Friday, December 28, 2007

Scene of the Crime Leads To Surprising Conclusion

It's pretty quiet on the home front just now.

Pookie and Son-in-Grace are on a Harley motorcycle somewhere in Big Sur, Stu is back at work, and Emily Blue and Third Child are out shopping for a replacement radio for his car.

It appears that some time in the night, the Anti-Santa and his orcs helped themselves to the original. They also relieved TC of his short-wave radio from his emergency "Go" bag, his iPod, and an uber-cool teeny Bluetooth headset from the glove compartment.

Oddly enough, they left behind the brand new hiking GPS we bought him for Christmas and a year-old Bluetooth headset. We're guessing they were more "urban opportunist" hooligans than your back country, "Rocky Mountain Man" outdoorsy types. This character assessment was further developed by our crime assessment/grief counseling crew over some sympathy dim-sum.

Fact: they had also left behind a low-end sleeping bag, a pair of almost new rock-climbing shoes, and an ultra-light portable cooking stove.

Fact: also rejected from the thieves jolly red sack of stolen goods was a fetching straw cowboy hat left over from this year's Halloween festivities.

Fact: they also passed on a really urban-hip-cool Navy pea coat, one of TC's favorite garments. (Hey, not all facts fall neatly into place in any crime scene. We're still trying to figure out the pea coat and second Bluetooth headset....)

As the heat of the violation began to subside (somewhere around the second sticky rice), TC mused that thieves really should be more polite. "If I were a thief, I'd at least take the time to leave the connector wires behind so the original owner could hook up a new radio without having to rip the dashboard apart. Also, I'd leave a little note thanking them for all their stuff, and a list of the most compatible replacement radios for that brand of car. Also, a nice note wishing the car owners a Happier New Year, perhaps with a P.S. reminding that it is better to give than to receive." If it were me, I'd even consider bring a dust-buster along to tidy up all the mess that ripping a radio out of a dashboard creates. Anyway, he was right. Thieves don't have be rude. They're just choosing to be rude."

I love my kids.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Lypp, Utterz, and Gaboogie: Sounds Like A Drinking Game, Right?

Commenting on the ridiculous nomenclature that has emerged in the Web 2.0 start-up-a-thon, John Murrell crafts this doozy of a sentence: "Gaboogie has refocused its business and is now called Lypp. It could face competition from Foonz, with its new offering, Utterz."

Indeed.

It's comforting (and oddly up-puffing) that as odd a title as I chose for my own foray into Web 2.0 with my blog this year, at least they were all real English words, guaranteed to conjure recognizable physical realities in Anglo-oriented brains, pink, fluffy and otherwise. And I didn't succumb to the temptation to futz with them, either, even though I could have without losing the connection to real "you can stick your finger in this!" meaning. For example, I could have called this little rag, "Pink Fluffy iCing 4 Brainz" and been really iN WiTH THE hiP MARKETiNG CROWD. Or with just a little tweaking that would have emphasized the erudite literary content of the blog of my dreams, I could have opted for "p_Ink Fluffy" and just left y'all wondering...

Of course, in the wild and wacky world of Web 2.0, it's always good practice to google*, well, everything, but especially potential names for newly hatched web sites (and a blog is sort of that.) And what, you ask, lands at the top o' the list in a Google search for "pink fluffy"?

Pink Fluffy
Corset Gallery and On-line Corset Shop: the worlds largest corset emporium. Now stocking latex!

Indeed.

It might have made for an interesting business opportunity as a pass-through portal to a classy burlesque troupe. But in the end (ha! sorry), it would have not been worth the risk. One can only imagine the untold hours I would have spent deleting spicy comments and crafting letters of explanation/apology to the children and in-laws.

Snigger as we might at the "Lypps" and
"Utterzs"** and "Gaboogies" of the world. You can bet your bottom Bux.com they did their Google "what shall we call ourselves?" homework.

____________________________________________________________________
*When Oxford says
"google" is the word (verb) of the year for 1998, and its somewhat shaggy cousin, Merriam Webster concurs, who are ANY of the 20 of us to quibble? Not me, that's for sure. (I actually did quibble once with someone on a different and unrelated topic but found it far too delicate an undertaking for my liking: no contact. I far prefer gently flicking my opponent on the forehead until they cede the point.)

**Not at all sure that would be the correct spelling of the plural "Utterz," but that edgy uncertainty is part of what makes being a linguaphile such an exciting and annoying to others experience.

Friday, December 21, 2007

A Modest Christmas Gift for Steph and Dave in Korea

Hi Steph and Dave,

I've been saving this until today in the hopes it would get to you before you leave for Thailand, but not much sooner. My hope is that it lands at just that moment when your Christmas heart needs a touch of your Canadian back yard and some time with your Dad and Behn.

Merry Christmas!
Love, k


Saturday, December 8, 2007

How I Maybe Got Lead Poisoning From Walking For Aids, And What This Means For Christmas



A couple of months ago, I participated in a "Walk For Aids" fund raiser. I was pretty chuffed about the whole gig: new friends, a glorious walk along the Guadalope River Parkway, identification with efforts of "Beautiful Day," a groovy new T-shirt, and so on. I even won several prizes for having raised $635. (And that's before getting the corporate matching gifts process figured out. I'm still working on that. Who knew charity could be so confusing and time consuming. I really must be a New Millenium kinda chick: I find myself wanting my charity to be convenient, accessible online, and preferably with auto-populating form fields.) A BIG thanks to all who supported the cause.

Imagine my surprise when I received the following message about a week ago:

Kathy,

I am writing to inform you that the six pack cooler bag issued during the Walk for AIDS 2007 may contain lead. The cooler bag was one of the prizes given to walkers who raised $250 or more for this year’s Walk. Please contact our office at 408-451-WALK and we will gladly replace any of these bags with a reusable canvas shopping tote. If you choose to keep the cooler bag, I suggest that you not allow food to come in direct contact with the liner, and that you wash your hands after use of the bag. Please contact any person to whom you may have gifted the box, and inform them of this matter as well.

Who knew that successful participation in a philanthropic effort could be so potentially threatening to one's health?! Of course, the AIDS Coalition never intended harm (so NOT what they are about!) and did the right thing, right away. But the whole experience does cause me to pause. If a good-will gesture from a fund-raiser isn't safe from accidental threat, what about Christmas? Will I end up sending my own apologetic recall letters in mid-January to friends and family? And even if a gift doesn't pose a direct physical threat to the cherished recipient themselves, was the production of it harmful to someone else? A sweat shop worker in Vietnam, say? And even if it was made in domestic, well-lit, heated and union supervised conditions, what if the recipient already has one? Will they throw the old one out, thereby filling up the landfills even faster? If the gift has a plug of some kind, am I contributing to the Great Electricity Grab and ultimately to global warming? What if Al Gore shows up with a camera crew on my front porch on Christmas morning?! I know: I'll hit him with the new solar powered K-Tel Slice-O-Matic I've asked Santa for.

Maybe I'll just stick to buying carbon credits (online) and a poinsettia for everyone on my list. And don't worry about the dog eating the poinsettia: they aren't poisonous.

Friday, November 23, 2007

P.S. to Thanksgiving Post

The mail just arrived, containing a freshly minted Employment Authorization Card with my mug shot and name on it. Once again, thanksgiving abounds for Big Loud Nasty Immigration Guy. This isn't the green card yet, but it does clean up one piece of the documentation trail that could have proven very sticky had it not been resolved. So, now we wait again, but at least we are waiting without confusion about wonky interim decisions that just didn't make sense.

And one note of clarification: the thanksgiving item for competent brain surgeons in my last post has apparently caused a ripple of distress throughout the ranks of my loyal readers. To be clear: no brains have been surged in this household as yet. My comment was intended to reflect our gratitude at finding my dear hubby in two of the most skilled hands in the medical world. If you simply must grow an acoustic neuroma, being this close to Stanford Medical Center is a darned handy place to discover you did! We have some more research and decisions to make in the next few weeks regarding radiation versus surgery, but no matter which way we go, we're in the right place to make them.

Grateful to be here, grateful for options, and grateful for peace.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

And While I'm On The Subject, Here's a Random Top Ten List of Other Stuff That I'm Thankful For...

  1. Big Loud Nasty Immigration Guy. (They re-opened my Employment Authorization Document application case this week. A heart-felt thank you from Doofus Applicant, BLNIG.)
  2. Blogging, and the discovery that you really can just write from the gut, release your words to the webber-net wind, and your worlds don't collide and the moon doesn't fall from the sky.
  3. My dear family: close and/or close by, north, right of north, left of anywhere on this planet, fodder for a Fox reality show, and all possible quirky positions in-between.
  4. The moon.
  5. Apple Computers, for giving me a new computing device (although we are still in the "circling each other warily and sniffing for signs of malevolent intent" stage) and for giving my mildly work-ethically challenged yet brilliant and soulful son a job.
  6. My friends... the whole obscenely-faithful, creative, encouraging and long-suffering lot of them.
  7. The amazing (in each and every sense of the word) people I work with, for, around, under and in spite of.
  8. Doctors who aren't afraid of using new machines on skittish-while-gowned ablation patients. Also, those who can stomach gently shoving aside a stark naked cerebellum during surgery to deal firmly with a little intracanalicular acoustic neuroma message from God, who seems to be asking, "So, do you really trust Me or is that just Sunday morning feel-good-to-heavy-drum-beatin' social conformity?"
  9. Cameras and the basic intellect with which to operate them, AND get them off the camera on to my new iMac. I take neither of these for granted.
  10. People who subscribe to PFIFB.

