what a weekend!

so friday night i did a huge chunk of my paper and then went for a walk with the dotytron and the roomie to peep some of the rich rich rich houses in riverdale. saturday morning i got up early, did another huge chunk of my paper and then went to the clothing show with dr. rei. it was aight. most of the vendors are shite but we both found vintage dresses for $20 from the same store i got my wedding dress from. actually, i'm no longer calling it a "wedding". i'm calling it a ___ performance (tbd) because when you say wedding, white people get all effed up about it and have all these expectations and go crazy. a performance means no expectations and i can do it how **i** want to do it (and by "i" i mean, "we"). anyway, i got this velvet stretchy piece with GIANT crystals on it that i'm going to wear backwards so that the low scoop back is at the front, paired with a black/silver bra or something. it's very 90210. the weight of the crystals alone makes the dress weigh like 10lbs. haha! dr. rei got this gold and black bat-wing number (i'm obsessed with batwings) that's very the last days of disco. it's fantastic. there were some nice clutches there, but i've realized that clutches are fundamentally impractical, and the ones they did have chain straps had the kind that were meant to be dangled-from-the-hand, instead of slung-over-the-shoulder (my preference). in other news, i know i've said this already, but i LOVE WIDE-LEGGED TROUSER STYLE PANTS (especially jeans). love!

then we came home and my niece came over and we had a hilarious time. we spent 2 hours at the park and then went to el sol and then met up with my sister, outlaw bro, and brothers at the ball my mom hosts every year. it was a gong show that resulted in random acts of senseless violence on the boys' part and drunken behaviour to the MAX (the annual tradition is that my outlaw bro gets s**tfaced at the ball, then he and my brother collect the dotytron and they go to the "loose moose" to generally behave like idiots).

then we had brunch this morning. and now i'm back at home, working on the last of my paper before we go to dodgeball. getting home was crazy annoying from the metro toronto convention centre because all the streets were closed off for the "run for the cure". cancer inconveniences us in so many ways. haha. maybe i should edit that.

that's the nicoise salad from friday night. tonight is dodgeball, then we're probably going to come home and order pizza or something cuz i'm feeling lazykins and still have to edit my paper.

fin.

*taps microphone*

rza? are you there, rza? it's me, margaret.

i forgot to mention that one of the funniest things that happened at the primo show was that for some reason, primo kept shouting out to rza and (i think) calling him to step up to the front and hop on stage. this happened at least three times. we were thoroughly befuddled. dr. rei was like, "rza is here?!?" maybe primo was confused, or maybe we misheard him, cuz it was kinda hard to make out what he was saying. in my mind, the even funnier scenario is rza ACTUALLY BEING THERE but standing at the back of the room, muttering to himself, "no way in HELL am i going up to the front" hahahaha! poor primo!

i'm plugging along on my paper. i'm about halfway through and i've only done 2 of my 12 (more like 18) annotations. i'm not really sure if it's what the prof wants, but it's what he's getting! it's supposed to be a very informal, general, non-academic essay for the general adult public. i find it a little difficult because i keep making unqualified, sweeping, grandiose statements that i'm putting forth as unbiased like, say "we have a dizzying array of food and food-related writing choices". this would only be true if you belonged to a certain class of people living in a specific place. but i can't keep qualifying every statement that i make so it all comes off sounding a little dodgerific.

i've downloaded all of sharon jones and the dap kings new album, "100 days, 100 nights". they've kind of moved away from the funk slammers to more of a slow burn-y tortured ballad style (in the same vein as james brown, etc). they also recorded it on analog. i effin' love the dap kings and sharon jones. the annoying thing is that all the media outlets keeping talking smash like, "you may know the dap kings from amy winehouse's chart-topping album" when in actuality, it's more like, "the reason you found amy winehouse in the least appealing is 90% due to the production value of marc ronson and the absolute murderation of the dap kings". seriously, amy would be NOTHING without the dap kings/marc ronson sound.

tonight i'm staying in to work on my paper some more cuz tomorrow is a big, long, day, so i gots to keep it together.

for dinner tonight i'm making a nicoise salad (blanched beans, potatoes, roasted peppers, roasted tomatoes) with a poached egg, dressed with bagna cauda and maybe a touch of mustard-dill vinaigrette.

fin.

feelin' poochy

ugh. i ate like, 3 pieces of domino's pizza last night right before passing out, and this is after "snacking" on two different over-priced and mega-crappy desserts from magic oven. i don't give magic oven on the danforth long to survive. they don't do slices. they're a strictly take-out or eat-in pizza parlour. they don't even do delivery. in this day and age, with the way most people conceptualize pizza, trying to carve out a niche as an eat-in pizza place seems really perilous to me. also considering the fact they didn't dump in THAT much money to transform the formerly-afghani kebab house into a warm or welcoming space. it looks kind of barren and seedy in there, like a cheap boutique hotel lobby. so instead of slices, they do $5 "personal" pizzas, which end up being half of a 8" round. that's right. half. so cheap! it looks so lame when you get a semi-circle of pizza. the roomie ordered it and was very disappointed. so me and the boy got dominos. i don't think i can go back to bready-crust pizza after switching my allegiances to mama's and now, magic oven takeout. it's so bready! and the tomato sauce is really acidic and fruity tasting, which i don't like at all.

anyway, the end result is i feel all gross and poochy, but that's probably because i'm pmsing.

i'm trying to catch up on my book reviews, so forgive me if you don't care about what i've read. you're really in the wrong place if you don't care about the ephemera and minutiae of my life. i read china mieville's "king rat" while i was at the cottage (so long ago! *tear*) . china mieville is one of my favorite fantasy-esque/speculative fiction authors. his "perdido street station" is one of my favorite novels of the last decade, and that book introduced me to his densely imaginative, vivid and engrossing prose style. i was expecting more of the same, but this, his first novel, totally disappointed. it was much more pedestrian in its re-working of the pied piper of hamelin story, featuring quasi-mythological elements intruding into the real world - i guess the closest analagous author i can come up with is neil gaiman. now, i really dislike neil gaiman's work. as a novelist, as a children's book author...basically anything he touches i find really sub-par. this was in the same vein and so was really disappointing for me.

the other bad thing is that china mieville was (is?) really into jungle, so there's this whole drum'n'bass subplot that's kind of embarrassing. it's cute because he's obviously enthusiastic about the music and is trying to transmit the ins and outs of this subculture to a larger audience, but it ends up being really trite and de-mystifying in its earnestness. it's like watching that stupid movie "human traffic". or the rave episode of 90210. lame, right? let's just say mieville gives one of his characters the dj name "rudegirl k". *cringe* the good thing is, china mieville really steps it up in subsequent books and his later stuff is definitely worth reading. his imagination and the ability to make the richness of his urban settings come to life is fantastic.

