Reading but Not Posting

I feel like a slacker! I've been working full-time all week and I've gotten so totally wrapped up in reading blogs the past couple of evenings that I haven't really come up for air. Trent recently answered a reader's question about reading challenging material and I've been sort of thinking about that in some little corner of my brain.

I was looking for something online and ended up going off on a tangent (ADD, moi?) and reading a lot of both blog posts and comments I would never have stumbled across otherwise. What I was reading about isn't important. But what I found, was. I learned a lot, not all of it pleasant. I found ignorant, biased people intent on forcing their viewpoint on the rest of society under a wide variety of banners. Of those, I think I found the intolerant liberals the most amusing. I mean, shouldn't "intolerant liberal" be an oxymoron? I learned a lot about a couple of groups of people, one of which I didn't really know existed.

I also found intelligent, caring people who have made tremendously different choices than I have in my life but who are very like me in a number of other ways. I found some people with excellent writing skills, people who have an ability with words that I will never have. I've seen how those skills can be used to support and encourage and I've seen how those skills can be used to condescend and isolate.

Much of what I've read has no connection to anything in my "real" life but it's true that reading things far different from your normal fare can shake things up. It's not that what I've read is causing me to question my beliefs and values. Rather I'm seeing more. More connections. More things I want to know more about.

But it's left me a little off-balance and feeling unprepared to write. My usual posts seem so banal, so trivial. My writing skills, skills I've been praised for at school and at work, seem sadly undeveloped.

My feelings of inadequacy are increased by the lack of progress in paying bills. I don't want to post on here and say that I'm still waiting to do x or y.

So, let me just close for today by telling you to go out and read. Look for things that are opposite to your usual inclinations. Read the comments. Follow links. Learn something new this weekend. It may shock you, enlighten you, anger you or amuse you but it will keep you growing.

Shabbat Shalom!

Another Miscellaneous Sunday

I spent quite a while in the garden this morning, pulling out a climbing weed that looks like Morning Glory, except that it has different flowers. It had appeared over the last month or so, climbing all over the chain link fence separating our yard from the neighbour’s.

Hubby dug out a huge stump that was right up against the house. Last year it was a tree that leaned up against the kitchen window and was taller than the roof. He cut it down but it all grew up again (about 3 feet in just the past month), so this time he decided the root had to go.

Originally, my plan for today was to lay the floor in the master bedroom and I actually got the first row together, but I can’t get the 2nd row to click into the previous one! I’ve laid both laminate and engineered hardwood floors before and never had a problem, but they were glued floors. Click flooring is supposed to be easy as pie, much easier than gluing. All I can say is “Ha! Easy, my foot!”

I’ve actually tried with more expensive Torlys click flooring at the Home Show and it was great. This, however, is not expensive flooring. It’s Tundra flooring from IKEA and costs $1.29 sq foot. I don’t know if it won’t go together because it’s cheap or what, but it’s driving me crazy.

I decided I had to leave it for a while and try it again when we get back from town. If I still can’t make it work I don’t know if I’m going to take back the 3 unopened boxes and get a credit or what. I still have to have flooring and I don’t really want to pay $7.99 per sq foot for the Torlys. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come back from town and it will miraculously work! Hey, I can hope.

Anyway, we have a few errands to do in town. We’re already totally out of water (I caught Dog trying to drink out of the toilet, yuck!) and we want some more of a new soft drink we bought the other day. It’s Canada Dry Ginger Ale, but with Green Tea and it’s really good, very refreshing in the heat and soothing on my scratchy throat. Yes, I’m sick. I shouldn’t be surprised. All the little girls have had runny noses and scratchy little voices for days (including my son-in-law’s sister’s kids, also roughly 3 years and not quite one, who were visiting for a couple of days last week). With all that exposure, not to mention all those kisses, I should expect to be immune? But being sick in the heat of summer is doubly unpleasant I think.

We’re heading back to the city sometime tomorrow, but I’m not sure yet whether we’re aiming to leave before lunch or in the late afternoon. Either way I probably won’t post again until tomorrow night.

Monday Evening With 'The Mole'

Many of my friends don't even own a television. We own three, each with either a VCR and/or a DVD player. Right now my 5 year old's TV is at our other house. It's the smallest TV of the 3 and that's the place where we only get one channel (CBC) and it's often fuzzy or in black and white. We mostly watch DVDs there.

Here in the city we almost always watch the TV in the bedroom, which has both a VCR and DVD in the TV and an additional VCR attached. I watch decorating shows, our DC watches childrens programming, Hubby watches sports, news, sports, every reality show ever made and sports.

I don't mind going to the occasional hockey or football game, but I tune out most of the sports on TV, especially when he watches the game, then the sports on 2 or 3 different channels (each one showing replays of the same goals) and some of the reality shows are just too out there for me.

But there are some I enjoy watching with Hubby. Foremost among them are The Amazing Race, Survivor and The Mole. The thing all 3 shows have in common is exotic locations (although once they get there, Survivor is static). But the contestants in the other 2 shows get to travel from country to country.

Monday night is The Mole and Hubby tapes it while I'm at work in the evening so we can watch it together after I get home. I love to travel and I'm detail-oriented but I couldn't imagine going on the show. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the show takes a number of people around the world, gives them tasks to do as a group and they earn money that goes into the pot. But one person is the Mole, a plant whose job is to prevent them from completing tasks, confuse them, get them lost, etc. The ultimate aim is to identify the Mole and there is a quiz at the end of each show. The person with the least number of correct answers is 'executed', leaves the show. The finale consists of 3 people, one of whom is the Mole. After the final quiz, the winner gets all the money in the pot.

They give the players journals to write in (although they sometimes take them away or give them to their opponents to read or whatever) but there are so many things you have to pay attention to while trying to complete the task that I can't imagine being successful at pinpointing the Mole. And the questions are really tough. Like: Was the Mole wearing a hat during such and such a task? Or: Where was the Mole sitting during dinner (from the host's viewpoint)?

Right now, there are 4 or 5 people left, including Nicole, whom I believe to be the Mole, and the pot is a little over $300,000.

So, how about it? Would you go on a show that meant you had to leave your work and family for a month or more, take part in physically challenging tasks and risk being sent home with nothing, all for the chance to win several hundred thousand dollars?

And what would you DO with hundreds of thousands of dollars? The dumbest answer I've heard came from a guy on a game show who said he wanted to buy a pirate ship!