Category Archives: Food

Yawn

Yeah, I know. The Court’s a bit boring these days. If I’m here, I’m tired and uninspired. If I’m away, well, I’m away.

I made homemade bruschetta with pearl onions and tomatoes right out of the back garden last week. Piled it on freshly baked focaccia and couldn’t stop eating it. That ended up being dinner for me. I used Lu’s recipe, roughly, but used lime juice in place of the red wine vinegar. I don’t think I put any herbs in at all. Just tomatoes and onions that tasted like sun, plus sea salt, the olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.

The editing/second draft work on Orchestrated continues apace. I’m at the Oh Noes Accident And Hospital part of the story, which means I think I’ve bridged all the [write this bit here] gaps that I needed to bridge. I’ll find out as I continue on, but I seem to remember everything being pretty straightforward from this point to the end. This could, of course, be an entirely falsified memory cleverly crafted by my subconscious in order to maintain sanity.

With the air conditioner installed as of last Saturday morning, we are blessedly free of the high heat and humidity warnings that are piling up. And as an added bonus, I no longer hear the landscaping crews and power tools working outside. We were trying to make it through the summer without installing it, and really, we did very well. The summer has been cooler than usual, but apparently the weather’s making up for that with a vengeance. Yesterday around six o’clock the thermometer in full sun on the back porch read 42 C/106 F, and that was before factoring in the humidity. (Putting in the A/C unit two weeks before September. What is this world coming to?)

Camping last weekend was lovely. There was plenty of tree cover to shade us from the sun and a very good fire pit on our site, which ended up being the central gathering area for everyone. Lovely new people; and so the (co!)coven grows. The only bad part of the experience was arriving to find the fire pit still smoldering, which means the people who used it before us weren’t responsible. The not sleeping well and waking up in lots of pain wasn’t great either. But everything else was enjoyable. There were many marshmallows roasted.

My spinning wheel still has not arrived. I am antsy and cranky about it, as we are rapidly coming up on a month since I ordered it. I was hoping to have it by Saturday, as that’s when we’re heading out to the Fearsranch in Alexandria for an overnight, and both Fearsclave and his Wicked Old Step-Mother want to see it. Of course, the WOSM has just gone out and bought her own gorgeous double-drive double-treadle Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel, so we may end up geeking out together over hers instead of mine, as was the first plan, or comparing the wheels, which was the second plan.

I have a cello lesson tomorrow night. I need to play for a while today.

This is the boy’s final week of part-time preschool. As of next Monday he is full-time, which means this Thursday is his last day with the caregiver, and Friday is his last weekday at home. We’re going to go see Ponyo together to mark the occasion.

So yeah. Not very exciting, here. Mostly tired, with a side of exhausted.

The Home Update

When we got home we discovered that the garden had gone rioting while we were away, so HRH took it in hand. The first thing we did before we even got into the house was pull out one of the carrots with the boy, who had been asking about them for a month, and lo and behold, it was carrot-sized, and very sweet! He’s had one a day since we got home.

We should have harvested all the peas before we left; they’re a bit sour now, but cooking them in sugar water will help that, Ceri tells me. We have a staggering number of green tomatoes, and three or four are even ripening and will be ready in a day or so! Yes! Real tomatoes this year! If they all ripen I will be able to make staggering amounts of preserved tomatoes. It’s probably mostly due to HRH thinning out the tomato plant foliage before we left to allow sunlight through to the fruit. And when he weeded everything out and pulled out the last of the lettuce, HRH found that a cucumber seed had actually taken and had stealthily been growing under the lettuce and potato greens. There are a couple of flowers on it, so we’ll see what happens there.

It’s the eleventh and so time for the boy’s monthly post, but that can wait as it took me three days to do the post-trip roundup.

I pulled the cello out last night once the boy was in bed and HRH was downstairs. Just before I left for NS I’d done a bunch of water-related work: washing several loads of dishes, bathing the boy, scrubbing the bathroom, washing my hair, that sort of thing. Just a lot of it in a very short period of time. And my callouses started lifting right off! While I was gone the last bits flaked off entirely, so I sat down with very smooth fingers last night. Well, the callouses are starting already, which is good. I played for about an hour, reviewing things, trying a new piece in the Positions book by Mooney, then messed around with all the harmonic positions on the C string. My teacher contacted a few of us yesterday and asked if anyone wanted a lesson next week, as she’d be in town and free, so I waved my hand madly. I know I’m doing things wrong, I just can’t figure out what.

