February’s a tough month for so many people, and this February was the mother of all Februarys. I’ve noticed a lot of people have been down lately. And even most of us who haven’t been down exactly haven’t been all that up either.
I have a bad habit of trying to cheer people up. I want to run up to all the winter-weary refugees and shout “We made it through February! We’ve turned the corner! The end is in sight!”
But the worst thing we can do is get too excited too soon. March serves up its own challenges. We hung on through February, counting down the days, struggling through the icy grey grip of winter, knowing if we could only survive till March, it would start getting better.
But we all know how fickle March can be. March is the two-steps-forward-one-step-back month. March is the month that make us feel hopeful and inspired with sunshine and melting and a hint of warmth, and then turns around and snatches it right back away from us with a big cruel dump of snow and arctic winds and plunging temperatures.
We expect nothing from February, but March? It tortures our reawakening hope.
And then we kick ourselves because we know what March is like, we’ve been through it dozens of times, but every year we allow it to trick us again – sometimes repeatedly throughout the month. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. We’re Charlie Brown. The football is Spring. Lucy is March.
March is good, though, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to have unrealistic expectations. Here are some things to look forward to:
March Break, if you get it
Multiple Personalities Day (March 5)
National Crown Roast of Pork Day (March 7)
International Women’s Day (March 8 )
Panic Day (March 9)
Daylight Savings Time begins! (March 9)
Middle Name Pride Day (March 10)
Good Samaritan Day (March 13)
Ides of March (March 15)
Everything You Do is Right Day (March 16)
St. Patrick’s Day (March 17)
Goddess of Fertility Day (March 18)
Supreme Sacrifice Day (March 18)
The Swallows Return to Capistrano Day (March 19)
The first day of Spring (March 20)
International Earth Day (March 20)
Extraterrestrial Abductions Day (March 20)
Single Parents Day (March 21)
Good Friday (March 21)
Easter (March 23: four-day weekend if you’re really lucky like me)
Near Miss Day (March 23)
Greek Independence Day (March 25)
Something on a Stick Day (March 28)
Bunsen Burner Day (March 31)
If we can just hang on till Bunsen Burner Day, I promise it’ll get better. I PROMISE.
A week or so ago Susanna suggested in the comments that Duncan might be an orange Norwegian Forest Cat. I’d never heard of the breed, but I liked how exotic it sounded. I searched for images and concluded that oh yes, Duncan comes from a long line of Norwegian Forest Cats. These are not dainty little house cats. These are magnificent beasts. Survivors. Vikings!
Here’s a picture I found on the Internet:
And this is Duncan:
Okay hers is longer and fluffier and mine is oranger and more muscular. But apart from that, they’re practically twins!
Let’s turn now to the history and description of the breed and see how Duncan measures up.
“These are the cats that explored the world with the Vikings, protecting the grain stores on land and sea, and which are believed to have left their progeny on the shores of North America as a legacy to the future.”
Oh yeah, Duncan could totally sail the high seas with Vikings and protect their grain stores. And he’d be all over that progeny thing if he wasn’t neutered. I sleep with him every night and I’m certain of it.
“The Norwegian Forest Cat is …. adapted to a very cold climate.”
Duncan hasn’t complained – not even once – about this godforsaken winter.
“In Norway they are known as Skogkat: Forest Cat. They emerged from the Scandinavian forests 4000 years ago.”
Yesterday I casually said “So Duncan, do you think you might be a Skogkat?” and he looked at me sagely. I think that says it all.
“Norwegian Forest Cats have a thick fluffy double-layered coat, tufted ears and a long bushy tail to protect them against the cold. Their coat is essentially waterproof due to its coarse outer layer and dense underlay.”
Yes! Duncan’s got it all going on with the Norwegian Forest Cat coat.
“They are very large cats with adult males weighing 6 to 10 kg (13 to 22 lb), while females are approximately half that size. Their hind legs are longer than their front legs.”
