Category: Life

How Freakin’ Fabulous Am I? (rhetorical question)

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

There are a few things I’d like to say:

1. I suck for having procrastinated from writing for ever so long. You may not care, but I know the truth: I officially suck for not taking the time to record all of the freakin’ fabulous thoughts I’ve had over the last several months. Some of the blame can be laid on the following inconsequential pastimes: work, two bands plus other music projects, and being there for my family.

2. While I initially anticipated the arrival of winter with fear and trepidation, now that it has been asserting its climatic domination of my area for weeks, I’ve mostly gotten used to it. I had some noteworthy help from a few contributors: the Fionas (my amazing knee-high, sexy black leather boots), elbow-length black leather gloves, snow tires, and CAA, with an honourable mention to hemp hearts and espresso.

3. At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I have a new bible that has very little to do with spirituality but everything to do with great taste. As happens with many great things, I stumbled upon this book in a local store that I hadn’t set foot in for a long while, and I can’t get enough of it. My new bible is written by What Not To Wear‘s Clinton Kelly, and it’s called: Freakin’ Fabulous: How to Dress, Speak, Behave, Eat, Drink, Entertain, Decorate, and Generally be Better Than Everyone Else.

Clinton’s approach is very humourous, but truly, truly fabulous. These pages are chock-full of common-sensical advice, from how to match patterns to how-to recipes for great appetizers to good manners. I love it, and possibly not platonically! I’ve been accused of being too proper, caring too much about grammar, and being picky about lighting, and now I find myself vindicated by Mr. Kelly. Alleluia!

I simply can’t leave it at that, I’m sorry. This book will likely stay on my coffee table for decades to come, and all of you who care will be able to leaf through it and glean its wisdom for yourself. Honestly, where else can you find all of this basic good advice in one very fun, well-published, entertaining format?

This is the book that I’ve been waiting to discover for all of my adult life. Or, at least since I discovered how fabulous one can be and my true potential for achieving it.

A great paragraph:

When throwing a party, you must sanitize and guest-proof your bathroom. If the bathroom that will be used by your guests is not absolutely spotless, you will quickly get a reputation as a dirty birdy. And then, nobody will eat the food you’ve made because they’re afraid of catching hepatitis.

Just sayin’: great writing, right?

Here’s another tidbit:

If chopping onions makes you cry, hold a few unlit matches in your mouth. The sulfur is supposed to absorb some of the onion fumes. You can also hold a slice of white bread in your mouth. Either way, you’ll look like an idiot. Also, try throwing the onion in the freezer for a bit before you chop it. The colder the onion, the less fumes. Personally, I don’t mind a good cry. In fact, if I cry while chopping the onions, I’ll run to the bathroom mirror and recite one of my favorite lines from Poltergeist: “Don’t you touch my babies!!!” It’s the part where the kids are being sucked into the bedroom closet for the second time and JoBeth Wiliams is at HER WIT’S END! It’s very dramatic. (Hi, JoBeth, if you’re reading this!!!)

I mean, come on! Mixing great advice with self-deprecating humour and pop-culture references? What could be better in a self-help book?

4. I have to go now. I have some more reading to do before I’ll be ready to host any freakin’ fabulous Christmas parties. Ta Ta.

On Being Single, Living Alone, and Having Hardly any Single Friends

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

1. Your back gets patchily tanned and/or burned.

2. There is a distinct lack of motivation to wash the dishes.

3. Nudity can happen frequently at home.

4. Solitude aplenty. Solitude in abundance. Solitude to the extreme!

5. 10 AM seems bright and early.

6. Going alone to the beach is unavoidable.

7. Clothes, magazines, shopping bags, wine bottles, bags of chips, iPod cables, newspapers, mail, and water bottles on the floor in every room is just normal.

8. No one reminds you when you’re road-raging about that tailgater that you just committed the same offense on the way home yesterday.

9. You can drink water, wine, OJ, and coffee every day for a month without running out of clean glasses (at least, I can).

10. Never mind the old adage that you should take off one piece of jewellery before you leave the house; in my case, I have some I can’t put on before I meet up with other people.

