WEll I find myself again alone. B should be getting groc before coming home and he should have Bron with him. She got her braces off this a.m. first thing. Wow! You wonder how you could be the parents of such a gorgeous creature. In a year and a little more than a half she has gone from a kid to being an almost adult. A young adult as they say. She has her hair dyed the same kind of red as my mother's hair, which always seem to look cute, no matter what she does with it and she has this gorgeous smile that lights up her face and laughing eyes (with cool glasses, I might add). I repeat, WOW. Then we went to the expensive eyewear store and ordered her some more cool glasses. Her perscription has changed. I had hoped she would just replace the lenses, but she wanted Transitions and I do too, as she never wears her sunglasses. I wish I had worn my sunglasses for real when I was in my teens and twenties and early 30's....wouldn't have these lovely squinty lines on my forehead that i never realized were there till I started driving myself to the city. caught myself in the rearview mirror, frowning away. I think I always look cranky now, even when I am not.
I am frequently cranky however.
I find it interesting, we were early to bed last night, so got an eight hour sleep and I find that I am not nearly as tired as usual after work today. Although it was busy, it was not as busy as some weeks. It is so bizarre that my schedule for here always changes in July. January would be better, not as busy then, less disruption. Sometimes I think that if Murphy can make things harder in any way, he does, just for fun.
Last night was the school open house, I cannot believe my second last one (at least until I possibly have grandchildren of school age who would live near enough and have a school open house that I would be available to go to....)(wow does that sound unlikely!!!) It felt weird to not be on the school board anymore. Or the school community council as it is known in it's new incarnation. It was time to go though. Most of the members are younger now and have the energy and time to devote to projects. For example, we always had a hot dog and hamburger meal for open house, this council chose to provide healthy snacks to promote their initiative of healthier living. That reminds me of something else I read this a.m. A Reader's Digest article where they were showing the diff between 50 years ago articles and now. One of the points was that margarine was hailed as the cheaper food, everything was about how to get the best deals on food. Now it is all about healthy foods. People still think marg is healthier. I am not sure about that, although I always buy the heart healthy kind and eat butter only rarely, although I love it more. Not that we eat a lot of fat. My inlaws still think I am weird for not putting butter on my peanut butter sandwiches or hot dogs....I am sure it does taste better, but I figure we eat enough fat as it is.
Anyway the point of the school open house, I had a few nice conversations, always nice to talk to teachers who think your kids are brilliant....talked to a few neighbours. If I didn't work here a few hours a week, or go to things like this, I would never talk to anyone except the people employed in the bank, store and gas station. Seems so sad that our lives shrink down to service people and people at work. But I have to admit, I could sit down this weekend and phone any friend or relative. Will I ? doubtful. By the time I talk to my daughter and dad I am phoned out.
Seems so awful not to have contacted my friends for so long, but they are no diff. And the relo's. I get a call on my birthday or a card at Christmas from a few of them, but that is about it. My family has communication troubles that way. Faced with enormous phone bills in the past, people learned to stop using the phone. Plus people get busy with their own kids, grandkids. We all think we have a life, that it is all so important. I admit, I am one of the worst to get myself all bound up in the issues of the day, at work, at home. I wonder if I will ever learn to just sit back and let things go. That is what my eldest recommends. The same @#$%% happens at her work but she ignores it all. She knows women love to gossip and get all involved. I wish I could be like her, I would likely have less stress. She goes to a gym all the time now, good for her. I think she has a very stressful job and needs to work that out, as well as get fit. or I should say, keep fit, she already is. I think the kids are all aware of the health pitfalls that our generation has mostly fallen into. When I think back to my late teens, early twenties, all I knew about was counting calories, because god forbid I would get fat, like my body was always trying to be.
I knew I was shaped like my dad and mostly like his mother. When I looked again at some old photos the other day, I realized just how much, now that I am likely the age she was in the photos....So you have heredity to fight. Then the fact that I grew up in a household where every major event was food related. When I met my husband, I remember telling him I could remember every meal from every big family occasion. He also comes from a very food oriented family and all our friends are foodies. Most of them, anyway. All the visiting occasions I can recall over my life have all centered around food. Part of it is the Prairie culture, I suppose, you have to feed people if you invite them over, or have a celebration of any kind. When i read the womens mags and they say to stop going for lunch with your friends and go for walk instead. It sounds like good advice, but the trouble is, most of us hardly have time for lunches with friends anymore. Most of my non-family meals are solitary ones, staff room with a book or sometimes a co-worker, or in front of the computer or tv at home.
