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