Friday, December 31, 2010

Last Day of 2010

There was a time New Year's Eve was the biggest thing, most stressful, worrisome and scary. What if no one kissed me at midnight? What if the wrong person did? Where will I go, which party, bar or house, vodka or rye?
But the last few years, as Baby Duck gives way to Dom, the biggest struggle I have is staying awake all the way to midnight.

Last year, we stayed at the house of friends in who live nearer the airport, so we could jet off first thing in the morning to our freezing cold Cuban getaway. The party, like the freezing cold Cuban getaway, was a bit of a bust.

Here's hoping you get kissed by the right person, choose the best-tasting drink and are wearing a funny hat when the bells ring out.

I'm just hoping no one notices if I move all the clocks ahead an hour. Or two.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Straddling the Digital Divide

The list-makers love this time of year, not just for the naughty-versus-nice collection, but stories of the year, athletes of the year, disasters of the year and so on and so on.

A list I came across this week has me a bit worried I'm on the wrong side of the digital divide; the Huffington Post published the following items that have become obsolete in the last ten years, and I'm still using most of them!

VCRs And VHS Tapes
travel agents
land lines
book stores
maps
separation of work and personal life
forgetting (thanks to the internet's never-ending memory)
watches
900 numbers
calling people
classifieds
encyclopedias
CDs
film
address books
dialup
wires
faxes
letters
catalogs

I must admit some confusion; I never did use the 900 numbers, much of my social life is indeed organised through facebook or email, but I still wrote out Christmas cards, by hand. And to top off my confusion, this week, my 6-CD changer from 1998finally died, and I'm at a loss for what to do for music in my house, other than of course, the radio. I have several Mp3 players, but none has the cord required to send the sound through my ageing amp to my relatively new speakers. Do I get a new amp? Do I load up on a whole new system and then have to take the time to load thousands of songs into a new player? The amp I have is working fine and it offends my environmental sensibilities to throw it out while it's still functional. Oh, it's a conundrum, all right, and honestly, how can I be expected to vacuum without Handel or The Hip?!

Friday, December 24, 2010

Done and done

Finally done.

You ready? I was born ready.

Ready for a nap, that is.

Why do so many of do this to ourselves? Every January, I make a promise to myself that next year will be different. I vow Christmas will be simple, elegant, restrained and nice, that I will not run myself ragged and will cut down on the sheer volume of gatherings. I promise myself not to overspend, overindulge, work myself into a frenzy or build up my expectations so high they can never be reached. And every year, I find myself overspending, hungover, tired, cranky and disappointed in my less-than-elegant trimmings and family get-togethers.

So, after (yet another) meltdown of complaints and criticisms, I apologise to those who heard them.
And I vow -honest this time- next year will be different.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Service with a Smile

Someone, somewhere has figured it out and passed it along and I'm so glad.

I have never received such good service while shopping as I have in the last few days.

Calling a store in Collingwood to order a part for my snowblower: phone answered on the second ring, clerk helpful with the right number to call.
Calling the call centre who-knows-where to order a part for the snowblower: phone answered on first ring, helpful, cheerful workers on the other end.
Calling a store in Wasaga Beach to enquire about a particular pair of winter boots: answered on the second ring, and a cheerful, helpful worker who kept her promise to phone back after searching the store for the boots.
Calling a store in Barrie about the same boots: fast, friendly, helpful and cheerful, and if the boots aren't in stock when we get there, they promise to order them.

Now, if only I could cheer up the guy with the wet, cold feet who's been running a broken snowblower for two weeks.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Dinosaur tape

We had an intern at the radio station last week, a strapping young, overconfident 19 year old who expects to set the world on fire and become a TV foreign correspondent, irrespective of the fact that every broadcast outlet in the world is closing bureaus, he speaks no language but English and seemed to me to be remarkably incurious about the world around him. (come to think of it, those characteristics will set him up quite nicely for a career at Fox news...)

He nearly made me cry, this kid.

As we were going over some of the basics in our newsroom the first day, he asked me what computer program I had used when I attended Fanshawe college.

Uh, we, um, didn't.

