Big Boy Joy

Conversation with the Big Boy this morning, who is with the Grands this weekend while I finish up IL:

BB: Hi Mummy [resigned voice]
Me: Hi Big Boy!
BB: Mummy, I miss you A LOT. [matter-of-fact voice]
Me: Oh, I miss you too.
BB: Where ARE you? [confused voice]
Me: Ottawa, at school.
BB: Oh, yeah. Now you've got 'zams. Lots of 'zams. [sympathetic voice]
Me: Yes, lots of exams.
BB: And lots of reading. Lots of reading. Are you coming home on Monday?
Me: Not Monday, Friday. Five sleeps [I count the sleeps with him]
BB: YEEESSSSSSSS!

He's starting to sound a lot older on the phone now. Like a little adult. I don't think I could take this much longer. He makes me too happy. I'm totally selfish for his love, his little kisses, his hysterical sense of humour, and his good company. Even if the Big Boy weren't my kid, I think we'd be friends. I mean, how can you not be friends with someone who adores you?! Aside from the adoration, there are definitely less than 10 people in this world who crack me up like he does. There's lots of other good things about him too, but if I get into them all, I'll just sound like one of those biased mothers (which would be true, but he's actually fabulous).

Rituals

It finally feels like I'm writing spring exams and not winter exams. Snow storm on Monday, but yesterday it was 18 degrees or something like that. Actually warm. I've been studying steady (almost) for the last 10 days, however, and I notice my exam rituals. I think I have three fairly reoccuring ones:

1Rroom cleaning. At the beginning of exams I always to a major clean up and then I basically have to start every day after tidying. Because by the end of a day of studying there's paper, coffee cups, glasses and the detritus of brain junk all over the place.

2) Music. This semester it's Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, Count Basie and a little Bob Marley (because the sun finally came out). Last semester it was Chris Isaac, Sarah Harmer, Hawksley, Cat Power. Apparently I needed mellowing last semester.

3) Junk food. I bought Coke last night. This is almost the only time I drink pop. I'm not even a mixed-drink kind of pop drinker. There will probably also be Pizza Pizza, M&Ms, chips. It's kind of like an act of desperation. I have no good excuses for this one!

Anyone got good exam karma for me?

Hitched!

Wow! I've been married to a nice guy for six years today. SIX YEARS! That's pretty good, I think. And what's really good is that I'm more sure today than I was eight years ago (when we got together) why we're great. It's a bit of a comfort to know that things have actually improved in our relationship over time. None of that post-honeymoon let-down. We're still getting better!

Anyway, to AHC, it really sucks that I'm not home today with you and the fruits of our (*my*) labours, but soon we'll be through this most difficult of years. History tells us that we keep getting better, so there's no reason to doubt that now...

And now that I'm in law school, I kind of love the fact that I got married in the Court of the Queen's Bench at Osgoode Hall. I loved it before, but my career path makes it extra-extra special (for the sentimentalist in me who likes tradition and lineage).

Home Stretch

It was rather anti-climactic, but my last class of 1L occured yesterday. There's a lot going on, so I failed to notice that I'd made it this far. "Made it" being a relative term. This was kind of a crappy semester, between the vertigo and the ear infections and the family strain (they are getting so sick of me being absent). Also, I haven't really made anything until I pass those final exams, which will hopefully be at least mediocre. You know it's been a bad semester when I am hoping for mediocre.

I have two papers and four exams to go. I already miss my friends. I'm a cocooner at exam time. I don't play well with others. I'm a study group failure. I kind of hate every person who ever encouraged me to go to law school. But it will pass. I hope. Since I really like some of those people.

Good luck to my prof who had to cancel class this morning. It's the best of times and the worst of times for awhile, but it usually gets better...

It's a Small, Small Wiki After All

I just found out that a guy I had a fling with in highschool has a wikipedia page. This is what living with your high school friend with a laptop and a highspeed wireless connection does to you.

