Sunday Randomonstrosity

 It took everything I had not to just title this "Fuck It, I'm Just Going to Say Some Stuff", but apparently I'm still clinging to a modicum of civility. 

I texted Suzanne to tell her that her that her blog post made me feel better about how scattered and distracted and weird I am feeling, and then did that clumsy thing where you're saying "thank-you so much for being relatable, you made me feel so much less lame... wait, I don't mean that to say that you're lame...." Also, Suzanne is younger and still has a kid at home that she's managing to keep fed and clothed and driven around to places, which I do not. 

I went out for dinner with my friend Pam, who I used to be practically joined at the hip with when our daughters were younger and in elementary school with. We dropped the kids off at school and went for walks, or went to the gym, or went for coffee, or ran errands and ended up in ridiculous situations (for two middle-aged mothers of school kids, which is to say, still pretty tame.) We have to work more at getting together these days since the kids grew up (annoying) and we got jobs (total drag). She picked me up and asked me how it was going and I was suddenly yelling that I thought that at this point in my life, when my kids are grown and semi-launched, when I'm not responsible for shepherding two other bodies through the day somehow, I would be... better. Like, more organized and more productive and less neurotic and more together.

Super dumb, right? I wasn't any of those things before. I think I just felt like when I had the kids here the chaos was more permissible and it was fine to have glitter footprints on the stairs and spiderman figurines in the bathtub and someday when the kids left I would get my shit together. As it turns out, with the kids gone I am the same person, just without kids living here. And I eventually stopped showering with Spiderman. 

Which is fine, it's FINE. I'm making an effort to stop beating myself up and instead sort of view myself with a kind of amused indulgence, as if I am my own un-sleep-trained, bad-at-impulse-control, all-hopped-up-on-sugar four-year-old. This afternoon I realized I was getting nothing useful done so I put myself in a time out in the back yard so I could get nothing useful done while getting some Vitamin D. I didn't put on sunscreen and could feel myself getting a sunburn on one arm because of the way the chair faces. Turns out I'm crap at looking after my inner four-year-old's outer (I was a good at mothering my actual four-year-olds, I don't think Eve has ever had a sunburn. Angus played baseball, so those were not on me).

Good things that have happened lately:

- I had a birthday party for Collette last weekend because she's getting her kitchen renovated and she likes gin and I have about thirty bottles. 

I made a menu. We squeezed so many limes and lemons that not a single square-inch of the kitchen was not sticky the next day. I made fancy garnishes that I occasionally remembered to put on the drinks. I bought sloe gin for the first time solely so I could make a Sloe Comfortable Screw (that night I gave my inner twelve-year-old free rein, while also letting her drink) - not super crazy about the drink, but big fan of Sloe Gin.

I took a group photo and then Matt said to take a selfie so I would be in it. So I took a selfie without the self.

I am super good at selfies.

Just some party people being very normal. Michael threatened me with death if I posted this on social media. Mark said to go ahead and post it on his professional page. 

-I went for lunch with Pam and our friend Sonia, and then Pam took me to the library so I could see her Fake Book Geocache that lives there.

She is really very cool and I need to hang out with her more.

-I went to Ikea with Jody. And I only bought a fifteen-dollar blanket for the couch, which is practically like going to Ikea and having them give YOU money.

Jody bought the middle one, because the left one was not pink enough and the right one was TOO pink, but the middle one was JUST pink enough. 

-I am having a trivial and yet absolutely enraging issue trying to send a package to Angus which I will probably have to do a whole cranky post about (see you on Thursday for that) (that is quite different from See you next Tuesday for that, to be clear), but Matt was calm and assertive about it and I am now ready to let it go, after being cranky about it for the post, because otherwise what's the point.

-Eve is FaceTiming me less often, which is always good because it means she's busy and happy, and then when she does FaceTime it's really fun and we have a lot to talk about. She was telling me about how bad a week her tongue was having because she burned it, and I made sympathetic noises and she said "well, actually I made it worse" and then told me she was taking ice out for a drink and I said "oh god, you tried to ice your tongue and it stuck to the ice cube?" and she said "Yep!" And then she described peeling the ice cube off her tongue and being fascinated by the little row of taste buds on the ice cube, which I told her probably meant that she is really leaning into being a biologist. And then she said she rinsed the taste buds off and still used the ice cube, and I thought once again of how much less weird and awesome my life would be if I had not had these kids. 

