{the cabin}

sometimes you need to get away from skyscrapers and bad drivers and under-construction roads and cell phone ring tones. there is a place about an hour out of the city where we go sometimes. it's a cabin on the lake with a boat and a bunch of good memories.

on sunday, we headed out there with some family for one last cabin trip together before barclay's sister and her sweet little family move out east.

{this is an appropriate place for a very sad face.}

i took more pictures than usual and held each hug a little bit longer than usual, too.


i like that we were given brains with a little space for memories.

{mammatus ftw!}

last night there was a storm.

there were tornado warnings and storm chasers and winds and dramatic lightning and thunder and rain and all that. my friends all huddled in their living rooms, nervously watching the skies and updating their facebook statuses. we did that for a while too, but there was a 3d movie at the imax that we hadn't seen yet {one of those nature ones with polar bears and walruses} so we went to the movies.

anyway. the movie was great; the ride home was a bit sketchy but we made it, and then we made popcorn and iced coffees and listened to the crashings for a bit from the safety of our living room, yada yada yada, storm storm storm, but THEN.

the storm passed, the sun peeked out a bit, and the sky was filled with mammatus clouds!

i'd never seen anything like it before. it was as though the sky was boiling. the city came out of hiding and everyone was on their front lawns taking cell phone pictures. it's kind of what i imagine the end of the world will be like--everyone hashtagging and social networking while the sky is being torn in two.

#dyingbreath
#fallingintothecenteroftheearth
#ididntknowtherewasavolcanothere

but the point is not that. the point, friends, is most definitely this:

{from the #yqr instagram page}

{spectacles}

all of my life i have always and only wanted big glasses. not sunglasses: eyeglasses glasses. spectacles, goggles, lunettes. i used to lie to my eye doctor, and he used to see right through me. somehow he knew. because of that, i always thought that the eye doctor must be somewhat supernatural. and also, i hated him.

so it was that i was made to attend school with two eyes instead of four. the common refrain was, "boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses," but i didn't care. i wanted to be a librarian. i wanted to read and write a million books and attend art galleries on the weekends, and go to the park to study strangers over the top of a good solid glasses rim, constantly adjusting and fidgeting and pulling my clunky eyewear off to chew on the arm while deep in thought. how could i do any of that with 20/20 vision? anyway. my vision started to go blurry about a year ago, and the 7 year-old inside of me was ecstatic, you guys. i finally got around to booking an appointment with an optometrist, and, armed with a prescription, ordered my first pair of legit specs off of clearlycontacts.ca {it just so happened that there was a sale, and i got mine for free}. i'm pretty happy. i may never be a librarian, but i kind of look like one.

{thanks lots}

thanks for all the birthday greetings and wishes and nice things said--and bless your hearts, those of you who offered to throw me a dinosaur birthday party and make me pterodactyl wings!

the day was beautiful; i woke up with all of my presents on my face, ate blueberry-raspberry pancakes in bed, went to brunch with karz and her baby, went to lunch at five guys burgers & fries with my parents and big brother {who all drove five hours just to see me for a few hours and then drove another five hours right back home} {{we spent a bit of the afternoon mowing the lawn and pulling weeds, and it was the best birthday afternoon ever, actually}}, had a dairy queen ice cream pizza dropped off at my door by my mum-in-law, was surprised with more five guys burgers & fries for supper {so much eating!!!}, spent the evening with more crazy yet wonderful people, and finished the night at starbucks, just me and barclay, where i got a free birthday drink. fell asleep watching season 3 of boy meets world. felt crazy loved.

my friends & family are just unreal. but like, i mean, they're real though. like, i'm not making them up.

{25}

i turned 25 this morning.

 it's strange to think i've only existed for 25 years. i feel as though i've been around since the dawn of time. all my friends are walking around saying, "ugh, i can't believe i'm 25 already!" and i join in because i know that's what you're supposed to say when you're 25, but 25 years isn't very many.

30 years isn't very many. 60 years isn't very many. even if you lived to 150, that wouldn't impress me very much.

 25 years is only just enough years to even sort of understand what's going on. you learn a few things, you relearn them, you realize that you learned them wrong, so you learn them again. you make some friends and lose a few people and gain stuff and knowledge and then you're living in a little house in a little city drinking your coffee {almost} black and thinking, i've only existed for 25 years. there is a time before i was born where the world was here and i just wasn't in it. at all. 


and then, inevitably, you get thinking about dinosaurs and cake.

if i was a dinosaur, i would want to be a pterodactyl. obviously.

anyway, here's some birthday cake for us to share:
{click through if you're in email or reader mode}

{what if i'm not here?}

one time when i was young i watched a movie about a woman who had alzheimer's and who thought she was young and newly married even though she was in her 90's and her husband had died years earlier. and then i spent an unreasonable amount of time wondering if i was actually an old woman just imagining that i was young again.


the thought crossed my mind again yesterday and i realized that there'd be no way to prove to myself that i'm actually here right now and not there thinking i'm here. that's a very strange thing to think about. excuse me. i'm going to go look in the mirror for a while.

