Category: Life Lessons

Time to Vote

These are the very best desserts on the planet.

  • Fresh strawberries kissed with maple syrup on a freshly baked tea biscuit and real lightly-sweetened whipping crea.
  • Italian tiramisu made from scratch with freshly baked lady’s fingers soaked in real coffee
  • Tarte tatin which is little more than apples, vanilla bean, cinnamon sticks, butter, and a pie shell
  • A raspberry Pavlova with fresh whipping cream then raspberry coulis laid between layers of perfectly baked sweetened meringue disks
  • Lemon meringue pie with meringue piled high and lightly browned and honey marks in the crusty meringue
  • Gingerbread served hot with either cold, lightly sweetened whipped cream or a warm, tart, and silky smooth lemon sauce
  • A four-layer deep rich chocolate Devil’s Food cake piled high with homemade white boiled icing
  • Trifle: the true English variety served in a glass bowl made with fresh whipped cream, fruit, cake, and sherry and topped with slivered almonds
  • Creme brulee (in any permutation)but I prefer the classic caramel variety
  • Baklava in a crunchy phyllo crust with crushed pistachios and honey
  • Burfi in almost any flavor
  • Gulab jamun served cold out of the fridge floating in sweet syrup
  • Zabaglione: rich, sweet, and heavily laced with a robust Madeira wine
  • Homemade ice cream either served alone straight from the canister or on a fresh piece of warm fruit pie

Vote on one to three of your top favorites. Discuss your memories of them or any other not on the list. Surprise me. Have a delicious day.

Qzzohsnzlk, One event can change your life

I needed a humorous distraction today. This appeal landed in my inbox from a hungry entrepreneur.

Hey Qzzohsnzlk, One day I was casually scrolling on Facebook and came across a business conference invitation. I didn’t know the host but from what I could see, the information was exactly what I had been looking for…“

I believe the sender of that message meant to address it to me. It landed in my inbox after all. But the name Margot – my name – showed up nowhere in the invite, the salutation, or the body of the email.

It would have been personally addressed to me if my name was Qzzohsnzllk [quiz-oh-sen-zilk – my best effort at spelling it phonetically].

It is clearly a technical glitch. (Or is it? Now I wonder if I am the only one. I wonder if there is a whole population of Qzzohsnzlk relatives out there for me to track down.)

As a child, I was a devoted fan of Mxyzptlik [Mix-yez-piddle-ick] in the Superman comics. Myxyzptlik is usually presented as a trickster in the classical mythological sense. He possesses reality-warping powers which he uses to torment Superman and make his life difficult.

All that aside, I mostly just loved saying his name: Mix-yez-piddle-ick. It felt like the password to a secret club where you gained admittance only if you could say the “secret” name.

That is sorta how Rumpelstiltskin tried to trick a young woman. Through circumstance, the husband believed his wife could spin straw into gold when it was, in fact, Rumpelstiltskin who had done it. The young woman was clearly in a bind from which R. would only extricate her if she could guess his real name.

R. gave her three chances and the challenge was not going well. Had she not followed him one night and overheard his name said at a campfire, he would have taken her firstborn son. She guessed right, he didn’t and thus the story ends well for the wife, though R. was pretty ticked about it all.

And speaking of fairytales, you gotta laugh at some pitches that pop up in your inbox. Absolute strangers are taking an absolute flyer on seducing you into parting with some serious coin with their bold promises.

They work hard to get you to pay them money to find out how THEY did it (whatever “it” is, but usually almost instant fame and wealth). This pitcher apparently made $100,000 IN HER FIRST THREE MONTHS and now “so can you.”

She assures us her journey was not entirely a cakewalk: “I showed up. Got the answers, did the work, and the results came quick!“

Deliciously vague, no? As a curious type, I have questions. What did she show up for? What were the answers she got? What were the questions she asked to begin with? What work? And what were those quick results you got? I need to see the evidence.

I’ve pretty much learned what does and doesn’t come quickly in life. I have learned that the most valuable things and things we truly value take time to acquire and grow. Family. Career. Friendships. Equity.

I have also learned the value of getting someone’s name right as a basic element of a successful marketing pitch.

I get the appeal of the “get-rich quick” schemes. I have been in financial hot water before. There are a few times I would have grabbed and held fast to a blade of eelgrass if I thought it would help me improve my situation faster.

