Category: The Non-Writing Life

‘Tis the Season to Paint the Bathroom, Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-FLOP

The “flop” is me falling down from exhaustion.

Sure, it’s a small bathroom, but did I really need to paint it now? So what if “paint the bathroom” has been on my to-do list for two years? So what if all the towel bars kept falling off the walls? So what if My Liege and I were replacing the towel rods in the kids’ bathroom, so figured now would be a good time to replace the aging rods in our bathroom, too? So what if M.L. didn’t see the point in painting the bathroom just because we were replacing the rods? I saw the point, and isn’t that what matters?

So what if I painted the room the exact same color as it was before? You know what? (So what?) It looks great! But I’m glad the job is done. (So what!)

I think I felt the need to paint the bathroom in the hectic weeks preceding Christmas, because I find it hard to write between Christmas shopping and planning for Eldest Son coming home, picking out the tree, trying not to strangle myself at the thought of hosting Christmas dinner two years in a row (usually, I’m an every-other-year sort of girl), writing the Christmas letter, buying the cards, remembering I forgot to the buy stamps, etc. etc.  So I might as well spruce up the house.

Anyone else have this affliction?

Sure, I have a TON of “must paints” on the to-do list for 2010. That’ll teach me for ONLY painting the bathroom. But that’s life.

This year I’m sending out Christmas letters with our cards as has been my habit for most of the years of my marriage. Every once in a while, I skip a year. I skipped last year, so I felt duty bound not to skip this year. That would mean, gasp, skipping two years in a row. In this day and age of email, do you still send out cards and/or Christmas letters? My Liege has suggested a time or two that I should email the letter instead of snail-mailing it. But I figure Canada Post can use the business. And as much as I love receiving emailed Christmas letters and cards, I admit I love receiving the paper versions more. It feels more Christmasey to arrange the cards on the piano and/or the fireplace mantel.

When I was a kid, my mom would let me and my brother and sister have the Christmas cards after New Year’s Day. We’d cut them up and make collages and stuff—after a rigorous selection process of deciding who got which cards. We’d start “claiming” cards as they came in the mail. But if your name wasn’t drawn first, you might be out of luck. We’d choose the cards turn by turn, then get into the creative stuff. It was a blast.

There, a tip to keep your children occupied over the holidays. Don’t say I never did anything for you. 😉

By the way, this is the last day to enter my 2009 BOX ‘O BOOKS HOLIDAY GIVE-AWAY. For details, click here.

The Great Christmas Tree Debate

An innocent posting (of mine) to Facebook last weekend sparked a bit of debate, so I thought I’d bring it here. Not the debate necessarily. Just the questions. You see, I’ve been harboring a bit of Christmas-decorating guilt. Because I haven’t done any yet. And I probably wouldn’t think of doing any if not for My Liege and Youngest Son doing it for me. Doing the outside decorating, that is. The blow-up Santa on the motorcycle is on the carport roof, the blowup_santalights are on the house. But I’m not, no way, not even considering, putting up our Christmas tree until at least December 15th. I’ve never been able to fathom putting up the tree earlier than 2 weeks prior to the big day. Part of this is because we use live trees, and I like them to last until after January 1st. We put our tree in the family room in the basement, because that’s where the monster TV and fireplace is, and My Liege does love his fire every night. We have a huge living room, but when we first moved into this house it served as a living room/piano room/partial dining room AND office (complete with two desks). There was no room for a tree. So the stockings went on the upstairs fireplace and the tree went downstairs. My kids grew up like that, so that’s how they want the tradition to remain. I can’t argue.

Thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, it has recently been revealed to me that it might be something of an American tradition to to do all your Christmas decorating—including putting up the tree—on Thanksgiving weekend a month before Christmas. In some ways, the idea makes me jealous. American Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season, so dispensing with the turkey one day, observing Black Friday the next, then decorating for Christmas makes sense. For me as a Canadian, however, it doesn’t make sense until I’m staring the Christmas countdown in the face, and that’s always ten days before.

Now, some say you can put up your tree a month early even if it’s a live tree, that proper watering will keep it going until Christmas. Thanks, but I don’t want to try that with a roaring fire in the same room every evening. The other option that is becoming more and more popular is the artificial Christmas tree. Twenty years ago, I found fake trees laughable. I mean, they looked pretty darn fake. Now, they look great. I can easily see the argument for an artificial tree (which I’ll refer to as fake from now on for the sake of my typing fingers). They can go up earlier and you don’t have to worry about them catching on fire or your toddlers playing in the water or eating the needles xmas_tree_farmthat fall on the floor. If you buy a good fake tree, I’m sure you could expect to keep it for twenty years before dumping it in the landfill. Whereas, with a live tree, you replace it every year.

