I think that tomorrow will be hard.....

curling up into a ball and crying now.....the day needs to start over......

Almost less crazy. Normal operations will resume shortly.

stressed.beyond.belief.

Another bloody salad

I can't help it! I love salads!
Green salad with tomatoes, dill, peaches, blueberries, and feta with a very vinegary vinaigrette - so amazing!

Mastering the art

Amid the chaos of work, I took last night off and went for chick flick night with the gals. We watched Julie and Julia, based on the blogger Julie Powell who cooks her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year, and Julia Child's arrival in France and her creation and completion of the book. The Julie bits were uniformly dull, the actors were hopelessly outmatched by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. I could have watched the Julia Child movie really. If you rent it, don't even bother watching the bits without Meryl Streep. As an aside, her shoes were also gorgeous.
What left an impression on me more than anything else was the relationship between Julia Child and her husband, Paul. One of my friends has told me that the portrayal of the relationship actually seems to be very true-to-life based on what she's read about it, but I guess that doesn't really matter other than to realise that a relationship like theirs can exist outside of a movie theater.
At one point in the movie, Paul is toasting his wife and remembering their first dinner date, and he says, "and suddenly it was just Julia, always Julia", that realization that he was staring at the person that was for him. That seems to sum up the portrayal, the Childs both seem to have found the person who answered the other halves of their individual conversations, whose thoughts were not the same, but who completed and enhanced each other's discourse. What an amazing thing it must be to find a person who stimulates and supports you, body and soul, someone you feel that certain of and trust so completely. I know that I may never have that, but I want it. I've spent a lot of time recently pondering love and relationships and there's a lot of stuff that I can't share with you here, but it seems that I have turned into a hopeless romantic of late and I see no reason to go back to being anything else.
I'm here, come and get me before I change my mind.

Friday unhaiku

Up since very early. Working. Listening to the rain and watching the sky lighten. I'm gonna be toast tonight....
I pick up my kids, I've missed my kids.

Running out of time...

supper

Days go by

Finally I have some time! Things have been busy, Ben was sick, he's not great with the heat. Naomi is thriving on it though, running around while the rest of us wilt. I have been enjoying salads of late and I'm planning a couscous tomato salad tonight with chickpeas. It's too hot to contemplate an oven anytime soon.
I haven't been sleeping a lot the past couple of days and my workload for the end of the week is insane. I just have to keep going and try to stay awake even though my brain is fantasizing about a nice long nap. Perhaps some more coffee is in order?

living in the heat

Another hot one. Last night I went over to Jen's with the kiddies and we had a communal supper of tacos and let the kids run around the house. We got back here a bit late, and Ben didn't sleep in this morning. We went out to Parc Jean Drapeau for the Fetes des Enfants. There were tons on people there and it was hot. The kids enjoyed the bus and metro ride out, but we found the people and the lines a bit daunting. Ben finally lost it when we told him we couldn't go swimming at the big pool, there were just too many people around, it was nuts. He pulled a tantrum the likes of which I haven't seen in years, he cried all the way home about how we had to go back. Once we got home and had another snack and relaxed he was fine, but the journey was awful.
I'm having a rough evening. Things are floating around in my mind that I can't seem to shake. And it's a very warm evening, so sleep may be hard to find tonight.
Tomorrow we have errands and a party - lots to do!

Another day

wheh, hot one!
Salad days for sure! I have a fridge full of fresh produce. Tonight while I got supper ready for the kids I threw together a quick green salad. I've decided to take part of the day off tomorrow. Today I was bombarded with new work and a project that I thought had died resurfaced. I need a few hours of nothing to regroup. We are all enjoying the hot weather, finally it is summer in Montreal. I plan on taking the kids to the pool or the water park this weekend. It's a bit warm at the new place, but really not too bad as long as you keep the clothing to a minimum. It has been an interesting week while I have fought myself on a few things and discovered a few things. The universe continues to work itself out and I have to let it. That sounds creepily cryptic, but it's really not. My heart still knows what it wants.

Darling is this love?

Grey day. I'm resisting the urge to crawl under my desk for a snooze, primarily because it was probably last vacuumed never.
Yesterday I grabbed the kiddies and we drove out to the townies to see my folks. The day was surprisingly sunny despite the forecast and we played outside and got bitten by mosquitoes and then played inside and ate cake. We got home and dinner and baths and bedtime and then I did a bunch of stuff and collapsed after midnight and woke up with a daughter passed out in my bed (I have no idea when she crawled in) and a son waking me up and I'm exhausted. Must get through today and run and get a few groceries to get ready for having the kids all week. Steve is at some geeky game convention, so I have our urchins this week and will attempt to keep my sanity. I also have to do some baking tonight because muffins have been requested. Woop!

Errands, market, some writing, some downtime, and.... supper!
So tired.... need....something.....

morning

It's a stunning day here, sunny and not too hot, emphasis on sunny. I spent the morning lounging in my bed reading, surfing, drinking coffee, and dreaming. Mornings like these are wonderful and indulgent and I used to feel guilty about them, but now when I get them I just grab my coffee and run back to bed and laze selfishly in the crisp sheets and allow myself the pleasure of the time completely to myself.
I forgot what it was like to have me time. I mean, I had time to myself when the kids weren't crawling on me, but it's not the same as being alone with no expectations on your time. You forget what that's like when you live with someone and have kids. I know it can get too lonely at times too and I want to share the silence with someone else. It's a balance. Right now, I'm soaking up the solitude when I get it and trying to really enjoy it.
So, now it's off to the market and hopefully tomatoes! I'm in the mood for some cooking, and I saw a few recipes today with fresh tomatoes that are making my mouth water.

