Well, better *this* Carrie than the one with all the pig's blood and telekinesis problems...

Yep, once more I was seduced by another "Which X in the show Y are you most like" quiz. For some reason, I can't get enough of these. For example, did you know that of all the Bond girls, I'm most like Honey Ryder from "Dr. No"? Or, of all the characters on Grey's Anatomy, I'm totally Miranda Bailey? (I figured I was more the Addison Montgomery type, or, failing that, slightly Izzy Stevens, but, there you go, can't argue with the exact and exacting science that is Internet quiz formulation.)

Anyway, I was thinking about dating and relationships, and lo and behold, stumbled across a "Which 'Sex and the City' vixen are you?" quiz. Vixen???? Moi???? Ooooo, gotta try that one out, and fast. Well, it seems I'm Carrie. Not bad. Now I just have to find my very own Mr. Big.

Try it yourself, the link is at the bottom of the post. Drop me a comment and let me know which one you are. I wanna know which other vixens I'm hanging with.

You Are Most Like Carrie!

You're quirky, flirty, and every guy's perfect first date. But can the guy in question live up to your romantic ideal? It's tough for you to find the right match - you're more than a little picky. Never fear... You've got a great group of friends and a great closet of clothes, no matter what! Romantic prediction: You'll fall for someone this year... Totally different from any guy you've dated.

Which Sex and the City Vixen Are You?

Random bits

Unfortunately I don't have it together enough to post anything succinct, coherent, well-constructed and/or witty today. In fact, I nearly sprained my brain trying to spell succinct, coherent, well-constructed and/or witty. Which should tell you exactly in what rough shape I'm in this morning. So, it's random bits that you're in for today -- and it's the best I can do.

• To those of you with younger girls -- are my girls the only ones that call their Littlest Petshop toys "Little Miss Petshop" instead? It keeps reminding me of "Little Miss Sunshine".

• The Hershey's factory in Smiths Falls, eastern Ontario, is going to be closing within the year. The production will be moved to Mexico, where costs are cheaper. This sucks. Not only does it put nearly 500 people out of work in a small town that is also facing large job losses (800 people) from the upcoming closure of the Rideau Regional Centre, an institution for adults with developmental disabilities, by 2009; but it also means the end of a favourite day trip for me and the girls. If you live nearby and haven't made the visit to tour the plant and buy cheap, cheap chocolate at the Chocolate Shoppe, you should go. It's best to go during the week and see the plant in operation (very, very cool), but the shop is open on weekends too. Stock up on all kinds of goodies that are bad for the waistline but good for the soul. The last time I was there, I spent $15 on chocolate, and that bought so much that the grocery-type plastic bag it was in ripped on the way out to the car.

• In an unrelated story, last Sunday night was not much fun. Deep in the throes of bad period cramps and in a pissy mood, I went to the pantry only to discover that not only was I out of cheap Hershey's chocolate, but that the girls have finished their Easter stashes (ungrateful offspring, not even saving any for the woman who carried them for what seemed like a combined total of 56 months and spent at least 3 and a half weeks in labour. But, I digress.). Then I remembered the baking chocolate. It was as if clouds parted and an errant beam of sunlight shone down (highly unlikely at ten at night) and illuminated the three-pound bag of Hershey semi-sweet chocolate chips down on the bottom shelf with the flour and the sugar and the oatmeal. SAVED! Before you could even say "chocolate chip" I was back in my chair, sweatpants hiked up snugly, self-medicating by washing down handfuls of Chipits with cheap French merlot and sobbing quietly at an episode of Grey's Anatomy from Season 2 on DVD. (You know, the one with the train wreck and the couple impaled on the steel rod while Meredith finds out Derek has chosen to stay married to Addison.) Ah, good times...[insert eye roll here].
  

• In contrast, last Saturday night was all kinds of fun. I got to meet up with some other Ottawa-area bloggers and was entertained and amused by them in person instead of in print, or online, or whatever. Chantal, Dani, Andrea and Alison are definitely as funny and interesting as you think they are from reading their blogs. I hope we can do it again when some of the other local blogging chix can make it.

• I have to get Rachel weighed. I know how tall she is, but not how much she weighs (no scale in the house), and I plugged in the values in the Parent Center Height Predictor tool. I had to guess her weight, but entered known values for all the other criteria. I guessed 40 pounds. I certainly hope that I'm wrong, because when I ran the little program, this is what I got back: " Your girl will likely be 7 feet, 0 inches at age 18." Um, yeah, right. Crap, better start researching basketball scholarships. (Or, maybe it was just a temporary software glitch. Tried it again this a.m. and it returned values of 5 feet 9 inches. Much more likely.)

• Last week Alissa, at Life's Little Adventures awarded me a Thinking Blogger Award.
  



Thanks Alissa! I'm somewhat floored by this, and very honoured. I never intended to make anyone think, just to make them laugh if possible. The deal is that I have to list 5 bloggers that make me think. So many bloggers make me think. I'll try to avoid tagging anyone that I know already has one, but I don't have the time to sift through archives and find out for certain, so, at the risk of repeating other choosings, here goes:


1. Chris at Rude Cactus. Today's posting is a good example of thought provoking.
2. Mamatulip at Where am I going... and why am I in this handbasket?. Her posts about her mother make me think, and often cry.
3. Kerry at Popwatchcanada posts on so many subjects, silly and serious, that there's always something there to think about.
4. Rick Mercer's Blog makes me laugh, and think, and then laugh some more. His skewering of the pompousness of Canadian politicians at all levels and of all stripes is breathtaking and very welcome. And snarky.
5. Andrea at a garden of nna mmoy makes me think. And leaves me in awe of her writing talents and her bravery in what she chooses to share with us.
   
   

One Hundred Years of Solitude -- yeah, I wish

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not a mother.

I know that he's not a mother for several reasons: for one, he's a man. But more importantly, a mother knows that you're lucky to get five minutes of solitude in an average day, and not all at once either. One hundred years of solitude can sound pretty good on a bad day. On a day when you can't even get two minutes alone for a pee without little hands knocking at the door and a litany of "Mooooom, Leah's being mean to me." "Mom, Rachel hit me with a Barbie, and it HURT." And so on. You know how it is.

One of the most useful inventions of the last century is the bathroom door lock. it's right up there with the automobile and the telephone. I've locked myself in the bathroom to make phone calls. I've locked myself in the bathroom to put on make-up without 'helpers'. God help me, I've even hid in there to sit on the closed toilet lid and just enjoy a minute of not having little hands grabbing at me or needing me to do something.

Yesterday the girls were playing some complicated imaginary game in the living room. Leah was a puppy and Rachel was wearing a long dress-up dress and carrying a baby doll. Nature called. I told them I was going into the bathroom and not to disturb me unless it was an emergency.

I had no sooner sat down than the knocking started. It was Rachel. "Mom, I need you".

"Mommy's going potty right now Rachel, I'll come and see you when I come out."

"But I need you now."

"Didn't I ask you to leave me alone unless it was an emergency?"

"But it is an emergency. I'm pregnant."

Well, after having 2 kids I tend to pee when I laugh anyway, so at least I was in the right place. After I had finished I went out in the hall to see Rae with a doll-shaped lump underneath her dress. "See, Mommy, I'm having a baby".

At four years old it's pretty funny. I just hope that we don't have the same conversation again when she's sixteen.

A hundred books

I love to read. It isn't an exaggeration to use the word love. At work I'm an editor (see, books again), so, in essence, I read for a living. At home, you'd think I would do something else to relax. But no, once the girls are tucked safely into bed and as much of the housework I feel like doing is done, I read. (What, you were expecting me to say salsa dance? Wrestle bears? Watch American Idol? Please...)

I've always loved reading. My mom told me that I taught myself to read at age 3, and I haven't stopped since. I come from a family of readers. As far back as I can remember there were always books in the house. My mom read constantly, my dad read too. Trips to the library were treats for my sister and me. Mom and I still swap author names we think each other would like, and every couple of months my dad will send me a book that he's read and liked.

The year I gave birth to Leah, I kept a journal of the books I read. One hundred and six books in one year. Have I mentioned I'm a fast reader? I hope that I can instill the love of reading in my own children. I think I'm doing OK. "Mommy, read me a story", is one of the most used phrases in our house (right after "Mommy, [insert Leah or Rachel here]'s bugging me!", "I'm hungry", and "You're not the boss of me").

I saw this a while back on But I Digress, and filed it away for a slow blog day. Today is the day.

Look at the list of books below.
The ones I’ve read are in bold.
The ones I want to read are in italics.
I've left alone the ones that I'm not interested in.

I wasn't as inventive as some have been in assigning them to categories, but here you go.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander* (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged** (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible***
46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead**** (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Helen Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In the Skin of a Lion (Michael Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses***** (James Joyce)

* I'm currently reading this (along with The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman - awesome!) and I'm almost finished, so I guess that counts as read.

** I'm not sure why, as this book, in paperback, is basically the same size, shape and density as a brick. And about as edifying. I read it when I was in university. I think I read it due to losing a bet. Whiskey and I shouldn't hang out together.

