The Thick of It

The heart of winter - we are in it.  The Xmas decorations have come down, our xmas lights hang mournful and unlit in the window, waiting for a warm day when we can take them down.  *Edit: we just flicked the switch last night and turned them back on again!  Huzzah!  Casa Dotytron-Lagerfeld - leaving our Christmas lights on until April, since 2010.  Bits and pieces of our life strewn around the house, in a holding pattern because this renovation is taking a million years (which I guess makes sense when your contractor works a solid, 8 hour work week on your job?!).  It's unremittingly cold outside and the worst kind of winter cold, too - the kind with no snow!  What's the point of winter without snow?

Truthfully, I don't mind.  Our lives have been busy and full.  One might say too busy and full, really.  Weekend visits, hosting, the return of extra curriculars in our lives, made possible by the age of the babies now mitigating prospective babysitter's qualms.  The Dotytron went to a weekly neighbourhood jazz jam last week, I went to a Board meeting on Monday and hit up Quilt Sunday at a Parkdale sewing shop.  We hosted some friends for dinner Sunday, hosted a Friday PA day Micelli Monday session...we are happy, fulfilled.  Did I go to bed at 9pm last night?  Yes.  Was I lured in part because I'm reading a corker of a book?  Yes.  See?  No complaints.

Except for how I was verbally threatened by a psycho on my way home from picking out the basement flooring.  I might have cut a guy off (but I'm not sure?), he leaned on the horn, I gave him the customary gesture one does, he stopped his car in front of mine (in the middle of the road), got out, and started banging on the window the my car and saying all kinds of rude, racist, sexually graphic things.  It was terrifying.  He looked like Bob from Twin Peaks.  He was probably mentally unhinged, definitely had anger management issues.  I took down his license plate and have been meaning to call it into the police non emergency line.  I wish I had pepper spray in my car, I would have sprayed his eyes out.  I don't understand why people (men) think it's okay to say certain things to people (women) in anger.  Like, why go there?  It reminds me of the "appropriate" responses we're constantly trying to inculcate in our children - like, the Big Yam now will (sometimes) say, "I'm SO MAD AT YOU RIGHT NOW!" I totally get that response.  People and strangers can make you mad.  If the guy had said, "You cut me off and I'm SO MAD AT YOUR RIGHT NOW!!!" I would have been like, fair enough, you're entitled to feel how you feel.  The level of detail and sexually charged violent undercurrent is not cool.  The galling thing is he took down MY license plate number (!)

The upside is that we picked out our flooring?  *Weak laugh*  We have decided on a white ash looking laminate.  We went back and forth.  Our architect recommend vinyl flooring.  They have high end vinyl now that looks like wood, comes with an acoustic backing, is virtually indestructible and 100% waterproof.  It's also kind of pricey (the good stuff is, anyway).  It's also plastic, at the end of the day.  The laminate we chose was 1/2 the price of the vinyl, and really, the basement is going to be for our personal use - it's not super high traffic, it's not a rental, we're not a condo building, so it's okay.  The waterproof argument is specious to me.  If my washer malfunctions and floods the basement, sure the floors will be okay, but it's not like I'm not going to have to replace drywall and all the other business, right?

We chose something that looks like this:

It's a white ash.  I wanted something neutral, light, and airy for the basement.  It's a basement, it doesn't get any natural light (only the bathroom and the bedroom down there will), so I wanted something that would contribute as much as possible to making the room seem expansive.  It has a slight grey wash to it, without being aggressively grey, and the floor doesn't have orange tones, which I like, because those orange tones just remind me of that awful 80s/90s parquet flooring that everyone had.

This is kind of the feel I'm going for, without being quite so stark and overtly Scandinavian/Helmut Newton-y.  About 75% less Helmut Newton.  And Helmet Lang.  LOL!  It's going to be warmed up with brass and warm wood, and big fluffy rug, and colourful throws, and oh yeah, a million kids toys and pieces of lego crunching underfoot.

