Funerals for life

Kung Kung's funeral was on Saturday. It's been a very emotional few days and I think I'm feeling a little depressed. I'm getting used to the idea that I'm going to be sad for a while. Today seems pretty bleak. There was all this momentum leading up to the funeral - organizing the program book, figuring out the speech, selecting flowers, figuring out all the arcane Chinese customs (of which, as my mom said, we're doing the "bare minimum" because if you went all crazy juju traditional about it, we'd probably have to take 6 months off of work and bind our feet and prostrate ourselves before a stone statue of Confucius or something), and now that the funeral is over, now that my siblings have scattered, now that we're back home, it's like the real work is beginning. The work of imagining a life without Kung Kung, the work of making sure my Poh Poh is okay.

I have only a scattered series of impressions from the visitation on Friday evening and the service on Saturday. There were some funny moments and there were some truly sorrowful moments. The chapel looked beautiful - so many people sent enormous flower displays and the chapel was filled to capacity - an amazing legacy - there's no way that many people would turn out for my funeral.

The reverend was wearing a Hugo Boss shirt that had all us kids giving each other "WTF?" type looks - it seemed like a specially designed one to accommodate the reverend collar. We had the photo boards put up around the chapel and there were a steady stream of people coming to the Friday night visitation and on Saturday. The receiving line at the end of the service on Saturday broke my heart. People filed up to pay final respects and there were "aunties" and "uncles" I hadn't seen in 10 years. The outpouring of support and love was incredible. It's remarkable how funerals bring people together, coming together across distance and time to make up a community from the pieces of your life. Grief is so much easier when people are knit together like this and our rites around death are an example of what people are capable of, at our very best. The feeling I had of being buoyed by this network caused me to utter the title phrase of this post to the Dotytron, "funerals 4 life!" I said in the car. To me, funerals and wakes are so much more meaningful than the way people come together for a wedding. It's easy to share in people's joy - it demands so much more of the goodness of humanity to come forward and offer to help shoulder the burden of someone's sorrow.

I beheld this network of people that have made up my life - who all knew my Kung Kung in some capacity or were there to support my mum and my family and I was unbelievably touched. It's crazy how a funeral becomes a sort of "Karl Lagerfeld...this is your life" situation. Some of these aunties and uncles I didn't even know by name - they were people who I only knew from seeing their faces at the mah jong and banquet tables at the three big to-do's my grandparents organized every year: Kung Kung's birthday, Poh Poh's birthday, and their anniversary. Some of them have known me since I was born and now that my Kung Kung has passed away and there's no more momentum to organize a big event, I'm suddenly feeling a loss for the end of an era. I'm wondering if I'll ever see these people again and I'm sad at the thought that I might not. It's even weirder when I think that I don't know some of their names - sitting at the "kids" table we came up with our own shorthand: Green Lantern Auntie, the Poet friend, the "brown" Auntie. LOL.

Funny story about "brown" auntie - it's terrible but we only know her as that because her brown-ness really made her stand out at the banquets...my grandparents aren't really known for having a multi-culti crew and Brown Auntie is a newer compadre. On Friday night I was working reception at the visitation, so I saw almost everyone who came in. I was fuming because I didn't see Brown Auntie show up and I then went off about it to my sister and Bruce Wayne, and made her the scapegoat for all my Kung Kung's fair weather friends - people I assumed would show up for the shark's fin soup at the banquets, but wouldn't be there when real friendship was required. During the paying of final respects, my siblings and I were flanking Poh Poh and offering her support as people filed by. My eyes were filled with tears at the kind hug of a long-forgotten auntie and I turned to the side and beheld Bruce Wayne, receiving a hug from Brown Auntie and Bruce Wayne met my eyes and gave me the tiniest, most imperceptible nod at the exact same moment that my sister gave me an urgent nudge in the side. All three of us broke into laughs and probably seemed really inappropriate, but it was some much needed levity. So thank you, Brown Auntie, for showing up at precisely the right moment.

I'm so proud of my littlest bro, who went up to the podium and nailed it with his speech. It was the cutest, sweetest, most heartfelt tribute ever, hitting all the marks - it was funny, it was personal and poignant. There is a 10 year difference between me and C-hova, so I wasn't around for most of his formative years. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like for him, to grow up almost an only child in my parent's giant house, with siblings who had other concerns and interests that he couldn't share in. An although I never think of him as an afterthought, my sister, Bruce Wayne and I do share a bank of memories and experiences that we went through together that C-hova just can't access. It is all the more remarkable then what a good kid he turned out to be.

