Lilac Colored Glasses

Do y’all remember my list of early morning annoyances? The cat puke, the shave gel clods, the shower mung, the slicing of the calf?

Well the day didn’t really improve at all.

The next few hours were uneventful until I decided to make some leek and lentil stew for dinner.  I’ve made it twice before and I love it.  It’s healthy, hearty, easy to make; a surefire way to have a nice meal before heading off to the Gentse Feesten for the evening right?

HA! NO!
“We don’t think so,” said the fates of whatever malevolent spirit that was bound and determined to fuck my shit up today.

Anyway, right, back to the story.
I had my stew at a boil and it was time to puréé it, so I spooned it all into the blender, pushed the lid down, heard it seal and hit the blend button.

And it exploded all over me and half of the kitchen.

Yes, that’s right, boiling soup.
In my face.
Down my sleeve.
All over the kitchen (read as all of our spare bags to take shopping, my ipod which was playing music, the speakers the ipod plugs into, a spare cabinet door, a small electric heater, the toaster, all the clean dishes and much of the wall).

I rang the extra doorbell we have rigged to get CB’s attention up on the top floor and after a few minutes I called up the stairs, telling him I’d scalded myself and needed help.  He came down, helped me clean up the mess and then tried to finish purééing our dinner.

And it exploded again, all over him and over the counter.  Fortunately it had cooled down and I was the only one with any burns (4 little blisters on my arm, not so bad, considering). We’re not sure what happened besides that it may have been too full, but that didn’t matter because during all of this I somehow managed to upend a carton of cream that was sitting open, covered with a plastic bag into the fridge.  Unbeknownst to me and CB until he opened the fridge and cream came spilling out all over everything.  We sopped that up and decided that we were getting the hell out of the house before anything else went wrong.

The Gentse Feesten was bustling as usual and we went to Sint Jakobsplein to hear Gorki, a Flemish rock group.  The square was packed…like, sardine can packed and we were jostled continuously as the show began.  The guy behind me was pressed uncomfortably close…like, I could feel through his jeans, he was pressed that close against my back.  CB saw the “I’m gonna hurl” look on my face and pointed to a tiny bit of clear space in front of him, so I moved to it.  There was a middle aged lady in front of me who turned and said something somewhat unfriendly, but her Dutch was so fast I didn’t understand it.  CB said not to worry about it but just then an older guy carrying two beers tried to squeeze past CB to stand next to the lady who had spoken to me.  CB didn’t go out of his way to move so the guy got in his face and made a vague threat about breaking CB’s nose.  Well, my boyfriend (who has a blue belt in karate and knows how to defend himself if neccessary) told the older guy to bring it.
The guy made as if to head butt CB and then turned around instead.
CB promptly whacked him in the back of the head and then asked the guy’s wife to keep him under control.  She just kept looking indecisive and shrugging (I was standing behind her with my fists clenched, wishing I knew some sort of insults in Dutch).  After a song or two the older guy turned to get more beer and this time really shoved CB as he walked by so CB grabbed his shirt and they started exchanging words.  People really started to look and I was sure there’d be a fight.  I mentally prepared myself to start clawing and kicking the older guy if the need arose.  The guy was apparently all bluster though, because after CB let him go he got his beer, made his way back to his wife and kept to himself for the rest of the show.

So, yeah, that pretty much sums up the evening.  I made us some mojitos when we got home and I think we’re about ready to turn in. Tomorrow we’re going to CB’s friends’ house in Zulte for barbecue.  I was volunteered to make fruit salad.

I was considering making kiwi applesauce, but I think I’ll avoid the blender.

I’m a shower thinker.

As in, I do a lot of my deepest thinking in the shower.  And no, I’m not talking about the kind of “thinking” that involves an adjustable massage setting shower head, oh no, I mean actually revelations come upon me suddenly whilst I muse in the shower.  I used to do most of this pondering while I drove in the states but you have to pay a lot more attention when you’re riding a bike than driving a car (I don’t know if that’s good or bad) so most of my excess brain activity has been funneled into shower time.

This morning, while I shaved my legs, I tried to brainstorm good blog topics for the day and while doing so I knicked my calf.  The bugger was that it was one of those really painful knicks where you actually feel the blade puncture your skin…you almost hear it….kind of like the sound you hear when you have to puncture a chicken breast before you marinate it…you know, that little snik sound.  Anyhow, after that I began listing the little things that were annoying me today:

1. Rex throwing up all the food he had just eaten for the second morning in a row and me having to clean it up.
2. The fact that 98% of the time, I’m the first one awake and so I almost always feed the cats and therefore almost always end up cleaning any vomit.
3. Discovering, when I went to run the shower water that a certain person who is not me or either cat decided to use my shaving gel on his face.  The use of my gel is not the problem as I use his foam all the time..but the nasty clumps of blue leftover gel that had been sitting in the bottom of the shower all night? That, my friends, was a bit of an issue.
4. The aforementioned discovery led me to truly see the state of our shower bottom and while the OCD in me feels compelled to clean it, the large house spiders in the corners make me shiver enough to avoid it.
5. Having one of those nasty nicks where you actually feel the blade enter your skin.

And that brought me up to the current time wherein I was shaving my legs.  I didn’t want my entry today to be merely a list of complaints, so I tried to think of some nice things to offset the shitty ones:

1. Luna climbing onto my shoulder this morning and falling asleep with her little head next to my cheek.
2. CB telling me he loves me every morning when we wake up (well…when I wake up and start fidgeting to the point where his hibernation is penetrated enough to allow speech).
3. My DivaCup and the loveliness of no more leaks and early morning discomfort from overflowing, super staurated cotton based products.
4. The new readers I seem to be picking up recently, as well as the faithful and fantastic readers who have followed for a while now…..

And suddenly I began thinking about that old song, “Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold” that I learned back during my year long stint as a Brownie.  And I thought to myself “I wish I had any sort of decent photshopping skills so I could make awards for my readers; silver for the older readers and gold for the newer ones…although really, the older readers deserve gold awards more than the newer ones…”

And that is when it hit me.

The new friends are supposed to be silver and the old ones are supposed to be gold!

Eureeka!

See, for the past, oh, twenty years, ever since I heard that song, my mind automatically assumed that old friends were silver cause, like, silver haired old people, right? And that never seemed fair to me that the new friends got gold when the old friends had been with you longer.  But now, two decades after I first heard that song, bent over trying not to slice my knee pit (the underside of the knee), one hand swiping at our day-glo orange shower curtain to keep it from sticking to my ass, I had the epiphany!

The new friends are silver.  The old friends are gold.

And for almost 2 minutes, all was right with the world.