Monthly Archives: January 2022

About My Pants

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Last week, a button popped off the waistband of my pants. Thankfully, it wasn’t because of undue strain due to Christmas binging or two years of Covid (over)eating. No, this favorite pair of pants have just started getting old: first the sporty emblem began to rub off, then one of the zippers on a side pocket went kaput, and now, the threads holding my button in place gave up their ghost.

Rather than change out of said pants into another, nearly identical pair for comfort and fifty-something style, I just grabbed a large safety pin and used that to fasten my pants and prevent them from sliding down every time I stood up. And I thought to myself, I guess this is what I’ll be like when I’m old and don’t want to go out and buy new clothes anymore.

But then it hit me: Who am I kidding? Apparently, that time has already arrived.

Actually, I’m not really sure if my swift employment of safety pins is about my age , my laziness to sewing on the button or my aversion to buying new clothes. I think I’ve always been one to resort to a quick fix when I’ve got better things to do. And for the most part, I work from my chair, drink lots of coffee and water, and only get up for hourly bathroom breaks so maybe the pin wasn’t even that necessary. I mean, I could hold my pants up for the ten seconds it takes to traverse the hallway to my urgent destination. Plus, there is the added efficiency to getting the job done: no button in the way. And who am I kidding? Most of the time, sitting in my chair, with my Christmas/Covid indulgences pressing the matter, I often undo the button and relax into a (girlish) Al Bundy posture in front of my laptop.

But there is a certain decency to wearing clothes that are in good repair. Granted, these particular pants have crossed over to the designation of “Home Pants”. They’re too shabby to wear to the grocery store (unless I’m wearing my uber-long winter coat, shhhhhh!) but they will do if I need to answer the door for a signed delivery or a surprise bottle-driver. (I will quickly run to change before I answer the door if I am caught still in my pajama pants because, I need to at least provide the illusion that I’m working, both to myself and to strangers. Covid dress-code, be damned. For me, anyway. You do you.)

Those pants have lasted me a very long time – I’m guessing about seven years. The replacement cost would be about $70 meaning the originals only cost me about $10 per year. By my Starbucks reckoning, that’s only two fancy-schmancy drinks. A year. So yes, I think I do need to go shopping, whether I like it or not.

Or maybe I just need to sew on that dang button.

About Cell Phone Photography

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Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

I have to organize my photos. Well, not all of them, but there’s a whole 2021 backlog on my phone that I really need to go through and then delete off the Cloud or else I’ll start getting those warning messages that my phone is NOT backed up and that Certain Doom will thus occur. I hate those messages so much that last year, instead of doing the work of paring down what needed to be stored in my phone, I just paid the extra for storage. Now I am a slave to Apple to the tune of $1.35 per month.

Okay, so that’s not a terrible price for ensuring that my memories don’t disappear – it’s only about the cost of one third of a Starbucks Grande Caramel Macchiato (with oat milk). The cost of Starbucks drinks helps me to relativize a lot of purchases that, in theory, should be a lot more important than coffee. Like photos. Like memories.

But when I do get around to looking at the photos from my phone that Magically-Instantly download to my computer to see what I can delete off my phone, this is what I find: screenshots of memes and their cropped versions that I sent to someone, screenshots of my phone mid-podcast to remind me to go back and listen to something again (which I almost never do) and screenshots of texts to remind me to do something. Oh, and some genuine photos.

I’ve learned not to delete them all. While many of these things are actual pictures of people I love blowing out birthday candles or beside the huge pile of snow they just shovelled or selfies of a group of us hiking in Canmore or just me on the trails in Vermilion Provincial Park, the memes and the texting and the podcast screenshots are also moments in time. I save a lot of conversations with my kids or my husband (either for future enjoyment or for future proof of things that moms and wives need to prove to their beloveds). A snap of a podcast shows me what I was into at the time I took it. And All Those Covid memes will (hopefully soon) remind me of when we wore masks and bought a lot of toilet paper.

Some stuff has to go: the price of SPAM at Costco, the mysterious & blurry shots of my shoes, the doubles and tens and twenties when my phone was accidentally in burst mode. But the random and odd pictures that my phone seems to take of its own accord have the flavor of those old time real photos from the end of the Kodak camera reel: slightly exposed, weirdly angled and capturing something ethereal that just might be happy to look back at twenty years from now.

Maybe I don’t have to organize my photos just yet. Maybe I’ll just time-capsule them instead in a folder on my computer or buy a round of Starbucks for a year’s worth of storage. And then twenty years from now, like looking through a shoebox of photos, I can then wonder what the heck I was thinking. Or not.

About January

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Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

[My brain is still thawing out from last week’s weather. So I dug up another throwback for y’all from 20 years ago when there was a drought, ergo – NO SNOW. And quarantine? Yeah, I just didn’t know.]

You sure can tell it’s January. January is a month that starts off with a big bang and quickly fizzles away into nondescript-ness. Its only merit is the holiday that occurs on the first of the month leaving nothing to look forward to. Unless you celebrate Ukrainian Christmas, but it’s too bad for you if it falls in the middle of the week. Arriving to work late (or the day after) with that excuse in hand will get you the same scrutiny from your boss as “my dog ate my homework”. The calendars in my house only herald such events as Classes Resume at the beginning of the month and Australia Day at the end. For the latter, I suppose we could spend the day singing the chorus of Six White Boomers (the chorus is all we know and only two lines of it) and watching all our taped episodes of The Crocodile Hunter.

