Explored!

Remember way back on Friday, when I wrote that post talking about how I’d finally given my head a shake and stopped worrying about having Flickr acknowledge the merits of my photographs with it’s “Explore” feature?

Snicker.

About 22 hours after I wrote that post, I snapped this photograph:

75:365 Rainy bokeh

And guess what? It got Explored! That means Flickr recognized it as one of the 500 most interesting photographs posted on April 5. Since Flickr gets about 6500 new photos every minute, I’m pretty excited. Lookit, here’s my souvenir poster!

My first Explore!

As I noted on the photograph’s page, some times you spend hours setting up a shot and taking 150 microscopically different versions, spend more hours tweaking and fixing and adjusting in photoshop, and you still have a very ordinary photograph. And some days, you plunk the tripod on the porch and balance the baby on your hip to snap a couple of images with one hand while trying to keep all three of you (you, the baby and the camera) out of the rain, and it’s a work of art. Go figure!

Zed-versus-Zee, the first in a series of reruns

Here’s another secret I’ve been keeping from you. (Two secrets in one month. Can you believe it?) I’ve been asked to guest-blog this week over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog. How cool is that? My first post should be up there later today – come on over and say hello! (Edited to add: it’s up!!)

I didn’t want to leave poor old blog completely neglected, though, and there simply isn’t enough time for two blogs and a photo habit this week. Instead, I’ve plumbed by not-inconsiderable archives to find a few favourite posts to share with you this week. You can call them re-runs, I’ll call them buried treasures.

First up, from 2005: Zed-versus-Zee, A Love Letter to Nancy.

It’s Nancy’s fault. She asked “So, which one is it (zed or zee)? Anyone know? And should we really care? Is it really a Canadian versus American thing? Or something else?”

Ooo ooo ooo! (dances in chair, waving hand in the air) I know, I know! I care!!

In fact, my darling Nancy, it is not so much a Canadian thing to say “zed” as it is an American thing to say “zee”. According to wikipedia:

In almost all forms of Commonwealth English, the letter is named zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta. Other European languages use a similar form, e.g. the French zède, Spanish and Italian zeta. The American English form zee derives from an English late 17th-century dialectal form, now obsolete in England.

Is it really worth all this debate? Even Shakespeare himself cast aspersions on the dignity of the 26th letter of the alphabet with an insult I’m going to try to work into at least two conversations today: Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! (King Lear, act II, scene II.)

You got me curious, though, so I did a little bit more research on the subject. According to the Concise Oxford Companion, “The modification of zed to zee appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc.” It seems Noah Webster, the dictionary guru, seems to have mass-marketed the “zee” pronunciation, along with the incorrect spelling of “centre”.

Apparently we Canadians aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of the Americanization of the “Sesame Street” phenomenon you mentioned and its influence on how you learned to say zee versus zed. I found a research paper titled, “Can Sesame Street bridge the Pacific Ocean? The effects of American television on the Australian language.” The introduction to her thesis talks about how just like here, Australian kids learn to say “zee” by watching Sesame Street and their parents correct them to say “zed”.

Sesame Street’s influence also gets mentioned in this chapter from the textbook Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance. He says,

With the use of “zee” stigmatized, it is perhaps strange that children should learn it at all. One source is pre-school television shows beamed from the United States, notably one called Sesame Street, which was almost universally watched by children in the 1960s when it had no serious rivals… Sesame Street and its imitators promote the alphabet with zeal, almost as a fetish, thus ensuring that their young viewers hear it early and recite it often. The “zee” pronunciation is reinforced especially by the “Alphabet Song,” a piece of doggerel set to music that ends with these lines:

ell em en oh pee cue,
ar ess tee,
yoo vee double-yoo, eks wye zee.
Now I know my ey bee sees,
Next time, won’t you sing with me?

The rhyme of “zee” with “tee” is ruined if it is pronounced “zed,” a fact that seems so salient that many Ontario nursery school teachers retain it in the song even though they would never use it elsewhere.

