Generation Exhausted

Better luck next time

I had a blinding flash of brilliance earlier. Everything made sense, and the mystery of life, the universe and everything was no longer a mystery. I knew the answer, and it wasn't forty-two. The distance between two points seemed insignificant, and all was right with the world.

Alas, I was nowhere near my computer at the time, and couldn't blog about it. And it's gone now. The flash fizzled. Have no clue what I was thinking at the time.

Sigh. Maybe tomorrow.

Pass the butter knife

One of the things I've come to learn in my thirty-odd years on the planet (and some of them have been odder than others, believe me) is that men and women have very different perspectives when it comes to home improvement/repair.

Men - and here's where I go all generalizing, but it's my blog, so there - will buy tools whether they need them or not. Need is also a matter of perspective - if you're installing vinyl siding, say, a rivet tool is used for about 3 percent of the job. Now, if you only need that tool for three percent of the job, why would you not either A - borrow it - or B - find a way to do without it?

Women, on the other hand, realize that the only two things you really need as a homeowner, are a butter knife and a good heavy shoe. Most screws, bolts, whatever, can be loosened with a good butter knife and some determination.  The shoe is used to hammer things. Any other tool you might need can always be borrowed from somewhere.

Work in the yard continues here, with the demolition of the back deck, and the near-completion of the new fence. The holes are filled in, mostly, and today marked the arrival of some 50 patio stones, which I'll install tomorrow.

Pass the butter knife.

Up/down

One of those "could go either way" days, some good stuff, some less than good stuff.

Good: The post hole digger guy came and got the job done in three hours.

Not so good: He arrived at 7 a.m. on the first "I can sleep until 9" day I've had in a while. And proceeded to operate heavy machinery outside my bedroom window.

Good: Littlest girl's t-ball team won the semi-final, they're going to the "ship" and she capped it off by hitting a homerun for the last bat of the game.

Not so good: I got a sunburn while watching the game. At 6 o'clock in the evening. Six. In the evening. You'd think this was the Cayman Islands the way the sun's been affecting me lately.

Good: A big agency said my novel was "smart and engaging" and my writing "accomplished". The first 100 pages were "delightfully readable".

Not so good: They won't be offering me representation because the rest of it was "typical Chick Lit" and "too predictable" and they couldn't give it the "enthusiasm it deserves". They even used that dreaded word "fresh", as in, "not fresh enough."

Good: At least it's feedback, much more welcome than the vague "don't feel enthusiastic enough" responses  I've been mostly getting. I welcome feedback. If they're saying no, I want to know why. I've been doing this writing thing for a while now - I have nerves of steel. I can take it. So, at least they told me.

Side note: Every editor I've ever encountered, including me, uses the word "fresh" and none of us can really define it. You know it when you see it, and I think it means something different to all of us. It's like shopping for shoes.

Good: I'm officially in Cup of Comfort for Women in Love, to be released September 2005.

So there's the day. I only hope that wondering why "typical Chick Lit" is a bad thing doesn't keep me awake half the night. I mean, typical Chick Lit is flying off the shelves, so you'd think that would be a plus, right? And I'm sure it is for someone, I just haven't found the right one yet.

Half baked

Another Grade 8 graduation tonight, another one of my kids heading off to high school in the fall. The ceremony was great, the kids looked wonderful, and I had a kicky new dress on that I couldn't completely enjoy.

You know how people will go away, somewhere tropical-like, in the dead of winter, and they'll come back seven days later, and you just know they've been "away"? How their skin gets all goldeny and tanned, and everyone says, "Oooh, look who's been spending time in the sun."?

When I come back from a week down south, I have to show my boarding pass as proof of my vacation. A week is simply not long enough for me to get tanned. I fall into that class of folk known as "fair skinned."  SPF 45? Invented for people like me.  Tanning is a gradual thing, that happens over several months of summer, and in spite of the gallons of sunscreen I lather on every day.

Because, you see, I burn. Quickly. There hasn't been a single time I've spent two hours in the sun without sunscreen that I haven't ended up red and crisp. In Colorado? Burned by dinner time the first day.

In spite of the fact that I know I will burn if I leave myself unprotected, I still forget to use sunscreen sometimes. Sunday was one of those times. I worked in the yard for three hours in the late afternoon, and my back now bears a remarkable resemblance to a lobster. And it hurts.

So my kicky new dress had a seam right across the centre of my back, and it was scratching the hell out of my sunburn. And the rest of me - the parts that were covered on Sunday - stood out in stark white contrast to my burned parts. Not even makeup, including blush, could balance out the red from my shoulders and back. With my kicky green dress, snappy new green shoes and matching handbag, I looked like a freakin' Christmas tree.

It's even affecting my computer time, as I can't bear to lean back in my chair. Lesson for the day - wear sunscreen. All the time. Or stay inside.

So the graduate is graduated, the holes in the yard are filled in, and the post hole digger guy comes tomorrow. Now I just have to buy teacher presents, and sell the rest of the yearbooks, and we can say goodbye to another school year.

