Go Fish Smackdown

Fiorellina is at a great age (5). She's totally confident with her numbers and letters so she can play games now. We got a game box from one of the grandmas with some board games as well as Go Fish, Old Maid and Crazy Eights.

She's not fooling around with the Go Fish. We've been in a tournament since yesterday afternoon and she's really good. No need to let her win, since she beats me 1/2 the time. And she's so proud of herself! She gets a devlish little laugh when she gets the cards she needs and she's also figured out how be sneaky - as in when she knows I've got a card (because I've been asking for it) as soon as she draws it, she remembers to steal if from me! And she even looks sneaky when she does it.

The tourney recently had to close when one of the 9 cards went missing. It's around here somewhere, but we're going to move onto Crazy Eights. Let's see how she does when the stakes get a little higher and the game gets a little more complicated.

A Flurry of Holiday Posts, Part I

I guess I needed to be off the grid for a few days. I've spent most of my time since returning from Ottawa with the kiddies, getting ready for Christmas (which came and went in a hurry), and making up for some lost time. We spent two days up north at my parents house. A Humble Chef returned to T.O. on Boxing Day so he could go to work early the next morning, but the kids and got home yesterday afternoon.

My favourite thing at Christmas, except for watching the kids get whacked out on excitement, is sitting in my parents' living room in front of the Christmas tree and the fireplace. The snow was missing this year, but I read a good book - A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. It was with a bit of reluctance that I took leave of the couch in front of the fire and packed up the gifts, and the luggage and the kids and drove home. I think I may be a little less fond of the city after that book. The country makes me crazy for its own reasons, but it's hard to beat for pure relaxing.

unMotherhood?

Since September, I have dropped Fiorellina off at school exactly three times and all three times I managed to get her there late. Friday, her last day before Christmas break, was no exception. Apparently she also normally goes with a school bag, a snack, and a gift for her teachers. Am I supposed to know where her school bag is, what she eats for snack or whether anyone has purchased gifts for her teachers? Okaaaaay, being her actual mother, some people might expect that I'd know such things.

I sort of forget how long it takes to get two little children dressed in the morning, the negotiation and wrangling required. It takes longer than 20 minutes, so I really need to get them up before 8 a.m. if I want to get out the door by 8:25 a.m.

But I did alright when she started barfing this morning (without fail, someone gets sick at Christmastime). And I got through two entire hours of shopping on the last Saturday afternoon before Christmas with the Big Boy in tow, with nary a meltdown. Now that's parenting.

Now There Are No Green Speckled Frogs

Last exam done and done. Well, at least until I figure out whether I completely bombed it. In which case I get a do-over for this one because of a medical deferral which I could have taken advantage of. What's that you say? A medical deferral?!

Yesterday, I spent 3 hours in the clinic to discover that I have an inner-ear infection. That would explain the dizzy, stumbling around. I sort of temporarily wondered if I'd done some drinking that had slipped my mind. Nope! Turns out I have fluid in my centre of balance.

So that created a kind of unhappy exam situation. Didn't study much yesterday, but didn't exactly feel unprepared. I didn't want it hanging over me during the holidays, so I just got it out of the way. It wasn't the most pleasant experience I've ever had but exams never are, are they?

On the plus side, my true friend and colleague gave me a bottle of Scotch for Christmas. A bottle of Scotch! We have a pact to drink it together, glass by glass between January and April.

On the plus-plus side, I'm done my first semester of 1L. And I better than survived.

Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings

I realised in my last post that I managed to be both abjectly apathetic and giddily excited. Somehow not complimentary feelings, and yet true under the circumstances.

And nothing says conflicting emotions like more youthful poetry! I don't know why, but I'm terribly amused by my youth these days (not that my youth is behind me...)

5-y-o rage, 2-y-o jealousy (Per E.) (Nov. 98 R.E.)
a description of your
five-year-old rage
goes like this:
frustration that hyperventilates
over nothing but frustration
and an inability to communicate,
hate that you cannot understand;
my bruised body on the brink
of alcoholism at the dinner table
and patience that exists
only in the imagination.

your two-year-old jealousy is:
blond, curly hair
and short, like silk
that demands attention
and curiosity,
a guttural laugh
and a giggle;
twice what you are
and yet not at all,
love and hate
and bittersweet,
that's all.

Now that I have kids, that has a bit of a new meaning, even though my kids totally love each other.

And Then There Was One

In spite of my more or less abject apathy towards the writing of exams, torts was quite amusing. Anything that involves James Bond with a tatoo across his muscled chest that says "Do Not
Resuscitate" is at least going to be amusing. Who can say "consent to medical procedures"?!

Post exam playlist: Chris Isaac, Hawksley Workman, Cat Power, Sarah Harmer, and Danny Michel all on shuffle.

