In Memoriam

My Kung Kung passed away last Thursday and I'm sitting here in front of the computer trying to find a way to disentangle the complexity of my sadness. Real life has its inevitable way of insinuating itself - so yes, I spent this past weekend at the farm with the kdubsguelphtdot crew, laughing and playing games, and yes, I have been thoroughly charmed by the Big Yam's continuing antics, but there have also been times of grief, sorrow, and a torrent of tears.

I spent all Monday and Tuesday sifting through old photo albums with my sister, selecting pictures of Kung Kung that will be displayed on poster boards on easels around the chapel. Poh Poh and Kung Kung kept many many many photos - most of them from when they were young, or on their travels just after Kung Kung retired in the late 60s/early 70s. So many pictures of Kung Kung and Poh Poh, dressed in the styles of the times, a mod green Hawaiian shirt on Kung Kung, Poh Poh in a matching shift dress, her hair teased up and hairsprayed into a poufy bouffant, standing in front of swaying palm trees before a sun-drenched beach in some tropical locale, Kung Kung smiling his characteristic grin, the analog photo bleached and aged with a Kodak-derived authenticity that no number of iPhone hipstamatic filters could hope to truly replicate. So many photos of Kung Kung smiling, smiling, smiling. That smile I know so well after 31 years of being reflected in it. That smile is the constant throughout all the photos - making him recognizable even through the subterfuge played by time and fashion.

Sifting through the photos, the relics of a life, one of the realizations brought to the fore, compounding my grief, is the dawning awareness that he was a person (if that makes sense) separate and autonomous from being my grandfather. That he had friends since lost to the annals of time, that he traveled and had his own jokes, dreams, petty worries, joys - that he was young, that he was like me. Seeing evidence of him with his boyhood chums, beaming with pride as he showed a visiting dignitary around his workplace, wearing a dashiki, sitting straight and tall without a hint of gray in his hair careening around in a bumper car, it makes him both real to me and more of an abstraction. I don't know that man in the photos. I knew a version of him, but there is so much that is opaque to me and will now be forever.

One of the photos shows my grandfather, standing in front of some crumbling Greek temple. It's taken from quite a few feet away and he's quite small in the photo, staring at the camera. I turned the photo over, and written on the back, in his small precise handwriting, were the words,

Portia, here's looking at you.

Oh, how I cried reading that tender, private little inscription - cry for how much he loved my Poh Poh and loves her still. How hard it must have been for him to leave her, after 62 years of constant togetherness, the two of them always hand in hand.

I feel like a bad granddaughter. Like I took his presence for granted. Like I didn't spend enough time with him. Like I didn't take it seriously that he wouldn't always be there and now rue my own hubris. Like I allowed the distance wrought by a generational and cultural divide to prevent me from making him know that I loved him. And I know, realistically, that he was human with faults and flaws that no amount of grieving romanticism will fix - but when someone passes you don't dwell on their human foibles. It is a testament to the essential goodness of people that in death, we honour people with a glossing of their lives; allowing their negative attributes to fade and carrying only their positive attributes forward.

In a way, I'm almost taken aback by how sad I am. I somewhat foolishly didn't think I would be, if I were to ever conceive of a world without Kung Kung. It's so very telling that his presence in my life was so constant that the idea that he would someday die was never more than a distant abstraction.

What I will always remember is Kung Kung's smile and his sense of humour and his matter-of-fact way of discussing things. Everything happened so suddenly - it was less than 2 months ago, over the Christmas holidays that the whole family was gathered around the dinner table at the grandparents' go-to restaurant and he was grilling Bruce Wayne (S-dawg's preferred pseudonym) about road tests. Kung Kung was concerned that he had to renew his license soon and was worried about taking a road test because in his words, "If I am forced to take a road test, I will most certainly fail." LOL! It's not only funny that he was still driving, what with his lack of confidence in his own abilities, but the central crux of his road test stumbling block was because he hasn't parallel parked in about 30 years.

I think he would have found it funny that when my mum was talking to me and the Dotytron about what music will be played at the service, and she said, Rock of Ages, the Dotytron and I looked at each other confused, because this is what we were thinking of:

and not this:

He was always ready with a joke or some kind of mildly insulting jab and I know that, my grief aside, he was lucky to have lived for 88 years with a wife he adored and with family and good friends surrounding him.

RIP, Kung Kung.

