January 6, 2015
Further Adventures in Accidental Cakery
“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” —Rebecca Solnit, “Woolf’s Darkness”
Today was a day so firmly determined to shrug off its plan that all one can really do is shrug one’s shoulders…and eat dessert.
I have a babysitter on Tuesday mornings, who called last night to cancel because she was ill. Which I thought meant I’d lose some productivity today, but I didn’t know the half of it. When we woke up this morning, the furnace was broken and the temperature down to 15 degrees. With the wind-chill, today felt like -17 outside, so this was troubling news. Luckily, our landlords were on it, and I was grateful that the babysitter would not have arrived at our freezing house after all. Iris and I took Harriet to school, and then we came home to await the serviceperson’s arrival. For about 10 minutes after we came out of the -17, the house actually felt warm, but then it got cold again even though I was wearing multiple layers of clothing, tights under my pants. The only option left then was to put something in the oven.
So I decided to make a cake. But it couldn’t be just any cake. We’ve had far too much in the way of baked goods over the past month and I’d sort of vowed to take a cake break, but then what else does one put in oven’s oven? I had absolutely nothing in the way of things to stew. So cake it was, but quinoa cake, I decided, because quinoa has been sitting in my cupboard for ages. (Although it was actually in the fridge, where we store all our grains to stymy inevitable infestations of mice and moths. Harriet thinks it’s weird that some families keep cereal in the cupboard. She’s never had a krispie that wasn’t chilled. Anyway…)
Quinoa sounded healthier than ordinary chocolate cake, at least. Except that it called for 4 eggs and we have no eggs. So I made it with flax meal sub’d for the four eggs. And coconut oil for the butter (and the coconut oil had frozen!). A quinoa cake didn’t sound all that promising in the first place, and all my sorry doctoring would do it no favours. I put it in my bundt pan (and how I love my bundt pan) where it baked for nearly two hours, and refused to be cooked all the way through. Mission accomplished though: I’d heated the kitchen most of the morning. Still no furnace serviceperson yet.
We’d lost another degree when I contacted our landlord to let her know that they’d not yet arrived. She heard back from them: they HAD come in the morning but knocked at my neighbour’s door and not ours, and didn’t call when they got no answer. She spent 40 minutes on the phone with the company, who told her that the serviceperson could return to our house tonight between 8 and 11pm. Unrelentingly, she stayed on the phone, where they finally agreed to return sooner but only at 3pm, when I leave to go pick up Harriet from school. And so I was charged with finding someone else to fetch Harriet from school, which I knew was going to be trouble—Harriet lives in perpetual fear that I’m not going to pick her up because I was late once in September 2013. Finally, both my landlord AND I found (different) kind neighbours willing to fetch Harriet, which led to more back and forthing as we sorted out the surfeit of human kindness.
The serviceperson finally arrived soon after Iris had awoken from the nap she was taking upstairs with a space heater. We had to chase him down before he left again, which wasn’t aided by the fact that Iris refused to be clothed in outerwear of any kind, and so I had to carry her out wrapped in Stuart’s hoodie. And then Iris and I had to spend 30 minutes in the basement bachelor apartment (where the furnace is) which had no place to sit down except the legendary sex bed (which I know well from sound through the air vents) and I didn’t feel exactly comfortable having Iris sit on that bed, but we had no choice. It was made, at least. She watched Elmo videos on my phone and ate goldfish crackers while I stared at at the serviceperson’s sizeable bum (and thankfully, it was not a plumber’s).
I asked him if all the furnaces broke on the coldest day of the year, and he said that tomorrow was actually the coldest day of the year, so we were getting our trouble out of the way early.
And then he was finally done, and I rushed out to find Harriet (not before putting Iris in snow pants and a jacket), who was being brought home by a classmate’s mother, but I went up the wrong street and missed them and was informed by the saintly crossing guard at Bloor and Spadina that Harriet had passed by her corner about five minutes before. So I had to run back home in the -17, and finally found Harriet in front of our house. Where we had heat again and Harriet was home, and so order was all restored, but I had accomplished absolutely nothing in the entire day, except for a really weird quinoa cake, so we sat down to eat it.
It wasn’t bad. Mushy in the middle, and really really rich. “If the furnace hadn’t broken, this cake wouldn’t exist,” I thought, as Iris found a knife and actually cut herself a second piece. I gave another to Harriet too, and then they wanted thirds, but I drew the line—quinoa, yes, but it had a cup of cocoa and even more sugar— and so they both crawled under the table and proceeded to eat the crumbs. They were down there for ages, and the licked the floor completely clean. I’ve never seen them so ravenous for anything.
