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How many rainbows does it take?

Happy Birthday to me. I have a bit of a cold but I’m dosing with mega-Vitamin C and echinacea-goldenseal tincture. I wrote my last exam today, I proctored the exam for the last class as TA for the semester and I’m about halfway through the marking. Later Rob is taking me for dinner and there will be Buffy the Vampire Slayer before the night is through. My father called and sang me the hb song — at a wrong number unfortunately, but still, cute story.

All these good things — so why does one shitty thing bring it all crashing down?

Dropping off the lunch bags for my kids at their dad’s, I’m on the porch, the kids are in the doorway saying hi and happy birthday to me. My youngest tells me that I can come to the school tonight and see his art, that there’s an open house of sorts. As he’s telling me, dad grabs a note, hands it to me and shuts the door saying “the note just came today”. Boom goes the door. No goodbyes, nothing.

Doesn’t matter that it’s my birthday, doesn’t matter that I have so many great things in my life. It doesn’t seem like there’s ever enough sunshine to make a rainbow when I leave there.

If you feel the urge to wish me an hb in the comments, I’ve turned off the captcha because I heard it was giving people a rough time. I’m going to try and forget about this and enjoy my night — goddess knows I’ve let that man make me miserable enough for one lifetime.

My kids come home tomorrow and we’ll have a good time. I just hate that I let him get me down and that the kids watch people get treated this way.

Good things

I am in such a wonderfully good place right now. There are still enough days between now and due dates that I’m not yet in full freakout, and I am surrounded by the most wonderful and caring people anyone could know. It began yesterday with some sweet things my kids said, then I was surprised late at night with warm sticky rice in coconut milk topped with cashews and a glass of good wine. Today this was followed up with kids who are excited to be learning to write secret codes in binary/ascii, who laugh, joke around and tell me they love me, and finally an end of semester party with Actiongirls and the Women’s Studies Student Association. These men and women are fun, intelligent, committed to social justice, the environment, feminism, and friendship. It feels so good to be a part of the group. Thank you Carol, Aubrey, Tina, Mike, Edith, David, Allison, Catherine, and Korinne. As for the party: good food, soooo much garlic, and a great theme picked out for next semester’s art-performance-extravaganza: Cliterature! Call for submissions coming out supersoon… stay tuned.

Too Socialist

I seem to be in a perpetual struggle for a secular education for my kids at the local public school. This past week my daughter brought home a spelling worksheet with the sentence “Insects are one of the many creatures God created. The word insects was underlined to be replaced with one of the list words. The sentence was also used on the test at the end of the week.

I complained (again) about religion in public schools and about the school teaching creationism, the teacher responded that I was surely exaggerating — that this was hardly creationism. I think “God created” is very clear creationism. Next he said that I can hardly hope to expunge god from everthing — but in a public school I certainly can and do expect a secular education for my children. Next there was something about him being a geologist… and he grudgingly apologized.

My friend in Toronto ran into another religion-in-the-public-school incident when she attended the Remembrance Day assembly with her son at his school where she is a volunteer. The school choir sang a United Church hymn filled with references to god as a male figure.

Later, she talked to the teacher about why they chose this song given all the songs written about creating peace in the world. The school is diverse and is part of the Toronto public board. Religion is not a part of the curriculum, including teaching god as a male deity. She learned that the original choice of songs for the kids was “If I had a Hammer” but the principal had vetoed it because it was too socialist. Full lyrics to If I had a Hammer here. I cannot believe that promoting Chrisitianity over socialism (if the song can even be labeled that) is happening, here, in 2006. What’s wrong with socialism?? And the only answer for choosing the hymn was that the kids knew it already.

The choir also sang an edited version of John Lennon’s Imagine with the line about “And no religion too” removed (full lyrics to Imagine here.) I cannot imagine why they’d edit it out — it’s a great song about peace and I think it’s a good point that religion divides people. It certainly happens in the schools here with there being two separate systems of publicly funded education: one Catholic and one for everyone else. It’s very divisive – ask the kids who go or went to one of the split schools where the two boards share a building.

What is so wrong about If I had a Hammer? And will we ever secure secular public education for our children?

