I actually know his whereabouts - my amazing mum has taken him for two days and he is staying up in the 'burbs with her and Big D. My sis is coming up with her brood of hooligans Thursday night and she's going to watch the Big Yam up in the 'burbs on Friday. Yam was super-stoked. We were talking about it on Monday evening and he was all like, "I'm going to have a bath with Little Big Cuz, and Little Ze, and Miss Ramona..." all matter-of-fact and excited. Kids love group baths. Real talk.
This is the longest stretch that we've ever been without the Boobla and when we got back home after dropping him off we were already all like, "Aww, the house feels so weird without him" (it's a 20 minute drive from Markham to our house).
He's just been so amazing lately. Once we weaned him off the iPad (he developed an addiction during our vacation), he's just been so sweet. We lie in our bed with him in the morning and before his bedtime and read stories and he asks to be cozy and for cuddles and for tickles. He's really chilled out on the b***h slapping, which has been nice and he's cooled it a bit on the whining. He doesn't eat a tonne at dinner but he's not throwing his food on the floor any more. All of this is a healthy reminder to me that what they say about these challenging stages of parenting are true: it will pass. It does. It really does. I have a notoriously low threshold for inappropriate kid behaviour and so I tend to go straight to: "he's a sociopath" and it's a good reminder for me that you just have to ride it out a couple of months and you have a totally new kid on your hands.
There is a lot of nature and a lot of nurture in there. You can't convince me that so many things aren't culturally dependent. This whole, "boys will be boys" malarkey is nonsense (so far). Little Big Cuz loves light sabre battles and pretending to be Iron Man and Hulk-smashing things left, right, and centre. He has older siblings and they watch action-y cartoons and stuff, so that's what he's around and knows. By comparison, the Big Yam doesn't even know how to hold to a toy Nerf gun. He holds the one at my parents' house in both hands (like the way you would hold a pita sandwich) and points it up at the sky. Last night when we were hanging out before leaving he was doing that and kept asking for us to play with him with it. We were like, "what do you want us to do?" and he had no idea - just kept pointing it at the ceiling. I took him to the drop in centre on Tuesday and there was this slightly older kid just ahead of us walking the same way who was all like, "I'm a pirate! Grrr!" and waving a plastic spoon like a sword at us and being all rambunctious and pirate-y about life. The Big Yam like, never does that. Which is good. I can't handle that level of aggression. Like seriously kid, CALM DOWN. Now look, I'm saying this and I bet you one of the twerps is going to be all Randy Macho Man Savage and basically bite my ear off as soon as he comes screaming into this world.
Our family already has enough aggression, courtesy of me. The other night, I was musing about how much I hate Justin Timberlake when his stupid song "Mirrors" came on in the car. The Dotytron is all like, "You feel the same way about him as I feel about Kanye" at which point I LOST MY EVER-LOVIN' MIND and started screaming like a banshee. I am a known Kanye apologist, but here's the thing. Kanye is a sick producer. Also, the worst thing people can accuse Kanye of is being a bit of a clueless megalomaniac (but that's everyone!) and of being "mean" to Taylor Swift and saying that Beyoncé's video was better (which is TRUE). Also, Kanye West came out and said that George Bush hates black people, which is amazing. He's just so unguarded. Whereas Justin Timberlake is under the delusion that he's so funny, is super smug, makes boring music, AND had a video played at his wedding that made fun of homeless people. I hate him so much.
When we dropped off the Big Yam on Tuesday we took my mum for dinner at Restoran Malaysia, this awesome, awesome Malaysian restaurant in Richmond Hill. It is so so so good. They only do halal meat and don't serve alcohol but it's the best Malaysian food I've had outside of Hong Kong.
We started with the appetizer platter: balacan fish patties, spring rolls, beef and chicken satay, cucumber and a peanut and sweet chili dipping sauce.
Our mains: green curry chicken (incendiary), red curry beef (really spicy), roti for dipping, and a Singapore laksa. Not pictured: this seafood stirfry rice noodle dish with a thick egg sauce.
Technically, the food above was more than enough for the 3 of us and the Yam, but then I panic-ordered an extra dish (as is my wont). That laksa was sooo good. The Dotytron thought it was too fishy, but I think he's crazy. A fiery coconut rich broth with lemongrass, ginger and yes, fish/shrimp paste notes surrounding slices of fish cake and tofu and chewy yellow noodles, it was so comforting on a cold day and the perfect amount of lip-tingling heat. My other favorite dish was the rice noodle stir-fry. I love fat rice noodles and these were FAT. Like, 1" thick, with pieces of gailan and mushroom, squid and shrimp all bound in a lovely rich, thick, eggy sauce. So tasty. The Big Yam had one bite of the beef curry and his face crumpled in distress and he said it was "Hot!!!" so we gave him water. Did it stop him from eating more? No. He is the original Spice Girl. I think he just needed to get used to the level of heat. I hope the twerps turn out to be Spice Girls too.
Recently it has come to my attention that there isn't enough food in the world for me. This is distressing on multiple levels. I am hungry all the time. ALL THE TIME. Like a newborn, I'm hungry every two hours. You would think that I would be concerned at the fact that I'm gaining over a pound a week at this point and I still have nineteen weeks to go, but I am not. My new favorite pastime? Other than talking about my food cravings to my willing and enabling cohort, Dr. Rei? My new favorite pastime is walking away from the Dotytron and asking if it looks like I'm pregnant from behind. For some reason, this is VERY important to me. You have to pick your battles, I guess?
For some reason, I clicked on these photos of Gisele, with her 3 month old daughter, rocking the same carrier I have and a teeny tiny bikini:
For the record: that's EXACTLY what I look like 3 months post partum.
We are celebrating my mum's birthday and my little bro's belated birthday this weekend up in the 'burbs with the family. Tomorrow is my first visit with my OB and then I have a massage booked with my RMT. Bring the pain. Otherwise, it's a low-key weekend. Back to Chinese school after a three week hiatus (two weeks of which were break) and we're hosting the Roomie on Sunday for brunch and otherwise just chilling out.
I promise to not post excessively about gestating the twerps, but let me just say this: I HAVE EXPLODED. I AM HUGE. Huge! I don't know what happened, but somehow, I went from barely showing to being as big as I was when I was 7 months pregnant. It would be somewhat alarming, if I had room in my brain for things other than pasta carbonara and roasted leg of lamb. Fortunately, keeping hunger headaches at bay by constant grilled cheese sandwich consumption is relegating anxieties about my increasingly Barbapapa-esque likeness to the distant ether.
We had a fairly calm weekend. I had ladies night with the ladies on my street and we went to Lalibela for Ethiopian. I don't dislike Ethiopian food, but I'm not the biggest fan of it either. I absolutely loathe that they serve the injera lukewarm or outright cold. It's not enjoyable to scoop up warm vegetables and meat with stone-cold bread. It was overall a pretty meh experience, foodwise, but a wonderful experience, lady-neighbour bonding-wise.
We (and by "we" I mean "I") made dinner for Momma D last night which served the simultaneous goal of facilitating a visit AND allowing us to piggyback her cable so that we could watch the Oscar's red carpet. I made us roasted leg of lamb (marinated for a day and a half in rosemary, oregano, thyme, garlic, lemon zest, syrah, and olive oil), roasted tatties, a broccoflower mash, and a brussels sprouts and almond salad.
I also made us Momofuku milk bar chocolate cookies which we ate with little dishes of Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream from Ed's. Delicious!
We sold our stroller on the weekend. We bought it in 2010 (it's a 2009 model) from some lady who had it for a few months and kept it in pristine condition. I think we bought it for $540 (she paid $909). I sold it for $475, which means that we basically paid $70 to rent a $900 stroller for 3 years. Pretty solid ROI, if I do say so myself. Every time I sell something on Kijiji or Craigslist, after the transaction, the Dotytron and I always turn to each other and say, "easy money" like John Connor in Terminator 2. I always feel like I got away with something. It's weird, I know.
We also test drove our next one. The thing is a tank. There's no way around it when you're going for a tandem double. It's the City Select Baby Jogger. It comes with a single seat as a base but then you can buy the second seat and adapter to turn it into a double. I've seen quite a few people with twins with this stroller and I asked them about it. It's also got some great features - better than the Uppababy in some cases. You can lock the wheels so that they don't pivot, the brake is really smooth and accessible, and unlike a lot of the other doubles, you can buy two car seat adapters so you can use it when the bambinos are very wee. The seats are also super-configurable. They can face each other or you or any combination thereof. The Dotytron is gunning for us to buy this one new with a warranty, since this will likely (haha, j/k, MOST DEFINITELY) be the last stroller we'll ever buy. That being said, we'll probably also get a lightweight umbrella type stroller too, for travelling.
