Victoria, I have missed your face.

I have been in Victoria for four days and have hiked Mt Doug three times.  Because it is Victoria, it usually rains on us while we are hiking, and then by the time I've gotten home and showered it looks like this:

Victoria is a contrary beast.

When I'm not hiking, I go for a lot of coffee.  Or Erika (the woman at whose house we are staying) and I go for lunch.  I should have asked her years ago for eating advice, because she knows all the good places, like the alleged best donair place in town (it is tragically closed on Mondays.  We may go there next week, or I may never confirm it's 'best donair' status).  At any rate, we had to settle for a smoked meat sandwich and poutine, which we shared, obviously.  I mean, come on.

La Belle Potate, you guys.  Serves mainly truckers and mechanics and hungry pregnant women.  Will give you extra pickles if you appear to be gestating.  The non-small poutine seemed like a mistake, but upon further reflection (the next day at lunch, while we ate the leftovers crisped up in the toaster oven) was probably the right idea.

In which I catch you up.

Mes amis, I have been neglecting you.  It has been...busy is the wrong word.  Full, maybe.

I went to see Robyn and Meredith and to pick Robyn's brain re: car seats and cribs, and to nibble on Meredith's fat baby arms.  Also, we had pulled pork.  Lucky for the arms.

I went to see my doctor and am still pregnant and appropriately fat, which counts as a successful visit in my books.

Anna came to visit and I picked HER brains re: post-maternity boobs, and we each bought a lovely blue-and-white-striped dress, which I will wear as a shirt.  One day I will do a post for you on my regular-clothes-as-maternity-clothes, because it's been working out well.

Also, I bought fat-pants.

They are comfortable like I can't even tell you.  And yet?  Most of me is still like Ugh, pants.  So I also bought leggings in a larger size, as to not have two waists.  Leggings-and-dresses feels very like the leggings-and-oversized-shirts of my childhood, only classier.

Have I mentioned that the family (boo and Darren, Matt and Gillian) all comes over for dinner on Thursdays?  And that company requires dessert?  Someone, possibly Amy Sedaris, compared raw ground beef to a woman putting on her stockings, i.e. it is the stage of the process that you should never let anyone see, because it taints the final product.  I feel that way about a lot of steps in food-making.  Like, no one needs to see the cinnamon buns when they are just a sheet of dough slathered in butter, with my hands all up in them (what.  You don't use your hands to spread the butter?).  Even seeing them at this stage is a bit deterring.

But there are about thirty seconds between them coming out of the oven and them being eaten, and those thirty seconds are required to frost them.  Besides, the lighting is bad then anyways.

Mum and I went to Target today.  I freaking love Target.  I have mostly been subsisting on non-maternity wear because maternity clothes are expENsive and also they come in sad colors and make me sad, unless they are LIZ LANGE FOR TARGET!  Target, why you no come to Canada?  You better re-make the hell out of those Zellerses you bought.

Also?  Someone bought teeny pink polka-dotted shoes.  I'm not going to name any names, but it sure wasn't me.  Yet.

We stopped at Five Guys Burgers on the way home, and somehow I missed the memo about the 'regular' burger being a double.

Mum got the 'little burger' in the background.  It was regular-burger-sized.  The fries were nothing to write home about

but the burgers tasted like being invited over by someone who is very good at bbq, and also has an enormous condiment-and-toppings table.  Also, my burger was, like, five dollars.

Now I am packing to go to Victoria for two weeks, and Joel is coming home tomorrow, and it is highly likely that I will nap between now and bedtime.

It is a wide and varied place.

Last night I went to the Richmond night market, which is all fried squid heads

and mushroom shoots wrapped in beef strips

and pork brains sui mai

and scallops with wasabi mayo

and steamed buns filled with pulled pork

and incongruous cowboys

and smoke and haze and shouting and rain.

And then this morning I went to the Granville Island market, which is all $110 handmade totes and paperies and hats with tulle and carefully-stacked fruits.

And I ate fried treats at each.

Moar shelves, please.

Wherever we set up camp, I like to have my Big Red Chair by my bookshelves so that I can use the shelves as a series of side-tables.  This is why we never have any clean mugs in the house.

It's also why I can never find any of my rings.

That one shelf is filthy because it's where I store my feet when I'm not using them.

I have been a crafty fish

I have been alchemizing some things.  Ok so yes, I am turning me and Joel into me, Joel, and a third person, but that is a very hands-free activity.

Hands-wise, in my spare time I have turned this pile of fabric

into this jaunty skirt

and this pile of fabric

into this sack-like dress

which I patterned after this dress

which I bought in Turkey and whipped on one day, figuring I could still wear it since IT IS A SACK, before realizing that even sacks have their limits.  And then also this dress which I could never solve the boobs of

into this skirt, which has no boobs at all

and a bunch of bibs and babs into this necklace

and an old sheet into this pillowcase for my much-beloved body pillow.

And also, I've been lugging around my booze-bottles-full-of-change from when I worked at Red Robin, both because I liked the way they looked and because I was too lazy to roll them.

I always said to myself that one day I'd be poor and pregnant and have no money for clothes, and that I'd roll them then, and LO!  Here we are.  So I turned this (the birdhouse is full of quarters.  Not full, because I used to raid it for bus fare, but full-ish)

into this

and eventually into $187-worth of Things That Fit Me.

I am a freaking wizard.

In the nick.

Yesterday was allegedly the last nice day for a while, so we had an impromptu bbq on the beach.

Good thing we got there before the sun went down.

