Mother Nature is surely joking

I can't believe it's April 1st and there's no snow on the ground. I half expected Mother Nature to pull a cosmic joke and wake up to two feet of snow this morning. Such is the expectation when you live in Canadaland.

I can't believe it's April 1st and leaves are unfurling.

I can't believe it's April 1st and the furnace is turned off.

I can't believe it's April 1st and I have been wearing shoes for two months.

I can't believe it's April 1st and people are out there riding bikes and playing Frisbee in the park.

I can't believe it's April 1st and I never got to use this cartoon to complain about the weather!

Auto-correct, My Worst Enema

As the saying goes, auto-correct is my worst enema.

I downloaded a popular predictive typing app years ago for my Android phone because it was so handy and a time saver; now it seems to have lost its mind a little.

I have pretty fat thumbs so I thought it would help me type better on a tiny screen. Instead, it constantly embarrasses me.

I wanted to congratulate an old co-worker on his new job, so I sent him a text that read "Congratulations Pail!" Oh c'mon, who on Earth names their kid ‘Pail’? Why didn't you suggest ‘Paul’? Doh.

This app will gallantly protect you from making a big ducking fool of yourself, but can’t get a popular name right.

Worse, I recently planned a potluck with a male friend via texting. “I’ll bring the slow cooker and we can make children” was totally not what I meant to write.

OMG! My thumb hit the send button faster than my eyes could see and my brain could comprehend. “Chili! Chili! We can make chili!!” Auto-correct, you’re driving me to an early grave, or at least making other transit riders inch away slowly from all the laughter. A slow cooker is about as unsexy as appliances get.

It seems the app is preoccupied with me having children actually, because it pops up the word constantly. The result is that hubs picks up fried children after work, I have leftover children for lunch and every now and then we go to Swiss Chalet for children with dipping sauce. Yeesh! You’d think I was Snow White’s wicked stepmother handing out poisoned apples left and right. I guess it’s my fault for doing a poor job of training the app. Garbage in, giggles out.

Now this one isn’t entirely the app’s fault, but it’s still pretty funny. One time we were driving down a thoroughfare alongside which our neighbours live. I dashed off a quick note to my friend whiile stopped at the intersection because I could see her sitting upstairs. “I can see your head through the -“ The light turned green and with one little bump, I completed the text. “I can see your head through the blood.”

“OK, I am totally going to hide in the closet now,” she wrote back, because that was not creepy at all!

As the saying goes, auto-correct is my worst enema. At least Word just quietly offers to change it to enemy :-)

From the Mixed Up Files of...

While catching up and reading some more old paperbacks from our basement, I realized it wasn't fair to make fun of others without first making fun of myself. We all start somewhere as authors, artists, creators, makers...and yeah, that early stuff is pretty cringeworthy!

My childhood is best described as a little weird and lonely. It's hard to believe, but there was a time when nerds and geeks were not cool. We didn't see a lot of movies and we didn't have a VCR. My parents also didn't realize they were raising two nerds, and dutifully tried to steer us away from anything geeky. Gushing about Star Wars was not a path to popularity at all!

Life got a little better when pay-TV arrived in 1989 after my parents gave up fixing the giant old CRT. Suddenly we had more than ten channels and it opened up a world of entertainment and ideas. Today we take 24/7 for granted, but CNN was downright amazing. Naturally my brother and I gravitated to MuchMusic, a Canadian sort of MTV, and loved every second of it.

The summer of 1991 had a lot of great movies and I really, really, really wanted to see Terminator 2. There were too many obstacles for a young person to overcome though - getting a ride to a movie theatre (half an hour away), finding an adult to take me (not happening) and scraping up the change to see it (nope!). It was also R-Rated, as hard as that is to believe. So what do you do when you can't see a movie you really, really, really want to see? You make up your own version, and years later breathe a sigh of relief that the Internet wasn't around!

Being a nerd, I began by meticulously researching T2 as much as possible. I snipped out pictures from magazines, read the newspaper and paid great attention whenever You Could Be Mine came on MuchMusic. Then I got a brand new red spiral notebook and began writing away with great gusto, all in pencil.

Since I had no idea at all how the story progressed and had no idea what was in the first movie, I began at the part when the Terminator finds an alien dog. He takes it back to his place to show his three roommates, one of which is his younger brother named Joe. Oh wait, you didn't know all that happened? Well, it did, let me tell you!

My pencil galloped across the pages like a wild mustang, kicking up bad dialog, stomping on linear narrative and making awful metaphors. The book, which I fantasized about publishing, eventually spiraled into four notebooks. It was hard to get past a few pages at a time - somewhere along the way it careened into a crossover with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Blessed are the folks who don't know they are writing fan fiction.