11. The things you have in common with your girlfriends (now married with children) grow less and less. And less (something just happened as I wrote this that really drove the point home).

12. Stigmas about Old Maidendom get closer to home, whether in your eyes or others’.

13. Wanting to go out means you either a) scrape together the nerve to go by yourself (not likely); b) wait until that one single friend you have is available on a Saturday night; or c) play the anti-social card. Again.

14. Items of clothing with buttons up the back are, sadly, not for you.

15. You’re the first person people think of when someone asks them for a pet-sitter or house-sitter.

16. Without a man, you really have no idea how to care for your car and just hope nothing happens.

17. No one helps you dig your way out of your driveway in winter.

18. You can only have Housewarming parties so many times. Besides that, what can a single girl register for to get stuff like engaged and expecting girls do?

19. Fashion means more to you.

20. The baby behaviour, baby stuff, baby growth, baby names, and baby care references get old when you’re the only one without a baby.

21. Master of the fake smile you are.

22. You fear the cat-lady reference yet admit to being a candle-lady.

23. Eating in is a novelty.

24. Cooking for one isn’t. You begin to long for NYC, where everything can be delivered. Or, perhaps, to hire someone just to have someone else to cook for.

25. Plant-and-candle lady?

26. Things stay where you put them. Ordinarily.

27. You flip-flop between wanting to nest and wishing you’d never stopped to roost.

28. No one cares what time you come in at, and no one cares what time you come in at.

29. Only you face the consequences for too much shopping.

30. There’s no one to blame for anything else, either.

A Day in My Life, June 2008

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

I had a sudden desire today to chronicle and compare the different stages of my life, as I look back and notice that my life in June 2008 is remarkable different from that of June 2007, June 2006, June 2005, and so on.

I invite you to be a witness on this journey.

June 2008 finds me 27 years old, living in a two-bedroom second-floor apartment in the only apartment building in a tiny town in East Huron County called Brucefield. This town is known for it’s flashing light, yellow if you’re driving between Clinton and Exeter on Highway 4, or red if you’re coming from either Seaforth or Bayfield. There is one elementary school, one church, one drive-in restaurant, two mechanic shops, one Asian/Home Decor/B&B/Lunch Room location, and one fire station.

My apartment overlooks a cornfield, the view of which is mostly obstructed by a lovely birch tree. Said tree helps me feel more confident walking around in my apartment in less-than-decent clothing on summer nights. After all, who would be driving by slowly enough whose gaze could penetrate the birch branches in the split second I happen to be passing through my dining room, several feet from my beautiful picture window?

I enjoy living alone, though sometimes I do wish someone was there to care whether I came in or not, or to wonder where I was, or to motivate me to do dishes, finally! My neighbours are understanding and quiet, the area is safe, and I actually have a place to call home. MY home. I’ve immensely enjoyed painting and decorating my apartment, putting all of my good taste to good use in a place where I’m the boss, now and forever.

Another addition to my life is that of Trixie the Toyota, a pretty, dark-green 1997 4Runner who goes with me everywhere I go. She hauls the accoutrements of my life and hobbies without complaint. She has survived being rolled over in the ditch after skidding out on an icy country road, being hit-and-run by some unknown person, a not-so-successful attempt at backing up a trailer, and carrying some of my more treasured furniture.

Not so enjoyable are the bills that go with being established and mobile, namely cell phone, rent, insurance, hydro, phone/internet, groceries, gas, repairs, etc. I can’t say as I ever yearned for that part of nesting, but I take it in stride, usually. I’ll be much happier when I can finally get my tax returns done (for the past 2 years), pay off my credit card, and have money set aside for winter tires.

I have spent more than a year at the same job, as a server at The Brew’n Arms English pub and restaurant in Bayfield, Ontario. Earlier this year, I graduated to keyholder and Dining Room Manager, as well as Kitchen Painter and Orchid-Caretaker extraordinaire. My bosses are wonderful people who have become friends and family, as well as the most understanding and flexible supervisors anyone could ask for. They make me want to stay and do my best for them, for their business, for their town.

