Larocque and Roll

Sticks and balls March 13, 2005

On Monday morning, the teachers and students of Waverly Drive P.S. will return to their school to find evidence of an epic battle that was fought in their parking lot. The puddles of slush and mud will bear slash marks and footprints, and even a few imprints of a fallen few.

The battle was hard fought, and attracted warriors from as far away as Ottawa, Sudbury, Owen Sound, and Toronto. It pitted husband against wife, sister against sister, friend against friend, stranger against stranger. Alliances were formed and the line in the snow was drawn and crossed.

But once it was all over and the snow had settled, a truce was negotiated and the weary combatants retired to the mess hall to feast on fresh bread and hot chili (a vegetarian version was also made available).

We had quite the time yesterday afternoon. The temperature hovered around the zero mark, and it snowed most of the morning. The parking lot was covered with fluffy snow and was very slippery, and no one had thought to bring a shovel to clear the surface. Fortunately no one was hurt. Very seriously.

At the end of the day, Team Napoleon (”The Ligers”) defeated Team Pedro. It was close, but I don’t think we kept score after the first hour or so. Some things haven’t changed from when I started playing, like Denise and Rachelle being on different teams and eventually fighting (not seriously - what started with snowballs ended with stealing each other’s hats and filling them with snow). A couple who have been good friends with my sister and her husband for a few years were also on separate teams, and it was funny to watch them arguing good-naturedly about what would happen if the one scored on the other.

Supper was good. Since most of us were from out of town, we weren’t able to contribute much to the affair. A few locals brought some munchies, and we all ate well. The plan was to hit a bar-type establishment after supper, but it took a while to get everyone moving again (a combination of being full and being exhausted from running around all day). I was the only one who didn’t go because I was dead on my feat, and I knew that the loud atmosphere of the pub would only make me more tired. Instead, I stayed home and cleaned the kitchen, showered, and retired for the evening.

This morning my sister made breakfast for everyone, and we watched The Emperor’s New Groove while eating. The rest of today has been spent in decadent sloth with my parents, who came up this morning. Rachelle heads back tonight, and I’m leaving in the morning. It’s been fun, and I’m looking forward to next year.

Book Club Verdict: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants March 11, 2005

It’s been almost a week, and I keep meaning to post the verdict of out last book club. Only three of us made it, but we all really liked it, with some qualifiers.

None of us really felt sorry for Bridge, the girl at soccer camp. Her coach should have known better, and we felt that she was foolish. None of us would have been friends with her in high school, mostly because she was so driven and focused we wouldn’t have been able to relate to her. Our verdict was mixed on Lena - some of us felt she was stuck up, some of us felt sorry for her, but we agreed that she should have told her grandparents the truth sooner.

Carmen was the one we felt the most sympathy for. Her father was a toad for not telling her sooner, and for not going after her when she ran away. And we all really liked Bailey, the girl with leukemia and helped Tibby look at things in a new way.

Except for Bailey, we did note the complete passiveness of the secondary characters in each girl’s story. They were wishy-washy and barely reactive, and mostly frustrating.

It sounds like we didn’t like it that much, but we really did enjoy this book. Our next book is The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which I started reading a while back but never finished. It’s slightly surreal and full of that strange British humour that makes Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so amusing.

“Are you sure you didn’t hear anything?” “Yes, I’m — wait, what was that?”

(The title alludes to the titles of this post and this post. I’m trying to create a suspenseful theme for my posts that don’t really have a point.)

The drive down was relatively uneventful, except for the crazy traffic when I left the Vaughn Ikea. I’m a country girl, and city driving makes me crazy. Long story made only slightly less long, it took me an hour to get back to the 407. And then more traffic, but not for long.

I also went to The Bookshelf, the cool indie bookstore in Guelph. It took me an hour and a half to find something, but since the books are in the car, I can’t remember what the titles are. One was a McSweeney’s book (yes, I couldn’t stand Eggers’ personal book, but I’m addicted to McSweeney’s. You should all be reading it.) Oh, the other was a Drawn & Quarterly issue.

