The unbearable lateness of being... me

So, tonight I inadvertently cured my daughter of ever wanting to be early again.

You see, I can’t seem to be on time for ANYTHING. I actually once used the wind as an excuse for being a half hour late to pick up my daughter from school.¹

On this allegedly blustery day I went for a walk with a friend (good for me) and completely misjudged how long we would be gone (bad, but typical, for me). It normally takes me six minutes to walk from my house to the local Starbucks,² but it took fifteen minutes to do the reverse that day. Now, according to my mother-in-law, there is an incline on the road to my home.³ Plus this was the end of an hour-long walk and I’m pathetically out of shape. The hurrieder I’d go, the behinder I’d get, so I deduced that the wind must be impeding my progress.

Since I was already fifteen minutes behind schedule, I started to panic. Daughter’s school is at the top of a hill⁴ that generally boasts some absolute gale-forced gusts,⁵ but on this particular day (of all days) there was nary a breath of air to be found atop the hill. I arrived at the school to find a beautiful, breezeless sunny day. An observation I, of course, did not make until after I told the other parents I was late because of the wind.

Oh well. I’m sure they’ll be nicer to my kid if they think her mother’s developmentally delayed.

At any rate,⁶ my point with this idiotic digression is that I tend to be late a lot, seemingly for no good reason. Or rather, whenever I try to explain the reason, I further reinforce my DD designation.

But tonight we were early for soccer. Well, actually, we were late picking up hubby after work which somehow made us a little bit early for the game. We wanted to have plenty of time because daughter and four of her Under-10 teammates had been called up to play for one of the Under-12 teams.

We were the first to arrive for the 7 o’clock game – we were just in time to see another U-12 team from our club get to half time. They spotted my daughter in her striped game shirt and ran over, begging her to play or they’d have to forfeit the game because they didn’t have enough players. Only eight years old but already showing promising signs of the full-fledged guilt of a grown woman, daughter agreed to play even though she was absolutely terrified to play alone with these big girls – some of whom were four years older and about a foot taller than she is.

My point?

Uh.... Who the hell knows by now? Maybe it's that I’m always late because I never shut up?

Oh wait, I remember now. My point is... sorry I’m late with my blog. Again. :)


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1. Don’t worry, there are usually other parents around, and she knows to go to the office if the others leave and I’m not there yet. She knows this because, well, I’m late a lot. Or at least I used to be. I did ok this past school year. Most days. Except windy ones.

2. A fact determined once when my in-laws visited us for three weeks.

3. Albeit a slight incline. A really slight one. Like, not visible to the naked eye nor detectable by anyone who walks more than the length of themselves twice a week.

4. A bona fide hill this time, I swear.

5. Lemme esplain how frikkin' windy it is up there. If Chicago showed up and challenged the St. Stephen's hill to an arm-wrestling contest, the home of Oprah would henceforth have to be re-nicknamed the Gentle Tropical Breeze City. 

6. My father’s “time-to-end-this-conversation” catchphrase.

It's raining again

In constant fear that my internal organs are going to start tumbling out through my jitch, I’ve revived The Kegel Pole-ka^TM exercise regime.¹ You'll recall this involves a fair bit of walking, so I wisely decided to start yesterday, which happened to be the hottest, sunniest day we’ve seen for what seems like forever.² I walked pretty far in bad shoes, sweating and turning a bright and melty shade of red that had my satellite-office³ employees diving for the phone to call 911 when I arrived there looking all heart-attacky-ish.

So today I was working at Mount Saint Vincent University. (Note the name.) I didn’t have the car and had printed off a bunch of bus schedules so I could take the bus home. Unfortunately, in my printing frenzy I forgot to bring money or tickets for the bus, so I set out to track down some change. It was after 5 pm, and it’s summer, so the only thing open in the Seton Academic Centre complex was the library.

“Is there a bank machine here or would I have to got up to Rosaria?” I asked the friendly librarian, who must have been bored stiff and miserably lonely because she jumped up and ran towards me as soon as I opened the library door.

“I’m sorry, you’d have to go up to Rosaria.”

Rosaria is behind the library. It takes about three minutes to get there. But it’s up a hill. A steep hill. (This is where you recall the university’s name. The MOUNT.⁴) And there’re A LOT of crows there that time of day.⁵

So instead, in my infinite and ever-surprising wisdom, I opted to take the half-hour walk to the grocery store instead. In the rain.⁶ Actually it was more of a drizzle – one where an umbrella won’t even help⁷ because the drops don’t fall down, they just sort of hover and slide around through the air, making them impossible to escape. If you’re stunned enough to venture outside. Which I clearly am.⁸

Do you know what was going through my head as I walked? Yep, you guessed it: the theme music from Sex And The City. It’s not that I think I’m anything like Carrie Bradshaw (I wish), but it sure makes the walk more fun if you strut a little and pretend like you don’t know the bus with your picture on the side is about to come along and splash mucky water all over you and your pink-leotard-and-tutu dress.⁹

So I’m prancing (yes, prancing) down the Bedford Highway during rush hour, and it’s not the most picturesque sight – the railroad tracks on the left mar the view of Halifax Harbour and giant concrete retaining walls flank me on the right. But then I see this:

Here it is up close:

That’s right. It’s raining rose petals.

Be open to the happy, my friends. It’s out there – rain or shine.

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1. I’m also concerned that if I don’t start losing some weight, I’m going to need a new postal code now that Canada Post is back in action.

2. It’s been raining incessantly here for the past few months. We all have Seasonal Affective Disorder and want to kill each other. I’ve even taken to sniping at strangers on other people’s blogs and FaceBook about the stupidest things. I haven’t been this bitchy since I made a girl cry in Grade 10 debating. The topic was “smoking in bingo halls.” I have no idea if our team was pro or con. All that matters is that we won, bitches.

3. Starbucks.

4. Please – no nun sex jokes, k?

5. Like, thousands. No joke.

6. Did I mention that the hot sunny weather was short-lived? Mother Nature has a serious hate-on for us right now. I blame the NDP.

7. Not that I had the fucking foresight to bring an umbrella, of course.

8. By the time I reached Superstore, my hair had frizzed to such a size that I couldn't fit through the door.

9. Sorry – that’s the SAD seeping in.