Planes Trains and Automobiles

 Our family has been on the move for June and July. Not always together and not in the same direction, but, you know, moving. 

After not having seen Angus since Christmas, we saw him three times in thirty days, which is an absolute embarrassment of riches. He came home mid-June to be there when two of his high school friends married each other (he got me roses for my birthday that lasted a crazy long time). 

He asked me to find an old picture of us to put on Instagram for my birthday. 

We flew to Akron to see the Rubber Ducks play over the July fourth weekend. Then we drove to Binghamton NY for Rubber ducks away games this past weekend. 

We got to Akron when the heat was like a blast furnace. Sitting through that first game was like sitting in an oven, even in the evening. We had planned to have dinner at the ball park and it was too hot to eat anything. But the hotel was air conditioned and all we had to do was sit, so this was really a first-world problem. The team has been struggling recently because of injuries (bad) and players being called up to the majors (good, really), but it was pretty good baseball to watch, they were ahead for part of the time in every game and only lost by a couple of runs.

I don't know how this wasn't a workplace safety violation.

We stayed at a cool hotel where the rooms were in a hallway lined with frosted doors and used to be cigar shops and haberdashers. Angus lives in an old law building that has beautiful architectural details. I met a couple of blog friends and their adorable pets and it was deliriously wonderful. We went to another game on the actual fourth, and thank goodness it was not quite as hot because the game was sold out and if I had had to endure brushing up against people like that and having duck kazoos blown in my ear for three hours while it was a million degrees out I would have committed either the sui or homi varieties of cide, or possibly both. 

After the game we went onto the field with Angus to watch the fireworks. The fireworks, at a minor league baseball game, that probably had the budget of three Canada Days on Parliament Hill. So trippy.

While we were flying to Akron, Eve was taking the train from Hamilton to Ottawa. It sucked that we weren't going to be home when she arrived, but she was going to a cottage with friends on the weekend anyway. Davis's mom Jody said she'd pick her up, and then we realized Eve was arriving and the close-to-home train station at 6:10 and Davis was arriving at the far-from-home train station at 6:20, so it was a bit of a conundrum, but both trains took turns being delayed until Jody ended up having time to pick up Davis and arrive to pick up Eve right as the train rolled in.

Eve took one week off from her master's work and then was doing a two-week bacteriophage boot camp at the University of Ottawa. The first day I dropped her at something called Field trip Farm to hunt bacteriophages, which is a sentence I never envisioned myself typing (they were actually collecting soil samples that they then prepared and harvested phages from). I have been enjoying making her dinner and packing her lunch (okay that's a lie, no one likes packing lunches, do they? but I'm happy to be able to do it for her), grumbling when she uses the last good spoon and fighting for whose yogurt gets prime space in the fridge. We also went to Chateau Montebello and spent a decadent day by the pool drinking really expensive Pina coladas while Matt ran a sales meeting, and then organized a party at home for a bunch of his colleagues.

The insanely appropriate wrapping paper she found for my birthday present. 

This past weekend Matt and I drove to Binghamton, New York for Rubber Ducks away games. A couple of friends from Ottawa who have known Angus since before he was born also came, and my sister and her husband drove from Southern Ontario, AND Binghamton is very close to Elmira where Angus did undergrad and played baseball, so he got to see two brothers who were on the team and have become really good friends, and their parents who basically adopted him when he was stuck over the border during Covid and we couldn't get to him. His coach from Elmira who was amazing to him also came to one game and seemed really happy and proud, and it was all very emotional. Everyone was outfitted with Ducks merch, we drank ballpark beer and ate ballpark hot dogs (my brother-in-law's was free because he caught one of the ones that were being thrown into the bleachers between innings - we took a minute to consider its provenance and then decided it was wrapped and it would probably be fine).

I am a whore for the Hilton check-in cookie.

Auntie Jody and Uncle Andrew

Coach G.

One is Mark and one is Mason and that's all I'm prepared to swear to. 

The Cracker Barrel pic we took to make my niece jealous. 

Mark and Collette, the only woman who has successfully gotten Angus to eat tuna.

Did I mention that we fucked off to have dinner with the Ryans and left my sister and BIL and Mark and Collette to have dinner together (not unexpectedly, we were very up front about this happening before the trip)? Had they met before? Well yes, my brother-in-law Andrew said he remembered going to some birthday party with us and they were there. Then my sister said "yes, as a matter of fact I think it was Jacob's (their first son) first birthday (Jacob is now 27). It's been a beat." They had a great time anyway, and we had drinks in the hotel room after dinner.

Did I further mention that Saturday was 95% chance of precipitation and there were severe thunderstorm warnings and we were worried the game would be cancelled? And then Mark spent a long time putting on sunscreen before we went and we mocked him because we are assholes? And then the clouds rolled away dramatically and the sun came out and we were like bugs under a magnifying glass and Mark looked like a genius and the rest of us were now sunburned assholes? Into every day a little rain must not-fall, I guess? 

