Via Jezebel

In this video, Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha makes like silly string and rocks out with her dad to the Jungle Book song “I wanna be like you.”  They are so totally adorable together, and are clearly having a blast.  Watching this video was definitely a happy way to end the day.

It reminds me of me and my dad a lot.  He and I are both completely silly people, both music lovers, and we’ll frequently break into comedic warbling or scattered dance routines when we’re blasting the tunes together.  Silliness: definitely one of the most awesome and underrated foundations of friendship.

I was thinking too how special it is that she’ll always have this video to watch even after he’s passed on.  Is that morbid?  Well, whatever.  I don’t think my family has any home videos, but recently I’ve started to capture small snippets of the things people do that so completely define them or just really make me smile.  Like my stepmother’s infectious laugh, or seeing her and my dad clowning around together and giggling; or one of my grandmother’s unintentionally hilarious lectures with the wagging pointed finger, where we all end up laughing.  I guess I’m just thinking more about mortality, and realizing how important it is to pull together some of those scraps of life into hard-copy memories.

My parents’ dog Bacchus…what a sweetie! I could cuddle that snuggly guy all day.

Today I’ve been meeting all kinds of interesting and inspiring folk at Change Camp Ottawa, an “unconference” on reimagining government and citizenship in the age of participation.  It’s been a really neat event – the participants set the agenda collaboratively, people were free to roam between sessions, there were lots of great discussions, and people were live-tweeting the whole thing (see #cco09 if you’re interested).  Seriously, I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one room!

Here’s a description of ChangeCamp from the site:

ChangeCamp is an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.

A ChangeCamp event is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question:

“How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.

All that to say, there were a whole lot of enthusiastic and tech-savvy people gathered together to imagine new ways of doing things.  It was hard to get out of bed so early on a Saturday, but definitely worth it!

Image via Flickr

Famous last words from my last post re. spring cleaning:

We’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.

HA!  Well, the universe certainly didn’t have that in store for us.  We did make some great progress on our spring cleaning in the first few days of our holiday, but eventually life caught up with us.  I got clobbered with a nasty migraine for a couple of days, and later my stepmum ended up going to the ER with appendicitis and having emergency surgery.  Yikes!  (She’s recovering very well, by the way.  Phew!)  Needless to say, some things are higher priority in life than re-alphabetizing the spice drawer.

But we did actually manage to relax a little too.  My partner and I spent his birthday luxuriating at Le Nordik, an outdoor spa in Quebec, followed by a wonderful lunch at a great little vegetarian place, Le Cafe Soupe ‘Herbe.  Absolutely wonderful.  I also had a fun day hanging out with my mom, and went to see a totally sweet movie – Bedtime Story – with my volunteer match (part of a group I volunteer with).  And hey, the weather wasn’t half bad.  So all in all, I think it was a pretty good week off.

Now our challenge is to keep hacking away at the spring cleaning now that we’re back to our busy work schedules.  The apartment is totally nutty with sorting boxes blanketing the living room floor, not to mention the plant re-potting station set up in the middle of the kitchen floor.  The half-way mess is driving me even more crazy than the initial mess!  Hopefully we can blast the rest of it on the weekend.

Saw this on the news today and nearly keeled over laughing.  From BBC News:

An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents’ £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he’ll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.

You know you’re rich and spoiled when you can paint a giant penis on your parents’ mansion and they don’t kill you when they find out…”oh yes, the giant phallus, we’ll have him fix it when he returns from his travels…”

I know, another video, but I couldn’t help myself!  This is a really well-done parody of Britney’s “womanizer” vid.  Maybe I’m just biased, hitched as I am to a headset-wearing, WoW playing, chewbacca action figure owning, Star Trek and Star Wars reference spouting, super awesome nerdy man

I’m going to see this documentary tomorrow night. It looks pretty interesting – check out this hilarious excerpt. The only thing more entertaining than the space-travel story is that it’s told by a middle-aged guy that looks like a mild-mannered duck conservationist.

This film is on a double-bill with another documentary, “Grass,” about the history of the US government’s war on marijuana. So it should be an interesting and educational night (this all counts as thesis research, right?…)

As much as I morbidly doubt that I’ll make it to a ripe old retirement age, I still dutifully contribute to my RRSP.  This year taking a small loan from my line of credit seemed worth it considering that I would get half of it back in my tax return and could pay off the rest relatively quickly.

To complicate matters, my dad spoke with his brother, an investment advisor, for advice on how I should invest my meagre funds.  Being woefully uninformed about investing myself, I appreciate advice from those in the know.  But the best course of action was, in part, to switch my RRSP to another bank.

I made an appointment with the other bank, signed up for the new RRSP, and wrote them a cheque for this year’s contribution.   I completed and filed my tax return, and was happy to have it done with.

Imagine my shock when I checked my bank account today to find my line of credit nearly maxed out.  And then it dawned on me – in all the chaos of last week I had forgotten to cancel the transfer I had previously set up to make a contribution to my old RRSP.  Oh NO!  Could I reverse it?  Would the tax man kick my ass for overcontributing to my RRSP?  If I took out the funds would I be penalized?  Total horror.  Not to mention that I feel like a complete moron for this total financial blunder caused by my absentmindedness.

I called my bank, waited on hold for 20 minutes while being serenaded by some horrendous 80s saxophone muzak, and then begged the rep to help me.  “Can you undo the transaction?”  The answer was basically, oh, you are switching your RRSP to another bank?  Well eff you. Don’t get me wrong, I love my bank, but it was like being caught getting it on with the milkman.  Sigh.

After work I called CRA and asked what I should do.  Will I be penalized for this?  The very reassuring guy on the phone said I had two options to fix the mess, both requiring a ton of paperwork (of course) – apply to get the money back without penalty, or apply to have it count for 2009 tax year.

I’m glad to know that there are options, but I still have to decide what to do.  The logical answer is that I can’t afford to keep the extra money in the RRSP so I should get it back.  But a year from now I’ll probably be depositing that amount in my RRSP anyway, so why not leave it in there?  Maybe if I really bust my ass I could pay it all off…but I just don’t know.  I guess I can think about it for a few days, while I peruse the craigslist job ads for dogwalking positions…

Ever since we travelled together to BC last summer, I’ve been nagging my partner to get a murse (for the uninitiated, murse = man purse).  I have a great little rugged purse from Derek Alexander that is perfect for travel – it has all the right pockets to hold maps, camera, phone, passport, etc., and has ventured with me to Manhattan, South Korea, Montreal, BC, and Spain.

I don’t know how men get by without one of these wonderful contraptions.  When G and I were in BC together this summer, he often asked me to stash his camera and various other things in my purse.  Eventually it got so heavy that I said “dude, you’ve gotta get a murse!”

At first he resisted, but eventually he came around.  We looked and looked, but even the most unisex designs didn’t have a long enough strap to fit a 6′2″ guy.  Finally, we found a winner in a great little bag shop in our neighbourhood.  We had to order it and have been waiting for a few weeks.

Well, yesterday the luggage shop called my partner to tell him his order was in.  He said “Oh! I believe you have a murse for me!”  The woman on the other end of the line paused, said “um yes!” gave him the details and then hung up laughing.  Haha.

After two days of use, my partner is a full-on murse convert now.  What man could resist something with so many cool pockets?