Surprise...

"I'm like a vault, baby; locked down."
- Will Smith, Hitch

Kids love keeping exciting secrets, like others' Christmas presents. Well, all except actually keeping the secret.

When I was a small child at Christmas, my dad came home and I immediately announced that I couldn't tell him what his present was, 'cause it was PURPLE SLIPPERS WITH NO FLOWERS ON THEM.
Sorry, Ma.

Fast forward to the new generation. I brought the boys to help buy a present for their dad. Spoiler: it's a thermos with a cup on top. (I daresay *I* didn't spoil it, though).

So we're at Canadian Tire and the kids are giddy with delight at being in on this clandestine operation (cue Mission: Impossible music). They were a great help, though I had to steer them away from the idea that a Bubba Keg-sized thermos would be an EXTRA great surprise.

On the way home, the car is full of adrenaline as the kids clutch the purchase and discuss the best hiding spot, which cannot be somewhere boring like in a drawer because Dad might just get a new and sudden urge to root through random drawers, and we can't risk that.

Dad won't be home for 2 hours, but time is of the essence. We gotta get this thing in the house, or all will be lost.

So because buzzkill Mom won't get out the ladder for them to climb to the attic, they decide on a drawer, but to be doubly sure that Dad doesn't stumble upon it in his random drawer-snooping activities, they make a big sign with his face with a line through it. There.

Now all they need to do is keep it secret for 2 weeks.

(Later that day: )

*sigh* Like a vault, baby. Locked down.

Merry Christmas!

First Date Problems

Anytime someone tells me, "I hate driving in downtown Ottawa", I tell them the story of Hubs' and my first date, 11 years ago this week.

I was living and working five hours north of the city in Val-d'Or, smallish-town Quebec. But I got down to Ottawa often, to see family and such. Therefore, it wasn't such a stretch on a Christmas-shopping-in-the-city visit to agree to a coffee date with that handsome French-Canadian computer scientist I met online. (We'd see if he was really 6' tall like he claimed... )

I was supposed to meet him at  a coffee shop in the Byward Market. I was not familiar with downtown and neither of us owned a cell phone, but I was armed with a Mapquest printout and a plan to swoop into the market, find a close parking spot, and show up all cool and collected at the coffee shop for 3:00 p.m.

Ottawa's roads had other plans for this out-of-town chump.

Sure, it's not the white-knuckled insanity of, say, Montreal, so don't roll your eyes too hard... but you really need to know what lanes go where, what lanes end, and where you can turn or not, and there are a lot of surprises for anyone not familiar with the routine.
For instance, you're heading north along Nicholas, thinking "I'll just keep straight, here in my right lane, and turn right on Rideau", and then the street's all "LOL NOPE" when your lane suddenly ends and you're exiting on some random side street instead.

So anyway, on that day in '06, things were not going well.

Yeah, I ended up pretty far from where I was trying to be.

Hubs told me that he figured he was being stood up (those online dates are so flaky) and was about to leave. Just then I burst in, 20 minutes late, all red-faced after power-walking four blocks. Whew! Future saved. Kids reappearing in the photo. So much for a dignified entry, though.

He offered me some of his ginger cookie, but I was too busy being embarrassed to take any. It was overall a pretty good date though.

I know the downtown pretty well now, having lived here ten years (you'd hope). It's a lot easier when you know what lane you'll need to be in and what roads can be taken where, but every so often in a new area Hubs or I find ourselves up against a traffic surprise and taking an unintended scenic route. It's those times I turn to him and say, "See? THAT'S why I was late."