I will always remember how, at the cemetery, on a miserable, wet, cold morning, as the casket was being lowered into the ground, my sister and I broke down crying, and I had my arm around her and I felt C-hova reach over and put his arm around us, and I felt Bruce Wayne reach over across my mother and put his hand on my shoulder, and we stood like that and watched Kung Kung's body being laid to rest. Even through my sadness, I will remember how grateful I felt for having such an extraordinary family and such amazing, accomplished, siblings to lean on.

In Chinese culture, it is traditional to bow 3 times during certain times of the year/significant days towards photos of your ancestors. Growing up, it was customary that during the Harvest Moon Festival, or Chinese New Year, we would be rounded up to bow 3 times in front of a picture of Kung Kung's mother, father, and his grandmother. Last night, as we were readying to depart for home, Poh Poh came over and suggested that we bow in front of Kung Kung's photo. It was very emotional - I never thought that one day, Kung Kung would be just a photo. And I know, somewhere, that he's not just a photo, that the usual platitudes are true, that he lives on in me, blah blah blah, but that knowledge seems very far and inaccessible at the moment, and all I can think about is that my Kung Kung is in the ground and that now Master T will be bowing before this photo of a man wearing a hesitant, for-the-photographer smile that doesn't begin to encapsulate his life or his essence and for Master T, that's all there is to that. The Chinese custom of bowing before your ancestors seems much more poignant and symbolic and weighty now. What were rote movements without meaning are now imbued with significance. I bow down before my grandfather and everything he represented - my body is weighed down by my gratitude to him for giving me life and for being a part of my story.

I'm struggling to find the gratitude that Master T got to meet his Tai Kung for 4 brief months and that I was lucky enough to have 31 years with my Kung Kung. I'm struggling to find the part where my incredible family, husband, and the circle of support of my grandparents' friends and my own will ease me to a better place. Right now, that doesn't seem possible. I know that life will prevail, that the mundane and petty realities will find a way to worm their way into occupying far too much of my waking hours, but right now, right now I am sad.

Fin.

In Memoriam

My Kung Kung passed away last Thursday and I'm sitting here in front of the computer trying to find a way to disentangle the complexity of my sadness. Real life has its inevitable way of insinuating itself - so yes, I spent this past weekend at the farm with the kdubsguelphtdot crew, laughing and playing games, and yes, I have been thoroughly charmed by the Big Yam's continuing antics, but there have also been times of grief, sorrow, and a torrent of tears.

I spent all Monday and Tuesday sifting through old photo albums with my sister, selecting pictures of Kung Kung that will be displayed on poster boards on easels around the chapel. Poh Poh and Kung Kung kept many many many photos - most of them from when they were young, or on their travels just after Kung Kung retired in the late 60s/early 70s. So many pictures of Kung Kung and Poh Poh, dressed in the styles of the times, a mod green Hawaiian shirt on Kung Kung, Poh Poh in a matching shift dress, her hair teased up and hairsprayed into a poufy bouffant, standing in front of swaying palm trees before a sun-drenched beach in some tropical locale, Kung Kung smiling his characteristic grin, the analog photo bleached and aged with a Kodak-derived authenticity that no number of iPhone hipstamatic filters could hope to truly replicate. So many photos of Kung Kung smiling, smiling, smiling. That smile I know so well after 31 years of being reflected in it. That smile is the constant throughout all the photos - making him recognizable even through the subterfuge played by time and fashion.

Sifting through the photos, the relics of a life, one of the realizations brought to the fore, compounding my grief, is the dawning awareness that he was a person (if that makes sense) separate and autonomous from being my grandfather. That he had friends since lost to the annals of time, that he traveled and had his own jokes, dreams, petty worries, joys - that he was young, that he was like me. Seeing evidence of him with his boyhood chums, beaming with pride as he showed a visiting dignitary around his workplace, wearing a dashiki, sitting straight and tall without a hint of gray in his hair careening around in a bumper car, it makes him both real to me and more of an abstraction. I don't know that man in the photos. I knew a version of him, but there is so much that is opaque to me and will now be forever.

One of the photos shows my grandfather, standing in front of some crumbling Greek temple. It's taken from quite a few feet away and he's quite small in the photo, staring at the camera. I turned the photo over, and written on the back, in his small precise handwriting, were the words,

Portia, here's looking at you.

