Spanish Steps

We have Spained (not sprained - much). 

Full disclosure that will shock approximately none of you: I am a terrible traveler. I WANT to travel, and immerse myself in other cultures and learn about how people live in other places and be open to new experiences. But I am so anxious and awkward. I always think I'm doing everything wrong. It is such a terrible, inconvenient thing having a body while traveling, particularly one that is crooked and reacts badly to changes in routine. 

 That is all okay. I said to Matt at one point that we spend a lot of money on traveling so it's easy to fall into the thinking that it should all be perfect and beautiful and if it isn't we're doing it wrong. But i think a very important element of travel IS being uncomfortable, physically and mentally. It's good to shake up a comfortable routine, and it's good to really feel what it's like to be somewhere where you don't speak or understand the language and everything is confusing and frightening. It gives us not just sympathy but empathy for the people who come to our countries from somewhere else and don't speak or understand the language. I'm always afraid I'm going to come across like a stupid tourist but whatever, I AM a stupid tourist, most people are nice about it. 

 I started my other-language immersion in the Uber on the way to the airport (because my husband was already in Malaga, having gone to Paris the week before, and I am alone with my terrible sense of direction, remember). A lovely man named Behezagire who spoke mostly French was driving me. We managed to have a nice conversation with his bit of English and my very bad French. I told him I was going to meet my husband in Spain to celebrate our 30th anniversary and he said he had also been married 30 years, and asked me how many kids we had. He said they had four kids (three boys and a girl) but it was because they had the kids when they still lived in Africa (Burundi). He said it would be a little crazy to have four kids living in Canada, which made me laugh. 

We had worked through almost a dozen scenarios getting me from Ottawa to Malaga, mostly because we booked the flight later than would have been ideal. In the end I flew Air France from Ottawa to Paris, then KLM from Paris to Amsterdam and Amsterdam to Malaga. I fully acknowledge that I was traveling with the highest level of privilege in the top level of comfort, but that is still a lot of flights over a lot of hours. Two days before I left Matt told me he had paid a couple hundred dollars for a 'concierge' to help me at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I said, a tiny bit indignantly, "you got me a babysitter?" You guys, without this lovely woman Lina, I would have disappeared somewhere in CDG airport never to be seen again. It is BIG, and confusing, and it was the middle of the night and I would have been utterly and completely screwed. In addition to knowing exactly where I had to go, she was allowed to bypass some long lines and enter some no-entry-looking entrances. The most surreal part of the long walk through the airport was a series of like twenty tv screens, all showing Julia Roberts being radiant and being pelted with cherries in some perfume ad - just what you want to see when you are limping along feeling greasy and gross and desperate for a decontamination shower. 

CDG airport looked like a total throwback. It seemed weird that it wasn't wreathed in clouds of smoke. I went to my gate and instead of an announcement for who should board when, the attendant just sort of looked around at people and gave a Gallic little shrug, and then I walked up and showed my boarding pass and he waved me through graciously. I went, but I was still baffled by the process. 

I got to Amsterdam and sat in the lounge at a table, surrounded by weirdly enormous chairs, staring at nothing for two hours. After the last flight I got off and found the baggage claim where the flight was listed. We waited, and some bags came out, and then there was nothing, and there were a bunch of us still waiting. I was firmly at the 'why does anyone travel voluntarily' stage of grief when a woman who had sent her husband ahead to get the rental car announced to us that he had called and told her that those of us not coming from the European Union had to go find a mysterious second baggage carousel - we were supposed to intuit this telepathically, I guess? My incandescent rage at the stupidity was outweighed by my relief at being able to grab my suitcase and meet Matt outside finally.

The hotel was only about a twenty-minute drive from the airport. I had the best shower of my life and was about to sleep for ten hours. Then Matt said "everyone's going out for dinner in an hour and you're invited." And I said "....okay". I am a fan of the group tapas dinners. Plates and plates came around and you could just grab a bite or two of everything rather than a big whack of one thing. I was sitting with Camille, Matt's colleague who I really like, and when I said no to wine she said "oh, so you don't fall asleep at the table?" and I said "yep, I haven't slept or eaten for fifteen hours and two countries". They are a good interesting, funny group and I got through on adrenaline. Dinner started at 8:30 and took a long time, and when we came out the area was still bustling. We had a nice walk back to the hotel and then I thoroughly and comprehensively crashed. 

