Tuesday, April 26, 2011

A month of travel

In the Wit Hotel in Chicago. Lovely little place, they gave me cookies as a welcome present. I was excited - until I found out they were orange flavored. Seriously. Who gives orange flavoured cookies??! I ate them anyway.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

New Rule: please let me know when your birthday is, because I have no intention to remember by myself

As we do every year, a group of us volunteered to participate in Hands on New York Cares Day last weekend. In the spring time, we mostly end up cleaning parks. In the autumn, it's usually painting schools. So this April we were asigned to a little waterfront park in Queens, where we were directed to remove unwanted debris from the coastal water-edge.

We were each given a pair of pickers, and had to poke and prod between the large rocks to pull out pieces of plastic and litter. Doing this every year is always a great lesson for me on the horrors of our plastic generation. But this time, we were otherwise preoccupied with other horrors. What with the recent news reports about the Long Island serial killer, everyone was slightly nervous about reaching their pickers between the rocks, only to discover the remains of a human body. But of course, this didn't transpire in the end (luckily). Instead, the events took a far more pleasant course, with our team wrapping up work early on account of the rain, and heading over instead to the nearby pub.

A few drinks into the afternoon, Lahsiv suddenly announced, "so guys, what should we do about my birthday next week?". We all looked at him in disbelief. How could none of us have known it was his birthday coming up?
"There's no way it's your birthday, man," someone said.
"Isnt your birthday in September?" I asked.
"Are you trying to just get free presents out of us?" someone else demanded.
"Guys!! It's my birthday next week!" Lahsiv launghed at our ridicule.
Not the most supportive of friends, I suppose you could say.

Finally, we checked it on facebook (the wikipedia of personal life), and realised that he had indeed been telling the truth. And so Delta and I decided to throw an impromptu party at our home yesterday, in honour of the ever mistrusted Lahsiv. I even decided to bake a cake (using case mix), but miscalculated the proportion of batter to pan, and we ended up with two cakes instead.

But a party's a party, whatever it's origin, and however many the cakes.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

A sedentary month

The last few weeks of our lives have been somewhat circulating around Delta's knee. Of course Delta himself, of the busted knee, hasn't been circulating around anything. He's been pretty much restricted to the five steps between the couch and the bathroom.

Although Delta's own frustration at his situation is starkly apparent, Queen Jaffa and I for our part have both adjusted our lives to this new situation with remarkable ease. Having lost my close biking/hiking compatriot, I relishingly embraced the more sedentary life snuggled with Delta on the couch. We doubled our netflix queue, bought a bunch of microwave popcord, and prepped for a month of catching up on all the movies we'd ever talked about. Queen Jaffa, for her part, warmly embraced having a napping buddy to share the couch with all day.

But if all goes well, Family McDelta's life of sloth will shortly be coming to a close. Delta finally had his surgery last week, and his knee has been steadily (if more slowly than he'd like) improving each day. The day is fast approaching when we will have run out of excuses. When once more, we'll pick up our backpacks and head out into the woods.

But until that day is upon us, until we are compelled by a driving force outside of our control, you'll find us quite warm and comfortable with our posteriors parked comfortably on the couch.