Banana - Orange You Glad I Said Banana?

This morning our bedroom was so cold my glasses fogged up when I put them on. But this beautiful quilt, which my very good friend made us for a wedding gift, kept us warm all night.

(I should mention that we never make our bed. This is something that we don't try at home; we let the professionals do it. So I had to take a picture since it'll last longer.) I'll call my friend Banana, because when she signs off emails sometimes her four-fingered typing goes awry and she types something that rhymes with Banana. Here is a detail of the quilt.

I realize it may not be to everyone's taste but it is SO our taste. I love brown. Here is proof of how much I love brown: my belly dance costume is brown, though because it's all velvet and beads, bronze is probably more accurate. And my wedding dress had bronze beading all over it too. I wore all amber jewellry at my wedding and Sugar Daddy gave me an amber ring when he proposed. Luckily, he loves earthy colours too. So we love this quilt.

Swee'pea and I had lunch with Banana today at a very yummy Greek restaurant. Banana is Intense, capital I, and a supermom. She just completed her BA after studying part-time, working full-time, mothering, singing in a choir, enjoying an active church life, getting fit, travelling, quilting, watching bad movies and tv, and more for the last several years. Needless to say she is pretty much a master of time management. Banana is a woman whose calendar is always jam packed so if you want to see her you pretty much have to take advantage of any openings that arise, and you usually have to make plans a pretty long time in advance. Since I very rarely schedule things and have a mostly wide-open calendar, this arrangement suits our friendship fairly well.

Sometimes it seems odd that we're friends because I am a total slacker. But then I remember that she is a slacker at housework too (just not anything else); not long ago she confessed to me that she only recently laid eyes on her dryer for the first time since they moved into their house three years ago. (She has a great husband who does all the laundry.) And while she takes type A to the max, I am secretly a bit type A myself. Our neuroses validate and normalize one another's.

We both eat grapefruits by first peeling the thick skin, then peeling the membranes from the segments. Many of our coworkers and friends mock this method -- until they try it. Seriously, if you have never eaten a grapefruit this way, you must try it. It's so much better than the conventional sliced in half with sugar and a serrated spoon. We also both eat a lot of rice and veg type leftovers for lunch and have strict requirements for the rice to sauce ratio. And we're both afraid of flying and share our prescriptions for lorazepam before international flights.

We also both share an obsession with efficiency. I drive myself nuts whenever I drive anywhere trying to figure out the perfect route to my destination. If I get stopped at a traffic light, I spend those minutes questioning my decision, regretting that I didn't take another route, and wondering how I can modify my route to make up the time. I am compulsively punctual. I thought having a baby would make me late for things, and I gave myself permission to be late, but somehow I am still precisely on time for about 95 per cent of dates. Banana is often late despite her best efforts, so I spend a lot of my time waiting for her. She hates to be kept waiting so I suppose these tendencies also suit our friendship just fine. But she has taken this obsession with efficiency to a new level: today she was telling me that she has also been walking on her lunch hours, but because no one else has been joining her, she reads while she walks. Reads. While. She. Walks. She defended herself by clarifying, "Well I look up for the intersections." Today she takes the cake.