This week I played a bass clarinet that the Dotytron brought home to practice with and we watched the movie Birdman and last night I went with an old friend to see Miranda July interviewed by Sheila Heti:

The average median age of the audience was about 25 and everyone looked like they had just slouched out of an Urban Outfitters store.  I was in my work clothes - black & white ikat print dress over a black turtleneck, tan belt, forest green (what my friend KD calls my "Masters" green blazer) blazer, and forest green tights, with black boots - I think I looked like I had slouched out of an Anthropologie - so one step up!  Probably more like I slouched off the Modcloth webpage.  Oh well.

Sheila Heti is the editor of that book Women In Clothes which I haven't taken a look at yet, but is all the rage with the McSweeney's set.  She's generally all the rage with the McSweeney's set.  I haven't read any of her work, but I'm thinking of suggesting her novel, How Should A Person Be? for the next next Academic Book Club.  It's described as "...A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millenium."  It's a mix of memoir and fiction and apparently features graphic, uncomfortable sex scenes.  Like Girls meets The New Yorker.  I think it would be a good hate-read and at least engender a fruitful and spirited discussion.  I suspect the book will infuriate me and I won't find her a good writer, but that's part of the fun, isn't it?  Book club is never good when we read something beautiful and affecting and unimpeachable.  I read a critique about her much-lauded Women In Clothes project that takes the editors to task for featuring mostly white people.  Heti herself sports the misguided baby bangs of Janeane Garofolo circa Reality Bites.  Also, she's not young.  She seems nice - she smiled shyly at me when I passed her at the venue.  She makes for a horrid interviewer though.  Apparently she and Miranda July are quite close friends, but you wouldn't have known that from their interaction.  It was quite stilted and awkward.  Heti's questions didn't really seem to go anywhere and July's answers kind of spun off into nothingness.  I was like, guys, did you not go over this in advance?!?  Come ON.

It's always interesting to hear artists talk about their process and I did enjoy Miranda July's first film, You Me and Everyone We Know.  I also read her first collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, when it first came out, but was unmoved by the writing at the time.  That being said, she wasn't a very pithy speaker.  It was all very airy and floaty, words floating above their heads without coming down to ground on anything concrete.  She talked about a performance art piece she does where she auctions off items' belonging to members' of the audience and then gives the accumulated money to the person in the audience who "needs it the most" at that very moment.  I found it an interesting take on the fluidity of capital.  In that vein, I accompanied my friend who got her book signed and so I had Miranda July sign the paper bag that had held my kathi roll dinner and I'm thinking of putting it up on ebay.  The Dotytron and I had a conversation about performativity and capital afterwards which means that the talk wasn't for naught.

Heti and July referenced Tavi Gevinson so I think that's all you need to know about that.  I admire Tavi but I will also say that her performance in the film Enough Said was the worst element about what was otherwise a sweet, naturalistic, grown-up movie.

I'm glad I went.  I like going to things like that.  It is inspiring and gets me thinking, which I need.

Otherwise, I'm knitting a cowl that is the first knitting project that I've worked on in some time that has excited me.  Perfect for winter.  This is the yarn I'm using - the softest, squishiest, delicious yarn in my collection at the moment:

I tried my hand at free motion quilting for the first time using a fancy-fancy machine at the Workroom and I FELL IN LOVE with the process.  I'm going to try tackling it at home with my perfectly serviceable but not as bells-and-whistles-loaded machine.  This quilt is for the Quincess.  It suits his personality, methinks.  

This is a latin-style "porchetta" sandwich and a shrimp po' boy from a sandwich shop (Sully's) that opened up recently in the 'hood.  These were pretty good.  The fries there are tasty.  I would go back but I'm not about to rave about it or insist you travel across town to check it out.  So don't do that, okay?  You can do whatever you want, but don't blame me if it doesn't live up to the hype.  I'm not hyping it up.

