Train Ride

The train to Ottawa was mostly without incident. My mom does this thing where she starts doing a bunch of stuff in a flurry right before I leave. One time I went to Montreal with wet laundry because my mom graciously did my laundry but ran out of time to dry it. She almost got into one of these moods again, but I convinced her it was better to have dry clothes.

As we rode through the Ontario countryside I saw Lizy looking out the window at the scenery.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” I said.

She looked at me confused, “I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking how lucky we are that we moved to California.”

Arrival

Lizy’s mom had delicious cabbage rolls waiting for us at the house. After dinner she showed me around her garden. She was growing potatoes for the first time that year. In the front she had planted patches of thyme.

“It’s good to grow because it doesn’t grow too tall like grass and it keeps away the mosquitoes,” she said.

Working

I was working remotely during the week in the office upstairs. I was coordinating with an intern on a project to understand role chains in AWS logs and was also doing some stuff around permission expandability.

Italian Festival

I don’t have notes for the Ottawa Italian Festival, but I have some photos. We ate vietnamese food after visiting the festival.

Family Friends

On Wednesday, Christine, Joan and Jack came over to the house for a barbecue. They are family friends from when Lizy was a kid. Jack is super energetic and extroverted. He says he gets it from his Sicilian heritage. His wife, Christine, had just retired from real estate, but he said he was never going to join her. He was going to work until the day he died. He still stayed at the office until 7pm most days. But for us he made an exception.

Polish Friends

On Friday, Elizabeth had Polish family friends come over for a barbecue. She made terrific salmon. Zosha brought over her three- and one-year-olds. I chased the three-year-old around the garden. He was a funny kid.

I drank some shots of mezcal with the Polish fathers. They stopped early, or so they said. I don’t think I could’ve kept up if they had hit the drinks any harder. Andy had bought the Mezcal during our trip to Mexico City.

Peter claimed to have never gotten drunk. “Sometimes I see people around me get drunk, but it never happens to me. I just drink and drink and I always stay sober.”

I guess he was just like Socrates.

Lizy made an announcement that she was pregnant. Everyone was excited.

Later that night Lizy had trouble sleeping because she couldn’t figure out what to name him.

“Maybe Mordecai?” she whispered to me.

“Maybe Magoo?” I said.

Cory’s house

We went over to Cory’s house for lunch with Lizy’s parents. Magda’s parents were there too, and the parents had instant chemistry. Everyone except Cory and I spoke Polish. We felt outnumbered.

Cory had put out a simple spread of bagels and cheese. He had gotten me dairy-free cream cheese. We talked mostly about the kid and about what we needed for ours. I held their new baby, Aurora, for a while. She was very content. She kept falling in and out of sleep.

Conclusion

That’s all I remember about Ottawa. After Ottawa we flew back to San Francisco.