Month: August 2006

We got an e-mail from my 16-year-old nephew the other day. Turns out it was one of those hoax messages about MSN being shut down if you don’t forward this message to everyone in your contact list, and Beloved sent back a patient explanation that it was just a hoax, and an old one at that.

The message we received was a forwarded version of the one my nephew sent to all his friends, and so I could see the e-mail addresses of everyone in his contact list. I’m not hyperbolizing when I say it was a terrifying insight into being a teenager in the 21st century.

There were a lot of the kind of thing I would have expected:
cinderella_princess@
daringgurly@
hershey_kiss_chick@
punkkrocker16@
morbid_purity__@
you-smell@
tarnished_blade_xo@

Now, I was pretty much a good kid at that age (you are doubtlessly shocked by that revelation) but I was into Dungeons and Dragons and other mischief, and I get the whole teenage angst thing; I get the whole exploration of the dark side, even as you still have your Air Supply album cover taped on the wall. (I’m really digging a hole for myself here, aren’t I?) But really, I do understand the whole teenage need to be cool, to shock, and the black lipstick and fingernail-polish rebellion.

But when I read some of the e-mail addresses these kids are using, it honestly made me sick to think about it:
barbiegonecrackwhore666@
bleed-the-dreams@
discipline-9mm@
fuct-up-kidd@
god_must_hate_me@
xokissofdeathxo@
lil_hottie_do_me@
xdreaming_of_deathx@

Maybe I’ll never be the cool mom I thought I would be. Maybe it’s time for me to start showing up for the 4 pm blue plate special and wearing socks with sandals, but if I found out my kid was putting out e-mail under the name “fuct up kid” or “barbie gone crack whore” … well, actually, I’d have no idea what to do. But it would definitely involve a suspension of e-mail priviledges, locking said child in his room until he goes off to college, and a lot of therapy for at least one of us.

What do you think? Am I so painfully unhip that you fear for my future teenagers, or do you find this as disturbing as I do?

Tristan just crept down the stairs, maybe 10 minutes after Beloved tucked him in and finished tonight’s chapters from Captain Underpants.

Tristan, sotto voce: “Mommy, where’s the fermoliter?”
Me, searching mental databanks for ‘fermoliter’: “Uhhhhhh…”

Tristan: “Because I have the hiccups.”
Me: *bursts into laughter*

Ohhhhhh, the fermoliter!!!! Now I get it.
Fermoliter = thermometer, which is needed to combat the dire symptom of hiccups. Right, makes perfect sense.

He’s since been downstairs once more with the eucalyptus chest cream. For the hiccups, you see.

I love fall fairs. I totally don’t get people who haven’t been to the fair in years – how can you not love them? Since I was a little girl, I don’t think I’ve missed a year. I’ll admit, I love the Western Fair, in my hometown of London, Ontario, best of them all. London’s inability to shake off its agricultural background makes the Western Fair a true fall fair with lots of livestock barns and pavillions full of exhibitors selling all manner of weird stuff, from hot tubs to acres of land on the moon.

The SuperEx is Ottawa’s our region’s biggest fall fair, but there are probably a dozen more in each of the small outlying communities like Metcalfe, Richmond, and Navan. It’s the inconveniently-located SuperEx that I never miss, though. It rarely changes, and that probably has a lot to do with why I love it so. And yet, this year was undoubtably one of the best years ever.

I don’t ride the midway rides much anymore, but now the boys are old enough to enjoy them, and I get to ride the merry-go-round for free and without feeling a little self-conscious. I did feel a little self-conscious riding bareback on a pony with Simon, but that was only because the 12-year-old girl leading the horse seemed overly concerned about my welfare, and her partner held on to my leg more tightly than they held on to Tristan riding by himself ahead of us. (And trying to hold on to a pony with your knees while balancing a two-year-old in front of you and still looking confident in your equestrian skills for the full five minute duration of the ride is more complicated than it looks – my knees still hurt.)

This year was the first time we were told that Tristan was too big to ride on a ride. Too big. He’s four years old, for goodness sake. And it didn’t look like a baby ride by any stretch of the imagination – it was a bunch of little cars made up to look like heavy machinery like backhoes and dump trucks and whatnot. What four year old wouldn’t love to do that?

