My dear old grandfather, Opa, would be 98 years old now if he hadn’t died when he was 86. He lived much of his life as a solitary artist in a house in the hills of the Eastern Townships. He lived alone and I think he was lonely.

Opa married frequently and poorly, and these marriages tended to crumble quickly under the weight of their own wretched improbability. Then he would be alone again.

His loneliness saddened me. I wanted him to have pets so he wouldn’t be lonely: dogs, cats, parrots, chimpanzees. One time he said he wished he had a goat to pull him around in a little cart and eat the grass. I wanted desperately to make that goat come true.* (Years later, when I reminded him of this, he said he had no recollection of ever wanting a goat; he probably just didn’t want to mow the lawn.)

Opa was a kind and humane man, but unfamiliar with the ways of domesticated animals. Living in the country as he did, he lived among animals but he bore no  responsibility for them. Despite my incessant urging, which persisted for decades, he did not get a pet. (My mother gave him a puppy once, but he left it at our house. It was his puppy in name only.)

When Opa was an old man, my mother and her partner went on a cruise, and they asked him to come and look after their three cats for a week. He agreed. They gave him the standard cat-sitter tour before sailing off into the sunset.

A week later they arrived home, tanned and well-fed.

“How did it go?” they asked Opa.

“Fine, no problems,” Opa replied, “The cats were very good, very well-behaved. But they don’t eat very much, do they?”

My mother glanced up sharply. “They eat all the time!” she said.

Opa frowned. “Well maybe they lost their appetites because they missed you,” he said, “I filled up the bowl once and I never had to fill it again. They barely ate anything.”

My mother and her partner made a beeline for the basement  to inspect the cats’ bowl.

“See?” said Opa, somewhat defensively, “The bowl is full.”

“It’s full alright,” replied my mom incredulously, “Full of kitty litter!” 

“Kitty litter?” asked Opa innocently, “What’s that?”

It seems that Opa, with his octogenarian eyes, had seen the big bag with the picture of a cat on it and assumed it was the cat food bag. It wasn’t his fault; he just wasn’t a cat person.

 The cats were pleased to see the return of the cat people.

 I stopped urging Opa to get a pet after that. But I still wonder if a goat might have worked out.

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*It is one of life’s great ironies that there is never a goat when you need one, yet sometimes you’re stuck with an unwanted goat.         

One day a couple of years ago I was in my dentist’s office for my regularly scheduled six-month checkup and cleaning. My dental hygienist was away on maternity leave, so I had a substitute.

About 10 minutes into the cleaning – at the point when your mouth is full of sharp objects and vacuum cleaners and buzzy things and so on – the substitute hygienist asks casually, “So…do you know Pierre ___________?”

It was a name from the distant past. Pierre and I had kind of dated while living in the house on McLeod Street way back when I was a teenager. We never had sex because he was freaked out about me being a virgin. For some reason he thought that meant a whole lot of responsibility on his part. As for me, I guess we’ll never know if I would have gone for it if he had been willing. Maybe yes, maybe no. But we did spend quite a few nights talking until the sun came up – sometimes at home, sometimes in an all-night restaurant at Bank & Holmwood. I forget what that restaurant was called then but now it’s just a Pizza Pizza.

Back to the dentist chair and the sharp objects in my mouth.

“So…do you know Pierre ____________?”

I nodded.

“I thought so,” she said, “I married him.”

I opened my eyes wider and made a questioning type of grunt.

“He’s such an asshole,” she mused thoughtfully.

Our eyes locked.

“You know,” she said, “He was a cold, selfish prick. All he cared about was himself.”

I waited for her to go on. The scraper scraped, the hose sucked, the clock ticked.

“I asked him once,” she continued “If he had ever loved anyone in his whole entire life. And you know what he said?”

I shook my head no.

“He said ‘Yes. I loved Susan _______________’ ”

I stared at her. She stopped scraping and stared back.

“What a jerk,” she said, flipping her instrument over and digging under my gumline with it.

There was a long pause while she dug deeper, pausing occasionally to wipe her sharp object on her latex glove.

“So you can imagine how I felt,” she said at last, “When I got to work this morning and saw your name on my appointment list. I mean, it’s an unusual name. How many Susan ______________’s can there be? I figured it had to be you.”

I felt sweat beading on my forehead. Why couldn’t I have been Susan Smith? Susan Jones? Susan White? Why did he have to TELL her my name?

