Category: How I love the Interwebs

In which Beloved is completely weirded out in the library

On the weekend, Beloved and Lucas went to the library to pick up a couple of books on hold. While he was there, scanning the books into the self-serve check-out, he heard someone say, “Hey look, there’s Lucas!”

He turned around to see someone he had never met before. The woman quite pleasantly introduced herself as a reader of the blog, and in turn introduced Beloved to her husband. “Oh, hello,” said her husband. “My wife has told me about your family. It’s nice to meet you.”

He didn’t catch (or didn’t remember) the name of the nice lady and her husband, but I’m pretty sure I know who it was. Funny how you never see some people who live in your neighbourhood out in the community, and you run into other people all over the place. This particular family I’ve bumped into at the grocery store more than once, at the gym, and now at the library. Too funny! *waves to nice neighbourhood friends*

Beloved came home and told me about his brush with minor celebrity, laughing but with a bit of a weirded out look in his eyes. “That’s it,” he said, and I think he was only half joking. “I think we’re done with the blog thing now.”

I had to laugh. Poor Beloved! You see lots of angst in the blogosphere about the effect that blogging your life has on the children, but not so much about the effect on the privacy-coveting spouse. Oh well, I’m sure he’ll come around the next time there’s chocolate bar or video game freebies to be reviewed!

Social Media for Mothers Seminar

This is a neat idea I wish I’d thought of myself. An Ottawa company is offering Social Media for Mothers seminars, just in time for Mother’s Day.

From the press release:

This unique seminar will show moms how to use social tools like blogs, Twitter, social networks, YouTube and Flickr to share their experiences online with family and/or other moms on the web. Moms will also learn how social media can help to nurture existing relationships and build new friendships in a global web community.

This seminar is for:

* mothers-to-be
* new and seasoned moms
* grandmothers
* great-grandmothers

Neat idea, eh? And if you go, you get to see me — on YouTube, blathering on about social media and motherhood. Natasha, the brains behind the operation, approached me a month or so ago and asked if I’d be interested in being interviewed for her seminar and being the shy and reticent person camera whore that I am, of course I said yes. You can see the clip on the social media press release. It`s a little drawn out, but she didn`t give me the cut sign so I just kept talking and talking and talking and talking. (There`s another familiar face there, too!)

Good luck, Natasha! Can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Who, me? Addicted to the what now?

One of my friends at work (*waves to Sue*) recently sent me a link to an article entitled “Why moms are at risk for Internet addiction.”

I have no idea why she sent it to me. (*looks obliquely to the left*) No really, I don’t have a problem. I mean, it did give me an uncomfortable little squiggle there for a minute with the bit about “14 percent of Internet users find it hard to stay away from it for several days at a time” (days? really? try ‘hours’!) and maybe that part about “9 percent try to hide their “nonessential Internet use” from their loved ones” has happened once or twice. (*begins to sweat*) And hey, that part about “that going online has become an imposing part of your life, which, at the least, means a load or two of laundry goes unwashed” — well, sure, but I always get to it eventually.

Oh hell, there’s no use fighting it. (*deep breath*)

My name is DaniGirl, and I am addicted to the Internet.

Funny, though, I don’t get online to escape my problems per se. It’s not an emotional escape for me, it’s often a physical one. When I’m at home sometimes I go online just because it means I can sit still and zone out for a couple of minutes. There’s something cathartic bordering on zen in the familiar circuit of checking the blog for new comments, checking the e-mail account for new messages, taking a quick peek on Flickr to see if anything is new there (that’s a new stop on my route, but sometimes lately the first place I’ll go depending on how much I love my photo of the day) and if there’s time I’ll stop by Twitter to see what’s going on there. Five minutes, tops, and I’ve had the chance to sit, breath and regroup. The hard part, of course, is not getting sucked in. “Oh look, @wombat627 thinks this video on YouTube is classic retro 80s. I’ll just take a peek.” And it spirals downhill from there, one click at a time.

The path to hell is not paved with good intentions but with clickable links and idle curiousity.

In all seriousness, there are days when I think my Internet love affair gets a little bit out of control. I could never quantify the amount of effort I’ve put into creating my little online universe, just as I could never quanify the richness it has brought to my life. But holy hell, it’s almost as much work keeping my online life in order as it is keeping my real life from falling apart!

Beyond simply writing the posts and creating the pictures, it’s amazing how much effort it is to nurture and cultivate the relationships that give this little corner of the Internet the sense of community that I so treasure. Once upon a time, I visited the blog of every single person who commented and tried to leave a comment in return, and I responded to almost all of my e-mails. If I did that today, I’d be online 37 hours a day! Like everything else in my life, I try to cycle through my online to-do list once every week or two, focusing on certain tasks and leaving others undone.

