Glomby

Yesterday I only ate homemade baking powder biscuits and carob cookies, with unsugared herbal tea, all day. It sounds like some weird fad diet.

I had made the biscuits and cookies the night before. When I woke up... well what could be more wonderful for breakfast than bp biscuits? If I were a drug addict I'd mainline them.

But then it came time to grab a lunch to bring to work with me, and I hadn't made anything else--and I'm avoiding spending money eating out, since I'm on my new budget. So I bagged more biscuits and cookies.

The managers were all at a meeting and I was working a mid shift to help out the senior who opened the store, and the visiting manager who was closing. So I was Mabel Manager for a day--wow it's been awhile. Getting pages all the time, running around... fun for a day, but.... When I got home I didn't feel like cooking. Just flopped down in front of my compy... with more biscuits and cookies!

Very interesting. I'd even used white flour cause I don't have a lot of whole wheat left, so I'm sure my intestines--which are used to a steady influx of roughage--were in a state of confusion. "What is this pasty glue glombing its way towards us? Ew! I demand a carrot!"

...I'd better work myself up to making a bean salad this afternoon.

Musings on Death and Muted Metal

A few years ago two of my friends' fathers had strokes. (Stroke or heart attack in one case? I don't remember the details.) And now I know three women my age who have a parent undergoing treatment for cancer.

Well... you get to a point in your life where it seems like everyone is marrying or shacking up. Then the babies start. Then the divorces begin. And then the parents get cancer? This seems to be the next Life Phase.

I also just read that girl babies who are big are more likely to get breast cancer. Well, looks like I'm doomed because I was a big sucker. And both my grandmothers had/have cancer, though apparently hereditary cancer is relatively rare. It's being born a big baby that'll get ya in the end!

In other and more trivial news, the upstairs neighbour is playing heavy metal, which is annoying. I like heavy metal, but it has to be listened to loud--not through the ceiling, from someone else's stereo. Oh well, I'll sit here reading the news and listening to muted metal.

Vote, ladies, vote! (and boys too)

I live in a riding where there is always a Liberal win, so In Theory it doesn't matter whether I vote. BUT I have three reasons why I push my lazy bottom out to the local high school:

(1) I have to imagine--what if everyone voting Liberal thought like me and stayed home? I have to take responsibility for my part.

(2) I can't overlook how hard women worked, generations ago, to win the right to vote. Imagine if you chained yourself to fences and spent time in jail and were force fed, and then found out your great-granddaughters didn't care! Ouch. (In Quebec that right only came in 1940, so we're not talking ancient history here.)

And it's not just about those who protested, but about the way women were ridiculed for the centuries leading up to this right--how they were treated like children and told they didn't have the brain capacity to decide how the country should be run. Grrr!

(3) Finally, I think about all the people in the world who still can't vote. Just as we take our clean streets, garbage disposal, constant electricity, taxes, democratic process, freedom of speech, newspapers, paid for schooling, and a million other little things for granted, we take voting for granted. It seems disrespectful, to me, to pass up the opportunity.

:-) If you want to know if you're on the electoral list, or where to vote, or when, or ID needed, or anything else... go here.

Or you can vote by mail!


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CBC video about Nellie McClung's "mock parliament" speech where she reversed the roles and talked about the horrors of men voting. (Or watch the Historica Minute recreation.)

BBC "In Pictures" slideshow.
And another.



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Nellie McClung as *Prime Minister*:

"If men were as intelligent and as good as Mr Skinner and his worthy though misguided followers we might consider this matter [of the vote], but they are not. 7/8 of the police court offenders are men, and only 1/3 of of the church membership. You ask me to enfranchise all these. ...

Men were made to support families. ...Shall I call man away from the useful plow and harrow to talk loud on street corners about things which do not concern him! Politics unsettle men, and unsettled men means unsettled bills!"



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From a recent article about young women and voting:

According to a 2006 paper by University of Calgary researchers Melanee Thomas [whom Miss Mabel attended school with, and who is a supa-smarty] and Lisa Young, young women are among the least-engaged groups in formal politics.

"The best-educated generation of women in Canadian history – those who are currently under the age of 27 – are in fact less interested in the formal political arena, less knowledgeable about it, feel less political efficacy, and are less involved in the formal political process than their male peers or previous generations of women," they wrote.

