Vancouver-ing While Anxious

Eve and I didn't go to Bluesfest for the first time in years last year - the lineup just didn't really hit for us, and it made sense to save the money for something else. I didn't buy passes this year either, but my lovely friend Pam had an extra ticket to see Hozier on Friday night and was willing to trade it for my knowledge of the best parking and setting up routine. There were many years of Bluesfesting While Anxious, but at this point I've done it so much that the anxiety has subsided considerably. 

Eve and I saw Hozier with friends at the Folk Festival a few years ago and the show was amazing. I had listened to some of his new stuff and didn't like it quite as much, but he played a lot of old stuff this time and even the new songs were fun to watch live - also, he didn't play our favourite song the first time we saw him, and he did tonight. He always seems really lovely in person also (I know it could be a front, I have given up thinking I know anything about celebrities, I only comment on whether I like their work because man, it is crushing when you learn that someone you think is a good person has done really shitty things.)

It's such a cool experience, being outside as the sun goes down, watching people take so much joy in what they do. Seeing live music will never not be magical to me, all the more when it's outside.

 Eve and I are leaving for Vancouver on Saturday. It's a pretty chill week - getting some medical appointments out of the way, meeting with a real estate agent with my parents, getting pedicures - so I have plenty of time to get organized and pack, but I'm still anxious because I am me. I'm also having a lot of knee pain, despite throwing everything at it - massage last week, chiropractor and physio this week (he stuck so many needles in my leg, you guys. So many). I was fretting pretty hard about this, and then I came to the realization that people with bad legs are allowed to go on vacation. People with NO legs are allowed to go on vacation. I might not be able to walk quite as much as I would like (there's a Seawall, I really want to walk the seawall), but I can still walk, and take a bunch of Advil, and when I get home I'll be a bit non-functional for a few days before I start rehabbing the knee again, and THAT'S OKAY. Everything doesn't have to be perfect. We will visit people we love, and see cool museums, and look at the ocean, and it will be fine.

The massage last week reminded me of something I forgot to blog, even though it was like the blog post composed itself. Some time in April, I think, I went for a massage at 2:30 in the afternoon. I never wash my hair before a massage, even if it needs it, because not only does massage oil get in the ends when she massages my back, but often at the end she will massage my entire scalp and head, so you can imagine what kind of deranged electrified octopus I am walking around with after that. Add to this that I had not yet learned that I shouldn't move my bangs out of the way to lie on my face (even though I hate the feeling of my face being ON my hair), because it makes my bangs stick straight out afterwards, and no amount of coaxing will lay them down again.

I am self-conscious about my appearance at the best of times, and clearly this is not the best of times. But I am also advanced in age, and more willing to be in public looking less than polished (which is never terribly polished in my case anyway, but I generally endeavour to have the majority of my hairs pointing downwards). I really wanted to stop at Farm Boy on the way home, rather than going home and showering and going out again. So I decided I just would.

As I got out of the car in the Farm Boy parking lot, it started to rain, which just added to the overall disastrous effect. "Whatever", I thought, "nobody stares at other people while grocery shopping, and it's unlikely I will see anyone I know."

You know what's coming, right?

I made it around the entire store unscathed, avoiding eye contact with anyone. I got in line. I heard this bright, friendly voice say "Allison?" from right ahead of me in line.

I mean, it wasn't an ex-boyfriend, which I guess would have been worse, but it WAS the most gorgeous teacher from my Monday school, which had just let out for the day. Seriously, you guys, she is SO beautiful. She has long black hair and perfect skin and everything she wears hangs on her perfectly and she looks like she's constantly backlit. She apologized for startling me - maybe she assumed that's why the majority of my hair was lurching skyward.

Well-played, Universe.

All the Summer Stuff: Fun at the Farm

 FIRST, my periodic awkward answering of questions from comments because I still can't decide if I should answer them IN the comments, or it doesn't format properly, or whatever.

Questions by ANNE, the loveliest of commenters - YES, Eve's supervisor's wife is indeed pregnant for the SIXTH TIME, resulting in his sabbatical being postponed and Eve now being able to start her master's in the lab she loves in September. 

ALSO YES, Eve's shoes are Doc Marten Mary Janes, and they are GLORIOUS. She's out wearing them right now, but I will get a close-up when she gets home. 

