How NaBloPoMo Can You Go?

Yah, I know that makes no sense. After all my moaning about how long November is, I totally didn't realize that today was the last day. Seems like I should have something more auspicious than...what I have.

My friend Pam's husband is away for an unspeakable amount of time so I picked up her kids and took them to school this morning so she could stay in her pajamas, because my Dad picked up the kids a couple of times while Matt was away and I stayed in my pajamas and it was five flavours of awesome. I worked in the library for a few hours and got my cuteness fix from Eve's adorable little twin friends who always come up and hand me their books beaming these fantastic little smiles. And their hair is a different length so I can tell them apart. Then I went to Winners to stock up on advent calendar stuff. Then I went to Chapters to buy battling rodents for my nephew and an obsessive compulsive squirrel book and toy for my other nephew and in a fit of giddiness I bought Come Thou Tortoise and The Elegance of the Hedgehog for myself because it was Just Too Perfect, they were clearly meant to be togther, with me -- I just barely managed not to buy Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (had to draw the line somewhere).

Then I came home and started looking through the Christmas boxes for these little boxes of 24 elf-hats that I got a couple of years ago at IKEA and decided that I would use this year instead of getting the Spiderman or Princess ones with the cheap sub-standard chocolate in them. Why? Beats the hell out of me. If my kids are happy to eat the sub-standard chocolate, why the hell am I not just keeping the good stuff for myself? Okay anyway, the advent hat thingies were in the last box. Not the last box I looked in, because duh. The very. last. Christmas. box. And if you'd seen my storage area, that would have a much bigger impact. Okay, I've just looked at some other DIY advent calendars and am having severe advent calendar envy. Then I took Eve to dance, and two other Moms and I ended up at....Chapters. Again! I managed not to buy anything this time (not even my tall vanilla rooibos tea latte because Patti owed me girl guide cookie money.) Then we went back to pick up the girls and the teacher reminded us next week was parents' night and half of us said "yay we get to go in and watch" and half of us said "you mean we don't get to go to Chapters?" I won't mention which half was which.

Then we came home. And I would be overjoyed that it was the last day of November except that we all know what comes next....

....gulp.

Stuff

I very determinedly mooched around for much of today. This was the first day the kids were in school since Matt got back home and I figured I was going to be tired and out of sorts so I decided I wouldn't really try to get too much done before picking the kids up, taking them to piano, getting groceries and making dinner. I have this bad habit of thinking I'm going to have a relaxing day and then letting my stupid Catholic guilt wreck it, which totally defeats the purpose of being lazy. So I mooched. Even though I don't really like the word mooch. Or nibble -- why does anything ever need to be nibbled? Eck, the very sound of it makes my shoulders creep up and my nose all wrinkly. And snippets. I hate snippets of anything. Little pieces? Fine. Wee bits? Grand. No snippets.

 

While we were having supper Angus asked Matt if he'd been everywhere in the world yet. No, I did not put him up to this. Matt said the list of places he hasn't been in still much longer than the list of places he has been. Then we decided to figure out which continents he hasn't visited (Africa, Antarctica and South America, but I've been to Africa so between the two of us we've nearly got them covered). Eve was trying to talk about Asia but kept saying it in French which she and Angus found hilarious. Then Angus asked what the biggest country was and I started singing the song I always sing to help me remember this because I suck at geography and love the Arrogant Worms. So then we played this while we were finishing supper -- hilarious AND educational. 

After supper I had a mini freak-out because I remembered that my assignment is due on Friday and HOLY CRAP WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING MOOCHING WHEN PUTTING SEARCH STRINGS TOGETHER AND COMBING DATABASES FOR facts on fibromyalgia and new cars and the 1911 census MUST BE DONE? Then I sat down and finished one question and decided it wasn't so bad. Then I ate some candy cane kisses and then became annoyed by all the stupid little wrappers that had to be hidden when I heard my husband coming downstairs. The stupid little snippets are hardly nibble-able.

BUT let us all celebrate the fact that for the first time in weeks I DON'T have a zit of gargantuan proportions camping out on one corner of my chin or the other or both. No? Okay, maybe just me. "I'm the second...largest country..."

(Little Ray of) Sunday

Last year nablopomo was really fun. I was coming up to the end of my first year of blogging and it was a great galvanizing force, encouraging me to shape a little word sculpture every day, channelling my thoughts into a few posts I really loved, and several that I was quite happy with.

This year? Not so much.

It's not horrible. I don't approach the computer chair with a great heavy curtain of doom closing around me or anything. But I also haven't whipped out anything that I'm terribly proud of, and several posts have definitely just been for-the-sake-of-posting. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to look at it like a canoe trip. I always end up wondering, at some point on the second day, why the hell I thought this was anything resembling a good idea. I always end up wondering, at some point during the second night, if my triceps will ever feel like normal muscles rather than knotted-up, chewed-on, whipped chopped and puréed balls of PAIN. I always end up wondering why some douchebag thinks it's a good idea to bring a watermelon on a canoe trip. And then at some point on the next-to-last day I realize sometimes you just do shit to prove to yourself that you can. And at least I don't have to do nablopomo with a crazy Austrian in the bow making me go all crooked. For that I have Absolut pear vodka.

And now I will leave you with my best two word verifications of the past few weeks:

irant (funny 'cause it's true)

rubpro (funny 'cause it's dirty).

