Beer, Race


We love xkcd's latest. Don't get us wrong. We think Obama was setting a good example by initiating a conversation about race. But the "over a beer" part seemed a little contrived. And I still can't get over Obama's choice of beer. I mean, why not choose a good beer made by an American brewer?

And Now...We Wait

Yesterday evening just before dinner, I was sitting at my computer checking email and reading the news. A new email message popped up from our adoption agency. The subject said, very clearly, "Your dossier went to Ethiopia today!" I saw the words "dossier" and "Ethiopia," but it took several seconds for me to decipher the meaning of the email. We thought for sure it wouldn't get there for another month. I was shocked. And then I exploded. I screamed, jumped out of my chair, ran back and forth from the living room to the kitchen a few times, and shouted to Xander, "OUR DOSSIER WENT TO ETHIOPIA TODAY!!!" And there was no response. Silence. I ran into the hallway and saw that Xander was in the bathroom. "OUR DOSSIER WENT TO ETHIOPIA TODAY!!!!" Still silence. "OUR DOSSIER WENT TO ETHIOPIA AND YOU'RE IN THE BATHROOM?! ARGH!" At which point, the door flew open and Xander came running out clearly prepared to do battle.

"What? What's wrong?!" He looked frenzied.

"Our dossier went to Ethiopia!"

Silence.

"Our dossier went to Ethiopia!" I jumped up and down and ran into the living room and did a little dance and ran back into the kitchen and did a little dance and still Xander just stood there, so I went and hugged him. He pushed me away.

"I'm sorry. I just need a minute."

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. We had waited all this time and he needed a minute? We could become parents any day now, and he needed a minute?! What the hell?!

"I'm sorry. I thought you were screaming because someone had broken into the apartment or because you were hurt, and I was in there getting ready to have to come out and do something and..."

"Ohhh...um, sorry. No intruder. Just babies." We stood there looking at each other for several quiet seconds before I resumed jumping up and down and exclaiming, "Our dossier went to Ethiopia!"

And then we hugged. And then I burst into tears. And then I sat on the sofa in stunned silence for a couple of hours while Xander called everyone and told them.

Guinness Is Good For You

I could tell drinking it made me feel good. It definitely tastes like it's packed with nutrients. I was just waiting for the science to catch up and reveal what has been obvious to many of us for years. But the wait is over. It turns out Guinness is good for you.

Really, this has to be the happiest day of my life. After maybe my wedding day. (Because I'm supposed to say that.)

Princess Leia

I've always thought Carrie Fisher was cool. As a kid, I was a big fan of Return of the Jedi and Princess Leia. I thought she was beautiful, and believe it or not, I wished I could wear a gold bikini and have my hair in giant buns on the side of my head. That was my idea of exotic. And I've sort of always understood the Princess Leia fantasy. So imagine how flattered I was when I received this in the mail from my nephew:


How awesome is that? Xander was jealous that he did not receive a drawing as well...until I pointed out that he's married to Princess Leia. Not a bad consolation prize, if I do say so myself.

What's For Dinner?

I've published a week's worth of dinners over at A Day in the Life of a Mostly Vegetarian. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like a recipe.

No idea what's for dinner tonight, but we just stocked up on fresh veggies over at Jean-Talon. Oh, and it's framboise time:


I see jam in my future.

Bits About Our Life in Quebec

1) It is perfectly acceptable to insert French words into English sentences without batting an eye and vice versa.

2) Fries + gravy + cheese curds = poutine = awesome

3) People are not as nice here as they were in New York.

4) Quebec has better beer than any place we have ever lived in or visited or, for that matter, dreamed of. Hands down.

5) I like "socialized" medicine.

6) The Jazz Festival is the single best free public event in the world.

7) There are other festivals. They're okay.

8) We like having a balcony.

9) Ice cream is considered a human right in the summer here.

10) Quebec French does sound different from French French. I'm convinced the difference is mostly in the vowel sounds. It's like comparing Southern English to Standard English.

11) Knowing your neighbors can be a good thing.

12) Montreal seems much more multicultural than New York. It's all a mix. We like it.

