That Novel I’ve Been Working On

There are little pockets of wilderness here and there around our subdivision, streams and ponds and wooded areas, and it means that occasionally very stupid bunnies have babies in our yard and from time to time I walk the dog past a sign that says something to the effect of “Beware!  There be badgers here.”  It also means that there are lots of ducks around during the spring and summer, ducks that occasionally decide to cross the street without first finding a crosswalk and then cautiously looking both ways.  Sometimes you have to make some allowances for these ducks, since obviously they do not fully understand the tragic repercussions of darting into traffic.  Read the rest of this entry »

Mike and I have spent the last several days attempting to deal with The Situation With Our Lawn.  The situation can essentially be boiled down to the fact that our subdivision is prone to infestations of European crane flies, bugs that basically look like giant mosquitoes and spend most of the fall making baby versions of themselves in the form of larvae who burrow into the lawn and nourish themselves by nibbling on the grass roots.  This, combined with the ban on pesticides, has made it increasingly difficult to maintain a lawn that looks like anything other than a sanctuary for wayward dandelions.  Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks, everyone, for the nice comments on the last post.  It’s good to be reminded that I should make the most of my current ability to nap with wild abandon, but also that I very likely will survive whenever the time comes to be responsible for a wee little creature with half my DNA.  I discovered on Saturday that I have another reason why it is seeming more urgent that we add to our family:  while at Costco, I impulsively purchased a gigantic tub of Disney-themed animal crackers, and I have no one to share them with.  This may end up being a moot point, because there are so many animal crackers that there may still be some left by the time we have a toddler old enough to imbibe with me.

In unrelated news, I have never been a very good note taker, mostly because I have a very good memory and have never really had to rely on my own scribbles to remember important details.  As a result, when I do write things down, they never include the important pieces of the conversation, and I end up tidying my desk and finding 100 post-it notes, all inscribed with random half-instructions, like the one I found yesterday that said “April 1st, 1:30 – salamander”.  I offer that with no comment, simply because I have no idea what it means.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind with work deadlines and general feelings of being unsettled and of wanting to eat nothing but chocolate chip cookies.  I’ve been busy and stressed, and Mike has been busy and stressed, and the dog has gone unwalked and the the groceries have gone unpurchased and the laundry has gone unlaundered.  Last night we went out and stocked the cupboards and swept the floors and I threw several loads of laundry into the wash (and even remembered to move them into the dryer) and life all of a sudden is feeling more balanced.

I wonder how people with kids do this every day, with work and life and keeping wee little people alive all day long — it’s just Mike and I and the dog and the cats and yet somehow it sometimes gets to the point where there is only a half-rotten papaya and some stale bread in the fridge — but I hope to someday find out, because a lot of the time I have this nagging feeling that our little family isn’t quite DONE yet, like there are little Butlers out there who are smart and funny and will probably need both glasses AND braces, and I really want to meet them, to find out if they’ll be good spellers and bad at math, or quadratic equation wiz kids who can barely manage text speak.  Read the rest of this entry »

Mike and I are making plans for the summer, and my cabin fever or spring fever or wanderlust or swine flu or whatever it is I’m suffering from seems to be getting worse.  My parents are currently at the very beginning of an almost 3 week stay on the Big Island of Hawaii right now, right in that beautiful part of the vacation when pretty much the whole thing is spreading out before you in an unbroken stretch of washing sand out from between your toes, drinking lilikoi margaritas, tossing your watch back in the suitcase without really even glancing at it, and wondering to yourselves what those poor saps back home would be doing right now, they’d probably just be getting in their cars to go to work right now but here WE are watching dolphins swim by not 10 feet from the edge of our deck, isn’t this the best vacation EVER?

We’re thinking of checking out the east coast, or maybe the west coast, or maybe San Francisco, or maybe just renting an adorable cottage in the middle of nowhere and spending the week reading and napping.  We can’t make up our minds, and we have no idea how much any of these options would cost or whether we could afford it, but we are both kind of feeling like tossing some sunscreen and a few changes of clothing into the back of the car and just hitting the ROAD, you know?

A couple of days ago, I came across an article online that was so singularly horrifying I had to share it via Google Reader.  I’ll link to it here, but the gist of the article (for those who can’t be bothered to click, since I really can’t blame you, who has time to actually CLICK things in this modern world) is that there are people out there, presumably mad scientists with stained lab coats and crazy hair, injecting the DNA of one animal into the DNA of another, giving us the animal equivalent of the plumcot, only twice as scary and at least three times more likely to kill you in your sleep.  The article lists beefalos, wholphins, and zorses as a few examples, but the one that really made me afraid for humanity is the spider goat, the females of which are able to “secrete milk through their udders that contains a silk more durable than Kevlar, more stretchable than nylon, and stronger than steel”.  Read the rest of this entry »

It never ceases to both amaze and amuse me how excited Canadians are to greet the first tentative appearance of spring by casting off their parkas, stowing their sock monkey hats in the darkest depths of the closet, and standing shivering but determined in front of their BBQs.  The whole thing is even more pronounced when the first nice week of the year happens to coincide nicely with March Break, and the end result is the ability to drive down the street in 7-degree weather and see small crowds of teenage girls wearing shorts and flip-flops, proving themselves to be tragically bereft of either a thermometer or a pair of pants.  Read the rest of this entry »

My questionable taste in music has probably been documented here before, but I stand before you today to confess that in addition to my deep and abiding love for Billy Joel, I also harbour a not-so-secret musical crush on Garth Brooks.  His Christmas album has recently been voted Most Likely To Put Me In The Festive Spirit and a number of his songs have pride of place on the List Of Songs I Listen To Loudly In The Car And Sing Along To Even If The Windows Are Down (And Sometimes ESPECIALLY If The Windows Are Down).  Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if it’s the sun, which is not only making more frequent appearances, but also seems to actually emit some honest-to-goodness warmth if it hits you in the right spot in the right way, or the exciting changes and opportunities going on in the lives of people all around me as they buy houses and take trips and anticipate the arrival of babies, or some other as-of-yet undiscovered but equally potent and influential factor, but I’m feeling adventurous, which is something I never feel, and a longing for the sensation of sand or cobblestones or grass under my feet, which is something I often yearn for but rarely picture quite so vividly, brown and grey and green, hot and hard and warm, familiar yet deliciously, tantalizingly, seductively exotic.

I woke up early this morning from a dream in which I was being forced to walk home from my first day of law school in bare feet in the middle of January.  Law school was at my high school and I was walking to my parents’ house (a 40+ minute walk away) and it was dark and the sidewalks were icy.  I had worn boots and socks TO school, but I had left them in my locker, and I didn’t want to go back because I had overheard the dean of the law school (played by Rene Auberjonois in my dream) make a bit speech to one of the other professors (played by an awful boss I had earlier in my real-life career) about how all first year law school students are sissies, and I didn’t want him to think I was a sissy.

The most upsetting part of the dream was not, however, the cold walk home, but rather how all of the professors spent most of each class fawning over one of my fellow students, a young man who confessed in the first hour that he was only in law school to learn enough to eventually become a well-respected and powerful  judge and systematically take away the rights of women and other minorities.  I’m not entirely sure why all of the professors were so excited to have him in their classes, but I expect it might have something to do with the fact that, if nothing else, he was demonstrating a rather impressive amount of commitment to the success of what can only be described as a long-range plan.