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.