April Cruel

It's bloody snowing again.

For the past few days, the waist-to-shoulder-high piles of filthy crystalizing snow have been slowly retreating from the edge of the sidewalks, gradually revealing beat-up garden ornaments and six-month-old dog droppings. The yard at my younger daughter's school is an skating rink in the mornings and a large iceberg-filled moat in the afternoon. However, it could still be said that progress was being made. Until midday.

I looked out the window between the knee-icings only to see the large white missiles plopping down and covering the newly exposed mud and khaki-coloured grass. This morning I had a hasty hall conference with one of younger daughter's EA's about an incident during morning recess yesterday, when she inexplicably yelled at her guardian angel and spent the period after recess weeping heartbrokenly while the EA tried to explain that yelling at friends is "bullying behaviour".

Is it? When I tried to find out what happened from younger daughter herself on the walk home from school yesterday, her response was predictable: "I don't want to talk about it." A block later, she said, "I'm feeling brave now." Heartened, I asked again, but she said, "I'm tired of talking about it now." What can you say to a child whose verbal abilities shut down when she's upset, who is probably terrified when the angry feelings well up, and who is convinced that anyone who tries to help her manage these feelings doesn't like or love her anymore? Bullying behaviour? Really?

And it's still snowing. I'm grateful that the internet is rippling with Doctor Who interviews and that David Tennant and Catherine Tate have been making the pilgrimage through the radio stations of London, leaving podcasts to take me out of my physical and emotional self. God help us if the spybots close down the illegal posters of the new Doctor Who; I've never needed it more. One of Mihangel's favourite posters got the axe last week, but he had titles and links all over the place, a veritable homing device for Auntie Beeb's single spies and battalions. Our favourite is a lady who comes out of the woodwork only to post at a specially-set up channel with renamed episodes. If she's found out, she pulls up stakes and posts from somewhere else.

Fanvids rarely get pulled, so here's two more of my favourites, this time with a Canadian content theme. The first is set (by woefully infrequent YouTube poster "MrsCake") to the optimistic, triumphing-over-adversity music of Great Big Sea from Newfoundland, and features, I think, five of the ten Doctors so far:



(Man, that was difficult to embed!) If Great Big Sea embodies the life-affirming possibilities of Doctor Who, then the Barenaked Ladies seem to perfectly match the quirkiness of the mad goings-on. Here's "Moto1261"'s interpretation of Rose's journey with the Ninth and Tenth Doctors which includes my very favourite version of the regeneration between the two:


Hooray for Canada! (Don't know if the posters are actually Canadian, but clearly they are People of Taste.) I'm starting to feel a bit better already. As for my younger daughter, I have to cling to the notion that what seem like regressions or even new problems are actually signs of progress. When she "lost it" a few years ago, it would mean days of recovery. Now, it's fifteen minutes of unpleasantness and grief. It may look like the Slough of Despond out there, but it's no place to live. Somehow, with plenty of backsliding and repetition, we'll all learn to cope...