God bless them, every one.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving, Rachel!

As vile foreigners from the Great White North, Rachel and her family of Mikey, Beth and the B Man were the first 'Marican family we were really thankful for. Hola, Rachel! We'll be thinking of you from Walbrook Dr. on Thursday, November 22.
Nicky says hi.

love, k

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Never Mind The CEO For Whom You Want To Consult: What Keeps ME Awake At Night?

Often (okay, twice) people have said something like "Boy, it must be interesting to live inside your brain." Yeah? I wonder how many people would find the following, delivered by said brain at approximately 2-4 a.m. today in rapid-fire order, interesting. Don't even ask what woke me up in the first place.
  1. What if I was in a mine cave-in and I really had to pee? Would it be better to just hold it and hope that my bladder was somehow fearfully and wonderfully enough made that it would know that after a certain time span, it should quietly re-absorb the precious pure H20 from itself and send it back in to my blood stream, leaving the poor old kidneys and liver to work double time on the concentrated toxins left behind? Does Emily Blue ever think about this? How is Emily Blue anyway, and why does it take the Canadian Border Security Office "a few MONTHS" to arrange follow up interviews? Are they performing remarkably thorough bladder security checks? I suppose it Depends on who they're checking.
  2. Gail made a good point this week: never patronize a restaurant with "Factory" in its name or a clothing store called the something "Barn." And I'll bet in the Great Cosmos those two concepts are related. I should spread the word.
  3. God of the Great Cosmos, I need Your Angels. What will I find out at the immigration field office next week? I should have my own soap opera: Days Of Our I-485s.
  4. Why does the quasi-slutty women's wear "evening and resort-wear" catalog I received today list a "tummy-control thong" on its discreetly middle-tucked page of "all the hike 'em up/plump 'em out/tuck 'em in" accouterments without which their apparel is impossible for mortal women to even consider appearing in public? For the love of all things dimpled, if you're old enough to pay $48 for a tummy control device, what the hell are you doing leaving your cellulite-enhanced tuchas waiving freely under some poor slice of unreinforced jersey evening wear? In the words of Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias, it would be "... like watchin' two pigs wrestlin' under a blanket." I'll just bet the surprisingly under-priced (made in China) evening wear pieces turn out to be loss-leaders for all the obscenely expensive (made in America) goo-gaas you need in order to be decent in them. Entrepreneurs... can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.
  5. Why can't I be Pioneer Woman? She shoots stuff all the time, and then makes it abso-frickin-lutey gorgeous in PhotoShop, and shows with screen shots how she did it, and why, with REALLY funny self-deprecating comments and "what do you think?" questions, thereby overtly soliciting the only thing that makes blogging seem worth the while: comments. Meanwhile, she's simu-baking some ridiculously yummy apple-turn-over-easy-bake-oven-cleaner-lite pot pie for Marlboro Man that you just HAVE to know the recipe for because her wacko sister also ate some and is now speaking to her again and it healed their family. I hate Pioneer Woman.
  6. How come nobody makes stuff out of bakelite anymore? What is bakelite, anyway? Does Third Child even know bakelite exists? Maybe he can make some nifty iWhatever appliance out of it and become a member of the Apple Super Orchard Achievers! And he will stand in the spotlight on Awards Night, eyes filling with tears as he struggles to overcome the lump in his throat to say, "... and I stand on the shoulders of the giants, especially my Mum, [letting his Canadian roots slip] without whom I would never have even heard of bakelite...." And then Steve Jobs will phone, a little drunk from the after party, to personally thank me for producing such an amazing progeny and invite me to the party, but I'll say, "Oh, gosh, thanks, but I'm just a quiet, behind-the-scenes kind of cheerleader for my family...." But what will I wear when I make my surprise splash entry to the party? Wait... I do have a few decent evening jersey outfits (and that fabu necklace I bought with J. in Paris but never have had a chance to wear) but no real good body-contorting under-goo-gaas... If only I had a holocaust cloak, or a good women's wear catalog featuring controlling devices specific to where you really need control.
  7. I should write my "Gripper" story in a blog posting someday...
  8. ....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...................

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Birthday Greetings to Pookie Flip-A-Bird!!

You are a treasure and a gift to us all. I'm even willing to briefly bend teensy little c0piwrite lawz for twenty minutes or so to show the world (okay, all 16 of my subscribers) why.

love, You Mama




And for all you email subscribers, please go to the site www.pinkfluffyicing.blogspot.com to view the video. By the time it downloads from the link in your email, my "poor starving Canadian musical artists" Conscience will be throwing a major middle-of-the-grocery-aisle tantrum and I will already have removed it from the site. I'll try to sit on her head until you get a chance to see it, though.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

I Got The Big, Nasty, Loud Immigration Guy: Part Three of Three

Prologue To Our Story
I Got The Big, Nasty, Loud Immigration Guy: Part One of Three
I Got The Big, Nasty, Loud Immigration Guy: Part Two of Three

W15 booms, "Your appointment?"

Despite DA's fairly decent fluency in English, she has no idea what he has just asked. Mentally flailing wildly for a grip on the moment, she stands slack-jawed for three seconds, leans down and in to talk through blow-hole number two and asks, "Pardon?"

"Where's your appointment slip?"

Aha!! DA slides the "B 27" paper square through the divet at the bottom of the plexi-glass shield.

"What're you here for, today?"

Ignoring the implication that she's a Repeat Offender, DA slides her thin, carefully paper-clipped sheaf of documentation under the plexi-glass shield, squeaking, "I'm hoping you can help clarify my situation regarding my renewal application for a temporary employment authorization document card." [Yes, that's really what they call it: a "document card."]

"UH oh! Looks like somebody was DENIED her I-765! Let's see here..."

His stubby, nail-chewed finger the size of a Costco bratwurst traces line by line down the denial letter. Mutter, mutter, read, "... denied...," read, mutter, mutter, read, "... because the adjustment of status application has been approved." Dead stop. "Well, that's good news!"

Taking a deep breath, DA kow-tows respectfully towards the blow hole and says quietly, "Yes, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But it's been six weeks and we haven't heard anything at all about the approval, so my lawyer called and they told him the adjustment of status was still pending, but that I would have to come here to talk to an officer to figure out what happened with the I-765."

Further explanatory babble threatens to bubble forth, but some primitive survival instinct kicks in with a vigorous, "FOR THE LOVE OF ALL IMMIGRANTS EVERYWHERE, SHUT UP!" So DA stands, like a mutton that is led to slaughter, and like an old goat that is silent before its shearers, so she does not open her mouth. For once.

"I'm going to look up what's going on with your adjustment of status. What's your Alien number?" Read, mutter, type, type, type, read. Screen, paperwork, screen, screen, paperwork.

"Wait a minute!" He turns and makes the first eye contact of the appointment. "There's been an error!"

Biting back the painfully obvious response of "No shit, Sherlock!" and seven years worth of quietly composting immigration angst just waiting to be released in a vitriolic spew, DA responds in calm, dulcet tones, "I'm so relieved you see it that way."

W15, eyes widening with the exertion, contemplates the situation for about four seconds. Then, "I'm gonna write an eMale! I'm gonna write a NASTY eMale!"

And with that, Big, Nasty, Loud Immigration Guy has switched teams and is now Big, Nasty, and Loud on DA's behalf. He's working the INS from the Inside, and he's bringing to the task all the energy that 300 pounds of institutional self-loathing can muster. As W15 hunts and pecks angrily on his industrial-strength keyboard, the will of God has, once again, become apparent.

Bang, bang, bang. "... however, this decision was made in error...." Bang, bang, bang. "... and so please advise what course of action is now open to the applicant since this was an erroneous decision...."

DA, now ironically nervous for a new reason, leans in to the blow hole with one light-hearted, "... Ha, ha! Just don't piss anyone off!" "I won't piss anyone off," and then with one final flurry of keyboard accostation, he concludes with, "Both I and the applicant thank you for your help," and we're done.

"Come back in one week. Or two weeks. Come to see me. At this window. I work Monday, Tuesday and Friday. And I will tell you what they said."

Squelching the need for clarification (well, is it one or two weeks? And how does one play Immigrant Bingo to guarantee a return to Wicket 15?), DA bows to the plexi-glass and says, "Bless you. And thank you. See you soon."

