Culture Club

My summer reading continues apace!

Pandemonium is the second book in Lauren Oliver's Delirium series.  Bonus for me that I slept on Delirium because that means that the next instalment was ready to go, published, and in the Library for me when I needed it.  The second book is even better than the first.  The protagonist, Lena has chosen her new life as one of the "uncured" (those who don't go through the procedure that takes away your ability to feel love or passion) living in the Wilds (areas outside of the regulated zones) and has joined the rebels.  A self-actualized heroine is much more interesting to me than the one who still has yet to make the (obvious) choice for free thought, etc.  Now that the world is already established, this book became more action-driven, and there was a big WHAT THE-?! reveal at the end that makes me really really really want the final book to come out soon.  

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is more "serious" YA that can also stand alone as regular fiction, in the vein of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep or John Green's Looking for Alaska.  Cameron Post's parents die in a car crash the same day she kisses her female friend for the first time.  Living in small-town Montana and now under the care of her born-again aunt, Cameron gets caught fooling around with the town rodeo princess and then gets shipped off to a religious camp that "fixes" gay kids.  Emily Danforth does a fantastic job of evoking the dusty, dirty stillness of small town America.  Each description of the town and the farms surrounding brought to mind the opening credits of Friday Night Lights.  I believe this is Danforth's first novel, which means that some of the passages give way to Writer's Craft-excessive flourishes that make passages describing the sunlight glinting off a haystack a little too much to bear, but overall, the story is a sweet, tender coming-of-age that draws you into a story of being a square peg in a red state.  It's not a very humorous story, per se, but it was an enjoyable read.

The Collective is about three Asian Americans artist friends who meet at college and chronicles the ensuing 20 years post as friendships come together and fizzle apart, all revolving around the exhortations and manoeuvring of their enigmatic, Gatsby-like nucleus, Joshua.  It's also about Asian-directed racism and art and how minorities are always asked to do more in their artistic endeavors than their white counterparts.  Either you're pandering to racial stereotypes or you're white-washing yourself, etc.  All these VERY SERIOUS TOPICS are tackled in the book through discussions among the characters, who are all pretty obnoxious and unlikeable, especially the whiny, feckless narrator, Eric.  The events in the book verge on soap opera and it's all very unbelievable, but in a very Writer's Craft-y way (Don has an MFA - creative writing - and was the editor of some literary journal).  The book never came together for me and actually seemed rather amateurish in parts.  

I became a hardcore Nora Ephron fan this summer.  On the way up to the cottage, I brought her latest, I Remember Nothing as an audio CD to listen to on the drive.  I read: I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman while at the cottage.  The essays are short and sassy and funny and wise.  It's like, the quickest read ever.  I actually prefer the audio CD because Ephron herself reads it and she imbues everything with warmth and is so delightfully chatty.  Sometimes the stuff gets a little to New York-y for me and sometimes it gets a little too "ageing lady" as well (as when she talks about the bald spot on the back of her head), but knowing that she was already sick when she wrote I Remember Nothing gives the recollections and stories an urgency, especially her list of "What I will Miss and Not Miss" that comes at the end of the book.  She lead a fantastic, interesting life and she relays anecdotes with a chatty, matter-of-factness that is quite endearing.  I didn't know she was married to Carl Bernstein (of Watergate and All the President's Men fame).  Pingy actually went to University with her son, which was thrilling to find out.  I'm waiting to get her book Heartburn which is a thinly fictionalized account of her breakup with Bernstein (upon discovering he was having an affair, while she was pregnant with their second child), from the Library.

I will of course be sure to report back.

Fin.

Lagerfeld vs. the Irishman

Things are gradually coming together at Lil' Ugmo.  Some people can handle living their lives with things everywhere and disorder.  We are not that family.  It's making our skin crawl to have all our stuff out of place and no pictures on the wall but we're trying to take things slow and pace ourselves.  We did a big purge of books and assorted miscellany so we're feeling a little lighter on that score, but it's still slow going and it involves many, many trips to Ikea.  I've realized that my adult life consists of trading in various permutations of Ikea's Expedit series of bookshelves.  We go from 4x4 to 2(1x5) to 2x4 to 2(2x2).  It's crazy.

