Fitted Desert Fashion

One time when I was living in Edmonton, I locked myself out of my apartment on accident and I didn’t know when my husband would arrive with the keys.  I then decided to try a little social experiment which is completely reprehensible.  Let me state clearly, I should not have done this, but I was curious and so I did it.  I got down on the grass, put my hands behind my head and pretended to soak up the afternoon sun.  I also put a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune on the grass next to me so that anyone who was passing would be able to read the title.  The experiment was asking how long it would take for a reasonably nerdy young man to hit on me using the book as a jumping off point.

It took about ten minutes.  

He talked to me, providing me with ample entertainment to pass the time, until my husband arrived with the keys.

Now, since I moved here on the island, I’ve noticed that a lot of the moms who come to the school to pick up their children wear coats and vests that are black stitched with long bubbles all down them.  They don’t wear different colors of this kind of bubble coat.  Just black.  They look very much like the still suits from the 1984 film version of Dune where the long bubbles very much resemble either the muscle groupings in the human body or a rib cage.  If you’ve ever seen the movie they give an explanation about how the suits are meant to filter sweat, urine, and poop, so that you can drink clean water while traveling in the deep desert.  

Thus, I find it incredibly interesting that anyone wears one.  I wonder if it’s a statement, or if it works well in the rain-soaked here.  They don’t look particularly effective in keeping the rain out, due to their material.  Nor do they look warm as the bubbles are way smaller and skinnier than anything down-filled in Alberta.  And yes, if someone suggested that they are black so that you can’t see your bodily fluids being processed, I’d say that that sounds like the best reason for wearing one.

Every time I see one of these island women I want to ask her about it, but I can’t… there are too many of them.  Thus, occasionally, I inquire as to where her coat came from and if there’s a story behind it.  The couple I have asked responded the exact same way.

“My mom gave it to me.”

And then my brain explodes.

Did she buy it for you on purpose?  Did she buy it for herself, come home, try it on, realize she couldn’t return it, and then bum it off on the first person she saw?  You?  Did she buy some for other people she knows?  Are your sisters wearing them?   Is that why so many women have them?

Or is there some beauty to these coats I can’t see?

Then I remember that moment on the grass and how the mere sight of a scifi novel made a man who didn’t even know me stop and talk for me for an indeterminate length of time.  Mother knows best.  She knows that what is beautiful to me, is perhaps not beautiful to a man, and every woman wants to take pride in her daughter’s beauty.  Doesn’t she?  I can’t even count how many mothers I have overheard say noisily about their daughter’s clothes (or lack thereof), “If ya got it, flaunt it.”  Perhaps what they mean to say is, “If ya got it, flaunt it… desert fashion.”


On another note:  I was reading this week about how The Mortal Engines didn’t do so well at the box office.  I can be excused from going to see it as I don’t live close to a movie theater, so I don’t see first run movies.  I read about 75% of that book years ago and I had to stop.  There is entirely too much information about processing poop in that story.  Seriously, entirely too much.  The author drew to a close the only plot arch I was interested in and then started to babble on for pages about how urine and poop are processed in the moving cities.  And I wondered if that was a particularly interesting subject to someone else as I let the book fall from my fingers.

Ghost of Dollar Stores Past

“It happened on a busy afternoon around Christmas, just like this one,” I told my friend and the cashier at the Dollarama.  One was running me through the checkout and the other one was waiting for me to be run through the checkout.  It wasn’t the ideal place for a ghost story, but I couldn’t have asked for a better setting for that particular ghost story.  I continued, “At a Dollarama just like this one.”  I paused for dramatic effect, even though I was still loading things onto the counter.  

I proceeded in slow dramatic tones, “I had a cart and I was buying some cute decorative boxes that came folded up.  There weren’t very many to choose from, but I got the last of the cute ones.  I thought I was lucky.  I continued shopping, but I turned my back on my cart for one minute, maybe not even a whole minute, and that’s when it happened.  I didn’t notice that anything was different until I went through the checkout.  All the cute boxes I had put in my cart were gone and they had been replaced with the ugly boxes I had refused to buy.  Someone had seen I had the nice ones and replaced them with the ugly ones in my cart when I wasn’t looking.”

“Did you see who did it?”

“No!  I was at Londonderry Mall in Edmonton!  Have you ever been in there around Christmas time?  Sheesh!  No.  That place was a complete zoo.  That store had so much traffic they had to move it to the other side of the mall and double its floor space.  No, I did not see who did it.  All I knew was that I had to use ugly obviously dollar store boxes for my Christmas favors that year.  It blew!”

In retrospect, I think I was making socks look like cupcakes and surrounding them with hand-made foil-wrapped chocolates.

Anyway, Christmas ghost story for ya.  You’re welcome.  And to whoever took my boxes… what nerve! 

Point of View

A nice game to play is to get a creative writing text book and go through the exercises in it. Now I know that sounds boring, but it's not because it's challenging. Here's one:

Man's perspective:

I sit down at my table. It's only my table for a few minutes... maybe twenty, but it's mine in an important sense, in that it is a place for me to sit—a sought after place in the rush for lunchtime noodles.

I'm alone at my table and I notice a few weary looks from those still in line for a place of their own. However, I notice that I am not the only long character on the page of square linen table cloths. There is a woman who is also lunching solo. She has just ordered from the menu and she taps both her fingers on the table and her feet beneath her. Whatever she has ordered, she has eaten it before if her glances at the kitchen and utter destruction of her lip gloss counted as effective non-verbal communication.

