Les Bonnes Choses

Evanston kicks ass. We received a community newsletter in the mail last week outlining the Hallowe'en day events. The Northwestern Wildcats played against the Penn State Nittany Lions (NU lost 34-13), and, because of the date, they had a number of kids activities that drew us out there. We didn't stay too long because le p'tit monsieur was a malcontent, though Jude did get a balloon "ghostes" (pronounced ghost'-ezz). We also stopped for a couple of minutes to appreciate the NU Marching Band (NUMB, which probably carries a dual meaning late in the season). I think a tear might have come to my eye when the band performed Thriller -- with one section at one point putting down their instruments to do the thriller dance.

We were home just after 3, in time to prepare for the trick-or-treaters. The other reason that Evanston kicks ass is that the community newsletter indicated that trick-or-treating runs between 4 and 7pm. There is little more irritating than teenagers ringing your doorbell at 8:30 dressed either in normal clothes (the punk costume) or else a boyfriends' football uniform (the jock costume) scavenging for whatever candy was not given out to the little kids earlier on. Having a definite end time makes it just a little easier to relax at the end of the night. This year, Jude would have nothing to do with trick-or-treating. He wouldn't even put on his costume. But perhaps he's just brilliant. We have a metric boatload of leftover candy, and he didn't have to ring a single doorbell to get it. On its own, this might not mean much, but keep in mind that Jude also helped give out candy at the door, and was quite a miser.

No sooner do I move to the US where I can finally watch reruns on Hulu when I find out that they're toying with becoming a paid service. Just my luck. Rebecca's able to catch up on Glee, which is pretty amusing. Marc's right though: they do make rather gratuitous use of the Auto-Tune. Perhaps it would be just too much to have actors that sing as good as they look. Where I'm concerned, the only valid use for auto-tune is in making humorous remixes, as in this brilliant slap-chop remix (brought to my attention by John and Panic):


I spent about forty minutes cleaning these pumpkin seeds only to scorch them when I put Jude to bed. Forty minutes. Considering I bought a bag of salted roasted squash seeds from the market last weekend for about $1.50 ... I don't even want to continue that thought.

Ooh! Shiny!

What was I talking about? Anyways, the family is getting better at going to church since we've moved here -- in part because fellow Catholics Amy and Gill were also raised with the belief that, if you don't go to church, it makes the baby Jesus cry. It's not just Catholic guilt driving us there, mind you. We also have a baby heathen in the house, and our home parish in London required us to take another pre-baptism course if we want to get the devil out of our baby. I'm not clear on what has changed in the last two years since Jude was baptised. In any case, I think we're doing pretty well at raising our kids in the church. For example, Jude now has very recently taken to roleplaying the mass. In his game, I am given a rolled up drawing and told to sit down on the church-pillow (which, I might add, is an absolutely brilliant idea and might be a reasonable starting place for Vatican III). As per his instructions, when Jude comes by with the wicker basket, I am to say "Oh Jesus" (emphasis on the oh, as though you just noticed your toilet is overflowing) and put the picture into the basket. And that concludes the mass, according to the Eastern Unorthodox rite.

Facebook has completed yet another round of improvements to their popular social networking website. Whereas before your homepage would be filled with a random assortment of updates about your friends, you now have the choice between a small random subset (news feed) and a larger random subset (live feed). I have yet to figure out what sort of things qualify for one or the other. I have, however, figured out that facebook seems to select pairs of friends who are themselves friends, and for a short period suggests that you might be friends with everyone they both know. In practice, this means that my each of my married friends have their in-laws foisted upon me for a couple days at a time.

Another proactive measure that facebook has taken concerns making sure that you keep in touch with friends with whom you have had the least amount of contact. Under the heading suggestions on your home page come directives to write on so-and-so's wall. This can be somewhat amusing, as I know of at least one occassion where facebook suggested that a friend of mine reconnect with her husband by writing on his wall (he was in the room with her at the time). Aside from the absurdity, this feature is bound to change eventually, because it also comes off as rather fascist. However, at least it doesn't judge your friends like another suggestion that I recently noticed: "[so-and-so] has only 11 friends. Suggest other friends for him (emphasis added)." I can only imagine what the programmers decided to name the function that searches its member database for people that haven't reached its popularity threshold. findLosers() or something like that, perhaps. Good thing there's something like Facebook to help these sad hermits make friends!

