I am sitting at the computer on Saturday morning with my coffee, and I have just finished reading the Guardian and the Irish Times and The Chronicle Herald (I shall read the Globe and Mail in paper format later today). The sun is streaming in the window.
Lovely Saturday morning.
Best Saturday morning in months.
I am alone.
Just me and the Qawwalli music blaring from the stereo - Mer Ali and Sher Ali to be precise, what I downloaded from eMusic the other day.
I do love a bit of Pakistani funeral music when I'm blogging.
Kitty is staying with a friend. I don't know the friend, and there is a small part of my brain that is thinking I should have been more circumspect about letting her out for the night, but her friend is her drama partner, and they both got great marks in the class, and Kitty must be sick of the sight of me and Himself every evening. So the bit of my brain thinking those things joined forces with the bit of my brain thinking 'Saturday morning to myself' and routed the circumspect bit.
If it all goes pear-shaped I shall be the one dealing with it, so I guess I am making the right decision.
Raising a sixteen year old is a constant stream of Hobson's Choice type decisions.
Himself is at work.
Himself LOVES work. I never see him anymore. He springs out of bed at 5.30am every morning and has his coffee and cigarette and then runs to the car to get to work. And he stays there until eight in the evening every night.
At work, there are lots of blokes who do blokeish things, and call each other blokeish names, and play blokeish tricks on each other, and jostle for position in the manliness stakes (in which Himself appears to be doing quite well, being a manly man).
And there are impressions to be made in terms of being willing to do overtime, so that the company will take an interest and keep him on and promote him.
And there is work to be done, which involves power tools and dangerous situations involving hazardous waste and confined spaces and oxygen masks and complicated instructions about not trying to save the other man if it comes to that, which Himself is always telling me he will of course ignore if it comes to that.
I just nod sagely when he does. I learned long ago that a man when he is being manly doesn't want to hear 'but the rules are there for a reason, dearest'.
And the skill set includes strength and cunning and strategic thinking and planning, and all the other hunter gatherer skills that Himself loves to practice.
And there is nice food and wages and on top of that pretty good overtime payments, which result in money to take Queenie out at the weekend and buy her nice things, and consequently feel even more manly.
And on top of all that there is the new best friend, who is a Brazilian called Nitro (because no one can pronounce his name properly). Nitro's English is not so great. And so nobody would talk to him for a while. So Himself decided to offer him a cigarette one day.
Now Nitro dances the salsa with Maurice the hip hop king from Dartmouth when he's working, and teaches Himself Portugese phrases and Spanish swear words. He sings Portugese love songs, and talks constantly in broken English and exaggerated hand gestures. It's his birthday on Monday so I have been dispatched to get a suitable present. We have studied the map of Brazil in detail and looked at Igassu Falls, which is where Nitro is from, although he hasn't been there because he is scared of heights.
His Mexican girlfriend is seeing someone else, so he is single and needs a girlfriend, and Himself has already picked one out for him from among my female friends. So we are to have a barbeque soon in order to get this on track... (I don't know whether to warn my friend or not)...
I love the way my man can't meet a bird with a broken wing without sitting down to whittle a splint for it. And I benefit too. My dream of us buying a Harley and driving to a Brazilian beach on it is making a lot more sense to him than it did before. Although I think we're going all the way to the Argentinian border now.
At the same time, I can't get the image of a Haligonian oil refinery version of Midnight Cowboy out of my head when I think of the three of them being involved in the refit of a major environmental hazard.
So I guess I won't ever see him again. I have lost Himself to the job and the new best friends.
Today, I couldn't care less.
Today I am alone.
And I feel that I have helped deliver Kitty and Himself into their new lives here in Halifax fairly successfully. So I can sit here with my coffee and daydream like I used to.
What SHALL I daydream about...
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