In other news: I feel like I've read A LOT lately. So many books! Here's a recap.
Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is beach reading for winter - immensely readable and disposable, but with a dark undertone. There were elements I wasn't a huge fan of: namely, the ending, but if I take a step back and don't get so emotional about it, I get what Flynn's overall goal was. This is a book told from the alternating points of view of a ne'er-do-well overgrown child of a husband, and his game, saintly wife. Wife goes missing and the chief suspect in her murder is the husband. What unfolds is a character study of a marriage that has ambitions towards a commentary on our true-crime/Nancy Grace obsessed culture but is at its best when it sticks to being a compulsively breezy novel about the ultimate unhealthy codependent relationship.
While the latest Jonathan Tropper book didn't ascend to quite the same heights as This is Where I Leave You, it was still a pretty good read about yet another sad sack man who doesn't have his life together. The tone of this one was still comic, but veered a bit more towards the melancholy (the protagonist, Silver, is dying, so yeah, I guess there's that). I like Tropper's balance between humor and sadness, and I also like that he delves into the male psyche within the framework of the sadsack loser, which is a perspective you don't get all that often.
I was looking for a few quick reads and wanted to get some some of the YA that's being turned into movies off my list (gotta stay ahead of the zeitgeist, don't ya know). I had read the first book in Ally Condie's Matched series a while ago (review here) and at the time, wasn't so taken with it that I wanted to continue. It's okay, as far as near-future dystopian YA goes. All the books kind of drag - there's a lack of action (it's like, diametrically opposed to The Hunger Games in that regard), and it centres the story around a kind of milque-toast heroine who is supposed to be relateable because she is inwardly steely though outwardly compliant and confused (as most teenagers are) and that steeliness has to be discovered over time. For a book where there's an entire overthrow of the ruling system, the pacing is plodding at best. Lots of internal here, not a lot of external. The world hasn't really been well-conceptualized. I might be experiencing anti-Mormon bias because I found out that the author went to Brigham Young University, which to me, based on my admittedly limited understanding is a fake university that churns out Mormons and probably doesn't teach evolution (or offer a science curricula). I keep looking for Mormon under/overtones.
This is my Academic Book Club's next pick. It is SERIOUS fiction (of the National Book Award-winning ilk) but because it is told from the perspective of a 13 year old boy, it avoided some of the trappings of high falutin' literary novels that I am lately not so into. The story is about the brutal rape of the boy's mother. The family is Native American and they live on a reservation in North Dakota. The events take place in the early 1980s. This is expertly written fiction. I read up on Erdich and she is (rightfully, I would say from my limited exposure) considered a forebearer of the Native American Renaissance movement in American arts. This book deftly weaves together politics, family relationships, mystery, and the coming-of-age of a boy. It's like Stand By Me but better. What I loved about this novel is that it again forced me to confront the gaping lacuna of my knowledge of reservation life and the experiences of Native Americans. It is unflinching in its portrayal of the realities of life but also provides a historical, social, and legal context that underpins these realities. The boy's father is a tribal judge with shades of Atticus Finch. One particular moment in the book, when the father uses a food metaphor to describe the tenuous, rotten foundations of reservation law, lingers with me still. It was punishingly good fiction. Fiction that makes literary fiction less unappealing to a low-brow reader like myself.
After the brutal violence of The Round House, I needed a break. So I turned to Where'd You Go, Bernadette? which was everything I wanted and needed it to be: funny, acerbic, entertaining, and a breeze. Bee is a gifted, precocious teen with an eccentric mum and a Microsoft whiz of a dad, going to a private school in Seattle. Through email exchanges between characters interspersed with Bee's own musings, you get this cutting look at liberal, wealthy west-coast-isms and the times we live in, wrapped around the story of the sudden disappearance of Bee's mother, Bernadette. It sends up all kinds of things that I love to see sent up: helicopter parents, the privileged, the west coast and its polar-fleece-swathed-elitism-masquerading-as-populism, gifted kids. Bernadette is my kind of mum. Pettiness born out of thwarted creativity, dismissive of small-minded people, eccentric, and a passionate champion of her daughter. This was a fantastic novel.
The last few nights' dinners have been good, but I'm too busy shovelling food into my gaping maw to take photos.
Monday we had a seafood chowder with croutons (I love love love croutons in a chowder) and salad. Last night we had cheese tortellini tossed with pesto and blanched broccoli and more salad.
- I excel at making obscure, Vanity Fair-themed jokes (the magazine, not the Thackeray novel). There isn't a Dominic Dunne or Gore Vidal bon mot I won't drop!
The Dotytron and I had an epic conversation (after our CD of tunes from Les Misérables, West Side Story, and Wicked had cycled through) on the drive down to visit my sis about our end-of-life wishes, based on me reading that Get Your Shit Together website's recommendations. Just talking about what constitutes life, or a quality of life, or consciousness and at what point the other person should make the decision to pull the plug. It is probably a sign of my inherent selfishness (and issues with mortality) that I insisted that if I was in a persistent vegetative state that I be kept alive for one year to see if I come out of it. The Dotytron is way more selfless - he's concerned about the impact on his loved ones - like what a burden it would be for me to have to visit him all the time and have him be a husk of a person. I don't know though - the Chinese way is to approach things with the sense that becoming a burden on your loved ones is kind of expected and that your loved ones should like, grovel for the opportunity to wait on you hand and foot and inconvenience themselves for you. I'm just living up to my culture, man. Then the Dotytron veered into "2nd partner" territory, as in: it would be weird for him and his future replacement-Lagerfeld to have me in their house, hooked up to breathing tubes and whatnot and I was all like, why would you want to be with someone who wasn't okay with you caring for the husk of your first partner? It would be SO LIKE the Dotytron to end up with someone who was all stereotypical evil stepmother/2nd wife syndrome.
His high school girlfriend (who was in my art classes all through high school) made herself a homemade Tori Amos t-shirt that was plain white with the words, "what's so amazing about really deep thoughts?" hand written across the front.
CASE CLOSED.
Speaking of Tori Amos, I'm hosting Academic Book Club tonight. There has been a feverish amount of tidying going on at Lil' Ugmo. The Tori Amos segue is apt because one of the book club members, my dear strident feminist out-of-touch-with-popular-culture friend J, talked about going to a Tori Amos concert (like, recently! In 2012!!!) at a meeting and I was all slack-jawed and gaped at her like she was a centaur or something. Like, I can't believe reasonable people would go to a Tori Amos concert to watch an old lady with brittle hair thrash around and hump a piano bench. But to each their own!
Anyway, I'm putting out a spread consisting of red wine, sparkling, flat, grapes, clementines, a green pea and pecorino dip, a goat's gouda (my current favorite cheese - it reminds me of the young pecorinos you get everywhere in Florence), an old Dutch beemster that is so loaded with those Parmesano Reggiano crystalline umami-bombs that I salivate just looking at it, and Le Riopelle, a triple cream cow's milk cheese from Quebec; some gluten free crackers, some bread, some baby carrots, and I made bittersweet chocolate budinos with salted caramel and chocolate crumbs, along with gluten free peanut butter cookies. I have a hosting reputation to uphold and since this is likely the last time I'll be up for hosting book club until, say, 2020, then I want to go out in a blaze of glory. Call me young gun.
Sometime between posting that post on Monday and today, my stomach/metabolism has waged an all-out war on my protestations of "not being that hungry." I'm getting hunger headaches every 2 hours. At first, I thought it was just a return-to-desk-job-after-a-weekend-in-Geneseo headache but then I realized that it went away when I ate. So even though I don't feel hungry, my body is HUNGRY. Like, this is me:
I can't tell you how much it amuses me endlessly the degree to which and the sincerity with which Dr. Rei can rhapsodise about this song - her "favorite duet of all time"
By the way, I countered that by saying that one of my favorite duets might be "Islands in the Stream."
Anyway, even the "not feeling hungry" seems to be going away and today I was hungry and thirsty ALL THE TIME. Even though I regularly drink TWO LITRES OF WATER A DAY. But my blood volume is supposed to increase by 100%. What the f**k are those two little twerps doing to me? It's super-hard to satisfy hunger healthfully. Like, I don't know how marathon runners or professional athletes do it. My colleagues at work today were talking about cholesterol and I got all freaked out and I changed my McDonald's order from my big mac combo/filet-o-fish chaser to a filet-o-fish combo/filet-o-fish chaser. This is after I spent about half an hour figuring out which McDonald's versus Popeye's combo variation was less likely to kill me. I swear, I would learn advanced Excel just to build a model that would allow me to figure this kind of stuff out (2 pieces or 3? Biscuit or mashed potatoes? Eat half the biscuit and get an extra piece of chicken? Diet soda?!?!) Maybe I should build an app for this. I could call it "Hungry Pigs."
