The Sad Broken Leg Story

Well, Blog World, my son has broken his leg. He managed to make it through 21-and-a-half years of life without breaking anything, which is just astounding in the rough-and-tumble world of boys, but today his luck ran out.

There is no good time to break a leg, of course, but as far as he's concerned, this is about the most inappropriate time possible. He had procured a job with a friend of his who is a mason, and who was prepared to give him work all summer long for as many hours as Jamie wanted and could fit in around his recording work. And who was paying him extremely well for such work, because tradesmen, craftsmen like masons, make extremely good money for what they do. For the past couple of weeks my son has been burning the candle at both ends, hefting rock from 8 to 4 and then recording well into the night, and been happy as a clam doing so. He was really enjoying working his young muscles during the day and doing his music at night, and who needs sleep when you're 21 years old?

But now that's ground to a halt. Not sure yet how long the cast will be on. I don't even know if he knows, because he's angry and frustrated and completely unapproachable at the moment. I did manage to determine that it's his fibula he broke. The obliging tech printed off a copy of his x-ray for him and even we laypeople can clearly see a clean, diagonal break right across the bone, high up, near the back of his knee.

He broke it working for the mason this morning. Again, I don't know too many details yet, but it seems he was pushing a stone-laden wheelbarrow down a grass slope and some sort of disaster occurred. He was in considerable pain, but figured he'd pulled a muscle or something, so he drove himself home (well, it's his left leg and the car has an automatic transmission!) and took some convincing to go to the doctor. He just wanted one of my T3s, a bit of a lie-down, and figured he'd be back at work tomorrow.

I must say he received excellent and prompt health care all the way along the line. The clinic doctor correctly predicted the break, the wait at the x-ray clinic was brief, and the cast (currently a removable fiberglass one) was applied very quickly. All we ever hear are the complaints of people waiting two or three days to have broken legs attended to. Jamie didn't even wait an hour.

Anyway, one of those character-building life lessons, I suppose. We moms wish the character could be built without such setbacks, though.

Retail therapy

I've been working hard lately and this afternoon at about 1:17 p.m. I hit a wall. I couldn't type another word. I needed to get out. I needed to get in my car and just drive away somewhere.

Now, you might imagine the sort of nice places I could drive, places like Ambleside or up Grouse Mountain or Lonsdale Quay or Commercial Drive. Endless possibilities in this beautiful city. I went to London Drugs. Well, you know, I needed a notebook.

Indeed I bought a notebook, which cost $1.29. However, the bill I paid before exiting London Drugs was, um, a little more than that. I love London Drugs. And you can be sure I never, ever buy anything I don't want.

So that was all it took. I am now all set to get back to work. Well, I have to, don't I? I spent $141.73 at freakin' London Drugs!

Pushy salesmen

So have you had any of these gas company salespeople come to your door yet? We've had two so far, both outstandingly aggressive. The first one came about 7:30 in the evening a few days ago. I was sitting on the couch in my living room, tired, peacefully reading, when I saw a young man with a clipboard approaching my front door. I shook my head at him, indicating I would not be answering the door. Not interested, thank you. Go away.

Well, he didn't go away. He stood there in my peripheral vision for at least five minutes, waving his clipboard, waving a brochure, waving his arms, doing everything to convince me that it was Extremely Urgent that I hear what he had to say. Being of the strong conviction that I have the right to not open my door to people just because they think I should, I continued ignoring him.

So he came right up to the door and pounded on it. Two or three minutes went by. He stood there. I was quite prepared to wait him out, but unfortunately Rob was not. He eventually answered the door and dealt with the fellow, far more politely than he deserved, in my opinion.

The second salesperson showed up yesterday afternoon. I was upstairs ironing and Janet came in and told me that "Terasen" was at the door wanting to see a copy of our last gas bill. I told her it was not Terasen and to send him packing. I heard her attempt to do this by advising him that her parents weren't home, and I heard him earnestly try to convince her that she was required to show him a gas bill. She pled (genuine) ignorance of the location of our gas bills. I was just about to storm down and give him many pieces of my mind when I heard Janet just quietly close the door on him. I assume he went away at some point after that. He was not there when I opened the door to get the paper this morning.

I understand that there are many companies out there frantic to be first to snatch all us newly-available gas customers away from Terasen. But surely I am not the only person for whom this sort of pushy hard-sell tactic only serves to completely turn me against the company which authorized such measures.

