So my parents have left on their annual migration south to Florida, where they will bask in the sun, warm weather and lower prices for the next two months. Bastards. Of course, before they went, I headed up to their house to wring one more free meal from them (and to pick up another pail of wine. That’s right – I said pail. It’s an 18L cask of wine! How can you go wrong with enough wine to keep you drunk for a MONTH?).
I was also there to get the lowdown on turning the heat on/off, as well as the water, since all of us kids plan to use their house while they’re away. My sister has started calling my parents’ house “The Cottage” and I suspect that we’re going to have to work out a visiting schedule, so we can all manage to get quality Cottage-ing time in, before my parents get back! 
Oh yes, we are a family with a plan.
Since all of us kids live far enough away, my parents contracted their neighbours to look after the house while they’re away. As a sort of Thank You, my parents had the neighbours over for dinner on Saturday, while I was visiting. This worked out well for me, because it meant that Mom made a “guest meal”, which would have been severely downgraded, had it just been me for dinner. It was an AMAZING meal of roast beef, roasted potatoes, garlic broccoli, herbed baby carrots, Yorkshire pudding and gravy… YUM! Trust me, I loaded up with ALL the leftovers before I went home. Hey, it’s not like my parents were going to eat it – they were leaving at 4am the next morning! I was doing them a favour! And, there are starving children in Africa, dammit. Taking the leftovers instead of green binning them makes me a better person. So there.
Of course, since it was my parents’ house and no one had to drive anywhere, my father got into the wine. Okay, FINE, so did I, but it’s only because I didn’t want him to have to drink alone. All in all, I think the three of us (one of the neighbours joined in, but drank significantly less – she was able to walk a straight line home, while I was barely able to wobble the 10 feet into bed) drank something like 4 or 5 bottles of wine. PLUS Irish coffees (which, in the case of my father’s coffee, is really more like whiskey in a mug with coffee for flavouring). Suffice it to say that my father and I were… happy. Unfortunately for their poor neighbour, when I get “happy”, I get chatty, and I think I completely rambled without a break for a good hour or so. Ack! Note to self – less wine next time, more coffee. 
Anyway, of course my father had had a lot to drink, and after hearing a story from the neighbours about their daughters leaving the kitchen a mess after a night home alone, he took it upon himself to see that they didn’t do it again on Saturday. How, you ask? He heaved his drunk ass off his chair, grabbed the phone and called the neighbours’ house. The poor girl that answered was subjected to my father, asking her how many bathrooms their house had, and if there was enough toilet paper to go around if he brought over the whole dinner party, plus 30 or so people from the pub behind their house. Apparently, the girls took him seriously (or semi-seriously, at least), because I was talking to their Mom, and she said that when she got home the kitchen was clean, and one of the girls was disappointed that they hadn’t brought the party home with them! Yeesh! Apparently, according to my Mom and sister, our father used to do this to us, in an effort to have us clean the house, but I seem to have blocked the incidents from my memory.
The next day, we all trooped out to Gramma’s to take her out to lunch before my parents’ migration. Surprise of surprises, my wee brother even came! I think it’s likely that he did so just for the free ride (I’d driven him from the city to his friends’ place on the way to my parents’ house, and then picked him up in the morning to go out to Gramma’s. If he hadn’t come with me, he wouldn’t have gotten a drive back straight to his door, and would have had to take the bus back into the city), but what the hell. At least we got to see him, out in public and hungover. But I digress. While waiting to go for lunch in Gramma’s 1,000-degree apartment, Dad & wee bro & I all sat in her TV room and admired her new television. Apparently, she thought that her old TV (all 40” of it) wasn’t doing the job, so she sent her tech-mad son on a mission to find her a new one. What he found her was a 50-something inch, flat-screen, High Definition TV (it’s high-def, but she doesn’t get any HD channels, so everything just looks slightly smudged to me). I don’t even want to THINK about how much it cost.
Anyway, Gramma, my Mom and my Dad are all golf freaks. I don’t get it, myself. I come from a long line of golfers, on both sides, and I have NO idea how to play the game. I’ve played it exactly once, and honestly, I don’t see the attraction. But what puzzles me most is that people WATCH this on TV. People will spend all day sitting on the couch, watching grown adults chase a little white ball around the lawn with a metal stick. Boring doesn’t even begin to cover it. Unfortunately, whenever the three of them are together, and if there’s a golf game on (or, heaven forbid, the golf CHANNEL), we are all forced to watch the golf. I have NEVER enjoyed this, and will usually do just about ANYTHING else. Until Sunday. On Sunday, I discovered why people watch golf, and his name is Johan Edfors. GOOD FLURGEN. I damn near drooled. At one point, I guess he hit WAY into the rough (like, off the course) and ended up in among the petunias. He was all smiley about it and man… I’ll need a bib if I go on. Oh Gods. I think I’m becoming a golf fan. Ack! Does that mean I have to wear plaid, pearls and talk through my teeth?
Okay, I know that I promised pictures from New Year’s Eve, but there was a hold up in getting them. In all honesty, I’m not sure that I’m allowed to put even these two up (the ninja photographer is an actual photographer, as in he gets paid. I don’t know if these photos are copyrighted or what), so enjoy them while you can. Copyright or not, they’ll likely be gone in a week.
Some examples of the “ninja photography”. Remember, I HATE having my photo taken, and when the second photo was taken, I thought the photographer was just playing with his camera – I didn’t know he was shooting. Jerkstore.
HELLOO!! LOOKING FOR THE MISSING PHOTOS? TOO SLOW, TORTOISE! Sorry, I took them down, because, like I said, I’m not so sure they should have been posted in the first place. If you really, really want to see them, leave a comment or e-mail me or something, and I’ll send them to you. Hey man, you snooze, you lose! ;-P
