The Ultimate Challenge

I do not sew. Not at all. Nope, not me. I code. I roast coffee. I even clean, but I do not sew. It's part of who I am, or mebbe who I'm not.

It started in my grade 8 home economics class when the same teacher who told me that no one would ever marry me if I didn't learn to butter bread "properly" handed me a flimsy paper pattern and a length of ugly blue fabric and told me that I would not enter high school unless a blouse was forthcoming. There never was a blouse. Well, technically something vaguely resembling a blouse did appear, but even the witch disguised as a teacher didn't have the heart to make me try it on.

In any case, I do not sew.

I have never regretted it. My wonderful husband does the button attaching around here, and anything more complicated than that goes to a seamstress. I'm also pretty handy with a glue gun and iron on tape.

And yes, I admit it, I did once fix a fallen hem with a stapler, but I am quite sure no one noticed. Well, no one important in a fire my ass kind of way.

Somehow, I have to move this posting along and mention that I love socks. I do not knit socks, but I truly love socks.  My co-workers look forward to checking out my socks each day. My guy no longer cares that I have two dresser drawers devoted to socks. Sometimes the only good thing about a given day is that I trudged through it wearing amazingly spectacular socks.

Now that you know these two things about me, I am ready to reveal the conundrum.

I lust for sock monkeys.

I am not talking about the ordinary ones found on Think Geek. No, I want special ones, as special as my most beloved socks. Until recently, I was able to keep this desire at bay. After all, it's not like there is a sock monkey store in the mall to tempt me on an on-going basis. I thought about asking my sister in law (who sews but does not write code) if she would make me a sock monkey or three, but I somehow never got up the nerve.

Then, earlier today, I came upon this, a sock monkey tutorial. It looks simple enough, well, except for the fact that Kris Howard, AKA The Web Goddess, doesn't make the first step something like "buy a sewing machine" and the second one "overcome your phobia and learn to sew."

I keep telling myself I have mastered more difficult tasks, but, somehow, this is different. It becomes an issue of whether or not I am willing to change something about myself that has been defining in what is, admittedly, a pretty bizarre kind of way, and move on. Heck,  perhaps I could become the coffee roasting-sock monkey lady at the local Farmers' Market.

Stranger things have happened. After all, I managed to attract not just one, but two, husbands (sequentially), without ever learning to properly butter bread.

 

posted by taming at 02:39 | link | comments (7)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: homelife, girlie-girl, remembering

w00t

Several years ago, the famous Uncle Max sent me an email expressing his concern that my son, his beloved nephew, did not appear to be able to write a grammatically correct sentence. And his spelling, oh my. Max almost met his maker three years ahead of schedule just thinking about it.

I wrote back to Uncle Max explaining that after years of gaming, H was used to communicating in a shorthand geekish way on-line, but that I would ask him to please use standard English when communicating with his older relatives. I then wrote to H and asked him to lay off the leet speak, and to use his spellchecker, when writing to Uncle Max.

Problem solved.

I wonder what Uncle Max would think if he had lived long enough to see that W00T had been chosen as the Miriam-Webster Word of the Year for 2007. I'm thinking that it was a better choice than last year's winner, the Colbert inspired "truthiness", but what do I know?

Leet speak has always seemed a bit like cockney for the rest of us, that is for those of us not lucky enough to have been born into that amazing language of rhyme and rhythm. As much as I enjoy it, I don't use it much because even though I have a touch o'geek in me, it just seems wrong for me to pretend to be a gamer or hacker, when I am neither.

I may throw in the occasional meh, but I try not to overdo it. It seems sort of pretentious, when I do, much like those annoying people who throw the odd French phrase into a perfectly fine discussion about the weather. There is no reason I can think of to make people wish they had a dictionary with them when they are in line at the grocery store.

Writing back and forth to my son is different, of course, As a family of geeks, we are culturally entitled to use it amongst ourselves, even if the only game I play on line is Free Rice. 