All my childhood I took for granted that my mother cooked and cleaned all the time. There were always goodies after school, great lunches to take to school. Lovely meals at suppertime. My friends also, the same. Now Bron has to come home and forage like an animal. I do cook some nights, most nights just heat things up. We go out more than we should, but less than the standard Americans, if you can believe the media. I love eating out. Sometimes it is disappointing and sometimes just lovely. I guess I am still enough of a housewife in me to appreciate someone else cooking and cleaning. All those lovely visits to the inlaws, incredible meals over the years. I enjoy cooking for the crowd also, but I will never have the skills or whatever to make those meals. I mean, my holiday meals are acceptable, not too bad at all, but nothing like my mother in law, who has probably made 100's of turkeys over the years. I can't even say I make one a year anymore. And I will never have the perogy and cabbage roll skills that she has. My mother made them too, but learned it all as an adult, cooking for my dad. My mother learned Norwegian and English cooking because that was her heritage. So I crave potato pancakes, sauerkraut, sausage from the German side, and lefse(potatoes again!) and crispy pastries from the Norwegian side. I pretty much love most kinds of food.
The other day I was looking on line and saw a mention of the puppet rampage and how people had to recover after the food. I thought the food was great. Before we left, someone who went last time, told me it was bland cafeteria food. I didn't find it bland. It was not haute cuisine or anything, it was one carnivore choice and one veggie choice. I guess if you were picky, too bad. I ate it all and loved it. For the most part. There was on lunch where the food ran out that I was not too impressed, not with the taste of that one either, but to feed so many for three meals a day and have it hot and plenty, that is not so easy.
When we go out with my dad, it is almost always Chinese or the like. We like to try other kinds too, African, Indian or Caribbean, but he is not up for that. That's okay, there is so much variety in the Asian restaurants that we almost always find a good meal. Sometimes we make poor choices because we take chances, we don't always order our favorites. One memorable time with my brother in law, who is not really a Chinese food fan anyway, we had all meats, all with sweet sauces. eeeesh. don't know how that got past me. I love when we have a big group, then we can have lots of choices, but it is still fun with the few of us that are around.
I sure know how to go off on a tangent, I bet I could type all night. I suppose I have an opinion or thoughts on almost everything. But my oven is beeping, my chicken wings are ready. Yeah, I was gonna cook a real meal until I realized that no idea when the rest of the family will get here. So I guess we will all forage again.
I am grateful right now for ovens that work (yay, extend that to all appliances!) and gorgeous smart kids who can do what they want in this world. oh before I go, I want to mention that we were run into today. Bron had just parked and I was scrambling for change to feed the meter and the guy ahead of us just boom, backed straight into us. He was an old guy, I assume he maybe looked and then we drove up (although we were there several min., not like we had just pulled up) and he never looked again. I just don't know how he could miss hearing or feeling that he had hit us. I was sitting there with the deer in the headlights thing going on, when my smart resourceful kid grabbed a pen and wrote the license plate number on her arm. So hopefully she and her dad have reported it. I feel sorry for old guys, I do, but keep in mind, one nearly ran over my oldest kid the night before she started Kindergarden all those years ago and then proceeded to run over a friend of mine a few min later in the evening, which changed her life. She was an elderly lady too, I wonder how she is now. I feel bad we never go visit. One of my few regrets in moving. I miss them and one set of other friends who never contact us anymore. (But do I pick up the phone either? no, so who is to blame? I blame the modern lifestyle, none of us know how to take a break anymore)
So anyway I am grateful that for all my nervousness about the kid learning to drive, we successfully navigated downtown Regina, and someone else was at fault. I had to tell her, I was waiting for her to make a mistake, not someone else! I am SO SO SO grateful that this is the last teenager I have to drive with. I can hardly stand the anxiety sometimes. I think it was easier in the spring. Sometimes she does fine and other times not, so I don't even know if she is close to ready to test or not. A diff personality from her sibs, for sure. But I treasure their individualities as well as their similarlities. Being the mother of YA's is so amazing. I marvel at it often. In the school last night, I was talking to three of her friends, who are a year older, so in gr. 12. I cannnot believe they are that old. They just seem like kids, not like adults on the edge of leaving home. The next ten months will be amazing, I think, in some ways. Sometimes I cannot believe I am coming up to 50 in a few years and then I think about what life was like as a kid, we didn't even have a dial phone. People didn't always have indoor plumbing. Seems incredible. We get to bitch about too much texting and here I am blogging into the ether. wow. No wonder they say if something is older than 50 it is antique. Used to bug me that my toys and lunch box are for sale in the antique mall. (mind you that is ten years ago now...makes a diff) There are things in this world to marvel at, I guess. I am just glad that people still read. E books will never take over. I read something the other day that I thought made sense. That ebooks would never replace books, but would replace a stack of books (eg. when you are on vac and want to take a pile of books, you could load up your ebook reader and go). Makes sense to me. I really enjoyed having an MP3 player with audiobooks. Now if only I could make it go track to track like CD's... oh well, I suppose at some point they will improve the tech. Then I would have to go buy another player!!! I really hate that.
okay really going now, bye for now, D
