High school, 20 years later

I saw this over on Andrea's and Bub and Pie's blogs, and though it would make a fun Friday brainless meme. I've been thinking about high school a bit lately, since I've been playing on Facebook. It's amazing to me that so many people who have signed up to "I graduated CCH in the 1980s" group are complete strangers to me, but I suppose in a school that huge (when I went there, Catholic Central was one of only two Catholic high schools in the city of London and had an average population of 1700 students) it's little surprise that I don't really remember anyone except the ones I spent significant time with. And, high school in general was a painfully awkward time for me socially anyway so I've probably blocked out all but the very best and worst of it.

(This is long, even by my standards, so I've tucked it below the fold. Click the "more please" button below to keep reading. And please excuse the excess white space, but Blogger has decided to insert two hard returns between each paragraph no matter how many times I edit them out. Grrr!)


1 Who was your best friend?


In Grades 9 and 10, I was inseparable from Suzan Marchand. She was my first girly-girl friend, in the giggling, note-passing, boy-crazy, incredibly annoying way only 15 year old girls can be. By Grade 11, I'd started running with a different crowd and I suppose the person to whom I was closest would be the guy who eventually became my 'practice husband' James. He lived in Sudbury, though, so during this time, I was pretty much inseparable from the Fry brothers, and Todd and Yvonne and Rose and a large, revolving pack of oddballs and outcasts.


2 What sports did you play?


Sports? Guffaw. No thanks. I didn't even take gym in high school, and didn't discover that physical activity could actually be enjoyable until my mid-twenties.


3 What kind of car did you drive?


The first car I drove was one of those giant early 1980s Oldsmobile station wagons, the kind with the faux-wood paneling on the sides and the backwards-facing third-row seat that folded down. On my 17th birthday, my Mom bought a new 1986 Mustang coupe and we 'shared' that for the rest of my high school career. How cool is my mom?


4 It’s Friday night, where were you?


Again, that depends on whether it was early or late in my high school career. Early on, probably talking for hours on the phone to Suzan and watching Friday Night Videos together over the phone. Later on, probably at the Fry's house, or standing in the parking lot of McDonalds with the rest of the crowd trying to decide on where to go.


5 Were you a party animal?


Um, no.


6 Were you considered a flirt?


Um, no. But not for lack of trying. And again, I think I got much better at this by Grade 12 or 13. Funy how I suddenly became that much more attractive to other boys once I had a steady (and conveniently out of town) boyfriend.


7 Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?


Oh yes. I played flute in the high school band for four years, and really wish I had taken my music lessons more seriously. With the band, we traveled to Orlando for a festival one year, and to Ottawa in my senior year, just a few short months before I planned to move up here with my boyfriend.


8 Were you a nerd?


Um... I don't know. I was socially awkward, especially in the first couple of years. I think I was too desperate to be liked to be a true nerd, but I had definite nerdy tendencies.


9 Did you get suspended/expelled?


No. My most heinous rule violation was to frequently flaunt the school dress code, which required navy pants or skirt and a white or navy shirt with a collar. It was the collar part against which I often rebelled, and I played fast and loose with the definition of 'navy' blue.


10 Can you sing the fight song?


Uh, something about "fight Crusaders"... but, no.


11 Who was your favorite teacher?


I had Mrs Hammond for English twice, and in Grade 13 she told me she'd give me a final grade over 90% (I was already close) if I could get published by the end of the year. True to her word, she gave me a final mark of 93% when I got a letter to the editor published in the local paper - which, upon reflection, was about as difficult as getting my name in the phone book, but I was pretty stoked at the time. I also loved my Grade 13 world history professor, a crusty oblate priest named Father Bill Thompson. When James and I got married the year after I graduated (eep!), we asked Father Thompson to officiate and he did.


12 School mascot?


Rodney (the Crusader) from the B.C. comic strip.


13 Did you go to Prom?


Yes. It was at Wonderland Gardens, which burned down a couple of years ago, from what I understand. I barely remember any of it, not because I was drinking but simply because I don't think it was a particularly memorable time. I do remember the dress, though, a sexy white number with a poofy skirt that fell above my knee (not unlike the ones that were in fashion last year) and a risqué lacy patch over my cleavage that my mother kept threatening to stick a hankerchief into.


14 If you could go back and do it over, would you?


Ugh. No. The good times were great, and I think being 17 was one of the best years of my life, but being 15 was excruciating. Once was more than enough, thanks.


15 What do you remember most about graduation?


At the time, Ontario had five years of high school. You could graduate in Grade 12 and go on to a trade school or community college, or do Grade 13 and go on to University. The only thing I remember about Grade 12 grad is that my parents couldn't get in to the church because nobody bothered to check tickets at the door and it was overfull. Did we have a Grade 13 grad? I think it was just a mass. I do remember, though, that Father Thompson officiated our Grade 13 grad mass, and spoke about a book he was reading by Carl Sagan called Contact. A few months later, I remembered him talking about it and read it myself, and it has since become one of my all-time favourite books.


16 Where were you on senior skip day?


This must be an American thing? But speaking of skip, yes, I did like to do that. Once in a blue moon, of course. Like the day we decided to drive to Port Huron, Michigan for absolutely no reason.


17 Did you have a job your senior year?


I had a string of jobs all through high school, starting from when I was 14 and working at the tobacco/newstand/camera store of a family friend. I worked at Baskin Robbins, a movie rental place, doing telephone sales of magazines and freezer plans, and Canadian Tire. By senior year, I was working as a cashier at Zellers, a job I continued when I moved to Ottawa and for which I later quit university to do full time.


18 Where did you go most often for lunch?


For the first few months, I was so terrified of the rest of the student body that I ate my lunch alone beside a fountain in a tiny park half a block from my school. By the time I actually had friends, we mostly ate in one of the two cafeterias while we played euchre.


19 Have you gained weight since then?


*insert eyeball roll here*


20 What did you do after graduation?


The weekend after high school finished, I moved to Ottawa to live with James. (We had gotten engaged in May of that year. I still shudder to think of it, I was in Grade 13 and wearing an engagement ring. My poor mother.) I started at Carleton University in the fall, but had quit by the end of the Christmas break that year. James and I were married in the summer of the following year (1989), and divorced five years later. I went back to school part time in 1992 and eventually graduated from university in 1998.


21 When did you graduate?


June, 1988.


22 Who was your Senior prom date?


James.


23 Are you going / did you go to your 10 year reunion?


Our school was never big on reunions. If there was a ten-year reunion, I never heard about it. I wouldn't go anyway. For the most part, the people I care about from high school are still around enough to be commenting here occasionally or at least a phone-call away. I met up with a few more online recently through Facebook. There's only one guy, Colin Murray, of whom I've completely lost track and often think about - but he doesn't strike me as a high school reunion type either.


24 Who was your home room teacher?


Oh good lord, I can't remember the plot of a book I read four months ago and you want me to remember stuff like this? I do remember being late more than my fair share of times because Fryman and Rose and I, along with some combination of others, used to drive in together in Fryman's beat-up shit-brown Volkswagon Rabbit, and we were easily distracted on the way to school. They had this promotion going on in my senior year called "Freebie Fridays" where you could get free French Toast Sticks at a participating Burger King, and we'd drive all over the city in search of free fast food. For reasons I can't quite remember, some days we'd randomly do stuff like decide to donate blood, too, and though we'd get peculiar looks from the administration, we at least never got in trouble for that act of altruism.


25 Who will repost this after you?


??? But if you do play along, leave a comment so I can come and relive this most painful and awkward time of your life with you!

