). When I Google it, it still comes up as a "month long writing exercise" that occurs each November. Well, I always did sort of torture the actual definition of exercise, so why should blogging be any different?

Maybe I shouldn't be all defeatist. Maybe it will be awesome. After all, I took Lucy out for a walk today fully expecting to be rained on, and instead the sun came out and made the path to our park look like all magical and shit. 

Truthfully, I'm feeling pretty good today. I am still engaged in the nearly full-time pursuit of de-crapifying the house, and I have come to a place in the process I feel like I've never been before, where I actually can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I still have time before guests arrive or my children come home or there's a holiday I have to prepare for, so I don't have to chuck the remaining piles into the closet or storage space before I'm ready to deal with them.

I'm heading to Hamilton for my professor's retirement reception on the week-end, which will probably be a good forced break, because this is a back-breaking pursuit and I'm at the point where I keep telling myself to sit down for ten minutes but instead I keep compulsively doing one more thing that leads to ten more things, and then it's 3 a.m. and I can't straighten up. My husband needs to come home from California and make me go to bed on time.

I also had kids in one of my libraries for the first time this year yesterday - there were major class re-organizations going on and we couldn't make a schedule until they were finished. I had classes in my other library, and although we cleared out and sorted a whole roomful of books (my personal leitmotif right now, I guess) and got a lot of cataloguing done, I was a bit weary of being alone. The kids were very excited to be coming in finally, which made me very happy.

Our friends' annual Halloween party was on Saturday. Not only were my kids far away, but this year my husband was also absent, and I told our family group text that it was kind of bullshit that I had to tape myself into the gift bag ALL BY MYSELF. I felt tired and a little weird (which is my usual state, to be perfectly honest), but it was still fun, although PSA: gift bags don't breathe at all. Also, once I was in it I couldn't bend over at all - I went to get Lucy's kong from her bed to fill with peanut butter and nope - fortunately there was one on the edge of the sink. I knocked a key onto the floor while getting my car keys out and it had to stay there until I got home. The actual driving? Let's not talk about it - fortunately my friends live twenty seconds away.

I'm wondering if this year I should try a theme or structure rather than just posting randomly. Something alphabetical or something. But fiddle-dee-dee, I'll think about it tomorrow. 

Maybe Some Territory Should be Left Uncharted

 I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had started trying to declutter and organize the house a little earlier this year than last, partly because I had the urge and partly because last year I started in November and was irritated when this ran into Christmas season and I had to stop and change gears before I was ready. 

Matt was away for four days last week and then he left Sunday again for ten days, so I'm trying to take advantage of being alone in the house to make as much progress as possible with no one here to be disturbed by the piles of stuff and the copious swearing. 

This may have been a terrible decision.

Eve's fall break week was a couple of weeks ago, beginning with Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. My sister and her family were coming here for Thanksgiving and they live just the other side of Hamilton where she goes to school, so they picked her up on the way. It was wonderful, as it always is when we're all together. We talked and laughed and ate and drank and played dumb games. I found Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader in a cupboard in the basement. 

Have you ever played Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? The questions and answers are printed on cards but then scrambled or filtered so they can't be read with the naked eye - you have to put them in a card-reader sleeve that unscrambles them - theoretically. What we found out was that no one over 25 could read anything - we kept going to younger and younger people until my niece, who's 20, could finally decipher them. Am I smarter than a fifth grader? I don't fucking know, can you make the questions legible so I can find out? Hmph.

The game was still fun. If Charlotte thought the question was too easy, she'd read it in French. Eve or my nephew would shout out the answer while the rest of us were still trying to translate in our heads. I said the wrong answer for whether stalagmites go up or down, which was upsetting because I made a point of learning which was which a few years ago and I KNOW the right answer, I just said it wrong. I did, however, invent something called the Sizeable Gin and Tonic that weekend, (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but whatever, some inventions are beautiful BECAUSE of their simplicity), and I'd like to see a fifth grader do that (no I would not, that would be very inappropriate, I'm insecure and lashing out, I'm sorry).