A Spanish chorizo, tripe, pork belly and chickpea dish I had in the freezer, served atop polenta with a fried egg and gremolata.  That's good stuff, folks.

Classic weeknight meal - pasta with sausage, chickpeas, and kale and parm.  The babies have been jerks lately and are only eating the pasta.  It's not good.

See?  Look at how much attitude I get during a single dinner!  By the way, that "Waof?" Lindsey says while pointing upstairs is his way of asking for a bath.  Lately, he's been pretty good about saying "puh" and then pointing upstairs at the bathroom AFTER he's already done the deed.  We are so close to a breakthrough, but it eludes us yet.

Busy weekend ahead.  Heavy agenda ahead of eating burgers and fries and chocolate pudding with salted caramel, chocolate crumbs, and whipped cream, and watching movies with the boys, tonight.  Saturday is the Big Yam's day of activities: Chinese school, then ballet, then hip hop.  Meanwhile, the twins have inexplicably been invited to a birthday party (!)  Sunday is family chill time and then Super Bowl which for us means eating ribs and nachos and baked potato skins.  All in all, forecast is calling for a pretty cozy weekend in.

Fin.

Amirite?!

I try to resist gender norms, but seriously, guys with colds are the suckiest, giantest babies of babydom.  Admittedly, the Dotytron doesn't come from strong stock.  He's a delicate flower produced by a parental lineage of delicate flowers.  I've never heard someone complain MORE when they have a case of the sniffles.  It's all boohooing, and dramatic, public neti-pot irrigation, and huddling under blankets and really, I'm like, "the degree to which you are removed from being an immigrant could not be MORE APPARENT right now."  

The world grinds to a standstill.  He was going to take a sick day on Monday, and then our caregiver called in early Monday morning because her friend/roommate was having a baby, and oh yeah, her friend/roommate is here alone (her partner is still in the Philippines) and is of a somewhat advanced maternal age, and this is her FIRST child.  You know what?  THAT lady is going through something.  The Dotytron?  Not so much.  Anyway, I had a big interview on Monday, so I couldn't stay home, which means I heard even more moaning and groaning about HOW HARD it was going to be to be home with the babies all day and "don't expect me to take them to the drop-in centre" and I was luckily distracted from being completely enraged (newsflash: they're YOUR kids, too, remember?!) by my interview to comment that, OH YEAH, THIS WAS EVERY TIME I WAS SICK ON MAT LEAVE, YA DUMMY.   Deal wit it.

This is why white, middle class Canadians haven't accomplished anything of note, like, ever.  Because they are giant baby diapers about regular life.

I am teasing a bit, but I also want to note that I came home to: a disheveled Dotytron trying to put dinner together (dinner which consisted of warming a frozen soup **I** had made in advance, and assembling a mashed squash toast **I** had made in advance), after no less than 3 different phone calls to my cell clarifying things (I had already sent him detailed instructions during the day), in a kitchen that was almost completely upended, and a tiny Quincess placidly hacking away at a D battery on the floor with a phillips head screwdriver.  My Discerning Coyote friend noted on Facebook that the Quincess was probably minutes away from completing his perpetual motion machine, which is probably true, though no less dangerous.

We had dinner at our friends' JJ & S's house last Saturday night, and JJ noted, as the Dotytron and I po-go'd in and out of our seats throughout the night to: feed babies, close the door to the basement, bring babies down from bar stools they had clambered up onto, remove glass jars from baby hands, change diapers, and so on and so forth, "this is the most labour-intensive time in parenting."  I COULDN'T AGREE MORE.  Quincess is full-on walking now, and while Lindsey isn't as keen and loves being carried more than anything, they are irrepressible imps who climb/destroy/reconfigure/disregard anything and everything.  We've started having to be more disciplined with them, which means that I've started to get quite stern with Lindsey.  He likes to chuck his food off of his high chair tray so the other night, I told him quite firmly, no, and if he did it again, he wouldn't be able to eat with us.  He's only 19 months old, so of course he didn't get it, which means I had to turn his high chair away from the table and the Dotytron and I desperately tried not to crack up at the sight of his big, open, Lindsey-Lou-Lou face craning around and being all confused and mildly dismayed.