This stupid multiples book I was reading (last one! I'm through!) had all these lamewad recipes at the back for "mini meatloaves" and fish burgers made with tinned salmon (barf). My forays into Roseanne territory aside, I really do feel like the meals we cook at home are generally healthy and balanced. Surely I'm killing it on variety alone? I made myself an egg white and spinach and cheese omelet the other morning for breakfast. It was very virtuous but the flavour and satisfaction derived from eating it was inversely related to the degree of virtue. Egg whites are the grossest. I mean, I like me a Swiss meringue buttercream and a lemon meringue pie and an île flottante, hard. But ALL of those dishes find a way to cleverly sneak in some yolk goodness. Last night we had clam linguine with a tonne of garlic and some baby heirloom hothouse tomatoes thrown in and it was DELICIOUS. I love me a linguine alle vongole so hard.
The bottom line is: don't be surprised if this little space devolves into me talking about what I want to eat (more than usual).
The Big Yam has reached a fun, fun, fun milestone: reading stories out loud to himself. I feel like it's a G-D miracle. He carries around The Very Hungry Caterpillar and reads out loud and counts out the foods and it's THE BEST! He's always pestering me in the mornings and the both of us at night to read stories and trying to get more stories out of us and it's really, really hard to say no and stick to a firm bedtime. How can I say no to a nascent love of reading?
The Dotytron had an assignment for his grade 6 students who are on the cusp of actually getting to play their band instruments. He's been gradually working up to it. The lead-up assignment was for them to research their instrument and to report back on stuff like: how to make a good tone, how your mouth should be, notable players of that instrument, etc. He had one person come back and report on the flute. The notable flutist was...
Alyssa Milano.
LOL!!! Kids rule. The kid also noted that "Alyssa Milano also plays the piano."
As an aside: I was reading up on Syria today. Ugh. Not good.
I'm trying not to let on too much, but having two twerps is freaking me out. I just feel like it increases the odds that something bad is going to happen...like the very fact that there's two twerps is tempting the fates. I know there's nothing I can do about it and it's one of those "come what may" scenarios but I just have this low-grade nervousness. It's partially hypochondria and partially being a worrier and partially having lived with a midwife for 4 years and partially reading too much about odds and statistics and having a shaky grasp of grade 11 finite math (which I somehow got an A in by the skin of my teeth, with the weird side effect of retaining nothing from that class. I blame this on Dr. B, our teacher, who was so old and doddering he smelled like he was rotting from the inside out).
Feeling the slog lately, folks. Not much to report, still reading the same book, doing the same things, just the daily grind as it were. Yesterday was a bit of a rough day. I basically turned into a fat little weirdo and went to town eating the most DISGUSTING things, all spurred by an incredibly salty pseudo-Thai food lunch. This resulted in scrapping last night's planned dinner (baked eggplant) in favour of hot dogs and KD (also salty). Then I went to town and destroyed three quarters of a bag of dill pickle chips (also salty) and then ate a giant slice of that chocolate cake washed down with a cold, icy glass of milk. I was sooooo thirsty all night. It was the worst and basically wasn't worth it. The Dotytron downloaded Deadwood and we've been watching it but I kinda hate it because everyone on the show is like, super ugly and grimy and dirty and unattractive all the time and I don't have the patience for that kind of wild west realism. So I've spent the last few nights complaining mightily and then passing out in a pool of my own spit on the couch and then turning into mad dog when the Dotytron wakes me up to go upstairs to bed and throwing a million punches and thrashing around like a tantrum having toddler. It's super-fun for my partner-in-residence, let me assure you. The Big Yam, aside from weirdly deciding to go on strike from one of his two chores (feeding the cats - the other chore is setting the table), has been super-fun after dinner and we've been spending time coloring and then singing along to him playing the harmonica. He's so cute. He requests "Home Range" and "Blackbird" and what he calls the "Fish Song" (this one) all the time. Here's a video of him playing the harmonica:
I love this kind of family time. I love the energy in our house when this stuff is happening. I know I'm going to look back on these videos and remember how happy and content and warm and cozy the house was with the Dotytron playing his guitar and the Big Yam discovering music. When the post-dinner before-bed goes well, it's magic I tells you. My only wish is that the Big Yam was a bit better with independent play - the ideal scenario is the Dotytron playing guitar and me reading or knitting and the Big Yam absorbed in his own activities (quietly). It would be nice to get that some days. But I get why he's so into being with us and having our attention after 10 hours spent at daycare (or "work" as he calls it). In recent weeks after reading something that clued me in to how he must be feeling at the end of the day, I've relaxed a bit on the rigidity of having the Dotytron start dinner as soon as he gets in the door. Having even 10 or 15 minutes of focused, parental play time is all the Big Yam needs to recalibrate and I find it does ease our transition into dinner and then the night. There's less of a fight this way and it's not so harried. Everything can wait.
We've been really good about using the slow cooker and capitalizing on quick meals to get us through the weeknights and it's paying off in spades. Tonight we had that baked eggplant with an arugula salad on the side. SHAME: I just realized I've been spelling "arugula" wrong for YEARS. It doesn't help that spell-check for some reason doesn't recognize the correct spelling. DON'T UNDERMINE ME, SPELL CHECK. THAT'S A B***H-A** MOVE. Fin.
It's been swell. I feel like the last weeks of summer kind of slipped us by. Since coming back from the cottage it's been just non-stop getting the house unpacked and in order and a million trips to Ikea and going to town with a microfibre cloth on the new hardwood. The Dotytron is a psychopath. As soon as I get something new, I'm very meh if it gets thrashed. I'm of the school of thought that furniture should be used and part of your life. The Dotytron is the EXACT opposite and is losing his mind with, well, just about everything. We got these new acrylic side tables and he freaks out when there's a smudge or a smear (note to all you furniture buyers: DO NOT buy clear acrylic anything if you have issues with smudges), claiming that any dirt on them makes us look like we live in "an 80s coke house" (he's not entirely wrong, there). He basically chases us all around with one of those hardwood microfibre mops and a bottle of the spray cleaner. I'm anticipating that as school starts to take more of his attention, that will wane and we'll go back to the "immaculate for company" style of housekeeping we usually favor. This morning was a return to the yearly rhythms and schedule and I for one, while we had a glorious summer, welcome it. We were in bed by 10 and up just before 6am and it was a well-oiled machine around these parts. The Big Yam and I got to J's house, EARLY, even! It was just nice to be organized and stress-free and normal again. And while I am stressing hard about knitting a million hats and mitts for the Boobla and gathering all the supplies for our Halloween costumes, I do love fall. I'm excited to hunker down and not be out and about and have more intimate dinners at home with people as opposed to all the high-concept outings we do in the summer. So I asked the Big Yam who he loves and without missing a nanosecond of a beat, he said, "Net" (what he call's J). Hahaha. So funny! On Sunday morning, I made us this for breakfast:
Basically, breakfast tostadas featuring those delicious, thick, corn tortillas from La Tortilleria in Kensington, some casing-less chorizo (also from Kensington - Segovia's), sautéed up and home made refried black beans, a poached egg, some crema, chunks of avocado and some of the green salsa from La Tortilleria. The big people got two per plate and the Big Yam got one. A pretty big portion all around relative to our respective sizes. So of course, being the speed-eater that I am, I hoovered my portion in like, 5 minutes. The Dotyron took about 10. The Big Yam wasn't feeling it at first. He just kind of ate the beans and was more interested in drinking water. He seemed content to sit there, though, so we left him and hung pictures. Over the course of about an hour, he quietly and diligently polished off his plate. Which included eating a poached egg which isn't generally his favorite egg preparation. This made us realize that we need to GIVE THE LAD TIME (and also, slow down eating ourselves). What we think of as being "snoopy" (which is a term from the Dotytron family for being a picky eater), is usually probably us just rushing him through his meal. If he has time to sit and consider and work at his own pace, he'll eat everything. A valuable lesson for all! He's kind of the best right now. I really enjoyed our walk to daycare this morning because he's talking so much and pointing stuff out and it's just thrilling watching him grown into his sentience. He's getting pretty good with his letter recognition, too. If we're reading a book or magazine he'll point out the letters he knows from the larger print. We also haven't had to deal with diaper deuces in like, forever. At least 3 months or so. He just tells us he has to go do a poop in the potty and like, DOES it. I'm telling you, early potty training is where it's at. I can't say enough good things about it. The sooner we can get this kid out of diapers, the better, as far as I'm concerned!
The weekend was so damn good - we did it up in style. Friday we had our last swim at Lolly's. Saturday was our last swim in the outdoor pool in our park before they closed it up. Sunday we hung with our Discerning Coyote friend and JJ and S and their kids in the park before taking DC to Phoenix for his inaugural HK Style Cafe experience. He's a big eater so it was nice to show him what we love about that kind of food. Yesterday we went to Ward's Island for a picnic with S and P and some of their friends. I loves me some Ward's Island, hard. Yes, it's filled with hipsters who all have banging bodies and make you feel like hell for ordering mad Dairy Queen...but it's so nice to have a sand beach in Toronto. I love living close to the beach! I love having multiple beach options so accessible! It feels like a bit more of an outing to pack up to the Island.
One of these people isn't thrilled about being part of this family.
All in all, it was a great wait to bid adieu to summer.
Tonight we had a tomato-basil tart with a salad of roasted peaches wrapped in proscuitto, arugala, and parmesan with balsamic vinaigrette. Here's a video of the Big Yam doing his extra consonant thing at the end of words:
Toast-s-s
Bonus video of him saying "Chewbacca" on his Tumblr. Fin.
i weighed myself today. scales are NOT my friend right now. but i'm not going to dwell on the negative. instead, here are some grown-up book reviews for you peeps who are tired of the YA focus of the last batch.
"lucy" by laurence gonzales, reads like a more human-centred michael crichton novel. it's about an primatologist who discovers an abandoned girl in the congo named lucy, who turns out to be a human-bonobo hybrid. attempts to integrate lucy are successful before her true genetics comes to light and then she becomes a pawn in a political/religious war - people want to destroy her because she's an abomination and people want to save her because for all intents and purposes, she's mostly human. the novel moves along at a pretty quick clip but ultimately it's unsatisfying - more of a pot-boiler piece of airport fiction than something that really gets into the meat of what it means to be human, etc. it was an entertaining enough read but i didn't love it - good for the cottage, and good for something you could pick up and put down again. there wasn't anything to the writing style that would elevate it above other similar science-thriller type works.
aimee bender's "the particular sadness of lemon cake" is about a young girl who wakes up and realizes one day that she can taste her mother's emotions in her cooking. now, when i say that, i know where your mind goes. you're thinking "like water for chocolate" or "eat drink man woman" or "chocolat" - some kind of magic realist fantasy of love lost, regained, family relationships, etc.
well...this book kind of subverts all those expectations. there's definitely a magic realist element to it and at its core, the book is about family relationships, but bender's treatment of the material is fresh, unsettling, and mysterious. the entire book is suffused with sadness and repression - the repression of a self-absorbed housewife mother, the repression of a taciturn father, a genius brother who becomes more and more remote with each passing year, and the central figure's attempts to repress her ability to taste feelings by seeking refuge in the most generic, mass-produced industrial food available. the writing has that slightly detached quality that's a hallmark of literary-type books.
but i'm not being completely honest here. i'm dancing around a certain issue because to this day, i still find it one of the weirdest things i've ever experienced in a novel. the ending is SOMETHING ELSE. i was shell-shocked by the end. completely gobsmacked by what happens to the point where i had to unburden myself to the dotytron who was completely ignorant of the rest of the plot but could still muster an appropriately "wtf?!?" reaction to my recounting of the closing scenes. the book goes someplace very, very weird and very, very sad, and that's all i can say without giving away the whole thing. i'd be interested to know if any of my readers pick it up, what they think of the way the book closes.
"the imperfectionists" by canadian born, london based author tom rachman, has generated a lot of buzz this past summer as one of the "must-read" books of the summer. it was also recently optioned by brad pitt's production company to be made into a film, which added to the hype that saw this volume of interrelated short stories on many a reputable "best of summer" reading list. the stories follow the various characters (copy editors, executive editors, foreign correspondents) working for an english-language newspaper based in rome, that shares the same dire circumstances as print newspapers everywhere. some of the stories are sad, some are funny, all are little character studies about the motivations and foibles and personal lives of the staff. it was a good, entertaining read, but nothing that lingers with you long after - i really enjoyed it though.
"loving frank" is nancy horan's account of the affair between frank lloyd wright and mamah borthwick - one that saw borthwick abandon her husband and two young children and mired the architect in scandal and all but destroyed his commissions in the united states for a time. this was the most recent selection from my academic book club. the book is really well researched - horan's background is in journalism - and it makes the interior lives of the characters really come to life. frank lloyd wright comes off as a bit of a preening, egotistical a** and borthwick's early feminist struggles are interesting. she starts off in the suffrage movement but her choice to pursue a life of self-fulfillment and love with wright, at the cost of her marriage and her relationship with her children, is really interesting and sparked a lot of discussion amongst the book club ladies.
there was a lot of censure of borthwick's selfishness - at her ability to cause pain to her children by essentially abandoning them for 3 years to flit around europe with wright. i sided with her choice and was in the minority - ultimately, i thought it was more damaging for her to stay locked in this half-life of dutiful wife and depressed mother than for her to self-actualize in some way and emancipate herself from the restrictive mores of american society at the time. this was a thoroughly engaging read - and the situation of the story in real-life events makes it all the more fascinating. i'd recommend it.
"mr. peanut" by adam ross, begins with the line, “when david pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. ee dreamed convenient acts of god.” (funny note: when typing that out - i accidentally typed "acts of cod" instead of "acts of god" - i think i might have made a major improvement to the work - someone hire me to be an editor!) this book is the story of 3 marriages, david pepin's marriage, and the marriages of the 2 cops who are brought in to investigate the suspicious death of pepin's wife. it's a bit of a mish-mash of a novel - the three narratives never really come together and there's a strange structural plot device that is hinted at with the author and pepin's fixation with mobius strips and m.c. esher, but ultimately the circuitous looping of the meta-narrative undermines ross' true gift - at detailing the long, hard struggle of marriage - of what happens when 2 people commit to throwing in their lot together for life: the gradual sloughing off of intensity, the endurance, the million little ways that the comfort of the familiar wears away your gratitude - how people start to take things for granted and how your partner can become invisible to you as a person. that's where the true meat of the story are - but i feel the author sacrifices this in favour of this weird murder-mystery thing and spends way too much time dividing the readers attention between all 3 marriages - leaving all but one of them unresolved. i'd still recommend it - it's a good read, but not without its' faults.
we were so good tonight! came home, hung out. went to see our friend bobes play with corin raymond at their weekly at the cameron house. i was making the dotytron crack up with my (semi-false) outrage at having to put money in the musician's tip jar - made all the more galling by the fact that i had already paid for a beer for my partner AND we weren't really in it to see the band, but to meet up with bobes. of course i ponied up in the end, i was only half-joking - i actually don't mind raymond's music - it's kind of like appalachian folk - but the stories are rooted in a canadian prairie context. then we went with bobes to ghandi's rotis for some good indian roti business. based on this article that revealed that the sag paneer roti has almost 1500 calories and over 70 grams of fat, i exercised a modicum of restraint and only ate half of my roti.
when i say "modicum of restrain" i mean a very miniscule modicum - a modicum modicum. during the day my work had a going away party for a colleague and i WENT TO TOWN. two giant pieces of slab cake and so many bite sized treats. i felt awful afterwards, which is the only reason i could exercise that modicum modicum of restraint at ghandi's.
we dropped bobes off so that he could set up for his second set and then were home by 10:15pm. a very civilized evening. we got to get out, hear some music, eat some food, see a friend, and still be home by bedtime. there's hope for us yet!
tomorrow we're having dinner with the dotytron's family for poppa d's birthday at joy bistro. i've been poring over the menu in anticipation - full review to come.
our friends H & A were in town from cleveland and stayed with us last night. we were the last stop before they headed back to the cleve on their whirlwind vacation to new england. it's always so good to see them. they're exactly like us! two total nerds who love food and eating and most of the same things we like. the best! we took them to this place, hanoi 3 seasons which does quasi-upscale vietnamese food. H is my mum's old friend J's son, and he owns a few japanese restaurants in cleveland and he's a total foodie - his first pick is always asian food, too. we followed that up with ice cream at ed's real scoop. so good.
as my belly gets bigger (seriously guys, i'm a whale of a tale right now) i'm realizing i can actually eat less than i would normally. when i get full i get REALLY full - like it feels like my stomach is a super-taut drum skin stretched way too tight. it's very uncomfortable.
i did a wack load of grocery shopping and stocked up on fruits and veggies and planned super-healthy meals for this week but i'm being hijacked at every turn. my cottage diet of cheetos and lipton's noodle and sauce and dessert every night in anticipation of a gestational diabetes diagnosis that thankfully never came has come to an end, thankfully. eating super-rich, super-meat-heavy meals takes a lot out of you. eggs and bacon and sausage and weekend brunch type breakfasts every day get a little wearing. i'm craving salads and freshness and a resumption of my life cereal with raspberries for breakkie and fruit for a treat with saugeen country yoghurt.