The nice lady closed with this: “Qzzohsnzlk, sometimes you are only one idea away from a major breakthrough.”

Copy that. I have decided – no personal slight intended – I won’t sign up for your life coaching, get-rich quick scheme … I mean, offer. In my world, that counts as a minor if not a major breakthrough.

It comes down to this. I followed gurus and chased mentors my whole adult life. No question they were valuable. But at a point, your definition of success and the path to get there must be mapped out by you. That is, we apply the lessons we have learned and hold our breath. Of course, we all need support and encouragement and a few bucks here and there to get by.

I’ve learned a true feeling of success and the self-esteem that goes with it starts when you are finally conducting your own orchestra, not just sitting in first chair. I wish the life coach lady well. I know she is only trying to make a living like the rest of us. Who knows? She may be fabulous at what she does for many people. She just isn’t going to do it for me.

Respectfully yours, Q

The Waiting Game

I’ve always wondered about English Literature curricula. I dutifully swallowed stacks of Shakespeare shoved at me in high school. More like nibbled at the juicy bits if I’m honest.

I could recite the entire balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet. But I couldn’t much relate to the two kids in the play. At best, my analysis described “two crazy kids overwhelmed by hormones from two families that didn’t get along and their story does not end well.”

I think about places where we so often have to be in life. Where we wait. Grocery stores. Banking machines. Doctor’s offices. Dentist’s offices. Just about any office associated with a medical practice.

Sometimes we know exactly what we are waiting for. At other times, it is a more vague kind of existential waiting or “I’ll know it when I see it” type of feeling. A generalized type of ennui.

Another confounding play we learned about in high school was Waiting for Godot. Two Italian guys keep holding themselves back instead of moving their adventures down the road because they are waiting for the selfsame Godot of the title, who never actually shows up.

The play is often interpreted as a depiction of the pointless, uneventful, and repetitive nature of modern life, which is often lived in anticipation of something which never materializes. That something is always just beyond the horizon, in the future, arriving ‘tomorrow’.

Well, now. Aren’t they a couple of cheery storylines to share with fragile young “chidults” which teenagers are? Their storylines are major buzzkills. These plays emerged from a time by writers who understood almost nothing promotes any certainty. Not love nor patience nor good deeds.

We are encouraged to “wait for absolution, or benefit, or reward or forgiveness.” The thing is if we don’t intervene and take active charge of our lives and the experiences we want to have in them, we are almost certainly going to be let down. And likely left out.

“Motion is lotion,” says my physical therapist, referring of course to the prescription for keeping joints limber. I would take that advice and apply it to all elements of life. Unless we are moving, we are stagnating. All fine and good if it is a temporary state of a few hours, even a few days. Both stasis and stagnation should be the breeding ground for devising your next move and for picking which direction you want to move in.

That direction should hold the promise of what you want to learn and how you want to spend your days. Want an education? Fill out an application form. Want to go on a date? Head to “target-rich” environments where there are other single people like you. Want to be rich? Study money. Watch how you spend it. Most important, clean up your relationship with money so it can be a good friend and not a constant torment.

Wait and see is a statement you can only make after you have planted the seeds or set something in motion. Then, and only then, should you settle back with a cup of coffee and wait for the phone to ring.

Ain’t It Awful?

There is a personal payoff in being a little withdrawn and isolated from the world occasionally. Many people spend a lot of time observing the world and listening to the news and hearing politicians expertly and bloodlessly dissect their opponents. Those people, understandably, often have a very dim worldview.

A common complaint I hear about the state of the world is that it is awful and they can’t do anything about it. For the most part, they are correct. But what most people don’t get is that what happens out there in those other theaters of life isn’t of much importance or relevance to their own daily lives.

Yes, of course, the decisions of politicians and policies and laws that are enacted affect our pocketbook and standard of living. They may decide what we can and cannot do or where we can and cannot go. As for our regular daily lives, they are simply so much noise. It is our choice whether to listen to that noise or not.

I feel sorry for young people today who are held sway by the endless pageantry of new developments in technology and the Internet. There is this influencer who must be followed and then that one and have you seen whats-her-names newest trend-setting video but he’s all the rage now and she no longer counts. How in hell do they keep it all straight in their heads. Maybe they don’t.

