My Internet Legacy

I never get tired of playing in the referral logs, speculating on the search terms that bring people here. I see some search terms over and over again (gift ideas for two year olds is a perennial favourite, as is cavities in a three year old, and I'm mystified by the sheer number of people - sometimes 10 a day - looking for a variation on lactating or lactation blog.)

Some are a little more obscure. I'm sure I was no help to the guy who wondered "how do i know my piranha is pregnant." Maybe we should get them together with the guy who asked "why is my sperm bigger." Bigger than what, I couldn't help but wonder. And, erm, how exactly did you know?

I'll have to try a little harder to boost myself up the page on the search return for "canadian child care sucks", but with the new nanny starting next week, my fingers are crossed for a good outcome at last.

My mother is endlessly tickled about my noteriety as the number one search return for "ottawa slut" but i'm just as happy to be first on a search for "Ottawa + Mommy Blogger."

Myself, I'm absurdly pleased to be the number one google return for "strange internet places." No doubt, the Web is full of strangeness, but I had little idea that this little blog was the strangest.

And now, since I'm obviously in danger of taking myself a bit too seriously today, is some more strangeness for you, courtesy of the Goddess of the Quirky Meme, Angry Pregnant Lawyer:

YOU ARE PAPER!

You Are Paper

Crafty and creative, you are able to adapt freely to almost any situation. People tend to underestimate you, unless they've truly seen what you are capable of. Deep down, you're always scheming and thinking up new plans. Your mind is constantly active. You are quite capable of anything you dream of. You can always figure out a way to get what you want. You can wrap a rock person up in your sheet of trickery. A scissor person can sneak up and cut you to pieces. When you fight: No one can anticipate your next move If someone makes you mad: You'll attack them mercilessly when they're unprepared.

Are You Rock, Paper, or Scissors?

A thank you note, a love letter, and a call to action

I'm so easy to please. In this case, I'm absolutely tickled to have been named as a "Rockin' Girl Blogger" by JanB from Just a Mom; That's more than enough.


Thanks, Jan! (You should go check out Jan's blog. I don't go over there often enough and she's got some great stuff, including a gallery of her artwork. Very cool!)

So now I'm supposed to pass on this honour. Trouble is, I could give it to any of the great chicks in my blogroll - have you clicked on a new blog lately? And, I'm so far behind on my blog reading that I have no idea who has already been nominated by someone else.

But the more I thought about it, the more I knew who I wanted to nominate. So this is a nomination and a love letter and a call to action all rolled up into one long post.

I first "met" Cooper and Emily through their blog Been There in early 2005. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the summer of 2005, Cooper and Emily set up a clearing house where people who wanted to help could connect with people in need, and I was in awe of the power of two mom bloggers to make a real and concrete difference in the lives of people in devastating circumstances.

In the subsequent years, Cooper and Emily have raised awareness about (and even serve on the executive committee of) Moms Rising.org, and have recently spearheaded the BlogHer's Act, a "year-long initiative to harness the incredible power of women online." And they've even inspired a Canadian version. You have until midnight on July 22 to vote on which issue you'd like to see BlogHers Act Canada support for the next year. It's your chance to step up beside your sister (and brother) bloggers to make a concrete difference in the world. (I should have been blogging about this stuff long before now. Shame on me for not getting on the ball sooner, but it's not too late - get over there and vote now, and then let's support these movements through the next year. You don't have to be a fan of BlogHer or be going to the conference - you just have to care enough to want to make your tiny corner of the world a better place. Cooper and Emily give a great quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Get over there, inform yourself, vote, and do what you can. Because we're all in this together!)

But back to Cooper and Emily, the stars of my show today. As if being in the centre of all this hasn't been amazing and incredible and enough to exhaust an entire cabal of bloggers, there is more! After more than a year of hard work, they've just launched another pet project, "The MotherHood."

What is The MotherHood? In Cooper and Emily's own words: "We asked ourselves -- what if we built a big, beautiful tent where mothers can find, share and talk about all the interesting, hilarious, intriguing, inspiring, mobilizing, good stuff on the web, and, more importantly, find each other? And, with that, the heart and soul of The MotherHood was born." There are link lists, discussion groups, favourite blogs, and much more on the way. It's a great concept, and I know with Cooper and Emily behind it, it will be a wonderful place to hang out online.

