Month: January 2008

Another mystery solved

Never mind how they get the creamy caramel into the Caramilk bar. Here’s my great mystery: how the hell does the Downy Ball know when to open up and spew the fabric softener into the rinse cycle?

Thanks to one of my new favourite sites, Home Ec 101, I now know the answer.

Being the anti-domestic goddess that I am, you might be surprised that this is one of my new favourite sites. But from it I’ve not only cracked the mysteries of the Downy Ball, I’ve learned how to make a damn tasty crockpot beef stew and collected a whole series of cookie recipes. I was playing in the archives of the “laundry lovin’” category when I found the Downy Ball revelation. (And did you know fabric softener makes towels less absorbent? Who knew?)

Anyway, now that I will be a stay-at-home mom again for the next year or so, I’m hoping this site will help me maintain the illusion that I have even the slightest clue about domestica.

What sites do you frequent that are outside of your regular interests and hobbies? Broaden our horizons!

Saying goodbye to Sassy

My dad is taking his dog to be put down today, and my heart aches for both of them.

Sassy is a gorgeous malamute, the kind of dog that other people stop you on the street to tell you how beautiful she is. She was also dumb as a bag of hammers, and stubborn as the day is long, but it was all a part of her charm. (I’m drifting between present and past tense, I know. It’s hard to think of her in the past tense, but her hours are numbered as I type this.)

My parents adopted Sassy from the Humane Society not long after they moved to Ottawa five years ago. At the time, they figured she was youngish – more than a pup, but barely. Over the years, though, they came to believe she was older than they first thought, and now they suspect she’s in the range of 10 years old. Just before Christmas, she developed some sort of tumor in her nose and in just a few short weeks, it has grown enough to obstruct both her nostrils and distort her snout. It’s obvious she’s in pain now, and can no longer breath through her nose. It’s time to let her go.

My parents have a knack for picking out good dogs from the Humane Society. When they moved up here, having just recently had to put down their previous dog, my dad was still recovering from liver transplant surgery in 2001 and his health was sketchy. Sassy, good natured though she was, also turned out to be a needy creature who craved long walks every day. Before long, my dad was walking her several kilometers a day, in all sorts of weather. All that walking reaped some impressive health benefits, and before long the chronic mystery pain he had been suffering for years had abated and then disappeared entirely. There’s little doubt that his daily walk with Sassy was the contributing factor to the disappearance of what had been a debilitating pain.

When I was Tristan’s age, we had a Shepherd-mix mutt named Happy, and my folks had to put Happy down at the insistence of a neighbour when Happy nipped a little girl. I clearly remember the entire incident, and the dog had acted only in playfulness – a playfulness that got out of hand, yes, but even at that age I knew the difference between aggression and accident. I was in my twenties when I found out that Happy hadn’t in fact run away, but had been put down. I thought about this last night as I debated whether to be completely honest with the boys about Sassy, or to cop out with a story about Sassy going to live with another family or some other fiction.

I’ll be honest with them, I think. Death is an inevitability, and losing a pet is the price we pay for loving them and letting them into our hearts. But if it moves me to tears at my age, with my capability to rationalize, it breaks my heart to think of how they’ll feel. And I’m breathless with grief for my dad today, bringing his companion in for this final act of compassion.

Goodbye, Sassy, and thank you for being a part of all of our lives. You were loved, and you will be missed.

Best and worst of words, 2008 edition

The most annoying thing about this time of year is the endless recaps, reviews and predictions for the new year. Yawn.

The best thing about this time of year is the linguistic analyses of word trends in the past year. I am such a word geek!

For instance, we have from the New York Times, this capricious and completely subjective list of some of the best slang of 2007. From LOLCATS to astronaut diapers, I’m feeling mighty hip to have at least a passing familiarity with these and about half a dozen other terms on the list. There’s plenty here for us online obsessives, quelle surprise. I liked these ones:

Life-streaming: “to make a thorough, continuous digital record of your life in video, sound, pictures and print.” (But, erm, isn’t this already called “blogging”?)

E-mail bankruptcy: “what you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them.” (Ha! I’d been doing this, rather surreptitiously and with great guilt. Somehow I feel more justified in doing it knowing it’s enough of an epidemic to have an official term for it!)

Bacn: “impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”

Kinnear: “to take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.” (I favour this one because I love the idea of a blogger coining a word that makes an NYT year-end list, especially one as clever and likeable – and Canadian! – as the Yarn Harlot!)

So now that you can talk the hip talk of 2008, make sure you don’t make the faux pas of using one of the Banished Words of 2008, as compiled annually by Lake Superior State University (I love this list and blogged about it in 2007 and 2006 too!)

This one pains me, because my speech is peppered with some of these terms. Heck, “back in the day” is the title of my archives; I’ve been known to utter an appreciative “Sweeeeet!” or two; and, “Webinar” is a huge part of what I’m doing at work right now. But I’m happy to bid a permanent adieu to “emotional”, “under the bus” and especially “random” – that last one has always grated on my nerves.

The comments have always been fun on this post. What words or phrases would YOU banish this year?