Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

Five things I learned about my iPhone 4S in my quest to improve battery performance

I love my iPhone. I love it madly, maybe even obsessively. I carry it with me everywhere and sleep with it charging on my bedside table. It’s half talisman and half umbilical cord. Like all great love affairs, though, ours is a tumultuous one. As passionately as I love it, I despise it when it misbehaves. The recent upgrade to iOS7 has been a lover’s spat of epic proportions. Suddenly my endlessly loyal companion was running out of passion (erm, battery juice) before noon, when I regularly get at least a day’s performance out of a single charge.

I clearly wasn’t the only one having problems with iPhone battery life after iOS7 upgrades (1.5M search returns and counting on iOS7 battery drain!), and I found these articles in particular from the Huffington Post and Mashable helpful in identifying and rectifying the worst battery-draining culprits. I’ve never allowed e-mails (or most notifications, for that matter) to push to my phone, but I did find out that apps were running in the background and draining a lot of juice – and data. It took me nearly a week of tinkering, but I’ve got it back to a point where I’m actually getting improved battery performance over where I was before the upgrade to iOS7.

In the process, I learned a few tips and tricks I thought worthy of sharing beyond the preservation of battery power. Maybe you knew all these things already, but they were news to me.

So then, five things I learned about my iPhone this week:

1. How to close apps running in the background

Did you know apps don’t close when you hit the home button (the circular button with the square on it at the bottom of your screen)? You just shove them into the background, and some of them keep running and sucking up power and resources. Double-click on the home button and you’ll be able to see all apps that are currently running. Flick the little screen cap above the icon upwards to close the app. I am now in the habit of going in and closing all running apps a few times a day. (I believe this only applies to iOS7 and not prior OSes.)

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2. You can set a delay on the passlock screen

It’s a good idea to have a lock on your phone, especially if it has sensitive contact info and photos on it. However, it always drove me nuts that the the second you click the phone into sleep mode, you have to re-enter the pass code to unlock the phone. Especially when you’re trying to snap photos, this can be tedious and time consuming. I thought I had searched every directory for an option to add a delay to this but could never find it — until now! Voila, delayed passcode! Look for this option under Settings > General > Passcode Lock.

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3. Apps running in the background may be updating over wi-fi or cellular connection

I was doubly annoyed to find out that not only was I burning through battery power faster than my five-year-old burns through goldfish crackers, but that I had smashed through my data cap by 20% only half way through the billing month. Turns out my iPhone was updating itself willy-nilly for apps that I didn’t even know were running. (See point 1 above – closing an app does not mean it’s not still running.) I turned THAT tap off in a hurry. Look for it under Settings > General > Background App Refresh.

4. Constantly seeking wi-fi and Bluetooth connections is a huge battery drain
You know that little window that pops up to tell you about nearby wi-fi connections? Your iPhone is always looking for connections (kind of like a randy teenager) and that’s a huge battery drain. My pedometer “talks” to my iPhone via bluetooth, which is very cool and I will write a separate post about that one of these days, but it also sucks battery life as the iPhone looks for Bluetooth devices to connect with. (I think this was one of the things that I turned off that made the biggest improvement in battery life, because I forgot to turn it back off after updating my Fitbit stats yesterday and battery life plummeted again.) And I don’t know about you, but most of the open wi-fi connections I find are cantankerous and I can’t usually get my mail to download over them anyway. I’m looking at you and your “free” wi-fi, Starbucks! Anyway, if you turn off the option to always seek new wi-fi connections, your iPhone will still connect automatically to recognized wi-fi networks, and you can seek them manually via the Settings function. Bonus: no annoying pop-up screens full of locked networks you can’t access anyway.

5. You can see how much data each app has gobbled up – and tell some apps never to connect on a cellular network
Wondering which apps are data hogs? Go to Settings > Cellular and scroll down to the bottom. You can see how much data each app is gobbling up here and turn connectivity over cellular off for the worst offenders. I like Facebook but I was gobsmacked to see how much data it consumed this month – probably almost entirely because I’d check it early in the day and close the app without turning it off so it would just keep updating all day long even though I wasn’t looking at it. Sigh.

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Oh, and here’s a bonus tip for you. I have had the old “nostalgia” ring tone on my iPhone pretty much since the day I got it. I have a newfound love for Macklemore, though, and decided that I really needed the opening riff from “Thrift Shop” as my ring tone. You can buy a Thrift Shop ring tone, but it’s not the funky sax riff with the “whut whut”s in it. I downloaded an app called Ringtone Designer that lets you take a 30 second snippet from any song in your iTunes library into a ring tone. Hey, if I can figure it out, anyone can. Not just any custom ring tone, but a hip hop one. I am cool now, right? RIGHT?!

I hope you found these useful! This actually ties in really well but absolutely coincidentally with a new gig I’ve taken on as a Rogers Mobile Ambassador. More about that soon!