I’m using my sister’s laptop, friends of theirs are over, and we’ve been playing classic Atari games on the Playstation and watching Anchorman. Now going out and painting the town a reddish colour, except that all the womenfolk here are tired, and the menfolk (both of them) can’t think of anything to do that will excite us. I also didn’t bring enough yarn to complete either of the knitting projects I brought. There are plans afoot to go on a yarn crawl on either Saturday or Sunday morning, so I’ll have to wait until then.

One of those “whack yourself upside the head” moments again

I don’t know what posessed me to, at 11:15 the night before a road trip, decide that I should turn the Books page into a blog rather than a plain old web site. It meant I had to redo the style sheet and the content page, and none of them are getting along with Blogger, and nothing seems to want to be where I tell it to be.

Since I’ll be away for the next few days, you will just have to take comfort in the fact I FINALLY finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and took great pleasure in tossing it over my shoulder. A Complicated Kindness has been, so far, the balm to sooth my aching psyche. I’ll fix the damn thing when I get back.

Be good!

Things I’ve done that you probably haven’t March 9, 2005

I’ve been reading what other people have been doing that I haven’t, and I realized that I lead a pretty mundane life. It’s not very exciting, so there’s probably not much that I’ve done that you haven’t already done too.

When I sat down and thought about it, I managed to come up with a fairly respectable list, including:

• Had my picture taken with a couple of Japanese tourists at the Columbia Ice Fields in Alberta (somewhere, I’m someone’s souvenir. Terrific.)
• Fenced with a member of the Canadian Olympic Fencing team (granted, he was twelve at the time. But he was good, even back then.)
• Went skating on the Rideau Canal after midnight.
• Was challenged by an MPP to assign him his Dewey Decimal number (in response to a button I was wearing at the time: “Librarian terrorist - get out of my way or I’ll catalogue you!” For the record, I don’t remember what number I gave him. Possibly I suggested that he was #1.)
• Played hockey trivia with a dozen other people while standing in line to meet a famous author.
• Been alone in a deserted airport in the middle of nowhere (well, okay - Dryden. But the airport really is in the middle of nowhere. It’s a pretty, quiet sort of nowhere, though, unless you’re downwind of the pulp mill in which case you’ll wish you were somewhere else.)
• Broke my leg falling out of a moving vehicle.
• Confronted an escaped prisoner. (He was looking for his lawyer.)
• Had a panic attack while crossing the Confederation Bridge (aka “Span of Green Gables” aka the bridge from PEI to New Brunswick. I’m afraid of heights and open water, and there was plenty of both.)

Calling all math geeks! (UPDATED)

I came across this math question on my break today, and it’s been driving me batty:

I liked math, and I used to be able to rock these kind of equations. But it appears that in my old age, memories of the Hallowe’en party in 1999 have pushed out how to solve for x. Here’s what I have so far:

• First, we multiply everything inside the brackets with everything outside the brackets:
• 24x²-16x-9x+6=1
• So, now we group stuff and add other stuff together:
• 24x²-25x=-5 (because if you subtract the 6 from one side, you have to do it to the other side as well.)
• Here’s where I start forgetting things. I want to get rid of the x’s, right? So I divide both sides by x, correct? Thus, I have:
• 24x-25=-5/x (Yeah, I skipped some work, but I was getting tired of writing the tags to make the “2″ superscript)
• I left the scrap of paper I was using to work on this at work, but do I put all the x’s on one side now, and put the -25 on the other?
• 24x+5/x=25

Actually, I think I had something completely different. I had several somethings completely different, but that was this afternoon. Can someone tell me how this crazy formula ends? Denise? Lisa? Help?

(Update: I am an idiot. As Jen very helpfully pointed out, I got it wrong. Oh so wrong. I was trying to solve the equation as a quadratic equation, but it quite obviously isn’t. For those of you playing along at home, a quadratic equation would have had both sets of numbers in brackets.

