family

settling in

So I’m still trying to settle into the new site – hanging my pictures on the walls, figuring out where exactly the furniture should go, and so on – but the boxes of all my old stuff still haven’t arrived. And by boxes, I mean files on a hard drive. My archives, to use a term that gives my collection of pet photos, lame status updates and rants about the weather a fancy name.

Since he had a problem with my totally inefficient plan of cutting and pasting HTML, post by post, The Boy Wonder is valiantly trying to figure out how to transfer all my old posts to the new site in one shot. And one shot (to the back of the head) is probably what I’m going to get if I nag him about it one more time.

In the meantime, please feel free to leave comments about what works and doesn’t work for you, both literally and figuratively. For example, on my desktop computer, the site’s colour scheme is a range of vibrant greens with a nice, sand-coloured sidebar. A sandbar, if you will. But when I looked at it on my laptop this morning, I was disappointed to discover the greens are flat and washed out and the warm sand colour a pale grey. Bleh. It makes me wonder what others see. Is it my laptop screen that’s off or is my desktop monitor overly bright?  Should I quit worrying about it and go do some dishes? No. Should I go to bed? Yes.

at last

After bugging The Boy Wonder for a couple years to re-do my blog, I finally got sick of waiting and decided to do it myself. Et voila! (I was going to write ‘Et viola!’ but worried you might not realize that’s a joke. It’s one of my pet peeves, as you can imagine. One of my 23,000 pet peeves.)

Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I started fooling around with designing a new site during my fourteen seconds of free time every day and, two months later (with a little bit of last-minute help from The BW), here it is. It’s still a work in progress – as am I – so please be gentle.

 

vacation photo album

My apologies in advance for what will be a photo-heavy post; you know I just can’t help myself when it comes to a camera. Thank God for digital. Okay, here we go. Our annual trip to PEI.

The kids and Mia on the Caribou-Wood Islands ferry:

Charlotte striking a pose at the gorgeous Greenwich National Park:

One of the wild roses that line the trails at the park:

Anna and Charlotte on the beach at Greenwich National Park. Check out the sand dunes, which are at least twelve feet high:

Naufrage Harbour:

Lobster traps:

And fishing boats:

Here’s Charlotte at a quiet little beach on the north shore:

And Foster and Mia on the same beach:

This is the lighthouse at East Point, which was built in 1867:

Mia loving/hating the beach:

Ripply sand, just because it’s my camera and I can shoot whatever I want:

A snail:

Charlotte and a starfish:

Wool spindles at the awesome MacAusland’s Woolen Mills in Bloomfield:

Some old spinning machinery:

Another neat machine that plies the spun wool, I think. And look! A black rotary phone on the post:

Here’s Foster watching a snail:

As the tide was coming in one morning, the kids and I engaged in some super-high tech time lapse photography. Here they are, with Jam:

And here they are exactly ten minutes later (I’ll spare you all the photos taken at one minute intervals in between. And don’t ask me what happened to Jam. I think she got bored and wandered off.):

A crab shell, because why not?:

Mia in glistening evening light:

The obligatory sunset shot:

Here are the kids at Port la Joye/Fort Amherst:

And the lighthouse behind them:

A nice view from Fort Amherst:

The kids and Mia trying to distract me from the view:

A shiny shell:

An egg case, probably from a dogfish, which is a type of shark, so let’s say I wrestled this from a shark:

Bumpy clouds:

Foster after swimming in the ocean:

Anna and Charlotte also after swimming in the ocean:

Foster against the cliffs, which are blazing orange in the evening light:

Foster and Anna:

A purple jellyfish:

One of my better attempts at drive-by photography:

Everyone who knows me knows my love for PEI knows no bounds and I’m happy to report the kids are getting there too. Every year they’re a little more reluctant to leave and look a little more longingly at houses for sale, saying, “We could live there, right?” Hear me cackling and rubbing my hands together? My plan is working.

maternal pride and some white-hot anger

The day after my last post, I accompanied Foster’s class on a trip to CFB 14 Wing Greenwood, where Foster promptly stole a parachute and tried to hijack the Hercules plane we were being shown:

That kid. Honestly. I can’t take him anywhere.

Two days later was this girl’s birthday:

Anna is twelve now. Twelve. Crazy. Because her birthday was a “marking day,” Anna had no school and instead spent the day going out for lunch and Frenchy’s shopping with Jam, then opening presents and going to Swiss Chalet for a birthday dinner with the whole family.

Two days after her birthday, Anna had a swimming/sleepover party with four of her friends. Yes, you heard me correctly: a swimming AND sleepover party. Are we not the world’s greatest parents? Yes, I think so. The Boy Wonder took Foster, Charlotte, Anna and four of her friends to the Acadia pool to swim for a couple hours, then they came home, decorated make-your-own pizzas for supper, ate homemade cake and then “slept” in the basement. I think I spent about eight solid hours just doing dishes that day. I won’t post photos from her party because I’m not sure how the girls’ parents would feel about that, but I can sum up my shots by saying the girls were JUST A LITTLE EXCITED.

Two days after that (see the pattern?) was the closing ceremony at Anna’s school, during which she won an Outstanding Effort and Achievement award:

Please forgive the photo; I was standing about a mile and a half away. That’s Anna to the left of the kid in the orange sweater. Her teacher is poking her head in between the two kids. The hoodlums in the back are the other Grade 6 teachers.

Anyway, this is what is printed on the back of her certificate (wording and random capitalization not mine, obviously):

This Award is presented to two students in each Homeroom

Who have Demonstrated an Outstanding Dedication to Learning.

These students have Shown Tremendous Intellectual and Social Development.

Both Exemplify the Academic Spirit and Work Ethic of

EMS to which All should Aspire.

Good God. I weep for the future. Seriously, people, just because you write something in italics doesn’t mean you can capitalize at will. I keep studying this little passage, looking for a pattern and I can’t find one. We have a few capitalized verbs, but not all. We have lots of capitalized nouns, but not all. I hate to be bitchy about it (not really, but let’s pretend), but shouldn’t EDUCATORS pay a teensy bit more attention to these kinds of things? You know, “setting a good example” and all that?

But maybe I’m just punchy because my medical situation has gone from bad to worse: a thyroid ultrasound I did about a month ago has revealed I have two nodules on my thyroid, one on the left side and one on the right. The good news is that the nodules aren’t necessarily cancerous and, even if they are, thyroid cancer is one of the easiest to treat. The bad news is I have to have a biopsy to find out for sure. Big needle in throat = no fun. So the revelation of this whole nodule thing combined with my whacked out hormone levels certainly helps explain my crappy health. Oh, how I’d love to take my ultrasound report and cram it down the piehole of that arsehole endocrinologist who said my problems were all in my head. Close, goofball – they’re in my throat, but better luck next time.