9:13 a.m. DA leaves the San Jose Immigration Field Office and heads home to change her pants.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I don't know yet where this will land. I went back a week later to visit W15 and he had encouraging news: "They're working on it. I'll send another email to see where they are in the process. Come back in two weeks."

Meanwhile, I'll do what I always do, and stay tooned.



Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I Got The Big, Loud, Nasty Immigration Guy: Part Two

To catch up with our story thus far, please see: I Got The Big, Loud, Nasty Immigration Guy: Part One

8:29 a.m.: Doofus Applicant leaves car for the third time, having performed personal strip search for ALL electronic doo-dads (not taking any chances this time on another circuit since she was already getting blisters from the mornings' cardio workout in pumps) and returns to San Jose Immigration Field Office building. After only two attempts at passing through the security inspection area--think "airport security" only with way more sensitive screening devices, necessitating the removal of belt, bracelet, and watch, and then on round two, blistering pumps--she's finally IN. (Half dressed, but in.)

8:38 a.m.: DA gets to first window and is handed a small square piece of paper inscribed with "B 27" and told to wait until her number is called, "over there." "Over there" is a large room filled with rows of plastic chairs facing a rounded bay of 15 wickets. Three of the wickets have the blinds up and are occupied by officers. The drill is you wait until your Bingo Number is called and you're assigned a window. "Now serving A 17 at Window 13" comes floating through the air courtesy of a silken-voiced automated recording, done no doubt by the same sedated woman hiding in the GPS system in our car.

Wicket 6 is occupied by a man who is obviously Officer Paper Overload. He is cutting efficiently through file after bulging file but no Bingo Winner ever gets called to his window. One assumes he has the blinds open for the air circulation and the view of a waiting room half filled with terrified but legal--so far--vile foreigners.

Wicket 13 is inhabited by a small and inexhaustibly patient officerette. So far, it has taken her 17 minutes with the one quiet couple that have been with her since DA arrived in the building. All three huddle close, each on their respective sides, to the plexi-glass sheet that separates them. The plexi-glass partition comes with three small "talk holes," drilled in at just the perfect level for diminutive vile foreigners (standing) and teeny immigration officers (seated) to exchange pertinent information.

And then there is Wicket 15.

W15 is an obvious source of major concern for every sweaty soul seated in a plastic chair clutching a mangled passport and limp bingo number.

In the first place, W15 is big. Think Dallas Cowboys refrigerator styled line-backer with no neck.

And, he's fast. Compared to W13, he is just a-hurtling through vile foreigners at a ratio of about 5-to-1. You want an I-765? Boom! Do this and mail it there, now! And what's that? You lost your card? Zap!! This is good for three months.

And, he's loud. Okay, maybe he has to be loud because he's so big. The talk holes are level with his nipples and he isn't the type to bow his head and grovel, anyway. To make himself heard, he just booms out his questions which float easily over the plexi-glass, reverberate off the opposite wall and riff back across the room with enough velocity to make the one poor guy's toupe lift slightly. I'm sure this communication choice is advantageous for the officer's posture and neck health, but the upshot is that everyone in the room knows the bidness of every Bingo Victim of W15.

Big, loud and fast are all okay, but he also seems particularly testosterony. Boom! "If you don't send the form in by the three month window, don't come back here, looking for a new temporary one. We won't give you one." And... ZAP! "Listen!! Do you want the card or not? Are you saying I don't know my job? Just fill in the form, mail it, and wait. That's how it works."

8:51 a.m.: Doofas A is praying. "God, please don't give me W15. I need some help here. There's been a mistake. The Adjustment of Status has not been approved and they denied my I-765 on the basis of it having been approved and I don't know if this guy will get it, plus he's really big and loud and fast and cranky.... Your will be done, in Jesus' name, amen."

8:55 a.m.: God's will becomes apparent: "Now serving B 27 at Window 15." DA discreetly wets her pants, then approaches W15.

Stay tuned: Part Three coming soon to a screen near you.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Happy Birthday, Emily Blue!

Em, I spent a lot of time thinking about you this week-end as I put this video together and thought about what it means for you to have been part of my life for 25 years now. I thought of ten thousand things I could write about how amazing you are and had great intentions of crafting the most eloquent birthday greeting yet in the history of mankind. But no matter how hard I try, I can't get the words to line up in actual sentences. And I think I have figured out why.

It's because those words know they're your words and are behaving accordingly. They know you'll take them as the essential building blocks of "the stuff of Emily" and you'll put them together in whatever way is fun, makes the most sense to you, and tastes good. Plus, you have the video if you need to see what they look like in action.

Here's your list of recalcitrant words:

Loyal brave integrity honorable alive compassionate athletic no-bull genuine gorgeous funny generous happy assertive spiritual smart tough authentic thoughtful rhythmical refreshing unique eloquent sassy dancin' queen protective fun beautiful adventurous creative edgy intuitive profound.

And best of all, ours.


Wednesday, October 17, 2007

I Got The Big, Nasty, Loud Immigration Guy: Part One of Three

It has taken me almost a full work week to recover enough to write this.

Monday, 7:48 a.m.: Applicant gets turned back from initial entry to the San Jose Immigration Field Office building and returns the three block walk to the car to put her cell phone in the trunk. Her error? Having taken at face value the sentence in the preparation document provided online: "No cell phones with cameras will be allowed in the building." New rule (no warning): no cell phones, period. Homeland security threat, apparently.

Monday, 7:56 a.m.: Applicant, a little sweaty from the jog back to the car, gets turned away from the door a second time. Her sin? Doofus Applicant thought she was setting up an appointment for October 15. However, she accidentally selected the October 22 box at the online "InfoPass" appointment setter-upper application now employed by the INS to make sure their vile foreigners show up in easily managed and appropriately spaced lots. This time it really was her error. But wait!

There's a guy who runs the coffee cart outside the building. In the entrepreneurial spirit upon which this Great Country was founded, he has also located a nearby electrical outlet, set up a laptop computer, and found a roaming internet connection. For a mere $5.50, he is willing to let the coffee stall mind itself and go online to see if he can re-book the "InfoPass" appointment on your behalf, real time, for that morning. (I was SO tempted to ask Mr. Heavily-Accented-Coffee/InfoPass Guy if he was a legal immigrant, but the irony of him NOT being so would have been just too much to bear.) Doofus App coughed up the cash and scored an appointment just 45 minutes in the future. But, given the dedication the INS has poured into properly pacing the whole icky immigrant flow (and who can blame them?), you can't get in the building any sooner than 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. So, armed with the best coffee a split-focused coffee/internet service provider can provide and a Costco blueberry muffin as big as her head, courtesy of Mr. InfoPass and another $6.25, DA heads back to her car to read the paper and wait her turn.

Can you stand the tension? Stay tuned...

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Corporate Communicators and Their Posturing Blogs

The scales have dropped from my eyes.

I honestly thought David Murray, Steve Crescenzo, and the rest of the IABC/Ragan Rat Pack were natural literary curmudgeons. But when squeaky Canadian-clean Ron Shewchuk felt compelled to recant the tone of his comment on David's latest blog as not being edgy enough, I had a mother of an "aha!" moment.

And I quothe: "I just realized how f*%$!!g [spelled correctly, in full] boring my last post was. No readers of this blog deserve such grandfatherly schmaltz. I wish I were trying to quit smoking so I could have that David Murray edge! I promise I'll try to be more of an asshole in the future."

Ron felt he had let the team down.

Apparently, if your Corp Comm blog doesn't ring with the blood-letting parry and thrust of a Tasmanian devil in unsupervised heroin withdrawal, you owe your reading public an apology. This is because real CC bloggers are a cranky, clever, cynical lot with murky backgrounds, a palpable disdain for those less linguistically enlightened, and a free hand with an emancipated vocabulary of the kind that got their mouths washed out with soap when they were kids.

"Yes, I inhaled, dammit, and I'm proud of it! I don't need no stinkin' presidency, anyway. Presidencies are for mealymouthed ex-CEOs who couldn't communicate their way out of a paper bag.... They're just corporate boobs who rattle on about 'leveraging employee engagement to empower corporate stakeholders to hit challenges out of the park.' I wouldn't take the Presidency if you shoved it down my f*%$!!g throat."

The truth is, I've met some of these guys. To a person, at least in conference mode, they have been smart, encouraging, creative, and witty people who need to pay the mortgage and feed the pet Vietnamese pig, just like everybody else. They also leak empathy. Yes, they spew vociferous rants into the blogosphere about what noodle-headed language mashers they have for clients. But when they're in their street clothes, I have this growing suspicion that they actually enjoy helping the poor stock-option bloated executive blighters navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous corporate baffle-gab. I need to believe that deep in their darkened souls, they know that mocking the linguistically blind for their inability to see is just not cricket.

HA! You guys are so busted. You won't fool me any longer. Ron, being Canadian and unable to help being nice out loud, you're just the most transparent of the lot. The rest of you? Come out of the closet and be the sweet boys your mother still knows in her heart you are!

Or have I missed something?

Thursday, October 11, 2007

A New Way of Communicating... At Least, New To Me

I sing Broadway show-tunes in business meetings. I know how to spell in American Sign Language. I speak English, French "com un canard Canadien," Swahili, Lanark County, and fluent pig-Latin. I speak CEO, COO, CFO, CTO and CBC. I've tried every kind of communication there is, I think, except the following:
  • Ground-breaking front-lines war coverage journalism (or any other kind of actual journalism, for that matter, but let's not quibble)
  • Morse code
  • Semaphore (The only official "girl's only" club I ever joined was something called "Explorers" which I think was somehow affiliated with the United Church of Canada we attended in Ottawa. There may have been semaphore offered in the program, but I didn't stick around to find out. I only stayed long enough to participate in the Annual Mom's and Daughters Cherry Blossom Tea and then quit. Not enough action, and, no boys.)
  • Shadow puppetry
  • Interpretive dance (that time at the Digital Equipment "Circle of Champions" sales meeting in Hawaii in 1990 when I first heard and embraced M.C. Hammer as a social movement worthy of my support and nifty dance moves definitely does not count)
So I thought I'd try a new kind of communication, this one specifically designed to speak compassion-ease. Jon Talbert, the "Compassion Pastor" at Westgate Church, calls it "Shut Up and Show Up." Novel concept, and I'm always up for something new. So, I'm walking for AIDS on October 21 with our Beautiful Day team. And we need your money. Click and donate. And then tell all your friends.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Life in the Linguistic Lane



I have the immense and enviable privilege of owning articulate, intellectually sharp, computer-savvy, and culturally engaged parents. The more testosterone-ishly inclined of the pair in particular has--and shares, at the least provocation--vigorously defended views on issues of language and meaning. As a result of my "ceding the linguistic nation" posting of yesterday, he responded, "No, no, no - don't give up the fight or all will be lost. Not only is our language being lost through carelessness and laziness, but the world of email and text-messaging is contributing to the scourge with the advancing plague of initials and acronyms."

I thought his comments (above) and my response (below) qualify as fodder worthy of my PFIFB readership, bless all yer little heads. My returning comments to Wordsmith Pater:

Yes, linguistic purity (not to mention spelling convention) may be in jeopardy due to the increased use of initials- and acronyms-disguised-as-words. The medium itself is in large part responsible for, and I'm sure even encourages, the speed, immediacy, and accessibility-by-all-riff-raff who care to participate, not to mention the inconsequential nature of the messages themselves. (Dad, you'll enjoy this next bit.) How much of what navigates the ethernet--in email, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs without number--have the conversational equivalence of: "J'eat jet?" "No, dj'yew?" An old joke about an ancient medium (speech) but one that translates quite nicely into our current realities, me thinks. A big part of Life As It Has Been Known is composed of inanities of this ilk. We are a race of superficial linguistic linkages: "Hi there!' "How are you?" "Fine!"

Ring a bell?

One more comment, and then I'm done and heading to actual food on a plate (as opposed to pleasing yet empty calories in a nicely shaped glass). Without email, facebook (at least with my kids), blogs and/or text-messaging, would you and I even be having this conversation? And given how busy I am (always) and how ill you have been (lately), this conversation is pretty darned precious to me.

And dj'yew know what I'll get parental grief for, in all of the above? The word "owning."

HA!!! :) I do so.

Love youse, Ma-MEE and WP

kl

Monday, October 8, 2007

I Give Up: Facebook Grammar Wins

For those of you waiting to exhale, breathe out.

I'm staying in facebook, irregardless of what I seen yesterday with the "Gotten New Friends?" headline on the new application what my friend used. The battle is already lost. Neither I nor the actual grammarians of the world who might shiv a git about English grammar can do a dagnabbit thing aboudit.

I was walking back to the car from a brief zip into Trader Joe's today and walked alongside a group of lovely elderly ladies disembarking from an "Our Lady Of Fatima Villa" handi-bus. Said Blue Hair with matching blue polyester suit to Sweet Companion with the walker and almost no hair but spiffy in her burgundy pedal-pushers nonetheless, "... so, I said, okay, like, whatever...."

You could have knocked me over with a travel tube of denture cream.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Facebook Grammar: I Was Okay Until I Hit "Gotten Some New Friends?"

I joined facebook about three weeks ago as an exploration exercise in new social media.

For the uninitiated among my vast readership, facebook is kind of like a communal online diary. It's a very cool human connection technology, right up there in scope of impact with the telegram and the middle finger salute in traffic. I love the broadcast, immediacy, and fluidity of the medium. I love the ability to both deliver and check in on the minutiae of daily life that at least gives the sense of close proximity with loved ones spread across, literally, the planet. The "status" option allows a person to give a one-line snapshot of what is the consuming thought of the moment, kind of like when you bump into a family member in front of the fridge and ask "What are you having for lunch?" and they respond, "Dunno... do you think this dim-sum from Saturday is still edible?"

It has been an addictive hoot. Not only did I get some swell comments from my kids: "Love that you're here... Now you can stalk me remotely" or "Hmmm... I'm not sure how I feel about you being on facebook! It's kind of like when I was in Grade 7 and found out you liked MC Hammer...." Apparently, they feel like it's a proactive collision of worlds, or in the words of my son, "Mom, if this were the fifties, it would be like you coming and sitting beside me in the malt shop." HA! So I started a group called "I Freaked Out My Kids By Joining Facebook." We're up to 8 members.

But aside from stalking my kids, I also found and re-connected with many dear Friends Of A Respectable Age. This is just a treat and a joy to hear what they are all up to. I've found that just because you lose sight doesn't mean you lose touch at the heart level. I'm delighted that Ellie is moving back to where she can keep daily contact with all her zany and marvelous sisters, and that George is running for Mayor of High Level. (I bet he's doing it on a dare.)

So, it's all good until I encounter an application on a friends' page called "Friends Block" that announces its benefit statement* in the following terms: "Gotten Some New Friends?"

And now I'm in my own collision of worlds. Knowing that I stand a slim to inconceivably non-existent margin of hope of influencing the grammatical sustainability of facebook, do I stay or leave? Stay tuned...

*Even in new social media, no one escapes the need to answer the question "So, why should I care about what you are offering?" Marketing is an ancient and honorable profession.

Friday, October 5, 2007

Where Is A Shut Up Pill When You Really Need One?

I wish there was a shut-up pill. Is that so much to ask? There are pills for every darned affliction you can think of, not to mention the "illnesses" I'm convinced pharmaceutical companies have crafted to boost sales. But for those poor souls who dominate every conversation that they find even remotely interesting because it's the only way they can think all the fun thoughts that demands to be processed and/or played with? Nada.

Trust me, this is no sniggering matter. (You don't even want to know what the spell checker wanted to change that word to.) It may come as a surprise to many to know that there are those among you who simply CAN'T THINK without the external loop that connects brain to mouth to ear to brain. Like, fer instance, me.

In a conversation, I often have no idea what I think about a topic until I hear it coming out of my mouth. And then, apparently, I speak with such declarative phrasing, vigor and volume that I delude my listeners (poor souls: where is the pill for them?) into thinking I have held this opinion for decades and am immovable on the subject. Don't even think about it. Quickly... someone change the subject, or give her a massive chunk of fresh toffee or pemmican to glue her jaws shut. Or just shoot her.

See? On all accounts, a shut-up pill would be a gesture of humanitarian generosity on the scale of the nose-hair trimmer. Honestly. That big. First, for those of us who would take the little white cup with the single red pill eagerly and with no complaining, we would bless you. What a relief it would be to go home at the end of a day of meetings/social events/book club dinners/community group nights, and not lie there and think "WHY? Why can't you just STFU and listen to the people you love and honestly do want to hear what they think?" It's a common complaint, I'm sure.

And is desiring a prophylactic babble inhibitor so trivial as to warrant an immediate and disdainful dismissal by People With Bigger Problems To Solve? Listen, burrito-imbibing socialites who fear an intestinal gas attack in public or during an intimate situation have pills they can take to pre-empt an unfortunately timed triple-flutter blast. They know it's a possibility, and one they'd rather avoid, so... insert a couple of Gas-Xs, add a chaser of H2O, tilt head, and... no problem. But for us gotta-think-outside-the-head victims? It's a case of medical/pharmaceutical industry bias: gas over gas-bag discrimination, plain and simple.

Boy, if I were still in Canada, I'd be writing a letter to the editor and signing it "Shocked and Appalled in Mississauga."