We had some contractor woes.  At first I was going to general contract manage the whole job by myself.  So I was calling people in to quote us on demo, drywall, electrical, floors, and painting.  I called a few carpenters to get a sense of how much it would cost to get the stair railing done.  Looking on Homestars, I found quite a few and called them.  One of them was the Irishman.  He gave me a quote and then asked who was doing the demo and drywall.  He said that he could do the work as well.  So he gave us a quote that was decent.  I checked his references, and away we go.  He apparently used to work as a carpenter under some dude who is featured on HGTV all the time (I don't watch that channel, so I dunno) and recently started his own business.  It all seemed legit.

Things started off pretty well.  He said the job was going to take one week and so I allotted 2 1/2.  He was originally going to start at the end of July.  When I emailed him a week before to confirm, he pushed the date back a week (this is after I had made arrangements to move out of our house, etc.)  I wasn't pleased, so I told him what he had told ME and told him it was a giant pisser since we'd made arrangements based on his original timeline.  We decide to meet in the middle and he starts work on August 1st (ANNOYANCE #1 - LACK OF ORGANIZATION).  His drywall taper doesn't work on weekends, and the work runs late, so the taper isn't into the house doing his first coat until August 8th.  The whole week the Irishman is telling me that I can have my painter start on August 10th or that my floor guy can start earlier, but I have them all slated in and scheduled for while we're away at the cottage, so I'm not making any changes.

The night of my birthday dinner at Guu (August 9th), I get a call from the Irishman telling me that the weather is too humid and the drywall isn't drying and he has to "crank the furnace" to get the heat on in the house so his taper can finish the job before my floor guy starts (August 14th).  I'm like, yeah whatever.  Then the Dotytron gets all stressed out about it because we had plugged up all our vents with towels to prevent the demo dust from getting everywhere and he thinks the furnace is going to backfire.  So I text the Irishman and let him know, just as an FYI.  And he calls me back and starts wigging about not knowing what he's supposed to do with this information, etc.  And I'm like, dude, just go to the house and take the towels out but put them back after. And he's getting kind of pissy with me on the phone about it but eventually does what I ask him to (ANNOYANCE #2 - BEGINNING TO SHOW TENDENCY FOR POOR CUSTOMER RELATIONS SKILLS)

We leave for the cottage and I'm assuming that the Irishman's work in the house is done and that David Lee Roth is going to start on Tuesday and everything will be fine.  I get a call from David Lee Roth while I'm at the cottage telling me my house is filthy, and that he brought stuff to protect the furniture, but it's all covered with dust and there's no point, etc.  So I call the Irishman to relay this information to him and to tell him that the painter is starting the following Monday (August 20th) and that we had specified with him that the house will be paint-ready, and the Irishman starts giving me mad static.  Saying stuff like, "It's my busiest time of year..." "I'm a carpenter, not a house cleaner..." "You're back on Saturday? Why don't you go down with a broom and a mop and clean it up yourself" (ANNOYANCE #3 - OH NO YOU DI'N'T JUST TALK TO ME LIKE THAT!).  The Roomie bore witness to my end of the phone conversation and was proud of me.  She said I stayed calm.  Basically I told him that our agreement was paint ready and that he should have the house paint-ready.  What I didn't include was: "I DON'T KNOW YOUR LIFE YOU HOOKER, SO IT'S NOT MY PROBS THAT IT'S YOUR BUSIEST TIME OF YEAR."

