Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

I like shopping for cars. I like thinking about the features, the colour, the style, the shape. I like comparison shopping, and I don’t mind haggling a little bit over price. I bought my first car back in December of 1990. It was a 1990 Mazda 323 hatchback, and I drove the snot out of that little car. In 1998, Beloved and I leased a Cayenne Red two-door Sunfire with a sunroof, and that was my sexy car. Completely impractical for kids, but a fun car to drive. That lease expired in June of 2001, and we signed the lease for our first Ford Focus station wagon that month. In fact, we signed on the dotted line during a fit of optimism during the two-week wait of our in vitro fertilization, and I remember thinking at the time that I would be some bloody pissed if the treatment didn’t work out and I ended up childless and driving a station wagon around town. Lucky for us, it turned out to be the perfect family car for our brand-new family. Simon was about four months old when we bought our next Focus wagon in 2004, and I would have been content with another wagon if we could have crammed a third car seat into the back seat, but they simply won’t fit.

Shopping for the minivan has not been the same. Oh, I’ve done my comparison shopping, and I have a pretty good idea which one has the highest safety rating (the Kia Sedona) and which one I’d love but can’t afford to splurge on (the Honda Odyssey.) And of course, I have the expert opinions of the bloggy peeps to guide my way.

(Oy, this is going to be long… I’m tucking the rest of this epic below the fold!)

Continue reading “The one where she buys the minivan”

Remember me saying that I had that big ol’ iPod full of empty space, just waiting for the right music to come along and fill it up? That was before I remembered that the holidays are upon us. And you’d better believe that a bona fide Christmas junkie like me has, erm, a few Christmas CDs laying around…

By the time I finished adding these to my iPod, it was well over half full!

My top ten favourite Christmas songs from this well-padded collection:

1. Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth – David Bowie and Bing Crosby
2. Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Dina Shore
3. Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid (what can I say, I’m a child of the 80s at heart)
4. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – U2
5. Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt (This is also Simon’s favourite – he likes the “ba-doum, ba-doum”s)
6. O Holy Night – Luciano Pavarotti
7. I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm – Dean Martin – although the Ella and Louis version is also excellent
8. I Believe in Father Christmas – Honeymoon Suite
9. O Tannenbaum – Vince Guaraldi Trio
10. Twelve Days of Christmas – Bob and Doug McKenzie (I know, I know, but it still makes me laugh)

A decidedly secular collection, in retrospect. I do love traditional carols, too, but more to sing them than to listen to recordings of them. And I’m seriously thinking of downloading the Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas Eve/Sarajevo.

What are your favourite seasonal songs?

I can’t tell you what a relief it was to be done NaBloPoMo on Friday (yay! I made it!) and not have to worry about throwing together a blog post on the weekend, not because we lacked bloggable fun but because we were so darn busy I hardly had time to sit down let alone blog about it.

This week is Beloved’s birthday, and I found out way back in the summer that there was a really cool social media conference going on in Toronto that I wanted to attend – on his birthday. “Happy Birthday, baby, I’m leaving you alone with the two kids while I jet off to a hotel for a day or so. Have a great one!” Because of that, and because he’s just such a great guy and wonderful husband and friend, and because he almost never gets really and truly spoiled, I wanted to get him something special for his birthday.

Way back in the summer, I knew I wanted to get him a Wii console. I like the idea of the Wii, like that they market themselves as a kid-friendly company, and love the idea that some of their games have a get-off-yer-duff-and-move component to them. The trick, of course, was finding one. It took me about a month of idle looking, but I finally found one online and ordered it at the end of September. I can’t remember the last time I was so twitchy to give someone a present! Two months of waiting – it’s been torture!

The funniest part has been listening to Beloved talk about the Wii systems for the last two months. To keep the secret, I had the console delivered to my parents’ house, and it seemed like every time they were around, he was finding some way to talk about the Wii. Or maybe it’s just because he was ALWAYS talking about the Wii and sometimes it happened to be when they were around… regardless, it’s been fun listening to him. Not that he was saying we should get one or anything, he was just rhapsodizing randomly on the various merits of the Wii, and I’d counter with either a flat out, “Are you kidding? Not a chance in hell” or a more compromising, “Why don’t we rent one after the Christmas holidays when the boys are home, just to test it out?” Beloved has long since discovered the efficacy of what I call the “death by a thousand paper cuts” approach to wearing down my resistance to any home electronics purchase, from our first DVD player to the laptop to the digital camera… just keep idly mentioning it, working it into conversations, reading specs out loud from the Future Shop flyer, until I can no longer stand it anymore and say something like “Oh, for the love of all things holy, just go out and buy it already. I don’t care what it costs, just STOP TALKING ABOUT IT!” He’s devious, that one.

