The ultimate DIY blog kit

If you’re reading the feed for the first time since Friday (you, on Facebook, I’m talking to YOU!) you’ll have to click through to formally admire my fancy new blog design. Did I mention I did it myself? Yay me!

I’ve been looking for a decent theme for WordPress on and off for the last six months at least. I’ve downloaded and tested almost a dozen different themes, but none of them were quite right. Even when I got the custom blog design in May, while it was a lovely design it just wasn’t *me*, yanno? And, more importantly, there was something in the code that caused Internet Explorer to seize up and shut down entirely, and no amount of trolling the interwebs for solutions proved fruitful.

I was about to download the free theme Neoclassical when I stumbled across a link for this theme by the same designer. It’s called Thesis, and although it wasn’t free, it is by miles and miles the most easily customizable theme I’ve ever seen. Worth every penny!

If you’re even pondering a new blog design, I highly endorse Thesis. Even if you have never mucked about in your blog’s code (over the years, I’ve learned to hack the html, the css and even the php just enough to really screw things up!) you can still give Thesis a lot of customization by making changes to the options on your WordPress dashboard. You can choose one, two or three columns, customize the font size and style (there are about two dozen font options), choose a different font for sidebars or headers or whatever, all with the settings panel in your dashboard. Don’t like it? Just choose a new option.

If you’re feeling braver, they’ve created a really unique system for more in-depth customizations, like the drop-cap at the beginning of each post, and the multi-coloured navigation menu across the top, and my favourite, the rotating pictures in the header. And they’ve got a great help forum with people who actually answer your pleas for assistance, like when I could not for the life of me figure out how to activate the code I’d installed for my archives page. Turns out it was hiding in a drop-down menu on the ‘create a page’ page. That was the only time I got really frustrated through the whole customization experience, knowing I was missing something incredibly simple and yet not being able to figure it out.

Anyway, just a little note of thanks to the Thesis community (I love that there is in fact a community of users!), especially the people in the support forum, the guy who wrote these tutorials, and this great post on adding a custom header. I learned a tonne just by reading their stuff.

Oh, and if you’re used to using the blogroll that used to be in the sidebar, it’s just moved to it’s own page now. It’s the “linky love” page, in blue up above the header image. And if you’re not in the blogroll but you should be, drop me a note and let me know!

(Thesis has an affiliate program, so if you click through from my blog a cookie will be added to your browser and if you do decide to buy it I get a small percentage. But that is not why I wrote this post. I wrote this post because I’m blown away by how awesome this theme is, and I’m so so so happy with the result! Best! Theme! EVAH!)

Worldwide Photo Walk

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to be one of 50 official Ottawa participants (and about another dozen or two unofficial participants!) in Scott Kelby’s WorldWide Photo Walk. (Scott Kelby is a Photoshop guru and writes great books about digital photography.) My good friend Beach Mama was there, too!

It was a fun evening, despite the quick downpour that trapped us under some overhanging branches near the locks for a while. I got to meet some nice people, including a few I’d “met” previously on Flickr, and it was nice just to be out and about downtown on a Saturday night. (The walk made a loose half circle around the building I work, though — certainly not unfamiliar territory for me. And yet, I think I found a few new perspectives!)

Worldwide Photo Walk Mosaic


1. Peacekeepers at the gallery, 2. O-train, 3. Cafe, 4. Parliament, 5. Photographer, 6. Music bus, 7. Fountain, 8. Through the gate, 9. Train station reflected in chateau, 10. Statue, 11. Keyhole, 12. Shadow, 13. Over the locks and through the bridge, 14. Water over the locks, 15. Gears, 16. Anna

I took about 200 pictures, but these ones were the best of the lot. I am allowed to upload one or two to the official site, but I can’t decide which ones I like best. Will you help me choose? They’re all numbered in the links below the pictures — let me know your faves!

(You can see the full set on Flickr, or visit the Ottawa Photo Walk group pool on Flickr to see how real photographers do it!)

Oooo, pretty shiny new blog…

So here it is! (You, over there on Google Reader — click through and admire the fancy new design please!)

There’s more work to be done, but I’m tired of hacking it on my test site. I would have thought that early Saturday morning was the perfect time to tinker, except there’s thunder in the background and the power keeps flickering and if I don’t have Bob the Builder on DVD as a distraction, no work will be done here today!

So what do you think? The header is a set of rotating images, so every time you refresh or click a new page, it changes. There’s only half a dozen or so now, but I’ll add more for variety as time (snicker) permits.

I love it! The only thing I’m still waffling on is the sidebars. I do want two, and I think they’re a little less cluttered than before, but if I can’t find a way to clean them up a bit I might just go back to one.

And I did it all by myself!! If you are looking for a new blog theme, I am in love with this one. It’s called Thesis, and it is hands down the best WordPress theme I’ve ever found. I’ll write more about that later, too!

