do you remember how it used to be Well, the day has finally arrived. froo arranged for a little adventure for Kyle as a Christmas present, as you can see in this video.



So everyone's meeting in Toronto today for a good old NBA basketball game. I'm actually flying in just after the game, and will spend the weekend with my people from West and East (my father - "granddad" to Kyle - is coming from Moncton). Woop!  | ¶ 3:46 p.m.

  just about the time the shadows call I Am Legend is a very scary movie. I watched it tonight with my father and step-mother (I'm in Moncton for a quick visit, don't you know). Barb and I were hiding our eyes under blankets during the many startling parts. Eek.

Why am I watching all these scary movies lately? I watched Sunshine last week. Alone. It also scared the shit out of me.

Time for some 30 Rock before bed; gotta ward off the monsters before dreams come!  | ¶ 10:48 p.m.

  I'm queen of attention to details Sometimes when Devin and I are watching TV in the evenings, I'll say (out of the blue), "did you say you were making cookies?" (or coffee) (or chocolate macaroons). The other night, he jumped up and said, "yeah, I did" and began to blend the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies. At first I milled around, observing, because he has a knack for making cookies that have something wrong with them; there's something missing, and we can never place it. But hovering only makes it worse, because he gets flustered, so I avoided the kitchen, just yelling out now and then, "did you make sure the butter and sugar are really well creamed together?!"

Yes, he assures me. Everything is super-blended and measured carefully. But when he brings me a taste of the dough, I can tell already that something's wrong. And when the cookies come out of the oven, looking perfect, they are fine, but bland. "Did you put salt?" "YES".

For the heck of it, on this particular night, I said, what if I made a second batch right now and we'll compare the result? So I did. And as I got to the final ingredients - the flour, baking soda and salt - I say, "hey, did you put baking soda?"

And finally we had our answer. At that moment I declared the baking soda to be henceforth known as "cookie deliciousness powder". My cookies came out perfect.  | ¶ 4:09 p.m.

  everything's here, all out of place I'm afraid I have nothing but lameness to report for my own observance of St. Patrick's Day. Nossir, nothing but laundry-doing and TV-watching going on in my life tonight.

Oh, and some deep thoughts. I think it might be time to start considering boycotting the Beijing Olympics. How can all these democracy-promoting nations in good conscience condone the actions of the Chinese military in Tibet? Less outrageous acts have been more strongly condemned before.  | ¶ 9:41 p.m.

  a lemonade to cool you in some leafy glade The idea is probably familiar as an concept, but once you see it in practice it seems pretty unfair. That is, that employees of the government / civil service really do not get many perks that you come to take for granted working in the private sector. Little things like coffee in the office - you won't find that around Ottawa (but holy, a ton of coffee shops). Or water coolers. Employee lunches are not frequent. And even for team-building activities like a half-day outing or an afternoon pizza gathering, employees often have to pay for themselves! Sometimes they even have to use their own vacation time to attend these events. It's a bit stupid taken to that extreme.

Although I worked recently at a Crown corporation, this past week has been my first exposure to true government working conditions. The Crown corp at least had an employee cafeteria and a water cooler in my department. My new workplace does not have a cafeteria or coffee supplies - but I was excited when I noticed a water cooler in the kitchen. I tend to drink a lot of water during the day, so this seemed like a bonus. I found a glass, but when I went to fill it, I noticed a sign on the water cooler that said "for members only". Apparently somebody was ambitious enough to organize some kind of water-drinking pool. Alas, I'm resorting to drinking tap water, which isn't a terrible thing, but it's sort of a depressing reminder how little you get as employee perks in this business.

Another thing that I've observed is the 4:00 on-the-dot near emptying out of the office. Granted, everyone seems to start pretty early in the morning (I'm more of a literal nine-to-five girl myself), but it's almost eerie how deathly quiet the place goes so suddenly. I enjoy it 'cause I work better with less cubicle chatter, and it makes me feel like a keener to be the last one to leave.

I don't know if anyone else had this problem, but I was super-sluggish all week. Can I blame it on the loss of that hour last weekend? That's what I'm going with.  | ¶ 11:31 p.m.

  I don't feel like singing tonight Almost every day I eat oatmeal for breakfast. So I was glad to see that Quaker recently introduced some "weight control" oatmeal to their product line.