Not only do I love and admire Cooper and Emily, but I'm simply dazzled by them. And more importantly, I'm inspired by them. All modesty aside, even this simple little blog can be a tool for change, and I can start - in my own small ways - making a difference. So I offer them the simple token of the Rockin' Girl Blogger award, my thanks and my pledge to do what I can.

Confessions, candy swaps, connections - and books

This is going to be another of those posts where I dump the contents of my brain (and my in-box) into your lap and let you sort through it like bargain hunters at a flea market to find the shiny bits in amongst all the drivel.

First and coincidentally, I think it was the last brain-and-inbox dump that I told you about the cross-border candy swap that Notes from the Cookie Jar hosted. I was partnered with Jennifer from In Case You Ever Wondered, who sent us a great package including Easter Tootsie Pops (the boys love these!), cotton candy and green marshmallow Peeps! Did you see that, Andrea? Peeps!

I fell down on the job and completely forgot to take a picture of my outgoing package, but I tried to find candy that I thought was uniquely Canadian. While I couldn't find any Mack toffee, I included a Kinder Egg (okay, not Canadian, but not widely available in the US, from what I understand), a mix of mini-chocolate bars including KitKats, Coffee Crisps and Smarties, some Kerr's gumdrops, and a box of Thrills Gum. Jennifer's son said they should use the Thrills Gum for punishment!

Thanks to Scattered Mom for inviting us to play along! It was fun!

***

Speaking of good things that come in the mail, after a rather long drought that I sated by reading The Calligrapher, I have been blessed by the book gods lately. Nadine sent me two "just because" books, both of which will likely turn up in the 10-page-in reviews soon. (It's good to have friends who work for publishers!) Then I was offered a review copy of Missy Chase Lepine's The Sneaky Chef cookbook - review also pending.

And finally, have you heard about MotherTalk? I had the great priviledge of being a part of a MotherTalk salon back in October when we were in Toronto for the Motherlode conference, and I'll be blogging on the upcoming tour for the Dangerous Book for Boys (which arrived in the mail the very same day as The Sneaky Chef!)

But what I wanted to tell you about today is another one of MotherTalk's new initiatives: the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza. According to the e-mail from Miriam Peskowitz, this is how it will work:

MotherTalk will suggest a topic, post it on our blog and email an announcement. Whoever wants to blog, join us. This is not about an elite in-group with a secret code. No way, it's about sharing an experience, writing together, and feeling connected through our blogs. I can already imagine what fun it will be to click through each other's blogs and read all the posts.

For each MotherTalk Blog Bonanza, we also hope to have an informal contest, where the author might pick a favorite post, and send that blogger an autographed book, say. We're not big into competition, we just want to spice it up, and send you a MotherTalk Blog Bonanza Winner emblem for your sidebar.

Next Friday (April 27) is Fearless Friday, inspired by Arianna Huffington's book, On Becoming Fearless. From the MotherTalk blog:

Let’s all write about times in our lives when we stepped out of our comfort zones, when we challenged our usual fears and anxieties and all the nervousness that keeps us in line, keeps us in our places, and prevents us from having as much fun, as much influence, as much personal, inner-voice purpose in the world. Whether this stepping-out, this fear-overcoming, happens at home, on the playground, at school, work, in writing or in the aisles of Congress, let’s tell our stories, inspire each other, and make a place for ourselves in the world.

Click through to the MotherTalk blog for further instructions if you want to play along!

***

Have you seen True Mom Confessions yet? It's part post-secret, part group therapy. I first found it via one of my government / social media buddies, Ian Ketcheson, and Ali had a post up about it yesterday. I found it irresistibly compelling for the first little while. I love how you can vote "me too" but not "you're a moron" or "are you kidding me?", and I love that there is no commentary. But since the last time I checked, now they've added discussion forums and I think it takes away from the elegant simplicity of the original concept. Still madly addictive, though.

