Home Sweet Home

The Loudshoes family is going to a cottage for a few days, and we are lucky enough to have a house sitter for the duration. (One of the nice things about working with so many young people who make very little money is that lots of them live with their parents, so there is no shortage of people who are dying to get out of the house and stay at our place for a while.) Our lovely assistant, Summer, has agreed to look after the Loudshoes estate for the week. She normally lives in a small town about 45 minutes away, and I think she is just excited at the novelty of living in the big city, as well as being able to sleep in until 7:30 on a work day.

Anyway, she came by this morning to get a key and a tour and all. And it struck me as all kinds of strange to try and explain your life and your house to someone else. (And weirder still to try and have it all explained to you.) There's all kinds of things that you live with every day, and don't think anything of, and then when someone else comes into your house, you find yourself realizing what a Dr. Seuss existence you really have.

For instance, there's the dishwasher that works much better if you give it a good thumping with your left knee when you close it. The window in the dining room that the handle comes right off if your use it even slightly the wrong way. (The handle goes right back on, but you will need superhuman strength to open the window then.) We never close the kitchen window, because it is awkward and stiff and doesn't open much more than 6 inches, and even though it presents a perfect opportunity for a thief to get in the house, I'm willing to take the chance because he would have to be about 89 pounds to fit through that thing.
Our television set-up is ridiculous in the extreme, and I am going to have to type up a tutorial for the poor girl if she is ever to get all the systems aligned. We have no less than FIVE remotes for the tv/DVD/Wii/PVR set up in the family room, and you practically need a PhD in engineering to get a movie playing. It would be easier to negotiate peace in the Middle East than to organize all the bits and pieces required to record "Canada's Next Top Model" on the PVR. I don't even bother trying to watch that thing, most of the time.
We have a keyless entry on the back door, but a traditional lock on the front door, with a key. But you have to make sure that the lock underneath the deadbolt isn't locked, or else your key will do you no good at all. The shower in the girl's bathroom leaks at the one corner, so you have to put down a towel, lest you create Lake Loudshoes in there. The tv in the kitchen is operated by the same remote as the one in our bedroom, so you have to stand at the dining room door and point the remote at the bedroom if you want to change the channel.
You get the idea.

I'm sure everyone's house is like that; full of idiosyncracies and foibles that slowly accumulate, so that the occupants don't even realize what they deal with every day. When you have to account for them to someone else, however, you begin to think you live in a bad sit-com.

I did mention to Summer that Toby will be off on holidays of his own; my mother and father will be looking after him while we are away, since Toby does NOT like being left alone in the house for extended lengths of time, and punishes the furniture severely. She was very happy not to have to deal with the Tuna Seeking Feline of Six A.M. Sleeping in until 7:30 may be the only upside to her staying here.

Prepare Yourself

It's a LOT of work to be on holidays. The Mister and I finished work on Saturday afternoon, all full of bonhomie and exhuberance, because we are off work for the next two weeks. But I've been so busy the past few days that it doesn't feel much like holidays just yet. Suffice it to say, I realized I'm only on holidays from one job, the paying job. My other job doesn't give holidays, and the pay sucks, too.

We are renting a cottage up on Lake Huron for a week, and we are getting ready to go. I love that cottage, and the week that we spend there, but oh. my. God. the effort to get us there feels like a monumental effort, like I'm climbing mountains barefoot carrying wet watermelons. Blindfolded. With sweaty socks. It's sort of like Christmas, lots of work beforehand, and then, boom, blissful sloth....I know I'm going to enjoy the torpid, near-comatose pace for a week when I get there, but I do have to do the work to get there.

I'm a list-maker from a way back; making a list for me is almost as good as getting the thing itself done. And my list for the cottage fills both sides of a standard piece of paper, it's so comprehensive. (For example, I put down "bed sheets, pillows, comforters, extra pillows", even though I'm pretty sure if I put "bed stuff" down I'd get it all, and one would think that if I was packing pillows, I'd just lob them all in there.) I end up packing way too much for a week away, so I have to revise the lists constantly so as to fit it all in the van. (Really, why do I pack the popcorn maker and the cross-stitch that I've never finished every. freaking. year?) So my lists got made last night, and I add to them regularly throughout the day. Also, I keep the list from last year so I don't forget anything. This, as you can imagine, can take up a lot of time.

Couple my preparations with the fact that we are having one of our staff house-sit for us, and you have me in a whirlwind of housekeeping that is entirely non-existant any other time. Now that someone else will be in the house, I feel the need to make sure she doesn't have to wallow in the filth that I am perfectly willing to live in myself. (Remember the Loudshoes family motto? "That will do".) Hence the back of the fridge will be vacuumed, and all the lightbulbs dusted. Not that she will notice, I'm sure, but I will.

Next week I will be sleeping in and eating when I feel like it and reading all the live long day and going for walks after dinner and not doing anything I don't want to. It will all be worth it.