He was, of course, shocked and overwhelmed and very, very pleased because he was nowhere near the usual critical mass of annoyance required to get me to capitulate to a purchase like this. The system I ordered came with Wii Sports, which I completely didn’t realize, and so I bought another game called Play that comes with a second controller. We had fun on the weekend playing everything from table tennis to bowling. (Those of you who have bowled with me in real life will be amazed to hear that apparently I’m quite good at it!) They also have one game which I’m suspecting will become a bit of an addiction for me, a game that is half air-hockey and half Pong. I’m all over that!

As if that weren’t enough for a weekend, we also put up our tree and decorated the house (a challenge on an ordinary weekend, and a feat of amazing strength and fortitute while trying to manoeuver around The Belly That Ate New York) and the boys have taken to standing in front of the tree and gazing lovingly at it, saying “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen” in reverently awed voices… for about six seconds, before they started clamouring for another go at the Wii.

We’re now in the middle of an epic snowstorm that may well scuttle my plans to fly out to Toronto tomorrow. We’ve got 20 cm (8 inches) on the ground already, with another 20 to 30 cm forecast for today. It takes a lot to shut this city down – aside from the ice storm in 1998 I’ve never seen it happen – but getting snowed in with the fancy new Wii is not the worst way to go…

We have a self-cleaning oven. For a while, I thought maybe this meant that fairies came in the night and cleaned the oven for us, but after an extended period of hopeful waiting, this does not appear to be the case. In fact, it involves setting the oven to some dangerously high temperature and scorching the holy hell out of the dirt, then scooping up the ashes. Which is actually a rather appealing solution to housecleaning, don’t you think? Screw the clutter, we’ll just carbonize the shit out of everything and then flush it down the toilet.

You also need to know – as if that won’t become self-evident by the end of this post – that I am not the most diligent housekeeper in the world. We don’t exactly live in squalor, but my threshold for a little mess is probably higher than most people’s.

So anyway, you’d think a self-cleaning oven would improve this situation, even if no fairies come to do the dirty work for you — and especially considering that since I’m no domestic goddess, I will seize any opportunity to NOT make dinner, thus reducing the wear and tear on the oven. But eventually even the most sparsely used oven gets a good coating of warmed-up take-out crumbs and frozen lasagne goo burnt to the bottom and needs a good cleaning.

Despite the fact that the nanny had previously expressed reservations about using the stove because of the ghastly amount of smoke that belched out of it one day when she was preheating it for chicken fingers (and decided instead to feed the boys peanut butter sandwiches for fear of using the oven), the tipping point actually came a while ago when we made homemade pizzas and some of the pepperoni slid off the cheese and ingratiated itself under the burner coils. Now, every time we use the oven everything tastes like charred pepperoni.

So we decided the time had finally come to test the self-cleaning part of the oven. Although I suck mightily at housework, I’m actually pretty good at filing paperwork (I am, after all, a bureaucrat in my day job) and was quite surprised when I could not find the oven owners’ manual anywhere, and setting the oven that high without having a vague idea of what I’m doing scared the crap out of me seemed unwise.

So after an endless amount of dithering, procrastination and just ignoring the problem, the charred pepperoni taste finally compelled me to the GE website, where they said sure you can get an owners’ manual here, just enter your model and serial number. It took me a while, but I found said model number and copied it carefully to a notepad and transcribed it onto the website, which promptly replied “that model does not exist.” I rechecked the numbers, and I hadn’t made any mistakes. It was the right model number, but apparently GE now denied its existence.

This was about as far as I got a year ago (did I just admit it’s been more than a year since I cleaned my oven?) and I lost interest. But by this time we were really, really desperate to clean the oven, so I perservered. And then I had a brain wave, and I went to the GE website and found a model that looked and sounded just like ours – coil burners, lift-top, self-cleaning, shiny white and purty – and copied THAT model and serial number into the “get yer own manual” page. (I’m so clever, aren’t I?) And once again the helpful reply said “that model does not exist.” On the same damn website!