Off to write more of that novel! And Lani - it was Finn, how did you guess? And why does it seem like all the good names are gone?

How many things can get done in one day?

The average teenager has approximately 347 facial expressions to convey disgust, disdain and/or disapproval. I know this because I took my daughter shopping for a bathing suit this morning.

If I liked it, she hated it. If I thought it was too small, she thought it was too big. Too bright, too dark, too "icky", and on and on. If she loved it, I thought it was trashy. If I suggested she try it on, she immediately claimed it was so awful she couldn't even stand to be within two feet of the rack.

You might be interested to know that the word "gross", in use lo these many decades now, is still part of the teenage lexicon.

Shelley pauses to look up "lexicon" to be sure of the word. Yep, that'll do it.

Finally, upon being presented with "the bathing suit", I insisted that I wasn't paying sixty dollars for anything before I'd seen it on her body. Off to the changing room we went, where we encountered her best friend in the whole entire world about to try on the exact same bathing suit.

Gah.

Good news in the world of fashion - the waistband appears to be rising. Oh, I'm sure it will never be what it was (though then again, it could be, eventually), but it's definitely getting higher. Much singing and celebrating from mom, more disdain from the teenager. Ha ha, too bad.

Hit the ground running today - convinced two people to change their schedules on my behalf before the clock struck eight. A.M. So the fence posts will, in fact, be delivered before the fence post digger guy comes to install them. That's the kind of thing you need to start a long day - a good thing happening when it could have been exactly the opposite. Makes you believe that anything is possible.

I wielded a shovel for a while, hauled concrete, shopped for Father's Day. Much accomplished. I can't wait until we pass that point where the yard starts to look better for all of our effort, instead of worse. On the up side, I'm going to have amazing upper body strength by the time this is done.

Have to get back to the novel, it's whispering at me. I was reading Maybe Baby, by the lovely and talented Lani, and the strangest thing happened. I'd just had this flash of inspiration - I suddenly knew exactly what I was going to call my as yet un-named character. Then, in the very next chapter, I discovered Lani had called one of her characters that. So it's back to the drawing board, but it was a very freaky coincidence.

More digging tomorrow, and brunch with the dads. I'm sure a good time will be had by all.

Who's sitting next to you?

When I was in Colorado...

(pauses while everyone groans, "Oh, for the love of Mike, is every post going to be about Colorado from now on?")

Well no, but that's how this story is starting.

When I was in Colorado, we rode the bus. Actually, we rode a lot of buses. A bus to the airport, a bus from the airport, a bus to Red Rocks Amphitheatre, etc. The children are used to riding school buses - many of them ride one every day. Or at least on field trips. And most of them have been on a coach bus for one trip or another.

But rarely, if ever, have these children ridden a city bus. These kids get rides, or they walk, or bike. The city bus is something that is foreign to them. Myself, it had been, oh, five years since I'd last ridden a city bus? Maybe six. Not counting Disney World. Which isn't really a city bus because it's a Disney bus.

So, in Boulder, we rode the bus to the Pearl Street Mall. The bus was crowded, mostly with other OM visitors, but there were - gasp! - locals too. And it was interesting to see how the kids reacted to the novelty of the city bus.

They swung from the handrails, and sprawled across the seats, and nearly fell out the back door. They complained - actually complained, some of them - because they couldn't put fare in the fare box thingy, because Boulder was letting the OM visitors ride the bus for free.

They shyed away from strangers, a stranger being anyone who wasn't wearing an OM wristband. (side note: we looked like a bunch of inmates with our pretty wristband I.D.s, really we did) Which is too bad, because sometimes, strangers are really interesting people.

Eighteen years ago - gah, has it been that long? - I rode the Greyhound up north. Annually, or more. And I always took the time to get to know my seatmate, because really, when you're going to be sitting next to someone for nine hours, and maybe falling asleep and drooling on their shoulder, you can at least be sociable.

So on this one trip, on the Toronto-Sudbury leg, I sat next to this guy who had long hair and a guitar case. He was very pleasant, quiet but friendly, who had been in Toronto for some audition, or guitar something-or-other and was going home to Winnipeg. And he told me of a trip he and his father had taken by canoe. It was a world-record setting trip, he said - they paddled all the way to Brazil in a canoe. I was only half listening, because I was just being polite. But I listened. And he mentioned that they'd turned their adventure into a book, and he'd stopped in at the Toronto publisher's to see the galleys, and was taking the cover proofs home with him.

And I remember thinking, "yeah, yeah, sure, whatever." Because everyone's got a story, right, and they're always a bit of a stretch. Just before I left the bus near Sudbury, he showed me the cover proofs, but I didn't really look.

About a year later, I was in a Mac's Milk looking at books, because I look at books everywhere I go. And this is what I saw:

Paddle to the Amazon

I bought it, of course, and pulled it out to read again a few days ago, which is what made me think of Dana Starkell. He was a really nice guy, and I wonder what ever happened with his guitar playing.

*Updated: Now I know.

