Monday, June 30, 2008

Lazy Summer Days

I have a million things I wanted to do this week, and instead I find myself at my computer, mindlessly clicking on “headlines” like “Pavarotti’s widow and daughters reach inheritance deal” and “Get a summer bod in 4 weeks”. I also found myself wishing for the return of Big Brother on TV so I could get in some good trash this summer. So I went onto CBS’ website, and guess what? Only 13 sleeps until BB10! Stay tuned – what will be the twist this season? Can the new contestants out-trash the previous seasons? We shall see...

Mike and I have been watching Entourage. We borrowed Season 2 from Chris and Ivana (had a handy little recap of Season 1 as a DVD extra) and rented Season 3 from Blockbuster last night. It’s pretty funny and I especially like all the LA lifestyle curiosities. It’s crude, though, be sure to check your prudishness at the door! We started watching it as an unspoken agreement to “avoid doing our taxes for yet another week”. It’s working so we have in fact accomplished something this week!

On Thursday I took the kids to the nursery with me. Not to drop them off or exchange them for other kids, ha ha, the PLANT nursery, people. Two of the three of us had an especially grand time playing the “hide from Mummy” game in the maze of perennials and bushes. See I like to throw words like perennials in there to show how knowledgeable I am about plants. $75 later, we had a trunk full of herbs, several varieties of flowers that I should know the names of but sadly I do not – let’s refer to them as the “yellows” and the “pinks”, two climbing clematis for the trellis thing in the huge planter tub, and a “blah-beddy-blah japonica” bush for my large blue pot. That is of course the latin name. I was on the deck happily up to my elbows in soil, planting those bad boys, when Mike came out and said, “Preparing for the annual plant kill?” POP – there went my Martha moment. I’ll have you know that it has been 4 days since they went in, and nothing has died yet. In fact, they are all beautiful. Nyah nee nyah.

Our big task of the day on Friday was to drop off Jack’s passport application. Check – mission accomplished! This time, I wasn’t an exhausted bawling wreck. It only took an hour and we should have his passport in a couple of weeks. Whew. On the way out of the office, we had to cross this field to where we parked the car. Passport Canada has chosen the sketchiest part of Surrey to locate themselves, but they have built a very nice fountain in the back. The kids thought it was great and ran screaming around the other side of this very large and loud fountain. They were absolute angels in the passport office so I was ok with them burning off steam outside UNTIL I could no longer see them. UNTIL I realized what part of Surrey we were in. UNTIL I remembered the crazy lady who had been performing some sort of semi-nude sun-dancing in the field as we entered the office an hour earlier. UNTIL I remembered that the security officers who are ALWAYS in the Passport lobby were suspiciously absent when we got out of the elevators. And as I rounded the edge of the fountain, I saw my lovely children, playing in the spray of the fountain, oblivious to that fact that they were right smack dab in the middle of a drug bust. This voice came out of somewhere deep in my belly: “Boys! To me! NOW” and they ran to me and I believe I teleported them to the car. Or something. Come to think of it, I may have come close to being arrested myself for possible child abuse as I dragged them across the field at light speed. This mama bear protects her cubs.

We have had wonderful hot weather this past weekend and I am loving it. I got two early birthday dinners. My parents had us over on Saturday and as I had spent the day scrubbing our decks and our patio furniture (it all looks awesome by the way), I was happy to collapse exhausted into their garden and watch the boys play in the paddling pool. We had a great chicken BBQ and a strawberry shortcake dessert. Yum. And a gift certificate to lululemon (hello, lulu, be seeing you soon!!) which I can’t wait to use. On Sunday I filled out our summer calendar with things like trips to the zoo, camping, Whistler weekends, waterparks... and then got treated by Susan to a gigantic dinner at Cactus Club. We all ate like pigs and then scarfed down dessert too.

I realized this morning that our Science World memberships run out in June. And that today is June 30th. So after collecting the boys from Dive Deep Detectives camp we had a quick lunch and zipped off for one last hurrah. It’s a great place, and the kids love it, but with E in school fulltime next year, and J now old enough to require me actually paying for him, I’m not going to renew the membership. I’ll put the $100 towards my lululemon day instead, ha ha. Anyway it was fun, and we rode in on the Skytrain – a Big Deal for the boys and definitely Old News for me. It was hot again today and I somehow thought it would be a good idea to pick up a bag of frozen chicken at Costco on the way home from the park and ride. So I spent the drive home with the chicken stuffed in the passenger side foot area, with all the A/C blasting at the feet and me sweating from the waist up, just so the chicken wouldn’t thaw before we got home. (It worked, in case you were wondering)

We got our Green Earth Organics delivery again today. It is just so exciting to open up that box and paw through all the fresh goodies. Here is a sample of what we got:
The days that I receive it are always the best dinner days. Tonight we had a fresh salad with just about every chopped vegetable imaginable, homemade dressing, grilled chicken on top, and a garlic baguette on the side. And as I was stuffing all this delicious produce into my fridge, the Pillsbury Crescent Rolls can fell out and exploded on the floor so we had croissants for dessert too.

I’m going to wish you all a Happy Canada Day – we’re celebrating tomorrow at Eliot’s with the kids and a bunch of friends. We’re going to grill some stuff and wander down to the celebrations where we get to see Loverboy for free! And they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch - O Canada!

1 comment:

Cathy said...

Everything still alive? I had terrible trouble with my cucumbers, have 10 surviving plants, now, had to plant another round after the first 8 died. We're desperate, you see, we ran out of Grandma's canned pickles, and therefore I must make new this year. Desperate.