tonight for dinner i'm making a pasta with sauteed spinach, garlic, onions, crushed pecans, and gorgonzola, with a salad. i toasted some pecans and have those set aside. then i'm going to caramelize an onion, add some garlic, saute my spinach and set that aside. toss the pasta, some of the pasta cooking water, with the spinach, pecans, and crumbled gorgonzola cheese and that's it.

fin.

i DON'T have michael jackson disease!

sweet! *pumps fist* i finally got in to see my dermatologist yesterday. she's really nice and surprisingly hot (although not that surprising considering that they do botox and lip injections and stuff at the clinic). she kinda looks like ellen pompeo, that chick from grey's anatomy, except 20 pounds heavier (ie. a healthy weight). anyway, the stuff i thought was ringworm was actually just a face-form of my dermatitis (eczema), which is environmentally related. the light spots are just my new skin that hasn't darkened up to match my old skin and will go away with time (i don't even notice them, to be honest with you). she gave me some steroid cream and told me that i couldn't wash dishes anymore, and that when i cook, i have to coat my hands in this preventive cream, prevex, beforehand and when i'm working with lemons or eggplant or tomatoes (stuff i know makes my hands worse) to wear vinyl gloves. i'm also banned from liquid soap. i asked about the organic stuff and she said that organic beauty and body products are a sham (which i kinda suspected). she says that most liquid soaps contain sodium-lauryl-sulphate (not sure if i'm spelling that correctly) which is really hard on your hands. so she has me on dove's sensitive skin bar soap and cetaphil. sometimes in the winter i get really deep cracks in my hands from dryness that are really hurty and bleedy, and i told her about them, and she told me to put crazy glue on the cracks. cool, eh? she said it's the same stuff that doctor's use when they don't give you stitches, or the same stuff in liquid band-aid except crazy glue is twice as strong and half as expensive and it keeps bacteria out while your skin can heal underneath. i really dug her.

i've slowly started working on my paper but i'm not progressing as fast as i'd like. i want to have it done by dodgeball time on sunday. we'll see. i've got only about 500 words down, but that's mainly my intro. the body only has to be about 3000 words, with my annotated book list embedded in it. it's kind of hard to write because it's VERY general and i really prefer to deal in specificities. it's also not supposed to be academic. ah well...it is what it will be.

before i left for the cottage, i finished reading "fat land: how americans became the fattest people in the world" by greg critser. it's one of those readable non-fiction books i'm so into lately. it was semi-enjoyable, except it was working well-trodden ground. the usual suspects were fingered (high fructose corn syrup in everything, the cheap availability of processed foods, the lack of funding in the school system preventing them from turning down soft-drink manufacturers, the targeting of the lower-classes by fast-food franchises). i do have to say that portion sizes and food quality in the states is much worse than here, although "here" is relative since i'm lucky enough to live in a highly urbanized setting. your options in barrie, by comparison, aren't too hot either. the lack of vegetables when you eat out is appalling though. i mean, **i** love it because i eat relatively healthily the rest of the time, so this is my vacation-break from that. however, for some people, that's their DIET. which is gross. and no wonder you're apathetic and lethargic.

last night's dinnie was a big payoff, for a quickie meal. i seared the halibut and then finished it in the oven and served it with tartar sauce. i pan-fried some yellow squash, and made whole-wheat couscous with some chopped tomato, red onion, parsley, and a lemon vinaigrette. it was quick and easy and came together in under 20 minutes.

today is my super-long day so i packed leftover stuffed eggplant for my dinner, along with a spinach salad and some fruits for snacking on.

fin.

new heroes last night

was kind of a total snoozer. the "cliff-hanger" ending wasn't even that engaging and the new characters were annoying. a lot of the mystery is gone from the show so i think that's kind of a problem, the momentum just isn't there. as the roomie said, "it feels like a middle-of-the-season episode." which is totally true.

the dotytron always comes back from teaching his after-school program with hilarious stories to tell. apparently the teacher they had last year was "soooo booooring" because it appears he just stuck to a rigid lesson book and had them plod their way through it. dotytron made a "music appreciation" cd with a wide range of songs on it, from the simpsons theme, to classical, to jazz, to classic rock, and had the kids pick out what they could hear. apparently it went over like bananas. then he had them list some of the music that they liked. the answers were hilarious. one kid like classical music (especially mozart) and hip hop. most of them liked pop music, some of them got really specific with the bands they liked, and it was interesting to see that classic rock was still a huge influence, as well as some prog (there's something kind of wrong with a kid listing rush as one of their favorite bands).

i recently finished reading miranda july's book "no one belongs here more than you". for those of you who have seen her palme d'or-winning movie "you, me and everyone we know" it's very similar. the short stories all share faintly tragic, absurdly comedic stories (all written in the first person) about the tentative and grotesque connections between people in all their lumpy, endearingly misshapen glory. it exposes the dark side of people, but not in a mean, todd solondz kind of way, it's not vicious. it's more the quiet, confused, strange and quirky side of people, that flirts with darkness but maintains enough self-aware humour to prevent it from becoming savage, keeping the stories safely on the humane side.

she has a particular gift for getting the tone of children right. the kids in her stories and in the movie were probably the most convincing of all the portrayals and her dialogue, often involving stilted conversations riding a wave of awkward misunderstandings, isn't mannered, and reads as true. overall, i really enjoyed the collection and i would recommend it.

tonight for dinner i think we're having halibut with tartar sauce, green beans, and some as-yet-to-be-determined starch.

fin.

i'm a fair skank

ummmm...agricultural fairs effin ROCK. i don't know what my suburban and urban addled brain was expecting, but the ancaster fair exceeded my expectations by about ten billion and then some. so many animals! we saw cows, and chickens (like, more kinds of chickens then you would think existed), and rabbits, and llamas, and pigs and sheep. strange kkk sheep that were very creepily sheathed in some kind of cultish outfit of racial domination.