The family made a trek to the Costco this afternoon to get a few things. A family of 4 doesn't generally need to buy things in bulk, but Jude's preschool requires each family to sign up for a snack week. Ours is next week, so we needed to get enough wholesome treats to feed 14 preschoolers for a week. I saw an interesting dynamic as we stood in the checkout line: a girl about Jude's age in the shopping cart in front of us was smiling, making faces and waving at Jude. Jude, for his part, was studiously avoiding her gaze, and surreptitiously casting sideways glances at her, as though he was waiting for her to tire of the whole thing and just go away. I don't know how far into the future this blog will be available, but if it's still available when he's about 14, I'd be interested to find out what he thinks of all of this. I did try to help him with his socialization by telling him that if some one is smiling and waving at you, it's good to wave back. This is especially true if the person waving at you has mistaken you for someone else, because that's your opportunity to really confuse somebody.

Interestingly, we were unable to actually purchase one of our impulse buys -- Sting's newest album, If On a Winter's Night. It turns out that the album hasn't been released yet, and therefore shouldn't have been on the floor. I suggested he let us pay for the CD and we could promise not to listen to it until Tuesday, but he didn't go for it. However, one thing that made it past the checkout was a ten-pound bag of carrots. Some of them are destined to become carrot sticks for snack week. Many of my friends came back with suggestions for what to do with the rest of the carrots. Here's one suggestion from our friends in Cincinnati. It's a Scottish pudding recipe (think: figgy pudding, not Bill Cosby style pudding).

Carrot Pudding

• 1 cup grated raw carrot


• 1 cup grated raw potato


• 1/2 cup butter


• 1 cup white sugar


• 1 cup flour


• 1 tsp baking soda


• 3/4 cup raisins


• 1/2 cup currants


• 1/2 tsp each of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon

Cream the butter and sugar. Add carrot and half of the potato.
Dust raisin, currants with a bit of the flour and mix in.
Add the remaining flour and the nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon.
Dissolve the baking soda into the remaining potato and add to the mixture.
Mix lightly and pour into your cooking vessels, filling no more than 3/4 full. Place the cooking vessels into a pot of simmering water so that the water comes up to just shy of the height of the cooking vessel and cook at low temperature for about 3 hours. If your cooking vessels happen to be quart mason jars, you can seal them and store your jar of pudding in a cool pantry for some long while (I'm not sure, but I think that the lid is supposed to be on the jar before you start the cooking).

I'm not a fan of the raisins, so I think I'd probably substitute something deadly like walnuts instead (I'm allegedly allergic). Apparently, I'd rather die than eat raisins.

Asher just beat up Jude. Jude is crying. Mark your calendars.

So I was cooking last night when an obscure word popped into my head. I often experience this. Occasionally, it'll be a word that I don't actually know and will have to look up on wikipedia, such as avoirdupois -- that was the previous word from the sky. I don't know where I may have encountered it before, other than that the word has french roots, so I had to look it up, because to have some peas doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

Yesterday's word from the heavens was defenestration. Go ahead and look it up if you're not familiar with the word; nobody will think less of you because it's got a pretty limited scope of usage. I did already know what that word meant -- that's not the source of my puzzlement. Rather, I got to thinking about how words enter the vocabulary. In the case of a verb like defenestration, before the word existed, people must have been instead using the word's definition, as in "I'm going to march over to the town hall and throw the mayor out the window". And if you only have to string a sentence like that together once or twice in your life, this might work fine for you. It's not until you often find yourself tossing people out the window that you might find it handy to have a single word to describe your intentions. In fact, using a word like defenestrate buys you all the more time to defenestrate other villagers. Of course, nobody else will understand your fancy word unless they too have been emptying townsmen from the windows like last night's bedpan. In other words, the admittance of a word like defenestrate into the English language suggests that there must have been period in our history where it was raining men (hallelujah).



Between the dictionary.com and wikipedia entries for the word, it appears that the word appeared sometime in the early 1600s in Prague. I guess what I'm saying is that, if you ever find yourself with the opportunity to go back in time, check the dictionary before selecting your destination.