(Thesis has an affiliate program, so if you click the link to check it out, my cookie is added to your browser.)

Like I said, I’m still tweaking and tinkering, but it’s mostly done. I think! Do you like how the photos are framed? I thought that was cool. And the colours in the navigation menu above (with home, contact me, etc) are taken from the text in the banners, which in turn is taken from the images themselves. And of course the images are all mine, most from my 365 project. Scroll down, I love how the older posts are displayed near the bottom, too (if you clicked through from a feed, you’ll have to click the header or “home” button to get to the main page and see how older posts are displayed).

Please let me know if you’re having any troubles with the display or with the page loading, or if anything looks “off” to you, and if you see something, I’d be grateful if you let me know which browser you’re using, too. I’m particularly concerned about the overall size — on one of our computers, the very rightmost edge of the banner and some of the right sidebar text gets lost, and you have to scroll sideways to see it. I’ll have to find a fix for that if it’s more than just our computer that does it.

Ahhhh, it feels good to have a design that I feel is completely “me” again…

Project 365: colours, contrasts and serendipitous mistakes

My brain has been a little bit too full this week, stuffed with insurance claims and residual values for the van, and with css and hex colours for the blog redesign, and with a million other silly little things. Thank goodness I’m on vacation as of this afternoon — I could really put those pesky eight to ten hours a day that work demands to better use! All that to say, the picture-taking hasn’t been my primary (wait for it!) focus this week. Har har har.

Ahem, anyway… I’ve been reading a steady stream of photography books, sucking up ideas, concepts and tips and filing them away in unoccupied nooks and crannies in my brain. I just finished the highly rated and highly recommended Learning to See Creatively by Bryan F. Peterson. He gives ideas like “Envision the world from the perspective of a leaf that’s just fallen off a tree.” I loved it! A really great book if you’re feeling a little stuck in the creativity department, with some stunning photography. Not your standard “to achieve minimum depth of field, use a focal length of…” tutorial. This picture was loosely inspired by that, imagining the perspective of a busy toddler at the park. Plus, I liked the purple of his shorts and hat with the lime green of his shirt!

172:365 A long way up

I love my daisies. I love bokeh. What could be better than bokeh daisies? (Bokeh – rhymes with mocha – is the character of the out-of-focus parts of your image. I’m going to put up a whole Family Photographer post on bokeh soon!) Anyway, I was really happy with how this turned out — watch for it to play a part in the fancy-schmancy new blog design to be revealed in the next week or so!

173:365 Bokeh daisies

A few years back, they shut down the Stittsville Flea Market, and Sunday afternoons just haven’t been the same since. On our way out to retrieve our personal belongings from the van (sniff) we stopped at a little echo of the Stittsville flea market and poked around for a bit. Take a look at the bottom-right image — that is by far the largest pile of scissors I have ever seen. And the top-right image got a little bit cut off in the mosaic, but the base says “#1 Mom!” Isn’t she frightful horrid adorable?

174:365 At the flea market

On these busy days, I’m honing a new specialty: the 365-dinner combo!

175:365 BBQ night

We were on our way home from swimming lessons and I was done like dinner, but I still didn’t have a decent picture. I don’t think I’d even put the viewfinder to my face that day… a new record for sure. On our way out of the sportsplex, I said to Tristan, “Go sniff those flowers.” Bless his little heart, he neither questioned me nor even cast a glance askew, he just patiently sniffed the flowers (don’ tell him they’re weeds!) while I took the picture. I do love my boys so…

176:365 Sniff

Although it has been a questionable summer at best, we lucked out on Wednesday morning with a glorious day of sunshine, perfect for a couple of hours at the park. I brought my telephoto lens and took almost 100 pictures, a few of which turned out rather well. I chose this one as the shot of the day because I liked the colours and the composition.

177:365 At the park

And, because I was out of the way and less obviously in their faces with my camera, I managed to get some nice portraits of each of the the boys at play.

At the park: Lucas


At the park: Simon


At the park: Tristan

(Tristan is wearing a fleece vest in the summer sun because it makes him “look like a Pokémon trainer.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.)

This last one is something a little different. It’s an abstract. Can you guess what it is? It caught my eye because of the contrasting blue and orange colours, and because of the really interesting texture. I shot this one with my telephoto lens, zoomed all the way out to 200mm for a close-up.

178:365 Abstract with rust

It’s the safety railing between levels in the parkade where I’ve parked at least two dozen times since I started the 365 project, possibly one of the nastiest places I go on a regular basis. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but as soon as I pulled up and the headlight illuminated the corrosion on the railing I thought it would make an interesting picture. I wasn’t expecting the background to fade out to black because it was reasonably well-lit in there. In fact, I set up the shot so the red car down 1/2 level would be the out-of-focus background for the railing, giving even more colour constrast — or so I thought. I kind of like how it turned out, though.