And then there’s the weather, the hot topic of small talk everywhere. By this time winter has lost all its novelty. The mercury in the thermometer appears badly out of shape, as it can’t seem to bench-press anything above a negative number. And getting the kids ready to get out the door in their multi-layered outfits loses a lot of appeal after the first two hundred times. Plus their lack of memory (first snow pants, then boots) is astonishing. After all, they’ve had two hundred times to practice. And I won’t even mention anything about zippers not built to last more than two hundred zips.

I waffle between whether I think more snow would be a good idea. There are certain advantages to an absence of snow. My sidewalk has been virtually maintenance free since even the least amount of frozen precipitation has Gil out the door to shovel the snow. The novelty of this hasn’t even had a chance to wear off, since there have been so few snow-removal opportunities for him. And pushing a loaded shopping cart back to my van is certainly easier when you’re not working against a day’s snowfall.

On the other hand, since it IS winter, I figure we might as well have some snow to go along with the frost on our windshields and the chill on our noses. Plus sending the kids out to play in the frozen grass just doesn’t hold the same appeal as a big downy blanket to curl up in. (Anyone with a snowmobile is sadly nodding their head in agreement right now.) Not to mention the desperate need for moisture. My eldest son is even recounting the good old days to his younger brothers, which in his memory is the year Grandpa was able to pile up the snow in the yard into a kid-sized mountain with the front-end loader.

And well, what would January be without the flu and the common cold? My kids have managed to space out their illnesses well enough that the ice cream pails only get about a day’s rest between sick sessions. That means we’ve been in quarantine. Although, it might only be three or four days since we’ve been out, it seems like a lot longer. And kids have such an incredible way of masking their sickness until some critical moment. Like when the van is running and you’re getting the kids ready to go out the door (first snow pants, then boots).  That’s usually when someone yells, “I need a pail!” and you set an Olympic record (one which involves speed and hurdles) either getting the pail to the kid or the kid to the toilet, depending on which course of action you chose in that split second.

I suppose in that light, you can’t really call January a boring month. These domestic challenges of getting that zipper to work just one more time and keeping the kids occupied indoors are what keep me going. And anyways, I shouldn’t complain. January IS one of my twelve favorite months!

About Vocabulary

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Bamboozled. Flabbergasted. Discombobulated. Shenanagins. Lollygag. Malarkey. Kerfuffle. Brouhaha. Nincompoop. Skedaddle. Pumpernickel.

About three months ago my eldest son sent me a meme titled “some of the best words literally ever”, with the suggestion that they might come in handy for my blog. He sent my thoughts cattywampus as I took on his challenge and elbowed them in one (and once two) at a time. I had seen all of them before and generally knew what they meant, except for today’s word: I mistook cattywampus for a noun. After all, it sounds like some kind of trouble a Dr. Suess character would get into.

Vocabulary, along with Spelling (or Gnilleps, the more challenging backwards version from the board game Cranium), are some of my favorite things. Is that nerdy? I ask myself (also answering myself by unconsciously nodding my head). Well, yes, in fact it’s SUPERnerdy. But I choose to emphasize the SUPER. I mean, we all want to have a superpower, right? So what’s wrong with wanting to know All The Words? Maybe it’s not as handy as invisibility or shooting spiderwebs out of your wrists, but it’s the one I want to work on. Because no superhero was born in a day.

As much as I have aspired at times to read the dictionary cover to cover, I have never got past “aardvark” because reading the dictionary is actually (spoiler alert) Pretty Boring. I mean, the first page is a whole column of the different meanings and uses for the letter “A”. Who knew? (Well, Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster, for two.) As handy as a dictionary is, or its online counterpart, it doesn’t serve well as a textbook.

So how do we increase our wordpower? The old Reader’s Digest quiz had it partly right: read an unfamilar word in a sentence and take a guess. Because the answer to that question is another of my favorites: Read, Read, Read. While entertaining my 7-year old niece this week (or rather, she was entertaining me), she read aloud for a few chapters from one of the classic Dav Pilkey books about Dog Man – the same Dav Pilkey who purveys Captain Underpants. (Is that the right use of the word purvey? I’m not totally sure. I’m just gonna go with it.) In this seemingly innocuous book for those in the 6+ set, Navy sometimes consulted me, sometimes barreled ahead and correctly pronounced such words as: obnoxious, consequences, humiliation and – my favorite – dopamine responders.

It reminded me of how I used to read everything as a kid, how I have sometimes consulted, sometimes barreled ahead without looking up a weird word because the story was just too darn good. Eventually, if you read and encounter sisyphean or solipsistic, perspicacious or pugillistic enough times, you’ll actually figure out what they mean. Or you’ll look it up. Or you’ll pick up an easier book – like Dog Man – where the known to unknown ratio is a little more palatable. But still challenging – and a darn good story.