No, Really... He Likes Books

Hola! Things are still nutty around here. The leaves are turning red (well, brown, but work with me). Toddlers are turning into preschoolers. Infants are turning into babies.

Specifically, infants are turning into loud, loud, let-me-just-say-that-again LOUD babies. To wit:



We do feel lucky to have such a jolly baby this time around, unlike his grouchasaurus older brother. It's just kind of funny that Will's happiness makes him sound exactly like Archie Bunker.

Now, Where Was I?

As you may have guessed (if, in fact, there still is a "you" out there after my long silence), I've been taking a little break from this site. Being a mom to two kids -- no matter how awesome said kids are -- kind of kicked my ass for a while. And I got the Apartment Therapy gig, which is great fun, but takes up the little free time I have. And I just signed on to start work on another site this fall, for a tremendously cool and inspiring show that'll be on the Food Network in the spring. And I finally cleaned my closet.

But I'll be back, I swear. I'm still tracking my reading, such as it is. (Bad news: Unless you count kids' books, I'm not going to hit 50 books this year, for the first time since I started this site.)

I've missed you guys (again with the hypothetical "you"). Stick around, okay?

Best Resignation Letter Ever

Stewart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr, has resigned from the company, signifying a parting of ways with Flickr's new owner, Yahoo. And his McSweeney's-esque exit letter is one of the best things I've read in ages.

It begins:

Dear Brad,

As you know, tin is in my blood. For generations my family has worked with this most useful of metals. When I joined Yahoo! back in '21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth, and innovation. I knew it was the place for me.

Over the decades, as the company grew and expanded, first into dyes and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry, and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was at the core of the business.

After the war, as we continued to branch out into electronics, all manner of aeronautical frames, hulls and bodies, computing and tabulating machines, precision controls, and later, farther afield -- real estate, brewing, consumer finance, grain processing, lighting and salty snacks -- I took it in stride, for there was still a place for me...

It gets even better. Go here to read the rest.

Good for you, Mr. Butterfield. That's the kind of soul-satisfying "burn the bridges" epistolary action you only see from multi-millionaires. Or from Rusty.

We All Live in a Capital I

If you pay attention, you can see the exact moment when Sam starts phoning in his performance.

Cattle Calling

Hey all! I'm trying out for a blogger position at Ohdeedoh, Apartment Therapy's site for kids (well, probably more for their parents, but you know). I've been a huge fan of AT for years, so, as you can imagine, I'm thrilled and honoured to have made it to the shortlist. My first audition post is up today. Head on over and see if you can guess which one it is.

Latest Report from the "Context is Everything" Department

To be honest, I'm not even sure context would help with some of these:

"How many winds are there in Vancouver?"
"My orange blood protects my red blood from being burned by the sun."
"A long time ago, before dump trucks were invented, front-end loaders dumped their loads into monster trucks."
"I'm sitting on the step and watching the fairies."
"'I don't like the look of that guy!' That's what octopuses and squids and jellyfishes say when they see a shark."
"Airplanes are sometimes made of plastic and sometimes made of toilet paper."
"I love sitting with you and watching the world go by."

Life May Be a Vale of Tears, but at Least We Have All That Dark Matter to Look Forward To

If you want to hold tight to your last vestige of childlike optimism and faith that humanity is headed in a good direction, I strongly advise you not to read the June issue of Harper's cover to cover.

If, on the other hand, you want to put your own petty beefs into some kind of perspective, have at 'er.

Inside Eudora Welty's Bedroom (and Other Places You Never Thought You'd See)

“This is the phone that William Faulkner was summoned to while working in the fields, to learn the news that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The writing above the phone is Faulkner's informal address book, preserved in his own handwriting.”

Faulkner's home -- as well as the homes of other Southern literary giants Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor -- is featured in a series called "A Sense of Place" by photographer Susana Raab. What's even cooler is that you can buy some of these prints in her Etsy shop.

To be honest, as interesting as I find this series, the idea of my own bedroom being preserved as a shrine freaks me out a little. Like, I hope somebody at least hides the porn. That won't go over well with the more sensitive tourists.

