Thankful Happygiving

 All my babies came home!

Sometimes I think when they come back here from where they are I also subconsciously expect that they will be little again too. Mostly it's good that they're big. 

Friday we reverted back to old patterns, got pizza and watched The Simpsons. When the kids were younger and Matt was away, the only thing that the kids could usually agree on watching was The Simpsons, so we would pick a random episode. Did I let them start watching it at an inappropriate age? I'm not sure - when the movie came out in (checks Google) 2007, wait what, TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN? I was going to tell the story about how Angus's friend Eric's mom invited us to go and since I thought of her as a stricter mom than me I figured it would be okay. Then I half-expected to be met at the exit door of the theatre by Children's Protective Services. 

Look at my children, watching the same tv in the same room!

Anyway. I thought we were going to pick a random episode, but we had to watch episode 2 of the new season that just started because it turns out that Eve has been a faithful Simpsons watcher, which I did not know. 

The episode was about (among other things) the distressing trend of tweens - children, really- becoming obsessed with anti-aging skin products. Since I haven't watched the show in real time for decades, this felt uncomfortably on the nose for me, particularly since the very next day Eve and Davis and I went to....

The new Barrhaven Sephora! 

*sounds of angels singing*

As we were walking up, Davis said "I wonder how long it will stay open. Could be a long time. All those ten-year-olds worrying about skin care" and Eve and I said "OMG, LAST NIGHT ON THE SIMPSONS...."

It is a really nice store. The mall ones always make me feel seconds away from a panic attack because of all the makeup stands that are taller than me and the narrow aisles. The aisles are wider in this stand-alone, and everything was clean and new and shiny.

There was so much sparkly stuff plastered on.

There were so many perfumes sampled. 

That one was NOT good

I bought them each one thing, and then we went next door to La Vie en Rose, feeling penitent about the noxious cloud lingering around us. Then a salesgirl walked past us and said "ooh, you guys smell good, what is that?" and we burst out laughing and said EVERYTHING.

This is Eve suddenly realizing that they new the sales girl from high school and telling Davis who then plaintively said "but she saw me in just my bra"

Eve went over to Davis's for Thanksgiving Dinner #1 (last year we both went there for Thanksgiving Dinner #2) and Angus and I watched some of the new Dexter, which is surprisingly good with a shockingly prestige cast.

Sunday afternoon we went outside to take some family pictures.

Matt was taking a picture of the three of us and Lucy was running around.

She started to go too far out and he said "Lucy! Come back here!" and she did this, which she has never done before.

I mean...

Then I went to ask my neighbour if she could take a picture of the four of us, and Lucy invited herself in. Yvonne said "I'll be over in a minute, and I'll bring your dog". Full-service neighbour, she is. 

Then my parents came over for dinner - first time they had seen Angus since last Christmas. The weather has been perfect and it was a really nice day.

Monday Eve and Davis and Jackson and I went to do Annual Pumpkin Patch Photo Shoot #7 - down a couple of kids who are at different corners of the globe but were there in spirit. This obviously needs its own post. 

Then they came back here to paint the pumpkins, while I tried to make dinner and bake more pumpkin muffins for people to take home and make Pillsbury cinnamon buns for the 'fall vibes' and we watched The Craft and the first three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Happy they are here, sad that they have to leave. Thankful for how fortunate we are. 

Unloading. Or load-shifting.

I don't want to jinx it, but after a few months of feeling just deeply disinclined to attack any of the chaos in my house, I seem to be getting the bug again. I was waffling about whether I would try to do anything about it Sunday, so I went down to flip the laundry and then did a little bit in the basement because DID I MENTION Angus is coming home for Thanksgiving? and I thought perhaps it behooved us to fix things so he didn't have to blaze a trail through piles of stuff to get to his bed (although, to be scrupulously fair, a lot of that stuff is still baseball-related). There's a table right outside the half-walls in front of the bed that turns into a dumping ground. There is also a table beside the dryer that turns into a dumping ground. I suddenly realized that, even if I didn't have time to get down to the finer details of dealing with the pile of crap, ALL of the pile of said crap could go in the laundry room where it will not be seen by any casual visitor. I seem to have a subconscious habit of spreading the crap around so there's a little bit of crap in a lot of places, when having MOST of the crap in ONE place (laundry room, back storage room) really makes the most sense. Although I realize that 'sense' is perhaps not the best word to apply to this situation.

I did some other stuff, then came down and sorted through a pile of stuff that had collected near the coffee table in the living room, which is at the front of the house. We don't really go in there unless we have company, and Matt tends to come in from work and drop his bag on one of the chairs flanking the table, so again, stuff collects. I separated out a couple of things and photographed them and posted them on my Facebook community giving group. There was a yoga mat I bought Eve when they were doing yoga at lunchtime at her elementary school - I have since bought her a bigger, thicker one, so this one was superfluous - some stationery with roses on it that is not my style, and some clothes that seemed nice enough to see if anyone specific wanted them rather than just donating them to the thrift store.

