Category: Uncategorized

Seems I’ve left a lot of loose ends lately. Far be it from me to keep you in suspense any longer. Here’s a progress report for you, board members of Danigirl’s Life Inc.

Back at the end of May, you were treated to my spectacular break-up with Weight Watchers. I’m pleased to nyah-nyah in the general direction of the “points” plan and tell you that I’ve lost not only the weight I gained while on WW but a pound or two more. Hooray! I’ve been to the gym at least three times a week since joining three weeks ago, and am loving it. No really, I am. Even better, a pair of shorts that did not fit me at all at the beginning of June now fit quite comfortably. Did I mention I love the gym? Pass the potato chips, please.

(And did you know that if you google “Tim Hortons Weight Watchers points”, I am the number one return? I get at least one hit a day from this. People, it’s a doughnut shop. Forget about the points and just enjoy your cruller, for goodness sake.)

A few of you have since asked me what ever came of my job choice dilemma a couple of weeks ago. I had the choice between a temporary increase in pay/status and staying with a familiar team and portfolio or accepting a new and permanent position with a new team and new workload. I chose (no real surprise) to stay with my current team, and have been assured they’ll do whatever they can to make my promotion permanent. And most importantly, I didn’t have to retake my second language tests!!

You seemed to enjoy my blog recommendations from earlier in the week, so can I direct your attention, if you haven’t already been there, to Getupgrrl’s poignant post yesterday on Chez Miscarriage. Her surrogate is getting pretty close to her due date, and Grrl is handling the stress with her usual neurotic wit. I wish she still had archives, because she is truly one of the funniest writers in blogdom.

And finally, a little geek fun. You’ll see over in the sidebar an icon that says, “I made science.” It’s part of a survey MIT is doing on weblogs. If you own a blog, please take 15 minutes or so to complete their survey. It’s quite interesting to see where your responses fit in with the returns to date (for example, at not quite 36 years old, I am considerably older than the majority of bloggers. But I have been at it for only 6 months, considerably less than most bloggers. And although I read fewer blogs than most respondants, my hits are pretty high.) Not that any of that means anything, but I’ve always loved playing with numbers. It’s all just lies, damn lies and statistics, according to Mark Twain.

Categories: blogging

Cuz Andrea and Marla were doing it…

“If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog.”

(I think I’ve forgotten how to live without an editorial voice-over making notes for future blog entries. Beloved has on more than one occasion looked at me and said, “You’re blogging this in your head right now, aren’t you?” And of course, he is right.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Wednesday…

Categories: memes

Lately, I have taken to referring to blog as my third child. At first, it was merely a bit of a jest, a way to illustrate how much blog has ingratiated itself into my life. Then I started to think about it, and have come to the realization that there are more similarities between blog and my boys than I would have expected.

For example, I have no idea what I did with all my spare time before the boys came along. Ditto blog. Both are very needy and I must pay attention to blog at least every day or so. Ditto boys.

Beloved is just a little bit mystified by my obsession with blog, and often mystified by the strange behaviour of the boys. (Inasmuch as running around the house with a bucket on your head hollering the theme to Blue’s Clues is strange behaviour.)(It’s the boys who do that. Not blog. Blog has a bit more sense than the boys.)

When they are particularly adorable, I will sit back with a mixture of wonder and satisfaction and think to myself, “I made them!” And I could be talking about either blog or boys.

I find the lamest excuses to work anecdotes about the boys into conversations. I don’t need much prompting to talk about blog either.

Both boys and blog have done a lot of damage to my previously svelte and girlish figure. (I dimly remember a time when I used to go for walks on my lunch hour.)

Blog and boys have both introduced me to a world of people I never would have met otherwise, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Both are an endless source of temptation to acquire the latest gadgets and do-haws. Digital camera, notebook computer, life-sized ride-on Thomas the Tank Engine. No, it’s not in the budget, but think how happy it will make {the boys/blog}.

Although both blog and boys are for the most part very fulfilling, they can at times cause me an inordinate amount of stress. I spend a lot of time lying in bed at 3 am wondering about their future and hoping I am doing right by them. (And by ‘them’ I mean the boys. And blog.)

It’s fun to dress both blog and boys up in new outfits, and bask in the glow of admiration by proxy. Although I have yet to find a way to coordinate their outfits. (Hmmm, maybe some ‘Mothership’ logo Ts for the boys…?)