And any day when you get your 365 picture in the can before 7 am is a good day!

Blog out loud!

I think this is such a neat idea! Lynn of Turtlehead has been working tirelessly to set up what I think is one of the coolest bloggy events I’ve heard of: Blog Out Loud. She’s invited a bunch of Ottawa bloggers not just to meet and schmooze (or, in my case, blush and toe the carpet), but to read some of their favourite posts out loud.

How cool is that?

And check out this list of participants! There’s Beach Mama and Andrea and Julie and Zoom and XUP, just to name a few. Oh, and me too!

Blog Out Loud will be next Thursday, July 23, at the Raw Sugar Café. If you can make it out, I’d love to see you there! And if you’re feeling really keen, I see that Lynn is looking for a few volunteers to make sure things run smoothly.

A bloggy work in progress

So I’m redesigning the blog again. I know, I know, it’s just been a couple of months since the last one. Even though I really like the design (and frankly love certain elements of it) it’s just not working for me — both metaphorically and literally.

It’s the literally not working problem that’s getting me down — there’s a bug with Internet Explorer 6 that causes the browser window to shut down entirely when you try to scroll sometimes, and though I’ve spent a month or two poking through more code-hacking forums than any self-respecting girl should admit to, I can’t find a fix. (I’ve seen it argued that IE6 itself is a bug, and I’m inclined to agree, but since it’s what I’m stuck with at work, and what some of my favourite readers are using, I’ve got to find a way to make it work. At home, I’m all Firefox all the time.)

Previously, I’ve done a big surprise “ta da” moment with the blog designs, but this time I’m getting you on board at the design phase. The blog is for you as much as it’s for me, so this time you get a say. Well, technically, you get “to” say — I’ll listen, but I don’t promise I’ll take all of your suggestions into account. Think of it like a big bloggy focus group!

After a quite a lot of searching, I found the perfect theme-building kit. I’ll tell you more about that on the reveal (I love it, though, truly and madly) and I have the basic structure in place. There’s lots of variables to play with, though, so let me know what you think. Here’s the kind of things I’m considering:

  • banner: one of the things I’m most excited about with this design is the ability to have rotating banner images across the top, so each time you refresh you get a new header. (Right now, I’ve only got a half a dozen made up, but at least it’s a bit of variety.) They’re made up of some of my favourite photographs, which is way cool, but it’s posing a few design challenges. I’m afraid of photo overkill, for one thing. And it’s difficult to pull a colour scheme for the rest of the blog out of the header because it’s always changing. And finally, I’m worried about consistency in the ‘look’. What do you think?
  • sidebars: one or two? The whole reason I moved to this design was because I coveted two sidebars. Right now, though, the design seems a little cramped. Thoughts?
  • sidebar content: do you even look at all that crap? Back in the day, I loved widgets and whatnot cluttering up the sidebar, and when I visit a new site I still find myself scanning the sidebars to get a feel for the place. But now I wonder if too much clutter doesn’t take away from the content?
  • fonts: do you find the current fonts readable? What do you think about coloured headlines on posts? And, for the design-conscious among you, if I’m using a sans-serif font in the body, which I favour, do I need to use a sans-serif in the post titles? Should I match my fonts across the site?
  • colours: going back to my original blogspot roots, I favour a clean white background. One of the things I wanted from the last redesign was multi-coloured sidebar boxes. I like the way they worked out, with a hint of colour, but they’re still not what I’d envisioned. What do you think of a really colourful site? Does it detract from the content? There’s a fine balance between colourful and cartoonish (or garish) and I see a lot of sites that trip rather spectacularly over that line. Do you have a preference?
  • photographs: are the pictures too big in the posts? I’ve been putting them at 500 pixels across in the new design, but they seem pretty cramped. I’m trying to balance the best way to feature the pictures against having them ‘shout’ and seem crowded
  • .

Anyway, these are just some of the things I’m chewing over. Your comments, observations and random thoughts are greatly apprecaited!!

Have you ever bought a house that hasn’t been built yet? Not only do you have to find the layout that’s right for you, but you have to make sure the paint in the kitchen matches the paint in the dining room while going with the new countertops, and the countertops have to match the fancy tiles on the backsplash, which can’t clash with the drawer pulls and cupboard hardware. But the dining room looks onto the hallway, which opens onto the bedrooms, and so you have to coordinate those colours as well.

That’s what I’m feeling like with this blog design. I’m giddy with the opportunity to build EXACTLY the blog design I wanted from the ground up, but am currently paralyzed by all the potential and possibilities. So please, save me from myself and talk to me about blog design!