Engie, thank-you for making me remember vividly the experience of watching television in Ontario and hearing a show announced for "Wednesday night at ten o'clock: ten-thirty in Newfoundland." Even though we all used to comment on it all the time, I don't think I've ever looked up what the reason was until now. It's not terribly exciting: "This time zone exists because of the location of the island and the fact that it was a separate dominion when time zones were established. Newfoundland lies squarely in the eastern half of the Atlantic Time Zone, with St. John's being exactly three-and-a-half hours from Greenwich."

You know when the kids are little and you're constantly on the lookout for fun ways to entertain them/ spend quality time with them/ not go insane? We live in the nation's capital, and while there are things that are profoundly disappointing about it - crappy, expensive public transit, an airport that doesn't let you fly direct, like, anywhere, a downtown with way too many one-way streets - there is a pretty good list of fun activities to do with your kid. Museums - Nature, History, Science and Tech, Children's, water parks, libraries, etc. 

Every now and then we think about places we used to go frequently with the kids that we haven't been back to since the kids were little. 

One of these places was the Experimental Farm, which adjoins the Ornamental Gardens and is across the street from the Arboretum. We went at least once every summer, and the kids both did summer camps there, which were amazing - they made ice cream and butter, hung around all the animals and got to adopt a cow to take care of. Angus's cow was named Tina. Eve got special permission to go into the row of cows where campers didn't usually go so she could take care of a cow named Eve.

Eve's housemate Zoe also lives in Ottawa. Until this summer they had never hung out together IN Ottawa, because they lived together during the school year and there was no urgency. Then they all graduated and moved out of the house and so they've been spending time together in their home city. Zoe lives within biking distance of the farm and arboretum, and according to Eve, Zoe and her boyfriend spent Covid lockdown wandering around the arboretum learning about trees: her exact phrasing was "they were literally spending every day in a tree museum while I was on Animal Crossing". (Are we bad parents? No, Zoe's parents are just a little bit better, maybe?)

Their friend came up from Toronto to visit, and with Zoe and her boyfriend they literally carried a canoe to the canal and paddled downtown (yes, rest assured I am feeling more bougie by the second). We literally OWN a canoe, but we took it out a couple of times when Angus was little, and then once we were at the river landing and Angus tried to kick a soccer ball and slipped on it and broke his femur when I was four months pregnant with Eve. I think the trauma of that coupled with, I don't know, having kids and being really busy for the next twenty years scarred us for life. I mean, we have been in a canoe since, just not our own.)

Ridiculously wholesome, or what?

We had to find her a shirt from Matt's closet because she couldn't figure out a canoeing-appropriate outfit.

After talking about all of this, we decided we needed to go back to the Experimental Farm, which Eve could barely remember. So we packed a picnic and picked up Zoe. As we were driving there Eve said "Experimental Farm makes it sound like they produce mutant animals." Zoe assured her that the experiments were all done on plants.

We saw the cows

We saw the pigs, which were very clean and knew how to drink from a straw!

I know I've seen sheep before. And yet walking into the sheep barn, I heard a sheep baaa-ing and I could have sworn it was a man trying to sound like a sheep. When my eyes adjusted I saw that there was only a woman and a child, and then the sheep vocalized again and Eve agreed it absolutely sounded fake.

But they were really cute.

Eve developed a deep and meaningful relationship with this outside sheep, and a black alpaca.

When we were outside, we read this information billboard which revealed that three Arcott sheep breeds were developed at the farm, which vindicated Eve on her suspicion of animal experimentation.

They needed very little encouragement to climb up into the tractor and play the planting game.

"Do you think call everyone Master Farmer?" Eve said. I said "no, I watched the kids before you lose and their dad said 'let's go, you're all terrible farmers'."

Basically it had most of the enjoyable parts of taking your kids to the farm, without the drawbacks of worrying about losing them or reminding them to wear their hats or asking them if they had to pee a dozen times.

We walked down to the arboretum and had a picnic.

We walked back up and through the ornamental gardens.

All the Summer Stuff: The Day of Canada

 On Canada Day, Tony makes a smoked-all-night brisket. Because he wants to, not because Collette badgers him into it. I think.

Mark looks like he's checking out my husband's butt, but he's not. I think.

