Having a young child is like having a messy, loud, inconsiderate roommate that you're not allowed to kick out of your house.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I just found out that I've been a criminal for the past three years. Apparently since 2009 you could recycle milk cartons in Vancouver. All this time I've been throwing them out and bitching about Vancouver's backward recycling program.

At least I'm not the only one who didn't know—AW didn't, either. The pain in the ass is that you don't get deposit for them and you still have to take them to a Return-it depot; grocery stores won't take them, and they can't go into the household recycling. So I guess the recycling program is still backward; just not as much as I'd thought.

I know what my New Year's resolution will be!

Finished copy editing a market research report and got as far as I could with the union journal I'm also editing. Now I can focus on some historical atlas action.

I'm pretty sure that my dad got Lil' Dude Hot Wheels tracks just so that he'd have an excuse to play with Hot Wheels tracks.

My sweetie just finished his final PhD defence. Hooray! This next week will prove to be a painful scramble to make thesis corrections, but he's almost done.

HT told me he was moving, so I made this into a poster and sent it to him as a housewarming gift. Turns out he's not quite moving yet, but I wanted him to get it before Christmas:

I made this a while back and sent it to SD. She's received it, so now I can post it:

I tried a variant with the dots coloured, but I think I prefer this one.

SD writes, "I tested it out on my family when they were here for Alexander's birthday and most of us saw it pretty quickly, except my mom, but she doesn't count because she is perpetually in a rush and not really noticing what she is doing."

So maybe it's not entirely squint free. I'll have to practise some more.

Went to a concert for The National yesterday at the Orpheum. So. Many. Hipsters. My observations:
1) I'm surprised that concert halls aren't equipped with a stand devoted to selling cough drops. Last evening was a rock concert, so I didn't exactly need them, but still.
2) I am too old to go to rock concerts. Well, at least I am too old to go to rock concerts while I have a sinus cold.
3) I find the whole encore procedure tedious. Come on, now—when the lights dim for the first time, you know you're not finished playing; we know you're not finished playing. Do we really have to go through the whole charade?
4) In an acoustically optimized venue like the Orpheum, it really isn't necessary to turn your amp up to eleven.

I am still glad I went. It was a great show, and I really enjoyed one of the openers. That is to say, I liked their sound—I couldn't hear what they were singing because of the whole overamplification thing. They could be a Christian rock band, for all I know. I got their CD, though, so now I can find out.

Does anyone use the green tops of leeks? Anyone? I've never seen a recipe that calls for them. Why do grocery stores cut off just the tips of them and sell you the rest? The leek doesn't fit in the crisper, and you end up throwing half of the leek away.

It's probably just that they want to make more money, of course, though I've seen their strategy backfire. Once my sweetie noticed that a leek spanned the edges of the scale while the bulk of it wasn't resting on the scale itself, cheating Safeway out of about two-thirds of the leek's weight.

Lil' Dude threw up and screamed and shivered a whole bunch upon returning home from the hospital to go visit his dad.

Jesus—when it rains, it pours, doesn't it? I just realized that I haven't showered in days...

So have we all signed up to oppose SOPA yet?

Sweetie broke his fibula yesterday playing hockey. Still awaiting surgery. Boo...

Well, fuck.

I just found out today that I've been doing cheat stitches where I was supposed to be doing double crochet stitches. No wonder my scarf has the wrong aspect ratio.

Now, the question is, do I just keep doing what I've been doing and finish the scarf, which will take me ridiculously long because the stitches are so short and will look a little funny in the end, or do I start over, and waste the, like, fifteen hours I've already sunk into the five centimetres of scarf that I've made?

Apparently I'm teaching an editing course for the SFU Writing and Publishing program next fall. Huh.

Stegosaurus!

Again, from the amazing June Gilbank. Pattern was one of several dinosaurs given to me by S&A as thanks for my editing SW's thesis. I asked him which he thought Baby Joël would most appreciate, and he said this one. Turned out pretty cute—I couldn't tell from the photos exactly how big they would end up, but this one was less than six inches long. Apparently it's already been thoroughly gummed by the teething baby. (Photos courtesy AW)

Should I be concerned that this blog gets way more traffic than my business site?

