G8/G20

before i delve headlong into the inanity, let's have a moment of quiet reflection. our inspiration: my harbord fish'n'chips haddock dinner last night.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

okay, let's carry on then, shall we?

my thoughts on the g8/g20 gathering and the resulting protests and media frenzy and looting and chupidness can be basically summed up in the following series of random musings and pithy quips:

- people i want to hear talking about global capitalism: 1) not you 2) economists and economic theorists

- apple products advertising brainwashing > g20 media coverage brainwashing. p.s. 9/11 was an inside job, right?

- as much as i romanticize paris, 1968 - i do blame it for the commodification of protest culture. violence against protesters is totally traded as cultural capital.

principally, i'm just tired of the rhetoric and ideological nature of the discourse. like, COULD IT REALLY HAVE GONE ANY OTHER WAY? of course not! this is the only way that these meetings of global leaders can play out. what's tiresome is how predictable the narrative and roles are. on the one hand you have your protesters - the peaceful and the jacked-up-on-delusions-of-grandeur machismo/garbled anti-capitalist types. on the other hand you have "the state" the face of which are the police. if there HADN'T have been any violence or any s**tshow, would the protesters have been satisfied? i doubt it, because an essential part of the narrative is that there be some kind of police crackdown and resulting media frenzy. would the cops have been satisfied? no, because there has to be a justification for the expenditure of funds. the space is there and people just blindly step into it and act their roles...so banal.

everything is so garbled and messed up. what does it MEAN to be anti-capitalist? what does it MEAN to have people protesting? and protesting WHAT? to me, the seattle riots make more sense, that's the WTO, and we all know those guys are MAD shady. but it's ridiculous to me to be protesting world leaders getting together to talk stuff out. and seriously? you're complaining that there's no binding resolutions that come out of the g8/g20 talks? DO YOU REALLY WANT THERE TO BE?!? have you ever read through UN resolutions? it's MIND-NUMBING!!! guess how effective the UN is?!? guess how NOT bound up by bureaucracy they are?!? crikey. there is nothing that comes out of the g8/g20 meetings that wasn't already in place before or was planned a long time ago. they're only meeting for like, 3 days. let's be realistic here. haven't you ever sat in on a committee meeting at your own workplace? (anarchists: obviously not, which is YET ANOTHER REASON why you're so stupid). how effective are those meetings? holding the world leaders to what's discussed over a 3 day period on issues that affect THE GLOBE is beyond stupid. it's for people who want the coles' notes versions of global events.

you know what the most effective way of making sure that your views are represented? WORKING AT A GRASSROOTS LEVEL TO MAKE SURE THAT LEADERS WHO REPRESENT YOUR VIEWS ARE ELECTED TO BRING THE ISSUES YOU CARE ABOUT TO THE TABLE. that means NOT preaching to the converted but getting your ish together to persuade people who stand on the opposite side of the fence. that's WAY harder than marching along and staging silly, situationist type flashmobs and the like.

what is OXFAM working towards? how are they aligned with labour, native groups, women's groups, etc? in this day and age, can we really subsume all these issues under ONE banner that maintains a tight, cohesive, coherent, critical, and above all INTELLIGENT message? what does protesting in this way actually achieve in this day and age (i've been saying this since 4th year university - watching the quebec riots, thanks cultural studies!!!)

how is it surprising to anyone that cops are racist? guess what? old people are racist! and probably in higher percentages than in cops! accountants are racist! engineers are racist! instead of focusing your energy on the most visible caricature of "the state" your energies would be better applied working in your communities to raise kids who are going to go out into the world, and be whatever they're going to be (doctors, cops, teachers, etc.) and NOT be racist. instead of pointing out the obvious. let's fight racism on a SYSTEMIC level!

the dotytron had a fairly brilliant idea. he was like, all the protesters and groups should band together, sign an affidavit agreeing NOT to protest at all, and then direct the 1 billion spent on security towards a clean water initiative in africa. that's money well spent. because marching in the street is one of the most impotent forms of expressing dissent in a DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. especially marching in the street like this - when you have like, 50 bazillion different groups who all want different, amorphous things, banding together.

it's just so adbuster-y/culture-jamming-y: the collusion of soft, a-critical minds trading in tired, entrenched ideological positions that have no nuance. it's as predictable and threatening as cream of wheat.

i also think that protesters should be honest with themselves and agree that there's a certain fetishization of these clashes between themselves and the state. violence against protesters is courted to a certain extent, because those stories are then traded as cultural capital. as much as drinking stories or getting high stories or tales from the trading floor. if it had been entirely peaceful there would have been nothing to report, no machine to feed from all ends and it's the WILLINGNESS of people to participate in this narrative that i find the most saddening. such a lack of creativity, vision, context, imagination. don't you SEE?!?

also, how DARE you talk about state oppression IN ONTARIO, CANADA. how dare you?! how DARE you in the privileged north try to align yourselves with people who ACTUALLY experience oppression in iran, china, countless other places as a ROUTINE part of their daily lives. how dare you smash blackberries and then record the smashing with your iphone? how dare you try to make your life more meaningful in the cheapest way imaginable - simultaneously exerting colonial privilege AND trivializing the struggles of people who ACTUALLY have it bad? are you serious?

blargh. so frustrating!


in more pleasant news, tonight for dinner we had zucchini blossom and little baby zucchini pancakes with sour cream and mint.


we also had slow grilled kolbassa served with caramelized onions and sauerkraut in beer on a bun with spicy mustard. my inspiration was from this recipe here, with some minor tweaks. i grilled the kolbassa but caramelized the onions on the stove as i wanted them to get all sweet and sticky and then drained and rinsed the sauerkraut so it wasn't all so briny. i was trying to be carb conscious so i only ate half a bun. ta-da!

fin.

what a blur

i've had a 4 day weekend and i can't even remember what happened on friday! i'm pretty sure that i was pretty busy...but i'm not sure with what? *consults day timer* oh yes! i remember now. i spent the morning hanging out with my former supervisor and current colleague T, cruising around bloor west village, which i'd never explored before. it was fun! there are a tonne of eastern european bakeries selling delectable, not-too-sweet, eastern european type breads, pastries, and smoked sausages. i also got to check out this store, diaper-eez, which is toronto's cloth diapering mecca. because i'm crazy and seriously considering giving cloth diapering ye olde college try. it was kind of confusing because there are so many types on the market, but i came away with a fairly good understanding of the two main types: pre-folds (which are basically a piece of reinforced cotton in a dishtowel shape that you twist around the bambino's butt and then cover with a breathable waterproof underpants type thing); and the all-in-ones, which are the breathable waterproof underpants type things, with an attached long piece of absorbent cotton/fleece that you fold up like a maxi pad in there.

