Remember the other day when I was saying that I’d be lucky if I were able to be an active, involved grandmother at the age of 72?

The other day I was watching The Rick Mercer Report, which is a funny news-ish kind of show here in Canada like Jon Stewart’s show in the States. He was doing a little feature story on Hazel McCallion, also known as “Hurricane Hazel,” who is the mayor of Mississauga.

Mississauga is a very nice, very huge bedroom community just outside of Toronto. Hazel has been the mayor there for a record-setting 31 years.

Thirty-one years, you say? Why, she must be what, seventy?

You’re off by a clear mile. She’s 88. That’s EIGHTY-EIGHT. Still going to work every day.

When the profile started, I expected her to be a little shaky and a little dotty. I figured that people had kept electing her out of sentimentality, or maybe an unwillingness to hurt the feelings of a sweet old lady by not voting for her.

But no. Hazel at 88 is both sharper than I am and in better physical shape. She and Rick Mercer played HOCKEY, for crap’s sake. She was plenty limber enough to dance around the city in a hilarious rock video and seemed able, quite frankly, to kick Rick’s ass if required.

And sassy! Holy cow, the sassy. She clearly had a firm grasp of the city’s social and political challenges and continues to do impressive work handling the city’s growth and attracting business to the area.

I seriously want to BE Hurricane Hazel. Or at least have her provide my grandkids with a suitable grandparent while I languish in an old people’s home.

On a related note, I was thinking last night about the opening chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers. He tells the story of a small town in Pennsylvania where the people just never seemed to get sick — rates for all major diseases were about a third of rates for the similar population, and almost all deaths in the town were simply due to old age. Plenty of research into the population revealed that the reason for their general wellness wasn’t their genetics, or the hill where they lived, or what they were eating. It was simply that everyone in the town knew each other — they were all immigrants from the same small area in Italy. They spoke the same language, shared the same values, and everyone looked out for everyone else. Often, three generations of a family would live together and care for each other. It was that sense of community, of having a place to belong, of having a complete social support system, that removed much of the stress and loneliness of everyday life and allowed these people to be happy and healthy much longer than most.

I’m thinking that these days, it’s the blogging community that provides that kind of support — that makes you feel like you’re a part of something, that others out there think and act like you, that people are available to answer your questions or come to your aid if need be.

So since I blog, maybe I’ll get to be Hazel-esque someday, after all.

Which is awesome! I’m going to go right ahead and book that vacation to DisneyWorld for the year 2072!

My mother’s mugs are here!

Yes indeed, that is the word “crotch” on the mugs we had made for my mom’s birthday. And you wondered why we thought she wouldn’t like it!

My sister FameThrowa made them using a website called Zazzle, which I had never heard of before. I just wanted to mention them here because I have been very impressed with their customer service, and good customer service is darn hard to come by these days.

One of the mugs was defective — the lettering was faded and smudged on one side (right over the word “crotch,” in fact, which of course is completely unacceptable). I was just going to let it go because I figured we’d have to send the defective mug back, and it would cost a fortune, and then we’d have to pay for shipping from the US for the replacement, which would cost another fortune, and quite frankly, I’m one or two fortunes short these days.

But their customer service policy said that they really, really wanted all their customers to be happy, so I sent them an email to ask what the procedure was and how much, bottom line, it would cost me to replace the mug.

And guess what? They are taking care of it! At no cost to me! I had to send them a digital picture of the defective item, they agreed it was a problem, so they are printing a new one right away. It’s probably in the mail already. Whoo hoo!

I am impressed. I’ll use them again.

If I survive the gift-giving process, that is. Wish me luck!

Andrea at Quietfish has movie passes! Free movie passes! To give away!

They are for tomorrow night’s preview showing of One Week, starring Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek fame. Now he’s on some other sci-fi show, but he will NEVER outlive the Pacey. NEVER.

She also has some passes left for a second preview showing, next Thursday, March 5. Both shows are at the Coliseum.

And here’s the best part! If you come to tomorrow night’s show, you can meet me! And Andrea! And other awesome bloggers from the Ottawa area!

I’ll be the one walking the red carpet in my designer Mark’s Work Wearhouse outfit.

If you’re up for it, visit this link for details.

I’m cranky today.

Know what happens when you turn 38 years old? Your friends start to split up. That totally sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks. I find I am having to develop a whole new set of coping/sympathy skills for helping friends through divorce. It’s new for me, figuring out how to be supportive and helpful without seeming too intrusive or drama-seeking. Any advice would be great.

If I could rewrite my (totally failed) entry for the Mabel’s Labels contest — What benefits have you seen from being part of the blogging community? — I’d say, it has probably saved my marriage. I’ve always said that I love being home with the kids and I am very fulfilled by being a stay-at-home mom but I think I’d be a lot more stressed out and prone to…seeking online romance, shall we say…if I didn’t get to pretend I was a Writer, not a Mommy, for a half hour a day. So there’s that.

In other news, after months of stability, we are having renewed allergy issues with the Captain. I swore I was all done blogging about that so I will not elaborate, except to say, SUCKS.

And in addition, I am SO OVER winter. We are TOTALLY BROKEN UP. I am tired of having to bundle everyone up to go outside, only to have my nose turn beet red and my eyeballs freeze just walking from the car to the Superstore. I am tired of being inside all the time and having to explain over and over to Little Miss Sunshine that it won’t always be like this.

