Month: April 2006

Linky love

(With props to Andrea, from whom I blatantly stole the phrase that titles this post.)

When in doubt of what to write about, you can always just post a run-down of cool stuff you’ve recently stumbed upon on the Interwebs. With bonus commentary, bien sûr.

I have one of those new Google personalized home page thingees, which I used at work to peek into my Gmail account. The firewall prevents me from actually opening any of the mail, or going to the Gmail home page itself, but I can see if there are messages in there and who they are from. It’s actually a little bit torturous, seeing mail in there and not being able to read it. And yet I continue to peek…

Ahem, I seem to have sidetracked myself from my point, which was that I also have a Reuters “odd news” feed on that page, which is how I found this news story. The first one is about how women in Cyprus are planning to make the world’s longest bra chain on April 30, to heighten awareness of breast cancer. They hope to string together as many as 100,000 bras, which will form a chain more than 50 miles long. I think I have about half that many in my “these bras don’t fit any more, or have pokey bones sticking out of them, so I don’t wear them, but I am pathologically unable to throw them away” drawer. Too much information?

Without even attempting a segue, hows about we talk about families? (Yah, I know, if I worked at it a little harder, I could come up with a segue. But it’s early and I’ve only had half a cup of coffee.) And you know what? Even having said that, it’s going to take some back story to get there.

When I first started blogging, I had just spent an evening with a bunch of girlfriends, admiring their lovely and lovingly rendered scrap books. (I loved the idea behind scrapbooking, and even had some of the requisite supplies. But I could never get the opportunity (read: time) and the organizational capability and the creativity to intersect. But I still went to scrapbooking nights, mostly to mooch the food and wine and admire my friends’ books.) One of my friends said that in scrapbooking, she sees herself as the family historian and that idea stayed with me.

When I’m blogging, I always have that idea of myself as the family historian (and documenter of minutia) in mind. So I really like the idea of JotSpot’s Family Site. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but it looks way cool, especially if you have a large and geographically dispersed family.

I particularly like the idea of an online family calendar with everyone’s birthdays and milestones. I’m pretty good at remembering that stuff, but I feel horrible when I do miss something. And I like the geneology, too. I’ve got a book (inconveniently written in Dutch) that documents my family way back to its ancestry with the de Beers – yes, those famous diamond people – and my links to my great-great-great-great-great uncle, an actual canonized saint. Sadly, neither the righteousness nor the riches seem to have trickled down the bloodline to my generation.

Oh alright, if you want a segue so badly, how about: “And speaking of fun online time-sinks…” or “And on the subject of your relative importance in the world…” (get it? relative importance?? I slay me.) … the useless and yet somehow compelling little aplet called BlogInfluence allows you to rate your ‘influence’ in the Blogosphere by aggregating your Google page rank, your Technorati and Bloglines stats, and some other Meaningful and Relevant bloggy data.

Lucky for you, that’s all I’ve got for today’s ramble. Don’t worry, I’m out of time, not out of arcane links and obscure commentary – there’s lots left where that came from!

The persecuted preschooler

Ahem. I would like to register a complaint.

Back when parenting was just a theory, people told me all sorts of things to watch out for. They said I should sleep when the baby sleeps, and that no matter how many receiving blankets we had, we’d need more. Check.

They said that when baby learned to walk there would be lots of bumps and bruises, and that when he started to talk he would melt my heart every single day. Check.

They said I should stop wearing white shirts because they would be spattered by an endless parade of leaked substances, from breastmilk to the alarming neon orange residue of alphaghettis. Check.

They said I might have to learn to let the baby cry, and that the first day I left him at daycare would be the day I came to understand what heartbroken really feels like. Check.

They said that a smiling, gurgling six-month-old is perhaps the most endearing creature on the face of the planet, and that the tantrums of the two-year-old are like thunderstorms in a perfect summer day. Check.

They said it would be the most rewarding, difficult, exhilarating, frustrating, heretofore unimaginable experience of my life, every. single. day. Check.

What they didn’t tell me is that my four-year-old would be more moody than a menopausal woman deprived of chocolate and coffee crossed with a lovesick fourteen-year-old girl.

How can a child who is so sweet, so good-natured, so clever and so loving be such a tremendously unpleasant creature? Within the same hour?? This is, by the way and in case you haven’t figured it out, one of those posts where I pretty much beg you to say, “Oh yes, me too!” Please.

