This Much is True

Well, while Christmas was a busy time for me, it was also a busy time for my book with a couple of reviews coming out for A Few Kinds of Wrong in the week before Christmas. Both were great reviews and lovely presents. You can check out some quotes from them on my reviews page.

Of course, Christmas was about family and presents and remembering how grateful we are for all we have. Santa was super-busy with not one but two visits–one to Nanny and Poppy’s house in Aspen Cove and one to Nanny and Poppy’s house in Ladle Cove and was even kind enough to drop by and leave a gift each for the boys in the small boxes Sam left under our tree in CBS. Needless to say, two Christmas mornings of presents from us and from Santa left us tired, “spent”, you might even say. I think I might do something different and review some of the presents in another post since everything I buy means a trip to the Internet first and checking on reviews others have posted. Maybe my opinions could help other people. The big hits, I’ll tell you now, were the night-vision goggles, Martian Matter, the Hexbug Nanos and habitat, and Elmo Live.

New Years Eve found us, as always at our friends, the Holletts, for supper, fireworks in the backyard, birthday cake to celebrate Pam’s birthday, and clinking of glasses at midnight. I couldn’t help thinking that ten years before we were celebrating the end of the millenium down at the waterfront and we didn’t even know the Holletts or what good friends they would become to us. Back then, if someone had told me that in ten years I would have quit my job at a detox centre to return to university and do IT, then worked at that university (Memorial University of Newfoundland) in IT, would be married, would have two children, would have two books published, would have won an award for writing, would have quit work to stay home with my kids, and that ten years from then, I would be truly happy, well, that’s a lot to take in and I, of course, would have laughed my ass off at your silly predictions. You never know, do you?

Happy new year everyone and may this new year bring you joy, laughter, and health. Don’t forget to celebrate the small moments along with the big ones.

My wish for you in 2010, is for you to be overjoyed. As the brilliant Christine Kane sings

All of the world is designed to remind you
All of the light you could find is inside
Under all of the noise
Here’s your chance to be overjoyed

This song, like others by Christine Kane, is available on iTunes. (Also check out the vid of No Such Thing As Girls Like That. It’s a hoot.)

Yes, that’s snow falling on my blog. Most of the blog is white so it doesn’t disturb reading much so I decided to do it. I like it. And I don’t have to shovel it. It’ll just be snowing on my blog until after the new year.

Well, I don’t really know you but I love what you said when you called Perez Hilton out as a “talentless dope”. This gives me hope that maybe there could be an end to the whole trend of people, who are devoid of talent, somehow becoming celebrities and being yammered on about on “entertainment” shows. So what will any waitress who has ever “served” Tiger Woods, and Jon Gosselin, and Michael Lohan, and Octomom, and anyone who has come in contact with Michael Jackson in the past fifty years, and anyone who has the last name “Kardashian”, and Spencer Pratt, and Heidi Montag, and…(well, we could go on a long time here but the idea of all these people is making me quite nauseous) do with themselves if the trend ends? Who cares?

Thank you, Sam. You’ve given me hope.

I’m not sure when I became a fan of Coronation Street. I think I watched it my entire life because surely my mom watched it while I was an infant. It was a constant in our home. When Coronation Street was on there was to be no talking and no answering the phone. And somewhere along the line, I started to like it. Maybe it’s how the show doesn’t drag things out for months and months like American soaps, maybe it’s because the people on it don’t all look perfect and they drink and they smoke and they even go to the bathroom. They eat toast in the morning, sitting at their tables, hair sticking off , faces reflecting how tired they are. They don’t look perfectly coiffed and wear their high heels and designer gowns around the house.

And they have memorable characters. Maggie Jones played one such memorable character–Blanche Hunt, a woman who never held anything back and could cut you down with a look or a put-down sharp enough cut through the toughest skin. Maggie Jones passed away this week at age 75. She played her last scenes in October but we in Canada will have to wait a good while to see those as we are several months behind in our episodes of Coronation Street. RIP Maggie Jones and thanks for all the laughs. If you’ve never seen her in action or want to again, here’s a video of her at an AA meeting, there to support her step-grandson. For Canadian viewers, the first part won’t be much of a spoiler as we all know Peter has a problem by now but if you go past 1:55 on the video, other spoilers will be revealed. It’s the first 1:55 that is classic Blanche anyway. No one could deliver those cutting lines like Maggie Jones. Also, check out a BBC video which lets you see Maggie Jones on Corrie in the 70s.

Some things can just make you smile with tears in your eyes. What simple yet powerful things we can do if we just choose to do so.

The geek in me thinks this Project Natal thing looks soo… oh no, there I’ve gone and drooled all over my keyboard. If I win the lottery, or sell the movie rights for my books, maybe I can have this one day.

And while I am excited by the idea, based on my experience with voice recognition software, I don’t think I’ll be winning any trivia games. I can just imagine how it might go:

Machine: Who wrote the books A Few Kinds of Wrong and This Much is True? (What? A girl can dream can’t she? Maybe the trivia game will have that as a question. It’s within the realm of possibility since the books exist and all.)

Me (after fainting and being revived several minutes later): Tina Chaulk.