There were the usual wide-ranging topics of discussion. Did you know that the kilogram is now defined in terms of Planck's Constant, instead of in terms of some cylinder thing in France? The cylinder thing is called The International Prototype of the Kilogram (band name!) and is platinum-iridium. I am sure some of you DID know this, but I did not, and it took me a minute to understand the concept. As a way of not forgetting it, the way I often forget other interesting facts, I have taken to saying "Did you know that the kilogram is now defined in terms of Planck's Constant?" almost everywhere I go, which makes me a super-fun guest/hang out partner. 

Also under discussion was the question of how many people's blood would be required to generate enough iron to make a sword. This was a segue from talking about Tony's swords, as we do fairly regularly - he bought them in Spain and then went through multiple channels trying to get them shipped back to Canada, all of which proved fruitless, so in Spain they reside to this day. 

Anyway. As soon as I typed "how many people's blood" into Google, it autofilled with "to make a sword", which should not have surprised me but did, a bit. The answer was fewer people than any of us thought - 300-400, while most of the guesses had numbered in the thousands. Google went on to hastily assure us that there are easier ways of obtaining iron (so much for net neutrality, hmph).

This is Collette showing why she was confused about a time zone, because she thought the country (Peru, I think) was in a different place than it was, and Matt adjusting her fingers to the correct place.

It looks like he's mocking her to the group, but he's not. I think.

Weird-Ass Little Coincidences

Eve has been scouring Facebook Marketplace for stuff for her new apartment. Oh shit, I haven't blogged about the new apartment.

Okay, SO, we had looked at two apartments in two days while we were down for grad. They were okay-ish, but not great, and a little too far from the bus route to compensate for other cons. We had had trouble booking a lot of appointments for the weekend because a lot of places don't show apartments on the week-ends, which seems weird to me because when do people who work full time find a place, but anyway. There was one place that looked pretty good, and I managed to make an appointment to see it Tuesday morning just before we headed home.

It was quite nice. It had a washer and dryer in-unit, which the others didn't (one had them on another floor, one had them in the basement (gross) and you had to pay for them. It had air conditioning, which the others didn't - both of these things weighed in, because this one was more expensive but we would have had to spend a few hundred on an air conditioning unit (Hamilton gets HOT) and laundry. The building had nice common areas and good safety features, and is on the exact street her bus would travel on coming home in the evenings (she's have to walk a couple streets over to catch the bus to campus, but being closer to home in the evenings seems more desirable). And the hallways were only moderately murder-y.

So there are homeless people in downtown Hamilton, some with drug issues. I don't think any of this is funny in the least, and yet the way this went down is funny - please know I fully acknowledge that the presence of unhoused people results from poor public policy and structural inequality.

We had done the tour and were standing just outside the lobby vestibule while the lovely Greek woman who had shown us around was going over the application process (Eve is extremely close to her BFF's Greek family, so we felt like this was a good omen). A fairly disheveled-looking man wandered in to the vestibule and started pushing all the buttons trying to get in. We heard him say "I forgot my key" a couple of times and Eve whispered "oh yeah, he'll get them with that one". The Greek woman, Lola, was trying to be cool about it, but finally said "even if he gets in, he can't go anywhere, you need a key fob for the elevator."

He finally wandered off and she visibly relaxed a little. Twenty seconds later a handyman from the building walked in and said "that crack-head was trying to get in". We could just see her thinking "thanks, Gary, I'm trying to rent to these nice people, read the room". Eve said at the apartment she looked at with Matt there was a memo in the vestibule with a photo of a man and a message begging the residents to stop letting him in. (Side note: Eve was showing me pics of the apartment in the hotel room and I asked "is that the vestibule?" and she side-eyed me and said "what the hell is a vestibule?"

We talked in the car and decided that this was the unit we would apply for. It went through by Wednesday, and I am massively relieved that we found a place so relatively easily, and in our budget (the top of our budget, but still!)

ANYWAY, she's been looking for stuff for her apartment. She developed a passion for these very nineties little hanging shelves with heart cut-outs. The first ones she saw were quite far away, and she messaged the guy to ask if he could ship them at her expense. He said they were still available but he was too busy to ship them, which, fair. The other two were in Perth, an adorable little town about an hour away, very near to where Matt's grandparents used to live. I said I would be willing to drive out there with her and we could have lunch and a wander. The seller was willing to wait a few days, so we booked it.

