Five For Friday

 Really just Friday randoms (un)cleverly disguised. 

1. Tiresome health stuff: yesterday was exactly three weeks in and I THINK I have managed to mostly quell the cough without having to go to the doctor. I looked it up and realized I was over-using my blue inhaler, so started using it once in the morning, once at night and two other times spaced out during the day. Instead of getting off the cold meds as soon as I felt I could, I took some morning and night for a solid week. I stopped the narcotic cough syrup two nights ago and have still slept pretty well. The only thing I hate is that if I start coughing in the night, the only thing that stops it is having a Strepsil lozenge even while I sleep. Assuming I don't choke to death, I cringe at what this is probably doing to my teeth, but I can't really see a good alternative. This seems to have forestalled the cough getting as bad as it did in January, when I regularly coughed until I threw up or nearly displaced a rib. My mom did ask if I thought I might have whooping cough, since she heard it's going around (thanks anti-vaxxers), and my dad scorned this theory since this is the same cough my sister and I have had since we were five years old. So many memories of my dad sitting on the side of my bed in the middle of the night dispensing cough syrup.

2. Eve is loving being in the lab for the most part. She has her own little bench and her own little experiment (I keep forgetting what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with seeing which bacteriophage can do something faster, so I refer to it as Racing Phages). She has a really nice PhD student as a mentor, and things are going well aside from her agar being a little lumpy. It would be awesome if she could do her grad work here, but the prof is going on sabbatical next year - sometimes I feel like she gets the reverse of all the lucky breaks that fall to Angus, because this spectacularly bad timing is something that has happened more than once for her. She's going to talk to him and see if he can recommend another lab with a similar culture (hee hee). 

3. I didn't sleep much Tuesday night, and went into my Wednesday morning school feeling like I could literally not hold my eyelids up. Then my first class - which had missed their official first day the week before - was so lovely and sweet and polite it actually made me tear up a bit. They all said thank-you. Some of them talked about their books excitedly. One girl said she liked my skirt. Last year my first class at Monday School was the same - so quiet and nice, and their teacher was so calm and nice with them. 

4. The left side of my neck has been an issue for over a year now. I started physio again two weeks ago, and since then some kind of nerve pinch is causing pain in my right arm now too - moving in the WRONG DIRECTION, body. When we were at camp one of the boys pulled a leg muscle and I gave him a can of Deep Relief spray from my first aid kit. He used most of it and found it really helpful, and his mom (my friend) replaced it for me with Extra Strength. Y'all, this is NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT.  I've been using it every night, which is helpful now that I've figured out that I need to be sparing, and spray in one location and then quickly walk away, otherwise it's like simultaneously pepper spraying myself and giving myself chemical burns. So much coughing and sneezing and crying and burning. I am a constant danger to myself.

5. I hosted book club last night, because the originally planned host just moved. We are finally tackling Don Quixote - book one this month, book two next. I sometimes try to theme the food, although most of the menu last night veered Mexican rather than Spanish. I did have Manchego, a Spanish sheep's milk cheese, and Manchego popovers, in addition to black bean empanadas - wait wait, I just looked it up and according to Mr. Internet empanadas (which I have just become entirely unable to type coherently) are actually Spanish in origin, so never mind - and guacamole with chips. Coincidentally, I just got a FB memory that in 2013 I hosted book club on the same day for Under the Volcano, which takes place in Mexico - "I just squeezed lime and sprinkled cilantro over a variety of foodstuffs, I should be good, right?" 

These always make me wonder why I don't make popovers every freaking day

Lucy riveted by the DQ discussion. 

Friday Randoms - Coughing and Cleaning

1. I'm still kind of sick. By which I mean I go stretches of a few hours when I feel almost normal, and then I erupt into an alarming booming cough with a whistle at the bottom of it, my eyes start watering so I can't see properly to try to fumble an inhaler and a cough drop out of my purse, and everyone in my vicinity flees for dear life. It's.. not great. I forgot to take a mask into the grocery store on Monday after work (because I had been normal for a couple of hours) and I felt like an asshole when I started coughing in the produce aisle and couldn't stop. I got out and made sure to put masks in my purse for next time. I'm not sure what else I can do. I just looked up how often I can use my salbutemol inhaler, and I've been using it too much. I'm going to try an around-the-clock dosage of cold meds for a couple of weeks - my airways are small and constrictive, and my nose and nasal passages are small and I have a bone spur behind one orbital ridge (sorry for the TMI), so it takes a long time for everything to clear, and maybe trying to get off the cold medicine as soon as I can is not the way to go. More than once in my life, people ranging from friends to complete strangers have commented on my 'cute little nose', and it turns out that a big honker would have served me better. Hmph.

