We are off to Ottawa. The main source of pleasure from these trips is the feeling of “I’m a good mother. I’m providing sociability opportunities and educational experiences to my child.” I mean, I love Ottawa but I love the feeling of having a reprieve from maternal guilt a lot more.

Burlington, Vermont was such a pretty little town. But this year it started dying. The stores and restaurants are boarded up, and the town looks dead.

Does anybody know what happened? Why is Burlington dying?

Another thing that’s different in Montreal is the absence of sidewalks in residential areas. How people are supposed to walk with strollers is a mystery. We have wonderful sidewalks where I live in the US. I had the best time of my life walking with a stroller when Klara was a baby. Of course, she’s one of those kids who refuse the stroller the moment they can exhibit a preference.

I do understand why there are no sidewalks here, though. The land is so expensive that nobody wants to waste even an inch.

This novel by a Costa Rican writer is so bad that I actually finished it just to make sure the author is really that inept. I kept waiting for a punchline of some sorts because it’s hard to imagine anybody writing such a crappy novel in all seriousness.

Between endless discussions of how white women stink while black women smell nice, extremely repetitive and probably copy-pasted descriptions of the female protagonist’s breasts, pages and pages of atrocity porn mixed up with the cheesiest sex scenes in existence, serious explanations of how MS-13 members are violent because they don’t get love from the government, lamentations of the horrible tragedy that was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and an inane celebration of 9/11, it’s truly one of the most idiotic books I ever read.

But all of this isn’t even the worst part. Rossi doesn’t know how to write novels. The mechanics of writing is all wrong. The plot is ridiculous, the shifts in perspective are clumsy, the characters are cartoonish, and every third sentence is a slogan of the tritest imaginable kind.

The promotional blurb describes the author as “a writer, translator, journalist, environmentalist, and a specialist in development and women’s studies.” I wonder if she sucks as badly at all of these professions.

From JD Vance’s recent talk:

I was talking with a woman who’s the only licensed youth counselor in that section of Ohio, a very tough job in an area very hard hit. And she was telling me about an eight-year-old kid of hers, an eight-year-old patient, who had become addicted to opioids. Now, the way this kid had become addicted to opioids is that his parents, like a lot of folks in the area, dealt drugs on the side to support their habit, and because they didn’t have a lot of money, they would reward this kid, they would send this kid on drug runs to deliver the drugs. And when he made a successful delivery, they would give him a Vicodin because they didn’t have a whole lot of money laying around, but they had a whole lot of pills laying around.

What I don’t get is why one never hears anybody but conservatives talk about this.

What’s cheaper in Montreal is pedicure. Not for any nefarious reasons but because it’s a lot faster. A pedicure where I live takes an hour 15 minutes. And here, it’s an hour for both manicure and pedicure. The whole thing feels a little industrial because the manicurist moves with a military precision. She ends up making more per hour but the procedure is cheaper for me.

Everything else, though – food, books, the kids’ gym, toiletries, children’s shoes, and most of all gas – is ruinously expensive. And it’s not like the people we are visiting live in the equivalent of Manhattan. They live in a green, quiet suburb like we do.

Ukrainians sit down to lunch: