Archive for the ‘sometimes I ramble’ Category

• Two Lost. Some Damaged.

  Date: 2010.09.08 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 4

  I was feeling the need for some retail therapy lately so when I was moving money out of my PayPal account I fell back to my former habit of leaving a bit of mad money in there. I used to try to keep a bit of money in there all the time for Etsy or eBay purchases. Not a lot, just a little to play with.

  I went to Etsy and started looking for jewelry. I wanted a shiny. A bauble. Sometime frivolous. I found myself heading scrolling to through the vintage section. I love vintage jewelry. I feel likeit has a story to it, even if I don’t know. It has history and right now I’m trying to hold on to bits of history.

  I kept looking at a particular ring and clicking away. I’d look at something shinier. I’d look at things that were beyond my budget. I’d look at things that were truly glitzy and perfect for night out. But I kept getting back to this ring. I hesitated. It was at the top of my size range  at a 6.5 (I have tiny fingers). I clicked the close up and saw there were a few stones missing. I wasn’t sure about that. I love history but I prefer my jewelry not be damaged.

  And then I read the description. It said that some of the stones were damaged and two are missing, but it did not affect the overall effect, and therefore beauty, of the ring.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh….”

  The reason I was looking for a frivolous bauble is that it was the day before a funeral — the second of my summer. First my grandmother in June and then this friend who really was taken from us too soon. It was feeling like everywhere I turned this particular week I was seeing pain. As I scrolled through my feeds I saw more death and loss and struggle. I needed something pretty to cross my path.

  I hurt. I hurt and I wanted to do something nice for myself. I wanted something tangible that I could hold and symbolize that while this summer sucked we all survived it.

  And so this ring will remind me of that, while holding close the memories of those two loved ones. It was a hard summer, the hardest I remember having. But there was beauty in it too. The good moments, the undamaged ones, were small but collectively they were wonderful. They got lost in hardness of the summer.

  I got the ring yesterday. There are two stones missing. There are a few stones that are damaged. You can tell the ring has been worn. It has that smoothness that comes from years of wear. You can tell the edges used to be more defined but they too are smooth. And as I type the dark stones catch glimmers of light and sparkle.

  Two lost. Some damaged. Still beautiful.

• Indulgence

  Date: 2010.09.03 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 6

  Sitting on the deck. Cold beer. Sunshine. I’m taking a break.

  There was a time when I would have said this was a guilty indulgence.

  I was sitting in our home office, feeling that slight burning sensation in my shoulders as the muscles in my shoulders started to tie themselves in knots. I have a special talent for tying myself in knots. It was a productive morning and I had been at the desk since 7am.

  Summer is waning. Soon we’ll be clearing snow off of the deck rather than basking in the sunshine.

  Is this an indulgence? Yes, but it is earned. And fleeting.

• Exhale

  Date: 2010.08.20 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 4

  This summer has been exhausting. It’s been rough. I’ve let things slide a bit because the weight of them on my shoulders was crushing me.

  When I was at BlogHer I asked Honeybeast if I needed to grovel for being just a lackadaisical writer this summer. She looked and me and said, “Everything happened to you this summer. Don’t worry about it.” I was talking to a friend the other night who said, almost word for word, the exact same thing.

  Wanna see my summer?

  June 2 – 10 Emergency trip to PEI after my grandmother had another stroke. Sat vigil and then stayed for the funeral.

  June 17 Spend the day in the ER thinking I had appendicitis (so did the doctor) and almost passing out on the nurses until they confined me to a stretcher for four hours. Still have appendix. Am medical mystery. Or had undetected ovarian cyst that burst. Whatever it was it hurt like a mofo and I discovered I’m not particularly fond of morphine. Another discovering is that when your lips turn blue and your feet and hands tingle nurses will literally run to attend to you. (I had great nurses.)

  June 25 – July 3 PEI for vacation. Had been planned for months before my grandmother passed away. It rained a lot. It was an mix of busy, busy, busy and relaxing.

  July 14 Take possession of our house. Sleep on the floor (well, air mattress) for about 9 days. Start getting hardwood floors installed July 19. Floors finished on the 21.

