Dear Internet Friends,

I love you dearly, but you make me want to bang my head on the desk when you confuse the homonyms peek, peak and pique.

I would have thought the difference between peek and peak should be fairly straightforward, but when I saw them interchanged for the third time in a single day recently, I knew I had to write this post.

Peek:
verb: 1. to look furtively. 2. to take a brief look.
noun: 1. a furtive look. 2. a brief look.

Peak:
verb to cause to come to a peak, point or maximum
noun: the highest level or greatest degree (see here for more definitions)
adjective: of, relating to or being a period of maximum intensity or activity (ie peak business hours)

Every time you misuse one of these spellings for the other, an angel loses its wings.

On the other hand, “pique” is a bit more of an obsure term and I may be able to forgive some misuse. But not after today!

Pique:
noun: a transient feeling of wounded vanity; resentment. (ie “He slammed the door in a fit of pique.”)
verb: to excite or arouse, especially by provocation, challenge or rebuff.

Here’s a quick quiz for you, with the most common incorrect usage I’ve seen:

“Wow, that’s interesting, you’ve really ____________ my curiousity now!”
(a) peeked
(b) peaked
(c) piqued

You picked (c), right? Right! Now go out and pique somebody’s interest while you’re in peak grammar form. Stay tuned for my next rant on “wallah!” versus “voilà!”

Okay, grammar geeks, now it’s your turn: which grammar errors are curdling your milk lately?

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There are a lot (no really? A LOT!) of things I love about the new house. I love the layout, and the location. And the light — oh my sweet lord, the morning light pouring in to the kitchen and then the setting sun bathing the whole front of the house in a rich, warm, yellow, delicious light… it’s truly gorgeous, even moreso than I expected.

I love the extra space in the kitchen, although it’s a new challenge to have to actually walk 10 steps across the kitchen to get something, as opposed to my tiny galley kitchen where everything was literally within arm’s reach. I’m happy to trade the extra space we lost in the master bedroom for the space we gained in the main living space, and even though I’m still a tiny bit anxious about having the big boys down in the basement, they are not in the least bit concerned about it and in fact love their giant-sized and not-shared bedrooms.

We’ve made good progress in getting stuff out of boxes and organized, although there is still a frightful amount of work to be done. We’ve probably got about 65 per cent of the boxes unpacked, and I have a pretty good idea of which box holds what of the boxes that remain. Unfortunately, of those boxes that remain, a large number of them are full of stuff that never really had a proper home in the last house, either. Those are the boxes that you keep shuffling off into the corner, saying, “Oh, I can’t deal with this one now. I’ll get to it later.” I figure we should be fully unpacked some time in, oh, say November. Of 2011.

One of the most challenging issues to date has been mapping our old daily routines onto a new house. It’s taking me forever to get ready for work in the mornings because I am if nothing else a creature of habit, and my habits don’t work in the new layout. I’ll finish one task, like brushing my teeth, and find myself in full-stop mode, standing rather perplexedly in the middle of the bathroom, flummoxed as to what to do next. Muscle memory would have previously carried me through to the next task in the routine, but with nothing where it is ‘supposed’ to be, I have to actually stop and think about what I have to do next and, more importantly, where the stuff is that I need to accomplish that task. Like, my socks. Getting dressed in the old house never taxed any of my pre-coffee brain cells!

And the thing that is most vexing about mapping my old routines onto the new house? There aren’t enough hooks. In fact, there aren’t any hooks at all.

We are, in general, lazy people. We seek to exert the shortest possible amount of effort on activities that involve housekeeping. Hanging a jacket up on a hanger takes four seconds of effort, but draping one over a hook takes less than two. If there are no nearby hooks, any nearby structure will do — chairs, railings, whatever. I’m sure we’d drape things over the dog if it weren’t for the infernal shedding.

The old house was filled with strategically placed hooks — by the front door, in the bathrooms, in the bedrooms. Anywhere one might want to divest one’s self of the contents of one’s hands (jacket, backpack, purse, towel, scarf, just about anything hookable!) there was a hook to prevent the unceremonious dumping of said contents onto the floor.

The problem is that the new house also doesn’t lend itself to the strategic placement of hooks in the same way the old house did. The entryway, while charming with its double door, allows space for neither coat hooks nor even a natural spot for a purse-resting key table or even a set of key hooks. I’m still puzzling over how to make that work.

The bathrooms are another area that cry out for hooks. While I have not yet managed to acquire new waste bins for them (attractive plastic Farm Boy bags currently fill that role, dangling from available knobs) I did set out on the very first day to acquire some bathroom-suitable hooks. We’re minus one shower in the new house, and the main and downstairs bathrooms simply don’t have enough towel bar space to accommodate five bath towels and bathrobes on a regular and rotating basis.

In my new favourite store, the Manotick Home Hardware, I carefully contemplated our needs and decided on a lovely set of over-the-door hooks that would give us a place to hang the here-to-fore homeless bathrobes and wet towels. And imagine my consternation when I arrived home, tore open the package, and stood in slack-jawed dismay at the door to the main bathroom. The 1960s bungalow special feature: a pocket door.

Foiled again.

Speaking of hooks, I think I’ll end this rambly and vaguely incoherent post here with this poor excuse for a conclusion, before the big hook comes up to yank me off the stage. (This is the kind of post you get when I have hours upon hours of time to think about blog posts while doing menial labour but not enough time to actually execute the ideas into coherence!!)

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Dear World,

Could you please slow down just a bit? I am so far behind now, between my work and home and online lives, that I may have to live to 350 to get all caught up.