{forever and a bit}

you can download this track for free here for a very limited time. and then you can put it on its very own playlist on repeat and just listen to it forever.

{the best part of waking up}

i looked in my coffee cup and i looked at him and he was in my coffee and he looked back at me and he stroked his moustache and he said, "hello my darling. aren't you glad it's the weekend?"

and i said that i was and then i drank him.

{things that i don't like that others seem to love}

sarah and caitlin got me thinking on this: there are a great many things that other people love that i just can't. CAN'T. tried. can't. these are a few:

1. indoor pets.

i think this is because i grew up with well over 50 outdoor cats which all died of not-that-mysterious causes {my dad shot them or my mom ran over them with the mini-van}, and two outdoor dogs--one of which my dad ran over with the combine {that was an accident; i'm not mad at him}, and one of which was constantly getting fleas or skunk-sprayed or swimming in the lagoon. so i guess i think of pets as dirty, and possibly rabid, and really, really short-lived because your parents are always killing them. and when i see pets inside of houses i think, in short, "YUCK."

2. paying for cable.

we already pay for the internet, and you can watch anything that you'd want to watch on tv, on the internet. including shows that aren't on tv anymore. whenever you want. for no extra charge. you all can pay for your 1000 channels, i'm going to watch sister sister on youtube. for "free".

3. violence in entertainment.

i used to love movies and tv shows that made me jump and scream and shiver and shudder. but i think that was back before i realized that most of those movies and tv shows are a little too close to reality--i mean, some of them are based on reality--who knows, maybe some reality is based on these tv shows and movies? "garbage in, garbage out." you know what i mean?

anyway, i guess it just freaks me out that someone's worst nightmare, something intensely personal and traumatizing, can be someone else's entertainment. it freaks me out that most people can watch certain movies and eat popcorn and laugh during certain scenes and walk out of the theatre pumped about how realistic the blood and guts were and how high the body count was. i saw a woman get hit by a truck a couple years ago, and i remember thinking afterwards how it felt like i was on the set of a movie. which, i think, is a strange thing to think when you're witnessing something so awful.

4. crowds for no good reason.

going to any event on opening night. big parties where i don't know anyone. cities where you're constantly elbow-to-elbow and everyone's glaring at everyone.  music festivals or shows are my exception to this rule. but that's maybe because whenever you're listening to live music, it's kind of like there's only two people, you know: Audience and Band. you think that's cheesy. well shut up.  

5. constant facebook statuses about "how blessed i am".

you know? like when people are all, "i am so thankful for _____! i can't believe how lucky i am to have ______!" every day. again, just my personal opinion. facebook statuses reach a lot of people, people from a lot of different places and stages in life. i have a friend who constantly posts statuses about how "oh! my husband just gave me flowers for no reason AGAIN you guys! what a romantic and thoughtful man i married!" i'm so happy for her, but i've unsubscribed from her newsfeed--and i can think of a bunch of our mutual single friends who probably have as well. don't get me wrong, i'm so happy in my marriage. we're just not the "flowers for no reason" kind of couple, and i doubt it's healthy to compare your relationship to anyone else's--but can you help it when you go to check your messages and there's a page-full of other people's bright shiny love for you to read about? brand new houses and beautiful babies and perfect-looking vacations--i don't care about the odd status, the occasional shout-out, and i love pictures and knowing how my friends are doing--but when i start turning green, the "unsubscribe to this user's status updates" is a wonderful tool, and i use it, even just for a week.


i could go on, but 5 seems like enough. i need to do the dishes. {this is something that i'd put on my list of "things that i like that others don't seem to love".}

{hiding in the bathroom}

i was at a thing last night and about halfway through, stuff stopped making sense. i was holding a cup and a sugar cookie and trying to focus on a conversation with a friend about the summer and about our lives, something about our lives, when the voices of all of the people seemed to clump together into a single physical mass that hummed and hung over the room and drowned out its own words. i imagined i was inside of a beehive.

someone waved from across the room and i felt a hand on my shoulder from another direction. i listened to a funny story and tried to laugh in the right places and i ate the sugar cookie in three bites and took another one. so many smiles and nods and words. how do people do this again? even in this familiar place with these familiar people, i'd seemed to have forgotten.

finally i slipped away into the bathroom, where i sat on the sink and picked at split ends for a few minutes. i thought about another time i'd hid in the bathroom--in grade 11 or 12 when i'd heard that a girl much bigger than me was looking for me because she was going to beat me up. i'd been tipped off by one of my friends who was in the know and i was scared out of my mind that she was going to break my nose and knock my teeth out.

i thought about how funny it was that now i was hiding in the bathroom from a crowd of people who only wanted to talk to me and smile at me and tell me stories about their babies and their work and their weekends, not beat me up. i reminded myself that unless i tripped and fell face first into a wall, i'd leave with all my teeth intact and my nose unbroken. and that helped a little.

however.

today, i am so happy to sit by myself a little while in my house with a cup of coffee and a few songs on repeat and putter away on some little watercolour pictures and household chores.

