Hello

Hello allergies.
Hello runny nose.
Hello itchy throat.
Hello itchy eyes.
Hello itchy nose.
Hello itchy gums.
Hello reminder that summer is over, that fall is here and winter is not that far behind.

Good to Have Dreams

People often ask us if we plan to stay at our house by the lake.

Our answer is always the same: If we find the house/property of our dreams we will leave our current location of our dreams.
The property of our dreams is a hobby farm. I have the picture of the property in my mind.

It’s a Victorian farmhouse that you get to by cruising down a maple-and-oak-lined driveway.

When you get to the house, there is lots of open space with shaded spots. There are lilac bushes, more maples and an English-country garden or two.

The yard is lined by the old-style post fence.

Walking further along the property, it turns to meadow, which has a stream cutting through it, then a forested area. Of course there are areas for the animals, and we would have a melange of them - chickens, sheep, cows, goats, pigs, cats, dogs. There may be a horse, but it would have to be my brother’s as I am not a horse fan.

We would also have crops and a good-sized vegetable garden to feed ourselves and sell the extras. I also see maple syrup and a Christmas tree farm.

As I don’t want to live too far away from my family, this dream may have to stay just that unless we strike it rich or some rich relative we don’t know about dies and leaves us her fortune.

Good to Have Dreams

People often ask us if we plan to stay at our house by the lake.

Our answer is always the same: If we find the house/property of our dreams we will leave our current location of our dreams.
The property of our dreams is a hobby farm. I have the picture of the property in my mind.

It’s a Victorian farmhouse that you get to by cruising down a maple-and-oak-lined driveway.

When you get to the house, there is lots of open space with shaded spots. There are lilac bushes, more maples and an English-country garden or two.

The yard is lined by the old-style post fence.

Walking further along the property, it turns to meadow, which has a stream cutting through it, then a forested area. Of course there are areas for the animals, and we would have a melange of them - chickens, sheep, cows, goats, pigs, cats, dogs. There may be a horse, but it would have to be my brother’s as I am not a horse fan.

We would also have crops and a good-sized vegetable garden to feed ourselves and sell the extras. I also see maple syrup and a Christmas tree farm.

As I don’t want to live too far away from my family, this dream may have to stay just that unless we strike it rich or some rich relative we don’t know about dies and leaves us her fortune.

What Is It?

My neighbour has this beautiful yellow flower in his garden. It looks like a yellow Queen Anne’s lace.

The tall plan has been in bloom for the entire month of August and it looks like it isn’t dying any time soon.

Any idea what it is?

Still Waiting

My stepdaughter is still waiting to hear if she has been accepted to York University’s Glendon College.

School starts in September.

For some reason, perhaps because so many students were ticked off at York U. due to last year’s strike, the university extended its application deadline to Aug. 14 for its September admission.

As there is just more than a week until school is to start, shouldn’t York U. be letting people know if they have gotten into the university?

I think it’s too late for AD for September. Even if she hears this week that she has gotten in, the application deadline for residence was July 31, and she couldn’t apply for that or for financial aid until she had confirmation that she accepted.

So the question remains why did York U. extend its application deadline? Were they being nice to those who, for whatever reason, missed the original deadline or was it because so many York students left in disgust because of the lengthy strike that the university requires more money?

Missing Nut

At a recent Day family function, I told our cousin the kind of peanut butter she buys is inferior to the kind I buy.

Skippy peanut butter is more creamy than Kraft, which is dry and sticks to your mouth. Having said that, I did enjoy Kraft on toast both mornings we stayed at our cousins’ home.

ND asked me what kind of peanut butter we grew up on and I confessed it was indeed Skippy that we consumed as children.

Not only did we enjoy the taste of Skippy, we always loved the fact that it was “the only one with the peanut on top.”

We were not allowed to open the new peanut butter jar until the old one was finished. As kids, we always planned our peanut butter eating so we could be the one to open the new jar and enjoy the whole peanut that was waiting for you when you cracked the seal.

There was nothing worse than finishing the old jar, opening the lid of the new jar and discovering that one of your siblings didn’t play by the rules and had already eaten the peanut.

When I moved in with my now-husband, I grudgingly offered to share the peanut. But then something happened.