there was also a very strange christian element at the ancaster fair. and not the benevolent, benign, "love thy neighbour" kind of christianity. the "beat your neighbour into submission with the word of the almighty lord" kind of christianity.
me and dr. rei did an initial sweep of the fairgrounds and passed an anti-abortion stand complete with little fetuses and that picture of a baby's arm reaching out of a hole cut in a uterus. you know, THAT picture. then there was another stand with a "test your bible knowledge!" quiz. being a trivia junkie, i was willing to give it a gander. it was one of those things with questions painted on a board and when you selected an answer the board would light up with right or wrong. but the questions were a little (like, a lot) dodgy. stuff like, "now that homosexual marriage is legal in canada, it is no longer a sin" (answer: FALSE); "it is possible to be a good christian and not go to church every week" (answer: FALSE). so me and dr. rei were talking amongst ourselves when we were BESET UPON by some dude with a maniacal gleam in his eyes (i kid you not). when i told him i have a masters in theology, he got even crazier. so he tried to test me with one of the questions on the board. i answered the blatantly non-christian answer, and he was waiting for the board to light up "wrong!" but the board wasn't working and none of the lights were working. he was frantically fiddling with the board to make the lights work, and i said, "see. GOD did this for me." that didn't make things better. he got really mad. shortly thereafter we had to extricate ourselves from him because he was creeping us out.

later in the night we returned to the fair with a cohort in tow. i've discovered my dream job, folks. i want to be a demolition derby ref. i can't even imagine the years of training required to execute that job.

dr. rei's mom cooked us a feast! there was an AMAZING salmon dish cooked with herbs that was light and fresh tasting. a rice and meat dish, rice and saffron cooked with a layer of pita on the bottom that becomes a crunchy and delicious skin of awesomeness (that was one of my favorites). the other dish was a mixture of herbs and kidney beans cooked with sour persian dried lemons that was so fragrant and citrusy in a way that i had never experienced before. that was probably my other favorite dish. everything was fantastic and her parents were so welcoming and the dinner conversation flowed really well and covered a wide range of topics.

playing my brother's team in dodgeball was hectic. his team was very competitive, but i'm proud to say, i think they were expecting to mop the floor with us, and we played amazing. we lost by 3 games and i totally don't think they were expecting that. i was really proud of our team. but my brother certainly doesn't make it "fun". he had some super-aggressive alpha males and females that were buckshot, so it got more heated than i had anticipated. i've actually gotten more chill as a captain now that my brother isn't on my case about how i have to "step up" and "pay attention" (the last was replete with tapping me on the temple).

finally, the weekend ended off with THIS madness. holy crap. me, the dotytron and dr. rei haven't been to a LIVE show in a long time. we walked into the basement of revival which featured some nameless dude playing b-sides, but when we walked upstairs into the main room, it was off the mother-effin' CHAINS. seriously, wall-to-wall people with minimum skeeze. the vibe was off the hook. primo is the consummate entertainer. he's so talented, so skilled at getting the crowd worked up,
and a wicked dj to boot. doesn't play the tunes out to long, knows how to balance giving people what they want with some proper history...both times i've seen him have been phenomenal.



today was madness and stressful with lots of running around. i got back in time for dinner and i made stuffed eggplant. following my supervisor toni's suggestions, i steamed eggplant halves, scraped out the flesh, mixed it with ground beef and veal and seasonings and stuffed it back into the eggplant shells and baked them in the oven with tomato sauce. served with a side salad.

fin.

international development vs. ME

my food course is driving me bonkers. it's got way too many young, save-the-world white people in it and it seems like the class discussions end up inevitably de-volving into modified versions of impassioned, grade 10 ethics class "debates" (but replace "euthanasia" and "schma-schmortion" with "GMO's" "transnational corporations" and "capitalism"). everyone is sooo typical! i shouldn't say that, there's a few peeps in there who interjected some worthwhile business. but they're vastly out-numbered by people who say "capitalism does this" "capitalism takes away people's choices" "the peasants (!!!) have no choices" blah blah blah. then the teacher does something really lame by taking down a speaker's list. so by the time you want to respond to something, it's like 10 people removed from where you are and conversation ends up being really stilted and stiff (more like singular orations than a dialogue). way to go u of t with your freakishly large grad seminars, way to go.

the only word(s) i got to pipe in was when some kid who was trying to take the "i'm a poor student card". i was like *funny voice* "you're privileged, buddy" and he goes "what! how am i privileged? if it wasn't for a loan i wouldn't be able to go to school" and i was like, "you're STILL privileged" at which point the professor told me that it was so and so's turn to talk. lame!

this one girl (pure parkdale, indie-loving, faux-mullet, vintage swathed) made the following statement (in a breathy voice fecund with naive befuddlement) (about GMO's and food production): "i. just. don't. understand. we have LAND. and we grow VEGETABLES on that land. and then we FEED. THE. VEGETABLES. TO. ANIMALS. and then we eat the animals?!? that seems so wrong to me, i mean, we have LAND."

at this point, my eyes are about to roll on out of my head and i'm looking around the class trying desperately to see if anyone else is HEARING this crap. there were a couple of people who had maybe a glimmer of awareness of the absurdity, but they were doing a better job of hiding it. like, lady...WHAT ARE YOU GETTING AT? what's the problem here? i have absolutely NO issues with vegetarianism, but c'mon. like seriously, c'mon.

at another point in the class, this other woman was trampling all over the agency and rights of people in developing nations (without knowing it, and under the guise of benevolent liberal pap) when a car pulled up outside the classroom (we're at bloor and spadina) and was blasting that ludacris and pharell tune (right at the chorus):

Shake your money maker
Like somebody boutta pay ya
I see you on my radar
Don't you act like you dont hear
Shh
You know I got it
If you want it, come get it
Stand next to this money
Like - ey ey ey

effin catchy as all hell. i hear that song, and i wanna get down. this girl, stops abruptly while the lyrics boom through the classroom and then as the car drives away, says, "i'm sorry, i forget what i was saying because of that rap [disparaging to the MAX] music" wow. that's all i gots to say. wow.

anyway, there's a lot of trampling all over the agency of people in developing nations. this one girl who's amazing, is in an international development program at u of t and she responded to this other girl who was saying that gmo's are disgusting and despicable and the scum of the earth by saying, "well, i agree with you to a certain extent, but if that's what a developing country chooses to do in order to feed their people and get them up to par with the developed world, then it's their right." which i totally agreed with. it's a matter of who gets to say, if it comes from the people of india versus monsanto, i'm all for it. there was another dude who piped in (who is my kindred spirit in the class, although i think he's just auditing it) and said we couldn't continue the discussion until we adequately defined the actors. that a famer's needs in canada is very different from a farmer's needs in india and you can't just subsume them all under the title of "farmer". i should be more forgiving though because i was 100% that to a T when i was in undergrad, so it's probably that i'm at a different age, experience-level, and stage of my life than some of the other kids. they're well-intentioned.

