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.

giant pictures yesterday aside

...not much happening around these parts, lately.

oh, except we might be squandering some of our tax return on a new couch. because our existing couch, whilst lovely, is rather narrow and it's difficult for the both of us to be comfortably prone while watching the tube of the boob variety. and we LOVE BEING PRONE while watching the boob tube. also, we only have the one couch in the living room, which means that whenever we have people over (which is often), we all have to sit in a row...not good!

plus this store on the danforth is having a 20% off sale on custom couches so i think we're going to hit that up. the problem is...our living room is quite narrow so it's going to require some rejigging - mostly involving condensing down our bookshelves. i'm always in favour of getting rid of books anyway - but the dotytron is a known and recalcitrant pack rat who likes holding onto EVERYTHING in the universe. it's super annoying. i mean, really...how often do we re-read books? barely ever, that's how often.

therefore, for the next little while, our living room might be a bit of a cramped pen...but that's just the way it'll have to be until we get our basement dug out and finished and can turn that into the rumpus room/den. if we're finding that it's ridiculous, we can always sell the now old, formerly new couch and just stick with the new new one.

i also want to repaint the dining room cuz it's driving me crazy and has been driving me crazy for nigh on 7 months. it's a small job, really - more inconvenient than anything else - but once it's done, it'll be done - now it's just a matter of finding the right colour. we also have to do the switcheroo on all the doorknobs in the house and work on the garden. those are the immediate concerns that don't cost an awful lot of money.

in other news...i've got the travel bug, bad. specifically, i've got the travel to hawaii bug, bad. we both want to go back, like yesterday. that's a tough bug to scratch (mixed metaphors, much?) here's the thing - i was looking up vacations on red flag deals and at all inclusive resorts in the caribbean and it seems to me, that when you're at that kind of a place, where ALL YOU DO is sit at the resort, then you kind of want to be at least 4 star and up, because anything else is kind of skeevy looking and suspect. once you get into the 4 star and up range in countries that are actually remotely interesting (ie. not cuba or the dominican or cancun) then you're looking at spending a good chunk of change, once taxes and all the rest are factored in.

and if it's the difference of a grand, total, i'd rather go to hawaii. it's PERFECT there - it really, really is. there are places to explore (ie. you're not trapped at your hotel), breathtaking vistas, sights, and the food! the food!!! i was thinking that next year we might go to oahu, stay at a B&B (why anyone would ever stay at a hotel when you can stay at a B&B that's nicer, comfier, way more chill and less expensive, is beyond me), rent a cheap car (because we're not on the big island, we wouldn't need a jeep wrangler) and probably have a very nice vacation for under $1500 each. i love hawaiian food - we both do - i found a place in oahu that has a make your own poke bar (poke is basically chunks of raw fish mixed with ponzu, soy, and tobiko) and thinking about eating moco loco in a greasy diner somewhere is enough to make me hop on a plane right now. plus, i love hawaii because you feel less bad about exploiting the peoples (they're american!) and you have the regular, north american amenities and because everyone is so active outdoors, the place shuts down at 9pm. love it. love it love it love it.

b&bing it up in hawaii is basically me and the dotytron's perfect vacation. we love staying at places where your exposure to randoms is minimized. if i close my eyes, i can totally recall the feeling of driving through the big island with the windows down, smelling the insanely fresh air and listening to classic rock. i can totally picture it now - the two of us, zipping along in a little compact, the windows down, with some poke and a fresh fruit shake in our belly, going to watch surfers on the north shore. so perfect.

alas, it's but a pipe dream currently. we won't be doing anything about it until next year this time, at the earliest. we gotta save some monies and pour some more monies into the house and our debt first...but a gyal can dream, right?



tonight for dinner we had spaghetti, tossed with a long-simmered tomato sauce made from canned san marzano tomatoes with a big handful of basil thrown in at the last minute. the pasta was topped with a spoonful of homemade ricotta, which in turn was drizzled with chili oil and sprinkled with fleur de sel and pepper. so good! we also had a fake caesar salad with croutons.

homemade ricotta is dead-easy to make and it tastes amazing - your yield sucks though...1L of whole organic milk and a 1/2 cup of cream makes approximately 1 c. of ricotta.

fin.