Her plate arrives before I even place my order. She has creamy pasta with chicken and black mussel shells protruding in contrast to the alfredo.

My waiter is by my side and I point to the lady I've been observing. “I'll have what she's having,” I say briskly.

Soon, my plate also arrives and I wonder how I'll manage to devour even a third of it before my hour for lunch expires.

A clatter of dishes. I didn't see what happened, but when I looked again at the girl I'd copied, the entirety of her food was seeping messily into the carpet. The sheer horror inscribed on her features was very much like that of a child whose ice cream has taken a tragic dive. For a moment, I wonder if she will cry like that child, but her eyes meet mine and in a moment, that woman knew everything about me that she needed to know.

She sat across from me and with her dinner fork still in her hand she started helping herself to the noodles on the untouched part of my plate.

Barman's Perspective:

One regular and one newcomer sat alone at separate tables. Both ordered the same thing. The girl was so hungry, she lifted her plate to get it closer to her mouth as she struggled to shovel the food into her digestive tract as soon as possible. The weight of the plate was too much for her and her wrist gave way. It was a waste of perfectly good alfredo and a waste of a good chef's time and skills, but most of all it was a waste of that hard-working woman's money. But she was the type to find hope when it had all but run dry. She sat down and helped the shrimp with his meal. It was just as well. He wasn't have finished it anyway.

The Light Fixture's Perspective:

“Can you usually eat a full plate of this?” she asked before bringing another length of pasta to her lips.

“I've never had this before,” he admitted as he scooped a mussel free from its shell.

“I make this at home sometimes, but it never tastes as good. Something about it always falls flat.”

“It's the fat. You either aren't adding enough olive oil, or you aren't adding enough butter.”

She chewed slowly and thought about this recommendation. “I gained seven points since I started coming here three months ago. This is my favourite dish. How much butter do you think is in here?”

He glanced at her figure instead of the noodles. “You look fine to me,” he said. Any man might have said those words, but the way he said them made them a compliment.

It was clear she recognized it as one as she reached across to her abandoned table to retrieve her water glass. “I suddenly feel full. Maybe half a plate of pasta is more than enough. Perhaps we could share one again some time?”

“I dunno. You say you're full, but I feel like I could eat a second plate. Would you care to join me?”

The Predator of Sadness

There's this guy I know who can smell sadness. If you're unhappy, he can smell it. He comes into the room I'm in and he's got his nose in the air. He looks at me, sees me on the bed and moves toward me in his slow beat way. He rolls his shoulders when he walks and his eyes meet mine in this way that seeks the visual confirmation that his suspicion is correct. Personally, he's not into crying or sobbing and lives his entire life only uttering noise if there is no other option for communication. But he seems deeply attracted to sadness. If I'm unhappy, it's time for him to reap the rewards, cause if I'm sitting around sad, he's going to get pet.

In case it hasn't been terribly obvious. He's a cat.

He comes over like he's giving a teddy bear to a weeping child, except I'm a grown woman and he is the teddy bear, except better, because he's warm, his fur is a thousand times nicer than a toy, and he purrs. And while he's there with his adorable, mostly expressionless face, I'll forget the thing that is hurting me.

The lack of facial expression is key. He doesn't look like he needs attention. He's sitting there, but he's not needy. He doesn't look pathetic, but proud, because he's there to comfort you, not the other way around. He also doesn't look like he feels sorry for you. He doesn't. Holding him just sets your nervous system to rights. He doesn't know what's bothering you, but he is your little furry therapist who has been comforting you whether defeated or ill. He's been vanquishing your pests and licking his chops. Mine likes to maim insects that make it inside my house. A truly noble animal.

When I adopted him from the SPCA, I had to wait in line for hours. I was at the front of the line and this blonde woman showed up with her two blonde daughters. They wanted the kitten I was there to get. You see, three new medium-hair kittens had just come up for adoption that morning and I was going to get the pretty girl kitten who had these incredible white marks around her eyes, and one of her brothers. These females had jumped the line, and there were around 15 other people who had been queueing up behind me. But, it wasn't my first time adopting a cat. I walked in and scooped up the adoption papers for all three cats before she even knew what was happening.

So, I sat down and looked at their pictures and thought about what I was going to do. There was a black one with a white diamond on his collarbone (cats don't have collarbones, but you get the idea), a stripy girl and a stripy boy. The boy wasn't as cute, but I was going to get two of them and as I sat there, I decided that it would be better for the kittens if I took both the boys. So, I got up and gave the blonde woman and her two daughters the adoption papers for the adorable girl kitten with the beautiful eye markings.

When I was paying the bill for the two kittens, the woman at the till said to me, “That's a really special cat you have there.”

I was like, “The striped one?” Since I had come so close to leaving him for someone else.

“No, the black one.”

And I wondered what that meant. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her, “Does that mean he's going to die soon?” But I didn't, because I didn't think the SPCA would have adopted out a cat that was likely to drop dead.

Except that was what happened. That black cat was the cuddliest sweetie pie who ever was. I loved him in a way I had never loved anything, and when I left my house with him in my arms for the last time, I thought I had never felt the pain of loss that sharply ever before.

