Month: June 2005

I have recently been accused of being a little uptight. Okay, that’s a bit of an understatement. Actually, I have been accused pretty much my whole life of being obsessive to the point of neurosis.

But it was only in a recent conversation with some friends that I realized I have been following the rules of life with a lot more vigour and enthusiasm than some of you. Therefore, I am taking an informal bloggy survey to see just how my own personal neuroses measure up to the rest of you. I’m not (yet) admitting to being neurotic about all of these, but I was surprised at how many little “rules” I could think of off the top of my head. Feel free to answer some or all of the following questions, or add your own peccadillo.

1. The sticker on the package of chicken breasts says it was best before two days ago. Do you cook it up and feed it to your family anyway?

2. Do you bring your car for an oil change religiously every 5000 km?

3. Knowing you will only need 1/2 of the baby food in the jar and intend to put the rest back in the fridge for another day, do / did you scoop the food out of the jar and into a bowl, or just spoon it from the jar?

4. Have you ever tried to pass off an expired coupon?

5. There is a tiny spot of mould on one end of the $6 hunk of cheese. Do you cut away the mouldy spot or turf the whole thing?

6. Would you allow your preschooler to ride a tricycle without a helmet?

7. Do you launder dry-clean only clothes? Do you even read care tags on clothes?

8. How old was your child before you bought your first “not recommended for children under age three” toy? (First child responses only!)

9. Do you throw away mascara after three months and buy a new one?

10. Would you allow a 12 year old to watch an R-rated movie?

11. Did you wait until your child was 20 lbs and one year before turning the car seat? Have you let your older child ride in a car without a car seat?

12. Do you always finish the full run of your antibiotics, or stop when you’re feeling better?

13. Do you *always* wash your hands after you go to the bathroom? Play with the dog? Handle raw poultry?

14. Did you wait until baby was one before introducing honey, and five before introducing peanut butter?

15. Did / do you avoid raw eggs, cold cuts and soft cheeses while pregnant?

16. Do you wait 20 minutes after eating before going in the pool?

17. Did / do you put your baby to sleep on his/her back, and avoid putting pillows, stuffies and heavy blankets into the crib until at least age 6 months?

18. Do you use the seatbelt in the stroller?

If you don’t feel like answering all the questions, just tell me if on the whole you follow (or would follow) these rules, or whether you’re too busy laughing at me to type.

Have you seen these Web sites in your e-mail inbox lately?

Forget-me-not panties: Ever worry about your wife cheating? Want to know where your daughter is late at night? Need to know when your girlfriend’s temperature is rising? These panties can give you her location, and even her temperature and heart rate, and she will never even know it’s there! Unlike the cumbersome and uncomfortable chastity belts of the past, these panties are 100% cotton, and use cutting-edge technology to help you protect what matters most.

The Brain Freeze: A Web site filled with video clips of people getting the infamous “Brain Freeze” or ice cream headache from Slurpees (Snack Mommy, this one made me think of you!)

Blogebrity Magazine: A celebrity Webzine just for bloggers! Are you in it? (And more importantly, how do I get in it?)

and last but not least,

Crying While Eating: View video clips of people crying while eating. Text blurbs beside each still photo tell you what they are eating and why they are crying.

Aside from being some seriously weird shit, these Web sites have at least one thing in common: they have all been created to be entries in a viral marketing contest called the Contagious Media Showdown. The contest, designed to study how ideas spread on the Web, has been running for a couple of weeks and ends tomorrow (June 9). Each Web site’s unique visitors and Technorati ranking are tabulated and they are ranked by popularity.

In an article in the Media Daily News Jonah Perretti of contest sponsor Eyebeam explains the contest was put together to determine what kind of virulent virals Web-goers could come up with, and the common characteristics of content with very high pass-along rates.

According to the same article, by day six of the contest, Crying While Eating had more than 150,000 unique visitors, although according to today’s ranking Forget Me Not Panties has pulled ahead. There have been some vetches that by publishing a live list of the rankings, Contagious Media have tampered with the results – people visiting the rankings tend to only view the top sites and perpetuate their ranking.

