Happy New Year!

Ahhh, Labour Day. This is far and away Grammar’s favourite day of the entire year. All summer long, all these random people mill about the streets and shops at any hour of the day. Children play happily outside until all hours of the night. Bah, humbug! Send the big ones back to their offices and the little ones back to their institutions of learning. Let the time of quiet and order and schedules begin again. As the air outside becomes blessedly nippy, Grammar can bundle up and walk the quiet streets, devoid of summertime hedonists running amok. Ahhhhh.

Happy Birthday, VCCGirl!

A wink of an eye ago she looked like this. Now she's all grown up, and she's no longer cute...she's beautiful.

PS: Yes, I know her birthday was actually a few days ago, but Grammar only remembers the blog at random intervals. Grammar only remembers anything at random intervals.

Things I Miss

I miss being able to stay up late. It’s been a busy week of work, but so nice to have the Olys to relax with in the evening. I wish I still had my old night-owl abilities and could stay up to watch more of the live coverage but alas, Grammar needs her bed by 11:00 these days.

I miss my youthful multitasking skills. This busy work week has involved a fair amount of co-ordination between a number of transcribers and the office manager. There is a flurry of messaging and emails and phone calls first thing each morning as we sort out the assignment o’ day.

So yesterday I was attempting to start a work download, messaging with two people about how this particular task would be split between us, and phoning the office manager about a download problem I was encountering. In the midst of this, one of my stable of tradeserfs rang the doorbell. SRH was unhelpfully in the shower and although I bellowed, declined to leap out of it and answer the door in a towel. Well, I thought my head was going to explode.

I miss my Laddie. I keep forgetting that he actually doesn’t live with us anymore. We ordered Chinese food for dinner tonight (Olys! Beijing!) and I automatically warned SRH and VCCGirl, as they loaded their plates, to save enough for the Lad. He’d always go to the fridge when he got home late from work, you see. It really jolted me that I didn’t need to save dinner for my boy, tonight or any other night. Funny how it hit me after he’s already been gone over a month. You think you’re ready and more than ready, some days, for them to head out on their own. But it still feels so very strange.

I also miss weather under 25 degrees Celsius -- but I’ll get that back soon! (I can actually tell exactly when the temperature hits 25. That precise point is the end of my comfort zone.) Sorry, sun-worshippers, but I’ve got autumn in my sights, and it’s a-coming!

Windows and siding and gardens, oh my!

Good morning, Blog World. Are we all enjoying the Olympics? I am, for the most part. Can’t abide water polo and fail to understand why every channel would want to show us that rather than, say, equestrian events, which I’ve seen nothing of in (our) daylight hours. Wouldn’t you think more of us would want to see that than water polo? We’ve had a lot of beach volleyball, which I enjoy except for being distracted by my own annoyance at the outfits the women players feel obliged to wear. The men wear board shorts and T-shirts, but the women, oh, they must wear itsy bitsy bikinis. It irks me.

So I don’t really have anything witty or clever to say today but feel like keeping in touch. We’ve been in our new home for a month now and continue to settle in. There are still more unpacked boxes tucked away here and there than there should be, but we’re whittling away at them. We’re as busy with tradespeople here as we were in the last few weeks at our old house. But these improvements we get to stay and enjoy!

We’re focusing on the outside, initially, given the time of year and also given that it’s difficult to do too much inside until we finally finish unpacking! After chopping down the incredible house-eating pine tree, we have had people clean out our gutters, which were of course overflowing with pine detritus. We have had a landscaper draw up plans to rejuvenate and spiff up our garden. While the wild, untended look does provide for a sort of camping in the woods effect, it needs some taming. So he has planned a lovely garden that will require no more than two or three visits from him a year to keep in shape. At this place and time, we’re all about no effort on our part!

Two windows on the east side of our house are being replaced, and after that’s done, a fellow is coming to replace all the cedar siding on that side, which is rotting disproportionately to the rest of the house (which is not at all rotten). We are told this is common on the east side because most weather hereabouts comes from that side. Winds driving rain and all that. I don’t know, but it’s important to SRH that this be done.

So once we have new windows and siding and a lovely new garden this fall, we will turn our attention to the inside -- where I hope there will be no more boxes left to impede our improvement efforts there! Our friend KCL, wearing her decorator hat, has many ideas for us and we are excited about implementing them.

So that’s what’s up Chez Grammar: the buzzing of tradespeople. Oh, Grammar does love having serfs about.

