weekends go down like this

the work picnic was nice - not the best iteration of the picnic that i've seen in my 4 summers at my work, but serviceable. i booked it home to pick up painting supplies and awaited the arrival of bwong, who helped me bang off two coats on the dining room. the colour FREAKED me out at first. i was really concerned that we had made the bad call and that i should have stuck with the original colour.

we took a work break to eat dinner (chino loco's) and watch "shottas" which is kind of like a jamaican backwards version of "belly" (that hype williams hip hop flick) with a $10,000 budget, gratuitous fake boobs and horrible acting. it was kind of awesome, even if the thick patois meant that i only understood about 15% of the dialogue (if that.) it features a performance by wyclef and a pretty boomin' soundtrack. i was exhausted so i fell asleep and missed a really ace scene where they show the requisite, insane-o enforcer goon, mad max, smoking a cigarette. pan out: it's being held in A DEAD GUY'S HAND. lol!

saturday we woke up hella early and got pwned first thing with some probable car troubles. the dotytron was driving in scarbs and some kids at the side of the road were like, "guy! your tire is on fire!" so he pulled over and checked and the rear right tire was smoldering. he called CAA and had them tow the car to our mechanic. i was home and the dotytron was en route to teach a lesson, so i dealt with the mechanic. it was my first time talking to him, and quite frankly, HE'S THE BEST GUY ON THE PLANET. CAA guy was telling us it might be our calipers seizing up, which would be a TOTAL piss-off because a) we just got the rear calipers replaced less than a year ago, and b) calipers cost around a grand. but when i talked to our mechanic, he said it wasn't that. he can't find out what's wrong, but he's going to take another look at it on monday and do our oil and a transmission flush at the same time. i can't convey how reassuring, calm, professional, and NON skeevy our mechanic is. he instantly puts you at ease, if you can find a cheaper price someplace else, he'll work something out with you, he doesn't try to force you to get work that doesn't need to be done, he's super-informative, busy enough so that there's always cars there but not so busy that he can't squeeze you in...i pretty much fell in love with him talking to him on the phone. the dotytron has won himself mad "get yourself out of the doghouse free" cards by finding this guy. to the point where i was all worried that he was old and was only going to be around for maybe 10 more years, and then we'd have to find a new mechanic again, but the dotytron has met him and told me that he's actually in his late 30s. phew.

we were supposed to go to deep richmond hill to attend our friends' P & R's baby shower, but there was no way we could get there with no car, so we had to bail, which meant that the day was consumed with going buck cleaning the house and finishing painting the dining room and doing the groceries. lil' ugmo has never been this clean. it's all because i'm hosting academic book club on wednesday and these are all grown-ups and i want to impress, i guess? i dunno. i do know that i effin' love a clean house. the dotytron and i are both like that. we luxuriate in it. we love just sitting in our freshly cleaned house and breathing in that natural cleaner smell and surveying everything being in the proper place. it's so calming.

so the big dining room overhaul is done. this is the dining room we inherited:



pretty hideous. awful acoustic tile ceiling, that disgusting fluorescent light picking out all the yellow tones in the walls, drab furniture...ugh. it's a wonder what we (read: the dotytron) ever saw in lil' ugmo and it's a wonder he managed to convince me that we should actually buy the thing.

this was the interim iteration of the dining room, that we've been living with for the past 8 months or so, featuring that blue paint that was supposed to be a steely gray-blue but ended up more sickening, baby's room blue and would drive me crazy every time i looked at it:

i only have 1 photo of it. i guess in my heart i always knew it was provisional.

this is the new and improved, for keeps (or for the next good long while, at any rate) dining room iteration:





the colour is a little off in the photos - it's a deep, greeny-blue with lots of red tints in it - like a deep, deep aquamarine. we picked it because it goes nicely with the red vignette on top of the refrigerator chest and the pale yellow in the embroidery hoops. the yellow picks up the yellow in the drapes and in the 2 chairs at the head and foot of the table.

here's a shot of the opposing wall, which is all white and features that fabric i bought at that vintage sale i went to a while back, mounted on a canvas frame and hung:

the plan is that later on, i'm going to stretch some twine in between two tacks just below it, and do a revolving photo display of photos that we like of friends, family, vacations, etc. hung from mini clothes pegs.

here's a closeup of the embroidery hoops - i bought vintage yellow fabric online and we hung our favorites in the hoops:

the dotytron totally got into the embroidery hoops - way more than i thought he would. i'm totally besotted with the new dining room. it's fulfilling all my nesting urges.

i love sitting on our new couch (!) from the living room, which is all thunderdome with couches...the new set-up is a little squishy, but not bad, and totally suitable for hosting movie club and whatnot:

we're calling new couch an homage to smudgie, because it's the exact same grey as him and is super soft and squishy.



we moved old new couch under the window, with a side table with the vintage lamp on it right next to it. shifted the colour-coded bookcase down and moved the tv to the far left of the buffet so that it can be angled so that anyone sitting on the couches can see it. pretty aces! i'm waiting to get my international year of astronomy posters framed and then hung above the new couch. the colours in there are grey and dark grey, the purple, red, and yellow. the drapes are the same in the living room and dining room, and the yellow and grey and red are continued throughout both rooms, providing some continuity.

love!

last night i made us a pretty boss dinner. we had grilled flank steak with chimichurri (chimichurri is SO GOOD! that was my first time eating/making it), with cumin black beans and brown rice, with lime squeezed over. we also had that cucumber, radish, feta and dill salad i like so much. for dessert we had another slice of the strawberry rhubarb crostata i made on friday, with whipped cream and ice cream:


we were EXHAUSTED after going to town on the house and doing errands yesterday...i think i passed out at 10:30pm in our blessedly cool house now that the heat has broken a bit AND tillers passed on the super-awesome tip to have the fan going on the furnace (no heat, just fan) to circulate the cooler air from downstairs up to the second floor.

even though we worked like, nonstop for about 12 hours on saturday, it was so worth it, seeing the results above and having everything tidy. i'm such a freak. my vices consist of being prepared, working hard, organizing and multi-tasking. it's sick. i'm addicted to all of the above and the hit of euphoria i get is a pure dopamine shot to the brain.

this morning we woke up at had a shanghai dim sum brunch with cousin yeti and his partner E. cousin yeti plays in this awesome 80s hair metal band called the diemonds. i think i've talked about them before. they are the best! so rockin! and so sincerely rockin at that. we're going to see them play their NXNE show at the newest hipster bar/restaurant sensation, parts and labour (owned by the same people who brought parkdale the social). cousin yeti started off as their drummer, played on their first album, took a break to go on tour with some other bands as a guitar tech, and now is back as their second guitarist.

tonight i think the plan is to go back to chino loco's as a nice treat before the dotytron abandons me for 3 days to take a bunch of grade 8s to montréal as part of their grad trip. i think we're also going to try to do some no-rules tennis or go for a bike ride, too.

fin.

the business resumes!

i'm still trying to get quotes from contractors about replacing two of the plaster walls in spumante's future room with drywall and perhaps adding insulation. if it's like a $500 difference, we might end up taking down the lath and plaster ourselves. my mentor at work had a good point (he's kind of the best mentor ever because he also mentors me on life stuff/home renos/AND the work stuff) - basically he said, doing demo is easy. you're just tearing stuff apart. and worse comes to worse, you can always call someone in and say, "i messed up, now can you come and fix it" which makes total sense to me! who knows, we might even try putting up the drywall ourselves - i'd probably leave the taping and finishing to an expert, though.

