Do you know what? This Christmas was the nicest we’ve had in years. I don’t know. This year it really felt like Christmas. We even put our tree up and decorated it. Yeah, that’s a big deal.

Confession: We hadn’t had a tree in about three years. See, last year Rob has just been laid off (I never mentioned that here. It sucked. I cried. I also hadn’t mentioned that he got a new job last month. That was awesome. I laughed. Now you know) and we didn’t feel much like celebrating. The year before that, the dogs we were supposed to get were killed two days before Christmas. Kind of threw a pall over the whole thing (plus then Judd Nelson passed away a few days later). And the year before that, Rob’s parents were supposed to come here for Christmas. We had bought their plane tickets and everything. And then two days before they were supposed to fly in, Rob’s mom injured herself and was unable to travel. Totally sucked the Christmas Spirit out of everything.
This year, though, we were resolute in that our Christmas was going to be great. And it was. I won’t go into huge detail and list gifts because 1) that would probably be boring and 2) it wasn’t the gifts that made it great (okay I lied; I’ll mention one gift and one gift only: SNUGGIE REPRESENT YO!) It was just a really, really nice day with family. We ate, we opened gifts, my brother and sister-in-law played their instruments and sang. We came home and snuggled with the dogs (either Sprocket’s horrible face haircut is starting to grow out or I’m just used to it but oh man he is the cutest little boy… well, tied for cutest with Doozer) and ate the leftover turkey, tourtiere and meat pie Mom sent home with us while watching Love Actually and White Christmas for the umpteenth time.

The only downside to the whole thing was that on Christmas Day night, someone broke into my brother’s garage and stole a bunch of tools and a lighting fixture that they had out there, which they had just purchased and were going to install in their dining room after the holiday. Needless to say my brother is pretty annoyed, and the police say that there’s so much of this kind of thing going on around here that it’s unlikely they’ll find the culprits anytime soon.

Oh and the fact that, as usual, I forgot that stores around here aren’t open on Boxing Day (which was Saturday), and that after Christmas we have no Sunday shopping until May (don’t even ask – weird arbitrary laws) and didn’t go grocery shopping before Christmas, so the only food we have had for two days has been frozen burritos and leftover fruitcake.

But it’s still been a wonderful, wonderful Christmas and I’m looking forward to the rest of my vacation.

A couple of years ago, Rob and I decided to get rid of our landline and just use our cellphones. We did it for a couple of reasons; first off, where we live, one phone company had a monopoly and so our bills were higher than we’d like. Secondly, I was sick and tired of answering the phone to telemarketers. So many telemarketer calls. People calling to give us term insurance quotes, calling to ask what kind of juice we drink, and calls to offer us a deal on a boat. Yes, a boat. Pain in the ass. Those calls were not missed when we went to cellphone-only.

Lately though we’ve been considering getting a house phone again. Mainly because the company who does our Internet hosting has finally expanded to bring phones into our area, so the price is better. That way I wouldn’t constantly have to be thinking “Wait, is it after 6 pm? Do I have minutes left?”. Not that I ever used up my daytime minutes on my cell because I barely ever talk on the phone anyway. Plus now there’s the National Do Not Call Registry that takes your phone number off telemarketers’ lists.

Now, of course, having a phone might make people think that I actually want to speak on it – I don’t. I hate talking on the phone. So much. Yeah… maybe it’s time to rethink this again.

You know you rely too much on the Internet when you use Google to try and find what you’re looking for. And when you end up with 14 results for “Plano dentists” instead of a dentist in your own hometown (said dentist’s name is, admittedly, close in spelling to ‘Plano’), you despair of ever finding your dentist’s phone number ever and all your teeth will fall out and you will have to eat only creamed corn and pudding forever.
And then your husband walks in with the number and you look at him in wonder and amazement, asking how he ever found it, explaining to him that you’ve tried every search term you could and kept coming up with the wrong results. And he says to you “Uh, yeah. I used the phone book.”
Yeah, just maybe slightly Internet-dependent.

So I got a new wig a few weeks ago (maybe a month? Mid-November. Yeah). Here it is:

And I like it alot. At the same time I kind of am feeling like a wig addict lately, and this one is really inexpensive, for a human hair lace wig:

I’d get it in a similar colour to the wig I’m wearing in the picture above. $55, compared to a couple of hundred… at the very least it would be something I could wear while I’m cooking and not have to worry about the hair melting.

Now, speaking of hair.

I brought the dogs to the groomer last week. They needed it – they hadn’t had a haircut since they were born, and their hair was always hanging in their eyes. Doozer, also, had procured a lovely matted area on his side which he wouldn’t let us anywhere near with a brush, from rolling around in the snow. One small tangle + moisture = dog hair felting like yarn. Not good. Now, the groomer who used to do my former dog, Wicket, passed away a few years ago. I don’t have any other experience with dog grooming. I asked some co-workers if they had any recommendations (several of them have shih tzus) and they all recommended this one lady. I called her – and she’s so busy, she’s not accepting new clients. I called another lady who was recommended by the lady who sold us the boys, and she’s full up until February. I finally called someone whose name I found in the phone book. She was able to get us in fairly quickly, which was good.