 

posted by taming at 06:55 | link | comments (4)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: tech, language

The Continuing Copyright Saga

It looks like the copyright reform bill might be tabled in Canada this morning. Like thousands of people have done, I just sent letters to my MP and to Ministers Jim Prentice and Josée Verner.

It takes about two minutes to use this on-line tool to send an Email of your own. The software will generate a form letter that you can modify, if you wish. Shortly after you press send, you will get a copy of the letter which you can then mail or fax, as well.

I sent both the form letter and something less canned. I kept the uncanned version short and sweet. Here it is:

December 13, 2007

Mr. Bob Mills
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6

Dear Sir,

We need a Made in Canada solution for copyright in the digital age, not something drafted in the back room of one of the US media giants.

I want to be able to do lawful fair use copying of materials I own in my home. I do not want to pirate music, TV, film or written materials or deny artists, musicians, writers and the businesses that work with them reasonable profits. Surely, we can reconcile the two better than the Americans did.

Respectfully,
yada yada

 

posted by taming at 05:03 | link | comments |
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: canada, copyright

Doris Lessing (and me)

My father used to tell the story of coming into our living room one Sunday morning to find me lying on the floor reading the Sunday comics to my baby brother. I was three.

I was lucky enough to be raised in a house full of books. My parents did many things wrong (what parents don't) but no matter what was happening in our house, there was always time to read a few pages of Uncle Wiggily before bedtime. Following along as those books were read to me, and longing for just a little bit more after the book was closed, was, I suppose, the key to my learning to read on my own.

I've never really understood how the right books seem to appear at the right moment. You know what I mean, you wander through a bookstore or a library, pick something up, take it home, and it turns out that the book is exactly what you need to read just then and life is transformed. Sometimes the transformation lasts only until the last page; sometimes it lasts a lifetime.

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was such a book for me. Written in 1962, when I was ten, it should, perhaps, have worked its magic on my mother's life, not mine. Oddly enough, I remember what my mother was reading about then, Naked Came I , a novel based on the life of August Rodin. What an odd thing memory is. I can still see it sitting on my mother's dresser, and wondering what on earth she was doing reading about naked camels.

If she read The Golden Notebook back then, I missed it. I was probably too busy closed up in my hidey-hole on the third floor reading a purloined copy of The Carpetbaggers.  My parents read widely, but necessarily for edification.

The Golden Notebook found its way into my life, exactly when I needed it, about 20 years later. I was a young wife trapped in a bad marriage, kept there by my own lack of vision and feelings of worthlessness.

I'd like to say that as I read the last sentence I was moved to pack my bags and leave, but that didn't happen. What did happen was a reframing of my life. And that reframing, including a descent into madness, eventually became a part of me, and I did walk out the door.

As I closed that door, I carried Lessing's Anna Wulf with me.

"Knowing was an 'illumination.' During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I've had these moments of 'knowing' one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet, these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die." --Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook

Please read Lessing's 2007 Nobel Prize for literature acceptance speech. Books really do change our lives.

 

posted by taming at 04:34 | link | comments (4)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: mental health, remembering

Are We Lemmings?

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to write something coherent about the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law. I've never gotten much beyond, "it's bad, it's very, very bad."

Fortunately, Cory Doctorow, a Canadian writer, said it better:

"The US’s approach to enforcing copyright in the digital age has resulted in 20,000 lawsuits against music fans, technology companies being sued out of existence for making new multi-purpose tools, and has not put one penny into the pocket of an artist or reduced downloading one bit. The USA stepped into uncharted territory in 1998 with the DMCA and fell off a cliff — that was reckless, but following them off the cliff is insane."

If this issue interests you, see the following:

Michael Geist's The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do

Michael Geist's Copyright Choices and Voices

BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow on Canadian copyright reform

CBC's Search Engine Asks Questions of Industry Minister Jim Prentice

Fair Copyright in Canada Facebook Group

It appears that the government has backed down, for the moment.

 

posted by taming at 03:25 | link | comments (2)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: copyright, cross-border, dmca

Home   Blog   Roasting/Brewing   Resources/Links   About   Site Map 

Copyright © 2007 4cats2much

Web Counter