Oh no.  Wait.  That is the moon.

Burgers ahoy.

Cruisecation: Day Nine

And then we got up ass-early for expedited ship-leaving, because if you're not off the ship by 7:30 you have to wait and have your bags taken by the stewards and then returned to you later and somewhere else, instead of just hauling them off yourself like a champ.

We had one last tater-totty breakfast at 5:30 and were off the ship by 6:30, at the airport checking our bags by 8 and driving around, looking for anything to be open at 9 on what we'd forgotten was a Sunday, until we finally just went for second-breakfast.  Joel and I bought bad-ass neon South Beach souvenirs for his siblings, as one does.

We were weirdly separated on the Miami-Houston flight, with Joel sitting way over there beside a shrieking infant, and me, mom and dad back here behind three drunken, singing hooligans, and Matt and Gillian directly in front of said hooligans and beside a Consummate Chatterer, and boo and Darren somewhere else (in front of the shrieking infant, I believe).  It was the worst flight for all of us, but especially Gillian, who had both drunken singing and incessant photo-showing to contend with.

But at least it was the short flight, and at least the flight from Houston to Vancouver was sparsely populated, and at least the limo got us home safely, and at least we managed to squeeze a cruise into the two-week window between when Joel finished school and when Joel started school again, and at least everyone found time off work, and at least this baby is still self-watering.  Vive la vacation!

Cruisecation: Day Eight

This was our last day on the boat, so all of the things we'd planned to do before our cruise was over came a-calling.

Get burgers and fries and onion rings and shakes at Johnny Rockets?

Check.

Ride the carousel?

Check.

Take photos by the expensive car while the photographer is on lunch so that he doesn't charge us to take photos by the expensive car?

Check.

Browse the shops for over-priced souvenirs, including $3000 bottles of whisky?

Check.

Eat at the cupcakery, even though we were already too full to live?

Check.  Oh cupcakes, you were such a dry disappointment.

Climb the climbing wall?

Check for everyone who wanted to, except for me because I was too fat to fit into a harness.

Between the burgers and the bottomless onion rings and the cupcakes, I was the least hungry I'd ever been.  But that has never deterred me from a pineapple and raspberry soup:

a bacon gnocci:

and a key lime tart.

And then we all went back to our rooms and moaned over our bellies and mournfully packed up our things.

Cruisecation: Day Seven

Day six, so boring.  I mean, so fun to do, so boring to read about.  Day seven, so much things!

Ok so we had signed up to go to Chichen Itza because it's one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  Rad, right?  Except that once we got on the bus, the driver is all, Sad face, Chichen Itza is closed today for political reasons.  I mean, we could drive the three hours there just to see if it's open...  And everyone was like, Grumble grumble but I paid for Chichen Itza grumble, but in the end we went to Tulum instead and it worked out better, at least for me.

Because it was HOT, you guys.  And I am very fat and I generate heat from the inside, and it seems that the fatter I get, the lower my tolerance for being hot gets, so I am always TOO HOT TO LIVE.  So while the ruins at Tulum were no Chichen Itza, they were pretty ruinous (and contained, as advertised, muchas iguanas)

AND were immediately adjacent to this:

Like, you come around a corner and BEACH.  Some of us pulled off our clothes while we raced to the water, since we had opted for swimsuits instead of underwear (too hot), and some of us just went in in our clothes, and we were all of us immediately less crabby.

Chichen Itza is very inland and, one imagines, breezeless.  We will go back one day when I am not so pregnant and it is not so August, maybe.  I predict that it, like Tulum (and Greece), will not be Turkey, which is to say we will not be allowed to CLIMB on the ruins and will be disappointed.

We had a few minutes to wander around the market before our bus took off, and boo and I bought sister-skeletons.  The guy wanted $30 each but was willing to give us two for $50.  We talked him down to giving us both skeletons for $31.

Señor Bones is an avid reader

The ferry from Tulum back to Cozumel played an endless loop of internet-style cat photos, three Irish lasses singing Enya, and a commercial for a '100% monogamy' fragrance that seemed to borrow in all seriousness from Eric Zoolander's 'moisture is the essence of wetness' commercial.

I hadn't been hungry in days, but slothing sweatily around ruins and, more importantly, being off the boat for the day will give you an appetite.  Behold my roasted butternut squash, white bean and arugula salad with lime vinaigrette!

Behold my foccacia bread salad with buffalo mozzarella!

But whither the fruit soups today?  Alas.  Behold instead my insanely delicious and filling spinach and ricotta pasta with pesto and marinara!

And my mile-high lemon meringue tart!

Mom and dad had found a bottle of champagne in their room, which we thought might be due to the Chichen Itza mix-up, but was instead to compensate for the buttons on dad's suit that the laundry people chipped.  So we had a champagne party.

the towel-pig drank mine

And then maybe we went for second-dinner at the trough for tempura and cobbler before heading to Blue Planet: The Most Unexplainably Terrible Show On Earth.

I can't even...it was cheesy but not on purpose?  The dancing was terrible?  The singing was operatic and also terrible?  It was made up entirely of singing and dancing, and was therefore completely terrible?  A girl came out and sang 'What A Wonderful World,' a song that never needs to be sung again unless it's going to be roughed up a bit, AND changed the first line to 'I see trees that are green' which is somehow even more banal than the original 'trees of green'?  Another girl came out in increasingly hideous but all eerily similar Renaissance Fair gowns?  Both guy-singers were skeevy?  They ruined Higher Ground for me?

And then we all went for a night-swim and laughed about how terrible it had been.