Category: Rants and rambles

Not for lack of trying

I’m trying to write a post, I swear I am. Not a great post, not the most cerebral or entertaining post ever, but I had an idea, and I had some pictures, and I was going to turn them into a post. So I dumped the photos from the camera to the laptop, and have been trying for the best part of an hour to force them onto the interwebs, but the interwebs have other ideas.

First, My Computer kept seizing as I tried to upload them to Flickr from My Computer. Fine. Go in through Flickr and try to upload them that way. Internet Explorer seizes. Fine, open Firefox and upload them through Flickr. Firefox seizes. Fine.

Move to desktop computer. Rogers’ parental controls ask me to sign in to the Internet using my Yahoo ID. Fine. Go to sign in to Flickr, and realize I have to change to my Flickr Yahoo ID, and not the Rogers Yahoo ID. When I sign out of the Rogers Yahoo ID, my internet access is denied.

FINE.

Decide to just upload the photos directly to my web space for hosting. Resize photos manually through Photoshop on the laptop. IE and Mozilla both still acting up, so transfer resized photos back on to the camera from the laptop and carry camera over to desktop. Realize that the USB ports on the desktop are all fried.

Curse laptop, desktop, Firefox, IE, and NaBloPoMo.

Sulk.

Spam and curses – or, cursed spam

What the holy hell is going on with the spam all of a sudden? My spam filter has caught more than 700 spam comments since Friday, and I’ve deleted another dozen or more spam trackbacks. That’s about four times what it usually is. Seriously, I’m getting a little annoyed. And the vast majority of them have Greek names attached to them – go figure.

I wade through all of them, because the spam filter does occassionally snag a legitimate comment by mistake, but it’s getting to be an onerous task. I may have to look into some sort of comment validation, much as I hate those things. Sigh. The splogs are getting out of hand, too, but while I find it annoying to see that “Floyd wrote an interesting piece on (keyword): here’s an excerpt” followed by my content, I don’t have the heart or the inclination to follow up on each and every one of them. (I’m finding about three a week these days through the trackback spam.) Did I mention sigh?

***

Tristan has picked up one of my linguistic peccadilloes. On more than one a few occasions lately, he’s looked at something and said, “What the hell is that?” And each time I gently correct him and say that “hell” is not polite, and we should say, “What the heck is that?” instead. But “hell” is so low on my radar screen of curse words that I’m sure I say “What the hell” or, more likely, “what the bloody hell” about sixteen times a day without even realizing it.

For a truly delightful article on a son’s indoctrination to the wide world of curses, check out this piece from the UK Guardian a couple weeks back (hat tip to Andrea, where I first saw it.)

Rampant with whining

Yeah, this is more like the November I’ve come to know and dread. Apologies to those of you with November birthdays, who bring a tiny bit of sunshine to this otherwise hellacious month, but I really do hate November.

The nanny called me at work yesterday sometime before 10:00 saying she was very sick and could I please come home, so I did. Takes just over an hour to get home on the bus at midday, damn suburbs.

The day passed reasonably uneventfully until 5 pm, when child number one barfed. He barfed again, this time accompanied by the runs, just before 7 pm. Child number two barfed at 8 pm. Child number one woke up crying with the runs and dry heaves (there is nothing more pathetic than a three-year-old with dry heaves) at 10:30. Child number two woke up and barfed sometime around 2:30 this morning. The nanny called in sick around 7:30 this morning.

What do you want to bet is on my agenda for this weekend? And really? I hate barfy viruses. Give me a good old fashioned chest cold any day. Sigh.

The good news is, at least Beloved can stay home with the boys today, because I’ve already missed the better part of two days this week. The sucky news is that I’m cranky and tired from not sleeping while I listened for barfing boys all night. The best news is that, for the most part, nobody barfed in their bed or on the carpet.

So I figured I could at least parlay all this pathetic-ness into a plea for your votes on the Weblog Awards this morning, but the Best Parenting Blog poll is messed up. Two of the 10 finalists are listed as “undefined” or something like that, including my blog. Sigh.

November sucks.

Edited to add: polls are fixed, and my kids have been barf-free since they got up. The day still holds some promise after all. So go ahead and VOTE already!

The one that could use a few segues

You know why pregnant women are cranky? It’s not the hormones, it’s not the sleep deprivation, it’s not the heartburn or the aching joints or the fact that your brain has taken a holiday in the south of France leaving you to defend for yourself without one.

It’s the pants.

