Tuesday February 22

So...that was Family Day. Yeah.

I was rather surprised to hear the clank of my mailbox and see the letter carrier walk on by...so, clearly, not Family Day for all. I'm pretty sure there's no mail service on August 1 which is a Civic Holiday here in Ontario--not sure why Canada Post has decided that Family Day is negotiable. Perhaps because no one has anywhere to go for a three-day weekend in February, the month before they might take off a week with the kids?

I didn't make it much of a Family Day so much as a Family Clean Up the House Day. This mostly amounted to me cleaning--and yelling at everyone who wasn't. So, by the time I was just about to drift off to sleep...I sat bolt upright in bed realising the assignment that I had put out of my brain. So, I'm going to put this entry together quickly...and go off and WORK!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ah, we Canucks and our Canadian Tire Money. Do we all have some? Perhaps all grownups with their own place of residence? I had a grandfather who was basically obsessed with Canadian Tire...he lived out in "the country" in an alleged town that was basically a bunch of farms gathered together. I think there was a gas station. It was called Nelles Corners...the only thing of interest was the Race Track, but when you listened to the ads on the radio, they always advertised that they were the "Cay-U-GA Speedway!!". Cayuga was the small town "down the street" where I lived with my family. We could tell out-of-towners easily enough...we all say "Cay-u-ga" cay as in bay; others said cai as in by. I have no clue what people say these days...

Anyway, I have no memory of a hardware store in Cayuga (one of those "every store was on the main street" kind of little places. It was officially a "village" at the time...I could probably name almost every store on that street), and I didn't really know what was in Hagersville (a small town, that we regarded as our closest "city"). The Canadian Tire might have been there--because it had to be somewhere close enough that every week, Grandpa would take a look through the sales flier, then head out, and load up. He had this enormous rambling property (so big that part of how he'd made his money was by selling the local Quarry access to themselves by letting them build a laneway from the highway across his land) with equally enormous rambling buildings. At one point, he'd had a chicken farm but the old "barn" was used after that for storage. When he died, someone broke the locks he had on the door to reveal the shelves full of items:  he would go to the Canadian Tire and buy ten, twenty, thirty of whatever was on sale. It was quite the auction after his death...

It also meant that he had quite the horde of Canadian Tire money. He didn't save it up and use it to purchase new items--bills were here, there and everywhere. I heard tales of there being thousands of dollars of Canadian Tire money which just added to the then-endless fights between his children over the division of his estate (word to the wise--if your children hate and despise each other, you might need to be a little more specific with the will than "divide it evenly between all the children". For example, if one of your children lives in a house that you technically owned, but you had always told them that they would get "in the will", that probably should have gone in the will. Not, "divide it evenly between all the children" so that some of those children insisted that it had to be sold and divided between them. So that it had to be evaluated for it's market value, and then the child who had been living in it for fifteen years, who had fixed it up from a small, empty, insulation-less summer-only cottage to a bright, beautiful year-round home wouldn't have had quite so much money to spend from the inheritance in order to buy that home).

Anyway...I very much thought of Grandpa Smith as I read this story from The Globe and Mail this morning, Why we love and hate Canadian Tire money.

----------------------------------------------------------------
An interesting little read from a Mom about a popular blog topic these days:  the boy interested in those things traditionally perceived as being "girly". She makes some good points, quotes an interesting study, and generally reinforces my belief that Dr. Phil is an idiot to be ignored at all costs.
My son, the pink boy
As always, do yourself the favour--don't read the comments. Unless you've had a lot of Ativan or some sort of mild sedative that's starting to kick in...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Spiderman Smackdown--a project being organised to put together a fully realised Spider-Man musical and have it open the day before the current big big BIG Broadway version, Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark. Well, before it officially opens, given that it's been running for ages now. Popular theory is that the organisers are not the slightest bit stupid and realise that's not the spelling of Spider-Man, and are looking to avoid any cease-and-desists from Marvel, which, let's all remember, is owned by Disney, one of the more litigious companies around. Read all about it at Topless Robot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And, while I was on Topless Robot, I read this fun little entry, 8 Movies That Inexplicably Got Cartoon Spin-offs. Much to my amazement, I actually hadn't heard of a couple of these...Robocop?  Seriously?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Work well today...