“Oh don’t worry,” she chuckled, “I’m over him. I’ve been over him for a long time. But it’s nice to finally meet you.”

I started to relax a bit, and smiled weakly to show good will.

 
“All these years I guess I thought you’d be something special,” she went on, “But you don’t seem all that special.”

The clock ticked.

“But you do have nice teeth,” she said, “I’ll give you that.”

UPDATE: I’ve upgraded WordPress, switched themes and fixed the comments problem. As far as I can tell, the only outstanding issue is the Dave X Change Challenge Flash Charts. I’ll fix that later, but right now I’m going to celebrate.  (If you happen to run across anything else that isn’t working properly, or if you have ideas for improvements, kindly let me know. Thanks.)

 Last night I switched to the WordPress theme fHeaavn, and made a few modifications so the sheep would migrate with us. I also attempted to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, but I’m a few versions behind so that’s going to be a little more complicated than simply pushing the upgrade button.

At any rate, I was quite pleased with the theme conversion until this morning when I realized that comments aren’t being displayed in the new theme. You put in your comment and all that gets displayed is your name. The comments ARE being collected, however, because when I switched back to the old theme, those missing comments displayed just fine.

I’ve looked in the style sheet to make sure nothing obviously stupid is going on there, like white text on a white background. As far as I can tell, everything looks okay. I googled the problem and didn’t come across anybody else reporting an identical issue with the fHeaavn theme. So I’m wishfully thinking the WordPress upgrade might magically and mysteriously make my problem go away.

Don’t you wish there was a big green button on the wall labelled “FIX PROBLEM” and no matter what your problem was, it would be resolved by pushing the magic button? It could be installed right beside a big red “TROUBLE” button; every time the Trouble button starts flashing you just push the Fix button. Life should also have an “UNDO” button, like software does. If you do something immediately regrettable, you should get a second chance.

Ah well. I’ve switched back to the old theme. I’ll try to get to the upgrade this afternoon, and then I’ll switch back to the new theme and see what happens. In the meantime, if anybody just happens to know what the problem is and how to fix it, please let me know.

Do you budget?

I’ve never had a budget of the kind where you enter information in a ledger or spreadsheet and then analyze the data and make informed financial decisions.

I was married for a couple of years once to someone who meticulously tracked all that stuff, and I have to say it worked for him: he had loads more money than me.

I’m more of an “intuitive budgeter.” I avoid debt, pay my bills and credit card balances off every month, put a chunk away each month for savings, and freely spend whatever’s left. I don’t actually track any of these transactions, I just intuitively know if I’m spending too much and then I rein it in for awhile. There’s a natural ebb and flow to it, a rhythm that I find comfortable.

I know someone who takes a head-in-the-sand approach to budgeting. She just does not look at her finances: the more monstrous they become, the more doggedly she refuses to even glance in their general direction. She doesn’t open the scary mail. She doesn’t answer the freaky phone. She doesn’t file a tax return. She hopes it might all go away if she ignores it. But deep down, she knows it won’t and anyway she’s not ignoring it, not really. She’s tormented by it. She can hear it breathing in the shadows when she’s awake, and it sucks noisily at the edge of her dreams when she’s sleeping.

I know a few happy-go-lucky people who are serendipitous and carefree about money. They have absolute faith that the universe will provide. If they have money today, it’s today’s money. Tomorrow will take care of itself. La-de-da.

I also know people who don’t budget because they have no money. That makes sense to me.

My style – the cautious intuitive budgeter style – is being sorely tested by this house-buying thing. The house changes everything! (Not only am I never going to be debt-free again, do you realize I’m going to have to start paying for water?? I always thought water was free!) In the past I used to save up for a trip or a digital camera or a daguerreotype or some other fun thing. Now I’m going to save up for a roof. According to the inspector, I’ve got a year or two before the roof will leak. I’ve had leaky roofs before, and I would just phone the landlord (who usually weaseled out of actually DOING anything about it, but still.). Now if the roof leaks, it’s my problem in every way. And a new roof isn’t even fun. I’m too short to see it and admire it. The only good thing about it is that it hopefully prevents bad things from happening.

So anyway, I’ve had all these numbers swimming around my head lately…bi-weekly mortgage payments, utilities, taxes, heating, closing costs, maintenance costs, extra transportation costs, etc. The cautious intuitive budgeter is starting to have bag lady fantasies(which, interestingly, affect nearly half of all women, including those who were born rich and have always been rich). So I’m thinking maybe I’d feel better if I meticulously wrote down all the numbers in a giant ledger or something. And then maybe I could go back to my intuitive style of budgeting once I became more familiar with my house and its insatiable appetite for money routine expenses.

