Someone bought our house! Life is good!

Bring on the mess! There’s no way I’m mopping the kitchen floor tonight, my friends. 🙂

The next season of The Amazing Race begins July 6th.

Check it out here.

Someone has written my novel.

A couple of years ago, when I got laid off from my job, I thought I’d try my hand at creative writing. Sir Monkeypants bought me a really nice journal to write in and I got started. My idea for a novel was to take a bunch of quirky, small-town characters and have them be in a book club. Each section of the novel would feature the club reading a different piece of classic literature, and something about the book they were reading would affect one of the characters’ lives. I had sketched out the basics of the characters and settings, and selected a few of the classic novels to feature.

Well, someone wrote my book! It’s called The Jane Austen Book Club and Entertainment Weekly just gave it a glowing review. I knew it was a good idea. I’m kind of sad about it, but I guess it was just an idea whose time had come. I’ll definitely be buying a copy and I’m sure I’ll love it.

Sigh.

We listed our townhouse for sale this morning, and already we have two viewings lined up. Whee!! Maybe this will all be over in a week — heaven knows we can’t possibly keep the house in such a pristine state of cleanliness for much longer.

So if you know of anyone who is looking for a great townhouse in Kanata, hook us up!

Man, I just watched last night’s season finale of The O.C. and I cried like a little baby. Crazy! The O.C. is definitely my favourite show on television — a show I love so much, it is totally filling the Buffy void. Despite the horror that is Mischa Barton, I highly recommend the show to all.

Other than The O.C., Monk, and Arrested Development (which I really, really hope gets renewed for next season), I’m finding there just isn’t much on TV these days. The West Wing has gone so far downhill, there’s now a website for fans of the first few seasons, devoted to trying to get NBC to pull the show OFF the air. Sad.

Anyone know of anything else I should be checking out in summer reruns, as a possible addition to my permanent fall lineup?

We did more packing on the weekend — finished the epic book sort, and packed away some non-essentials like knickknacks, photo albums, and some art. We also filled another couple of boxes full of “give away to charity” stuff.

I’m pretty impressed at how good I’m being about giving stuff away, stuff that just 10 years ago I thought I’d never, ever, EVER part with in a million years. I think the secret is that, now that we have a house and a kid, I’m starting to get all the stuff I’ve been storing in my mom’s basement for years delivered up here. My mom is a total pack rat — she keeps EVERYTHING. She’s been sending up boxes full of a) every toy I ever had as a kid, b) every essay, project, and note I ever took in school as a kid, and c) dozens of books of the “teen heartache” variety. I find it interesting that she is much more emotionally attached to this stuff than I am. I look at a box of old toys and think, yeah, the Captain is never going to play with those Pretty Ponies and I don’t really care about them, so off to charity they go. My mom looks at the same box and thinks, Pretty Ponies! You used to love those! You can’t get rid of those, no way! You must cherish them forever!

I think part of the reason she’s so into keeping our stuff is that it reminds her of when we were kids — happy memories for her, but nothing special for us. But more than that, I think her attachment issues stem from the fact that her mom, our grandmother, was not a keeper. She’s a streamlined woman who, I’m assuming, kept very little of sentimental value from her kids’ childhoods. Probably my mom grew up and found out that her mom had tossed out her baby clothes, her dolls, and her grade 10 essay on Julius Caesar, and was pretty pissed about it. So, now, she overcompensates by keeping every thing her own kids ever did.

Ironically, it is turning her daughters into complete non-pack-rats, people who are able to get rid of tons of stuff because we have to — I don’t have space to store all this stuff, I don’t care that much about it (those essays, in particular, are pretty freakin’ embarrassing), and it’s all really, really dusty. I did keep a few little things, but the majority is going. It’s sort of like the cycle of life — one non-keeper begot a total pack rat begot a non-keeper. Interesting.

My sister FameThrowa came by on the weekend with a cool gift for the Captain — a mixed CD of kid-friendly tunes she’d made herself. So far the Captain’s favourites are (surprise, surprise) the Phil Collins song and the Ricky Martin song (a poor man’s Enrique, he says).

But also at the top of the list, surprisingly, is “My Girl” by The Temptations. I’m pretty happy that he likes the song, and also happy that FameThrowa put several cool selections from the 50s and 60s on the CD. I’ve been searching for family-friendly music for the Captain for a while, and although we have several CDs that are expressly made for children, I’ve found that my personal favourites are early rock albums, like those by The Beatles and Elton John.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about older songs from the 50s and 60s, and how Captain Jelly Belly will never hear them if I’m not really proactive about playing them. They just don’t play a lot of music from that era on the radio anymore. When I was growing up, my mom listened to an “oldies” station that played 50s and 60s stuff — stuff from her youth — all the time, so I know all kinds of songs by big bands like the Beach Boys and The Four Seasons, but also songs by one-hit wonders like Booker T and MGs or The Singing Nun. Now, our local “oldies” station plays stuff from the 80s and 90s — stuff from my youth — and the 50s and 60s stuff is all but gone. Sometimes you’ll hear a Beatles tune on the easy listening station, or a Rolling Stones song on the classic rock station, but there’s no one out there these days playing a lot of Elvis or Smokey Robinson or The Supremes. I guess it’s because all the folks that are my mom’s age have moved over to listening to the CBC.