{help my ears}

i'm getting ready for a garage sale. out with the old! out! out!

our house, as i've mentioned before, is 480 square feet. there's a place where i can stand and see all of the rooms {excluding the basement} at once. this is the kind of space that i need--it requires me to constantly purge.

out with the old! out! out!

so. the process of getting ready for a garage sale is maybe a little daunting. but the very very first thing on my list of important preparatory things to do today is make mix tapes so that we don't get bored sitting on the lawn in the quiet, and so that we feel summery, and so that the rain doesn't make us lose heart by noon.

here's the beginnings. if you have anything to add, by all means: the comments section is your oyster.

{manners}

the problem with people is that they are dirty.
the problem with people besides that they are dirty is that they can't keep their dirt to themselves.
so, you know, i have a problem with people.

we went for a walk on saturday, barclay and i, and we were crossing the street at the same time as somebody else was crossing it.

now, you know, there are manners.
the problem with people is that they don't know about all of the manners that they should know about.

manners like, "don't spit on other people, especially people that you don't know."
those kinds of manners.

as we crossed the street, and this other person crossed the street, he raised up his eyes and gave us a look. i didn't know what the look meant at that exact time, but now i know that the look meant, "i'm going to spit on you, because i don't know about all of the manners."

the look preceded the throat clearing, which preceded the spray.

and the guy kept on walking, because he didn't have enough manners to say, "i'm sorry that i spit on you. have a nice day."

i was thankful that the spit only landed on my kneecaps, because i don't use my kneecaps for anything other than capping my knees. i wiggled my legs a little and complained about how i don't like having strangers spit on my legs.

but then i looked up and saw barclay wiping his face off and realized that i'd been very, very lucky.

{writing for the fun of it}

i've been bad at blogging the last couple of weeks. not for any reason. 

i don't feel indebted to anyone to write every day, and my existence online is more of a whisper than a scream, so i don't feel like my voice has been missed, but i have missed this space. i'm one of those people who can't travel alone, or go to shows or restaurants alone, largely because if i don't have someone to share an experience with, it's as if it didn't even happen. i need to put details down and post even the crappiest of cell phone pictures because if i don't, my brain stamps the memories INVALID. bold red ink. 

anyways, this morning i woke up and felt as though i haven't existed for a couple of weeks. is that weird? i miss existing. i miss pointless stories and teeny tiny details and writing and deleting and posting whatever i feel like whenever i feel like and not worrying about what people will think of it. i remember when i first started blogging in 2008, and every post was really lame and mostly about how much i hated my job. but it was for me and now it's like a scrapbook and hopefully a beacon of light and hope to anyone who's ever had to work at staples. you know? 

so i started reading from the beginning of my old blog this morning, just to get back in the mindset of "writing for the fun of it", and found some memories that i'm glad i wrote down, even if i'm mortified about the way i acted or would write them differently now--living in a new city with old friends and strange encounters with scary strangers and being the worst employee ever. i mean, yeah, i'd totally rather remember myself as awesome and lovely and funny, but the real me is the me that was, and i'm ok with her. 

though. i'm glad she's not quite as ditzy and snarky as she used to be. 

some old posts, for nostalgia's sake? 

{schmaltz}

last night i was hanging out in the living room thinking about something, when my thoughts derailed and crashed right into the pile of yearbooks on the bookshelf beside the piano. i picked up the one from my second year of college and skimmed through the scribbles on the inside covers. and then i was laughing so hard i was crying a little.


it would seem that all of my friendships centred around mean nicknames and inside jokes involving injuries i sustained in embarrassing ways. {example: GB = garbage butt, because of the time tim stuffed me in a garbage can and then knocked it over. you should have seen my back after that. rusty legs, sloth fingers, apple cheeks, cold fish hands, the list goes on--we're talking physical scarring, you guys.} also, can you tell none of us were very big on given names? {dirt, foster child, heinrique, etc.}

anyway, it got me feeling pretty nostalgic. i long for that time when my friends beat me up and laughed at me.

here's all of us. can you find me?

{first row standing, blue jeans, blonde side ponytail. no rusty legs or garbage butt yet, as this was taken on the first day.}