Update and a Letter

So we have put an offer on an absolutely beautiful house in a suburb just to the east of Prairie City. Our offer has been accepted, and we are now working on getting our finances set up, and our inspection done, and then the house will be ours! The new house is very different from the Wee House, but it is absolutely gorgeous and we are very excited to get the sale finalized and to move in. I'll post some pictures as soon as I can.

And now for the letter:

Dear Persons who left their ugly-ass couch in our back yard,

That was SO kind of you! Thank you so much for leaving the ugly couch, and all the crap you piled on top of it, in our yard for us to take care of. We are sooooo grateful. And we totally understand how hard it must have been for you, after you had already loaded the couch and the crap into your truck, to drive the extra THREE BLOCKS to the Eco-station to drop them off there. No, no, that would have been IMPOSSIBLE. We are entirely understanding that our backyard was the most logical choice, and we look forward to paying the junk removal guy $80 to get rid of it for us. Because really, we have nothing better to do with our time or our money.

Forever yours,

WH and Chorus.

PS You're a jackass.

The Weekend

... was long, and trying.

• WH and I are embroiled in a highly aggravating situation with our accountant over our taxes. High aggravating, and also highly expensive. Sparing you all the details, this situation is the source of significant worry and tension, and has some fairly major financial implications both now and in the year to come.
  
• We were this close (you'll have to imagine me holding up my thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart) to getting a pre-list offer on our house this weekend, an offer that would have allowed us to save the commission for our real estate agent. But they phoned yesterday and backed out. They did so for entirely legitimate and understandable reasons, but still, it was disappointing.

Those are the majors and they, coupled with a few other little things, made for a difficult weekend. My reaction to these kinds of things is a strong desire to eat my body weight in jelly beans, which probably isn't helpful.

Weekend Review

Oy, what a weekend.

Saturday morning, we headed to Giant Do-It-Yourself Store and bought the tile and accessories for our kitchen backsplash, which was the last part of the kitchen reno project from last year that we had to finish. Once we got all that home, WH headed downtown to play a wedding and I went to the fabric store to find something suitable to reupholster the ends of our couches, where the cats have done some fairly impressive damage. In the meantime, our bathroom contractor arrived to fix the two windows he broke on our front porch. By the time WH got home from the wedding, I had one end of the love seat done and looking really good! By the same time, the contractor had decided that he couldn't fix the windows afterall and had gone away again. I finished the love seat and the couch while WH started tiling. He managed to get all the non-cut tile up before we headed to a Chamber Choir Executive meeting to discuss the budget for next year. Somewhere in that afternoon the cats got out of the house (twice) and needed to be retrieved. We had a somewhat panicked 10 minutes of not being able to find Baby Cat, but she appeared out of the back alley eventually. So that was Saturday.

Sunday morning, WH leapt out of bed at an early hour and went back to Giant Do-It-Yourself-Store to rent a wet tile saw and get the rest of the tile up. (No Church Choir this week.) I got up eventually, sorted the laundry and put the first load in the washer. A few minutes later I came downstairs and discovered that the floor drain, into which the washing machine drains, was backed up and that our basement floor was very, very wet. We borrowed MB's plumbing snake, but it didn't take us very long to figure out that we were dealing with a pretty major problem. Phoned emergency plumbing place, emergency plumber arrived and needed something ridiculous like NINETY FEET of snake to find the problem. Drum roll please.... TREE ROOTS! Not quite the news a person hopes for a week before putting a house on the market. Anyway, he got the immediate problem solved; we gave him $500 for his trouble. Sigh. But the tiling got done and looks fantastic!

Then we headed to the church for a rehearsal, and concert (unrelated to the rehearsal) and our annual St. Arnold's Beer Tasting event. While WH rehearsed, I helped get the food and set-up for the beer tasting ready. Then we decided not to go up for the concert afterall, and took advantage of the time we had before the tasting to get a bunch of the set-up done for this week's church rummage sale. You see, the rummage committee was all a-flutter that we had planned a concert and the tasting on the same afternoon as their traditional set-up, so we promised to do all the set-up. We await reports this morning of all the things we have set-up incorrectly.

