This guest post was written and contributed by Airdrie who blogs at Talking to Air and co-hosts the Lipgloss and Laptops podcast
When I woke up this morning my husband was already in the kitchen feeding the kids. I noticed some small spots of blood on his pillow. My stomach sank — the sight of his blood always makes me queasy and worried. I’m guessing some of the pus-filled pimples on his face must have broken last night, and perhaps started bleeding.
My husband was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer 19 months ago. Since then he has spent over a month in the hospital, had several operations, and endured months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. You can follow his story over at his blog, penmachine.com.
The pimples on his face and torso are the side effects of an experimental drug treatment he is currently receiving through a clinical trial at the BC Cancer Agency. He has “used up” all his government-approved treatments, but there are still small tumors growing in his lungs. If this does not work, then I don’t know what is next – nobody talks about it. The future is uncertain. The only thing that is certain in my life is uncertainty. Thankfully, I have a great therapist who helps me, but that is another story.
When Raul asked me to guest post on his Blogathon, I had no idea what to blog about. Then I noticed that his charity of choice is the BC Cancer Foundation and I immediately knew that I wanted to write about: my experience as the wife of a cancer patient.
Let’s start with the good. They say every cloud has a silver lining. I have learned to enjoy each day with Derek. I now know what it means to live “one day at a time.” Each day is a gift, as they say. I have also realized that I am a strong person. I have inner strength. I take on the role of caregiver begrudgingly. But in the end, I am here for the long ride, through sickness and health.
I’ve learned that I need to ask for help, and that it really does take a “village” to raise a child, in this case, an adult child. My parents and his parents have played important roles in keeping him well, and keeping me sane. My children are flourishing, as kids do, despite the fact that their dad is sick. I have a huge support network, and it took Derek’s illness for me to see it, as though it was invisible before. For that I am grateful.
Now the bad. Cancer is not very sexy. Ileostomy bags, chronic pain, midnight runs to the Emergency room, multiple surgeries, medications and vomiting do not exactly fit into what I had pictured for our future together. There is a lot we can no longer do. He can’t get medical insurance to cover him for travels out of Canada. So I had to leave him at home during our family vacation to California earlier this month.
I was happy to leave him at home, close to his doctors. The truth is, I worry about him way more than I ever did before. It is almost at the point that I feel better when he is in the hospital, because when he is at home, I am always asking him, “how do you feel?” Not only is this very draining, but allowing myself to imagine a reprieve at some point in the future makes me think the unthinkable: only in his death will this pain, this cancer, stop controlling our lives. So I don’t think about it. But repressed feelings tend to build up and spurt out at inopportune times. And rather than keep it all to myself, I’m writing about it here for the world to see.
Truth time. It is most likely that my husband will die from this cancer. Even worse, nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone keeps saying to me that I need to stay positive. But what they are really saying is, “it is not helpful to think about the worst-case scenario.” Well, let me tell you right now, it is necessary for a wife and mother to think about the worst-case scenario.
Derek does not talk about it with me. His parents do not talk about it with us. But I have to think about it. I have two little girls to look after. So if I seem suddenly hard or selfish, I am. But it is not Derek’s fault. It is the cancer’s fault: the cancer that was not supposed to strike a young father at age 37.
Even the doctors don’t like to talk about it. I finally asked his oncologist the big question that everyone asks in the movies: “How long does he have to live?” The doctor said his cancer has a 30% five-year survival rate, with an average survival rate of two years.
So here I am, 19 months in to this role as wife of a cancer patient, and my husband is still alive. I am grateful for that. I honestly think I might fall apart if he were to die. But I am strong. I am realistic. We have put our “affairs in order.” I am drinking more margaritas than usual. I worry about blood stains.
I don’t understand what it means that patients only get 12-16 chemo treatments covered under the BC Medical Services Plan (what about Universal Health Care?). Who can answer that one?
I’m living life one day at a time. It seems some days to be getting worse, and other days to be getting better. I’ve never run a marathon, but I’m guessing it has to be easier than this.
Airdrie blogs at TalkingToAir.com and co-hosts the Lip Gloss and Laptops podcast.
This will be a really short post, because it relates to a forthcoming post on the fact that I need an iPhone. While walking to meet my good friend AF, I basically clipped everything you could ever imagine to my belt:
– My glasses case
– My iPod
– My cell phone case
In addition, I was wearing:
– Sunglasses
– Watch
– Wallet
By the end of it, I took everything off, simply because I can’t stand having things attached to me. I’ve never been one for carrying stuff around (that’s why I always try to get a nice backpack) and in addition to the stuff you see in the photo, I also was carrying my digital camera and my Flip camera. URGH. I hate carrying stuff around, I hate it!
This post was contributed by Pat Zaph who blogs at Listen To The Cheese
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are apt to annoy some people. If so, suck it up. The views expressed in this post are also apt to appeal to hippies. If you are a hippie, go take a shower.
In the most basic sense, all you really need to be happy is food, shelter and clothing. Over and above that, in the most realistic sense, anything else is a bonus. The problem with these bonuses is that far too often we treat them as being essentials. The idea that we are entitled to these extra essentials has become so ingrained in our heads that questioning them is often met with harsh criticism or deference. If I asked you to list three things off the top of your head without stopping to think that you would count as essential to your life above and beyond the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter, I doubt that most people would be able to. Not because they can’t think of any, but because once you take something for granted as essential to your life, you stop being able to disconnect it from what you think is necessary.
