Come one, come all

It has been a busy week here in Canadia. In anticipation of the delivery of our new bed, I tore up the carpet in the bedroom and painted. Now, a) I've painted plenty before and b) I'm really not stupid, so I'm going to offer you a tip that tripped even me up in spite of my husband's efforts to avoid the mishap. When painting a stippled ceiling, buy ceiling paint. There. I did not listen to my husband's advice and went ahead and used a Whole Gallon of paint on the ceiling of one 12'x12' room. Doh.

In any case, I then didn't have enough paint left over for the trim, so I had to go buy more this morning at the paint store. Grr.

The new bed is positively luxurious. I spent most of the weekend in dog-free, king-sized slumber. I haven't slept this well in months.

What's new in Jewish Victoria? The preschool is a raging success - at capacity for the year. The Hebrew school is growing. Two more Orthodox families are, G-d willing, moving to town within the next six months AND (here's the big news) the fine rabbi and his wife at the Other Orthodox Shul have built a mikveh in their basement (the first and only mikveh on Vancouver Island, I think - not counting the numerous lakes or the ocean). Life here is getting easier and easier.

In the past seven months, we've found sliced bread with hashgacha and a place to get meat at better prices than in Detroit. Heck, we even found kosher frozen unbaked croissants that are pareve, pas yisroel and delicious.

So, all those of you out there who wish there was a frum community on the edge of civilization replete with sunset vistas, mountains to climb, clean air, and heimishe people, we invite you to Victoria.

Propaganda? Do I care?

I was listening to CBC this morning and they were interviewing a former employee of the Lincoln Group, a contractor in Iraq and elsewhere touting itself as a "strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments".

The gentleman being interviewed said that news media in Iraq is, essentially, for hire. The Lincoln Group would receive "storyboards" (read: articles) from the U.S. Military. They would then transmit those storyboards to Iraqi journalists along with a certain sum of cash. The journalists would then see that the "storyboard" got published in whichever newspaper he worked for.

Now, my sensibilities about a free press and all that were initially offended at the idea that my government was paying to have propaganda published in Iraq. Then, I sat back and thought about it. I've come to some tentative conclusions:

1. If these newspapers are taking money from the U.S. Military, they will likely take it from anyone - propaganda runs both ways, after all.
2. Would the reporting be fair and unbiased if these papers were left to their own devices in Iraq, an environment permeated with terror? Probably not.
3. Having spent decades under the regime of Saddam Hussein who controlled all the media in Iraq, do Iraqis have a healthy suspicion that not everything they read in the paper is absolute truth? Probably.
   

So, I say keep the propaganda flowing. No doubt it's keeping some newspaper men (and women?) in food and clothes and it's probably not doing any real damage.

I Love Canada

Update: The winner "Cows in the Closet". Thanks to BB and Mr. W for your participation.

Ok, just remember that I never claimed to be mature or politically correct. It's late and I can't come up with a caption for the photo. I'll post any good ones you send to me, though.

Calling Calgary

Update: Mystery solved. As I suspected, someone who reads this blog found their way to the other blog during the 48 hour window of opportunity completely harmlessly. Can't be too paranoid though... ;)

We tried this once before and got no response, but I'd like to try again. One of you out there is visiting this blog from Calgary. Somehow, you also got through to our more personal baby blog. This is all fine and dandy and we certainly don't mind you reading our baby blog if it's only out of interest, but since you know so much about us, we'd like to know who you are. Originally, the baby blog was only intended to be sent to family and friends (i.e. people we know). Through a technical error on my part, for about 48 hours it was possible to access both blogs via my husband's profile. We fixed it ASAP to preserve some semblance of anonymity.

If you live in or near Calgary and you read this blog, email us at chossonhunt2005@yahoo.com - we just want to know who you are.

Finally

I feel a little sheepish, but I'm glad all the yamim tovim are finally over. We haven't had a true "weekend" in over a month. I miss Sundays when we typically do a little shopping, take a drive, visit with the inlaws, etc. Now it's fall and Sunday afternoons are the perfect time to see movies. We bought passes to the IMAX at the BC Natural History Museum. IMAX movies are great - they average about an hour so even if the movie drags a little, it's not too long.

The last one we saw was NASCAR. Soulmate, lover of all things car-related, wanted to see it and I figured I might as well learn a little more about the NASCAR demographic. Lots of my former students were NASCAR fans and I had never quite understood exactly what was interesting about the sport - cars going around in circles at high speeds, what's the big deal? The movie left me even more mystified. Apparently there are people who take their yearly family vacation going to NASCAR races. They load up the Winnebago and truck it to wherever the race happens to be. Then, they barbecue, set up chairs on TOP of the Winnebago and watch the race. Ok. I still don't get it.

