So this is Earth Day, and what have you done?

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(another year over, and a new one just begun. A VERY MERRY EARTH DAAAAAAAAY…. ) ahem. anyhow.

Let’s see. This Earth Day I’ve:

-Driven to work
-Stopped at a coffee shop and purchased coffee in a paper cup & food in a paper wrapper (both of which went in the garbage)
-Drove 10 blocks to get lunch
-Got takeout lunch in non-recyclable, non-reusable plastic containers
-Set fire to a pile of tires
-Poured solvent down the drain
-Kicked a puppy

Okay, so maybe those last few are fibs, but the rest is accurate so far.

What can I say, the week went a little sideways on me, and Earth Day caught me a bit by surprise.

I tend to treat Earth Day mostly like Valentine’s day anyhow – we rarely actually celebrate on the 14th of February. We do enough things that show we love each other throughout the year that it’s not so important that we clean up our act for one random day out of the year.

The rest of the year I:

-Bike to work sometimes
-compost
-recycle
-shop locally
-grow vegetables
-eat sustainably produced foods
-keep the heat turned down
-have dual-flush toilets at home
-turn off the tap while I brush my teeth

Just… not today. Except those last three – I TOTALLY conserved energy and water today! SCORE!

I’m sure you’re all far more together than I, and have done some lovely and extraordinary things for the planet today. Why don’t you share them in the comments?

And, on the off chance you’re a little behind on your planning and good intentions, as I am today, commiserate on the ways you’ve joined me in accidentally destroying the planet for future generations.

Perhaps if enough people comment, we’ll cancel each other out! Environmental offsets FTW!

Penned In

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My job for the past number of years has been marketing technology products.

For the most part I love it – the amazing ways people are finding to manipulate machines to improve lives (even if it doesn’t always work out that way) is fascinating. The communities are exciting; the innovation is inspiring. I love the feeling I get when someone discovers our products, engages with us as a company, and is profoundly thankful that what we do has made them better at what they do.

And then I try to explain to my grandmother what I do.

“Well, many businesses buy a really big software system to run everything at their companies, like hiring and bookkeeping and inventory, and the software we build helps one of those pieces work better…”

“I tell people about the software we make and show them how it can help them make the most of this other software they have….”

“How? I build calculators to show that spending $40,000 can save them $80,000 and go to user groups to share ideas and write papers and presentations to explain the technology and….”

“Yes, I’m sortof a writer. No, it’s not like writing a book or for newspapers and magazines. Mostly it goes through email.”

My job, in my grandmother’s eyes, is reduced to writing (sortof) and sending email. And she still doesn’t understand why I didn’t go work in a bookstore.

So I think it’s understandable that when I can get out of the magical world of ones and zeros and make something that I can point to, touch, have aches and blisters from building, and whose form and function are plainly obvious to anyone, anywhere in the world, I get pretty excited.

Over the past long weekend, we fenced in our pig pen! Pigs arrive first week of June.

As I get further and further away from work that anyone understands, I get more and more satisfaction from things that everyone can relate to.

Errrr….. hi?

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I never know how to pick this thing back up.

When I’ve meant to write a post for a while, promised at the next thing to come, then completely drop the ball on delivering, I have no idea what to write next.

Do I continue on as if I didn’t just drop off the face of the blog for most of a month? Clearly I have voted “no” on that one, at least this time.

Do I jump back in with the thing I said I’d write about, or change tacks completely? Obviously I’m still undecided on that one.

Inquisitive kitten wants to know: How would you resume posting on your neglected blog?


(photo courtesy of eleda 1)

Two Years

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Look at that, another wedding anniversary! We’ve been so busy lately, it really crept up on us. Plans include a quiet dinner at home with a bottle of the good wine.

One of the bigger challenges in the past months has been dealing with the wacky health (physical and mental) issues our damn dog’s been having. So it seems appropriate that I post a little reminder (also printed on the back of our wedding programs in 2008) that love, and dogs, are worth it.

Falling in love is like owning a dog
an epithalamion by Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

First of all, it’s a big responsibility,
especially in a city like New York.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you’re walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain’t no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breathes
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn’t like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,
but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!
Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.
Love leaves you little surprises here and there.
Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
Sometimes you just want to get love fixed.
Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper
and swat love on the nose,
not so much to cause pain,
just to let love know Don’t you ever do that again!

Sometimes love just wants to go for a nice long walk.
Because love loves exercise.
It runs you around the block and leaves you panting.
It pulls you in several different directions at once,
or winds around and around you
until you’re all wound up and can’t move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.
People who have nothing in common but love
stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,
again, and again, and again.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.

Thai Travelogue Part 2: Chiang Mai Photos

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We spent the first part of our trip in Chiang Mai, only because it seemed the easiest place to start in terms of available transport options. In hindsight, it was an excellent way to acclimate ourselves to the temperature and customs of Thailand in a slightly cooler and fairly low-pressure environment.

Highlights (because if I don’t reduce this to bullet-esque blips, I’ll never write it):

Chiang Mai Sausage

Chiang Mai Sausage! Regional Delicacy!

Fish Spa!

Dr. Fish Fish Spa! Tiny fish eat the dead skin off your feet! (Ticklish Neil’s verdict? “I would make a TERRIBLE hippo!” So true my love, so true.)

Meat & Squid on Sticks

Street Meat!

Kitchen Bitch

Cooking School! Two days, ten dishes, countless chillies, VERY full bellies. A foodie’s dream, we LOVED this part of the trip.

Tiny Ant Larvae

I ate an ant larvae. They have no flavour, but do go “pop” when they burst in your mouth!

Baby Elephant!

Elephants!

Bamboo Rafting

Bamboo Rafting. Unremarkable, except to note that shortly after this shot was taken, I had to duck quickly around a large tree branch (or land in the river) and the Canon G9 paid the price. I knocked something loose inside the lens mechanism, and now it doesn’t like to cooperate when retracting.

Next up, things we learned in Chiang Mai and a couple of stories.

Thai Travelogue Part 1: Bangkok to Chiang Mai

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When we left on our trip, we were armed with only a bunch of ideas, a guide book, our airline tickets, 1 small backpack each. No checked luggage, no advance bookings.

It was awesome.

Starting the trip, we were expecting the typical mediocre flight, and began to expect the worst when we arrived at the airport to find our airline didn’t have any of the automated check-in kiosks we’ve become so used to. We stood in line for about an hour to finally check in, and our hearts sank a little further when we received boarding passes with row 82 on them. EIGHTY TWO! Do they even make planes that long? Were we sitting on the tailwing?

Turns out 82 is a very good row when you’re in a 747 with EVA Air! They have their airplanes configured so the upper deck of the 747 is still economy class. There are only about 10 rows up there of 3 & 3. There’s plenty of storage, including a bonus space of side-stowage next to the windows, and with so few people it’s really quiet. Score.

If you’re flying from here to Asia, I’ll heartily recommend EVA (hub in Taiwan). The plane was clean and comfortable. The food was highly edible. The service was lovely (especially the attendant who brought us earplugs when there was a screaming child for a few hours) and the price was certainly right.

After an uneventful flight, we landed in Bangkok and found our way to the taxi stand. Our plan was to head to the train station and catch the night train to Chiang Mai to spend the first week of our trip in the North.

We’d done a lot of reading about transport in Thailand, and were ready when the Taxi driver (as expected) didn’t turn on his meter, and tried to take us out of the way to his “friend’s business” to sell us train tickets, instead of to the train station.

We didn’t manage to insist on the meter, and paid about 550 THB for a 300 THB ride (about $7 too much), but we did persevere and insisted on buying our tickets at the train station. Not too bad for our first attempted hosing. And we weren’t taken in again by anyone else.

The train station is very near to the Chinatown area of town, and we had about 5 hours to kill before our train boarded, so we ditched our bags at the luggage holding area and wandered off to explore.

Bangkok, especially Chinatown, is… not for the newbie or the faint of heart. It is busy and loud and chaotic. The sidewalks are covered in food stalls and sidewalk vendors. But don’t walk in the streets, that’s just suicide with the array of trucks, cars, scooters & tuktuks whizzing by in a crazed ballet where lines on the road are just suggestions.

Lanterns in Chinatown

We lasted a few hours in the heat and mayhem, and headed back to the train station to wait the last couple hours before our train left.

The train ride was one of my favourite parts of the trip. The State Railway of Thailand is the longest metre-gauge rail system in the world, and a very efficient and economic way of getting around the country. We booked a 1st-class sleeper car for about $70 for the two of us to make the overnight journey.

We had our own car with a couch that folded up into bunk beds. We had dinner & breakfast service, sheets and pillows delivered to us and collected in the morning. It further solidified my love of rail travel. Don’t worry, that all gets torn apart in a future story.

Train Passing

Next though, our week in Chiang Mai.

Dog-Gone It!

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My dog ate my door.

No, that is not a type-o or a euphemism or a metaphor.

MY DOG ATE MY DOOR!

We came home from our trip, picked the dog up from the usual dog-sitters, brought her home and carried on with life as usual.

Except suddenly, life “as usual” is not good enough for our dog. She has developed a staggering case of separation anxiety, and on Friday night while we were out she ate a big piece of molding off our front door! (Along with making a huge mess of the room where her food is.) We made sure she wasn’t left for long over the rest of the weekend, and gave her lots of exercise.

It hasn’t helped.

Her anxiety’s been getting steadily worse over the past couple days, and this morning I couldn’t even shower alone. She clawed and whined at the bathroom door until I opened it.

