I’ve been thinning out my books - I don’t want to grow into one of those old women who end up surrounded by stacks of books, cats, papers, and piles of “stuff” - and had to admit that there were a couple of books that I knew I probably wouldn’t read again but that I enjoyed immensely the first time around. A lot of the time, these books are picked up during my travels because I finished the book I took with me and needed something to read on the flight home, or because the topic was something I was curious about and a book came up on the topic, or because the title was just too good to walk by.
Here are a few of my faves:
Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods---My Mother’s, My Father’s, and Mine by Noelle Howey - An autobiography by a teen who goes through her adolescence (an awkward time at best) at the same time her father goes through his own form of style adolescence as he prepares for trans-gender surgery. Told with a wry sense of humour that lets you in on her adolescent angst without too much earnestness.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman - The first premise of the book is that someone will eventually ask him if he’ll now recant something he wrote years ago, that no woman could ever satisfy him, and he’s say, of course, because he’s now married. But of course, no one would ever know if he’s telling the truth because there is public pressure to say the right thing. The whole Emo angst (hmmm, there’s that word again) about fake love drew me in, and then the titles of various chapters made me curious. Lise Loeb and Ice Planet Hoth ... Toby over Moby - OK, I kind of knew who Moby was ... I felt I needed to get out of the middle-aged closet, at least a little bit. I now read way more blogs and watch a lot less TV.
Black Rubber Dress, by Lauren Henderson - A whodunnit set in London where the protagonist is a low-rent, edgy sculptor of gigantic mobiles. She’s a bit of an anti-hero, so has the usual accoutrements like a male nickname and, if I’m not mistaken, tattoos and promiscuity, not to mention recreational drug use - the better the contrast to be able to critique the well-heeled crowd that make up the rest of the crowd in the book. A refreshing airplane read.
Genderqueer, edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins - I picked up this book because it’s subtitled “beyond the sexual binary” and discusses transgendered and intersexed issues intelligently, as well as the usual gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even quirkyalone, in a way. I bought it in Baltimore, where I was speaking at a conference, and used the book to describe situations where we except binaries and are made to stretch our minds when presented with more options. I was surprised at how many feedback forms involved a comment about how the presenter talked about (gasp!) sex! Really ... the inability to relate concepts ... but I digress.
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson - I couldn’t put this book down. It’s been a couple of years now since I read it, but I still remember the characters vividly. For weeks afterwards, I would wonder what happened to Ivy, Cayce, and Parkaboy. I wanted a sequel. That reminds me to check out Gibson’s latest.
The other two boxes of books will go into the donation box without fanfare. Some are well-loved, like Ann Marie MacDonald’s books, that I hope will be equally enjoyed by their next owner, and others I hope will be better enjoyed by the new owners.
A long while back I heard about a site called Songs to Wear Pants To. In cleaning out a bunch of old business cards, I came across the site name and thought I’d see if the site was still there, and it is!
Andrew is a songwriter who creates custom songs based on whatever criteria you provide, no matter how odd. All you need is a little pancreas? No problem. Crazy candy theme? His pleasure. Polka loca? Of coursa. Celtic techno burrito? Why sure-o. The site even has its own theme song. I have to hand it to Andrew for the longevity of the site, the way he’s found to make money doing something he loves, and for finding a way to stay good-humoured about the weird and whacky requests he gets for songs.
Considering that my family is entering “birthday season” - a few of us have birthdays between late November and end of January, then just about everyone else’s birthday is clumped together between end of March and beginning of June; something like 18 birthdays - this may be the gift that everyone gets this year!
Back in November, I made up my mind to get fit. I was tired of being hostage to my food allergies, which were getting worse, my joint pain, which was getting worse, and the excess weight, which has so much negative effect on my quality of life. A friend and client from Minneapolis had made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse - his payment terms for work done for his company would be that the cheque would be made out not to my company, but to a personal trainer of my choosing. Well, the strategy is paying off. I’m stronger, thinner, and have a better sense of balance (which I’d lost during the years surrounding my ship replacement).