Another chapter in the (apparently endless) iPod saga

Those of you who have been around a while know I have, um, issues with iPods. Or, perhaps more specifically, iPods seem to have issues with me. Let’s take a moment to review my rather checkered iPod past, shall we?

I joined the clan of the Apple faithful in August of 2006. Beloved bought me a 1G iPod nano, and I loved the heck out of the little dickens. Perhaps I loved it a little too much, though, because it died an untimely death a mere two and a half weeks later.

The replacement iPod lasted a whole five months before it seized up and died in the midst of transfering a play list from my computer one day. Less than a year old, though, it was replaced under Apple’s one-year warranty protection plan.

The new iPod, shipped straight from Apple, died before I even opened the box. It arrived in a pre-deceased condition. Seriously!

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s four iPods in six months. The next one lived a good life. A whole eight months went by before I, um, laundered it to death in the fall of 2007.

And because the universe was running out of new and innovative ways to kill my iPod(s), the latest replacement was simply stolen out of my unlocked van one night almost exactly a year ago.

I replaced it, though, and I’ve come to be rather fond of this latest lucky seventh iPod, the one that has been with me the longest. Perhaps that’s why of all the trauma and hassle resulting from the accident on Thursday, the loss of this last iPod was the bitterest pill to swallow.

I don’t usually leave my iPod in the van. I’d had it at the gym, as usual, on Wednesday, was distracted leaving the van and left it lying on the seat. Later in the day, I stuffed it into the glove box, but the cord from the earphones was dangling out. Thursday before work, I stopped to get something out of the van on my way to the bus, and noticed the dangling cord. “I should put that in the house,” I thought, but knew I was running late for the bus. “Okay, I’ll just stuff the cord into the glove box and get it later. It’ll be fine.”

Famous last words.

About 10 hours later, the front corner of the van closest to the glove compartment crumpled into a heap shortly before being engulfed in flames, and then throughly soaked by the firefighters’ hose. If my iPods can’t survive a data transfer, there was no way it could have possibly survived this:

Aftermath

(I couldn’t resist this last picture when we went to the impound lot to retrieve any personal belongings from the van yesterday. You know, it’s amazing what minutaie collects in your car. Umbrellas, sippy cups, CDs, kids’ toys and books, a soother (I left that behind), a case of club soda… it was both traumatic and cathartic to pick through the charred ruins of my former van, collecting these little bits of normalcy. It was a very surreal moment, especially because the van was in the exact condition it was in at the moment of impact — the key still in the ignition, the windows were still open, because it was a warm and glorious summer afternoon. That more than anything brought me immediately back to the crash…)

When I first looked through the open window, after I took in the still-inflated air bags, I noticed the glove compartment was open. “For chrissake,” I thought. “Bad enough I’ve got to deal with everything else, but someone’s been rifling through the van looking for anything worth stealing.” It’s a secure yard, though, and it turns out the glove box just popped open from the impact.

We’d had the van for nearly a year when we realized that it actually has two glove compartments, one above the other. The second one, the less obvious one, is where I had stashed my iPod. After looking at the sodden remains of my owner’s manual in the lower glove compartment (I left it behind, but the magpie in me kept a little Dodge Ram emblem that had popped off of something), I had little hope that there would be anything left of the iPod. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to open the glove compartment, looking at the state of the rest of that corner of the van.

It opened easily, though, and I was surprised to see very little evidence of the fire inside the glove compartment. I reached in and pulled out the iPod, still in it’s Roots neoprene case and still attached to the headphones. When the headphones actually dripped as I pulled them out, so saturated was the foam padding on the ear pieces, my heart sank. I’d been holding out against hope, I think, without even realizing it. I threw the whole thing into the box with the umbrellas and the sippy cups, and threw them into the back of the car.

A few minutes later, I pulled it out to show Beloved. I reached into the neoprene case, and could feel the dampness through the neoprene. I peered at the LED display in the bright sunlight, and to my shock, the display was working. I must have hit the clickwheel with my thumb as I was pulling it out. I was so surprised, I actually turned it off again, and then back on. I clicked a few times, and cranked the click wheel to turn up the volume, and damn if Headley wasn’t suddenly blasting out of the sodden headphones.

Talk about lucky number seven. My iPod survived!

Random bullets after the crash

Just over two days later, and I’m surprised to find myself still mildly traumatized over the whole “my van is on fire” thing. I keep alternating between feeling breathless with gratitude that it wasn’t worse, and sick with regret. Funny how these things seem to come over you in waves.