I expected the “He’s looking at me!” kind of complaint at this age. I expected to referee a lot of roughhousing, and settle a lot of disputes over toy possession. I didn’t expect the “Everybody is mean to me!” whine on a daily basis. (Uttered whenever he is compelled to do pretty much anything, from eating his dinner to taking off his shoes before coming into the house.)

He has more than one weapon in his martyr’s arsenal. When he is contradicted (“No, you cannot ride your bike in the house.”) he yells, “FINE then!” and runs up to his room to sulk. He will look at me with his stormy grey eyes brimming with tears and tell me he’s “not having a very good day” because of one small thing that has happened in an otherwise near perfect day. It’s both frustrating (especially for an infernal optimist like me) and disappointing to see him fixate on the negative aspects to the exclusion of the positive.

If this is just a phase, I don’t mind riding it out. I’ve tried to sit down with him and explain all the wonderful things that happened in a day to offset the single bad thing, but he just squirms and is obviously having a hard time listening to it. I’ve tried to reason with him that everybody is not so much being mean to him as enforcing rules that we all have to live by. None of it seems to sink in.

My friend Twinmomplusone wrote a post the other day about four-year-olds that got me thinking about this. She has TWO of these mysterious creatures – imagine!!

So, for those of you who have four-year-olds, or have recently endured the phenomenon – please tell me: is this moodiness typical of your average four-year-old? And how do you deal with it? Most importantly, is five better? Or (cringe) worse?

10-pages-in book review: Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw

This is the 15th edition of the 10-pages-in book review, and one of my favourite books to date. I’m reading Will Ferguson’s Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, and you can officially add Will Ferguson to my list of literary crushes, along with Douglas Coupland and Nick Hornby.

Will Ferguson has a lot in common with Douglas Coupland, now that I think about it: both are Canadian and of more or less the same generation as me, both have a satiric touch that makes me laugh out loud, both spent time teaching ESL in Japan (Ferguson brought home a Japanese wife on his return to Canada), both are ferverent nationalists in a Gen-X slacker kind of way, and both have a keen eye for our national idiosyncracies and write about them with such effortless panache that I stop mid-paragraph to admire the prose sometimes.

Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw is part travel memoir, part history book, part love letter to Canada. In each chapter the author visits a different city (or town, or Fort) in a different province, and in visiting describes both the modern-day place and the history that sculpted it. In effortless strokes, he links his own personal history to the history of the nation, and his descriptions of the quirky characters that make up the threads of our national tapestry make me that much more fiercely proud to be Canadian.

One of many unforgettable vignettes describes a turn of the century shipbuilder who walked – walked! – 1000 kms from Minnesota to Saskatechewan, back to Minnesota and finally back again, and then built a giant ship on the prairies, determined to sail home to Finland. From Saskatchewan. Who would’ve guessed that Saskatchewan isn’t landlocked?

From the fur trade to prairie prohibition whiskey tunnels to polar bears to the übercolonial Victoria, this is a gorgeous series of sketches of Canada, and Canadians. But it’s the author’s personal insight and observant eye that make this book so entirely charming. Pardon the long passage, but I loved this bit of description of Will and his son taking a ‘rest stop’ on the side of highway one traveling night:

Things I learned while standing on the side of the highway in the middle of the night, trying not to get peed on as I hold a three-year-old so that he doesn’t trip or fall down a ditch as he looks up and the night sky and asks questions about the moon while he pees (invariably) into the wind:

(1) Although warm initially, pee very soon becomes cold.

(2) If you get pee on your shoelaces, there is nothing you can do. Your shoelaces will never dry, and you will never get the odour out. Best to throw them away and start anew.

(3) There are a lot of stars. Man, there are a lot of stars. Out here, beyond the refractive fog of city streetlights, the sky is awash with them. The Milky Way – it’s like a river of rhinestones; it spills across from horizon to horizon. Thousands and thousands of stars.

(4) Cars on the highway travel really fast. You can hear the rishing pitch of Doppler-effect waves pushed in front of them, then blast past, rattling the air. When we are inside our cars, hurtling across a landscape, we don’t realize how quickly we are moving – until we stop.