As Lise, fellow Dal grad, book clubber and Librarian at Laurentian wrote me this afternoon:

Oh! Oh! Pick me, pick me!

If you actually did mean 8x - 3(3x-2) = 1, then your question is much
simpler: it becomes 8x - [9x -6] = 1; 8x-9x+6=1; -1x = -5; therefore x = 5.

But if you did mean to write (8x-3)(3x-2)=1, you’re dealing with a
quadratic equation, and you’ll have two possible answers for x (your
thought of trying to solve for x makes perfect sense, but there’s a
different way of approaching it when you have x^2 and x in the same equation). Your first step is to solve for 0, so (I won’t write the steps - I know you can do this part) you get 24x^2 -25x +5 = 0, and ideally you could factor it at this point, but this particular equation doesn’t factor nicely with integers. So for this equation you can find the solution by the dreaded completing the square method. You’ll end up with x = (25/48) +/- sqrt(145/2304); therefore x =0.77 or x=0.27. Not very pretty, but it works.

God, I am such a math geek. I was way too excited about this.

You guys are the best! Thanks! I owe you both a beverage of your choice

Don’t you hate it when… ?

Don’t you hate it when you wake up an hour before you’re supposed to wake up, thinking about the really cool thing you should be doing right now instead of sleeping, but by the time you get up and make the coffee and rice pudding and sit down in front of the computer you’ve forgotten what it was?

Man, I hate mornings like this.

Women’s Day March 8, 2005

Happy International Women’s Day, y’all.

To celebrate, I’m going to make an iTunes playlist, featuring “I am woman, watch me dance my ass off” type songs. Yeah, it’s kind of last minute. Sorry about that.

1. Army of Me - Bjork
2. Angel of Montgomery - Leslie Spit Tree-o
3. Shoop - Salt-n-Peppa
4. No One Takes Your Freedom - DJ Earworm (feat. Scissor Sisters, George Michael, the Beatles, and Aretha Franklin)
5. Aria - Delerium (feat. The medieval Baebes)
6. So Pure - Alanis Morrisette
7. I Am Stretched Out on Your Grave - Sinead O’Conner (I can’t do the funky accents thing)
8. Trouble - Pink
9. Legend of a Cowgirl - Imani Coppola
10. I Love Rock and Roll - Joan Jett
11. Filthy/Gorgeous - Scissor Sisters
12. Misguided Angel - Cowboy Junkies
13. Bitch - Meredith Brooks
14. Take Your Mama - Scissor Sisters (they’re my new favourite bandwagon)
15. Brass in Pockets - The Pretenders
16. Lovely Rita - The Beatles
17. Une Very Stylish Fille - Dmitri From Paris
18. The Littlest Bird - The Be Good Tanyas

(I may burn this onto a CD to listen to on Friday or sometime over the weekend.)

New stuff

So, if you look to the left, you’ll see a link to my page of book reviews. But don’t get too used to it. I’m playing around with some CSS, and plan on changing how it looks. (It looks like shite right now, but hopefully I’ll make it better. We’ll see.)

(Update: Yeah, I don’t know why that double posted the other thing, but it did. Oops. Darn you Blogger, darn you to heck. Anyhoodle, I scraped together my first built-from-scratch CSS form and posted it and linked the book page to it. Go look at it! It’s so pretty!)

Speaking up March 6, 2005

Today has been pretty nondescript. Woke up with the headache I’ve been fighting with since Thursday, managed to dull it with some Advil and a pot of coffee, went for a walk, and was linked to by Censoround. (Thanks Chris!)

(I’m not normally the type of person to speak up in times of controversy. I’m willing to accept that everyone has a point of view, and that no one perspective is wrong. I also tend to get tounge-tied and inarticulate, and end up sputtering until I think of something more intellegent than, “Well, you’re stupid!” to respond with.

However, PZB and Herren’s post, plus this post on Pamie.com, plus the “marriage is one man and one woman” lecture at church last night, have left me feeling grumpy. I wanted to say something, and so I sent the links to Chris. And you know the rest of the story.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go calm down and get ready for book club tonight.