Anyhoo, beer tasting was a great success... lots of food, plenty of beer, and a really wonderful turn-out. Our theme this time was comparing local beers with European imports, and then pairing the beer with local food. The comparisons led to some great conversations!! Once the event was over, we tackled the massive clean-up while the rummage sale set-up was completed. WH and I went out for dinner because we were, by this point, too exhausted to think about cooking. Came home, decided we were still too tired to think about any of the items on our house to-do list, and went to bed pretty quickly.

I slept well, which was good.

How was your weekend?

In which Chorus...

... probably overreacts, but feels good that she got her own way over something stupid and petty.

So the local Gigantic Chain Grocery Store has a deal of sorts involving their cloth re-usable bags, of which WH and I are the proud owner of seven. If you use the bags, and use your Gigantic Chain Grocery Store debit or credit card, you collect extra points towards discounts on future grocery orders. I think it would probably take a person 100 years of grocery shopping with the cloth bags to actually make up any meaningful discount... but that's beside the point.

I went grocery shopping on Saturday morning with my seven cloth bags. I bought roughly $200 worth of groceries. I took them to the checkout, where the cashier asked me if I needed plastic bags (for which they charge 2c a piece). I said that no, I didn't need plastic bags because I had seven of the cloth bags, and that I would be using my store debit card (so she would know to apply the points.)

She didn't apply them and gave me what I realize now was a dirty look.

She rang through all the groceries and told me the total. I asked, politely, if the points for my bags had been applied.

Cashier: "Well... how many do you have?"
Chorus: "Seven."
Cashier: "Well... are you going to be using ALL of them?"
Chorus: (whose smile was starting to be a bit forced) Yes, I am.

With perhaps more force than was necessary, she punched in the code for the bags.

I bagged everything up and was pushing my cart away when, and I kid you not, SHE STOPPED HELPING THE CUSTOMER BEHIND ME TO COUNT THE BAGS IN MY CART.

With full understanding that it's a stupid petty thing, it still gets under my skin. If stores want to create incentives for their customers, they shouldn't make their customers feel guilty about taking advantage of them.

This concludes a Monday Morning Rant.

In other news, Palm Sunday was GLORIOUS!

In Typical Monday Fashion...

... I dropped my coffee this morning getting out of the car in the parkade.

My travel mug broke, and my poor coffee ran down the concrete in a very distressing and dramatic fashion.

WH offered to give me his coffee, proving once again that he is seriously worth keeping.

I declined the offer and bought myself a cup from the student association coffee place on my way into the office.

Rating of the coffee I make at home on a scale of 1 (drain cleaner) to 10 (ground from the hands of Juan Valdez himself) = 9.5
Rating of the coffee made by the student association coffee place on the same scale as above = 6

I am feeling somewhat more sorry for myself about this than is reasonable, and dwelling on it also more than is reasonable.

Never mind, I'll get over it eventually.

Good football game yesterday, eh?

Oh, blech.

So I've posted once before about our hockey pool and about the fact that this year, I'm the only girl participating. It's really not a big deal to be the only girl; I've known all the other participants for a while, and they're all good guys, so while our pool has a fair amount of trash talking, the chatter always stays focused on the teams themselves.

Until yesterday.

One of our regular participants brought a friend to the pool, a guy that none of the rest of us really know. Fundamentally, this is great; the more participants, the more money! Early this week, my team had a little surge of success, and jumped over a whole bunch of others, including New Guy, to about 5th place in the standings. Somebody else mocked New Guy for being suddenly at the bottom of the pool, and asked how he was enjoying the view. New Guy responded that the view was just fine because there was a skirt above him.