The one about Facebook

Back when I started blogging in January of 2005, a lot of my friends rolled their eyes. Half of them had no idea what the hell a blog was, and those that did (I'm looking at you, Übergeek!) thought blogs were the domain of tech geeks and lovesick 14 year old diarists - not 30-something working mothers of preschoolers. Since then, a few more people have discovered blogging - like 30 or 40 million people - and blogging has become fairly mainstream.

In the same vein, try to keep an open mind when I told you that I am newly addicted to yet another social medium: Facebook.

*pauses to wait for gales of laughter and rolling of eyeballs and slapping of knees to subside*

Yes, I know. I know. There are multitudinous reasons that I should not be spending precious time and brain cells on Facebook. One of them is that I don't have enough time for all the crap in my life as it is, without adding another time sink. Another is that I'm actually over the legal age of majority, unlike the vast majority of other people on Facebook. But, I'm hooked.

So what is Facebook? Well, I'm still a bit of a newbie, and I only this week realized I could do stuff like import my own blog feed to show up in my profile. But you have a profile, just like any other social media site, and you can sign yourself up for various networks like where you live, where you went to school and where you work. (Beloved is a college teacher, and at the beginning of the year, they had a community police officer speaking at a staff meeting who opined that Facebook is the single most dangerous tool young people are using, because of the huge amount of personal information they share and how naive they are about posting their full names, addresses, mobile numbers and whatnot. Ottawa tech blogger EngTech had a great article about modifying your privacy settings to protect yourself, if you're interested.)

The addictive part, aside from the networks, is of course the interactivity. You can chat, or send messages to your friends. There are also 'groups' that you can join, which are basically bulletin boards with photo sharing capability. That's the quick and dirty - I'm quite convinced there's far more to it than I am aware, but that's what I've figured out by playing around with it.

It took a while. I signed up for an account maybe six weeks ago out of sheer curiousity. I figured if I'm going to speak with any authority about this social media stuff, I ought to take a peek and see what it's all about. So I signed up, created a bare-bones profile, and took a little tour. I checked my high school graduating class (Catholic Central Secondary in London, class of 1988) and not a single person was registered. I typed in the names of a few friends, old and new. Nothing. And I shrugged and said, whatever, and went back to catching up on bloglines.

Maybe a week or so later, I commented on one of Suze's blog posts about Facebook, and she 'friended' me, and then so did a couple of other people. Pretty soon I had a dozen or so friends, most of them from the blogosphere but a few from work, too. Then a really old friend, one from grade school and high school and one of the last people I would ever expect to see online (Fryman - it was Gary! Remember Gary??) friended me just before Easter.

Right about that time, I discovered the weirdly addictive and voyeuristic habit of surfing my friends' friend lists. I think that was the tipping point for me, where I started to actively check Facebook as part of my regular 'check-comments-check-email-check-bloglines' online routine. I'm still not wholly into it - yet. I signed up for a couple of groups, one for the KRZR bloggers, one for GTA bloggers and the people who read them, and one amusingly called "People who are too old for Facebook." (And I'm even older than most of them! Yikes.)

Speaking of age, I don't know whether it's a coincidence of timing or something that just turned on in the collective DNA of my generation like the homing instinct of salmon, but it seems like my peers are suddenly flooding on to Facebook in massive numbers in the past month or so. My highschool graduating class suddenly has more than a dozen members (only one of which I'd be remotely interested in hearing from and most of whom I had never heard of.) My real-life and online friends are coalescing into cyber-existence at the rate of a new friend every day or two. This mad herding of the 30-something crowd, of course, is a sure sign that Facebook is no longer cool.

It's not the cool factor that's got me hooked, though. On the weekend, I discovered a new pastime, one that addicted me firmly and fully to Facebook: surfing the 'friend list' of minor celebrities. I'm not talking about A-listers here, not even B-listers. But I was fascinated by the friend list of David Akin, a political journalist who has 'friended' major Canadian politicians (Stephen Harper and Stephan Dion among them), celebrities like Rick Mercer, and writers like Paul Wells. (Props to Colin at Canuckflack.com, who got me stalking looking at David Akin's profile in the first place.) And discovering them, I felt myself compelled to surf their friend lists, to see who else was cool and accessible. I've tried looking up a few favourite authors, for example, thinking maybe I'd be brave and send a note to say hello, but so far I haven't found any of the ones I've tried.