They were both big enough to walk through the fun house by themselves, which I personally thought was a bad idea. They were fine all the way through, but Simon looked increasingly distressed at the noise, and the traffic backed up behind him as he oh-so-slowly navigated the shifting floor panels. I finally had to go in and rescue him to get him through the rolling barrel of a tunnel at the exit. It brought back memories of being scared half to death and getting stuck in a haunted house back when I was eight or nine, and standing at a window crying until my dad came in and escorted me out.

If I had to choose one thing, I’d say it was the games that I love the most. I like the squirt-the-clown’s mouth games, and the roll-the-balls to move your gravatar games, and especially the bet-on-the-horses game where you win loonies instead of dollar-store toys. The big hit for the boys this year was a shiny, multicoloured bead necklace remnant of Mardi Gras. Who would have guessed?

I love the exhibitions, too, especially the animal ones. We were admiring this large yellow snake when the handler draped her (him?) across my shoulders. Very cool, but it was a struggle convincing Beloved to come close enough even to snap this picture.

The most amazing part of the day was how the boys behaved. Granny and Papa Lou were with us, so the boys were deprived of nothing that caught their eyes, but they seemed to take everything with a grace that I don’t see every day. I was so proud of Tristan’s attitude, especially toward Simon. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the noise and the lights and everything else, but his manners never failed. He was especially considerate of Simon, too, making sure he saw the cool stuff and helping him on and off the rides. A whole day at the fair with no squabbles – I didn’t think it was possible.

Best day at the fair ever, no doubt. Even the long walk back to the car, parked a few blocks away in the leafy district, was pleasant. Even Tristan seemed aware of the magic, as he referred again and again to our “most special day” at the fair.

Sure, you can complain about the cost, or the noise, or the inconvenience, but I would – and will – do it all over again just to make sure the boys’ mental photo albums are filled with happy days like these.

There’s no comment game today. Sorry about that. I can never tell if you are playing along because you’re humouring me, or if you genuinely like those things. Let me know if you really enjoy them, and I’ll find some more.

Then again, there’s not much else today. It’s been a long week and my brain is pretty much fried this morning. That, and I’m having a bad sweater day, and I’m feeling peevish about it.

Do you have clothing that pisses you off? I’ve had this sweater for (stops to count on fingers) way too long. Maybe six or eight years? And I can’t stand it. It’s acrylic, which makes my skin hot – not to mention the static cling factor, and it’s a litte bit fuzzy, which is kind of annoying in a tickly sort of way, and it’s cut about an inch and a half too short, so that it makes my belly look like a third boob hanging a little too low.

So why am I wearing it? Because when I look at it on the hanger, it’s a lovely sweater. It’s a nice light knit in a creamy white. I love the neckline and the way it hangs. It is in theory a perfect light low-maintenance sweater for summer, but in actual practice, it feels yucky and is very unflattering on me. And I cannot reconcile these two views of the same sweater, so I leave it hanging in the closet year after year, and about every six months it finally wears me down enough that I pull it off the hanger and try it on, and usually, like this morning, I’m only considering it because I’m already late and short on choices and don’t have time to iron anything else, so by the time I get it on and realize how much I can’t stand it I’m already late for the bus and I have to run so there’s no time to switch it for a less offensive sweater. And then I spend the whole ride into town on the bus sulking about being duped into wearing my bad sweater and scheming about how I can find a spare minute to sneak into the Rideau Centre to buy another shirt just so I don’t have to put up with this annoying fucking sweater any longer than I have to.

That happens to you too, right?

Just got this reminder in my in box. I blogged about it a few days (weeks?) ago.

Dear Friends of First Book:
A few weeks ago we emailed you to announce National Benefit Days promotion taking place in Borders and Waldenbooks stores on August 26 and 27. With these dates just a few days away, we wanted to remind you to bring your shopping lists – and this coupon – to your local Borders or Waldenbooks store this Saturday and Sunday.

Just $25 spent on back-to-school shopping, a couple of great beach reads, or the latest CD or DVD release will help get one child in need his or her very own, and perhaps very first, new book. Borders will donate 10% of the proceeds from your purchases to First Book, who will use those funds to provide new books for children nationwide. You will benefit not only from the 10% taken off your purchase, but from the knowledge that you personally are giving children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books!

Thank you for your support of First Book!