The Other Most Wonderful Time of the Year

 I use ice in my drinks. Like, a lot of ice. And by drinks I mean mainly water, which is what I drink most of the time. I think it was after my pregnancies that water that was anything less than glacial became revolting. 

 

Having a fridge with an ice maker always seemed impossibly luxurious and decadent. Then at some point I read or heard that they tend to break down and cause problems, so I put it out of my mind entirely. We used ice cube trays like normal people, except unlike normal people I tended to go through two trays of ice a day, between my home water glasses and my work water bottles, and cracking the ice cubes out of the trays was really hard on my hands, which pregnancy had done a number on.

 

When we decided on our new fridge I didn't even realize at first that it came with an ice maker - not the one on the front of the door, but one inside that filled up a bin. Since it was a feature of most of the fridges, I just went with it and felt like I had won a magical lottery. I was giddy with ice. I was Elsa in her frozen kingdom, but less sad and isolated (sometimes). I strew ice like diamonds in my path. Every drink was arctic. 

 

Then the inevitable happened. The fridge stopped making that beautiful clunking noise that meant it was birthing little cubes of joy. The ice level in the bin went down, down, down, until it was empty. We tried a few things to fix it. We found out that it would be really expensive to get someone else to fix it. I resigned myself to going back to ice cube trays like a chump. 

 

A few months later there was a tornado nearby that knocked our power out for sixty hours. We coped well enough. Half a day after the power came back on, my husband came upstairs bearing an oblong sliver of ice like the crown jewels. We were back, baby! For a while, anyway. When it packed up again, I tried defrosting the fridge for a day, but it didn't work. It is, of course, the first worldiest of all first world problems, so I shrugged and resumed the regular routine. 

 

The next Christmas, Matt bought me an ice maker. It lived downstairs in the laundry room, and didn't make a ton of ice at a time, and the ice came out wet, so I would go down, take out the ice and store it in the chest freezer, bring up the frozen chunk ice that was currently in the chest freezer, smash it with a meat tenderizer, and put it in the upstairs freezer. It was fine - better than cracking ice cube trays. 

 

We have theorized that in the winter when everything is cold, somehow the water line freezes, and the fridge can't make ice. But then in the spring, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, my ice comes back, a precious gift that is perhaps more meaningful because of its impermanence. 

I Am Here and Will Shortly Be Somewhere Else

When I am not blogging my head is filled with post ideas. When I sit down to blog they all flee madly off in all directions and I sit staring at the screen "like a pudding" as my lovely Scottish bookstore co-worker used to say. 

Matt left for Paris on Sunday and I am leaving tomorrow to meet him in Spain. This means I am flying to Paris and then Amsterdam and then Malaga (because you can't fucking get anywhere direct from fucking Ottawa because why would you be able to, we're only the nation's capital ffs, deep breath, regain serenity) alone, rather than trailing after my professional-traveler husband like a lost puppy, which is how I much prefer to do it, but it's fine, it's all fine, everything's fine, I almost certainly won't get lost and never be heard from again and lose my dignity and/or my organs. Did I mention I have zero sense of direction? 

The weekend at our friends' cottage was wonderful, as always. I climbed up and down the 25-flight down-the-cliff switchback trail to the water multiple times and my wonky knee actually felt great. It might have had something to do with the very cold water I floated in for hours every day having some anti-inflammatory effect. Tony's signature drink this year (remember the Hurricanes of 2024? Don't worry, many of us don't either) was called a Painkiller, or at least that's what he said, but we decided afterwards it was probably more like Pain+Killer, so I don't think that had much to do with my knee not hurting.

When we were camping, a family on the beach set up this odd looking game consisting of wide sticks with numbers on them and then another stick being thrown at them. Matthew googled "bowling with logs" and found that it is a Finnish game called Mollky (I can't figure out how to make an umlaut, which probably isn't even actually an umlaut because this is Finnish, not German) and that the proper word for 'wide sticks' is actually 'batons'. I bought one because our group is always looking for fun new ways to suck at things, trash talk each other and risk weird injuries. It was fun and very difficult.