It took me until January to find a trainer that I liked - I chose Matt Cole of Peak Exercise Sciences because he’s a MSc, BHK, CSCS, and RK. He’s not only knowledgeable about training and fitness and injuries and rehabilitation, but he’s experienced (he’s not as young as he looks, he assures me). And he has a disarming way about him - none of this bootcamp obnoxiousness which would have turned me off right away. As well, something that I needed was flexibility; as a consultant, I’m all over the place during the week, so I looked for someone who could train with me downtown or close to where I live, or at my townhouse complex’s fitness room when needed. He comes up with cockamamie exercises that are meant to improve my core strength, and just when I manage to master them, he finds something else that I completely suck at, and I start over again.
Yesterday, I went to The Running Room to invest in a good pair of sneakers which would accommodate my orthotics and my lift and let me get in a good workout without hurting my ankles or knees. And I put on a t-shirt I got at a conference, a t-shirt that was two sizes smaller than I usually wear, and it fit! And I put on some jeans, and realized I needed to wear a belt to keep them up, and my belt fit on my hips (a belt that would have barely fit my waist before), and I checked and I’m down 15 pounds. Whoo hoo!
I wonder why my joints still hurt. Must ask Matt about that. But hey, I’m more motivated than ever to keep going. Working out, riding my Trikke, watching my nutrition, trying to keep my stress levels under control. Stay tuned ...
My hairdresser tells me that when her sister and brother-in-law used to come to visit from Winnipeg, she was reluctant to send them out into the neighborhood - Vancouver’s West End - because of her brother-in-law’s rampant homophobia. So when they arrived this weekend to stay, and she needed them to busy themselves for a couple of hours before she could entertain them, she hesitated. But her brother-in-law said not to worry, he was going to head up the street to the local Starbucks.
Well, four hours later, when she and her sister couldn’t find him, they went on the hunt and sure enough, there he was, in Starbucks, and didn’t want to leave. Seems he was in the process of listening in on a number of conversations of the surrounding patrons and wanted to know how their conversations would end. It seems that a middle-aged gay couple was in the process of breaking up ("It’s so sad!") and a lesbian couple was talking about their impending adoption ("They sound so excited; they’ll make great parents.") It seems that after discovering Will and Grace and the humanization of the urban gay, we’re not so scary, and neither is walking around a gay neighborhood. Who knew that a TV show had such influence? Gotta love it.
Note: Reposting this because I deleted it by accident while trying to delete nuisance trackbacks..
When I hear people calling into talk shows calling for bans on cell phones in cars, draconian measures such as building in phone de-activators, I roll my eyes and wonder what world they live in. Or, as they’d say in my business, they haven’t thought through their use cases, let alone the edge cases. (So even passengers wouldn’t be able to use their phones in the car? If I’m pulled over but in my car, I’d have to step out onto the highway to call for help? Now there’s a less-than-safe alternative!) Instead, I’m a believer in knowing your limits. At the point in time when I realized I could not safely dial and drive, I stopped. If I’m talking and have to attend to a traffic situation, I simply say, “hold on, hold on” and deal with whatever I have to deal with, no matter how long the silence gets. Safety first. Have I texted while driving? Sure, while I’m stopped at a red light. It might take me three or four red lights to tap out the message “very late. be there 30 mins” but the second the light turns green, I put down my phone and concentrate on the road. I never want to be like the driver of an F150 truck I saw weaving down the highway one night. I assumed the driver was drunk; when I passed the truck, I saw the glow of the open cell phone - the driver was meandering between two lanes while texting.
So yesterday, when taking the Super Shuttle from the San Francisco airport to the downtown Palomar Hotel, I was scared out of my wits. The driver was driving at 60-70 MPH over the Bay Bridge while text messaging the entire time. I was completely appalled. The other passengers didn’t say a word, which surprised me because I asked the guy next to me if he thought this was a safe practice and he was clearly uncomfortable, and it was only when I shrilly demanded that he stop that he did – until he had dropped all the other passengers off, and then he could not resist picking up his phone again while he made his way to my hotel. I don’t know if he was indulging in political discourse or an overactive libido, but it was obvious to me that whatever his motivation, it was pretty compulsive. (The hotel staff inform me that texting while driving is not legal in California, which means that his compulsion was stronger than his common sense on more than one front.)