Unplugging from technology seems analogous to committing social suicide these days. It is particularly sad that young people – teenagers say – who are at the very point of trying to discover who they are and what they want to be in life, have to dig through, filter out and mirror their life choices against the preaching of dozens of online personalities. Strangers in point of fact.

I am not as vulnerable to this information overload as I once was but I cannot say I am not influenced. Some websites and video reels catch me and have an uncanny power to eat up a half hour or more of my time before I am even conscious of it. There are several excellent writers out there who have my attention and I feel I can barely keep up with their output.

The chief culprits in my life presently are Facebook video cooking reels. A revolving cast of chefs from all sorts of genres display feats of culinary prowess that I would give anything to replicate. The videos are almost choreographed ballets as much as they are recipe-sharing. Happily, I am old enough to realize, that while they are dazzling, I am not inclined to beat myself up if I cannot recreate their splendid creations in my own kitchen.

I take that analogy and apply its potential to more impressionable and searching young people. I can only imagine that they must suffer for not always having the “right” clothes, or the most up-to-date cellphone, and maybe spontaneous weekend trips to anywhere but here. It is kinda diabolical.

As old as I am and with the resources I can draw on, some of these come-ons attract me. I don’t act on them and I don’t suffer for not acting on them. But if I were younger, I might feel left out.

I was at first bemused by and then a little sad to learn there is an actual thing out there called FOMO – “fear of missing out.” It seems to be there is so much technological space litter available out there that you can’t help but be missing out on something.

It is like some kind of fiendish device that is deliberately designed to keep us all “off-balance.” It seems to force people to rely exclusively on “significant” “others” “outside” themselves to find joy and happiness. They even seem to rely on them to tell them who they are. That is the biggest fraud of all. And a dangerous one if you are particularly fragile or vulnerable.

My version of “Give Peace A Chance” is unplugging from time to time. I rarely watch the news on television anymore. It is an irritation to the spirit and has an eerily similar sameness with its litany of tragedy, and skulduggery, and focuses on the worst of what humans are and do.

Books give me greater comfort. I can pick and choose among them for lessons I want to learn and master and access the emotional experiences I want to have. That is why popular successful authors are so popular. They are reliable and predictable in their style and output. Sure seems to me that in a world that is most kindly described as a little topsy-turvy, I’ll take a circuitous John Grisham novel bashing the legal system over CNN and Youtube anytime.

It keeps a rein on my sanity and a paddock for my well-being.

Rich vs. Poor

I’ve been thinking about these two states of being a lot lately: wealth and poverty. I have been in and out of one or the other at various times in my life. Rich wins the popularity contest as it means the bills are paid and you don’t have to fret about where your next meal or rent payment is coming from.

But poor is a great teacher, too. Though clearly not as popular. It can teach you how resourceful and resilient you are. It can also teach you valuable lessons about what is important.

I learned that lesson as a teenager. In my very earliest days as a working girl, I sold Avon cosmetics. You know, the brand. Perfumes. Lipsticks. Usually packaged and sold in cute little bottles that have gone on to become collectors’ items worth ridiculous amounts of money.

It was something of a rite of passage for “working girls” in my crowd and the provincial part of the world I came from. In any case, it was not a disgraceful vocation. Still, I looked down on it and on myself when I was doing it. But had I not done it, I would not have learned a great lesson.

A thin woman with a strained face and a ponytail, a big smile, and several kids in tow came to see me about her husband’s Christmas present. She had many questions about the reliability of delivery and wanted to ensure her order would arrive by Christmas Day. In those days, we did not take payment upfront. It was strictly payment on delivery.

The lady carefully looked over the offerings in my sample case. Smelling each fragrance with great intensity and earnestness. She picked out an aftershave for her husband called Wild Country. It came in a bottle that looked like cowhide. It would cost her $8 when it was delivered. $8.56 with 7% sales tax. So she placed the order with me and went on her way, her gaggle of kids in tow.

It seemed to take forever for the Avon orders to come in that December. However, when they arrived, I managed to distribute and receive payment for most orders in fairly short order. But the pony-tailed lady kept putting me off with one excuse or another. “Too busy.” “One of the kids is sick.” “Car’s low on gas.”

My spidey senses were triggered. I was going to lose this sale and have to eat that $8.56. I thought ungenerous thoughts. “That’s what you get for selling to poor people.” “You should have known she was going to squelch on the deal.” And a string of other thoughts that would have landed me in a confessional if I were Catholic.

