First of all, I want to say how incredible it was to get those emails from people telling me about the mishaps they have had from blogging. They were all interesting to read - some sad, but most of them hilarious.

Second of all, I will be away from my blog for about a week. I know you are panicking right now (notice the deep sarcasm here). I will try my best to get to a computer sometime during those days but I can't promise anything.
What is especially terrible is that I have an assignment next week that focuses on alternative service delivery arrangements and most of the analysis is to be read from Canadian government websites. I will be staying in a home with no computer access and I don't know how OK it will be to jet off to the public library for a couple of hours (OK, make that many hours). Bad Timing.

On the baby front, I'm finding an unusual sound coming from my child's mouth these days. He is quite a vocal kid, he has the ability to say, "Juice please Mommy", "Hup (help) Mommy", and "See Truck Mommy". Nevertheless, these type of cute little phrases are not what he thinks of when he is trying to pry open a DVD case in order to store his crackers. Instead he comes up with an incredibly piercing, high-pitched squeal.

Holy mother of Saint Bernard!
(I'm giving up cursing for Lent, seeing as how Franklin finds it fun to copy me and since we are about visit the in-laws...)

This morning I finally said, "Whoa Franklin! That sound is not OK! Please Stop!"

There was silence while we looked at each other, as if in some kind of face off. He pulled up his adorable little hand and said "OK, Stop peeze".

Then he squealed again.

I had actually prepared an incredibly tiring piece on the state of poverty in BC, specifically Victoria where I live, but I think I will shorten it down and take some of my slanted bias out of it. I woke up this morning happy I had not posted.

There are many blogs out there which are personal and very confessional. In these cases I find many opinions that are judgmental and selfish. I absolutely don't think this is a bad thing.
A blog is a blog is a blog.
It's your own forum, you can cry if you want to! In fact, I have on many occasion! (see various posts on anal fissures, breast-feeding, September 11, to name a few... )

However, for me, when I am aware that a certain group of people are reading my blog, such as family, friends and the odd acquaintance, I try to keep the petty personal matters out. This cuts down on the passive aggressive factor of blogging as well. It's not that I'm sterile, it's just that it is too easy to cause damage - just ask dooce or the house of winds, or many other amazingly talented people who started out with a personal diary in the vast internet ocean only to end up being pin pointed, discovered, exposed or accused of indiscretions.

Of course, every situation is different. I understand. I'm not saying Miss E should not post about her ex-husband, or dooce should refrain from making fun of her family's religion. I fact, I don't have the authority to say anything of the sort. As Miss E beautifully stated on another comment board, "It may be exhibitionist and narcissistic to blog, but it's just masochistic to read on when you're obviously uncomfortable with what you're reading".
So true and well said.
Of course, in my case, when the point of my blog is to keep in touch with certain people who I count on visiting the site, I am not prepared to make them uncomfortable in public. I can do that very well in person...

All I'm saying is, among others, my family and close friends read this. Some of who are closely connected to poverty in some way or another. My views in what I wrote contradict some and expose others. I'm not willing to make a friend feel badly about their life just because I have a certain view that I need to spout off to the world. There are just so many other things to talk about.
Like Chair and Jay's little bean's conception! Hooray! Congratulations you guys!

Last night I went to bed at a somewhat decent hour and although this alone is big news, believe it or not, I have even more to report.

We were woken up at about 2am by a loud bang. My first reaction was, of course, to scream to the unknown disturbance: "Jesus! Shut-up! You'll wake the baby!"
These days, I don't think a train wreck and subsequent chemical explosion would wake this child but consider me trained...

Once I came to a semi-conscious state I thought I would look outside to see what was going on. Things went pretty silent and I figured some drunk idiot had smashed into the dumpster in the parking lot. Since we have the privileged view of said dumpster from our bedroom window I took a look.

There was a man, about our age, dumpster diving for food! Yes, it's true. In a city with welfare, soup kitchens and regular, expected pan-handling, there are still hungry people. I'm inclined to think perhaps things aren't working.

I watched this guy look around, jump into the dumpster, shuffle through a ton of dirty diapers (you know, those things really don't decompose), and locate a half-eaten submarine. He ate that sandwich like he hadn't eaten in weeks.
He licked the wrapper.

The rest of the night I dreamt about strapping the dumpster with bags of apples and cooked turkey.

This is quite funny, Kofi Annan is on Sesame Street.

Elmo and his friends were arguing over who was going to sing the alphabet and along came the big guy.
He introduced himself as "Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations". Elmo retorted that he was "Elmo, who was Elmo". (cheeky little puppet)

Kofi proceeds to solve the dispute by suggesting that there was really no argument at all. They could sing the tune together.
Then they all decided that if they ever wanted to solve an argument ever again, all they had to do was solve it like the United Nations.

Everyone now: t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r.

Wow, conflict resolution among puppets on Sesame Street.

so cute. so true. and so sad.

yeah, still no word on what to do with the pop-unders.
sorry about that

but hey! at least I'm getting what I pay for... except that I thought I paying for no pop-unders.

I'm in the computer lab at the university. I'm finishing off an assignment that I didn't feel was "perfect".
strange

I act like I'm a perfectionist but if you really knew me, or even kind-of, slightly knew me, you'd know that I'm horribly not. In fact, the only reason why I check my spelling on this thing is because I seem to have my personal little spelling dominatrix who brings out her email whip whenever she finds an error - that one with the sharp bit on the end,

ooooh it stings...

I've just come from class. I could be at home with D, suitably pebbled and watching reality TV but alas, my perfectionist nature...

yeah, right.

Of course, I'm here, blogging. I'm not finishing the assignment.
so, I'll get right on that... where's a good dominatrix when you need one?

So, I think it's all been transferred over to dirtyolive.net

You should have been redirected by a scary service of geocities which threatens to delete your free site after it moves everything over for you.

I'm still sweating. I don't want to loose everything.

How can I make a back-up of all of this? I gotta move all this stuff to my hard drive or something because if this was lost one day I would be very sad.

well, change your links everyone.

When we take pictures of Franklin we tend to go slightly over board.
I don't know if most people are like this, but when I take a picture, I always think, two second later, that there is an even better angle, light, or situation that would be perfect. I think this is a very good justification for digital cameras.

Yet... we don't own one. One day perhaps. One day. Sigh.

The photos we have developed since the birth of our son now span over three large photo albums and I'm currently looking for a fourth. I pity the friends who haven't seen me in awhile and come to town to visit. They will be subjected to shots of my nipples, Franklin's messiest poops, blurry close ups of his hands, and a thousand different poses in a highchair,on the floor with toys,in the park and in the snow.

If we were ever to have photographs taken of us - professionally, to pass on down the family tree (and something that I would not have to explain why my thumb was obscuring the corner of the shot) - it would definitely be similar to the work of Loretta Lux.
(via Mighty Girl)

The time of successful distraction and physical removal are quickly coming to a close.
Yesterday, Franklin and I spent a couple of hours at the beach. We had a blast but I now realize that getting Franklin to not go into the water, eat sand, run with sharp sticks, or pet strange dogs will get harder and harder as time goes by.

Each time Franklin would run toward the water's edge I would hold him back and say,

No No Franklin, It's veeerrrrry cold*
Bbbrrrrr!
... and wet
Wet!
Yuk
Cold!
Look Franklin a ...tree/dog/sand castle/blue sky...
(This is my version of toddler talk.)

I think I may have had to say this about 60 times (no exaggeration here). He understood not to go in the water but it was as if he didn't have the ability to resist.
In the end, he would run up the edge and say,

"Cooall, Wet, Yuckky, No"

Still though, today was the same. Unfortunately, he reeealy wanted to climb a large rock in the park that even I would be scared to attempt. There was very little room for discussion and although he eventually lost what simple form of debate we had, it was not a pretty scene.

He gets over it pretty quickly and doesn't seem to be holding a grudge but sometimes it sucks to be the bad guy.

*(The average ocean temperature is 7-11 degrees Celsius or 44-52 degrees Fahrenheit. So, although we have a bright sun and nice green grass here, a breeze off the ocean can make for a very chilly February.)

"This thing that you are reading? You may have noticed that it is a bit, well, off the cuff. Not finely crafted. Not sublime writing of literary merit. Not even consistently and inspiredly humorous. I am just writing a long (overly long) letter to the Internet, and to my future self. I read a lot of journals that have one gorgeous, brilliant, knock-you-over-with-their-diamond-sharp-prose, entry every few weeks, and hooray for that, but (from me at least) an even bigger hooray for those journals who spend their words on sharing the mundane in an interesting way. The hugest, hugest hooray, a hooray forty thousand feet tall, for the diarists and webloggers who see their publicly documented life as a process, and NOT as a well-written commercial product that they wait for some audience to approve or disapprove of. And a hooray the size of the known and unknown universe for those who bring intellectual discipline and expansive imagination to the documentation of their own personal inventories.

(Dude. If I had known I was going to get all heavy like that, I probably would have picked a better inappropriate interjection-as-noun to get all parallel with than "hooray." In fact I probably would have skipped over interjections entirely and gone for something more sensible.)"