the gestational diabetes test is a bit of a mind-f**k. you fast overnight and then they take your fasting blood and make you drink this super sugary drink and then test your blood 1 hour and then 2 hours after to see how your body is processing the sugar. the drink was totally over-hyped by people i talked to. ladies were like, "i felt like vomiting, it was so sweet" etc., etc., but it's really a small amount of liquid (way less than 500ml) and they serve it to you chilled and it's carbonated. it tastes like orange fanta - i'd say it's even less sweet than orange crush at the end of the day.
i got my results back and i'm in the clear. which is nice. it doesn't mean i'm going to let up on my pre-cottage eating habits - i'm still cutting out juice and drinking big glasses of milk instead and avoiding white foods but it's nice knowing that ed's real scoop is still a viable post-dinner constitutional destination for the remainder of the summer.
the problem is: this week is mental! last night we went out for food (yummy, healthy, clean-tasting vietnamese food, but still). today for lunch we took my colleague G out for a swiss chalet group lunch as it's her last week of work before mat leave. friday night momma and poppa d are hosting us for a belated birthday dinner. friday lunch dr. rei is INSISTING on taking me out for a pusateri's meal. saturday we're having brunch at our friends' S & P's place and sunday night is our supper club.
how am i supposed to combat those forces!?! i'm definitely hitting up the lane swim tonight and since i ate a 1/4 chicken dinner with a heap of fries i'm going to eat fruit and nuts and yoghurt for "dinner" tonight and try to avoid eating two giant meals in a day. this means that upon the dotytron's return home he'll turn to me and ask "what's for dinner" and i'll explain that i'm not making dinner tonight and why and then his FIRST DEFAULT INSTINCT will be to get takeout instead of taking the TONNES OF TONNES OF RAW MATERIALS IN OUR FRIDGE AND TURNING THEM INTO A MEAL FOR HIMSELF. that's his signature move. then i yell at him (that's MY signature move) and then he'll sulkily make himself like, the worst meal ever (like peanut butter on bread with cottage cheese) and eat that.
have i told you already (forgive me, but i write here ALOT and sometimes i plumb forget if i've regaled your with stories before, mmmkay?) about how i've been having mad anxiety about what little time will be available to me in the weeks after the fatburger is born and how i'm worried that he's going to be colicky and that i'll be up all night and not getting enough sleep but STILL wanting with every fiber of my type A being to maintain the same standards of living that i prided myself in prior to ejecting a little squirming babe and that i'm expecting the dotytron to pick up the slack on house cleaning and meal cooking? and that to that end i've been quizzing him on how to make food because pretty much ever since i stopped being a cook and started being a librarian, i've been doing the cooking because 8-5 jobs are conducive to you living our your passions like that. so i've been doing stuff like ambushing him with: "TELL ME STEP BY STEP HOW YOU MAKE PASTA CARBONARA" and then screaming my head off when he doesn't do things in the right sequence or neglects to TELL me that he's going to reserve some of the pasta cooking water to loosen a gummy tacky sauce?
speaking of that, i actually haven't given him the treatment in a while. i should. i think it's important for our child to see that both parents share in domestic duties and that it's not like the mum is the ONLY one responsible for putting out salsa in little serving dishes and shaking the tortilla chips into bowls and the pops is the ONLY one responsible for doing anything related to the grill and leaning on hamburgers with a bbq spatula and squeezing out all the juice *shudders* in our house though, the pops IS the only one responsible for un-chonging the toilet because as we all know, poo (and chinotto) is my nemesis.
zomg! a zillion different things going on and trying to schedule a zillion different things in the too-limited time we have left this summer. oy oy oy! my to-do list and to-see list is mega!
*deep breath*
first things first, the dotytron just might very well have a job in the TORONTO DISTRICT MOTHER-EFFIN' SCHOOL BOARD, A-HOLES! wooooooooooooo!!! it's only a 0.5 but that's still so so so good! so now he's trying to see if he can do that in the afternoon and keep his private school gig teaching music in the mornings. but worse comes to worse, the principal said that he can usually pick up supply teaching mornings in the school where his contract would be. wa wa wee wa!
i had an epic phone convo with dr. rei at lunch just trying to figure everything out for this summer into september. we got so much going on this summer! heck, we got so much going on THIS WEEK! pingy is still in town so we want to have a night in with her and then our friend A comes into town from his sojourns in NYC doing his masters in music composition and he's playing some shows that we should see and also just see him and catch up. dr. rei is itching to have us over for dinner so we're trying to fit that in somewheres. we're having AYCE sushi with goosetang & lolly on friday night followed up with a viewing of "eclipse", on saturday we're having going to see a wu-tang documentary with the kdubsguelph crew and then a picnic in high park, and on sunday our supper club was supposed to meet but i think we have to cut that out in favour of going to lounge in hanbo's parents' pool. the dotytron's parents are also trying to have us over to clean out their basement. phew! it's exhausting/exhilarating/gratifying having so many good peoples in our lives. we're such lucky pigs.
and to re-cap: so much sun this weekend! this was probably the first weekend where i felt impeded by being a vessel for the fatburger. the combination of the sun, playing outfield during kick/whiffle ball, and the squirmy bean meant that i got yelled at alot by s-dawg for doing a bad job playing outfield. basically he just sits there and screams "LAGERFELD!!!! JESUS F**KING CHRIST!!!! YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!!?" while i half-heartedly tried to chase the kickball into the outfield.
on friday i went shopping with the roomie and our montreal friend I. we hit my favorite grocery store clothes, joe, AND winners where i managed to snag some suitably bump-friendly clothing that should take me into fall. i got a dress, 2 pairs of leggings, 1 blouse, and 3 button down shirts for about $125. pretty good, overall, i'd say. on the way up to markham for the big grandparents' s**tshow i was driving and the dotytron and i were singing in the car. we basically only sing extreme's "more than words" but last summer, when we were practicing our vows and taking all those road trips to geneseo, i seem to remember us having more in our repertoire. so the dotytron was like, "don't we sing any other songs?" and as a joke, i was like, "yeah, don't you remember how we used to harmonize to 'anna is a speed freak'?" which got a round of LOLs. in case you forgot the early 90s, "anna is a speed freak" goes like this:
ahahahhaahahahaha!!! then we flipped through the radio and the dotytron was like, "all i want to hear is 'runaway train' right now" and seriously made a concerted effort to find a call-in request show so that he could request it. we were close with 97.3fm, but i forgot the last digit of the phone number so that was a bit of a fail. in the end we dredged up the lyrics from our respective drug-addled youths and managed to cobble together a pretty solid rendition.
saturday we went for AYCE japanese and managed to break free from the loafing forces of suburbia to wrangle everyone downtown to the beach. it was LOVELY. although i have to say, the toronto beaches is a big, ol' cocktease. YOU CAN'T GO IN THE WATER?!?!! we laid out in the sun and then my sis and i took the kids to the donald d. summerville public pool, which is right at the beach. it's pretty awesome. it has an olympic sized swimming pool, a kiddie pool, AND a diving pool all in the same complex. we followed that up with the kids getting nice and sandy and the boys going to challenge some super-asians to a series of beach volleyball games that they lost.
we also made an important discovery - THERE IS SOMEONE WHO SELLS FUNNEL CAKES AT THE BEACHES! FOR LESS THAN WHAT YOU PAY AT WONDERLAND. this was a BIG deal! this means that i'm a 5 minute bike ride away from funnel cakes ALL SUMMER LONG.
we posseyed up and then headed to big mouth kee for a textbook big d's big day at big mouth kee meal. s-dawg had this plan to see the UFC fight at bo-pie with some friends. the outlaw bro, chova and the dotytron were obviously in for drinking and carousing so they went. this is how my sister and i watch UFC fights. we show up at bo-pie. order 2 glasses of water. order a brownie sunday and their chocolate explosion. eat dessert. leave before the fight begins. rent "valentine's day." i can't comment on the movie because i basically passed out from BOREDOM to the sounds of my sister complaining about how they can't write a decent romantic comedy any more and how implausible EVERY SINGLE PLOT POINT was and how shrill all the female characters are. good times. i will say that the fatburger was going BUCK during the UFC pre-fight stuff. i think he wanted to fight his in utero cousin.
on sunday me, my mum, and my sis went to this nearby nail place to get a pedicure. guys, i was BRUTALISED at that session. i'm not kidding you. the lady was ROUGH with me. doesn't she know that pedis are supposed to feel GOOD?! she had false nails and so she kept pinching the flesh on each toe between her talons and she made me bleed when she was working my cuticles. alls i gotta say is: if i end up with a staph infection or find out that i was paula abdul'ed , kathy's nails, i'm coming for ya.