Duncan currently weighs 9kg. His hind legs might be marginally longer than his front legs, but every time I try to measure them, he sits down.
“They are very intelligent, playful cats that enjoy human company.”
Duncan’s a genius and he loves human company. (He’s not playful though. Honestly, he can barely bring himself to watch me play with his toys.)
“they have a particular liking for water, with the ability to catch fish in lakes and streams”
I haven’t had him during fishing season yet, but he does love water. He dangles a paw in the tub while watching me bathe.
“These lovely cats are really two for the price of one, they can differ so greatly in looks from summer to winter. Some time in the spring they take off their “winter underwear,†the downy undercoat that provides warmth, and the long non-tangling outer guardhairs that act as protection from rain and snow.”
I’ve only had him for one season, but if Spring ever arrives I’ll be watching eagerly when he takes off his winter underwear.
“A question frequently asked is about the care the long coats require. As one breeder is fond of saying: ‘Mother Nature does not have hairdressers in the deep woods, so she did not design [the Norwegian Forest Cat] to require the daily attention necessary to some other longhaired breeds.’ ”
Duncan hardly sheds at all. He’s had no knots or tangles, just a tiny mat on his throat. He’s surprisingly low maintenance from a grooming perspective.
Speaking of grooming, I just got my hair cut. This is what it looks like when the hairdresser styles it. I tried doing it myself once, but the round brush got hopelessly stuck in my hair, right up against my scalp. I thought I was going to have to go downtown on the bus with a brush stuck to my head and get my hairstylist to remove it. I did manage to get it out, but since then I have left hairstyling to the professionals. I only look like this picture four days each year.
Posted by zoom! on February 27, 2008, at 9:02 pm |
Did you know that in addition to Duncan I have seventeen other pets?
I haven’t blogged about them before because they’re kind of embarrassing.
They’re my Facebook Live Gift pets. It all started 23 days ago when I received a Facebook notification saying my brother had sent me a Live Gift. Did I want to see it? Click here! I clicked, and Facebook conned me into installing the application and then showed me a smiling flower.
“Feed him so he doesn’t die!” Facebook said. So I clicked the Feed button. It seemed simple enough. A little mindless, perhaps, but not too onerous.
Then my brother-in-law sent me a mouse named Scooter, and my sister sent me Doug the puppy. I fed them each morning before work, just by clicking the Feed button. They didn’t wake me up at 4:00 in the morning demanding food and affection. They didn’t poop. It was do-able.
Several others arrived – a puppy from my other sister, another mouse, a cat, a giraffe.
Taking care of seven pets wasn’t much more work than taking care of one.
But then I discovered that they had social needs, and they would be happier if only I would allow them to socialize.
You just click on a pet, and then click the Mingle button, and then click on the pet you want the first pet to socialize with. Both pets get a social point. Easy.
I thought there must be more to it. Maybe something happens if your pet gets ten social points? So I socialized them all up to 10. Nothing happened. Maybe at 100? Clickity click. It was tedious work, but I brought them all up to 100 social points. Still nothing.
Then I made the mistake of visiting the adoption clinic. This is where the starving neglected pets end up. If they’re not adopted today, they’ll die.
This is what Teddy looked like when I first adopted him:
This is what he looked like after I lavished some tender loving care on him:
Then I adopted a sad little goldfish on the verge of death.
“Poor little thing,” I thought, “How could anybody do this to him?”
I named him after my son. First AND last name. I don’t know why I did that. I fed him all the way up to 100% fullness. Then I started mingling him with my other pets until he had over 700 social points. It was mind-numbingly boring, but I got some strange satisfaction from knowing I was taking good care of him.
Meanwhile, I sent my son a giraffe named Joe. My son refused to install the Live Gift application because it was already annoying him with constant notifications like “Zoom fed your Live Gift named Joe with her own food. Feed your Live Gift before it dies.” and “Zoom mingled her Live Gift named Chester with your Live Gift named Joe. You both get one extra food.”