  • Lucas continues to be fine. He’s got the faintest red scratch on his neck from his seat belt, but is otherwise unscathed. Thank you, universe, for protecting him.
  • Ironically, almost all of my injuries are a result of the safety features of the van. I have a couple of spectacular bruises, one on my thigh that I can’t quite account for — I think it might have been the lap belt, or maybe the van door — and a couple of burns from the air bags, one on my hand and one on my leg. My knee has a burn on top of a bruise, which is really kind of painful – I think the air bags for the driver’s side are under the steering wheel and that’s what hit my knee. I’m a little bit bodily sore, but no worse than you’d be after a hard workout at the gym. Again, thank you universe.
  • The insurance company hasn’t yet sent out their appraiser, but the EMS people and the tow truck guy all seem to think the van will be a total write-off. Since the front end was engulfed in flames, I have a hard time seeing how it would be recoverable. We were leasing it, and the lease would have been up in February or March. The nice guy at Chrysler confirmed that they’ll either provide a new vehicle for the remainder of the lease or, more likely, pay out the lease and we start again from scratch. That’s a bummer because Chrysler no longer has a leasing program, so we’d have to buy outright if we go with another Grand Caravan.
  • I’m torn on the issue of replacing the van. My strongest instinct, which is most surely a coping mechanism, is to restore order. That means getting EXACTLY what we had before, same year and same colour. That’s my strongest impulse, but I’m pretty sure it’s not in any way based in reason. I’m conflicted — by all accounts, such a relatively minor accident should NOT have caused that kind of fire. On the other hand, Lucas and I are safe and relatively unscathed.
  • Regardless, we need something. We briefly toyed with the idea of going back to using only one car, but that’s simply not feasible any more. Right now, even though we have insurance coverage for a rental, we can’t find a minivan in the region to rent, so we’ve had to cram all three car seats into the back of our Focus wagon. It works, but we have to take out one booster, belt a kid in, and then put the booster back and belt in the middle kid. An inelegant solution, and it won’t be long before they’re trying to kill each other, being confined cheek-to-jowl like that.
  • Another thing to be grateful for — that this happened a week after and not a week before the family vacation.
  • Today, I’m going to head out to the impound lot to see if anything is recoverable from the inside of the van. This makes me want to cry every time I think about it. I miss my van, I want it back. When the crash happened, Beloved found one of Lucas’s Bob the Builder toys when he took a quick look at the inside of the van and it was soaked with the water from the firefighters. This makes me want to cry, too.
  • Not only will this cause us a great amount of inconvenience in the next little while, but it stands to cost us a pretty penny, too. Since the lease will likely be paid out, we now face the regular expenses associated with buying a car — downpayments, etc. And my fine, which is only $100. And the deductible. Sigh.
  • Plus, we had a really sweet deal with the lease, if you’d remember my mad negotiating skillz, and I’m just not sure I have it in me right now to bother with all that. I can’t imagine that we’d get a monthly rate for a purchase anywhere near the low rate we had for a 27-month lease. I wish I could just call somebody up and order a new van over the phone, knowing I was paying the best possible price. And we can’t even get started on that until the insurance company appraises the old van and negotiates with Chrysler on the outcome, a conversation I am not allowed to be a part of.
  • Oh, and while the insurance does cover the cost of replacing the car seats, with a reduction for depreciation (sigh), it doesn’t cover my poor, beleaguered iPod. I’d have to claim that under my house contents insurance. When I bought it, it was less than the cost of the deductible, and you can’t even buy a 2G nano anymore. I simply don’t feel that I’m entitled to spend another $200 to replace it, on top of all the other expenses we’ve suddenly inherited right now. Sigh.
  • I’m whining, aren’t I? I know, I know, I am supremely grateful that everything turned out okay, and that it could have been so much worse. It’s all just so overwhelming and I really want it all to go away. I guess I just thought that the point of insurance was to restore things to more or less exactly the way they were before the accident and that is not quite how it’s turning out.
  • Back to the gratitude side: I am so grateful to all of you for your sweet comments and notes over the past few days. I think my favourite was François, who let his toasts burn while he read our story. Maybe I can submit that to the insurance company, too? I thought maybe some of you had wandered away for good — nice to hear from you again!
  • And I have to say that almost everybody I have spoken to has been extremely kind and tried their best to be helpful, from the people at the insurance company and the brokerage to the car rental places to the leasing manager at the car dealership to the woman at Ford who is rush ordering us a part so we can put Lucas’s car seat in the middle of the back seat of the Focus, perhaps keeping the big boys from killing each other. Everyone has been beyond professional and has tried their best to help us out.
  • If you take away anything from these posts, please let it be this: always, ALWAYS take a minute to make sure the straps are secure and properly placed in your car seat. Don’t let them get twisted, they have to lie flat. The buckle should be at the child’s nipple level, and tight enough that you can only fit two fingers between the strap and the child. You might have to adjust this if your child is wearing a jacket or just a thin t-shirt. Please do.
  • I’m a lucky, lucky girl.

Project 365: Two Explores in one week!