"Why does Perth randomly have the most beautiful sign and bench ever?" Eve asked.

The day BEFORE we were supposed to go, Matt texted us at lunch and said his aunt and uncle,who we love and used to see much more often before the grandparents died, had been on a cross-country trip and were now nearby and wanted to know if we could drive out to meet them for dinner. In -- guess where -- PERTH.

Eve pinged her shelf woman, who wasn't able to meet that evening, so we resigned ourselves to Perth-ing twice in two days, after not having been there for years.

We had a really fun dinner and catch-up with Kate and Fraser, and Eve and I had a wonderful time the next day. We went into one darling little boutique and didn't buy anything but Eve fell in love with the owner's one-eyed dog who was very happy to be loved on. We found a weird little everything store with a sale table out front and Eve bought a horse mug, sort of ironically but sort of not, for four dollars. 

Matches her eyes AND her dress!

We went to River Guild Pottery, where I always used to go with Nana and where they bought our wedding gift pottery, and I bought Eve a heart pottery mug for her place for considerably more than four dollars. She commented that we had thus covered the spectrum of mug-ness over the course of the day. 

We had lunch at a little Mexican place on the water. It started raining really hard as we were finishing, so we moved under the restaurant overhang for a few minutes and then ran for it. Eve paid for parking because surprisingly for a gentrified little town, it still had Small Town parking prices - fifty cents an hour. 

Besides two Perth events in two days, there was a cellphone thing. My husband loses his cellphone constantly. He will have been in the house for ten minutes and have to search the whole house for his phone - it's like he comes in, finds the most remote place to put it, leaves it there and then forgets. 

Eve and I don't, as a rule, lose our phones. I keep mine in the same pocket in my purse, and when I come home I take it out and put it on the stairs if I'm going upstairs or on the table by the couch if I'm not. But when we got home from dinner, I did a couple of things in the kitchen and then realized I didn't know where my phone was. The only good thing was that I had texted Sonia to say we were coming to pick up Lucy when we left Perth, so I knew I had brought it home. But where was it? 

It's on sometimes, but often not, so I knew Matt trying to call it might not work. I double-checked my purse, the car, the table by my computer -- nothing. I checked everywhere again. Eve had gotten in the shower, so I couldn't ask her to help, but as a Hail Mary I went into her room, and sure enough, she had picked up my phone from the stairs and it was on her bed. This has literally never happened before. I told Matt I had no idea how he does this all the time, I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. Should my phone hold this high a place of importance in my life? That's a question for another post.

The next morning, Eve and I were ready to leave (for Perth again, in case you need me to say Perth again, Perth Perth Perth) and suddenly she couldn't find her phone. WHICH NEVER HAPPENS. She had been downstairs to make breakfast, so we checked the kitchen, the bathroom, her bedroom (a couple of times, of course). This was equally as baffling as mine the night before. I was heading downstairs to check again while she started to lift the blanket that was on her bed, and I heard her say "Like what the hell, did someone..... oh, there it is". It was so far under the blanket it was basically in the center of the bed. I would think Lucy had punked her if I didn't know better. Wait, do I know better? `

Anyway, that was our funny little two-day couplet of coincidences about things that start with the letter P. 

The Main Event: Eve's Grad Weekend Part 3

What was wrong with the dessert, Suzanne? I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. Well, not really, but I'm happy to talk about it because it was SO WEIRD. It was a brownie that was supposed to come with chocolate sauce, caramel sauce and ice cream and whipped cream - all three of us were going to share it. I didn't used to like brownies that much, but the malt chocolate brownie dessert at Jack Astor's sort of changed my mind a few years ago.

So it was a brownie. It pretty much came with a bit of whipped cream and a sliced up strawberry. No problem. It also just tasted... really weird. Kind of like somebody had maybe used the knife they used on the brownie and strawberries to chop up some garlic and mushrooms first? I would have said something, but we were kind of just ready to cut our losses with the restaurant. I will say that it was not outrageously priced. I really liked the salad I got, and the salmon and mashed potatoes were...fine. Matt got a steak that he said was adequate. Eve got fish and chips and it was fine. Matt had insisted on booking a dinner with our home friends for Thursday night after we got back, and I thought it was superfluous at the time, but it ended up being such a fun night where I was right in the middle of the table so got to talk to anyone and felt brilliantly witty and hilarious all night and the food was AMAZING, so I was very wrong and he was very right, and the mediocre dinner that already wouldn't have been a big deal is now even less of one.