blah blah blah. last night me and the roomie ended up going for drinks and visiting with my doppelganger and her bf, who very much acts like a counterbalance to her me-ness in the same way the dotytron acts as a counterbalance to my me-ness. we're like a doppelganger couple. i really really really like them both and they just got an apartment on the danny so we checked it out. it's sweet! i love having friends in the neighbourhood. then, because the roomie grew up in this hood, we rendezvoused with another old friends of hers who alsolives on the danny, and coincidentally ran into yet another old friend who used to live in riverdale and now lives in taiwan. it was a fun night, but i'm exhausted.

today i'm going to visit hamilton with dr. rei. her mummy is making me a persian feast! i'm soooo excited. i've never eaten persian food before. i made a fig and walnut tart and those cocoa-and-orange love cookies the boy made me that time as gifts. the fig walnut tart looks beautiful but it's the first time i've made the recipe so i don't know how it'll taste. i also overworked the cookie dough a bit so the cookies are tougher than when the dotytron made them, but they're still very tasty, just not as delicate and sandy as i would like.

fin.

i'm not a litigious person...

something tells me that if i fight the law, the law is totally going to win. so i called the wsib yesterday, to see if they would cover my time away from work or the reconstructive therapy. my adjudicator (who is very nice) didn't seem to think that they would, since i have "functional" ability back on my foot and it's just my foot, and blah blah blah. so i called a personal injury lawyer my mom refers cases to sometimes, who was also very nice, but seemed to indicate that it might not be worth my while. it's all very complicated. you have to get a letter from a doctor (that costs like, $1000-$1500) saying that i'm in great pain and suffering and it's causing me untold and more importantly, incalculable amounts of strife and trauma and impeding my ability to function like a normal human being. call me the world's greatest survivor, or the toughest gal on earth, but that's kinda not the case (p.s. who are these scheisty doctors anyhoo? all i can picture is dr. nick riviera). then the lawyer said the same thing, that since it's my foot, and it can be covered up, it's probably not worth my time, energy, and money. and if i take action against my employer, i'll probably be held accountable for half of the accident, which cuts into my potential earnings, plus lawyer fees, etc. at which point i interject and go, "look. i'm not a litigious person, i just want to have the reconstruction covered" and lawyer dude's all like, "you may not be a litigious person, but you have to understand how the litigious system works". basically, it seems the only way i'll get any money to cover the costs is if i claim "pain and suffering" which is the x factor in litigation. otherwise, it's a series of charts and checkmarks used by actuarial scientists to figure out how much having a non-disfigured foot is worth me. the other option is that i might be able to take action against the wsib for NOT covering it.

i think people have a very skewed sense of our legal system. the amount of times people have looked at me sympathetically and said, "you should sue!" with a maniacal gleam in their eyes (no doubt gleaned from countless stories of american justice packed into our heads of windfalls from finding a severed digit in your baconator burger at wendy's), i know they're thinking enviously of the piles and piles of money and how my ugly foot is my ticket to a work-free life. this is not the case. the law is a lot more dry and didactic and boring than you would think. it's very procedural. foots are worth x amount of a facial scar. size equals x amount of renumeration. boring.

i also think that when i tell people i have a "scar" on my foot, they're not exactly picturing what this mother looks like. the reconstruction isn't merely cosmetic, i have like a 1" growth on my foot that kinda impedes putting on shoes and stuff.

ah well, the lawyer dude is going to call me back and give me a heads up.

in other news, i'm exhausted right now but this weekend is supposed to be fun! tonight i'm staying in, sleeping, resting, and trying to work on a paper due in a couple of weeks. tomorrow morning i'm doing the same thing, and then i'm packing up and heading to hamilton to visit with dr. rei's family for the first time! we're going to the ancaster fair. apparently there's tractor pulls and other such things that i adore. then sunday we return home, do a little more work, then it's dodgeball, wings at duff's and dj premier (of gangstarr) at revival! what a night!!!

tonight for dinnie is leftovers.

fin.

the scar

just as my amateur epidemiology sleuthing on wikipedia indicated, the thing that has taken up residence on my foot is an abnormally large, abnormally thick, keloid scar (i suspect that being forced back to work was part of the problem). so the plastic surgeon recommended steroid injections (with the warning that, "they really hurt") as the first round of treatment in addition to some therapeutic massage to break down the scar tissue, and if that doesn't work, they can try cutting the scar off, and taking some skin from my butt and grafting it on (that apparently REALLY hurts, especially from the butt-al region, as you've basically got a patch with exposed nerve-endings...another open wound). so he prepared the steroid injection while i was right there, and the needle was thick. it was like a sewing needle or like a sewing machine needle, not one of those dainty, brittle-like-a-victorian-era-housewife vaccination needles, no sir. just before it goes in, he gives me a dramatic, "are you ready?" and i'm like, "what? no! you're freaking me out!" but he stabbed it in anyway. i'm happy to announce that my keloid is so thick that it is devoid of feeling (much like its' owner). i didn't feel a single smart, pinch, fluid entering the tissue, nothing.

now i have to try to arrange physio. i gotta see if workman's comp will either a) cover my time away from work to go to these sessions, or b) pay for a private clinic closer to my house which has hours that are more amenable to my work schedule. we'll see. my adjudicator is really nice. i'm also thinking of maybe suing canoe. i know i'm not a litigious person, but it's starting to rankle that i gotta go through all this bullcrap and they get to sit around all fat and smug and fat-babyish and give me a hard time about coming back to work and then give me a hard time about leaving even when i gave them two weeks notice and stayed for the hell that is summerlicious. the jerks!

my government documents course looks fun. it's got that kind of laid-back, chummy, practical-based professor teaching it that i dig. not big on the readings, big on hands-on assignments that don't seem too labour intensive. this semester looks like it's going to be my easy one. yay! also it looks like working where i do is really going to help with the assignments. the stuff is like, digging up statute citations and blah blah blah.

the work seems pretty spaced out too, and there's not a lot of running around gathering up readings, which is very nice. i met up with my friend richardson yesterday which was delight. she's preggos. being preggos has subjected her to a heretofore hidden side of her partner's mum (the shrill, controlling, censorious, patronizing side) that seems to come out in mums when faced with particular hot-button, big-ticket issues like weddings and babies and home-buying. for what it's worth, one of the amazing things about my mum is that she doesn't really butt in at all. she tends to reserve jugement, offer off-the-cuff suggestions, and laugh at my choices (with sarcastic, disparaging, oh-so-chinese flavour). i've talked over some of my wedding ideas with her, and she's pretty game, as long as she doesn't have to pay for it.

today is a public library then leg library day. then home. yesterday's dinner was delicious! i put some toasted pistachios and toasted coconut in the coconut steamed basmati rice and it was really texturally satisfying and tasty. my bastardized eggplant bharta really benefited from sitting in the slow cooker all day, and the one habenero pepper i put in added just the right amount of head.

i'm making a roasted beet and beet green pasta with ricotta salata. i peel and cut up the beets and roast them in the oven with some roasted garlic oil and salt and pepper. while those are cooking through, i smush up the roasted garlic and toss that in a pan with some chopped onion, and add the chopped and washed (beet greens get really gritty) beet greens. while the pasta is cooking, i reserve some of the pasta cooking water, and then toss the pasta with the roasted beets, the beet greens and some crumbled ricotta salata cheese. i'm hoping to serve this with a baby spinach salad with a red wine vinaigrette.