Looking back, there have been a number of recurring themes in the sorts of things that motivate me to write. One of them is the thought that being a productive member of society often involves doing wasteful things in order to waste money on useless things. Nothing epitomizes this better than the bureaucracy. Interestingly, business-minded people must be aware of this, because the first thing to get cut after a corporate merger is middle-management. And yet, it persists.

Am I being uncharitable in my rather negative description of the sorts of make-work clerical positions that currently have me riled up? You decide: I arrived at school today to find a message in my email inbox from the Northwestern HR department, asking me to call regarding a benefit for which I had applied that entitles me to a contribution towards Jude's preschool costs. The entitlement depends on my income, which they determine from the previous year's IRS filing. As a newly-arrived Canadian, I have no such documentation, but was told to provide the equivalent Canadian documentation -- I provided my CRA notice of assessment from 2008. The problem was in an inconsistency between the value I listed as my income, and the fact that my CRA assessment indicates that I have been living in the sort of squalour normally found in the slums of Calcutta. Once this issue was sorted out, the HR contact informed me that, during the Open Enrollment period, I would have to re-enroll for this benefit. This entails re-applying on the HR website, and (here's the punchline) because I will not have submitted anything to the IRS, will require me to come into the HR office again and provide the very same documents she had in front of her. Now, keep in mind that the Open Enrollment period begins in 12 days. All I could think of was suggesting she seal the documents into an envelope and in a couple of weeks, open it up and pretend it was a big surprise!

Now, I'm not suggesting that this woman doesn't deserve a livelihood. It's just that the money spent paying her to make my life more difficult might be better used. Hey, they still haven't figured out how to pay for healthcare down here, have they?

So Canadian Turkey Day has come and gone, and in my neck of the woods, there was no exception. Rebecca's parents arrived in the afternoon on a cold, drizzly Friday the 9th, and her sister and brother-in-law and Jude's 3 cousins, and her aunt and her husband arrived later on in the evening to help us be thankful this weekend. All but her aunt and her husband stayed with us, so we also got a chance to see how well our house can accommodate the large volume of visitors we were hoping for. It seemed to have worked out pretty well, as our 2-bedroom house can masquerade as a 4-bedroom house pretty well, and that's without anyone sleeping on a couch.

Jude also got his third kick at the birthday can on Sunday. Neither my family nor Rebecca's family were with us on Jude's actual birthday, so it was only natural that they would want to celebrate this weekend. The family went back to London with the caravan of vehicles early Monday morning, so it seems likely that Jude will have yet another round of birthday cake this week. We have a custom calendar with pictures from Rebecca's rather large collection of digital photographs. The month of October features a picture of Jude blowing out candles on a cake on his second birthday. Between that calendar and the series of birthday celebrations, that boy is going to spend his formative years believing that his birthday lasts the month of October. As it is, you can't go into a store without him collecting items that he wants for his birthday.

I wasn't sure whether I could make a blog entry out of this, but in light of the fact that I don't have a twitter account, I really had no other choice than to interrupt this regularly entertaining blog with a public service announcement. For all of you who are drinking the version of Tetley's Decaffeinated tea sold in the United States: you are in the placebo group. Even after 10 minutes of steeping, I can't tell the difference between this and a mug of warm water.

However, while the national brand teas might be inferior, they have some really damn good bacon here, in Illinois, at least. Hey, I wonder if I can steep that...

Google Street View went live in Canada. I head heard rumour that it was coming, and have been waiting until today to see this. Legend has it that this Toronto house is haunted. If you look closely, you can see a ghastly apparition in the second floor window. Sadly, London doesn't merit a privacy invasion from the google people, so the only GSouvenir we have of our old house is a satellite image that shows that we own a red car, and, wow, did our lawn ever look shabby.