I’m terrible now at responding to e-mails, even though I read every single one. I don’t comment nearly as much as I used to, even though I’m still reading the same number of blogs. I can’t remember the last time I opened Facebook, and I have about 100 more people following me on Twitter than I follow, largely because I haven’t had the chance to peek at their profiles and see who they are — and even then I’m not sure why I’m following half the people I am. I’d love to be spending even more time online catching up with all this stuff, but I have this whole real life on the outside of the computer that seems to demand the lion’s share of my attention!

All in all, I suppose my online habit is rather benign, considering it’s better for my health than smack and better for my wallet than being addicted to shopping. What do you think? Are you a junkie like me, or do you have your Internet compulsions more firmly under control?

More reruns: The Sweater Story

I’m blogging over at Family Jewels again today, and it’s a topic both dear to my heart and important for you to read, so get on over there and read it, okay?

But if you still can’t get enough of me today (frankly, I’m a little sick of me these days!) here’s a golden oldie from my way-back archives, The Sweater Story.

I’ve been back at work for about three weeks now, and I think I’m finally into the rhythm of the office again. I’ve been working on some pretty high-profile stuff around here, so I get lots of face time with senior management, which is nice for a new employee although some days I really feel like I’m in over my head.

Today was an especially busy day. We had our usual all-staff morning meeting, where I gave an update on my project to the group, and I had a couple of drop-by-my-cube meetings with colleagues. I also spent about 30 minutes on a conference call in my director’s office, sitting across the desk from her while we talked to some of the folks down in Southern Ontario region.

It was about 10:30 by the time I finally made it to the bathroom. I was washing my hands when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and noticed it. IT. In that moment, I became truly cognizant of the definition of mortified. On my sweater sleeve – my creamy white cotton knit sleeve, no less – smeared from mid-bicep to near my wrist, was a painfully obvious, incredibly nasty two inch wide smear of baby shit. Suddenly I flashed back to the pre-dawn gloaming of Tristan’s room, where I rushed in to grab a little cuddle before running for the bus. I picked him up out of his crib and slung him onto my hip to deliver him to Beloved, blissfully unaware of the toxic ooze seeping out of his Pampers and ingratiating itself with my arm.

As I gazed at my sullied reflection in the mirror, I tried to console myself: “They won’t notice. It’s not that obvious.” It WAS that obvious. THEY NOTICED! You would have to make a Herculean effort of avoidance to miss it, and I just knew my colleagues weren’t up to the task.

I tried to at least mitigate the damage. First, I tried to rub it off. Have you ever tried to rub dried baby shit off cotton ribbed knit? Then thought maybe a little water might do it. Which worked, inasmuch as it diluted the stain by about 20 per cent and spread it over an area about 300 per cent of the original stain. So I rolled up the sleeve as much as I could, which did a great job of drawing attention to the goodly part of the stain still visible, left the other sleeve down, and tried valiantly not to make eye contact with anyone in my office for three months.

Rerun week continues with A Love Letter to My Daughter, Who Will Never Be

(I’m guest-blogging this week over at Canadian Family magazine’s blog, Family Jewels, so it’s nothing but re-runs back here. Since I’m writing today about why sons are better than daughters, I thought it would be a good day to share this one from my archives, originally posted in September 2007.)

To my darling daughter, who will never be:

It may seem odd to begin a letter with a farewell, and perhaps even moreso a farewell to someone who never was, someone who never will be. But I needed to find a way to say goodbye to you, my daughter, because even though we never had the chance to say hello, you’ve always been a part of me. You’ve been with me – the idea of you – my whole life. As far back as I can remember, I expected you. I spent my life preparing for the act of mothering you. I carried the potential of you, my daughter, close to my heart, and in quiet moments I have loved to savour the imagining of you. But now, through the vagaries of fate and nature, it seems you are simply not to be.

It’s a wonder of the human heart that it can be filled with boundless joy at the idea of a son, and yet haunted by regretful longing on losing the idea of a daughter.

I am sad to have lost the opportunity to know you. I feel an empty hollow in the place I’ve always reserved for you. After a lifetime of expecting you, I’m struggling to let go of the idea of you, and with that, the idea of us as mother and daughter. Having felt you so keenly in my life, have expected you so fully, the reality of life without you still perplexes me slightly. “What do you mean I’ll never have a daughter?” It’s like trying to imagine a world without the colour red. Red has always been there; red belongs in the colour scheme of life.

