It's happening to me again. That feeling that I can either plan my work or do my work but not both. And that usually means it's time for me take a step back and spend a few hours planning the next few weeks. But my next few weeks are so busy, and I don't often get several hours in a row to work, that I can't figure out when I'm going to be able to do my planning.

that I completely forgot to mention in my blog that I was going on vacation? Well...yeah, um, that was last week.

I have a dessert theatre performance next monday and approximately 500,000 things to do this week so I may not get to an essay this week either.

But I will leave you with this thought: the coolest sound in the world is my two sons laughing together. It turns out that The Little Guy thinks it is hilarious to hold his brother's hair and The Boy thinks that his brother's laughter is hilarious. Works for me!

The Little Guy slept for almost 10 hours last night. 10 HOURS! The Boy didn't do that until he was two and a half. The weird thing is, last night TLG fell asleep in my arms, I put him in his carseat to sleep until I got in bed, when I was ready for bed I took him out of the seat and brought him upstairs and put him between me and the man in bed and HE DIDN'T WAKE UP. Obviously there will be repercussions, The Little Guy will decide not to nap or perhaps all his teeth wil come in this afternoon, causing hours of top-of the-lungs wailing. There is another shoe, the dropping is just a matter of time :)

I mostly kid, I'm not that gloomy. Perhaps this a sign of things to come, with both children being asleep by 9pm and staying that way all night. Perhaps I may actually be able to go out for the evening without the omnipresent fear of returning to a baby who has been crying piteously in his father's arms for hours.

If this long sleep stretch happens on a semi-regular basis I may have to change my site name.

And don't even ask about me laying him down in bed, apparently the mattress is an excellent alarm clock. Go figure!

Since I wrote my last essay there has been a furor in the blogosphere (I hate the word blog but I love love love the word blogosphere) about crying-it-out. I am out of this furor loop of course because this weblog ( I don't mind that one) is tucked into the far reaches of the blogosphere and is read by only a few people so the similarity in topic is co-incidence only.

Julie at a little pregnant wrote last week about how she lets her son cry or fuss himself back to sleep halfway through his nap. That is, he needs a longer nap than he was taking so rather than picking him up after his first 45 mintue stretch, she'd leave him to his own devices (safely ensconced in a crib) for the 10 or 15 minutes it would take for him to fall back asleep for another hour or so.

Unfortunately, her entry touched a nerve in the cry-it-out/no crying throwndown arena and next thing Julie is being persecuted like she is Mommy anti-christ. It's really made me wonder what the hell is going on.

Sure I can see disagreeing with someone, I can see caring enough about your side of the issue to post about it on someone's weblog but I can't see attacking someone personally. That's not debate, that's junior high.

This thing with Julie has made me stronger in my resolve not to have comments on my weblog. Sure it would be great to know who was reading my site, and maybe have a little discussion with my readers but I can't stand the thought of some random moron taking issue with my stand on something and launching a personal attack at me on my own website. That's not to say that I don't want people to disagree with me. Hell, they're free to do that, but I don't want to have to waste time and brainspace dealing with someone who decides to build a soapbox in my comments section rather than creating their own website with which to educate the masses.

So I completely missed doing an essay last week, I'll double up this week, I promise.

This is not an essay, however, this is a meme. And since I was tagged by Ann Douglas, who rocks most profoundly, I am honour-bound to complete it.

Number of Books I Own: Around 1000, I think, maybe more, including ones that are currently 'visiting' my friends and family. My kids probably have about 100 and my husband probably has 200 or so.

Last Book I Bought: For me? hmmm, I think it wasthe notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers. It was an excellent book, full of writerly musings and short stories, two of my favorite things.

Last Book I Read: I want to lie and say I was reading Foucault or something, but actually the last book I read was Curtiss Ann Matlock's At the Corner of Love and Heartache. When you have full-on crazykids and you are hiding out in the bathtub, you need what my mother-in-law calls 'such a nice story, you know' to help you relax. Thanks, Ms. Matlock.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: These are not in order of importance, just in the order they occurred to me.

1) Erica Jong's Fear of Flying - This book let me know that it was perfectly okay to write about the good and the bad and the weird. Also, I liked it.

2) Selected Stories of Alice Munro- It turns out that it is also okay to write about how interesting ordinary lives are. Also, I liked it.

3) Andi Buchanon's Mother Shock - And in other news, essays about motherhood are very interesting, and very important. I wish I had had 'Giving Birth to Ambivalence' back in November 2001 when The Boy arrived 7 weeks early and life was very confusing.

4) Linda Austin's What's Holding You Back? and Gail Blanke's In My Wildest Dreams These two books not only helped me figure out what I wanted to be doing with my life, but they've helped me in my informal 'career' as life coach to my friends and family.

5) I have to steal Ann's idea and say Anne Of Green Gables>, I have loved that book since I was about 7 years old, and I've read it 30 or 40 times. When I was in PEI in 1993, I loved the musical but the whole marketing thrust of 'Marilla's Pizza' and other stores confused me beyond measure. I mean, sure, cash in on the tourist attraction, more power to you, but Marilla would no more have eaten pizza than she would have had a margarita.

Oh, I guess this is the part where I have to tag people. Hmm, I'll pick Meagan (if she isn't too busy being a food zombie), Monica (if she is not intoxicated from her first week of decent sleep since November) and Mark (in case he is feeling participatory today). Like my whole 'M' theme for this meme? a meme-theme, if you will?