My sister's family left on Monday and Eve had the rest of the week to recover from the preceding insane week of midterms and assignments and hang out with her friends. Four years ago we did our first pumpkin patch photo shoot with her four friends, and it was so much fun we try to do it every year. Of course, four years ago was right before Covid, so the next year the shoot had to be masked and distanced. Now they're all in university, so we go with whoever we can gather - this year we had Eve, Alison and Davis for the photo shoot and Jackson joined for the pumpkin painting later that night after classes. Marianna is in B.C. at drama school so she only gets home at Christmas.

They usually come here to paint because I used to paint stuff for fun and we always have a lot of craft paint and brushes lying around. I completely forgot this year that this would be happening, and I had moved the box of paint that used to sit at the end of the coffee table behind the chair downstairs. I had to go into the big scary storage room behind the laundry room and try to find some, and kept emerging to where Eve was waiting with boxes containing a few bottles of paint and also marbles, ribbons, crumpled paper, and a tiny wooden chest I've had since I was a little girl. I apologized for the fact that we still live like this, and she said "I think it's awesome. You get so many surprises". Way to put a nice spin on it, I guess.

I had book club on Monday night and we were talking about home organizing. Someone asked me if I was going room to room systemically and I laughed and laughed because no, my system is not going methodically room to room. My system is not even a system, because why would I not bring the same chaos demon energy I bring to everything? I started upstairs in Eve's closet, and packed up some outgrown clothes to give away, then brought a couple of things down to store in the downstairs closet, which was a disaster so I started moving things around in there, then brought something up to the dining room and ended up emptying out the china cabinets. I've managed to leave the family room largely untouched, which is good because it means I have one more-or-less orderly space to retreat to.

The book we read this month was Michael Palin's Erebus: The Story of a Ship, about the other ship from the Franklin expedition (the one that wasn't the Terror, which is the one I always think of when I think Franklin Expedition), which was also sailed extensively around the Antarctic before Franklin and everyone else involved kind of screwed the pooch and got her sunk. Now that I've typed that it sounds disrespectful to all the men who died, which is absolutely a tragedy, but it really does sound like the expedition was ill-conceived and fraught with poor judgment from the beginning. And whoo, Jane Franklin was a terrifyingly smart and manipulative piece of work. The past couple of days I've been mostly navigating the vast and perilous shoals of my basement and I have to tell you, tinned meat and sleeping in a frozen hammock are not sounding terrible by comparison.

I went to the One World Bazaar with Jody (HI JODY) on Saturday and she was mad at me for engaging in negative self-talk - apparently I'm not supposed to say I'm an idiot even when I'm being an idiot (wait, sorry, that's doing it again. I'm really having to be on guard against that while engaged in this particular pursuit, because all I keep thinking is 1) how on earth did we end up with all this crap and 2) why am I even bothering with this because clearly I am just a worthless slattern who is incapable of maintaining any level of order and structure. This is not helpful. Most of these things served a purpose at one time. Now they do not, and they can move on and serve a purpose somewhere else. I might not be able to maintain the level of neatness and precision I'm aiming for, but that's okay - anything will be an improvement, and it will take a while for entropy to reassert itself. Right?

So right now a lot of my basement looks like this:

But, like Eve says, you get so many surprises. Like this get well card she made for me when she was little, that I found inside a biography of Virginia Woolf:

Also, I bought one of the carved ducks that I yearned for last year at the Bazaar, and quite extensively rearranged stuff on the two pieces of furniture by the entrance solely to show it off to best effect, and I regret nothing.