So how are you and YOUR iPhone doing after upgrading to iOS7? Have you found it troubling? Any other tips to share? Ha, what ELSE don’t I know??? 😉

I need you to read this article

You know how there are some articles that pop up in social media and for a while it seems like everyone is sharing them and talking about them, but you’re either looking for something else or just not hooked by the share and you skim past them? But then you keep seeing them floating up from several sources who you trust, and finally you click on it and read it? And you understand why everyone is sharing, and why you have to share too?

Yeah, this is one of those articles. Michael Curran, editor of the Ottawa Business Journal, got the call a month ago that no parent should ever get – his son had been badly beaten in a bar fight in Yellowknife, and was not expected to live. A horrible, gut-wrenching story in itself, but a tragedy wrapped in a love story. Because Michael’s son Emerson, a beautiful 20-year old boy, had told his mother one day that he believed in organ donation. Please read this sad, lovely story of loss and redemption and courage: My son’s tragedy turns to hope for others

Through the courage of Michael and his wife, Emerson donated his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas and tissues. Michael wrote, “Emerson’s story is only half the story. There is another part of it that I do not know. It’s the story of 4,000 patients in Canada desperately waiting for donations that could miraculously save, or radically improve, their lives.”

Here’s my half of that story. As many of you know my father received a liver transplant in October 2001, when I was pregnant with Tristan. Without that transplant, I’m not sure my boys would have ever known their Papa Lou. One brave organ donor gave my boys a grandfather whom they love deeply, and they gave me the joy of finding a whole new way to love my dad. I’m so deeply touched by this gift that I simply don’t have the words to express it.

157:365 Happy Birthday Papa Lou!

Please read Michael’s article, and please share Emerson’s story. And please, do more than just think about organ donation – talk about it with your family, make your wishes known, and be a donor.

Six months with Bella

My pretty baby girl Bella turns nine months old this week! When Bella bounced into our lives and hearts back in March, I envisioned writing a series of posts about life with a puppy. (There is almost nothing I do in life that I don’t consider blog fodder, is there?) I imagined posts full of savvy tips about integrating puppy into your household, puppy training basics, and clever, witty posts recounting our misadventures.

So much for that plan, eh? Turns out having a puppy is so life-altering that it takes up pretty much all your time just to keep your sanity. Had I managed to write them out, the first month of posts would have been a long and painful series of “holy crap, what have we done?” lamentations. Oy, those early weeks were tough. But she was cute, and clearly there was a good dog buried somewhere underneath the ceaseless energy and mischief (but buried deep, oh so deep, so regretfully deep in that thick outer shell of mischief) so we stuck it out.

See? So cute.

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We took her to puppy class at the Bytown Obedience Club, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. We enjoyed their puppy socialization class so much that we went back for the novice obedience class as well. Bella is a clever but exhuberent girl and clearly loves to please us, so she is pretty easy to train. I’m sure if I didn’t also have three kids and four jobs and the attention span of a nanny goat we could train her as a rally dog — or at least train her to more reliably come when she’s called. For now, though, we’re happy enough that she listens to our commands more often than not. The obedience bar is not high.

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I love how much she loves people. She adores the members of her pack, and it’s cute how she clearly sees the boys as fellow pups in the litter. The first few months were tough, though, as she tried to play with them exactly as she would have played with the other pups in her litter – by leaping, nipping and pulling at them. Several bits of clothing were torn, and a few long scratches were endured, but she was (thankfully) never so rough that she did any significant damage. I think we’re mostly past that now – at nine months, she’s learned to control her enthusiasm, but still has a bad habit of gently tugging at hands and feet with her mouth when she wants to play. She’s also a ridiculous jumper – during puppy class, the trainers would laugh as she sproinged straight up and down when she was restless. She doesn’t lunge in a vicious way but does love to jump up, the last bad habit we must yet conquer. Good thing she’s only 50 lbs and probably never will be much bigger.

Did I mention she’s a people dog? She adores Papa Lou, probably in equal measures because the feeling is mutual and because he so blatantly ignores all the house rules about no feeding of table scraps and no dogs on the furniture while he is visiting. Oy, grandparents! 😉

Bella meets Granny and Papa Lou

True to her shepherd lineage, she is loyal to a fault. Probably because I am her main trainer, and she sleeps in my room, and because I am so deeply a dog person while so many others in my house are cat people, I am her alpha dog, and she will follow me from room to room as I move through the house. If she’s awake, she likes to have me in her line of vision, which was really sweet at first but can occasionally become tiresome as I trip over her or she runs into me if I stop too abruptly moving from room to room.

#fromwhereistand - with a dog on my feet!

