Speaking French, funny stories, rollercoasters, West African music and dance, an assortment of photos, video clips, and discussions made this evening quite enjoyable. My youngest sister is in town for a couple weeks, and I hadn’t seen her since my mom and I went up to Ohio back in April to see her performances.
Since then she’s been to Burkina Faso for the second time and loved it. I was excited to hear about her trip and looking forward to speaking with her in French, which she’d really like to keep up. We hung out at my mom’s. Kevin came over after work and grocery shopping and cut up fruit for us all to eat while we were talking.
Food Matters
We laughed about some amusing moments from when we were growing up, one of those being the day that my mom quickly packed my sister “a lunch” for the day she was spending with me while I took care of “my two little guys.” (For further explanation, see My Nanny Diary.) The contents of said lunch were rather interesting: 1. a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread 2. a box of individual packets of hot cocoa mix.
Opening a package of crackers and eating a couple that were starting to go stale, my sister said she didn’t mind them. I told her that she should have known they were stale since there wasn’t FRESH written on the side of the package in black permanent marker. Writing FRESH in black marker was a trick a household member had for identifying the cereal purchased most recently that was least likely to be stale. Rather than throw the stale cereal out, this individual helpfully marked the new box as FRESH.
Enjoy the Ride
My mom and sister just got back from some time in Rochester, New York, so we were talking about the people and places they visited up there and got onto the subject of roller coasters. There is a rather small (in terms of other amusement parks we’ve gone to) place with rides and a water park that’s been in its current location since before I was born. Often when we’d go up to Rochester to visit my grandma, grandpa, uncles, and my parents' friends from college, we would spend a day at Seabreeze where they have such rides as the Jack Rabbit, a wooden rollercoaster that my parents went on years before we were even a twinkle in their eyes. My sister and cousins went to the park for a quick visit to hit the highlights at Seabreeze before they closed the gates.
This got us into a discussion about rollercoasters at different amusement parks and how family members responded to those at Seabreeze, King’s Dominion, and Busch Gardens. Kevin had to tell the story about the time we were at King’s Dominion for the day, and we rode the Outer Limits rollercoaster for the first time. Afterward, we decided to have lunch. I went up to an open window and asked for “two orders of stricken chips.” The person looked at me quite confused. I didn’t even realize what I’d said until Kevin stepped forward and said, “I’m sorry. We just got off a rollercoaster. What she meant to say is that we’d like two orders of chicken strips, please.” We spent the entire lunch laughing hysterically as we ate our chicken and fries, and later I drew a little picture of a house and wrote "Home for Abused Chips" on the front of one of the many letters I sent him back then when we were still dating.
Kevin's kept every card, note, and letter I sent him from when we first met throughout the entire time we were dating, so I came across the envelope the other day when I was rereading cards, letters, and things I'd sent him which are now mixed in with the letters and cards he sent me way back when.