They found that in the past 20 years, young women with university educations consistently had lower rates of voter turnout than their male counterparts.

It's in quotes, so it must be true

Here are some random quotes about friendship which experience has taught me are vewy twue...


"A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation." Bertrand Russell

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." Anaïs Nin

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." CS Lewis

"There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living." Don Marquis

"[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us." Margaret Guenther

"Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone." Maya Angelou

"I have no trouble with my enemies. But my goddam friends,...they are the ones that keep me walking the floor nights." Oscar Levant

"Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance." Rabindranath Tagore

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command." Emerson

"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend." Robert Louis Stevenson

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?" Thoreau

"Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you." Samuel Johnson

"Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse." Simone Weil

"The blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away." Dinah Craik

"A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails." Donna Roberts

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you." Dale Carnegie

"Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies." Dave Attell (Okay I haven't experienced that one in full, I'm just guessing it's true.)

Some older friends...

Some newer friends...

Friend Roll Call

So now that I've been out of school for months, and have caught up with family, and have caught up with myself, and have caught up with my husband and cats... I've slowly got to catch up with friends.

I've seen Mae and Midnightstreet and that little circle of friends. I've seen Mr Gilbs. I've been in facebook and email contact with Yea Aulde High School Best Friend (though we've both been too lazy to follow through on a face to face meeting.) I've been in email contact with my childhood best friend, and my old church best friend. (An older lady I once knew told me she keeps one friend from each period of her life. I thought it was great advice, and try my best.)

I fired off a little facebook email to an old work acquaintance, Amanda, to see what's new with her. And I randomly send comments to random other facebook folk I know, to keep the wheels greased. There's been radio silence from Friend Paul and his girlfriend since they moved south to do the next degree... better send an email there... hold on. Okay I'm back.

I haven't seen Rrrraquel since the winter, but she's been busy--I've had some email contact at least. Will be time to see her soon. I just emailed my Late High School Best Friend, Cide (or Super Banana), cause it's definitely been over a year since I've seen her. And I've emailed an old work-and-book-sales buddy (my book enabler) because I haven't seen her since her wedding.

Have I missed anyone. Oh! My American friends! I have fairly regular e-relationships with KR, JB and CCB.

And now that I'm back at work more, I'm seeing all my work buddies.

I haven't had the sort of friendship where I go out with someone regularly in years, I must say. I think I went out with Mae and Gilby the most, but then school happened, and then Mae left school and moved further out, and Gilby moved even further. I only saw Pablo and Delyriam regularly--and in this last year, Pablo. I tend to fill my life with sooo many hobbies and interests that I can easily hobbit-hole for long periods of time, but I think school was also giving me an artificial sense of an effortless social life. I knew so many interesting and funny people, and because we were in Poli Sci, the interesting and stimulating conversations just dropped from the sky like Shakespeare's Mercy. Not to mention seminars, which were essentially 3 hour long conversations.

So now there's no school, so I can't fake it. While I can hobbit-hole away, I know myself... I know I need to push myself into some actual sit-down conversations. I'd invite people over if I didn't have a cat who gets into pee-mode when the moon is in the right phase, and runs around like a Peeing Bandit. Maybe if I stick a couple chairs and a mini fridge in the foyer of the apartment...

Interestingly, this season of House will I guess be exploring the idea of friendship a bit, as Wilson has finally ended his rather poisonous relationship with House. And now House has to figure out if finding another doctor who pays for his food, likes Monster Trucks, and has a conscience is enough to replace Wilson. Or he could just keep paying the private eye to listen to him.

not so lol

"Motorists who send text messages while driving are "significantly more impaired" than those who drive drunk, even at the minimum legal limit for alcohol, according to a British study.

The study showed that drivers' reaction times deteriorated by 35 per cent and they saw a 91 per cent decrease in steering ability.

Similar studies of drunk driving, by comparison, showed that reaction times fell by a mere 12 per cent.

...The study comes on the heels of reports that texting was to blame when a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in Los Angles two weeks ago, killing 25 people.

Officials believe the engineer on the commuter train was texting at the time." (CBC)

Any pedestrian can tell you this. People on cell phones never see you at a crosswalk until the last second. I'm so glad Quebec outlawed using handheld phones while driving, which I assume includes texting.

Mark Jenkins' installation art - love it!

More here.