HI friends

This is a long letter from our son, who has been home alone while we’ve been over here. It has been edited slightly, mostly for punctuation and paragraphing!

And my dh wonders why I want to go home?

Mir Vama!


Hey Mom,
How’s your trip been? Thought I'd e-mail you tell you what I've been up to...

So Ill start with Week 1 when you guys left...
I went to Canada's Wonderland just for fun, it was on the way, and when I was there I won a free pass to go there again(which never got to be used :( It went through the wash), anyways I left when it closed and started driving home. Now I get to about Barrie and I'm practically falling asleep at the wheel and I said to myself this won't do; I can't die on my first day without parents. I need to save that till at least week 2 (which also happens to be the day I light the stove on fire...I’ll go more in depth with this story when I get there.. stay tuned). Anyways, I get to Barrie and decide I will find a cheap hotel to stay at for the night, I go to five hotels all of them booked; no vacancy. They tell me the nearest one is in Orillia, another 20 minute drive, so I muster up all my will/Redbull, and drive to Orillia. I go to two hotels there again booked solid...they tell me everything is booked, again no good at all...so I drive around thinking this can't be true. I need sleep. I need to find a hotel so in my solo exploration of Orillia(a really boring little city) I find one more hotel, but it’s really nice:(. I think to myself, might as well try. I get in the hotel, they have a room, I was, like, awesome so everything is not booked. Then this group of people come in behind me and ask for a room, the clerk was, like, "Sorry there are no more"...I chuckled at my luck for the day, holding my room key in one hand and my free ticket to Wonderland in the other. I then go to sleep for the night.

I awake the next morning to find a meal ticket on the dresser next to my bed. I guess I hadn't noticed it the night before but I wasn't about to complain. I go downstairs after showering and confiscating one of their towels and have my breakfast, hoping to God the van hasn't been towed because I was parked in the only free spot at the hotel, which as with most busy places was a handicap spot.

On to the drive home. Driving home I was well rested and felt like a good drive so I took the longest way back home, I went straight to (I’ve edited out locations, but trust me when I say he definitely took the LONG route home! JP) and then through (…), stopping of course at Tony's Restaurant to say "Hi", while there he tells me to come by on the following Saturday, and we can all get together from the play (note, our family has had some involvement with the local Little Theatre), plus S who we all knew anyways. So I said I would, and continued my perilous journey back home.

So I get back home, and what do I do? Absolutely nothing! I watched some movies, then went to bed because it was late again. The next day I woke up and said to myself: what will I do today? I decided I'd do dishes so I could start with a clean slate so I could no longer, for the rest of my stay here, blame the dishes in the sink on someone other than myself… but boy did I complain on that first load of dishes! Of course nobody listened except for the cat, so eventually I just sulked to myself and finished up. After doing dishes I decided I would clean every room in the house. Why? Because I was just that bored, and my ADD kicked in (mother’s note: the length of this note attests to the fact that ds does NOT in fact have ADD!) and I got bored of playing on the computer. So I clean dad's room, 2nd hardest by far. I'm sorry but for him not being in it for so long I couldn't believe how messy it was! (Mother’s note! DH strongly protests that the room was NOT messy when he left!)

After I had finished Dad's room I continued on to C's, only to find it was not in dis-array at all, easiest room by far. Now, who wins the award for hardest to clean? I know you’re all dying to know...It was your’s mom. You have a lot of random stuff in your room. Your room I did in steps. One day was spent just organizing what already had a surface, the next was just finding space for everything else, yet making it possible to move around...

The next room of course is S's, very easy to clean, just raked everything up, and put in the laundry, garbage, or wherever it was supposed to go.

Now of course your’re wondering about my room, saying to yourself, "V cleans rooms. What about his? Where does it stand in this competition for hardest room to clean?"...Now I say to you, "Do I ever clean my room? :)" So I think you know where my room stands. lol (P.S I did eventually clean it, Ill get to that later).

So yes now a couple days have passed and all I've really done is clean the house. I've not really socialized too much, except with the cat, who I must say will use any excuse to talk. So we move on to Saturday. I have the day off, so I head down to (…), and make a stop at the restaurant to talk to Tony and see what’s going on. He doesn't really know so I decided I'd make the plans...now I'm not really good with making plans, but I figured I'd try and get something going...this backfired...so I enlist help. I stop over at S's (last name S. I told you you knew her) and she calls everyone up: C, T, some other people I do not know. I had brought down my DVD's. I like bringing them with me in case of emergency. Those and my security blanket make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. So we watched a bunch of movies until about 3 in the morning, we then call it a night and I go home...