* i changed around the template for this blog because i think that reading white text on a dark background is better for your eyes - we'll see how well this takes*

fin.

collagen injections and a tummy tuck

i'm going to see my plastic surgeon this morning. i love saying that because it makes me feel so l.a. the real truth of it is much less glamorous, as i'm seeing him to see if anything can be done about my little friend on my foot. i just don't want whatever procedure is recommended, to hurt, although i don't have much sensation in the scar anyway so i guess it wouldn't matter?

one of the things i absolutely adore about working at the leg library is that one of my coworkers is really really into film. he's very knowledgeable about the entire canon and has a wide range of tastes (ie. in conversation he'll drop the name of a croatian cinematographer or a french actress), but it's not in a snobby way, just a really well-versed and enthusiastic way. i managed to finagle his "best of '06" list from him and it's very in-depth, but i like that he doesn't shy away from commercial films. if anything, he's very, very objective (insofar as one can be objective) in that he'll watch anything, with no preconceptions. there's always lots to talk about with him and it's nice to have someone's armchair-professional take on stuff.

i submitted one of my "reading responses" for my sociology of food course. they're supposed to be informal, but the syllabus has silly guidelines like, "in one page, your reading response should include 2 'keepers', 2 'questions' and 1 'so-what'". i hate it when profs try to overly-determine what's laid out as an "informal" exercise. i'll say what i have to say! this is grad school for pete's sake! mine ended up being kinda breezy but they're pass fail and she takes the best 8 out of 12, if you submit all 12. the readings this week weren't very inspiring. they were from the "socialist register" and attempt to illustrate the economic impetus for the current state of globalized food and its attendant societal ills (obesity, the subjugation of the developing world, etc). i appreciated a lot of the points, but i thought that the argument was too situated in a marxist base/superstructure binary, which left little room for the subject's intervention. it was a tidy little system all wrapped up in a bow, which is great, but the problem with the base/superstructure thing is that the end result is: we're screwed and there's nothing you can do about it, whereas, in my infinite wisdom as i age, i don't believe you have to throw the baby out with the bath water, and that there might be ways to negotiate within capitalism. i don't know what those ways are, but i find it a little more hopeful overall.

last night's dinner was a total winner. the zucchini was tender and al dente as was the pasta, and those oven-roasted, oil-packed chilis my supervisor gave me (the "toni chilies" as we've taken to calling them) make everything good. i'm realizing that my camera is starting to be woefully inadequate compared to other people's digital cameras. but i'm poor, so that's okay. it just gets my goat when i see like, 8.0 megapixel glamour shots of food that i know doesn't taste as good as mine. it's like false advertising! the paris hilton of food-blogging! sour grapes on my part, i know! i love my little camera though, so loyal to it i shall be.

tonight is my mega-long day so i'm packing an eggplant and chickpea coconut milk curry with coconut-pistachio basmati rice for my dinner at school. i made the curry in the slow cooker and it turned out alright if i do say so myself. a bit of a bastardized eggplant bharta.

fin.

ce n'est pas acceptable

so one of my co-workers threw out the dish sponge yesterday at the leg library, making claims of disease ridden, bacteria-laden, death bombs swabbing our dishes and leaving us with any number of wasting, flesh-eating viruseses (virii???). this would have been fine if we had a replacement but we didn't. her suggestion? using wadded up paper towels to wash our dishes. i can't deal. i almost imploded. i am someone who has VERY fixed notions of the proper way to wash dishes, and those notions have "sponge" as their unifying centre. not j-cloths, not wadded up paper towels...sponges. it almost broke me using the paper towels. the strange thing is, when it actually comes to the washing of dishes, i'm pretty lax (ie. the person most likely in this house to leave crusted food on utensils is yours truly). as long as they come in contact with soap and hot hot water, i'm okay. this coworker is a clean freak. she washes her sheets EVERY WEEK. now, maybe i'm revealing too much here, but i do it considerably less than that. mainly because stripping and remaking the bed always seems like such a herculean task that you build it up in your head until it becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle between you and sleeping bliss. seriously, the joy of the fresh sheet feeling only lasts for one sleep, and then you're back at square one.

while at the cottage, i read miriam toews "a complicated kindness" about this semi-precocious, blase, mennonite girl living in a remote mennonite community in manitoba, struggling to come to grips with her life after her mother and sister up and leave town one day. it wasn't without it's small humours and moments, but overall, i don't know if it's my kind of thing. i don't really dig that kind of disaffected-but-naive voice (ie. catcher in the rye bored me to tears). and fiction (aside from harry potter) hasn't been doing it for me lately. some of the descriptions were kind of clever, but it was really just a compendium of musings from this mennonite girl, some of which were kind of clever.

wonderful but life-busying things are happening for the dotytron right now. he's working at the music store, and volunteering at our old high school one day a week to gain in-class experience for his teacher's college application. he also teaches music out of our house on sundays, but some of his students are shifty. while he was serving some lady and her kid at the music store, she was so impressed with his way with children (the dotytron has like, babies falling out of his fingertips, that's how good with kids he is), that she recommended him to her catholic school board, so on sunday he was offered a job teaching in their after-school music program on mondays and fridays. the pay is amazing and it's going to look FANTABULOUSO on his application. on top of all this he has a meeting today with another all-music school to see if he can teach there. poor little squirrel-that-looks-like-abraham-lincoln is working 7 days a week now, and he still has to finish two courses and do this crazy music jury thing where they have to learn like a billion songs, and the judges call like, 10 and he has to be able to play on them, cold. i'm sympathetic to his state and i'm being extra nice and soft lately, but i'm also secretly glad to see some hustle from him. eye on the prize! eye on the prize!

