July 10, 2006

A full and round understanding.

I should have seen this coming. I have said before that it is my personal belief that the universe seeks balance. That for every right there is a wrong, for every stop there is a start and for every completely brilliant weekend, well. I should have seen it coming.

This weekend:

1. The weather was smashing. Truly glorious. It was really hot, but I like the heat. (There's this beer ad that points out that the average length of a Canadian summer is only 58 days long. Since that means that 307 days aren't summer, I can take whatever the summer wants to dish out. The contrast is nice.) Perfect cherry picking weather.

Cherriespicked78

2. The children were lovely, and polite, and did their math without being asked, and Megan came downstairs on Saturday, looked at herself for a moment and then said "oh yes, that's too much makeup" and went and washed her face. What are the odds on a teenage girl doing that?

3. I finished my trekking socks,

Trekking90Do78

(Trekking XXL, colour 90. 2.25mm needles, using my basic sock recipe. Before you ask, yes. Yes, I wrote the recipe down here. ) and I put them into the LRPD box. (Long Range Planning Department)

Trekking90D78

4. I cast on new socks with this yarn.

Lucymerinoskiris87

It's a Merino/tencel blend hand dyed by Lucy at Minds Eye Yarns, and I think it's all of the colours of foggy iris. This pleases me more than I can tell you.

5. The sock got to go to see Great Big Sea on Saturday.

Greatbigsea78

It was a seriously good time. I have a not-at-all secret crush on Alan Doyle, love me a good kitchen party, and got to go with Joe and his Mum and Dad.

Mumdad78

Turns out that Joe Sr. is a pretty good date. Claps in time, knows all the words to "Rant and Roar", isn't embarrassed by flashing around a sock. It was pretty brilliant.

6. In my continuing TV-less coverage of the World Cup...

Italywinswv78

I have a sneaking suspicion that Italy did very well. (Besides the Italian street party that went until 2am, French flags are now deeply discounted at my corner store. Not a good sign for the French.)

7. To top off my weekend, I had a really nice dinner last night with an old friend. My daughters were charming, the wine Cabernet, the pasta al dente, the dessert cherry upside-down cake, and the conversation went late into the warm evening the way that all the best summer dinners do.

Then, Midnight came, Monday began...and the universe sought balance.

1. I couldn't sleep. I was completely sideswiped by this, since normally I can sleep anywhere, anytime. (I don't sleep much, but I do sleep well.) This infuriating and inexplicable wave of insomnia kept me awake until 5am.

2. At 5am, Joe snored. I shoved him.

3. At 5:05, the cat danced on my head for a while. (It turned out that the cat only danced on my head for a while because that was really all the time she could spare away from shredding the bookcase in the kitchen.)

4. At 5:30, someone nearby remembered that Italy had won the world cup and exploded in a nocturnal expression of car-honking joy.

5. 6:45, my alarm went off. I wept softly, but got up and started making the girls breakfast and lunches. I drank an enormous amount of coffee.

7. 8am, Megan and I get on our bikes so that we can ride over to her summer program. Last week I led Meg, and this week Meg is to lead me. Towards the end of the week I will trail her like a stalker, not helping or directing her so that we will both know that she can manage the urban ride by herself. This morning however, Megan explains to me (sort of loudly, or that could just be the sleep deprivation) that she cannot, yay, WILL not ride without me. That she will surely be lost or hit by a car if I am not with her, and that I am a very, very poor mother for trying to make her do this.
(I would like to take this moment to point out that it is not the work or the discipline of teenagers that makes them exhausting. It is the contrasts. It is that a child who spent an evening last week screeching about needing independence and needing her mum off her arse, could now refuse to ride her bike to school if her mummy doesn't come with her.)

8. 8:25. Megan enters the school, and the moment her precious little head is under cover, the sky opens and nine-thousand-million litres of water are poured on my head. I ride home on my bike in the driving rain, contemplating that I have never been wetter in my entire life. I have been drier while I was in the bath. I was as wet as a human being can get before they actually begin to dissolve.

9. While waiting to turn (I had to wait for all of the cars to have a turn, because if you are in a nice dry car, you should TOTALLY get to turn before the drowned lady sitting on her bike. ) I was splashed head to toe up and down the left side of my body by not one, not two, but NINE cars. Luckily, I had reached a certain peace with my lot by then. Except for the mud and the street filth, things were already as bad as they could be.

10. Come home and strip of my remarkably wet clothes, take them down to the basement to toss them in Mr. Washie, and discover that the basement is leaking....again. Actually, leaking would be the wrong word. Leaking sort of implies a slow influx of water. Pouring. That's what the water in the basement is doing. Luckily, I had a colony of ants take up residence on the kitchen counter to distract me.

In the face of this preponderance of evidence that the planet is balancing things out, I am going to go and sit quietly in a corner, drink a very great many cups of coffee, try to work in a manner that doesn't attract attention to myself, (lest I be hit by lightning) and wait for the balancing phase to be over. Despite being wet, filthy, flooded and overtired, I had such a good weekend, that I regret nothing.

Nothing except that I'm going to have to go back out on my bike in the rain to pick Meg up, since Joe had a pretty great weekend too...and now he's locked his keys in the pick-up.

Posted by Stephanie at July 10, 2006 12:54 PM