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

In the book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (Fugere, Hardaway, and Warshawsky), I found a new way to unpack the acronym SCUBA: System to Clean Up Bogus Acronyms. This was an enjoyable and timely moment for me for three reasons.
  1. I had recently read a fun posting on a friend's blog where he comments on a news article about a virtual church. In the blog, he plays with a variety of possible acronyms that could be used for the virtual pastor of this virtual church, starting with Preacher EGHEAD (electronically generated, humanly engineered, adjustable device). In a follow-up posting, he mentions other possibilities: Post Mortal Shepherd (PMS), or maybe Automated Simulated Shepherd (first name, "Jack"). My favorite? Simulated Thing that Undermines People’s Intrinsic Design + Automated Preaching Entity (STUPID APE).
  2. I work in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. Sitting in a meeting with the technical dudes at the office is the conversational equivalent of text messaging between two 12-year old girls: "At ICCAD, should our COO talk about our LCC and CAA tools? Or should he focus on RETs, like OPC and PSM?" omg*... k.w.e.
  3. It made me remember that I love to use self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.







*That's "goodness" in my lexicon.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

New iMac, New Blahg, and One New Insight

Today iAm the proud owner of an iMac for which iBe most grateful. And a wee bit confused: how do you "select all" on a Mac, and what's the deal with the squeezy buttons on each side of the mouse? I'm sure I'll stumble on the answer to all these black box questions sooner or later. Actually, that's a PC-biased statement: they're more like "white monitor" questions now and I should take more care with my language. This is especially true now that Third Child is solidly embedded into the core of Apple. (HA! I should be shot, sometimes, and probably frequently.) BTW, his first question when he found out that the UPS stork had landed and we were unpacking and gluing together all the iBits and iPieces--okay, no glue and only 3 iBits and no iPieces--was "Has iT crashed yet?" hmmm....

So, now I have all this nifty new software, housed in a sleek mondo screen and connected to my brain by a midgy wee keyboard and freaky mouse. I'm told that somewhere there is a pre-installed menu, in a land far, far away and accessible no doubt by two roller-ball clicks and a double simu-side-squeeze on the weirdo mouse. This mythical menu theoretically contains access to a "websites for dummies" application that makes building or updating a website so easy you don't have to know anything at all in order to tell the world just that. If that's true, I'm going to re-visit the ol' www.kathyschmidt.com website and convert it to a blahg focusing on issues and topics specifically relating to communications: corporate, personal, inter-planetary... whatever. PFIFB will then revert to its roots as a sweet little home-spun blahg which focuses on issues and topics relating to nothing specific at all aside from my own random synapse connections spawned in hormonal rages or lack of sleep, punctuated by moments of lucid insights or profound spiritual slaps-upside-the-head. Let it be said you heard it here first: I'll be using the the Mac for more serious corporate reputation-enhancing material, and the PC for my wild-side: creative, experimental, self-revelatory (and probably rambling) personal drivel. Like this:

One of my more memorable (I took a picture so I would remember) take-ways from last week's "Corporate Communications and The Social Media Revolution*" was the realization that at most hotel catered continental breakfast offerings, the best part of the meal is the garnish. Tip To You: get there early before I scoop up all the fruit and all that's left is the colon-clogging carbo mountains of bagels and the plates filled with ribbons of some disgusting pink crap that I think was supposed to be strawberry cream cheese but looked like something that had waged a valiant war with bottles and bottles of Pepto Bismol on the intestinal distress front, but lost. I certainly wasn't going to be eating any of it this side of the Donner Pass.



*BTW, I've referenced the name of this event several times already in this blahg, and I think that's the first time I've actually got it right. See? The serious "get it right" Mac phenomenon is kicking in already!

Friday, September 28, 2007

But Will It Blend a Rake? George From BlendTec on Viral Videos

Yesterday I sat in on George Wright's session at the Ragan Communications "New Social Media" conference I'm at in Chicago. George is the brain-daddy behind the wildly viral Will It Blend? video marketing campaign that launched about a year ago. He told the wonderful story of how, as the new (and first) BlendTec "marketing guy," he wandered through the manufacturing plant one day and noticed a sizeable pile of sawdust on the floor. He asked, "What's that about?" and was told casually that was how they tested their blenders... with 2 x 2s! A great idea, borrowed handy-cam, one chunk of lumber, a six-pack of coke, a handful of marbles, four golf balls, and an iPod later... voila! An new twist on an ancient form of marketing was born: intentional online viral marketing. The videos are now snagged from their own little podunk website in Utah as quickly as they're put up, slapped on to youtube and immediately hit the #1 favorite list time after time. It's the power of that little red "share" button on youtube.

Of course, viral marketing itself isn't new. It's been happening for at least as long as women have been buying shoes. The online version of it is simply when you see something that makes you pay attention--something interesting, unusual, funny, bizarre, intriguing, etc.--you pass it along to your friends. I had actually seen one of the "will it blend?" videos before yesterday as a result of viral sharing, so it was really interesting to hear the whole story and meet the man behind it. George is a delightfully self-effacing "marketing hick from the backwoods with a blender and a rake" who, with a $50 budget and a blender, got six million hits on his marketing experiment in the first week. Of course, the fact that he ended his talk by blending a rake was pretty impressive too.



BTW: The latest "Will It Blend?" video of Chuck Norris versus the bad guys mixing it up (sorry:) is a hoot and shows that even with an idea this powerful, you still need to introduce the element of the interesting or unexpected to keep up the momentum.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I'M GETTING MY GREEN CARD!!! I think...



About a week ago, I got an email from our immigration firm with a letter attached from the USCIS (United States Customs and Immigration Services). I thought I'd include it here for the interest of those dear souls who have travelled the past seven years with us in our immigration adventures. It is a document that brings our family great news, I think. I hope. But I'm not entirely sure.

I share it here to primarily let you know that something is happening. Also, I hope it will explain why in the past when I have started trying to explain the latest episode or movement in our immigration process over these years, my listener's eyes begin to glaze over and all of a sudden they remember an important errand they must tend to immediately. All the communications between the US government and our family have shared the same level of transparency of meaning, tone, and timing. (It's been three weeks since the letter is dated and so far, not another syllable has been issued regarding my status.)

In case the font is a bit small in the image I've posted of the letter itself, I've re-typed the pertinent section below so you can celebrate the moment with us. That is, when and if you can figure out what exactly the news is. And when you do, will you please let me know?

"This notice refers to your Application for Employment Authorization (Form I-765) filed on May 29, 2007, in which you are requesting employment based upon your filing of a pending application for adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident under Title 8, Code of Federal Regulations, (8CFR) 274a.129(C)(9). Upon consideration, it is ordered that the request be denied for the following reasons:

Title 8, Code of Federal Regulations, (8CFR) 274a.129(C)(9) states, in pertinent part:

'Any alien who has filed an application for adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident pursuant to Part 345 of this chapter may apply for employment authorization during the period that application is pending.'

A review of your record indicates that the Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status (I-485) you filed with this Service has been approved. The Form I-485 is therefore no longer pending with this Service and you are ineligible for employment authorization under 274a.12(c)(9).

There is no appeal to this decision. Please note that aliens who are lawful permanent residents of the United States are authorized to engage in employment. Please refer any question to your local INS office."

Monday, September 24, 2007

Someone Should Really Fix This Mess

Every once in a while, my News-Pater sends me a scan of some piece of note from their local fish-wrapper on Vancouver Island. The latest installment was a delightful piece on the demise/need for preservation of the English language by Iain Hunter. I was caught up short by this line:

"It's easier, I find, to maintain that anything in danger from vanishing from this planet should be preserved, and leave it to others to find ways to stop the planet itself from vanishing."

Much in my life these days echoes this sentiment... that all I can really handle right now is to maintain a small position on matters, and leave the BIG questions to those either smarter than me, or at least to those who get more sleep. The world and all its confusions and complexities and desperate need that someone know something for certain and act on it to fix things is quite beyond me these days. All I really know is who I care about and how much I love them and how incredibly vulnerable the whole shiteroo is to misunderstanding and miscommunication and messiness. We are in desperate need of a Savior.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

On The Fun of Shooting Video with A Still Camera

Two weeks ago, I shot a bit of video footage for a recent corporate "summer concert" event at work. The goal was to capture some folks with kids, wine glasses and mothers-in-law in tow having fun to post on our internal website. However, back then we were a low-budget/"this is just an experiment stage" kinda outfit. (Hey! this is Silicon Valley baby! We travel on internet-speed: Starbucks fueled, Wall St. observed and "if you don't work 14 hour days how committed are you?" time here! Two weeks is, like, so two weeks ago!) So back then, I didn't have a nifty hand-held company-sponsored video camera. (Do now.) So I volunteered my personal Christmas gift of last year: my Canon G7. It's a digital still camera with video capabilities.

And here's the fun part. When you approach people with a small black hand-held device that looks like a still camera, they think they are gonna have their picture took. Here's the trick: it's set on video. This means you get to capture people adjusting themselves. They unconsciously leak their perceptions of what makes them more attractive, or what they perceive as their "weaker bits." They believe they have a few seconds before you hit the "capture!" button. In those precious few seconds, they will hurriedly futz with what they think needs to be cloaked, hiked forward, smoothed down, covered with bangs, fluffed up, stuffed back, hid sorta sideways behind other people's body parts, centered, tucked in, or dug out of their teeth.