  July 23 Official move in day. Yay for movers. Time to unpack. And organize. Change work schedule.

  August 3 – August 9 New York City for BlogHer ’10 and general site-seeing.

  I was exhausted going into BlogHer ’10. The last day of the conference I was tired. Very, very tired. More tired than I let on and feeling that lost feeling you get when you are really tired.

  When I got home I jumped into a bit of extra work and worked through last weekend.

  This is my first weekend “off” where we’re not packing, unpacking, travelling, moving, or SOMETHING in well, months.

  I’m going to read. I’m going to sit in the sun. I’m going to eat real food. I’m going to go for a walk in the woods.

  I’m going to exhale after holding my breath all summer.

• Mommies, Community and Me, the Non-Mommy

  Date: 2010.07.12 | Category: Blogs, sometimes I ramble | Response: 19

  A tweet passed through my stream a few months back that caught my attention. It was from a local blogger to a bunch of other local bloggers about how great it was to meet up with everyone. “Oh,” I wondered. “Did I miss an event?” Scrolling through I realized I did… and that I didn’t. There was a local meet-up but it was mommies, of which I’m not. “Oh,” I thought. “Oh, I wasn’t invited to hang out because I’m not a mommy.” Such is the life of a non-mommy.*

  I know these women and I know that they didn’t exclude me intentionally. I know that they were a bunch of moms just getting together to hang out with their kids. I know that if I could ping them and say, “Hey guys, I know I don’t have kids or anything but I’d really like you hang out with you guys next time.” I know that they’d all say, “Absolutely!” I know they never gave a thought to excluding anyone, it was just a meet up of local moms. How could that be exclusionary, right? I know this but I won’t lie — the unintentional exclusion still stings a little.

  I’m not a mother. I’m not, nor have I tried, to have children. Currently we’re still saying that we probably won’t have children, though we’re keeping a foot on that fence. At this point, my non-mommy status is by choice. (At least as far as we know. We’ve never tried to have children so we’re only assuming that we can.)

  I’ve blogged about the fact that I’m child-free by choice. I’ve blogged about the fact that I’m really not great with children. I’ve also blogged that I don’t hate children and that I’m perfectly fine hanging out with women and their children (though preferably not at Chuck E. Cheese).

  I’ve been the only non-mommy at events. I will watch your kids while you go the bathroom. I’ll keep an eye on your kids while they are running around the playground and if they fall while you are at the other end of the park I’ll go and check to see if they are ok. I’ll hold your baby while you are tending to another child.

  I’m a non-mommy, not a child-hater. I’m not going to sit there and “preach” about the benefits of a childless life. No, I’m not going to tell you how you should raise your children. Yes, I will sometimes offer an opinion if it is something you’ve asked for an opinion on it or for which I have a strong opinion. (I’m pretty darn good with book recommendations for kids, for example.) If you mention something about parenting that you are looking for input on and I’ve read a blog post about it I may send you the link if you aren’t familiar with it. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life any more than I’ll let you how expound on how I should live mine.

  I know that I can be a bit of a curiosity at times. I know that I am a non-mom who doesn’t want to be a mom and yet wants to hang out with moms and sometimes their children. What people sometimes don’t see is that I don’t necessarily want to hang out with moms; I want to hang out with women. I want to hang out with smart women who are interested in the same things that I do and happen to be active online. These women, and many of my mommyblogging friends, happen to be all those things. They also happen to be mommies. Does that mean we should exclude each other?

  I’ve been told that I don’t have the same experiences as these women. I’ve been asked if there’s not a “better” community for me to join. I’m confused.

  I’m confused because I’ve heard many of these women that I know and love (and who are not the ones asking me this) say that they aren’t just mommies. They are women. They don’t want to be defined solely by the label of “Mommy.” They don’t drop their friends that don’t have kids when they have theirs. Should I not want to be friends with them after they have children? I think if that were the case it would make me a pretty crappy human being.

