Friday, May 30, 2014

{snack quest 2014}


I'm as meticulous and persnickety in my search for the perfect snack as I am in my search for the perfect dayplanner, or the perfect pair of jeans, or the perfect couch. There are a lot of couches that are the right color but not the right, you know, cush, a lot of dayplanners that are the right size but not the right layout, a lot of jeans that are the right length but not the right wash. 

Don't even get me started on snacks.

I've started.

My dream snack:
- Is crunchy (but a little bit smooth).
- Is sweet (but not too sweet).
- Is nutritious (so I can eat a lot with no guilt). (But a little bit sugary and bad (because for some reason that makes it taste better). Just a little bit.)
- Involves chocolate.
- Is something I can pick at mindlessly while I'm reading or writing or drawing.
- Is cheap.
- Is ready right now.

So anyway, I've found it. Barclay thought it up out of his beautiful brown brain. It's sort of a modified version of puppy chow but it's healthier and faster and requires half the ingredients so I'm attributing it to him and hereby naming it: Frosty Poops. I literally can't think of a better name. I'm sleep deprived and when I look at these things all I can think to call them is Frosty Poops. They just look like frosty poops.

That's too bad.

Anyway.


You melt a [big, huge] tablespoon of peanut butter in a bowl in the microwave. You stir in a [wee] teaspoon of cocoa. You dump in a handful of almonds and stir. You dump icing sugar in and stir so it coats the chocolatey almonds. See? Frosty poops.


But I could eat them all day long. They fulfill every snacking requirement I've ever had. Besides the aesthetic ones, obviously. Oh well.

Frosty poops all day every day.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

{four}

I'm writing this from a rocking chair at 2:30 AM. There's a crazy thunderstorm happening outside my window and I'm so tired my eyes are crossing. Sullivan, as always, is as hungry as a cow. 

Last week, he hit the four month mark like a bulldozer. He's solidly out of the newborn stage and growing into the clothes in the bag in the back of the closet that I almost honestly believed wouldn't fit him for years yet. He laughs when I kiss his nose and wants eye contact 24/7. He still cries a lot, but I guess some babies just cry a lot. He has a toy microphone that my friend Marcie made for him that he likes to hit himself in the face with. Luckily, it's crocheted and doesn't seem to hurt him. Then again, maybe that's why he cries a lot.

Last week also marked one year since we found out he was on his way.

I remember waking up about this time on May 24, 2013 and just knowing. Just like that. I had come to a place where I knew I'd never be able to fully give up on it, but the possibility of it ever actually happening seemed far off and unlikely, at best. I no longer really got my hopes up about it, and hadn't taken a pregnancy test in at least a year. 

But that night, my eyes popped open and I just...knew. I can't even pinpoint why. I laid there in the dark for three hours staring at the shadowy shapes around the room and thinking about all the change that was about to happen. I didn't wake Barclay up. 

I was like a sky diver sitting for a second before jumping. The view from the plane was amazing. I wanted to really take in how motherhood looked from this perspective one last time before it came rushing towards me. 

And here we are. And it's every bit as beautiful and terrifying as it looked from up there.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

{things that I have learned lately and a picture of some dinosaurs I found by my house}

1. You don't have to clean the bathroom all at once. You can clean the sink now, if you have a second, and you can clean the tub (or even just half of the tub) after supper if you want. You can wash the floor tomorrow and scrub the toilet right before you hop in the shower on Saturday. You can just cycle through like that, five minutes here and five minutes there, doing a really good job of a very little bit at a time, once or twice a day. If you do it like this it'll feel like you never clean the bathroom, but somehow the bathroom will always be clean.

2. Write stuff down. Stuff you need to do. Stuff you don't want to forget. Stuff you think is funny. Write in journals and on your blog and on sticky notes and on the back of your hand. You're always saying, "I'll have to remember that," but you're never remembering any of the things you're saying that about.

3. You don't have to be so offended all the time. Everybody says stupid things because nobody has experienced everything and even if they have experienced something, they haven't necessarily experienced it from your physical/emotional vantage point. It's good to calm down and stop looking for things to get worked up over.

4. Instagram can actually be a pretty helpful self-monitoring tool. Go to your profile page and scroll down. If the pictures are all of the same thing, person, or place, maybe you could try something/hang out with someone/go somewhere new. If you can't go somewhere different, maybe try noticing something different about where you are. Try to take a completely different picture every day for a week. It's not like it's wrong for you to post a million pictures of your living room; I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that this is a pretty simple way to see if you're in a rut or not, and a fun way to try to climb out of it if you are.

5. Drink more water. Eat more chocolate. I mean cake. I mean spinach. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

{bird park}


I live in my favourite place: on the edge of the middle of the city, by the lake, in a cute little neighbourhood full of young families in wartime houses. If I feel like I need tall buildings and car horns and streetlights, I walk out my front door and turn right. If I feel like I need spindly trees and narrow dirt paths and water to skip rocks into, I walk out my front door and turn left. I've never been strictly one person or the other person. I like dirt, but I need pavement too.


Yesterday, because we hadn't in a while and because the weather was so peppy and because it's just a good thing to do, Becky came over and went left with me.

We found this little bird park across the lake from my house. It looked all peaceful and cute, so we went in to look around. We took some pictures and walked across a little bridge and I thought, "Wow. What a great park. You could propose to someone in this park. You could take your kids for a picnic in this park. You could lay down on a pile of bird feathers and just drift off to sleep in this park."

No.

The little bird park turned out to be the scariest place in the world because the geese who live there aren't messing around. They're trying to start a family and they think you're going to mess it up for them and they want to peck your eyes out preemptively so you can't find their stupid eggs.

