Puffballs Are Not Dandelions - Important Public Notice

I cannot believe puffballs are not common knowledge. They are a type of fungus that grows up into a large ball which can be HUGE! GIGANTIC! And their most important feature - should you be either a child or really immature - is that when you step on them, they make a very dramatic cloud of spores over and over again.

Also, they're edible and quite tasty.

Dandelions are pretty awesome, too. They're cheerful and hardy and early and edible (The Girl insisted right at the start of spring that we eat a dandelion leaf salad for supper one night.) and when they go to seed, you can make wishes. What more do you want? One of these days, all of my dandelion wishes will come true and I'll wake up to a pony in my yard and the guy I had a crush on in grade seven calling me for a date. AWKWARD!

Puffballs seemed to be more common when I was a kid, although this might have been because I spent more time running around damp fields than I do now. My husband and I exchanged stories of magical school days in the rainy spring when you'd go outside at recess and the whole YARD was covered in puffballs and little kids in rainboots stomping on them, surrounded by this enormous dusty cloud.

Here's my three kite-flying last night. The giant mob of seagulls hadn't quite got there yet. Isn't that sky something?

You can see the gulls in this picture - look for all of the white flecks at the top of the hill.

Hundreds of gulls, each avidly watching the kite flying through the air. One swallow bravely flew around the kite several times and then soared away, a courageous brown-winged bird disappearing into the trees.

Life is full of beautiful things - the silvery wings of the gulls, the circling arch of the sparrow, my laughing children running through the damp fields, the red kite craning into the sky, straining against the string. The end.

Today's News

The Girl had an invitation to go fishing this afternoon. On a river several towns over. Did I mention that the water is still so cold that if you go in, you'll likely die? So anyhoo, we had plans already and I was able to say no without feeling like The Most Cruel Mother Ever Who Is Denying Her Child Her Lawful Birthright Of Doing Northern Things. And then there was a tremendous rainstorm this afternoon, although I'm much too classy to go "SEE? SEEEEE? I WAS TOTALLY RIGHT!".

Nah, I'm lying. I did that for about half an hour.

Every year at exactly this time, I manage to suppress any knowledge that I am horrible at gardening and that my yard consists entirely of sand and anthills and I am tempted once again by the siren's call of the garden center. "Buy us!" cry the merrily coloured flowers. "We are tired of life and wish to die a terrible shrivelled death!". So we went to the garden center today and I wandered around the bright aisles, wishing forlornly that it would hurry up and stop freezing at night, already. I have flowers that need a-killin'.

We also flew a kite this evening. The kite looked like a pirate ship and I was dubious that it would fly but it did, taking wing in the deep blue sky and then hundreds of seagulls came flying around, their feathers flashing silver and white in the sky. And then I found a puffball, which sounds horribly anticlimactic but no it was not. It was pleasing. I stomped on it and a deeply satisfying cloud of spores flew into the air. If the puffball crop is unusually luxurious this year, you may thank me.

And now to play Plants Vs. Zombies YET AGAIN.

I Took A Blogcation!

And yet life still stumbled on. How very humbling.

Anyhow. Here is today's post, and you'd think it would be better given that I didn't write anything for several days before it, but no, it's just me moping on about babies and kids getting OLDer and the usual. Now that I've tempted you beyond bearing, I'll see you there!

Versus

Heroic Dog Stories VS. Actual Dogs Themselves
I like few things better than heroic dog stories: chihuahuas throwing themselves in front of cobras to protect a toddler! Dying blind bulldogs stumbling down burning hallways to wake up their sleeping owners! And this one story I read about a missing preschooler in the woods and a flooding river and SEVERAL DAYS passing and a grim recovery mission that turned into joy when it turned out that a neighborhood dog had hung out with her for the whole time and kept her safe. I could just cry even thinking about it.

Real dogs, though? They bark loudly. They drool on my lap and try to commit indecent acts to my pant legs. They bite. But little dogs in sweaters are awesome and I've known some dogs who were fairly decent people. And there was one dog from my childhood who was this magical, compassionate animal and who died a brutal, unfair death with dignity, the poor thing.

Winner: Um.... I'm going to go with real dogs. This surprises me.