Fin.

Laugh out loud

at my kid singing along to "Jolene" this morning when I fired up some country pon the Youtube. The Boobla was fixated on the screen and cooing along - it was hilarious.

Dolly is amazing. I feel like I've posted that video before, but it's worth a repeat rinse. I also fired up The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by the Band. I really have to see The Last Waltz (which is the source for the above clip), which is a concert from the Band in the 70s. I'm inspired to do some checking out of country music - after watching Winter's Bone and seeing some of the acts in the Grammy's on Sunday, that songwriting and emotion really speak to me (you know, a Chinese Canadian growing up in the suburbs obviously has a genetic predisposition to mandolin and steel string guitar and dobros). I'm pretty sure I must have linked this video before too, but it's an all-time fave. There have been more than one occasion when the Dotytron and I have been driving down to Geneseo and either the Dixie Chicks version or the Stevie Nicks version comes on the radio and we both start bawling. I love that the Dotytron is so emotive. It's the cutest:

There was talk of how that tune would work as a funeral number but the Dotytron vetoed it...too sad (which is true).

In a bit of a tonal shift, here is a video of the Boobla in his Jolly Jumper, getting down to Usher:

And here's a photo of him raising his head (with the assistance of a pillow) with an expression on his face that's all like, blasé and "welcome to Masterpiece Theatre" and all like, "but of course I can raise my head, it's no big deal"

Finally, a picture of last night's dinner, fake eggplant parmesan sandwiches. It was supposed to be a healthier rendition. Instead of breading and frying the eggplant slices, I drizzled them with oil and seasoned them and baked them in the oven at high heat, flipping them halfway through until they were nice and soft. Layered it on a split long potato bread smeared with garlic butter (unhealthy check one!), topped the slices with homemade tomato sauce and grated mozzarella cheese (unhealthy check two! - mostly due to quantity) and then topped it with some panko breadcrumbs that I also drizzled with oil (to replicate the crunch of the breading and frying, without the added step) and popped the whole thing open faced into the oven. Sandwiched it together, cut it into three and we were done. It was pretty intense. Like garlic bread to the max:

Naptime sleep-training seems to be working okay so far. With some built-in flexibility. We're trying to do 2 two hour naps a day and have him in bed by 9:30pm. It worked okay yesterday, but he skipped morning nap because we hoofed it on TTC to visit my friend H and sweet baby D and he was all like, "whattup sketballs on public transit?" and too wired to sleep. He's been waking up closer to 5am since we implemented the earlier sleep time, but I figure eventually his belly will be able to hold a bit more and it'll tide him over consistently. 7-8 hours of consecutive sleep from a 4 month old is pretty darn heavenly, so I'm not going to fuss over it.

Fin.

To overindulge

The Big Yam is 4 months old as of Friday. I can scarcely believe it. He of the expressive eyebrows, fulsome cheeks, teensy nose, gummy grin, and disregard for physical milestones has been around for 16 life-altering, refocusing weeks. Oh, we do adore him so. It's hard to believe he started as a collection of cells - his consciousness pulled from the great universal unknown, cooked in my belly until he emerged as a complete, total, sentient being. Nature versus nurture indeed (six of one, half dozen of the other).

Thursday night neighbs hangs were absolutely delightful. We stayed until almost midnight - talking about food, music, parenting, home renos...it's SO NICE to have neighbours we like! It's truly the best. How lucky are we?

Well, not so lucky that our car won't get broken into. Truth be told, the Dotytron suspects he might have left the Captain unlocked. It's happened on our street before - someone checks car doors and looks for open windows and rummages around looking for cash. The would-be thief must have been sorely disappointed to find that there is nothing in the Captain but a plethora of burned CDs with little mass-market appeal (ranging from Heart and Rush's greatest hits to the more esoteric of the Dotytron's listening pleasures), my beloved emergency preparedness kit, and my equally beloved Jolly Jumper car-seat organizer, which contains a lovingly curated stash of MORE emergency preparedness supplies - these ones baby-centred (spare diapers, outfits, wipes and the like). More than anything, it's intensely irritating that someone in the neighbourhood would DO that and that they're pawing through our stuff and that they think we're dumb enough to keep cash or meth in the glove box of our car. I'm going to write out a note and post it in the window lambasting them. I'm also going to take up a watch on a random, sleepless night. The lack of sleep will be totally worth it to catch the dickface in the act. I don't even want to hand them over to the cops. I just want to unleash a string of expletives on them and scare the s**t out of them by blasting an air horn in their face. I want to be like that landlady from Kung Fu Hustle:

My Facebook post on the subject revealed that it's happened a bunch on our street and elsewhere in Toronto, to a wide range of people, so I'm not getting all urban-scared about it. It's just what happens when you live in the city.