Next week,
Cursing myself because I know I have church in a couple of hours, I fall asleep when I get home in about 2 seconds. I wake up and it’s time to go to church. I'm happy because its Thanksgiving at the L’s that day too. I get together with M after church and we chill waiting for dinner. Dinner was amazing. Me and M decide we'll get together tomorrow and I go home because I need sleep.

Monday I wake up, and call up T too, and he says he'll come over in about and hour, so I quickly clean my room(told you I did it), and putter awaiting T’s arrival. He comes over we play some World of Warcraft(WoW), then get going to pick up M. We basically just watch TV and movies at M's house, then we go out for supper and then they go back to school at around 7PM. The rest of this week is pretty boring: just talking to people on MSN, playing games, going to work… that’s about it.

By Thursday I'm getting bored of this and decide I need to take up something to keep me somewhat busy. Tony had mentioned the play for Little Theatre, so I go and sign up to be stagecrew, for that which will at least keep me busy Saturdays. I coaxed S into doing it too, so that at least I know someone doing stage crew, although I know most of the cast as well. At practices I don't really do much stage crew yet, so I mostly go help E with singing training for the cast (Mother’s note:!!!!).

Oh yeah, also this week I caught the stove on fire. That was on Tuesday. I decided I'd make Perogies to eat, I then went downstairs to clean the basement, then I went on my computer, and was playing some games. When I got bored of that I went back upstairs, now forgetting about my perogies which are in the frying pan on the stove, I think to myself "I'm hungry" so I go into the freezer and get out a steak and go to the BBQ and start to cook it… still completely forgetting I have perogies on the stove. So my steak is done cooking, I bring it inside to eat it at the table, I start eating it, when I suddenly smell burning. I thought nothing of it and continued eating because it was faint and the house sometimes gets a smell like burning in it (mother’s note…this smell had puzzled us. We eventually discovered that the occasional insect was flying into the halogen lamp!) Then the smoke alarm goes off so I rush up run to the smoke alarm to shut it off, when I whip around the corner I see flames, I then remembered "Oh s**t, I was making perogies for lunch"! So I cover the frying pan to put the flames out. I use “flames” loosely. They weren't that big but boy did they smoke. And put my carbonogies into the green box. That was about it. I then laugh because I thought of the humour in it (mother’s note…I had tears running down my face, I was laughing so hard at this point…but I wonder how my children know how to handle kitchen fires so well).

The next couple of weeks, are pretty boring. The most exciting was I had an 80s night with the people from D where we watched all the big movies from the 80s. It was good. Other than that pretty boring weeks ensue although there were a lot of freakin weddings. I went to 3 but heard of, like, 8. So I bought a nice suit for the occasions knowing I was not going to be wearing it just once and put it away forever. To go along with the suit I also bought a Fedora, which I turned into a Tilsbey hat(gangster hat). Basically you take a fedora and take the feather out, and bend the front down so it curves down not up, and you have a Tilsbey hat. As well I got a stainless steel flask, and a stainless steel Zippo, because when you’re wearing that suit, you have to have a big cigar in the front pocket(even if you’re not going to smoke it, its just part of the style) and when you have a big cigar in the front pocket, people are going to ask you for a lighter, and you can't just pull out a normal plastic lighter, because that just throws off the coolness. You need to have a nice lighter, and a stainless steel Zippo is styling. I will be getting both the flask and the lighter engraved, but that will be later, because I’m trying to save for Christmas right now. (Mother’s note: He doesn’t smoke ANYTHING!LOL)

So the play is going well, we gave S a gift today for her baby and we all signed a card. There’s another women sort of taking over because S is apparently due any time and it wouldn’t suprise me; she looks like she will explode. I've been keeping myself busy going to the bars and stuff with colleagues from work, played poker with some of the guys, been doing well. Just thought as your trip winds down I'd tell you what I've been up to. Oh yeah in other news too some doctors quit delivering babies at the P Hospital, Drs. P (both) and I believe Dr. G. They said it is too dangerous and refuse. They say the hospital is ill-equipped...Dad thought you might want to know. (Mother’s note…this ward was just renovated. Our baby, who is not yet 2, was born on the old ward. And they were about the last GPs who delivered babies in our area)

Anyways thats pretty much it,
Ill be seeing you on the 9th.

Love You,