Last year at this time, I was also working as a drywaller, and, shocker! I don’t miss it a tiny bit. I do enjoy my refined house-painting skills, which I have recently put to good use in a “cottage” in Bayfield, and hope to expand as a second job. If you hear of someone looking to hire a house painter, give them my number!

I’m not attending church because I couldn’t handle the one I had called “home” for years. I’m generally fed up with the institution that is what church has become, with all its expectations and traditions and legalism. I would enjoy a faith-based community of believers that is honest and open, a group that can laugh and be reverent in an informal way. I really could expand this paragraph to a whole essay, but suffice it to say that I have not encountered such a community, but I still seek to hold onto my beliefs. I am discovering more of what life is like on “the other side” (outside the Christian bubble), and it’s very educational, despite occasionally dangerous.

If it were possible to live on coffee, I’d do it.

I’ve joined the wonderful realm of BlackBerry, as I once dreamed of doing. And I’m paying for it, too.

Writing is still my best communication method.

I rarely see earlier than 10 AM, or close my eyes earlier than 1 or 2 AM. I’d like to change that.

The music in my life has developed over the past year as well. I am the youngest voice of the all-female cover band, Cactus Jam, and I love it, despite playing mostly Legions. I was also privileged enough to be part of Noted!, a project sponsored by the United Way in my county, which is helping to boost the music careers of the 17 women chosen to participate. We got to record 14 tracks in a professional studio, and a great-sounding CD is the result. This past winter I also ventured out to sing a few times at Open Mic nights at a local pub, and have been the featured soloist at two church events.

This year finds me recently motherless, a drastic blight on anyone’s life, and definitely on mine. It has changed so many things and finally propelled me into nesting in the first place. It also made my brother and I guardians of our youngest brother and launched me further into the land of disabled children in Ontario. I now have a lawyer, communicate regularly with several case workers, get all kinds of official mail, and have to return junk mail still addressed to Mom.

June 2008 also finds me blonde, and with an even greater fashion sense. I love that about growing older! I predict I’ll still be stylish in my 80s. If I’m not, remind me of now.

I’ve discovered I love flowers and plants, doing the Toronto Saturday Star crossword, Pinot Grigio and Shiraz, premium beer, CBC Radio, brie on melba rounds with semi-dried tomatoes in duck confit, Dollarama’s plain candles, serving dessert, mom’s old couch and armchair (with my apartment’s decor built around them), C&E used furniture in Goderich, Americanos from The Bean, and living in Huron County!!! (Sorry, but that deserved more than three exclamation points)
Being Sarah Elizabeth takes different shapes all the time, and I’m enjoying the process. Here’s to another year!

Hip Hip Who Cares?

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

It’s 1:56 am, almost two hours into one of my life’s milestones. You guessed, a birthday. The big 2-7, not that I look it, according to people everywhere. One of the ironies of life, I suppose.

Mac Forums sent me an email congratulating me, and the Facebook team is wishing me a great day. Kind of unbelievable, isn’t it, that I haven’t met the Facebook team, and that Mac Forums isn’t even a person, and they remembered my birthday?

Better yet, I seem to have thought I’d forget my own birthday. When I checked my BlackBerry a few minutes ago, I found an alert from my calendar that said “Birthday!” and gave me the options to Open, Dismiss, or Snooze (5 min.) I chose dismiss, which brings me closer to my point.

25 was a great birthday (Norway, 90 people I didn’t know, me standing on a chair while they all sang to me a song in a language I didn’t know and clapped their hands and spun around and tweaked their noses. Yes, they were adults). The ones before that were pretty fun. On what I think was my 23rd, I innocently and inadvertently ordered a pi

Semi-Prude

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

I once was a prude. There are people (my little sister, perhaps), who still think I am. But I’ve come a long way in the last ten years. No, I don’t feel inclined to spill the beans here (at this time) about all of my indiscretions and anti-prudish behaviour, but suffiice it to say that I am no longer a prude.

prude |pro?d|
noun
a person who is or claims to be easily shocked by matters relating to sex or nudity.

prude ?pr

How to Force a Reno

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

Today was a great day. Even though it started early (I had to be somewhere by 9:00 am), I loved that I had a reason to get up. The day continued to be great, even though I did a few hours of dirty work (pulling old nails out of two-by-fours at a kitchen renovation project), enhanced by some scrumptious raspberry turnovers and delectable coffee (thanks to the newly re-opened Art See Cafe on Main Street in Bayfield for the complimentary coffee on this, their first day of business!). Even when I pinched my left index finger between a crowbar and a plank, it continued to be a good day.

