We’re having trouble logging into our FTP server so I just called our ISP for support. They said they would send a new password to the admin ID, which is my old Sidekick Magazine ID, which is no longer valid. So I told them to change the admin ID, but the support guy said that for security reasons, he can’t change it, only the billing department can change it.

So I had to call back (they couldn’t transfer me) and talk to billing and ask to change the admin ID. And the girl there told me that she would tell the support guys to do it. And I told her that the support guys just told me that it had to be billing. So she explained that she doesn’t actually have the technical ability to change the password, but she is the only one with authority to tell the guys to make the change.

But the kicker is that on top of all this red tape, she didn’t even ask me any security questions! She couldn’t even have asked me address-type info to verify, as they had our old address on file, so I changed that too while I was talking to her.

So to sum up, I just called up my ISP and a) changed my address information, b) changed my admin ID, and c) had a new password sent to that new account right away, all without being challenged in any way.

Crimey!

We’re taking Captain Jelly Belly out for Halloween this year for the first time. At his own request he’ll be dressed as Spiderman. He’s still really little so we’ll probably just take him to the 10 closest houses around here and see how it goes.

In general though I find that Trick-Or-Treating has really fallen off in popularity. At our old house we usually got around 30 or 40 kids on Halloween. At our new place I expect even less, as we are on a crescent — probably just the kids from our own street will come around. By 7:30 the night is basically over. I find things like Halloween parties and treating-by-car, so you can hit just the houses of people you know, are becoming the norm. I understand why — dangerous times and all — but I feel nostalgic for the old ways.

When I was a kid, my mom would man the door and she’d get, easily, upwards of 250 kids at the door. I remember more than one year when she ran out of candy and resorted to giving out apples from our fruit cellar (no razor blades, but I’m sure the kids who took one didn’t get to eat it anyway). The first kids would show up around 5:30pm and there would still be knocks on the door as late as 9:30. It was an endless parade of scary monster costumes and kids with chocolate on their breath. This year I expect to get a few Elmos and princesses and that’ll be it.

Meanwhile, my dad, who was basically a professional Trick-Or-Treater, would take us out. In the peak years, when all four of us qualified for the treating age, we’d all go out for 2 or 3 hours. We’d cover whole subdivisions — us collecting in small plastic bags and my dad gathering our loot when the small bags got full into a garbage bag or two that he hauled around on his back. We’d come home and dump it all out to sort it and it was a major, major pile of candy. My mom would divide it all up by type and then divy it out in our lunches for, literally, the next two months. It’d be New Years before we were down to those orange-and-black wrapped molasses candies, which, over time, I learned to love. Sadly, I haven’t seen them for sale for a long time.

In any case, I’m always excited to be manning the door in our own home — it feels like tradition. I’m looking forward to whatever activity we get — and of course, any leftovers.

Trick or Treat!

I just got the e-vite to the party. Apparently I have to bring $2 for the “Boobies Take All” draw.

I think that speaks for itself.

A few days ago I got an email from a friend of mine from my Mommy And Baby group. She wanted to know what dates were good for all of us, as she was planning a party — a Fantasia Party. I thought, “Party, good! But that Fantasia thing…sounds XXX.”

And it turns out…it is X-rated! It’s like a Tupperware party, but instead of selling practical containers in functional shapes, they sell cock-rings in five different novelty colours. I don’t know about that. It’s not like I disapprove of such things but if I wanted to buy, say, a pink vibrator with 10 different settings for her pleasure, I’d order it online and have it delivered to my house in a brown paper package. Failing that I might venture out to the local erotica store, but alone, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, and maybe even a Groucho Marx-type nose and fake mustache for good measure.

I certainly don’t see the appeal of shopping for sex toys in the presense of my Mommy friends. I don’t need to be imagining the parents of my kids’ friends rubbing each other with chocolate body paint and playing a game called “Fetish” while wearing his and hers edible underwear.

Crimey…it’s too late.

Several years ago I was watching The Newlywed Game (don’t mock me; admitting you have a problem is half the battle) and the question posed was this: What is something your spouse thinks they are good at, but really are not?

