Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

Christmas Lights on Parliament Hill

It was cold. Damn cold. Somewhere around minus 17C with the windchill, I think. And yet, we bundled up the kids, and coerced a few friends, and headed out to see the Christmas Light Ceremony on Parliament Hill last night.

I’ve lived in Ottawa for 18 Christmases now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Hill for the lighting ceremony. Might well be the last, too!

Kerry and Tristan keeping warm!

Oh, it was nice enough. They had free hot chocolate and Beaver Tails, if you wanted to wait in the massive queue for them. They had large bbq pits set up with free marshmallows for toasting, if you could get your marsmallow toasted before it froze solid. They even had free candles, and nothing says Christmas entertainment like watching your bored two- and four-year-olds in a stiff wind with open flame!

Tristan’s face DID actually freeze like that.

I had hoped for more carolling and Christmas music, but there was only the Peace Tower bells chiming festively. The boys were restless, completely understandable since it was about a hundred degrees below zero and all they could see was a bunch of shivering butts. I had also understood the 5:45 starting time to mean that the switch would be thrown at 5:45, but in fact, that meant that the political speechifying began at 5:45, carrying on in both official languages for the better part of half an hour. Just when we thought it was over, they started playing taped messages from every single provincial and territorial premier, and the shivering crowd groaned audibly.

Angie and Sam looking cheerful despite the chill!

And yet, in the endurance of the cold and the congeniality of a crowd of people all wondering together what on earth made them choose this escapade over a warm dinner and maybe a nice Seinfeld rerun on the TV, we found it was fun nonetheless. Because the crowd had densely packed itself in an attempt to conserve and share body heat, we couldn’t actually see any of the more than 100,000 lights that illuminate the Hill, Confederation Boulevard and the rest of downtown, but the crowd did gasp appreciately when the Parliament Buildings were illuminated by multi-coloured spotlights and giant drifting snowflakes.

(You can actually see me shivering as I try to hold the camera steady!)

A little something for everybody

I can’t even remember the last time we had a ramble around here. I’ve got a whole bunch of flotsam and pretty pieces of beach glass that I’ve collected, but I have no idea what to do with them. So, I’ll drop them unceremoniously into a single post and let you make something of it.

First, if you haven’t been there already, you should go check out Nancy’s blog. She’s doing a fun Christmas craft or activity every day leading up to December 24.

Second, speaking of holiday activities, my Christmas lights really hate me this year. Or is it the other way around? Back in November, when I was still pregnant, I found myself on a step-ladder hanging the outdoor lights. It was only after about 40 minutes, when I got all the way to the end of the string and my arms were aching from being lifted over my head for so long, that I realized I had started at the wrong end. I had to pull them all back down and re-hang them with the plug on the end nearest the receptacle and not furthest from it. I only mention it now because yesterday I noticed one of our three strings of indoor tree lights was not working. After some fidgeting, I decided the string was officially dead, and needed to be replaced. Of course, this was the middle string. So I very carefully unstrung it, trying hard not to dislodge too many ornaments, and very carefully wove a new string into more or less the same space. When I plugged it in, another string of lights died. When I tested the removed string, it worked fine. So I unstrung a SECOND string of lights and restrung the original string. With all the shifting and yanking and replacing of ornaments, the tree looks like it was decorated by a band of blind monkeys, but at least the lights are working. For now.

Third, some tips from the peanut gallery. Fryman sent me this article in the Globe and Mail about how 96% of Canadian women contribute to the control the family finances, and the vast majority, 63%, have sole control. I have to admit, even though in my house I have pretty much sole control over the finances, I was still surprised to see the figure as high as 63%. Does that figure surprise you?

Fourth, also from the peanut gallery, this amusing link from the one and only Marla. I’ve been trying for days to come up with a post witty enough to support it, but I have failed abjectly. Therefore, I simply ask you to try to imagine taking a refreshing walk along the beach and finding thousands of bags of Doritos, washed up like 200 gram beached whales. Go ahead, if you can make something funnier out of this, be my guest!

Fifth, for those of you who came of age watching television in the 1980s (like me), I offer you the 50 greatest television commercials from the 80s.

And finally, a follow-up to my horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day. This morning in his Action Line column in the Citizen, columnist Tony Côté addressed my request for his help to find, repay and recognize the kindness of that cab driver who was so kind to me. Well, not so much addressed it as, much to my surprise, simply reprinted my entire e-mail to him (complete with my full name and all – and I mean all – of the gory details, including the miscarriage, the forgotten wallet and the tears) pretty much verbatim. I was hoping he might help me find my way to a real person at Blue Line who could put me in touch with the cabbie, but it looks like I’ll have to keep trying that avenue on my own. Instead, my most humiliating day is now available to a much wider audience than I could have ever reached through blog. Oy, how do I get myself into these things?

