Growing up my parents were hard on us. Grade 2 was very traumatic for me. While we were living in the apartment, my father was teaching me algebra where I had to solve for both x and y. I remember yelling and arguing with my father that you could not solve for x and y at once. I was a bit young to understand substituting some of it with letters. Afterwards when we moved my father decided to traumatize me again when we moved to our new house. I did not know that we were moving and when i came home I saw that our apartment was completely empty. I remember being worried about what I was going to do and I thought that my parents forgot about me. My dad then showed up in the rental truck and most likely laughed at me and brought me to our new house. When we arrived at the new house there was a kid from down the street that was running amok throughout our house and climbing within the closets. We never became friends as he was a bit too wild and younger than I was. This is also when I first walked into my backyard, looked up the hill and saw a kid that would play a large role in my life for the next 40+ years.
Today was a slow day, Mel and I went to grab some breakfast and coffee from various places and then we came back to the hotel where I did work until it was time for lunch. There were two things that I had wanted to order for this trip. I wanted to have a chicken shwarma and I also wanted to order pizza from a place where I use to order from when I lived in Ottawa. I managed to have shwarma for lunch and the pizza for my 10pm snack. The pizza that I use to order was pepperoni, bacon, green olives and feta cheese. Pizza in Ottawa is super heavy on cheese and the pizza was like I had remembered. It was salty deliciousness and everyone enjoyed them. I am not sure if I ate a lot today or not as we ate through most of the day and had quite a few drinks. I had a craving for a slushie on the way back from the hockey game and told Mel that if we saw a Circle K on the right side of the street that we would stop. A couple of minutes later, one appeared and we made a quick pit stop. We ventured out this afternoon to Costco Business Center and picked up some supplies that we can not get in Sudbury and then off to T&T to buy some fruit and random snacks and ramen. I managed to get in close to 3500 steps today which is quite a bit. Fatigue levels have been exceptional as I have not felt very tired throughout this. I had spoken with one of my nurses from supportive care and she was not too concerned with my ascites at the moment and thinks that I can hold off for another week or two and get drained then. The longer I can wait between drainages the better.
Xavier’s hockey game tonight was interesting. He had a bit of a rough start to the game where he let in a couple of goals. The goals were not bad goals in the first period, but they are things that I expect him to save. In the third period we were done 2 men due to a penalty where we were shorthanded for 5 whole minutes because of a major penalty. The team has some very skilled players on the team and they managed to score 3 goals during this period. Xavier almost made a beautiful slide across desperation save with his glove but it went off his pad and glove and into the net. When we were down 5 to 1 I did not think that we could come back, but the other goalie was not that great and we did not get a lot of shots on them. In the third period we managed to score 3 goals and Xavier stopped 13 shots for us to salvage a tie. He tends to play well in the clutch and make key saves when it matters for the team. There were multiple breakaways in the third period that he stopped and it was a bit nerve wracking as we kept on getting more and more penalties. After the game he did not make any excuses for his play and Mel asked him what he could have done different and his reply was sometimes he is just not playing well and there is not much he can do. In his defense most of the goals were 1 on 1 situations with the shooter, odd man rushes or after rebounds. The issue is that the expectation is that he saves that, and he expects it of himself, so when he does not then that is a failure. He will review the videos once we get home and have them uploaded. He has kept up his streak of winning player of the game at least once in every tournament as he received it for the first game. The coach said he kept them in this game as well, despite letting in 5 goals. He will need to up his game in the tomorrow if we are to advance. In the morning we are playing kids he knows so it should be interesting. I am always surprised at the number of kids that know who he is, even though he does not always know who they are,
So far this weekend has been a resounding success. Except for the impact on my wallet with everything that we are doing. Mel wants to save money, yet she wants all of these large items for renovating our basement and outdoors. We have enough money to pay for it all, but it also means less money can go into savings. She wonders where all of our money goes. It is iced lattes and avocado toast. Once we get through this round of renovations we can start saving up our money again in 2027. Until then we will spend all of our money on upgrading things.
QHM