1969. The moon landing. Midnight Cowboy. Led Zeppelin I. The maiden flight of the Boeing 747. The election of Golda Meir.
Also, I was born.
Which, for those of you too lazy to do the math, means that I am turning 40 this year. The big 4-oh.
Now, popular culture, despite Erica Jong, seems determined to regard 40 as the threshold between youth and middle age – which, let’s face it, really means old. In my circle of friends, most people seem to have dealt with the idea of forty pretty well, with the exception of one friend who’s been celebrating his 29th birthday for 15 years as of April, and one other friend whose issues cannot be addressed here, but suffice it to say, they’re big issues.
How am I dealing with forty?
Last August, I got a tattoo. My first. On Good Friday, I got my nose pierced. My first piercing (aside from my ear lobes, which are conventional piercings for most women in our culture). This afternoon, I’m planning to have my navel pierced. Next week, I have consultation to discuss laser eye surgery.
Some might argue that these are the actions of a woman in denial, or of a woman desperately trying to hang onto her youth. In fact, some have already made those arguments. Who knows, maybe some psychiatrist out there will confirm this diagnosis.
My counter-argument is that I love the idea of forty. I have wanted a tattoo since I was a teenager, but managed to talk myself out of it for over twenty years because I was afraid I would get to a certain point in my adult life and seriously regret it. I have always liked the idea of a nose stud, but talked myself out of it because I was convinced my nose was too big. I talked myself out of a navel piercing because I don’t have washboard abs. I talked myself out of laser eye correction because I was afraid it was too risky.
You know what? I love my tattoo. I love my nose stud. So why not the other stuff?
Sure, my nose is big – but I love how it looks with my little diamond. I like my nose more now. So I figure I may not have perfect abs, but I bet my tummy will look just fine with a bit of bling.
I am not afraid of 40. I love 40. Forty means I can relax and say “I don’t care whether or not you think this is a good idea.”
I am in a great place in my life. I have a job that I love, and colleagues that respect my work. I have a great husband who more than appreciates me. I have two great kids – one of whom starts high school this fall. I have a great house, and while it’s hardly ever clean, it’s cozy and feels like home. I may not be model material, but I’m in pretty good shape and pretty comfortable with those bits of me that are in different shapes. I have good friends, and good family.
Forty rocks.
Stress management
So another month, more or less, has passed, and all my good intentions to blog more regularly, both here and over at the Communal Kitchen (which, in passing, I almost always start to type as the “Communical Kitchen”), have paved the way to an appalling lack of activity.
I maintain that this is a direct effect of having far too many other commitments (see previous post) and being clearly overdependent on sleep. I am working on both.
We’re past the mid-point of the semester, and although there’s some confusion over my workload, it looks unlikely that I’ll have to teach this summer, which is a relief. My e-learning project is a little stressful, and deadlines come and go with horrible inevitability, but I’m coping.
Thankfully, I did find a way to destress, at least for a week. As previously mentioned, I harangued Dr. T into taking me away from it all, and with the help of the World’s Greatest Mother-in-Law ™ as a babysitter, we jetted off to Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, for a week in the sun. While we were there, we did our four open water certification dives for our SCUBA licenses, as well as three more dives as licensed divers, and that underwater camera came in handy!
(see the whole set here)
When we weren’t 40 feet underwater, we were revelling in the 5-star treatment of our all-inclusive resort: eating well, enjoying great Spanish riojas, lounging in the sun, snorkeling along the beach, reading, and sleeping. The weather was fantastic the whole week – warm, but with a pretty good ocean breeze keeping things comfortable, and sunny. The only significant rain started literally as we were getting into the shuttle to return to the airport (granted, that rain was significant enough to close the airport for a brief period later, when we were already trapped in the plane).
We didn’t spend a lot of time lounging, and in fact we really didn’t get to know any of our fellow guests, but we had a great time with our dive masters, and our package tour rep, Tony, is either really, really good at his job or he genuinely liked us, but either way, he made us feel all warm and fuzzy.
Best of all, we discovered that scuba was everything we imagined and hoped. We loved swimming with the fishes, and there’s a surreal, otherworldly feeling you get when you’re floating over a coral reef – like you’re flying over mountains, in a way. Sound is completely different, too… there’s a very meditative flow to everything down there.
I miss it already, of course… we got home late Saturday night, and I spent Sunday in the laundry room, then walked outside Monday morning to go back to work, only to discover that it was -11 C. -17 with the windchill. Sigh.
The women who made me me
Next week is International Women’s Week. I wrote the following for inclusion in our campus union newsletter, in response to a call for articles on inspiring women:
Many years ago, when I was a student here at Vanier, I wrote an item for the school newspaper, The Phoenix, about REAL Women. For those who may not recognize the group, REAL Women (Realistic, Equal, Active, for Life) is an “alternative” women’s group that primarily champions women’s right to be stay-at-home mothers – a noble cause, certainly, but at the time I was writing, the group’s language was a lot more controversial, and their message included condemnation of women who chose to work, pursue higher education and challenging careers, or engage in oral sex, among other grievous sins.