Machine: No, I am sorry. Team her shock is not the correct answer.

Machine: What is the name of the anthem of Newfoundland and Labrador? (What? That might be a question.  In the super-hard category, you know, for those annoying people who know everything and can quote obscure 18th century poems and whole chapters from the Bible AND every line from the Simpsons. You know the kind I’m talking about. )

Me: The Ode to Newfoundland:

Machine: No, I am sorry. The old do to move the man’s is not correct.

Me: Oh, %*$# off.

Machine: No, I am sorry. Flock of is not the answer either.

This is my new favourite video. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, just take three minutes or so to have a listen. And if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo, have a listen anyway, because it’s very catchy.

You can catch more videos from Kristina Horner on YouTube or you can read her blog.

You know when someone calculates the Vampire National Product of a nation (and finds it to be $771.5 million annually), that there’s a bit of a frenzy going on. And there is. It’s all about the new sequel to the movie New Moon, based on the second novel from the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.  It’s hoped that it will bring in $100 million on this, its opening weekend. I know people who don’t live anywhere near a movie theatre who will drive for hours today to use the tickets they bought last month to see the movie. There’s a whole lexicon to describe, not just Twilight and Twilight related things but the various levels of Twilight fans–from twilighter (a moderate fan) to twi-hard (a more obsessive fan) to twitard (someone really, really out there in obsessive fan love for Twilight), and right back to the people who don’t like Twilight and are called antis. (And if this alleged list of attacks on antis by Twilight fans is true, you might not want to be so vocal about not liking the series.)

And I don’t mind telling you I’m a teensy bit jealous. I really mean a teensy bit because I know the nature of this beast and that even if I could write a vampire book and do it justice, and hit all the right notes that Stephenie Meyer seems to have done with the Twilight series, chances are my vampire book would not create this kind of frenzy. This is an anomaly in the book world, just like when JK Rowling was told she would never make any money writing books for children then released the Harry Potter series, or when Dan Brown published his fourth book about a Da Vinci Code after publishing three novels which didn’t sell more than 10,000 copies each in their first runs. It’s lik e winning the lottery only much better because you made the money by doing something you love. So, the title of this post is facetious but I can’t help being a litle jealous and wondering what would have happened if Jennifer Collins, the main character in A Few Kinds of Wrong maybe drank blood instead of coffee, or could do a few magic spells on the side, or dropped her wrench, left the garage, and ran off to Rome to figure out a Vatican mystery. Hmmm, maybe I should start thinking about a sequel. A Few Kinds of Blood? A Few Kind of Magic? I’ll keep working on it.

Well, the words of the year lists have started coming out and already they have me painfully rolling my eyes (apparently you can’t roll them allllll the way back–once you get so far, it really hurts!) and ranting to my computer. At which time, my computer said, don’t tell me, go post on your blog about it.

Let’s start with the University of Oxford Press. They’ve named ‘unfriend’ as its word of the year. I know they just pick these things to cause debate but for me this particular word and this particular whole list makes me want to ‘unlearn’ what I’ve read on their list. For those of you who don’t know, ‘unfriend’ is a verb and means “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook”. Now, I don’t know what the reasons for this being the word of the year are.  Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program, says that the word has “real lex-appeal” and explains some more in their announcement. It’s not a particularly wonderful word to say as in, say my own personal favourite word, nonchalant. It’s not really a twist on the meaning of words like, for instance, the word Stephen Colbert created and Merriam-Webster named its 2006 word of the year, ‘truthiness’. ‘Unfriend’ seems boring and I’m pretty sure no one will understand it in ten, maybe five, maybe even one year. Really, the whole list has some pretty sad sack words, like ‘hashtag’ (the hash sign you add into twitter posts as a way of tagging certain words) and the ridiculous–I am not kidding you here–’teabagger’ which the Oxford University Press says refers to a person who takes part in the anti-Obama Tea Party protests, but which is much better know as someone who partakes in teabagging which is, um, well, I’ll let Wikipedia tell you about it.

When you look at their complete list of notable words, it’s hard to find one that’s not related to either technology or Obama. Oh, but there’s “tramp stamp’ (a tattoo on the lower back of a woman) which has only been around since about 2003. Oxford University Press, if you were my facebook friend, you know what I’d do, don’t ya? I’ll give you a hint. It’s the word of the year.

Then onto Webster’s New World which has chosen as its word of the year, “Distracted Driving”. Hmm, is that a word? I mean, it’s two words, maybe more of a term of the year. But, maybe some of their other notable words could be more like words. There’s um, well, they say that other notable ‘words’ are ‘cloud computing’ and ‘wallet biopsy’, ‘wrap rage’ and ‘go viral’. Here’s one: Word– “a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use” or “any segment of written or printed discourse ordinarily appearing between spaces or between a space and a punctuation mark”. Maybe you could get your head around that one and then give us a word of the year.

I know, that’s just two words of the year, but the others are not out yet (at least I couldn’t find them). I’ll get back to you when Merriam-Webster’s and the American Dialect Society tells us their picks. I bet they’ll be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Now, THAT is a word.