Sunset Cruise

This morning I got up at 5 so I could leave the house at 5:30 and run with Hilary and Misty. 19 miles - and I even managed to run 15.5 of them with Hilary. After that I had to bail on her and slow down. Even so, I wound up running 19 miles in 2:44. I finally got home and was lounging sweatily on the floor with my post-run chocolate milk when Brian reminded me that Riley had a birthday party to go to, and I needed to talk to Christy about carpooling and wrap the gift and get Riley dressed before leaving for the party in 30 minutes.
It was a Fairy Tea Party, which is apparently quite popular among 5 year olds these days. Riley’s birthday is coming up, and for those that aren’t aware, this year she is going to have a “flower, fairy, mermaid, princess, sparkle tea party.” She came up with the theme herself, and I’m glad the date has finally approached close enough that I could order invitations, thus halting the addition of new adjectives to the party’s title.
A few weeks ago, Riley asked to have a pinata at her party. “Sure,” I agreed. That’s a pretty simple party game to arrange.
But with me, it seems, nothing is simple.
I have this pet peeve about store-bought pinatas. They’re actually just cardboard, and it usually takes a grown-up with a knife (or at least a really big bat) to finally slice and pummel the candy out of it. So this year I had resolved to make it myself. Perfect! A great rainy day activity, and this time of year in Florida, there’s generally no shortage of rainy days (courtesy of whatever hurricane is in the gulf). Riley and even Jackson could help - I’d get them their own balloons and let them slop newspaper and paper mache to their hearts content. I had even made a special trip to the store to buy balloons and organic rice flour (I read somewhere on the internet that this was better than wheat for holding together pinatas - which actually originated in China, not Mexico). I happened to mention to the floral arranging lady that I wanted one single balloon for a pinata - which treated me to a lecture on how I should make one out of cardboard with ribbons to pull on and release the candy, since the striking of a pinata with a big stick can be so dangerous. Ah, thanks for the advice, but STOP MESSING WITH MY MENTAL PICTURES!
I don’t know about anyone else, but in my mental pictures I get while anticipating a project, it’s all bucolic and serene, with messy hands. Period. I tend to forget that the mess usually doesn’t stop with the hands, and hence I have paper mache everywhere. It’s all over the Florida room floor, all over the windows, all over the door knobs, tracked along to the bathroom where it again covers the floor as well as the sink and the water faucet. It’s it Riley’s hair, it’s in the dogs hair, and we might as well just stick some tissue paper on Jackson’s head and call him DONE. Oh, and Riley’s friend Kate was playing over at hour house that afternoon. In my mind, I thought “Her mom will be so impressed with my creativity at amusing the girls on a rainy day.” but instead I suspect her thoughts were more like “Gee, thanks for the generous coating of glop on my 5 year old.” I had covered the girls with art-t-shirts, but about mid-glopage I looked over at Kate and noticed she had goo on her pretty play purse and on her tiara and jeweled high heels. I suppose I should have done a better job at pre-project policing. I just get so antsy to GET STARTED that I sometimes skip over all those little details.
I wound up so flustered by the sheer magnitude of this undertaking, that I forgot about the pinata (maybe blocked out is a better phrase) for the next 2 days, and did not get the next 2 critical coats of paper mache on the pinata before the balloon imploded (and in case you’re wondering, rice flour is generally too grainy for pinatas, and not nearly gluey enough). So, one side of the pinata was completely caved in, but I was determined to salvage it. This time I decided to use the more traditional wheat based flour for the glue. Unfortunately, there is no white flour in this house, but only stone-ground, organic whole wheat (I know, those of you that think I’ve gone way off the deep end with the organics and the vegetarian stuff for the past 15 years or so are snickering quietly at this point). No problem, I figured, I’d just add some extra gluten to it (organic, of course). It generally worked okay, and I patched up one side of the pinata and placed it aside to dry.
So, on this particular day in question, I had to patch up the other, more extensively damaged side. But this time I would bypass the mess issue, and Riley and I set up outside. All was going well, and I’d patched the large rift in the pinata’s eastern hemisphere and was preparing to hang the pinata to dry.
And surprisingly, the paintbrush that I’d wedged inside and clipped to the coat hanger to try and hang from the ceiling of the Florida room failed miserably, sending the still-soggy pinata pummeling first onto the art table and then rolling off to plop on the floor.
Needless to say, this was not a graceful fall, and didn’t do much for the structural integrity of the pinata. (insert deep sigh and a couple of internalized cuss words here.) Not to be put off, I found another balloon, blew it up inside the pinata’s carcass as structural support, (all the while, Brian is cautiously suggesting I COULD just BUY a pinata) and slopped another layer of organic paper mache on the entire thing and gingerly propped it up on the patio table to dry.
I only had an hour or so to get all this done - my pinata salvage time was squashed between the Birthday party (which happened to be 30 minutes away from from our house and near a Target. And since I’ve this addiction to wandering the aisles of Target, I couldn’t NOT go...) and the “sunset cruise” Brian had planned for us with some friends. We had initially planned on it being a kidless double date, but all our baby sitting prospects had plans for the long weekend, so it wound up being a family outing. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and we headed to a local waterfront restaurant with a pier to park the boat.
Nice dinner, Riley ate her meal and half of mine, while Jackson ate only the hush puppies with butter and proceeded to run laps around the table singing “Ring-around-the-rosy”. So I took him outside to intermittently play “car” with the boat steering wheel and then hurtle towards the edge of the dock shrieking “PISH! PISH!” I am never quite sure if he will actually stop before he gets to the edge or simply careen over the edge to see the fish up close, so I do a fair amount of dashing about, too (and after a long run in the morning, I’m not so quick). Fortunately, the rest of our party finished up and joined us before the water became too enticing, and we headed back to the boat for sunset.
Riley does great on a boat, and she was sitting placidly up front with Brian. Jackson on the other hand likes to try and either 1) crawl over the edge 2)complain about my holding onto his lifejacket so he doesn’t crawl over the edge or 3) try and drink my beer. So, I’m usually a bit pre-occupied. Still, the sunset was beautiful and lots of pictures were taken.
Then I turned away from the sunset to head to the back of the boat and saw this big, black , ominous sky to the east. Not really wanting to alarm anyone, I whipped out my iphone and checked the weather radar. Sure enough, a bright red front was looming.
We decided it might be time to head to shore, and speed back as fast as we could. The waves were getting really choppy, and lots of spray was coming over the sides of the boat to drench us. Riley was bouncing along in Brian’s lap with a somewhat worried look on her face. Nicole was wrapped in a towel in her mom’s lap whimpering “I don’t like getting wet!”
And Jackson was giggling, shouting “More!More!” and “Do it again!”
We made it back to the car about 3 minutes before the deluge and no one was really the worse for wear.
But as we were pulling back into our driveway, Brian said,
“Too bad about your pinata.”
And for a couple of seconds, I thought “That’s weird, I thought my patch job was pretty good, and why is he mentioning it at this odd time.” Then I remembered...
...it was still sitting on the back porch... in the rain.