So that's settled.  Then my floor guy calls again wanting to know what's going on with some unfinished vent holes and what he's supposed to do and I tell him to call the contractor.  So he calls back the next day and says he tried to call the Irishman at 9am.  The Irishman didn't get back to him until 6pm, and so my floor guy put in the baseboard that he could and left like, 30 feet for the Irishman to do once the Irishman put in the vent covers.  So I tell the Irishman that and he's like, "That wasn't included in my original agreement with you.  If you want me to put in the baseboard then I'll have to charge you my hourly rate."  (ANNOYANCE #4 - STOP BEING SUCH A HOOKER.)

I get back from the cottage.  Go to the house (solo, because if you remember, the Dotytron was on his bachelor party camping trip).  THE HOUSE IS A S**TSHOW.  Dust EVERYWHERE.  NOT paint-ready by any stretch of the imagination.  Between Saturday and Sunday I spend about 8 hours cleaning the house so that the painter can start as scheduled.  The Irishman calls on Monday wanting the last chunk of his money and to know if "we're happy with things."  I tell him to meet me us at the house.  We go over all the little details we want fixed.  I give him $1000 and hold back the last $600 until we've lived in the house a bit and see what's what.  He takes the cheque, goes to "Home Depot" to pick up the supplies he needs (I think what he really did was immediately cash the cheque I wrote him) and then came back and fixed some things, but then did a sloppy job on the rest.

The next day, we were still pretty sore about everything and kind of unhappy.  Meanwhile, our painter comes in and sees what needs to be done and just goes ahead and like, fixes everything.  Plasters, putties, fills holes, sands, and just does it, because he has pride in his work.  We were getting increasingly unhappy with the entire situation, so the Dotytron wrote the Irishman an email.  He started with the positives, and then listed all the negatives.  At the end, he offered the Irishman a deal - we could pay him $300 and hold back $300 to give to our painter, and then we wouldn't write a review on Homestars and he wouldn't use us as a reference; or, we would pay him the whole $600 but we would write a full review on Homestars.  We wouldn't drag him through the mud, but we would list the positives and negatives we had experienced.  

The Irishman calls me up and is pretty cross with me.  But here's the thing, I think he called me up thinking that I was the good cop to the Dotytron's bad cop.  What he doesn't know is that with the Dotytron and me, it's like, Dotytron = bad cop and I = CRAZY cop.  When he started getting all defensive and cross and telling me about how busy he was and how it wasn't his job to do such and such and how he thought my floor guy was supposed to start Wednesday or Thursday, I laid into him (calmly).  I basically said that I don't care how busy he is with OTHER jobs.  I hired him to do MY job.  I also told him that I had multiple records where I told him all the dates, how I had to clean my own house for 8 hours, how his crew stood on MY furniture and got it dirty and scuffed, how he didn't try to fix any of the stuff we had problems with, how I had NEVER been talked to by anyone the way he spoke to me, and how, in my opinion, maybe he SHOULDN'T have broken off from the general contractor he was teamed up with and gone off on his own.  Then he got all moochy and was like, "Karl, I'm not trying to argue with you," (ANNOYANCE #5 YES, YES YOU ARE) and does that thing people do when they're on the losing end of an argument and pull the "now now, calm down" card which is the pussiest card ever.  It's like, UMMM...YOU MADE ME THIS WAY.   

On the plus side: we love our floor guy and our painter, so if any of my 5 readers need referrals for those two tasks, I've got amazing peeps for you.

Finally, allow me  to leave you with some Ice Cream F**K.  Errr...truck.

You can also hear him doing the "truck-k-k" thing.

Fin.

Roughin' it.

Well, we're back in the house.  Painting is still going on so right now our downstairs looks like this:

The Dotytron is champing it up largecore.  He basically cleaned most of the kitchen yesterday and hauled all our stuff back from Momma D's house.  After we put the Big Yam down to sleep last night we finished up the kitchen so at least we can cook/live there.  I did the bathroom on the weekend (did I mention I spent like, 8 hours cleaning our house on the weekend AFTER THE COTTAGE?  I also pulled a classic me and moved like, a couch and all our furniture around to facilitate said cleaning because when I want to get 'er done, I somehow can summon the strength of 10 mes.  It's pure willpower).  So we can live in our bedrooms and we ate dinner outside on our neighbour's stoop and played outside with the kids until it was bed, so it just feels like a regular summer evening.