Stuart came home and the house was in disarray, but we were reading stories, and everything seemed to be settling down. We were having a pasta dinner that involved boiling water and squeezing a lemon, so that was good, and then I remembered that tomorrow is pizza day, which is even better—no lunch to make. And once the pasta was eaten, we finished the cake, the whole thing (save for the quarter I gave to Harriet’s classmate’s mom for bringing her home, wrapped in tinfoil).
I am beginning to think there may be an order to the universe after all, and that accidental cake is part of it, most certainly.
March 3, 2014
Reading when the world seems unsteady
That time does fly is demonstrated by the fact that once again, I am waiting for test results on my thyroid lump (as I will be six months from now, and six months after that, and if this schedule alters, it’s probably not a positive twist in the story). It is no fun waiting for test results, I am learning, no matter how routine it becomes to get needles stabbed in one’s neck. It is no fun getting needles stabbed in one’s neck either. But the very worst is waiting on test results when one is reading a novel that isn’t very good.
I was reading that not very good novel yesterday when I wasn’t waiting for test results, and while the novel wasn’t good, reading it wasn’t so bad. But once I’d had the tests and things got heightened, I started to feel resentful.
We turn to books for certain things–for entertainment, for wisdom, to pass the time. Sometimes the right book comes along and offers all the answers that infinite existential google searches might fail to turn up. But to need some such thing and find yourself instead in the hands of an author whose book is carelessly constructed, sloppy, superficial, thoughtless. I don’t have time for that. The amount of understanding I’m willing to extend as a reader shrinks to about none.
When my world seems unsteady, I don’t want to read for escape. Instead, I require literary foundations solid and deep, something sure beneath my feet.
Is it too much to want a book to capture my attention, and also save my life? Anything less is just bookish jetsam.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be reading the new Lorrie Moore.
January 16, 2014
The Saddest News
A few years ago, I misread a headline that Book City in Bloor West Village was closing as my local Book City closing (Bloor Street in the Annex), and was devastated for a moment. The relief I felt upon realizing my mistake was absolutely epic, but I always suspected that the moment was a glimpse of things to come. I’ve been lucky to this long stay immune to the indie bookshop closure plague, but it seems that my luck is finally up with the announcement today that Book City’s flagship location would indeed be closing, and I cried and cried and cried.
Of course, one could say, the loss of a store is not a real thing. But then it is a real thing, which is the whole point of a proper bookshop. Real things are people, like Jen who phoned me yesterday afternoon to confirm my order for the collected letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Like John, who has worked there since 1976, and everybody else who takes my special orders, rings through my giant stacks of books, rings through my customer discount without even seeing my card because they know my name. My husband went into Book City shortly after Iris’s birth, and came home with a present from Rachel. I have tweeted that I’m coming in for a particular book, and they’ll have it behind the counter for me by the time I’m at the shop. Such excellent, knowledgable, expert customer service, and all these people are going to be out of a job. I am so sad for each and every one of them.
We used to live in Little Italy, and it wasn’t until we moved nearly six years ago that I realized what I’d been missing all my life: a bookshop just around the corner. It is the ultimate destination. I do all my Christmas shopping there, and if I’ve ever given you a book for any other occasion, that’s where it’s come from. Any time Stuart and I go out on a date, we make a late-night stop in. We took Harriet trick-or-treating there on Halloween. After Harriet was born, it was the first place I ever ventured. During Harriet’s first year when I was bored and alone, I became a regular. The shop staff (Hi, Suzanne!) were some of the brightest spots in my life. Harriet wanders around the shop like she owns it, and I feel like she has grown up there. It makes me so sad that Iris won’t have that experience. I have bought so many books because someone has been smart enough to display it at the counter knowing it was precisely what I wanted/needed. So many bookish discussions at the counter. Running into bookish friends in their natural habitats. On lazy Saturdays when we have to go somewhere, it is generally where we go. I look around my library and see that most of my books have come from there. Memorable visits, like the day Harriet bought Wonder Woman. Pre-ordering Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith, and getting my mitts on those books the day they come out. When we were on austerity measures after Stuart lost his job 3 years ago, and for Mother’s Day my gift was to buy some books and it was such a pleasure. I love that whenever I’ve wanted a poetry book from a small press, I could be reasonably assured of seeing it on the shelf. I was so looking forward to The M Word being on sale there.