Oh, how I cried reading that tender, private little inscription - cry for how much he loved my Poh Poh and loves her still. How hard it must have been for him to leave her, after 62 years of constant togetherness, the two of them always hand in hand.

I feel like a bad granddaughter. Like I took his presence for granted. Like I didn't spend enough time with him. Like I didn't take it seriously that he wouldn't always be there and now rue my own hubris. Like I allowed the distance wrought by a generational and cultural divide to prevent me from making him know that I loved him. And I know, realistically, that he was human with faults and flaws that no amount of grieving romanticism will fix - but when someone passes you don't dwell on their human foibles. It is a testament to the essential goodness of people that in death, we honour people with a glossing of their lives; allowing their negative attributes to fade and carrying only their positive attributes forward.

In a way, I'm almost taken aback by how sad I am. I somewhat foolishly didn't think I would be, if I were to ever conceive of a world without Kung Kung. It's so very telling that his presence in my life was so constant that the idea that he would someday die was never more than a distant abstraction.

What I will always remember is Kung Kung's smile and his sense of humour and his matter-of-fact way of discussing things. Everything happened so suddenly - it was less than 2 months ago, over the Christmas holidays that the whole family was gathered around the dinner table at the grandparents' go-to restaurant and he was grilling Bruce Wayne (S-dawg's preferred pseudonym) about road tests. Kung Kung was concerned that he had to renew his license soon and was worried about taking a road test because in his words, "If I am forced to take a road test, I will most certainly fail." LOL! It's not only funny that he was still driving, what with his lack of confidence in his own abilities, but the central crux of his road test stumbling block was because he hasn't parallel parked in about 30 years.

I think he would have found it funny that when my mum was talking to me and the Dotytron about what music will be played at the service, and she said, Rock of Ages, the Dotytron and I looked at each other confused, because this is what we were thinking of:

and not this:

He was always ready with a joke or some kind of mildly insulting jab and I know that, my grief aside, he was lucky to have lived for 88 years with a wife he adored and with family and good friends surrounding him.

RIP, Kung Kung.

Fin.

Kung Kung

My grandfather (Kung Kung) on my mum's side had a stroke last Wednesday. Followed by two more additional smaller strokes. The past week has been a blur of juggling hospital shifts with my siblings, taking care of my Poh Poh (grandma), and making sure the babies (plural, because my sister came up immediately with her 3 in tow) were taken care of.

This hasn't been a good year for grandpas in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld family tree. The brain is a funny, miraculous thing, though. Unlike with Poppa, whose cancer had progressed to the point where you knew it was an end-of-life care scenario, Kung Kung's situation is quite different - more touch and go. The doctors want us to be prepared for the worst but at the same time, he's still here, a week later, talking, lucid, complaining, knowing who we are. He can't move the left side of his body and he can be a bit confused sometimes - asking for his mother, reaching for a glass, etc. Other times he can be really funny - he's such a wily old fox. He really wants to get out of bed and on Sunday, when I spent a chunk of time with him, he kept asking to get out of bed, "just one step!" he said. When I told him that he couldn't, because he was attached to an IV, and we'd need a nurse to put it back in, he said, "I'll put it back in!" He's also been asking for milk tea and Perrier, with ice.

I've definitely seen the dark side of socialized medicine this past week. The hospital he's at is less than stellar and there have been numerous complications - it was impossible to get a doctor to see him, he apparently had pneumonia which was undiagnosed for THREE DAYS, and on the weekends, the hospital is a ghost town - the nurses are harried and didn't notice his IV was put in incorrectly until one of my mum's friends pointed it out. It's scary.

It's going to be a long, long road. Poh Poh and Kung Kung have been married for sixty two years. She's very much lost without him, as he's been taking care of her for that long. She doesn't really know what to do without him and even now, he's still taking care of her. When I was asking my grandma whether she took her eye drops and she said yes, I was giving her a hard time because I knew she hadn't. Out of nowhere, my grandpa, who I had thought was sound asleep, chastised me, "don't be mean to Poh Poh!" in Chinese. She has been reminiscing about how they met. How he was a total shrimp - short, skinny, and a bit of a country boy. How she didn't want to give him the time of day at first, because as she says, he didn't know how to do anything. Didn't know how to dance, didn't know how to ride horses, didn't know about a lot of things she loved to do, all he knew how to do was play mah jong. She told us how he pursued her - how he would stand in front of her desk at work and make fake bird calls that would say, "want to go for a date?" "yes! yes!" She's been talking about how clever he was - joining the Hong Kong civil service at age 16 and eventually rising to the rank of Chief Registrar. There is a whole generation of people in Hong Kong who have Kung Kung's signature on their birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates.