Eating Down the House.

Yay holidays! The Mister and I are off work for the next two weeks. Most people who own their own businesses don't get to do that, but we are extremely fortunate to have a staff that will carry on pretty much the same whether we are there or not.

This week we will be home, but doing stuff around the city that we don't usually have time for, and next week we will go to a rented cottage. Because we are going away and out so much, we are engaged in an activity I call "eating down the house", which involves eating as much food that is already here, rather than getting any more groceries. That way, when I go to do the big shop for the cottage, I won't be duplicating stuff, or leaving a fridge full of stuff to spoil until we get back. (I'm finding myself singing "Eating Down the House" to this tune in my head. It's getting very tedious.)

We've been doing pretty well, cobbling together respectable meals with what's here; you'd hardly know we were doing it, up til now. But now it's been a week since I bought anything, and it looks like tonight's dinner will be chickpeas, eggs, cucumbers and popsicles.
When we do shop for the cottage, it's a nutritionist's nightmare. For one week of the year, I let the kids (and myself) eat pretty much whatever they want, any time they want. There's no need to ask if it's okay to have Pringles at ten in the morning, for that one week a year, it is. You want pudding and licorice for lunch? Go right ahead. One morning, when Thing 2 was about 6 or 7, I came out of our bedroom to find her sitting on the couch watching a DVD and eating vanilla icing straight out of the can. Mostly I was horrified, but a part of me was really impressed that she could even stand it.

After a couple of days of the nutritional free-for-all, they tend to start looking for salad and apples. It doesn't take long for a body to tire of sodium, guar gum, and Red Dye #2.
But "eating down the house" takes some discipline; it's not easy to sit down to a meal of yogurt and granola bars. It just makes next week's menu of "everything fun" that much more appealing.

Kibbles and Bits And Some More

Apparently nobody told the weather that it is July. Because it is cold and damp and drizzly and way more like April than July. Maybe the weather got mixed up and gave us England's usual summer weather, because England certainly seems to have ours.
Today I wore a t-shirt with a light cardigan over it to work, and because it was particularly dismal when I left the house, I work a new striped, cotton scarf with it, too. I walked to Starbucks to get a coffee in the slobbery conditions, and when I got back to work, I noticed a distinctly....bacony sort of smell around me. After a bit of detective work, it turns out it was my damp scarf. Lovely. I smelled vaguely of smoked pork product the rest of the day. Luckily, I do not work with Labrador Retrievers.

My nephew Colm has been around for the past week here. He lives in Toronto, but occasionally makes forays to our city to visit. He's a nice kid, chatty and good-humored. We took him to the driving range with us the other day, and he was game, if completely inexperienced. No matter how many times we showed him how to swing a golf club, his hands kept sliding down to hold it like a hockey stick; that is with his right hand about half way down the shaft and slapping away at the ball like it was a puck. When he did connect with the ball, it was pretty impressive; that thing smoked. But unfortunately, that didn't happen very often, usually he ended up taking a divot out of the ground that would break your leg if you happened to fall in it. But he remained chipper and sunny, nonetheless. All golfers should be so blithe.

Thing 1 and her friends took a public bus to the beach, about an hour a way, last Saturday. It's a great deal, only 8 bucks each way, and the only way to get to the beach when you don't drive or don't have a car. The only thing was that the bus didn't come back home until 9:30 at night, and that would have meant that she and her friends would have had to hang around a lot longer than they wanted to waiting for it. I said I'd drive up and get them after work. I dropped The Mister at my parents house, where we were going to eat dinner, and then I drove up to the beach, got the girls and came back. When we came out of my mom and dad's, we heard and ominous hissing noise and found that one of the front tires was almost completely flat. Long story short, I had run over a roofing nail in my parents condo complex on my way back, and the tire had been leaking all the time we were at dinner. Can you imagine if that had happened when I dropped the Mister off???? I'd have been out on the highway with a gaggle of 15 year old girls and a flat tire. (And you can imagine how much help they would have been.) Luckily, we were able to patch the tire on Monday, and it only cost 30 bucks.

One of the features I can put on my blog is a counter, down at the bottom. I love that counter, I check it every day to see if anyone has looked at my blog. And they have, YOU have, and it thrills me every single time I see it. Recently, I've found a place where it shows me on a map of the world where the last 10 viewers are from, and this has enthralled me like nothing else. I check it all the time....Vancouver! That must be the Tattooed One! Calgary! That must be James or Lisa! GERMANY! My friends Anne and Jack are in Germany on an exchange for 6 weeks, that must be them! INDIA! YUKON?!? SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA!?!! I don't even know people in these places!! Strangers are reading my blog!! I'm ready to black out, I'm so excited! I have to stop myself from checking that little map every hour, it is unseemly. So, thank you, everyone, you have no idea how exciting it is to see that people read my stuff.

