Leaving Edmonton for Iowa


Leaving Edmonton

 

A tip for all traveling with tykes around the holidays, dress your wee one in something seasonally fitting and adorable. For example, bunny ears and a tail. My daughter made the ears at child-minding and the tail in her kindergarten class Holy Thursday and proceeded to wear them non-stop through the rest of that day and into Good Friday when we were flying out of Edmonton to Minneapolis for holiday. She would even hop for people with all the verve of Peter Cottontail himself. Now we have flown with Katy before and she is very cute even without a costume, but no one in Customs or with the TSA has ever seemed to notice. But, as a bunny she drew smiles and cooing noises from nearly every one she encountered, proving that even these folks are human. I was beginning to wonder. It was the most pleasant near anal probing I have ever been on the receiving end of as far as airport security goes. None of the usual “mach schnell” and stealing furtive glances around myself wondering if someone was going to snatch us from line and whisk us off to some little room somewhere. (Perhaps if I wrote about them in a more upbeat and ingratiating manner I would be less nervous?)

 

Despite sailing through customs and security, we ended up boarding late, as there was snow in Minneapolis that delayed the inbound flight we were taking. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to fly back and forth between two destinations all day long. It makes teaching look like fun in comparison. Though the weather portrait being painted for us by the Edmonton Northwest employees looked dreary, the reality was not as bleak. Not really any colder when we finally arrived but minus the sunshine we are becoming accustomed to seeing for at least part, if not all, of our days.

 

We barely made the connecting flight, only to be stuck on the runway for almost as long as the actual flight took. De-icing and then waiting for our turn to take-off pushed this flight back as well. I don’t take things like this in stride as my husband does. He reminded me when I was particularly crabby that if he ends up taking the Houston job we will eventually have to fly overseas and those are much longer flights. He is a “see, it could be much worse” person and I am an “it kinda sucks now” person. I think I would have been better had I not had a child next to me kicking my legs and pelting me with a hundred questions or the Father Knows Best family sitting in the seats ahead of us loud talking with another passenger.

 

People who can strike up meaningless banter with their seatmates on a plane always impress me. Chuck Palahniuk refers to them as “single serving friends” in his novel Fight Club. Directly in front of me was a young college student and a thirtyish woman who looked as if she could have been that girl you knew in high school who was a cheerleader and in homecoming court and dated only the cute athletic guys from well off families. You know her, right? Well, they get plump and cut their hair into short fashionable SAHM do’s when they hit thirty and flirt with single guys nine or so years younger on planes when they are coming home from shopping jaunts to Mall of America where they met their college sorority sisters for a mad weekend of credit card maxing and mai tai’s at the Ruby Tuesday’s. They probably don’t also get hit on by the kid’s dad in the seats across the aisle whose wife is sitting right beside him looking like a fiftyish version of her though. Am I being catty? Okay, I am. I like running across these women now that I am older. I enjoy seeing what time has done to them. I wonder if they realize what has happened, or if they are just as clueless as they were back in high school. If they are, it is willful. How could you stand being the same vacuous person as an adult that you were as a teen?

 

Stuck as we were and as loud a competition as this father and son were in for the fashionably done up Sex in the Small Town woman, I ended up having to listen to the dad tell the same bad joke over and over, the mom recite the doings of their entire clan for that last two years – this included a complete medical history of her father and a bragging session about their well-married older daughter and finding out the kid’s name was “Bud”. Who does that to their own child?

 

We managed to arrive in Iowa nearly on time and with all of our luggage this trip and scored a nice vehicle from the rental people. My best friend and her family drove over from Des Moines to meet us at our hotel and we ended up swimming that night and spending time at the nearly deserted mall the next day.  And despite the dire predictions, the weather was seasonable and most of the snow had melted. I have found out a few things about my family that I am wondering the impact of on me this coming year but that is stuff for another day.

 

I still hate flying and would much prefer driving however.

Kid in a Candy Store


I used to shop at a grocery chain called Hy-Vee when I lived in Des Moines. Open 24hrs seven days a week except for Christmas it could boast of being a fairly full-service venue. Pharmacy. Starbucks. Bank that keep the same hours pretty much. And a nicely stocked health food section to appeal to the conscious eaters among us. I took it for granted. The Safeway I use now is very nice. The people are nice and most know me on sight in and out of the store now but to give you an example of the difference in service level I will tell you this little story. The Safeway has new shopping carts. They are the small two-tiered ones for people who won’t or can’t fill the bigger carts. I was pleased to see them. I missed them because I had used them quite a bit back in Des Moines. The clerk at the Safeway commented to me about them as I checked through one day last week. She thought they were marvelous. A kind of sliced bread thing. It was quaint and when I agreed that they were wonderful, I also mentioned that I had used them before where I used to live. She was amazed. She thought they were some new innovation in grocery carts. Shopping in Canada is not like shopping in the U.S. whether it be groceries or clothing or home improvements. The shelves in Canada can be bare for a time while awaiting the next truck and given the lack of any kind of worker in Alberta sometimes that can be a long wait.