Martha Speaks VS. Word Girl.
We like Word Girl. She's funny and smart and her brother unwittingly has a crush on her, which is rather hilariously gross. But we don't like the theme song - ugh! - and much of the show's humour sails over my kids' heads.
Martha Speaks has a jolly little singalong theme song, an endearingly doofy main character and a relaxed, gently funny feel with no incest whatsoever.

Winner:.... MARTHA SPEAKS! I am all about dogs today, apparently.

Magnum PI VS. Remington Steele
Two highly attractive 80s detectives!
This is Remington Steele, played by Pierce Brosnan before he got old and kind of skeezy looking:

And this is Magnum PI, played by Tom Selleck who is a thing of beauty and a joy forever:

And the winner is: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? LOOK AT THAT MAN RIGHT ABOVE THESE WORDS. Remington Steele had doofy poofy hair and a fey, picky look, while Magnum PI was manly. And had one of the few awesome moustaches. Magnum for the win.

"Handy" Budget Advice!

"A sumptuously styled bedroom on any budget," you say, Canada's Style At Home (July 2009)? I would love to have a sumptuously styled bedroom! And yes, it is a lovely room. Let's see - the High End Room has:

1. A rather lovely bed and at $2799 it had BETTER be lovely.
2. $280 a roll wallpaper. REALLY?
3. Wee, adorable silk pillows that cost $145. Each. Perhaps they sing you gentle songs as you fall asleep with a big chunk of money clutched in your fist.
4. A chandelier that costs $1800. Well, it IS pretty.
.... and more crap, including $300 fitted sheets and an $8000 rug, with a final tally of...

$20,398.

But it is a VERY pretty bedroom. Just lovely. Take heart, though, my fellow non-wealthy people who comprise most of Canada! We have been promised an equally lovely bedroom at any budget! Are you ready to hear about our inexpensive, money saving options? Here we go!

1. A rather lovely bed at $2099. Well, it DID save me $700.
2. Pillowcases that cost $91 EACH. BARGAIN!
3. A piece of $540 art, since nothing says "I am on a tight budget" like spending half a grand on art for one's bedroom, SURE.
4. A few $200 silk scarves tossed casually around.
And oh, let us not forget every penny pincher's friend,
5. The $995 chandelier. For one's BEDROOM.

And the grand total - are you ready to hear this frugal, For-Any-Budget amount? - is $6714. For a bed (but not a mattress), bedding, lights and a nightstand.

And yes, $6714 is quite a lot less then $20,000. Certainly. But doesn't it suggest that someone is slightly out of touch with current economic realities to say that a nearly $7000 budget for a bedroom is within everyone's grasp? Because we have a weekly home decor budget of about $15. We bought some curtains the other day and they cost nearly $100 for both windows and we felt like we'd foolishly tossed our money away like giddy, drunken sailors. AND WE HAVE A MIDDLE CLASS INCOME. WTF, interior designers?

I mean, COME ON. If you can spend $6714 on a few bedroom pieces without wincing or going into significant debt, you're not middle class - you're rich. Or at least well-off. And I certainly don't begrudge you the nice bedroom - no, and I'd also like to be your friend - but let's not pretend that all of us have that kind of money lying around, or that the second option listed is in any way the budget option. It's still for well-off people only, REALLY.

I got the magazine (my mom ordered it for me for free from a cereal box promotion) out of my mailbox today with a little lift of my heart. Won't this be pleasant to read after I clean my house? I thought, cheerfully and sat down with it as planned... and realized after flipping through it that I was really quite depressed. All of those rich people and their pretty lives! And for only $6714 we can join their club - or live lives of grim, unrelieved ugliness, I guess.

:(

You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of right before the French Revolution, and a queen so clueless that when told her subjects couldn't afford bread, innocently suggested that instead they eat (so the story, which is almost certainly untrue, goes) cake. There's a monumental failure at a certain level of society to realize how hard things are at almost all other levels, a failure to see that for most people, a thousand dollars for a bedroom chandelier might as well be a million and that their industry will almost certainly be affected by this unless they start making suggestions that are for people with realistic budgets. Think it's gonna happen? Neither do I.

My post for today

This gutted me to write, so WARNING, it's not a happy post. I think - well, I hope - that it's a good one, and worth reading. I hope.

