Sizing It Up

I generally make my coffee at home or at the office, but I am a fan of the Timmys, and treat myself once in while.

I'm not a big fan, though. I'm a medium fan. Medium regular, that is.

Before long though, my medium will become a small as the coffee company changes the names of its cups. Large will become medium and what's now extra large will be renamed large to make way for the biggest of the coffees, the Extra Large, which will be a whopping 24ounces or 710 millilitres.

While Tims is at it, I suggest we get rid of all the smalls, mediums and larges, and find some way to standardize sizes elsewhere, to perhaps bring some sanity to sizing.

One day recently, as my mother continued the seemingly never-ending process of divesting her house of my childhood stuff, I took delivery of a pair of skirts I had worn during the early years of high school. I tried them on in the hope I might be the same size as I was way back then. Since I've taken up running and am watching what I eat, I thought maybe, just maybe, my high school skirts might be too big. Imagine the bragging rights!

Well, the skirts actually fit just right, even with their far-too-high 80s waists. Here's the thing, though: the skirts fit, but my pants, the ones my sweetie urged me to buy three pairs of last year because they fit so well, they are now far too big, but their labels say they're four sizes smaller than the perfectly-fitting high-school skirts. As Tina Fey would say, "What the What?"

Why can't clothes be the same as shoes? The sizes are pretty much standard, so if you're an 8, you're an 8 everywhere and you likely were an 8 last year, too.

The confusion about sizes might have to do with the fact that our feet stay the same size for a long time, but our, shall we say, assets, sometimes don't. My girlfriends tell me the size labels are all about psychology, and that retailers have done a number on them so people who are getting fatter don't have to feel bad about it and thus will keep buying more clothes.

So to straighten this out: I was a size 13 in 1989, but I'm an 8 now, even though I'm actually the same size in both centuries, which means 13 and 8 are really the same thing, the reason being that girls who were 13s in grade 12 still want to buy a 13 even though they might now be what would have been a 20 back then?

My head hurts. I wonder what size hat I need? Probably a medium.

Wasted Effort

There's a lot to be upset about in the death of Jack Layton: the sheer cruelty of cancer taking a victorious fighter just as he reaches the apex of his career, the heartbreak for his ever-hopeful fans and followers, the loss of what appears to me to have been a decent, driven, thoughtful person, far too early in their life.

The worst of it, though, is the stunning loss of potential creativity.

I was very much looking forward to watching the thrust and parry between Layton and Stephen Harper, two leaders who really, really believe their view of the world is correct and if we all would only get on board with their beliefs, all would be well. Layton's blazing passion versus Harper's gimlet-eyed cool would have been a delight to behold in Question Period, for those of us who are into that kind of thing.

I was also excited about seeing how the nascent movement to unite the left was going to turn out. Now, with the Liberals, Bloc and NDP all leaderless, we are in for a few years of one-party rule, which makes for boring politics, not to mention a clear lack of accountability.

But what I was most eagerly anticipating was the attack ads.

You have to know the attack was being burnished, in spite of Layton's illness. After all, he'd been Opposition leader since May, a full four months. It seemed like mere minutes after he became Opposition Leader, ads pillorying Stephane Dion were on air. The ad wrecking ball was swinging toward Michael Ignatieff before he'd even stepped off the plane from Harvard. But in their cases, attacking was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was obvious what the thrust would be: he's not up for the job, he's not from here. duh.

Layton might have been harder to skewer since he embraced the very things that might have been used against him. He was an unabashed mustachioed urbanite academic on a bike. How do you attack that?

In some parts of the country, the attacks could simply have shown Layton with his 'ethnic' wife on their bicycle at the gay pride parade, perhaps with the copy line, "enough said". But in other parts of the country, such an ad might have been seen as actually being in support of the NDP.

Maybe the ads would have used a line like, "He can't even walk, how could he lead?" with a shot of Layton holding up his cane. Would the ads have gone as far as to call Layton a "Pinko"?

It's tragic we'll never know what brilliance was in store.

I imagine a heartbroken advertising executive weeping today as he gently opens his palm over a calm lake in the northern woods, releasing a memory card into the waters below, the copy, pictures, video and plans for a narrative arc softly coming to rest beside the hulk of an Avro Arrow.

