It's the last day of 2008. To celebrate, Blake and I are watching the last episode of the latest season of Canada's Worst Driver, and hopefully going to bed early. Last night we stayed up too late and ended up sleeping in, which made us late to go to the Art Gallery, but more importantly made Blake hurry through his morning routine and miss his cup of coffee, so I had to deal with his bad mood all the way through the gallery. It was like dragging a recalcitrant donkey around.

But I digress. This here is my New Year's Resolutions post. I meant to make one of these a year ago, but I never got to it, which leads me to my first resolution:

Blog more. As you might have guessed from my frantic book blogging of the last few days, I have a lot more to say than I actually get around to saying. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion, but there's no point in having a blog if you don't post to it. Now that the girls are a little older, and now that we have two computers (maybe three if we get the new router and the old Toshiba set up) I hope I can post at least once at week. That should allow me to, at least, keep on top of the books.

I alluded to the necessity of my next resolution above: try to sleep from 11 until 7. I know, eight hours a night for a mother of two seems a little princessy, but really the whole family is better off when I've had my beauty sleep. It also seems to me that I feel most well-rested when I wake up at 7, and I have a pretty good alert period in the late evening which I could take advantage of if I stayed up until 11. I read an article in New Scientist a few years ago which said that everyone has their own natural "time zone" (and so some people's time zone doesn't fit into the 9-5 world, which gives them a kind of societally-inflicted jet lag). I think 11 to 7 works best for me — I'm just a little too cranky when I wake up before 7. Fortunately the girls sleep that late most days.

(This might be my last year of sleeping until 7 for a long time, since next year Delphine starts Grade One and I'm not sure if we can get out the door in time waking up at 7.)

Next, I'm going to try and schedule more playdates for Delphine. She's a really social little kid and I know she would love to play with her friends more — I know I would have when I was her age. The only reason she doesn't is that I don't get around to scheduling playdates for her. So I'm going to try harder and get her out there (or someone over here) maybe once a week or so.

This one is a bit embarrassing, but here it is. I have a problem keeping my cat's water clean. I tend to fill it up and then leave it for days while it gets gnarlier and gnarlier until Thomas is obliged to drink the leftover water in the bathtub. To be sure, Thomas contributes by doing everything in his limited power to drown pieces of kibble in the water bowl, and by inexplicably flicking the water out of the bowl and mucking up the tray his water lives in. Anyway, I need to just suck it up and pick up Thomas's gross water bowl every day and replace it with a clean one. How hard is that?

I need to talk to my mother more often. Before my dad died I talked on the phone with my mother maybe every couple of weeks, which isn't often enough. I should talk to her every couple of days at least, just to touch base and chit chat. Part of the problem is that I just don't make the time to call, and part of the problem is that my mother is incapable of ten minute phone calls; every call turns into a hour-long extravaganza. However, maybe if I called every day my Mum wouldn't feel the need to keep me on the phone forever? Anyway, I make stupid excuses, like I have two little kids and I'm tired and I have other stuff to do, but of course those excuses won't hold much water when my Mum is gone too and I've missed a thousand opportunities to talk to her. That would be stupid.

This is a gimme: I'm going to give up on houseplants. I just can't do it. My house is too dark and I never remember to water them at the right time, and I just don't care that much. I have enough trouble keeping three people and a cat alive. The houseplants are toast.

I have a million books on hold at the library, but I have to catch up on my Neal Stephenson. I read Cryptonomicon but I haven't read any since then, and my geek cred is severely suffering as a result. I don't know if I'm going to plough through The Baroque Trilogy or just skip straight to the latest one. We'll see.

I read The Greek for Love: A Memoir of Sorrow and Joy by James Chatto because it was favourably reviewed in the Globe, and because it's set (is it called "set" when it's non-fiction?) in Corfu, a part of Greece I have some memoirish familiarity with due to my obsessive childhood love of Gerald Durrell. I thought it would be interesting to read a different, more modern perspective on the island. Also this book is about someone losing a child. Like most parents I am consumed with fear that I will lose (nice euphemism, as if I'm going to put them down in a restaurant and forget to take them with me, like a pair of gloves or an umbrella) one of my children and my life will be destroyed. I know I can't reasonably be assured that both my children will survive me, but the matter of whether or not I can go on with my life in the event of a tragedy is much more in my control. So I rather like to read about people surviving and carrying on after the death of a child.

This book provided admirably on both counts; it's an evocative sketch of Corfu in the seventies (? I think it was the seventies): the weather, the landscape, the crazy locals and the lovely ones. It was also a beautifully written story of loss and how the author and his wife dealt with it and moved through it.

So funny story. It was coming up to Blake's birthday and as usual I had no idea what to get him. Mostly Blake wants arcane pieces of electronic equipment that usually cost a few hundred dollars. So I buy him socks and underwear, and chocolate-covered marzipan. Well, he's a reader too so this year I went to the local second-hand bookstore and stood gormlessly in front of the SF/Fantasy section, apparently mistaking him for my first boyfriend who would read pretty much any SF or fantasy. After a few moments I came to my senses and remembered that if 80% of everything is crap, 99% of genre fiction is crap and likely Blake had already read the 1% of SF that isn't. So I shuffled disconsolately around the store until I got to the non-fiction section, which as you might guess is my favourite place.

Now the problem with buying books for another reader, especially when your interests overlap somewhat, is that it's hard to tell whether you have picked up a particular book because you think the other person would enjoy it, or because you want to get your own hands on it. (We actually have a convention in our family that it's fine to read a book, carefully, before you give it to someone as a gift.) So there I was standing in front of the non-fiction books trying to figure out what I could give to Blake that wouldn't be too transparently something I wanted to read myself, when a peculiar thought came to me:

"I wish Dave were here, he would know what to get."

Now why my brother, who lives on the other side of the planet and who hasn't seen Blake for years, would know better than I who spend every day with the man what Blake would like to read I don't know, but just then my eyes lit upon the Bill Bryson books and I remembered that Dave had said something favourable about Bryson recently in his blog. I also remembered that Blake had enjoyed another of his books, and so for Blake's birthday I got him The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson. And then read it. Well, I let Blake read it first. And it was very good, and I enjoyed it. Bill Bryson rocks, I should read more of his stuff.

Incidentally Blake really liked it too — I had forgotten that Bryson also wrote The Mother Tongue, a book Blake really enjoys. So apparently Dave actually is the go-to guy when I need a gift idea for my own husband. This is what happens when you marry your brother.

Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama came to me in a package from my mother, who had received it in turn from my brother. I believe Dave either got it from a friend or lent it to a friend before sending it to Mum, so our copy has been read by four people on two continents. Right now it's stuck on our bookshelf because Blake wants to read it but hasn't gotten to it. If anyone reading this would like it let me know and I will send it on, because it's a fantastic book. (Blake can get it from the library if he really wants to read it.)

A while ago I posted about why I was happy that Obama won the election, and a large part of that post was informed by what I know about the man from this book. It's wonderfully well-written and Obama is clearly a very intelligent person who isn't satisfied with just seeing the surfaces of things or with simple explanations. This book is about identity and personal history and I found it particularly interesting because I related to issues of constructing identity from family, of being an immigrant, and of having a mobile, unsettled childhood. It was a wonderful read and I am looking forward to reading The Audacity of Hope, and anything else Obama has the time to write.

Long Way Down: An Epic Journey by Motorcycle from Scotland to South Africa by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman is the companion book to the reality series of the same name, about McGregor and Boorman's motorcycle ride from John O'Groats to Cape Town. Good book, pretty much like Long Way Round which I read in 2006. I liked reading a new perspective on Africa.

Morgan secured her nomination for Sister-in-law Of The Year when she gave me Slash by Slash and Anthony Bozza for my birthday. (And now that I think of it, she borrowed it as soon as I finished it. I guess my new family is more like my old family than I sometimes realize.) I loved this book. This is going to sound odd, but it gave me new insight into the roots of the Guns N' Roses sound. When I started listening to them in 1988 or 89 I was basically coming to rock music cold, with a listening history of almost exclusively pop music. I've gained a clue or two since then but never re-examined GN'R, just maintained my uncomplicated love for their music. So it was very interesting to put that music into the context of the glam and punk scenes it was born from, scenes I didn't have Clue One about back when I was a pimply Good Girl teenager in northern Saskatchewan.

This book also gave me a more subtle appreciation for the contributions of the non Slash/Axl members of the band, who I had previously largely disregarded. Especially Steve Adler; I used to think he was pretty much an interchangable Lego-piece drummer, but Slash convinced me that his casually hyper rock style contributed significantly to the sound of Appetite for Destruction.

This book also made me appreciate just how much crap you can throw at a human body and have it survive. Well, more or less survive, if you have a pacemaker anyway. Slash had a weird, undisciplined childhood and a crazy life but he is grounded and disciplined and seems like a decent (in the "honest" sense if not the "proper" sense) guy. Fun book.

I took out The Vanished Landscape by Paul Johnson because I was looking for books about Staffordshire, where my mother is from. The subtitle of the book is "A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries", which is exactly what my mother had. Funnily enough, my mother's childhood and Johnson's couldn't have been more different. Johnson is the child of middle-class parents, his father an art teacher and his mother one of those women who does nice things for poor people. They moved from Manchester to Stoke when Johnson spent his early childhood.

My mother, on the other hand, is the child of working class parents and she grew up in a small town near Stoke, one of those pastoral Shire-like English towns, with hedgerows and sheep and little walls made of stones. The little towns that no longer exist because they've turned into exurbs of nearby cities. Anyway, Johnson is a beautiful writer and describes Stoke wonderfully, especially the "vanished landscape" of the title, the old potbanks and wastelands born of the pottery industry. His father taught him to see the Burtynsky-esque beauty in that kind of landscape. I also loved Johnson's descriptions of his family and other people, and his stories of a much more unfettered childhood than today's children are allowed.

My mother read this book, too, and it got her blood boiling because Johnson is an old-school English snob, going on about how the poor people (that's my Mum) are all dirty and ignorant and need charity. As it turns out Johnson (who I had never heard of before) came to America and was an advisor for the Republican party. No surprise there.

I will probably read more Johnson because I love how he writes, but I wish there were more memoirs of Staffordshire out there. Like Barack Obama, I am continually searching for my identity through my family history.

Kids' Fiction

The Treasure at Greene Knowe, and The Stones at Greene Knowe by Lucy Boston are books in a series I started reading last year, about an old house with lots of secrets and ghosts and things. I have always loved books about houses with lots of secrets and ghosts, hidden passageways and so on, and this series is no exception. It's very well written and I'm looking forward to sharing it with Delphine.

I had to pick up A Coyote's In The House by Elmore Leonard because I wanted to know how he would handle young adult fiction. Well, first of all he managed to contrive a situation in which he could legitimately use the word "bitch" a lot. Kudos! This is a book written from the point of view of a coyote contemplating the life of a domesticated dog. The characters are well-drawn and the story is good. I liked this book.

Adult Fiction

I read Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers because it was recommended in the Globe and Mail Books section, and because I was intrigued by the premise: the book is written almost entirely in notes between a woman and her teenage daughter, left, as you might guess, on the refrigerator door. Surprisingly enough, the conceit works and the story is well-told. It's a tear-jerker but ends on a hopeful note.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a book which Blake got me to read because he really enjoyed it. It's a SF mystery thriller about a vigilante assassin, full of plot twists and lies within lies which keep you guessing and manage to hang together right to the final page. It's one of those books which, upon finishing it, you immediately want to start it again so you can see if it all fits together properly. A great book if you like that sort of thing.

I put I Am Legend (and other stories) by Richard Matheson on hold at the library back when the movie came out — I do that a lot, read books which have been made into movies without bothering to see the movie. I am often intrigued by the premise of a movie but know that the book will be better (not to mention cheaper). Anyway, everyone else in Toronto did the same thing before me so it took ages for my turn to come, and the memory of the unseen movie had long faded by the time I got the book. I like horror, though, so I gave it a read and quite enjoyed the title story. It's the story of a guy who remains uninfected when a disease very much like vampirism spreads over the world. Kind of a cool post-apocalyptic story with a grim but satisfying ending.

I started reading the other stories in the book, but they were all kind of samish and didn't do much for me.

The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen is a book my mother sent me, a mystery about a lady who finds some bones in her garden and goes off to Maine to investigate them. It was pretty good. I've seen some people say that Tess Gerritsen is really great and she's won a couple of awards and been nominated for an Edgar, but this book didn't blow me away. Maybe I should read Vanish, the book which got all the awards. (Except apparently the Toronto Public Library doesn't have a copy. Go TPL!)

I picked up Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain and Watchman by Ian Rankin in summer as my fluffy, mindless reading. I chose them because I like the authors and that's what the library had on the shelves, and I managed to get a McBain book that isn't an 87th Precinct book and a Rankin that isn't a Rebus book. However, they were both pretty good reads, definitely fulfilling what I required of them.

I joined a book club in 2008, in part to force me to read more fiction, and to think about what I read more. In spite of how much I read — well, maybe because I read so much — I don't think about what I read as much as I would like to. Knowing I'm going to have to talk intelligently about the books forces me to read more mindfully, which improves all my reading.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult is a book about a girl, Anna, who is born to provide her sister Kate with bone marrow. Kate gets better but then gets sick again, over and over, and Anna keeps getting tapped for more and more biological matter. I quite enjoyed the book, I think (it was a while ago, but I know I didn't hate it, except the ending which was egregiously heart-rending), and there was plenty to talk about: the ethics of designer babies, issues of identity and responsibility to family, and a bizarre subplot about a lawyer with an anachronistically shameful disorder of his own. Pretty good but don't run out and read it or anything.

The Girls by Lori Larsen is a book about conjoined twins living in a small town near London, Ontario. This is a beautifully crafted book, not just about the sisters but about life in small-town Canada. I found the characters so compelling and real that I kept feeling I could Google them to find out their ultimate fate. The one weird thing is that although the girls in the book are almost my exact contemporaries I kept feeling the book was set in the fifties or sixties. I don't know if that was intentional on the part of the author, to evoke the nostalgia of small-town life or of the cloistered nature of the girls' lives, or not, but it quite jarring when one of the sisters started looking things up on the Internet herself. Other than that I really enjoyed this book.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs is about a New York woman who owns a knitting store and has a teenage daughter and meets up with an old friend and, I dunno, hilarity ensues. As you might guess I wasn't overwhelmed with love for this book. It was fluffy like a ball of mohair and seemed contrived.

Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant is a book about the various inhabitants of a dying town on the Massachusetts coast. It's gloomy reading but compelling. The characters are well-drawn and the stories are interesting and credible. A worthwhile read.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards is about a woman who, upon being asked to take a doctor's baby daughter, born with Down syndrome, to an institution, instead kidnaps the daughter and takes her to live in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile the doctor tells his wife that the baby died and they go on to have a messed-up marriage and never quite find happiness. A bunch of things happen and everyone lives happily ever after, more or less.

This was another good book which didn't blow me away. It seemed quite contrived and book clubbish, with lots of Talking Points and Dramatic Turns.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Yes, we read Ender's Game in book club. Weird! About half of the book club members don't read science fiction, so it was an interesting meeting. Anyway, so this is another book about a kid who is born for a special purpose, this time to be the child genius who saves mankind by having the a unique combination of video gaming skillz and innocence required to defeat an alien species which threatens mankind. You have to suspend your disbelief pretty high over a couple of things in this book, but if you give yourself over to Card you're rewarded with a good yarn and some interesting things to think over, like the ethics of using children to fight wars, and the similarity between modern warfare and video games. Also the techniques of military training, the value of adding in bits to a book which don't really make sense in that book but pave the way for a sequal, preemptive war, genocide, whether we could recognize the "humanity" in alien species, and what form those species might take, collective intelligence versus individual minds and the inability to truly know another person. Lots to talk about.

I actually read Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett as a companion piece to this (according to Blake there is a whole subgenre of "video games that turn out to be real" SF out there). They're quite different books but they're neck and neck in terms of quality of characterization and depth of insight, with Pratchett coming out ahead with Humour over Earnestness.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is my big winner this year, in terms of fiction. This book ripped me up. The writing is gorgeous and the characters are instantly compelling, but the plot is gruelling and horrifying. I wept for the women in this book, and at the same time I learned so much about Kabul and the recent history of Afghanistan. I sent my mother a copy of this book and she read it in two days. Fantastic book.

I'm not sure where to post this, but I saved it because it rings so true for me. It's from Robert Sapolsky's Essay, "Mountain Gorilla and Yeshiva Boy", in Curious Minds: How A Child Becomes A Scientist. He describes an epiphany:

...There is no God. This is gibberish.

Since then, I've had no religion, in fact no capacity for spirituality of any sort whatsoever. There is no facet of my life — love, parenting, mulling over why we are here — that I view outside the context of mechanistic science. For me, there is no Divine Watchmaker — no top-down volition, no purpose, no cause beyond what emerges from the complexity of biological systems. This is no a cold point of view: I am as intensely emotional now as I was at the age of thirteen, and I don't find science and emotionality to be at all contradictory. Nor do I believe that science is an emotional substitute for religion. But for me, it has finally made the religious worldview impossible.

Here are the parenting books I read in 2008, sorted into two categories:

Books that Made me Say "Enh"

These are books which were pretty useful but didn't change my world view or particularly affect my parenting style.

• Curious Minds ed. by John Brockman
• Toilet Training the Brazelton Way by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow
• Children: The Challenge by Rudolph Dreikurs
• Parent Talk by Stanley Shapiro and Karen Skinulis
• Your Five-Year-Old: Sunny and Serene by Ames and Ilg
• The Highly Sensitive Child by Elaine Aron
• Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
• The Money-Tree Myth by Gail Vaz-Oxlade

Awesome Books

These are the books which either blew me away with their insight or actually changed how I view my role as a parent.

• Breaking The Good Mom Myth: Every Mom's Modern Guide to Getting Past Perfection, Regaining Sanity, and Raising Great Kids by Alyson Schafer is about democratic parenting, the notion that kids are actually much more competent than they are given credit for, and that we must give them more responsibility to allow them to grow into competent and independent adults. (This philosophy also says that we should allow our children to experience the consequences of their decisions, which has unfortunately led to people using "consequence" as a euphemism for "punishment". If there's a point, some folk are bound to miss it.)
  

  This book changed how I parent; I used to fret so much about how to get them to tidy their rooms, how to get them to dress appropriately outside, how to get them to play nicely together. Schafer points out that you can't really "get" kids to do things, but you can treat them like human beings, explain the situation, help them make their own decisions and then live with them. The problem, of course, is that you have to live with their decisions too, but as long as you remember that your kids are not in fact tiny extensions of yourself, that's usually not really a problem. The nice thing is that once something is your kid's responsibility it's no longer yours! Hooray! - Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn. I was led to this book by the Schafer book, which is a bit ironic because Kohn tears a strip off the democratic parenting crowd for their euphemistic "consequences" and their apparent lack of sympathetic support for little kids. Anyway, this book is about how rewards (praise, stickers, grades, incentives, commissions, bonuses) are actually counterproductive in parenting and in business.
  

  Kohn is brilliant and very compelling and has led me to fundamentally change my parenting style. I now almost never praise the girls and never reward them, and I am very conscious of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in myself as well as them. Absolutely everyone should read this book, whether parents, teachers, employers, managers, or anyone else. - Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion by Dale McGowan is a collection of essays about raising children in a household without religion or other superstition. I was casting about for support in this area when I discovered this book, apparently the only one on this topic. It's a great book, interesting and funny and insightful. - The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing by Bruce Perry is a book about how the development of children who have undergone extreme trauma can teach us about normal mental development. It is fascinating, inspiring and at times grueling. Another must-read for anyone who has or works with children.

Back on November 17 when I started this blog entry I had read about fifty books since the beginning of the year. I wrote up eight of them and then got distracted (probably by reading, I think I have read another ten at least since then) and haven't worked on it since. It's now December 23rd, and I would really like to post my book logs for this year. The problem is I obviously don't have time to write up each book properly, so this is going to end up being a giant list of books I have read. I hate to do that because then it takes all the value-add out of a book blog and seems a lot like bragging. Neener neener, look at all the books I read, I'm such a smarty pants. But I've come to depend on my book blog to see what I have read and how I liked it, so I'm going to go ahead anyway, and I'll try and categorize things cleverly and hopefully write a little bit about books which really had an impact, so this isn't a completely worthless process.

