Amazing Race 21, Ep. 2

It always sucks to see a team go home entirely because of taxi luck. I really liked Amy and what's his head, and it's too bad they are gone through no fault of their own.

I read "Pudong Airport" as "Pudding Airport", and was momentarily reallly thrilled.

The bull racing task was more of a time-killer than an actual task. Other than "not falling off and being embarrassed in front of 10,000 Indonesians", the racers actually didn't actually have to do much. I manage to not embarrass myself in front of 10,000 Indonesians every day.

That had to be the most freaking adorable child ever giving that clue at the balloon challenge. It was the tiny Harry Potter glasses that got me.

And I have to say, the Chippendales were so delighted and goofy about working with kids, my Grinchy little heart melted a little. Those two may not be the brightest bulbs on the chandelier, but anyone who gets all that puppy-like enthusiastic about working with kids goes way up in my books.

Team Monster Truck needs to stop berating locals who are doing their best to get the job done. Gues what, Yellow Beard? Random Indonesian Taxi Driver is trying to make a living, he doesn't care that you are in a race with a bunch of other relatively rich Americans to win a boatload of money. Stop trying to make him care by yelling at him.

The Twins redeemed themselves somewhat from last week's screaming bitch-fest, but Mother of God, could you please turn down the volume? You don't need to SHOUT OUT EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT IN YOUR HEAD, you know.

"Kick-Ass Sri Lankans". Band name!

Who knew that "tying balloons" would be another skill one has to put on the "Things I Need To Master Before Going On The Race"?

I want to root for David and Goliath, I really do; any "uber-fans" of the race have a soft spot in my heart but, RACE, dammit! Saying "we're not going to run" makes it very difficult for me to root for you.

Favorite Line of the Night: "If there's one thing gay guys are naturally good at, it's making balloon animals." Words to live by.


That preview for next week didn't tell me a damn thing about what's going to happen next week.

Until next week....

Giving Thanks

It's Thanksgiving here in the True North Strong and Free. Canadian Thanksgiving, unlike American Thanksgiving, is in October and has nothing to do with Pilgrims. We just thought we'd like an opportunity to have a long weekend about 6 weeks after school begins, and a good excuse to eat ourselves into a food coma in sufficient time to recover enough for Christmas.

I am thankful for many things in my life:

• Velcro. Velcro is magical.
• Coffee. A legal drug, cheap and widely available. That first cup of coffee in the morning always, always gets a minute of my time to appreciate it.
• My PVR. Being able to record shows and pause them while watching them and then watch them without commericals is nothing short of fabulous. Plus, setting a PVR to record is so much freaking easier than VCRs used to be. Back in the day, you would take a half an hour to set up your VCR to record a show you really wanted to watch, and then you'd come home to find you'd managed to tape an hour of the Weather Channel. It would make you weep. With the PVR you do not have to pay the teenager next door to come over and  make sure you have everything set up ok. And, there's no annoying "12:00" flashing endlessly at you, either.
• Universal Health Care. My dad was pretty sick last year; he had three surgeries in 5 days, 3 stints in the ICU and spend four months in hospital. He had exceptional care; surgeons, nurses, respiratory therapists, physiotherapists, doctors, social workers and every specialist you could imagine, all wonderful.  And he's alive today because of that care. And we never had to worry for one second if we could afford it or not; all we had to pay for was the parking.
• My husband doesn't spit. I regularly see men walking down the street who hork up a loogie and spit it out on the sidewalk; its disgusting. I am ever so thankful that the man I married has no prediliction whatsoever to do this.
• I can read in a moving car. I know loads of people who get all woozy and nauseous when they read in a car, and I wasn't even aware that this was a problem until a little while ago. Reading in a car does not make me sick, and in fact, I think it probably makes me a considerably more pleasant passenger. For me, an 8-hour drive to Montreal is not an endless marathon of boredom, like it is for lots of people. but an uninterrupted and totally permissible excuse to read for hours at a time without feeling guilty because I am not cleaning the house.
• I haven't been bored in years. Between reading, scrapbooking, knitting, cooking, the internet and working, looking after a house and raising a family, I can't remember a time when I thought "what am I going to DO with myself today?"
• I lost 20 pounds since March. Because the weather is getting colder, I am putting on all sorts of clothes lately that I haven't had on in months. The immeasurable pleasure I get from zipping things up and having them fit never gets old.
• My iPhone. I love my phone. I love it. I use it endlessly: I text my daughters all the time (they might not think that's as wonderful as I do), I check my e-mail and my Facebook, I check the weather forcast, see where an address is located in the city, check the hours of a business, count the rows in my knitting, find out where the nearest Starbucks or Tim Hortons are, listen to music and find out where that plane going over my house is headed to. Occasionally I make phone calls on it.
• I have a very nice life for someone who doesn't work very hard.
• Nutella.

