It really is amazing... we feel like we have gone so far, changed so much, grown each day - but yet when we see those people from "the old days" nothing about us has really changed at all.  We still love one another, we still have the same things in common as we had before, and if there is change the people who you were once attracted to as friends are still just as attractive as they were when you met all those years ago!  Am I just particularly good at picking friends?  I think not!  I have to say that there must be something organic about these choices?

I attended a workshop on Friday in Toronto.  It was put on by the Writer's Union of Canada.  It was such a wonderful experience to sit in the room with all those writers! 
The interesting paradox, is that though writing is a solitary experience, writers on a whole are engaging "people persons".  I will have difficulty with this too, I imagine.

I want to acknowledge this blog:

http://runawayrubberduckie.blogspot.com/

It makes me laugh.  I also wonder how the duck gets all the money.

There is so much to find out about others out there in blogtopia that it blows me away!  Seems like it was not so long ago that a person had to go to the mall to people watch, and now, you can sit at home at your desk and watch people's lives unfolding all around the world and in parallel!  Technology is astonishing.
What I am wondering though is how do you make friends in a new city since so many interesting people are at home sitting at the computer that only a few are out and about and they are all young and looking for dates, of which I am either.
As a new blogger, I am reminded that one must be careful out there too, just as they are in the real world.  Twice now I have been contacted by morons looking for some sex though I make it abundently clear that I am very married and have 8 kids under my wings still of my brood of 13.  Believe me I know what sex gets you and I am not looking for any of that! 

My husband and I will soon be having our seventh year wedding anniversary.  Seven years is the longest time that I have ever spent with one person.  The longest relationship I had before this was only 2.5 years and I wonder how people who stay married for sixty or seventy years make it through all the silly day to day stuff?  I find that I feel often times totally negated by my husband.
Right now I am mad at him.  The thing is that I have been mad at him for so long now that I don't even know when it started.  Perhaps five years ago and all small things build on this.  My husband, he is a decent man.  A good provider, and so on, so I feel a bit like the girl from the Bell Jar complaining about him... what right do I have, after all, to complain when so many people have things so bad?  A middle class difficulty to be sure.
Our conversations become less about things that matter and that are interesting and stimulating and more about how our days need to be arranged.  We have a tug-of-war going with "you did this" and "you did that" or "you need to do this", or "I need to do this" and so on... but it never really gets resolved which I think is a big problem... Five years of unresolved miniscule crap is a lot of crap and I don't really know how to eliminate and let go of this.  This morning for example he wanted our daughter to leave with him to go to school and he put on his coat and stood there complaining.  I was busy getting berry jam off the little boys before I could let them down but our daughter needed to have her hair done before she could leave for school.  I don't understand why he could not wait to put on his coat and wipe off the boys instead of standing there like a big negative energy transmitter whose sole intent seems to be directed at making me feel bad.  It worked, of course, because I have been angry all day.  If it was just today too, I would bounce back, recover, but these little mean things seem to happen increasingly more often the longer we are married. 
The sad result is that I do less and less for him.  Honestly, I have twinges of guilt since I do so much more when he is not around, relish his business trips as time to myself and as well the house stays spotless and kids well organized when he is away.  I have energy that I never feel now in his presence.  Guilt, guilt, guilt.  Perhaps I should try just to be a better wife, put up and shut up a little better.  I guess that was likely what my grandmother did, right?

We just started the second phase of a three phase renovation project on our Edwardian home.  The first bit cost us 60K so we had to wait for the pockets to fill up again before we went on to phase two.  This time it is wee peices that got left on phase one and also a total gutting, insulating, rebuild, built-ins, hardwood floor installation and general spruce up for our entire third floor.  We are very excited about this since it will mean that we gain a huge living space that does not now currently exist in any form but ramshackle.  We had been considering a major upgrade by knocking out one of the sides of the roof and putting in a HUGE dormer with loads of windows, but we made the executive decision to leave the roof line as it is - save the money and live with the smaller space since we won't be able to get our money out of this house as it is and this would simply serve to amplify our outgoing costs.  Yes... it is sad, since this would give us 125 sq feet extra space to use!  We will have to live without it  becuase the cost would be somewhere around 20K which is a lot to pay for a bit of extra space, don't you agree?
Anyway, our contractor Don T is back for a few weeks again.  We are very happy with his work and workmanship and his prices are very fair so there are NO compliants (which I understand is unusual for people having work done).
What will we do with another floor?  Simple!  An office, linen storage room, exercise room and family room.  The office and family room will be an open concept 350 sq foot room.  We will be making this  space slightly smaller since we will be having built-in shelving around the room for the loads of books that we have collected over the years.  In short we will gain storage, shelving and space.
So... what about phase three... What to do yet and when we we get er done? Time will tell!

It is cold here today and the dogs are making a little pile.  The four dogs love to be a pile even when it is warm out, but on these really cold days they really huddle together like Oslo's Gustav Vigeland Monolith - but for dogs, you understand...
There are four dogs here who together weigh about 25 pounds.  It would be less, but Klinky is a tank and Imp likes to be fed. 
I think that they like being our dogs but would like us to sit with them every single moment, but instead we move to other rooms and have outside lives which I think they find quite astonishing and disturbing.
People who meet them feel the need to decide which of the little dogs they like best, which is odd since one would never say that about someone's children.  "oh I like Bobby the best!  Jenny is just too hairy and freindly for me and she jumps around too much and if I were you I would send that Little Joe to obedience school he really is a total brat!"  Seriously, people might think it about kids but they would never really say what is on the mind.  Maybe they ought to though since it is obvious to me that my dogs are far more likable, clean and well taken care of than many people's children.  I guess that the sort of bluntness that people have about dogs when extended to children, might force people who have them to be better parents if others just spoke up now and again. 
how many times have you been out in public and wanted to tell parents to teach the kids they have right from wrong?  For me it is much more often than not!