Monday Randoms

1. New recipe: I made this sauce for the edamame for book club, and I've made it twice more, for edamame and to put on coconut rice. It somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts, and I had a giant jar of sambal oelek in the fridge that I've barely used.

2. So we did go from this

to this

on the last freaking weekend of March, which if you ask me is exceptionally rude, but we fared much better than cities more south than us, and this

fortunately proved unnecessary. 

Matt left for Montreal on the train Saturday morning (his flight left from the Montreal airport that night). Lucy and I did a bit of this.

Then some yoga

Is this puppy pose?

I had been looking forward to a quiet weekend after a few busier ones. It was mostly nice, although I felt a little out of sorts on Sunday with the freezing rain warning. I tried not to worry before there was anything concrete to worry about, but I am bad at that. 

I didn't sleep well Sunday night - my shoulder hurt a lot, which was probably from shoveling the icy wet snow, and my head has been killing me for days with the pressure systems rolling in. I felt like I was literally dragging my old ass in to work this morning, and then I remembered how much I love this school and this library.

They recently replaced the icky laminated top of our counter that kept peeling up, and it is smooth and fancy. 

There are identical twins named Noah and Zayn in a grade one class - they are always dressed the same and are completely fine with the fact that I have to ask which one is which. They got a telescope on the weekend that they're going to build, and Noah got a book on the solar system and showed me the Andromeda galaxy and said Jupiter has a red spot that's a tornado (I looked it up, it's true). I love a good kid obsession. 

In the grade five class there are identical TRIPLETS, they're Chinese and their names all start with Sun and have three different suffixes, and it took me forever to figure out that they were triplets because I'm an idiot, and at the beginning of the year I thought the same kid kept coming back with new books and couldn't figure out why no books were signed out to him yet. The names aren't in lists, the barcodes are spaced out, but still, there's no really good excuse. I couldn't stop laughing when I finally figured it out.

The grade six class is so incredibly sweet and they all thank me individually for checking out their books and tell me to have a nice week and they are darling and I love them. 

On my way out of the school I saw a bulletin board that made me stop to read - in the middle was the cover of a children's book called Ruby Finds a Worry, and all around were kids' pages where they listed their fear and drew a picture of it. The pictures were mostly pretty abstract, but some of the fears were heartwrenching - "I'm afraid my daddy will get hurt", "I'm afraid when my sister goes to piano (i miss her)", "I'm afraid of the dark." Then there was one that made me think of Little Angus - "right now I'm worried that I lost my spider ring."

4. After work I went to physio which is weirdly fun at this point - he just pokes me in a few places and then works his way around my body, pulling and prodding and bending and shockwaving and needling, and we talk about books and our kids and politics and every now and then I yell MOTHERFUCKER, and he pats me soothingly and continues doing whatever hideously painful thing he's doing, and we continue talking.

5. Eve did her first poster session at a symposium on Friday. Matt told her to be prepared for no one coming up to her because sometimes people are just there for the scheduled talks, but she got about fifteen people, and she felt confident about all the questions she was asked. A couple of people also recognized her from the musical. 

And Angus made potatoes!

And now, since I am alone and the weather is still gross, I might just have scrambled eggs for dinner and go to bed ridiculously early with a book. 

Five For Friday

 1. Monday work was good. I went to Costco after to get some stuff for book club which was yesterday (Thursday). I still forget I have a membership and find going there kind of panic-inducing, and a thing which happens quite often happened, which is that I couldn't find the Gyoza pork dumplings I bought last time and really liked. I bought chicken and vegetable potstickers instead, and they were good, but whyyyyy Costco why, I hate change in all things, even dumplings. I also got spring rolls and edamame because the book was Japanese, and I don't always match the food to the book, but I do if I can because it amuses me.

I made quinoa bowls for dinner, of which I was ridiculously proud. My ADD brain makes it really hard to do something with this many steps - I order them but almost never make them. So Sunday I made stir-fried lemongrass chicken and instant pot Mongolian beef for the week, and then Monday I cooked the edamame, sweet potato, lime cilantro black beans and quinoa and made bowls with the chicken. 

2. Tuesday I went for lunch with Sonia who has a timeshare in my dog, and Pam, my dear, dear friend who I met when Eve was in kindergarten with her daughter Laura. We used to hang out constantly while the kids were in school, walk a lot and go shopping and get weird looks from the staff (or meet weird staff which made great stories). The kids got older and we got jobs and it's harder to get together, so it was really nice to see her. 