And I didn't know how me and my remaining stripy feline would get along together. But he is the predator of sadness and came over as if to say, “I'm patient, and I waited for this day, not knowing or caring if it would ever come. Now that it has come, I will be your cat and you will love only me.”

Okay, that seems super creepy when I read it back, but he has claws, fangs, slitted irises and a particular fondness for ripping the wings off things. But for me, he's a warm fluff ball with a heart of purr.

Yay! I'm a Llama Again!

Last spring I was waiting in the dentist office when a woman who was also waiting suddenly said to me, “You're Stephanie Van Orman, aren't you?” I smiled and said I was. She said she recognized me from church and asked me about the thing I was crocheting (I'm almost done the thing now and I'll write another post about it). She then asked me if I liked crocheting and for some reason I answered her question oddly. I said, “I like fibre.” She then told me she had a hobby farm with 17 llamas and alpacas, with no where for the fleeces to go. At that exact moment, her name was called and she disappeared into the back.

I was stunned. Try to envision me: eyes wide, pink cheeked, mouth slightly open—stunned. I had just met someone who didn't know what to do with a fleece. I have NEVER met someone who didn't know what to do with a fleece. Everyone I know wants one, sacrifices ridiculous time/money/effort to acquire wool from natural fibres. The only fleece I have ever seen for sale was up for $150. I had always thought my dream of spinning yarn on a real spinning wheel something I would never experience. Because, if you've ever priced out that hobby, you'll go back to Walmart and buy something from the end of the aisle.

As I sat there in the dentist office, I decided I could not let this chance pass me by. I wanted to make yarn and if she was just going to get rid of them, then she could give them to me. So, I grabbed her and told her of my plan for her property. She said okay.

After the shearing, I went and took pictures of the llamas and alpacas. I ended up taking every fleece they had, because I thought I could at least get these things distributed to the spinning and weaving guild.

But let's talk about what you do with an alpaca fleece.

It's horrible.

Cleaning an alpaca fleece will take days. And I'm not talking about cleaning the whole thing. I'm talking about cleaning one mesh garment bag full of fleece. One. Only one. Just one. And then you'll need to pick through the fibre and remove all the grass, dirt, poop, and any piece of fibre that isn't of a certain length. You need the long ones.

It's like being handed thousands—literally thousands—of detached My Little Pony tails and being told you have to comb the grass out of all of them.

I am not joking.

The only happy part is that alpaca fleece feels nothing like Barbie hair (it looks like it though). It smells nice and feels even better. The whole process is utterly gruelling, but one of the ladies at the guild showed me what it would look like as yarn when she span a bit of it. It looked like the best yarn I've ever seen.

So, I'm doing this.

Thing Can Sing

This thing likes to sing. This thing can't sing like anything. She sings high while the others sing low, but she is not too bad, you know.

That is not a genuine Dr. Seuss quote. Like I said, I like to sing, but my voice is what I would call completely mediocre. Sometimes, I sing really well and people compliment me and I just know I nailed it. Other times, no one says anything because they are well behaved humans who haven't calmly clamped a hand over my mouth to stop the sounds from coming out while whispering in my ear that, 'some things aren't worth dying for.'

I know what you're thinking. No one can have that large of a spectrum between awesome and Seagull from Little Mermaid. But I am telling you, I have no control over whether or not it's going to be a good day, or otherwise. I am also not particularly improved by practise. I can practice a thing, and still botch it on performance day. I also tend to cry... a lot. Now with what I've listed so far, I again know what you're thinking. I should sing in a group. Again, this is a terrible idea. If I am singing next to a person who sings, I'll just hear them singing and I won't have any clue what I'm doing with my voice. I used to try to sing in a choir, and the choir director would stop everyone, point in my direction and say, “Someone over there is off.” She wouldn't take me aside and say I was the mouldy peach in the patch, but I couldn't swear an affidavit that I wasn't the one who was off. I have ears that require silence to hear things. I'm not good at picking out overlapping voices.

Lately, I've been doing a challenge with myself to see if I can sing all the songs in church without a hymnbook. I've found I like it partly because then I don't have to hold a wrist-hurty-heavy hymnbook. So, now I tell whoever is trying to share a hymnbook with me to hold it comfortably and when they do, I can still see the words! What I want to do is yell at them that they were supposed to hold it so I couldn't see it, not hold it comfortably. How did they not understand that? Weird. I made it perfectly clear.

The most success I've ever had with singing is when I'm singing something by myself and if there is an accompanist, she's on a piano far, far, away. I'm singing something I know, I have the music in front of me and I know. I mean, I really know, that even if I blow it BIG TIME, it doesn't matter. Someone has asked me to sing something on the fly. I have had zero practice time, and something about the situation is good. I don't know what. Maybe it's that my nerves haven't tied themselves into knots with the awful knowledge that I was going to sing in front of a couple hundred people in a week or two. Maybe it's that church music has a heart of its own, no matter who is performing it. Maybe it's that my lungs are smaller than the average singer and I can take the kind of pauses I need to get the best out of my voice.

Or maybe, I have it all wrong and dying waterfowl sound better.

Little Prairie Girl

Today I felt nervous. I have a lot of new things I'm doing/trying and today I felt really nervous. I tried to read something and my brain just would not accept reading as a calming activity. I was too fired up... but in a bad way.