(via Apartment Therapy)

I Love Lynda Barry So Much, It Hurts a Little

When Barry created her "100 Poses of Marlys" series several years ago, I ordered one of the pieces, sending in my order with a fan letter so gushingly effuse I'd be embarrassed about it now if it weren't for the fact that I meant -- and still mean -- every word.

I still have the letter Barry wrote me back (enclosed with my signed original of "Graceful Pose Marlys"). It's a real letter, not one of those depressing form deals, and Barry is every bit as warm and awesome as you'd expect her to be. I can't even hold it against her that her novel, Cruddy, may have permanently damaged me.

So of course I read this recent interview with Barry in The New York Times from start to finish. It's a nice write-up, even if they did use the word "spunky" to describe Marlys. It's kind of too bad that she's become so reclusive (she and her husband live on a dairy farm, growing most of their own food and even chopping their own wood for fuel), but hey, whatever makes her happy.

On the plus side for the rest of us, she has a new book coming out, What It Is, which explains her method of making drawings and stories. I'll be grabbing a copy, but what I really wish is that I could attend Barry's workshop, "Writing the Unthinkable":

Taking the workshop, which Ms. Barry teaches several times a year, is a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance piece. Aided by her assistant, Betty Bong (in reality, Kelly Hogan, a torch singer who lives in Chicago), Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause.

As Marlys would say, daaang.

Why You Should Never Discuss the Classics with Preschoolers

"Why did Moby Dick want to wreck the Pequod?"
"Well, maybe it was because the Pequod hunted whales, and he didn't want to be hunted."
"Why did the Pequod hunt whales?"
"Because a long time ago, people used oil from whales for their lights and things."
"Why did they use oil from whales?"
"People hadn't discovered electricity yet. Remember when we talked about how lights use electricity?"
"Why didn't people discover electricity yet?"
"I guess because it just hadn't occurred to them."
"Why?"
"Well, I don't know. What do you think?"
"No, what do YOU think?"
"I'm kind of stumped, actually."
"Why are you stumped, actually?"

And then my head exploded. The end.

(This post would not have been possible without this fabulous pop-up edition of Moby-Dick, given to Sam by our good friend Shona. It's making me reconsider my hard-line stance against reading the unexpurgated version.)

For Doppelsis

I know, I know. I don't update this site, I don't return emails, I don't send pictures of the kids. Things have been pretty hectic, and I keep forgetting to pull out the camera. But if you want to know what Will looks like these days, this picture should give you a pretty good idea:

(More photos, plus heartwarming story, here.)

I'm a Yuppie Douchebag and That's Okay

A quick physical inventory:

• Head - Ache-y and congested
• Throat - Scratchy
• Ears - Ouchy
• Back - Sore from non-stop holding of baby, who may also be getting sick
• All the rest - Well, flabbier than I'd like, to be frank

But today, right now, none of this matters. For against all odds, my elder son has just been enrolled successfully in the good preschool.

Yes, preschool concerns are a hallmark of your standard-issue yuppie douchebag. If wanting my kid to go to the school that looks like the inside of a charming ski lodge and has the awesome outdoor play area makes me a yuppie douchebag, then I accept that. Let the douchery begin!

An Open Letter to Everyone Who Told Me Two Kids Are Almost as Easy as One

Dear fellow parents,

Please inspect your pants. I believe careful examination will reveal that they are on fire.

Love,
Doppelganger

So, What Did You Do for the Long Weekend?

Me? I went and had a baby. This one, to be specific:

Say howdy to William Falco. Feel free to call him Will. Some of you may be wondering if there's some deep literary significance to either of his given names, like his elder bro's. Literature is stuffed to the gills with Williams, of course... Shakespeare, Thackeray, Carlos Williams. I like those guys a lot, but I think that, deep down, I just like the fact that Will's name is both a verb and a noun. Though, given how hard I had to fight with myself not to title this post something like "Where There's a Will, There's a Way!" he may not thank me for this later.

