the little peanut is getting to be fun. i have enough strength to pick her up for short periods of time (to the relief of the queen, since she really likes being carried around. she looks at things now! we're not always sure what she is looking at, but it's something. she seriously ponders it).
parents tend to view their child with favoritism (this deluded behaviour is part of a survival mechanism of the child's, trust me) and we have decided she is the cutest, has lovely long fingers and is abnormally strong. this leads to long discussions about chasing boys away, and whether rugby practice will conflict with piano lessons. it's important that she learns to read music before approaching the guitar from a free, jamming perspective, says the queen. she does love to wave the limbs around though. she pushes the bottle away and raises one arm a lot, sometimes pointing, other times addressing the crowd with her hands in a politician's style ("my people - we are gathered here today on this momentous occasion to mark a point in history...").
speaking of gathered here today, trixie is helping me plan our wedding. yeah, gettin' hitched alberta style! mud wrestling! cowboys! dead meat!
trying to have a small wedding when you're marrying someone of irish catholic background is challenging, but i am being fierce - i will hurt people's feelings by not inviting them if that's what i have to do (only my own friends of course - the queen had to hurt his friends' feelings himself. that's how relationships work). it's difficult, because i don't feel like i have a clear line of "these people are emotionally significant and these people are merely casual acquaintances". so there are emotionally significant folks whom i just don't see often enough and/or haven't known long enough to make the "small wedding" cut. and that sucks, in huge part because i am a people-pleaser and don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. i like telling people they belong. but hey, i guess my wedding isn't the social event of the year and i'm probably sadder than they will be. it helps to check the ego.
some humour - i passed time in the hospital imagining the food preparation guidelines (i almost typed "food perpetration, and it's not all wrong). for example, toast:
1. set oven to lowest setting
2. place slices of bread inside on tray
3. let sit for four hours
or the chicken consommé:
1. start with too much cornstarch
2. add one slice of green onion
3. add water; don't mix
4. take boullion cube of chicken; shave tiny amount in - enough so that you can legally testify you put it in there
5. heat and serve
but i never could figure out what the hell they did to the meat to make it taste so horribly. airplane food and prison food are both better than hospital food. what is this about?
March 21, 2011
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during my internship i worked at a food prep 'factory' that prepared all the food for almost all of the hospitals in ottawa. i made toast one day. a huge assembly line of bread, going through a giant toasting machine, coming out the other side just short of perfectly browned, four at a time... and then it was my job to pack it all into boxes, a hundred or so slices per crate. then it's shipped to the hospital where it's loaded via another assembly line onto patient trays, stacked into heating carts, and slowly, over a period of a few hours, cranked up to 'hot'. hard to get anything other than a hockey puck when that's how it's done... disheartening, isn't it? even more disheartening: the hospital's budget for feeding patients was raised the year i was there to $7 per day, up from $5.50. that's $7 to provide 3 meals, 3 snacks, and any nutritional supplements required. how on earth they can afford anything other than hockey puck toast and water is beyond me. which is not an excuse for the food, which truly is awful in some institutions... but it does put things in perspective...
ReplyDelete- the vixen