These scenarios stretch a family to its limits and there has been a fair amount of heightened tempers. It's hard on everyone. There is no real graceful way to navigate through this - I'm so glad I have my siblings. And the Dotytron, who has been so incredible, at one point he was in charge of the two babies AND Miss Ramona and Little Ze. I came home from my shift at the hospital to find that Miss Ramona had lost a tooth, they had done some finger painting (pictures for Kung Kung's room), and he had two babies peacefully lying on the play mat. It was very sweet. The other sweet thing was that Little Ze woke up the next morning when Miss Ramona was rejoicing in her Tooth Fairy money claiming that he saw the Tooth Fairy the night before. According to him, the Tooth Fairy looked like a tiny flea and it was sparkly and had a blue light (it was a boy). I don't know how I'd be able to navigate through this without my brothers and sister and the Dotytron - and friends, too (you know who you are!)

On Sunday night, the Dotytron and I were having dinner at Gal's Sushi in Markham. We had one of those ESP moments where we both wanted the same things from the giant menu without consulting each other. I was telling him about how my grandparents had a true love story and how the Dotytron and I love each other, but it's different from the way my grandparents adore each other. The Dotytron took offense to that and claimed to adore me. I was like, "no you don't!" and he said, "the only reason I don't is because you would see that as a form of weakness and take every opportunity to capitalize on it and exploit it" LOL. So true! Then he followed it up with, "of course I adore you, just look at how I've been following you around this sushi tray" and I looked at the decimated platter and realized he had been following me around it. I'd have a piece of butterfish, and then he would, etc. Pretty darned cute.

Well, you know I'm not going to talk about something being pretty darned cute without segueing into a discussion of the Boobla. He's a grinning, happy, babbling mess right now. My mum has been calling him "Dai Fan Shu" which means "big yam" after a character with that name from this classic Chinese comic called Old Master Q - about the exploits of Old Master Q (aka Lao Fu Zi). Big yam is the one on the top right in the picture below - you can see the resemblance - big goofy smile, giant head, squat little body, extensive forehead:

Here are some recent shots of my Big Yam, laughing his head off:

Looking like such a little boy in the outfit his Auntie T got him:

and finally, chilling with his his cousin:

Fin.

Admin

This week so far has been all about admin. Calling contractors, calling deck/fence people, calling daycares, calling school daycares (you know, for when Master T is FOUR YEARS OLD!!! - daycare in Toronto is mental), and maintaining and updating all my files pertaining to the above. It's insane. Daycare rates in Toronto range from $1300/month to $1800+/month. Luckily, we're on the waiting list for a fee subsidy, thanks to the fortuitous timing of the Dotytron being a student in recent memory. We're fortunate that we can afford to pay full fee as well, I know many other families don't have that option. At that rate, you're pretty much working to pay for daycare. At that rate, you might as well open your own home daycare.

Calling contractors is similarly disheartening, but at least I know there's going to be a significant return on my investment. I know I'm building equity. With your kid, it's a crapshoot on that score.

I say all this, but every night, we lie in bed and the energy emanating from that little body snoozing away in the next room worms its way into your heart and envelops you in a warm wash of memories of happy smiles and chuckles and baby babble. At the end of the day, lying in bed, there's a certain Darwinian trick that results in your ability to only recollect the good stuff and not the crying, the screaming, the poopsplosions, or the particularly demeaning moment when you found yourself seething at your child through gritted teeth, "shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!"

The Boobla (or the Bubby as I've been calling him of late) is SO FREAKIN' CUTE! i love him to pieces. I love his soft skin and showering his chubby belly with kisses and tickling him and making him do his silent, open-mouthed, one-note laughs. I love it when we're reading the nighttime story and the Dotytron is holding him and you can see the Bubby fighting sleep. I love how he's starting to talk more and more and how his favorite place to hold court is on high on the changing table, where he loves to tell us his thoughts on all topics big and small. I love how one of his favorite things to do while eating is to break off from the boob and coo at me to test me to see if I'm listening and will repeat back what he's said, and I love the big grin of satisfaction he gets when I do. The Dotytron and I still look at each other sometimes and say, "we made this!" with equal parts wonder, pride, and incredulity.