Walking back to the car, shoelaces damp, son on shoulders, I say in my wise and fatherly way, “You know son, long ago, sailors and sea captains could guide their ships by using the stars.”

“Really?” he says. “How?”

I stop. Think about this for a moment. “I have no idea.”

The book is peppered with self-deprecating and gentle (oh so Canadian) humour like this. I don’t often have a lot of patience for non-fiction books, but this one is so entirely endearing, not to mention educational (did you know the name Moose Jaw has probably nothing to do with the jaw or any part of a moose, and instead originates from the Cree word moosgaw, meaning “warm breeze”? Or that polar bears are so dangerous that the town of Churchill has demarcated “do not enter” zones in polar bear season?) that I could go on quoting from it for quite some time.

I’ve read some of Will Ferguson’s other books, and didn’t find them quite so appealing. I wasn’t overly fond of How to be a Canadian – while clever, I found it to be a little bit contrived. I did enjoy the biting satire of Happiness(TM) , but it got just a little bit long toward the end. This one, though, is by far my favourite. I can’t believe the sheer volume of things I learned about this country I love so much – and in his eastward progression that starts in BC, I’ve only made it as far as Ontario and still have all of eastern Canada yet to go. I’m already wondering how I can plan a trip to visit some of these places – Saskatchewan and Manitoba have never been more fascinating.

Canadian history has never been so engaging, so charming, so funny and so interesting. They should teach this version in school!

A long weekend in broad strokes

Our internet connection died on Saturday, which would have been horrendous on a dreary winter long weekend, but was barely noticed on this busy and sunshine-filled couple of days. (If you had told me I’d spend two of four days of a long weekend with neither shopping nor Internet, I’d’ve told you I wouldn’t make it through half of it with my sanity intact.)

I spent most of Friday rehabilitating my gardens after a long winter. I raked, I pruned, I turned the earth – and it was good. I only meant to do 15 minutes of work and ended up spending two hours on it. If only I could sustain that kind of enthusiasm throughout the season.

Friday night we went out for dinner with my folks to a great little upscale burger joint called The Works. If you ever get the chance to check it out, I highly recommend the sweet potato fries. And the boys were tickled by beverages that arrived in pyrex measuring cups.

My father and the waiter sustained an ongoing banter throughout the meal, starting with the waiver my dad had to sign to have his burger cooked only to rare. They actually had a waiver (how very un-Canadian), and to the statement that he indemnified the restaurant of any gastrointestinal dismay as a result of undercooked meat, he added a clause that the choice of vehicular or helicopter ambulance would be his. To which the waiter something else clever that escapes me, and my father rejoindered that his remains should be available for takeout in a white styrofoam box. The waiter replied that all remains become the property of the restaurant, and get fed back into the meat grinder. It was that kind of conversation, reminiscent of many, many childhood experiences watching my dad kibitz with whomever would play along. It’s one of my favourite things about him, to this day.

I don’t know whether it was the day spent outside, or the loud music and laid-back atmosphere of the pub, or just a cosmic warm spot, but it was one of the best restaurant meals ever with the boys. Tristan was a little squirrelly, but occupied himself driving toy cars on the bench beside me, and Simon entertained himself for the best part of an hour with two ice cubes, a lemon wedge, and 52 ml of water in his small-sized measuring cup. We took a loping drive back across town on roads I never drive through neighbourhoods I forgot exist. It was like being on vacation in my own city, and it was lovely.

All the bending and turning of the yard work must have loosened something in my caboose, because I was pulling Simon’s pyjama bottoms up when the subtle forward-leaning movement caused something to shift ever so slightly in my back and I was briefly but painfully unable to move. I think I pinched the sciatic nerve, given the intensity of the pain radiating down my leg, and I couldn’t sleep that night because every time I turned on to either side, pain radiated down my hip and into my leg. I spent Saturday gingerly running errands and gasping when I forgot and moved too quickly.

We spent a good portion of Sunday outside as well. (How will I ever reclimatize myself to an office after four days of sunshine and fresh air?) We went to the park, we wandered the ‘hood, and we sated ourselved on turkey dinner chez mes parents. It was the first time we could open the back door and shoo the boys outside to entertain themselves – and it was good.