2. Yesterday I was off, and I read for a bit and then decided to start addressing some of the areas of clutter I've been wanting to get to. I went through everything that had piled up on the dining room table and in a couple of corners. I bagged up some stuff for the thrift store and freecycled a bunch more - most things have already been picked up, which is always nice. The 'no more plastic grocery bags' thing is better for the environment and I'm all for it, but it presents a dilemma for porch pickups. I've had to get a bit creative and just hope people are okay with it.

Then I did the coffee table behind the chair, kind of between the family room and the kitchen. I still had a pile of the wallet photos that I used for the Christmas cards last December - a friend offered to print them for me and then misunderstood when I used 'sheet' meaning the sheet of four I usually get from the photo lab, and printed "sheets' like 8.5 by 11, which is A LARGE NUMBER OF PHOTOS. I send about fifty Christmas cards, which was not enough to use all the pictures. But they are great quality pictures of my beautiful children, and just throwing them out feels wrong. So there they sat. Not that I've actually thrown them out yet or anything, but they are now beside my computer and will not go back on the coffee table. 

3. The lower cupboard to the left of the stove. Jesus god, how many rice stick noodles did I think I was going to use? There is not enough white lady pad thai in the world. And salad dressing. I feel like there was salad dressing in there that was older than the house, and yet I am fairly confident that I did not bring any salad dressing when we moved in. As usual, I forgot to take a picture before I started - rest assured, it was much, much worse than this.

Now, of course, I realized I had made a grave error, because this cupboard was low down and hard on my back, and I couldn't do too much activity without provoking another coughing fit, but it was not a job that was going to be able to stay half done for long.

Need some vinegar? Rice vinegar? Champagne vinegar? Apple cider vinegar? We have ALL THE VINEGARS

The only thing that kept me from sticking my head in the oven immediately to my right (which isn't gas, so it would have been dramatic but fruitless) was the fact that most everything could go in the green bin. Me next garbage day, wheeling a green bin filled with expired noodles and beans and chia seeds and other non-mainstream grains to the curb. How the hell did I think I was going to remember any of that was in there? It was worse than the Great Cracker Purse of 2013.

Yes, I still have many more child-sized cups than is required for a family that no longer has children in it. Baby steps. You don't even want to know how recently I got rid of the sippy cups. 

4. Someone did indeed take the blue shelves before garbage pickup. I am resolved to believe they have found a new home with lovely people.

5. When Angus was little he called scissors "haircut" and frying pans "pancake". This randomly popped into my head today and I felt the need to share it. It's not quite synecdoche or metonymy, but I feel like it comes close. 

I took a friend out for a birthday lunch (HI NAT) and only the hot and sour soup made me cough. Tonight Collette is coming over for a movie (HI COLLETTE) so I don't get too weird and hermitty with Matt away for one more week. Happy week-end!

It's Too Darn Hot

 I titled the post that as an homage to a number from Kiss Me Kate, which I saw performed at McMaster thirty years ago. I'm sure you can all appreciate that in actuality I am using a much less-cute adjective.

I had an awesome Saturday. I went to the Carp Farmer's Market, which I've been meaning to do pretty much since we moved here, with two friends. It was super fun, but dear god it was HOT. I would like to go back and amble around buying scones and honey and looking at pottery and having bacon on a bun some time when sweat isn't running down the backs of my knees. I got some gorgeous flowers for my mom, since we were taking them out for their birthday dinners that evening - their birthdays are next weekend but Matt left for Arizona and Germany yesterday.

After dinner we watched the last two episodes of A Gentleman in Moscow. Do you have shows you only watch with your husband and shows you watch alone? When they were network shows there would be enough episodes to carry us through most of a year, but now they're mostly streaming series which means we can go long stretches when we don't really have anything to watch together. And then new seasons of Only Murders in the Building, Slow Horses and The Old Man came out, right before my husband is away for most of the fall, so we hurried up to finish the one show we were watching. I haven't read the book, but the series was really good - visually stunning, flawlessly acted, sad and funny and moving. 

Sunday I thought I would just sleep in and read for most of the day, but even with the air conditioning I was uncomfortably warm, and at some point in the afternoon I got cranky and restless and decided to do yoga and clean some stuff out of Angus's old room, and then I was crying because we put a shelf out on the curb that used to hold a bunch of kids' books, and it was the blue that I painted everything back then, and it was really kind of crappy and I wanted the space more than I wanted to keep the shelf, but - you know that IKEA commercial where the lamp is out in the rain and the Swedish guy says "you are sad for the lamp - that is because you are crazy. It has no feelings, and the new lamp is much better"? I needed someone to tell me that. Also I couldn't do a stupid scissor legs yoga move. And my kids are far away. But this all would have been manageable if it wasn't so fucking HOT.