'Cause you know, oatmeal used to be so fattening.  | ¶ 10:26 p.m.

  I stare into some great abyss Hey, guess what. I'm starting a new (temp) job tomorrow. This is the one that they made me interview for last week, and will apparently last until the end of the month. Look at me, all working regularly and stuff. I don't like to be too specific about where I'm working, but let's just say it's a branch with the biggest employer in town, and that I've been jokingly referring to it as being at the "prison". I hope it doesn't suck.

Did you see all our snow? Wow! I went on a reconnaissance mission this morning to assess the situation and really got a workout clearing my own path on the sidewalks. It was like walking through deep water, having to lift your legs up high and making those hip flexors work extra hard. Hopefully the sidewalk plows have a chance to do their work before morning.

I tried out another kind of squash this weekend. Before the great storm hit we were at the grocery store along with everybody else in town, and because of "armageddon", the produce section was looking a little picked over already. I couldn't find a butternut squash like I wanted, so I went for a spaghetti squash instead. If you've ever baked one of these, you'll know why they call it "spaghetti" - as you're scraping out all the meat-y stuff after baking, it comes out in strands, just like spaghetti. Some recipes even instruct you to serve it baked and mixed with other vegetables as though it were a casserole (no pasta added). I didn't do that today - I made another one of my soups. This time my veggie combo was squash, potatoes, garlic and spinach. I boiled the potatoes and garlic in chicken broth, steamed the spinach, then pureed the whole batch. Add some milk to make it soupy and you're all done - quite tasty! A lot of squash soups are served with a dollop of sour cream in the middle, and I've found that this is a genius flavour enhancer.

Good luck with the daylight savings transition tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to be a bit of a tough morning for me.  | ¶ 10:01 p.m.

  blank stares at blank pages "The two-day total accumulation of both systems was 51 centimetres, and at 2 a.m. Sunday morning Ottawa's total snow tally for the season was 407.3 centimetres." Story.
  | ¶ 1:15 p.m.

  I like to sit on chairs and you prefer the floor This is a nice way to make a point. There should be more media coverage (with photos) about just how destructive all that development in the oilsands really is. Here's an excerpt from a pretty creative piece:

Mr. Harper said that the Rockies were beautiful and all, but that nature tended to be overrated, and that he and Mr. Dion were off to a new, all-inclusive resort near Fort McMurray called Alberta Oil Sands Land. Mr. Dion said that Alberta Oil Sands Land was supposed to be better than Wonderland in Ontario or Disney Land in California and more exciting than the West Edmonton Mall.

I have to admit that the place did sound tempting.

Well, the beach area next to the ponds was pretty crowded, but it didn’t take me long to find Mr. Harper and Mr. Dion. Mr. Harper had bought a pair of high-top rubber boots from the Protective Clothing concession so he could dangle his feet in the water without the risk of sores and lesions. Mr. Dion was building a large sand castle that looked a lot like Parliament, and he took the time to show me how the contaminated oil in the sand helped to hold the whole enterprise together.

Now my feet did get greasy, and I did wonder if this might be a health concern, but Mr. Harper said that you could get detoxifying sprays from the Ralph Klein vending machines and that the oil was actually good for your skin and helped to block the sun.

I should say that I was disappointed with all the “No Swimming” signs and the barbed wire.

  | ¶ 6:48 p.m.

  in these deep city lights, girl could get lost tonight
I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched and all that, but it seems like maybe this one successful temp gig recently has given me some kind of credibility with my agency. They take a YEAR to send me on an assignment, and I'm pretty sure they heard some solid reviews, so all of a sudden they're calling me about other opportunities. I went on an interview today (that's me trudging through the snow to get there) - for another temp gig, which I find weird, but I guess that's how they do things here.

I've been scrambling this week to get my secret clearance for another government position, too. I mentioned this last year when I first attempted to complete the "secret" security clearance forms, but wow, is it comprehensive. To facilitate the information-gathering, I sent out a mass email to the family on Monday asking for all their details (middle names, employers, addresses). I had to cover all siblings and parents, including "step" relatives in this exercise, and that's eleven people in my family. Then I had to provide ten years of employment history, and ten years of residential history. I also had to find three character references and one "neighbourhood" reference. I find it kinda random that they want to talk to one's neighbour. I ended up attaching four Schedules to the forms with all my extra information - silly.