There are certain topics of study that the media seems to really find 'sexy'. I've seen enough newspaper articles and evening news clips to have formed a pretty good idea of the sorts of things that make a good general interest story about how amazingly cool brains are. Stories about interpersonal relationships and communication are a good example -- everyone has heard of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which, despite being a pop-culture book, has a crunchy (as opposed to soft and fluffy) foundation of scientific research. Developmental psychology also seems to be sexy enough to garner lots of funding -- after all, the next generation is already going to be handicapped by an educational system designed with the social goal of maintaining and improving self-esteem (as opposed to actually, you know, educating). And stories about the amazing capabilities of the child's mind are prime grounds for a news cast's obligatory feel-good content. Given the newsworthiness of stories such as these, it seems we still have a way to go until we realize that, yes, even babies are really smart. They had better be. Have you ever seen a pigeon? Their heads are really small, and that includes the beak. Their brains are even smaller, but you (or someone qualified) can teach a pigeon how to do all kinds of things. If your child is getting pwned by a pigeon, you need to ask yourself some hard questions.

Now, Le P'tit Monsieur? He's on top of things. There's still lots of stuff he doesn't know, but what he does know is that, when he wakes up in bed at, say, 9pm, and doesn't have a boob at the ready, the surefire way to remedy the situation is to wail. One thing he hasn't learned yet is the poker face. As I pick him up from the bed, his screaming only intensifies. It isn't until I hand him off to his mom that he stops. Immediately. And then grins at me. He apparently doesn't know what I do for a living. He doesn't know this yet, but he's also grounded until he's 13.

Uncle Bill's here. I'm off to the cottage now. See you Sunday!

No, you're not. You're grounded.

Wha..? Why?

Go read my blog. By the time you find the relevant entry, you'll be free to go out again.

So I tried a little something this evening. Inspired by an episode of Good Eats, Rebecca bought a celery root last week. Implied with the purchase is that I would figure out how to cook it. So this evening, I staged a rather scaled down Iron Chef with celery root as the not-so-secret ingredient, and without the competition. There was judging, however. Jude wasn't very subtle in his evaluation, and spat a mouthful of mashed celery root out on to his plate, and exclaimed that he didn't like it at all. In case there was any confusion, he continued to make "pthooey" sounds until the taste left his mouth. Rebecca and I didn't mind it so much, though we both agreed that it needed 'something'. Being a fan of peanut butter on celery, I tried a forkful of mashed celery root with some Skippy, and decided that it wasn't bad. I don't know how I might make that into a side dish, however.

The accompanying meat product was a pork tenderloin with a dry herb rub. I browned it in a 12-inch cast-iron skilled and, not wanting to dirty another dish, I just put the whole thing into the 425° oven. After I took it out of the oven and had served it up, I wished I had some wine with which to deglaze the pan. But then it occurred to me that vinegar is sour wine, and that balsamic vinegar becomes a sweet syrup when you reduce it, and I now highly recommend balsamic vinegar as a deglazing agent.

If you're still reading, waiting for the moral of the story, you're in the wrong blog. I don't do fairy tales. Though it just occurred to me that Hans Christian Anderson Cooper 360 would be an awesome name for a blog.

"Live and let live," that's what I say. Except when it comes to bugs in my house. Look, I'm all for doing my bit to minimize my environmental trashing. It pains me to throw away plastics. When I cut the grass, I've been dumping the clippings into ever-growing piles along the garbage alley, rather than send it off to landfill. But I draw the line at insects in my house. The most obvious irritants are those that get into your crap and eat it. I'm talking about the earwig you find in your oatmeal (or in Carolyn's case, the half-earwig), or the trail of ants exiting your pantry. [Editor's note: for those of you who may be considering visiting us, we have neither earwigs in our oatmeal, nor trails of ants]. I think we can all agree that those guys suck. But then you've got the "good guys" of the insect world: the spiders and such, who eat the guys that suck. I'm of two minds about those guys. On one hand, they do try to pull their weight and keep your house clean of roaches. But check out this little fella:

That's the business end of a centipede. As I learned from Christine (and later from wikipedia), centipedes are technically on the 'good guys' team. But, damn, they're creepy. Fast little buggers, too. So, which would you rather see: a centipede skittering in your sink, or cockroach skittering on your floor? Neither? Me too. And, really, have you seen the half-assed web jobs that house spiders try to pass off? I don't know if it's just union spiders, but there's not alot of fly traffic going on between the ceiling and the drapes. Laying down some DDT is probably the best thing you could do for those buggers. Save them a slow death due to starvation.