Monday, September 2, 2019

#MicroblogMondays: Labour Day musings

  • It used to be that a statutory holiday like Labour Day was truly a holiday, i.e., just about everything would be closed.  For dh & me, though, today has been a normal Monday, more or less:  the bank was not open (although cash was readily accessible from the ABM) and traffic was somewhat lighter than usual -- but the supermarket & bookstore/Starbucks were both open. Both were busy, and the supermarket in particular was a mob scene, with families stocking up on supplies for school lunches, etc. 
    • August/September hereabouts is also "tomato time."  This is a predominantly Italian community, and the parking lot garden centres, which were full of flowers & seedling vegetable plants in the springtime, have given way to racks of bushel baskets full of ripe red Roma tomatos, which people buy for processing & canning homemade tomato sauce. When dh was growing up, the tomatos would be ground up via handcranked machine (which the kids took turns cranking). These days you can buy electric-powered machines that do the job in half the time, pulverizing the tomatos and separating the seeds & skins from the pulp and juice. Personally, dh & I have never "done" the tomatos in the 30+ years we've been married (although I am sure we would have, had his mother still been alive) -- and of course, I'm allergic anyway.  :(  Many of his cousins look on it as drudgery but many nevertheless continue the tradition.   
  • Two of dh's cousins took their kids to university over the weekend & got them settled into their dorms (as we saw via "empty nest" posts on Facebook & Instagram). 
  • This brought back memories of my own (much less emotionally fraught, as I recall) drop off at residence & first days at university, 40 (!!!)  years ago this week (as I posted yesterday). I pulled out my photo albums (not yet digitized) & smiled at the snapshots of my floormates and some of the hijinks we got up to during that first year. Not very many photos of ME (1/ we didn't take as many photos then as we do now -- film & processing were expensive, especially when you're a poor student...!  and 2/ selfies not being a thing back then, lol) -- but I did have the good sense to take photos of my dorm room, both when it was newly set up (with posters of Peter Frampton and the Muppets' Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem on the wall, lol) and then again just before I dismantled it and headed home for the summer. 
  • Bracing myself for the fresh onslaught of back to school photos tomorrow...! 
  • Wondering whether I need to swap my white purse for something more fall-appropriate yet (brown or black). Does the "no white after Labour Day" rule still apply these days?? 
  • Wondering how much longer I can get away with wearing capris & sandals... temperatures are already starting to feel cooler... :(  
  • Trying to accept that, for all intents & purposes, summer is over (even if there are still a few weeks of it left officially on the calendar). :(    

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here

4 comments:

  1. I love imagining your dorm room with those pix on the wall! And I wish I'd had the prescience to take such a picture as you did.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Such a good idea to take photos of your dorm room at those points. I really wish I had done that as well. Totally hear you about the slightly cooler weather - it feels like the last couple of years, September has been warmer than this, but it really feels like early fall this year.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i'm trying to wear as much of my summer wardrobe as possible even though it's cooling down here too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Read this last week on another device, and forgot to come back to my laptop and comment. I definitely try to avoid malls and popular cafes on public holidays. I always breathe a sigh of relief when the kids are back at school, and I get to reclaim the city! lol
    And I believe I too might have had a poster of Peter Frampton back in the day!
    I've also never understood the "no white after Labour Day" rule when it's still what we would call mid-summer. (I was introduced to it before an October business trip to Washington DC.) I think you should wear what you want, and what feels right.

    ReplyDelete