-----------------------------------------------------
homemade ricotta
yields approximately 1 cup ricotta

1 L whole milk
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/4 t. salt
1 1/2 T. lemon juice

- combine the milk, cream, and salt in a heavy saucepan.
- line a colander (i just used a fine-mesh strainer) with cheesecloth and set it in a large bowl. measure out the lemon juice and set it aside.
- bring the milk mixture to a simmer over medium high heat, stirring occasionally with a spatula to prevent scalding. once the mixture is simmering, add the lemon juice and stir gently with the spatula.
- let the mixture sit for about 1 minute, turning down the heat slightly so it stays at a simmer but doesn’t reach a boil.
- stir with the spatula after about 1 minute, then let it sit another minute until it looks like most of the liquid has separated into curds and whey.
- drain the mixture into the cheesecloth-lined colander set over a bowl, and let it drain at room temperature until you get the desired consistency.
- transfer the ricotta to an airtight container and refrigerate.

notes: i felt that you could have upped the salt in this recipe, at least double. i'm going to try that next time. we drained ours for about 30 minutes and it was very firm (you can see that it almost quenelles in the picture above - if you wanted it creamier, i'd check it and stir it after 15 minutes of draining - it's up to you what your desired consistency is.

m.i.a. x 2!

what the-? am i off blurging? no. just mad busyface and life insists on kicking me in the 'nads.

to wit: today, while baking one of the THREE cakes i'm making for the performance, during one of the now increasingly de rigeur, global-warming-initiated, toronto torrential rainstorms, the dotytron came home, went downstairs and started screaming his little pin head off. whyfor? BECAUSE OUR BASEMENT WAS HAD FILLED WITH AN INCH OF WATER. mayhap i should now mention that OUR BEDROOM AND 99% OF OUR WORLDLY POSSESSIONS ARE IN THE BASEMENT?!?? oy vey. luckily, the floor in the basement isn't even so there are high spots and low spots. the area outside our bedroom had 2 inches of water, but we don't keep anything there except for some metro shelving for our linens and the litterboxes for the cats. the floor in the bathroom also dips down and also was covered in 2 inches of water that was creeping its way into our bedroom and under our bed. PURE CHAOS! i didn't even know what to do. i placed a frantic call to our perpetually beleaguered landlord who gave me his trademark heavy sighs and then called me back with instructions to buy a shop vac ("make sure it's a good one") and vacuum up the water - he's going to reimburse me for the shop vac.

so we went to ever-trusty home depot and grabbed a shop vac. for the record: shop vacs are amazing. they're miracles of modern engineering. it made short work of what had been a daunting task comprised of equal parts: bailing into a bucket with two sour cream containers; sponging up a teaspoon of water at a time with our oft-abused and cheap mop and wringing it into another bucket; and holding back heaving waves of vomit at the dust-bunny, hair, and dried insect carapace slurry pooling at our ankles.

the good news is: i've baked 2 of my cakes and they're safely enshrouded in a saran sarcophagus and sitting in cryo. i also did some packing and finished the pillow for our grillz-bearer. i also went and got a pedi with dr. rei at urban nails. they were insanely busy and i was told that my polish was dry and to slide my pampered tootsies into birkenstocks before the enamel had fully hardened. result? i gouged a chunk of polish out of my big toe. now i have to go BACK and get this shiz fixed tomorrow. ag! the positive thing is that through the help of dr. rei, i've figured out my makeup situation for the big day. dr. rei is much better at being a girl than i am. well, i'm really good at the clothes and styling part, not so good at the hair and makeup part. let's just say that liquid liner works miracles. the looks is pretty cute...very 50s and subdued. now all that remains is the hair question - fat curls/waves or stick straight? my hairpiece is kind of intense, but dr. rei is a big fan of soft waves on me.

things are chugging along at a healthy clip. now we're doing recording sessions and final mastering and tomorrow we have to bang out another track for the cd.

last night was fun! my friend lives in a crazy condo complex at front and spadina. parking was IMPOSSIBLE. however, guess what we saw en route to A's place that made last night the most MAGICAL NIGHT IN ALL OF EXISTENCE?

