Getting up

I'm lying in bed, cozy and warm and the sheets are soft against my skin and I want to burrow in and linger and daydream. Dream about accomplishing my goals, dream about creating wondrous things, dream about loving and being loved and seeing the world and discovering.
But nothing's gonna happen if I don't get up and stop playing with my phone....

Stayin' Alive

I have a longing tonight for something sweet, simple, and genuine, with a side of smiling eye crinkles and the knowledge that you would do anything to make me smile because you just love my smile that much. Serves me right for listening to The Bee Gees, they make me naively happy. I'm missing you and smiling wherever you are.....and that's no jive talkin'....

juvenile laugh of the day

Museum display people have a good sense of humour.... these were up on the top shelf by the way.

Flux

My job today feels very stupid and unimportant. I want to throw everything aside, climb out my window and run - run past the streets, cars, condos, stores, run past the restaurants, and the cemeteries, and the parks and the fountains, and the trees, and just keep going and going and going until someone catches me up into their arms and holds me and says, "You can stop running now, you're here".

Thbbbttttt

Sometimes, you just get so tired of hearing the word "no", that you stop trying.

when all else fails, make a list

A few tiny thoughts before I fall asleep:

• I have got to stop sitting down to write and then feeling like I have nothing to say, and then when I get up to do something useful suddenly get ideas, but then be too busy doing the useful thing to go and write, and then when I sit down and write forget what the hell I wanted to write and and feel like I have nothing to say.
  That just must stop.
  
• My daughter has not started school yet, but she already has a crush on the floppy-haired young music teacher. Her father is already counting the white hairs. He is cute though...
  
• I have no idea why I can never remember how long it takes to cook a hard-boiled egg. Seriously, why must I look it up on the internet every single time?
  
• There are a few things happening now that I don't think I'm ready for. I shall try to bluff my way through until I am.
  
• Universe, I think I am close on this one, so give me a break and I'll try to be less neurotic so I don't wreck it.
  
• I got a great haircut.
  

The mouse, part one

So there was this mouse.
This past winter I was cleaning stuff off the pantry floor, picked up a discarded cloth grocery bag, and discovered a few cups of catfood inside. I was confused for a moment until I noticed little mouse droppings in a corner. Great. And yes, I'm the worst housekeeper ever. Mr Mouse had been stashing that away for a while I guessed. So I threw out the bag and cleaned up the pantry and washed the floor and the next day found myself staring at the display for vermin traps at the hardware store. The classic wooden Victory ones were there, but so were a variety of humane traps. Live and let live is my motto, and I didn't want the mouse dead, just out of my house, so I bought a couple of non-killing traps and went home. It took a week to talk myself into baiting them and putting them out. I'd like to make one thing clear at this point-I'm not afraid of mice. I do not jump on chairs or scream, they do not bother me in the slightest when they are alive and free and running around places that are not my house. I always wanted gerbils or hamsters (my parents wouldn't let me have them) and I even raised lab rats. My problem is dealing with dead mice or captured, panicked mice. I had visions of the mouse crawling into the trap and getting caught and then squeaking and freaking me out in the middle of the night. What if the kids were here? And what would I do with it? I'd have to drive it somewhere (I was thinking the nicer area of town with the big houses) otherwise it would just get back into my house. I'd have to transfer it to something with air holes, maybe a cage? I didn't have one. Would it chew through a cardboard box? Maybe the kids would like to see it, would they get attached? Blabbyblahblah my brain inventing all these scenarios that had me suddenly incapable of handling a very small rodent. Dumb brain. I overcame, set out the traps, and waited, and waited. And moved the traps, and changed the bait, and waited some more, and tried a few more traps of different types, and waited. Nothing. Yet all the while I was finding new stashes of catfood hidden here and there and droppings. I cleaned and cleaned and moved things out of areas I knew that mouse was hanging around to discourage it when there was nothing to hide behind and tried to close its access points into the house. You may ask where my cat was for all of this, well, she was mostly sleeping on my bed and the living room sofa. She's at least 300 in human years of something, so while she was a fantastic mouser in her prime, those days are over. I think that she has adopted the "I don't see you, you don't see me" policy.
This went on all winter. I finally mentioned it to my landlady and she was shocked and claimed to not have any mice, despite living downstairs. I'm fairly certain that my mouse did not parachute into my house, but nevermind. She came up that afternoon and dropped off a couple of the classic Victory traps. Sigh, she was right. Mr Mouse had to go. I nearly took my finger off setting the traps and placed them in two places where I know he was hanging out, and went about my evening. At 11:30pm I heard one snap. I froze, paralyzed by the inevitable. I texted a friend in a panic and he said to leave it until morning and try to forget it. In the morning I slowly opened the cupboard door and looked inside to see an empty trap, the cheese gone. Damn. I was a bit relieved, but then pissed off - now I'd have to do this again! I set it again, this time with a smaller piece of cheese, and closed the cupboard. In the morning I opened that cupboard to grab a bottle of cleaner because the cat barfed on the floor, and saw trap the had been successful. I actually only saw the tail in the quick glance before I closed the cupboard. Yay and crap. What was I going to do now? I texted my friend again, now Monday morning. The kids were eating breakfast in the dining room, and I figured it would be best not to mention it. Naomi would have stared and poked and Ben might have gotten upset and insisted on a burial. My friend came over and disposed of the corpse seeing as how I couldn't even look at it. It was quick and with minimal clever remarks. I felt like a wimp.
I'm just not cut out for premeditated murder I suppose. Perhaps it gets easier after your first kill?

the day

Work, run, home, garbage, laundry, made soup, made muffins, made granola, cleaned kitchen, collapsed.

