Last week, I couldn’t decide what to eat for lunch until I looked at the weather forecast. It wasn’t even as simple as needing to know what the current weather conditions were. No, I needed a forecast.
On the weekend, we had discussed going to a swanky restaurant near our place on Tuesday night. But on Monday, the weatherman forecasted a nice, warm, sunny Tuesday. Prime opportunity to put up the Christmas lights when Hubby got home from work.
No, not so he could put up the Christmas lights; so he could hold the ladder while I put up the lights. I’m taller than he is, and he’s afraid of heights. I’m okay with heights, but I’m afraid of ladders unless he’s holding them. We’re a team.
So I decided to cook a pot of stew Tuesday night so we wouldn’t have to run around trying to get the lights up before rushing off to our dinner reservation. We agreed to go out Wednesday night instead.
But Tuesday’s forecast was wrong. The temperature dropped steadily, a bone-cutting wind blew in from the east, and snow sifted down. We lost interest in putting up the lights, but we ate at home and stuck with our plans for Wednesday.
Until evening, when we discovered it was supposed to dump snow overnight. So we decided to wait and see what Wednesday morning was like before making the final decision on dinner. Neither of us has any particular fear of driving in the snow; after all, we’re Canadian. We’d have to confine our outings to ten minutes in August if we were afraid of driving in the snow.
But it’s annoying to fight the idiot drivers, so we tend not to actively seek out snow-driving.
Fast-forward (or, in the case of this blog post, “drag agonizingly toward an obscure but hopefully imminent conclusion”) to Wednesday noon.
I went downstairs for lunch, opened the fridge door, and realized that the only thing worth eating was the leftover stew. Fine… except that there was enough stew for two.
So if we weren’t going out, it would make more sense for me to make something else and save the leftover stew for supper. But if we were going out, I could eat the stew for lunch, go out for dinner1, and then eat stew again for Thursday’s lunch.
Only one catch: It was snowing lightly. If it was going to dump snow, we’d probably want to stay home. If it was going to hold off until after supper, we’d probably go. Time to check the weather forecast.
Heavy snowfall warning.
Guess I’ll make something for lunch…
Phone rings.
Hubby says, “Let’s go out tonight. It’s going to snow, so the restaurant won’t be too busy.”
*facepalm*
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1Note: I grew up in the country. ‘Breakfast’ was in the morning, ‘dinner’ was at noon, ‘lunch’ was at four o’clock, and ‘supper’ was at six. Then I got out into the big world and discovered that urbanites referred to the noon meal as ‘lunch’, the six o’clock meal as ‘dinner’, and there was no four o’clock meal! City dwellers are sick bastards. So now I usually call ‘dinner’ ‘lunch’, and ‘supper’ ‘supper’, unless I’m going out for ‘dinner’…
Have I confused you yet? What do you call your meals? (And why are you trying to slap me?)
Author Diane Henders 