Then, to my surprise, I got a phone call early on Christmas Eve afternoon. The thin woman wanted to ensure I was home. She was coming for the Wild Country.

When she showed up at my door, she didn’t have a few of her kids with her. She had all eight of them in tow. Each one was shiny as a new penny, in crisp, clean clothes, shiny shoes, and some hair evidently recently washed. They were going to Christmas Eve service, she explained, after this stop.

She also had her husband with her. He was as tall as she was short. He had the faint air of Frankenstein about him – in a good way. Think Herman Munster on The Addams Family. He was mostly non-verbal. They all crowded in the foyer of my small apartment. Mastering all the stealth and subterfuge she could manage, she instructed hubby to keep the kids busy while she spirited me into another room to collect her goods.

On the side table by my bed (which passed for an office/retail store in those days), she carefully counted out eight crisp dollar bills, two quarters, a nickel, and a penny. She was beside herself with excitement. I discreetly packed the after-shave box in an Avon bag which she covertly concealed in the shopping bag she was carrying.

It then dawned on me that the bottle of Avon Wild Country aftershave was the sole Christmas present for her beloved husband from her and all of the kids. I felt about two inches tall.

Not only did I completely misread her character and intentions, I saw the love and joy she had for her man who had gifted her with all those kids. I thought back guiltily on the Christmases with gifts piled high for me and my sisters as well as for Mom and Dad. Opening presents could take more than an hour back in the day.

I learned a valuable lesson about the meaning of wealth and poverty that day. That family likely didn’t have an extra quarter to spare in the household. I thought about the daily struggle those parents must have gone through in managing the care and feeding those eight little ones. Their devotion to one another was palpable.

Instead of their obvious financial lack, I saw the wealth they did have that is rarer than money. Their cup runnethed over with love. I made up that word. Because it works and I like it.

Suffering from Right-Way-ism

You know the types I mean. The ones who always know the “right way” to do things. The ones who believe there is only one “right way” to do things.

They not only know how to do things the “right way” but they insist that you do things the “right way” (code for “their” way), too.

Those types made me miserable for a large part of my life. Now they just make me crazy. I tend to walk in the opposite direction to escape their certitude – emphasis on “their.”

I love problem-solving. I expect that comes from my long line of ancestors that includes machinists and engineers and shoemakers for whom exactitude was imperative to their work.

Of course, I firmly believe that in order to break the rules, one must first learn what they are. I think about many creative professions – painters, musicians, and writers, for example. They all must know the basics of their craft before they become impresarios. Those basics are usually hard-won by mindless hours of practice and perfecting techniques.

In the writing game, or more specifically, the journalistic writing game, this is known as “paying your dues.” Flights of fancy and artful turns-of-phrase usually only emerge after hours spent hunched over countless blank pages that must be turned into something digestible for an audience.

Musicians are much the same. Not one of those fancy guitar pickers can launch into mind-blowing solos until they have learned musical scales.

Creatives transform into artists if, and when, they have mastered the basic techniques of their craft. Becoming an artist is not a given. Unless you cleave to the theory that artistry is god-given.

The truth is that fear confounds the heart and soul of many creatives who might have or could become great artists. To become great means to take risks. Many people, including creatives, are not risk-takers.

I think back to the craftspeople of my Canadian home province. In New Brunswick, there are numerous brilliant craftspeople. What sets the artists in their field apart from the journeymen of the trade is risk-taking.

Many solid potters produce and make a decent living by producing vast numbers of essentially the same patterns with the same glazes that the same people come back and buy year after year.

One can certainly respect their output and work ethic but it would be a stretch to call them artists in their field. The Canadian arts community recognizes outstanding craftsmanship with the annual Saidye Bronfman Awards. The artist who produce stupefying pieces of breathtaking beauty are honored with a title and a cash award.

Most of these artists no longer do their art “the right way.” Far from it. They have transcended and pushed the boundaries of their craft into formerly unknown creations. They gently thumb their noses at the rules they were taught as apprentices and, while still honoring the basics of their craft, push on to create something that had formerly not been conceived of.

We tend to forget (or more likely never knew unless we were art students) how ground-breaking and genre-defying the artworks of Picasso, Jackson Pollock or Paul Klee or even Andy Warhol were before they brought their creative visions into being.

