the last glut
i stayed late at work on friday. my mind was full of ideas. i was in the zone. i think it was 8ish when i left. i was wearing my teal polka dot t-shirt and i carried my sweatshirt layer, long since shed, with me. on the way home i stopped for a shawerma. i didn't feel like shrugging my sweatshirt back on so i strode in bare arms, fuzzy hot pink mittens. it was young shawerma guy. "girrrrrrrl!" he bellowed, "don't you feel the cold??" i looked him straight in the eye and said "yes." no explanation. i feel it and i disregard it for this moment. he laughed and i ordered my shawerma and gobbled it down in my cave like the cavewoman i am.
saturday morning i answered heather's call and opened my eyes to snow at the same time. "oh. it's snowing" i said to her. she laughed "sorry did i wake you up?" no not really but kinda. you know when you are awakISH. that had been my state. so it was our last hot chocolate festival meet up. final day of the festival. we discussed our transit and meet up strategies and hung up.
i pulled out my legit heavy pink coat from the back of the closet for the occasion. it just so happens to match my fluffy pink mitts perfectly. i got as much snow as possible off of sahib with my short little scraper and in the process got a lot of snow on me. but it was easy to shake off.
as i was driving gingerly through the snowy streets i thought this really goes to show how meaningful these meet ups are to us. if it was non-pandemic living i think one of us would have bailed because of the snow and stayed nested in our hobbit holes on a snow day. but neither of us really considered not going out. not slippery streets, nor missing buses really phased us. we got to jam cafe around the same time and there was a parking spot right in front. i parallel parked like, whatevs. my seatbelt, lockburt, doesn't fit me with a coat on. so i got out of the car and shrugged on my winter wear.
h got the pay by phone app so we didn't have a repeat of last week's parking situation. the line up to get into jam cafe looked longer than it was and it wasn't long before we were inside shedding our outer wear and feeling cozy as the snow continued to fall gently outside. i ordered the later tater bowl. it had crispy tater tots, pulled pork, corn, chimchurri sauce, and 2 eggs (scrambled for me, but supposed to be sunny side up). h, i discovered, has a classist tater tot prejudice, which is quite shocking. she is aware of it and open to challenging it but at the same time has a particular dislike of the barrel shape of said tots. nevertheless she was waffling, heh heh, whether to get the later tater bowl or chicken and waffles. i expressed my surprise because of our earlier discussion of the humble tater tot. "well i assume they make theirs home made" she said. i both found this kind of funny and doubted that they did. but i wisely did not share the doubt because i did not want to stand in the way of tater tot-heather facilitations. besides i could be wrong. also i should say that i also do not love casseroles with soggy tots on top or within. a tot should always be crispy. anways h had never had chicken and waffles so we decided i would get the later tater and she would get the chicken and waffles and then we could share so the best of both worlds. and that's what we did. we shared a ration of bacon. 2 slices. for 7 dollars. but we both agreed the bacon was thick, smokey, and crisp. quality. h's chicken and waffles came with 2 sunny side eggs on top and some sausage gravy. she instantly wished she had gotten the bowl but did like the chicken and waffles. and the bowl was a little spicy for her. in a role reversal, i could not eat my bowl. that's a lot of tots ok. so i took some home.
also i must say that that glasses were very small but the serving staff was very attentive at refilling them. like one gulp, and they were there to refill. i was thinking that they should just get bigger glasses when heather said out loud "the way to fix that is bigger glasses." haha.
after we were done we decided to go to kits beach. there were 2 or 3 stop signs on a slippery downhill route that were very iffy and my thighs burned from pumping the brakes. but there was only one i couldn't stop for. luckily it wasn't a busy road and no one was coming on the cross road.
there was a plow clearing the parking lot at kits. we taunted and teased him before settling on a parking spot. i actually backed in, which i never do, but we wanted a good view of the beach and park from the car. we sat in the car for quite a while watching all the people playing in the snow and walking their dogs. it was very entertaining. we saw a guy wearing a bathing cap walk by with a bucket. we tried to figure out his plan. the pool was closed. "is he going swimming in the ocean??" we asked each other with popped out eyes. "but what's the bucket for?" i asked. "maybe he will get his dinner with it." said heather and we both laughed.
