These aren't the droids you're looking for

I know what I want to be when I grow up: a Jedi knight.

Seriously, what's not to like? A cool lightsaber; a choice of flattering garments, from brown robes to more form-fitting white leggings and a tunic; totally awesome martial arts skills; and the ability to use telekinesis to bring things flying to you from across the room -- like the aforementioned lightsaber -- or, more practically, a new roll of toilet paper when you really, really need one.

But the best thing, the coolest talent that I'd have, is the Jedi mind trick, the ability to use the Force to influence the minds of others, just like Obi-wan:

I could use it on my daughters at home, so I could have more time for blogging, reading and sitting on my ass doing nothing gardening:


I could use it at work, to decrease the stress of my heavy workload:

If it works on customer service drones over the phone, I could use it to effect a positive cash-flow situation in the family budget:

Hell, I could use it on everyone in the whole wide world!!!!

Sigh. I guess even the Force has some limits.


But the ultimate use of the Jedi mind trick, the Holy Grail of mind control, would obviously be this:

May the Force be with me.

I'm not making this up, you know.

Leah has a thing for words. She loves to read, to write and illustrate stories, to leave me notes, and she has a passion for those word puzzles where you have to find and circle words in a large block of what looks like random letters. She's even created her own -- slaving over the paper and then presenting me or Rachel with the finished product, the lines slanting and wavering, but the list of words at the bottom are always found in the letter block.

Knowing this, my mum gave Leah a giant word-search puzzle book at Easter. It languished for a while in her bedroom, but she's been working on it lately. Last Thursday we were at Rachel's soccer game, sitting on the sidelines, hoping that the rain would hold off (it didn't), and Leah was working on one of the puzzles in the book. She was using a bright red marker to circle the words. I glanced over at her just in time to see her circle the word plastered. Excuse me? What was that again? I leaned over for a better look. Yup, plastered. I checked the title of the puzzle: 'Drunken Stupor'. Nice. The word list included addled, bender, blasted, blotto, crocked, loaded, stewed, stinko, tanked, and wasted. Hmmm, the cover of the book didn't say anything like 'for ages 16 and up'.

Later that night, after Leah was in bed, I picked up the puzzle book and started leafing through it. The first puzzle was called 'Critical Condition' and contained words like adjudge, appraise, analysis, evaluate, partisan, review, regard, unbiased. OK, fine.

The next puzzle was 'Of High Standards': accept, admire, credence, curtsy, gratuity, ratify, tribute. I can't see how those words relate to the title, but still, OK.

Number 3 was the aforementioned 'Drunken Stupor'. Probably an anomaly, right? All the rest were probably lists of barnyard animals, or cities in Florida, or cooking terms. (And yes, all those were in the book, but they weren't the next ones, oh no siree.)

Number 4, 'This is a Bust': addiction, bong, bummer, charge, dusted, freebase, habit, hooked, kitchen, loaded, mainline, needle, overdose, posession, rush, score, wired.

And the logical follow-up, 'Dead End Street': acidhead, addict, candyman, connection, dealer, dopehead, freak, junkie, pillhead, pusher, runner.

So, of course, the next one would have to be 'Arresting Factors': accessory, bandit, bookie, conman, crook, felon, hooker, hooligan, killer, mafia, mugger, racketeer, thief, tong, vandal.

....?

I'm torn between tearing out the offending pages and letting them stay. She hasn't asked about any of the words, they're just patterns of letters that she's looking for. And who knows, perhaps this vocabulary can set her on a career path as a Crown prosecutor. Or a writer for Law and Order or CSI: Carp.

No, they're not

"The rich are different from you and me." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"No, they're not." - Alison

See, we're all the same underneath, whether we're royalty, or just that guy who thinks it's funny to give his wife a Dutch oven in bed after a night of beer and chili.

Random thoughts

• Random thought upon seeing a bunch of highschool boys at the ice cream stand trying to impress the girls: Just because you can grow a beard, doesn't mean you should.



• Random thought upon first noticing the unusually large number of robins in Carp this spring/summer: Awwww, it's so nice to see all the birds around. It must mean that the environment is doing well, at least around here.



• Random thought upon seeing that Norwalk Furniture has changed its name to Lûxe Home Interiors: It's about time. Really, who wants to buy furniture from a store that shares its name with a virus that causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Kind of like bragging to your neighbour, "Yes, that couch is stunning, isn't it. We got it at Stomach Flu Fine Furniture -- you know, down on Carling Avenue?" That was probably the worst business name since "Ayd's Meat Market" back in Windsor.