Eight things

James tagged me for this, and I've been sitting on it for quite a while. Part of it has been the interruption of the vacation and subsequent blogging, but part has been simply because I had a hard time coming up with a list of eight things you don't already know about me.

The Rules:

I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.


2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.


3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.


4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Okay, so here's what I came up with.

One: One of my favourite after-the-kids-are-in-bed treat is a homestyle oatmeal chocolate chip cookie with a glass of skim milk. And it's only really worth eating if you microwave it for a few seconds to make the chocolate chips all melty. Twelve seconds is not quite long enough and fourteen seconds is a tiny bit too long, but I cannot bring myself to nuke it for 13 seconds.

Two: I'm entomophobic; that is to say, I'm afraid of bugs. Some more than others. I am wickedly freaked out by tent caterpillars, for instance, but not so much by bees and wasps. Earwigs and silverfish make my skin crawl, but I'm not afraid of ants. While I love to putter in my garden, I'm always vaguely revulsed by the critters that live in it. I've been trying very hard to not let the boys see how afraid of bugs I am, and have had to breath deeply to avoid shrieking when they have picked up random insects off the ground and brought them (with their HANDS!) to show them to me. *shudder*

Three: I love my barbecue. From early spring through first snowfall, I'll use the grill three or four times per week. My favourites are (a) peppercorn steak kebabs with cherry tomatoes (is there anything more heavenly than grilled cherry tomatoes?), zucchini, onions and mushrooms; (b) chicken breasts that have been rubbed and left to sit in a sort of dry marinade made of commercial fajita mix and olive oil - makes for lovely spicy chicken fajitas with a cajuny flavour; and (c) plain old hamburgers, which brings me tidily to my next point:

Four: Even though I am the Queen of Convenience Foods, I am a snob about hamburger patties and will never buy the preformed ones. I make mine with extra lean ground beef, a bit of chopped up onion, bread crumbs or wheat germ when I have it, egg (yolk only) and a couple of shakes of worcestershire sauce. The trick is to handle the patties as little as possible, and to flip them only once or twice, not many times.

Five: I went to get some blood work done this week because this pregnancy is seriously knocking me on my ass. I've passed beyond chronically tired into barely functional (with a healthy does of apathetic on the side) and it's far worse than it has been for any previous pregnancy. Does it strike anybody else as absurdly ironic that in testing you for anaemia they take SEVEN vials of blood from you?

Six: Speaking of pregnant, I'm coming up on 11 weeks and have moved once again into the realm of transitional pants. Except they won't stay on my hips and keep wanting to slide off my ass. So in addition to debilitating fatigue and near-constant stomach upset, I plan to spend the next five or six weeks extremely cranky as I battle gravity for control of my pants.

Seven: My memory is getting worse, and my memories for plot details is abysmal. As I've said, I'm re-reading all the Harry Potter books in anticipation of the arrival of Deathly Hallows next week. Next! Week! I'm currently just finishing up Half-Blood Prince, which I consumed rather voraciously when it came out just two years ago, and yet it's like reading it for the first time. I mean, I'm not overly surprised that some of the details of the books I first read back in 2000 have since escaped me, but it's rather alarming how much of this reads like I've never read it before. And even worse, I'm already having trouble remembering the details of some of the books I just re-read a few short months ago. When Harry and Dumbledore talk about Harry destroying the Horcrux that was was Tom Riddle's diary from Chamber of Secrets, I can only vaguely remember how Harry destroyed it. The good news is, it will save me a fortune in buying new books over the years; I'll just start recycling the old ones every couple of years. (Speaking of Harry Potter, if you're in the mood for some great speculation and a considered, intelligent review of the state of the series to date and the prevalent theories on where it's all going, Macleans had a great feature last week.)

Eight: The boys are in swimming lessons right now. I lucked into the same time slot for each of them in a different level, so I sit on the pool deck and watch both of them with their respective teachers. It's Tristan's third session, but Simon's first without a parent in the pool. They're both doing extremely well, and I can't help but beam proudly at them from my vantage point. Tristan never stops smiling the whole time he's in the pool, and is so obviously eager to please his teacher that it breaks my heart. He's just becoming able to dog paddle short distances without a noodle, and he pesters me endlessly through the week with a countdown of how many more sleeps until swim lessons. Simon also seems to be doing well, and I was pleased to see that the teacher knew his name from the very first day. Maybe it's just me projecting, but she seems to favour him. Can't say I blame her, he's awfully cute bobbing around like he was born in the water.

So now, I'm supposed to tag eight other people. Hmmm, just about everyone has done this, and I'm so behind in my blog reading right now that I'm not sure who has and who has not been tagged. Having said that, how about:

1. Not so little sister
2. Sara
3. Liz
4. Suze
5. Alison
6. Barbara
7. Miche
8. You! (Leave a comment if you want to play along and I'll link back to you.)

Reactions

First of all, thank you all for your sweet words of congratulations. I love you guys, I really do! You not only to you elevate my joy, but you inspire me to tell better stories - or at least to tell stories better, as I don't think I could have improved the way the narrative line unfolded itself on that one.

Although of course I am delighted to find myself pregnant, I truly have to say it's the funny and sweet reactions of the people around us that have touched me deeply. This was the e-mail correspondence between Jojo (the boys' godmother) and I before, during and after lunch time on Wednesday. (To truly appreciate this story, you have to know that when we were going for our first IVF cycle back in 2001, Jojo's mom Maureen went to her church and lit a candle for our success. When we conceived Tristan from that cycle, Maureen earned herself a place of honour in our family forever.) So anyway, Jojo and I were talking about The Secret, and Jojo had been telling me how even though we're both a little cynical about these things, she had had some pretty impressive and immediate results. The (very slightly edited for the sake of brevity) correspondence from that point goes on like this:

-----Original Message-----
To: Jojo
Sent: May 30, 2007 10:50 AM
RE: The Secret

Holy shit! Yes, I would very much like to borrow your DVD now!!!!!!! I promise to not roll my eyes any more when people talk about the Secret!

Send out your magic happy thoughts that the nanny interview goes well for me tonight, if you can spare it for me please!!!

----- Original Message ----
To: Jojo
Sent: May 30, 2007 10:50:40 AM
RE: The Secret

P.S. I'm also four days late. Tick tick tick....

----- Original Message ----
To: Dani
Sent: May 30, 2007 11:18 AM
RE: The Secret

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! How have you not POAS?????

You are my favourite silver lining friend! I am sending out an order for both things today for you!

----- Original Message ----
To: Jojo
Sent: May 30, 2007 11:31 AM
RE: The Secret

*laughing* I think I might buy one today. I have no physical symptoms, but didn't have any in Sept either. The one thing that is really making me go "hmmmmmm?" is that I've woken up the last two nights at 2:30 or so in the morning and haven't been able to get back to sleep. Insomnia has been a huge symptom for all of my pgcies. ?????

----- Original Message ----
To: Dani
Sent: May 30, 2007 11:46 AM
RE: The Secret

Get thee to a pharmacy! And you know....tonight IS a Sens game.

----- Original Message ----
To: Jojo
Sent: May 30, 2007 12:34 PM
RE: The Secret

Um, Jojo?

It's postive!!!!!!!!

-----Original Message-----
To: Dani
Sent: May 30, 2007 12:51 PM
From: Jojo
Re: The Secret

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GODOH MY GOD OH MY GOD

YES!

The universe listens to you!

***

(I actually had to take out about half of the "OH MY GOD"s. They more than filled my screen!)

