Month: December 2009

Two – no, THREE! — very different advent calendars

’Tis the season for advent calendars, and even though we’re already half way through December, I wanted to tell you about this amazing blog post courtesy of my friend Sue, who is the curator of the children’s lit collection at UNB (doesn’t that sound like an awesome job?)

Sue has put together a wonderful list of 25 animated shorts based on children’s books. Truly, it’s a thing of beauty, this list. It’s defiinitely worth bookmarking, whether you share them with your kids throughout the holiday season or save them for a rainy day. Brilliant stuff! And if you love it as much as I did, toss Sue’s blog a vote in the Canadian Blog Awards, would you? It’s Mouse-traps and the Moon, and she’s up for Best Canadian Culture or Literature Blog.

And, ahem, if you’re still in a voting mood… you could always toss me a bit of clickety-love, too!

***

Speaking of advent calendars, I’ve continued to be impressed by the items we’re unwrapping from the Hill and Knowlton / President’s Choice advent calendar. We’re up to day 17, and despite continuing exhortations from Beloved to jump ahead, we’re still opening one new item each day. In case you missed it, here’s what we’ve had so far. In the last week and a bit, we’ve opened:

  • PC Mocktails, a raspberry fizzy drink. Beloved and Simon give two thumbs up (my kids don’t drink pop, so Tristan wasn’t overly impressed, and I’m not fond of sweet drinks like that myself.)
  • PC Holiday Cards: this was a nice change of pace, and will come in handy as I’ve already used up all my Costco Photo Cards.
  • From the PC Antipasto Collection, Gigandes Beans in Vinaigrette. Okay, this one didn’t fly at our house. Interesting idea, and I do love most antipasto nibblers, but this one was a universal bust with us. Oh well, you can’t win them all!
  • PC Mint Jelly: Not sure about this one, either. We don’t eat lamb, the only use I know of for mint jelly. Can you just eat it on toast? If nothing else, this calendar is broadening our horizons!!
  • PC Wheat Hazelnut Cantuccini Mini Biscotti. This? To die for. We polished off the box the very first day we opened it, and I bought two more at the grocery store later in the weekend. Yummy!!!
  • PC Caramel Latte Drink Mix. Again, too sweet for me (and I’m not much of a flavoured coffee girl anyway) but Beloved approves!
  • PC Chocolate Covered Gingerbread Bites. Really, do I need to tell you that this went down like a house on fire? Even the baby loved them.
  • PC Pad Thai Sauce. I’ve never had Pad Thai, though I have enjoyed many other Thai dishes. Since the PC Tika Masala is one of my favourite standby meals, and since the directions on the jar seem straightforward enough, I’ll have to give this one a try soon.
  • PC Chocolate Butter Fudge. Seriously. How am I supposed to lose those 5 lbs I’ve been working on when this kind of thing magically appears in the house? Sooooo good, especially straight out of the freezer with coffee.

With just over a week to go, even though I can’t imagine there is anything more delicious than the truffles and the biscotti left under the tree, I fear I may yet lose the battle to prolong our enjoyment of these treats throughout the full 25 days of Christmas.

Edited to add: when I was noodling this post in my head, I knew I had three advent calendar ideas but for the life of me couldn’t remember the last one when I actually sat down at the computer. Got it now! Courtesy of Suze of Here In My Head, check out this awesome collection of 25 of the year’s best images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Truly awe-inspiring!!

Dani or Danielle

My mother named me Danielle Monique. The joke was that if my father had gotten to the birth certificate form first, I would have been Monique Danielle. I’m not sure I ever asked where Monique came from, but Danielle was from a book my mom read when she was a teenager. In fact, Danielle was such a rare name in my anglo southern Ontario town in the early 1970s that a neighbour of my grandmother named her daughter Danielle after hearing my grandmother call it out for me. My folks went to Paris when I was 10 or 11 and I still have the necklace pendant they brought back for me — the first time I’d ever seen any kind of name souvenir with Danielle written on it. Of course, now that I live in the bilingual national capital, there’s a lot more Danielles around.

When I was 12, I was desperately in need of a reinvention. I’d changed schools, and wanted an even fresher start, so I started calling myself Dani. It was my dad who first called me that, but by high school just about everyone — except my mother — did. I’ve used Danielle professionally through the years, using the longer name formally and Dani informally. All my documents say Danielle, but just about everyone — except my mother — still calls me Dani.

As you can see, I’ve made quite the online brand for myself as DaniGirl. It was my friend Heather who first called me that, in my early 20s. And Beloved calls me DaniGirl, too. It still makes me smile.

