Welcome to Addawa

• Hello bonjour and we're back home again nous sommes de retour and bilingual in a different way en ingles y frances, no en espanol - bugger. En anglais et francais, I mean, et non pas en espagnol.
  
  Ou sont les little squiggly things and accents for the letters?
  
  
• Back home. Tired. Kids fully asleep. Home lovely. Tummy notsomuch - dined on about half a cup of salt, 1/4 cup sugar, and 3/4 fat - glued together by preservatives. No dinner service on the planes, so we had nothing but pretzels, cookies, chips, and pop. Yummy.
  
  
• Kids got "Junior Canada Customs Agent" badges at the airport - which caused Daniel to immediately burst into a rendition of "badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!"
  
  
• I love my kids.
  
  
• I love Chris.
  
  
• I love being home.
  
  
• The weather, I could do without ;)

!!

Went to buy my required text for Globalisation. It's about 100 pages long.

CDN$176. That's about US$153. Good Christ. I could photocopy it for about CDN$90.

meme

Stolen from kaylarudbek: This is a list of the 50 Worst Songs of All Time, as put together by the hip magazine Blender. Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to bold the songs you actually like and admit your shame to the world.

1. We Built This City ... Starship
2. Achy Breaky Heart ... Billy Ray Cyrus
3. Everybody Have Fun Tonight ... Wang Chung
4. Rollin' ... Limp Bizkit
5. Ice Ice Baby ... Vanilla Ice
6. The Heart of Rock & Roll ... Huey Lewis and the News Hey, this one is actually good. Or maybe I just think it's actually good because DTV did a video of it, featuring excerpts from Disney films.
7. Don't Worry, Be Happy ... Bobby McFerrin Daniel and I are learning it at homeschooling choir :)
8. Party All the Time ... Eddie Murphy
9. American Life ... Madonna
10. Ebony and Ivory ... Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder Sappy, but cute :)
11. Invisible ... Clay Aiken
12. Kokomo ... The Beach Boys You would not believe how many times we heard this at Disney's California Adventure.
13. Illegal Alien ... Genesis
14. From a Distance ... Bette Midler
15. I'll Be There for You ... The Rembrandts
16. What's Up? ... 4 Non Blondes
17. Pumps and a Bump ... Hammer
18. You're the Inspiration ... Chicago
19. Broken Wings ... Mr. Mister
20. Dancing on the Ceiling ... Lionel Richie
21. Two Princes ... Spin Doctors Hey, this one is actually good too. IMHO. Am I alone in this sentiment?
::silence::
I am, aren't it?
22. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American) ... Toby Keith
23. Sunglasses at Night ... Corey Hart ::hurl::
24. Superman ... Five for Fighting
25. I'll Be Missing You ... Puff Daddy featuring Faith Evans and 112 -
26. The End ... The Doors
27. The Final Countdown ... Europe
28. Your Body Is a Wonderland ... John Mayer
29. Breakfast at Tiffany's ... Deep Blue Something
30. Greatest Love of All ... Whitney Houston I don't actually like it, because it was so unbelievably overplayed when it came out, but I think if it hadn't been blared at me at 20 times a day for months, I would like it.
31. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm ... Crash Test Dummies
32. Will 2K ... Will Smith
33. Barbie Girl ... Aqua
34. Longer ... Dan Fogelberg
35. Shiny Happy People ... R.E.M.
36. Make Em Say Uhh! ... Master P featuring Silkk, Fiend, Mia-X and Mystikal
37. Rico Suave ... Gerardo
38. Cotton Eyed Joe ... Rednex
39. She Bangs ... Ricky Martin
40. I Wanna Sex You Up ... Color Me Badd
41. We Didn't Start the Fire ... Billy Joel History geek here. Of course I like it.
42. The Sound of Silence ... Simon & Garfunkel What on earth is wrong with this one?
43. Follow Me ... Uncle Kracker
44. I'll Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) ... Meat Loaf I dunno, I always wondered what "that" was, and why he wouldn't do it ;)
45. Mesmerize ... Ja Rule featuring Ashanti
46. Hangin' Tough ... New Kids on the Block
47. The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me Is You ... Bryan Adams
48. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da ... The Beatles
49. I'm Too Sexy ... Right Said Fred the video was just too funny, and the way it was parodied for the next couple of years was hilarious
50. My Heart Will Go On ... Celine Dion ("and on and on and on and on and on and on" - Arrogant Worms)

( Celine Dion, by The Arrogant Worms )

motophoto

Because I just haven't taken enough pictures with ninja_kat's digital camera yet, I'm jumping into the photo meme, copied from lots of folks.

