Les Bonnes Choses

Related to a recent post, it's been 5 days since I last wrote something, and I feel just awful about it. And I decided that this feeling might be symptomatic of some kind of personality disorder, namely, megalomania. I think the trigger may have been that traffic tracker widget. Before I added it, I had very little evidence that I was writing to amuse anyone but myself. I figured, at the very least, I could refer back to my blog should I ever want to write my memoirs. So one could argue that, before the widget, I suffered from low self-esteem if anything. But now that I see that, aside from the people befuddled by Kate McNamara's accent, the random perverts looking for pictures of geriatric porn, popped collars and Julius Caesar's murder, I do have a number of regular readers (some even subscribe!), I feel obliged to keep writing. After all, I can imagine my lonely reader from Antarctica sitting in the perpetual winter darkness, with only my witty writing to keep him/her sane...

See what I mean about delusions of grandeur? Still, it could be an interesting premise for a thriller, I suppose.

I'll just tack this unrelated thought on at the end because it doesn't really warrant its own blog entry, but every so often, I'll be in a men's room, and watch somebody just leave without washing their hands. I then have to figure out how to exit the washroom without transferring their pee-pee germs to my hands. Depending on the venue, I also may spend the rest of my evening looking over at some dude at a nearby table thinking "Unclean! Unclean!" Would a method of visibly marking such people be too draconian? I'm thinking maybe some kind of exploding dye pack. Or how's this for a really mortifying alternative:

Waiter: "Your drink, sir."
Mr. Nastyhands: "I didn't order a drink."
Waiter: "A gentleman at another table ordered it for 'the fellow in the yellow shirt who didn't wash his hands after using the toilet'."

Despite the oppressive heat, I cut the lawn this afternoon. Last week brought with it quite a bit of rain, so it's been growing like gangbusters. Here's a question: why is it that the grass along the wooden fence along either side of the yard is the lushest? It's irritating how the thickest, longest grass is also the most difficult to cut. Without my mp3 player, I had only my thoughts to keep me company as I paced back and forth across the lawn, paying just enough attention to what I was doing to avoid running over the extension cord. I found most of my thoughts were directed at adding items to the mental list Rebecca and I have been making for what to look for in our next house. When we bought this house, we were childless, and new to home ownership. The selling feature of this house was that the open concept main floor was conducive to hosting sushi parties. Seriously. That's why we bought the house. That, and it was on a bus route that would let me get to the university quickly -- or at least, so I thought. The bus route map doesn't indicate that the bus idles at a nearby intersection for 10-15 minutes for no apparent reason.

So now that I've had five summers of "tending" a yard, building decks, and planting grass to replace dead sod, we'll be a little savvier in our next house hunt. For starters, you can be sure that I'll be paying better attention to the yard. I'll know to ask questions like, "did you just drop some sod over top of gravel, or does the soil here actually support anything other than the most obnoxious weeds found in nature?"

Bindweed, the weed that I first met about four years ago when I decided to take a break from writing my comprehensive exam papers, has finally made the move to the front yard. I've been waiting for this other shoe to drop for a few years now, so I'll be glad not to have that headache anymore.

Update: in my seething anger, I read up a little more about bindweed. First, I was dismayed because I found that the plant is very difficult to chemically control, not that chemicals can be used cosmetically in Ontario anyways. But then I found this article about a bindweed mite. I may have to save some bindweed in a pot just so I can enjoy watching it die.

I found today's episode of Q to be actually interesting, as it was about three topics that I find quite interesting: city planning, amateur journalism on social networking sites, and accents. I find accents really neat to listen to and try to mimic. There was a passage of text that I once heard of through a friend of mine in the UWO audiology program. Called The Rainbow Passage, it contains all possible coarticulations in the English language. It seemed like a good tool to use when practicing accents.

The second interview concerned how mainstream journalism has embraced amateur journalism coming from so-called Web 2.0 sites. Twitter, especially, has been featured heavily in the news, as it's been the only way to hear about events like the recent protests in Iran. I'm all for it. It's certainly no replacement for professional journalism, but it means that if someone wants to give and uninformed opinions, they have to associate their name with it. Anonymous comments left on websites are infuriatingly idiodic.

