Masterchef - and smelling food

One of the judges on the television show is Chef Joe Bastianich.
Prior to this show airing I had no idea who he was and so my entire opinion of him has been based on a few hours of television viewing and editing.
One of the things he does on the show ( I can't find an image of it to share with you) is smell EVERYTHING before eating it. I have never really noticed anyone else doing this in the way he does. Not a lot of people smell their food before consuming it.
This has had me thinking. I had never really thought of smelling everything "I" ate, though it makes sense. I have on RARE occasion put something into my mouth that has been bad and had I smelled it before hand I would not have had the experience.  One time in particular I opened a box of chocolate milk and drank from the carton and the milk was bad. NASTY NASTY NASTY.
So I decided to do it.
And I did it.
And I have to give one SMALL recommendation to anyone who decides to try this.
The time to decide to start smelling your food before consuming it should NOT be, I repeat, NOT BE, when you buy a hot dog from the drive through window of Dairy Queen.

original song - get it right

I know for some people the thought of watching Glee is as painful as pulling teeth. (getting teeth pulled is painful as I can attest to today)
Knowing that there are people out there who wouldn't normally check out Glee, but still have an appreciation for good music, I am posting this original song, written for the show, which I think is worth a listen.
Check it out!

Http://www.youtu.be/Mb7dyVtdRlg

Just another way in which the computer illustrates it is smarter than I am ...

I have a new phone. I had a blackberry and from the day it arrived I had problems with it. The problems got greater and greater until the phone was virtually useless and so I got another.
I now have am HTC  "Desire" - which I think is a strange name for a phone - but anyway.
I needed to link my phone to my work email so that I am in contact with work at all times and in all places and so I had to enter some information into the phone for this process to happen.
Then I needed to enter a gmail account so that I could link to something else I apparently needed but I don't have a gmail account, I only have a hotmail account. I signed up for a gmail account.
I have a bad habit of tending to ignore details when I am not interested in them and so I am fairly certain (but not 100 percent), that in NO way at ANY time in the process did I link my hotmail account information to my new gmail account information.
So riddle me this.
This blog is set up through my hotmail account. It is my hotmail account that is my login. When I sign into blogger I enter my hotmail account BUT ALL OF A SUDDEN, since getting my new phone and entering the new information, once I am logged in AND when I go to other blogs to comment, the email that shows up is my GMAIL email address.
It freaks me out a little.
What the hellfire?

Some thoughts about privacy

I am married to an admitted conspiracy theorist. In the time we have been together I have had (and taken) opportunities to tease her about how she is paranoid about privacy.
She hates for me to give up any information she considers to be private to anyone at anytime, but I tend to think about things like that a little less. For instance, if someone phones me (and I answer - which is rare) but say I answer the phone - and someone begins to ask me questions. I have in the past been quite forthcoming with my answers. Whenever I hang up the phone Shel is there with eyebrows raised wondering who it was that I just shared the intricacies of my life with. In 14 years of being together I HAVE learned something - I am much less inclined to share information over the phone now than I ever have been before.
Which brings me to facebook. 
We both have facebook accounts and we both have our privacy settings set very high. We both play games on facebook - farmville, citiville, mafia wars, and I play Carmen Sandiego. In all of these games, and especially in citiville, you rely on friends to progress in the game. Shel has made friends with people who "only" are gaming friends. They all play the same group of games and they are are very serious about sending and receiving gifts and supporting one another throughout the gaming process allowing for the most success for all of them.
I am envious of her gaming friends but I think it is insane to have friends who are not actually people that you know! She has suggested one or two of them to me because I get stuck in my progression in some games but I just cannot bring myself to friend a complete stranger. Am I insane?
Instead of friending complete strangers to play games with, I have created a facebook account for my dog. She's a great facebook gaming friend. She always sends me exactly what I need and I know she isn't going to do some weird stalkerish thing to my facebook account.

Writing and re-writing

Oh what a hellacious week this has been (or two weeks) of writing and re-writing job descriptions.
Almost 2 years ago we became a part of a different college. This transition has happened twice since I have been in my position and we have both times had to "meld" to the corporate structure of another institution.
This is a PAINFUL process. There are some things that are great, some things that are fun, but many, many growing pains and some things that are just downright nasty. Add to that the joy of doing this all the second time around in a recession.

In the most recent incarnation of our work life we are trying to meld two campuses, in two different communities, with staff represented by three different staff associations and a union.
People on different campuses in the "same" job - work different hours for different pay with different benefits and we have been trying to work it all out. add to that the people with the same job title who do VASTLY different jobs., then the people who do a conglomeration of many different jobs, and those few people who have no idea what they are doing.

