Summertime, And The Livin's Easy

It has been.....a busy summer.  Some people might in fact say, I have been busy all summer.  Although honestly, starting from the NOTL trip in June I haven't had much time to myself to just boot around the homestead and do things like blogging.  That's a lie, I should make the time.  But I'm le-tired.

So, Summer.  A few weekends after Niagara I went up North to take a week vacation with my mom.  She has been going to Fleming College in Haliburton for several years now.  Usually her best friend goes up with her, but this year her friend had a new puppy that needed the stability of home.  So my mom asked me, and I said YES.  Of course, what I should have said was, I'll join you at the cottage but I'm not taking a course.  I'm kidding/not-kidding on that one.  It was a rough week full of long hours and not much downtime.  Which normally is ok, but not for a week long vacation.  My mom has been taking the Millinery course for several years in a row.  So I skimmed through the calendar for that week in July and landed on Calligraphy.  I would say, it's a craft that slowly slips away if you don't keep it up.  By the end of the week most of the class was fairly sufficient.  Now I would say, I'm almost back to the start.  At any rate, my teacher was this cute tiny little woman who worked as a professional Calligrapher, mostly for the Canadian Government.  I'm not sure if she moved to Ottawa, or ended up there for the proximity.  I wore my Iceland novelty shirt on the first day, and she spent the whole week thinking I had Icelandic routes.  On the last day near the end of the class she came by and quietly asked me if I was from Iceland.  If the blonde hair and blue eyes didn't give it away I'm not sure what did.  I kindly replied no, and let her in on the joke of the shirt that reads "I don't speak Icelandic", and the high number of people who sigh and say "Oh.....alright then" after they ask me what the shirt says.

Mom and I made a point of reconnecting with some family while we were up there.  On my dad's side, his nan had a sister young enough to be her own kid, and thus created two lineages, one missing a generation.  She's the same age as my parents, but she called my great grandma auntie.  If that makes any sense of even matters.  She has a cottage just across the bay from us, and we invited her over for dinner.  We had planned to make burgers or loaf from some of Simona's ground beef, but at the last minute my mom was like, is she vegetarian??  I texted her and yes.  So that was a game changer.  My mom wiped out a cookbook she had brought up.  And we went out and bought ingredients for the most amazing barley salad.  It was blueberry, feta, cucumber, and barley.  It was a masterpiece really.  And then with a few other sides we pulled together a pretty phenom vegetarian meal.  She was telling us about her son is running a charitable organization in Peterborough called Food Not Bombs, that collects leftover produce from farms or grocery stores and once a week hosts a huge free meal downtown.  I just love it.  So that was great.  And then we also arranged to meet with my cousin who also has a cottage across the way and we haven't seen in aaa-aaa-aaaages.  She also arranged for my other cousin in the family to bring her three babes.  One little young man and two 9mos old twins.  One of the twins sat on my lap and didn't stir the entire hour.  It was really great.  We have kind of kept in touch on facebook, but she said we really reconnected when I reached out to donate to her girl's hockey team for the Superbowl Squares game.  I recounted how it was a horrible scoring game, and how we ran our own game of Squares.  And being a silly dolt I gave the dogs the 0,0 and 9,9 square and with an unbelievably low scoring game, the dogs ended up winning the most quarters.

It was a really special week.  And I think that we have really rekindled some special family relationships.  I look forward to seeing them again soon.

I wanted to write this up, but I also have memories of a trip to BC to visit Jackie and Chris.  Spoiler alert, I climbed a mountain.

I'll just finish with the final and only byproduct from my week of calligraphy.  Sim asked if I could write out the girls' names for door signs.  I practiced for weeks until I felt good enough to put pen to paper.  And then I picked up a few pages of stickers to glam them up.  I think....they turned out pretty alright.