Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

I first read this story in the newspaper on Sunday morning, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Everyone I’ve spoken to in the last couple of days has been subjected to this story, so fascinated by it am I.

Did you hear about the 62 year old French guy who’s about to be launched to a height of 40 km (25 miles) and do a seven minute free fall on to a Saskatchewan field, exceeding Mach 1 and creating a sonic boom with only his body in the process?

I’m honestly torn between “how wicked cool is that?” and “what kind of suicidal dumbass is he, anyway?”

From the canada.com article:

At 40,000 metres, temperatures are around -100 C and the air is so thin he will have to spend hours beforehand inhaling pure oxygen to remove all traces of nitrogen from his blood. He must nose-dive out of the pop-can-shaped capsule, freefalling for seven minutes before pulling his chute 1,000 metres from landing for an eight-minute descent to the ground. But if he goes into a spin at the start, no one knows if he will survive as he plummets to Earth at speeds reaching 1,500 km/h and in cold dipping to -115 C, breaking the sound barrier at 1,067 km/h and crashing through the ozone layer.

There’s also an article in the Times Online that describes the experience of the previous record-holder for longest freefall: “set by Joe Kittinger, a US air force test pilot who jumped from just under 20 miles in 1960 and told of his four-minute 36-second descent in a 1961 autobiography, The Long Lonely Leap. ‘There is no sound, no movement,’ he wrote. ‘No wind hisses in my ears or billows my clothing.'”

Apparently, if Fournier is successful with his Grand Saut (French for Big Jump), he’ll break four records: the longest freefall, the fastest freefall, the parachute jump from the highest altitude and the highest altitude achieved by a human in a balloon. The part that really fascinates me, though, is the “crashing through the ozone layer” bit, coupled with the breaking of the sound barrier with his body. From the few articles I’ve read on this, they have no idea what the impact of creating a sonic boom will have on his body.

What do you think? Is this guy a hero, or a Darwin Award waiting to happen?

While I love this steamy hot summertime weather, it’s sapping my already-nominal culinary inspiration. I’ve completely run out of fresh summertime food ideas. We’ve done burgers to death, and I’ve lost my taste for hot dogs. It’s too hot to boil pasta, and we’ve had enough corn on the cob to pluck an entire corn field clean.

Last night, we had one of my summertime favourites: steak and veggie kabobs rolled in peppercorns, grilled on the BBQ and then served as make-yer-own pita sandwiches with tzatziki and feta and fresh cucumber and tomato slices. Mmmmmm!

Save me from another pizza; I’m desperate for inspiration. What’s your favourite summertime meal?

For a week, we’re a two-car family. We’re watching my parents dog while they’re on vacation, and my mom loaned me her car for the duration. It was my intention to leave the car in the driveway except in case of emergency, but I was going to take the opportunity to switch out the boys’ full-sized car seats for booster seats. (If you’ve ever installed car seats into a two-door, pre-LATCH system Sunfire with bucket seats, you’ll know the pain of which I speak. But we got new CARS booster seats for the boys – Granny is going to be the coolest of the cool the next time she takes them for a ride.)

I’d toyed briefly with the idea of taking my mom’s car to work (shades of high school) but decided in the end to take the bus, as usual. However, when the bus showed up this morning, I walked on and realized that there were no seats. No seats. It’s a 40 minute ride, and I would have had to stand the entire way. Not going to happen.

So I pulled the bell and got off at the next stop and marched righteously back to the house, muttering to myself the whole way about how I pay a premium fare ($81/month) for my express pass and I’m three months pregnant and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand up the whole way to work at six friggin’ thirty in the morning and what the hell are all these people doing on the bus anyway because it’s July and shouldn’t they all be on holiday or something?

It was a gorgeous morning to be driving with the sunroof open, hot coffee in my hand. I didn’t get to read the morning paper, but I listened to CBC the whole way in. My route of preference brings me first through pastoral countryside, where I can wave to the cows, then along the full length of the Rideau Canal. On the early side of seven o’clock in the morning, there’s no traffic to speak of.

No rude person tried to take up more than their half of our shared seat, no crazy driver lurched to sudden and unexpected stops, nobody’s oversized back pack bonked me in the head as they shifted back and forth in the aisle. It cost me a whole $7 to park half a block from work and the most traumatic part of the commute was choosing between the sketchy elevator and the even more sketchy stairwell in what must be the world’s scariest parking garage where I tried hard to not touch any surface with my bare flesh.

I’ve long acknowledged our days as a one-car family are limited, and I’m proud that we’ve lived in the suburbs for four years without a second car. But there simply isn’t room across the back seat of our Focus wagon for three car seats, and I absolutely refuse to spend an entire year of maternity leave stuck in the house at home with no car and three kids while Beloved drives back and forth each day.