we then met up with my grandparents at dim sum brunch at chili secrets. whereby my grandma dropped the BIG BOMB that she dislikes the dotytron? basically my grandpa was ribbing chova about why he and his ex gf broke up. then grandpa said that they didn't really seem compatible. then i asked out loud, somewhat rhetorically, "are the dotytron and i suited?" and my grandma, totally frowned, and shook her head, "no"!!!!! i was like, DID ANYONE JUST SEE THAT?!!!??? my grandma is like, evil incarnate so i'm not taking it seriously, but dayum. p.s. the dotytron was sitting right there. awwww, poor dotytron!
we fought the MSG AGAIN and managed to take the kids to a splash pad in this fairly awesome-for-suburbia park in richmond hill which had a playground, a splash pad, a basketball court, and like, 2 soccer fields. it was pretty fun, even if it was a little dirty. i don't think suburbanites understand that you're supposed to PUT GARBAGE IN THE GARBAGE RECEPTACLES PROVIDED. it's like a mystery to them or something. they probably expect their nannies to do the cleaning up. the next time i'm going to call the town of markham and complain just before we go up so it's all tidy. the kids had a good time and when my niece started whinging we set up a game of my sis, s-dawg and myself versus team whitey (outlaw bro and dotytron) at kickball/whiffle ball (we alternated innings). it was pretty hilarious and fun. mostly because we were using my niece's skipping rope to mark third base and when she asked to use it to go skipping WE WOULDN'T LET HER. lol!!!
so she threw a fuss and didn't want to play and basically sulked and cried for like 20 minutes. when she had calmed down she then asked to join our team when we were up at bat, WE WOULDN'T LET HER. we told her to that she COULDN'T JOIN THE BATTING ORDER MID-INNING and would be able to join once we flipped to playing outfield. LOL!!! i keep thinking about how those two events would go over with the super-research-y and super-liberal parenting types i know and i can already hear them calling CAS on us. lol!!!
after being a giant piggerton all weekend, i resumed regular low/good carb eating today. for dinner we had a salmon, corn & bacon chowder with a spinach salad with strawberries, toasted salted pumpkin seeds, and red peppers in a lime-honey dressing.
i also did the lane swim thing. things the dotytron likes about my swimming attire: i wear pretty skimpy bikinis, almost exclusively. things the dotytron DOESN'T like about my swimming attire: i top said bikinis with a speedo swimming cap which is probably too small AND mistakenly purchased CHILD-SIZED speedo swimming goggles (also too small) so it's party on the bottom and immigrant aquaman on top. pure sex.
1) why am i so obsessed with teen love?!? like, shouldn't i be way past the point of re-reading the scene in the e. lockhart ruby oliver books where the protagonist, ruby oliver, finally kisses her crush object, noel duboise, after a series of high school emotionally overblown, ramped up dramas? i'm an old lady! why do i get that giddy rush of hormonal, wacked-out impulsive bliss at reading a FICTIONAL kissing scene?!? how do i even have ACCESS to that emotional state anymore? isn't that the domain of teenagers and teenagers only and never a 30-something year old shall pass?!? why am i contemplating re-watching "veronica mars" season 1 again to rejoice in THE BEST TEENAGE KISSING SCENE OF ALL TIME?!? am i messed? how am i ready to potentially be a parent? how far am i away from being THIS:
and before you too-quickly leap to the defense of my inner-teenager, in the interests of full disclosure i should be truthful and tell you that i just added denim cut-off shorts to my "must-buy" list:
notwithstanding the fact that my legs are WAY thicker and stumpier than that gamine model's - WHO WANTS TO SEE A FAT, WADDLING, PREGGOS LADY IN DENIM CUT-OFFS AND A SUPER-THIN, GAUZY, AMERICAN APPAREL T?!??!
also, I REMEMBER WHAT HIGH SCHOOL WAS LIKE (kinda.) it was messy. lots of upheaval and social anxieties and situations rife with potential earth-swallowing humiliation. why do i like going back there? maybe cuz it was a simpler time. maybe cuz thinking about whether or not you've got the grades to go to university and handing in ONE THOUSAND WORD independent study project and feeling the dizzying swell of lust when your crush walks by (a crush that you will subsequently, in later, saner years, renounce with every fiber of your being) is way easier than having to call contractors to get quotes and thinking about your hefty mortgage and dealing with the protracted, shifting, testy realities of a long term relationship where you're preoccupied with building and sustaining a LIFE together. i dunno. maybe.
alls i gotta say is: bring on logan echolls. bring on noel duboise. bring on dexter from sarah dessen's "this lullaby"
2) past and passed after 30-something years of having the two straight, lately, whenever i have to write "past" or "passed" i have to spend a good minute or two thinking about which one i should be CORRECTLY employing. that's messed, right?
3) the internet is NOT your friend when you're incubating a fatburger. all i do is stress that spumante is underweight and that i should be showing more and reading up on pre-eclampsia and preemies and not having enough amniotic fluid and it's enough to make you go crazy. like, who are these people who are incredibly ELATED AND FILLED WITH JOY AND HAPPINESS at the impending arrival of what (to me) is going to be a black hole of all my neuroses and worries?!??!!!
4) the fat little weirdo chronicles continueth yesterday was a BAD BAD BAD eating day. like, epically bad. first off, allow me to say that i'm NEVER EVER EVER EVER going to eat the "big breakfast" at work again. it makes you feel like hell. it's pretty basic: 2 eggs, 4 pieces of sausage or bacon, 2 of those hash browns like what mcdonald's has, and 2 pieces of toast, for a ridiculous price like $4 something with an 8 oz coffee or tea. i LOVE those hash browns so i finally worked up the nerve to ask our frequently stressed and disgruntled caf cook if i could sub 2 extra hash browns for the toast. and he said yes. which means i ate FOUR hash browns. and then felt unbelievably thirsty, cranky, and stomach-churningly full for the next 3 hours. at least until lunch. just when i was starting to reach a state of gastrointestinal equilibrium, i went with the girls to hernando's hideaway, where i scarfed down 4 flautas - filled with spicy chicken. then felt like hell again. then went for a too-short massage then ordered A THREE PIECE MEAL DEAL, A SIDE OF MACARONI & CHEESE, AND A DEEP FRIED APPLE PIE from popeye's. that's SICK. no wonder i've been feeling unmotivated and groggy.
i haven't run in at least a week and i have no inclination to do so. i haven't done any yoga either so i'm generally a sluggish, sore, tense, linguistically confused, worrying mass of teenage lust.
it's bizarre.
dodgeball game tonight should hopefully set things back on course.
first, my cinqo de mayo dinner plans changed to something much more thematically sound than the previously described moroccan sandwiches on account of the rain kiboshing our plans to go out to hear some straight-ahead jazz last night. the dotytron was mad stressing so i think another night out was too much for him to think about. i made corn, zucchini, and monterrey jack enchiladas, sauced in a poblano cream sauce with a last-minute addition of crumbled chorizo on top:
it looks like a hot mess because i over-sauced and over-baked it so that the corn tortillas absorbed too much sauce and started to break down too much. doesn't matter, it was freakin' delicious.
today is when things went off the rails a bit. i started off the day with a regular sized breakfast. 3 slices of malt toast with butter, a glass of o.j., a glass of water. then i got to work and G treated me to a big breakfast, which is 2 eggs, 4 links of sausage, 2 pieces of toast, and 2 hashbrowns. then i bought myself lunch and got chicken fingers and fries with gravy. then i came home and decided that since spumante was obviously demanding a diet of high fructose corn syrup, GMO carbs, 3000% of my daily recommended sodium intake, and feedlot beef, that i might as well go whole hog and succumb to my long-denied need for burger king.
so i got the steakhouse XT burger and a poutine. and now i feel like hell:
the dotytron got the angry whopper which was ultimately the better call, as it's a promo item that's based on the whopper patty - whereas the XT is based on this new patty which is nowhere near as beefy as the whopper patty, even if it is thicker. the whopper patty is the bomb. i should never forget that.
...we got hitched! tied to the hitching post! we're joined in an unholy union in unholy matrimony for richer and poorer (even though i think i mouthed the word, "NEVER!" at the dotytron during the "poorer" bit) and in sickness and in health until we're parted by death (note to people getting married: vows can be a bit of a downer - there's some macabre shiz in there, friends.)
first: i can't believe that w.p. video of them dancing down the aisle has been taken off of youtube because of a "copyright claim by kevin heinz" - GHEY! so lame! why would you do that and be so weaksauce? are you trying to give me further ammunition for my "you guys are lamewads" thesis? jeez.