We always go to the restaurant at the college nearby, where the food and service is all done by students in the hospitality program. The food is always really good. This time we got a clearly very new waiter who was very nervous and sort of hilariously bad at everything, and we had to pitch our response somewhere between reassuring and condescending. He tried to take out his pen to write down orders and flung it halfway across the restaurant. He didn't know what side to serve anything from. He brought me soup, stared at it and said "you'll probably need a spoon". He took the drink orders then came back and said to Sonia "how big a wine did you want?" He brought the bill, looked at it in his hands, put it down on the table and pushed it over to me and said "here". No judgment, to be clear - I was a waitress in university and sucked at it. It just added to the experience.

After lunch we went to Bath and Body Works because Pam had let us use her hand sanitizer which was lotiony and smelled like sunshine and oranges instead of rotten tequila (which most of the store hand sanitizers seemed to smell like during Covid) and we wanted to buy some. I bought two little hand sanitizers. Sonia bought eight hand soaps and forgot to buy sanitizer. The employee helping us was into our wacky vibe. She nearly managed to sell me a soap and candle called Book Loft, and it smelled okay but I really would have been buying it for the name, and I RESISTED.

3. Wednesday I accidentally read a whole book. Sarah inspired me to start researching upcoming books and racing to be one of the first few people to put some on hold. This has resulted in me pausing most of my life to be a nearly full-time reader, so ask me how that makes me feel compared to Sarah who is doing this while parenting five kids and professoring - FINE, it's FINE. Anyway, I went to pick up two holds and then in a fit of extreme optimism picked up a book from the Express shelf, which I almost NEVER do, but hey, no fines now, it's a lawless reading wild west.

I got home and ate something, then carried some stuff upstairs, including the library books. I sat down in my chair and opened the Express book just to read the synopsis again, and then two hours later I was still in the chair, and then a while later I got into bed and kept reading.

It was The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune. I read The House in the Cerulean Sea a while ago, and thought it was wholesome and lovely (I am really overusing the word 'lovely' lately, I've somehow morphed into a lavender-hat-wearing seventy-year-old auntie), and sort of vaguely meant to read more but hadn't until now. How everything was probably going to go was apparent very early, but the characters were very enjoyable and the narrative energy was off the charts. The back flap made reference to the author being queer and thinking that more queer representation in literature was necessary - no argument there. After I finished the book, I googled to see whether he had a partner, and found an incredibly sad story about how he did, but the partner died and the circumstances were very sad (I'm not going to detail them, they are available if you are curious). I kind of wished I hadn't googled, but there is something very poignant about how he is grieving but still putting out hopeful stories into the world. 

4. Thursday was book club. It was good. There was a little bit of a 'young people today' session that started, and that kind of talk really gets my back up. Most of the young people I know are smart, thoughtful, empathetic and way more politically engaged than I was at the same age. Are some young people dumb and annoying? Uh-huh. Are many old people similarly dumb and annoying? UH-HUH. I mean, what did our generation do, besides fuck the planet and get bad perms? Yeah, I'm over-simplifying, which is what happens when you try to categorize any generation. Anyway. Deep breath. It's a hot button for me.

5. After book club I went to bed and proceeded to have one of the crappiest nights of sleep I have had in a long time. Around four a.m., still tossing and uncomfortable and having weird pains, I decided I would do mostly nothing today except read and rest, and Lucy could run around in the back yard with Riley and it would be fine. I got up to let Lucy out, and it was a beautiful, sunny, cool day. It is worth mentioning that the forecast for the weekend is for a possible blizzard and/or ice storm. I can't decide whether it's my fault for getting my winter tires off TODAY, or Matt's fault for leaving the country tomorrow FOR CALIFORNIA (his fault, obviously, right?) So we went for a really nice walk, and then I did a healing yoga session, and now if we're stuck inside all weekend it will be not as bad, and I'm glad I changed my plan. 

The calm before the storm. 

6. I have no memory of buying this dress.

Star-Crossed...Students

 There's no way i can convey the enormity of the exuberance and energy and obvious hundreds of hours of work that were on display, although anyone who has ever worked on something like this or been close to one knows.