But first, here are the eight books I wrote up back in November.

I ended up grouping all the books I've read into six rough categories: books on parenting and childhood development, memoirs, non-fiction books on other topics, books I read for my bookclub, and other fiction. (Okay, that's five. Degree in math, what?) The only thing which really surprised me was the number of books I read which could be termed memoirs. I certainly don't consider myself a person who reads memoirs. As it turns out there is no particular pattern or commonality among the memoirs I read; each one was chosen for some specific reason.

Anyway, here are the Non-Fiction (Other) books I read, broken into "Books About How To Do Stuff" and "Other Non-Fiction". Perhaps that should be "Otherer Non-Fiction".

Books About How To Do Stuff

Houseworks by Cynthia Townley Evers is a book about how to organize your house, or at least that's how it's billed. The author is the organizedhome.com lady, and this is to some extent a bookization of the website. It works very well as a book, since getting organized is inherently a somewhat linear procedure. But it's not just an organization book, it's really much more than that. It functions as a full household maintenance reference, along the lines of Home Comforts, by Cheryl Mendelson, although much less hardcore. I got some helpful tips from this book and I'm already pretty organized, so I recommend it to anyone who feels they need a little help in the housekeeping department.

Knife Skills Illustrated by Peter Hertzmann. Go ahead and guess what this book is about. It covers what to look for when you are buying knives, how to care for your knives and keep them sharp, and knife safety. The second half of the book demonstrates, through photographs, how to cut up various fruits, veggies, meats, and the other stuff you might want to dismember in the comfort of your own kitchen.
Insasmuch as something as inherently physical and three-dimensional can be taught in a book, this is a handy book. I still feel like I would learn more in a half-hour face-to-face with an expert.

The Naturalized Garden by Stephen Westcott-Gratton is about how to grow a garden which takes care of itself, by choosing indigenous and hardy plants suitable for the characteristics of your garden. This book discusses woodland (or shady) gardens, meadow (or sunny) gardens, and damp gardens. (I can't remember the picturesque name for damp gardens.) The author recommends hundreds of species and gives advice on planting and maintenance. I love this book and it has inspired me to (gradually) convert my back and front gardens to naturalized gardens. Thanks to Auntie J'Anne I already have a nice patch of hostas and ferns in the back, to which I added some astilbe and plenty of bulbs (I got one of those 75 bulbs for $30 deals, we'll see how they do). To my surprise I determined that the front of the backyard (if you will) is actually reasonably sunny so I will have to revisit the book sometime to get some meadow suggestions.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a book which is very much discussed and followed on the Interweb. I decided to check it out after screwing up something which seemed disastrous at the time but which I have now forgotten. I hate that feeling of being out of control I get when I miss something important or let someone down.

The author is an organization expert who has distilled all his experience with executives into this amazing foolproof n-step plan to get things done. I had to know. It actually does seem to be a really good system, although somehow the infrastructure doesn't entirely fit into my life, probably because I don't spend a whole lot of time with pen and paper, or computer. You do need to spend a little time on the infrastrucure of the system, but that's better than spending the time looking for lost files or apologizing to people for dropping the ball on things. I did implement some aspects of this book, most notably keeping little notebooks all over the place and writing everything down, and also creating a file system for absolutely everything. It has helped. I will probably get it out again soon and see what other incremental changes I can make.

The Global Warming Survival Handbook by David De Rothschild is a really rather handy little book of ideas on how you can act to reduce global climate change. There are plenty of good ideas in here, including big changes that will really make a difference, like living in a smaller house, close to work, and biking to work. And the most important — changing a lightbulb is good but changing a representative is better: vote for the people who will make a difference. (That's why I voted Liberal. Didn't seem to make a difference... sigh.)

I read this book in tandem with a little piece of crap that calls itself something like The Green Book. It's a bunch of tips from celebrities on how you can prevent climate change. The other book was written with scientists, and if I might advise you, when given the choice between taking tips from celebrities or taking tips from scientists on matters of science, go with the scientists. Celebrities have lots of great tips on, I dunno, mascara, but they don't know crap about climate change. This book perpetuates the nice myth that we'll be able to save the world without too much inconvenience. They suggest such profound changes as using paper matches instead of wooden matches. Not taking a receipt at the ATM. I think my favourite celebrity advice was from Jennifer Aniston. Apparently she saves water by brushing her teeth in the shower. Now unless I'm out of touch and Jennifer Aniston is actually the earthly manifestation of the multi-armed Hindu goddess of destruction Kali and can actually brush her teeth and soap up her hoo-hah &at the same time, brushing your teeth in the shower is exactly the same thing as brushing your teeth in front of the sink with the tap running! Stupid, so so stupid.

The book is notable only for it's amazing analogies: if everyone in America switched to single-ply tissues, say, a wad of snotrag the size of a cruise ship would be saved every year!
They must have had a team of interns devoted to the creation of a giant database of various dimensions and their pithy equivalents.

When You Catch An Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda. I love a good grammar book but this one didn't grab me. It's a long time since I read it so I can't remember why. Let's see what I wrote in my notebook... Okay, I said I didn't really learn anything about parts of speech (the topic of the book) because that stuff is inherently boring, but I enjoyed the discussions of historical and popular usage.

One thing that stayed with me is that "they" as the gender-neutral pronoun was in use before "he or she", so I will happily keep saying "they" when gender is not specified.

The Perfect Wrong Note by William Westney is a book about musical practice and performance. The author is a concert pianist and teacher, and he has come up with some new theories of musical training, practice and performance. Mainly he doesn't like the traditional way of dealing with mistakes: you make a mistake, you go back over the passage and beat it into the ground until you can play it a time or two without the mistake, and then you charge on. His contention is that the mistake is teaching you something about what you know (or rather, don't know) about the piece. You need to go back and figure out what the mistake is telling you so you can correct it properly and deepen your understanding of the piece.

He also has some interesting ideas about how to practice: that you should treat it more like a physical workout than a mental exercise, so start by relaxing your body and mind, stretching, finding a comfortable and relaxed position. Then play some notes, make some noises. Not music, just noises. It's all a little hippy-trippy but if I were an earnest student of music I would definitely try it. I totally agree that the making of music is as much an athletic pursuit as a cerebral one; I never gained as good a physical appreciation for my body and it's strengths and liabilities as I did when I was studying voice.

There's one rather intimidating point in the book: Westney encourages a profound knowledge of each piece you play — he would like you to be able to verbally describe what is happening at any point in the piece. For example, "In this bar, the piece retains the key signature of the tonic minor but modulates to its relative major of G flat"... It's representative of my limited musical knowledge that I had to use Google to find that technical-sounding phrase, and while I know more or less what it means I'm not entirely sure it makes sense in this context. And it is very safe to say I have never known or understood any piece I have learned or performed that intimately. It's amazing how clueless a choral singer can be and get away with it. And humbling to realize how little I know. What did I learn in those eight or so years of piano lessons? Apparently not much.

Feel the Fear... And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. I have this sneaking feeling — maybe everyone has it — that I am not living up to my potential. I am smart, and organized, I can talk to people, I can solve problems and understand complex situations, and yet I am of no more value to the world than any stay-at-home mother. I feel like I should be contributing more than I am. I feel like, well, I'm wasting my potential. This is a matter for an entire blog post, of course, and there's more to it than I can go into in this paragraph. Lucky you.

Anyway, at various points in my life I have been given opportunities to do interesting or ambitious things and I have passed them up, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by dropping the ball. I realized this summer that I run away from these exciting possibilities because I am scared. Scared of screwing up, of letting someone down, of getting in over my head, of becoming overwhelmed. It seems like a pretty straightforward thing, but it took my thirty-two years to figure it out. So, as I do when I have any kind of problem, I headed to the library to check out a book about it, and this is the one I chose because Gail Vaz-Oxlade recommended it, and she seems pretty sensible.

I found the book mostly helpful. It had a few great insights which seem, in retrospect, to be really obvious but which I needed to have pointed out to me: no matter what happens, you can handle it; other people are scared too, they just go ahead anyway (that is, fear isn't a legitimate reason not to do something); even if something horrible does happen, you can get through it and find some good in it. Jeffers talks about moving away from being a victim, how to deal with that negative chatterbox (that's my personal hobgoblin), and how to live a balanced and meaningful life so that failure in one area doesn't destroy your whole sense of self.

A couple of things didn't work for me: Jeffers loves affirmations, but I find them contrived and dorky. I do make a point to avoid negative self-talk and strive for the opposite (or at least, realistic self-talk) but I can't stand in front of the mirror and chant canned new-agey phrases. That's not me. Also at the end of the book she gets into this woo-woo stuff about the Universe having a Plan for you and reaching your Higher Consciousness. I am don't believe in the supernatural and I know the universe is just a whirling mass of elements with no intention at all for me or anyone else. I ignored those chapters, without any detriment to the value of the rest of the book.

Other Non-Fiction

Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature by David P. Barash and Nanelle Barash is an examination of literature through the lens of evolutionary theory. Or is it an examination of evolutionary theory through the lens of literature? I'm still not sure. I came into it with a little understanding of literature and slightly more understanding of evolution, and I left it with a much better understanding of both. To the extent that literature is really the encoding of human nature, this book greatly increased my understanding of how evolution as we know it informs the way we behave. Fantastic book, I recommend it to all inquisitive readers.

The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need by Chris Turner. The author, upon having a baby, realized that the world is in very real danger of going to hell in a handbasket. Being a go-get-em journalist type, he decided to travel around the world (I don't know how you get away with that when you've just had a baby; he must have a very forgiving wife) and figure out who is doing what to prevent that, and how's it working out anyway. He concludes that in fact the technology already exists to save our collective asses, and that what is required is the political will to implement it on a significant scale. (See above re: changing representatives as well as lightbulbs.) This was a fun and heartening read: Turner sees hope and possibility in a green economy and culture. Turner continues to track developments in sustainable policy and technology in his Globe and Mail column.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — And the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata is an overview of the history of dieting and the current scientific thinking on obesity and dieting.

Kolata describes what happens to your body when you reduce caloric intake: you become panicky and obsessed with food. Once healthy intake resumes, you rapidly regain weight. Similarly, if you increase caloric intake and gain weight outside of your natural weight range, you rapidly lose it again once you stop overeating. That's why it's so easy for actors to lose weight if they have gained it for a role (assuming they were within their own healthy weight beforehand). Bottom line: it's very difficult for people to change their own weight. There are numerous biological checks and balances in your body to keep your weight consistent, whether you like it or not.

This book challenges popular wisdom with its crazy old nemesis, data. Apparently, for example, changes in cafeteria menus and physical education programs in an attempt to reduce obesity levels in students don't make any significant difference. Bummer. Kolata also dicusses the fact that the danger of being overweight (which is of course just a medical/social construct) are overstated. Being overweight — as opposed to obese, or "normal" weight — is possibly optimal for good health. It's certainly not the medical disaster it is often made out to be.

The frustrating thing about this book is that it doesn't explain why everyone is getting fatter, but of course that's because we don't exactly know. My opinion is that it's probably a perfect storm of factors: ready availability of food, reduced need to exercise, and possibly the effect of some novel chemical or combination of chemicals. Only time will tell.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is overweight or worried about their weight, and for anyone who feels they need to have an opinion on fatness.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo Phil Zimbardo is the guy who did the Stanford Prison Experiment. You know, the one where they took a bunch of undergrad men, assigned half of them to be guards and half to be prisoners, and let them at it in a fake prison constructed in a basement. Obviously, the experiment went terribly and it was finally stopped only a few days in after an observer insisted it was cruel and immoral. The experiment ended but Zimbardo has never stopped thinking about what makes normal people do evil things.
He studied this experiement, as well as wars and genocides. After thinking about it for years he wrote this book, which I found profoundly interesting and useful.

Zimbardo describes the circumstances you need to create an environment where people behave evilly: group conformity, obedience to authority, deindividuation (so lack of individual responsibility), dehumanization and moral disengagement (so the others are pigs, rats, cockroaches; anything but human), Inaction and passive bystanders.

It's not just a description of evil and how it comes about, but a how-to of not being evil! Everyone needs one of those. I honestly can't say, if I were in some awful situation like a genocide, that I wouldn't be one of the bystanders. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't take a machete to my neighbours but I know I have a weak, fearful, conformist, deferential-to-authority streak that could see me looking the other way while my neighbours machete each other. "Well, if everyone else thinks it okay," I would say to myself. Or, "Well if I say something I could be next. I don't want to piss off the guy with the machete." Zimbardo addresses these excuses and more. If you want to learn how to not be evil it's all there at the Lucifer Effect website. They are good rules for living, not just for avoiding evilness: admit mistakes; be mindful, be responsible, assert your individuality, rebel against unjust authority, value your independence from groupthink... and so on. Worth a look at the website even if you don't have time to read the book.

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg is all about personal hygiene through history.

(This is where I stopped writing back in November, and here end the long write-ups. This book was neat but didn't blow me away. If you are interested in personal hygiene through history, check it out.)

Here are the other non-fiction books I read before November 17th:

• Bonk by Mary Roach is a book about scientific research into sex, written for a general audience. Funny and interesting.
• Only In Canada, You Say? by Katherine Barber is a book about uniquely Canadian words and phrases. Awesome book, notable for the number of times I said "What the hell does everyone else call it?" Double-double? Open concept? Reno? You people need words for these things.
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is that book about what the earth would do if people suddenly disappeared. It's awesome and thrilling and very informative. And humbling.
• Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar (Yes, I do get lots of book recommendations from The Daily Show.) A book about how to be happier. I think this must have covered a lot of the same material as the other happiness books I've read because nothing stands out in my memory. Still probably a worthwhile read if you would like to be happier.
• The End of Food by Paul Roberts is about the incredible fragility of the global food industry. It could be laid low at any time by disease, climate change, peak oil. When you walk into the grocery store it seems as if there is such endless abundance, but it's really a house of cards. Scary but well worth reading.

The command to use is:

$ env CC=/usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc CC_FOR_BUILD=gcc ./configure --host=mac; make

Well, kind of. First you do that, then you copy gsc/gsc to gsc/gsc.onboard, then you go to a new directory, and type:

$ ./configure;make

and copy the gsc/gsc from that directory into the first directory.

To compile a script into an exe:

$ gsc/gsc -:=. -c euler.scm
$ gsc/gsc -:=. -link euler.c
$ /usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc euler.c euler_.c -Iinclude -Llib -lgambc -o euler

It's freaking huge!

$ ls -alh euler
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton  4M Jan 23 14:22 euler
$ ls -alh /WifiToggle
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton  17K Jan 16 14:07 /WifiToggle

And it's not a lot faster. 0.1643 seconds for the compiled version, as opposed to 0.1803 seconds for the interpreter.

But on my Mac:

$ more m1.c
power_of_2 (int x) { return 1<<x; }
$ more m2.scm
(c-declare "extern int power_of_2 ();")
(define pow2 (c-lambda (int) int "power_of_2"))
(define (twice x) (cons x x))
$ more m3.scm
(write (map twice (map pow2 '(1 2 3 4)))) (newline)
$ gsc/gsc -:=. -link -flat -o foo.o1.c m2 m3
$ /usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc -Iinclude -bundle -D___DYNAMIC m1.c m2.c m3.c foo.o1.c -o foo.o1
$ ls -alh foo.o1
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton    13K Jan 23 14:45 foo.o1

then on the iTouch,

# scp bwinton@latte.ca:/Users/bwinton/Programming/Bazaar/iTouch/gambc-v4_1_2/foo.o1 .
# gsi foo.o1
((2 . 2) (4 . 4) (8 . 8) (16 . 16))
# gsi
Gambit v4.1.2

> (load "foo")
((2 . 2) (4 . 4) (8 . 8) (16 . 16))
"/private/var/root/foo.o1"
> (twice 5)
(5 . 5)
> (pow2 10)
1024

'Tis the season for acquisitiveness, but honestly, I want stuff all year 'round. I don't expect anyone to get me any of this, because we're not "doing" presents this year and anyway Blake never buys me anything that he knows I want. Some kind of perverse male pride thing, like not asking for directions. So this list is really just for my amusement.

This is what I want right now:

• a classic French mandoline
• a long fleece nightie for those mornings when I just don't want to get out of bed. (Isn't it nice when you imagine your perfect whatever, and then it turns out someone else has designed and manufactured it?)
• too many books to name.
• ballerina-style slippers like this
• a new bra. I've been wearing the same two nursing bras for three years now. They are so done. I'm not even nursing any more! I also need another running bra. Except I don't know what size I am, so I have to go to the store and get measured properly.
• another computer so I can do computer stuff while we watch TV (our computer is our TV). Actually Blake just bought a new computer so in theory I could borrow his.
• protective table pads; back before we even thought about having kids we bought an elegant, flawless wood dining table. Turns out it shows every scratch and fingerprint.
  So now I keep it covered with a cloth tablecloth over a vinyl tablecloth. It looks awful but it works. Now, those table pads I linked to look really tacky because apparently they haven't redone their marketing material since 1982, but I was at the house of a friend who has them and they actually look really great. I thought she had a cool leather-embossed table at first. They're only a couple hundred bucks and I really should have bought some by now.
• a long down coat for those freezing afterschool pickups. Not black, though, or I will look like all the other North Toronto moms in their long black down coats.

A few Fridays ago, I was laid off from my job. After seven years I’m sort of out of practice at looking for a new job. The economy is also kind of slow, and I know a few people who are going to graduate soon into this economy, and who might want to know what I did when I was laid off, and how I’ve found a new job.

So, Friday. As a side note, if you’re ever in the position of letting go of employees, please don’t lay them off or fire them on a Friday. They can’t do anything but sit and brood over the weekend, which can really get them depressed. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty upbeat about it because after seven years, I’m kind of ready for a change. It was a big shock when I first learned about it, but I had made my peace with it after around 30 minutes or so. An hour later, there was a meeting where the rest of the employees found out, and that was kind of tough to sit through, but afterwards it was like there was a big weight lifted from my shoulders, and my co-workers and I started to joke around about it.

That afternoon, and the next couple of days, I emailed my friends and asked whether they knew of any companies that were hiring. From that I got six or seven leads, and three or four interviews, and finally decided to do some work and sign a three month contract, which will probably turn into a longer term contract. I don’t expect it’ll turn into a full time job, but that works out fine for me, since I expect the market will have changed by the new year, and I’m hoping that a friend of mine will get the hiring freeze he’s currently in lifted by then, and hire me.

On the plus side, now that I’m working from home, I bought a new computer because I can deduct the price from my income as a business expense. Similarly I can deduct part of the interest on my mortgage from my income. And I’ll be making a fair bit more than I was getting as a full-time employee, because of the lack of benefits, my inside knowledge of the app, and finally because I have had only one raise in the last seven years. (It was hard for me to ask for a raise, because I knew the company didn’t have a lot of money to give me a raise with, and because I owned some of the company, so I would rather have seen my shares increase in value than get extra cash in the short term. Of course neither ended up happening, but who could have foreseen that?)

So yeah, there’s my tale of woe and hope. It’s really not that bad, apart from the sadness of seeing something that you worked really hard for crash and burn. But even in that sadness is the spark of excitement for something new and different. If you haven’t gotten your first job yet, then I don’t know if this will help you all that much. I guess the main thing to take away from it would be that you should cultivate contacts among your peers, profs, co-workers, and clients because they’re the ones who will find you the good jobs, in the end.

Yesterday I went to see a presentation by Kosta Zabashta about the work he did on Basie. The presentation went fairly well, but while listening to it, I had a few ideas that I thought I should write down.

First, since the configurations for Exim and Postfix are so complicated and so different, it would be nice if we had a program that could figure out which one you’re running, and generate the lines to add to your config files to get it all set up.

Second, I think we probably don’t need to add that many boolean or set operators to the search functionality. I seem to remember reading a paper a while ago where Google said that people only used 2 of the advanced search features, "s to make a phrase, and OR to choose between two different things. Sure, some people used all the wacky operators, but it was a vanishingly small percentage.

Third, do we update the search index when items change, or are we constantly rebuilding it? I would have thought that doing the dynamic updates would have run into many of the same issues as the Events app, but maybe there was a smarter way to do it that I’m overlooking.