ANYWAY, this weekend was all kinds of awesome. geneseo, ny tends to be guaranteed good times but the dotytron and i love it SO MUCH that it was nice to be able to show people why. we got in late wednesday night. thursday dawned bright and sunny so we loaded up the car and went to wegman's and finished up our last minute errands. stuff like: renting an amp from buzzo music on main street geneseo (tip: if you click on the link, please do take the extra effort to click on "buzzo poems" - you won't be disappointed). buzzo doesn't usually do rentals but he was so tickled pink at our "rock'n'roll" wedding performance that he made a special exception. for your general buzzo trivia edification: buzzo also once won a wrestling match in guelph. amazing! he talks exactly the way you'd expect someone who looks like a grizzled veteran of the grateful dead to talk and he walks with the aid of a walking stick fashioned from what appears to be 3/4 of a magic 8 ball frankensteined onto a lucite bar with packing tape. he's kind of awesome.
after that, we had some spare time so i proposed a trip to stony brook state park for me and the dotytron. stony brook is near and dear to my heart. its a place that is teeming with magic. a stream fed pool nestled at the base of a towering gorge, public picnic tables with hibachis hidden amongst the dappled shade of tall trees, a concession stand selling fries and perry's ice cream, and a cedar-chip floored playground with all manner of entertaining things for kids. there's nothing better than going for a freshwater swim, clambering out and letting the sun dry you as you lay out in the sun to dry on a damp towel, happy and tired, alternating thumbing lazily through the pages of a book with dozy, sun-drunk naps with your arm flung over your eyes. i love the tired you get from being outdoors and being active. that fresh-air/swimming tired/cottage tired feeling. there's nothing better because it's so removed from your mind whirring. it's your body that's tired, not your head.
for lunch that day we had subs from aunt cookie's sub shop. now, i RARELY eat subs. i'm not the biggest fan of cold cut sandwiches in general - you'll never see me going to mr. sub or subway as my first choice. but upstate new york has a huge sub culture (heh) and aunt cookie's are THE BEST. hands down. it's so simple: a toasted wheat or sesame seed bun - ever so perfectly crisped so that there's the slightest bit of crunch and between the toppings and the soft give of the bread. sub bread at the chains is gummy, rapidly reduced to tissue paper pablum, but the stuff here is made for topping. and the meats, the meats! you've got regular assorted, italian assorted, just capicolla, just italian salami - a dizzying variety that manages to thrill while still being restrained enough so that your decision making processes aren't compromised. some oil and vinegar, some mayonnaise, a fine confetti of shredded iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced white onion, and some sliced tomato and salt and pepper are all you need to reach sub heaven. i could eat those things all day.
i made dinner for my sis and outlaw bro and family that night. something simple: grilled sausages, a corn and jicama salad with scallion aioli, and sliced tomatoes with basil and little balls of fresh mozzarella cheese, topped with olive oil and coarse salt.
the next day we did some more erranding - some small final preparations, putting welcome bags with rochester-area treats (nunda's mustard, dinosaur bbq chips, maple syrup), an itinerary, and some bottled water in our out-of-town guests' hotel rooms, laying out the tables in the tent, setting up the folding chairs, cleaning my sister's house and then packing up to head to the B&B.
at this point, i had put myself on a "no carb" diet in a bid to make sure i could fit in the 26" waist of my dress. there was NO GIVE in that thing and no extra room for alterations. it was still, "no carb" lagerfeld style, though. which means that on friday morning me and the dotytron had breakfast at the cracker barrel where i indulged in chicken fried steak and eggs, biscuits and sawmill gravy, grits, hashbrowns and a side of patty sausage.
that's the dotytron in his brand new, $6 buzzo t-shirt.
my sis & outlaw bro booked friday and saturday night at a B&B for us. it's a lovely place, the temple hill is, shaded by towering, verdant oaks in a quiet strip off the main drag. our room was gorgeous. we chilled out there and then went to meet everyone for the rehearsal dinner, which was a hoot.
best thing about having a tiny performance - everyone came to the rehearsal dinner! we had it at delmonico's italian steakhouse. the dotytron's family were totally flummoxed by american style serving sizes. "does that say one HALF pound steak?" "no, that's ONE AND A HALF pound steak" i could hear nany and poppa (dotytron grandparents) and uncle mert and pat (dotytron grand-uncle and grand-aunt) muttering about how on earth they were going to finish everything, what with the pork chop dish on the set menu described as "two 8oz portions of pork loin chops" i gotta say, you can't beat the value. the banquet/large group menu had a house salad, followed by a MASSIVE entrée and dessert! the desserts were HUGE! look at the size of the KIDS sundae! look at how happy dr. rei is!
everyone was in jovial spirits. a small group was also nice because people could freely get up and mix and mingle and talk to each other and it was a lot more manageable facilitating conversation across groups. of course nany and poppa ended up knowing the manager at delmonico's, who presented us with a GIANT surprise gift basket of all kinds of italian treats. it was so random! lol!
the next morning we got up super early and went to my sis and outlaw bro's house to do some final set up, before heading back to the B&B to get ready. we had a quick breakfast at the B&B and met this hilarious kid, hunter, who was there with his parents attending a different wedding. the kid was hilarious because he was so awkward. dr. rei helped me get primped and did an awesome job. she totally made my eyes pop and managed to perform admirable under pressure while hanbo took pictures of us being ghey because he eats that stuff up.
then we did the ceremony. it happened REALLY quick. i was kind of worried that little ze might be difficult but in the end, he took his job REALLY seriously. the dotytron played me down the aisle with a ridiculously over-the-top electric guitar to the tune of the "theme from top gun" and then the judge did his vows and we sang our vows, which was the theme from the tv show "growing pains" - here are the words:
Show me that smile again. (Show me that smile) Don't waste another minute on your cryin. We're nowhere near the end (nowhere near) The best is ready to begin.
Oooohhh. As long as we got each other We got the world spinnin right in our hands. Baby you and me, we gotta be The luckiest dreamers who never quit dreamin.
As long as we keep on givin We can take anything that comes our way Baby, rain or shine, all the time We got each other Sharin the laughter and love.
the best part of that was that we filled in the electric guitar bits. with our voices. lol! then we exchanged grillz and kissed and trooped out to the sounds of the allman brothers' "whipping post." cut to: tuesday afternoon. dotytron calls me at work. "ummm, have you actually LISTENED to the lyrics from 'whipping post' before?" me: "yeah." him: "so you know it's all about how the dude's woman has been a skag and is floozing it up with some other guy?" me: "sounds about right."
we piled into our vandalized car and headed out to do photos. you can't tell, but there was a mysterious green lantern insignia that appeared on the side of captain save-a-hoe.
chowtime! the food was really good! dinosaur bbq runs a tiptop operation. the food that was supposed to be hot was hotish, the food that was supposed to be cold was cold, the deviled eggs and peel'n'eat shrimp were as tasty as they are at the restaurant. even better, they provide everything. paper plates, cutlery, napkins, wipes, serving utensils...you can just load everything up into a garbage can after and whisk it away and it's like nothing ever happened.
after lunch, most of the older folk left and the younger generation played a bocce tournament. we randomized the partners. bwong and s-dawg were team "ching chong ching", me and hanbo were "the kings", dr. rei and the dotytron were "team boring", and c-hova and outlaw bro rico were "booze." me and hanbo pretty much won. after that we kind of got the itis and we laid out under the sun on towels by the swing set and idly chatted and played random motivational games s-dawg picked up from the ted rogers autobiography.
the dotytron's sister got us an amazing wedding prezzie (in addition to being the girl photographer for hire for the entire festivities) - an antique door knocker engraved with "dotytron / lagerfeld" - BEST!
we rested up and then piled into our cars to hit the charcoal corral and silver lakes drive-in. that complex is like a warren of time-warp fun. there's an arcade, a room filled with rattan furniture and wood-bladed ceiling fans known as the "fiesta room," a wood-paneled pizzeria, an old fashioned ice cream parlour, a grill restaurant, a stage for concerts, chicken bbq on fridays and saturdays, outdoor seating, a GIANT bouncy castle, and a mini-putt course. it's crazy! the dotytron's sis fell in lurve as soon as she saw that this was a real-deal drive-in replete with oldies wafting through the air.
by the time we got there (6:30pm!!!) chicken bbq was sold out, so i had another buffalo/western new york specialty, beef on weck, so named because it comes on a kimmelweck bun (a bun flecked with caraway seeds and coarse pretzel salt). the bun makes it. it's rare roast beef sliced thin and piled high on the bun. i had mine plain (it was my first time) but it's best (apparently) with horseradish and mayo. i had heard of it in my travels but as i was contemplating the extensive charcoal corral menu, a little forlorn at the chicken bbq shortage, i mused aloud, "beef on weck? what's that?" and a really nice lady at an adjoining table gave me the lowdown. when i finally started eating the sandwich she came up and asked me how i liked it! so cute! the thing about my experiences in geneseo is, people are SO NICE. so genuinely, warm, friendly and NICE. there's no artifice. it's very sincere.
