As much as I love food, I don’t love lunch. I like breakfast because I’m hungry after a long night and because I need my coffee but can’t drink it without eating something too. I love big breakfasts of eggs and bacon and sausage, or French toast or even the greasy crack crap from Mickey D’s. Even a bagel or bowl of oatmeal is okay.

I like supper because it’s a nice, big hot meal. Whether it’s chicken or beef or pork, whether it’s something mostly pre-made, like the roasted chickens from Loblaws that only need me to prepare a side of veggies and pasta/rice or something I make from scratch, supper is something I enjoy.

And God knows I love my snacks of chips or perhaps a chocolate bar with my nightly tea.

But lunch. Lunch is the bane of my existence. It’s not too bad if there are leftovers from supper, but often I send those with George to break up the monotony of sandwiches in his lunch bag, or else we eat it all the night before. I’m not a huge sandwich person so I tend to eat PB & J or PB & banana if I go that route. I’ve eaten more boxes of Kraft Dinner than one person should eat. If I have hot dogs in the fridge I’ll happily eat those.

However, it all boils down to one thing: I am so uninspired with lunch. I like to cook but not during the day, and I’m out of ideas. Thus, I turn to the ever-reliable (err, usually) Internet.

What are you having for lunch today? What is your favorite thing to have for lunch? Restaurant fare doesn’t count. I need ideas. Please share!

My dad (as evidenced by the comment left here) is reading my weblog now after finally making his way over here. Say hi to my dad everyone. “Hi Sherry’s Dad!”

Since he and my mom were looking at a bunch of pictures, here are a few more to look at, taken recently, such as this one where Hayley and Breanna were sitting on the bed singing – Hayley was singing “Hush little baby” and Breanna was singing “Ohhhhhahhhhhh”. They got pretty loud. Future duet?

Hayley got a Dora doll for her birthday and she came with this dog. Breanna loves to chew on his ears, but unfortunately she can’t be unsupervised with it because he has a fairly pointy tail that would be perfect for poking herself in the eye. Alas.

Getting up at FIVE IN THE MORNING makes you pretty mellow.

Getting up that early also makes you feel like resting on the running dryer.

How to get turned into a pile of mush.

Breanna is all prepped to watch a good documentary but Hayley’s bogarting the remote again.

Who needs to suck a thumb when you have a whole fist at your disposal? (Yes, teething has begun. Yes, she’s only three months old. But eveyrone thought I was crazy for thinking that with Hayley and at four months she had two teeth. Trust me. Breebles is teething.)

I must have done something right in a past life.

(Oh, and for my Mom, the house thing starts over here!)

Conversation from the other day:

Hayley: Mommy?
Sherry: Yes?
Hayley: Daddy’s my favorite.
Sherry: … You know, I don’t think you’re actually supposed to tell me that.

I have loved Christina since day one, but Bailey is quickly becoming her competition as my favorite character, especially tonight. I was almost crying from laughing.

If I had to give up every television show but one, this is the one I would keep.

It’s been a nice weekend. I guess it technically started on Friday evening, but I don’t remember much in particular. Well, except for the fact that I woke up to a waking and hungry Breanna at 5 am and realized that she had slept straight through for six hours. But I refuse to talk about that because if I do, it will be a year before she does it again.

Saturday, George was supposed to take Hayley to the park to play in all the new fluffy snow. Half an hour before they were going to go, our friend Louie called and said he’d bring Hayley’s boyfriend his son A over and they could all go together. This was great in theory, except that they made it as far as the courtyard and realized it was minus a billion degrees with the wind chill so they came right back up. Both kids had bright red faces from less than five minutes outside. I guess Canada finally decided to remember that it’s winter.

It was okay though, because they stayed for the afternoon. George had a recording session for his friend Frank, but Louie and I chatted in the living room with Breanna and Hayley and A played ecstatically in her room. I later asked Hayley what they played and apparently they played Mommy & Daddy (this game included fleeing to escape a burning house!), Baby (each took turns in the crib), and Cinderella (Hayley was Cinderella, A was the prince). My uterus nearly exploded from the cuteness.

Hayley was so tired from all the fun that she barely spoke through supper, and even though Frank was still here working on music right across the hall, she was asleep in under 20 minutes.

Today is really low-key in comparison. The biggest excitement has been bath time (Hayley always has a daytime bath now because she likes to play in there for half an hour or so) and a cartton version of The Wizard Of Oz.

I like weekends like this – not TOO busy but not boring either.

I’m sure I seem reasonably entertaing and amusing here on my weblog. What you may not realize is that I can be somewhat annoying to live with. Just ask George, since he’s been doing it for years now.

Awhile back Jaeme wrote a fun entry about all the things about her that made her husband a little crazy and I’ve been meaning to do the same ever since. I already knew a couple of pet peeves George has about me but when I actually asked for ideas, he only came up with one. I think he’s just trying to be nice.

Anyway, based on his one suggestion and some things I know really do drive him nuts, here are some reasons why I might be annoying to live with.