She is also an excellent guard dog, in that she barks at strangers as they approach the house, walk past the house, walk anywhere near the house, walk in an area that might be near the house, or walk anywhere that could conceivably some day bring them near to the house. She also barks at other dogs, and squirrels, and leaves, and trees, and butterflies flapping their wings in China. Oy, the barking. And not just one or two alert barks (I always think of the Gary Larson’s dog translator comic – turns out all the dogs are saying when they bark is “hey! hey! hey!”) but a full series of barks, hackles raised, and occasionally quite shrill. It’s lovely when she feels a disturbance in the Force worth barking at when it’s 4:03 am, I can testify. We are seriously considering a bark collar. Or a sedative. (For me, I mean. I’m developing a twitch from the constant startles.)

Incoming porch dog!!

When the barking gets under my skin, I find it helpful to think of all the ways in which she has been a remarkably good puppy. We have not, to my surprise, lost a single shoe to chewing – although we have lost a plastic Super Mario and the arm off one poor Skylander. (By comparison, my darling Katie in her puppyhood chewed up among other things several shoes, my eyeglasses, a TV remote, several cords and wires, and an entire tin of coffee, can and all.) She has also shown a remarkable resistance to the kitchen garbage, showing a level of restraint Katie was never able to master. We finally have the house training largely under control, although that was also touch and go (as in, go in the house) for a while. She sits contentedly with me on the porch for hours at a stretch, and learned quickly that while digging is great fun, digging is only permitted in the sand under the playstructure and not the rest of the lawn.

Bella and the shoe

So you might be wondering how Willie the cat has taken to our lively Miss Bella. Not well, I’m afraid. It pains me that Willie loved to play with ancient, slow-moving and tolerant Katie, and would even try to sneak a cuddle every now and then, while Willie will have absolutely nothing to do with Bella. Oh the irony!

Willie and Bella

This is an older picture now, but easily sums up pretty much every one of their interactions – either Willie is rearing up to bat her on the nose (thankfully with claws mostly retracted) growling deep in his throat, or he is scrambling to make it to safe ground while she tears after him, claws scabbering on hardwood. I had hoped that by the time we were six months in, we’d have less baby gates around the house, but they are an ongoing vexation in my life as we keep Bella away from Willie, Willie’s litter box (aka the snack tray) and the kids’ rooms full of the one thing Bella seems unable to resist – stuffed animals.

Bella and Willie, not quite a love story

Last week we brought her in to the Ottawa spay/neuter clinic to make sure it is a very long time indeed before we have any more puppies in the house. I was super-impressed with the care she received, and if you ever think your job is a nuthouse, just drop by the spay/neuter clinic some morning during the morning drop-off. What a madhouse!

Do you have any thoughts about those bark collars? Have you used them? I know they have citronella ones and ones with a little jolt. I’m not super-keen on the idea, but we either get the barking under control or I have to cut my caffiene consumption so I’m a little less jumpy, and that’s certainly not going to happen!

Summer 2013 playlist

Now that the boys have iPods, our family iTunes account has become very, um, diverse in its musical tastes. Let’s just say that the Genius recommendations that used to kick out a lot of college alternative stuff are now so skewed toward Minecraft parody songs as to be unusable.

I have to admit, though, that the boys have brought a needed dose of modernity to the 80s-entrenched playlists that Beloved and I have enjoyed for years. Just a few years ago, I could barely recognize a song or two from the annual best-of-summer lists, and now we’re bopping along to Daft Punk and Macklemore (I totally had to google the band names – but I know all the lyrics by heart! in fact, the boys have parody-ized Get Lucky and I find myself singing along about Mexican Monkeys – but that may in fact be a good alternative to them singing the actual lyrics to that one. But I digress…)

Here’s the playlist I pulled together from our family iTunes account for Summer 2013. Can you guess which song comes from which generation?

Call me maybe – Carly Rae Jepson
I’m yours – Jason Mraz (I adore this song!)
She’s so young – The Pursuit of Happiness
Every red light – Shawn Hook
1234 – Feist
Don’t you (forget about me) – Simple Minds
Payphone – Maroon 5
Let’s go crazy – Prince
Party Rock Anthem – LMFAO
Whistle – Flo-rida
I wanna be sedated – Ramones
It’s the end of the world as we know it – REM
Gangnam Style – Psy
Moves like Jagger – Maroon 5
Freewill – Rush
Pretty in pink – The Psychedelic Furs
Changes – David Bowie

It tickles me to see the 15-year gaping hole that comprises the late 1990s to 2010 or so. It’s missing some Great Big Sea and Tragically Hip, and I had originally included Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls but it got deleted somehow. But it does make for some fun road trip music that keeps the whole family singing along.

What else am I missing? What’s your summer earworm of 2013?

Curse you, Michael Pollan!

When I read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in 2008, it radically changed how I thought about food and eating. I took to heart then and still try hard to live by his simple prescriptive advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Every time I visit the grocery store, I think about his tests to ensure you are consuming actual food and not just foodlike substances: “would your great-grandmother recognize it as food” and “don’t eat it if it has ingredients you don’t recognize and/or can’t pronounce.”

