A Friend For Dragon

 Last week was the last library visit for my classes at Thursday school. Several of them didn't come, which was fine, and foreseeable - the actual last visit was supposed to be the week before, but since the library had been closed for three out of the last five Thursdays for EQAO (barf) and vaccines (hard to argue with that one), I offered the opportunity for classes who still wanted to come. 

My last class of the day is the grade three class I love, who I always do storytime with. I was sort of thinking we wouldn't do storytime, because I still didn't have much of a voice and the library was hot AF. I put their cards out on the table, and when they came in I told them they could just go pick books. They said "no" as a group, and walked over to the storytime circle and sat down. 

I kind of loved this, obviously, even though my reading glasses were sweating right off my face by the end. I let one of the kids pick the story and it worked out well. This was very stupid of me, since the last time I picked a book without knowing the ending it went horribly wrong.

I love doing storytime, but I get ridiculous anxiety about the book choice. It absolutely HAS to be funny, or at least have funny parts. Middle school kids are not there to have a lesson read to them, and I'm not there to read them a lesson. I agree with Angus's (and Eve's, actually) JK teacher that storybooks should mostly be fun (I had bought her two beautiful but painfully lesson-y storybooks before I heard her say that, so that was embarrassing, but oh well - they were more storybooks for adults anyway). It's great if they mention underwear. People falling down or getting bonked on the head is a plus. There's this great one called Piranhas Don't Eat Bananas, where Brian the piranha keeps trying to get the other piranhas into fruit but they prefer body parts - do they want some plums? What rhymes with plums? You guessed it! That one was a big hit. 

A couple of times I've brought books over from my other schools, if I find a good one while shelving (Ninja Red Riding Hood - great fun). I've even brought in books from my copious home collection, which was large even before I had kids, and only grew after that - we've passed on some of them, but still have a good-sized bunch (Sink or Swim, about cows learning how to swim). But usually I come in and bookdrop the pile of books waiting and while I shelve I walk around the picture book section and just look at books at random. The Cats and Dogs section is good - all the animal ones, actually. Big Feelings and Amazing Me are possibilities - I don't object to the book HAVING a bit of a lesson, as long as it's put across in a funny way. You can never go wrong with a good Elephant and Piggie, but I usually try to find one that not everyone knows already.

So this one day I picked up A Friend for Dragon, by Dav Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants and Dogman Series among others. For this reason I was pretty confident it would be 'good'. I flipped through the first few pages - okay, dragon is lonely, a few asshole animals don't want to be his friend, he sits under an apple tree, the snake behind a rock talks to him and Dragon thinks it's an apple. Cool, hilarity must ensue! I assumed that in short order, Snake would confess it was really him and Dragon and Snake were at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

You know what they say about ASSUMing? That's right - librarians who do it are dUMbASSes. Or something. 

So I start reading, while the children are on the floor in front of me looking up with their sweet, expectant faces.

Poor dragon, nobody wants to be his friend. ("That squirrel was RUDE" said one little girl). He's under an apple tree. Snake plays a joke by hiding behind a rock and pretending that he's an apple, and Dragon is all excited that Apple wants to be his friend.

Dragon takes the apple home, while the kids and I wait for Snake to step up and reveal the joke and begin the beautiful friendship.

Huh. Dragon makes dinner for himself and Apple and eats his own dinner, then Apple's dinner when Apple doesn't eat anything. He puts Apple to bed. Any minute, now, Snake....

The next day Apple won't wake up and talk to Dragon, and Dragon is worried and calls the doctor. The children and I are also exchanging concerned looks, as I turn the pages with more and more trepidation.

Dragon takes his friend to the doctor, where a walrus offers to hold Apple for him. I now confess to the kids that I haven't actually read this book all the way through yet, and I don't KNOW what's going to happen next, but surely it's not that...

THE WALRUS EATS DRAGON'S FRIEND APPLE WHAT THE FUCK DAV PILKEY WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO US

We're all convulsed with some mixture of anguish and hilarity at this point, and I'm wondering if I'm going to get called to the principal's office - the book was IN the kids' books section, what the hell. 