A consultant was hired to oversee the reclassification of all jobs on our campus for all members of the union. We all went to workshops on what was expected and then back to our respective offices with more questions than answers. An email came out requesting that all jobs be rewritten  and turned in by April 01. So, the past two weeks we have been spending time writing, then re-writing the job descriptions on this campus to fit into a form developed years ago on the other campus, but first changes had to be made to the form to make it representative of the union.

The form arrived. It was NOT a "fillable" form that one might expect, certainly I expected it. It was a very pretty Microsoft Word document with nice lines and well spaced, good looking boxes that needed to be filled out. Only it was not that simple. So add to the stress of having to re-write your job description now the additional stress of trying to fill out a form where text didn't wrap, boxes could not be checked off, the printable version was outside the borders and so the ends of sentences were cut off... just to name a FEW of the problems with this very attractive, very DISfunctional, form.

I know, I have high expectations. Honestly the drama over this form almost caused me to blow a gasket and my gasket blowing days are far behind me. I am someone who spends considerable time working on the computer, and to try and get the other staff in this area whom I am responsible for who DON'T use a computer to fill out this form was so disastrous that I ended up doing all but three of the inputs myself.
I LOVE working with data. I love forms. I love making them. I love spreadsheets. Excel makes me happy. For fun, really for fun, a co-worker and I used to have competitions making the prettiest form on excel. I ENJOYED IT. (don't tell my spouse). I know how to make a fillable form. yeah, it takes time, but there are really great programs out there designed to do it. I have to say that I "oozed" a little of my frustration over work email (which I NEVER do) and it was a complete joke. One person made the most asinine comment about how the form was very easy to fill - as she had done with a pencil! Only what she doesn't realize is that no matter how easy it was for her to fill out, someone had to input all of her info into the computer
And joy of joys, I had to do this form not once, not twice, not thrice, but SEVEN, count it, SEVEN times. It has been the nightmare of my waking hours. Finally on Friday I thought I had all but two remaining to submit.
On Monday I submitted what I thought were the last two, but no.
REVISION TIME!

What I came away from the training with was not at all what my supervisor wanted from the forms. Re-write.
Now it is 4:30 in the afternoon on TUESDAY and these revisions are just getting stupid. No word of a lie, the administrator in my office has now printed, in the last 15 minutes of her day, FOUR front pages. The first time it didn't save, the second time we saw the word "manager" was spelled "manger", the third time we saw that job duties title "A" was identical to job duties title "B" which somehow we missed in the past 12 reviews so we needed to come up with two new titles, print number four I don't even remember what we missed.
HOPEFULLY. HOPEFULLY. We are finished. I know my brain is finished.
Unfortunately the stress of the process has only just begun. Now (if they don't need more revision)  they go to committee for review and for placement on the pay scale. We should hear by SEPTEMBER what has happened.

And my mom wonders why I am not working on my thesis!

Skype is great and what is in my office. (13 things)

I am loving Skype. Have I mentioned this before?
Today I was able to catch my dad on skype - he is living in South Africa and unfortunately our schedules are so different we haven't managed to catch up with one another before today.
He was also having difficulty with his video camera so he could see me but I could only hear him. I still don't care, because it was still fun to talk to him (for free!)
I was sitting at my desk on my lunch break and chatting with him and telling him how I am feeling sick and discombobulated and how I feel like I am in a giant bubble.
I would ideally like to go home and sleep but I have a boat load of stuff to do at work. I was telling him how much I have to do but how as I look around the office things just seem to be out of place and I can't get settled enough to get to the grind stone.
I started to hold up items on my desk to the camera so he could see what I had on my desk and how strange it all was. Then I asked him if he thought if I listed the items online and asked people to guess what my job was based on the items in my office would anyone be able to guess what I did for a living - and I doubt they would, unless they were in the same (or a related field).
So here is a list of the items in my office that I shared with my dad....
1. Three pens, (one of which is a brand I never use) and a yellow highlighter (I also avoid yellow as a highlighter colour!)
2. A baby bottle.
3.  Two tape dispensers without any tape in them.
4.  A giant bubble blower
He asked me if I had a babies diaper - and I did!
6. Two cameras
7. Two X boxes and a kinect
8. A megaphone
9. shampoo
10. A bag of coin rolls
11. A box of wall mounting tabs
12. A fire extinguisher - empty
13. A small stone statue of smiling buddha

Quite the office accoutrement's if I say so myself - and I have to add that the office has recently been cleared of boxes of t-shirts, pool cues, pool balls and chalk, a broken steam cleaner and a mini fridge.

how do these travel websites work?