I am returning to the airport on Wednesday but will make other arrangements (even take public transit, if I have to) to avoid such a hair-raising experience again. To their credit, Super Shuttle responded by saying that a complaint has been filed and forwarded to the local Quality Assurance manager for review, and I should get an answer within five days. Let’s see what kind of response they come up with.
Social networking reverting to a global local village model?
I was listening to CBC’s program, Spark, about a discussion with Washington Post’s Marc Fisher that was an editorial on a Snow Day story, where a high-achiever student called a school administrator to know why school hadn’t been canceled because of snow, and the administrator’s wife left a scathing message for the student, which got posted to FaceBook.
For me, the original story wasn’t so interesting [sidebar: Students’ judgments aren’t fully formed yet (hey, that’s why they’re students) and are supposed be learning from the adult role models around them. The administrator’s wife is evidently not fit to be one of those role models. I learned from one of my co-workers long ago that if you’re not prepared for your words to be published on the front page of the New York Times, you should abstain from articulating whatever you’re thinking. This woman learned it the hard way.] but the subtext to the story was: how technology, and in particular the social networking phenomenon, has potentially eroded our privacy, making us hyper-aware of our every move.
What’s interesting to me, being over 50 and from a small (and I mean small!) town in rural Ontario, is that what is being described is the social network from my youth, only on a much larger scale. In essence, what social networking has done is return us to the “global local village.” As Fisher was talking, I was doing a mental check in my head of the similarities.
In a rural setting, when a car drove by, you looked up and noticed who was driving by. My dad would say, “There goes old Jack. Must be going up to see Jim – heard the horse was sick.” The men of the community kept track of social comings and goings through the local coffee shop/feed store. Ours was called the Two-by-Four. When a petty crime happened, we all knew whose kids did it, even if the police could never prove anything. When I bought an experimental pack of cigarettes, the store owner told my dad. My mother’s big shame would have been for a teacher - they all lived within a few miles of there - to see me doing that. My mom told me I couldn’t wait at the corner store to get picked up from the school bus any more, with the cool kids who played the pinball game and smoked. I had to take a different school bus home now; I had to ride on her school bus. Privacy? What privacy?
We knew where our teachers lived, and they bumped into us everywhere. I took piano lessons from the prinicipal’s wife; another teacher went to the same church as my grandmother and lived two doors down from my aunt. Mornings, I walked a quarter-mile to the school bus stop, and in inclement weather, waited in the porch of the teacher who lived on the corner. There was no formal contact between teachers and students, but to be sure, students knew that their teachers were everywhere, and they were continually interacting, just as a part of their community status and part of community life. We knew lots about our teachers, all 12 of them, and they knew lots about all 350 of us.
If there were an angry outburst with a student, the next day everyone would know. (If a teacher’s wife were to have an angry outburst, that would have been unthinkable. It would have been gossip fodder for years!) In our school, the school bus was the unmediated public space – the low-tech IM - and by lunch time, all the students were mimicking the teacher’s words and tone out of earshot of the playground supervisors. Similarly, when our French teacher left his wife and children for a grade 12 student, we all knew – and he was gone. After all, you couldn’t really go far without someone seeing you and the rumors starting. And reputations were forever – the fact that I vividly remember the incident 32 years later speaks to it. The permanence lived on, just as a farm would go by the name of the owners for the last forty years, not the ones who lived there “only” the last ten. The grocer knew what you bought, and shared your reputation by the soundness of your food choices. The low-tech FaceBook was the gossip network, and it was kept active by men and women alike.
When I moved to the city, the anonymity was a novelty. The move away from local grocers to big-box stores was a novelty. Fill your cart with frozen dinners and there was no one to criticize your moral fiber. The tight weave that existed during my school years didn’t exist for my son, and other than some pre-internet circumstances that mirrored social networking (a chance discussion in a YWCA pool change room, with my son’s grade 2 teacher, both of us naked, discussing a problem my son was having, sticks out in my mind), there was little substance to the social fabric. But that has become the norm, and the norm is not easy to change. Instead of a new, not-yet-understood phenomenon, maybe we can see the social networking phenomenon as a return to the local village, albeit in a larger scale – a kind of global local village.
