Postcards from the Mothership

Copied directly from my referral log:

Mon 8 May 2006 22:04:00 ws.churchofscientology.org LOS ANGELES
http: q=”pants&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&filter=0&sa=N&start=10″

Nice, eh? Someone from the Church of Scientology in LA found blog last night while doing a Google Blog search on “pants”.

You know what? I really don’t want to know.

This government job of mine pays pretty well, and the benefit package has indisputable attraction. But all this playing with words and ideas and abstract concepts all day is getting a little old, and on the weekend I think I found my one true calling. I think it’s time for a career change.

I want to lay sod for a living.

Turns out I’m pretty good at it. Who knew?

We had ordered sod, enough for our front lawn and our next door neighbours, to be delivered Friday afternoon with the intention of laying it Saturday while my mom took the boys elsewhere. When I got home from work Friday and looked at the neat stacks of rolled sod sitting at the end of the driveway, though, all it seemed to be missing was a sign: FREE SOD, TAKE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN CARRY! So even though Beloved was working late, I asked my mother to take the boys to her place for dinner, and I set to laying the sod myself.

No doubt, laying sod is dirty work. I was wearing socks and running shoes and my toes were still black with earthy toe jam by the time I was done. But it is also extremely satisfying. When your lawn is only the width of six or seven rolls of sod, you can measure your progress quickly. There is a soothing rhythm to the pattern of lift, haul, drop, align, roll, tug, push, re-roll, re-align… well, you get it.

Instead of just laying the strips of sod down willy nilly, I laid out each piece with compulsive attention. I learned to butt the edges against each other and “sew” the seams together just like the guy in Canadian Tire recommended when I went in looking for a “sod cutter” and instead got a free 20 minute lecture on sod installation. (There’s no such thing as a sod cutter, as it turns out, and asking for a sod cutter marks you as a gardening naif the same way a tie and pocket protector dooms to you a certain social caste on the first day of high school.)

Now that I am a sod-laying professional, I can impart upon you the wisdom of my experience. Aren’t you lucky? For instance, if you are going to start laying sod on a Friday at dinnertime in suburbia, don’t do it on an empty stomach. The smell of the barbeques will make you very, very cranky.

If you ever want to meet your neighbours, spend some time on your hands and knees laying sod in your front yard. I talked to more residents of Barrhaven Friday afternoon than I have in the three years we’ve lived here. Nobody could pass by without offering some comment, except for the elderly Chinese couple who passed by several times and simply stopped to smile at me, beaming wordlessly at my feeble attempts at conversation. Passers-by were fairly evenly divided into those who offered tips (“Ah, the sod dance,” observed one fellow nostalgically as I stomped down the seams. “You missed a spot right over there.”) and those asking for advice. “Do you, you know, DO this?” said one well-dressed but particularly unarticulate woman. “Um, well, I’m doing it now,” I hedged. “But I’m a sod virgin. This is my first time.” She moved along without another word.

It took me about two hours to finish the front lawn, a patch maybe 275 square feet that took 30 rolls of sod. It also took about four hours the week before to turn all the soil and pull out the weeds that had already taken root this early in the season, and shave away the last scraggly remnants of old lawn. But it is lovely, so very lovely now. Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself.

Here’s the “lawn”, such as it was, about a month ago.

And here it is on Sunday morning, in all its luscious emerald glory:

Admire it now. With two boys who like dirt, shovels and trucks, and one slightly inattentive homeowner who has enough trouble ensuring the bipeds and the animals of the manor get water and nourishment, it will never last.

Think it’s too late for a career change? Sod laying and professional communications probably fall around the same salary range, right? Or maybe I could just freelance. You know, in all my spare time…

It’s bloggy book tour day again! This time, it’s my great pleasure to host the tour for It’s A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, edited by Andi Buchanan, the same brilliant editor behind the Literary Mama anthology and the companion book to this one, It’s A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons.