So finally, getting stubborn, I started clicking around and actually found an oven reasonably like ours, and when you click on the product specs, it gives you a link for that oven’s owners’ manual, which was close enough. So I printed it out and read it, and now I know how to self-clean an oven that’s at least mostly like mine. Just to be safe, I read the owners’ manual of three or four other self-cleaning ovens, making sure that the basic instructions remained the same. I am now an expert in the functionality of the self-cleaning feature on standard GE ovens.

That was two weeks ago. Despite my newly garnered expertise on the subject, we still haven’t gotten around to actually cleaning the oven, and the muffins continue to taste like charred pepperoni.

Oh well.

(This post may look familiar to those of you who read Nancy’s blog. Yes, I’m now pilfering my own comments on other people’s blogs for fresh material. Standards are falling like snowflakes around here.)

All the reminders about the time change this weekend have been accompanied by some reference to an extra hour of sleep. Bah! Sleeping in. If you don’t have kids, maybe. It’s just before nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, and we’ve already been up for more than four hours. We’ve watched a video, played a rousing round of Candyland, had breakfast and a snack. I’ve read the entire Sunday paper while the kids played video games, and had two cups of coffee. Four hours later, and I’m still bitter about dragging myself resentfully from my warm and cozy flannel sheets at 4:43 this morning. The day stretches out like an endless desert horizon before us with no relief in sight; it’s not even 9 am and we’re already bored and sick of each other and climbing the walls.

Time changes? Suck.

It’s my fault that they’re early risers, I know. I get up for work every day just before 6 am, and I’m hardwired for early mornings now. (I’ve said, only half-joking, that my brain power and energy levels peak sometime around 10:30 in the morning, and it’s just a long, slow slide to bedtime from there.) It’s been years since I’ve slept as late as 8 am, and even if I did, I’d feel like I’d wasted half the day. But even for an inveterate morning person like me, wake-up times that start with a four are inhumane.

I know, I know, someday they’ll be teenagers and will sleep through the morning straight on into afternoon and I’ll be complaining because I can’t get them out of bed. And nobody has ever actually expired from sleep deprivation, right? Right?

Save me from last place! Have you voted today?

Sigh. I guess there’s no avoiding it. We’re capitulating to the dark side. Not only are we in the market for a second car, but we’re officially shopping for a minivan now.

At first, I thought maybe we could get by with the Mazda 5 or the Kia Rondo, the new station wagons with the third row of seating. (I love our Ford Focus wagon. We’re on our second one, and I think it’s the perfect family car — if you have two kids or less.) But, I’ve been doing some reading and there isn’t even enough storage space in the back of the Mazda 5 for a stroller, let alone some of the gear you’d have to bring along for an excursion of any length. So, we’re looking at minivans.

Aside from the stigma of being a minivan mom, and the horrendous fuel consumption, I have other concerns about the minivan. I hate the idea that one of the kids will be in the very back row – and very far out of my reach. If I put Tristan’s booster seat in the back row, Simon will want to be back there, too, and that seems a long way from me up in the driver’s seat. And of course I can’t put the baby’s seat way back there. For families with more than two kids, how do you arrange the seating in your car?

And then there’s the whole rigamarole of actually choosing and buying a van — makes me tired just thinking about it. I ordinarily love car shopping, but I’m feeling no joy in this one. I don’t know from minivans, and I don’t know what to look for in selecting one. They all look the same to me, and even after a few weeks of comparison shopping by scoping out other peoples’ vans in the grocery store parking lot (a bonus of living in the child-rich suburbs) I still can’t tell what distinguishes one van from another.

Our final dilemma is the new-vs-used debate. The monthly payments to lease a 2008 are actually less than what it would cost to buy a used 2004 or 2005, so that will probably be the route we go. Given the time of year, we might be able to find a good deal on a 2007, I’m thinking. Did you know that Ford and Saturn are no longer even offering minivans for 2008? So the main contenders right now seem to be the Kia Sedona, the Dodge Grand Caravan and the Hyundai Entourage. (I’d love a Toyota Sienna or Honda Odyssey, but both are a little out of our price range for now… it’s going to be painful enough doubling our existing car and insurance payments!!) I was playing around on the “build and price” part of the Dodge Caravan web site, but gave up because there are just too many options and I frankly am not sure whether I care about more than half of them. Even stuff like A/C and power windows is not overly important to me… although I do love the the heated seats on our Focus. Nothing like a warm toushie on a cold February morning!!

