a peek inside the fishbowl

As some of you know, I have two young teen daughters. No one said parenting was going to be a walk in the park, but it sure isn’t easy raising girls who were born into a social media age that is completely unlike the era in which I grew up.

In those days, communications was limited to a rotary phone with the very long cord, notes passed in school, knocking on someone’s door, and the post (in other words, MAIL). I remember when we first got cable, and a wireless remote control. I remember the thrill of watching a movie that we could rent at the store, and watch as many times as we wanted. I remember how awesome it was to record music and television shows. I remember sending my first emails and being amazed at the speed of which information could suddenly travel.

Today, it’s Netflix and texting and Snapchat and Twitter. Much more of the communicating that’s done is faceless and anonymous. Although I refuse to live my life in fear – afraid for myself and afraid for my kids – I do believe that it’s important to help our kids understand what kind of things they might run into out there in the world.

Sidebar: I never talked to my daughters about the #YesAllWomen articles and discussions that happened awhile back. But maybe I will, because there’s so much truth in there that it hurts. (If you don’t know about it, you can read about how it started right here.)

This was one of the stories that was floating around my social networks this morning: Woman catches man taking creeper shots. Ugh. Go read it.

As the mother of two young teen girls, this makes my skin crawl. THIS guy is the kind of guy I’ve been warning my kids about. I don’t know if they really believe men can be so gross, so close to home. And I’m not sure if men truly understand how this kind of thing makes women feel, and how frequently it happens.

Just last week I was working at my local coffee shop. There was a gaggle of tween girls sitting at a nearby table. I love watching young people in the wild. They are in their element, it seems, and it makes me happy to see them so happy. Wrapped up in their little social cocoon, happily talking and laughing, blissfully unaware of everything that is going on around them. It looked like they were working on an assignment, as their conversation was mostly centred around a laptop and I could overheard snippets of academic chatter over the sounds of the coffee shop.

I happened to be sitting at an L-shaped bank of seats. I was facing outward, towards their table, on one half of the L. On the other half of the L, there was a guy, sitting alone, facing outward as well. He looked like he was in his late 30s. He didn’t have a coffee in front of him, just a reusable water bottle. He was seated right across from the girls’ table. Every once in awhile he held his phone up in a certain way that made me think he might be taking a photo. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, because I didn’t have a clear view. I watched him, hoping to catch him in the act. He eventually caught me glaring, gave me an odd smirk, and put his phone down.

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen this happen. It’s happened before, at a local beach, and I was so angry I had to speak up: not just to the men who were surreptitiously taking photos of a group of young teen girls, but to the girls themselves. I told them what was happening, and that it was NOT ok.

There have always been creepy guys among us, but we live in different times, and the unfortunate reality is that the rise of smart phones makes this behaviour a lot more common.

This is why I’m asking you, if you see someone taking sneaky photos of someone else and you’re in a safe place, you must call them on it. If those were my girls at the coffee shop the other day, I’d want someone to look out for them and protect them from photo-taking creeps. Wouldn’t you?

I’ve decided to invent a new phrase: PRETTY AS A PICKLE. Do you think it’ll catch on?

My parents used to preserve cherries we harvested from the trees in our backyard. The idea of canning berries and fruit and pickles and beans has always intimidated me, mostly because of the huge amount of effort involved and the fact that I  could kill someone as a result of my ineptitude or impatience with the process. (HELLO FOOD POISONING and BOTULISM.)

I spotted this jar at terra20 recently and something clicked in my brain. I remembered a recipe I saw for fresh refrigerator pickles; pickles without the pickling and the possibility of death! Suddenly, I had to have pickles.

I followed this recipe for quick pickles and I was surprised at how good they were. Next time I might use a smidge more sugar and half the garlic, and maybe some chili peppers too. This is the magical part of this recipe, you can totally customize it according to your own tastes.

These pickles were very easy to make. I sliced up four small field cukes, threw them in my pretty new jar along with some dill fronds, poured the pickling juice over it all, gave it a shake, and tossed it in the fridge. The pickles have since settled and the flavours have intensified, making for some very happy snacking indeed.

I wouldn’t keep this in the fridge more than 4-5 days, but I don’t think it’ll even last that long.

* What do you call someone who preserves things anyway? :)

I felt adrift all day yesterday, not like myself at all. I did a load of laundry, some gardening, and tidied a bit. It was hot, for starters, very hot and humid. I couldn’t decide whether to stay indoors or out, and I found myself oscillating between A/C and jungle-like humidity.

Our youngest had a sleepover the night before and I fussed and puttered around grumpily. At one point I just stopped and asked myself, SELF, what is your problem? And then I sat in our hammock to stare off into space and give this more thought.

I think this was the crux of my grumpiness: I wanted to be DOING something for Canada Day, and I wasn’t doing anything outside of usual household stuff, and I couldn’t accept it or relax about it. There’s no shortage of things to do in Ottawa for Canada Day yet I couldn’t muster up the energy to do any of it. Also: I don’t like crowds, so there’s that. I had to let it go, but I couldn’t.

So I puttered around the house all day until it was time for dinner. Dinner was good: steak, and spinach salad with gorgeous pink grapefruit and slices of halloum cheese and baguette grilled on the BBQ. Afterwards there was vanilla ice cream topped with crushed strawberries.

After awhile we picked ourselves up and went downtown. It’s a tradition here at Casa Fishbowl to watch the fireworks. We have a secret/awesome place to park, and then we walk, and as we walked we watched the sky change colours and the people start to converge.

We walked and chatted and took photos while we made our way to our usual spot behind the Supreme Court building.

Here’s the thing, the crowds are sparse on this side of Parliament Hill (that would be the west side) and the view is a good one. It’s easy to get in, easy to get out. We watch near the big fountain, but there’s also a hidden park behind there (just down a set of stairs) that few people seem to know about. This was the view as the sun was setting:

And that was it for my photo-taking. I chose to live in the moment for a change.

As we waited for the fireworks to begin a thick reddish cloud made its way overhead. It started with one drop, then another, and then, a deluge. Water poured from the sky, the crowd shrieked and ran for cover (of which there wasn’t very much) and we all got soaked. As it turns out, the rain washed away my own dark clouds, and I settled in, looked up, and watched with a lighter heart as the fireworks began their beautiful rumbling across the sky.