As I wait to hear about working again, I'm preparing for a midterm on Friday. My Global Politics class is a TV class, and I haven't been so good about watching or even taping the lectures this term (it's aired on Saturday evenings - I seem to forget), so I recently borrowed all the DVDs from the CUTV centre in order to take notes. It's tricky in a way, though, when you can so easily pause and rewind the lectures; I ended up with way more notes than if I'd been attending a live class. Ah well, better to be over-prepared, eh.  | ¶ 11:59 p.m.

  it's that same old cannonball coming back for your heart again "Tories Propose Morality Clause On Film Tax Credits"

...the amendment to Bill C-10 could allow tax credits to be cancelled even if government funding has already been secured, potentially stranding the development of a television show in pre-production or bankrupting a film in mid-production.

A closed-door panel of representatives from both the Heritage and Justice departments would decide what content is too sensitive for freethinking adults to manage their own exposure to. Annette Gibbons, a representative from Heritage Canada, says that the enhanced powers of censorship are merely a minor revision to the existing act, stating, "It's our responsibility to ensure that public funds are not invested in certain types of material, such as hate propaganda, excessively violent material, or pornography."

It is even more disturbing to discover that an evangelical activist claims to be behind this new proposal to police the morality of Canadian artists. Well-known partypooper and self-proclaimed Harper pal Charles McVety (right), president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, says that non-right-wing "values" are unwelcome in the Canadian entertainment industry—including sexual content devoid of any educational value, and, unsurprisingly, depictions of homosexuality. McVety boasts that his lobbying of Conservatives like Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day led to the revised draft of Bill C-10.

This it outrageous. All of a sudden it's all over Canadian media, but only after it has been passed in the House of Commons. I saw that McVety dude on CBC Sunday this morning and it chilled me to hear him talking about his opposition to spending "family budgets" on Canadian film projects; since when are tax dollars designated solely for families? I'm going to be doing some research on the matter to see what can be done about it. As soon as I find out who I can email, they will be hearing from me.

I'm becoming a bit of a letter-writer lately (an interview with a sobbing Brenda Martin on CBC radio this week really got to me). My gig at the unnamed Crown Corp has made me aware of how correspondence from the general public is handled in government: it's addressed! ALL of it! So if you feel passionate about something, find out who's in charge, and whip off an email. It's my new hobby.  | ¶ 12:39 p.m.

  knowing is the easy part
It would have been my grandmother's birthday last week - her 90th. At the time of her 89th birthday last year, my brother Kris was visiting with her. We knew her health was deteriorating, so some of us made an effort to get back to New Brunswick for a visit. I went in May, and although it was a long drive (with a cat!), I'm glad I made the trip.

Nana was already preparing for her own departure over her final few months and made a point of giving away some of her possessions as we visited. She gave me an afghan she'd knitted. And you know, for several months after I visited, I had a note on my calendar "send thank-you note to Nana R". I'm so bad for that kind of thing, though, and I never did.

I didn't know my grandmother terribly well as an adult, but have lots of random childhood memories and have heard plenty of stories, and I really respect the person that she was. It kinda seems like she never sat around feeling sorry for herself or complaining about anything; she just made the best of things and just lived. Whatever that gene is, I hope I have it.

Recently, on a night when I went to sleep feeling troubled, I had a dream about her. In the dream I was repeating my visit with her, only this time I knew it was the last time I'd see her. But she's so alive, I remember thinking - how can she be gone so quickly? Because that's how it was when I visited - she mentioned that she was having some pain, so my father, the dutiful son, went out to the store to grab some painkillers for her. When he got back and buzzed to be let in, she jumped up and got to the intercom so quickly, I was almost surprised. This is a woman who spent many of her last years hardly being able to see; I was incredibly impressed with her agility and sure-footedness. She was still so vibrant, six months before her death. I believe that the spirits of the dead communicate with the living by visiting us in our dreams sometimes, so I've tried to take something from my dream of our visit. I guess she was telling me, live; be fearless.  | ¶ 11:59 p.m.