Fourth, and finally, I wonder if there’s a way to use metadata about the objects we’re searching to influence rankings. To take the Google approach, add the number of mail messages/commit logs/wiki pages/tickets that refer to an item as a factor in determining the ranking. Or, push more recent things higher in the search results, since we know when things were added. Do we actually want to do either of those? Maybe, maybe not, but we’ve got a lot of data about each item, and it seems like using it might be, well, maybe more interesting than useful. :)

So, there are my thoughts on stuff we might want to do for the next version of Basie. I suppose the next step will be to get Greg to link to this, and get other people commenting. (And now that I’ve written it all out, I suppose it might have been cleverer to post this to the Basie blog. Ah well. Live and learn.)

...independent! We had Cordelia's parent-teacher "chat" today, with her nursery school teachers. I love talking about my children, so I was very excited to be there, and of course Blake doesn't have a job so he came along 'coz he doesn't have anything else to do. Just kidding; he had taken the morning off to come anyway, before the company folded (or whatever it's in the process of doing).

Simone and Sameera were very happy to talk about Cordelia too. Apparently she's a delight at school. (I bet they say that to all the parents.) She's very independent; she puts on her own outside clothes and clears up after snack by herself. This is a revelation to me because like idiots we're still helping her on with her snowsuit and boots, and begging her to take just one thing into the kitchen after meals. Suckers, we are!

Her favourite things are sensory activities: playdough, cornstarch, sand. Anything messy. She's still focused to the point of being oblivious to what's going on around her (she gets that from Blake), and she's happy playing by herself, to the point that her teachers are actually engineering situations to force her into talking and playing with other kids. They are going to hook me up with some good playdate matches for her.

That's their only concern for kindergarten, that she won't be able to make connections with other kids and with the teacher. Academically, in terms of colours, shapes, letters and numbers, she's just fine!

Okay, one game in particular this time. One of my favourites from back in my Palm days.

Bike Or Die 2.

It’s awesome. It’s harder than I remember the Palm version being, but that's probably as much because I'm out of practice as anything else. After a couple of weeks of playing the beta version, I’m now at the point where I rarely hit the wrong button, even though they're on-screen instead of being hard buttons.

Not only is it a great game for what it is, but it’s got a ton of user-created levels, and an online high score board (which I’m nowhere near the top of). The re-playability of this game is stunning.

If you're still undecided, you can read the thread about it on TouchArcade. (Yeah, I’ve been answering a bunch of questions over there.) There’s also a video showing gameplay from the beta.

Finally, it only costs $2.99, but I hear it’s going up to $7 after the introductory period is over. (I suggested he sell it for $7.99-$9.99, but he’s apparently a nicer person than I am.)

(No, he’s not paying me for this. Heck, I didn’t even get an iTunes gift certificate for all my hard work finding bugs. I just really like the game.)

Yes, after four months I finally put up new pictures. Enjoy!

Last night a friend asked me why I was excited that Barack Obama won the American election. Why, as a Canadian, do I care? I couldn't really begin to explain in a Twitter post, and I was tired, but I thought about it as I went to sleep and here is what I have come up with.

I like Americans. I know lots of them and I like most of the Americans I know, and for a long time I have been perplexed by the apparent gulf between "America" and the American people I know. Last night's victory closed that gulf; it seems America the country is a lot more closely aligned to the beliefs and hopes of the America I know than to the vocal minority of fundamentalist and fear-mongers we have heard from of late. And thank goodness for that. So I am very happy for my American friends, that finally their government reflects them.

I like what this victory says about America. I have a friend who was predicting a McCain win: "The young people won't wait in line to vote", he said. "The early results with show a strong lead for Obama and everyone else won't bother to vote", he said. There was an argument put forth that Americans say to pollsters that they would vote for an African-American, but then in the privacy of the polling booth their secret inner racist comes out. I am glad those arguments were wrong. I am glad America got excited about its future and came out to vote in droves, many for the first time, many waiting in line (or on line) for hours.

Why am I glad? Because Americans are people, and people are the same everywhere, and if Americans can get excited about democracy and step up and do the right thing, it makes me feel better about people everywhere.

I'm glad Barack Obama won because he ran an honourable and decent campaign. Everyone pisses and moans about negative campaigning, mud-slinging and pettiness, but it seemed, until now, inevitable, like the weather. Obama has proved it's possible to win an election with a positive, optimistic campaign. (Okay, maybe rather vague, but vague in a positive way.) While McCain and Palin were screechin' and spittin', fear-mongerin' and fist-shakin', Obama maintained his composure without condescending. This is a great lesson for American politicians and a great lesson for politicians everywhere in the world. The bar has been raised.

Obama is smart. Really smart, and America is crying out for a smart person in the White House. Why does this matter to me as a Canadian? Because I am excited to have someone in office who has a hope of understanding and acting on climate change, a global issue if ever there was one. Where America leads, the world follows and we desperately need someone to lead us in the right direction on this matter. (Apparently Canada isn't going to do it.)

It's not just climate change. The world faces numerous potential global threats: a flu pandemic, a disaster in our fragile food distribution system, terrorism, peak oil. Not to mention whatever the hell is going on with the economy. It's fine, I guess, to have a numbskull in office when there's not much to do, but when anything could happen I am much happier knowing that there is someone in the most powerful position in the world who has a hope of really understanding the situation, consulting with the right people and making an informed decision without resorting to dogma and superstition.

And I'll admit it: I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. (I still am; I am dying to sit down and watch the Stewart/Colbert special from last night!) Obama is the "other" to so many Americans: he is black to white Americans, he is educated to uneducated Americans, he is foreign-raised to Americans who have never left the country, he is the son of an African to slave-descended Americans (although I never heard anyone talk about that), he is the son of an atheist and a lapsed Muslim to Christian Americans, he is erudite and witty and Northern and liberal(ish); he is so many things that we have heard that Americans aren't (Real Americans, that is) and yet America voted for him. That so many people were able to see past the things they don't share with Barack Obama and see in him the best of their common humanity stirs in me great pride and hope for what has been and could again be a great nation.

Here are some more links:

• Obama could be great for science, yay.
• Here's Obama on science in his own words
• The wonderful Dale McGowan points out that Obama is the first American president raised in a non-religious household
• Mr Crankypants (PZ Myers) sounds the voice of pessimism. I tend to agree with his commenters -- can't we have just one day of irrational exuberance before we get real? (Mr Crankypants posted a follow-up comment.)

I don't know if Barack Obama is going to be as shiny as his most enthusiastic supporters make him out to be. I don't know if any mortal could be. But I am excited about what this election says about America and I am optimistic about the future. Why not be?

Yesterday Blake taught Delphine about contrails. This morning we were out walking and she looked up into the clear blue Hallowe'en sky and saw a plane. "It has a cotton-trail!"

We were talking about everyone's costumes. "Mrs Thompson was a lady who works in a church. The ladies who wear necklaces with a criss-cross thing on." I love that my kid doesn't even know what a cross is. (Mrs Thompson was a nun.)

Cordelia and I were reading Dr Suess's ABC: "Big A, little a, what begins with A?"

"AMY!"

"Aunt Annie's alligator, A..a..A. Big B, little B, what begins with B?"

"BLAKE!"

"Barber, baby, bubbles, and a bumblebee." And so on with Cordelia chiming in whenever she knew someone with that letter. After C ("CORDELIA!"), D ("DELPHINE!") and E ("ERIK!") she said "Almost everyone we know has a letter in this book!"

Yeah, almost!

Delphine and I were talking about meat today, because we were walking over to a friend's house to pick up a quarter cow. She asked if someone killed the cow, and I said that they did.

"That's sad. We should be nice to animals."

"That's true. But then we couldn't eat meat."

"Meat is tasty."

"Some people don't like to kill animals, so they don't eat meat. They're called vegetarians."

"But meat is so tasty!"

"I know! It's a hard decision to make."

So we talked about how Daddy and I decided to keep eating meat but to try and make sure that the cows and chickens and other animals we eat are happy when they're alive, hence the trek to pick up cow.

Not my kid but my friend's kid (and my kid's friend) Ursa. Yesterday they were eating a Chinese beef dish and Ursa said "I like this dark brown chicken!" (Good thing, because they got a quarter cow too.) What's the deal with kids thinking everything is chicken? The other day Cordelia called tilapia chicken. The kids at daycare used to call tofu chicken. No wonder everything tastes like chicken, it's because chicken tastes like everything!

Now the CSC is going to have to get a plant!

Our school website contains a list of handy Hallowe'en safety tips, among them the old chestnut about inspecting kids' candy before they eat it. I suppose that wouldn't hurt, but it might be interesting to know that there has never been a case of random poisoned Hallowe'en candy. There have been a few reports of candy with pins, and apples with razors, but the vast majority of those were hoaxes or pranks.

Here are a couple of links from the valuable Snopes website:

• On poisoning
• On needles and razors

Perhaps it seems harmless to continue repeating these needless warnings, but I think it breeds cynicism and fear, which we have far too much of. (Don't even get me started on "Stranger Danger".)

(I'm going to have to think further about the appropriateness of cynicism and/or fear with respect to Chinese candy.)

13 Things You don't Want To Hear From Your Translator on the Road in Rebel Territory in Congo

We're in the midst of the fall festive season, and as anyone who is less than four feet tall knows, that means it's Hallowe'en. Both Delphine and Cordelia are very excited, and it's clear that Cordelia remembers a thing or two about last year.

Delphine is planning to be a penguin this year. We haven't bought a penguin costume; rather we are hoping to kludge something together with a white shirt and a black hoodie and orange construction paper beak and feet. I hope it works because we haven't had a chance to try it out and we're running out of pre-Hallowe'en weekend. Delphine has a pretty convincing penguin waddle which would sell the lamest costume, though.

Cordelia has independently decided to be a black cat. For a while there she was going with ghost and I thought we would have to find and then butcher a white sheet — you always see that white-sheet-with-holes ghost costume in cartoons and stuff but I've never seen it in real life. I thought it would be cool to try it out. But about a week ago she switched to black cat, so I dropped a whopping $19 on ears and a tail, which together with black clothes and some eyeliner whiskers will make a convincing and adorable cat.

The great thing about Hallowe'en is that it gives you lots of chances to talk about such topics of childhood interest as death and scary things. Last year we spent a lot of time talking about being dead and what death is (and who Death is — a house around the corner has an inflatable Grim Reaper). This year we are leaning more towards Hallowe'en imagery and what is scary. Delphine wanted to know why someone had fake gravestones on their lawn. "Gravestones aren't scary", she said. I said they mark where dead people are buried, but she was unmoved by that because to her mind dead people aren't scary. And of course by extension, skeletons aren't scary either. What is scary? Witches, spiders and ghosts are apparently scary. I don't think bats are and rats definitely aren't, although we did decorate with black rubber rats.

Delphine likes Monopoly. I know, weird. I wouldn't have occurred to me to put her in front of a game of Monopoly, but my friend Tanya, who is nothing if not ambitious with what she exposes her kid to, brought it over and Delphine loves it. She loves the money: she likes to sort it out, stack it up, pay for things and get money from other people. She likes choosing which piece she will be, and she loves to move around the board. She got tired of it, though, after maybe forty minutes, and started acting up. "I'm so bored of giving people money!" Yeah, tell me about it. So for Christmas I got her Monopoly Junior. I'm normally not in favour of kiddified versions of things, but this looks like it retains the main elements of the adult version (including the lovely money) but goes faster. Plus the setting is a carnival, not some boring old city. Delphine loves carnivals and fairs and things.

Cordelia went for her birthday sleepover at Auntie Morgan's house this weekend. Unfortunately I have no idea what they did because Cordelia said she had fun but she didn't want to talk about it. I know what Delphine did, though, because she stayed home for what we have termed a "sleepunder", which is what you get when you're the sister who stays home and has Mum and Dad to herself. Mostly we played Monopoly. Delphine chose KD for supper, and we read lots of chapters at bedtime because we didn't have to put Cordelia to bed. In the morning Delphine decreed that Blake should get up early (that is, when Delphine and I got up) and join us for a breakfast of French toast and pancakes. Then more Monopoly, and then we went out to get Cordelia back.

(Incidentally, the thing with Blake getting up with us turned out abysmally. Usually he stays in bed for an hour or more on weekend mornings while I get up with the kids and make breakfast and read the paper. Having missed that extra sleep, however, he was logy and grumpy all day. He napped twice but it didn't help. God knows what he's like during the week, but from now on I will gladly let him get his morning beauty sleep.)

The sleepunder was lovely. Unfortunately at the moment the girls are much more pleasant to be around one at a time than together. Delphine alone is insightful and contemplative and interesting, Cordelia alone is funny and clever and demonstrative. Together they are whiny and scrappy and tiresome. Not all the time, but often enough that it wears me out. Hopefully between them they will eventually grow out of it and figure out how to enjoy each other's company more.

Cordelia is three! She has been three for almost two weeks now! We didn't have a big party or anything, because she doesn't really have any friends yet, and also I couldn't be bothered. I asked her what kind of cake she wanted and she said "a tomato cake!" Apparently there is such a thing, but I didn't feel up to that kind of experimental weirdness, so I asked her (on a different occasion) whether she would like a chocolate cake or a white one. (This is how you get little kids to do what you want, you trick them and then you paint them into a corner.) She said she wanted a white cake with chocolate icing (this is how they get what they want). And since she had been talking about having a tomato birthday for months, I drew three juicy tomatoes on top of the cake in red icing. That seemed to satisfy her.

We didn't have a party, as I mentioned, but a few people did end up coming over for cake: Baba and Zaida were there, and Tanya and Douglas and Ursa and Otis came too.

Cordelia's choice for her special birthday dinner was sushi, so Zaida kindly brought over a platter of sushi from our favourite place. Extra kindly, because his car wouldn't start! He walked it halfway over to our place and Blake met him and brought it the rest of the way. What these men wouldn't do for their little girls.

Cordelia really seems to have bought into this three thing. Her new favourite word is "why", in that reflexive way little kids ask when they're trying to get as much information into their little brains as possible. She has stopped fighting so much with Delphine, and is generally more easy-going lately. We don't lock horns so much over silly things like which way her toast is sliced.

Her latest favourite book is a counting book called "Ten Black Dots" by Donald Crews. We've read it at every nap and bedtime for the last week. She likes to point at the dots and count them, which she now does perfectly, even down to pointing to each dot exactly once. She can also do rudimentary math in her head, adding or subtracting one or two. I said rudimentary! Generally she seems more numerically-oriented than Delphine was at her age.

She's also really big! Actually she's right on the 50th percentile, but dammit, she seems big to me. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that my baby days are behind me. I know that means that also behind me are spit-up and leaky boobs and diapers and baby gates and food allergy scares and chokable object embargoes, and ahead of me are piano lessons and baking together and interesting conversations and going for walks and joking and reading and doing crossword puzzles. But I've been a baby-mummy for five years; it was such a huge part of my life — it was my whole life! — for such a long time and yet it's already over. How can that be?

Cordelia is three! She has been three for almost two weeks now! We didn't have a big party or anything, because she doesn't really have any friends yet, and also I couldn't be bothered. I asked her what kind of cake she wanted and she said "a tomato cake!" Apparently there is such a thing, but I didn't feel up to that kind of experimental weirdness, so I asked her (on a different occasion) whether she would like a chocolate cake or a white one. (This is how you get little kids to do what you want, you trick them and then you paint them into a corner.) She said she wanted a white cake with chocolate icing (this is how they get what they want). And since she had been talking about having a tomato birthday for months, I drew three juicy tomatoes on top of the cake in red icing. That seemed to satisfy her.

We didn't have a party, as I mentioned, but a few people did end up coming over for cake: Baba and Zaida were there, and Tanya and Douglas and Ursa and Otis came too.

Cordelia's choice for her special birthday dinner was sushi, so Zaida kindly brought over a platter of sushi from our favourite place. Extra kindly, because his car wouldn't start! He walked it halfway over to our place and Blake met him and brought it the rest of the way. What these men wouldn't do for their little girls.

Cordelia really seems to have bought into this three thing. Her new favourite word is "why", in that reflexive way little kids ask when they're trying to get as much information into their little brains as possible. She has stopped fighting so much with Delphine, and is generally more easy-going lately. We don't lock horns so much over silly things like which way her toast is sliced.

Her latest favourite book is a counting book called "Ten Black Dots" by Donald Crews. We've read it at every nap and bedtime for the last week. She likes to point at the dots and count them, which she now does perfectly, even down to pointing to each dot exactly once. She can also do rudimentary math in her head, adding or subtracting one or two. I said rudimentary! Generally she seems more numerically-oriented than Delphine was at her age.

She's also really big! Actually she's right on the 50th percentile, but dammit, she seems big to me. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that my baby days are behind me. I know that means that also behind me are spit-up and leaky boobs and diapers and baby gates and food allergy scares and chokable object embargoes, and ahead of me are piano lessons and baking together and interesting conversations and going for walks and joking and reading and doing crossword puzzles. But I've been a baby-mummy for five years; it was such a huge part of my life — it was my whole life! — for such a long time and yet it's already over. How can that be?

What more could I say?

Yeah, it’s my Windows box, displaying my iTouch’s screen, over VNC.

Pure coolness.

(Oh, and the song it’s playing is Fancy Footwork by Chromeo.)

A co-worker recently got a new iPhone, and I since he didn’t have many apps on it yet, I thought I’ld send him a list of the stuff I had bought/downloaded and enjoyed. So, without any further ado, here are a few of my favourites, all available on the AppStore.¹

Toy Bot Diaries. (The link is to the free version, but I bought the full version.)

Galcon. (The link is to the free version, but I bought the full version.)

Line Rider. ($2.99, but c’mon, it’s Line Rider. How can you not get it? ;)

Twitterrific. (Free, but only useful if you’re on Twitter. Which I am. As bwinton.)

TimmyMe. (Free, finds the closest Tim Hortons to you.)

Tap Tap Revenge. (Free, like Dance Dance Revolution, but for your fingers. I actually don’t play this much, but it’s free.)

PapiJump. (Free. By the guy who made the world’s most addictive Palm game, SFCave.)

Labyrinth. (The link is to the free version. I didn’t buy the full version of this.)

Cube Runner. (Free. I got this after watching someone play it on the subway.)

Enigmo. ($4.99, but really impressive. Really, really impressive.)

That’s about it…

As Amy mentioned in the previous post, her father passed away. So she’s gone out to Saskatchewan to spend some time with her mother. This means that for the next seven days, I get to stay home and take care of the kids, making sure that they have food to eat, clothes to wear, and get to wherever they’re going when they need to be there.

The first day went pretty well, the only casualty being a slightly-charred side of a grilled bacon-tomato-cheese sandwich. And today has been going pretty well too, with a load of laundry washed and hung, the dishwasher currently running, and tonight’s meal (beef stew in the crock pot) already cooking.

A large part of why it’s all running so smoothly is my parents. They have totally stepped up, helping me by taking Delphine and Cordelia places, or just looking after them while I do the stuff that needs to be done around the house.

Delphine has been a huge help too. This morning, while I was in the shower, she got dressed, came downstairs, got out three bowls and three small spoons, some cereal, and the milk from the fridge. She then poured cereal for herself and Cordelia, and the two of them were done breakfast before I was dressed. I know she’s five and all, but sometimes she’s so grown up it astonishes me.

Anyways, they’re currently out on an adventure with Zaida, so I’ld better get to folding the laundry, because it ain’t gonna fold itself.

My dad died today at 4:15 am Saskatchewan time, which is 6:15 am EST. So fifteen minutes before I woke up this morning my dad was quietly dying two provinces away.

My mom called at 6:37 am to tell me. I was only half-awake, and so my first thought was "How did they know it was 4:15?" My dad wasn't on any kind of life support, so barring the unlikely event that someone was in the room with him and noticed him go, 4:15 is surely just a best guess. Which is fine, really, but my early morning pedant wanted that to be clear. 4:15? Really? Or 'around 4:15'? Which is, I'm sure, exactly what my mother needed!

Actually apparently what she thought I meant was "How did they know he is dead?" which is a valid question because lately the difference between my dad dead and my dad alive has been a subtle one. When we all went to see him in August he was largely unresponsive, and in an unguarded moment (I have a lot of them) I described him to the girls as Mostly Dead. Which he was.

So now he's Completely Dead, and it's a bit weird how that's so very different that him being only Mostly Dead at, say, 3:15 this morning, while also being so much the same. My brother and I and probably my Mum are having trouble with this state change, this passing from being Mostly Mourning to Completely Mourning.

Right now the girls are with their Baba and I suppose I should be doing grown-up things like getting a flight home, but really I just feel like baking a giant batch of cookies and sitting down with a magazine and some tea.

One last whine — our terabyte drive crashed so we don't have any music, and I don't have a single Requiem on my ipod. Not Mozart, not Faure, not even the fairly alarming Brahms we started practicing yesterday. So I'm stuck listening to some random mass, which is nice but not the same.

Last Tuesday was Delphine's last day of summer vacation. We stuck labels on her new backpack, lunch bag and shoes, and speculated about her new teacher, which of last year's kids would be in this year's class, and whether the JKs would be cute or not. While we were eating lunch I wondered how we had felt on the same day last year, Delphine's last day before Junior Kindergarten. Were we excited, were we nervous? I don't know, and I never will because I never wrote it down.

This year Delphine was a little nervous. She was scared that the teacher wouldn't like her, although that fear was largely soothed by the arrival of a lovely letter from Mrs Thompson to Delphine (in the mail, no less!) saying how excited she was to meet Delphine and what fun they would have in kindergarten, learning letters and numbers. Delphine was a bit offended by that last bit — "I already know letters and numbers!" — but I said Mrs T probably sent the same letter to the SKs and JKs, who might not know their letters and numbers yet.

I, too, was a little nervous, probably more so than last year because this year I know what is coming — a lot of getting people places on time and not much time in between to take stock. But only a little nervous, because this year I do know what's coming, and I have a plan, and perhaps most importantly I have accepted that taking people places is my main job during the school year (well, along with feeding and clothing them), and anything else I can get done apart from that is pretty much bonus. So rather than regarding the commuting as an inconvenient interruption to my life, I now just go along with it. Think of all the exercise!

Delphine's first day of school was last Wednesday. She's still in afternoons, and she's in the same classroom as last year, and as it turns out, all the Seniors were in her class last year. The first day of school was only Seniors, so she got to renew some old friendships and get to know her new teacher. Delphine loves Mrs Thompson! Mrs Thompson smiles a lot, and on the first day she wore a pink dress — I don't know if that was calculated to win the favour of a roomful of five-year-old girls (the Seniors are six girls and two boys) but if it was, it worked. Delphine says Mrs Thompson does everything in the wrong order (which is to say, not the way Mrs Hollister did it) but she seems willing to indulge her errors. Mrs Thompson taught her a new song! In fact, yesterday Mrs Thompson taught her the Macarena! And they say public schooling is inferior!

Delphine has now had four days of SK. She wasn't impressed by the JKs on day two — they were noisy and talked too much — but yesterday she kind of made friends with one of them. She had gym on Thursday (her teacher's name is Mr Laundry! Actually it's Mr Landry, but 'Mr Laundry' cracks her up) and Library on Friday, and everything seems to be going fabulously.

Since Delphine learned to read over the summer, and SK/Grade 1 is supposed to be when you learn to read, I'm going to talk to Mrs Thompson about what, if any, other goals Delphine should work towards over the school year, and what kinds of enrichment she can offer her. She's beyond the basic "k-k-k-kite" Jolly Phonics stuff this year, so I hope we can manage not to bore her out of her tree. Especially considering there are only eight SKs. But I'm borrowing trouble, I'm sure we'll work something out. Now it's time to make lunch and haul everyone off to school, at least once I manage to get some clothes on Cordelia.

Last Tuesday was Delphine's last day of summer vacation. We stuck labels on her new backpack, lunch bag and shoes, and speculated about her new teacher, which of last year's kids would be in this year's class, and whether the JKs would be cute or not. While we were eating lunch I wondered how we had felt on the same day last year, Delphine's last day before Junior Kindergarten. Were we excited, were we nervous? I don't know, and I never will because I never wrote it down.

This year Delphine was a little nervous. She was scared that the teacher wouldn't like her, although that fear was largely soothed by the arrival of a lovely letter from Mrs Thompson to Delphine (in the mail, no less!) saying how excited she was to meet Delphine and what fun they would have in kindergarten, learning letters and numbers. Delphine was a bit offended by that last bit — "I already know letters and numbers!" — but I said Mrs T probably sent the same letter to the SKs and JKs, who might not know their letters and numbers yet.

I, too, was a little nervous, probably more so than last year because this year I know what is coming — a lot of getting people places on time and not much time in between to take stock. But only a little nervous, because this year I do know what's coming, and I have a plan, and perhaps most importantly I have accepted that taking people places is my main job during the school year (well, along with feeding and clothing them), and anything else I can get done apart from that is pretty much bonus. So rather than regarding the commuting as an inconvenient interruption to my life, I now just go along with it. Think of all the exercise!

Delphine's first day of school was last Wednesday. She's still in afternoons, and she's in the same classroom as last year, and as it turns out, all the Seniors were in her class last year. The first day of school was only Seniors, so she got to renew some old friendships and get to know her new teacher. Delphine loves Mrs Thompson! Mrs Thompson smiles a lot, and on the first day she wore a pink dress — I don't know if that was calculated to win the favour of a roomful of five-year-old girls (the Seniors are six girls and two boys) but if it was, it worked. Delphine says Mrs Thompson does everything in the wrong order (which is to say, not the way Mrs Hollister did it) but she seems willing to indulge her errors. Mrs Thompson taught her a new song! In fact, yesterday Mrs Thompson taught her the Macarena! And they say public schooling is inferior!

Delphine has now had four days of SK. She wasn't impressed by the JKs on day two — they were noisy and talked too much — but yesterday she kind of made friends with one of them. She had gym on Thursday (her teacher's name is Mr Laundry! Actually it's Mr Landry, but 'Mr Laundry' cracks her up) and Library on Friday, and everything seems to be going fabulously.

Since Delphine learned to read over the summer, and SK/Grade 1 is supposed to be when you learn to read, I'm going to talk to Mrs Thompson about what, if any, other goals Delphine should work towards over the school year, and what kinds of enrichment she can offer her. She's beyond the basic "k-k-k-kite" Jolly Phonics stuff this year, so I hope we can manage not to bore her out of her tree. Especially considering there are only eight SKs. But I'm borrowing trouble, I'm sure we'll work something out. Now it's time to make lunch and haul everyone off to school, at least once I manage to get some clothes on Cordelia.

It's cool today, and rainy, but I opened the doors and windows anyway, because it's the last day of summer vacation and I want to get as much of that summer air in the house as I can before we get back to the routine of walking here, walking there, packing snacks, hurrying up and going. This year I have got myself yet more taking and fetching to do in the form of an eight-year-old boy I'm looking after before and after school. He won't make much more work for me (I think, unless he turns out to be horrible, which I'm pretty sure he isn't) and he makes me quite a lot more money, so I expect that will be a net win.

But that's what's happening next, and I wanted to post about what we did this summer.

The first thing we did in summer vacation was a trip to the ROM, on the very first day after school ended. Getting there turned out to be quite an ordeal; the subway wasn't running, so we tried in various ways to outsmart the crowded shuttle buses; we took the number 11 back to Mount Pleasant, tried to catch a Mount Pleasant bus (almost lost Cordelia), then got back on another number 11 which magically turned into a Yonge Street shuttle. (We missed the most obvious workaround which is to take the normal 97 Yonge St bus.) All our fooling around killed enough time that they managed to get the subway running again by the time we got to St Clair, and we were back en route.

After all that we had a nice visit to the ROM, and saw both the Darwin and Wedgewood exhibits. Because my mother is from North Staffordshire of course we think we're related to both Wedgewood and Darwin, so I particularly enjoyed the exhibits. For that reason and also because both Staffordshire pottery and evolution are particularly close to my heart. And did you know ceramics and fossils have similar chemical properties? It's all connected.

I mentioned we almost lost Cordelia, but what I should say is that she almost lost us. We were all standing at the corner waiting for the bus, and the girls were fooling around on a little staircase, hanging on the banisters, walking down the hill, the usual fidgety little kid stuff. Suddenly Cordelia took off running in the opposite direction, crying and shouting. I wondered if perhaps she had been bitten by something, or seen a scary dog. I shouted her name but she didn't turn around, so Blake took off after her. She was running full-tilt so she got half a block before he caught up with her, and apparently she had lost track of us and thought we had lost her. She was petrified! She has a fear of being left behind or leaving someone else behind — if I don't stop and wait for Delphine while we're out walking she screams "Mummy 'top!" — and I guess she panicked and forgot to, oh, look around a full 360° before running for it.

Another adventure was a trip downtown to have lunch with Daddy. I wasn't sure whether simply going downtown would be enough excitement for two little kids, but Delphine kept saying "I love downtown!" We went to Queen and stopped at The Bay for some kid undergarments, and then walked along to John to Grange Park. Delphine and I had already walked along Queen a few weeks earlier when we went to the ballet, and I think she got a kick out of seeing places again. "This is where they always have a ice cream truck and a french fries truck!" We stopped for a snack on the landscaped median of University, under the statue of Adam Beck who apparently invented hydro-electricity. Apparently it still isn't cheap enough, because the fountain at his feet wasn't running. As we were sitting, Delphine looked up and said "That building says 'Canada Life'." Which it does! She reads everything now, signs and the writing on trucks and labels, which I remember doing as a kid and apparently Blake did too. Actually I still do it; if it's printed I have to read it.

One of our goals for this summer was to go out on a boat, so one fine Monday morning the girls and I went down to the Harbourfront. We walked along the boardwalk admiring the boats and ships, and looking for ducks, until I found someone selling boat rides. I asked him which was the cheapest one, and he said we could all go out on the Ste Marie for $11; it was to be a 45 minute ride leaving at 11:15, so we signed on. We turned out to be the only passengers on a tour around the Toronto islands; we saw nature preserves and Centre Island, swans and cygnets, and learned all about Ned Hanlan. Delphine won herself and Cordelia a lollipop each in a one-question trivia contest: "What lake are we on right now?" "Ontario Lake!" I had told her that very morning.

Our biggest adventure this summer was a surprise trip to Saskatchewan, surprise because I had intended to go at Christmas until I realized it would be fully twice a much money, to the tune of $4000 instead of $2000, to go at Christmas instead of summer. So we decided to go in August instead. I flew out there with the girls first, and my mother's saintly friend Shirley picked us up from the airport in Saskatoon. Blake came a few days later, and picked up a rental car and drove to Big River by himself, almost without incident!

Shirley also engineered the high point of the visit, a fishing trip in her motor boat. Delphine got to reel in a fish, and I also fished for the very first time. Blake caught the biggest fish of the day, but we released all of them in favour of some already-clean fish from Shirley's freezer.

We managed to stay quite busy in Saskatchewan, going out for lunch a couple of times, driving down to PA to see an old school friend, going to the school playground, visiting the farmer's market, shopping in Debden, or just going to get the mail. The girls had a great time with my mum; she let them watch as much TV as they wanted, eat cookies and play with all her thousands of tchotchkes. Blake said that between the cookies and fishing and Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! it was just like his visits to his grandparents in Winnipeg when he was a kid.

We also visited my Dad in the nursing home a couple of times. Last year, when Cordelia and I were in Sask in September, my dad had just moved into the nursing home and we visited every day. We chatted with him and had a nice time. This year I literally didn't recognize him at first: he was tucked up in a giant bed-like wheelchair and he had lost a lot of weight. With his teeth out he just looked like some generic old guy, skinny and wrinkly and not like my dad at all. It took a minute to recognize that nose and those ears, things that don't change, and then I realized that old guy was really my dad.

The first day we were there he didn't open his eyes or acknowledge us at all, apart from tapping his foot apparently in response to the songs that the girls and I sang for him. I was so shook up it took me a couple of days to gather the nerve to go again, but when I did I was sorry I had waited, because Dad opened his eyes and looked at me and the girls and smiled at us. But the next time we visited, again he didn't open his eyes. All I could do for him was ask the nurses to play music for him.

While we were in Sask the hospital called my mother to let her know that they are discontinuing his diabetes medication because he's not eating. I know my poor Dad is just trying to go, and there's no legal way we can make it easier for him. Humanity my ass.

The girls took it all in their stride. They asked why Grandpa doesn't talk or open his eyes, and I said he's really old and sick and he needs to sleep all the time. I said he's too tired to open his eyes or talk. They weren't upset about it at all, because they are still young enough that they take it in their stride, and because neither of them really knew him when he was lucid. Dad got to meet Delphine when she was three, but I don't know how much of that either of them remember.

My mother, on the other hand, is doing well by herself. She has friends and neighbours who help her out with things like mowing the lawn. The people in town — the pharmacist, the postmaster, the plumber (just like in a Richard Scarry book) — know her and look out for her. And of course she has her cats to torment her and keep her on her toes.

I remember when the children were younger the travel itself was the big worry, but there was hardly anything to talk about this time; I loaded up with activity books and little plane-friendly toys — a magnetic dress-up doll, some brilliant Micro Playmobil in its own little box, sticker books — and plenty of snacks, and we managed the three hours on the plane and two and a half hours in the car without much ado.

Since we got home from Sask we haven't had any grand adventures, although we have had a steady stream of playdates and visits. School starts next Wednesday and Delphine is looking forward to it. She was scared that she wouldn't like her teacher, until she received a welcome letter from said teacher in the mail and now she's excited and happy. Cordelia's school starts the following Monday — she's doing Monday, Wednesday and Friday this year. I don't know how that's going to go; she has been very clingy lately. I expect she will howl terribly, I will leave and she'll be fine within five minutes. I expect further that after a couple of weeks of school she will no longer be so clingy. There's nothing like confronting your fears, even when you're two and your mother makes you do it.

I think this has been a great summer. At the beginning I wondered if I should have enrolled my kids in a thousand camps and programs, like everyone else does (nevermind that we don't have the money). I decided I would rather not spend my entire summer ferrying everyone around, and that we would make our own fun, and so we did. There was a little whining that there's nothing to do, that we never go to the park, that our backyard is the worst in the world, and that everyone else gets to go away on holiday, but for the most part we got along with each other and found interesting things to do both near and far.

So, first off, I think Python developers these days need to use stuff like virtualenv and zc.buildout in order to develop in a sane manner. Yeah, this is the first project I’m using them on, but do what I say, not what I do.

Anyways, on to the instructions.

sudo easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages basie
cd basie/
. bin/activate

Then, you’re gonna need a buildout.cfg. Mine looks like this:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11

[buildout]
parts = django
eggs = ipython

[django]
recipe = djangorecipe
version = trunk
settings = development
eggs = ${buildout:eggs}
project = basie
wsgi = true

You’ll also need a bootstrap.py, which will look a little something like this:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62

##############################################################################
#
# Copyright (c) 2006 Zope Corporation and Contributors.
# All Rights Reserved.
#
# This software is subject to the provisions of the Zope Public License,
# Version 2.1 (ZPL).  A copy of the ZPL should accompany this distribution.
# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES ARE DISCLAIMED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, AGAINST INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS
# FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
#
##############################################################################
"""Bootstrap a buildout-based project

Simply run this script in a directory containing a buildout.cfg.
The script accepts buildout command-line options, so you can
use the -c option to specify an alternate configuration file.

$Id$
"""

import os, shutil, sys, tempfile, urllib2

tmpeggs = tempfile.mkdtemp()

try:
    import pkg_resources
except ImportError:
    ez = {}
    exec urllib2.urlopen('http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py'
                         ).read() in ez
    ez['use_setuptools'](to_dir=tmpeggs, download_delay=0)

    import pkg_resources

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    def quote(c):
        if ' ' in c:
            return '"%s"' % c # work around spawn lamosity on windows
        else:
            return c
else:
    def quote (c):
        return c

cmd = 'from setuptools.command.easy_install import main; main()'
ws  = pkg_resources.working_set
assert os.spawnle(
    os.P_WAIT, sys.executable, quote (sys.executable),
    '-c', quote (cmd), '-mqNxd', quote (tmpeggs), 'zc.buildout',
    dict(os.environ,
         PYTHONPATH=
         ws.find(pkg_resources.Requirement.parse('setuptools')).location
         ),
    ) == 0

ws.add_entry(tmpeggs)
ws.require('zc.buildout')
import zc.buildout.buildout
zc.buildout.buildout.main(sys.argv[1:] + ['bootstrap'])
shutil.rmtree(tmpeggs)

After you’ve got those, it’s basically:

python bootstrap.py
buildout -v
django help
django runserver

And when you’re done, deactivate

Any comments on things that don’t work would be highly appreciated.

Yesterday was my thirty-third birthday. Thirty-three isn't a very interesting number, but it's one of the ones you have to get through on the way to ooooold.

Blake's first present to me was to tell the girls not to fight on my birthday. If you know any two- and five-year-old sisters you will know how long that lasted, but they did try. For at least an hour. The next nice thing was that Blake let me languish in bed while he went downstairs with the girls and made tea and toast for me.

After breakfast we opened presents: Delphine got me a strand of blue silk flowers and beads on a wire, to decorate things with. Cordelia got me a wire and bead ladybug (and then broke it, but not fatally), and Blake got me a Moleskine notebook for Writing Things Down In. I loved everything. Blake thought I might not like the girls' things because of their tchotchke-like nature, but it's surprising how much I completely adore them just because my girlies picked them out. I put the blue flower garland on the banister and I put the ladybug... well, I put it up high. Hopefully I can put it somewhere else soon.

Despite it being my birthday we still had a million errands to run (partly because we're going to Sask next week) but I had a nice time. I spent far too much money on clothes for Delphine (but they were on sale! And so cute!) and far too much money on a present for my cousin. We met up with our friends Tanya and Ursa and continued the tradition started last year of decorating cupcakes (which is to say, burying them in as many sprinkles as they will hold). Tanya and I got some very rare talking-together-like-grownups time while the little ones slept and the five-year-olds played with Playmobil.

After Tanya and Ursa left, Blake came home with KFC (my annual treat) and more presents! A beautiful Basil pannier and the Torchwood season one DVD! He tried to get the latter signed, but I'm glad he didn't manage it because I would have died of jealousy if he had met John Barrowman without me. Well, maybe not died, quite.

Then more company; Kat came over and watched our TV while the children were in bed, and we went for a walk and had coffee. We came home, watched the first episode of Torchwood (I think we may have converted Kat) and went to bed.

All in all, a super birthday, but my first full day of being thirty-three was fabulous too. Kat stayed over and we went to yoga together in the morning. Yoga was fun, as usual, but my hamstrings are astonishingly tight and there were some postures I couldn't even consider. As usual, though, yoga threw me some ego-boosting soft pitches: I can balance! I can ... well, mainly I can balance! But there's a lot of that in yoga! The thing I like about yoga is that you might try a posture one minute that seems completely impossible — you look at the person next to you and wonder if perhaps there is some optical illusion involved — but the very next posture is something you can not only do, but do the "if you want a little more challenge" variation! Yoga wants you to feel good.

But the best thing of all was that today Delphine learned how to ride a bike! She went off with Blake to practice riding in the school ground, and when they got back she was riding all by herself. I could hardly believe my eyes! This summer has been great for her; she learned to climb a tree, she is reading (not entire books but words and phrases), and now riding a bike. Wow!

Today, I finally reached 5000km of biking. I forgot the camera, so I don’t have a picture of the odometer at exactly 5000.0, but I took this one when I got home, and it’s close enough. I guess that’s all, but I wanted to throw up a picture, as proof. So here you go:

I posted pictures! Hopefully a picture really is worth a thousand words because I'm not getting many words up here lately.

This afternoon, Cordelia wanted to “paint on your computer”! so after I finished my game, I fired up Sketches, and this is what she ended up painting. It’s nothing in particular, but kind of pretty nonetheless.

This afternoon, Cordelia wanted to “paint on your computer”! so after I finished my game, I fired up Sketches, and this is what she ended up painting. It’s nothing in particular, but kind of pretty nonetheless.

A few days ago, the city closed the pedestrian bridge at Summerhill (and MacLennan) in order to tear it down and replace it. Since then I’ve been trying to find a way across the railroad tracks that doesn’t involve taking a major road. And I’ve totally failed. So from now until September 28th, I’ll be biking down Bayview and turning right on Nesbitt before dispy-doodling my way over to Glen Road. It’s not my favourite route, since the traffic on the Bayview Extension is going a fair bit faster than I’ld like to, and the lane isn’t wide enough to share at those speeds (and the right-hand side of the lane is brutally cracked and very difficult to ride on, particularly at 50 km/h), but I still think it’s better than Mt. Pleasant.

Looking closer at the map, there might be another route, if I can get into the path leading South from David A. Balfour park… Yeah, that might be a route to try on my way home tonight. I’ll reply with a comment, letting both of the people who read this know how it was. ;)

This year, Amy and I decided to try the Tour de Dufflet. Okay, so it was more like _I_ decided to try the Tour de Dufflet, and convinced Amy to come along with me, but that’s the same, right? I took a few notes¹²³⁴⁵ on which routes would be less likely to have a lot of traffic on them, and after my parents picked up Delphine and Cordelia, we set out. 46 km and 4 hours later, we arrived home, tired, sore, and full. I think it was mostly a success, although Amy was certainly done having fun by the time we were on the third leg. The stats were as follows:

• Average speed: 15.0 km/h
• Total distance: 46.18 km
• Biking time: 3:04:32
• Total time (including eating cake): around 4 hours.

I’ve got to say, I’m really pretty impressed with how well Amy did. To go from virtually no bicycling to a 46 km trek (and a 46 km trek with a self-admitted speed freak) is something that a lot of people would skip out on, or avoid, but she went for it, and went faster than I hoped she would. Would we do it again next year? My guess is no, since it wasn’t a lot of fun at the end. On the other hand, if Amy continues to bike throughout the year, she might just go for it, to see if it’s gotten any easier. (I’m hoping to do it next year, as you might have guessed from the url of the post.)

Here is Cordelia watching, bemused, as everyone else participates in "Sticky Bubblegum":

And here is Delphine and her class performing a chant about recycling:

Delphine and Cordelia have really started fighting in earnest, sibling-style, lately. Previously they got in little tiffs about who should play with which toy, or who should be on what side of the bath — sensible stuff — but now they just bicker for the sake of it. The other day I heard this:

Delphine: "You're a pest! You're Ramona!"
Cordelia: "No I not Ramona! I not in a book!"
Delphine: "Yes you are!"
Cordelia: "This in't a book!"

But later that same day Delphine retreated to her room for half an hour and emerged with four pages stapled together with a drawing of a princess to colour in, some dotted lines to trace over and letters to copy. It was an activity book for Cordelia, and on the first page she titled it "UORVAREFRSTBOKK". ("Your Very First Book") She spent all that time and thought to do something nice for her sister. That's how I know she really loves her, even though she is a pest.

Delphine's writing is progressing (although as you can see she doesn't know about spaces between words, internal vowels are sporadic, and she prefers ALL CAPS) and she loves to write things down. The trend now is to let little kids just write things down anyhow and work on spelling later; it's called inventive spelling and for me it mainly reinforces how difficult and random the English language is.

Yesterday Delphine decided she wanted to write down some girl names that she liked, in case she has a girl baby. Here is what she came up with:

GORLS (That's the title.)
GABREELA (Gabriella)
MEGIMN (Megan)
MEG
LVEA (Livia)
HEG (Hedge — I don't know why this is on her list)
LENDA (Linda)

Delphine and Cordelia have really started fighting in earnest, sibling-style, lately. Previously they got in little tiffs about who should play with which toy, or who should be on what side of the bath — sensible stuff — but now they just bicker for the sake of it. The other day I heard this:

Delphine: "You're a pest! You're Ramona!"
Cordelia: "No I not Ramona! I not in a book!"
Delphine: "Yes you are!"
Cordelia: "This in't a book!"

But later that same day Delphine retreated to her room for half an hour and emerged with four pages stapled together with a drawing of a princess to colour in, some dotted lines to trace over and letters to copy. It was an activity book for Cordelia, and on the first page she titled it "UORVAREFRSTBOKK". ("Your Very First Book") She spent all that time and thought to do something nice for her sister. That's how I know she really loves her, even though she is a pest.

Delphine's writing is progressing (although as you can see she doesn't know about spaces between words, internal vowels are sporadic, and she prefers ALL CAPS) and she loves to write things down. The trend now is to let little kids just write things down anyhow and work on spelling later; it's called inventive spelling and for me it mainly reinforces how difficult and random the English language is.

Yesterday Delphine decided she wanted to write down some girl names that she liked, in case she has a girl baby. Here is what she came up with:

GORLS (That's the title.)
GABREELA (Gabriella)
MEGIMN (Megan)
MEG
LVEA (Livia)
HEG (Hedge — I don't know why this is on her list)
LENDA (Linda)

I’ve recently installed a new version of Sketches, and today Delphine asked if we could draw another picture. So we did. Then we emailed it to Amy, and I got Delphine to tell me what letters to write for her sentence. (I also told her about putting a space between each word, which is something that Ms. Hollister said that we could tell her about if we wanted.)

The sentence was “Ths is a heis on a hil wth to bsis.”, which I’m sure you can all read as “This is a house on a hill with two bushes.”.

I’ve recently installed a new version of Sketches, and today Delphine asked if we could draw another picture. So we did. Then we emailed it to Amy, and I got Delphine to tell me what letters to write for her sentence. (I also told her about putting a space between each word, which is something that Ms. Hollister said that we could tell her about if we wanted.)

The sentence was “Ths is a heis on a hil wth to bsis.”, which I’m sure you can all read as “This is a house on a hill with two bushes.”.

I knew when I woke up this morning that it would be an annoying ride in. It was raining fairly hard, but there was a breakfast at The Bike Joint, and they usually have one of the better breakfasts. It’s the same coffee, muffins, bagels, and fresh fruit as filling. As it turns out, this year they got an espresso machine, so instead of the normal coffee, I had a very nice latte along with my chocolate chip muffin, but along the way I got almost completely soaked and tore a hole in the crotch of my biking jeans. The hole wasn’t a complete surprise; the other side had gone a couple of weeks ago, and I had patched it with some old t-shirt. I guess it’s time to re-do the patch, and extend it to cover both sides.

Anyways, I got there, had some coffee and a muffin, and as I got on my bike after crossing the street when I noticed that my rear wheel didn’t really feel right. I looked behind me and found that it had gone completely flat while I was standing around eating breakfast. I wheeled the bike back to the store, Derrick replaced the tube, and I was on my way just as it started to rain again. And then my front light fell off and broke into three pieces. Fortunately, that was easy enough for me to snap back together, and be on my way once more.

After all that, I ended up being late for the 10:00am Status Meeting at work, which was the cherry of annoyance on top of the annoying ride.

The rest of the day, so far, has gone much better. I listening to a not-particularly-interesting talk about bicycle touring at MEC, and while I was there bought a bell. My current bell works just fine, but it’s one of the ding-ding ones, and no-one seems to recognize it as a bike bell, so I got one that goes ringggg-ringgg, which is the canonical bike bell noise, and I hope that’ll help. Work is good too, if a little busier than I might like. And I finally got emacs working with Markdown pretty much the way I want, so all in all, woot!

(Update: The ride home went mostly well, although there were spatters of rain throughout the trip. Around Sherbourne and Bloor, my rear tire started to slow wayyyy down, and then stop. When I flipped the bike over, I noticed that it was jammed right up against the frame, so I loosened it, straightened it, re-tightened it, and kept on going. Still, that’s never happened to me before, and was pretty strange.)

On Friday, Cordelia (who is two and eight months) decided she was done wearing diapers and wanted to wear underwear. She has decided to wear underwear before with mixed results, but this time she was really adamant about not wearing diapers, not even pull-ups. So she wore underwear, I accompanied her to the bathroom after meals and her nap, and she went the whole day without an accident. Saturday she had three accidents but mostly because we weren't on the ball with taking her to the bathroom at regular intervals. Notably, after her first accident, Blake (who didn't yet understand the depth of her determination to wear underwear) tried to put her in a diaper and she was mortified! She was furious and miserable until I explained to her that she could wear underwear and everyone has accidents. Since Saturday she hasn't had any accidents.

On top of that, in Saturday we sold her crib, the one the people at work bought for Delphine, and now Cordelia is sleeping in the toddler bed. She is big! She will get really mad if you call her "little".

So that's it, I don't have any babies any more.

On Friday, Cordelia (who is two and eight months) decided she was done wearing diapers and wanted to wear underwear. She has decided to wear underwear before with mixed results, but this time she was really adamant about not wearing diapers, not even pull-ups. So she wore underwear, I accompanied her to the bathroom after meals and her nap, and she went the whole day without an accident. Saturday she had three accidents but mostly because we weren't on the ball with taking her to the bathroom at regular intervals. Notably, after her first accident, Blake (who didn't yet understand the depth of her determination to wear underwear) tried to put her in a diaper and she was mortified! She was furious and miserable until I explained to her that she could wear underwear and everyone has accidents. Since Saturday she hasn't had any accidents.

On top of that, in Saturday we sold her crib, the one the people at work bought for Delphine, and now Cordelia is sleeping in the toddler bed. She is big! She will get really mad if you call her "little".

So that's it, I don't have any babies any more.

I finally got around to uploading pictures. I know, it's been months! You know where to get them.

Delphine turned five this Saturday, and we had a party on the deck. Delphine invited five of her friends, and between food and cleaning up and decorating and games and loot it was almost as much work as a grown-up party. But now the house is clean! Ish.

The night before her birthday, Delphine slept over at Baba and Zaida's house. Baba wanted to take Delphine to Science Rendezvous in the morning, and I had a book club meeting Friday night, so a sleepover was advantageous for all.

Saturday dawned bright but not as early as usual; we had put Cordelia down early on Friday so between that and not having Delphine around to wake her, she slept in until 7:45. (Did you know if you put your kids to bed earlier they sleep later? Weird but true.) We got up and leapt into action; Blake and Cordelia picked up flowers and bread and pickles, I cleaned up and made egg salad and iced cupcakes and put up the daisy decorations Delphine had made. After lunch we put Cordelia down for an early nap, and Auntie Morgan came over to help out.

The party started at 2:00, and Delphine only got home a few minutes before that in time to put on her new red party dress. All the partiers arrived on time —Ursa, Erika, Tina, Sydney, and Athena, and four out of the five Mums stayed, which was cool; also in attendance were Baba and Zaida and Auntie Morgan and Uncle Erik — and we got into the swing of things: crafts, a treasure hunt (the treasure was wrapped boxes of Nerds), some dancing games (they didn't seem to enjoy those much), Pass the Parcel (that was a huge hit), and of course little sandwiches, chips, cake, ice cream and jelly (Jell-o, except made with real juice). (That was a really long sentence with altogether too much punctuation.) There was a good bit of random running around the backyard, too, which was more popular than I expected.

Delphine mostly had a good time — she got mad at me when I didn't take her suggestion for a music game (who knew "Row Row Row Your Boat" was even a game?) but otherwise it was nice. There is some weird bullying/power abuse going on with one of the girls and we tried to ameliorate that as much as we could, but Delphine wasn't directly involved so it didn't seem to bother her. We'll have the "victim" over for a playdate sometime to make her feel more welcome and loved. (She — the victim — is a very intensely affectionate little girl, and that annoys the others a bit, and so they are mean to her – they say she can't play with them. Not surprisingly she's also intensely emotional so she takes it seriously when someone says something hurtful. It's a mess; I'm so glad I'm not a little girl any more! That sucked!)

Anyway, apart from that the party was a hit, and Delphine got some great presents and had a lovely day.

In addition to turning five, she has also grown two centimeters in the last month, and she can now read upside-down. Well, she can't properly read books and stuff, but she's getting pretty good at picking out individual words as long as their spelling is "standard". I guess the memorization of non-standard words really begins once you start reading in earnest and encounter those words more. (Although of course she can read "one" and "two" which are non-standard, so I guess she has already started to build up that database.) She's working on learning to ride a bike without training wheels, and to skip. Five is going to be a very exciting year!

Delphine turned five this Saturday, and we had a party on the deck. Delphine invited five of her friends, and between food and cleaning up and decorating and games and loot it was almost as much work as a grown-up party. But now the house is clean! Ish.

The night before her birthday, Delphine slept over at Baba and Zaida's house. Baba wanted to take Delphine to Science Rendezvous in the morning, and I had a book club meeting Friday night, so a sleepover was advantageous for all.

Saturday dawned bright but not as early as usual; we had put Cordelia down early on Friday so between that and not having Delphine around to wake her, she slept in until 7:45. (Did you know if you put your kids to bed earlier they sleep later? Weird but true.) We got up and leapt into action; Blake and Cordelia picked up flowers and bread and pickles, I cleaned up and made egg salad and iced cupcakes and put up the daisy decorations Delphine had made. After lunch we put Cordelia down for an early nap, and Auntie Morgan came over to help out.

The party started at 2:00, and Delphine only got home a few minutes before that in time to put on her new red party dress. All the partiers arrived on time —Ursa, Erika, Tina, Sydney, and Athena, and four out of the five Mums stayed, which was cool; also in attendance were Baba and Zaida and Auntie Morgan and Uncle Erik — and we got into the swing of things: crafts, a treasure hunt (the treasure was wrapped boxes of Nerds), some dancing games (they didn't seem to enjoy those much), Pass the Parcel (that was a huge hit), and of course little sandwiches, chips, cake, ice cream and jelly (Jell-o, except made with real juice). (That was a really long sentence with altogether too much punctuation.) There was a good bit of random running around the backyard, too, which was more popular than I expected.

Delphine mostly had a good time — she got mad at me when I didn't take her suggestion for a music game (who knew "Row Row Row Your Boat" was even a game?) but otherwise it was nice. There is some weird bullying/power abuse going on with one of the girls and we tried to ameliorate that as much as we could, but Delphine wasn't directly involved so it didn't seem to bother her. We'll have the "victim" over for a playdate sometime to make her feel more welcome and loved. (She — the victim — is a very intensely affectionate little girl, and that annoys the others a bit, and so they are mean to her – they say she can't play with them. Not surprisingly she's also intensely emotional so she takes it seriously when someone says something hurtful. It's a mess; I'm so glad I'm not a little girl any more! That sucked!)

Anyway, apart from that the party was a hit, and Delphine got some great presents and had a lovely day.

In addition to turning five, she has also grown two centimeters in the last month, and she can now read upside-down. Well, she can't properly read books and stuff, but she's getting pretty good at picking out individual words as long as their spelling is "standard". I guess the memorization of non-standard words really begins once you start reading in earnest and encounter those words more. (Although of course she can read "one" and "two" which are non-standard, so I guess she has already started to build up that database.) She's working on learning to ride a bike without training wheels, and to skip. Five is going to be a very exciting year!

Okay, more on the free-range kids thing. Look at this map, showing how the habitat of an English eight-year-old has shrunk in four generations; it's wild!

It's from this article.

My mother, as a child, was one of those "get out of the house and don't come back until six o'clock" kids but my brother and I stayed more close to home. The best bit was when "home" was five acres of land.

We have this old Fisher-Price toy camera from the seventies — it was Blake's as a boy — and it's a toy version of the old 110 cameras, remember them? It has a flash cube on the top which rotates 90° every time you take a picture. (Dave, I think we might have had the same one, I remember it or something like it.)

So despite this "camera" being completely unlike any camera the girls have ever seen, they have taken to it very well and pretend to take pictures all the time. "Say 'banana'!"

Cordelia, however, takes it one step further. After taking the picture, she runs up to you, turns the camera around and shows you the non-existent screen on the back; "See yer picture! See yer picture!"

We have this old Fisher-Price toy camera from the seventies — it was Blake's as a boy — and it's a toy version of the old 110 cameras, remember them? It has a flash cube on the top which rotates 90° every time you take a picture. (Dave, I think we might have had the same one, I remember it or something like it.)

So despite this "camera" being completely unlike any camera the girls have ever seen, they have taken to it very well and pretend to take pictures all the time. "Say 'banana'!"

Cordelia, however, takes it one step further. After taking the picture, she runs up to you, turns the camera around and shows you the non-existent screen on the back; "See yer picture! See yer picture!"

I gave Delphine and Cordelia each a lollipop after lunch today, and wow, was it ever quiet with two gobs stopped up with candy! When Delphine was halfway through hers, she said, "If I were going to name this thing I'm eating, I would call it Lick Sticks. Because you lick it, and it's a stick. It doesn't pop, and you don't lolly it!"

She has a future in marketing.

I gave Delphine and Cordelia each a lollipop after lunch today, and wow, was it ever quiet with two gobs stopped up with candy! When Delphine was halfway through hers, she said, "If I were going to name this thing I'm eating, I would call it Lick Sticks. Because you lick it, and it's a stick. It doesn't pop, and you don't lolly it!"

She has a future in marketing.

Delphine and I have been reading some classic chapter books about kindergarteners, like Ramona and the Betsy books. (By the way, if anyone can recommend any other books/series in that vein I would love to hear it!) I am struck by how early these kids walk to school alone: specifically, early kindergarten. Ramona was written in the sixties and Betsy was written in the thirties. So, apart from the cars which I agree are a concern, what has changed in the world since then that prevents us from letting our kindergartners walk to school? Nothing. But we don't because of some irrational, formless fear that Something Bad will happen to our children if we don't supervise their every move.

I'm thrilled to find a website of people who don't want to wrap their children in bubble-wrap, and I'm astonished I didn't find it before now: Free Range Kids. I don't have time to read much now but I'm looking forward to exploring this website! And in the meantime I might even let my kids play in the front yard without supervision! I'm a maverick.

Cordelia is so funny and verbal that I think we almost take the cute things she says for granted, but I'm going to try and write some of them down for posterity, and Delphine's too!

Today, Cordelia had just woken up from her nap and she accompanied me into the bathroom while I peed. After I finished peeing she said "You need paper?" I agreed and she got me one little piece of toilet paper, crumpled up into a tiny ball.

I looked at it and said, "I have to get some more because my bits are very big."

She said, "I like your hairy and big, strong bits!"

"Thank you!"

"And also your slippers."

Cordelia is so funny and verbal that I think we almost take the cute things she says for granted, but I'm going to try and write some of them down for posterity, and Delphine's too!

Today, Cordelia had just woken up from her nap and she accompanied me into the bathroom while I peed. After I finished peeing she said "You need paper?" I agreed and she got me one little piece of toilet paper, crumpled up into a tiny ball.

I looked at it and said, "I have to get some more because my bits are very big."

She said, "I like your hairy and big, strong bits!"

"Thank you!"

"And also your slippers."

I'm posting this here mainly so Dave can enjoy some schadenfreude about our fair city and so Sascha and Leontine can see the messier side of Toronto. Oh politics, why must you be so hard?

(Delphine is almost five and Cordelia is two and a half and a month.)

It's 8:03 in the morning, and the girls are out on the deck. It's about 10 degrees outside so they both have on sweaters, and Cordelia has on mismatched wellies. They are lounging on the lounge chairs (the "relaxing" chairs) and playing "Ah ah ah!" with a crow. The crow says "Ah ah ah!" and they say "Ah ah ah!" back. Blake stood at Delphine's window (which overlooks the deck) and said "Ah ah ah!" and Cordelia started giggling.

Delphine loves to go outside every morning right after breakfast, now that it has warmed up (the weather, not breakfast). She has explored every one of the thousand square feet back there, and she keeps track of what is growing for me. Right now the fiddleheads are coming up, and it's all I can do to stop her from picking them all to eat.

Cordelia is at that stage where she overgeneralizes grammatical rules, so she "holded" my hand or she "moveded" back. (I'm not sure what that double-suffix thing is about, but it's pretty cute, in a Gollum-esque way.) Anyway, that's cute enough but Delphine has started doing it too, which is awesome. I like that she's learning things from her sister, even if those things are wrong. I'm sure they'll get sorted out sooner or later.

8:17 am: Cordelia is sitting at the dining table drawing with crayons. She says "I'm drawin' a hyclops! The hyclops goin' to have hair..." And she talks herself through the whole picture. She likes drawing cyclopses because she's still at the stage where her drawings are mostly circles and lines. Circle, circle inside, two lines sticking out; ta-da! Hyclops!

Delphine is making pictures of all different houses. She drew a condo, and a boathouse, and the roof of a house, and a round house, and just a regular house.

This morning Delphine told me she had a bad dream, but she changed it to be a good dream. There were monsters, and she had writing on her skin which told the monsters there was something inside her, but she told the monsters that the stuff inside was stuff they didn't like, muscles and bones, not something good like money and treasure. Then she flew away, and the monsters couldn't fly. She triumphs in her dreams!

It must have been a good night for bad dreams, because Cordelia woke up twice with bad dreams, too. Maybe Delphine can teach her how to make her bad dreams go better.

It's 2:42 pm which means I should go and wake up Cordelia so we can go pick up Delphine. Cordelia has only been asleep for about an hour; I put her down a little later than usual because there was a guy here aerating our lawn and I had to pay him.