The only real way to break this habit, I think, is to be put in the middle of a situation where you’re forced to recognize this. I’ve been living through one of these situations for the last three months. I can step out onto the roof of the building I’m staying in, look out over a suburb of Dhaka and realize that complaining about the annoyances we face in life at home are pithy and pointless. You go to a restaurant, and your order isn’t as hot as it should be. This annoys you and you send it back demanding a decrease in the price. Don’t act as though you’ve never done something that callous, it’s a trait we have as Westerners. Few people actually stop to think that the amount of food on that plate amounts to three weeks of food for some people. I explained to my students here how much I pay for lunch at A&W in Harbour Center and they asked me if I was buying food for a feast. A $6 Teen Burger combo could buy a week’s worth of food for some people here. So the next time you pick up that Big Mac, or Subway, think about how many people there are in the world that don’t make enough money in over a month to even buy the fries in your combo.
Maybe you have thought that before. Good on you. But until you walk through the shanty towns and see with your own eyes what the living conditions are, there still too much of a disconnect between you and them to make much of a difference in your perspectives. I doubt that most people could conceive the duress people live in, even if they like to think they can. Reading about it online, watching a humanitarian story on the news, or listening to it on the radio seems to give people a sense of satisfaction that they know what’s wrong with the world, and that since they are aware of its problems, this makes them a better person. People might toss a can in the food donation bin and smugly feel that they’ve just made a difference in someone’s life. I’ve come to decide that if you do this, you’re an asshole.
You’re making shit all of a difference because you’ve done it without thinking of the context of people who are really in need. Being able to throw food in a donation bin still lets you keep a large disconnect between you and the people you think you’re helping. If you don’t have to see who’s getting it, you feel better. This is the same thing as donating money to an NGO to send it to developing countries. You feel happy that you’ve helped without even wondering about the end result. You think that your money will go to help people in need but don’t question how it’s used to do this. Keeping that disconnect between you and the people you want to help means you don’t know that the money was used to help build storm and flood shelters for poor farmers in monsoon threatened areas. Keeping this disconnect means that you don’t know that your money has been spent on these shelters without any regard to cultural context. Keeping this disconnect means that you have no idea that the shelter you kindly donated your money to with a grin on your face did little to help because this is a Muslim country and there were no separations between the men and women so many women were forced to stay outside and drown. Keeping this disconnect means that your happily donated money didn’t build shelters for the animals that the farmers need for their livelihood, so more people died trying to save their animals from drowning instead of staying in the shelters. But you sit in your air conditioned home or office with a big, self-satisfied grin on your face because you know that you made a personal contribution to help those people and since you did that, they must be happier now.
We take it for granted that our contributions make some large difference to society on a grand scale. We assume that our donations or monetary contributions will make a huge difference to people in need. But no one ever really takes much time to see who these people in need are. They’re just People in Need, and they need our help. Somehow, we also think that if only people followed our values, that they’d be much farther along in life. I’ve seen a string of volunteers come through here in the last few months, and even being here that comes out. And I’m not ashamed at all to say that the biggest culprits of this have been the American volunteers. It’s almost beyond a lot of them to accept the fact that not everyone in the world can live life with a smile on it without western values and what we (they) think of as organization.
This might just be the basis for the every problem dealing with helping people. Those of use fortunate enough to be comfortable in life too often assume that if only people Lived Like Us, that they would be far happier and be able to live a much better life. This frame of thought easily ignores the fact that this takes far greater amounts of money than most of the world will hope to see, and that maybe living like us isn’t necessarily the best thing for a large portion of the population of the world. We need food, clothing and shelter to be happy. I can look out my window, I can walk down the flooded streets, I can talk to the people living in a shanty built up on stilts, and all of them will have a smile on their face because they have a basic roof, a basic meal, and basic clothing. They might not be the happiest person every day of their lives, but I’d much rather see a smile on a persons face knowing that they have all they need to be happy rather than the smile on the face of a person who thinks it essential to know which movie star is fucking which movie star and who wore what to whatever awards show. If our attitude is that people in need should learn to live like us, I hope that they slam the door in our face and tell us to please fuck off. If you really want to live your life happy and know that you’ve made a real difference with some contribution, then go see how your help is making a difference. Don’t sit in a room and assume that you’ve made one, go see for yourself.
Credit: Pat Zaph (all photos in this post)
Maybe that way, you might learn that some of those things you thought were so important to your life aren’t so necessary anymore.
All photos in this post (c) Pat Zaph
This post has been brought to you buy the malnourished construction workers breaking bricks by hand outside my window.
EDITOR’S NOTE – All photos in this post are (c) of Pat Zaph
Since Rebecca recently ventured to the world of self-employment as a social media consultant, we’ve talked a lot about blogging as a professional gig. At a recent interview she had with 24 Hrs (the newspaper) I reminded Rebecca of a post she wrote and that I really liked on the value of blog posts, where she touched on this very issue. As of right now, I have been offered some freelance gigs, but I have got no clue as to pricing strategies, content delivery, format, etc. So, I’ve been learning a lot from Rebecca’s and other’s experiences.
Michael Kwan is a freelance writer himself, and he always maintains a good, streaming flow of blog posts in addition to his own freelance writing gigs. How does he do it? I always have wondered. I guess it comes with the responsibility of knowing that you NEED to be ready, and he often also writes about self-discipline. I hope I can be THAT disciplined should I ever go the freelance route!
Have you had any experiences in freelancing? What would be the best freelance tips you could provide? Thanks!
J. Karen Parker is a PhD student in Computer Science at UBC, a friend, a geeky blogger and academic, and a WordPress fan, same as me! She Blogs at Jkparker.ca
Since Raul is a prolific writer of local restaurant reviews (check out his collection on Urban Spoon), I thought I would make my guest post restaurant-themed.