I spent the majority of the day yesterday trying to book a flight for Shel to go to Wisconsin on very short notice. Travelocity, Expedia, Cheaptickets, Westejet, Sears travel, you name it, I tried it.
At one point I got on the phone with my sister in law in the USA. I was on a site and having difficulty with payment and asked if she could help me. She went to the same site, we logged on and entered travel details identically and her site brought up tickets for about 400 dollars cheaper than my site did. This was for the same person, starting and ending in the same place on the same dates of travel. I simply don't understand how it is possible for this to happen. She tried to pay from her end because I was having difficulties from my end. We were getting the same error message as we tried to pay with a credit card.
We called the bank and verified the credit card info AND the fact that the charges for the credit card had come into the bank every single time we entered them on the site. That took a bit of clearing up to do because between her and I and our mutual obsessiveness we had tried to enter credit card information a number of times each. Once that was cleared up the bank advised us to call the website. The website advised us to call the airline. The airline said the problem was with the bank.
Needless to say we exited that site!
At the end of a gruelling day online trying to get Shel to Wisconsin as early as we possibly could, we ended up buying the ticket from the USA, paying Canadian funds for the ticket, but getting almost a thousand dollars off the price as it was listed where I was accessing the site in Canada. Strange.
I POSSIBLY could comprehend if the sites were different - in the way that amazon.ca is different from amazon.com, but these were IDENTICAL sites being browsed simultaneously. In any case, with MUCH appreciation for her sister and the time she spent getting flights booked, Shel will be on her way in just a few days, and for a few hundred dollars cheaper than I was able to find.

While we are on the topic...

Since I'm on the topic of sperm and sperm donation (well kind of anyway). I thought it might be a fun and distracting kind of thing for me to come up with a list of people I would take sperm from - if they offered.

Here's my list in no particular order.

1. Rob Thomas

2. Anderson Cooper

3. David Beckham

4. Xabi Alonso

 5. Steven Gerrard

6. Dennis Rodman

7. Jason Behr

8. Ruben Cortada



things that make me smile (and maybe even cry a little)

This is a television moment that I love. Whether you are a fan of Rosie O'Donnell or not it is worth watching to see the joy. It's long - about 8 minutes, but worth every one.



Have you done anything recently to bring joy to another person?
I tried to today!

Adapting

Shel and I were talking the other night about how different our lives are now from what we have envisioned for ourselves growing up. Though we both wanted children, neither of us ever really "saw" ourselves parenting because of the difficulty it is to have children when you are lesbian.

Now that we have children we have to adapt again, this time because we have two boys with special needs.

One of the issues with both our boys involves sensory integration disorder. Sensory integration disorder is a neurological disorder that affects the ability to organize sensory information for use by the brain. Someone with S.I.D. has an inability to organize sensory information as it comes in through the senses. This is expressed differently for every person with the disorder. Our youngest has Oral Input Dysfunction (among others). What this means for him is that he is hypersensitive to oral input. He has difficulty chewing and even though he just turned two he still only eat "soft" or pureed foods. He gags with textured foods - and sometimes he gags for what appears to be "no" reason. He is highly resistant to having any dental work done - or to using a toothbrush. He LOVES toothbrushes though, but mostly uses them to clean the sink!

Yesterday was his birthday and his brother and I made him a "happy cake". When I got home from work we iced it and covered it with teeny tiny multi coloured sprinkles. Then we sang happy birthday to him and ate cake. I should say "tried to eat cake".

Part of S.I.D. is constantly finding new things about your child. I discovered yesterday that those tiny sprinkles make my baby gag. I will admit, it was kind of funny because he wanted SO much to eat the icing, but every time he put his finger into the icing and into his mouth - he gagged.

I have to separate myself a little from this whole thing because it can be easy to start to feel defeated by it. I wanted to do something special for him and it turned out it wasn't so special after all. We adapted, we took the sprinkles off and he ate some happy cake. It just wasn't what I thought it would be for him. I have to look at it as a learning experience and in the future we will have happy cake sans sprinkles!

I think what I fear the most is that if I spend so much time "learning", will my boys have wonderful childhoods or just feel like experiments?

