Jan not only WASHED MY DISHES – and every freaking dish in the house was dirty, folks – she DROVE ME TO THE FERRY with kinder in tow. How can I not love in-common-laws like that? She’s a goddess among women!
Got a great picture of Katie taking a picture from the ferry but I don’t have the software to get it onto the computer at my parents so that will be for later. My 92 year old granny has a convection oven and BAKED MY FAVOURITE chocolate cake with butter icing (Homer voice, mmmm butter icing) and I made her a cup of tea and we all had pizza and various other foodicles for lunch. I’ve decided I don’t want to go to the Egypt exhibit, the notion of standing for hours in a line is not something I can grok currently, so I watched Howard Keel and Katherine Grayson in Kiss Me Kate instead. (Kate’s idea, she likes Grayson and really likes the movie – actually she’s a bit of a fifties musical fan – blood will tell dahlings.) I get a strange thrill every time I see Bob Fosse dancing in that movie. He could sing, he could dance, and man could he choreograph. Too bad he was such a little sh*t, but that’s the artistic temperament for you. Not much else has happened today, saw my brother briefly and watched Katie snap him while he snoozed in the dreaded Coils of Morpheus (the sun room La-Z-Boy), bought three kinds of underwear (Sponge Bob boxers for Kate, no name black boxers for me, and these cotton briefs that Katie calls ‘granny panties’ for me (Kate wears thongs, which for a variety of reasons I am too polite to describe in detail wouldn’t uh work for me)) as well as boys jeans for her. I sorted through some of my parents’ castoffs and collected two of my favourite books from my childhood/adolescence (being Bob Hope’s severely ghostwritten and really funny autobiography Have Tux Will Travel and The Marx Brothers at the Movies, which has long excerpts from the scripts, which after almost 70 years are still absolutely brilliant, anarchic, witty and surreal.) I could have had a brown suede coat and a spoiled mustard coloured coat but after almost a decade in Vancouver I’ve declared war on any coat that doesn’t have a functioning hood. I did yoink the moccasins, I’ve had a yen for such footgear for a while and they fit perfectly. My mother has just finished assembling her mother’s family stories with tons and tons of pics, and I bound some of them on the comb binding machine while parts of Kiss Me Kate (ie dialogue) were on that I didn’t enjoy so much. I LOVE James Whitmore’s suit in that movie, I’d kill for a suit and hat like that even if it made me look ludicrous. Katie loves Anne Millers’ pink Bianca costume in Kiss me Kate – it’s this wispy busty little number. Keith announced that he wants to learn tap dancing. I told him to practice some more on the mandolin and we’d discuss it. Actually I can see him Irish Step Dancing instead, which is one of the ancestors of tap. He says he’s a lot more coordinated than he used to be, which is very true, but we’re already paying for one set of lessons.
I think that this morning on the ferry was the first time in about ten years I’ve gotten onto a ferry without spending any money. Amazing. Picture shown is something I pulled at random off my mother’s hard drive.
My mother is thrilled that I did the comb binding on the three family books already and is getting the rest of them ready to finish so I’ll be off now. I feel so happy and so relaxed that I just know it won’t last.