Today you benefit from my tightwad tendencies! I thought I’d share with
you some of my favourite local haunts and tricks for getting delicious
food at ridiculously affordable prices. I am a PhD student and in my
many, many years of university I’ve honed my deal-finding skills. As a
former PhD student himself I suspect Raul can identify with this
talent. 😉 However, even when I am no longer a starving student I
suspect I’ll continue hunting down cheap eats. I just love finding a deal!
First some general suggestions…
1. Pick up an Entertainment Book.
Many local schools sell them in the fall as a charity fundraiser, or
you can order one online from the Entertainment website. The book
contains 2-for-1 coupons for oodles of local restaurants, from trendy
Robson street cafes to laid back Burnaby pubs.
2. Take advantage of weekly and time-of-day specials.
Some restaurants offer deals on certain days of the week (e.g. Pizza From Hell’s
2-for-1 Tuesday). Others offer earlybird or late-night specials. If
your schedule is flexible, bumping that dinner reservation to 5pm (or
10pm!) might save you some cash.
3. Get it to go.
If you order takeout you can enjoy yummy
restaurant food in the comfort of your own home and you won’t be
tempted by that $9 glass of wine, beer, or cocktail. Instead, you can
have a drink from your fridge (or liquor cabinet, or wine rack) at a
fraction of the price. Getting takeout will also save you a long wait
in line at some of Vancouver’s cheap eats meccas: Places like Stepho’ and Anton’s are legendary for their lineups.
4. Try the “prix fixe.”
You’re probably familiar with Dine Out Vancouver
when, for a couple weeks every winter, restaurants all over Vancouver
offer set menus for $15, $25, or $35. However, some restaurants offer
similar specials year-round. For example, I recently discovered
(through this very blog!) that between 5pm and 5:55pm every night Goldfish Pacific Kitchen offers a prix fixe for a very reasonable $25.
5. Ask the internet for help
One of my all time favourite places to look for restaurant reccommendations is the Chowhound boards.
Chowhound is filled with foodies from around the world and while many
of the restaurants they recommend are quite high-budget, there are also
lots of deals to be found. For example, searching for vancouver cheap eats turns up several excellent threads.
And now for a few of my favourite places to get cheap eats (and drinks)…
Tanpopo
The service is spotty at best, but this remains my go-to restaurant
whenever I am craving sushi. Their late-night all-you-can-eat special
beats the pants off the other places in town. Show up after 9:30pm and
you can have unlimited wild salmon sashimi, toro, tempura and many
other Japanese delights for a mere $12.
Falafel King
Denman
street is littered with falafel restaurants but this one is the best by
far. Despite the name of the place, I usually skip the falafel and go
for the chicken shwarma plate. It easily feeds two, leaving just enough
room in your bellies for a spot of gelato down the street at Mondo.
Kam’s Place
This
Singaporean restaurant has (IMHO) the best lunch deal in the west end.
Choose from one of a selection of Singaporean main dishes along with
soup, salad, and rice, all for about $6! And if you’re dining there in
the evening make sure you bring a copy of the Georgia Straight – Kam’s
publishes a 2-for-1 coupon in the Straight every week.
Cafe Crepe
When I moved to Vancouver (from
Halifax) I had some serious sticker shock when I ordered my first
pitcher of beer in a local pub. Luckily, I quickly discovered that Cafe
Crepe offers beer, cocktails, and other libations at some of the most
reasonable prices in town. They may be low on atmosphere, but they’ve
got rock bottom prices on vodka martinis and pitchers of Keith’s. Start
your night on the town here and have a cheap cocktail before heading
out to a more upscale club for the evening.
There you go! The list above skews heavily towards downtown Vancouver, since I live in the neighbourhood. What are your favourite tips and locations for cheap eats in Vancouver? Leave your suggestions in the comments!
Karen is also into synchronized swimming, and you can find her personal blog here
The other day, I was watching an episode of CSI:NY and they’re making use of Second Life… it’s awesome! Darren was mentioning that there were a lot of good applications for SL (although I’m not sure if I’ll ever join).
I think TV shows are adopting a lot of information technology ideas. For example, the main character in Gossip Girl is a blogger. Now, CSI:NY uses Second Life to capture a criminal. Nice! I even wrote about Twitter on an episode of CSI (the original one). YOWZA!
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZbxwtEKpEL4]
I just want to salute my fellow Blogathoners
Duane Storey,Tania Morrison (Ottawa), Rebecca Bollwitt, Shane Gibson, Karen Hamilton, Ayeza Garcia, Isabella Mori, Danny Dang, Mehnaz Thawer, Jenn Lowther/Nadia Nascimento, Barbara Doduk, Chris Richardson, and Colleen Vince.
I’m going to try and keep commenting on everyone’s blogs, but I am not sure if I can keep doing it with the frequency I’d like as I still have to write my own posts! Again, thanks to Rebecca for organizing, for everyone who is pledging and funding our efforts (shout out to Fresh Start Recycling who were my very first sponsors for a post!) and to all my fellow Blogathoners, let’s keep going!
I linked to one of Ian’s posts recently. Here is a Best of Craigslist link you *need* to read. Since my blog is a fairly Safe-For-The-Office one, I prefer that you check the CL link yourself. Then come back and drop a comment
July 26th, 2008 in
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This post was written and contributed by Jodi Hamilton who blogs at Jodiferous.com
Why I Wish I Was More Like Raul
You know, I wish I was more like Raul. Hear me out. First of all, he’s wicked smart. He’s got a PhD in stuff I cannot even begin to explain. If I had a PhD, I would make EVERYONE call me Dr. Hamilton. Even my husband. But Raul isn’t crazy like me, with all those brains, he still acts like he’s no better than the rest of us.