As I began my journalism career, we in radio, big and small, were still cutting tape, actual magnetic tape, on reel-to-reel machines. Some stations were using computer programs for their music, but the news was still strictly reel to reel and carts. If there were a piece of sound we wanted rid of in a clip or interview, we literally chopped it out, sticking the remaining pieces back together with tape. On very fancy machines, there might be a special 45-degree cutter to get the splices just right. You had done a good job if you couldn't hear the splices.

These days, I sometimes complain about the fact that I do the jobs that would have been held by three or even four people 'back in the day', (newsrun, co-host and produce/host a talk show) but it dawns on me that technology has advanced to such an awesome degree in a mere 15 years, those of us with decent organisational skills really can do the jobs that used to require three people. For example, where it used to take perhaps as much as three minutes to locate and edit a clip for a newscast and then move it to the cart from which it would play during the news, now, that same work is done with two clicks of a mouse and the time it takes to type out the title. Three to five minutes minutes versus fifteen to twenty seconds. That's a lot of time saved in just over a decade.
So why does it feel as though we've made the leap from dinosaurs to manned flight, and I'm the dinosaur?

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Tummy Trimming

When does a coincidence become an outbreak?

Three of the men and two of the women who were at the tree trimming party have come down with various gradations of gastrointesingal upset of the 'both ends' variety. (I'm trying to be delicate here....)

A few years ago, my family had Mother's Day brunch at the Royal Botanical Gardens, and along with about 350 other people who dined there, everyone but my sister in law and me came down with salmonella poisoning. My poor sweetie wound up with a bruise on his knee where his elbow sat as he perched on the 'throne', exhausted, head on his hand for three days of misery. I'll never look at a buffet the same way again.

This seems to be different, but not much.

I'm sincerely hoping they recover, and soon. I'm also hoping they forget before next year's party.

Tree Trimming

I had friends in on Saturday night for my annual 'Watch Me Trim the Tree' party. It sounds kind of horrible, but actually started out innocently enough: a few years ago, friends were in the middle of a renovation and were not putting up a Christmas tree. But they were missing out on the Christmas-y feeling, so the night I put up my tree and installed the ridiculous number of clear glass ornaments I've collected over the years, I invited them over.

Each ornament I would pull out, I would exclaim over. "This one's my favourite!" and Lovely Pete would good-naturedly reply, "I can see why," So, now, we have several couples over, their children, too and I try not to freak out when the kids handle my fragile ornaments with less care than I might like.

Adults are allowed only to eat and drink, not hang the decorations, and they don't seem to mind.

But Sunday morning, as I cleared away the debris of the party, I realized there was something missing from my tree: there were no presents under it!

I had managed, by December 12th, to purchase just one lonely, sad little present, and I had picked it up in July!

Oh, I had lists. Ideas. Dreams. But nothing to wrap. So, on a slippery and snowy Sunday and Monday, I spent my days and my Christmas budget in one fell swoop.

Well, almost. There is still one aunt, one niece and a nephew whose prezzies I can't decide on. But the tree looks great, with twinkling sparkling stuff above and below.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Take That!

From councillors in Collingwood to Grapes to the entire GOP, there seems to me to be a lot of angry winners around.

The US President is facing a wall of 'no' to everything he tries to do, the Republicans with their majority in the House flat out saying there will be no compromise, no talking, no discussion, no nothing, period.

In Toronto, Don Cherry didn't praise the mayor he was brought to City Hall to introduce, at least, not much. He instead berated 'pinkos', and told the "left wing kooks" to "put that in your pipe".

And here in little Collingwood, rather than articulating ideas, hopes or plans, one of our town councillors continues to write in his blog about his long-simmering distaste for the former mayor and defeated councillors. These are the same people the blogging councillor spent the last four years complaining about after meetings.

What's in common in all these cases is that there are precious few ideas being put forward and not many thoughts on offer about how to make things better. In all three cases, it's just heaps of negativity infused with a steaming dollop of nastiness.

I hope, for all our sakes, that the New Year lets the naysayers get over themselves and start some ideas percolating.