This is nice.

Most mornings, I wake up a bit before Piet and Elizabeth and head to the office to check email and lj. It's a few minutes of private time before they have to get up.

Well, the last few mornings, Elizabeth has been getting up twenty minutes or so after me, toddling into the office, and climbing into my lap. There she snuggles contentedly, sometimes going back to sleep, sometimes playing with my hair, sometimes just giving me a few minutes of hug-time before she goes to perform Daddy's wake-up call. "Daddy wha're you doin'? Is Morning! Wake up, daddy!"

It's so sweet.

Now if only she would figure out that despite Mike and Sully and Randall, there are, in fact, no monsters in her closet. She wants me to go to sleep on her floor lately, to keep the monsters away. I rue the day we let her watch Monsters Inc.

I'm still on it.

My mid-20th-century music kick, that is. I think I've been on it since Christmas, more or less. It comes and goes.

The other day in my mom's pool, my stepdad and I were discussing the movie South Pacific, which we watched a while ago and really enjoyed. I tried, with very little success, to call into my head the waltz from that movie. I could see the female lead singing it. I could hear Julie Andrews' voice singing it (I have it on a CD with her.) I could pull up random lines from it (high as a flag on the fourth of July, if you'll excuse an expression I use, I'm in love. . .) But I could not for the life of me come up with the entire song.

This is unusual for me. Normally, I will come up with one lyric, and be able to simply pick up the song from there and keep going, singing it in a loop. The one line should have been enough to trigger the memory so I could sing the whole thing. But it wasn't, the the words didn't come.

So today I pulled out the aforementioned Julie Andrews CD and listened to it. Now I've got it running through my head in a medley of Richard Rodgers tunes, with the Carousel waltz providing background flavour.

I wonder when songwriters decided that good poetry wasn't necessary for a good song? The lyrics of these old tunes stick with me in a way modern lyrics very rarely do. Is it simply that, with fewer methods of recording and a smaller industry, only good stuff got produced? Is it that only the good stuff has survived for me to hear it, long after the composers are dead? Or are more people really writing awful stuff now than ever before?

I don't know, and I'd rather go back to listening to Julie Andrews than ponder it.

Elizabeth likes waltzing around the living room with Mommy, while Mommy sings, "I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love, I'm in love with a wonderful guy!" at the top of her lungs. It's just a part of the fact that her Mommy is crazy and she loves it. :)

Murphy's Law of Cleaning Supplies

A few days ago, there were half a dozen rolls of paper towel upstairs. I made some comment about how nowadays, we were needing it a lot more on the main floor, but there was none.

Today, Elizabeth decided to use her open bottle of shampoo as a stepladder to get to her toothpaste.

I want to clean up the resulting lake of shampoo.

Guess where all the paper towel is?

The girlie thing.

I just had the best pedicure of my life.

My sister (the one who's getting married tomorrow) made an appointment at L.A. Nails, on Kenilworth, a block from Centre Mall. Now, this is not exactly prime real estate. Half the storefronts on Kenilworth are empty, and the other half contain convenience stores, foam supply, taverns - you get the idea. I figured that if she were paying $20 for acrylics, I would pay less than that for a full manicure, and I'd rather have someone do it than try to do it myself. So I made an appointment too, for a manicure.

I know, I know, pedicure. Be patient, I'm getting there.

Well, the place is very east-end. The patrons were wearing shorts and tank tops, one or two of them popped out for a smoke while they were waiting, the window coverings consisted of white slat blinds with forest-green toppers, and the walls were white with discoloured posters in cheap frames on them. The price lists were displayed prominently on one wall, and included lists for permanent make-up, piercings, every imaginable service for nails, manicures, pedicures, and waxing. The only thing they didn't offer in terms of spa treatments were facials and massages. But I suppose the piercings make up for those.

The price for a manicure was $12 - the best price I've ever seen. The price for a pedicure was $25 - ditto. The price for the two together was $35. Even in Hamilton, manicure/pedicures start at about $50 at a spa. So I figured I couldn't lose.

After having my hands prepared for polish quite professionally, and chatting with a very nice lady about the wedding and the joys of a two-year-old flower girl (that's the other thing that marked it as east-end - patrons talked to each other!) I went to the pedicure seat. She painted my fingernails while my feet were soaking, and then turned to the pedicure.

It was worth every last cent. I've been to a couple of very professional, higher-end spas for pedicures now, and this one was the best I'd had. The conversation was friendly, the products and services were excellent, and I can live with an east-end atmosphere - I'm an east-end girl at heart.

I told my sister that in the fall, when I have a bit of money again, I'll treat her to a pedicure there. At that price, I can afford it. Maybe I'll offer to treat Alanna and Heather both, as their birthday gifts from me. (Since we all have birthdays in the summer and none of us have money at the moment, we had planned on going shopping and each buying birthday gifts for the other two, one day in the fall. I think I like this idea better.)

Now I'm going to wait for Elizabeth to wake up, then go over to Grandma's to swim for part of the afternoon. The worst of the heat has broken - or at least, there's no humidity to make it feel ten degrees hotter than it is - so it's a lovely day for a walk, and a swim at the end of it.