And as for Blogebrity Magazine? They’re actually thinking of launching the Webzine and used their contest entry as a trail balloon. I wonder if they’re looking for a cover girl? (insert coquettish eyelash flutter here)

So I’ve told you about Simon, menace to things that are folded, stacked or otherwise put away. And I’ve told you about Tristan, slave to the cult of Thomas and Friends. I’ve even told you about Beloved, man of my dreams.

But before there was babies, before we were even married, there was Katie. Katie, perhaps the world’s best natured dog. Katie, whom I love as a daughter and sister in my house full of men.

Katie is a golden retriever-German shepherd mix, just turned six years old. She looks like a very large yellow lab, but with the thick ruff of a shepherd. She is perhaps the most patient dog on god’s green earth. No dog should put up with what that dog tolerates from my two rambunctious preschoolers and still be as loving and forgiving as her. She is regularly poked, kissed, prodded, laid-on, tickled, examined, ridden like a pony and used as a step-stool to get onto the couch, among other indignities — and she doesn’t flinch.

I have never seen her so much as curl a lip at my boys, no matter how they are torturing her. At her most annoyed, she will open her mouth and use her very large head to knock over and away whomever is pestering her. Mostly, she just gets up and walks away, throwing a look that drips baleful annoyance in my direction. I can clearly read, in her brown doggie eyes, “You did this to me.”

Katie was my problem child. She was so wild as a pup that we had to take her to obedience training twice. Puppy classes at the community centre did nothing to curb her wildness, so we took her to a former police dog trainer who laid down the law. He taught us to use one of those awful spiked choke chains because she was obtusely unaware of any other kind of restraint on her and it was the only way I could exert any control over her. Yet she was incredibly submissive, so much so that she’d pee on the floor, writhing on the ground desperate for approval whenever someone approached her. (We’re alike in so many ways, my Katie and me.) She was always great with kids, so much so that in the days before I had kids of my own the boys who lived a few doors down would come and knock on the door and ask if Katie could come out to play.

Katie was also our practise child. I remember crying on the phone to my mother, exasperated after she had destroyed something or other and exhausted by her puppy neediness, wondering how I’d ever be able to raise children if I couldn’t contain this insanely rambunctious puppy. And when we were going through our diagnosis and treatment for infertility, through two failed treatments and a miscarriage Katie was my substitute child, so much so that I joked in a not-quite-joking kind of way that if we didn’t have kids soon, one would find me some day at the mall pushing Katie in a pram with a bonnet on her head.

When Tristan came along, she guarded us through the night on our first night home from the hospital. Tristan slept in a cradle at my bedside, and every time he so much as squeaked, she would jump up and look in on him, shooting me perplexed and anxious looks that clearly said, “It’s alive! It’s making a noise! Do something!”

As he grew, so did Katie. Literally. Although initially alarmed by his burgeoning mobility around the age of six or seven months, Katie soon realized that the trade off for tolerating the baby was the fact that the baby was a reliable food source. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that Tristan in his high chair provided an all-you-can-drop buffet from heaven.

The combination of the new found source of nourishment and the fact that I was too tired to haul both her and Tristan for the long walks we enjoyed pre-baby worked together to inflate Katie’s weight rather dramatically. The vet scolded us back in 2003 when she gained 10 lbs in a year and we had to buy two packages of heartworm and flea control medication because she was too fat for just one.

I was quite proud when in 2004, we had her back to a somewhat svelte 99 lbs – she really is a big dog. However, 2004 was also the year that Simon arrived, and subsequently became yet another source of doggie junk food. For a dog who was never fed table scraps pre-children, I think she consumes more people food in the average day than Tristan does. Which seems apt, I guess, because I think Simon consumes more dog food than Katie does.

Last week we brought her back in for her annual check up, and I knew by the sight of her hefty haunches that our trip to the scale would not be pretty. But even I was not prepared for the final weigh-in. In the past year, my plump little pup gained a whopping 20 lbs, an appalling 1/5 of her body weight. She’s up to 120 lbs. Egad!

I’m sure that in this age of pampered pets, there’s probably some weight watchers equivalent for dogs, but I’m still bitter about the whole weight watchers thing right now. Although I haven’t gained anymore this week, I’m still static at a pound over my sign-up weight four weeks into the program. You’d think all the running we do would be helping Katie and I with our weight issues (her getting out of the way of the boys, and me cleaning up the trail of destruction in the wake of said boys), but so far it’s not working out for us.

