We are slowly making plans for the house after Vince moves out next year. For example, we are planning on emptying Vince’s room, ripping out the carpet (10,000 pee stains from Maxi) and installing linoleum flooring and turning it into Jeremy’s office and a gym. (Vince asked where he was going to sleep when he comes home to visit and I said the couch was always available. And then Jeremy said no – he can sleep in the guest room. And then Vince asked if he was coming home for Thanksgiving next year and I said probably not if he was on the west coast and then it occured to all of us that if he went to Canada, he’d probably be working over Thanksgiving as their Thanksgiving is in October.) We are also going to empty the living room and buy a ping-pong table and automatic ping pong launcher and 1,000 ping pongs and start to learn to be competitive ping-pong players. Ha ha, ok maybe not ping-pong. Maybe tap dancing. Then the wood floors would be completely ruined. Mostly Jeremy and I are hoping to massively declutter the house. Before we moved into this house, we lived in a different place every year or two, so the decluttering happened automatically. Now ever single Target purchase just gets swallowed up by the house and nothing ever leaves.
I often think about the presidential candidates and wonder how they are not tired all the time. Right now, in order to operate at an optimal level, I need 8 hours of sleep at night and a 1-hour nap during the day. That is perfect. Projecting out, when I’m 70, I want to sleep 11 hours a night and then take a 2.5 hour nap during the day. Now that sounds delicious. Vince got a bunch of college applications out this week – UC Santa Cruz, Davis, Irvine, Drexel, Penn State and U. British Columbia. The Canadian schools are totally confusing to me. Jeremy said that they would not be confusing if we were Canadian. I’m not even quite sure the applications are complete. But we paid something and hit enter. For Toronto, instead of saying I want to study engineering or political science or English, I swear it asked you – do you want to live in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin or Ravenclaw. (Well not exactly those names, but it made you choose different residential halls.) So we looked up all the residential halls and crossed out all the ones that wanted essays, crossed off the one that wanted formal dress for meals (I guess this one is for the lawyerly types) and then randomly picked from the others. For UBC as part of the application, separate from the application fee, they wanted us to put a $50 deposit down on housing which included such things as – do you stay up late? are you messy? (Vince answered – being tidy is not important to me). do you want to live with people who drink? I was like – don’t you think they want to offer admission first before asking us to be putting down the deposit for housing? What happens if you get housing and aren’t admitted? Do you think you can just move to Vancouver? Katherine asked if the $50 was refundable if he ends up not going. I said I think it just went into the disappeared money category.
Vince held a Friendsgiving on Saturday night and we skidaddled out of the house for dinner. Jeremy wanted a place to have vegetables. We went to Flower Child which is a kind of vegetarian-ish place. It opened up a few months ago near us. It was good (I thought). Jeremy said that it was fine, but he should never go there if he was hungry because he could eat all three of our meals.
Then we went to Trader Joe’s.
