August 2009

1. We cleaned, moved, sorted, organized and offered-on-freecycle a bunch of stuff. Phew.
2. The kids’ rooms are improving greatly with each passing weekend. :)
3. I’m still giddy that Glass Dharma agreed to give away glass straws. I got my 10″ straw yesterday and love it just as much as I love my smaller straws. You can still enter the give-away – until Sunday night – by clicking onto that blog post and leaving a comment.
4. Feeding the squirrels, on the front porch, with Coffee. And feeding the bluejays by myself.
5. Tomorrow I get my hair dyed. Huzzah!

Yesterday I posted about my love for glass straws. Glass Dharma, the company that makes them, noticed a bunch of you clicking through to their site and then they started following me on Twitter. Noticing them following me, I sent a quick message asking if they’d mind doing a give-away here, on my blog, for my readers. David, the owner of the company, happily offered up 4 straws.

(Yay!!)

You can win a glass straw of your very own!!

If you’d like to win, leave a comment on this post telling me why. That’s it – just tell me why you’d like a glass straw of your very own, why you think it’s a good idea, why you’re curious..

Your comment needs to have your real email address (though it won’t appear on the site, I can see it behind the scenes) and, if you win, you’ll have to be comfortable providing me – and Glass Dharma – with a shipping address for your straw.

On Sunday night I’ll pick 4 winners – using a random number generator – and get in touch with you for shipping information.

Now, tell me why you want a glass straw..

1. Waking up with “Salutation to the Dawn” (see below) in my head, provoking good memories and making me laugh.
2. The short bit of time that I get to spend with Coffee in the morning, chatting.
3. My hair dye arrived yesterday! This weekend I shall return to pink!
4. Stretches that seem to be helping my shoulder and neck. And looking forward to seeing a physiotherapist in September.
5. It’s almost the weekend! Yippee!!

Salutation To The Dawn
–Kalidasa

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of achievement,
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is just a vision,
And today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore to this day!
Such is the salutation to the dawn.

1. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekend!!
2. Planning – just in general, I enjoy doing some good planning-work.
3. Daisy and the “itchy sweet spot” on her belly that, when I rub it, causes her feet to kick around. Heh.
4. Getting Oldest One onto Facebook and locking his profile down tight – and blocking him from most of mine, too.
5. Running errands with Coffee.

Generally, when I do a book review here I’m compensated with an Amazon credit.

The problem with that compensation is that I rarely buy books these days (unless I am convinced I will need to reread it, mark it up, or otherwise keep it around) and instead indulge my reading urges through the gloriousness that is the local public library.

The good thing is that Amazon has a lot more to offer than just books these days and they’ve got some nice deals on international shipping.

Many moons ago, while living in Toronto, I picked up some stainless steel ‘drinking spoons’ from Restoration Hardware. They were normal spoons on the bottom and, in place of a normal grip area (handle?) they had a straw for drinking your beverage – like these. They were awesome – but I could never be sure they were clean on the inside. As a semi-germaphobe, that grossed me right out and I stopped using them after a short period of time and went back to plastic.

I drink all of my beverages with a straw. Coffee in the morning (yes, really), milk, water, hot tea, hot chocolate.. everything. I don’t like the feeling of liquid on my upper lip and I don’t like drinks touching my front teeth. (Germaphobe + crazy = awesome!) This means we go through vast quantities of plastic straws and have for many years.

Then I heard about glass straws.

And learned that I could buy them through Amazon.com.

So I bought myself a 4 pack of ‘em and promptly fell in love with them.

I’m not linking to the Amazon product page for them because I found out later that they can be purchased for significantly cheaper – and less shipping cost – directly from the (small) manufacturer. Bonus points all around.

This is the place to buy them. You can read about the who/what/where and whys of the straws on the about page.

I’m extremely pleased with my straws. They have a certain heft and thickness to them that feels.. good. They’re easy to clean in the dishwasher (and mine also came with a cleaning brush) and they’re very pretty. You can buy sleeves or bamboo containers for traveling – so you can keep a straw in your backpack or purse (I didn’t get one of these – I will get one in the future if I think it’ll come in handy, however.)

One thing that I particular like is that the straws come in various sizes and styles – from the “kid” size to big, thick smoothie straws. Some have bends in them. Mine have little coloured-glass “bumps” on the side that prevent them from rolling if they’re set down.

They have a lifetime warranty – if it chips or breaks somehow (a difficult thing to do to this particular kind of glass) the company will either repair it or send you a new one.

Super neat stuff.

1. Making some progress in sorting, moving, organizing our vast collection of music. Phew.
2. The squirrel who sits patiently on the front porch, waiting for her morning peanut allotment.
3. That Coffee let me be grumpy and grumbly last night – and that I slept it off (as far as I can tell, so far).
4. The stretches that make my shoulder and back feel a bit better.
5. Glass drinking straws – they fulfill my need to cut down on waste AND to drink everything with a straw..

Even though it makes my very logical husband roll his eyes, I must confess that I believe very strongly in good omens. Some things are strong indicators of what’s to come, as far as I’m concerned.

In high school, our bus drove past a farm that occupied some very densely-treed rolling hills. It had a front pasture (near the road) and a back pasture (back behind a tree line, and visible only during the autumn and winter months) and a tiny white house in the middle. My friend Dave and I, sitting in the furthest back seat of the bus, would press our faces up to the windows and look very hard for a flash of the “good omen”.

On a good-omen-day – one that was likely to feature happy moments at school – the farm would have their cows out in the front field. That was the good omen. See, the cows themselves were the magic – weird-looking in a completely awesome way, even to a bunch of kids from farmland. The Dutch Belted are not exactly common creatures and, well, imagine driving past a field filled with them for the first time. SO COOL.

We’d pretty much squeal with glee on seeing them out there. In the winter, just a glimpse of them in the back pasture was equally acceptable. We knew it was going to be a good day if we saw our “banded cows”.

(In our last year of high school, when we had driver’s licenses, we actually drove to the farm to finally ask what kind of cows they were. The farmers seemed perplexed to find us there, all awkward and giddy, but they humoured us and filled us in.)

My “good omens” didn’t end when I graduated and moved away from the area. I’ve attached a happiness guarantee to such things as pigeons hanging out in certain areas, a particular person being in a specific spot along my commute, and, of course, any wiener dog sighting.

Some days, however, there are no wiener dogs out and about. There are no chipmunks sitting on metal hippos on my front porch. There are no squirrels or birds walking down the sidewalk – pretending to be people (something that makes me laugh ’til I cry. It’s unbelievably hilarious to me when wild animals walk down the sidewalk. It’s equally hilarious when birds walk around instead of flying.)

This requires me to look around for other good omens – things that make me smile or seem particularly cheerful. That’s right, I LOOK for good omens, I don’t wait for them to reveal themselves. You have to keep your eyes open to the magic of the world, y’know.

My newest good omen, added to my stock, is The Bird Man.

I first sighted him riding his bike a block or two after I dropped Coffee off at work one morning. As a former cyclist of the “very serious” sort, I immediately check out the calves of anyone on a bike, then thighs, then the bike itself, and occasionally make my way up the person’s body to notice who they are or something else about them. This man had unspeakably sharp-muscled calves, indicating a serious dedication to that bike!

The next thing I noticed was his very, very long dreadlocks (I love dreadlocks!) that hung down past the seat on his bike. They were gorgeous.

I didn’t make it to the bike, however, because it was then that I noticed the birds.

He had at least five birds in his hair – riding happily along with him. I noted one that was a lime green colour, and the others were shades of white and yellow and grey. I was so stunned by this sight that I couldn’t take in anything else, other than the fact that they weren’t tied into his hair, weren’t flapping to get away, and seemed quite content to.. ride along on his hair.

Traffic was moving, I couldn’t stop, I didn’t have my camera (and my cell phone camera isn’t good while I’m moving).. so I drove my stunned self home with a huge grin on my face. I told Coffee what I had seen and I couldn’t stop grinning about it. Bird Man!

I decided I’d have to ask Kelly if she knew him (she knows all the fun people in KW, it seems, even though she doesn’t live here).

This morning, as Coffee was getting out of the car, I looked in my sideview mirror and saw The Bird Man approaching on his bike. I made shrieky noises at Coffee and gestured wildly and conveyed, somehow, that it WAS HIM. Coffee said something along the lines of, “Whoah.” and I giggled.

The Bird Man rode by, birds in his hair looking happy in the sunshine, and now today is going to be awesome.

(And I finally emailed Kelly to ask if she knows him – because now I know I wasn’t hallucinating.)

1. Finding 2 dressers – one gorgeous! – at the side of the road today. Maymo needs a new one, Coffee was with me because I was in the middle of driving him to work, and we made 2 trips to pick them up (because they were just around the corner from our house). SERENDIPITY!
2. That Coffee got to see the “Bird Man” today. I must describe my first sighting of him in a later post!
3. Finding out that the class I have scheduled on Thursday afternoons is not a weekly thing – just an “on occasion and if you need help” meeting for an independent study class! Yeeehaaaaaaw! I’ll be done my school week at 10am on Thursdays!
4. Getting a whole lot of clutter and ‘stuff’ cleared up and cleared out yesterday.
5. Oldest One is still at his friend’s place – he stayed over another night (unsurprising to anyone, really…)

I miss you, Debbie Sue. Happy Birthday.

1. Oldest One’s phone call at 11pm last night, asking if we could adjust the parental controls on World of Warcraft to allow him to play at his friend’s house. I’m amused.
2. The clicking and popping in my back and neck mean that the muscles are unclenching and thus I will shortly be in significantly less pain.
3. I found the mold on the pita before I smothered it in hummus and took a bite.
4. The kitten is fully addicted to her kitty treats and is quite vocal about it. MORE! MEW! MORE! MEW!
5. Coffee bringing home a picture of a wiener dog, on his cellphone, yesterday. It made me grin.