More than just ending the alphabet song with a jarring non-rhyme, the zed/zee conundrum poses problems for people trying to market technology across the border. CNews reports on a Toronto law firm who lobbied Bell Canada and Nortel to change the pronunciation from “zee” to “zed” in the directory on their voice mail system:

“We’ve had inquiries about why it is the way it is when we’re Canadian,” said Tammie Manning, a communications analyst at the law firm. “(People said) we’re not the States. We’re independent. Why should we be subjected to that?”

Several officials from Nortel insisted the technology to make the switch from “zee” to “zed” was simply not yet available. But by mid-afternoon Friday, following several calls from a reporter, the company’s director of corporate communications said Nortel would change the “zee” to “zed” as soon as possible.

And then, of course, there is the infamous Joe Canadian rant from Molson’s, which although overplayed and out of date, still merits mention in the discussion:

Hey, I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader, and I don’t live in an igloo, or eat blubber or own a dogsled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a Prime Minister… not a president, I speak English and French, not American and I pronounce it About, not A-boot.

I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack, I believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it IS pronounced Zed, not Zee… ZED!! Canada is the 2nd largest land mass, the 1st nation of hockey, and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I AM CANADIAN! Thank you.

So you see, dearest Nancy, it DOES matter, in a patriotic sort of way. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

Project 365: Confessions of a Praise Junkie

I’ve been thinking this week about how much my Project 365 experience has mirrored my blogging experience, at least in the early days. In both cases, I started out on a whim with no plan except to satisfy a creative urge. And in both cases, I got totally sucked in by the comments and feedback, and the gravitational pull of that praise pulled me completely out of my own orbit. Both have been extremely satisfying, but my own insatiable need for external validation has completely hijacked any sense of doing the thing simply for its own merit.

Until I started up the 365, I was only marginally aware of Flickr’s “Interestingness” feature. The idea is that through a secretive algorithm that encompasses number of times a photo is viewed, number of comments, groups to which the photo belongs, and number of times someone selects the photo as a favourite, Flickr assigns an “interestingness” value. Thanks to a third-party hack, I’ve made up a little set of my 20 most “interesting” photos at any given time — it changes daily.

Flickr also chooses the 500 most “interesting” photos each day and puts them in its own showcase, called “Explore“. I get a lot of inspiration and ideas just from paging through some of the great pictures on Explore, but it never would have occured to me that some day one of my pictures might make it up there. My main 365 group on Flickr seems to have extraordinary success in having their photos “explored” though — more than 100 of them in March alone.

Suddenly, I began to think that maybe I could get one of my photos in Explore, too. I started looking at the factors that go into the algorithm and thinking, hey, I’m pretty close on some of these. And then, I found myself disappointed when people weren’t commenting or favouriting my photos because I wanted that spot in Explore so badly. (Because that, too, is a feature of my personality — the pattern that goes oblivion -> awareness -> desire -> obsession.)

And then this week I realized that I was actually causing myself no small amount of anxiety in my covetousness of this arcane little bit of recognition and I gave my head a shake and said, “Why are you doing this project? Are you doing this to express your creativity and improve your skills, or are you doing this for some sort of esoteric bragging rights?” I don’t know why I let myself get my knickers in a twist over something like this in the first place, but it was a huge relief to absolve myself of the need for that particular bit of praise and get back to taking pictures because they were interesting, instead of Interesting. Or just, you know, pretty.

(The big irony is that Flickr must be well aware of how deeply some of us desire that spot on Explore, because on April 1st all of my photos were deemed worthy of Explore! April Fools or not, I was happy to grab a souvenir poster that marks membership into this exclusive club.)

Ahem, anyway, here are this week’s pictures. All of them have captions on Flickr, if you’re curious as to the story behind the photo. None of them have been Explored — but I like them nonetheless!

67:365 Sunrise on Mooney's Bay
67:365 Sunrise on Mooney’s Bay

68:365 Back in the day
68:365 Back in the day

69:365 Slinky
69:365 Slinky

70:365 Fool's Gold
70:365 Fool’s Gold*

71:365 The wonders of spring
71:365 The wonders of spring

72:365 Just dropping by
72:365 Just dropping by

73:365 Starbucks revisited
73:365 Starbucks revisited

* For a theme on ‘Fool’s Gold’. My caption said “Oh, pyrite? I thought you said pirate!” I also lamented how it’s difficult to compose a good shot when the talent keeps trying to eat the props.