Also, there is a tradition of minor league teams being renamed for themed games or weekends ("temporary sponsor identities", I just looked it up). The Binghamton Rumble Ponies (so named because of Binghamton being the carousel capital of the world, and workhorses being called rumble horses, but ... I don't know, ponies sounding better?) were going by The Scoop Scoundrels the weekend we were there, which we kept being confused about while for some reason neglecting to just consult the Knowers of All Things that were on our person at all times. My eminently sensible hot-dog-catching brother in law looked it up, and the reference was to a Binghamton law against carrying an ice cream cone in your back pocket. Why, you may ask? Because horse thieves would lure the horses with ice cream cones in their... you guessed it. We pursued this a little further into 'well what if you put it in your FRONT pocket' territory, which led to the obvious "is that an ice cream cone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" joke and then we decided it was probably best to let the matter drop. 

The first 1000 people got ice cream bucket hats. Eve really wants me to be clear that we didn't buy these. 

I Did a Blip

 I have been a bad blog friend because when I'm not blogging reading other blogs makes me feel too guilty. But I miss all of you! I had a tiny manic phase which was great because I could go on four or five hours sleep a night but I was too restless to sit down long enough to write anything (my house should really be even cleaner than it is). I went to see Eve and my professor and my sister. I turned un-manic and had a tiny mental health bobble as a result. I turned fifty-six. 

I kept thinking I should blog, and then I thought what if I just sort of...float in a sea of existing for a bit. And not feel like I'm shirking some kind of duty or like I might as well just stop forever if I stop for three weeks. I hung out in extended child's pose. I gardened. I sat outside in the back yard looking at flowers and reading brainless fluff. I did another book fair and it almost killed me. 

I drove down to see Eve - briefly, because she was preparing to leave for a conference and then do a presentation for the institute that funds her lab right after returning, and had a shit ton of stuff to deal with - and then continued on to my sister's place. My sister only lives an hour and a half from Eve, but it's still been difficult to get there much because whenever we were down in Hamilton it was to bring Eve home, and she was so desperate to come home for a bit I didn't want to ask her to spend her vacation time somewhere else. Jody and her husband come up here quite a bit, which is lovely but it's always a big family thing. Since Eve's been doing her master's I've been able to visit her and then hang out with my sister alone for a few days three times in five months, which has been joyful in a way I didn't even know I was missing. 

We went to the bookstore that she used to live down the street from because we always do if it's open. She bought me a puzzle for my birthday because if I buy any more puzzles my husband will murder me, and it was really pretty and made from sustainable cardboard. When I picked her up she was wearing a dress that I wore to Matt's thesis supervisor's wedding thirty years ago. I found it and couldn't believe I still had it and showed it to her before giving it away and she claimed it and wears it all the time. I still love it and it makes me happy every time I see it on her. 

Eve showed me around her lab for the first time - the centrifuge that could rip through a wall if safety protocols aren't followed, the sign that says how many days since exploding agar, the burners where they explode the agar, the super-poisonous stuff and the e. coli that probably wouldn't poison anyone. I met two more of her lab mates and saw her bench. Her lab is in the hospital, and I had parked randomly in the underground parking lot and was not sure we would ever be able to find each other, but I got in the right coloured elevator by accident and it was actually very easy. It was very, very cool to see her in that setting, doing actual science-y stuff but in a place that appreciates her wit and offbeat humour. One of the other women bought a pink flamingo for her little boy, but when she saw Eve's face upon seeing it she turned it into a lab flamingo named Walter instead. 

Stickers on the door of their very serious workplace

Isn't her record keeping so incredibly neat and pleasing?

Where the magic exploding agar happens

I took her out for dinner and then we went to hang at my hotel for a bit. We were going to go to the hot tub but there was a hockey tournament, so Eve suggested we watch some of season two of The Four Seasons on Netflix. I was a bit surprised that she was into it (it's about a group of fifty-something couple friends who travel together each season, with various dramatic arcs), but she said "obviously. It reminds me of you and your friends because you're the same age and you travel together and you all love each other and occasionally there's drama and sometimes you're very stupid." No lies detected. 

We went out for dinner with Lauren, Eve's housemate and now close friend, and Jean, my former professor who also taught Eve (still so trippy). We had a riotous, wide-ranging, gossipy, amazing talk session as usual, and then we went outside and talked even more and I went to take a picture of Jean with the girls, and a couple was just coming out of the movie theatre next door and asked if I wanted to be in the picture. I did not - Jean is tiny, and even the small girls look big next to her, and I always feel like an ogre. Eve says this is stupid, it is obvious that Jean is jellybean-sized, and I didn't want to turn down the kind offer, so we let the man take our picture and asked what movie they had seen and it was Project Hail Mary. They said it had been hard to catch some stuff because of their hearing aids, and Lauren ended up clarifying much of the movie's action in minute detail, which it was obvious the couple was loving, and it was loud and funny and weird in the way it often is when we're all together. 

Eve putting actual coins in a parking meter, which was a huge novelty for her

I was driving Eve back to her apartment and she thanked me for being 'such a nice low-maintenance Mommy', which was awesome, because, in all honesty, parenting our kids has never come with a whole lot of heavy lifting, which is all down to dumb luck, but I have always hoped that me being around would always feel like a nice thing and not an obligation for them. She'll be home for a bit at the beginning of July, but it was nice to have an opportunity for a couple of hugs and a couple of meals until then.