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Seeing my mother’s face in mine

When I began to get “older” I was occasionally alarmed to catch sight of my mother’s face looking back at me from the mirror, or her hands resting in my lap — or, worse yet, my grandmother’s face or hands. I saw these resemblances only as a sign that I was aging. But as of this year, I am the eldest person in my immediate family, and suddenly I kind of like the idea that I look and sound like the women who came before me. It is as though I am carrying around a special key that only I am able to use to unlock the past – and I do it so easily: with a facial expression, a way of saying something, or a laugh. The family resemblance has turned from something I resented into a precious heirloom.

A smartphone app I wish someone would invent

Now that I can use my iPhone as a heart-rate monitor, I wish someone would invent an app that I could use to set up my workouts by desired target heart rate, including such variables as the length of time I want to get to the peak heart rate during the exercise period, how long I want to stay there, and how long the overall workout should be. The app would then select iTunes from my built-in iPod that have the correct beat to correspond to my desired heart rate (starting heart rate building to target heart rate, and then decreasing again at the end of the workout). Then I could run in time to the music and actually listen to the music and work with it instead of thinking about my heart rate and how much longer or faster I have to go.

So get on it, and let me know when it's done. I'll even pay. A bit.

Vegans and Vegetarians:

I wonder if they ever feel guilty when they contemplate the fact that they are MADE of meat.

I just discovered the most thirst-quenching drink ever

Boil 6 cups of water. Pour it into a juice container.

Drop 3 teabags into the hot water, as follows (some variation permitted. This is what I used):

1 Dry Desert Lime (Numi brand)
1 Green Tea
1 Wildberry Delight (Tetley)

Leave it for an hour. Then put it in the fridge (with the teabags still in it). Wait for a few hours, or overnight or whatever.

Pour yourself a glass when you're thirsty. You won't believe how good it tastes.

Roget's Thesaurus

I consider it a loss that most young people today will never have an opportunity to marvel at how intelligently and intuitively Roget constructed his thesaurus. I use, and am grateful for, the on-line one at thesaurus.com, even paying for the privilege to use it all year long, but I was looking at the actual book today and appreciating its creator anew. You can climb into Roget's Thesaurus and get satisfyingly tangled in the threads for hours.

Strolling

One more downside to tv ads: Now when I see a couple my age out for a walk, I think, "Oh, dear-- strolling. They should see a doctor."

Just Wondering

If the smell of burning toast is a sign that you are having a stroke, and you are making toast and it burns, and you have a stroke because you think you are having a stroke, would you fail to notice an important symptom -- namely, the smell of burning toast?

The Best

For me, there is nothing, nothing, nothing better in the world than the feeling I get when I complete the last revision to a piece of creative writing and the product pleases me. I've been writing for thirty years now, and the feeling of elation at this point never changes.

This is why I write.

The undoing of the media

On-line media report that Gordon Lightfoot is not dead, Simon Cowell is not engaged, Brangelina did not break up, and J.K.Rowling did not plagiarize. We have entered the era of de-newsing.

Valentine's Day 2010

What appealed to me most about Valentine's Day this year was the sight of so many slightly embarrassed looking young men walking along the streets and onto the subway carrying flowers wrapped in cellophane and paper.

The Subway: A Metaphor

The other day at Rosedale Station A Voice asked everyone to get off the subway quick quick quick as the train had to return south to the Royal York. The Voice said another train would be along shortly. The Voice said, "We are closing the doors. Please exit the train." Everyone got off quick quick quick. They closed the doors. A minute later, the doors opened again and the Voice said we could all get back on. We did, and we continued our journey.

Was this the new train they had promised us?

This is a metaphor for my life, I think. I just have to figure it out.

A perc from the phone company

My elderly aunt passed away on Tuesday. On Thursday, I cancelled my aunt's phone. The phone company guy completed the request, then said that he and his family would pray for my aunt's soul to make sure it got to heaven. I thanked him, and later remarked to my younger son, "It's amazing what you can get from your phone company these days." He replied, "I think it's part of a bundle.

Gaggles or giggles of girls

by which I mean the early-teen variety, and sometimes including boys as well, should not be allowed to gather in groups in coffee shops. Do these young people ("Oh, my GAWWDDD!!!" "Oh, my GAWD!" "OH. MY. GAWWD!!!") not realize that some of us have abandoned our cherished spots in libraries, where no one says "Hush" any more, and fled to Starbucks or The Second Cup to get our reading and our writing done?

What Peter says about Paul....

People get aggravated because the mega-corps based in North America who sell them their computers, telephones, etc. are outsourcing the service contracts for those products to companies with offices in countries where the hourly wages are lower -- India being a prime example. What I don't understand (aside from why so many of us have such problems understanding people who don't speak English exactly the same way we do) is why the complainers seem to blame the people at the other end of the line--most of whom actually do have the answers they need, and are doing their best to help. They are not the ones who engineered this system.

How to make yourself feel great!

Invite everyone you know in a certain city to a farewell party. (I'm not sure whether you actually have to be leaving town to do this or not.) The ones who cannot attend will write lovely notes to you telling you how much you mean to them and how much they will miss you. They will not necessarily mean what they say, but they will make you feel great. (I'm not sure how often you can do this in one calendar year--at least once, I am sure.)

(For more information, see my Moving To Toronto blog)

Spin Dry -- and the Wasp Sucker revisited

Someone should invent a big salad-spinner-type contraption for the change rooms of public swimming pools into which you could drop your bathing suit and then crank the handle to spin the water out of the suit before you put it in your pack and take it home.

UPDATE: My FaceBook friends inform me that these things do exist--just not at the pool I go to. So... I still haven't seen my idea for a wasp sucker on sale anywhere (like a Dustbuster only with a long, narrow neck with a baffle in it, so that you can suck wasps off your steak at barbeques and dispose of them later). It's such a simple idea. I want one of those. I even sent the idea to Black and Decker -- nothing. Drawing available on request. The fat end where the wasps would accumulate during dinner could later be emptied into the bushes or sprayed full of Raid, depending on your views about wasps' right to life.

From the "technology that baffles me" department....

One of my many goals in life is to get an envelope to come out of the printer with the address the right way up on it AND with the address not printed on the back flap.

I need a search engine for life

As I was looking for cinnamon in my cupboards just now, I realized that a part of my brain was wondering where the search engine for the kitchen had gone.

On being irreplaceable

In times of economic crisis, people worry a lot about being replaceable. Everywhere in the media these days--in blogs and business columns, in opinion pieces and video interviews--corporate pundits and pop psychologists are struggling to explain how we can stand out from the crowd (in a good way) so that our employers will see the need to keep us on.

When Steve Jobs had to take some time off work, the words "No one is indispensable" became both reassuring and terrifying to millions of cogs in a host of corporate machines.

In good times and bad, the only business with a really, truly indispensable and irreplaceable person at its core is the one that runs off an individual creative vision. John Updike was irreplaceable. Picasso was irreplaceable. Eartha Kitt was irreplaceable. So was Yves St. Laurent.

Artists often undervalue their own contributions--probably because for most of us it takes so long to attract the only meaningful measure of our worth, which is money. We should not be discouraged. Some of us may not make a living from our art just yet (in that regard, for us there is no difference between the good times and the bad!), but we cannot be replaced, and we will always be "employed."

We have what everybody wants. We should be happy (and even a bit snooty) about that.