photo saturday: the least exciting birthday weekend

mermaid's tailtwo years on

pink mountainstruck saviour
Okay, first things first...

Ma had her second operation on his shoulder at the very end of May, and is now back in a sling and on the mend.

The doctor called me after the operation, which was very sweet of him, to tell me everything went well, and Ma's physiotherapist seems to think that even this early on in the process (two weeks on Tuesday), her shoulder is about at the stage that they would expect it to be in two more weeks. So that's all pretty good news.

It does mean that we're back to square one with everything else though, but hopefully she'll be improving in leaps and bounds and will be back to her old self before we know it.

This is also why there wasn't a post last weekend... she was staying with her friends so that a) she had somebody with her and b) didn't have to deal with any stairs.

But that also meant that I didn't go up to her place last weekend since there wasn't a lot of point.

So, rolling back the clock slightly...

A couple of Sundays back now, I went to see a documentary on Armistead Maupin as part of the American Essentials Film Festival... and it was fantastic. Interestingly enough I may very well have been one of the youngest people in the room, but most of the crowd were gay gentlemen of a certain age. And because the Universe has a twisted sense of humour, while I didn't know anybody else in the room, I was sitting right next to one of the two guys from the gay men's art group I posed for a few weeks back. Because of course I was.

I will say that the documentary made the final three Tales books make a hell of a lot more sense (from the perspective of who the main characters were and why they were written at all after so long). I'm also really interested to read Maupin's biography that he's currently working on, which should be out later in the year.

Otherwise it's been a couple of weeks of not very much of anything. I had a chiro appointment at the end of last week, so I headed into the city, had my appointment and then had a bit of a wander around town... although it's always a little bit less exciting when you don't have money to spend on inconsequentials.

And then at the beginning of the week I got a message that The Nuthouse was going for drinks. I will admit I was a little noncommittal originally, but figured I had to go and do it at least once.

What I didn't realise until after I'd already decided was that I also had the first of the three Cabaret Festival shows scheduled for the same night... although luckily not until 10:30, so I was able to go to drinks, be last man standing as usual, get some dinner and then head off to the show.

Downside being that because I wasn't going to get out of the show until after midnight, I really didn't want to walk home and the buses don't run that late, so I drove in and only had a couple of drinks early in the evening.

It was actually nice to see the people who showed up... and I got a nice chat with a number of them. As sometimes happens, especially either around a long weekend (also, side note, I actually had no idea this was a long weekend until someone mentioned it on Friday... because why the hell would I even remember that?) or at less than a week's notice, it was a reduced crew, but it was all good.

Weirdly it feels both like quite a long time since I've seen them all, and also no time at all.

The last person (La Ninj) left sometime after 8... so I ordered some food, had dinner and then wandered down to the Riverbank. I still had an hour and a half to kill, so I end up having a wander along the river, taking some photos and listening to a podcast to fill in the time, which was quite nice.

And given that Briefs is a show I generally to a lot of cheering and whatnot at, and I also have a tendency to lose some of my voice at the pub, I was a little bit screwed... I think I made it though about the first half hour of the show before my voice gave up on my completely (or at least made it so that I couldn't cheer all that loud). I didn't lose it, but I've been more than a little husky today.

By the time I walked back to the car after the show and got home it was pushing 1am, so it's not really a big surprise that I had a bit of a slow start this morning.

And I clearly wasn't firing on all cylinders when I left the house, because I went out without my wallet. Fortunately I did have cash on me... so I bought my groceries with cash. It's not the first time I've done that, but previously I've had Ma to bail me out... I'm just glad I had the money with me.

ma's 70th birthday presents - beforema's 70th birthday presents - after (not particularly exciting tbd)

This week was also Ma's 70th birthday... but given that she only came out of the hospital the week before, there wasn't a hell of a lot we could really do to celebrate. I'm just thankful that we never got really organised and made any plans for this particular birthday.

The Pop! Vinyls seem actually even more appropriate right now to be honest, because these are what caused the whole bloody arm dilemma in the first place. Ma was heading over to the shopping centre to see if they had either of those figures in stock so she could put it on her list for her Secret Santa.

As soon as she told me that I filed it away in the back of my head, but I had to wait until Christmas before I could do anything about it because I had to wait to see what she actually got (turned out she got a completely different, but totally appropriate Pop)... but as soon as that happened I jumped online and ordered these two.

The perfume was just part of the stockpile I bought before Christmas... whenever we see her favourite perfume on special I like to stock up so that I can ration them out at Christmas and her birthday.

And it turned out that Me From Last Year had already bought a card... I don't know if I mentioned it at the time, but after I'd run around looking for cards for both Ma and Owlgirl's birthdays last year I decided to go and look in one last place and bought cards for both of them which where better than the cards I'd already bought... so I quite happily went with what I already had to hand.

Also, the slippers were because she asked for them... granted she asked for a couple of pairs which I got for her and she paid me back for, this was an extra pair I just threw in because why not.

Like I said, we didn't do very much of anything... I spend most of the afternoon with her, we watched a godawful movie on teevee (and amused ourselves by making fun of it, at least until it got really frustrating by the last third or so) and I did a bunch of stuff for her she couldn't really do for herself.

So it was quite literally the least exciting birthday weekend either of us have had in quite a while (if not ever).

It's also definitely something we'll have to make up for later.

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