Finally, The The first interview was with some guy who, God bless him, dreams of car-less cities. While I agree that it would be a wonderful ideal to aim for, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot when we spread out all over the continent shortly after arriving here so that we could have a little of what Schoolhouse Rock called "elbow room". Interestingly, in the process, indiginous peoples were concentrated into smaller, more manageable parcels of land euphemistically called reserves where they frequently live 15 or more to a shack here in Canada. Those anonymous commenters I mentioned earlier? Some of them are outraged that our government was sending them hand sanitizer, to, you know, mitigate the effects of H1N1 virus, which moves quite quickly in a shanty of a dozen or more people. See what I mean by idiotic comments? Anyone can see that a $2 bottle of hand sanitizer is clearly more economical than proper housing.

An addendum to the previous post. I just now finished decorating my niece's birthday present. Around here, we usually use plain wrapping paper and decorate it. Most often the wrapping paper is the brown craft paper, which is nice because it's good for stamping, and our presents are always quite distinctive. My niece's birthday present was wrapped in glossy pink wrapping paper, so I had to decorate it with sharpie. I blanked. The only thing I can draw anymore are Pixar cars at 3/4 view. And a duck. I couldn't get duck out of my head, and I'm sure a 4 year old girl who loves princesses does not want a picture of a cartoon duck on her present -- it could be a miniature castle with real live fairies all wrapped up in there, and the duck would just wreck it.

In the end, I drew a crown. It's a little lopsided though. It kind of looks like a duck.

If only I were as diligent with academic writing as I am with blogging, I'd probably be employed at a university by now. As it is, I am nearly 35 and have yet to work a single day in the career I chose one warm afternoon in 1992 at a track and field meet.

I contend that anything you could ever want to know can be found somewhere on the internet. There are some things that can't be found, mind you, like a recipe that uses toothpaste, but again, is that something that you would want to know how to do? So when I found myself not knowing what to blog about today, I turned to the internet.

"What to blog about," I asked google. I probably shouldn't have done that, because now I feel bad for not researching my audience, finding a niche and selecting a topic. Blagging is serious business.

So now I am at a crossroads, just like Jon and Kate. Okay, I'm just messing with y'all. I just wanted to make fun of the melodrama. If I never hear about that program again, it'll be too soon. When we move, seriously, no cable. Speaking of which, in just a little over a month, we'll be packing it all up -- or most of it, at least. The Christmas stuff will probably all remain in my mom and dad's basement, as we'll be spending the Christmas season in London anyways. Time to photograph some stuff for kijiji and have a garage sale!

Alot changes in a week. With the exception of the reprieve we got when Asher was born, tomorrow is the first Sunday in a month that we don't have to leave the house spotless first thing in the morning for an open house. In fact, I can't speak for Rebecca, but I'm sort of deliberately leaving messes here and there as some lame act of rebellion. I'm not entirely sure against whom it is I am rebelling -- I suppose I could just cite the nameless 'man', but I thought 'the man' just kept you down; I've never known insisting on a tidy house to be on his agenda.

Another thing that has changed this week is that Monsieur Jude has already loved and lost. Sure, he had his share of flings -- Riley at his preschool used to regularly corner him to hug and kiss him until he fought her off -- but that didn't mean anything. Tonight, however, we were at his surrogate third grandmother's retirement party. The relation is that she is his aunt's (Rebecca's sister) mother-in-law. In genealogy circles, such a link would be tenuous at best, but as we've been at nearly all of their family functions for as long as I've been with Rebecca, the bonds run somewhat deeper. Fortunately for Jude, however, they don't run deep enough to preclude a romance with any of the multitude of female pseudo-cousins with whom he was playing after the potluck dinner. He was especially attached to one of these girls, to whom he first referred as "the purple guy" (her dress was purple), and then "Purple Leah" when he learned her name. He followed Purple Leah everywhere for the rest of the evening. Being about three years older than him, she must have seemed very sophisticated; to be sure, she was very tolerant. But when Jude's night was over, and Purple Leah was not impressed enough with Jude's claim to own Kung Fu Panda to come home with us as he had begged, he was heartbroken. Or maybe just overtired.

It's so appropriate, then, that tomorrow is Father's Day. And I may find myself, just like fathers the world over have for generations, having a talk with his son about girls; and how they're hard to understand; and how they just don't like kung fu and cars the same as boys do; and how, maybe in about 18 years, he should look up Purple Leah and ask her if she wants to go for ice cream.

