Shaken, not Stirred

It would be fair to say that as a friend group, ours has consumed a goodly amount of alcohol over the years. Our weekly bar night is at, well, a bar. Our camping dinners are frequently accompanied by a big-ass jug of strawberry margarita or peach bourbon lemonade or something called a Hypnotique that made us all cluck like chickens. 

I don't worry about this, exactly. I do think about it on occasion. We're all children of the late sixties and early seventies. Most of our parents drank liberally (mine still have happy hour every single day, and they are in their eighties and doing really well, so...) A lot of university had a boozy film over it (Century Club - what the hell were we thinking?) I get uncomfortable with a lot of the 'wine mom' discourse on social media these days - I understand the underpinnings, and honestly a lot of the memes are funny, and I've probably said similar stuff on occasion without really meaning it. First of all, it seems a little dangerous to position alcohol as a way of dealing with the hardships of parenting (just observing, not judging, because downing my weight in m&ms was also not the best way), and second of all it seems insensitive to anyone reading who is in recovery, so I try to check myself on alcohol intake and attitude periodically.

But anyway. I'm pretty comfortable that we're within the bounds of decency and health. Nobody gets pressured to drink if they don't want to. One of us gives up alcohol for Lent every year even though he's not Catholic. When I'm in a depressive episode or just don't feel like drinking on a Tuesday it's a non-issue. The annual Christmas party can get a little rowdy, but mostly none of us has the time or inclination to spend the next day incapacitated, and it's been years since I've drunk enough to actually have a hangover (Michael's fortieth birthday party, oy. Drank like I was twenty. Subsequently felt like I was eighty. Eve was mortified - for the next few weeks every time anyone offered me a beer she would hiss "she's fine".)

Admittedly, this is all so I can tell you about last night, which was really fun, and not have you worry that we should be looking for group rates at the nearest rehab centre. 

Lucy, on the other hand, leads a life of appalling debauchery

Our friend Tony is extremely knowledgeable and skilled in matters spirituous. I think he's taken courses in wine, beer and scotch at least. Occasionally he invites us over for drinks and has an actual drink menu. 

In case it hasn't been obvious, I am a bit preoccupied with the photographic record. I like having pictures and I also have kind of a crappy memory. I was bad enough when I had to use a camera - now that I can just use a phone, I'm unstoppable. Generally everyone is pretty agreeable about this, because it means they get pictures and don't have to worry about taking them. At one point at Sandbanks this year, I asked four teenaged girls and one nine-year-old to jump on a picnic table for a pic and they all instantly fell into formation. I said something about being one of our kids really teaching you how to pose and Rachel said "especially when you're dealing with the Group Photographer". Then Eve said "now imagine she goes with you everywhere" (when I retell this she claims I make her sound meaner than she actually did, which is probably fair). 

So we were sitting around Tony's table, across the island from his beautiful kitchen, with immaculately mixed, poured and garnished cocktails, and I kept thinking I should take a picture, because even though at some point in every evening things devolve into ridiculous battles over the music, and I maintain my assertion that many of my friends are ridiculous obnoxious musical snobs, and I defend my hurling of a handful of heirloom carrots at Mark when he said 'a wall of sound, not a mountain of sound' for the seventh time, I love these people with my whole heart and my life would suck considerably more without them.

But I didn't. I basked in the warmth and laughter instead. I drank something lemony and something purple with lavender bitters and a couple other things.

Near the end of the evening, Collette was finished her drink, and Tony turned around and grabbed a bottle of Kraken and a can of Coke Zero from the island for her to mix a new one (she had dispensed with the fancy drinks at this point). She opened the bottle of Kraken, started to tip it over her glass, squinted at something in the middle distance, and put the bottle down without pouring it. We asked her why, and she said "because I see twelve tomatoes".

There were only four tomatoes. She knew there were only four tomatoes, but she was seeing three groups of them, so she was exercising a hitherto unseen discretion in foregoing more alcohol.

This would have been slightly more impressive if she hadn't glance down five minutes later and exclaimed indignantly "why didn't I pour my drink??" (I mean, her memory is notoriously bad, maybe it wasn't the booze at all).

So the whole evening, I only took a picture of the ass squash on Tony's counter and the four tomatoes that almost saved Collette from herself. 

And I am comfortable with that decision.

Don't Be a Chicken, Grab Your Spoon and Shoulder Your Burdens

 Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been... *checks last post* 15 days since my last blog post. I am just starting to get back into a routine, at the start of my second full week without any kids at home, which will hopefully include blogging regularly again, although I don't really know what that means, precisely.

Both kids seem to be doing well. I got them both instant pots in the summer when Canadian Tire had a fantastic deal on the one we have here, so I could show them the basics before they left. They've both managed to break theirs in long, long before I got over my fear of mine (I bought it in a really good Black Friday sale and then was too scared to use it for a year and a half). I FaceTimed with Eve while she made some curry chicken in hers, and Angus uses his daily and texted that it's the greatest invention of all time.

Instant pot chicken with the homemade taco seasoning I sent with him

I drove Eve to Hamilton because Matt was in Vegas (poor guy, his job is so rough, wtf). On the way there we stopped at a Burger King and both went to the bathroom before getting food. The music being piped in was an appallingly lugubrious Rod Stewart song about a girl leaving home and presumably getting hooked on drugs or something and her mother crying herself to sleep every night. We both left our respective washrooms making weird faces about it. We lined up to order, and after a minute or two Eve put her head on my shoulder and I put my arms around her. At the exact same second we both started fake-emotionally singing the song and then burst out laughing and had our usual discussion of sharing a brain and I worried briefly about how it was going to go for me when I had to go home with only my half.

I drove home Wednesday, worked my first couple shifts at various school libraries Thursday and Friday and then we went to a friend's cottage on Saturday. 

It's a lovely place with only one bathroom that we generally fill to bursting with at least four families with at least two kids each. Our kids are away now and a few others were working so it was a tiny bit less crowded. We are a close-knit crew who nevertheless delight in challenging each other to diverse feats of strength or intelligence and engaging in some truly terrible trash-talking in the pursuit of said feats, so if you looked in one direction you would see a cottage with a wide, welcoming deck and a bunch of chairs for conversation and tree-viewing, and if you looked in the other direction you would see what resembled a redneck shooting gallery - a target board with all the family names at the four corners and one on top so we could all fling knives and axes at the names of our beloved friends, and beer and pop cans for bb guns and slingshots. Inside was ping-pong and spoons (a card game where you try to get four of a kind and when you do you try to grab a spoon from the pile in the middle of the table where there is one less spoon than players - like musical chairs with more violence. Matt said he assumed the game was suited to the talents of the family who proposed it - 'pattern recognition and extreme aggression').

It was all lovely except I threw the axe too hard and now I have to go back to physio for my shoulder - I an officially too old for this shit. Oh well, I would have buggered it up at some point again anyway, and this way I get to sound slightly cooler saying I hurt myself axe-throwing rather than gardening or baking (hey, rolling out empanada dough takes some muscle, shut up).

Sometimes I feel lost and sad at the beginning of fall, even though I like fall and look forward to getting back into a routine. Right now I feel pretty good. I do keep forgetting that Eve isn't just down the hall in her room, but I still get her daily download most nights over FaceTime. I'm looking forward to having students in the library in both schools. My friends make life absurd and fun and only occasionally dangerous. And it's finally cooled off and I'm going to go read outside.