Because I was so deeply moved by In Defense of Food, I knew I would like his latest book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. About two months ago, I read an interesting interview with Pollan in a blog on the NY Times. In that interview, he said:

“Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet. What matters most is not any particular nutrient, or even any particular food: it’s the act of cooking itself. People who cook eat a healthier diet without giving it a thought. It’s the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic.”

When you cook, you choose the ingredients: “And you’re going to use higher-quality ingredients than whoever’s making your home-meal replacement would ever use. You’re not going to use additives. So the quality of the food will automatically be better.”

I believe that, wholeheartedly. I believe in just about everything Pollan in preaching, and so I was delighted last week to be stuck in the car for drive across the city long enough to catch all of Jian Ghomeshi’s interview of Michael Pollan on the radio program Q. Pollan discussed Big Food and how (pardon me as a paraphrase from my memory of something I heard a week ago) any industrialized food production will automatically choose the least expensive (and therefore lowest quality and least healthy) ingredients, because companies are all about making profits. But to cover up the fact that they are using marginal ingredients (think of the quality of cheese and flour, for example, used to make a frozen pizza) they add all sorts of other things that are salty or sugary or fatty because when our body detects those things it says YUM, and those salty/fatty/sugary additives mask the meh of the mediocre ingredients. And it’s those salty/fatty/sugary additives that are the problem, the huge problem, the biggest food problem of them all.

Jian Ghomeshi asked Pollan about adding things like butter, gobs of butter, to a home cooked meal to make it tastier and Pollan said that you basically can’t go wrong with home-cooked food, and no matter how much salt you shake out or butter you slather on, if you are cooking real food you are ingesting a mere fraction of what you get in pre-packaged Big Food foodlike products.

This makes so much sense to me. SO much. I totally buy this argument. Eating at home is a touchstone in our family. I’m also a rabid believer in the whole “family dinner” concept, and while we do takeout pizza about once a week, we mostly eat meals I cook at home.

387:1000 Cake baking

Before we had kids, cooking dinner meant taking a box from the freezer or fridge and making it warm. I’ve come a long way since then, I have to admit that much. But as I am listening to Michael cursed Pollan and nodding my head in agreement, I am beginning to think critically about what “cooking” means in our house. I think about how I make spaghetti and meatballs, for instance. Box of (whole wheat, natch) noodles, jar of sauce, frozen meatballs from M&M. Um, okay, so not exactly home cooked. But my veggie primavera with noodles and fresh zukes, peppers, snowpeas and mushrooms – I cook all that from scratch. Well, except for the noodles. And the jarred pesto. Hmm. Oh wait! Fajitas, my specialty, with guacamole from scratch and Farm Boy (but fresh, dammit!) salsa. Totally from scratch. Except the spice rub on the chicken. And the prepackaged tortillas.

Damn. There is almost nothing I cook that doesn’t come somehow from Big Food, that is not processed. Even hamburgers with meat I go out of my way to get from the local butcher (ethically and sustainably farmed!) goes on buns from a bag beside beans from a can.

I want to make the good choices, I honestly do. I have a local, organic CSA farm share, for god’s sake. I am trying.so.hard. But I stood in the grocery store the day after I listened to that interview and I was paralyzed. What can I buy? What can I make for dinner? How can I possibly conceptualize and home-cook from scratch seven dinners that all five people in my house will eat and not completely lose my ever-loving mind? And then do it all again the next week? And the next?

By the time I reached the check-out, I had completely capitulated. Not only were the usual suspects in my cart (cans of beans, jars of sauce, those amazing chicken dumplings from the freezer section) but also several signs of my utter resignation: sugary cereal, frozen waffles, a bag of chips so big it needed its own shopping bag.

Curse you, Michael Pollan. Curse you for opening my eyes, eyes which I thought were already wide open for the love of god, and making me think about eating all over again. I’m afraid to read your bloody damn book in case it makes me think even more because my head may just explode.

Deep breaths.

Now that we’ve eaten the can of beans and the pre-prepped macaroni salad, I’ve shaken off my ennui and vowed to try again. If I’ve made the leap from simply heating crap up to making large swaths of most of our meals, I can incrementally start to cook more and more from scratch, right? Maybe even start with the basics?

You think the family will mind if we have home-made from scratch spaghetti sauce on noodles from a box four times next week? Because the older I get, the harder it is for this dog to learn new tricks.

Confessions of a junk show junkie

The free world might be caught up in the compelling drama of Downtown Abbey or Game of Thrones or even Mad Men (at least I’ve seen a couple of episodes of that one) but I have noticed that my television consuption has skewed away from shows with plots and narrative arcs. Who has the attention span for that these days? And anyway, then I’d have no time for Auction Hunters, Storage Wars or Pawn Stars. My name is Dani, and I am addicted to junk shop television.

