I had actually planned to do it the right way.

You know, get a url first, then start my blog on that url from the beginning.

But I couldn’t wait to write my first post, so I opted for hosting at WordPress. Which has been great, but I realized that if I want to eventually house my blog at my own url, I should do it sooner rather than later.

So here I am…moving. Already! I have my very own url: www.thisiskat.com

Cool, eh?

But really, you don’t need to do anything at all, because my original url, http://thisiskat.wordpress.com will direct you right over here.

The only thing is, if you have any links to This Is Kat anywhere out there on your url, if you could change them to the new url, that would be super excellent!

Thanks, and welcome to my “new” home!

I’d like you to meet Pika (on the left) and Fashion Girl (on the right).

They’re the two plush toys I got railroaded into sewing for my kids on Wednesday.

How? You ask? Why?

Well, it all started at 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

After going to sleep at 2:00 a.m. (long story, see here for some insight), I was awoken by Gril1, saying “I feel like I’m going to throw up.” She did. Repeatedly. Until 7:30 a.m. At which point, she promptly recovered completely, but of course I couldn’t send her to school after all that. Noooooo. She had to stay home.

And on Wednesday, I took a moment out of my day to download a few patterns for homemade plush toys as part of my non-Chinese-sweatshop Christmas gifts plan. (More to come on this plan…stay tuned!) Just at the moment that the picture of Wee Bunny came up on my screen, Girl1 happened by.

Well, of course she did!

And really, could you resist this?

Okay, okay, I know. Pika and Fashion Girl don’t compare to the original Wee Bunny, but they were for practice, okay?

Anyway, the point is, they talked me into cutting up some old curtains, clothes and whatnot and making - well - they named them: Pika and Fashion Girl.

Pika is for Girl1, and is named after a Pika (Girl1 lurves animals).

Fashion Girl is for Girl2, and is named after, ahhh…a fashion girl? Actually, there is a pattern of girls with ponytails on the flannel I used for the back panels of her bunny, so I guess (hope) that’s the inspiration for the name.

So that was Wednesday. And that was one possible Christmas present revealed, but the payoff was Girl1’s comment:

Mommy, homemade stuffies are the best, but they’re even better when your own Mom makes them for you

Awwww…here I go off to the sewing machine!

Here’s where I jump off the edge and right into the deep end. Maybe I should have built up my readership first, before delving into religion and politics all in one shot, but you know, it’s more like the real me to lay it all out there and — discretion be damned — I’m gonna say what I think whether you like me or not afterwards. To thine own self be true, and all that, right? (Nod to Polonius, wisest of fathers.)

Probably I need to mellow out, grow up or mature (or quite possibly all three!) but, anyway, here goes.

Get this: there are people out there in the world, real people, living in our neighbourhoods (well, mine anyway), under the age of one-hundred-and-seven, who believe that you can choose your sexuality. To wit: earlier this autumn, a fellow mom in the schoolyard said this to me:

I truly believe gay people choose to be gay and they can be cured.

Oh, sorry. I had a momentary black-out there. It might have been a mini-stroke. Or perhaps just utter, mind-numbing incredulity. Read the rest of this entry »

A million apologies for not posting in, like three days, or something!

I was sooooooo busy preparing for and hosting a crop (for you non-scrapbookers that’s what we scrap-heads call it when we get together to make pretty things with paper) on Saturday. I was actually up until about 3:00 a.m. cutting paper for my Christmas Card workshop (they turned out great so it was worth it).

I sat in our entertainment room (yes, we have an entertainment room, lol) and put ROME, Season 1 in the DVD player while I cut, cut, cut away. I should have known how late it was getting, since I started around 11:00 p.m. and managed to watch about five episodes, but I guess I was so into the show (I adore, adore, adore ROME, and last night would be about the seventh time I’ve watched Season 1…I don’t tend to re-watch Season 2 as much because Caesar is already dead by then, and he’s my fave…) Anyway, I got so into the show I was shocked to look up and see that it was 2:45 when my hubby came in to say “I hope you’re not still awake…” Ooops. I finished up what I was doing, and came up to bed.

By then, he had the TV on in our room, and we watched an infomercial starring Peter Fonda for an 18CD set called Flower Power. I sang along to every. single. song. Scary, isn’t it? Sometime before 4:00 a.m. I finally fell asleep, only to be woken up by hubby saying, “you have got to see this…it’s worth waking up for…”

It was.
Read the rest of this entry »

Damn! I bought my daughter AquaDots for her 7th birthday last month.

They’ve been recalled.

Seems there’s a chemical coating the beads that, when metabolized, converts to GHB, otherwise known as the “date-rape drug“. According to American National Public Radio, “both the products and the working conditions are dangerous”. What a surprise. Dangerous working conditions in a Chinese toy factory. It’s too much of a theme.

You must read this (okay, it’s long - but skim the headings, including “Workers In China Paid Just 19¢ For Every Barbie Toy They Make”) before you buy another Mattel toy for your child. And read this before you buy another toy at Wal-Mart. I know it’s hard work people, but let’s think before we buy, ‘kay?

We’re going to have a hard time fulfilling Santa’s list this year…

If you haven’t, you can go ahead and read Can You Believe? Part One here.

