Maggie's Holiday

Is this the face of someone mising their mum while she was away???

Yeah, didn't think so

um, yeah, so this is a little embarrassing .....

I was reading this and was reminded of a similar incident a few years back ....

I was house/dog sitting at a friend's place for a couple of weeks. After I got home and unpacked all of my stuff I realized that I had forgotten something. This is kind of the conversation that ensued ....

"Hey -- welcome back! Good trip? Great!! So, um, well, yeah, this is a little embarrassing, but I kind of forgot something in your bedroom. Yeah, nope, nothing like that. NOOOOOOOOO Not condoms or slinky underwear. Nope, my stuffed dog "Trouble" What???? Marlow ATE HIM?????!!!!! You found him under the pillows and thought how nice, Kathryn left a toy for Marlow. Sorry, all that's left is a plastic eye."

Somehow I think that leaving illicit material behind would have been less embarrassing.

almost too much cuteness to bear

Maggie went to stay with her auntie in Squamish for a few days last week --- looks like she had a terrible time, non?

Shootings at Dawson College, Montreal

By now pretty much everyone in North America has heard about this tragedy in some form or another. It struck pretty close close to home for me, being from Montreal, and in particular because the apartment my parents, until very recently, lived in while in the city overlooked Dawson College and I attended the college, many, many years ago. It's all well and good for us Canadians to say that guns and violence are an American problem but I believe that this incident was a huge dose of the unfortunate reality that is our current culture.

I was up late last night, unable to sleep for a variety of unrelated reasons, and caught some US network news casts and was kind of shocked and then impressed that they were reporting live from Montreal about the shootings. Given the natural preoccupation of the 5 year anniversary of the 9/11 bombings, it was nice (wrong word but I can't think of another) to see them expanding their sometimes narrow focus of world events to include what some consider to be an insignificant country to the north. However, my cousin just sent me the following email that she sent to a radio station she listens to from Bellingham, WA, directly across the border:

"There is a large country just north of you called "Canada" - ever heard of it? 13 students were shot yesterday - one confirmed dead - at a college in Montreal, Quebec. It would have been nice for you to acknowledge this horrible event in your news report this morning. Instead, your D.J.s chose to yammer on about car brakes and property taxes. Why?"

Why indeed.

*EDIT - half of this post seems to have been eaten by blogger --- the rest of the intended post waxed poetically about how the whole point was not that we should care about what the American media thinks of us, and why are we always concerned with what they think and report, etc. but that the tragedy and horror of such a terrible event happening in an extremely safe city and country. Then I got this email from my mum this morning (slightly edited as I am not going to share everything my mummy says to me):

"have been in Montreal for 2 days (yes, during the shooting at Dawson which was very scary as we were in the neighbourhood... greene avenue etc. weren't witness to it but definitely had our day disrupted with traffic etc as you could not go west of Peel or east of Greene Ave... quite a large area for a Westmount type... still don't know a lot about the killing or how bad the last four students are in Hospital but whatever, it was a horrible event and so shocking in our very very safe city.... Daddy has a story to tell re the event as one of his lawyers that he was meeting with that day was involved at the outset innocently walking into Westmount Square when he was confronted by the murderer who asked him to take a bag out of a car and carry it...he said why and no... and the guy pointed a gun at him and told him to take the fu..... bag or he would kill him... needless to say he took it but fortunately shortly after walked into a police car, threw the bag and ran... and then events unfolded.... ask Daddy he knows all the details... lots of love Mummy"

yeah, so I have standards

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Beautiful Girls
Metropolitan
Love Actually
The Princess Bride
BBC Pride & Prejudice

Q. What do these films have in common??

A. They have been watched and enjoyed repeatedly by me and if you hope to stand any chance of having any sort of lasting relationship with me (read like longer than a weekend) you had better get used to this and LOVE it.

Other desired features include, but are not limited to, the following:

Dancing in the kitchen just ‘cause it’s fun

Embracing the joy that is eating cinnamon toast fingers, in bed, with hot cups of tea

Waking up to the first snow of the season and running outside right away to revel in it --- coat and boots over jammies

Realizing that it’s because she’s Maggie

Crossword puzzles are done in ink and reading anything of mine before I get the chance to is a crime punishable by death (seriously)

Generally speaking, I am right

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I am certain this also serves to solidify many people’s belief that I am not quite sane (or ever so slightly difficult …)

Happiness is a warm puppy, really

God but this picture gave me the ever-so-much-needed warm fuzzies this morning.

One of the many, many joys of being a woman

Went 4 rounds with the endometriosis last night, as opposed to the usual 9 or 10, so all things considered I got off pretty light. I haven’t had a bout in a couple of months and so thought maybe it had passed --- after all there had been a good 10 years of dormancy until it reared its ugly head again last June. I had felt rather off all day and so engaged my usual preventative fasting tactic (my reasoning being that if there is nothing IN my system to begin with, then there is nothing to be forced OUT). It doesn’t really work, but it gives me some source of comfort.

In any event, on schedule at 11 pm (it only ever happens at night, usually after 11), the pain kicked in, the vomiting and other loveliness ensued and then I spent a good 40 minutes lying at the bottom of my shower with scorching hot water beating down on my lower abdomen. Pretty picture, non?? However, like I said it was only 4 rounds, so I did not feel like committing Hare Kari, which sometimes feels like the most logical option.

Having never had children I don’t know first hand what labour feels like, but I have a feeling that this is pretty similar ---- uterus contracting at pretty regular intervals, and all that, unbelievable pain and shaking and then that tricky calm with no pain, but YOU KNOW IT”S COMING!!!!!!! The self-styled hydrotherapy combined with some serious painkillers eventually kicked in, enabling me to drag my sorry soggy self, wrapped in my fluffy robe, to the couch to settle in for a few mind-numbing hours of CSI, ’cause although dopey from the drugs, sleep tends to elude me for many hours.

So yeah, I am whining and felling really, really tired. Not to mention highly irritable and apt to bite your head off if you so much as look at me sideways.


You have been warned and ..... Happy Monday.

YIKES!!!

Was just down in Starbucks, perusing their cd selection while waiting for my coffee. Sam Moore, of Sam & Dave fame, has released a "new" album of cover songs which looks to be quite excellent. However, on closer inspection it was revealed that he is doing a cover of "Blame It On The Rain" --- infamously "recorded" by that marvel of 80's marketing Milli Vanilli.

That is just so very wrong.

I only carry real money

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT ANTI-AMERICAN. QUITE FOND OF OUR NEIGHBOURS TO THE SOUTH AS A MATTER OF FACT. HOWEVER, PEOPLE LIKE THE ONES DESCRIBED BELOW GIVE THE REST OF THEIR COUNTRY(WO)MEN A BAD NAME

I was getting coffee this morning on my way in to the office and there was a bit of a hold-up at the front of the line. What was the cause of this hold-up? 3 Americans paying for their morning cup-o-jo with American currency. In and of itself an annoyance ---- the assumption that anyone will simply take American currency in a country other than the United States and give them the current and correct exchange rate. Imagine trying that in their country? Yeah, that'll happen --- they treat Canadian currency like it's Monopoly money and won't even take a Canadian penny for chrissakes!!!!!! When I was in the service industry (waiting tables, tending bar and the like) I would happily take American cash AT PAR. Amazing how many people accepted that. Yet I digress.

What made it worse than the fact that they simply assumed that the foreign currency would be accepted without question was the following statement:

"I only carry real money."

Nice.