Happy Victoria Day!

It's my favorite Canadian (unless you live in Quebec or Nunavut, apparently) holiday celebrating a long-dead British monarch!

This monarch:

One isn't born looking like this, you know:

I'll spare you the lecture about how yes, there is a poignancy to how short a time one actually is a dewy-eyed, lovely maiden, but our culture has forgotten the longer-lasting, sturdier joys of being a formidable matron in our cultural quest to stay Hot as long as possible. Try if you like, but it's not going to work out in the long run. Very few people are hot at 70 and it seems more productive to work on building character, which you get to keep, unlike youthful good looks, which happens to be the very definition of fleeting.

Of course, I wasn't a good looking young woman - it took me a while to grow into my face - and while I'm happy enough with my looks now*, it doesn't pain me one way or another to think about looking older. I suspect it would be different if I'd been a beautiful girl, if being good looking was part of my identity - than maybe getting older would mean losing something that was a big part of my identity. I've felt sorry, eventually, for most of the really beautiful women I've known.

(*although older men keep telling me that "I've become a real handsome woman," which makes me feel like a striking large building. That's fine, I GUESS.)

It's also - meaning Victoria Day, which I seem to have strayed from - called the MayTwo Four weekend, which refers both to the date and to the fact that beer is sold in cases of 24, and with that you may gather how my fellow Canadians and I toast Victoria's birthday. A lot of the gardeners I know use this weekend as the marker for when it's safe to begin gardening, since it can be reasonably assumed (if you live in SOUTHERN Ontario) that you probably won't have a hard frost after this date. I'm not presuming ANYthing of the sort, however. My husband is on his yearly Manly Camping Trip, for one, and that always means a late May snowstorm. Oh, and I am having my yearly Petulant Fit about the whole thing, too.

The Boy - only having me for a parent - wants my attention, which means off I go. Sigh. Hope you're having fun today.

Little kid....

.... big tree.

STORM!

WOW, it is windy outside! I hope a house doesn't land on me.

Today's post is about the shared work of parenting, and how hard it is to relinquish control. And now that it's written, I'm going to go hide in my basement. Yikes!

Happy Birthday To My Mom!

Yesterday's post was a lot of fun - I should just write a book called "Things You'll Probably Disagree With" and then sit back and rub my hands together and cackle like a silent movie villain. I don't know why ranting is so enjoyable BUT GOSH IT IS.

Today is my mom's birthday! My mother does not enjoy conflict and finds my love of writing ranty posts somewhat stomach-ache inducing, actually. I've written before that I'm not much like my mother, and I'm really not - in fact, I'm sitting here straining my brain muscles trying to think of things we have in common. Um. We both like reading. We've both given birth three times, although one of my three times was by c-section and one of my very, very Mother Earth-y friends once told me, confidentially, that "it didn't really count as giving birth."

!

What's that kid doing living in my house then? Sheesh! What a freeloader!

Oh, I've thought of some more things I have in common with my mother: we both like puppets and making up words! We both like pasta! And we both think that my kids are the cutest.

She's a good grandmother - very involved, close to the kids, eager to spend time with them and yet respectful of our space and cautious about intruding into our Parental Business. This is, in fact, my personal idea of what an Ideal Grandmother would be like, and I don't necessarily have much patience with other models. It is a stark place, my mind.

You know what else makes my mom uncomfortable? ME WRITING ABOUT HER. Ha! Mom!

She is modest. I am a show off. True story!

(and I also wrote a short book review of a book I read recently and liked very much. You can read it next, mom!)

Facing The Music

One of the things that I hold Baby Boomers most responsible for is the idea that popular rock music should be "meaningful" - and meaningful, of course, in the Baby Boomer sense, which means "to stare yearningly at one's navel". Another thing that I hold Boomers responsible for is the idea that the music that one listens to is now part of one's easily purchased identity, since we're all free* of the former bounds of social class and convention now.

* No, we're not.