Oh! Suzanne was talking about having weird dreams about other bloggers, which reminded me of when we were at my sister's and I went up to the attic where Eve was sleeping and flopped on her bed so we could share our weird dreams. Hers was about being mad at her friends because they kept making plans that didn't leave enough time for all the stuff they had to get done. Mine was being kidnapped by people who said they were taking me to a Gentle Hospital, and then when we got there I looked around and realized that they actually meant a Mental Hospital (like, RUDE MUCH, Subconscious?)

Sort-of Surly Thursday

I am a freaking disaster. I drove to southern Ontario twice in two weeks and it has taken me OUT. No, this does not seem reasonable, and yet here we are. I am sucking hard at cooking and exercising and blogging. Last week I made one pan of lime and cilantro black beans and we had bean and cheese quesadillas. Every day. For a week. I go into my yoga room and stretch and then I try to do actual yoga but anything involving hands and knees is out because of my, well, hand and knee, so I stretch and then watch TikToks lying on the floor with my legs against the wall. It's rained every damned day and even Lucy doesn't want to walk. 

I do this very rarely, but sometimes desperate times call for a morning Diet Pepsi

I haven't slept well the past few nights and I was hopeless trying to get ready for work this morning. It took me three tries to hook my bra properly and four to get my shirt over my head facing the right way. On work days I drive Matt and Lucy to my mom and dad's and he takes Lucy in and then either borrows their vehicle or walks the rest of the way to work. I like doing it this way for a number of reasons. It feels like a normal thing that normal couples do, and I seldom feel normal. It means he helps me stick all my crap in the car - my ridiculously heavy purse, my work bag with my chair cushion and water bottle and desk fan, in the winter my bag with my indoor shoes, and Lucy in her carrier. I thought I had another reason, but it has departed my mind. 

This morning Matt was loading the car while I was still trying to get organized and get my shoes on. This resulted in a complicated and amusing kind of dance where I was trying to find my shoes and get them on and tie them,  but also flattening myself against the wall when Matt came back in and reached past me to grab a bag. At one point I almost kicked him in the head with a shoe that wasn't even on my foot yet. 

Work was fine. I do consider myself very lucky in that anyone who 'manages' me is generally pretty far removed from my direct sphere of activity. I have so many friends dealing with terrible managers, and it can really blight an otherwise good job. I mean, yeah, the kids can be annoying, but the worst are usually grade five or six boys, and I only see them for half an hour plus they're young, there's at least the hope that they will eventually not suck someday. 

This is the part of the post where I cannibalize my friends' blog posts for ideas to not leave the post stuck at four measly paragraphs of random shit. Suzanne wrote about being caught out driving with her daughter when there was a tornado warning. This reminded me of a few years ago when a tornado ripped through our neighbourhood and we had no power for two and a half days, and then for the next couple of years we had frequent tornado warnings, which freaked me out the first few times, but then I lost the ability to sustain that level of panic. Which is fine, except it resulted in Eve and I doing a charming little Starbucks and bookstore date with Zarah and Sophie when they were visiting, and then driving a few streets over to the library and seeing garbage cans and tree branches and pieces of roofs on the street and thinking we should probably have paid more attention to the tornado warning. 

lolz, look at these complete idiots

Engie wrote about seeing two little kids on a roof and wondering why no other adult in the vicinity knocked on the house's door to inform a parent. This reminded me of when we were camping a few years ago, it was late in the day, and most people had left the beach to go get ready for dinner. I was still on the beach with Collette's daughter Rachel and her girlfriend. We were just sitting and talking, and then we noticed a small girl in the water - about a football field down the beach from us - who didn't look accompanied. We started to walk over, and then we saw a man who was way too far ahead of her walking out into the water turn around and see her. We stopped. He walked a few steps back towards her, and then motioned at her to go back onto the beach and turned around and KEPT WALKING OUT. She looked like she was two or three and we were in disbelief. We kept walking towards them, and the man finally turned around again and Rachel shouted asking if the little girl was his. He finally walked back far enough to pick her up, but for crying out loud. There were still multiple people on the beach and in the water and everyone was either oblivious or unconcerned. Bystander effect, I guess, but geez.