What’s that, you say? I know not whereof I speak, in the reviewing of essays by women about raising daughters, because I have no daughter of my own?

In fact, that’s why I found these essays so interesting. While you know I love my two boys, I’ve made no secret of coveting a daughter of my own, and maybe with a little luck this summer, frostie will turn out to be a baby of the internal plumbing variety.

So it was with a mixture of curiosity and covetness that I devoured the essays in It’s A Girl. I wanted the real scoop on raising girls – the princesses, the pink, the whole deal. Turns out, raising daughters is just like raising boys, except when it’s different.

On the whole, I found these essays wonderfully insightful, mostly charming and candidly honest. As with any anthology, some of the pieces are stronger than others, and some spoke to me with surprising directness. One essay in particular, “Ladylike” by Gabrielle Smith-Dluha, caught my attention, partly because of it’s opening paragraph, which describes her five-year-old daughter reciting rap lyrics that would make your mother blanche, and partly because her family situation so closely reflects the one I hope to create: two older brothers, followed by a daughter. It also contains the priceless scene of a mother trying to mitigate her daughter’s insistence on being one of the boys: “It’s even gone so far that when she admires and envies certain male body parts, I find myself saying, “Well, I love my vagina,” trying to toss off that phrase as comfortably and casually as I can.” I laughed out loud as I read that, drawing curious glances from the nearby patrons in the food-court as I lingered and read over lunch one day.

So even though I don’t yet have a daughter, I could relate to the many essays that considered the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. In particular, Ann Douglas’ “The Food Rules” and Joyce Maynards “The World’s Most Beautiful Baby – Take Two” do an excellent job of examining the shifting point of where a mother’s life ends and a daughter’s life begins, but from two very different perspectives.

The one thing that struck me as odd and ultimately unfortunate was that, especially in the first section of the book, author after author seems to take great pains to distance themselves from girliness – it would have been nice to see more celebration of the feminine, rather than resignation to it. After all, I’m dying to rush out and stock a closet with pink bonnets and ruffled bloomers, and I’m far from a girly-girl. But it’s a small complaint, all in all, spoken from someone who is wistful for feminine companionship after reading descriptions of daughters who love pink poodle cakes and play relationship games and have tea parties with Barbie.

And yet, for all my talk of coveting a girl, I read something like Catherine Newman’s “Baby Fat” and I have to admit there are landmines I probably will avoid, should I mother only boys in this world. She writes, of her chubby baby daughter,

…this person is going to have to grow up into a girl, and then into a woman, who feels good about herself. And that good feeling is going to have to come from us, from herself… Instead, there will be the nasty flotsam of impossible standards, the greasy black tides of contemptuous appraisal, and a disparaging undertow. She will be too fat or too thin, too bosomy or boardlike, too gangly-tall or stumpy. Whatever her anatomical coordinates, they will never be quite right.

I had this book sitting on my desk at work for a few days as I was reading it, and of all the books I’ve had in my cubicle, I think this is the one that generated the most attention. Almost all the women who noticed it picked it up and asked about it, because even those of us who aren’t mothers to daughters are daughters to mothers. It’s that kind of book – it has a little something for everyone, even mothers who spend more time with Thomas the Tank Engine than Barbie, and more time playing Giant Earth Crushing Monster With Green Boogers Is Eating New York than having tea parties with the stuffies.

I enjoyed the essays in It’s A Girl so much that now I’m off to find me a copy of It’s A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons. Because that’s something I know a little bit about.

Oops! I was supposed to be hosting the It’s A Girl : Women Writers on Raising Daughters book tour here today, but I forgot my copy of the book at home, and it has all my little notes and ideas and observations scrawled on an envelope tucked under the front cover. Bad Dani, BAD! So drop by later this evening, where I will post the entire review, complete with references.