As for Falco, that was the name of Rusty's grandfather, who brought his family from Italy to the New Country on a steamship at the turn of the century. A bit of an adventurer, which merits a naming, I think. Plus, if you think I'm missing out on a legitimate opportunity to name one of my offspring Falco, then you don't realize what a child of the '80s I truly am.

Posting has been sporadic lately, but now that I've got lots of free time for one-handed typing (whoa! deja vu!), you can expect to see a lot more of me 'round these parts.

And a happy day to you.

"I Hereby Claim This Female Reproductive System in the Name of... Me!"

Time to learn stuff!

Braxton Hicks contractions are named after John Braxton Hicks, an English doctor who, according to Wikipedia, "first described them" in 1872.

And also according to Wikipedia, the G-spot is named after the German gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg who "first hypothesized its existence" in 1944.

And the Skene's gland, the gland ostensibly responsible for the elusive female ejaculatory orgasm? Again we look to Wikipedia to learn that these glands are named after the physician who "described them first in Western medical literature," one Alexander Skene.

Note the operative word "first" in all these claims. Because I'm sure not a single woman in the history of humankind ever noticed any of these things about their own bodies until they were pointed out to them. They were probably too busy doing EVERYTHING ELSE.

I Think I've Found My New Calling

From the LA Times:

The Los Angeles metropolitan area accounts for more than 5% of U.S. book sales, a figure surpassed only by New York City, according to Nielsen BookScan. But even though a study by the National Endowment for the Arts says Angelenos read more than their Manhattan counterparts, Los Angeles still ranks 53rd on the America's Most Literate Cities report measuring per-capita usage of bookstores and libraries, among other things.

Which is perhaps why a certain segment of the population in Southern California has begun to showcase the home library as an image-enhancing badge of literacy. The trend has even spawned a service: the library consultant.

Can you imagine? Getting PAID to tell people what books to read. This scheme involves two of my favourite things: being bossy, and receiving money for very little effort.

[via Apartment Therapy]

Oh, Sure, NOW I Find Out You Can Just Buy One on Craigslist

Coincidentally, "Ennui" Rhymes with "Almost Three"

So I just realized that when Sam plaintively tells us "I don't want to do anything," it means one of three things, depending on which word is emphasized:

"I don't want to do ANYTHING."
Translation: I am bored.

"I don't want to DO anything."
Translation: I am inconsolably sad for no apparent reason, though I invite you to try cheering me up.

"I don't WANT to do anything."
Translation: Your efforts are laughable.

And Then He Said "Eff You"

"Oh my god."
"I can't watch this right now! I'm all hormonal. It'll make me cry!"
"I'm crying right now."
"Baby."

Giving to Others Makes Me Hot

It's a troubling mental picture, isn't it? An eight-months-pregnant lady all hot and bothered? I promise never to mention it again if you haul your delightful derriere over to the Dewey Donation System website to check out this year's drive.

Donating, of course, is an awesome first step. Plugging the drive on your own blog/website/newsletter/skywriting campaign is an excellent choice as well. And if you have any goods or services to donate as prizes... well, that may just earn you a special seat next to your favourite deity in book heaven.

P.S. If you're interested in what I gave, go here.

Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

This series of repurposed paintings is so awesome, it may actually be beyond awesome.

[via design*sponge]

Watch That First Step. It's a Doozy.

"Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client's desire for a library to form a 'library staircase' in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books."

Trust me. You NEED to see the rest of the photos of this feat of architectural genius.

[via Apartment Therapy]

Know-It-All

"Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
"What's that, Sammy?"
"Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
"Ah. That's what I thought you said."
"..."
"Princess Leia says that, doesn't she, Sam?"
"Actually, R2-D2 says that."
"Well, yes, technically... I suppose he does."
"Not technically. ACTUALLY."

Fun to Say, AND TRUE

Moses supposes his toeses are roses,
But Moses supposes erroneously.
For nobody's toeses are posies of roses.
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

Oops.

If you're seven-and-a-half months pregnant, you might want to think twice about emailing your friends a link to an amusing article, using the article's headline as the subject line. Especially if said headline reads as follows:

Baby won't wait; arrives in driveway

Handy

I've been on bit of a book-organizing bender lately, which is why, despite not normally being much of an impulse shopper, I had to order two sets of these bookends for Sam's room as soon as I saw them on Apartment Therapy this morning:

If you don't agree that they're ten different flavours of awesome, I don't want to know about it.