Every year the arts and science students put on a musical that is related to their program - past productions were called Feel the Fission, An Inquiry Line and Project Sassafras, among others. It's student-written - this year Eve's housemate Lauren was a co-writer. They write the script, then find songs to base the parody songs on, then music students arrange the songs and write choreography. The band conductor was only in second year! Then they work on it for hours and hours and hours, all while carrying heavy course loads. Eve said in second year that she didn't think there was any way she could do the musical with her workload. In third year I told her to do the musical even if she had to drop a course. She told them she didn't want a lead, but then after her audition they said 'are you SURE about that part' and she said 'okay fine.'

This year she said she definitely couldn't do a lead role, and she claims that the musical took up less of her time, which is good but I don't really see how that's possible, since she was in most of the play and had multiple solo verses, although no solo songs. 

The play was called An Artsci Story and was Romeo and Juliet but with arts and science - Romeo is Lord Art's son and Juliet is Lady Sci's daughter. The Prince is of McMaster instead of Verona, and the Arts and Sciences are feuding over whose thesis is going to win Thesis Day. Romeo and Juliet each become curious about what would happen if they became more open-minded about the arts and science being separate, and everyone panics and feuds accordingly.

In Romeo and Juliet, the nurse is Juliet's nanny and confidante, which she also kind of is here, but she's also Nurse, a resurrectionist who freaks everybody out with her dead-body experimentation. 

At one point, she pulls a dead bunny out of her purse to impress Lady Sci with her progress.

The Arts family has a tea party where Romeo substitutes kombucha for the usual oolong and they end up doing keg stands. When Romeo says something about exploring science in front of the prince, his mother apologizes and says her son has had too much of 'the sweet booch' tonight.

Mercutio dies when someone switches Tybalt's mild acids with her murder acids. The Arts and Sciences join together (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein coupled with galvanism experiments) to bring him back to life.

And of course he's green.

Romeo and Juliet are just friends and study partners. At one point when Friar Lawrence calls them 'lovebirds' and encourages them to kiss, Juliet stomps offstage muttering "that's NOT a part of this fucking STORY".

Instead of fake taking poison, Juliet pretends to drop out of school, but Romeo doesn't find out that it was a ruse and drops out for real. 

There's a murder board

There are three professors on the board, and the night I was there the one with the cat ears was there (Dr. Clarke) and he absolutely cackled. He is famous for posting a rhapsodic complimentary passage of writing after the musical every year that is full of Classical allusions and nearly incomprehensible, it's very enjoyable. 

Eventually they find out that the prince has been keeping the departments separate and selling their ideas for profit (yeah, don't examine that one too closely) and they send the prince to the 'less lovely town of Western' and merge the faculties. 

************

Professor Jean and I (my date on Saturday night, who had a cameo in the 2019 production when she was department head) left Eve at the theatre, about to get her mike off and head to the cast party.

And here she is walking home at 3 a.m. with a giant garlic baguette that she picked up at the pizza place on the way. 

I have to upload the videos to Youtube to post them, in clips of less than 60 seconds since they're based on copyrighted songs, and I'm bad at editing (and shot this covertly from my lap, and the chick beside me kept screaming which made the sound go wonky). Let's see if this works.

Video:

Science is What We Know - tune of 'Stick to the Status Quo' from High School musical (I was so excited when she told me about this one)

Mix Our Disciplines - tune of 'Time Warp' from Rocky Horror Picture Show

We Are the Same - tune of 'The Worm' by HMLTD 

Let Us Learn - tune of 'Let It Grow' from The Lorax

March Break

 March Break was super relaxing up front and enjoyable but not remotely relaxing at the end, which was a little backwards but what can you do, the Arts and Science Musical waits for no woman. 

Monday a group of us had lunch at a fun local Indian place. Two of us work in schools so were off for March Break, two of us work for Investors Group people who were off for March Break, and two of us are self-employed law practice people. Plus there was Tony, as long as his boss doesn't read this blog he's good. 

Tuesday I had a chill reading and yoga day and went to the chiropractor. I have thrown chiro, physio and massage therapy at this neck and back thing for years now, and I am starting to think I've gone as far as I can go addressing this structurally and my next step should be better drugs. Then we went to bar night and I had TWO drinks, because it was NOT a school night.