Number two, have you heard of Twitter? Raul has. And he can make friends with nothing more than a twitter account. Myself, I am actually quite shy. I would need, most likely, a several shots of vodka and some herbal assistance to be as social and friendly as Raul. Everywhere he goes he MEETS people and has EXPERIENCES. In all caps. To a wallflower such as myself, this is an enviable trait. I recently accompanied my spouse to a work function, a bbq. And how did I handle it? I befriended the family dog and played a marathon game of fetch with him. It’s all good, though. I think the dog and I are going to try to meet for coffee sometime next week.
And now, to top it off, he is spending 24 hours writing and raising money for the BC Cancer Society. I don’t mean this to sound trite, but he is a giver in the best and most noble sense of the word. I lost my stepfather last year to metastatic melanoma, last year, so, to me, Raul is a hero.
However, I can eat cheese with no adverse effects. So I have that going for me. Which is nice.
Jodi Hamilton is the proud owner of Jodiferous.com, which [despite Raul’s best intentions] is still written using a Movable Type 4 platform. Raul recently lost a bet to Jodi and had to pay a Dr. Pepper, and there is photographic proof on Raul’s Flickr! And she’s also an awesome writer!
I used to have a category for small restaurants (e.g. eateries) but since I don’t make the distinction anymore, it’ll be ok if I categorize this as a restaurant. Tanya took me there for lunch as her office is in the neighbourhood (Mount Pleasant) and I live close by. We had talked about meeting at the Argo Cafe for lunch sometime, but we had never gotten around to it, but luckily we got a chance to do so this week.
There are many reasons why I enjoyed this lunch so much. The first one, without a doubt, was having the company of Tanya, and having a chance to catch up IRL (in real life). The second one was being in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, close to the False Creek Olympic Village. I admit it, I am still an industry-oriented guy. Heck, if you read the post that Rebecca kindly invited me to write for Miss604.com, you’ll see how much I love this neighbourhood.
I am a chemical engineer, and that’s one of the reasons why I love this area so much, it still maintains a lot of its industrial flavor. Anyways, back to the Argo Cafe. It’s a very neat, clean, hole-in-the-wall kind of place that caters mostly to the people who work around the neighbourhood. It’s always packed, and the prices are really inexpensive. You can have a really hearty meal for around $9 to $10 dollars.
I ordered a burger without cheese (obviously) and with bacon, and it was big! I didn’t order the fries as Tanya ordered fish and chips and she shared some with me. I think it is a really cool place, and I look forward to coming down there again for lunch with Tanya (and I heard that Travis works close by, as I think does John Bollwitt!) … GeekCamp!
This guest post was contributed by Maktaaq from Maktaaq.com. Follow her blog there!”
Hello to Raul’s readers! My name is Maktaaq. I am guest blogging for my friend Raul this Blogathon 2008. However, because of my usual choice of subject matter, I am asking Raul to slot me in somewhere around 4 am. Nobody really reads the 4 am posts except the slackers who sleep through it and just read their rss feeds. By then, with 47 other posts clogging their feed, no one will notice.
Someone sent me a link to the Chinese angel cat, an animal that is quickly becoming my favourite animal freak. This cat isn’t just cute and fluffy, it’s got wings. Useless wings that won’t get this cat airborne, but still, it’s a cat with wing-like appendages!
The cat belongs to a certain Granny Feng of Xianyang in Sha’anxi, a province in Mainland China. The stumps that became the wings appeared a month ago, right around the time that the cat was apparently raped by some troublesome female cats. Granny Feng is convinced her cat was sexually harassed: “A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow,” she said in Huashang News exclusive interview.
Heh. The cat grows “two hairy 4-inch long wings” after a run-in with some horny girl cats. The wings have bones. Me sees what’s the deal here.
One of the things that I have found most challenging with the blogging I have done is keeping some degree of a reputation in the academic realm, and translating social media for the hard-core academics. Surely, some of my former professors would think that writing blog posts is not precisely very academic.
The truth is, if it weren’t for my blogging, I am pretty sure my writing wouldn’t be as sharp. Remember, I write ALL the time, and I write in a language that isn’t my native tongue. Furthermore, I keep the words flowing and thus I am able to maintain a writing pace that most people envy. Yeah, I could be more focused in my research, and I swear I’d publish more papers and journal articles if I didn’t have a social life. But my life would be definitely much worse off.
But wait a minute, there are other bloggers who are also academics and geeks. Dr. Beth Snow, for example, and my friend Melanie A. And Karen Parker. And the list goes on. Therefore, while the academic model is still one that I think is important for me, it is no longer the only one. I now write for two different audiences, and I write under two different models, but the mind that produces the content is still the same: MINE, and only mine.
This post was contributed by the always lovely Monica Hamburg, who blogs amongst other places, at Me Like the Interwebs
The summer of 2002 was a rough one. I had always prided myself on being someone who could hold it together no matter how I felt. Put a good face, on, be perky and. all. that. jazz. No matter what.
But finally, it all hit me. My insomnia was worse than ever before. And I knew why: I was working a go nowhere job, not being able to make my acting career work – I felt like a tremendous failure. I had recently gotten out of a relationship, still had no enduring friendships and I felt very, very alone.
And lonely. Awfully lonely.
It wasn’t fun to realize I wasn’t holding it together. I needed to get out of town and fast. My best friend was living in LA at the time. Vancouver to LA is a quick plane ride, but I was broke and so a Greyhound would do.
By my splendid math/geography calculations the bus ride would be about 6 hrs. Yeah 8pm to 2.
‘Course it was really 8pm one day to like 2pm 2 days later, but ya know, by the time I realized that I really really wanted to go (oh, this was the 2nd time I had made this kind of error – the first being a Greyhound from New York to Minneapolis that lasted way longer than a human being need suffer).
I got on the bus, burnt, almost so tired of it all that I couldn’t feel the excitement that came with the anticipation of being somewhere different. The first hint that I had made the wrong choice with my method of transportation was the scruffy guy who sat next to me and promptly told me he had been dumped by his girlfriend. Then he said how he thought about killing everyone around him and then himself.
Yeah, this was going to be fun.
I had never taken the school bus as a child, but from TV & films I got a pretty good sense of what the horror was like.
This. Was. Worse.
Shouting, freaked out, pissed off people were the norm.
To make things extra fun, the bus stopped in every single small town, to refuel, pick up passengers, or generally make up a reason to turn on the bus lights and create some sort of sleep-deprivation exercise.
6hrs in: My homicidal/suicidal seatmate gets off. Happy trails.
He is replaced by a big biker guy who just got on. Perfect, I think, this’ll suck.
The Biker offers me some Nutter Butters. Awww. We’re friends now & life is good again.
10hrs in:
The man behind me begins to bark. Then laugh manically. Then bark, bark, bark. Finally the Biker turns around and tells him he’ll cut his balls off if he doesn’t stop. A blissful silence ensues.
20hrs in:
We stop at a “terminal” somewhere in California. I go to the public bathroom. There is the very obvious sound of a person “evacuating their bowels”. A woman walks in and says (excitedly, I swear!) “Oh yeah! Go for it, baby! It’s nice to have that good morning shit!”
Please please please can I be in LA, already?!!!
26 hrs in:
We have a new bus driver. Telling jokes. Wonderful. Unfortunately there is also a clued-out Eastern European woman responding to the rhetorical questions:
Bus Driver: Why do men always have the remote control? Woman: Because it is usually near them on the table.
Or
Bus Driver: What’s the difference between a woman and LA? Woman: Well, one is a person and the other a city.
Something like 42hrs later, the bus arrives in LA.
I feel dirty, gritty and more like a cockroach than I have ever felt before.
But I’m here. Finally.
Let the games begin.
Monica Hamburg is a social media evangelist and blogs, amongst others, at Me Like The Interwebs.
Admittedly, I thought I wasn’t ever going to publish again an eatery review, but I was browsing through my Flickr account and realized that I had photos from the So.Cial deli and I hadn’t posted them so I figured I’d write a post about it, and review it. Since my wallet can’t aford So.Cial (the restaurant) right now, I am glad that Rebecca suggested the deli, because a sandwich, yes that I can afford!
The sandwiches are affordable (although the big, big sammich is about $ 14 bucks, which I find slightly overpriced). I went with a $ 6.00 (small-ish) sandwich with turkey breast, but I saw that Rebecca’s roast beef sandwich was HUGE (next time I’m buying that one!)
Here is another picture of their prices and menu 🙂
Overall, I enjoyed it but I wonder if I had a good time there because of the sandwich or because it was a fun opportunity to hang out with Rebecca outside of the blogosphere and just before she liveblogged NetTuesday. The sandwich was good, but I think I’m going to stand by my La Grotta del Formaggio sandwiches!
Apologies to Blogathoners, but I wanted to communicate to my Aunt why I am Blogathoning and why I am dedicating this to her and to my local friend who is also fighting cancer. So I’m going to switch to Spanish. You can read the other entries.
Querida tia: Hable hace unas semanas con mi mama, y me comento sobre el estado de tu salud, y que te escuchabas contenta y motivada y de alguna manera, te ibas mejorando y la qumio te estaba cayendo bien. Luego recientemente me comento que andabas medio afectada de la garganta y que no sentias tan de maravilla, por lo que pense en que mi participacion en Blogathon. podria de alguna manera motivarte. Espero que ese sea el caso.
Un Blogathon es como un maraton. Estamos escribiendo 49 posts cortitos (o bueno, de cualquier tamaNo), un post cada 30 minutos por 24 horas, con la idea de recaudar fondos para una organizacion caritativa (charity). La agencia que estoy tratando de patrocinar es la Agencia de Columbia Britanica contra el Cancer (BC Cancer Agency).
Espero realmente que el hecho de que estoy dedicandote este Blogathon te motive a echarle ganas, siempre has sido una persona muy positiva y de mente muy abierta y con la voluntad de salir adelante. No te detuvieron otros problemas en el pasado, echale todas las ganas del mundo que aca en Canada yo te estoy echando porras (y mis hermanos tambien, ya que con todos he hablado acerca de nuestros deseos de que pronto se restablezca tu salud).
Muchos besos de tu sobrino que te quiere, Raul.
As I was preparing to meet Tanya for lunch at the Argo Cafe and packing my bag, I realized that I carry all this equipment everywhere I go:
– My laptop (almost dead, but still, working somewhat)
– My digital camera
– My Flip video camera
– My iPod
For all the fuss I’ve made about NOT buying an iPhone and being outraged at the costs, turns out that I actually DO need one. Simply because I need to stop carrying all this equipment. Also, because it would make my life so much easier if I could have Twitter on the road. *sigh* More money to be shelled out, darn it!
The one thing that deters me is definitely the 3 year contract with Rogers. *sigh* We’ll see what I do with that. But if you already have an iPhone, you can leave me a comment and tell me all the nice features it has. I already know about the camera, the included Twitterrific app, the fact that uses 3G when you don’t have wifi, the albums feature, the GPS and Google directions (but the only problem is that this is not dynamic). Anyhow, what are your favorite applications or uses you are giving to your iPhone?
