All I want is poutine.

There's just something about going out of town.  In a few days, we'll be going to Ontario for a wedding and all I can think about is chip wagon poutine.  For my non-Canadian friends, that's fresh french fries with cheese curds and brown gravy....... MMMMMMM.  If you haven't tried them don't knock em', they're awesome.  


My family always had a bad habit of planning vacations around food.  Before we'd even get to our destination we'd have a plan.  "When we get in, let's go to that restaurant on the hill that serves popovers." "No, I want to go to the Lobster Boil"  Or, "Hey, do you think we could go to Papillons when we go downtown?"  "OK, but for dinner can we have California Dreamin?"  


Now, when I think of destinations I associate them with food.  When I go home I want Kruse and Muers, Olga's, Mongolian BBQ, Ram's Horn or authentic Polish food.  When I go to the east coast, I long for crab cakes, but avoid the Chinese food.  Even when it comes to places like Disney World, all I can think of is the Japanese restaurant in Epcot.  I'm quite certain it's a disease really.

In pictures

I spent a few hours this weekend reviewing and organizing old pictures.  For some reason though, it feels strangely different.  It's been years since I've taken a roll of film in to be developed.  I had a stack of old negatives and now I felt impelled to throw them away.  I thought...."will I ever need these?"

All those pictures, it's really amazing.  People.  Places.  Memories.  From one picture I can remember the shoes I wore with an outfit and why, or where we ate for dinner that night, and none of it is in the picture.  But without that little glimpse of the past, I never would have remembered any of it.  I guess that's what they mean by a picture is worth a thousand words.

How do we get from point A to point Q?

One day, as a family, we were driving home from a dinner out.  My son was about 2 or 3.  He was at a stage when he liked pointing things out to us that he saw.  As we were driving, we passed a billboard for a local hospital that is well known for delivering babies.  Not surprisingly, on the billboard was a baby.  My son pointed it out and said, "Look at the big baby!"  Encouraging him, I said, "Awe, isn't he sweet, he's sleeping."  My husband responded, "Yep, like all babies, all they do is sleep, eat and poop." I followed up with the fact that we all did and so did our cat.  To which my son replied, "I don't want Taylor to poop."  I temporarily lost my breath I laughed so hard.  Where did that come from?

This information came to you at no extra charge

That's another thing that a teacher said to me that stuck.  I might have been the only one in class that day that laughed, but I found it amusing.  Quite often, this instructor got off course.  It didn't matter to me though, his tangents were always useful bits of info.  But this particular day, he went on about something for about 10 minutes.  Then, he stopped and said, "and this information came to you at no extra charge."  Is it just me, or did you have to be there?

Finding humor in the everyday

I'm sorry if I've laughed at something you've said to me, but I have to say, that people say the darnedest things.  Pretty regularly I laugh at things that people say.  It's the little subtleties of the English language that amuse me.  The unfortunate thing is that usually when I'm laughing, I've twisted something that people have said, or made a pun in my head based on context, but they don't know why I'm laughing.  

As my son is growing up however, the plays on words seem to present themselves more frequently.  It's amazing how children perceive what we say.  In their eyes, everything is very literal.  I used to have terms of endearment that I referred to him with, such as Pumpkin, but I was always met with an "I'm not a pumpkin."  The rest of the world would feel vindicated too.  The first time he ever watched people playing soccer, he said that he wanted to play football.