Denis has always had a rather unorthodox manner of doing things, and the way he’s packing is in keeping with that.  The other day he said he’d bought a ‘container’ for his tools.  I paid no attention whatsoever.  Then a couple of days ago I heard the beep beep beep of a dangerously large truck trying to back its way up our steep driveway.

I looked out and saw a rust-coloured, God knows how long, metal shipping container with the large letters HYUNDAI painted across the sides.  When the machine unloaded it, the container landed with a thud so loud it shook the entire house.  It’s now sitting squarely across the lower part of the yard.

Denis plans to fill this up with his stuff, and then have the man return and pick it up and move it into the yard at Oxford Street where Denis plans to live.  I hesitantly asked him if perhaps the neighbours there, it being such a suburban area of Kelowna and all, might not object to something like that in their line of sight.

Denis just said piffle to all of that, and is busy buying lumber and building some kind of weird interior.  I’m watching all of it with an odd sense of detachment, knowing that in a few weeks my yard is going to be pristine for the first time in 20 years.  But who knows, maybe I’ll grow nostalgic and ask the kids to put the shell of a vehicle up on blocks for me outside the garage.

To help Denis look like a hero at work I told him I’d make huge potato and Greek salads for him for a barbecue today with Shirley Bond, the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure.  So last night in preparation I boiled and peeled a bunch of eggs and put them into the fridge.

Naturally when I went to get the eggs this morning half of them had been eaten.  Did I mention that Luke’s home for a couple of weeks?  In preparation I went straight to Costco last week and got a box each of Taquitos and spanakopitas.  Showing some restraint, Luke said he was on a diet so declined my offer to make him some chocolate chip cookies.

I certainly didn’t decline any of the delicious morsels of food offered to me by the caterers at our friends Mark and Gitte’s 25th wedding anniversary party last Saturday.  They live in a beautiful house right at the base of Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver.  A full bar complete with a bartender were set up in the dining room, and all evening we were served platter after platter of fancy snacks.

The delicacies and sophistication of that evening seem far away as I sit here waiting for the plumber to plumb our toilet.  Upon querying each of the children last night, Nicky said he threw a bucket of water he’d used to clean the basement floor into the toilet, and ‘perhaps’ the cloth had still been in the bucket.

What can one do after 24 solid years of child-rearing but walk straight to the cupboard and get out the Tequila and Cointreau and mix a Margarita?  After all, one of these days all of these stories are going to seem very, very funny, right?