SO HAPPY TO BE BACK HOME.  I LOVE LIL' UGMO!  I LOVE OUR NEIGHBS!  Everyone was out in full force last night and it was so, so nice.  A bunch of the houses are going on a group camping trip together this weekend so one of our neighbs had a tent and sleeping bag set up and the kids were going buck in there.  Super cute.

The PeaPod.  The Roomie and L'Armi lent their PeaPod for us to take to the cottage we rented with Momma D and I was so promptly enamored with it that I went out and bought the next size up.  It's basically a little travel bed/tent for kids to sleep in - THAT FOLDS UP TO WEIGH 5LBS.  It's miraculous!  I can't say enough good things about it.  It comes with an inflatable air mattress and all kinds of zips and things so that if you were, say camping, you could have a baby or a toddler snoozing without worrying about bugs and whatnot.  It makes a great, portable travel bed (versus a pack'n'play) and it's so practical and ingenious I can't say enough about it.  I am definitely considering getting rid of our pack'n'play and only doing PeaPod.  I bought mine second hand from Kijiji.  The biggest size (the one I got) is the PeaPod Plus and it's just under 4.5' long (the PeaPod was a little snug for the Big Yam).  This thing is awesome.

The Dotytron went on a canoe camping/bachelor party trip from Friday to Sunday for our friend B.  They canoed down the French River and now the Dotytron has the camping bug, baaaaad.  I think I've been bitten, too.  I'm kind of outdoorsy and I love the packing and preparation and organizing that goes into planning a camping trip (it's basically like emergency preparedness light).  I also love canoeing and being tough and cooking over a fire.  Car camping is less appealing to me.  I would much rather take a deuce in a hole in the woods than use a "comfort station" that's been mauled by a million other families.  I like being away from it all.  The Roomie and L'Armi are big campers and so is Ping.  I think we might do something next summer.  Nothing with a crazy portage but maybe a big canoe out to a site or two.  It's definitely something I want to try and I think I would have a super-fun time doing it.

Right now we have like, negative gear so we'll see how it goes.  I was harranguing the Dotytron leading up to the trip by constantly reminding him that he was moving out of the house for renos and from his mom's house he was going to a cottage for a week AND from there a camping trip, so he had to pack accordingly.  He got testy with me for nagging so I shut my trap with the end result being that the Dotytron brought NOTHING with him.  No tent. No sleeping bag. No pack.  Nothing.  If it weren't for the fact that Pingy travels with camping gear and loaned him everything, he would have been royally screwed.

The Big Yam is KILLING us lately.  I still have to capture video of the "baby toe" talking.  He also does this thing where some words that end with "p" (like "nap") he hads a "t" sound to, so he says "napT" with an extra-enunciated T sound so you can't miss it.  He also does this weird thing where sometimes he repeats the last sound in a word (generally with hard consonants).  So if he says "snack" it sounds like "snack-kuh-kuh-kuh."  I don't know if it's like a nervous tic or anything (he doesn't strike me particularly nervous) but for right now, it's adorable, and this is coming from someone who has a lifelong hate-on for Porky Pig.

I'm going to come back at you tomorrow with a slew of book reviews.  I've been reading up a storm.

Fin.

Holiday in Magnetewan

BACK! We had the best ever time at the cottage with this crew.  It was a near-perfect confluence of personalities for optimal cottaging.  We have Pingy, who as it turns out, is a NYTimes Crossword Puzzle SHARK.  In fact, even though we all left the cottage at the same time, she didn't get home until 3 hours after us because she got sucked into spending 2 hours at the Burks' Falls Tim Horton's working on a Sunday puzzle.  She also indulges my love of celebrity gossip and we had a great time dissecting the whole K. Stew/Rob Pats debacle.  We have L'Armi, who is a fishing machine, so we went out and fished and talked lures and trawled and rigged up jigs and jigged up rigs.  We have Montreal I, who brought with her six (!) bags of Fairmont Bagels and a love of sitting around the camp fire talking long into the night.  We have the Roomie, who is content to sit and talk and philosophize and hold therapy sessions and will lend you her yoga mat and force you to stretch and do yoga after a run.  And then there was us, and we love doing all of the above and more.  