It has been an honour to pay full(ish–I had my customer discount after all) price for books in exchange for having an excellent independent book shop in my neighbourhood. I wish that more people could see how much we gain for such a transaction. Books cost money because they are items of value, and I think that in our society’s hunger for deals and discounts, in that we have made everything about dollar signs, we have forgotten what value is. Anyone who has let Chapters/Indigo drive out their local indies will soon be sorry when that whole enterprise shuts down and they’re left with no place to buy books at all. And then there is Amazon, who has seen fit to forfeit profit in order to ruin everybody else, but I promise you that their prices will no longer be so reasonable once they’ve finally achieved their grand monopoly. And how about conditions in their warehouses? Also, real things: Amazon does not qualify.
And I know I have been spoiled, to take for granted that I could walk around the corner and to pick up nearly any book I desired. There are those who will say I need to get with the times, who find my elitism repugnant, who find that Costco serves their book buying needs just fine, thank you very much. But those people must not know that they’re missing. These are not the people I want designing our society. People who have never known how a bookshop really can be the heart of a neighbourhood, and what a hole is left when one disappears. All this is partly sentimental, which I think is what they call it when I despair about the loss of things that make me happy, but it is also practical–where will I buy my books now? I am fortunate to have some excellent specialty bookshops in my neighbourhood still, but no place for new adult books unless I go out of my way. And I guess what I’ve always liked about my life and where we live is that I’ve never had to go out of my way to buy a book. Book-buying has always been right there on the main thoroughfare, along with Sweet Fantasies Ice Cream. In short, life has been complete. I have been so lucky. I am not sure this is a bad thing and think it should be wider-spread, not rare. Can you imagine how much better and smarter the world could be if everybody had such a place around the corner to go?
It is shameful that the Annex will no longer contain a proper bookstore–how far this storied neighbourhood has fallen. And I implore some brave soul with capital to make a new venture, please. I promise to come and spend lots of money.
See also: Jon Paul Fiorentino on the need for fixed book pricing in Canada: “FBP may seem, to some, to be counter intuitive to the free market sensibilities we have in North America, but consider this: The book marketplace is one of the only marketplaces where vendors can return merchandise to their suppliers for a full refund whenever they want. Books are clearly not typical merchandise. They are as much cultural artifacts as they are goods for sale. In fact, books represent the source of our cultural and intellectual reality. So why should they be treated with the same notion of disposability as jeans or candy bars? FBP is good for bookstores because it levels the playing field and eliminates undercutting. It’s good for independent publishers because it allows them to control their print runs, stay in competition with larger houses, and take risks on less popular but innovative and vital authors. It’s good for authors because it secures a level of remuneration with regard to the fixed net price their royalties will be paid out at, and it’s good for consumers because it diversifies the marketplace and gives them more options.”
January 11, 2014
On Seven Months
As it was when Harriet was a baby, seven months has been a turning point. The baby has become vertical. She sits and eats her dinner with us in her chair. She has a sense of humour. I can put her down and she can play by herself, thereby ensuring that dinner gets made. She and Harriet are beginning to play together. We have found equilibrium as a family of four. And yet seven months is turning point in another sense, such as we’ve turned a corner and smashed into a wall. It would be more troubling if we hadn’t been precisely here before, but it’s still exhausting and frustrating. Six nights out of seven, she won’t be put down to sleep in the evenings, and then we take turns sitting on the sofa drinking wine by ourselves while the other is upstairs trying to get her to settle. Because we’ve been here before, we know enough not to turn it into a power struggle, we know that baby needs what she needs, and that “sleep habits” are indeed something a child of 18 months can indeed acquire out of the blue. I always expected that we’d end up here again, but oh, it’s not a fun place, even if you’re only visiting. (She is upstairs, screaming right now, and just spat out her soother and it sailed down the stairs.) We know we know we know, and it could be a million things–she is teething (or just evil?), and on antibiotics since this morning for cellulitis. I spent 4 hours last night at the emergency room having that cellulitis diagnosed, so you can see why I had hopes for having earned a more enjoyable way to spend my time tonight than the screamy baby relay. When I am refreshed enough to be philosophical about the whole thing, I know she is little, in need, that I love her, and these days are fleeting (and it’s the nights that are the trouble; the days themselves are fine, and I’m not even really tired because once I come to bed, she is happy enough to sleep beside me), but more often on these nights, I’m just impatient and angry. There is nothing like a baby to take one to the limits of herself. My own limits, as I learned very early in my mothering days, are closer than I’d like to admit.
August 17, 2013
Flaws in the cloth, flies in the ointment.