Well, that's what I'm led to believe from my site stats, anyway. Apparently someone in Russia and someone else in Brazil give a rat's ass about my mental diarrhea. (Thanks for reading, but who are you?)

Anyway, I should probably be directing more people to my business site, so that I can actually cash in on this whole Internet thing.

Go!

"Grignotines"

What a perfect word for what it describes.

... aaaand I've lost my poppy already.

Participated as a healthy volunteer for a schizophrenia study today and got my brain scanned by MEG and fMRI. In both, you're expected to lie very still so that images of magnetic activity and blood flow can be taken while you perform a simple cognitive task. The MEG is done in a magnetically shielded room, while the MRI is done in the tunnel in an electromagnet. I was commenting to the principal investigator that it must be challenging for the subjects with schizophrenia to deal with the potential claustrophobia, restrictions on movement, and the potential paranoia associated with having coils stuck to their heads. He concurred, saying that he has to get rid of maybe one in fifteen control scans for excessive movement, but with the schizophrenic subjects, the attrition proportion is more like one in five.

Wish I had pictures from today to show you, but the CD they gave me of my brain images is in some Unix executable file format that I can't read.

Where do you pin a Remembrance Day poppy on a rain jacket whose waterproofness you don't want to compromise?

I've been doing a piss-poor job of documenting Lil' Dude's preschool creations. So I'm implementing an arbitrary rule that I'll be better about it for the three-dimensional stuff he brings home. Here's a pumpkin he decorated last week:

He keeps sabotaging it—trying to tear the eyes and decorations off, stabbing it with a key, throwing it down the stairs, etc., so I figure I should probably get a photo of it before it gets completely demolished.

The $1 serrated pumpkin knife my sweetie picked up works shockingly well for making jack o' lanterns. I have to admit I was pretty skeptical.

I think back to our pumpkin-carving contests in junior high and the dull straight-edged chef's knives we were expected to use—think five prepubescent and awkward teenagers wildly stabbing a slippery pumpkin from different directions under a 30-minute time constraint—and am fairly shocked nobody lost a finger.

I took part yesterday in the very cool Beginner Cheese Workshop at UBC, presented by David Rotsztain. I didn't have the foresight to take a writing utensil, though, so I just have to get all of what I remember down in writing before it completely leaves my brain.
• Good cheesecloths? Not supermarket cheesecloths. Try muslin at fabric stores or discount clothing stores like Value Village. David uses a do-rag and says it's the cat's ass. Deodorize and disinfect with baking soda and boiling water before using.
• I had always wondered how ricotta works—how do you get more cheese from whey, which has already been cheesed? Turns out rennet cheeses, made at lower temperature, coagulate only the casein. The albumen stays in the whey, and it precipitates out when heated to a high temperature and exposed to acid. (Now I understand why you add vinegar to water before poaching eggs, too.) It's because of the albumen that heated cheeses like paneer will not melt.
• To think I've just been throwing my valuable yogurt whey down the drain. Add a quarter cup of the stuff to a gallon of warmed milk to start the souring process for rennet cheese.
• For (hung) yogurt cheese, to one 650g tub of yogurt, hung for 24 hours, adding about 1 tsp salt, then hanging for another few hours will help preserve it for up to 2 weeks. Add any flavourings to the cheese after it's been dried; otherwise it will just come out in the whey.
• Using a higher-fat-content milk will make a creamier product and improve your yield. Also, for yogurt cheeses, lower-fat yogurts are more likely to have thickeners like corn or tapioca starch, which will prevent the whey from separating.
• For rennet cheeses that need to age, don't use iodized salt, which will kill the culture. Salting pulls out moisture, helping to preserve the cheese, and adds flavour. Alternatively, brine: dissolve 1 cup salt to 1 L whey, then add an additional 1 cup salt as a reservoir. A camembert-like wheel will need 1 hour's worth of brining, whereas larger cheese will need longer.
• Paneer will absorb the flavour of the acid that you use to precipitate out the proteins, so keep that in mind. For sweet applications, use lemon juice. A balsamic vinegar will produce a great paneer with amazing purple streaks.
• Using whey as the weight to press cheese not only is convenient, but it also helps more whey come out of the cheese because of its warmth.
• Only non-homogenized milk works for rennet cheeses. Pasteurized is okay, but raw makes better curds.

