Assorted Nonsense

In the comments section of my last post Mike expressed interest in how we decided on names for our twin girls.   In particular I think he was interested in how we settled on which one would be called what.

So here’s the whole story of the naming of the Schmoops:

We spent months trying to come up with appropriate names.  We never did manage to agree on decent male names.  Well, that’s not entirely true; we both liked Benjamin and Samuel, but one of my cousins had had twin boys the year before and guess what she called them?  So we couldn’t go with that.

Lynda liked Aiden for a boy’s name.  I suggested that if both twins were boys we could call them “Aiden” and “Abettin.”  For some reason Lynda didn’t want to go with that.

Fortunately we had girls instead, and we had managed to agree on girls’ names.  I’ve always liked the name Erin ever since Erin Mulcahey was in my core group back in first year Ryerson.  So I suggested Erin and Lynda agreed.  We were both interested in celtic names and that certainly fit the bill, although I understand the name Erin is far more popular in North America than it is in Ireland.  (For those of you who may not know, Erin means Ireland).

 At our friend Alison George’s wedding reception we sat with a woman named Keira, who was Scottish I believe, and when she introduced herself Lynda and I looked at one another and knew we had the second name.

Middle names were a challenge.  Lynda’s mother’s name was Anne, although she always called herself Nancy.  So for awhile there Erin was going to be Erin Anne Mahoney.  I wasn’t keen on the name Anne but figured I would have to lump it, as I had picked the first name.  Then it occurred to us that Lynda’s mother had insisted on being called Nancy because she hated the name Anne so much.  What a relief.  So Erin became Erin Rose because my grandmother’s name was Rose, and my mother’s name Rosaleen.

Keira was harder.  We didn’t honour anybody with her middle name.  I was driving somewhere one day trying to think of good sounding names and the name Leigh popped into my head.  Keira Leigh has a ring to it.  I’m always singing, “Keira Leigh, Keira Loo, we love you” to Keira.  She doesn’t seem to mind.  (So as not to leave Erin out, I sing “Erin Ree, Erin Roo, we love you” to her.  She doesn’t seem to mind either.) 

As for the order, the girls were born two months premature, so we hadn’t gotten around to deciding the order yet.  Literally as they were coming out, the nurse (whose name was Grace) asked us whose name was going to be what.  Lynda said, we should call the first one out Erin because she’s “errin’ in her ways” wanting to come out two months early. 

I reacted strongly to that, saying, no way can we saddle the child with that as the reason for her name!  Which settled it.  The first one out became Keira, and the second one out became Erin.

On our last full day at Bon Echo.

We couldn’t get in at the Provincial campground, so I booked us a spot at a nearby campground called Bon Echo Family campground.  It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from the Provincial park, so that’s worked out well… every second day we get a day pass and spend it at the provincial park canoing, swimming, hiking, exploring.  And there’s canoing available where we’re staying, along with a beach that’s even better than at the provincial park, so we have the best of both worlds in many respects.

And the weather has been fantastic, especially considering it looked quite dodgy the day we got here, cold and rainy.  But every day since then has been better and better.

And that’s all the time I will spend blogging today, as this is not supposed to be an electronic vacation.  In fact, I just hooked up to the campground wireless to see if Mr. Schmidt had read my submission to Analog yet… but no such luck.

No news is good news, I guess.

And tomorrow it’s back to Whitby, and the following Monday back to real life.

Not thinking about that, though.  This afternoon is all about swimming, canoing, and ice cream.

Here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve encountered lately. People expressing concern because I am nearing completion of my novel “A Time and a Place”. They’re concerned because I’ve obviously invested so much time and energy into this project — the genesis of the novel was more than twenty years ago (though I’ve only been working on it in earnest for about four years).

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…

And then there’s being a Dad.

Sometimes I wonder what the girls will say when they’re grown, and they look back at my performance as a Dad.

“Left a little bit to be desired there, Dad,” they might say.

“Hey, I did the best I could given my limitations as a human being,” I might insist.

“Sure Dad,” E will say. “But what about the broom?”

Ah yes.

The broom.

Came home one night after they’d been with a babysitter. They’re always a little worked up after babysitters. Probably because they get a sense of how great the world would be without any rules. And then I come along and re-impose rules on their universe.

So this one night I’m keeping my cool, and they will. Not. Do. A. Single thing I say.

Parents sometimes wonder why they’re perfectly calm one minute and a raving lunatic the next. One explanation offered is that it’s because the kids are getting under your skin, but you’ve got your foot on the brake keeping yourself calm, right up until the point that they’re painting the dog and putting the cat in the oven, and then, attempting to save your prize rhododendron from the microwave you take your foot off the brake, but the other foot has been on the gas all along and suddenly you’re zero to a hundred and twenty in a split second.

