Birthday, Visit, No Recipe

I'm lazy on the recipe front. In fact, I could almost say that it has prevented me from posting. Not that I haven't been cooking, because, as an unemployed one, I cook, I just don't feel like writing out a recipe.

I don't believe that I have ever used four commas in a sentence that short.

My sister was here, so that prevented posting because we were shopping all the time, except for when we were drinking.

The Big One turned seven on the long weekend just past, and that took much orchestrating and arranging, things I hate to do. We held a birthday party for her with little school friends, and that was a tiny bit of a fiasco but not too bad. I had to rush, because I took my sister to Pearson Airport for 11:30a.m., picked up stuff for the party from a grocery store and while there realized that I could buy neither cake nor ice cream because one of Big One's little friends has a severe nut allergy. While I know that an epi-pen works really well and I certainly know how to dial 911, I just wasn't interested in the kind of hassle all of that would cause. Thus, I arrived home at 1:00, made a chocolate cake (for which I am not giving you the recipe), cleaned the house up somewhat, iced the cake and then got my sister-in-law to drive me up to the school as I was running late. Gathered together the seven little girls (for the seven years of life that Big One has enjoyed) and walked down the hill, 1.2km to our house.

You'd have thought I'd asked them to roll the rock uphill forever, a la Sisophys, rather than just walk down a hill to the house. The wailing! The gnashing of baby teeth! and Big One striding along as though nothing was going on behind her (she led, I stayed at the back with the stragglers).

Little girls complain a lot, little girls run and scream a lot, and little girls eat a lot. I could have just stood at the kitchen door and thrown food at them, rather than prepare their little sandwiches and give them plates and the like. They ate: 14 sandwiches, two bags of potato chips, a bag of baby carrots, a melon, grapes, three litres of juice, and almost the entire cake except for two skinny pieces for Hub and I (and don't think they didn't ask if they could have that too). It was a bit appalling.

Luckily, many of their parents came to get them just a tiny bit early, so we were quit of them quickly. Big One was overwhelmed, and next year it's not eight little girls, just four.

Sunday we did it all again with family this time, and Big One was again overwhelmed but calmer and knew that she could escape without admonishments about rudeness. She held it together as long as she could, and opened presents and let everyone stare at her while she blew out the candles on the cake, but then she'd had enough. For a young girl she has a remarkable amount of poise and can hold it together pretty well, even when she's really done with all of the fanfare.

We're almost back to regular life, except that on Friday I'm heading to Winnipeg for the CSC national conference to fulfill my role as Inorganic Pariah. Should be lots of fun, just can't wait to see my PhD supervisor and ask him why on earth he couldn't just send a "Sorry to hear that" note about my job situation. I'm not asking for pity, just acknowledgement of existence. Also cannot wait to meet up with several other "friends" who've ignored my emails, even when I wasn't talking about anything except chemistry-related topics. It will be so exciting, I can hardly wait. I've never really been a pariah before, at least not a professional one, so really this should be an awesome experience that I can add to my list. I'm really looking forward to it.

And then after I'm done with that, I can hang out with BF1 and family members, and drop the whole pariah gig. Thing is, I actually don't mind that I'm not faculty any more. I don't miss the work and I don't miss the atmosphere all that much....if I have to go back to work I'd rather be in an academic setting, but that's just because I'm difficult to work with and it's better to be in a place where everyone else is difficult too.