Just a quick blurb about a post I found on “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” about a girl in England who will be competing in the upcoming Miss England contest. She is a plus sized model at a whooping size 12 U.S. standards. God that just pisses me off. Plus -sized? Anyway, at 5’10” she is also a 38DD, which I can’t imagine and am so blessed not to be. The link includes a link with pictures, so if you are visiting from Uncle Keith or Nurse Myra – enjoy.
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Leaving Edmonton
A tip for all traveling with tykes around the holidays, dress your wee one in something seasonally fitting and adorable. For example, bunny ears and a tail. My daughter made the ears at child-minding and the tail in her kindergarten class Holy Thursday and proceeded to wear them non-stop through the rest of that day and into Good Friday when we were flying out of Edmonton to Minneapolis for holiday. She would even hop for people with all the verve of Peter Cottontail himself. Now we have flown with Katy before and she is very cute even without a costume, but no one in Customs or with the TSA has ever seemed to notice. But, as a bunny she drew smiles and cooing noises from nearly every one she encountered, proving that even these folks are human. I was beginning to wonder. It was the most pleasant near anal probing I have ever been on the receiving end of as far as airport security goes. None of the usual “mach schnell” and stealing furtive glances around myself wondering if someone was going to snatch us from line and whisk us off to some little room somewhere. (Perhaps if I wrote about them in a more upbeat and ingratiating manner I would be less nervous?)
Despite sailing through customs and security, we ended up boarding late, as there was snow in Minneapolis that delayed the inbound flight we were taking. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to fly back and forth between two destinations all day long. It makes teaching look like fun in comparison. Though the weather portrait being painted for us by the Edmonton Northwest employees looked dreary, the reality was not as bleak. Not really any colder when we finally arrived but minus the sunshine we are becoming accustomed to seeing for at least part, if not all, of our days.
We barely made the connecting flight, only to be stuck on the runway for almost as long as the actual flight took. De-icing and then waiting for our turn to take-off pushed this flight back as well. I don’t take things like this in stride as my husband does. He reminded me when I was particularly crabby that if he ends up taking the Houston job we will eventually have to fly overseas and those are much longer flights. He is a “see, it could be much worse” person and I am an “it kinda sucks now” person. I think I would have been better had I not had a child next to me kicking my legs and pelting me with a hundred questions or the Father Knows Best family sitting in the seats ahead of us loud talking with another passenger.
People who can strike up meaningless banter with their seatmates on a plane always impress me. Chuck Palahniuk refers to them as “single serving friends” in his novel Fight Club. Directly in front of me was a young college student and a thirtyish woman who looked as if she could have been that girl you knew in high school who was a cheerleader and in homecoming court and dated only the cute athletic guys from well off families. You know her, right? Well, they get plump and cut their hair into short fashionable SAHM do’s when they hit thirty and flirt with single guys nine or so years younger on planes when they are coming home from shopping jaunts to Mall of America where they met their college sorority sisters for a mad weekend of credit card maxing and mai tai’s at the Ruby Tuesday’s. They probably don’t also get hit on by the kid’s dad in the seats across the aisle whose wife is sitting right beside him looking like a fiftyish version of her though. Am I being catty? Okay, I am. I like running across these women now that I am older. I enjoy seeing what time has done to them. I wonder if they realize what has happened, or if they are just as clueless as they were back in high school. If they are, it is willful. How could you stand being the same vacuous person as an adult that you were as a teen?
Stuck as we were and as loud a competition as this father and son were in for the fashionably done up Sex in the Small Town woman, I ended up having to listen to the dad tell the same bad joke over and over, the mom recite the doings of their entire clan for that last two years – this included a complete medical history of her father and a bragging session about their well-married older daughter and finding out the kid’s name was “Bud”. Who does that to their own child?
We managed to arrive in Iowa nearly on time and with all of our luggage this trip and scored a nice vehicle from the rental people. My best friend and her family drove over from Des Moines to meet us at our hotel and we ended up swimming that night and spending time at the nearly deserted mall the next day. And despite the dire predictions, the weather was seasonable and most of the snow had melted. I have found out a few things about my family that I am wondering the impact of on me this coming year but that is stuff for another day.
I still hate flying and would much prefer driving however.
I used to shop at a grocery chain called Hy-Vee when I lived in Des Moines. Open 24hrs seven days a week except for Christmas it could boast of being a fairly full-service venue. Pharmacy. Starbucks. Bank that keep the same hours pretty much. And a nicely stocked health food section to appeal to the conscious eaters among us. I took it for granted. The Safeway I use now is very nice. The people are nice and most know me on sight in and out of the store now but to give you an example of the difference in service level I will tell you this little story. The Safeway has new shopping carts. They are the small two-tiered ones for people who won’t or can’t fill the bigger carts. I was pleased to see them. I missed them because I had used them quite a bit back in Des Moines. The clerk at the Safeway commented to me about them as I checked through one day last week. She thought they were marvelous. A kind of sliced bread thing. It was quaint and when I agreed that they were wonderful, I also mentioned that I had used them before where I used to live. She was amazed. She thought they were some new innovation in grocery carts. Shopping in Canada is not like shopping in the U.S. whether it be groceries or clothing or home improvements. The shelves in Canada can be bare for a time while awaiting the next truck and given the lack of any kind of worker in Alberta sometimes that can be a long wait.
So today, Rob and I went grocery shopping for Easter dinner at the Hy-Vee near our bed and breakfast. The first thing I did was get a chai to drink while I shopped, and I can do this back home too, but though it is a good chai at the Safeway, I have yet to have a chai anywhere in Canada that tastes as yummy as in the U.S. We started out in the produce and by the time we’d moved on to the next area, my eyes were as big as saucers, I swear. The more time I spent wandering the supermarket aisles, the more like a deer in the headlights I became. There were so many aisles and each crammed with oodles of choices. Oodles. And cheap too.
Rob and I read a lot about the tanking U.S. economy but haven’t yet seen much evidence of it. My mother complained about food prices going up but they were still far cheaper than what we play up North, and it didn’t seem to me that lack of anything was keeping people away, The grocery was packed as was the J.C. Penney’s we’d visited earlier in the day for a sale. Plenty of merchandise and people willing to buy it.
The clothes shopping I have done, just today, puts any shopping trip I have gone on in Canada to shame. Remember my Old Navy visit a while back? I went to Old Navy this evening. The shelves were stocked. There was stuff on sale everywhere. I left with a pair of sweats and three shirts for under $30 U.S. I was almost giddy with shopping fervor. I could have shopped all night, not even bought anything and be completely content. People here, and I was once one of them, have no idea what kind of a good life is all around them. Hip deep in cheap food. Affordable clothing. Even the gas is cheap. $3.19. That’s the same price as six months ago and certainly cheaper than anything we have ever paid in Alberta or B.C.
It’s such a spoiled life here.