So I’m still taking French lessons. Four hours a day, two days a week. I think I’m improving, because the voices in my head speak an endearing Franglais for a couple hours after each class, so that’s got to count for something.

I’ve taken a LOT of French lessons in my life. Took it in school up to grade 10 or so, took lunchtime courses on and off throughout my career, took a semester of eight-hours-per-week lessons, and for the year before I failed my oral exam (twice) earlier this year, took two-hour classes twice a week. (Gah – I look back at all the lessons I’ve taken through the years, and am truly beginning to wonder if this second-language thing isn’t going to be my Waterloo. How many times do you kick a dead horse, anyway?)

Ahem, though, my point was that I’m becoming a connosieur of language schools. Language schools proliferate in Ottawa, where there are juicy government contracts to be had and a surfeit of painfully anglophone public servants who need to learn a second language to survive in their government careers. (At least I’m in good company.) I think this time around I got stuck with one of the more colourful language schools in the city – kind of like the Island for Misfit Language Instructors.

I think I mentioned here that the first teacher I had with this school was a bit of a newbie – in fact, I was her first student. Ever. She’s a lovely girl, and smart, with a journalism degree and a masters in French literature, but she doesn’t quite get that I am no longer interested in the lofty goal of learning French – I just want to learn how to pass my exam. (I pass my exam, I get five years of grace before I have to do all this over again, and more importantly, I lock in the promotion I earned fourteen months ago that is now completely dependent on me passing my exam by the end of October. ) I really like her on a personal level, but she seems a bit intimidated by me and doesn’t correct half the errors I hear myself making. Rather than correct me or redirect me when I get turned around, she simply says “It would be better to say XXX” and launches into beautifully constructed phrases that are both poetic and completely beyond my linguistic capability.

I had to change my schedule around, so I ended up getting a second teacher. I see Anie on Thursdays, and the other teacher on Fridays. The new teacher was absent for our first class two weeks ago, so I got a substitute – Denis the bitter expatriate Belgian. Denis is definitely the most colourful language teacher I ever had, and he’s got some interesting ideas on language acquisition. He describes the various verb tenses as worlds – the indicative is the Earth, the passé is the Moon, and the conditional is Mars. The subjuntive, on the other hand, has something to do with a car with one driver, or a car being pulled by another car and the ‘que’ in a subjunctive phrase is the little trailer hitch. All of this is illustrated with detailed schema, which I dutifully copied., and which I can now make neither heads nor tails.

Quite frankly, Denis’s approach was so unique and deviant from the norm that I actually got a lot out of it. I might have even asked for him to be my permanent teacher, except that in between all the little schema and illustrations, you had to listen to a big rant about how much he hates Belgium and Belgians and how hard it is for him to get a job as an IT professional here in Canada and how desperately he wants his Canadian citizenship and what a waste of his life this teaching thing is.

By the end of the four hours, I had a unique perspective on language acquisition and Belguim – but a massive headache. Oy.

I started with my other half-time professor last week. After the first hour, I was almost in tears because I hadn’t understood more than a dozen words he’d said. Ahmed is from a little country in Africa that I was embarrassed to never have heard of: D’Joubiti. He speaks so quickly that by the time I figure out the first three words in the sentence, he’s a full paragraph ahead of me. When I begged him to slow down, he just smiled and shrugged and told me it was part of the learning process to teach my ears to hurry up. He’s right, of course, but it didn’t stop me from grinding my teeth in annoyance for the next hour of the class. By the end, I had learned to listen a little quicker, and found that I was gazing blankly at him after only every third or fourth phrase instead of constantly, so I’m taking comfort from that.

It’s quite vexing, this whole second language thing, but I’ve become stubbornly determined to master it. What happens when an irressistable force (my determination to pass) acts on an immovable object (my inability to internalize this crap once and for all)? Stay tuned for that, and more dispatches from the Island of Misfit Language Instructors…

It’s been a good week. First, the public annoucement of the whole Motherlode conference thing, and the flurry of planning that resulted when we all realized it was a scant two months away. (My heart is thumping just thinking about it.)

And then this morning, I was playing in the referral logs again and realized that some very kind writers over at National Geographic Traveler Magazine online have quoted me and my posts about our adventure this summer in their feature on 48 hours in Quebec City. How cool is that?

Hey, wouldn’t “traveling with preschoolers’ make an excellent Squidoo lens? I know, I’m incorrigible.

