Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story

 The photos from my previous post are:

Eve in grade eight in a fractured fairy tales play at her school. She was the princess from The Frog Prince, and she complained to The Storyteller that her frog was not as wealthy and handsome as promised. Near the end she comes onstage yelling "Storyteller, I need a new frog, this one's broken!" The school kept yards of this tulle stuff, and in many plays the costume was black leggings and a fitted shirt with the different colours of tulle draped on somehow. It was actually pretty cool.

A stage backdrop at Bluesfest. I don't remember for which band.

An exhibit at the Corning Museum of Glass (trees made out of glasses) which we visited when we drove Angus to Elmira for the very first time, almost exactly.... SEVEN years ago, *whimper*. I absolutely loved that museum. We always meant to go back - I think Covid really prevented that as much or more as procrastination and laziness, but who can say really.

A fire whipper arounder guy in Mexico, or maybe Hawaii?

I have changed my blog layout and am accepting opinions. I felt like the other one made sentences too long and it might be annoying to try to read. I've had to stop reading blogs before because they were visually too difficult for me. I love Sarah's layout with the narrower columns, so I was aiming for something kind of like that. Eve doesn't like the grey background. 

Engie asked what all the fuss was about Hamilton. I was not an early adopter. I am sometimes susceptible to a kind of reverse snobbery that is just as bad as the regular kind, where I think that anything too popular is probably not that good. They say things like 'ten million people can't be wrong', but they can, right? They can be SO wrong. 

I randomly started listening to the soundtrack on my break at a school where I don't work any more. The first song I listened to was Helpless. I think the next thing that happened fairly soon after was that I got the flu right before March Break and we were supposed to go visit Matt's mom in Florida at her summer house, but I was too sick so Matt and Eve went and I stayed home and hovered near death without getting out of bed for about seventy-two hours. One of the things that comforted me was listening to the soundtrack on repeat, and by the time I was better I was devoted.

I have heard that people think it's not right to portray George Washington as a remotely good guy because he owned slaves, as did many of the other characters in the play. I can't really refute that. I'm not going looking for more criticism because this is my blog and I don't feel like it. I just think it's an incredibly creative and fun way to set some events from a certain point of history to music (and rap). Someone that I used to be friends with said the fact that it casts POC in traditionally white roles was 'cute, not impactful', which I thought was kind of snotty - I mean, it's a matter of scale, maybe it didn't change the theater world but it was presumably a little impactful (no, I didn't unfriend her because of Hamilton, but it was admittedly a nail in the coffin).

We saw it for the first time last summer - it was supposed to be during one of the Covid years, so we had the tickets for a really long time. It was really fun to see then, but I feel like this production was even better - that might be because of recency bias, but I think a couple of roles were just cast better, and this time I just got the sense that they were having a hell of a lot of fun as well as turning in some amazing performances. Eve and I were talking about how it's difficult with something like this where so many people are so familiar with the original Broadway soundtrack that when you go see it you kind of want it to sound the same, but you accept that each actor probably wants to kind of put their own spin on it. Yesterday King George and Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson did a bang-up job of being faithful to the original while putting their own hilarious spin on things. 

Going to try posting a relevant picture now. 

Whoo hoo! That's from the first time we went, but I posted it on purpose!

Who's on First

 I've been in a bit of a funk the last few days. Eve is getting ready to move back and we're not sure what her time off will be like, but the master's goes straight through for two years, so she'll be home, but not for two weeks or four months at a time. This is hitting both her and me pretty hard - she said "I might be realizing that if I don't have four months off every years then I can't live that far away permanently." I will always support my kids in their efforts to be independent and do rewarding work, but I kind of hope she does end up a little closer to home.

Moving my parents has hit a snag or two - there aren't many apartments available that meet their specs - so we're all a little anxious and cranky, and even if it was all going smoothly, it's definitely the end of something, and there's a low-level grief happening around that. Then there are smaller annoyances - getting my chronic neck pain to a more manageable level just in time for chronic knee pain to become a thing, my new CPAP mask making my nose bleed every night even though it should be exactly the same as my old mask, just newer. 

It will be okay. I have a friend coming on Tuesday to stay for a few days which will be fun and good for getting me out of my head. Matt and Eve drove to Hamilton last Sunday and did a move-in of all the big stuff - furniture from my parents' house, clearing out the storage locker, IKEA trip - and I'll take her back next week-end to move her clothes and stuff in and finish up making sure she has enough kitchen stuff etc. 