Sincerely,
DaniGirl

To that end, I’m curious. I get anywhere from one to ten random, unsolicited e-mails a day with some sort of pitch or news release or information in them. I do a quick triage as they come in, and even if I’m not interested, if it’s obvious someone has taken the time to personalize their form letter even a bit, I will find a couple of polite words to decline.

For those of you who receive these unsolicited pitches, I’m curious — do you respond to each one?

I’m heading out in a bit to see Tristan’s class play. He has the lead! I have butterflies of anticipation in my stomach for him already! He plays a tiger shark who just wants everyone to get along. Too cute for words!

We’ve been studying his lines for two weeks. It’s astonishing to me how quickly and easily he memorizes things. Or maybe it astonishes me how creaky and slow my own brain has become by comparison.

I also have to remember to stop over at Costco to pick up the photographs I sent for printing. How cool is this? A guy in Ireland is doing a gallery show on through the viewfinder (TtV) photography. He’s asked TtV photographers from all over the world to send him 4×4″ TtV prints, which will be mounted with a dot of velcro onto a giant mural nine metres long and one metre tall. Gallery patrons will be invited to take home one of the photos, and the gaps will be replenished through the duration of the show. We can submit as many prints as we want (he’s hoping to get more than 2000 prints) and include on the back any publicity or contact information we want.

So, there’s a good chance that some stranger in Ireland will take home a print of one of these as a souvenir:

How cool is that? My first gallery showing — well, me and a couple hundred other TtV fanatics, but I’ll take it!

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The other day, I was on the phone at work and giving my last name to someone. They missed it and I repeated myself, “Donders, like the reindeer.” After I hung up, because the cubicle farm provides not a scintilla of privacy, a colleague asked me, “What was that you said about the reindeer?” And so I launched into my seasonal tirade, which reminded me that I almost forgot to repost it again this year. (Hey, if CBS can air How the Grinch Stole Christmas every year for 45 years, I’m entitled to a seasonal repeat too!)

And because I understand that the beauty of the Christmas special repeats is their familiarity, here’s last year’s post, verbatim:

“Oh no,” lament the bloggy peeps who have been around for a while. “Not the reindeer thing again!”

Why yes, as a matter of fact. It’s the reindeer thing again. If I can educate one misinformed soul every year about the correct names of Santa’s reindeer, my mission will be a success.

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

As you might know, my last name is Donders. As such, it has been my lifelong quest to set the record straight and right the wrongs entrenched by Johnny Marks and Gene Autry.

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter (sorry for the noisy link – it’s the only copy I could find online) by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material.

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride. (Or, for more fun with the true meaning of Donder, you can read this post from the archives, too!)

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Last week, I was tickled to stumble across this fun list of “cool Canadians on Twitter.” I don’t know why, but Canadian celebrities just seem more accessible, somehow, don’t they? I promptly started following Bryan Adams, William Shatner, Jann Arden, Rick Mercer, Brent Butt, the Tragically Hip, Matthew Perry, and Great Big Sea on Twitter, rounding out my existing CanCon-follow repetoire of Burton Cummings, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, and Jian Ghomeshi.

For the most part, I don’t see the point in following celebrities on Twitter. I mean, does Oprah really tweet, or does one of her minions do it for her? With more than two million followers, she doesn’t need me. I simply haven’t been interested in following any celebrities up until now.

But there’s something about these Canadian celebrities (and *air quotes* celebrities */air quotes*) that immediately feel more intimate and accessible. When I read Brent Butt’s tweets, his voice and sense of humour are charmingly distinct — and his tweets are distinctly down to earth, like: “Ok… I should get back to work. Then again, I should also eat less cheese, and I don’t think THAT’S going to happen any time soon.” And reading Douglas Coupland’s tweets is like 140 characters clipped directly from his books: “If you read the NYTimes site right after reading The Onion, reality morphs in a not unpleasant way. It’s like the news just had a stroke.” They seem pleasantly — ordinary, somehow.

When I was 15 years old, I had a crush on a boy named Greg. I also had a massive crush on Bryan Adams. And Greg had an older sister who had a picture of herself on a train with Bryan Adams. I think I was more jealous of that girl than any other person before or since. Not only was she Greg’s sister and could see him each day at dinner, each morning at breakfast, any old time she pleased, but she had actually (gasp!) met (titter!) Bryan Adams (swoon!) in person. It was beyond imaginable to me. The idea of simply being on the same train as Bryan Adams was fodder for endless hours of daydreaming, that long ago autumn of 1985.

I laugh now when I think of how my 15-year-old self would shimmer and explode in a cloud of teenaged hormonal delight at the idea of following Bryan Adams on Twitter. It even gave my 40-year-old self a bit of a nostalgic shiver when he recently tweeted “Ottawa today, got my first real six string…right here”. (I missed that concert, but caught a terrific one about a decade back, at Lansdowne.)

There’s something about Twitter, when used properly, that invites an intimacy with both big and little C celebrity that would simply astonish my Tiger-Beat reading self of two decades ago. I’m under no delusion that Rick Mercer will ever follow my tweets (heck, he wouldn’t even pick up the bloggy gauntlet I threw down, back in 2005) but there’s still an undeniable thrill to feel even an illusory sort of connection to actual famous people, yanno? Apparently my inner 14-year-old is barely repressed, even at the best of times!

I’ve been idling over this for a while, but I keep getting tangled up in my own words. What do you think? Do you follow any celebrities on twitter, or through other online forums? Do you actually try to talk to them? Does the fact that an author (or actor, musician, or other celeb) uses social media in a way that invites insight into their personality intrigue you or change how you feel about them?