That's all I remember that isn't in the handout provided. Excited to take the advanced class sometime in the new year!

If I were a three-year-old again, one of my main reasons for wanting to grow bigger would be so that my head would no longer be right at most grown-ups' fart level.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." —Thomas Palmer

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results." —Albert Einstein
***
So I guess Palmer's quote should be amended to say, "If at first you don't succeed, examine your axioms and initial conditions, make a reasonable adjustment, then try, try again." Or maybe he was just insane.

This little creature will be part of my brother-in-law's Christmas present:

(The odds of his reading this blog before then are infinitesimal.) The aardvark sits atop a Chicago Manual of Style because I did most of my work on it during an editorial retreat.

Nomnomnom...

SD got her birthday amigurumi. Here we see Alexander dutifully chewing on the turtle; the elephant is in the foreground. Both animals are a bit different from the similar ones I made before. Rather than clamp the turtle feet between the top and bottom shell, I sewed them onto the bottom shell, and I tried to give the elephant a natural curve to the trunk, but my sweetie says it looks a bit like Cyril Sneer. (Photo courtesy SD)

Kits farmers' market done for the year. Pout.

I initially found it enormously amusing that Lil' Dude appeared to have named his toy dolphin "Beauregard" but later realized that he was just horribly mispronouncing (and misidentifying) "beluga."

Um, awesome?

I never thought my Gromit would turn out this well, but the pattern was great. The stitches are loose, so the stuffing shows through, so if I try to make it again, I'll have to use a smaller hook.

I made this one as a Christmas gift for our nanny's little girl, whom our nanny hasn't seen in person in two years. I asked her what animal her daughter would like, and she said she wanted a dog, so I figured this was a good excuse to try the free pattern out. Just in case her daughter's never heard of Gromit, I bought her Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Collection to go along with the amigurumi. The set includes A Matter of Loaf and Death, which I haven't even seen.

I signed me and Lil' Dude up as subjects for a study about behaviour, emotion and aggression in young children. After a two-hour interview today, I got to take home $40, and Lil' Dude got some apple juice and a handful of toy cars. I'm not doing this for the money, of course, but it is nice to be compensated, and it does seem a better use of my cash-earning time than, say, completing online market research surveys for Ipsos, where, after over a year, all I managed to earn was a $20 Amazon.ca voucher.

Anyway, after I'd volunteered for the study, I decided to look on Craigslist for other similar research that I could serve as a human subject for. After spending a summer doing MRI research on human subjects, I know how hard it can be to recruit eligible Guinea pigs. Since I now have way more flexible work hours, I can finally participate in these kinds of studies, which I always find interesting. They make me feel as though I'm making some minimal contribution to progress.

NM: "Hello?"

Person on phone: "Hi! I am calling from the campaign of Suzanne Anton. Can she count on your support this upcoming municipal election?"

NM: "I'm afraid not, no."

PoP: "Oh. If an election were held today, who would you be voting for?"

NM: "I'd unequivocally be voting for Gregor Robertson."

PoP: *pause*. "Uh... Is he C-O-P-E or Vision Vancouver?"

NM: "I'm pretty sure he's Vision."

PoP: "Oh. Thanks! I didn't know, 'cause I'm calling from London..."

Nice work, NPA. Outsource your municipal election campaign responsibilities to some call centre in London. Because Vancouverites are too busy doing important things, I guess?

My sweetie defended his PhD today (the first of two presentations he has to give). I and three of his friends painted his name on our bellies and yelled "DE-fence! DE-fence!"

I wish we had pictures.

"Please stop painting soy sauce on your pants with that bean."

We picked 120 lbs. of grapes for the fruit tree project today.

is where God decided I had to have a pimple this week.

To Kraft Canada:

Hello,

The fact that Dad's Cookies are Bullfrog Powered was a large part of the reason I chose to purchase these cookies over competing products. I applaud you for taking steps to reduce your carbon footprint. However, if you are sincere about your environmental commitment, I would fervently encourage you to investigate alternative packaging methods that would allow your packaging to be more easily recycled. The polystyrene inner tray, for example, could easily be replaced with a polypropylene tray. My local recycling program in Vancouver will accept the latter but not the former, and I know that other municipalities in the rest of Canada have similar restrictions on polystyrene.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration,

Nori Maki.