So take pity on those who are bound by the conventions of doing everything the “right way.” By doing so, you will likely walk a straight and narrow path for the rest of your life. And that is all you will do.

To make waves, change hearts and minds, influence social movements, and address injustice, art must sometimes be done “the wrong way.” That means by saying or showing or even singing about wrongs that need righting, humanity moves forward. Counter-intuitive as that may sound.

Self-Care

This is my 81st post in a row. Nothing particularly special about that number, just noteworthy.

As a refresher for those who may have just recently joined me, I started this blog on March 14, 2023, with a view to documenting my book-writing journey. I planned and still plan to write a post every day for 365 days in total. Ostensibly until I have a manuscript in hand.

I guess I wondered what I would learn along the way. Well, here’s something I’ve picked up. Life intervenes. That was inevitable and I knew that starting out. I did wonder how I would handle life’s interventions when they did come up.

So far, I’ve managed to keep writing daily posts through my daughter’s visit with all of the delicious deviations and distractions, all the machinations and legal/financial back and forth and endless phone calls involved in buying a house, going through a stop-start immigration process, which is still stopping and starting. All that is on top of just daily living.

So today I felt myself vacillating. I was going to sign off on this post with two sentences and excuse myself. But then I realized that this stage is as much a learning stage as any other. I need to remind myself about self-care.

There have been minor but time-consuming medical procedures to contend with on top of all the aforementioned issues. I am exhausted. A temporary casualty of my “busy-ness” has been my faithfulness to my 3X weekly women’s writing group. I miss it and the consistency of carving out those two hours three days a week to get grounded and just write.

If a friend of mine was going through what I have been going through, what would I tell her? “Honey, it will be just fine.” “It is a marathon, not a sprint.” That is generally a good perspective to keep in mind whether chasing a degree, a house-building project, child-rearing, or writing a book.

The world will not fall apart if you don’t publish every single day for 365 days. No one will punish me. I am good enough at doing that myself.

I once did a 60-day yoga challenge. That meant showing up consistently for a one-hour yoga class every single day for two months. Boy, there were days I didn’t want to go. So I did workarounds. My favorite workaround was yoga nidra. I felt like. a naughty child because this yoga “practice” essentially means lying flat on your back and breathing deliberately and deeply for an hour. Heck, I could have done that in my sleep. In fact, a couple of times, I think I did.

The point is, I have created for myself something of a false idol with my goal of daily publishing something I’ve written. It is a worthy goal and I have no plan to shirk it. I just don’t feel the need to twist myself into knots whether or if I do or not. Heaven knows it might be a welcome relief for readers!

A technical glitch had me miss a day in my publishing continuity this week. I did not read about this grievous oversight on the front page of The New York Times. Oddly.

So I am off to bed. Clear conscience. Happy to have gathered this assembly of words together and to push them out into the world come what may. We, women, are notorious for putting all sorts of absurd and unrealistic expectations on ourselves.

More and more I prefer the route of self-care when life warrants as it often does. That goes for me and anyone else out there who occasionally struggles with the weight of life’s load.

Get yourself into a comfortable position. Put that extraneous clutter out of your head for a while. Breathe deeply. Relax. You can thank me later. You’re welcome.

Self-Regulation

If anyone detects a throughline in my posts lately, you are right. I am a little obsessed about the ups and downs of my emotions. No, I am not manic-depressive. I am, however, something of a stress case.

I am stressed by the complexities of the household move we are making. And, in good old hunker down and get ‘er done fashion, I’m trying to act as if it is not bothering me one bit. But it is bothering me. Quite a bit.

Yesterday a lady from whom I had purchased two armchairs on Facebook Marketplace leaned on me rather imperiously to come and collect them. I have 73 things on my plate at the minute. Picking up her chairs was somewhere around 65 on my priority list. Why couldn’t she ease off and understand the stress I am under?

Turns out she was under some stress, too. Imagine? They were packing up to leave the following day on an extended trip. She had just had two disks inserted into her spine. As I watched her walking upright around her living room, I was impressed and amazed but also embarrassed by my childish reaction to her insistence that I pick up what I bought.

I thumbed through my mental Rolodex (remember those?) and the common denominator in this type of uncomfortable situation was me. Something to do with growing up without boundaries sometimes makes it very difficult to impose them on myself.

I had grown up accustomed to having inappropriate responsibility heaped upon me without oversight or intervention by my parents. There were very few rules in our household when I was growing up. Beyond those where we worked to keep up appearances of normality and hide the addictions and violence between the parents going on behind closed doors.

In a worldly and sophisticated city like Paris or London, our family might have been perceived as Bohemian. Being a Bohemian had a certain artistic cachet in a big city. In a small conservative town, it was simply seen as neglect.

I ached when most of my friends were called home to supper or nervously checked their Timexes as it inched closer to the time they had been told to be home. Me and my two sisters rarely had to be home at a specific time for anything, let alone sit-down meals.

There was no set bedtime on any night – even school nights – throughout my childhood. We stayed up with and partied and socialized as long as the adults did. The line between freedom and neglect was very thin in the household I grew up in.

As I grew older, my lack of internalized boundaries often showed up in a wide and rapid range of my felt emotions. An old boyfriend often used to say: “Margot, you’re “too.” What I thought was charming and coquettish behavior, others likely perceived as bad-mannered and precocious. I longed to be calm and cool like many of my other girlfriends. I had no idea how to do that.

With time, it got better and easier to settle myself down in stressful situations and hold my tongue and not say something I would invariably come to regret. I eventually taught myself strong and consistent boundaries. Most of the time, the dyke holds.

But I was already tired and overwhelmed and rundown by the time this lady started demanding something of me that mostly just felt like “one more thing.” I was still smarting over the paint-ruined carpet of the day before and had just had an inane conversation with the security system installation representative. I was beat. I am beat.

What is different now from days gone by is recognizing me in all of my “bitchy, over-the-top, I’ve had enough and need to lie down” glory. What followed my little phone outburst of sarcasm and displeasure with the lady I had been rude to were copious declarations of mea culpa. That’s progress, I guess.

Tomorrow – aside from the things I must do – will be about attacking that absurd and overburdened “to-do” list and cutting it down to a manageable size. It is okay to take time and let weeks, even months pass before we settle into our new digs. As is often said in healing circles, I’m “setting boundaries.”

I’ll be setting boundaries both with myself and with the unrealistic expectations I created for myself. Easing up on myself and letting go of some of the irritants somebody else can take care of.

Now there you go. I feel better already.

I’m Such A Hypocrite

Do I present as someone who is cool, calm, and collected? Most of the time? I try to. Well, I am here to tell you, I am a fraud. I aspire to be one of those “too cool for school” kids. I consistently fail.

Seeing a massive blob of dark navy oil paint on a pale brown carpet in the bright light of day in my “brand new to me” house set me off. Remember yesterday when I said how calm, cool, and collected I was over this little “accident?” I was either delusional or lying. I was actually livid.

Here is what I hate about “mistakes.” They inevitably cost time, energy, and money. How much depends on the magnitude of the mistake. Murder someone, get caught and you’ll likely end up paying with your life for the rest of your life.

Car “accidents” alter the course of people’s lives. In horrific and tragic ways. I have experienced those tragedies with people in my very own circle. The outcome is – as in the wake of all accidents – there is aught to do but pick up the pieces, work at healing, and try to put life back together. Irreversibly altered.

By comparison, a square-foot indelible blob of navy blue in a piece of carpet paint has cost me very little. But it has cost me. To start, the carpet has to be taken up and trashed. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, I worked frantically with water and paint remover, and cleaning spray to remove the blob. That now bemuses and saddens me a little bit. The fate of that carpet was sealed at the moment that paint can fell over.

So the initial “move-in” plan was to get the rooms painted – bippity, boppity, boo. Painting would have taken a day or two. Then the carpet cleaners were to come in. I was going to give the carpets a day or two to dry really well. Then – when the carpets were practically desiccated – the furniture could be moved in.

We would sit in our new living arrangement and “ooh” and “aah” over our new digs and hoist a glass of bubbly together to celebrate. I don’t see that happening now for a month.

The next week will be filled with getting on the phone to make appointments with other painters, meeting up with them, getting estimates, and deciding among them before the job even starts. That’s at least a week.

I’ll be schlepping back to the hardware store to get more paint plus carving out time to be on the job site to “supervise” people. Clearly, I should have supervised this job, too. I just told my concerned husband my mood would improve when this situation improves.

