Busy Nothings

  Driving back from school this morning, I had a hankering for a nice fresh coffee and a muffin. It's a golden time of the day after I get the girls successfully launched off to school, and I feel the need for a leisurely caffeine fix. Frugal instincts kicked in, however, and I thought "Why spend money on a fat-packed muffin and a coffee at a fast-food joint when I could make one at home for free?" Indeed. Then it occurred to me that when packing for our move, I had tossed all of our ratty old muffin tins and had not gotten around to buying new ones yet. So I popped into a large store which shall remain nameless but by its very existence encourages us all to spend funds on more stuff than we ever need. And then it all went something like this... Grabbed a shopping cart, never a good idea when you are just there for one thing. Found the muffin tin aisle, but they did not have the silicone one I wanted to try so I just got a regular one and oh, look, a mini-muff...

Saskatchewan in January is cold.  Really cold. Having grown up next to the Gulf Stream, I have become spoiled by mildish winters that yes, do dump a lot of snow (like the winter our swing set completely disappeared under 6 feet of snow) but are very rarely really frigid. Now I have never lived up north, so possibly I don't completely comprehend what real cold is, but today feels pretty profoundly freeze-your-face-off cold. I am starting to understand why Laura of the Little House was always afraid of getting caught out on the open prairie in winter, and wrote that burrowing into a hay bale might not even keep you from freezing to death. She was not kidding around. It is cold. Yesterday it got down to -43 celsius with the wind, and my friend Alison asked me how could we survive in that kind of conditions. She lives in New Zealand, where my girls were fascinated to learn it is now summertime, where they can wear summer dresses and have barbecues on Christmas d...

Like Dorothy and her glam ruby slippers, there are moments when I wish I could just click my heels and we would all be back home, back in our big, somewhat drafty but always homey home. There were idiosyncrasies, to be sure, like the fact that when the wind really howled outside we could actually feel the house move, swaying in the gales that blew in off the sea. Even more disconcerting was the cold draft that blew up the toilet on really windy days. How could that even be?? I never did figure out the physics of that one, although my dad patiently tried to explain something about pee traps and the direction of the wind. But ANYHOW. I digress. I have moved more times than I can count, it is true, and somehow it seemed like a badge of honour to be always jaunting around the countryside, to and fro and hither and yon and to New Brunswick and everything. There is something quite thrilling about making a new place your own, so why does it now seem more daunting to be jaunting? (Sorry...

One of our winter visitors... Every year on New Year's Eve we pull out our family journal and review our list of goals that we made the previous year. We check things off if we have achieved them, and talk about the how and why and when some things got accomplished and some things fell off the radar. Then we all joyously contribute our new goals for the coming year. I have always found this to be a great way of marking the end of one year and the beginning of another. Now that our daughters are older, they like to kick in their ideas, and they think it is a hoot to look back at past years' goals and achievements. Things like "Ava: Learn to talk." and "Katherine: Potty train." For the grownups, it was often financial or personal goals, along with things that we wanted to do as a family, like "Do something active as a family twice a week: bike, swim, walk, etc." Once our goal was to "Have another baby." Check. The funny thing is, wr...