Aside from the voyeuristic aspect of Facebook, which somehow seems even more personal than blogging, not to mention the ethics of stalking people I don't actually know, there are social minefields to be navigated - especially for someone who considers a cocktail party unimaginably complex and fraught with potential peril. There is the issue, which has just happened to me, of what happens when someone you clearly don't know tries to 'friend' you. I don't want to be rude, especially since it's entirely possible that I do somehow know this person perhaps somewhere in the distant recesses of my foggy memory (one more argument against the over-30 crowd being on Facebook - our social histories are just so much longer and more complex than the teenagers who can clearly remember the first grade when I can't really dredge up clear memories of my early 20s.) At the same time, much like I struggle when asked to add a blog I don't like to my blogroll, I don't want to simply add friends willy-nilly. Call me old-fashioned, but stating someone is my friend means something to me.

Thank goodness I haven't yet had to deal with the extreme awkwardness of having somebody I know but truly dislike trying to friend me. No, I'm not talking about you. But it is kind of ironic that even though I click every day to see who has signed up from my graduating class, with the exception of maybe half a dozen people, there is nobody from high school that I have the remotest earthly desire to hear from. Except maybe to puff up my chest and say 'screw you, look how good my life turned out. Doesn't it suck to be you in comparison?"

And I wonder why more people haven't friended me.

So what do you think? Have you been on Facebook? Why or why not? Do you think Facebook is the new e-mail, and our grandparents will be doing it before long?

And, erm, if you're on Facebook, feel free to look me up. If you can't find me, send me an e-mail and I'll tell you the secret clubhouse handshake to get in the door.

(Edited to add: one more reason to love Facebook - tonnes of Canadian content. From Kris Abel's CTV blog today: "A recent explosion of new users has placed Toronto (Canada's largest population centre) as the biggest group of users in the world (almost half a million), offering more members than both New York and Los Angeles combined." I had no idea! I thought it was just a coincidence of geography that so many of the people I was stumbling upon were Canadian.)

Friday miscellany

APL always manages to find these funky little things!

You Are a Chimera

You are very outgoing and well connected to many people. Incredibly devoted to your family and friends, you find purpose in nurturing others. You are rarely alone, and you do best in the company of others. You are incredibly expressive, and people are sometimes overwhelmed by your strong emotions.

What Mythological Creature Are You?

It's all quite true, isn't it? Mythologically, the Chimera was part lion (I'm a Leo, after all!), part goat (stubborn as the day is long) and part dragon (especially after the spicy Thai for lunch!)

From the same site:

You Will Be a Cool Parent

You seem to naturally know a lot about parenting, and you know what kids need. You can tell when it's time to let kids off the hook, and when it's time to lay down the law. While your parenting is modern and hip, it's not over the top. You know that there's nothing cool about a parent who acts like a teenager... or a drill sergeant!

Would You Be a Cool Parent?

Well, thank goodness I have this confirmed in writing. Note to self: print off and keep multiple copies for future use with disbelieving children.

***

Have you seen the Alanis Morisette cover of My Humps? Props to Kerry for finding it. I was reading somewhere that Alanis hasn't yet said what her intent was, whether it's a parody or an April Fools Joke or a criticism or what. I hope it was intended to demonstrate how truly inane and stupid the song's lyrics are, despite the catchy beat. I have to say, I like it!

***

For a truly disturbing YouTube experience, make sure the kiddies aren't looking over your shoulder and then watch Kermit on Crank, where Kermit the Frog covers the NIN song hurt while rather graphically shooting up. I'm not sure I needed to see this one.

***

Yesterday, after I posted the interview questions and answers it occured to me that it would have been a fun time to play the cocktail party comment game and have y'all interview each other. Since it's a long weekend, let's do it now. It's a cocktail party, and you all have to make small talk. Pay attention, cuz if you play there's TWO parts to each comment. Each person who comments will answer the question in the comment directly above theirs, and then pose a question of their own for the next person. Got it? Each comment has the answer to the previous question, and the question for the next person.