This guest post was contributed by MelanieA, who actually happens to be all three things: a Mom, a PhD and a good friend of mine!
I have a button which states, plainly, “PhD Mom”. My own mother gave it to me just before my son’s first birthday. I also have a T-shirt that has a print that resembles those cliché “Hello, my name is” stickers; in this case, printed in pink, it says, “Hello, my name is Mommy“; I received it as a Mother’s Day gift this year.
I am a PhD and a Mama. My PhD is five years old, and at the time I (finally) defended my thesis, I was convinced it would be my only offspring.
And then I fell in love. The rest, as they say, is history.
My son will be two this fall. My husband is also an academic, so although I haven’t worked in the ivory tower (or, for that matter, anywhere else for a paycheque) since just before I became pregnant, and because most of our friends have multiple degrees, I still float in research-oriented circles. In fact, I know Raul through grad school.
I spent 12 years in university, and have four degrees to show for it, yet most of the time I feel dumb. Preggie brain has never really gone away, and that’s surely part of the problem, but the main thing is that I’m out of the loop. To be an effective researcher, one must stay on top of the literature (not to mention gossip in the discipline). I zoom through chick-lit novels at an expensive pace, but don’t remember the last time I managed to read an entire copy (or even more than a single section) of the Globe and Mail. So forget about reading anything scholarly; even if I found the time and summoned the energy, I no longer feel smart enough to make sense of it, even if I actually do still have the capacity.
I have managed to get a bunch of papers published since becoming a Mama, but truthfully I’d done all the hard work some time before and it was just because of editorial delays that all these papers suddenly entered the public domain. (Vexingly, the referee report on one of those manuscripts – submitted even before I was married – arrived in my inbox when my son’s age was best counted in days.) I’ve refereed one paper, and just a couple of days ago received a follow-up request regarding the revised manuscript. I still show some signs of academic life.
When I’m most self-conscious, though, is when I’m interacting with other PhDs. You know, the ones who are actually using their degrees. I feel as though I have nothing to contribute to conversations with other PhDs (but just ask me about the price of diapers, or better yet the pros and cons of myriad baby strollers, and I can go on and on and on!).
Possibly the most jarring (if not downright painful) experience, though, was while living abroad during my husband’s recent sabbatical. In Europe, our upstairs neighbour was another Canuck. When we met her, she showed interest only in my husband’s research and teaching. For all intents and purposes, she ignored me. I don’t remember her even asking my name. And, although it was probably just my own hyper-sensitivity about my credentials and lack thereof, I felt dismissed when she said that her “husband’s job was too important” for him to leave and so, rather than join her (and their toddler) in Europe, he stayed behind in Canada. She never once asked me what I did, whether I’d left a job behind to accompany my husband or to enter motherhood. We were there for six months. I always felt that she’d assumed I was nothing but a dim housewife. I should’ve made more of an effort to flash my PhD Mom button.
I do label myself as an “Overeducated Hausfrau”, but at the same time I don’t believe that my education has wasted. I have always felt that education is intrinsically good, and I feel very privileged that I had the opportunities to study as I have. However, I still remember with shocking clarity a moment when my son was just a few weeks old: I was dealing with what I will politely describe as a diaper containment failure. I had baby poop on my hand, and I started to cry as I thought, “I did a doctorate for this??” And I had to answer yes: I met my husband in the ivory tower. I had just completed my degree and begun my post-doc, and he was already a faculty member. So yes, if I hadn’t done a doctorate, I probably wouldn’t have met him, and therefore wouldn’t have had my delightful son, and therefore, at that very moment, would not have had baby poop on my hand.
With time, I have come to terms with my new role. I have a bunch of degrees that I do not currently use in my daily life (although perhaps that will change as my son grows up), but those are mine and mine alone and nobody can take them away from me. (Even though I do have the occasional nightmare that my PhD has be revoked for one reason or another…) On the other hand, I have a little boy whose giggle lights up my day, whose smile makes me swoon, and peaceful sleep reminds me what a treasure I’ve been given to protect and to shepherd through life. I can’t say that every day is easy, but I can say with utter truth that I feel so fortunate to have witnessed his first steps and heard his first words. While my research was unique, I am not so vain as to think nobody else could pursue the same stream; but who else could be Mama to my little boy?
When we first talked about marriage and eventually starting a family, I realised that I wanted to be the kind of mother who had freshly-baked homemade cookies waiting at the end of the school day. A bit retro, perhaps, but I also assumed my husband’s surname when we married. I suppose, for all my efforts at being an independent (and independently-minded) woman, I’m kind of traditional at heart. It was a conscious decision to be a stay-at-home-mom, and I know that we are extraordinarily fortunate as a family to be able to make that choice. I know many mothers do work in the ivory tower, and I admire them, but I decided early on that I’d rather do one thing well than two things poorly, as I feared would be the case with me. So, for now at least, it is motherhood alone which is my priority; a paid career may follow later on.
Mommyhood isn’t all rose-coloured glasses, and some days I crave contact and conversation with taller, more verbally-developed humans who don’t need me to wipe their bottoms, but on a macro scale (see, I do still have some sort of scholar trapped inside!) I cherish the privilege and joy of having time with our son when, too soon, once he makes friends of his own choosing and starts school and maybe even gets a crush on a teacher, his Mama and Papa will become the backdrops of his life.
I am privileged to have had so many educational opportunities, and I am blessed to have been entrusted with this little being and to have the gift to watch him grow into his own person.