In other fun news, I also got tickets for Eve and I to go and see Hamilton (the musical) this weekend. I knew the touring company was coming back through but I had forgotten until Collette said she was at Hamilton and I was confused thinking she said she was IN Hamilton, and then remembered. I asked Eve yesterday if I should see if there were reasonable tickets and she said she'd love to go, so I called Matt at work to ask if he wanted to come to. I said "Eve and I are going to go to Hamilton on Sunday" and Eve yelled out "CONFUSING" and I realized I had idiotically done the same thing to him that Collette had unintentionally done to me, and hastily clarified. We're driving to Hamilton (the city) next Sunday, so Eve now has "Hamilton" marked on her calendar for three consecutive Sundays for two different causes. 

Oh, in other stupid annoying things, my old Blogger app stopped working, so I updated it and now pictures won't load. I am therefore unable to expose you to a deluge of absolute banger Vancouver Aquarium pictures. I know you're disappointed, so while I troubleshoot the issue I am going to publish posts with random old pictures from my Chromebook. I trust the foregoing photos will now be less perplexing. 

The Beer I Had for Breakfast

 Nicole and I have talked fairly often about how frequently it happens that we are going about our day and suddenly an innocent word or phrase sets off a song in our head. I think we both use songs as post titles, although Nicole does it more often maybe, and they make more sense. Last night I was at a last-minute birthday get-together and there was a last-minute cake, and the last-minute birthday boy was cutting the cake and Collette counted everyone at the table 'one two three four five six seven eight nine' and I was like how am I the only one singing The Ten Duel Commandments?

This reminded me of when I was catching up on blogs after we got home from Vancouver and Nicole's second-to-last post was called Alone Again, Naturally. 

I have a weird hole in my music familiarity, I'm not sure why except maybe that I went to university and lived in residence for two years and then a student house, and I wasn't really engaged in the music coming out during those years - we listened to cassette tapes (The Proclaimers and Jane Siberry, over and over) and weird bands that came to play in Faculty Hollow. I go to Bluesfest sometimes to see some early 90s band thinking maybe I will recognize the music, and I usually do not. 

So there is what I listened to when I started driving around and listening to the radio again, and then there is the deep deep dive stuff, which Alone Again, Naturally prompted, which is my parents' eight tracks in our car and trailer. This was a lot of Gordon Lightfoot, Abba, the Irish Rovers and random country collections (we were eclectic?) I heard Alone Again, Naturally so many times at camp, and also the song Sunday Morning Coming Down, which when I was little was hilarious to me - "Well I woke up Sunday mornin'/ With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt/ And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad/ So I had one more for dessert/ Then I fumbled in my closet through my clothes/ And found my cleanest dirty shirt." What a crazy clown this guy was! Beer for breakfast! Cleanest dirty shirt! Then I got older and realized it was about a minimally functional alcoholic questioning all of his life choices, cool, pass the marshmallows.

When we were in Vancouver one of Eve's friend's pseudo-famous friends (I don't really know what this means but I want one) gave them free tickets to a Tate McRae concert - this is someone they don't love as a singer but she's a really good dancer, and they wouldn't have bought tickets, but were happy to go for free (there was some musing over whether she could post pictures on social media while making it clear that the tickets were free. This is a problem that I have never had.) Eve's housemate lives in Vancouver but was still living in Hamilton over the summer, but then Eve found out that she was in town for her driver's test while we were there. She said "I bet she's going to the concert" and she was, but the second night, so we just had dinner with her and Eve's BFF, which was an enjoyable combining of the old and the new.

While the girls were at the concert, Katherine and I went to Theatre Under the Stars in Stanley Park. It was Legally Blonde, and I was a little bit surprised at how much I loved it, and how polished the performances were. It was basically lawn chairs and we had walked a lot during the day, and I was a little worried I would be sleepy and uncomfortable, but I was neither.

Now I'm just saying random music stuff to justify that I felt compelled to write about how I've had dessert beer on my mind for the last few days and it's Nicole's fault. We had a great trip to Vancouver and Matt had fun camping and I am ready to write about that now that I've emptied my head of Johnny Cash being melancholy. Maybe he was out Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night before Sunday Morning Came Down. Maybe he Didn't Like Mondays. I would like to go on record as vowing that I have never had beer for breakfast. I might have had a Harvey Wallbanger once, but that has orange juice.