So just like Rolling Stones-fan Boomers saw themselves as a group apart from Beatles-fan Boomers, I now know people my own age - which is to say, mid-30s - who classify themselves into goofy groups according - in part - to what kinds of music they listen to:

I am a Hot Mom! I listen to Top 30 Pop!
I am a Soulful Mom! I listen to morose, vaguely folky female singers!
I am a Hip Mom! I listen to alternata-stuff!
I am a Country Mom! I listen to country music, although NOT AROUND BECK!

Of course, we're just like our own moms, who listened to Fleetwood Mac and Carly Simon on the car's 8 track player and thought that they were all young and with-it and then we went and made them feel all old by liking The Cure and Depeche Mode. It amuses me to see people trying to ward off the inevitable by assuring themselves that their tastes are so great that their kids will certainly want to listen to THEIR music and not, like, Miley Cyrus. Certainly.

I'm going to be The Grim Ghost of Lameness Present and tell you right now that you probably already DO like old people music, unless you're really into youth culture in a big, creepy way. If you're in your mid-30s, you probably are already listening to stuff that makes ACTUAL young people roll their eyes and if you're not, you're like the oldest guy at the bar. Remember him? The 42 year old hitting on the 19 year olds? NOBODY WANTS TO BE THAT GUY.

This idea that what we listen to has some big significance, that it's part of some important personal identity, would be kind of cute if it wasn't an overall symptom of our cultural yearning towards perpetual adolescence. But teenagers - even 35 year old ones - don't make good parents, and a lot of the messages in a lot of the music that people I know (me included) listen to are not appropriate around young kids. And I'm not talking just about references to sex and drugs (although yes, those too) - I'm talking about the cynical attitudes towards relationships, the nihilistic attitudes towards life, and the oblique references towards suicide and death. I don't want cynical, nihilistic, suicidal, prematurely jaded children, don't want little kids burdened with a shallow veneer of storebought faux sophistication. So I think that part of good parenting is being as careful about music as we are about any other form of media - music is so much a part of our background noise now that it gets an unearned free pass, but it SHOULDN'T.

And I also don't want to create a needless conflict with my future teenagers (THREE YEARS! I WILL HAVE A TEENAGER IN THREE YEARS!), to cause their growing sense of their adolescent identities to clash with their parents, the official and longstanding teenagers in residence. But as long as my identity revolves around a shallow, commercially-driven youth culture, I will inevitably be disenfranchised when my children are old enough to be the actual youth culture. The whole idea of the counter-culture - how our culture is burdened with these Baby Boomer relics! - was that we could create a new culture that was more meaningful than the old one, but that hasn't HAPPENED. Now we all have these shallow dopey ideas about ourselves and everyone thinks they can stay young and people get all whiny when it's suggested that perhaps drug-addicted, hard-faced high school drop-outs shouldn't play a part in your child's childhood, that maybe being a good parent means turning the freaking stereo OFF.

(IMPORTANT! This is not an anti-music post, and I think that it's probably a good thing to expose your kids to different kids of music. This is a post about using music AS AN ADULT as a form of identity, and attempting to impose that identity on our kids.)

A post that is about not much

And how was your Mother's Day?

Mother's Day doesn't loom large in my own personal canon - I know women who spend the day in a scowling funk if they're not allowed to nap for 12 solid hours, but for whatever reason, it's not terribly important to me. And that is why, MOM, I forgot to buy you a card. I'm just too large-minded! Yeah. In conclusion, I am a terrible daughter.
Yours truly, Beck.

We're all still sick. The kids are sick enough to not be at school STILL - you can actually hear the knowledge leaving their little heads! - but not too sick to be fractious and bored out of their wits. We spent the weekend - since we couldn't GO anywhere - in one of those make-work projects we do every so often, switching everyone's bedrooms around AGAIN. And so now I have a new bedroom and I'm waking up every five minutes at night disoriented and unsure of where I might actually be, or where my children are. I'm semi-hysterical with exhaustion right now, and my house is awash in trails of clutter - Happy Meal toys, lego men, little Playmobil animals, Polly Pocket's whorish little shoes - left behind by the change in bedrooms.

We're painting the girls' room - they're sharing again! - a lovely robin's egg blue, a colour so heart-rendingly pretty that when the clerk opened the paint can to show us the colour before sealing it, my heart felt oddly broken for a second. Some colours are like that - not my office's muted olive green (although it's a nice colour), but my living room's yellow, yes, the way it turns to ridiculous Maxfield Parrish gold when the sun hits it in the early evening. My whole house will eventually be shades of yellow and blue and then good luck selling it, me.