Good quote

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
— Albert Einstein

things you eat when the kids aren't home

I found the best bread yesterday, I should never go to Akhavan hungry - the bread, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, smoked salmon, feta, almonds, yogurt = eclectic dinner. I wasn't surprised when I woke up from a nightmare involving purple trees that talk like Dame Edna.
Could not get a last-minute ticket for the MSO last night, truly bummed because I was looking forward to it. I needed some beautiful moments.

From a tornado to a soft warm breeze, well, sort of.....

It's spring here, that means that the lovely sunny weather we have had has turned cold and grey, and it's time for a weather and progress report. The winter was cold at times, stormy, but also beautiful and clean. Things lay dormant and I focused on what was happening inside for a while. My long-term goal is to continue to become a happier person. How am I doing? What have I learned?
First of all, I'm way too uptight about stuff. That does have its good points, but I am learning that I've got to be a little less up in people's faces and that goes for me as well. Forcing the world into my square peg/round hole view is exhausting and futile. I'm trying to be more forgiving, more open, more understanding. Some days this is also exhausting, but when I succeed I feel better about what I'm doing and less frustrated with others and myself.
I've talked about my problem with hurrying before. What is my rush? I'm slowing down, letting some responsibilities go, resetting priorities. What's more important? Getting to work on time or stopping to look at something in the park on the walk across to the school? I'm also driving a little less like a lunatic and actually getting a chuckle by frustrating hurried drivers behind me. Hey, gotta have fun somewhere!
I'm taking the time to enjoy myself as well. More concerts, more evenings with friends, more conversations with colleagues, and so much more planned this year!
I am not succeeding to do this every day. Most of the time I realise that I'm being a tornado mid-whirl and try to repair my damage. When I am able to still myself I feel so good that I know I want to continue this work I'm doing. It's just taking a lot longer than the tornado part of me wants to accept.

How you phrase it

I was having a conversation with a friend recently and we were discussing languages (and my apparent disability when it comes to learning them). I mentioned that among the other truly not useful things stored in my brain is the phrase "I don't know how to speak Russian", which actually did come in handy one day at a pharmacy, much to the confusion of the Russian lady I replied to. He thought that was a very useful phrase, and added these to the list of ones you should know when first learning a language: "Where is the bathroom?", "What's for dinner?", "Will you marry me?", "Are we married?", and "Take me to your leader". I was reading Molly Watson's excellent cooking blog, when I came across this post. In it she talks about a very strange phrase book she and a companion picked up which included phrases such as, "your hair is like gold, but more precious", and "you dance like a fairy". I have decided that learning how to tell someone that they dance like a fairy is too good to pass up. My daughter would appreciate hearing it, and perhaps because I am a girl I will avoid being seriously injured by a man in a discotheque. So, we'll start with Swedish I think:
Du dansar som en älva.

Girls who wear glasses

It is the end of an era. A few weeks ago, I went for my eye checkup, which I do religiously every ten years. Normally I go and the doctor tells me to come back in another ten years. This time, however, was different.
My eyesight is still great, I can still read the tiniest print on the farthest card with relative ease, but my eyes are getting old. As the doctor explained it, "you know how at the end of the day after you've been on the computer working and you've been doing a lot of reading and your eyes are really tired and sometimes you have a headache? Well, that's not supposed to happen." Oh. So she fiddled with all the settings on that machiney they make you look through and came up with the world's tiniest prescription for glasses to be worn when I work at the computer and for reading when my eyes feel tired. I went with my girlfriends and picked out some frames and the glasses came in. I wore them for the first time today, and I have to ask, HOW DO PEOPLE WEAR THESE THINGS ALL THE TIME? I can barely manage 20 minutes without making myself bonkers. Looking through a layer of glass at stuff isn't normal. Seeing the edges of glasses in your vision is distracting. I got a smudge on them and my eyes started to water. I'm not even sure that they make me look smarter. And I can't look through them for anything past my computer screen, so I have to look over them, or take them off to look at anything else. On the plus side, this does make it much harder for me to poke myself in the eye.
When I was a kid I always wanted glasses, I was jealous of all the kids who had them. Now I realise why so many people get laser surgery. My friends have told me that I'll get used to it, and I know they are right. I guess I don't have much of a choice anyway. Is senility and hearing loss that far behind?

