Bundle up, it’s summer!

It seems our unbelievably mild winter and early, hot spring has melted into a typical Calgary summer: cool, rainy, grey, and windy, topped off with inexplicable daily thunderstorms. How can we get so many thunderstorms without daytime heat? I don’t know. In any case, looking on the bright side, I don’t have to worry about watering my garden. Yesterday we went for a family bike ride and the wind was so cold that I actually wished I had earmuffs on my bike helmet.

I’m taking this as a sign to take things easy today, to just spend some quiet indoor time with the kids. Well, “quiet.” I keep seeing recipes that are “beat the heat” this and “no-bake” that, and meanwhile I’m considering a marathon baking session today, wearing an apron over my wool sweater. Last week I faced my pastry fears and baked my very first pie.

I don’t eat pie, but by all accounts it was excellent, despite being very, very ugly. Facing my fears via pie crust is the topic for a whole post in itself, however, so I shall not bore you with the details at the moment. I’ll bore you with them later!

One benefit of kind-of-crappy weather is that outdoor attractions are not at all busy, so the boys and I bundled up to go to the zoo last week. We even got to see the new baby gorilla, nursing and riding on her mother’s back. It’s very heartening to see babies in captivity doing well, and I laughed to see one of the males beating his chest to no one in particular and getting in the mother’s space, only to have her scamper away with the baby on her back. Every time the male came near her, she left, and if she could speak English I’m sure she would be saying Get away from me, you loser, and rolling her eyes. Finally he gave up and went to munch on some lettuce.

Pants, sweater, a jacket…the perfect summer outfit!

In other exciting news, my husband and I are going to a concert on Thursday night. I haven’t been to a concert in over two decades, so it should be very fun. The kids are going to Camp Grandma for a couple of days, so the going will be very tough for them, I’m sure. It’s going to be non-stop goodies and marathon sessions of Simpsons’ Clue.

Remember when concert tickets were less than $20 apiece? I sure do, and I’m not one to lament times gone by but those were the days, were they not? My girlfriends and I saw tons of great shows all for the price of a few hours’ babysitting. Actually, now that I think of it, I made about $2/hour babysitting, so I guess those concert tickets were pretty hard-earned after all. But I am looking very much forward to this concert, and it is during Stampede so I’m contemplating what to wear. Will it be hot with all the people and (presumably) dancing? Or should I dress for the chilly weather outside? Should I put on layers, or will that be too risky in terms of losing clothing articles? I mean, there probably isn’t going to be a mosh pit or crowd surfing or anything at Zak Brown Band, but the fewer things to keep track of, the better.

Many years ago, I was at a concert at the university, when my friend’s boyfriend did some drunken crowd surfing, and ended up with one shoe, in the middle of winter. We looked and looked, to no avail. We even went back to the Economics Undergraduates Society office, where I was the president, and made drawings of shoes on pieces of foolscap, captioned “Have You Seen Me?” but we never did find that shoe. The guy had to walk/ hop through the snow to the designated driver’s car, with his soggy foot. I wonder if that was the last time I was at a concert.

What was the last concert you went to? What was the first? I don’t remember my last one but my first was INXS in 1988. Good times.