Friday, September 19, 2008

Just Peachy

After a flurry of blogging the past few weeks, I see it all came to a crashing halt. It's been a boring type of busy lately.

Last week, much of my free time was spent getting ready for the baby's christening, cleaning, shopping, cake making blahblahblah. The day went very well, thank you for asking. Except of course that it was the one day all month where the Humidex goes to nuts and we had to keep cranking the AC up lest the guests melt into a puddle round the shrimp ring.

The rest of the time I have been drowning under a mountain of...peaches. Peaches. Hundreds of peaches.

A friend of mine has a 4 peach trees in her backyard, and this year, for whatever reason (most likely the copious rain) they have produced ridiculous amounts of fruit. I think she has peaches numbering in the thousands. So last week, I went to her house and we picked peaches (me off the tree, Kieran off the ground), brought them home and I went to work freezing, baking and pureeing them into baby food. I used them all up and was patting myself on the back for being both thrifty and domestic-goddess like.

Then earlier this week,since we hadn't had any for several days, Kieran started to ask for peaches so I went out a bought a big basket. The next day, the peach-friend calls to beg me to come back and take more. So, reluctantly I go to her house and lined up in her entryway are three overflowing bags of peaches. I pray she isn't expecting me to take all of them, but she was. I lug them home and drop them on our doorstep and today figured I had to start doing something with them. It wasn't the warm and fuzzy (pun intended) domestic experience of last week. This week the peaches are on their last legs...huge rotting spots on many of them, and covered in 8 trillion fruit flies. Sometimes I would reach into the bag and my hand would just hit mush. I'm pretty sure they were actually rotting in front of my eyes as I was sorting through them. But, I went back to work, finding all the good ones and pureeing MORE baby food (poor Kaya is going to have peaches every day until she's 2), freezing more bags for protein shakes and future crisps and smoothies and then even made a cobbler for dinner. After what felt like hours, I gave up and took about 40 out the green bin and dumped them in. Then I turned around to see that i still have a full bag remaining...not to mention the basket that I bought a few days ago. Uncle.

And this weekend...we are picking apples. Luckily, I loathe cooked apples - no pie crust or cobbler topping can distract me from my hatred, so no baking frenzy will take place. Selfish I know, however, the fruit flies will have a new place to call home.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Tidbits...or Timbits. Mmmm Timbits

So, I read somewhere that if you haven't lost the baby weight by 6 months you never will. I need to know what they mean by "never". Is that statistically never or empirically never? No matter. I still have five weeks.


Lance Armstrong is planning a comeback to racing. Please. Can't anyone stay retired any more? Next thing you know my Dad will come out of retirement to go back to teaching. It's all so predictable. Besides, what does he (Lance, not my dad) want to prove? That he's found yet some new way to escape steroid detection? Call me cynical and jaded. Call me irresponsible, but I for one do not believe that man won 6 (or was it 7) Tours de France (Tour de Frances?) completely clean. Can't he just stick to dating starlets?


The baby slept for 12 hours solid last night. Seven-thirty to seven-thirty and not a single peep in between. I fully expect three wise men show up at our door bearing gifts for the new messiah. Which will be nice...I'll finally find out what the hell myrrh is.


Eric bought a couple of Scratch and Win tickets the other night. My ticket (boringly) consisted of scratching four symbols and then winning the corresponding prize at the end of the line. On my second line I won $50. Whoo Hoo! Then I won $5... whoo hoo. Then I won $20....then I read the rules. Apparently I needed to have 4 matching symbols, not three like I thought. I continued to scratch the ticket and by their rules I won nothing. By MY rules I won $100,175.