I check on Joe every day to see if James has started taking care of him yet, and he hasn’t, so I feed him and mingle him with some of my pets. I know James just wants to let Joe die (along with the Live Gifts other people sent him and which are also annoying him with constant notifications) but Joe is like a grandson to me now….probably more so than a digital giraffe ought to be. (I might have some attachment issues.)
I was a little concerned about what would happen to all my Live Gifts when I go on holidays, but I see they just added a babysitter feature. It’s pretty cheap too.
For awhile there I kept going into the adoption clinic and feeding the starving animals. Occasionally I would adopt one. This is why I now have seventeen pets. I’m trying not to do this anymore.
The whole application is so pointless, and to be honest, the Live Gifts aren’t even much fun. It’s all about accumulating pointless points through pointless repetitive clicking. If I get enough points I can click on a picture of a roller coaster, and then it will say “Your Live Gift took a ride on a roller coaster.” How can I let something this dumb suck me into all this pointlessness?
I am tempted to just let them die, but I don’t think I can do that. I might be able to let the others die, but not James the Goldfish.
Posted by zoom! on February 26, 2008, at 9:00 pm |
Years ago I saw this doctor or nutritionist on TV who said “The average family has a repertoire of ten dinners. That’s it. Ten dinners that they eat almost all the time. If I could replace your ten dinners with ten healthier dinners, I could add years to the lives of everybody in your family.”
He went on to say that his goal would be to find ten healthy, affordable dinners that we liked just as much, found just as convenient to prepare, and could easily keep the ingredients on hand to make.
I eat a lot healthier than I did when I was younger (piece of cake), but I’m not obsessive about it. Nor do I want to be. But I do like the idea that if there’s going to be a lot of repetition in my diet, it might as well be healthy tasty repetition rather than unhealthy tasty repetition.
I don’t even think I have ten meals in my current repertoire. I actually don’t cook all that often. Last night I had a bowl of Raisin Bran for dinner, with yogurt on top. I bet I eat that for dinner three times in the average ten-day stretch.
Turkey soup is in my repertoire too. I make a huge batch of turkey soup maybe three times a year, and freeze it. It keeps me going for months. I eat turkey soup for dinner probably twice in every ten-day period.
And pizza. I make good pizza. I make the dough in the breadmaker and I top it with lots of veggies and apples and pears and hot Italian sausage and four different cheeses.
Baguettes. I love baguettes. Sometimes I just eat half a baguette for dinner, with a little cheese or cold cuts or something if I’m feeling sophisticated. (I’m kicking this one out of my repertoire though, and banishing it to the ‘occasional treats’ list.)
Sunday night I cooked a real meal because I wanted protein. I made a filet mignon, fried onions, asparagus broiled with balsamic vinegar and parmesan, broccoli, and a hunk of a baguette. This meal was a rare treat, and probably not especially healthy, but I’m adding it to my ten-meal repertoire effective immediately. (It feels a little weird making a meal like that when you live alone, but I can’t think of any good reason not to.)
Hmmm….even with the filet mignon, I still only have four dinners in my repertoire: Raisin Bran, turkey soup, pizza and filet mignon.
Do you have a healthy, easy, yummy meal I can add to my ten-day repertoire?
Posted by zoom! on February 25, 2008, at 5:39 pm |
I know, I know, you were expecting to see a little more knitting on a blog named knitnut.net, weren’t you? I DO knit, I just run out of things to say about knitting, so I only blog about it once in awhile.
The flip side of this is that someone recently suggested I rename the blog, since the name knitnut.net doesn’t really convey what it’s actually about, and it might dissuade non-knitters from visiting.
I probably wouldn’t have named it knitnut if I’d known when I started what I know now, but I do like the name and the sheep and knitting and blogging and it’s okay if I only blog about knitting once in awhile when something spectactular happens like I Actually Finish Knitting Something.