As I’ve become a woman of a (cough) certain age, I’ve wondered whether the undeniably perky name Dani still suits me. When I changed jobs last month, I introduced myself as Danielle. Seems more, um, managerial than Dani. And it took about two e-mails before I was signing off as Dani, if nothing else because it saves me four keystrokes each time! Beloved and I were invited out to a social gathering on the weekend with some of my new colleagues, and it resonated in my ears when they called me Danielle. I introduced myself to strangers at the party as Dani. It’s habit now.

Names have been an interesting challenge for me throughout my life. When I got married at 20, my “practice” marriage, I took his name, even though it was so French that my little anglo tongue had to practice it for ages to get it right. And long before I knew we were headed for splitsville, I’d asked him if it would be okay for me to go back to using my maiden name. I felt lost without it. And through sheer stubbornness, I’ve saddled the boys with a mouthful of hyphenated surnames for which I’m sure they will curse me in years to come.

Care to add to this rather pointless ramble on names? Have you moved from Susan to Susie to Sue through the years? Decided that Becky was better than Rebecca? Were horrified when someone truncated your name and it stuck? Do you correct people when they call you Pat instead of Patricia? (It still gets my back up when people call me Dan. I know it’s dangerous to admit this to some of you, who will forevermore call me exactly that, but it really does grate when I hear it!)

***

A propos of nothing at all — no, wait, I can make a segue out of this: Speaking of names, I’d love to be named the Best Family Blog in the Canadian Blog Awards! (Aw, c’mon, it’s not bad!) You can vote for me today and every day this week! Instructions are here, or you can just click through to the voting form and wing it — just don’t forget to press the “vote” button at the bottom and the “confirm” button on the next screen! And thanks!! 🙂

Best! Santa! Ever!

Every year, we bring the boys to see Santa at the mall and have their picture taken. We were quite fond of the Santa at the Loblaws in Barrhaven because he was the santa-est looking Santa we’d ever seen. Let’s just say that come New Year’s Day, that Santa would still have his beard! He was sweet to the boys, soft-spoken and kind, and we never had to wait in line. In fact, I was forever charmed when one year we approached to find Santa snoring gently in his chair, waiting for his next visitor.

Sadly, there’s no Santa at the Barrhaven Loblaws this year, and I really did not want to repeat our epic adventure from last year, involving two separate malls and a 95 minute wait in the queue, so we decided to bring the boys out to Hazeldean Mall in Kanata, where we’ve had some previous Santa success.

And you know what? Best. Santa. Ever.

I am so impressed with the whole Santa operation at Hazeldean. First, they asked us to register by writing down the boys’ names. We only had to wait 10 minutes or so, as there were three families in front of us. Ironically, it was Lucas who was most anxious to move on from the queue, tugging at the velvet-lined rope saying, “Open, open, open!” with charming insistence.

I must take a moment to back up a bit and tell you that Lucas is the most shy of all three boys by a long margin. I never would have expected any child of mine, let alone the third one, to be so shy. When strangers talk to him, he invariably turns his head away, or makes what I now recognize as his pained “Somebody help me, there’s a stranger LOOKING at me” face.

Knowing that most kids around the age of two years are not particularly fond of the giant stranger in the bright red suit (understandably so, when you think about it) and knowing that Lucas is already less than fond of meeting new people, I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to get him within about five feet of Santa’s lap. Much as I’d’ve liked a picture of all three on Santa’s knee, I wasn’t willing to stress anybody out over it.

So Tristan and Simon walked right over to Santa, and Santa greeted them by name because his eflin assistant had leaned over and whispered their names in his ear after consulting our registration paper. I’ve never seen that done before, and what a brilliant addition to the Santa experience! I mean, he’s supposed to know everything, right? So why should Santa be asking their names? Nice touch.

Santa with Tristan and Simon

They chat for a couple of minutes with Santa, telling him they’ve been good and unloading their dearest desires for Lego (check) and a Nintendo DS (so not going to happen), and the whole time I’ve got Lucas by the hand about six feet away from Santa, trying to cajole him to get within arms reach. And it’s quite obvious that it’s not going to happen. Whenever Lucas gets anywhere close to photographable range, he starts to panic, and I’m not willing to completely freak him out over the issue so I’m about ready to let it go.

What I didn’t realize was that Santa was processing all this, too, and when Tristan and Simon are done he gives them each a candy cane and wishes them a Merry Christmas, and then tells his alarmingly young photographer elf to stand by. (In, I must add, a very stern voice that made me snicker a bit under my breath. Santa does not suffer fools gladly, apparently, and is not shy about giving instructions to his ingenue helper!)