My day got better when I (finally) had the chance to stop at the shops in the little town that I drive through on my way home to Brucefield. I am usually either in a rush or driving passing at midnight, so I’ve never been able to check them out. Until today. One of them was great! An interior decorating shop, it was full of furniture, antiques, candles, wall-hangings, drapes, centerpieces, and much more. And a new friend, Debbie, who I now feel like I’ve known for a while.

It didn’t take long for me to share the pertinent details of my small-town Huron County life with Debbie and her elderly parents, and soon she started apologizing for her almost-baldness, citing chemotherapy as its cause. I started asking her questions, and was delighted to discover that my new friend is a breast cancer survivor! I shook her hand and explained my interest.

A couple hours later, after lunch and a shower (and an episode of The Office), I returned to Debbie’s store, this time with paraphernalia from my apartment in tow, to seek her help picking paint and drapery colours. Together we picked out a lovely deep blue-grey called Distant Thunder for my bathroom.

Skipping forward a few more hours, I spent the evening singing with the Noted! ladies, practicing our group songs for the CD Launch next week (if you don’t have your tickets yet or your CDs pre-ordered, what the heck are you waiting for?!). Gosh-darn it, we are talented!

Finally arriving home, I made use of both arms and toted my purse, papers, a shopping bag, my new gallon of paint, a jug of laundry soap, the items I took to help decide on a paint colour, and a McFlurry all up to my second floor apartment in one fell swoop.

All was well, til I set the can of paint down at the top of the stairs and started fishing for my keys. I somehow knocked the can over, and it started a fateful course down the carpeted stairs. Who knew the lids to paint cans would fall off of their own accord? Not I! Granted, it had some helpful momentum. Nervously, I turned around. And started to swear. My lovely Distant Thunder was all down the stairs, pooled on the floor at the bottom, flung onto the walls, and even splotched onto the ceiling of the entryway.
(Insert more swearing here)

 

The hideous evidence:

Paint can covered in paint
This can was brand new 30 minutes ago…

 

A wiped-up puddle of blue-grey paint
What was left after scooping up the majority of the paint puddle

 

Carpeted stairs dripped with paint
The view from the bottom

 

Paint drips on a wall
Water birds on a wall?
Paint smeared above a door
A little here and a little there…
Paint down carpeted steps
After cleaning up… luckily no one cares about this carpet!

The Grief Train Marches On

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

I’ve often had very vivid REM dreams that stick with me all day. Sometimes I wonder whether they are meant to remind me of something, or to reflect something that I don’t realize I truly feel. This morning is the second time since my mom died that those dreams were dedicated to her.

She was alive, but dying, and we knew it. She was weak and losing weight, but not enough for one of us to carry her by ourselves. She was happy even though she must have been in pain. There were so many people around, that knew her but didn’t necessarily know us. Still, we all formed a family there, circling in her orbit.

I wanted to get her outside, so that her feet could touch grass and she could soak up the sunshine, but I couldn’t carry her by myself. My sister helped me. We then tried to hold her up but neither one of us could do it alone. My sister tried to carry Mom on her back, but she was still solid enough to weigh my sister down, bent almost to the ground! That was funny.

Then, in the way dreams go, I found myself tightly hugging an opaque jar. I kept peeking in, to make sure its contents were alright. Mom had transitioned from a bed to a jar, and I had to keep her safe. All that was left was a beating heart, immersed in some kind of liquid, in a pretty jar. As long as it was still beating, I had to keep it company, hold it, protect it, keep it warm.