The questions can be on whatever topic you like, and you can take as long or as little to answer as you like. The questions should be about personal preferences, attitudes and opinions, along the lines of the ones you see in those e-mail memes: what's the last book you read? What's your favourite movie? What's under your bed? Vanilla or chocolate? What's the best vacation you ever took? What are your pets' names and why? (Yes, I know, these are lame questions. But I trust that you can do oh so much better.)

Okay, so my question for the first commenter is: What superhero did you want to be when you were a kid?

In which I dump the contents of my inbox into your lap

I have so many little mental post-it notes stuck to my forehead that I can't see through them anymore. I've got to get some of this stuff out, coherent post be damned.

Do you like free? I like free. Do you like camping? I like camping somewhat less than I like free, but even stuff that I don't ordinarily like, I am magnanimous enough to like if it's, well, free. So I'm all over KOA's annual free camping weekend. Pay for a site, or one of their funky little cabins, on Friday May 11 and stay for free on Saturday May 12. This will be our third year (see previous adventures here and here) and like last year, our 'camping' will consist of cramming the entire extended family (six adults, four kids under six) into a perfect little cottage at the Ivy Lea KOA campground near Gananoque. I can't wait!

***

Camping not your thing? Prefer culture to campfire? How about a live performance of the Barber of Seville, direct from the Metropolitan Opera House, broadcast directly to a local movie theatre in high definition? I love this idea, and wish the boys were old enough to enjoy or at least appreciate it. It's happening this Saturday in select theatres. I wish I could go!

***

I thought this was way wicked cool. Michelle at Scribbit created a custom search engine for mom blogs. I liked the idea so much, I added it to the sidebar. Scroll down (waaaay down, gosh that sidebar is taking on a life of its own!) to give it a try. Michelle has added more than 1500 mom blogs, so you can do a custom mom-blog search on whatever tickles your fancy.

Blogger ingenuity at work to make your world a better place! (And I'm happy to sponge off it, for the price of a link!)

***

And now for the laundry list of other things. (That's a funny phrase, isn't it? I mean, who makes a list to do the laundry? Lord knows I need a list to keep track of just about everything else in my life - you thought I was kidding about the post-it note reference above? - but I've never been compelled to make a list to separate my whites from my colours.)

Man, I get some weird shit in my in-box. Lots of people want me to tell you about their stuff. I am ashamed to admit, I simply ignore most of them. It seems terribly rude, and makes me feel ungrateful, because I know it's nice people like you who made this blog a place worth of solicitation. So I've decided that every so often I'll just dump all the stuff I get into a single post and I can stop feeling guilty about it. (I kind of got this idea from Paul Wells, who said he posts every 100th news release he gets, in its entirety.)

So in this post that is dying for any sort of a segue and more or less in their own words, I give you:

The Tutorlinker: "We use Google Map API to search and point tutors. Parents/students can simply type their address to search and compare tutors in their area and there is no registration. Tutors can go through simple registration step to be listed."

Centre for Disease Control's Mom2Mom: "CDC’s new website has a lot to offer, and I want to make sure that the word gets out. So if you have the time and the inclination, check out the site share your advice - you can even share your past blog posts on the message board - and engage with other moms."

The Starter Wife: "After being blacklisted from premieres to pilates, Molly Kagan (Debra Messing) searches to rediscover life after divorce. A brief respite in Malibu and some oh-so-Hollywood friends prove to be the perfect cocktail for her transformation from "Starter Wife" to her new life. Based on Gigi Levangie Grazer's New York Times best seller of the same name, The Starter Wife also stars Judy Davis, Joe Mantegna, Miranda Otto & Anika Noni Rose. I am working with USA network to help raise awareness for a promotion that they are running for The Starter Wife in conjunction with Ponds. Their contest, “40’s and Fabulous” is an essay contest looking for stories from real women about why your beauty and confidence now makes you happier and more comfortable in your 40s than you were in your 30s or 20s. To enter, all you have to do is visit the official site. Five winners will be showcased in their own USA commercial -- and win an all expense paid weekend of pampering in Hollywood, including a fashion/beauty makeover and tickets to The Starter Wife premiere!"