Time Travel, recycled and re-used!

This is the first meme I ever did, and I liked it so much I did it again the next year. I intended to do it every year, but — like so many of my great intentions — seem to have lost it in the shuffle. As Homer said about the roasted pig: “It’s still good!”

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • finalizing my divorce (big, happy smile)
  • unpacking boxes after moving in to my first “own” place, a room rented in a student house in the Glebe shared with five other people
  • delirious with reclaimed freedom and terrified of being out on my own

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • finaling the plans for our July wedding (another big, happy smile!)
  • living in the Glebe a block away from that student house, in a gorgeous little bo-ho attic apartment with a balcony perched off the kitchen like a tree house
  • a month away from finding Katie, the world’s best doggie and my first baby

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • at home on maternity leave, with a newborn (Simon) and a two year old (Tristan) in the house
  • massively, pathetically sleep-deprived
  • a post-partum hormonal toxic disaster

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • at home on maternity leave with a newborn, a four-year old and a six-year old in the house!
  • coping with three much better than I coped with two, having just laid off our first nanny
  • taking Lucas for his first visit to the Children’s Hospital

This year I am:

  • thrilled with my new four-day work weeks
  • obsessed with photography in much the same way I’ve been obsessed with blogging for the past four years
  • very, very busy but very, very happy

Today I:

  • forgot to buy my April bus pass (the driver let me ride anyway, bless him) and forgot my building pass at home. Sigh.
  • will celebrate the early spring warmth by going for a photo-expedition at lunch time, perhaps behind the Parliament Buildings or over to the National Gallery.
  • am worried about my dad.*

Next year I hope:

  • to have a little bit more free time on my hands
  • to have a little bit more control over the chaos and a few more projects checked off the to-do list
  • to be doing more or less exactly what I’m doing now — but better!

(You like the vagueness here? Goal-setting was never one of my strengths!)

In five years I hope:

  • to be thinking about looking for a four-bedroom house
  • to be *this close* to having all three boys in school full-time
  • to be rejigging my priorities to be putting a little bit more emphasis back on my career

This was really fun to do, and surprisingly difficult on the prognostication parts. It’s quite interesting to read the ones I’ve written before and see what I chose to note as important at that time, too!

Let me know if you play along!

* My dad is in the hospital with a subdural hematoma, and they’ll have to operate some time in the next few days to relieve the pressure on his brain. It sounds a little bit too much like an episode of House for my liking. They don’t know exactly how it happened, but suspect it came from a tumble down some stairs quite a few weeks ago.

This is cool – Invisible Labels from Mabel

I’ve said before I’m a fan of Mabel’s Labels, and they just keep setting the bar higher with new and interesting products. They kindly offered me and my readers a limited-time special offer discount of 15% off any order to celebrate the arrival of their new line of Invisible Sticky Labels. I’ve often wanted to have a more discreet label,and this would work perfectly. I’m getting them for all my camera equipment. Click through before noon on Thursday to receive 15% off your entire order!

mabelapril

It’s still March, I have time to squeeze in one more post about breasts!!

So now that we’ve established that March is officially breast month here, let’s end the month with a flourish, shall we? And then we’ll have to find something else to talk about in April, lest I be compelled to change the blog name to “Postcards from my Bra”. Penises, perhaps?

Ahem, anyway, here’s a little secret I never told you. (I *know*!! Who would have guessed that I was capable of keeping a secret from the Interwebs? Not me, and certainly not Beloved!!)

So anyway, about breasts. Right. Last summer, I did some research and asked my GP for a referral to have breast reduction surgery. This is something I’ve toyed with, pondered over, and secretly desired for most of my adult life. I was completely fed up with trying to find bras that fit; at the time, my measurements were in the 35-36 range for band size and an F or G in cup size — the land of cup sizes beyond DD gets a little sketchy in the consistency department. More than the ill-fitting bras and puckered buttons on my shirt-fronts, though, I was sick to death of constantly being damp and itchy under my breasts and from having to reach under me and tuck the damn things out of the way every time I rolled over in bed. (Pencil test – ha! I could keep an entire stationery store hidden under there.)