(You may want to take a quick bathroom break right now, just in case)

The Terminator, oh so imaginatively named Arnold (every cyborg assassin needs a cover, I guess) shared his, oh man, I can barely type this, secret mountain hideout with his roommates and, ha, hahaha, they spend their days riding and fixing motorcycles and visiting their friend down the road. He's a doctor named Felix with a psychic horse named Oberon.

(Remember, you already got your bathroom break warning)

So one day, one day Oberon (snortle!) gets this prediction that something bad is going to happen to Sarah Connor and her son. Arnold hops on his bike and travels to the big city. I made up the city name, along with a whole bunch of other things, like how Arnold and Sarah used to be romantically involved (don't worry, the Terminator is not John's dad!). Thanks to the my careful study of You Could Be Mine, I was able to fill in the rest of the story, although quite laughably.

Now, maybe you're wondering what the other three notebooks were filled with once the T-1000 had been vanquished. Well, to be honest, I skimmed through the notebooks because continuing would mean needing a few puffs from my husband's asthma inhaler. With so many male characters, something was missing...like girlfriends! Each male character got a love interest that developed awkwardly while Arnold and Joe visited...their mother. The awful dialog sadly proves that I was not the sophisticated teenager I presumed to be. Eventually boredom set in and the lovey dovey parts gave way to an intricate history of one of the roommates, an Australian with a mean streak. He was mean because he had a really tough upbringing, right from the start, when he was born in the back of a truck in the outback (I can see why it's taken me a while to write this blog post...oof!).

Who was this unrecognizable younger self that wrote all this...verbiage? There were no real themes, just little bits of daily life, punch lines from Saturday Night Live and lots and lots of...huh. Where did all these ideas come from, plus the energy to write so much? The last notebook is dated November 28, 1992. Maybe I grew up a little bit in a year, maybe I got to the end of the notebook and realized that was a good time to stop this...saga. The last notebook just stops with the funeral of Felix's half brother, Jack.

And, here's the punch line - I still haven't seen Terminator 2. Or 3 or 4 or the TV series. Maybe it's because I always liked my version better :-). My husband groaned and pointed to the paper shredder in the corner of his man cave when I tried to regale him with these ridiculous scenarios. Naw, these notebooks don't deserve that fate...yet!




* Years later in the 90s, at a comic show, I was thrilled to find an Ewok action figure.

A Simple Goal for the New Year

You know what long winter commutes are good for? Catching up on my thoughts with Evernote. The first day of the new year was surprising sunny and optimistic, with a sky dappled with clouds. Happy 2015!

The next day looked like the same old year - grey and overcast until we plunged into a snowy deep freeze. I needed that sky to find my optimism for 2015. I was busy taking care of my self, my family and a friend for the last part of 2014. There's always a kind of joy to starting a new year fresh, but also so much pressure to make the most of it too. I started 2011 with being laid off. No one plans for that! It's a hard lesson for anyone who loves to plan. Life doesn't go from point A to point B or turn out like the PowerPoint. Hope is not a strategy either.

A few months ago we had a motivational speaker at work that emphasized that trying to change everything at once leads to failure. He suggested making one degree changes (no 180s people!). My wake up call last year was a troublesome tooth that revealed that I had to change my diet in a big way - not just cut back on sweets, but that I also had an iron deficiency. Thanks to iron supplements, I had to eat more fibre, and because of that, which meant drinking more water. If I make 357 more changes, like getting a cast iron skillet, I will be a whole new person. At least, that's my theory.

But, looping back, one thing I do plan on accomplishing (notice I didn't say hope) is finishing this cross stitch peacock. It was started in 1998. 1998! I don't want to die with it rolled up in a drawer, which was the fate of some needlework my great-aunt started in the 50s or earlier. Great Aunt Katie was childless and so are we. My niece is probably not going to want two generations of unfinished embroidery :-)

As motivating as it was to want to finish it, there were logistical problems. I would have to go out and find new embroidery floss, which probably wouldn't match after all these years. Then I would have to find the pattern, etc. etc. Truly, it's the little obstacles that prevent us from accomplishing great things. 

Then I was reminded of something from art college - Kintsugi - or the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold resin. It's a way of giving a broken object new life. Objects have all sorts of lives - and the peacock is a reminder of how much I used to love cross-stitch and find peace in little fabric pixels. I bought a few kinds of gold embroidery floss and I'll apply the same idea to my peacock - just gleefully fill in all the empty spots with gold so that it can live the life I always meant for it to have.

