The CBC website has a pretty in-depth story about the shooting at Dawson College yesterday. A name has finally been released and the gunman has been identified as 25-year-old Laval resident Kimveer Gill. It’s interesting how eyewitness accounts can be off sometimes – yesterday afternoon they were saying he was a blond man with a mohawk.

In further updates, although yesterday it was believed that no one had died other than the gunman himself, who was shot by police, this morning they confirmed that an 18-year-old girl, Anastasia de Souza was also killed in the shooting. There was a press conference this morning about the 19 other victims who were in varying conditions, some critical. There were at least eight people who required surgery, including one boy who had been shot in the neck.

On Canada AM this morning, they mentioned that Kimveer had a blog which had been taken down by police. They said he wrote about his loathing of “jocks” as well as posted pictures of himself with knives and guns. According to the story above on CBC, the last handful of images showed him in the black trench coat that witnesses had described, with the final image showing him with a gun and the caption “ready for action”. Despite the claim of deletion, there does appear to be a feed of the website, at least the blog entries. I looked a few of them over and eventually decided I don’t really care about how he felt because he certainly didn’t care about anyone else, and I clicked away.

It’s funny how stories like this make you want – need – to personalize the details. I didn’t go to Dawson and I dont think I know anyone who is a student there now (though one of my co-bloggers on Montreal Metroblogs works at Dawson and he posted his personal account of the day’s events). But it’s like we need to personalize it anyway to try to understand it or to try to cope with the feelings of helplessness. I didn’t go there, but Amanda did. I also know the layout of the school quite well because I visited a couple of times years ago when a group of student newspapers – I was a part of the paper at Champlain College – did a collaboration issue and the meetings were at Dawson’s paper. I once sat in the same cafeteria which was yesteday’s crime scene – I was there to audition for the school’s theater program and I sat at one of the tables to go over my monologues one last time. I ended up being accepted into the program but ultimately turned it down.

But you also personalize it when you have kids. I look at Hayley and I know she will be starting school next year. a year from now she’ll already be attending kindergarten. You sort of think to yourself, “Well, another kindergarten student isn’t going to open fire in the middle of storytime” but you can’t help but worry a little. How many other mothers and fathers were terrified yesterday amid all the broken and inconclusive news feeds, wondering if their child was one of the victims? It makes me want to hide away in a cabin in the woods (with high speed internet access, naturally) and homeschool the girls and never send them off to a school where some crazed person with a pissy attitude and a lack of respect for human life thinks that it’s okay to open fire on innocent students during lunch. How do you ever recover from something like that? I don’t want to have to figure that out.

I’ve been a bit of a news junkie for awhile now, but I know that I look at the news differently now and I have since September of 2002 when Hayley was born. Every tragedy becomes personal as I think, “What if that was MY kid?”

I know there’s no real way to protect your kids from everything. You do the best you can, you teach them safety rules and guidelines, you offer up a prayer to whoever you believe in, and you cross your fingers and hope for the best. There’s not much else you can do. Because the truth is you can’t really hide out from the world forever, even if you might want to sometimes. Danger will always be there and you have to send your kids out into the world eventually.

But today, on a rainy day less than 24 hours after a horrible school shooting where not much makes sense, it’s probably okay to just stay inside. And while you do, it’s definitely okay to take your kids and hug them just a little closer, because somewhere in Montreal, an 18-year-old girl’s parents can’t.

Christ. For the past hour and a half I’ve been watching the news. Someone opened fire on students at Dawson College, a Montreal CEGEP*.

So far the only person who has died is the gunman, who was “neutralized” by police. However, many people have been taken to the hospital, some in critical condition or requiring surgery for life-threatening injuries.

I didn’t go to Dawson but my sister did, and I spent enough time there on several occasions for student paper events and also to audition for their Theater program, so I know the layout enough to know he picked the best time of day (lunch) and the best location (cafeteria) to make the maximum impact.

I can’t believe this happened.