That's enough sickly ramblings for now. Do you have any ideas about things for me to write about? I'm low on "topics" right now.

Fifth Disease!

We have had SUCH a sick week. And really, the time to get sick is NOT in the middle of a Scary New Disease Pandemic. I do NOT recommend this. But I gave away the punchline with my title, and all three of my kids are enjoying a sickly week at home.

Did you know - ahem - that Fifth Disease is one of the five Classical rashy diseases of childhood? Three of the others still exist, the nasty child-killers - measles, mumps and rubella - while the other one has been utterly forgotten by history (that would be "fourth disease."). Fifth Disease is not very serious unless you're pregnant, in which case you will want to stay FAR FAR AWAY from me and my hacking children.

Have a fun weekend!

Decade

My firstborn is ten today.

I remember turning 10 myself, remember feeling melancholy over leaving behind the simplicity of being a single number forever. My childhood, I knew, was ending soon.

How do you feel about being ten? I asked The Girl this morning.

"I feel exactly the same!" she said, laughing, the sunlight pouring in through the windows and turning her hair to gold. If she knows that childhood soon will end, she carries it lightly.

Before I had kids, I had ideas about what sort of children I wanted. I wanted them to be JUST like me, but like improved versions of me, able to use my talents and smarts in ways that I'm too lazy to do. I wanted them to look like me, with my dark eyes and dark hair and sharp face, but to have it transformed into beauty. I wanted them to have my personality but not to be made miserable by it. I wanted them, in short, to live my life for me, to carry the burden of being me with better grace than I ever have.

Mercifully, my oldest child is nothing like me. She is a gentle child and not fearful. Her heart is light and tender and strong. She does not cry easily, does not bear grudges and carries pain like a little warrior. Her life is her own and she is more nature's child than mine, with her hair like wheat, her eyes like a calm green sea, herself as fragile and resilient as a wildflower. And turning ten just means cake and presents and her best friend over for the weekend.

Have you had a happy childhood? I fretted at her last night, and she made a face at me. "What a funny question," she said, "I am having a happy childhood. I am right in the middle of it. Yes." And then she said, laughing "Stop worrying, mom!"

Who are you? I used to think, amused, during our days together. And now I know. Ten years has brought me many things - the grace to be happier with my own self, the knowledge that I am stronger than I thought. Ten years has brought me this child, standing in the middle of her childhood, surrounded by her birthday and the uncomplicated happy thought of presents and cake to come. And ten years ago this very morning, she was placed in my arms and I stared at her uncomprehending, unable to know that ten years later she would be, quite simply, the joy of my heart, my little glowing girl.

Happy birthday, sweet child.

For kicks last night, I let my older kids review a ton of cookies. They took this job very, very seriously, with unintentionally hilarious results. Ha! I strongly recommend reading their post.

Let Us Read Together

I have this month's issue of my church magazine - The United Church Observer - right here, and within it's recycled and responsibly printed covers you can find both what I love about belonging to a liberal Protestant denomination and what makes me want to knock myself deliberately into unconsciousness about THE VERY SAME THING.

Let us begin with the Letters page!
First we have one reader complaining about the heinous and obnoxious changes to CBC Radio 2, and another reader complimenting said horrible changes. The second letter writer is wrong.

The Rev. Douglas C. Moore writes: Did you not perceive that the people who organized the atheist ad were hoping that some church group would denounce it? Did you think it clever to try the old "turnabout is fair play" trick? I don't take atheists for fools. The current crop is not playing at it.... God is not running for office. Belief is not a popularity contest.

I have to sit here and be depressed for a moment. The United Church of Canada has spent a lot of time trying to engage atheist groups in ways which I think are foolish and naive beyond words. I don't - you'll note - engage in religious debate online, because people who WANT to debate belief are not normally people who want to have their views of the opposing side changed. No, online religious debaters are generally people who think that the other side is either a bunch of banjo-plucking toothless hillbilly morons OR the eternally damned (and I'm not saying that's what all religious people or all atheists think - of course not! - but people who go seeking out debate online? GENERALLY, YES.). And I don't think that's a profitable conversation, REALLY.