  I don’t want to be part of the mommyblogging community, exactly. I want to be part of community of women and mommy or not, we’re all women. Whether or not we have children is one part of our lives. Yes, a big part, but mommy or non-mommy is not all that we are. I have good friends that are moms. I have good friends that are not moms. I have good friends that would very much like to be mothers.

  It’s a fact that cannot be ignored that most women my age either having children or want to have children. If I exclude everyone who fits those two categories from my life there would not be many people left.

  I fail to see why I should not participate in the conversation on a mommyblog and if I participate why I should not consider myself a member of that community. I did, once upon a time, say that I wasn’t part of the mommyblogging community. Someone quickly corrected me. They reminded me that I support mommybloggers (which is easy as they are pretty awesome), that I participate on their blogs and that I am friends with them. Why wouldn’t I consider myself part of their community?

  Why indeed. It’s not whether or not we have children that forges the connection between us. It’s who we are as people and women.

  But maybe I’m wrong. Can a childfree women be part of a community of women that have children? Can a blogger without children be part of the mommyblogging community?

  *Please note that this is not about these lovely, lovely women who I know would drag me along if I so much as hinted to a glimmer of a thought of not being included. This all comes from this conversation on BlogHer about non-mommies, mommyblogging, and community.

• Life without a microwave: month one

  Date: 2010.05.10 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 2

  I don’t miss the microwave. At all.

  Really.

  There’s actually room to prepare real food and I swear way less while making dinner than I did before. It’s kind of awesome.

  Lee, on the other hand, claims to miss having the microwave. However he is hard-pressed to say why he misses it. He’ll tell you that he misses being able to heat up the all-natural peanut butter so that it spreads easier. However it took him three weeks to realize that he couldn’t do it so I tend to disagree.

  Maybe it’s just me but I feel like we’re wasting less food. We are cooking slightly smaller portions because it’s slightly harder to heat food up. It takes a bit more thought to figure out how we’re going to reheat pasta for example, when we can’t just throw it in the microwave for a minute or two to reheat.

  Life without a microwave means we have to have a bit more patience (um, never a particular strong suit of mine to be honest). That we need to think about our food a bit more but it’s not a huge change for us really. We hardly ever had microwave meals in the house. It was pretty much a reheating device for us. We didn’t use it to actually cook.

  It’s not radical to live without a microwave. As I found out when I originally twittered that I was thinking of it I found out that many of you already do. So why is there so much resistance to the idea? Why do so many people look at us as though we are off our rocker when they find out?

• And no one shall hear us pee. The end.

  Date: 2010.05.01 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 22

  We bought a house.

  We didn’t really mean to buy a house. Really, we didn’t.

  You see, we were looking at open houses. Scoping out neighbourhoods. Trying to figure out where we’d like to move. But then one weekend there weren’t very many open houses in the neighbourhoods we wanted to check out, so I unclicked the “open house” box on MLS to see what was for sale in that area.

  Up it popped. A little house in the ‘burbs (gah, the ‘burbs – scary!). Not too big, not too little and very importantly, not too many neighbours. (Am a hermit. No, really.) To be honest, it if was surrounded by neighbours we might not have been so interested.

  Best of all, it was priced just right.

  So we pinged our real-estate agent (a friend of ours) and said, “So um I know we said we weren’t really looking for a house but what can you tell us about this house and could you maybe set up a viewing? kthxbai!”

  So she did. And we viewed. And then we talked. And then the next day we put in an offer. And after one round of countering they accepted our offer. Then we went to the bank and ran around like chickens with our heads cut off getting all the paperwork gathered and all our ducks in a row. Then we had a mortgage.

  We bought a house.

  We’re moving in July, about ten days before going to BlogHer in NYC because hi! I’m insane! Though we’re not 100% sure of move date yet because we’re getting hardwood installed upstairs before we move in. I’m freaking picking out hardwood and it is weird.

  I’m going to have a yard. And a deck. I’ll be able to go sit outside and read without people staring at me.

  And our neighbours will not be able to hear us pee. The end.

