Ten Things I Loved This Week

It's been a week of the most insane weather possible. One day it's so warm you're walking outside in a T-shirt, enjoying the breeze, the next day it's below zero and you're in a winter coat. This has got to end soon, right? Ah well, if that's the most annoying thing that happened this week, then it was a pretty darn good week. Here are some of my favourite things (cue Julie Andrews!)

1. I mentioned last week that going to yoga was fun, but it turns out, playing hookey from yoga can be even more fun. I wasn't feeling great but showed up at my best friend's house to pick her up before yoga, and she was eager to just skip it, for my sake, of course. ;) So we ended up on the couch for the next two hours gabbing instead about TV, books, and what we'll do at Slayage next year. Lovely.

2. On Tuesday I took my Brownie troop on a hike through the woods behind my house for an hour and a half, and when we got to the halfway point — a parking lot on the opposite end of the woods, where we turned around to come back — we stopped for ten minutes to clean up the garbage in the parking lot. While it dawned on me that people can still be disgusting pigs despite growing up with "No Littering" being part of our subconscious, seeing these little girls running around picking up things with such vigour and making the parking lot spotless was wonderful.

3. Earlier that day, I walked through the woods with my little man as we mapped out the route, and I just loved listening to his non-stop chatter and watching him find new things in the woods with such excitement (so much so that I ended up making a scavenger hunt list for the girls to find). He joined the Brownies later that evening because he just wanted to do the walk again, and this time he was way up front telling them he knew the way better than anyone and they need to follow him. And they did.

4. I was going to accompany my family to Toronto for the weekend where my husband was going to see a Johnny Marr show with a friend (he played "The Queen Is Dead"!) and my kids were having playdates with old friends, and at the last minute I realized that I could get a lot more done if I just stayed at home. And suddenly I had a full day of quiet solitude to do ANYTHING. Any mother of two young children knows the glorious, glorious thing this is. I only wish I'd known in advance so I could have planned it, because, as usual when I have a moment of peace, I stand there for almost an hour with such dizzying possibilities before me I can't choose just one! But it was a day of catching up on Doctor Who (loved last night's ep, by the way), reading two different books, getting some work done, cleaning,   eating dinner in front of the television, and watching a new series that I'd been meaning to get started on for ages (and I love it already).

5. I went and sat out on the back porch for a while the other day and just breathed in the peace. Not a sound. We're far enough away from the closest main road that you can't hear it from the backyard (if someone honked you could but no one ever seems to), and we're on a cul-de-sac so no one drives onto it unless they live here, and during the day kids are at school and people are away at work, so it's silent. And I just listened to the birds sing and the squirrels chatter at each other while chipmunks darted through the leaves. It was like stepping into a Beatrix Potter book.

6. Watching Downton Abbey with my husband. We like it, and we don't like it, and so we're able to watch it with just the right amount of adoration and sarcasm that made it a ton of fun. When the show opens we always yell, "Dog ass!" because of the close-up of just that when the credits begin, and when O'Brien's name shows up, "Siobhan," we yell, "Sib-boe-han!" because when I had my daughter my husband wanted to name her Siobhan, but we both joked that my mom would refer to her as Sib-boe-han her entire life. ;) We also tend to add extra dialogue to some of the scenes where there just wasn't enough double entendre for our liking. We finally finished season 3 and while we were very disappointed with the contrived end to the season, I am definitely eager for season 4 (they might have lost my husband as a viewer with that ending, however, even though I know there were things going on behind the scenes that forced them to do that). Although I must admit, we were both very disappointed that Thomas didn't even once refer to Anna's husband as "Master Bates," especially considering where Bates spent the first half of the season. Opportunity lost.

7. It was Career Day at school this week, and my son went as a police officer and my daughter as a pop singer. They both looked pretty awesome, even though I'm not sure either one actually is aiming for those professions as their careers (in my son's case, he just thought he could get the coolest outfit out of it). I didn't have a hat and uniform for my son, so I put him in a plaid shirt and tie and told him he'd already made detective. He didn't get it. My daughter always says she wants to be a writer so I suggested going in an old t-shirt and sweatpants. She didn't find that as funny as I did.

8. Thanks to Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?, the authors of an upcoming book on Doctor Who that covers the entire series from 1963 onwards, I now have a strong desire to read the novels and watch all the spinoffs. I haven't even read the Buffy novels, nor do I care, so this is quite an achievement. So, to start, I got the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures out of the library and my son and I watched most of the season this week, and he loved it. On the days where he was home from school (he's in all-day, every-other-day kindergarten) he would say, "Can we watch some Sarah Jane, Mommy?" And I'm happy to say he finds it almost as scary as Doctor Who. At one point he literally turned, leapt over the back of the couch and then slowly moved his head around one side so only one eye could see the screen. It was like watching a cartoon.

9. Just this morning, seeing friends posting about seeing advance screenings of Much Ado About Nothing and knowing that SOON I won't be one of the only people I know who's seen it. I can't wait to finally be able to talk about it!! (One friend got her pic with Alexis and Amy Acker, eeeee!!)

10. I know we're all complaining about the weather, and by this time in the year we should be starting to see May flowers, but just this week I started noticing the buds on my trees hinting that they're about to come out, and it made me so happy. When you're denied nice weather for so long, you appreciate it so much more when it finally comes.

Tell me about something lovely that you did/saw/heard this week.