I recently gave up trying to keep my separate professional and private life separate, and decided to live my life the way I did as a kid in my rural Ontario roots. After all, search engines will inevitably find my personal blog when people do a search on my professional life, and vice-versa, so my best recourse is to conduct myself honorably and know that no matter what they find, there will be no embarrassing photos, no reports of unethical conduct, no blue-language rants, just me being me, going about my business, the way I would if I were driving to my parents’ farm, waving at the neighbors, and realizing that if they’re going out of their way to pass judgment, it’s just because they’ve got a little too much time on their hands. I predict that will become the new norm, and it won’t take another complete generation for the shift to happen.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually done anything for International Women’s Day other than take a moment for myself to think about the implications for my own life and the women around me. There’s not much discussion of it any more, just like there’s not much discussion of feminism any more. It drives me crazy when women say they’re not feminists, and that the feminist movement did nothing for them. (Oh yeah? Do they want to go back to the days when a bank manager wouldn’t give a woman a bank loan? Or give a woman a mortgage? Or give a woman a hassle about opening her own bank account, without the signature of her husband or father?) The completely irrational cop-out of “well, I don’t want to call myself a feminist because some thirty years ago, there was an urban myth about women burning bras that I don’t want to be associated with” drives me crazy. The “I don’t want to call myself a [name any group] because there are some [name the fringe element to that group] that give that group a bad name” argument is so lame. I always want to respond with “well, I don’t want to call myself a lesbian because there were some incidents about man-hating separatists that I don’t want to be associated with. Apply that to religion, culture, status in life (motherhood, for example), profession ... anyhow, back to International Women’s Day.
I’m quite thankful for many of the women in my life. There are a couple that I want to throttle right now - I wish they’d renounce their womanhood so I could simply distance myself completely from them. I would like to be able to say that they have NOTHING in common with me, not even sex or gender. Well, one in particular I don’t consider to be of the same gender though she’s of the same sex. But life isn’t simple that way. We have to live with ambiguity and complexity, and interconnectedness of circumstance. I remind myself of this because even if I were able to say “we have nothing common,” it would still not give me license to hate. The difference in gender doesn’t stop me from deeply loving my grandsons. The difference in the values with which my granddaughters are being raised doesn’t stop me from deeply loving them. International Women’s Day reminds me of all these things, and more. - it’s a day for us, and for all those affected by us.
Went to work out today for the first time since falling down the stairs. Hurt like hell, but didn’t want to leave it too long. When I came home, stiff and sore, I came up from the underground parking and saw a half-dozen robins hopping about the yard, pulling worms out. They paused when they saw me, cocked their heads to see if I was a threat or a passing phenomenon, and resumed their foraging for wriggling protein. It made me happy - spring is imminent.
Speaking of happy - I just read that British and Australian researchers have shown that half the differences in happiness are genetic, based on studies done on twins. Common genes result in personality traits that predispose people to happiness. Does that mean that certain miserable people I know will always remain so?
I wonder if they’ll ever find the tacky gene. If they do, I could certainly get behind certain pragmatic uses for genetic testing.
Mostly, living in a strata situation is okay - less yard work, tree trimming, trash collection, and so on. But every so often, there are things that drive me crazy. Like having slippery outside stairs and not being able to just fix them - no, you have to wait for the powers that be to Do Something - which is not likely to happen unless you make a fuss.
So the bloody awful coating on the steps is slippery when the temperature drops to around the freezing point. Anyhow, despite wearing flat, rubber-soled shoes, I fall down the stairs and am in great pain. I’m pretty paranoid about my artificial hip and my remaining good hip, so I go get x-rays at Burnaby General. All day at emergency.
All bloody day it takes them to do an x-ray and tell me that nothing is broken, no hairline fracture. At some point, through my morphine haze, I hear a medical professional complain that all the beds are full, and I think to myself that if someone would come in and pronounce me releasable, they could have an extra bed. And probably another few of us, as well. They need some work process re-engineering in the emergency department there.
