Category: How I love the Interwebs

Five ways to interact with Santa

Back in the day, the only ways you could “interact” with Santa were to stand in line at the mall to sit on his knee, or maybe at your parents’ annual company Christmas party.

Now that we live in an interactive world, though, not only can your kids write a letter to Santa, or listen to Christmas Eve updates of his whereabouts from the local weather man, but you can get e-mails, videos and track the big dude yourself starting early in December. Here are five fun ways for kids to communicate with Santa, starting with my fave.

1. The Portable North Pole. I love this app, madly and deeply. Whomever came up with this and put it together is brilliant. I did this last year and the look on the boys’ faces was priceless — and though I haven’t been all the way through it this year, I can see they’ve made even more improvements and personalization. You the parent have to go in ahead of time and set it up, supplying your kids’ first names, something they’ve done that’s good, a photo if you like, and other personalized details. They give you a link to a video, and you can visit it later with your kids. I must remember to go in tonight to set up all three boys, so they’ll know Santa is thinking about them!

2. Letters and e-mails to Santa. Yes, it’s true, you can e-mail Santa and he’ll reply, but isn’t the ritual of writing and sending an actual paper letter, and then the eye-popping excitement of getting something back in the mail box, worth the extra effort? In Canada, you have to mail your letters before December 16 if you want a reply. Mail to:

Santa Claus
North Pole
H0H 0H0

Or you can send an e-mail through canadapost.ca/santascorner. (Hmmm, in the US, it seems that the US Postal Service has stopped providing a Letters to Santa service this year. Any other ideas from our American friends?)

3. Norad’s Santa Tracker. When I was a kid, I remember watching with slack-jawed wonder as Percy Saltzman, the weather man on Global News, talked about Norad tracking Santa as he began his journey around the world on Christmas Eve. I think just about everybody has heard of Norad’s Santa Tracking service, but I had no idea of this charming history to the project, courtesy of WikiPedia:

In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in.

In 1997, Canadian Major Jamie Robertson took over the program and expanded it to the Web where corporation-donated services have given the tradition global accessibility. In 2004, NORAD received more than 35,000 e-mails, 55,000 calls and 912 million hits on the Santa-tracking website from 181 countries. The site now gets well over 1 billion hits.

Love it!

4. Friend Santa’s on Facebook Last year, there was a kerfuffle online when Facebook refused to let Santa have more than 5000 friends but the Norad Tracks Santa page has more than 37,000 fans. And if you’re in it for the presents, the I Believe In Santa Claus group has more than 150,000 fans and seems to have regular giveaways.

5. Follow Santa on Twitter. Alas, Santa is not immune to the celebrity social media phenomenon of having squatters steal his identity, but you can trust updates from @noradsanta (official twitter ID of the Norad Santa Tracker project) and @SantaClaus is keeping a public list of who’s naughty and nice! (And, those of you with a more cynical inclination to the holidays might appreciate the tweets of @loadedsanta, definitely not safe for kids!)

I’m trapped in the basement! Vote for me to set me free!!

Okay, so the fact that I’m trapped in the basement (they’re installing the laminate over my head as I type) and the fact that I’ve been nominated for Best Family Blog in the Canadian Blog Awards are completely unrelated. And yet, they’re the best segue I’ve got. Save me from the noise (oh my sweet lord, the noise!) and the dust and the chaos, send me a vote as a salve on my twitchy soul. (Too much? Yeah, I was afraid of that.)

Ahem, anyway, they’re using a new voting system this year, and while it looks a little bit intimidating, it’s not too bad. If you would like to vote for me (please please please?) these instructions will help you navigate through.

  1. Click on this link to the Best Family Blog poll and it will open the voting page in a new window.

  2. Scroll down until you find Postcards for the Mothership.

  3. Click on the little drop-down triangle immediately to the right of the blog title.

  4. Select “1st”. Cuz you love me, right?

  5. Optional: there are lots of other great blogs in this list, so if you want to choose more than one, you can rank your choices and toss a vote to all your favourites. I’m not entirely sure I understand the ranking system, though. You don’t have to rank or choose more than one blog to vote, though.