I had classes in my libraries for the first time this week. Most of it went really well and it felt good to have the kids moving through again. There is one group of boys in a 2/3 split that is going to be an issue, but the teacher is aware of it and I have no qualms about sending them all to their various corners and I don't think it will be quite to the level of the 4/5 split at Broadview that made me contemplate quitting library work and interacting with children forever.

Angus's first season with the Cleveland Guardians organization is over. He is in Cleveland right now with the Big Boy team, unsure what exactly he will be doing, and then he comes home for a bit and then he goes to Arizona to look for an apartment (the idea is for Arizona to be his primary residence and then he will rent wherever he is during the season). We have procured ALL of the Rubber Ducks merch, because when will there ever be better team merch, and I have also collected as many of my son's baseball card as I can locate - $1.66 on Ebay, (or best offer). Let's just not talk about the fact that he is immortalized with a moustache. It's not the worst he's sported and, well, he's in baseball now, and in baseball there are moustaches. 

Going to pack and panic a bit more. See you on the other side, assuming I don't disappear into the Red Light District forever. 

I Will Stop Talking About Camping Any Minute Now

We are going to our friends' cottage for Labour Day weekend, which is obviously wonderful, but it's also giving me a tiny bit of camping PTSD. For most of the weekend it will be camping numbers of people, with one bathroom, and we're bringing the tent, although I might not end up sleeping in it - it's just getting so confusing trying to Tetris all the sleepers into a viable arrangement that we're bringing it just in case.

I have an unreasonable need to wash my hands and face several times a day. I mean sure, good hand hygiene is important, and my skin is oily so face washing needs to happen too, but there is a disturbing element of compulsion. I can touch something that I anticipate being oily and find that it is not oily, and still have to wash my hands. At bar night last week Collette didn't finish her chicken wings so she offered them to the table and three people each took one, but there were no wet naps left so I found one in my purse to offer them and none of them used it! They ate a chicken wing and just sat there with chicken wing hands for the rest of the night!

Anyway, at camp I have a basin at the end of the picnic table with water that I change several times a day, plus a big water jug with a spigot and liquid soap so I can wash my hands and face the same stupid number of times a day I do at home. Before I get in the tent to sleep, I basically do a comprehensive sponge bath before changing into my pajamas (it's generally two a.m. and very dark, so I am not traumatizing the campground), but I have to just be in denial about the fact that I have feet and lower shins for the entire time, because there is just no way for your feet to be clean unless you're actively in the water. 

Earlier this year Matt made some noises, as group members sometimes do, about finding a way for us all to do something together in the summer that doesn't involve quite so much heavy labour. Collette told him to go ahead and organize it and she would be in. A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine posted some gorgeous pictures from a rental cottage in Quebec where they saw whales and it looked beautiful. I did a bit of investigating and at bar night told people that we could rent a cottage there that slept ten for a few days for not that much more than camping ends of costing. People were very interested, and then we talked about it some more and it seems to have ended up as this being something we could add in to our regular calendar of annual events, which includes a Robbie Burns dinner in January, a Guys Cook Valentine's Day dinner in February, some kind of St Patrick's Day party in March, birthday barbecues in April and June, brisket at Tony's for Canada Day in July, A Halloween party in October, Christmas and New Year's parties in December, AND CAMPING. *weeps* 

There is running water at the cottage, but twenty people presents a not inconsiderable threat to the septic system, so .... *packs basin, water jug and wipes*

It was Tony's birthday earlier in August, but we were all recovering from camping still, so we celebrated this past weekend by confirming what was a pretty solid suspicion that we are, as a group, remarkably accomplished at drinking cocktails on tiki boats and really really bad at solving escape rooms.

Birthday boy!

Espresso martinis, which were supposed to help them focus for the escape room.
They did not. 