Onto the My View column, where the author writes about Chicago's Willow Creek Church which calls itself an Acts 2 church, and then goes on to describe the United Church as a James 2 church:

14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?
Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and
daily food. 16If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and
well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the
same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

Well, all right. But that also just reduces the message of Christianity to "Be a nice person and help other people!" which is also the message of kindergarten. The whole issue of salvation has apparently been discarded by the United Church as not befitting a people as sophisticated and worldly as ourselves.

Then there's a piece where the a minister scaldingly replies to a questioner who was hurt by a reference from the pew referring to the Nativity as "a myth". "This is an issue of your need to grow in the faith... Grow beyond your Sunday School understanding. Mature in your faith," chides the writer. And then I said something that I won't print on my blog.

Here's an article you can actually read, which writes about the some of the positives of our current economic good times - everyone being too poor to go anywhere means fewer air flights, which is certainly a good thing for the environment, and perhaps this will give us all some time to rethink our lifestyles and consumption patterns, although my wild consumption patterns have been limited for most of my adult life to buying groceries on a weekly basis. It also says, in a piece of startling understatement, "For those on the front lines, being philosophical can seem a bit of a luxury." YOU THINK?

Sheesh.

Onto "Windows on The Divine" - Five Canadian artists who "take us into the realm of the infinite", starting with... oh, for Pete's sake, Leonard Cohen. Moving on!

Next up, we have Margaret Laurence, who I have not read since high school, but who is part of my stirring argument that in order to be a female writer, you really should be named either Margaret or Alice. Huh, she was a practicing Christian. I did not know that.

Anne Michaels is next. Perhaps her MIDDLE name is Margaret or Alice. The article quotes here as writing that "God can be called "getting over fear." I stared at that sentence for a while and then dismissed it.

Blah blah blah, Glenn Gould and painter of mucky landscapes, Emily Carr. My mom had me read "The Book of Small" as a youngish sort of person and even now the title makes me flinch away from the twee.

Sad article on Native Residential Schools. There's the big shell of one of them not too far from here, Mary standing forever alone in a niche, her face grieving. And I'm going to stop at the sad article, since it reflects what I do love about my church - the attempts to be honest about past wrongs, the attempts to honestly atone for things that have happened. I do not believe that earnest niceness will save the world, but I am touched by those who do. I DO think that attempts to be culturally relevant can end up undermining the very fabric of faith, and at the same time I'm glad that there IS a church that welcomes a wide variety of people and beliefs. The magazine, however, is kinda lame.

Well, Hello!

I'm back.
We had a lovely weekend away, with the exception of one of the kids getting wretchedly sick in a parking lot because we'd decided to see how said kid would do without Gravol. Result?

BAAAAARRRRRFFFF.

I was asked recently why we don't travel more often with the children. Here is my list of why not:
1. My kids get carsick.
This doesn't sound like an insurmountable obstacle, but let me enchant you with the following lovely tale:
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful family who headed off to visit relatives. Within the first half hour, one of the kids barfed all over himself.
His parents stopped the car, cleaned him up and changed him (he was only about 3) into another set of clothes.
Within the next half hour, the same kid barfed all over himself again.
His parents stopped the car, cleaned him up and changed him into another set of clothes.
Half an hour yet again, the predictable happened.
His parents stopped the car, cleaned him up and changed him into... pajamas, since he had run out of clothing by this point.
When the beautiful family arrived at their destination, the kid was wearing only underpants and his sister promptly barfed on her uncle's shoes as soon as she got out of the car.

Does that story make you feel like packing up the munchkins and heading out onto the open road? Yeah.

2. Travelling is expensive.
Sure, we could probably pack peanut butter sandwiches and sleep in the car, but it still costs MONEY to bring kids places, and it costs even MORE money to bring a small herd of them places. We don't have all that much spare money laying around, sadly.

There you have it.

I did get to run around a hedge maze on the weekend, and you will be disappointed to hear that nothing Mysterious or Unusual happened as a result. Once again, real life fails to live up to books. I also spent a lot of time reading My Official Church Magazine in the car and ranting at my poor, poor husband, which means that tomorrow I'm probably going to write about My Official Church Magazine. Oh boy!