the pre-folds are WAY cheaper and way more environmentally friendly - as the all-in-ones are $25 EACH and you only get 1 use out of each one before washing the insert AND the cover. whereas the pre-folds are like, $30/12 and you can just keep reusing the breathable cover provided there hasn't been a poo nuclear meltdown. both of them turn your bambino's butt into a saggy bottom boy/giant drawers type scenario, but i think for the enviro factor, i'm going to give it a go.

we had dinner with people on saturday night who are also having their first and were giving me the shockface that i was considering the cloth diapering and then tried to say that the enviro factor doesn't add up because the energy costs of heating the water and the laundering negates the effect. i kind of think the dude was wrong and was just feeling judged by my decision, which is redonkulous, because people can do whatever they damn well please. i think with the new super-high energy efficient washers and dryers, especially the front-loading ones that use less water, there's NO WAY that the enviro impact can be more than with the production AND landfill clogging nature of disposables. add to that the fact that drying in a dryer is completely optional, and you've also cut out energy there. add in the fact that purchasing cloth diapers is a one-time investment. the environmental production costs happens once, and then you resuse for subsequent children and over and over again, whereas the disposable diapers have to be CONSTANTLY produced.

ultimately, who's to say that i'm going to stick it out. but i would like to try. i mean, it's not like we're more than two generations removed from cloth diapering being the ONLY option anyway.




our friday night dinner was DELICIOUS. i had the first few selfishly procured zucchini blossoms of the season, stuffed with ricotta, lemon zest, and oaxaca cheese and battered in an ethereal tempura batter and deep fried, sprinkled with sea salt. so delicious! eaten al fresco on the front steps with the antipasto salad, which consists of sliced head lettuce, sliced hot capicollo, sliced genoa salami, chickpeas, tomatoes, roasted red peppers. sliced black olives, picled eggplant, and basil leaves, dressed in a red wine vinaigrette with chili oil. so cool and tasty and mouth-feel good.

saturday and sunday were occupied all day with 9:30-5:30pm emergency first aid and CPR certification that i signed us up for thinking that if we were going to have a bambino it would be good for us to know infant resuscitation and choking and whatnot. suffice to say the dotytron was markedly UNAMUSED at frittering away one of the prime weekends in the summer (1 of 12!!!) cooped up indoors looking at pictures of contusions. he was also very UNAMUSED when this lifeguard kid stole his roller chair during break and subbed it with a non-roller office chair. lame! we were both unamused by one of the instructors who dragged out the whole session asking stupid rhetorical questions like, "now, if you see a dirty drinking straw, do you use it to perform a tracheotomy?" and then waiting for 3-5 seconds until someone responded. i mean, one or two rhetorical questions as a device to keep snoozy students interested, i get. but it was seriously like every other line.

the good thing is that ultimately, it was a worthwhile endeavor for us to learn this info because toronto has a horrible rate of intervention when people are having heart attacks. people don't want to intervene for legal/communicable disease reasons. we found out that we're covered by the good samaritan act, which means that as long as you don't act in a grossly negligent way and try your very best, you can't be charged. there hasn't been a successfully tried case yet of someone attempting to intervene and being charged with criminal negligence. also, we wait the longest to call 911 IN OUR OWN HOMES. we were taught to recognize the signs of angina, stroke, heart attack, and how to resuscitate a non-breathing, unconscious or conscious adult, infant, and child. good to know!

saturday night we had a mexican-themed dinner at J & S's house, along with J's brother L and their friends B & C, whom we've had dinner with before. it was a lovely evening. i made that suburban 7 layer mexican dip. B & C made an avocado and mint soup, and J & S served tacos with carnitas and salsas from a tortilla place on st. clair. J also made us a tres leches cake which was delicious, piled with whipped cream and drizzled with dulce de leche. B & C are also expecting a bambino so there was a lot of parenting talk. they're like, EXTREMELY well read. they've read a million things. the dotytron and i have maybe read a single book between the two of us. maybe. it made me feel nervous that we haven't read anything. like, they were talking about how there's controversy about WHEN to cut the cord and stuff. i dunno...i'm going to leave that to our care practitioners to decide. also, we were planning on putting venetian blinds in the fatburger's room to block out the nosy neighbours and B & C are removing all cords from their house!!!

you come up against a lot of people like that - parenting has become this zero-sum competitive game. it makes you feel a bit bad that you're not really thinking about it, but what can you do? reading books on that stuff (pregnancy, labour, parenting) is THE BORINGEST. i would prefer a comic format or youtube videos. i think like in all my undertakings (knitting, quilting, making croissants from scratch, fixing stuff around the home) my mode of attack tends to be to read a little, get the basics, and then jump in with both feet and figure stuff out as it happens. i have a grand history of tackling projects that are beyond the scope of a beginner and muddling through okay - isn't having a baby the same thing?

sunday night therew as a blackout caused by a crazy torrential storm that knocked out the power for 2+ hours. it was very exciting. we set up camp in the living room and upon realizing that we had no D batteries and no matches, lit the candles that we do have with a lighter and planned a list of things to get for emergency preparedness for the home and car, which naturally included LED flashlights (the kind you have to jerk off to power), matches, bottled water, etc. i LOVE making emergency preparedness lists! we ate a cold dinner of leftover salami and leftover 7layer dip with nacho chips, and then spent the rest of the blackout reading out loud from macbeth from my norton anthology of shakespeare by candlelight. it was really really fun! it made me laugh, because another thing that B & C are doing for their kid in utero is reading out loud from children's books every night. apparently the kid starts to recognize the stories so if you read them when they're freaking out they calm right down. apparently. anyway, B & C's kid is getting "goodnight moon" in utero and we're giving our kid the tragedy of macbeth. with funny voices. lol!

monday i met up with H and sweet baby D and we hung out and she gave me some of her more unisex bambino gear. H reiterated that hanging out with other parents is the boringest, which i totally buy. like mom and tot drop ins are just giant parenting-measuring sessions that get competitive and gossipy and they're all weirdo liberal, super-privileged freaks. you don't have to tell me that twice! i'm hoping to avoid that shiz like the plague. that kind of nuttiness is totally catching.

then i came home and went to town, making garlic-dill pickles, jumbleberry jam, strawberry fig jam, and preparing some bread and butter pickles i'm going to finish on tuesday evening. the dotytron was home all day and he did errands and then napped on the couch listening to louis armstrong. it was such a throwback of an afternoon. i was in my house dress with the fans whirring, in the hot humid kitchen, putting up preserves while satchmo serenaded me from the speakers. it was a lovely (hot) way to spend an afternoon...and just looking at my jars all lined up on the dining room table is making me very happy.