The “one with the peanut on top” became the one with no peanut on top.

Skippy, where did the peanut go?

Right Leaning

I lean to the right.

For whatever reason, my son refuses to nurse on the left side. He has been this way since he was a baby.

When trying to get him to nurse on the left side, he either throws his head back and refuses to latch or will drink for a couple of minutes before returning to the right side.

As such, my right breast, in comparison, is giant, while my left side is basically non-existent.

So if you see me leaning toward the right, you’ll know why.

Bringing Cheap To A Whole New Level

My son has been on heart medication since he was airlifted to Sick Kids hospital in Toronto when he was one-month-old.

The medication is an old man’s drug but instead of getting an old-man dosage of 200 milligrams, my son gets 20 mg once a day. As the medication is created for my son, only one hospital has the capsule maker to create it - the Shoppers Drug Mart at Sick Kids itself.

Each month, a week before I run out of my son’s medication, I call Shoppers to ask them to make my medication, giving them three days notice. (The medication has an expiry date so I can’t order too far in advance. Shoppers’ pharmacists require three days to get the medication ready for some reason.)

My brother-in-law’s girlfriend and now my husband have been going downtown since December to pick up my son’s medication, with our drug company covering all but $10 of the $53 bill.

So here is where I am annoyed.

My son obviously can’t swallow an adult-sized capsule. I have to break it open, mix it with sterilized water and draw it up into a syringe. My son sucks it out from there.

Shoppers charges us for the syringes.

I paid with credit card for the first few months so I didn’t notice the charge. My husband pays cash and he told me the drug store charges us 15 cents for each syringe, with each syringe lasting a few months.

Are you kidding me? Is Shoppers so cheap it can’t provide syringes for free? The drug store is the only one that can make the medication. We are forced to go to Shoppers. We are forced to work on their schedule and we are forced to drive more than a hour to get it. And they can’t provide a 15-cent syringe for free.

Pathetic really.

Just Wondering ...

I promise this will be the last time I write about grey hair for a little while but I was just wondering why when I shower and clumps of hair fall out, it is the brown ones that I stick to the wall, not the grey ones.

It seems a shame that I am losing the healthy, correct-colour hair but the grey/white/silver ones stay and multiply.

On another hair note, I was talking to my sister-in-law last night, while pulling out grey hair, and I found several clumps of grey and several ones that were a foot long.

Yikes.

Colour Any One?

With the amount of grey in my head I think there is only one choice - I must dye it before returning to work.

And that, quite frankly, sucks.

I am not THAT type of woman. I don’t spend hours applying makeup. I don’t wear makeup. I don’t get up early so I can do my hair. My type of haircut is one that allows me to get up, shower, comb and leave. I don’t put my clothes out the night before because I hate shopping so I actually have very little to choose from.
So the idea of dying my hair, and spending that kind of money, makes me sick.

As I see it, I have two choices in the hair dying solution: colour-in-a-box and highlights at a hair dresser.

Never venturing down a hair-colour aisle, I do admit most of this information comes secondhand, but I have been told that colour-in-a-box requires you to do it by yourself (yikes!), washes out quite quickly, exposing the very grey I am trying to hide, and really isn’t that cheap. Highlights, while expensive, last at least six months and allows me to keep - and highlight - the natural colours in my hair. And I don’t have to attempt it on my own.

Hmm.

Perhaps I do have one other choice. Go grey.

Greying Matters

My husband was pushing our son and I on the air mattress on the lake when he noticed something that I discovered months ago - grey has infiltrated my hair.

Several years ago, my stepdaughter decided to pull out my grey hairs and she yanked enough that she could have made a sweater for a gerbil or a small rat.

Now, if she had the time, she could pull out enough grey hairs to make a sweater for a small dog.

My mom kindly pointed out that she didn’t go grey until she was in her 40s. My husband said it is unlikely that I would be IDed at the casino anymore. In fact, he did mention that I may be able to get the seniors discount.

Bring it on.

We Are Off to See the Days ....

We are off to see my husband’s family, who lives outside of Napanee.