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Is it just me, or has the pace of life sped up considerably over the last couple of days weeks? I’m feeling breathless everywhere I go for the sheer number of things I’m supposed to be doing, trying to do at the same time, or simply not getting around to doing at all. Usually, I feel this way about work while my home life is relatively sane, or vice versa — but life seems to be simply relentless lately. You? I’m trying to figure out if it’s the simple fact of having a life filled to bursting with three busy boys, the shift in routine from summer mode to back in school, or just the non-stop chaos that comes with having a toddling menace wandering around undoing everything I’ve done and then some each time I turn around.

I’m feeling a little lot overwhelmed by the stuff I’m not getting done these days. Despite running through the last week or so at about a hundred miles an hour with all cylinders firing, my “oops, never did get around to that” list seems to be outstripping my “phew, another thing checked off the list” list at an alarming pace.

Sometimes, the bloggy well is dry and I’ve got nothing to write about, so I’ll toss up a post begging your indulgence while I search for my navel muse. Right now, though, I’ve got tonnes of bits of things to write about… and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t get organized enough to get them out to you. One post needs pictures, another needs research, yet another needs a bit of serious contemplation and careful craft — and none of that seems to be happening these days!

All that to say, help! No wait, what I really mean is, there be good stuff ahead, I just have to figure out how to milk an extra couple of hours out of my schedule to get to it. And, I’m sorry for all the e-mails I’m not replying to right now, the blog posts I’m not reading and the comments I’m not leaving. I’m kind of falling down on the “social” end of my social networks these days.

This is just a phase, right?

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So it’s been a little less than a week since we’ve had our fancy new digital cable box, and you know what?

Even with 600+ channels, there’s STILL nothing on TV.

Worse, I now spend my precious hour or so of TV time each night scaling through the digital TV Guide gadget looking for stuff to watch instead of actually, you know, watching stuff. There may yet be a learning curve so I don’t have to scroll painfully through all 600 channels looking for a particular channel or, worse, hoping to serendipitously find something worth watching, but right now the TV is actually adding to the agitation rather than distracting me from it.

I’m paying for this experience? (Ha, well, not for the next 5 3/4 months I’m not!)

In the last week, I’ve watched about two hours of the Food network, and the boys have come to love 1970s-era superhero cartoons on early morning Toon Retro. And that’s about it. Everything else is just 50 timeshifted or HD or who knows what versions of the same crap that wasn’t worth watching last week, either.

There are a couple of things I would have liked to watch on the retro sitcom networks, but we don’t get those channels. Beloved was excited to get the National Geographic channel, but we don’t get that channel. And I would have invested an hour or so on Saturday afternoon in MuchMusicRetro (it’s my fave at the gym) but — wait for it — we don’t get that channel, either. Just about everything I found in the electronic guide that made me say, “Oh! That looks good!” ended up with a screen telling me that I don’t have access to that channel. For an additional fee, though, they’d be happy to hook me up. Bah.

And just by the way? Why can’t all the on-demand stuff be on the same channel? I spent at least 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out why the Treehouse-on-demand show I had saved for the boys was nowhere to be found on the Rogers-on-demand channel until I realized they were two separate entities.

All in all, I’d have to say that my first week of digital cable has left me unimpressed. We haven’t even tried out the PVR yet because there was simply nothing worth recording.

Oh well, I suppose I can always use my former TV time to catch up on my blog reading…

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I’m on day two of a migraine, and I’m stubbornly refusing to lower the blinds in my office so the bright morning light is making me squint rather unattractively at the monitor. I keep thinking, “I swear, the NEXT blog post will have actual real content. Just as soon as I get past XXX” — where XXX = a severe shortage of time, a screaming headache, a complete lack of ideas or inspiration, an itchy left toe… yeah.

Anyway, in lieu of actual content, here’s some stuff:

• The other day, there was a comment about problems while scrolling with the new blog theme. I’ve had the same problem. If you’ve had this problem too (or, for that matter, any other problem with the layout or design) could you please let me know? From what I’ve read, this particular scrolling problem is a quirk of IE6 (I know, I know, but I can’t do anything about the equipment here. I use Firefox at home!) and the only solution is to wait until the page is fully loaded before scrolling. That should help. Or, update your browser! The comment was anonymous, but if you find that works — or doesn’t — could you please let me know?
• Did you catch Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on Q yesterday? They did an hour-long interview but I only caught the second half. Man, I love Rush, I really really do. If you missed it, there’s an extended 63-minute interview available for download on CBC. Their third retrospective album will be my next acquisition on iTunes.
• I brought Lucas to the after-hours pediatric clinic on Tuesday night. He had a really juicy cough with a wheeze in his chest that I found quite alarming. I’m talking to the doc, and say, “He’s otherwise fine. No fever, no lethargy, no obvious signs of distress.” The doc looks up from his laptop and for the first time since I’ve arrived takes a really good look at me. “Oh, are you in health care?” he asks. “No. But this is my third child.” He nods, looks vaguely perplexed, and goes back to typing. Ah, the things I’ve learned! (FWIW, no medication required. Just a virus. Again.)
• I spent more than an hour yesterday and an hour on the weekend de-dandelioning my lawn. It’s not even the end of May yet and my back yard is already overgrown. I love summer, but it means that in addition to disaster inside the house now I have to contend with the disaster outside the house! Really, I need more hours in the day. I’m not overly concerned about the dandelions, but we seem to have a lot of those prickly stinging nettles, too, and I hate those things.
• I think our cat is on his last legs. He’s 18 years old, and has been the worse for wear for at least the last year or so. He’s losing teeth now, and is skinny and matted and looks like he’s having trouble moving around. He’s blind in one eye. Poor old guy. He came upstairs the other day with blood on his mouth, and he’s been gacking and pooping all over the basement. His days are numbered. I hate this part of pet ownership.
• There’s a giant consignment sale in Nepean this weekend, and I’ll be unloading most of our baby clothes and gear there. So far I’ve tagged about $250 worth of clothes, most of it at $3 – $5 per piece for Gap, Old Navy and Children’s Place clothes. Even if only half of it sells, we should get about $100 bucks out of the deal. I’ve been trying to remain coldhearted in the rise of swelling sentiment (“awwww, all three boys wore these dungarees from Granny!”) but there were a couple of outfits I just couldn’t bear to part with. It feels good to finally divest myself of about three cartons of clothes, though!
• Yesterday, I met our city councillor, Jan Harder, while standing in line at Subway. I told her about Simon’s enthusiasm for the new Barrhaven children’s library and thanked her for her efforts. It must be a thankless job to be a city councillor, but she seemed genuinely pleased by my praise and thanks. (The careful and almost barely noticable pause before she answered my “Excuse me, but aren’t you Jan Harder?” was very telling!) She said the only feedback she’s received so far is two complaints that taxpayer dollars are being spent on a new (and temporary) security guard who both helps orient people to the new layout and makes sure children don’t wander out the door, in case parents who come in from the upper level aren’t aware of the new exit.