Amazing Race 21, Ep. 1

HELLO RACE!! Nice to see you back.

What was with the Partridge Family bus at the beginning?

The really are trying to cast people who we can tell apart, aren't they? "Double Amputee Who's Been Dating Her Partner On and Off for Ten Years", "Monster Truck Champions", "Twin Sri Lankans", and of course "Gay Goat Farmers". (Gay Goat Farmers is a demographie that has been woefully underrepresented in the past.) Next time around they are going to be seeking out "Inuit Lesbian Poets" and "Honey Boo Boo and a Dugger Kid Who Turned Out To Be Gay" just to go easy on us.

Just to tell you, I am never going to be able to tell which one is the lawyer and which one is the rock musician.

I like the Chippendale dancers, and not for the reasons you are thinking. They seem very nice and sort of dim and really pumped about doing the Race. I wonder, however, what possible circumstance they could find themselves in where "slapping on the ol' collars and cuffs" would improve the situation? Lost in downtown Tokyo? Nope. Rolling cheese down a hill in Austria? Not really. Learning a dance routine in Bollywood? Possibly. Time will tell.

Why does the Monster Truck man have a green beard? The hairdresser in me says he needs a better toner on that after the bleach job. And I have to question the wisdom of having the little luggage on wheels. That might work for a quick trip down to Orlando, but running on cobblestones in crowds won't be very much fun. Besides, those things always remind me of stupid dogs, following you around like that.


Wow, remind me to never have a camera attached to any helmet...those things are hella unflattering. Everyone looked like they were a Seuss character.

Shreiking Twin has got to stop. It's hard to concentrate on anything (including watching your favorite show) with that caterwalling going on in the background.

I hope that little Chinese ping-pong champion doesn't speak English; she's bound to get a complex from all those people referring to her as "he". I did really, really like the sound of the frying pan hitting the ping-pong ball, though.

Oh, food challenges in Asia are always a delight, arent' they? I just wonder at the though process that went into "hmmmm, what can I do with these pesky fallopian tubes; it's a pity there are so many of them going to waste. I know! Papaya! Problem solved!"
Thing 1 said that your motto in Asia should be "Eat First, Puke Later". I think I'll get a t-shirt with that on it.


I'm surprised at how many people didn't know what an abacus is. (One racer said "why doesn't she just use a calculator?".....an abacus is a calculator, Einstein. One with the advantage of never needing batteries. I actually remember being taught how to use one when I was in early elementary school, and no, it was not in the 1890s. Some hippy substitute teacher who was probably a Communist spent an afternoon showing us how an abacus works. I don't remember much about it except that we somehow managed to have 30 abacuses {abacai?} in a school that regularly did not have toilet paper past March every year.)

I think they should have another whole Race where they only cast teams that were out first or second on their season. It would be nice to give them another crack at it. But who would want to be out first BOTH times they tried it?

Until next week!

The Loudshoes in Quebec.

This past week was our first bit back at work after two weeks of holidays. I usually sigh and re-enter my life after holidays with a bit of and effort, but this time, it seemed right and true and wholly appropriate to get back to work. Maybe it was because we had a really nice, really relaxing time for the two weeks, or maybe it's that I was ready to get back to my routine, or maybe it was because I like my job and was eager to feel useful and needed and productive. Or maybe it was because I liked the idea of talking to someone I wasn't related to, or that I needed to make some money.
Regardless of the reason, it was nice to like going back to work.

We had a wonderful holiday, and it's not lost on me that, because my daughters are getting older and on the cusp of leading their own lives, and maybe will not want to go on holidays with their parents much longer. (When my mother suggested this to my father when my brother and I were around the same age, he confidently told her "as long as we're paying, they'll come.")