Someone took the yoga mat almost immediately. Someone asked for the stationery, so I put it in the mailbox. She said she'd be there after 5, but it was still in there when I left for work the next day.

My mood for this kind of thing is very inconsistent. Sometimes I'm happy to leave something out for several days (it's in a bag, it's sheltered from weather, come grab it whenever). I also almost never ask for anything on the group, unless it's unbelievably perfectly something I need that it would therefore be dumb to spend money on, because I have trouble enough remembering to brush my teeth and breathe these days, never mind making any additional stops. Sometimes it annoys me inordinately when someone says definitively they will come by a certain time and they do not.

When we first started, I left a pair of kids' snowpants on my front step for MONTHS. My parents are coming over this weekend, so subconsciously I was probably thinking of my mom saying "why is something hanging out of your mailbox?' when I messages the person and politely asked when she was planning to come.

The usual response when you remind someone that they forgot to pick up something is that they breathlessly detail some crazy emergency that just happened - their child broke a tooth! their mom tripped over a feral hog and needed emergency surgery! a meteorite crashed through their roof and started a fire! And like, I get it. I do. But this person said "Oh, I'm so sorry, I completely forgot, I will come today". 

I was deep into a paragraph about how refreshing it was to have someone just admitting to have forgotten rather than making up some story fit for this year's Guinness World Records when I realized that I do not know this woman and my effusive thanks would probably terrify her to the point where she wouldn't want to come within a hundred metres of my house, so I erased it and gave it to you instead. 

Although this Facebook memory because funny Eve is funny, pretty much from her first word on.

Walking and Sweating

 I did not go for a walk after work today. It was hot out, my mom had already walked Lucy (I drop her at their place while I'm working because she is an extremely spoiled dog) and my Monday school offers ample opportunity for getting steps in.

It is quite a long walk in from the parking lot.

It is a long-ish walk from the end of the school to the front door, or from the servery door, where I usually enter, to the library.

Once I am in the library, the distance from the desk to the end of the shelves (a distance I cover multiple times during the day) is not inconsiderable.

I did not realize until today how long and flat this school and library is. 

I kind of like that the very last book in the non-fiction section is about Antarctica.

The pictures from all my other walks from October 1st until yesterday are all pretty similar - leaves changing even though the temperature remains stubbornly, stickily, dystopically warm.

At my parents' place after work I said it looked like next weekend (when we'll all be together for Thanksgiving -the Canadian version) was going to be nice, my mom said "cooler" and I said "that's what I mean by nice."

Tonight I am browning a bunch of ground beef and pork to make taco meat (homemade seasoning), beef taco skillet, (I make it with more spieces) and vietnamese caramelised pork for next weekend when the kids are home (Angus is coming home for Canadian Thanksgiving for the first time in literally years. Eve said "omg, we're getting the band back together?) 

That tweet reminds me of when we opened the local paper and saw a picture of Angus with his cooking class visiting a local butcher and getting to help them make a turducken. I was like "we asked you what happened that day and you said 'nothing' - A TURDUCKEN).

Lucy.

Friday Randoms

 I have a list of things that I thought I was going to blog about, and some of them make zero sense. I don't know why I think two words is going to make me remember what I was going to say. Someone (obviously I don't remember who) suggested in a comment that I might want to think about HRT even though I am much younger than her, and I remember thinking I am NOT that much younger, and yes, a doctor's appointment to discuss HRT is on my list. How do women with important jobs where forgetting stuff might have actual consequences manage through perimenopause? That thing where someone goes in for surgery and ends up having the wrong arm or leg or testicle removed? If I was a surgeon I would be pretty frickin' nervous right now.

The greatest humiliation of my trivia career is probably the time I couldn't remember 'Don Quixote's squire". 

The correct answer is Sancho Panza.

All I could think of was Pancho Villa.

Someone I follow on Facebook made a humorous post about their little boy looking a little goofy in his first school picture. This reminded me of how I used to get a little frantic about how the kids should dress and post for school pictures until my husband told me to relax, it was just supposed to show a snapshot of how they were that year. Fortunately this happened before the year that Angus went wearing a t-shirt we had brought him from Mexico (without paying very close attention to ALL the words besides "sun" and "sand") and the word 'tequila was prominently displayed in the picture. Also the year he wore a thrifted Abercrombie and Fitch shirt and a fold made it look like it said 'bitch'. Parents of the year over here. 

I finally made a recipe from one of Suzanne's Dinners This Week posts, after saying I was going to for let's not even calculate how long. It was this recipe I think - kind of like with this recipe that my friend Kerry recommended, I couldn't imagine exactly what the flavour profile was going to be, which is interesting since a lot of the stuff I cook is pretty standard. Another enjoyable aspect was the text exchange Suzanne and I ended up having about inch-thick pork chops, which I will not detail here (not without getting permission from Suzanne anyway). The ones I cooked were very much not one inch thick, and I did end up overcooking them a little, but they were still delicious.