• Fragile

  Date: 2010.04.26 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 3

  Last week was stressful. It was busy. It was exhausting. By the end of the week I felt like I need a “handle with care” sticker plastered to my forehead.

  And I did what I always do when I’m feeling tired and like I’m in over my head. I wore aggressive clothes, I bore up and then when it was all over and done with I had a meltdown. I lost my appetite and had to force myself to eat. I got to into a book I was reading and absorbed too many of the author’s emotions.

  Then I slept. And slept. And slept.

  I could probably still go to sleep right now if given the choice.

  The difference between way back in the days where I’d look forward to taking a shower just so that I could sit down and cry in it is that I know what causes it. I know where the fear comes from. I know how I react to it and what I need to do and not do.

  And when all else fails, I can never go wrong with a bag of lime tostitos and some sunshine.

• Because our neighbour can hear us pee

  Date: 2010.04.13 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Response: 3

  Lee and I have started looking at houses. We’re not ready to buy. Yet. We don’t have quite enough for a down payment. Yet. We’re getting there. We’re getting close (and yeah, yeah we’d be getting closer faster if we didn’t have so many trips planned, whatever). So we’re heading out to open houses on the weekends, more to get a feel for neighbourhoods than anything. While Lee has lived in this city almost his whole life I haven’t been here for two full years.

  This city frequently frustrates me and yet it is going to most likely be where I end up buying a house. Go figure.

  We don’t know really know what we want or where we want it. This is all part of what we are figuring out now before we sit down and have a serious conversation with our real estate agent.

  But we know this – we do not want to share a wall, a floor or a ceiling with anyone. We want there to be enough space between our house and the one next to us that we don’t hear our neighbours snore.

  And that they don’t hear us pee.

  You see, we currently live in a house, one we believe was built in the 1940s. It’s been turned into three units. We live on the main level.

  Our landlord put in the extra soundproofing between the levels, which is wonderful but there are these heating vents. The vents allow sound to carry from one unit to another. It’s mostly just enough to be occasionally annoying.

  In October our former downstairs neighbour moved out. In March a new one moved in. When she moved in we quickly discovered something. The heating vent from our bathroom must be on the same track that goes to her kitchen. We can be in the bathroom going about our business and hear her conversations and the microwave beeping.

  Now, I lived in a co-ed dorm with a co-ed bathroom. I’m completely comfortable with using public and shared bathrooms. When I’m in my own private bathroom with the door closed I’m not so comfortable with hearing a stranger having a conversation as they make lunch and while they listen to us peace.

  Yes, Lee and I are starting to house hunt because we would like to pee in private.

• Does Life Exist Without A Microwave?

  Date: 2010.04.08 | Category: Ponder, What's for Dinner?, sometimes I ramble | Response: 6

  I believe it does. I’ve been campaigning for a life without a microwave for a long time.

  I planted the seed many moons ago when it became clear that the microwave did not work so well anymore. Lee was not so fond of the idea when I mentioned it and I let it rest. Every fews weeks one of us would mention we need a new microwave and we’d look at prices. We’d then decide that we could wait a little bit longer. Between those times, every now and then I’d mention that we could just try living without a microwave. I mean we don’t really need one, right? He scoffed but I wore Lee down bit by bit and then on Tuesday I sent him an email with my crazy idea, that we’d get rid of the microwave on garbage day (I am not donating it as it really does not work well) and we wouldn’t buy another one. If we decide, after an indeterminate length of time, that we need a microwave we can get one. Lee thinks this indeterminate length of time is a month. I think it’s when we buy a house, at which point we’ll need to buy a bunch of other stuff, such as a lawnmover, and we will decide we can live without one for a while longer. (Oh wait, he reads this. Um… Surprise!!!)
  

