Birthday

Another year older.  But I prefer to think of it as another year better....  Although, the wonderful gifts I received remind me that I'm also another year even less mature than the last - and proud of it!

It's tradition to do family supper for birthdays but since I am already too busy during the week to even write this post (but I'm doing it anyway), we gathered Sunday night to celebrate.

Reason #847 that my Seester is awesome:

If you were a fan of Arrested Development, you already know that Annyong is Korean for "hello."  If you missed the "You had me at hello" reference, to you I say, "Seriously, you've never seen Jerry Maguire???" (Sidebar:  apparently, the clerk at the t-shirt place had never heard of either as the shirt my sister gave her came back reading "You had me at annoying." That shirt has now been relegated to pyjamas or for wearing on Dadaism Tuesdays.)

With a birthday celebrated two days in advance, there was, of course, debate whether or not presents would be given or kept until the actual day.

Mum:  Well, I already gave her one so...
Dad: Oooh, can I give her mine today?
Mum:  Yours?  It's from both of us...
Dad:  Yeah, but I bought it.
                At this point in the conversation, Mother gives Father an incredible death glare that translates as "shut up or she'll figure out what it is!"

Curiosity piqued!  Father picked out my gift? Whatever could it be?  I certainly didn't think it would be this:

HAPPY CAMPER!

If you read this weblog regularly, you've likely figured out I'm a *bit* of a hockey fan.  A sweater was needed, wanted and is oh so appreciated... I've always had a soft spot for goalies.  Also, while the smallest size they had, it's big on me and, wearing it, I feel about the same size as I was when Father took me to my first game oh so many years ago.  The feeling has a sweet nostalgia to it that reminds me why I treasure my family and am thankful for moments, both small and large.

Dad:  I almost got you a Leafs jersey...

Me:  That would've been pretty cool, too.

Dad: ...but I couldn't think of a player in Toronto that anyone's heard of.

I almost fell off my chair laughing.  Sad, but true.  I love Boston for the feel-good times and old-time's sake, and Toronto because they keep me humble. Perpetually.

Great birthday.  Hope you had a great un-birthday (or birthday, as the case may be!)

The Link doesn't dissolve with Marriage and Children

My sister and I have always been able to communicate entire thought waves with very few or even a single word.  Kinda like zipping a file before sending an email. But then she got married and had a baby and I started to wonder if we were losing our mojo... The other day, a rapid-fire conversation took place.


Seester:  That commercial always reminds me of that dojo.... (snaps fingers in attempt to remember)
Me:  Cobra-Kai.
Seester:  YES! See, I love that I can just say 'dojo' and you know exactly what I'm talking about...
Me:  What other dojo could you possibly mean?  
Seester:  Mmm.  True.


Mum:  *...*  What just happened?
Bro:  I have no idea...


Just because she's married doesn't mean I don't *get* her anymore and vice versa.  Sisterhood; such a wonderful and strange phenomenon...

PS.  She was referring to the evil instructor and his dojo in The Karate Kid.  The classic one.  Pat Morita, not Jackie Chan.  I still love Jackie Chan but he's not as easily incorporated into our familial nostalgia...

Sweet Nostalgia; Random Connections

On the street where I grew up, like the streets where everyone else grew up, you could mark seasons by the sounds.  Summer brought the whir of lawnmowers, the subsequent clank when one mower would pick up a rock and send it shooting across the sidewalk, the clickety-tap of neon-coloured beads on bicycle tires,  or engines revving as teenagers took to drag-racing down the stretch after curfew.  In winter, metal shovels scraping against cement driveways, toboggans dragging on asphalt behind sixty-pound children wrapped in eighty pounds of scarf, and tinny, choking engines trying to turn over.
Regardless of the season, you could hear the kid across the street firing hockey pucks against the garage door.  But the timbre and pitch of the bang would let you know if it were a crisp autumn morning or a balmy spring evening.  It was a constant reminder that it was an ordinary day in an ordinary neighbourhood.  To this day, the sound is comforting and bittersweet.
Tonight, that kid from across the street hoisted the Stanley Cup.   Ordinary day for me.  Extraordinary day for him.
They put residential speed bumps on the stretch, we moved to a crescent, and most people have replaced shovels with snowblowers.  But no matter the season, there's always a kid banging pucks against the garage.

Another friendly family competition...

Candy and cookies and icing - oh my!!

This is what happens when Sister buys gingerbread kits, sends us out for bulk candy, and we have a few hours to visit. Team M, Team H and Team Carly. We're not really competitive but there may have been some idea-defense strategies in place, serious architectural debates and some creative use of fruit leather....

Another afternoon of good clean fun.

Team M:

Note the fruit leather chimney complete with twist-tie smoke....

Team H:

Fruit leather bricks on the path.... Sister was displeased that the kit did NOT contain pieces for a three-dimensional chimney. She promptly stole Dad's chimney and dissected the gingerbread man in order to create the other two sides. (Oooohhhh nOooooo, not the gumdrop buttons!!!)

Team Carly:

A license plate (HOH OHO), taillights and a Chev logo. Inside joke here - the cookies were attached to each other and when I went to separate them, they got a bit crushed. So I made a remark about how I must have been driving. Hence the Chev logo. No winners were declared but I think it's pretty obvious, don't you?? Heehee.

Nostalgia ran amuck this weekend. And in days of yore, when one of the women in our large bunch of matriarchs was making buns, we children were given a chunk of dough in order to make a BunMan. It took us many years to learn that finer details were obscured by the final rise but we tried, time and again, to convey the true essence of our creations. This time, I skipped the raisin face.

