When this happens to me, I feel like I need support, but I can’t in any way accomplish a civilized phone call.  My complaints come across like accusations.  Texting solves this problem in a way I could not have anticipated! It’s a thing of beauty, really.  Here’s a sample hormone-rage-deflationary text conversation:

Me:  I’m upset and cranky

Me: Very frustrated

Husband: I’m leaving in an hour. It’ll be a good day.

Let me pause to emphasize the significance of this.  If I had called, there is NO WAY Husband could have been expected to respond in such a supportive way. He would have been justified saying, “I’m staying away until you get your shit together.”

Me: Help.

Husband: Need a call?

Me: No I’ll just piss you off.

Husband: Just relax and I’ll see you soon.

Person 2 has NO IDEA that person 1 could be thumping messages into iPhone keypad, hurling the iPhone across the yard, and then running after it frantically retrieving it from a puddle to read the response.  Person 1 has the opportunity to decline the phone call, which would not have ended in her favor.

Me: Don’t react badly to my state right now

Husband:  I’m not at all. I love you and it’ll get better once I’m home.

Me: Ok

Me: Just in case you get home and I tear you a new one, you know why

Husband: I’m pretty used to it at this point.

Me: Ok

How can the situation not be completely resolved after that? Just a few lines of text, and my emotional situation is deflated. I can’t tear him a new one now.  My man was shielded from my outburst, and as a result he still loves me! Texting for a happy marriage.  Try it sometime!

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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The garden has never looked better for the time of year. I’m on top of weeding in the flower garden in the front. I’ve planted all the beds, many pots, and part of the garden. I’ve even clipped the lilac and the crab apple, and taken a saw to any branches resisting my clippers. A saw!

The way to accomplish this is:

a) avoid pregnancy
b) have no children under 18 months
c) spend 1-3 hours in the garden

Also:

a) enlist children 3+ to water daily - forget about trying to set limits (”That one is drowning now!” “More!” “Okay.”)
b) allow children all ages to muck in the bedding plants - it keeps them occupied
c) don’t fret if children dig out your perfectly trenched leek seedlings - you can buy leeks in the store, silly

Here’s our beautiful crab apple, which unfurls its leaves one day, and explodes with blossoms the next, like floral fireworks, and is currently a busy meeting place for bees of all kinds.  Standing under the canopy looking up, I could hardly see the sky for the blooms, and I could hear the constant hum of all the busy floating bees. Looking more carefully, I could see the bees - bees everywhere! - many to each bunch of flowers. They were swirling about each other, trading places, catching each others’ hands as they spun, just as though there was a bee orchestra somewhere high above.

And I didn’t get stung once. Didn’t see that coming, did ya?

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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The latest technological innovation that Canada lacks, for some reason, is the Kindle.  It’s a wireless ebook reading device that aims to provide access to all books everywhere within a wireless network.  It has been around for 2 years and was recently reissued as the Kindle DX, larger, easier to read, and easier to use.  It’s pretty easy to see how that could directly benefit students, seniors, kids, people with limited access for any reason (disabilities or location of residence, for instance) and the environment, for those on the paperless trail.

The Kindle shows Canadians why their country should be more accepting of technological innovation.  Our national gut reaction shouldn’t be to protect any institutions, such as television networks in the case of TiVo or publishers in the case of the Kindle, that may be affected by the latest invention.  It should be to recognize a valuable technology, welcome it, learn how it works, and then imagine ways it could change our lives.  Kindle technology is the kind of progress that doesn’t come along every day, and the potential impact on literacy huge.

Imagine if we could learn to accept all kinds of technology - not just the Kindle - earlier in its development.  Would Canadian inventors and scientists feel more like exploring ideas within our borders?  Would Canada be able to generate ideas and products for export to other countries?  Could we take more of a lead in the development of technology that could improve lives worldwide?  I think so.

But I’m not sure how many people agree with me. Maybe Canadians don’t care about technology at all.  I have thought of that. That’s why I have put up a petition to assess people’s interest in the Kindle DX.  If you’re Canadian and you think the Kindle should be available in the Canadian market, sign the petition. So far, only a few people have.  And I can tell you: if I was Amazon, I wouldn’t be too worried that I couldn’t get the Kindle to sell in Canada if I knew that only a handful of people were interested. I’d be like, “Ten Canadians want the Kindle?  That’s so sweet!  Okay, you guys can take a number.  I’m going to focus on the 10,000 Americans who want one first.”

If we get a respectable number of signatures, I plan to present them to Amazon, who created the Kindle, to wireless providers in Canada, such as Rogers, Bell, and Telus, and to the Canadian government.  I think those are the guys that need to know Canadians have an interest in the Kindle, and in any new technology that could impact how we conduct our daily lives.

Ways you can help the petition:

Sign it!

Tweet it! I just signed a petition saying that Canadians want the Kindle! If you agree, you should sign too! http://tinyurl.com/oxckuq

Tell your Facebook friends! Say: Signing the Kindle Petition at TechChicklets.com!

Put a poster up!

and SIGN IT!

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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So Kim and I will be the Tech Chicklets, and we’ll be doing a podcast as often as possible for the next little while, and if we get a good response, why we might never stop!

Here are some great ways to check out the show:

• Find it at the source

• Subscribe through iTunes

• Subscribe at Podcast Alley

The website is also pretty snazzy, and features pleasing graphics, a dynamic archive (containing the one episode), and a forum for discussion. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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The very first time Daniel leant away from me to stand on his own, I remember feeling surprisingly sad that he didn’t need me for that anymore. Now, he needs me less and less - more for other things, but still always less. Being a mom is letting go all the time. It’s good, but sad too.

Mother’s Day is coming up, and I have to share a great little book with you. It’s called Mother’s & Children, and it’s full of great images from the National Geographic. It’s just the right book to sit with a cup of coffee during nap time, and flip slowly through the pages. It covers motherhood from many different perspectives - across the world, and through time - and illustrates that the most important bond is universal, despite all the appearance of difference. Here are some pictures from it:

It’s a nice hardcover book, guaranteed to make any mom tear up a little from time to time, for only $23 CAN. Get out your hotel rewards credit cards, because that’s what to get for Mother’s Day. You can find out more at the National Geographic site, or, of course, on Amazon, or probably anywhere else they sell books online.

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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The person who started this meme says she believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Really!? That is so unlikely!

People love to hate these kinds of memes.  Feel free to ignore it.  Since you CAN’T, feel free to let the blood rise hot and angry to your cheeks as you notice the entire Harry Potter series is on a list that seems to be testing your intelligence through your reading history.  When that happens, you know you are part of the intelligentsia, a rare individual who can articulate the difference between popular culture and art. You pass. Take a button.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ next to those you have read.
2) Add an extra “X” next to the ones you LOVE.
3) Tally your total at the bottom. Either add the total number of books, or the total number of X’s, keeping in mind that no one cares about any number but their own.
4) Tag a few people and add your own Hostile Reality Meme editorial

Book List

(XX) 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
(XX) 2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (ALL)
(XX) 3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
(XX) 4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (ALL)
(X) 5.To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
() 6. The Bible
(XX)7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
(X) 8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
(XX) 9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
(X)10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
(X) 11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
(X) 12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
()13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
()14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
() 15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
(XX) 16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
() 17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
() 18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
() 19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
(XX) 20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
() 21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
(XX)22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
(X) 23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
() 24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
(XX)25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
(X) 26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
() 27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
() 28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
(XX) 29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
(XX) 30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
() 31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
(X) 32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
(XX) 33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
(X) 34. Emma - Jane Austen
(XX) 35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
() 36. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
()37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
() 38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
() 39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
(XX) 40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
(X) 41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
(X)42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
() 43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
() 44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
(XX) 45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
()46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
(X) 47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
(XX)48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
(X)49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
() 50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
() 51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
() 52. Dune - Frank Herbert
() 53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
(XX) 54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
() 55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
() 56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
() 57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
(XX) 58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
() 59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
() 60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(X) 61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
(X) 62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
() 63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
() 64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
() 65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
() 66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
(X) 67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
() 68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
() 69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
(X) 70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
(X) 71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
(X) 72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
(XX) 73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
(X) 74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
(X) 75. Ulysses - James Joyce
() 76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
() 77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
() 78. Germinal - Emile Zola
() 79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
() 80. Possession - AS Byatt
(X) 81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
() 82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
() 83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
() 84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
() 85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
() 86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
(XX) 87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
() 88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
() 89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
() 90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
(XX) 91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
() 92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
() 93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
(X) 94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
() 95. A Confederacy of Dunces -John Kennedy Toole
() 96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
() 97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
() 98. Beloved - Toni Morrison
(X) 99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
() 100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Hostile Reality Meme Personalized Editorial

