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I was getting a sunburn as I wandered through the kiosks at the Moss Street Market.
Victoria’s blue skies, light breezes, whispy clouds and sunshine
Have been traded for Malmo’s winterscape.
Cheerful shopping crowds, happy children, guitar playing buskers and miles of sidewalk
Have been relpaced by Me’n The Man, a field of whiney cows and miles of highway and gravel road.
But it IS good to be back.
Really.
Honest.
There’s no place like home.
…there’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…
And I have done it again…
Pushed the proper sequence for switching the keyboard to French…
So what I was going to write, I will continue to write, but with weird punctuation…
sigh
I`m flying off to Victoria tomorrow.
I plan to be away for a week, during which time I expect the HOT, hot weather to be gone, and more livable temperatures to be in residence.
I don`t worry about leaving The Guys on their own, as we`re just a week past the 6 week post-surgery mark, and I have observed them being fairly competent as far as cooking, cleaning and generally looking after themselves goes.
It will be nice to hang out with my friend and her family.
And it looks like I`ll get to touch base with Johanna before I head home next week.
I`m not taking my computer along, so if I don`t have access to wifi I`ll make an effort to check my email on the computer there, but I mayn`t take time to play all my Scrabble games.
Just a heads up there.
Time for one more suitcase check, and then to bed.
See ya in a week.
Unless I miss you too much.
Yesterday, on my way home from my blood test results, (we’re making progress, by the way- up to 24 now. Only 1 point behind the requisite lowest acceptable level of feritin!), I stopped in at Safeway to get my Metformin prescription (diabetes meds) filled.
I submitted the scrawled receipt to the Pharmacist and wandered over to the Starbucks kiosk to get some coffee.
As I roamed the store, waiting for the pharmacy, I texted Randall to see if he wanted anything while I was there.
He suggested a few things, so I picked them up and took them through Till number 1.
When we got to my “Safeway Card” number I gave her my phone number. Not having changed it over yet, I started, “306-764-…)
The Cashier looked up, “Prince Albert?” she said.
I was a little surprised, but said, “Yes! And you?”
She’d moved from Nipawin about ten years ago.
The store was pretty slow and we had a good 10 minutes before someone queued up behind me. A really nice visit, we had.
She hasn’t been working there long, and I hope I encouraged her as much as her friendliness and smile encouraged me.
I’d like to think I started to make a new friend there. I hope so.
I’ll be looking for her next time I’m at Safeway.
I should wear a nametag too… so I’m not the only one who knows the other’s name.
Especially as our daughter signed up for a Safeway card after I did, and when I use our old phone number it always comes up with her name on it, and I wouldn’t want her to go on thinking I’m Johanna…
I did that once- let someone call me the wrong name thinking I’d correct it later, only to find that each time she greeted me it felt more awkward to say anything. She didn’t find out until we moved, five years later, that she had my name wrong, and I felt so terrible for her discomfort and embarrassment that I vowed to never let it happen again.
Regardless of how nice people are and how “at home” I feel here,
It was something of a bright spot to find the open warmth of a clear Saskatchewan day in that lovely lady’s friendly smile.
So if 6 Ikea frozen meatballs is a serving and equals 85 g,
10 meatballs should be about 142 g.
This means that each meatball is about 14 g each.
Therefore, if a bag full of Ikea frozen meatballs is 1.13 kg,
There should be 80 or 81 meatballs per bag.
If I can expect to feed 15-20 junior and senior high youth… does that include the staff?… and if I figure on 8-10 meatballs per person (judging by what my family eats when we have them)
That would give me 8 actual servings per bag…
So the four bags we bought would give us 32 servings.
Perfect. That should be TONS of meatballs.
Even for hungry teenaged boys.
NOW.
There’s 6 cups of rice, cooked before I went to town this morning, and another 14 in the rice cooker…
If I do one more rice cooker full that will give us 40 cups of cooked rice.
That should also be plenty.
Two bags of frozen peas… five loaves of French bread…
The question remains
How much Sweet and Sour Sauce will I need to make…?
…if I double the recipe for us, a cup each of brown sugar, white sugar & vinegar plus one and a half cups of water… and that makes enough for meatballs for 4 or 5 of us… and you’d want about a cup of sauce per 10 meatballs per person…
Excuse me while I get cooking.