[EDITOR’S NOTE – MelanieA’s research, as a matter of fact, is very unique and I’m proud to call her a friend and a colleague. But I have to agree (somewhat painfully) that yeah, unfortunately, sometimes when women with PhDs became Moms, people forget that they are actually also scholars! GRRRR]
This week has been intense, and I feel really overwhelmed. Between all the things I do online and off-line, I am at the point where the hummingbird needs to take a break. But as always, there are things that I ponder about.
Recently, I have become more aware of the fact that my blogging will probably be a factor in the job decision-making process. If I get a job with the government, will I be able to blog? Will I be able to express the opinions that I have in the same manner? Or should I be subject to a specific standard/code of conduct?
I have been saying that I want Web 2.0 and my blogging to help me get my next job, and I am quite appreciative of the things I have managed to achieve, and the neat things I have been able to do (and all of this, thanks to some very kind people who are in my life now).
Anyhow, not sure where exactly this reflection is going, but figured I should just throw it out there. Particularly since it’s late at night and I’m not 100% sure what I can blog about. But basically, I just want to remind you to donate to the BC Cancer Agency through my page, it’s a very worthy cause.
Furthermore, I would also like to remind my readers that people whom I care for a lot (an Aunt and a friend of mine) are currently afflicted by the illness, and it is to their battle that I dedicate this Blogathon.
This guest post was written and contributed by Dr. Beth Snow from Not to be Trusted With Knives. Dr. Snow was also the official BlogHer correspondant for Miss604.com and you can find her guest posts here
Well, apparently this guest blog posting thing is catching. Last week I was the official BlogHer 2008 correspondent for Miss604.com, and now here I am on Hummingbird604.com. Now I feel out of sorts because I’m not a 6041.But I digress.
First, I’d like to give props to Dr. Raul for supporting the BC Cancer Agency through this 24 hr Blogathon. It’s a really great cause, so it would be wicked awesome if you could donate to the BCCA.
Now, what to blog about, what to blog about. Hmmm…. Ah, yes. I know. I’m going to blog about why you should give me & Raul MacBook Pros. No, really. You should.
As regular readers of HB604 know, Raul’s dream is to own a MacBook Pro. And this is something that R and I share in common, along with our tech geek neophyte status, the fact that we are bloggers, our lengthy time in grad school and resultant crushing student debts2, and our respective ownership of crappy, crappy PC latops.3. And these commonalities are, in fact, all related to why you should give us MacBook Pros. Our geek neophyte (a.k.a. techy geeks-in-training) status means that we like to hang around with grade A geeks. All of whom have Macs. And who look at our sad little PCs and shake their heads. Who answer our questions of “Why won’t my laptop connect to the wifi/run this cool program/stop giving me the blue screen of death?” with a shrug and a “Well, it’s not a Mac, is it?” We really do need each need a Mac if we ever wish to transcend the rank of geek neophyte. So why don’t we just buy ourselves ones, you ask? Well, the answer to that starts with a “c” and ends with a “-rushing student debt.” And since we both have blogs we would totally blog about how awesome you are if you gave us MacBook Pros. And then it would be written on the Internets that you are awesome. Which would make it doubly true, given that, as everyone knows, everything on the Internets is true4.
So, as I see it, there’s no reason not to give us MacBook Pros.
1As I don’t have a 604 number anymore, ever since I ditched my landline and went solely mobile. All the cool kids have 604s.
2I actually have no idea if R has a crushing level of student loan debt, or even if R has student debt at all, but I like to tell myself that I can’t be the only one. Editor’s note – YES, I DO have a crushing level of student debt!
3And before you say it, I know that saying both “crappy” and “PC” is redundant.
4The fact that everything on the Internets is true must be true because you just read it on the Internets and, as you may recall from earlier in this sentence, everything written on the Internets is true.a Q.E.D.
aThis joke was stolen from was adapted from is an homage to the great Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A. And he’s a doctor and I’m a doctor and Raul’s a doctor, so it’s totally legit. No, really.
I just came to Waves in Yaletown to launch my Blogathon 2008 (keep the donations coming!) and my laptop wouldn’t start. I freaked out a bit and thought “well, if worse comes to worse, I’m just going to call Gus or Tanya or someone in Yaletown – needed help!) but luckily my laptop has been behaving ok, so I am pretty well covered I think.
I might swing by Duane‘s or by Rebecca‘s and John Bollwitt‘s for some wi-fi and energy drink to keep me going, depending on how I am feeling. [EDIT – I just received a tweet from John that he’s got fuel for Duane and myself to keep us going, so I’m quite excited. GOOD TIMES. I’m not supposed to be still at the stage when I start having tears flow from my eyes, but they are flowing already… oops]
I had a chance to go to the Backstage Lounge to celebrate CS’s PhD defense (I know, poor HZ, two PhD theses and defenses in a year!). Our usual crowd (minus AF and DM, BB and JN) showed up, ML, JH, BS and myself. We had drinks and yam fries, but I have to say – the prices were steep and the service was pretty lacking. So I am quite unimpressed. I am NOT going to write a nice review of the Backstage Lounge, for sure.
Ok, back to the grind of writing more blog posts. Keep the donations coming! If you need directions towards my donation page, you can click here.
This guest post was written and contributed by Anya from Structured Moments and Beyond Robson
Ahh yes, some people bike across Canada, some run for insane distances, and others… blog. YEP. Welcome me to Blogathon. My name is Anya (or Anna, if you like to be formal) and you probably don’t know who I am. I’m actually quite surprised that Raul offered me to guest blog (thanks! -EDITOR’S NOTE – I like your writing, Anya, that’s why I invited you!) and I’m not too sure how long or thought-out these things are supposed to be. If this is anything like the entries on my own blog, it will be neither long nor thought-out. That’s partly because in about 4 hours I am supposed to be in a car (perhaps driving that car) and on my way to the Pemberton Music Festival.
