House Arrest
It's been another long lull between entries and, as always, I'm sorry. I've been too busy to write. No, that's not right: I have been too *lazy* to write. But I have had a lot on my plate. Busy with the job, busy moving, busy corralling contractors to work on my apartment, weekends out of town, and I just bought an iguana, so, you know...ok I did not buy an iguana, but everything else is true.
So some of you are probably wondering: Dan, while you are waiting for your apartment to be renovated, what's it like to live at your dad's house? You know, two swinging, Westmount bachelors, tearing up the town? Here's a little taste:
Last night I came home from work at 7pm and took a nap. My dad got in at 9pm, woke me up, and asked me, as he always does, when I was planning on moving out all the "goddamn furniture" that my sister and I were storing in his house. This cross-examination occurs every time I visit, and now that I am a temporary resident, I wonder if this will happen every night? Only time will tell. Just some background: my father lives alone in a cozy, tiny, 7-bedroom house. It's just him and the cat, a black and white beast who rules the basement with an iron paw. So there is, understandably, very little storage space. Most of our furniture is being stored in a small, corner room on the 2nd floor, a room visited by my father with even less frequency than the room which houses a treadmill, bought and used by his second wife. My dad does not "do" treadmills.
Anyhow, after he agreed, as he always does, that the furniture could stay a little while longer, we sat in the kitchen and counted all the spare change I had accumulated in my apartment over the past 2 years. I think my dad enjoys counting money, and this is partially due, I believe, to the attempted kidnapping of his nephew some 40 years ago. His older cousin's German housekeeper had attempted to kidnap their only child. It ended quickly and peacefully, thanks to the help of the RCMP, but there was a demand for ransom money, and my Dad, I guess a good math student at the time, was entrusted with counting the money. I guess even if you aren't good at math, you know not to screw up counting the ransom money, so I guess that his skill is forever heightened due to the urgency of that one episode, where you could not afford to screw up. I wonder if my math struggles in high school would have been mitigated by a family kidnapping? Would my possible acing of trigonometry and algebra been worth the possible sustained psychological trauma? Follow-up question: if it was my stepmother being kidnapped, would I have cared enough to count accurately? I just don't know.
Anyhow, 4 years ago my Dad bought one of those change counter gizmos where the change goes round and round and is counted and sorted by denomination. He loves this machine, but rarely gets to use it. This machine is communism: In theory, it is supposed to take all the money you have and divvy it up in a central "system"...but it is a seriously flawed mechanism and you learn that, in the end, it works better as a theory than as a real-life solution. Counting by hand was faster, which we did. I was in bed by 10pm. I am not sure what tonight's activity will be, but i have a feeling it might involve alphabetizing my father's tapes of Law & Order. Please don't pinch me - I do not want this dream to end.
So some of you are probably wondering: Dan, while you are waiting for your apartment to be renovated, what's it like to live at your dad's house? You know, two swinging, Westmount bachelors, tearing up the town? Here's a little taste:
Last night I came home from work at 7pm and took a nap. My dad got in at 9pm, woke me up, and asked me, as he always does, when I was planning on moving out all the "goddamn furniture" that my sister and I were storing in his house. This cross-examination occurs every time I visit, and now that I am a temporary resident, I wonder if this will happen every night? Only time will tell. Just some background: my father lives alone in a cozy, tiny, 7-bedroom house. It's just him and the cat, a black and white beast who rules the basement with an iron paw. So there is, understandably, very little storage space. Most of our furniture is being stored in a small, corner room on the 2nd floor, a room visited by my father with even less frequency than the room which houses a treadmill, bought and used by his second wife. My dad does not "do" treadmills.
Anyhow, after he agreed, as he always does, that the furniture could stay a little while longer, we sat in the kitchen and counted all the spare change I had accumulated in my apartment over the past 2 years. I think my dad enjoys counting money, and this is partially due, I believe, to the attempted kidnapping of his nephew some 40 years ago. His older cousin's German housekeeper had attempted to kidnap their only child. It ended quickly and peacefully, thanks to the help of the RCMP, but there was a demand for ransom money, and my Dad, I guess a good math student at the time, was entrusted with counting the money. I guess even if you aren't good at math, you know not to screw up counting the ransom money, so I guess that his skill is forever heightened due to the urgency of that one episode, where you could not afford to screw up. I wonder if my math struggles in high school would have been mitigated by a family kidnapping? Would my possible acing of trigonometry and algebra been worth the possible sustained psychological trauma? Follow-up question: if it was my stepmother being kidnapped, would I have cared enough to count accurately? I just don't know.
Anyhow, 4 years ago my Dad bought one of those change counter gizmos where the change goes round and round and is counted and sorted by denomination. He loves this machine, but rarely gets to use it. This machine is communism: In theory, it is supposed to take all the money you have and divvy it up in a central "system"...but it is a seriously flawed mechanism and you learn that, in the end, it works better as a theory than as a real-life solution. Counting by hand was faster, which we did. I was in bed by 10pm. I am not sure what tonight's activity will be, but i have a feeling it might involve alphabetizing my father's tapes of Law & Order. Please don't pinch me - I do not want this dream to end.
posted by filthy soapbox at 7:16 AM
1 comments