So, for one thing, don't diss The Secret! And for another, don't you think everybody needs a friend like Jojo?

Beloved's reaction was more - how can I put this delicately? - restrained. He had been out with the boys all afternoon at a picnic, and so I waited until I got home from work to tell him (which is also why I waited until late in the afternoon to post about it. Some things you just shouldn't find out through your wife's blog, ya know?) I think I mentioned to him that I was on the late side, but I certainly hadn't been obsessing about my lateness in the usual way, so I definitely caught him by surprise.

He was lying on the couch being used as a jungle gym by two climbing monkeys when I flashed the positive test at him without prelude, and his eyes bulged out in a way that even Chuck Jones couldn't have animated better. He looked at me with a lovely mixture of confusion, exhaustion and guarded joy, and later asked my forgiveness if it takes a while for him to feel fully engaged by the idea. The miscarriage last November was harder on him than it was on me, I think, and I competely understand where he is coming from.

My Mom and Dad also received the news with a mix of joy and restraint. My sweet, sweet mother tried valiantly to convince me not to share the news at first. She's just superstitious enough that my public outing of the pregnancy this early in the game screams a dangerous tempting of fate. But she soon came around to my argument that joyous moments are worth sharing, and if sad times come we'll deal with them, too. She did, however, send me a list of "demands" late in the afternoon:

-----Original Message-----
To: Dani
Sent: May 30, 2007 1:25 PM
From: Mom

Here's my list:
Do not lift anything heavy
Do not pick up heavy sod
Get a cleaner for the first 4 months
Do not pick up heavy sod
Eat Eat Eat folic acid and vitamins
Do not pick up heavy sod
Do not be stubborn about this
Love Mom

And, the next morning:

-----Original Message-----
To: Dani
Sent: May 30, 2007 1:25 PM
From: Mom

If that pen is heavy - put it down right now
Ha ha
Love Mom

My own reaction has been one of surprisingly calm. I've been basking in the joy of the reactions of everyone else without thinking spending too much time worrying over the details in my head. It helps that we've been distracted by the sheer busyness of my work and home life right now, including the interview with the potential new nanny. She's lovely and I really like her and hope it works out, but I fear we can't afford her. I sent her an e-mail with our best offer, which is about $200 per month short of what she said she was hoping to earn, and I'm waiting to hear back from her.

I really hope to maintain a sort of "que sera sera" attitude throughout this pregnancy. No good can come of worrying myself sick, and a copy of this article happened to run in yesterday's Citizen (what timing!) confirming that as early as 17 weeks gestation babies can be affected by maternal stress.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change... and the wisdom to enjoy the moment. But it wouldn't hurt to get my hands on a copy of The Secret either...

Edited to add: can I say again how much I love the people who contribute to the lively conversation in the comment box? I just got this in my mailbox and had to share it with you. Nicole, you ROCK! My mother will be very impressed... and I promise, no sod will be lifted.

Shaking it off

Well. That was an unpleasant little trip through the dark corners of my psyche. Thanks to all of you for your comments of support and solidarity. It's edifying to hear that a lot of you think the whole daycare-crapout situation was ridiculous - at least it wasn't entirely me!

I spent quite a large part of the long weekend trying to wrest control over the things I can, and looking for the courage to accept the things I can't. Cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed, washed the floors. Boxed up our winter boots and hauled them down to the basement. Threw out half the stuff in the funny-shaped cupboard in the corner that barfs out misbalanced stacks of lidless tupperware and disposable aluminum pans and stray paper plates every time you open the cupboard door. Bought a new battery for the cordless phone that dies if you leave it off the cradle longer than an hour or deign to talk more than 15 minutes. Mowed the lawn, front and back, AND hauled out the weedwhacker to do the edges. Bought a funky new Hound Dog dandelion puller after reading a review of it in the paper (and it was worth every penny of the $25 I spent on it. I filled half a bag of dandelions in less than an hour! Disclosure: link built through my Amazon Associates account.) Bought a bleeding heart perennial to fill a gap in the back flowerbed.

In short, I tried my best to eliminate as many things as possible that have caused me some form of grief in the last little while. And still found time to read a chapter or two of a good book on my new swing. AND watch that stellar hockey game on Saturday. Thank goodness for long weekends.

This post may well qualify for induction into the "Boring Posts Hall of Fame", but I'm trying to cram something in before bringing Tristan to school. I'm home with the boys today since we are newly caregiverless, and I have to tell you, on a sunny May day it's not a bad time to be out of the office.

Sincerely, thank you to all of you who offered a word of kindness in the last couple of days. The good news is, I think my words are unstuck again, and I'm feeling a lot better about the chaos that wasn't banished over the weekend. I mean, life without at least a little bit of chaos is kind of uninteresting, right?

Thanks, friends.

Bad days

This is not the post I wrote today. I wrote two others at various points today, trying to relieve some of the pressure in my head. The first two are tucked away in the draft folders, too raw to be published. Hopefully, just getting them out of my head and into the computer is enough.

It hasn't been the best day. It hasn't been the best week. Matter of fact, we're going on two weeks that I'd pretty much either do over or erase from memory.

When I went to see the doctor 10 days ago and she diagnosed the pneumonia, the symptom that was bothering me the most was not the cough, or the fever. It was a much less quantifiable, "I don't feel like myself." The antibiotics quelled the cough and broke the fever, but the emotional malaise lingers, amplified by the criticism and concerns raised by the caregiver.

I'm tired of listening to the various voices in my head. One of the other two posts I wrote today tried to capture the ongoing conversation - no, debate - in my head over the past three days. The voice of comfort tries to tell me I'm doing a good job, I have a great life and very little to complain about on a relative scale, and that this too shall pass. The voice of the critic is less charitable, and makes me feel inadequate and overwhelmed as a parent, as a wife, as an employee, as a person.

Overwhelmed. Inadequate.

Breath in, breath out. Try to find your bliss, try to find just a granule of peace to tide you over.

Right now, I can't think of anything that would make me feel better, which is a kind of desolate place to be. Often, I'll be able to cheer myself up with a meal at a favourite restaurant, or an afternoon of shopping indulgence, or just an hour with a bowl of chips and a good book. Meh. None of those things appeal to me.

The malaise coalesces every now and then into a flare. A flash of temper, a raised voice, tears. And then I feel bad, because my life really isn't so bad and I don't know what the hell has gotten into me. But the negativity is strong, and I look around and see faults everywhere. That was the other post I wrote, trying to capture my vacillating feelings about the boys right now. After the caregivers comments, I'm suddenly hyper-aware of their faults, of my failings. They ARE restless, and relentless. They DO need to learn to listen the first time. They DO talk back a lot, oh my god the arguing and bickering and complaining. Simon really is a handful right now, and I'm honestly out of ideas of how to discipline him. I know they're just going through a phase right now, but their relentless testing feeds my growing ennui and I'm overwhelmed - with worry, with guilt, with anxiety. What if I am screwing this up? What if it's too late? Why can't I do this? Why is it so hard? Why is it so goddamn hard?

So I start to make plans, to compensate. I'll make up charts with reward stickers for good behaviour, limit computer time, make myself more available to them. Except, I haven't washed the floor in two weeks and the toilets in I don't know how long and the grass in the backyard is nearly to my shins. And suddenly two days have gone by and I've been doing menial tasks all weekend with the voices arguing in my head and noticing every. little. thing the boys have done wrong (and, to their credit, a good number of the things they have done right) and I still have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach like I'm not doing a good job anywhere in my life right now. And I just want that feeling to fuck right off because I like it much better when I'm happy and oblivious to the mess and the chaos and I wonder what that says about me.

