kids for sale

Hey, check out http://208.169.218.91/kids.html. (screen snapshot of an actual eBay ad) Bizarre, or what?

Cathy and I went to the ballet last night and checked out the Erik Bruhn competition at the Hummingbird Centre. It's much more exciting than the usual ballet event because the entrants are fairly young (18-23 years old) and none are principal dancers. Several ballet companies enter two of their most promising young dancers. You can see the nervousness in their dancing sometimes, and they usual push themselves pretty hard. At the last competition, one of the ballerinas fell :(. The atmosphere is sort of like that of the Olympics figure skating crowd, I suppose...lots of ooohs and ooohs and spontaneous applause, very unlike a typical ballet performance.

Drowning in work.

I'm still using Grocery Gateway, by the way. I love ordering my groceries online; saves so much time, and I'm also spending less. The delivery guys are all cute and very polite (and no one has called me 'ma'am', yet).

Got a cellphone yesterday. Might sound weird for someone who works at home, but I'm finding it necessary these days. Anyway, I discovered in the process of buying the phone that as a married woman who shares a bank account with her husband and is self-employed, I'm pretty much of a non-person. They wouldn't let me buy the phone at first. I've never had a loan, so I have no credit history (I guess my student loan didn't count). I showed them my driver's license, my social insurance number, my credit card, a picture of my niece Sara...no dice. I don't get it...my monthly online expenses are much higher than the cost of that phone! What's the difference? Anyway, I finally managed to get around it by pre-paying a number of months (normally, payments are automatically taken off each month). Definitely a sobering experience, though.

After I finally got the phone working properly (I won't bore you with the details, but I spent a lot of time griping to Cantel on the phone), I discovered that the phone comes with three GAMES on it. GAMES. On a PHONE. Why on earth does a phone need games on it? I just don't understand. Or maybe I'm just hopelessly behind the times. Maybe all the hip new generation are saying, "I want a phone with games on it. If it doesn't have games on it, I'm not buying it." I can also change the ringer so that instead of a terribly dull but functional RIIIING, I can get the phone to play a few bars from Mozart's Symphony No. 40 In D Minor (granted, it doesn't sound quite like the live orchestra version), Fur Elise, etc. etc. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO? Wow, do I sound like an oldster, or what? Geez...(Debbie gropes for her cane)...

Thanks for the welcome back in Blatherings, everyone. :-)