Apparently, we just hold hands in bed.

I was watching Grey’s Anatomy last night.  It’s a fairly good show – very light. They aren’t shy with the sex.  Well, they aren’t graphic either – but sex certainly is on the menu.  Recently, they’ve jumped on the lesbian bandwagon.  Last night they had a scene with two women in bed after, according to the implication of the dialogue, they had just had sex.  But oddly, they were fully clothed.   What were they doing in there that had them exclaiming how good it was?  Having a nice long cuddle?

Later in the show, one of these same women has sex with a man – and there’s plenty of skin showing.  It’s kind of weird where the line is drawn on american tv.  On any given evening you can see plenty of boy-on-girl sex with partial nudity, depicting pre-marital sex, extra marital sex, teenage sex, whatever – it’s all good as long as it’s boy-on-girl.  As early as 7 p.m. on any given school night you can get an eyeful of rape and sexualized violence, usually against women, when re-runs of Law and Order are aired.  And that’s apparently ok too. 

But two women together?  That’s a little too much for the viewer to have to endure.  You can have them talk about sex, maybe kiss, but if they’re in bed together it’s time to break out the cotton nighties!

What is Wrong With This Picture?

The Conservative party has been re-elected with 37.6 % of the vote — meaning that the vast majority of voting Canadians did not want them in power, didn’t vote for them, didn’t agree with their views or their vision for the future.

No wonder we had the lowest voter turnout ever (59.1%).  When the majority of voters (in this case 62.4%) aren’t heard, it’s going to be hard to convince people to continue to participate in this model of “democracy”.

And if Harper says he has a mandate from the people to stay the course, I think my head will explode.

Elizabeth May defeated

She didn’t win her riding, but she’s a winner in my books.  Plus, she got a whackload of votes – right now she has over 11,000 vs Peter McKay’s 16,000.  Not bad for what had been considered a total fringe party until the recent debate. The last time, the Greens only got 600 or so votes in that riding. 

But it’s amazing how many  Conservatives who had recently been lambasted in the press have kept their seats.  Maxime Bernier.  Gerry Ritz.  And in Ontario, the Liberals are currently down 16 seats with the Conservatives takin 10 and the NDP taking the other 6.  Clearly the Liberals fumbled the campaign.  I like some of Dion’s ideas (yes, I like a carbon tax) – but he really didn’t sell himself or his party. New leadership in order?

Back to Normal?

I remember how thrilled I was when my Dad brought home a used Minolta SLR.  He said it was for both mom and me, but I used it more than anyone else did.  It had a 50mm lens on it and I had a lot of fun with it.  It served me well for most things, but I remember being disappointed with my pictures sometimes, when the subject looked smaller than I remembered.  There are times when you can’t just get closer to the subject — if it’s across a river or high up on a building, for example.  And 50mm just didn’t cut it.

So I asked for and received a zoom lens for Christmas.  It was freakin’ huge. It was around 200mm at the longest focal length but with a larger circumference than I expected.  I don’t know if my parents got good advice or it was dumb luck, but it was a pretty fast lens (hence the wideness).   Years later, when I treated myself to an autofocus SLR, I bought a wide zoom (28mm – 70mm), a long zoom (70mm-200mm), neither of which were very fast — so I also bought a fast 50mm normal lens just incase.  I’m pretty sure I never, not once, used the normal lens though. 

I got tired of carrying that kit around.  No sherpa, no fun.  So I bought a small Canon digital (S100).  it was handy to carry around, but slooow.   I decided to upgrade for the trip to Ecuador so bought a Canon G3.  It had a 4x zoom (36mm-144mm) that sounded like it should do the trick, but I wished for more when I was actually taking pictures.  It wasn’t the most responsive camera, but was faster than the little S100.  And it had a fairly nice way of dealing with colour. 

My next camera was a Panasonic FZ7.  It was a bit noisy, and the skin tones were too magenta, but boy it was fun.  It was responsive and the 12x zoom was excellent (35mm-420mm).  Even if I wasn’t going to take a picture at full zoom, it served very well as a stand-in for binoculars.

But the G3 and the FZ7 were both stolen, so I’ve been thinking about a replacement.  I could get the FZ28 – with its 18x (28mm-486mm) lens which should fit the “fun” niche.  But I was never happy with the skin tones of the FZ7 and I have no reason to think things have changed.  I’d like to improve on that, and I liked the Canon colours of my G3 and S100.

Canon sells a similar superzoom (the SX10) and has the flip out LCD that I like (and with my aging eyes, it’s nice to be able to use the camera at waist level).  But I’m not taken with the pics it takes – too much red fringing.  The G10 is built like a brick, has better image quality than the SX10 (although the Canon fringing is still evident) but the zoom range isn’t there.  On the Panasonic front there’s also the LX3 – which has a scant 24mm-60mm zoom (that said,  I’m not sure if the G10’s 140mm would be of much more use than the LX3s 60mm).  But I’ve been really impressed with some of the pictures people have taken with it – often at the wider end, making most of the perspective it offers.  And it’s got a fast little lens, opening as much as f2.0 at the widest end and f2.8 at the longest. 

