Monthly Archives: November 2014

Shut the Door, November, it’s COLD Outside

The trees look very male-pattern-balding with their crowns just twigs and still all bushy with leaves around the bottom. Bald men with hairy bottoms! It was a very mild week and then a snowstorm came.

SNOW!!! The children exclaimed Saturday morning and quickly put on their snow pants and boots and hats and mitts and then froze their tushes off because it’s unseasonably cold. Usually we get snow as a precursor to rain, so it’s wet and mucky and goes away (unless it doesn’t, hey climate change). This time it basically froze right when it hit the ground so there is powdery snow that doesn’t form a snowball but instead goes poof like an icy dandelion.

All the sidewalks are ice, which is annoying. I can’t run (very long) on ice so my run today was canceled. I’ve been running less since the half marathon anyway but I still need it for my mental health so I’m desperately trying to keep up three runs a week.

Plus I woke up feeling still tired. And I’m freezing. So I’m grumpy.

The sun is out. The sky is blue and the snow sits on the trees like frosting and we’re all healthy. My grumpiness stems entirely from there being an obstacle between me and what I want.

Despite there being no fresh snow today, the early-rising, highly excitable Eli still wanted to go outside and play in yesterday’s snow at 7 am so I had to say, it is -8C and there is nothing to play with. It’s like playing in a gravel pit. It’s like playing in the middle of a skating rink with no skates on. It’s like playing in a walk-in freezer with hunks of last year’s snowballs that you insisted on freezing in ziploc bags.

(Truth: just as I typed this, Eli came in from playing outside, carrying a small snowball. “This is for the freezer,” he said. “I’m going to label it so we don’t think it’s pie crust.” After trying to write on a snowball with a felt pen [hello metaphor] he found a small plastic bag to put the snowball in and now we have 2014 snow in our freezer hooray)

Well, can you make waffles for breakfast, said Eli.
No, I said.
Why not?
I don’t want to.

Arlo came downstairs.

Eli said, I asked if she’d make waffles but she said no. She’s too… [he almost said lazy and then called back a conversation we had a couple weeks ago where I explained that actually that’s an insult] she doesn’t want to.

Nope, I agreed. Don’t feel like it.

Oh, said Arlo.

I ended up making pancakes, later, after I’d had some coffee. Because kids gotta eat. While I was making the pancakes the internet radio station, called Back to the 80s, played a Front 242 song called Welcome to Paradise. It goes like this: HEY POOR. HEY POOR. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE POOR ANYMORE. JESUS IS HERE. It’s about televangelists. I have never heard a Front 242 song on any radio, let alone an 80s throwback station that usually plays Belinda Carlisle and Falco and the Bangles.

So delighted was I that I left the radio station on for the rest of the day. A few minutes ago, it played Don’t Worry Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin, a song I have managed to tune out for most of my life. It was on the Cocktail soundtrack and I loved Cocktail and its soundtrack but that track was not my favourite. Today I actually paid attention to it.

“Put a smile on that face!” he says. “It will soon pass, whatever it is!” he says.

Wow did I ever want to go to Bobby McFerrin’s house and punch him in the nose. But I don’t really want to go out. Instead I am feeling retroactively very sorry for the people who had personal crises the year that song came out. (I? Was fourteen, and while that was sort of a personal crisis, I’m talking more about the real kind where if you endured it while also having to hear Don’t Worry Be Happy on the radio four thousand times a day it’d make you want to hide your head in a walk in freezer full of snowballs.)

I was going to say it’s awful and annoying like Happy by Pharrell, but then I realized that at least Pharrell is giving us the OPTION to clap along if we want to. We don’t have to. He’s talking about how HE’S happy. He totally has the right to his own happiness just like we have the right to our own sadness.

Here we find two different approaches to cheering up the world at large. Diminishing their feelings by telling them to buck up l’il camper vs. giving them a happy model to follow/clap along with or not.

Maybe I’ll clap along tomorrow. When it’s December.

Whimsical Adulthood

Woke up and wrote for an hour. Working on a story. For maybe the second time in my life, I have started with a title and have written five pages of story five different ways and none of it seems to be the right fit for the title. Titles are tyranny!

Closed the notebook and decided I need to be more whimsical.

Woodbridge Meadow Whimsy - geograph.org.uk - 934787

Took the kids to school. Discussed briefly with neighbour kid’s dad how neighbour kid going to daycare during his formative years means he is used to walking blindly out into streets without first looking both ways because he was always with a pack. I had not considered this as a cause for neighbour kid’s inability to cross the street nor as a possible detrimental side effect of daycare. Still not sure it’s a real cause & effect situation. Neighbour kid also takes forty minutes to walk three blocks.