So, suddenly I got the idea to go on Pinterest and look at pictures of the prairie. It was really amazing at how well it worked to calm me down. Actually, it was almost embarrassing. Whenever I was anxious as a teen, I'd go for a walk out to nowhere. And it really was nowhere. It used to be my ambition to write stories that took place in my hometown, but it always failed, because nothing ever happened there. Nothing could happen there. And I was not able to write a proper novel until I had spent enough time in Edmonton to set a story there.

My hometown was the place ideas went to die. But there was always a gust of wind and a sunset and a view of the mountain range far away. There was clover growing in big itchy or cooling clumps (depending entirely on the position of the sun), and there was a sky so big, you wouldn't know what was happening on all nine sides of it at once. And yes, the sky had nine sides. Big clouds. Cemeteries. Sometimes it seems impossible that I met and married a man there, because my memories of my hometown are remarkable void of people. Sometimes I became a person who spent too much time alone. Wandering on the edges of fields that didn't belong to me or people I knew. I pet the noses of their cattle since they were the only ones curious about what I was doing there. Home wasn't home. And nine sides of sky were not always welcoming. And there wasn't much to think about. Doing anything would start you doing more than you could stand. Can't sing. Someone could see me and call me weird again, because being or doing anything would be weird. And their view of me might make me more alone.

After all my griping about how I couldn't think an idea for a story to set in my hometown, I finally gave up writing a novel and wrote a short story called 'Blog Entries of the Brokenhearted.' And it really is all that my hometown was... but like I shone a spotlight on it and then cut the cord to set it free.

Here's a link to it. Free reading. Leave a comment if you like.

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2706114/1/Blog-Entries-of-the-Brokenhearted

Excerpt of 'Behind His Mask'

Welcome to the excerpt of Behind His Mask.  This is the part of the blog where I include a segment of my new book for your reading pleasure.  I read this excerpt in my liquid romance voice when I do reading in public.  Please enjoy reading here since it is the next best thing to hearing me read it out loud.

I only had one spare that day and it was during second to last period. It wasn’t until then that I got a chance to crack open Evander’s book. I went to the library, found a cozy spot in the corner on one of the couches, and pulled it out of my bag. The book itself smelled great. It looked great too, just like one of those beautifully bound books on the shelf of a nineteenth century library. I was excited as I flipped open the cover and found the title of the first part. It was called The Lord of the Capricorns.

Insert girlish scream—which was immediately squelched by the grouchy librarian's glare.

I started reading.

Once upon a time, there was a land of greenness unlike any other. It bordered no seashore, no desert, and no mountains. It was a land touched by the grace of the goddess of rain. There, the sun shone golden, covering the land in light and beauty. It was a place of peace where the fields had not absorbed the blood of war and where dead warriors were not buried. Flowers were as valuable as gemstones. Images reflected on a clear lake's surface were more prized than those on foreign mirrors.

The kingdom was known as Lilikeen. In the center of all gracefulness and goodness was their greatest prize, Princess Sarafina. Her beauty caused aches of longing throughout all the neighboring countries. Her head was blessed with soft, sunlit, curls that fell in voluminous waves to her slender waist. When she wore rings on her fingers, the rings seemed enormous and made her fingers more elegant. Her eyes were green like the green that unfolds in the curve of a newborn leaf.

Love for her was inevitable.

Reading it made me hate Evander, too. Of course he liked that kind of girl. It sounded like a female version of him, except for the green eyes. But even after having my fears about him confirmed, my disgust didn't negate my interest in what he had to say, so I kept reading.

At the age of fourteen, she stood in her personal library. It was a beautiful room designed with enormous panels of glass in the ceiling to let in the light for the weightless vines that clung to the bookshelves, adding color and freshness. She was meant to entertain a prince, but not just any prince. The youth invited was the second prince of the Kingdom of Bellique—a country with a strong political hold on Lilikeen.

Bellique lay to the south. It was a great arching country that covered the entire continental coast and cradled a multitude of small kingdoms in its arc. It was the shape of a crescent moon and Lilikeen was like a star dangling from the top corner of it. Bellique sat in a rather difficult position, for it was constantly under invasion from the countries across the sea. It was stained in blood until the earth was red, and if Lilikeen and her neighbors wished to keep their lands pure from warfare, they had to pay a heavy tribute. The money kept Bellique's soldiers paid, their weapons sharp, and their boats afloat. Each and every citizen of Lilikeen paid some of their income to keep Bellique's war machine ticking.

The morning Sarafina entertained Prince Murmur of Bellique, the Queen of Lilikeen watched with great interest from a balcony above.

Murmur entered. Sarafina stood by an empty fireplace with nothing on her mind particularly. She had already learned she did not need to exert herself particularly when dealing with prospective suitors. She did not need to think of witty conversation. They were happy enough to talk about themselves and the time would soon pass.

For Murmur, the effect of her beauty was devastating. Because she did not speak much, she opened his imagination up for what she could be instead of exactly what she was, which was bored, underdeveloped, and childish. He didn't know this. The combination of her obvious acceptance of him and her outward perfection made him believe, even though he was too young to marry her then, that he could have no one else as his wife.