last night's dinnie was delicious. i have a secret passion for fried seafood and tartar sauce. tartar sauce is one of my "mother" sauces. in classic french cooking, the mother sauces are the basis for all the sauces in the french canon, and it's stuff like demi-glace, bechamel, blah blah blah. mine is like, tartar sauce, bagna cauda, sweet chili dipping sauce, etc. ha. tonight for dinnie we're having a quick pasta of zucchini that i slice thin and sautee with garlic and chilies and toss with the hot pasta and some grated pecorino romano. with a baby spinach salad with toasted pecans and goat cheese in a bacon vinaigrette on the side.

fin.

shellacked

we crushed the other team in last night's premiere dodgeball game, 14-5. in their defense, they were a really nice, easygoing and fun team to play, and it was a lot of the members' first time playing. so they're where we were, last time around. it was fun to run around and i'm not as sore as i was last time, which is good. i feel like i'm more in shape or something. last time we started in the spring, which comes after 3 solids months of me taking ttc to school and work, so i think it's working better. next week we're playing my brother's team, which should be fun.

today is my really long day at the library. i'm there from 8:30 - 5:30 with a half hour lunch. it's rough!

that's an unappetizing picture of what was a surprisingly appetizing dinner considering i pulled it out of my ass. last night's dinner conversation was fairly off-colour, featuring appearances by internet celebrities "tubgirl" and "goatse". anyone not familiar with these terms, i beg you, DO NOT GOOGLE THEM. suffice it to say it's disgusting (but LEGAL AND CONSENTING disgusting) - that disclaimer is for the prurient tastes of my lawmaker sister. the roomie has never seen goatse, so was intrigued by the concept (a guy pulling his a**hole inside out). i told her she didn't want to see it (and was quite emphatic about it). she said she did. i told her it looked like a meat flower, or a meat tulip, specifically, at which point we both almost died laughing. if i ever open a restaurant, i think i'm going to call it "the meat tulip". class-ay.

tonight for dinner we're having fried calamari sandwiches with tartar sauce and a salad.

fin.

i have a new monitor!

i've been neglecting to mention that "chinotto is my nemesis" is being constructed on my brand-new, 17", flat-screen, lcd, acer monitor. i feel so grown-up! the boy's lovely mum bought me a photodock and printer for our kodak digital camera for my birthday, but unfortunately it was for the wrong model, so the boy returned it for me and got me the monitor instead (i'm also in the process of having my dear friend aaron upgrade my computer). fancy pants! there was even some money left over for the boy to buy me a copy of joss whedon's "firefly" on dvd. thanks, momma d!

i'm going through a phase of anxiety and feeling like i need to perform a house-enema. i basically want to print up a bunch of my cache of digital photos from the past 3 years and put them in albums and frame them, and clear through some of the detritus in the house and reorganize, box and label things appropriately. this seems to happen whenever i'm in school, probably as the outcome of sublimated procrastination urges catalyzed by my incessant need to always be doing something/organizing something/producing something. anyway, the house enema is going to involve lots of rubbermaid storage bins and liberal use of my brother p touch label-maker that my little brother got me for my birthday last year. my little(st) brother is the best gift buyer because he ALWAYS sticks to the list.

thanks to my lovely coworker, i was introduced to this company, blurb, that has software that allows you to create your own books and will then "bookstore-quality" produce them for you. i suppose it's the same as a lot of the options made available by kodak and other photo companies, but the layout options and finishing on blurb are a lot nicer, and the pricing is a lot more affordable. so i think i'm going to indulge the inner-scrapbooker lurking just beneath the surface of my urban flaneur and make photobooks of our trips and of the past couple years, instead of going to the trouble of producing photo albums.

fish tacos were amazing and were deceptively light, thus enabling me to cross the hairline that separates "reasonable portion" from "gross overeating." the banana cake was delicious and simple, really just a moist banana bread/cake covered in cream cheese frosting. my love for cream cheese frosting is not to be underestimated. i would do many a thing and cross many an ethical and moral boundary for cream cheese frosting. thank goodness it hasn't come to that. yet. i also made a banana bread for my co-workers at the library. this morning we had an early sunday breakkie of peameal, cheddar, tomato and a fried egg on a soft kaiser, with beet-carrot-apple-cucumber-ginger juice.

dinner tonight is going to be pan-seared pork chops with cornbread stuffing and some kind of vegetable (maybe beans?). nice and simple. we're also playing our first dodgeball game of the new season this afternoon. weeeeeeeeeeeee! i'm fantastically out of shape. weeeeeeeeeeeee!

fin.

you win this round, magic oven

i was all prepared to find magic oven guilty of all kinds of upscale-pizza related infractions: soggy crust, meager portions, ridiculous toppings, and the worst of all - no value for your dollar. unfortunately, the pizza was pretty flippin' fantastic. the pizza is smaller than the XL at mama's, so the portions are slightly less than what we're used to, but still satisfying for a friday night meal. there's a wide array of vegan pizzas, chicken pizzas, and meat and seafood pizzas with pre-configured toppings. now, in my universe, i have no truck with all of the above save the meat pizzas and a clam pizza. seriously, chicken on a pizza wigs me out. there's just no need for that shiz! chicken is SO BORING, you might as well put cubes of tofu on your pizza (don't even THINK about it!). they also have a lot of options for hippity dippity crusts: spelt, whole wheat (oil free, yeast free), and white. i wanted a whole wheat crust WITH oil and yeast, but for some reason they don't do that for XL, and i don't even know if they do whole wheat with the yeast and oil (which makes no sense to me, but whatever...i mean, can't i have leavened extra fibre in my pizza?) we ordered the "harmony magic" which is: olive oil, proscuitto, garlic, caramelized onion, spicy italian sausage, light mozzarella, gorgonzola and arugala. the crust (white) is FANTASTIC. light, thin, crunchy on the bottom, nicely golden (as if fried) but not greasy or oily in the least, and with an almost flaky quality. that combination of toppings with that crust was an unqualified winner. it ended up costing us $37, which is decent for takeout night...on the high end we end up spending at most, $15 per person so it's well within the takeout night budget. i was kinda pissed though cuz the waitress stole my change even though i walked in and picked up my pizza, in which case, i never tip, because well, i haven't been served. that's fair, right? next time she tries to pull that i'm going to be right on her.

today is homework and errands day, as my mum bailed on a proposed ball gown mission with me.

tonight for dinner we're having fish tacos. lightly floured tilapia pieces, pan fried and served in warm corn tortillas with guacamole, salsa, shredded lettuce, sour cream, etc. i might make a banana cake with cream cheese frosting for dessert, or rice krispie squares to use up the boatloads of marshmallows left over from the cottage.

fin.

yay yay yay!