Anyway. I had classes in at Monday school today and they were lovely - mostly grades one and two, so eager and cute, and one grade six class who seem very nice. Only a couple of kids were unable or unwilling to tell me their names - it will come. 

Air Canada was due to go on Strike on September 18, right in the middle of Matt's first trip, and it looked like it could be long and ugly. So he went online and, at considerable expense and convenience cost, switched all his flights to United for the next two months. Then they ended up settling the strike before it even happened, so to everyone who was relieved by this, Matt says You're Welcome. 

According to the forecast we have one more hot-as-balls week and then some still-weirdly-hot-for-fall but cooler days. At this rate I won't be able to put on socks until November. 

Aaaand I'm sick again

 Don't get me wrong, I am totally grateful that I didn't get sick before we went to Charlotte, and it's not terribly surprising that I'm sick soon after getting back. It would have been nice to do library orientation without being half-high on cold meds and worrying about coughing fits, but whatever. I am still starting Operation De-Crapify The House, but slowly, because even colds with me tend to take a long time to depart fully, and I don't want to be dumb. Early on it seemed to be moving at a really fast clip, like those days when the wind is so strong the clouds seem to be moving across the sky at accelerated video speed. One and a half days of alarmingly sore throat, one and a half days of absolutely apocalyptic snot levels, and then everything settling down to just annoying. I am leaning on my anti-inflammatory inhaler hard, and started using the narcotic cough syrup right away in an attempt to forestall the Cough of Death, which has plagued me my entire life except for a bit of a break during Covid, before I got Covid. Should I just everywhere I go? I probably should, I did it for two years. Do I want to? No, I do not. I've done it a couple of times and found it surprisingly hard to go back. 

On the apocalyptic snot day, I was gratefully distracted by Early Morning Riser, a book recommended by Nicole. Nicole and I have a very small intersection in our reading Venn diagrams (I hope I said that right, if not let's put it down to sickness and not dumbness?), but every now and then there's a smash hit, and I am so, so grateful this one came along right when I really needed an escape from my aching head. The next day I woke up feeling like I'd watched a really amazing movie, with scenes still playing in my head, and then I realized it was the book (I'm pretty sure this wasn't just fever-generated). I think Nicole said it was hard to describe what it was about, which it is, but what struck me before I started reading it was that it has been lauded by the New York Post, The New York Times and the Washington Post, but also by E! and Pop Sugar. It is bright and sometimes deceptively simple, containing bittersweet insight into the casual cruelty of the universe under the bubbles. I loved it. I LOVED it.

I did not necessarily intend for the picture to be that alarmingly huge, but here we are. 

Eve has been spending much of the week in the lab where she'll be doing her fourth-year thesis project. This is weird since she only started university a few weeks ago - oh wait, she actually has been there for three years? Okay fine, you're tripping but whatever. It's been a lot - yesterday she left the house at eight and didn't get home until seven. This is because she's doing a bunch of lab orientation stuff with everyone who works in the lab, in addition to her other classes. After this week it will be more self-directed. But the fact that she Facetimed me after that eleven-hour day and was still pretty fired-up about how cool the lab is, and she gets her own little bench and her own little lab notebook with her name on it, and her own project (in some labs the undergrads only do the grunt work of the grad students) is pretty cool. She's also been to a lot of parties. One was Costco themed, so her roommate made them these labels (they live on Newton Ave.)



I thought it was brilliant. (We did catch the typo).

Now, to step one in de-crapifying. At some point I collected a bunch of random items from upstairs and put them in a spare wastebasket to bring down. How long ago was that? Many, many moons. I finally brought it down and am now bemusedly surveying the contents: canned bubble tea, the ridiculous over-packaging from my nasal spray, an Ottawa Senators pencil case that must be at least 11 years old, dog pee carpet spray (okay, that one's going back up), video games from two systems ago, and a single East Nepean Little League Celtics baseball sock (I think I was intending to try to use it as a lick sleeve after Lucy had her surgery, but honestly, who the hell knows).

Sometimes I imagine my guardian angel gesturing at me while looking around at all the other guardian angels going "LOOK! LOOK what I have to work with!" 

See you tomorrow for Friday randoms, which will be completely different from this post, which is a carefully-planned, cohesive essay.

(outtake for your amusement)

Empty Nest, Visiting One Chick Who Flew the Coop

 How do you all BLOG SO MUCH? Is blogging just a thing you do like brushing your teeth or walking the dog or making dinner? That would explain a lot, actually (shut up, I brush my teeth, excessively almost.)