we had dinner with our friends S & A at harbord fish'n'chips last night - first harbord fish'n'chips of the season! it was so delicious. then dr. rei and hanbo met us and we walked to greg's for ice cream. that's a pretty near-perfect summer evening as far as i'm concerned. the heat has broken so the next few days should be a little cooler.

stay tuned for a massive post with my thoughts on the G20 s**tshow.

fin.

in utero

le sigh. yesterday was a tumultuous day. the postings for the toronto board for those on the eligible-to-hire list came out (those are jobs for people who don't have existing contracts or are already hired covering mat leaves and such) and of the 50 or so jobs the dotytron applied to the 4 or 5 music ones he was eligible for. about five minutes after submitting he got a call from one of the schools asking him to come in for an interview in an HOUR AND A HALF! so we were all like, "woohoo!" because seriously, how could you NOT meet the dotytron and realize he's the best freakin' teacher ever? how?!??!! he's actually ENGAGED WITH HIS PROFESSION AS A PROFESSION and NOT in it for the stupid pension and union and because he doesn't have any other options. like, he is actually an AMAZING, patient, creative, gifted teacher and parents and kids instantly fall in love with him.

so he went to the interview and he said he did okay, but that the principal and the vice principal seemed a little detached and flat and non-expressive and disengaged. then he came home and found out that he didn't get it. which all leads me to believe that they already had a candidate they wanted (the toronto board is ALL about who you know) and just interviewed him to make sure they were fulfilling the minimum hiring requirements. i'm not kidding you and i'm seriously NOT being biased when i say that the dotytron is a top-notch teacher.

the annoying thing is that the arcane hiring practices of the toronto board require eligible teachers to do silly things like get all their additional qualifications to teach special ed, or teach french just to get INTO the system, and to me, that's really stupid. because then you have people with NO INVESTMENT in that particular sub-discipline teaching it just to get in so that they can suckle at the union teat and have their pension as the goal. so dumb. i hate it.

ultimately, the point is that he's lucky that he's teaching and he's at a private school that loves him and values him and challenges him.

the dotytron has implemented in utero listening sessions for the fatburger. there have been numerous studies that show that sounds and music that bambinos are exposed to in utero make them more amenable to them once they're out of the womb. like babies born of classical musicians have a predisposition to like classical music, etc. so the dotytron has the fatburger on this graduated listening curriculum. we were supposed to start last night but he couldn't get his ipod loaded so it began this morning with a barely awake me holding his sennheiser headphones flattened to my belly while he cranked the first two songs on the playlist.

one of them was a guqin number. what, you mean you've never heard of the guqin? that's because the dotytron is one of, like, a thousand people IN THE WORLD who know this instrument and are keeping it alive. it's an ancient chinese instrument that apparently was almost wiped out during the cultural revolution...so there's only a handful of people that play it and of this select few the dotytron aspires to be one. it's a stringed instrument, like a zither. the wikipedia article above has some links.

the second piece on spumante's listening odyssey was the beginning part of john coltrane's "a love supreme." all i could picture in my head during this 1/2 hour exercise was the fatburger flailing around in there, all startled, being all, "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING HERE?!??! COULD YOU TURN IT DOWN, PLEASE??!!!!" which is pretty funny if you think about the little blobkin getting jolted from a peaceful slumber to ancient chinese music and the coltrane. i think the next stage is to introduce some sense of rhythmic complexity into the fatburger's life.

so i'm supposed to be able to feel the fatburger moving around now, getting stronger in the coming weeks. sometimes i feel a little flutter down there, but i'm not sure if that's it. there was an earthquake in toronto yesterday, of which i was completely oblivious, which begs the question that if i don't notice a 5.5 on the richter scale earthquake, how the crap am i going to notice something the size of a banana?

last night for dinner we had a tomato, cucumber, roasted pepper and olive panzanella with rosemary focaccia croutons and fresh basil. i topped it with squid grilled a la plancha, which basically means in the spanish style on a very hot flat-top (or in my case, my cast-iron pan). it was a good (low carb!) dinner.



tomorrow is a day off! my work is closed because of the g20. i'm meeting my old supervisor T to explore bloor west village (which i've never done before, can you imagine?) and go to this cheese store she loves which sells burrata. mmmmmmmmm burrata.

fin.

junior republicans

my niece is proving to be a testament to small-town conservative values. when she heard the story of "the little red hen" she agreed with the moral that those animals who didn't contribute to the baking of the bread shouldn't get to eat it. this past weekend, at a work picnic, there were games for all the little tots and all the kids got to pick a small prize afterwards. apparently she kept bugging my sis about why it is that EVERYONE should get a prize when they didn't complete the task at hand. as my sister said, she should sign her up for the tea party right now.

as an addendum to that story though, you should know that my niece is one of the BIGGEST sore losers of all time. like, non-stop moochie face and whining. which actually makes her a perfect candidate for the tea party. lol!

don't you love the cover of that little golden book up there? i have very fond memories of some of my first reading experiences being from the "little golden book" series. i love them. i want a vintage set for the little fatburger. i prefer the ones that aren't branded and re-telling of disney movie plots, preferably.

in spumante bambino news, saw the midwife today and peed on the stick. and my glucose was OFF THE CHARTS!!! basically the highest it could be according to the colour change on the stick. ruh-roh. so she's fast-tracking me to do the gestational diabetes test, given my genetic background (asians are prone to the GD) and my family history (my mum had the GD with c-hova). yikes. i'm a little baffled, to be honest. i mean, granted we do eat white pasta but in sensible portions, and the odd dalliance with challah aside, i mostly do whole grains. i drink nothing but water except for a 1/2 c. of juice in the mornings...so the only thing i can think of is that all the snacking on fruit i'm doing? how can fruit be bad for you?!??

my midwife did say that the pee test isn't the most precise and that i just have to change my conceptualization of what i think of as a "treat" - ie. not just your standard-issue desserts, but stuff like pastas and white breads. and when i do eat these things, to combine them with protein and fat to slow the intake into my blood. so it looks like the lagerfeld and dotytron will be protein-loading for the next little while. i was actually looking over this week's menu and it's pretty good for not that many carbs. we have a grilled squid a la plancha panzanella salad (my panzanellas tend to be heavy on the veggies and low on the bread cubes) and the antipasto salad, and a slow grilled kolbassa with sauerkraut and onions on a bun, but i'll eat half the bun. the dotytron is super-cute and has pledged solidarity and is also willing to forgo the bun. he's actually trying to get in shape lately so that means he's been skipping the after-work beers in favour of after work cocktails. i'm not sure if that's better for him or not, but he certainly seems to think so.

i think breakfast is my big achilles' heel (well, that and plain old dessert). i like mini wheats! and i like french toast! but i guess it'll be more eggs and bacon from now on and i'll skip the juice. my midwife also told me that milk is pretty sugary but i should be getting more calcium so that i should go for the highest fat milk i can stomach (so...whipping cream?) yay an excuse to drink homogenized milk! i think i'll sub out the morning o.j. for milk and snack on more nuts and yoghurt than fruit. realistically, i know i eat really healthy and moderately and way better than 90% of north americans so my feathers got a little ruffled and i was taking it a bit personally to be honest. the dotytron thinks that this will just be a new challenge for me to undertake during my menu planning and it does seem like fun. i will say that it's REALLY, REALLY HARD to get your recommended daily intake of everything. between the fiber, calcium, vitamins and whatnot...it's a minefield of eating out there - and look at the sheer VARIETY of food that **i** eat. if i'm stressed out and i barely repeat a meal in a year, what are other people supposed to do?!?

my colleague G seems to think that i should just go bucksauce until i actually do the diagnostic test. lol! but i really don't want the fatburger to start packing on the L-Bs and turn into a sugar bambino. the sugar in your blood is also mitigated by exercise immediately thereafter. so i'm baffled again. how does a 27km bike ride not count?

last night after dinner we met up with the roomie and then walked 25 minutes to a basketball court (good!), saw that it was full and went for ice cream (bad!) and then played 21 for a good 35-40 minutes (good!) and then walked home (good!)

ah well, you can't win 'em all. the roomie, as it turns out, is really good at getting baskets. it's hilarious. she'll flinch and put up her arms reflexively in a defensive position if you pass her the ball, but she NAILS basket after basket. in crocs.



last night we had tuna mac salad (bad! but so, so soooo good!) and that blanched yellow bean and grape tomato salad in the mustard dill vinaigrette (good!) it's rainy and pooey tonight so i think i'm going to succumb to a night of excess and treat myself to fried chicken from chick'n'joy for dinner. carb-cutting will begin in earnest starting tomorrow.

until then, there's fried chicken, fries, and gravy. nom nom nom.

fin.

my cup runneth over...

and over and over and over...sure life can be hard, and it's full of trials and tribulations and challenges, but after weekends like this, i'm reminded of how lucky i am and how grateful i am for the ability to be aware of the multitude of joys in my life. let's face it, folks, winning the vagina sweepstakes and landing in the northern (read: mostly developed) hemisphere is reason enough to rejoice in our good fortune. having a minimum of one person out there who loves you is enough and knowing that so many of us have a multiplicity of love in our lives is the sweetest, fluffiest, most decadent buttercream frosting on the cake.

this weekend was filled with moments of gratitude and laughter.

1) look at this bowl of pierogies. isn't it divine?

 

i've finally figured out my pierogi making technique. you start with bacon, sliced into little thin lardons. render those out until they're crisp, and then set aside on a paper-towel lined plate to drain. into the bacon drippings go a large spanish onion, thinly sliced, to sweat and caramelize and turn into silky shreds of allium goodness over a long, slow cook on medium heat, with some assistance from a big blob of chopped garlic. back in go those bacon bits, topped with your frozen pierogies and a sprinkling of salt and a good hit of freshly ground black pepper. then into the oven they go, to be annointed upon their emergence, all browned and crispy-chewy with a mountain of full-fat sour cream and a heap of thinly sliced scallions. that there is good stuff. and while it's not the most seasonal of summer dishes, it is an intensely satisfying one when you're coming home ravenous on a friday night.

2) the diemonds were super fun! they were on a mixed bill with some other grindcore and hardcore bands, so it wasn't the best crowd, though there were some hair-a** dudes giving it their all in the headbanging arena. there were multiple points of hilarity en route with the classic M-R-I team made up with dr. rei in the backseat nattering on and the three of us frequently dissolving into riotous bouts of laughter over the following:

i) dr. rei mistaking a fat, pasty, frequently topless and man-boobs sporting old weird-al yankovic guy for cousin al.
ii) dr. rei realizing her mistake upon meeting cousin al and seeing his neck tattoos.
iii) us going for ice cream at the drake's "ice cream and t-shirts" store. as dr. rei and i are ordering our scoops, we see the server's eyes get big as she gasps out, "that's not a bench!!!" as we hear a crash behind us, to find that the dotytron has tried to sit on a remarkably bench-like piece of furniture that it turns out is ACTUALLY a miniature bowling game, but that has stupidly been placed in the EXACT spot in the store where you would expect a bench-shaped piece of furniture to be.
iv) the three of us getting so taken with the idea of massimo's pizza and poutini's poutine and ice cream and wanting to grab all the food in the general vicinity and then picturing the three of us, the most unlikely and out ouf place people at an 80s hair metal show, grooving in a corner to grind core with our hands full of pizza, ice cream, pop and poutine. lol!!!
v) it taking us AN HOUR to get home, more than 45 minutes of which was spent arguing with an overweight, highly stressed out mcdonald's drive thru clerk who was losing his mind, forgot to punch in 1 of our big mac combo's and then insisted that we would have to DRIVE AROUND TO THE END OF THE 15 MINUTE LINE OF CARS WE JUST SAT THROUGH TO GET TO THE PICK-UP WINDOW AND REPLACE OUR ORDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was unbelievable.

3) this is c.c. diemond. who is AMAZING. i mean, i love my l.a. glam metal as much as the next person, but i've never beeon one to find the rangy, skinny, acid-wash jeans-bedecked dudes attractive. but there's something about the boozy decadence of c.c. diemond that is VERY appealing. he EMBODIES this scene. the tightest jeans you've ever seen, a tiny shrunken leather vest, ankle boots, giant hair, pure swagger. boss.

4) saturday we loafed around and dr. rei watched me bake and we went grocery shopping and i told sordid tales from my promiscious past which titillated and shocked dr. rei and then we watched the cameroon denmark world cup game and hated the danes and their winning ways.

5) this is us at ribfest. ribfest was decent. the food was aight. not as good as dinosaur but i've come to expect that at ribfest. we shared a full rack of ribs with beans and coleslaw and a pulled pork sandwich and corn that was FOUR DOLLARS AN EAR and sat on a tablecloth i had brought and listened to crappy blues. i'm never going to quibble with this ribfest's food because the proceeds go to a camp for kids who are burn victims, which totally made the dotytron tear up when he found out about it, which in turn makes me grateful i found such a sensitive, good hearted bloke.

