Lauren | 
February 8th, 2010 | 
We spent the weekend at my parents’ house celebrating my sister’s birthday, and then subsequently at the house of friends of ours, celebrating the Superbowl (and by “celebrating” I mean I glanced up periodically from the chubby face of the baby in my lap to spout random facts about some of the players – facts that, like everything else I seem to know, appear randomly in my brain and crowd out useful information – and stuff my face with chicken and guacamole) and as a result of all of the celebrating, I’m pretty sure that were I some sort of camel or hibernating bear, I would never have to eat again. I am sadly not a camel, nor do I have any real bear-type properties, so I am probably going to have lunch in half an hour as is my custom. Read the rest of this entry »
People who know me well know I’m a stickler for the rules. No, not THOSE rules, but rather the rules, written and unwritten, that make our society run as a well-oiled, polite machine. It’s why I’ve never had a speeding ticket, and why I get so annoyed at people that sit behind in me in the theatre and insist on talking through a whole movie, and also why, ever since it became illegal to talk on a cellphone in the car without using a hands-free device and I discovered I don’t have a hands-free device, I tend to shriek into the phone “TALK FAST I’M AT A STOPLIGHT YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS WHAT DO YOU WANT?” and then after 10 seconds of confused silence I yell, “TIME’S UP LIGHT’S GREEN THANKS FOR CALLING!” and hurl the phone down onto the passenger seat. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t have much to say today except to suggest that my electric blanket breaking in the same 24 hour period as the furnace is a confluence of events that would be funny if it wasn’t so COLD, and frankly one I’d rather not experience again. The furnace is fixed and it’s not 16 degrees in here anymore, which is nice, and moreover we didn’t even have to pay to have it fixed thanks to our protection plan, which is also nice, but I’m just now thawing out, thanks to the heat of my laptop and the snuggliness of my cat and the fuzziness of my sweater. If it had continued much longer, I may have had to resort to the ridiculousness of my sock rabbit hat.
I never got around to reading The Catcher in the Rye when I was an angsty teenager, as I believe you are supposed to, and upon discovering in university that I had never read it, my friend Dahl was shocked and appalled and insisted I remedy that immediately. I did, and I … didn’t like it. At all, really. And I was disappointed, because it’s a classic, and with classics you kind of expect to love them, or at very least appreciate them on some level, and I wasn’t capable of doing either. Undaunted, Dahl insisted I read Nine Stories, which I did, and Franny and Zooey, and the rest of the books about the Glass family, and I complied, reluctantly at first, and then more willingly, and then voraciously. To this day, I’m really unsure of exactly why Catcher is considered Salinger’s great work of genius, because the rest of his writing is almost overwhelmingly poetic and sophisticated and tortured and brilliant and … just really, really great to read. Read the rest of this entry »
Daisy, as I have mentioned before, is an all-weather sort of dog. While she indeed spends most of the summer bringing me her frisbee in an attempt to convince me to come outside and play right this very minute, it’s very urgent, the sun is shining, don’t you see, we’re going to MISS IT, she is also quite willing to sit on the deck in the pouring rain and enjoy the … ambiance, I guess. She also quite enjoys sitting on the deck in the snow or diving off the deck into snow drifts up to her chest in a fit of ecstasy and/or in pursuit of a tennis ball, which we rarely buy for her but keep showing up mysteriously in our back yard. Really, what I’m trying to say is she spends a lot of time smelling like wet dog. Read the rest of this entry »
My schedule is such that I’m out of the house rather inconsistently and also, some weeks, rather infrequently as well. I say this to give a little context to how strange it is that almost invariably, no matter which part of town I’m in, no matter which time it is that I’m in it, I see one of two people on the sidewalk that runs alongside part of the route I’ve chosen that day. One of them is a woman, likely in her 70s, who runs, gracefully and at a much faster pace than the labourious one I tend to move at while running, dressed in a white long-sleeved t-shirt and bright orange running shorts. The other is a man, probably in his 70s as well, bearded and blue-sweatpantsed, who walks, quickly and not at all gracefully, swinging his arms with such force that his entire torso twists with every step he takes. Collectively they must have covered a great deal of ground over the years and I wonder if maybe they’re at home right now, blogging about a red car that always seems to drive by while they’re out walking or running, and wondering why the brown-haired girl who drives it is always peering at them as she passes.
I’m not sure why I bring this up, except to say that I find it strange, and also wonderfully comforting, the remarkable regularity with which they are out and about and also the remarkable regularity with which I get to watch their routine from a distance, and if ever a few weeks pass where I haven’t seen either the man or the woman, I may start to worry.
On Monday, while I was on my way to meet Pam for a run, I stopped at a red light. Crossing the intersection in front of me, coming from one direction were two 20-something guys, each with a puppy. Crossing the same intersection from the other direction were two young women, each with a baby. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, too much cute (laughing babies! chubby cheeks! playful bounding! floppy ears and oversized paws!) all contained in just a few square feet and I couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be some sort of city bylaw in place to prevent this sort of cuteness explosion from happening. As it is, I may never again be satisfied with just ONE puppy or just ONE baby, or even just one of each at any given time.
I have a really sensitive sense of smell, a fact that is both a blessing (when cookies are baking) and a curse (when I manage to somehow track a tiny piece of cigarette butt into our car on the bottom of my shoe and then spend half an hour wondering why the car smells so strongly of cigarette smoke). I also love Christmas, perhaps more than just about anything else, and so I find Christmas tree shopping and my trusty proboscis to be two great tastes that taste great together: the tree lot smells like Christmas trees, and then your car smells like Christmas trees, and then your house smells like Christmas trees. Eventually your garage smells like Christmas trees and then the side of the road smells like Christmas trees and some landfill smells like Christmas trees and I’m curled up in the fetal position on the couch, weeping and feeling not at all festive enough. Read the rest of this entry »
For some reason, Mike and I embarked on kind of a cleaning frenzy around the house during the time we had off over Christmas. We ransacked both of the closets in the basement, setting aside things to sell at the garage sale we plan to have this summer, and then tackled the closet in my office, which was full of a myriad of non-office-related items, as well as some file boxes that contained a bunch of things from both of our pasts that we have never been quite ready to part with. In one of the boxes was a blue binder that contained about 100 pages of miscellaneous writing that I did during the apparently rather tumultuous and angsty period of my life that covered the tail end of grade 12 through to a few months after I started dating Mike. It’s awful and it’s cheesy (oh, so awful and so cheesy) and I thought y’all might enjoy a few excerpts and thusly a quick peek into my subconscious from a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »
I got up yesterday morning and had breakfast and walked the dog, and it was cold but it was sunny and everything sparkled a little and the dog was really happy, bouncing from snowbank to snowbank, trying to eat a little bit of sandwich someone left on the sidewalk, wagging and wagging and wagging. I brought her inside and peeled off my sweaty clothes and planned to have a quick shower before my doctor’s appointment, only to realize it was in 15 minutes, not 45 minutes, so I put my sweaty clothes back on in a hurry and drove across town to their shiny new office, and parked in the new parking lot, and opened the door of the car, which was caught by a gust of wind and driven directly into the passenger door of the van parked next to me, leaving a small, barely-noticeable-to-most but glaringly-obvious-to-me dent and smudge of red paint. I panicked, and wondered what to do, and decided I was late and I should just check in at the doctor and then decide whether to leave a note. Read the rest of this entry »