HRH tells me the hallway and the fourth wall of the living room will be painted this week! We’re off to secure paint chips today.

In Which She Imitates A Sloth

Not purposefully, mind you. It’s just how I feel after overdoing it yesterday. Fibrosloth! (Hmm. May need a fibrosloth icon.)

Yesterday morning I found myself craving fresh peaches, with no idea where the craving night have come from. Amanda then told me that she’d seen the first Niagara peaches now available here in markets; Mum mentioned she’d bought her first peaches last weekend, but I thought it would be at least another week here. Yay! Then I had the weirdest urge to learn to play The Swan. What is *with* me today?, I wondered. So with an hour before I had to leave, I pulled out the sheet music to The Swan. (Well, I didn’t have peaches, so cello it was.) And lo and behold, there was much absence of suckage in The Swan! (Well, except for bar 8. Stupid scale run with accidentals.) Judging from my well-meaning but full of fail previous fingerings, I was enthusiastic but not confident enough in shifting before. Or rather, not confident enough in my knowledge of the geography of the fingerboard, meaning I tried to shift as rarely as possible, leading me to play in awkward positions longer than I really needed to. I even managed some nice subtlety of expressions and some very attractive timbre.

I headed out to meet friends for lunch via bus and Metro, and used the Touch as an MP3 player for the first time. It was stupidly exciting. Also embarrassing, because I couldn’t figure out how to actually get something to, you know, play. Oy. Yay for random button-mashing. (Or touch-screen mashing. Oh Apple, why can you not be consistent in what needs a double-click and what does not?)

Lovely lunch in the company of excellent friends, but I ended up totally wiped regardless. We had a three-hour lunch, then MLG offered to keep me company and drive me to the library as it looked like rain, but we walked all the way back to where he’d parked at Mackay’s, and that ten-minute brisk walk plus the humid air downed me. It’s a worse fibro week than I thought. So no Bibliotheque nationale for me; he drove me home instead, bless him.

So this morning I had to figure out whether I should drive downtown to the library after dropping Liam off and picking something up from Paze, or go in by bus and metro tomorrow. I felt so stupidly paralyzed by the decision. Thursdays always feel rushed anyway, but if I drove I could get the whole thing done in less time. And there’s always meter parking around Archambault around ten in the morning. I made the decision to go, but by the time I got to Paze’s I was wiped. Yesterday’s outing just killed me. By the time I left her place I knew I couldn’t go downtown; I could barely concentrate enough to get home. No driving downtown for me. I did do the local running around (had to hit the bank three times, because I forgot one of the several transactions I had to do EVERY TIME, gah) and came back home to do the freelance thing.

I started working on the last part of this particular freelance gig, and in waltzed the self-doubt. I don’t know whether some of this doesn’t make sense because it’s bioengineering-speak, or because English is the writer’s second language. It occurs to me that it might also be due to the fibro-fog, requiring me to reread sentences several times in order to make head or tail of them.

Well, I’m done now; I’m just doing a final reread to make sure I haven’t missed anything, before sending it off to the grad student. Then I think I shall pass out.

Another Vague Weekend Roundup

The humidity is melting my brain.

Friday afternoon HRH came home early and announced that he was taking me out to lunch, so we checked to see if our favourite sushi spot was still open for lunch (it was!) and headed out for a light sushi nibble. We shared a salad and had just enough sushi to make us feel fabulous. We hit two bookstores (one had a lineup directly from hell so we went to the other for the gift we wanted), did groceries, picked up what we needed at the pharmacy, and then had a stop at home before collecting the boy, who had spent a fabulous day with friends he hadn’t seen in a while. When the boy went to bed I put the mute on the cello and played for a while. Just as I feared, the cello doesn’t come to mind very often now that lessons are on hold for the summer; I play once or twice a week and that’s all. But I’m working through Mooney’s Position Pieces book one, and on some independent stuff too.