I had no idea that anyone was listening. I must be an important cog in the Blogger machinery, because the very week I lamented Blogger’s lack of categories and started my first cautious exploration of other blogging platforms, the Google folks behind the screen unveiled a new and improved iteration of Blogger called Blogger Beta.

I saw the invitation on my dashboard to convert my blog into the new platform and took a quick browse through, but didn’t get organized enough to actually submit my blog for conversion. It’s a damn good thing, too, because this weekend when I read Phantom Scribbler’s harrowing account of losing her HaloScan connection and her custom-made blog banner, my heart froze in sympathetic terror. Luckily for her, she was able to restore her original settings and step carefully away from Blogger Beta, but her experience served as a cautionary tale for me.

I found myself with enough time on the weekend to set up a test blog so I could play with the new features, and I rather like them. There’s a new drag-and-drop functionality for template building that makes it easy to customize your colours and fonts, you can specify who can read your blog (and, I think, particular posts) and finally, they offer – be still my heart – categories, which Blogger calls “labels,” just like in parent-company-owned Gmail.

The biggest problem is that you can no longer edit your template html, so you can’t have add-ons like HaloScan commenting or customized banners or other embedded blog tricks. Blogger Buzz promises this will soon be incorporated, but until it is I think I’ll be staying with the devil I know. But, categories!! Woot!

If you’d like to set up a test blog yourself, you can sign up for a new blog and give it a go. Let me know what you think.

And as if I had enough time for yet another online addiction, the clever and lovely but subversively evil Ann Douglas has introduced me to Squidoo. (If you’ve got some time, check out all of Ann’s lenses – seven of them! That woman’s boundless energy and enthusiasm never fail to amaze me.)

Do you Squidoo? How could you resist playing with an application with a name like that! So what exactly is Squidoo? In their own words:

We have built a new online platform and community that makes it easy for anyone to build a single page–called a lens–on a topic, idea, product or cause he is passionate about. These lenses in turn help finders get unique, human perspectives instead of computer-selected and often irrelevant search results. Not only can Lensmasters spread their ideas, get recognized for their knowledge, and send more traffic to their Web sites and blogs—they could also earn royalties.

Like blogging, it’s surprisingly addictive. I started with one lens on Fun for Families in Ottawa, and soon branched out to a second lens on (quelle surprise) iPods for Newbies. I think the former worked out a little better than the latter, but I’m having fun playing with both of them. I have a third one under construction, and probably more to follow. Once you get going, you find Squidoo-able topics everywhere!

It’s been a dog’s age since we’ve had a meme around here. Don’t you think we’re overdue?

Filched from Pilgrim/Heretic by way of Phantom Scribbler. “The idea behind this meme is that you’re supposed to click on this page, generating semi-random quotations until you find the five that best express who you are or what you believe.”

I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of my Saturday night playing with the random quote generator. Really, I HAVE to get out (or laid) more often! But seriously, it’s a little bit addictive. I had a very hard time keeping myself to just five, and finally narrowed it down to this list of eight that spoke to me about the condition of my life.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A. A. Milne

There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.
Doctor Who

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he’s buying.
Fran Lebowitz

I gotta work out. I keep saying it all the time. I keep saying I gotta start working out. It’s been about two months since I’ve worked out. And I just don’t have the time. Which uh..is odd. Because I have the time to go out to dinner. And uh..and watch tv. And get a bone density test. And uh.. try to figure out what my phone number spells in words.
Ellen DeGeneres

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
Bill Watterson

I write because I’m afraid to say some things out loud.
RealLivePreacher.com

If you can’t be funny, be interesting.
Harold Ross

And that’s when I discovered an entire page of Douglas Adams quotes, and I could easily attribute my entire life philosophy to a crunchy mix of the Hitchhiker Trilogy (in five parts), Star Wars and Jesus Christ Superstar. As Phantom did with Dorothy Parker and Woody Allen, here are my favourite Douglas Adams quotes:

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

and my new favourite quote, suitable for framing in my cubicle:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I always feel bad tagging people for these things because I worry about hurting the feelings of all the people I didn’t tag, so feel free to play along if you’re so inclined. But two friends have recently started new blogs, and I’d like to tag them to give them a chance to pick up their first meme. Kerry and Cakes, I’m talking to you!