  This is my microwave. It’s not so big as far as microwaves go, and I’ve had it for over 10 years, just a few weeks longer than I’ve had Piper (a.k.a. the fake cat). I bought it when I got my first apartment — well, my first apartment that was just my own and that I didn’t have to share with roommates. My mother came to Montreal to help me get settled. I didn’t need much really. I already had dishes. I had a bed. I had a desk and computer. I had a couch and an armchair. The former tenant had kindly left crappy barstools for the island so I didn’t need a table. I had picked up a secondhand 13-inch television for $10 (I was thrifty). The only things I didn’t have were a VCR and a microwave. My mother declared she would buy me a VCR and I bought myself this microwave. I carried it home on the subway the few blocks to my new place, the whole time it getting heavier and heavier and the box dug bruises into my skin.

  This microwaved moved with me to four different apartments in Montreal, two apartments in Toronto, back to an apartment in Montreal and is going to its death here in Ottawa. This microwave has seen more of the world than your average microwave. I probably should have given it a name.

  About once a month I’ll be doing something in the kitchen and I’ll screech that I hate our kitchen. The most common reason is that there’s no counter space and what little we do have is crammed with stuff – like the microwave. While I can banish the toaster to hidden depths of the corner cupboard the microwave does not lend itself well to being hidden. It’s rather big and bulky and trust me, we do not have a close to hide it in.

  Counter space is prime real estate. We could surely live without a microwave. I mean sure, every place I’ve lived has had one since my eldest brother gave my mother one in 1988 for Christmas but I don’t really need one do I? It’s all about convenience isn’t it? What do you really use the microwave for? Softening butter. There are other ways to do that. Melting chocolate. There are other ways to do that. Reheating food. Well, people reheated food someway before they had microwaves didn’t they? I can figure out how to reheat the leftover General Tso chicken or Thai green curry some other way. Popcorn? We’re air-popped devotees already. Defrosting? We never defrost stuff in the microwave.

  I inquired on Twitter and you know what, plenty of people don’t have a microwave. Chris didn’t have one for years and she has many children, like as many children as my mother had many children (that’s a lot of children). The only reason she has one now is because it came with her house and she declares she doesn’t know what to with it. Capital Mom doesn’t have a microwave. Another mom on Twitter said she has one but she keeps in the basement and uses it only for “microwave emergencies,” which if you were wondering mostly involve heating up a Magic Bag.

  Clearly we do not need a microwave.

  So the microwave is now sitting on our floor, waiting to go to the big trash heap in the sky (or you know, on the outskirts of the city). And I have this:

  

  Counter space. Beautiful, wonderful counter space. Room to knead bread. Room to put out more than one bowl when baking. Room to put out two cutting boards. At once!

  Yes, I do believe there is life after a microwave. Or at least I will, just as soon as I figure out how to reheat the green curry chicken.

• Peace and Love My Ass

  Date: 2010.03.23 | Category: ottawa, sometimes I ramble | Response: 1

  Sometime in the late 1990s NBC (I think it was NBC) did a miniseries called The ’60s. Julie Stiles was one of the stars and she played a suburban teenager who gets knocked up by a guy in a band and runs away from home after her father has a shit fit about it. She ends up in Haight-Ashbury (of course) and plays the role of the hippie flower child and appropriately names her kid Rainbow. (Ok fine, Micheal Rainbow but all her fellow hippies just call him Rainbow.) At one point she and her son are homeless, she’s mugged and no one will give her a dime to use the payphone. So she screams, “Peace and love, my ass! I hate this goddamn city!”

  Somedays that’s how I feel about Ottawa.

  This is one of those days.

  No I don’t have a good reason for it. It’s just one of those days. They happen. I had them in Montreal. I had them in Toronto. But they seem to happen more often here.

  And unlike other cities I’ve lived in, I never seem to have days where I say “I love this goddamn city.”

  I’ll have good days and bad days. I know a new city takes time. A friend’s parent once told me that it three years for a city to really feel like your own and I believe that most of the time. However, I think Ottawa and I are going to take much longer.

  There are things I appreciate about this city and there are certainly people I appreciate here, but the city as a whole I find frustrating. I don’t seem to fit anywhere. I’m a square peg and the city is a round hole that I’m tired of bashing myself against.

  I know I’ll wake up tomorrow and continue to bash myself against it. But for today this square peg is going to sit and a corner and nurse her bruises while telling Ottawa where it can shove itself.