On Saturday HRH was supposed to hit Mousme‘s place to continue painting while she was away for the weekend but there was a key kerfuffle, so while he waited by the phone the boy and I took the bus to the fabric store to buy some velveteen to cover the Styrofoam inserts HRH had carved for the hard cello case. The bus trip was fun, except for the tears that made an appearance when we got off the bus ( “But I don’t want to get off the bus — I want to get back on that bus! I don’t want to take a different bus home!” What the hey? Good grief.) We found some really nice taupe/grey velveteen on the bargain shelves and brought it home. We had a brand new bus on the trip back, and the boy charged right to the back seat and had a blast swinging his legs and jabbering about how excited Dada would be to know we had been on one of the new buses, with the new seats and the new paint!

After his nap he cheerfully suggested, “I know! Let’s play Rock Band!” and so I tried the drums for the first time ever. Holy nasty timing on the bass pedal. Give me the bass guitar back, please. Then we went out for ice cream, which was as hilarious as usual because the boy always gets chocolate and his face is a mess during and after the experience. Then we walked to the fruit stand nearby and picked up a tray of mixed berries, and stuffed ourselves on them during the drive home along the Lakeshore. We put the boy in his bathing suit and turned the sprinkler on in the back, and he soaked himself and screamed quite happily. (Placing the sprinkler so it drenches the slide? Priceless.) I baked two loaves of bread, and we ate one in entirety for dinner. Ice cream, fresh local berries, homemade bread: I count this a winner of a summer weekend dinner, personally.

Once the boy was in bed I cut out, fitted, pinned, and sewed the velveteen covers for the cello case inserts, and they’re essentially done except for the final handstitching of the end flaps. (I also need to trim and reglue the existing velveteen lining where HRH took out the built-in curves that were interfering with the 7/8’s position, but that’s cosmetic.) There was Sewing Machine Dramah where it refused to work, producing loops and snarls and jams instead of the smooth line I needed, and the Internet was useless; I have no idea where my manual is, and I couldn’t find one online. Nothing I did worked, not adjusting bobbin tension, not adjusting spool tension, not rethreading repeatedly, not changing bobbin thread, not changing the spool thread, not cleaning, not waving my hands over it and chanting mystical gibberish. Not until I did it all over again in a different order, that is, and magically the problem vanished. I did a thorough cleaning, and that may have been a factor; evidently the last major thing I sewed on it was HRH’s Van Helsing coat, because holy cats, the amount of black fluff inside it. Oh no, hang on; I sewed and then tore apart and remade a kick-ass black mock suede corset for band after we moved in; that’s what it all is. I hang my head in shame for not cleaning the machine properly afterward. I must admit to essentially leaving it alone for four years, though. I did some sachets on it, hemmed a baby sling, and made curtains for the boy’s room, but that’s pretty much been the extent of my sewing aside from the corset since we moved and the boy was born. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I missed sewing while I worked on the inset covers. One of the things I did to distract the boy from his tears when we got to the fabric store was take him to the catalogues to look through the costumes, and he found a standard superhero pattern and declared that wanted to be the Flash for Halloween. I told him that it was duly noted and we’d revisit the notion in September (which is five weeks from now, WHERE DID THE SUMMER YEAR GO). We never did get around to making the lovely little pirate coat for which I gathered all the materials and accessories a couple of years ago; he wanted to be a superhero or an engineer instead. Maybe this year he’ll actually let me sew something for him.

Sunday morning we dropped HRH at Mousme’s house so he could strip wallpaper and paint her bedroom. The boy and I had a lovely morning out and about, and everything was spectacular until nap time, when he had a tearful meltdown about no, not needing a rest, really. Then it was about how noisy his room was and it was quieter outside it so he’d sleep out there (no), and then it was about wanting to keep me company while I worked (also no). I finally got him into our bed and snuggled him until he passed out an hour and a half after he usually does, and he slept for an hour before we left to pick up HRH. We had tacos for dinner followed by freshly made chocolate ice cream, then the boy had his bath and went to bed without a problem. There were some impressive thunderstorms that went through last night, which unfortunately necessitated closing the bedroom window, which faces west. If we weren’t going to NS soon I’d have HRH put the air conditioner in, just to take some of the damp out of the air. It’s not that it’s hot; it’s just wet all the time, and everything smells musty.

Okay, I need to go lie down. The day’s work is done, and despite being adequately hydrated and fed I’m dizzy and kind of flopsy. I knew this wouldn’t be a good fibro day after two nights of broken and low-quality sleep, but I just got up to answer the phone and am having more difficulty than I expected. I guess it’s reading or staring into space for the rest of the day.