 

 

bwong was supposed to meet us but was like a billion hours late because he was secret-shredding a billion pages of paper on his way down with his cousin of privilege. they finally met up with us while me, dr. rei and the dotytron were playing a game of 2-on-1 basketball and then 21 with this random dude lee at the basketball courts at jimmy simpson park. basketball is fun! it's a good workout...but only if dr. rei is with me going 2-on-1 against the dotytron. otherwise, it's pretty unfair if it's just me and him playing.

we came home with bwong and the cousin of privilege in tow and ate peanut butter pie, but not before bwong was again mysteriously waylaid on the way to our house - for THIRTY MINUTES?!??

6) sunday morning we woke up and then biked out to mitzi's on sorauren for a father's day brunch with poppa d and the d family. the brunch was really good, although i think it was a titch overpriced for the serving sizes. everything was also priced the same, which made no sense to me - there's no way that french toast costs the same amount as scrambled eggs. i had poached eggs on a sausage hash with a tomato-y sauce and homefries - i shared with the dotytron who had scrambled eggs with basil and parm with an olive biscuit and homefries. they were good...i wish i had photos to show you. i don't know that we'd come all the way back though. after biking home we google mapped the distance and we had biked over 25km!!! it was crazy!

7) then we had my family over for a father's day dinner with big d. i made us a pile of big d's favorite things: clam linguine, steamed lobsters, and his favorite dessert, chocolate swiss roll cake with whipped cream:

 

 

 

do you see what i have to be so grateful for? how much better can a summer weekend get? how lucky am i to have spend my weekends surrounded by friends and family and laughter and being outdoor and active in the sun?

tonight we're having tuna mac salad for dinner with a bean and grape tomato salad in a mustard dill vinaigrette. tuna mac salad was something that my sister and outlaw bro introduced me to that i'm OBSESSED with. at it's most basic, it's essentially cold pasta (shells or elbows), chopped celery, canned tuna, and mayonnaise. but the end results belies the simplicity of the ingredients. i'm going to make it the classic way this once and resist the urge to muck around by adding red onions or garlic or parsley or herbs. it was so good when it was kept simple that i want to replicate what got me hooked in the first place.

we also have a standing date with the kids across the street to play frisbee. K seems to think our date is for "after school" so i had to gently tell him that i get home after he does and that i also have to eat dinner first. there's also a potential visit from the roomie in the works for this evening.

my cup continueth to be filled and runneth over.

fin.

80s hair metal

tonight is going to be about this:



and this:



and maybe some of this:



all leading up to this:

isn't the lead singer super-charismatic and a hottie? i'm totally pumped for this.

i'm also totally pumped for an M-R-I reunion with dr. rei sleeping over cuz she's done the first draft of thesis hell AND unfortunately hanbo is out of town. but if that means a sleepover with the bfffff then we'll have to make do with a hanbo-less weekend. yay sleepovers!

i woke up just shy of 6am this morning, so we'll see how i last. i predict some post-dinner pre-spin gallery napping might be in the cards.

i'm LESS enthused that last night was the last dodgeball game of the season, and do to my burgeoning belly, of my foreseeable future. not happy. at least i went out on a good note - i rocked a solid game with some key catches and got some people out with the much sought after "foot shot" but i'm so sad i can't play! this is the first season i've taken off in like, 4 years, since i started. it's balls i tell you. the only thing making it easier is that summer yields SO MANY physical activities. we haven't played a single game of "no rules tennis" and we've only played a couple rounds of frisbee. haven't hit the driving range yet and once the pool opens, i'm sure we'll be there quite a bit - at least for senior citizen lane swim time.

last night we ate leftovers, but on wednesday we went a little buck and ordered pizza and a meatball sandwich to split from this new place, recommended by cousin al, who incidentally is the former drummer and now 2nd guitar player for the diemonds. the new place is called colombo's pizza. the food was pretty good! you could tell it was homemade. they're known for their "neapolitan" pizza, which is a no-sauce pizza with fresh tomatoes, sausage, oregano, and mozzarella. the toppings are super-tasty, especially the sausage chunks which are redolent of fennel. unfortunately the crust needs some work. the crust is very much like a slightly less cardboard-y pizza pizza crust. if the crust was just a little bit thinner and greasier, it would be perfect.

the meatball sandwich is legit. tender, soft meatballs gently nestled in a perfectly crusty-yet-yielding bun with a sweet tomato sauce and cheese. we'll definitely be ordering from there again:

 

 

tonight will probably be leftovers or some freezer-clearing pierogies, before cleaning the house takes over and a pre-show nap.

fin.

lazy summer evenings

are spent playing in a badminton tourney with the neighbourhood kids and adults and having over-the-fence conversations about gentrification anxieties like good schools versus bad schools and building permits and demo permits and pre-schools and all day kindergarten.

that's what we did last night after a dinner of muttar paneer with minted yoghurt and a squirt of lime on a bed of brown rice:



the questions never stop when you're incubating a parasite. first people want to know how you're feeling. then if you're going to find out the sex. then people want to know the name situation. we've had a shortlist of boy and girl names for a while with some obvious front runners that are a leetle controversial. i think we'll wait until the fatburger makes an appearance before making the final, final decision, in case our favorite doesn't fit. plus, i didn't know this, but people can be JERKS about the names. for the record, my mum is rooting for elvis. she wanted to name c-hova that when he was born over 2 decades ago. either elvis or thor. lol!

so. literature.

i finished "asterios polyp" AGES ago. it's a graphic novel about an architect who tends to see things in binary terms. following an "act of god" (lighting) which burns down his home, he goes on a journey and lives in a small town and the comic tracks the evolution in his worldview, as the present-day events are interspersed with scenes of asterios' failed marriage, his career and life. there are also portions of the story that are narrated by his twin brother, who died at birth. this comic won a billion eisner awards when it came out - it was quite good, although the goodness is more in the reading than in my re-telling. it was kind of like a less depressing, more urban alice munro story.

speaking of which...alice munro's "too much happiness" should have been called "ANYTHING BUT too much happiness" it was so depressing! depressing stories of downtrodden white people in small town ontario going about their pathetic lives with wistful, hazy internal monologues i didn't really give a flying crap about. i found it incredibly boring. it was my first alice munro and definitely my last. i just didn't CARE. the writing was never all that engaging the stories never all that enticing - just a bunch of faux-literary vignettes where you're supposed to "read between the lines" to tease out what the author is REALLY getting at. i don't care to work that hard for short stories! especially short stories about stupid problems. i give it a resounding MEH.

