Category: Uncategorized

…has abandoned me.
I’m assuming that there must be a tenth muse, or that we’ve modernized Calliope (or in my case, perhaps Thalia) to incorporate blogging into her portfolio. We could call her Wikerpe.
Anyway, whoever she is, she’s giving me the cold shoulder these days. I’ve even had correcting to do, which is usually a guarantee that I’ll find something to blog about, just to distract myself. I can only conclude that I have become more conscientious when it comes to correcting ~ or that in my advancing years I’ve lost the art of procrastination. It’s a shame really; I was very good at it.
So, in the absence of anything worthwhile, let me put this out there, instead: what is (or should be) the term for blogging about one’s lack of blogging? I mean, it happens all the time. There’s gotta be a word for it.

Plagiarism is a bad thing, obviously. First of all, it’s theft. When you try to present someone else’s ideas, directly or “in your own words,” you have to give that someone credit – and if you don’t, you’re stealing from that someone. Secondly, it’s deception. Presenting someone else’s ideas as if they are your ideas is a blatant lie. And of course, there’s always the laziness factor.
But the element of plagiarism that really pisses me off is the sheer arrogance.
Let’s face it, a student who presents a plagiarized paper is saying several things to his/her teacher:
1. I couldn’t be bothered with your lame assignment
2. The mark matters, but the learning doesn’t
3. I believe you’re too stupid to catch me
The penalty for plagiarism shouldn’t stop at a letter in the student’s file and a zero on the assignment. The student should have to walk around campus for a week wearing a t-shirt that says “I committed academic plagiarism”. Or that says simply “CHEATER” in big, I mean fricking HUGE, red letters. And the teacher should be allowed to follow the student around swatting him/her with a nerf bat.
Yeah.

This weekend was wonderful, not least because the weather was well and truly springlike. Naturally, we threw open the doors and windows to get some of that lovely, warm spring air in the house. After a few months, “cozy” starts to feel like “stuffy.” Dr. T even swept off the back porch, and I toured the garden, relishing every tiny sprout of green. Who knows? Next weekend we might even rake up all the dead crap.
I took advantage of the weather on Saturday to walk from Dina’s place, with Dina, to our favourite fancy dress store (OK, our only fancy dress store), where I found a great dress to wear to my cousin’s wedding in two weeks. We walked back to her place, then I toddled off home to get supper ready for Irene and Dave & Kate. After supper, Kate got out her knitting and I whipped off a few more granny squares for the next baby blanket, and we got caught up ~ it’s been ages since we saw everyone.
Well-fed, well-wined, and content, we saw our guests off and crawled into bed, and slept the sleep of the righteous.
Righteous, but not all that bright.
Now that Colin and Robert are nine and seven, respectively, they’re pretty good about getting up by themselves on weekend mornings, and heading downstairs. They eat cereal, and turn on the TV or the Nintendo in the basement, and Dr. T and I actually get to sleep in.
On Sunday, however, the boys woke us up because of the bird in the basement.
Remember when I said “we threw open the doors and windows to get some of that lovely, warm spring air in the house”? We neglected to close the balcony door in the office.
Now, those of you who have lived through similar experiences (or who pay attention to the post titles) know where this is going…
I headed down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. So there I was, minding my own business, when the bat buzzed my head.
To my credit, I did not, at that point, shriek like a little girl.
I edged over to the back door, and opened it, talking calmly to the bat the whole time. Despite my reassurances, the bat chose to fly back to the basement, rather than through the open door. My soothing voice must have touched a chord, though, because once I was back upstairs, sitting in front of the computer, the bat followed me and started flying haphazardly around the room, getting pretty frickin close to my head with each pass.
At that point, I did shriek like a girl. I mean, it’s one thing to encounter a bat in your kitchen; it’s kind of disconcerting to be stalked by the bat.
After a few more heart-stopping minutes, the bat apparently exhausted itself and flew into the closet, otherwise known as the barely-contained stack of crap and old boxes. Armed with an old tennis racket (which had a really small head, but Dr. T refused to use one of our good rackets on bat control), I entered the fray, and found the bat huddled in an old box, which I gingerly pulled from the closet. I was almost at the balcony door when the bat jumped out of the box. I thought that all was lost, but rather than flying around again, the bat slumped on the floor, right in front of the door. I used the box and the racket to scoop up the bat, and actually managed to get him (or her ~ we didn’t get that close) out the door and onto the floor of the balcony.
Suffice it to say, we’re never opening our doors and windows again.