I'm too kind to ever eventually display those embarrassingly human and altogether predictable moves in a video. But I'm apparently not too kind to indulge in pushing the human play/drama just a bit further. In a spirit of clinical observation, ("... and this IS for posterity, so please be honest....") I have allowed people the time they think they need to become "acceptable" before the eye of the camera. Then, I let them wait there just a few more seconds longer than they think it should take for me to hit the darned "gotcha" button with their best wide open smile/spinach-checked-and-probably-artificially-whitened-teeth on display. And then their teeth start to dry out, and their upper lip gets stuck on them as their face slowly un-composes. And then they get cranky. And then I start to chuckle. Because their lips are now surely permanently stuck on their their upper teeth and they are miffed that the camera didn't work when they were so.... perfect!

You know, you'd think you'd get nicer as you get older. But on the trajectory I'm riding, by the time I'm 90, I'll be pulling the chairs out from behind the other old geezers in the cafeteria just before they sit down. Then I'll put the Depends to the test as I lay my head back and laugh until I almost choke on my dentures. And there will be no one to pat me on the back to dislodge them because I've been such a nasty old bird.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

A Gadget Just Crying Out To Be Invented

So, I spent 11 stupifyingly irritating minutes just now looking for the darned tape-measure, and it hit me: the idea for a new household gadget for aging boomers that will generate Spousal Unit (SPU) and me untold TENS of retirement dollars!

Take those infuriating little RF ID tags I keep finding in books I have bought. And BTW, why the hell do they care where I take the book? Surely once it hits a cash register somewhere, their interest in tracking the artifact from production through purchase is DONE! But no! Months later, I'll be sitting in American Airlines SFO-to-JFK, seat 34D, trying to ignore the "sharers of intimate details" that I seem to attract like cat hair to my favorite black dress, and hello!... I turn to page 226 and on to my lap drops a little 1"x1" white bar-coded package that has evidently been emitting tracking bleeps or chirps or whatever it does from every lunch break room/bathroom/night table/travel briefcase it's been in since I bought the book. And who the hell is "they," anyway?!! Nonetheless, it's cool technology that will help me not eat cat food when I'm 80 so I'm moving on....

Anyway, we have RFID tags so let's slap 'em willy-nilly on things like tape measures and keys and the single jug of Windex we seem to be able to afford at one go in this household.

We also have remote control devices. I know this because I fight them on two fronts almost nightly. First, if I am Contender #2 in the media room, I lose. I don't lose graciously about anything, so I remember these incidents with frightening clarity. And secondly, if I'm Contender #1, I lose anyway. I can't figure out how to use the damn thing without it "freezing." (And HELLO! the "Honey, not tonight, I'm too cold" gig died out with the Stepford clan.) Nonetheless, I know remote control devices exist and some people have figured out how to 1) be Commander, and 2) make them submit. And these remote control devices come with scary names like "universal" and seem to be able to control almost anything in Bluetooth range, except of course a) the Remote Commander himself, and b) its own ability to function. Never mind... you take what you can get in these cool gadget fantasies.

Okay, so we have doomahickeys that can track stuff, and Bluetooth devices that can control doomahickeys.

We also have (and here is the BRILLIANT bit) aging folk (me) who cannot, under penalty of death, order poster frames on line because they can't remember what size the poster is AND can't find the tape measure, even though they are SURE they saw it yesterday in their own office. Dear SPU is napping (because he has worked really hard this week) on the couch we meant to throw out but forgot. And now I can't bring myself to wake him up to ask if he knows where the tape measure is. So we have a market need of a doomahickey device that can find stuff.

Here's how it would work.

The remote itself would be a type of clapper device ("Universal Clapper App"?) since, of course, if you couldn't find the friggin' remote, you'd be back just looking for the tape measure. So clap once, and a claxton, the decibels of which would rival the take-off revs of a Boeing 747, begins and you find the black box under couch cushion #4. Once in hand, the remote displays a simple menu of options, based on previously personally assigned and applied RFID tags:

1. Find keys to SPU's car.
2. Find keys to PFIFB's car.
3. Find sunglasses (all)
4. Find marbles
5. Find tape measure

Make your selection, track the beep and voila! Don't you think there is a TON of pennies to be made here?

BTW, SPU woke up, found the tape measure, and brought it to me with great relief and delight, presenting it with a "ta-DA!!" kinda joy.

And then I couldn't remember why I wanted it in the first place. Now THERE is an increasing problem just CRYING for a gadget!

To My Son-In-Grace

Dear Tim,

I've been thinking about the term "son-in-law" this week. What does it really mean?

I suppose the answer depends on who is asking the question, just as the "real meaning" of an apple will depend on whether you ask an orchard owner, a nutritionist, or a theologian. Likewise, if your daughter's man-picker is defective and you end up with less than optimum specimen living in your basement suite for four years while he "explores his options," then the term "son-in-law" is going to have a specific and very real meaning for you.

But the more I thought about you and the wonderful gift you have been not only to Pookie1 but to our entire family, the less appropriate the term became. "Son?" Absolutely, although I'm sure from your end there have been many times when you've watched our family together and wondered if it was really such a good idea to risk wading into this particular end of the gene pool. But from our end, it feels like you have brought in a piece that had been missing all along and we just hadn't known it until you showed up. As a clan, we are just better--happier, more optimistic, calmer, and most miraculously, more gracious with one another--with you here.

And that's where I stumbled this week on the "in law" part. Maybe that part was true for the moment you were signing the register in the Chapel in The Woods three years ago. But you are now our son-in-grace, by Grace, and we thank Him for you with great gratitude.

Love, The Mother-In-Law

NOTE: For email subscribers, please go to www.pinkfluffyicing.blogspot.com and view the streaming video directly from the website. Otherwise, if you click on the link below within your email program, it will need to download to your computer before you view it. This will take approximately until his next birthday, and you'll miss this year's Christmas video!



Monday, September 3, 2007

On the Miracle of Glass


I love glass.

I don't have normal Canadian flotsam/jetsam in my house. This is entirely fitting, since I am probably not a normal Canadian girl. Or a normal anything, for that matter, except history proves I can be normal when it counts.

I am a dust-prone, trinket-averse housekeeper. HA! First quadruple compound adjective in the English language! If this is not true or even grammatically correct, keep it to yourself. I'm recovering from a terror-riddled (but altogether successful) surgery and I've put in a full day at work and am rather fragile.

As I was saying, I am not a collector of stuff, even stuff that one probably/possibly should/could collect. I travel a lot. I have ample opportunities to bring home stuffage. What I bring home instead is images and the memory of the people I met along the way. Both will be easily displayed/dispersed/dismissed/ when I shake off these mortal coils. (Note to future biographers: the world heard it here first. "Walk softly and carry a small camera." I'm paraphrasing an old movie line, but if you aren't from that generation, it won't mean anything to you anyway. In fact, by now, you'll already have buggered off to see what's the latest video response on YouTube to Miss South Carolina's on-air debacle, God bless her poor numbed parents....)

Where was I?

Ah yes... glass. And why glass, today? Because my dear husband spent a painful portion of this aptly named Labour Day week-end putting in a line of glass blocks in my house for my aesthetic appreciation. Yes, the spelling of "labour" is Canadian. Look it up in your own well-thumbed version of the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary.

Why this fondness for glass? I don't know... Because I've always loved glass? Because it's a medium designed to transfer light? For the last 25 years or so, I resonate with that. To greater and WAY lesser degrees of success, I have discovered to my astonishment that I myself am a vessel designed to transmit light. The technical explanation goes on to say that ".... we [BTW, that's me, in between the "w" and the "e"] shine like stars in the universe as we hold out the Word of light in a dark and exceedingly sad and panicky generation...." I'm paraphrasing the Bible here, but hey! I know a few Greek words too, ya know.

Glass also appreciates the crushing pressure involved in transformation. What is glass, really, except the end result of silicon finally understanding that, under duress, stress, and a great deal of sweat on one's upper lip, that under intense pressure, one has been "sanctified" (set apart) to become something greater than oneself? And then becomes beautiful, and practical, and life changing? Think greenhouses, the miracle of microscopes, the pyramid in the Louvre...

Flashback: at nine years old, I stood in the smoke and darkness in a small building on an island off the coast of Venice. I watched men of immense lung capacity swoop globs of glowing molten silicon and breathe, fling and twist them into life. Bowls for grapes and strawberries, exotic fish escaping prey, and ashtrays for what was then still an acceptable form of social interaction, cigarette smoking. Could they have known that a skinny little Canadian kid who had traveled from Tanzania, with no volume control--or even on/off button--would remember this moment in her life? Probably not. And today, what little kid's life did you accidentally impact, forever?

Thanks, Dear Spousal Unit, for literally cementing a small portion of signature glass in to our home this week-end. Every time I look at it, I will understand it as a labour of understanding, and love.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

On the Pros and Cons of Accidental Eavesdropping, Part 2

There are very few pros to what happened next.