That was me that night. Doing my best to remain calm in the face of two completely adorable but utterly out of control orangutangs, and failing miserably.

I’d had enough. I took my foot off the brake. Picked up one of the girl’s toy brooms. Threw the broom on the floor. As God is my witness I thought it would bounce. Instead it shattered into a thousand pieces.

I had the girls’ attention now. But I certainly hadn’t improved the situation any. Man were they mad, especially E, because it was her broom I’d broken. She was inconsolable, and I was ashamed, because this was not me. I was not someone who broke kids’ brooms, or lost control.

And I heard about that broom for months. I’m sure when I’m an adult I’ll hear about it again. I won’t be completely forgiven until the girls have children of their own, and discover that they too are only human. Just as I’ve forgiven my own parents for the odd bonehead move they made when I was a kid.

Now if I can just limit my own bonehead moves to the broom for the next nine years…

My father-in-law arrived in town Sunday night. It was my job to pick him up at Union Station in Toronto.

So I drove down, parked near the station, and went in to meet him.

He wasn’t there yet, which was a good thing, because it turned out I was waiting in the wrong place. I was upstairs in Union Station when I should have been downstairs. A friendly employee set me straight, and I headed downstairs to meet the man.

When I got there, I realized that the place I was required to meet my father-in-law was a fair distance from where he would get off the train. My father-in-law is seventy-nine years old, and while not decrepit by any stretch of the imagination, I thought it wouldn’t be particularly nice to require him to carry his baggage all that distance. Plus I had no idea how many bags he had or how big they were.

So I wandered into the inner sanctum of Union Station and inquired of another employee how close I could get to where my father-in-law would be getting off the train.

“Down by that escalator,” the fellow said. He didn’t seem to have any problem with me waiting there, so I high-tailed it off to the escalator.

When I got to the escalator, it occurred to me that there were two escalators, separated by walls, and if my father-in-law were to come down the wrong one, I would never see him. So even though the escalator stairs were going down, I ran up them to see where the passengers were getting off the train.

Sure enough they were getting off near the other escalator.

Instead of running back down the escalator, I thought I would just run over to where the passengers were getting off and meet them, thinking to reduce the distance my father-in-law would have to carry his bags to zero.

Well.

The employee who had directed me to wait by the escalator (the wrong escalator, mind you) greeted me with a decidedly snippy, “I thought I told you to wait downstairs!”

“I just want to help my father-in-law with his bags,” I told him. “He’s seventy-nine years old.”

The employee stepped away and muttered something to another employee who happened to have a walkie-talkie. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say something about “a trespasser.”

Huh, I thought. How ’bout that, a trespasser. And I looked around for some seedy looking character before realizing that he was talking about me, of all people.

‘Cause of course that’s exactly what I was doing, albeit with the best of intentions.

My father-in-law was getting off the train. He saw me. I saw him. I couldn’t leave. Somewhere nearby a security detachment had been deployed to rid the station of its trespasser. Me.

My father-in-law stepped off the train. We shook hands. I took his suitcase from him. It was enormous. It would have been a long walk to meet me.*

“Never mind,” I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say. “He’s leaving now.”

And leave we did.

I readily admit this story would have been a lot more interesting (and painful) if it had ended with me being tasered. I apologize for the lack of tasering. And I mean no disrespect for the poor fellow in the news these days whose name I’m not even going to attempt to spell at this late hour who was in fact tasered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the incident has made me think about the difference between right and wrong, and the grey area in between. Clearly I violated at least Union Station laws by being where I wasn’t supposed to be. But would it have been right to leave my seventy-nine year old father-in-law with an enormous bag to carry a great distance? Should I have assumed that train staff would help him? Was I in the wrong attempting to do the right thing? Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

I dunno.

Glad I wasn’t tasered though.

*(Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted the suitcase in question turned out to have wheels.)

(Joe: Shh!)

Chatted briefly with my mother this evening. I was making a homemade cornmeal pizza at the time, and looking forward to making some chocolate balls later. The cornmeal pizza was fairly healthful (all the cheese notwithstanding); the chocolate balls less so.

We got to talking about weight. I told her I thought chubby people seemed happier than skinny people. I have no scientific evidence to back this up, it was really a foolish assertion to make. And yet my life’s experience seems to bear this out. Which is just as foolish an assertion to make. And yet, dear reader, it is far from the last foolish assertion I will make in this post.

I told my mother, “Mom,” I said, “It seems to me that to be happy you have to be large. Which is why I’m feeding my family large slabs of homemade cornmeal pizza, and then later copious amounts of homemade chocolate balls.”