today is the class i'm looking forward to the mostest. it's a sociology classed called: SOCIAL ECOLOGY - FOOD IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT *swoon* *lovebirds* *hearts and unicorns* it's like the class was MADE for me! yay! i hope it lives up to my expectations! the prof sent me an early copy of the syllabus and it looks right up my alley.

last night's dinnie was spectacular. so comforting and tasty. as you can see, i ended up going with cornbread with the now de rigeur butter and maple syrup as my side starch. and i just had it for breakkie too! you can't lose! tonight is take out night. magic oven (a gourmet pizza place with veggie/vegan leanings) just opened up practically across the street so we're going to try them out. the pizzas are on the pricey side so we'll see how it actually stacks up, tastewise.

fin.

going to bed with a stitch from laughing

is a very, very good thing.

so, there's been some talk in my family that i'm not really living up to my full potential or capabilities, considering my abilities, talents, whathaveyou. they think that me doing library school is a bit of a cop-out. i'm not gonna lie, it kinda is. basically, my ambition in terms of career is to have a fairly cushy job that's not too taxing with three week's paid vacation (that's to start, mind you) and sick days and personal leave days and a hefty pension. this is what i decided after giving my life to cooking for 4 years and seeing nothing come of it - and i'm not going to piss around the bush here, i was GOOD at what i did. and after pursuing grad school for a while and becoming disillusioned (yes, there was a time when the golden light of idealism shone through the swiftly thickening crust of hard-boiled cynicism encasing my soul). the thing is, i'm STILL good at what i'm doing now (librarianing, researching, etc), but this way allows me to pursue my REAL life's ambition, which is to have a rich fulfilling life (and the wherewithal to do so) surrounded by people i love. so i think when my family looks at my career choice and are lamenting the fact that it doesn't require as much of my exceptional genius as something else, i think they gloss over the fact of how fantastically happy i am. like, disgustingly happy. like, so happy that the superstitious chinese in me types these words ever-so-cautiously for fear of tempting the capricious and malevolent hand of fate. *kow-tows to confucious and lao tsu and mulan*

anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that i went to bed roaring with laughter over two things. a) the other night, i started calling the dotytron "lady di" and for some reason i still find this side-splittingly funny. i think it's a new nickname in the making. b) we were sleepily talking over our halloween costume ideas for this year. i want to go as simon and garfunkel. the only problem is, i'm concerned that with the sweaters and whatnot, it's going to be too hot to go dancing. then we started saying how much funnier it would be to show up to a jungle party as shimon (from ram records) and garfunkel. hahahaha!!! especially if that meant that i had to go in blackface (it turns out shimon is a white guy, ah zoot...i can still do whiteface i guess). i almost peed my pants. the reference only has meaning if you're a drum'n'bass fan, but believe me, it's funny. we're all about our obscure halloween costumes. the first year we did a pair thing, we went as matthew and gunnar nelson.

while at the cottage, i coasted to the finish of the Harry Potter phenomena-zeitgeist-wave. j.k. rowling is the shiz. after all the ink and type that have been exhausted on this, i feel i have very little of worth to contribute, only that she has managed to craft a deeply moving, sophisticated, and engrossing series, and that as a cultural movement, the idea of so many people for so long a time in so many different places coming together over a story (that's not about racial purity or ethnic cleansing or arms trading...actually, i guess the story kinda IS about those things, but in the good way, not the bad way) gives me goosebumps.

i cried buckets during the climax of the narrative, because this is the culmination of a long relationship with these characters and this world and it was ultimately soooo rewarding. i highly endorse you to read the series, put aside your misgivings about its' popularity, ubiquitousness, whatever your qualms are. it's a piece of well-crafted fiction in the grandest, epic sense, and it's well worth your time.

yesterday my multiculti class is what's to be expected from a class that tries to tackle multiculturalism in any form, public library oriented or not. we had a class discussion about a very poorly written article written by some dude about whether germany could stand to adopt canada's stance on multiculturalism. talking about such broad terms in such a broad way does my head in. the failure to define the specificity or frame the argument in any way results in grade 10 debating class style "big topic" wrangling that stresses me out. it's like trying to encapsulate the enormity of the universe or conceptualize what existed pre-big-bang. it does my head in. i actually heard a classmate say something like, "so, in canada we have the cultural mosaic, as opposed to the states, which is a melting pot" !!!!!!!!!!! wow.

i saved the best part for last. yesterday, after class, i went to my department's library (called the "inforum" *rollseyesdotbarfdotgif*) to get some books and photocopy my readings for next week. didn't have any money on my card, so i tried to borrow someone else's, they had no money, i decided to suck it up and go to robarts. add money to my card and robarts and photocopy my readings and then head back into my faculty building and take the elevator (in itself a weird occurence cuz i almost always walk the stairs) to the inforum to drop off my books and leave. as the elevator doors open, what entrancing visage do i see before me? DR. REI!!! the expression on our faces was hi-larious. our mouths gaped open and glee washed over our perpetually youthful good looks. best day ever! i love seeing familiar, good friend faces on campus. it reminds me there is a life outside of the wackness of FIS. it was such a fluke too!

last night i made that cumin-mint dressed red pepper, celery and cucumber salad to go with the perogies. i wanted something crunchy and fresh beside all the starchiness. we tried a new perogie brand. they were alright. we also thought outside the box in terms and deviated from our usual flavour (potato cheddar) to try their sauerkraut and mushroom and broccoli cheddar kind. i dunno if it's worth it. the reason i eat perogies is as an excuse for loads of full-fat sour cream and caramelized onion mixed with something vaguely starchy. i don't need all the bells and whistles, methinks. tonight for dinner we're having a creamy stewed chicken one-pot dealie with peas and baby carrots. the return of hectic-ness means the return of the slow cooker to the repertoire. yay fall! fall food pwns! so i browned some chicken, added leek, celery and garlic mirepoix to the pan, tossed in some flour, cooked that out, deglazed with wine, and chucked it all with the baby carrots and chicken stock into the slowcooker. when i get home, i'm going to fish out the bones, so it's just shredded chicken meat, add some frozen peas and some cream and bake some biscuits to go with. mmmm!

fin.