And after years and years of subjecting myself to the whims of OC Transpo twice a day, I could get used to driving downtown by myself. It’s still a bargain at twice the cost of the bus.

So I don’t usually do movie reviews here, mostly because I don’t see nearly enough movies. And this isn’t exactly a movie review, because it’s not terribly critical. But we went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on Friday night, and though Beloved and I have rehashed it to death, I still want to talk about it.

(Lots of people are talking about it, and it tickles me to no end that when you google “Harry Potter invisible horses” my blog is the first search return that pops up. The traffic spike has been pretty funny to watch.)

So, have you seen it? What did you think? (mild spoiler alert – consider yourself warned)

I have to say I loved it. LOVED it. The “fidget factor”, the means by which I measure my own engagement in a film by the number of times I shift, stretch, check my watch and look around the theatre, was a perfect score. I think I shifted from one cheek to the other once, that was it. I was completely engaged through the whole movie. And I have to say, the theatre was packed and kids between the ages of 8 and 16 comprised about 1/3 of the audience – and yet, with the exception of one annoying giggler in the front row, the theatre was largely silent and glued to the screen throughout. (It really was cute seeing kids showing up dressed in robes.)

It’s rare, so rare, when you can love the book and love the movie. The only example that comes even close for me was Carl Sagan’s Contact, one of my top-ten fave books of all time. The movie did the book justice, but wasn’t nearly as wonderful as the book.

Now, as I may have mention once or ten times, I’ve been re-reading the books for the last couple of months, and I just finished Order of the Phoenix the night before we left for Bar Harbor so all the details were fresh in my mind. There were quite a few points where the book and movie diverged, but I imagine a movie true to a 600 page book’s every detail would probably run somewhere around 26 hours, so I get the shortcuts they took. I realized after the movie that there was not a single reference to quiddich in the whole movie. Not that I missed it; I always kind of found the whole quiddich thing kind of tiresome.

It was too bad we didn’t see more from some of the supporting cast, but again I can see why they had to trim things down to size. Even Ron and Hermione probably had about three pages each of dialogue in the whole movie. I didn’t find Dolores Umbridge nearly toady enough, but that was my only quibble with the casting. They did a fantastic job with the special effects and a great job with the Ministry of Magic. I loved the final battle scene, especially the one brief bit where Harry and Sirius were fighting Death Eaters side-by-side. Probably my favourite scene in the whole movie – very stirring, especially for a hormonal pregnant woman.

As we were walking out of the theatre, I told Beloved that I’d happily turn around and go watch the whole thing again. It was that good. And then I went home and read the last four chapters of Half-Blood Prince.

Six days and counting. I’m stoked.

Some items from the newspaper are just too precious to pass by without commenting on them.

Apparently, three elephants escaped from the Garden Bros Circus in Newmarket, Ontario (near Toronto) and went on a 3 am stroll through suburbia. The electric fence penning them in somehow lost power, and when the elephants realized it, they knocked down the fence and made a break for it. Take a moment to picture two full-grown elephants – elephants! – roaming around in your suburban neighbourhood under cover of night. And now imagine being the caller, or better yet, the dispatcher, on this 911 call, as reported in the Globe and Mail:

Caller: “Hi. Umm… we’ve found an elephant walking down the street near the community centre, the Ray Twiney.”

Operator: “Sorry?”

Caller: “We’ve found an elephant walking down the street. Like the ones from, like, the circus at the Ray Twiney Centre. One of them got loose and it’s walking down the street.”

For the next few minutes, the caller explains that there are, in fact, at least two fully grown, trainer-less elephants milling about, as a woman in the background can be heard futilely exclaiming: “Don’t let it cross the street!”

Priceless!

I was absolutely fascinated by a recent post of Julie’s over on A little pregnant. She was talking about going into a grocery store in her town and finding that they have carts with television sets embedded into them, so for a dollar your kidlets can watch an episode of The Wiggles or Bob the Builder or whatever while you do your grocery shopping. A TV! In the grocery cart!

I had to know more. From the Cabco website, makers of the TV Kartâ„¢:

Designed for use by parents and caregivers of children aged between two and five years, TV Kartâ„¢ Classic engages children so parents can relax and have a better shopping experience in retail stores.

Inside each TV Kartâ„¢ Classic, there is a steering wheel, interactive buttons on the dashboard, and a 7-inch TV monitor on which children watch selected TV programs.

There is seating for two pre-school children and appropriate safety belts aboard each kart. The adult carer can select what their children watch from a range of appropriate pre-school programs on offer.

Now, I’m the last person to get all high and mighty about TV. I’ve capitulated to the fact that all four of us are junkies for the big electric nipple, and the TV is often on at our house even if it’s just background noise. And you know I don’t have a problem with the idea of a DVD player in the car for long trips – although I will say that I’m purposefully avoiding a built-in DVD system in the car because I wouldn’t want the kids clamouring for it while we drove to the library or, say, the grocery store.