Half-baked

Baking is one of those skills that all mothers have, like healing boo-boos with kisses and controlling behaviour with the hairy eyeball. Somehow, though, when I was in the parenthood department store picking out my mothering skills, I went down the neuroses aisle twice instead of getting my supply of baking skills. I got too much Woody Allen and not enough Julia Child.

Baking should be easy. It comes with instructions. How many things in life come with explicit instructions? Do you remember the first time you changed a diaper or tried to put a child in a onsie? Oh sure, NOW you can do it in a washroom stall the size of a shoebox, balancing a diaper bag with one had and a wriggling baby in the other, while keeping the door with the broken lock closed with your knee and holding a box of wipes in your teeth. But the first time, when it took you three tries and 20 minutes to figure out which was the front end, didn’t you wish you had a nice set of instructions?

Baking comes with instructions. It tells you exactly how much of each ingredient you need, exactly the order to add them together, and exactly how long to cook them at a precise temperature. The question is not how I could screw this up once, but how I could screw it up more often than not.

I made a cake for Beloved’s birthday this week. A cake from a box, mind you. You know the ones – dump the box, add eggs and oil and water, mix, bake. No-brainer, right? Well, first of all, that cake had the density of a neutron star. I’m surprised the kitchen table had the structural integrity to hold it up.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it was a cake with attitude, and that cake did not want to be frosted. In fact, not only did it wilfully resist being frosted, it actually threw off the frosting as I was trying to slather it on. I’d pass the spatula (because I get that baking is about the right tools, and I have a spatula for frosting a cake, even though the cake inevitably doesn’t want to be frosted) over one section, and rather than the frosting sticking to the cake, the frosting peeled up layers of the cake and stuck to the spatula. The more frosting I tried to apply, the more cake ended up stuck to the spatula. It was not pretty. I used an entire can of frosting on one cake. Cake from a box, frosting from a can, and still I screwed it up. That takes a special level of culinary incompetence, don’t you think?

The one thing I really, really, really want to be able to bake is cookies. Mothers can bake cookies. I am a mother. Ergo, I should be able to bake cookies. In fact, I can make chocolate chip coasters, and large cookie sheets of an oatmealish material loosely identifiable as former cookie dough, and that’s about it. Sometimes they are overcooked, sometimes they are undercooked, but they are consistently unappetizing and often inedible.

My favourite cookies right now are the Farmer’s Market gourmet homestyle cookies from Loblaws. The other day as I was perusing the freezer section beside the bakery, a ray of light fell down from the heavens and a chorus of angels heralded my discovery of a box of frozen Farmer’s Market gourmet homestyle cookie dough chunks, complete with baking instructions.

Finally, a foolproof cookie! Place premixed, preformed chocolate chip oatmeal cookie dough pucks on a cookie sheet, bake at precisely 325F for exactly 11 minutes, and revel in the glory of being a successful cookie baker at last.

What actually happened was that they ran together into a massive cookie pangea, and were so badly stuck to the cookie sheet that by the time I pried them up they were less cookie and more chunks and crumbs. Chewy chunks and crumbs, but not in that melt-in-your-mouth way that a normal person’s freshly-baked cookies would be.

From now on I’ll just buy the already-baked cookies, and just nuke them for a few seconds to make the chocolate chips all melty. Five seconds in the microwave counts as baking, right?

Christmas coffee tea cups

It’s not the snow that does it. It’s not the Christmas lights. It’s not the parades, it’s not the Christmas muzak in the malls. I do love all those signs of the season, but it really doesn’t feel like Christmas until you get that first festive paper cup from Tim Hortons.

As I’ve previously lamented, I lost my taste for coffee when I was about six weeks pregnant. Loved the smell of it, craved the idea of it, but whenever I tried to drink it, it always tasted like the worst cup of six hour old diner coffee you’ve ever forced yourself to drink so you’d at least benefit from the caffeine hit. I haven’t been able to finish a cup in three months.

Rather than give up my morning routine, I swapped my morning beverage of choice. I still queued up at Timmy’s, but ordered a bagel and steeped tea instead of a muffin and coffee. It’s been my breakfast every weekday since Labour Day.

Now that I’m unpregnant again, I’m patiently waiting for my taste for coffee to return. I’ve genuinely missed it. Yesterday afternoon, I found myself craving a midafternoon java jolt, and figured my taste for coffee was finally returning. I ambled over to Timmy’s and even got one of the festive cups.