I’m sure I had more stuff. My head is very congested with stuff right now. This will have to do for today. Hey, consider yourself lucky I can’t remember the rest of it!

How’s that for a satisfying narrative with a strong finish?

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One of the most valuable things that this blog has given me has been a record of the minutiae of our daily lives. Not only of the milestones and special occassions and momentous changes, but of the rhythm of every-day life as our family has grown.

And because I tend to blog whatever is in my head, however I happen to be perceiving it, the blog is in a lot of ways like my own personal mood barometer. Without it, I might not have realized, for instance, that the month of May seems to be a particularly difficult time for me on an emotional level. It’s a funny time to be depressed, with the flowers blooming and the days growing longer and full of sunshine and warmth, but for whatever reason, I seem to be more likely to be anxious and even mildly depressed in May. Also in November, which makes a little more sense from a seasonal perspective.

(May also happens to be when I am most fertile. Of five pregnancies, four of them were conceived in May or June. Even with the vasectomy last year, I can’t bring myself to have unprotected sex this month!!)

A friend and I were discussing the anxieties of parenting, and what you do on the dark days when it seems like you’ve truly lost control. I don’t blog about those feeling much anymore, partly because it got a little embarrassing having my colleagues who read the blog come rushing into my cubicle to check on my obviously precarious mental health after reading that morning’s rant, and partially because I was just sick of listening to myself whine about the tedium of the anxiety of the moment when by the time I hit “publish” or at latest, the next morning, I was over whatever knot had twisted my knickers.

The anxieties still come and go, though, in a sort of a regular cycle that I am now learning to recognize. That recognition has been a huge relief in and of itself, because now I can simply say, “This too shall pass” and believe myself. I can see in the blog that I’ve felt overwhelmed by my own life on a fairly regular basis, that the feelings of being incompetent and lost and simply exhausted by it all come and go like the tulips and the fall leaves — sometimes in a couple of hours, sometimes over the course of a couple of days.

I’ve even wondered, occassionally. whether I should find a way — through therapy, maybe, or medication — to try to fight off the bad days, the dark moods, the wrenching anxiety that occasionally gets the better of me and turns me into a tantrumming two-year-old or feeling hollow and frustrated and incapable. But then the tides turn and I feel strong and smart in control again, and I forget — until the next time.

All this to say, in talking to my friend about this, she said that if nothing else, it was good to know somebody else sometimes feels that way, too. It makes me wonder whether we’re all in a similar place on that continuum of contentment to anxiety, slipping back and forth depending on season and circumstance.

It’s a very personal subject, and something we just don’t talk about very much, even in this most personal and intimate of forums, but if you’d like to talk about it I’m curious: do you know that feeling, of slipping beyond comfortable footing into the panic of despair? Do you just hold your breath and wait it out, knowing that this too shall pass, or do you have other ways of coping? How do you judge the difference between “I’m having a bad day” and “I need professional help” and “I really need to get the hell out of my head”? (That last one would be my personal Achilles heel.) When the stress threatens to break out of whatever containment system you’ve rigged up in your brain, what do you do to get it back under control?

(And even as I type, I’m thinking about just deleting the whole post, because it’s too close to the sort of self-indulgent navel-gazing and whining that I dislike in myself. But I’ll publish it, because if nothing else I don’t have any other ideas for today.)

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In lieu of a coherent blog post, which I promise you is forthcoming one of these days (ahem, weeks) here’s a few random bullets of Mother’s Day.