Weekend Roundup, Birthday Edition

What a lovely weekend!

Saturday HRH went over to his parents’ house and helped his dad build the new back deck until they got rained out. The boy and I lazed around the house all morning: he watched the fifth and final disc of the first season of the Animaniacs, while I read and surfed online. HRH came home halfway through the boy’s nap once it had started to rain, and wow, did it ever rain for the rest of the day! We sat on the back doorstep and watched the wicked storms roll in, and when it began to be too wet back there we opened the front living room wall living room patio doors and sat there watching the rain pound the road and the huge maple tree whip around in the high winds. HRH had to go downstairs and rescue the garage from flooding, as the drain at the base of the driveway had blocked with dirt and maple keys. It was fabulous storm, and watching it was a lot of fun, too. At one point the thunder rolled and Liam clapped, then said, “That’s the big man in the sky with his hammer!” HRH turned to me and said with deep satisfaction, “My place in Valhalla is now assured.” The storm’s damage was impressive, including flooded highways that created miserable traffic problems that we saw but fortunately didn’t have to deal with, as we drove in the opposite direction that night.

HRH’s parents arrived at five, and I opened my birthday gifts from both sets of parents because the boy was nearly beside himself with excitement wondering what was in them. My parents had given me a copy of The Cello Suites (the recent book by a Montreal journalist, not a recording, because I have at least three four five of the latter) and a fabulous tiny micro-grater, while HRH’s parents gave me a lovely candle and money to put toward whatever I liked. Then HRH and I headed out to meet Ceri and Scott for a sushi dinner that had been planned for about four months. We ate fabulously delicious sushi, and then discussed the merits of moving on to a place like Rockaberry’s for dessert versus returning to their place to play Rock Band. The discussion didn’t last long: Rock Band it was! We played for a good couple of hours and then drove home in yet another storm in order to release HRH’s parents from babysitting the boy, so they could go home before the storm got any worse.

Sunday morning they tried to let me sleep in but the boy was too excited about the day. “Do you know what your presents are? Will they be surprises?” he kept sneaking in to my room to whisper. We went back to HRH’s parents’ house so HRH could help his dad finish the deck that had been rained out the day before, and the boy, his Grandma and I went out to pick up groceries. Once back home, the boy napped while HRH went out to pick up ice and my not-so-secret-by-that-point birthday present, and I made a Thai noodle salad for the small birthday picnic I’d planned.

One of the intangible birthday gifts I received came during my weekly phone call with my mother. My parents had flown out to Vancouver to visit with my grandmother last week, while they were there they took Gran out to the library. They set her up at a computer, put a set of headphones on her, and my dad cued up the URLs to some of the videos taken at the Canada Day concert. It didn’t quite sink in for her until my dad moved the cursor to point at me in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, at which point she exclaimed quite loudly (she is rather deaf and had headphones on, after all). Fortunately, the people around her in the library were amused rather than upset. Mum says Gran was quite overcome and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I knew she was in an orchestra, but I had no idea it was like that,” she apparently said. I’m just thrilled that she finally got a chance to see and hear a concert, and I’m especially pleased that it was this particular performance. One of the ideas behind the MiniDisc player was to send her some sort of recording, but she doesn’t have a CD player or a computer, and I have no way to record it into cassettes (if she even has a cassette deck any more), and as we saw on Canada Day, the MiniDisc may not be capable of handling the level of music produced by the orchestra. The video was a much more personal way of sharing it with her. So once again, I’m thankful that the HD video was made.

We packed for the picnic, and on the way to the park we stopped to pick up balloons, as the boy says all birthdays require balloons. Unfortunately, the wind was so strong that half an hour after we arrived they were tugged loose from the picnic backpack to which we’d attached them, and they rose to tangle in the branches of the huge poplar tree under which we sat. It was pretty, but not as pretty as having them right there with us, and rather put paid to my plan of sending them home with the kids in attendance. Everyone had made some kind of salad to share, which was terribly amusing, but they were all very different: pasta salad, strawberry/walnut/spinach salad, two-potato and corn salad, my Thai noodle salad, and I think I’m missing one. It was a light and refreshing meal. I didn’t bake a cake this year; instead, we’d bought one that morning that was nice and light and not too sweet. There were nine adults and three kids, which made for a small and relaxed group. Pasley, Jeff and the girls gave me a lovely amber-coloured beaded necklace with a photo pendant of an owl on it (and a moon on the other side!) and a set of earrings to match, and Devon drew me a really excellent card of me playing my cello.