Storms and Change

I've been worried about what we humans have done to the world for a while now, complaining about tasteless tomatoes bred for travel not nutrition and avoiding the use of my electric clothes dryer in hopes of cutting my carbon footprint. I recycle. I walk instead of driving, I buy local and I eat local.

All of this effort is in the hope that my puny efforts combined with yours, will help prevent what's being called the most urgent environmental catastrophe ever.

But we can't count out the power of nature, and yesterday was one of the days we got a reminder of just how small we all are when one of the most powerful tornadoes in Ontario's history came roaring off Lake Huron to devastate the town of Goderich, with its gorgeous little town square.

The people of Goderich are already banding together to start the cleanup, taking down the broken trees and clearing the streets. But it will be years before the repairs are done, years before they can put back together was was destroyed in just a few seconds.

I'm not saying this storm is connected to global climate change. I'm saying that there's so much to climate change, even the biggest of our little human brains will never get around it.

And so, as I take out the trash today, and the recycling and compost, I wonder if mother nature isn't more than capable of taking care of herself, no matter what we do. I wonder if she's not more than capable of taking care of us measly humans, too.

If there was nothing you could do to change the outcome of climate change, would you do anything differently? I'm just wondering.

Ugly Hour

A lot of things are changing for me as I age. I'm not exactly in my dotage yet, but I do require glasses to read at night, there is a nasty varicose vein on the back of my right leg, and little things are adding up, like the number of candles on my birthday cake.

But there are a few great things about getting older, like the fuzziness that replaces some previously sharp memories. For example, it's nice to forget things like the pong of desperation in the air near closing time at a crowded and sweaty nightclub.

I spent Friday night in Toronto with two of my favourite girlfriends, and after a lovely dinner (and several drinks), we decided it would be a great idea to go dancing at one of the clubs on King Street.

We had a lot of fun and I loved the energy of a packed house of people dancing and carrying on, but it has been a while since I went out on the town with the girls, and there was a lot I had forgotten. Notably, I had forgotten the leer of those strange guys who stand on or very near the dance floor. They're not dancing, they're just standing there, watching the dancing. It's disquieting. I had also forgotten that sometimes, men you've never met (and frankly, don't want to know) will grab your butt as you dance, perhaps in the hope a grope will be considered charming. It isn't.

My personal favourite thing to have forgotten is the guys who come up behind a girl on the dance floor and basically spoon her as she dances, again perhaps in the hope she will find it charming. It isn't.

I was especially disturbed by all this because I had left my wedding and engagement rings firmly on, and so had my buddies. Either the lechers didn't notice or perhaps they didn't care. Again, I don't remember it being this way when I was younger and single, but maybe the rings were part of the attraction. Perhaps we were more attractive because we were not in a desperate search for validation and love. We were just there to dance.

As we got ready to leave, one of my girlfriends reminded me what she used to call the final minutes of an evening out: Ugly Hour. It's that hideous, desperate, slightly scary time of night just as the clubs close and the mist of drink and loneliness overrides caution and discretion. I'm glad it had passed from my memory, and I hope not to become reacquainted with it any time soon.

Cleaning up the puppy

My dog loves me. I can tell by the fact that if I go from one room to another, she's right there behind me. Even if my sweetheart is cuddled up with her on the couch, she leaves the room to be with me.

If I dash into a store and leave her in the car, she howls like I've taken one of her paws with me, stopping the noise only when she can see me returning.

She also sleeps in our bed (not great for spontaneous romance, let me tell you..), sometimes right under the covers and as she settles in, she is nearly always in bodily contact with me in some way, often with her chin draped across my knees, ankles or waist.

Now, you might think her devotion is about food, but I'm not the one who dishes out her grub- that's my sweetie's job. However, I do offer the thing she wants most in the whole world: exercise. She's a Weimaraner, and Weimaraners need a LOT of running. To get her enough exercise, I used to wear rollerblades while she ran, which was exhilarating but terrifying as she pulled me along at about 40 kilometres an hour. During those runs, I unknowingly taught her to stop with one word when I would pull her to a stop at each intersection, tugging at the lead and saying, "whoa, whoa, whoa..." One day, while walking on the trail, I said, "whoa," and she stopped dead in her tracks. Cool!

The problem with my darling dog's devotion is that she's disconsolate when I'm not around. We crated her for several years but I got so sick of cleaning up the blankets she ripped to shreds, we eventually put the crate away and have given her the run of our newly dog-proofed house.

