Visiting

Last week-end Eve and I and my parents drove down to London to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family (the boys stayed home because Angus was writing SATs Saturday here in town). This week-end I drove down to Waterloo with some friends to go to an Oktoberfest event with friends that had moved there in the summer (Matt went to Watertown with Angus for baseball - Eve had music camp at school and found it inexpressibly amusing that Matt and I were both going to places that had Water in the name. She's weird).

Both week-ends were great, except I'm getting worse and worse at staying at other people's houses. It's never been my favourite thing. I'm a weird guest. I use a lot of ice. I need a lot of showers. I hate getting up in the morning in a strange place. And I'm used to keeping my house a few degrees above a walk-in refrigerator's temperature and this fall has been unseasonably warm, so I was melting for close to the entire time. I don't know if the perimenopause thing has fully kicked in that way, but unless I was right out of a cold shower and standing in front of a fan I was uncomfortable - and other people were wearing sweaters. It makes me afraid that I'm going to turn into a weird(er) recluse who never goes anywhere. Is it just me? Everyone I was traveling with seemed to just take it all in stride.

Besides that, it was all great. Eve joined school band for the first time last year and had an amazing teacher who really encouraged her and it was a great experience. He invited her to volunteer at a band camp he runs at the school in the summer, which she did, and finished all her volunteer hours before she even started high school. But all my friends were kind of dicks about how she kept saying "band camp", so my sister and I told her to watch American Pie with my niece. She watched it. She said "screw all of you, I'm still calling it band camp". And this is why I love her. They also watched the first episode of This Is Us, and I got to be there when the penny dropped near the end of the episode and they were very satisfyingly open-mouthed and shocked and impressed and teary and it was an epic moment.

I haven't been to an Oktoberfest event since university when I went to a Waterloo bar that just put an '-ausen' on the end of its name and got drunk, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Since we're older with more disposable income now, we bought tickets to a more authentic venue and it was really cool (Dracula jokes aside). There was a band that was a polka band and a cover band, and traditional dancing that was really cool, and traditional food that was delicious, and people in lederhosen and dirndls, and a mechanical bull that I didn't ride because I was wearing a dress (I have some regrets).

And now I'm home, and a comfortable temperature, and had a good sleep in my own bed, and I miss my sister and my friends. But Eve just came home and said "I have an egg test tomorrow so you're all getting poached eggs for dinner". And Angus made the honour roll again last year even though he went to Oklahoma for the Junior Sunbelt Classic one week before second-term exams. So there's that.