We went to Ottawa and saw the fireworks on Parlaiment Hill, which is something every Canadian should do sooner or later; it's a spectacular setting. There's something very satisfying about watching fireworks on a warm summer night with your family a a couple of thousand other people.

Then we went to Montreal for a few days, which is always a delight.
Iparticularly love Old Montreal. One time, when I was there with some of my cousins from Europe, I wondered out loud why, when they first settled Montreal in the 1700s, why did they build everything so close together? I mean, all they had was room, millions and millions of acres of land all around them, and they cram the buildings in on top of each other....what the hell? And my cousins, after a bit of thought, said that, compared to some of the oldest streets in Paris and Edinborough, these streets ARE wide....that there's streets there you can barely fit two horses going in opposite directions. So, yeah, I guess what is now Old Montreal was spacious and roomy by those standards. Also, I guess you have to remember that those millions of acres of land was filled with understandably hostile natives who would have been happy to slaughter any intruders bent on converting them to Christianity, and also, the winters there are freakishly cold, and maybe living on top of each other wasn't the worst idea in the world. Anyway, Old Montreal is fascinating and beautiful and entirely enchanting.

Later, we went to the Laurentians, where Big Liver Girl and her husband very generously allowed us to use their condo. Our girls had never been there, and were A) happy to finally see what I've been talking about for years, and B) delighted to be somewhere that everyone had their own rooms, and they could hang out and relax instead of having their mother constantly shreiking that she didn't drive all this way to sit in a hotel room and watch "My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding".

The ski hill in Ste-Sauveur becomes a water park in the summer, and it is, hands down, the best water park I've ever been to. How can you not love a water park that requires you to take a chair-lift to the top of the water slide? And water slides that require a helmet?

Here is a shot of the Mister and I coming down a slide that rattled my brain and rearranged my internal organs and left us bloodied and bruised. I don't know if you can zoom in on my face, but I look like I'm either in dire need of medical intervention, or a good, stiff drink. (Maybe they are one in the same, I don't know.) Anyway, Thing 1 took this picture while standing on a little bridge, and she said she could hear me way before she could see me.

On another slide, we had to manoever our way down the mountain on a an inner tube while negotiating a series of slides and little pools that had us crashing into each other (and strangers), and laughing hysterically. I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure we all incurred a bit of brain damage on that ride.

After we walked home from the water park, and we compared bruises and battle scars. The Mister's worse complaint was where his knees clonked together so hard he had two egg sized lumps and some impressively livid bruises on the inside of his legs. (He said he had trouble sleeping that night, because it's hard to get comfortable when every position requires your knees be involved somehow.) I had a sore shoulder from slamming into Thing 1 so hard I shot her over the lip of a slide, and Thing 2's elbows looked like she had been sandblasted.

It was a good day. And we weren't even done yet!

On The Road Again

The Loudshoes family is currently on vacation; we left last Sunday for Ottawa, and then spent a few days in Montreal and now are in Ste-Sauveur, just north of Montreal in the Laurentians.
It was about a 6 hour drive to Ottawa from our house, then another 2 to Montreal and an hour more to Ste-Sauveur. Welcome to Canada: the Land Where Everything Is Far From Everywhere!

I don't mind a long drive; a good road trip can be almost as much fun as the actual vacation. I can read in a car without getting sick, which means I get plenty of uninterrupted book time, and it is an unparalleled opportunity to have a nap. I can get a lot of knitting done, too. It's pretty quiet in the car,
the Mister is usually a man of very few words, and he requires very little entertainment while he drives. What he thinks about for all those hours I do not want to know. (Once, when the Mister had a kidney stone and was all hopped up on Percoset, I drove us to Montreal with him nattering non-stop in the seat beside me...it was torture. In his drug-induced haze, he read every single road sign out to me for 500 miles. "It's 127 km to Kingston!"Every. Single. One. Throughout our marriage, I've been known to beg him for the occasional conversation, but right there and then I decided that him shutting up was the key to our success.)

Also, I'm of the firm belief that there are no calories in a moving vehicle, which means that one can consume as many potato chips, ju-jubes, peanut butter cookies and coffee as one's constituion and bladder will allow. Of course, this also has something to do with the fact that I have some control over where and when we stop, as well as how good the snack are in the cooler.

