Cookies and popcorn

My mom came to visit for part of my four-day weekend. She had a bike race in the region, so we did some hard care race preparation including carb loading and relaxation techniques, i.e. watching movies and playing scrabble. Mom did what moms do: made chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, cleaned my apartment about four times and fixed me breakfast.

My freezer is now stocked with enough cookie dough to hold a bake sale. Hmmm, maybe that is what I should do to raise money for the speeding ticket I got the other weekend.

Anyway, it was nice to have the company and be taken care of for a couple days. I needed it.

Lessons learned: When you're an adult, your mom lets you have popcorn, beer and cookies for lunch.

Thanksgiving number 1

My sister, Amanda, and I are in Truckee now visiting my mom. We're lounging while she bakes, occasionally looking up from our books to try to convince her to sit down. It smells like banana bread and squash right now.

We're having a Thanksgiving meal tonight with some of her friends, since Amanda has to work on the real holiday and we're all together. We are about to undo last weekend's constant exercise, which is okay by me.

Lessons learned: I will never starve here.

Keeping tradition

Last weekend I went to visit my mom in the Tahoe area to see a Shakespeare play, in our yearly tradition. Actually I think last year's was one of my blog posts. It's crazy to think it's been a year already.

As usual, the play was fantastic. We saw Taming of the Shrew. It was set in the traditional time, but there were all this misplaced references to pop-culture embedded in the story line. For example, Bianca was completely dressed in pink and wore white sunglasses. She answered her cell phone "Good morrow."

I think the stars are brighter when you are sitting in the sand on Lake Tahoe.

The great thing about that area is that at any given time, there are always people bike riding — whether it's road, bike or mountain — on the road. And most drivers, probably because they are bikers themselves, don't try to run you off the road like they do where I live.

We also took our own bike ride, on a windy trail that leads to a reservoir. The whole trip is about 30 miles, which isn't out of the realm of what I usually do. Maybe it was the wine we drank the night before, maybe it was that the last ten miles were all up hill, or maybe I'm out of biking shape, but I was exhausted afterwards. It was still fun. Mom and I played the movie game (like the name game but with movie titles) for about three hours.

Lessons learned: There aren't many movies that begin with "K."

Parading through

Every year this time, the city I live in converts to its roots, becoming an old western town again. We have a parade, rodeo, dance and Mother's Day brunch in one weekend. The suspense building up to it is contagious. I've never quite seen an entire county embrace something so hokey. It's endearing.

My mom came to town this weekend so we could do a joint Mother's Day and my birthday combo celebration. We packed a picnic of strawberries, cheese, apples, popcorn and wine (because of course you can drink on the street during this event), and camped out in our lawn chairs for the parade.

It was great to be in a place where your greatest stress is putting on sun screen and deciding how to juggle the Tupperware containers of food while pouring a glass of wine.

Lesson learned: There should be more parades like this one.