At this very moment M is at a birthday party for one of her little friends. I boggle at this, because:

1. It’s Friday, when the kids are their most tired and fractious
2. And it was the 100th day of school, so they’re already jacked up on sugar from their class party
3. And it’s in the evening — arsenic hour!
4. And they invited all the girls in the class
5. And it’s at their house, not some facility made to tolerate the excited shrieking and bouncing of a dozen smallish girls
6. AND it’s three hours long.

Just the thought of it makes me want to lie down with a cold cloth on my head.

But instead D and I are heading out for a nice quiet dinner and a beer. Happy birthday A.!

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Wed Jan 28, 2009

Vicious herbivores! I am amused.

Because denying a woman choice is one step on the way to telling her what else she may or may not do while pregnant.

Because if men got pregnant, this wouldn’t even be a question.

But above all, because my body is my body and it is mine to control.

M: Daddy, what is that?
D: It’s a tie.
M: It is?
D: I understand how you might not recognize it. I haven’t worn one since… uh…

(We pause to consider this question. Someone’s wedding? Maybe? We can’t recall any recent funerals…)

D: … well, I haven’t worn one for a long time.
M: How do you wear it?
D: Pretend I am wearing a shirt (demonstrates bare-chested tie-tying prowess, with only one false start)
M: Huh. That’s complicated.

Tie is removed and put on the bed, where a cat is most interested by its sudden appearance and starts to creep up on it.

Me: Dude, that’s a tie. Don’t sit on it. Fur is not a necessary component of ties. (Attempts to move cat.)

Cat: (jumps back about three feet in 0.1 nanoseconds) WTF? There’s a SNAKE over there and you gotta go sneaking up behind me and touching me without warning like that? Geez, woman! Aaaaaa! Oh, my heart! I think I need a nap now. zzzzzzz

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Sun Jan 11, 2009

A silly but entertaining stunt/prank/bit of performance art/whatever from Improv in Toronto: the annual No Pants Subway Ride.

Gotta love all the people in the background studiously ignoring the whole thing and just getting on with their day… SO Toronto.

(No, I didn’t participate. -9C is a bit cold for my lizard blood.)

(xkcd, of course)

(Not our cat. We are too fond of our lives.)

We’re having a lazy day, since we did our big dinner yesterday. I have washed the two pairs of footie fleecy jammies that were my Christmas present — one red, for everyday use, and one navy blue for more formal occasions. I’ll probably don one set and head to bed with some new books shortly after dinner, since we’re up before dawn to catch the train for our Second Annual Niagara Waterpark Extravaganza.

Hope everyone is having a similarly relaxed and pleasant holiday!

And from last year, but still apropos:

Tomorrow when we wake up, the sun will rise a bit earlier and set a bit later. Hurray! Light!

Happy solstice. To celebrate I made cookies with a very large quantity of instant espresso,* figuring a bit of extra perkiness was seasonally appropriate, however substance-induced it may be.

–
* which is not ever to be used as an actual drink, blech! — but is a decent baking ingredient

12 things to throw at Bush

Best line:

12. Reality
…

He will merely blink a few times and get that look on his face like he almost had a thought, then it passed, like a bit of gas.

Heh.

From the Star:

Doctors may have resolved the perennial up-or-down-toilet-seat debate for families with small boys in the house.

Leave it up, experts say.

Falling toilet seats are injuring an alarming number of recently potty-trained toddlers, a British study reports. The medical term for the damage – penis crush.

No, no, no.

The sensible thing to do is to teach them to sit down when they pee, like civilized people. NOT to leave the seat up so everyone has to look at the horrible gaping maw of the toilet and the ick that accumulates on the bottom of the toilet seat when uncivilized people insist on standing to pee and the unappetizing sight of the cat(s) drinking from and/or bathing in the thing. No. Sit the heck down, already. And close the lid when you’re done.

Tree!

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

The extremely, enthusiastically, hyper-helpful-even-if-you’re-just-looking-fine-thank-you local Scouts sold us a perfect tree this year — the right height and shape, the right smell, nice and fresh. And lots of space underneath for a big box that I’m sure will contain the footie jammies that are the sole (NPI) item on my Christmas list.

M and I went to Supper Solved a week or so ago to make dinner entrees. It’s one of those newish places that’s designed to send you home in a relatively short time with a whole pile of dinners ready for the freezer.

It’s set up in stations, one station per recipe, and each station has the recipe posted and everything you need to make that recipe. If it says “add one cup chopped beets” there’s a bin of chopped beets in front of you with a clever 1-cup scoop/measuring spoon in it, and so on. When you’re done making the recipe you put it in aluminum freezer-to-oven containers, stick a pre-printed label on top so you’ll know later what it is and how to cook it, and then just walk away and leave the mess behind for staff to clean up. They change the recipes monthly.