My response then, as it is now, is that women like my mother – who, at the tender age of 23 found herself a single parent, in a country an ocean away from her family – are the real women that inspire me. My mother worked full-time to support me, and even after she met and married my step-father, she continued to work, because she loved her job (she retired more than a little reluctantly a few years ago). She was a driving force in my education, and encourages my sister and me to pursue our careers with all our passion. Of course she loves our husbands and her grandchildren, but she has never suggested – because it would never occur to her – that we’re doing any disservice to our families by exploring life outside the domestic sphere.
I have learned in recent years that my mother’s extraordinarily progressive philosophy is genetic. My grandmother, born shortly after the First World War, left school at 14 to earn a living and help support her family, which she did for eleven years before she married my grandfather. After her six children were all in school, she went back, finished high school, and got her teacher’s license, and taught elementary school until she retired at 63, the mandatory age at the time. She’s still going strong at 87, living on her own, playing competitive bridge and taking the occasional cruise around the Mediterranean.
Shortly after they were married, my grandfather said to my grandmother “Mary, our family has always voted Labour, and now that you’re in the family, you will too.” My grandmother’s reply? “Edward, women like Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t starve themselves and chain themselves to railings so you could have two votes.” She never did vote Labour, either.
There are so many inspirational women around the world, making changes and leading extraordinary lives – but I am most inspired by, and most thankful for, my Mum and my Gran.
Happy International Women’s Week.
Don’t you hate it when life gets in the way of a good blog?
Ok, it’s been a while. Why? Well…
– school started. Technically, it had started when I last posted, but only just. Now it’s real, and I actually have to, like, work, and stuff.
– other school started, that is, the one in which I am a student. I’m in the last phase of the M.Ed. now, and again, this apparently demands effort and focus. Honestly, what was I thinking?
– other other school started, that is, the one for which I am designing an on-line course, etc., etc. (yes, there is a pattern here).
– Dr. T and I took an intensive SCUBA course, because we’re determined (read, I am determined, and he is tolerant) to go somewhere hot and sunny and beachy next month, without the boys, and for some reason I decided that this, too, had to be a learning experience. So we’re learning how to breathe underwater.
In preparation for this new venture, I have splurged on a new camera, a Canon G10, which came with an underwater housing so I can take pictures of blurry fins as the sea creatures flash past. While I wait for the hot sunny beachy place, I have, naturally, been trying this puppy out. Enjoy.
It’s all downhill from here
My lovely friend Erin (or, as Dr. T calls her, my hot supermodel friend Erin) recently interviewed Colin and Robert for her article on tobogganing – check it out!!
In the photo, by the way, Erin is wearing a hat that I made. The hat did not take as long to make as the children.
Owm
What do you think of when someone mentions yoga? Calm, serene, meditative stretchy bendiness? That’s what I think of, certainly.
Now, I am aware that there are other forms of yoga involving sweating and speed, but having never tried these forms I feel completely qualified to dismiss these as horribly misguided distortions of the art.
But that is neither here nor there…
I bring up yoga because it seems to me unlikely that one can sustain a yoga-related injury. What could happen? I suppose you could get stuck in a particularly interesting position, or maybe develop an incense headache, but really, it’s slow and calm and generally non-threatening.
Yet somehow, Colin managed to sustain a series of gouges on his face, and inflict some pretty significant damage on his glasses, through yoga.
Last weekend, my friend Erin came over to go sledding with us, after which we went back to my place. I went off to the kitchen to make some well-deserved hot chocolate, and left Erin to be entertained by the boys.
So Colin got up on a chair in the hallway, to show Erin how well he can do the lotus position – that’s the one where you sit and cross your legs over each other, or, as my pre-PC elementary school phys. ed. teacher would say, “Indian style.” To further impress Erin, Colin wove his arms through his legs – and pitched face-first off the chair and onto the wooden floor.
At which point Robert yelled at Erin “Why didn’t you catch him?!”
Erin, who does not any insane children of her own, took this quite seriously, and was very apologetic to Robert, Colin and me about failing to prevent this accident, which clearly was not her fault at all.
I was able to reassure her a few days later, when I told her about taking the boys to the hairdresser the next day – where Robert yelled at his hairdresser from start to finish: “why are you washing my hair?! Why are you throwing ice on my head?! [cold water] Why are you pouring lava on my head?! [she turned the warm water up] What is this towel for?!” And that was just while getting his hair washed.
So, in the end, Colin’s fine – his face has already healed, and we convinced a very nice lady at the optometrist’s shop to bend his frames back into shape – and Robert is in training to be George Costanza’s mother.