There have been some very funny Big Yam moments lately.  Like:

The Big Yam, spying my discarded bra on the bed: "I'm going to wear these boobies!"  Puts it on, and then: "it fits perfectly." Strutting around, he pauses, "I'm a...babysitter" (with a tone of wonder).

The other night, while we were debriefing from an evening that featured a bunch of fireside chats, punctuated with time outs and screaming (both).  Me, probing, "Do you think you had a good day?" Big Yam: "No."  "Why?" "I had to do a lot of dealing. With you. About me."

We drove down to visit my sister this past weekend and drove down with my mum in the car.  She was sitting in the back with the Big Yam and as we pulled across the border, asked if we'd seen a show called "Border Security" which shows people trying to smuggle stuff across the border?  I guess?  I don't know, we don't have cable.  She asks us if we've seen the show and is explaining it when the Big Yam replied, "No.  We don't even know what you're talking about."  LOL!  The best is how he answered for all of us.  So good.

The Dotytron hosted an inaugural Bourbon Night two weeks ago.  People (all guys this time) paid a small amount to get pours from 6-7 bottles in his collection, food, beer, and their name entered to win a bottle that was raffled off.  It seemed to be a good time.  Our buddy is a chef at a local barbecue restaurant and HOOKED the Dotytron up.  He served smoked chicken wings, ribs, brisket burnt ends, smoked duck tacos and fixings, barbecued jalepeno poppers, cornbread, pickles, baked beans...it was unreal.  My ex bf came over and had a visit before I made myself scarce and went out.  It's funny reconnecting with people now that I'm a fully realized adult (or something like it.)  I'm just not fussed about stuff any more.  I don't even know why I lost touch with some people.  It really is true that when you hit your prime 30s, you just don't have room in your life for anything extra.  Living is too much of a slog to give into the dramas.

My ex bf reading Lenny a story.

This weekend was fairly chill.  We went down to the States, I got my George Nelson bubble lamp (swoon!) fixture for our basement.  We ate more than we should.  We caught up on movies and played charades.  I attended my niece's hockey scrimmage and complained the ENTIRE TIME about how I don't see the point of sports (a bit of an over exaggeration) and how I could never see myself actually CARING about how my kid's sports team does.  It's just not in me.  Anyway, it was a good time.  The Big Yam loves being with his cousins.

The two cousins off on a mission to Mars.

 Lenny was so pleased with his little cowboy hat that we shelled out $15 in the Cracker Barrel "General Store" to get it.  He loves wearing it and has been chasing it around the house - "hat. Hat. hat."

An osso buco, polenta, gremolata dinner recently.

Freezer wedding soup with a mashed squash toast based on a Smitten recipe.  I used kabocha squash, halved, drizzled with oil and salt and pepper and roasted in an oven until soft.  Then we mashed the flesh with some salt and pepper and spread it on ricotta-smeared toast and topped it with caramelized onions and a drizzle of good balsamic.  This was a BIG hit.  Huge.  All three kids went to town on it.  The key was toasting the toast in a frying pan (oil both sides and then toast over medium heat until crunchy on the outside but still soft-middled).

A recent breakfast - leftover bacon-wrapped smoked jalepeno poppers (spicy!) sliced on top of avocado toast, topped with a fried egg.

Rice cooker soy sauce chicken thigh rice with dried shitakes, Chinese sausage, and garlic sautéed choi on the side.

Fin.