The next day he was carried away back to Bellique's impenetrable capital, but two months later a very royal missive was received by the King and Queen of Lilikeen. It was an official request for a betrothal. An excellent offer it was too, for it offered to have the tribute sent to Bellique reduced by half during each year Sarafina was married to Murmur. However, the King and Queen did not accept it. The Queen knew what their kingdom had—they had a daughter capable of mystifying a prince in one afternoon. From that moment on, the Queen began plotting for a better marriage for Sarafina. What good was Prince Murmur? He was not the Crown Prince. He would never be a king. Instead, she set her heart on his older brother, Prince Tremor.

Tremor was a legend. It was not Murmur who protected the entire continent from the threat across the sea, but the Crown Prince. If Sarafina could have the tribute halved by marrying a prince who would never be a king, how much could she have it reduced if she married the man who would be? Tremor was an unmarried soldier, a general, and a prince who would be a king.

The Queen wrote a letter inviting Tremor to Lilikeen. There was no response for over six months and when the epistle was received, it was opened to uncover his refusal. He could not leave his fortress at Sealoch to go courting. To the Queen, it was a minor setback. This was a different kind of warfare, one for which a queen was well equipped. She would have her daughter married to the Lord of Sealoch!

Welp, I hope y'all enjoyed that.  Now please, be captivated, mesmerized and thirsty for more.  Please buy my book on amazon. Here's the link to amazon.ca and below that the link to amazon.com.  

https://www.amazon.ca/Behind-His-Mask-First-Spell/dp/1981024735/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533585096&sr=8-1&keywords=behind+his+mask+by+stephanie+van+orman

https://www.amazon.com/Behind-His-Mask-First-Spell/dp/1981024735/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533663990&sr=8-1&keywords=behind+his+mask

Hello Dear Readers,
Today I am announcing the release of my novel Behind His Mask.  Here's the synopsis:

Sarah thinks she knows everything about Evander.  He hardly speaks to her, but she doesn't need him to explain his snotty upbringing.  She still likes him.

Things change when she is given a book he authored, and is unexpectedly drawn into the story.  Suddenly, she's wearing ball gowns and playing hostess to princes.  The pretend world of his book seems like the adventure of a lifetime, until the world Evander created becomes dangerous in ways that spill over into real life.  There are bloodthirsty capricorns to contend with, ironclad knights who keep threatening to light her on fire, and a doomed mansion with howling ghosts.  Perhaps even a demon.

She'll have to read the whole book to find out who Evander really is.

Paperback and ebook versions are on sale on amazon.com and an ebook version is on sale on amazon.ca.

Next week, I'll post an excerpt.

Happy reading!

Wild Animals are Everywhere!

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that there are wild animals here and they are everywhere. My property backs onto 15 km of wild forest. I don't own it, but the government doesn't charge me for looking at it.

Yesterday, I was sitting on my back deck and a saw part of a little green body between the boards and I thought to myself, “I'm about to see the biggest grasshopper I've ever seen.” I was pretty into it and waited excitedly for the little friend to show himself. To my delight, he was not a grasshopper but a pacific tree frog. I didn't even know we had tree frogs in Canada.

We had rabbits in Edmonton, great big jack rabbits that were honestly big enough that the whole concept of 'rabbit stew' made sense. Here we have little brown bunnies that look like something off a Disney cartoon. They're small and fat with... wait for it... floppy ears.

We went to a rocky beach to hang out and my sons caught a truck load of crabs. Not tiny crabs. big crabs. I didn't take them home and cook them because I had absolutely no idea how to do that or even if you're allowed to just walk to up to the beach and start treating it like a grocery store. But I like crabs and was very entertained by the event.

Whoever planted the flowering bushes around my house had hummingbirds in mind and more than one variety comes to drink out of the different trumpets, but when I try to identify them according to the internet, they aren't on the list of hummingbirds that are supposed to live on Vancouver island.

Owls live in the woods too. Of course you can't see them because it's night and they seem to be quite a distance from the house, but you can figure out woo they are by their hoot. I think we mostly get great horned owls.

There are lots of different birds of prey who circle around the skies during the day. The bald eagles are easy to spot and when they come by the shoreline to catch things, you can get a real sense of how big they are. Ya know, because they're really close.

Another surprising flying thing are the pale swallowtail butterflies. When I first saw one this spring, I ducked because it was super enormous and heading right for me. I didn't get a good look at it, and it looked like a tiny flying cathedral with long dark bars like the iron work of a stained glass window, except that there is no colour, only pale light gleaming through the bars. As the season progressed, you could see one swoop by nearly every time you went outside, and every time I'd stop and gaze in amazement that butterflies could grow that big.

The squirrels here have enormous fluffy tails. They are mostly black or grey. There are racoons that cross the street here. I mean I hit my breaks for one crossing the street. I also hit the breaks for a mama duck and her line of ducklings. One time I drove alongside a buck with beautiful antlers. I didn't do that until it seemed very certain that he had no intention to cross the road. The deer around here seem like they know a lot about crossing the road. There's lots of roadkill here, but I've only ever seen one deer. Mostly, they're dead racoons.

So, there are snakes here, and humongous slugs, and dragonflies, and damselflies, and big black beetles with shiny shells, and quail who run hilariously, and noisy cicadas, and more birds than you can shake a stick at who like to sing at four in the morning, so no one will ever know what they look like.

