clearbluecup

Seven years ago today I found myself at a party, wide eyed and wearing ridiculous pink pajama pants. Or rather, I had lost myself and was in the process of searching for all my little tiny pieces amidst the lego men and googly-eyed puppets strewn about on the floor. I was nineteen.

At that party I got tangled up in my hoodie, and couldn't find my way out for some time. When I emerged, I saw the most wonderful smile radiating towards me.

Tonight Tom and I sat and went through our photos, from the first shots of our house in Edmonton and all the photos one takes with a new camera - my stuff! my plants! the serial number of every piece of electrical equipment we own! 10 different shots of a piece of string shaped like a pair of eyes and a bit of dead twig dragged in from outside that looks like a smiley face! Pictures of us hiking and camping and throwing parties and hiding under duvets in the coldest early twilight dawn of other people's parties. Driving along the highway in our trusty rusty van and cooking up coffee at the side of the road. The sparse emptiness of our first flat in Cork. Pictures of our niece Chloe, Andy's house in Skib, old photos of Tom's siblings as babies and his Citroen resting peacefully beneath an Irish rainbow. Windswept headlands, London market scenes, Edmonton's skyline, a deer nibbling the apple buds on our front lawn. My belly, in hundreds of different shots. Beatrice, gleefully smiling at six weeks old.

Seven years of departures and arrivals, sometimes stumbling through rocky fields at night and sometimes camping on the edge of Honeymoon Lake.

I love you, my fellow april fool. Here's to many more adventures together....

So I had a wonderful, clever and witty post all written, and then Tom and Beatrice returned home and I walked away from the computer without clicking save. Big mistake.

These days I feel a lot like Sisyphus. Just when you think you've got the rock to the top of the hill it rolls back down to the very bottom and you have to start over again. The dishes never end. There is always a wet diaper in the bucket. Our bedroom is always covered in piles of (usually clean) clothes. I never wake up and say, "wow, the house looks great!"

To paraphrase my last post, here's our latest news:

Beatrice has gotten her first tooth! On the day I wrote the March 23 post here, I put my fiinger in her mouth and felt the first sharp pointy bits poking through.

We bought a new (to us) car! It's the newest car we've ever had - a 2004 Ford Focus. It's totally bare-bones (no a/c! no power locks! a tape deck!) but it's in reasonably good condition, it's a standard and the price was great. So to celebrate our new car-owner status we drove out to Lynn Valley yesterday and walked around Rice Lake. It's still amazing to me that we can drive 10 minutes from our house and be in the Canadian Forest.

The past few weeks I've been struggling with the moop. This is very closely tied to the Sisyphus feeling of never being able to feel on top of things, and I have an unfortunate tendency to give up too quickly when something starts to crumble. It's also partly related to my somewhat antisocial tendencies, and the end of the music class that Beatrice and I had been attending through the winter. There was a while there where I didn't get out of the house much and didn't really see anyone and Tom was working long hours all week and working on his thesis with a renewed effort and dedication all weekend. I also realised that I was coming down from the high of moving. The first six months after a move are so hectic and full of arranging things, unpacking, settling in, etc, that I don't seem to notice the displacement so much. It's after the dust has settled and the furniture stays in one place for a while and starts to grow accumulations of clutter on it that I realise I am halfway across the world from where I used to be.

When I abandoned my cleaning schedule and stopped leaving the house, I embraced crafting. I've made a long sleeved t-shirt and summer dress for Beatrice, I knitted a cotton dishcloth and sewed together a quilt block from a quilt that my mom and I started cutting out over Christmas. I had written something witty in my original post about some slimy jars that I had left in the sink for four days, but I just can't remember how it went exactly. The flow is gone and I am still frustrated over losing my writing. Grrr. Anyway, the gist of it was that I could use that cotton dishcloth I knitted to wash the jars, but in the meantime after my post was sucked into the black hole of disapparated internet writing I actually just washed them with an ordinary dishcloth so I needn't bother trying to remember and rewrite my original post because it is no longer true or relevant.

Sigh.

I've also been thrifting a lot, and have found some great deals. Next weekend there are two crafting/thrifting events on saturday - the seamrippers I Heart Crafts bazaar and the Swap-O-Rama-Rama. There seem to be lots of other people in my neighbourhood who are into the same thrifty crafting (or is that crafty thrifting?). The next logical prograssion is into reconstructionist fashion, but I don't feel too confident with that yet. I might start by turning my tattered trousers into capris and seeing where I go from there.

I hope everyone is having a Happy Easter. :)

I just wanted to write a quick update to say that I'm not feeling quite as dark as I was when I wrote my last post.