the dotytron and i were bickering outside in the parking lot at wegman's over captain save-a-hoe's busted calipers and there was a jolly fat guy in a biker t-shirt and his batik-muumuu wearing wife kind of being forced to listen and not quite knowing what to make of our display. the woman said, "i can tell you like each other by the way you're talking to each other," in a friendly way, and i replied, "i know! we're actually getting married this weekend!" and she came right over and pulled me into her bountiful bosom for a bear hug. it was sweet.
we played improv games outside of the screen waiting for the movie to start. we saw "funny people" (review to follow). it was an exhausting day and we went to bed tired.
the next day was my THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY. dun dun duuuuuuuuuun. i woke up, way too early, groggily slumped my way to the bathroom to pee, peered at myself in the mirror and FREAKED OUT. THE EYE FOLD ON MY RIGHT EYE WAS MISSING. my right eye had gone asian on me (see top photo for an example). i rubbed at it. i rolled my eye. i poked and prodded at it and while i could coax my eye fold back for a second or two, it KEPT DISAPPEARING. at this point, i woke the dotytron up, frantic. "MY EYE FOLD IS MISSING!" he was a little befuddled to say the least. at first he claimed not to know what i was talking about and tried feebly to convince me that both eyes looked the same. BUT HE WAS BEING A LYING SACK OF POO. then i kind of had a meltdown and threw myself face down on the bed and moaned and groaned, "is this what happens when you turn 30?!??? one half of my face turns asian?!??? this sucks!!!!! this is what makes me cute!!!!!!!!! i swear if it doesn't come back by monday i'm scheduling the surgery!" (asian people can get an eye fold cosmetically manufactured by any semi-skilled plastic surgeon). i know, crazy talk, right? after about 45 minutes of me lost in a 30th birthday depression, i looked in the mirror and it had come back. i think i was just overtired or something.
the dotytron gave me my "surprise" birthday prezzie. he made me a tshirt that said: "my two most beloved things are: 1) amens, all kinds; 2) 808s, all kinds" with my little happy face picture on it. super cute! he totally spoiler alerted himself though because a week and a half ago i came home to find a google chrome incognito window open on my computer with a map and address for a t-shirt making place on it. ON MY COMPUTER! lol! i was good though! i didn't give it away that i had suspicions until i opened the prezzie. he also gave me a voucher for a weber charcoal bbq to be picked out at a later date. dotytron's sister em gave me a gorgeous muumuu and momma and poppa d got me an awesome day of the dead apron and scrilla. so aces! i'm such a spoiled lucky button.
we went to brian's u.s.a. diner for breakfast. we were supposed to go golfing but it was raining pretty hard and we knew it would be miserable. breakfast was fun - again people were boggled by the portion sizes. then we said goodbye to the dotytron's family, my family, and headed back to my sister's place to loaf. dr. rei and hanbo went shopping but came back in time to see me presented with my birthday cake:
the lead-up to this cake was pretty awesome. i had kind of guessed that it was coming - the day before as we were packing up the leftovers i faux-casually said to my sister, "oh, we should just use the carrot cake for my birthday cake" to which she replied, "no, i got something from weggy's" (which i knew, but i just wanted to be sure. she's really easy to bait, being the anti-scheist and all). anyway, later on i mused, "i wonder what kind of cake you got me?" and my sister said something like, "you couldn't even IMAGINE a cake like this" which of course made me super curious. she and the dotytron were in cahoots. the two of them went together to pick it up and he kept laughing each time she mentioned it. it totally lived up to the expectations. lol! apparently the weggy's people were SUPER embarrassed to even have this design at the back of the book, much less make it for people of the asian persuasion. the dotytron even tried to get them to do a mash-up - they had some bride cakes and he tried to get them to combine the bride cake with the racist chinese people/miley cyrus scandal cake which my sis rapidly kiboshed. awesome, eh? i love my family.
a-mazing. then the remaining people sat outside and hung out and talked smack and the boys smoked cigars. we talked about our garbled understanding of french new wave cinema and how dr. rei hates the future and the apocalypse. lol! best part was when i saw my doosier nephew, little ze, starting to get a little crankers and i said, "i think it's time for a nap" to which he looked up, looked me square in the eye and replied, "NOT." lol!!!!!!!!! so funny! my niece was being super cute all weekend too. i introduced her to babybel cheese and she was quite taken with it. she took her role as grillz-bearer very seriously and was being ultra precocious on the day of the performance, laying on the compliments, "your hair looks pretty like that," "i like your dress," "i like your flowers," etc. the day before the ceremony when i was going through the timeline for the umpteenth time she kept interrupting me by raising her hand and saying officiously, "i have something to say" and then saying something kind of inane. at a certain point, she leaned over to my outlaw bro and whispered, "i think you should tell aunt lagerfeld that you've been married longer and that she has to listen to you." ha!
on monday we packed up the kids and took them to stony brook. we packed a pretty fantastic picnic, if i do say so myself. we had water, juice, babybel cheese (bonbel AND original babybel), spicy salami, genoa salami, ham, some other kind of italian cured meat, little roasted marinated tomatoes, baguette slices, little bocaccini balls, cherries, crackers, and grapes. it was a feast.
we also dealt with the captain's seized calipers issue. the dotytron suggested that it might be cheaper to get it fixed in the states, and i was starting to get super-concerned about making a 3 hour drive with the grinding noise we heard every time we applied pressure to the breaks, so we took it to a mechanic near my sister's house. they put it up on blocks and called us 2 hours later and said that it was because our rear rotors were warped and we needed new rotors and pads and new calipers. if we wanted to do it all, it would cost us $875 (USD) + tax. but, we could get away with just doing the rotors and pads for $400 and change. at which point i started hyperventilating and freaking out. the dotytron was of the mind that we should get it all done at once and they did guarantee the calipers for life. so i was like, "ummm, if they can guarantee the calipers for life, WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO THE ONES THAT CAME WITH THE CAR?!???"
i was kind of hopping mad at how expensive it was and of course this reaction was exacerbated by how little money we have now and how much we're going to need on our closing day. so i called the mazda dealership and i called a tonne of places in toronto (nothing was open because it was a holiday). i managed to get one toronto garage on the line who said that something like that would run 400-500 bones. CANADIAN. then i called another garage who said that it would cost $540 plus tax. so i had the dotytron call garage number 1 back and play them against each other. dotytron tells garage 1 that he's been receiving quotes from $500-525 with the same year-long guarantee on the labour and the lifetime guarantee on the parts so what's with the discrepancy, blah blah blah, and garage 1 puts him on hold to "crunch the numbers" and comes back and says that he can do it for $520. WHAT. THE. HELL. do they KNOW who they're messing with?
meanwhile, i've called garage 18 who's literally 4 stores down from garage 1 and just when we decided to go with garage 1 since they already have the captain up on the blocks or whatever, garage 18 comes back and tells me that it's going to be $340. gives me the breakdown on how much each part will cost and tells me that labour is $70/hour and it'll probably take an hour and a half but he's going to charge me for one. so we place a frantic call to garage 1, tell them to CEASE AND DESIST and drive it over to garage 18.
you want to see furious? try to screw over a chinese girl when there's money involved. nuh-uh. i am NOT some doddering biddy who'll roll over. this experience was educational on a number of levels. 1) now we know where to get cheap and good auto mechanic work done in geneseo 2) now i know how to deal with mechanics. you pit them against each other. make up how much you WANT to pay (average out the quotes and then go a bit lower) and don't EVER tell them that you're from out of town and want to drive your car back tonight. hear that, auto mechanics of the free world? you're going to be SO SORRY that i ever got possession of a possible lemon mazda protégé. your days of pulling one over on me are OVER.
and i will never go hungry again!
enough epic post for me. above is the rundown of my totally excellent weekend. i love my family. i can't say enough for all the things they've done for me. i'm blessed to have the BEST siblings in the whole freaking world. THE BEST. bar none. i'm lucky to have gotten such an amazing, warm, accepting NEW white family! they're kooks but so lovable. and my friends can't be beat. i was so happy to be able to have bwong and dr. rei and hanbo there, in this town i love, with the people who know me best in the world outside of them, all together in one place.
my name is karl lagerfeld. i'm a lucky button, buckshot shorty, and an industrious pig. i write about food, popular culture, film, books, politics, theory, and the ephemera of my life. a can of chinotto once ruined my night. the rest, as they say, is history.