We went last week to update our Health Cards. Since Eric had to replace his anyway (his wallet still MIA) and since mine is one of the old, raggedy Red and White jobbies, we all went. It was the usual rush of getting two kids out the door for an undetermined length of time, so I was a bit frazzled when we finally hit the road. We finally got to the right place and had just settled in waiting for our number to be called.
Me: "Thank God we don't have to get our picture taken. I totally forgot to brush my hair."
Awkward Pause as I look around the room and see cameras flashing all over the place.
Me: "Ohhhhh."
Eric: "How did you not know this?"
Me: "The kids cards don't have pictures..."
Eric: "You're an idiot."
An idiot, with frizzy unbrushed hair and an official document to prove it.


We went to watch Eric's playoff baseball game on Sunday night. I was not-so-secretly-hoping his team would lose, so he would have Sunday night's free again. Watching baseball with babies is scary. I kept having visions of foul balls smashing into soft baby skulls. (See? Scary thought, right?) We didn't stay long. And they lost, so our work was done anyway.

I'm waiting anxiously for the Fall TV season to start. I actually watched The Hills for the first time ever last week. Is that show supposed to be real? I'm not sure what the hell is going on, but everyone on it is a complete tool. I followed that up with a little 90210 which is Lance Jonesing itself back onto our lives. It's the same stupid show as 15 years ago, only this time there's a black kid.   Yawn.




Friday, September 5, 2008

Water Wars

Sadly, I have no new Internet rumours to report today. This saddens me as my life, as you will see from the next entry,  is quite dull otherwise. 

I know I have mentioned past run-ins with the neighbours on both sides. The old people who get all bent out of shape about Eric's clients parking on the street are a total write off. But the younger people on the other side are OKish. Or, the wife and kids are OK. The husband though is creepy. For a few months he forgot my name and was calling me "Jezebel". How brutal is that? We know he's a drinker, but I'm never sure if he's also sort of stupid because he asks me the same questions every time we have a conversation. 

Anyway, he is currently refilling his pool after having the liner repaired and he asked Eric yesterday afternoon, just as we were heading out for a few hours,  if he could borrow our hose. Eric said OK. Obviously, we are totally naive because we didn't think anything of it until we come home and see that he's borrowing our hose all right....still hooked up to our water. So, at about 10 pm last night the water was still running so we figured enough is enough and  turned it off. Literally seconds later, the guy is banging at our door explaining to Eric that he'll pay us blahblahblah, so the water got turned back on. 

This morning at 7,  I get up and I can STILL hear the water running so I go outside to turn it off. I'm just coming back into the house and there he is over the fence. "Oh, sorry about the hose, Jezebel." What? Is this guy standing over the hose all night? Does an alarm sound inside his house if our hose stops? I was out there for five seconds! Anyway, I told him I was turning it off, but he said he would give us $100 and then give us more if our water bill was crazy. It still pisses me off though. I'm not sure if I'm being unreasonable and un-neighbourly, but his pool takes 20,000 litres of water! Why do we have to be responsible for half of it? 

It's better when your neighbours are NOT talking to you I think.  






Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Politically Incorrect

I'm not so much into politics, American or Canadian. I like to know a little bit about most issues so I can get by at a dinner party and vote with a clear conscience. Of course, if there is something that particularly interests me, I'll go to great lengths to learn a lot about it. But in general I prefer other types of news...like gossip.

But when politics and salacious gossip come together....it's fabulous.

Simply put, I am fascinated, BEYOND FASCINATED with the current scandal that is unfolding in the US regarding Sarah Palin, John McCain's questionable pick as his presidential running mate.

First of all, I'm going to come right out and say that Sarah Palin is the kind of woman I loathe, both in real life and politics. She is a gun-loving conservative of the highest order, is anti-abortion (even in the case of rape), wants creationism taught in schools AND believes sex ed is teaching "abstinence only". And she has poofy blow-dried hair, which may or may not be held up by a banana clip.

No, Sarah Palin and I would NOT be friends.

Oddly, my dislike of Palin started way before she ever entered into the American election race. No, I first disliked her back in April after I gave birth to the Papaya.

