Yesterday I went to a birthday party for Jade, who turned three. Jade and her five-year-old sister, Lilyanne, kept me busy all afternoon. We watched my favourite movie, Finding Nemo. I love how they made that movie with one level of humour for kids and a whole other level of humour for adults.

Children are phenomenal multitaskers, so of course we couldn’t just watch the movie while we watched the movie. These are some of the things they suggested we do while watching the movie: colour, make jewelry, cuddle, wrestle, go for a bike ride, sit on our heels, pick our favourite fish, talk about things we’re scared of, do piggyback rides, squish each other, take pictures with my camera, do my hair and pretend we’re cats.

At the end of the day, seven exhausted adults were draped all over the furniture while the two little girls were still building momentum.

When I was a little kid I thought it was tragic that grownups just wanted to sit around on couches and talk to each other all the time. I felt sorry for them because their lives were so pathetic. The world was full of fun things to do like building forts and playing games and climbing trees and wrestling, but the poor grownups were always too tired for fun. And on those rare occasions a grownup could be persuaded to actually get up off the couch and play for a bit, they ran out of steam really fast and needed to sit down some more.

I also felt sorry for them because when they did have some energy they would waste it on housework and laundry and cooking. I assumed this was their idea of fun, because grownups could do anything they wanted and this is what they chose to do. I could hardly wait till I was a grownup: nobody would be the boss of me and I could stay up all night and play all the time and eat all my favourite foods and do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

And that’s exactly what I do, except for work, of course, and housework, laundry, cooking and sitting on the couch.

(P.S. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms and people with moms out there.)

I got my bone marrow biopsy results back the other day from the Mysterious Hematologist. It appears he has ruled out a lot of the diseases he wouldn’t tell me about. Not only that, but he’s pretty sure he now knows what is causing my freakishly large red blood cells. Not only THAT, but he told me what it is.

[insert drum roll here]

Cold Agglutinin Disease (aka Cold Antibody Disease or Cold Antibody Hemolytic Anemia).

It’s an autoimmune disorder. My body turns on itself when it’s cold, and starts killing off my red blood cells. It’s idiopathic, which means there’s no known cause. There’s also no known cure, and the only treatment is to move to the Canary Islands.

Can you believe it? I live in the second coldest capital city in the world, and I’m allergic to cold weather.

I also have no iron stores in my bone marrow and very little iron in my blood, so I have to take mega-doses of iron for a year.

All of this goes a long way towards explaining why I’m always cold, why I can barely function at work after 2:00 pm, and why I fall asleep on buses and in waiting rooms and especially during meetings. I always thought it was because I only get about 6.5 hours of sleep each night. But apparently I’m not not only sleep-deprived, I’m also oxygen-starved. (All things considered, I’m doing very well, don’t you think? By rights I should be comatose.)

The good news is that I’m surrounded at work by women with hot flashes who are always too hot, compared to only a couple of us who are always too cold. Even though I’m in the minority, I think they’ll compromise more on the temperature settings now: my comfort has become a health and safety issue. If it gets too cold in the office I can just start moaning pitifully from my cubicle about how painful it is when my blood cells die, and they’ll rush to turn up the thermostat. (Either that or they’ll try to finish me off by stealing my sweaters and buying me iced cappucinos. Time will tell.)

Anyway, it looks like I’ll be sticking around for awhile. 😉

I spent the weekend in Orangeville, celebrating my big sister’s wedding!

I can’t cover the whole wedding here, and I won’t subject you to the 250 photos I took, so I’m just going to say it was a very touching wedding followed by a most excellent party.

Rob is an avid fisherman, and Deb actually went fishing with him a few times last year during the courtship. I think the only other time she went fishing in her life was in Mexico with me. I caught a tuna while Deb perched in her bathing suit on the deck like a hood ornament. Fishing is not her thing, but she loves Rob so much she actually bought a very alluring fishing vest and some lures and went fishing.

Immediately after the ceremony I hugged the bride and groom and said “Look at you, all married and everything!”

Deb said, “I finally hooked me a man!”

“Now you can give up fishing!” I said.