I woke up before her heart stopped beating…

Landing in Winter Wonder

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

Very unsafely on my way to work a few days ago, with my delectable new BlackBerry, I took these winter scenery photos.




Don’t they give you a sense of something impending? A bit of a pregnant tingle that at first glance looks bleak but keeps you coming back for another view.

Those trees are deep, their stories not fully told. The snow resting upon them is both a weight and a comfort. A hush is the only sound you expect, till a weak branch suddenly snaps under its glistening burden. The sky is bearing in on the trees, but still they stand.

Me, too.

This. Life. Now.

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

Since winter returned to our town, an outdoor rink has been set up in the park across from my mother’s house. This afternoon, two weeks after my mother died, I’m watching the skaters glide effortlessly and gleefully over the ice and realizing that I’m used to my life feeling more like that than this.

Not even sure I want to dig around the murky depths of my brain to imagine a word picture for “this”, I can at least say it’s not effortless or gleeful. Picture the opposite of effortless and gleeful and you might have a bit of an idea what these days and weeks have been like and what the near future promises to hold.

“This” involves a lot of tension and stress, worry and hard work, sickness and grieving, loneliness and depression, deadlines and expectations. “This” is something you only expect to see in the movies, never in your own life. And things don’t turn out in real life as well as they do in the movies, in case you were still living in that unrealistic bubble. Sorry for breaking it.

“This” means feeling as if you may never land gently, as if you will never again be whole, and sometimes as if everyone depended on you and everyone will let you down. “This” is knowing that you desperately need the strength and peace of your faith and at the same time seeing that your life and emotions are so much like a tenuous high-wire that one wrong circumstance could send you grasping in another direction, any direction.

“This” is so unlike skating.

Christmas with the Crazies

Sarah StrightLeave a comment

I’m crazy, you’re crazy, we’re all crazy, I think, I wonder. I’m slowly becoming more and more convinced that we all have an element to ourselves that is less than sane. That element seems to only increase with time and circumstance in my family. Pity the girls that have married (or are about to marry) into us. And should there be guys marrying in someday… Heaven help them! Or they will have to be superheroes.

Issues. We have issues. Us girls more than the guys, apparently. We’re intense, we’re emotional, we react strangely to things, etc.

The two of us even seem to be polar opposites to each other, never able to clearly communicate or to see eye to eye about anything. It has only intensified over the years, as our lives went different directions and our personalities developed in different environments.

Now, every family gathering seems to be characterized by some clash of ours, this Chrismas more so than usual, I think, to the degree that we had a red hot verbal lashing of each other between the giving of grace and the filling of the plates. It ended up with her yanking her plate off the table and stalking upstairs to eat, yelling that she’d only stay if I left.

The thing with us, and not just us girls, I think, is that we incite a thunder storm of ear-covering magnitude, we run away, we take a few breaths, medicate with something or other, then return as if nothing had happened. We don’t deal. We don’t know how to deal.

In some ways, I’m grateful that my sister incites me to vocalize my frustrations and anger with her, because I feel like I know how she feels about me, how we feel about each other. I wish more of us were that open with each other.

Yet, I’m sick of the storming and the bashing and the yelling. These past two days have been, well, to say it again, intense! I’m trying not to write this out of anger, so I won’t go into details, but she’s mostly unbearable, today was rough when she was in the house, and enjoyable when she wasn’t.

I wonder if this very difficult time in our (and I’m referring to all of my immediate family now) lives will make us shy away from each other, as our weaknesses and insecurities and, again, ISSUES become more and more glaring. Can we keep it together? Or will we run away from each other?

Superheroes, these in-laws, superheroes, I say. The Apostle Paul says it’s better to marry than to burn. I wonder if it’s better for us to stay single than to pull other people into our issue-ridden dysfunctionality. I mean, love can conquer everything, they say, but our kind of crazy I wouldn’t wish on any lover.

Still, we had a mostly merry Christmas, I’d say due largely in part to the three little adorable blonde heads distracting us from our issues and making us smile in spite of ourselves. I love you, Salome, Jaida, and Eliana! May you never inherit our emotional complications!