When I brought them in, I told her that I wanted their feet and faces done, (get the hair out of their eyes, clip their nails), and that with Doozer, I knew that he would probably need to be shaved, as well, because of the matting. For Sprocket – he has different hair from Doozer, and he didn’t have any tangles at all, so I asked her to do his feet and face, and get the hair out of his eyes, and just cut a couple of inches off the length of his hair (it’s about six inches long at this point). Something like this:
(no, that’s not Sprocket although it has the same colouring) or even like this:
(sorry if that’s a giant picture).

Well. With Doozer, we got this:

Which really isn’t so bad. Yes, he’s wearing a sweater, because it’s cold out. If you could see beneath the sweater you would see that he’s short all over, and his hair is sort of curly. I love his little underbite.

For Sprocket, though?

I walked in and I thought “Oh, she must not be done, even though she phoned me and told me they were ready to go”. She had cut his face and feet, but done nothing with the rest of his hair. I fully admit that I punked out. I am not aggressive and I am not experienced with dog groomers (my mom was the one who took Wicket to the groomer – I was a kid). I was like “You’re done?” and she said “Yeah, I cleaned up his face for you, but his hair is so beautiful I didn’t want to cut it off – he has a beautiful coat”. Then she started going on about how they were really difficult to cut and they were wiggly and stuff and I felt guilty so I gave her her money and we left.

I took this picture in the car:

You can’t really tell, but on the right side of his nose, part of it is shaved down to the skin, and then on the other side it’s long. It’s just terrible is all.

Then when we got home I noticed that the lady hadn’t cut their toenails at all and that there were all kinds of longer hairs sticking out randomly on Doozer. Sprocket had like, sideburns. I had to get out the scissors and try to even things up a little but there’s not much fixing to be done in this situation.

So now Sprocket is looking like this (hooray for the snaggletooth!):

and we are never going back to that groomer again. My brother saw them today and was like “Uh you PAID her for this?” and I told him about how she said they were wiggling and trying to turn around to look at her and didn’t want her to give them a bath and he said “Yeah, well, groomers are supposed to be trained to deal with that kind of thing… don’t you remember how Coquette (my grandmother’s dog) would try to BITE her groomer? And she still got her hair done properly.”

So yeah. Not happy. The dogs don’t seem to care though (well, Sprocket often rubs at the part of his face that’s shaved down to the skin) and hopefully it will grow back quickly enough. And we will find someone who won’t scalp their faces.

So uh… do you like that wig?

I’m still alive – just really, really busy and tired most days.
In fact, it’s 8:42 and I’m headed to bed right now. I just thought I’d let people know there was no reason to send flowers (although if you want to, hey, I love receiving them).

from Kate Beaton

I barely ever use MSN anymore, mainly because with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, barely any of my contacts ever use MSN anymore so it’s not really worthwhile. Maybe once a week I’ll log in, and see if my Mom (who doesn’t understand that she could actually PHONE) has left me any offline messages. This morning, I logged on, and lo and behold up popped a message from Mom from Tuesday, about Christmas (she also emails these messages, so it’s not as though I’m totally missing them). Then all of a sudden up popped a “hello!” from someone named Nadia. I was like “Uh, who is Nadia?” – and it turned out that it was my friend R. Her daughter had changed the settings on her MSN account.

R and I met in university, and became friends right away. Through five years, including one in which she had just given birth and was only driving in once a week (doing her other classes by correspondence), and then after her boyfriend left and she moved back to the town where the university is, two years where I would babysit her baby daughter on Tuesday nights while she was in class during our B. Ed. (I don’t think those last sentences are all that grammatically correct). I was maid of honour at her wedding (10 years ago this New Years’ Eve!).

Through the years, we lost contact with each other. I moved, she moved, she had more kids and got really busy… but every now and then we would manage to get back in touch and every time we spoke, it was as though nothing had changed.

It was the same today. After a brief couple of minutes on MSN (she has four kids – one who’s 13 – the one I used to babysit!- one who’s 9, and then a 3 year old and a 10-month old, so she can’t stay on the computer very long) she phoned me and we spoke for over an hour about everything. And again, it was as though absolutely nothing had changed between us, despite all the changes in our lives. She has had a lot of upheaval in her extended family, Rob and I got that sad news this summer, a new baby for her, new puppies for me… but beneath it all we’re still the same girls who used to sit next to each other in Psych class and write notes joking about the professor and his obsession with tail babies (and his insistence on showing us a Polaroid he had of his wife’s placenta).

It’s so good to know that someone who shared a huge part of my life still feels the same way about me, and that we can be comfortable together after over a year without contact.