"i have this thing..."

so on monday night, one of the boy's co-workers (he works at a music store) came over for a quick visit and chat. this dude is like, 30 plus, and he comes over, with a basketful of sour grapes, about one of their coworkers, who i guess had seniority, but is now second-in-command in the store. so he's complaining about how he got called into the office, and this is what dude man says: "okay, so i have this thing, where sometimes, i sleep through my alarm, and i show up to work like a few hours late. i mean, it's not like it's a big deal, it only happens every few months and ___ is going to bust my chops about it?!?" so i kept expecting him to explain what this mysterious ailment was, but he didn't. i was VERY proud of myself for being able to bite my tongue and not call him out for being the lazy, irresponsible schlub he clearly is. dude, if you're flaking out on work, at least have the balls to admit it. "i have this thing where i sleep through my alarm?!?" who DOES that?

i'm all for people doing what they want to do, but i'm telling you, staying at that music store is bad news for the dotytron. it's a bunch of dudes with arrested development (not the boy, and i guess not everyone is like that)...it's like a head-in-the-clouds "musicians" holding pen. yikes, is alls i gotta says, yikes. i mean, i'm sure it's fun day to day, but they sound like a bunch of preschoolers sometimes.

first day of class was good, except for my professor breaking my heart. it's that same uptight professor as my last term. who lectures for the FULL THREE HOURS and EVEN A LITTLE BIT OVER but is so well-meaning and well-intentioned that my heart shatters to pieces. especially when he does stuff like during break, go sit on a metal chair in the corner of the room and engage in some kind of quiet reflection. how heartbreaking is that? not even shuffling papers, or going to the bathroom, or going to his office! he just sits down and stares at his hands !!!!!! gah! i'm going to talk to him next class. something tells me i'll be talking to him A LOT since i have a 4000 word essay due in less than 3 weeks, PLUS a 12 book annotated reading list. we're off to the races, people!

i have another class today, "public library service to culturally diverse communities"

i'm soo busy! it's crazy...it's already non-stop. when i get home, it's a race to make dinner, eat it, and then get to doing odds and ends before i can even THINK of doing my actual schoolwork. yeeps.

tonight for dinner we're having perogies with caramelized onions, sour cream, and some kind of salad. i keep forgetting to take pictures of my dinnies but i'll start up again, post-haste.

fin.

quiet reflection

in marked contrast to my first week of cottaging, the following week at the boy's family's cottage was a time of quiet introspection, reflection, and lots of lots of naps and eating and reading. it was refreshing and nice to have the opportunity to do both kinds of cottaging. this past week of idleness has left me feeling recharged and much more zen about stuff. that's the view from the hammock. the cottage is accessed by boat only, so it's quite removed. it's on the finger jutting off of a very large lake and their part of the lake is a dead end, so there's not a lot of boat traffic and only a scattering of properties. we went on long canoe rides and i portaged for the first time ever! (incidental note for factual consideration: the portage was about 4 feet) the next few shots are pics from our early morning canoe adventures, featuring my first experience with a real beaver dam. beaver dams are palatial residences that seem to occur near swamps with fetid smells. i'm just saying, is all.

most of my time was occupied with swimming, fishing (i caught a crapload of fish but they were too small to eat/keep), and playing games at night. we found this game called "up words" (we called it "word up") which is kinda like scrabble except you can build up your words vertically as well as horizontally, and the value is consistent for every letter. i was hooked!!! there was also a game called "rummy" (with tiles, not cards) that i suspect is very similar to mah jong, which means that i've received the preliminary training to continue my grandfather's lineage of gambling supremacy round the mah jong table. aces!

today is my first real day back into real worldsville. le sigh. my class today is called: "reader's advisory: reference work and resources", but i call it: "bird course: karl's fulfillment of credit requirements with a minimum of effort and labour expenditure" it's with that prof who has the stutter who's kind of ocd. he sent out this wacky email over the weekend thanking all the students who had already downloaded the syllabus so i'm like, "wtf guy? where the crap am i supposed to download the syllabus from?" and i emailed him something to that effect with no response. i'm telling you, universities are saving a crapload on paper costs by getting US to shell out for ink cartridges and paper and whatnot. and yet, tuition continues to rise?

also, one of my resolutions upon returning to the cottage was to limit my time doing purposeless interneting/tving. to that end, i'm trying to break my addiction to online celebrity gossip. however, i couldn't help but watch britney's performance at the vma's. wow. tragic. you can see the dawning awareness of her own irrelevance in her eyes. it's like the bard himself couldn't have crafted a more poignant scene of crushing self-realization.

tonight for dinnie we're having pasta with leftover sauce but i'm going to switch it up and bake it in the oven with ricotta and mozzarella and have it with caesar salad again. the roomie made a solid meat sauce! she gone done good.

fin.

backstreet's back, aight!

well, it's the new, improved, less stressed, more relaxed version (2.0 perhaps?) of karl lagerfeld esquire round these parts, which is what two weeks of doing absolutely nothing will do for you. i mean, we did do things, but we didn't HAVE to do anything, which is the major point for the very existence of the muskokas region, as far as i'm concerned. the first week with my family at the cottage we rented was non-stop laughs; hilariousness; bawdy, off-colour humour; ruminations round the fire every night; star-gazing; lazing on the dock; swimming in the unseasonably warm water; snacking; and eating outrageously, sinfully well. the lake we were on was fairly small (only about 1 - 1.5km across) and wasn't overly deep, so the water was really nice and refreshing. we were blessed with fantastic weather - hot, no humidity, blazing sun for every day except for one. the cottage was fairly well-appointed, although the "fully stocked kitchen" was a big, fat, lie. i mean, i guess it was "fully stocked" if all you were going to be eating was weiners and beans, but for the way **I** cook at the cottage, it was slim pickin's. the good thing was, that in my infinite wisdom and obsessive compulsiveness, i packed about 30 tonnes of kitchen equipment to make our lives easier. my other major contribution to the events of the cottage was the idea to create thebaby-containment-holding pen known forthwith as "babydome" (2 kids enter, 1 kid leaves). basically, i stuck some blankets down inside a mosquito tent on the property, we'd chuck the kids in there, and then zip 'em up while we went and drove atv's drunk, mixed heavy machinery with depressants, and drove around in a shallow lake with a 160 horsepower engine. fun! i jest, though. in reality, we were mere steps away, mainly to prevent alarmingly brazen chipmunks from slipping into the tent and terrorizing the children.

it was a fantastic, family-bonding experience. i'll put up some pictures of our time at the boy's family's cottage tomorrow. i was clever enough to take the day off today to futz around and clean and prepare for my insane-o weeks to come. i've got 12 hours of class time, 20 hours of work at the library, and 8 hours of work at the public library, bringing me to 40 hours from monday through friday. not counting the work i have to do for class (which is basically a joke, as faithful readers all know that i don't DO work for class).

i've been eating like a disgusting pig so it's back to healthy portion sizes and lots of fruits and veggies for me. tonight the roomie made us some kind of meat-based pasta, which we're having with caesar salad.

finally, what kind of geek-family cottage vacation would it be without a time-lapsed documented attempt at drawing the batman logo in sparklers?

fin.