So, my loose affiliation of bloggy weight loss buddies, is it okay if Katie joins our little support group? She doesn’t say much, but her heart is as big as, well, it’s bigger than her ass, and that’s plenty big.

As I mentioned last week, Friday night was date night. Beloved and I went to see the final instalment of the Star Wars saga. I don’t think I’ve said anything in this post that blows any major secrets, but be warned anyway – I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.

I can sum up my feelings pretty succinctly, for a change. It was excellent!

I don’t know whether I’ve finally given up expecting these latest episodes to measure up to the original Star Wars, or whether George Lucas has crafted a much better piece of cinema this time around, but I really enjoyed Revenge of the Sith. It has the charm, the wonder and the humanity that seemed to be lacking in Episodes I and II, and is an ultimately satisfying conclusion to a series that I hold quite dear to my heart.

I have to give Lucas props. Not only is he working under the scrutiny of a generation for tampering with its mythology, but he also manages to keep an audience spellbound even when they all know full well how the story comes out in the end.

Anakin’s descent to the dark side is believable and even compelling, but I don’t know what happened to Natalie Portman’s Padme. She went from being strong and smart in the first couple of movies to helpless and pining, and spends way too much of the movie looking pensively out the window.

I mentioned the other day that when I was a young girl I had a big thing for Luke Skywalker. As I got a little older, my affections roamed to Han Solo. Sorry boys, but there’s a new crush in town. Who would have guessed that Obi Wan Kenobi would curl my toes some day?

Ewan McGregor stole my heart in Moulin Rouge, but he sealed the deal as Obi Wan Kenobi. Hubba hubba. Somehow it seems appropriate that after all these years of loving Star Wars, I am left with a schoolgirl crush as the series ends.

I’m a child of the Trudeau era. I learned to sing my national anthem in two languages, was willing to accept one of 13 television stations in 1970s southern Ontario as devoted to French, and have grown acccustomed to the fact that even though French and English share equal space on food packaging, the French is invariably on the first side you turn to when trying to read product information or prepation instructions.

In theory, I believe there is room for two official languages in our country.

In practice, on a personal level, today I disagree.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been taking French lessons. Actually, I’ve been taking French lessons my whole life. I started in grade 6 and by the end of high school attained a level of French aptitude exceeded only by most preschoolers.

On and off through my government career, I’ve taken additional language training, and now at least I can muddle through enough to be able to follow the thread of a conversation and offer a grammatically ugly but at least comprehensible contributions to the discussion.

The government categorizes your linguistic aptitute in three areas: reading, writing and oral interaction. They rate you on a scale of nil-A-B-C-exempt, with probably the majority of positions requiring an intermediate (B) skill level. Unless you score the golden “exempt” level, you have to be re-tested every five years.

I was last tested on June 27, 2000. At the time, after befriending my young and unilingual French teacher and spending the spring teaching each other our own maternal language, I pulled off an advanced rating on my reading skills, and intermediate on my writing and speaking. Then I had two babies and two year-long maternity leaves nearly consecutively, and spent a lot more time at home changing diapers than conjugating verbs.

Which bring us to today – and don’t think I didn’t hear you saying, “Finally!”

It seems I’m doing quite well on a competitive process for a senior communications advisor position. (How the government promotes people, through competitive process instead of whimsy and piccadillo, is a blog for another day.) Suffice to say, much to my surprise, I’ve successfully jumped through the hoops of a written exam, an interview and have submitted my references. Since I have provided said references with long and flowery scripts (and hefty bribes) embellishing my finest qualities and half-realized achievements, I find myself having done far better than I expected and am actually quite close to possibly getting this promotion.

Except for the language thing.

It could all fall apart because of the language thing.

Even if in the best case scenario, I am successful through the whole competitive process (no small hill of beans, to be honest), unless an appointment to the position is made before June 27, I will have to retake the language test. If I don’t pass my language levels, I am no longer a qualified candidate and it all slips through my fingers.

Now, I realize this isn’t the end of the world. I still have a job (although if I don’t pass my test, I also lose my $800 a year bilingual bonus) and I’m sure there will be other opportunities for competitions in the future. And in my own estimation, I’m right on the edge of being able to pass the language test – it could go either way, depending on the alignment of Mercury and Venus and the amount of sleep I get the week before the test.

