Great photos! I have a wonderful photo of Leah I took when she was 4 sitting in a pile of leaves, and I'm very partial to leaf pictures. I haven't been reading your blog for a while, so I will now comment here on one of your previous posts.
On the subject of Word's spellcheck word-replace function, I once received a paper to edit that was written by someone whose first language was Japanese. He had apparently run the spell check in order to clean up the paper, but had hit replace in a few places that he shouldn't have. The paper was on borehole geophysics, and he had OK'd the change from 'borehole' to the Word suggestion of 'brothel'. Now that was a fun paper to edit. My favourite part was when he discussed 'excellent brothel conditions' and I wondered what would constitute excellent brothel conditions: pretty girls? soft beds? good scotch? cheap rates?
Great photos! I love photos of children outside playing. It just seems...right. Ummm...did you have your children racking up the leaves at a park, or do you have a park bench in your yard??? Very fancy!
FUN! I love the annual rake-the- leaves-jump-in-the-pile-repeat-repeat-repeat. Much fun! Until the leaves are all shredded in tiny pieces all over the lawn and impossible to bag up...
Awwwww, those are awesome shots!! I'm torn, in our current cookie cutter home, we have no yard, no trees, thus no leaves...on the one hand, I'm grateful to have no raking, but on the other, my kids are missing out on one of the joys of childhood! Maybe I need to take a quick trip to the cottage this week....
:-))
Anonymous said…
I'm pretty sure child labour laws only apply to situations like taking your kid out of school so they can engage in paid work. Forcing them to rake leaves during their off hours is TOTALLY allowed. Maybe even encouraged.
" My Mom got a speeding ticket because she was looking at garage sales." "You don't have to poo on me!" "This is what we do. That's the way we do it." "What language is Jai Ho?" "My Mom had to bring my Dad his shoes because he had a doctor's appointment for his feet because his toes are all weird." "Una cerveza, por favor." "You're so cool -- constipated over-rated (something I didn't hear) loser." "For some reason I feel like some of the chocolate has nuts in it." "I don't think there's enough room." "I'm a tuna sandwich." "I can burp the alphabet but I'll just do A since it's your birthday." ********************* What are: Things you will hear (whether you want to or not) while driving to the North Gower Bowling Alley for your son's ninth birthday party with five boys in the back of a minivan.
To my American friends, I'm sorry. Not in any kind of distanced, pitying, smug way, because I believe we are headed in a similar direction here in Canada, and I am sad and sick at heart. I told myself I wasn't hoping for the other outcome because I was afraid to, but I realize that I absolutely was, because I was not prepared for how bad this would feel. Some random thoughts I am having about the whole thing. 1. I'm going to try not to hate anyone. For a while at least. I am totally cool with anyone else hating people that helped this happen. A lot of them did it out of hate. Some did it out of ignorance. Some are struggling and desperate and thought this was a solution. I know that's not an excuse, but it makes me think of when I read The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He said that he didn't feel like he could judge people who betrayed their fellow Jews for favours from their captors, because he was never given the opportunity and if he had he couldn't ...
I don't know how to do this other than as a sprawling, messy, off-in-all-directions thing. I can't do book reviews like Emily, who has her own little New York Times thingy going on at Edge of the Page . I remember this one professor I had for a few courses -- he was French, and big and bearish with spiky black hair and a beard, and it always seemed to me that he carried this towering body of knowledge around right on top of his head, and all he had to do was reach up and pluck out a few facts and an allusion or two, and there was another fucking brilliant off-the-cuff insight. In contrast, I always felt like I had a much smaller body of knowledge, and it was all tucked away in my pockets or left on my dresser at home, so I was always saying something like "well, it's like the goat in the desert and... wait!... something about Flaubert and feet, or everybody dreaming about Zeus and then walking funny..." I guess there's a good reason why I ended up writing abou...
Comments
On the subject of Word's spellcheck word-replace function, I once received a paper to edit that was written by someone whose first language was Japanese. He had apparently run the spell check in order to clean up the paper, but had hit replace in a few places that he shouldn't have. The paper was on borehole geophysics, and he had OK'd the change from 'borehole' to the Word suggestion of 'brothel'. Now that was a fun paper to edit. My favourite part was when he discussed 'excellent brothel conditions' and I wondered what would constitute excellent brothel conditions: pretty girls? soft beds? good scotch? cheap rates?
:-))