My Unibrow Baby

I have a nemesis. Only she doesn't know it.

She's one of those nosy Nellies who can't seem to leave well enough alone. She lives in my apartment building and walks around with a pair of scissors in her purse so she can cut down posters and fliers people put up on telephone poles. That's right, scissors in her purse.

And I'm not talking ads for psychics or all-night rave orgies - she's ruthless in her efforts to stop illegal telephone pole posting (which is ruining western civilization?): signs for apartment rentals, free language lessons, lost kittens. This woman has no conscience! But really, who made her telephone pole police?

Until recently, I would secretly seethe over this woman's high and mightiness whenever I saw her. If we both got into the elevator together, I'd smile, but wouldn't say hello. (Man, you don't want to get on my bad side.)

But over the last few weeks things have gotten more complicated. My nemesis has started talking to me. Well, that's being generous - really she's started talking to my son - the most angelic and lovable child to walk the earth, when he isn't screaming "mumee, mumee, mumee - more cackers!" She's really quite pleasant to us (him) so it kind of makes it awkward for me to secretly hate her while happily chit chatting about napping and messy faces.

It's also hard because, as the women who just last weekend threw my hands up in air and made a muffled "ugh!" sound when someone butted in front of me in line for the cash at Old Navy, I KNOW I will become this woman one day - wandering the neighbourhood muttering about how rude people are these days . . .

Lying to Yourself

I was in a Tim Horton's today and the guy behind me ordered a double double. Then he corrected himself.

"I mean, triple triple," he said.

At what point should you just let it go and admit you don't like drinking coffee?

Deep Thoughts

Help settle a debate currently raging around here:

"Promenade" - is it pronounced promen-aid or promen-ad?

Keep in mind, the debate was sparked by the daily reading of a book that features a cow dancing with a pig.

When people say parenthood is fulfilling, they don't mean on an intellectual level.

How Sweet It Is

Has it really been more than a month since I last posted? Yikes. It honestly doesn’t feel like it. I kept coming up with things to talk about but then I’d sit down and write about them and suddenly they all just seemed silly and pointless. Do I really have anything interesting to say? For the most part, probably not.

Well, just this once I do have something interesting to say. I am so very, very, very happy to announce that I GOT A JOB (!) and I am now working full time again.

A few weeks after I was first laid off, my husband and I went to hang out with some friends (a couple) and the wife said she’d known someone who’d been laid off and it had taken them six months to find a job. I remember being horrified and saying something to the effect of “God I hope it doesn’t take that long!” But it did. Well, almost. I was unemployed for five months almost to the day I was laid off. Quel nightmare.

To be fair, I found out that I got the job three weeks before I could start, so if I wanted to stroke my ego I could say that I was only unemployed for four months. But seeing as I spent those three weeks at home working (minimal) freelance and desperate for my situation to change, I really don’t think they count. Actually, if I'm going to be honest, those were probably the three worst weeks of the whole summer. Just imagine - finally finding out I have a job, that someone deems me worthy, but still being stuck at home doing NOTHING! Many tears were cried, much vodka was consumed and an addiction to a vampire-related book series (and TV show) that can best be described as "soapopera trash" was developed.

The three week delay was because the job was conditional on government funding and naturally there were delays on the government’s end crossing their Ts and dotting there Is. But it’s over now and I am back to the good old days of struggling to get out the door on time.

And boy have things changed in those five months that I've been gone. I no longer have a 13-month old who walks slowly and just stands there as I feed and dress him. I’ve now got an 18-month old who screams when I try to take his PJs off against his will (Fashionista? Overly heightened sense of personal space?) and who feeds himself very well . . . but at a snail’s pace. A snail who hasn’t yet had his morning coffee. A snail who took too many sleeping pills the night before and has a nasty, groggy medication-induced hangover.

But you know what? I don’t care. I much prefer the juggling act required to manage a toddler and household than I did having the summer “off”. I would have failed in the 1950s as a women and a wife. It seems my love for Mad Men only extends to its glossy exterior of sexy tight suits and slick words. The reality, as it turns out, is NOT for me.