So not, in the grand scheme of things, a REALLY offensive comment, but more just... yucky. And not really the kind of attention that I need or want as a part of my hockey pool participation. So WH, bless his heart, replied quickly that, actually, I was wearing pants, and that I was kicking New Guy's @ss all over the pool. So that was gratifying.

More than I am offended by the comment itself, I'm annoyed that New Guy went in that direction. He's introduced an element of awkwardness to the pool that has never existed before. Blech.

_____________

On another note, Baby Cat caught her first mouse last night!

In which Chorus rages...

It seems to me that we are inundated, daily, by stories that are horrifying, jarring, nasty and nauseating. Stories of war and the victims of it, stories of homes and lives destroyed by hurricanes, stories of desperation in the face of a crumbling economy.... there is no shortage. Somehow, in the face of them all, we manage to get up every morning and go on with our lives, living them as fruitfully and as productively and as happily as we can manage. We have an incredible capacity to manage this great quantity of sadness and soldier on.

But every now and again, a story comes along that I find much more difficult to digest. I'm not sure exactly why, but stories like this one will weigh on my mind for hours. And maybe that's because I struggle to comprehend how anybody finds this kind of thing amusing or entertaining or acceptable. It is so simply unnecessary and cruel... so clearly avoidable, so inexplicably nasty.

On Sleeping

I really like to sleep. I LOVE to sleep. I have had discussions with some friends and acquaintances who don't like to sleep, who view sleeping as an inconvenient interruption of otherwise busy days, but not me. I LOVE TO SLEEP.

Thankfully, I have also been a really good sleeper for most of my life. I fall asleep easily, I sleep through the night without interruption, and I sleep through thunder storms, sirens, etc. It also takes very little to get me to fall asleep on the couch for a nice nap.

In the last couple of weeks, however, something seems to have interrupted the flow. While I'm still falling asleep pretty easily, I wake up several times a night (last night, every hour) at the slightest noise or movement. For the last few nights, the temperature has been very warm in Prairie City, so I've had difficulty getting a comfortably arranged with blankets, sheets, husband, cats etc. But I don't think that the heat is entirely to blame, as restlessness was starting to become a regular occurence even before the temperature spiked.

And to make matters worse, when I wake up during the night, WH also usually wakes up (he's a much lighter sleeper than I am normally), and then NEITHER of us can get back to sleep and we're both cranky in the morning. Thankfully, he slept through all my turns and shuffles and sighs last night.

I'm hoping that I can get back to my normal schedule before the end of the summer and before the busy-ness of rehearsal and concert season starts up again!

In which Chorus Skips Rehearsal

So, since last night, when I made it successfully to and from Chamber Choir rehearsal without undue difficulty on the roads, we have received another 4 or 5 inches of snow, and the wind has picked up still more, which has the effect of blowing the snow almost perfectly horizontally across the road. So I'm skipping Orchestral Choir rehearsal tonight; it's simply too stressful to drive through this stuff white-knuckling it the whole way, and that experience is not good for the spirits, I find. We are quite early in the rehearsal process for Orchestral Choir's next concert, so this is probably as good as it gets in terms of rehearsals to miss.

According to weather-related sources, this will be the worst of it (touch wood), and we should be seeing some respite, both in snow and in temperature, in the next 24 hours. I'm hoping that the major snowfall will have stopped by the time I get home tonight so that I can shovel without feeling as though I'll have to get up tomorrow morning and do it again. Maybe that's overly optimistic; I'm not sure.

Bad weather has this way of overtaking all other possible blog topics...

In which Chorus kicks her blog

I am suffering from grumpiness, related to a kind of blogging block. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; there are dozens of potential posts dancing around in my brain at any given time. But when I've tried to write some of those posts, the words don't come in the way that I want them to.

BAD BLOG. (Kicks blog several times in the knee-cap.)

