Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

It’s National Organ Donation Week in Canada.

Those of you who have been reading for a while know that this is an annual post for me. I wrote about it in 2005 and again in 2006. And you know what? I’ll write about it again in 2008 and 2009. I’ll keep writing about it, and I’ll keep talking about it, because somebody in Canada dies every three days waiting for an organ donation. Every three days a family loses a father, a mother, a brother, a sister – or a child – because there simply aren’t enough organs for all the people on waiting lists. A single donor can make a difference in as many as fifty people’s lives. And that’s just the recipients; think of the families of all those people given a second chance at life, or the chance to overcome blindness, or the chance at restored mobility through a bone graft.

Here in Canada, we have one of the lowest donor rates in the industrialized world. There has been a call for a national donor registrant database (but because health is a provincial / territorial jurisdiction, it would be hard to manage on a national level.) In a pilot program in BC, living donors are reimbursed for expenses like travel costs and lost wages. Ontario is considering a similar program. Ontario has recently decided against an ‘opt-out’ approach to organ donations after an expert panel recommended against it. The same article noted that almost half of the families of people who would make good donors are saying no.

That’s one of the major problems: even if you have signed an organ donor card, that information may not be immediately available when it’s most needed. Doctors often must rely on family members for consent, and if your family doesn’t know what you want, your wishes might not be respected. Another article notes: “Studies show about 50% of Canadians are unaware of what their loved ones wanted regarding organ and tissue donations. Yet 96% of relatives in Canada agree to organ donation if they’re aware that their deceased loved one was in favour of donating.” It’s not enough to simply register as an organ donor; you have to talk to your family and make your wishes known.

Organ donation is an issue close to my heart: my dad had a life-saving liver transplant in 2001, when I was six months pregnant with Tristan. My boys are blissfully oblivious to how close we all came to losing Papa Lou. I never forget it.

I was playing with Simon in the car the other day. We were being silly, laughing together, and I said, “Who loves you the most in the whole wide world, Simon?” And Simon didn’t even stop to think about it. “Papa Lou!” he cried with delight. Not me, or Beloved. Not even Granny, who spoils him with lollipops and marshmallows and just about every other thing his little heart desires. Papa Lou, whom he would have never met if it weren’t for the lifegiving generosity of an organ donor and his or her family.

Sign your donor card and tell your family. Choose the gift of life.

After thirteen hours away and $150 in taxi fares, I’m back from my conference yesterday. I love traveling for business. I feel like such a grown-up. I’m a very infrequent flier, though, and I made a couple of rookie mistakes.

As I mentioned, I had to get up at four in the morning to catch my 6 am flight. I bought my coffee on the wrong side of the security barrier and of course coffee falls under the ban on liquids crossing the security checkpoint. By the time I made it through, the queue for the Tim Horton’s on the ‘safe’ side of the barrier was huge and I didn’t have time to wait for one. And then we lifted off into a giant storm of wind, snow and rain that was so turbulent that they cancelled the in-flight beverage service, so I didn’t actually get my first coffee of the day until I was in Pearson airport, nearly four hours after the alarm dragged me unwillingly to consciousness. (Note how I am far more disturbed by the lack of coffee than by the relentless and possibly life-threatening turbulence buffeting the plane. Who me, addicted?)

(Editorial aside: both my flights were late in leaving, but made up most of the delay in the air. Each way, terminal to terminal the 35 minute Ottawa-Toronto flight was actually shorter than my daily commute from Barrhaven to downtown on the bus. That just doesn’t seem right!)

But this conference – wow! It was the first ever Canadian word of mouth marketing conference, and I went wearning both my government-communicator-studying-social-media hat and my mommy-blogger hat. It was a great conference with some fantastic speakers. I met Janet Kestin, chief creative director at the agency behind the Dove Real Beauty campaign (including the Evolution video – you MUST click through if you haven’t seen it) and she was just so incredibly nice as I fawned at her. They had a raft of other top-drawer social media marketing types, including some truly excellent speakers. One of the funnier presentations was by Douglas Walker, the buy who founded the World Rock Paper Scisscors Society (talk about a grassroots word of mouth campaign!), and it was really interesting to hear how Lululemon runs their anti-marketing non-traditional campaigns (but I’m still annoyed at the company for not offering their clothes in sizes larger than 12.)

But what really blew me away was the presentation by Kyle MacDonald, better know to the world as the One Red Paperclip guy. I know I’ve blogged about him before – hasn’t everybody? – but damn if I can find the post. Anyway, he’s the guy who over 12 months in 2005/2006 traded – in a series of 14 trades that included a coleman camping stove, a cube van, and an afternoon with Alice Cooper – one red paperclip for a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. It was a great story at the time, and I remember following it. But I had no idea of the full extent of the story until listening to his presentation yesterday. He’s a terrific and funny public speaker, and he tells his story with an endearling combination of aw-shucks modesty and wide-eyed optimism that I found truly irresistible (except that I’m probably almost old enough to be his mom. Sigh.) Sample: “If you ever get the chance to go on stage in Fargo with Alice Cooper, I highly recommend it.”