Foods that I eat because they're good for me and not because I particularly enjoy them:

1. Oatmeal
2. Yogurt
3. Kale

I'm still not really getting kale. I'm admittedly a bit of a kale neophyte, but do the hippies actually like this vegetable because they think it's delicious? I keep reading shit like, "ZOMG kale is like the best evarrr!!!" I can't help but think I must be missing something. I mean, I'll eat it—I have it in at least two meals a week, actually—but it's not something I look forward to with the great anticipation that I have for, say, gai lan. I've also done the kale chip thing, and, no, despite what the Internet says, they don't taste "just like potato chips."

I used to wonder whether we're culturally conditioned to think that farts are funny or if they're inherently hilarious. Since I've had a child I can now state this with certainty: farts are inherently hilarious.

Is it odd that I feel a bit weirded out when I scratch a dog's leg-thumping spot? It just feels... inappropriate. Not just in an "Is the dog getting sexual gratification from this?" way but also in an "I would probably punch someone if he or she touched me in a way that made my limbs spasm uncontrollably" way. Especially if it was a stranger.

Cross-stitched Megan ambigram done:

A bit of a shit photo. Are we detecting a pattern here?

Anyway, I'm delivering it to C&M today. Hope they like it.

I made an elephant (or "effephant," as Lil' Dude calls it) based on this free Lion Brand Yarn pattern, with a couple of modifications.

My sweetie took one look at it and said, "Trunkus erectus"—which doesn't exactly inspire confidence. There are certainly some better elephant patterns out there, but this was only the second amigurumi I started, so I figured it would be an easy intro. Lil' Dude liked it and decided that Baby Joël had to have it, and that was adorable in itself.

One day at preschool and Lil' Dude's already gotten me sick.

The turtle is complete:

I used Basics Stop yarn by Lana Grossa, colour 21 the darker green and colour 11 the lighter stuff, and followed this free pattern on Lion Brand Yarn's website. The legs are way too close to each other and to the head, and I did a crap job of stitching on the head, but Lil' Dude still seems to like it.

"No, sweetie, that's a Shirley Temple, which is different from a dimple, which is also distinct from a nipple."

"Stop that, please. Why are you rubbing cheese on me?"

I had to get an affidavit notarized. The notary charged me $25 plus tax for checking my ID, signing the document, and sealing it—maybe a five-minute job. At first I thought, "What the fuck kind of racket is this?" And then I realized that there is no way you could ever pay me enough to do what a notary does, so I guess that counts for something.

"Sweetie, stop forking your dad."

"Look! Holes!"

"Yes, I see. It's not a good idea to put holes in your father."

I've been working on an ambigram for HG, since I haven't seen her in a while, and her first and last names make a pretty natural ambigram—except for the whole i/n issue. Not sure my approach is a particularly good solution, but it's the best I could come up with that harmonized with the rest of the letterforms:

Holy bumper crop, Batman! JD and I picked for about thirty-five minutes and hauled in about 3 litres of blackberries. Sure makes up for last year's crap harvest.

This is about a third of them:

We made them into a delicious pie for dessert.

I don't ever remember shedding tears over the death of a politician, but this morning I blubbered like a baby. RIP, Jack.

CL: "What's he doing?"

NM: "He's trying to wink."

CL: "Oh. Good winking, buddy! Looking a bit constipated, but..."

Lil' Dude's "wink" currently consists of his squinting and scrunching up his nose. One eye is completely closed, whereas the other one is about 95 percent there.

And so it begins...

Actually, it began in January, when Lil' Dude was enrolled in an art class and brought home his art projects each week. I had the, "Shit, what am I going to do with all the stuff he brings home?" thought. Fortunately I could put off thinking about it for a while, because he made mostly paintings in his art class, which are pretty much two dimensional and not that hard to store.

In his one day of daycamp today, he brought home a bracelet he made. I shudder to think of all the crafts he'll fill the house with when he starts preschool in a couple weeks.