the sky was a veil of grey over a grey sea. everything was white and grey. it was very beautiful. many people were building snow people. we really enjoyed watching these two, maybe univeristy student age women build a very large snow person just to the side of us. we decided the one girl was probably from manitoba. she was very expert with snow. their snow person was probably taller than me. we watched them take pics of each other beside it, arms in the air, exultant in their creation, and then they left. then a pack of doofy doobs showed up. doobs often run in packs. i started guffawing at them and giving them voices while they threw snow balls at the snow man. none of the doofy doobs could hit it. idiots. why does the fire of destruction burn in the heart of a doob pack? i saw it in their faces. not content with missing snow person with their projectiles they hatched a doobier plan. most of the doobs walked closer to the snow person and one readied his phone to film the crime. one was readied himself from afar. "no." i said to them from inside the car, my finger hovering over the window button, half ready to scold them, "no. don't do it. no!" but he did. he ran and body slammed the snow person, knocking it's head off and parts of it's mid section. they laughed and happy that creation had been desecrated they went on their dooby way, leaving two steaming, indignant, angry middle aged pudgies fuming behind them. "boys!" we growled in commiseration to each other. after a while a little girl and her mom came and started working on the crumbling snow person. "look," i said to h, "girls save the world." she agreed. so it became something again, but something much more humble than the original. i still feel a sting. why??? why stomp on shells and kick jack o lanterns? why???? ack.
not all boys are doobs though. we also enjoyed watching a girl and 2 guys build a snow person on a bench. they were so so into it. it had legs and an arm going along the back of the bench. they gave it moss hair and eye brows and a very delicate face. after they left many people stopped to take pictures with their snow person. that gave us a lot of joy.
eventually we got out of the car too. we also took pics of the bench snow person. h had to use the washroom. so we walked that way down the path. we saw 3 or 4 crazy souls changing out of wet clothes. their bodies were hot pink from the cold. one of them was the bathing cap man. i looked at the wrong moment and saw him drying of his junk with a big shake. i averted my eyes, whipped my head around and hunched my shoulders in the universal whisper laugh. heather guessed quite accurately what had happened. we walked back to the main area, watching dogs and kids and dad's pulling kids on sleds. there was this one patient weary man pulling his kid. he stopped got his gloves and left again. when we saw him next the kid was wearing the gloves and his hands were bare. they put the sled in the van and went back out hand in hand looking for a lost item in the snow. there was a field full of snow people big and small. we counted 17 that we could pick out from the white on white. walking that little way on the path and then on the uneven snow was hurting my bum foot. we used the trusty red poncho to sit on a bench and watch people more until we were good and cold and headed back.
hot chocolate. it was the last day. it is our tradition to go to koko monk's for hot chocolate on the last week of the festival because you can get a flight of 3 hot chocolate flavours. koko monk is owned by a turkish guy named paul. paul writes very poetic descriptions of his creations which really amuse me. because more often than not, you are like "what??" also his flavour creations are the work of an artist. he is magnificent in what he does. yes, some years there are duds. like we will never forget the year there was white chocolate tomato raspberry hot chocolate. but paul takes creative risks and i like that. anyways, we did talk about possibly going somewhere else this time, but in the end we decided on koko monk and i'm glad we did. there was a orange chocolate, i don't love orange chocolate, but it was warm and good. we both agreed it was in 3rd place though. 2nd place was the cardamom pear one. 1st place was called winter trees. it was aged cedar smoked chocolate with thyme and ginger. it was beautiful.
there was a bakery just a couple shops down called pure bread. heather was excited because she had amazing coconut cake from there before. i was excited because every single thing in the window looked like art and heaven. i oohed and awed and drooled and pointed and sighed in ecstasy just looking at everything. why are bakeries this way. why do they put me into throws of delight and nirvana? there was no coconut cake so heather didn't get anything. i showed tremendous restraint and only got 2 loaves of bread, dysfunction ale bread, and simply seedy, and a 'pudgie pie'--that name. how could i not. i ate the pudgie pie for dinner. imma pudgie pie!
after that i drop kicked heather out on the side of the road so she could catch her bus on arbutus and i drove home. bum foot was pulsating painfully. i stopped to get cat food and dropped my cans only 3 times. somehow i cannot be bothered to get a basket. i prefer catastrophic can fumbles. it's not easy carying 12 large cans of cat food at once but i have this inner belief that i CAN. don't crush my spirit. i got izzy 2 new toys. i gave the first one to her last night. it's a little plushy squirrel that squeaks and has hard long lasting pellets of cat nip inside. she started playing with it right away.
today i stayed in bed all day watching the snow fall outside my window against the wall of trees. snow snow snow.
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