Me breastfeeding on a ferry-boat. I am proud of this.
It occurs to me that as I enter my mid-thirties, only now am I really learning how to be alive, how to be strong, to be brave. Part of this is having children (two! can you believe it?) which changes the stakes, but a large part of it is also flaws in the cloth, flies in the ointment finally starting to turn up after three decades in which things like good health and general happiness could still be taken for granted. And I wasn’t even going to write about this, for two days imagined that I wouldn’t have to, but this space is such an outlet for me. It also seems very dishonest to document the truly lovely parts of my life but leave out the sordid bits. To let you know all my stunning achievements (yesterday I breastfed standing up on a ferry boat!) but neglect to inform you that I am once again waiting on biopsy results. “Biopsy”, which was once a terrifying prophecy but has actually become an idea as banal as is the actual experience.
I returned to my thyroid doctor on Thursday for what I hoped would be my final appointment, the one where he told me to return annually for lump-checks but all would be well, but discovered that my thyroid lump has grown again. They did a biopsy, and I tried not to cry, and in doing so, forgot to ask questions properly about the state of my lump and therefore now my imagination is taking me to terrible places again. Though not so terrible–my lump is mainly cystic, which makes the change not so surprising. As it was not cancer before, it is likely to not be cancer again (though I fear believing too strongly in this until I know for sure, for fear of being absolutely gutted by reality. Also, I was only reassured that it was probably nothing by the resident doctor, and I fear she was just trying to be nice. I liked better being reassured by the doctor himself as I was before, as he is devoid of social skills and therefore would never just try to be nice. See, all this worrying takes one down twisty, twisty roads). Even if it was cancer, it is a cancer that will not change my life significantly. Though not being cancer won’t mean I get off easy either–the fact that the lump is changing suggests that I may still require a thyroidectomy. (Initially I wrote “will probably require…” but changed it, as I don’t in fact know this, or anything, and wild speculations have taken us to stupid places before, so let’s not do that again.) And while I can console myself that life will go on after this, and I could have far, far worse problems, sometimes these consolations are not quite enough and I find myself feeling quite sad, hence the need to sit down and write this post here on my blog.
This may be the last post I ever write on this computer. I turned on my computer last night, and the system had gone haywire. It’s working properly today, but I think this machine is reaching the end of its life. (Harriet is confused by our insistence on talking about computers “dying” and “being brought back to life”. It is strange but not so surprising that we accord them such essential mortal characteristics.) 4 years ago, my computer “broke down in an altogether final sense” and I lost many precious things, learning a very important lesson about backing up my files and also that computers don’t last forever (a fact I still resent: they are so expensive!). Consequently, the loss of this machine is not a big deal and I have enough money to buy a new computer, which I think I am going to do today before driving this one completely into the ground.
However clunky and unpretty, these computers suit as a kind of metaphor. (Forgive me, but my computer really is an extension of myself.) The crash 4 years ago came on my 30th birthday, a few weeks after Harriet was born. I lost everything, which was sort of how I was feeling those days, the disclocation of self that came with new motherhood. I consoled myself with the opportunity of a blank slate, stories to be written in replacement of those I had lost. And I am proud of what I’ve made in the years since. This time, however, there has been no crash. This computer I’m losing not long after the birth of Iris has all its files back-upped elsewhere. Instead of being caught unaware, I’m averting disaster. And instead of being inspired by a blank slate, I’m just inspired in general, more ready than ever to build on what I’ve created in the last four years.
I was terrified at the prospect of another new baby, that after the progress we’d made in the parent-game of having to go all the way back to the beginning. But it hasn’t been like that at all. The biggest surprise of having Iris in our lives is how clear she’s made it that I’ve actually been in a stasis the last four years, a kind of limbo as we sorted out the question of a second child, whether or not to have one. And now she is here and it’s as though we’re moving forward, finally. I suspect that I am probably done having children, and now it’s time to look outward, to focus on other things. I am enormously excited to think of what lies before me, of the things I’m going to write on the new computer that comes into my life today. (I am also returning to the Mac life, I think, which will automatically make me a more physcially attractive human being).
And so it goes, flaws in the cloth. I’m finally learning how normal life is supposed to go. Oh, but how I do love the cloth, this life, right here in what just might be the very best summer (and believe me, I’ve known some excellent summers in my time). And I love this blog as a proper reflection of it all, the good and the bad, and I am so grateful for this space where take note of all the things that are important to me. And to those people who are reading.