[insert drum roll here]
I finished knitting the Three-Year Sweater!!* And yes, I am a slow knitter, and I also tend to “lay projects aside” (as in “stuff them in a bin in the basement”) when I get bored or confused, or when seasons change or when I see something else I’d rather be knitting.
I wore it yesterday to Julia’s birthday party (which was an excellent party, by the way, with lots of interesting conversation, and I had the pleasure of meeting two more of my virtual friends – Carmen, who knits and who comments regularly on my blog, and Robert who reads regularly but rarely comments and who consistently beats me at Scrabble on Facebook.)
Carmen and Julia were anxious to get my outer layers stripped off as soon as I arrived so they could see my freshly completed sweater. They said it was beautiful and admired the perfect Darrell Thomas buttons and there was even a subsequent discussion about the nature of art and whether knitting qualifies as art. (I think only the designer can claim it as art, unless the knitter made extensive modifications to the pattern, which I never do because I’m not that good.)
I don’t know if anybody else does this, but I always have this urge to point out my knitting mistakes whenever someone admires something I knit. I’m not a hundred percent thrilled with how I sewed this sweater together, and I think it’s affecting how it hangs. See? There I go again.
Here’s the sweater on Genevieve, who is my most model-y mannequin. I also posted it on Ravelry. (I think I was the last knitter on the internet to find out about ravelry, but just in case there’s anybody left who still hasn’t heard about it, go sign up!)
I immediately started knitting another sweater, since I already have the wool and the pattern and the momentum. It’s the Mission Falls Erika Cardigan. I should be done in about 2011, and I’ll make a point of blogging it then.
Unfortunately I sustained a foot injury while knitting and watching the Oscars last night, so today I’m sidelined from running even though Ottawa is experiencing perfect running weather today.
*The Three-Year Sweater is also known as Sirdar #8336. If you ever knit it, be forewarned that there’s an error in the pattern with respect to the math behind the buttonhole spacing. It’s easy enough to recalculate, but it’s better to know recalculations are required before you knit it the wrong way.
Posted by zoom! on February 24, 2008, at 10:41 am |
“Anybody who suggests that our job is not to combat every crime and combat every criminal involved in every crime, then they are idiots,” said Chief Vern White, “We pursue these folks in every possible way using every tool we have.”
I would suggest that the police enforce the laws somewhat selectively. They have priorities. They make decisions about where to focus their limited resources. They make decisions about what to ignore. White collar crime, for example, is notoriously under-enforced.
The Chief is using this false premise – about combating every crime and every criminal with every tool available to him – to justify his decision to send the names of all suspected drug dealers to the provincial welfare authorities for welfare fraud investigation.
Welfare fraud has traditionally been left to welfare agencies, not the police. Similarly, income tax fraud has traditionally been left to the Canadian Revenue Agency, not the police. This sudden change in practice cannot be explained by the Chief’s assertion that the police are just using every tool available to pursue every criminal and every crime, because clearly they are using specific tools to pursue a certain class of criminal, while turning a blind eye to others.
Here’s what’s wrong with this new approach, from my perspective:
1. Stereotypes and stigma: This approach reinforces damaging stereotypes about welfare, crime and cheating. There’s already too much stigma around welfare without the Chief of Police contributing to it. Most people on welfare are doing the best they can with extremely limited resources, and they’re not selling drugs.
2. It is targetted harassment of welfare recipients, especially since none of these alleged drug dealers have been convicted. The police are threatening people’s primary source of income and security based on unproven allegations. This particular brand of police intimidation is being selectively applied to the second-most desperately poor people in our society – welfare recipients. (I’m inclined to agree with Mark Ertel, president of the Defence Counsel Association of Ottawa, who suggests police will use this threat as leverage in recruiting police informants.)
