To Canadians: 10 Reasons For Non-Douchebags to Vote On May 2, 2011

Tags

Canada, Canada Votes, Conservatives, democracy, Election Canada, electoral reform, government, Harper, Ignatieff, Layton, Liberals, May 2 2011, MPs, NDP, politics, Prime Minister, ridings, vote, voting

It's his Canada, too

As I hope all Canadians know, we have an election on Monday.

AGAIN.

And yes, we’re tired of elections that don’t change anything and just cost a lot of our money.

YES, we’re frustrated by the first-past-the-post system (I’m in one of those ridings where my vote won’t really count. Even the other MPs don’t think they have a chance. The alternative options are a slouching guy in a funny hat and a shiny 19 year old in university).

YES, the polls are pretty clear about who is going to win the election.

And YES, that means that we may have to go through this whole rigmarole again.

So you totally need to vote:

1. “I’m tired of elections that don’t change anything and just cost a lot of money.”

Then you should totally vote. The money is being spent. Get your money’s worth, at least. Also, if no one votes in this election, everyone is going to be like “k, that one doesn’t count!” and they’ll give us ANOTHER. If there’s a big turnout, then it will be hard to argue that the will of the people is not reflected by the current government.

2. “I’m frustrated by the first-past-the-post system. One party is winning by a landslide in my riding, so my vote won’t count.”

In the Canadian system, sadly, that is true. But in that case, why don’t you vote swap with someone else? If you do that, your vote will count, so you should totally vote.

3. “I don’t trust vote swapping. What if the other guy just votes for his party anyway? Then I’ve been tricked into giving the other guy a double vote.”

Sure that is always a risk… but you didn’t think your vote counted anyway, right? Are you now saying that an extra vote would make a difference? If so, you should totally vote.

4. “I just don’t care who wins.”

Then you don’t get to complain about anything, ever. Taxes too high? Well, you should have voted. No jobs? Well, you should have voted. EI cheque too small? Well, you should have voted. The Prime Minister has proposed a new law to force all Canadians to wear bowling shoes and beanie hats? You really should have voted.

5. “I don’t know what’s going on. I feel like I won’t be making an informed decision.”

Let me Google that for you. Or, if all those words confuse you, here’s a summary of the Harper years with big pictures and comic-book speech bubbles. Form an opinion, for gawdsake. Taxes? Jobs? Economy? Religion? Freedom of Speech? Environment? These things affect you. Spend ten minutes informing yourself, and then you can bloody well vote.

6. “That doesn’t help me. I still can’t decide who to vote for. Everyone’s saying different things. I don’t know who to believe.”

Let me introduce you to Vote Compass. It examines your political views and tells you which parties fit you best. Now you can vote.

7. “Vote Compass dropped me smack in the middle of three left-wing parties. I still don’t know who to vote for.” In that case, why don’t you visit Project Democracy and see who has the best chance of winning in your riding? You’re a perfect candidate for strategic voting, because any one of several parties would suit your views. So you should definitely vote.

8. “There’s no one I want to support. The candidates are all crooks and they’re ugly.”

It’s true that Ignatieff’s creepy eyebrows look like they were scribbled on by Harper while he slept, and that whenever Harper leans into the microphone, I half expect him to moan “braaaaaaaaaaaains”, and that Jack Layton looks like a used car salesman and his chin is too pointy. The party leaders have the combined charisma of an arachnid, I know.

But remember this: the elections are determined by percentage points, not sheer numbers. So your vote actually counts twice – it adds to the percentage of the candidate you vote for, and it dilutes the percentages of the other candidates. So go vote for, like, the Pirate Party or something and screw them all over. It’s your electoral right! With a vote swap you could actually have a chance at voting in an Independant or similar MP who would take a seat in Parliament from the other parties.

It’s not ALL about who is the Prime Minister. MPs have power too. OBVIOUSLY, or we wouldn’t be having an election. Vote for the MP who looks the least useless.

9. “I hate the whole political system and I’m not going to support it by voting, because I’m all brilliant and cynical and DEEP like that.”

Yeah, because the world’s history is filled with people who changed the world by simply NOT participating in Democracy while making whiny comments on the sidelines. If you hate the system so much, change it. Vote for the people who will make those changes, or even better, put your money where you mouth is and run as an independent next election.

10.  “Like, I still really don’t think one vote will, like, matter, and I totally have a hair appointment that day and it’s super important.”

That must be what 42% of Canadians said two years ago, because that’s how many people didn’t vote.

I think that nearly 10 million people probably COULD have made a difference last election, but maybe that’s just me.

In this election, the three biggest parties are 5 – 7 percentage points away from each other in the polls. 42% of the population could make a HELL of a difference in those numbers on the actual election day, so you should totally vote. 

Make the decision to vote, and then convince everyone you know to vote, too. Send them this link. Send them other links. Convince them, too. Then it isn’t just one vote, it’s ten votes. If all of your friends convince some other people to vote, it’s even more. And more. And the next thing you know, you’ve changed Canada’s political history, all by posting a few links and then checking a box on a slip of paper.

Besides, there’s a secret 11th reason why you should vote: You are legally entitled to three consecutive hours off on Monday, PAID, to vote.

BONUS, am I right?

11. “Maybe I’ll take the time off work “to vote”, but not waste my time voting.”

…Yes, you could do that, but that would make you a lazy, deceitful douchebag. In fact, don’t vote. Because I really don’t need my country’s future being determined by lazy, deceitful douchebags. You are excused. Watch out for George Takei on your way out the door.

I don’t have anything interesting to say, so here’s a video of Babby being repeatedly attacked by a raccoon

[vimeo vimeo.com/23022157]

In Which I Threaten to Descend Upon The Maritimes With Murderous Robots In My Wake

Tags

bloggers, DoCo, Dooce, Nova Scotia, robots, travel, twitter

I’m going to be home in less than a month! 

Since Perfect Husband hasn’t been home for more than two or three days (at Christmas) in years, we’re taking a proper vacation in Nova Scotia. We’re going to catch up with old friends and relatives, make them all admire our baby while he spits up all over them, and then I’m going to dump water on his head.

I’m not religious, and PH is downright atheist, so a Christening seems a little odd, I know. But I believe in doing a naming ceremony for the baby. All cultures tend to have some form of tradition around naming the baby or welcoming him into the family, and in our culture, a Christening seems like the only way to do that. I wish we could just formally name him and welcome him to the family and eat cake without anyone trying to cleanse my child of inborn evil or dedicating his life to Christ, but that doesn’t appear to really be an option.

Plus, I think it’s important to my mother, who is the daughter of an Anglican minister.

In any case, I’m very excited to be going home. I am looking forward to seeing my friends, my family, and maybe taking Babby to Peggy’s Cove or my old university.

Among the many people I can't wait to see are my boy cousins, one of whom drew this awesome picture of my fur babbies

The extra-awesome thing is that the Halifax Meetup of Dooce Community members is totally happening while I’m home. I can’t wait to meet all of these bloggers. I hope they like me.

If anyone else wants to meet up with my while I’m in town, I’d love to schedule you in. Drop me an email or twitter or some such (I’d just like to point out that after all that pressure to join Twitter, I finally have and I only have 9 followers. I haven’t felt this much of a loser since I was one of the first people I knew on Facebook and wandered around going “hellooo? Is anyone else on here?”).

I’m leaving in midMay (since I don’t have the restriction of vacation time) and PH is joining me later. That means I’ll be flying across the country with Babby alone. AGAIN. It’ll be worth it, but oh boy, it’s going to be a long flight.

NOTE: to all of you creepy internet stalkers who think you know that my home will be empty and are already planning to break in and masturbate gloomily in the kitchen – TOO BAD! Perfect Husband will be home for the first while, and then when he leaves the house it will be guarded by robots with axes.

And they won’t be Asimov “Three Laws” robots. They’ll be, like, Chopping Mall robots.

So yeah. Watch out.

Then We Make Love To The Stanley Cup

Tags

Canucks, hockey, Ivan Hrvatska

I am not a sports person, but I do care about hockey.

As long as the Canucks are doing well.

See, you probably think I’m a Canucks fan because I live in Vancouver. Well, you’re wrong! I’ve been a Canucks fan ever since 2004, when I still lived in New Brunswick and my roommate discovered this song :

Of course, it’s very old now, and most of those team members are no longer on the team. So you can imagine how jubilant I am about this:

A post that starts with a vacuum and ends with an alien. With Babby-training in between.

Tags

aliens, anxiety, bissel, carnivals, dogs, exposure, exposure therapy, fairs, fear, noise, photos, socialization, training, vacuums

We got a new vacuum the other day.

Finally.

Our old vacuum, a Bissel specially designed for picking up pet hair, has been sitting unused for the greater part of a year. I have only dragged it out and switched it on when the cat litter spilled or when the fur levels on the carpet upstairs had reached our knees.

It was a great vacuum once upon a time. In our old apartment, which largely featured open space, it sucked things up great. However,

1. It was never really the same after PH decided to deal with the Spot Incident by soaking up vegetable oil with cornstarch and then vacuuming up the goopy mess
2. Our new house has about the same square footage of our old apartment, but split onto two floors, with stairs in between. There are no wide open spaces. Only corners. And crevices.

Suddenly big-and-heavy-and-filled-with-goop was no longer appropriate for our household.  PH knew we needed a new vacuum, but kept putting it off, because, well, we don’t have any money.

Last week we went out and picked up a Bissel EasyVac for 40- bucks, and it runs great. It’s small, lightweight, no-frills, but it gets in the corners and gets the fur off of the floor.

However, it doesn’t run as smoothly as our old massive vac. PH was holding Babby when I flipped it on for its inaugeral run, and Babby startled noticeably and started to fuss while clutching his father’s shirt.

This is really the first significant fear reaction we have ever seen in Babby. Sure, he startles to loud noises – he even did that in the womb – but he had always recovered quickly. The old vacuum never bothered him, on the rare occasions that we lugged it out and dragged it along the floor.

But he’s getting older, and this one clearly freaked him out.

Now, I’ve never had a baby before, but I know what to do when dogs are scared of something:

1. Acknowledge their feelings with moderate sensitivity. Scolding a fear reaction or totally ignoring it doesn’t help anyone feel validated.  Don’t coddle or get overly mushy, though, because if you’re like “oohh, poor Doggy, it’s scary isn’t it? Yes, let me pat you and take you away from that,” they’ll assume that it means that it really IS scary and their fears are totally justified. So instead you say, “oh, are you scared? It makes a big noise, doesn’t it?” in a sympathetic but cheery voice.
2. Smile to show them that you aren’t scared of it, and preferably demonstrate its harmlessness by approaching the fear object yourself and interacting with it.
3. Encourage – but do not force – the dog to approach the object. We often use treats tossed near the vacuum, for example, or just sitting by it and encouraging the dog to approach US.
4. Never remove the fear object or take the dog further away from it until the dog has managed at least a partial recovery. Otherwise the dog will learn that reacting fearfully makes the object go away, and they will also always remember the object as scary.

Perfect Husband has seen me deal with fear reactions in dogs before, not to mention helping me through my anxiety exposure therapy CBT, so we immediately began to treat Babby’s fear in the same way we treat mine/a dog’s. We didn’t even have to discuss it. We’re a well oiled machine. A well oiled fear-fighting machine.

He hugged Babby and said “Oh, is that big noise scaring you? It’s just a vacuum. Look! Wow!”

I smiled at Babby and moved the vacuum around and said “Oh, it makes a big noise, so you’re scared, but it won’t hurt you. See, it’s a vacuum! I’m using it! Wheee!”