“Son,” she said, “You’re an idiot.”

I beg your pardon, actually she was just thinking that. What she actually said was, “So what you’re telling me” — idiot — “Is that in order to be happy you have to be unhealthy.”

I hadn’t actually thought of it like that until she said it. But the truth of it hit me like a bag of potato chips in the face. Which is to say it didn’t hurt much or leave much of an impression. “That’s it exactly Mom,” I told her. “I’ve known lots of skinny people and they’re all miserable sods” (another ridiculous assertion). “Whereas all the large people I know are full of joy, among other things.” The conversation soon drifted into other areas as my mother gently and without too much difficulty steered her idiot son toward more benign conversational material.

But the idea has taken seed, which is why my immediate family and I are going to eat our faces off this Christmas season. And I’m not talking pan fried fish here (although there will almost certainly be some of that… Arctic Char… hmm). No, it’s Chocolate Balls and Cherry Surprises for us. Turkey with lots of gravy and stuffing. Cherry Cheese Cake, Jell-O Pudding Pie, and Harold Squares. Red wine and beer. Potato Chips and Strawberry Wine.

We will be large. We will be happy. Life will be short, but grand.

Burp.

Although many of you might have considered my previous post a stupifying bore, and far be it from me to blame you, I actually found it quite interesting. And not for the reason that you might think.

I found it interesting because I had to make a decision in the course of writing it. I came up with a line that made me laugh, and then had to decide whether to use the line. As I was making the decision I was acutely aware of the presence of my mother looking over my shoulder, and of the good opinions of all my clean living, clean thinking friends, all three of them.

No I don’t live with my mother, although I’m sure such an arrangement would be most pleasant and result in a good deal less cooking on my part. But she does on occasion read my blog and I value her good opinion of me.

If you read over the previous post I’m sure you’ll quickly note which line I’m thinking about. Maybe you don’t find it particularly funny, but when I thought of it I chuckled. Wrote it down. And promptly deleted it and replaced it with something infinitely more boring.

And then I erased that and put the line back.

Robertson Davies has said (or it has been said of him) that he couldn’t write worth a damn until his parents passed on. I don’t want my parents to pass on, I’m all for immortality for the both of them, but I’d love to be able to write like Robertson Davies. His writing was tame before the death of his parents (I believe, not having read his entire oevre), and it was only with their passing that he no longer felt their benign yet nevertheless judgmental presence.

So it was that I felt the need to grow up and allow myself to indulge in one fairly inocuous if crude expression for the sake of a minor chuckle.

Robertson Davies, look out!

Not.

The following gallery of pictures is one of those typical forwards we all receive via email from well-meaning friends, relatives, and people we barely know who’ve somehow, mysteriously managed to get their hands on our email addresses.  I don’t mind them; most are saccharine nonsense, but every now and then you come across a gem.

This one’s a gem. Not because it’s particularly sublime, although it is rather amusing.  Not because it’s true, either, because several of the photos are obviously jokes as opposed to authentic examples of lousy parenting.

No, it’s a gem because one of the pictures features my sister Shawna’s offspring, who was stunned to have this example of her lousy parenting skills forwarded to her out of the blue one day.  Yet another reason why anything off the internet should be taken with a large grain of salt.

See if you can figure out which offspring is her:

Or the water in your basement, as the case may be:

And just in case you were curious, this is how much of our damaged goods the kindly movers managed to cram into their truck:

As some of you know we took my daughter E in for her MRI yesterday, the day after we got back from our trip to PEI and New Brunswick. The girls were extremely well behaved on our trip to and from PEI, and this little trip to Sick Kids Hospital was no exception… at first. But as you will see the girls were not to blame.

We got to Sick Kids in plenty of time for the appointment, which was at two. They wanted us there at one to be on the safe side, and even earlier if we wanted a patch for E to numb the spot where she’d be getting a needle. So we showed up at twelve noon. Unfortunately they were running behind in the MRI department and didn’t see E until about five o’clock. So we had to improvise a whole lot of entertaining for the girls as we waited. But the girls were good sports and we all managed to have a good time in the waiting room, playing silly games, reading books, talking, and playing with other kids who were also enduring long waits. The girls had their puppets Hush Puppy and Lambchop which made it a bit easier.

To prepare for sedation, E was not allowed solids past midnight the night before. In the morning she was allowed Jello, water and Apple Juice until eleven o’clock, and nothing else after that. So by five o’clock she was starting to get a bit hungry and thirsty.