As I often do, I am looking for the lesson in this very minor disaster. Good parents teach their kids a lot of little life lessons in the safety of their home environment before they are launched in to adulthood.

Children should be encouraged to make a lot of little mistakes when they are young so they don’t make them again when they are established adults. It is the rule of “the hand on the hot stove.” If it happens once when you are a child, it is unlikely to happen again later in life unless there are copious amounts of alcohol involved.

The consequences of adult mistakes are often much harder to unravel. The emotional and temporal costs are hard, too, but harder to put a price tag on.

So in the wake of this screwup, I am looking for the “blessing in disguise.” We have decided laminate flooring is the way to go in the now carpeted areas given our lifestyle and lackluster housecleaning chops.

My dear friend and architect Diane – who knows just about everything there is to know about houses and job site screwups – gave me a boost when she sent me a message saying: “Hey, maybe there is hardwood underneath the carpet!”

Unlikely but it gave me a chuckle and a glimmer of hope. Sometimes that is enough to get you through inevitably difficult life patches. Friends rule.

Stuff

Days of reckoning. We are moving into a new house and the dreaded stuff sort has begun. What to take – and why. What to leave behind – and why. What to let go of – forever. What does that even mean?

The stuff will either be useful or not. Beautiful or not. Sentimental enough to be worth keeping – or not. I am both excited and daunted by the prospect.

Stuff has been something of a creative and escapist pastime of mine. I have lived a life filled at various times with either lack or abundance. I have learned important lessons from both states. Abundance has been nice and it is extremely comforting not to have to worry about where the next infusion of money is coming from or what bills have to be paid this month.

Lack taught me much, too. I learned how little I really needed to survive materially. Once the basics of food, shelter, and clothing are covered, almost anything else is gravy. There were days when I accepted charity from the church. I learned humility and grace from those experiences.

I also learned about money in a more fervent way than I might have had I not been driven by want.

I am fascinated by humans’ ingenuity in the realm of invention, innovation, creation of beauty, and practicality.

Perhaps oddly, soft furnishings come to mind, for example. There are so many different textures and colors and patterns to choose from. Knitted or woven shawls were a standard part of a woman’s daily costume for centuries. Women gained both social and practical satisfaction by joining together in quilting bees.

The appearance of dish towels, for example, would have emerged from the practical necessity of housewives and servants in days gone by to get the washing up done in a timely manner after meals. A fascination with the practical uses of fabric emerged in concert with the general use of “soft furnishings” as decorative additions to living spaces. Quilts, afghans, comforters, cozies, foot warmers, and for a time, the ubiquitous doily that adorned every piece of wooden furniture. The product of some woman’s effort and talent in crochet or tatting.

There has long been self-expression in stuff, whether it is homemade goods, fashion, home decoration or jewellery. It is interesting to contemplate how “taste” or “personal fashion preferences” emerge. As a child, I used to pore through the Sears’ catalog and dream about all the stuff I would acquire when I was a grownup.

I remember a particular fixation with a pretty red dress with white dots and a red underslip. It had a modified type of small Dutch red ruffle at the neckline and ties that pulled the dress in tight in the back. It had pretty little transparent red short sleeves. I thought it was the prettiest dress I had ever seen in my life.

I wonder what I would think if I saw that dress now. I might be embarrassed at how quaint and dated it looked.

So as I am facing the stuff I’ve collected over a lifetime that needs to be faced in order to transition from this life to a new life, I feel the familiar pull of sentimentality for some objects. Faux practicality for others (I may be able to use that someday). Or the penny-pinchers decluttering dilemma (I paid a lot of money for that!!)

As I am about to face the hoard, I am forced to admit that stuff was at one time more important to me than people. Easier to acquire and oddly harder to let go of than some acquaintances. Stuff doesn’t push back. Not deliberately at any rate.

So wish me luck, dear readers, and a following sea. I am aware now that the people going through this process are actually more important than any of the stuff we bring into our new situation.

Today already I smashed two out of a matching set of four coffee cups. Our painter – with copious, if ineffectual, apologies – spilled about a cup of dark blue paint on our light brown carpet, destroying it.

There was a time when I would have lost it over the carelessness of the painter and my own clumsiness for breaking the cups. I admit I am much better at taking them in stride. I think I am also growing much more practical. We had too many cups and I can now switch out the flooring to the waterproof laminate I wanted to install anyway.