(Full disclosure: the end of this e-mail offered a Ponds gift pack in exchange for posting something about this. I am *not* accepting anything in exchange for this link, just adding it to the pile in case it's something one of you might be interested in. Me, I had a hard time reading right to the end, what with my eyeballs rolling back in my head like that. But hey, to each her own. And hey, if you do enter the contest and you do win, you're morally obligated to bring me with you to the pampering and premiere weekend, right? I mean, I'm all ethical and shit, and I'm mocking the whole concept with my usual subtle finesse, but Hollywood pampering and premieres? I'm all over that!)

Edited to add: Rats, I forgot one! I wanted to tell you that Scattered Mom from Notes from the Cookie Jar is hosting a cross-border candy swap. Since Beloved was so excited to get a package of candy from the States during the last candy swap, I think I'm maritally obligated to sign up for this one. You only have until March 25 (this Sunday) to sign up!

Sign # 312 you need to get a life

I'd been hearing a lot about a viral video called "introducing the book," so I went looking for it on YouTube. Unfortunately, the video has apparently been removed by the user who posted it, but I did find the original Norwegian version.

You know you spend way too much time on the Internet when you find yourself watching non-dubbed Norwegian comedy skits on YouTube. And laughing your ass off. I'm just sayin'.

Blog payola

I've been doing a lot of research on the bigger world of blogs lately, and I've been seeing some interesting stuff. And not interesting in a good way, either.

A while ago, I declared blog an ad-free zone. I'm content with the decision, and haven't regretted it. I also turned down a few product review opportunities, just because I was still trying to find my comfort zone with the whole viral marketing thing. I wanted to make sure that I was being completely transparent. For example, I accepted the free phone (a phone I'm not hugely thrilled with, to tell you the truth, but free is free!) for blogging about it, but I think I was honest about the whole process of how I came to have the phone and why I was blogging about it. Same with the books I've reviewed - I've made an effort to tell you when I've received a review copy from a publisher, and when I'm doing a review just because the book inspired me to do one. (Feel free to call me on it if you disagree - I always like to think the best of myself, despite evidence to the contrary!)

I'm thinking about all this after reading about services like PayPerPost. Have you read about this? Advertisers pay to post details of their 'opportunity' to a forum, and bloggers snatch up what seems to be a finite number of opportunities, then write a post about the product or service - and get paid to do so. I followed one set of links back to a low-traffic, low-ecosystem blog who posted about a Harry Potter audio book and is bragging in her sidebar - but not in the post itself - to have made more than $800 in a few months through PayPerPost.

Since its launch this summer, PayPerPost has been roundly criticised by many in the blogosphere for its lack of a disclosure policy. In other words, you aren't required to mention anywhere in your post that you were getting compensated to flog a product on your blog. In response to that criticism, PayPerPost launched a new website called DisclosurePolicy.org , which TechCrunch compared to big tobacco companies funding addiction research: "they are creating a distraction, designed to keep the buzz about PayPerPost going strong, as well as to move people’s attention away from the core issue of blogger disclosure of product shilling."

In a related story, Jason Calacanis, former General Manager of Netscape and CEO of Weblogs, Inc., is following rumours that users are being paid to 'digg' stories. (Digg is a way to rank news stories and web pages by allowing users to 'digg' or 'bury' an item.)

Every day, it seems like there are more ways that marketers are finding ways to influence (I thought about using the world 'infiltrate' instead of 'influence') the blogosphere. Personally, I find initiatives like this extremely distasteful. Call me a purist, but when I read a blog post, or see something has been conferred a certain status by a group of users, I'd still like to believe it's on the basis of merit and not remuneration from a faceless marketer. On the flip side, it gives me faith in the power of the blogosphere to see that these services are being exposed by the very network they are trying to manipulate.

I'm still struggling with my own comfort level on accepting products or reviewing services. I suppose a blog with my readership numbers and links is considered moderately influential, and I get a couple of requests for pitches every month. I consider each one carefully, even the simple "link to my site" ones, but haven't taken up anyone recently simply because I'm not sure where to draw my line in the sand. I wish there was a handbook for this somewhere!