He talked about how each trade was meaningful for him, and had to be made in person with a handshake. When he had an offer for a recording contract that he knew he couldn’t ever use, he understood immediately that he could use it to make someone else’s lifelong dream come true. And he says he’ll never sell the house in Kipling, even though he doesn’t live there full time, because he feels people will ascribe a monetary value to his series of trades that he says would cheapen the whole experience. He’s got a book coming out this year, and I’ll have to pick it up now. What a great story!

Speaking of books, I was sitting at a table at the conference (completely by chance) with one woman from Random House, one woman from Simon and Schuster, and one woman who used to work for Harper Collins! Holy bookpublishing power table, Batman! You can bet I not-so-subtly started handing out my little bloggy Moo cards to anyone who would take one. I may be a long, long way to needing friends in the industry (heck, I already have one!) but it never hurts to make those connections. And besides, book publishers have books to share, and if I can’t be publishing my own stuff just yet, I’m more than happy to accept freebies of the people who have!

(Sorry, Marla. I made my flight last night and couldn’t stay over for the ticklefight and pocky buffet. Next time, I promise!)

Edited to add: it’s such a small world. I was kvetching with a guy over one of the coffee urns at the conference about the early start to my day as he drained the last of the coffee. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, turns out he is Ian from the Moto KRZR blog, the fellow who set me up with my fancy new phone. How funny is that?

It’s that time again. The cold, clear, sunny weather just hovering at the freezing mark is the ideal time for it: the annual spring rite of picking up of the poop-dogs, as they are unaffectionately known around here. Nothing like spending a couple of hours on a Saturday morning prying frozen shit off the lawn to make one wax philosophical and contemplate the nature of life, the universe, and dog poop.

Why, for example, do month-old frozen dog turds have to be the exact same colour as six month old fallen maple leaves? Couldn’t they be a different colour? That would make my job a lot easier.

And since we’re on the whys – why don’t frozen poop-dogs stay on the shovel? Why do they roll off the end more than three-quarters of the time? And what the holy hell has that dog been eating that she poops her entire body weight at least twice each winter?

Apparently the dog is not the only creature using my back yard as a toilet. It took me about a half an hour and four pounds of poop dogs of wondering where the hell the dog was getting all those undigested raisins I was finding before I realized that they weren’t dog-excreted raisins after all. It seems we have rabbits, and from the copious quantities of scat, I’d say a whole warren’s worth.

My over-the-fence neighbour was out tackling the rabbit turd problem this morning as well. Where I was using a shovel, he came muttering out of his house carrying the shop vac. His wife had sent him out to make the lawn presentable for an Easter Egg hunt next weekend, and he wasn’t messing around. He spent the best part of an hour vacuuming the rabbit pellets out of the grass. He was not amused, but I certainly was.

This year, for the first time I found a paid dog-waste spring pick-up service in Ottawa. The estimated quote was in the $100 range for a one-time spring clean-up and cart-away, and my Dutch/Scottish ancestry kicked in and said there were far better things I could do with $100 than pay someone to haul off two months worth of dog crap. I cursed my skinflint ancestors for the full three hours, spread over two weekends, that it took me to do it myself. Next year, maybe I’ll treat myself. Would you pay someone to do it?

I have to admit, I’ve honed my technique considerably this year. I used to favour the plastic bag over garden glove pick-up, but this year I started using a shovel. It’s better for prying up the frozen bits, but the aforementioned problem of the shit rolling off the end of the shovel was tiresome. In the end, I used a second spade to do a sort of pinch-and-lift, and dumped the results into a 12″ plastic flower pot lined with a plastic grocery bag.

An entire post about poop-dogs. Aren’t you glad you dropped by?

Edited to add: I swear, the raisin theme this week was entirely coincidental.

As I mentioned a while ago, we got a new Moto KRZR phone recently. I like it a lot more than the Nokia 6682, even though it has less stuff on it. (Yes, “stuff.” I’m so techno-ignorant it’s a wonder I can figure out the blog some days.)

One thing I do prefer on the Nokia is the “nostalgic” ring tone that sounds just like an old fashioned bell ringer from the 1970s. I know, I can probably download one from somewhere, but that involves the intersection of the time and the inclination to do so, and that conjunction hasn’t yet occured.

In the meanwhile, it’s got the default ringer on it, which is a man’s voice – in a tone described as Beloved as ‘flamboyantly robotic’ – that says, “Hello, Moto!” followed by some really bad funky music. It’s pure fromage.