Came home. Was entertained by various municipal election articles and websites. If a candidate uses too many exclamation marks and capital letters, they both please and sadden me. I like to watch kooky people unfold in the world, but I also am sad they have no one to tell them to just use one exclamation mark. And to make their platform more elaborate than just “bring SMILES to the PEOPLE.”

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Wade whimsies 4o06” by Snowmanradio at en.wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Innotata using CommonsHelper.(Original text : Own work). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Went to the mall to return some pants. Tried on running shoes and nearly bought a pair but couldn’t commit. After I bought the pair in the spring that ended up hurting my feet but it was too late to take them back, and buying the two pairs I used to train for the race, but which are worn out, I am shoe-shy. I don’t want to buy the wrong shoe. I really want two more pairs of the kind that are worn out but they’re done now. Done. Bought some tights instead, and a new Sport Bra because those are easy. No they are. I’m flat chested.

Right! Whimsical! Was starving so I went to the food court at the mall and walked around until I found something that cost less than $5.25, which was all I had in cash. Ended up eating a breakfast combo at Tim Hortons. The hashbrown was hard as a rock. The sandwich was chilly. The tea was hot.

While I was waiting for my food, a woman walked past me and said, “I like your hairdo.” I thanked her.

To be more whimsical I sat on the opposite side of the food court, by the windows, in one of the red pleather seats. A collection of old men in sensible shoes and old man hats played cards at a round table. Next to them, a collection of old women ate noodles and chattered. I ate my bad food and sipped my tea and started a sixth version of the story whose title I am trying to do justice. (TYRANNY)

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Curious Figure part2 Tom Otterness Beelden aan Zee Den Haag” by BrbblOwn work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Home to get Saint Aardvark so we could go vote. The municipal election is ten days away but on that day we will be in Seattle having a very small vacation so we voted today. Everyone at the voting place was very friendly and helpful. The woman voting next to me mentioned that neither of the pens worked, then the whatever-you-call-him-guy-who-works-there (invigilator?) asked her if she’d taken the cap off the pen and she said no.

I got a sticker and put it on my notebook, and SA did the same with his sticker on his notebook. We’re so alike.

Up the street we wandered to the grocery store where I’d heard we could get flu shots at the pharmacy. As we don’t have convenient family docotrs, every year we get our flu shots somewhere new. Two years ago I got mine at Safeway and it hurt like a sonofabitch. Last year I went to London Drugs and it was marvelous, I barely felt a thing. I swore I would never go anywhere else for a flu shot and yet, here I was at Save On Foods, with a small, rushed pharmacist who made the smallest pretence at assessing how I was doing before jabbing that needle into my poor muscle so hard I nearly kicked him in the face.

I thought at first that I just had much bigger muscles than last year, but SA claimed his also hurt like whoa so next year, for real, no grocery store pharmacist flu shots. N.O.

After the flu shot, it was time for the notary! The first notary we went to was..not in the office. He is the only notary who works in the office, it is named after him, yet his office was open and his receptionist was there to tell people he wasn’t there, at his office, so that was confusing, but she gave us a list of other notaries in Uptown New Westminster and there were a number of them. In fact one could do a comparison of notaries to hair cuttery establishments in New Westminster and it would probably come up even I think. So we found another notary right across the street and went to see him.

We needed him to notarize the letter that authorizes me to take the children across the border next week because SA won’t be with me because he’ll already BE in Seattle you see and maybe this is overkill but the kids have different last names and I remember once my Peruvian co-worker trying to take her kids on vacation to Peru without her husband and she nearly missed the plane because she didn’t have a letter from her partner saying it was OK to take the three kids to Peru.

I had forgotten we’d explained all this to the kids the other day so I was surprised when I mentioned the notary to Eli on our walk home from school and he said, “Oh to sign the letter proving you’re not a kidnapper, right?” Right.

Then back to school to get the kids, then home, then back out to get Arlo from his friend’s house, then home, then dinner and perusing the Toys R Us Christmas catalogue where I made the children spit out their dinner with laughter as I pointed to the doll called Baby All Gone and said, “Oh that’s the toy where you bring it home and then it disappears!”

Eli made me laugh when he saw the Disney Princess Lego castle and said, “Really? Now, Lego you’ve gone too far.”

Whimsy to close out the day.

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