My strategy is to take photos of them and post them here so that he'll have a record of them and maybe won't be too heartbroken to part with them. This one, of his bracelet, is unfortunately a shitty take, what with the low light and out-of-focusness and all. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow in better light.

Both my sweetie and I had had the same idea a few weeks ago, when Lil' Dude went to a barbecue hosted by a local organic market and made this head out of a tomato. We'd both taken photos of it before it became encrusted with fruit flies. It's in the fridge right now, but it looks as though Lil' Dude's finally forgotten about it and we can throw it out soon. I'll dig up those photos in the next couple of days.

There. I've finished my first attempt at amigurumi, based on the pattern by June Gilbank:

The stuffing shows through the midsection, and there are a couple of looser loops. I hope I'll progress to the point where I can look back on this and say, "Geez, look at the crap I used to make."

Apparently the hardest thing about freelancing is to remember that, yes, even at home, I need to drink water to survive.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

My sweetie, Lil' Dude, and I went kayaking to the smaller of the Defence Islands. We camped there Saturday night, alone except for a mother seal and her pup, who would occasionally poke their heads out of the water to see who the fuck was on their rocks. I misplaced my new hat, but otherwise it was a lovely weekend.

FREE-lance!

I made a couple of tweaks to the g. Wonder if it's better now. Our non-native-English-speaking nanny can read it; I'm calling that good enough.

Tried another ambigram—for yet another baby:

 

I don't know if my goal of making squint-free ambigrams is going so well. LC saw what it was supposed to be, but when I showed it to my sweetie, he said, "Mesaw?"

Sigh. Don't know now whether to go ahead with making it into something more substantial.

I am frustrated by both evolution and physiology that I can be woken up in the middle of the night both urgently needing to pee and also desperately thirsty. Why the fuck can't my body be better at redistributing hydration where I need it?

I put Thai basil on my pizza, and it was fucking delicious.

Lil' Dude still hasn't figured out how to pedal. I tried to get him to ride his trike to the playground yesterday; he basically Fred Flintstoned his way there and Fred Flintstoned his way back.

So I designed an ambigram for S&A's baby:

That was what I was cross-stitching:

S&A seem pretty pleased with it, so that makes me happy.

My goal in ambigram design: to create typography you don't have to squint to decipher.

Cross-stitching notes to self:
•Use masking tape over the piece edges to prevent fraying. Otherwise you will constantly catch your thread on the edges and drive yourself mad.
•Cut off loose ends as soon as the thread is secured. Again, to prevent insanity.
•If you are not stitching over the centre square, mark it with white floss. Coloured floss will stain.
•Don't use a thread longer than a metre. It will get frayed and shredded as you stitch.
•Don't try to use regular embroidery floss with 22-count evenweave. It will bunch up the surrounding stitches.
•When using 18-count evenweave, don't assume there are actually 18 pixels per inch. Actual pattern turns out much larger, for some dumb reason.
•Don't start a cross-stitching project unless you have infinite time. Three-year-olds are not much interested in sitting patiently and watching you stitch.

When I was cleaning out my crap at my parents' place, I came across old flower looms: a round one and a square one. I did a bit of online research to see if I could use them to make something that wasn't gaudy and hideous, and the results are a resounding no.

Last night I spent an hour cleaning orange juice residue from twelve of my keys. Thank God for the keyboard condom I got after the last time Lil' Dude spilled a drink on my computer; otherwise it could have been way worse. I really should back up my data...

"No eat the pine cone?"

"That's right. We don't eat pine cones."

"I had an epic struggle trying to get Lil' Dude to sleep."

"Oh yeah? As epic as The Lord of the Rings?"

"I don't know. Did The Lord of the Rings feature a child forcibly opening another character's mouth and deliberately drooling a goober into it? 'Cause if it didn't, I think my experience was more epic."

What the fuck made me think that I could take up cross-stitching and raise a toddler at the same time?

I was holding Lil' Dude at a bus shelter and asked him if he wanted to sit down on the bench. He said yes. Two women were talking on either end of the three-seater, and their bags were on the ends of the bench, so I said, "Excuse me" and inserted Lil' Dude in the vacant middle seat. The older woman muttered something under her breath and, through gritted teeth, said to the younger one, "Take her picture."

I turned to her. "Sorry—why are you taking my picture?"