I remember many a long drive as a kid where I thought it would never end, and hell consisted of a hot car doing Mach 1 endlessly down the 401. Part of the problem, of course, when you are a kid is that you have no clue about how long this is going to take....you might have been put in the car to go pick up the dry cleaning, or you might be in there for the rest of the day, who knows?
Big Liver Girl told me a story that illustrates this nicely; when her now brother-in-law was about 7, his entire family (2 parents, 5 kids, of which he was the youngest) got into the station wagon (circa 1973....any bets on whether or not it had wood paneled siding?)to go to a hunting/fishing camp WAY far away. They drive all day the first day, stayed somewhere overnight and then piled in the car the next day and took off driving again. After about another 6 hours in the car, David asked with some exasperation "where are we even GOING???" like it had never occurred to anyone to tell him, and it really hadn't occurred to him to ask.

Two things have improved the summer family car trip immeasurably: air conditioning and IPods. Before air conditioning was commonplace in cars, there was no option but to keep the windows closed or have the windows open. If the windows were closed, you roasted. But if you had the windows open, it was only marginally cooler and considerably louder,  but you did have a hurricane force wind blowing through the car while you tried vainly to keep small children from being sucked out the window. After a few hours of that, you feel like you've spent the day Iin a wind tunnel. And your hair looks just bitching'.
Before there was any sort of personal musical device, one's choices were: A) play the radio for the whole car, or B) conversation between the passengers, or c) silence. Options B and C had their own dangers, depending on the temperment and current mood of the participants, and Option A meant that someone in the car was deeply unhappy, no matter what was playing. My friend Kelly's father thought that a perfectly reasonable compromise was to set the radio on "search" and have it play 5 second of every station along the dial, in a continuous loop. As you can imagine, that sent everyone batshit crazy in about two minutes.
Now, with the happy advent of earbuds and personal music devices, the car is blissfully quiet and no one is paying the slightest attention to each other. You would think this is exact opposite idea of an ideal family vacation, but in fact, it insures its success: the less we talk to each other, the better we get along. I never once had to threaten to stop the car and walk to Montreal by myself, as my mother once did.

When we get home, I hope my children appreciate the wonderful memories that their father and I strived to create for them, fuelled by potato chips and Ipods.

First World Problems

Recently overheard at Starbucks: "Do you have any butter that hasn't been previously frozen?"

Why is it always Starbucks?

Work It Out.

The blog has been sadly neglected of late....I'm pretty sure my mother and Big Liver Girl are the only ones who have lamented that fact, and they can get me on the phone any time they want.
But I think I've had enough of a hiatus, and it's time I got back into it.

Thing 2 is 15 now, and she has been dying to get a job since she was about 8 years old. You see, she found out that people will pay you to do things, and since she would like to aquire a lifestyle that will demand enormous wads of cash, then gainful employement is the obvious place to start. (I'm just glad she didn't know about the lucrative possibilities of becoming a golddigger.)

Thing 1 has been working as a busser at a local restaurant for the past few years, and they asked her if her sister would like a job. Did you read that correctly? They handed her a job, just like that. And Thing 2 was all "well, I don't know if I want to work there". After I gently reminded her that she has no skills, no experience and that being offered a job was the rarest thing in the entire realm of human experience.
She took the job.

After her first shift, she came home pretty pumped; she's a fairly social kid, and new people and new experiences is right up her alley.

And, she was thrilled to come home with twenty-five dollars in her pocket! (She had no idea that the waitresses tipped out the bus staff, and so the bonus of coming home with cash in hand was totally unexpected.)
I said that the one really great thing about restaurant work was the tips...its dirty work and hard work, but the fact that you leave with cold hard cash in your hands was a decided bonus. I also said that when I worked in restaurants, I tried to live off my tips and bank my paycheques entirely.
She said, "what do you mean?" and I said "If I could swing it, I'd put my paycheques into the bank and try not to touch them at all, and just live off my tips, if possible. That way I'd have money in the bank and money in my pocket."

She gave me a hard, squinty-eyed look and said in a deadly, quiet tone...."There's a paycheque?"

She had no idea, she thought the twenty-five bucks was her pay. And, get this, she was happy with that. Imagine her delight when she found out she would get MORE than five dollars an hour! Capitalism has never looked so appealling!