If You're Stuffy and You Need it, Clap Your Hands

There are very few things in life I love more than driving home from Seattle late at night with my mom and my cousin, the three of us bursting out laughing simultaneously, but, as we would later discover, all for different reasons.

My favorite cousin Naomi, who it seems is such a regular on my blog that I should add her to my Cast of Characters, drove over from Walla Walla the weekend before last for our second annual jaunt to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. But oh, we did so much more than frolic through muddy fields of daffodils. We also allotted the appropriate amount of time to being profoundly vexed by the tulip field map I'd printed off the internet, which was okay because I don't think there's a better way to spend a Friday morning than roaming the backroads of La Conner, Washington while devouring a bag of octagonal (or were they hexagonal?) edamame crackers while listening to Cat Stevens Greatest Hits for the second time in a row. Rest assured, though, that if there were tulips to be seen we saw them. We also saw several chickens on the side of the road, at which point I unnecessarily announced, "Chickens!" Naomi, glancing ahead at a flock of snow geese, responded coolly, as she is wont to do: "Those are definitely not chickens."

Other highlights of the visit included, but were not limited to, the following:

1. Encountering the world's most nauseating Port-o-Potty name and pulling up outside of it in our car to postulate on how incredibly awkward it would be if someone were to emerge from the facility while we were snapping photos through our rolled-down window.













2. Playing dress-up with my brother's Stetsons. I'm certain this is all the photographic evidence you'll need to conclude that I am not a gangster. Naomi, yes. Olivia, GOD no.

3. Paper marbling for dummies. Naomi's housemate recently learned how to marble paper in her art class, and we decided to replicate the procedure...with a few minor adjustments. Instead of a tub of water in which you dissolve alum and surfactant chemicals to help the ink stay on the surface and absorb into the paper, we opted for the slightly less scientific--but undeniably more pungent--choice of food coloring and shaving cream. Well, shaving gel. Lavender-scented. (You can admire our finger painting-esque masterpieces to the left.) For two twenty-somethings who have both had years of leg-shaving experience, we were astonishingly out of our element in the shaving cream aisle of Target. "What is shaving gel exactly?" we wondered aloud, not caring that we shared the aisle with two women who clearly knew what they were doing. "You know," Naomi said as we were leaving the store with our two bottles, "the only scenario I can imagine in which it is acceptable for two girls to buy shaving cream together is if we were preteens about to shave our legs for the first time."

4. The "ah-sem-blahge" of my brother's birthday dessert: a mouth-watering trifle made by layering cubes of poundcake, amaretto liqueur, sour cherry compote, Greek yogurt custard, crumbled almond cookies (supposed to be amaretti cookies, but apparently these do not exist in Woodinville), whipped cream, and crushed almonds. "Ah-sem-blahge," a term coined by my mother to spice up the dullness of the word "assemblage," became our weekend war cry of sorts. We went out of our way, almost to the point of actual physical pain, to integrate it into our daily conversations. And let me tell you, the ah-sem-blahge of this dessert was no small feat. While shopping for ingredients, we found ourselves standing in front of a rack of travel-sized bottles of liqueur in the liquor store, using--or should I say attempting to use--the conversion chart in the back of Naomi's day planner to determine how many 150-milliliter bottles equaled a half-cup of amaretto liqueur. (We couldn't figure it out and eventually had to ask the owner, who knew exactly what we were going to ask before we even asked it.)

5. Dinner at Banh Thai, home of "the best red curry in Seattle," before seeing Pacific Northwest Ballet's A Midsummer Night's Dream at McCaw Hall. This picture was taken after the waitress brought Naomi a drink she did not order, but before a group of elderly diners shuffled to the table behind us and decided that the dim mood lighting necessitated the use of a flashlight to read the menu. In fact, the menu was a hot topic that evening. It was bound in such a manner that it was literally impossible to open it with one hand, and virtually impossible even with two. On numerous occasions I caught Naomi sneaking a peak at my menu, as she was too distraught by the complexity of her own.

Other notable moments (of which I do not have pictures):

6. When Naomi was explaining that she was excited to start her new allergy medication, my mom was singing praises of her trusty pal, Zyrtec. "I've got my Allegra so I think I'll be fine," Naomi said, to which my mother responded, "Well I've got Zyrtec, so if you're stuffy and you need it...." In one of our uncanny cousin moments in which we share the same mind, Naomi and I looked at each other and exclaimed, "Clap your hands!"

7. The first act of the ballet was close to two hours long. During the intermission, we compared the length of the descriptions of each act in the program. Given that the synopsis of Act I took up two columns while the synopsis for Act II was a mere ten lines, we judged the second act to be approximately 12 seconds. We weren't far off.

8. Also during the intermission, we were discussing our plans for tuliping the next morning. Ever the helper, my mother used her finger to trace us a map of La Conner on the armrest between our seats. "If the water is here," she said, pointing to Naomi, "then the parking lot turn-around is here, the restaurant is here, and my favorite little knitting store is right down here." The diagram actually came in quite handy while navigating La Conner's one street, as long as we remembered that the turn-around was just past the restaurant and that Naomi was in the water.

Thus concludes the recap of yet another successful cousin visit. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have the absolute best cousin in the world.