It may have been a traumatic week otherwise, but it was a good week for photography. I got some gorgeous shots this week, and I’m really happy with most of the pictures I took. Funny how everything creative, from writing to blogging to photography, runs hot and cold, isn’t it?

Although it seems like a million years ago now, this was the photo I took to commemorate our 10-year anniversary last Friday. These guys were the centrepiece on our wedding cake!

165:365 Wedding frogs

This is one of the two pictures that made it into Flickr’s “Explore” feature this week. I wait all year for my daisies to come out, and they grow in a large and unruly but happy-looking patch in my front yard. One of the first pictures I took with my D40 was of Simon in the daisies in 2007! I shot this one from down low, pointing up and into the light on one of the rare days of sun this week, so the petals have a neat translucent quality to them. (I didn’t do much post-processing on this, just a little bit of sharpening to bring out the edges and a tiny bit of a warmer cast. The blurry bits around the edges are the leaves from the tree above the daisies.)

166:365 Into the light

This is the other picture that made it into Explore. When I saw the rhubarb stacked up in one of the Market stalls, I liked the almost-repeating shapes of the cut edges, and the almost-repeating patterns in the stalks, and the nice complimentary transition from red to green. I thought it was a throwaway snap, actually, until I was reviewing my shots that evening and something about it appealed to me. Even so, I am quite perplexed by how much people seem to like it — random strangers keep adding it as a favourite and it’s been bouncing in and out of Explore all week.

168:365 Rhubarb

This one, on the other hand, is not only one of my favourites this week but one of my all-time faves. I called it “Precarious” – something about those about-to-tumble blocks gives it a nice dynamicism. (Is that a word?) I sat and watched Lucas stack the same blocks over and over and over again, snapping pictures of the different constructions, for the better part of an hour — and a hundred images!! This one was the best, IMHO.

167:365 Precarious

I was making dinner the other day, and hadn’t snapped a single picture all day. It’s either a testament to my newly acquired comfort with the camera or a testament to my mad mothering skillz, but half a year ago I wouldn’t be able to conceptualize, compose and capture a photo like this while in the midst of making dinner!

169:365 Juicy

(Conveniently, I’ve recently realized that the spot between the two burners on my stove makes for an excellent seamless white back drop. I’d been using the bathtub, but the light is better in the kitchen! I used it for the frog pictures above, too.)

In my favourite Flickr group, there are weekly challenges posted. This week, the challenge was to take a self-portrait. I made this one on my lunch hour, but I wasn’t overly fond of it. I’d planned to take another image of some sort in the evening, but that plan got derailed by the whole van-on-fire thing, so this is it for the day.

171:365 Working lunch

This is my favourite picture of the week. I took it when we first arrived on Victoria Island for our Aboriginal Experiences adventure. I noticed the reflection right away, but it was a bit of a trick to get the image composed fast enough to still take the picture and get to Lucas in time to prevent him from soaking himself. I did it! And I love the image. I desaturated it just a bit in Photoshop to give it that timeless feeling.

170:365 The Puddle

Funny, the rhubarb and the daisy pictures made it into Explore, but I far prefer the photos of the puddle and the blocks. But then, I’m a little biased about the subject matter. I really don’t even like rhubarb!

The one where she totals the van

So, remember waaaaay back, when we were first looking at shopping for a mini-van? And I was petulant because I did not want a mini van, thought they were cumbersome and mildly embarrassing? I’ve been meaning to blog for months now about my dirty little secret — I adore that van. Love it. Love driving it, love the space in it, love having a car of my own. Well, past tense – loved it. I was in an accident last night, and the van was a write-off. My first-ever car accident. Go big or go home, right.

I was making a left turn from Fisher into the Lone Star parking lot to pick up some takeout, with Lucas in the van. Lots of traffic. The lady in the inside oncoming lane waved me through. The chick in the outside lane was doing about 60 when she hit me. I didn’t even see her coming. When I thought about it later, I didn’t hear a squeal of brakes, or else I would have looked her way, so I’m not even sure she saw me.

She was in a little sedan, but she hit me hard enough to spin me around a 1/4 turn. The first thing I registered after “oh shit” and “the baby is in the car!” was “ouch, these fucking airbags are burning my (bare) legs!”

I jumped out without even thinking to turn the car off and got Lucas out of his car seat – he of course started crying on impact – to check him out, but he was fine. He doesn’t even have bruise marks from the seat belt. Thank god, thank god, thank god for properly installed car seats.

Right away, people were trying to help. One guy was behind me even as I was undoing Luke’s belt, saying “Oh my god, I saw the baby seat in the back and my heart stopped, is he okay?” Another guy is already calling 911. I’m pretty sure I’m okay and Lucas is okay but holy fuck it was a hell of an impact. A young girl is there, and she’s ashen and stunned, she reaches out her hand and starts to cry saying “oh my god was there a baby in the car?” I automatically reach out to grasp her hands and realize that she was driving the other car. She’s maybe 20. She’s far more freaked out than I am, but she seems to be largely okay, too.

