Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

I’ve been spending a lot of time blogging in my head lately, but can’t for the life of me get a full post out of any of it. Some random bits of flotsam and jetsam:

I have to blog my appreciation of the Canadian kids’ clothing chain Please Mum. I’ve always liked the quality of their clothes, and was so impressed with the winter parka that lasted Tristan two years that I bought both boys their winter parkas there this year. Tristan’s was fine, but Simon’s had a wonky zipper right from the start. Not a big deal, but enough to be an annoyance and prevent Simon from being able to zip up his own coat most of the time. Then, last week the coat split under the arm when Beloved went to boost Simon into the van, and a couple of days ago the zipper suddenly spazzed out entirely and popped open every time I zipped it up.

Fed up fighting with it, I brought the coat back to the store this week. I had no receipt, and told the clerk that while I generally admire the quality of Please Mum’s merchandise, this one had obviously been made at a quarter to five on the Friday of a long weekend.

She took a look at the various offending bits and clucked her tongue. She not only refunded my purchase price (already reduced once when I brought it in for a price adjustment three weeks after I bought it) but gave it to me in cash instead of as a store credit. “That should never happen,” was all she said when I told her that I was truly impressed with the customer service. So, props to Please Mum! (They have a great special on right now where you will get $25 off a $50 purchase — good deals to be had! And no, I’m not blogging any of this for any reason except I think stories of decent retailers and excellent customer service need to be noted and shared.)

Something smells a little sketchy in the bottom of my refrigerator, but I cannot for the life of me convince myself to sit on the floor and start searching for it. Sometimes these things just clear up on their own, right?

Oh my god, is WonderPets (click through at your own peril!!) not the most annoying children’s show ever? Seriously, I’ve seen it three times since I’ve been home on maternity leave and I want to scratch my eyes out every single time it comes on. Why do they sing everything? And why the fuck does that duck lisp like that? I don’t know if I can take a whole year of this.

Telling a pregnant woman to drink an additional three to four cups of raspberry leaf tea a day to induce labour is somebody’s idea of a practical joke, right? Or am I supposed to pee the baby out?

Tristan had a school project this week. It was his turn for “All About Me” week at school and he had to draw up a series of pictures on themes to be presented to the class, like, “My favourite food is (meatballs, pogos, lollipops and ice cream)” and “My favourite colour is (red)” and “When I grow up, I want to be (a racecar driver)” and “My favourite thing about me is (my blond fuzzy hair).” The very last statement was “I am special because…” and I was quite curious how he’d answer that one. Imagine the melted hormonal puddle I became when he answered it thusly: “I am special because my mommy and daddy love me.” Couldn’t you just hug him to bits?

2008 happens to be the 20th anniversary of the year I graduated from high school and moved from my parents’ home in London, Ontario to Ottawa. Twenty years since high school – ouch!

There was a fun article in the Ottawa Citizen last week that I would link to here if only I could find it online using their inefficient and rather annoying search engine. It listed a series of pop culture anniversaries that will be celebrated this year, many of which I’m sure will make you scratch your head and say, as I did, “Holy crap I’m getting old!”

For example, did you know it’s already been ten years since:

• the FINAL episode of Seinfeld (it seems more like it should be ten years since the debut!)
• the debut of Dawson’s Creek (I used to love watching this before we headed out to the Clocktower for pints on a Friday night.)
• the debut of Sex in the City, of which I have only ever watched maybe two episodes.
• the release of Brittney Spears’ first single, Baby One More Time.

In addition to my graduation from high school and life-alterning move across the province, it’s been twenty years since:

• the debut of Roseanne.
• the release of Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry Be Happy AND Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (somehow, they’re better juxtaposed)

And, not from the article and not a nice round number, but because I got it on DVD for Christmas to replace my almost worn through copy, can you believe it’s been 21 years since the 1987 release of The Princess Bride? I just watched it again last weekend, and it’s as good as it’s ever been. I even considered Westley as a middle name for the baby!

It’s been 25 years since I started high school in 1983, in addition to:

• the finale of M*A*S*H (always a favourite show in my house when I was growing up. I have fond memories of watching M*A*S*H and Barney Miller with my dad, and imagine they had a lot to do with the strong cheeky and ironic streak in my own sense of humour.)
• the theatrical release of Flashdance and Risky Business. C’mon, admit it, you either owned a torn sweatshirt that sat canted off one shoulder, or a pair of RayBans.
• we were stunned by the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back. (This wasn’t in the article either, but significant enough in my own childhood to make its exclusion from the article seem like a heinous oversight.)

It’s been 30 years since:

• the release of Grease and National Lampoon’s Animal House (I didn’t actually see Grease until VCRs appeared on the scene in the early 80s, but I had a photonovel that I wore to dog-ears, and my next door neighbour had the soundtrack. We spent endless summer vacation days alternating between playing Grease and the Partridge Family that summer of 1978!)
• the debut of Dallas and – the one that inspired me to blog this article in the first place – the debut of Mork and Mindy. 30 years of Robin Williams… I’ll let you make your own editorial observations on that one!

Holy crap, I’m old.

Just a little reminder that if you haven’t already done so, you can vote for me (and a whole raft of deserving others!) in the Best Family Blog category of the Canadian Blog Awards. You can only vote once per round, and voting for round one ends January 21. C’mon, you want to keep me in this so I can continue to pester you to vote for me in the finals, right?

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?