• It started early as Simon woke me up at 5:25, clutching the Mother’s Day present he brought home from school on Friday anxiously as he stage whispered in a near shout, “Mom! Are you still sleeping yet?” Um, not anymore I’m not!
• Barely a couple of minutes later, Lucas was awake as well. We’re early risers, but for the entire family to be awake and downstairs before 6 am on a Sunday is not only mostly unprecedented but bodes for a very long day. (On days when I’m not working, usually Tristan and I are up a good hour or more before everyone else, giving me precious time to have a coffee or three and peruse the morning paper before the rest of them tumble out of bed in all their needy and noisy glory.)
• The coffee was still percolating as I opened the Mother’s Day gifts the boys brought home from school on Friday. Simon had asked several times over the weekend if I could please open my Mother’s Day gifts NOW, please please please, and each time I gently put him off and said I wanted to save the surprise for Sunday morning. Imagine the guilt I felt when I opened the beautifully-decorated brown-paper-bag he’d been clutching to find a small planter of annuals — inside a sealed ziploc baggie. Poor things were traumatized yellow by the weekend without air, but they perked up a bit with some water. We’ll see if they survive to be transplanted into the garden.
• Tristan’s gift was instructions for a foot massage and a little bottle of lotion he’d decorated himself, and a cookbook of his classmates’ favourite recipes. Tristan’s pizza recipe:

  1/2 cup of pineapple
  5 pieces of pepperoni
  a bag of cheese
  some sauce
  one piece of wheat bread

  Put sauce on bread, add cheese, place pepperoni and pineapple and bake for 8 minutes at 20 degrees.

  (How cute is that?)

• The day was already feeling a little long when I stepped out of the shower and in the midst of towel-drying my hair felt an unbearable wrenching pull in my back, just off my shoulder blade. It was so painful I could barely draw a deep breath. I’m not sure if this is what people mean when they say, “I put my back out,” but holy god in heaven does it ever hurt. Even 24 hours later, I’m holding myself stiffly to avoid the wrenching spasm that shoots across the upper right quadrant of my back if I move the wrong way. (The wrong way being just about any extension of my arms, turning of my head to the side, or looking down in the slightest bit.)
• It’s still painful enough that I’d debated a bit about the merits of coming to work versus staying home, but with a houseful of kids and nanny, I thought work might be the more peaceful option. After just about a half an hour of typing and mouse-clicking, though, I’m beginning to think it was a bad choice.
• Any insight into whether this merits medical attention or a wait-it-out approach is appreciated, as is your anecdotal experience with back pain. This is a new one for me.
• The good news is that Beloved was a darling throughout the day, and the pull in my back forced me to pretty much take it easy the whole of Mother’s Day, something I might not have done otherwise. I didn’t change a single diaper all day, and read the last half of a photography book that was due back at the library this week. Of course, I also emptied the dishwasher, picked up some clutter and did a few loads of laundry — because I think I’m now physically and mentally incapable of actually doing nothing for a day.
• After Lucas’s nap, Beloved took the whole family on a trip to Henry’s camera shop where he let me pick out my Mother’s Day gift. I waffled for a bit between a set of reflectors, a Gorillapod, and a neutral density filter, but finally settled on a circular polarizing filter. A polarizing filter is cool to have because it balances the brightness of the sky against a landscape while bringing out details and colour saturation, and cuts down on reflectivity of water and glass. A fun new toy to play with!
• To finish off the day, we had Granny and Papa Lou over for takeout fajitas from Lone Star, and they brought cheesecake from Costco for dessert. Five-star seal of approval on that meal!

Aside from the wrenched muscles and the fact that it was grey and just about subzero all day, it was a lovely Mother’s Day. You?

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I wish I had a lot more time today to write about this subject, because it really fascinates me. There was an article in yesterday’s Citizen about how secondary school students in Ontario are no longer being failed for transgressions as serious as plagarizing. (When I was in university, it seems to me that was grounds for explusion, let alone failing an assignment.) The article notes:

Teachers are saying they are increasingly pressured to make sure students pass. If a student fails to hand in assignments on time, cheats, plagiarizes or doesn’t show up for tests, they can “rescue” their endangered credit. If the student fails, he or she can re-do the assignments they bombed and “recover” a wayward credit. Teachers are, as a result, concerned about “credit integrity” — whether a final mark awarded to a student who procrastinates, plagiarizes and bombs tests should be worth the same as the mark awarded to a student who earned a credit by the books the first time around.

This drives me crazy! It’s all linked to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s new and noble drive to increase graduation rates and decrease dropout rates. As the article notes, “While 68 per cent of students graduated from high school within five years in 2003-2004, the province aims to increase the graduation rate to 85 per cent by 2010-2011. Last year, 13,500 more students graduated from Ontario high schools than in the previous year.”

Well yes, they graduated, but can they write a paragraph? What will they do when they go off to university and have to actually do the work to pass, with thousands of dollars of tuition on the line? And what happens when they head out into the real world and they have a boss who isn’t interested in offering “rescue” or “recovery” options the first time they miss a deadline for an important project?

Call me a hardass on this one, but I think this is yet another way in which we’re coddling kids today and it’s really got to stop! In another article today that I couldn’t immediately find online, Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said, “What we know for now from education research is that failing kids doesn’t motivate [them].” Well, passing them for shoddy work certainly isn’t going to do it, either!

I feel very strongly about this, in case you didn’t notice, but I also feel like the old fart waving her cane at the passing hooligans from her porch rocker. But seriously, I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be a teacher working in these times. Johnny failed the test because he was playing his Xbox all night instead of studying for the exam, but he’s sorry now and he’d like the chance to recover his credit, so Ms Teacher can you please redesign another test to give Johnny a second chance? Oh, and make sure it’s equally challenging, make special arrangements for a quiet time and place for him to write it, take extra time to mark it, and then help Johnny catch up on all the stuff he missed while he was taking his second test? Oh, he failed again? Oh well. Go ahead and start making up that third test for him.

I also see this as horrendously unfair to the kids who do try their best and who are going to learn in a righteous hurry that there is absolutely no reason for them to work hard or indeed work at all if the kid sitting next to them committing academic fraud and showing up only when it’s convenient ends up with the same damn diploma at the end of it all.