13) Winter sucks. Really, really bad.

14) I do not like wearing sweaters in July.

15) The strawberries! The blueberries! YUM!

16) New York apples are better.

17) Montrealers don't know how to ride the metro.

18) It is true that any Canadian can identify Canadian celebrities without needing to consult IMDB or Wikipedia.

19) We miss the traffic noises. But we have gained sounds like chimes, birds, crickets, and wind blowing through leaves. Not a bad trade, eh?

20) We say "eh" at the ends of some of our sentences now.

My Most Fussy, Frivolous Post Ever

Greetings, Internetland. I come to you with a problem, and I hope that some of you will provide me with answers. First, a little background.

I love jeans. LOVE THEM. Wear them almost every day. It's not because I'm a sloppy dresser. I refuse to wear such things as sweatshirts and fleece outside of the house, even on camping trips. I am not, generally speaking, a very casual person. I don't even wear sneakers unless I am A) running, B) hiking long distances, or C) forced to at gunpoint. But I LOVE jeans. I love the way they look, the way they feel, their working-class roots.

The second important piece of background information is that I am short. Not short enough to be classified as a midget--I discovered through intensive research as an undergraduate--but short enough that it affects my daily life. I get pushed around a lot in crowds, and I'm occasionally mistaken for a high schooler. Most of my pants must be hemmed, which I'm okay with, but occasionally I come across a pair of pants or jeans that is clearly designed for someone who is at least a foot taller than I am.

Got it? Short. Love jeans.

I have, in the past year, lost not one, not two, but THREE pairs of jeans to crotch-area rippage. While I'm all about repairing jeans and have done so in the past, I have learned the hard way that repairing the crotch area is a bad idea. I learned this lesson when my last favorite pair of jeans decided to expose me in the middle of a train station one morning last spring. (Luckily, I was the one traveling and had a suitcase full of clothes with me.) So repairs are out of the question given the location of the damage.

The bottom line is that I need new jeans. Good jeans. Jeans that will stick with me for awhile. Jeans that I like enough to buy two pairs so they don't wear out so fast. But I'm on a budget. I cannot buy the $200 pair of jeans the magazines recommend. I need a pair I can afford. Let's say under $80.

Oh, right. There's a third bit of important information to share: I hate shopping. I know, what kind of woman am I? Fortunately, my husband enjoys shopping and is more than happy to sit in the dressing room while I strip repeatedly and ask him to stare at my newly-denimed backside and offer reports. But even so, it would be nice to know where to start.

Where should I go? What should I buy? What brand is your favorite pair of jeans? And how can I make them last longer?

And seriously, how lucky am I that this is my main problem today?

Dooce

All right, so I read Dooce.com and like it. It's not exactly a secret, what with the link over there on the right. And why wouldn't I? I swear. A lot. I, too, am not a fluffy-pink-bunny-goo-goo-ga-ga-sappy-type mom. I'm known to occasionally dish a healthy serving of cynical along with my hippie world view. I guess I'm a little embarrassed because Dooce is becoming so...so...mainstream. And if there's anything I'm afraid of, it's becoming too mainstream. Like my husband always says, I like to beat my own drummer.

You can find out just how mainstream this Dooce character is by reading this.

Equality and Accountability

I wanted to write a really eloquent post about Barack Obama's inspired speech to the NAACP. The only thing I found lacking was a call to all of us to accept responsibility for inequality, a call to stop hiding behind colorblindness and fight racism wherever we find it. But it turns out I don't have to write such an essay, because The Root has already done it for me.

Thank goodness there are eloquent people out there to make up for my shortcomings. Now I can just go back to watching television and eating potato chips.

Creatures We Met

Last vacation-related post. We met lots of critters on our trip. We had a bear for a neighbor at our campsite, which we were told came over to introduce himself one afternoon while we took a nap in the tent. (We thought the noises were just someone setting up camp next door, but we awoke to find the campsite empty.) We met a really friendly chipmunk who mistook Xander for a tree. (And no, we didn't feed him!) We saw lots of ants hauling away their meals. Several snakes. Several frogs. One starfish. And we saw one very scary porcupine who did not want his picture taken.