Despite more years of coffee drinking than I can count, apparently it’s only taken three months to confuse my brain into expecting the distinctly sharper bite of steeped tea instead of the mellow roast of coffee.

It still doesn’t taste right. It’s not awful, but it’s not worth craving. Oh well, at least I can get a tea in a festive cup.

What says “it’s Christmas” to you?

Snot and social media

I’m having a hell of a time pulling together anything coherent this morning. I have a few loose ideas around the topic of social media and society, but I’m having a little trouble unifying them.

I was going to start with a special thank you to Andrea. She left a link in the comment box yesterday to an old Sesame Street clip on YouTube. Tristan and I spent the better part of an hour last night clicking through various clips and I was instantly transported back to 1974. Oh how I loved Sesame Street when I was a kid! Oh how I still love it today!

And YouTube made me think about how I was going to write about the debate raging in our corner of the world right now about whether students should be allowed to have cell phones and digital cameras in the classroom. Last week, two students in Gatineau (across the river from Ottawa) used a cell phone camera to record their teacher yelling at another student and posted the clip on YouTube, but it sounds like the teacher was provoked by the students and the students have since been suspended. Michael Geist wrote an interesting editorial this morning about YouTube and our candid camera society.

And I wanted to tell you that I’m so excited because I might actually be able to tie my ongoing fascination with social media to my paying job. Isn’t that the Holy Grail for most bloggers? Since I work in communications, and since I am a known blog junkie, I might have the opportunity to do some work examining how we in government can and should be using social media to communicate. Cool, eh?

Surely there is a more elegant way for me to weave this jumble into a cohesive post, together with considered reflection and insight, but I just don’t think I have it in me today. I can’t even come up with a conclusion, or a decent question to ask to solicit your comments. I blame the snot. Eight days later, and the cold from hell will not relinquish its hold on my mucus membranes. Snot and social media… surely I should have come up with a better post than this.

Patriotic ear worms

I recently heard someone refer to those songs that get stuck in your head as ‘ear worms’. While the term makes me shudder just a little bit, I must admit that it has a certain cachet.

I think I’m particularly susceptible to ear worms. As I walk through the mall in the mornings on my way from transit to office, the Christmas muzak bounces off the closed store doors and windows and resonates in my head, leaving me humming Feliz Navidad for hours afterward despite my best efforts to replace it with something – anything! – else.

Moreso, I think I’ve passed my susceptibility on to Tristan. A few times recently, he has hopped out of the car singing snippets of the last song that happened to be on the radio, something I know he has likely not heard before. (Aside: the boys’ favourite song right now? Crabbuckit by K-OS. I have only myself to blame for their first indoctrination to hip hop. I may live to rue this day.)

There is one song that seems to get caught in the loop of Tristan’s internal CD player more often than any other. I can’t say I’m surprised, as he hears it every single morning when he’s at school. The problem is that he hums it throughout the day – every day – and of course, it ends up stuck in my head every night. (Nope, not exaggerating here. Every.single.day.) Not that it’s a bad song, it’s just not the one I want as the soundtrack to my life. I spend all day humming bad Christmas muzak like Feliz Navidad, and spend the rest of my waking hours humming O Canada.

(The evil blogger in me is hoping I’ve indoctrinated you with at least one of these songs by now. Come on, you can hear them in your head, can’t you? There’s nothing like a little Mexican Christmas joy to start the week, is there?)

What’s your musical weakness? What song do you dread hearing, knowing that after just a few bars, it will be rattling around in your brain for hours – if not days – afterward?

Bring it on!

While those of you south of the 49th parallel tend to hold off the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving (isn’t that this week?), we have to fend off holiday decorations starting now before Halloween. Remembrance Day (November 11) is about as long as we can hold off the official launch of our holiday frenzy.

By household decree, I’m not allowed to put up the tree until after Beloved’s birthday on December 4, but I’ve managed to sneak up the house lights (new LED lights this year!), and yesterday was the Santa Claus Parade.

The boys seemed to have a good time at the parade yesterday. We opted for the big one downtown because the weather was holding and our trio of runny noses seemed benign. We were late arriving to the parade route, partly because I forgot to build in an extra 20 minutes (I wish I were exaggerating) to get the boys into ski pants, boots, hats, mitts and the whole winter gear deal. Since we were already late, of course we couldn’t find a parking spot closer than three blocks from the parade route. After an almost-sprint down Fourth Avenue, yanking a wagon with about 100 lbs of boy behind me, we made it just in time to hear the sirens and horns of the leading motorcycle police just a few blocks away.