This morning I got my hair done, and afterwards I walked down the sidewalk to the little cupcake place I almost never go to - I suddenly realized that I could probably get a chai latte there - I never get them anymore because Eve said I'm not allowed to go to Starbucks anymore which, fair. I had a pleasant exchange with the girl at the counter, who then whispered that she was going to give me a free strawberry coconut cupcake because it had fallen over and the icing was a bit smooshed so they couldn't sell it. I said I could pay for it but she just shushed me and stuck it in the bag. I am reminded of that time Pam and I went for lunch and were offered cupcakes instead of carrots - I am pleased both by the memory and that I managed to find the post from FOURTEEN YEARS AGO WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF.

Then I stopped by the grocery store, and in the parking lot I stopped to let an old man in a yellow t-shirt cross to his car and he yelled thank-you, and then another old man said "beautiful day!" as we were walking into the store, so then I came home high on free-cupcake-cheerful-old-man energy, walked Lucy and read in the backyard.

Wishing everybody a splendid week-end.

Found Everywhere, Commonplace

 At bar night last week Michael said something, realized that what he said hadn't been particularly intelligent, then said "I'm in great shape for trivia tomorrow night". I said "oh, are you guys doing trivia tomorrow night?" Then they all looked at me and I said "oh shit, am I doing trivia tomorrow night?"

We used to do trivia nights at a local restaurant called Stoneface Dolly's but it closed during Covid, which sucks, the couple that ran it was really nice. Our name was The Pugnacious Six - I just sat here for a few minutes trying to remember why; it was because each night was to raise money for a local charity, and the first one was a pug rescue. The next one was for brain injuries, so we toyed with changing out name to the Medulla Oblongatas, but the host couldn't pronounce it so we stayed pugnacious. On our way to trivia this time, I made some comment about someone being at Diminished Capacity, which became our new name (Dim Cap for short). It is usually six of us because a few people hate trivia and Matt is so often out of the country.

We tend to be a very robust group brain, while individually being exceedingly weak in some areas. Tony can tell you what year any song or movie came out. Mark and Matt are very strong in sports and geography. Collette and Dave are wild cards with really good general knowledge and Collette knows what all the British kings and queens look like on sight, which freaks me the hell out. I slay on literature and basically nothing else, although last time we did this I was very proud of the fact that I got a question about an actor's last name being what happens when you do his first name (Rip Torn).

There was a section with musical clues. The first clip was Cruel Summer by Bananarama, which we got because we are old. The second one started, and we were all looking around blankly, then the chorus started and I realized I knew it, at the same time that Michael realized he knew it, and then looked really dismayed that we all saw him recognizing it, because it was Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift and Michael prides himself on his sophisticated musical taste (we call it "he hates anything that has a melody"). The third one was some rap thing we didn't know - we thought it might be another Cruel Summer, but it was not. 

It's a fun mix of questions with different themes and ways of asking. One section had the categories listed and as soon as I saw "Merchant-Ivory films" I knew I had to remember the author of Howard's End and A Passage to India, and I was briefly seized by the terror that I would not be able to summon it up, because if I fail at a lit question you guys, I really have nothing to offer. Fortunately it came to me, PLUS I learned the fun new fact that he briefly served as a private secretary to a maharajah, which seems like a fun thing to be able to put on a resume. 

To demonstrate how much people who are good at one category can suck at another, Collette and I kept trying to answer Kenya for which country's national dance was tinikling, which is dancing between long bamboo poles, until Michael pointed out that the bamboo made it more likely to be an Asian country than an African one (goddammit, I just looked it up and bamboo DOES grow in Kenya, our wrong answer was still possible, screw you Michael). I looked up a Youtube video of tinikling and got a broken ankle just watching. I wish I could think of someone else guessing something dumb. Alas, I cannot, unless you count Collette thinking a picture of Kumail Nanjiani was a picture of "the Indian guy from the Big Bang Theory". I am faceblind but remember names, and Tony knows faces but not names, so he said "no, that's the guy from The Big Sick", which was all I needed - see? Unbeatable group brain. 

Oh! I have another one that I got by guessing. It was film titles that were Latin phrases, and the only one we didn't know was a 1951 film starring Deborah Kerr and the title meant 'where are you going?' I pulled Quo Vadis out of somewhere while everyone else was still stuck on Veni Vidi Vici. 

I can't quite figure out why I enjoy trivia nights so much when I invariably end up feeling dumb and embarrassed multiple times throughout the evening. It's so satisfying when you actually get one? The endless lure of possibility? We did win, although we did so badly on the last section that Michael said he felt like we didn't deserve it. He said this multiple times, actually, until I told him to shut up and drink his giant Oktoberfest beer. 

This is Dave, however, not Michael.