Category: It IS all about me

Confessions of a junk show junkie

The free world might be caught up in the compelling drama of Downtown Abbey or Game of Thrones or even Mad Men (at least I’ve seen a couple of episodes of that one) but I have noticed that my television consuption has skewed away from shows with plots and narrative arcs. Who has the attention span for that these days? And anyway, then I’d have no time for Auction Hunters, Storage Wars or Pawn Stars. My name is Dani, and I am addicted to junk shop television.

It’s hardly a surprise. One of our favourite family activities has long been scouring the countryside for vintage crap at local flea markets. It’s not even so much about the stuff as it is about the thrill of the hunt for the stuff. (Although some of the stuff has been awesome. My darling old Underwood typewriter, for example, or the red wagon I use in so many of my photo shoots. Neither of which would have made a ripple had they been discovered in a locker on Storage Wars, but both of which give me great happiness every time I look at them. One woman’s treasure…)

Flea market awesomeness #1
Not everything at the flea market is awesome, some of it is just scary

Given infinite resources of time, space and child patience, we would happiply spend every weekend hunting through flea markets, visiting auctions and rifling through dusty shelves at antiques and second-hand shops – to say nothing of the now-ubiquitous spring yard sales, church bazaars and the crap people simply leave at the end of their driveways. (Most of my porch furniture was acquired this way!) But really, how many butter boxes do we actually need anyway? I have this weird container fixation, and I love vintage stuff. Things at the intersection of the two like butter boxes, vintage suitcases and old wooden crates drive me into paroxysms of covetousness even though I have no place or need for any more. And let’s not even TALK about all the old camera gear out there. Thankfully, a couple of episodes of Canadian Pickers or Auction Kings scratches my treasure-hunter itch without tapping my far-from-unlimited resources.

I know they like to play the drama and the personalities in these shows, but I find that part tedious. Never mind the people and their petty conflicts, tell me more about the stuff. The stuff fascinates me! It’s not just about the valuable stuff, the lost Tom Thompson everybody hopes is hiding in their grandmother’s attic, but about why we have the stuff and why we want the stuff and why we hold on to and sell and forget we even had the stuff. I think that’s why I like Pawn Stars and Auction Kings and Canadian Pickers best of all of them – they give a little bit of insight and history of the stuff, and why it’s interesting or valuable. It’s what the stuff tells us about ourselves that fascinates me.

What do you think? Are you a picker-wanna-be? Do you hang out in the second-hand shops hunting elusive treasures or are you an armchair picker like me? Or are you totally skeeved out at the idea of anything whose provenance is unknown, preferring factory-fresh new stuff instead?

The skinny on “mom jeans”

Okay, peeps, we need to talk about jeans. I was going to play this one straight for comedy, but like all things that are truly funny, this cuts a little too close to the bone for me to leave my insecurities completely, ahem, behind.

I’ve been perturbed by the term “mom jeans” from just about the first time I heard it. (Another variation of this post is filled with righteous indignation, which is an excellent alternative to comedy when the truth cuts too close to the bone and you are not blessed with a sense of humour.) But seriously, why exactly do we imply high-waisted, unflattering and poorly fitting jeans are “mom” jeans? Are moms by default more slovenly and worthy of scorn? It has been many years since I went to work with baby shit smeared from my wrist to my bicep, but somehow just by being the bearer of children my choice of denim should be disrespected?

So I could get all righteous about the term “mom jeans” but truth be told, getting worked up about anything related to fashion would be completely hypocritical of me. It’s one of the major reasons I’m so relieved to have a passel of boys and no girls to worry about. I don’t really follow trends, I forget to wear makeup most days, and if I wear anything but comfortable shoes my knees ache all the way to my hips. I don’t do fashion, I do smart-casual-meets-comfortable. Jeans are my go-to staple from work to weekends. I stray occasionally into the fancy world of dress pants and even (gasp!) skirts, but the predominant fabric swathing my legs is denim.

In particular, I live in GAP jeans. I discovered the Long and Lean style about three years ago, and snap them up when they go on sale. The sticker price is around $65, but I usually only pay about half of that. Including the deep indigo wash and the midnight black ones, I think I’m up to about five pairs in my closet. I thought I was being fashion-forward. I mean, it’s the GAP, right? They’re a cool label, no?

Apparently not when it comes to mom jeans. Apparently, GAP and Old Navy are ‘gateway’ mom-jeans.

Huh.

