My inner geek

On Canadians and space and cheeky geekery

10 January 2013 Life in Ottawa

I have always been a bit of a space geek. When I was a kid, I read every single book on astronomy in the public library, and I’ve always been fascinated by space and cosmology. I think I like cosmology (the history of the universe) because it means reading books in warm, bright places instead […]

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In which she achieves maximum geekery

18 February 2012 My inner geek

This? Makes me insanely happy. I just waited nearly an hour in line for a car wash so I could properly apply my new Star Wars family decals!! The minute I saw them on pinterest, I had to have them. The only debate was whether Beloved would be Darth Vader or Han Solo. “Luke, I […]

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My latest grammar pet peeve: Peek, peak and pique

13 February 2012 My inner geek

Dear Internet Friends, I love you dearly, but you make me want to bang my head on the desk when you confuse the homonyms peek, peak and pique. I would have thought the difference between peek and peak should be fairly straightforward, but when I saw them interchanged for the third time in a single […]

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An unprovoked attack on Comic Sans font

28 January 2011 How I love the Interwebs

I was in a committee meeting of the boys’ school council recently, and one of the other members presented a letter of some import that would be going home with each child in the school on behalf of school council. It was a very serious letter with a significant call to action (we’re raising funds […]

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In which the Dark Side recruits my kids

21 March 2010 Life, the Universe and Everything

I might have mentioned that we love flea markets. It’s a little early for flea market season, but there was an antiques and collectibles show at the Nepean Sportsplex this weekend, and we thought it would be fun to check it out. About two minutes after we got there, I realized that we’d made a […]

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We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.*

10 August 2009 Life, the Universe and Everything

I felt a pang of nostalgic sadness last week when I heard that film director and writer John Hughes had died in Manhatten. His movies were the backdrop and soundtrack to some of my best memories of high school and young adulthood, and his characters felt like people I knew — extensions of the loopy […]

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Happy Star Wars Day!

4 May 2009 Life, the Universe and Everything

What, you didn’t know it was Star Wars Day today? Look at the calendar, isn’t it obvious? (wait for it, you’re gonna groan) May the 4th be with you!!!! (I couldn’t possibly resist this one. The intersection of embarrassingly bad puns and hopeless geekyness is my happy place.) So since we’re talking about Star Wars, […]

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Worthy words and banished words

17 March 2009 My inner geek

Okay, so retro is cool, right? And retro is basically recycling old stuff and making it new again, often by those who missed it the first time around, right? Grand, so I’m totally retro in finally remembering on St Patty’s Day that I forgot to put up my annual posts in January about the word […]

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Apostrophe catastrophe

5 February 2009 My inner geek

We’ve defended the disappearing hyphen and debated the lowly comma, but it’s been a bloody good long time since we’ve had a dust-up as much fun as the one-space or two after a period debacle. Thanks to Kerry, though, we can now turn our attentions to the latest incidence of grammar-phobes running amok. From the […]

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In defense of grammar geeks

13 May 2008 How I love the Interwebs

Courtesy of Kerry, #99 in the ongoing series of Things White People Like: Grammar. Sheesh, can you believe there are people in the world who get frothed over the use of the comma? Or punctuation? Or the last letter of the alphabet? What kind of geek delights in discovering grammatical errors the same way kids […]

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