THIS GUY:


a groundhog! in the city! how crazy is that? look at how fat he is! it's a quasi-miracle.

my offerings were a big hit at the bbq. especially the peanut butter pie, which always makes people go mental. in other news...i think last night was the first time i've been somewhere where the number of people who DON'T like deviled eggs outnumbered the people who do. i've actually never been ANYWHERE where my deviled eggs weren't met with fawning appreciation. it was a little unsettling, i'm not gonna lie.

"(500) days of summer" was a mediocre trifle. some cute elements, some genuinely funny moments, but overall unmemorable and a little to self-assuredly winsome even for me - and for a long time there zooey was my style icon and i LOVE winsome! but this was too much. it's about a relationship between tom and summer and as the officious meta-narrator explains: theirs is not a love story. tom is a hopeless romantic and summer not quite. the good points of the film were the WARDROBE. oh my! zooey's wardrobe was TO DIE FOR. all prim sleeveless blouses vaguely reminiscent of the 50s with full tailored pants (so katherine hepburn!) for the office or circle skirts for play, a blue ribbon in her jaunty, swingy ponytail
like a dark-haired, blue eyed betty from riverdale. eeks. i wanted everything she wore.

the story was a bit trifling - purporting to show all the messy bits from a failed relationship. the soundtrack that's garnered so much press was a bit intrusive, you could just tell how clever they thought they were being with their choices. the whole thing reeked of precociousness which was off-putting. i've read reviews that critique summer for being too much of a cipher - but i think that's the point. the film is mostly played out from tom's perspective and a great deal of it is about how he projected onto her - and how you always project onto this idealized girl/boy/etc. of your dreams. the film makes zooey deschanel very alluring in her zooey-ness. i don't know how much longer she can ride this schtick out for - can you be that dewy and curlicue girlish at 40? how is she going to grow out of it? summer is the girl that every urbanite or small town/suburbanite secretly covets. into "cool" music, funny, dry, game.

it was fine, just very predictable. i'm not sure that i would recommend paying full price for it.

it makes you want to be alluring though. oh, how i wish i was as alluring and delicious as zooey deschanel! i expressed as much to the dotytron and he told me that i WAS alluring - in a better way, even. i mean, i guess? if you consider the jabbering, crass, f-bombs dropping, awkward question asking, prickly pear stuffing her face with deviled eggs at the party and talking with her mouth full type alluring. ha. seriously, my signature party move is to blunder into asking someone a seemingly innocuous question that ends up being about the most awful part of their life and then to talk about how much i love deviled eggs and draw attention to the fact that **I** brought them to the party. what a shy, demure peach i am!

dinner tonight was stuffed eggplant with garlic bread on the side. tasty and the needed respite from what ended up being a hellish day. yes, i did pick that entire sheet of burnished provolone off the eggplant and roll it up like a cigar and eat it thusly. you would have done the same. while we're at it, yes, i did end up eating the steak gristle off of everyone's plate. so sue me!

my fair lil' ugmo - living room edition:

k, i think we're in the market for a new couch. i had been coveting these models from style garage (a local toronto company):


but they are priced for lawrence park royalty. seriously! the bottom one STARTS at $3000! my sister got the world's comfiest couches from raymour and flanagan for like, $800. hers are GIANT and squishy! me and the dotytron can both lie down on the full size couch without touching. s-dawg can hide BEHIND the back cushions with someone lying on the couch and be undetectable during a game of hide and seek! plus, i've come to realize that tufting is not your friend. some tufting yes. excessive tufting, no. tufts are ground zero for pet hair and crumb collection. they're the capacious belly buttons of the sofa world. not good.