I found that post through a friend’s Facebook page. At first I was filled with righteous rage. When are we going to get over this stupid “mom jeans” term was my first thought. Then as I was reading, I was justifying and rationalizing in my head. “Oh, this writer is American. It’s probably different there. I’m sure the fits and labels are all different.” And there, down near the bottom of the post, are my beloved Long and Lean jeans. the ones that make my legs look like they’re about 11 feet long. Or so I thought. Until I got to the bit where she said Long and Lean are “the only pair that qualified beyond Gateway and straight into Mom Jeans.”

I’m feeling very conflicted now. I’m 43 years old for god’s sake, I’m way too old and comfortable with myself to get my denim worked into a twist over this. What do I care how my jeans look, beyond the fact that I try to leave the house without too much breakfast and dog hair smudged on them? I’ve borne three babies on these hips, they’ve earned a little extra padding. And it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone with my caboose anymore – that horse is waaaaaaay out of the barn. So why the hell should I care what some cheeky blogger things about how my ass looks?

See all that righteousness? Methinks she doth protest too much. Apparently I do care, because my idle brain keeps coming back to pick at the idea like a festering scab. Maybe my ass is not as cool as I thought it was, wrapped in middle class friendly but not boutique-level denim? Maybe I need to drag Beloved to the Rideau Centre and have him trail around behind me taking pictures of my keister in Lucky Jeans and American Eagle and oh my god I’m so uncool I don’t even know what the cool stores might be! Good Christ, I’m 43 and I NEVER LEFT HIGH SCHOOL. Or perhaps more acutely, high school never left me.

In 1982, the thing I wanted more than anything in the universe was a pair of Road Runner jeans. We weren’t exactly poor but we weren’t exactly wealthy, either, and they were a little more costly than the Zellers house brand jeans I had been wearing. I remember how amazed I was when my mom actually bought me a pair. To my great dismay, I was just as unpopular in Road Runner jeans as I had been without them. It only took about 25 more years for me to really start to understand that what’s in my head is way more important than whatever label is on my jeans.

But my head keeps thinking about my ass, and wondering if maybe I’m at an age where I deserve a little help in the fit department. Clearly I’m conflicted, bloggy peeps. What say ye, oh wise and wonderful friends? There’s lots of food for thought here – mom jeans, societal expectations of women of a certain age, and my obvious inability to get my head out of my back pocket. Care to riff on any of those themes?

And, ppsssstt – where can a shallow girl of a certain age and fuller-than-waifish shape get a pair of jeans that are comfortable, flattering and on sale?

Yep, she’s still blogging eight years later

A part of me says, “Wow, has it already been eight years since your first blog post?” And another part of me says, “Seriously, it’s only been eight years? Seems like much longer than that.” Well, in a way I suppose it has been. I created my first website dedicated to photos and stories about the kids back when I was pregnant with Tristan (heh, using my mad HTML skills, Front Page and a Geocities site!) so that’s going back about a dozen years. But it’s been eight years this week since I’ve been on the bloggy bandwagon.

Every couple of years I like to haul out the first meme I ever did (memes were good, eh? I miss memes) and use it as an excuse to wax blatantly nostalgic.

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • About to graduate magna cum laude from the University of Ottawa with a degree in Comms, after going part-time nights for six years to get my degree
  • Freshly appointed to a mid-level program management beancounter job and feeling like a young professional for the first time
  • Living in a tiny third-floor attic apartment in the Glebe with Beloved and starting to think about wedding plans for the next year

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • Getting ready to come back to work after my first year of maternity leave
  • Tempering my dismay at the end of mat leave with huge excitement about coming back to a new job: my first job in public affairs (where I still work today)
  • A couple of months away from finding and buying our townhouse in Barrhaven and then finding out I was pregnant with Simon

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • Hugely pregnant and overdue with Lucas, and liveblogging the lack of labour and then, finally, the labour and arrival of the “player to be named later” (the posts from my pregnancy with Lucas still seem like the glory days of the blog community. I miss those days!)
  • Did I mention hugely pregnant?
  • And overdue?

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • Happy to be back with public affairs, this time managing the social media team (I love my job!)
  • Enrolling “baby” Lucas in junior kindergarten
  • Finding my groove and kicking off a very successful year with the photography business

This year I am:

  • Thinking about blog and website makeovers (now taking suggestions!)
  • Contemplating changing the photography business name
  • Feeling busy and involved but (blissfully!) not overwhelmed… most of the time

Today I am:

  • In the midst of birthday season mayhem
  • Feeling much more confident about my parenting skills than I was 10 years ago
  • Happy

Next year I hope:

  • To have saved enough from the photography business for the full-frame camera I’ve been coveting
  • To do more travel with the family
  • To be done with daycare forever

In five years I hope:

  • To be wrangling with Tristan over getting his (gasp!) driver’s license!
  • To be considering a return to full-time employment (to top up my last years of income before retirement!)
  • To have renovated the kitchen and the basement family room

I was going to include a checklist of which prognostications and goals I got right and wrong in prior years but this is getting long, so I’ll save that for another day.