Angus moved to North Carolina. Eve went back to school. Matt and I went to Charlotte for the long weekend to visit Angus and it was awesome. 

We didn't really get to Ithaca until he was almost ready to leave, and I was sad that I couldn't really picture much of his day to day life and environment (is that weird? I don't know if it's weird). He made the drive mid-August and we gave him a couple of weeks to settle in and set up his room and then said we'd come and we could help him with anything he needed and go out for dinner but we wouldn't be intrusive and we'd just explore the city a little. 

I can't remember if I told this story here, but how he got his roommate is so funny and typical for him and the baseball community. When he came home during Covid and needed a summer job I told Matt we should just pay him to do shit around the house that needed doing. Matt said 'okay, if he has trouble finding a job' and I said (SO SMUGLY) 'I sort of doubt he's papering the neighbourhood with resumés'. He came up from the basement ten minutes later and said he got a job cleaning windows and was starting the next day - hired by a baseball buddy OF COURSE.

When he told his friends he got a job in Charlotte they immediately hooked him up with a guy who was moving to Charlotte to start the same job at the same company three months earlier than Angus. 

Blink. Blink.

So this guy did all the legwork looking for an apartment and sent pictures and they got a really nice place with two bedrooms and two bathrooms and laundry in the apartment and a pool and a rooftop patio and a gym and game room. For less than he was paying for a shithole in Ithaca with two bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, laundry in the basement and.... that's it. Plus the roommate has been filling him in on all the job onboarding stuff. It's so weirdly perfect.

Apparently a lot of people move to Charlotte and then look for a job because they want to live there, which Angus found a bit funny because basically '" would have moved to Siberia for this job". We walked around his building and found all the outdoor and rooftop and common areas he hadn't discovered yet.

Walk-in closet!

We walked around, we drove around, we saw a minor league baseball game (beautiful sunken diamond with the skyline behind), we sat by the pool, we found a national military park with a cool trail. And fake soldiers, so us Loyalists could know what it's like to realize you're about to be shot by a Patriot, I guess.

The minor league team is called The Charlotte Knights. The mascot is a dragon. There's an animatronic dragon that blows smoke if there's a home run. Angus was baffled about the mascot being a dragon. "Knights fight dragons?" we said. "Yeah, but a knight is a thing. You could have a knight mascot. It's not like the Aggies where you're like what the hell is an aggie." And that was a solid point, to which I had no rejoinder.

We stayed in a slightly fancier Mariott than we usually do, and Matt's status got us access to a little lounge where there was free diet pepsi (!!) and free candy. You might think this was a good thing, but it was not. I cannot be trusted around free candy.

I came across a mention of a speakeasy where you had to find a hallway past a taco place and a fancy barber shop and find a password on social media to say into a pay phone. We set out thinking this could be something embarrassingly lame, or it would be crowded and terrible (it was Friday night, and our preferred time to go places is usually Wednesday evening when no one else is there), but it was worth a shot.

We got there early (because introvert losers) and muddled out way around to find the payphone. I had told Eve she might have to help me find the password because I am an old and I really only do Facebook, but I managed to find it. It was dim and decorated with wizardy stuff and there were only a few people (because early). This worked out really well for us because the bartender clocked us as Canadians and ended up hanging out with us all night. He was a Korean army brat whose family was in Atlanta now but they'd been all over the world, so we had many stories to exchange. He made us drinks from the menu and then drinks with stuff we liked and then drinks he just wanted to try out. We texted Angus pictures and he came and joined us. We laughed so much the other bartender came over and said her customers were lame and she was jealous. We recommended drinks to new people that came in and the bartender said if you don't like it, blame the Canadians. Another customer had grandparents who had run an actual speakeasy in Nebraska.

You know those things where you think, if this goes right it will be so cool and memorable, but it probably won't go right? It went right. Best night ever. I keep meaning to look up why it is called a speakeasy and finally  have - people were told to 'speak easy' about the secret drinking establishments, and would have to be quiet in them so police couldn't overhear. 

On our last night we went to a restaurant high up with a view. The view was of some really freaky weather.

I had grits for the first time in about 25 years (at breakfast, not at dinner). They weren't bad, but they weren't good.

Then we came home. I'm not sure why Queen Charlotte is in such a rush, she's a Queen, presumably people would wait for her. Also uncertain about why her boobs are out in the middle of an airport, but hey, I don't judge. Well, the sculptor was a man, obviously, so I judge a little. 

I feel like he's in a good place, and I'm happy we got to see it.

I did not tell them to pose like this