Breath in, breath out.

I don't know whether I want to publish this post or not. It seems to me I've been doing more than my share of whining lately, and I keep coming to you asking for your feedback, for your endorsement, for your support. That's not what I want, not what I need. But maybe if I tell you that I'm having a hard time, it will make me feel better, and make it easier for me to not be having a hard time anymore.

My words are stuck

Even though I'm not a writer in the traditional definition of the word, I rely on the written word for my livelihood. I write communication strategies, news releases, web content, briefing notes and reports, among a long list of other things. My job is all about words.

The amount of finesse required and the level of care I take when stringing those words together varies day by day and product by product. If I'm writing e-mails all day long, not so much. But there are days when how I string those words together matters. Working for the government doesn't give me a huge creative licence, but there is still room for artistry.

On the blog, I write every day. (Every damn day. It tires me out just thinking about it some times!) Even with blog, though, some days involve more effort and creativity than others. I'm not especially careful when I string together a meme, but I'll often rework an anecdote for quite a while. The mechanics of good writing come naturally to me, but I like to pick at a first draft for at least a couple of minutes to reconsider the word choices and the rhythm and the resonance.

Lately, getting the words out has been a painful and difficult process. Whether I'm writing for work or for blog, for the past week or more the simple act of writing has been a struggle. Each sentence is an effort, wrested from some deep subconscious dungeon and dragged reluctantly to the light of day. Each paragraph is filled with false starts and abandoned phrases. My writing feels stilted and forced.

When it's good, it's very good. I love the joyous rush of being in the groove, of completely disengaging my brain from my furiously typing fingers and simply sitting back to marvel as the words assert themselves on the screen. I am my own biggest fan, and there are days when I go back and read some of the stuff that I've written and say, 'Damn, woman! You can write!' And then, of course, there are days like today when I look back at some of my finer writing and think, 'That's it, I've jumped the shark. I'll never write that well again.'

It's not a matter of being in a creative drought or lacking my muse; even when I know exactly what I want to say, the words themselves are the hinderance. Rather than flowing together, tumbling out in an enthusiastic and satisfying rush, the words are tangled and sticky and awkward, and each one has to be coaxed reluctantly onto the page. It's exhausting.

Is there anything more excruciatingly boring than reading someone complain about how hard it is to string words together? Oh yes, definitely: writing about how hard it is to string words together.

P.S. On my screen, my sidebar seems to be taking a vacation in the sunny south. (Although it's fine on the laptop at home.) I'm not sure why. It started doing that yesterday, but I haven't added anything to it, nor do I have any content in the posts that would throw off the alignment. I'm hoping it fixes itself. Bad enough when the words are fighting back, but the technology is throwing a hissy fit, too. At this rate, I'll be sending out blog posts via seminole semaphore signals by next week...

Happy Mother's Day!

This is what my sweet, sweet boys and Beloved gave me for Mother's Day:

This is all I really needed:


Happy mother's day!

Save me from the clutter

My name is Dani and I have a problem.

I am a packrat. More than a packrat, I have what is bordering on a pathological inability to throw things away.

What things, you ask? Well, I'm okay when it comes to throwing out dirty diapers and pizza crusts and apple cores and whatnot. But the rest of the clutter that migrates into our house on a daily basis, moves in and procreates in corners, in piles on end tables, crowding into bookshelves and spilling out of drawers? It's taking over.

Some of it I keep because I think I might need it again some day. Stacks of magazines with interesting articles on parenting and astronomy; recipes I might want to try some day if I ever develop a taste for food I don't currently like; things the boys might some day find interesting about art and classical music and politics. Newspaper clippings that are about people I know, or were particularly interesting, or I thought some day might lead to inspiration for an unspecified future writing project. Eight years worth of bank statements because once I needed to find one from the previous year. Containers of any shape or size, because you can never have enough containers in your life - even when they begin to take over your life. Flower pots, mismatched cutlery, coffee carafes, empty picture frames - because you just never know when they might come in handy. A full series of 1990 Topps baseball cards. Almost a dozen boxes of comic books. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of three million paperbacks.

Way too much space is occupied by things I think might make good crafts some day. We'd have to make a craft every day and night for the next six years to use up all the bits of flotsam and jetsam I've stashed away for unidentified future crafts. Meters and meters of fabric scraps, each scrap too small to be a quilt square. Ditto for scraps of wrapping paper. Construction paper with only one corner cut off, or one line drawn and then abandoned, saved for a rainy-day project. Socks with no mates, or socks with holes in them, that would make lovely sock puppets. Straws, popsicle sticks, shiny bits and sparkly things. Scraps of lumber leaning in the corner, waiting to inspire. Greeting cards from people I no longer remember, saved not for sentimental reasons but for the craft-able-ness of the pretty pictures.

Speaking of sentimental, that's a whole other category of stuff that I'm destined to keep for the rest of my natural life. Simon's soothers, for example. How can I throw them away? I think I still have Tristan's tucked away somewhere. And every greeting card I ever got from the people whom I do care about, like Beloved and the boys and my folks. Photos. Who can throw a photo away, even if you can't quite remember who the photo is of? And clothes that don't fit anymore, or are ridiculously out of style, but were bought for me by my mom. I can't throw those away!

Clothes are hugely difficult for me to throw away, or even recycle. My grandmother used to recycle my grandfather's shirts by pulling the stitching out of the worn collars and cuffs, turning them inside out and restitching them. Now myself, I can barely sew a hem and certainly not an invisible one, but I have baskets of distressed clothing that I imagine could be resuscitated - if I only could figure out how. And since Tristan is so hard on the knees of his pants, there are many pairs of one-kneed pants just waiting to be converted into shorts. Or, you know, to sit in the drawer and take up space for eternity.

And even the undamaged clothes I find hard to part with. I have five, maybe six rubbermaid bins of clothes too small for the boys that are stacked in Simon's closet. Some days I think I'm saving them for a potential future baby of mine. Other days, I'm saving them to sell on eBay. Mostly, though, I'm saving them because it's less emotionally difficult than deciding to get rid of them. That's without even mentioning the entire maternity wardrobe hanging patiently in my closet, from work clothes to weekend wear to underwear. I might need it, and if I don't need it maybe I can sell it. Or maybe give it away. But not yet - someday, but not yet.

And then there's the boys' artwork. They love to colour, to draw, to paint. I simply can't in good conscience bring myself to recycle their masterpieces, no matter how minor. They print colouring pages off the Internet by the ream, and each of them is a work of art, even the ones where they never actually got around to finishing the colouring. And now that Tristan is in school, he brings home workbooks and exercises in addition to artwork, and there's no way I can bring myself to turf the products of his labour. We'll need a new house to store it all by the time both boys have made it to university.

No wonder I can't keep the damn house clean - I spend all my (albeit rather limited) dedicated housework time taming clutter instead of actually cleaning. But I'm not ready to part with any of it. Not yet, anyway.

Surely I'm not alone. What do you collect?

Maybe I'm just not a bulk sort of girl

After years of listening to friends rave about Costco, I took advantage of a deal that knocked $20 off the price of a membership and signed up online. Today, we took our first trip.

I swear, I must be the only person in North America who can walk into a Costco and walk out with nothing but a bag of milk and two loaves of bread.

The one where I'm not pregnant

I peed on a stick yesterday morning. One line. Sigh.