Friday night we dragged the Boobla to our dodgeball game which we WON for a change. It was a bit of a cakewalk, but I think the team needed a win for morale. Then we dragged Master T up to Markham for AYCE sushi with Lolly. Whereupon he had a class A wigout and we turned into THOSE people at the restaurant. He just wasn't happy. There was a lot of pathetic pouting going on. He wasn't being cranky or a fuss - just not buddies with the situation. Our friend L was having his birthday party and there was another dinner/drinks gathering of high school peeps that we had wanted to go to, but we bailed on both because the little Boobla obviously wasn't having it.

Saturday we cleaned house a bit and hung around and then packed up Master T to drop him off at Dr. Rei and Hanbo's place so that we could go see Wayne Shorter at Massey Hall. We picked up rotis and had dinner with them first - I also baked these toffee s'mores cookies, which are INSANELY good:

A chocolate cookie dough that bakes up soft and chewy, studded with toffee baking bits and topped with a gooey, melted marshmallow graham cracker topping. Wickedly intense.

It was so nice of them to babysit for us and for us to have the chance to visit with them for a bit. That's what you call champion best friends. We probably could have asked Momma and Poppa D, but I figured it's always nice to expand the potential pool of people we're comfortable leaving Master T with - that way, in situations like now, when my parents are preoccupied looking after my Kung Kung, there are just more avenues for child care available.

Wayne Shorter was incredible. It was basically jazz nerd mecca. The talk surrounding our seats was all "I have a gig at blah blah blah" and all "I go to Humber/U of T" etc. I don't have the grounding in jazz to really appreciate the intricacies (in fact, earlier that day I had asked the Dotytron, "so, Wayne Shorter plays the trumpet, right?" and basically broke his heart), but it was an incredible sonic experience. Brian Blade, the drummer, is INSANE. Not to mention a hot piece of ace:

See? When we came back from the show, Dr. Rei's mum and dad were there, so we had a chance to visit with them. Apparently Master T was quite taken with Dr. Rei's mum speaking to him in Farsi. We had a really interesting discussion about Facebook and Twitter and social media and peak oil and the food crisis which made us all kind of depressed and resulted in the conclusion that we have to figure out a way to keep the developing world down somehow. So that the growing middle class in the developing world doesn't take all our food and grain and oil. LOL! The funniest thing is truly how we KNOW peak oil has come and gone and yet we still insist on thinking it's a big joke and ignoring the problem. I love those guys so much. All of them! Dr. Rei, Hanbo, Dr. Rei's mum and dad. They're all adorable and warm my heart.

This morning we woke up and had the fat baby pancake with maple syrup poached apples and cranberry maple sausage from the mennonites for breakfast:

Tonight we had a special Valentine's day meal with Lolly over for good measure. I made rack of lamb with a mustard-herb crust, roasted potatoes, creamed spinach, and Indian-spiced cauliflower:

For dessert I made the malted milk ball cake from the Baked cookbook. I was happier with this cake recipe - the malt flavour is built by adding Ovaltine to the cake batter. I pooched up one of the layers by grossly over baking it so what was supposed to be a triple layer cake turned out a more modest double layer extravaganza. I substituted my own milk chocolate buttercream for their frosting recipe, which I don't trust. You can't beat a whipped meringue buttercream for texture and flavour anyway:

This was a weekend of over consumption. Now I'm trying to restrain myself and lose those last 5 pregnancy lbs.

Fin.

Like an orange on a toothpick

The Big Yam had his 4 month check up today, a day shy of his 4 month birthday proper. His head circumference is in the 75-90th percentile, his body length is also in the 75-90th percentile, and his weight is in the 50th percentile (tell that to my back and shoulders), making him a top-heavy bastard.