Sat(on ass all)urday Rant

Yay my husband's home. My stock response to anything the kids have said all day is "I don't know, talk to your father". I have read two Saturday papers cover to cover. I have coined scathing responses to this article by Johanna Schneller, about her interview with Billy Bob Thornton, who acted like a total asshat last year on Q, a CBC radio show hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. Schneller calls Thornton a 'courtly iconoclast', and 'self-deprecating', and 'candid' and I don't know that he actually autographed her butt but she seems to have done everything short of planting a big old smacker on his. Because you know, he's "overly sensitive", and "I carry too much of what I see and hear" -- this in his own words, and this separates him from Robert Pattinson how? She claims that his bitchy mutterings, sullen teen-agerish silences and general douche-baggery on Q were a 'rejection of an opportunity to shill' in an age of 'relentless self-promotion'. This reminds me of when I was doing my Master's in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto in whatever the hell year it was and Derek Walcott was teaching a course. Some of the students thought that he was a little detached and dismissive as a teacher. I was out at a pub and one of the other girls said, with a breathless, groupie-ish air "but you know, I think it's that he's, well, he's a poet, and he doesn't want to be teaching these obsessed-with-marks, academic, grad students". To which another prof who was there drily replied, "then that's when you say I appreciate the job offer but no thank-you all the same". So yeah -- Billy Bob, how about you say no thanks to the interview or if you agree to do the interview, then USE YOUR FUCKING WORDS.

Fried Day

Yay. My husband is home. I can now make him do everything and then tell him how he's doing it all wrong. Because yes, apparently a large part of me IS still in grade nine. Blissful P.D. day. Kids are still in the pajamas I gave them yesterday. We all read, then Eve fell asleep for two hours and woke up outraged that she had "slept much longer than I planned to". 

Tremendously exciting package arrived from Budding Artists. It's run by a friend of a friend, so I had heard about it years ago, but being your basic disorganized lazy procrastinator, it took me this long to get my act together and send them some of Eve's art. I put in a huge order for Christmas gifts for both sides of our family. We got fridge magnets, coasters, luggage tags, garden stakes, a coffee cup and a shirt for my nephew, all with Eve's pictures on them. I hadn't told her about it and her reaction when we opened the box was priceless -- loud, and priceless. Also, I had forgotten that I placed the order, and now I've realized that most of my Christmas shopping, for the most difficult-to-buy for people is done. DONE!! And if they don't like it, well that basically makes them monsters, because it's their granddaughter's/great-granddaughter's/niece's purest expression of her creativity, right? Some people include a card with their gifts -- I like to slip in a little emotional blackmail. 

I'm still pissed off at myself for not doing this when Angus still would have gotten more of a kick out of it. I think I will do it with some of the stuff he drew when he was younger -- there was a particular 'house with a tree and a butterfly' period he went through that should be preserved for posterity. I still haven't decided if Eve's 'naked people with enormous hands and belly buttons' should be immortalized or hidden away forever though. Gotta go. Matt is getting the kids ice cream and I mustn't miss my chance to criticize while not doing anything to help. Welcome home, honey.

Merry Thursday

We're at husband return day minus one. I have given up all pretenses to responsible parenting and am currently revelling in excess and permissiveness. We went to the movies. We had popcorn and french fries for dinner (with a few Swedish berries -- which at least resemble fruit -- as a garnish). Then we went to Chapters to get a birthday present for Eve's friend and I bought Angus the next two books in the series he's reading and Eve the fourth Judy Moody book, instead of giving them their allowance, spending more than their allowance, thus TOTALLY NEGATING the very purpose of having an allowance (excess! permissiveness! total negation!) We came home and I gave them the absurdly fuzzy fleece Land's End pajamas (there was a link to snowflake feet pajamas here) I meant to save for Christmas -- hey, it's cold out and they arrived today, like it was meant to be. I have now been comprehensively, literarily and fuzzily hugged and snuggled.

Today was the Christmas bazaar at our school. People donate stuff which is set out on tables and priced from 50 cents to five dollars, and kids are allowed to shop for their family members. The idealist in me thinks this is a lovely idea. The cynic in me thinks this is an opportunity for a bunch of reasonably well-off people to donate the crap they don't want any more in order for their kids to spend their money on someone else's crap, in the fortunate case that they don't unrecognizingly buy back the crap their own parents donated. It's kind of like musical crap. I wrapped stuff for three hours. I wrapped tea cups and candle holders and stuffed animals and various other weirdly-shaped stuff and one -- only ONE -- nice, flat, square, easy-to-wrap book. I said "can you write two gift tags?", sometimes three or four times before it sank in that I wanted them to -- hey! -- write two gift tags! I managed to mostly keep my good humour. My good humour nearly deserted me when I got to the movie theatre with the kids, went to pull out my wallet and realized that instead of leaving the tape dispenser I had carried around all afternoon at home I had left my wallet and was now trying to pay for the movie with the tape dispenser. Happily, we don't live too far from the movie theatre. And my kids are used to me doing weird crap with my wallet -- they looked at the tape dispenser, looked at me, looked at each other and walked back to the van and got in, kindly saving their eye rolls for after I got in and they were behind me. And it's a P.D. day tomorrow. When we will all wear our pajamas and read books all day. I may or may not serve actual food. I'll let you know. p.s. Angus pajamas had dinosaurs on them, in case you think I gave him snowflake footies.

Wordless Wednesday: Angus McCrock

I shared the pictures of Angus McCrock from World Trivia Night with Angus. Angus is now being really obnoxious.






Angus is walking around saying "if it's not me it's crap!" Eve said "is he calling me crap?!" I said "he's calling me crap too -- and I'm his mother." For some reason that made her feel better.