Escape from The To-Do List

When roughly half your year is spent in wintry cold, it's so easy to take summer for granted. Suddenly everyone is social and there's so much to do. I found myself slipping deeper and deeper into the To-Do List! The joke goes, "There are only two seasons in Canada, winter and construction." It's mostly true, because you can't paint your garage or pour a new sidewalk when it's -40C out. 

Not that long ago I was standing at the dinner table, wrapping several packages and I wondered why I wasn't outside enjoying this particular cool spring day. White and pink blossoms, the rich green grass, the cloudless blue sky - and I was inside, staring wistfully out the windows. It was like an invisible parent was staring down at me and saying, "No playtime until all your chores are done!"

And when life starts looking like a Buzzfeed listicle, you know you need to Escape from the To-Do List. Eventually everything becomes a chore. The To-Do List starts affecting your body and you don't really know why at first:

The To-Do List just becomes one never ending cycle. Inspiration to flee came from a safety ad on the bus:

 Stop          Think          React 

I put my phone away, I took a deep cleansing breath. The heart of my entanglement in the To-Do List was that I could not say no. It was a trap within a trap! I had to climb out of the Yes Pit.

It's not easy to say "no", especially for women. Some people are raised to put others needs before their own. Some people feel that it's incredibly rude to say no. And yet others say yes because it might be a career killer. My time as a temp certainly eroded my ability to say "no" too. It's natural to want to fit in, please people and say "yes" when we mean "no". Maybe the trouble with saying "no" is that we know how to say "yes" easily, but not "no".

"Practice big no's and little no's," I told myself. Yesterday my husband wanted to watch Dr. Who. No thanks! Last week an old co-worker was hopeful that I had some free weekends and evenings to help with her work project. No, my bandwidth has been exceeded lately! Last month I ran into someone from a group I volunteered with in the past - did I want to be webmaster again? Without burning a single bridge, I replied, "No, but I know someone who might be interested!"

The To-Do List shrank as I exercised the power of "no". Maybe it's easier to reframe "no" as "not today" or "not right now" when considering a request. Maybe I'll want to watch Dr. Who tomorrow! Saying "no" is actually saying "yes" to other things - like time with family, myself (remember, I'm an introvert!) and things I really care about. It's not fun giving up weekends for extra work - especially during a short Canadian summer. That's something I really can't say no to at all!

Time to Bloom

Originally I was working on a post about my failure to bloom. Every day last week the same bleak blue grey canvas greeted me when I left the house. Where was the cloudless blue sky I loved? When there was snow instead of rain, my heart broke. Would I ever feel warmth instead of a persistent chill? Now that I was finally able to sleep, when would I really wake up?

Ray Bradbury had the right idea about mood and weather when wrote his classic story, All Summer in a Day. It's about a little girl whose awful classmates lock her in the closet for the brief time that the sun shines on Venus, which is once every seven years! I couldn't go once every seven days. I live in an unusually sunny place on the prairies, so it's really noticeable when the sun is gone. Living at a higher altitude also means that our sunlight is more intense, making for wildly painted sunrises and sunsets. The kinds of things that makes the soul bloom and the spirit stretch (apparently my inner poet is also stirring). When it snowed about a week ago, part of my soul literally died. Snow? Noooooooo! It wasn't just me, the wildlife were affected too. There were some unhappy robins in my backyard and I spotted a ground squirrel that looked traumatized as he pipped and squeaked at me. Yeah, I would feel cheated too if I just came out of hibernation.

But the weatherman was finally right the past weekend - sun. Glorious, warm, life giving sun! It was so wonderful to be outside, with cool refreshing breezes too. It felt like autumn in reverse. Time to cast off the winter woollies and embrace the freedom of shoes, light jackets and cute hats. Spring is truly an act of faith sometimes!

Some day, this will be green!

My Somnambulistic Life

2014 has been the weirdest year ever! Instead of riding the horse, I feel like it's dragging me around in circles. I hope March is better, because most of February was sleepless, literally. It started with too much going on in my head:

Then it continued with randomly waking up at 4am every morning. By the time Friday rolled around I looked like the living dead:

And just when I started waking up at 6am again...my father in law started calling between 10 and 10:30pm every night. I guess seniors have no reason to go to bed early, unlike us poor young folk:

Why! Why? Why did my body and my FIL hate sleep so much? And my brain! During the last week of February, my brain had a hankering for belting out Tom Jones for a solid hour and a half:

Let me tell you, What's New Pussycat? is a really, really, really long, long song! Fortunately my before bedtime habits, body clock, father in law and brain have all shaped up, because March is so far, so good in the sleep department. Sweet dreams!

PS, if you like the font, you can download it for free from Blambot.