Funny that I’ve now got blog posts in the archives that cover so many of these highlights! I wonder if I’ll ever get to a version where I say, “15 years ago I launched this blog, using (snicker) a keyboard and a PC!” and we’ll all laugh about how quaintly antiquated it all was?

This week in pictures: winter family fun – and an award!!

How cool is this? I just found out that Postcards from the Mothership won third place in the “Art and Photography” category of the Canadian Weblog Awards!!

2012 Canadian Weblog Awards winners

I had been nominated in three (!) categories: Best Parenting Blog, Best Blog about Life and Best Art and Photography Blog. (And a HUGE thank you to whomever nominated me!) I love the fact that the Canadian Weblog Awards are juried (no grovelling for votes!) and I love love love that I won in the Art and Photography category. Thank you!!!

So, ahem, how about some photos?

On Saturday, we went out to enjoy Manotick’s Shiverfest with a little sledding. What we didn’t realize until after was that the city had closed all its hills because they were so icy. We’d hauled ourselves out in the cold, though, and we had the hill to ourselves for most of the time we were there, so with me playing traffic cop to make sure nobody took off too soon and wiped out a brother, we ended up having a lot of fun.

Shiverfest sledding fun

Shiverfest sledding fun

Listening to Lucas hoot and holler, somewhere between exhilaration and terror, was priceless, as was his bellow of assurance at the bottom of each run. “I’m okay mom!”

Shiverfest sledding fun

The next day Tristan and I braved the cold for a wander around the Lime Kiln Trail. The poor wee birds must have been starving with the recent deep freeze, because I swear we could have just sat in the car and held our hands out the window to feed them. We’ve fed the chickadees many times, and I’ve never seen them so aggressive.

Feeding the chickadees

Feeding the chickadees

The middle bit of the week was a little less photogenic. Tristan put together this “cracker napkin” and I thought it would make a good instagram shot.

Cracker napkin

And there’s always room for a cat-dog shot, right?

Cat's eye view

(I’d like that one a lot more if the light had been a little better and the shot a little less grainy. Oh well.)

And then suddenly, Simon was nine years old!

Happy birthday Simon!

Can I eat my cake now mom?

Doesn’t his expression say “okay mom, one more, but can I eat my cake now please?”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there is a birthday party at some point today for which I should be getting ready… 😉

Come and play along with the I Love Ottawa/Gatineau photo contest!

I mentioned last week that I’ve been invited to participate in a fun new contest to help raise money for the Ottawa Food Bank. The launch event was this morning. It was a horrible morning outside (sleet and howling winds that turned into a blizzard while we were there!) but a warm and friendly morning inside as I had the chance to fawn over chat with Mayor Jim Watson, digital media teacher Allison Burnet, old friend and blogger Andrea Tomkins, CBC weather man Ian Black and two of my Ottawa radio heros: CBC All in a Day host Alan Neal and fellow Manotick resident Sandy Sharkey from BOB-FM.

Launch of the I love Ott photo contest w @harry_nowell @jimwatsonottawa @blacksweather @sandysharkey @missfish and @alannealottawa

Of all the celebrity and media personalities there, the kids were most impressed by the fact that I met Sandy Sharkey. 🙂 I kinda thought I was in radio heaven watching this interview take place:

@sandysharkey and @alannealottawa chatting at the #ottgatlove photo contest launch #ottawastarsinmyeyes

So yes, it was a lovely morning, but one with a great purpose as well: all participants will be submitting up to three photographs on the theme of “Why I love Ottawa/Gatineau”. Entries will be framed by contest sponsors Harry Nowell, Artopix, Dave Andrews Fine Art Printer and Patrick Gordon Framing, and then sold at a silent auction on February 23 at Ottawa Studio Works to raise funds for the Ottawa Food Bank. How fun is that?

Would you like to play along? Members of the public are invited to submit up to three high-resolution photos on the theme of “Why I love Ottawa/Gatineau” to the contest Facebook page between now and February 16. Convince your family and friends to vote for your photo and the one with the most votes will be printed, framed and included in the auction as well! You can also follow the contest twitter feed (run by Allison’s digital marketing class) on Twitter (@OttGatLove and #ottgatlove) or even check out their inspiration board on Pinterest.

Will you be playing along? If not, at least help me with some inspiration. For most of the one week I have to come up with my entries, the weather forecast is calling for daily HIGH temperatures in the -20C range! (Yikes!!) So the challenge may now be how do I best show my love of Ottawa – indoors!!