Look like anyone you know?

Six of one, a full dozen of the other...

Yesterday morning, I was in a hurry. I still had several little birds to hand-finish as a birthday gift for Sister before family-double-birthday-dinner-out at 5:30 (Father's is Tuesday). I had tried several times to accomplish this apparently simple task several times throughout the week and had been thwarted - yes, thwarted! - repeatedly. I thought I had them well in hand (so to speak) on Thursday night, enlisting borrowed fingers for stuffing when Sister arrives unexpectedly and there was a mad scramble to conceal the evidence and the smug and untrue accusation that I was a Survivor-watcher....

Luckily, yesterday morning, I was blessed with a solid uninterrupted hour during which to finish and package the ornaments. I mused about having a little sister and that she was getting older and that made me even older than that. I gave myself a good hard giggle when a line from The Three Amigos popped into my head: "Sew, very old one. Sew like the wind!" It was followed by Steve Martin doing his birdcall: "Caw! Caw! Lookuphere, lookuphere!" Why is that movie so very funny to me? I imagine it has to do with precious childhood and days when we were small. Sister does the best "Lookuphere" of anyone I know.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I marvelled at the time I now had to take a shower and eat my brain with a couple hours of a mindless computer game I hadn't played in ages. I could've gotten a jump on some other sewing projects for Christmas but I needed a sewing break.

Because if I'm honest, these birds kicked my ass a little bit. They looked simple enough. BUT I did learn and hone the technique for making them with almost every step. Poignant lessons such as: Small curves need short stitch length and anyone who says that a 3/4" strip can yield 1/2" bias tape is lying to you! Use the full inch. Three-quarters yields burnt fingers, blue-streaked air and semi-useless, mangled 3/4" strips of fabric scraps. A vicious horrible lie.

Like low-fat cheese. [Full body shudder complete with blecch face.]

*Pattern for birds with wings can be found on The Purl Bee. The other birds were found in Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts - written, conveniently, by the talented Joelle Hoverson, who owns Purl, where I would like to visit provided I had some money because I KNOW I would not leave there empty-handed, even if she lies viciously about bias tape. (She has a yarn shop, too. Swoon.)

Nostalgia at the dinner table

Sunday supper is a big deal around here. It's a tradition that's been revived in our family and generally ends in apple crisp or pie of some sort. It's the same thing every week and we don't plan to get anything else accomplished between 3 and 9pm - from coffee and getting supper ready to clearing the table and pouring more coffee. Conversation is always a big part. Things slow down while we sit and enjoy each other's company.

My sister loves to flip through my mother's latest arrivals in the catalogue department. The Sears WishBook has already shown it's face and before the school year has begun! Good gravy. Didn't it sneak onto the porch somewhere in late September, early October when I was a kid? Things move faster and we plan farther and farther ahead. I'm aware that perception of the passage of time is skewed by perspective but the world has ramped up its rotation, as well. Instant gratification rules the world. If you disagree, consider Twitter.... Who has time to keep up with technology? ( By the time I mastered "predictive text" on my cellular telephone, it had been replaced with a qwerty keyboard that slides out. Or a touch screen that should almost be called a "touchy" screen. Sometimes one feels they need to split an atom to come down on the right letter.)

And the rules we knew before change. Things we were taught in school as facts are no longer true. Flipping through the catalogue, my sister discovered a ceiling mounted light fixture shaped like the sun with eight planets "and one dwarf planet" surrounding it in their approximate astronomical positions. "Oh," she sighed, "poor little Pluto..." and my childhood heart sighed along with her.

We grew up in a world in a solar system with nine planets. It was a fact. There was even a clever mnemonic to remember them all and their order. My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Kids today - their Very Educated Mothers Just Served Them Nothing!! (They probably grabbed an Easy Mac from the microwave. Their mums might be too busy trying to keep up with the frantic pace of the world that we are grown-ups in.)

There's a t-shirt that I saw somewhere online with a sad little planet-shaped cosmological body on it that reads, "It's okay, Pluto...I'm not a planet, either."

Photo found here.

Kids today won't grow up with the same nostalgic sympathy for Pluto. He'll just be a dog to them. :-(

I had a conversation with my cousin's son a few weeks ago at my aforementioned sister's wedding - another family dinner of sorts... He had a Blackberry in his hands and was deeply engaged in some sort of game. And that's when I broke out the hallmark phrase of relating nostalgia to someone much, much younger. "When I was YOUR age..... we didn't have cell phones. If you were expecting a call, you had to stay home! And there wasn't an easy way to tell if someone called you. None of this caller-ID nonsense...." He looked at me wide-eyed and, since he was clearly enthralled, I continued. "We didn't have remote controls either. I WAS the remote control. We literally TURNED the channel with a little dial. And (the kicker) we only had twelve channels; six of them were snow. " ( I left out the part where I walked to school barefoot eighteen miles uphill both ways....:-)

"Whoa...." he said. He's a sweet kid.

Now we can watch television on the go, downloaded to a cellphone, smaller than an 10-song eight-track cassette, itself holding more music that we could play on a road trip to Grandma's house.

Some things are better than we were kids and I don't miss the black and white Toshiba 6" thick "laptop" that was our first family computer. I don't miss "fixing" VHS cassettes by blowing really hard along the ribbon. I don't miss lugging a carton of tapes and a small fortune in batteries around with my giant walkman. I don't miss the very scratchy, dark pink bandages that left half its glue on your skin (for weeks) while still taking skin with it when it was yanked off your scabby, dirty knee.

But I am really glad that the most important things, like a lazy Sunday family supper, never change.