33 and a Third

It was my dad’s 82nd birthday last weekend, so we headed down to Thorold for a visit. I don’t think my dad really cares about his birthday, but it’s a good excuse for a visit.

He says he never expected to live this long. His parents didn’t make it to their 70’s. I always thought my side of the family wasn’t long lived, but since hooking up with family in Australia and Brazil, I found that wasn’t true. Life’s getting a little difficult for him. He has to deal with various health problems, the worst being his loss of memory. It upsets him greatly that he’s forgotten the names of most of his family and friends. A comment he made is circulating around my extended family that perfectly describes his frustration. Sounds better in Italian, but it’s basically: “It sucks going from being a lion to being a lamb.”

We’re all happy the weather has gotten warm, and he can spend his time outside. He’s such an outdoors man!

On to a completely different subject…

Michael has received offers to attend all 3 universities he applied to. He heard from Queens first, months ago. He even got a $1,500 scholarship! He was quite happy as Queens was his 2nd choice.

A few weeks ago, he received an email that he was accepted from Waterloo. A few days later, a phone call where they said they hoped he would consider attending their university. Finally, we got the offer of admission in a way cool package. It screams “You’re In!” How exciting to see that in the mail! Too bad, though, it wasn’t Michael’s top choice. He got a $1,000 scholarship from them.

Next day, he got a lovely hand-written note from Queens – “Oh, please come”!!

And of course, last, like I expected it would be, was the admission for University of Toronto, where he was hoping to go. No scholarship. No phone call. No hand written note. Of course not, arrogant buggers.

I hate arrogance, yet… I love UofT. I loved the scale of it (huge!), I loved huge amount of choices for classes, I loved the feel, I loved the buildings. Well, most of them. His grandfather went there, his father, mother and step-father went there. Lots of the people his parents hang out with went there (and some are still there). You might think I convinced him to go, but I didn’t. I mentioned a few pros and cons, and he made up his mind that it was the place for him. I think he’ll really enjoy downtown life. He wants to get into residence at UC.

His offers remind me of mine a little…

I got accepted at my home town university, Brock. I got a $500 scholarship from them, which I never told my father about! I got accepted at McMaster, and got a nice phone call, too. But of course, nothing but an offer from UofT.

I’m very excited for him. He’s entering computer science, but he’s been thinking of English, and History. He’s going to see how things go. Woo hoo!

What a great weekend we had. Fantastic weather. Summer must be here, even unofficially, if I’ve put the sky chair up! Here’s the view looking up, while sitting in the chair.

Reid took Ronnie tobogganing one weekend at our local hill, just a walk away. Reid took tons of pictures, which was great when you want to capture wipe outs:

Smiles all the way down. But these are my favourite, particularly the last one:

Cilantro (fresh coriander) is evil. It should be wiped off the face of the earth. Horrid stuff, I can’t understand why anyone on the planet would want to actually ingest the stuff.

I first came across it eating at a Thai restaurant. Although I had eaten Thai food before, I couldn’t believe the horrible taste that particular day. I couldn’t eat it, and soon discovered it was due to some chopped up green stuff. Even the tiniest, most minute piece produced such a vile response. It doesn’t really have a taste to me. I kind of feel it in my sinuses — there’s an immediate reaction my body says: “get it out, get it out, get it out!!” I couldn’t believe it when my husband could eat it. I was very confused.

A few years later, I discovered my brother hates it as much as I do. Although he’s been telling me lately that as he gets older, he can actually tolerate it a little better. It’s still horrible, but I don’t think he has to spit it out any more. A few months ago, I was in a grocery store with my parents. I found some of the evil stuff and took a single leaf. I gave each of my parents a bit of the leaf and asked them to chew it. My mother’s face screwed up in horror, and my father had no reaction. OK, so we get it from my mother’s side of the family.

I keep running across things on the internet that say.. some people don’t like cilantro, but they should learn to like it. It’s so pleasant, they really should stick with it. Well, excuse me. I don’t think so. Not now, not ever. It’s the most vile, most disgusting stuff on the planet. Eradicate it!!

Want to help in my endeavour? Join the “I hate cilantro” community: http://www.ihatecilantro.com/

Well, it’s MOSTLY done. We still have some unpacking to do, and I believe it’ll take us quite a long time to get everything back to where it belongs. But Reid’s been back in the basement for a while now and most of our shelving is back up. What takes a particularly long time is sorting through things and deciding where they go. Plus, that’s mostly Reid’s job now. My job seems to be to badger him about it, poor fellow.

Putting all the IKEA furniture together was fun (usually). The desk was a lot simpler to put together than I thought. But the couple of wall shelves that Reid wanted were the worst (trying to get therm to be even was next to impossible). We’ve been waiting a month now for one particular type of shelving to come back into stock. It’ll be what all our paperbacks go into, so they’ll be in boxes for a while yet.

Did I ever mention how much I love my cordless drill? I got it for Christmas. My brother has a similar one, and he mentioned how much he liked his, so I wanted the same one. It’s a little newer model, and heavier than his I think (unfortunately), but it’s a way cool red colour! It’s the Sears brand (Master Craft).