Columnists
Chit Chats and other Consumables
It’s half past February and Valentine’s Day, as I write this column. LOML and I have barely picked up the last of the errant tinkel, a.k.a. tinsel, and we’re still working on Christmas chocolates and candy canes. This morning, Valentine’s Day, we have added a little pile of heart-shaped sugar cookies, a bag of dark chocolate hearts and two Dooher’s Donuts to the “a moment on your lips” pile. While we do have a lot of philosophical discussions once in a while, these days our go-to topics are usually food and beverages. Mostly, we talk about what we’re going to eat for lunch and for dinner. Sometimes, we wonder if we need to go to the LICKBO (LCBO to those of you who haven’t heard a youngster sound words out) to restock the coffee add-ins. Yep, we’re obsessed with cooking, baking, drinking and consuming. I do the cooking and baking and we both do the consuming. Last year it was all about the sourdough bread; this year we’ve branched out a bit. As we dug into the Valentine’s chocolates we mused about becoming Rubenesque, or more so, and agreed to Google “Rubens” to see if pandemic- eating was the cause of the voluptuousness of his models. In the back of my mind I wondered if being a bit plump would become “a thing”. Actually, I’m hoping it does, because I’ve got “the plump” sorted out.
Just in case you were wondering if all of our discussions were about sustenance, LOML and I have had a few philosophical discussions in the months since we’ve been masked-up, locked-down and isolated from friends and family. Most of our non-consumption/ edible/drinkable related chitchats have been just that, chitchats. During chitchats we talk about the birds or the squirrels that visit our yard. By the way, the birds really liked leftover fruitcake. We don’t have the types of birds sorted out, so mostly they fall into these cate gories, blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, turkey vultures or not blue jays, not cardinals, not chickadees and not turkey vultures. Sometimes we chitchat about what we’d do if we won BIG on our lottery ticket. Between the wildlife in the yard, and the lottery win, chitchats happen about twice a week. Other chitchats are about mundane things like the “remember that time when?”. Not all of our recent ramblings are superficial, sometimes our conversations have been very deep. One day we talked about how fortunate we are to be living in the County and how long it took for us to really, really appreciate how lucky we are. Another day we yapped about how much closer we feel to our friends and family, even though we aren’t physically close to anyone, these days. Existential conversations happen, once in a while. One, or the other, of us has noticed all of the marvellous creativity that has emerged from the pandemic and have tried to spend more time being creative. The problem being we can’t easily get our hands on craft or art supplies and have to rely on our deeper creative mind to continue to produce “works of art”. On Saturday I remembered making potato prints when we were kids and retreated to “the studio” to create a potato-printed Valentine’s Day card for Oldus McManus. I’m still not sure what to do with a pile of chunkedup, painty pieces of potatoes, but the card is kind of rustic and cute. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume the birds and squirrels won’t like them, but maybe the bunnies will. We’ve got bunnies in the yard. They aren’t nearly as amusing as the birds and squirrels.
And so it goes. We eat. We talk about eating. We talk about the best thing we’ve ever eaten. We drink. We talking about drinking. We talk about the best add-in for our coffees. We discuss the wildlife in our yard. We paint, we carve, I bake and I cook. Oh, oh, and we read. We read a lot of crime novels. Most of the crime novels I gravitate toward the main character spends a lot of time describing his meals and what he drinks and not too much time is spent on the crime scene. Once, Oldus McManus and I even chatted about learning a new-to-us language during the pandemic, but couldn’t narrow it down to which language we’d want to “pick up” and laughed because we wouldn’t have anyone to practice with, if we did. Not too many people speak ancient Norse anymore, and Babbel doesn’t have that on their dropdown of “try me for thirty days”.
And so it goes. One year ago we thought we’d be out-and-about in a couple of months. Now March is just around the corner and we might be in this holding pattern for another six months. I am looking forward to March, though, when I’ll virtually celebrate my sister’s seventy-sixth trip around the sun and remember my late Dad’s birthday. The Dropkick Murphys are doing a virtual concert on the seventeenth and I think I want to perfect my macrame skills, or maybe I’ll spend more time on my “potato prints”. Perhaps I’ll macrame a hanging thingy to store the potatoes for my prints.
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