Wednesday I got a pedicure. No matter how much I scrape and slather my feet, they are icky, and I think I just have to start getting pedicures more than once every year and a half. I don't think I've ever gone by myself before, and it was actually really nice. Then I went to a movie with Collette - Mickey 17, by Bong Joon-Ho, the director of Parasite which I loved. I didn't love this one quite as much, but it was interesting, and not a sequel or a remake, which is something I am always down to support. 

Thursday we left for Hamilton at around noon. We took a back way instead of the usual fastest highway route, and it was really nice - even though we still stopped at a burger joint fast food place, we got out of the car and ate at a table like fancy people. 

We didn't get to see Eve because she was in rehearsal from 5:30 until 10:30, so we just had a salad in the hotel bistro and went to bed early. 

The next day I slept in a bit and Matt did some work. Our friend Zarah drove in from Barrie and Eve wanted some company to distract her from pre-show jitters, so we went into Westdale and took her out for Persian food and went to the cute little stationery store and bookstore in her neighbourhood, plus Shoppers Drug Mart so I could buy her hairspray and mascara - and naturally we ran into our professor who walks several kilometres around Westdale most days. 

A little dramatic

At the bookstore Eve came over to me with a Japanese book called The Blanket Cats and said "omg look at this, it's about a place where people borrow a cat" and I was really confused because I thought I had heard about this book but it was called We Will Prescribe You a Cat. We thought maybe it was a different translation, but then we went back to the shelf and there the other book was, one shelf up. Not only that, there were two other Japanese books about cats (no judgment, to be clear).  Obviously I bought her one.

We dropped Eve off and went back to the hotel to meet Matt after his last call. We were now on awkward opposite feeding schedules since Zarah and I were full of saffron and lemon chicken and Matt hadn't really eaten much. We went to Jack Astor's for him to eat, and then somehow found it in ourselves to fall on a malted brownie like starving dogs before heading down for the show.

Zarah was having an amazing hair day and mine was bugging me, so I'm just going to let this be the family pic

The show was amazing (more on that later), and very long, and the seats were very small. At intermission we recalled going to shows there in our undergrad and thinking the theatre seemed a lot bigger. After the show we went back to the hotel and had super-classy hotel room gin and tonics and Doritos.

Saturday Zarah headed home and Matt and I went to visit his sister-in-law and our niblings (his bro had to go save heart patients, the selfish jerk). We went to the mall and bought them popcorn cooked in unnatural-coloured sugar syrup first. They told us about school and trampolining and Mitchie got Matt to help him make his hobby horse and pelted me with Squishmallows and showed me his calendar which was basically a way of keeping track of the birthdays of everyone he knows and Ninja Zone on Fridays ("I don't know when it stops so I just does it on all of them for the whole year"). Both the parents are doctors, and Mitchie frequently says "don't talk about sickness because it might freak me out". They are delicious and I love them. 

I got a lime cilantro chicken bowl from Tim Horton's on the way back to the hotel since I knew I wasn't getting out of the play until ten. Matt dropped me off and picked me up, and my tiny professor dashed from her house to the theatre at the last minute as usual and still got nabbed by multiple people to talk until the very last second until the lights went down.

I did the same as last year - Friday night sat further back and got a good idea for the whole production and Saturday night sat in the second row and shot covert photos and video from my lap. It was even better - they had ironed out a few kinks from the night before and were having a blast. They always sneak in a few ad libs on the last performance because the department head has to approve the script but, as Eve's friend Leah said, "It's the last show and she's already written my reference letters". 

Matt picked me up and we went back to the hotel. I read pretty late, but not late enough to see Eve's text that she got back from the cast party at 3:30 a.m. And she was still up for us to drop off groceries at eleven AND went into the lab for three hours on Sunday. 

I was tired for work on Monday but my Monday school classes really love library and I was happy to see them again. Two grade sixes were looking for books and I sent them to the shelves. When they couldn't find the book I walked over saying "well sometimes people take them without signing them out, so --" plucking the book from the shelf - "but in this case you're just bad at looking" and they laughed, and the little kids told me all about what they did on March Break and it felt like the Platonic ideal of being an elementary school librarian. 

So the week had a little of everything and I DO feel somewhat refreshed and restored. 