It’s not really set up for kids, but it worked OK — M read the recipes and did the majority of the prep work, except if it required touching raw meat (“ew! slimy!”) or if the bins were out of her reach. If we go again I’ll take a little step-stool for her.

The quality of the ingredients was very good and I was happy with the quantity for the price. Chicken entrees had 6 boneless skinless chicken breasts, salmon had 6 good-size salmon fillets, pork tenderloin had 2 large tenderloins, etc. While it’s still a relatively expensive way to do dinners, it’s certainly not usurious and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than going out or ordering in. And boy, is it ever nice to have all the prep work and cleanup done by someone else.

We split most of the entrees in half (they provide smaller packages for that purpose) since we don’t have all that many occasions on which we need to feed six people at once. A bunch of them have now gone to some friends who have a very new baby so they don’t have to eat lasagne constantly*.

We were in & out in ninety minutes, but that’s with a six-year-old reading the recipes, doing most of the work and slooowwwly making sure the label stickers were JUST SO. With two adults doing different recipes at different stations at a reasonably brisk pace you could probably finish six entrees in half an hour or forty minutes.

I took our wire-frame granny cart to schlep everything home, which worked very well. It was light enough to lift up our stairs at home so I imagine it would be fine to lift onto a bus too.

We’ve now eaten three of the entrees and they’ve all been excellent. So, two thumbs up!

–

* not that there’s anything wrong with lasagne, but after a week or two one does crave a bit of diversity in one’s dinners…

Quotation of the Day for August 8, 2008

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”

- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

There’s been a lot out this week about the discovery of a proto-turtle with a plastron (front plate) but no shell. Very cool!

Turtles are extremely interesting in an evolutionary sense because it is completely not clear how their shells developed. This new discovery begins to answer one part of that question — OK, it seems the front bit of the shell began to develop, and then later on the dorsal part joined it.

But it still leaves unanswered the main question of turtle evolution, which is: how on earth did the turtle’s hips and shoulders end up inside its ribcage? Think about it for a minute. What is the interim stage there? And why would it ever have been evolutionarily successful given the wide selection of large predators back when turtles were developing?

This isn’t a criticism of the interpretation of the new fossil turtle find at all, just a general statement about the extreme mysteriousness of turtles. Who have been the same for 150+ million years now (vs. our 200,000-ish). Whatever they’ve got, it works. But we may never know how they got there.

On the shelf at a local toy shop, next to (appropriately enough, I guess) a doctor’s kit:

“Stiffy Stuff”. snort.

Someone didn’t quite do enough market research there.

Me, having picked M up from a birthday party, as she dug into her loot bag: “Honey, don’t fill up on sugary junk. We’re going out to dinner.”

Her: “I wouldn’t call it sugary junk.”

Me: “No? What is it then?”

Her: “Candy!”

No, no, no. This is just mad:

Hybrid Cars Too Quiet For Pedestrian Safety? Add Engine Noise, Say Researchers

Important pedestrian safety issues have emerged with the advent of hybrid and electric vehicles. These vehicles are relatively quiet—they do not emit the sounds pedestrians and bicyclists are accustomed to hearing as a vehicle approaches them on the street or at an intersection. In a recent study, human factors/ergonomics researchers examined participants’ preferences for sounds that could be added to quiet vehicles to make them easier to detect.

They’re not even seeing the problem clearly. The problem here is that most cars are insanely loud, not that a very few of them are quiet. The problem is that those of us in cities have to put up with increasing levels of noise pollution. The problem is that drivers of cars (loud or quiet) don’t watch properly for pedestrians and cyclists, nor are they much good at sharing the road with them — or even recognizing that anything other than a car has any right to use our publicly-funded roads (but that’s another rant for another time).

Deliberately add noise and that compensatory human response to safety measures will kick in: my car makes a special noise, so it’s other people’s problem to get out of my way (cf. the beeping noises of trucks backing up — truck drivers never seem to bother checking behind them anymore, assuming the wretched beeps do the job).

The answer is not “make the cars louder”. It is to teach people this: if you’re silent, whether it be as a pedestrian, a cyclist, or the driver of a blessedly quiet hybrid car, pay attention. Assume you’re invisible, or assume the guy trying to cross the road in front of you is blind, or (even better) assume both of those things. You’re not a guided missile aiming for your home or your office, you’re part of the grand dance that is traffic. Try to keep in time and try not to step on people’s toes.

Actually, I’d like the folks using non-silent modes of transport to think that way too.