I’m not terribly surprised. I knew I had ovulated fairly late in my cycle, if at all. (Funny, I spent all of our infertile years being mystified by my body, using a microscope to read its inscrutable signs. Now it sends me fertility signals in 72-point font, and yet I still can’t force it to succumb to my will. I am truly my own worst enemy.) I would have been expecting day one last Friday given an ordinary cycle, but I might have ovulated up to five days or a week late, so I really shouldn’t have been expecting my period any time before this weekend.

I got sucked in by hope, though. Damn optimism. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but I simply felt like I might be pregnant. Part of that might have been the absence of the injustices my body usually offers in the week before my period arrives either. I’ll save you the gory details, but we’re mostly talking about minor mood swings, bloat, and an inability to stop eating – especially eating junk food.

By Monday, pregnancy watch had officially commenced with the scrutinizing of the toilet paper. You know how it is, where you begin wondering if you are peeing all the time because you are pregnant, or because you just want the chance to check the toilet paper again to stave off doubt and denial. And there’s that brief suspended moment just before you examine the tissue where you are braced for the tell-tale smudge of blood, but holding out hope for a pristine smudge-free wipe.

While making dinner Tuesday, I had begun thinking about home pregnancy tests and when I might be able to test without feeling foolishly premature. I’d been idly thinking about a possible leftover (unused!) test from last summer, and when I rooted through the bathroom cupboard and found one, it seemed like a postcard from fate. It was a freebie; I could test and be sure of the answer and stop what had become a near-constant cacophony of “what-ifs” in my mind with one quick trip to the bathroom.

To test or not to test. This is the question of women the world over. So much hope, so much fear, so much possibility, so much dread, all imbued into one little chemical strip. There is widespread agreement in the infertility community that "pee sticks" are evil. Assuming you are trying to conceive, the positive test is the best possible outcome. However, the negative test doesn't allow much closure. We've all heard the stories of people who have negative hpts and go on to have lovely babies nine months later.

I've had a rocky relationship with the pee sticks myself. Three positives, one of which was Simon (I never got that far in to the two week wait with Tristan; I had a positive blood test when I started showing signs of OHSS nine days after the embryo transfer.) I can't even count how many negative ones. Dozens, probably.

So in the gloaming of an early morning, before anybody else in the house is awake, I pee on a stick. Every single time I've taken a pregnancy test, I am swept up by the swell of possiblity and the suspension of disbelief in that breathless moment where the urine surges up the little stick. I'm almost afraid to look, afraid to give up the hope of speculation to the harsh reality of fact. The moment seems endless, my optimism champing at the bit, my mind already formulating announcements and due dates and nursery colour schemes.

One line. With an exhalation of breath, I take an embarrassed moment to reign in my rampant optimism. Of course it wasn't positive. How silly of me to think so. I never really thought I was pregnant. I was just, you know, making sure.

Later that afternoon, I can't help myself. I pull the test back out of its nest of tissues in the bathroom garbage bin. I peer carefully at the used test, trying by sheer force of will to conjure a ghostly pink line in the hopelessly blank space beside ruby-red test line. I step to the window and turn the test back and forth, squinting at the test from various angles until I am nearly cross-eyed. Despite my best efforts, the test remains stubbornly negative. I move to toss it back into the waste bin, but stop and lay it carefully on the counter. I'll check one more time, later.

You never know. Hope springs eternal.

Fancy feets

You know that snowstorm that wallopped the Northeastern USA, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces on Monday? Yah, sorry about that. Mea culpa. You see, I bought some new spring shoes on the weekend, thus condemning us to at least six more weeks of winter (I'm far more reliable than Wiarton Willie or Punxsutawney Phil!)

I'm not really a shoe person. Mostly, I buy shoes because it's not socially acceptable to pad around in my socks all day. Not terribly comfortable in February, either. So shoes are a functional thing for me. I have some black ones, some brown ones. I have a couple of pairs for work, one of which is good for skirts. I have my winter boots (new and a steal from Globo this year) and a pair of Guess backless canvas tennis shoes that have come a long way from their original white. I have a pair of sandals for summer, of course, and a kicky little pair of cream coloured dress sandals with kitten heels I got last summer to wear to work. I have a pair of Timberland hikers that I have worn within an inch of their lives, and a pair of Saucony runners that I paid a comparatively small fortune for, but I love them. My single foray into the world of fashionable shoes has been this adorable pair of navy ballet flats with orange and cranberry and emerald embroidery and (gasp!) sequins that I bought last summer.

(Aren't they cute? And I paid a stunning TWELVE dollars for them.)

So I own probably ten pairs in all, maybe a dozen. It seems to me an excess of shoes, shoes for every occassion. They're all very nice, very functional, mostly comfortable and (with the exception of my fancy little ballet flats above) terribly uninteresting shoes.

My skirt shoes (I really have just one pair, a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe) had worn down considerably in the four years since I bought them to wear to work after my maternity leave with Tristan had ended. So this season, I found myself in need - okay, in want - of a new pair of skirt shoes.

I was in the mall on the weekend looking for new pants for Tristan (post for another day = what the holy hell do boys do to their pants that is so hard on the knees?) and I just happened to pop into Payless on my way by.

I started off looking for something in a staid black pump with a two-inch heel and a square toe. What I found was a sassy little patent leather(ish) slingback with kitten heels and a flirty little bow. LOVED them! I haven't worn patent leather shoes since I was six years old, but I immediately and deeply loved them. I had to have them.



You'll be shocked to hear that I was then mesmerized into buying a second pair by the buy-one-get-one-half-price devilry of Payless. As I mentioned, to date all my shoes have been variations on a safe neutral palette and conservative styling. But I've been studiously taking notes while watching Friday night episodes of What Not To Wear, and Clinton's exhortation to punch it up with a bold splash of colour was rattling through my brain when I set my sights on a gorgeous pair of (he says red, she says coral) strappy summer shoes with a skinny wedge heel.



Aren't they lovely? Red, strappy shoes. I feel so fancy! And so thrifty, too, because I paid only $40 for the lot, including tax.

(insert smug and fancy grin here)

But can I just take a minute to say that taking pictures of your own feet is not nearly so easy as it looks? Oh sure, the taking of the picture is easy enough, but the not making your legs look like sticks or amorphous blobs? Not so easy. Props to Marla, whose carefree feet photos seem as effortless as they are adorable. She is an unacknowledged master of the foot-photo, and of the foot family portrait.

So, bloggy friends, having just endured an entire post about my feet, do tell me about yours. Are you a shoe person? What are your favourite shoes?

How cool am I?

How cool am I? Why, thanks for asking. I am, in fact, way wicked cool. And terribly impressed with my sassy self at just this moment.

What's got me so excited? Tickets to see Rush in concert, baby! The last great concert I need to see. I've been a Rush fan since I was ten years old and Moving Pictures came out - it was one of the first LP albums I ever owned. Geddy Lee is one of my personal heroes and Neil Peart is a demi-god. Rush!!

And not only am I cool enough to be going, but I've already got my tickets when they don't even go on sale to the general public until Friday.

*pauses for ohs and ahs of befuddled wonderment and whispers of amazed curiousity*

I was futzing about on the ticketmaster.ca site, trying to figure out the prices, and I found something about advance fan-club sales. So I went on the Rush site, and followed the links on tour portion of the Web site. It gave me the secret code and I was in like Flynn! (And ya gotta know that only people who are so secure in their ultimate coolness are comfortable to use a phrase as hokey as "in like Flynn", let me tell you.)

Rush! Me! In September! Squee!!

On waste and waist management

I've been trudging along on my healthy-living / weight-loss campaign. I was doing okay in fits and starts - didn't lose anything for the month of January, lost steadily a pound a week through February and into March and then it happened. The pepperoni arrived and blew my diet all to hell.

