Category: Uncategorized

Another meme!

Troy, the Percipent Scribe, has thrown down a gauntlet I can’t refuse. (Funny how the phrase “throw down the gauntlet” has survived so much longer than actual gauntlets, isn’t it? Not terribly practical, those gauntlets. Not that this has anything to do with Troy. He’s not obsolete yet.) He’s tagged me with the ubiquitous book meme, and I couldn’t resist.

Number of books I own: A lot! I hoard a lot of things, but I hoard books above all else. And I married a book hoarder. Really, we shouldn’t be allowed to breed, us mutual book hoarders, because there just isn’t enough space in the house. I have no idea how many books we have, but there are five bookcases I can think of, plus happy piles of paperbacks and magazines everywhere, and I think another box or two of books tucked in my bedroom closet since we moved two years ago. And another box of paperbacks in the garage that didn’t sell at the garage sale last summer but that I am now re-thinking discarding because who knows, I might want to re-read them some day even if they are trashy. A lot of books.

Last book I bought: um… thinking… thinking… hmph. Been a long time since I bought a book. Between the library’s wonderful online reservation queue and the steady diet of pulp paperbacks from my mother (she reads at least one a week), I’m sure it’s been six months since I bought a book for myself. Most likely, the last thing I bought was for the boys, probably a Sandra Boynton or maybe something with Bob the Builder.

Last book I read: Finished Stephen King’s On Writing yesterday. Excellent!

Five books that mean a lot to me: Crap, this is hard. Authors would be easier than books, but let’s give it a try.

1. Contact by Carl Sagan: I went to a Catholic high school, and during our Grade 13 grad mass, my history teacher who happened to be an Oblate priest talked about this book in his sermon, and the first summer I lived out here (1988) I bought it. I have it in paperback, hardcover, unabridged audio book on CD and a VHS copy of the movie. I simply adore this book. I love the examination of the relationship between science and religion, but I also think it’s just a really great story. The movie is not bad but the book is amazing.

2. Generation X by Douglas Coupland: I credit this book as one of the forces that gave me enough courage to shake off my unhealthy marriage and set off to find a better me. It opened my mind to the fact that I was way too young to be cloistered from the world in a marriage that was doing me more harm than good. Every book of Coupland’s does that to me – connects startlingly with my inner self, the self that I lose in the minutia of daily life. (I once went to a reading by Douglas Coupland at the national library, I think it was when Life After God came out. I met an old friend in the queue to get our books autographed, and he inscribed my friend’s book, “Tom, thanks for helping me knock over that 7-11. Your pal, Doug.” If by some fluke of the universe I am ever in a position to be autographing my books for people, I plan to be that kind of quirky.)

3. Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro: Really, this could be any of Alice Munro’s books, but I list this one because I so clearly remember ‘discovering’ Alice Munro in Grade 9 through the short story “An Ounce of Cure” from this collection. I was fascinated by this story because it was about someone young like me but not written with the cloying simplicity or condescention prevalent in most stories about young people. I have also loved Alice Munro for decades because her stories are often set in the southern Ontario that is the geographic backdrop of my childhood. Her writing resonates with me on more levels than I can explain.

4. An Acre of Time by Phil Jenkins: I was in the car one day, just pulling into the mall parking lot, listening to a discussion about this book on CBC radio and I was so intrigued I went straight to the bookstore and bought it. It’s – well, it’s incredibly hard to describe, but it’s a book about an acre of land just a mile or two west of the Parliament Buildings here in Ottawa. It discusses the physical history of this land, from Pangea to the bottom of the Champlain Sea to the natives to the first French explorers and courriers du bois (phew, worked in some French for Troy!) to the working class families who settled there when Ottawa was a hard-core lumber town to the great fire of 1902 (?) to the expropriation of those workers’ homes to build a grand boulevard leading to the Parliament Buildings in the 1960s to an empty and abandoned acre of grassland in the heart of the city. It’s a geographical, political, sociological and anthropological (among other things) history of Ottawa as seen through the prism of this single acre of land. If you’re in the least interested in the history of Ottawa or even Canada, it’s a great read and very unique.

5. Shoeless Joe by WP Kinsella : Actually, any of the baseball stories by WP Kinsella will do. I also loved The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and Box Socials. I have a thing for magic realism (see Alice Munro reference above) and quirky characters, and Kinsella’s work is filled with both. Kinsella captures a sense wonder and innocence, weaves it together with baseball folklore, and bastes it with gentle humour. His books are emotional comfort food.

Phew, that was almost as many words as I have books! This is a bit of an onerous task, but I love to see what books other people hold sacred, so I will gently tap on the shoulder a few souls and politely ask them if they would like to play. No pressure, but consider yourself invited if you’ve got nothing better to do.