I am quite excited about our upcoming road trip except I am dreading the car ride. Our baby is not a car child. I figure it could be one, or more, of several reasons:

1. Payback
I have been told numerous times that I was a terrible car baby myself. I once screamed from my grandfather’s cottage in Bracebridge to my parents’ house, at least a three-hour ride. My dad had to sing Rock a Bye Baby over and over to settle me.
Singing helps for a bit but then it doesn’t, and my husband says my voice certainly doesn’t help him. Perhaps I am a tad tone deaf.

2. Car sickness
My mom now thinks it was likely car sickness that had me screaming for hours in the car, an affliction I still suffer. As I got older, the only thing that helped was listening to music with headphones, sitting in the front seat and the ultimate car-sickness cure - driving. As our son won’t taking the wheel for about 16 years, we’ll have to find another solution.

3. Loneliness or boredom
Our son is used to having someone’s attention or at least the ability to move around for his own entertainment. Despite how comfortable the car seat looks to me, perhaps it’s the feeling of being trapped he doesn’t like or ...

4. Instant gratification
... Or perhaps he is not used getting what he wants when he wants it.
I would imagine his hate of the car could be any of these things or perhaps he is hungry, wet, cold, hot, scared, confused, tired, not tired, blinded by the sun, uncomfortable or any other thing a baby feels and can’t tell us.

Wish us luck.

These Are The People In Your Neighbourhood

If you are looking for a way to meet your neighbours, I suggest simply getting pregnant, taking your year of maternity leave and walking up and down the street with your baby on a daily basis.

I have met more of my neighbours in the nine short months my son has been around than I did in the eight previous years.

While I have always said hello to my neighbours, most of whom live in the city and only come up on weekends, holidays and summer vacation, when you are pushing a baby stroller, people will come right up to you and stop and chat.

It has been wonderful.

I have met so many interesting people including one woman who has been coming to this neighbourhood since she was a girl in the 1940s. PG has three daughters and in the wonderful small world that we live in, I actually worked with one of her girls. I had never met L, who worked at my parent company, but we chatted on the phone a fair bit, and I finally got to meet her this summer when she popped to say hello.

So to recap: Baby equals great opportunities to meet new people.

Missing Our Sylvester

We put our cat, Sylvester, down yesterday. He had congenital heart failure.

Being a cat, Sylvester hid his pain and suffering for what was likely months, which makes me feel just dreadful. The poor guy’s lungs were filled with fluid so he felt like he was drowning.

At around 3 p.m. yesterday, we noticed Sylvester’s breathing was funny and by 6 p.m., he was no longer with us.

While I feel badly that we didn’t have a lot of time cuddling, I think he had a good last day. The night before he had steak for dinner and he spent part of the night cuddling under the covers with me, his chin tucked under mine, purring away. In the morning, my son and I scratched his ears and pet him for a while before our day began. He had a lick of peanut butter and a lick of Cheese Whiz for a snack after his breakfast of soft and hard food. Our son leaped over my legs to get at Sylvester, giving him a big sloppy kiss and a couple of pets, along with some yanking.


Unfortunately, I did sit on Sylvester in order to get his flea medication on, but he did get four treats and then spent some time outside before being brought in. We had some more petting time before he was forced into the car, his least favourite place, before being brought to the vet.


I really miss him today but feel most badly that our son will not grow up as planned with his furry brother, who was like a dog, child and cat to us.

Overcome by Dirt

For one simple reason, I love that I live a hour and a half away from everyone.

I never have to worry about the pop-in.

Because of the distance, people never pop by for an unexpected visit so I don’t have to worry when my house is messy or down-right dirty, which it is immediately after cleaning.

I am not sure if it’s because we live in a windowed house by the lake, or if it is that we are truly dirty people but my house is not just untidy, but it’s disgusting.

You don’t look up because there are cobwebs coating the windows; you don’t look down because some genius put red carpets in a house that has very little walls so the flooring is not only faded but also worn and impossible to get clean; and you don’t look directly in front of you because no matter what you do, the walls are grimy.

Now that we don’t have a wood fireplace heating our upstairs, things certainly have improved. However, we have exceptionally hard water so even when you are cleaning, walls, counters, clothing, remains dirty.

My solution - perhaps a match - and certainly a challenge to house-cleaning companies: Can you make this house clean? If you can, I will shout from hilltops about your services - and certainly blog about it.