There now. Having failed at my attempt to write the post I wanted to, I instead present a list of things I'm hoping to get accomplished before WH gets home on the 27th

1. Get our hockey pool money all paid out. (Progress report: email sent this morning to our winners; making arrangements for delivery of payments, hopefully sooner rather than later.)
2. Arrange for piano delivery. (Progress report: DONE. The piano will be delivered on Friday.*)
   
3. Spring cleaning. (Progress report: Thought about it a lot; haven't actually started yet. What I have thought about is my desire to spend significant time in every single room of the house at some point in the next two weeks, to the effect that when WH gets home, the house won't just look clean, but IMPROVED.)
   
4. Deliver our donations to the church rummage sale. (Progress Report: I've set aside the clothes that we'll be donating, but I still need to have a look through our downstairs storage shelves to see what else might go. Have I mentioned on this blog before that I am clutter's worst nightmare?)
   
5. Bake a pie. (Progress Report: Just thought of this one in the last few minutes because I saw a picture of a pie. And I've never baked one before. This may wait until late next week so that WH can help me eat the pie.)
   
6. Put away dreaded pile of unsorted music at the church. (Progress report: I look at that pile with pure distaste every time I'm at the church. Hopefully one of these days, that distaste will turn to action.)
   
7. Surprise for WH. I can't provide too much detail about this one, suffice to say that I've consulted with my expert, and I think I have an action plan. Tee hee hee...
   

* Friends of ours have asked us to babysit their piano while they rebuild their garage, in which the piano was being stored while its refurbishment was pending. It's a beautiful old piano, with great carvings - just very badly needs to be tuned!)

In which Chorus puts a second-rate pro golfer in his place...

... because I have nothing better to do this morning.

Actually, that's a lie. I have lots of work to do, but this irritates me just enough to need to blog about it.

Here's the story.

So, even if Tripp Isenhour is telling the truth, and he didn't intend to hit the bird, and it was a complete fluke, and he was just trying to hit the tree, and the whole world is against him, and when he was a child he had to walk through 6 feet of snow uphill both ways to get to school, the situation still belies the question of why Tripp Isenhour doesn't realize that his actions still make him look like a jackass. Full stop.

Let's go over the highlights, shall we?

Tripp Isenhour was filming a golf instructional video. (Oooh, sign me up for two copies!)
A Protected Red-Shouldered Hawk was singing his little heart out to the world, because life was good and the sun was shining and he felt like he had lots to sing about.
Tripp Isenhour hit several golf balls in the direction of the hawk until he hit it, causing the bird's death.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that if Tripp Isenhour (and no, I hadn't heard of him either) thinks that the BIRD is what's causing problems with his golf game, he's slightly misdirected. As one commentator said, "The really sad thing about this situation is that it was possibly the first solid golf shot that Tripp Isenhour has hit in a long time."

Let me be honest; I like golf. WH is an avid golfer, and I've picked up the game in the last couple of years and really enjoy playing. But anytime I step on a golf course, I do so with the recognition that the land I'm playing on, and the birds and the gophers and the rabbits and the deer, WERE THERE FIRST. And to cause any distress to any of them for the sake of a ridiculous game makes a person just about as petty and small and STUPID as it's possible to be.

Idiot.

Y'all are liars!

So first it was James Fey and his fake memoir of substance abuse, crime and rehabilitation, A Million Little Pieces, which probably got more attention than it needed or deserved due to Oprah's very public and awkward flaying of the author.

Then last week, news broke that Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, in which the author describes being raised by wolves during the Second World War after her parents were deported by the Nazis, is complete and utter fiction. For some strange reason, this news surprised people. (Seriously? Raised by wolves??)

And on the tail of that news, we hear that Love and Consequences, a story of gang-life and poverty in Los Angeles, is also fake. The author, Margaret B. Jones, is in fact Margaret Seltzer, and she bears pretty much no resemblance to the person she claims to be in the book.

I have several questions. First and foremost, "What the h*ll is wrong with you people?"

