Friday, February 19, 2010

Snow day

...but not for me.

The excitement over a snow day as one ages progresses something like this:

School-aged:  WAHOO! SNOW DAY!

University student: C'mon! All the K-12 schools are closed!

Professional: It will be a quiet one in the office today.

Working parent of a school-aged child: Damn. Not again.

This marks three Fridays in a row that schools have been closed. Kids these days don't know how lucky they are.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Rented!

So I'm pretty stoked I've found tenants for my house. I couldn't really afford to go on maternity leave and have my house sit vacant. A family of five will be moving in next month, after I move out of here and into the construction zone that is soon to be Our House. I didn't meet all five family members - the couple brought their youngest, an eight-year-old, along to see the place. The girl was polite and talkative and made eye contact with me, which I believe reflects well on her parents. Is it wrong to judge potential tenants by their offspring? I was hoping for a retired couple or maybe a smaller family (five people are really going to wreck havoc on my water pump), but I got good vibes from the kid.

Monday, February 15, 2010

It's my blog and I'll cry if I want too

I cried at work today. Great big fat tears that rolled down my neck and into the creases of my too-small bra. I haven't cried in weeks, and I was having an otherwise easy deadline day. So what happened?

Yeah yeah, hormones schmormones.

What happened was this: My coworker mentioned a number of kids she knew with hyphenated last names. Smith-Murphy. Green-McDonald. For example. Asked what Baby would be.

Aha! Man and I have talked about this. I tease him about giving Baby my last name only. He clams up and grunts and doesn't say no, but doesn't exactly say okay either. I am teasing, because it is his kid as much as it is mine, and there's no singular argument for giving the child my last name (even if it is infinitely more cute than his last name. Just sayin'...). So I figured we'd hyphenate. I believe having family unity is important, if only for when travelling through customs. And seeing as I don't use his last name (we're not married), hyphenated is the way to go. If we were married, I'd go hyphenated (I really do love my last name, and it truly is much cuter than his) but the kid would have Man's last name. That way we'd all have one name in common and customs/air travel would be that much easier. Without a marriage certificate, it's Baby who is burdened with being the tie that binds. Sorry, kid.

And this is what set off the waterworks. Okay, maybe there's something to this hormone thing after all.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

You lazy lout

Get off the couch and do some dishes. Or light the fire. Or pack up the spare room. You're MOVING in three weeks.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

A pencil, a notebook and a bus ticket

Oh.

I've just come from browsing the Interwebs, following links from an old classmate's blog to another, and another.

I thought I was doing pretty good, making a living and putting my journalism degree to good use. I thought I was a success story, coming from a class of 60 who graduated on the eve of a recession and in the dying times of newspapers and journalism (because all these "Bloggers" are taking over the news, you see).

I've kept in touch with a few classmates. We commiserate on being under-paid, on how volatile the freelance thing is, and whose work we caught on CBC or in the Globe. Though I never said it out loud, I was pretty pleased with myself for jobbing it up in the journalism field.

But apparently community reporting is not good enough for some of my classmates, even some of the chronically unemployed ones. They bemoan the state of newspapers, and begrudge the lack of newspaper jobs. Hello! There are five openings in this province! Where are all these journalist wannabes when the job ads go out?? One, who did a stint at a small-town paper in Alberta, called community reporting "a joke."

Thing is, they want to write the Next Great Scoop. They want to be Barbara Frum, Stephanie Nolan, Peter Jennings and Ian Brown. (Another camp want to be Carrie Bradshaw, but that's neither here not there). And so they are too good for community reporting.

Now I don't know where the greats got their start, but I know they didn't walk out the hallowed halls of journalism school and into top reporting jobs around the world. I would venture, when they were cub reporters, nothing was beneath them. Because good reporters find good stories everywhere.

Never mind that I have a sneaking suspicion that this line of work just ain't my thing. Never mind that I feel hopelessly inadequate sometimes. Never mind that I know I'll never write 10,000-word investigative pieces for the national papers. I have a job, and that's more than I could say for the majority of my peers.

But apparently weekly community newspapers are just not cool enough for my breed of classmates. I am sure I am not the first new grad to weigh her accomplishments against her classmates, and I certainly won't be the last. I am fiercely aware that I have many, many more years of learning ahead. Still, I wish every out-of-work reporter with sights set on the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail would read this. And then think about where they really want to work, and whose stories they want to write.

Quality time with the Baby

Baby and I are having a nice day today. I'm cleaning house, and Baby is napping and kicking my bladder intermittently. We're listening to tunes LOUD, and I've already shaped up the office, spare room, furnace room, rec room and living room. All that's left are the kitchen, bathroom and laundry room. Then I need to sweep snow from the front and back steps and see about tearing down the broken Christmas lights from the eaves.

Why the flurry of activity? Some may call it nesting. I call it 'Potential Tenants Are Coming To View My House Tomorrow and I Want Them To Take It So I Can Afford To Go On Maternity Leave.

The sky has clouded over since this morning - the good news is I don't need to wash the windows now! (Boy that sunlight really shows off the dirt). It's windy and effing cold, but my furnace fire is crackling away. I haven't spent a lot of time at my house lately. This is nice.

The OTHER house is getting subfloor upstairs today. Maybe even a bedroom wall, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Nine weeks, Five days to go.