Today, the boys, the dog and I went for a wander through a little conservation area a few clicks from our house. There’s a kilometre or so of trails, plus another click or so of boardwalk through marsh grasses beside the Rideau River. It’s lovely in any season, but we don’t get down there in the winter, so being back makes the arrival of spring official. The river is as low as I’ve ever seen it, which I can only guess means they are filling the Rideau Canal for the summer boating season. Winter really is over – every year, I can hardly believe we’ve made it through another one.

There really should be more long weekends sprinkled through the year. The house is as clean as it ever gets – which, for what it’s worth, is not really very clean, but what the hell. Playing is more fun. The garage is reorganized, and the dead leaves are out of the flower beds. The tulips and daffs are peeking out, and the worst of the dog crap is lifted. Most of the laundry is done, and the cupboards are overflowing with chocolate eggs. And I got a sizeable chunk of a good book read. It’s been a good weekend!

(Hmmm, look at all the stuff I managed to get done without Internet access. I wonder if there is a message hidden in there somewhere? What’s that? La la la, I can’t hear you….)

You’re in trouble now

As if it weren’t bad enough that I bombard you with pictures of my boys on a semi-regular basis… I have now harnessed the considerable power of the Interweb to bring you live streaming video of my lovelies!!

This one is a little test, but it captures my current heart-melting favourite of Simon’s gestures, the thoughtful man.

Click the link to go to You Tube, which should load the video automatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkmVzE0b3qY

The audio is a little out of synch at the end, but it still captures Simon pretty well.

Try it and tell me if it works! (But be warned, if it does work you will be assailed with regular snippets from my nearly limitless supply of footage…)

Edited to add: hey, lookit this! I can just embed it right here!! It takes a second to load, though.

Mrs., Ms., and Missing the point

There was an article in the Citizen this morning (sorry, not in their online edition, but it’s a syndication of this London Times article) about the movement in France to stop differentiating between madame and mademoiselle, the French versions of Mrs. and Miss. Feminists are calling the distinction between the two a ‘flagarant example of sex discrimination’ because it forces women to reveal their marital status, whereas men have the simple honourific of monsieur regardless of their marital status. They are not advocating an equivalent to the English Ms., but a straight choice between madame and monsieur.

I think this is a great idea. I think we should do it in English, too. Let’s get rid of Mrs., with its matronly baggage, and the coquettish Miss, and just go with a simple choice between Mr. and Ms. I skip this box wherever I can, and choose Ms. when forced to do so, not out of any disrespect to my marriage but because I think the distinction is anachronous in modern society.

French culture seems to be ahead of the curve on this one, and on the issue of marital name change, too. In the province of Quebec, a woman keeps her birth name upon marriage unless she files legal paperwork to change it. I’m quite frankly a little surprised to see how many women still change their names.

When I got married the first time (the infamous practice marriage), I actually cried the night of our wedding at the idea of being Mrs Whassisname. I had spent 20 years forming idea of myself based on being Miss Donders, and the formal reality of being Mrs Whassisname left me feeling cut off from my past and my identity. Three years later, before I realized divorce was on the horizon, I started talking about switching back to my birth name. He was not impressed. When we did get divorced, I remember clearly the day I received my new provincial health card in the mail – the first official document that restored my birth name – and I cried again.

Most of you know, too, that the boys have hyphenated surnames. I thought I was okay with them having Beloved’s surname officially, and my surname as a second middle name – until it was time to fill out the paperwork and leave the hospital when Tristan was about 40 hours old. I couldn’t do it. Sometimes, when I’m spelling it out for the third time over the phone to a pharmacist or receptionist or the like, I expect the boys might curse my willful modern attitudes some day… but I hope they’ll be the kind of guys who understand why this sort of thing does matter.

As a sidebar, even the language we use to discuss names is laden with meaning: women have a “maiden” name (an archaic term I’ve been studiously avoiding) which is the name you give up on marriage to take on your husband’s “surname”. Interesting, no?

What do you think? Are you proud to be Mrs. Hisfamilyname? Would you be offended if your wife kept (or reclaimed) her birth name? What possible use is served by the distinction between Mrs., Ms., and Miss?

A confession

When we moved into our house, three years this June, one of the things I was most excited about was having a patch of lawn to tend. I come from people who grow thick, lush carpets of grass and have many happy memories of playing on said green carpets.