EDIT TO POST: It was pointed out to me by eagle-eyed fan Missy Moo that in the above pic, it appears my new garden is going to spill way out into the street. It won't, of course. Obviously a problem with the software (or user thereof). The perspective is very inaccurate.

Boomer culture?

There was a little article in the paper this morning headlined “Boomers to remain ‘cultural titans’ as they continue to age, author says”. Caught my eye, of course, being both a Boomer and interested in being considered a titan of pretty much anything.

Turns out the author of the headline is a historian who will be speaking at the World Future Society’s annual conference in Washington on Monday. I have no information whatsoever on the WFS’ history of successful prognostication because although they have been around for over 40 years and have a website with some bits and pieces of information, nowhere does it provide statistics on how well they tend to forecast. So I suppose I’ll have to just hope for the best on this titan thing.

The main focus of the brief newspaper article was a specific aspect of culture: music. The writer opens by saying “Get ready for more radio stations blasting golden oldies…”, but a few paragraphs later expounds on “the disappearance of a generation gap in cultural terms [with] the iPod overlap between parents and teens, usually finding 20 to 30 per cent of songs in common.”

Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either the Boomers want only to listen to songs from the 60s and 70s and will commandeer the radio waves to ensure they’re played in plenitude, or we’re open to music outside of those two tired decades. Or perhaps her message was that what she calls the “millennial generation” (those who began graduating high school in the year 2000) include our golden oldies on their iPods.

I think it’s probably some of each, myself. I do agree that whatever gaps exist between my generation and that of my children, music is not one of the bigger ones. Rap and hip hop are not generally big with the Boomers (although Ellen Degeneres, who is one of us, has gone a long way in broadening the comfort zone of the older women who watch her TV program, as she is a fan of hip hop and opens every show dancing to it.) But there is much more to modern pop music than rap. My kids and I do have a percentage of overlap on our iPods, and it goes both ways. When I was 20, I listened to very little but the Top 40 radio stations of the day. It's a wonderful thing that my progeny are much more open-minded. They enjoy and have on their iPods music from a wide gamut of genres and times.

So I don’t know about this idea of a proliferation of oldies radio stations. I think most of us Boomers are actually pretty done with listening to the same armful of songs from 30 or 40 years ago. Some of the music from our youth has proved enduring and classic, and that’s the stuff that’s on our kids’ iPods. But a lot of it is just horribly cheesy and inane and needs to be left in the archives. If we Boomers are to continue to be titans of anything as we clump into the senior demographic, I think music is a bad example. Frankly, and sadly, I don’t believe we’re going to be titans of anything at all other than the paycheques of Millenials who are trying to support our health care demands.

Job One

Bye-bye, tree!

Today at Chez Grammar we are in the throes of the first big priority in shaping our new home to our own liking. There is an absolutely enormous pine tree in our back yard and three strapping and well-insured young men are currently involved in the long, careful process of taking it down.

Now, Grammar likes to hug trees and have her oxygen refreshed and all that with the best of them, but this tree is completely out of scale. Ours is a very small back yard and the tree is undermining the patio with its roots, eating the back deck with its huge scraggly branches, and generally looming ominously over our roof. High, high over our roof, at least again as high as our house. It is a tree that belongs in a forest, not an urban back yard. We cannot imagine how the previous owners allowed it to get this way. We do know that in notifying our immediate neighbours of our removal plans, they all expressed gratitude that appeared heartfelt, although I’m sure they are not enjoying the chain-saw-wood-chipper racket any more than we are. That kind of ceaseless noise just wears you down, doesn’t it? And it’s going to be going on for a long time yet. Did I say how big this tree is…?

And the Winner Is...

Further to my post of yesterday, Grammar received word from Jimdandy this forenoon that all is well in his telephonic world. It seems the fine gentleman at Telus he spoke to yesterday apparently does have the clout his title would suggest. A woman called Uncle first thing this morning to assure him that three years' worth of overpayments would be immediately credited to his account, meaning he will not have a phone bill for some months. She was very apologetic that they could not offer more than three years, but that was as far back as she was able to check the records. Uncle thought that was jimdandy and graciously accepted. The woman gave him her name and direct telephone number and told him that any future problems he had with Telus, of which she fervently hoped there were not any, he should call her and she would personally fix them.

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we all had our own personal customer service rep down at the utility companies? But no, the rest of us who are not 95, stubborn as mules and persistent as bulldogs will still have to Push 1 for service in English...