More From the "Context is Everything" Department

More things my toddler has said in public that were hard to explain to strangers (numbers 287 through 291):

"I need to keep my face on to keep my head warm."
"Daddy fell down the basement stairs and was eaten by the dryer."
"The Buddha is not a dinosaur or a monster or a Komodo dragon."
"I have to take your head to Home Depot and use your eyes to buy tools."
"There's a Canadian on your leg."

Catching Up

Goodness. Looks like I left the Christmas tree up a little late this year. How embarrassing.

I hope you all had a great holiday, however you chose to celebrate -- or not celebrate -- it, and that your new year has proved satisfactory, at the very least, so far. Mine was pretty good, and the new year seems A-OK so far. I don't have any resolutions or anything, other than, you know, popping out another baby and trying not to go batshit crazy. Those seem attainable, I think.

Since I feel like some catch-up is in order, a few life events of note:

• Our cat Lulu had to be put down a couple of days after Christmas. She was sixteen years old, blind, mostly deaf, incontinent, and suffered from high blood pressure and lymphoma. She started to fail noticeably before Christmas and things went downhill quickly one day. We were sad, and yeah, the timing sure sucked, but we were glad that at least we were all at home for the holidays so that we could monitor her closely and then say goodbye properly. She was the sweetest cat you could imagine, and she was sweet all the way up to the end. I was worried that she'd be afraid, but she went peacefully. Rusty gave her a proper Dickensian burial in the backyard in the cold, sleeting, dark-grey late afternoon.
  
  
• On a more upbeat note, gestation continues apace. We're counting down the final ten weeks, which is kind of shocking, all the more so because we haven't done anything to get ready. We figure we'll pick up some diapers in early March.
  
  
• Oh, but get this: my doctor, whom I've been seeing for ten years and I really like, forgot to tell me that she's no longer doing deliveries. I just found this out two weeks ago. Argh, right? Fortunately, I've always been interested in the idea of midwifery, and even more fortunately, my good friend Anne-Marie happens to work for an excellent midwifery clinic and got me in the door quickly, and now I'm all set to go. Nonplussed? Moi? Bah! My midwife also permanently endeared herself to me, via my sense of medical vanity, by looking at my records and exclaiming about my unbelievably awesome hemaglobin. Everyone has to be good at something, right? In my case it would seem to be absorbing iron. You can't tell it to look at me, but I'm socking away minerals like a mofo over here.
  
  
• I've been freelancing since September, when I landed a big contract for a website for the Discovery Channel, which launched a month ago. I'm the solo site editor, which has been awesome and challenging and again awesome (because dude, it's the DISCOVERY CHANNEL, yo). It's probably the perfect project for me to cut my freelance teeth on, and the timing couldn't have been better, as it wraps up about three weeks before my due date. (If you're wondering, yes, I do occasionally find it uncomfortable to sit with this horseshoe up my ass.)
  
  
• Despite the fact that both Rusty and I have been gunned, work-wise, we've been doing a LOT of work around the house for the past month... cleaning, purging, organizing, painting, and getting really familiar with the floorplan of the nearest IKEA. One of the highlights of all our work is that we finally -- FINALLY! -- got new bookshelves in the kitchen, replacing our crappy old utility shelves with a much nicer set of Billy shelves (with the height extender, which I highly recommend for that authentic library look). To jog your memory, here are the old shelves. And here are the new ones:

• Despite all this other stuff, I don't know how but I've actually managed to read a lot of books. I'll get around to recapping my remaining books from 2007 one of these days. Who knows, I may even throw in a top ten list or something like that. And then, man, I've got to nail the ones I've read so far in 2008, or else they're going to totally get on top of me.

Am I the only person who's ever looked forward to her maternity leave so that she'll finally get a chance to friggin' relax?

Merry Merry!