“And sex!” she laughed.

“And grooming!” I said, “And housework!”

“I already gave up housework,” she said.

Rob just stood there beaming.

Our family has been through numerous iterations over the years, because we have a multi-generational history of fairly high marital turnover. We were doing divorce long before it was trendy. We like to think of ourselves as the family that puts the fun back in dysfunctional.

Even though we’ve had lots of marriages and divorces, this was our first family wedding.

The reception was a lot of fun, and my niece Kati gave a speech that brought tears to my eyes. Rob’s best man was a woman and her speech was very touching too. This wedding was all about people eventually finding the love they deserve, long after they’ve given up looking for it, and how it’s worth waiting for. I actually believe Deb and Rob going to live happily ever after and stay married forever.

Here are a few of the highlights from the weekend, with an emphasis on the events at Table 2.

I wore a dress and high heels for the first time ever, and I saw my son in a tie.

There was much talk of bras since most of the women in our family had to buy bras for the wedding. There will be detailed coverage of Kerry’s new bra in a subsequent post (Kerry’s the one with the placentas and dead guinea pig in her freezer).

There was more than the average amount of discussion of feet and the horrifying things that can happen to them if you don’t wear socks. (Story and photos to follow.)

There was the usual talk of who might get married next. I’m thinking it’ll be Rob and Scott, since they didn’t recoil from the suggestion.

Deb led the congregation in a revival service. Towards the end of the evening there was even some talking in tongues.

I saw my dad for the first time in quite a few years, although he has been a faithful reader of the blog for a number of months now.

My mother and my father – whose marriage ended when they were still teenagers – danced to Chubby Checker’s The Twist.

My mother and my father’s lovely third wife met for the first time. That’s Merle on the left and my mother on the right. They seemed to get along.

Eventually my dad just got out of the way.

Following the reception there was an After Party in my son’s room, in which there was much merriment and photographing of feet. We also cast our votes for Weirdest Family Member (I can’t tell you who won, but the ground rules explicitly stated that we couldn’t vote for anybody in the room, so it wasn’t me.)

The morning after was a little more subdued, as people slowly filtered down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and much remedial drinking of coffee and juice took place. This is my lovely niece Lindsay. Those are not her pants.

And finally there was the long drive back to Ottawa. We took the Peterborough route and saw a street called Television Road and a store called Almost Perfect Frozen Food. We didn’t stop.

The day Sam died (I know, I promised I wouldn’t write anything about death for awhile, but bear with me), I was drifting around my house wrapped in layers of sadness, and everything around me seemed very, very depressing. I even got an urge to clean, which is a Very Bad Sign.

I cleaned: I tidied, I decluttered, I swept, I scrubbed walls. At one point I was in the kitchen, cleaning things I don’t even normally notice, like the clutter that had gradually usurped the already limited counter space. Empty coffee cans, wine bottles, recipes I’m going to try someday, junk mail. An avocado that was past its prime.

What is it about avocados anyway? I love them, but my timing is almost always off. They’re either not ready yet or it’s too late, and once again I’ve missed that tiny window of avocado edibility.

Anyway, I was just about to toss the avocado in the garbage, when it occurred to me that I could plant the pit in Sam’s memory. So I did. I suspended it in a glass of water with toothpicks, and put it on top of the microwave with all the other avocado pits that have been suspended in glasses of water with toothpicks for months.

I’m known in some circles as somewhat of an Avocado Expert, because most people who attempt to grow avocados don’t have any luck and I do. Most people assume their avocado pits are duds because they don’t sprout, so they throw them out. The secret is not to throw them out. That secret is what makes me an Avocado Expert.

Every now and then I check the suspended pits for signs of either life or death, and finding none, I top up the water and forget about them again.

Tonight Sam’s avocado rewarded me with signs of life! Not only that, but it set a record – it rooted in just 33 days (maybe even less, because I hadn’t checked for at least a few days). Sam’s avocado is going to be an avocado tree!

I have to admit, I cried a few happy-sad tears when I saw it. (I don’t usually cry when my avocados root, but I always feel a little leap of emotion.)