"when you reach me" is a FANTASTIC, newberry award-winning YA novel in the same vein as madeleine l'engle's work - that is, it is set in the real world but features dalliances with science fictiony-y elements that are nonetheless firmly rooted in realism. told from the point of a view of a 12 year old (ish, it's been a while) girl, in the summer of the late 1970s in new york city, it features a bit of a mystery and slowly unravels an enthralling, sad, bildungsroman-ish story by employing an epistolary format. there's nothing genre-y about this. no romance, no flighty typical girly girl stuff - just solid, accessible storytelling.

lawrence hill's "the book of negroes" was my academic book club's previous selection before i made them read "twilight." the book club found it divisive and we weren't unanimously in favour of it. i didn't really like it. it tells the story of aminata, a young girl who is taken from her tribe in western africa by slave traders and makes the journey across the atlantic to the rice plantations of the carolinas, up to new york, then eastern canada's black communities, and then back to africa and finally england. it tracks the story of aminata's life and weaves in historical tidbits at the same time. the author is a historian by nature and i thought one of the major faults of the novel was that. it read more like a laundry list of events than anything else. it didn't really make the history "come alive" so to speak and it certainly didn't delve into the character or motivations of aminata at all. she's a bit of a blank slate, really. and in so far as one can say this, she was also one of the luckiest slaves ever. rarely beaten, always fortuitously saved from the rigors of physical labour through the intervention or discovery of one of her myriad skills (she has midwifery training, can read, and speak many languages), she never really has to make hard moral choices, which makes the story much less interesting and captivating as fiction. the ending is a little trite and pat and that didn't help.

so that's what i've been reading, and now we're all caught up.

last night the neighbours across the street ordered KFC, which got me all hot and bothered to eat KFC again. the dotytron does not share my enthusiasm. i know that realistically, i'm going to eat it and it's not going to be as good as i remember, but i've got a KFC itch that needs scratching...and i don't know why! they followed up their meal with two-bite brownies which had me hankering for some brownies as well. since i can replicate brownies a lot easier than i can replicate KFC, i'll post the recipe i used.

tonight we're having perogies with bacon, onions, garlic, sour cream and scallions. with leftovers of that crunchy salad from monday night. this is shaping up to be a weekend of heavy eating so the KFC fix will have to come another night.

fin.

----------------------------------

katharine hepburn's brownie recipe
only very small adaptations made to a recipe pulled from my gourmet cookbook

1 stick (1/2 c.) unsalted butter
2 oz unsweetened chocolate (i used semi-sweet cuz that's what i had on hand)
2 eggs
1 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1/3 c. of flour
1 t. of vanilla
1 c. of chopped nuts (optional - original recipe recommends walnuts but i find them
- grease and flour and 8" square pan and pre-heat your oven to 325F
- melt the butter and chocolate together in a saucepan over medium-low heat until melted and smooth.
- take the pot off the heat and stir in the eggs, the sugar, the flour, and the vanilla, and the nuts, if you're adding it.
- scrape into the prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean and the top is glossy.
- this makes about 16 2" brownie squares.

*note: i added the scrapings from an almost empty jar of nutella to the brownie mixture - about 1/4 c. and it was DELICIOUS but it did make the brownies a little too sweet. you can follow my example but i would reduce the sugar by 1/3 or even 1/2 a cup.

parenthood

so we had our 20 week obstetrical ultrasound today. they make you drink like, a full litre of water an hour BEFORE the scheduled appointment time and you can't pee it out, which is kind of tortuous. i can see why they do it. when the tech couldn't get the shots she needed for the radiologist to do the analysis, she would have me pee out like, 2 cups worth, and then empty the bladder so that the fatburger could flip over. i think the full bladder just gives the tech some maneuverability - if you had an empty bladder, then they couldn't ask you to drink while you're there, and wait for your bladder to fill.

anyway...things seem to be okay? she got the 4 chambers of the heart, and the shots she wanted for the radiologist to analyze. the fatburger seems to like chilling on its stomach and had to be coaxed (through the aforementioned peeing) to flip over. it's so much more developed now! i'm right on track for my projected due date and spumante is right in the 50th percentile for weight so that's good. i guess we won't know any more until the radiologist is done.

i will say that we got a lot more angles and it was easier to see all the features...like the nose, mouth, ears, stomach. at one point, we got a head-on shot where the fatburger was FACING us, and it looked up, and the ultrasound caught its cornea which looked like a total eye staring out of this weird, alien skull face and then it OPENED ITS MOUTH REALLY SLOWLY AND SHUT IT and it was the FREAKIEST thing i've ever seen. it basically looked like this:

aka scary as all f**k. but then the other shots of it flexing out its little hand and yawning and rubbing its' eyes were pretty cute. head-on in the womb? not so much.

we found out the sex. it's a boy! and WHAT a boy! lol! i mean, if i can see the equipment, it was pretty obvious. that's not to say that we know what the gender will be, but its got the male equipment.

i feel its important to talk through some of your approaches to parenting prior to being thrust into actualizing it. this is something that you do with your partner through the course of your relationship...like for the past 9 years, we've talked back and forth about our philosophies on stuff like discipline, etc. this obviously has gotten ramped up with the deadline foisted on us by the imminent arrival of the fatburger.

we've been doing a lot of talking through of hypothetical scenarios. including, but not limited to, how we would deal if our kid was transgendered. in this case, we both unequivocally agree. we won't pay for the surgery. lol! i was like, "would you be freaked out if spumante felt they were born in the wrong body?" and the dotytron is like, "no, of course not" but we agreed that we shouldn't be on the hook for the surgery. it's elective. they can dress how they like, they can act how they like, but to me, paying for the sex transitioning is like paying for a boob job or a nose job. purely elective. ESPECIALLY since i don't really believe that gender has anything to do with the body.

so this is what we talk about. we don't know where we stand on the vaccinations thing, but in terms of paying for sex change surgery, we're clear.

tonight we had pasta with creme fraiche, peas, mint, and lemon and a salad of sliced cucumber, celery, red pepper and more mint in a cumin dressing:

 

 

fin.

maxing and relaxing

after the labours and non-stop work of last weekend, this weekend found us with a surprisingly light plate of house chores and "things to do." it's been lovely.

the challenges of dressing continue - although i'm still getting by with non-mat clothes. friday i buttoned myself into a shirt that has started to gape between the buttons over my widening belly and i turned to the dotytron and said, "is this appropriate for work?" to which in answer i received an appreciative nod and the approving words, "your boobs are getting bigger!" which did and didn't answer my question.