I was listening to the Diane Rehm show today on NPR. The discussion centered around the proposed "fence" along our border with Mexico. This older lady called in to say that the majority of immigrants coming to the US were high school dropouts (so???). She then went on to make the point that if we let in high school dropouts from Mexico, they will take jobs away from our own high school dropouts... Wha?????

Soulmate is on the other side of the province today for work. I dropped him off at the airport at 8 and with pick him up at 6:30 tonight. In the mean time, I'm going to put some of this nesting energy to work and start prepping the bedroom to be painted.

Island Life

One of the things we put up with living on the island is that nearly all the good shopping is in Vancouver. As the crow flies, Vancouver is not far - maybe 40 miles. However, the crow is expensive, so we take the boat - about 75 minutes worth of driving and 1.75 hours on the ferry. This way, too, is expensive - round trip for the two of us yesterday was $114 (down from $128 at peak summer rates).

In spite of all this, our trip to Vancouver was a welcome distraction on chol hamoed. I've been missing Detroit more keenly this week. Sukkos, I've come to realize, is a very communal holiday if you're single. As a female, I was never obligated to build and eat in a sukkah, so I didn't. My neighbors two doors down invited me nearly every night of chol hamoed. Suppers were lively with all the boys home from yeshiva and usually a few out-of-town guests. I missed that this year. Soulmate and I built and enjoyed our sukkah, but we remained very concious that ours was one of perhaps 6 sukkahs in the entire city. In Detroit, you could hear your neighbor singing in his sukkah. Here, I'm sure the neighbors are panicking that the sukkah will be a permanent structure in the back yard.

Nothing like a little retail-therapy to give you a boost. We managed to score a dining room table from the "damaged" room at Ikea that will sit eight - there were no visible scratches or structural problems, so we paid for the table and left quickly before they could realize that we were getting a screaming deal. I also managed to find frozen, unbaked croissants. Soulmate had purchased a box at Costco last year. We discovered when we got married that they make an easy and ideal Shabbos breakfast treat when combined with butter and homemade strawberry jam. Alas, we ran out several weeks ago and have been having to subsist on homemade cinnamon buns. Costco no longer carries a kosher brand of croissants (at least not here) so we expanded our search. Fortunately, a new bakery opened in Vancouver a few weeks ago selling frozen unbaked croissants! We now have 3 dozen in the freezer and 10 proofing on the counter.

The leaves have started to turn here and the long-awaited winter rain is scheduled to arrive tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to snuggling inside and enjoying the mild temperatures. As Soulmate has been fond of annoucing when passing the outdoor thermometer when we leave the house, "It's two degrees cooler now than when I came to see you at Chanukah last year" (generally this comes up when the temp is in the mid-fifties - about average in the winter for around here). Who'd have thought that I would move to Canada and have to pack away my ful-length down-filled winter coat?

CIA: Kim Jong Il has a small missile

As I've watched North Korea's Kim Jong Il prance across the screen in file footage this week in the wake of North Korea's nuclear weapons test, I wondered how the he** the rest of the world has tolerated this Napoleon-complexed dictator. Moreover, how has the brainwashed and starved North Korean populace tolerated it?

All that aside, what are we going to do now? Urge China and Japan to action? Enforce UN sanctions?

Two ideas have come to the attention of this blogger over the past 24 hours:

• While the muckety-mucks at the UN debate, a "U.S. government official" (per CNN.com) announced that U.S. spy agencies (CIA?) have reached three possible conclusions as to why the nuclear weapons test appears to have been "relatively small":

1. The bomb was big and powerful and the test was conducted SO FAR underground that it didn't produce the seismic after-effects they would've predicted.
2. It wasn't really a nuclear test - it was just made to look like one. They actually conducted the test using conventional explosives.
3. My personal favorite: the test went awry and only a small explosion was produced. That's right, the CIA flipped ol' Kim Jong Il the bird by telling him that his missile was either very small or that it misfired. Soulmate has informed me that some Asian men are very self-concious about "missile" size so the CIA's accusation should cause even more consternation than it would in a country full of more well-endowed missiles...Granted, insulting foreign leaders isn't really a viable way to deal with the problem, but it sure is amusing.
   

• Over at Blogblond, our own BB has some very interesting ideas about pitting the Iranians against the North Koreans. You have to read the post to appreciate its intricacy and beauty.

I'm off to eat Nutella directly out of the jar. Enjoy your Wednesday.

Starbucks Commits Genocide

Do you remember those “Save the Children” ads where a celebrity would say that for the price of a cup of coffee each day, you can save the life of a child in a Third World country?

