Category: Rants and rambles

Sorry, I still don’t have much for you today. I’m still feeling crappy, and still working my ass off to get my Very Important File done at work. And even though I usually love my job, this week I’m feeling frustrated and demoralized. I’m sick and working extra hard and frankly am not feeling the love from the people we are working hardest to satisfy.

I have some ideas for posts percolating, but simply don’t have the time to crank them out just now. By the time the wee beasties are in bed, I don’t have the energy to turn on the computer.

This too shall pass.

I would like to put forth a motion to amend the bylaws, please. There should be a rule that the body is only allowed to house one virus at a time. Multiple viruses will not be permitted to inhabit the body. Specificially, cough-inducing chest cold viruses shall completely vacate the premises before the arrival of migraine-accompanied stomach viruses.

I would further like to move that all viruses be banned from inhabiting the body when said body is up to its eyeballs in work, or when the progeny are dealing with their own viruses.

Hmmm… this was supposed to be a lament, a rant, a bonafide panic post about how the security IT guys cut off our access to Blogger. I came in to work yesterday and fired up the browser as usual, flipped open my favourites to the Blogger dashboard and got the Web filter screen telling me access was denied. I’m sure if the vast majority of you weren’t being buffeted by gale force winds and the snowstorm of the year, you’d have heard my wail of dismay. Not only could I not access any Blogger dashboard tools, but any Blogspot comment boxes were blocked as well. I was, to put it mildly, not impressed yesterday.

But hey, look! Here I am. *looks furtively over her shoulder for lurking IT security guys and knocks on wood*

So instead of the tirade against free access to the Web, here’s something I’ve been thinking of sharing with you for a while.

For those of you keeping track, the 5 lbs that I lost did in fact find their way home to me the next week. Well, not all of them. I’m down 2 or 3 lbs net, which is still not bad. I knew the 5 lbs was too good to be true. I’m still a little disillusioned, as 3 lbs of weight loss over six weeks of concerted effort doesn’t seem like enough of a reward to sustain my enthusiasm. (And yes, I know it’s less about the pounds and more about how I look and feel, but that doesn’t seem to be changing much either.)

But for now, I’m still committed to healthy eating and good choices and all that crap. On that subject, I’ve found a couple of bits worth sharing recently. Have you seen this illustration of what 200 calories looks like? All the pictures display the portion sizes relative to each other, so you can see how much or how little 200 calories gets you. Compare, for example, kiwis to Hershey’s Kisses. Very cool.

For those of you who have really been around for a while, you’ll remember that I joined weight watchers online summer before last, and our relationship ended on less than amicable terms. But I always did like their online tools, like the food diary, and the database with the calorie and fat counts of various foods. This calorie counter database seems to have all the same tools, but it’s free. And you know how I feel about free. Seems pretty comprehensive and very easy to use (although I admit, I’ve only been playing with it for a couple of days.)

And now, just as I’m ready to hit publish and be grateful to the kind souls in IT security who must have realized the error of their ways and re-granted our access to Blogger, I see by the error message across the bottom of my editing window that my connection to Blogger.com has died yet again.

Universe, are you seriously trying to tell me to move to private domain and blog hosting or what???

In yesterday’s comments, Madeleine assured me that the dead iPod, the dead cordless phone and the sketchy Blogger connection were my technological ‘three’, and that my week should improve from there. You know, bad things happen in threes?

I wish.

I got home from work and ran the dishwasher while I was making dinner. By the time dinner was ready, the dishwasher had run, but for the second day in a row, there was water in the bottom of it. This time, the water filled the entire bottom of the dishwasher to a depth of 10 to 15 cm.

Crap.

So I hauled out our trusty home repair book, and even found the owner’s manual for the dishwasher, neither of which were helpful. I called for a service appointment, because despite my pretentions otherwise, what do I know from appliance repair? To their credit, they are able to come by tomorrow, the only day of the week Beloved is home with the boys.

But the real indignity is that I still had a dinner’s worth of dishes to wash. By hand. Oh, the humanity.

I haven’t washed dishes by hand for a good four years. Washing dishes was one of my jobs from the time I was about eight years old, and man how I hated washing dishes. Washing dishes by hand is for chumps.