It’s hardly a surprise. One of our favourite family activities has long been scouring the countryside for vintage crap at local flea markets. It’s not even so much about the stuff as it is about the thrill of the hunt for the stuff. (Although some of the stuff has been awesome. My darling old Underwood typewriter, for example, or the red wagon I use in so many of my photo shoots. Neither of which would have made a ripple had they been discovered in a locker on Storage Wars, but both of which give me great happiness every time I look at them. One woman’s treasure…)

Flea market awesomeness #1
Not everything at the flea market is awesome, some of it is just scary

Given infinite resources of time, space and child patience, we would happiply spend every weekend hunting through flea markets, visiting auctions and rifling through dusty shelves at antiques and second-hand shops – to say nothing of the now-ubiquitous spring yard sales, church bazaars and the crap people simply leave at the end of their driveways. (Most of my porch furniture was acquired this way!) But really, how many butter boxes do we actually need anyway? I have this weird container fixation, and I love vintage stuff. Things at the intersection of the two like butter boxes, vintage suitcases and old wooden crates drive me into paroxysms of covetousness even though I have no place or need for any more. And let’s not even TALK about all the old camera gear out there. Thankfully, a couple of episodes of Canadian Pickers or Auction Kings scratches my treasure-hunter itch without tapping my far-from-unlimited resources.

I know they like to play the drama and the personalities in these shows, but I find that part tedious. Never mind the people and their petty conflicts, tell me more about the stuff. The stuff fascinates me! It’s not just about the valuable stuff, the lost Tom Thompson everybody hopes is hiding in their grandmother’s attic, but about why we have the stuff and why we want the stuff and why we hold on to and sell and forget we even had the stuff. I think that’s why I like Pawn Stars and Auction Kings and Canadian Pickers best of all of them – they give a little bit of insight and history of the stuff, and why it’s interesting or valuable. It’s what the stuff tells us about ourselves that fascinates me.

What do you think? Are you a picker-wanna-be? Do you hang out in the second-hand shops hunting elusive treasures or are you an armchair picker like me? Or are you totally skeeved out at the idea of anything whose provenance is unknown, preferring factory-fresh new stuff instead?

National We Day in Ottawa: One mother’s perspective

I am about a quarter of a century older than the demographic that We Day seeks to motivate and inspire, but it would have been impossible to attend yesterday’s amazing national We Day event in Ottawa and not leave feeling like you can change the world. As much as the day’s events spoke to my inner 15 year old girl (who is, truth be told, never very far from the surface) I found myself considering the We Day messages and speakers through a maternal lens.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know it was a very exciting day for Tristan, Simon and me. Together with a few other blogger families, we were invited to cover the event and given media access to some of the celebrity activists and supporters thanks to TELUS. Through a partnership with Free The Children, TELUS is helping to inspire young leaders and build a community of young people dedicated to positive social change. High on my list of “best parenting moments ever” is watching Tristan pose a question to Free the Children founder Craig Kielburger himself – which I will let HIM tell you about in a separate post. But here’s a shaky shot of my boys patiently waiting their turn in the media line.

Waiting to meet Craig Kielburger at National We Day!!

If you missed my earlier post (and endless Facebook and Twitter updates yesterday) you might be wondering what exactly this We Day thing is all about.

Free The Children is the world’s largest network of children helping children, with more than one million youth in 45 countries involved in their innovative education and development programs. Through domestic programs they educate, engage and empower hundreds of thousands of youth in North America, the UK and around the world. Their international projects have brought over 650 schools and school rooms to youth and provided clean water, health care and sanitation to one million people around the world.

I’ve loosely followed Craig’s story and his Free the Children movement in the media for years. I knew they did charitable and educational work, and I knew through the We Day programs at the boys’ school that one of their primary goals was motivating young people to “Be the Change” in their world. The subtext I missed before attending the National We Day event, though, was how that empowerment works on an individual level. Yes, it’s about providing clean water for Ghana and schools for girls in Africa – but it’s also about having the courage to speak up on behalf of a classmate, about making small but meaningful choices for a better world, about having the courage to know yourself and be true to yourself. Powerful stuff for a pre-teen audience – but truly, who needs that message more than students at this complicated age? And what better way to reach them than through a rocking event with 5000 screaming peers?

#weday behind the screens. HUGE crowd! #telusforweday

I think I personally was most touched by the story of Spencer West. His legs were amputated below the pelvis when he was five years old. I keep trying to imagine what that must have been like for his family, thinking about my own five year old boy. Clearly, Spencer overcame unimaginable odds stacked against him, and in 2012 he climbed Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro – on his hands.

National We Day in Ottawa - Spencer West

We had the chance to chat with Spencer during the media scrum, and I wish I could have talked to him for about three more hours. This quote was one of my favourites of the day:

Here’s a couple more vignettes from the day.