You’d be cranky, too, if you had to adjust your pants every. single. time you moved. Stand up – hitch up pants. Before sitting down – hitch up pants. Walk any distance greater than four steps – hitch up pants. Every half hour, your underwear have been hitched up and down by your migrating pants so many times that you have a wedgie AND they’re somewhere near your knees. AT THE SAME TIME. And it’s not just the pants, because your shirt tails have to be adjusted, too, because pregnancy shirts are so long these days. It’s more like “stand up – lift shirt tail – hitch up pants – adjust underwear – smooth out shirt tail – take two steps – repeat.”

No wonder women wear those silly-looking bib overalls for most of their pregnancies. I mean, sure they’re cute and all when you’re a perkily pregnant 24. But when you’re a lumberingly pregnant 38, you wear the damn things just to have some blessed relief from wrangling gravity for your pants all the damn day long.

***

Did you see the CanadaWrites contest on CBC? They’re calling it “the writing game for quick-witted Canadians.” Send in your original short piece in one of the following categories: songs, humour, ad, movie pitch or … wait for it … BLOG POST!

I was so excited about this until I realized just how very short 200 words is. I took a look at four or five of my favourite posts, and they were each in excess of 800 words, some of them more than 1000 words. Yikes! It takes me 200 words just to set the scene some days. Oh well. I may still enter – and tell me if you do, so I can vote for you!

***

My friend ÃœberGeek sent me a note yesterday playfully accusing me of propping up my search rank by lacing my breastfeeding post with google bait for porn searchers. I laughed him off, and then cringed ruefully this morning when I got more than five hits from this referrer: girls.go41.de/?s=girl%20breast%20photo. I didn’t want to click through and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the link. But sigh. And ick. And sigh.

***

We’ve heard a lot about bad corporate behaviour on the Interwebs lately, between pictures being stolen from Flickr and Secret Agent Josephine’s artwork being stolen, not to mention the endless proliferation of content scrapers and splogs.

This is not one of those stories.

I noticed a couple of hits from links at MommyClub.ca, so I clicked through to see what they were linking to. I was rather annoyed to find my entire post from yesterday, and when I looked around I saw that they were syndicating my feed. I was just about to write a “cease and desist” letter when I got an e-mail from one of the managing partners. She said she had approached me some time ago asking my permission to syndicate the content (which she did) and did not remember if they had my consent or not (they didn’t.) They’d had some sort of infrastructure change and somehow my feed was activated, and when she noticed it she wanted to check with me to make sure it was okay with me if they posted my feed.

I politely declined, but I have to say I was highly impressed with MommyClub.ca’s behaviour. They proactively checked with me, not once but twice, to ask my permission to publish my content. When I said no thanks, the posts in question were gone almost immediately.

The Interwebs are full of bad behaviour, but there are some good people who still behave ethically out there. I thought this one deserved some props.

This would be a bullety post if I weren’t so infernally verbose

Have you noticed that my posts are getting longer, and longer, and longer? I mean, they’re barely posts anymore, they’re friggin’ chapters… and there’s no sign of relief today, either.

First, something rather disturbing. Through Babes in Blogland, I came across this story about how some users of Orkut (a social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace, but owned by Google) are “stealing” images of kids from Flickr to create fake user profiles. You can read about it on SaraSmiles’ Flickr account (over 1200 comments in three days… at least people are paying attention!) While I find this distasteful and kinda gross, I’m not going to be pulling my photos off of Flickr anytime soon. I will be following the story, though, and I thought you might like to know about this, too.

On a lighter note, I have to tell you that I scored a victory for slacker snack moms everywhere last week. We had “meet the teacher” night at Tristan’s school, and all the junior and senior kindergarten parents were brought together for an information session. They gave an overview of the curriculum, spoke briefly about some new procedures, and then brought up a few “housekeeping” items. One of them was a plea – really, that’s the right word – from one of the teachers to please, please send simpler snacks for the kids. “When they have three or four items to choose from, they get overwhelmed,” she said. “We really only plan for 15 or 20 minutes at snack time, and we’re only here for a short time. The kids are bringing these multi-course snacks and it takes them half the afternoon just to eat them.” Yes!! Slacker moms unite, we have scored one small victory in our inherent laziness.

And finally, this is way cool. As you know, I’ve long been a huge fan of Cooper and Emily from Been There, and the BlogHers Act initiative, and The Motherhood. Head over to Been There to read about how yesterday, Emily was not only live-blogging the Clinton Global Initiative, but she got to ask a question – to Angelina Jolie!! Click on over to Been There to read Emily’s great question about what mothers can do, and the terrific response she got.

I may be saving the world from overenthusiastic snack moms, but Emily’s content to just save the world. Isn’t she lovely?

