What Day Is It? Twenty Weeks In

Very late to the party, but last night I finally watched Hamilton and it was worth staying up an hour past my bedtime to do it. The music! The costumes! The entire cast and ensemble! Normally I fall asleep within minutes of watching, well, pretty much anything, but this felt like an EVENT.

Watching Hamilton on a Sunday night did not help my complete disorientation with regards to time. As I mentioned, last week was our week of summer and we spent some days at my parents’ place up at the lake. This feeling of festivity and holiday, along with my husband STILL WORKING EVERY SINGLE DAY, has left me feeling like this:

The other day I squirted dish soap into the sink full of dirty dishes and turned the hot water on full blast. I puttered around, putting things back in the fridge and wiping the countertops, and when I turned back to the sink, anticipating it to be nearly full, I was startled to see it empty, just a couple of bubbles sadly resting on the dishes. I went into full panic mode that something! Had happened to our sink! And we are in a pandemic! And my husband is working EVERY SINGLE DAY! And I’ll have to call Tony The Hot Plumber to come and fix it and it’s just one more thing to schedule into the week that I don’t know what day is what! And then I realized that I didn’t actually PUT the plug in.

Well. I was at Superstore last week, and at the entrance is a giant bottle of hand sanitizer and a giant bottle of spray with which to wipe down carts. At the Co-Op – which I rarely frequent these days, given my enormous once-weekly routine – there is a bottle of spray that is meant for both wiping carts and sanitizing hands. Like I said, I am rarely there these days so it’s not like that is the routine I’m used to. I am used to Superstore. So I don’t know why I sprayed both my hands and the cart with the same bottle, belatedly realizing that the bottle contained BLEACH. I stood there in the entrance way, masked people zipping around me to grab the actual hand sanitizer, while I realized that I bleached my own hands and waited for my skin to dissolve.

That incident did NOT help the dried-out old-lady appearance of my hands.

Peas from my parents’ garden! If there’s anything better than eating them straight out of the pod, I don’t know what it is.

In addition to fresh garden veggies, we spent time paddle boarding and lots of time on my dad’s boat. It was warm enough to swim, although the water – like any Alberta lake – is NOT warm. The boys had a great time jumping from boat to water until, in what can only be described as a testosterone-fueled attempt to jump the furthest, my older son sliced his toe open on the edge of the boat. Oops. I hope Grandma’s not upset that I got blood all over her towel. Luckily it wasn’t deep enough for stitches, and also luckily, we take butterfly bandages with us wherever we go.

Well, we had a great week and it looks like there will be MORE sunshine and warm weather this week too! I can hardly believe it.

Pandemic Reading

I picked this up on a whim at the library and was glad I did; on the surface it’s about how we live our lives online, and what that means. What does it mean if someone likes your post? Or doesn’t? But deeper than that, it’s about systemic barriers for women of colour and trans women in the music industry, white privilege, and how the world tries to pit women against each other. A timely read, that’s for sure.

I picked this up because it was touted as uplifting, but I frankly found it just extremely sad. It’s a memoir written by a man dying of a very strange and debilitating neurological disease, and as he wrote about his childhood, I was reminded of the theory that painful and traumatic childhoods are associated with chronic health issues and illness in adulthood.

That’s it for me this week – August, my god, it’s August – I’m off to enjoy the next few days of summer. Next week…an update on my herb garden! I bet you can’t wait. xo