I Am Not Catholic

But I love this blog.

Um...So You're Telling Me This Process Ends in Babies?

Just the other day, I was talking to our good friend (who coincidentally is also a cousin), Brie, about pending parenthood. She's due to become a mom any day now, and I asked if her husband was getting excited. She said he was, but that she felt like it was harder for fathers to really feel excitement before the baby is born. And it was like a lightbulb went off and I practically shouted, "That's it! That's what it's like!" I may look like a woman, but I feel like an expectant father. We've spent about a year and a half researching adoption and doing paperwork, all with the idea that the end result is that we'll have children. But there's something about this that still seems so far away to me. Like I won't really believe it's happening until I can see their pictures. Or meet them. But oh! I hope it doesn't take that long for me to make that transition! Because the getting ready is supposed to be the fun part. I've been talking about painting things and making things and buying things. But I can't seem to get myself to actually do any of it.

We expect that very soon, almost certainly next month, our dossier will be in Ethiopia. And from that point, we may wait one month. We may wait seven. There's no way to know. So we go back and forth about the idea of getting ready for actual babies. It's so easy to think, "Oh, we've got months and months before the babies arrive. We don't need to worry about getting ready any time soon." Or we'll say, "We shouldn't buy anything, because maybe someone will give us something we've already bought, and then we'll have two, and that would be wasteful." But the next day, one of us will say, "What if we're one of those families that gets the call really soon, and we don't have any baby stuff?! And we'll have so much other stuff to do that we won't have time to worry about it then!" I realize one of these days we're going to have to, you know, get ready for real babies. We'll have to assemble the cribs, buy some clothes, figure out how we're going to get these kiddos around, how we're going to feed them, etc. We make excuses about how we don't really know exactly how old they'll be, but really a lot of stuff will be the same whether they are six months or twelve months. We'll still have to bathe them and feed them and take them places and put them to sleep...somewhere.

The truth is that I'm stalling. I'm still in that phase where I'm protecting myself from being disappointed. If I don't let myself get too excited about the prospect of meeting these babies, then I can't be hurt if something goes wrong. Right? Riiight? I'm told this doesn't really work. And that keeping all of my feelings in could actually make any disappointment more painful. So I've decided I'm allowed to stall until September. And then, no more excuses. Whether I feel like it or not, whether we think our referral is one month off or seven, we're going to do it. We're going to set up cribs. We're going to decorate. Start shopping for things we need. Start perusing Craigslist and Kijiji for that expensive stroller we want. Start getting excited. You know. Things expectant parents do. Because we hear that's what we are.

On a related note, there's some sadness up here in Canada over that article I linked to earlier in this post about this agency that has left a lot of people here and in other countries wondering about their futures. There is also a lot of nasty commentary and bad reporting floating around online and on the telly. I really enjoyed reading this message to lurking reporters anxious for adoption news and thought you might as well.

The Things We Saw

Some things we saw on vacation, in no particular order:

A really big waterfall, engravings on buildings, a Sears Catalogue sign (something I haven't seen since I was a kid), big electric tower and power lines, liberation graffiti, pretty churches by the St. Lawrence, funny little dioramas illustrating Quebec history, ladders on roofs, statues of guys crushing beer cans, religious art on government buildings, lots of moose warning signs (but no actual moose), and Cyclorama de Jerusalem.

Saguenay: Part III

While at Saguenay, we hiked Cap Trinité. The hike was described as "difficile" by the park guide, but it was only about 3km, so we thought, "Difficile? How difficile can it be if it's only 3km?" (Yes, we insert French words straight into English sentences now. It just...happens. My French may be awful, but my Franglais is improving.) So it turns out you spend 1.5km of the trail hiking straight up the cap, then 1.5km hiking straight back down. Then you spend another 1.5 going up again, and then another 1.5 going back down. THAT is why it's called "difficile," and it was. We passed a number of ill-equipped people who must have had the same thought we did, including one guy in sandals and socks and a button-up shirt with an iPhone sticking out of his front pocket. Anyway, we made it and got to see the statue of the virgin on the other side, which the park amusingly compared to the Statue of Liberty. It was anticlimactic after all the physical stress, but it was still a pretty hike.