3. Slippery Slope: The Chief’s logic is that undeclared income is welfare fraud and welfare fraud is a crime, therefore the police will alert the welfare authorities when they suspect recipients might have undeclared income. The underlying logic has nothing whatsoever to do with drugs, although so far it is only being applied to alleged drug dealers.
But where will it stop? Some people on welfare – including many who have nothing to do with drugs – do cobble together a little extra income if they can. Maybe they walk a neighbour’s dog for $20 a week. Maybe they babysit a few hours here and there. Maybe they collect bottles out of recycling bins and return them to stores for the deposit. Maybe their mom takes them grocery shopping once in awhile. Maybe they panhandle. Maybe they turn a few tricks towards the end of the month. All of these people are breaking the law by not declaring that income. All of them are potential targets of the Chief’s newfound interest in cracking down on welfare cheats.
Perhaps we should be looking instead at whether our disturbingly low social assistance payments are forcing some people to resort to criminal behaviour. (In 2005, the total legitmate annual income for a single person without a disability on social assistance in Ontario was $7,007; for a single person with a disability, $12,057. For a single parent with one child, it was $14,451; for a two-parent family with two children, it was $19,302. Source: National Council of Welfare.)
4. Wrong Targets: Most of the small-time drug dealers are selling to other addicts in order to feed their own addiction. If they’re on welfare, they’re probably just as poor as if they were non-addicts on welfare. The bigger drug dealers – the ones who are making money from it – are not collecting welfare. Dealers do not go on welfare if they don’t need to, because it’s way too much of an invasion of their privacy. Someone who is making a good living selling drugs (typically a non-addict), will not be voluntarily and unnecessarily opening up their home, bank records and life to scrutiny by welfare authorities.
Bottom line? The Chief needs to rethink this one. This kind of tactic will ultimately be ineffective because it targets the wrong people. It targets addicts with very limited options, rather than the mid and upper level dealers who are exploiting addicts for profit. Making addicts’ lives even more precarious is not going to make them any less addicted. Drying up their only legitimate source of income is going to force them to find more illegitimate sources of income. If you want to target addicts, build a treatment centre.
Posted by zoom! on February 23, 2008, at 9:35 pm |
Okay, so I mentioned in passing that Duncan was a bad cat, and it seems to have piqued the interest of a number of readers. Judging by the comments and emails, “Duncan was bad last night” is the most intriguing thing I’ve said in a long time.
So. What did Duncan do?
Well. As you know, Duncan is usually a very lovey cat at bedtime. But sometimes he’s a little, well, overly lovey. And he’s no lightweight, so when he gets it into his head to be overly lovey, he is not easily dissuaded.
So last night and the night before, Duncan gets into bed with some serious lovin’ on his mind.
Now, something I haven’t told you before: Duncan always prepares to lie down. He has to line himself up just so and then drop his legs out from underneath him and fall over to one side. I think it’s because he’s so big. So he lines himself up just so, leans towards my head and drops his legs out of the way and thump! lands on my shoulder with his cheek aligned with my cheek. It’s an art. But there are no accidents. The weight of him pins me in place. Then he unsheaths his claws and starts kneading my chest with them.
“That hurts,” I say, unhooking his claws from my skin and holding them back.
“PUUUURRRRR,” growls Duncan insistently as he frees his claws, reinserts them under my skin and leans in to lick my eyes with his IAMS turkey breath.
“Duncan, that’s just not nice,” I say, pushing him away slightly.
“PURRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!” growls Duncan menacingly as he reinserts himself, licks my lower lip and shifts more of his weight onto me.
“Ugh!” I say, and try to roll away from him, but I’m limited by the fact he’s got my shoulder pinned. In the dark it almost looks like he’s leering at me, but that’s probably just my imagination.
We then spend the next few minutes negotiating our boundaries, after which we fall asleep for about six hours.
At 4:30 a.m. Duncan makes a unilateral decision and a grand proclamation: It Is Time To Feed The Cat.