For once in my life, I have my cell phone on me. In my purse. In the van. And as I turn to go back to the van I see that there are little licks of flame underneath it. Flame. And my brain goes on a funny little tangent and says, “Wow man, this is some serious shit you’ve gotten yourself into.” I turn to a nice lady who’s asking if we’re okay, it turns out that she’s the one who stopped to wave me through in the oncoming lane, and I ask her to hold Lucas while I go get my purse because it’s okay for me to go toward the flaming van, not so much the baby.

I get my purse and my phone, and people keep asking me if we’re okay, and I’m increasingly convinced we are, except for the wretched mess of the front of the van. And those troubling little flames under it. So I call Beloved, and try my very damnedest not to freak him out more than I have to. “Hi babe, listen, I’m okay and Lucas is fine. We’re really fine. But I’ve been in accident, and the van is in bad shape.” And just about this point, it’s the only time the hint of hysteria gets to me as I watch those tiny flames start to lick up the front of the van. “And the van in on Fire. It’s on FIRE. (deep breath, deep breath, do NOT freak him out right now, you must make sure he stays calm) But we’re okay. So can you come and pick us up?”

So I’m standing there in the Lone Star parking lot, holding Lucas in my arms, because I didn’t even bother putting any shoes on him because we were just going to the takeout counter and back, and we’re watching my van go up in flames. Surreal moment, dude. There’s this exceptional lady who appears, and she keeps talking to Lucas, to me, and she’s just the most calming presence. She tries to lead me away from watching the van go up in smoke (and really impressive bright orange flames) saying, “You don’t need to see this” but I tell her that I really do. Her sweet boys, maybe 9 and 11, have seen the whole thing and they are obviously torn between the thrill of watching my van incinerate and care for me and Lucas. I am in love with this family of guardian angels.

The fire department and police and paramedics show up and they put the fire out really quickly, wow, the little detached part of my brain is busy evaluating the efficiency of the fire department and the size of the hose and the sheer number of emergency vehicles and personnel who seem to have materialized out of the sewers or something they got here so quickly.

The paramedics begin to assess us, and I wave them toward the girl first. Once the fire is out, I lose a little bit of the adrenaline that has been coursing through my system and realize that the baby is very heavy and so am I and I think I’ll just go sit down on that curb for a minute if nobody minds. There’s another nice lady, an older lady, who seems to work in one of the stores in the plaza, and she’s offering me a chair, which I decline, and a drink, which I decline and she’s offering me food for me and for the baby and even though I’m starving I keep saying polite nos until finally just because she really seems to need to get me something I say some water would be nice. She comes back out with another man who ought to be her husband if he isn’t, they seem like a nice matched set, both with the remnants of a slavic accent from long ago, and I have to all over again assure him that I need nothing else. I realize later they work at the Macs convenience store behind me, and I really feel badly that I didn’t pay for the water bottle (and cup and straw) she brought me, so I’ll have to go pay for it today.

In a quiet moment, I sit on the curb and cry just a few tears, more in response to the sheer kindness being show to us than over what has happened. I know the insurance will cover the cost of the van, mostly, and that these things happen. I do have a bit of a bad moment, though, whenever I let myself think of what could have, might have happened. How very much worse it could have been. It makes me weirdly giddy. My new best friend, I find out her name is Karen, the lady who tried to convince me not to watch the van burning, reappears. She’s told the Lone Star takeout counter what happened (note to self, call Lone Star to apologize, too, I never did go pick up the food) and has brought orange slices in a plastic cup and four mini-packs of crackers. As I’m sitting on the curb, taking bites of orange out of my mouth and feeding them to Lucas, the police officer walks up with a stroller and a Roots backpack that look suspiciously like mine. This is the detail that temporarily sends my brain into blue screen until I realize he’s retrieved them from the back of the van for me. This makes me start to cry again. He says it’s about all he could recover, and I realize my iPod and my gym membership card are in the glove compartment. Crisped beyond recognition, I’m sure, and likely a lot more wet than the time I sent them through the washing machine. My brain wanders away for a while, contemplating why the universe does not want me to have an iPod.

While I’m overwhelmed by the accident, what really amazes me is the sheer kindness of the people around me. What seems like dozens of people have asked if I’m okay, if Lucas is okay, if there is anything they can do. The lady in the oncoming lane who waved me through has had to move on, but she leaves her name and number. The emergency services people are outstanding. I learn that the paramedic and one of the fire department guys live on the street behind me and have been in my back-fence neighbour’s hot tub. I tell them I am disgruntled that I have not. The paramedic seems to appreciate my humour-as-a-coping-mechanism schtick and we somehow end up arguing about whether almost turning forty is wretched or not. When the police officer arrives to finish his report, he joins in on the debate. Everybody is genial and it’s a pleasant afternoon except for the first-degree burns on my hand and second degree burns on my leg from the air bags, and the fact that they’re hauling the burnt husk of my minivan onto a flatbed to haul to the junkyard.