I was doing so well on watching what I was eating, until the week I ate FOUR ENTIRE PEPPERONI STICKS. And not just those little ones, either, but the ones as long as your forearm. What the hell causes a normal person to eat FOUR pepperoni sticks in a week (cough cough four days cough), you ask? My brother has this totally amazing butcher near his house, and he makes spicy pepperoni to die for. My folks visited one weekend and brought no less than six pepperoni sticks home for me.

I'm telling you, that stuff is meat mixed with crack. I'd cut myself a small piece and put it back in the fridge, intentionally hiding it behind other stuff so I couldn't see it. I'd finish the bite I'd cut and start smacking my lips, salivating for more. Okay, I'd think, just another little piece, just a tiny bite. I'll eat less at dinner. And after cutting off some more, I'd put the pepperoni away and the knife in the dishwasher and I'd still be back in the fridge five minutes later looking for more. And once it was half gone, well, there's no sense in leaving it around for me to agonize over all night, right? Might as well polish it off. And at about the 3/4 mark, with my mouth tingling from the spiciness, I'd start to think that maybe I should stop now, but I wouldn't be able to stop and so I'd just eat the whole damn thing. And then I'd have a righteous bellyache, because that's really a disgusting amount of meat and fat(*) to consume as a snack. And yet, the next day I'd be right back at it, cutting myself just the tiniest sliver of the next one, just for a taste.

In the end, after four straight days of my pepperoni-stick-a-day habit, I threw the last two sticks in the garbage. I just couldn't garner the willpower to resist them. I'm not kidding when I speculate that they are made with crack. Yummy, spicy, fatty crack. I gained two pounds that week.

Throwing food away is something new for me, and I'm very torn about it. I've been doing it since January, and I honestly think it's one of the liberating concepts that have helped me actually lose weight this time. More than just leaving food on my plate, I've started to throw junk food away. I'll eat a few chips and throw the rest of the bag away. Even more liberating, I'll take a bite out of a cookie and throw the rest away. This works for me largely because I often only want a taste of something. Other than the crack-filled pepperoni, I've realized that I'm usually satisfied with most treats after a single bite or two.

The waste bothers me, of course. I've mentioned before that I have Scottish and Dutch roots, which combine to make me ruthlessly frugal when it suits my needs, and the idea of actually throwing away perfectly good food that I've spent perfectly good money to acquire disturbs me on a fundamental level. My grandmother on my father's side would be rolling over in her grave right about now. Like so many people of her generation, she didn't waste a scrap of food (or anything else for that matter) and the idea of taking a bite out of a cookie and simply tossing the rest of it in the garbage would have been horrifying to her.

But I remember reading a while back an article about controlling your eating that asked the question: are you a garbage can? When you are satisfied with something, you have two options: you can throw it away, or you can continue to eat it. When you continue to eat it, you become the garbage can, because the food has outlived it's utility to you. I've really started to internalize this concept lately, and I try to find the point at which I'm satisfied and sacrifice the rest to the garbage can. It's strangely empowering.

(Saving it for later is always an option, I suppose, but to me it defeats the purpose. Especially if something is a treat, like chips or a cookie, I will obsess about it if I know it is in the cupboard waiting for me. Throwing it away eliminates the temptation.)

And yes, I suppose simply not buying it in the first place is probably the most sensible option, but my willpower is a fearsome beast and if I can trick it into being placated with this simple sleight-of-hand, I'm willing to pay the price. Bottom line is, although the the pace has been glacial, the weight has been coming off. It took me three weeks to work off the two pounds of pepperoni weight, but I'm back on track.

(*) According to my favourite nutritional database, a single 10 inch (25 cm) pepperoni stick contains: 187% of your recommended daily sodium intake, 202% of your recommended daily saturated fat intake, more than half your daily calorie intake and a whopping 156% of your recommended daily fat intake. Yikes!

The interview meme

I think the success of any interview gives much more weight to the questions than the answers. That's why I jumped on the chance to play along with the interview meme that's sweeping through the Momosphere right now when Bub and Pie asked if anyone wanted to be an interviewee. She's always thoughtful and clever and I was curious to see what questions she'd come up with for me. I wasn't disappointed - they're great questions. Now let's see if I can do them justice with my answers! (And don't forget to go back and read B&P's answers to the questions posed to her by Mouse.)

1. You’re very open on your blog – it’s one of the things that draws readers in, makes us feel we know you. Experiencing your pregnancy alongside you and then the tragedy of your miscarriage was an intense experience for me as a reader. Do you ever regret the permanent record you’ve left here of your pregnancy in posts that now have a different meaning in light of your miscarriage?

There's one post in particular I wrote maybe a week before the miscarriage when I was around 15 weeks or so, talking about how I thought maybe I could feel the baby moving. In retrospect, that was pretty unlikely, as given what we found out, the baby had likely died by that point. I called it "The Quickening" and I still get a lot of google traffic on that word (sigh, probably more now that I've highlighted it again. Darn spider-bots.) and it always made me cringe. I almost took it down, just because I was feeling a little bit bitter about it showing up in the referral logs, but I never did. That's as close as I come to regret over any of it.

All of that stuff I wrote while I was pregnant was true as it was happening, and was a completely honest representation of what I was going through at the time, so no, I don't regret any of it. It's still hard for me to go back and read some of it, but I can't say that I wish I didn't write it, or that I wish I had thought differently at the time. I've always believed in sharing my joy while it lasts, which is why I could never wait to announce a pregnancy. Sad times may come, so live your moments of joy with enthusiastic abandon while you can.

2. Like me, you were married unhappily once, and are married much more happily now. Do you feel that your first experience in marriage helped shape your second?

Funny, my answer to this question after thinking about it was not my knee-jerk, first-blush response. I don't write a lot about my ex because he's not around to defend himself, and frankly, I'm done giving him any power over me, even all these years later. Suffice to say, he didn't always treat me as well as he should have. He cheated on me, for one. Told his best friend that the best way to 'train' his new wife was to keep putting her down until she stopped fighting back, for another (and he practiced what he preached). And he was, in the most clinical sense of the definition, a pathological liar. He would lie even when the truth was a perfectly acceptable answer. He would lie for the sake of lying, even when there was no doubt whatsoever he'd get caught in his lie. And he lied to me about a lot of stuff - everything from "I took the movies back to the video store today" when he didn't, to "I didn't take your bank card out of your wallet and use it to take money out of your account" when he did, to "I didn't sleep with her" when he did.

So yes, living with that for my most formative years (started 'steady' dating when I was 16, got married when I was 20, got divorced at 24) definitely affected the relationships that followed. When Beloved and I had been living together for a couple of years but not yet married, I went to see a psychologist for a while, and we worked through a lot of the crap I was still carrying around with me. She helped me understand that it was not okay for him to force sex through guilt and withholding of affection, which he did too often, and that I was not at 'fault' for his lies, his adultery, his difficulty in holding a job, and so many other things. Truly, the dozen or so sessions I had with that psychologist were one of the best things I've ever done for myself.

All this to say that I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage by the time Beloved and I moved in together - but not in the ways I might have expected. I've never had trust issues with Beloved, for example. I trust him blindly, with my whole heart, and always have. It's a kind of triumph of naivety and love over experience. But I do have residual control issues. For example, because I could never trust my ex to pay the bills, I must be in charge of the family finances now - I can't cede control of that over to Beloved.

