baby-related goodness

Baby shower was excellent! I really had no idea what to expect, never having been to such a thing before (I know it's unreasonable, at the ripe old age of 30, to be surprised that my friends are starting to have babies, but there you go). I picked up Roula and Eric at their apartment in the Plateau (later than planned -- I had to pick up the car and finish wrapping my present and it was snowing and I got in the wrong lane on Parc and found myself wandering through Outremont) and we set off for the wilds of Laval -- I am very glad they were with me because I'm not sure how I'd have found the place otherwise, to say nothing of who I'd have found to talk to.

Eric and I were expecting maybe 20 people at a table in a restaurant somewhere, but no, it was nothing so meagre -- Gia's mum (who is adorable) had rented a hall with a wee dance floor, decorated it to the nines (the centerpiece was a white wicker chair on a dais, surmounted by a lace umbrella and lots of gauze), brought flowers for the tables and planned a pile of baby-related party games. We were there on the dot of 5, but as it turns out Gia and Mike had been invited for 6 and didn't arrive until 6:20 or so -- Roula, Eric and I were sitting at a table with a couple we didn't know, and conversation started to get a wee bit sticky after the first hour or so. But there was a small child running around to act as a conversation piece, and as soon as the parents-to-be arrived the energy level went sky-high again. (Also, they fed us. That helped too.) Gia and I won the diaper-a-balloon-using-my-left-hand-and-her-right contest, thanks entirely to her advance planning.

In the end I guess there were about 35 or 40 people. We sat in a circle to watch the gifts being unwrapped, and I've no idea how they got all the loot home -- this will be one well-dressed, well-entertained baby! Nobody else got what I did, thank goodness (this is always a worry for me), to wit: the Puffin Baby and Toddler Treasury, also a stuffed giraffe and a pair of yellow socks with elephants on them. In fact I think the only duplicate was that both sets of grandparents-to-be gave the same model of portable playpen.

People started heading off after that, but we stayed for cake and Greek dancing (which is tiring, let me tell you!) and eventually took ourselves off near 11. The snow had stopped, luckily.

I smell baking.

Unfortunately I have to wander into the office to print out more drug reviews -- might make the edits I did yesterday on the computer there, too.

Have a great day, all!

GIP

I got all fangirly. It's bean_daily's fault.

Drug reviews drug reviews drug reviews drug reviews...

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Bloody Word.

I'm only trying to change the bloody bullets. Quit bloody crashing on me.

and another thing

How is it possible that individual words in these things are set to proof as French? It's redlining "malignant" and giving me "m'alignant" and "alignant" as options.

Monster category DONE!

Woo hoo!

Unfortunately, those were the easy ones. Fortunately, it was the category with 15 agents -- my other one only has 8, and I've already done 4.

maybe I'll leave it until tomorrow...

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Incidentally, mrdankelly is still my hero.

before I go...

I got Chester Brown's Riel biography out of the library this week, and just finished reading it today. It's excellent. By a strange coincidence (considering what else I've been doing today), in the endnotes pertaining to Riel's stay in a mental institution Brown mentions that he doesn't believe mental illness is organically based or, indeed, an illness at all; apparently he's explored this theme in more detail elsewhere. I've heard some discussion of this from other sources -- must look into it more thoroughly. If "mental illness doesn't exist" is all there is to the theory, I don't buy it, but I assume there are subtleties I'm not aware of. (On the same theme, there was a good article in the latest Walrus on a researcher who's using PET to look at brain changes in depression.)

(Slaps to Time for calling Riel "Quebecois", by the way -- I suppose they thought "Metis" would be too obscure, but did they have to follow the path of complete inaccuracy?)