Dr. T and I are lapsed Catholics. I mean, we’re practically relapsed. We were married in a United church. We ‘baptised’ our children at home, with no mention of any supreme beings (or, as one of my students once wrote, “super” beings). We regularly take the Lord’s name in vain, for God’s sake.
So you can imagine we’re bemused by the fact that our two sons appear to have captured the essence of the two major divisions of Christianity, as evidenced by a meal at our dinner table:
Colin, the Protestant, carefully arranges his food into separate ingredients, and eats these separate piles in order, from least appreciated to most. In other words, he saves the best for last. The work ethic, as applied to supper.
Meanwhile, Robert, the Catholic, carefully pulls out the best bits to eat first, and then reluctantly tackles the rest. If he’s lucky, no one notices the remainder, and he doesn’t have to atone for enjoying the good stuff. If we do notice, he dutifully eats his penance, and we’re all satisfied in the end.
Take cake, for instance. While Robert enthusiastically eats all the icing first, and frequently eats no actual cake, Colin meticulously eats the cake, leaving an empty shell of icing. Once all the cake has been taken care of, he rewards himself with the icing.
Obviously, this phenomenon explains their behaviour during the papal transition. While the world waited with bated breath, first for the death of JP2, then for the election of Benedict, Colin asked a million questions about the function of the pope, the process of choosing a pope, the path to becoming a pope, and so on. Robert paid no attention whatsoever ~ obviously trusting in the super-being and his representatives on Earth to take care of everything.
Mysterious ways indeed.
*NB ~ that’s sects, not sex. There is no such thing as Christian sex, the missionary position notwithstanding (and definitely never standing). We don’t do that kind of thing. It’s bad. It’s dirty. It’s naughty…

We live in the city. As such, we’re not exposed to a whole lot of wildlife. In fact, last fall, when I took my students on a tour of St-Henri, I realized that urbanites really don’t know what true wildlife is ~ because these students were talking about grey squirrels the way I might talk about encounters with, say, a moose.
Having grown up in a rural area, I am a lot more complacent about city-based wildlife, which seems to consist of squirrels, pigeons, and the occasional raccoon. Since we have a backyard (really more of a back-foot-and-a-half), we do have a lot of animal activity, mostly in the form of squirrels scampering along the overhead wires and pigeons trying to nest in the eaves.
Until this winter, that is.
This year, the squirrels took advantage of the inroads made by the pigeons (or, as my ornithologically-minded Dad would have it, the ‘rock doves’), and broke into the crawl-space between the ceiling and the roof of our house.
Initially, this was annoying because of all the coming and going, since the traffic seemed to go right up the balcony door (think tiny claws scrambling up glass and you’ll understand why this was annoying). Then we realized the squirrels were actually in the ceiling ~ we were tipped off by the pitter patter of little feet running overhead.
OK, obviously not an ideal situation.
The other night I came home to discover a pile of plaster on my desk…
…and looked up to see three little holes in the ceiling.
Yesterday morning, I called the Humane Wildlife people, who impressed me by (a) not sounding judgmental when I admitted these animals have been living up there for at least a month, and (b) sending a technician this morning.
So, three hours and $550 later, we are squirrel-free, and the squirrels – including the soon-to-be-mother whose nesting created the holes in the ceiling – are ousted, but alive.
All of this merely to explain why I was compelled to find and share this:

If you have time, watch the one with the cat-herders, too

So, apparently my loyal readers are desperate for new material. This must be how Bill Cosby feels.
Anyway, up here in the Great White North, when we have nothing to say but are compelled to speak nonetheless, we talk about… the weather.
OK, so, it’s like, March, right? Which means the weather is, like, messed up (I would say it’s f***ed up, but my mother reads this blog, y’know).
For instance – yesterday? Minus 24C, or minus-frikkin-38C with the windchill. For the sake of consistency, I duly provide the non-metric equivalents: -11F, and -36F.
On Friday, we got 34 cm of snow in one day. That’s more than a foot of snow. In one day.
Oh yes, March has definitely come in all liony.
Right now, it’s “only” -11C, or a balmy -22C with the windchill. So naturally, the forecast for Saturday is +5C. [a.k.a. 12F, -8F, and 41F respectively]
Of course, that’s the forecast according to the Weather Network. Environment Canada is calling for +9C [48F], while over at canoe.ca, they’re chilling out and calling for 0C [32F].
And you know what? None of this has anything to do with global climate change. This is just March in Montreal.
Stupid month.

For a while now, Dr. T and I have been into wine (which apparently makes us all hip and trendy). We’ve got a pretty well-stocked wine cellar, a few books, and at least three decanters.
We’ve also invested in good glasses. Initially, we bought a dozen water glasses, which were the right size and shape for most of the wines we enjoy.
We really liked these glasses – but of the original dozen, we have about five left.
So we did some more research – there are some pretty pricy glasses out there, let me tell you. We found a nice compromise with these Italian chardonnay glasses.
They’re a little bigger than the water glasses, and a little heavier, but they are lovely, and, we thought, sturdy.
Ha. Turns out that if exposed to a room full of drunken English teachers who happen to be flinging digital cameras around, these babies will crack like an egg.
Despite the loss, a good fantastic time was had by all. Thanks, ladies – you can come break more stuff anytime.

Say what you want about the Snickers Superbowl ad, this one is my favourite.

Yesterday on the way to work I saw someone reading Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams, RIP.
On the way home last night, I saw a completely different someone reading The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, also by Douglas Adams.
Now, consider this: I live in a city where the English-speaking population is small enough that it only takes us three steps to get to Kevin Bacon, if you know what I mean. Furthermore, the members of that population who indulge in Adams are, I thought, all people I already know, several of them intimately (though not Biblically). Finally, both books in question are from the 1980s, so it’s not like they’re hot new releases.
Someone is trying to tell me something.
In the words of Marvin, “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

Happy Valentine’s Day