March Break

This week the kids are off school for March Break. I love March Break....it comes at just the right time, as the combination of weather and routine have pummelled me into a defenseless mass of acquiescence. I am just about at the point of throwing in the towel and saying "okay, Winter, you win.". And then along comes the March Break, when we get a week to do whatever we like and make no apologies for it.

This year, the March Break dovetailed neatly with the onset of Daylight Savings Time. It has meant that we can get up as late as we want for days after having lost an hour of sleep. Whoever came up with that idea should get a medal.

There is some entertaining of children during this week, but the Things are getting old enough to be in charge of their own social lives, plus they are fairly easy to please. There was a time when I had several other children to look after for the week, and sometimes finding one activity that would keep everyone happy could present a challenge. They were troopers, though, all of them, and never groaned once when we went out to the sugar bush yet again. (For those of you not familiar with a sugar bush, it is where they make maple syrup. You get to eat pancakes and syrup and bacon and sausages, but for this you have to pay the price of hearing the god-awful presentation of how the maple syrup is made. For reasons unknown, the presenters are hell-bent on you hearing the story of The Evolution of the Syrup, from it's aboriginal origins, to the pioneers to the present day outfit. The speech never varies, from presenter to presenter, and it's given in an unenthusiastic, dirge-like fashion. It's only just worth the bacon and sausages.)

Yesterday we took the girls up to the lake where we rent a cottage every year. They've never seen the lake in the winter, and we thought they'd enjoy the contrast.

This is the point where we bike to most evenings to catch the sunset over Lake Huron.

It was considerably chillier yesterday than when the picture on the right was taken.

March Break is a welcome reprieve from the routine, and I'm enjoying it very much. Now, if we could get another week to sleep in, that would be great.

Global Warming, My Ass.

We've just been walloped with another late winter snow storm, and I am really quite exasperated with the whole winter thing. I get that global warming is happening, but right now it's very hard to see a down side to the whole thing.

It started snowing last Friday evening, and didn't stop until early Sunday morning. I'm not kidding, we got a good 20 inches of snow, which is perfectly ridiculous for March. If there was a Customer Service Department at the Bureau in Charge of Weather, you know I'd be writing a scathing letter of complaint.

Here is the side of the Loudshoes house, complete with Winter Snow Sculpture, for those of you into art.

Thing 2 had a sleepover at a friend's house scheduled for Saturday night, and she had no intentions of missing it. Thing 1, her friend and I walked Thing 2 to the friends house, slogging through a good foot of snow most of the way, because there was no way I was going to drive anywhere. We went down one street which clearly hadn't been plowed since the last storm, and there was a poor pizza delivery guy stuck half way down the street. He had driven as far as he dared, and walked the couple of hundred yards to the house to give them the pizza. (What kind of person makes the pizza delivery guy go out on a night they wouldn't go out themselves??? And not even tip him?) To make matters worse, the poor guy was clearly not from around here, what with his dark skin and Jamaican accent. He probably regretted emigrating more than ever that night. Anyway, we helped push him out and and saw him on his way, and joined him in soundly cursing the bastards that made him deliver a pizza and didn't even tip. Nice bit of cross-cultural bonding, there.

We have had a pretty snowy winter here this year; the driving has been consistently bad, and I've been shovelling the driveway every couple of days, it seems. One of my friends, who has grown up around here and really should know better, complained the other day with an air of righteous indignation that she's "had to wear boots every day this winter", like it was some sort of absurd imposition on her. ("Welcome to a Canada"I said, where there's 9 months of good snowmobiling weather, and 3 months of not so good snowmobiling weather.")

Toby has had enough, too. Here he is on the windowsill of the kitchen, desperate to come inside.
(The Elvis stickers are new. I think they add a fairly jaunty air to our kitchen, as well as Toby's plight.) If you didn't know better, you would think that he's been left to freeze to death in the breezeway, instead of having just gone outside about 3 seconds ago.

I'd be very happy to see the sun, not have to take 10 minutes to prepare myself to go outside, and have my feet be warm for once. Remind me of this in August, when I'm sick of being hot. If that ever happens.

Skills I Have That Are No Longer Needed

I've realized, recently, that a lot of the skills that I have painstakingly acquired over my 46 years are now completely useless. Like the universe and technology have declared "thank you, darling, but we won't be needing you now". Such as:

• Writing a cheque- Since the advent of the debit card, I only write a cheque for the couple of dollars I end up owing Revenue Canada every spring. (On which I write "choke on it".)
• Changing a typewriter ribbon- A messy business under the best of circumstances, but which became a tussle to the death of one was not. I got to be pretty good at it.
• Rewinding a cassette tape using one's little finger- Cassette tape players had a vindictive streak, in which they would eat the tape, and when you pulled the cassette out, the guts of the tape became unravelled. I was very good at coaxing the tape back in, using my little finger and some kind words.
• Loading a film in a camera- Very tricky. If you didn't get the 35mm film in just right, you would think you were winding the film as you took the pictures, but you were not, and you'd end up coming home from you cousin's wedding with the pictures in your head and the film pristinely nestled in the wrong end of the camera housing. My brother was very good at this, too.
• Counting back change- There was a time when you had to figure out the change you were giving back to a customer, right in your head, without the cash register telling you what to do. Even though I am completely useless when it comes to math, I could do this.
• Using a credit card imprinter- Back in the day, we had to make a hard copy of the customer's credit card using that little machine that goes "ca-chunk!" We still have one at the shop for the odd time when the Interac machine goes down, and some of the younger people I work with have to ask "what's that?".
• Lettraset- Before computers, the only way to get any sort of display writing was to use a stencil set or Lettraset. Lettraset was a sheet of rub off letters which you lined up on the page and rubbed off using a popsicle stick. They were an absolute bitch to get straight or perfectly spaced, and it was fantastically impossible. My hand/eye co-ordination was pretty good, so I would do it for my classmates for a price.
• Loading a fountain pen with ink from a bottle- I used to do a lot of calligraphy (because it was still easier to learn that than to use Lettraset), and most of the pens were fountain pens that did not use the little cartridge full of ink, you had to load it from a bottle. I don't even know if you can buy that stuff anymore. You probably shouldn't because, oh, my, even a couple of drops of that stuff made an unbelievable mess. Once I dropped a whole bottle of it, and just about ran away from home.
• Making popcorn with oil on the top of the stove- Before microwaves, making popcorn involved heating oil in a big pot on the stove, adding the popcorn and shaking the bejesus out of the pot until the popping stopped. It took forever, your arms fell off and there was considerable skill involved to pop all the corn, but not burn it at the very last second. It was exhausting.
• Making a carbon copy with real carbon paper- Many an essay had to be typed using messy, smudgy, soul-destroying carbon paper. (I once had someone younger than me ask what did "CC" mean on an e-mail, and I said it stood for "carbon paper" and she asked what that was and I replied "Satan's plaything.") For those of you who have never had to wrestle with carbon paper, it was this black paper you put in behind the page you were typing, and you made an copy while you typed. Of course, getting it properly aligned was impossible, and every single mistake was cast in stone. And? Your fingers would be permanently marked with black, signalling that you were either a typist or a criminal. Or both.
• Adjusting the tracker on a VCR- When VCRs came out they had a little knob called the "tracker" that had to be constantly adjusted in order to get the picture to be viewable. Often several times within the same movie. It was fussy work and quite a job to get it ju--u-u-ust right.
• Use a rotary phone- My children saw one of these at my husband's aunt's house, and they asked where the "talk" button was.

Several skills that I do not possess, but which others do are:

• My brother can develop film in a darkroom. Just try to find anyone who even knows what a darkroom is anymore.
• My father can speak Latin. Very handy in this day and age.
• I had a friend when I was a kid who had two older sisters who went to all sorts of desperate measures to make their hair perfectly flat and straight. (It was the late 60's) This was before blow driers or flat irons, and the two sisters used to actually iron their hair with a clothes iron (wool setting!) to achieve this. The real skill was making sure you didn't leave a dent at the top where you first set the iron down. One of them had a boyfriend who was actually pretty good at this, and they liked for him to do it. He was mortified that he was pressed into service in this manner, let alone good at it, and threatened my friend and I with all sorts of bodily harm if we ever told a single soul.
• my mother knows how to use a ditto machine.

Even if I am the old fart in the room, I'm happy enough to never have to wrestle with at typewriter ribbon or fuss with the tracker on a VCR ever again. Technology does have it's advantages.

How Are We Still Married?

The Mister has informed me, recently, that there is one more thing I do that he hates. Apparently, I throw out the toothpaste tube before it is completely empty, and this entirely unacceptable and wrong-headed of me, and Not To Be Borne. (He informed me by retrieving the empty-enough-tube-by-my-standards from the wastebasket in the bathroom and pointedly leaving it on the edge of the vanity.) While there is still one or two more blobs of toothpaste left in the tube, one cannot possibly throw it out.
This brings me to the inevitable conclusion that the list of things my husband does that I hate has yet another entry. That is, he is physically incapable of throwing anything away, even the things that every sane person would consider trash, and therefore leaves it to me to throw away and then complains about it. (I guess, technically, that would be three things.)

Himself has many, many fine qualities, and I am really quite smitten with him, but if I have to justify pitching one more piece of crap around here, I am really going to have the mother of all hissy-fits.
He has various reasons for not throwing things away:
1. "We might need that". Really? You think we are going to need the kid's high chair again? Because I think your new wife will probably want to buy her kids a new one. And the broken patio umbrella? Perhaps we can use that for a tv antenna, or lawn art. And how about all the jars in the fridge with a smidgen of jam or mustard or hoisin sauce on the bottom...we keeping those for a special occasion?
2. "What if we have to return it?" This excuse is for boxes. We keep every box we ever got anything in, even if we no longer have the thing that originally came in the box. "You can always use a box", is the other reason. (Well, Toby can always use another box.)
3. (And my personal favourite)"It might be worth money someday". The Mister is still mad that his mother threw out a whole whack of baseball cards he had as a kid, and assuredly would have paid off our mortgage by now. So, I have to fight to the death to throw out anything that could possibly be of any value in the future. I'm confident that tossing the Freddy Fender album and the cowboy boots from the Carter administration were still a good idea, but Himself is ready to hold it over my head when I am proved wrong.

So, this morning, I thanked the Mister for showing me the error of my ways, and for teaching me a Very Valuable Lesson About Thrift and Economy. And then I threw out the toothpaste tube when he had gone to work.

Not The Answer I Was Expecting.

When I went to hairdressing school, back in the mid-80's, I got a bit more of an education than just how to cut hair. My hairdressing school was in a bit of a rough area of town, and we often had people come in who I did not usually encounter in my day-to-day life in the north end suburbs of my white-bread and Velveeta city.
In the morning, we had class time, whereby the teachers lectured, and then we had practical, hands-on training in the afternoon.
One morning, the topic under discussion was how to talk to clients in a professional, mature manner. We were cautioned not to talk about religion or politics, and to keep the details of our latest breakup/eviction/"Girls Nite Tequila Shot-a-Thon" to ourselves. We were encouraged to ask the client open-ended questions, to get them to talk about themselves and also, to keep the conversation geared to innocuous, benign, lily-white topics.

That afternoon, my first client was a young man, about my age. Taking the morning's advice to heart, I asked him if he grew up locally, and he said yes. Trying my best to keep the conversation going, I asked where he went to high school; this city's not too big, and since we looked to be of the same vintage, perhaps we had some acquaintances in common. He replied that he hadn't gone to high school.
I said "really, I thought everyone had to go to high school.".
To which he flatly replied "Not if you killed a guy, you don't."

And I stopped talking after that.

Things My Husband Does That I Hate

A few days ago I posted a bit about Things I Do That I'm Pretty Sure My Husband Hates. Lest you think that he is some long-suffering martyr who puts up with the most selfish, slovenly, surly woman God ever created, let you in on something: he's not exactly Prince Charming himself, sometimes. Although he is very easy to get along with (most of the time) and so laid back that he's been known to scrape the back of his head on the ground sometimes, he has a few habits that render me senseless with rage. Some of these he can't help, but by God, some of them he can and I know he chooses not to!

1. He has trouble with spacial relationships. "Beside" the hamper is not "in" the hamper. This also is the case with the dishwasher, the closet and the garage. For some reason, he seems to think that putting things close to where they need to go is good enough. Not so, because it is me who ends up completing the transaction.

2. He is stupid like a fox. When asked why things are where they are, which is not where they are supposed to be and usually in my way, he feigns complete idiocy and pretends he has no clue whatsoever as to what I am ranting about. He does not mind that anyone may take him for the resident moron, and knows full well that whatever it is, it is not his problem any more.

3. He never fully completes a project. If the Loudshoes family had a motto, it would be "Ut Mos Operor" ("That Will Do"). He starts a project, he gets most of the way through, until things are at least functional,(if I am lucky) and then just..... stops. (Drywall seems to be the Mister's kryptonite, because that is usually where the project comes to a complete and utter halt and remains, in suspended animation, for another couple of years.) Sometimes, the project only gets to the "buying all the new stuff" phase before being ignored completely. I have no doors on a cupboard in the kitchen and several large sheets of maple in the downstairs hallway for about eight years now.

4. He sniffles. I know the poor man has allergies and can't help the way he feels but OH MY GOD the sniffling in the morning enrages me to the point where I find myself thinking, seriously thinking, of where I could reasonable hide the body.

5. He hates rice pudding, bread pudding, coffee and Kalamata olives. Now, you would be hard pressed to find a easier person to feed that Himself. I mean, he's eaten almost every single thing I've ever put in front of him, even stuff I couldn't choke down myself. But he hates four of the things I love most in the world.

6. He cannot be early for anything. I grew up in the House of the Hyper-Punctual. If you were late for anything, the hounds of hell would be unleashed on your head. This has rendered me a mite particular about being on time. The Mister has a much, much more cavalier attitude towards punctuality, and it makes my head burst into flames. I've cured him of the most egregious lateness (i.e. stepping into the shower at the precise time we were supposed to be arriving somewhere), but he still cannot seem to get himself out the door with any margin for error. We arrive everywhere at the last possible second, me in a funk and him clueless as to why. The concept of actually being early for something is completely out of his imagination.

He does have many, many positive attributes (he can do math in his head, he can open jars, he is kind and doesn't spit and he makes a very good show of listening to me), so if this is the worst I can come up with, I think we're doing okay. You may need to ask him about that, though.

Christmas Gifts From Kelly

Kelly has the dubious distinction of being by oldest friend. Not that she is ancient or a senior citzen or anything; "oldest" in the sense of being in my life the longest of anyone other than my family. Kelly and I met in kindergarten, in Sister Doris's class. (Sister Doris went on to some noteriety after having taught us. She left the convent and wrote a racy autobiography. I'm sure we had nothing to do with either decision.) I moved away in Grade 6 and we met up again in Mr. Wilson's Grade 9 geography homeroom, and have been unable to leave each other alone ever since.

Somewhere along the line, we started to give each other ridiculous presents for Christmas, and Kelly and I have maintained an enthusiasm for this tradition all these years. (Kelly does have an unfair advantage, because she goes to Tennesee once a year, and the shopping there is like nowhere else.)

Among other things that Kelly has given me are:

-A vial of dirt from Graceland

-An inflatable Mona Lisa

-A bust of Henry XIII that sings "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am!"

-A little statue of a lady made out of a lobster shell. Someone had taken apart a lobster, and then put it back together as a Southern Belle. Why, we will never know.

-A coffee mug with pictures of all the U.S. presidents on it that plays "The Star Spangled Banner" when you expose the bottom of the mug to light. In other words, every time you pick it up.

-Bob Hope's head made out of popcorn. (At one point, Kelly and her sister decided that I was a closet Bob Hope fan, and from then on I got all sorts of presents consistent with my alleged ardor. Once they even made a huge Bob Hope head out of paper-mache and then made a friend of theirs wear it around their place and then took pictures of it and made a scrapbook entitled "Bob Hope Visits the Farm". I cannot begin to tell you how spectacularly wonderful that book was. I still have it, somewhere.)

-A Mister T. soap-on-a-rope. ("I pity the dirt!")

This year we were not able to exchange gifts until recently, because the weather had thwarted us continually since Christmas. But this past weekend, it was Christmas all over again! This year, I got:

-A poster of all the First Ladies, starting with Herbert Hoover's wife, Lou, and ending with Barbara Bush. Presumably, they'd update it if given the chance.

This beautiful sewing pattern for a men's leisure suit, straight out of 1973. I could make it for the Mister!

-A book about the history of "Air Force One", the plane, not the movie.

-A book made up entirely of front pages from various newspapers around the world from the day the Pope died,

This charming box of Christmas card, inexplicably featuring

drunken monks. (How festive!)

This book, entitled "72 Sure-Fired Ways of Having Fun" and then the subtitle is "The Life of the Party". It is filled with suggestions for groan-worthy party games which were clearly intended to make your guest go home as soon as possible. The activities are likely designed for a pre-technological age, because I cannot imagine anyone else putting up with these unless there was absolutely no television to turn on. You can see from the woman on the cover's near hysteria that these games are not for the faint of heart.

Just for the record, I gave her a can of "Ninth Symphony Bean Mix" ("Eat and music will follow!" the can suggested, jauntily.) and a mouse pad with a picture of her sister wearing a cactus hat we had made her for her birthday last summer. Also, some picture books about some shows that were bad in the '80s and no better now, and folk music. Her sister got some excellent slippers that were obviously made for an elf, complete with curled up toes and bells, and a CD of "truck-drivin' hits!" that we had to play in the car on our way to dinner.

Merry Christmas.