Our family doctor asked me a bunch of questions about his progress culminating in a question about whether or not he gets "tummy time" to which I answered with a hesitant affirmative. IT'S NOT MY FAULT. I try to give the kid tummy time, but his only reflex when put on his stomach is to faceplant his giant head into whatever surface I have him on and cry in abject misery. If I'm lucky, he ends up crying himself to sleep. So to reiterate: my child would rather complain himself into exhaustion rather than TRY to lift up his head and use his abdominal/arm muscles. I don't know where he gets it from [/deadpan]. Anyway, the doctor flipped him onto his stomach on the examination table and wonder of wonders, the kid lifted his head about .005mm for about .000001 of a second. I must have been wearing a telltale sheepish, vaguely embarrassed expression on my face because our doctor said briskly, "Well. Hmmm. He's definitely on the spectrum of ability" which is a really nice and politically correct way of saying that my kid is a lazy fathead. I mean, ALL HUMAN EXPERIENCE exists on a "spectrum" with lazy fatheads like my son making up the furthest poles of the available breadth of ability. Le sigh. There is a statute of limitations on how long and far being a fathead Buddha will carry you in life. What is beatific and charmingly jolly now is one case of congenital sausage fingers and a motorized scooter away from being pitiable.

Tonight we're going to our neighbour's house to watch Top Chef and eat takeout. FRATERNIZING WITH THE NEIGHBOURS!!!!!!!! This is a great leap forward for Dotyron and Lagerfeld neighbourhood integration. I'm quite excited about the whole thing, if a bit sheepish about our contributions - guacamole and chips and those Paula Deen kit kat bars (pictured below). We just got a text inquiring about our beer preferences - so I feel they're doing too much and are going to make me feel like a crummy guest. Eeep.

That's not a bad contribution to bring for a Top Chef viewing party, is it?!???

Fin.

Pre-interviewing

This morning we had a PRE-interview for a spot on the waiting list for a home daycare in our neighbourhood. It went really well...it's crazy - it was more about her interviewing us than us interviewing her. We really liked it though...but spots opening up are rare so I doubt we'll get in. The point is: we passed. As the Dotytron says, "you love passing stuff" - it's true. I love being validated by some kind of assessment process. She said she'd put us in her file of people to call if a spot becomes available, but I'm not holding my breath.

Today marks the beginning of sleep training for the Boobla. Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuuun. The daycare lady said that sleep training is super important. We do it at night already - he seems to understand that after giant bottle, swaddle, story, song, and head pats it's time to go to sleep for a good stretch. Nap times are a different story and are pure randomonium currently. He kind of goes down whenever/wherever, averaging about 2 a day. I don't really see the point of structured naps because I'm not finding his randomonium impeding my daily life - like, I'm still leaving the house and doing my errands on my own time, and he pretty reliably falls asleep/chills out whenever he's in his stroller/carrier. But I can see why daycare providers would prefer a kid who consistently knows how to put themselves to sleep at fairly regular times of the day.

[edit: time lapse]

Well, we just had a visit from my friend in my book club C, who brought her 6 month old baby N along. This means a few things: 1) Sleep Training: Nap edition has been postponed because he's all jacked up and we're about to go for a walk to our local yarn purveyor, which means that once he's in the car seat in the stroller he's going to conk out, requiring negatory training. 2) I got all freaked out because C is part of like, 3 different mom clubs and does mom & baby yoga, mom & baby cardio, and has a tonne of friends with babies. I'm all worried that **I** should join a billion mom clubs or that the fact that I'm perfectly content to meet up with people a couple of times a week and to see friends/family on weekends and spend the rest of the time at home doing errand-y/house-y/grad school-y type stuff means that there's something wrong with me.

I mean, I don't feel like I'm lacking in social interaction. If anything, I feel like our social calendar is too busy, considering it's only the second weekend of February and we're already booking into March. And I'm really happy to hang out at home, calling our mechanic, calling daycares, working on my school stuff, going grocery shopping, going to the library, and making nice dinners...so I guess I just answered my own question. There are many models of maternity leave and motherhood and I suppose mine don't include hanging with a bunch of stranger-lady moms drinking coffee and talking about parenting styles, per se.

That being said, I do have enough people in my life who have babies. Some are good friends from work, some are more acquaintances from various points in my life - if I slot them all in once a week, I feel like I'm doing enough socializing with people who can answer my questions on sleep training and when to start solid foods and what's the next car seat level to go up to (since Master T's feet are DANGLING OFF THE ENDS OF HIS INFANT CAR SEAT AT NOT EVEN FOUR MONTHS OLD). Oy. This kid is a juggernaut.

