Bringing Up Bobbin

Hedging their bets

Presidential election season always brings a new set of searchers to my corner of the internet. Where a few months ago, the top searches that brought people to our virtual doorstep here at timothyandheather.com were things like:

• Wedding Limericks
• bridesmaids dresses
• Pregnancy
• Ultrasound
• Marmoleum
• Silestone

and so many more baby, wedding, and house building / interior decorating seekers, this month I'm finding a lot more people looking for stuff like

• Marry a Canadian
• Overstressed mom
• Can't get enough air in my lungs
• pain between my shoulder blades
• is my lung collapsed
• Blocked salivary glands
• sublingual gland swelling
• salivary gland milking
• infected salivery gland
• Insomnia Random Itching
• Toothache when I bite cold or hot food
• Bacteria invade dentinal tubual
• I am bringing up yellow acid
• unable to regulate my body temperature

I feel compelled to offer my expert analysis - on the searchers, not on me. Because clearly if they are searching for this icky stuff on the internet and they are arriving here, I have a few problems of my own going on.

So here it is:

1) The economy sucks. Who can afford to build, let alone redecorate a house, get married anywhere other than the county courthouse, or buy paper to write fancy limericks on. :-)

2) The politics is wearing on everyone. It's stressing people out. Stress manifests itself in physical ways. People are getting sick. Panic attacks; trouble breathing; trouble sleeping; trouble keeping stomach acid down; trouble taking care of their oral hygiene because they're too depressed to care; Depression and also depression medication is also one cause of blocked salivary ducts (I learned in my research) so more people are getting depressed and/or getting on depression meds. Woe is the world. Or they are just becoming hypocondriacs because their stressed and emotional minds would rather deal with a problem that is entirely of their own making and fixing than something completely outside of their control.

3) And, if all hell goes to a handbasket (Wait... that's not right, is it? You know what I mean.. oh yeah... if all goes to hell in a handbasket is what I meant to say) and McCain gets elected, there appear to be an awful lot of Americans out there lookin' to make a fast break up to Canada through marriage. Lucky for Tim he's already got me. We're set ;-)

Either way - happy to be of service to those internet searchers out there. I have had some rather unpleasant glandular fun over the years that you might find informative, as have my bouts with insomnia, stress, anxiety and depression. However most of my Canadian friends are married or engaged though so I won't be able hook any'ya up that are looking to move north come November. But keep on lookin'. There are plenty up there.

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Blasts from Canadian TV pasts

Every now and then I get a flashback to some old Canadian children's show I used to watch as a kid.

My latest search to find out the name of the show that featured the puppets that lived and sang under water led me to another all-but-forgotten favourite: Readalong. I think my sister loved this too... if I recall correctly, she really got a kick out of the pink talking shoe and the talking boot (I think his name was "Boot"). Ah... the memories :-). I also came across "Barbapapa", "The Bodyworks", "Fables of the Green Forest" (which I think was another Sarah favourite as well), "Guess What?", "Read All About It", "Write On", "You Can't Do That on Television", and Report Canada with Heather Conkie. (Wow. Does anyone else out there remember Heather Conkie?)

And I can't forget "Today's Special" and "Romper Room" - Hey - Sarah - remember those?

Ah.... such memories. Yes, these are the tv programs of my youth that helped influence my development into the person I am today. Of course, I read a lot too :-). But this does help explain things a bit, does it not? ;-)

Nothing about puppet fish though. Damn I wish I could remember what that was called.

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Passe-Partout!

I'm not entirely sure what brought it to mind, but something today triggered a memory of a french-canadian TV show I used to watch as a child, called "Passe-Partout". Searching on the internet for it led me predictibly to the wikipedia, which has a pretty good synopsis of the show and its rather interesting (at least to us Canadians) history of which I had been unaware. I'm gonna have to get me some of those (legal) DVDs when they come out.

I also learned that apparently, I am part of the "Génération passe-partout" :-)

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D�j� Vu.

I just read this:

Man in trench coat opens fire at Canada school
Gunman wounds at least 20 in Montreal before being killed, police say

And my LITERAL immediate first reaction was "Wha? That happened like 17 years ago. Did they somehow publish an archived story accidentally? Wait. MSNBC wasn't around 17 years ago. The commercial internet was barely around 17 years ago. What the hell is going on?"

Indeed, it is a new story, and yet not. 20 people, not 14. Wounded, but not (thankfully) killed. At Dawson College, not �cole Polytechnique de Montr�al.

Canada, my home and native land, what is happening to you? And when did it all start?