The final injustice, though, was the sheer number of times my nipples were knelt on or stepped on while a toddler or child moved anywhere near me in bed. After a lifetime of being vexed by my breasts at every opportunity, I was more than happy to chop them down to a more manageable size. The idea of being a C cup seemed like winning the lottery… and if they would throw in a wee bit of a lift to get my nipples up and out of risk of being tucked into my waistband, so much the better.

After screwing up my courage for a couple of weeks, at my annual physical I asked my GP to make the referral for me. I wasn’t sure what kind of wait list I’d be facing, and I wasn’t ready to actually go through with the surgery until some time this summer or later, but I wanted to get in and see someone and explore my options. To my great consternation, a couple of weeks later my GP called to say that the surgeon wouldn’t even see me until my body mass index (BMI) was below 22, which would be at around 176 lbs for me. I’d just started the week before with Dr Bishop’s weight loss plan, and at the time I weighed 191 lbs.

I was furious. Furious! Not so much because I’d been thwarted — I wasn’t exactly convinced that I wanted the reduction in the first place. I was angry, though, that someone shaped like me could be denied this surgery sight-unseen, based solely on what are increasingly questionable calculations. No doubt I was overweight, but I was far from obese. I felt like the doctor should have at least seen me and assessed me in person.

By the time I was down below 170 lbs and within the surgeon’s “acceptable” weight range for a consult, I had lost my courage again. I haven’t called back to make the appointment. Part of that is, of course, because when you lose 30+ lbs, you do lose inches everywhere, breasts included. Part of that is the fact that we’re likely within weeks if not days of weaning Lucas — or, more specifically, of Lucas weaning himself. My band size is back down to a 32 or 33, and my cup size is somewhere just above a DD. To paraphrase an old favourite quote of mine, I used to be a 34DD, now I’m a 34 long. I’d still like to get it done, but I’m just not sure if the annoyance factor of dealing with my breasts as they are outweighs the annoyance factor of going through with the surgery.

I may yet screw up my courage enough to follow through on this, but for now I’ll wait it out and see how the ‘chafe’ factor plays out this summer. In the interim, though, I really do have to get myself a couple of quality bras. None of my old pre-pregnancy ones fit anymore — that in itself is enough to keep me happy for the time being!

Project 365 week 9 — or something like that

The best thing and the worst thing about taking a picture every single day is that your glory and your defeat are only locked in for 24 hours; after that, the slate is clean and you start all over again. That seems to be the theme of this week, where I took a couple of great pictures and a couple of “meh” pictures, and now I foist them all upon you.

I loved my four-part series of these paintbrushes and the palette. (All bought by our wonderful nanny at the dollar store of all places, to keep the boys busy during March Break. I just loved how the colours of the brushes reflect the colours in the palette, though.)

61:365 Paintbrushes

This experiment was less successful. The idea is that you put a shaped filter over your lens so that the out-of-focus areas (called bokeh) take on the shape of the filter. The points of light are just ordinary Christmas LEDs, and I made the filter with a craft punch. It didn’t turn out great, but I think I at least understand why now.

60:365 Happy Spring!

Some opportunities presented themselves to me on the way to or from work:

57:365 Chucks up

59:365 Bike shadow

64:365 Bongo dude

63:365 Please play again

(This was for a theme on “secrets”. A bit of a stretch, I know.)

66:365 vanishing point

I really liked this old abadoned barn. I found it on Sunday morning, driving around with Lucas sleeping in the back seat of the van.

62:365 Deserted barn

It’s within plain sight of the grocery store I’ve been shopping at for six years, and yet somehow I never noticed it before. I spent quite a while poking around here, and will likely return. That’s one thing I truly love about this photo-a-day project — the things you find when you simply open your eyes!

And this is my other favourite from the week. The other day, a friend lamented on Twitter that she was facing a Sisyphean day, and I had one of those “Aha!” moments. Not the first adjective I’d go to, but one that *perfectly* describes this low-level ennui that has been plaguing me for a week or so. Poor old Sisyphus, who pushed a boulder up a hill every single day only to have to start over again the next day. Sigh.