• Random thought upon noticing all the bird poop, mostly from robins, on the driveway: Wow, there are a lot of birds around this year.



• Random thought upon purchasing LCBO gift cards as end-of-year teachers' gifts: Nothing says "Thanks for educating my child" like alcohol.



• Random thought upon skimming bird poop out of the pool for the first time: Hey, bird poop floats! Who knew?



• Random thought upon skimming bird poop out of the pool for the second and subsequent times: Freaking birds, stop CRAPPING in my pool!



• Random thought upon being woken for the first time at 4:20 a.m. by the sound of birdsong: How beautiful! Back when I lived in Ottawa, it was sirens from the fire station that woke me in the night. This is so much nicer and gentler.



• Random thought upon being woken for the second and subsequent times at 4:20 a.m. by the sound of birdsong: Shut up, shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP! OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT UP AND LET ME SLEEP!!!!!!



• Random thought upon finding the remains of a robin on my front walkway that had run afoul (afowl?) of a predator during the night: Yesssssss! (accompanied by Gretzkyesque fist pump.)



• Random thought upon hearing coyotes yipping and howling down in the valley in the wee hours of this morning: Wow, the hair on my arms just stood up. What a wild and amazing sound! How lucky am I to hear that haunting noise coming in through the window on the night breeze while I'm tucked up all safe in my bed? Nature is beautiful.... I wonder if coyotes eat robins.

I don't think I want to know what's going on here

I went into Rae's bedroom the other day to put away some laundry, and I found this little tableau. I would have asked her what was going on, but she was on a playdate at someone else's house. (By the time she returned and I asked, she simply shrugged her shoulders and said, "I don't remember".)

I tried to figure out a scenario that would take into account Bride Barbie and Belle in the car with Aladdin lying on the hood, naked except for his little cap and his gold pointy-toed boots, while Erik (Or Derek, I can't remember which) sprawled face-down in front of the jeep. Because I'm telling you, it looked disturbingly like a couple of Michigan hunters with a deer tied to the hood of their pickup; if, you know, Michigan hunters were wearing full wedding regalia and a ballgown and driving a cute little roadster, while the deer was a clothing-challenged Arabian kid who's best friends with a genie. I can't even factor in the drunk/sleeping/dead guy on the road ahead. Competing hunter, perhaps? Friendly-fire collateral damage from the deer/naked-guy hunt? Too many Barbie Budweisers? The mind boggles.

There has to be an innocent six-year-old explanation for this. Maybe BB and Belle were out for a drive, when Aladdin, driven from the shower by a wasp, pulled on his boots and ran out of the house......no.

OK, how about this: Derek/Erik and Aladdin were taking a walk, and it was hot, so Aladdin stripped down, when Belle and BB......nope.

OK: Aladdin is sunbathing face-up on the hood of Belle's car while she's changing the radio station, and D/E is sunbathing face-down on the ground. Bride Barbie is just heading off to bring back iced tea for everyone.

There. There's an explanation I can live with.

Victoria's Secret, meet Red Green

It was not the best of days yesterday. I got up at 4:30 a.m. in order to try to fix a mistake I'd made the night before with the swimming pool. The pool is up and running but I'm still fighting with the water quality it to make it something that one might want to swim in, rather than something one might stock bass in, and I got up early to try to rectify the problem and still get the girls up, dressed and fed and dropped off early at daycare so I could be on time for an early workshop at work. (What I did wrong with the pool would take an entire blog post on its own to describe -- suffice it to say it involved 3 kilograms of stablilizer granules, a black stocking, a tug-of-war, and much angst. But I digress...)

So there I was, half asleep, trying to get dressed and moving. The high humidity of the morning, coupled with the fact that I had run out of hair conditoner, meant that I looked disturbingly like this:

And to top it off, my last good bra had popped an underwire -- making it even more of a medieval torture device than it is already. What could I do? I was running out of time. While brushing my teeth, I was seriously trying to figure out which shirt I could put on that would best disguise the fact that I was reduced to wearing a bikini top to work, when suddenly, the solution came to me.

Duct tape.

Good for everything, including emergency underwear repair. And the silver colour is so sparkly and feminine. Red would be proud.

(Keep your stick on the ice.)

Because we just don't have enough gold lamé parachute pants in our lives these days

Take that, you skinny-jeans-wearing clones!!