He announces this decision by purring loudly and meowing incessantly and poking his claws into my skin repeatedly.
I might not have been the best mother in the world, but I did do a couple of things right. And one of them was I never caved in to whining or temper tantrums, because it doesn’t make sense to reward the behaviour you don’t like. So whenever my son whined, I would just cheerfully say “Oh, I don’t like that noise. Would you mind finishing whining in your room, and then come back out when you’re done?” And being the sweet, easy-going and accommodating child he was, he would toddle off to his room, say “Whi-i-i-i-ine” a few times in his best whiny voice, then come back out and announce, “All done whining, Mom.” It worked like a charm. His whiny phase only lasted a few weeks and then he never whined again. EVER.
So when Duncan started whining for food at 4:30 in the morning, I refused to feed him. My plan was to wait for the whining to stop and THEN get up and feed him. Only the whining didn’t stop. It went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I timed it: he meowed 24 times a minute for two and a half hours. And because it wasn’t working, he added a few other charming little tricks to the mix, like plucking my ear with a single claw, licking my eye sockets, stepping on my nipples, and biting my head.
And then finally, FINALLY, at 7:00, I pushed him off the bed, and he went away for a few minutes, which gave me that window of opportunity to get up and go feed him while he was NOT whining. Of course the minute he saw I was up, he started whining again with renewed vigor. I’m pretty sure he attributed the fact that I fed him to his successful whining. I might have won the battle of wills, but in the end it was all for nothing.
Posted by zoom! on February 22, 2008, at 9:12 pm |
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but you may have noticed I’m having a little trouble focusing on the blog lately.
Here’s a list of what’s new.
1. I finished knitting a sweater. It only took me three years.
2. I started knitting a new sweater.
3. Duncan was very bad last night.
4. I’ve started thinking about my summer vacation.
5. Two women almost came to blows directly outside my office window yesterday. I took pictures.
6. I found a delicious healthy lunch take-out place and now I will buy my lunch there every day for a year because I am a creature of habit. Today I had rosemary-potato pizza.
Okay, enough of that. I’m going to blog about my summer vacation.
I am seriously considering not doing Bluesfest this year. I know what you’re thinking – you’re wondering who will be the unofficial Bluesfest Porta-Potty blogger if I don’t go.
I hate to leave you in the lurch, but I’m not getting any younger, and Bluesfest just about killed me last year. Eleven consecutive days of working during the days, Bluesfest crowds at night and porta-potty blogging at dawn – it was just too much.
So I’m thinking of maybe going to school this summer instead of going to Bluesfest. Haliburton School of the Arts offers a virutal smorgasborg of tempting summer courses; all kinds of them look good to me. Visual arts, music, creative writing, crafts. Each course is a week long, 47 hours, $252. I’d love to go for the whole summer. Realistically, though, I’ll probably stay for two weeks and do two courses. Maybe a week of guitar and a week of watercolour or mixed media or something like that.
I just need to register, rent a room or a campsite or a cottage, find someone to look after Duncan, and figure out how to get to Haliburton. It’s north of Peterborough and according to Google Maps it takes three hours and forty-seven minutes to drive there. But according to Voyageur Bus Lines, it takes the bus 10 hours to get there and 22 hours to get back.
What’s everybody else thinking about doing this summer?
Posted by zoom! on February 21, 2008, at 9:37 pm |
My earliest crow memory: Age six, waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of chaos, and finding my mother in her babydoll pyjamas, chasing a crow around the kitchen with a broom.
My second earliest crow memory: Age nine, watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with my mother and sister. It scared the crap out of me.
My son’s earliest crow memory is probably visiting a greenhouse near Arnprior when he was about seven – a crow flew over to him, landed at his feet, fixed a beady black eye on him and started speaking to him in English.