This is Monday's curried sweet potato soup, which we had with a baby spinach salad and warmed pita with PC baba ghanouj:

Last night for dinner I made that broiled feta, grape tomatoes, and olive thing with rosemary and chili oil - so simple to put together and so tasty scooped up with more warmed pita. We had a hearty caesar salad on the side:

This week of eating healthfully has been going well so far. I am considerably buoyed by the fact that I've been fitting into my pre-pregnancy skinny jeans. Only one pair though. One pair that I'm pretty sure was mislabeled a 27" waist. WHATEVER. I want to get back into a regular yoga routine, if for nothing else than to give my jacked-up back a break from hauling the little electric tubalub around.

Tonight we had shrimp po' boys with a celery root and apple remoulade and kale chips:

The shrimp was dredged in flour with creole seasoning, then an egg wash, and then a masa harina/cornmeal mixture with creole seasoning. The remoulade had Zataran's creole mustard in there. This dinner was DELICIOUS.

I feel like I've gotten my knitting mojo back. I'm starting a scarf for the Dotytron (thus the trip to the Purple Purl today) and a hat for myself. Trying to eke out time is damn near impossible but I have to start prioritizing this stuff, if for no other reason than it makes me feel like more of a whole, normal being again. There are exciting plans a foot for my super-close, super-longtime friend T to come and visit from Vancouver at the end of April and I'm BEYOND excited. WestJet was having a 72 hour seat sale and I wanted to capitalize on it, but being tied to the school calendar is really limiting and it would have meant that we would have flown to Vancouver for only 2.5 days, which even at the heavily discounted seat sale rate, doesn't make sense. So instead I've cajoled her into coming here! Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

This summer is going to be the summer of fun poverty. My work maternity leave top-up dries out in late June, which means we'll be running on fumes. But we have my family's cottage week to look forward to, cottage time at the Dotytron's family cottage hopefully, a road trip to Cleveland, maybe some time spent at the farm with R & R and their menagerie, and definite weekends in Geneseo. Pretty damn full if not exactly glamorous.

Speaking of R&R Acres - R gave us this pair of baby slippers for the Boobla and they're THE BEST. Not only do we want them for ourselves, but seeing him wearing what comes down to baby Uggs is hilarious. The best is when he's in a little short sleeved onesie and wearing them - boy babies in Uggs are the cutest, if only because they remind us of Jason Segel in I Love You, Man.

Fin.

Weekend shenanigans

I'm realizing that being a parent means living your days measured by how many times your love for your child is re-set. One minute I'm wrestling a baby energetically playing bucking bronco in my arms and letting forth a ululating howl of unearthly volume directly in my ear; his tongue, vibrating in tandem with his screams, made visible by the open-mouthed, downturned lip of the dramatically, pathetically distressed. I'm letting out a stream of steady shushing noises the tenor of which has rapidly degraded from soothing to a furious seethe. Finally, blessedly, the baby sleeps. And sleeps. Napping for such an unprecedented jag that I managed to finish my readings for class tomorrow, prep dinner, do the dishes, AND shower uninterrupted. I peek in on him and he looks like this:

and at that point, you realize the wisdom of his being and clamber into bed beside him, your heart swelling, your previous anxiety seeming like a distant hallucination carried away by the regularity of his steady breaths and the wonder of his little fingers curled up into tiny fists.

My friend G gave me some sage advice this week - she reminded me to ENJOY EVERY MINUTE that I get with this bundle of sweetness. That while the urge to finish projects, clean the house, and all the other sundry noise pulling at my attention can be strong, that those things will wait and that I have a very limited window when he will be so focused on me, his mother. So I'm going to try to go against my essential being and relax a bit and rejoice in the fact that when the Dotytron and I are both vying for his attention, his gaze finds and fixes on me. That he reserves his most special smiles and happiest squawks for me. Because it's not going to be like this forever and when it's time to go over the ledger of my life, I'm going to be very willing to have my dishes-and-laundry-done column in the red if it means my nose-to-nose time with the Boobla is in the black.

He is so very, very, very sweet.