Most of the Grade 6 class from the boys’ school earned tickets to We Day through their actions on a local and global level. Through one initiative, the school raised more than 170,000 pennies when the Mint announced the penny phase-out earlier this year. For their efforts, they earned a shout-out from Craig Kielburger during a pre-show interview on CBC Ottawa Morning and a moment in the spotlight during the show itself. I’m just glad I had my camera in my hand already! I was so proud of them. 🙂

National We Day in Ottawa - St Leonard shout-out

Perhaps one of the biggest celebrities present was actor and activist Martin Sheen. I have to tell you, I was pretty excited at the possibility of meeting him, having never missed an episode of the West Wing. We were standing in the corner, more or less trying to stay out of the way but still have a good sightline to where he would be answering questions, when Martin Sheen “snuck” into the room.

OMG just had a lovely chat with Martin Sheen and my boys. #weday #telusforweday

He was supposed to go to the backdrop and start answering media questions, but to everyone’s surprise – most spectacularly, my own! – he walked straight up to me with his hand out for a handshake and introduced himself. He asked me “Who are you here with?” and so of course I introduced him to Tristan and Simon. I’m not sure that’s what he meant by the question, but he seemed delighted with the answer and went on to chat with them about how wonderful the day was and whether they were enjoying themselves.

Eventually, they got him to where he was supposed to be answering questions (after he stopped to chat with a few more people on the way) and he said the other quote that resonated deeply with me for the day:

National We Day in Ottawa - Martin Sheen

One of my favourite moments of the day was watching his “handlers” try to get him out of the media room and back to where he was supposed to be getting ready to deliver his address to the crowd. Despite their best intentions to move him along, he kept shaking them off and stopping to chat with anyone who looked like they were under the age of 25 about why they were there and what they were doing. It was truly delightful and more than a little bit funny. Hey, when you’ve been POTUS I guess you prefer to decide when and where you are going.

I was also please to find out that I’m not as much of a dinosaur as I might have thought. While I only recongized one or two of the musical acts by name, I was delighted to find out that I did in fact know the songs, if not the bands. In fact, the boys and I agreed that we’ll have to add a little Shawn Desman and Kardinal Offishall’s Turn it Up to our iTunes collections. This was Kardinal Offishall Turning it UP for the big finale at We Day:

National We Day in Ottawa - Turn it UP!

There was so much more – environmental messages in Rob Stewart’s Revolution (click through and watch the trailer!), organ transplant messages from Ottawa’s own Hélène Campbell, a voice from Canada’s northern people and a reminder that Canada is taller than it is wide from Inuit speaker Terry Aulda, anti-bullying messages from visually-impaired teen Molly Burke, RBC’s ONE DROP initiative – the single resonating theme of the day was that there are a myriad ways in which a single person can make a difference, and that a seemingly small action can have enormous and occasionally unexpected effects.

The definition of “changing the world” has changed for this generation, for the children we are raising today. When I was a child, it meant that you grew up to be an activist or someone in a position of power, or you were one of those extraordinary young people like Craig Kielburger himself, who drew global attention to a cause he was passionate about. What I’m realizing is what our kids seem to know intuitively, and what We Day is promoting: you don’t need a megaphone to make a difference, and you don’t need to be famous or powerful or have a lot of resources behind you. Social justice isn’t about petitioning on Parliament Hill and letter-writing campaigns, it’s about the choices you make and the way you live your life every single day.

Choose organic and local produce. Choose to hold a door for someone rather than let it slam. Choose to donate a bag of used toys to charity rather than dump them in the trash. Choose to spend 20 minutes of your time promoting a cause rather than playing a video game. Choose to turn off the tap while you brush your teeth and turn off the lights when you leave the room. Choose to speak up to defend someone rather than stand mutely by and watch bullying happen. Like the pennies collected by the boys’ school, each small act on it’s own may seem so insignificant as to be worthless. However, when you start stacking them by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, they have unmistakable, undeniable worth and value.

Also? It was a really fun day.

National We Day in Ottawa - meeting Craig Kielburger!

A hell of a day, in fact, don’t you think? But wait, there’s more! Stand by, the boys want to tell you about We Day from their perspective next. 🙂

Changing the world, one kid at a time

Have you heard of We Day? I’ve been hearing about it all year from the boys as they raised funds and awareness through various projects at school from penny drives to vows of silence. Founded by Free the Children, We Day is a series of events held across Canada to inspire youth to create change in their communities and around the world. If you don’t recognize the We Day title, your school-age kids probably do, and you’ll likely recognize the name of Free the Children founders Marc and Craig Kielburger. Since 1995, when he was a Grade 7 student in Thornhill, Craig has become a global social activist with the simple (!) goal of empowering youth to change the world.

I knew through my connections in school council that the school would be sending a contingent to the national We Day event being held here in Ottawa/Gatineau next week, but that tickets were very limited because they can’t be bought – they have to be earned through local or global acts of service. Neat, eh? More than 4,000 youth and educators from across Canada would be attending.