So!

 Monday! Graduation day! It felt like we'd been in Hamilton forever by this point. It was quite cool and windy on Friday, but had been warming up a little bit every day, and Monday morning was kind of perfect - not too hot for me, not too cold for Eve to wear a dress. 

We had a late breakfast at the hotel since the ceremony was going to make lunch kind of impossible and dinner wasn't until seven. There is some sort of odd, random tradition of girls wearing white dresses for McMaster graduation. Eve would have had to buy another dress, and she didn't really want to, so she decided to buck the trend. She had found this at a vintage store in Westdale just before coming home.

We got to the venue and she followed the signs for where she had to go and we went and found seats. She texted that there were a LOT of white dresses, but sent us this picture.

We were there almost an hour and a half early, but we talked and I organized pictures on my phone and it went pretty fast. 

I have mixed feelings about the dress I wore. I really liked it when I tried it on, but I maybe should have observed it while moving around more.

The off-white colour and the lace remind me of my wedding dress, and I knew I needed something cool. But later on in pictures I was a bit worried that it looked like I was wearing a nightgown.

Anyway. Arts and Science was grouped with Humanities for this ceremony, and quite a few people felt like there was a fair amount of Arts and Science erasure. There were speeches from the Humanities Chair but not the Arts and Science Chair. Eve was nervous because she was the first person to go up for her department and she was worried she wouldn't know what to do. We didn't love the way they did it - putting the hood on beforehand rather than when the student went up, not really enough time for them to do anything but smile awkwardly and keep walking. My professor friend said they used to do the hooding as they walked up, and it didn't take that much longer. Anyway - it's never going to be perfect. 

The students had to send in the pronunciation of their names, which is completely understandable. Apparently the humanities chair had pushed for AI to read out the names, and our chair fought them on it - seems like that could have been laughably bad. Things went pretty well, except for a few understandable slips - the funniest was probably when the previous name had been something very long and complicated and the person read it perfectly, and then the next person was named Brayden and she pronounced it "Brain-Ned". 

The speeches were all good - not too long, some humour, insightful. When the department chair said the formal "I present these students as being found worthy and suitable" I actually felt kind of emotional.

Afterwards we met the girls outside the venue. Everyone was a little dazed. We hadn't met most of the other housemates' parents yet, as well as the parents of a couple of Eve's other friends, so that was all happening in a rushed and giddy fashion.

There was a reception in a building across the street so we walked over. 

We met Jean coming in - she stepped down as department head so after thirty years does not have to sit through the whole ceremony anymore.

Honestly, it was pretty awkward - just small enough so you felt like you should know everyone but you didn't, quite. We were all ravenous, though, so we lined up for a cracker and a piece of cheese and six grapes and some ice water (no shade, it was perfect). And then took pictures out in the hallway.

The mother-daughter alumni and graduate photo.

The housemates! They look like a garden! 

The picture of Eve and her housemates was the first pic featured in the social media post about the Arts and Science graduation. 

About a week before we left, Eve and her housemates had been talking and someone suggested having dinner with all the house girls and their parents. I'd been kind of thinking this would be fun but I didn't want to be the first one to ask. Naturally, this turned into a flurry of stress and indecision about where we would go, where would be big enough, where would be nice but not too nice, was this actually a good idea. Eve hates talking on the phone and dealing with logistics like this, but she also hates watching people dithering when there is a solution to be had (the way she laid out who should take what room in their house was masterful). So she went up to her room, closed the door and then came out saying she had called Nanaa's, the Persian restaurant near their house, and secured a reservation at seven o'clock for twenty-four people and a baby. 

So that was that.

We had eaten there and knew the food was incredible, it was nice but not fancy, and the service was incredible. I regret that we didn't get a picture of all the parents at our long table, but I got a pic of all the girls and Zoe's boyfriend Sam smushed happily in their booth.

Eve made them all little clay houses, with the house number and a magnet on the back.

We all hung around talking outside on the sidewalk for a while, and had to tear ourselves away. Basically, it all turned out pretty much as well as we could have hoped.