Friday night we had an early dinner - I made a lamb, eggplant, and chickpea stew flavoured with vaguely Middle Eastern spices and a rice pilaf with a crunchy layer of tadiq (the Persian - I think - name for the crunchy layer at the bottom of the rice), which I have been craving since I ate it for the first time when Dr. Rei's mom made it for me, like, 4 years ago. It's THE BEST. There are a lot of tricks to making it, the most important being that you have to use high quality, WHITE basmati rice (in a nod to the Dotytron's long-held preference for white rice over brown). I added some grated carrot and saffron, but next time I might do a proper pilau and add sultanas and pistachios and caramelized onions as well. Fluffy white basmati rice IS addictive, especially when it's accompanied by the textural contrast of a butter-browned, slowly crisped, crunchy pita hat:

We narrowly lost our dodgeball game on Friday. We have a lot of new people on the team this year and we seem to have a pretty strong divide between people who are playing to win and who want to play "for fun." Now, as I've mentioned before, I have a REALLY hard time playing "for fun." I also have a REALLY hard time listening to strategies from players on my team whose understanding of the game is shaky at best. But ultimately, I'm just grateful to be playing again, so I'm trying to curb less sportsmanlike impulses. It is exceedingly frustrating when your team doesn't heed your hard-earned nuggets of dodgeball wisdom though.

On Sunday we went to Momma & Poppa D's house for a birthday brunch for Ehmdo. Momma D made us "daisies" which are eggs cooked in a cream sauce made to look like a daisy. They were most delicious. We also had fruit and I contributed monkey bread. Nany was there too and was totally taken with the monkey bread (as is everyone I've ever made it for):

Then we came home and hung out until the Goosetang clan came over to watch the Super Bowl. We pooled our resources and made a random assortment of foods: crockpot meatballs in bbq sauce, baked brie with pepper jelly, chips & Helluva Good dip, corn chips with guacamole and salsa, baba ghanouj and pita, and these homemade "kit kat" bars that are a Paula Deen recipe - they're freaking amazing...I'll post a picture tomorrow.

Watching the Super Bowl was jokes. We didn't really pay attention to it and instead had a hilarious time consisting of many soon-to-be classic gems, among them:

- trying to come up with a working definition of constipation

- a lengthy discussion about how after I tricked the Dotytron into singing the Beach Boys' Kokomo with me, we decided that our life's mission was to go to all the Kokomo places in Kokomo order (Kokomo itself will be the hardest to execute). This then segued into a conversation about the Kokomo state of mind and how difficult it is to maintain.

- a rousing game of Bananagrams

- Hanbo turning to me and saying, semi-sarcastically, "so, are you excited for the Black Eyed Peas half-time show?" fully expecting me to say "no!" and being somewhat taken aback by my wide-eyed enthusiasm when I said, with the utmost sincerity, "YES!!!" (my logic is that it's better than Bruce Springsteen, or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers).

- During said half-time show, watching Will.I.Am's antics, I uttered the phrase, "I can't believe Will.I.Am wanted to be the mayor of Haiti"

- A prolonged discussion about the ethnicity of the fourth, oft-overlooked member of BEP (ie. not Will.I.Am, not Fergie, not the Vampire guy - the black-ish [me]/possibly Filipino [the Dotytron] dude who never gets featured).

Today is all about eating vegetables and fruit and getting our cholesterol count back in order. For dinner tonight we're having a curried sweet potato soup with a big spinach salad with all kinds of goodness chopped up in there.

Fin.

Year of the Rabbit

Hoppy Year of the Rabbit (see what I did there?)!

Yesterday was a snow day - the first one in 12 years for the TDSB. This meant that when I woke up, the Dotytron was doing a little happy dance that involved much swiveling of the hips - trust me, his hips don't lie. This also meant that me and Master T had the unexpected pleasure of having the Dotytron home with us ALL DAY. It was GLORIOUS! But the time went really quickly - it just made us realize how it would be so nice to have a whole week of snow days.