Let’s see, how about Ann, Cooper, Mommy-Abroad, Andrea and YOU! (Yep, leaving this one open to pretty much anyone who wants to play. What can I say, I’m feeling inclusive today.)

Categories: memes

Like so much in technology and the rest of my life, I am wondering why I waited so long. I have discovered Flickr, and it is good.

Check out my funky little Flickr photo badge over there —>
in the sidebar. Scroll down, it’s under the Blogroll. What do you think? Pretty cool, eh? You can click on it to see the photos, and you can comment on them or tag them… so much more than I am currently doing, which is just posting them in an album. I’m on vacation this week, so hopefully I can play around with it and learn a bit more about it. Anything is better than using the excrutiating Hello to post photos to Blogger.

Happy weekend!

Categories: blogging

To borrow a phrase from the inimitable Jen at MUBAR, today we swim in the shallow end of the pool.

I’m going to get my hair cut today. As I mentioned before, I spend a lot of money on haircuts. Well, it seems like a lot of money to me. Enough that I try to remain obtusely vague when the costs of haircuts comes up in conversation with Beloved. Ignorance is bliss.

Haircut day is full of mixed emotions. I am excited, because today maybe I’ll turn out like one of those “after” girls in the makeover shows. Maybe today is the day I get the haircut that looks just as good two weeks from Wednesday as it does when I’m flouncing out of the salon, preening at my reflection in the chrome on the escalator. A good haircut can succeed where a month of Weight Watchers has failed.

Haircut day is also full of anxiety. What if he gives me a really bad haircut? What if he cuts it too short? Has my hair really been bothering me enough lately to get it cut? What if it’s worse after than before? What if his wife didn’t put out last night and he burnt his toast this morning and someone was parked in his spot and he’s feeling particularly cranky and takes out his frustrations on my hapless hair?

Okay, so I have hair issues. And probably social issues, too. A blog for another day?

Actually, I really like the guy who cuts my hair. He’s been doing it for seven or eight years (did I mention I’m not good with change?) and when I first started seeing him he reminded me a lot of Rob Lowe. We’ve both aged since then, but we continue to flirt affectionately, and going for a haircut is as much about having my ego stroked as getting my locks trimmed.

He’s been my arm’s length confidante on just about everything over the better part of the last decade: my wedding to Beloved, trying to conceive and infertility treatments, the arrivals of Tristan and Simon, and my crawl up the corporate ladder, not to mention the endless minutia of my daily life. He probably knows about as much about me as you do, if you drop by often enough. Certainly he knows me as well as if not better than a lot of my friends. Why is it we talk so sincerely and candidly to hair stylists, anyway?

Finding a stylist I trusted took me a long time. For the most part, I am completely intimidated by male stylists. But I find that women stylists tend to have their own ideas about how your hair should/could look and style to their ideal rather than your request.

Granted, I am not an easy customer, and usually walk in and say something to James like, “I think maybe it’s time to cut it shorter. I’d like it more, you know, flippy. Kind of ‘suburban MILF in the boardroom chic meets nature girl.’ But not too short. Shorter, but not shorter. You know, just fix it. ” And bless his heart, he does.

Do you agonize over hair? Are you brave, trying new colours and styles on a seasonal basis? Do you buy high-end salon products? (It is a running debate between James and I – he continues to be horrified that I buy drug store shampoo, even though I assure him I buy the ‘expensive’ stuff at $6 a bottle. Did I mention I’m mostly cheap, too?) Or are you one of those people who cuts your own hair once every six months? (I am actually saying that with admiration. I could save a fortune if I could wean myself off downtown salon prices!)

Or are you muttering to yourself about the 90 seconds of your life you just wasted reading this drivel when you could have been filing your toe nails or taking a leak?

On Tuesday, the American Film Institute came out with their list of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. I read through them, and while there were a few smiles and nods and “Yah, I loved that movie” warm fuzzies, for the most part their choices left me kind of flat.

Where are the Monty Python quotes? (“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”) Not a single John Hughes film? I think I could fill a top 50 list with just The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (“The world’s an imperfect place, sir. Screws fall out all the time.” Or, “It’s a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.”)

And nothing from A Christmas Story? I could go on for days on that one! (“Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian.” Or, “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master.” Or, “He looks like a deranged Easter Bunny.”)

And while AFI did give the nod to Field of Dreams’s “If you build it, they will come”, they completely ignored the best baseball movie of all time: Bull Durham. Just a sampling:

“Yeah? From what I hear, you couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a fucking boat.”

“Don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club.”

“Well, he fucks like he pitches – sorta all over the place.”

“Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?”

and of course:

“Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fibre, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”

And what of The Princess Bride, truly one of the most quotable films ever? Don’t remember the dialogue? It’s time to watch this classic again! At least check out the quotes page on IMDB.