Excellent, well put, Thank Goodness, just what I was thinking, nice, hooray!

Apparently some people have had trouble getting on to my site because of the god-awful pop-ups that appear. Alas, this comes with a free geocities site.

What is even more pitiful though, is that I own and am currently paying for dirtyolive.net and have not gotten around to transferring it over. I will be doing this soon. I just can't do it this weekend as I am lecturing a class on Tuesday and I'm not prepared yet.

"The Executive and the Bureaucracy", "Interdepartmental and Intradepartmental Relations" and "The Legislature and the Bureaucracy"

Amazingly, I find this stuff pretty interesting. I'm not so sure about the class though. It can sound pretty dry up there.

I'm going to try and spice it up by adding the case of Mohammed Al-Mashat. Many students in the class are quite young so I don't think they'll remember this incident, but it was interesting at the time. He was Iraq's ambassador to the United States during the Gulf War crisis. He was admitted to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1991. Apparently, his entry was considerably expedited by Canadian officials but no one accepted responsibilty for such a politically controversial decision. In fact, the minister of External Affairs, Joe Clark, wasn't even aware of Al-Mashat's application.

Understandably, this could all be quite boring to you, but the fact that during the inquiry minister's laid blame on public servants, opposition members laid blame on ministers, and even public servants disagreed among themselves brings up some interesting questions.

The appropriate relationship between public servants and politicians, ministerial responsibility, political neutrality, role of the legislature for holding public servants accountable... all this stuff I find fascinating.

You know when you're a kid and your parents don't seem to understand you? It feels like you are on a different planet and you can't believe you are even related to them?

I thought this wouldn't happen to me because I'm so cool my son would be inviting me to his own parties and boasting to his friends just how damn awesome his mother is...

yeah

He's going to be opposite of me alright. He'll also be asking me to his party - most likely his prom because everyone else will think he's a weanie. That, or the next generation of children are all going to be such sucks that parents will be cranking up the music and trying to stuff pot brownies in their lunches in order to get them to "loosen up".

You see, I've been saying thank-you whenever I give something to Franklin and whenever he gives something to me. I thought I would start him out right with some manners so that when he met the hoards of old ladies at the rich beaches they would give him money (or something along those lines, aren't kids supposed to be polite?)...
We also live in a very small place and as he goes from one toy to another I tend to clean up after him in order to give him more space to play.

All this has resulted in a child who reminds everyone to say thank-you when he gives them something, cleans up after all the others in daycare, and get this, he even turned down the radio this afternoon!
He covered his ears and turned down Richardson's Round-up which was talking about rap music and something or other. I didn't even know he knew how to do that! It could have been a coincidence right then - but he definitely knows how to do it now.

My kid's a weenie, but I love him.

Well, if today is any indication of what the next month and a half are going to be like, I'm extremely excited.

I'm back to the guess and double check of the date for my entries because I am that out of touch with that date part of the world - the one you automatically belong to when you are working everyday. I only seem to know if it's a night class day, a doctor appointment day, a lunch with a friend day, or a daycare visit day.
This is a nice part of staying at home.

This morning I took Franklin to the doctor to see how he is doing with the pneumonia aftermath. So far, so good. Except that our new doctor is not too popular with him - he's a little shy.
She's popular with me though - very professional, explains everything (down to the research performed on the antibiotics and why it was only a 5 day dose), is familiar with children and has some of her own, is flexible with her viewpoints and practices what she preaches (as far as I can tell).

After the appointment the two of us went to a coffee shop that sits on top of a building and if you sit at the floor to ceiling windows, you can see the buses and cars drive by.
What a thrill for Franklin!
He sat on a seat all by himself, munched on pineapple bread, drank his water, all the while pointing out the buses and trucks as they went by:

Mommy!!! Bussssss!! Mommy!!!! RRRrrukkk!!!
Mommy? See? Up? Down? Mommmy!!

We had a great time.

Well, I think, I hope, Franklin has turned the corner.
Thank-you to everyone for their well-wishes. I have been walking and sleeping with my teeth clenched shut for the past 4 days, I can feel it in my jaw and the headache says the same thing.

Apparently, the antibiotics take awhile to kick in because although he no longer has a fever, the cough and the congestion and the phlegm have all been horrendous. He has had a couple of side-effects from the antibiotics as well. However, this has all started to clear up today.
All in all, the experience hasn't been fun. We aren't used to Franklin being sick and not only does he have pneumonia but is seriously teething as well. Poor little guy.

Pneumonia. Argh, how did my baby get Pneumonia?!?!?