Today’s latest temper tantrum: “I wanna go play hockey! I wanna go play hockey! I wanna go play hockey!”

M’s comment: “At last! The words I’ve yearned to hear.”

My comment: “Oh God. There go her teeth.”

Then after M. left we were discussing how he wouldn’t be home in time for bedtime and she had this to say:

“Daddy’s going to bring me some new booze from the store!

Huh?!?!?!?!

When asked to repeat herself: “Daddy’s going to bring me some new boots from the store.”

Ah yes. That makes more sense considering she found last year’s boots and tried them on just before dinner which lead to a discussion about how they were too small and we’d get her some new ones this week. But the first version just about killed me.

In other news, Baby Bear has a second tooth! Perhaps this is the reason for his recent spate of crankiness. He’s also almost crawling, but not quite. He moves all over the floor by pushing with his hands which causes him to move backwards. He finds it quite frustrating when there is a toy just out of reach and his attempts to get it result in him moving farther away.

Unfortunately, the novel sputtered, coughed and died.  It happened in Matheran, not for from Bombay, a small hill station with some onkeys but no tea estates.  It’s a misery pecular to would-be-writers.  […] Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it.  The discovery is something sou-destroying, I tell you.  It leaves you with an aching hunger. 

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel.  I mailed them to a fictitious address in Siberia, with a return address, equally fictitious, in Bolivia.  After the clerk had stamped the envelope and thrown it into a sorting bin, I sat down, glum and disheartened.  “What now, Tolstoy?  What other bright ideas do you have for your life?”  I asked myself.

from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, page VII

So I’ve finished the author’s note, which that passage comes from, and read about thirty pages of the actual story.  That leaves me roughtly 324 pages to read by dinnertime tonight if I’m going to book club this evening.  My head hurts and my kids are very needy today (they’ve been sick) and my house is a mess and there’s so much to do.  324 pages seems as insurmountable as Moby Dick and Love and Peace combined at the moment.

Why yes, I have read three of four other books (and please let us not mention the copious amounts of fanfiction) since I checked this one out of the library.  What’s your point?

Is it bedtime yet?

I’ve been up for nearly three hours.  That counts as a day, right?

Need more coffee.  Need more advil.

It’s in the house.  I know it is.

Because my kind and generous husband brought home a chocolate bar for me.  Only I didn’t eat all of it, and he put the rest away somewhere for me to eat today.

But alas, I didn’t see where he put it.

And now it’s someplace in my kitchen, and it’s calling me.  It’s saying “Haha, I’m right here, and you-ou can’t find me.”

It’s using that sing-song voice that chocolate prefers to use when it knows that it is both wanted and safe.

I’ve searched in the cabinets.  I’ve searched in the fridge.  I’ve searched in the drawers and the freezer and then in the cabinets again.  It is nowhere to be found.

And yet I can still hear it mocking me.

I want that chocolate.  It will be MINE!

I even twice tried calling M. at work to ask where he’d put it before I remembered that he’s on course today and so not in the office.  I’m hoping he calls me on lunch from the cell.  I don’t want to call him in case he forgot to turn it off and it rings during class - always an embarrasment.

You-hoo, Chocolate, where are you?

In other news, I stayed up until nearly one last night chatting in the Edmonton wrimos chatroom (not the general nanowrimo one).  This was quite foolish and might have something to do with just how bad my head hurts this morning.  And yet I recall a time when going to bed at one in the morning was an early night.  I’m getting old, I am.

- I have been in the big goodwill stuff several times, and I have yet to find anything in Munchkin’s size but a paltry selection of summer clothes. There’s a large baby section which ends at size twenty-four months, and there is a large selection of cltohes in the 5t and above section, but nothing for Munchkin. There must be an area that I am missing.

- We did find a Little Tykes basketball net similar to this one but without the graphic and very faded for twelve bucks. We called it a very late birthday present and we pick it up tomorrow.

- Did I mention that lunch was very, very, very good?

- I was outbid by fifty cents in the last ten seconds of an Ebay auction. I’m being rather unreasonably annoyed by this considering how often I snipe auctions. Which actually isn’t that often since I’ve only bought a handful of things of Ebay, but is still a good percentage of what I have bought.

- Why does shipping to Canada have to be so insanely expensive? And why is it often even more expensive to have shipped within Canada than it is to have it shipped to or from the US?