I don’t wring out the dishcloth when I’m done with it. This was his contribution to the list. I’ve actually made a point to try to remember to wring it out since he mentioned it awhile back since I know it bugs him. I’m not entirely sure why it’s an issue since I do the dishes 99% of the time so I’m the only one who deals with it, but it’s true that I do tend to just hang the dripping cloth over the tap. I don’t know why.

I leave books everywhere. I’m usually reading one book for the sheer joy of reading. On top of that, I’m usually reading at least one parent-related book, as well as magazines. I tend to bring one of them over to the couch to read or at least glance through while I’m feeding Breanna, and then when I’m done with nursing her, I get up with her and walk away, leaving my reading material on the back of the couch or the arm. Or right on the seat. Sometimes I leave magazines open in the middle of an article on the kitchen counter where I skim it as I’m stirring supper or at the table. It’s uncontrollable. Every time I think I’ve gotten everything picked up I notice another book lying out. Oops.

I have a tendency to rack up multiple glasses/cups with varying amounts of water. I leave them on the night table, my dresser, my desk, the counter, the table, the deep freezer, the dryer in the bathroom (because I get thirsty folding clothes you know). If I want something to drink and have to spend more than ten seconds looking for the glass I was using, I just fill up a new one. It’s insane. If I don’t rein myself in every day or two, we’d run out of glasses.

I have a bad habit of depositing my dirty clothes on the floor beside the bed despite having a hamper AND a dirty clothes basket. Every so often I get determined to stop, but then after a few days or a week max, I get back in the bad habit. What I clearly need is a house with a laundry chute in the bedroom.

I crack my toes. I do it a lot. I do it inadvertantly while walking, especially if I’m barefoot. I do it on purpose when I feel a need to. I think it would require hypnosis to stop this since I’ve been doing it since I was 13.

I bite down on my fork and keep my teeth clamped down while I pull the fork out. Apparently this makes a nails-on-chalkboard sound which is a little irritating. He only ever mentioned it once or twice a really long time ago and I got really self-conscious about it, but I bet if I really paid attention I’d find I still do it I think he’s just tuned it out.

I talk ad nauseum about shows he doesn’t even watch. He could not possibly care any less about American Idol. He’s seen maybe three or four episodes of Lost. He thinks Grey’s Anatomy is crap. He only sees All My Children if he’s home during the day and has no other choice. And yet I feel compelled to talk about them anyway. I’m sure he’s totally thinking about his own music while I yammer on about what Simon said on AI or explain the details of the computer and countdown on Lost.

I get random urges to re-organize things. This leads to George rummaging, frustrated, through various cupboards before finally asking me where the HELL the frying pans are today. This is another long-time habit. He should ask my mom about all the times she came in my room at 11 pm to see what had fallen with a loud crash, only to discover I was completely re-arranging my room. Which was particularly obnoxious since we lived over our early-to-bed, early-to-rise landlady. He should consider himself lucky that it’s just little things and not all the furniture in the living room.

I serve him food with cream of mushroom sauce. He’s a little tired of it, but hey. I’m the primary chef so tough, you know? 🙂

And despite all of that (plus trust me, I have my pet peeves too, ahem) here we are on February 22nd, 2006, celebrating seven years (!) together. It feels like forever and yesterday all at once. I still remember how exciting it was to be able to say we’d been together for one year, because it sounded more permanent once we could stop thinking in months. Now we’ve added another six years. It’s hard to believe that at this time seven years ago I stayed late at the studio to work on a very mushy song with him (with lyrics that I pretty much wrote FOR him), and ended up starting a relationship. In seven years we’ve travelled, moved in together, shared every holiday, worked together, spent an insane amount of time in bars together while he played in various bands, and had two kids together. We’ve had rough moments but even more amazing moments. We’ve had seven years of memories to practice for all the years of the future.

We’ve come a long way, baby. (Okay, that was dorky.)

Happy anniversary, George. I’ll see what else I can do to annoy you for the next seven years.

I joined the crowd and created a store. You know, in case you were dying to have a t-shirt with silly stuff on it. I get 10% if you buy something.

So yeah, between the t-shirts, the ads in the sidebar, and the PayPal donation button in the sidebar, I’m all about being an unapologetic sellout. Back when I pulled in an actual salary, I wouldn’t have considered doing any of this, but if I can make ANY money off my weblog, well, duh. I won’t say no.

I once took a picture of my grandmother’s house and it looked like this:

Long-time readers know that the house was sold after being in the family for several generations and that it was hard on everyone. I went up north for the first time since it was torn down. And standing at the window in the place my grandmother is renting, I looked across the street to where that house used to be and this is all there is.

For perspective, the tree in the bottom image is the same one on the far right of the first one.

Her new place ischeaper to maintain, much easier to care for, and seriously cute. But it’s not THE house. Like a small town really needed a bigger fucking parking lot for one of their grocery stores.

(For anyone who’s curious, I did a mini-tour over here for my sister.)

Proof that childbirth and sleep deprivation make you stupid: I just dumped fish food in the rat tank.

I think I’m going TO BED NOW.