But then... I think I heard a cougar kill a deer in the forest outside my window recently. People around here talk about cougars like they're around and I roll my eyes and go, “Yes, please don't talk to my kids about them. They'll refuse to walk home from school.” But this was in the dead of night. The cougar hissed and the deer screamed and then the deer let out a cry that was totally guttural, and then there was silence. And I looked out into the black woods and saw nothing.

That's a Paddling

Since I live in a village that surrounds a lake, I decided that I needed to take up some kind of water sport. Years ago, I was flutter-boarding in Hawaii and I saw this woman paddle-boarding to shore. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I wondered exactly what I would need to do to be that cool. I immediately decided that it was completely impossible. I mean, I lived in Alberta, which is landlocked and my last experience with dipping my toes in Albertan water was in Waterton. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but no one should do a water sport in Waterton that involves touching water. It's so cold, its best purpose is to treat BBQ burns.

So I put paddle-boarding out of my mind.

But then I moved here and decided that I was going to buy a paddle board and get busy.

There were a lot of naysayers.

I heard all kinds of things. Things like, “It takes a lot of stamina to paddle board.” Honestly, I have zero stamina and that scared me. “Isn't it hard to balance?” My brain finishes that thought with, “And doesn't every human being start losing their balance after their tenth birthday... or soon after?” “Are you sure you want to buy one when you've never done it before and you're from a province that's land locked?”

There were a lot of doubts.

Okay, so I bought one and I've done this and this is my report.

It does require a lot of stamina. Firstly, mine weighs fifty pounds. I have to drag it out of my garage, heave it onto the roof of my vehicle, strap it to the roof, drive to the lake, find a place to unload it, unstrap it, pull it down, lock up and look cool while carrying a fifty pound board that is heavier on one end to the water. It's not easy, but I have always had T-Rex arms, so maybe a little harder for me than the currently disembodied you.

When it's time to go, I have to heave it out of the water, carry it back to my van, heave it onto the top, strap it down, drive home, open my garage door (which is not automatic my arms have suddenly noticed), unstrap it, get it down, and haul it into the garage. It should also be noted the last time I did this, when I was about to pull my paddle board down from my van, my neighbour yelled over the fence, “You got it up there, so you can get it down again.” I bit my lip on, “Who asked you!?”

So, yes, paddling-boarding takes a lot of stamina. Balance? Yes. It's heavy and sort of wants to crush you. Was it extra hard because I hadn't done it before? I may be from Alberta, but that's where heavy things come from, so no.

With all that said, it's a good thing that once you get your board on the water, it is essentially effortless. And the best way to get a view of my lake is to get in the middle of it. It is really tree lined. What? This is still Canada.

The Joke that Keeps on Giving

I did not make up this joke.

A guy walks up to a boloney sandwich truck and says, “I'd like to order a boloney sandwich shaped like it's got a bite taken out of it.”

The vendor says, “Yeah, shaped like it's got a bite taken out of it.” Wink. Wink.

“That's what I said, shaped like it's got a bite taken out of it.”

“Right, shaped like it's got a bite taken out of it.” Wink. Wink.

It goes on like that. I told this joke to my kids a few times and probably even showed them the cartoon somewhere on homestarrunner.com, and then one day it stopped being stupid for the sake of stupid and started being AWESOME.

Sometimes when you're a mom, things happen at the dinner table... unspeakable things. Things no one wants to know. Things you wouldn't rehearse to another human being simply because reliving the horror would be like letting your tiny army win, or losing those precious seconds of your life that it would take you to explain what really happened when there is simply... no right answer. But today, I'm going to take you into the dragon's den and explain the sort of thing that goes on at the dinner table.

Let's say it's been a tough day and you decide that you're going to make hamburgers for your kids as a bit of a treat. You cook them on the grill and when they are almost finished, you put a slice of cheese on all of them but two. When you present these all done up with lettuce and ketchup on the table, each kid takes one. One of the kids who hates cheese gets one of the burgers that didn't have cheese and the other one was accidentally scooped up by a cheese loving child. Nobody realizes the mix-up until it is too take. There is only one cheeseless hamburger and it has a bite taken out of it. The child who wants that cheeseless burger is on the verge of losing his fricken mind and sadly, you only have one burger for each person at the table.

To solve this, maybe you could scrape the cheese off the burger this kid was given. Maybe they'll take it, or maybe they won't because they think they can still taste the cheese. Maybe you could get all industrious and fry up another patty. Maybe the kid will cry for an hour no matter what you do. Or maybe, just maybe, you could take that imperfect cheeseless hamburger, put it on the kid's plate, smile and say, “It's shaped like it has a bite taken out of it!”

What if, miraculously, that kid smiles, laughs, and eats that hamburger despite the mistake? That, my friends, is what I mean by AWESOME. The kid doesn't cry and I don't get an earache while I remake dinner. That is what dreams are made out of.

The Warm Stair

The phenomenon I am referring to is when you walk down (or up) your carpeted stairs and one of steps is warm on the bottom of your foot. It happens because my cat, Storm, likes to stretch out his whole body on one of the stairs and then he gets spooked and moves a few seconds before I start climbing the staircase, thus leaving a warm stair.

Sometimes I feel bad for my little Storm, fearing that he's not really happy. He's obviously a wild creature. He's a medium hair and quite large, even though he isn't yet two years old. He has a ruff and camouflage markings. He would blend into the forest and prowl and pounce, but instead... he lives with me and he must sit on a cushion and watch the forest from the comfort of the cushion. He isn't allowed to go outside. He dreams about birds, but isn't allowed to chase them.