AND due to the impossible heat wave we're been having (which thankfully broke last night with the thunderstorm) i'm researching CAC units. the downstairs of lil' ugmo gets no natural light, which means that it's always nice and cool (we're topping out at around 75F, which i know is a normal room temperature and only feels warm to us because i insist on keeping the house at 64F in the WINTER!) but the upstairs has been pretty brutal. i've been okay with a regimen of a fan on, computers off during the day when we're not home and at night, cold showers right before bed and coverless sleeping, but the little principessa the dotytron has been complaining and complaining (keep in mind, i'm the preggos one who is literally incubating another life form) so it's time to start thinking about CAC. we could get by with a window unit but for resale, CAC is kind of par for the course.

secret admission: i love researching stuff like CAC. it's so much fun! i just like being an informed consumer - i don't go buck, but i like to at least have some terminology and specs down.

this week has been crazy. dotytron is djing the school fun fair and barreling towards the end of the school year with all that entails (ie. report cards), we're trying to paint the dining room and get some house stuff done before i host my book club and before the dotytron leaves next monday for 3 days in montreal with his school, last night we went to see momma d sing with the toronto choral society at their spring concert, this weekend we've got a baby shower and brunch and more house stuff...it's just a lot piling up. but it is what it is.

this is tuesday night's pasta dinner - so good, huh? we've been eating out on the front steps if it's nice enough as we're avoiding our death trap of a back deck:

 

last night i made us fried rice with chinese sausage, egg, napa cabbage with steamed shanghai choy on the side and dumplings that i accidentally burned (we still scraped them up and ate them):

 

thank you chinese sausage for maxing out my sodium intake for A WEEK.

tonight is dodgeball - last game before the playoffs! so pumped to play.

this is what's got me cranked right now:

1) looking forward to TWO weeks cottaging this summer. 1 week with my family, 1 week with my kdubsguelph family. the kdubsguelph one was kind of a bonus-throw-in so it's even better.

2) dr. rei has filled my head with the idea of renting a villa in sardinia next summer. check out some of the rentals, here. some of them are surprisingly affordable, considering that you'd be sharing the cost with another couple. so pumped! look at those places! even if it doesn't end up happening, what a place to dream about.

3) my friend L, introduced the dotytron to the wonders of "yacht rock" which is a series about the quasi-fictional development of the smooth rock sound (ie. steely dan, the doobie brothers, chicago, kenny loggins, etc.) of the late 70s and early 80s. it's HILARIOUS. check it out for yourselves:



the dude playing oates from hall and oates makes me want to pee my pants, laughing. granted, this has a pretty limited appeal - you kind of have to know some of the figures involved for it to be funny. we've been walking around singing like michael mcdonald all week. so good!

i've read quite a few books lately, expect a monster review capsule post soon.

tomorrow is the work picnic on centre island, assuming we don't get rained out.

fin.

nothing better

than geneseo on the first REAL weekend of the summer. why can't all weekends in the summer be 4 day weekends, i ask? why?

friday we took my niece on her special day out. we met up with my sister at bill gray's (a rochester institution as far as burgers go) in the strong national museum of play. bill gray's is kind of your classic burger place - they do burgers and dog and chili dogs and chicken fingers and milkshakes and curly fries:


i can't resist curly fries which are exotic by virtue of their infrequent appearance on fast food menus, but overall the burgers weren't all that great. they were rough, shaggy patties but didn't have the beef flavour of a five guys burgers and fries. the strong museum is actually every child's dream of a kid's museum. it's heavily funded by private enterprise, which means that there's a whole mini-supermarket (wegmans) with everything to scale and barcodes that beep and that will produce a receipt. there's also an educational part where you can learn about magnets and velocity and there's a slanty house that you walk into and makes you feel like you're drunk stumbling around because the entire perspective of the room is off. super-fun. there's also a small version of sesame street, where you can do fun stuff like PUT YOURSELF INTO SESAME STREET:

i kind of thought my threshold for staying would be two hours max, but this is before we realized that the special exhibit, "mindbender mansion," which was actually supposed to open for realsies on saturday, was doing a SOFT OPEN on friday. this is when me and the dotytron pretty much lost our minds and our niece started having a medium amount of fun. the premise of "mindbender mansion" is that there are all these rooms set up and all the rooms have various sized like gifted/problem solving/puzzle/IQ type games. THE FUNNEST. stuff like reorganizing shapes into a triangle AND a hexagon, or making tetris blocks fit into two differently sized boxes, or having a grid and the numbers 1-9 and you have to make every LINE (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) add up to 15. BEYOND FUN! then the dotytron picked up this card thing where if you correctly answered specific puzzles within each room they would give you a key, which you then plugged into a machine that would give you another key. when you finished all the rooms you could plug all your final answer keys into the computer and you get to be on their wall of fame.

me + competitiveness + wall of fame = we went buck in there. my sister got let off of work early and called me to find out where we were at and i basically screamed into the phone: "WE'RE STILL AT THE MINDBENDER MANSION, OMG IT'S THE BEST, WE NEED YOUR HELP, GET HERE NOW!!!" so she showed up with little ze and we finally finished but it took us like, 3 more hours. lol!

i wish i had the photos from our wall of fame but they were totally awesome. (sis: keep the photos and set them aside! i'm going to scan them)

the most obnoxious part was there was some dad and his daughter there in the most challenging room, the library (we had spent 30 minutes there, quit, and came back to finish it up) and he was working on this colour puzzle thing with his kid for FOREVER and DIDN'T FINISH. then, the dotytron solved this one puzzle where you had to get a bunch of shapes to fit into a T formation. he did it, undid it, then little ze (who is a puzzle master and btw is only FOUR) FIGURED IT OUT ON HIS OWN. he left the puzzle pieces in the correct placement, so then little girl shows up, sees the FINISHED PUZZLE, undoes it, and redoes it (which is obviously, the easiest thing in the world when you ALREADY SEE THE ANSWER) and starts crowing about how easy it was, and her dad is like, all smug, and "yeah, it WAS easy" and then goes and tries to give smug advice to my sister who is working on this number puzzle. he has nothing constructive which just got our goats. meanwhile, i finished the colour puzzle that he and his kid couldn't figure out. lame! we were so cheesed.

for dinner we went to delmonico's italian steakhouse (where we had our rehearsal dinner!) because i had some gift certificates to use up. it's kind of classic, jersey, new york, red sauce style italian food. veal marsala, linguine al vongole, type stuff. HUMONGOUS portions and actually really, really, delicious. we all shared their fried mozzarella in marinara sauce appetizer. i got the delmonico's steak which is $17.99 for a POUND AND A HALF of USDA prime rib eye. the dotytron got this veal mushroom escarole special (look at the size of that portion!!!) we split a tiramisu to finish:




then we headed home to rendezvous with my outlaw bro and s-dawg, who showed up after work on friday. s-dawg introduced us to the human centipede trailer, which is totally disgusting and scarred me for life (WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK - YOU'VE BEEN WARNED):

this obviously meant we spent the rest of the weekend joking about it and being grossed out and thinking up ideas for the sequel and the third part. this also meant that i spent the whole night wondering aloud really stupid stuff like: "i just don't understand the guy's motivation for making the human centipede" and my siblings yelling back at me: "he's a DEMENTED SURGEON!" this seriously happened like, 9 times.

saturday we went to brian's u.s.a. diner for breakkie. this was the size of my breakfast (p.s. it was only $5.39):


the dotytron got the belt-buster, which is corned beef hash:

then we drove and hung out in letchworth gorge (the grand canyon of the west) and then went to the u.s. army corps of engineers doo-wop thing at mount morris dam which turned out to be kind of lame but also fun because we were all there together.