crate and barrel's petrie sofa has taken the design world by storm. every blogger and their twitterer (see what i did there?) has one and sings its praises. it's still pricey though.

this little beaut from eq3 is the one i'm gunning for. sleek, cute, affordable (less than a grand) and with cute stubby wooden legs. i'll have to take a seat on 'er to see how she holds up...but right now, that's the front runner. in a nice, dark, inky grey (the better to camouflage cat hair).

we've pretty much decided on paint colours...white trim and accents, most rooms will have pale, pale grey walls with 1 wall a bold colour - teal, plummy purple, citron. the dining room is going to be a grey-blue, my craft room/office is going to be a pale turquoise/sea green with orange accents.

i'm pumped! too bad we got to run the gauntlet before that stuff happens.

fin.

petty economizing...

lagerfeld style. behold my new rosewood buffet! it is even more beautiful and lustrous than the photo would indicate. the doors slide BACK into the sides, because they're all sliced up into a million pieces and curve back. don't ask me how it works. know only that it is BEAUTIFUL. it cost $450. not cheap. but it's definitely a collector's item that will retain its value. even after we drill holes into the back. it's our new tv stand. it works a little better than the other buffet i bought (which remember, was a steal at $280) because it's a foot shorter. the other buffet we're going to put in the dining room and use it to hold plates and bar supplies and other buffet/sideboard/credenza type things (the dotytron totally busted me on the nomenclature: "why do you keep calling it something different?") the rosewood buffet is heavy as all f**k and in better shape. i'm in love with it.

the petty economizing comes in when i bought expired tropicana orange juice at $2 off to make up for it. lol! and i am going to return all those anthropologie clothes. no more clothes for me, no sir. not for a long while (or, as long as i can stand it...which probably won't be all that long.) it's working out to my benefit that this summer isn't much for being hot. i don't have an opportunity to run through my copious amounts of summer clothes.

i've also snagged 2 very very old and rickety telephone tables which i'm going to turn into my first diy furniture refinishing project. i'll document the results. this weekend is busy with crafty projects. i'm going to try to clean up this chrome chair i pulled out of the trash. i gave one to H to go with her school desk (H and i are kind of setting up mirror homes...we have the same school desks, now the same chairs, and the same ikea tray underneath our respective kitty dishes...lol) i've done some research. you can apparently use 0000 steel wool and chrome polish, coca cola, or a ball of aluminum foil. i'm going to try all three to get the rust off.

on tuesday night i made up the last of the farro and black bean burger mix and made a new batch of the smoky red pepper spread to go along with.

tonight we just ate salad...i wasn't very hungry as i had a big lunch. we took a colleague out to lunch in the workplace dining room as a last huzzah. i had a pretty decent turkey burger with excellent, skinny-crispy sweet potato fries. after work i came home and met up with the dotytron and we played some no-rules tennis. i can't really generally handle eating a big meal at lunch and dinner unless i've kind of set myself up for it (ie. vacay/an "eat whatever i want" day, etc.) so i wasn't terribly hungry so i ate the spinach, grape tomato, red onion, avocado, and sunflower seed salad i couldn't eat last night. the dotytron supplemented his dinner with some leftover black bean chili.

now i'm gearing up to bake off my entries for the workplace cookie baking competition as part of the picnic on friday. i'm in it to win it (as they say.) no prisoners. it's been getting really ugly at work with my old supervisor, T. there have been accusations of sabotage.

in other news...my sister bought and devoured (her words!) sarah dessen's "just listen" in one night and then promptly went out and bought like, 3 more of her books. lol! amazing! i've gotten dr. rei hooked on the e. lockhart ruby oliver series too. i've still got a horrendous backlog of book reviews to do.

okay...i gotta put the finishing touches on the performance invites. eeks!

fin.