But I'll save my essay titled "Guilt I feel for being happier outside of the home instead of inside of it" for another day. For now, I'll just do my best to look back at the summer of 2009 as a learning experience and not the vast cavern of nothingness that it really was.

Good Old Days of Music

I was at a friend's for a BBQ a few weeks ago, thoroughly enjoying the food, drink and great music playing. Sometime around Bob Seger's "Night Moves", the following exchange took place:

Me: "This is a great playlist."
My friend, laughing: "I put it on just for you. It's my 'Southern Rock' playlist."
My friend, turning to everyone else present: "Scribe doesn't think any music of value was written after 1978."

Now, that's not entirely true - there are songs and artists who have come out in the last 20 years that I like - I just don't appreciate music containing the words "Disco Stick" or with group dance sequences in the videos. I hold a soft spot for a particular generation of Rock/pop
. . . it's just not my generation.

But I try to have an open mind when it comes to new music and love discovering some new great song or artist. In fact, several different people (including my friend at the BBQ) have recently recommended that I listen to Kings of Leon. One friend even made me a CD of their music and I've been giving it a listen. I will say that I'm intrigued and this ditty in particular has been stuck in my head for a week:




At the same time, I'm currently debating whether or not I want to go see "Taking Woodstock", Ang Lee's new movie.




The preview makes it look a little cheesy, but my sentimentality over the era and the event might win out. I mean, I may have been the only 15-year-old to ask for the Woodstock soundtrack for Christmas - in the 1990s.

Amazing!

A few days ago I accidentally deleted one of my posts from August 20. Then I discovered what a scary and magical place the internet really is.

Here's the post - recovered!

Remember this when you take that photo of yourself . . . you know the one . . . and post it somewhere. It will live FOREVER.

>>Thursday, August 20, 2009

>>Hello Out There

I don't think I have that many loyal followers, but to those of you who are kind enough to frequent this space, I'm sorry for being absent for a while.

Things have been quiet on the blog because things have been busy in my life. Job interviews, freelance work, volunteer work . . . I've been go, go, go for the last week or more but trust me, I'm not complaining!

One of the projects I've been working on is writing a small piece on the new organic food regulations for an online women's magazine. I've spent the majority of my career writing for researchers or professionals in the life/health sciences, so I'm used to editors asking for more detail! More numbers! More specifics!

This project would require me to do things a little differently since I was writing for the average Joe, but I'm trying to branch out and add to my skills so it seemed like a totally doable challenge. Hey, I've written for the average Joe before. Heck, I am the average Joe.

I did my research, had my interview and wrote up my little piece feeling pretty good about my efforts. Then comes an email from the editor: A+ for effort, she said, but you need to dumb it down. More bullet points, less big science words. What a wake-up call . . . I thought that's what I'd done!

Hopefully it's just a case of "old habits die hard" and not a warning sign that I need to get into a new line of work.

How I Learned to Stop Worring and Love My Slow Cooker

When I was growing up my mother only ever used her slow cooker for chili, so for the longest time I associated the slow cooker with winter - a time when you wanted things like chili, soup, stew, etc.

When I started to get ready to go back to work at the end of my mat leave, I started looking into ways I could use my slow cooker more and found a whole whack of recipes that go beyond the stew genre. The funny thing is, a slow cooker is perfect for the summer months because it doesn't heat up the kitchen like a stove does. If only we'd known this during my air conditionless childhood!

The reason I wanted to learn how to use the slow cooker more was to save time . . . see I was supposed to be juggling work, getting a kid home and fixing dinner all in a short space of time. It didn't exactly work out that way, but I now have a nice pile of recipes that work great in the slow cooker and one of last week's recipes was a prime example: pulled pork sandwiches. This is one of my favourites and it always turns out great - tender, juicy meat in a mouth-watering, homemade BBQ sauce. Just slap it on buns and serve with a side dish. Remind me why we don't have this every week again?