Seriously, I should be studying.

The Riot Grrls Will Not be Happy

Argh! There's a porn movie on an adult channel (which, by the way, I do not subscribe to, I just see the menu) called "Grrrl Power!" Talk about co-opting the women's movement for the wrong reasons. And something tells me it's not of the feminist porn genre. Could it be that it's on the Hustler channel. Yup, that might be it.

Oops

I just dropped my cellphone into my coffee.

Opinions on whether that's bad?

This Week in Survival

I turned and faced the strain this week, which meant a return to the family in Toronto. It's been a long seven months of me being mostly gone and we're all feeling it.

This week I got by on:

• Loose leaf Earl Grey tea
• Raking the yard
• Putting air in the bike tires for spring
• After dinner walks around the neighbourhood
• Mommy sandwiches
• Picnics on the front porch (first one of spring) and on the livingroom floor
• Planning a feminist counter-culture bachelor(ette) party for a great friend
• Buying new mechanical pencils
  
• Hot butterscotch toddy before bed

Without classes to get in my way, I have actually been doing quite a lot of work, co-mingled with quite a lot of family time. Sometimes school is not the end all be all, and that's just the way it is.

Eat Your Heart Out

I love AHC. He is so delightful that he agreed to bring his chef self to Ottawa and cook for my small group. One of our profs is a sommalier and she agreed to do the wine pairing. And one of my colleagues (and his lovely wife) with a real house, including real (i.e. not student) kitchen offered to host us. I think there were 24 of us all together. Here's the menu, to set your mouth a-watering:

Smoked salmon on pesto-glazed crostini w/ drizzle of balsamic-soy reduction
*
Ginger-lobster salsa on Belgian endive with rice vinaigrette
*
Tequila-lemongrass broth
*
Lamb shank or chicken with shitake mushroom risotto and steamed bok choi
*
Watermelon-basil palette refresher
*
Chocolate mousse & flourless chocolate torte w/ sake flambéd berries.

Wines:

Quinta de Cabriz Vino Espumante Qualidade Bruto, 2004

Jean-Paul Godinat Quincy, 2005

Five Rivers Pinot Noir, 2005

Cuvee des Ardoises Chateau des Earles, 2003

Moscato d'Asti, 2006

Ho-ly Christ. It was a fantastic meal, if I do say so myself. Nice work, AHC, and nice work Prof. Sommalier.

Richard Posner, One Helluva Guy

I recently read the following passage in Solove & Rotenberg, eds., Information Privacy Law (New York: Aspen Publishers 2003) at p. 41. (Sorry if the citation is wrong. Where is my goddamned McGill Guide when I need it?!)

One economic argument for privacy is that sometimes people form irrational judgments based upon learning certain information about others. For example, an employer may not hire certain people based on their political views or associations, sexual orientation, mental illness, and prior criminal convictions -- even though these facts may have no relevance to a potential employee's abilities to do the job. These judgments decrease efficiency. Posner, in his book, The Economics of Justice, offers a response:

This objection overlooks the opportunity costs of shunning people for stupid reasons, or, stated otherwise, the gains from dealing with someone whom others shun irrationally. If ex-convicts are good workers but most employers do not know this, employers who do know will be able to hire them at a below-average wage because of their depressed job opportunities and will thereby obtain a competitieve advantage over the bigots. In a diverse, decentralized, and competitive society, irrational shunning will be weeded out over time..." [emphasis added]

Now, I'm as much of a fan of the law and economics perspective as the next person (*ahem*) but am I the only one who thinks that 1) the above statement is practically inhumane and 2) Posner is a blindly faithful fool if he thinks that irrational shunning will be weeded out in a decentralized and competitive society? Because, yeah, so far that's totally playing out. Or maybe when he says "over time" he means like a really really loooooooong time when we'll all be, you know, dead.

You Do It To Yourself, You Do

In a cruel twist, I am being punished for making light of dead grandmothers (who are not legitimately dead anyhow, so I don't know why I am being punished).

More or less 24 hours ago, I brought up "Dead Grandmother Season" and what happens to me? Struck down by dual ear infections. And when I say struck down, I mean it kind of literally, in that
my balance is all screwed up and I walked into a doorframe and practically knocked myself unconscious. [Stop laughing at me!]

Now the pressure in my ears is so intense that I can't sleep, which would be very nice, and I can't do anything useful, which would at least be productive. Poor poor me.

In lieu of useful or very nice, and in an attempt to distract myself, I just spend 5 minutes checking out Feminist Law Professors. This post positively made me cry, and not because of my ears. Ann Bartow is my new flavour of the month (and perhaps longer, but I won't know until I can spend more than 5 minutes at a time reading). Thanks to the CRCELT for pointing out this blog. Someday I hope to know as many cool things and people, but I doubt if I'll ever catch up now.

Pointless Law Question of the Day + One Embarassing Moment

I don't know why this thought popped into my head, but I was wondering what happens to all of the "R. v."s when we don't have a Queen anymore? When Charles takes over, will we call cases The King v. So-and-so, Rex Regis v. So-and-so? Someone, please clear this up for me.

My embarassing moment occured when I ran into one of my profs on the way out of FTX. He asked me how I was doing, and I replied that I was busy with school work and that it was getting to be "Dead Grandmother Season". He had this just absolutely horrified look on his face and seemed worried for a minute until I said that I just meant that it was getting to be that time of year where people start coming up with excuses for not getting their work done. As in "Sorry my paper is late, my grandmother died." As one former-prof friend of mine said, "they start dropping like flies this time of year."

I suppose I may have been a bit presumptuous - I just assumed he'd get that since he's a prof and I heard that expression from other of my profs (though not law profs). So wow, I don't know if he now thinks that I have really poor taste in humour or what, but the look on his face was kind of priceless (even if he does think I'm a bad person now for making light of poor dead grandmothers).

Train Etiquette

I've learned a thing or two about train etiquette since I've been taking the train about six times a month for the past six months. I'm a commuter on the VIA passenger service, so my perspective is a little more sophisticated perhaps, than someone who is just an occasional traveller.

I was mightily annoyer nearly the entire ride home yesterday morning with a passenger who was sitting behind me. She decided to share far too much information with the women sitting across from her. For example, I know that she's on her third degree (you'd think someone was giving her the third degree), and she's in teacher's college right now; she once took a class in which she had to learn all of the states and their capitals, as well as countries and capitals (or maybe she knows someone who was teaching that class); her boyfriend's name is Tom and he's a swell guy; they've had quite a lot of long distance in their relationship due to travel and school, but they talk all the time (like that morning and the night before); she was quite ill this fall and had to be hospitalized for a while; when she got out, Tom re-arranged his schedule so he could be in Ottawa with her and he had to follow her around for two weeks because she had some balance problem which could have caused her to topple over at any moment; she has a brother who is two years younger than her, who was put into a private school as a teenager because their parents were worried about his behaviour; said brother went through three post-sec programs in two years and couldn't decide on one until finally Dad refused to pay anymore; now Brother is working for Dad and he's turned himself around - all of the customer's love him because he's a real charmer and no one has a bad word to say about him; she struggled with the decision whether to pay for a cab to the train station in the morning, but she decided to in the end and she tipped the cabbie (who spent the entire time on the phone) because he was really friendly; she lives somewhere within a $12 cab ride of the train station in a first floor apartment with a few steps walk-up; I also know her opinions on the Children's Aid Society, manners and a general parental failure to teach them these days (as if, we get blamed for everything), friendliness, cleanliness and godliness. Okay, I don't know if she talked about godliness - I slept half the time. But the rest of it is true.

It's not that I care if she shares all sorts of personal and pointless information with strangers. It's really more that she did it in a carrying voice for all to hear. Talking in the train requires something akin to a stage whisper. Loud talking on the train is probably the biggest breach of etiquette. Forget the safety cards in the seats - print the rules of etiquette.