You can imagine my delight when I was approached by national We Day sponsor Telus to attend and cover the We Day event here on the blog – and invite one of my children along. I was doubly excited when they kindly agreed to allow me to bring TWO of the boys. The event is on Monday, and we’re beside ourselves with anticipation. The more I research this incredible movement, the more amazed I become. Look at this! Since the first We Day in 2007, youth involved in We Act have achieved remarkable, measureable social change results:

  • $20 million raised for more than 500 local and global causes
  • 5.1 million hours volunteered for local and global causes
  • 2.8 million lbs of food collected for local food banks
  • 6.3 million hours of silence logged by youth who stood up for children in developing communities silenced by poverty and exploitation

So here’s where I’d like your help. There’s a small but real chance I’ll get to meet Craig and Marc Keilburger, or one of the events inspirational speakers like Martin Sheen (President Bartlett!!), Chief Shawn Atleo, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, humanitarian and Second Cup founder Frank O’Dea, the cast of Degrassi, or one of the dozen or so other celebrity guests and inpirational speakers. I am mute with awe at the very idea of being able to speak with some of these people, and coming up with a set of meaningful and penetrating questions is, well, out of the question.

Help me, bloggy peeps, what would YOU ask in a situation like this? (Assuming, that is, I can get my mouth opened at all.) I’m so proud to be a part of this event but just a wee bit overwhelmed by it all. What exactly do you say to an activist who has inspired global change? What would you like to know from a pair of brothers who have between them the amazing goal of empowering youth to change the world?

Stand by, I hope to have our three-person coverage of the event up on the blog early next week! And if you’d like more information, you can connect with the We Day movement on Facebook or learn about how you can get involved at www.weday.com.

The one where she set the stove on fire

We’ve had the new oven for maybe three or four months now. I like it, which makes it seem even more odd that I’d set it on fire. My first kitchen fire EVER, no less. I know, lousy cook and hopeless klutz that I am, you’d think kitchen fires would be a regular occurence for me, yes?

Well, I didn’t SET it on fire. It sort of set itself on fire. Cautionary tale #1: don’t use the maximum burner settings. Did you know when you set the burners to max they get infinitely hot? My friend Yvonne once liquefied a high-end pot when it boiled dry and I have never forgotten that lesson she learned on my behalf. I’m sure if you left the burners on max for a day or three you could go thermonuclear with those little coils.

No, what happened was that the plastic bag on the corn tortillas melted and then fused with the nylon cutting board resting on top of them, and I think it might have been the tortillas that combusted. Cautionary tale #2: don’t put crap on your burners. Even when you think you’re not using them.

As I said, it’s been three or four months since we got the new oven, but I am clearly having a hard time adjusting to the fact that the dials that control each burner are in a different spot than they were on the old stove. The inside dial controls the FRONT burner on this stove, not the rear burner. I’ve made the mistake a few times before and always feared someone *ahemmeahem* would put their fingers on the front burner that I’d accidentally turned on to boil the pot on the rear burner, which is a really ineffective way to boil a pot of water, let me tell you. Cautionary tale #3: once you commit to a certain burner-dial configuration, you are wedded to it for all the stoves you will ever own in your entire life and YOU SHOULD NOT MESS WITH IT.

I was completely oblivious to the blaze on the stovetop as I was busy at the sink pouring bleach into the compost bin to kill a surprise mould build up while I waited for the pot to boil, and I am very grateful that Beloved in the dining room and Tristan coming up the stairs both shouted out some sort of “hey, is that a fire?” sort of alarm. Beloved and I managed to contain the blaze, me by flinging the melting tortilla-cutting-board-mass off the burner and him by using his Super Freeze Breath powers to blow it out. (And he wasn’t even wearing his T-shirt with the big S on it!) I was impressed that he could blow it out, since pretty much the whole burner was flaming. Cautionary tale #4: go check your fire extinguishers RIGHT NOW. I haven’t looked at ours since I stashed it under the sink when we moved it and I’m not sure I could have remembered how to use it in a panicked situation or whether or how often they need to be replaced. Also, check your smoke detector batteries while you’re at it. And hug your mother.

In the end, the damage was limited to one sacrificed cutting board, one inedible bag of corn tortillas, and a bit of a mess. We managed to rub, scrape and peel most of the charred plastic bits off the burner, and I’ll take one more go at it tonight before I retry the burner UNDER CAREFUL SUPERVISION to make sure we got all the flammable bits off. Cautionary tale #5: from what I’ve been told, had this been a smooth-top oven I would have had a lot more damage with which to contend. At worst I would have had to replace a single coil, but even that may not be necessary. And the coil-top range was way cheaper than the smooth-top ones, too. Cheap is good, if you plan to regularly set fire to them, right?

It was only much later that I realized the true travesty of this whole event was the missed opportunity for a visit from the local fire department. Damn. You think it’s too late to call them over? You know, just to make sure everything is safe? It’s not like they’re not familiar with the location…

Okay bloggy peeps, ‘fess up. What have YOU set aflame in the kitchen? Surely I’m not the only one!