And to make matters worse, I made bake-permanent-sticky-sauce-to-the-dish chicken and burn-the-bottom-of-the-pot risotto for dinner. I even used a collander, for the love of god. A collander! Had I known I would be washing the dishes by hand, we would have ordered pizza and eaten it from the cardboard box.

I even had (brace yourself) an apron on. Me, the domestic anti-goddess, in an apron washing dishes by hand. Surely it’s one of the eight signs of the apocalypse.

Civilized homes should not be without functioning dishwashers. I would give up the oven and the clothes dryer before I gave up the dishwasher – and maybe the microwave, seeing as how Tristan doesn’t eat food any warmer than room temperature anyway. But for the love of all things holy, don’t mess with my dishwasher.

Beloved and I are watching American Idol on TV. Well, Beloved is watching it and I’m futzing about on the laptop, half paying attention.

A commercial comes on for Wendy’s, the hamburger chain, and Beloved nearly chokes. I miss the visual, but the music running in the background is the Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun.

Seriously.

It’s not that I’m some boomer-wanna-be bemoaning the appropriation of the music of my youth; I just think if you’re going to lift a song for its funky bass riff, you should at least think about what that song means to one of your major demographic groups. They’re selling a squeaky-clean, family-friendly hamburger chain and they use that song? Tell me how these lyrics makes you crave a hamburger, fries and a frosty?

When I’m out walkin’ I strut my stuff
Man, I’m so strung out
I’m high as a kite and I just might stop to check you out
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know you’re the one
Body and heat I stain my sheets I don’t even know why
My girlfriend she’s at the end and she is starting to cry
Let me go on like I blister in the sun
Let me go on big hands I know you’re the one

So that bit about “I stain my sheets” – that was from ketchup and mustard, was it?

I mean, seriously!

It’s a damn good thing it’s sweeps week on the major networks, because I’ve got nothing but re-runs for you here today.

This was supposed to be the post where I raved about the fantastic service I got from Apple.

As you know, my iPod died a week ago Friday. On Saturday, I spoke to someone at Apple, and on Tuesday, a box arrived on my doorstep to return my deceased iPod to its mothership. I missed the Tuesday night pickup at the UPS store, so it went out on Wednesday. I followed its progress on Apple’s Web site, and was amazed at how quickly it was processed. On Thursday, the Web site indicated a replacement iPod had been shipped, and if we hadn’t been out of the house, I would have had it in my hot little hands some time around 6 pm on Friday. Now that’s impressive service… if we’d have been home, it would have been exactly seven days from problem to new iPod.

As it was, I had to wait an extra two days because the delivery company works Monday to Friday only. When I got home from work yesterday, sure enough, the new iPod was waiting for me. Since it had been sitting on the porch in minus 20 degree temperatures all day, I thought it prudent to let it warm up to room temperature before I plugged it in.

By the time I finally sat down to load some music on the new iPod, I was pretty excited. I plugged in the USB cable, watched as iTunes opened, and selected a few songs to load.

That’s when I got the first error message. I tinkered with it, and it got worse. I went to Apple’s Web site support and followed some instructions. (I am always a bit relieved to see the error messages I’m receiving addressed, but ultimately disappointed when the proposed solutions never seem to work.)

I called Apple support and spoke to one agent, who walked me through the steps I’d just taken, and when it didn’t work for him either, he referred me to a ‘product specialist’ who walked me through a few more solutions. Are you shocked to hear that none of those solutions worked, either?

They’re sending me another box today, so I can return this ex-iPod back to its maker, too.

For those of you keeping score, that’s four iPods in six months. Yikes!

The worst part? My cordless phone died in the middle of my conversation with the guy from Apple support. And, just now Blogger crapped out as I was typing this with its suddenly ubiquitous message, “Could not connect to Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail.”

You think maybe the universe is trying to tell me something?

My iPod died on Friday night. Again. I mean, seriously. How many times do I have to go through this? There’s no doubt that iPods are to MP3 players what Kleenex are to facial tissue and Frisbees are to flying disks, but there’s a limit to how much patience I have for technology that dies multiple times in the same year. I love the holy hell out of it, but it’s more fickle than a hungry, overtired two year old.

After three hours of useless troubleshooting on Friday night, during which I once resurrected it like Lazarus only to have it die again when I tried to load the music back on it, and reinstalling iTunes not once, not twice, but three times on two different computers, I finally gave up.