It was the perfect balance of quiet times, games, talking, gossiping, laughing, eating non-stop and late late night star gazing on the dock.  

So while the weather might not have been ideal (we happened to go the week that cottage country transitions from summer to fall), it was such a lovely time that there's already talk of a winter cabin.

These are L'Armi's photos:

Group shot!  Look at the expression on the Big Yam's face!  LOL!

One of the best family portraits ever. About to embark on a canoe trip.

The aforementioned canoe trip.

We swam back and forth to that island every day and then rested on the dock.

The Big Yam loved his Pingy, or "Ping Ping" as he calls her.  Instant BFF.

Look at that BABY!  Look at her!!! The cutest.

In the end, all my fears about oatmeal breakfast were (somewhat predictably) the overworked histrionics of a class A nutjob (me).  We ate well and couldn't have had a better time, really.  

We also had a Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen sighting on the way home.  We stopped at a McDonald's just outside of Barrie and I spotted the unmistakable short, unassuming form and frizzy Jafro of Michael Sheen (is he even Jewish? Who knows?) and then looked down and saw Rachel McAdams hiding under a floppy hat and sunglasses and Uggs.  This is my takeaway from this: Rachel McAdams, who looks like a regular, slender girl, is TINY in real life.  TINY.  But she doesn't look it in movies, am I right?  I relayed this to Dr. Rei who relayed a story in turn of how a friend of a friend met the Jigga and Bey in real life and that Beyoncé is also, TINY.  Which is shocking.  Like, the friend of a friend was flabbergasted at how small she is IRL and how her petiteness is in NO way reflected in the photos of her that pop up in the gossip rags I so slavishly devour. Which means that Keira Knightley must be a will-o'-the-wisp and also: how cruel is it that the camera adds a million pounds?  All this means is that I'm probably the same size as Queen Latifah.  Which is mildly depressing, in a still body-positive and not dysmorphic way.

The Big Yam is THE BEST right now.  But also the worst.  He's gotten used to sleeping in bed with us so whenever we put him in his little tent/portable bed (the PeaPod, to be discussed later) he would scream bloody murder unless I did one of the following two things:

1) unzip the tent just enough so that we could hold hands while he went to sleep (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

2) pull him into bed with me

Seriously.  ALL HE WANTS TO DO IS HOLD MY HAND AS HE'S FALLING ASLEEP.  Which is every bit as heart-explodingly adorable as it sounds, but comes with the caveat that even I think he's been asleep for 10 minutes and I try to slowly extricate my hand from his grasp (and let me be clear: the kid is a champion hand-holder. Not too firm, not too loose. Not sweaty.), he wakes up and screams.  

The past two nights he's been adding to the pathos by sobbing out, "MAAAAMMMAAA!  MAAAMAAA!" 

I mean, really.  What the heck am I supposed to do?

I want to go home so that we can re-sleep train him because I'm not so far gone as to co-sleep every night, but the kid is killing me with the cuteness.  His voice is the best!  And I love that when I tell him what we're going to be doing he responds with this super-sweet, super-soft, "okay."  I feel like that "okay" sums up his current personality perfectly.  Even though technically he has no say, he's offering a soft little acknowledgement and agreement of his (theoretical) compliance.  It's so him.  

I'll post a video of him saying "baby toe" and I defy you not to have your sex organs explode in response.

I cooked up a storm at the cottage but we're hopefully going to be moving back into our house tonight (which is in the throes of paint-pocalypse) because we're so desperate to sleep in our own G-D beds again.

Fin.