"You like to take it up the rear, don't you?"

"Excuse me?"

"You take it up the rear. That's the only reason they let you stay on our land!" (Both women were First Nations.)

I was standing there, holding Lil' Dude's hands. The bizarre verbal assault continued. "You're a slut! When he grows up, he's going to want to have sex with you. You'll just spread it for anyone, won't you. You're not sorry for anything. We're taking your picture because we're sick of it. You're going to get deported! They're sick of it, too. Sending you back where you came from! Look at you! Cover yourself up! You slut!"

At that point I just picked up Lil' Dude and walked over to the bus stop a little ways away and waited for the bus to arrive.

When I recounted the story later that evening, my sweetie remarked, "Yeah, nothing says 'easy lay' like a knee brace."

"No, no—shoes don't belong in the fridge."

The most useless response from Clubhouse:
***
Dear nori:

Thank you for contacting us in regards to our Club House Extracts. Our customers are our first concern and we are always interested in assisting you with any questions or comments you may have on any of our products.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We have forwarded your comments to the marketing director for future consideration.

If you have questions regarding any of our products, please do not hesitate to contact me via email or call our toll free number, 1-800-265-2600.

Sincerely,

Valerie Mailloux

Consumer Affairs Specialist
McCormick Canada
www.clubhouse.ca
***
I didn't write back, but I regret that a little bit now. Marketing? How is that productive?

I guess if I'm going to start making this complaint letter schtick a thing, I should start following through, huh? Anyway, if in five years you start seeing vanilla and almond extract bottles that don't fucking leak (I'm pretty sure that technology will be available then), know that you have me—or possibly hundreds of other people who have come to the same simple realization—to thank.

So you know how when you inadvertently translate your hand a key over and start touch-typing gobbledygook? It seems Google is clever enough to know you've done that and what you actually meant. Huh.

All right—for lack of something better to post, here is my complaint letter to Clubhouse:
***
Category Type: Complaint
Subject: Packaging
Product Name: Vanilla extract, almond extract, etc.
Message: Is there any way you can redesign your vanilla extract and almond extract bottles to be more leak resistant? I can't imagine that I am the only consumer who accidentally and unknowingly knocks over those bottles in the pantry only to discover them lying in a messy puddle with half the extract wasted. It would be enormously helpful if you could add a soft plastic gasket to the lid or something, because the paper gasket that you use just gets saturated and then doesn't function well as a barrier against leaks.
***
Their response to follow.

I'm in Edmonton, where my parents have asked me to go through all of my childhood shit so that they can cull what they can and get the house ready to sell. I started the process yesterday, going through two bookshelves and three desk drawers. Dear Lord, I had a lot of useless crap. I've already stuffed one recycling bag and am well on my way to filling another.

I expected having to sort through my old belongings to be exhausting and emotional, but it hasn't been too bad so far, possibly because we went through a great purge of our apartment a few months back, when I learned that I needed to take a clinical approach. Still, twenty years' worth of accumulated possessions, memories, and unfulfilled ambitions are bound to be fraught.

What isn't hard at all is throwing out my old florid writing from my high school days. I'm almost embarrassed to read it—it's so awful. I now know that's a phase I had to go through. Experimenting and pushing the edges of my sensibilities so that I could feel out where my boundaries are. Not that I knew that's what I was doing at the time—I'm sure I thought my writing was fucking brilliant back then. I'll just have to keep this in mind when it's Lil' Dude's turn to write for school and not stifle his own discovery by trying to impose my standards of quality on him . Fortunately, since I rediscovered this blog eight years after starting it, as I read through the archives I was relieved to discover that only a few of my past entries really made me cringe. Of course I hope I'll never stop learning, developing, and evolving, but it's reassuring to know that my tendencies have been reasonably stable since I've matured a bit.

I also found (and discarded) stacks and stacks and stacks of my old study cards from high school and early university. The handwriting is mine, but I have no recollection of creating it. This exercise has made me realize how much I once learned and how incredibly much I've now forgotten. How knowledgeable I'd be if I could just retain a fraction more of what I read.