I see there are thousands of tools out there to help me get more financially conscientious. I could spend weeks trying them out. Maybe you can save me some time by answering some of these personal financial questions: What is your personal budgeting style and are you happy with it? (How) do you keep track of your finances? How much time do you spend on it? Does keeping track of how you spend change how you spend? Are there any tools (ie software, paper systems, books, etc. ) you would recommend?

Last night I was at Stuart’s weekly Thursday Night Barbecue Party in Mechanicsville, and I actually got my first blog request. John asked that I post a couple of pictures from the previous Thursday Night Barbecue Party, since it was an amazing night and we set some records last Thursday.

The first record is that 50 people showed up. (Some people claim to have counted 51, and at least one person counted 100 but we suspect he was seeing double so we’re ruling him out as a statistical outlier). Here are Taryl, Preston and John, three of the 50 people:

The second record was that we finally achieved what can only be described as the perfect meat/vegetable balance. Some Thursdays we end up with 20 different kinds of meat (I never even knew there were 20 different kinds of meat) and no salads. For some reason we never seem to end up with 20 salads and no meat. It’s definitely a carnivorous crowd. Here’s some meat:

And here’s some salad:

We had two kinds of corn on the cob: carefully cultivated corn from the Experimental Farm, and 12/$1.99 corn from Loblaws. The Loblaws corn won, hands down. Here’s the award-winning Loblaw’s corn:

And here’s the evening’s musical entertainment: The incomparable Guy Del Villano on the piano with some jazzy blues and bluesy jazz.

I don’t have a picture of it, but at last night’s Barbecue Party, there was an absolutely phenomenal salad, which I believe was Jicama-Spinach Salad with Tequila Dressing. It was fabulous, absolutely perfect. (I have reason to believe John did some pretty extensive taste-testing and fine-tuning of the dressing beforehand, given that Stuart wouldn’t let him use the carving knife later in the evening.) When it was all gone, Caroline and I were ready to go salad-bowl-diving with straws. [John, if it’s not a cherished secret family heirloom recipe, could you please share it with us?]

I just realized my blog looks like a pile of crap in IE 7. I don’t have time to fix it right now, but I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

Update:
After messing around with the templates and the coding and getting nowhere, I did a little research and discovered that the Benevolence theme (I use a modified version of it) is not XHTML strict compliant and will not work with IE7. So…I guess I need a new theme. I might as well upgrade to the latest version of WordPress while I’m at it. I’ll be messing with it this weekend.

I’ve been thinking I need a second alarm clock. I have one, which starts squawking annoyingly at 6:00 am, and continues to squawk incessantly until I smash it with my fist. This is fine for the days that I go running at 6:00 am – I hear the alarm, smash it with my fist, roll out of bed and into my running gear and out the door. However, I only run every second day, and on the other days I don’t have to get up until 6:45. Re-setting the alarm clock every night is a pain, and I have a love-hate relationship with the snooze button, so I’m thinking a second alarm clock is the way to go.

There’s a lot of choice these days in alarm clock technology – far more than there was 15 years ago when I bought mine at Big Bud’s for $4.99. I think people would do well to think through their needs and options when choosing an alarm clock. After all, it plays a significant role in our lives: it’s the first thing we interact with each day, and it sets the waking mood.

Not only that, but our alarm clock needs do not necessarily remain static throughout our lives. I, for example, am a morning person, but I don’t greet each new day nearly as enthusiastically as I did before I started having sleeping problems in January. Now I struggle to fall asleep and often spend the night repeatedly rising above the surface of sleep, and trying to sink back down into it again. Pretty much the only time I seem to sleep soundly is around 6:00 am when the alarm clock goes off, piercing my sweet dream with its demanding squawk. (It’s a good thing momma taught me that life isn’t fair and you might as well get used to it right from the get-go).