But you can't dog-proof for pee. Nearly every single day, I come home to a puddle in the front foyer. Which would be fine if we had linoleum or tile, but we have hundred year old maple, and I'm worried the boards are not going to make it to a hundred and one. At first, we thought it was that she was being left too long, but recently, I forgot something not five minutes after we'd left, and the puddle was already there.

I'm running out of patience, and newspaper.

Running Repression

While you're reading this, I'm procrastinating. My house has never been cleaner, my projects never more up to date and nearly all my planned summer reading is complete. I'm contemplating starting work on next year's taxes as I avoid going for my latest run.

I should just put on the stupid shoes and go already, but I'm ashamed to admit I'm afraid of this particular phase of training. Intimidated. I'm scared I won't be able to finish and will turn into a puddle of goo on the trail. A puddle that needs to be scraped up.

After eight weeks of training, I'm moving into 'week five' of the prgogram I'm following for the 5K race I will run in October. So far, it's been relatively easy: I have no twinges in my knees anymore, and I have received quite a few compliments on my slightly altered figure. My sweetheart even stopped me in the upstairs hallway last week to say he thought my legs looked different. He couldn't quite put words to it, but thought I was leaner somehow. Stronger. He was well rewarded for the observation.

But this latest run scares me. It's three five-minute runs, with a mere two minutes of walking in between. Truthfully, it's not very much more activity than the 'week four' schedule. The additional running amounts to only two extra minutes. But still, I'm afraid.

What if I can't do all three of the runs? Worse, what if I can? Then I'll have to move on to next week, which is eight minutes of running at a time. The following week is a solid 20 minutes- all at once. eek.

Hey, does anyone need some vacuuming done today?

Luddite Comeuppance

I'm bracing for a battle over the TV.

I like to consider myself one of those people who doesn't watch much television. Some studies suggest that people who say they don't watch television actually watch about 8 hours a week of it, which is apparently only a teeny bit less viewing than the people who admit watching tons of it.

When we moved into our house, we discovered to our delight that there was an antenna in the attic, and decided to forgo installing cable or satellite. We get seven channels and except during the Brier or Scotties or Olympics, really don't miss it. We estimate we've pocketed more than $4000 with the cash we haven't laid out in the last seven years.

At the end of the month, we'll either be at the end of the gravy train, or getting off on easy street when over the air broadcasting goes digital. We've shelled out the 100 bucks for a digital transformer box, but considering we're in Collingwood and not Toronto, we're not sure it's going to make any difference to us. So far, we can't get any of our regular channels broadcasting in digital, but we're having trouble finding any information on when the switches will take place. The only firm piece of information I have is that TVO is planning to make its switch on August 18th, so I guess we'll see soon whether we're perusing the Bell and Rogers brochures, or laughing all the way to the bank.

I just know I can't miss Y&R.
Or The Good Wife.
Or Glee.
Or Grey's Anatomy.
Or CSI.

(Good thing we don't watch TV, eh?)

Happy Tomato Week

This week is the week I wait for every year with eager anticipation.. Ah yes, my favourite week of the year: the week the tomatoes arrive. I plan to gorge myself.
Of course, you can buy tomatoes every week of the year at the grocery store, but what's the point when they taste nothing like a tomato, and actually, like nothing at all.

The tomatoes you buy the rest of the year have been bred for travelling, for ease of picking, and to ripen all at once for the convenience of the superfarms in California. Like much of the food we buy in our industrialised food chain, they're not actually bred for things like, say, taste or nutrition. Flavour is nowhere on the list of factors for the breeders of the seeds.

But for those of us who know the difference, this is the week. The first of the real, honest to goodness, ripened in the sun in a field that's not in California tomatoes start to become available. I'm gobbling them down two at a time even as I keep a close eye on the little green beauties that continue to swell in my backyard.

While some people are complaining about the heat, the growing conditions for backyard tomatoes have been perfect this year, as long as you can keep them from drying out.

And there really is a difference. On my plate with a little white vinegar and salt or squeezed into a pasta sauce for use in the winter, there's a difference between the food you get at the industrial grocery and the stuff you can watch growing. More and more of us have noticed, and that's why you're seeing the proliferation of farmers' markets.

It might be about the 100 mile thing, but for me, it's all about the taste.