I could never date a weatherman.

I’m starting to develop trust issues. Every morning, I make the poor but optimistic decision to dress according to the weatherman’s forecast. So this morning, after three different meteorologists told me that my day would be filled with showers and storms, I abandoned my skirt-and-cute-sandals idea for the camp-counselor-chic baggy khakis and old runners. These particular khakis make people stare at my bum. Not because it’s amazing, but because they can’t find it. My trunk is junkless. But enough about my backside.

It didn’t rain. I even walked around downtown after work today, hoping to get caught in a downpour and thus making my grubbiness worth it. Nope. Perfectly dry. And now it will probably rain tomorrow, again threatening to demolish any trace of style I pretend to have….

My Weekend

Quite some time ago, my mom tried to sleep over at my place. “Try” is the key word here. I don’t think either of us slept. The place was hot, the boy next door left for the weekend after cranking his stereo and making my walls vibrate all night with hard rock, and Mom kept waking up in pain from trying to spend the night on my mini-loveseat. It was one of those experiences that made it easy to write off any future overnight guests.

This weekend, we gave it another go.

My mom spent the past week at her mom’s, and then bused it to Toronto early Friday evening. I met her at the station, and we took the subway over to my place. Of course, Mom also got to experience one of my strange transit conversations, sitting patiently through a stranger’s recipe for a veal dish I should make for my mother. Yeah. Too bad I don’t have red wine, peanut oil, flour, veal, or three hours to make her something neither of us really wanted to eat.

We dropped her stuff at my place and walked over to the ghetto Food Basics near my place. We made salad and fresh green beans before spending the evening playing Scrabble and eating no-name Pringles (which taste just as good as the real thing).

The whole point of the weekend was my birthday gift for my mom. I gave her an IOU for the Titanic Exhibit at the Science Centre. Fortunately, the Science Centre is only about a 15-minute bus ride from my place. After a reasonable good night’s sleep (Mom got my bed, I got the yoga mat. I don’t do yoga. I guess it’s a Pilates mat. And I slept quite soundly. And the boy behind the wall was silent. And the A/C was working), we headed out with our packed lunches, ready to learn.

I highly recommend it. I think both of us were quite inspired by the stories being told. The exhibit quite effectively focuses on telling the stories of passengers instead of just focusing on ice, steel and horsepower. When you enter, you’re given a ticket with a passenger’s name on it. Throughout the tour, you’re constantly on the lookout for your person. We were both ridiculously wealthy first-class passengers (Did you know that a first-class ticket would cost the equivalent of $75,000+ today?) By the end, you discover your fate. I survived. Mom chose to die with her husband. Two thumbs up (for the experience, not the death). Learning is cool, kids. When I was in the fourth grade, I was in a drama club where we would pretend to be on the Titanic. I can only imagine what we looked like, screaming while running on an angle, preparing to meet our fate during recess. (If you go, be sure to check out the Titanica feature playing at the Omnimax. Also excellent).

We ate lunch in the courtyard, wandered through the Science Centre (although I wasn’t quite as into trying to beat the world record in high jump as I was in elementary school, nor was I super-intrigued by random sparking wires), and headed out. We visit the small quasi-ghetto mall nearby and walked home with ice cream comes. Dad met us at my place and we ordered pizza from the place across the street. It was surprisingly awesome pizza. The place has 72 toppings. And I don’t need to write down the number, as I can just look out my window and dial.

It’s such a blessing to be able to host my parents. And such a relief to know that overnight guests aren’t quite as impossible as I once thought. If I could get an accurate weather forecast, all would be right in the world.