The puppy project

To say I was unprepared for the upheaval in our lives due to the arrival of a puppy would be a bit of an understatement. A laughable understatement, really, since I’ve had dogs pretty much my whole life and puppies more than once. I have not, though, had a puppy with three kids and a cat and yard without a fence and a winter that will.not.quit. The combination is making me very, very tired.

For the most part, Bella is a great dog. She’s intelligent, has a wonderful nature, loves all the members of the family, and I think she’ll make a terrific lifelong companion. We just have to get through the puppy phase first.

Oy. Puppies. Nipping, peeing, willful, leaping, chewing, cat-chasing, obstinate puppies. It’s exhausting, the relentless puppyness of it all. Can we just fast forward to the year mark, where she’s housetrained and done teething and doesn’t keep confusing the kids’ feet with her chew toys?

It’s funny how much she (and we!) have changed since we brought her home about three and a half weeks ago. I thought at first she was on the timid and skittish side, but there’s very little trace of that left now. For the first few days, I had the hardest time just getting her outside to pee – she’d cower miserably by the door each time I tried to bring her outside. Now I have to bring her out on a leash most of the time as she so loves the yard and charging around it so much that we can’t get her back inside. She howled pitifully, trembled and was sick in her carrier the first time I brought her home in the car, and now she sits happily beside me in the passenger seat for short rides, only whining occasionally. I used to have to carry her away from the house (trembling in my arms the whole way) just so I could put her down and let her drag me back to the house — that was our version of a walk for the first week or so. She’s still terrible on leash, either pulling backwards or forwards half the time, but at least we can walk now, and she’s way better on a walk if her littermates, erm I mean, the kids, are out on a walk with her.

I think the thing that gave me most insight into her personality was bringing her for puppy class last week. We’re in a small class with only two other dogs (kind of defeats the socialization aspect, but oh well) and seeing how quick and bright and eager to please she is in the training session really gave me hope and reminded me that while it seems like we’re constantly scolding her for her puppy mischief, she’s actually a clever little girl who will do just about anything for a treat. And did I think this dog was timid? She was a little submissive with the older and larger Rottweiler (!) puppy, but while she tucked her tail and rolled on her back when he chased her, she just as quickly hopped up to chase and play with him.

I think maybe what I need is some valium. Oh, not for the puppy – for us! Our biggest challenge is not getting worked up about the puppy mischief and accepting it as both natural and (I hope) short-lived. Her worst transgressions to date have been tearing Tristan’s favourite jammies beyond repair, and peeing on a couple of beds. (How NOT to ingratiate yourself with your owners in one easy pee.) If I could snap my fingers and remove one behaviour problem, it would be nipping and jumping at the kids when she’s excited, so that’s what we’re working on the most but I’m finding it’s one of the harder ones to control because she does it out of pure excitement and joy to be with them. It’s also a huge challenge because she is at her most rambunctious in the early morning after I’ve gone to work but before the rest of them leave for school and work.

I know the responsibility is on our shoulders. We need to keep her chewing on the right things, exercising her regularly, showing her lots of love, and training her. We’ve lifted throw rugs and other things she might chew or pee on and the house is a warren of baby gates (much to the dismay of both Willie and Lucas.) Even though I’ve been through this before, though, I do not remember it being quite so exhausting! If I’m not scolding and redirecting the puppy, I’m scolding and redirecting the kids around the puppy. She sure is loveable, though. When she’s not out of her puppy mind with energy, she plays a great game of fetch (I love fetch!) and is very affectionate. She sleeps through the night with no problem in her crate and she’s getting better on leash for walks. She understands sit and stay, and is a little sketchier on ‘come here’ but we’re getting there. She’s only 14 weeks old after all!

Most adorably, her ears seem to be trying to become the stand-up shepherd ears I’ve always loved. Well, one of them is trying to stand up. Which might, after all, just amp up the cute factor.

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I suppose the puppy project is just the last in a long list of obsessions over the years. Way way back it was crafty things, then woodworking, and I went through a sewing phase. More constantly in the past few years have been blogging and photography, and losing 30 lbs was another one back a couple of years ago. So if you see a little less of me online in the next little while, at least you’ll know why. I’m working on the puppy project.

Any puppy advice, oh clever bloggy peeps? Share your stories of puppy insanity and how you survived, please. I’ll read the comments on my iPhone as I pace the frozen back yard with Bella, waiting for pee and spring.

Edited to add: Ha! The blog’s related post feature thinks this post about life with 14 month old Lucas, written nearly four years ago almost to the day, sounds suspiciously similar to life with 14 week old Bella. Why yes it is, clever blog. So you’re trying to tell me something? (Reading that old post brought a smile to my face. Okay, we CAN get through this, too!)