You can't go home again

For the past week we've been living at Momma D's house and loving life, because she has stuff (like a dishwasher and central air and a beautiful garden and patio), that we don't have, and she's been away for the past week at a cottage, so it's been like living at a really nice B&B.  She came home on Sunday night and we  IMMEDIATELY got into trouble.  She walked in and was like, "it smells like fish in here!" (I had made fish tacos for dinner), "you guys forgot to take out the garbage!" "why is there a light on in the basement?" - you know, living with your parents type stuff.  The Dotytron and I were immediately chastened.  It's funny but also kind of exasperating, in the way close, sustained contact with parents can be.

My sister sent up Miss Ramona and Little Ze to stay with my mum for two weeks so that she and Uncle Rico could get stuff done without the kids underfoot and so that she could save on summer camp.  So we had them on Thursday (my birthday) for the day.  WE SPENT LIKE, A HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS.  WTF?!?  I'm willing to bet that a week of camp for the both of them would be $75.  Bruce Wayne took them to LaserQuest and Canada's Wonderland, and so between the various groups of us, hanging out with them costs us minimum $100 a day.  We had a really good time though and the Big Yam was thrilled (thrilled!!!) to be hanging with his cousins.  We went to St. Lawrence and picked out picnic stuff and then took the ferry to the island and went to Centreville and sent the kids on the Scrambler.  It was a good day:

For the record, I had stuck my head in the cut-out for the big-chested lady on the left there, but the Dotytron didn't see me and cut me out of the photo!  We also saw a kid get her head "stuck" in the far right hole before us and we almost died laughing as she started freaking out.  We're horrible people.

LOL @ the Big Yam's expression!

Then we went to Libretto on the Danforth for dinner and shocker of shockers, the kids ate a D.O.P margherita pizza (first picking off the basil)!!!  Colour me impressed.  

The rest of the weekend was a blur.  We had a picnic on the beach with a bunch of high school peeps on Saturday night which was the funnest.  It was mostly remarkable because the Dotytron for once relaxed his anxieties about having the Big Yam fall asleep in someone else's house while we were out, so when a storm rolled in and we decamped to B & G's house, we swung by Momma D's, filled a bottle, and then got to continue our night instead of just going home and putting the Big Yam to bed close to his normal bedtime, which is what the Dotytron usually has us do.  We gave him a bath at B & G's and then he fell asleep in my arms while we were talking at their table and then we put him down on some quilts on the floor and we got to stay out super-late and drink more wine and eat grilled haloumi and sausages!  Huzzah!  Success!

My weird, erratic, and illogical approach to lower carb continues (kinda sorta).  This weekend was filled with good eating:

We grilled up the leftover leg of lamb and ate it with tzatiki and chimichurri, more cauliflower patties, and a quick-pickled cucumber salad with dill.

The offending article: haddock fish tacos with cabbage-carrot slaw, crema, guacamole, and this tomatillo salsa and ranchero salsa from La Tortilleria.  So yes, the house smelled like fish but these were DELICIOUS.  

The Dotytron and the Big Yam made me a birthday cake!

So we started watching The Newsroom and like, immediately didn't love it.  I find it preachy and didactic and like I'm getting a lecture in media awareness.  I feel like it's kind of unnuanced (I would argue that Season 5 of The Wire had a much more realistic-feeling depiction of the constraints on the news) and the soap opera elements bother me.  I don't love how close together Alison Pill's eyes are and it freaks me out. I also don't love how her love interest looks like the bad son from the movie Parenthood (i.e. "Wolfie" from Amadeus). We found the use of music kind of heavy-handed and maudlin.  It's just not our thing.  The clincher was when they played that Coldplay song "Fix You" at the end of an episode.  Coldplay makes my skin crawl.  I made two mistakes: 1) telling Lolly that I didn't like the Newsroom.  I think she's mad at me because of it!  Which is also kind of hilarious, in a mad-cap comedy of errors kind of way? 2) telling Momma D that I hate that song.  She likes the song.  A lot.  As the Dotytron said, in reference to me always expressing my opinion around his parents, "it's always safest to NOT give your opinion...the likelihood that there will be overlap is minimal," and yet, in the grand tradition of me assuming that everyone shares my taste, I continue to blunder into these types of situations with my outlaws.  Like when I said that I find blonde children disgusting.  It didn't go over well, to say the least.  Why is it that Aziz Ansari can say that he thinks white babies aren't as cute as other babies (he says it looks like they're not done baking) and it's funny, but when I say essentially the same thing (i.e. that blonde children are disgusting to me), it doesn't fly?  The type of blonde child is very specific.  If any of you have the board book by Mem Fox, Time for Bed, there's a blonde kid who pops up in the last two pages who is the epitome of what I find disgusting.  Hit up an Indigo and holler back at me.

In other news: I've hit a SERIOUS block with my New York Times crossword puzzling.  I have like, 7 unfinished puzzles on the go and it's infuriating!  I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT WILL SHORTZ, YOU SADIST!!!  

In other, other embarrassing news, at the BBQ on Saturday, the crew we were rolling with are pretty well versed with their global affairs.  They read The Economist (which I keep vowing to start, but the print is so small!!!) regularly and one of them is in Egypt right now and our friend B grew up in Lebanon.  Anyway, I didn't know that like, Aleppo was a city in Syria.  I just knew it as a pepper.  Whoops.  Live and learn, live and learn.  

Hopefully this ^^^ will help get me temporarily up to speed.  Guys, I DON'T WANNA READ THE ECONOMIST!!!  Is that so wrong?  But then...but then maybe it would help me with these crossword puzzles.  GAH.

Fin.

YOLO

So we're renting a cottage for a week with the Roomie, L'Armi, Pingy and Montreal I.  I'm super-pumped and I love all those cats to death.  I threw up a menu plan because I've been project managing this whole ordeal and that's what I do.  I don't really need to know what other people are making, of course, it's really just a place so that we can divide up responsibilities for common items and so that you don't end up with like, five bottles of olive oil or something.

The Roomie is notorious for saying stuff to me like, "I really just like fruit for dessert" and then eating a tonne of whipped cream or rhubarb eton mess, which used to drive me crazy when we were living together but now I'm removed from it so it's no biggie.  You just go on lying to yourself.  I was a little concerned that we would be bringing up proper cottage food (read: chips, and plenty of 'em!) and then she would bring like, Brazil nuts and sunflower seeds and then eat all my chips and Cheezies, but I reconciled myself to it.  I totally did.

Then we had a phone chat where she's talking about how she would prefer to do all her cooking in advance and just bring up frozen entrees to the cottage and I was like, "okay, that's cool." but internally I'm like, uhhh...you're at the cottage for 7 days.  That's 168 hours.  What are you going to do with all that leisure time?!?  Cooking at the cottage is one of the major events for the day!!!  But I'm like, okay, sure, I can deal with that.  It's like when we divided up cooking responsibilities last year at my family's cottage week and for once made my mum contribute something other than being a giant succubus who basically sits on her iPad and then demands to be fed and then doesn't help clean.  So my mum was like, "I'm doing 'cook your own' steaks" and the Dotytron was like, "ABSOLUTELY NOT.  The whole point is that I DON'T have to cook my own dinner.  I want your mother to come down to the dock, and say, 'dinner is ready' and I come up and dinner is in front of me."  In the end, it was a mix.  She roped Uncle Rico into cooking the steaks and she had prepared salads and dessert that she had obviously put a lot of thought into.

