TurtleHead

Last year during NaBloPoMo, a lot of the bloggers who had been doing very well were busted during American Thanksgiving. They were travelling and couldn’t get internet access during transit, or their parents’ place didn’t have a computer, or it was just too busy to find time to dash off a few lines.

I’m not proud to say that I was pretty smug about the fact that Canadian Thanksgiving comes in October. We’d already made our big family trip and now I was free to sit at home, in comfort, using my own pretty little computer to blog every day. (I wouldn’t find it out of line if you wanted to slap me around, just a little bit. Smugness, begone!)

Now it’s payback time. We didn’t go down to Southern Ontario to visit our families this past Thanksgiving because my mother and my sisters made the trek up here. That doesn’t happen very often, so we definitely wanted to encourage them to come on up and have a good time. And it really was a great time, plus, having Thanksgiving dinner here had the major bonus of giving me cold turkey sandwiches with stuffing for FIVE DAYS after the fact, which: BLISS.

But. Since my family came up, Sir Monkeypants’ family did not get their usual visit. And since we would like to spend Christmas at home, that means we have to make a quick weekend trip down in November to visit his side of the family.

So I have just realised that I’ll be away for five days in the middle of November with NO INTERNET. Yipes!

Think my in-laws will notice if I slip off to an internet cafe every day for an hour or so? No?

It’s time to strategize. I’m not giving up yet. Is it cheating to post-date your posts?

I’m finding it very hard to shop for my father-in-law and brother-in-law this year for Christmas. We’ll be seeing them both in about two weeks for the last time before the holidays and I need some ideas pronto!

One of my ideas is to get them both a food gift, some sort of (relatively) exotic and special sweet treat. Does anyone know of a (sort of) unique and funky chocolate shop or bakery in the Ottawa area that sells cool treats, that you’d recommend?

I’ve been watching So You Think You Can Dance Canada, of course. And of course, I must blog about it, because it’s a dance show and by definition takes up at least 50% of my waking thoughts. But I realize that there is an even smaller audience for my Canadian dance show commentary than my American dance show commentary, so those of you with actual lives can just skip this post.

Also, warning to FameThrowa, who is like, three weeks behind in her SYTYCDC viewing, there will be spoilers. I drink your milkshake!

(more…)

This morning I had to go to Lee Valley, and when I was getting off the highway exit ramp I noticed that some guy in a small black car was following me CLOSE, REALCLOSE, like, I could basically hear him breathing. I’m not a good driver to begin with, and when someone follows me too closely I get very nervous. I know other people would probably get pissed off and deliberately slow down and make rude gestures, but I always want to just pull over so the person can go around me and harass someone else already, and leave me free to drive the speed limit without feeling any guilt about it.

Anyway, once off the highway there was a traffic light, and it turned out that we both needed to turn right at the light. This particular light has kind of an access ramp that feeds cars turning right so that they only have a “yield,” and don’t need to come to a full stop at the light. But I am not a confident merger — I like to wait until there is a very, very big gap for me to ease the van into. And, I was already nervous from the close follower. So I pulled into the right hand turn lane, but I felt that there wasn’t enough of a gap for me to merge just yet, so I stopped, and waited for a nice big gap.

I know that a more confident driver probably would have been able to just merge already. And that my failure to merge into multiple slots of questionable (in my opinion) size would anger some people.

But man, did the guy behind me in his little black car ever get PISSED OFF. He started honking and honking. He was saying stuff, and years of watching professional sports on television has given me the ability to read lips for any and all swear words, so I understood him perfectly. He was honking and waving and swearing and it really was not helping me feel any more confident about merging, I can tell you.

So I tried to pull forward as far as I could into the small merge lane, and then I waved at him to go around. But instead, he just pulled up as close as he could behind me and kept swearing and such.

It was freaking me out, I have to say.

Eventually the light turned red the other way so I pulled forward. I expected Mr. Frantic to go racing around me in the other, completely clear lane, but NO, he followed right on my tail. Less than a block later I had to turn right again, and SO DID HE.

Then I got really freaked out!

I took the immediate next right into the Lee Valley parking lot, and I really thought he was going to follow me and get out and try to confront me. Like seriously, what do people get out of that? It happened to me once before that some guy who thought I was weaving too much on the road while driving behind him FOLLOWED ME HOME, to MY HOUSE, where I was unloading my CHILDREN in the driveway, to lecture me.

And this kind of behaviour helps them resolve their issues HOW, EXACTLY?

Anyway, Mr. Frantic wound up speeding past me at the Lee Valley entrance, honking AGAIN and giving me the finger to boot. I was pretty happy to see him move along, let me tell you.

So I went into Lee Valley and bought a lovely Christmas gift for my mother-in-law (we are seeing them for the last time before the holidays in a couple of weeks, so I have to shop now). I came out and loaded Little Miss Sunshine into the van and drove off.

I turned out of the Lee Valley parking lot and took my first right to get back on the highway and you know what?

THE SAME GUY WAS BEHIND ME. Right on my tail.

It was like some sort of Quentin Tarantino B-movie horror flick!

I don’t think he was lying in wait for me. I hope not. But man, is that freaky, or is that freaky?

So we went around the block together and came to the exact same light where we had the merging incident and I crawled to a stop so he could go ahead of me into the left-hand-turn lane. Then we turned and he got on the highway going east, whereas I was going west, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

(I think maybe I don’t get enough drama in my day-to-day life. I just wrote a thousand words on a two-minute traffic kerfuffle. Yipes!)

While putting the Captain to bed last night:

Sir Monkeypants: Goodnight, Captain.

Captain Jelly Belly: But wait! My monkey needs to say goodnight too!

Sir Monkeypants: Boys who are already in bed are not supposed to talk.

Captain Jelly Belly: That’s just because they don’t have the POWER OF THE FORCE like Obiwan Kenobi.

He’s a force, alright.