I'm All A-gog

Another blog that has me enthralled: The 4th Knitter of the Apocolypse.

Fabulous.

Glorious and Free

It's Canada Day today, the only other holiday in the roster that floats around the week, depending on when it falls. This year, it falls on a Wednesday, which is usually a working day for me, and therefore is a bonus day-off that I get paid for, and that makes me very happy.

My parents moved here when I was very little, and except for about 3 weeks every year in about late February, early March, I am profoundly grateful that they chose Canada to emigrate to. They chose very well.

Some of the things I like about Canada are:

• Canadians, as a whole, are very polite. If a Canadian bumps into a door jamb, he or she will apologize.
• Niagara Falls. I LOVE going to Niagara Falls, it is such a cool place. The Falls themselves are pretty impressive, but the mist and the noise and the power of all that water is truly thrilling. And the touristy bit of the town is fabulous, unapologetically cheesy and entirely entertaining.
• CBC radio. We are incredibly blessed with a spectacular public radio network. That has no advertising.
• The Canadian political system usually makes sure that no politician can get too comfortable in office. If we want, we can toss them out and have another election.
• This is a very safe place. The other night we forgot to close the front door, let alone lock it. My purse, the keys to the van and the van were all there in the morning.
• Same-sex marriage is legal here. And nobody makes much of a fuss about it. Also, in Ontario, women are allowed to go topless in public without getting arrested. Not that it happens, mind you, but it's legal.
• Universal health care. My babies were born, my mother was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and my husband went to the emergency room with kidney stones. And we all walked out of the hospital without owing one cent.
• Whole milk here is called "homogonized" milk, sold as "homo" milk, which makes me giggle every time I see it.
• We can take stability, peace and security for granted. I can criticize my government, I don't have to pay bribes to any police force and go to whatever church I take into my head to attend, without being thrown in jail. Considering what I hear going on in other places in the world, this is something other people can only dream of.
• The Great Lakes. I've only been to three of them, but they are spectacular.
• I can buy lemongrass, masa harina, fiddleheads, jerk sauce and piccalilli all at my local grocery store.
• The Canadian Post office has an address for Santa Claus (Santa Claus, North Pole, Canada, H0H 0H0) that they advertise, and they answer every letter that they get.
• Butter Tarts. Sort of like a bitty pecan pie but without the pecans. Heavenly.

Happy Birthday, Canada!

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crackerjack

They didn't win, and it was a shame. We took the girls to see a Blue Jays game in Toronto yesterday, and despite their defeat to the Phillys, it was a great day anyway.

I love going to baseball games. I hardly ever watch it on tv, although if the Mister is watching one, I'll sort of pay attention, but I adore going to a live game. It's probably the only sport I will pay to watch, in fact. (The NFL doesn't seem interested in coming up with the necessary incentive to get me to pay attention to them, which would be considerable, I can tell you.)

One of the things I love about baseball games is watching the crowd...there's no end of fascinating people at a big baseball park. Like the woman who sat in front of us who seemed to spend the entire game trying to get her boyfriend's attention. (Seriously, he's at a professional sports event, lady, if you showed up naked with tequila he wouldn't pay attention to you.) There were two twenty-something guys sitting beside me who giggled like 11 year-old girls the entire game, and a couple of Orthodox Jews with some little boys who yelled like banshees whenever the Jays got a hit. Everyone was having a ball. I also love that at baseball games, everyone talks to each other. One guy sitting in our row was a Philadelphia fan (in fact, from what I could hear, he drove from Philadelphia to see the game.) and he put up with some good-natured trash-talk until Toronto started trailing, wherein he gave as good as he got.

There is one thing I noticed at the ball park, and that is that there apparently was some sort of convention of People Who Walk Without Watching Where They Are Going meeting there, because no matter where you went, there was someone walking in one direction, and walking in another. They usually complicated matters by carrying vats of Diet Coke and trailing at least one small child with them while doing it.

One of the best things about going to a ball game is the food....for some reason the food at the ball park is unbelievably good. Don't ask me why. But it is heinously expensive. I'm sure the Rogers Centre is no better or worse than any other major league park, but you could easily run through your entire RRSP if you wanted to eat anything there. I bought 2 Coke Zeros and 2 soft pretzels for, get this, $17.00. Seventeen dollars. I saw a woman with a huge box full of hot dogs, at least two dozen, and I bet she had to have a talk with her bank manager this morning regarding that. We did stop off at the grocery store before we set out for the big city, and the Mister found some peanuts there that claimed to be the "official" peanuts of the Blue Jays, so he bought 4 bags for a dollar each. When we got there, the exact same bags were selling for $4.75. So, we felt like we got away with something. (The Mister is always happier when he feels like he's got the financial and moral high ground.)

So much to see and do and eat. You can't beat a ball game on a summer's day.