*For non-Montreal folks, CEGEP is similar to a prep school for university. We only go to grade 11 in high school here, then you go to CEGEP/college where you can take a two-year program to prepare for university or a three-year technical program that includes internship and leads straight to the work force.

This morning I was preparing my second cup of coffee (and honestly, I could use another two or three today if only it didn’t make me shake and feel like crap after the first two) while holding Breanna. She was staring with big, curious eyes while I spooned out the coffee and measured the sugar so I explained it to her.

“You see, Breanna, this is my religion. I don’t have to go to a church or read a holy book. It’s quite simple in that sense. But the Church of Coffee is still demanding.

“First of all, like the Christian God, the Coffee God is a jealous God. Do not forsake it to cozy up to a cup of morning tea. Do not worship the much lower demi-god of decaf. They are nothing but empty idols who will not carry you like the Coffee God does. You will be left tired and broken.

“There’s also a serious time commitment. While you are free to worship from home, it must be done much more frequently than your average once-a-week-on-Sunday worship at the local church. You must worship every day. EVERY DAY. Do not fail to worship your coffee every morning, for if you do not bow before the Mug Of Steaming Beans, the Coffee God will be angry and He will smite you with a nasty headache.

“If you wish, you can join other coffee worshippers at a shockingly wide variety of churches – Tim Horton’s, Second Cup, Starbucks, even small privately owned cafes. The nice part of this religion though, is you can feel free to just worship privately in the comforts of your own home. You can convert others and share your faith with them by brewing up a pot of coffee or you can be a solitary practitioner with a single cup of instant.

“Just like many major religions offer slightly different denominations, there are many spiritual coffee paths that you can choose to explore: Regular coffee, flavored coffee, black coffee, coffee with sugar, artificially sweetened coffee, coffee with milk, coffee with flavored creamers… If you seek frilly religion, you can seek out the lessons of the latte,the cappucino, and the high priest, the espresso.

“Somewhat similar to a cult, the religion of Coffee is reluctant to let you go. Once you become involved in the church, you will find it very difficult to leave, but you will likely find you have little desire to escape anyway.

“Be sure you are serious before starting a relationship with the Coffee God and enter into the sacred covenant of coffee-making with caution. However, rest assured that once you have entered the church, salvation is always only a cup away.”

Yawn. Forget my normal two-cup limit. I’m so tired today that I think I have to take communion for a third time after lunch.

Five years ago, planes crashed into the World Trade Center, into the Pentagon, and into the ground. Almost three thousand people died on the 11th of September, 2001. D.C. Roe has created a fantastic project called 2996. Interested participants signed up and were assigned one of the 2996 victims of September 11th. We were given a name, a link, and asked to remember.

The saddest part for me is not only that Klaus was one of the victims; it’s that it was so difficult to find any information about him. Several Google searches brought up page after page of 9/11 memorial sites, all of which contained the same small blurb about him. Perhaps, buried in the middle of all the memorials, there might be a page with more information about him written by someone in his native Germany. I hope so. I hope it’s only that I can’t understand enough German to be able to find him. I’d like to think that somewhere, someone has written his story. If I died tomorrow, the world could still find out who I am because of this site and because of others who would write about me. It saddens me that I can’t find the same overload of information about him.

What I do know is that Klaus was only 31 years old, one year younger than I am now. I know by his picture that he was quite attractive. I know that he was married, and I wish I knew her name. I know he was a father to one child, and I can’t even tell you if it’s a girl or a boy. I know that he was flying from Linkenhein, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany on a business trip with two other executives from BCT Technology AG. I don’t know where they were going specifically or what business was on the agenda, only that Klaus was the director of development since 1994

Klaus boarded Flight 175 and left Boston’s Logan airport that morning, headed for Los Angeles. He was on the plane that hit the South Tower in New York City.

If you think it’s hard to care about or feel for someone that you have never known you are wrong. Because today I am sitting here and not only crying for the loss of 2996 people overall, I am crying for a man I never met, someone I know little about, and wishing I could somehow reach out to a widow and fatherless child that I will never know.

Just in case there was any doubt or thoughts that I’m embellishing, here’s a little 16-second video for you.