I could go on for a while here. I think the problem is that what AFI calls a memorable quote I simply see as a tag line that everybody and his brother mimics and paraphrases. Anyone can get lucky and crank out a tag line – it takes talent to write a movie that people memorize verbatim.

Ever erudite and often ahead of the curve, Troy of Lowly Scribe came out with a great list of movie quotes a couple of days ago. He wondered what insights into a person’s psychological makeup you could glean from their list of favourite movie quotes. Frankly, I like his list better than AFI’s.

What say ye, citizens of blogdom? What’s your favourite movie quote? What makes it memorable?

How do you make decisions? Big decisions, I mean. It’s true, I have a lot of trouble with little decisions, like what to have for dinner every damn day (a blog for another day) and what to wear and whether to choose the Berrylicious or the Summer Bronze gloss.

But if I have trouble with minutia, I positively agonize over big decisions. I’ve found myself at a fork in my career path. Remember that competitive process I was talking about? Seems I did pretty well. So well, in fact, that I have two offers on the table, much to my shock and dismay. (I tell you, there’s just no pleasing some people!)

Down one road lies a change in direction, probably a new way of working, a shift out of my comfort zone… and a permanent increase in salary and responsibility. Plus the chance to work with someone I really like and admire, but with whom I have never worked before.

Down the other road lies more of what I’ve been doing for the last year or two, with a temporary increase in salary and responsibility (an acting assignment rather than a permanent offer, for those of you who speak government.) Also down this path is my current manager, mentor and substitute mother, easily the best person I have ever worked for and with.

I wasn’t expecting to be given the choice, and I have to admit that I didn’t handle the surprise well. I was a wreck yesterday and I’m not entirely sure why. It’s quite silly that I would be upset really. As one colleague said, “You don’t look very happy for a girl with the world at her feet.”

In the fresh light of morning, I think being caught off guard in having to make any choice at all was a part of my reaction. I’m not good with change at the best of times, but change that jumps out of the bushes and surprises you is worse. The fact that I had less than 24 hours to make my choice didn’t help matters, either.

The largest part, however, was the fact that after feeling overwhelmed and out of control for quite a while, I have just recently settled in again. Ever since my epic wail for help, I have been feeling (touch wood) ever so much better. Quite wonderful, in fact. And Shrek may say, “Change is good, Donkey,” but I’m not convinced I agree with him. 103rd thing about me: not good with change.

Sorry for the navel-gazing today. Still working through my decision, I guess. I have, in fact, made my decision, but I haven’t told anybody here yet. If you’re curious, let me know and I’ll talk about it some more another time.

So back to my original question: when big decisions are thrust upon you, how do you handle them? Do you ponder? (Yvonne, I’m nodding in your direction!) Do you leap? Do you consult? (I live my life by consultation. Did you know that just by virtue of stumbling by, you are a member of the Danigirl Board of Management?) Do you write long lists of pros and cons? Do you flip coins? And sure, tell me what you would do if you were me. I’m curious!

There’s a problem with blog.

GASP! No, you cry, say it ain’t so. A problem? With BLOG?

You see, I’m running out of things to talk about. Not here, of course. Good god knows I’ll pass off just about anything as a post these days. Don’t think I don’t have that whole ‘grocery list’ thing floating around in the back of my head just in case times get lean.

But I’ve suckered so many of my family and friends into coming here on a regular basis that I’ve run out of things to tell them in person. For example, I was having coffee with friends the other day:

Me: You should hear Simon saying ‘please’ these days… (settles into anecdote mode).
Friends: We know, we read about it.

Me: Oh yeah.
(awkward silence)

Me: So I read this really terrific book called the Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s about this guy…
Friends (interrupting): We know.

Me: Right. Um…
(more awkward silence)

Me: So, did I tell you about this really amazing nap I had out on the glider for about an hour and a half yesterday?
Friends: Hey! That wasn’t you, that was Marla!

Me (sheepishly): Oh, hey, really? I, um, got a little mixed up I guess. Well, nice seeing you guys again. I gotta run, I think I left the kettle on. Bye! (slinking out the door)

So I either need to find some new friends, or I need all my old friends to stop dropping by blog. Anybody know where I can get some new friends? (Damn, and it was such a lot of hard work cultivating the first batch!)

A few years ago, I spent a while talking to a psychologist trying to untangle some of the knots my ex-husband left behind, and one day she told me that after hearing so much about my childhood and how I felt about growing up, one of the best things I could do with my life was to raise a couple of kids the way my parents raised me. Is that not the most amazing compliment you can ever imagine?

In response to my 101 things post, Cooper from Been There – which is a really good blog, BTW – said, “What did your parents do right and why did you love your childhood (outside of school) so much? I want to know this so I can do that for my kids. Tell me!”