I started thinking the other day about all of the people in my office who go out for a latte, cappuccino, or mocha once or twice a day. These things cost 2 or 3 times the price of a regular cup of coffee. Based on this, each of them could save 2 children each. If you look at how many fluffy coffees Starbucks sells each day across North America, millions of children a year could be saved. Given the trend of the last 15 years of people abdicating personal responsibility more and more each day, Starbucks could be viewed as being responsible for the deaths of millions of Children a year.

It's all the same

When I was an exchange student to Belgium way back in high school, one of the conclusions I reached was that everyone's family has a little bit of crazy. Some have more crazy than others, but everyone has at least a little.

Over the course of one year, I lived with three different families (as proscribed by the program I was with, Rotary International). In the first family, my host brother stole $500 from me to spend on gambling. His parents refused to admit that he had taken the money, I moved on, and a year later, he entered a program for help with his addiction.

My host-parents in Family #2 were a doctor (the mom) and a lawyer (the dad) who had their own dysfunctions. We once spent an entire Friday night delousing the entire family after one daughter brought lice home from school. Another time, I looked in the five-year-old's mouth and saw that nearly all his teeth were completely rotted out. They had been depending on him (or his older sisters?) to brush his own teeth. This familiy's advantage, however, was their warmth and ability to make everything fun. I always felt welcome and part of things.

Family #3 was a case unto itself. The family had recently reunited after the father spent three years living down the block with his mistress. The son, a tough and mouthy ten-year-old, regularly told his dad the French equivalent of "f- you". Can't say I blamed him.

But, this post isn't about families. It's about bureaucracy and how it's dealt with all over the world. After living in Canada for nearly eight months and reading Mia's trials and tribulation with first Hungarian, and now Swedish bureaucracy, I've come to some conclusions:

1) Bureaucracy is the universal language. Everyone wants to pass the buck and no civil servants anywhere are authorized to take responsibility for anything (like they want to anyway...)

2)No matter which form you fill out, it's always the wrong one...

3) Canadians are extraordinarily kind and patient. Everyone I've talked to, from the people at the national immigration center to the people at the provincial Ministry of Health have been sweet and lovely. They listen. They offer advice and understanding beyond the script provided to them. They can't always help, but they sure make you think that they wish they could.

In conclusion, Canada's bureaucracy, like families around the world, has it's own meshugass (craziness). But, Canadians really are kinder and gentler (for the most part - exceptions always exist) and that, I believe, makes all the difference.

Coming soon... Wells-Fargo bites my bum and other rants about one giant mortgage company's inability to give ANYONE a straight answer.

Early October Thoughts

I've been missing my old blog. There, I was relatively anonymous. Here, we've been quite up-front about where we live which wouldn't be a big deal except there are, b'li ayin hara, five frum (Orthodox) couples here. I'm afraid to say anything controversial for fear that it will come back to haunt me.

I didn't go to shul at all yesterday. Dehydration can bring on contractions and at 28 weeks pregnant I didn't want to take any chances by getting sweaty doing things like standing and davening (praying). Instead, I spent the day in bed and on the couch thinking about the question of what to do with Jews who are non-observant. I read several chapters in a book on Ahavas Yisrael (loving your fellow Jew no matter what)

We are part of a Chabad congregation and the overwhelming majority of the congregants aren't frum at all. I mean, AT ALL. The other Shabbos I had to stop one woman in the congregation from adding water to the cooking cholent when she arrived at shul. Another woman asked me if she could take the kiddush leftovers to her son so that she wouldn't have to cook for him that afternoon (she was going to carry them to her car and drive them home Shabbos afternoon). I had no idea what to say. I told her to ask the rabbi since the leftovers technically belonged to the shul...

I have a hard time knowing when to educate and when to let it ride. Granted, it's not really my job to preach frumkeit in this situation, but I'm forced into the position quite often.

I spoke to the rabbi about this at one point after he gave a drash (sermon) that I was SURE was directed at me - tolerance toward one's fellow Jew no matter what level he's at. I hypothesized that perhaps it was easier for people who were FFB (people who were born Orthodox) to exercise this tolerance because they had never known differently. Those of us who are BT (didn't grow up Orthodox) conciously rejected the path that these very same non-observant congregants are on. How do you tolerate what you have deliberately and conciously rejected? It's tough. Very tough. Nevertheless, I have to keep working at it.

On top of all this, I'm generally cranky these days. It's hard to sleep when you're pregnant. Rolling over takes on a whole new dimension and your bladder fills much more quickly. My little soccer player likes to get up around 4am, so at least I'm not awake alone.

But, the weather is fine and life is easy. We're heading to Home Depot tonight to buy sukkah materials and look at paint samples for the bedroom. The Stinky Dog and her new sister the Little Woozle stole a whole chocolate cake off the counter last night and are feeling the consequences today (Stinky is living up to her name...). I'm off to try my hand yet again at bread starter.