24mm-60mm would essentially bring me back to those early days of having only a normal lens to work with (except the LX3 has the added benefit of going wide).  It’s a very adjustable camera, so some people have adjusted the white balance to take what they consider to be better skin tones.  Of course, if I got the Leica version (D-Lux 4) it seems that less colour adjustment would be necessary.  Although they’re essentally the same camera, Panasonic tweaks their jpeg engine to pinker skin tones and more vivid greens.  Leica supposedly prefers their jpegs to have truer colours.  But the price tag is almost double the LX3.

Then there’s the recently announced Panasonic G1micro four thirds - flip out LCD, large sensor  (compared to a point-and-shoot), no video (not sure if that would matter to me.  But they’re coming out with another version next year with HDvideo) and interchangeable lenses (of which there are very few choices.  Initially, they’ll offer only a 28mm-90mm and a 90mm-280mm.  There’ll be a 28-280mm next year – but I’m suspicious that it will be prohibitively expensive).  It looks like it’s just a bit larger than the Canon SX10.  Better image quality than the FZ28… but will it be as much fun?  Certainly not if I have to change lenses.  And perhaps not without a 400+mm focal length.  The 3″ flip out LCD is nice though…

So, it’s likely that it will be a question of just getting a FZ28 and using it for all purposes (suffering through poor skin tones and iffy indoor performance), or getting a LX3 now, and a superzoom the next time I go on a trip (and who knows when that will be?).

Elizabeth May Rocks

Ok, it’s only 10 minutes into the Federal Political Debate, but Elizabeth May is kicking ass.  It’s especially sweet since the networks and other parties tried to keep her out of the debates.

The hardest part about watching the debate is listening to that typical stuffy political double-speak –obfuscation and avoidance of answering questions by attacking the opponent.  Plus, there’s something about Stephen Harper’s demeanor when he’s “listening” to his opponents that has me expecting him to morph into a giant lizard-headed alien at any minute and bite the head off of Stephane Dion.

Elizabeth May, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air.  Too bad she isn’t in my riding.  I hope she gets a seat.

The LifeQuest chronicles…

So – it’s been 7 attempts, no luck ( S is counting the missed try in June – the one where the clinic started cycle monitoring 2 days later than S wished, and it turns out she ovulated before they were ready for her). 

Because it’s been 7 tries, and because we’re very sure that last month the inseminations started 2 days too soon (a $1,200 mistake – but since it’s our $1,200 I suppose it doesn’t matter), we made another appointment with the doctor to review our options.  Specifically, we want to try hCG so that the timing of insemination could be closer to ovulation.  Some articles online suggest that timing of insemination should be within 6 hours on either side of ovulation. 

I was surprised to see that our doctor didn’t understand how we thought hCG could help.  She wanted us to tell her when we’d want to take it (eg if the follicle is 1.8 cm and LH is still in the early teens).  Isn’t that her job?

She said that she used hCG in her fellowship, but in conjunction with fertility drugs.   LifeQuest doesn’t use hCG but instead uses double inseminations 24 hours apart with the goal of having one before and one after ovulation.  And that’s cool — but it hasn’t been working. 

S doesn’t want to take fertility drugs right now, because she doesn’t want to be faced with triplets or quads and having to decide whether to cull the herd.  And that’s fair.  From my layman’s perspective, I’d just as soon she switch to IVF if taking fertility drugs – get as many embryos as possible and keep trying that way.  But the doctor would rather see us try a few cycles with fertility drugs, and then perhaps test for endometrial function and, if indicated, have surgical procedures to try and remedy any problem. If there is no endometrial problem, then we could try moving to IVF.

Frankly, if S’s womb is sufficiently inhospitable as to require surgery, I’d suggest we take a look at mine before doing anything that invasive.  With IVF, there’s no reason why we couldn’t just switch wombs.  But it’s her body that would have to suffer either the invasiveness of IVF or the invasiveness of surgery, so it’s her choice.

The doctor relented and we’ll try Ovidrel and a single insemination this month.  The confusing part for me is that two other women in our DPT group use hCG, as well as a colleague of mine.  So it isn’t unheard of.  Rather the opposite. ( These people use the Hannam clinic and the First Steps clinic). 

As we left, we realized the doctor forgot to give us the protocol for this month, and also for got to give us the prescription (which we went back and got). Between that and the disparity between what other clinics seem to do with respect to HcG, we’re not bouyed with confidence in our clinic.

If anyone is considering LifeQuest, also consider that this month S went for her full bladder Day 3 ultrasound and had to wait for an hour and 40 minutes.  If it was my bladder they were talking about, I wouldn’t have been able to hold it that long, considering you pretty much arrive with a full bladder.  Why don’t they put the full bladder ultrasounds to the top of the list, just to be humane, considering the wait is unimaginably long?  You might want to find out how long the wait is at other clinics.  But also find out how much the other clinics charge in admin fees, or if they add a surcharge onto the price of frozen sperm (we hear a couple of clinics do this.  LifeQuest doesn’t).  Each clinic is different, apparently for the better or for the worse.  Buyer beware.