Home 2022 May

Month: May 2022

When and Why I Read Romance

I think I’ve blogged before about friends who grabbed and shook when I said, somewhat ignorantly, that I didn’t read romance. I’m happy to report that I have good friends. I was corrected, firmly and often, until I saw the error of my ways. Now I don’t regularly read romance, because it’s not what I regularly want. But when it is what I want? Absolutely. Delighted to take recommendations. Gimme those good books. What I didn’t get back then, and I what I do get now, is that sometimes we just need to know that it’s all going to be okay. For me, at least, if I can’t get that in the real world (don’t look around if you haven’t lately. Trust me.) then I need it in my distractions. So, romance. Or stuff I’ve read before, but I’ve been doing a lot of rereading. So. Romance. Last week (or the week before, honestly it’s hard to keep track) I read my way through the Brothers Sinister by Courtney Milan. Also in that read-a-thon somewhere were the Langham Line books by Amanda Pahorst. Romance is not, though, my favorite genre. There’s tons of good fantasy and SF I haven’t read! So I’ve been wanting to venture out of the safe haven of romance. I still want my happy endings! I just wanted…more of what I like. I was thinking of picking up the Murderbot series. Or finishing, at long last, Temeraire. Or the Wheel of Time! –okay, not the Wheel…

Continue reading

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…

Like the song, I’ve had a pretty big change in my life recently. I started having symptoms of what I thought was another food allergy. For the record, I was diagnosed with quite a few nut allergies — including a deadly peanut allergy which did not manifest in childhood, oddly enough — and fruit allergies, as well as a few other random ones (latex and wintergreen, I’m looking at you). Fun fact: If you are allergic to either latex or bananas, chances are, you will be allergic to the other one, too. I didn’t know that. I’d known about my latex allergy for years, having worked in foodservice and was forced to wear latex gloves and basically suffer with hives going up my arms every night until they allowed me to start using non-latex gloves later. But the banana allergy took some time to figure out. Anyway, this all happened in my twenties, and I am forty-six now, so it’s been awhile. My symptoms were similar to hay fever: runny nose and tearing eyes, and also some fun digestive issues. (We won’t get into that). So after making a list of the culprit foods (a very varied list, I might add), I went to my allergist and got a scratch test. Which, by the way, is no longer a scratch test but more like a poke test. Anyway, nothing came up as an allergy. She told me that it was possible that these symptoms were due to an intolerance, which…

Continue reading

Oh, May, the Busiest Month of the Year

Hi, friends! It’s May. Every year May sneaks up on me. No matter how stressful the last May was, I always forget before May rolls around again, and then I am surprised by the amount of stuff that I suddenly need to do. I should put a reminder in my calendar. “BEWARE MAY” or something like that, that pops up around April 25th or so. May is the last month of school for the small, mobile ones. Which means there’s stuff like teacher gifts and a memory book for each child, plus one of their teachers is retiring, so there’s parties and gifts for that, and I’ve got to track down contact info for friends for playdates, and all that jazz. So much jazz. And then there’s a birthday to be done too, which I am never on top of because of other things and the fact that it’s right after school gets out, and there is so much work that needs to be done for a child’s birthday, not the least of which is the contact info issue mentioned above, and I have definitely lost the phone number said child brought home to me that I needed. There’s volunteer commitments, most of which circulate around said small, mobile ones, and so need to be done by the end of the school year as well. I am working on passing some of those off onto other parents, though, so hopefully that will be better in the future. There’s summer plans…

Continue reading

Re-entry, Part 3

[CW: pandemic, mental health] Here in Toronto, the world hasn’t fully started up again yet. Lots of white-collar workers are still working from home at least some of the time, and downtown is still pretty empty. My contra dance group has just held its first dance since February 2020 (though I didn’t feel comfortable attending…maybe next time). And I’m tiptoeing back, one step at a time…but there are an awful lot of steps to take, somehow. (Case in point: this is my third re-entry post.) My spouse and I just got back from our first trip since summer 2020 — we took the train to Montreal to visit family for a week. It was wonderful to spend time with some of my immediate family members again, as well as hug a dear friend and pet a kitty and visit a bilingual indie SF&F bookstore. The travel and associated “new” experiences were less anxiety-inducing than I’d feared, especially since I had a really hard time with going back to the office pre-Omicron. My anxiety from earlier in the pandemic still flares up sometimes, but it’s back to being more manageable now. As long as I’m able to keep my mask on, I’m okay. (It gets harder as the hours stretch on or when I need to take the mask off in close quarters.) The part I found more exhausting was all the “peopling”, that is, spending time around people (other than my spouse, who doesn’t count). I’m an introvert and have…

Continue reading

Timelines II

by Siri Paulson in that other timeline the one that made some kind of narrative sense the one we could all agree was real we got our dual shots and it was over a year and a half after it began the world resumed better than before because we learned what the universe wanted us to know in the timeline that existed in a just world the vaccines came first to the most vulnerable countries, neighbourhoods, individuals who could least afford the high price of getting sick and inequities were levelled out instead of being piled higher in the timeline that never went sideways the one that even now we can’t believe we won’t see again we still breathed on each other and moved in crowds without a second thought we never knew the fear that burrowed into the bronchioles of our lungs the invisible six-foot spheres that followed us everywhere so what then do we call this timeline we’re stuck in now a Groundhog Day of wave after wave a sea that threatens to take our breath? if we can’t undo the last two years if we can’t step sideways and disappear into another part of the multiverse where will we go from here? what is the after and how will we know when we’ve reached it?

Continue reading