We wrapped everything up around six, and came home. I played with the iPod Touch that HRH and Meallanmouse had given me and thanks to the free wifi network nearby downloaded a couple of free apps (Twitterrific and Stanza being the ones I am the most excited about) and then several free e-books. (A Room With a View! Howards End! Persuasion! Sense & Sensibility! Pride & Prejudice! Jane Eyre! The Prisoner of Zenda! And just to blow the curve, His Majesty’s Dragon!) Now I have lots of my favourite books with me all the time, and I will never be caught without something to read again. This makes me disgustingly gleeful, and also smug. I can’t get over how crisp and clear the screen is, how easy it is to read on it, and how accurate the on-screen keyboard is. Liam wandered into my office after his nap yesterday and said, “What’s that?” “It’s, um, like a little computer that plays music and I can read books on it, too,” I said. He climbed on my lap and watched me tap my way through some things, then asked if he could try it. I pulled up Notes for him and said, “Why don’t you try typing your name?” He hunted and pecked, and again I was amazed at how accurate the keyboard was, even for preschool fingers. He slipped off my lap and left my office with the Touch, saying, “I’ll bring this back to you when I’m finished with it.” I found him in the living room typing things. He’d figured out that if he turned it so that the screen was landscape instead of portrait, the keyboard enlarged. He’d also found something that made a terrible buzzing sound, so I rescued it before he could do something irreparable to it. The Touch is currently decked out in the cartoon skulls and bones skin that Meallanmouse had on it, which amuses me because it is so cute and so punk at the same time. “Does the Touch have a name yet?” Ceri asked me this morning. “At the moment it is called the YAY NEW TOY, all in caps,” I replied.

The boy developed a cold last Thursday evening, which means he got it at school at the beginning of last week. It’s not bad, but I have it now too, of course. Which, apart from the sad loss of the lovely balloons, was the only down side to the weekend. Well, I would have liked to have seen HRH some more, but we did get out on Saturday night, and that was absolutely wonderful. And tonight’s meeting has been cancelled, so perhaps we will be able to play some more Rock Band together. (It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one to know that I hold the bass like a cello because it’s easier on my hands and arms. This is fine in the Wii version because the upright position triggers overdrive as soon as the option is available, but the Xbox wants me to move the bass to trigger it and won’t recognise the left/down motion I make or the return to upright, so all that lovely energy was wasted. Scott told me to use the Select button, which works very well instead, except I need to time it properly so I don’t start missing notes.)

So all in all, the birthday weekend was very pleasant indeed. It was relatively low-key, and I have a new toy whose code name is YAY NEW TOY, and there is a piece of cake left in the fridge for me. I have a pile of new music by The Donnas, courtesy of Ceri, to speed me along my day of work. And my birthday celebration continues throughout the week, what with the Mac Mini appointment Tuesday night, and my local family birthday dinner this coming Saturday night!

The Mac Transition Begins; Or, SQUEE!!!

HRH just handed me a gift bag. While the boy napped and I made Thai noodle salad, he’d gone out to buy ice for the cooler and what he called “a thick card.”

Inside the bag was a joint gift from Meallanmouse and himself: an iPod Touch! It’s Meallanmouse’s original Touch, which was replaced by her new iPhone. And as I’d been looking for a secondhand iTouch to use as an e-book reader, and she was going to sell hers, well, the stars aligned and I have a new toy!

(“Don’t you want me to open it at the picnic this afternoon?” I said when he handed it to me. “No, I want you to open it now to have enough time to play with it before we head out,” he said.)

Scott showed me his Touch at dinner last night, and it further cemented my resolution to get one. Hurrah for things going excitingly well and friends conspiring! And further to the stars-aligning thing, I found a classified listing for someone selling a few-months-old top-model Mac Mini with eighteen months of warranty left on it, for less than the base model I was saving up to buy new. We talked, we clicked, and he took his ad down. HRH and I are heading out Tuesday night to look it over and pick it up if all is as it should be. And so my transition to Mac will be complete! (Once we ascertain that my ergo keyboard and my compact mouse are recognized by the Mac, that is. If they’re not HRH will bring me an Apple set home from work, as they have boxes of used ones taking up space.) I am resisting my desire to connect the Touch to my computer and start loading it with exciting things, because I don’t want to brick it. I’m waiting for the Mac Mini, under the admittedly naive belief that two Apple products will play together better than an Apple and a PC.