I'm feeling giddy excitement at the prospect of only having one exam left. If only it wasn't going to kick my a**! But none of that matters now. Che sara, sara and this time next week I'll be sitting on the floor of our living room in T.O. surrounded by castle toys and wrapping paper and the three people that give me the best reasons for being in law school in the first place.

Brain Junk

I have resorted to Pizza Pizza, Coke and M&M's to get me through the next several hours of tort law. My brain is feeling cottony at the moment (and why I think junk food will help that is completely illogical). I've officially become bored with exams. There is nothing exciting about this process, unlike law school in general.

We're headed into week 3 of exams, most of which has been spent labouring over some form or another of summary in relative isolation. I'm feeling cut off from my peers and profs, which is what (whom, to be precise) I like the most about law school.

Isn't there some constitutionally protected right being infringed by this stupid process?????

Bruce Ziff, I Owe You A Beer

I might just pass my property exam tomorrow, thanks in no small part to Bruce Ziff, author of Principles of Property Law (Fourth Edition) and accompanying case book. Thank you, Ziff, for the following two sentences:

"In short, under Canadian property law all testators can become King Lear for a day!" (It would not be the same without that exclamation mark!)

"Until relatively recently, engaging in the Sisyphean chores of housework had not given rise to right to the property over which one laboured..." (Apparently, Ziff has feminist aspirations.)

And the following five words:

Hedonic 1 of or characterised by pleasure. 2 Psych. of pleasant or unpleasant sensations.

Fugacious 1 literary fleeting, evanescent, hard to capture or keep. 2 Bot & Zool. falling or fading early; soon cast off. I can't even believe this is a real word!

Chary (qting judgment) 1 cautious, wary. 2 sparing; ungenerous. 3 shy.

Otiose adv. serving no practical purpose; not required; functionless. He's not talking about property law is he...?

Hortatory adj. tending or serving to exhort. These words exist for people to use them. Good on ya!

No, seriously Ziff, I think you might be friends with my prof, so next time you're in town, I totally owe you a beer.

The Optimist Revealed

In lieu of sleeping (restless) or studying property law (cant...take.it...any.more.) I've spent quality time with PhotoShop (oh, how I've missed you). I could be drinking Scotch right now (nod, nod) but instead I shall write about why I am a The Closet Optimist.

Curiously, it all began in this very city at the piano bar of the Chateau Laurier...

There was a time in my life when I was a Millennium Scholarship Excellence Award Laureate (I am officially a nerd) and I was here for a conference. Typically, I was hanging out with the cynical do-gooders, the ones who skipped laugh yoga to go to the bar for a drink. We kept kind of making fun at the people who were really chirpy. On the last night, after the gala at the Chateau, the same few of us hit the piano bar. And we invited Andrew Woodall (director of the Excellence program) to sit with us. And we challenged him a little (but probably not much) on the relative merits of chirpy do-gooders. And he said to me, "I don't believe for a minute that you're really a cynic."

To which I replied, after a moment of thought, "Ok, I guess I'm a closet optimist." And they all liked it, so here we are today.

It's Back! The Recurring Exam Nightmare

It just happened. I just had a two-hour nap to recover from my constitutional law exam (Damn you, Law test! Damn you, remedies!) and while sleeping I had the recurring dream that I inevitably have during exams and when I'm under particular stress.

The dreams always change a little bit to fit the circumstances (for example, this one took place in my Ottawa apartment), but they always involve some or all of my teeth crumbling out of my mouth.

Who can tell me what that means? It's a recurring dream that I've had for many years now. I kind of have a thing about my teeth, I guess. My dentist likes to say that I won the genetic lottery with my mouth, so there's very little chance of my teeth crumbling and falling out, but apparently the thought horrifies me.

Norman Mailer, One Helluva Guy

The Proust Questionnaire in the January edition of Vanity Fair features Norman Mailer and he has some of the most fantastic answers ever!

Q: What is the quality you most like in a woman?
A: Beauty, mystery, wit, and the inner superiority to be above political correctness.

Self, let me be that woman!

Welcome to Ottawa, the Smallest World in the Town

Apparently Ottawa is the Capital of the Small World.

During orientation I met a woman at an event. We started chatting and turns out she's got a two-year-old son, so we jive on that. Turns out we have a couple of classes together and eventually we figure out that her husband grew up in the same place I did. He went to school a year ahead of my sister. Then, another day she tells me they were back there for a wedding. Whose wedding? A girl and guy that I went to school with (I was in school with the guy from the time is was in primary). Who was the maid of honour? Another girl I was friends with when I was younger - our dads worked together.