The car saga
On a Tuesday morning in mid-December, Dr. T rushed the kids out the door – we were, as usual, running late – and into the car.
Except the car was not there.
We don’t have a driveway or a garage, so our car gets parked on the street in front of our house, except on the two mornings a week that parking isn’t allowed, when we park around the corner.
This was not a restricted morning. Nor was there any snow clearing planned. In fact, our neighbours’ cars were parked, as usual, in the spaces behind and in front of our car – or the now-open space where our car had been.
We spent a few puzzled minutes asking each other if we’d absent-mindedly parked around the corner, or gone to the grocery store by car but walked home, or lost the car in a bad poker game…
None of the above. This was grand theft our car. Our nice, new, wonderful car.
We bought (more specifically leased) this car in April. Our last two cars were Corollas, which were fine, but not great, and although Dr. T would have happily kept our 2004 Corolla, I was not really comfortable driving it, and we’re now a one-car family, since the death of my deal-of-the-century Subaru. Last Christmas, we talked about our options, and in the spring, on the advice of my dad (who owns more cars that one person can possibly drive, and is currently in the process of building another one), we test-drove the Saturn Astra. I called my dad:
Me: We drove the Astra.
Dad: Hmph.
Me: We like it a lot – feels good, drives great…
Dad: Hmph.
Me: So we think we’re going to get one. Thanks for the tip!
Dad: Try an Impreza.
Me: What?
Dad: Don’t buy anything until you’ve tried the new Impreza.
Me: Hmph.
Fine. So we test-drove the Impreza. And, of course, we fell in love. I called my dad again:
Me: We drove the Impreza.
Dad: Hmph.
Me: We like it a lot – feels good, drives great…
Dad: Hmph.
Me: So we think we’re going to get one. Thanks for the tip!
Dad: Try a Honda.
Me: Hmph.
We did not try a Honda, and we stopped calling my dad. Instead, we signed on the dotted line and drove home in our new AWD Impreza hatchback (although now car dealers call them “5-doors” for some reason).
I managed to resist the urge to sucker-punch my dad when he looked at the car, grunted, and told us it looked like a Mazda.
When the snow started falling this winter, we discovered just how great our car was – no shovelling required! We felt safe driving in the snow and slush.
But then, that fateful morning, no car. Car gone. Nine days before Christmas.
Fast-forward a month, and everything’s settled – the car is probably on the other side of the planet now, and our insurance people took care of everything, and given that this happened over the holidays, everything went pretty quickly, and on Thursday, I drove home in our new Impreza hatchback.
We decided to take advantage of our do-over, and opted for the sports package, which meant our lovely blue was no longer an option, but we’ve got a few extras we didn’t have the first time around, including fog lights, a sunroof, wiper de-icers, 6-disk CD players with extra speakers and satellite radio, and audio controls on the leather-wrapped steering wheel.
Best of all, we now have heated seats. Since the temperature over the last few days has hovered around -25 (so far, 19 major water mains have burst on the island of Montreal. it’s cold), heated seats are a good thing. Nothing beats warm buns on a cold day.
Yesterday, I took our new bun-warmer to a local garage and had a GPS-tracking anti-theft system installed. Keep your fingers crossed.
Booyah!
So there was, in fact, an unbelievably simple way to do what I was trying to do – Feedburner has an option called BuzzBoost in the Publicize tab that does pretty much exactly what I set out to do, namely, have an updated list of recent entries from The Communal Kitchen.
The results are right over there
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I’ve lost my geek mojo
Help!
I’m trying to be a good girl and post more regularly to The Communal Kitchen, and I want to incorporate the RSS feed from that blog into this blog’s sidebar.
Translation: I want new entry titles from my recipe site to appear as links in a permanent section in the sidebar of the page you’re currently reading.
I’ve found a few variations on this theme, but no code that actually does what I want it to, and I can’t figure out how to tweak the codes I have found to make them do my bidding.
I have set up a feedburner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCommunalKitchen#
Maybe it’s my keywords, but most of the stuff I’ve turned up in researching this is either how to set up a feed for your site (which I’ve done) or how to read other feeds in various readers.
I’m convinced that what I am trying to do is easy, and that I’m probably just overlooking a really simple solution – help!
If you have a nice, simple solution (or even a messy complicated one, really), please let me know!
In case you were wondering what I think about in the bathroom
So I was brushing my teeth this morning, and reading the toothpaste tube, since there’s not a whole lot of intellectual stimulation to be gleaned from the brushing itself. The tube in question is a stand-up model, so I assume the marketers were referring to the packaging when the stuck a big friendly circle on the cap that trumpets “CLEAN! EASY TO USE!”
This is a big relief, because until now my relationship with toothpaste has been, sadly, dirty and complicated.