I-I-I-I’m Still Alive!

So here it is, May 23, and we are still here.  I guess the rapture didn’t occur after all, or, if it did, I was seriously excluded.  I wore my special Judgment Day panties for nothing?  NOTHING?

I spent the weekend celebrating the birth of Queen Victoria by way of a road trip to visit my in-laws, and as of today I am on a cleanse because, let me tell you, no one needs to consume that much booze and ice cream over a sixty-five hour period.  HOO BOY.  Today we made the trip home in a record seven hours, as opposed to the usual eight-to-ten-depending-on-road-construction.  Here’s our little family secret for “making good time”: if you get on the road by 6:30 am, there will be very little in the way of traffic.  We like to get an early start, and theoretically, the children will be so tired from our waking them up an hour early that they will fall asleep in the car.  HA HA HA.  This almost never happens, but today, by some miracle, it did.  Mark and Jake both slept for ten and twenty minutes, respectively. 

They are good travellers though, despite their penchant for asking if we are almost there, even when it was explained five minutes ago that there are six more hours left of travel time. 

It was a lovely trip, and I am struck, as always, by how much nicer other places are than the city in which I reside.  There are many benefits to my home city – employment and standard of living topping the list – but climate and vegetation are not among them.  I came home to see that my beautiful, well-established clematis is not even up yet – Is it dead?  How? – which was a touch depressing given the sight of lilacs, fully in bloom and growing wild around the perimeter of my in-laws’ property.  

Ah, but the long weekend is over and now it’s back to the old grind.  Which, for me, means pretty much nothing.  The life of a lady of leisure!  I suppose it means groceries and running back and forth from the school, and also attacking a weird mountain of laundry, weird due to the fact that I actually DID laundry, twice, within my sixty-five hour vacation period, so I’m not totally sure where all this laundry is coming from.

Also for this week: I wasn’t going to bring this up due to the fact that it makes me sound like I’m going to slip on my heels and pearls and start vacuuming, but I have NEW SMALL APPLIANCES to play with.  Last week I got a food processor – my dreams have come true! – and today my new stand mixer, coffee maker, toaster, and microwave arrived!  I am so excited about them that my younger self probably wants to slap me in the face, enraged with my domesticity and housewifery.