I was ready to answer this question with the many ways that the practice marriage has affected my marriage with Beloved, but I'm pleased to see that in the analysis, maybe I overestimated them. I'm sure there are a thousand other ways, large and small, that have left a residual imprint, but it's surprisingly difficult to analyze what comes as a result of the 'practice' marriage and what was inherently me in the first place.

3. Who do you consider to be the sexiest Canadian politician?

I have three answers for this question, with varying degrees of qualifiers. To answer the question straight up, the sexiest current politician is Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, which I conveniently happened to decide not that long ago when I saw him on the Rick Mercer Report.

Now, if we can expand the parameters a bit, as he hasn't yet run for his seat in Papineau, but when he officially becomes a politician, I'm going to have to switch my allegiance to Justin Trudeau as the sexiest politician. I've had a crush on him since long before the moving eulogy he delivered for his father.

And if we can extend the definition of politics to include speechwriters and communicators for national leaders, my vote goes to former Liberal campaign blogger Scott Feschuk. I have a wicked literary crush on him.

4. Severus Snape: friend or foe?

Ugh. I don't know!! I've been re-reading the books to refresh my memory of the details of the stories in anticipation of the July arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I read, I've been trying to glean any little bit of meaning or insight to this very question in all the scenes where Snape appears.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!! If you have not yet read to the end of Half Blood Prince, STOP READING and skip to the next question!

I've been pondering for two years now whether Snape was simply fulfilling his destiny, or some sort of obligation to Dumbledore, or whether he was truly evil all along, or whether he was possessed by Voldemort. I don't know! I'm too Pollyanna to think that Snape is a truly evil character who willfully killed Dumbledore, and Rowling is after all writing what are in essence children's books.

My bet is that he was under some sort of spell or obligation. I'm itching to read the next book, though. Conveniently, it arrives the first day of my two-week summer vacation. Coincidence or excellent planning on my part? I'll be torn the whole way through, racing to the end to find out once and for all what happens, but slowing myself down because there won't be another helping of Harry Potter after this one is consumed. Peanut gallery, what say you?

5. How do you think birth order affects the personalities of your children?

Another good question! I can definitely see that my boys seem to fit into their birth-order personality stereotypes, for lack of a better word.

Tristan, the first born, is a people-pleaser, and a little high strung. He's keen and tends to be serious more often than not, and plays happily by himself. Simon, on the other hand, is mellower. He's much more social and outgoing, and much more flexible.

This has been great fun to answer. If you'd like me to interview you, let me know in the comments. I don't promise to be as prompt, let alone as insightful, as Bub and Pie was in sending her questions off to me, but I'll do my best.

My 15 minutes in Chatelaine

Thanks to my colleague Rebecca, who was the first to realize that the Chatelaine article I mentioned is already posted online! No more skulking around the magazine racks at every grocery store and news stand in town, waiting for the paper copy to arrive. Er, not that I was doing that, of course.

Anyway, it's with great pleasure and excitement (and a certain lack of subtlety) that I happily point you toward the article in the online May edition of Chatelaine magazine, In vitro we trust - coming soon to a paper edition near you! In my humble opinion, even past the bits that feature me, it's a well balanced and informative article about the state of reproductive technologies in Canada. It's quite long, though - nine screens' worth - so grab a cup of your beverage of choice before you settle in if you want to read the whole thing.

There's nothing about our story that you haven't already read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here (shameless, aren't I?) but it still tickles me to see it all laid out like that in somebody else's words. I was pleased to see that the article manages to shout out both boys and blog by name (sadly, without a direct link. Oh well.)

Even though we knew it was coming and discussed it in advance, I still cringed just a bit when I saw the bit outing Beloved's low sperm count. We've come a long way from the days immediately after our diagnosis, when we could barely discuss it between ourselves. By now, of course, he has become rather acclimatized to me discussing our most intimate moments with the widest possible audience - in blog, on national TV (not once, but twice!) and now in a national magazine as well. He took it in stride, and in fact insists I correct the record by clarifying that it's not so much that his sperm are not copious, but that (in his words, not mine) they are "stupid". The fertility doctors used the slightly more clinical term, "of impaired morphology", but you get the point.

All this to say, in my usual belaboured and roundabout way, that I'm terribly proud to be featured in the article. In case you hadn't gleaned that from my oh-so-understated neon billboard of a post about it.

My Visual DNA

A neat new take on memes!

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

(If you click through, just start selecting the pix that appeal to you, and it will analyze your choices at the end.)

Pressure

This working and mothering thing? Not so easy.

Okay, so most of the time, we achieve a reasonable balance. I admit, my job is easy on the family in that I work early hours, am home most days by 4:30, and almost never work overtime.

This week? Flaming exception. Between last Tuesday and yesterday, I put in more than 18 hours of overtime, including a marathon 12 hour stretch on Sunday.

There was a considerable amount of mommy-guilt on my part, being away from the family that much, but with a remarkably small amount of grumbling, Beloved picked up the slack. Dinners were made, nobody ran out of underwear, and while the cupboards are now stocked with Lucky Charms and Bear Paws and Oreos instead of, say, things we can actually eat for dinner and the house looks like warring tribes pitched a four-day battle in it, we made it through the worst of it. I've been loving the work I am doing, and really enjoying the challenge of crisis communications.

Yesterday, I had to drop everything on the backs of my colleagues because Tristan spiked a fever so bad we were doing the two-hour rotation of Motrin and Tylenol and I had to stay home with him.

His fever isn't entirely better today, so Beloved and I played a round of "why my work is more important than your work." In the end, I gave up and called the caregiver and asked her if Tristan could come, with the fever. She said of course, I hung up the phone and promptly burst into tears. This is the caregiver we are letting go. I'm afraid I'm making a mistake. I should be home with Tristan when he's sick. I have a crapload of work to do today, and there's no sign of it letting up for the next week at least, maybe two.

Did I mention my in-laws are on their way for a two-day visit and will arrive in time for dinner?

Edited to add: the caregiver called shortly after lunch, saying Tristan was crying and asking for me. Within 10 minutes, I was on my way, thanks in no small part to the help of my boss, who finds more ways to endear herself to me each day. By the time we got home an hour later, he was - of course - feeling better. The boys are currently watching Toy Story 2 and eating popcorn, calling each other Captain Underpants and Doctor Diaper.

A Thinking Blogger - that's me!

I’ve been had an honour bestowed upon me which is also a tag, a meme that is an award. Because you know this motherhood thing? It’s all about the multitasking. The clever, witty and insightful Mad Hatter has kindly tagged me with the Thinking Blogger’s Award.


Nice, eh? She nominated me on the basis of my little rant on child care, but she said that it was your comments, from all points on the political spectrum, which increased the “think factor.” I’ve long known this little blog of mine wouldn’t be half the fun it is if it weren’t for you guys, so we can share this little award.

And speaking of sharing, it’s all about the sharing. Now I’m supposed to come up with five other Thinking Bloggers worthy of nomination. Except at least three of my favourites have already been tagged. Am I allowed to repeat? No? Okay, but I’m a little behind on my blog reading and this is spreading like the flu through preschool, so I hope I’m quick enough.

First off, I’d like to tag Phantom Scribbler. I heart Phantom. She has a way of using her own life as a lens to examine some weighty issues, and while she’s opinionated as hell, she’s never didactic. I like that in a smart blogger. But I’m nominating her for this particular honour because of a recent post written in response to a recent article in New York Magazine called the “Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids.” I thought the idea of over-praising your kids was totally bogus until I read her post and the subsequent comments from the Pixies. One of many, many posts that I’ve found myself contemplating long after my browser window was closed.