Dragon takes the apple core home and buries it, then sits by the grave until an apple tree grows and now he presumably has a tree full of new friends. Who will also not eat or talk and... get eaten by walruses? 

I looked up the book and found it described as a 'warmhearted tale of love and loss', about which I have SOME QUESTIONS. Did you ever read the book Bridge to Terabithia? They made a movie of it and Collette watched it with her kids and when (spoiler alert) the girl dies, Collette confidently told them "it's fine, she'll come back to life". "Oh no!" I said when she told me this "She doesn't come back to life!" "Well I know that NOW, where the hell were you last week?" Collette said.

I guess it's unreasonable to expect the synopsis to explicitly say "READ ALL THE WAY TO END BEFORE EXPOSING CHILDREN". Actually, it's unreasonable to blame the synopsis at all, because I didn't READ any synopsis. Let's be real, this is all on me. Have I learned my lesson? Almost certainly not. I like to live on the edge. 

I'm Mostly Better

 First, I FINALLY made something from Suzanne's dinner list, except I've been sick and it's been hot and I got kind of confused and made a bunch of different stuff that didn't EXACTLY add up to a whole meal, but I think it will at some point.

Honey Chipotle Chicken!

Lime cilantro black beans!

I couldn't find my fucking quinoa! So I couldn't make crispy quinoa for the salad OR lime quinoa for the honey chipotle chicken bowls, but I'm going to make the salad tomorrow and have it with black beans and chicken and maybe Matt will go out and buy me some quinoa if I ask extra nicely.

Apparently I have Chronic Laryngitis now (not really, I think this is just something they say when your voice goes away for more than three weeks and they don't want to say 'we don't fucking know what's going on'), and we were under a heat advisory for much of the week, but Sarah is blogging from the beach so that's probably not a good excuse for how lame I've been at blogging lately. 

There was a Heat Dome over a bunch of provinces this week. I think this probably only pushed us into the same temps the southern U.S. sees on the regular, and my house is air conditioned, so I was acutely aware of the fact that the worst I experienced was some discomfort, while some people were in actual physical danger. Go climate change, right? 

Two of the schools I work in are air conditioned. One has a 'cooling system' which does sweet FA during a heat wave. Broadview I don't even know, it's terrible. I found out this week that in order to 'save money', any cooling systems are TURNED OFF every night and for the weekend, and then fired up in the morning and expected to cool an entire school. I can't even tell which thing this would be bumping off when I add it to my 'Stupidest Things I've Ever Heard' list, but holy shit. I can't think this actually DOES save any money, because of how hard the system then has to work, but also any school that has upper floors has rooms that become uninhabitable when it's thirty degrees Celsius or over (86 for you Fahrenheit folks). 

"Do you have a neck fan?" my wise friend Kerry asked, and YES I DO because my other wise friend Dimitra got me one and I actually found it, and it did help.

Anyway, I got through Monday, I got through Wednesday but then I was severely nauseated all Wednesday night. Given that I find the Broadview library unbearable even when it's normal temperatures, I texted the other librarian and proposed that I work a full day with her next week so we can put the library to bed for the summer together rather than me baking myself like a chicken on Thursday afternoon. She said that sounded good.

My birthday was Saturday the 15th. We knew months back that there was a reunion for the school Matt went to at the Ontario Science Center. I like the people, but I didn't think I wanted to spend my birthday with them on this particular occasion. I told Matt he should go, which he waffled on like a nice husband, but he works a lot and travels for work a lot and I really wanted him to just go and not have me there to worry about. I said maybe Eve and I would just go downtown and go shopping and get dinner or something.

He said "hello, my name is Matthew and I am a Titanium Elite member of the Marriott class of hotels." 

We invited Jody and Davis, but Jody was braiding horses for the day (IYKYK, I did not K but now I do), so I took Eve and Davis downtown after lunch. We went to the hotel and I said "it's probably too early to check in, but can we store our bags while we walk around?" and the desk guy said "I'll move some things around and get you into a room". As we were walking down the hall I said "oh, dad said he got us a Parliament view, but they moved us so we might not...."

But we did

Eve and Davis said we should complain about the missing W.

You punched your floor in OUTSIDE the elevator and it TOLD you what elevator was coming and then it just TOOK YOU TO YOUR FLOOR so fast our ears popped. Yes, I am very easily impressed.

