Random Tuesday: Best Just Stay Home Edition

Welcome to Tuesday. I have a headache, the weather is crappy, and good people are dying. I’m going to stay home and eat cookies and watch penguins.

• Is it snowing where you are? It’s snowing a little bit here. But it’s nowhere NEAR as bad as in London ON, where they are expecting 100 cm of snow before the storm they’re having ends. But here’s the thing: London is an hour’s drive from here. They just happen to be in a snow belt, and we’re in the black hole of weather. No, we’re like the ANTI-Bermuda Triangle of weather. Weather happens north of us, and west through London, and maybe along the 401 corridor… but we don’t often get much of anything here (well, except tornadoes. We’re good at tornadoes.) So as long as we don’t have to go anywhere, we’re fine. Of course, that would be easier if we DID have a big-ass snowstorm falling on our heads. Can’t have a Snow Day without some fricking snow, right? Hmmm. We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

• Yesterday gave me a few moments of sad, as it was announced that Mark Dailey passed away. Now, many, if not MOST of you, have no idea who Mark Dailey was. And some of you do, and maybe don’t know it. Mark Dailey was, for all intents and purposes, the Voice of Toronto. Mark was the announcer at CITY-TV in Toronto for the last 30 years, famous for tagging “CITY-TV. Everywhere.” in that incredible baritone of his. And for bookending shows with hilarious, sarcastic commentary. He also did newscasts, and Speaker’s Corner stuff, and was a crime beat reporter, among many other things. If you grew up in southern Ontario in the 80s and 90s, you grew up listening to Mark Dailey. And as a kid who watched a lot of CITY, his voice was just part of my experience, and so I was really saddened by his passing. I never met the man, but he was generally regarded as just an all around stand up guy, one of the nicest, most decent people you’d ever want to meet. At the age of 57, he succumbed much too young to a battle with cancer that he fought hard, and on TV a lot of the time, in an effort to raise awareness that men need to “check under the hood”, as I think he phrased it. So, rest in peace, Mark. You were the voice of a city, and you were well loved. Everywhere.

• I made gingerbread yesterday. My world-famous, much-sought-after gingerbread cookies. (Well, technically it’s not MY recipe. I totally stole it from Canadian Living. And then I take credit for the cookie goodness.) I know I told you I made dough, but that dough eventually made it into COOKIE FORM. Well, some of it did, anyway. It was deelish. And Tova and Karen? I TOTALLY did not feel festive while making them. Not at ALL. I also am not feeling festive while eating them with a mug of tea. I guess I’ll have to make some more to see if it brings on the festiveness.

• Also? Tomorrow may be the LAST in Stinkerbelle’s craft-and-gym classes! ACK! I don’t know. I think it may be. On the one hand, that’s good because she really only enjoyed the gym part of the class; not so much the craft part. But on the other hand, the teacher really tried hard (she’s a student at the university so I cut her a ton of slack and she really tried to do a lot of great thinks with the kids) and it was good for Stinkerbelle to get out and be part of a class and be with other kids. She just TOTALLY never got into the whole “okay, now let’s do THIS!!’ structure of things. And I never got into the whole trying-to-get-my-kid-to-engage-and-not-be-a-butthead-that-runs-around-being-loud thing. So I am kind of mixed on the class ending, to be honest. But the thing that I’m angsting over is… is there going to be some sort of party thing tomorrow to which I will have not gotten the memo about dressing up or bringing in treats to share or whatever, thereby looking (once again) like Incompetent Mom? Oh well, you’d think I’d be used to it by now.

• Alright people. In the spirit of fun, not to mention embracing the snowishness, I give you: PENGUIN-CAM! Live penguins, doing penguin-y things, all the time! Okay, not ALL the time, because it’s in Edinburgh, Scotland, and, well, sometimes it’s nighttime. Like right now. It’s a whole lot of night there. Not much in the way of penguins going on. But in the daytime… PENGUIN EXTRAVAGANZA! (It’s also a time-sucking vampire of a site, and yet? They’re cute and funny, so somehow it’s okay to waste hours watching penguins do penguin-ish stuff.)