We get our live trees from a Christmas tree farm down the road (that’s a picture from last year). The farm is within walking distance, but the trees are up a steep hill and we always seem to have to go to the top to find THE one. That’s enough walking without needing to haul the tree all the way back to the house without benefit of the pickup. Before we discovered the Christmas tree farm, we’d cut a live tree from our woodlot or a piece of property we once owned, or one of my dad’s properties. We called it juvenile thinning. Now, it’s much easier to just visit the tree farm, which didn’t grow anything but dry yellow grass and cow pies before it came into existence. Every year around about this coming weekend, we go and flag which tree we want. Then, when we go back around the 15th, we’re rest assured there’s still a tree left to buy. The tree goes up until New Year’s Day, and then we take it into town for chipping. For getting a live tree, I figure the way we do it could qualify as “green.”

I didn’t realize until I posted about live versus fake trees on Facebook that there’s a bit of a controversy over the environmental greenness of Christmas trees. I can see arguments on both sides, so I thought I’d do a little survey here.

  1. Do you have a fake or live tree?
  2. What’s the reason for your choice? Are you motivated by environmentalism or something else?
  3. Are you staunchly against live or fake trees? Why?
  4. How early do you put up your tree?
  5. When do you take it down?
  6. If Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, why can’t we kick off our Christmas holiday season then?
  7. If not for Halloween, would we?
  8. Can you imagine drinking eggnog for two freaking months?

Doggone It

While my American readers were enjoying Thanksgiving feasts last Thursday night, I was having conniptions (and doing a great job of not showing it, I might add). I lost Allie McBeagle! And it was all my fault.

Any hound owner knows not to leave their beagle, foxhound, walker hound, bloodhound, basset hound, whatever-else-sort-of hound or partial hound, unattended in the great outdoors. Beagles have been described as a “nose on legs,” and that pretty much describes my Allie. She’s motivated by food and scents. We live on a double lot and don’t have a fenced yard. Well, we do have a fence, but it’s one of those post-and-board thingies like they put up back in the Sixties (when our house was built) when dogs ran free and you were lucky to have even a decorative fence. We’ve lived in this house 19 years and we have considered replacing the fence. But then we’re also considering selling this house and building on the empty lot within the next several years, and then we’d just have to build another fence. Too lazy to do it twice (not to mention the expense).

So…I took Allie grocery shopping. When we returned, no males were home. Usually, the dog is in the house with me while my guys bring in the goodies. Not this time. Allie was wandering the yard while I did it. And then…I thought I called her in. I remember her actually being in the kitchen. Was it her doppelganger? It must have been, because I closed the door and went about my business confident that all was well and good.

About 30-40 minutes later, I realized that the house was too quiet. No pattering of little dog claws. My first thought was that Allie had had an epileptic seizure (as she does a couple of times a year), so I scoured the house for her. No luck. It was already getting dark by this time, so I scoured the yard, then phoned My Liege while I set off through the neighborhood to look for my dog.

My Liege came home and did The Whistle (that I can’t do) from the deck. No luck. He went on the roof and did The Whistle several more times. Still no luck. It was dark by now, and we both started driving and/or walking the neighborhood. I called the SPCA and a local radio station. Every 30 minutes to an hour I’d return to the house to eager_beaglesee if someone had called. No luck.

What really scared me was that she didn’t respond to The Whistle. She always responds to The Whistle. She’s eight years old now and will come if she hears it. Not like when she was one or so and ran away while I was walking her in the orchard. She saw a deer (dead of winter) and took off after it high into the hills and into the provincial park. I thought that was it, I’d never see her again (courtesy of hungry coyotes or cougars). About 6 hours later, the orchard caretaker found her and returned her to me.

Another time, she was found two roads away. The person who found her called the SPCA with her dog tag number, they gave the person my phone number, and the person phoned me. At that point I realized not all people would know to call the SPCA, so I got Allie a tag with her name, phone number, address, province and even country! I mean, you just never know. That tag has saved her twice now, and it saved her Thanksgiving night. After more than 2 hours of looking, I came home to find a phone message. She was the next neighborhood over, far enough away that she couldn’t hear The Whistle, but traveling a route that she and I travel frequently on our walks.

It was only after we got her home that I broke down in tears. Of relief. I already have one dog’s demise on my conscience (Blackie, from my childhood, who my dad had to put down after he bit my BFF, formerly known as Sandorf Verster, sometimes now referred to as Claudia Zenk). Another dog, a stray that we took in when I was a kid, Rufus, was hit on the highway above the subdivision where I lived. That wasn’t my fault. But for some reason it still felt like my fault. And I won’t get into what happened to Kai, a pooch my friends gave me for my birthday to help me get over Rufus. The point is, I had doggie-owner guilt, even though My Liege told me over and over it was no one’s fault.

If those very nice people (who were going to a hockey game, so we gave them $20 to buy snacks) hadn’t phoned when they found Allie in their front yard, would she have come home for the night? She never has before. We always have to find her. I like to think she’d come home once she became hungry and cold enough. But there’s always the fear the dog is lying in a ditch somewhere. And then, while looking for her, I thought of all those poor people who turn their backs on their child for a handful of minutes and in that time the child is kidnapped. If I felt horrible about my dog, how horrible must those poor people feel? That thought helped put my experience into perspective.

Last Thursday wasn’t Thanksgiving in Canada, but I ended the night very thankful all the same.

Have you ever lost your dog? Did it come back on its own?

Life Can Be A PITN

Literally.

I put my neck out on Friday. No, I wasn’t bungee-jumping or doing gymnastics or painting the ceilings. I was, um, waking up.

I turned my head too quickly the wrong way, and pop, ouch, squeal. There I was, not even out of bed yet and down for the count.

Luckily, I had my bi-monthly (that does mean twice a month, doesn’t it?) massage therapy appointment scheduled for the afternoon. I quickly put in a call for a chiro appointment. The chiro couldn’t even move my neck, although he gave me a nice adjustment of a trouble spot that had been plaguing me since Wednesday and which probably led to the neck trouble. The massage was great, but did more for my back than my neck, because my life is also a PITA.

Literally.

I’ve been walking like a duck since childhood (or like a ballet dancer, take your pick). Then in high school I hurt my right knee in a production of Oklahoma! (I know, weird, right? Let’s just say it involved a wagon wheel back stage and a cast member who was taking “Break a Leg” too literally). Since The Knee Incident, I’ve been slightly hobbled, and apparently it’s affected my gait. Factor in a major car accident when Youngest Son was 11 months old, and an abusive need to (try and) run Allie McBeagle two or three times a week…well, my gimpy right knee/right hip means my massage therapist needs to take care of my PITA every couple weeks, too.

Over the weekend, the neck has relaxed some. But it’s still not great. If I would just lie in front of the TV for three days, all would be fine. Or so my mother tells me. Apparently, back in the day, when you put out your back or your neck, you rested for three days, and voila! you got fixed.

Now we’re too busy to rest for three whole long days. At least I am. If I could convince myself not to do any activities that exacerbate my problem, I might not keep finding myself in pain. But that would mean not using the computer, not writing, not painting the house when it needs it, not walking and running the dog, etc., etc. It would mean sitting there like a lump. Not for me.

Birdbrain

Ever had a bird in the house? Ever wondered how it got in? Ever considered that it might not be via the cat?

My family has lived in our current home for nineteen years. Sure, we’ve had birds in the house before, courtesy of cats, but those are easy to spot because they’re usually wounded. In fact, our first cat, Slink, once brought a baby owl (dead and frozen before he got to it) into a house we rented in a town about three hours drive from where we currently live. Our second cat, Seiki (a nasty, toothless Siamese I immortalized in BORROWING ALEX as Rusty), considered himself quite the Great White Hunter (one of his nicknames). He’d bring maimed birds into the house and then get much joy from watching them flap about trying to get away from him. Lucky for those birds, the family was usually on the ball and saved the bird before Seiki could further torment it. I can’t recall one single bird becoming the cat’s dinner.

Now, we’re on our third cat, Keisha. Otherwise known around the blog as The Evil Entity. She’s not actually evil. She is quite sweet. Behold, evidence:

keisha_head

Come on, admit it. She’s cute!

So, The Evil Entity has a cat door. Our cats have always had cat doors. I grew up with a cat jumping on my window screen in the middle of the night to get in the house. Not fun. Thus, the cat door. It’s accessible from the carport.

Last winter we had to close the cat door for several months, because, sweet as she is, The Evil Entity wasn’t guarding it very well. A big black cat in the neighborhood decided that sneaking into our house in the middle of the night to eat Keisha’s cat food was a fine idea.

Jump to the summer. We decided to open the cat door again. The big black cat seems to have forgotten about it. Good news. The bad news? We have a birdbrain!

Last weekend, while My Liege was busy helping Eldest Son put away his car for the winter, the kitchen door was left open. My Liege was walking by the cat door in the carport and noticed Keisha inspecting said cat door. He realized something was inside the house, pushing back on the cat door, but not strong enough to get out. Keisha wanted to get in, but was unnerved by the pushing on the door.

So. My Liege goes downstairs, and there’s a huge bird—quite healthy, totally unmaimed by a cat—pushing against the cat door in a vain effort to get out. M.L. and E.S. managed to get the bird to fly back out again (after removing a screen from a basement window), but not before the bird tried to dive-bomb E.S. the_birdsWhat, did he think we were casting for a remake of The Birds?

Okay, bird leaves the house, The Evil Entity, Not Very Evil, can now enter the house again. Everyone is happy. How did the bird enter the house, we wondered? I theorized that E.E. pushed it in through the cat door, but M.L. and E.S. maintained the bird was far too large for E.E. to catch, much less push through a cat door.

All right, I conceded, I guess the bird flew in through the open kitchen door and just happened to fly into the workshop and decide to try to get out again via a cat door.

Meanwhile, My Liege had moved a bunch of freshly chopped kindling into the carport beside the cat door, but no one, not even moi, considered that this wood might have had something to do with the birdbrained bird entering our house.

So. The other day, I take Allie McBeagle outside for a bathroom break. We pass the carport. A huge bird that at this point lives in my imagination as part crow/part magpie because I didn’t get a good look as a result of lowering my head so it wouldn’t Hitchcock me, swept up from near the cat door, wings fluttering madly, and attempted to dive-bomb my head before I screamed and scared it off. The Evil Entity was sitting at the other end of the carport, watching with interest.

That dagnabbed bird, I swear, was trying to get into our house via the cat door. What a birdbrain.

Why would it do such a thing? My guess is that it can smell the freshly cut kindling (can birds smell?), and, look, there’s an opening right next to this nice-smelling wood. Surely, the wood must be a weird tree and the opening a nice door for a bird house.

Except it’s my house, birdbrain! Get the heck out!

Bad Things

I’m taking a break from blogging this week. The universe decided to dump all over my family over the last few days, and I don’t have the wherewithal to draft posts. First, a member of My Liege’s immediate family was rushed to hospital for the second time in a week in very serious condition. She spent the weekend in the ICU, and although she’s back at home now the details of her condition remain a mystery. We hope to find out more by the end of the month.

The day after that happened, we learned a lightning strike had created a fire on our woodlot. My Liege had to deal with that (the fire’s contained now, as far as we know). No idea of the damage to the timber.

The same day, we finally got our new stove, only to discover an 18-inch long gouge in the side. Back to the store it went, and we’re waiting for another.

We thought that was Bad Thing #3, and we couldn’t possibly receive any more grungy news.

Pitiful humans. A gouge in a stove doesn’t even count as a Bad Thing, it appears.

Yesterday, just as Eldest Son was leaving on a four-day camping trip without cell access, we learned that the room in the private home he was to move into in two weeks for his last year at university was damaged in a fire that occurred while the owner was on vacation. The repairs won’t be finished until October, which leaves him a month without a place to live. We have fantastic friends in his university town, and they offered to let him stay with them while repairs were underway. But I’ve been in that position before—staying in one home for September before moving into the “permanent” spot in October, and it’s not the best situation in the world. It’s hard to dig into your studies when you don’t feel settled.

So…yesterday, I quickly gathered information for the remaining available housing. He and I went through them, and our friend in the university town checked out the only two of the seven or so that responded. The good news is Eldest Son has a new place to live, not quite as private as his former situation, but cheaper, so he’ll be happy when he comes home and learns that’s settled.

Then last night I awoke in the early hours of the morning with the worst sinus headache I’ve had in years. I’m still battling it.

Today is Youngest Son’s 19th birthday! That’s the best news I’ve heard all week. I’m doing nothing more strenuous than baking him a cake, reading, relaxing, walking the dog, fighting this cold, and maybe going over some notes for a manuscript revision that, at this point, I don’t even remember brainstorming with a writing friend yesterday afternoon over Skype. Good thing I was typing while she talked!

Tuesday, September 1st, romantic suspense author Kylie Brant is guest-blogging. Her promo post will go up on Monday. Unless I feel markedly better between now and Friday, that’s the next time you’ll hear from me. The universe had taken this round. I know when I’m beat. 🙂