  6. Scroll down to the bottom of the poll and click “vote”.

  7. Press “confirm”.

  8. Bask in the sunshine of my everlasting gratitude!

This is round one, and there will be a round two for the top ten vote-getters next week. Throw me a vote and send me through to the finals?

And stay tuned, because I have an awesome holiday giveaway that starts later today or tomorrow — don’t miss it!!

The Muppets go viral

This? May be the best justification I’ve ever seen for the existence of the Internet.

The Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody:

Lucas watched this four times end to end before the spell was finally broken. Between this and Bohemian Rhapsody being on Lego Rockband’s song list, the boys will have a decent appreciation for one of my all-time favourite bands. Pure awesomeness!

The one with the pancakes in a can — no, really!

Attention marketers and PR types: even if you have a product that might not otherwise catch my attention, if you can contextualize your product as a fun blog post in my head, you’ve got my attention. A good product is fundamental, but you also have to catch my attention — and inspiring my sense of whimsy definitely helps.

That’s what happened today when I had my first — and, I can only imagine, my only — experience of drive-by pancaking. Pancakes from a can, no less. No, seriously!

The Batter Blaster people were in town this morning doing a media tour, and they canvassed a few local bloggers to see if anyone might be interested in having chef Anthony Elman drop by and make a pancake breakfast for the family. That’s not a pitch you get every day! They were pitching a new product called Batter Blaster, which is basically pancake batter in a can. Unfortunately for me, I was already at work by the time I got the e-mail. I ended up exchanging a few e-mails with the PR team, and they offered to drop off a free sample to me downtown and, intrigued, I said yes.

I have to admit, at first I rolled my eyes. Pancake batter in a can that looks suspiciously like a whipped cream canister? But I read the ingredient list, and was surprisingly wholesome. Organic, no less. Since Monday is one of the days that I am on my own for dinner, this seemed like an easy and fun dinner idea. When I was a kid I used to absolutely love the frozen pancake batter you could get in a milk carton. In fact, not that long ago I wondered to Beloved why you can’t get that anymore.

So that’s how I came to meet Julie and Anthony, my Batter Blaster peeps, for an illicit mid-afternoon drive-by pancaking in the Market.

Julie and Tony

They’re super-nice by the way, and they’re surprisingly passionate about their pancakes. Not only did I get dinner, and pictures, and a great blog post, but they had more ideas and recipes, and even threw in (snicker, I swear I am not making this up!) a set of Batter Blaster t-shirts for the family.

The boys were fascinated by the idea of pancakes from a can, and were keen to “help” make dinner.

boys

When you squeeze the trigger, the batter is surprisingly light and fluffy, and kind of melts into a traditional pancake batter as it settles. (Please admire the artistry of taking a photograph one-handed with a right-shutter camera while using my right hand to dispense the batter!)

squirt

I taught the boys the fine art of waiting for the bubbles to surface, and they took turns squirting the batter and flipping the pancakes.

watching

And the true test? Damn, they were really, really tasty pancakes. I mean, really good! Light and fluffy, and better than I usually make from the just-add-water mix.

with syrup

We all agreed.

yum

In fact, I had to step up production when my helpers started absconding to eat the pancakes and I couldn’t make them fast enough.

three in a pan

In fact, we ate the whole can! I think the boys had about five pancakes each. I’d made myself an omelette, because I’m trying to watch my carbs again, but I couldn’t resist one or two myself — they were just that good.

empty table

So that’s the story of how I got drive-by pancaked by Batter Blaster, the pancakes in a can. I wanted to mock this product, but I have nothing left to mock. It was a tasty, easy meal; the clean-up was minimal; the boys played along; I made one meal for all four of us; AND every single piece of the empty can is recyclable. The PR pitch was fun, and so was dinner. Plus, I laughed a lot when I explained it all to Beloved when he got home, from the drive-by pancaking to the free t-shirts.

