Generation Exhausted

Dollar daze

It looks like 2006 is going to be The Year I Get All Responsible With Money (Or At Least Try To), so when I headed for the grocery store today, it was with one thing in mind:

Buy a week's worth of groceries.

You see, for many, many, many years, I've bought groceries for two, two and a half, three, even four weeks at a time. But I'd like to get a better handle on just how much it costs to feed this family of mine, so I figured I'd start with seeing what a week's worth costs.

But the dollar sales are my downfall.

You see, when something - yogurt tubes, canned ravioli, Corn Flakes - are onyl a dollar, I think, "Heck! It's only a dollar! I'll get two! Or three!"

And god forbid there's an item limit. Because if the sign says "Only Six Per Customer" then I interpret that as "If you're Not Buying Six, You're Making A Serious Mistake."

End result: $245. But we have enough canned ravioli and Corn Flakes to last a month.

Their EI must have run out

If they think this will make them "cool", they're mistaken.

Canada's ex-prime ministers in reality TV gig

I like the show's premise, and it seems to me it was done at least once before. However, you have to wonder if these four former PMs are really entertaining enough to attract viewers.

Let's see...Mulroney could sing "Irish Eyes Are Smiling". Campbell could appear nude while holding her judges robes in front of her naughty bits. And I suppose Turner could pat the female contenders on the bum. Clark? I dunno, maybe he square dances.

But Chretien? Although scandal and corruption do make for good TV. I envision alliances made and broken, a la Survivor, with a bit of bribery thrown in for good measure.

Then again, maybe it's just that they're no longer qualified to do anything else.

No, I can't just stop talking.

Add "off the heezy" to the list of things my children have forbidden me from saying out loud. Especially in public.

Already on the list are "fo' shizzle" and "s'up dawg?"

And apparently, "all up in my grill" has gone out of fashion, in favour of "all up in my Kool-Aid(tm)" Which I'm also not allowed to say.

However, should my teenager be heard to say "Who peed in your Corn Flakes?", I swear, she didn't hear it from me.

If I'd known he was there, I would have paid more attention

ALERT TO MY AMERICAN READERS: Canadian politics-type stuff coming up. You may politely avert your eyes, or take advantage of this opportunity to expand your intellectual horizons. Actually, it's not about politics at all, so why don't you stay tuned and see what happens?

Regardless of your political stripe, I don't think you can deny that this guy is freakin' hilarious. And kudos to the Libs for letting it appear on their official party site. I maybe read Feschuk a few times when he wrote for the Post, and neither of those times was I awestruck by his apparent genius. Clearly, the old Post overlooked a gem in their midst, never letting his true talent shine through. Perhaps they couldn't hear him over Eckler's whine.

I was up past 4 this morning, catching up on the first 52 days of his blog. I wish I'd seen it sooner - he's taken the most boring thing in the world (a federal election? Didn't we just vote last year?) and made it entertaining.

Since he's likely going to be out of a job come Tuesday morning, I hope that the employment offers will pour in. Perhaps Air Farce or 22 Minutes. Or someone south of the 49th.

The guy's a hoot.

Thirteenth. T-H-I-R-T-E-E-N-T-H.

Well.

In the days leading up to the Spelling Bee, as we tried desperately to cram twenty years worth of vocabulary into a nine-year-old's head (seriously, I haven't used my dictionary so much in YEARS. And I'm a writer), we talked much about luck.

Spelling bees are about skill, yes, but they are also about luck. Particularly when the words are coming off a randomly generated list, and the order of the list has to be adhered to. So that an eighth-grader has to spell the word "youth" and the fourth-grader sitting next in line has to spell the word "obliquely". You study hard, and learn everything you can about language (which is especially impressive in a school system that still believes, all the way through elementary school that spelling doesn't "count"), and then hope like heck that the one word in 200 that you haven't mastered isn't given when it's your turn.

Now, we believe the "baby" has a certain amount of "luck". She was born, you see, at the 13th minute of the 13th hour of the 13th day of November. She weighed 6 lbs. and 13 ounces. Thirteen unlucky? Pshaw. It's her number.

So, guess how she did out of 30 kids? She came in 13th.

Which is pretty darn good for her first kick at the can. She's got four more years of Spelling Bee opportunities ahead of her. We're all very proud.

Oh, and I take full responsibility for her not advancing another round. Had she gotten "maelstrom" she probably would have hung in there longer, because it's a ride at Disney World. However, we don't follow the CFL, hence the word "argonaut" was completely foreign to her.

Ruminations

Baby Think It Over (tm) is visiting tonight. The thing was totally silent from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. and then started squalling, and has been doing so periodically since then. Methinks it has its days and nights mixed up. Like its grandmother, I suppose.