I had just barely recovered from the visual trauma of the imprint of the nurse's butt in the curtain, backing up into the limited space already fully occupied by my very narrow gurney, layered on the assault on my inner ear of the high-pitched whine of the Remington 500 applied to the correct knee of my nearest neighbor, Oral Surgeon_Cube 2.

Kathryn, the OR nurse (and BTW, the SECOND Kathryn of that specific spelling I had been introduced that morning, myself not included, which made three in the same building on any given morning, freaky in and of itself) had settled in and started to chat.

Let me just add that at this point, no lovely, clear liquid inducing the "Wwhheeee! Can we roll down the hallway again?" response had been added yet to my escape-preventive IV.

Kathryn Of The Blue OR Cap began apologizing that we were a few minutes late heading in to the operating room.

"We're just waiting for the rep. From the company that makes the machine that will be doing your surgery."

"Oh, wait... Is that her?" she asked of another blue-gowned, blue-capped Queen of the Nether Realms.

Yes, it was the rep. It would just be a few minutes while she "... told the doctor how the new machine worked."

Fabu. I was Patient #1 on the New Machine.

I hadn't known going in how keen I would be to see the anesthesiologist. But at some points in your life, you just have to trust that 1) God is in control, 2) new machines must be better than old machines, 3) medical device reps have a vested interest in doctors understanding REALLY well how the 'chinery is asspossedta work, and that it does, and 4) you will be blissfully unconscious in the unlikely event that variables 2&3 above turn out to be not true.

Anybody ever said the words "God, I trust you" and "Jeronimo!" in the same breath?

Friday, August 31, 2007

On the Pros and Cons of Accidental Eavesdropping in Pre-Op

Let me say at the outset that the situation, while not totally out of my control, was somewhat beyond my ability to fix. Yes, I could have ripped the IV out of my hand and slid off the gurney and out of pre-op curtained cubicle #1, clothed in nothing but my cotton socks (apparently the only item of personal apparel allowed under Hospital Regulation #142-HUMIL-I-8) and well-laundered and remarkably soft hospital gown. I could have stomped back through the waiting room of day-surgery patients and out in to the parking lot, untied surgical gown flapping gently in my wake as I emerged blinking into the sunlight without a cab (or the means to pay for one) in sight. I could have. But the option seemed a bit daunting at the time, so I just lay there. The prevailing thought 'o the moment was, "Well, at least I'll have something to write about tomorrow on PFIFB."

The man in #2--so close I could see the shape of the attending nurse's butt in the curtain creating our personal spaces--had described himself 5 minutes earlier to the anesthesiologist as an oral surgeon. They had had quite the professional conversation regarding the best combination of drugs to a) get 'em under, quick and dirty, b) prevent post-op nausea, and c) deal with those radical surgeries (although he didn't do the much these days, being 68 and all...) where you have to reconstruct the whole face. Nina, the lovely nurse whose hands hadn't shaken too severely when "finding a nice vein for the IV" on me, had followed the Gas Queen in and was inquiring which knee was up for meniscus repair.

"The left one," he said.

"Will you please point to it?" she asked.

Maybe it's just me, but I found this disturbing.

I have often found these kinds of conversations confusing myself, albeit in completely non-urgent, non-surgical and (from my frame of reference) understandable circumstances. For instance, is "stage-right" from the perspective of the guy on the stage or the dude in the audience? I can never keep this straight. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here. How many times every day across the planet do you think someone asks the question, "Is that my left or yours?" However, to hear it asked in the pre-op ward BY someone who was responsible not only for the welfare of his left knee but also all my own cherished body parts, and OF someone who was known in the ward to be "in the profession" was disconcerting, to say the least. If they don't understand each other in this arena, what hope was there for clear communication for me?

Apparently, she only asked so she was sure she was shaving the correct limb (which I also got to enjoy, auditorially speaking.) One hopes his surgeon had a slightly better grip on the job spec.
I wasn't done with the inadvertent eavesdropping yet, but this will wait as the fodder of tomorrow's post. For now, let me just say that I was most relieved to realize that regarding the object of my own surgical attention, I had only one.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Wind and Waves: Playing With My Camera

Trying the video feature again with a smaller file size. (Different video, for those of you who already enjoyed Paris on YouTube.)

While I wait for it to upload, thought we'd check back in for a few updates. First, let's check back in with the "My Son Is Dismantling My iPod" episode. For those of you wondering, the surgery a few weeks ago on all mobile wireless devices in our household by Third Child paid off. 1) He got them all put back together in working order. And 2) he signed with Apple today. We are now the proud parents of an employed (pending usual immigration hoopla, of course) Product Design Engineer. I have no idea what that means, but we are pickled tink!

I've had a few questions re: the new driving machine. Yes, it is an ultimate DM. Yes, it's a convertible. Yes, it's used (2003). And yes, it appears to be learning the routes to work and the beach in record time. I will be on auto-pilot to my regular haunts before you can say "Bye-bye, little red apple of my eye...."

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Update to Travelling With a Buddy and Bonding With a Car

For my regular readers: I took the new driving machine for a training run down Highway 17 this afternoon. It growled appreciatively at just the right places, and sighed in harmony when nestling in to just the perfect parking space at Newbie Surfer beach on West Cliff Dr. The bonding has begun.

On a related but rather stretched note: I blathered a while back about the importance of women finding a great travel buddy, early. I just wish I had understood early on about the importance of finding the great car buddy then as well. Ah well, never too late to learn the important lessons of life.

And now to weave it all together: in celebration of one (and there were several!) great trip this year, I am attempting to include a new feature offered by blogspot.com (God love Google!): the video link. For those of you subscribing by email or RSS feed, you will have to visit the actual website to click on this to see my offering for today, I think. (There is a link in the end bits of the email update notice.) It is a short video created from still shots taken while my Travel Buddy and I were in Paris this February. Enjoy!

September 27: Update from my first un-conference

Rats. I loved this video. I love the photos, I love my travelling buddy, and I loved the beautiful haunting solo by Andre Bocelli that I had included as the sound track. And I hate that I have just been convinced that even on my piddly little 12-subscriber blog, this constitutes a copy-right violation.

My alternatives: re-render with cheesy synthesized stock music, pay thousands of dollars in royalty fees to Mr. B to leave the sound track in place, recording three minutes of the lovely melody on a kazoo myself, silence, or remove the video.

Realities: hate cheesy stock music, no budget, kazoo soundtrack will lose everyone in my subscriber list except those who haven't yet figured out how to turn on their computer speakers yet, and I've never been good with silence,... ever. So, I'm removing the video until I can figure out how to have my video and post it, too. Sorry. And sad. And a little frustrated.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

I'm Back! and Ruminating On Bonding With a Car

I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I pee my pants.
It turns out that trying to run AND blog while on vacation has the same effect. And since I pride myself on exemplary personal hygiene, not to mention my well-honed sensibilities on how to be a polite house guest, I elected to alternate between the two, with running taking the lead by a nose towards the end of the last few weeks. I can't tell you how satisfying it has been, therefore, to have not one but several comments from those with my actual email address saying they missed hearing from PFIFB. Ahhh.... I'm having a Sally Field moment even as we speak...

So, I'm back. And luckily for my readers, I'm in a right snarky mood, ready to comment willy-nilly on every darned thing that irks, interests, or elevates. (I can hear you from the front porch: "Oh Boy!!") Fortunately for my readers, the blahg-worth epiphany of the day translates into an elevating observation rather than a cranky rant, and it is this: I have learned what it means to bond with a car.

This comes as a great shock to me. Until now, car bonding has been right up there with public mucus snorking, throat or nose, take your pick. (HA! I confess I love it when a pun appears unbidden from around the corner, like the Cheshire cat grinning unashamedly in mid-air. What was I saying?...) Ah yes... machine affinity and sinus clearing maneuvers. To sum up: in my mind they have always been relegated to the testosterone enhanced end of the human gender spectrum. In my more cranky moments, referring to a collection of inanimate mechanically connected gears, pistons, and what-have-yous as a "she" and snot snorking pretty much cover the "Men!" explanation. That and the complete comfort one might experience in appearing dripping wet and half-naked, grunting one's way down on to a narrow cedar plank in a public sauna with unwilling conversation partners hunkered down by the door. But I digress.

Three years ago I became the proud owner of a bright red 1994 Honda Del Sol. Over the intervening years, that little machine and I have come to an enviably robust set of agreements. For my part, I provided overnight sheltered covering, oil changes and tire pressure checks. Okay, so not me personally--a big public thanks to my live-in mechanics, one and all. I did, personally, ensure spa-like dashboard Armor All treatments, strategic parking arrangements at grocery stores, and regular words of encouragement and endearment. In return, the car never once abandoned me on the side of the road or failed to make it up the steep bits on Highway 17. In fact, we came to a most important understanding: any sunny Saturday that I happened to fill up the tank, it would switch on the factory-installed auto-pilot and whisk me down Highway 85 and over the mountains for a wonderful (every single one) walk on West Cliff Dr. in Santa Cruz. I wouldn't even have to ask.