 

So today, Rob and I went grocery shopping for Easter dinner at the Hy-Vee near our bed and breakfast. The first thing I did was get a chai to drink while I shopped, and I can do this back home too, but though it is a good chai at the Safeway, I have yet to have a chai anywhere in Canada that tastes as yummy as in the U.S. We started out in the produce and by the time we’d moved on to the next area, my eyes were as big as saucers, I swear. The more time I spent wandering the supermarket aisles, the more like a deer in the headlights I became. There were so many aisles and each crammed with oodles of choices. Oodles. And cheap too.

 

Rob and I read a lot about the tanking U.S. economy but haven’t yet seen much evidence of it. My mother complained about food prices going up but they were still far cheaper than what we play up North, and it didn’t seem to me that lack of anything was keeping people away, The grocery was packed as was the J.C. Penney’s we’d visited earlier in the day for a sale. Plenty of merchandise and people willing to buy it.

 

The clothes shopping I have done, just today, puts any shopping trip I have gone on in Canada to shame. Remember my Old Navy visit a while back? I went to Old Navy this evening. The shelves were stocked. There was stuff on sale everywhere. I left with a pair of sweats and three shirts for under $30 U.S. I was almost giddy with shopping fervor. I could have shopped all night, not even bought anything and be completely content. People here, and I was once one of them, have no idea what kind of a good life is all around them. Hip deep in cheap food. Affordable clothing. Even the gas is cheap. $3.19. That’s the same price as six months ago and certainly cheaper than anything we have ever paid in Alberta or B.C.

 

It’s such a spoiled life here.

Blogging Etiquette: The In’s and Out’s of Linking


I discovered today that Uncle Keith over at A Riot is an Ugly Thing linked me in his blogroll. I almost danced around my office. I love it when I get linked. I feel validated. As if blogging were a real form of writing that carries some weight in terms of the writing profession overall. I know that is not true. Most real employed writers cast disdainful glances over the tops of their specs or down their long pointy noses at we rebels who take the publishing thing into our own hands and blog. Still, Uncle Keith writes a witty blog and it’s an honor to be linked to it.

 

Because I was pondering links today, not just due to Uncle Keith, I did a tag search of the topic. I wondered what others thought about links and linking. I know since discovering my Technorati listing that links help one build something called “authority” which simply means the number of legitimate links a blog has to other sites. This authority is responsible for one’s ranking among a shitload of other blogs. Not a technically or politically correct way of putting it, but there are millions of blogs out there. There are more blogs than newspapers or magazines. They outnumber radio and television stations too, I bet. And they reach millions of people, or they could if millions of people where interested in being reached. Some have tens of thousands of views a day and I find that my mind buckles and my soul starts looking for the nearest bed to crawl under at the thought of that. I nearly had a panic attack the day I provoked the few hundred Angelina fans into checking out a tongue in cheek titled piece I wrote about women and unrealistic beauty expectations not long ago. Though my husband knows me better than I know myself and insists that I would “learn to deal” should I ever become a consumable blogging flavor, there is a shy fat girl in me always who would need smelling salts daily if that should ever happen.

 

Most of my links are informational ones. I have sites and literary magazines listed for my own use and for any writers who stumble across here hoping to find publishing opportunities for fiction or poetry or whatever. I have the widow blogs (which I recently discovered is a term that at least on of them takes issue with but misses the point that I label them for the convenience of those searching for information and not because I feel that the people who write these blogs are one dimensional. I am/always was far more than just that one event in my life). And then there are the links to sites that are just darn good reads. Funny. Thought provoking. Interactive. Writing should be all those things and more. Some are blogs my husband loves to read to me. Johnny Virgil for instance is even more funny when he reads it aloud to me than when I read it myself. Same holds true of Pulp at Gil Meche. There are others that I found and read when I have time to catch up, which isn’t daily but I do set aside time to read and I really try to comment because that is something about blogging that is so very important. More than people realize. Here is a writing medium that begs for audience participation and readers should respond. It’s kind of their job, in my opinion.

 

Which brings me to a blog I stumbled on today. The entry was about linking to sites that don’t return the favor. Now, I don’t advocate linking blogs simply to get linked. Unless you are providing a list for information purposes only it’s better that you read or have a some sort of cyber acquaintanceship with the blog or blogger. I link people because I know them from somewhere else. Like Konnie at It’s Cheaper Than Therapy. She and I go back to BabyCenter when we were trying to conceive and posting on the message boards there. Many of the widow links are connections from the YWBB whose posts I read and blogs I found on that particular journey in my life. One of my biggest referrers from there is Tanja. A Dutch ex-pat in the U.S. who is a wonderful writer and is working on her teacher’s certification. She is a keen observer. The blog post I read today talked about bloggers who snub you despite your being a reader/commenter of long-standing. I have had my share of that. I have linked people who do not have me linked in return. It hurts frankly but just because you have found something in another’s blog that speaks to you doesn’t mean that the blogger will take to you in kind. We can speak to each other without being heard in return. And too there are instances where a certain blogger has a particular theme to their blog with links that reflect that, and your blog simply doesn’t fit in.

 

The blog universe, just like the real world of social interaction we all learned about back in our high school days, is full of clichés and in crowds that we all can’t have membership in. Some of us will be popular and cool and some of us will still be geeks even in our own ethereal worlds. Not fair, but who said we were building a more equitable place to dwell here on the ‘Net? I try to remember that it’s not all personal despite the sometimes cozy feeling we get when we read and comment and are responded to in turn.