Just not here.
Which brings us to last night. A Friday night with no son around, beautiful weather, and a new cocktail recipe book called, “It’s 5 o’clock Somewhere“. Drink recipes from around the world. I’m not a huge drinker (college kind of cured me of that) but this book looked fun.
A quick trip to the liquor store from some creme de cassis, gin, and other specialty drink ingredients and we have the opportunity for a little fun on the patio while watching a sunset, punctuated by the squirrels jumping onto and emptying our bird feeder. Oh, the hilarity! Who needs to go out when this type of show is free in the backyard?
And then it happened… The photo shoot call. “Please come to our function and photograph the election and installation of officers. We only need you for an hour.”
Call back answer, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
“Great, but now we need you for 4 hours.”
“Even better! I had no plans to spend time with my wife!” Giving me the thumbs up and cheesey smile while on the phone. Hey, cheesey smile and thumbs up back at ya! while mentally I’m dialing a divorce attorney…
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back at 9:30pm so I’ll have plenty of time to charge up the batteries for tomorrow’s wedding. And maybe we can hang together for a few minutes before bed since tomorrow’s start time is early!” Oh yeah, that was my big concern. Guess I’ll be drinking on the patio by myself this evening. Isn’t that how alchoholism starts?
But wait! I’m the forgiving person! So 9:00pm rolls around and I think to myself, “It’s still 5:00pm somewhere in the world. I’ll just pretend I’m in the Alaskan time zone.” I make a couple of our Blackberry Bramble drinks, light a few candles and wait to greet my hardworking hubby.
All of a sudden, I realize I’m not in Alaska anymore. I’m working my way into the Hawaiian/Aleutian time zone… It’s 5 o’clock there…
I finish my drink. Watch a field mouse run out and back on the patio, hear some bats squeaking overhead, swat some June bugs that are flying by me.
His ice has melted. I better polish off his drink since it’s now watered down from the ice water. Wait, it’s 6 o’clock in Hawaii now. Is Samoa the next time zone? Is it an hour behind Hawaii? I really don’t care as I make the third drink of the night.
Finally I throw in the towel and put another melted ice drink on the kitchen counter. Part of me says to drink it. Part of me says a hangover will be my best friend in the morning if I do. I leave it as a testament of the missed together time.
Paul finally comes home. Oooops, those pesky elections took longer than expected. He polished off the drink on the counter. He proclaimed it watery.
Yeah, go figure. Wonder what the next drink I’ll try alone will be…
You’re probably wondering what I did for Father’s Day, given that wonderfully disappointing Mother’s Day.
I took the high road and planned out a getaway weekend in Baltimore, visiting Inner Harbor and the B&O Train Museum. The plan was to leave Saturday morning, after shooting a wedding on Friday night. Visit the National Aquarium Saturday afternoon, stay overnight at the Inner Harbor Renaissance Hotel, right on the waterfront, then trip over to the train musem the next day for Father’s Day.
Paul loves trains. So this would be a really cool trip for him to see that big roundhouse and all those locomotives perfectly restored. I felt I had really hit the mark with this surprise adventure.
Until…
He tells me that he needs to shoot a photo session on Father’s Day. I guess the people who scheduled it didn’t have a father, or they hated their father. Who knows. The only thing I got was that the celebration I had planned was in jeopardy. And not the show with Alex Tribec.
Did I ever metion that I tried out for Jeopardy (the game show)? It was one of the hardest thing I ever did. But easier than being married…
Anyhoo, back to the story.
Seething doesn’t really cover the extent of my reaction. Here we had a weekend where we could actually get away to celebrate a normal person holiday and Mr. I-love-photography-more-than-you was telling me he was going to schedule a shoot. So after making his “I don’t know what you had planned but this photo shoot would be WAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY cooler than that” pitch to have me cancel our plans, I laid it out on the table that “You don’t know what your missing because this trip is WAAAAYYYYYYYYYY cooler than any photo shoot and it will be even COOLER for ME if I take a date!”
I think he got the message.
We ended up in Baltimore, as planned, and I even let Paul use my two good lenses on his camera. I think photographing the sharks made him happy. I know photographing the trains made him happy.
Next year’s Mother’s Day better be good.
Let’s start with Mother’s Day.
Ok, granted the exact date moves around from year to year, but basically everyone knows it’s in May. And everyone knows that May follows April, etc., etc.
So when asked, wait, no. Strike that. When I mentioned off-hand one day that I would really like to go to a Mother’s Day buffet, I thought my gift request was simple to understand and carry out. I wasn’t asking that the men of the house make me breakfast, buy me something extreme, or send them on some mythical quest to the unknown for the Holy Grail. It was, “Let’s do brunch”.
Before going much further, I should probably explain why brunch on Mother’s Day is a big deal. Normally, since moving to Pittsburgh, every Mother’s Day was spent running the Komen Race for the Cure 5K. While this is a great event and we would raise $1000 for the event, it also meant getting up at 4am, driving to Oakland, fighting other racers for parking, standing out in the chilly morning, running up and down some insane hills, becoming completely drenched in sweat, and fighting our way out of Oakland to drive back home. All of this feel good activity would occur right in the prime brunch hours. Paul and I would usually photograph a wedding the night before, getting to bed around 1am, which meant exhaustion as well. And those who have met me know that I am not a runner. I hate it. But this is one event where I will run, even while cursing under my breath the people who invented asphalt and the ancient geologic forces that shaped the Pittsburgh terrain. I ran this event for 7 years straight, even one year when I flew in from San Francisco the night before.
So last year Paul begged me not to sign us up for the Komen if we had a wedding the night before. Something about his body being old, beat up, blah blah blah. Ok, I agreed.
Enter 2009. Wedding scheduled for May 10th. No Komen race to be run. I decided that brunch would be a nice, nice, nice thing since I didn’t get to do Mother’s Day brunch any other year.
What could be easier?
As Paul found out, making Mother’s Day brunch reservations tends to not be a cake walk if you try to make them 4 days before the blessed Sunday event…
Who knew that other families would be taking THEIR moms out for breakfast as well? Come on, brunch with Mom? This had to be some novel idea that no one else would do on Mother’s Day!
So instead of having brunch out, I ended up making my own breakfast because the guys were too tied up in their own thing to get out a mixing bowl and spatula. My son did go out and get me a card and a Barnes & Noble gift card. That was nice.
Paul, however, seemed to think that picking up the phone and attempting to make reservations constituted the whole of his effort. So when I asked him if I could have my MD card, he was stunned that I would want one. Instead, his MD present to me was making the bed and doing the dishes. Wow. What a keeper. Two things he does anyways.
To redeem himself, on May 23rd he ran out and bought a birthday card for me. By crossing out all the “birthday” and hand writing in “Mother’s Day”, he felt this was acceptable to make me feel exhaulted and appreciated.
Hands off, ladies. He’s all mine.
I’ve been absent for a while. Not because Mr. Addicted-to-everything-Nikon has been good and attentive. No, far from it. It’s because I had too much fodder to write about and needed to organize my thoughts into separate stories for greater clarity.
So much to tell…