Mid-Week Miscellany

It's Wednesday, and I haven't posted since Monday, and I don't want to just let the week go by postless again, but I don't really have anything. I had book club tonight. We read a first draft of my friend Sharon's first novel Keeping Mum, which she printed out and bound for all of us. It was really good - it was so good that I totally forgot I was reading something by someone I knew while I was reading it.

I heard Rihanna and Britney Spears kissed at some awards ceremony. I was astounded. That anyone actually bothered to report it.

It's Eve's dance recital on Sunday. It's at the National Arts Centre, downtown, the same day as the Ottawa Race Week-end. This is causing me intense driving and parking anxiety, exacerbated by the fact that my Mom is supposed to come with us. I'm trying to convince my husband that we should just take the bus, but he's not really a bus guy. I'm trying to concentrate on the fact that dance recitals in the past have consisted of a rigid routine of steps, expensive costumes and eighteen-step instructions for how to do the dancers' hair, while this one consists largely of choreography the girls have made up themselves, five-dollar tie-dyed t-shirts and no particular instructions for hair at all. After years of bitchy office managers and self-fashioned temperamental artistic types, we are so happy where we are.

Angus had track and field day at school. He placed first or second in the 100 metre, the ball throw (big surprise) and the relay. He then came home and wandered around moaning about lactic acid build-up and begging for leg massages all night. Matt massaged his quads, which then prompted Eve to insist that her baseball game was hard on her legs too and that she also needed a leg massage. She then proceeded to leap a foot off the bed shrieking with laughter and bit down on her comforter to endure the rest of the massage. Sometimes you have to suffer for equality.

Then I read this post of Nicole's, which reminded me (in an unclear, tangential manner) of when we were at my sister's place last summer. We'd gotten there late so somebody went out and got us all McDonald's for supper. Later, the kids and I were up in my five-year-old nephew Jonah's room as he was being put to bed. For a bedtime story, my sister was reading him a book about fish, and she was at the section about salmon swimming upriver to spawn. She read, "baby salmon are called fry". She kept reading, but Jonah's eyes widened and he interrupted to ask, "do we EAT salmon?" She said that we do sometimes, and his eyes got even wider and he said:

"FRIES.....ARE BABY.......SALMONS?"

Well, it was McDonald's. Who the hell knows what are in those fries, exactly?