So I start my own little discharge campaign. First, I just get dressed. A nurse asks me if I’ve been OKed to get dressed. I say that I’m getting dressed before the morphine wears off and I can still move. Then, I go in search of water. A nurse wants my assurance I’m coming back. I say sure, of course. Then, I put on my jacket. She wants to make sure I’m not leaving. I say I’m freezing (which is true). Then I put on my gloves, mainly because by now, my blood sugar has dropped and I’m really, really freezing.
Now, the doctor comes in and says oh, you’ve had a hip replacement and I can understand why you’re really concerned about falls. And I think to myself, hmmm, isn’t that what I tried to tell you when I came in? I’m sure I mentioned that ... but it’s one of those things. I can talk,a but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person listens. Haven’t figured out how to exactly make the loop close, at least not all the time.
Losing a day at the hospital, then another day of being nauseous and on painkillers, a week before our big conference, is the worst possible time to be unproductive. Guess this weekend will be another working weekend - have to make up for lost time somehow. I’m really excited about the conference and want to put in as much time as I can to make sure it’s a success.
Yesterday I wore the one pink shirt in my wardrobe for Say No to Bullying day. Though I’ve never been a big fan of Christy Clark (remember the statistically impossible “all our children should be above average” remark?), this is one of her initiatives I can get behind. I have no reason to divulge this, at least not often, but I was bullied terribly from grade 5 to grade 11. For me, that was age 8 to 14, more or less. Being younger, shorter, and different in a lot of other ways from the rest of the kids made me a walking target. My parents were no help. My mother, a fundamentalist Christian, counseled me with the “turn the other cheek” line - today that would probably get me killed; back then, it just got me tormented. My emotionally absent father was ... well, he had his share of bully in him, as well, so it took me into my adult years to stare him down, let alone ask for his help.
What I think did me in, though, was being smart, in a geeky kind of way. I lived a pretty isolated life - on a farm, away from other kids, not encouraged to socialize with the non-believers. It was a rural school - we were all bussed in from our farms and villages - but the social situation was the same as in the city. No one explained to me that girls aren’t supposed to flaunt their brains after grade 4. But being younger and weaker, I couldn’t run as fast as the rest of my classmates, or reach as tall as them, or get permission to do the things they did (I couldn’t even get a driver’s license until my graduating year of high school!), but I did seem to absorb information without trying, and being ostracized meant that I could speed read a book a day, and went through the school library pretty fast. Which probably made things worse, in retrospect. Smart, geeky, and my mom drove the school bus. As much as I loved school, I hated the school yard, and would do anything to get out of field trips, group work, team sports, and anything involving hanging out in the school yard. Hallelujah for library club.
OK, it’s forty years later, and the schools are just getting around to recognizing bullying as a phenomenon that needs some attention. Better late than never. Count me in - I’m there for my grandchildren.
The descent of Canadian media: when shoes trump budget announcements
Usually I like Pete McMartin’s columns in the Vancouver Sun, but this past week, his sense of judgment was way off, and I really had to wonder if poor old Pete’s sense of dollar value had calcified somewhere in the last decade, or if he just didn’t have a clue about the reality of women’s fashions. For my non-Canadian readers, a little context first. There is a quaint Canadian tradition whereby on the day that a new budget gets unveiled, the Finance Minister wears new shoes. For years, Finance Minister after Finance Minister would show the smooth bottom of his (always a him) new, generally black loafers, to the media. Now, we have Carole Taylor, former chair of the CBC and now the Provincial Liberal Party Finance Minister for British Columbia. By virtue of being neither a him, nor dowdy, she seems to be targeted for her footwear choices, at the cost of obscuring whatever is going on in the provincial budget.
At this week’s budget unveiling, Taylor chose to wear a pair of Fluevog Teapot Darjeelings. Green for economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Fluevog as a Canadian company, and a choice that shows her to . A good choice, I thought. What is interesting is to see Pete McMartin falling victim to what I think of as American tabloid mentality – an entire column devoted to what he perceives as Carole Taylor’s inappropriate shoe choice. He mentions several times that he is spitting up wine reading about her shoes because they supposedly cost $249. (I checked the Fluevog site, and they’re currently on sale for $149, but I digress.) He had suggested she buy something from one of the local big box stores, something less pricey, something pedestrian, to use his words. Well, there are a few bones I have to pick with his argument, starting with the price.
