I was at World Trivia Night on Friday, which is a huge trivia competition done in teams of 10 people here in Ottawa, once a year. There are a LOT of teams, and as a result we are usually crammed in there pretty tightly. I was sitting at the corner of our table of 10, and pretty much back-to-back with the lady on the team next to us who was at the corner of her team’s table.

Over the course of the evening, those of us at that end of the table (sending shoutouts to my poker buddy LuckySevens and Bibliomama) smelled the distinctive heavy sweet smell of weed. It took us a while but we eventually pinpointed it to the lady sitting back-to-back with me.

She had smoked enough of it beforehand to smell of it when she arrived. There were two 15-minute breaks in the three-hour evening, and during both she went outside and smoked more (evidence: whiff test).

It was just kind of an interesting thing. I’ve smelled it before at say, concerts, or in the parking lot outside the Circle K down the street from us. But this was a quiet sort of average public event. I guess this kind of thing might happen more often now that marijuana is legal.

The weirdest thing for me was how incredibly normal this lady seemed. She was about my age and about my size (read: starting to thicken out in the middle a bit and sporting some grey hairs). She looked like your average soccer mom. She was there with her husband/partner and they seemed really happy and cuddly. She looked healthy, although I know some kinds of pain don’t really have external symptoms.

It wasn’t a horrifying or icky thing or anything like that. Just curious and interesting. Is this going to be a typical thing now, or was it just a fluke? Are average soccer moms toking up several times a day, or is it still just something for people who are sick and/or rock stars?

I guess I just assumed that with the legalization of pot, it would be something people do in their homes, in private, quietly, with a small circle of friends. Maybe something you did in a party situation; not something you did three times in a three-hour window while at a public event. I wasn’t anticipating the general public to quickly start carrying it around and smoking it freely. Maybe I was naive.

But it does make me think it will be hard to keep it out of the hands of young people.

Have you had any experience with legalized pot so far? What have you seen?

(Also: free use of the phrase “toking up” in this post is meant to disturb my teenagers, who had never heard that term before and still deny that it even exists. I’m bringing it back, baby!)

Our family is a multiracial family – my husband is Indian – and I feel so lucky to live in a place where a) I have never once thought that this could be any kind of problem, and b) at least ten other mixed race families live on my very own street, so it’s literally no big deal. Surburban Ottawa rocks, y’all!

But that said, I am vaguely and mildly aware that there are very few mixed race characters on TV and in the movies. So when I see one, I do notice, and I like it.

Recently I watched a Christmas movie on Netflix while I was spending the day cooking for a Girl Guide sleepover. It was called The Holiday Calendar and the main character had a white mom and a black dad and it was all super casual, like not even pointed out, absolutely not any kind of factor in the story.

Don’t get me wrong, you should NOT watch this movie. It was terrible. (My apologies to those friends of mine on Facebook who liked it and recommended it.) Terrible acting and writing. But still, it will always have a little special place in my heart for the way it showed a multirace family as being a totally normal thing.

In a similar way, this is my favourite TV commercial. It’s for Tide Pods and they have bought my respect and goodwill forever for the same reason – the way they showcase a multiracial family like it’s no big deal.

Hard to believe that no more than five years ago, similar commercials from Old Navy and Cheerios caused a big stink. We’ve come a long way, which is nice, considering the first black-white kiss on TV was back in 1977 and was a huge, huge deal. No need to rush or anything, pop culture!

When you see yourself reflected in movies and TV, it’s something, isn’t it? I don’t know, I just get a warm feeling. I shouldn’t need a cheesy romance movie or a Tide commercial to feel like my family is normal and accepted, but I guess I do. It’s just reassuring – especially the ad, as advertising is usually all about including the widest audience possible and not offending anyone. Canada is a pretty awesome place to be right now, I’d say.

I love a good craft.

Some people like a craft where they are given a random assortment of supplies and then they invent something. Or they love taking a jumble of home-related stuff and creating a tableau. Or they like just getting their hands into some clay or paint or pastels and seeing what happens.

I am not that kind of crafter – I really love to make a THING out of a KIT. I am a paint-by-numbers, follow the Pinterest directions, use this pattern and instructions kind of girl. But that is good crafting, too. It’s just creative enough for me and I get a lot of satisfaction out of making something and that can be fun.

This weekend, for example, I made some flags for a Semaphore station I am running at a city-wide Girl Guide event on Saturday.