We have no idea what triggered the anxiety. She’s 6.5 years old and has never had a problem before. She’s had plenty of upheaval in her life and has always settled immediately back into a routine without being destructive. She always goes to the same dog-sitters, and she’s been with them for a 3 week vacation before.

The only thing new, is that our dog-sitters now have a dog of their own, and she became quite good friends with that dog while we were away. Does she miss having a buddy SO badly that she can no longer handle being alone? That would be terrible, considering we are not going to get another dog.

Anyone out there had experience with a sudden onset of separation anxiety in their dog? Any suggestions for what to do about it?

IMG_2484

I would prefer she stick to eating ice cream.

What a Rube

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We are home, mostly recovered from the jetlag, and almost done sorting through the pictures. I shall have vacation tales for you soon!

In the meantime, it looks like an amazing music video was released right around the time we got back. OK GO produced a 2nd video for their single This Too Shall Pass, featuring an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that runs for the duration of the song and was built to sync up to the music with its blerks and borks and crashes and movements.

It’s amazing.

There is a very special place in my heart for Rube Goldberg machines.

When I was in elementary school I was part of a team in a district-wide Rube Goldberg competition. The machine had to start a certain way (activated with one finger I believe), contain at least X steps (I forget how many now – somewhere around 13), and finish by launching a beanbag into the center of a circular target on the floor.

I don’t remember much about the specifics of our machine, except that it finished by launching the beanbag off an old metal-frame foot-pump for blowing up bike tires and soccer balls and the like.

We were a pre-pubescent team of perfectionists, and rigorously tested our machine in my driveway, running it multiple times to confirm the distance it would launch the sample beanbag we were given, and used that distance to measure exactly how far from the edge of the circle we needed to set up the final step of the machine to hit the center target.

Competition day.

We are nervous but confident. We have our beanbag launching precision down to the centimeter.

We confirm the distance and set up our machine. Nervously, one of us hits the “go” button.

Tick. Tock. Smash. Ping. Crash. Swivel. Ping. Pop…. LAUNCH!

Our soft fabric beanbag sails through the air in a graceful arc! We hold our breath as it goes… up, up, up, down, down, down…. BINGO!

The beanbag landed EXACTLY in the center of the target.

The target on the smooth (completely un-like my driveway) polished concrete floor of the de-iced community rink we were in. And slid. Nearly to the other side of the circle.

The highly unqualified (in my oh-so-expert opinion) panel of judges awarded the prize to the much less prepared rinky-dink team from another school whose beanbag haphazardly slid nearest to the target. We got the launching aspect of the competition nailed. Too bad they hadn’t informed us of the curling part. We lost.

And thus I experienced my first lesson in how not to test, and that sometimes those in charge of RFPs don’t know to supply all the required parameters to build something that works, and that sometimes you fail and go away in tears, and if you’re lucky you get to adjust your work and try again another day, but sometimes it means you just lose.

But enough about me. Back to OK GO!

Their machine goes off without a hitch, including the payoff at the end. Please watch, and think of an 8-year-old me and my machine when you do!

Out of office

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dear internets,

thank you for calling! we are off galavanting through Thailand, and can’t take your call.

while we’re away, eat your vegetables, scrub behind your ears, don’t give the housesitter any trouble, and don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!

see you in march!

much love, chez watercooler

Sproing

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This whole formspring thing has generated far more interest than I thought it would.

Questions I’ve answered in the past few weeks include:

What’s on your life to-do list after Thailand?

Is it true that since you moved down to the Coast you have taken up smoking a lot of dope? Why? Do you not worry about the longer term affects?

What are your guilty pleasures, food, TV etc?

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

And about a dozen more.

Click, check out the answers, and ask some more questions!

Holding Out

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Was having a conversation with a friend the other day about street food (specifically kebab/donair/shwarma), which eventually lead to discussing how to pronounce “gyro” – is it hero or jai-row?

Of course it’s hero, but most North Americans start out calling it a jai-row until corrected.

By that time of course the word gyro is stuck in my head, and I’m doing this thing where I roll a word around in my mouth until it sounds ridiculous (gyro…. gyroooooo…. gyyyyyyrooooowwwwww…. gyRO!). And the inevitable happens. I start singing the song Holding Out for a Hero in my head.

Except, it’s “Holding Out for a Gyro” – and now it’s Weird Al (because OF COURSE it is), and while I’m not actually composing alternate lyrics to the song, I am directing the music video on my head:

Drunken Weird Al is careening about a busy New York City street on a drunken Saturday night, upsetting food carts of all sorts, looking for the perfect thing to soak up alcohol – nothing else will do, he’s Holding out For a Gyro.

Does anyone else do this?

