[  Mood: Distorted ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
So the city got hit with what could be termed as a perfect storm.

* The bus drivers went on strike last night stopping our transit system cold.
* A winter storm hit the city yesterday. Snow and freezing rain have blanketed the city. We have got at least 20 cm according to Environment Canada, but according to the radio we have gotten 34 cm. That is about a foot of snow.
* Because of the storm, school buses have been cancelled, but the schools are open. So if you need childcare, you have to drive your kids to school.
* One of the main comuter bridges has been reduced to two lanes due to some structural issues.
* Certain postal workers are on strike as well and given that the places they are picketing are on major intersections, traffic gets slowed even more.

Yeah – so apparently the commute is a bit of a hassle. The husband unit has arranged a carpool, but given the delays, the ride has yet to appear.

Be happy you are not here.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]

Brit Paul West is hired by a French firn to develop an authentic English tea house chain. He moves to Paris and finds himself almost immediately struggling to fit in to to the City of Lights. He finds navigating the streets while trying to avoid piles of dog poo. Paul also finds that in France, work has a whole different meaning, what with strikes and workers who don’t actually work. Finally, he also finds that Parisiam women are completely different than British women.

Author Stephan Clark has created a laugh out loud piece of fish out of water fiction. The reader is taken along on Paul’s journey down the rabbit hole. This is so worth reading. I have requested the next one from the biblio.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Trying to read to my son, who likes to randomly flip pages,  ]
Another port that I am expanding.

Microserfs is a wonderful book from Michael Copeland, the wunderkind of Can Lit. It explores the lives a group of Microsoft Employees and the endless drugery of their lives. Until the majority of them jump ship and create a start-up and then tbe novel takes a sharp left turn.

One of the most memorable scene in the book comes early on when one of the characters gets a scathing email from Bill Gates and proceeds to lock himself in his office. His friends become worried when he fails to emmerge after a few days, so they head off to the grocery store to buy flat food that they can slide it under the door.

A wonderful, quirky book.

[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
As I mentioned in our podcast taping last night, Canadian politics has suddenly gotten very exciting.

We have a parliamentary system here in Canada, which means that the party who gets the most votes gets to form the government. In our recent election, the Conservatives won enough votes to form a minority government.

And so they set about to govern. The problem is they forgot they were a minority. They came forward with an economic bill to address the looming financial crisis. A bill devoid of any real economic policies. Instead they went after their favourite ideological targets. Specifically:

The Public Service Unions – a proposal their wage increases rolled back and right to strike removed.
Pay-Equity – the conservatives want to set aside human rights tribunal decisions and not work towards equal pay for work of equal value
Funding for Political Parties (based on how many votes they recieved in the last election) – this too would be recinded, despite the fact that some people voted for some political parties just so that they could get funding. Of course, the Tories also have a huge war chest, so they don’t need the money

When they presented the bill, the expected the opposition to roll over, like a good dog. This is in part because it’s what the opposition had done in the previous parliament, but also because the Liberals (one of the opposition parties) are in the midst of picking a new leader.

But the opposition didn’t roll over. Instead they have quickly banded together and negotiated deal to take over the government as a coalition.

But, wait, you ask. How?

Well they would bring down the Tory government on a non-confidence motion and then go to the Governor General and say "Hey Queen’s representative, instead of calling an election, we’ll govern."

This has put the cat among the pigeons. The Tory government is shrieking about it being an assault on democracy, despite the fact it has happened before. And despite the fact that the Tories were willing to do the same a few years ago.

The Tories have started to back pedal and ramp up the attack ads. The Governor General is rushing back from a European trip. Talk radio has gone nuts.

This is, quite frankly, the most exciting to happen in Canadian politics in a long time. I am getting the popcorn.

[  Mood: Amused ]
So the Americans have just finished Thanksgiving and, along with us Canucks, are heading to Christmas. So we all might have a turkey or two in our future.

So imagine my glee when I found this site. Now I knew that deep-fried turkeys were de-riguer south of the boarder, but I did not know that things like this existed.

If you can’t see the picture, those are pecans and an a honey glaze overtop of the deep-fried bird.

So my question is, when did turkey become dessert? I can feel my arteries hardening just looking at the picture.

So now I am waiting for the chocolate fudge flattop turkey to appear.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Breastfeeding My Son ]
Still porting

While I enjoyed this book, I found it diffficult to follow at times, with Steinbeck’s dialogue not flowing in a natural way. Cathy is an evil woman though, and having a villain like her makes the novel very engrossing. Of course many a literary scholar would disagree that Cathy is a villain in the classic mustache twirling kin of way, but believe me she is evil.

Steinbeck says that this book is based on stories from the area he grew-up in, and indeed there are some Steinbecks in the book, but other things I have read about this book say that it is a retelling of the Adam and Eve (in the book this is Adam and Cathy) and then Cain and Abel (Cal and Aron), so who knows how much is based in fact, and how much is from his imagination.

Good book, and yes I got this one from Oprah too. But the next one I did not. Promise.