He tells his photographer, in that stern but quiet voice that says he’s used to being obeyed, “Move over here and wait until I tell you.” Then he turns to Lucas with a beaming smile and bends down low to offer him a candy cane. Lucas is obviously tempted by the candy cane, and I can see his little brain trying to figure out how to acquire it without coming within arm’s reach of the dude in the red suit. He inches incrementally closer, and finally clasps his hand around it. The second he’s begun to reach for it, Santa says to his photographer in a soft voice, “Now!”

Santa & Lucas

Isn’t that wonderful? I was so tickled that he made the extra effort to orchestrate a picture for us, and to make the experience so positive for all of us. As the boys bounded away to show their candy canes to Daddy, I leaned over and said a special thank you. “You should give Santa lessons!”

And rather than sending us to the local photo store to pick up our pictures, or charging us $20 for a 5×7, they way they do it at Hazeldean is that you pay $12 and they give you a CD with all the shots they took on it and a coupon for a free 4×6. We ended up with 12 images to choose from, including one where Santa’s eyes were closed and one where Tristan was cross-eyed — but the two images above are worth every penny!

Hey, lookit that, I made the top ten!

Hey, thanks for your votes! I made the first cut on the Canadian Blog Awards to make the top 10 Best Family Blogs. Yay!!

So you know what comes next, right? Much pestering on my part for your continued voting support, especially now that I know you have to are permitted to vote every day. Hint, hint.

Let’s post those voting instructions one more time, shall we?

  1. Click on this link to the Best Family Blog poll and it will open the voting page in a new window.

  2. Scroll down until you find Postcards for the Mothership.

  3. Click on the little drop-down triangle immediately to the right of the blog title.

  4. Select “1st”. Cuz you love me, right?

  5. Optional: there are lots of other great blogs in this list, so if you want to choose more than one, you can rank your choices and toss a vote to all your favourites. I’m not entirely sure I understand the ranking system, though. You don’t have to rank or choose more than one blog to vote, though.

  6. Scroll down to the bottom of the poll and click “vote”.

  7. Press “confirm”. Don’t forget this part!

  8. Bask in the sunshine of my everlasting gratitude!

And, hey, guess what? If you found that to be an enjoying and enriching experience, great news — you can do it every day through December 19! 😉

Thanks, as always, for your affection and support. (And indulgence!)

Save 25 per cent at Lulu.com

This is convenient! Remember the other day when I told you about the Ottawa photo calendar I made up for sale at Lulu.com? I just got an e-mail saying you can save 25% on everything at Lulu.com through the end of December by entering code “HOHOHO” when you check out. So, if you were thinking about getting an Ottawa photo calendar, chock full of some of the best shots of my 365 project,now there’s even more incentive! 🙂

Project365: Bring on the Christmas pix!

In our house, the holiday season officially begins on December 4, with Beloved’s birthday.

318:365 Happy birthday, my Beloved!

Once we have that out of the way, we can officially get on with the Christmas mania! After the mouse-poop fiasco and a good sanitizing, we decided that we love our Christmas tree too much to sacrifice it.

319:365 Guess what we did today?

The boys each lost a tooth on Friday, Simon from the bottom and Tristan from the top. So now, they can together sing, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!” (Somehow, I forgot to upload the picture of Simon. Oops!)

319b:365 All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth

One of the restrictions of taking pictures through my Duaflex is that you have a really wide angle of view with a very long depth of field. (Everything is in focus, from close to the camera to the far distance.) I’d seen some talk in the forums on Flickr of using a close-up filter to get a larger image of the viewfinder, which worked well, but had a really interesting effect on depth of field. See how the closest bits of cedar are sharp and those further away are blurred? The close-up filter does that, and for reasons I don’t understand, it also blurs the edges of the viewfinder.

320:365 TtV Christmas lights

(You’ve seen this Christmas mouse already, but you can see the same effect as above.)

321:365 TtV Christmas mouse

In addition to being Beloved’s birthday, this week we also celebrated Lucas’s 22 month birthday. He gets cuter by the day, don’t you think?

322:365 I'm 22 months old today

On Wednesday, I was puttering around the house looking for something to turn into a still life. I started with my grandmother’s antique soup bowl, and then tried adding some clementines. That didn’t work so I started tried some nuts, but it wasn’t very interesting. Then I added my macro filter and got in real close, and this is what I ended up with. (That’s a fairly accurate summary of how I approach most images you see here: something catches my eye as potentially photographable, I try a few different angles and approaches, add some things and subtract some others, refine my approach and end up with a final image — about 20 shots after I started!)