Fear, you guys, fear is a 20 pound Canada Goose coming at you hissing like a cobra with its wings all open and its beak flashing sharp and dagger-like in the sunlight.


We tried to be brave, but mostly we just hid behind trees and yelled things like, "No. Goose. GOOSE. GOOSE! NO!" and "I PROMISE I DON'T WANT YOUR STUPID EGGS." Then we took a couple of pictures because even though it was pretty life-threatening it was still gorgeous (which, by the way, I think, was really very indomitable of us) and got the heck out of there.

So I guess the moral of the story is: don't propose to your girlfriend in a bird park. Don't take your kids to a bird park. And for Pete's sake, don't sleep there either. Unless you want to die.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

{about blogging}


I updated my About Me page yesterday--it still said that I was 25 and living in the Village and contained strange pictures of me eating myself. So I changed all the writing, and should probably take new pictures too. You know, so that people don't think I'm some kind of freak. Ah, blog maintenance...

Anyway, I was trying to write some sort of "introduction" to my space here, and got thinking about what this is and why I do it and what I like about it and all that. I've been at it for over six years now, and for the majority of that time (up until these past few months when life has been just a tad more hectic than usual), I've had something to say or post every single weekday. That's a ridiculous amount of words to be putting out there. A lot of work for no pay-off.

When I started out it was just for me, a place to get words out into cyberspace but a closely and fiercely guarded secret in real life--I remember the day Barclay was over at my house and opened my laptop to look something up on YouTube and found my blog opened to the drafts page. I was mortified. I had this idea in my head about people who blogged, and was downright ashamed that I was one of them. We'd only known each other a couple of months and I legitimately thought he was going to dump me if he found out. (He didn't.) I swore him to secrecy. With threats. But somehow my parents found out about it a little while later (I don't know how) and I received a phone call from Dad expressing concern over my going on adventures in back alleys with strange people in strange cities. (And so it was that I learned that you can't do anything online without expecting your offline people to find it. A crash course in smart Internetting!)

I wrote about my job, my friends, a move to a new city, a memory from a few years back, my boyfriend, the music I was listening to. Over time, complete strangers started stumbling across my blog, and I started reading theirs too and even making friends. (This was harder to admit to people than the fact that I had a blog in the first place.)

But that, admittedly, quickly became my favourite part of blogging. I saw these people taking amazing pictures of seemingly mundane things and suddenly I began seeing my own real-life surroundings in a different light. I read blogs by brilliant writers and crafty women and amazing cooks and they inspired me to try new stuff and work harder at the things I already loved. I read blogs by people who loved music as much as I did and introduced me to new favourite bands and musicians. The desire to have something to write about had me looking for abnormal things in normal days. I met people from Scotland, England, all over the States, all across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, France...

And the thing about blogging that was different from, say, a magazine or television, was that it was so personal, and so interactive. I wasn't just passively taking in information; I was processing it and commenting on it and adding to it. Like the blog world was this big fat book of stories and pictures and ideas that a bunch of people from all over the real world were working on simultaneously. And somewhere in there was my story. I loved being part of something like that.

It's changing, though. I feel a little bit like I'm a wildlife preservation activist right now, about to talk about endangerment and extinction and how you need to do your part to save the blog as it is before it slowly goes the way of the buffalo. (I'm not going to say anything like that.) Things change and that's okay. People are turning their blogs into full-time jobs, businesses, making money off of sponsors and advertising, keeping a close eye on page views and comments and SEO and all that. That feels too much like work and pressure to me, so I probably won't jump on the bandwagon. But I don't begrudge those that do.

Maybe I'm less like a preservation activist and more like a bearded mountain man (picture it) in a little cabin in the woods. Feel free to live in the city with your billboards and flashy lights and TV commercials; I'll just be out here in my own cozy space, rambling to whoever wants to hear it about what I did today. I have some neighbours out here to visit with and tell stories to. We're content. 

Speaking of rambling, I don't even know where I'm going with this.

Blogging...What this is, why I do it, what I like about it...

Oh yeah. So this is where I ended up:

Hi, My name is Suzy. I've been blogging for a while now, and it's probably one of my favourite hobbies--I like writing and taking pictures and doodling, but I'll never be pro at any of it. This is a place to quietly do those things in a fun little community without taking myself too seriously.

So thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. Thanks to those of you who have your own blogs and inspire me to be more creative and open and intentional. I love it. 

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

{snarky puppy}


We've been watching a lot of live music DVDs lately around here.

I've never been the type to get 'homesick', but watching these shows on TV instead of being there makes me feel my very own version of what I think homesick is. Because there is a vast (ocean-space-football field) difference between watching music on a screen and sitting in a great big cloud of it with the bass running up your spine.

We went over to some friends' house a couple nights ago to watch this one that was filmed in the Netherlands by a band called Snarky Puppy, a collective of a dozen or so completely brilliant musicians who play jazz/funk/world music. The show was recorded in front of a studio audience with music that had been composed the weekend before the recording. It was pretty magical, and I was crawly-skinned-itchy-brained-jealous of each and every person in the audience, every musician and camera person and sound technician.

I slumped into the passenger seat on the way home and wished on every single star I saw that Barclay would just drive right past our house and all the way to a little jazz club in New York so I could have some cheesecake and live music.

But guess what? Apparently Jimminy Cricket was full of beans because when you wish upon a star your dreams don't come true, you just go straight home and right to bed. Thanks, Walt.

Summer, however, is almost here and with it will come outdoor music festivals and concerts on the plaza and maybe even some cheesecake. Until then, you should click the links below and listen to these songs which, for whatever reason, are not embeddable on my blog. Catch this fever.

Shofukan 
I'll Do Me
Lingus