Kaya was born on April 13. Sarah Palin, who is 44, gave birth to a son on April 18. So, the uncertainty and randomness of childbirth was still fresh in my mind when I heard about this Alaskan Governor whose water broke while on state business in Texas. What did this woman do? No, no, she didn't check into the neareast Dallas hospital. She did what any mother of four (soon to be five) would do...she stayed in Texas to give her speech that night, then without telling anyone at the airline that she was in labour (or soon should be), boarded a plane to fly from Texas to Alaska (with a stopover in Seattle no-less). She landed in Alaska, then drove past some fancy medical centres in Anchorage to give birth to her son in a hokey small town hospital an hour away. Did I mention that she had gone into labour one month early and her son was born with Down's Syndrome, which they knew about before hand? At the time, I distinctly, remember thinking: "is this woman a MORON?" I thought this was THE most irresponsible thing I had ever heard.

The childbirth rule is simple: the more children you have the faster labour goes. Now, "Three-Failed-Labour-Inducing-Gel-Gen" will be the very first to admit that there are exceptions to every rule, however that does not change the fact that you just DON'T know that YOU'RE going to the be that exception. How did this woman know she wasn't going to give birth on the plane? What a horrible, unforgivable, risk to take with the life of your baby. As a brand new mother I was offended by this woman's reasoning which seemed to boil down to some sense of misguided Alaskan patriotism. After all, I'm sure the baby would rather be alive than "Alaskan".

Fast forward four and half months and, low and behold, this woman of questionable judgement is (rashly in my mind) chosen as John McCain's running mate. Her, and naturally her fresh-scrubbed family, are thrown into the intense media spotlight. It takes only a few short days before rumours start to surface, that Sarah Palin's fifth baby was not hers at all, but was, in fact, the son of her now-17-year-old daughter.

Sure it's a vicious rumour, but for me, it's like everything clicked into place. You sure wouldn't be worried about flying across the country (two countries, in fact) if you weren't actually pregnant.

After doing a bit of research, keeping in mind that it can be hard to differentiate fact from fiction on the internet, it would appear that this rumour has some serious legs. As in, the daughter apparently was removed from school for 5 months last year for "mono", and the fact that Palin sprung the news of her pregnancy on a shocked public when she was 7 months pregnant didn't look it.

Believe it or not, I think I actually would prefer that this woman would try to pass off her unwed teenage daughters baby as her own for presumably, the sake of her career and and her reputation, rather than believe that she would be so cavalier as to risk her baby's life as she indisputably did. Or maybe I wouldn't. Whatever the scenario, the woman is an idiot.

But it's not over yet!

Yesterday the news breaks that NOW Sarah Palin's teenage daughter is 5 months pregnant. What?! They apparently decided to announce the pregnancy to dispel the growing rumours about baby Trig's parentage. Since when is "She wasn't pregnant then, but NOW she is" an appropriate defense?

My mind is just about the explode.

Could this be an elaborate cover up of monumental proportions? Could Bristol Palin be pregnant...for the second time?Far less likely, and I'll only mention it because it would be hilarious...could they be faking her pregnancy now ? After all 5 months is a very convenient length of time to be pregnant when trying to dispel rumours that a 4.5 month old is not yours.

Regardless, that "abstinence only" education has worked like a CHARM.

All I can say is that I do feel horrendously sorry for the teenaged Bristol who gets the short, pointy end of the stick no matter what scenario turns out to be true. Because to live out whatever drama she's been living, under the global media spotlight, must be a nightmare. The best thing for poor Bristol would be for her mother to withdraw from the ticket. I might actually gain some respect for the woman if she did that.

I have no idea where this will go....perhaps the truth is exactly what has been publicly put forward. I have no idea and I don't really care. But the simple fact that this scandal is attached to a US Presidential Election makes it irresistible. Can it last? Is there more to come? If my head is going to explode, what about John McCain's? We all know he's not getting any younger.

America...this could be your First Family!!