This way, I save on worm medication. Actually, that's one of my life goals. Not to need worm medicine. So far, so good!

But I digress.

Sometimes Storm is still waiting on the stairs as I approach and he has this look on his face like he's surprised to see me there. It sort of reminds me of when you saw a boy loitering outside your house and then he pretends he's surprised to see you when you come out of your own house. “Fancy meeting you here!” Or when you literally bump into a boy you've been trying to bump into around that particular corner. “Eek, he touched me!” Even though from the boy's perspective, it was a hundred percent accidental. I think Storm has those moments of sudden joy when I'm around with his tiny feline heart beating wildly. Cats particularly like their contact to seem accidental.

He's a sweet boy. He likes to chase bugs that somehow get into the house. I'll see an ant (BTW ants are enormous here), Storm is chasing it and batting it back and forth. He seems engaged and I think he's finally going to start earning his keep, when suddenly, he loses interest completely and wanders off to loll about on the stairs. The ant walks away like he's so evolved he can let an attack like that slide.

And I am not egocentric enough to believe that my cat has a more complex relationship with me than that ant. He was probably also thrilled when he saw the ant scuttle across the checked floor. Bat, pat, bat with his paw and then the mood left him and he'd rather sleep or snooze or snore. It's the same for me. I pet him and rub behind his ears, and then boom, he's bored and he goes to the foot of the bed to put some space between us. He'll give me a nice slow blink, like he loves me, but prefers it if I don't touch him.

He also likes to stretch out on the stairs at night in the dark. That's when I'm the ant. He's gonna catch me.

Whatever I Want

When I was a kid and I couldn't find something, I always thought my mom was sitting on it. I'd insist that the thing I wanted was under her butt and make her get up. When it wasn't there and she sat down again, I still insisted that she was sitting on it and make her get up again. This wasn't something I did when I was a little tiny baby either. I have memories of looking for things when I was a teenager and wanting to ask her to move because I still thought the remote control/my hair accessory/my book or whatever was under her butt.

I have had this theory for years that anything I want is within reach... like literally. I want a pen, I should be able to reach in some direction and pick one up. This has been true a shocking number of times, especially in my bedroom. I want an elastic for my hair? It's right there. The other day, I was trying to have a nap and the sunlight in my room was unbearable. So, using my theory, I started rooting around on my headboard (that is more like a bookshelf than your average headboard) and I found something. It was part of a robot Halloween costume I had made for one of my kids. It was a hat. It was very long, and went right over my eyes without squashing my nose. Hip hip hooray for home made costumes.

Which reminds me, almost this whole winter, whenever I wanted a hat, the only hat I could find was a toque I had sewn six eyes onto. It was the crowning piece of a spider costume. And every time I needed a hat, that was the one I could find. So, one day I was driving to my hubby's work and if you drive around in Edmonton, you know finding parking is like finding the Lost City of Atlantis. So, I found something close according to Google maps and parked. Then I paid for parking, realized I was in the wrong car park and had to walk about a block over to my hubby's work. It was windy and coldish, and I knew I would get an earache if I didn't put on a hat, so I crawled through my van looking for something and the only thing I could find was that six eyed spider hat. Originally, I was going to sew eight eyes on it when my hubby said that the kid wearing it already had two eyes so I only had to do six. That made me feel so much better when I had to ring a doorbell at his work and explain myself to someone I'd never met before who knew EXACTLY WHO I WAS.

So, now that I'm all grown up and my kids come up to me and they think I'm sitting on the remote control (I am) or that I have snacks in my hoodie pocket (I do) and I'm taking a nap or picking them up from school wearing their part of their Halloween costume. I also think someone is sitting on the thing I want. It's my cat and yes he is sitting on my phone. It's cause it's warm.

Not the Red Room!

The interior of my house has been painted many times. I have seen evidence of recent repainting and for the most part, I'm okay with their colour decisions, but there was one room in my house that was painted red. Red on all four walls. Scratch that. On all six walls. It's a funny shaped room, and I put a kid to sleep in that room. They didn't do well, like Jane Eyre who cried and fainted and feared the dreaded ghost of her dead uncle.

As a disclaimer, I have seen red rooms that are not hideous. I keep telling people that I'm not against red in such a way that I can't acknowledge that it looks nice from time to time. It looks really good in the Pizza Hut I patron sometimes, but that room in my house just bummed everyone out. Being in there made you feel like you were getting your soul sucked out. It's a narrow room with a dark floor.

Painting that room was on the list of things that needed to be done, but it didn't get done until last week. I took the kid in question to the paint store and let them pick whatever colour they wanted that was at least somewhat neutral. I made them stand in front of the colour pallet for five minutes while I rubbed my hands together evilly and thought, “This paint will up my resale value.” Seriously, any colour would. The red was that bad. When I was looking at the pictures of my house when we were still buying it, I didn't get a good look at that room until the home inspector sent me a very detailed package of pictures. You know the kind, where they take a picture of a drain really close up, or a pipe, or a filter, and then a picture of that room. The rest of the house is painted sage green and butter cream yellow, then suddenly in that room there's blood pouring down from the ceiling.

“Funny, the blood usually gets off on the second floor.”

So, the kid picked a light turquoise. I was okay with that. The gal selling me the paint reassured me that Behr Marquee paint would cover my red paint in one coat. It was a good thing I didn't believe her, because if I had I would have been mighty right ripped after I finished the first coat that was in no way adequate. The woman at the store even gave me detailed instructions on how to apply the paint to get the best results. I stared at her and wondered how long I had to listen to her filthy lies. I bit my tongue on telling her that I'd used that paint before and it was good paint, but her description of its super powers was ridiculously overrated.

AND the person who applied that wretched red paint did not tape, so there's little flecks of red paint on the ceiling and on the trim. Foul renovator! 

Oh... and one more thing. There is another room in my house painted red. They couldn't just do one.

Everyone and their Dog has a Dog

I first started noticing dog walkers when I lived about a block away from the river valley in Edmonton. If you sit by the window long enough, you'll start to notice a pattern in Edmonton. Once a year, there's this day at the end of winter and the beginning of spring (this day can occur quite randomly). It's the day where it's warm enough outside to NOT FREEZE YOUR FACE OFF. That's the day people who haven't walked their dogs all winter will get outside and walk their K9 friend. Then they keep on walking them until the corresponding day in fall where if you go outside you will FREEZE YOUR FACE OFF. The people who continue to walk their dog in winter are few, and they usually have a nicotine addiction.

Here on the Island, everyone has a dog. Today I walked past a car with this huge line of white stick figures indicating their family members. They had four dogs. So, if you sit in my living room and open the blinds, you will see a healthy parade of dogs go by. And it never gets SO COLD IT WILL FREEZE YOUR FACE OFF here, so there are plenty of pooches to approve of.

So, the other night, I was taking out compost or something and as I stepped onto my front porch and I saw this enormous coil of poop up the steps, just feet from my front door. And I thought that the dog walkers of this place had gone out of control. Seriously? Poop on my front step? Get a leash! Get a baggie! The deer around here aren't that much bigger than big dogs, so I guessed it might have been a deer, but on my front step? I was not happy. And that crap wasn't staying there.

I went to clean it up and BOOM! I was very apologetic to the dog owners of the area. It wasn't poop. It was the BIGGEST slug I'd ever seen in my life. It was really fat and in the dark, I couldn't tell it wasn't poop until I got too close to it to ever forget what I saw. Ew! I am not afraid of spiders. I actually sort of like them and before this incident the biggest slug I'd ever seen was on the road here. He was dark brown and really long. Actually, I mistook him for a branch. You know, part of a broken branch. But he wasn't on my step.

I went and got my husband. That's boy work if I ever saw it. He grabbed a hoe and was like, “Are you sure you want me to get rid of him? It probably took him forever to get up here.”

Just to be clear, all we were discussing was whether or not to get him off the porch and the answer was yes. Yes, please.

So, to those in Alberta who are at present freezing their faces off, remember that big creepy bugs don't live there.

Driving Myself Crazy

When I drove in Alberta, I'd call my vehicle my Hypothetical Argument Simulator. That was how I used to sort out my problems. I'd get in my vehicle, drive somewhere, and have a good conversation with myself about why I was ticked off, run through a collection of scenarios as to how to tell someone off, realize that no matter what I said I was still wrong, defuse myself and accept the situation.

When you drive in Edmonton, there are long straight stretches of nothing but stop lights. You don't have to think very hard when you drive, because there aren't many turns, the roads are wide, and since you're staring at a red light you have the time to think about whatever is bothering you.

Here, forget about all that. There are very few stop lights. You never get a second to even pause. You better like what's on your play list because you can't spare one finger to change the song. The roads are insanely curvy so you have to focus all the time. Sometimes, I feel like there's a driving instructor in the seat next to me. “You know how to turn your car, don't you?” he says. And I say, “I've had my driver's license for 15 years. I've probably done it twice.” And then we laugh and laugh, because the roads here are windier than a Mario Cart track. And so, yes, since I came from Edmonton, I can't claim to have driven on curves before.

So, the other problem is that if you go off the road for some reason, you'll die. I mean, you will die. Die. Death. The shoulders here maybe have enough room on them for half a car and then there is a wall of trees that goes along the sides of the road forever. You will die if you go off the road. You will hit a forest, total your car and that will be the end of it. When I got here, there were some sweet little wickets they put on the white line on the road by the lake. I saw them and I was like, “This is how I prove I can live here, by never ever grazing one.” Okay, so I didn't touch them, but the locals have completely decimated all of them. Sometimes people go so fast, they have a hard time staying on the road.

Those incredible trees also mean it's dark here – really dark here. The moon and the stars are shining, but you can only see a tiny sliver of sky above you. The trees are that dense. The sky is only available where the road cut away the trees. It's mostly black walls on both sides of you. Drivers use their brights here all the time. After driving somewhere at night, you honestly feel like you've been interrogated for espionage and they've finally agreed to let you have a glass of water. It's not just the cars in front of you either. The car riding your back bumper has their brights on too. But sometimes, when you're driving alone on the road, you make a turn or have to go down a hill and it feels like you are diving into a black hole. And I'm singing A-ha, Little Black Heart in my head, “But I've never felt darkness the way I feel it tonight.”

Just a post script, if you thought my mentioning a glass of water above was strange, it's because you can't get yourself a drink when you're driving. You wouldn't dare, even if your drink has a straw in it, because you're about to take a crazy curve.