February 27, 2013
The problem with optimism
The problem, of course, with my resilient and cheerful “It’s just a cyst!” response to last week’s lump discovery is that when an ultrasound suggests it’s something more suspicious than that, being optimistic just starts to seem stupid. Which is why I’ve spent many of the last 20 hours crying, imagining myself having the rarest form of thyroid cancer that has no treatment and kills in six months, and why the poor woman who made the mistake of asking how I was this morning was met with me bursting into tears. If you thought I was planning my funeral last week, it’s got nothing on what’s happened since. And baby has been kicking away like a mad-fetus, is healthy as ever, but this isn’t really consoling, actually, because I just keep thinking, “You can’t be here without me.”
And so the fact of the matter is that yesterday’s ultrasound revealed suspicious results and I am being referred to for a biopsy. I am really scared, not of a biopsy or even surgery, but of more bad news that is the opposite of what I’m expecting to hear. I am also nervous because I know that being in the third trimester of pregnancy complicates things, and that I wouldn’t be able to have surgery until after our baby comes. I keep desperately googling various combination of terms in an effort to finally stumble on the site that says, “You, Kerry, are going to be fine,” but I haven’t found that one yet. Even though I know that there is a good chance the lump is benign, and that even if it isn’t, that it can be treated, and that the survival rate for thyroid cancer is 97%, and these are the things I keep trying to remember, but it is hard to stay grounded. I have always had this weird tendency to see worry as insurance too, and fear that being optimistic will only trip things up and make everything fall apart.
I picked up Ina-May’s Guide to Breastfeeding at the library yesterday, and thought, “How on earth am I going to find time to read this book?” And then I heard from my doctor and it all seemed more and more unlikely. How does anyone ever has time for any of this? And how do you bear the waiting, the unknowing, the uncertainty (which is basically what life is, usually we can fool ourselves into thinking it’s less precarious)? What is giving me a little bit of peace though is imagining the summer, our baby here, leaves on the trees, and I do suppose the whole “not being dead” thing is going to give the post-partum days a rather glorious perspective. In the meantime, however, it is hard to just wait.
February 21, 2013
Something is not right.
I don’t imagine I touch my neck very often, but somehow yesterday while I was eating breakfast, I happened to discover a very large lump on my throat. “Something is not right,” I realized, in Miss Clavel style, and it was an interesting realization because I spend as much as any woman does examining my body for lumpy things, and being that bodies are quite lumpy in and of themselves, I’d always wondered how you’d know when you found a real one. But it’s like love, I guess, and orgasms. I got up from the table and announced that I had googling to do. I kept googling to a minimum as you always should whenever anything is actually wrong, and made an appointment with my doctor. She saw me later in the afternoon, and couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed the lump before. But then, as I’ve stated, I don’t touch my neck very often. The lump, she says, is on my thyroid, and feels more like a cyst than a nodule (and therefore, hopefully, less likely to contain nasty things). It is probably huge because I am pregnant, and pregnant bodies don’t do anything half way. She told me I am not to worry. I have an ultrasound next week which will confirm just what the lump contains. It is likely we won’t have to worry about what to do about it until after the baby is born. She said, “You’ve got bigger fish to fry anyway” (ie having a baby, who is, I am grateful to say, bigger than the lump).
I am writing about this here not be melodramatic, but because the more I’ve talked about it, the more ordinary and okay matters have seemed. It helped considerably when I realized that Betty Draper too had had a lump on her thyroid and that she was fine. (I also had a funny conversation with my mom about how we’d tried desperately to have me diagnosed with thyroid problems when I was a teenager, but it turned out that I was just fat because I went through entire tubs of cheez-whiz in a weekend. There was, sadly, no other excuse.) I am writing about this here really to be the opposite of melodramatic, because keeping my anxieties to myself would only make me crazy and because the likelihood of everything being fine is as such that being a brave, desperate martyr isn’t really called for. There is sort of a script for these sorts of situations, in which I start imagining my children growing up without me, planning my own funeral, and things being as they are, following this script would be more self-indulgent than anything else. We will save the panic and melodrama for when it’s really required. And while it’s easier to follow the script, really, because it’s a script, it’s not a useful script. It is always helpful to remember that one is not a character in a television drama. It is always better to face troubles as they are, as they arrive. To not jump so far into the future. To do otherwise is a waste of a life.
And so, onward. This post resonated with me”: “I want to be strong. I think I am strong. But sometimes I wonder, at what point does “strength” become “unwillingness to appear weak”?” But then we’re all constructed of various strengths and weaknesses, aren’t we? We’re all vulnerable, and sometimes that vulnerability is the clearest sign we have that the world and everything we love in it is real.