Another driving lesson last night. Twenty minutes around the neighbourhood was all I could take. I may paint an "L" and an "R" on the backs of her hands to help her out.

Oldest also told me I could not talk about her on my blog anymore. She's going to give me guidelines. I asked if I could blog about the guidelines, and she was not amused.

Little one is the best speller she could possibly be with only five days practise. Practice. Think good thoughts.

And, from somewhere, I've gotten a cosmic kick in the ass. I got an assignment yesterday morning, mailed out a partial to an agent in the afternoon, and sent a query last night. Today I touched base with an editor somewhere else, and things look good. I also went to bed at 11 last night, and was up at 7:30 this morning, and did not nap. Worked like a demon all day. Things are looking up.

Busy. B-U-S-Y. Busy.

Twenty-eight years ago, I learned how to spell chimney the hard way. I was in the first grade, and was taking part in the primary spelling bee. I had practiced and studied and practiced, and, even at that young age, had begun to believe my own press.

The word was chimney. C-H-I-M-N-E-Y. Chimney. I spelled it, and looked to the judges.

"Could you please repeat that?" they asked.

So, I panicked, decided I must have made a mistake, and spelled it wrong the second time. I was out.

I haven't spelled it wrong since. And in Grade Three, I won the primary Spelling Bee, so all was good.

I'm spending the weekend living vicariously through my youngest daughter. The little one will represent her class in the school Spelling Bee later this week, so we are preparing. I thought I was a good speller. Ha! There are words on this list that I've never HEARD of, and I'm wondering how my Little Reluctant Reader is going to do.

We quiz for fifteen minutes or so, spend another few minutes studying, and then break for an hour or more. There are also now 200+ index cards taped to her bedrom wall with the harder words printed on them. I'm all about the variety of study methods around here.

We'll keep you posted. P-O-S-T-E-D. Posted.

What happens when I run out of letters?

A sure sign of my prolific nature is my computer keyboard. When we got the last new computer in fall 2004, which meant a shifting around the household of existing computers, hubby quietly requested the new keyboard. "Just once," he said, "I'd like to start off with all the letters."

See, it's only a matter of weeks with a new keyboard before the letters start to rub off. The "e" key is the first to begin fading, followed shortly by the "s". At present, this is the state of my keyboard, which has been the victim of my flying fingers since 2003:

Long gone: e, a, s

Barely recognizable: d, r, c

On their way out: g, m, n, f, w, t

That's 12 out of 26 letters. And the "h" has started to go too. Oddly enough, the enter key, which you'd think would be pretty significant, is intact, as are all the numbers and punctuation keys.

It drives the kids nuts, especially the little one. She'll sit down at my computer to type something, or play a game, and then exclaim, "You have no E! How can I type without any E?"

I've conversed with enough writers that I know this is a common problem. Those of us who type so much that the letters wear off ideally type well enough that we're not hunting and pecking. Nonetheless, it strikes me - is the fading of the keys a sign that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing? And should the letters cease their disappearing act, does that mean I'm not writing enough?

Do I not use enough periods or commas, or that holy mark of the true literati, the semi-colon? Does the continuing presence of the question mark mean I'm not asking enough questions? Does the fading of the "w" mean I'm spending too much time on the World Wide Web?

I don't know. But I guess that as long as I'm running out of letters I'm not running out of words.

Everybody off the sidewalks!

This afternoon, I waited in a really long line, and then paid $125 for the privilege of aging instantly.

Oh, and they gave my little girl a piece of paper that says she can get behind the wheel and learn to drive.

Later, I let her drive four blocks on the way home from somewhere. Under the heading of "things I'm supposed to tell my kids but never thought of" add, "You don't use both feet when you drive."

My mom took her out for a whole hour after that, and LET HER DRIVE WHERE THERE WERE OTHER CARS AROUND.

My mother and I are now swapping ulcer stories.

I don't know if I'll ever get used to this.

It is too real life. So there.

Hubby was most impressed to see that some people were having a conversation, right here in my very own blog comments. So I told him who was having the conversation, and what they were talking about, and why it mattered, etc. etc.

And he just gave me one of those looks. You know. THOSE looks.

Which told me that:

a)he could have gone on and lived quite happily never having had the whole thing explained to him

b)he still wonders sometimes if my "life on the internets" isn't perhaps a hazard to my mental well-being

c)he sometimes thinks that the phrase ball and chain should be changed to cross to bear.

But he loves me muchly, even when I start talking about the people that live on the internets. He knows they're real, at least some of them. Linda has even been in my very own living room. And someone named AGK sent a Christmas card once. Make-believe people don't send Christmas cards.

And to think, he never would have given me that look if Linda would just learn to spell my name. You'd think my BFF would have memorized it by now. I know it's a little more complex than "AGK", but really.