Despite the fact that I try very hard to impose some discipline and direction, the boys and blog are willful creatures and insist on having a mind of their own.

My boss, although extremely patient and understanding, would probably prefer that I spent just a little bit more of my work day focused on something other than the boys. Or blog.

Like any parent, all I want is for them to grow up to be fine upstanding citizens, settle down near by and provide me with oodles of grandbabies/blogs to keep me company in my old age.

Categories: blogging

We’ve discussed at some length the fact that I am just the tiniest bit of an attention junkie. And a media whore.

I’ve had a handful of letters to the editor published, most notably my recent whinge on changes to Ottawa bus service and a few years ago when some wingnut said the embryos lost from IVF were tatamount to abortion. And I’ve dragged poor Beloved with me onto the CBC national news to talk about infertility and IVF not once but twice back in 2001 and 2002.

Having conquered print media and television, I am pleased to announce that I can now add the Interweb to the list of media outlets credulous enough to give me a forum. And I’m not just talking blog, either. This is a real cititation in on a respectable Web site!

Back in April, our favourite resident parenting author Ann sent out a call asking for input from people who had experienced pregnancy after infertility for an article commissioned by WebMD. She took my random blatherings and made them sound like considered insight from a reasonable and well-adjusted person. Ann, maybe you should try your hand at fiction writing?

Give it a click and admire my pithy comments and Ann’s handiwork! Emotional roulette: Pregnancy after infertility.

You know that old Hollywood axiom, “Say whatever you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right”? Well, now I understand that. Close but not quite on the surname. Oh well, I’ll take my 15 seconds where I can get it.

So we’ve covered print media, TV and the Web. Time to turn my sights on glossy magazines and books. And since I’ve signed up for Ann’s parenting panel on her latest sleep book, looks like I only need to ingratiate myself with a periodical editor. Don’t think I haven’t given up on the idea of being a centrefold for Blogebrity Magazine, staples and all!

Categories: infertility

Sorry, folks. Not much to see here today. I came back to work from a week’s holidays this morning to find that the new PC they were supposed to install in my new cubicle is not installed, and my user-id has been wiped so all my favourites and everything have been lost. Sigh.

I hate to leave you stranded though. Try checking out some of these blogs – they’re my daily favourites:

The Mother of All Blogs: My first blog buddy! Ann is funny, smart and addicted to Starbucks. Drop by and read about her new book in progress.

Lowly Scribe: Troy is a great writer, a sweet dad and wickedly funny, especially when he is in rant mode.

Hello Josephine: Marla is either my long-lost sister or my evil nemesis. I haven’t decided which yet. Nobody spins a tale like Marla, and only Marla could make sunscreen smudges on her camera lens seem like art.

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Dean Dad was the first person to ever be kind enough to comment on my blog, so holds a special place in my heart. He’s also got two preschoolers at home, and his struggles with bureacracy in academia often reflect my own frustrations with government-think. Also a very funny writer.

If you’ve never visited these blogs, give them a try! You won’t regret it!

Okay, so this might be a little trite and overdone, but it’s the end of a long hot week of being on vacation (translation: brain dead) and it’s the best I can come up with.

In honour of Canada Day and in no particular order, ten reasons I love Canada:

1. One year maternity leave.

2. Bilingual TV. Yah, I know, I vacillate on the whole bilingual thing. But at least it makes us unique.

3. Four seasons – spring, summer, fall and winter. A little something for everyone.

4. Constitutional monarchy – quaint, but effective.

5. Crispy Crunch chocolate bars. Not candy bars, chocolate bars.

6. CBC Radio One.

7. Canadian Tire (and by extension, Canadian Tire money).

8. Spelling colour and honour with a “u” and pronouncing ‘schedule’ to start with a shhh and not a sk.

9. No out of pocket charges for appointments with the doctor or trips to the ER.

10. Leonard Cohen, Diana Krall, Mike Myers, Neil Young, Margaret Atwood, Mordechai Richler, Burton Cummings, William Shatner, and The Barenaked Ladies.

And a little Canada Day anecdote:

I was on a step ladder, hanging the flag up over the front door (been meaning to do it since spring, but just now got the Christmas lights out of the way) and Tristan was watching me with interest.