We got it last summer from Best Buy, and bless Beloved’s paranoid susceptibility to marketing, we bought a $40 product replacement warranty. When we returned it the first time, less than three weeks after we bought it, they simply took the dead iPod from me and gave me a new one still factory-sealed in the box. I was highly impressed.

Saturday, I headed out into the frigid morning expecting the same service. But much to my dismay, when I showed up at Best Buy with a handful of unresponsive iPod, they told me I’d have to either contact Apple, who offer a one-year warranty, or Best Buy’s customer service telephone number. Either one would take a minimum of 10 days to get a working iPod back in my hands.

I was not impressed. I’ve been pushing myself to do a minimum of two, but preferably three, workouts at the gym each week, and my iPod has been carefully loaded with music to burn calories by. I had made it through my Saturday workout without it, but I have to tell you that listening to Angler and Hunter (rant for another day: why on earth does my women’s-only gym play Angler and Hunter on its TVs on a Saturday morning?) definitely detracts from my energy level and my enthusiasm for the whole workout.

Petulant, I started flipping through the Best Buy product replacement plan (please take a small moment to admire the fact that I had not only kept but could find in a timely manner the receipt and warranty) and read the fine print: even though the warranty covers a period through July 2008, its obligation to replace an item ends after one replacement. In other words, even though I paid for two years of coverage, if I were to get a replacement iPod today and that iPod died again in six months, I would be SOL. Given the fact that I’m on my third iPod in the first six months, I don’t like those odds.

So I called Apple, and they have sent out a box I will use to send my recalcitrant iPod back to its mothership, or at least a satellite repair depot. I asked the very nice lady at the call centre somewhere in Pennsylvania whether they would repair or simply replace it, she said they would make a cursory attempt to repair it, but would likely simply replace it. It should be back in my sweaty little hands in 10 to 14 days.

That leaves my Best Buy warranty intact for the next iPod failure. At least now I know to expect it. In the end, my annoyance with the iPod’s untimely demise is at least reasonably offset by the fairly decent repair and replacement service from Apple. I don’t have anything nice to say about Best Buy, though. A two-year product replacement plan should replace products for two years, wouldn’t you think?

Warning: Those of you reading from the Prairies might want to breeze past this one. Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?

Been a long time since I blogged about the weather. Did you know that as a Canadian citizen, we’re constitutionally obligated to discuss the weather at least 37 per cent of the time? And with a winter like this, especially with the undewhelming performance of the Senators (hockey being the other topic we are constitutionally obligated to discuss), there’s nothing else worthy of conversation.

What the heck is up with this weather, anyway? It’s mid-January, and we’re still waiting for winter to arrive. We’ve had two, maybe three snowfalls, plus a few dustings. The temperatures have been in the range of ten or more degrees (Centigrade, bien sûr) above the norm almost every day. Quite frankly, as a cautionary tale on global warming, it’s scaring the hell out of me.

Every February, Ottawa has a winter festival called Winterlude. Central to Winterlude is the Rideau Canal, a 7.8 km skateway recently certifed by the Guiness people as the world’s longest. Also popular are the ice scupltures and the snow playground.

Who would have imagined that Winterlude, nestled deep in the cold heart of February, would be in jeopardy due to unfreezing temperatures? In the Citizen today, they had a little graphic stating that we need at least 10 days of temperatures below -15C for the Canal to freeze. There are only 22 days until the start of Winterlude, and the long-term forecast doesn’t show a single day that will get that cold.

To my great surprise, I’m finding that I’m actually missing the winter weather. I miss the way the snow insulates sound, so that when you go for a walk on a snowy winter evening, the world is peacefully silent except for the crunch and squeak of snow under your boots. I miss the ruddy hue on the boys’ chubby cheeks. I miss that biting, shocking blast of cold that snatches the air out of your lungs when you first step outside.

Who knew it was possible to have a year without a winter? And who knew I’d be disappointed? It’s just not right, I tell you. There are some things we can count on, and a cold Canadian winter should be one of them. It’s just not right.

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

Ah yes, it’s that time of year again. Those of you who know me well are rolling your eyes and saying “oh no, not the reindeer thing again.”

Yes, the reindeer thing again. If I can educate just ONE person each year about the correct names of Santa’s eight reindeer, my work here will be done.

I had a post half-typed up about this when I realized that I’ve done all this before. Why reinvent the wheel when I can just cut and paste my post from last year? I wrote:

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