I like to imagine that you would have been like me, but better. The best of me and of your father distilled, and improved upon by that which would have been uniquely you. You would have been precocious, and willful, and you would have kept your doting brothers wrapped around your little finger. You would have grown into a strong and capable woman, and you would have become, with the passage of the years, my friend as well as my daughter. We would have shared things that only a mother and daughter can share, and I would have treasured our unique relationship as much as I treasure the relationship I have with my own mother – a relationship I could only hope to replicate, as it would be impossible to improve upon it.

It may seem to be a little strange to say goodbye to someone who never existed; who never will exist. But to me, you were as real as the sunrise, as real as the stars that shine at night. I can’t touch those things either, but that hasn’t stopped me from believing in them. But now, after a lifetime of anticipating you, I relinquish you to the stars and banish the idea of you to the speculation of long, dark nights. What might have been, what will not be. In the darkest of those nights, I think of three lost souls, three babies miscarried, and even poor Frostie, and I wonder. I wonder if you were there, if you tried to arrive, if there was some great ironic twist of biology that prevented me from gestating a girl. I’ll never know.

While I may have spent my life expecting a girl, I’ve been delighted by the inherent joy of mothering my boys. My boys; those odd and adorable creatures whom I love beyond reason. I truly had no idea how wonderful it is to be the mother of boys. And though I can’t imagine life without them, the arrival of each boy somehow only deepened my certainty in your eventual arrival.

But now, finally, it’s time to say goodbye to you, my daughter, as I embrace with my whole heart the idea of spending my life being the princess, the diva, the queen among my coterie of men. I’ll miss you, my girl. I’ll miss holding a place for you in my life, and I’ll miss what might have been. I’ll have to adjust my sense of self, too, my sense of how my life will unfold from here. But my heart is full, and I have more blessings in my life than I ever dared hope for.

Goodbye, my beautiful daughter.

Zed-versus-Zee, the first in a series of reruns

Here’s another secret I’ve been keeping from you. (Two secrets in one month. Can you believe it?) I’ve been asked to guest-blog this week over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog. How cool is that? My first post should be up there later today – come on over and say hello! (Edited to add: it’s up!!)

I didn’t want to leave poor old blog completely neglected, though, and there simply isn’t enough time for two blogs and a photo habit this week. Instead, I’ve plumbed by not-inconsiderable archives to find a few favourite posts to share with you this week. You can call them re-runs, I’ll call them buried treasures.

First up, from 2005: Zed-versus-Zee, A Love Letter to Nancy.

It’s Nancy’s fault. She asked “So, which one is it (zed or zee)? Anyone know? And should we really care? Is it really a Canadian versus American thing? Or something else?”

Ooo ooo ooo! (dances in chair, waving hand in the air) I know, I know! I care!!

In fact, my darling Nancy, it is not so much a Canadian thing to say “zed” as it is an American thing to say “zee”. According to wikipedia:

In almost all forms of Commonwealth English, the letter is named zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta. Other European languages use a similar form, e.g. the French zède, Spanish and Italian zeta. The American English form zee derives from an English late 17th-century dialectal form, now obsolete in England.

Is it really worth all this debate? Even Shakespeare himself cast aspersions on the dignity of the 26th letter of the alphabet with an insult I’m going to try to work into at least two conversations today: Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! (King Lear, act II, scene II.)

You got me curious, though, so I did a little bit more research on the subject. According to the Concise Oxford Companion, “The modification of zed to zee appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc.” It seems Noah Webster, the dictionary guru, seems to have mass-marketed the “zee” pronunciation, along with the incorrect spelling of “centre”.

Apparently we Canadians aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of the Americanization of the “Sesame Street” phenomenon you mentioned and its influence on how you learned to say zee versus zed. I found a research paper titled, “Can Sesame Street bridge the Pacific Ocean? The effects of American television on the Australian language.” The introduction to her thesis talks about how just like here, Australian kids learn to say “zee” by watching Sesame Street and their parents correct them to say “zed”.

Sesame Street’s influence also gets mentioned in this chapter from the textbook Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance. He says,

With the use of “zee” stigmatized, it is perhaps strange that children should learn it at all. One source is pre-school television shows beamed from the United States, notably one called Sesame Street, which was almost universally watched by children in the 1960s when it had no serious rivals… Sesame Street and its imitators promote the alphabet with zeal, almost as a fetish, thus ensuring that their young viewers hear it early and recite it often. The “zee” pronunciation is reinforced especially by the “Alphabet Song,” a piece of doggerel set to music that ends with these lines:

ell em en oh pee cue,
ar ess tee,
yoo vee double-yoo, eks wye zee.
Now I know my ey bee sees,
Next time, won’t you sing with me?

