The Not So Great Banana Thief

Dispatches from a kinda awesome weekend at 19 George:

(1) Recently we decided to part with one of our two vehicles. We've only had it for a short while, bought it in haste and weren't overly attached. R is home from work most days by 1pm and so if I have any distant errands to run I can plan for them then. We're pretty proud of ourselves for making such a responsible parent decision given how much this will save us in insurance over the next year.

Also, I like being without a car. If I have a car I will take it to places that I could walk to. Not so much from laziness as from a chronic and all-encompassing lateness. Then I feel silly and guilty and unorganized - getting in a car to rush to the store (three blocks away) or the bank (two blocks away). Yesterday R made the car all shiny and posted it on Kijiji and today the viewings begin!

(2) I've started to fill our super little deep freezer with yummy foods for the first week or so after Frankie arrives - lasagna and chili and pizza. Today I'm going to attempt banana chocolate chip muffins if I can keep the test babies from trying to run away with my saran-wrapped frozen bananas. So bad of them but also kind of funny.

(3) Finally finished the sixth of six Star Wars movies and moved onto Indianna Jones (which I also haven't seen). I feel like a communist bloc exchange student visiting 1980s North America. No big surprise but the first three Star Wars (Episodes 4-6) were way better than the second three (Episodes 1-3). I'm trying not to read too much into the space hexalogy but if popular culture influences our values and if the first three were more complex (as in not 90 minutes of battles and computer generated images and had some dialogue and character development) what does this mean for the generation growing up with just these types of movies. I'm so old.

Also, what happened to the Ewoks? If any peripheral character warranted being carried over it was this guy (furry and big eyes and in a basket - hello cute)

(4) The May issue of The Turnip has been delivered! We've been on a bit of a Turnip hiatus - part post-Christmas exhaustion and part not wanting to deliver 578 papers in February. But it's back and with a website: www.theturnip.net. R crafted this site (on top of his million other things to do) and I am beaming with proudness - it is as functional as it is beautiful. Included in this latest edition are plans for the first Great Northend Community Garage Sale (in the tradition of the Great Glebe Garage Sale but unfortunately with fewer rich people's things). Very exciting.

(5) We're making some progress on the test baby discipline project. Last night test baby two only scratched at the bedroom door once. This is a big improvement from the once every two hours we've been enduring for the last month or so. No matter how many times I try to explain to him that we don't sleep all day and that we don't sleep in two hour increments he doesn't seem to understand. I am returning his English for Cats CDs. He thinks if he's up we should be up. And by up he means playing with him or petting him or feeding him unless we want him to eat our hair which he does when we try to ignore him and go back to sleep. We were determined to break his awful scratching habit for the sake of the paint on the doors and pre-Frankie since I doubt they'll try to coordinate their sleeping schedules.

(6) Our backyard is starting to look early-spring lush. Aces. Last year at this time it was all just sadness - grass that was barely there, dog poo every second step and piles of dirt passing for flower beds. We invested in two bags of Eco Turf grass seed, cleaned up after the previous owners and their pooch and added some order to the foliage. I was thinking about turning one of the remaining no grass zones into another flower bed but decided instead that I'll try one more bag of grass seed to see if that does the trick. We've got three flower beds now and this might not be the easiest summer to tend to a fourth :)