WoW Talent Specs for Level 27 and 28 Priest

My priest in World Of Warcraft is Level 28, working her way up to 60 bit by bit. With the latest Before the Storm patch every character gets their Talent points reimbursed so that you can re-spec given the changes that have been made to each class, race and talent tree. Lots of things have changed so it’s worth looking into to see what’s new and also to change your style of play if it suits you. I’ve switched my Dwarf priest from Holy priest to Shadow. Read more

And today is December 6

Today is December 6, 2006. It is 17 years after the day a gunman shot and killed 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Thirteen were students and one was an employee of the university. Today we remember these victims of gendered violence and reflect on women everywhere who are victims of gendered violence. The Montréal Massacre was not an isolated event. There are many women suffering today for the sole reason that they are women. For some it’s because of war, others face sexist laws, religions, and customs. Some are somewhere at the wrong time, like the women who were in class and on campus on December 16, 1989. Others are victims of repeated violence in their homes, at work, and in their neighbourhoods, by family and people they know. Think of them all today.

The Fourteen Not Forgotten

Geneviève Bergeron b. 1968 – civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan b. 1966 – mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau b. 1966 – mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault b. 1967 – mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward b. 1968 – chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick b. 1960 – materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière b. 1964 – budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair b. 1966 – materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay b. 1967 – mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier b. 1961 – mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard b. 1968 – materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault b. 1966 – mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte b. 1969 – materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz b. 1958 – nursing student

Bonnie spoke for Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter back in 1989 following the Massacre, “Many women have paid a high price for equality and liberty in our struggle. We call on men to tell each other that you have no permission to commit any act of violence against women.”

Please, remember these women, and what Bonnie said. It is needed as much today as ever.

Revised to add: You can read last year’s memorial post here.

WoW Enchanters Take Heart

Never fear, it’s not all doom and gloom for enchanters. One of the improvements for this “Before the Storm” patch in preparation for the release of WoW Burning Crusade includes making all Enchanting Rods counts as all lower level rods as well.

Read more

Sad times for WoW Enchanters

We’re getting ready for World Of Warcraft Expansion: Burning Crusade, due out at the beginning of 2007. Blizzard put out a patch yesterday and scrolling through the changes makes me sad for all the newbie and wannabe enchanters out there. Time was, a new enchanter could increase their skill level and fill their enchanting bags with supplies for the future by disenchanting cheap buys from the auction house (or unusable but bound loot) but alas, it won’t be so easy anymore. Read more

Writing an abstract

This is based on my experience as an undergraduate TA. I thought I would share what I’ve put together to help students understand what an abstract does if they’ve never done one before. An abstract is brief, clear, and concise. It gives the reader enough information to know what an article is about but not so much that they can cite it just from the abstract without reading the article.

A lot of abstracts are set up to provide the following information:

A: What does the piece do – what does it explain, address, discuss ? This part often starts with something like, “This essay/article examines….”

B: Some background, what the reader needs to know – brief, but enough so the reader knows if it might be what they are looking for, if they should keep reading.

C: How does your paper do what it does? Does it analyze data or experiences?

D: What sources, theories, etc. does your paper draw upon to make its conclusions (and why these, not others) — and everyone’s favourite bit: What is the thesis??

Here is a really clear example:

Resisting Neo-Liberalism: the Poisoned Water Disaster in Walkerton, Ontario
Laureen Snider
Queen’s University, Canada
http://sls.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/2/265

{{section A}} This article examines how relations of governance generate particular forms of resistance, and the mechanisms through which resistance can reconfigure governance. It seeks to clarify actual and potential links between resistance, transformative politics and ameliorative change. {{section B}} Empirically it documents an environmental disaster in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, when seven people died and 2300 became ill after E. Coli contaminated public drinking water in May of 2000. Following a Public Inquiry and nine months of Hearings, the intensely critical O’Connor Report explained the disaster as resulting from policies adopted by Ontario’s neo-liberal government and its ‘Common Sense Revolution’. The Report forced government to re-regulate and restaff the Ministry of the Environment. {{Section C}} To understand how this critical narrative was produced and why it was heard, the article situates the Inquiry process in its historical, cultural and political context. {{Section D}} Focusing on two particular forms of knowledge/power, science and law, it argues that the universalistic truth claims of science were allied with the normative and procedural claims of law to challenge hegemonic power and interrogate the truth claims of neo-liberal government. Resistance in this case took local form, but its roots and resonance came from history, timing, and world-wide struggles against globalization, free trade and the ever-expanding American empire.

