Joie's Space

Friday, December 30, 2005 ______________________________________________________________________________

...and a Happy New Year

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a very special edition of Joie's Space. In today's post, we will talk about the holidays and the spirit of the season. Good things to eat and wishes and resolutions for the upcoming year.

Man. I should stop watching so much Martha. I think that's going to be my first New Year's Resolution. Stop watching so much damn daytime TV. Ahhh maybe not. It's not good to make resolutions that you fully intend to break even as you're thinking about making them. A resolution that I do intend to stick with though is to keep off the 50lbs I have lost so far (hoping maybe to lose a few more) and to start taking yoga classes to get a little more definition in my body.

I've also resolved to be a little better to this blog. It's always the first thing to be sacrificed when things get rough around here, but that also means that the people who actually bother to visit to read are being slighted. You guys out there, you know who you are (yes, both of you) and you're certainly not the least important thing in my life but since you guys also keep blogs, you know how it is...right? Well this blogging drought has a damn good reason - exams. I am pleased to report that this year, I have gotten the Best. Grades. Ever. I don't want to brag or anything, but I have to share that I got 95% (yes, ninety-five percent, count it) for the graduate course in Hearing Science. The one which I had to fight tooth and nail to get accepted for because the instructor did not want to grant me permission to attend. I'm thinking that I might want to attend AUDI 554 which is the next course in Hearing Science, but I don't want to overload myself next term and I need all the other courses I have to graduate. Bugger. I am really turned on by audiology though and I'm probably going to apply for Audiology programs after I've taken my gap year.

This year in Victoria I took my requisite visit to the Bug Zoo and am proud to announce that I have mustered up the guts to hold yet another insect, this time a Katydid. I don't have the picture with me because Jim and I did not bring our camera. When Brian emails me the picture though, you can be assured that it's going right up on this blog. I'm really proud of it especially because it's such a big bug. And leggy. Leggy things really creep me out. The angle the photo was shot makes it look as though the bug is as big as my head. It really isn't quite that big, but it's close.

Completely off-topic without even a lead-in tangent, I'm looking out my window to my right and I'm staring at a collapsed street. As in the street has completely collapsed into this underground parking lot they were excavating for a new condo development. As far as I know, no one was hurt, it collapsed when no one was there and damaged water lines but no humans. From that standpoint, I'm delighted at the collapse. This is because the new condos, when erected would have further obscured my waterfront view. So there. Ha. I'm even hoping that because of these apparent foundational problems, they will decide that it is only safe to build to a certain height, that certain height being lower than the 16th floor. Oh yeah.

I wonder what they're going to do about it though. It seems like a huge horrible mess to start the new year with.

Speaking of mess...my place is a right piece of work. As a result of my Christmas baking, every known counter top is covered in flour and three kinds of sugar. There are dirty dishes everywhere because Jim and I have been so far in and out of the apartment - we've been to Whistler, Victoria and Richmond and Surrey, we've been gone 7 nights of the last 10. The cats water dish and litter boxes are in need of their weekly cleaning (left for over a fortnight now). I refuse to start the new year in this squallor. This being the reason this post ends now.

Best wishes to all for 2006.

posted by Joie! at 11:40 a.m.

______________________________________________________________________________

Tuesday, December 06, 2005 ______________________________________________________________________________

3 Good Reasons I Should Not Have Kids

I was just sitting down after having played with my dinner and I had an epiphany. As of now unless something changes, I am not fit to have kids.

Reason #1: I don't do anything I have to do until after it has to be done.
The prime example of this would be my cats' water and litter box. But wait Joie! Didn't you say you had a self-filtering cat fountain and an automatic self-cleaning litterbox? Yes. I do. Which makes this alot worse than if the average person didn't perform these tasks. Cleaning my litterbox means taking the plastic bag full of cat waste and throwing it away, then adding more litter. It doesn't involve messy scooping, having to wash it out while enduring the stink of cat piss, nothing. Cleaning out my cat fountain just means rinsing and refilling the fountain once a week (technically once every fortnight or less because Jim shares in these duties as well). When it's Jim's turn to clean the litterbox/fountain he does it promptly. I leave both receptacles until the cats start drinking water out of our glasses at dinner time and standing next to the litterbox and meowing pointedly for a few days before I get around to doing it. Can you imagine what the state of my hypothetical kid's diaper would be like?

Reason #2: The Buchanan Tower Elevator Incident
The Buchanan Tower houses several departments, including English. There are 12 floors (hence "Tower") and an ancient elevator system with signs above the three doors saying "This Car Next" that light up to indicate which doors to stand in front of. The buttons are metal and give ever so slightly when you push them, emitting an elegant [bIp] sound. They even have a border of red that lights up to indicate that it already has been pushed. Yesterday I had to go to the English main office to hand in a late term paper (on how Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy and Hermione in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series reinforce negative female stereotypes). The office was on the 3^rd floor, enough to justify taking the lift. Those buttons! Oh those seductive buttons! On my return to the ground floor I pressed ALL THE BUTTONS! BUAHAHAHAHAHA! only to find quite a few people in the lobby who were all waiting for the lift. the "this car next" sign even had them all lined up ready to enter. i mean - classes were over! who would've thought there would be so many people in buchanan tower? I pulled the hood over my head and ran. Now is this a person you would give a kid to? I think not.

Reason #3: My...uh..."Eating Habits"
Jimmy went to have dinner with his dad tonight who has a broken arm (Brian, not Jim) so I had dinner by myself. After playing with my food for a while I threw it out and opened a bag of Christie Crunchers (which is a crunchy snack that has more than 70% less fat that potato chips and no trans fats) and proceeded to lick the seasoning off each chip. I didn't go through the whole bag, mainly because dinner was rather unappetizing and so I didn't really feel like eating anything else. I still had a neat little pile of plain crunchers sitting in front of me though. I quickly swept this disgraceful evidence into a styrofoam container that used to hold Chinese delivery (from Hon's) and promptly threw it in the trash. See, with this I wouldn't be able to tell kids to (a) stop playing with [their] food or (b) not to lick the good stuff off something and then throw it away because that would make me a hypocrite. I don't like hypocrites and I refuse to be one. On the other hand, kids are slobbery and sloppy enough without someone who doesn't enforce proper mealtime etiquette.

So there. 3 very good reasons why I'm probably not going to have any kids. Besides, now that this is in print on the world wide web I doubly cannot have kids - what if they grow up one day and read this? That would be the end of parenting as we know it. Following that line of thought, I wonder what kids who see their parents on Maury doing the whole "You are not the father"/"You are the father" turn out like. Then again, those kids probably have so many things stacked against them that there are just too many confounding factors to consider when assessing the impact of this particular incident for there to be a conclusive answer. Oh well.

posted by Joie! at 6:00 p.m.

______________________________________________________________________________