we had a professional development afternoon on friday, complete with a motivational speaker who somehow makes a living traveling the globe delivering platitudes like, "have you ever met someone who's negativity just sucks all the energy out of the room?" "did you know it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile? just think about that." and so on and so forth. i feel like i'm too much an cynical misanthrope for that to work, but i guess it must work for SOMEONE because this lady gets gigs all over.

the best part of the professional development afternoon was that we got to leave early on a friday, not before we heard a presentation from our work security detail scaring the bejeezus out of me regarding the upcoming g20 protests. i'm not really sure how it's going to affect my work or how i'm going to get IN to work. i guess i didn't think it was going to effect me much, but who knows what those loony first year university students and "anarchists" are capable of. don't get me wrong: i'm all for protesting. i'm not as much for looting and rioting and firebombing, especially from the privileged, not-so-disenfranchised elite. there are better ways of getting your point across that aren't so self-serving and self-aggrandizing. think to yourself when you're putting together your molotov cocktail: when i lob this through the window of a bank, am i really serving the southern hemisphere, or am i just stoking the amorphous fires of youth and shoring up stories with which to regale other, stupider people?

for dinner i made us steak sandwiches with the other half of the flank steak that i froze from dinner the previous week. i grilled it up and sliced it thin and piled it on a bun with arugala, tomato, chimichurri and triple cream cheese. we also had strawberry shortcakes because ontario strawberries are in season and i'm making sure to consume at least a dry quart of them a day, if i can help it.

 

 

we also rented a movie from the film buff called "tokyo decadence" which can only be described as a very racy, sexier, take on a david lynch film. it was very weird. we went in there looking for "more than a game," that documentary about the final season of the team that lebron james was on in high school, then we briefly considered a re-watching of "the fantastic mr fox" and from there, ended up lured by the salacious, titillating text on the back of the "tokyo decadence" dvd case. basically it follows around a high class prostitute as she goes on calls with some of tokyo's depraved businessmen in hotels. it's lynchian in the sense that there's a very odd tension throughout the movie and the director is clearly fixated with the idea of the filth and decrepitude underpinning modern tokyo society, all seemingly repressed and proper (similar to david lynch's fixation with the dark underbelly of america.) there's a very odd sequence at the end featuring disjointed weird people coming together to dance in a moonlit park - i didn't really know what to make of it. it featured a LOT of s&m sequences though. very strange, though not not entertaining.

saturday was delightful. a lazy breakfast consisting of toasted challah sandwiching some provolone, a fried egg, arugala, sliced tomato, and chimichurri:

 

followed by a long walk and an even longer nap. i passed out on the couch for a solid 2 hours - the kind of hazy, deep, druggy sleep that you wake from intermittently, aware that you really SHOULD wake up but unable to will yourself from the weighty torpor to summon consciousness. i slept and slept for over 2 hours and woke up feeling stupid and groggy and mildly depressed. i always find that napping too long can do that to you. i don't know why.

 

dinner was a salmon burger with more arugala and tomato and chili mayo on a bun, along with some crispy bacon. i pan-fried the patties to make it easier on myself.

so we were invited to our friend L's kegger - we kept agonizing all day over whether or not we wanted to go. it was so gloomy and drizzly and cold out that the weather was really steering us towards another night holed up in lil' ugmo. but wonder of wonders, we summoned the energy to emerge from our lair and put on our best, "so, what's your story?" faces and braved the kegger to small talk with new people. it was fun. we knew a good number of people there and we also ran into our friends S & P, who we're having dinner with tonight at B & G's house (they know the other roommate in L's house) and it was fun. i only got stuck in one boring conversation with this guy mark from vancouver who is an animator and is intensely, intensely boring. that's the worst. getting trapped at house parties in boring conversations. when you can HEAR another conversation that sounds so much more interesting and your mind is going a million miles a minute with all the funny, well-received interjections into the OTHER conversation you could be making, and instead, you have to say stuff like, "so, have you lived in vancouver all your life?" and then wait for a response you don't really give 2 s**ts about. my other problem is that i'm a stationary partier. like, i like to stay in one spot. so i'm a more likely candidate for getting trapped. the other problem is that I'M STONE SOBER. all things considered, we had a really fun time and i was proud we made it out.

this morning we took my mum for her delayed mother's day present - which was brunch at the black hoof. we shared everything: bone marrow beignets, the bone marrow proper (good god i love bone marrow), foie gras brioche french toast with strawberries and macadamia nuts, suckling pig eggs benny, and the tongue grilled cheese:

 

 

 

 

now we're off to do some more lazy day errands. hopefully i can squeeze in another nap in there, and then we're having dinner as mentioned at B & G's house (they had the foresight to buy on the east end of toronto, thank goodness) with S & P.

tomorrow is our obstetrical ultrasound. if spumante cooperates we'll be finding out the sex and if everything is growing as it should be. wish us an anatomically correct fatburger!

fin.

out of wack

i feel all out of wack when the dotytron isn't home. mostly because our morning routine is being disrupted.

the morning routine consists of the dotytron emailing/futzing around on the computer, and me coming in, standing behind him, flossing my teeth, and asking: "who are you talking to?" or "are you watching porn?"

he gets really upset because a) he hates it when i floss my teeth anywhere near him and ESPECIALLY in his studio/office; b) he hates when i ask him "who are you talking to?" and "are you watching porn?" when he's doing random internet-ing because he really just wants to be able to internet in peace, without me being obnoxious barking questions at him through a barrage of floss-loosened plaque particles from behind his chair.

also, i left the house yesterday without locking the door by accident, which means that me being scared to be home alone went into overdrive and i had to go through every room/closet/crawlspace in the house with a cell phone in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, ready to carve up any interloper to pieces.

finally, when the dotytron isn't home and smudgie can't sleep on his chest, he likes to sleep ON MY HEAD which is annoying, because i keep waking up to find his fuzzy grey butt has encroached more and more on the pillow and that i'm being pushed down toward the foot of the bed.

academic book club was a riot. i wish you could have seen the spread i laid out but one of the ladies showed up early just as i was putting the finishing touches on the table. ultimately, "twilight" worked as a pick and provided a lot of grist for the mill. we ventured into a lengthy discussion of mormonism too (the author is a mormon), which was fascinating.

