Am I still milking this (routine and utterly unremarkable) deadline? Of course I am. Here’s my current list of wants:

1. I’m on a hot chocolate kick, right now. I actually prefer the add water to powder stuff over the real thing, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting a really fancy version of that powder, packaged in some impractical (but attractive!) vintage tin.

2. Speaking of which, remember those round tins of stacked biscuits? I’ve mentioned them on a previous want list, and they’re probably still a regular thing on other continents, but you never see them here anymore. I doubt they’re any better than your average boxed cookie, but they carry all the glamour of extinction so I can’t help but want them anyway.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt that my grandmother used to offer them to me when I’d visit her house to play Lego, and she’d only let me have one or two at a time. She was teaching me good manners, I expect. And moderation… for shame, Marian. Lessons wasted.

3. When I make these want lists, I’m often left with one blank spot. Normally I mull over it for a while, and fill it with something ever so slightly less wanted, but that always feels wrong, and worse yet, it’s a stone in my shoe forever afterwards. So from now on I’m just going to make scribbles instead. Which feels psychologically apt, right? Sort of? The vacant heart of wanting!

4. Chanterelles are really expensive this year, for some reason; too expensive for me to afford, which is surely a form of damnation. Now I’m the wraith who haunts the mushroom section of the grocery store, waiting for the price to go down, occasionally extending a pale claw in yearning, letting my wafting cloak fragments snag on the root vegetables, hissing and wailing when any creature of warm flesh approaches…

5. I so, so badly want a dog! I can’t have one for several reasons – most crucially, because my building doesn’t allow them – but I daydream about it constantly. I can’t even check the greyhound rescue site, because I get fully attached to every single dog they post, and then my sulking is proportionate to my wanting.

6. As luck would have it, my parents are going on a trip and leaving their house (which is on Bowen Island) empty just as I finish my deadline, so now I have this incredible motivator. I can’t be even half a day late, because that would steal from my limited fund of island time. This is the currency with which my soul may be purchased, in case you were wondering.

7. Shinies, of course. Today, lodolite and moss agate, because they have little forests inside them.