- I am currently kicking myself because I completely forgot to bid in an auction for a cute sweater and matching tights for Munchkin. They ended up not going for very much, and the shipping charges were quite reasonable for once. Why didn’t I check the auctions I was watching today?

- Munchkin picked this bear out of a bin at Ikea today and claimed that she had to have it. It’s amazing how happy something that costs three bucks can make a kid. It’s also amazing just how many stuffed animals she has - I have no idea how her collection grew to such a size.

- Poor Baby Bear, on the other hand, only has one stuffed animal. He had none until a few weeks ago when I was wandering through the kids section of Ikea and felt the need to at least start to remedy the inequity of the stuffed animal situation. So we bought him this bunny which is so cute and soft and the carrot is a rattle.

- Someday one or the other of my kids will get this because it cracks me up every time I see it. I have no idea why, it just does.

- We also looked at new living room furniture today. I think we’re going to be able to get a new set soon - I hope it’s before our current stuff falls apart completely. I also need a new rocking chair somewhat sooner than we’d get everything else. Like right now.

- I bought Baby Bear a pacifier the yesterday in the hopes that it might solve our recent sleep problem (all of a sudden he is impossible to put down while sleeping, and he won’t sleep at all if he’s not cuddled up to me. It might be teething.) He wouldn’t take one one he was younger, but another mother was just telling me the other day that her baby didn’t start taking one until four or five months. So I thought I might as well try. Of course he wanted nothing to do with it. On the other hand, Munchkin, who also wanted absolutley nothing to do with one as a baby - keeps putting it in her mouth and claiming to be a baby. Suddenly I am reminded of just why we tossed the ones we bought him when he was younger.

- I was out shopping by myself (how strange!) for a bit yesterday. I kept looking around for my children in a panic until I’d remember two seconds later that they were at home with M. Does everyone else do this?

- Am I the only one obsessively checking the Nanowrimo forums to see if they have re-launched yet? I never did get around to posting before they went down, and I’ve been actively lurking since July! Only about three more hours until they are officially late in getting them back online. Oh, and I am so going to fail misserably this year. But that’s okay.

- OHMYGOODNESS IT IS OCTOBER ALREADY!!!!

What we didn’t do this weekend: take part in the breastfeeding challenge which was held at the West Edmonton Mall again yesterday. Last year I was sick. I can’t remember why I didn’t take part the year before that. The year before that Munchkin was just a itty-bitty baby and I was too disorganized to get us out the door for anything scheduled.

So I swore that this would be the year we would make it. But one just doesn’t take a child with a high fever out and about, much less to a place where there will be a lot of babies who might be infected. So we skipped it again.

What we did do: Munchkin was feeling much better today, so after a quick visit to Ikea we headed to out to a special buffet lunch at a vegan restaurant in celebration of World Vegetarian day. The food was absolutely delicious as always, and I ate way too much. It’s a good thing they are all the way across town from us or we’d be there every night.

Their special celebration buffets are always really well attended. Since we generally neglect to call ahead, all of the small table are often in ue or reserved when we arrive, so several times we’ve ended up at a large table sitting with strangers. This is fine with us, and last time we went we ened up with a family with a child around Munchin’s age, so all was good.

This time we ened up with a nice elderly couple and a gentlemen with a lovely accent that I won’t even attempt to place because I would surely be wrong. I’m not clear of the couple and the gentlement knew each other before - they may have just met as we had. We talked to them briefly, but mostly we were focused on our food and our kids and not on the conversation across the table. Also, it was quite a large table and amidst a noisy atmosphere so I couldn’t hear them very well.

But I did hear snippets.

There was much talk of auras and energy and spirital matters, but that was all fine if a bit new-agey. Then I caught bits about being from the future and coming back to heal a time rift and about the Philadelphia Experiment (which I hadn’t heard of before, thank you Wikipedia). Then I heard something about fighting evil and oversouls, the latter of which there are apparently about five hundred and some of. And I just thought to look oversoul up in Wikipedia as well, and they probably were talking about something along these lines. They discussed a few particular over-souls by name - particularly the one they believed the other man at the table to belong to, and I wish I’d remembered the names to look up.
At first I was wondering what science fiction series they were talking about. Then, as I realized they were talking about themselves, I waited to hear what game they were roleplaying for. Eventually it became clear that they weren’t playing a game.

O_o