323:365 Awww nuts!

Last but definitely not least — poor ol’ Katie, the best doggy in the world. I called this one “All I want for Christmas is some peace and quiet!”

324:365 All I want for Christmas is some peace and quiet...

Only 40 more days to go!!

Shameless, I am!

A couple of quick items: first, aren’t you pleased that I haven’t been haranguing you every single day to vote for me in the Canadian Blog Awards? It’s a nice change over previous years, no? But, ahem, have you voted for me under the Best Family Blog category in the Canadian Blog Awards yet? (Apparently, you could have been voting for me every day for the past week and a half. Had I only known!)

Anyway, if you missed the earlier post on it, here’s the instructions. (The fact that I need to publish instructions to harangue you for your votes definitely factored into my decision not to be obnoxious about this!)

  1. Click on this link to the Best Family Blog poll and it will open the voting page in a new window.

  2. Scroll down until you find Postcards for the Mothership.

  3. Click on the little drop-down triangle immediately to the right of the blog title.

  4. Select “1st”. Cuz you love me, right?

  5. Optional: there are lots of other great blogs in this list, so if you want to choose more than one, you can rank your choices and toss a vote to all your favourites. I’m not entirely sure I understand the ranking system, though. You don’t have to rank or choose more than one blog to vote, though.

  6. Scroll down to the bottom of the poll and click “vote”.

  7. Press “confirm”.

  8. Bask in the sunshine of my everlasting gratitude!

And speaking of shameless self-promotion, that’s entirely what I forgot to do with this. I don’t know if you noticed it sitting there unobtrusively in the sidebar since September, but I made up a calendar of some of my best images of Ottawa from my 365 project and turned them into a calendar that’s for sale on Lulu.com.

You can click through to Lulu.com to see a full preview of the calendar pages, but that seems to only work sporadically. Here are a few of the many images from my 365 project that I’ve used singly and in collages throughout the calendar:

My creation

I had a *lot* of trouble with Lulu.com, to be honest, and almost didn’t bother to tell you about it. But then I got an e-mail (that I didn’t entirely understand, to be honest) that said my calendar would be featured on Amazon.com (which I still haven’t been able to find) and I thought, “Well hell, I might as well put it on my own blog, then!”

And special for you, I’ve just dropped the price by $5.00!

Welcome to our newest sponsor: BraChic!

I‘d like to extend a special welcome to the newest sponsor of Postcards from the Mothership, Ottawa’s own BraChic.

I am so pleased to have Marianne and her shop advertising here for several reasons: I love the shop itself, I love the idea of supporting local business, and I love the serendipity of how this arrangement came to be.

You might remember my blog post from this summer, of how walking into BraChic one day totally revolutionized how I see my body. Really, I’m not exaggerating. I was seriously considering a breast reduction when I realized that a well-fitting bra can do as much, if not more, to make you look and feel better than a scalpel could. I still love the two bras I bought at BraChic and think that I might be due for a third some time in the new year.

So I wrote about my bra-fitting experience, and at least some of you read it and wandered on down to BraChic yourself, because Marianne said that people had mentioned the blog post to her. And then one day I noticed that Marianne had also linked to my blog post in the “news” section of her Web site, so on a whim I approached her an asked if she’d be interested in advertising and she said yes right away. It took us a few months of missed contacts, vacations and downed Internet connections to get the deal put together, but I’m thrilled to have her on board.

Initially, she sent me this image when we were discussing how the ad might look. I could never have made it work as a sidebar image, but I knew when I saw it that I had to share it with you. Is this not awesome? It’s for a line called HotMilk Maternity Lingerie. I love this ad!

HotMilk ad

So thanks, Marianne and BraChic, for being one of the hand-picked sponsors of Postcards from the Mothership.

(And no, it has not escaped my attention that both my current advertisers are bra-related business, and I spend so much time yammering about my vexatious breasts that they need their own damn category. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence….)

Update on Ottawa’s Olympic Torch Relay and Christmas Light celebration

Remember last month when I mentioned that the Christmas Lights Across Canada program (where each year hundreds of thousands of lights throughout downtown Ottawa are launched with a special lighting ceremony on Parliament Hill) will this year coincide with the arrival of the Olympic Torch Relay? Pretty cool stuff, eh? Well, the National Capital Commission noticed that post, too, and offered me some of their official publicity material to share with you.