Now I am looking out the window disapprovingly at the gathering clouds. We’re meeting a small number of friends at the park for a picnic, and if it rains I will be very displeased indeed. Especially since I have enough Thai noodle salad here to feed a small army. Also, if I cannot show off my shiny new toy I will pout.

Holiday Roundup, With Bonus Today Stuff

All right; my work for the day is done. I have read and written a two-paragraph endorsement of a book coming out this fall, and it’s just as well I didn’t bring it with me; it was mostly correspondences and such, so I needed to do it all in one go to get a feel for the overall book. (And I’ve just been informed that as a thank you, I’m getting a copy of the bound book when it comes out this fall; how nice of them!) Things got off to an early start, what with me getting up at 3:45 AM (hello, insomnia, I have not missed you, and just because I slept an average of four hours each of the past four nights does not mean it’s a pattern that ought to be perpetuated), so I didn’t have to drag myself awake for a couple of hours when the boys left. Also, I ate lunch at 10:30, so I kept being surprised that it was only noon or whatever when I checked later.

Today I got a secondhand book in the post, then a postal truck arrived and gave me my order of Vienna Teng CDs, and just now a second postal truck came by with a different driver, to give me yet another secondhand book. I suspect this is what inefficiency looks like.

Right, so, here it is, the highlight reel of our week away:

SUNDAY we drove to Toronto. The six-hour stretch between these cities is without doubt the most boring stretch of highway in the country. It is flat. It is straight. It is dull. But the drive went relatively well, except for getting off the 401 at Whitby to get to the 407 instead of Ajax. Yeah, we won’t be doing that again. See, despite the little 407 toll route! signs at the exit we took, the 407 doesn’t actually start in Whitby. Lying little signs. You have to take the tiny you-call-this-a-highway 7 to get to it, after driving north on Brock for about half an hour. Which kind of undercuts the whole idea of saving time idea. Anyway, the 407 is a beautiful highway, and traffic-free. Traffic free = stress free. Sure, we pay about $20 to drive almost its entire length, but as we do it only two or three times a year, it’s totally worth it. It saves about 45 minutes, and avoids lots of sitting in traffic, construction, and crankiness.

MONDAY we puttered around. Can’t remember doing anything spectacular, really. We went to the used kids’ clothing store in the morning and found new shorts for the boy, which he sorely needed, and a couple of new books, one of which was a Transformers reader. Wandered aimlessly at the bookstore; there’s nothing out that I want, really, or perhaps more correctly nothing I will spend $10 on when I know I’ll read it in ninety minutes. The boy splashed around in his wading pool for about two hours. And by ‘splashed’ I really mean ‘ran at it and took flying dives into it.’ Those are HRH’s genes, thank you very much.

TUESDAY was the family gathering. There were eleven of us: HRH and myself, my parents, the boy, my cousin and his wife, their three-year-old daughter, their ten-day old new baby girl, my aunt (aka my cousin’s mom and my mother’s sister) and my cousin’s mother-in-law over from Japan. I think that was everyone. Oh, we ate. We always eat when family get together. There was cheese and fruit before dinner, and grilled flank with potatoes and cold orzo-grilled veggie salad, and green beans. Dessert was two huge crystal bowls of torn up angel food cake, piled with fresh local strawberries, and further piled with freshly whipped cream. I had both kids on the floor of the kitchen helping me make these, spooning berries over the piles of cake, then trying to spoon the cream on top, but it kept sticking to the spoons so they got it all over their hands. Everyone had two servings, so it’s a good thing we made tonnes of it. It was so light, though; it felt like you were eating air.

WEDNESDAY morning Mum and I went out to Spun Fibre Arts in Burlington to check it out. They have a lovely selection. I went to see what spinning wheels they had in stock, but the owner wasn’t there to demonstrate them. They had the Schacht Ladybug and a Louet Victoria there, and while I’ve heard the Ladybug is more versatile, I was really impressed by the Victoria’s smoothness. After the boy’s nap we went to visit Granddad at the Canadian Warcraft Heritage Museum so the boy could run around among the priceless and irreplaceable airplanes. It was nice and quiet, so my father offered to let HRH crawl around inside one of the only two operational Lancasters in the world. Yeah. HRH was totally blown away. The boy got his kicks sitting in the Fleet and the CF-100, showing me how the sticks still moved the flaps. On the way out we hit the gift shop and the boy chose a really well-done metal toy of the Lanc, and HRH bought a CAF shirt for himself and one for the boy.