And by “this” I mean direct music videos in your head, although I’d also be interested if you have drunken Gyro-hunting stories…

Meat-head

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Blog posts I started to write and (thankfully) didn’t publish today:

• Why I think you might be an idiot
• Here, let me beat you down with logic
• I don’t care that humans are inherently illogical, I WILL DROWN YOU IN REASON ANYHOW

What can I say, I have a wickedly sore shoulder and a hearty case of didn’t sleep well last night.

But! What I also have is an incredibly tasty lunch. Let me share the recipe with you!

This is my new favorite burger recipe. It sounds like it will please no one, since it has too little meat for the carnivores and too much meat for the vegetarians, but I’m pleasantly surprised with how much I love it every time I make it. Perhaps you will be too.

Meat-and-Grain loaf, burgers, balls
adapted from Mark Bittman’s Food Matters

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• 1 lb raw spinach leaves (blanched, drained, water squeezed out and roughly chopped – feel free to skip this by just buying a packet of frozen spinach and thawing)
• 1 onion chopped fine
• 2-3 cloves garlic pressed, grated or chopped fine
• 2 cups cooked grains (I like it with Millet best, but barley or brown rice also work well)
• Cumin (to taste)
• Cayenne (to taste)
• Salt (to taste)
• Pepper (to taste)
• 1 egg

Put everything in a bowl. Squish about gently with fingers until evenly mixed.

Form into a loaf (in a loaf pan), burger patties (I make 8 large patties with this recipe) or balls of any size.

Bake at 400 F until done (about 30 minutes for burgers)

I love this, because it’s got some extra veggies in it, but still tastes really meaty. The grains soak up the meat-juice as it bakes, so the patties stay moist and the flavour permeates everything.

Try it out! And tell me if you like it. I will probably be much less grumpy by then.

Which Beach?

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Neil and I are planning on spending about a week of our 20-day vacation soaking up the sun on a Thai beach. Obviously we can’t see and do everything with the time we’ve got, so we’d like to head for one major beach area and stick with it for ultimate relaxation, rather than trying to cover multiple coasts and islands.

Problem is, we can’t decide which of the 3 major beach areas to go to!

So, for all of you who’ve been to the fine Kingdom of Thailand, would like to go, or have heard stories from others who’ve gone, please vote in the poll below: which beach should we aim for?

Our ultimate goal is relaxation. We don’t need cable or internet, though running water and a private, en suite bathroom are mandatory. It would also be great if there were diving and/or snorkeling available, and some areas or trails for nature walks.

We don’t want to be in a tourist trap, but we do demand good food is around, preferably with a few different dining options. They can all be Thai of course; tasting different chef’s interpretations of the local food is what keeps things interesting.

So, let ‘er rip! Where would you go? And even if you don’t have any Thailand-specific advice, what do you look for in a vacation destination?

Fighting the Wrong Battle with Bullies

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I saw quite a few people recently tweeting about a bullying article.

If you don’t care to click through, the reader’s digest version is: a cadre of bullies picked on a girl (Phoebe), using the usual teenaged-girl-bully tactics of social pressure, name calling and other psychological barbs. These bullies have apparently not been curtailed, and they occasionally get physical with their abuse. Eventually, in the face of the bullying, 15-year-old Phoebe went home and hanged herself.

So of course the call to action in the article, and the subsequent agreements in comments and the tweets that were circulating the article, is to do something about bullying. Stop the bullies.

Which is all fine and well, and bullies are a pox on society for sure. But if one thing has become obvious in the last few years, it’s that there are increased venues and formats for intimidation, and bullies are exceedingly well-versed in how to use them. In fact, bullies can be more effective than ever, because what else to teenagers have to do besides figure out new and exciting ways to do things their parents haven’t caught on to yet?

So while I’m absolutely in favor of anti-bullying campaigns, I think there’s a huge issue that’s not being addressed enough, especially when it comes to girls: why are we not teaching kids how to cope with bullies?

Teaching coping mechanisms and self-worth is far from an endorsement of bullying. But it’s never too early to teach kids a bit of Emotional Intelligence. They may as well learn early that the only person someone can control is him or herself. Sadly, bullies may never stop, no matter what “anti-bullying” programs are put in place. But teaching kids some self-worth, self-awareness and an innate knowledge that there will always be people who don’t like you and are incredibly mean – but it has to do more with them than you – might help kids like Phoebe start to recognize that death isn’t the only alternative to dealing with a bully.

And I say this is extra important for girls, because girls are much more ruthless with psychological abuse when it comes to bullying. All the more reason to equip girls with the mental tools to cope with it.

So to the commenters and criers out for anti-bullying and teaching kids to act with compassion; I’d implore you not to forget to add teaching some coping skills onto that. I’m awfully skeptical about anyone’s ability to stop bullies. But I think we can instill the tools in our daughters to stop another suicide like Phoebe’s.