Blossoming in the Sun

In a city like Van­couver in the depths of winter, when we’re so used to rain, rain, and more rain, to the extent that even the loc­al paper prints “this is get­ting bor­ing” as the weath­er fore­cast, any sun is appre­ci­ated. So today’s glor­i­ous sun­shine, even though accom­pan­ied by cold frosts in the morn­ing, was extremely wel­come. Every­one is out walk­ing, people are vis­ibly relax­ing and enjoy­ing the sun, their faces remin­is­cent of blos­som­ing flowers, rather than scur­ry­ing along under umbrel­las scowl­ing at the grey skies. Many are delib­er­ately not look­ing at the weath­er fore­cast, pre­fer­ring to enjoy the weath­er as it is rather than be cast into des­pond­ency over the rain that is undoubtedly just over the hori­zon. Even the trees seem to be smil­ing, and the cats are out­side cat­ting around rather than hibernating.

Some­how even work­ing in the base­ment seems easi­er when the sun is shining.

One-Stop Shopping

I see that Paul Ked­rosky is talk­ing about a resur­gence of depart­ment stores, based on the fact that lots of people want one-stop shop­ping rather than going from store to store. Fun­nily enough, Wal­mart has been meet­ing pre­cisely this need for years; I gath­er one of the major demo­graph­ics for Wal­mart is har­ried moth­ers with chil­dren in tow who also don’t want to schlep from store to store. Now, if depart­ment stores would actu­ally make it more pleas­ant to shop in them, and more effi­cient, they’d get more of my busi­ness as well. Effi­ciency to me means a reas­on­able selec­tion of products, not only cloth­ing, organ­ised in a way that means I can find what I’m look­ing for (or find out they don’t have it) in a short peri­od of time. People to help in the pro­cess would be a def­in­ite plus, but some logic in where things are would make up for that. Rolling carts for people push­ing strollers or bug­gies would help as well.

‘Tis the Season to be Frazzled

If I have a New Year’s Res­ol­u­tion, it’s to not let next year’s year-end become as stressed. And to get enough sleep. Both of these hold a longer story that I don’t have the energy to tell right now. Tim pos­ted some; in the last couple of days oth­ers have got sick (there seems to be a gastroenteritis/norovirus epi­dem­ic in Van­couver) and the tod­dler hurt her hand and is sleep­ing even more poorly than usual.

As a con­sequence I haven’t had the energy to blog (or do any­thing much, to be hon­est), and it will take a few days before I do.

To Gift or To Give

I’m usu­ally a bit of a stick­ler for try­ing to use lan­guage cor­rectly. I real­ise that one of the beau­ties of the Eng­lish lan­guage is the way new words and phrases are coined, and I will defend the right of people to do so, but it does­n’t mean I need to like all of them. Like the cur­rent use of gift as a verb. To me it seemed obvi­ous that you should always use give instead, until I real­ised that the mean­ing is actu­ally to give as a gift. Which isn’t as tau­to­log­ous as it sounds, since the verb “give” has many mean­ings, only some of which have to do with the giv­ing of gifts.

It seems to be mainly used in one of two contexts:

  1. To give as a gift some­thing that the giver made (or could have made), such as knit­ted or baked items. Per­fect for bak­ing and gift­ing, for example.
  2. And the notori­ous regift­ing, the giv­ing of a gift to someone else that the giver was giv­en. There seem to be whole treat­ises writ­ten around how to do this at this time of year.

I’ve nev­er heard gift used as a verb in spoken Eng­lish, but it crops up a lot on blogs and email lists writ­ten by Amer­ic­ans. I’m sure the usage will spread and fig­ur­ing out the subtle dif­fer­ence in mean­ing to give makes it easi­er to take. Mind you, I still don’t like it much.

Toddler Books

Our tod­dler daugh­ter (18 months old) likes hav­ing books read to her. Some of them are def­in­ite favour­ites, to be read as often as pos­sible, while oth­ers are the ones she likes when she’s told to go and get anoth­er book. They’re not neces­sar­ily books I would choose myself, but it’s not my taste that counts <grin>. The ver­sions we have are mostly board­books, well worth­while at this age since she often sits on the floor and looks at her books on her own, and she can turn the board­book pages eas­ily enough that she does­n’t get frustrated.

Her top favour­ites cur­rently are We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxen­bury (Pow­ell’s link), I Love You With All My Heart by Noris Kern (Pow­ell’s link), and Moth­er, May I? by Grace Mac­car­one (Pow­ell’s link).

The next bunch of books also hold her atten­tion for a bit, but she tends not to bring them over to be read as often as the books in the first group. Sandra Boyn­ton fea­tures heav­ily here, and her books are small enough that the girl can hold them while she’s being changed. They’re fun to read as well, as they lend them­selves to silly voices. We have Hip­pos Go Ber­serk (Pow­ell’s link), Barn­yard Dance! (Pow­ell’s link), and Moo Baa La La La (Pow­ell’s link). Round­ing out this are A. J. Wood’s Hubble Bubble, Cauldron Trouble (Spooky Tales) and Nina Laden’s Grow Up! (Pow­ell’s link), where she really likes the chick­en page for some reason. 

Of course, by next week the favour­ites might be a com­pletely dif­fer­ent set of books.

Facebook Privacy Settings

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about Face­book’s pri­vacy issues, and the import­ance of mak­ing sure the pri­vacy set­tings in your Face­book pro­file match what you want to have hap­pen to your per­son­al data. Bri­an pos­ted on this same top­ic and has some good points and detailed instruc­tions; the com­ments are also worth reading.

I went and checked my set­tings and found they looked a little dif­fer­ent to what I remembered, so it’s prob­ably a good idea to check your set­tings on a reg­u­lar basis; as Face­book changes what they do they may change which options exist. And think about what you want, about that bal­ance between let­ting out enough inform­a­tion so old friends can find you again (as lots of people want) and mak­ing sure that not too much inform­a­tion gets out. I changed most of mine to “friends only” from the default “my net­works and friends”; maybe at some stage I’ll change some of them back again but for the time being I feel more com­fort­able this way.