This past January, I saw a huge murder of crows from Merivale Road. They were flying maybe 30 abreast, and they stretched from one horizon to the other. There were thousands of them.
I’ve mentioned crows on my blog a few times, so now I get a lot of people coming here in search of information about the massive crow congregations in Ottawa. In fact, according to Google Analytics, “crows, ottawa” is the sixth most common google search that brings people here. So, being the responsive blogger that I am, I’ve been trying to figure out what is going on with the crows. Yesterday I even went on a field trip!
According to Elizabeth LeGeyt, the Ottawa Citizen’s bird columnist,
“[crows] are gregarious at this time coming together, often in large numbers, to nightly roosts. The Ottawa birds use the trees around the General Hospital campus and have done for several years now. The crows leave the roost in the morning, fanning out around the area in search of food. In the late afternoon, they return along established flight lines, often stopping at a few pre-roosting places. At dusk, they return to the primary roost and settle down for the night.”
I happen to think crows’ roosts are fascinating. Nobody seems to know exactly why they gather together at night. Protection? Sex? Socializing? Just to freak people out?
The largest crows’ roost is in Fort Cobb, Oklahoma: it is estimated to hold over two million crows!
Not everybody likes crows’ roosts. In 2005, the City of Chatham, Ontario, paid $60,000 to get rid of their crows. Crow extermination has a long and icky history. There’s even a Crow Hunters Superstore. With recipes. They display their hate mail proudly on their website.
Anyway, yesterday after work a friend swung by and picked me up to go check out the roost near the General Hospital. We couldn’t find it, but on our way back we just happened to stumble across the pre-roost at Billings Bridge. Apparently big gangs of crows spend the late afternoons in the pre-roosts at Billings Bridge, the Experimental Farm, and Vincent Massey Park, and then head over to the General Hospital roost for the night. I think the reason we didn’t find the main roost was because we were an hour too early.
Either that or I’m just not very observant. I wanted to watch the lunar eclipse last night too, but I couldn’t find the moon.
Posted by zoom! on February 18, 2008, at 2:40 pm |
If you’re anything like me, you’ve already seen this video 22 times, but you just can’t get enough of it. I’m totally enchanted by it. It’s my all-time favourite YouTube video.
If you go to YouTube and search on “Charlie Bit Me” you’ll find dozens of remakes, mostly of adults re-enacting this video. I bet they just about peed themselves laughing while they were making them.
I’m sure half the appeal of this video is the accent.
When I was a kid growing up in Kinburn, Kinburn wasn’t very multicultural. (That was a profound understatement: If you were from Galetta, you’d be treated like a foreigner, and Galetta was only about seven miles away.)
Anyway, one summer someone had some British children visiting. They were little, maybe three and four years old. They brought them to our baseball games (I played shortstop for the Kinburn Kool Katz. No, seriously, I did.) Every kid in Kinburn was completely charmed by these little British kids with their adorable little British accents. We’d gather round them and make them say our names, and then we’d fall down in paroxysms of laughter at the sound of our names in British. We’d fight over whose name they’d say next. We adored those children – they were such a novelty item – and we missed them terribly when they went back home.
We probably would have liked people from Galetta if only they’d had charming accents.
They’re my Facebook Live Gift pets. It all started 23 days ago when I received a Facebook notification saying my brother had sent me a Live Gift. Did I want to see it? Click here! I clicked, and Facebook conned me into installing the application and then showed me a smiling flower. 
I named him after my son. First AND last name. I don’t know why I did that. I fed him all the way up to 100% fullness. Then I started mingling him with my other pets until he had over 700 social points. It was mind-numbingly boring, but I got some strange satisfaction from knowing I was taking good care of him. 
Years ago I saw this doctor or nutritionist on TV who said “The average family has a repertoire of ten dinners. That’s it. Ten dinners that they eat almost all the time. If I could replace your ten dinners with ten healthier dinners, I could add years to the lives of everybody in your family.”
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