Funny moment with our Portuguese contractor (one of many names I keep on file) the other day. I had him in to take a look at a leak in our kitchen ceiling that's been happening when we take a bath. Well, apparently, "bath" means a different thing to Carlos than it does for me. "Bath" for Carlos is inclusive of showering AND running the tub, so he was a bit startled when he started checking the shower and I said, "no, it only happens when we take a bath" and he said, "every time?" and I said, "well, we only take a bath at most, a couple of times a month." I was wondering why he paused for a bit before gamely going on to ascertain the problem - only realizing that he thought we were disgusting pigs when after a few more false starts he finally said, "oh, you mean it only happens when you use the TUB?" HAHAHA!

We watched Winter's Bone the other night - a story about a girl in the Ozarks looking for her meth-cooking MIA dad. Anchored by a strong, steely performance by Jennifer Lawrence, it's a story that I found enthralling because it shows you a piece of America that you don't normally see - what it's like in the Ozarks for people growing up dirt poor, addicted to meth, on the fringes, and far from the urban comforts of which I'm so familiar. The film is gorgeous and the story has a tense urgency that makes you invested in her increasingly dire situation. There is something beautiful in the craggy, lined, faces and sunken mouths of people in the film...the performances were all exquisitely good, especially the actor who plays the dead beat dad's menacing uncle, Teardrop. There's a beautiful scene featuring some banjos and fiddlers and bluegrass music - I love that stuff - it's so strange that such a beautiful music could come out of such abject poverty. I'd highly recommend this flick.

This means that we've seen 9 out of 10 of the best picture nominations for this year's Academy Awards. We just have to see The King's Speech and this might be our best record yet for the Oscars.

Monday night we had that kale and ricotta pie with a caesar salad:

Last night I made us cauliflower soup with a grilled zucchini, eggplant, roasted pepper, provolone and pesto panini.

Fin.

ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG!

THIS DAY HAS BEEN SO CRAY-CRAY!!!

zomg! a zillion different things going on and trying to schedule a zillion different things in the too-limited time we have left this summer. oy oy oy! my to-do list and to-see list is mega!

*deep breath*

first things first, the dotytron just might very well have a job in the TORONTO DISTRICT MOTHER-EFFIN' SCHOOL BOARD, A-HOLES! wooooooooooooo!!! it's only a 0.5 but that's still so so so good! so now he's trying to see if he can do that in the afternoon and keep his private school gig teaching music in the mornings. but worse comes to worse, the principal said that he can usually pick up supply teaching mornings in the school where his contract would be. wa wa wee wa!

i had an epic phone convo with dr. rei at lunch just trying to figure everything out for this summer into september. we got so much going on this summer! heck, we got so much going on THIS WEEK! pingy is still in town so we want to have a night in with her and then our friend A comes into town from his sojourns in NYC doing his masters in music composition and he's playing some shows that we should see and also just see him and catch up. dr. rei is itching to have us over for dinner so we're trying to fit that in somewheres. we're having AYCE sushi with goosetang & lolly on friday night followed up with a viewing of "eclipse", on saturday we're having going to see a wu-tang documentary with the kdubsguelph crew and then a picnic in high park, and on sunday our supper club was supposed to meet but i think we have to cut that out in favour of going to lounge in hanbo's parents' pool. the dotytron's parents are also trying to have us over to clean out their basement. phew! it's exhausting/exhilarating/gratifying having so many good peoples in our lives. we're such lucky pigs.

and to re-cap: so much sun this weekend! this was probably the first weekend where i felt impeded by being a vessel for the fatburger. the combination of the sun, playing outfield during kick/whiffle ball, and the squirmy bean meant that i got yelled at alot by s-dawg for doing a bad job playing outfield. basically he just sits there and screams "LAGERFELD!!!! JESUS F**KING CHRIST!!!! YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!!?" while i half-heartedly tried to chase the kickball into the outfield.