Happy New Year! Have A Cold!

I didn't plan on spending the first seven days of the new year with a cold, but it was pretty bad. I bailed on Mom's birthday party, stared at the ceiling, chugged Emergen C and nipped at Nyquil. But this was a doozy of a cold. The sad thing is, if I had just listened to my Dad, I might have gotten over it sooner. When you come from an immigrant family, it's a constant struggle between old ways and new ways, and when repeated doses of Nyquil left my mouth more arid than the Sahara, I finally gave in. Time to pull out of big guns.

Garlic.

Lots of garlic.

Now, the way a cold works is that one doesn't get better until it passes on to someone else. As I roamed the shopping centre, the virus awakened and I searched for healthy young bodies to sneeze and cough on. People avoided me, especially after my left eye spontaneously teared up and couldn't stay open. The bags under my eyes were brutal, and I looked every bit of a virus vampire as I felt. I came to my senses, paid 63 cents for a bulb and hurried on out.

Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Once home, I found my little used garlic press and crushed a fresh clove on a slice of toast. Here goes nothing! I like garlic, but usually it's cooked and accompanied by other flavours. It's an accent, not the main course. Each bite was intense and took a lot of willpower to choke down.

A few hours later, another slice of garlic toast. My sinuses felt better, but soon I smelled worse. I was already banished to the spare bedroom anyway, so it couldn't hurt to have more garlic. That night, I could literally feel my whole body fight the cold. I was flush from head to toe and needed no covers at all. The strange, warm glowy feeling lasted the next day, and topped up with one final slice of toast. Four cloves and I couldn't take any more. By the end of the second day, I was breathing through both nostrils again. Ah! Talk about fast relief! It sure beat waking up with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, thanks to Nyquil.

Huh, it is true then, all this stuff about garlic being a wonder food with anti-microbial and anti-fungal properties. It even, ahem, has a laxative effect, which so many websites fail to mention (but no doubt falls under "and many more benefits"). The moment I realized that I was morphing from a virus vampire to a pungent poltergeist was when I knew I had to stop right there and have a shower instead of more toast. Now I'm back to my normal self...until the next cold!

Welcome to Winter!

Well, you now have my permission to believe every stereotype about Canadian winters you've heard. A blizzard passed through town on Monday, dumped three or four feet of snow (unevenly, mind you) and went on its way, leaving chaos behind. It's taking two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. Thank goodness a delicious beef roast waited in the slow cooker on Monday, because we've been nibbling away on that all week. Tonight it's going to "feel like" -39 C. This is not a time for the furnace to fail either :-D

 That north west wind goes where it wants! Source: Gord Gilles

The blizzard reminded me that I should get a move on and finish a story I'm working on for the next batch of stories. It's tentatively titled "A Cold, Cold Country". It's based on my experience during a flash spring ice storm that I was ill prepared for. The storm came in so fast that the street I was walking on turned into ice instantly and visibility was poor. Naturally I was walking because twenty minutes earlier the bus I was on had become stuck at the top of the hill. Three years later, I can't remember what made me walk to find another bus route - it was a foolish decision because I lacked winter clothing and the neighbourhood had almost no stores or restaurants. Almost none, except for a little pizza joint where I waited six hours for Mr. Potenti to come pick me up. If I recall right, a half hour drive took him almost four hours due to accidents. Anything is possible when Mother Nature has a mood swing.

The freshness of the memory has come back every night that I wait for a bus that doesn't come, and trudge home in the dark. Last night I couldn't get a bus into my neighbourhood. Normally it's a quick little walk from the main drag to our house, but it was agonizing as my feet plunged into the soft snow. Ice crystals stung my face as I was forced to walk into the wind. Every moment was excruciating because my fingers froze despite warm, double lined gloves. Once inside I stripped everything off and made some tea, stat!

Drifts are deeper than they appear...this goes up to my knee!

Winter is really no joke in Canada. My granny's first husband succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning when his truck became stuck in a snow bank way back in the 1960s. This knowledge forever colours how I perceive winter, because all it takes is a slick road or forgotten house keys to get into real trouble. It's said by literary scholars that Canadians have a garrison mentality "that fears the emptiness of the Canadian landscape". When you're in the middle of nowhere, with snow drifts making every feature and landmark indistinguishable, nothing but purple sky all around - that fear becomes very real. Now I just need to put all those things into a finished story :-)

Tea for Tuesday

It's so strange - for the past ten years or so a big fall cold strikes me down. Cools my jets! Relegates me to the couch to watch daytime TV! It happens so predictably that there's no avoiding it. But, I'll settle for this little fall cold. Besides the modern miracle that is Nyquil, I'm thankful for Cold 911 made by the good people at David's Tea. It's not just peppermint tea, it's peppermint tea with juniper berries, eucalyptus and orange peels. It is so delicious and satisfying. Time to make another pot!