It took a long time and I had to invest my own money in the supplies, both of which are the primary things I like to bitch about when it comes to Girl Guides, but on the other hand I MADE FLAGS, which is pretty much my most favourite thing in the world so it’s all good. Hopefully the event goes well, as I am not just running a station, but I am supervising 12 of my guides on my own because no other leaders could come, plus I am cooking four different dishes for 300 people because they couldn’t get enough people to cook, AND I have to sleep on the floor because there isn’t any room for blow-up mattresses. SIGH.

I really am not doing a good job of convincing you all to be Girl Guide leaders, am I? PLEASE COME LEAD MY UNIT.

My youngest is also heavily into crafts and when she is bored around here, she is driven to create. Which I totally get, but also, it often means there is crafty stuff all over our one table when it’s time to eat/do homework/play cards/literally anything else that requires a flat surface. We really need a craft room here but sadly, three rooms of my house are now given over exclusively to Girl Guide storage so that makes it tough to find room.

(Really, you WANT to come lead my unit! You do!)

Little Miss Sunshine is also a by-the-kit kind of crafter so she likes to look things up on Instagram (she subscribes to many, many crafting feeds) and then mimic them. Lately she has been working on a series of Jars Painted To Look Like Fruit, which I think is actually a mish mash of a craft we did in guides combined with other stuff she’s seen online. She has several of them now but I could only find this one – it’s her Strawberry – for a photo:

I forsee an Etsy shop in her future.

And while we’re talking about getting creative, I was tired of my middle daughter’s bedroom floor having a foot-deep layer of discarded clothing on it all the time. So I bought her some of those temporary mount hooks for her wall and now it looks like this in there:

That’s making me happy. Man, that girl sure does love her plaid.

Halloween was last night. I have a firm “no trick or treating after Grade 8 rule” but then a friend of Gal Smiley’s, who moved away over the summer, called and said she wanted to go out and so I let her go, along with Little Miss Sunshine. The Captain is now in Grade 10 and he said “all his friends” were still going out and he was quite bitter about not being allowed to go. Am I a Halloween Scrooge? Just wondering.

One of my favourite things about Sorting Through The Candy is looking at the unusual treats some people give out. Last year we got several Fortune Cookies and personally I thought that was pretty cool. This year each of the kids got a freezie, unfrozen, which is interesting (and likely very cost effective) but I envisioned several exploding inside the trick-or-treat bags of small children, leading to unhappy kids and even more unhappy parents, so I’m thinking that’s a pass. The Little Miss also got two Kool Aid Jammers, which are definitely sweet enough to count as a treat but I still would guess that they came from a “we ran out of candy” house, or possibly a “we forgot to buy candy” house.

We have one house on our street that hands out cans of pop. (The Little Miss pointed out that it is always caffeine free pop, like Sprite or Cream Soda or MUG Root Beer, in case you are wondering about that.) I used to think this was weird and also decadent, as we usually get at least 300 kids on our street each year. But this morning Little Miss Sunshine and I were talking it over, and I may be sold.

Consider:
If you buy your pop at Costco, you are likely paying in the range of 20 cents a can.

With 300 kids at your door, that’s about $60.

I bought 8 boxes of candy – because the pieces are so small, I like to give two per kid – and I got it on sale at $15 a box, but that is still $120.

Plus, if there are leftovers – and we do have some this year, as we only got 270 kids at the door last night – we are stuck with a lot of leftover candy, which I either have to give away or eat, and then I have to buy new pants. But the pop family – a family of six – will likely use up the leftovers over the course of the year, even if they only have it as treats or on special occasions.

Conclusion: GENIUS.

The only real drawback is that it is very heavy in a kid’s bag, and for very young kids, they often have a pretty small bag to boot. So maybe they have one box of small treats for the under-three set, and everyone older gets a pop. It works! I’m making a note to at least consider it for next year.

And as always, the end of Halloween means Christmas decorations are flocking to the stores and we’re on to the winter season. We’ve already had one light snowfall here, and the days are grey and rainy and cold. But I love November – it’s my birthday month, and there’s always cheer and warmth inside by the fireplace, and the first few snows are still exciting and clean and white, and I can look forward to shopping for Christmas presents and ski season and World Trivia Night.

Plus I have a huge bucket of leftover candy to go through. Things are looking up!