Time moves on, backs age, and tires wear out. Such is life. So last week-end when we realized we were on the threshold of new Michelins and the cusp of "old cars all of a sudden need a ton of really expensive work," and the realization that for as long as I kept the car, I would be heaving the removable roof on and off at the passing of every cloud, I got a new car. The make, model and year of the new beast are irrelevant. It's just a machine.... so far. But my little red buddy is sitting in the garage, detailed and ready to hit the dating scene again. One potential buyer has already been by. They went for coffee and a danish. He's coming back in the morning with the cash. I can't be here when he comes.

And so now I get it, at least a little. While I never got to the place where I knew its gender, I connected. I care. I'll miss it. Whoa.... I'll be snorking and scratching and grunting in public next!

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

On Public Saunas and Women's Gardens

Yesterday I joined my mom for a morning swim at the lovely Comox Valley Aquatic Center. Not only did I really enjoy the sun-drenched, chlorine-free and uncrowded ambiance, but I learned something brand new. I discovered I don't like sharing a dry sauna with a man to whom I have not been formally introduced.

I had been sitting quietly by myself in the dry sauna, red-faced and dripping with cathartic toxin run-off, when a half-naked man yanked open the door, waddled in and plunked himself at the other end of the room with a grunt. It was a quiet room, and there were now two human beings sharing the small space. In the absence of any reading material or a big screen TV, I found myself feeling an increasing pressure to chat. This made me cranky. I found myself thinking, "I'm sweating here in clothing not much bigger than respectable Christian underwear and it seems a somewhat private enterprise to share. Why can'tcha find another sauna to grunt in? Isn't there a men's sauna somewhere?" Within a minute, I had left the sauna and headed back to the pool for a few more laps.

I didn't think about the sauna encounter until about an hour later. I was finished my swim before Mom's Aqua Motion class was done, so I showered and dressed and went to the lounge with my book to wait. Cruising through "A Thousand Splendid Suns," by Khaled Hosseini, I read this: "Herat [a city in Afghanistan] was visible from here, spread below her like a child's board game: the Women's Garden to the north of the city, Char-suq Bazaar and the ruins of Alexander the Great's old citadel to the south."

I hit "the Women's Garden" and stopped. As far as I can remember, I have always been just a little offended when I read about areas that were/are set aside for women only: the women's court in the Temple, the women's side in a synagogue, the women's this or that. All of this segregation of public places/spaces, intentional or otherwise, had only ever struck me as a way to keep women out of where the real action takes place. (Think burkhas, the British House of Lords (Spiritual), Hooters Restaurant, etc.) And I had thought this way until I hit the phrase "... the Women's Garden..." in my book and a new possibility occured to me.

Maybe women in various cultures and times in history have actually cherished having these "women only" sides of synagogues, gardens, and yes, even saunas to themselves as a gender. Women talk about different things when it's just other women present. We relax in ways not possible when high levels of testosterone are in the air. We are okay with sweating together in small rooms without knowing each other's names. We bond quickly, able to laugh with total strangers in changing rooms over ridiculously sized/priced/marketed clothing. We actually ask AND answer the question "Does this make me look fat?" of women we've never met before, and trust her to tell us the truth. Come to think of it, the amazing success of the women-only gym franchise, "Curves," should have been my first clue.

Maybe I have been remotely and mildly indignant over "women only" practices on behalf of a group of people who, had they known, might have reacted with puzzlement and even perhaps pity. I think I'll go check out my local Curves. If nothing else, they might have a sauna.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

On The Urge To Share

I flew to Calgary yesterday and had been assigned the emergency exit second row, window seat with no seat in front of me, middle seat empty. Score!! Before the plane had even taxied to the runway, the gentleman in the aisle seat had told me that while his 17-year old college-bound daughter didn’t have a drug problem, he was concerned about her drinking. This was, evidently, a big worry, because while he and his wife had at first not wanted any children at all, after nine years of marriage they changed their mind but then had only been able to conceive the once.

Before he could enlighten me further (and I have to assume that was the direction we were heading), the flight attendant came by to discuss with the Emergency Exit Rows Commandos our moral and legally binding duties in case the pilot had been drinking and hit a curb on take-off. When the question came up (and isn’t there always one of those guys?) on precisely how to remove the cover blocking the handle, we were informed that it was basically a velcro-type system and therefore the adrenaline rush would be enough to guarantee that any technique would suffice. The woman in the middle seat in front emergency exit row took this as her cue to lean around the back of her seat and let me in on the personal factoid that she actually didn’t have adrenal glands.

This second disclosure became even more intriguing when the woman’s adult daughter, sitting beside her, exclaimed, “You don’t?! Why not?” Mom informed us all together that they had taken it out when they had removed her tumor.

What is it about commercial air travel that incites people to share these kinds of intimate personal details with total strangers? The woman hadn’t seen fit to inform even a closes relative of her adrenal-gland free condition, yet she risks dislocating her spine to fill me in with the very same insight. And who knows where the man in 17D would have wound up without the intervention of the "In The Event Of An Emergency" lecture, after which I opened my book so quickly that I nicked my nose on the corner. Does some kind of “seat buddy” social bonding kick in? Or is it as simple as the protection of anonymity converging with the opportunity to vent? If that’s the case, it’s much cheaper to just start a blahg.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Transplanting Your Teen, Part Two

Note to readers: my July 29 posting, "Transplanting Your Teen into a California High School, Part One" is on the recommended summer reading list for this class, er.... posting.


I was having a staff off-site meeting on my front porch today. (I love California.) Around 3 p.m., what sounded like fourteen tubas and an off-key trombone filled the air, warming up with what Third Child informs me are arpeggios. This reminded me that we have entered "Band Camp" season, and I owed PFIFB Lesson #2 in the "Transplanting Your Teen" series.

Lesson #2: Public schools in California are heavily subsidized from the parental coffers. This reality dwarfed by an order of magnitude my previous experience of “Waddya mean, you need $7.00 and a dozen cupcakes for the field trip to the National Art Gallery tomorrow?!” That had been chicken feed, compared to the experience that awaited us here.

Two weeks after school began, TC came home with a note saying that his marching band fees of $650.00 were due the next day (surprise!) , and could he go to Italy in March with the band? If so, he would need to take in his $1300 deposit for that tomorrow, too. Apparently, the first school-to-parent missive on the subject had come during--you guessed it--band camp.

Morale of the story: When deciding between alternatives presented in the syllabus, create an excel spreadsheet. Create a column embedded with the off-planet math formula that will be necessary to determine whether, in addition to the transfer credits from your previous school system, the class under scrutiny will eventually map to the prerequisites for the eventual courses that will suffice to get the kid a diploma. Then (and here's the part they don't tell you) add a column that tallies the eventual layout that will be necessary for each option. Book an appointment with the guidance counselor, your accountant and estate lawyers, your kid and that really scary smart guy down the hall from you at work who gets the math to hammer out your options, and voila! BTW: it helps to make it to band camp.

These extra costs don’t seem to surprise or disturb the natives. I’m not sure if all American parents share this unspoken “no sacrifice is too high to gild Johnnie’s high school experience,” or if this is a localized cultural phenomenon. However, if you come from the land of socialized (free) almost everything except beer and other "sin taxable" consumables, I can tell you this: public school fees significantly add to an immigrant's first year "sticker shock" experience of living in, and loving, Silicon Valley.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Can The World Come Out To Play?

I was going to write today about why I am unsettled when I upload a new posting and hear nothing back from the void: no comment on the site, no "reply" email, nada. But no matter how hard I tried, the result came off as a whiny "please... somebody comment!" and that is just so pathetic that I have given up. Don't comment. In fact, I have shut off the ability for anyone to comment until I figure you all (all 11 of you) will have forgotten this posting.

However, the reason I was heading in that direction was as a result of reading just a few chapters into an epiphanal book, The Cluetrain Manifest: The End of Business as Usual. (BTW, that link will allow you to read the entire book online, for free, which is itself a clue as to why this is such an important book. If you are in business and care about staying there, read it.)

The book is about the social implications of the Web and how it, at a most fundamental level, is re-introducing the concept of the conversation at the public market and why it is so important to businesses today. This really resonates with me, since I have been talking to women in my circles for the past twenty years about how isolating it is that we no longer have to visit a village well for daily water, and how women in particular have suffered from the loss of community that necessity used to bring. (And yes, I am very grateful to have running water in my house. Living with conflicting emotions is one of my core competencies.)

The book extends that "village well" idea to include men and women as previous frequenters of the public market, and of the impact the Web has had on re-introducing the idea of "conversation between individuals" to the marketplace.

"Though corporations insist on seeing it as one, the new marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic. Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy -- and free rein -- to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge."

To play, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn... That's why I am unsettled when no one comments: it feels like I called, but no one came out to play.