Is there something you want to see a picture of? Comment and I'll post it.

Edit: I'll post it providing doing so doesn't break any laws or outrage common decency ;)

Random brain blips from the last couple of days of our trip

• People sure are funny.
  
  The last morning, the boys were wearing the Canada shirts that Chris had made them - their names, Canadian flags, peace symbols, and maple leafs. At breakfast, they told one of our fellow guests (Grumpy Old Man) that they'd just had their birthdays; he apparently grunted "Hm." When I got to our table, they were still trying to engage Grumpy Old Man in conversation, and he was clearly not amused. I heard him say something like, "Colonel. I bet you don't even know what that means."
  
  "That means somebody very high up in the military," Chris told the boys. They were impressed.
  
  "I mean I am a Colonel," Grumpy Old Man - sorry, Grumpy Old Colonel - said.
  
  "Oh, cool!" said Chris.
  
  "'Cool'?" said the GOC, still clearly not amused. "You think it's 'cool'?" Then he called across the room at his spouse, said something like, "Are we leaving now, or what?"
  
  And he hadn't even taken a look at my own Canada shirt, with the "Canada: a nation of pot-smoking, homo-loving peaceniks" on it.
  
  
• But somebody else did, at Disneyland. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a woman looking at it with raised eyebrows - then she suddenly smiled and said to somebody behind her, "No - she is Canadian." She saw me looking at her and chuckled, "Heh - good for you!"
  
  
• It was amusing having so many people tell us nice things about Canadians. Namely, that we're all so polite. One guy even said, "You know, I've never met a rude Canadian."
  
  I refrained from responding with a smart-aleck "I could introduce you to a few" ;)
  
  It was particularly amusing hearing this when, except for the GOC, almost every single person we met during our trip was unfailingly friendly and polite, whether staff or fellow guest/visitor. Far more so than most Ottawans.
  
  
• I learned English at an American school when I was a kid (no, this is not a complete non-sequitur). My German cousins kept asking me to say "Frankfurt" in my American accent - the contrast between their German 'Frahnkforrt' and my 'Frainkfurt' was hilarious to them.
  
  Now I know how they felt. Every time airport or hotel staff said "Aaddawuh," I wanted to giggle.
  
  
• At breakfast one day, Daniel struck up a conversation with a family from Arizona. They were complaining about the cold and he said something like "It was -35 in Ottawa when we came here!"
  
  They were rather aghast, even after I'd approximated it in Fahrenheit. They asked us curiously, "How can you live there?"
  
  "We stay indoors a lot," I answered.
  
  "Why do you like living there?" asked the mom.
  
  "'Cause Canada's really big!" Daniel replied promptly. "And we have socialized medicine."
  
  They thought this was very cute. I was so proud of him :)
  
  Also, rather relieved that my stern little "We are guests in this country and we will not say rude things about America or its president while we are here" speech had done some good. I had cringed a little, expecting him to say something like "Because our Prime Minister is not a crazy idiot!"
  
  
• Weird visiting another country right after doing Critical Race Theory. Really, really weird. Among the ethnic-based observations I can remember:
  
  
  1. Total # of hijabs spotted in LA: 6. Ottawa? Somewhat more than that in any given half an hour.
     
  2. Total # of yarmulkes: can't count that high. Ottawa? Um... I'm sure I must have seen somebody in a yarmulke this year. No, wait - that was on TV.
     
  3. I have never seen so many people look totally Southeast Asian and be totally Latin American in my life. Quite startling the first few times.
     
  4. Total # of East Indian-looking people seen in the first five minutes at Ottawa Airport: at least 3. That's when I realized I'd hardly seen any in California.
     
  5. It's odd, noting various colour-based social structures in LA - who does what, who lives where, who serves, who is served, etc. I don't see it in Ottawa. And it's odd knowing that visitors to Ottawa could probably spot a whole bunch of race-based stuff that's totally invisible to me, because of its very familiarity.
  
  Like I said, really weird.
  
  
• Wonderful surprise when I went to pick up the kids at 5:00pm today: light!! As in, the sun hadn't quite set yet. I'm so used to going to get them in the dead of night. But in the week we were gone, sunset moved. Yay!!