on friday i went shopping with the roomie and our montreal friend I. we hit my favorite grocery store clothes, joe, AND winners where i managed to snag some suitably bump-friendly clothing that should take me into fall. i got a dress, 2 pairs of leggings, 1 blouse, and 3 button down shirts for about $125. pretty good, overall, i'd say. on the way up to markham for the big grandparents' s**tshow i was driving and the dotytron and i were singing in the car. we basically only sing extreme's "more than words" but last summer, when we were practicing our vows and taking all those road trips to geneseo, i seem to remember us having more in our repertoire. so the dotytron was like, "don't we sing any other songs?" and as a joke, i was like, "yeah, don't you remember how we used to harmonize to 'anna is a speed freak'?" which got a round of LOLs. in case you forgot the early 90s, "anna is a speed freak" goes like this:

ahahahhaahahahaha!!! then we flipped through the radio and the dotytron was like, "all i want to hear is 'runaway train' right now" and seriously made a concerted effort to find a call-in request show so that he could request it. we were close with 97.3fm, but i forgot the last digit of the phone number so that was a bit of a fail. in the end we dredged up the lyrics from our respective drug-addled youths and managed to cobble together a pretty solid rendition.

saturday we went for AYCE japanese and managed to break free from the loafing forces of suburbia to wrangle everyone downtown to the beach. it was LOVELY. although i have to say, the toronto beaches is a big, ol' cocktease. YOU CAN'T GO IN THE WATER?!?!! we laid out in the sun and then my sis and i took the kids to the donald d. summerville public pool, which is right at the beach. it's pretty awesome. it has an olympic sized swimming pool, a kiddie pool, AND a diving pool all in the same complex. we followed that up with the kids getting nice and sandy and the boys going to challenge some super-asians to a series of beach volleyball games that they lost.

we also made an important discovery - THERE IS SOMEONE WHO SELLS FUNNEL CAKES AT THE BEACHES! FOR LESS THAN WHAT YOU PAY AT WONDERLAND. this was a BIG deal! this means that i'm a 5 minute bike ride away from funnel cakes ALL SUMMER LONG.

we posseyed up and then headed to big mouth kee for a textbook big d's big day at big mouth kee meal. s-dawg had this plan to see the UFC fight at bo-pie with some friends. the outlaw bro, chova and the dotytron were obviously in for drinking and carousing so they went. this is how my sister and i watch UFC fights. we show up at bo-pie. order 2 glasses of water. order a brownie sunday and their chocolate explosion. eat dessert. leave before the fight begins. rent "valentine's day." i can't comment on the movie because i basically passed out from BOREDOM to the sounds of my sister complaining about how they can't write a decent romantic comedy any more and how implausible EVERY SINGLE PLOT POINT was and how shrill all the female characters are. good times. i will say that the fatburger was going BUCK during the UFC pre-fight stuff. i think he wanted to fight his in utero cousin.

on sunday me, my mum, and my sis went to this nearby nail place to get a pedicure. guys, i was BRUTALISED at that session. i'm not kidding you. the lady was ROUGH with me. doesn't she know that pedis are supposed to feel GOOD?! she had false nails and so she kept pinching the flesh on each toe between her talons and she made me bleed when she was working my cuticles. alls i gotta say is: if i end up with a staph infection or find out that i was paula abdul'ed , kathy's nails, i'm coming for ya.

we then met up with my grandparents at dim sum brunch at chili secrets. whereby my grandma dropped the BIG BOMB that she dislikes the dotytron? basically my grandpa was ribbing chova about why he and his ex gf broke up. then grandpa said that they didn't really seem compatible. then i asked out loud, somewhat rhetorically, "are the dotytron and i suited?" and my grandma, totally frowned, and shook her head, "no"!!!!! i was like, DID ANYONE JUST SEE THAT?!!!??? my grandma is like, evil incarnate so i'm not taking it seriously, but dayum. p.s. the dotytron was sitting right there. awwww, poor dotytron!

we fought the MSG AGAIN and managed to take the kids to a splash pad in this fairly awesome-for-suburbia park in richmond hill which had a playground, a splash pad, a basketball court, and like, 2 soccer fields. it was pretty fun, even if it was a little dirty. i don't think suburbanites understand that you're supposed to PUT GARBAGE IN THE GARBAGE RECEPTACLES PROVIDED. it's like a mystery to them or something. they probably expect their nannies to do the cleaning up. the next time i'm going to call the town of markham and complain just before we go up so it's all tidy. the kids had a good time and when my niece started whinging we set up a game of my sis, s-dawg and myself versus team whitey (outlaw bro and dotytron) at kickball/whiffle ball (we alternated innings). it was pretty hilarious and fun. mostly because we were using my niece's skipping rope to mark third base and when she asked to use it to go skipping WE WOULDN'T LET HER. lol!!!