I’ve never been able to come up with a good answer for Sir Monkeypants, but I knew right away what he’d say about me: my driving. He’s pretty good about not bugging me about it but I know that he, my mother, and FameThrowa all think I’m pretty scary behind the wheel. It’s not like I thought I was an excellent driver but, at the time of the show, I thought I wasn’t that bad. Now I’m forced to admit that they are probably right.

In the past few weeks I’ve gone clean through a red light (unfortunately, with FameThrowa and Sir Monkeypants in the car right behind me as witnesses, which won’t help my driving rep any), failed to pause to look both ways while pulling out of a parking lot (at the end of a dead-end road at 11pm, but still), and routinely followed too close (a known driving problem of mine). At the mall yesterday I got blocked in between a car that was pulling out and a car that was pulling in, causing someone else who wanted out to be trapped, which nearly came to blows. It didn’t really seem like my fault but I do seem to always wind up in situations like this and it makes me wonder.

I think my main problem really is that I space out when driving, and don’t keep my focus on what I’m doing. I get caught up in listening to the radio, or watching the kids in the rear-view mirror to make sure they aren’t getting sun in their eyes, or composing future blog posts, and I don’t pay close enough attention to what is going on around me. Heaven forbid I travel with an adult passenger and start talking to them, as that’s certainly a recipe for a hair-raising ride.

But admitting you have a problem is half the battle, no?

It says something about motherhood that when the Captain sings, “Movin’ to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches” over and over again in the car on the way home, I find it endlessly endearing, whereas if it were someone else’s kid, I’d feel like pounding a steel bolt through my eye after about 100 iterations.

I love game shows, and when I was in university I was so desperate to kill time that I spent a half hour each morning watching Supermarket Sweep, possibly the crappiest game show of all time. Three pairs of contestants answered trivia questions to earn sweep time, and then they got that amount of time at the end of the show to run through a supermarket and grab as much stuff as they could. The team that grabbed the most stuff, in terms of dollar value, won a craptastic prize like two recliners or two Timex watches or, if they were very lucky, a weekend trip to Montreal.

It seems straightforward enough but I never really understood the standard strategy that most teams employed for the final sweep. The team that had earned the most time got to start first, then the next team started, then the third team, so that all teams ended at the same time. The first team always ran straight to the Obus Forme back supports, which were like $60 a pop, but instead of grabbing them all, they’d take maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the available stock, and move on. The next stop for every team was these giant hams, at about $20 each, and again, they’d take maybe 2 or 3 of them, and leave 3 or 4 behind.

Another weird thing the teams did was that there was this special set of three products, and if you got all three of them, you’d get a bonus dollar amount. Each team would invariably run to the right section, like say, the vitamins section, then spend a minute looking carefully at each package until they found the right brand and flavour of vitamins, then pick up one box. I’d be screaming at the TV every time, “Just grab each one! Grab everything! Use your whole arm and sweep the shelf!” But no one ever did.

I used to think that maybe the teams got to keep the stuff they put in their carts, and really, a person only has freezer space for so many giant hams. But once I carefully read the closing small-print and it specifically stated that the contestants didn’t keep the stuff. Then I thought that there was some rule they weren’t telling the audience that they had to limit the number of things they took of each item, but then some freak team would come along and grab a basket of cereal and dump the whole thing in their cart like a sane person would do, throwing that theory out the window.

The only thing I can think of is that since it was a Canadian show, the Canadian contestants were just too polite to grab all the expensive stuff, leaving their competitors to stuck with nothing more pricey than toilet paper and canned peaches. The team that had earned the most time almost always won, so I guess they felt bad about kicking the other teams when they were down by taking all the good stuff.

Yup, university was quite a worthwhile expense.

I used to have my hair cut by Kim, who was very nice and did a nice job but her salon was halfway across the city from our place, so once Captain Jelly Belly was born, taking an hour extra for haircuts due to the commute was out of the question. So a couple of years ago I switched to Saer, another very nice man who was a little closer and a little bit better of a stylist. I only went to him a few times before I had Gal Smiley. Now it’s been more than a year and I haven’t had my hair cut in the meantime.