That evening, we went over to the L'anse-Saint-Jean sector of the park and had dinner while watching the sunset. There was pretty much no one around, and someone had the brilliant idea to put a picnic table right next to the best lookout. It was perfect.





On the drive home from Saguenay, we stopped in Quebec City. Despite the fact that it was crawling with tourists for the summer festival, it was still charming. I would like to go back around the holidays when there's snow. Our friends went during the winter and said they felt like they were wandering around inside a snow globe. It's a walled city and has been much better preserved than Montreal (where all the best stuff was demolished in the name of "progress"). You can actually walk along sections of the forifications, which is quite cool. The streets and sidewalks are narrow, the buildings are old and quaint, and many of the townhouses have the silver roofs that are so popular here in Quebec. We didn't have time to tour any of the historic sites, but we'll definitely do that next time.








And on the drive home, we were treated to views of the canola fields that cover the countryside. The yellow patches are incredibly brilliant and can be seen from miles away.

Saguenay: Part II

One day during our vacation, we went whale watching on the St. Lawrence. Whales love the St. Lawrence, and no one is really sure exactly why. Some suspect it has something to do with the sandy bottom in certain areas of the river. Others suspect it has something to do with the food supply. Whatever the reason, whales are in abundance there. We took the ferry over the Saguenay to Tadoussac and drove up to the Cap de Bon-Désir section of the Parc Marin du Saguenay-Saint-Laurent. The moment we walked on to the rocks at the shore, we saw a whale. They just kept coming after that. We saw several belugas** and one minke, but sadly no blue. Oh well. Maybe next time. But I must say I was surprised by the enormous size of the belugas, which I always thought of as little guys. Sure, they're small in comparison to the blues and finbacks, but they are still big enough to eat you.

After our whale watching experience, we learned a little bit about lighthouses and marine conservation issues (which convinced us to cut back our consumption of seafood even further--no more eel or cod for us), then we headed back into Tadoussac for some local cheese and beer. In particular, I found the pairing of Vieux Charlevoix with Gros Mollet to be heavenly. The cheese gives the beer a sort of chocolate aftertaste, so it's like you're eating cheese, beer, and chocolate, which is my idea of awesome. Truly the best beer and cheese combination I've ever tasted.





See that white thing below? It's not a wave. It's a whale.







**Belugas are an endangered species, due largely to overhunting in earlier decades. Despite the apparent beauty of the St. Lawrence, the waters are becoming increasingly polluted. So polluted, in fact, that the bodies of deceased belugas are treated as toxic waste. I feel another post about the state of the environment coming on...

Saguenay: Part I

Last week, we went camping at Parc national du Saguenay. It was a nearly perfect trip, except for the rain we encountered on the drive out there and back. It's no secret that I'm not exactly Montreal's biggest fan, but the Quebec countryside is magical. Quebec is a beautiful, beautiful province, and I'm not sure why more people don't vacation here. The Saguenay fjord is straight out of a fairytale, and we never got tired of looking at the enormous rocky cliffs that escort the Saguenay River from the St. Lawrence to Lac-Saint-Jean. The park was practically empty, as were the parks we camped in last year. Hiking the trails all alone in these remote areas just adds to the feeling that you're on some Lord-of-the-Rings-type adventure in the Misty Mountains. We highly recommend it. And if you don't like camping, there are cabins in the parks and B&Bs nearby, too. It makes for an amazing, affordable vacation. Much cheaper than, say, a trip to the Scottish countryside. Gaspesie remains my favorite park in Quebec, but Saguenay was a close second. Anyway, the photos:











These photos were from our first hike on Le Caps trail toward Cap Éternité. The trails here, like in other Quebec parks, have shelters and rustic camp sites along the way for those who want to do multi-day hikes. The entire Le Caps trail is something like 50km. We only hiked 10. More photos from the rest of our trip coming soon.