weekends go down like this

the work picnic was nice - not the best iteration of the picnic that i've seen in my 4 summers at my work, but serviceable. i booked it home to pick up painting supplies and awaited the arrival of bwong, who helped me bang off two coats on the dining room. the colour FREAKED me out at first. i was really concerned that we had made the bad call and that i should have stuck with the original colour.

we took a work break to eat dinner (chino loco's) and watch "shottas" which is kind of like a jamaican backwards version of "belly" (that hype williams hip hop flick) with a $10,000 budget, gratuitous fake boobs and horrible acting. it was kind of awesome, even if the thick patois meant that i only understood about 15% of the dialogue (if that.) it features a performance by wyclef and a pretty boomin' soundtrack. i was exhausted so i fell asleep and missed a really ace scene where they show the requisite, insane-o enforcer goon, mad max, smoking a cigarette. pan out: it's being held in A DEAD GUY'S HAND. lol!

saturday we woke up hella early and got pwned first thing with some probable car troubles. the dotytron was driving in scarbs and some kids at the side of the road were like, "guy! your tire is on fire!" so he pulled over and checked and the rear right tire was smoldering. he called CAA and had them tow the car to our mechanic. i was home and the dotytron was en route to teach a lesson, so i dealt with the mechanic. it was my first time talking to him, and quite frankly, HE'S THE BEST GUY ON THE PLANET. CAA guy was telling us it might be our calipers seizing up, which would be a TOTAL piss-off because a) we just got the rear calipers replaced less than a year ago, and b) calipers cost around a grand. but when i talked to our mechanic, he said it wasn't that. he can't find out what's wrong, but he's going to take another look at it on monday and do our oil and a transmission flush at the same time. i can't convey how reassuring, calm, professional, and NON skeevy our mechanic is. he instantly puts you at ease, if you can find a cheaper price someplace else, he'll work something out with you, he doesn't try to force you to get work that doesn't need to be done, he's super-informative, busy enough so that there's always cars there but not so busy that he can't squeeze you in...i pretty much fell in love with him talking to him on the phone. the dotytron has won himself mad "get yourself out of the doghouse free" cards by finding this guy. to the point where i was all worried that he was old and was only going to be around for maybe 10 more years, and then we'd have to find a new mechanic again, but the dotytron has met him and told me that he's actually in his late 30s. phew.

we were supposed to go to deep richmond hill to attend our friends' P & R's baby shower, but there was no way we could get there with no car, so we had to bail, which meant that the day was consumed with going buck cleaning the house and finishing painting the dining room and doing the groceries. lil' ugmo has never been this clean. it's all because i'm hosting academic book club on wednesday and these are all grown-ups and i want to impress, i guess? i dunno. i do know that i effin' love a clean house. the dotytron and i are both like that. we luxuriate in it. we love just sitting in our freshly cleaned house and breathing in that natural cleaner smell and surveying everything being in the proper place. it's so calming.

so the big dining room overhaul is done. this is the dining room we inherited:



pretty hideous. awful acoustic tile ceiling, that disgusting fluorescent light picking out all the yellow tones in the walls, drab furniture...ugh. it's a wonder what we (read: the dotytron) ever saw in lil' ugmo and it's a wonder he managed to convince me that we should actually buy the thing.

this was the interim iteration of the dining room, that we've been living with for the past 8 months or so, featuring that blue paint that was supposed to be a steely gray-blue but ended up more sickening, baby's room blue and would drive me crazy every time i looked at it:

i only have 1 photo of it. i guess in my heart i always knew it was provisional.

this is the new and improved, for keeps (or for the next good long while, at any rate) dining room iteration:





the colour is a little off in the photos - it's a deep, greeny-blue with lots of red tints in it - like a deep, deep aquamarine. we picked it because it goes nicely with the red vignette on top of the refrigerator chest and the pale yellow in the embroidery hoops. the yellow picks up the yellow in the drapes and in the 2 chairs at the head and foot of the table.

here's a shot of the opposing wall, which is all white and features that fabric i bought at that vintage sale i went to a while back, mounted on a canvas frame and hung:

the plan is that later on, i'm going to stretch some twine in between two tacks just below it, and do a revolving photo display of photos that we like of friends, family, vacations, etc. hung from mini clothes pegs.

here's a closeup of the embroidery hoops - i bought vintage yellow fabric online and we hung our favorites in the hoops:

the dotytron totally got into the embroidery hoops - way more than i thought he would. i'm totally besotted with the new dining room. it's fulfilling all my nesting urges.

i love sitting on our new couch (!) from the living room, which is all thunderdome with couches...the new set-up is a little squishy, but not bad, and totally suitable for hosting movie club and whatnot:

we're calling new couch an homage to smudgie, because it's the exact same grey as him and is super soft and squishy.



we moved old new couch under the window, with a side table with the vintage lamp on it right next to it. shifted the colour-coded bookcase down and moved the tv to the far left of the buffet so that it can be angled so that anyone sitting on the couches can see it. pretty aces! i'm waiting to get my international year of astronomy posters framed and then hung above the new couch. the colours in there are grey and dark grey, the purple, red, and yellow. the drapes are the same in the living room and dining room, and the yellow and grey and red are continued throughout both rooms, providing some continuity.

love!

last night i made us a pretty boss dinner. we had grilled flank steak with chimichurri (chimichurri is SO GOOD! that was my first time eating/making it), with cumin black beans and brown rice, with lime squeezed over. we also had that cucumber, radish, feta and dill salad i like so much. for dessert we had another slice of the strawberry rhubarb crostata i made on friday, with whipped cream and ice cream:


we were EXHAUSTED after going to town on the house and doing errands yesterday...i think i passed out at 10:30pm in our blessedly cool house now that the heat has broken a bit AND tillers passed on the super-awesome tip to have the fan going on the furnace (no heat, just fan) to circulate the cooler air from downstairs up to the second floor.

even though we worked like, nonstop for about 12 hours on saturday, it was so worth it, seeing the results above and having everything tidy. i'm such a freak. my vices consist of being prepared, working hard, organizing and multi-tasking. it's sick. i'm addicted to all of the above and the hit of euphoria i get is a pure dopamine shot to the brain.

this morning we woke up at had a shanghai dim sum brunch with cousin yeti and his partner E. cousin yeti plays in this awesome 80s hair metal band called the diemonds. i think i've talked about them before. they are the best! so rockin! and so sincerely rockin at that. we're going to see them play their NXNE show at the newest hipster bar/restaurant sensation, parts and labour (owned by the same people who brought parkdale the social). cousin yeti started off as their drummer, played on their first album, took a break to go on tour with some other bands as a guitar tech, and now is back as their second guitarist.

tonight i think the plan is to go back to chino loco's as a nice treat before the dotytron abandons me for 3 days to take a bunch of grade 8s to montréal as part of their grad trip. i think we're also going to try to do some no-rules tennis or go for a bike ride, too.

fin.

no motivation, zero energy

that's pretty much me right now. last night i went to bed at 8:00pm. more correctly, i passed out while re-reading e. lockhart's "ruby oliver" series of young adult fiction (that i adore more than life itself) huddled under an afghan in my freezing cold living room only to wake up an hour later with a crick in my neck and a cloudy mind. i managed to haul myself through the wet wool torpor that made my limbs and consciousness sodden and sluggish upstairs whereupon i announced to the dotytron in as pathetic a voice as i could muster that, "i don't feel so good" and then threw off my clothes and curled under the covers only to wake again at 6:00am this morning when the alarm went off.

on the plus side, i managed to pick up a whole new slew of paint chips for the dining room and they're much more promising. i just have to muster the courage to actually see my vision through and go a deep, dark, green-y teal/turquoise on the walls. 3 walls will be that colour and one wall will be white. technically, it's not even 3 full walls, as 1 of the walls has the archway into the living room and the other wall is mostly the window. do i have the nads to go dark, jewel tones in the dining room? stay tuned and find out!

anything has to be better than the namby pamby slightly too-blue/grey combo we have in there. ugh.

i've read a tonne of books lately, but i have no motivation to review them. i somehow convinced my academic book club (which i'm hosting - eek!) to read "twilight" by stephenie meyer. lol! we'll see how they do. there was some resistance but i'm like, ladies - let's find out what this is all about, shall we? having them come over in the second week of june is giving me a very fixed deadline to work towards in terms of getting the dining room ready. hopefully couch numero dos gets here in time, too. there's nothing like having a whack of people over to get your jazzed to get your house ready.

tonight we had dinner with the roomie at queen margherita pizza. i forgot my camera because forgetting things is part of my life at the moment and i've made peace with it. i have another opportunity to capture the chewy-crusted goodness on sunday as we're taking the supper club there. my capsule review is very favorable. they push the prix fixe on you but will allow you to order pizzas a la carte. some of the pizza topping combinations are lacking (plus one, libretto) but most hardcore pizza heads will tell you that pizza is ultimately about the sauce and the crust. the crust is pretty damn amazing. it's not as uniformly thin as libretto's but to me, has a more textbook correct brawny, puffy chew to it, with some nice char spots on the underside. it's more reminiscent of the naples-style pizza we had in florence (which i know is a locovore/slow foodist's nightmare, but i didn't go to naples, so suck it, aight?)

l'army couldn't make it so we ordered 2 à la carte pizzas and 2 prix fixe. first they brought out terrible, terrible bread. like, IGA generic "baguette" bread - tight, snow-white crumb, no flavour, etc. with olive oil and balsamic to make a slurry for dipping. i'm not particularly fond of dipping my bread in olive oil and balsamic under the best of circumstances and when it's crappy bread, i'm even less inclined. i don't know why they don't just send out pieces of their pizza dough - straight from the wood-fired oven.

one of our antipasti was sausage, red peppers and potatoes which is exactly as it sounds - fluffy skinless yukon gold potato chunks, big pieces of denuded fennel-flecked italian sausage and strips of red pepper in a jolly melange. this was very tasty. the other was buffalo milk ricotta with chopped pecans, cranberries, and honey. we all felt that the ricotta was delicious with the accoutrements, minus the honey - which made everything taste like honey instead of letting the milky sweetness of the ricotta shine through. plus, the cranberries provide a lovely sweet-tart counterpoint, you don't need the heavy, treacly hand of honey on a dish that delicate - throws the whole balance off.

when the pizzas arrived we passed slices around so that we got to try all four. the dotytron's pizza was the best - it had italian sausage, cheese, tomato sauce. the other fantastic thing about queen margherita is the sauce. full of pulpy, bright tomato flavour. i can't remember what the sauce at libretto tasted like. i got a vegetarian pizza that was okay, the roomie went off the rails and got a smoked salmon pizza with mascarpone that was pretty bad (but i don't really think a neapolitan style pizza place should even have smoked salmon pizza on the menu anyway), and we tried l'army's which had proscuitto cotto and olives. i will say the topping combinations at libretto are better - but again, i think if margherita dialed it back to just a few basic topping combinations, they would knock it out of the park. scrap the smoked salmon (ugh), don't do a vegetarian if you've already got the margherita, limit your topping numbers to 3. on the strength of the crust and the sauce alone, i think margherita has libretto beat.

libretto has a more extensive menu though, so they get points for that, but they're also in one of the most annoying neighbourhoods in toronto, so minus points. ultimately, margherita will win because they're a 5 minute walk from my house, they take resos, and no pizza in the world is so good that it warrants a 2 hour wait. and the crust and sauce at margherita are insanely good. you just have to pick your pizza judiciously. i think on sunday i'm going to go the classico route and order a margherita pizza - the pizza standard.

the prix fixe follows up your pizza with a salad, in this case a mixed greens with a honey drizzled pear. the dressing was pretty ace - vinegary and sweet at the same time.

we also split a dessert, "nonna's" tiramisu which apparently is ACTUALLY made by "rocco's" nonna. it was good - boozy and light. points off for the highly unorthodox whipped cream topping. additional points off for being a saucerfull of tiramisu for 7 dollars.

i'll post pics on sunday (if i remember to bring my camera).

here's an installment that we haven't had in a while:

roll call of awesome:

dan style's art prints - available here:




the world maps from these are things:


i love futura font. i think the aqua print would look great in the fatburger's room (or even ours), but we just bought this ork poster toronto print in black and white for the big wall leading up the stairs:

so i feel like the hyper-masculine black and silver one would go better with the colour story i'm developing there. i'm thinking black and greys against the pale-pale grey wall with some black and white significant photos hung with bulldog clips.

this light shade is pretty boss. it's also $950 (excluding delivery)

wylie dufresne. so awesome. we've been watching "top chef masters" and i just love his little face and his mannerisms and the fact that he uses thomas' english muffins in the deconstructed eggs benedict dish at his restaurant wd-50 because he says there's nothing better (and i totally agree - thomas' english muffins are THE BEST.) i think he's super-talented, inspiring, and still totally approachable, unlike cerebro weirdos like grant achatz.

fin.

loves me a good deal

score! so you know how i was talking about how redonkulously expensive those glass doorknobs were at the door store? i told my colleague and she sent me a link to a bucket of glass knobs that just got deposited at the habitat for humanity restore in north york. people and businesses make donations of new and gently used stuff to the restores, which they sell at discounted prices. they had a heap of knobs for $25/set!!!

so i sent the dotytron and he snagged 5 for us...for the same price (actually, much less) than we would have paid for ONE at the door store! wooee! now we just have to buy the rosettes and latches - i found a guy on ebay selling retrofit sets including rosettes and latches in a variety of finishes for $25 USD/set...but we're still going to see if home depot or lowe's has any first. SO ACES! so we're going to get the entire thing done for less than $60/door which i can totally live with. $180 door when you have cheap doors is just silly. i think they're going to look pretty amazing when we have them set up.

the colour of our dining room is starting to drive me kind of crazy...i really want to repaint it, but i'll probably be sensible and wait until we have our kitchen done (a year or two? depending on when i win the lottery?):

this is the kind of colour i'm going for. i think that kind of rich, jewel tone will look lovely against the deep purple in the living room and provide a gorgeous backdrop to bring out the tones in the sideboard and will make the white accents in the room (the chairs, the centrepiece) really pop.

okay...so here's the annoying thing about the dudes on my dodgeball team (the dudes and ladies) which you might be able to chalk up to the fact that they're young, but mostly due to the fact that they're dummies. so i put together this dancehall, hip-hoppy mix of tunes with some ragga jungle thrown in to get the team (read: me and doty) pumped. there's been some controversy because s-dawg has been playing his mix which includes your standard kind of stadium fist-pumpers along with the theme from "rocky" (the orchestral theme), which when it came on, totally through two members of the team (they're young girls) for a loop and they were all like, *curled lip* "WHAT IS THIS?!" and being all snarky and one of them turned it off, even though the dotytron and s-dawg were getting all hype because they've actually SEEN "rocky" (i haven't, but i don't get ruffled by the tunes that people play during dball, generally. like, most of the time my team when they play on sundays plays really stupid metal and i just shrug it off.)

ANYWAY, sister nancy's "bam bam" comes on:



and AGAIN the two girls are curling their lips (p.s. one of them DOESN'T EVEN PLAY DBALL AND IS THE GIRLFRIEND OF ONE OF THE PLAYERS AND IS LIKE AN ELEVENTEEN YEAR OLD WHO WORKS RETAIL - NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING INTRINSICALLY WRONG WITH THAT) and asking incredulously, "what IS this?!?" like they've NEVER HEARD DANCEHALL or reggae or music made by black people before.

and i'm like, b***h, SHUT IT. it's infuriating. like, i don't expect everyone to know EVERYTHING, ça c'est impossible. i get it. but you don't have to be all like, "what is this freak music for jerks" about it, when really IT JUST SHOWS THAT YOU are a small-minded, sheltered weirdo from HICKSVILLE, WHITEYTOWN! (your standard caveats about context, blah blah blah) like, there's an opinion about music after having listened to it and giving it a chance and then there's just showing your ignorance and being a jerk about it.

like, how come i can take the time to know what fleet foxes and ok go and tragically hip and ALL THAT OTHER CRAP I THINK IS THE WORSTEST sounds like, so that i can say, "you know what? it's not my thing" but you can ONLY know the tragically hip and think all songs written by non white hairy dudes that aren't derivative to the max is "weird"? COME ON. and as usual, HAVE YOU MET YOU?

and then the dotytron told me that when then this tune came on:



and one of the tithead girls comes running up and is like, "i know this! it's sean paul!" and was all crestfallen when she realized it wasn't dance mix 2005. not that there's anything wrong with sean de paul. but they're BABIES. who DON'T KNOW ANYTHING. and most egregiously, DON'T KNOW THAT THEY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING AND MASK THEIR PROFOUND AND TOTAL IGNORANCE WITH DISGUST.

gah. it just makes you feel old. but i mean, i don't think there should be an age limit on being as well-rounded as you can be. there's no time when it's okay not to be curious about stuff.

yesterday's meals were all about the poultry and fries. my colleage T took me to lunch at this place on yonge called the coach house which is the kind of old fashioned diner-type places with vinyl seats, an ancient cash register up at the front, and formica tables and where they serve the classics like hot turkey sandwiches on white bread with boiled veggies and fries with real chunks of turkey and fake gravy. it was awesome. we went halfsies on the club and hot turkey and ate fries and i was stuffed. then after dodgeball we met up with old kitchen friends of mine M and F who are married and ate duff's wings and fries for dinner. i worked with M at bymark but he got out of the business and now does landscaping and F is the sous chef at george and is trying to get out of the business or at least reduce the hours/time spent in the kitchen. it's a hard mentality to break. only working 10 hours days instead of 12+ and leaving at a reasonable time and not feeling guilty when you say goodbye to the other line cooks that you know still have 6 hours of service and clean up ahead of them.

tonight we're heading up to markham to visit with my sis and the kids, sans outlaw bro. sis is in town to go with s-dawg and myself to my uncle's funeral tomorrow. it's my deadbeat dad's bro. we've only met him a handful of times so i'm feeling a little removed - but it's always sad when people go before their time.

for dinner the dotytron and i are going to phoenix, which is famous for their hainan chicken rice and hk style food (well, this type of restaurant tends to do like, hong kong takes on singaporean and malaysian style food - and hong kong style western food. malaysian curries, ox tongue spaghetti and whatnot.) i'll take a photo of our meal and post it. hainan chicken rice is rice that's been poached in a chicken stock that gets re-used over and over to produce an ultra-flavourful, concentrated stock. the accompanying rice is cooked in a fatty, rich chicken stock resulting in fragrant, perfumed rice with a distinct unctuousness and separate, fluffy grains. it's traditionally served with a piquant ginger-scallion relish for dipping. it's so addictive. totally comfort food all slippery and slightly neutral and gentle on your stomach. the best is now restaurants make the hainan chicken BONELESS. sweet mother of all that is good that was a major step forward in hainan chicken rice preparation.

fin.

what the-

i'm starting to get spam comments on my blog? what the hell?!??? this can only mean one of two not terribly exciting things. 1) there are actually THOUSANDS of people reading this blog and the traffic and linking to and fro has finally caught the attention of evil spammers and trolling bots; 2) there are spammers out there that have canned searches for the following terms: "chinotto" "nemesis" "lagerfeld" "dotytron" "bucktown" - which is kind of commendable from the creativity standpoint.
guys...it's almost a new decade. in the 2000s. like, what the f88k?!? i remember when the 80s changed to the 90s it was totally a big deal and i flipped through a people magazine retrospective that was lying in my house and marveled at the 80s and wondered at what strange and wondrous things the 90s would bring. and now we're like, TWO DECADES PAST THAT. i'm old, sons!

i'm old enough to start being a fiscal conservative! so david frum was on george strombo's show (p.s. i hate george strombo) and was talking about how the right wing in america has moved away from its fiscal underpinnings and has been coopted by the loonies (i'm paraphrasing) who are interested in issues that aren't part of the realm of the traditional right (ie. like whether science is a discipline, shmashmortion, etc.) so true! guys! i'm all for fiscal restraint! i'm all for pulling up the bootstraps and buckling down and the value of hard, honest, labor. p.s. this is not an endorsement of david frum - it's a general commentary on how the whole political dialogue is being coopted by peripheral, reductive, polarizing dichotomies between talking (shouting) heads and we're losing our sense of nuance and winnowing away at our capacity to critically engage and imagine. so sad!

dr. rei and i were talking about marking rubrics today. another issue of classification! tell people what they need to get an A - try to legitimize and standardize the qualitative by subsuming it in our worship of the quantitative. ugh. i remember the first time i came across one - it accompanied my A paper on top chef that i wrote for my sociology class. "demonstrates a creative understanding of key concepts discussed during the term" - whaaaa??? i was so confused. if i was to go back for a phd in information studies - it would definitely be something to do with my representational entropy model - the slippages that occur between rubrics, metrics, and classification systems and the material things they attempt to fix, define, relate.

okay, i'm currently in LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE with my dining room. love it. love love love it. the dotytron is way more cognizant generally of spending a mint on something and then wanting to preserve it - he gets it from momma d, i think. she once graciously offered me a table pad for our former dining room table and i never used it once. i'm of the opinion that stuff is meant to be used and you shouldn't be buying stuff that might potentially get mucked up a bit. not that you shouldn't take preventative measures, mind. anyway, i've caught him wiping at stray water droplets with his sleeve so i'm going to make place mats for the table. i think i'm going to make it out of toile/lace patterned oil cloth, since the marimekko stuff i pine for goes for $50 US A YARD!!!

i wanted something with a tight enough pattern that it wouldn't compete with the rest of the room's elements. i didn't want it to be HEY LOOK AT MY CHERRY PRINT PLACEMATS! but i didn't want them to be plain, either. i thought the black toile would be a good compromise.

i'm spending the weekend at the crumbling family estate. my sis is up after her turkey day. so pumped! we brought our skates. we're going for AYCE hot pot and asian legend tonight. we're going to see "the fantastic mr. fox" - hopefully.

i love these songs:

the best is the prolonged, tortured, "oooooooooohhooooooohhh"

video under copyright











this video is also under copyright...but it's worth it because the accompanying video is HILARIOUS. lol x 1000000000000000000!!!!!!!!

we're going to montreal with dr. rei and hanbo and bwong. to celebrate the birthday's of hanbo and the dotytron. to eat at au pied du cochon (the trip was precipitated by my panic at an unsubstantiated rumour i heard that they were closing in the new year). to hang with my favorite people. to go on a road trip. i've instructed everyone to make two cds for the road featuring their personal favorite singalong songs. these are definitely on my short list.

the best is the other night in the car when the dotytron asked me if billy idol's "white wedding" was a euphemism for something, or if he really thinks it's a nice day (in the meteorological sense) for a white wedding. lol!

happy weekend all! squish someone you love!

fin.

can't talk...

too busy putting together ikea furniture with "gs to gents" in the background *shoots self in face* that show is HORRID. it's so mind-numbingly BORING. i had a class A wigout last night putting together our dining room tables while the dotytron lolled around on the couch like a strangely lanky seal. i very rarely indulge in mindless tv watching - like, watching something just to WATCH SOMETHING so when the dotytron does it or when i'm trying to accomplish something and that's happening in the background, it puts me on edge. since i was already putting together ikea furniture and was ALREADY on edge, i was a seething ball of barely suppressed (and frequently unleashed) rage. my mulled apple cider was too sweet! i didn't want to go into the basement to get the drill bits! my butt was sore from sitting on the ground! it's too hot in the house! COULDYOUPLEASEJUSTGETUPANDGETMETHEDRILLBITSCAN'TYOUSEEI'MPUTTINGTOGETHEROURFURNITURE?!?????!!!!

i apologized soon after the meltdown (once the chairs were done). it wasn't even a big meltdown, it was just another in the long line of classic lagerfeld and dotytron he said ("why do you have to do this now?") she said ("i'm doing it now because i want it DONE and the least you can do since YOU'RE not the one doing it is get me the small thing i want to finish the job!") testy, snippy scenario. the point is: i got my dining room chairs done. phew! i had lunch with dr. rei yesterday and she was remarking how people always ask her how her friend karl lagerfeld manages to cook dinner, make a billion crafts, etc. and how dr. rei has come to the realization that it's because i'm INSANE, and the most organized person she knows. lol! what really drove it home for her was this past summer, when we went for lunch and i was buying stuff in chinatown, and she asked me what it was for, and i said the meal, and she asked if that's what we were having tonight, and i said no, it's for two weeks from now. lol! i AM insane. and yet, 95% of the time, my insanity doesn't cause me any stress and i REALLY ENJOY it. i love being organized. i love updating my calendars. i love being a little puttering busybody. in another life, i SHOULD have been the heir to martha stewart's throne.

so, for the dining room chairs, i ended up going with these ones:

ikea gilbert, in white. they're in restaurants all over the place, pretty affordable, sturdy, comfortable, and they go with our vaguely modern mish-mash aesthetic. plus i really liked the contrast of the stark white with our dark table and the clean modern lines with the heaviness of our harvest-y table.

i'm still not happy with our dining room colour. what i wanted to be a cool, blue-grey turned more baby's room blue. a little too saccharine. i think i want to punch it up and make it more teal-y/turquoise-y blue...the exact colour in this youtube video (wait for a few seconds in, to see their kitchen colour) would go really well with the purple wall in the living room:



i'm in LOOOOOOOOOVE with our new plates. being the thrifty little parker that i am, i had originally planned on going to tap phong and loading up. then i was snooping around on crate and barrel online and found that they were having a sale on their essential dinnerware. they sell them in 16 piece sets (4 4 piece sets: 8.5" salad plates, 11.5" buffet plate, 7" bowl, and mug)...so i got 3 of those (to make 12 place settings) and then bought for extras of the plates and bowls (i didn't think i would ever need 16 mugs). we like entertaining at home so i wanted a big set, plus my family alone is 10 people and growing. anyway, ALL of that (16 buffet plates, 16 salad plates, 12 mugs, 16 bowls) in microwave and dishwasher safe porcelain okay for ovens up to 300F, was $200 INCLUDING DELIVERY. score me!

i can't bear overpaying for stuff. it makes me mental. i have two sizable williams sonoma gift cards that i can't even use because every time i go in there, their stuff is so ridiculously overpriced that i literally can't bring myself to "waste" the gift cards in there when i know i can get the item for cheaper somewhere else. it's seriously highway robbery in there - i don't even find it fun, the way other people seem to - for me, williams sonoma is not the cook's playground...it's the dilettante's playground. it's not fun over-spending. you can't take the chinese out of me! it's the same when people ask me if i'm going to trick out my kitchen when i reno with a viking range or all the rest. i mean, yeah, if i had unlimited funds a subzero would be nice, i guess? and a viking or thermidor range? but seriously? i'm not the kind of person to go buck like that. i've been banging out amazing meals on my crappy GE gas stove at the old apartment and now the made-in-mexico discontinued line moffat we inherited at lil' ugmo and i'm doing just fine. cooks can cook anywhere. fancy gadgets are nice, but not necessary, and i don't see the value for it. it's like when dilettantes go and throw money at a new hobby and get TOP OF THE LINE recording equipment or the best golf clubs - why don't you develop your craft/hobby first before going out and shelling out the big ducats? i feel like that's one of the ways you can differentiate between people who are serious about their crafts and people who think that throwing money at a leisure activity will solve everything.

tuesday night we had the ex roomie and l'army over for dinner - it was nice! i miss having her around. i made a root vegetable/squash mash (sweet potatoes, yukons, butternut) mixed with the leftover dill sour cream from borscht the night before. i made beer-braised smoked mennonite sausage and kolbassa with caramelized onions, as well as cabbage and apples braised with some salt pork. for dessert i pulled out a frozen log of pecan shortbread i had from last xmas (!) and sliced and baked those off. having frozen cookie dough that's either pre-portioned or the slice and bake kind is really, truly, a godsend.

last night i went to ikea and got to ride on the rickety wooden ikea bus. the dotytron met up with me and we bought the chairs and some picture frames (yay, credit!) and then headed home to leftovers. i'm not good at this leftovers game. to give you an idea of how bad i am at cooking for two, i ate leftover muttar paneer. we had that like, a week and a half ago!!! i finished it off.

tonight is dodgeball and it's my dodgeball boyfriend's birthday so we're going out someplace after for food and drinks. i'll stay out for a bit (to eat) and then high-tail it home to hopefully finish writing thank you cards and packing for the weekend. team geneseo is coming up! yay! after thank you cards are done then it's time for xmas cards - gadzooks! but that's easy because it's not as much handwriting and profuse thanking.

i have a whole passel of book reviews to do, but first let me say that our tv watching has started to plumb new lows. we've gotten semi-hooked on dr. drew's "sex rehab" on much music. it's the worst/best! the other "celebrity" (loosest possible definition of that term) rehabs are tough to watch because they're kind of depressing and harrowing because of the physical effects of withdrawal. but sex rehab just seems a lot sillier. even though when you start to get into the people's histories it gets really dark. so i think we're going to stop watching. also, dr. drew is the worst psychologist/psychiatrist ever. he gives you this really patronizing, faux-concerned, duck lip/nod combo that would make me turn TO an addiction, not FROM it.

fin.

gotta cool it...

the story of our old contractor is that he did all this work, fairly cheap. when we asked him to do additional work fixing our closets and installing shelving in there, he quoted us a price of $600, JUST to put in a rod and shelf...not to repair the plaster walls, no priming, no painting. so we were like, wtf? so i send him an email asking him what could POSSIBLY cost $600 - the materials? the labour? the email was also to say that his guys (we call them the jabberwockies because they'r a crew of youngish, ex-old skool hip hoppers who are all asian) thrashed our new ladder we bought and also ran late etc...so we were wondering if we could get some adjustments. then he calls back and makes me feel like poo for "nickel and diming" him when he did all this extra work for free (ie. the price didn't change even though we ended up picking shorter baseboard than what we originally had, so there had to be a lot of plaster work done, the baseboard was 120 ft. instead of 100, blah blah blah" so i'm like, dude, TELL ME WHEN YOU DO THIS STUFF. i was like, i'm not nickel and diming you, but in the future, it's helpful for me to know this stuff, so that when we're settling up, and i see stuff that wasn't done, i know what i'm walking into. and he's all "well, when we're doing it it's not a big deal, we're already there, but when you start nickel and diming..." i was like, a) i didn't ask you to do that stuff and b) i WANT TO PAY YOU FOR THE WORK THAT YOU DID. so we ended up just settling up and i was like, next time, tell me exactly what you're doing so that i'm not caught not knowing that you did extra work and then you calling me on it way late in the game when i'm trying to get you to pay me for that ladder you trashed.

as a chinese person, dealing with another chinese person, i wasn't into being accused of nickel and diming (which, btw, is a confucius-given chinese RIGHT) when i asked what i was getting for my $600. THAT'S when you tell me all the stuff you threw in? get outta here. i do want to maintain a positive relationship with this guy and the jabberwockies because they're cheap and do decent work.

we ended up going with this other guy for our closets - he's done everyone on our street - you name it, he's done it. the street is basically keeping him in business. he charged us $800 but it included fixing the walls, re-taping the drywall and priming. he's also cleaner than the other guy (ie. he constructed this elaborate cardboard protective barrier for our shoes so they wouldn't get all dusty where he was working).

so that was that. during my week off, the old owner had the temerity to come back to the house. did i tell you guys that on labour day weeken, after the house had been good and ours for over 4 days (keys in hand, title transferred) we came by at 10pm on sunday evening to show our friends the place and the old owner was there putting stuff in the trunk of his rav4? yeah! so i went up to him and he kind of jumped and started and spun around a bit, not knowing whether to close his trunk or not...and then i said (in broken cantonese): "ummm, what are you doing?" and he said he had forgotten to get stuff, and was all like, "do you want me to show you what i took?" and i said yes, and he opened up his trunk and it was a few rusty pipes that he used to hang his laundry on (don't ask). i was too shell-shocked to say, don't ever come back here again, which was stupid.

so the week off, old owner's brother came by (he looks exactly the same, they both owned the place). i happened to be cleaning the windows in the master bedroom, so i saw him start down the driveway and then i shouted, "HEY! YOU CANNOT BE HERE" (i was clearly more prepared this time). and he said he was just looking for mail and then i basically screamed (in chinese no more fixed than my last encounter with these knobs) "IF YOU EVER COME BACK HERE I AM CALLING THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY. YOU CANNOT BE HERE. YOUR STUPID BROTHER CAME HERE AFTER HOUSE MINE AND TAKE STUFF" and he was like, "well, he wasn't stealing, he didn't move it all." and i was like (picture me, almost getting a nosebleed with my attempts to make sense in my second language): "I CARE NOT. YOU TELL HIM HE COME BACK HERE I CALL POLICE RIGHT AWAY! BOTH OF YOU NEVER COME BACK AGAIN!" then he said i had to calm down and he was only looking for letters and then i had to explain "return to sender" which almost gave me a migraine.

i think i scared him off. what freaks.

on friday night i made us paninis on focaccia. they had: grilled zucchini, grilled eggplant, roasted pepper, sliced onion, provolone, and a fried egg. they were really, really good.

saturday i was hauling the aforementioned sod from off my yard and painting and otherwise working my way through my precious free time. we had my brother over for dinner and i made tagliatelle with wilted radicchio, bagna cauda, and a fried egg with a spinach salad with out-of-season strawberries (sorry, locavores!), toasted almonds, sunflower seeds, and a red wine vinaigrette.

sunday my mum came over to visit the place (her first time) and have brunch with us. we went to okayokay on queen east. this was the site of the famous, "how about your real name" incident. we walked in and we saw there were seats at the bar, with a booth about to be vacated. the same gruff waitress said, "you can have a seat at the bar," and i said, "no thanks, i think we'll wait for that booth" and she looked me right in the eye and said, super stern, "the thing is: i'll seat you at a booth, but i won't seat you at a dirty table, OKAY?" and cocked her head all b***hface on the "okay" part. i was like, so ready to walk out of the place. what the hell kind of service is that? and the food was BEYOND meh. it was actually pretty weak. $10.99 for a "breafkast burrito" consisting of a few scrambled eggs mixed with jack cheese, stuffed in a tortilla, topped with a tablespoon each of oxidized (brown) guacamole, salsa, sour cream? $10.99 for eggs benny served with NO homefries and with a fried macdonald's hashbrown instead of the english muffin? come on. they're banhammered FOR LIFE. we also left a crappy tip, which i usually NEVER do, but i'm not contributing to this culture of entitlement by dropping 20% in a glorified diner on crappy service. i'd rather give it to the clerk at walgreen's next time i'm in the states, who always (regardless of city!) calls me "hon."

then we drove around and did more errands. we went to crate & barrel and bought our dining room table. we got the basque in honey that i pictured before - the 82"

it'll be ready in mid-november. A&J got the same one!!! i'm going for a wood-white-industrial look so i want to get 2 galvanized french bistro chairs, like these, for the head and end of the table (the dotytron wouldn't let me buy the C&B ones cuz he said they're too expensive):


i'll have to wait though...see what turns up antiquing and craigslisting...and then i'll just get these ikea bent plywood ones for the rest of the seating:

i'm not waiting around for an eames or whatever...that's ludicrous. these are rated highly and will do the trick nicely. spending a lot of money for bent plywood is the height of stupidity...i'm not THAT wedded to mid-century modern, thanks.

edit - i'm having second thoughts about the table. i can get a vintage walnut (veneer) one with slim lines and slim legs from the 60s or 70s for $299 - the one i saw online even had TWO leaves! i have time to change my mind, though. PROS: if i get the cheaper table, i can get my galvanized chairs, which are harder to find, vintage. dining room tables are a dime a dozen.

last night for dinner i made us seared salmon with ultra-crispy skin, sweet potato and yukon latkes with sour cream and applesauce and broccoli in a spicy-soy sauce. so tasty! i also celebrated my new oven racks with new york times chocolate chip cookies - we ate a tonne of them while my s-dawg was over. he introduced us to this new game - the world of munchkin. it's kind of like d'n'd with a lot less rules. it's fun! it won best game of the year recently.

we also went down to this kick-ass movie rental place, the film buff which sells scoops of ice cream AND is the kind of movie place where they organize the titles by director and country. love it! we rented "all the president's men" - we didn't finish cuz we were pooped and went to bed at 10pm but it's SO GOOD! i'll post a review when we finish.

tonight for dinner we had short pasta in a creamy squash (b-nut) sauce with roasted garlic and herbs (fried sage and fresh chopped parsley). it was really tasty and really easy to do. i'll post a recipe at a later date.

fin.

in praise of lamp light

everything looks better with lamp light! did i mention that unlike every other nice house on the block, we went NON neutral with our colour scheme? bye, sage green! bye, taupe! bye, mocha!

hello, sea-green/cucumber! hello vintage grape purple! hello, teal! hello, citron! the colours look fantastic in the light of day but much less so under the cold, intensely unflattering, blue-spectrum glare of the fluorescents we have in most of the rooms (we inherited them!!!) good god, blue spectrum fluorescents are THE WORST!

last week when i had lunch with my dad, that was one of his parting words of wisdom: GET RID OF FLUORESCENT LIGHTING. specifically, "god, you know! fluorescent lighting! it makes chinese people in particular look terrible. the yellow tone of the skin! GOD!" lol!

anyway, any time we have the lights on, it makes me want to scream and it makes me hate lil' ugmo. last night, we brought over some of our lamps...i plugged them in and IMMEDIATELY my "SELL THIS MONSTROSITY NOW!" impulse abated, ebbing into the warm pull of lamp light. WHY OH WHY do people love overhead lighting so much?!? lamps are way more fun! WAY more fun! so much more flattering!

also, if one more person asks us if we're getting pot lights, i'm going to vomit. who cares? why does everyone have such a big horny for pot lights? i don't get it.

so the citron wall is INTENSE. it is NOT JOKING AROUND. it is CITRON! at first i was freaking out about how we would work around it as a colour (ie. drapes, etc.) - but i've found some online inspiration - we can do navy or dark grey or hot pink - it's actually quite versatile:

this is from a wedding blog i stalk. it's a pretty sophisticated colour combo. i like the blue and the grey, but i think together it's a little severe.

i keep leaning towards this fabric for drapes for the master:

i know, it's pretty intense - but i kind of love it. the issue with this print is then the bedding - you'd want something fairly solid, with white. but i just bought some gorgeous sheet sets that are bright (the marimekko one) or super colourful (the pottery barn flower set).

this one is another option, if i want to tone it down a bit. or this:

but i keep being drawn towards the floral. we're going to do two layers - one set of sheers and one set of drapes hung on a double rod.

the dotytron is getting this for his studio drapes. his room is mostly blues, whites, and red - with a big teal wall.

i have the fabric already for the drapes in my craft room.

i'm the iffiest about the colour in the dining room. it ended up more blue than i wanted - really baby's room. kind of like this:

which is fine - and it even looks good with the white accents and teak furniture they have - similar to the buffet we're putting in there. but i wanted more this:

a little lighter - a little clearer with a bit more green in it. we'll see. i'm off all next week so if i get fed up enough, i must just go buck and paint over it while i've got the time.