When I was a kid, we used to have “song nights” at my house where we’d haul out my mom’s 45s (she had hundreds of them) and I’d play DJ, and my sisters and I would groove to the old tunes all evening. I don’t even have a turntable now, so there’s just no way to play those songs. It makes me sad — like a whole generation of good music (better than the 80s, as evidenced by that embarrassing local “oldies” station) is disappearing. I vow to do my best to illegally download all the old favourites I can remember, and play them for Captain Jelly Belly as much as possible. Maybe I’ll make my mom a CD, too.

You’re Ireland!
Mystical and rain-soaked, you remain mysterious to many people, and this
makes you intriguing.  You also like a good night at the pub, though many are just as
worried that you will blow up the pub as drink your beverage of choice.  You’re good
with words, remarkably lucky, and know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of eating a potato.
 You really don’t like snakes.
Take the Country Quiz at
the Blue Pyramid

Captain Jelly Belly slept for an hour and a half this morning, and I totally meant to have a nap, I swear. But time really seems to fly when he’s asleep.

Here’s what I did instead:

• talked to Sir Monkeypants about his plans for the day, and said goodbye to him
• called our lawyer to make an appointment to go in and sign our wills
• called ADT to get a quote for an alarm system for our new house (their customer service totally sucks, though, and I’m seriously rethinking hiring them)
• called my chiropractor to reschedule an appointment that conflicts with the Captain’s doctor’s appointment
• searched for a schedule of OLN’s upcoming programming, to try to figure out when The Lance Armstrong Chronicles is on, but their website sucks and I couldn’t figure it out
• tried to register for our 10-year university reunion, but it turns out it costs money, so I need to double check with to see if we really should register, or if we should just try to crash instead
• had a look at our epic “things to do before selling the house” list to see if there was anything I could knock off today
• checked all the websites I check every day (IMDB news, Fametracker, Tomato Nation, Dooce, Television Without Pity)
• read the LiveJournal posts of my buddies, and replied to some
• checked my mail
• looked at photos people had sent me of last week’s Mommy And Baby party, and integrated the new photos with our photos into one photo album
• showered, dressed, and dried my hair
• posted to LiveJournal

And now the Captain is awake. Go go go!

This morning at 3 a.m., Captain Jelly Belly started screaming. Not just crying, but really screaming, in a way I’d never heard before. He had had a cold for the past several days, but we didn’t think it was anything special. By 6 this morning, though, when all the usual tricks failed to calm him down and stop the screaming, we had to admit that something was really wrong with our little boy. Nothing is scarier than looking at your spouse and knowing you’re both thinking, “Hospital.”

We got to emergency around 6:30 and the Captain was still screaming so we went right in. They quickly determined that the wheezy breathing we’d been hearing on and off the past few days was something much more serious than just a cold — he was having trouble breathing normally and his blood-oxygen level was low. They put him on a face mask and gave him some sort of lung medicine and he calmed down a little bit, but we had to go for an X-ray to rule out something serious. Nothing is scarier than when the emerg doctor says, “Pneumonia.”

The X-ray was horrible — they have to put the baby in a full body lock-up thing like Hannibal Lecter, and I couldn’t stay in the room because of George Foreman Jatania II. Nothing is scarier than hearing your baby scream from the hallway and not being able to do anything about it.

Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t pneumonia, but clearly there was some sort of lung infection going on, so they transferred us to the children’s hospital, CHEO. Nothing is scarier than the phrase, “Transfer by ambulance.”

Of course, by this time, all three of the Jatanias were way overtired, overhungry, and stressed out, so I had a misty-eyed moment in the back of the ambulance while Captain Jelly Belly had a pretty good time playing with the equipment and accepting the gift of a little stuffed bear from the EMTs, who he had eating out of the palm of his hand. And I didn’t even throw up, despite having had little to eat, which Georgie II usually really complains about. And everyone on the highway had to get out of our way due to our flashing lights. So that part, at least, was okay.

At CHEO, the Captain had many more face masks and some steroids to improve his lung capacity, but he continued to wheeze and gasp and be cranky. And trust me, nothing, nothing is scarier than the words, “We may have to keep him here overnight.”

Happily, after many, many hours, he started to respond to the medicine, and we were so, so relieved to hear the doctor say that we could take him home. They gave us an inhaler and some more steroids for him to use in the next few days. By the time we got home, the Captain was exhausted, but already showing signs of being back to his normal self. He’s sleeping right now, relatively peacefully — at least, no screaming so far. His parents are very, very happy.

just got back with his steroid prescription, which had a few warnings attached. The phrase, “May cause stomach upset and vomiting” is pretty scary, but right now, I think I can handle anything, because my kid is going to be okay.

Pardon me as I have another misty-eyed moment…and now, it’s time for bed.