I’m telling you, sometimes life is stranger than fiction. Pancakes in a can. Who knew?

On celebrity and social media

Last week, I was tickled to stumble across this fun list of “cool Canadians on Twitter.” I don’t know why, but Canadian celebrities just seem more accessible, somehow, don’t they? I promptly started following Bryan Adams, William Shatner, Jann Arden, Rick Mercer, Brent Butt, the Tragically Hip, Matthew Perry, and Great Big Sea on Twitter, rounding out my existing CanCon-follow repetoire of Burton Cummings, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, and Jian Ghomeshi.

For the most part, I don’t see the point in following celebrities on Twitter. I mean, does Oprah really tweet, or does one of her minions do it for her? With more than two million followers, she doesn’t need me. I simply haven’t been interested in following any celebrities up until now.

But there’s something about these Canadian celebrities (and *air quotes* celebrities */air quotes*) that immediately feel more intimate and accessible. When I read Brent Butt’s tweets, his voice and sense of humour are charmingly distinct — and his tweets are distinctly down to earth, like: “Ok… I should get back to work. Then again, I should also eat less cheese, and I don’t think THAT’S going to happen any time soon.” And reading Douglas Coupland’s tweets is like 140 characters clipped directly from his books: “If you read the NYTimes site right after reading The Onion, reality morphs in a not unpleasant way. It’s like the news just had a stroke.” They seem pleasantly — ordinary, somehow.

When I was 15 years old, I had a crush on a boy named Greg. I also had a massive crush on Bryan Adams. And Greg had an older sister who had a picture of herself on a train with Bryan Adams. I think I was more jealous of that girl than any other person before or since. Not only was she Greg’s sister and could see him each day at dinner, each morning at breakfast, any old time she pleased, but she had actually (gasp!) met (titter!) Bryan Adams (swoon!) in person. It was beyond imaginable to me. The idea of simply being on the same train as Bryan Adams was fodder for endless hours of daydreaming, that long ago autumn of 1985.

I laugh now when I think of how my 15-year-old self would shimmer and explode in a cloud of teenaged hormonal delight at the idea of following Bryan Adams on Twitter. It even gave my 40-year-old self a bit of a nostalgic shiver when he recently tweeted “Ottawa today, got my first real six string…right here”. (I missed that concert, but caught a terrific one about a decade back, at Lansdowne.)

There’s something about Twitter, when used properly, that invites an intimacy with both big and little C celebrity that would simply astonish my Tiger-Beat reading self of two decades ago. I’m under no delusion that Rick Mercer will ever follow my tweets (heck, he wouldn’t even pick up the bloggy gauntlet I threw down, back in 2005) but there’s still an undeniable thrill to feel even an illusory sort of connection to actual famous people, yanno? Apparently my inner 14-year-old is barely repressed, even at the best of times!

I’ve been idling over this for a while, but I keep getting tangled up in my own words. What do you think? Do you follow any celebrities on twitter, or through other online forums? Do you actually try to talk to them? Does the fact that an author (or actor, musician, or other celeb) uses social media in a way that invites insight into their personality intrigue you or change how you feel about them?

Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog (a book review)

About a million years ago, I used to do book reviews here on the blog. I think it’s been more than a year since I’ve put one up. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been at least six months since I’ve read anything other than a photography book (but man, I’ve read a lot of those!) or a trashy detective novel from my mother’s endless stash.

Also a million years ago, I was a co-presenter with an amazing panel of writers and bloggers at the Association for Research on Mothering’s (ARM) Motherlode conference. Have you heard of ARM? This is how they self-describe:

The Association for Research on Mothering, at York University, Toronto, houses the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Demeter Press, and Mother Outlaws. The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood.

These bits of ancient history intersected in a recent e-mail I received from ARM. Earlier this year, they released a book called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog. I received a review copy a week or so back, and I couldn’t wait to dive into it.

The book is a series of essays, ranging in tone from scholarly papers to personal narrative, all centred around the experience of “mommy” blogs. The essays also range in perspective from the blogger to the reader of blogs to, in the introduction, the relatively uninitiated.

I have to tell you, I didn’t read every word. Some of the essays appealed to me more than others. Of course, I devoured every word of the contributions from my friends and Motherlode co-presenters, Ann Douglas and Jen Lawrence.

In “Web 2.0, Meet the Mommy Bloggers” Ann Douglas, esteemed parenting writer and a long-time friend and mentor, writes about the darker side of the “mamasphere” — how the influx of marketers and marketing, as well as human nature’s baser instincts, make mothers compete against each other for a slice of the pie. The pie is not just financial recompense, though. She notes,

…social networking sites are able to attract hundreds of thousands of members who are willing to accept popularity — or even the promise of popularity — in lieu of cash payment for the content they provide to these sites. […] This can, in turn, create an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation between mothers.

Jen Lawrence, a blogger I credit as one of my first favourites and a blogger I’ve tried to emulate over the years, submitted a reworked version of her Motherlode presentation. In “Blog for Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations” she discusses how the advent of the monetization movement circa 2006 completely altered the dynamic between bloggers and readers, and among bloggers themselves. She includes one of my favourite analogies of all time, with respect to marketing and bloggers. She says,

I think that blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to building community, even if there are blog ads running down the sidebar. […] But I don’t want blogging to become just another guerilla marketing technique. I don’t want to be invited to a friend’s home, only to discover I was really invited to a Tupperware party.

I didn’t just love the essays in this book that happened to be written by my friends, though. I was completely sucked in by Melissa Camara Wilkins’ “Beyond Cute: A Mom, a Blog, and a Question of Content.” Her essay examines why she blogs, and the satisfaction she derives from being a part of the online mothering community. She perfectly surmizes one of the reasons I so love mommyblogs as a whole: “I’m not narcissistically writing about myself; I am recording my personal narrative and contributing to a collective, descriptive understanding of contemporary motherhood.”

Also on a personal note, I was drawn in by May Friedman’s essay, “Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz: Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs.” Since I cut my teeth reading those same infertility blogs, I found Friedman’s perspective (as a “quite fertile” reader of infertility blogs) rather intriguing. And I read with a sort of openmouthed wonder Jennifer Gilbert’s “I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood.” She explains, in witty detail, how reading mommyblogs convinced her that “mothering was a thankless, Sisyphean exercise that involved prying jellybeans and loose change out of a child’s nose from sunup to sundown” (*snicker*) and simply not the life she wanted to live.

When I first started reading this book, I cringed at how dated some of the references felt. I don’t know a lot about the publishing industry, but it must be hard to get out a book that’s cutting edge when references to things that happened less than two years ago seem like ancient history. Then again, there have been a lot of pixels posted about the nature of mommyblogging again this summer, so like every other fad in motherhood, whatever is old is new again… the cycle is just a lot faster now!

If you’re at all interested in how mommyblogs are shaping our mothering conversations, I highly recommend this book — or at least, big chunks of it. And the nice thing about such varied styles and perspectives is the fact that the chunks that appeal to you are likely not the same ones that appealed to me. Like the mamasphere itself, it offers an intriguing range of voices and opinions, some contradictory and some conciliatory, some vexing and some inspiring, some educated and some entertaining. In this case, as in the mamasphere, the whole is as intriguing as the sum of the parts.

Who knew blogging out loud could be so much fun?

Thanks a million to Lynn of TurtleHead for organizing a fantastic night out last night at Blog Out Loud Ottawa, otherwise known as BOLO. (Or #BOLO, if you’re on Twitter.) I don’t know what I enjoyed more: seeing old friends, putting real live people together with their online personae, or finding a whole bunch of new Ottawa bloggers to read. Okay, so I need more blogs to read like I need a short in my keyboard, but based on the readings last night, there’s a whack of blogs I need to be subscribing to TODAY so I don’t miss any more of the bloggy goodness.

I took a tonne of photos (no surprise there) but it was the first time I took my fancy-ass flash out of the box, and my photos really don’t compare to the excellent stuff captured by Milan and displayed on the Raw Sugar facebook page.

Oh, and the post I read was one that I thought was a pretty good example of the kind of stories I like to tell here. You might remember it from about this time last year. It’s called Tristan Takes a Dive, and I was supremely pleased to hear people laughing in all the right places when I read it. The only thing more validating than comments is real live laughter!

Once I figure out the best way to do it, I’ll upload the best of my pictures of the night somewhere…

The ultimate DIY blog kit

If you’re reading the feed for the first time since Friday (you, on Facebook, I’m talking to YOU!) you’ll have to click through to formally admire my fancy new blog design. Did I mention I did it myself? Yay me!

I’ve been looking for a decent theme for WordPress on and off for the last six months at least. I’ve downloaded and tested almost a dozen different themes, but none of them were quite right. Even when I got the custom blog design in May, while it was a lovely design it just wasn’t *me*, yanno? And, more importantly, there was something in the code that caused Internet Explorer to seize up and shut down entirely, and no amount of trolling the interwebs for solutions proved fruitful.

I was about to download the free theme Neoclassical when I stumbled across a link for this theme by the same designer. It’s called Thesis, and although it wasn’t free, it is by miles and miles the most easily customizable theme I’ve ever seen. Worth every penny!

If you’re even pondering a new blog design, I highly endorse Thesis. Even if you have never mucked about in your blog’s code (over the years, I’ve learned to hack the html, the css and even the php just enough to really screw things up!) you can still give Thesis a lot of customization by making changes to the options on your WordPress dashboard. You can choose one, two or three columns, customize the font size and style (there are about two dozen font options), choose a different font for sidebars or headers or whatever, all with the settings panel in your dashboard. Don’t like it? Just choose a new option.

If you’re feeling braver, they’ve created a really unique system for more in-depth customizations, like the drop-cap at the beginning of each post, and the multi-coloured navigation menu across the top, and my favourite, the rotating pictures in the header. And they’ve got a great help forum with people who actually answer your pleas for assistance, like when I could not for the life of me figure out how to activate the code I’d installed for my archives page. Turns out it was hiding in a drop-down menu on the ‘create a page’ page. That was the only time I got really frustrated through the whole customization experience, knowing I was missing something incredibly simple and yet not being able to figure it out.

Anyway, just a little note of thanks to the Thesis community (I love that there is in fact a community of users!), especially the people in the support forum, the guy who wrote these tutorials, and this great post on adding a custom header. I learned a tonne just by reading their stuff.

Oh, and if you’re used to using the blogroll that used to be in the sidebar, it’s just moved to it’s own page now. It’s the “linky love” page, in blue up above the header image. And if you’re not in the blogroll but you should be, drop me a note and let me know!

(Thesis has an affiliate program, so if you click through from my blog a cookie will be added to your browser and if you do decide to buy it I get a small percentage. But that is not why I wrote this post. I wrote this post because I’m blown away by how awesome this theme is, and I’m so so so happy with the result! Best! Theme! EVAH!)

Blog out loud!

I think this is such a neat idea! Lynn of Turtlehead has been working tirelessly to set up what I think is one of the coolest bloggy events I’ve heard of: Blog Out Loud. She’s invited a bunch of Ottawa bloggers not just to meet and schmooze (or, in my case, blush and toe the carpet), but to read some of their favourite posts out loud.

How cool is that?

And check out this list of participants! There’s Beach Mama and Andrea and Julie and Zoom and XUP, just to name a few. Oh, and me too!

Blog Out Loud will be next Thursday, July 23, at the Raw Sugar Café. If you can make it out, I’d love to see you there! And if you’re feeling really keen, I see that Lynn is looking for a few volunteers to make sure things run smoothly.