So yesterday I addressed the missing link argument in Searching for the Missing “Pink” Link on Family Reformation. (As in my first post, as well, I’ll point out that all quotations of Pastor McDonald below are from the post linked here so I won’t link to them again.)

Now…let’s move on to this “pink” link of Pastor McDonald’s. He doesn’t specifically define the term, rather he cites examples of “the alleged poster women for an alternative career path” and “that ever-missing link” sought by “evangelical feminists”. By this I can only presume he means evangelical Christians who are also feminists, and not feminists who are evangelical about their feminism; these could be — and no doubt are — from all and no faiths.

I’m not going to argue with McDonald on the basis of his Biblical examples. You see, I’m an atheist, so I don’t see the Bible as the received word of god, but rather as a piece of literature (and one full of contradictions at that). I have read it - cover to cover, actually - but I don’t see it as a valid source of ethical, moral or other guidance. Therefore I cannot enter the argument on those grounds. Those who see the Bible differently may be swayed one way or the other by quotations of biblical verse, but to me, you might as well quote the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Niebelungenlied or John Lennon. Actually, I think more people should quote John Lennon. Now that’s something that would make the world a better place… Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I click on the links that WordPress features on their main page, and sometimes I find a gem of a blog that I bookmark, and sometimes I find something that shocks and amazes me.

In the shocks and amazes category, I clicked through to a blog called: Family Reformation (that should have been my first red flag; in the immortal words of Monty Python, “Run away! Run away!”) where there was a post entitled, intriguingly:

Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”

(read it here, if you dare, and note that all quotations of the author below derive from this link, so I will not link them individually.)

In Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”, blogging Pastor James McDonald takes aim at women seeking fulfillment outside the domestic sphere by comparing the arguments in favour of said expansion of women’s sphere by “egalitarians” (quotation marks his) to the evolutionary missing link - a species between apes & humans that McDonald clearly believes is a silly myth. I should point out here that taxonomically speaking, of course, we — Homo sapiens sapiens* — are already apes, as we belong to the family hominidae, or great apes, along with gorillas and chimpanzees.

*From here onwards, I’ll shorten Homo sapiens sapiens for simplicity’s sake to just H. sapiens: anyway, when you read tripe like this you question whether we deserve even the one sapiens moniker; wise indeed!

As a thinking (and reasonably educated) person, I couldn’t ignore his off-hand dismissal of evolution; as if it were a given that there was no missing link (there are many!), and so I’d like to take on Pastor McDonald first on these grounds, then (in my next post) on his real argument: that of woman’s “unique role as wife, mother, and keeper at home—the normative role for women…happily under the authority of her husband”. Join me, if you will: all that’s required is an open, questioning mind. I ask you simply to look at the evidence and make your own decision, unlike some, who would require you to believe in the - frankly - unbelievable. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, I just need to put it out there, that if you get a crush on an actor, you should NEVER visit his fansite. There are several reasons for this:

1. You will find out that he is either gay or happily married with children or has been married seven times, most recently to a seventeen-year-old. Basically, this will burst the tiny bubble of fantasy you have created in which you are not, in fact, married with children yourself and he is, in fact, not an actor playing the role of a sexy, sensitive and intriguing man, but the man himself.
2. You will be forced to witness other women stooping to sickening lows by posting ridiculous fan fiction, fan art or even — and you have to see this to believe it — fan videos. The latter are made by taking clips of said actor in one (or several) roles, firing them into iMovie (or similar software), and setting them to sickening pop music.
3. You will feel compelled to enter the fan forum. See point 2 above about witnessing the humiliation of other women. And multiply it. Tenfold.

So, now that you’ve all got that straight, click on over to urbanmoms.ca and read about a few of my (Irish) celebrity crushes in my stint as a guest-blogger on Girls’ Night.

Oh! And while we’re on the topic of Ireland — what? you didn’t know we were on the topic of Ireland? See my parenthetical remark above: it clearly says “Irish”. There. Ireland — did you know they use the metric system there? They do. And did you know I’m an expert at using the magic of metric to turn defeat into victory? I am. Find out how, in my most recent post at Losing It.

Off to bed now: to sleep, perchance to dream. Or more likely to read. I’m re-reading (for the fourth? fifth? time) Jurassic Park. What can I say. I saw it on TV last night and remembered how much I had enjoyed the book, so I picked it up again. Luckily I just finished my last book (Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion — go and read this book if you haven’t yet!) so I had room to pick up an old fave. See you in the Land of Nod!

You remember this, right? My hubby’s desperate plea to get rid of the leftover Hallowe’en candy?

And remember what I did with it? How I hid it in the deep freeze?

Ah - yeah. It’s not in the freezer anymore. It’s here:

I got it out of the freezer, dumped it out on my desk and ate my way through the Coffee Crisp, Glosette Raisins and these:

FROZEN SMARTIES.

I heart frozen smarties. You should really try them. There’s just something about that super-hard “crack!” when you bite ‘em. Truly addictive.

So anyway, that was my lunch - yum, and healthy ;P

…Kids have this way of needing to be picked up after school. Especially the four-year-old.

What? You can’t walk home from preschool by yourself?

Ohhh…I can hear the wind howling and there’s snow on the ground!

Don’t make me gooooo……

…gone.