Anyway, this morning we went to the library to pick up the thousands of books Blake and I had on hold, and to get some books for the girls. The girls got another Alfie book by Shirley Hughes, and a few more picture books. I got a couple for Delphine from the "Advanced Picture Books" shelf. I must also remember to order a new chapter book for her; we just finished "'B' is for Betsy" by Carolyn Haywood. We read a couple of books while we were there; Delphine picked out a book about a farmer, but she was very disappointed when it turned out to be just a counting book. She is getting too old for probably about half of the books in the picture book section of the library. I think we might have to switch to a bigger library, but I don't want to; I love this library and it's so handy.

After the library we went to the toy store to get something for Ursa, who is turning 5 this weekend. The girls were supposed to help me pick something out, but they got distracted by the train set. There was a little boy playing with the trains too, and they did 'dinosaurs knock over the trains' and 'look out, sheep, don't get hit by a train!' and all kinds of other train/plastic animal hybrid games. I finally got them to help my pick some little things out, and we headed home.

Lunch was peanut butter and Marmite on leftover buns (I forgot to make bread again). I made Delphine a snack of oatmeal cookies and prunes (no, she's not constipated, she just really likes prunes) and we were off to school. After I dropped her off, Cordelia and I headed home, the lawn aerator guy was here, and that's the end of that story, mostly. After he was done I overseeded the lawn and seeded the border we are converting to lawn. I know, it's madness. I need to come up with something better to do with my backyard, but in the meantime grass seed is cheap.

Now I'm going to wake up Cordelia and get her something to nibble on while we go back to the school to pick up her big sister.

Cordelia had a couple of oatmeal cookies to nibble on, and I put her in the big double stroller to go pick up Delphine. Usually we take a smaller stroller, but Delphine stubbed her toe really badly in the morning so I thought she might need a ride home.

After school, Delphine stopped and played with her friends for ages, as usual. School is out at 3:15 but we're lucky if we get home before 4:15. As usual, they started off playing in the school play structure, sliding, jumping on the wobbly bridge, and, increasingly, climbing the various climby bits – ladders, ropes, tires, and so on. Then they moved on to playing right at the far end of the playing field, apparently in the dirt. I think they like it over there because they're so far away from their Mums and grandmothers and so on. Finally we Mums got them moving by promising a few minutes of play on "Big Hill", the sloped lawn at the front of the school. (Obviously Delphine's toe was no longer bothering her.) We finally managed to leave with only some of the usual hysterics, and came home to a dinner of pancakes and bacon and mango and fried tomato. Sometimes I like to have breakfast for supper, just for fun.

We skipped bathtime in favour of reading some books, and then it was into pajamas and into bed by 7:15. I make that sound easy, but often there is some debate as to whether and when it is necessary to put on pajamas, brush teeth, tidy bedrooms or go to bed. Usually we all agree on reading a book or two, though.

Blake got home, as usual, sometime in the middle of bedtime and joined in the mess of brushing and reading and fighting. After the Smalls were in bed we Bigs took the laundry off the line and folded it, cleaned the kitchen, Blake had his supper, we watched a couple of Daily Shows and went to bed.

And that's a day in the life.

From André Roberge

jennifer:~ bwinton$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn | head
86 ls
80 bzr
60 cd
56 scp
46 vi
38 exit
37 sudo
25 xcodebuild
13 spam
7 ssh

I’m not sad about that set of commands. I look around a lot, and check stuff in a lot, and copy it to my iTouch most of the time. I’m sure xcodebuild would be higher in the list if I didn’t use Command-B from inside the IDE.

As I mentioned before, I’ve ported Gambit Scheme to my iTouch, and have been playing around with it a little. It’s pretty nice all in all, but I recently ran into a small problem while I was trying to play around with macros. The problem? There’s no way to enter a backtick (`) on the iTouch! That means that I don’t really have a way to write code like

1

`( a b ,(+ 1 2) d)

which makes writing macros a lot more painful. Fortunately, I got a lot of help from the people on IRC and on the Gambit mailing list. Specifically, Marc Feeley, the author of Gambit, posted a snippet of code that I could put into my .gambcini file that would add $ as a synonym for `. The code looked like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

(begin
  (##readtable-char-class-set!
    (current-readtable)
    #\$  ;; the character to dispatch on
    #t   ;; this character is a delimiter
    (lambda (re c) (##read-quotation re #\`)))  ;; handler
  #f)

and the example, which works, is:

1
2

$(1 ,(+ 2 3) 4)
output: (1 5 4)

If you’re trying to write that code on your iTouch, you might notice that it includes the forbidden `, and so you’re once again out of luck. Except that in this case, you can replace #\` with #\u0060, which you can type in on the iTouch, and then it’ll all work.

Spring has arrived with an unlikely two sunny warm days in a row, over a weekend! We celebrated by playing in the muck. We raked most of last fall's leaves off the front and back lawns, and I cleared off and weeded some of the north border in the backyard. I pulled out about a ton of creeping charlie, which is surprisingly satisfying to uproot when the ground is soft; you can get hold of a bit without breaking the stem and then reel in about a foot of plant and roots, like a magician pulling scarves out of a hat.

We also uprooted some of the many raspberries, and I cleaned out some of the raspberry patch. There are dozens of plants there and it's hard to get the leaves and twigs and weeds out from between them, to say nothing of trimming out the dead canes, pulling out the millions of little suckers, and removing the raccoon poop. I think the smart thing to do with the raspberry patch will be to thin it out as well as reduce its overall footprint. The previous owners must have really like raspberries.

There are lots of little things growing, but the only things flowering yet are crocuses. I'm not sure what the other things are so I'm looking forward to their flowers. Some tulips I planted last fall are coming up in the front yard; Delphine is very excited about that because she helped me plant them.

Perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment this week was that Blake built a frame for our Square Foot Garden. That's a technique for vegetable gardening whereby you plant your entire garden in one (or more) four-by-four foot squares. We picked out the spot for the garden and Blake was poking around in the shed and found four perfect four-and-a-half foot planks, which he screwed together into a frame to delineate and protect the garden. I say this casually, as if Blake screws things together to make other things all the time, but if you know Blake you know that just isn't so. He is not what you might call "handy". However, he made a perfectly lovely frame without swearing or drawing blood, so I think he might be handier than either of us suspected. The frame is gracing our garden and waiting patiently for some nice compost and lots of seeds.

Last night, I finally got the garage door open, after it had been frozen in a block of ice for most of the winter, and got my bike out. So this morning, I biked to work for the first time in, uh, I don’t even know how long. It was a pretty sweet ride, all in all. There were any number of reasons not to do it; my biking jeans are dirty, it’s too cold, I couldn’t down-shift, but as always there was one reason that trumped them all. I wanted to ride again. And so I did.

Some of the things I forgot about during my hiatus were how good that first cup of coffee tastes after you’ve been riding in -5° weather, what a rush it is to pass cars as they’re sitting, idling in stop-and-go traffic, and how invigorated I feel when I finally get to the office, and sit down. Oh, also how sore my butt is. Damn, that’s a small hard seat. I can’t wait to get used to it again.

Well, that’s about it. I made it in safely, and I’m sure I’ll be doing it again, and again, and pocketing the $22.50/week that would have gone to the TTC, to spend on random upgrades.

Wow, I didn't realize I hadn't updated my book log since August. That's insane! Book log updates take a long time, so I guess I put off doing them, but eight months? Here are the books I read from August to the end of last year, and I'll post this year's books in another post. One day. Maybe in August.

Three Junes by Julia Glass was a vacation read I borrowed from Baba, and it was a great book. I am looking at all the notes I made on it after I read it, and sadly despite having written the notes and now reading them, I don't remember much of the story, which doesn't reflect well on my attempts to read more attentively and remember what I read. Anyway, it's one of those novels with dozens of different characters whose lives intersect in interesting ways. The characters are beautifully drawn and the intersections of their lives are plausible and enjoyable to read about.

I sound like an idiot when I try and write about fiction! Maybe non-fiction too. Oh, I wish I were smarter. You would think all this reading would help.

Get Smart: Nine Sure Ways to Help Your Child Succeed in School by Ronald Dietel. I think I picked this up because it was on display at the library. That is to say, I didn't order it especially, and I'm not worried about Delphine's academic development or anything. I'm not even particularly worried about whether she "succeeds" in school; the question of whether getting good grades can be considered succeeding is very much up in the air for me at the moment. Anyway, that's now, but back in September when I read this book I thought it would be cool to know how to help my kid succeed in school.

Dietel starts by commenting on the fact that apparently there is no time to be a kid any more, and there's big pressure on even the smallest of children to succeed in school. "The words 'let them be kids' are becoming a faint echo of the past." And that's all he says. He doesn't say that sucks, he doesn't say you should be a counterpoint to the pressure in your kid's life, he doesn't say maybe achieving in school isn't the be all and end all. And I guess he wouldn't! If he felt that way I bet he would have written a different book.

He goes on the talk about the different factors which affect your kid's success at school (specifically: ability, effort, attitute, school quality, teacher quality, school learning habits, home learning habits, evaluations, communication). And then for each factor he talks about how you can affect and improve it, varying from study techniques to working with your kid's teacher to homework routines. It was a pretty useful book, for what it was. I am older and wiser* now than I was when I read the book, and have some different perspectives on school and learning and how much involvement I should have in my kid's life, so even though I only read this book a few months ago I think I would approach it a lot differently if I read it today.

* I am older and wiser now mainly because of a book I just read called Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn which has blown my mind and made me rethink everything about interacting with my children, but in the best possible way. I will post about it sometime.

The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen by Mitali Perkins; another just-picked-it-up choice. This is a young adult novel about an Indian-American teenager who is torn between her traditional grandparents and her desire to be an ordinary American girl. I generally liked the story and the message of the book, but I am spoiled by all the Canadian books I usually read and was really put off by all the American references. I don't see why an American book shouldn't have American references, but there's something nice about books set in Canada. They're easier to read. I expect the same is true about books set in Sweden if you're Swedish. I also though that Sunita's boyfriend's exoticization of Indian culture was kind of creepy, but it was presented positively in the book.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande is a book about how to succeed in medicine, or any endeavour which involves risk and responsibility. Gawande's three core requirements for success are Diligence, Doing Right and Ingenuity. He illustrates them with fascinating examples from the field, from the difficulty in getting people (doctors!) to wash their hands to the subtleties of conduct in the examining room, to the near-magical improvements in neonatal survival after the introduction of the Apgar score. This is a wonderfully written, interesting and thought-provoking book, whether you are a doctor or just want to be smarter and better at what you do every day.

Incidentally, here are Gawande's five "Suggestions for Becoming A Positive Deviant":

1. Ask an unscripted question; be interested in someone else, surprise them, learn something about the people you see every day, find their humanity.
2. Don't complain; it drags you and everyone else down, it is unhelpful and boring.
3. Count something, track something; be a scientist in the world. If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.
4. Write something; add some small observations about your world; step back and think about a problem; make yourself a part of the larger conversation.
5. Change; respond to new ideas; recognize the inadequacies in what you do and seek out solutions.

Find something new to try, count how often you succeed, write about it, ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going. These are words I try to live by, even in my relatively small world. I strive for constant improvement. That sounds really dorky, but it's true.

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. Another fantastic book! It's great when I get two good books in a row. This is a fascinating book about, as it says, how doctors think, and mainly how they diagnose. Groopman talks about the inadequacies in medical training, how doctors feel about you as a patient, how they come to their conclusions and how they can get stuck in stereotyped views of you and your condition. Most importantly he writes about how you can ask questions to understand your doctor's thinking and perhaps gently steer them in a different direction if you feel like they are not giving enough thought to your condition, or if you just want to understand their diagnosis better.

Everyone who is a patient should read this book, and doctors should too.

The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough by Sarah Nettleton. This is mainly house porn; lots of pretty pictures of "simple" houses; houses that are exactly as big and complex as they need to be, and no more. Pretty and inspirational.

Supernanny: How To Get The Best From Your Children by Jo Frost and Nanny Wisdom: Our Secrets for Raising Healthy, Happy Children — From Newborns to Preschoolers by Justine Walsh and Kim Nicholson. I read these books because I was looking for inspiration on how to discipline Cordelia, who was just getting into a bit of a hellish phase. Both books favoured timeouts, which I tried and which failed miserably because Cordelia would either be completely happy on the "naughty step", or Delphine would go over and comfort her.

Anyway, otherwise these are pretty good books which emphasise what I consider to be the cornerstone of good parenting, a structured routine. They also both give a shoutout to an early bedtime, another parenting tool which I think is sadly underused these days.

However, I wish the Nanny Wisdom nannies would stick to general parenting advice and stay away from advice on nursing, which is... well, it's none of their business and they don't know what they're talking about. They say you should stop nursing at a year and they say that at some point your milk dries up and your kid is just nursing for pleasure. Which is not true at all! They clearly overstepped the bounds of their own expertise there. If you want good nursing advice, the book for you is Breastfeeding Made Simple by Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett. Not some nanny book.

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is what you experience when you are completely involved in what you are doing, when you feel simultaneously focused and transcendent. It doesn't happen very often, and Csikszentmihalyi has studied when it happens and how. This is a book about how to fully engage in life, how to live without waste of time or potential. If you don't believe in an afterlife then you know we've only got maybe eighty years of consciousness, and you'd better believe I don't want to waste any of mine. This is a wonderful book about finding happiness and fulfillment, sometimes where you least expect it (like at work!).

Factory Girl by Barbara Greenwood. Barbara Greenwood is a lady in my choir who writes really neat history books for children, which combine historical facts with a narrative. She tells the story for a few pages and then breaks off and talks about the facts behind the story. This was an interesting read for me because it made me realize how much I bluff when I'm reading historical fiction. For example, the character in the book works in a sweatshop that makes shirtwaists. Sure, shirtwaists, I thought! Cool! It was only three pages later when Greenwood breaks out and says, in effect, "Here is what a shirtwaist is" along with a few illustrations out of the Eaton's catalogue, that I realize I had no idea what it was, really. Similarly she tells what, specifically, you could buy with the girl's meagre pay. I found this to be a very effective teaching technique; I think you're more likely to ask questions about what you're reading if you know that the answers are coming up, and I think these books encourage curiosity. I look forward to reading more of Greenwood's books with the girls.

Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs. This was better than the last Kathy Reichs. I think I need another go-to mystery writer, though, because Reichs continues to annoy with her sentence fragments and her "it's on the tip of my tongue" intuitive mystery-solving.

Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. This was useful but I can't remember exactly what I learned that I didn't already know. Oh, I guess I learned that it is considered okay to put the entire message in your subject header (if your message is short). That always annoys me, but I guess if no-one else minds I'll have to put up with it. Also apparently you are only supposed to have one topic per email; if you want to talk to someone about two things you should send two emails. That sounds really maddening to me, but I have learned from experience that some people just don't read (or comprehend) more than one item or paragraph in an email message. Also I suppose having one topic per message might make it easier to file, if you're a dinosaur and you still use folders instead of tags.

And that's the end of my 2007 reading! I can't believe Cordelia is still asleep! I might even be able to post about what I've read in the last three months sometime before the end of April.

A while ago, I had bought an iPod Touch, and started messing around with the CSS on this weblog, to try and get it looking a little nicer on the small screen. Sadly, it never quite worked, and because of a bug in my selector (“min-device-width” should have been “max-device-width”), I broke the weblog for Safari too. Fortunately, today, I grabbed a copy of the latest version of Safari, and fixed the bug! So now iPhones and iTouches will both get a pretty version of the site, and Safari 3.1 looks beautiful again. Even more beautiful, now that SVG is supported. (Give it a try, and let me know if you can see the green ? in a circle.)

Delphine is just under two months away from being five, and in the last month or so she went through one of those quantum changes — your kid goes to bed one day and she's four and a half, and wakes up the next day and she's nearly five. Her hair is longer, her face is more girlish and less babyish, she has all these freckles that came out of nowhere, she uses long words and elaborate grammatical constructions, she can almost read. It's a bit dizzying, frankly, but I couldn't be happier. The more she moves away from babyhood the more I like hanging out with her.

So yeah, she can almost read. I would say she's a few weeks from really being able to read; she can sound out short (phonically logical) words, and she is learning a few tricks (like looking at the first letter and the associated picture and guessing!) to work out the other 95% of the English language. She's also sight-learned a few words, which suits me because that's largely how I (and I assume most literate adults) read.

I will say now that I hate phonics. I hated it when I was a kid and I still hate it now. I hated it when I was a kid because it didn't work (and because I thought it was a lame crutch for kids who couldn't "really" read — I was a huge snob when I was a kid). I hate it now because it still doesn't work; I feel like such a fraud when I tell Delphine to "sound it out" when I know that that's a technique which will hardly ever help her figure out a word. I am perplexed by the emphasis phonics receives, unless it's because no-one has come up with a better way of "teaching" kids to read, and they want to feel like they're doing something. The English language is too full of exceptions for phonics to be worth anything — if you want to read anything more interesting than the most pedestrian Easy Reader (another thing I hated as a kid) you are going to come across the word "one" or the word "weigh" or the word "said" and phonics is going to let you down. I don't have any answers, though. All I know is I figured out how to read by being read to (no-one taught me) and I expect my children will do that same, whether or not they learn "k-k-k-kite" at school.

Back to Delphine, who can also write. She can form letters like a demon, so she writes quickly if you spell things out for her, but she's also really bold about writing on her own and guessing how things are spelled. She loves to write cards for her friends. "Athena I love you." They are always love letters.

Okay, this is my last brag about Delphine, I promise. We were talking about aunties the other day; since she's been old enough to talk we've been working with the convenient fiction that she has two aunties, Auntie Morgan and Auntie J'Anne. On Sunday I decided she's old enough to understand that Auntie J'Anne is actually Daddy's auntie and her Great-Aunt (although J'Anne is hardly the quivering old dear that the title implies). To illustrate the idea I decided to do a family tree. I walked Delphine through drawing up a crude diagram with circles for each person and lines joining us all up. When it came to labelling, Delphine decided that she was going to write each person's name around their circle, with the letters projecting out perpendicular to the surface of the circle. (I'll take a picture so you can see what I mean.) And she did so, forming each letter correctly with respect to the slope of the circle, without turning the paper around. That means she can rotate two-dimensional objects in her head!

Obviously I think that's pretty cool, whether or not almost-five is exactly when you would expect someone to be able to rotate two-dimensional objects in their head (I have no idea). It's math! Do you know what this means? It means she'll be able to read maps, and walk around strange cities without getting hopelessly lost, and figure out where this bit goes on that bicycle without trying it! It means she'll be able to do those useless spatial manipulation questions in IQ tests! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she has math brain — she comes from two families of math heads — but I'm still pleased. Now we just need to get her doing cryptics.

Part of the being-almost-five (and not really four anymore) is that Delphine is generally nicer to be around (don't let anyone tell you about Terrible Twos, Four is much worse. Twos get a bad rap.) However I can't get her to stop yelling at Cordelia. Poor Cordelia seems to get screamed at all day, when she won't give up a toy, when she can't learn the rules of a game, when she hides wrong in Hide and Seek. I know Delphine learned all about yelling from me, but the scale is entirely different! I have yelled at her fewer than ten times in her whole life, whereas she seems to yell at DeeDee ten times a day. Well, maybe five. I guess they mean it when they say your bad behaviour will be reflected in your kids' behaviour, but I didn't realize it would be magnified to this extent. I have a book out about managing Anger and Aggression (for parents and children) so hopefully that will help. Because I don't have Clue One what to do at this point. At least March Break is over so they can get out of each other's hair for a while every day.

Delphine is just under two months away from being five, and in the last month or so she went through one of those quantum changes — your kid goes to bed one day and she's four and a half, and wakes up the next day and she's nearly five. Her hair is longer, her face is more girlish and less babyish, she has all these freckles that came out of nowhere, she uses long words and elaborate grammatical constructions, she can almost read. It's a bit dizzying, frankly, but I couldn't be happier. The more she moves away from babyhood the more I like hanging out with her.

So yeah, she can almost read. I would say she's a few weeks from really being able to read; she can sound out short (phonically logical) words, and she is learning a few tricks (like looking at the first letter and the associated picture and guessing!) to work out the other 95% of the English language. She's also sight-learned a few words, which suits me because that's largely how I (and I assume most literate adults) read.