We went out for gelato and wandered around shopping and looking at flowers and watching people. 

We went back to the hotel to chill until dinner, and there was a cheese tray and a card that basically said "WE LOVE YOU MATTHEW, NEVER LEAVE US", (actually they call him Robert, which is his legal first name, which has been all manner of pain in the ass. When I went to get our wedding invitations done, I gave them the script, and then in the middle of the night I sat up and said "Allison and Robert", remembering that the front of the invitation had the two first names on it, and I had forgotten to specify that his first name wasn't his real first name. So then I called my mom and said "I accidentally made the front of our invitation say Allison and Robert" and she yelled WHAT, and I explained, and she said "oh, that's his real NAME, that's fine then").

We went for dinner, after dashing back to one store so Jody could buy Davis the dress she tried on because I texted her pics like a good mom-adjacent. Everything was close to everything else, which was nice. I love the market, and I always say we should go down more. Did you know there was coconut tequila? I did NOT know there was coconut tequila, but I have two bottles now. Davis and I had a drink called a Caught in the Rain - coconut tequila and pineapple juice, DO YOU GET IT?

After dinner we were walking back to the hotel and we remembered that the girls were sad that they'd forgotten to bring bathing suits and there was a hot tub. The Rideau Center is literally attached to the Westin, so we thought we'd take a look to see if we could get them some cheap bikinis, without much hope because they both have - well, I think the technical term is ginormous gazongas - and bathing suits are usually expensive and hard to find. 

We went into Ardene and looked at the wall of tiny bikinis. "We'll just get something that barely covers the nips, who cares, no one will ever see us again", they said. They tried on tiny bikini tops and said 'okay, never mind". I found a couple of sports bras, same style but one green and one black, and they thought they could make those work. They were both wearing skirts so they had little bike shorts underneath, so they decided they would just wear those. The sports bras were literally fourteen bucks each, so it was a win, kind of.

NOPE

We got back to the room and they changed, with much hilarity. They wore sundress coverups down to the pool and Jody and I went to the bar to have a drink. Well, I had two - a Perfectly Pair'd (which should have been Perfectly Impair'd, right? I guess maybe that would send the wrong message, since bars kind of like to pretend you're supposed to drink the drinks but not get drunk. Which I kind of did, actually.) I also had a Practice What You Peach, and they were both spectacular. 

Eve texted "old old men in the hot tub". I texted back "so what are you doing?" and she wrote "lurking in the corner and laughing like idiots every time we consider our situation". Then nothing for forty-five minutes or so and then "okay, we had a hot tub and a swim and it was great, we'll be down after we change."

They came down and told us they were sitting on loungers cackling and then Davis said "what if we just asserted our dominance and went in" and Eve said "if I agreed, would you really?" and Davis said "probably, if I was wearing a real bathing suit." Then a few old men left, so they went in the hot tub. Naturally their little shorts (white and nude coloured) disappeared in the water - Davis said "at this point I was really regretting the thong". Eve said, between laughing until she got the hiccups, that it was particularly amusing that they clearly looked like two people that had forgotten their swimsuits, "but then why did we match?" Then they went in the pool and the few people in the pool said that it was kind of cold and they were brave getting in so fast and Eve was like "we were desperate to get under water and also, could they stop looking at us". 

I had booked two double beds, sort of forgetting that I haven't actually slept in a double bed with another person in years, and they looked TINY. The girls snuggled up in one to watch their Emotional Support Appallingly Bad Reality TV before bed and Jody fell asleep in the other half of mine, and then switched places with Eve. Everybody slept pretty well which was shocking.

We woke up and went for brunch and then did a bit more shopping (there's one store the girls like that is only in the market, and it was good that we went, because I found a crossword puzzle t-shirt for my dad for fathers' day), then bought fruit and vegetables at the market before heading home.

Jody resentfully agreeing to be photographed in her polka-dot jammies

It was a weekend, so a lot of stores were busy, and there were lineups for the change rooms. Whenever feasible, the girls were completely willing to nip into an aisle and try on shorts under their skirt or just doff whole pieces of what they were wearing to try on other pieces. This kept making it look like they'd been raptured.

