Love = poached halibut

Husband was off on a boondoggle in Ottawa the last few days, leaving me to negotiate the Children's Festival, a birthday party, dinners, dog walks and school attendance. At some things I failed spectacularly (the last three things, actually). The first two weren't great either. Looking around frantically for a win here. . . I did recognize the need for Kid to have underwear that actually fits, and made that purchase. So: check! Yay me! I bought superhero gaunch.

When DH is away, I fall into a sort of fog. It's not, despite my obvious affection for the darling man, that I can't live without him, it's just that I can't seem to live well without him. Watching DH prepare the first decent meal we would eat since last Thursday, Kid and I have decided that love tastes like poached halibut.

Rocking the Norm

So, yesterday I left another woman's small boy outside the school in the rain on his birthday because I am, well, me. This morning, I slept in and so Kid is not in school. (Attention, any potential CBE employees out there: sometimes I write fiction on this blog. You just never know.) (But this is true.) ("True.") (You'll never take me alive, coppers.) The last time Kid had socks that matched was last year on his birthday when he received a pair of them from his scandalized grandmother. They've never been seen since. The dog was walked yesterday. Twice, around the back yard. That way, when Husband phones from his Ottawa Valley boondoggle, I won't have to lie about whether Elvis got some exercise. I made frozen burritos for dinner; they were stil frozen in the middle after 30 minutes in the oven, so we chipped away at the sad corn and did our best. My son greeted the pacifist mother of his friend at the front door not with a polite "hello" but with a loaded cap gun. That same kid cannot spell "Tuesday" but can spell "thermonuclear detonator" and "hydrogen fission." Also: "diarrhea."

This is what a friend calls, with affection, my "parenting style." She like how I "rock the norm."

I think I've done waaay more than rock the norm. I think I've taken the norm down to its subatomic core and applied dancing filaments of energy thereupon. What happens next is anyone's guess at this point--but tomorrow? It involves a birthday party, the military museum, the Children's Festival and a dinner date with some Hogwart's Lego and a princess.

I just glanced in the mirror I keep by the desk for detecting and eliminating chin hairs by daylight. I have crazy eyes.

Pic St-Loup

So I took May off from this blog. I didn't mean to, but the life! The life got in the way!
I now know much more about Osler-Weber-Rendu than I ever expected to, purchased some custom beryl earrings from Wexford Jewelers because that's the sort of thing I do in the middle of the wide-awake night when no one's around on Facebook to play Scrabble with--I think about what jewelry I have to leave to my neices in my will and decide that none of it is good enough so I really ought to have myself fashioned some raw beryl earrings and avoid post-mortem embarrassment, I saw one of my closest friends run naked across a stage while hundreds of the blue-rinse set howled with laughter and all I could think was "Wow, she's been working out," clipped a foxhound's dewclaws, was assailed by cauliflower left too long to its own devices, put my hand in a bucket of aquatic insects while four Grade 2s squealed in horror, purchased inappropriately above-the-knee clothing for a woman of my advanced years, told a bird to fuck off, listened as the doctor diagnosed my gorgeous blue-eyed baby with some kind of serious myopia perhaps requiring the insertion of hard glass disks into his poor blind eyes, and yelled at a really mean person who phoned me up at 4.30 in the morning and then wouldn't believe that I was not, in fact, the owner of an architectural supplies firm named DAVE.  And now my friends are going to Italy to join other friends already there, a friend's baby has been born and her brother has died, one of my sisters and two of my brothers-in-law are in Ottawa, as is my husband, and the woman whose birthday-boy son I just left standing in front of the school in the rain for 20 minutes brought me a bottle of wine to thank me for helping her out.

It's a huge swirling world of joy and pain and rain and Italy and medicine and airports and those green plastic perfumed dog poo bags, and sometimes there is no room for blogging about it.

BUT! So far no scrapes, no bruises, no sad undergarments making a break for it. And Pic St-Loup at the end of A Day.

Cheers.

Hi Betty and Lorna

Ladies, thanks for the laffs today. Elvis also enjoyed your delightful company. If wish I could use your real names, but that would mean I couldn't in good conscience allude to the stunt you pulled in the bathroom with the phone, the octogenarian and the coonhound.
Must good manners ALWAYS win?