Am I reading this wrong? Have I got my knickers in a twist over nothing? (Can’t say that’s ever happened before.) Do you think the province is on the right track by mollycoddling kids through high school?

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Ugh.

Yep, that’s about all I’ve got to contribute today. Go about your business. Nothing to see here.

What, you’re still reading? Foolish you. Okay, then, if you’re willing to put up with it, I’m going to whine. Poor, poor me. Whimper.

I’ve been sick for days. Started, I dunno, back on Friday or Saturday maybe? Actually, it started three weeks ago after the March break with this damn cough that will not go away. Then on the weekend, a wicked raw sore throat that I was so sure was strep I headed to the walk-in clinic on Monday. I was taking Tylenol every four hours just to deal with it, despite the fact that once upon a time when I was delivering Simon, the anesthesiologist observed that I have a remarkably high tolerance for pain. For some dumbass reason, it takes 48 hours for them to finish the strep test, so I’m waiting for the lab results today. In the meanwhile, yesterday the cough came back worse than ever, and I woke up in the middle of the night with my eyes practically sealed shut with goop. Good times, I tell ya.

I have more stuff to whine about, if you’re still silly enough to be reading. As soon as I’m done here (hiding upstairs with the laptop while the nanny — also sick with a cold — takes care of Lucas) I have to call the tax department and argue with them for a while because they applied my 2008 payment to my 2009 payroll account and then assessed me interest and a penalty for not paying my bill. Fun. And then I have to call my HR rep and get them to uncancel my health insurance, which they canceled in error while I was on maternity leave. When I called them last week to have them fix it, they reinstated it the next day — effective April 2009 and not April 2008, thus causing my $700 benefit claim comprising all of last year to be rejected for a second time. Gah.

There is good news, though. My dad had his operation late last week (for a subdural hematoma they suspect came from a fall down the stairs back in November) and he came home from the hospital on Monday feeling better than he has in a year. Yay!

And the sun is shining. That’s always nice. And lookit here, I have a whole blog post written and I don’t have to worry about feeling like I’m neglecting you all any more. If anyone would care to stop by and do 17 loads of laundry and clean my floors, I’d be downright perky!

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Okay, so retro is cool, right? And retro is basically recycling old stuff and making it new again, often by those who missed it the first time around, right? Grand, so I’m totally retro in finally remembering on St Patty’s Day that I forgot to put up my annual posts in January about the word of the year and the banished word of the year. I’m so kewl it hurts.

Right then. Word of the year for 2008 from our friends at the American Dialect Society is “bailout”. Excellent choice, IMHO.

In its 19th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “bailout” as the word of the year. In the specific sense used most frequently in 2008, bailout refers to the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.

The winner was selected by popular vote, following nominations from the public. Subcategories include Most Useful (Barack Obama)(!), Most Unnecessary (moofing), Most Euphemistic (scooping technician), Most and Least Likely to Succeed (shovel-ready and PUMA, respectively), and Most Creative:

WINNER: recombobulation area: An area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in which passengers that have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order.

long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.

skadoosh: A nonsense interjection popularized by Jack Black in the movie Kung Fu Panda.

rofflenui: A blended New Zealand English-Maori word that means “rolling on the floor laughing a lot.”

Ironically — or perhaps not so much — “bailout” was also on the list of words nominated for banishment by Lake Superior State University’s “34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

Bailout was defeated, however, and the banishment crown went to “the ubiquitous ‘Green’ and all of its variables, such as ‘going green,’ ‘building green,’ ‘greening,’ ‘green technology,’ ‘green solutions’ and more.”

Not a bad choice, even if I do support the movement in principle. What should really be banished is the use of “green” as a marketing term. THAT would make me happy!

If I were to banish any one word from the English language, it would be “utilize.” I can’t tell you how much it makes me cringe to see this word “utilized” when good old “used” would do just fine. Maybe that’s because it’s usually “utilized” by officious users who never pass over a five dollar word when a nickel word would do, and by people who think turning any prose from active to passive voice is a stroke of creative genius. ( /rant)

What say ye, bloggy peeps? What words or phrases would you banish, should you suddenly find yourself King or Queen of the Language?

(And, can I just add one more quick coda to say how proud — and, honestly, a little surprised — I was yesterday when Tristan correctly used the subjunctive tense in the phrase “if I were allowed to” as opposed to “if I was allowed to”. Yay for internalizing obscure grammar rules!!!)

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And you wonder why bloggers get a little testy with all the crap people send us sometimes. From today’s mail:

I’m interested in selling your postcards through our network of stores. I think they’d be a great fit. Do you wholesale? We work hand in hand with buyers from thousands of specialty shops, large chains, mail-order catalog companies and Internet shopping sites. We need a larger variety of postcards they can choose from, hence my email to you.

Gah!

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The boys are playing happily behind me, the big boys stacking a dozen or so Webkinz into piles for the baby to crawl over. So rare is the opportunity to be online with everyone in the same room, I must take advantage of it even if I have nothing to say!

It’s been a rough couple of days. The stomach flu that had Simon down late last week took the weekend to work it’s way through the rest of the family. Tristan was sick last night and so I kept him home today, but he’s full of piss and vinegar this afternoon. I think we did, no joke, a dozen or more loads of laundry since Thursday night. Anybody want to come over for a folding party?

