Bad way to introduce your business

I am on very few mailing lists, mostly due to my reluctance to participate in things with people. Somehow, I’m on a folk music list. I think I was harvested from a group email to the members of PWAC (Professional Writers Association of Canada) so I get the occasional heads up about an upcoming evening of boring, sleepy and long-winded music. Huzzah.

I’m also on a theatre-related list, from my previous involvement with the Grand theatre’s Playwright’s cabaret. It’s a little irritating now, since I haven’t made it into the last two Cabarets, but that’s my own fault for submitting really slapdash work. I wanted to find the quality threshold for the contest (it seems) and I found it. My heart wasn’t in it so I did a half-assed job and that is a generous assessment of the amount of effort I put in. That should limit the shame of failure but strangely enough it did not. But I digress.

The most recent list email I received has the dubious distinction of being the worst commercial email I’ve ever received. It wasn’t to the level of gibberish spam email touting penis pills and cheap watches, but it wasn’t pretty.

I shouldn’t make too much of a big deal about this, I guess. They only mis-spelled 1 word. Unfortunately, it was one of the words in their company name. And the incorrect spelling was in 4 different locations in the email, including the ‘from’ field.  Oh, for the love of a good editor. I don’t think I’ll be attending their event.

Good enough-let’s roll!

Holidays are a strange time for me.  I have  a very weird and difficult relationship with my relatives and progress has been slow in making things any better. Of course, when I was a young dumb man with no  real concerns,  this didn’t matter to me. I thought that they could take care of themselves, I would live my life, and everyone would be just fine. The story totally changes when Max makes his entrance.

There’s a need for normalcy that plays into my renewed attempts at doing traditional family things, so that he doesn’t feel out-of-place or odd when his friends and playmates talk about their families. I want Max to have at least a basic sense of having a complete circle of family members who would care for and help him. And so, I put effort into trying to build a new and improved version of my family relations. I don’t have  the best toolkit to do so,  but you gotta work with what you have.

Tonight was our Thanksgiving dinner, and it went well. My brother and his family weren’t a part of this one, and their exclusion was equal parts accident and venue restrictions. We just don’t have seating to host us, plus my mother and aunt, plus my sister-in-law PLUS my brother and his wife and two kids. I do feel bad that they weren’t a part of things, but I’m not sure if I could have  managed the entire group with full attendance. In the grand scheme of things, I hope they can understand and let it slide.

On the plus side, I made a good dinner. Doing all of the cooking (aside from the dishes brought by our lovely guests) helped me handle the whole situation. It kept me busy, involved but slightly removed, and in control of something.  Max’s harmonica concert at the end of the evening was a real crowd pleaser. And, I got to give my mother my stern dadface when she forgot to use the magic word. Ah, the sweet power. I have to remember as well that I really enjoy my aunt’s company, and I should put extra effort into spending more time with her.

And now, with fatigue settling in, Max’s bedtime underway,  and a  pot of turkey soup coming into existence upstairs, I can sit back and relax.

 

Stop weirding me out, little dude

I came upstairs last night to find Max leading his mother on a quest for items he needed to take care of his ‘baby’, a small teddy bear from his room. This baffled me. He has shown some caregiver behaviors before, like brushing the teeth of a few of his stuffed animals during  teeth-brushing time, but the focus, determination and complexity of his taking care of baby baffled me.

It turns out that one of his friends is quite fond of her baby doll, and he saw her playing mommy at her birthday party.  I would have never bet on Max deciding to devote over an hour to dressing, feeding, and tucking in his baby. I don’t even like pretending to take care of a baby right now, so it’s a little hard for me to be an enthusiastic participant in the baby game. Nonetheless, I helped him get his old baby chair from the basement and set it up for his furry little child.

As an added bonus, the baby chair has a motor in it to generate a gentle vibrating sensation to soothe a grumpy child. I had forgotten all about that motor, and I spent a good half hour trying to identify the quiet buzzing noise that was lurking in the living room. Oh that boy.