We got home last night at half past midnight, exhausted, and fell asleep as soon as the cats were fed and our teeth were brushed.
Let’s back up. The past few days have been a whirlwind—fun, nearly every moment of them, but packed. Thursday, I got up early to clean the house, wash linens, make the guest bed (er, futon), pick up a pork tenderloin and some good balsamic vinegar from Harris Teeter, and prep said tenderloin so it could marinate for the rest of the day. I watched A. for the afternoon, playing outside with him and the family’s Australian Shepherd, feeding him peas, and singing to him while stacking blocks. Every time I finish singing him a song, he claps, grins, and says, “Yay! Yay!” I have no idea how I managed that, but let me tell you, with that reaction, I’m singing all the time now. Sometimes, when I forget the words to “Hush Little Baby” (I can get started, but then I forget what order things are supposed to be given…) or run out of alphabet- or farm-themed songs, I resort to Elton John.
Thursday afternoon, about a half hour after I came home from watching A., Beth and her mom Cheryl drove up and we commenced the requisite hugging-and-squealing phase of the visit, which we followed with a house tour (about thirty seconds is all it takes to see the whole thing) and conversation in the living room. We then started dinner, popping the tenderloin in the oven and starting in on the mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, green beans, and bread. Jesse came home and we poured lemon Italian soda into champagne glasses and got out the tablecloth and had ourselves a nice little dinner. Jesse ran out to the store afterward to grab ice cream, which I’d forgotten earlier, and we had brownie and hot fudge sundaes. We stayed up late playing card games and something called Speed Scrabble (fun, fun, fun).
Friday morning, Jesse left for work early and Beth, Cheryl, and I had a lazy morning at home. We took our time getting up and getting ready, and then we set up a waffle bar for breakfast. Aunt Joannie got me this fabulous waffle maker for Christmas, the kind you flip over to make two waffles at once, and it’s red and shiny and, apparently, it makes The Best Waffles Ever. I took my mom’s suggestion and separated the eggs, beating the whites separately and folding them in at the end, and the waffles were light and fluffy but with perfectly crispy outsides. Yum. We improvised a blueberry-lemon syrup and we whipped cream and served the waffles with strawberries and macadamia nuts. Beth had brought a tea called Lady Grey, and we drank nearly a pot of it as we sat around the table, making and eating our waffles, and talking—so much talking!
Beth and I have known each other our whole lives. Our parents lived next door to one another in Nitro before we were born. Then we showed up, three months apart, and we’ve been friends ever since, even though both our families left West Virginia when we were children, even though we’ve not lived in the same state since we were four. Beth is kind and mild mannered and smart. In college, she majored in chemistry and French, and now she works in a hospital pharmacy, in a place so clean she wears a hairnet and cannot wear any makeup for fear it might flake off and contaminate someone’s IV bag. That fact alone puts her job into the category of Jobs I Will Never Do, but Beth does it because she’s not as vain as I am and has a very lovely complexion anyway.
Beth and her mom had to leave in the afternoon, so we took leftover veggie soup to the church and had lunch with Jesse before they headed out of town. After they left, I did a little copyediting and then went shopping. Because it was Friday and because I had a gift card and because it was warm enough to wear a skirt and flip flops, and that made life oh-so-good. At the mall, I found sales and managed to leave with $10 still on my gift card, and I drove to Ulta to pick up some makeup I was running out of (no hospital pharmacy for me) and I kept the windows down, which made my hair unhappy, but I didn’t care, because it made the rest of me happy and my hair is unhappy so often that its desires cannot be taken too seriously.
And then that evening I nearly forgot that Jamie Oliver’s new show was on, but I remembered in time to see three-fourths of it (so good!) and found the rest of it on Hulu today. (You can watch it there if you didn’t catch it.)
That brings us to yesterday, when we got up early and left for Charlotte to help Joannie move in to her new apartment. It’s in a fantastic part of town with a shopping center across the street that has a Target, a Harris Teeter, a movie theater, just about every kind of restaurant you could want, and dozens of other shops, including one that rents out audio books. Lovely! Mom and I cooked chicken fajitas for dinner and we drove around the area to see what we could see and we cooed at Joannie’s cats and tried to reassure them everything was fine, even though they were not quite sure what was going on. Jesse and I left after eight that night and made a wrong turn, which meant we pulled into our driveway about four hours later, just about cross-eyed with fatigue. And Oliver and Gracie were waiting at the door, meowing for dinner, which, they made clear to us, was far too late for their liking.
2 Comments
A store that rents audio books sounds fantastic! Hopefully they have a larger selection than the library.
And by the way, I love that pizza counts as two breads. Whyever would you need to bread in the first place?
Yes, definitely. Our library has audio books (I still want to call them “books on tape”), but not a great selection. And they’re fairly expensive at B&N.
I know–crazy, right? I remember when I taught school, I ate lunch with the kids every day (no lunchroom monitors at the school) and there were some meals the kids got that made me lose my appetite. I remember this one dish, some kind of meat in gravy over noodles. The whole thing was gray, and it literally stunk. Some kids would just refuse to eat it, skipping lunch altogether. If the people in charge of school lunches had to actually eat said lunches, they’d probably change in a heartbeat.