Winding down 2014

As is seemingly the norm around here, I started drafting this post three weeks ago.  In that time, we've had Christmas, New Year, a Dotyron birthday, a Dotytron inking, a horrible anniversary marked, and now this, the Sunday afternoon before the return to thrumming, frenetic, "normal" life.  The babies are asleep, the Dotytron is napping, the Big Yam is serving out his weekend "quiet time" with relative calm in his room, playing with Lego, and I've taken a break from piecing the back of a quilt to update.

Quiet time and lazy Sundays are the stuff that parents-of-young babies dreams' are made of.  The idea that there will be a guaranteed two hour block of everyone engaged in their own individual, quiet, personal pursuits is the harbor that the Dotytron and I cling to when we're raking a tsunami of Duplo off our carpet for the 15th time in a day.  When every counter in our newly renovated kitchen is covered with last night's dinner tailings because we just weren't up for the last and final wave of cleaning after rousing ourselves from the daily 9pm "trying to find just the right thing to watch on Netflix, giving up, and passing out" ritual, and each child is clamoring for a different morning dairy product (cottage cheese! Yogurt! Smoothie!), the flashes of the Great Promise that is family weekend quiet time is what sustains us.  Two uninterrupted hours to work are a glorious, glorious thing.

Our two week holiday was as usual, about half holiday and half visits, eating, some stress, living.  We actually had our s**t pretty much together this year - so much so that I managed to bang out a quilt top and quilt back this break.  That's not nothing, folks.  We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day with Momma D and Emdo.  We spent Boxing Day weekend with my family.  We had 4 (FOUR!) meals out (!!!!) and a very low-key NYE.

I'm telling you, man, I'm not buying a single thing for my kids ever again.  Especially not around the holidays.  It's insane!  Every year, we talk about "scaling back" and every year, present opening takes a minimum of 2 hours and by the end of it we're all pasty and clammy and shell-shocked from the whole ordeal.  The Big Yam has been consistently asking for a "skeleton" from Santa since about the end of Halloween (I think he got his holidays confused) and opened his present from Santa on Christmas Day and was such a giant nerd about how into it he was:

I love my nerdbomber kid, so much.  
Post present opening remark: "How did Santa know I like dead things?"

Pre-hairtcut photo shoot for grandparental units

Quincess Leia "cheese face"

Cousins shot - Lenny doing his "cheese" face like whoa

Lenny "cheese" face in detail

Classic Quincess - such a little daydream believer

The one year anniversary of Cousin Al's death happened over the break.  This coincided with Pixar's Up joining the regular rotation in our household which means that the Dotytron and I have had to sit through the opening montage which contains all of human life and love in one dialogue-less sucker punch to the gut (and tear ducts).  Lots of crying ensues.  Lots of tears shed into the Big Yam's head as we pull him into a wriggling, confused embrace and use him as a human handkerchief to sop up our tears.  We've found some solace recently when I showed Guillermo del Toro's new animated film, The Book of Life, which talks about the tradition of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and how those departed loved ones of ours live a glorious, joy filled existence in the Land of the Remembered, so long as you continue to honour them and keep their memory alive.  I've said it before, but it is such a beautiful way of constructing a cosmology and taking back at least a little agency from the grip of sadness in the wake of a loved one's death.  It also mitigates the anger, too - at the capriciousness of fates, at the inevitability of our own mortality.

We celebrated the Dotytron's birthday with a Louis CK style "bang bang" (two different meals at two different restaurants).  We started at Kintori Yakitori with the seafood selection sampler and the yaktori (chicken) sampler, and added some grilled tongue and chicken knee cartilage, fried.  This place is owned and operated by the Guu crew and I dunno, man, those places just SPEAK to me.  There's something about it all - the vibe, the music, the hot Japanese cooks, the fact that the Asian to non-Asian ratio is about 80:1 - these are my people.  We hopped downstairs and hit up some shio ramen at Kinton Ramen after.  Technically, I know that it's not a true "bang bang" - I don't think it would fulfill the requirements - the meals aren't different enough and aren't like, "full" meals, but I did finish my entire bowl of ramen down to the last drop, as I decided that I wanted to join the "Kinton Bowler" club which requires you to eat insane amounts of ramen to get some throwaway prizes (30 bowls gets you a Kinton towel though!)