I got 46, with many embarrassing omissions.   And no, it’s not OKAY that I haven’t read the Bible just because I’m an atheist.  It’s not UNDERSTANDABLE that I’ve read the entire Harry Potter Series, but I haven’t cracked my copy of Love in a Time of Cholera.  And most of all, it is a crying shame that when I see the title “Dracula” my frontal lobes are paralyzed by an overriding urge to listen to Rob Zombie’s Dragula, available for $0.99 on iTunes.  My score: FAIL.

I sincerely hope you do better.

© 2008 Three Bright Stars | All rights reserved. Copyright for republished writing or artwork belongs to the original writer or artist, as noted. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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In advance, I explained to Daniel what the funeral would be like, that “there will be a man talking in the front, and everyone will be listening, so we should be quiet and listen too.”  I told him about the singing, and the music, and he said, “yeah,” to everything I said.  What else can you do to prepare, except have generally reasonable discipline at home? I am not always confident about the state of discipline at home.

We all sat together in at the front of the church, Alex with my mom, which I thought would be good for both of them, and Daniel between Husband and I.  Daniel was great for the first ten minutes or so, and then he got bored and tried to make his own games.  As soon as he peeped, I just touched his chin, leaned down, and reminded him to keep quiet. I pointed to the Reverend, and whispered, “that man is talking, and everyone is listening to him. We should listen too.”

This worked for another few minutes, when Alex started to fidget as well, and Daniel started to feel unfairly disciplined.  After all, no one was speaking to Alex about listening carefully to the man up front.  (I learned afterwards that Alex had been maintaining eye contact with the organist, and forcing him with her intensity to respond to her insane cuteness.)  Daniel started to cry.

I moved him onto my lap facing me, and rocked him whispering reassurances in his ear.  He calmed down again, and took to looking back toward the congregation.  When we stood for prayers, he crawled up onto the pew, and made his way behind us, quietly occupied.

Meanwhile, Alex had lost interest in the organist, and began clambering from my mom to my dad, and then continued down the pew, insisting that the person to the right take her.  I don’t know what her endgame was. Escape, likely.

Despite all of this activity, of which I was keenly aware, both of the kids remained reasonably quiet through the whole service.  When it was over, we moved to the church basement for Eva’s Tea, and many people complimented me on the kids’ good behavior!  I can’t think of a better compliment for a mother to receive.  Many people asked me if I stay home with them, and were satisfied that that explained their compliance.  I don’t often hear that, and whether it’s true or not, I’ll surely accept it.  It was nice to feel good about something, especially at Grandma’s funeral.

Grandma’s Tea was the best thing for the kids, as well.  It was English biscuits, Cadbury digestives, Jaffa cakes, Cadbury fingers, plates and plates of them everywhere: Daniel was in heaven.  He ate all the chocolate from one plate, and then ran around the room from person to person, laughing and performing.  Alex stayed on our laps until she wouldn’t anymore, and then stuck a bottle top in her mouth and galloped around the room giggling.

All in all, it wasn’t only alright having the kids at the funeral; they were a credit to us, and also a welcome distraction and comfort.  I know Grandma would have loved to have seen them!

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