Um, so, in the absence of that… (*sound of crickets*)

Okay, so these aren’t fully formed posts, but I have a bunch of notes on blogs and writing and books and stuff that I was going to tell you about, and I’m just going to dump them on you and let you make something out of them, cuz apparently I’m not thinking terribly well early on a Monday morning.

For example, here’s an article from Business Week about “blooks” – books from bloggers, and more specifically, books from blogs. The first half of the article talks about getting an actual publishing deal, and creating a book from a blog, which while I think is a relatively cool idea, I don’t think would ever happen in this dilettante writer’s lifetime. The second half of the article talks about making your own archival copy of blog into a book, which I would love to do some day. I’m surprised they don’t mention services like Blogbinders. Wouldn’t that be cool, to have a coffee-table version of blog? Some day I will do this, because my original way-back-when idea for this blog was to document the moments and minutia that have made up our early years with the boys, and having a paper copy of it sitting on the shelf somehow seems more tactile-y satisfying than booting up the computer to reminisce.

But, back to today – Micro Persuasion had a link this morning to an interesting article on blog plagarism. The article talks about not only having entire posts appropriated (Getupgrrl from the now defunct Chez Miscarriage, perhaps one of my favourite blog writers ever, didn’t keep an archive because of ongoing problems with plagarism), but even stealing Flickr photos and claiming credit for them.

One of the things the article mentions to mitigate the risk of plagarism is to only post snippets on their RSS feeds, instead of full posts. It never occured to me that this is why some people don’t let you read the whole post on an aggregator. Now I’m wondering if I should bother truncating my own feeds, as right now I have the full feed enabled.

This is a kind of weird discussion to have, because part of me thinks I’m a little full of myself to think that I write well enough to have anybody bother to plagarise me, but I will admit that I’ve occasionally run google searches on some lines from my favourite posts to see if they are getting lifted. So far, so good. I think I am relieved.

Any thoughts on all this? Would you buy a book based on your favourite blog, or is that a matter of not buying the cow when you can get the milk for free? If you loved a blogger’s style, would that be enough to make you buy their book? And what about blog plagarism? Have you seen it? If it happened, what would you do?
I have faith in you, clever commenters! You have a wonderful way of taking a dogpile of disorganized information and making an interesting discussion out of it – get to it!

We rented Tristan and Isolde on DVD last night. Not nearly as bad as I had expected, given it’s “don’t blink or you’ll miss it” duration at the box office. Loosely told and fairly true to the legend, but not legendary by any stretch.

But there’s one scene that freaked me out completely. It’s early in the movie, when Tristan and his followers face the invading Irish in a battle. Tristan is wounded with a poisoned sword, and his companions assume he is killed, so they set him off in a funereal boat with another boat for the only other man killed in the battle. The other fallen man’s name?

Simon.

Weirded me right out.

This isn’t a 10-pages-in book review, because it’s only a 95 page book, and they’re relatively small pages, and every second page is a picture. In fact, I swallowed the whole thing up like a slice of cheesecake in one enjoyable sitting.

I’m talking about Jennifer Margulis’ utterly delightful and charming Why Babies Do That, a delicious little snack of a book. I have to admit, when I received my review copy, I underestimated it at first. It looks more like one of the boys’ board books than a book for me.

And then I thought it was going to be one of those fluffy, pretty and generally useless books people feel compelled to give pregnant woman, something with lots of glossy pictures of smiling cherubs and platitudes, but ultimately devoid of practical information.

I was wrong. Not only is this book full of lovely pictures of smiling, and drooling, and sucking, and yawning, and crying babies, but it contains real nuggets of practical and interesting information about babies and why they do those charming but generally perplexing things babies do.

Covering everything from why do newborns open only one eye, and often cross their eyes when both eyes are open, to why do most babies lose the hair they are born with, to why do babies waddle when they walk, Jennifer Margulis offers mini-essays on dozens of adorable quirks of behaviour that are often mysterious to parents, both first-timers and old hands.