In our defense, the more we talk about it the more we think the escape room was really badly designed, and even if we had tried it before all the drinking on the tiki boat we probably wouldn't have been successful in escaping. One crucial difficulty was that there were almost a dozen combination locks that had to be solved to open drawers or doors that contained clues. We actually managed to figure out many of the combinations, but we were a group of fifty-somethings, and no one could see any of the fucking numbers. We weren't allowed to have our phones, which, fair enough, but we told the perky twenty-somethings running the place that they needed to provide flashlights. But I might just be bitter because there was a cabinet we never got open that apparently had six heads in it, and that would have been cool.

At the end of the night we went back to Tony's because why wouldn't he want to end his birthday night making complicated and labour-intensive drinks for all your friends? 

Also, we took drugs. 

I was back in the library starting a couple of weeks ago. Everything is still quiet and neat, awaiting the onslaught. There are new autism classes at my Wednesday school, and they are both in my library time slot, which I am happy about because I used to have the autism unit at the very first school I worked in, and I really enjoyed working on the simple, concrete goals like getting each child to say their name and learn the procedure for borrowing books. There was one little girl who would only cry every time she approached the desk at the beginning of the year and by the end she would say "Emily!" happily when I asked her name, and it was unspeakably gratifying. This made up for the fact that there were two blonde teachers with that class who were almost identical and one really liked me and one seemed to dislike me strongly and I was extremely confused until I figured out they weren't the same person. 

Reading (and being idiots) at Camp

Please trust, dearest darlings, that I am in no way trying to convince any of you to camp. I can barely convince myself to camp. Half the reason I camp is to get funny blog stories about stuff that was not that funny while it was happening. 

Okay, this was very funny while it was happening, though. When we got back to camp, about four of us (not me) got to work tarping the campsite where dinner was supposed to take place that night. The rest of us (including me) stood around gawking and eating chips. Our campsite was directly across the road from the dinner campsite, and gradually a line of chairs was set up in front of our site, and another line of chairs set up in the dinner site facing the other line. 

 

This was the perfect set-up both for heckling the tarpers, and each other, and then interacting with anyone who drove or walked by on the road. Some people looked scared. More people looked charmed. When people walked by and asked where the water tap was, we all pointed and chorused 'there' like Stepford children. Then we applauded the woman who got water. And the park employee who came around weed-whacking around the campsite posts. Then the kids playing football. They all seemed to appreciate the validation (yes, we are obnoxious assholes as a group, but we mean well). 

Pictures of group dinner at Mark and Collette's - short rib chili, corn and bread that was supposed to be homemade over the fire but ended up being sourdough from Loblaws. 

I asked everyone to send car selfies while driving back to camp. 

This one was the winner:

Dumping the water out of the tent, or, oh no! The tent is eating Jared!

Tony's bespoke drink on his dinner night was concocted after he had a dream about making a drink out of carrot water. It was dark rum with carrot, clove, cinnamon and nutmeg and simple syrup and lemon juice, called the "What's Up, Doc" and it was delicious. 

The ridiculously big campfire circle we have now. 

The Books of Camping

 Vivian: Fantastic Land by Mike Bockoven. Haven't read it.

Jacob: Dunkirk to Belsen: The Soldiers' Own Dramatic Stories by John Sadler. Haven't read it. 

Ben and Melanie (who, since our last camping trip, got engaged!): Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Morning Star by Pierce Brown. Haven't read them, but I also had an Adrian Tchaikovsky book.

Collette: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. Haven't read it, have had it on hold with the library forever, I think they've lost their copy. 

Logan: Classic Tales of Horror (on brand). Have read some. 

Jordan: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if You're Life Depended on it by Chris Voss. Haven't read it, hadn't really paid attention to the title before now, and now I might be a little scared of Jordan. 

Jared: Dammit, I can't remember - Predator Something?. It is crucial for me to be able to take the title FROM THE PHOTO, Jared!

Margot: Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune. Haven't read it. 

Alina: Holding Reins by Paisley Hope (I initially read 'Hope' as 'Whore', that type really fades into the background too much). Haven't read it. 

Me: Tender by Sofia Samatar (short stories - amazing, although one smashed my heart into little pieces and then crushed up the pieces in a blender and poured them down the garbage disposal) and Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky (bought in San Francisco because Steph recommended it and my eye fell on it the minute I entered the bookstore. I loved it - thoughtful and melancholy.