Now that I have that out of the way, I am prepared to engage in more articulate consideration of why people feel compelled to create these wildly outrageous LIES ('cause they are lies, folks) and risk everything -- career, reputation, family -- to publish these LIES as biographical truth. Because one could, if one felt really compelled to write a story about, say, a little girl being raised by wolves during a period of global conflict, write that story and publish it as fiction. "Here is a story (fictional) about a (fictional) person growing up in L.A amid tremendous proverty and gang-activity," one could advertise.

I can hear the counter-argument to that. The counter-argument is that the genre of Biography or Memoire is EXTRA-compelling (and therefore marketable) because the stories are TRUE! People will be more willing to buy these extra-compelling books because they can read TRUE stories about REAL people and be amazed by the tremendous courage/intelligence/tenacity demonstrated by the subject.

To this counter argument, I call BULL. The choice to publish fictional material as truth isn't clever marketing; it's laziness. It is the job of the author to write stories that are compelling to the reader. And if the author can't do that without tagging the story with "AND IT'S ALL TRUE, FOLKS!" then the author is not a very good one and should think about doing something else.

And I know that because I have read hundreds and hundreds of fictional books by fantastic authors that have made me cry or laugh or feel nauseated or get angry or be touched. And at no point in reading those books did I say to myself, "Well, if only this book were a memoire; then it would be REALLY good."

What makes me so angry about these stories is the damage they cause to real people who have chosen to tell their real stories in writing. What happens to the poor woman who really WAS raised by wolves during the Second World War and wants to tell that story to the world. Well, instead of interested readers, that story now gets met immediately by doubt and suspicion. I'm being facetious in my example, but the difficulty is a real one. The damage caused by these kinds of LIES extends beyond the damage to the author and his/her reputation, and to those who are genuinely devoted to the art of biographical writing.

This concludes my rant.

I dislike mail.

Actually, it's less a dislike, and more a kind of resentment.

And the resentment doesn't come from the stereotypical "all we ever get is bills" angle, and it doesn't mean that I don't enjoy receiving correspondance from friends and family who are far afield. Quite the contrary; I love getting notes and cards from people.

No, the automatic narrowing of eyes and curling of lips that inevitably cross my face when I spy the pile of letters, flyers, magazines, etc. on our front porch comes from a more complicated place. It comes from the place deep inside me that is engaged in what I expect will be a life-long battle against piles of paper in my house.

Paper is the number-one enemy in my fight against clutter. And the mail is the worst offender.

We've introduced a couple of methods by which we can control the mail-related paper coming in to the house, most notably by putting a recycling bin on the front porch so that most flyers, junk mail etc. don't come in to the house at all, but go straight into the can. In addition, I am determined to get the upper hand on the stacks of paper that have accumulated in our office since we moved in, so am trying to dedicate some time every evening to sorting and throwing things out. I have found that the problem is not just about quantity; it's also about order. We haven't yet found a good system for handling incoming paper and getting it put in its rightful place as soon as possible, so bits and pieces of paper lie around on the coffee table, for example, untended, which makes me nuts.

So you've been warned, paper. It's ON. And I will take. you. down.

Oh Good GRIEF.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2007/12/20/pullman-compass-ban.html

To summarize the article above, the Toronto Catholic School Board has banned the Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and its two sequels from school libraries for not being conducive to the Board's "governing values." A great deal has been written about the trilogy's so-called anti-religious themes, and about the author's atheism.

Let me start by saying, clearly, that I thought The Golden Compass was a wonderful, beautifully told story. The book is chalk-full of fantastic imagery, rich characters and deep imagination. I loved it.

But the issue is not about the quality of the story. And MY issue isn't really even about whether or not the books are anti-religious. My issue with this kind of book-banning, that is the kind that is intended to "spare" children from perspectives we don't want them to have, is that it assumes one really ridiculous thing. It assumes that our children are stupid. It assumes that our children will believe everything they read, that our children have no ability to separate reality from fiction, that a story can immediately overrun any other teaching that has been given to a child from the moment that child was born. It assumes that our children can't think critically, even that the act of thinking critically is bad. It assumes that children have no imagination.