I will say now that I hate phonics. I hated it when I was a kid and I still hate it now. I hated it when I was a kid because it didn't work (and because I thought it was a lame crutch for kids who couldn't "really" read — I was a huge snob when I was a kid). I hate it now because it still doesn't work; I feel like such a fraud when I tell Delphine to "sound it out" when I know that that's a technique which will hardly ever help her figure out a word. I am perplexed by the emphasis phonics receives, unless it's because no-one has come up with a better way of "teaching" kids to read, and they want to feel like they're doing something. The English language is too full of exceptions for phonics to be worth anything — if you want to read anything more interesting than the most pedestrian Easy Reader (another thing I hated as a kid) you are going to come across the word "one" or the word "weigh" or the word "said" and phonics is going to let you down. I don't have any answers, though. All I know is I figured out how to read by being read to (no-one taught me) and I expect my children will do that same, whether or not they learn "k-k-k-kite" at school.

Back to Delphine, who can also write. She can form letters like a demon, so she writes quickly if you spell things out for her, but she's also really bold about writing on her own and guessing how things are spelled. She loves to write cards for her friends. "Athena I love you." They are always love letters.

Okay, this is my last brag about Delphine, I promise. We were talking about aunties the other day; since she's been old enough to talk we've been working with the convenient fiction that she has two aunties, Auntie Morgan and Auntie J'Anne. On Sunday I decided she's old enough to understand that Auntie J'Anne is actually Daddy's auntie and her Great-Aunt (although J'Anne is hardly the quivering old dear that the title implies). To illustrate the idea I decided to do a family tree. I walked Delphine through drawing up a crude diagram with circles for each person and lines joining us all up. When it came to labelling, Delphine decided that she was going to write each person's name around their circle, with the letters projecting out perpendicular to the surface of the circle. (I'll take a picture so you can see what I mean.) And she did so, forming each letter correctly with respect to the slope of the circle, without turning the paper around. That means she can rotate two-dimensional objects in her head!

Obviously I think that's pretty cool, whether or not almost-five is exactly when you would expect someone to be able to rotate two-dimensional objects in their head (I have no idea). It's math! Do you know what this means? It means she'll be able to read maps, and walk around strange cities without getting hopelessly lost, and figure out where this bit goes on that bicycle without trying it! It means she'll be able to do those useless spatial manipulation questions in IQ tests! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she has math brain — she comes from two families of math heads — but I'm still pleased. Now we just need to get her doing cryptics.

Part of the being-almost-five (and not really four anymore) is that Delphine is generally nicer to be around (don't let anyone tell you about Terrible Twos, Four is much worse. Twos get a bad rap.) However I can't get her to stop yelling at Cordelia. Poor Cordelia seems to get screamed at all day, when she won't give up a toy, when she can't learn the rules of a game, when she hides wrong in Hide and Seek. I know Delphine learned all about yelling from me, but the scale is entirely different! I have yelled at her fewer than ten times in her whole life, whereas she seems to yell at DeeDee ten times a day. Well, maybe five. I guess they mean it when they say your bad behaviour will be reflected in your kids' behaviour, but I didn't realize it would be magnified to this extent. I have a book out about managing Anger and Aggression (for parents and children) so hopefully that will help. Because I don't have Clue One what to do at this point. At least March Break is over so they can get out of each other's hair for a while every day.

It’s been a while since Delphine has wanted to play on my little computer at bedtime. We’ve been too busy reading old, old books about animals of various kinds. Yesterday, we both seemed to realize this, and decided that tonight we would play on the little computer instead of reading books. I’m sure Delphine was thinking something more along the lines of “We’ll play on the little computer, and then read books”, but that was never going to happen.

The commentary on this is “It’s a head. On a slide. With a hat, and the sun.”

It’s been a while since Delphine has wanted to play on my little computer at bedtime. We’ve been too busy reading old, old books about animals of various kinds. Yesterday, we both seemed to realize this, and decided that tonight we would play on the little computer instead of reading books. I’m sure Delphine was thinking something more along the lines of “We’ll play on the little computer, and then read books”, but that was never going to happen.

The commentary on this is “It’s a head. On a slide. With a hat, and the sun.”

On the Bazaar mailing list, Robert Collins wrote:

I’m happy to announce bzr-loom.

And I’m happy to use them!

My company uses vss for our version control, (I know. That should be “for our ‘version’ ‘control’”,) and we had recently announced a code freeze for an impending release. Thanks to bzr-loom, which I downloaded and installed on my birthday (the 5th), I could continue to push ahead with my work, and pop down and fix bugs in the frozen code when it became necessary, and never lose my history, and not have to deal with copying directories back and forth. Heck, by adding a thread for each proposed future VSS checkin, I even had a reasonable history in VSS when it came time to check everything in.

Thank you, Robert, for making my job far more bearable.

It's day three of March break, which I have been looking forward to for a while. As I might have mentioned a thousand times, taking people to and from school is the thorn in my side for this winter, so a week of unstructured days where we don't have to be anywhere in particular are any particular time sounds awesome. I'm also glad to say I haven't turned into one of those Moms who is scared to face a week or even a day with her kids. (One of my favourite examples is an acquaintance from school who has bought her kid millions of toys but "has" to schedule her for activity after activity because she is "bored" at home. My kids aren't allowed to be bored.)

So on Monday we had a friend of Delphine's over and they did the usual dressing up and jumping on the bed and drawing pictures and stuff. I threw together some lunch and then Delphine went over to the friend's house while Cordelia napped and I ... I don't remember what I did. Read, maybe?

Tuesday we had a huge impromptu March Break Pizza Party. I had invited my friend Ellen over with her three, and my friend Tanya invited herself over (she's allowed to do that) with her two, and she in turn mentioned to a friend, Anna, that she was coming, and said friend invited herself over (she's not really allowed to do that but we have been muttering about getting together sometime, and she's moving to England soon so it's not like I need to worry about something awkward developing.) Anna has two boys, so altogether there were nine children (two babies, three toddlers and four kindergartners) and four Mummies. We tossed the eldest out into the snow for a while where Jake (the senior kindergartner) gave orders and pulled people around on the sled. The Mums juggled babies and made pizza and talked some awesome talk (I love smart people) and then we hailed everyone in and fed them all. Then all the kids played upstairs. It was an interesting dynamic; they are all three and four and I swear they spend eighty percent of the time discussing what they were going to play and what the rules were and whose rules they should use, and maybe twenty percent of the time actually playing, usually chasing each other and screaming.

Gradually people left (but not without cleaning the kitchen first!) until it was just Tanya and me and ours, and we agreed it was good fun but not something you'd want to do every day.

Today I declared Toy Sort-Out day. We brought every toy in the house down to the dining room along with the assorted boxes and bags and things they go in, and put everything where it's supposed to be, creating new categories and boxes (with labels) as necessary. I am trying to train them to be organized freaks like me. It was hard work but it only took the morning. After lunch Delphine and I "rested" on the couch (with the TV on) while DeeDee napped, and now they are outside painting the snow with food colouring-tinted water, and making snow cookies with the sandbox toys I dug out.

Tomorrow we're venturing downtown to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Arts, and Friday is still wide open! Maybe we will go tobogganing in the park. What are you doing for March break?

Here's an article from Scientific American about how a focus on your kid's effort — not their intelligence — is the key to success in life (and school). The bottom line is, either your kid believes that she's smart and successful because she was born that way (a fixed intelligence mindset) or she believes she's smart and successful because she works hard and practices (a growth mindset). In either case, eventually your kid is going to run into something she can't succeed at effortlessly. If she has a fixed intelligence mindset she will give up on that thing, assuming that it's just something she's not good at. If she has a growth mindset she will just try harder and harder. Children with fixed mindsets will also be scared to try new things, and to make mistakes, for fear that they will be "outed" as someone who isn't so smart after all.

So your kid needs to know that intelligence isn't intrinsic but is something that can be changed and improved, and she needs to know that being intelligent isn't much use without a good dose of hard work and courage. That's why I am not impressed when my kids are smart; of course they are smart. It's what they do with themselves that I am interested in.

This issue is close to home for me because I grew up with a very fixed mindset and it has taken me years to shake it. It also caused me to make some decisions I still regret now. Basically every time I wasn't instantly successful at something I would give it up, and I was absolutely petrified of making mistakes, so I never took any risks. I would like my children to be bolder, less fearful of failure and mistakes, and to work harder than I did as a child. (And as an adult, now that I mention it.)

Here's an interesting paragraph from the article for Kat — this ties into something we were talking about the other day:

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people’s willingness—or unwillingness—to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them, according to a 2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.

Oh, incidentally I got the link from Alyson Schafer's blog.

Last night I was browsing the newest iTouch apps, and I saw one called LEDBanner. It allowed you to scroll text across your screen as if your screen was a set of LEDs. My only problem with it was that I couldn’t programmatically change the text. Fortunately the source was available, and so, with only minor changes, I now have a version which lets me change the text to whatever I want.

For instance, the following scheme code:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13

#! /usr/bin/gsi(define (flmod x y) (fl- x (fl* (floor (fl/ x y)) y)))
(define (%100 time) (flmod (floor (time->seconds time))
(fixnum->flonum 100)))
(define (f)
  (begin
    (with-output-to-file
      (list
        path: "~/Library/Preferences/org.akamatsu.LEDBanner.msg"
        truncate: #t)
      (lambda () (display (%100 (current-time)))))
    (thread-sleep! 3)
    (f)))
(f)

changes the text every three seconds to the number of seconds, modulo 100. Which turns out to be a mostly-random number, as shown below.

One of the things I wanted to add to WifiToggle was having the icon show you whether your wifi was on or off, by having the switch be up or down (and the blue glow be on or off, since in Australia a down switch means that the light is on, whereas in Canada, it’s the opposite). Sadly, it didn’t seem possible, since Springboard¹ seems to cache your icon.png, and ignore any updates you do to it. And so that was where I left it for a long time…

Recently, however, I was browsing through AppFlow and I noticed that the MobileCalendar application’s icon was different than the one in Springboard. Specifically, the one on AppFlow was blank, whereas the one in Springboard showed me the current day and date (i.e. "Saturday" and "1" for today). How did it do that? I grabbed the source, and grepped through it for the answer, which turned out to be a special key in the Info.plist:

<key>SBIconClass</key>
<string>SBCalendarApplicationIcon</string>

When I set WifiToggle’s SBIconClass key to be the same, I too had the day and date drawn on top of my icon! Partial success! So now I’m at the point of trying to figure out if I can use any class that implements the correct interface (I’m thinking specifically about adding a class to my application to handle the updates.) Of course, I have no idea what that interface is, but hey, I’m way closer than I was this morning, so that’s got to count for something.

When I went to pick Delphine up from school this afternoon, she burst into tears as soon as she saw me. One of the other moms pointed her out to me; "Isn't that yours crying up there?" The teacher, a substitute, said "She just started crying, I don't know what happened!"

I asked Delphine, "Did something happen?" She shook her head. "Did someone do something?" No. "Did you lose something?" No. "Did you hurt yourself?" No. "Are you going to tell me why you're crying?" No. So I didn't press the issue, and we started walking home. After we had said goodbye to Delphine's friend and walked a few more steps, Delphine said "There was a different teacher, and Mrs Hollister said it was going to be Mrs Green or Mrs Turk and it wasn't any of them! And we had music in the gym, not in music! Everything was too different!" And she sobbed. She went on to detail further how things were different (she had lunch at a friend's house instead of home, and the gym was all set up for a concert, not like normal). She was really upset! I remember hating things to be different when I was a kid, so my heart went out to her. Once we got home we read a book and cuddled on the couch, and she seems to feel better now.

I hope things aren't so different tomorrow!

When I went to pick Delphine up from school this afternoon, she burst into tears as soon as she saw me. One of the other moms pointed her out to me; "Isn't that yours crying up there?" The teacher, a substitute, said "She just started crying, I don't know what happened!"

I asked Delphine, "Did something happen?" She shook her head. "Did someone do something?" No. "Did you lose something?" No. "Did you hurt yourself?" No. "Are you going to tell me why you're crying?" No. So I didn't press the issue, and we started walking home. After we had said goodbye to Delphine's friend and walked a few more steps, Delphine said "There was a different teacher, and Mrs Hollister said it was going to be Mrs Green or Mrs Turk and it wasn't any of them! And we had music in the gym, not in music! Everything was too different!" And she sobbed. She went on to detail further how things were different (she had lunch at a friend's house instead of home, and the gym was all set up for a concert, not like normal). She was really upset! I remember hating things to be different when I was a kid, so my heart went out to her. Once we got home we read a book and cuddled on the couch, and she seems to feel better now.

I hope things aren't so different tomorrow!

Hopefully this all just works. Include A&B, and 4 < 5.

Headers

Smaller headers

Blockquotes.

• Lists
• of

• things

  Blocks of python code could be here.

etc, etc.

Okay, so now that I’ve determined that it works, here’s how I did it: I added a new entry parser, called pymarkdown.py, to my plugins directory. The content of the code looks like this:

FILE_EXT = 'md'

__version__ = 'pymarkdown 0.1'
__author__ = 'Blake Winton <bwinton+python@latte.ca>'

import markdown

try:
    from Pyblosxom import tools
except ImportError:
    pass

def cb_entryparser(entryparsingdict):
       """
       Register self as markdown file handler
       """
       entryparsingdict[FILE_EXT] = parse
       return entryparsingdict

def parse(filename, request):
    """
    We just read everything off the file here, using the filename as
    title
    """
    entrydata = {}

    f = open(filename, "r")
    lines = f.readlines()
    f.close()

    # strip off the first line and use that as the title.
    title = lines.pop(0).strip()
    entrydata['title'] = title

    # absorb meta data lines which begin with a # and consist
    # of a name and a value
    while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
        meta = lines.pop(0)
        meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
        meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
        entrydata[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

    # join the rest of the lines as the story
    story = ''.join(lines)
    story = markdown.markdown( story )
    entrydata['body'] = story

    return entrydata

And you’re done.

I guess you might be wondering why I would bother doing that, since both Amy and I are obviously comfortable writing straight HTML. Well, DrProject is switching from a custom-built Wiki-ish-syntax parser to a third-party Markdown parser, and I figured this would give me a bit of a headstart on getting used to the new syntax, and also give me a bit of a playground for testing out new features that I might want to add.

This Tuesday we were treated to a most peculiar sight; our street, which usually has between six and ten cars parked on it, was empty of cars but full of two Bobcats and a huge yellow snow eating/spitting machine, and a steady succession of dump trucks being filled with snow. We have had so much snow this winter (a storm every three days in February alone) that the city has given up trying to shovel it around and is trucking it away to who knows where? And in order to get the job done they have resorted to the extreme measure of towing people's cars around the corner, moving the snow, then towing the cars back (I think, or maybe they just leave the cars where they dropped them!). It's costing millions and it's a little crazy, but I'm glad they did it because it was getting almost impossible to get over the huge snowbanks at every intersection, even with the awesome stroller.

As far as I am concerned, spring cannot come too soon this year. Although I suspect we're in for a spell more winter yet.

Today has been nice, so far. I managed to jettison my children — Cordelia to nursery school and Delphine to a friend's house — and then I went to Doug Miller Books and talked with Doug Miller himself about the sad state of kids' books, then up to Bean Sprout and chatted for a bit with the girl there about our sad little house and our big reno and our big debt. Then I emerged into the sunshine and realized, not for the first time, that the thing which makes this stay-at-home mom thing so hard for me is how lonely it is. I am not one of those solitary people, one of those people who needs time alone to recharge; I need people. I would be happy if I had friends at my house all the time.

If you ask my friend Jeff from work he will tell you I spent half my time at the office hanging out with him talking about movies and TV shows and life. What he doesn't know is that I spent the other half online chatting with my brother and on my favourite message board. (Yeah, I didn't get much work done, although no-one seemed to mind.) One of my favourite times of my life was when I was in university, when there was always someone around to hang out with no matter what time of day, even if it was only some creepy Unix guy with a dirty beard.

But here I am, here I have been for almost five years, with very little company. Sometimes a friend comes over, and that's great, but mostly it's just me and the little ones, and they keep me busy and they're fun to be around (except when they're not) but they're no substitute for grown-up company. And I realized today I think that's one of the reasons I'm such a sucker for these ensemble dramas, like Firefly and Torchwood; because I miss that cameraderie and rapport and just plain companionship.

So today was good, pathetically enough, because the sun was shining in that way that makes you think maybe, one day, spring will come, and because I had a little time to myself, unhurried, to get some jobs done, and because I got to hang out with Doug Miller and the Bean Sprout girl whose name I don't even know and have some company and talk about things I care about with people who know how I feel. And I feel a little bit nourished, a little bit more filled up, a little bit less lonely.

Lest you think I'm one of those horrible mothers who is only happy when she gets away from her children, let me tell you about Family Day. Family Day is the contrived excuse for a February long weekend that the Ontario government has decreed. I am all for a long weekend in winter — I have been saying we need one for years — but I think if you are the kind of person who spends long weekends with your family you will anyway, and if you aren't nothing Dalton McGuinty says is going to make you want to.

But we like to spend our free time together, so this first Family Day, after the girls and I had breakfast we gathered all the saved-up paper towel rolls and cereal boxes and popsicle sticks and packing tape together and built a crazy castle with turrets and towers all akimbo, and then Delphine and Cordelia strapped on their smocks and I got out the poster paint and they decorated the thing, which is now on display on our desk in the living room. I figure we can keep decorating it for years, probably.

That was all done and cleaned-up-after by ten thirty, so I kicked the family into action to help me vacuum (they pick up all the toys and small furniture off the floor and I vacuum). Delphine went off to a friend's house for lunch, and while Cordelia was napping I read pages and pages of my book — chapters and chapters! — while Blake did I don't know what. Something on the computer, I think.

After Delphine came home and Cordelia woke up we all made calzone together, then the girls went to bed and Blake and I watched TV (guess what we watched?) and it was pretty much my perfect day. Playing and reading and cooking and a freshly vacuumed house? Heaven.

Pronounced "windjing", it means "complaining persistently and in a peevish or irritating way". Since so much of my blogging (and indeed most people's) is devoted to general or specific pissing and moaning, I thought I'd better give it its own category. Not so much to elevate the whiny posts, but to segregate them from the rest of the weblog, the parts which might give you the impression that I'm a normal well-adjusted person and not a neurotic whining freak.

I had a teeny tiny breakdown this morning. It started yesterday; I was reading a book and one of the characters was talking about lying awake all night with insomnia. Luckily I have never had trouble sleeping, because the very thought of trying to deal with the children and get through a day without any sleep (or even without the seven hours which I absolutely need) got me into a bit of a panic. Then I got to thinking about how one person raising a family, alone for most of the day, is completely abnormal from a biological point of view. Humans are pack animals, we are supposed to live in extended family groups. I should have grannies and aunties and big sisters and cousins around to help me with my kids while I help with theirs. I shouldn't have to pull Cordelia out of her nap every single day to pick Delphine up from school, or drag Delphine away from her activities so we can get Cordelia from her school.

So there was all that, and on top of it the children are fighting like ferrets in a sack all the time, or at least it seems like it, and furthermore Delphine has started to explore the exciting world of misbehaviour and deception — and I'm feeling singularly unqualified to deal with that — and I have a cough and a sinus infection and it's bloody cold outside — I am so sick of winter — and I'm tired and all I want to do is sit on the couch eating brownies and watching Jack Harkness kiss people, which isn't going to happen until I have dragged my carcass through another sorry day of this madness. The nice thing about working in an office is that you can phone it in for a day, or a week, or even a month or two and no-one seems to notice, but as a Mom you have to step up and cook and clean and pick up and drop off every single bloody blessed day with no reprieve. Well, except after bedtime. Thank god for bedtime. And thank god my kids are as good as they are, because as Blake's mother says, "You think this is bad, you should see regular children!"

And that has been the whinge for today. Thank you very much.

Three TV shows worth watching: Chuck, which looks like absolute cheesy crap but it has great characters, and it's funny, and hey, it has Jayne! Battlestar Galactica, which pretty much everyone knows about now. Fantastic characters (that's mainly what I look for in a TV show) and thought-provoking plot lines. And last but not least, my current favourite, Torchwood, the show that makes me wish Leontine still worked for the BBC so she could design a cool box for the DVD and then send it to me. With the DVDs in it. Russell T. Davies is a brilliant writer who has created an ensemble of witty, subtle and interesting (oh, and gorgeous) characters and put them in a universe which keeps throwing horrible things at them. If you miss Buffy, this is the show for you.