If you try to answer those questions clearly and concisely your abstract should write itself.

Site update: new look for femilicious

It’s been almost a year and a half since femilicious was born and I felt that it was time for a new look. This new theme is based on Freedom Blue by Frank Helmschrott. I chose this theme after searching off and on for a few weeks for something that wouldn’t need too much tweaking to get a look and feel I like, and in one afternoon I have something I think I can live with for awhile.

Besides changing some colours, one of the changes I made to get this theme up was to change the German text to English. I doubt it would slow down an avid blog reader but I’m not sure how many people understand the German for “submit a comment” and “email required”. I didn’t know I did until I was doing it. There are still a few words here and there that need translation to English and I’ll get to these soon. It’s just a matter of hunting down which files hold the text and editing them.

There was also an error in the Archives.php file – I had to change the id to match the other pages so that the content would wrap inside the left-hand div. The id is misnamed so if you’re trying to get this theme working on your own site change

<div id="content">

to

<div id="contentwrap">

in the fourth line of code. Once this is changed the body will sit in the left div and the sidebar will return to the right.

One of the things I like about this theme is that the divs set the main content first and the sidebar information follows. This is really important for browsing without a stylesheet. It’s not just for Naked Day anymore; people browsing from mobile devices or with a speech reader don’t want to scroll through/listen to your entire blogroll, archives, and categories before they get to your new post. If you want to see how your divs are laid out, one easy way is install the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, then on the CSS tab select Disable Styles then choose All Styles. You can get a pretty good idea here of what your site will look like to someone with a text only browser. If things are not good you can fix it by rearranging your divs so the most important content comes first and controlling presentation with floats.

I decided to try out a random html flickr badge for some colour and life. It’s also for my own benefit as a happiness generator. It makes me happy to see pictures that I took on vacation or somewhere else fun. There were some problems finding a placement for the badge that didn’t throw the entire site presentation out of whack. I had originally thought to place it in the header but had a much easier time setting it at the top of the main style template after the call for the get_header function. Opera and MSInternet Explorer didn’t like the having CSS information in the php file so I had to cut it out and move it into the stylesheet. Now that I’ve done that it’s looking good in Opera but MSIE still needs a bit of tweaking. MSIE is a nightmare for incompatibilities. For that reason, if you’re not already using it, you might want to get firefox – it will make your life so much better, and not just if you’re developing for the web. For added browsing pleasure, install AdBlock Plus and you can take advertising right out of your life.

I still want to bring back the categories list and the blogroll but those need a bit more work so they’ll have to wait for another day. If you find a glaring mess in any browser please leave a comment.

Update: Right above the comment text box are some buttons whose labels were in German until an few minutes ago. The values for the buttons were in a separate javascript file, sitting in wp-content / themes / this theme and lo-and-behold there it was. I knew it was javascript and that it was somewhere but it took me awhile to find it. I’ve changed those to English now as well. If you mouseover you can read the German. Enjoy.

Say thank you

I found this post in my draft folder. Since I just lost the wonderful post I’d written about citing wikipedia I decided to look back and see what’s just sitting around getting stale. I opened this one because it had an interesting title and I wanted to see what I was so happy about that it got a post. It’s especially good to read since I’m at the end of another semester. Here it is, from last April 13, 2006:

I’ve been sick. Sicker than I can remember being in a long time. I seem to catch a cold or something every end of semester. Between the due dates and not having time to eat right or take care of myself, something always gives, and that is usually me.

But even when I’m sick there are responsibilities. The kids can make cold cereal and hot pasta but haven’t really had to figure out broccoli yet. I somehow managed to keep them fed and clean but it’s all a bit blurry now. I’ve been lucid for a few hours in between fevers so that’s when it must have happened.

The most wonderful thing happened on Tuesday night though. I had classes at the U all afternoon and then I taught my ballet lessons. This was actually just before I realized how sick I was going to get. I headed to Rob’s after my last lesson and when I got there he had a hot bath waiting for me. It was exactly what I needed. Thanks Rob.

————
So I feel bad I never posted it back in April, but I must have gotten pulled away by child or chore or school. Here it is now, better late than never – and thanks again. I still remember that day.