My very best wishes for peace and happiness to you all. May your turkey be moist, may your socks stay dry, and may you have all the books you can read, now and in the new year.

[Photo from IJM]

Next Up: Beowulf

Ever since young Master Sam sat raptly through an entire reading of Green Eggs and Ham at the age of four months, the works of Dr. Seuss have been in pretty heavy rotation around our house. This could explain why, when one of his grandmothers asked him who would be coming down the chimney at Christmas, he immediately responded with "The Grinch!"

I knew Sam was a fan of the Grinch and his holiday-thwarting shenanigans, but I didn't realize how big a fan until I overheard him reciting the following to himself, verbatim, while he was noodling around with his toy cars:

And the Grinch grabbed the tree, and he started to shove,
When he heard a small sound like the coo of a dove.
He turned around fast, and he saw a small Who!
Little Cindy-Lou Who, who was not more than two.

The Grinch had been caught by this little Who daughter,
Who'd got out of bed for a cup of cold water.
She stared at the Grinch and said, "Santy Claus, why,
Why are you taking our Christmas tree? WHY?"

But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick,
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
"Why, my sweet little tot," the fake Santy Claus lied,
"There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side.
So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear.
I'll fix it up there. Then I'll bring it back here."

And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head
And he got her a drink and he sent he to bed.
And when Cindy-Lou Who went to bed with her cup,
HE went to the chimney and stuffed the tree up!

Then the last thing he took
Was the log for their fire.
Then he went up the chimney himself, the old liar.
On their walls he left nothing but hooks, and some wire.

And the one speck of food
That he left in the house
Was a crumb that was even too small for a mouse.

Then he did the same thing
To the other Whos' houses,
Leaving crumbs
Much too small
For the other Whos' mouses!

Now if only this awesome toddler brain power could be channelled into something like, say, learning not to poop his pants.

Storytelling Tip #381: Respect Your Audience

"How did bedtime go?"
"Fine."
"Did you tell more stories from Star Wars?"
"That's getting kind of old, so I decided to mix it up by using the characters in regular fairy tales."
"So what story did you tell?"
"Jack and the Beanstalk. But I used Luke Skywalker instead of Jack. And he gets the magic beans from Obi Wan Kenobi, when he goes into town to try to sell the family's droid. And then when he climbs up the beanstalk, the Death Star is at the top."
"I... see. How did it go over?"
"He really liked it. But I was really tired, so when I got to the part with the goose that lays the golden egg, I accidentally made it say quack-quack. And then he got really upset and was all, 'Geese don't say quack-quack! Geese say honk-honk!'"
"Well, he has a point."
"Sure, but it kind of seemed like we'd agreed on a fair degree of suspension of disbelief."
"But only if you're being creative. Like, maybe you could have gotten away with it if you'd had the goose go woof-woof or moo-moo, or something like that."
"True. Woof-woof would have been creatively absurd."
"Exactly. Quack-quack is just sloppy."

Those Trees Aren't Going to Kill Themselves, You Know

Gah! Sick! Pregnant! Toddler! Deadlines! Did I already say "Gah!"?

It's going to be a list-y week. (It would seem that, for me, the week starts on Wednesday.) So here's the first instalment.

Like many people who live, work, and love on the internet, Rusty and I have found our attention spans shrivelling to the point where an article that requires scrolling is considered way too wordy to deserve our precious clicking time. So, in an effort to keep our aging brains from further atrophy, we've recommitting to print magazines, which were once the great love of our pre-internet life. Here are the ones we've subscribed to so far:

Dwell
Maisonneuve
Harper's
The Walrus
The Economist

I'd explain why we chose each publication, but that would defeat the entire purpose of the brief list post. I will say that we've been getting them for a couple of months now, and so far we've actually been reading them, pretty much cover to cover. This could be because we keep them in the bathroom, which is one of the favourite retreats of savvy parents of small children. Because while you can't say to your partner, "Hey, watch the kid while I go fuck off with a magazine for half an hour," you can say, "Hey, keep an eye on the boy while I use the facilities, okay?" And then what's he going to do? Dispute it? Time you?

And in conclusion, I win!