So what do I want from an alarm clock? Do I want to be alarmed? Do I want to be aggravated or shocked into the day? No, dammit! I just don’t want to be late for work and I don’t want to start the day off all resentful and surly. I want an alarm clock to be tender and gentle. I want it to snuggle up and stroke my hair and murmur gently and make me feel happy to be alive and awake. I want it to nudge me into the day and coax me out of bed. Is that so much to ask?? (Perhaps I’ve been single too long…)

Knowing myself as well as I apparently do, I would be wise not to choose the Puzzle Alarm Clock, which wakes you up by making noise and firing puzzle pieces all around your bedroom. It does not stop making its annoying noise until you get out of bed, find all the puzzle pieces, and return them to the clock. For a mere $52 US, I could make myself furious every single morning upon awakening.

Equally irritating might be the Blowfly Alarm Clock, which operates on the theory that nobody can sleep when there’s a mosquito buzzing about. The Blowfly, at the appointed time, makes annoying noise and releases a mechanical insect which flies around your room. You must leap out of bed, catch the insect and return it to the clock before the clock and the insect will shut up.

At the other end of the Alarm Clock spectrum is the Progression Wake-Up Clock. About half an hour before your appointed wake-up time, it starts to glow like a sunrise, gradually brightening over the next 30 minutes. As the light increases, the clock warms up and in turn warms the aromatherapy beads, releasing the aroma of coffee into the air. Fifteen minutes before wake-up time, soft nature sounds begin – you have a choice of Thunder Storm, Zen Melody, Mountain Stream, Songbirds, and Ocean Surf. And finally, when it’s time to get up, a soft buzzer sounds. (There is also a reverse setting on this clock, so it can put you to sleep at night by growing dimmer, emitting lavender aromas, playing Nightfall nature sounds, and so on.) This is a kinder, gentler alarm clock, and it’s cheaper than the stupid puzzle clock too, at $50.

It did tempt me, but at the same time I thought I’m Not a Complete Wimp, and besides, I’d probably resent smelling coffee that wasn’t there.

The Zen Alarm Clock simply chimes once and if you don’t turn it off it chimes again a few minutes later. One might expect a little more for $110 US, but that’s probably just me. After all, the value of zen lies in its simplicity, right? When less is more, I suppose it’s worth it to pay a little extra for what isn’t there.

Then there’s the ubiquitous clock-radio, which as you all know wakes you up with the radio instead of fingernails on a chalkboard. Myself, I’m not sure I could listen to the news and all the horrible things we’ve done to one another during the night, at least not until I’ve had my shower. Music, however, might be okay. Maybe the theme song from Rocky would be enough to get me to throw back the covers and leap from my bed, fully refreshed and eager to embrace a new day with renewed vigor and enthusiasm stay awake.

If I were to go the clock-radio route, I’ve heard the RCA RP3765 CD Clock Radio is very good, at $58. It has the added bonus of a CD player that can be set to wake you up to a specific song on your CD. Like Rocky. (I used to have a foster mother who would wake me up by poking her head in my room and singing “Good morning to you! Good morning to you! We’re all in our places with bright shining faces, good morning, good morning, good morning to you!” – as charming as this was, it would not be my first choice.)

I haven’t completely made up my mind which alarm clock to get. Recommendations, of course, are encouraged.

In the meantime, I think I’ll sleep on it some more.

It was cool to be a hippie in the sixties, and even cooler to raise your kids like little hippies. I understand the appeal, truly I do. But this is 2006, and at some point don’t you start to wonder if you’re living in the past with your tie-dye short set and your son with the gorgeous hair down to his waist? And truly it IS gorgeous and I’m envious, but I can’t help but wonder if the child begs for a haircut every single day so he won’t be a freak among his peers. If he doesn’t do so yet (he is, after all, only eight years old and no doubt home-schooled), what about later? Will his tie-dyed parents respect his freedom and individuality enough to let him cut his lovely locks?

And just so you don’t think I’m being mean…I confess to showing up late to the hippie party and staying a decade or two after everybody else had moved on, and I confess to keeping Jamie’s hair longer than that of all his friends, and to not letting him cut it as frequently (and certainly nowhere near as short) as he would have liked. And I even admit that he was occasionally mistaken for a girl, which distressed him, especially considering he attended Connaught School at the time. You know what happened? As soon as his hair was under HIS control, he immediately cut it way too short and every time it started to look halfway decent, he cut it again. He bought one of those shaver things, and gave himself a # 2 buzz regularly. (And then he lost the #2 blade thingy, and switched to the even shorter #1.)

Here’s a picture of Jamie on Monday – living proof that little boys with long tresses don’t grow up to be hippies, they grow up to look like they’re on military leave:

But he’s still a hippie at heart.