But it just goes to show you that you can meet some pretty interesting people on the bus.

The Sun Also Rises

One of the things that happened during my sabbatical was that I began to experience a change in how I viewed the world. As in, I got to see it in the morning, when normal people get up and start their day.

It began in Colorado. Understand that I was travelling with school staff that have known me many moons. My reputation at the school is well established - Mrs. H. is not a morning person. This is a known fact. It may even be written in my children's files: "Mother is not a drunken layabout, she just doesn't like to get up in the morning." The secretary and I often traded witticisms about it.  The principal often began phone calls with, "I'm sorry to call so early, but I'm about to go for lunch and needed to..."

So. In Colorado, I got up every morning before 7. A.M. In. The. Morning. And I did it willingly, and of my own accord, and without needing the teachers to pound on my door to wake me up. In fact, it was not uncommon for them to knock and my daughter to say, "She's gone to breakfast already."

Much was made of Mrs. H's conversion to the land of the daytime dwellers. They may give me an award. I chalked it up to what I've always said - I simply live in the wrong time zone for my body's clock. You see, 7 a.m. in Colorado is 9 a.m. at home.

But upon our return to Eastern time, my early rising thus continued. I was waking with the birds. Driving the children to school. In the morning. Showered and dressed and chipper, not still in my pajamas, eyes still half-closed.

And I began to go to sleep at night. Oh, not necessarily like "normal" people, but at a much more respectable midnight or one, rather than 2 or 3 a.m. And it was not forced. It just happened. Go figure.

Did you know there is no line at the bank at 9 a.m.? Did you know that the days go faster when you're awake for the daylight hours and asleep during the night-time ones? Did you know that sunrise is just as tranquil and beautiful as sunset?

Now I know.

Now, where was I?

AGK! DON'T CLICK AWAY - IT'S REALLY ME!

To all of you who thought a week was only seven days long, I apologize - after twenty-three days, I'm back. I'm here. Regular visiting hours may now resume. Oh, and spread the word - I'm terrified that my beloved readers may have given up on me.

So, twenty-three days. Twenty. Three. You're wondering what I've been up to, aren't you? Well, let's see:

DAY ONE - I got on a plane with twenty children and four adults from my daughter's school and jetted off to the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals in Boulder, Colorado, where the weather was unseasonably warm, the the air uncomfortably thin, and the sun alarmingly close to the Earth. I had a sunburn by noon. And a headache by nightfall.

DAY TWO - Pondering the wisdom of travelling 1200 miles across the country only to sleep in the bottom bunk and share my meals with 800 children, I flitted off to breakfast, where I met, live and in person, the lovely and talented Kira, as well as some other strangers I met on the Internet. Kira is...delightful. Warm, witty, and shorter than me. I think. It was twenty-one days ago, after all.

That evening, I gathered with 5000 or so other people and watched my daughter carry the Ontario banner in the Opening Ceremonies, all whilst wondering if it could actually be 1000 degrees in that stadium. Apparently, Colorado hadn't turned on the air conditioning yet.

DAYS THREE TO SIX - Trailed along behind aformentioned 20 children, ate 3000 calories at every meal and walked five miles a day around the campus. Also, met Kira for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. It was busy, and so they gave us a pager while we waited for a table. I'd never been anywhere that gave you a pager before. Kira let me carry it. Didn't have cheesecake, as it was my second dinner of the day. I swear, I would go to the OM Worlds again just for the food. There's something...right...about having ice cream bars for dessert at every meal. Including breakfast. Saw the Rocky Mountains. Saw more Rocky Mountains. Bit tongue while own teen took 47 pictures of Rocky Mountains. Returned home without a medal, but with every single kid we took with us. Mission accomplished.

DAYS SEVEN THROUGH...Oh, never mind.

Suffice it to say I have produced a school yearbook, an annual Baby Guide, and a feature article in the last two weeks, PLUS, there is a July issue to put out this week, PLUS, I am digging holes in the backyard.

If you ever get someone to break up your old driveway to put in a new one, be sure that they don't bury all the huge chunks of concrete in the middle of the backyard. Otherwise, someone will curse you for it twenty years later. That's all I'm saying. Ever see that movie "Holes"? That's what my yard looks like. True story.

You know how every neighbourhood has that one family? That family that, you look out your window, and think, "NOW WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?" On the street where I live, we're that family. I'm going to write an essay about it, and sell it somewhere big, and use the money to pay for someone to take all the huge chunks of concrete away.

Life is still busy, but manageable, and things are beginning to taper off. I'll have more novel news to share soon, and will tell you all about the adorable shoes I bought in CO. I've learned many things while away - like, what to do when the teen you're chaperoning (not your own) turns out to have scissors in their carry-on. Or, that some children, (again, not your own), when left to their own devices, WILL eat Fruit Loops at every meal. Or, that taking 5 pictures of the school band doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to find ONE on the day you finish the Yearbook.

For now, I'm back, and hopefully that's enough to get you to click in again tomorrow. Thanks for missing me, and not giving up. I won't stay away again so long, I promise.