We made it, though, and the boys said they had a good time. Tristan tends to the stoic sometimes, and even though he watched most of the parade with serious contemplation, he insisted he was having a good time. Simon was not impressed with the clowns, the sirens, and any loud noises, and asked to be held aloft for far longer than my aching arms could comply, but both were finally moved to smiles by lollipops and candy canes.

In the evening, we snuggled in and watched both The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas on the VCR. Once upon a time, I said I didn’t want to get those particular specials on tape, because the magic of happening to catch them on broadcast television made them that much more precious. I was, of course, wrong.

Watching the Grinch and a Charlie Brown Christmas with my boys for the first time was what made it magical. I’m ready for Christmas now – bring it on!

(We’ve also made it more than half way through November, and National Blog Post Month. Posting each weekday has been a breeze, but coming up with something to write about at 8 pm on a Sunday night is stretching me to creative capacity!! If you want to reward my tenacity, if not my creativity, you can always toss me a vote at the Canadian Blog Awards. /hint)

The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

The boys are loving some of the classic (and excuse me while I use that term rather loosely) cartoon shows from my childhood. Scooby Doo and Garfield are both current favourites.

Early this morning, I checked the TV listings looking for Scooby Doo and instead, to my great delight, found a listing on the Space network for the Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

Do you remember this truly classic show? Along with Sesame Street and the Electric Company, it was one of my favourites. I clearly remember being awake before the rest of the house and watching HHF in the early morning light. (I guess the boys come by their early-rising tendencies honestly.)

A couple of months ago, when the Electric Company DVD boxed set came out, Beloved got a copy for me (for Mother’s Day!), but I have to admit that I remembered less than half of the sketches. Watching HHF this morning, though, it was hard to believe that it’s been more than 30 years since I’ve seen an episode. It was all just like I remembered it: Dr Pet Vet, the Grammar Slammer, Igor and the sloth, and bad poetry from Vincent Price. I was hoping to see the Wolfman Jack segment, but according to this Wikipedia entry, they haven’t been able to secure the musical rights and so have cut that segment out of the syndicated repeats.

Did you watch this when you were a kid? I had no idea it was Canadian until I read the Wiki entry – in fact, it was produced by CHCH in Hamilton, close enough to my home town of London to be in our original pre-cable 13 channel line-up along with Tiny Talent Time. (Ah, Tiny Talent Time… I’m sure my not-so-latent need for media attention somehow relates to the thwarted desires of my inner six-year-old to be on Tiny Talent Time.)

We watched about 20 minutes of HHF this morning before the boys got restless and started asking to see the copy of Cars we rented for the weekend. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Count Frightenstein doesn’t measure up to Lightning McQueen… but I am a little disappointed.

Maybe I’ll set the VCR for next Sunday morning and watch a few episodes after the boys go to bed. Nostalgia rocks!

What shows from your childhood would you watch today?

International icon for breastfeeding?

I get a lot of Google traffic looking for pictures of nursing mothers. I’m never sure exactly what it is they’re looking for, but I’m betting this isn’t it!

The folks at Mothering.com held a contest recently to solicit designs for an internationally-recognizable icon to represent breastfeeding. They said, “The image of a baby bottle on an airport sign announcing the location of a “parents lounge” infuriated us and got us thinking: Isn’t there an international symbol for breastfeeding?”

The results of their contest are clever (check out the finalists here), but I find these also-rans (click through for more) particularly funny:

Here in Canada, or at least in Ottawa, there is a commonly-recognized symbol of a baby that indicates nursing stations, baby-change rooms and whatnot. Are they not common everywhere?

In praise of free

Two of the most popular items in our house these days, for the under-five set at least, came to us completely free.

Simon’s new favourite book, which we *must* read every nap and bedtime, is a small paperback copy of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom that came free in a box of Cheerios. From the same promotion, we also got John Lithgow’s Marsupial Sue, but apparently it’s not as magical as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which I can now recite from memory.

And yesterday, we stopped at Harvey’s for lunch after a morning on the town, where the kids’ meal toy was Silly Putty. Silly Putty definitely deserves a spot on our list of ‘timeless toys.’ I have previously mentioned how much I love Harvey’s kids’ meal toys. Play Dough, markers and notebooks, Silly Putty… so much better than the plastic junk that McDonalds and the rest of the fast food places give out!

For those of you willing to invest a little more than the price of a hamburger combo in your holiday gift shopping, the Canadian Toy Testing Council has come out with their annual report on the best toys for 2007. You can also consult their full report for all the toys and books their panel of more than 1000 toy experts – Canadian kids of all ages! – tested this year.

(This disjointed Sunday-morning ramble brought to you by NaBloPoMo. This might be harder than I thought! Anybody got a good meme?)