Next, I’d like to tag Kerry at Popwatch Canada for her post on religion a week or so back. She also posts great Grey’s Anatomy recaps, and has an obsession with Justin Timberlake that continues to perplex me, but threaded through the shiny bits about pop culture, Kerry blogs some pretty interesting ideas and opinions. And I’m not just saying that because she writes my performance reviews, or because my boys are both in love with her and she may yet end up to be my daughter-in-law some day.

My next nomination goes not to a particular post, but to the blog The Smartmouth Mombie in general. For starters, I love any blog with a permanent preamble that says something like “This is what a feminist writes like.” Like the other blogs I’ve tagged so far, Chris strikes a lovely balance between weighty thought pieces and ‘minutiae of mothering’ pieces.

Sadly, my next nominee has gone on temporary hiatus. Angry Pregnant Lawyer is freshly back at work after maternity and painfully sleep deprived. I already miss her quick wit and cutting sarcasm, and I have learned a lot about American culture and politics from her. And yes, that’s a compliment!

And finally, my last tag goes to JF Scientist at A Natural Scientist. I’ve only just started reading this blog, but Jenny writes, according to her tag line, about “science, education, feminism and religion.” I love love love her “ask a scientist” series, and the incredibly wide scope of her posts. I never know what I’ll find when I drop by, but I am assured I’ll learn something – often something I didn’t know I needed to know, but sure enough, turns out I did.

Wow, this was way harder than I thought. I tried to wander away from my usual favourites with this process. Thanks again to Mad Hatter for nominating me, and if reading my nominees makes you crave even more thinking bloggers, there’s five more back at Mad Hatter’s place, and five more at Bub and Pie’s place, too. I’m not going to get any work done at this rate!

Donder op!

My brother and his family were in town last weekend for Simon's birthday. We were having dinner at my parents' place, the adults lingering over dinner while the children played noisily nearby, and it was a moment of perfect contentment.

My brother was telling us about one day a few weeks ago, he was sitting in his car when a man with a very thick Dutch accent approached him and asked my brother if he knew what the word on his car licence plate meant (he has our family surname, Donders, on his personalized plate.) Caught off guard by the gentleman's agitation, my brother replied that to his knowledge it means "thunder" in Dutch. The man said that in fact, it was a very offensive word to someone from South Africa, and walked off in a huff.

In my family mythology, we know that donder means thunder (my dad was a professional percussionist when I was growing up. Isn't Lou Thunder a great stage name for a drummer?), and of course I have subjected you more than once to the Donder / Donner reindeer debate.

But "donder" as offensive? I had to do more research. My first stop was an e-mail to the witty and clever Tertia, who writes the blog So Close and happens to be the only person I "know" who lives in South Africa. . (Tertia and I are both haunted the message boards at IVF Connections, back in the day.) She passed me to her husband Marko, who wrote:

Donder in dutch means thunder as you have said, this is the literal meaning of the word. But it is also used loosely as a slang word for beating someone up. It is not really a very harsh swear word and should not be offensive to others unless they are very sensitive.

Curious, I kept searching the Internet, and found a few more interesting tidbits. From my general reading, to 'donder' someone means to rough them up, and the expresion 'donder op' is a general expletive that can range in meaning from 'get out of here' to 'fuck off'.

From The Afrikaans Challenge - translating to English:

'Donder' is another very useful word, used as an all-purpose swearword, which again has no good English translation. Used as a verb, it can express any degree of roughing up. As a noun, it is a pejorative, as they politely say in dictionaries, to mean whatever you want it to mean.

Cool! All this time, I thought I was benignly named after a force of nature, or even one of Santa's reindeer, but in fact, each time I say my name it's a pejorative. If only I had known that in high school, I may have been less marginalized. (Stop snickering. I'm sure the popular kids would have been fascinated to be cornered at a school dance or party or other social event while I lectured to them about the origins and alternate meanings of my family name. They wouldn't have thought me even more strange than they already did, I'm sure of it.)

And finally, when I came across this entry, I knew it was time to stop searching. I had found the One True Meaning of my name.

From Allwords.com:

donder (slang)
Etymology: Afrikaans, from Dutch
'donderen': to swear or bully
verb
dondered, dondering 1. To beat up or thrash someone.
noun
1. A scoundrel; a rogue.

Being a scoundrel and a rogue is so very much cooler than being named after one of Santa's reindeer, don't you think? And to think, for 37 years I've been blissfully oblivious to this secret and titillating meaning of my name. Some day, my boys are going to thank me for burdening them with those hyphenated surnames!

Progress?

For quite some time, I have been composing a very whiny post in my head. Very whiny. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Ahem. You may not have noticed, since I only blog about it every other day, that I've been working hard on this weight-loss thing. But you reading about it occassionally is not nearly so overwhelmingly annoying as me living with it has been. It seems like I'm fighting a battle with my willpower many, many times each day:

Whiner me: I don't waaaant to work out.
Keener me: Oh, just do it and you'll feel better.

Whiner me: But I worked out, now I really waaaaant that caramel pecan chocolate chip cookie!
(damn those caramel chocolate pecan cookies, they will be my undoing)
Keener me: No, no, no. You don't need cookies. Have a piece of lettuce.

Whiner me: Oh but look, chips are on sale. Sale, I say. Chips... I love chips. Chips make me happy, and I deserve to be happy.
Keener me: NO CHIPS! Chips are evil. You are better than chips. Just say NO to chips.

Whiner me: Wah! I've been so good all day, I'm tired, I just want to order a pizza for dinner. And the boys won't eat pizza unless it has double cheese and bacon. C'mon, throw me a bone here, it's been a long day.
Keener me: Oh come off it. It will take 15 minutes to throw together a veggie stir fry. You can do it!

Lather, rinse and repeat every. single. day. Damn, I'm starting to hate 'keener me'.

And it wouldn't have been so very hard to keep up this internal argument if I were making progress. But every Saturday, I would step on to the scale at the gym, and every Saturday the needle would be magnetically drawn to the same place, a full 10 lbs heavier than I've ever been. I lost that one pound the first week, gained it back the second week, and it hasn't budged in four long weeks. It has been, in a word, demoralizing. Why try if it isn't making any difference? Why work out two or three times a week, why deny myself the treats, why stress myself out for NOTHING?

(Like I said, whiny. Don't say I didn't warn you!)

BUT!

This Saturday, as I stepped on to the scale, I was braced for the disappointment. I centred my feet in exactly the same spot I always do, leaned forward the way I always do, and damn near fell off the scale when I saw it was down a full five pounds.

Five pounds? FIVE POUNDS? I lost five pounds in just one week?

So I stepped off the scale, did a little shuffle, and stepped back on the scale. I could barely bring myself to look. Still down five pounds.

I left the gym feeling a little shakey, and it wasn't just from the 25 minutes full-tilt on the elliptical. I wanted to believe, wanted with my whole heart to believe it was true, and yet I couldn't help but feel that someone was about to snatch this small victory away from me.

I've never actually been successful at weight loss before. I've lost weight due to stress (lost a bunch when I moved away from home the first time, lost so much when I went through my divorce that I took to saying I'd lost 225 lbs - 25 lbs off me, and another 200 lbs off my back) but I've never in the years of trying lost more than a pound or so. I've just kind of acclimatized to the new weight every couple of years.

Do you think it's possible? Did I really lose 5 lbs last week? No wait, shhhhhh, don't say anything. If I just never step on a scale again, I can live with only having met half my goal. I'm going to scratch this one off as a victory while I still can.