As I went around the room talking to Babby happily, PH slowly approached closer and closer. He stopped if Babby acted too frightened, and then once Babby relaxed a bit, inched yet closer again.  By the time I turned off the vacuum, Babby was right next to the vacuum (still in the loving safety of Daddy’s arms) and starting to relax. You could tell he still wasn’t pleased, but at least he wasn’t trying to climb his father like a tree.

We have noticed several similar fear reactions to loud noises since. So we think it’s time to start socializing him. If we want to avoid his picking up on my anxiety, we need to raise him with the CBT skills that I had to be taught in adulthood:

• approach your anxieties, instead of running away.

So when we saw that the Midway had set up at the local mall, we decided to take Babby. Sure, he couldn’t go on any of the rides (they wouldn’t even let us get on the sedate choo-choo train that went around an oval track a 5 km an hour which the conductor could stop with his hand and that had a sign saying “everybody welcome!”) but we figured it was good socialization just to be around all the noise and bustle. We always used to take dogs to the fair for the same reason.

So we loaded Babby into my new rebozo and walked around.

"Where are you taking me?"

As we predicted, the noise freaked him out. He was clinging tightly to me. He especially disliked that one that goes up and spins and holds everyone to its sides by centripetal force. I told him I don’t like that ride either.

"Eeewww. It makes NOISE."

But I hugged him and told him that it was cool and pretty, rather than scary, and showed him that I wasn’t actually afraid of it (which is only partially true – I wouldn’t get on that thing if you paid me) and we walked all around and ate corn dogs and he began to relax.

"Not scary, huh? Hmm."

Then PH tried to win stuffed animals for me, as he usually does. He eventually gave up trying to win the GIGANTIC fluffy penguin toy, which would have taken up a quarter of Babby’s room but would have made me inexplicably happy, and eventually just won a stuffed alien that I liked, because it reminded me of my little Babby.

"Whadya mean, it looks like me?"

"Oh"

So, all in all, it was a productive day.

In Which We Do NOT Fall Off A Mountain

Tags

back roads, British Columbia, crazy exploits, driving, exploration, Google Earth, Google maps, logging roads, Mission, mountains, Pemberton, Sasquatch trail, toyota, travel

Perfect Husband likes to explore. 

I never knew this about him when we lived on the East Coast, but it turns out that’s because he’d already explored the East Coast pretty well. But in B.C., there are lots of funny little roads that take you out of the city and into the mountains, and within minutes BAM! You’re in totally foreign territory.

So he sits at home and looks at Google Maps and finds roads he doesn’t recognize, and then he piles us into the car and we explore it.

We’ve found some cool stuff this way, like a little air field for toy r.c. airplanes. PH likes to revisit that road a lot. He likes planes.

Well, this week PH had some time off for Easter and I let him persuade me into trying the Exploration of all Explorations.

The Sasquatch Trail.

Now, there’s really only one way to get from Vancouver to places in the mountains like Whistler and Pemberton. You go along the Sea to Sky highway. Where sometimes rocks fall.

The last time rocks fell, there was a lot of talk about what to do if this happened during the Olympics. If the only road was closed due to tumbling mountains, how would people get to the ski slopes where, you know, the snow is?

They started talking about a series of logging roads, which they called the Sasquatch trail. Supposedly you can get to Pemberton by following this route.

PH decided that he needed to try this. Go out to Mission, drive the Sasquatch trail, have dinner in Pemberton or Whistler, and come home on the Sea to Sky.

The problem is, the “Sasquatch Trail” seems to be more a hypothetical than a reality. Google Maps can’t give you directions along it. Some of the roads don’t even have names. In fact, Google Maps says some of the roads don’t even connect, but PH looked at the satellite images and decided that they were lying.

So we bought a lot of snacks, some water, and packed 24 hours worth of cloth diapers in the diaper bag, and we headed out for an adventure.