So next weekend we have a big party to go to, and I thought hey, why not go crazy and get a freakin’ haircut. So I called up Saer but he doesn’t work at the old place anymore. I asked for the new number and called there, worried that he had moved somewhere far away, because the search for a new local stylist was a huge pain in the ass the first time around — almost as bad as finding a doctor — and I really, really didn’t want to have to go through that again.

So I asked the receptionist for directions, and she starts giving them to me, and I realise she is directing me to my own house. It turns out he has moved to the salon which is literally two blocks away from here in a mini-mall. I could walk there! Needless to say I booked an appointment right away.

Hair serendipity!

We’ve had a rough time with our son the past few weeks; we learned that in addition to being allergic to eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts, he’s also allergic to dairy. Since he was getting pretty much all his protein and at least 50% of his calories from dairy products, and we are vegetarians, it makes it pretty hard to ensure he’s getting a balanced diet. Plus, like most toddlers he’s strongly opposed to eating anything that looks weird, smells weird, feels weird, or doesn’t contain sugar.

We’re pleased to say that we’ve been barf-free since we took him off of milk (8 days and counting!), but we had a heartbreaking few days where he subsisted on only apple juice and rice krispies, while begging me constantly for cheese. But I have since discovered that, thanks to the vegans of the world, there is a shocking number of fake products out there that he can eat. He can have phoney baloney, ground soy “beef”, and fake bacon (known to insiders as “facon”). He can have “cheese” slices with no dairy in them, cream “cheese” with no dairy in it, soy milk and rice milk. He can have cake baked with egg-replacers and rice krispie squares prepared with whey-free margarine. And all of this stuff is available at my local grocery store, which is quite small by Canadian city Superstore standards.

Vegans of the world unite!

When I was pregnant with Captain Jelly Belly, and I used to quiz each other from time to time, to make sure we’d make good parents. We’d ask each other, “Why is the sky blue?” and “How do they make crayons?” and “Which NFL team is the greatest ever?” — all in anticipation of the day when our kid would want to know all about the world. We imagined ourselves imparting wisdom through a soft-focus lens while our kid nodded and absorbed everything we said.

The Captain is at that stage now, but he never wants to know about the big and interesting questions in life, like we studied. He only ever wants to know about mundane stuff. I used to dream that I’d never have to say “Just because!” when asked “Why?” by my kid, but now I so, so understand. Here’s a typical conversation that I’ve had every morning with Captain Jelly Belly for the past two weeks, as he eats his morning cereal.

CJB: Who is this?
Me: Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
CJB: What are these?
Me: Those are their heads.
CJB: Where are their feet?
Me: They aren’t in this picture.
CJB: Why?
Me: It’s just a picture of their heads.
CJB: Which one is Snap?
Me: This one.
CJB: Which one is Pop?
Me: This one.
CJB: What is the other one again?
Me: Crackle.
CJB: Which one is Crackle?
Me: This one.
CJB: Where are their feet?
Me: It’s just a picture of their heads.
CJB: What is this one named?
Me: Snap.
CJB: Where are his Krispies?
Me: He doesn’t have any, just the other two are holding some. But I’m sure they will all share.
CJB: Where are their feet?
Me: I DON’T KNOW. Breakfast over!

He’s also obsessed with what “kind” everything is. As in:

CJB: I don’t want this.
Me: Just put it down on that chair.
CJB: What kind of chair?
Me: That blue one.
CJB: What kind of blue one?
Me: The small blue chair beside the table.
CJB: What kind of small blue chair beside the table?
Me: JUST PUT IT DOWN.

Or:
CJB: What is this picture of?
Me: A gopher.
CJB: What kind of gopher?
Me: There are no kinds of gophers, it’s just a gopher.
CJB: What kind of gopher?
Me: The brown kind.
CJB: What kind of brown kind?
Me: How about we play trains instead?

Man, if I knew how little of my actual life knowledge the Captain would be interested in, I’d never have bothered to learn how rainbows are formed, or how they make candles, or why the sun shines!