You can SO get too much

Yes, I inadvertently took an extended break, and I'm not even sure I can finish this and publish it before we leave for Hamilton (I did not), and no one remembers this anymore, BUT, my Vitamin-D warnings shall not be impugned, Vitamin D toxicity IS a thing. Is it rare? Yes. Do I gulp down Vitamin D supplements like candy without a care? Yes. Is the warning on the Corona Sunbrew bottle almost certainly an ass-covering measure that is nearly unnecessary? Also yes. And the treatment for Vitamin D toxicity, usually caused by taking too many Vitamin D supplements is to.... stop taking the supplements.

Drink responsibly - you won't get drunk, but you might get hypercalcemic!

Whew. Glad I got that off my chest. A couple other niggling details - the Corona sunbrews were being consumed not by people who don't drink alcohol, but by people who are endeavouring to drink less alcohol - my only quibble was that, if I was trying to drink fewer beers (I never drink a lot of beers because beer is so filling), I would probably sub in a different drink every beer or so, not a fake beer - but drinking less alcohol is never a bad thing (I often hesitate to put things in absolute terms, but I can't actually think of a case where drinking less alcohol would be a bad thing, except in that movie where people had to stay hammered to avoid being eaten by monsters, and that was fiction) so obviously I support this choice. 

I also can't really argue with the 'drinking group' designation someone gave us, but I feel like maybe 'bar night' is a bit of a misleading designation. One day, years and years ago, I said to Collette "You know in the movies or on tv where someone says 'let's go get a beer'? Is that only on tv? Why don't we ever do that?" A few days later she called me on her way home from somewhere and said "do you want to meet me at Johnny Canuck's for a beer?" Johnny Canucks was a little restaurant about a block from my house and a couple of blocks from her. So I met her for a beer, and I can't remember the exact progression from there, but the next time we brought our husbands, and then we invited the two other couples, and we settled on whatever night chicken wings were on special because nobody's kids had sports or activities that night. 

This was two days after Dave's bike accident and shoulder surgery and the same day Matt went to the ER and passed a kidney stone. 

As you may have noticed, we are a close-knit group, and I guess we didn't really need a weekly hang-out to stay that way, but it's nice. We complain about work, or talk over problems, or share information about our kids, or just discuss random, often very strange, topics in minute detail. We never run out of stuff to talk about, which is kind of cool. And does everyone drink alcohol? No, not every time. We had one abstainer, but she moved to Chicago (not because of us, I don't think, although now that I say this, I don't know for sure). Tony gives up alcohol for Lent although he's not Catholic. I don't drink much at all in the winter because it aggravates my seasonal depression. I also don't find that drinking alcohol relaxes me. To be perfectly honest, I enjoy getting a little tipsy now and then, but having one or two drinks on a random night seems like a waste of whatever subtle harm alcohol might do to me. 

Thus was born 'bar night'. We started when our kids were young enough that sometimes Eve demanded we get home before she went to bed, and now our kids are all in university or working. At some point one of the waiters asked us what kind of team we were, at which point we collapsed in laughter, but he started giving us a 'team bill' anyway, and when we found out Johnny Canucks was closing, we brought in all our receipts and they gave us a five-hundred dollar allowance for our last night before they closed. 

We had a bit of trouble finding a new place. We tried the Barley Mow, but they had live music and it was too loud to talk. I feel like we tried at least one more place, but I can't remember what it was. We settled on Broadways - still pretty close, although a longer walk if we want to walk now. We go on Tuesday which is wing night, and most of the other food is pretty bad, so we stick to wings or don't bother getting food. We had a really great waitress (the first time our waitress Bridget at Johnny Canucks said "do you want a Stella, Allison?" and I realized I had a 'usual', I was giddy) and probably will again - she went off on maternity leave and we gave her an envelope of cash and some baby clothes. We don't have quite the rapport with our new waitress, but we'll get there. 

Ergo, ipso facto, and various other possibly-relevant Latin phrases, we are not all alcoholics and I was not making up the fact that you can technically overdose on Vitamin D.

Ha ha, what a weird and random ramble for my first post in a million years. Do I sound defensive? I didn't mean to, I just don't want to be seen promoting weekly binge drinking in your fifties. Or forties, or perhaps late thirties I guess, can't remember, time's lost all meaning even when you're not marinating your brain in tequila. 

I had a wonderful March Break and an amazing first day back at work today, the time change knocked me for a loop as usual (at one point I went to clean up the kitchen and realized I had thrown a kleenex in the sink and was running water over it) but now it feels like we've turned the corner and spring is at least a possibility if not a foregone conclusion.