“You sure you don’t mind doing this?” my husband asked me, in the same voice that I might ask “are you sure you don’t mind me eating the last brownie?”

“I trust you,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I just don’t want to fall off a mountain. Don’t let us fall off the mountain,” I said.

“Don’t worry – the whole plan is to hug Harrison Lake. Look – we’ll be right along the water most of the way. We can’t possibly fall off anything.”

Ha.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

Mental note: Next time, get PH to use Google Earth instead of Google Maps, and check on the elevation.

The drive out past Mission was fine and normal. Then we hit the dirt-and-rock-and-pothole logging road, and it started to look like this:

I trust my husband. I trust my husband.

Hello, creepy branches.

We passed this sign.

I trust my husband. I trust my husband.

By the way, I drive a 2003 Toyota Echo.

It needs new shocks, and a new battery. But hey, it’s insured, and it’s never let me down!

We began to go up.

Easter Cherry Blossoms

Tags

cherry blossoms, Easter, trees

Happy Easter, folks!

I think the Easter bunny is going to give our house a miss, because Babby was up at 5:30 am and I think that scared any chocolate-dispensing lagomorphs away.

But Babby is in bunny pyjamas, so that’s what counts.

Here, have some oddly coloured trees for Easter!

No, I didn't photoshop this

Beloved Dog noticed nothing amiss, unsurprisingly

A Rebozo for Easter! And a Giraffe!

Tags

art, baby wearing, chocolate, Easter, gifts, giraffes, rebozo, sewing, short wrap, wraps

Look what my mother made for me! Isn’t it purtiful?

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She made that fringe herself by picking apart the fabric and painstakingly braiding the strings.

Also, Curiosity sent me my prize from her big giveaway! On top of the chocolate bar and surprised-looking giraffe that I was promised, I also recieved a sketch of my family with a disinterested badger. That photo didn’t quite come out, but I’m including it anyway.

The creepy thing is the giraffe looks exactly the way I imagined it. What do you call deja vu with a giraffe?

He only looks a little evil

Hey, we got the photos.

What do you think?

Remember – nine bucks. We have an 8 x 10, two 5 x 7s, and a lot of littley ones.

Jane Emo, 2011. FASSBENDER!

Tags

adaptations, books, criticism, Fassbender, Jane Eyre, literature, movies, reviews

Jane Emo. Now with violins!

Perfect Husband and I had a movie date this evening. He took me to see the newest Jane Eyre.

I’m always on the lookout for a GOOD version of my favourite book. So far, my favourite is the 1983 version with Timothy Dalton. Jane is spritely enough but doesn’t have quite enough edge for my taste. Still, it’s decent.

I have been very excited about this version, however, ever since I heard that Ellen Page would be playing Jane. I knew that she would get the sharp wit of Jane exactly right, even if she is too pretty. She’d even have the perfect wry smile that I see on Jane’s face whenever she calls Mr. Rochester “sir”.

Then Ellen Page dropped out and they cast that chick from The Kids Are All Right instead. But I was still willing to give it a chance.

…I regret it.

It was dreadful. Possibly one of the worst adaptations I’ve seen yet.

You won’t believe me, but I swear, I’m not an impossible-to-please cynic who complains about every cut scene, and every alteration to the plot in a book adaptation. Some of my favourite book adaptations (About A Boy, The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, Bridget Jone’s Diary, Jurassic Park), have totally altered key parts of the books, but recreate the characters, the feel, and the meaning of the story so well that I love them to bits.

This was not one of those movies.

This movie stuck to the plot faithfully but managed to totally wreck the characters and the whole point of the story. They took a story about a feisty little feminist who doesn’t let poverty and abuse get her down, and made a movie about an expressionless dishrag who falls in love with someone awful for no good reason. You know, like Twilight, except Bella Swan has more personality.

It also involved a lot of emo chiaroscuro and a softly wailing solo violin.

For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with Jane Eyre and her awesomeness, here’s a summary in 30 seconds: