Lately when not listening to the CBC I’ve started listening to a couple of local radio stations that play a lot of 80s hit music. This is my prime era — the late 80s were my high school years — so I should be all nostalgic about this music, I think. But I’m amazed to find, instead, that a heck of a lot of 80s music is really crappy. It’s so formulaic — every song sounds the same, with a synthesized beat, doctored vocals, standard verse-bridge-chorus structure. There’s band after band that had just one or two hits and seem to have no talent, other than looking good in cool outfits in videos. Was no one doing anything interesting, unique, or new in the 80s?

I hear a lot of complaints about the 70s but really, I think there was still lots of interesting new music and experimentation going on then. 80s music is just one generic song after another. Other than bands considered “alternative” at the time (I still like The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, and the like), I can barely stand to even listen to the crap that passed for actual hits at the time.

It makes me wonder about today’s radio — 20 years from now, will we hear “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears and be embarrassed that it was a major hit? Maybe pop music really is dead.

So and Captain Jelly Belly left early this morning for their camping trip — they decided not to go last night as it was raining at the park, which was a good call because rain sucks, and also because now I only have one night to fret about them instead of two.

This morning I went to The Spa for a pedicure and manicure. I feel so pretty! I haven’t had a pedicure in ages and I adore them — so calming, so nice, and plus, it’s really hard with the 8-month belly to get down there for proper foot care. This was my first ever manicure, and all I can say about that is that I’m sorry I’ve been missing out for the past 32 years. Several years ago when my friend Sarah got married, all my friends went to a spa for a girlie day and I decided to bail because I didn’t know what the heck I’d do with a manicure, because I take terrible care of my nails — I keep them uber-short and I always have a million hangnails and chips and other embarrassing things wrong with my hands. But even so, the manicure was so worth it! Now my hands are all soft and clean. Plus I have lovely dark pinky-purple toenails and girlie lilac-coloured fingernails.

It makes me hope that George Foreman Jatania II is a girl so I can take her for pedicures with me when she turns 12 or so. Ah, the dreams of a mother :).

Now I’m off for a nap. I miss my guys but the napping, girl-based activities, and unlimited Olympics watching sure does have its benefits — oh, not to mention the ability to actually read the paper uninterupted. Whee!

I’m quite bitter at the moment over the price of DVD players. I bought mine about four years ago when they were just starting to go mainstream, and I paid upwards of $600 for it. It’s a Sony, and we fell in love instantally. I’ve loved having a DVD player all this time even though, as and can attest, it’s quite a crappy one — if you leave it on too long (as in, while watching a movie that is over 2 hours) the sound gets out of sync with the picture, and on content-packed DVDs (like my Buffy DVDs) it has a tendancy to “skip,” repeating the same scene over and over.

So it is time for a new DVD player, and I just got the Canadian Tire flyer, and now you can buy one for $55. $55!!! At Canadian Tire! I had to go to a high-end electronics store for mine! Now I can pick one up at Canadian Tire for $55! And it’s probably better quality, too!

I don’t suppose anyone on eBay would give me $600 for my old one. Sigh.

Why is it that ducks in children’s books and toys are always yellow with orange or red beaks? I’ve never seen a duck like that in real life.

I bring it up because “duck” was one of the Captain’s first words, and as a result he is adept at identifying iconic yellow ducks on his cups, clothes, toys, and in his favourite videos. He points and says, “Duck,” in an extremely cute manner.

But a few weeks ago I took him to the petting zoo, and they had ducks there, but of course they weren’t yellow. Most of them were brown and grey, and they had a couple that were white. I pointed and told the Captain that they were ducks, and he looked at me like I was nuts. Eventually I got him to identify the birds as ducks, but I could tell he was just humouring me. Inside he was thinking, “Hello, Mommy, ducks are yellow.”

As if the real world isn’t going to be shocking enough for the poor guy, now I have to deal with a duck crisis.

I really like to look at license plates when I’m out driving or riding in a car. It’s just a quirky little habit I have, but I confess I sometimes fantasize about seeing a car doing something relatively innocuous and noting its license plate, and then finding out later it was involved in some major crime, and I go to the police with my information and save the day. Yes, yes, I am a major geek.

About, oh, six years or so ago the new Ontario license plates came into effect with four letters at the beginning instead of just three. For a license plate watcher it was an exciting time and poor Sir Monkeypants had to listen to me exclaiming about it every time we went out in the car together for months. I was amazed at how fast they were handing out the letters, and it seemed incredible to me that they could possibly be selling so many new cars in Ontario in such a short time frame. Within six months or so, I’d seen plates around the province starting with AA and going all the way up to AM — over 2 300 000 new plates. Could they really sell so many new cars on an ongoing basis?

At the time Sir Monkeypants theorized (I think he just wanted to keep me quiet) that they had assigned certain prefixes to certain cities or areas, and were not handing them out sequentially. Now it seems he must have been right, since it’s like, five years later, and I still haven’t seen anything farther along than AT. In the Ottawa area there certainly are a lot of AC plates, which seems to imply that the 575 000 AC plates were given to Ottawa to hand out as needed. I’ve been waiting ages to spot one that starts with a B. Man, that’ll be an exciting day. Poor Sir Monkeypants.

So it turns out that although Ken Jennings is home now, he still is an unbeaten champion. Yesterday’s episode of Jeopardy was the last one of this season, and of course, he won. Not only that, but he won $75,000, beating the one-day winnings record (finally).

The show is now on hiatus. New episodes return on September 6th with Ken picking up where he left off as returning champion. So far he’s won 38 days in a row. Maybe next year he can do a whole season!

Yesterday’s time trial up L’Alp D’Huez was pretty cool. Jan Ullrich went fifth-last and set the best time — then along came Lance, riding last, and kicked everyone’s ass. He finished a minute ahead of Jan, more than two minutes ahead of Basso, and now has a comfortable 3+ minute lead on everyone else.

Yesterday’s key phrase was “dancing on the pedals.”

Today’s key phrase is clearly “a great bike rider.” In addition to this perennial favourite, I’ve already heard:

• an amazing bike rider
• a very clever bike rider
• a magnificent bike rider
• a talented bike rider
• a gifted bike rider
• a magnificent bike rider
• a tough bike rider

Nice to see Phil and Paul have picked up a thesaurus :).

Yesterday was the first stage in the Alps and it was pretty good. Since today is the first time trial (where riders ride alone for a stage, without the help of their team) many people thought that the big stars might take it easy yesterday to rest up. However, Jan Ullrich — who seemed to be out of it altogether, since he hasn’t performed well and actually has been asked to support another member of his team, Kloden — took off on an attack on one of the major climbs. It was thrilling for a while, until Lance’s US Postal team and Basso’s CSC team reeled him back in. One of the coolest things about the reel-in was that CSC “called back” Jens Voight — he was ahead of Ullrich due to an earlier breakaway, and he just pulled over and waited for Lance and Basso to catch up with him, so he could help them catch Ullrich. Fascinating strategy.

The attack spread out the field and several of the top 10 in the overall standings were dropped, including Voeckler (who held the yellow jersey), Mancebo, Casar, and Toechning.

At the end of the stage, only five top guys were left at the front — Lance, Jan, Levi Leipheimer, Kloden, and Basso. It was a sprint finish and Lance won! He totally celebrated in a exuberant fashion. It’s the 18th stage win of his career.

Lance is now in yellow. Basso is second and Kloden third, and they are his major remaining challengers. Mancebo hangs on to fourth, and Ullrich managed to pull himself up to fifth, but he is almost 7 minutes back, and that will be tough to make up.

Today is the first time trial and it is very exciting because it is on one of the most famous Tour mountains — L’Alp D’Huez. It’s very steep and the time trial will be completely uphill. Lance will start last because he’s in the overall lead. I can’t wait!

We had a power outage today, which is not at all unusual. Apparently here in Kanata we are serviced by one of the oldest, most fragile power grids in Ontario, and we have an outage at least once a month or so. It sucks, but I’m quite adept now at resetting all our clocks, and working the manual override on our automatic garage door opener.

The last power outage we had was a couple of days ago. It was really hot and humid and the power cut out right at 5:30, when (we assume) everyone got home from work and cranked up their air conditioners. Sir Monkeypants and I did the responsible thing and turned off our air so it wouldn’t drain the system when the power did come back on (which took a couple of hours), but most people didn’t do that, because you could hear major air conditioning hums from all over the street as soon as the power did come back on.

So chatting about air conditioners reminded me of an article I had read on the weekend in the paper about how to save money on your hydro bills. It recommended raising your air conditioner temperature setting from 19 degrees Celsius to 22 degrees Celsius. I found it impossible to believe that anyone out there seriously sets their air conditioner to 19 degrees. We keep ours set at 25 during the day, 24 at night. Is that freakishly high? I remember one summer I had a roommate who set the air at 20 degrees and I thought he was insane — I spent the whole summer wearing sweaters and drinking hot chocolate.

On the other hand, however, we are very bad with the heat in the winter. We have tried setting it to 20 degrees, but we just shiver all the time, so we’ve given in and now we set our heat at 22 degrees. So maybe over the whole year, someone who keeps their thermostat at 19 degrees summer and winter is being just as responsible as us…

Where do you set your thermostat, summer and winter?