Fingers and Toes and Whether to Expose

 Eve and I went to the spa today for a manicure (her) and a pedicure (me). On the way there, I told her that at the bar on Tuesday we had been talking about how sometimes you think something that you quickly realize is really dumb, or realize when someone else is saying something that you had always been wrong about that thing, and the feeling of massive relief you get that you avoided saying the Wrong Thing out loud and looking like a dumbass. 

(One example of this that I can remember like it was yesterday was being at someone's house with a group of people that included a boy in my grade who was kind of a know-it-all, and we were always competing for the best grades. I can't remember what the game was, but it involved having to take a card and read whatever was on it, and he read the word 'anemones' the way it should be read (a-nem-oh-neez) and I, who had always read it as a-nem-moans, felt hot and cold with the realization that I could have drawn the card and said it wrong in front of him and never recovered from the mortification.)

Most of us at the bar, though, agreed that at a certain age the fear of looking dumb in public has subsided, partly because you have a different perspective, partly (perhaps) because of a desensitizing effect from having it happen so often (maybe that's just me?) For this reason, having the dumb thought, realizing it is dumb, and then cheerfully proclaiming it to the world becomes one of the greatest joys in life.

Eve laughed, and then said "so I assume that was prompted by a thought you had just now?" And indeed it was. I never wear flip flops with toe thongs, I find them horribly uncomfortable. Matt and I went on a super fancy Cabo san Lucas trip before Covid, when the sales guys all voted for him to get an award that usually only sales guys can get, which was very sweet. Every night there was a new gift left in our rooms, and one night it was these really nice flip flops, which I brought home and gave to Eve because, toe thongs. I wore them today because Eve was getting a manicure, and my Croc flip flops overlap my baby toe so I can't wear them right after a pedicure.

What I was about to say to Eve before I caught myself was "I know I'll have to put these on before she puts the polish on, but I hope I don't have to wear them the whole time, because they're really uncomfortable". Then I thought that through and realized that that would not be possible, because the first part of the pedicure involves your feet being repeatedly submerged in a sink full of water.

I've always been kind of surprised and grateful that Eve and her friend group never seemed to go through a Sullen Adolescent phase. I certainly did, and Angus, while he was never surly towards me, definitely had a period where he was sort of grumpy and hard to get talking (which I totally get! It's a tough time!) In grade six she came home with her friends and they were talking about how the other grade six class had 'cooler' kids who never wore their snowpants at recess, so today Eve had tried not wearing hers. She said "I just felt cold, and weird about how skinny the bottom of my body was compared to the top". The consensus was that being 'cool' wasn't worth the discomfort.

They just seemed to continue feeling very comfortable discussing everything with us (the moms), up to and including drug and sex stuff. There were still trying times, of course, but without the added stress of feeling like they wouldn't talk to us. I can't stress enough that I don't think this was because of anything we did or did not do, it was purest dumb luck.

The other fun thing was that they never became jaded and unwilling to express excitement and wonder about things and experiences (like the Experimental Farm twenty years later). Eve shops sparingly for clothes and treasures each item. When she crafts something she likes she is so happy and proud. When she sets up her desk nicely to study or work she sends me a picture of the scene. So I loved taking her to get her nails done, because after agonizing over what colour to get, she ran around the house all afternoon saying she felt like a mermaid, and kept sticking her nails in my face, and this morning she got up and said "It's awesome going to bed the day after getting your nails done, because then you wake up and you haven't seen them for eight hours and it's exciting all over again." When I was her age, I would have felt like it was somehow unsafe to be that outwardly delighted by anything - and not without reason, because I remember times when people made it clear I was being extremely un-cool. One of my friend's friends said "why do I get the feeling Allison is just excited by life?" and I don't think it was meant to be a compliment. Oops, I've dipped my toes back into traumatic waters, back away!

Anyway, I am both glad to be past the point where I care what people think about my enthusiasm for whatever, and happy that my daughter doesn't seem to be restrained in hers.

Now back to anxiously over-packing. 

A little Lucy content for Engie, and Eve's shoes for Anne.

We went in to buy her boots, but there were two pairs of Doc Mary Janes. We picked these because of the flower buckle. I saved them for Christmas.

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.