Edited to add: (I mentioned this to Blake yesterday and he said I should post it. I guess any vestigial signs of intelligence should be encouraged.) Torchwood is the show Angel would have been if it had been better written and David Boreanaz was a better actor: it's dark, sexy, adult, scary, with lots of great one-liners and sex. Plenty of sex.

Jeez. Apparently I am not the first person to make that connection; Russell T. Davies was. Well, he did borrow Spike, didn't he.

Delphine is a few months shy of turning five, and she has become a tremendously capable and independent little thing, to the point that I am having trouble figuring out where to set limits.

I recently read a wonderful book called Breaking the Good Mom Myth by Alyson Schafer. Schafer is an Adlerian psychotherapist, and the Adlerian philosphy basically says, among other things, that you should throw as much responsibility on your child as they can handle. This is something Blake and I have been doing all along, but the book features an inspiring list of things that kids should be able to do at each age. By the time she's eight she'll be running the whole household!

Delphine's been dressing herself since she was two, and she can easily handle the putting on of winter gear that some kids older than her are still getting helped with. (I was going to say they couldn't manage it, but I am sure they could if their parents would just leave them to it.) But lately the independence has been getting out of hand. The other morning I came downstairs to see that Delphine had used a steak knife to slice a chunk, for breakfast, off an old moldy loaf I had forgotten about. Yesterday she used my facecloths to clean up after her friend peed on the bedroom floor. It's like there's no challenge she can't face alone!

Which is great, but we are going to have to draw some lines and make some rules. The first rule has to be about knives, specifically don't touch them. The second has to be something about cleaning up messes, I think. Cleaning up messes is just very complicated, what with the different products and tools, not to mention the biohazard factor. A grown-up has to be involved. I am sure we will figure out the limits we need to set, but in the meantime it's pretty exciting to see her growing up.

Delphine is a few months shy of turning five, and she has become a tremendously capable and independent little thing, to the point that I am having trouble figuring out where to set limits.

I recently read a wonderful book called Breaking the Good Mom Myth by Alyson Schafer. Schafer is an Adlerian psychotherapist, and the Adlerian philosphy basically says, among other things, that you should throw as much responsibility on your child as they can handle. This is something Blake and I have been doing all along, but the book features an inspiring list of things that kids should be able to do at each age. By the time she's eight she'll be running the whole household!

Delphine's been dressing herself since she was two, and she can easily handle the putting on of winter gear that some kids older than her are still getting helped with. (I was going to say they couldn't manage it, but I am sure they could if their parents would just leave them to it.) But lately the independence has been getting out of hand. The other morning I came downstairs to see that Delphine had used a steak knife to slice a chunk, for breakfast, off an old moldy loaf I had forgotten about. Yesterday she used my facecloths to clean up after her friend peed on the bedroom floor. It's like there's no challenge she can't face alone!

Which is great, but we are going to have to draw some lines and make some rules. The first rule has to be about knives, specifically don't touch them. The second has to be something about cleaning up messes, I think. Cleaning up messes is just very complicated, what with the different products and tools, not to mention the biohazard factor. A grown-up has to be involved. I am sure we will figure out the limits we need to set, but in the meantime it's pretty exciting to see her growing up.

Due to various factors, it has come to pass that Cordelia has been the subject of a parent-teacher interview several months before her older sister will be. I was supposed to meet with Cordelia's nursery school teachers back in December, but I barely had time to breathe let alone sit around talking about my kids (usually my favourite pastime). So I finally managed to meet with Lakeisha and Simone a couple of weeks ago.

My original thought was, this is going to be kind of pointless; Cordelia's two, she plays in water and makes pictures and builds towers out of blocks. How much is there going to be to say? But as it turns out I am really glad I went because hearing about how she behaves in school has given me a whole perspective on Cordelia.

Apparently Cordelia is very focussed in class; she will work on something for ten or fifteen minutes. If you know anything about two-year-olds you know how weird that is; usually they do stuff for a couple of minutes then move on to the next thing. The "Your X-Year-Old" series of books has a little overhead diagram of a room with various activities set up, and then a map of a typical kid's path through that room, and the map for the two-year-old is like a bowl of spaghetti. Not Cordelia. I saw an example of that focus in action the other day at supper as she painstakingly shelled three snow pea pods. (Ever since we gave them edamame my kids have had trouble knowing what peas need to be shelled.) She apparently also comes back to things; the teachers know to leave her pictures or whatever out because she'll come back later to work on them.

She has only been talking at school since after Christmas; she's been talking for us for ages, but she held back at school and now they're astounded at her voice. Well, mostly the other children. "She talks!" But what Lakeisha and Simone actually said — and if you know Cordelia in person you should make sure you're sitting down right now — is, "They're surprised when she talks because she's usually so quiet." Quiet! Apparently the Cordelia at school is the quiet, studious Cordelia.

She's also observant; she was the first and only kid to notice a new science table the day I went to visit, and she examined everything on it with her (apparently) usual thoroughness.

I am really pleased I went to the meeting and was able to hear about this other side of Cordelia. I think the problem with having exactly two kids is that you end up forcing them into false dichotomies: Delphine is the quiet one, therefore Cordelia must be the loud one; Delphine is the studious one, therefore Cordelia must be the flippertigibbet. This was an excellent reminder that it is profoundly important to step back and see my children for who they really are, not just who they aren't because that's who their sister is. Otherwise I risk missing the most wonderful and interesting parts of them.

This has also made me really glad that I put Cordelia in nursery school, despite the gruelling mess it makes of my day twice a week. (I'm the mother, what the hell else am I doing anyway?) It's such a great opportunity for her to blossom outside of the home and away from her sister and me.

And finally, I am very excited about Delphine's parent-teacher interview. What surprises has my oldest been hiding? What will I learn about her? I can't wait.

Due to various factors, it has come to pass that Cordelia has been the subject of a parent-teacher interview several months before her older sister will be. I was supposed to meet with Cordelia's nursery school teachers back in December, but I barely had time to breathe let alone sit around talking about my kids (usually my favourite pastime). So I finally managed to meet with Lakeisha and Simone a couple of weeks ago.

My original thought was, this is going to be kind of pointless; Cordelia's two, she plays in water and makes pictures and builds towers out of blocks. How much is there going to be to say? But as it turns out I am really glad I went because hearing about how she behaves in school has given me a whole perspective on Cordelia.

Apparently Cordelia is very focussed in class; she will work on something for ten or fifteen minutes. If you know anything about two-year-olds you know how weird that is; usually they do stuff for a couple of minutes then move on to the next thing. The "Your X-Year-Old" series of books has a little overhead diagram of a room with various activities set up, and then a map of a typical kid's path through that room, and the map for the two-year-old is like a bowl of spaghetti. Not Cordelia. I saw an example of that focus in action the other day at supper as she painstakingly shelled three snow pea pods. (Ever since we gave them edamame my kids have had trouble knowing what peas need to be shelled.) She apparently also comes back to things; the teachers know to leave her pictures or whatever out because she'll come back later to work on them.

She has only been talking at school since after Christmas; she's been talking for us for ages, but she held back at school and now they're astounded at her voice. Well, mostly the other children. "She talks!" But what Lakeisha and Simone actually said — and if you know Cordelia in person you should make sure you're sitting down right now — is, "They're surprised when she talks because she's usually so quiet." Quiet! Apparently the Cordelia at school is the quiet, studious Cordelia.

She's also observant; she was the first and only kid to notice a new science table the day I went to visit, and she examined everything on it with her (apparently) usual thoroughness.

I am really pleased I went to the meeting and was able to hear about this other side of Cordelia. I think the problem with having exactly two kids is that you end up forcing them into false dichotomies: Delphine is the quiet one, therefore Cordelia must be the loud one; Delphine is the studious one, therefore Cordelia must be the flippertigibbet. This was an excellent reminder that it is profoundly important to step back and see my children for who they really are, not just who they aren't because that's who their sister is. Otherwise I risk missing the most wonderful and interesting parts of them.

This has also made me really glad that I put Cordelia in nursery school, despite the gruelling mess it makes of my day twice a week. (I'm the mother, what the hell else am I doing anyway?) It's such a great opportunity for her to blossom outside of the home and away from her sister and me.

And finally, I am very excited about Delphine's parent-teacher interview. What surprises has my oldest been hiding? What will I learn about her? I can't wait.

I was reading a presentation about how to write better software for non-developers, and it said:

I would refuse to work on any sort of collaborative software development project that doesn’t use version control.

I totally agree. Heck, I even use version control for my personal one-off projects. But it got me wondering what people use at their jobs, so I asked my friends who were on instant messenger, as a straw poll. The results were shockingly unanimous. Subversion. 8 for 8. I regret to say that I’m not using Subversion at my job, but that may change someday. In the meantime, leave a comment, and tell me what you’re using at work or at home, either to make me feel better, or to rub my nose in it.

Update: One person uses Clear Case. I’ve heard good things about Clear Case.

For some reason I am feeling a bit melancholy this afternoon, so I thought I would buck up and listen to some music and do some housework.

First my iPod gave me "Why Worry" by Dire Straits, which is kind of a bummer song anyway, and which reminds me of my brother Dave (see above) who I miss these days. Then came on "Song for a Winter's Night" by Sarah McLachlan, which for some reason always makes me really lonely for my mother, and I thought what the hell, no-one's around, why not shed a few tears. Then that song ended and I thought good, that's enough gloom! What's next?

"Close Your Eyes", the Buffy and Angel theme from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Kill me now. With a big sword. Even though you really love me. It's for the good of the world.

There was a new version of Sketches in my update queue the last time I checked. The main feature of this one is the ability to draw shapes, like arrows, ovals, and rectangles, as shown below.

There was a new version of Sketches in my update queue the last time I checked. The main feature of this one is the ability to draw shapes, like arrows, ovals, and rectangles, as shown below.

I am sorry I was rude to you. I know you are up in the middle of the night somewhere in India trying to convince irate Canadians to switch to your idiotic home phone service, and you are just doing your job and following a script, but honestly. Do you have to call twice a week? In the middle of naptime? Please just stop.

Thank you,
An Irate Canadian.

The main tip-off that these are back-dated entries is my inability not to use 21:12 as the posting time.

The left-hand image is of a flower beside a river. The blue at the top of the picture is the sky. Only having one shade of blue is one of the limitations you have to work around when using a free drawing app on an MP3 player. Less of a limitation when you’re 4. The drawing on the right is a flower, and the sun. Or maybe it’s a sunflower. Heh.

The main tip-off that these are back-dated entries is my inability not to use 21:12 as the posting time.

The left-hand image is of a flower beside a river. The blue at the top of the picture is the sky. Only having one shade of blue is one of the limitations you have to work around when using a free drawing app on an MP3 player. Less of a limitation when you’re 4. The drawing on the right is a flower, and the sun. Or maybe it’s a sunflower. Heh.

I’m retro-actively posting a few pictures, so if you think you haven’t seen these entries before, you’re probably right.

Below you can see a flower. A black flower. Or maybe it was a cloud. The blue stuff is rain, anyways, I know that.

I’m retro-actively posting a few pictures, so if you think you haven’t seen these entries before, you’re probably right.

Below you can see a flower. A black flower. Or maybe it was a cloud. The blue stuff is rain, anyways, I know that.

The best thing about this is that I never have to take the pictures down because the magnets are running out of strength. (Just a sun today, on the default Etch-a-Sketch background, instead of the note paper background of yesterday.)

The best thing about this is that I never have to take the pictures down because the magnets are running out of strength. (Just a sun today, on the default Etch-a-Sketch background, instead of the note paper background of yesterday.)

There’s a program called Sketches on my iTouch that Delphine likes to play with before she goes to sleep. I recently found out that I could email the drawings to myself, and so here are Delphine’s drawings from today. The one on the left is obviously a flower, with the sun in the sky. The one on the right is, uh, just pretty with all the colours mixed together, I think.

There’s a program called Sketches on my iTouch that Delphine likes to play with before she goes to sleep. I recently found out that I could email the drawings to myself, and so here are Delphine’s drawings from today. The one on the left is obviously a flower, with the sun in the sky. The one on the right is, uh, just pretty with all the colours mixed together, I think.

Today, at 3:20, Amy and I took Mimi to the vet, and had her put down.

It’s really hard, and I’m finding that I have to kind of pull back from it for a while, or I’ld be totally bawling all the time I’m writing this.

She was cranky, rude, ill-tempered, and maybe a little mean (although never to me). But I did love her, and she really seemed to be getting worse, and not enjoying life anymore, and so I think that it is the right decision, hard though it is. Heck, just looking at her, sleeping on the sofa beside me last night, I could totally see that she wasn’t right. She was in pain, and wasn’t happy anymore, and didn’t have much of a prospect of getting better. (Certainly not while we weren’t willing to spend $1000’s of dollars treating cancer. Chemotherapy seems like a cruel thing to put a cat through.) She’s also the first pet I’ve ever had to put down. I was sad when the rats died, but this feels totally different, probably because we’re doing it by choice, instead of it happening on its own time. I guess I just figured that she would disappear one night, and I could delude myself into thinking that she found another home, but it’s probably better this way. More of a sense of closure, and all that...

She went really quickly, (really really quickly,) which was a blessing, and the vet agreed that she was on her way out, and that we probably did the right thing at the right time.

I can also see why people believe in God and Heaven and stuff. I would kind of like to believe that Mimi has gone to some sort of better place, but I know in my heart that she hasn’t. That she’s just gone. And it sucks.

On a happier note, there are a lot of things I want to remember about her, both good and bad. The way her head smelled of ginger and cinnamon. The time she made Kathryn cry while she was babysitting for us. How loud and incessant her purr was. The way she would always hiss and swipe at Colin when we were all working in my living room. How soft she was under her chin. The way she let Amy (and only Amy) comfort her after spending a night at the vet. Heck, I even want to remember the way she would scratch her ass on the rug, and complain when I wanted to sit down on my couch. Damn stupid cat. I loved her.

Yeah, like I was done messing with my iTouch. Whatever.

I've been playing around a lot with the iTouch, and developing quite a few programs for it. The first one was by request, although I’m also finding it very useful. (And apparently a few other people are as well! Cool!) It’s called WifiToggle, and it’s a small app that simply toggles on and off your Wifi connection, so as to save batteries. The next thing I did was a port of the SpiderMonkey Javascript interpreter. It works, and it wasn’t that hard to get compiled and installed, which is really pretty cool when you stop to think about it.

The final thing I got working just tonight (which I was playing around with mostly to take my mind off of stuff. See tomorrow’s post for details), was a port of the Gambit Scheme interpreter. I know, Scheme is just like Javascript, only with an uglier syntax, but I still like it, and hopefully the lack of punctuation will make it easier to use on the iTouch. Heh.

Anyways, if you own an iPhone or iTouch, and have jailbroken it, be sure to add http://iphone.latte.ca/ to your list of Installer sources, and geek out!

I was pondering, a few weeks ago, how great my relationship with Blake is, how he respects me and treats me as equal in every way, and I wondered when and how I developed an intolerance for men who behave any differently. I cannot and do not abide any kind of sexist comments or behaviour, and I think that's partially why I have such a good relationship with Blake; because I would not give him the time of day if he weren't the kind of man who treats women as equal.

But where does my insistance on respect come from, I wondered? Definitely not from my parents' relationship, which is really just kind of weird. Then I realized it was from my relationship with my brother. When we were growing up Dave and I were best friends; in each others' pockets, confidantes and pals, and Dave never ever suggested I was less capable, less intelligent, less anything because I was a girl. I don't think it even occurred to him; he always had female friends and he's one of those men who simply treats women as human beings. That set the bar pretty high for every other man on the planet, and so while I don't have many male friends, the ones I do have are golden, because they have to pass the "Dave Brown Don't Treat Me Like A Idiot" test.

I was listening to my iPod Shuffle and it gave me "So Far Away From Me" by Dire Straits and it took me back to one of the happiest memories of my adolescence. I used to spend countless hours and countless evenings in my brother's room just hanging out; I played games on his computer, and I guess we must have talked, although I don't remember about what. I remember it as dark in his room, and warm, and full of that teenage boy funky smell which to this day I still rather like. We used to listen to Dire Straits and Elton John and The Eagles and Don Henley and Travelling Wilburys and all that old man music that Dave favoured at the time and has probably grown out of by now. (I haven't! Love me some old man music.) I don't remember how often I was in Dave's room or for how long, but looking back it seems like I was there all the time, just enjoying his company. How many teenage brothers and sisters can say they had a relationship like that?

So there are two things about my brother (known about these parts as Uncle Dave). It was his thirty-fourth birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday Dave!

OMG! How did they get these pictures of our wedding?!?!!!1!

I know, it's old, I'm not all hooked into the celebrity gossip.

Well, apparently I will never have time to actually blog, but there are three pages of new pictures (November, December, and Christmas) up at the pictures page, so let's hope a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Well, it’s official. I just cancelled my cable service, effective January 23rd. I found that for the past few weeks, I really haven’t been watching anything worth while, and $96.22/month is a lot to spend to have the only thing on be the HD version of American Gladiators. (No, seriously, that’s what I’m watching right now. Pity me.) I’ld like to say that it’s the writer’s strike, and the resulting lack of decent shows, or that I’m getting smarter and the shows are appealing to me less and less, but really it’s just gotten too expensive for the value I’m getting out of it. Heck, maybe I’ll take half of that money, and buy a couple of DVDs every month. But we’ll probably use it to pay down the Line of Credit that financed the deck.

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have cable of some sort, and so I’m not really sure how I’ll be occupying my time. Reading books? Reading the Interweeb? Programming? It’s a blank slate. It’s all up in the air. And if I end up spending all my time at my sister’s house, watching her TV, then we’ll know I’ve got a bad addiction, and should seek professional help.

Oh, I should also mention that the person on the other end of the line was really nice. She tried to figure out a way for me to pay less, and still get the channels I wanted, (the best deal was $19.95/month for channels 2-28 and 59-70, but that was only for 6 months, and it’s still $20/month I would rather spend elsewhere,) but totally wasn’t pushy about it and was fine with me cancelling the service outright. I picked up the dial phone when they called me back for the customer satisfaction survey, and so couldn’t complete it, but I did want to make a mention of how helpful she was, and how well it all went.

On Friday and Saturday afternoon this week, I took some time out of my day to go down to the University of Toronto and participate in the DrProject Code Sprint. It was a lot of fun, and I managed to fix a couple of bugs, and get a better understanding of one of the hairier parts of DrProject. At least I hope it’s one of the hairier parts of DrProject, since if the whole codebase is as ugly as the wiki parts, we’re in some serious trouble. To be fair, it’s a not-entirely-deterministic parser for a not-entirely-deterministic language, so when something goes wrong, it’s kind of, uh, tricky to figure out what’s just happened. For example, after parsing a link surrounded in square brackets, the following character seems to be treated as text. Why? Who knows. As someone new to the wiki parser, I’ld love to have the code be simpler to understand, but I’m starting to suspect that the complexity is inherent in what it’s trying to do.

The two bugfixes/feature additions I did, although they seem sort of unrelated, both work together to let people create a bibliography/set of footnotes to pages, which is something Greg said that he’s been wanting for a while, so that was kind of cool. It’s nice to be able to go somewhere, be surrounded by smart people, and concentrate on making something better without interruptions.

Speaking of the bugfixes, they were:

• adding support for dl/dt/dd in the wiki syntax, which turned out to be surprisingly hard, since it seemed to be the first bit of syntax that wanted to either return more than one tag or insert a tag into the already-generated stream, so I had to figure out which option to go with, and how to get it working, and
• coming up with and implementing a wiki syntax for creating and referring to anchors in a page, which I think I did a pretty decent job on. The syntax uses [wiki:#foo] as an anchor, and [wiki:MyPage#foo] as a link to that anchor

I’m watching a video on my new iTouch about how to break web applications, and it presented the idea that Javascript is the same as stack overflows which are also the same as getting free phone calls by whistling a note into a payphone…
They're all examples of bad things happening when you intermingle code (javascript/return addresses/command tones) and data (html/arrays on the stack/your voice). I guess it’s sort of expensive to set up two connections for every connection, but that seems to be the only way to avoid stuff like this, which has apparently been happening for years.

I don’t think there’s a lot I can do with this new idea, but it seemed interesting, so I figured I’ld record it for posterity.