Hope you're good.

The Boy Wrote A Review!

It's up at my new review site.

Nope! I'm not Australian.

In yesterday's post, I managed to imply that I was Australian. That took some doing. I am not Australian - I'm as Canadian as poutine with extra maple syrup, being hand fed to you by the members of Loverboy - but I could EASILY have been Australian. Pull up a chair, relax and get ready for Boring Tales From My Family Tree!

Once upon a time, there were two brothers who lived in England. One of them moved to Australia with his wife and family and settled there. The other moved to Canada with his wife and family etc. and THAT man was my great-great-possibly-another-great-grandfather.

The end.

Do you think they meant to both go to the same country but one of them got on the wrong boat? Or maybe they waved goodbye to each other gleefully, like "SO LONG! DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON YOUR WAY OUT (of England)!"

My sister-in-law is feeling a lot better, thank God. She's still having a very rough time, so please keep her in your prayers, if you're the praying sort.

Eight Things I'm Looking Forward To
Oh, this one is hard. Recent stuff has strip-mined me of optimism, really.
1. I am buying new pants tomorrow!
2. Possibly they will be capri pants!
3. I am going away for the weekend!
4. Um. Exclamation mark!
5. Don't rob my house! There's nothing in it but a bunch of books and some old cats!
6. I am looking forward to not writing another whining-strip-mining-optimism sentence again.
7. I am looking forward to my kids going to bed.... soon! YAAAY!
8. My husband just told me that he has my favorite chocolate bar stashed in the cupboard for my Ghost Whisperer-watching pleasure. Whoo.

Eight Things I Did Yesterday
Yesterday was kind of horrible.
1) Went to a party. A lame party for preschoolers.
2) Felt dour.
3) Hung out with The Girl, who was home sick.
4) Discussed whether or not we had Swine Flu with my child. We were unsure.
5) Called my husband at work. He told us that we had colds.
6) Made myself cry imagining how sad my funeral would be.
7) Called my husband at work again, sobbing. He was strangely very busy.
8) Worried about my sister-in-law.

Eight Things I Wish I Could Do
1) I wish I could CALM THE HECK DOWN.
2) I wish that I could lose an unspecified amount of weight. But not in some horrible Monkey's Paw sort of way, FATE.
3) I wish I could come up with a great answer when people ask me what I'm going to do next year. I'll know when I get there, PEOPLE!
4) I should be writing down actual skills here, eh? Like DRIVING. I like not driving, though. It's restful. It provides a handy excuse for things I don't want to do.
5) I wish I could sew. There ya go.
6) Also knitting. I am not good at the womanly handicrafts.
7) Oh! I know. I've always wanted to know how to use a lasso. That would be awesome.
8) I wish I could watch tonight's episode of the Ghost Whisperer, which is set IN A HAUNTED DOLLHOUSE, but my rotten children are still up. Geez.

Eight Shows I Watch
Okay, this one? Is easy! TV IS MY FRIEND!
1) 30 Rock.
I love this show. This show is everything I have always wanted a show to be.
2) The Office.
I do not love this show as much as I used to. But I still love it.
3) The Ghost Whisperer
The best and greatest show currently being made about a buxom antique store owner who can speak to the dead.
4) National Geographic Specials
Not because I'm so smart but because we've cancelled most of our cable and much of the day, THIS IS WHAT IS ON. I now know more than I've ever known before about lemurs.
5) Martha Speaks
Maybe even better than The Ghost Whisperer and WAY more believable. They should do some cross-over episodes.
6) Mantracker
RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVEEEEES!
7) Magnum PI
The older I am, the hotter Magnum gets. SCIENTIFIC FACT.
8) Murder She Wrote
The greatest show of all time. Jessica Fletcher, you jolly Angel of Death, I salute you.

Eight People I Tag
I don't like tagging people. If you want to do this meme, let me know and I'll tag you AFTER the fact. So very, very lazy.
1. First outta the gate: Mimi! Git workin'.
2. Nicole!
3. Veronica!
4. Subspace! (she tagged herself on twitter.)
5. Heidi!