I had to think about this for a while, but I think the answer is that I always felt secure. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was loved: by my parents, two sets of grandparents, even my pesty younger brother. Unconditional love builds a safety net so that you have the courage to stretch yourself out a little bit, to try new things, to be brave, knowing that if you don’t quite make it, there will be someone there to catch you, or at least pick you up and dust you off and work out some of the dents in your ego before sending you off to try again.

Also, my parents worked fairly hard at preserving my innocence. Ignorance truly is bliss. While I could tell you in graphic detail where babies came from for as long as I can remember, I had no idea that for the first years of my life my parents barely had two nickles to rub together. My granny used to buy clothes for me, because my folks just couldn’t afford it. I had no idea until I was much older. And while I was reading the newspaper daily starting when I was in elementary school, and we watched the news every night, somehow I managed to stay completely sheltered of the cruelties of the world for most of my childhood.

It helps, too, that my parents were very much in love, and I can’t recall a single instance of them fighting, truly fighting, in front of us. Conversely, I wonder if this is where my fear of conflict comes from (hey, make that 102 things about me – I don’t think I mentioned I have a deeply entrenched fear of conflict and hate fighting of any kind) and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to see that people can fight and resolve a situation rather than just not seeing the fighting in the first place.

One thing that makes me a little bit sad that my boys won’t have the freedom I had, because I have so many happy memories of just taking off and wandering around the neighbourhood when I was just five or six or seven years old, or playing hide and seek with the neighbourhood gang until it was too dark to see. It makes me a little sad that they will grow up in such a different kind of world than I did. I used to walk to school and back again every day by myself at the age of four – can you imagine that happening today?

What do you guys think? What makes for a happy childhood? What will you do that your parents did, or what will you desperately hope you will never do?

We have one of those oversized inflatable kiddie pools in our backyard. It’s 12 feet across, and the water is maybe 26 inches deep. I got it last year at the end of July as a birthday present from my men, and I think the temperatures were nice enough to swim maybe four or five times the rest of that summer.

Through the winter, we debated on whether to put it up again this year. It was, frankly, a heck of a lot of bother and wasted space considering the amount of enjoyment we got out of it. One of the major impediments to my enjoyment was that my darling Tristan pooped in the pool around day five that we had it up, and no amount of chlorine ever convinced me the water was clean again.

We finally decided that putting the pool up again this year would be less work than filling in the 12′ crop circle in the back yard. I’m so glad we did! We’ve had an early summer heat wave for the last two weekends, and temperatures have topped out around 30 degrees before the humidity. Factor in the humidity and we’re warm enough to be our own sun. And sweaty enough to fill our own saltwater lake.

We’ve gotten more than our money’s worth so far this season. We’ve been in swimming each day on the weekends and on my Mondays off. A couple of days it was hot enough to go in twice. The only problem is, we’re a dirty lot. We’re sweaty, we’ve got sunscreen glommed on us, and we have to walk through the grass to get into the pool, grass which loves to go for a swim with us.

It probably doesn’t help that I got a great deal on a sand and water table at a garage sale last Saturday, and somehow we managed to buy the kind of sand that has a mind of its own and hides in cracks and crevices, using sunscreen as glue, only disengaging itself from the boys when they are in the middle of the living room — or in the pool.

You see, I’ve become a little bit obsessed about keeping the pool clean. I’ve never had a pool before, so this whole routine is new to me. I feel like a scientist with my little box of chemicals and test strips. I run the filter regularly, setting the oven timer so I don’t leave it on all night (or for an entire week, as happened last summer.) I even have a bunch of pool care Web sites bookmarked, where I learned the wonders of baking soda for Ph balance.

But what I really love to do is skim the pool. I could skim the pool for hours. There is something oddly satisfying about working my way down the flotsam chain from drowned wasps to grass blades to dandilion fuzz to sand grains to particles so small I have to squint to see them. There is a meditational zen in scudding my skimmer into a settled pile of sediment and scooping up the debris, sweeping it through the water and slapping it out onto the lawn. Move over two inches and repeat. Move over two inches and repeat. I could pass an entire afternoon ensuring the water is as clean and clear as anything that flows from a Swiss spring.

And this summer, I’ve realized that the optimum place to stand is not at the edge of the pool, but in the middle of the pool. The water only comes up to the middle of my thigh, a few inches under the cuff of my shorts, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Bright sun, warm air and tepid poolwater – the summer trifecta.

Now if only I could get half as interested in picking up the avalanche of toys that are taking over my living room. Or de-crumming the kitchen. Or maybe even putting away the folded laundry. What is it about outdoor chores that makes them so much less tedious than indoor chores?