At the doldrums of my workday, I heard Douglas trooping upstairs and I yelled out: “Is there candy?” The usual reply is “NO” and an eyeroll. (Yes, yes, “usual” suggests that when I’m grumbly and bored some part of my brain thinks candy can be magicked out of thin air.) No response. I stuck my head out to repeat myself cause he might just be ignoring me. He rounded the corner and said “YES”.
When I regained consciousness, he handed me a package with a customs sticker on it that clearly said “candy”. Elizabeth had sent me candy from her Japan dai boken! And a little card with more stickers.
Japanese Candy
There was a small argument about whether we’d open the packages. But calmer minds prevailed.
Banana Kit-Kat has to be the oddest tasting confectionary I’ve ever had. Each nugget has a yellow, nearly waxy coating that smells very, very banana-like. The banana “flavour” overpowers the interior wafers.
At first glance the Hello Kitty candy looks like wax on a bamboo skewer. It turns out to be a strawberry flavoured coating on top of pretzel-like pocky.
So many thanks to Elizabeth for the afternoon surprise.
Heather
Elizabeth and Linda have been in Japan collecting stamps, paper goods, manga, photographs, and various wounds and abrasions that come with travelling in a wheelchair in Japan and eating unfamiliar food.. I’ve been following their adventures in Elizabeth’s blog but hadn’t expected a postcard at all at all. There was, ahem, some undignified squeaks of delight the other day when the postcard was plucked out of the mailbox–Mount Fuji on the front and a note and stickers on the back.
How manga became a subject of interest in our household is a matter of debate. Maybe it’s an offshoot of comics. Maybe it’s a echo of 1990s conversations about anime. Or maybe it’s all Elizabeth’s fault. )
So. For the last couple of months I’ve been looking forward to this weekend. I had several vacation days lined up and we were planning on a jaunt to Toronto to go to TCAF where there’d be mountains and mountains of comics and graphic novels to look at and buy. Instead the closest I got to an interesting graphic experience looked like this.
After a 16-hour stay in the emergency department, I have learned
- If you keep vomiting up your painkillers, a trip to the emerg is probably a good idea.
- Also if you need to pee but can only pass about a tablespoon at a time, a trip to the emerg is also a probably a good idea.
- There’s a lot of waiting even if you’re rocking back and forth in pain.
- Gravol eventually works. Happy bonus: it will put you asleep so you don’t notice the pain.
- Intense lower belly pain could be an ovarian cyst and you will get a pelvic exam. This will be especially surreal if your partner is in the room with you and you know he’s taking mental notes for a comic he’s working on.
- The staff doctor will have second thoughts about the resident’s evaluation and will order blood work. When they say it will take an hour to get the results back, they are being wildly optimistic.
- Eventually the blood work will reveal that your kidneys are in trouble and you need an IV to replace the fluids you’ve been hurling up. It’ll also make it easier to do the CT in the morning too.
- The vein busy nurses prefer to use for an IV hurts more than you’d think.
- A stretcher in the back corridor is a weird place. I didn’t need to learn as much as I did about the cleaning staff. The cleaner who wore his latex gloves into the bathroom, peed, and then came out still wearing the gloves needs a refresher course in personal hygiene. The cleaner who was looking for attention and sympathy from patients on stretchers needs to rethink her job choice.
- There are two CT machines. Your paperwork will not be at the first one you’re wheeled to. Your partner will get semi-lost trying to follow your speeding stretcher to the other CT machine.
- By the time you’re inside the CT machine, you’ll be so tired that you will find the "hold your breath" icons intensely amusing.
- If you’ve been there a long time, especially past a shift change, you may need to make a small fuss to get someone to chase the CT results.
- Kidney stones are incredibly painful.
Heather
We’re back from a short trip to Toronto. Lots of posts to follow I expect. What I brought back
- a revised idea of what hell might look like: a pedestrian’s view of the underside of the Gardiner Expressway in the heavy wind and rain
- a weariness for black clothing: if my pink-almost-mauve jacket didn’t give us up, our conspicuous street-light-obeying must have.