So, minivan owners, educate me. What features do you absolutely love about your van? What do you hate? What can’t you do without? Which features would you pay extra for? Wax poetic or rant righteously, but tell me what I need to know when I’m shopping for a minivan please!

It’s just before 6 am on Saturday morning, and somebody’s car alarm goes off nearby. It squalls for two or three seconds, just enough to wake me up, then stops. I lie in bed, considering whether to get up or not, when it squalls again. Cursing the irresponsiblity of people who let their alarms ring unchecked at 6 o’clock on a Saturday morning, I roll over and pull the covers up over my head, just in time to hear the phone ring. It rings twice, and stops before I can pick it up.

“Mommy!” calls Tristan from downstairs. “What’s that noise?”

I go downstairs, and the alarm is louder. I follow the sound to the living room and pull the couch away from the wall, and the squalling becomes deafening. It’s not a car alarm, it’s our house alarm.

There are three problems with it being our house alarm:

1. I’ve by now figured out that it’s being set off by the motion detectors, and every time we move through the main floor of the house, we trip off the wailing siren.
2. I didn’t set the alarm. We don’t use the alarm. We haven’t used the alarm in three or four years, and I have no idea what the codes are anymore.
3. It started acting oddly a few months ago, so Beloved went downstairs and took the battery out of the control panel, supposedly disabling it entirely.

In other words, it’s become a rogue alarm working on its own agenda – and power source – and we have no idea how to turn it off. (Maybe it was an act of vengeance for my laundered-to-death iPod?)

So with the now nearly-hysterical kids and dog running in circles around the main floor to the splitting wail of the siren, I go to call the alarm company to get them to shut the infernal thing off. Which is when I discover a previously unknown feature of our alarm system: apparently, when the burlar alarm gets tripped, it cuts off your telephone.

Let’s think about this for a minute. The alarm system. Cuts off. The phone.

Does anyone else see a flaw or two in this system?

So now it’s 6:05 am and the siren is wailing and the kids (and dog) are hysterical and I’m standing in the driveway in a T-shirt and underwear and nothing else, rooting around in the centre console of the car for my cell phone and praying with every fibre of my being that it has at least enough of a charge left in it that I can call the alarm company.

And I am Not Happy.

At least by this point I’ve had the brainwave to throw a towel over the motion detector so it stops whooping every time somebody moves. However, there is nothing I can do about the sensors on the doors, as I find out when Tristan goes to let the dog out into the yard and once again triggers the siren.

Since we haven’t used the alarm in who knows how long, I have no reason to keep their telephone number handy, and by the way, did you know that the phone company stopped issuing the white pages this year, so you can only use the yellow pages to find things and when an alarm is sounding and you’re frozen half to death with wet leaves stuck to your bare feet and the kids and the dog are hysterical, it’s not exactly easy to find things in the yellow pages because when you look up “TURN OFF THE GODDAMN ALARM” there aren’t any listings?

So I call information and the robotic voice gives me a toll-free number which I write down and dial, and another robotic voice tells me “The number you have dialed cannot be reached from your calling area.” While I gnash my teeth and plan a new QuakerLuddite lifestyle free of any electronic devices, Beloved starts flipping madly through various phone directories and finally gets a local number. I am so overwhelmed with joy when an actual person answers with a surprisingly chipper, “Oui, bonjour!” that I completely don’t bother to wonder why he has answered in French. It’s only after he spends the best part of 10 minutes looking for my file that we realize he is in Montreal and I am… not. Don’t even ask me how or why a locally-dialled number gets re-routed to Montreal. It’s the least of my worries at this point. So he gives me yet another number and tells me to follow the instructions to have an emergency page sent, and oh, sorry, but he can’t help me turn the alarm off. And I’d better call soon to let them know it’s a false alarm because the police are likely on the way.

Finally, fifteen minutes later a technician returns my page and walks Beloved through the process of disarming the system entirely by removing a wire or two. By now I’ve noticed that while all the other electronics in the house seem fine, the stove and coffee maker digital clocks are showing a power surge or interruption that happened, go figure, a few minutes before 6 am. The technician explains that since the battery had been removed, the power surge probably caused the alarm system to override whatever we programmed into it and default to its factory settings.

We finally get the kids and dog calmed down and Beloved trundles grumpily back to bed while I put on a pot of coffee and try to get our morning back on track. It’s been nearly 30 minutes and we never did hear from the police, which is mildly disheartening from one perspective, but a bit of a relief overall.