*** Well, I've read parts. All of us have read parts, haven't we?

**** After Altas Shrugged, you'd think I'd know better, wouldn't you. But I didn't. Now I know why people read Ayn Rand: it's like hitting your head against a brick wall -- it feels so good when you stop.

***** Everyone I know says they want to read it, but no one I know actually has. One day, I'd like to take a stab at it. Maybe. If I'm really bored. And there's no bad reality TV on that night (sorry -- redundant). Oh, who am I kidding. It'll probably never happen.

Finally, the reno reveal

Well, it's hardly Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, but I'm really happy with the way my bedroom turned out. A new bed, new duvet cover, and new paint turned our old bedroom into my new bedroom. Much more feminine. In fact, the inspiration for the paint colour came from a Victoria's Secret bra, and you can't get much more feminine than that.

Before:






The colour "swatch" with new paint. Pretty close match, dontcha think?:



After:







I still need a window treatment and a couple of pictures, but all in all, much better. A sanctuary that's all mine.

When girls drink too much

I was just reading Danigirl's post Dancing with Beloved on Postcards from the Mothership, and the lines where she described the differences between dancing near someone and dancing with someone made a great deal of tea exit through my nose, and made me think of an e-mail a friend had sent me a while back (in particular, number 2, below, is what reminded me), and I thought I would share it with you:

When we girls drink too much...........

1. We have absolutely no idea where our purse is.

2. We believe that dancing with our arms overhead and wiggling
our butt while yelling "woo-hoo!" is truly the sexiest dance move
around.

3. We've suddenly decided that we want to kick someone's butt
and honestly believe we could do it too.

4. In our last trip to pee, we realize that we now look more like a
homeless hooker than the goddess we were just four hours ago.

5. We drop our 3:00 a.m. submarine sandwich on the floor (which
we're eating even though we are not the least bit hungry), pick it up and carry on eating it

6. We start crying and telling everyone we see that we love them
sooooo much.

7. We get extremely excited and jump up and down every time a
new song plays because "Oh my god! I love this song!"

8. We've found a deeper/spiritual side to the geek sitting next to us.

9. The man we're flirting with used to be our 5th grade teacher.

10. The urge to take off articles of clothing, stand on a table
and sing or dance becomes strangely overwhelming to us.

11. Our eyes just don't seem to want to stay open on their own
so we keep them half closed and think it looks exotically sexy.

12. We've suddenly taken up smoking and become really good at it.

13. We yell at the bartender, who we believe cheated us by giving us just lemonade, but that's just because we can no longer taste the gin.

14. We think we are in bed, but our pillow feels strangely like
the kitchen floor.

15. We start every conversation with a booming, "don't take this the wrong way but..."

16. We fail to notice that the toilet lid's down when we sit on it.

17. Our hugs begin to resemble wrestling take-down moves.

18. We are tired so we just sit on the floor (wherever we
happen to be standing) and take a quick nap.

19. We begin leaving the buttons open on our button fly pants
to cut down on the time we're in the bathroom away from our drink.

20. We take our shoes off because we believe it's their fault that
we're having problems walking straight.

These are sadly, pathetically, and totally familiar -- in my case I'm intimately familiar with numbers 1, 2, 4, 6, 7 (especially 7), and 18, as anyone who went drinking with me back in the day and stayed sober enough to take note of my behaviour will tell you. Not that this happens with any great frequency these days, but I'm just sayin'. Total. Accuracy.

You too, right?

Spring....sorta

OK, the snow we're going to get this weekend? My fault.

Seriously.

I've tempted fate. Right now, my car is at the garage having an oil change and having the summer tires put on. Which of course means that we will be royally dumped on this weekend. That's just the way it goes.

But spring is here today at least. The sun is supposed to come out today before the rain starts tomorrow, and the snow flurries on the weekend (that's from Environment Canada, and not just a pessimistic assessment of my bad snow-tire-removal karma).

My mom and stepdad were up on the weekend for a visit. While she was here, we celebrated her birthday and dyed eggs with the girls for Easter. Her favourite flowers are daffodils, and we bought a bunch from the Cancer Society and waited impatiently for them to bloom.









I wish I had Alissa's photography talents and camera.

Oh yeah. And what was my mom doing in Eastern Ontario on the weekend, you might ask? Well, it was to pick up the car she won in a raffle. How cool is that? And not just any car, but one decorated by Marlene Ross, who paints masks for a lot of NHL goalies.





Not bad for a ten dollar raffle ticket, eh?