It is a narrow-minded and short-sighted act, and it reeks of defensiveness.

And it BOTHERS me. I certainly understand that there are books/movies/TV shows out there that are not suitable for children, and I'm not suggesting that caution and care should not be exercised when deciding what children should be exposed to. BUT THIS IS A CHILDREN'S STORY, and a good one, at that. Yes, it's dark, and scary and frightening, at times. And the story is quite probably coloured by Philip Pullman's perspective on the world (and possibly on the church). But I have a hard time believing that he sat at his desk, hunched over, giggling to himself, saying, "Hee hee hee... I'll write this story and it will be clearly anti-church, and then all the kiddies will be atheists and then I'll take over the WORLD! BWAHAHA..."

If there could be a universal getting of a grip on this one, it would be good.

Mid-Week Grumps

Today is the office Christmas party. Which will be lovely, I'm sure. There will be nice food, and I think there will be wine (yum), and it will be a nice opportunity to sit socially with co-workers that I don't often chat with.

The part of the lunch to which I am not looking forward is caroling. Chorus volunteered herself to lead the singing of Christmas carols. This volunteerism is the culmination (or continuation?) of a long and moronic discussion amongst staff of the office about what "entertainment" we should have at the Christmas lunch. You see, a couple of years ago, we hired one of the university choirs to sing at the Christmas lunch. I wasn't working here at the time, but apparently the choir was lovely. About 80% of the people really liked them. But the other 20% were indignant that nobody had recognized that not everybody LIKES choirs, didn't we know, and we should do something more... "fun" for entertainment. So last year, we didn't book the choir, and I, along with a few co-workers led some carol singing. And then the folks who had liked the choir took the liberty of approaching me after the lunch last year and saying things like, "No offense, but last year we had a choir, and they were REALLY GOOD," and "Did you know that we hired a choir last year? Maybe we should do that again next year."

And yet somehow, here I am again, with carol books and word sheets all copied to lead carols over lunch. But I swear to the Most High, that the first person who reminds me that "One time, we had a choir and they were awesome," is going to get my thumb, right in the eye.

How's that for Christmas spirit?

Frustrations

Today feels bogged down in little frustrations. And of course, as soon as one or two frustrations make themselves apparent, I start looking for other ones, just to try and improve the efficiences of my frustration.

WH took me to the Dr. this morning to have my blood (and other things) tested in the hopes that whatever it is that is making my hands and feet feel like they're asleep all the time would make itself apparent. While we wait for test results (should appear before tomorrow), I am increasingly frustrated by the symptoms. They're not painful, exactly, but just uncomfortable enough to be impossible to ignore.

A colleague at Colourful U, responsible for a job search for which I applied and was not short-listed, was kind enough to speak to me on the subject last night, and tell me that though I was "long listed," I was lacking HR experience. This fact is not news to me. It's a fact that has been commented upon by my supervisors in my own department. It's a fact they have talked about rectifying when they take my (currently) contract position and make it permanent. They have been talking about doing THAT since April. Though I love my job, today these facts are frustrating.

And other little things that come and that I blow out of proportion. Ne'er mind; the day is almost done and we're in for the evening, with the possible exception of doing some frame shopping. So it's ok.

In order to not dedicate an entire blog entry to whining today, I'll end with some pieces of thankfulness:
-Parents in Law are coming in to town this weekend for a party, for WH's convocation from the Doctor of Music program, for a Symphonic Choir concert in which WH is conducting, for good conversation, and good times!
-There is a bottle of champagne at home that I think we might consume tonight.
-It has been a fair to medium day in terms of productivity, and if that doesn't seem like such a big deal, think how productive YOU would be if both your feet and one hand were asleep for most of the day. ;)