I could fill a blog with rants about the inefficiecies of the competitive process in the federal government, and another entire blog with rants against official bilingualism. In general, I think they both work and are a mediocre compromise for a necessary evil.

But as usual, in this little cyberspace fiefdom, it’s all about me. I’m sulking because I’m about to spend all my free time (ha!) for the next three weeks cramming on French grammar. And I’ve got this really amazing book I’d rather be reading.

Wish me some bonne chance, will ya?

Edited after the fact to add: And here is the material I will be studying. Go ahead, click on it. There’s a little something for everybody. Awe and impress your friends!

Categories: Canadianisms

I’m so proud.

We were at the dinner table the other night and Tristan, in response to something I can’t now recall, said, “It’s cool, eh?”

Barely three years old, and he can “eh” in context. I’m a proud Canadian mommy.

It’s funny, my otherwise patriotic father hates that affectation in my speech. I don’t remember him correcting me as a child, but he did point it out quite a few times when as a grown up I returned home for visits. Perhaps moving to the nation’s capital is what ingrained it so deeply into my linguistic rhythms.

Speaking of endearing things my preschooler says, here’s a conversational vignette from this week that my offspring will not thank me for sharing with the Internet:

Beloved, to Tristan: Get your hand out of your diaper, I’m trying to tape it up.
Tristan: It’s mine!
Me (teasing): No, it’s mine!
Tristan: No, it’s mine. I bought it for two bucks.

Heck, if I’d known they were that cheap, I’d’ve picked one up for myself by now.

Categories: Canadianisms

I’m ready.

I procured a babysitter for Friday night. (Can you procure your own mother?)

I’ve done my homework: we watched Episode I weekend before last, and rented Episode II this past weekend.

I’ve got gift certificates to cover the cost of admission and popcorn.

Hooray, I’m going to the movies!!!! (insert triumphant swelling of John Williams music here)

Not just any movie, I’m going to see Star Wars.

I love Star Wars, always have. I’ve read enough geek blogs lately about people’s seminal Star Wars theatre experience to keep me from kicking that dead horse, but suffice to say Star Wars has been a motif that resonates regularly through my life, providing milestones by which I can chart my own growth.

I was seven when the first movie came out, and we saw the movie as a family with friends of my parents and their kids. For The Empire Strikes Back, I was 10 and old enough to be dropped off at the theatre myself. By the time Jedi came out, I was 13 and my 8 year old brother and I made our way to the theatre downtown on our own for a screening at 8:30 on a Saturday morning.

When VCRs came out in the 1980s, Star Wars was one of the first movies we rented, and as a bored and pre-car teenager I would regularly watch my pirated copy to kill time until Friday Night Videos came on.

I spent my childhood pining for a tousled blond Luke Skywalker to burst into my life to rescue me, then in my teen years realized the roguish Han Solo would be a lot more fun at a party. I never did have enough hair to make danishes on the side of my head, which in retrospect is probably a good thing.

When Episode I came out, we saw it in theatres the first weekend, and like most fans, were more than a little disappointed. I don’t know how any movie could live up to the mythological expectations of a generation. It was only when we were watching the DVD for Episode II that I realized I had never even seen it. Somehow, it fell off my radar screen. It came out in 2002, which was the year Tristan was born, so I guess that’s my only excuse. It was actually pretty good – much better than Episode I, in my humble opinion. (Ãœbergeek, are you reading? Give it a try!)

I came across this little tidbit of Star Wars trivia recently that tickled me. Did you know that in every movie, someone utters the phrase, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Since I’ve memorized every scrap of dialogue from the original movie over the years, I can clearly picture Han Solo saying it in Episode IV. Over the past two weekends, I caught it in Episodes I and II. I am just enough of a geek to not only anticipate “discovering” it in the new movie this weekend, but to haul out our copies of Empire and Jedi over the next few weeks to look for it there, too.

It’s amazing to me to look back at my life and see these movies as the video equivalent of a soundtrack. I try to imagine what my seven year-old self would think of the woman I’ve become, a woman – a mother – who plans for three weeks to make a simple trip to the theatre but who hasn’t lost her sense of giddy anticipation, who is willing to relinquish her adult self to the wonder of an epic tale for just a few hours.

I think she’d be proud.