after that we went home and loafed around and napped and sat outside. for dinner we had sub-par chicken bbq from some church that wasn't prepared and didn't really know how to do a proper chicken bbq:

sunday we made breakfast and then loafed around outside. we filled up the kiddie pool and lounged around on the deck in our bathing suits and played whiffle ball baseball and napped and then i made a louisiana shrimp boil dinner, which we ate on newspaper and butcher paper on the patio table:



THE SHRIMP BOIL WAS AMAZING! corn, salt potatoes, shrimp, andouille sausage and clams boiled and then tossed with butter and old bay seasoning. we had it with a tuna mac salad my sister made, bread and butter, green salad, and for dessert, wegmans' memorial day cake with strawberries and whipped cream.

more loafing and napping and then monday we woke up, the dotytron and i grabbed aunt cookies subs and then we all went to watch the memorial day parade. the parade started off with the war veterans, who were all really old and basically had me sobbing in like 10 seconds. too many old people all at once! and they're WAR VETERANS!!! aka basically the best people on earth.



main street geneseo was all done up with flags and it was really sweet - there was a middle school and high school marching band and all the little league teams were in the parade too - it was adorable, random classmates of my niece would be all like, "hey miss ramona!" when they walked past in the parade. freakin' adorable.

notes on the weekend:

- how is it that there are a MILLION things to do in geneseo and surrounding area (in the county) on any given weekend and there's like, nothing to do in toronto? seriously! we had such a hard time deciding what to do on the weekend - the penny saver was chock full of stuff.

- s-dawg saw this weekend as an opportunity to unveil the best/the worst john lithgow impression of all time. it basically consists of him bugging out his eyes, doing a dramatic wave, and putting on a voice and saying the words: "WHAT? JOHN LITHGOW!" repeatedly. ha!

- we caught the latter half of "harry potter and the goblet of fire" on t.v. and they showed severus snape and i was all like, "severus snape is awesome!" and i was like, "what's the deal with harry potter's parents anyway, they weren't even that great" and my sister says, "um, james potter was an a**hole" and her face was totally indignant and it was hilarious. so we've decided that if we ever go to visit the harry potter experience at universal studios, our family t-shirts are going to read: "james potter was an a-hole"

- we're focusing our fatburger research not so much on birth but on what to expect the first year once the kid has already arrived - stuff like colic, and how to know when to feed, etc. so the dotytron has been plowing through "what to expect the first year" and i was like, "look up thrush!" and the dotytron read quietly for a bit and then says, "okay, i know all about it. it's basically an infection in the baby's mouth that it gets when it eats your vagine on the way out." LOL!!! i basically married the funniest guy in the world.

- yesterday, when we were out doing our grocery shopping after coming back from the states...we passed by the mark's work wearhouse on the danforth, and i saw a woman sitting on a bench outside of it, sobbing her eyes out.
me: "dude, i just saw a woman bawling her eyes out outside of mark's work wearhouse"
doty: "really? that's rough"
*two second pause*
doty: "especially if it's related to stock issues"

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ahahahahahahahaha!

tonight i made us spaghetti with white anchovies, chilies, and garlic breadcrumbs. with a salad. because i need to start eating healthy again.

fin.

i'm too tired to write...

and too excited by my impending road trip to lovely geneseo to bother with the long rundown. so here's a capsule photo montage. i don't know why some of the photos aren't showing up but i'm too lazycakes to fix it.

this is a cotton candy machine that was outside another of the izakayas in the east village.

on monday morning we had breakfast at good enough to eat, where i had the best corned beef hash ever (and i've eaten a lot of corned beef hash in my day, trust me), with big chunks of greasy, crusty potatoes, onions, and tender bits of real corned beef. it was served with fluffy yeasted biscuits and whipped strawberry butter. the strawberry butter was delightful. the dotytron had a regular farmer's breakfast with pork sausage patties, poached eggs, and a delicately flavoured onion-dill bread:

we rented bikes near central park and then biked around. we made a mistake and finished a small loop of the park in about 20 minutes - thinking we'd done the whole thing. MISTAKE. when we took the other fork in the road the bike ride was over an hour to circle the park - and some of it was ruthlessly uphill, which is deceiving because most of manhattan lulls you into complacency with its' flatness. we also biked along the hudson where i took horrible, ugly, unpicturesque photos:

our last dinner in nyc was in brooklyn, again in williamsburg, at fatty 'cue. zakary pelaccio has another restaurant (two branches, now) called fatty crab, which serves malaysian street food type stuff - laksas, curried crabs, etc. this is a southeast asian take on bbq with delicious, piquant results. this is a nam prik eggplant, which is served with chiccharones, green mango, radishes, and beans for dipping:

this is dragon pullman loaf from chinatown, toasted (the fluffiest white bread ever) served with fat from the smoker. somewhat predictably, i was the only fan:

this was pork belly, served with the most fragrant yellow curry custard - so good:

the dishes are meant for sharing and they arrive in no particular order. this was pulled lamb shoulder with house made pita and greek yoghurt with thai mint:

a cucumber salad and a celery salad with yuzu:

a smoked snapper that is then seared, served with chili sauce:

some of the juciest, most flavourful, most perfectly cooked duck i've ever eaten, served with a red curry custard:

brisket served with bone broth, bao, and condiments. the idea is you make little sandwiches with the bao and then dip in the bone broth:

this was a special that night, called "the legend" basically a cross section of the belly of the pig, smoked and then fried, served with more bao. sooooooooooooo good:

we had the snapper bones fried so we could snack on them:

i freakin' love that place and would go back in an instant. so good! so very, very good. lentz joined pingy, pingy's roomie, myself and the dotytron for dinner and he and the dotytron had a blast taking down the "recession special" at the bar and with dinner - a set of drinks which featured a shot of whiskey, a shot of pickle juice, and then a tall boy of pabst blue ribbon for $8. the pickle juice was really, really good! kind of gingery and not acrid briny at all.

the morning before we left we stopped at amy ruth's which is one of our favorite soul food restaurants, and also (according to the menu) a favorite of such african american luminaries as the reverend al sharpton and bill clinton. my stomach has been feeling a little sensitive and over-worked lately, so we kept it "light" so to speak. i had biscuits, virginia ham and eggs and the dotytron had bacon, grits, and eggs:

then we hopped on a plane and raced to our midwifery appointment and now we're all caught up.

last night we went to see stravinsky's petrushka at the toronto symphony orchestra. it was fantastico. i fell asleep through most of petrushka but stayed away for the pre-intermission bit, which was the second part of the three cornered hat (or something) which i LOVED and this nuevo tango number which i also LOVED.

i've been craving fresh, cold, salad-y things lately for dinner so i made us a GIANT pre-symphony greek salad which we had with beef souvlaki from sun valley:

it's been SO HOT and we don't have a/c in our house that i wanted cold crispiness. we're going to eat that again tonight before we drive down to geneseo.

squee! so excited to see my sis and outlaw bro and her family. we haven't seen them since easter. it was miss ramona's birthday a while back so i made up a certificate for her naming her aunt mercy and uncle do-do's "favorite niece of the year" and had a fill-in-the-blanks prize form for her to fill out and mail back which entitled her to a very special fun day with just us and her. she picked going to the strong museum (children's museum in rochester) and eating burgers for her activity. so we're definitely going to do that. otherwise it'll just be me and my sis rubbing our bellies together to get the cousins acquainted and eating and relaxing and watching MTOD. i'm hoping it's going to be hot and sunny enough that we can go swimming at stony brook, if it's even open yet.

happy memorial day weekend everyone!

i'm currently in love with this tune - it's so hands-in-the-air 80s:

it's made by the same guy who made her "hot'n'cold" which i kinda love, "since u been gone" which i TOTALLY love, and "party in the u.s.a." which is TOTALLY TOTALLY love. this guy, dr. luke, totally has me dialed in.

lol!

fin.