There are these tall, skinny houses in the Beaches. Marlene’s and my conversation went something like this:
“they’re really tall”
“and skinny”
“which is kind of cool”
“I think it would make you feel tall”
“of course it would suck if you couldn’t climb stairs”
“like say if you had a broken leg”
“or a hip replacement!”
“or you were pregnant!”
I can’t remember who said what, but that’s kind of the point: we were talking back and forth with rapid-fire speed while we did our usual bopping up and down. Lee, who was sedately walking his dog between us on the boardwalk, only had one comment:
“same voice box, same logic, look, stereo”
Heh. Given how much I like my sister, being told we’re very similar is only a compliment in my books. And Lee gets bonus points for hanging out with the extremely hyper Wandel sisters this weekend. He didn’t even try to run away and hide. Though once, when we went into the chocolate store, he stayed outside with the dog. And disappeared! We came out, chocolate in hand, and no Lee. We had been ditched! (So we ate his chocolate. What would you do? Except, of course, then Lee came back and we were well on our way to starting a sugar rush, and the only way people on a sugar rush are bearable is if you’re on a sugar rush yourself, so Marlene went and bought some more chocolate while I guarded Lee to make sure he didn’t give us the slip again. Because then we’d have to eat his chocolate again!)
Chocolate was only appropriate: it was the weekend of indulging in our obsession. And this weekend was all about our Fred Eaglesmith obsession. I had a flight credit to use up before it expired, and in August Marlene and I started poring over the Fred schedule to see where and when our attack should be: should I fly to Thunder Bay? Should she come here? We ended up settling on a Fred double-header at Hugh’s Room: there were four shows scheduled, and two of them were on a weekend. Rather than decide on one or the other, we decided to show no restraint and buy tickets for both! Because they were different shows: one was the Flying Squirrels show, and one was the Smokin’ Losers show, and really, you shouldn’t have to decide between ice cream and cookie dough either and that’s why cookie dough ice cream exists so the Fred double-header can also exist. Besides, there were people who went for a Fred quadruple-header! We were mild in our obsession, really! And not at all freakish, because Lee, who is a sane grown-up and has no Wandel blood in him at all, also decided to go to both shows, so this is perfectly normal.
And if you’re going to see two shows in Toronto on consecutive nights, you might as well stay… and thus the dog walking in the Beaches interlude, as well as the coffee shop with the slab of fudge-peanut butter-brownie cake and scrabble game and the greasy breakfast and the poking around stores on Queen East and general hick-like behaviour because we got to go to the city! I don’t think we stopped bouncing up and down and chattering the entire time. Except maybe when we had a sugar crash, and got grumpy and decided we needed naps.
So, really, let me sum up the highlights of the weekend for you:
Sister! Fred Eaglesmith! Beer! Dinner! Lee’s house! Being woken up by a dog! Breakfast! Walk! Beaches! Chocolate! More chocolate! Scrabble! Wine! Dinner! Fred Eaglesmith again!
(I think I would need a lot of naps if I was around my sister all the time, because being hyper makes us all tuckered out after a few days. Hence the mellow multi-lingual Scrabble playing on Sunday, where we discovered that we don’t, after all, speak German, we only thought we did…)