But What About the Important Stuff?

My parents are moving out of their home of 35 years, into a condominium nearby. The house they are in is lovely and unusual and has been a wonderful place to call home, but the yard and the pool and the house are all getting to be too much for them to maintain, and so they've decided to pack up and move to slightly smaller quarters with a yard service.
Thing 1 has been entirely sanguine about the idea of them moving, but Thing 2 has been having a bit of a hard time with it. She's definitely the one who uses the pool the most, and she will miss that keenly, but also, this is the biggest change she's ever had in her 11 years, and the adjustment has taken some time. (I was fretting a little bit about her to one of my friends, who had enough of my whining and said "look, it's not like either of her parents has just discovered they are gay, or are getting a divorce or moving her from her house or anything else that blows a kid's world to smithereens in a couple of words. She'll get over it." My friends are awesome.)

Today my mom and dad got the key to the new place, and we all trooped over to take a look. I had seen it before, but it was all new to the kids, and they had a proper look at the place. Both of them were enchanted by the novelty of the whole enterprise, and spent a good deal of time inspecting every nook and cranny, and reporting on their findings. ("Look! They left a medical dictionary!", "A jacuzzi tub!", " ) My mother sent them off to count the phone jacks and they marvelled at the plasma tv that was left as part of the deal.
After about a half an hour or so, Thing 2 bounced into the kitchen and happily looked around while asking "So, where will we keep the treats?".

I think she's completed the mental gymnastics necessary to accept the new place.

Family Fun Night

Each year at our kids school, the PTA puts on a big fundraiser we call "Family Fun Night". We have games and face-painting and a bouncy castle and karaoke and hot dogs and cotton candy. For the kids, it's sort of like their version of a cocktail party....they get a little something to eat, mingle and see their friends, play a few games and have a good time. Plus, no hangovers.

This year, I was in charge of selling tickets for the basket raffle. (We assign each grade a theme, and people donate items to go into the baskets. There's usually stuff like "Movie Night" and "Spa Treats" and "Chocolate Lovers". I think we should have "PMS Frenzy", with chocolate covered potato chips and a pair of sweatpants, and "Mid-Life Crisis", with a gold chain and a gift certificate for hair transplants.) I thought the concept of a raffle was pretty simple, but I guess I was wrong. I had to explain it to dozens of people, lots of them old enough to know better: "you put your ticket into the bag in front of the item you want to win, and then we choose one ticket and that person wins. No, there is no guarantee you will win it, and no, you cannot buy it, and yes, it is totally random, and you are correct, it is entirely unfair."
Thing 1 won a "Chocolate Lovers" basket, which her father generously put a ticket in on, and I won two tickets to a Blue Jays game for when we are on holidays this summer. (The only problem is that there are four of us. Hopefully we will be able to get two more tickets, otherwise, one of us will go with our favorite child.)

Thing 2 came home with a whole shitload of crappy toys that she won, which she is thrilled beyone belief with. When I asked her how she won so many prizes, she replied that she "didn't waste her tickets on something to eat, so she played games with all of them. Not when we have food at home."
This year, one of the toys the kids could win was water pistols. I wonder who thought that would be a good idea? Of course, last year, we gave out whistles, which was a mistake we did not make again. The year before we managed to find the only temporary tattoos that did not come off for weeks and weeks. I think they eventually had to be sandblasted off.

It's been a busy week, so I think I'll strong-arm Thing 1 into parting with some of that chocolate, and settle down for the evening. Maybe I'll rustle up some sweatpants.

PD Day

I spent the past two days at an advanced training class for hairdressers, put on by L'Oreal Professional. (I love L'Oreal. They put on the big hairdressing thing in Montreal every year, and for that reason alone they have my relentless support. If they put dog poo in a bottle, I would buy it.) It was a cutting and colour class, where a bunch of people, all dressed in black, learned some new haircutting and colouring techniques, and tried not to look too spazzy doing it. Classes are always fun; you learn new stuff and you realize you usually know more than you thought you did, or at least more than one other person in the room.

Lest you get antsy, we work on mannequin heads, not real people, since it would be difficult to find eleven people with exactly the same hair who would be willing to let a bunch of scissor-wielding enthusiasts loose on their heads.

There were about 11 hairdressers in the class, all very nice, but very quiet. You'd be surprised at how reticent a bunch of normally outgoing and talkative people are when they are off their turf and on their own. (Until you bring out the liquor, and then you can't shut them up for anything. Hairdressers are like sailors on shore leave when the booze comes out.) The experience of the group ranged from less than a year to "longer than some of you have been alive". (That would be me and two other ones.) There were two men in the class, other than the instructor. One guy seemed unfazed by the amount of estrogen in the room, but the other poor young fella was clearly alarmed. When he mentioned that he had never heard of Tom Jones or George Michael, gormlessly mentioning that he never listened to "old kind of music", I was slightly afraid for his personal safety.