A lot of our time was spent preparing the house for Chinese New Year, which meant cleaning the house from top to bottom. You're not supposed to sweep on New Year's day, as you're "sweeping" away all your good luck/prosperity, etc." For similar reasons you're not supposed to shower or bathe on New Year's day. I had originally planned on making this lamb and eggplant stew with tadiq (the crusty bottom on Persian rice), but the Dotytron kept balking at it and kept wanting for us to go out for Chinese food for dinner. I didn't want to brave the questionable downtown Chinese restaurants after navigating the questionable, post-storm downtown streets in the Captain, so we settled on a compromise, going to T&T, where we assembled a hodge-podge Chinese meal of randomness, behold:

We made dumplings (pot stickers and soup-filled), and steamed gai lan, and made rice with Chinese sausage (lap cheong), and bought prepared tofu with mushrooms and roasted bbq pork. It was a very pork heavy meal. We followed it up with pan-fried gow (a sweet cake, we bought 2 - 1 coconut and 1 osmanthus flavoured) and black sesame ice cream, because the Dotytron is OBSESSED with any and all things black sesame flavoured. He loves it more than anything. I went a little crazy at T & T and quickly filled up a basket full of random goodies - at one point, as I chucked a tray of coconut buns in the cart, I turned to the Dotytron and said, "I'm going a little crazy here" and he gave me a deadpan, dry, intensely sarcastic, "No. No. Please stop." As we all know, T & T is like the Dotytron's mecca. He loves it there and he loves Chinese food like few other things on earth.

This is what else we've been eating around here:

This was a random meal of homemade falafel balls with tahini-yoghurt sauce, served low-carb in Boston lettuce leaves (I had been remiss in defrosting the pitas.) It ended up working out rather well - I think I might actually prefer this way of eating falafel balls. Makes everything less bready. Alongside I made quick pickled beets.

We were supposed to host our friends S & A for dinner before things went all haywire with our weekend. I was planning a Southern-style menu with a baked ham, zucchini casserole, biscuits, sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping, etc. Upon my return home, faced with a fridge full of zucchini, I turned it into a pasta with whole wheat fusilli, T's chilies, ricotta, and zucchini. It was really tasty - creamy and spicy and chock full of tender bites of zucchini in every forkful.

We watched The King's Speech on the weekend. It wasn't my cup of tea (snork, British reference, snork!) I found it kind of stilted and predictable and Oscar-baity. The performances were decent but I was strangely unmoved by Bertie's plight. I think the real story would have been more stirring - the reluctant monarch who needs to rally the country during a time of crisis crippled with a speech impediment...but the film's depiction was lacking a certain momentum and urgency. They didn't manage to draw me in and make me care. Although I did particularly respond to Helen Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mum - she managed to convey the repressed cheekiness and twinkle the Queen Mum always had in her eye.

We also watched Blue Valentine. Opinions on this film are mixed in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld household, with Lagerfeld pro and the Dotytron con. Lagerfeld feels that the film is beautifully acted and beautifully shot - gorgeous, naturalistic shots suffused with the golden light of sunset on the Brooklyn bridge, or the eerie blue tones of a cheap, future-themed room in a campy sex hotel. I also loved the performances - so real (a lot of the dialogue was ad-libbed) and believable. The Dotytron contends that the story is uber-depressing and he has no interest in seeing these kinds of movies (an opinion shared by Dr. Rei, who has recently come out as wanting only to see movies about extraordinary people and/or the Harry Potter universe.) I believe that sometimes, the art of a film is in its exploration of the mundane. Watching Williams and Gosling (two of the finest actors of their generation) inhabit so fully the roles of Cindy and Dean as they meet, fall in love and subsequently fall out of love, is a treat, as is the dissection of a relationship in decline. The early love is so beautifully depicted - much has been made of Williams' charming tap-dance to Gosling's ukulele-accompanied warbling as one of the more charming scenes of nascent, young, sort-of-poor love ever and it's made all the more poignant by being cast into sharp relief with the rancor that follows.

The nuance in their relationship, the push and the pull of two people who have grown out of love sharing equal blame, is really well done. I can't say that I loved this movie - but I really liked it and thought it was worth watching. I'd take it over the pap of The King's Speech any day.

Tonight we're having dinner with the Roomie and L'Armi at their place. A late dinner as we have a contractor coming by to quote us on some stuff we can't afford.

Fin.

Kung Kung

My grandfather (Kung Kung) on my mum's side had a stroke last Wednesday. Followed by two more additional smaller strokes. The past week has been a blur of juggling hospital shifts with my siblings, taking care of my Poh Poh (grandma), and making sure the babies (plural, because my sister came up immediately with her 3 in tow) were taken care of.