Then, one day I'm in line at the coffee shop (coffee is the friend of all law students). Another woman I have some classes with turns and says, "I know your cousin in Winnipeg, we worked together." Whatthe?! Then last night, I found out the same woman actually knows my roomie from when they were both at Glendon a year apart. So she was there when I was there (my brief stint at Glendon), and I totally thought she looked familiar, but I just thought it was from seeing her around law school. Maybe not.

It's a small world after all.

* I just met someone today whose husband is from where I grew up too AND she knows some people I know from the good old Awenda/SMATH/DiscoHarbour days. What a weird place this is...

The Official Last Post Before Exams

I doubt this will be the last post until Dec 21 (my final day of exams), but this is the last post until exams begin. Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.

People are starting to go a little crazy. I'm either in a state of denial or sheer confidence (sure, I'll get all that studying done!).

Chris Isaak, for some reason, has become the music to study to. Mellow, but not too boring, and not too not-boring.

I need to go grocery shopping but it seems like the sort of thing I can't take a time-out for. Stupid! Since eating would probably be a good idea. So far I've survived on egg sandwiches, but there are only two eggs left, so that won't get me through today.

Okay, time to end this excessively boring post (you know you're avoiding when...). Contract law, here I come.

All I want for Christmas

Just in case Santa reads blogs, here's a random list of things I'd dig:

* Extra battery for my Dell Inspiron 9300. Long train rides. Short battery life. Two outlets per car. That's math that even I can do.
* Black's or Canadian Law Dictionary. I don't know if this will help me, but I have that thing about dictionaries.
* An iPod. Yes, I might be the only person who doesn't have one. AND I'm totally getting suckered in, but my current MP3 player is underperforming - my musicon has dramatically improved since moving in with my musically well-endowed roomie. I need something with some serious capacity.
* A digital SLR. Haha! No one's going to buy me that, but I thought I'd throw it in. Bizarrely, law school is making me extrememly creative while leaving me with little time to pursue and even fewer resources to execute. I'm trying to work that part of it out, to no avail so far.

This will all be moot if I fail to survive exams. Maybe that should be on my list too.

Our Children Are So Precious When They Are Young

Not that I'm having existential crises all of the time about the choice to live in a different city from my children in order to study law or anything, but I would hardly be human if I didn't occasionally feel a bit hard on myself. As a society, we love to love mothers and we love to hate them.

Anyway, occasionally my children affirm me. They still love me, apparently, in spite of the weekly abandonment. According to cher monsieur, our charming and adorable five-year-old said that mummy goes to a "special school only really smart people go to" and that her school is for playing and having fun but mommy's school is really hard but still fun.

Last week, she spied snowmen decorations on someone's lawn and said that we should get some too, but that we should get snow WOMEN. Awesome! She's a feminist!

That kid is smart as a whip. She's waaaaaay smarter than I am. And she's totally adorable. And I'm not just saying that because I'm her mother. I swear.

We Are So Precious When We Are Young

I half take back what I said below in the Wordsworth post about being poetic. Apparently there was a time in my life when I was poetic. Or at least I wanted to be. It coincided with the time in my life when I was living in Europe, riding a bike everywhere and drinking a bottle of wine per day (oh, shut your judgmental mouths, the wine was provided to me by my employers who still entrusted me with their little children and obviously realized that a bottle of wine would help in the rearing of their brood. When in Rome...).

This may be destined to be Awkward Web Moment Part II, when I reveal my youthful poetry, but it's so precious, that I'm going to risk humiliation.

Good Advice (Feb 99 R.E.)
Shed this agony of separation
and dance! Dance!
Dance as if you were barefoot
on the green grass of summer
Do twirly-whirls until dizzy
as you did when a child
And welcome back the innocence
of those pleasures
that's love's treasure map
has led you to rediscover,
Those treasures you once hid
from Pirates.

Just pretend it wasn't me who wrote that next time you see me. In truth I was a different person anyway, so that wouldn't be much of a stretch.

Ambiguous No More

Wow, the aforementioned ambiguity totally lasted as long as it took me to walk to the bus stop in the freezing rain.

Nothing says fun like a four hour train ride in wet clothes.

First Snow of Ottawa

Yesterday morning it may have been 10 degrees and warm, but this morning I woke up (after a night of unrest) to snowfall. I feel a little ambiguous about this new weather development. I hear it's unrelentingly cold in O-Town during the winter months. But I wore my real winter coat for the first time today, and I kind of liked it.

When I walk to the bus to go to the train station, I usually walk past this church on Wilbrod. All fall I noticed on the sidewalk these beautiful impressions of fallen leaves. I could never tell if they had fallen in fresh cement and left a sort of fossil, or if they were just fallen leaves that decomposed until they were a ghost of their past selves. They always always struck me as just so beautiful.

The smoke pluming from the chimney of the house below my window is lovely and rich, but the sidewalks are already dirty and wet. Will the ghosts of our past selves be lost in the mush?

Like I said, ambiguous.