Just after 8 am after I’ve consumed the Saturday paper in its entirety, the doorbell rings, and with resignation I get up to answer it, wondering what fresh hell could be awaiting us on this already endless Saturday morning. It’s my friend Yvonne, on her way back from shuttling one of her boys from hockey practice and asking me how my morning has been so far with a bit of a knowing twinkle in her eye. Turns out she’s still on the alam company contract, signed somewhere back around 2001 or so, as our emergency contact. When the alarm went off, they called her to see if everything was okay, and since we hadn’t happened to be in touch in the last, oh, couple weeks or so, she truly had no idea.

So we had an impromptu playdate and coffee, and I am eternally grateful to have the kind of friends who don’t disown you after a 6 am false alarm and are concerned enough to drop by and make sure that everything is okay but know you well enough to figure it can wait until after hockey practice.

But I’m still considering that Quaker Luddite lifestyle. I just have to figure out a way to blog with a quill and ink, and we’re all set.

This week, my iPod died. Well, it didn’t so much die as drown. Or maybe it was the laundry soap that killed it. Might have, now that I think about it, been the spin cycle that finally sent it back to the big Apple in the sky.

Yes, it’s true. I feel great shame. I laundered my iPod. And now it’s dead.

Well, that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t me who laundered the iPod, it was Beloved. It was, however, me who put said iPod in the bib pocket of my overalls, and me who forgot it was there, and me who dumped said overalls into the laundry hamper, and then transferred them into a laundry basket. But it was Beloved who ultimately laundered the iPod. Somehow that matters.

Beloved found the sparkling clean iPod resting in the bottom of the washing machine, so at least it was spared the circuit-melting indignity of the dryer. With comingling shame and trepidation, I scoured the Interwebs for information about recently laundered iPods. After all, there has been no shortage of information about the other things I’ve unbeknowingly laundered, like lipstick. And chapstick. And a small fortune in coins and bills, which seem to be a lot hardier than lipstick, or chapsticks. Or iPods.

However, not unsurprisingly, I’m far from the first to commit this sin, and following the example of those who laundered before me, for five days I left the hapless iPod untouched on a shelf to thoroughly dry out and recover from its adventure in washing machine land.

Yesterday, it was time to face the music – or lack thereof. With great hope and fingers crossed, I pressed the clickwheel — and nothing happened. I pressed it once or twice more for good measure, and nothing continued to happen. So I plugged it into the USB port and hoped the laptop might resuscitate the poor thing, remembering something someone said about their iPod surviving a laundry cycle but losing its battery charge.

Nothing.

In the words of Apple, my iPod failed to mount. (It sounds kind of salacious, doesn’t it? Poor flaccid thing.)

What we have here is an ex-iPod. It’s not resting, not tired and shagged out after a long squawk, not pining for the fjords. This iPod is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It’s bleeding demised. (If you don’t get the implied references in this paragraph, forget about my dead iPod and get yerself over here for a proper education.)

So what do you do with a dead iPod? Or shall I say, yet another dead iPod? Well, first you read the fine print on your product replacement warranty veeeeery carefully, looking for references to the warranty being invalidated by random acts of laundering. And when you call the product replacement info line, and they neglect to ask the cause of the demise of your iPod, you neglect to tell. And when you pack up said iPod to go back to the big Apple in the sky and wait patiently for a replacement to arrive, you swear on all that is holy that you will, by god, learn to check your pockets before you do any more laundry.

Or maybe just give up laundry altogether instead. It’s probably better for everyone that way.

Why is it that when I’m short on time, I’m shorter on ideas? I just want to dash off a quick post today and I’ve written about 600 words on four different topics – none of which will coalesce into anything worth posting.

(I suppose I should have known I was scraping the bottom of the blog-fodder barrel when I admitted to the Interwebs that I wet my pants in Loblaws. Pretty clear sign in retrospect that maybe I need to restock the ideas cupboard!)

And now I’m completely out of time, and have nothing. Nothing!

So, in lieu of an actual post, I will resort to the laziest of devices and turn it all back on you.

Tell me three things about you. Any old three things at all. Your three favourite colours, three favourite foods, names of three pets you have owned, three vacations you have taken or want to take or would never dream of taking. Three books you want to read. Three shows you wish were still on TV. The three best toppings on a pizza. Why three? Because I’m thinking in threes lately – three sons, three boys, three children.

Don’t be shy – speak up! Surely there are three of SOMETHING rattling around in your brain.