so she threw a fuss and didn't want to play and basically sulked and cried for like 20 minutes. when she had calmed down she then asked to join our team when we were up at bat, WE WOULDN'T LET HER. we told her to that she COULDN'T JOIN THE BATTING ORDER MID-INNING and would be able to join once we flipped to playing outfield. LOL!!! i keep thinking about how those two events would go over with the super-research-y and super-liberal parenting types i know and i can already hear them calling CAS on us. lol!!!



after being a giant piggerton all weekend, i resumed regular low/good carb eating today. for dinner we had a salmon, corn & bacon chowder with a spinach salad with strawberries, toasted salted pumpkin seeds, and red peppers in a lime-honey dressing.

i also did the lane swim thing. things the dotytron likes about my swimming attire: i wear pretty skimpy bikinis, almost exclusively. things the dotytron DOESN'T like about my swimming attire: i top said bikinis with a speedo swimming cap which is probably too small AND mistakenly purchased CHILD-SIZED speedo swimming goggles (also too small) so it's party on the bottom and immigrant aquaman on top. pure sex.

fin.

if the dotytron and i were amigurumi characters that played ukuleles

...our version of the ventures' "walk don't run" would be like this:



this is u900. i believe they are a band. they have a myspace page and a few precious videos on youtube of them being adorable and japanese. adorably japanese? is there any other kind? well...i guess there's sex surrogate doll-loving japanese. or grown-men-dressed-like-giant-babies japanese.

it's my grandpa's birthday next weekend. because chinese new year is this weekend and there'll be a mass run of every slant-eyed, yellow skin, laundromat owner/railroad builder within a 100km radius of a ho-lee chow on any respectable chinese restaurant of repute and there aren't enough tables on a saturday to accommodate the family and 100+ of my grandpa's closest friends which means that he had to move his birthday dinner to sunday, a night that's not nearly as amenable to my sister, chova, or basically anyone that's NOT a retiree, we're doing a small family birthday dinner for him on the saturday. just family. which is kind of preferable because family tends to get lost in the shuffle of the dog-and-pony-and-sea-cucumber show that is the usual banquet/mah jong fests.

so, the last time we were all together, we cooked up the idea of the family paying for grandpa's birthday meal and US deciding on the menu. we've been calling it "dream menu" night and we're SUPER stoked. everyone gets to pick ONE dish. now, if you know anything about chinese banquet dining - there's a certain rhythm, order, and tradition to things. certain dishes have a semiotic/symbolic significance and there's a certain order and flow to the way the meal unfolds. "dream menu" is blowing all of that outta the water. lol! it's kind of the best. so far the pickings are thus:

little ze: peking duck
chova: shark's fin soup (chova has been eating shark's fin soup since he was a baby)
miss ramona: these fried crab claw things that feature a little nub of crab claw encased in a shrimp filling and then deep fried. her original pick was the WRAPPERS from pot stickers (but they don't serve that at pak fook - the family's go-to restaurant).
the dotytron: curried stuffed crab shells with breadcrumb topping
my sister: 3 egg steamed dish
rico: curried crab
s-dawg: sweet'n'sour pork
me: fried pork riblets with spicy salt

you'll see that we're leaning heavy on the seafood and pork right now. we have NO starches and NO vegetables at the moment and none of the traditional "wow" items to commemorate birthdays. i'm SO PUMPED for "dream menu"!!!

speaking of chinese new year, this year is the year of the tiger. if i was going to have a kid, it'd be pretty awesome if we could have a tiger baby. next year is the year of the rabbit - not as cool, methinks.

this year also marks the first year where, as a married lady, i start being the giver, rather than recipient of lai see, also known to you round-eyes as "lucky money" - the stuff in the red envelopes. G at work was lovely enough to hook me up with some red envelopes and i dragged dr. rei with me to the bank to get some crisp, new bills to stuff them with. i'm supposed to give to the "kids" (read: unmarried people) in my generation and younger, so basically my brothers, and my niece and nephew.

we're doing a chinese new year dinner up in markham on friday night with my family at big mouth kee (aka big d's favorite restaurant in the whole freakin' world). i like being chinese. the dotytron also likes being chinese, which is nice.

fin.