now, we all know i'm all over YA fiction, but i found the "twilight" series to be puzzling in its extreme popularity. the messages we're sending! i find it anti-feminist and it seems to advocate sex-negative (chastity!), creepy, possessive, stalker-y behavior from edward that wouldn't fly if he WASN'T a vampire, and barely flies even with that caveat. bella is pretty annoying. she's kind of a whiner who treats her "friends" in forks, WA (where she ends up after moving from phoenix) who are nothing more than welcoming and inclusive, as disposable placeholders that she doesn't care about or even deign to interact with, UNLESS her stupid edward is around.

i mean, it's a quick read, but NOTHING HAPPENS. the first 3/4 is ALL STARING and longing and kind of boring with edward being intensely moody and a creep who watches her while she sleeps and acts like it's the most natural thing in the world, instead of a gross invasion of privacy. also, every other line in the book is about how devastatingly handsome he his, even though his flesh is cold and hard and marble like (we thought that meant he was the human embodiment of a phallus - a cold one.) i'm sorry, but it doesn't sound fun to me AT ALL to snuggle up to someone who's icy cold and totally pretentious. also, i think robert pattinson was totally mis-cast. when you think dreamboat, do you think of that guy? i certainly don't.

i'm not sure what our next book is going to be, but i'm excited for it.

tomorrow night is the first round of dodgeball playoffs. we're 3rd ranked right now and we're facing off against the #2 team. if we win, we get to go for #1! what a comeback story (if we win.)

last week after the game i went with my bro and fraser and her fiancée davey (who were nice enough to sub in for us) to boston pizza (or, bo-pie as i like to call it.) i've been VERY disparaging of boston pizza in the past, and frequently like to espouse my opinion that likens their pizza to that made in an english pub, that is, a place where making pizza is obviously an afterthought. if you go after a game and mention that you're from the league though, you get a free order of their cactus cut chips which are REALLY good. think fresh kettle chips with a spicy dipping sauce. i also ordered a buffalo chicken sandwich which was quite good and fraser and davey split a perogy pizza which actually looked very appetizing. it features the cactus cut chips on a thin round of pizza dough, with cheddar cheese, mozzarella, bacon bits and a blob of sour cream. if we go back i'm totally getting that. i was also intensely jazzed to win $10 in bo-pie money playing musical bingo.

i've crowed about winning the $10 so many times this week that i've worn out the dotytron's initial (pitying) enthusiasm and now he just gives me looks of withering pity at how small the prize has to be for me to exult in winning.

i really, really, really love winning, okay?

fin.

home alone

have i ever mentioned how much i hate being home alone? i get super-freaked out and scared really easy. technically, i get super-freaked out and scared really easy even when i'm not home alone. like on saturday i was vacuuming and the dotytron came upstairs to where i was and called out "beebs!" like 5 times, and i heard him, backed out from under the bed, took a look at him, and STILL screamed my head off for like, a minute. it's truly bizarre.

our sunday night dinner was a bit of an s**t show. we got mexican fries from great burger kitchen AND burrito's from chino loco's. they skimped us on the cheese on the mexican fries...i find great burger kitchen super inconsistent so i'm not sure that i'm going to continue to frequent them. at the very least, we're on a time out for the moment:




last night the roomie came over to keep me company while l'army was playing ball hockey. have i said already how much i love the roomie? and how good she is at her job? now that i'm exposed more fully as a client to the midwifery practice, seeing how the roomie acts in her profession, how patient she is, how knowledgeable and reassuring she is with me and my inane questions that i don't really want to bother my proper midwife with (the questions fall more into the "irrational worries you talk out with a friend" territory, as opposed to "clinically warranted" territory) it's just so lovely. i'm so lucky! because i have a friend who is QUALIFIED to reassure my irrational worries from a clinical perspective. it's the best case scenario. i really feel like it's deepened our friendship and i say as much to anyone i talk to. having known the roomie since the 2nd year of her undergrad and all this time knowing that she's wanted to be a midwife, and living with her through her last years of midwifery school and her first years of practicing, it's been so gratifying to see someone so well suited to their profession and giving so much of themselves to their work and the community. and that's NOT just the hormones talking!

i'm still barely bumping out - it kind of looks more like a post AYCE-meal food baby, so i've been worried about that. so she helped me learn how to feel where my uterus is and it's in the right place. then she used her doppler so that i could listen to the fatburger's heartbeat again. so aces! i was at dinner with another preggos who was at five months a few months ago, and she was all like, "i think i want to buy a doppler, just so i can check in on the bambino sometimes" and in my head, i was like, "wow white lady, you crazy" but i TOTALLY GET IT. well, the irrational part of me, which constitutes about 21% right now, totally gets it. i wasn't going to do it, but the roomie had it right there in her car and it was easy, so we did it - which was super nice of her just to make my stupid hypochrondriac worrying butt feel better. this time, in addition to the heartbeat, the roomie pointed out these fast swish sounds, which she said was the fatburger kicking to get away from the doppler, apparently they're not super-into it and they tend to swirl away from it and hide - which leads me to think they have sensitivity to super-high pitched sounds? like they can pick up that frequency? kind of weird, right?

i took the leftover white anchovy and chili pasta and reheated it in a pan and then topped it with a poached egg and some of the extra breadcrumb mixture. it was delicious! we ate it with caesar salad.

we've started eating dinner on the front stoop, so we get some outside action and can avoid the terrors of the back deck. so the roomie got a taste of my street in full-on sesame street mode. it's rare that i come home and people aren't hanging out outside, catching up, all up in each other's business. the across the street guy we're obsessed with, R, apparently has a hot tub, a trampoline, and a hammock in their backyard which all the kids love hanging out in - in his words, "it's like the 'price is right' back there" lol! he just finished writing his last CFA exam, he says if he passes he's going to treat himself to a sound system. lol! he also told us this while wearing 3D glasses as shades, and a kid's beaded necklace. double lol! on thursdays and fridays it's not unusual to see a blanket spread out on one of the lawns and everyone congregated there, sitting on the blanket and chiefing it up. it's kind of the best. i hope no one ever moves.

tonight i'm going to eat that leftover flank steak with the black beans and rice and chimichurri, while i get busy prepping the last things for the book club meeting tomorrow.

i'm putting out a spread consisting of a spanish goat's cheese, a triple cream called tuxedo from france, which features a chalky interior, some mortadella, some hard-cured cacciatore, olives, cherries, sliced radishes, roasted garlic eggplant dip, smoky red pepper feta dip, these spicy crispy flatbreads i love, some crostinis, and raspberry brown butter bars. i bought a rosé and a white wine and we have the stuff to make gin and tonics and negronis. i'm also making a strawberry lemonade with mint syrup.

i know i'm probably going crazy and totally over-killing it. but a good portion of the above is going to make up my dinner tomorrow, so i'm personally excited to eat the spread!

fin.

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.