Bear with me and we'll muddle through it together. I can promise you this, though: if I'm getting any benefit from a product or service or link I promote here, I promise I'll tell you about it. Hey, it's not much, but it's a start.

A little something for everybody

I can't even remember the last time we had a ramble around here. I've got a whole bunch of flotsam and pretty pieces of beach glass that I've collected, but I have no idea what to do with them. So, I'll drop them unceremoniously into a single post and let you make something of it.

First, if you haven't been there already, you should go check out Nancy's blog. She's doing a fun Christmas craft or activity every day leading up to December 24.

Second, speaking of holiday activities, my Christmas lights really hate me this year. Or is it the other way around? Back in November, when I was still pregnant, I found myself on a step-ladder hanging the outdoor lights. It was only after about 40 minutes, when I got all the way to the end of the string and my arms were aching from being lifted over my head for so long, that I realized I had started at the wrong end. I had to pull them all back down and re-hang them with the plug on the end nearest the receptacle and not furthest from it. I only mention it now because yesterday I noticed one of our three strings of indoor tree lights was not working. After some fidgeting, I decided the string was officially dead, and needed to be replaced. Of course, this was the middle string. So I very carefully unstrung it, trying hard not to dislodge too many ornaments, and very carefully wove a new string into more or less the same space. When I plugged it in, another string of lights died. When I tested the removed string, it worked fine. So I unstrung a SECOND string of lights and restrung the original string. With all the shifting and yanking and replacing of ornaments, the tree looks like it was decorated by a band of blind monkeys, but at least the lights are working. For now.

Third, some tips from the peanut gallery. Fryman sent me this article in the Globe and Mail about how 96% of Canadian women contribute to the control the family finances, and the vast majority, 63%, have sole control. I have to admit, even though in my house I have pretty much sole control over the finances, I was still surprised to see the figure as high as 63%. Does that figure surprise you?

Fourth, also from the peanut gallery, this amusing link from the one and only Marla. I've been trying for days to come up with a post witty enough to support it, but I have failed abjectly. Therefore, I simply ask you to try to imagine taking a refreshing walk along the beach and finding thousands of bags of Doritos, washed up like 200 gram beached whales. Go ahead, if you can make something funnier out of this, be my guest!

Fifth, for those of you who came of age watching television in the 1980s (like me), I offer you the 50 greatest television commercials from the 80s.

And finally, a follow-up to my horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day. This morning in his Action Line column in the Citizen, columnist Tony Côté addressed my request for his help to find, repay and recognize the kindness of that cab driver who was so kind to me. Well, not so much addressed it as, much to my surprise, simply reprinted my entire e-mail to him (complete with my full name and all - and I mean all - of the gory details, including the miscarriage, the forgotten wallet and the tears) pretty much verbatim. I was hoping he might help me find my way to a real person at Blue Line who could put me in touch with the cabbie, but it looks like I'll have to keep trying that avenue on my own. Instead, my most humiliating day is now available to a much wider audience than I could have ever reached through blog. Oy, how do I get myself into these things?

Our national preoccupations

You know I'm intrigued by the differences between Canadian and Americans; you know I'm mesmerized by search results. Many of you know I even have a vested interest in taxation.

How then could I leave unblogged this article in the Globe and Mail that intersects so many of my bloggy fascinations. It compares the top search terms from 2006 on Yahoo! and Yahoo! Canada.

Here's a list of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo! Canada in 2006:

NHL
FIFA World Cup
American Idol
Rock Star Supernova
WWE
Neopets
Revenue Canada
Days of Our Lives
Environment Canada
Jessica Simpson

And here, by contrast, is a list of the U.S.'s top 10 Yahoo! searches in 2006:

Britney Spears
WWE
Shakira
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
American Idol
Beyoncé Knowles
Chris Brown
Pamela Anderson
Lindsay Lohan

I'm not sure whether to feel smug or ashamed. I mean, it's not pretty that seven of the top ten American searches are for the female celebrity flavour of the month, but it is also rather embarrassing (if not telling) that the top ten Canadian preoccupations in 2006 include hockey, weather, taxation, soap operas and - neopets??

My mother will be so proud

When you google "ottawa slut", I am the number one search return.