Other things that happened:

We left the babies with our caregiver and snuck off and ate a delicious medianoche-filled lunch at La Cubana one day.  I really like that place, teensy tiny tables, delicious habanero honey fried calamari and all.  I really hope that the normalization of Cuban-American relations doesn't change the cuisine.

I went to the AGO with the Big Yam and my friend Montreal I to check the Alex Colville exhibit.  The Big Yam was not a fan.  I was, but unfortunately, if you pay for a special exhibit, bringing a person the Big Yam's age to the AGO is not your friend.  You are working at cross-purposes.  He found the exhibit "boring," the paintings with the animals "scary," and I got a lot of "I want to go home."  He wanted to run around in the Henry Moore sculpture gallery, which is what we ended up doing.  

Mid-haircut, I had to tour a new electrician around our basement wearing this amazeballs shirt that Momma D got me for Xmas.  It would be an XL on Rita McNeil.  It is hilarious.  Oh, did I mention that half my hair was straightened and clipped up (only half?!)  

I hung out with this little bobblehead.  HOW CUTE IS THIS BABY?!?  Short answer: the cutest. 

We had the Roomie, and Montreal I, and L'Armi over one night and we were all in the kitchen cleaning up from dinner when L'Armi called disinterestedly from the living room, "Uh, we have a bit of a situation here."  So we all walked over and saw that the Quincess had smeared about half a tub of Vaseline over half his face.

I made this malted buttercream chocolate stump (it's supposed to be a buche de noel turned on its' side - or what Dr. Rei calls a "log of yule") courtesy of the Baked team.  Recipe is here.  Overall, the recipe was a bit fussy and indulgent (17 eggs!) for a decent yield.  You make a genoise and spread the buttercream on and roll it up.  I don't think I would make it in that form again.  Or maybe cut the recipe in half?  I always find genoise cakes kind of dry.  

My 2014 Xmas cookie plate (left to right, top to bottom): Tartine's salted chocolate rye cookies, classic chocolate chip, chocolate oatmeal, Smitten's buckeyes, Martha Stewart's gingerbread, malted chocolate chip, maple brown sugar, gingersnaps, Dutch vanilla almond sugar cookies.  I would re-do the Tartine ones.  The buckeyes are now standard, the gingerbread recipe produces a nice, cakey, soft gingerbread so that's our go-to now as well, as are the malted milk chocolate.  My gingersnaps always over-baked and got too crisp this year.  The Dutch sugar cookies were a bit bland and disappointing (I was supposed to be able to pipe the batter but it almost made two piping bags explode!), and the maple brown sugar ones were also too sweet.  

Our New Year's eve saw me lining up at Diana's seafood on the BUSIEST SEAFOOD DAY OF THE YEAR like a total idiot for oysters.  We also made some fresh pasta and then the Dotytron went out briefly for drinks with his friends while I snuggled in with the Big Yam and contentedly fell asleep at 9pm.  Good times.

Sunday supper was a return to normalcy (read: not cookies for dinner).  A bastardized Hungarian goulash (according to Tillers, my choice to omit the caraway is sacrilege), whole wheat spaetzle, and braised cabbage.  

I'm nearly finished a quilt!  Fastest turnaround time, ever.  Details to come, but suffice to say that on Sunday night, while the Dotytron and I puzzled through the amorphous and entirely implausible motivations of the sadistic multinational corporation pulling the strings in the Maze Runner movie, I enlisted his help with basting.  Which I will never do again as almost all his pins were stuck to the carpet and we had to re-do them anyway.  But also, look at my handsome progressive partner in his Zubaz!

Fin.