That's the thing: I don't know if the reticence is because of: a) laziness; b) self-consciousness about cooking skills; c) lack of enjoyment of food (and by extension, life).  In my mom's case, it was a bit of A and B.  That I can totally get.  You want to do a good meal and you're nervous about pulling it off.  Totally understandable.  A and C alone are the pisser ones.  Because it's like, YOLO dudes, YOLO.  People who don't enjoy food totally confound me.  And I totally THOUGHT that the Roomie was a foodie.  But then the Dotytron set me straight.  Left to her own devices she has weird tastes (that is, she will eat gummy bears and coconut ice pops and acidophilus and Taco Bell) that occasionally dovetail with mine.  When the Roomie was living with us, she was basically getting gourmet meals (which she contributed financially to) and leftovers and I thought that because of this, she was a chowhound.  I was wrong.  Basically, if you walk up to her and leave food on her doorstep, she'll eat it if it's convenient, but she's not really going to search out food or she doesn't think about it.  No biggie.

Anyway, this is all to say that the Roomie and L'Armi updated their cottage menu plan and one of their breakfast offerings is oatmeal and I'm all like: A#$(#@*(!! and feel like I'm being punished.  That is NOT my idea of vacation food, yo.  Just scramble some eggs, you cowards!  You can do it!  Especially cuz I KNOWS you're going to be scarfing down my cornflake crunch French toast with Mennonite smoked breakfast sausage like there's no tomorrow (YOLO).  So...does it make me a dick if I bring my own bacon and make myself a bacon'n'egg sammy on the oatmeal morning?  Think about it in the spirit of YOLO.  I'm also of the opinion that when I go over to people's houses for dinner, I want to be served meat.  A comment that infamously got me in trouble that time we went to R & R's house and they made pasta puttanesca and I inadvertently slammed the meal (which was delicious).

At the end of the day, I'm just grumbling and being a giant, pissy curmudgeon. I'm sure I'll love the oatmeal and I love the Roomie to death and I know and accept her indifferent attitude to the spirit of excessive cottage consumption.

...I still might bring up a pack of personal bacon, though.

We were talking about YOLO with R & R when we hung with them a couple of weekends ago and about how all the grade school kids are all YOLO-ing all over the place and I we were wondering if YOLO works the other way.  So like, do you want to go snorkel through the Great Barrier Reef? YOLO.  Do you want to supervise a Grade 8 field trip to Quebec City? Uhhh, no. YOLO (from the teacher's perspective).  Pretty funny.

So I've recently become obsessed with Neil deGrasse Tyson and I think I want him to be my dad.  He's awesome and I've put a hold on every DVD he's ever been involved with and bringing it with me to the cottage, which will undoubtedly make Montreal I very happy, because she is one of the geekiest knowledge-hunters I count amongst my friends.

Speaking of wondering in the universe and how we can feel both big and small.  The Big Yam is a riot, lately.  He's started saying "oh" in context, and the style of the "oh" modulated in response to the scenario presented and it's SO FREAKIN' FUNNY.  It kills me and the Dotytron every time.

Big Yam: "Baba! Help!" (wanting to help grate zucchini)

The Dotyron: "Sorry, buddy, I'm just finishing up here."

Big Yam: "Oh."

He also says things really wrong sometimes, and then when we try to correct him, he does this thing where he slooowly repeats back to us his wrong pronunciation.  So, for instance, he calls "ambulances" "bee-bim."  He's got insane super-sonic hearing, so he heard an ambulance while we were driving and piped up from the back seat, "bee-bim!"

Me: "It's AM-BU-LANCE."

Big Yam: "Oh."

*long pause*

Big Yam: "Mama?"

Me: "Yes?"

Big Yam: "Baba?"

Dotytron: "Yes, buddy?"

Big Yam: "BEE-BIM."

Last night for dinner I made us a low-carb cobb salad with chicken breasts brushed with my chipotle bbq sauce, bacon, avocadoes, lettuce, tomatoes, and a creamy buttermilk-chive dressing.

Tonight R (Momma D's friend who owns the farm and who rooms with her during the week when she works in Toronto), had brought back a boneless leg of lamb from farm country, that I marinated in red wine, garlic, oregano, and rosemary.  We grilled it and had it with zucchini fritters and CSA snowpeas tossed with scape pesto.  I also made a blueberry pudding cake with whipped cream, on account of me nailing a perfect medium on the lamb and all.

Fin.