Edited to add: Wow, issues with photos are everywhere today. Dutch at Sweet Juniper blogged today about the inappropriate use – okay, theft – of a photo of his daughter by the online magazine Babble, and daysgoby pointed out a a post at Joy Unexpected about how her photo was used to sell a product – without her knowledge or permission. Maybe it’s time to start at least watermarking my photos?

An open letter to John Tory

Dear Mr Tory,

This is my happy little blog, which tends to be very non-political. Unless you get me riled up about daycare. Or reproductive rights. But mostly, I’m pretty happy to hang out here and tell my stories.

I’d say probably half the people who read this blog don’t live in Ontario, so they don’t know that you are running for Premier of Ontario, as leader of the provincial Conservative Party. They might not have also heard that you recently stated that publicly funded Christian schools would be able to continue to teach creationism within the guidelines of the Ontario school curriculum.

Creationism? Seriously?

So when the Liberal folks came by yesterday and asked me if they could stick a sign on my lawn, apolitical as I usually am, I said yes. Because this single issue is enough to sway my vote. It’s not that I’m not open to other points of view, and I fully support teaching kids to be open minded and critical thinkers. But creationism has no basis in fact. It’s completely fallacious and flies in the face of hundreds of years of scientific theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fantasy. And there is no place for it in a publicly funded school.

But I’m willing to make a deal with you. I’ll take down that Liberal sign and put up a Conservative sign, and leave it there all through the election, even though my skin will crawl just a little bit every time I look out my window. And all you have to do is confirm that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism will also be taught in publicly funded schools. I mean, that’s only fair, right? Balanced.

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Sincerely yours,
DaniGirl

Information overload

As usual, I consumed most of the newspaper on the bus on my ride to work this morning, and I have to tell you that the news was not good.

Aside from the fact that I now have a new big boss (holding off judgement on that for the time being) I read that Mattel has announced another massive toy recall for lead paint and dangerous toys. Then I read an article that says out of 250,000 births in Canada every year, as many as 1,700 babies suffer skull fractures or other traumatic injuries during birth. And to completely wreck my morning, a new study confirms that “eating large quantities of junk food when pregnant and breastfeeding could impair the normal control of appetite and promote an exacerbated taste for junk food in offspring.”

Sigh. It’s enough to make you want to crawl back into bed and hide there for a day or two, isn’t it?

Since I went looking for it and you might want to do the same, here’s the Mattel recalled toys list. It mostly affects Sarge from Pixar’s Cars for lead paint, and some Batman, Barbie, Polly Pocket and other toys for dangerous magnets. We have a Sarge, but he’s been with us since Christmas and the recall period is for Cars from May through August 2007. But still!

I mean, seriously, when you think of name-brand toys you can trust, don’t you think of Fisher Price, and Barbie, and Mattel, and even Thomas the Tank Engine? These aren’t dollar store junk toys, for goodness sake. I’d rant a little more on this topic, but Ann Douglas has a great article up over on Yahoo Parenting that says it far better than I ever could.

As for the birth injuries article, well, that just makes me feel a little bit better about my decision to go with the midwife. And about my consumption of junk food? I’ll have to pause a moment to wipe the crust of honey cruller sugar from my fingers while I formulate a proper response to that one. In the meanwhile, I blame my mother.

The news isn’t all bad, though. If you’re looking for something a little more lighthearted, field reporter Fryman sends along this link to a photo gallery on the Globe and Mail’s web site of roadside mascots, including the World’s Largest Atlantic Salmon, Perogie, Fly Fishing Rod and – of course – Hockey Stick and Puck. Canadiana at it’s best! How many of them have you seen? Wouldn’t it make a great end-of-summer road trip to tour around and check them all out?

In which I rant just a bit

It’s my last day of vacation and I’m feeling a little cranky about it. Plus, ya know, I’m old now, and entitled to be curmudgeonly without warning.

So to celebrate this mood of minor annoyance, today I present to you the top five things that piss me off.

1. People who don’t acknowledge common courtesy.

It drives me nuts when I slow down to let someone into a lane ahead of me, or stop to hold open a door, or step back to let someone else go first, and they don’t even bother to acknowledge me. I don’t need a bouquet of roses, but a nod or a smile or a wave (or god forbid, a “thank you”) would go a long way.

2. People who don’t signal lane changes.

Apparently, I have a whole set of issues with lane changes. (Can you tell I drove back and forth through Toronto recently?) Also on their own sublist of things that piss me off are people who think they are entitled to your lane simply by virtue of the fact that their lane is ending, regardless of the fact that you might currently be occupying said lane, and people who must occupy the buffer of space I’m trying to leave between myself and the car in front of me as we hurtle along the 401 at the speed of light.