She doesn’t believe me, by the way.

I keep waiting for that little hint of Spring in the air, that little bit of warm breeze coupled with a distinctive smell that says things are starting to stir, growth is happening. But it’s never there. I’ve even started to dress less warmly in protest. Which is not helping, as you can imagine.

SUCKS.

And now, I am off to watch the Oscars on my PVR, so I can stop avoiding the rest of the internet. Hopefully the pretty pretty people in their pretty pretty clothes will cheer me up.

If the kids let me watch it, that is.

I’ve become obsessed with the song “Raisins” by the Barenaked Ladies. It’s from their kids’ CD, Snacktime, a CD that you will either find whimsical and charming, or else twee to high heaven. It’s a fine line.

“Raisins,” for example, contains such immortal lines as, “Raisins come from grapes, people come from apes, I come from Canada” and “When I make mistakes, I use a lot of salt, ’cause salt makes m’steaks taste great.” Fortunately I’m one of those who finds such sentiments to be precious, but not too precious.

Plus, Raisins has an awesome whistling chorus that I would totally get as my ringtone, if I had a cellular phone that had been made in this decade.

Anyway, this morning I felt like listening to it, but I didn’t feel like walking all the way over to the other side of the room to turn on the stereo, because walking is just so hard at 6:30 a.m. So instead, I looked for it on YouTube.

Do you think you can find an obscure non-single from a kids’ CD on YouTube?

YOU KNOW IT.

This is actually one of a series of videos from the Snacktime CD, in which Ed Robertson records himself, unplugged, performing in his bathroom. So charming!

So this is bascially proof that YouTube is taking over the entire world. Seriously, is there nothing you cannot find on YouTube? It’s becoming a digital library of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

Seriously, the number of people who have put cute videos of their kids up on YouTube for public consumption makes me wonder why the hell I bother to use aliases for the kids on this site. Stalkers have more than enough choice. I guess at the very least it will provide them with the ability to deny any and all relation to me in the future.

Is YouTube a profitable business? I cannot see how they make money from the site…but if they do, then someday, they’ll rule the world. And they’ll have everyone’s babies on film to help them enforce their power. BWA HA HA HA!

I was watching last night’s American Idol, and there is this guy on the show called Danny something that the judges cannot stop fawning over. He’s a good singer and everything, but really, it’s getting to be a bit over the top. Last night he performed well, but not the best that we’ve seen from him, but still the judges declared him inspirational and life-changing and orgasmic and whatever.

(Except for my boy Simon, who declared him “good, but not excellent.” Speaking of Simon, Captain Jelly Belly says he should play Mr. Carl Sagan in a story about his life.)

Anyway, I was thinking about Danny and wondering if he actually believes his own hype, or if he is starting to feel kind of awkward about it. He seems like a smart, nice guy, and I suspect he knows when he’s given it his all, as opposed to when he just didn’t quite nail it.

And that got me thinking about high school English. I did really well in high school English, and I almost always got an A or A+…even on a few occasions when something didn’t turn out just the way I wanted, or when I half-assed the effort, or when I rushed through (probably because American Idol was on!).

I always knew when one of my essays was iffy. Yet still, I’d get an A. I always felt like such a poser, and when other kids called me a teacher’s pet, it did seem kind of true. Did I get an A based on my name alone? Did I get an A because even though it was a weak paper for me, it was still the best in the class? Or did I get an A because I had met some sort of minimum requirement, and the extra distance of originality and readability were not actually required?

So I wonder, do you think that English teachers (and other essay-type teachers, like teachers of History or Sociology) grade their papers:

A. Comparatively — so that the best paper gets an A, and the worst gets a D, and all the other papers fall in between as appropriate;

B. Objectively — so that papers that meet criteria X, Y, and Z get an A, and those that don’t get a D, and those that meet only X or Y get a B;

C. Personally — so that if someone who is usually a B student makes a big effort, they get an A, because it’s a good job for them, even if it wouldn’t be a good job for someone else; or,

D. By Reputation — so that someone who always gets an A, gets an A, unless they really screw it up.

Let’s put it to a vote — oooh, my first ever poll!

Yesterday was family day, so we were all spending a quiet day at home. We put Little Miss Sunshine down for her afternoon nap, and Gal Smiley and Captain Jelly Belly were playing happily and quietly together, so Sir Monkeypants suggested we watch Sunday night’s premiere episode of The Amazing Race. Soon after it started, the Captain and the Gal wandered in to join us.

So we all sat on the couch watching together. Each of us was wearing either a construction helmet or a fire hat — Gal Smiley passed them out as initiation into her “secret club.” We each got a pair of winter gloves to wear, too, as part of our club uniform. Working the remote while wearing gloves is really hard.

Anyway.

The contestants flew to Switzerland, where they were presented with a challenge. Both team members had to climb a steep, muddy, slippery hill and carry down huge wheels of cheese — they weighed 50 pounds each. They were supposed to transport the cheese using “traditional cheese-carrying devices” that sort of looked like wooden backpacks, but most of the teams slipped and fell, shattering their “traditional device.”

When the devices broke, the cheese got away. Giant cheeses were flying down the hill, rolling and bouncing into fences, barns, and other players. The contestants slid and crawled down the hill in hot pursuit.

It occurred to us that the ideal thing to scream at your partner in such an environment was, “COME ON, FASTER THAN CHEESE!”

And higher understanding was achieved.