Magic

Banjo man, you've stolen my heart. I saw you in Montreal last night, and now all I want is to lay down in the grass and stare up at the starry night sky and hear you serenade me.
thank you :-)

amazing lyrics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r3Bs_KkP94

"But image on image like beads on a rosary
Pulled through my head as the music takes hold
And the sickener hits, I can work till I break
But I love the bones of you that I will never escape"

Have you ever loved like that? Have you ever been loved like that?

Sleepy, banjos, snubbed

Got back from lunch and am now struggling to keep my eyes open. I can't go for a run, too full. Maggie's home and I met her for lunch at Pushaps.
I'm pretty excited about tonight, I'm going out to see Bela Fleck. He's performing with an African musician at the Francofolies and I know it's going to be fantastic! I love going to live music events that don't involve people with lighters.
I'm starting to make lists of all the work that needs to get done for the end of this month and I'm trying to resist the urge to curl up in a corner and start chewing my hair. It's overwhelming.
Oh, and I have now alienated another academic - too many questions and not enough adoration I believe.....imagine that, theories break down :-)
I'm now starting to think about the qualification of happiness. I'm trying to come up with a list of things that make me truly happy and then thinking more about how they make me feel than what they are, that comfort, that calm that floods though my body when I anticipate them.

Are you happy?

Now discussing ideas of happiness with Gilbert, you gotta love the Internet!
My questions were about the length of time simulated happiness lasts and the nature of choice and experience. I guess that the happiness you create for yourself lasts as long as you are able to maintain the certainty of your decision, there shouldn't be a difference between types of happiness, or is there? Is there an absolute happiness? Is there something that will always bring you happiness in every situation in your life? Is there a place or a person or a thing or a piece of music that you can always point to and say that it will always give you happiness? If it does exist, have you had it since childhood? Is it rooted in something comforting that makes you think, "home"?

muffin woman

More often than not when I need to think, I bake. More often than not when I bake and there's something on my mind I end up with something not on the recipe happening, one thing is substituted for another, a spice is added, a cookie turns into a brownie, or a cake layer. Sometimes things are utterly disastrous, other times they are just what I needed.
I managed to get an astounding amount of fiber and fruit into these puppies and still keep them moist and cakey enough that the kids will eat them. I wonder if I can remember how I did this for next time.....

It's a holiday everywhere else in Canada but here.
That sucks.....

blather

Ben is home! He had so much fun, but I missed him. He and Naomi were ecstatic to see each other. She held him tightly and wouldn't let go and he cried he was so happy to see her. I know they will not do this forever, but I hope that the core of their feelings never changes, I hope that they always have each other. As an only child I never had the chance to bond with a sibling, instead always hanging out on the sidelines and watching it. Do we ever grow out of our desire to have that kind of relationship? Do we always look for people to fill that role?
Last week was rough. I lost my ability to cope for reasons I'm not sure that I understand. I'm sure that this week will be better, not perfect, but better.
I watched Up the Yangtze last night. What a lovely, sad, sweet, surreal movie. I'm not sure how he managed to get people to let him film quite so much. I mean, some of it must have been staged? Just to see how people live, how they survive. The main family start out living in a hut they built by the river, but they must move eventually. They grow some food and he works jobs carrying goods or breaking rocks. Neither parent can read or write or speak English. I guess the thing that struck me most was their knowledge of where they stood in the universe. They had regrets about what they could not give their children in terms of paying for higher education, but they didn't question their place in society or the government's decision to build the dam and displace them. Their ability to accept the decisions of those with authority and even their daughter's boss was very sad for me to watch, but their acceptance of their roles in life was oddly freeing. I've been watching TED talks again, and I was listening to Dan Gilbert talk about the what makes us happy and synthesizing happiness and Alain de Botton talking about our ideas of failure and success and it got me to thinking. As I watched this movie, watching the people, real people, their acceptance of their fate, the way that the mother and father are at peace with their roles in society, they don't beat themselves up because they don't have wealth, they are matter-of-fact about their daughter having to go and work on a cruise ship at the age of 15 or 16. Their daughter has a middle-school education and resents not being able to go to high school, she wants something more and is not content. As much as I could not imagine not questioning authority or willingly tolerate a class system, I realise how easy it must be to come to terms with your life when that is your reality, when you believe that your choices in this world are finite. Does that mean that limited choice and resignation to one type of life is good? Maybe not. But it certainly doesn't keep you up at night. Gilbert's main gist is that people who make a decision and stick to it (are not given a choice to change it) are happier than ones given time to deliberate on whether they are happy with it or not. If not given an option, the choice that you make is one that you eventually become very satisfied with, your brain comes to peace with the situation rather than pondering, "what if". Once again, removing choice and possibility from the menu seems to determine your course. So how do you apply that to a life full of choice? How do you walk down that great big cereal aisle of life and make your choice and stick with it? What happens when you realise that you went with the Cheerios and should have gotten the granola? The times I have been happiest in life have been the times when I have just acted, but that can't be good advice for everyone. And what about when you're happy with your own decisions, but not happy with the decisions of others?
I think it's time to do some baking and see if my head can't get around this.

Try this

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/