The back lawn, despite three years of dog business and a 12′ diameter dirt circle where the pool sits for three months of the year, is in surprisingly good shape. It’s a little patchy in places, and the weeds are creeping in, but I’m altogether satisfied with it.

The front lawn is my nemesis.

When we moved in, the front yard was perfect. By the end of that summer, it was dry and had small dirt patches throughout, which I attributed to neglectful watering. The following spring, I carefully seeded it and hired a lawn care company to do some organic fertilizing and weed control. (That was the summer Simon was a newborn and I knew I wouldn’t have time to properly take care of the lawn.)

The lawncare company thought we might have grubs, and we discussed options – either chemical or organic. I chose organic – at twice the cost, mind you – but they never got around to doing the treatment. And they weren’t so great with the weeding bit either. They’d spray the occasional dandilion with some vinegar solution and that was it. I figured at least they’d try to pull them, but I spent most of the summer doing that myself and wondering what exactly I had paid them for.

That September I seeded, and seeded again in April of last year. I spent last summer seeding, fertilizing, watering, and managed to coax a lovely crop of weeds to grow, because at least the weeds were green and covered the dirt.

This year, the whole front lawn is one big dirt patch, nary a blade of grass to be seen. When you rake the dirt, you can see the nasty little grubs. Ugh! Grubs freak. me. out. (Why? Blog for another day.) The robins are thrilled, and in fact the ground looks like it’s been aerated, there are so many beak-holes in the dirt.

So after three years of dismal success, I have capitulated. I’m sick of spending the time and the money and having nothing to show for it. I’m going to resod the whole sodding thing, and I’m going to hire a new lawn-care company. (whispers) And I’m going to let them use pesticides.

(cringe of shame)

I know. I am completely opposed to the use of pesticides in cosmetic lawn care. I am deeply offended by it. I walk past lawns that are acres and acres of uniform emerald blades and feel deep regret that the earth is being poisoned – that we are poisoned – simply so this lawn can be weedless and perfect. A few years ago, I successfully lobbied the condominum corporation of our last house to stop using Par III on the common grounds, and signed a petition to get our city to stop using cosmetic pesticides on city property. I’m mortified at the idea of having one of those little paper flags (‘an evil person who doesn’t care about your children and your pets and the future of the planet lives here’) marking me as a neighbourhood scourge – but I don’t know what else to do.

I’ve been worn down by my three year battle with the front lawn. I’ve tried, really I have. I gave it my best shot, hundreds of dollars and countless hours. It doesn’t have to be a Stepford lawn, perfect and uniform – but the curb-to-driveway dirt farm is just depressing. Not to mention messy – the boys are thrilled to have so much black dirt so easily accessible each time you step out the front door, I assure you, but I’m a little tired of cleaning it out of the carpet. And the car. And their clothes. And the dog.

Oh, the guilt. I promise, I’ll just do it this one year, to get us back on track with a healthy, normal lawn. We’ll just get rid of those creepy, grubby creatures, and I’ll spend the rest of my life pulling dandilions by hand… as long as I can kneel in the grass to do it.

Don’t hate me.

But where does God buy his car?

Tristan starts Catholic school in September, but I still haven’t found just the right place to start introducing the concepts of God and Jesus and the Church. We had a few goes of it at Christmas, but I don’t think much sunk in. Luckily, a perfect opportunity presented itself in the car recently.

Tristan: “What’s that little store over there?”
Me: “Um, that’s not a store, sweetie, that’s a church.” And please give me credit here for restraining myself on the topic of what they might be selling.

(pause)

Tristan: “A church?”
Me (carefully): “A church is where people go to talk to God.”

I’ll bet you can see this one coming, can’t you?

Tristan: “God?”
Me (feigning casualness): “Um hmmm. God. (pause) Some people believe God created everything – the grass, the trees, the stars and the moon. (with growing confidence) Some people believe that God is the father of all of the people in the world.”

(cringe a little bit, consider some revisions, wait to see how this dust settles first)

(thoughtful pause)

Tristan: “Mommy?”
Me: “Yes, sweetie?”

Tristan: “Where did our car come from?”
Me: “A car store.”
Tristan: “Oh. Okay.”

I’m both pleased and unsurprised that our first philosophical discussion on religion has turned out to be rather circular in nature.