Tristan: Whatcha doing, mummy?

Me: Hanging the flag up, so it can wave to us whenever we come home and go in the house.

Tristan: Hmm. Hello, flag. Lovely day, eh?

Cheers!! Happy Canada Day!

Categories: Canadianisms

So, what do you think? Okay for a first draft? Can you even see the new banner?

After your incredibly sweet comments yesterday, you got me to thinking. Blog is pretty much an accounting of my life in progress, right? Not an after-the-fact memoir, but a live and in real time before your eyes kind of thing. So it seems only fitting that you get to watch the evolution of blog in real time, too.

I’m a little self-conscious. I have visions of you looking at the banner and thinking to yourself, “You worked all day and that’s all you came up with?” Hey, it’s all about learning, right? And did I mention 179 fonts to choose from? Do you realize how long it takes just to look at 179 fonts? A LONG time!

It’s not exactly what I had pictured when I started out, but it’s not a bad start. I’d like to clean up the ink-spot images, especially the blue one. It got a little distorted when I resized it. And do those footprints look like baby footprints to you? That was the idea, but I’m not sure it worked. I’m going to box in the text, I think, and maybe add another colour – maybe orange or a cranberry red?

I know only 5 to 10 per cent of you who come here comment with any regularity, but I’d love it if you could drop me a note in the comments to tell me whether you can see the new banner or not. You don’t have to critique it – I would just like to know whether the majority of people can see it or not, and whether it significantly impedes the loading or viewing of blog. Of course, your comments on the aethestic aspects are more than welcome as well.

I promise we’ll return to our regular drivel soon…

Categories: blogging

Beloved and I have been chatting up the germ of an idea for a blog banner for a couple of weeks. Finally, the one day this week that I’m home (on vacation – hooray!) and the wee beasties are with the daycare provider, I can ignore the clutter and the weeds and whatnot and just indulge in a couple of uninterrupted hours in front of the computer. Ah, guilty pleasure!

The thing is, none of these design programs are intuitive. There’s layers and selecting and transforming and in front of and behind and it’s really all quite annoying. What I could do in 10 minutes with a piece of paper and a magic marker I couldn’t do in six hours glued to the keyboard.

It would have probably gone a lot faster, except I was drowning in decisions. Do you know we have 179 fonts installed on our computer? No exaggeration, one hundred and seventy nine fonts. It took me an hour just to decide between “ale and wenches”, “swingset” and “bottix”. And colours… oh, the colours. If someone could just narrow things down to what’s in an 8-pack of Crayolas, it have taken me about half the time.

Finally, we get something reasonably close to what I had envisioned. Not quite there, but close. After SIX HOURS! Did I mention I have the attention span of a hummingbird? And I try to post it on Blogger, thinking with my albeit rudimentary knowledge of CSS and HTML, I should be able to figure it out. You need an image tag and somewhere to host your source – simple as that.

Apparently not.

(You think this story is excruciatingly long in the telling, you should have been here in real time!)

After another hour of mucking about in the Blogger template, I resorted to a public plea for assistance, and the effulgent Troy, whom you should admire not only for his extensive vocabulary and rapier wit but for his ability to translate HTML into dippy chick, was quick to come to my rescue. Lo and behold, it worked! Ta da!!!

(Waiting for you to scroll up and make sure that the header is the same old boring header it was yesterday and every day before that. Sighing heavily.)

So why, WHY are computers so evil? I happened to be on the laptop when I plugged in Troy’s extra-simple and easy to understand solution, and it worked fine. I was so excited I came right downstairs to our main computer, the only one with Photoshop, to tweak and improve my banner before the big reveal. I opened my practice template and – nothing. I can see it on the laptop, but not on the other computer. I have the same problem with a bunch of my favourite blogs: Ann’s, Troy’s, Ella’s… the really cool banners just don’t display reliably.

So really, do I want to spend any more time working on this when it’s not going to display properly on my own damn computer, let alone how it might look to you? Really, is there anything more annoying on god’s green earth than computers?

To add insult to injury, my darling ÃœberGeek, who has also been incredibly patient in offering tech support to the clueless, told me that blog has been crashing his browser since I installed my fancy-ass Flickr badge on Friday.