Want to know what worked?

I dressed up in my black hoodie and went down to my favourite cafe by myself. I drank a latte and people-watched and wrote in my journal. It felt like the old days, and after writing down all my worries I came to the conclusion that I just need to work at some of my concerns (get out of the house, talk to people, etc, etc) but most of all I need to be kind to myself and realize that it can be difficult to move, be a parent, overcome introversion and isolation, whatever, and that being mean to myself is not going to help me get through any of that.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? :)

I have taken the jumper cables out of the trunk of my brain this week, and applied them to my battery. It was time for a mental boost.

This boost has taken the form of CBC radio one. Yes, the radio. Seems simple, doesn't it? Archaic, even. But the radio has solved two problems in my life.

One, I felt like my brain was turning to mush from disuse. Listening to talk radio is like watching the news and discussion programs on the television, without any of the head-wrecking video segments or commercials. It is more engaging and easier to grasp than reading the news on the internet, and I can interact with Beatrice at the same time, which I can't do very well while surfing.

And two, I can get things done in the kitchen while I listen. So my kitchen is cleaner, I am cooking and baking more, and Beatice plays happily on the floor while I do these things. It's like a revolution!

((Yes, this is my life. Talk radio is a revolution.))

So now I know about the plan to restore Stanley Park, how according to some experts biodiesel is a net energy loser, and how there is a new scholarship being created in the name of a young teacher who was killed last fall.

I've also become fascinated with wool. I picked up knitting a few weeks ago, made myself a dishcloth, and started surfing knitting websites. Then I bought a great big bag of wool from value village and embarked upon a journey to figure out what the heck I am going to do with it all. And I have discovered that there are people out there who knit all kinds of things, and who make their own felt and spin their own wool, even raise their own sheep and take the wool every step of the way from the field to the sweater.

I am fascinated by this, by all the paraphernalia of spindles and spinning wheels, fluffy fibres and smooth needles and the beautiful texture of expertly knit stitches. And the way people describe them, like My stitches appeared extremely clean and even, almost as if I were knitting with large strands of clay. It's like living anthropology, rediscovering all these archaic things that I first learned about in fairy tales but have never actually seen or used in real life. And there is a power in being able to do things yourself that you would normally pay someone else to do, like bake your own bread or spin your own yarn or sew your own clothes. You are no longer in debt to someone else's skill.

I think the sunshine is also helping to fuel my brain. I am starting to feel that solstice madness creeping on, but in a good way. Kind of manic, but good.

heheheeee..... :)

So, in an effort to understand and generally poke fun at my foul mood, I will outline here all the things that get under my skin. Feel free to skip over this post; it's mostly venting for my mental health.

1. We're Killing The Earth With Oil-Burning Mammoths and I Got Blisters From the Push Mower. I am re-realising why I have a love/hate relationship with the media. Once I turn it on I suck it all in, and it sits up in my mind festering away. If I had more distractions in my life maybe the radio wouldn't have such a powerful effect on me, but as it is I have very little else to think about and I get caught in a powerful vortex of negativity. We are killing the earth, killing each other, and there is no great solution on the horizon. So I go outside to mow the lawn with our newly-acquired push mower, thinking that at least I can feel smug about my ecologically friendly lawn care. I am mowing the bit of grass between the sidewalk and the street, Beatrice is strapped onto my back in the Didymos, and some guy pulls up in a huge red Suburban that spews a great cloud of exhaust and he shouts, "Good exercise, huh?" I thought about shouting back, "Yeah, it's great on gas!" But I didn't. I think I should have. And I got blisters. Wah-wah, poor me, etc, etc.