Lucas had it Saturday night, too, but seemed to be okay yesterday. This morning, he was particularly fussy and pulling at his ears, and since I’m getting good at this after three kids, I suspected an ear infection. We were lucky to get an afternoon appointment with the ped, and it turns out his ears are clear. He does, however, have a “very mucusy” throat and his ear is full of fluid. If you’re keeping count, that’s back to back stomach virus and respiratory infections the first week of January and again this week. Plus his two top teeth broke through this weekend. No wonder he (and, by extension, I) haven’t slept more than 3 hours in a row for a hundred years a couple of weeks.

Despite the sickness, though, and the fact that today marks the start of my last week of maternity leave (ever! *nostalgic sigh*) I’m feeling pretty chipper. Hey, if everybody in the house has been sick in the past five days, that gives me at least a four-day window before the next virus can set in, right? And right now, a barf-free week sounds like winning the lottery!

Ah, but the mood behind me has turned. The baby has lost interest in the Webkinz mountain, and the boys have started to bicker. (Little wonder, they’ve been cooped up together for days on end by now!) Only four more hours until Beloved gets home from work… not that I’m watching the clock.

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What could possibly make me long for the last couple of nights, when the baby woke up between three and seven times a night, where I was rocking him to sleep two or three times in a row, only to end up jiggling him to sleep on my arm when I give up in frustration? What could make me think that those were the nights when I had it good?

How about six solid hours of an almost-five year old barfing every 20 minutes? Yep, that would do it.

Of course, the baby slept through the whole thing. Dust molecules moving over the Mojave Desert disturb him, but six hours of relentless dry heaves in the next room don’t merit so much as ripple his slumber.

Sigh. At least the five year old seems better this morning. Wanna lay bets on what’s in store for the almost seven-year old or his beleaguered parents? I really, really don’t want this virus.

(This is not the sleep deprivation post. This is the “Hey we just finished a barfy virus three weeks ago, it’s not our turn again already!” post. Once I finish sanitizing five loads of laundry, I might get back around to the sleep-dep post. Consider yourself whined warned.)

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Let’s say I have a hypothetical friend. She’s a lot like me, but let me stress this — she’s not me. We have a lot in common, though. We both view our jobs with the public service as something of a noble calling and a privilege to serve Canadians. She is such an amazing boss and mentor that she recently won a national award of excellence for people management. She is a little more senior than me in the management tree, a little more politically conservative, a lot more sophisticated about politics. We both have a blog. She and I have both called Stephen Harper an idiot on our blogs, me mostly over childcare issues and her over the recent economic statement fiasco.

As it turns out, she has recently applied for and been offered a new job in a new department. As this is the 21st century and she’s plenty savvy about social media, she wasn’t surprised when she went to meet the new team and found out that they’d googled her, and found her blog. She was surprised — and that’s a bit of an understatement — when the senior manager at the new department contacted her old senior manager and said that the political entries on her blog are contrary to the Public Service Code of Values and Ethics. (!!) They told her that not only did she have to agree to not ever blog about politics again, but to take down the existing political posts. Not posts critical about the department or the work environment or anything sensitive, mind you. Just the sort of observational rant that any citizen might make over drinks or the backyard fence. They said that this was a “dealbreaker.”

I am – hypothetically, of course – outraged over this. We’re talking about someone who blogs in a manner very similar to me, maybe 30 percent personal, 65 percent pop culture, 5 percent political. I’ve read the posts in question, and they’re no different than what you’d see in the average Letter to the Editor, if not a hell of a lot better written and a lot less vitriolic.

What do you think? Should an ordinary public servant be allowed the same freedoms as any citizen, to air their opinions – political or otherwise – on a private blog written on private time? And if it were you, would you dig in your heels and stick up for your rights or acquiesce for the sake of making nice with your new peeps?

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So we’re in McDonalds the other day. (Granny came with us to skating lessons and offered to take us all out to lunch at McDonalds as a special treat for the boys.) While there is room in my Plan B diet for a rare treat of hamburgers and fries, I’d rather they be really tasty home-made ones than the crap that passes for food at McDonalds. Besides, I’m not even particularly hungry, so I decide to order a salad. I know they have salads at McDonalds, because I’ve ordered one before. They suck, but at least they’re guilt-free.

I’m looking at the menu boards above the cash registers, but after carefully perusing each of the half-dozen or so menu blocks, I can find no mention anywhere of salads. They have giant pictures of the burger combos, and a placard for the Monopoly game. There’s not even a board with the kids’ meals on it. That sign standing by itself, propped in a corner.

Remember the good old days when the menu boards in fast-food restaurants used to actually show you all the items that were on the menu? This has been a gripe of mine for a while. I first noticed it outside at the drive-through. I figured maybe they don’t put all the items on display out there because of a lack of space or something, or because the menu boards have to be further away thus limiting the text they use. But here I am standing inside the restaurant, and I still can’t find any mention of foods that I know should be available. I actually step out of line and go read the microprint on the nutritional information poster near the condiment stand to find out whether they still carry salads.

We eat our lunch, but it’s still bugging me, so I go up to the counter and ask someone who seems to be in a position of authority. All of about fourteen years old, from the look of him, but he’s so quick with an answer that I can tell he’s either been practicing or has answered this one a few times before.

“Oh yes, we still carry salads,” he says. “But head office knows they aren’t very good, so we don’t promote them.” I’m too gobsmacked by all that is wrong with this answer to even begin to reply, so he continues. “They’ll be some fantastic new salads unveiled soon, though!” he says with evangelical zeal. “You’ll love them, and we’ll have lots of new signs then.”

Uh huh. So the takehome message for me is this:

(1) McDonalds has salads, but they’re too embarrassed by the quality of them to admit it publicly.