65:365 Sisyphus

(Don’t you love the expression? And yes, that’s Princess Leia’s hair. It’s the only girl hair we have in our surprisingly extensive Lego mini-fig collection. As I noted in the caption to this photo, didn’t every little girl who grew up in the 70s and 80s want to be Princess Leia at some point? And no that’s not a mustache, it’s a shadow!)

When I look at these and compare them objectively to the photos I was taking and posting just a couple of months ago, I know there is an appreciable improvement. But Flickr has opened my eyes to a world of photographers who are creating some stunning images, and my confidence in my own work falters as a result. I have to keep reminding myself to compare myself to me, and not to them. It’s hard!

Continuing right along with the boob theme…

I’m not sure why March’s post seem to be predominately themed around breasts and breastfeeding and bras and boobs, but here we go again! (Hey, whatever works, right?)

Not too long ago, I was offered the chance to review some mom and baby products. Being a mom and having a baby, I was open to the idea in general, but when I heard one of the product lines was Burt’s Bees, I was all over that. I swear by those little tins of Burts Bees lip balm (I keep one in my winter jacket pocket and one on my bedside table – I really love them!), and I like their shimmery lip gloss, too.

I got a great little care package that included one container of Burt’s Bees Baby Shampoo and Wash, which I really like and use every time I bathe Lucas. The rest of the care package comprised a nice little collection of products from a line that I’d not heard of before: Mama Mio Skincare.

They sent me a moisturizing shower gel, a body buff exfoliating cream, and a (snicker) Boob Tube bust-firming cream. More on that in a second.

First, I love love love the Body Buff cream. I noticed on the website that Milla Jovovich apparently uses it in the shower, but I like to use it on dry (literally, dry and flaking) skin. It’s perfect for that bit on the back of your arms that always seems kind of chicken-skinish. I rub it on my winter-weary arms when I’m going to wear short sleeves, and between the buff and my new addiction to the rowing machine, my pipes are looking pretty damn good these days!

And about that Boob Tube… okay, nothing short of a breast reduction is going to give me any lift, but I have to admit that I’ve been holding off on really giving this one a test drive until turtleneck season is done. Here’s what the Mama Mio people say about it:

Mama Mio Boob Tube is designed to help avoid the classic lifecycle of every boob – gorgeous young boob (perky), pregnant boob (big), a nursing boob (bigger) and finally no-longer-nursing or slightly older boob (saggy). You want smaller but pert right? (Ok actually you want big and pert – but alas we can’t help with that!).

Who loves it? It seems EVERYBODY! Already winning 5 industry awards, Boob Tube is even recommended by plastic surgeons to help skin cope and heal with bust surgery. We have a following of 18 year olds whose moms have told them that they should start to fight gravity now. Women of all ages are loving Boob Tube as a daily skin mantenance. Some women start using it as a pre-bikini booster (nothing like stripping to your bikini on a beach to focus the mind on skin care!). The list goes on and on… and if you happen to find us in stock of Boob Tube you are lucky because we sell out regularly.

Which brings me back to the first point: Got boobs? Then Boob Tube is for you.

So not only did I enjoy the products, I was impressed by Mama Mio’s cheeky and clever marketing. I’m always impressed when decent products and irreverent marketing meet!

And now, because I love you all so much, I’ve once again agreed to do a product review on the condition that I be allowed to share some of the booty (or, ahem, is that boobie?) with you. I’m happy to offer you a chance to win a Mama Mio BBB (that’s boobs, butt and bellies) kit. Here’s the fine print:

  1. In order to win, you (sorry!) must be a Canadian.
  2. You must leave a comment on this post before the end of day Sunday March 29, 2009.
  3. In your comment you must tell me about (at least) one of your favourite body parts. Got great legs? Glowing complexion? Brilliant eyes? Perfect earlobes? What physical feature do you love about yourself? (I’m partial to my own dimples, and my legs seem to be holding up well through the years — thanks Mom!)

That’s it! Winner will be chosen at random on Monday March 30.