So screw it. I’m a word kind of chick. Blog is about words, not pictures. You want pretty pictures, go find somebody else’s blog. (And if you come back tomorrow after reading this self-indulgent whine, you’re a true friend indeed!)

Categories: blogging

I have spent almost an entire day of my vacation playing with the damn computer. Not an entirely bad thing, because I think it is somewhere around 57 degrees centrigrade outside, and I am huddled in the relatively cool basement with my sexy husband. (I am dictating, he is typing. Could you tell?)

Ahem (wrenching control of the keyboard) – as I was saying… We’ve spent the better part of the day playing with Photoshop, and have come up with a relatively cute little banner for blog. But, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to post it. I’ve played in the CSS of the existing template a bit, but honestly thought it would be as easy as an IMG tag. Apparently not. I’ve studied some of the CSS on blogs in my Blogroll, but don’t quite get it.

Is there an easy answer for this? I just want to use the existing template for now and instead of the header at the top, I want my banner to appear. I can host the image on server space from my cable Internet provider, but when I just key in the image tag with that addy, nothing happens. Do I have to build a little CSS script to define the banner space and centre it and point to the image or something? Also, if you are giving free advice, how do I include images in between my posts and/or change my sidebar headers to images I will design in some future year when the boys go off to college.

If I need to teach myself more about CSS I will, but I’d prefer a quick fix!

I have no idea what I’m going to say today. As if this whole vacation thing weren’t messing with my routine enough as it is, we had a power outage last night from 6:30 pm to somewhere around 3:30 in the morning. And this morning, my little natives are absolutely insane. I’m cloistered in the basement with the computer, trying not to listen as they screech and thunder around the house like a herd of rabid hippos.

One of the benefits of last night’s blackout was that I got to sit on the back deck in the dying light of a spectacular day, trying to position my book to catch the last rays of visible light before having to go into the house and actually make conversation with Beloved. (Oh TV, how I missed your glowing face!) And while out on the back deck, I was blessed to hear in excruciating detail the innermost thoughts of the 15 year old next door and a few of his friends. Actually, I think I could have been four blocks over and still heard every detail. Apparently neither three year olds nor 15 year olds get the concept of ‘inside’ voices.

Also, the 15 year olds take just about as long as my three year old to tell a story, because every single noun has to be modified by the word “fucking”. Verbs, too. Versatile word, that “fucking”. Now, I have been accused of having a bit of a potty mouth at times, but for the love of Christ at the very least they could mix up their curses just a little bit. Show some variety. Please.

I don’t envy the woman who is this boy’s mother. In addition to him, she has an 11 year old girl and a nine year old boy and she’s recently divorced. The younger kids are sweet enough, and they like to play with my boys at the playground or in the driveway on occasion, but the oldest boy is obviously out of control. I could handle the music blaring through the walls at all hours, the smoke from the backyard that drifts into our windows, and the groups of extremely noisy teens who hang around in our shared driveway at the strangest hours… hey, I was a good kid, but we still got into trouble and I remember what it was like to be that age. But I’ve caught them doing some spectacularly stupid stuff, like standing on the end of our shared driveway and pitching beer bottles into the park across the street – the park where my kids play. And when I turned into one of those suburban mothers and came bellowing out of the house after seeing that, I woke up the next morning to see my car covered in gobs of spit. I’m just glad they didn’t take it into their heads to key the paint.

Last Saturday morning, the neighbour on the other side woke to find the downspout from her eavestrough bent and crushed, and the neighbour on the other side said she’d heard a commotion in the middle of the night and looked out to see a young man with a baseball bat smashing the hell out of it – for no discernable reason. He was part of a group of teenagers coming in and out of – guess which house? I noticed some suspiciously bat-sized dents in their garage door the next day, too.

There’s not much I can do about all this except hope he doesn’t do something incredibly stupid that puts us all at risk – like leaving a cigarette or a candle burning. I certainly don’t want to become the focus for his wrath. They just bought the house and moved in last summer, so I’m guessing they aren’t going anywhere too soon, and I’m certainly not moving, so I guess we have to live side by side and stay out of each other’s way.

Any thoughts for improving the situation, oh wise bloggy friends? Or do you have a neighbours from hell story that would make me drop to my knees and thank god for the delinquent next door?