(2) I’m only allowed to order a salad if I know to ask for one. And I’m not allowed to know the price in advance, either.

(3) Instead of providing patrons with a list of actual food items available in its restaurants, McDonalds would rather display ginormous pictures of their most popular but least healthy items.

(4) McDonalds would rather you just forget about the whole salad thing entirely and have a supersized Big Mac and fries instead. (That’s 1090 calories, more than three-quarters of my entire daily calorie consumption.)

Nice, McDonalds. Very nice.

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Every couple of years, I get my knickers in enough of a twist to fire off a letter to the editor of our local paper. I’ve got a pretty good record of getting them published. I’ve got another one published this morning.

The back story has to do with a mother of a two-year old and a baby who was trying on the weekend to get onto an OCTranspo (city) bus at a stop with another mom pushing a stroller also waiting. The driver got into a spat and ended up denying access to the two moms and strollers. Except, the two-year old daughter of one of the mothers had already boarded the bus. He drove a short distance away, and then stopped when the other passengers either (a) screamed in horror or (b) informed him that the two-year old was on the bus, depending on whose version of the story you believe.

Regardless, the ensuing shitstorm has been all over the media, and has brought the anti-stroller lobby out of the woodwork. It was to these kind souls, who think that mothers with strollers have no place on public transit, that my letter was addressed.

Stay off buses?
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, October 09, 2008

Re: Strollers are headache for drivers, passengers, Oct. 8.

I read with interest Doloros Swallow’s letter and union leader André Cornellier’s comments in Kelly Egan’s column (“Try sitting in the bus driver’s seat”) about strollers on OC Transpo buses.

As a mother of three boys under seven and a regular user of OC Transpo, I’d like to ask these people: what else should mothers of babies do? Do you recommend they leave the strollers at home and carry their babies and toddlers everywhere? That’s not so easy with a 30-pound napping toddler.

Perhaps they should stay off the buses altogether? Isn’t one of the main tenets of public transportation supposed to be that it should be accessible to those who don’t have other means of transportation?

You might argue that there are smaller strollers available on the market. Even if you overlook the fact that umbrella-type folding strollers are not appropriate for very young babies, you should try pushing one through even the thinnest sheen of slush on Ottawa’s winter sidewalks, let alone in more than a couple of centimetres of fresh snow. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford more than one stroller — one for foul weather and one for small spaces. Many other parents are not so fortunate.

Yes, it’s difficult to manoeuvre around one or more strollers at the front of an OC Transpo bus. Yes, mothers (and other caregivers) should do what they can to take up as small a space as possible.

But I think we all have enough things to worry about right now without castigating people who are simply trying to do the very same thing you are — to get from one place to another with as little hassle and inconvenience as possible.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

Ha, now that I think about it, my last published letter to the editor was about public transit as well!

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Poor Beloved. Not bad enough I have no shame in blogging about my life, but now I’m blogging about his most personal bits. Good thing we’ve got a lot of family freebies out of blog over the years to compensate for my appalling lack of respect for his private parts.

He’s going today for his first consult with the vasectomy doctor. Could it be any more ironic? Seven years ago when I was pregnant with Tristan, the poor man went under the knife to have his bits repaired (he had a varicocele, which is basically a varicose vein in the scrotum, and it can cause pain and infertility) and three boys later he’s going back under the knife (well, laser) to turn off the faucet. From infertile to abundantly fertile and back to infertile in one decade.

I’m extremely grateful that he’s willing to undergo this procedure so I don’t have to undergo the much more invasive and risky tubal ligation, and birth control pills are not an option for me as they make me horribly sick.

There’s no doubt (well, very little doubt) (no, really, no doubt) (almost 99.9% doubt-free) that we’re done with this baby-making thing, and yet I still can’t help but feel sad and a little bit anxious about taking such irrevocable action. We just couldn’t afford the daycare or the education of four kids, and our house is already bursting at the seams with love and stinky running shoes. And if we won the lottery tomorrow? Tough call. My first thought is that I’d consider it again, but then I’m 39 now and the last pregnancy was hard on me. Not sure how well I’d handle another, let alone the possibility of losing another one. And the idea of going back to “trying” again? Ugh. That’s one chapter of my life I’m quite happy to leave behind, thank you.

It’s been such a huge relief knowing that Lucas is the last baby. I’ve been savouring each stage, each moment, each milestone, knowing that we won’t go down this road again. And I’ve been ditching my baby and maternity stuff like a madwoman. So really, we’re done. It’s taken me two paragraphs to reconvince myself after the finality of seeing it all in print in front of me, but really, we’re done.

You know what really gobsmacked me, though? When Beloved went to our GP and asked for the referral to Dr Zap (they cauterize the vas deferens. Eep.) she asked him if he had discussed the idea of the vasectomy with me and if I was in agreement.

Can you believe it? Can you imagine the hue and cry if a woman needed a man’s approval or agreement (tacit or otherwise) to get her tubes tied or an abortion? Now, I absolutely agree that a husband and wife should be in complete agreement when such drastic action is taken, but this just seems wrong to me. They’re his bits, and much as I claim ownership over the rest of him, in the end it’s his choice to end his fertile years — short and blissful though they have been.

And on a not-quite-completely unrelated topic, I must tip my bloggy hat to Kate, who has come up with what I think is by far the most pithy and succinct commentary on Sarah Palin, a saga I have been watching with amazed disbelief: “Why is it that women should be trusted with the Vice Presidency, but not with their own reproductive decisions?”

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