Edited to add: Thanks to Alan Neal for including me rambling on your segment on All in a Day today, and thanks Harry Nowell for this fun photo of Alan stealing my ideas interviewing me. 🙂

A week of walking

I mentioned last week that I’ve got a new gadget: a fancy little pedometer called a FitBit. I’ve spent the last week walking around with it tucked in my pocket to get an idea of exactly how many steps I take in an average day, and then I’ll try to figure out a reasonable plan to increase that number, which will lead to weight loss, greater health, whiter teeth, healthier self-esteem, better sex and a cleaner house. Right?!

The funny thing is that I don’t really seem to have an “average” day. One day I walked almost 12k steps when I happened to go to my French class in the morning and decided to walk to pick up the boys from school in the afternoon (both round trips of 2 km or so, or about 3K steps.) On Sunday, however, I walked a measly 3,000 steps during the entire day when I drove out to Kanata and sat through the nearly 3 hour long movie (The Hobbit, which was excellent!) with the boys and then spent nearly two hours playing mom’s taxi in the evening.

I didn’t expect to see that I tend to walk more on days I’m in the office than on days I’m at home. I guess that has everything to do with me walking from the parkade to my office and then walking to Starbucks later in the morning and then walking about looking for photos and lunch and coffee at least one more time during the day. On the days I’m home, getting a coffee requires about 20 steps, but the round-trip to Starbucks from my desk takes closer to 1,000.

Lesson 1: to increase number of steps, I only need to increase number of trips to Starbucks!

Here’s what my “baseline” week looks like:

One thing that shocked me was the vast amount of time that I am completely sedentary. Most days, FitBit tells me, more than 90% of my waking hours are completely sedentary. Ouch! When I move, I tend to move a lot (my daily graphs of activity are filled with long flat-lines broken by towering spikes of movement) but clearly one of the ways to increase my daily step count is to break up the many two-hour stretches in my day when nothing but my fingertips and my synapses are firing.

So now I know that (in winter months, at least) I walk about 6,000 steps each day. If I can boost that up to between 8K and 10K every day, I should be able to burn an extra couple hundred calories – about what you’d find in, say, 20 potato chips.

Baby steps, right? 😉

How do you think your weekly activity levels would stack up to mine?

Reinvention 2013, and a new gizmo

I have never been a fan of new year’s resolutions, but I am a sucker for a seasonal re-adjustment and reinvention. Something about January begs for a little bit of belt-tightening and clean living after the excesses and chaos of the holiday season.

You might remember back in 2008, just after Lucas was born, over the course of about six months I managed to lose just over 30 lbs. I felt (and looked!) great, and I more or less managed to keep it off, but there’s been a bit of a weight creep going on for the last year or two. I’d like to lose about 10 lbs to get back to my ideal weight, or 15 lbs to get back to the lowest I achieved in 2009.

Even moreso, I’ve been getting a little too sedentary lately for my own liking. I’m a lazy creature to begin with, and one of my favourite ways to spend hours at a stretch involves me staring slack-jawed and motionless at a monitor while only my fingertips exert themselves. I need some sort of motivation to get up and get moving.

And finally, I’ve been seeing a phystiotherapist for the last few months for what I thought was a flare-up of my years-old knee problem. I love love love my new physiotherapist, though, because she’s shown me that the patello-femoral syndrome that’s been bothering me is actually a symptom of a larger problem with my hips and how I’m walking, and so I’ve been working on readjusting that, too.

My mind was swirling with this perfect storm of the desire for physical reinvention when I read Julie’s post last week about her own new year resolution to take 8,000 to 10,000 steps each day. I loved the idea – I’ve long known walking is an excellent form of exercise, and a perfect one for my lifestyle – and she had (gasp!) a gadget. Okay, it’s actually a pedometer, but it is the most fun and interesting pedometer I’ve ever seen. It’s called a FitBit and it uploads your daily steps, distance and calories burned wirelessly not just to your computer but to your iPhone as well. You can also record your food intake, something I know helped me lose the 30+ lbs in 2008.

Walking + motivation + accountability + gadgetry = perfect solution for me!!

Untitled

I’m in geeky heaven. I love stats and graphs and counting things, I really do. I got it this afternoon, and for the next day or two I’m just going to measure how many steps I take in an average day. I am guessing that will be around 6,000. If I can boost that up to 8,000, I’ll be burning around 300 extra calories a day, which will stop the pounds from creeping on. By boosting another 300 calories up to 10,000 steps a day, I should be able to carve off a pound or so each week, which means I’ll be back to my target weight for spring(ish).