Buyer Beware

A bizarre catalogue arrived in my mailslot last week. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why I would have been sent the "Security Cameras Direct" catalogue, which contains interesting items such as the "World's Smallest Color Video Camera" (USD$125), the "Ultra-tiny Video Camera" (USD$89), and my personal favourite, the "Hidden Camera Inside Smoke Detector" (USD$79 for the wide angle model).

Alright, I don't want to stereotype, but it all seemed so American to me. Which is why it didn't take me too long to recall that I bought AHC a pair of opera glasses for Christmas. We like opera. It was also kind of a joke because AHC needs new glasses and he keeps putting it off. (Seriously, man, just go get the damned things!) Anyway, I was having some trouble finding them (not helped by the fact that I left it a bit late in spite of having this good idea for at least a month before the holidays), so I turned to the world wide web for a little shopping. Practically the only place I could find the ones I wanted was on this American website. In spite of my trepidation about turning my credit card info over to a US company (as if they don't have it anyway), I clicked my way to a pair of opera glasses for AHC.

Is there some correlation between opera glasses and security cameras that I am unaware of? It just seems so unlikely to me. God only knows what mailing/marketing list I've gotten myself onto now. It's my own fault, I know. As TF&C put it: "if you... don't want your personal information collected by retailers and data munchers, don't buy so much crap and quit putting pictures of yourself on the internet."

Marriage v. Marriage

Lest anyone be confused about the marriage I was referring to in my last post, it was my marriage to law school and the law in general. I realised post-post that it was not exactly clear that I was referring to my law marriage, as opposed to my actual marriage to AHC. That marriage is fine. In fact, who knows where I'd be without it?

In fact, it is my pining for that marriage (among other things) that is making me a bit annoyed with law school. I really like AHC and the kids. We have fun together, so it sucks that my focus is elsewhere for significant expanses of time. But, like my parents before me, the two significant relationships in my life are destined to be with my family and my career. They will forever compete and will frequently be spitting at each other, I'm sure. Sometimes it will be okay, and sometimes I will disappear into my job, partly by virtue of who I am (ambitious, dedicated to hard work, and hopefully loyal to the job), and partly by nature of the work. Lawyering and law is not necessarily a 9-5 gig. I accept it; it suits my character anyhow.

All marriages require commitment, dedication, hard work, love, fun, humour. Marriage isn't easy, but it's worth it if you're in the right one. I'm lucky that both of the marriages I'm in are right.

Honeymoon's Over

Law school is annoying me right now. The only reason we're not getting a divorce is because of the offspring of this relationship (TF&C, Trixie, indiglo®, et. al.), the cost of a divorce (tuition, living expenses, year of lost wages), and because I'm not a quitter. I believe in marriage counselling. At least three years worth. And by that time I'll have graduated, so I might as well stick it out, at least for the sake of the children.

Existential crisis anyone?

Time: Marching On

Holy! It's March 1! I'm in shock!

Those extra 3-4 days in the month (i.e. the ones between 29-31) are sure useful. Why does February only have 28 days? I can't really remember. Please enlighten me.

The Beaver: Not the Only Clichéd Canadian Symbol

My friend, who works at Heritage Canada, was rather frustrated at the use of the beaver for the PIPWatch toolbar. Because, as she said, there are more clichéd Canadian symbols out there than just the beaver. For example:

The moose
The lumberjack
Igloo (can you imagine? The privacy igloo)
The Bluenose
The Rocky Moutains
Tuques
Hockey, hockey hair, hockey players
The Great White North
Northern Lights
Mounties
The maple leaf

Anyhow, you get the idea. It's hard for me to know whether those PIPWatch people were being deliberately funny when picking the beaver, or just kind of lazy. Post it in comments if you have other fine clichéd Canadian symbols.