I remember in my grade 8 trip to Washington D.C. (from London, Ontario, and yes I am saying Grade 8 instead of 8th Grade on purpose to honour - that's with an O-U-R - my Canadian heritage and education).

One of our class events while we were there was a baseball game in Baltimore. Orioles vs Toronto Blue Jays.

On the way to the stadium we drove through a fairly shady part of town. I say that without knowing for sure because before we went through it the bus driver pulled over and told us to keep our windows closed and to look straight ahead and to not make eye contact with anyone outside while driving through this particular neighbourhood because it could get us killed (never mind the questionable judgement displayed by the driver and our chaperones in taking a busload of Canadian grade-8-ers through such a bad part of town when there surely had to have been alternate and safer routes to our destination). I did what I was told and I trusted he knew what he was talking about.

When we got there, we sat up in the nose bleed section, scattered across several rows. I sat in the last of those rows with two of my friends. Behind me were two seedy looking characters in their late teens, smoking pot (I didn't know it was pot at the time. It wasn't until several years later, in University actually, when I smelled that same smell again in the park across from our apartments where we'd go to watch the bongo drum playing and the freaky hippies dance, and asked my roommate what the smell was. Talk about naive and sheltered :-). One of the potheads put his feet up on the back of my seat, kicking me in the head. I started to turn around and he said in menacing whisper that sounded for real "I've got a gun. If you turn around, I'll kill you". I nearly wet my pants. And then the three of us got up and moved up several rows. We never told our teacher. We were too afraid.

Later, around the 3rd or 4th inning, as we started getting into the game and the Jays were actually making some good hits and scoring a couple of runs, we started happily cheering for our home team. Clapping and shouting "Go Blue Jays!". That was it. Innocent enough? Not to the home crowd that was there. We were escorted out of the game in the 5th inning by Stadium Security, who were concerned that the half-full glass beer bottles and other debris that the entire stadium were throwing at us to get us to stop cheering, would hurt us (actually, they were probably more concerned about the resulting lawsuit, although being Canadians it's not clear we'd have sued; an apology and some free pop probably would have been sufficient). So it was "for our own safety" that we were ordered to leave the grounds. I never did see who won.

That whole experience gave me a first impression of the US that lasted for YEARS. Literally. It was still the memory I carried with me in the back of my head when I made the decision to move to the US at the tender age of 23! I envisioned the United States as a big scary place where everyone does drugs and carries guns and drinks too much and gets into fights over stupid things ((I'm not too far off there on all those points) and I was actually more than a little apprehensive about what would happen to me while living here, but it made me equally proud of my own country which felt friendly and safe and secure. I trusted those types of things you hear about happening in the US and that I experienced on my grade-8 trip would never happen in MY country. In Canada. Where people are taken care of and respected and friendly and the streets are paved with golden, and no one ever grows old...

I know I was fairly sheltered as a child, and my impressions of my country were idealistic, innocent, and naive. But I also think It's changed too. Maybe the fact that I haven't lived there for 12 years make news stories like this feel like that change has occurred all that much more suddenly, when in fact like most change it's been slow and gradual and natural. I dunno. I'm gonna try and cling to my childhood and teenage and even young-adult idealistic vision of Canada as long as possible.

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I. Am. Canadian.

Tim came acrossThe Mechanical Contrivium on the Internet and posted the results on his blog for the word "crappymusic". On a whim, I decided to give it a try for "Canadians" and here's what it came up with:

Explains a lot, doesn't it? Of course, it begs the question, "Well, what about Americans?"

#7 is the only one that really came as a surprise to me. The rest I am sure are well known facts.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Black-headed Grusbeak I need to detangle from my hair.

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Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

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Happy Birthday Canada!

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear CANADA!
Happy birthday to you!

Happy Canada Day, eh?!

How will I be celebrating, you ask? At home in my PJs in bed with a pile of pillows, a couple of boxes of kleenex, a huge container of orange juice, some fever-reducing tylenol, and a can of spaghettios-with-meatballs (comfort food).

Actually - my slight fever of 100 broke yesterday which was my main concern, but the snot continues to run uncontrollably. Baby Girl is in good spirits though. She's probably happy to be a bit cooler now that the fever is gone, and she seems completely unaffected by my lack of sleep and congestion. She's still punching and kicking away as usual. She could probably do without my sneezing and coughing though, which makes loud noises and requires my abdominal muscles and which I've also found often induces a braxton-hicks contraction. I think I've startled her a couple of times with my sneezes.

More info than any of you all really needed, but what can I say. I'm at home, sick, exhausted, uncomfortable, miserable, bored, and very pregnant, with internet access. And it's my blog, so I'll write about whatever I want :-)

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