And <*snap*> just like that
At some slightly nebulous time around 3:00 this afternoon
I will pass the six week, post surgery time line.
Will there be a sparkling, glowing light around me while the tinkling of faerie bells chimes up the scale?
How will we know when that magical moment has passed?
It’s like crossing the International Date Line… one minute it’s today, and the next minute… it’s today. Or yesterday, depending on which way you’re going…
How SHALL I commemorate this auspicious occasion?
Shall I drape streamers across the living room ceiling and invite my friends and neighbours to join me in joyous festivities? Shall I sing and dance my way across the yard and frolic among the dandelions and deer poop? Shall I take a solemn moment of silence to reflect on my life and the last six weeks of recuperation?
Or will I carry the laundry basket to the closet, iron the shirts that have been hanging on the doorknob for 5 weeks, and finish off with a rousing round of vacuuming?
Ah, yes.
Back to reality.
Is what I started singing after he blew out the votive candle that precariously perched on his (Ikea) cinnamon bun this morning.
He cocked his eyebrow at me & I explained that while there are several 16th birthday songs out there, most of them seem to have been written by creepy older men who have been waiting somewhat impatiently for the object of their obsession to reach the magical age of sixteen (& of consent, presumably, back in the day).
At least all the Sixteenth Birthday songs I know.
So I transitioned to “Happy Birthday to you”, and watched him get halfway through his bun before I had to confirm that we had, indeed heard the bus.
Of all the days for it to be early, eh?
My last glimpse of the Birthday Boy was of him running across the yard, open backpack flapping, disposable hot beverage of (at least) his favourite Starbucks tea raised in one hand.
His father woke up to shouts of, “You’ve lost your cinnamon bun! And some of your homework!” (as these items were bounced out of the open backpack while he ran for it)
On the bright side, his day can only get better, right?
9:00 am, the skies are blue, the birds are happily singing (instead of trying to pull a B&E caper through the front window), and it’s warm enough to be sitting with my morning tea on the front porch.
Very nice.
The Wifi & Ipod are nice touches too. (there’s a [weak] pun intended there)
Because they’re obviously crazy.
Last year it was a retarded baby sparrow.
This year it’s the likewise intellectually delayed robins.
Always the slanted part of the bowed window that faces the church.
Don’t know if it’s the way the trees in the front of the house reflect on that particular window, or if the rail on the porch is particularly handy as a launch pad, or if it’s the residual bird poop calling out to them.
Whatever it is, they seem excessively fond of that bit of rail, and that angled window.
Completely bonkers.
Round about noon I realized that tomorrow is the second Saturday of the month, which means that it might be Quilt Sampler Class day.
I missed last month, being just two weeks into the recuperation process, but one of my friends picked up the square I missed.
The deal with this class is that it starts in September, and every month until August we’re shown a different quilt block. We pay about $7 for the first month, and take home some fabric scraps and an instruction sheet. If we show up on time with our quilt block finished the second (and subsequent) month, we are given the fabric scraps at no additional charge. If we haven’t finished our block, (by either not being in attendance or by just not having it done) we pay $7 for that month/the square we missed.
In theory, one could have 12 quilt blocks for $7.
The reality is that one is most likely to miss a couple of months. I missed December and April… but I must have had to pay for more than 2 months, because there are at least 3 unfinished blocks in the sewing room…
Anyway, when a quick check of the paperwork proved that Quilt day is indeed tomorrow, I thought I’d better have a go at the assigned square.
It’s now 10:00 pm and bedtime, and I must confess that I gave up on my square just before supper.
The instructions seemed somewhat convoluted, and I suspect that I may have made at least one mistake cutting out the pieces.
After chatting with probably the most experienced quilter in our group and finding out that it took her two days to get her square sorted, I don’t feel as badly about crapping out as I did this afternoon. I won’t have a finished block to bring along, so it’ll cost me, but I’m hoping that others besides myself had trouble with it so the teacher will go over the instructions again. It’s a nice, if complicated, quilt block, and would be nice to have figured out.
Ah, well.
I’m enjoying learning the finer points of quilt making. Maybe some day I’ll even make a whole quilt.
Some day.