The Klutz Spiral Draw Book Review

Every year I get myself a birthday and a Christmas gift, and I encourage you to do the same. Nothing is quite as awesome as opening your gift, giving yourself the thumbs up in the mirror and saying "It's just what I wanted. Thank you, me!"

Just kidding, I don't go that far. This year I bought myself the Klutz Spiral Draw Book, mostly so I could get birthday bonus points on my Indigo book club card. Klutz books are great because they come with everything you need to get started right away and the materials are good quality, plus, they're just fun. It comes with a drawing book, a spiffy six colour pen and the drawing gears. Perfect for the impatient child or adult. Amazon has a picture of the older version, which was spiral bound and had three gel pens with it.

No batteries, AC Adapter or expansion set required!

Right way I began making these masterpieces. Clearly, the cover of my next book is going to have a lot of spirals.

Even though this book is Klutz proof, it's not without a couple of flaws. First of all, I didn't even realize the book came out of the package! Doh! Secondly, the frame needs to be held down quite firmly and the paper needs to be as flat as possible, so don't be afraid to bend the book open. I could see this being a challenge for younger children. On more than one occasion the gear slipped under the frame (woe!) and then when drawing near the binding of the book, the gear wouldn't turn all the way. No problem though, because the drawings don't need to be perfect. In fact, you don't even have to make a whole circle to make a cool picture.

It would have been nice to see some blank pages in the book, as it is illustrated with cartoon characters throughout. The Klutz editors were very thoughtful though in making it appealing to girls and boys and adults.

There's a zen quality in creating for the sake of it, especially when the results are so random. Nowadays people tend to plan everything down to the tiniest detail, so happy accidents were just that. I found myself absorbed in making round after multicolored round of shapes, so much so that I barely noticed the time passing. That kind of relaxing, imaginative play is the most priceless gift of all.

The Time, It Flies!

It's so refreshing just to be able to sit here and type away. While dodging time traps, the Potentis have been spending a lot of time with friends and family. Birthdays abound at the end of September (tee hee, we know what your parents were doing in December) and it was also our ninth wedding anniversary. Nine years!

It's easy to not find time for reflection on the past when one is so busy living in the present and thinking about the future. At the eight year mark our wedding photos finally found their way out of a shoebox and into an album! Life is so comfortable now that it's easy to forget how hard it was ten years ago we went for broke to buy our house. I was on the verge of being laid off, Jack had already been laid off. We looked at each other, realized our nerd love was strong enough to withstand anything, and took up our new hobby of riding life's rollercoasters. Sorry, that was a really bad metaphor. We actually bought our house on Valentine's Day while we both had colds. I remember lying in bed afterwards, waiting for Nyquil to kick in, and feeling dizzy. Had we done the right thing? Was this the right house? We weren't even married!

My parents, being the Old Country type, had thought it was a big mistake. I was ruining my life and throwing away my money. It caused a lot of tension because I was still living at home. My Dad poorly translated an idiom that resulted in Jack being called a bread basket almost constantly ("What does that even mean?" "I have no idea!"). Their fear was understandable. Trusting someone with your heart and your savings is every parent's worst nightmare. Instead of seeing the Big Adult Decision you are embarking on, they picture headlines involving cheating hearts and bankruptcy. Then, around the same time we were pledging our love, Mr. Potenti's own parents were getting a divorce after 33 years. Would we end up like them? A tub of Rolaids couldn't soothe our jitters.

It's not possible to predict the future. If it was, well...we'd all be Microsoft millionaires and we would forgo that extra burrito at Taco Bell. We can only make the best choices possible at the time when they are made - and continue to work hard to keep them on track. And if it turns out to be a mistake - well, it's something learned. Sometimes you have to go through the bad to get to the good. And the shocking thing is that most of the bad is pretty temporary - we both found new jobs within two years and the days of eating hot dogs and beans slid by. My in-laws married new partners and are happier than before. "Bread basket" hasn't been heard since 2005. That whole period of our lives seems so strange, and hard to believe it happened.

It took another year after buying our home to make our love official with $250 worth of rings and a $75 piece of paper. My wedding dress was $50 off the discount rack at Sears, our place of vows a public garden rented for $300. The cake was just a sheet cake from Costco. An old co-worker took the photos and a talented friend played the keyboard. My mother cried and our friends were happy for us. It wasn't fancy, but it did the job - and nine years later I love my husband more than ever.

I couldn't even afford a manicure then...ah well.