Cutting hair isn't difficult. Cutting hair well is. Most haircuts are based on the variations of two or three basic cuts, but this class was a bit more advanced. Here is my "headsheet" on the cut we did on the second day:

Note the blob of colour up in the left hand corner. I'm a bit of a slob.

I can kind of read it, but am having considerable trouble reading some of my handwriting, and also, I used some shorthand in places that I'm sure made sense at the time, but is completely undecipherable now. (What do you think I meant by "2A @ 45° but X to"?) You probably can't tell from the squiggles on the right, but the cut was lovely, and totally going into my repertoire.

I also learned some new colouring techniques. ("you can put one colour on the roots, and a different colour on the ends!""Put more peroxide in so it's not so dark!", "try using pie shaped sections!") All very exciting.

The photo on the left is the final results. (The middle one is the cut from the headsheet.) All the clients were very happy, and tipped lavishly, I might add.

And the best part is, you get to keep the mannequin heads! These mannequins make stunningly excellent Halloween decorations, by the way, and now I have three more of them, which thrills me. The last two years we have dangled them from the tree in our front yard, and scared the snot out of adults and children alike.

Well worth it, I'd say.

Wascally Wabbits

The weekend weather was perfection itself: warm, sunny, breezy and entirely designed to make us forget that winter ever happened. The Mister worked long and hard over the past two days to get the flowers into the ground and the vegetable garden up and running. I? supervised.

The Mister loves that vegetable garden. He's always had one, ever since he's had a house of his own and was able to putter around in it without having to ask for permission first.

When we were first married, we got the brilliant idea to plant only "novelty" vegetables, like purple peppers, blue potatoes, yellow tomatoes and white pumpkins. The only real problem was that most of those things are bred for looks, not flavor, and the salsa made with the purple peppers and yellow tomatoes was entirely without flavor, and looked just like barf. The shepherd's pie I made with the blue potatoes looked so revolting we couldn't bring ourselves to eat it. (Seriously, blue mashed potatoes are just a big, steaming pile of yuck.) We've stuck to more conventional efforts since.

Some things have been more successful than others. Even though the Mister tried to grow strawberries for 12 years, our biggest bumper crop was only about 7 berries. On the flip side, we've grown raspberries for a couple of years now, and they have been stellar. The rhubarb is always bountiful, even if the broccoli yeild has been niggling.

One of our biggest impediments to a plenteous harvest is the rabbits. Damn those rodents, they decimate that friggin garden, and it makes the Mister crazy. It's like he morphs into Elmer Fudd every year at this time. The Mister hates the rabbits with a fervor that, honestly, I find a little frightening in someone who is usually so temperate. I understand that the rabbits are a nuisance, but he reacts so violently to their presence in the garden that I am really, really glad that handguns are not legal in Canada. (My mother has the same reaction....it's like a reflex for both of them: see a rabbit, burst into flames.)

To that end, the Mister has engaged in a consumate, full-metal-jacket, unmitigated assault on the rabbits. He's not out to hurt them, he's out to thwart them utterly, in the hopes that they will move onto, literally, greener pastures, and leave the Loudshoes garden the hell alone.

He has constructed a very thorough and comprehensive fence around the garden, complete with a little gate. He did look into electric fencing, but decided it was too expensive. I'm not making that up, either.) The chicken wire and staples will be his WMD. It may deter the rabbits, but I'm sure the raccoons will laugh themselves silly, and then vault over the chicken wire (or just use the gate) and gorge themselves on our watermelon and spinach.

I do hope, for Himself and Thing 2's sake, that this works. Because if he starts up with a speech impediment and wearing a goofy hat, I'm out of here.

Feild Trip Follies

All year long, I've been unable to go on any field trips with Thing 2's class. They've all been on days I work, or they haven't needed volunteers when I could go. Thing 2 has been feeling the lack of me lately, so I took the morning off to go on a "bridge tour". The class had been studying bridges recently; different kinds of bridges, what each design is good for and how they are made. We took a walk from one park in the north end, along the river to downtown, checking out about 9 bridges along the way. It was pretty interesting, as field trips go. (Thank GOD I didn't have to go to the sugar bush yet again. I could give the tour myself by now.)

The ride there on the school bus was ear-splitting. What is it about a school bus ride that makes children only able to converse at a clamourous shriek? Is it the lack of meaningful entertainment for a full 15 minutes that whips them to such a fever pitch? Is it the tight confines of the vehicle that render them incapable of speaking normally? Most likely it is the fact that every other child on the bus is screeching shrilly at top volume for the duration of the ride. Honestly, I feel like I've just had a grand mal seizure by the end of a school bus ride. (I certainly don't remember that when I took a bus every day to school. Maybe it's the curious sensitivity to noise that befalls everyone over the age of 40.)