Beloved arrives, and he’s dropped the big boys off with my mom. I’m so relieved to see him, to see he is smiling and that he’s here. A few minutes later, as I’m talking to the police officer, my dad arrives, too. I should have called my mom. Too many things to remember. The paramedic asks one more time if I want to go to the hospital, and while all seems fine, I think it prudent to get Lucas checked out. As soon as I realize, though, that the paramedics can only take him to the children’s hospital, I balk. No way am I taking my healthy baby into the emerg there, with H1N1 and who knows what. But the ambulance cannot take him anywhere else. The paramedic explains other options, I can bring him to a walk-in, or bring him to Queensway Carleton hospital myself. I decide on the latter.

The police officer is a gem. He tells me he’s about to add to my pain, and I get a ticket for “failure to yield” – $100 and three demerit points. I’m giddy with relief again, because I hadn’t known what to expect of this part. I suspect he has been easy on me, administering the lowest fine he was obligated to, and I’m a little choked up with relief. Right about this time, we realize that we have a problem. We have never put a baby car seat in the Focus. We discuss options for getting Lucas home with the police officer. I know that car seats should be discarded after an impact like this, but we decide in this case that it’s a better alternative than the booster seats in the Focus that the big boys use. Mark goes to the van to retrieve it, but it’s soaked and covered in bits of glass from when the windshield (shudder) exploded in the fire. Not an option. We chew it over for a minute, and knowing we have a proper spare car seat at home, we decide the best option is to strap Lucas into the booster, and the police officer will escort all the way home. By this time, maybe an hour or even a bit less since impact, and everything has been cleared away. The young woman has gone to the hospital, but I speak to her mother and it is more precautionary than anything. Her mother is also kind. The cars have been hauled away. Beloved drives us home.

My adventures did not end there. In shorthand: I waffle between a walk-in and the hospital, and decide on hospital just because I fear the walk-in might just send me there anyway. Arrive at Queensway Carleton hospital, realize I don’t have Lucas’s health card. Just then my mother calls, with that uncanny intuition mothers have, and asks if she can help. She offers to get the card and bring it to me, and to help with Lucas at the ER. I agree. I get into the ER, and see there is not a single empty seat in the waiting room. I ask the triage nurse if we’re looking at an hours-long wait. She nods. “Even with the baby?” I ask hopefully. She nods again, and an elderly lady tells me she’s been waiting since 1 pm. It’s a little after seven. I walk out. While waiting for my mom, I call my pediatrician’s number, thinking about the after hours clinic. I have to call back twice to get the number right, but eventually get through and get an appointment for 8 pm. I have a little more than 30 minutes. Still waiting for my mom, call the insurance company. The guy taking the details actually says, “Wow” when I tell him about the van going up in flames. I’m impressed that he’s impressed. Swallow down another “what might have happened but didn’t” panic attack. Getting increasingly agitated for time, and my mom shows up. I take the health card, thank her, and we head in opposite directions. I try to pay for my parking and can’t get the infernal device to work. Feeling time-pressured, I finally get it to work. $16 on my Visa to walk in and out of the ER. Gah. Then, the infernal gate won’t open. I’m nearly hysterical, it’s almost the time of my appointment at the after-hours clinic and I still have to drive 15 minutes, and it keeps telling me my ticket isn’t valid. I repay, just to be out of there. It accepts another $16 charge on my Visa, and the gate still won’t open. With four or five cars queued behind me, I lose it. Lose. It. I jump out of my car and yell toward the unmanned barrier, “For Christ’s sake, will somebody open the goddamned gate!” By the time I hit the word gate, my voice has gone up three octaves and I’m crying. Total meltdown. Long story short (way too late for that) I make it to the after-hours clinic and — the door is locked. I call, and I’m in the wrong place. Remember this story? I’ve gone to the place I should have gone the last time, and it turns out I should have gone to the place I did go. It takes the very last of my reserve not to do an encore presentation of “meltdown at the after-hours clinic” but I manage. The doctor examines Lucas, and we marvel over the fact that there is not a single bruise on him. He is perfect, as always.

It’s all good.

(Edited to add: you had to know there’s be a photograph. Can you believe it’s the one time in a million I didn’t brink the Nikon — and that’s a good thing — but I snapped this one with my cell phone, not so much for the 365 project as for potential insurance issues, and posterity.)

171b:365 Lookit that, my van is on fire.