3. People who dribble on the toilet seat and don’t wipe it up.

It happens. Either you dribble a few drops when you stand up to wipe, or you are one of those people with stronger knees than me who can hover over the seat and give it a good spray when you pee. Regardless, would it kill you to take a minute and a square or two and wipe the seat when you’re done? I really shouldn’t have to do it, and it’s nothing short of disgusting to sit down and realize that you just sat in someone else’s pee.

4. People who sit on the gym equipment and chat.

I like to move quickly through my weight workout to keep my heart rate up, and I was told many years ago by a trainer that it’s best to stick to a particular order, working the larger muscles before the smaller ones. While I don’t mind jumping out of order if it’s busy and there’s a lot of people using the equipment, it drives me nuts to have to wait for a machine because someone is sitting on it while chatting with someone else. Frankly, it also kind of bugs me when people sit on the machines between sets, and when people don’t wipe down the equipment between uses. Hmmm, looks like I have some issues with the gym as well. Maybe a little too much testosterone in my system?

5. People who don’t say “excuse me” when they need to get off the bus.

This one is my number-one irritant right now. I’ve been idly thinking about blogging it for months. Almost every single morning, I sit on the aisle side of a shared seat on the bus. A surprising amount of the time, I’m sure the vast majority, when the person sitting beside me needs to get off, rather than saying “Excuse me” or even “This is my stop”, they simply make a lurching thrust toward me that I’m supposed to detect and interpret as an intention to get off the bus and that I should get out of the way. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and it pisses me off every single time. Seriously, how hard is it to say “excuse me”? I usually toss in a smile for free when I do it.

And they say we Canadians are overly polite. Bah!

By all means, don’t let me rant alone. What cheeses you off?

Random babbling on a Monday morning

The good news is, this is the LAST Monday I have to work until after Labour Day. Having a certain amount of seniority means I get almost five weeks of vacation time this year, and in addition to a week in June and a couple later in the summer, I have booked off every Monday through June, July and August. Yay!

The bad news is, I have to work five days this week and the forecast calls for wall-to-wall sunshine. What a drag!

The good news is, the Sens are playing in game one of the Stanley Cup finals tonight. Go Sens GO!

The bad news is, the game starts at 8 pm and the end of regulation time will be dangerously close to my bedtime. Please, hockey gods, no overtime on the weeknight games.

The good news is, I’ve made contact with a few potential caregivers this weekend, including two daycare providers and a nanny.

The bad news is, I’m tired of interviewing caregivers and more than a little gun-shy about starting all this over again. My standards for personal connection are considerably elevated (and they were pretty damn high to begin with!) and my financial threshhold is getting dangerously high, too.

The good news is, I have hugely satisfied my recent craving for family friendship by getting together with some old friends last week that I had lost touch with, and spent Sunday with not one but two different groups of friends who are like family and family who are like friends.

The bad news is, with all that socializing the house is a disaster and I have no clean underwear.

The good news is, my backyard is in full bloom, from the lilacs to the irises to the apple tree to the honeysuckle and the myriad other perennials that are self-sufficient enough that I haven’t yet neglected them to death.

The bad news is, we still have a 12′ diameter dirt circle we have to resod from where the pool used to sit. It looks alarmingly like a crop circle in our backyard. I’m thinking of painting a red target in it, just to see if the neighbours react.

The goods news is, I actually managed to whip together a post this morning, which is more than I expected to be able to accomplish because there is simply not enough hours in the day to do all the stuff I’ve been trying to get done lately.

The bad news is, it’s a pretty sad excuse for a post. I’ll do better tomorrow, probably. Or, you know, maybe not. See, that’s the fun of coming here lately. You never know which of the 17 personalities I’ve been cultivating will be holding the pen. Today, I think it was a group effort.

Another reason to love Rick Mercer

Following our heated rivalry for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards, Rick Mercer and I have come to an easy peace (inasmuch as I stopped obsessing about him and he continued to not notice that I exist.)

Just now, I was futzing about on the computer looking up bits for our trip to Bar Harbour, and the Rick Mercer Report was on in the background. I suddenly knew he must have been thinking about me all this time, maybe quietly lurking on the blog, when I heard his skit featuring the Stephen Harper Home Pregnancy Kit, which lampooned the new child tax credit from the recent federal budget with the tag line, “Canada’s New Government – Fooling Families Two Budgets in a Row!”

Sing it, Rick!