Last year I was driving to Hamilton to get Eve after summer courses, which was totally fine. We often have a party, which is lovely but I was not up to party planning this year and Matt wouldn't have been here, so this was the perfect birthday weekend - walking around, looking at pretty stuff, laughing a lot, marvelling at how lucky we got with our daughters. Also at one point Davis said "your squeaky little voice is so cute" and Eve said "that's good because I think it's forever now". 

Apologies for the million pictures. And for still not telling Engie what the song was. Any post now, I promise. 

<3

I'm Sort of Better

 "I'm so late commenting you're probably well by now" said Engie, IF ONLY. Man, that sucked. I'm not sure my voice is ever coming back, but I am now feeling better enough that I am panicking about how little I've accomplished over the past couple of weeks, which is SUPER HELPFUL for a healthful recovery.

It was a bit of a funny weekend. Not for normal people, probably. I usually think of my winter depression lifting by March, but I feel like perimenopause is complicating everything, and I have been treading water a bit until now. I did get really sick in January and May, though, so maybe I'll just calm down. I've been in the kind of weird reading spot where I bury myself in books - buying new books, looking up new books in the library database, reading ABOUT books but not reading THE books as much. I suddenly realized I hadn't posted anything in my Book Bingo Facebook group since January. I was SIX BOOKS BEHIND in my Goodreads reading challenge at one point which is unheard of (I hate the stupid Goodreads reading challenge, why do I do it every year).

Angus came home! Just for the week-end, to get his winter tires off because it's unlikely he'll need them in North Carolina. Now we have to decide what to do with those winter tires. He's going back to Ithaca for a few weeks, still working in the provost's office and doing a goodbye tour with his friends in the area. 

Friday night we had Chinese food with my parents since Angus won't be here for Father's Day and Matt will be traveling. It's been monsoon-ing off and on - Thursday I got groceries and drove home in one of those absolutely zero visibility torrential downpours. I could have tried to wait it out but the sky was uniformly black, the clouds were going nowhere. I saw kids trying to get home from school and wanted to help, but I didn't have room for all of them.

Eve suited up to bring in the groceries

Saturday Angus and I were going to go for a walk and get Starbucks, and it kept typhoon-ing, but then in between it would be sunny and perfect. We finally chanced it and took umbrellas, and it was perfect the whole time we walked and I was mad I didn't have sunglasses. Eve's friend Davis was home from Montreal finally after doing a summer course, so she would head out every night and be out later than anyone (not usual) and we'd have to remember not to lock her out.

Also, Matt had been telling me for weeks that he was leaving on the Saturday, which is why I had invited my parents over for Friday, and then he realized he was actually leaving Sunday, so I was confused about what day it was all weekend, but the good kind of confused where you have an extra day rather than the obverse. He came upstairs and started talking about how he didn't have to visit customers this trip so he didn't need a lot of nice clothes, but then he was flying back into Toronto and going to a school reunion thing before coming home... I looked up from my book and said "you're engendering a great deal of confidence in your organized packing skills right now."

Then they kept delaying his flight to Toronto which was going to fuck up catching his flight to Germany, and he was big mad, and he called and spoke sternly to someone which didn't really change anything, and then he decided to go to the airport early anyway and work in the lounge and eat lounge food angrily, so he stuffed his ramen noodles back in the package and left.

In between all of this there was constant college baseball on tv cast from Angus's phone. And Angus kept picking up Lucy and she kept looking around like "I'm not usually this high up, what the heck". And Eve and her friends have this weird habit of watching really bad reality tv (I don't really judge, I watch crap tv too, I just prefer it to have writers). So if they're here, when I walk into the room I'm always asking "Is this a Love Is Something, or a Selling Something, or a Housewives Something?" 

Also, my very first fancy black bra with pink embroidery that I got measured for and bought at the fancy bra store near Zarah popped an underwire. We had a good run, fancy bra *sob*.

And I cooked some actual meals after three weeks of living on cereal and noodles. And I planted some stuff, after going to the garden center and very conscientiously only buying flowers that I had a plan for  piling every pretty plant onto my cart with gay abandon. 

Here's to not coughing until we barf!