Update: It occurs to me that this is a situation for which Caroline Woodward’s and Julie Morstad’s Singing Away the Dark comes in handy.
Update 2: I am feeling far less morbid and dramatic a few days later. Looking forward to an ultrasound this week that will confirm that all will be well. And in the meantime, are people ever kind. Thank you for your kind comments and emails, for tracking down second opinions, and offering to refer me to your thyroid specialist doctor dad. I sure do have some fine people looking out for me. And it’s much appreciated. xo
August 22, 2011
So let us be loving
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.” —Jack Layton (1950-2011), August 20 2011
June 23, 2011
Penguins in the Post
Oh, there are words to describe yesterday, but they’re not very polite ones. They’re the words I was thinking as I hauled my hysterically tantrumming toddler home from a drop-in we visited in the morning, one that was so nice that apparently Harriet never wanted to go home. She was able to contort her body to become completely rigid (this kid would rock at planking) or to become a wet noodle, therefore rendering stroller get-her-inning completely impossible. She wanted me to carry her, and it was raining, and I couldn’t push a stroller, hold Harriet and an umbrella, so we got soaked. And then I could no longer carry Harriet at all, and that was all she wrote. It was horrid. And we won’t even get started on the whole “leaving the farmer’s market” meltdown in the afternoon, which was even worse, totally embarrassing and annoying. By the time Stuart came home from work, I was totally broken, and once again, considering putting Harriet up for adoption. “But tomorrow will be better,” I told myself, believing this to be somewhat naive, but it is June, mind you, and life is good in June, and indeed, better today has definitely been.
And it still would have been better had I not received this incredible surprise from my pal at Penguin Canada. A Penguin tote bag (which would be enough in itself) packed with 24 Mini Moderns. But it would not be possible to receive a package like this, and for a day not to be made. And yes, partly because we’re in our third week of a mail strike and I’ve been missing surprises at my door, and partly because these books are so brilliantly Penguinesque in their design and because I can’t wait to find a place where I can line them all up in a row, and because there are authors I love here, and others still yet to be discovered. But mostly because now I am totally assured that there is such brilliant possibility in never knowing what a new day might deliver.
May 15, 2011
A terrible day, and some wonderful books
We’re really good at delightful days at our house, mostly because our bad days get so bad that they border on comedic. Most of the problem today was probably my bad attitude, which is why my description of our gloomy Sunday probably won’t convey how awful it felt to be in the midst of it. The second straight day of cold rain and grey skies, Harriet being absolutely insufferable and my behaviour not much better. When she woke up early from her nap, I decided that only a tea party could dispel the dread, so I threw a batch of scones in the oven. Somehow, they managed to set off the upstairs smoke alarm five times (but not the kitchen smoke alarm once). I turned on the extractor fan to see if it could drive away the nonexistent smoke, and then when I turned it off, the extractor fan exploded! A terrifying boom, with sparks raining down over the stove. Cleverly, I considered flicking the switch again, chose to do so, it exploded again, and blew the fuse for the fridge, as well as inevitably some other outlets throughout our magically-wired house which we’ll discover as the evening progresses.
The tea party was good, but we still had to leave the house, even though no one really wanted to, but it was necessary for our mutual 
well-being. We had a cheque to deposit at the bank, so we went there, but of course there were no deposit envelopes to be had, so that was another lost cause. We went to the ROM next to have a quick tramp around the biodiversity gallery, but took Harriet in the backpack carrier, forgetting that the museum makes you check these. Not relishing the idea of Harriet wandering around untethered (or of parting with a loonie), we decided to explore the gift shop instead, which was fine because it really is one of my favourite parts of the museum, and that is saying something because I love the museum. (Have you read Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet, in which she writes about why museum gift shops these days are more like museums than the museums are?)
We’re short on cash these days, so exploring the gift shop was an exercise in wishing (which is not as sad as it sounds. Is there anything more hopeful than wishing?). In addition to wonderful teapots, this umbrella stand that I want so, so badly, and the globe plush toy, I found the three best books ever. The Encyclopedia of Animals, with its photography and facts, animals I’ve never heard of (racoon dog, anyone?) I think we will eventually own this one; The Pattern Sourcebook, each page a different world to get lost on (scroll down to see samples); and then Key to the Quaternary Pollen and Spores of the Great Lakes Region, just because I think the world is a better place for this book existing in it, and for there being at least three people who understand what it’s about.
