Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
I am pretty sure I have mentioned this before, but I am a magazine-aholic. I currently subscribe to six magazines: Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, The Walrus, Cottage Life, and Toronto Life. I also get the Report on Business every month via my Globe and Mail newspaper subscription, bonus issues of Fashion (useless) …
Like many of my cohort, I am in deep denial with respect to my chronological age. In my head, I am in my early forties, officially grownup but still able to stay out way too late on a school night without dire consequences. The money the government sends me every month tells a different story. …
The Buicks have emerged from their winter slumber. The ones that live under the dock sun themselves with smug entitlement but startle and slip between the boards when I stomp my feet to gain a spider-free walkway to the swim ladder. I am not sure where the fuzzy dinner-plate-sized specimen that hangs out between the …
Contrary to popular belief, May is actually the cruelest month. Even though other months may be implicated, when the ice goes out and it is possible to get to the cottage, it is strictly May’s purview to reveal what winter’s months have wrought. Luckily this year, after the water pump went into the lake, there …
It is indeed winter, although some days it feels more like March than January. Not that I am complaining. The cats are the ones with full dibs on complaining these days. There are a surprising number of things to complain about when you are a cat (or at least when you are one of my …
The goose migration is finished. Although they do, of course, fly, I cannot imagine them being classy enough to leave from an airport on even the most discounted of discount airlines. Geese must leave from a bus station, after they have eaten discarded French fries and pooped on all available surfaces. “Bus departing on platform …
The good news: the hummingbirds are back. The bad news: the racoons are back. It is possible that I aided and abetted the latter because of my method of composting, which involves flinging vegetable peelings over the deck railing into the forest at large. In my own defense, the height of the deck provides the …
It has come to my attention that I am not the only household harbouring criminals. There have been two usurpers prowling in the backyard lately, a gray tabby and a calico. Henry oversees all of this from his perch on the railing of the second-floor deck. He likes to sit on the northeast corner in …
This is a suburban status report because the cottage is a wrap for 2020. That means we are now entering the phase of ‘things I’m pretty sure I forgot to bring home.’ These things reveal themselves slowly and it will likely take the entirety of winter for them to make themselves fully known. The upside …
It’s been twenty-five years since Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill. For each and every one of the years between then and now, she has had to suffer the scorn of English 101 students everywhere, because they are experts in recognizing and using irony as a device that can be verbal, dramatic, or situational, but …