Not dead — just busy having a fabulous weekend.

Friday was entirely consumed by the freelance evaluation I wanted done by noon. It wasn’t. It was a tricky one to handle because of the subject matter. We had homemade pizza for dinner (which has now officially become the Friday night meal in our household, because our homemade pizza is yum), which went over very well.

Saturday morning we dawdled for while over coffee/tea/trains, then headed out to try to pick up various necessities. This was foiled by the store advertising an item we’d intended to pick up as a Christmas gift for someone being out of stock of said item, so we moved on to get the rest of the list. We wrapped the morning up by taking the boy out for a hot dog lunch at a local La Belle Province (because we have become highly disillusioned with the quality of food produced by our local Lafleur‘s), where we ate in a booth with sparkly vinyl benches and chrome fixtures. The boy approved. We were very happy with the flavour of everything, and so our allegiance has shifted (at least between these two local franchises). While the boy napped I managed to get half an hour of work on the runs in the final movement of the Haydn symphony done. (Official state of stun: I practiced on the weekend.)

The local grandparents came over Saturday after the boy’s nap to stay with him for the evening. HRH and I went out to our favourite sushi restaurant for our anniversary dinner, a treat afforded by my mother’s generosity. We hadn’t been there in three years, but nothing has changed: same jazz CDs, same decor, same delicious everything. We ordered a very ambitious and enthusiastic amount of sushi, and ate most of it, too, earning the amused approval of the chef who’d assembled it for us. We boxed up the remaining sushi and maki and brought them as our buffet offering to the fifth annual Tarasmas event!

I have written about Tarasmas before (notably here and here) so I won’t rehash the explanation of the event other than to say that in a glorious turnaround of the birthday gifting tradition, t! throws a party that revolves around a series of one-act plays he writes for the event, to be performed by the partygoers who get their scripts around fifteen minutes before they go on. Tarasmas 2008 featured a medieval comedy replete with puns, a Western ( “I was just trying to kill you to get your attention”), and an old-fashioned melodrama that required traditional audience participation (in which zombie chickens made a special musical appearance). This year I got to play the heroine of the melodrama, which was, like the previous two plays, hilarious. Tarasmas is a great opportunity to appreciate clever writing, t!’s genius in assigning roles to people (to either draw them out, play against type, or play to their strengths) and to enthusiastically abandon oneself to laughter and cheering. It’s not about performing well; it’s about fiftyish people participating together and sharing the experience, either as performer or audience member. It’s truly a group effort, with t! as ringmaster. Every year just gets better and better.

I’d been looking forward to Tarasmas for days because I knew I’d see lots of people I hadn’t seen in a while, and have tons of fun. And I met new people, too, and had lovely conversations with them. I got to try Ceri’s new Aspire One, which was very adorable but just too small for me. Now that I’ve tried it properly I have laid to rest the excited-writer-coveting-new-toy part of me that had been dying for one of these mini-notebooks since they were released a couple of months ago. It’s good to know the secondhand iBook route I’ve been exploring is the better option for me.

I didn’t take my medication until I got home (and a good thing, really, because if I took it at the regular time I wouldn’t have been able to make it all the way to the end of Tarasmas and the final play, which would have been somewhat problematic as I was in it) and so I didn’t fall asleep until somewhere around two-thirty. Consequently I didn’t wake up until sometime after nine the following morning. But once I was awake, Sunday was lovely. We headed out for groceries and wine because my mother and her sister were stopping by for dinner on their way to start their lovely driving tour through the Eastern Townships. I haven’t seen my aunt in about six years, and seeing my mother any time is great. I decided to make some sort of approximation of the delicious chicken-Brie puff pastry thing I’d had when we went out to dinner with Brendan in Old Montreal this past summer, and wow, did I ever succeed! It’s always slightly unnerving to make a dish you’ve never prepared before for guests, but this was a terrific success. I served it with a simple salad of baby lettuces and parsley in a sesame oil-rice vinegar dressing. (Yes, yes, I will post it on the Recipe Trade forthwith.) We’d given the boy the responsibility of deciding on a dessert, which meant it was ice cream (although I had a local ice cider to offer as well as an after-dinner sweet). It was a lovely, lovely evening and I wish I could do things like that with my family more often. My aunt told us we had to come down to stay at the cottage in Mahone Bay next summer, as HRH has an entire month off, and we accepted her offer. It’s been six years since I’ve been back to the Maritimes, and I miss it. It will be a lot of fun to introduce the boy to wading in the ocean, picking periwinkles and seaweed, and chasing crabs. And mussels. Oh gods, yes, the mussels. By the potful.

Took my medication on time but couldn’t fall asleep till one AM anyhow. Nevertheless, I woke up at 6:30 when the boy pattered into the bedroom saying that he needed to go to the bathroom, and spent a pleasant hour with the boys before they headed out to school. I expected to have a new freelance assignment this morning but it seems that the one I handed in on Friday afternoon hasn’t been processed yet. So I have some time to catch up on news and such and maybe whack out a few words in a file somewhere.

The weekend was so wonderful that not even the very grey day outside my window can bring me down.