This hasn't been a good year for grandpas in the Dotytron-Lagerfeld family tree. The brain is a funny, miraculous thing, though. Unlike with Poppa, whose cancer had progressed to the point where you knew it was an end-of-life care scenario, Kung Kung's situation is quite different - more touch and go. The doctors want us to be prepared for the worst but at the same time, he's still here, a week later, talking, lucid, complaining, knowing who we are. He can't move the left side of his body and he can be a bit confused sometimes - asking for his mother, reaching for a glass, etc. Other times he can be really funny - he's such a wily old fox. He really wants to get out of bed and on Sunday, when I spent a chunk of time with him, he kept asking to get out of bed, "just one step!" he said. When I told him that he couldn't, because he was attached to an IV, and we'd need a nurse to put it back in, he said, "I'll put it back in!" He's also been asking for milk tea and Perrier, with ice.

I've definitely seen the dark side of socialized medicine this past week. The hospital he's at is less than stellar and there have been numerous complications - it was impossible to get a doctor to see him, he apparently had pneumonia which was undiagnosed for THREE DAYS, and on the weekends, the hospital is a ghost town - the nurses are harried and didn't notice his IV was put in incorrectly until one of my mum's friends pointed it out. It's scary.

It's going to be a long, long road. Poh Poh and Kung Kung have been married for sixty two years. She's very much lost without him, as he's been taking care of her for that long. She doesn't really know what to do without him and even now, he's still taking care of her. When I was asking my grandma whether she took her eye drops and she said yes, I was giving her a hard time because I knew she hadn't. Out of nowhere, my grandpa, who I had thought was sound asleep, chastised me, "don't be mean to Poh Poh!" in Chinese. She has been reminiscing about how they met. How he was a total shrimp - short, skinny, and a bit of a country boy. How she didn't want to give him the time of day at first, because as she says, he didn't know how to do anything. Didn't know how to dance, didn't know how to ride horses, didn't know about a lot of things she loved to do, all he knew how to do was play mah jong. She told us how he pursued her - how he would stand in front of her desk at work and make fake bird calls that would say, "want to go for a date?" "yes! yes!" She's been talking about how clever he was - joining the Hong Kong civil service at age 16 and eventually rising to the rank of Chief Registrar. There is a whole generation of people in Hong Kong who have Kung Kung's signature on their birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates.

These scenarios stretch a family to its limits and there has been a fair amount of heightened tempers. It's hard on everyone. There is no real graceful way to navigate through this - I'm so glad I have my siblings. And the Dotytron, who has been so incredible, at one point he was in charge of the two babies AND Miss Ramona and Little Ze. I came home from my shift at the hospital to find that Miss Ramona had lost a tooth, they had done some finger painting (pictures for Kung Kung's room), and he had two babies peacefully lying on the play mat. It was very sweet. The other sweet thing was that Little Ze woke up the next morning when Miss Ramona was rejoicing in her Tooth Fairy money claiming that he saw the Tooth Fairy the night before. According to him, the Tooth Fairy looked like a tiny flea and it was sparkly and had a blue light (it was a boy). I don't know how I'd be able to navigate through this without my brothers and sister and the Dotytron - and friends, too (you know who you are!)

On Sunday night, the Dotytron and I were having dinner at Gal's Sushi in Markham. We had one of those ESP moments where we both wanted the same things from the giant menu without consulting each other. I was telling him about how my grandparents had a true love story and how the Dotytron and I love each other, but it's different from the way my grandparents adore each other. The Dotytron took offense to that and claimed to adore me. I was like, "no you don't!" and he said, "the only reason I don't is because you would see that as a form of weakness and take every opportunity to capitalize on it and exploit it" LOL. So true! Then he followed it up with, "of course I adore you, just look at how I've been following you around this sushi tray" and I looked at the decimated platter and realized he had been following me around it. I'd have a piece of butterfish, and then he would, etc. Pretty darned cute.

Well, you know I'm not going to talk about something being pretty darned cute without segueing into a discussion of the Boobla. He's a grinning, happy, babbling mess right now. My mum has been calling him "Dai Fan Shu" which means "big yam" after a character with that name from this classic Chinese comic called Old Master Q - about the exploits of Old Master Q (aka Lao Fu Zi). Big yam is the one on the top right in the picture below - you can see the resemblance - big goofy smile, giant head, squat little body, extensive forehead:

Here are some recent shots of my Big Yam, laughing his head off:

Looking like such a little boy in the outfit his Auntie T got him:

and finally, chilling with his his cousin:

Fin.