The day was lovely, and I enjoyed the bit of talk about the bridges. I was able to contribute somewhat, as I was the only person on the tour that could remember when the pedestrian bridge at Gibbons park was a tenuous structure made of oil barrels and planks and rope. It was positively medieval. (Everyone, even the other adults, looked at me like I was reminiscing fondly about "gentleman callers" and seeing electric lights for the first time.)

We finally made our way to the final bridge, which was nearby to a playground where everyone ate their lunch and the kids played on the equipment until the bus came to pick them up. I was only a couple of blocks from work, and so I left them and walked to the salon.

When Thing 2 came home later, she told me that I missed "the best part of the day", the "barf festival". It seems that some of the kids played a bit too enthusiastically on one of the spinny contraptions, and one boy threw up just before they got on the bus. And then he threw up on the bus. And one more time just as they got to the school. This was just too much for another boy, and he threw up on the school's front lawn. Another kid witnessed it, and, in sympathy, lost his lunch. The first kid threw up again, and yet another kid tossed his cookies, too. She said the kids who barfed weren't too upset about it, it was so comical by that point, and she also said that the teacher nearly hurt himself laughing. (This teacher is a riot; he's replaced the teacher they've had all year, who went on medical leave. He's only been here for 3 weeks, and this is his first teaching job. The fact that his reaction to all the vomit was to double over and laugh makes me love him all the more.) I'm so sorry I missed it.

The class is going on an end of the year trip to a provincial park about an hour away. I don't know if I can handle the bus ride, but I'm sure going to try to be there for the rest of the day. I'll see if I can make anyone barf.

Morning at Tim Hortons.

Okay, I've mentioned before how the Tim Hortons near the salon is some sort of clearing house for every nutbar in the city. I think they convene there every day, just to organize themselves. ("You, Crazy Talking Man, you take the west end, You, Parrot Woman, you get yourself to the courthouse and you with the Giant Mutant Head, you wander around here shouting 'the monkeys are listening!' ")

Today there was a guy parked beside the door in one of those huge motorized scooters with the Canadian flag sticking up off the back of it, and he was wearing shorts and a tank top, despite the fact that it was offensively cold out. He did look as though he was playing with only half a deck, and this was borne out by the fact that he bellowed "are you a boy or a girl?" to every single person who left. Some of them answered, but most people ignored him. The guy right ahead of me, clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing, but too Canadian to be outright rude, muttered "a boy" as he passed. And Scooter Man yelled "you're not good to me, son!" after him.
I was highly amused, and couldn't pass by without a hearty "I'm a girl!", and I was richly rewarded with an enthusiastic thumbs up as I went. "I like girls", he yelled after me, like maybe I doubted it, and he was reassuring me.

Made. My. Day.

Routine and Mundane.

I'm not sure one could have a more mundane day than I did today.

I haven't been home much recently, what with the changes at work (read: I now work 36 hours, up from, what? 20.) and just a lot of social stuff. The house has descended to a toxic waste dump, and I was happy enough to have a day here to deal with all the flotsom and jetsom that has accumulated since the last time I did this. I cleaned the kitchen thoroughly, having one cleaning epiphany after another: "good God that is dirty!", "Holy shit, would you look at that!", "Gaaahh! What the hell died in here?"
I was watching one of those shows on the telly while I was cleaning, you know the ones where the two scolding British women humiliate filthy people on the state of their hovels? Anyway, one of them suggested that the detergent you use in the dishwasher is very good for cleaning the range hood over the oven, and any other greasy sort of dirt, like on the back splash, and lo and behold, I tried it and it was magical! Of course, my house wasn't nearly as vile as the ones on tv, which is why I was watching that show....anything to give me a feeling of superiority.

I went to the mall, I went to the library and I went to Wal-Mart. I made dinner (pork souvlaki with Greek salad and grilled pita bread. It got an A+ and will be put into regular rotation from hereon in.) I checked my e-mail, loaded up my MP3 player for the bus ride into work tomorrow, (Dave Matthews and Paolo Nutini mostly, in anticipation of Big Liver Girl's and my road trip next month to see them both in Toronto.) and I let the cat in and out about a hundred times.

It wasn't an exciting day, but I've had plenty of excitement in the past few weeks, and mundane looks pretty good from here. Past experience has told me that June is a very hectic month, where you have not a whiff of spare time, and you hemmorhage money. I will enjoy mundane whiel it lasts.