Finally at five a nurse saw her, asked her a few questions (such as “Do you have any metal in your head?” a question E found most amusing), and got her to change into a hospital gown. Once she was changed, we had to wait another forty-five minutes before beginning the sedation process.

Finally at about five forty-five we began the procedure. E was fearful of the needle required for the medication she was about to receive but in the end agreed to get up on the bed and lie down. Wendy the nurse gave her the smallest needle they had, which E later named “Pipsqueak”. It was through this needle that E received the sedative required to calm her, and then the drug to actually put her to sleep. (Um, not in the sense that animals are put to sleep. Although the thought crossed my mind as she was undergoing the procedure that mistakes happen in hospitals; I hoped this wouldn’t be one of them.)

E was not keen on the sight of the needle in her arm nor the fact that it was to be a semi-permanent fixture. She did not like the idea of being forced to sleep. She did not like the feeling of dizziness that the sedative provoked. She did not like the feeling induced by the other medication. She especially did not like being held down by the two nurses and myself that were required to prevent her from falling off the table and ripping the needle out of her arm. With her eyes three quarters shut and no longer able to talk she fought us every second of the thirty minutes it took for her to go to sleep. It required a second full dose of sedative to do the job, close to the maximum medication allowed for children. Several times Wendy the nurse called E a “fighter.”

“She’s a fighter,” she kept telling me, sounding increasingly amazed by just how much of a fighter E was as the minutes ticked by.

Apparently kids can have a “parodoxical” reaction to the medication, and become increasingly agitated instead of sleepy, and I was afraid this was happening to E. I think Wendy was a bit afraid too. I wasn’t allowed to talk for the entire time this was happening for fear of keeping E awake, so I had to endure E’s panicked flailing in silence. Wendy kept reassuring me that everything was okay but it was really hard to put E through this. It must have been horrible for her, because we were removing all control from her, wrapping her tight in blankets so she couldn’t move her arms, her own father forcing her down on the table, strange nurses sticking needles in her arm, and worst of all the medication in her system making her feel weird and helpless.

Finally I couldn’t remain silent any more. I said to Wendy, “She’s going to be awfully mad at me later.”

Wendy said, “She’ll be mad at me, not you.”

(In the end she was pretty much mad at all of us.)

She finally fell asleep after the second dose of sedative. They wheeled her off to the MRI, and told me to go get a coffee and a bite to eat.

“Keep a close eye on her,” I told them.

“We will,” Wendy told me.

I knew that she would be okay and that the procedure was necessary. Still, I had found the whole experience upsetting and couldn’t eat. So I paced the halls instead. Later K helped distract me by taking me on a tour of the main floor of the hospital, where we climbed stairs and rode yellow elevators that made you feel funny as you went up and down in them.

At about six forty-five the receptionist told me E was waking up in a recovery room. I went in to find her cheerful but drunk. At least, that’s how Wendy described her and that’s how she looked and sounded to me. I helped her get dressed while Wendy found her a wheelchair. She suggested we get her a bite to eat before driving home, so Lynda, K and I brought her to the main floor where Lynda gave her some Jello and a drink. She had a hard time putting the Jello in her mouth… she kept missing her mouth with the spoon.

And as the whole experience began to come back to her she began to get upset. It drove her crazy that she couldn’t move her body properly. We tried to keep her in the wheelchair to protect herself but she hated it. I had bought a sub to give me the strength to drive home (I hadn’t eaten all day either) but my timing was extremely unfortunate… I should have eaten earlier when I had the chance. I wound up carrying E to the Parking Garage, but she hated being carried even more than she hated being confined to the wheelchair. After having been bound and drugged against her will shortly before I didn’t blame her even as she pummelled my head and face repeatedly on the way down to our van.

In the van poor Lynda had her hands full trying to calm her down as I foolishly and perhaps selfishly finished my sub before heading out. The entire drive home E cried and railed against the health system that, in her view, had treated her so unkindly. At home we fed a slightly calmer E and watched her carefully as she staggered around the living room. We sat on the couch and had a good talk with her about the whole unfortunate experience, then put her to bed.

This morning she was still slightly uncoordinated but much more charitable toward Sick Kids, Wendy the Nurse, and Pipsqueak the Needle. She realizes that everyone was just trying to help her, and has even decided that she likes needles (!), especially Pipsqueak, which she wishes she had been allowed to keep. She actually professes to be looking forward to her next trip to Sick Kids for the results of the MRI, which we should get in a few weeks. At that appointment she’ll get to take the subway, which she loves taking.

Lynda and I (and K, I expect) found the entire experience rather trying, but of course it was E who got the brunt of it.

Hopefully soon we’ll find out that the experience was not only trying but pointless too… when the results come back negative.

Knock wood.