June 27th

Spot the creep.


Pitting cherries with the OXO Good Grips cherry pitter I got last year and never used.




Freeze lemonade in ice cube trays & blend with more lemonade, it’s the lemonade-iest.

Sym graduated from elementary school this week. I know some people think elementary school graduations are stupid but like, who gives a shit? When I finished elementary school there wasn’t a ceremony (that I can recall, it was about fifty billion years ago though) but my school only went to grade five, and there was a grade eight graduation dinner & dance when I finished middle school. At the dinner me & the other girls in choir sang “The Rose” and “I’ll Remember You” by Skid Row (IT WAS 1990 OKAY) backed by a rock band called BAD HABITS that consisted of cool guys from the high school.

I STILL KNOW ALL THE WORDS.

There was also an awards ceremony the next week, and the day of the ceremony my mom forced me to wear an outfit I hated (which she actually bought for me to wear the the dance but I secretly “borrowed” a very 1980s formal dress with ruching and a sequin applique at the waist from my older sister’s closet and changed in the gymnasium bathroom haha) because unbeknownst to me, I had won the academic award for having the best grades in the school. Clearly, I peaked too early.

So, back to Sym…the teachers are still on strike but the principal & vice principal held a graduation ceremony on Tuesday at a hotel, which was actually great for me as normally they have them at the school during school hours, so Taylor and I wouldn’t have been able to go. SOME OF US HAVE JOBS, OK. It was so funny seeing all of her little friends dressed up with their hair done looking like Pretty Little Liars: The Tween Years or something. The vice principal called all the kids to get their certificates and mispronounced Sym’s last name, which kind if annoyed me. There were only like, 70 kids in her grade, you’d think the vice principal could learn how to say their names??

Gwen’s big thing this week is climbing up on stuff and then asking* to be lifted down, and if you don’t lift her down in timely fashion OR EVEN IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO, she will probably fall off and yell. She twirls around on the end table until she’s dizzy, she backs away from you towards the edge when you try to lift her off, she runs on the top of the L-shaped benches and takes the corner too quickly, she clambers from the dining room chairs to the the dining table itself**… she’s out of control! So far she hasn’t seriously hurt herself, and she’ll learn to not fall off things eventually. I hope. Anyway, what can I do, just NOT have furniture in the house? Seems impractical.

Taylor’s favourite pie is cherry pie, so when I found really nice cherries on sale for shockingly cheap I decided to try my hand at making one. Since I’m a scatterbrained idiot it was kind of a disaster, OF COURSE. I didn’t want to make my own crust (lazy) so I was going to use a frozen one I had. Since cherry pie is supposed to be a double-crust pie and I only had one crust, I originally planned to make a mini pie using the mini pie pan I bought a few weeks ago, as a single full crust would be enough to make a mini double crust (still following this?). Then I realized that I had the exact amount of cherries that the recipe I’d chosen called for, so I decided to make a full-sized pie, forgetting that I only had one crust. I didn’t remember until I’d already pitted all the cherries and mixed them with the rest of the pie filling ingredients, so I was just like OH WHAT THE HECK and decided to go for it. I use my one crust and formed an impression of a lattice using the scraps I trimmed from the edge. Sym called it #pie. Looked weird, tasted great, next time I’ll be less lazy and make my own crust.

In gardening news, the two pathetic hostas that I transplanted the other week are THRIVING! I was out watering the plants with a juice jug the other night (my new garden hose hasn’t come yet, ugh) and the one pathetic hosta that had never grown more than two tiny leaves now has a THIRD leaf, and the other pathetic hosta has sprouted a tiny, stunted flower stem! Exciting times. I planted some more groundcover plants, but I might end up moving them as I’m planning on acquiring some bricks or flagstones from somewhere and making a little path from my patio into the garden. I’d want to put the groundcovers between the stones.

I finally stole I MEAN TRANSPLANTED that lil fern from the front of the house. I had to wedge myself between a chained-up bike and the wall and stand in a horrible spider pit to get it, and there was some contractor was working on something nearby and he was like “WTF IS WITH THIS CHICK.” Then the property manager was hanging around in the backyard for some reason and I had to pretend it was totally normal for me to be carrying around a loose fern with a dirty root ball and a trowel like I wasn’t stealing plants. Anyway. I put it in this little planter outside my front door where there USED to be a fern that was strangled by ivy. Hopefully it lives.

*By “asking” I mean holding her arms out to you and squealing, she doesn’t really talk yet. Sometimes I worry about that, but idk, she understands what we are saying to her and she manages to communicate her wishes by shaking her head no and saying “mah” (mine) to ask for things. Every thing. All the things. She’s kind of like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. Mine? Mine? MINE????

**safety disclaimer: I came back in the room after like ONE SECOND and found her sitting up there, and my phone was right on the kitchen island in front of me. I didn’t leave her unsupervised for an extended amount of time, or leave her on the table while I went to grab my phone, and I only paused to take a picture because she was sitting down on the table, if she’d been standing I wouldn’t have.