I am having this memory of one of the first “adult” stories I ever read. Not like, porn-adult, but I felt so illicit reading it anyway.
I was 7 years old. We were in Quebec visiting family and my sister and I were having a sleepover at my aunt and uncle’s. I was bored and looking for something to read. They didn’t have any kids’ books in French, just L’actualité and a bunch of huge novels which I wasn’t about to crack open, and of course they had nothing in English. I had read and re-read the Bobbsey Twins In The Country (Flossie and Freddie were kind of spoiled brats, weren’t they?). I went whining to my sister, and she handed me a stack of magazines she’d brought with her. Tiger Beat, Teen, and True Confessions. Tiger Beat was full of pictures of boys I didn’t know. Not Interested. I was a little bit excited when I saw Scott Baio (Chachi!) but there was no Happy Days story to go along with it. I wanted actual stories. With narrative. A beginning, middle, and end. Adversity to overcome. Maybe a Big Bad Wolf thrown in. Tiger Beat didn’t have that. Teen was no good either – there were all kinds of articles about how to apply makeup, and there were ads for slimming pills, but no STORIES. Then I opened up True Confessions.

Now, I knew that I shouldn’t actually be reading this – my mom had said so the previous year, that it wasn’t a magazine for six year olds. Then again, TECHNICALLY, I was seven now. So I opened up the magazine and commenced to reading. And was shocked – SHOCKED- at the Adult Material I was reading. THERE WAS KISSING IN THESE STORIES.

But to tell the truth? The story I remember the most was one of a lady who used to be fat (I think she said her previous weight had been 140 lbs. HAH! FAT!) but had dieted her way down to 107. Only throughout the story, her fat friend (who, according to the author, was EVEN FATTER than the protagonist had been – at least 150 lbs!) kept inviting her out to dinner. Where Our Heroine (let’s call her Skinny) would order pasta and then feel guilty about it later and say “never again!” but wouldn’t actually mention not wanting to go to restaurants to her friend. Then one night her friend brought over a giant cake, saying “I made this for my boyfriend’s birthday party tomorrow and I need to hide it from him – can I keep it here tonight?”. Skinny said sure, no problem. Then she stared at the cake all evening and eventually ate a piece. And then another. I remember that it was a chocolate cake, with mint-green icing. Oh, 1983.

Skinny suddenly came to the realization that her friend (let’s call her Fattie) was Intentionally Sabotaging Her Diet. How dare she invite her out to restaurants where there was pasta that she could order? How dare she bring a cake over and ask Skinny to keep it hidden? HOW DARE SHE ASK SKINNY TO DO THINGS THAT NORMAL FRIENDS DO WITH AND FOR EACH OTHER!

So what did Skinny do?

She threw the cake into a lake behind her house, and when Fattie came over to pick it up, Skinny refused to answer the door, and then wouldn’t answer the phone. She needed to cut the Evil Fattie out of her life, so that she could stay thin, and didn’t owe Fattie any explanations. And, at the end of the story, she hadn’t spoken to Fattie for two months, had lost another couple of pounds (was down to 103 lbs) and had met a man at the gym. Hooray! A winner! The way the story was written, Skinny had overcome the adversity of having a fat friend weighing (hah!) her down and holding her back. It was, I guess, inspirational.

At the time, my thoughts were “Wait, Skinny is supposed to be the good guy? She ate someone’s birthday cake, then threw it in a lake! And she stopped being friends with someone because she was fat and didn’t even tell her why she was ignoring her! That’s not a good guy at all! That’s the meanest kind of guy!”

And I still kinda feel that way.

I live in a neighbourhood where many of my students live. A few know which house is mine; most don’t. I haven’t had any trouble at all (not even at Hallowe’en! When teachers’ houses are always egged/tp’d! It’s never happened) since moving here. Still though, I don’t tell them which one’s my house. A couple know because they’ve seen me getting into my car or whatever, but I don’t point out where I live to them.

This morning, after breakfast (a BLT – yeah, I know, I should eat a BLT because my body is such a natural fat burner – yeah right), I took the dogs for a walk. And at about Mile 1.5, I saw one of my students standing in front of her house. She called out to me and waved. I waved back and kept on trucking – no time to stop and talk. And at Mile 2, I noticed that there was someone behind us. Yeah. My student. She was kind of following, and had a couple of other kids with her – ones I don’t know so they must be younger and at the elementary school. I heard her say “That’s my teacher! I want to know where she lives!” to one of her companions, but whenever I’d turn around to look at her, she’d pretend she was looking at a tree or something. Super spy sleuthing skillz, for sure.

It’s not that I don’t like my students, or even that I think that they would do anything terrible if they did know exactly where I lived. It’s just that I want to be able to do things like, oh, be in my backyard this spring, without all of them hanging around and watching me while I work on the garden. They’re fascinated by their teachers’ lives outside of school. It’s like zoo times or something. They’ll stand around and stare for two hours at me just pulling weeds.

Anyway, eventually I lost her (I think one of her friends got tired of walking, plus it was starting to rain), and the dogs and I came home. I’m sure on Monday she’ll say something like “I almost found out where you live!” and I’ll just smile and nod. And hope that she loses interest soon enough.