The week we got the phone, Beloved was home alone one day. He was in the bathroom, pinching a loaf. (I debated between metaphors for a long time, I’ll have you know. I’m sure he’ll be overjoyed to read this level of detail goes into the blog.) As I said, the house was completely still and empty when the cell phone rang. Well, it didn’t exactly ring. First, a ‘flamboyantly robotic’ voice called out from the kitchen, “Hello, Moto!” and then some really bad funky music started.

Beloved was, to say the least, alarmed.

I’m sure this is exactly the kind of quality post the KRZR PR folks had in mind when they gave me the shiny, pretty phone.

I like to think I know from boys. Growing up, I spent a lot more time hanging out with boys than with girls, espeically in those teen years when gender differences become prevalent. Then I married not one but two guys (although not at the same time), and of course I contributed to the world’s male population with two sons of my own.

Being the primary caregiver for two sets of male apparatus has been enlightening. For example, I didn’t know before I had boys of my own that the fly in underwear is purely for decoration and not for utility. I had no idea that you have to take care in pointing a baby boy’s bits in just the right direction when closing up a diaper or risk leakage. And I had no idea the extent to which those bits extended beyond plumbing and procreation to the realm of imaginary friend and playmate.

Being surrounded as I am by the XY chromosome, I was interested to read this article in the weekend Citizen about the new trend toward home urinals. Yes, you read it here first. That article was interesting enough in itself, but what truly fascinated me was the final paragraph.

Perhaps the real appeal of having a urinal at home is that it offers a taste of the sort of freedom men can experience in only a natural or rural setting. As one designer admitted, off the record, rather than a urinal at home, what men really want is a bathroom door that leads directly to a patch of lawn and a strategically placed tree.

I had no idea that the ability to pee outside was anything more than a convenient option. It’s actually a preference?

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.

I know, I still owe you a post for Tristan’s birthday. It’s okay, as long as I get it in before he’s old enough to read, I’m good.

In the meanwhile, in lieu of anything particularly thought provoking or time consuming, I thought I’d steal this idea from Mama Tulip. Four of these five statements are true; one is a fib. Can you tell my fact from fiction? (Those of you who know me well likely know the truth – if you do, don’t tell!)

1.) In a fit of defiance and independence, I had my belly button pierced despite my ex-husband’s opinion that I should not get it done. It became horrendously infected and I had to take it out after less than a month. I still have the scar.

2.) While traveling solo through Europe, on a train from Munich to Salzburg I was propositioned by a man who told me he had just been released from prison. He was escorted off the train because his ‘ticket’ was hand-written on a cocktail napkin.

3.) Beloved and I met in a bar. He was in the Fine Arts program at the University of Westen Ontario at the time. The night we met, he invited me back to his apartment to “see his drawings”. I said yes, and we’ve been together ever since.

4.) We were visiting my in-laws one summer weekend for the first time. My mother-in-law had just baked two lemon meringue pies for a charity auction and had left them on a shelf in her utility room to cool. We went out for dinner and in our absence, my exhuberant puppy-brained dog licked exactly half the meringue off each of the two pies, leaving the yellow lemon base. I walked into the utility room and froze when I saw the half-demeringued pies, and contemplated for a long minute simply packing the dog into the car and returning home without a word, never to return.

5.) Our long and convoluted fertility and IVF stories, from the first miscarriage in 2000 through the IUIs, the IVF, Tristan’s birth, Simon’s surprise arrival, our Frostie adventure and even the miscarriage last November will be featured in a story in the May issue of Chatelaine magazine.

I’m a terrible liar in person – can I pull it off on the blog? Which one is a fib?

Edited to add: only one day remains in the Great Canadian Rimroller Contest! Enter today!

Remember back last summer, when I was part of that free Nokia smartphones for bloggers campaign? I am feeling almost ridiculously priviledged to be lucky enough to be part of another PR blogger outreach campaign, this one for the Motorola KRZR phone. Two free phones in a year – how lucky am I?

So, you ask, who do you have to know to get a free phone? In my case, I got involved because I met Brendan from Hill and Knowlton (the PR firm handling the campaign) through the other stuff I’m doing on social media.

Hmm, you say. And you ask, what portion of your soul do you have to sell to get a free phone? It’s a pretty sweet deal. Hill and Knowlton gave me a shiny new KRZR phone and some accessories. I’m free to blog about (and with) it however I choose. I can keep the phone or give it back at the end of the campaign. Not a bad deal, eh?

And it came in this fancy-ass secret agent shiny briefcase. When I mentioned to Beloved that the boys could have it to play with, he said he wanted to keep it to bring his lunch to work. The whole family is entertained by the box, let alone the phone inside.