the longest week ever

is finally drawing to a close! mid-week statutory holidays are a bust, lemme tells you. you don't get the feeling of having a proper long weekend, you have to come back to work (wednesday felt like such a monday.)  add to it that my workload increased exponentially and i'm ready to embrace two days of sleeping in (kinda) and business casual-free tomfoolery.

yoga class yesterday was really, really good. the perfect balance. i really like this teacher. his name is sebastian. he pushes us pretty hard, but there's enough time to really breathe into the stretches and feel yourself sinking into the postures, without it being a cardio workout. it's a great pace and i'm learning lots of new moves. i come out of it gleaming with a thin veil of sweat, but not perspiring heavily. because this is the last class of the evening, the class size is perfect, too; usually averaging between 5-7 people, so the teacher can come around and correct your postures. i'm totally hooked and it works into my schedule perfectly. the dotytron works late on thursdays and i have enough time to come home, make a nice dinner, and go to class and come home all loose and languid and unwound. now that dodgeball is moving to mondays, i can also start going to sunday classes too! two yoga classes a week in addition to my home practicing and running is the perfect amount. the outdoor pools are open so i might start going for swims...yay to working full time! i LOVE it! look at me, being able to go to adult lane swims!

recently i finished reading the following comics: "big baby" by charles burns, "skin deep" by charles burns, and "aya" by marguerite abouet and clement oubrerie. by now, i know what to expect from charles burns. macabre, grotesque, mysterious and pulpy stores laced with the seedy, alien, hidden underbelly of american life. these two books are collections consisting of 3 short comics each. "big baby" features the titular character, a child with an active imagination who comes in contact with mole people, a wife abuser, ghosts, and plagues that strike sexually active teenagers. all that being said, the "big baby" stories were less fantastical and had less of an evil truly malignant tone than the stories in "skin deep" (probably because they featured a child's point of view). "skin deep" is much more dark (featuring appearances by the devil! and a woman trapped in a woman's body!). i really enjoy his drawings and the references he makes to the science fiction and pulp novels of the 50s and 60s.

"aya" is kind of boring and doesn't have much of a story, but it gives you a snapshot of life as a middle-class person in the cote d'ivoire during its economic boom, which is a side of africa we rarely, if ever, see in the west. otherwise, it's very, very slight. the woman who wrote it didn't do the illustrations, so at that point, it's kind of like, well...what DID you do? because the story isn't much at all. it's getting rave (and i think undeserved) reviews for what it is.

last night for dinner (i'm writing this saturday morning) i made a swiss chard, chili, roasted garlic and ricotta salata pasta with a salad of red leaf lettuce, tomatoes, and shallots in a mustard dill dressing. i also made homemade ice cream sandwiches, using a recipe that gives you the same kind of cookie consistency as those cheap, $1, ice cream sandwiches you get from the convenience store. aces! those things are my favorite and i'm capable of eating an ungodly amount of them. i overcooked the cookie slightly, as i didn't account for the carryover cooking crisping them up (they seemed too soft so i left them in a little longer than stated, and then they got too crispy and weren't soft/chewy enough).

this is the BEST summer so far. i love the weather for downtown toronto. some people are griping that it's too cool, but i absolutely adore it. it's warm enough to wear a dress during the day, with no humidity, and then it cools down enough at night so that you want to wear a thin layer over your shorts and t-shirt. perfect. and it's amazing for running. we sat out in the backyard after dinner, me knitting, the dotytron studying for his geoscience exam and ate it up. ate up our dinner, then the dusk, the fat drunken bumblebees buzzing around our garden (which is having a break-out year of gloriousness), the sounds of the ice cream truck and the gravelly rumble of kids' plastic trike tires running up and down the street. laughter and far off screaming and screen doors slamming shut and the smell of barbecue in the air. i love my backyard i love this weather and i love this summer so far. i love that we can enjoy it outside instead of running inside to air conditioned havens to save ourselves from oppressive humidity.

today is a day of errands and cooking and knitting outside. it's also the beats breaks and culture thing at the harbourfront. thunderheist is playing for free and so is crystal castles, but the dotytron hates that stuff so i'm not sure if we're going to go. we might just have dinner here and then bike down to the beaches and hang out there, or just play frisbee in the park with some friends. i'm getting a shipment of zucchini blossoms today so i'm doing a whole meal of antipasti. stuffed, battered and fried zucchini blossoms. this thing that my old supervisor T told me about where you take roasted peppers and stuff them with proscuitto and provolone, bread them and deep fry them. a grilled eggplant, zucchini and basil salad with some crumbled goat's cheese and balsamic. some cheese and crackers and italian cold cuts. cold cocktails and water and an orange curd tart in a hazelnut crust for dessert.

doesn't summer seem endless right now?

fin.