Ms. Overachiever will be ten months in two more weeks. I don’t know whether to be impressed or go hide in a dark corner and weep.

I completely forgot about Love Thursday over at Chookooloonks yesterday. Oops. I even had a picture for it. So here it is anyway.

I tried to take a nice picture but Breanna just wanted to stand up on the rock and Hayley was strangely nervous (strangely because she frequently has no trouble pushing her down at home) so it ended up kind of blurry. Hayley kept wrapping her arm around Breanna to keep her from falling over. I guess it just shows that even though she can get a bit rough, she really does love her little sister.

Sometimes, even though I live with her, Hayley’s vocabulary startles me. People compliment me all the time about it but really, I didn’t go out of my way to teach her to be well-spoken. All I did was avoid any form of baby talk. She never had owies or boo-boos, I always called them cuts and scrapes. As a tiny baby I always called her body parts by their proper names so that she knew she had a vagina and not a hoo-ha, wazoo, or any other name for it. Beyond that, I never did anything special. I didn’t sit her down with flash cards, drilling her for hours a day. I guess she just inherited her mother’s love of words and natural verbosity.

That said, there really are times when she says things and I wonder where she got them from because I don’t necessarily remember teaching them to her. Other times, I know the origins of the words, expressions, or sentences but they still take me by surprise when I hear them come out of her mouth.

Some recent Hayley-isms:

(To George’s sister) “I’m so happy to play with you because I don’t always get the opportunity to see you.” Opportunity?!

“Look Mommy! There’s dinosaur bones under this bench! Oh. It’s not dinosaur bones, just a stick. I thought it was a pterodactyl.”

“We have to say grace before we eat because it’s important to be grateful for our food. Some people don’t have any food.” (Trust me, she doesn’t get the grace thing from this heathen-filled household!)

“Oh, this is too difficult.”

“Cricket! Get out of the bathroom IMMEDIATELY!” (She totally gets “immediately” from me and all the times I’ve said it to her, but it’s still funny to hear.)

She turns four in less than two weeks and I can hardly believe the time has flown so fast.

What our household will be like for the next decade or so:

Hayley just purposely farted on Breanna’s head. Signs of the future.

I can’t even express how incredibly sad I was to wake up this morning to the news that Steve Irwin was dead after a stingray attack. I remember first watching “The Crocodile Hunter” years ago with George. We both thought he was a certifiable loon but we loved him and his show and often stayed up too late watching it before bed. For ages we would holler a loud “Crikey” in a questionable imitation of an Aussie accent.

There were times I disagreed with things he did, like the time he was feeding raw chicken to a crocodile with one hand while holding his baby with the other, and boy did he ever come under fire for that. Overall, though, he was such a wonderful person. He was only as crazy as he was because he was so incredibly passionate about his work. He brought animal awareness and interest to so many people, especially kids; on top of that he helped bring that awareness to animals that don’t often get a favorable mention the way that the cuter, furry animals do. As much as I love reptiles myself, you couldn’t pay me enough to get as close to komodo dragons as he did, and that’s what made the show so much fun – the fact that he would go ahead and get right among them, talking about them like they were just misunderstood teenagers.

I feel so badly for his family. Wherever he is, I hope there are lots of crocodiles and funny reptiles for him to play with. Rest in peace, Steve.

Over at Motherhood Uncensored, Kristen was talking about making some motivational posters for moms, something that would feature things we can actually relate to as opposed to the cheesy “dream big” written beneath a tiny scorpion crossing the vast desert or whatever.

Thanks to the nifty tools over at Flickr, it was easy to come up with four quick “momivational” posters.

Because, really, a princess has to be a princess even when she’s sneezing, sniffling, and coughing up a pancreas.

Ah, sisters. Always there for you.

The scary side of parenting.

And finally, don’t let the man (or the toy store) get you down. Boys can play Barbies and girls can drive bulldozers.

This is surprisingly addictive. I had to force myself to stop at four. If you do one too, go drop by Kristen’s site and let her know!