THURSDAY we went downtown to the ROM, to see the dinosaurs. I adore the ROM, and this was my first opportunity to see the new pavilion. The natural history exhibits have been installed in this new section, and it all suits very well. You can’t do the entire ROM in one day (well, maybe some can) and I really missed not being able to go through the textiles and the many cultural galleries. We promised the boy he could pick something out at the gift shop of this museum too, and he chose a dinosaur egg, one of those things you put in water and it dissolves/cracks while the dinosaur inside ‘grows.’ It was put in a jar of water pretty much as soon as we got home. We had planned to split up at lunchtime, the boys to have sausages from the cart on the corner, and Mum and I to Remenyi to check for an orchestral tuner. And we did, except the major deviation from the plan was the spectacular thunder and lightning storm we walked out into, totally unexpected after the bright, clear, hot day we’d started with. Mum and I got drenched going across the street, and the boys dashed to the cart and back to shelter to eat their lunches. In the end, Remenyi didn’t have an orchestral tuner, I wasn’t going to buy the very excellently designed and priced cello case I saw without testing it for fit, and we missed the GO train heading back to Oakville. Because yes, we took the GO train to town, and then the subway to the museum, which thrilled the boy to no end because it meant four train rides. We ended up sitting at Union Station for forty-five minutes waiting for the next train, but it wasn’t so bad; Mum and I shared a ham/cheese/tomato bagel sandwich, then we wandered over to the Second Cup where she got tea and I had a delicious caramel steamed milk, which I shared with the boy when it cooled enough. Mum and I entertained ourselves by rating the shoes and clothes we saw go by. People wear the oddest things. That night after the boy was in bed HRH took me out for a caramel latte at William’s Coffee Pub in Burlington, one of our favourite places for a date. (Yeah, we don’t get out much.) To my delight they do decaf lattes. Next time I may go wild and have a mocha, although I love the flavour of the caramel lattes and the balance between the milk, the coffee, and the syrup drizzled on top. I also nipped into The Shoe Company ten minutes before they closed and scored the perfect pair of black leather mules by Liz Claiborne for $60. I have been looking for these ideal shoes for about ten years. I win.

FRIDAY morning HRH and Dad went over to install a fan in a friend’s house, while Mum, the boy and I went out to look at netbooks and do some grocery shopping. We hit HMV because Mum was looking for a Great Big Sea album (which wasn’t in stock, of course, because it isn’t new but not old enough to qualify for the 2 for whatever price promotion), but I picked up the first season of the original Transformers TV show for the boy, who is thoroughly delighted with it. That afternoon his grandparents took him out to visit the local trainyard, where he happily watched engines shunting things all over. An engineer came down out of a diesel locomotive and gave him a CN ballcap, which sent to boy right over the moon. Then they went out for gelato, as did HRH and I, although we went to two different places. Forget ice cream; gelato is where it’s at. (Two dates in two days!) There was perfectly grilled salmon for dinner, brushed with maple syrup and a touch of soya sauce.

SATURDAY we came home. The boy woke me up by gently waving something wet and squishy in my face and saying tenderly, “Look, Mama, I helped it be borned!” The little dinosaur egg had finally crumbled enough and the dinosaur’s foam tail and feet were far enough out that he just couldn’t wait any more. Under HRH’s supervision the jar was opened, the water decanted, and the remaining bits of ‘eggshell’ pulled off. It took him a while going through his dinosaur books in the car on the way home, but we identified it as a chubby little dimetrodon. It was a good trip home, too. I like this travelling on non-holiday weekends thing.

While away, I read In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan, A Matter of Justice by Charles Todd, Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi, and then I finished Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and The City & The City by China Mieville the night we got home.

There. Caught up. As usual, it’s nowhere what I wanted it to be, because I’ve already forgotten the little things that made each day special.

I’m going to go read now. I can’t decide if I want to drink a beer or a latte from a packet. To heck with it: red wine it is.