2. OH MY GOD, I LOST THE CAR. Or, Why Designers of Underground Parking Should Paint Different Floors With Different Colours of Paint. This was an absolute nightmare. I had gone to Metrotown mall thinking that I would research carseats and maybe buy one for Beatrice as she is nearing the height limit of her current carseat. I hadn't thought at all about what kind of shopping centre I was actually going to until I got there and discovered that this was an enormous, West Edmonton Mall-scale shopping complex. I then realised that I hadn't actually been shopping somewhere like this since I returned to North America, and it totally blindsided me. I lost my sense of direction totally and completely, I went up and down in the elevator 400 times, and every single time Beatrice screamed her head off because the first time we went in the elevator it was kind of dark and clunky and there was a freaky man in it with us. I looked around me and saw girls dressed like prostitutes (the mom-ification happens quickly, I tell you), and racks and racks of STUFF that extended into infinity and made me feel dizzy and sick thinking about all the resources that went into creating and transporting all that STUFF all around the world, and the third-world women who sewed it all and I just felt a bit ill. I almost bought T-shirts at Old Navy until I thought about the poor sweatshop workers that made them so I turned around and bought a t-shirt for twice the price at American Apparel because they don't support sweatshops (but as Tom rightly pointed out, that t-shirt was likely made by an illegal mexican immigrant in LA, so whether it is morally any better is questionable). I decided that I am not going to buy t-shirts at thrift shops because they smell like armpit, and I am not going to buy t-shirts that are made in sweatshops, so that leaves me with making all my own t-shirts. I will be my own sweatshop instead. ANYWAY. I digress. So after all this exhausting traipsing around the Shrine of Consumerism I head back to the car. And Beatrice is tired and hungry and doesn't want to go in any more elevators, and she is crying and whinging a bit, but I want to wait until I get back to the car to feed her. So I go to where I was sure I had left the car, and I see a tow-truck towing away a car right next to where I thought I had parked. And my car is nowhere to be seen. I look away and look back, still no car. I look on the other side of the escalators, then look back. Still no car. I see a sign saying that any car exceeding the 4 hour parking limit will be towed. I have been parked for 3.75 hours. I start to hyperventilate and write down the phone number for the towing company. I phone them and freak out at the person who answers the phone (I have become that horrible person!). They don't have my car. I flag down a security guy. He explains that Level one and Level two of the parking lot are identical, and maybe I have parked on Level two? DUH. I have never felt so stupid in my life, and have never been so relieved to see my car. And once I found the car, I realised that I had noticed several incongruencies that should have clued me in to the fact that I was looking for my car on the wrong level, such as automatic wheelchair-friendly doors that opened one door on the top level and two doors on the lower level. And a fan room door that was right in front of where my car was parked on the lower level, and missing in the same spot on the upper level. But really, the similarities were EERIE and it seriously felt like a nightmare. Rushing adrenaline and everything. Oh yeah, and I never did get a carseat.

3. Yee-Haw, Let's Jackhammer Next Door All the Live-Long Day, Three Days in a Row. Fairly self-explanatory.

4. Tooth Number Two Makes an Appearance. Maybe all the jackhammering rattled it out.

5. I Have No Career, I Have No Income, Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me, I'm Going to go out and Eat Worms. Pity party, anyone? We will serve tea and whinge about how we never do anything interesting anymore. I do tend to suffer from selective memory during periods of moopiness and conveniently forgot about the wonderful time I had at the Swap-o-Rama-Rama last weekend. They had piles of clothes! They had DJs playing fun music! There was a fashion show! And sewing stations! And free silkscreening! It was bustling, and fun! Of course, I was alone and didn't meet anyone, and everyone else found better stuff, and I brought home a shirt that smelled like someone else's armpit once I washed it and wore it for the first time. Boo-hoo, wah-wah, etc etc.

6. I am Wearing a Bedraggled Mop on my Head. Thankfully, I am doing something proactive about this one and it is being cleaned up tomorrow at 10am. Thank-you Aisling. :)

I think that is all. If you have read this far, you are a saint. Feel free to whinge self-centeredly in the comments about your own problems.

I finally kicked myself in the butt and got some more photos sorted and uploaded. Two months worth, in fact! Here they are:

Every now and then I wake up and find that Beatrice has learned a whole new repertoire of skills overnight. On Monday her Language Production Unit suddenly activated, and she began making sounds that really sounded like language - ba ba ba, ma ma ma. The same day she discovered that she could move around on the floor - backwards, but still. She is Mobile! Let the babyproofing begin in earnest.

As for me, I got a haircut and feel like a new woman. Must not forget the easy solutions.

I also found a link to this site a few days ago, and have been thinking about it since. It ties in with my recent obsession with the end of the world as we know it, which I am more and more convinced that we will see in our lifetimes. But this is more than just the end of driving out to Horseshoe Bay in the evening simply because we feel like it, but a monumental (elemental? I am searching for the right word but nothing seems to really convey the hugeness of this) trauma to the earth. Is it something that we as a civilization can prepare for in any meaningful way? Or is it like holding an umbrella over your head to protect you from the tsunami? And am I causing myself psychological harm by even worrying about this stuff? Is it all a bunch of crazy hooey? I suspect that the most useful way to prepare for even the possibility of a major change, whether a post-oil world or a post-polar-shift world, is just to love your loved ones, live right as best you can and cultivate your spirituality. Because if you live through the disaster, and even if you don't, you will probably need it.