I gobbled this book up almost entirely on a single bus ride home from work one night, and I found myself beaming broadly as I read the various chapters, remembering these fleeting but universal baby behaviours. With a two- and four-year-old, I’m hardly distantly removed from the newborn phase, but this book made me nostalgic for the blissful joys of life with a newborn – the first smiles, the mustardy poops, the daily wonder of discovery and the constant cuddles.

This sweet little book would make a terrific shower gift for a new mom, but it would also make a nice Mother’s Day gift for anybody who has ever enjoyed the antics of a newborn and wondered, “Why do babies do that?”

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that someone (or say – somebody’s husband) burned the holy crap out of a bag of microwave popcorn by accidentally hitting the wrong setting on the microwave. And say said popcorn got so thoroughly crisped that smoke came out the back of the microwave and stained the entire inside of the microwave. And say it was three days later and no matter what you do, you absolutely cannot get the smell of burnt popcorn out of the house.

What would you do?

We’ve tried airing it out, scrubbing it down, and even boiling a large bowl of water with orange slices in it. We’re now down to burning candles around the house to try to kill the smell.

Any ideas?

Aren’t we due for a Friday ramble? I sure hope so, because I’ve got a few things to tell you.

First, as soon as I read this article I knew I had to talk to you about it. It’s about Hewlett Packard’s new digital cameras, which come equipped with an editing tool that allows you to look up to 15 lbs slimmer. It works by compressing the centre of the image while stretching the outside border. You can then download both the original photo and the edited “new, slimmer you” version to your computer or for printing. (Oops, sorry – the Citizen article is subscriber only, but you can read about the camera on Gizmodo, too.)

Isn’t that simply awful? I mean really, that’s got to be one of the most offensive things I’ve read this week. Do they have a fattening feature, too, so you can plump yourself up? Yah, I know, maybe I should lighten up, but this just rubbed me the wrong way. HP is being pretty careful in their marketing, too – the ‘slimming feature’ isn’t even mentioned in the product specs on Best Buy. What do you think?

Moving right along, you can always bring your new, slimming-feature-enabled camera along with you if you are celebrating international No Pants Day today. Yes, my trouserly-encumbered friends, today is the day you can officially shed those constricting chinos and show off your beautiful boxers to an appreciative (or maybe not so much) public. You know, I simply could not make up better material than this. Ours is a strange, strange world.

And finally, I could not resist getting your thoughts on this news feature either. Seems a woman in Britain is set to give birth to her third child, at the tender age of 63. Nope, not a typo – the woman is sixty-three years old. You know, I fear I am tending toward the curmdugeonly because this bugs me almost as much as the slimming feature in the camera. I mean, you know I am a huge advocate of reproductive technologies and the right of any woman to bear a child, but this is really pushing it. No matter how fresh and frisky she’s feeling, I don’t think anybody over 60 is going to have the same ability to cope with the demands of a newborn and a toddler as someone twenty years their junior. Now the fact that they’ve hired a PR firm to deal with the ‘leak’ of the news of the pregnancy tells me that they’ll probably have plenty of cash to hire a nanny and maybe a household crew to help raise the baby, but I can’t help but feel sorry for this woman’s child when she’s the only kindergartener who’s mother is receiving both a baby bonus and an old-age pension.

Now, just to show you I’m not all rants and bile today, let’s finish on a lighter note with anecdote from earlier this week.

Wednesdays are long days for me because Beloved works late, arriving home before bedtime but after dinner, and this one particularly so because I worked at the mental equivalent of a dead run all day at work, trying to catch up on various projects that are being neglected while I dedicate part of my week to language training.

I pick up the boys at daycare and tug them home in the wagon. It’s about a 25 minute walk, and they seem twice as heavy as their combined weight of 70 or 80 lbs. Tristan wants to ride his bike when we get home, so we wander to the mailbox and back, and but it’s a half-hearted and rather listless walk/ride because we’re all succumbing to the late-afternoon heavy-lidded dozies.