But seriously! Are kids so unable to entertain themselves – to contain themselves – that we need to sedate them with TV for 60 minutes so mom or dad can pick out the Lucky Charms and cookie dough ice cream lima beans and organic free range chicken in peace?

Call me crazy, but I don’t actually mind shopping with the kids. Sometimes. In our neighbourhood we’re even lucky enough to have a grocery store that offers a free (FREE!) drop-in playzone where you can leave the kids while you shop. But it’s small and the produce and meats haven’t been the best quality lately, so we only shop there occasionally. Heck, there are times when I actually like taking the kids with me to do errands. Simply for the (gasp!) pleasure of their company.

And even if you can get past the whole TV in the cart thing, which you can see I’m not quite able to do yet, it’s bad enough with the stores that have carts shaped like race cars. The kids know which stores have them and tend to whine if we don’t get one. I can only imagine the ruckus if they were anticipating a TV cart and didn’t get one. Or if they happened to notice some other kid watching TV in a cart while they had to, you know, not watch TV. Oh, the whinging!

Whaddya think, bloggy peeps? Would you pay a dollar for the priviledge of using a grocery cart with a TV in it? Or would you stop frequenting your favourite store if they suddenly started offering them?

Tristan told his first joke the other day.

“How do you stop a cat from meowing in the back seat?”

“You throw him in the front seat.”

I laughed, partly because lame though it was, I’d never heard it before, but mostly because I was delighted that Tristan joins a long line of ancestry in love with bad jokes.

Of course, that was immediately followed by a thousand nonsensical and increasingly unfunny versions from both boys, including “How do you get a pepperoni to stop pizzaing in the back seat?” “You put it in the front seat.” If nothing else, they got the format down pat.

Previously, knock-knock jokes reigned supreme. My repitoire for knock-knock jokes is unparalleled.

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Isabelle.
Isabelle who?
Isabelle broken? I had to knock.

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Police.
Police who?
Po-lice open the door, it’s freezing out here.

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Dwayne.
Dwayne who?
Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!

The boys are good at memorizing them, but also favour the non-seqitor over an actual pun. For instance:

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
C3p0.
C3p0 who?
C3P0 ate spaghetti for dinner!

I think we need some new material. Care to dip into your repretoire and share your fave kid jokes?

The title to this post is a bumper sticker from the American College of Obstretricians and Gynecologists quoted in an article about “freebirth” in today’s Citizen. The article discusses the apparently increasingly popular choice of some expecting mothers to deliver baby at home with no medical professionals in attendance – no doctor, no midwife, no doula.

Um, no thanks.

(I’m sure my mother is breathing a sigh of relief right about now.)

I guess I’m a moderate on this particular spectrum. I have to admit, I’m a little cynical of people who choose “convenience” c-sections. (We had an interesting discussion about this last year.) And note here I’m talking about convenience c-sections and am in no way being critical of c-sections in general – hell, that’s how I debuted almost 38 years ago.

On the other hand, while I can appreciate on an intellectual level why someone would choose an unmedicated child birth, I’d no sooner choose to have my wisdom teeth pulled without medication than try to birth a child without it. The irony is that my body is particularly unresponsive to the epidural, and after hours of tinkering with the “cocktails” both boys were fired out pretty much without the benefit of anesthesia.

While I would never choose a home birth, and certainly not an unassisted one (and again, please let me say that this is not a criticism of those who do – just one girl’s humble opinion on what’s best for her parts and her babies) I have to admit that for the first time I’m idly considering switching from an obstetrician to a midwife.

(My mother is shaking her head in dismay.)

I’ve actually always rather enjoyed my obstetrician’s clinical professionalism. If I remember correctly, she once served at the chief of obstetrics at the hospital where the boys were born. We’ve had some pretty traumatic moments with her, from the elevated risk of Down syndrome with Tristan to the miscarriage last year, and while she was never exactly warm or comforting, I was always reassured by my faith in her capability. And yet, because of the nature of her practice, she hasn’t been present at the birth of either boy.

A midwife appeals to me because of the extra attention implied in midwife care: the extra hand-holding, extended appointments, and after-birth care. Truthfully, I don’t even know that much about midwives and the regulations that govern them here in Ontario. Last I heard, if you have a midwife in attendance at a hospital birth, you are encouraged to leave soon afterward, as opposed to the 48 hours that you stay if you have an OB in attendance. Is that right? And midwives are covered under OHIP (public health insurance), right?

Anyway, I likely won’t change – but I’m curious. Where do you find yourself on the continuum – freebirth advocate or convenience c-section or somewhere in between?