Palin

I spent some time watching the vice presidential debates and I was struck by the communication "STYLE" which Palin adopted. I know that all politicians do it, but Mrs. Palin was blatant in her avoidance of questions.

From the transcript of the vice presidential debate: link here for the full transcript

BIDEN: Number two, with regard to bankruptcy now, Gwen, what we should be doing now -- and Barack Obama and I support it -- we should be allowing bankruptcy courts to be able to re-adjust not just the interest rate you're paying on your mortgage to be able to stay in your home, but be able to adjust the principal that you owe, the principal that you owe.
That would keep people in their homes, actually help banks by keeping it from going under. But John McCain, as I understand it -- I'm not sure of this, but I believe John McCain and the governor don't support that. There are ways to help people now. And there -- ways that we're offering are not being supported by -- by the Bush administration nor do I believe by John McCain and Governor Palin.
IFILL: Governor Palin, is that so?
PALIN: That is not so, but because that's just a quick answer, I want to talk about, again, my record on energy versus your ticket's energy ticket, also.

This really struck me - especially as a parent of a two year old. My spouse and I are working very hard with our son to learn proper communication styles. We are emphasizing eye contact and appropriate response to questions. We reiterate with him that he must answer what we ask and acknowledge that he hears and understands our questions.

I am not yet the parent of a teenager, but I have worked with them for years in corrections. I have also been married for over 11 years. None of these things individually make me an "expert" in communication, but I know a thing or two about what makes for successful conversation.
If I were ever to have answered my parents questions in the way that Palin did, or talk to my spouse (or have my spouse talk to me) in the way that she did, we would have some severe relationship problems.

What I don't understand is how we accept this behavior from someone who is nominated to be the US vice president when we wouldn't tolerate the behavior in our children or our spouses - and can you imagine if we went to work and responded to our bosses in the way Palin responded to questions? There would be a heck of a lot of unemployed people. Why do republicans continue to defend her nomination?

olympics: synchronized swimming

The 2008 Olympics started today. I love the olympics. I love to watch a lot of sports, and I particularly enjoy watching the olympics. Some of the sports I take more pleasure in watching and I honestly don't watch them all. One sport which makes me laugh is synchronized swimming. Don't get me wrong, I can appriciate the athleticism of these ladies (why are they always ladies?)
I once went to deep water aquasize and I had an asthma attack, swallowed water and almost drowned "WITH" a floatation device on trying to kick and lift my shoulders above the water. I know these swimmers are athletes. I laugh though because really - the glitter and noseplugs?


Because the cameras are on they keep their sparkling eyes open and smile UNDERWATER with creepy noseplugs. What is not funny about that?

Oh MAN I want one of these!

We have a pretty big yard - a few acres. There is LOTs and LOTs of work to do to make it into the paradise we envision. My spousal Unit and I are somewhat nerdy about gardening equipment and when we get the gardening catalogues (which my geekier spouse subscribes to) we oogle over the cool gardening implements that we can't afford.
Today on boingboing I saw this and I fell in love.
I am SURE there is a place for this in our yard.

Public SERVANTS

On the 30th of May the premier of Alberta and his cabinet made a decision to given themselves a 30 percent pay increase, adding between $42,000 and $54,000 to their salaries and making them the highest paid cabinet in the country. There was no corresponding increase in their job duties. One-third of the salary MLA's get is tax-free. Ministers will also now be paid separately for cabinet meetings, Treasury Board and policy committees. These roles were considered part of their duties - and salary - until now. (read more about it here) According to the premier the pay hike was needed to attract good talent to the positions in the future because "people between 25 to 45 years old told him there was no incentive to run for government if they had to abandon their pension and job security".

SHUT UP. Even BEFORE the pay increase he was drawing over 150 grand per year. What 25 year old is not attracted to that? I call B.S. - if it was to attract new people in the future then the increases should have been given AFTER this government was moving on. And since when was being in politics about being motivated by the money?

The premier of Alberta now draws a salary of $213,450. It should be illegal for sitting politicians to increase their OWN salaries.

a) increases should be decided for the NEXT group of elected officials, not for sitting officials who are making decisions in their own interest.
b) the people who voted these individuals into office should have a say in whether there is an increase or not
c) when the price of gas is skyrocketing and the cost of living is increasing at such a rate as to demand that individuals take second jobs, or have both spouses work, etc. etc. then NO increases in salary should be given to elected officials.

There are currently in the office where I work, four employees. The combined salary of all four of us is LESS than what the premier of Alberta makes.

So much for "serving the public".

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