I had wanted to write about this at the time, but in so doing, I'd be advertising to the world (as far South as Antarctica, I understand) that we were out of the house. I'm back from our rental expedition to Chicago, and everything went exceedingly well: we lucked into the most amazing rental opportunity since God spake to his chosen people and said, "Here, I've got this great Mediterranean property you might be interested in. Here's the rider and lease agreement. There's just 10 items on it, and the rent is free. Oh, and you'll also have to mow the grass." Of course, they never did write down the amendment "thou shalt provide thine own lawncare," so the 11th commandment was lost to the ages. Still, we have a heavily discounted rental in a high-rent neighbourhood, just a 5 minute walk from Amy. As another stroke of luck, it was just in the freeps today that direct flights between London and Chicago will be starting up at the end of September. I did a hypothetical online booking with United Airlines and found that the round trip ticket came to $380.The night that we wowed the property manager with our fantastic charisma (I'd put Asher's at 15 or higher) I received a phone call from our realtor that the sale was finalized, so, yay!

The next step will be to review the to-do list compiled by Graeme and Amy to find out what the heck I have to do over the next few weeks in order to have a smooth cross-border move.

Update on yesterday's post. Our agent received an email from the buyer regarding the result of the home inspection (the offer was conditional on the results of the inspection). Everything inside the house was fine (including my DIY basement), but not so great outside of the house. The roof apparently shows more wear than would be expected of a 6 year old house. They buyers are sending a roofing specialist up to give a more detailed assessment today. I hope this is covered under our new home warranty.

In other news, the low-frequency hum that I have been experiencing in my right ear for the last two weeks hasn't kicked in so far today -- if you have a set of computer speakers with a sub-woofer, turn up the volume really loud -- the hum you hear coming out of the sub-woofer basically matches what I've been hearing in my ear 24 hours a day for the last couple of weeks.

And what did the doctor say about this problem, you ask? Good question. I went to the UWO walk-in because our family doctor was inconveniently away and I was on the verge of perforating my eardrum in order to deliberately deafen myself. The doctor was perplexed by my apparently healthy ear and said she'd call back later in the day with a referral to a specialist. That was two weeks ago, which brings to mind the time that I wore some contraption to monitor a heart arrhythmia, or the time I had my ribs X-rayed because of a likely fracture: neither was there any follow-up on either of those occasions. Of course, because we have a universal health-care system, none of these incidents cost me a cent. Unfortunately, where health care is concerned, it appears that I have been getting what I paid for.

My editor has been breathing down my neck as I failed to meet my last submission deadline. He said that people don't pay good money for me to sit around on my duff and -- what? People aren't paying good money? I don't even have an editor?

Oh. That changes things. Okay, then. I'm going to take today off. I'm busy. I will leave, however, with a report that our house has received a conditional offer. We've already had the home inspection, so I don't know what the default status of the offer is -- it expires on Tuesday, so does the offer stand unless we hear otherwise, or is the offer rescinded unless we hear otherwise? Maybe someone who has more experience in this sort of thing might leave a comment. Or maybe I'll pester my agent, about whom, incidentally, I have nothing but good things to say. He has been working amazingly hard on getting this house sold.

In my research, I make heavy use of ratings. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that sometimes these sorts of relational judgments are artificial, especially at the extremes. For example, who is the most attractive female celebrity out there? Does it even make sense to try and distinguish from among Elaine Irwin Mellencamp (you may recognize her as the face of Almay), Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman? I mean, someone might insist that there is some way of quantifying beauty in such a way as to be able to rank order them, but I'll be damned if it would really mean anything.

On our way to my post-convocation lunch with my family, Rebecca and I witnessed what I claimed at the time to be the strangest thing I had seen. But then I remembered my philosophy on superlatives and decided that, no this wasn't the strangest thing I had ever seen, but it right up at the top: as we sat at the intersection of Kipps Lane and Adelaide waiting for a break in traffic, we saw what appeared to be some white guy decked out like a house painter lipping off at an SUV with four very much not white guys straight out of a hip-hop video. At one point, he walked out into traffic on a 60 km/h road to talk to the occupants of the car. It was when the car door opened that I learned something about Rebecca as she urged me to complete the turn so that we "[didn't] witness anything". Granted, we had a baby in the car, and it seemed not entirely impossible that some kind of gunplay might break out, but when I think back on it, Rebecca's choice of words amuses me.

If you have some OTC medication nearby, I'll bet you five to one that it says somewhere on the label that it is not suitable for pregnant or lactating women. I'm sure that new or expecting mothers among my diverse readership would agree: two pink lines on a pee stick signal at least a year of sucking it up as you endure headaches, allergies, colds, flus and a host of other uncomfortable plagues* without the benefit of any pharmaceutical relief. The alternative, I suppose, would be to go into your local GNC or Sangsters and pick up some herbal remedy. But those bottles of valerian root or mosswort don't carry those same warnings only because they aren't regulated in the same way; in any case, if it's a placebo effect you're after, sugar pills are much cheaper, especially if you swipe all the Rockets candy from your kid's hallowe'en sack.

No, I think that there's a huge opportunity out there for somebody to make a pile of cash by figuring out how to make mommy-safe versions of common OTC medications. Someone could probably retire comfortably on hemorrhoid ointment.

While I'm suggesting lucrative pharmaceuticals, here's another awesome idea out of pregnancy lore: As a woman gets closer to giving birth, her body releases chemicals that make her more flexible. Rebecca complained of her hips feeling like they were falling out of their sockets. My ligaments, on the other hand, have all but ossified. Whatever is going on with expectant mothers' joints, somebody ought to bottle that stuff up. They could call it Liquid Yoga. I'd buy it. My buddy A says that the yoga in his workout DVDs kicks his ass, so he'd probably buy it too.


*Currently, there are no FDA-approved medications for the treatment of frogs, locusts, or rivers of blood

...after all, it's been a week with my new and improved family. So far, Asher has seen about 6 hours of daylight. The rest of the time? Sleeping, which also means he doesn't really cry much either. Knock on wood.

I've spent the last week mostly working in the yard. We had a load of topsoil dropped off last weekend, and I literally had more topsoil than I knew what to do with. I was also under the gun to disperse the pile of dirt because the last time I had a delivery of topsoil, the weather kept me from doing anything with it for several weeks, during which time all the grass underneath died. All that work finished up today, just prior to our open house, when I put down some nice cedar mulch. That stuff smells amazing. I still have a bag and a half of it that I have reserved for snorting.

Now, because all I have been doing for the last week is shovel dirt and divide hosta plants, I don't have much else to talk about. Hopefully this next week will bring an offer on my house so I can get back to things that matter. There will also be a short trip to Chicago in the near future because I have to scope out a place to live in Evanston. In related news, I confirmed that Amtrak has a train that runs between Chicago and Port Huron for $27. Hopefully that'll be some incentive for people to come visit us, as well as make it easier for some of us to make it back to London to visit family.

My apologies to those out there who don't know me well enough to know that I'm the sort of person who would make a geek reference in the middle of a birth announcement. James Tiberius (as in James T. Kirk from the original Star Trek series) is definitely a well-crafted name, but our first-born, Jude, already has a lifetime of "Hey Jude" references ahead of him. I can't imagine it would be any easier for someone to grow up with a name that's an obvious reference to a womanizing starship captain. He seems to be a pretty good-looking boy, and I could imagine a desperate girl might make the mistake of painting herself green to try to win his affections.

We didn't know ahead of time if we were having a boy or girl, whose name would have been Sasha Claire (I also liked the name Portia, but I was already responsible for the middle name). We eventually decided on the name Asher, and arriving at this decision was a difficult process because it took 8 brain-racking months to come up with the first boy's name, Jude, that met my stringent social-engineering-based criteria was a challenge. Deciding on a middle name for Asher was a little less difficult, on account of the fact that they are generally used only when the child is in big cucks, though this was not without it's difficulties either. Rebecca first proposed the name Jackson. On it's own, it's not a bad name, but when combined with Asher, well, I couldn't say Asher Jackson without instead calling him Action Jackson and then giggling. In the end, Rebecca thought it wouldn't be appropriate if I laughed at the mention of my son's name, so we went with Benjamin - a name shared by a good, selfless friend of mine.



So here's where I give a few shoutouts. Props to our midwife, Natalie Hicken, who was great company the whole day. Props also go to my dad for answering the phone at 6am and coming to get Jude that morning, and to Heather and X for coming down from Toronto for the weekend and willing the baby to be born (Heather is that stubborn).

On the other hand, slops go to Rogers home phone service, which spontaneously cut out in the middle of our emergency call to the midwives to tell them that we were in labour. We were fortunate to have a cell phone, but I was plenty irate with the loss of service in the middle of an emergency call. They were, after all, the ones that required us to replace our phone-line service with their stupid, unreliable cable phone.

I finish off with the observation that childbirth isn't called labour for nothing. It's a lot of hard work, which is why it isn't called vacation instead. I'm not sure why nature took that route; I'm sure it would be nice to have pleasant tickling contractions and have the baby come out with something that felt like a backrub. I don't know who to talk to about that. I'm always inventing things, you see, and I think I've got a real moneymaker of an idea going.