Tag: entertainment

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It’s Friday – beige dinner night. Also: vacations

Well, not all beige. Some nights – like tonight – we’re doing pizza. My favourite recipe for pizza is this Ultimate Vegan Pizza recipe by The Buddhist Chef. Even if you don’t make the cheez (which you should try as it is delicious) it is an amazing recipe for the crust alone. If you oil a square baking sheet before spreading out the crust, it’s even crispier! We’re having it with salad – so again, not beige – but it’s a Caesar salad so the green is just for show.

It’s strange to think about now but we are setting up our plans for summer vacation. Typically we go somewhere in the winter but of course no one is going anywhere this year. As much as we love travel, it’s been nice to not have to have another rushed vacation with the kids. Mr. Tucker also really enjoyed his week at home doing nothing but a few house chores during the week at Christmas. So because of that, he is going to take two weeks off during the summer: one week for the cottage week with two other families, and one week to stay home, relax, and get a few odd jobs around the house.

While these plans chose us this year, it is also nice to be able to save money by not going anywhere this year. Mr. Tucker and I have some fairly intense financial goals over the next three years and so we have actually nixed international travel for the foreseeable future (unless one of us gets an astronomical windfall or raise).

If I am perfectly honest, we’ve also seen a lot with the kids: we’ve been to Disney World twice, Universal Studios once, and we’ve seen most of the Caribbean and many countries in Central America – including a cruise through the Panama Canal. They’ve been on boat cruise in NYC on New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty, and stayed in Venice Beach & walked around Hollywood. It’s enough for kids who are only 10 & 12! Besides, the Bean is in jr. high now and taking time off in winter is just not as do-able as it was when they were in primary school.

At the end of our three years of tight budgeting and saving, we can make decisions then. But until we reach the end of those 30 months, it’s going to be very lean: we will have enough to live a really good life but not a little wiggle room for anything outside that. Right now we are leveraging the fact that we can’t go out in the pandemic to kickstart our new habit to reach our goals. Nothing makes staying home easier than an emergency stay-at-home order.

So our rowdy weekend plans include homemade pizza and a movie on the big screen (the projector in our basement rec room). In fact, this pretty much looks like our rowdy weekend plans for the next 3 years – and I am ok with that. Besides, this idiot has 136 more books to read before the end of the year!

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Pandemic positives – Trivial Pursuit

By now we are four months into the lockdown that started in March & it looks like life as we knew it has changed forever. Of course, after September 11 life changed monumentally as well but because we have 19 years distance between that event and life today, most of the changes seem normal now. Life does change, sometimes slowly and sometimes drastically but not all of those changes are for the worse. While we are still managing the fallout from recent events, some people are saying that they appreciate things like being able to work from home, not rushing from activity-to-activity all the time, and spending more time together as a family (although, some people feel the opposite is true).

One of my favourite pandemic activities has been getting together once-a-week with friends to play Trivial Pursuit. Now, I am a HUGE trivia buff but I have terrible recall. My friends on the other hand are trivia masters & one of them has even been on Jeopardy. So while my chances of winning are low, that’s not the point. The point is that I get to virtually see my friends – in three different time zones & two different countries – and we get to laugh & joke and play games. For a very small window of time I get to connect with my friends & it feels almost normal.

We all know that online meetings lack the intimacy of in-person connection but it’s better than no connection at all. I’ve gone from seeing all of them in the past year to probably not seeing them at all for at least a year. That is the problem when some of your closest friends live far away. But we are no strangers to distance: our connection was brought together because of the internet and so we are used to most of our communication being digital. So our weekly TP game is just in addition to our interaction both online and via group chats.

Honestly though, our weekly game is one of my favourite nights of the week. It can be chaotic with dogs, kids, and people eating dinner (that pesky time zone issue) but for me, it’s become one of the best things to have come out of this pandemic. I really hope that when things get normalized and when we can do other things with our evenings that we really make the effort to continue our game night on some scale. It’s really nice to connect with your friends even if it is only virtually.