i REALLY REALLY REALLY want these shelves for above the bed in the master:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i know they're for a kids room but good god! they're adorable! and will be perfect spaced out over the bed - i wonder if it's too juvenile? i think it'll add the right touch of whimsy and give us a spot to put pictures and prints. i effin' love these more than anything! anything!!! i want i want i want!

tonight H and that guy were total lambs and helped us give a second coat on the hallways and paint the trim on the doors and windows upstairs. wheee! now all we have to do is paint the baseboard, the master bedroom trim, the doors themselves, the window and door trim downstairs, and do some touch ups on the grey and our painting is mostly done. it sounds like a lot but it's not that bad.

we have SO much to do between now and moving day! how did this happen! for a while i thought we were doing so well staying on top of it. but now i feel like we have mountains of work to do and negative time to do it.

gadzooks, i say!

fin.

conferencing

i went to a conference today. it was okay. my chief concern was making sure that i ate enough - to that end, i spent $20 on food (nutella crepe, italian sausage, poutine, water). i also saw richie florida. he was the keynote speaker. i don't want to say he comes off a little greasy except i just did. also, i know nothing about him but i was kind of suspicious already (in the way that i'm always suspicious and mistrusting of anything i don't know about), so i was blathering to K, "what kind of credentials does he have anyway?" only to find out in the intro that he's taught at harvard, got his phd from columbia - you know, provincial colleges like that. lol! his talk was decent, but unsubstantiated by data, which he claims is in the book. now i'm going to have to read the book(s) so i can tear him a new a-hole with authority.

i also went to my first camp/unconference session...it was called WIREDcamp. it was all about how anyone who doesn't use social networking is a tool (that's their position, not mine) and how twitter is the be all and end all. i called someone a fascist. mainly for saying that use of social networking tools should be used as a base-level skill before hiring someone. i was like, ummmmm...how many of you know how to manipulate data effectively in an excel spreadsheet? and the rebuttal i got was that those skills were way more specific. how 'bout you come talk to me when oh, i don't know, INTELLECTUAL RIGOR, READING COMPREHENSION, AND THE CONCEPT OF COMPARABLE DATA becomes a base-level skill before hiring someone? how about that? you gotta crawl before you can walk, son.

i was like, you know why people hate you guys? because you act like freakin' social networking moonies. the discourse gets framed with a quasi-religious fervour that can be QUITE off-putting and alienating. also, SOCIAL NETWORKING IS ABOUT THE SOCIAL! there has to be a USE for it in your day to day work life. so yes, if you're in communications or running consultations or something, then i can see the use of it. but it shouldn't be mandatory for someone working in payroll or something - especially as it can't be demonstrated that for their WORK it's necessary or will make things easier. let people have fun on facebook on their time off, to chat with their friends. and another thing - it's one thing for twitter to exist, it's another thing to force our work flows to adapt to it for the SAKE of it. make the technology work for you, don't force your work into the technology.

also the discourse gets framed in a very antagonistic way and you know what? that's REALLY OFF-PUTTING. plus, it's hard to get into social networking for work when you work in a politically sensitive environment. social networking tools allow for the collapse between different subject positions that we assume in our lives - so work people can suddenly access stuff about me, whereas traditionally - those avenues were kept separate. at the same time, when you work in a professional environment, you have to MAINTAIN those subject positions concurrently - so you can't really be "you" if you link your job information to your profile.

i'm coming across as more negative than i actually am. i think this stuff is great, overall. wikis really helped my family plan our family vacay and it has cut down on the backlog of email convos when you're doing group projects at work. and twitter is fantastic in giving me a window into REAL TIME spats between lindsay lohan and samantha ronson. but i think the discourse is all-too-often really patronizing to people who don't use the stuff. like you HAVE to. it's a choice! remember choice? and "social networking tools" becomes this black box for a larger picture that's not being discussed - stuff like knowledge management and retention, like information management, like general media literacy. it should be part of a larger dialogue to make the base of skills in a workplace more well-rounded - so that i know how to use outlook effectively AND post on a wiki AND understand what it means to be flamebroiled on a messageboard for being an attention whore AND organize your blog reading list. it's all part of it. knowledge and information as a WHOLE, not solely through the lens of social networking tools.

[/rant]

we got rid of the dining set. yay! so all that leaves now is the bed. the bed isn't a deal-breaker - it's easy enough to take apart and move. so now we need a new dining table. i kind of want something that's expandable - as you all know, i love to entertain and frequently host large groups. i'd like it to comfortably seat 8, if at all possible. space is a bit of an issue. the easiest route for me to go would be mid-century danish style - but i don't want our whole house to be that and we already have a buffet in the dining room that's going to be like that.

really, i want something kind of rustic, solid wood, and rough hewn - maybe with industrial touches like metal legs. something like this:

from visitor parking.

from kiosk furniture and accessories.

i know we're talking tables, but these chairs (also from kiosk) are hot fiyah:



from design within reach.

but those are all at least 2 g's if not more. CRAZY! then you peep crate and barrel and you say, "damn sons...why you gotta be all sensible and shiz?" check out these beauties (on sale for $699! seats up to 8!):

terravida (new and reclaimed teak)

basque dining table (solid mango wood)

pacifica (solid teak)

drake extension table (less enamored with this guy, but it's the only one that's an extension table)

this one is a grand and a bit - but so nice! solid european white oak!

solid american walnut! over a grand, too (closer to 2).

the big sur - a little light coloured for my liking and also coming close to 2 grand.

the thing with the crate and barrel tables is that they're 99% all wood, whereas the super design-y king east ones are way more expensive AND they're particle board with veneer. so wack!

surprisingly, those school chairs i posted a while ago, are kind of cheap compared to regular dining chairs. adult sized ones average about $40 a chair and you know those mothers are built to last - plus they come in a wide range of colours. i like 'em.

okay that's enough outta me for one night.

fin.