I am losing my mind

Hi, blog world! Haven't blogged in awhile because I've been extremely busy with that stupid making-a-living stuff. And one of my many fans actually complained about my lack of bloggage! I had no idea anyone could possibly actually care if I wrote any of my nonsense here or not! What a tremendous number of exclamation marks in this paragraph!!!!!

So anyway, busy busy with work. I'm training a new transcriber, who is fortunately brilliant and therefore easy to train (and who reads this blog -- Hi, Katie!), but it is time-consuming on top of doing my own work. Plus we've been going out to look at houses (no luck yet) and getting some stuff done around this house, and there have been a few days lately where I've felt as if I'm losing my mind.

Well. There are many who would say that I've always been a little peculiar (Hi, family! Hi, Jaynut!) but thanks to my lifelong journal-keeping, I can actually pinpoint the day when I began losing my mind. It was October 14, 1995.

My daughter had had a friend sleep over the previous night. The two seven-year-olds had been rambunctious and I was ready for Stephanie to go home. So as my husband was out in the one car we owned at the time, I called her mother to come fetch her (because that's what we Boomer parents did, right? No walking allowed!) I felt a little badly about not being able to run Stephanie home myself, so I began our conversation apologizing for this and requesting a pick-up before 11, as I had to go out then. I added, "if Rob is back with the car by then", which was silly because where I wanted to go was just to a neighbour's and I didn't even need the car. In fact, I knew perfectly well Rob would not be back by 11, so already I was starting to make no sense.

Then it struck me that Brenda might think it odd that if I was heading out at 11, I couldn't just drop Stephanie off on my way, and out of my mouth came the following bizarre words: “I’d bring her home myself then but I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet. I’m waiting for word.”

Okay.

I’m waiting for word?? WORD???? Word from who? Is the Lord going to speak, giving me direction (perhaps to where my brain is lying)? I don’t know where I’m GOING?

Somehow Stephanie was permitted to continue to be friends with my daughter. They are good friends to this day. I always feel as if her mother is looking at me funny, though.

Graduation Day - 1st Part

It is that time of year when all the graduating students are preparing for their big events. I have seen both a son and a daughter through this process and it is different in every possible way.

My son wore a suit he already owned to the prom. He got a $10 haircut a few days before. The day of the dance, he began getting ready approximately 20 minutes before we needed to head out the door. Shower, brush the teeth, comb the hair, throw on the suit, we're outta here.

With a daughter, the process begins months ahead of time. The search for the perfect dress begins soon after Christmas. Everyone with older sisters/daughters is interviewed extensively as to where they had success shopping. Many stores are visited and dresses flouffy, dresses slinky, dresses bizarre, are all tried on. There are tears. There are photos taken with cellphones and emailed to friends. Text messaging is frenzied.

And then there is the dress she puts on, and looks at herself in the mirror, and it is …

Oh. Oh.

Although this, of course, is what you see:

In the mirror, the mother watches her little girl's face and knows it is the very first time she sees herself as a truly beautiful, grown-up woman. Hopefully you were wise and have not even let her put it on her body if it is out of your price range, because if you did let her and it is The Oh Dress, you will be buying it no matter what. You will insist upon it, never mind the second mortgage, because you saw that face.

But this is only the beginning. To go with the dress, there must be shoes, a purse, and bling. (Fortunately it is perfectly acceptable for the bling to be fake, as long as it is shiny and makes you feel like a princess.) All this must be located in different stores on different days.

Dresses and purses and shoes and bling, and ka-ching and ka-ching and ka-ching.

And then there is the hair, the makeup, the nails. All must be professionally done, if at all possible, and appointments must be made months ahead of time. For the hair, it is usually also necessary to have a pre-appointment so that the stylist can do a mock-up of your style of choice so that you don't look like this:

When you wanted to look like this:

And ka-ching and ka-ching and ka-ching. My wedding was much less complicated than this. Getting ready for the Academy Awards is much less complicated than this.

On prom day, the girls are up at the crack of dawn. They have these precision-timed multiple beautifying appointments to get to, then must be home in time to carefully put The Dress on without damaging nails, hair or makeup. What has taken the boys 20 minutes to accomplish (well, plus 10 minutes for the haircut a few days earlier), has taken the girls about four months.

Not to mention that ka-ching factor. At the end of my daughter's prom, the kids were eager to move on to their adult-free after-grad activities and started gravitating to the washrooms to change into more casual clothes. The parents waited to receive the gowns and take them home. One mother looked over at me and my armful of seafoam green tulle, and asked drily, "So how much do you suppose that amortized out to per hour?"

Luckily there is an organization called the Cinderella Project, which collects gently-used grad dresses and all the peripherals you may also wish to donate, and makes them available to girls who would not otherwise be able to afford them. My daughter and her friends were all very happy to pass their gowns on and know that they would bring joy to someone else.

But not before she tried it on just one more time in front of the mirror.

Oh.

Random things that have made me snort stuff out my nose

I have a hair-trigger sense of humour. I will laugh, a lot, at almost anything (fortunately, including myself). I have an raucous, uninhibited guffaw that sends my husband cringing from the room.

Humour is, of course, a subjective thing. Something I find funny, you may well not. Indeed, something I found so funny I just about puked with laughter one day, by the very next day I could be wondering what I was going on about.

Here are some not-that-funny things that have, in particular contexts, sent me into hysterics:

Aztecs (the car)
Bobble-head dolls
The word "Shoe". Also the word "Myanmar".
Once when typing really fast, I garbled the word "himself" so badly that Spellcheck asked anxiously: Did you mean "housefly"? Had I agreed to this correction, the sentence I was typing would have read, "He went to the store by housefly."

The great humourist Dave Barry once wrote a column about his unparalleled delight when he discovered the existence of a UNESCO heritage site in Alberta called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. He claims that when he telephoned the place and the call was answered, "Head-Smashed-In, how can I help you?" he went into absolute paroxysms of joy. I totally understand this. This is one of the funniest things I have ever heard.

Getting the uncontrollable giggles is common to young girls. It's not still supposed to be a problem in menopausal women. I went to a choral concert a couple of years ago with a friend. The choir was a professional one, dressed formally in tuxes or long black skirts (whichever they preferred, one assumes). They were all thoroughly white of skin. The programme was primarily classical, but ended with a few rousing spirituals. I do not remember the name of the first one they treated us to, but I certainly do recall that it involved a lot of repetition of the word "heaven", especially in the many refrains. Except that they pronounced it the way I suppose it was written, which was "heab'n".

I cannot begin to tell you how odd and inappropriate this sounds coming from a stiff, Caucasian, Canadian classical choir. I totally lost it. I scribbled on my program "These people have NO BUSINESS saying heab'n!" and passed it to my female companion, who immediately also become hysterical. The song seemed to go on forever. Heab'n, heab'n, heab'n. The two of us were shaking and trembling and weeping. The people behind us must have thought we were spiritually moved to transports by this music. I was certainly spiritually moved to pray very, very hard that none of the subsequent spirituals would contain the word heab'n.

The most painful thing I have ever snorted out my nose when laughing was French onion chip dip. That really burned.

In Which No One is Grown Up or Stupid

By now you will have noticed that my blog is not like other blogs. I don't talk about my day or what's going on in my life. I don't do this because this is what it would look like if I did:

1. Got up. 2. Read the paper. 3. Had a shower. 4. Worked. 5. Went to Safeway/dry cleaner/bank. 6. Worked. 7. Made dinner. 8. Watched TV. 9. Went to bed.

So now you know exactly what goes on in my life, and instead I can happily blog my little thoughts and memories.

However, I have just read over my entire blog oeuvre (no, this does not mean egg. Or ovary. dictionary.com, people), and was a bit startled to discover that three themes seem to keep cropping up. One is the subject of grownupness (don't try that one on dictionary.com), whether it be my children's or my own. The second is that children, particularly my own, are stupid. And the third is Myanmar, but that was on purpose.

My younger child turning 18 and me turning 50 occurred within a couple of weeks of each other not so many months ago and I suppose that's why the subject of grownupitude is much on my mind these days. As to the subject of children being stupid and perhaps more trouble than they're worth, of course I don't really mean that. Really. Although it has now been scientifically proven with medical brain scans of some sort that teenagers' brains actually do work differently -- that is, more stupidly -- than adult brains. But that doesn't mean I should go on and on about it.

So I promise to find some new subjects and shut up about grownupiturity and stupid children. I make no such promise about Myanmar.

And now if you'll excuse me, I must go and Step 4.