We make it into the house and when the boys ask if they can watch a video, I’ve just finished ordering a pizza and can’t be bothered to mount an argument against it. I change Simon’s diaper as Pingu begins to play on the TV, and when I stand him on his feet to pull his sweatpants back up he stands for only the briefest moment before plopping himself with comfortable aplomb into my lap. It isn’t long before Tristan has found a space for himself in my lap, too, and the three of us sit on the floor, bathed in the glow of Pingu’s antics.

It is, I realize rather unsuddenly, a moment worth noticing. The boys are quiet and still in my lap, neither twitching nor fussing nor jockeying for position. They are actually touching each other, legs tangled with arms resting against backs sprawled in my lap, somehow immune to their usual hyperawareness of physical contact. I can barely believe my luck, this congruence of my own desire for a moment of peace and the boys’ willingness to tolerate cuddling not only with me but with each other. There won’t be many moments like these.

It is, in fact, a perfect moment. Except for the excruciating pain arching down my legs.

My boys are heavy. Ridiculously heavy. Heavy like small neutron stars, an entire galaxy of denseness in each soft-skinned, touseled-hair package. I’m trying not to shift to much, as I truly don’t want to taint the magic of this affectionate moment, but my hips are hyperextended into an unnatural posture any yogi would covet and I can’t feel anything below the middle of my thighs. I list to one side and then the other, a squirming ship of dazed preschoolers, trying to aleviate the pressure. The boys, obliviously to both my bliss and my discomfort, eventually snap to attention and realize there is mischief to be made elsewhere in the house and lift out of my lap with uncanny syncronicity, both rolling to their feet in opposite directions in a simultaneous move that I couldn’t choreograph with a week of practice.

I am left sitting on the floor, legs relieved and arms empty, savouring the moment.

I have a special love for playoff hockey. It’s true, I’m not a die-hard fan most of the year, but I do love to jump on the bandwagon for the playoffs – and playoff hockey is inextricably intertwined with Simon in my heart.

Once again, our beloved Senators are thick in the hunt for the Cup, having easily stickhandled past Tampa Bay into round two of the playoffs. Should be a great weekend to catch a game, right?

Wrong. Scotiabank Place will be a busy mecca to fans of another kind this weekend. Hockey Night in Canada won’t be broadcasting playoff games from Ottawa this Saturday and Sunday because Dora the Explorer has the place booked solid for five sold-out shows. Did you catch that? Five. Sold. Out. Shows. The first four sold out almost immediately, so they added a fifth. They speculate they could have easily sold out a sixth show at this, Ottawa’s largest entertainment venue. Yikes!

My boys like Dora. Tristan won’t admit to it, and in fact actively states he doesn’t like her, but they tend to sit riveted in front of the TV for the entire 21 minutes she is on, yelling words in Spanish that I hope are not obscene. But personally, I can’t stand her. I can’t stand the video-game-esque flavour of the show with the arrow pointer and the clicking, and I find her grating at best. Yes, I happily forked over $200 to bring the family to see the Wiggles, and we’re spending another small fortune to go on another Day Out With Thomas adventure this summer, but you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through a Dora stage show. And I’m perfectly content with that hypocrisy, thanks.

Here’s some interesting Dora tidbits gleaned from the Ottawa Citizen this week:

* Dora was watched by 21.9 million people in November 2005, including 5.6 million kids between the ages of two and five.

* Dora licenced merchandise is the fourth Nickelodeon property to reach one billion dollars in sales, after Rugrats, Blues Clues and SpongeBob SquarePants. (What is it about Nickelodeon? I don’t mind Blue’s Clues, but why is it that these other shows that are both the most popular and the most unbearably annoying shows on TV? Why??)

* Dora is seen in more than 74 countries in 15 languages.

I dunno. Personally, I’d rather be watching playoff hockey. Oh, and my condolences to the Habs fans out there.

Go Sens Go!!