And so it came to pass that she spent almost 48 hours without attaching herself to the computer. And lo, to her great surprise, it was good.

And while she was not clacking madly on the keyboard, she found that she had opportunities to play with her children, and read new books, and converse with her family, and eat – and eat – and eat. And lo, it was good.

And she did not read her Bloglines account, and she did not fret over the great numbers of unread posts piling up. And lo, it was good.

And she bathed in the warm glow of her baby niece’s smile, and laughed at the noisy antics of her boys and their adoring cousins, while trying only half successfully to have grownup conversations around their happy exhuberance. And lo, it was good.

And there were gifts, and there was family, and there was food, and there was love.

And lo, it was very, very good.

It’s Christmas Eve, early in the morning. Today will be a chaotic day from end to end, and I’m almost reluctant to launch myself into it, knowing when the dust finally settles that Christmas will be more or less over.

The boys and I are taking the bus downtown to my work (an adventure in itself, their first ride on public transit!) and Beloved will join us later for the office children’s Christmas party, complete with a visit from Santa himself. I have to make one last stop at the Rideau Centre, which promises even more chaos. Then home for an afternoon visit from my entire side of the family – fourteen or more of us, crammed into my little townhouse! – which will meander its way into our traditional Christmas Eve gift exchange after dinner.

I’m so lucky to be at the centre of this family. I remember the Christmases when my brother and I were young adults, and there were no children racing through the house on Christmas Eve. Though it was always wonderful to be with my family, the extra joy of my two kids, plus my brother’s two, plus my cousin’s six year old, will fill the house with the kind of blissfully crazy energy that only kids hepped up on Christmas overload can generate.

I hope to cram in one more post before Christmas, but just in case I don’t get around to it — Happy Christmas (or just Happy Tuesday, if that’s your preference) to all of you, and your families. May happy chaos be the order of the day!

• It’s been just over a week since we picked up the minivan. Meh. I don’t hate it, but I can’t say I’m in love with it. It has wheels, a steering wheel, and it goes. I suppose that’s a good start.
• The first time we tried to pick it up, we made it all the way to the dealership with the boys in tow before they realized they had forgotten to order the licence plates for us, so I had to trek back the next day after work to pick it up.
• The good news is, the dealership is a four-minute walk from a major transit station. (And, for the record, it’s the only time I’ve had to stand on a bus for this whole pregnancy. People who live in Barrhaven apparently have better manners than the people who live in South Keys. I’m just sayin’.)
• The bad news is, it was yet another snowsqually day in Ottawa (have there actually been ANY days without snow so far this year?) and it took me more than an hour to make the 15 minute drive from the dealership to my house.
• Being stuck in crawling traffic for an hour in the dark gave me a lot of time to poke around and play with various features inside the van, like the multitudinous cup holders, the drop-down sunglasses holder / conversation mirror, and the dual cigarette lighters (with no ashtray – where will I put my coins??) At least I know the defroster, the heater and the windshield wipers work.
• I still have no idea how to set the radio stations.
• I must admit I do like the imperial feeling of sitting WAY up high and looking down at all the little sedan drivers below.
• The highest speed I achieved on that first drive was a heady 40 km/h on Fallowfield. I see this as an omen.
• When I went to step out of the van in the driveway, and my leg swung open into a vast expanse of nothingness with the ground a vertiginous distance below, I really thought I was going to have to use a step-ladder to get in and out of the damn thing for the rest of this pregnancy.
• The boys were desperate to go for a ride, so we took them for a spin up to the movie store at the corner.
• Tristan, who is apparently five going on fifteen, immediately claimed the back corner seat for himself. He seems miles away from the driver’s seat and I’m not used to having to practically shout to talk to him. I find myself watching him more closely now in the rearview mirror simply because he seems so far away.
• Simon claimed a seat on the middle bench, and announced that the seat beside him was reserved for his “baby brudder.” When Beloved tossed the DVD boxes on the seat beside him for the ride home, Simon immediately told him to move them or his baby brudder would have to sit on them.
• It took a couple of days, but I’m starting to get the feel for manoeuvering the tank in and out of parking spots. But getting the snow off that sucker takes about a week and the use of a long-handled broom.
• It’s a royal pain having to either remember to switch stuff from one car to the other or stock a second car with all the things you stow in your car so you don’t have to worry about them – a snow scraper, a box of kleenex, the iPod transmitter thingee, the reuseable grocery bags – let alone the cost of a second set of car seats. I don’t even have a plastic sleeve to keep my new insurance and ownership papers in.
• I hadn’t really thought about the impact of having a second car in the driveway, aside from the annoying fact that no matter which car is closest to the road, you need the other one. But now we have no driveway left for hockey games or visitors, and with six foot snowbanks there’s no street parking either.
• A few nights ago, I took the Focus Wagon up to the grocery store, and it was like sliding into a comfortable pair of shoes. I think I actually sighed in contentment as I pulled into a parking spot. SO much more comfortable. Sigh.

A quick question for the bloggy peeps: with my brother and his family visiting this Christmas, we have ten stockings to hang. In previous years, we’ve hung the stockings from the curtain rod – but, this past summer, the boys pulled it out of the wall and it’s simply not all that strong. We’ve also used those stick-and-remove hooks before, but I balked at the price tag; at $3.99 each, it will cost over $40 just to HANG the stockings, let alone fill them!

What do you use to hang your stockings?