Conference Fun

I spent the day at the Internet Privacy Symposium, hosted by uOttawa's Law & Technology program and the Privacy Commisioner of Canada. All quite interesting, but we still managed to have some completely distracted fun, which I've received permission to blog (all anonymously, as usual, but anyone who actually knows who I am will be able to guess who the culprits are. I officially have to come up with blog names for all of my friends who appear).

So there was once session that talked about the PIPWatch toolbar. It's kind of a long story, but it's a Firefox extension that essentially has to do with rating the privacy policies of websites. And one of their symbols is - I'm not kidding - the privacy beaver. It shows green, yellow or red as a quick visual indicator of the "acceptability" of the privacy policy. So my small group friend Vimutra (he picked that name for himself, not me!) leans over to me and says, "I thought everyone's beaver was private." Except maybe Paris Hilton on the Internet, so I wonder what colour her privacy beaver rating would be? Ok, I apologize immediately for that, but I'm not retracting.

At some later point, during the post-lunch attention span lull, I'm sorry to say that we devolved into a bit of note passing. In our defence, this did honestly start out as academic discussion ("What about the potential privacy apps that are counter to corporate interests? Are they funding that?"), but it degenerated into a very short game of primary school check box and "Who would you do?" (listen, it's not that I engage in this kind of behaviour a lot, but we all do it so stop being so judgmental already). I did have a couple of good ones, but the only one I'll admit to is "The PIPWatch beaver or the Greyhound dog". Once again, I apologize, but I think this is maybe the kind of behaviour the emerges at conferences for short 10 min periods.

The rest of the time I was totally focused and learning really interesting things. For example: Some company called Citywatcher.com was requiring some employees to implant RFIDs in order to enter into a secure data centre. Did you all get that? Some job is requiring their employees to implant RFIDs in order to carry out their duties. As in your boss requiring you to implant a device into your body. Wow, I can't imagine I'm the only one who's a bit spooked by that. As I said to TF&C, "But can't you see how secure that data site is now? Someone would have to hack off their arm to get into that place." A real victory for secure data. [sarcasm]

Then there was this cool guy, Yves Poullet who spoke on the subject of third generation privacy laws. He's not a native English speaker (though, like many Europeans I've met, totally competent) and his Power Point slide had this sentence:

"Governments have lost the control"

To which TF&C immediately deadpanned:

"It's between the cushions of the couch."

Am I the only one who thinks that funny? TF&C also brought up the notion of being a data terrorist. The fact that I've written the word "terrorist" on my blog will probably have me indexed somewhere now, but anyway, I think it's kind of an interesting concept. What exactly would a data terrorist do, and would one be considered to work on the side of good or evil? (Good and evil being quite subjective notions in the realm of privacy. Please discuss.)

Also totally fantastic is the fact that Yves Poullet's bio says that, in addition to having a PhD, he holds a "License in Philosophy". Holy Christ! Some university (in Europe, I suppose) grants a license in philosophy. As TF&C said (ok, he's everywhere in this post, but we were sitting beside each other), it's harder to get than a license to kill. Oh my God! Could you imagine if it was a "License to Philosophy"? That would be the cat's meow. Then, afterwards, I actually chatted with Poullet for a minute and he said I could come see him in Belgium. I am SO into that.

Also on the subject of "Poullet" (and this will be my last point because this post is becoming unwieldy), at some point I had to notice that in English, you don't find anyone with the last name "Chicken". You don't even find anyone with the last name "Chiken". Why do you suppose that is???

I Eat Food Yum Yum!

A Humble Chef has started a recipe blog. Apparently one of my lady friends tried out the brownie recipe he posted and brought them to work and they sort of, ahem, went down really well. So her colleagues been asking where on Earth did she get that fantastic recipe. So I made AHC make a new blog.

Prepare to be impressed!

CHALLENGE: Whom among you is astute enough to catch the reference to Canadian children's lit? Show me the reference, and I'll show you the delights of AHC.