Seems do-able, yes? That, and I want to do a better job getting more fruits and veg into my own diet and that of the boys. And pay down some of our debt. And swear less. And do a better job keeping on top of the household chores. And do a better job fitting in my daily exercises and stretches for physio. And be more mindful of the present, instead of spending so much time stuck to a device. And get back into my bloggy grove a little bit more. And I think I’m doing another 365 project.

Gee, it’s a good thing I don’t make any new year’s resolutions, isn’t it? *eyeball roll*

Anybody want to play along? What are you resolving (or not resolving) to do in 2013?

Flashback faves: The Reindeer Rant

You can thank CBC Ottawa Morning for reminding me to post the annual reindeer rant today. There’s no way in a year that I’ve started mining my own content for repeats that I would forget to post my favourite seasonal repeat! And props to CBC for getting it right and saying DONDER instead of Donner. : )
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Did you think might get through one Christmas season without the annual Donder reindeer rant? Sorry to disappoint you. As long as I have pixels to purvey my message, the reindeer rant will play out at some time in the month of December.

New around here? Darling, this one is for you!

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

As you might know, my last name is Donders. As such, it has been my lifelong quest to set the record straight and right the wrongs entrenched by Johnny Marks and Gene Autry.

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.

Donder

Okay, time to ‘fess up. Have I convinced you yet? Or do I have to roll this one out again next year too? 🙂

Speaking of adventures in publishing…

Before I became obsessive about photography, I was in love with words. I’ve always loved to tell a tale, and to find the perfect words to do it justice. Once upon a time, I thought I might even write a book some day.

Well, I didn’t exactly write a book, but in the same week I self-published not one but TWO photography books on Blurb.ca, take a look at what else is in print: my very own article and photograph in Ottawa Family Living magazine. How fun is this?

Ottawa Family Living magazine, December 2012

OttFamLiv Mag Dec 2012 pg 2

That’s my byline! I wrote the article AND I took the photo of Watson’s Mill. I’m pretty darn pleased with myself. 🙂

Watch for your copy of Ottawa Family Magazine (also featuring my friends Sara McConnell and Karen Wilson, among others!) in this Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen.

Edited to add: oh look! Here it is online!

En français

It was only when I got an odd look from the man walking past me that I realized I’d been concentrating so hard on practicing an internal dialogue for my upcoming French exam that I had actually been speaking aloud. There I was, walking down George Street in the Byward Market in the pre-dawn gloaming, chattering away to myself badly in French along the lines of: “I work for the government of Canada in the field of public affairs, and I’m the team leader for the social media programs.” His half-smirk was priceless. Only in Ottawa is this not a mark of insanity but simply another beleagured anglophone in search of a bilingual bonus.

You might remember I spent most of my summer vacation in 2011 practicing for my reading and writing tests in French, which I needed to come back to the CRA from my stint with the Army web team. I passed those, but my oral exam results expired in October of 2011, so I’ve been taking lessons for the last year to gear up for it. When I last took the oral exam in 2006, I failed twice before getting the required B level result (B = bearable), so I am half expecting the same result this time. My exam is a week today – wish me luck!

I’m actually fairly confident. One thing I have going for me this time that I didn’t have going for me back in 2006 is two little French speakers to practice with at the dinner table. Tristan is in an immersion French program and Simon will follow suit next year. It both kills me and fills me with pride to hear their perfect little accents and the unselfconsious ease with which they speak in French. They’re more fluent after just a couple of years than I am after 20 bloody years of French lessons. Must be latent on Beloved’s side – his ancestors were apparently in Louis XIV’s court way back in the day. There’s no French on my side to fall back on, though, and I have a much easier time rolling a Scottish burr than rolling a French rrrrr.

It fascinates me how differently they are learning French than I did. No rote memorization of noun gender, no endless conjugation of verbs, no lectures on agreement of adjectives. They just Рspeak. And listen. And Рgasp! Рunderstand. They have no idea of what the pass̩ compos̩ might be, but they use it.

I had mixed feelings when the kids were wee about sending them through the immersion program at school. I was worried they wouldn’t be strong in either language. Clearly, I had nothing to worry about. They’re strong in both languages, and my four year old has a vocabulary that would make an English teacher proud. I have a deep envy of people for whom a second language comes easily and would love nothing more than to be unselfconcious when speaking French myself.

Alas, I think after 20 years of trying, that goal may be unattainable. I think I’m doomed to muddle along, translating in my head as I go and muttering to myself in an incomprehensible mix of both languages. So if you see me walking down the street talking to myself, just smile and say ‘bonjour!’