Funnily enough, I have another Rachel story that is pertinent to Engie's blog post. Rachel has always been extremely athletic, fast, strong, and fearless. This has been great for her various basketball teams, but was less overwhelmingly possible for the people trying to parent her early on. One day in the summer her father was out in the driveway doing some work when a neighbour approached him. The man stood right in front of him as Mark stood with his back to the house and said quietly "do not freak out, but Rachel has opened the window and climbed out her bedroom window, and is sitting on the roof." A land-speed record for getting in the house and upstairs was probably set, and after that the family probably needed a fire escape route that did not involve getting out Rachel's bedroom window. 

I started the Surly Thursday blog post series years ago in a bit of an effort to collect all my weekly complaining for one day and not complain in every single post. I let it lapse partly because I let everything lapse and partly because I was less surly for a while. I'm not extremely surly right now, but as usual, when I start posting about stuff that isn't totally positive, by the end of the post I find it amusing. 

Unsure What the Collective Noun Would Be

So this is some bullshit.

Pardon me, my good weather, what seems to be the fuck? 

Last week was a good week for Jody-ing. I have spoken before of the fact that I have a Jody here (HI JODY), whose daughter was practically conjoined with mine for the six years of middle school and high school and they are still very close, and naturally my glorious gifted daughter would find a friend who came with a friend for me attached - sort of like when you buy a bottle of vodka or rum at the liquor store (or the 7/11 if you're American, I don't judge) and it comes with an adorable tiny bottle of some other kind of liquor attached. And then I have a Jody six hours away with whom I shared consecutive womb space. As Matt puts it, "your sister Jody is tall and loud and opinionated. Your friend Jody is the same except not tall.") It's an embarrassment of Jody riches.

Friend-Jody had invited me to come to her house on Passover for the Seder she was doing with her brother and his family and her mom. I thought it sounded really cool but then the day of had massive social anxiety and hadn't slept well and actually nodded off at my desk for a few minutes, so I almost cancelled. Matt was in Thailand and I was driving my parents six hours to my sister's on Friday and I was just anxious and waffle-y and my hair was terrible and I didn't know what to wear and I was on the verge of bailing, and then I managed to give myself a stern talking-to and forced myself out of the house.

It was SO the right decision. The Seder was louder and swearier than I was expecting, which was silly of me because I know Jody. She sat me beside her and we did not behave decorously at all, which reminded me of when my mom would take me and my sister to church and sit between us because otherwise we were unruly and unserious. This might be forgivable for small children, but we were in high school at the time. At one point Jody's husband was reading his passage and he pronounced 'travail' the French way, which I think strictly speaking it would not have been in this context, which is such a dumb thing to get giggly over, but Jody and I did anyway, and he broke off from his "fleeing our persecution" sentence to hiss "STOP IT" at us and Jody said "that's what the Jews said to their persecutors, STOP IT" and then we lost it completely.

There was also the food element which was glorious. Jody's brother and his family were incredibly fun and lovely - I asked them if they wanted to drive to London for Easter on the week-end, they said they'd think about it. 

The drive with my parents went fine - the On Route we stopped at was insanely crowded but we just grabbed sandwiches from the market store and kept going. My dad's mobility is bad but he did okay on the one stop. I think the drive was hard on them anyway, and we may not get to do this again, but I think it was good of them to get out of their house for a few days and we didn't get to do Christmas all together last year so this was really nice. My nephew works fairly near to where Eve is at school, which is only about an hour from my sister, so he picked her up and they were already there when we got there. 

We hot tubbed and watched a couple of just unbelievably bad Blue Jays games (well, bad for us, not for the other guys), and a little bit of the Rubber Ducks game - we were confused about why the camera was on a guy driving a tractor but apparently it's a tradition for the tractor to deliver a box of -- balls? Game-day items? The team was 3-0 as of yesterday, so Angus is happy. 

We had dinner on Saturday so Eve could get back home on Sunday night to work in the lab Monday.

 We laughed about stupid things - Sunday night we started talking about music and my brother-in-law called up musicians my father remembered on the tv. One was Fabian ("he was good-looking but had a voice like a do-it-yourself violin kit" according to my dad) and the song that jumped out at us was Love Me, Love My Tiger. Listening to it in full did not make it make any more sense. Apparently he also had another song called just Tiger, which was very successful, so maybe he was still chasing that high. Still. Love Me, Love My Tiger? Wtf, Fabian? 

Eve and Jonah and my sister and I did the Connections puzzle all the days we were together, alternately swearing and crowing and giggling, to my parents' bafflement. I told them about the furries and then I opened Facebook and saw this and I legit hurt myself laughing.

Also there were cats. Miko was very into having company, Seamus not so much.