Here’s the official details of the event taking place this Saturday night, December 12, on Parliament Hill:

Starting at 5:30 pm, be part of history alongside thousand of Canadians gathered to take in a unique evening of free activities, featuring internationally renowned artists like Gregory Charles and Tom Cochrane.

Olympic medalists for Canada, Nathalie Lambert and Steve Podborski, Chef de Mission and Assistant Chef de Mission for the Canadian Olympic Team, are the distinguished masters of ceremony for this spectacular event.

Gregory Charles, composer of the official community celebrations theme song, will conduct a choir composed of 100 singers from the region. Following these performances, the crowd will be captivated by an aboriginal dance choreography interpreted by artists from many parts of Canada. The festivities will end with a performance by Tom Cochrane.

The evening culminates with the arrival of the Olympic Torch and the illumination of the Christmas lights at 7 pm. The final torchbearer will be Joé Juneau, 1992 Albertville Olympic medallist and former Montréal Canadiens team member. He will have the honour of lighting the Olympic Flame in the Capital.

Hot chocolate and BeaverTails® pastries will be offered from 5 pm to 8 pm (while quantities last).

Sounds like a fun night! If you can’t make it downtown for the Christmas Light/Torch Relay ceremony, you can use this interactive map to see if and when the Olympic Torch Relay will pass near your neighbourhood. Ottawa, Kanata, Gatineau, Buckingham, Hawkesbury, Almonte, Renfrew and Highway 17 all the way up to Pembroke are on the route over the course of three days from December 11 through 13.

And if you just can’t get enough of all things related to the NCC’s sponsorship of this event, you can take a look at the pix in the official Flickr account and this YouTube video. Props to the NCC for embracing social media, but I’m hoping the content gets a little less, um, official as the Olympic Torch passes through!

DaniGirl versus the Mouse, Round 2

Remember in my previous post, when I said about the mouse living in our basement “He is Legion”?

I had no idea.

The mice, they are everywhere. They are in my garage, they are in my basement, they are even in my office, a whole 10 km away from my house. I swear, I am beginning to dream about eight-foot tall towering, slavering mice penning me into a corner… it’s not pretty.

We’ve had some success with the traps. I think we caught three or four in the basement (one of which was triggered while the poor nanny was downstairs, much to her dismay) and one committed suicide by jumping into the recycling bin in the garage. The last remaining trap in the basement has been sitting without being triggered for close to three weeks now — I take that as a good sign.

Meanwhile, apparently my corner of the building is a hot spot for mice at work, as they do some work on the foundation. Last week, I had to call the janitor to remove a, um, full trap from under my desk. No more kicking off the shoes while sitting at my desk!

So while the actual vermin themselves seem to be under control, we keep incrementally discovering the extent to which they’ve wreaked havoc this fall. I told you about the kids’ Halloween costumes, and I also threw out our almost-expired newborn car seat when I found it full of mouse poop.

The very worst part, though? Last week I went into the garage to get my beloved almost-20-year-old Christmas tree, a tree that makes me happy every single year when I put it up, and when I pulled it out I found the bottom of the new-last-year red Christmas tree storage bag speckled with mouse poop. The suckers had chewed right through the bag, then used fragments of the bag as nesting material.

Farkin’ mice!!!

So I threw away the tree skirt and the bag itself, rescued a set of handmade wooden snowmen, and shook the holy hell out of the tree segments themselves. Hardly any mouse poop actually fell off of it, so after agonizing for a few days I decided to go ahead and decorate it. But I’m so mad at those damn mice for tainting my tree bliss! I would have happily used that tree for another 20 years, not least of which because I took a look around and I couldn’t replace it quality-wise for less than $300, and because I have always said that “artificial” trees are an environmentally friendly choice as long as you commit to one and stick with it. I think we might have to get another one for next year, though. It makes me so sad, but the tree is just not the same since the mice got into it.

Needless to say, I’m not feeling at all sympathetic to the mice in the traps any more.

When I was a kid, this guy used to hang on our family Christmas tree, and my mom carefully wrapped him in tissue and paper towels and shipped him up to me the first Christmas I lived away from home, back in 1988.

321:365 TtV Christmas mouse

He’s always been one of my favourites, despite the fact that his fuzz is a little uneven now, and some time in the last decade or two he’s lost the jaunty red ribbon that used to be wrapped around his neck. He still sits in a place of honour at eye-level in our tree, but I can’t help but scowl at him whenever I walk past.

I think this round goes to the mice. Stay tuned for round three…