No Horses Have Been Lost in the Writing of This Post

 I am sitting at my kitchen table beside a sliding door through which a beautiful fall day is visible. To my right on the table is a tape measure that looks like a square Pinocchio head, and pulling out the tape means his nose grows. Because it's so brightly coloured, I keep catching it in the corner of my eye and thinking it's my phone and I'm getting a text. This is silly and annoying and amusing.

I just didn't feel like starting yet another post with an explanation of why I haven't blogged for three weeks and an enumeration of all the events since I last blogged (although that's coming), so I went another way. 

What's been going on? Well for starters, does no one lock their cars anymore? I only ask because I have been out running errands and opened the door of my black SUV (which opens automatically when I have my fob in my hand, because I DO lock my door) and then had one ass cheek in the seat before realizing that THIS IS NOT MY VEHICLE on MULTIPLE occasions in the past few weeks. If the door opens, I assume it's my vehicle, but my memory is on life support, I am easily distracted, and there are a FUCKTON of black SUVs (SsUV?) out there. Once I only noticed I was in the wrong car because of a can of nuts in the centre console, and then I wondered what kind of a chump I am driving around with no nuts in the centre console, because come on, that is just a good idea. Sometimes it's only the lack of used kleenex piled behind the gearshift that tips me off (and if I clean it out, then I'm worried I'm in the wrong car the next time I get in). I always leap back out like my butt has been burned, and I haven't been caught yet, but geez, LOCK YOUR DOORS, people!

Speaking of do as I say, not as I do, when Angus was still home in the summer, one night we had just gotten back from somewhere, all gotten out of the car, forgotten to lock it, and gone inside. I only went in long enough to fill up the watering can, then stepped out the front door to water the hanging baskets. At first I thought it was Angus looking in the Rav for something, then realized it was a man I didn't know. I stood there staring like an idiot, nearly saying something massively idiotic like "can I help you?" He calmly closed the door and started walking away, until I shouted "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, FUCKWEASEL" and then he started running. It was only ten-thirty in the evening! Lock your doors, people! (It's me, I'm people).

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had thrown axes at our friends' cottage and was paying for it with a pinched nerve and pretty bad nerve pain shooting down my arm. In an unaccustomed lack of procrastination, I booked a physiotherapy appointment barely two weeks into this being a problem (it hurt a lot). I also called Rocket Doctor (a virtual doctor service in Canada) to ask for an anti-inflammatory and/or muscle relaxant to get me through to my physio appointment. I told the doctor I hurt myself throwing axes and he said "...nice". Stretch before axe-throwing, people!

I had one previous wonderful experience at the place I went to, after switching from a crappy place that seemed to spend a lot of time on icing and TENS machines and other things I could do myself at home and hardly any on effective therapeutic techniques. This time was also extremely positive. After only three visits I was to the point where the medication could take the pain down to zero, and after four the injury pain was gone and this dude was addressing stuff that I thought was just pain I had to live with now. I did end up with some spectacular bruising after one visit. He said "did your husband ask you what the hell happened?" I said "Yeah, I just told him I got dry-nailed by an Italian man named Luca". He said "NEEDLED, Allison, dry-NEEDLED". 

So yeah, fall. My favourite season has been throwing pretty good favourite-season vibes. Some rain, but then some great weather when I really needed it. Some tea and reading outside until I couldn't feel my fingers (all I need is some gloves that leave on fingertip naked for turning ipad pages and I'm set). Anyone else want to flip a table every time you see the word 'shacket?' This is a new, super-stupid marketing thing. It's a combination of a shirt and a jacket but sounds ridiculous and, as my friend Marilyn (HI MARILYN) pointed out, evokes a jacket made of or associated with shit. Could they not have gone with 'sweater' instead? Is 'swacket' any stupider? What genius was responsible for this abomination? And are they related to whatever brainiac came up with "Feel again, at the movies" to get people back in theatres? Did no one think that one could use a touch more workshopping? 

Enough, I'm getting cranky and this is not a Surly Thursday post. Love you all. Lock your doors. Button up your shackets. Be well.