Any of the shoes I’ve seen in the big box stores have been questionable-quality leather, imported from China, and likely made in a sweatshop there (Fluevogs are made in fair-wage facilities in western Europe). They have no support for the mature female foot, and women that buy them usually do so because they follow fashion trends, and intend to get rid of them after a season. Smart adult shoppers invest in good quality shoes (because I need orthotics, I favour Naot shoes, also around the $200 mark) that will last us more than a year.
So I don’t think the price of Taylor’s shoes was outrageous for a woman of her standing. If she’d worn $49 pumps from Payless, there would no doubt have been a hue and cry from the female reporters about how incredibly tackily she was dressed. I can see the column now: Taylor can’t even afford decent shoes on her salary – prediction of economic gloom in the province? And one doesn’t have to be middle class to have a pair of Fluevogs. When I think of the Fluevog wearers I know, they’re often students who invest in a good pair of fashionable yet comfortable shoes as a fashion statement, instead of having a half-dozen pair of cheap shoes that fall apart after a season’s wear.
And Pete, where were all your columns on the cost of the shoes the previous Finance Ministers wore? Now, it’s been a long time since I dated guys, but the my last relationship was with someone in that socio-economic range, and I know what he paid for shoes, back in the 1980s, and it was at par with women’s shoes, even back then. Just because they were boring black loafers that you couldn’t identify closely enough to look up the prices of on a website, don’t think that the previous Finance Ministers were shlumping around in $49 specials, either. But we never found out, because oh gosh, you were talking about their budgets instead of their shoes.
It’s often a lose-lose-lose proposition for any woman in the public eye. No matter what Taylor would wear, she would get slammed by someone. That’s the way it has always worked. Distract the public by commenting on their wardrobe. If not that, pick on their hair or make-up. If that doesn’t work, go for the weight. Claiming they lost or gained a few pounds will get them every time. It’s also ironic that Pete McMartin disparages the shoes as “exactly like the kind of indestructible footwear middle-aged tap-dancing instructors wear in class” - obviously out of touch with the last decade of fashion, there, Pete - which suggests to me that he’d rather have seen her in something more feminine, yet last year, I believe he slammed her for ultra-feminine Guccis she wore the year before.
I suppose I expected more – in fact, way more – from Pete McMartin, as he’s one of the columnists I actually like. This time, though, I think he’s out of touch with the double-standard that women have to live by. (For example, I dry-clean a woman’s shirt, it costs me 30% more than to dry-clean a man’s shirt. I buy a pair of running shoes in the women’s department, it costs me way more than those same shoes in the boy’s department – never mind that trainers, trainers, are well over $100 if you want any kind of support in them. And I suspect that even at that price, they’re manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, as well; try to find a pair that isn’t. But I digress.) Heck, if I were allowed to wear heels, I would buy a pair of Teapot Darjeelings, too.
And my advice to Carole Taylor? Next year, get a pair of men’s black loafers, preferably similar to those worn by previous Finance Ministers. The journalists will still comment on your shoes, but they’ll also have to figure out how to justify why they didn’t complain about the shoes of your predecessors Gary Collins and Colin Hansen. Actually, Fluevog has a pair that looks a lot like what your male counterparts probably wear, without media mention. They’re called Capitalist T.S.E., and cost only $295.
This year, I wanted to do more for me. Yeah, yeah, it probably falls under the category of New year’s resolutions, but it’s been a long time coming and it’s here now. The changes may not seem profound but I feel they’re the start of a new phase:
Do things I want to do - don’t guilt myself into staying home when I’m rather be out seeing a play or having fun doing something else outside the house
Take care of my emotional health - don’t engage with people whose own inability to cope ends up projecting their drama onto me, be that anger, guilt, or other drama
Take care of my physical health - Find physical activities I like to do, work with a trainer, and eat better
So far, so good. It did mean staying away from certain people completely and scaling back time with others. But I’ve compensated by going out of my way to make new friends or strengthen existing relationships with people whose company is easy and comfortable. It also meant getting a personal trainer, which I haven’t done since before my hip surgery, and it’s been great. Getting strong, building core, and losing weight already.
2008 should be a fabulous year; it’s looking up already.
Over the holidays I didn’t post much, and realize I haven’t shared some of the things I’m most proud of. One of my big pride moments is when my braniac grandson sent me a copy of his acceptance letter to a prestigious boarding school, Brentwood College. He has wanted to be in an environment that challenges him and where he’s among other students who are similarly motivated. And now he has that opportunity, after having done fabulously on his entrance exam. That’s motivated him more to bring him his first truly wonderful report card, which made me ask if he was working harder now, to which he replied, “Not really, I just have a reason to get good grades now.” Thank you, Harry Potter, for reviving the idea of boarding school!
Of course, we’ll are going to miss him terribly. It’s a long road from when he first came to live with me when he was 1, to when he was adopted by his fabulous dads, and ended up with, as he would always say, 11 grandmas, 3 dads, 2 sisters, and 1 mom. Of course, his dads find his acceptance a bittersweet moment - they didn’t adopt him to send him off to a boarding school - but he really wants to go, and I’m sure he’s going to thrive there. He’ll soak up the academic environment like a sponge, and we’ll all compete for his time when he gets time off from his rigorous six day-a-week, practically year-round program.
So I spent a few days in St. Louis, Missouri with a long-time friend and her family. During the week, I spent most of my time working, just as if I’d been at home, but on Saturday we ventured out. The weather was quite nice. I expected it to be cold and snowy, but when we went to the Botannical Gardens, it was warm enough that I elected to leave my coat in the car. The gardens were in their winter state, of course, but I could appreciate what they look like during the spring and summer. I would love to be there when the Scent garden - lilac, lavender, rosemary, lemon thyme, chocolate plant, sage, and other fragrant plants must be spectacular. We did go into the biosphere and see the tropical and temperate foliage. The afternoon at the basilica was nice, also. It was quite beautiful, very ornate. I loved the black marble and appreciated huge efforts that went into the over-height small-tiled mosaics.
The oddest things I saw were two signs. One was on the door of an upscale ice cream shop that said “Concealed Weapons Forbidden on These Premises”. The other was a billboard advertising a Bike Show that had across the top “Register Now to Win a Free Breast Augmentation”.
There was a great bookstore called The Left Bank where I would have bought a trunkload of books, had I not been traveling by plane and had to clear customs. But I have to admit that I was turned off by trying to get coffee mid-afternoon and finding that in The Loop, the places near the bookstore that served coffee were only serving in their bar areas, where people smoked indoors. How last century is that? But we did find a Starbucks, which is always reliable - in its product, in the cleanliness of its premises, and its no-smoking atmosphere.
A couple of weekends ago, my grandson and I went to rent trikkes (pronounced trikes) up in Courtenay - remarkably, the only place in BC that handles them. (The good folks at Mansfield Wheels claim that this is because Vancouver bike shops are bicycle snobs; somehow, I don’t doubt it.) Because it was pouring rain with gale-force winds coming off the water, the fellow would only take us out for a brief lesson on a path shielded by a bank of trees, but I could have stayed out longer. (Good thing I didn’t because the next day, my extra-sensitive skin was windburned beyond belief.)
Anyhow, I haven’t had this much fun in ages, and with my declining sense of balance, I felt quite safe riding the trikke. That’s what motivated me: a stable alternative to a bicycle. The next day, my entire body was sore, but I’m sure that after wrestling with the trikke for a few weeks, I’ll have made it do my bidding and won’t feel it as much. There are lots of “cool” trikke videos but my style is more like this:
Life is too short not to be the best you can be. Me? In no particular order: Woman. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Aunt. Friend. Business owner. Writer. Musician. Jew. Scrabbler. Traveller. Lesbian. Taxpayer. Volunteer. Blogger. Social critic. Voice of reason. PITA. Inspiration. Visionary. Advocate. Convert. Pet owner.