I’m pretending to be excited about it, but to be honest I am thinking about all the atrocities we’ll have to go through to a) drive there b) get into the venue c) set up our tents and d) somehow get out on Sunday night. 40,000 people are expected to attend. I don’t like Vancouverites enough to spend three days in close proximity with that many of them. But I digress… the other reason why my blog entries aren’t generally accessible is that when I blog for pleasure, it’s really a stream-of-consciousness kind of deal, where I just let my thoughts roam in the jungle (or more like the attic that’s stacked with old creepy dolls) that is my brain.
Oh god. I just did it. I promised that I wouldn’t talk about my blog here because, as numerous people have articulated, talking about your blog is kind of like talking about your dog or your kids. Blah, blah, it’s great, but nobody cares.
So here we go, I’ll talk about something I’ve been meaning to write about myself but haven’t gotten around to. Recently, I saw this ad for BMW on ffffound (have you seen ffffound? It’s like crack cocaine), and it got me thinking a lot about advertising.
Here’s the deal: I am on my way to getting a liberal arts degree, and I’ve loved the little bit of Women’s Studies I have taken. I’m critical, supposedly socially aware, cynical, all that good stuff. But at the same time, I currently work in marketing and I really like my job. Marketing is fascinating and it can be a lot of fun. So when I saw this ad, two parts of me reacted. The feminist me is angry at the use of women’s sexuality in a blatantly demeaning way to sell used cars. USED CARS.
Hold on there a minute, partner, BWM would say: not just any used cars (women, whatever), used BMWs. Which means quality and sexiness and beauty and everything that that girl represents. Anyways, it’s pretty despicable that BMW is recycling the same stereotypes of male sexual dominance and experience in its campaign, and perpetuating the idea that a man is the judge of a woman’s value, which he bases on her level of sexual experience. All that draws me away from this ad, and pisses me off. But the marketer in me keeps going back to this ad because it’s good. It sticks in your mind, and it works. It’s simple and effective, especially for straight men, I would imagine. So, since my readership is a lot smaller than Raul’s, I thought it might be a good place to ask for reactions about the ad over here. What do you think? Are you enraged or do you love it? Are you running to a BWM dealership with cash or with a protest sign? Let me know, I’d love to hear reactions.
That’s it for me! Happy blogging and reading, Blogathon folk! If you’d like to read more of what I have to say, you can do so at Structured Moments or over at Beyond Robson. Or follow me on Twitter or something. The great thing about Web 2.0 is that it gives you myriad stalking options!
Waves in Yaletown kindly offered me a free tea as I always rave about them, and right now my laptop is working but there is a chance that my laptop is going to die so I’m going to see if I can post exactly at 10.30pm and then head home. Sorry if this post is somewhat fluffy but I fully expected that my laptop wouldn’t work, so I am just taking advantage of the fact that it’s working now.
I might head into the West End or simply go home, depending on how long my laptop decides to behave. In the mean time, keep the donations coming!
First of all, thank you to Rebecca for organizing Blogathon 2008, and thanks to all my fellow Blogathoners (whom I’ll mention in a post very soon). I am really excited, as I just had a really nice afternoon and morning with JT, and now heading to meet HZ, CS and a bunch of other friends for another PhD defense celebration.
I invited a bunch of really great bloggers to contribute with guest blog posts, so you won’t be totally bored with only my content. Again, please remember that you can contribute to my fundraising efforts for the BC Cancer Agency by clicking here and donating online. The site is supposed to track the donations in real time, so I’ll know who has donated.
Thanks again so much to sponsors, fellow Blogathoners – good luck and we’ll see you soon!
A few weeks ago, I wrote a guest post for Rebecca’s series on Metro Vancouver parks on Westminster Quay, and this past week that I went to the Surrey Fusion Festival, I drove back through New West (JT was too tired to drive, which is fine since I love driving, and he never gets to see the views I enjoy whenever he drives out).
If I worked from home (I do now, but I mean, well-paid!), or I married rich and retired, I think I would seriously consider buying an apartment in Westminster Quay. The views are great and I really enjoyed walking around this area, and the Skytrain station (New Westminster) is literally minutes away. I found the walk a bit too much for me, but it was because at the time, I was kind of tired. But overall, I probably would move to this area, for sure.
Given my current workload (and some personal circumstances) I decided to still do Blogathon to raise funds for the BC Cancer Agency, but instead of doing the Sunshine Shift (5:00am on Saturday to 5:00am on Sunday), I am going to be doing Friday July 25th at 10pm to Saturday July 26th at 10pm. I’ll try to juggle my work commitments with my blogging commitments. We’ll see whether I succeed or not.
The BC Cancer Agency was kind enough to include me in their Calendar of Events!
A number of local blogger friends of mine are also doing Blogathon (see Rebecca’s wonderful Blogathon page). If you want to pledge and support my efforts, you could do one of two things
1) Go to Rebecca’s page and submit the form with your pledge. Once Blogathon is over, I will email you reminding you to submit your donation to BCCA.
or
2) Go directly to the page that BC Cancer Agency generated for me.
Thanks in advance! Please be aware that no money goes through me, and that all your donations will have a tax receipt issued by BCCA. Also – if you follow me on Twitter or you read my RSS feeds, you should know that you’ll be flooded with 49 posts.