So now I'm left with about a shelf's worth of university-level physics and math textbooks that I have no idea what to do with. My cursory online research has turned up Books for Africa, an NGO based in the U.S., and Books 2 Prisoners, which has a Vancouver office. Not clear if the latter will accept physics texts, though; its focus seems to be the humanities, and law. More probing needed.

I tried to sneak a juice box for Lil' Dude past airport security, but they confiscated it. I was tempted to say, "You know Osama Bin Laden's dead, right?" but I didn't want them to take me to the little room.

"Please stop paddling your mother with the pie server."

Sunlight—the exclamation-filled response:
***
Hello nori,

Thanks so much for writing!

We are writing in response to your comments regarding our advertisement for our products.

As a manufacturer we feel it is a major responsibility to provide our friends and consumers with the most creative and informative means of advertising possible. Needless to say, we are most concerned with your comments as they suggest we may not be successfully promoting this message on behalf of our product.

You may be interested to know that all of our commercials and advertisements are pre-tested and various techniques are used to evaluate consumer reactions. Based on the results of our pre-testing procedures, the presentations are chosen for their majority appeal. Please let us assure you that your comments are extremely important to us in evaluating the success of our commercials and advertisements.

We have a long history of presenting "tasteful" advertising to the public. Our ads must be informative and truthful. The agencies creating our advertising adhere strictly to these guidelines.

We certainly do not wish to offend anyone. In developing product messages, Sun Products and its agencies may not always anticipate all possible implications of an advertisement or television commercial.

We will certainly forward your comments to the Marketing staff. Consumer comments are very important and evaluated on a regular basis.

We do thank you for your interest!
Your friends at Sun Products
***
I especially like the quotes around "tasteful." And I yet again did not succeed in getting free samples, not that I was angling for them.

Apparently the latex within fig leaves can be a severe irritant to human skin. Perhaps not the best option for covering one's shame?

Got attacked by stinging nettles at Rebecca Spit today, but I think the haul of beautiful salmonberries was worth it.

Lil' Dude seems awfully fond of them.

The QR code for this blog is









This is what happens when I find myself on holiday with too much time on my hands.

Doesn't "I'm a Little Teapot" conflate teapots and tea kettles?

My sweetie thinks it's "cute" that I write complaint letters to faceless corporations and attempt to reason with them. *Shrug*. I don't really expect anything to come of them—I'm not even angling for free samples or anything—but if I'm going to complain about something, I figure I may as well complain to the companies themselves, which are they only ones that can do anything about the problem... right? I keep assuming the art must be in striking the right balance of constructive criticism, but maybe I need to take a squeaky-wheel approach.

My latest missive was to Sunlight®:

In your Sunlight Deep Clean commercial, your use of statistics about women implies that doing the laundry is entirely a woman's responsibility. I know that I'm not alone in feeling that this implication is outdated, if not a bit irresponsible. As a consumer of laundry detergent and other cleaning products, I can say that I would be much more responsive to an ad that took a more balanced approach and showed that cleaning is just as much the responsibility of male members of the household.

Thanks,

nori maki
***
I wrote a note to Clubhouse a few months ago. Maybe I'll post that later for its entertainment value.

Complaint letters—perhaps that can be my blogging schtick.

Am I really resurrecting this thing? After spending a couple of hours trying to remember what login I used for this account and wrestling with Blogger to get my access restored, I now feel sort of obligated to see it through.

What started it all was a conversation I had with SW, who'd signed up for a Twitter account so that he could tweet his random, inane (almost always hilarious) thoughts. Yet now he doesn't feel that he can fulfill that promise, because he's somehow ended up accumulating a bunch of what he calls "respectable" followers. I'd thought for a microsecond about joining Twitter for the same purpose—sharing my completely irrelevant "insights"—but his experience gave me pause. I concluded that it was best to vacuum the cobwebs out of this sad blog and bring it back to life.

I'm almost certain nobody will read my posts, but what finally convinced me to come back was reading through my own old entries. Recalling friends, experiences I'd forgotten about.

So now what?

I see my posts here as an opportunity to keep up my writing and to purge what's on my mind as I leave the secure (?) but exhausting (!) world of in-house editing to pursue a freelance business full time. I won't have lunchtimes with coworkers to shoot the shit, so Internet, you're the next best thing.

We'll see how long I can keep this up.