The rhyme of “zee” with “tee” is ruined if it is pronounced “zed,” a fact that seems so salient that many Ontario nursery school teachers retain it in the song even though they would never use it elsewhere.

More than just ending the alphabet song with a jarring non-rhyme, the zed/zee conundrum poses problems for people trying to market technology across the border. CNews reports on a Toronto law firm who lobbied Bell Canada and Nortel to change the pronunciation from “zee” to “zed” in the directory on their voice mail system:

“We’ve had inquiries about why it is the way it is when we’re Canadian,” said Tammie Manning, a communications analyst at the law firm. “(People said) we’re not the States. We’re independent. Why should we be subjected to that?”

Several officials from Nortel insisted the technology to make the switch from “zee” to “zed” was simply not yet available. But by mid-afternoon Friday, following several calls from a reporter, the company’s director of corporate communications said Nortel would change the “zee” to “zed” as soon as possible.

And then, of course, there is the infamous Joe Canadian rant from Molson’s, which although overplayed and out of date, still merits mention in the discussion:

Hey, I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader, and I don’t live in an igloo, or eat blubber or own a dogsled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a Prime Minister… not a president, I speak English and French, not American and I pronounce it About, not A-boot.

I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack, I believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it IS pronounced Zed, not Zee… ZED!! Canada is the 2nd largest land mass, the 1st nation of hockey, and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I AM CANADIAN! Thank you.

So you see, dearest Nancy, it DOES matter, in a patriotic sort of way. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

Time Travel, recycled and re-used!

This is the first meme I ever did, and I liked it so much I did it again the next year. I intended to do it every year, but — like so many of my great intentions — seem to have lost it in the shuffle. As Homer said about the roasted pig: “It’s still good!”

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • finalizing my divorce (big, happy smile)
  • unpacking boxes after moving in to my first “own” place, a room rented in a student house in the Glebe shared with five other people
  • delirious with reclaimed freedom and terrified of being out on my own

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • finaling the plans for our July wedding (another big, happy smile!)
  • living in the Glebe a block away from that student house, in a gorgeous little bo-ho attic apartment with a balcony perched off the kitchen like a tree house
  • a month away from finding Katie, the world’s best doggie and my first baby

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • at home on maternity leave, with a newborn (Simon) and a two year old (Tristan) in the house
  • massively, pathetically sleep-deprived
  • a post-partum hormonal toxic disaster

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • at home on maternity leave with a newborn, a four-year old and a six-year old in the house!
  • coping with three much better than I coped with two, having just laid off our first nanny
  • taking Lucas for his first visit to the Children’s Hospital

This year I am:

  • thrilled with my new four-day work weeks
  • obsessed with photography in much the same way I’ve been obsessed with blogging for the past four years
  • very, very busy but very, very happy

Today I:

  • forgot to buy my April bus pass (the driver let me ride anyway, bless him) and forgot my building pass at home. Sigh.
  • will celebrate the early spring warmth by going for a photo-expedition at lunch time, perhaps behind the Parliament Buildings or over to the National Gallery.
  • am worried about my dad.*

Next year I hope:

  • to have a little bit more free time on my hands
  • to have a little bit more control over the chaos and a few more projects checked off the to-do list
  • to be doing more or less exactly what I’m doing now — but better!

(You like the vagueness here? Goal-setting was never one of my strengths!)

In five years I hope:

  • to be thinking about looking for a four-bedroom house
  • to be *this close* to having all three boys in school full-time
  • to be rejigging my priorities to be putting a little bit more emphasis back on my career

This was really fun to do, and surprisingly difficult on the prognostication parts. It’s quite interesting to read the ones I’ve written before and see what I chose to note as important at that time, too!

Let me know if you play along!

* My dad is in the hospital with a subdural hematoma, and they’ll have to operate some time in the next few days to relieve the pressure on his brain. It sounds a little bit too much like an episode of House for my liking. They don’t know exactly how it happened, but suspect it came from a tumble down some stairs quite a few weeks ago.

Because we need more random whimsey in our lives…

I’ve got a column up today at TechLifePost, where I talk about Postcrossing, Photochaining and other new and obscure ways to waste time spend quality time on the Internet. If you’ve ever wanted to receive postcards from exotic locales, or leave a photographic memory card lying around for a random stranger to find (!!) check it out!

In which she pines for the glory days of Blogging 1.0

My friend Barbara, also a social media junkie and mom-blogger, sent me a link yesterday to an article about a contest sponsored by Scholastic to find the “best Mommy Blogs on the Web.”

No wait, don’t leave just yet, I promise I’m not out to whore any votes for this one! The voting is over – apparently, more than 10,000 unique votes were cast – and the winners revealed. And between us, neither Barbara nor I have heard of a single one of the winning blogs. No Dooce, no Amalah, no Rocks in my Dryer, no Finslippy. (Ah, I can’t be bothered to make the links. Google ’em if you’re curious.) None of the winners were any of the big names you’d normally associate with mom blogs, in fact. Or maybe they are the big names now, and I am just too far from the epicenter to know it. Maybe once again I’m a vinyl girl living in a CD world.

I don’t think so, though. I think the blogosphere has just gone through one of those fundamental shifts in the last year or two, leaving the landscape irrevocably changed. I’ve been noodling ways to express this idea in a couple of posts that will likely never escape the vortex that is my drafts folder, but I can’t quite seem to get it to come out right.

What I’m trying to express, with virtually no success, is how different things are in the blogosphere than they were back when I started bloggin in early 2005. Back then, the parenting blogosphere was like a big high school; there were cliques and clans, and there were a few genuinely popular blogs that everyone seemed to link to, but we all kinda-sorta knew each other — or at least of each other. If a blog had been around a while, you’d likely at least have heard of it, if not visited it once or twice. Now, the blogosphere is like a country the size of Canada, and the chances of you knowing even the bloggers in your own city are as remote as the chances of you knowing Phil from Saskatchewan when you live in Corner Brook.

Along the same lines, I was nodding my head in agreement the entire time I read a recent article and post written by Lindsay at Suburban Turmoil (another old-skooler from back in the day) about how mommy blogging is lately less about story-telling and sharing perspectives and more about SEO optimization and branding. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am completely NOT opposed to the idea of people making a profit from their blogs — far from. But it seems to me that the essential charm of the mommy blog, what drew me in to the medium in the first place, is getting lost in all the noise from the product hawking and advertising deals.

So what’s my point? I dunno. I’m just sitting here on my porch rocker, waving my cane at those young whipper-snappers with their review blogs and revenue generating opportunites. Back in my day, I tell ya…

Ch-ch-ch-changes

So you know I hate change. Really, I do. It took me four years to finally change my gravatar photo, for goodness sake, and it pained me to do so. Even when I know I’m going to like the new thing better, I’m still reluctant to let go of the old thing. (I was going to make a cheeky comment here about my marriage, but maybe we shouldn’t go there! *smooches to Beloved*)

Ahem, anyway, about change. I’ve been wanting to update the blog for quite some time now. I’ve spent hours scouring the interwebs for new WordPress themes, and, well — meh. I’ve found some that I *almost* like. Design Disease has some good ones (Andrea has a great one on her blog) and BlogOhBlog comes pretty darn close to what I want with a few of their themes… but not quite. I’ve downloaded more than a dozen different themes to play with, but they either don’t work properly, or I can’t figure out how to customize them to suit my needs. I even downloaded a little DIY theme designer program, but after toying with it a bit I’ve figured out that I have exactly the wrong amount of knowledge — just enough to know exactly what I want, but not enough to make it so. Sigh.

So here’s what I’m hoping. Either you know this really great site with just the perfect theme for me that I can download and use out of the box with breathtaking results, or you have this friend who does sensational custom blog designs and is just itching for a new, low-cost/high-affection client to add to his portfolio. Not too much to hope for, eh?

Here’s what I want:

  • Three-column (two sidebar) non-fixed format (do they call that “fluid”?) I’m not sure what the terminology is, but I don’t want it the way it is now, with a box around the text and sidebar. I want it more open – but boxes around the sidebar widgets is okay.
  • The design should tend toward the minimalistic — not a lot of graphics.
  • Must be colourful: I like the idea of multicoloured tabs across the top, and multicoloured sidebar boxes with rounded corners (or, at least, multicoloured title boxes.)
  • If you haven’t noticed (ha!) I’m all about teh Flickr lately, so I’d like a design that showcases my pictures either in the banner or the sidebar – or both!
  • It has to be fully widgetized, because I like the stuff in the sidebar and would probably add even more stuff. (Thus the need for two sidebars.)

Talk to me about blog design. How did you pick yours? What should I do with mine? What do you love and hate about blog designs you’ve seen? What should I make sure to do and what should I avoid at all costs? And speaking of costs – premium themes are not out of the question, but they have to be pretty damn good to get me to fork out any cash, so if you know of a good site, do let me know!