- a slightly strained shoulder. Be warned: if your train leaves from track 13, you’ll have to haul yourself, your purse, your string bag, and your suitcase up a longer-than-you-expect set of stairs. Escalators and rolly-bags are one of the pleasures of modern travel but they lead to a neglect of the key rule: don’t bring it if you can’t carry it yourself.
- a small stack of CDs: Lynn Miles, Shemekia Copeland, Hylozoists, and a collection of Black Appalacian singers
- more books than was wise
More anon.
Back from visiting relatives. Oddly exhausting and much of the trip was a lot less fun than a sweaty concert.
Happy highlights of the visit included
- a trip to Frenchy’s where I scored a couple of t-shirts and a couple of wonderfully ugly work shirts with embroidered logos. (Frenchy’s made the New Yorker last week. Calvin Trillin loves it.) I think Douglas will look quite fetching in Paul’s Plumbing snap front shirt. I’m holding onto the minor hockey tournament t-shirt for myself I think; he can have the Take-One-Down-Hand-It-Around t-shirt
- a dash into Stanfield’s outlet shop where my search for long underwear was wildly successful. He now has all the wooly undershirts he could possibly need. And as an added bonus–even though they were seconds, the arms and legs are the right length. Genuine 100% itchy grey wool Windsor Wear remains elusive.
- a jaunt out Tatamagouche way to the Lismore Sheep Farm yielded some beautiful wooden needles, a drop spindle, and wool that should make up into some good working mittens. My guess is that it’d also make a good gansey.
Heather
We’re back to sitting around but it’s been busier than usual with short trips hither and yon.
In yon, there was much walking which resulted in a blister in a never-before-blistered place. Interesting sites were seen though no photographs were taken. Good food in surprising places. And pounds and pounds of books and music were hauled back. Let’s see
- Picture Books: Bechdel’s Fun Home, Abel’s Perdita, a stack of Bone, and a book on Japanese baseball cards
- Music: Esther Phillips, three or four sets traditional Chinese music, Nick Cave, Mary Gautier, Finnish music that turns out to sound very much like Cape Breton fiddle tunes
- Nonfiction: Illustrated histories of women in WWII, a history of temperance banners, a book on top-whorl spinning
- Fiction: Morrall’s Natural Flights, McClung’s Zed, a omnibus Jane Bowles, Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, Smith’s first novel Like, Mantel’s Beyond Black
After a short break, we headed out to hither for a family jaunt across the border for some baseball, pie, and decrepit miniature golf.
And now, home again where it’s calm if soggy.
Over the last couple of years several of our relatives have undone our trick of moving a thousand miles west to create psychological space in the family. Somehow half the family has followed us and we now live shortish train rides away from them. And when kids were added to the mix our refusal to travel in December eroded. We still avoid scrambling to be with the extended family on the twenty-fifth but we do First Christmas a week or two before to please the children and the parents. The trip was pleasant enough; the gifts made people happy all round; and the food was excellent.
The kids giggled themselves silly. We suspect that one secretly thinks her father is Santa and not just her Santa but everyone’s Santa. The other is still very worried about the definition of “good” but is very clear that Santa only brings toys and never brings socks or underwear.
We’ve passed the milestone of First Christmas. And now we’re into the slightly less mad rush to fill the house up with good food and drink, clean away the year’s accumulated grunge, and enjoy the passage of time in each other’s company. An entirely secular and private time.
Twenty minutes after the train pulled out, I began searching for my keys. Jeans pockets. Jacket pockets. Bag compartments. Jeans, jacket , bag. Jeans, jacket, bag. A couple more times through the cycle and I was sure I had lost my keys somewhere at our relatives’ apartment. The rest of the way home I obsessed. And repeatedly ran through a litany of things I’ve lost in my lifetime: twenty dollars, a jacket, and now my keys. Losing the keys was surprising; but the freaked-out way I kept repeating “twenty dollars, a jacket, and now my keys” was startling. Just as the litany started to slow down, the phone rang. The keys were found on a closet floor and would be mailed. Each day since getting the keys back, I’ve remembered another thing that I’ve lost: a watch, a pin, a scarf. That makes it twenty dollars, a jacket, a watch, a pin, and a scarf.