I need to get out more

A few months ago, I bemoaned the fact that I had missed the Naked-Daniel-Jackson episode of Stargate but all is well now.

Last Thursday's episode included another possible ascension storyline and when Daniel Jackson re-appeared at Cheyenne Mountain, he was naked again!

Of course, O'Neill did give him a flag to wrap himself in he strolled into view just wearing that from the waist down. YAY! and also, yummy!

I almost prefer to see him just shirtless rather than naked (not that you could actually see anything specific in the first NDJ episode) since I have sort of a thing for shirtless men. Specifically, shirtless men in jeans, with the top button undone (blame it on Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise).

Now, after much deliberation I've decided that shirtless men in flags are also okay with me :)

So now that you are all shaking your heads in confusion as to how one brain contains feminist mom essays and naked DJ ramblings, I'll go hang out with my kids.

So this afternoon we went to my in-laws for lunch and before we left, The Man and The In-Laws headed out to chase The Boy around on the front lawn for a while (while I got The Little Guy and myself into shoes and coats). I carried TLG in his carseat down the front steps and looked at my husband, my oldest son and my in-laws all laughing at the bugs in an old tree stump. I stood there, looking from my infant in his carseat to my great big boy laughing with his Dad and grandparents and I thought 'Man, this life rocks!'

I strolled over toward them, still carrying TLG in his carseat, and as I got close to them I stepped into a little hollow in the lawn and turned my ankle. So this evening I'm in a lot of pain and I can't walk.

The moral of the story? Rest assured, gentle readers, the universe does indeed still hate me.

But hey, at least I got the nice moment first. Right?

Compounding the problem of mental lists, is the fact that after writing 800-1000 word entries writing a little blurb about something odd that happened just feels a little silly.

But then I realized that I like silly.

So I'm going to intersperse my essays with short pieces more often from now on.

Let's see how that pans out.

I don't like to argue. Well that's not strictly true, I guess the problem is that I only like to argue in certain circumstances and those are rather impossible to generate.

Oh, and let me be clear, I'm not talking about knock-em-down, drag-em-out arguments here, yelling and the screaming and the like. I'm just referring to your garden variety differences of opinion that might be called 'intellectual debate' in some circles. And before you jump to any conclusions, my reluctance isn't due to a lack of opinions, nor is it due to a lack of confidence in my position, it's more of a friend issue, an etiquette issue and well, an apathy issue.

I have a number of close friends that I disagree with occasionally. I don't avoid letting them know when I disagree but I also don't seek out topics that might start an argument. I value the friendship(s) too much to risk the hurt feelings and frustrations that often result from even casual disagreements.

But such discussions with friends are currently my only vaguely comfortable arguing situation, sitting around together batting a topic back and forth and either agreeing to stop the discussion if it gets heated or someone making a joke to defusion any tension that builds.

I hate to have deep discussions or disagreements on, say, Messenger, because it is too easy to misunderstand someone if you can't read their face, or catch their tone. And to make things worse, sometimes the other person is typing at the same time as you, and by the time you hit send your reply seems to be connected to a different statement of theirs and things get very awkward. That taps into one of my great fears and annoyances --being misunderstood.

And what's worse about an IM conversation is that the other person can blithely ignore your side of the discussion and essentially carry on a monologue broken into short spurts of typing, leaving you beating your head against the wall.

Speaking of beating one's head against a wall, I enjoy reading some online forums, but I don't often wade into discussions there either. I don't have time to hover around following where my comment might lead a thread, and correcting any misinterpretations of my statements. And a lot of the time I find that I just don't care enough about any given topic to get into the fray since people seem more determined to make their point than in exploring the subject at hand.

I sometimes miss being in university because it gave me a context for discussing and developing my ideas on a given topic and because it all took place in person, I could interpret other people's positions more effectively and I could ensure that I was understood. It is hard when you move past that context, because you no longer have a group of people who have read the same things you have and are equally interested in the topic.

Oddly enough, I don't enjoy not arguing either. It makes me feel unengaged, like I'm not keeping up. I'm not even sure what it is that I want to keep up with. And, then, in an effort to challenge myself, I find myself accidentally involved in arguments on topics that I don't know a lot about and I really can't keep up (being more of a discusser of ideas than a marshaller of statistics and specific details) and then I just feel dumb and I wander further away from good arguing contexts.

This must be rectified before the only argument I can participate in is the 'have two more bites of bread and then you can watch tv' discussion, because that is not satisfying at all.

Or maybe I've just had an attack of the vapours.

You see, I just can't care enough to write about anything. I just feel all scattered and disjointed and it is way easier not to write than it is to write.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what sorts of writing I want to do, and now I fear I have just overthought the whole process. I probably just need to keep forcing myself to write until something coherent appears.

Alas, the location for that forced writing? My weblog. Sad days for you, reader.

I don't have anything major to say today so I'll just give you some information that The Boy has relayed to me this week.

A conversation between me and The Boy:

Mombie: Do you love your little brother?

The Boy: Oh yes!

Mombie: Really? How much?

The Boy: A hillion, million, ten feet tall.

I don't know what that means, but it seems like a good thing to me. Also, in case you were wondering, Spiderman catches leaves just like flies, and he lives in a blood, no, no, make that a crime. He lives in a crime.