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure | Video on TED.com

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure | Video on TED.com

To the woman in the black Hyundai this morning

Do you really think that driving while putting on your makeup is ever a good idea? Not only did you terrorize your fellow drivers with the weaving and sudden braking, but I'm guessing from the wild arms movements that you showed up at work looking like a clown, which I'm also guessing is not your profession because I didn't see a red nose when you cut through two lanes of traffic and back again for no apparent reason.
You will now be known as The Menace with the Mascara Brush.

Kids slept in, got everyone out the door, work, lunch, work, run, work, chat with a friend, home, read, bake cookies and fudge for bake sale, relax, sit. Dull, eh?

Positive thinking, it's not just for breakfast anymore

So I was reading this excellent book review a couple of days ago and it got me to thinking. The review was of a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I haven't read it, but the title tells you the subject and stance. The author addresses the mass-mania positive thinking has in our society.
As witnessed, there has been a lot of positive thinking going on on this blog as of late. Most of it stems from the fact that I am generally a pretty happy person, but I also believe that positive things happen to positive people and that sometimes you just have to slap that smile back on your face and keep moving in order to get out of places of pain, ("smile, though your heart is aching, smile, even though it's breaking"). This all comes from the belief that everything happens for a reason and no pain lasts forever - at some point some new pain will come to take its place ;-)
With all that said, I know that sometimes it's just all blah blah blah. The idea that we should be happy all the time is an impossibility. We are all going to have bad stuff happen: heartbreak, loss, failure, disappointment, it's what we do with the bad stuff that matters. When you can take a soul-sucking failure and turn it into a life lesson and move on, that's a good thing - when you refuse to acknowledge your failure and quote something you heard on Oprah, well, that's stupid.

Ehrenreich talks about being shunned when she was being treated for cancer. Apparently failure is not an option, and she was criticized for expressing her feelings because she should have been spending all her time fighting off the cancer with positive energy. In our world of teddy bears and pink ribbons what is a woman to do when she feels mad and sad about her cancer? Is there no room for individual thought? There's a lot to be said on this subject. Let's face it, the ribbons have gotten out of control - they are on lapels, pickup trucks, hanging from houses, and even show up in emails made out of \ and |. They have come to symbolize the insipidness of people to follow blindly in large groups, it's like Mary Kay, only terrible because breast cancer awareness and all the fund raising should be a subject we respect. All too often now, the pink ribbons represent a roll-your-eyes symbol of fat ladies walking in large groups with inspirational music playing in the background. Not to say that this doesn't have its place, but being able to have one's own thoughts about one's illness is important.

So how do we find sincere positive thinking? Well, for starters, it has to be actual thinking, something that comes from the individual. Jumping on the bandwagon to raise money is all fine and good, but to gain anything on a personal level you have to think for yourself. Most of all, you have to be honest with yourself and not dismiss your less-than-positive feelings, they are an important part of the process as long as you learn to let them go.

And when all else fails, ice cream and your girlfriends solve nearly everything....

You say you want a resolution?

I've been working on this post in my head for a while and thinking, and rethinking. My end of year post gave the general outline of what I want to do this year: continue to follow my heart and my interests, appreciate and love my life and the people in it and let the positive stuff in.
I have a few specific goals that are on their way. I have a notebook with a list of things that I am currently writing, researching, or are just floating around in my head. I will focus enough this year to finish a few of them. My biggest stumbling block has never been writing, I write constantly, compulsively, my block has always been in believing that my writing is good enough for other people to read. I'm not talking about the writing I do for work every day, I'm talking about personal writing, the kind that is so hard to hear criticized. It's far from perfect, but a few people have encouraged me this year and I think that I have the confidence to put more of my words out into the world. Some of my hopes and dreams are a bit more lofty and I will keep them under my hat for the moment. I can visualize them, but advertising them seems a bit much even for me.
It always seems to boil down to confidence, and how easily that confidence can ebb and flow. If I have to choose one thing to accomplish within me, I think it will be to believe in myself, to believe in what I think and feel and do and try not to falter.
If possible, I would also like to learn to conduct a rudimentary conversation in Swedish, to swim laps gracefully, and to finally get my brain and body coordinated enough to juggle, but I won't be greedy.
Ok, time to get the party started.

I am exhausted. More reading, then bed.

Me day

As part of my new Christmas traditions, I think I will create a me day, that is, a day over the holidays where I do nothing but sit around lazily and do stuff I can never justify doing all day. Today my ex picked up the kids to take them to Ottawa and my folks left soon after that, so I had the house to myself. I did not clean, or do laundry, or bake, or cook, or catch up on work. Instead, I sat on the sofa and read, watched dvds, ate a ton of leftover holiday food, started crocheting a robot, and listened to music. I also took a bath and painted my toenails. It was a day of complete and total idleness, the only thing missing was a nap. Too many times I find that I never take the time for me, I think that it's selfish to put me first, or when I do I feel guilty about it and it lessens the joy of the time I am taking. NO MORE! I deserve to stop moving, working, cleaning and whatever else once in a while and I'm doing it! Perhaps I will try to take one day a month and just stop the world. A bit of self-imposed sloth is good for the soul.