Le sigh...

...we have crawling! Kind of. It's weird...I feel like when you watch him go, it doesn't actually look like he's moving (the motions aren't fluid in the least - he does these weird Frankenstein arms), but then you notice that he's somehow maneuvered his way across the floor. Happyface! Sadface! The following video also features a Smudgie cameo AND an extended self-examination of the diaper fastenings interlude. Scintillating stuff.

The Big Yam mastered the art of self-locomotion in tandem with the ability to pull himself up to standing. Ai-Ya. He's not consistent at it yet, but all the foundations are there. Time to get baby gates and resign ourselves to everything at knee height being pulled onto the floor.

I ran intervals yesterday. Which is a HUGE leap up from my usual slow-jog-canter-barely-breaking-a-sweat action. Ummmmm...intervals are HARD. On the plus side, I've already met my boot camp quota for the week with three days left to go! Huzzah! I'm also thinking of taking up skipping as a cardio activity. Aaaand...we have my beloved softball tonight. Aaaand...I've had the opportunity to have myself a catch several times this week. Love playing catch. Loooooooooves it.

What a busy week! Wednesday hangs with Hanbo was good times. Strolled the Roncey strip, picked up an awesome takeout lunch of breaded pork and coleslaw, nosed around the antique stores on Queen West, felt grateful that I don't live out there, had a catch - all in all, a successful mission. Yesterday I took the Boobla into City Hall to have lunch with my friend A from my book club. She's my successful, down-to-earth, and really engaged friend. She has 2 boys and is about 6 years older than me, but I still sometimes feel like a kid around her for some reason...or like a little sister.

I'm feeling pretty good about my portion of the research paper. If the nap gods line up, I should have it done by this evening, hopefully, leaving my weekend free for fun and games. The agenda this weekend is as follows: take Poh Poh out to lunch tomorrow, then head to Scarborough to see the final "gala" for the Dotytron's after school program kids (where they do a showcase of all the stuff they've been working on), then head over to B & G's house to help them with their deck if the boys are still working on it, then hanging with Dr. Rei and Hanbo.

Is it totally weird that I love helping people with decks? That to me is a good time. Mainly because I like social activities that combine some hands-on work and learning opportunities. Our friend Gaz used to be a contractor and B is a great, hands-on learner/project tackler, and our friend Fox is always willing to help out. I like having those kinds of dudes in my life. The kind who like doing dude things and don't think that spending an afternoon drinking beer in the sun and building something is work. The kind that will offer to help you demo your deck and garage and are actually looking FORWARD to it. The kind that will get me over my fear of building my own deck. The kind that keep me from being the kind of person (like some of my neighbours) who have their fathers come downtown to install a wireless doorbell.

Sunday is Father's Day - I'm making the Dotytron brunch and then maybe taking him out for a quick dinner if the timing works out...we're supposed to go up to Markham because Bruce Wayne and CHova want to take Big D out to Red Lobster, but I'm pretty sure Red Lobster doesn't take reservations and I feel like that's going to be a shiz-show. So it might just be our family together on Baba's day. No complaints here, really. I always wonder when your family unit gets to claim holidays as your own.

Last night's Polski Ogorki meal - 2 kinds of kolbassa, pickled herring & raw onions on heavily buttered rye bread, a cucumber-sour cream-dill salad on my CSA lettuce.

Tonight we're having another cool, no-cook meal - roasted peppers and tomatoes topped with burrata, some cured meats, and some baguette.

Fin.

this and that

the rest of the weekend consisted of me playing dodgeball and our team being SUPER short on people. like, there were 4 of us (normally you have 6 people on the court) and we only lost by 5 games! bwahahahaha...the offshoot of this is: my muscles got owned. i'm so stiff! i can barely cross my legs.

so kdubs J is doing this 4x4 challenge where she goes to hot yoga 4 times a week for 4 weeks (you get a sticker each time you go). it sounded like a pretty good idea so i think for the month of february, i'm going to do my own 4x4 challenge, of doing at least 1 hour of yoga, 4 times a week, for 4 weeks. it'll probably be a combination of classes and my own home practice - i don't know how people squeeze in going to the gym or going to yoga after work and a) eating a home cooked meal, or b) getting any post-work activities in before bed. i've been feeling like i've been sleep-deprived lately so the plan for this week (and as a general monday-thursday rule) is to be in bed by 10pm for some reading before (hopefully) being asleep by 11pm. this means that the miles davis' autobiography read-a-longs have been moved up. lol!

i have no idea if my weeks are especially crazy or if everyone's life is like this...but this is how it's shaping up:

monday: juice monster over for dinner
tuesday: john carpenter appreciation film club meeting (i'm bailing on this because the person hosting is a stranger) OR TND with dr. rei and her TND crew (i'm bailing on this because i want to make chilaquiles)
wednesday: nothing
thursday: after work drinks with colleagues, then book club, then (hopefully)dodgeball
friday: ultimate fryer dinner with J & S and L
saturday: saturday night supper club
sunday: dodgeball! superbowl sunday! and birthday drinks for the dotytron's sister

WHAT THE WHAT. if i wasn't bailing on john carpenter film club night, that'd be only 2 nights that i didn't have an outing planned. how the heck is someone supposed to fit in tv watching/paperwork/skating/yoga/crafting/home improvements around that kind of a schedule? can you imagine throwing a BABY into the mix?

i had my mum, aka the juice monster, over for dinner last night because she had a board meeting downtown. she's a TOTAL juice monster. my sister has to stock up on juice before she comes down to geneseo. technically, she's a juice and magazine monster. so you also have to stock up on magazines, too. i was instructed in no short terms to "leave all current issues of magazines on the coffee table." i'm probably going to regret this, but my mum has her own key to our place. going to our house isn't the funnest for her because a) we don't drink juice and only keep one 1 L. carton of tropicana on hand (i have a glass of o.j. with my breakfast and that's it) and b) i only subscribe to food and wine and entertainment weekly - my sister's house totally trumps mine on both those fronts.


i made us my ultimate mac'n'cheese with thyme breadcrumbs and that radicchio salad with anchovy vinaigrette and egg. i didn't bother sieving the egg over the salad this time...there was no point in making a mess of the sieve - i just did a rough chop and tossed it in. i can't BELIEVE this is ONLY the first time this winter that i've made ultimate mac'n'cheese (or, not-so-ultimate: in my mum's opinion "it's not cheesy enough." she also slapped the dotytron's hand away from the plate of lemon bars i put out for dessert because she wanted to take the rest home. LOL!) i'm already stressing about the imminent onset of spring and how that's going to strike winter foods off the menu. i haven't made: prime rib, pot roast, short ribs, chili, lamb shanks, goose, ham and countless other cold weather foods yet and time is running short!!!

i'm ditching john carpenter film appreciation night because a) it's the newest of my film clubs and b) i'm only barely acquaintances with the person whose idea it was to have this film club and the person who is hosting i don't know at all and H & that guy and sweet baby D only *barely* know the host. i dunno...i feel weird having someone who's basically a stranger make dinner for like, 8 people, more than half of whom she barely knows. i'd prefer it if someone i knew was hosting and then i could meet her and then the NEXT TIME, she could host and i wouldn't feel like it's imposing. plus i need a night AT HOME. is that weird? i just feel like making dinner for 8 people is a LOT of work under most circumstances and a big imposition unless you're a freak like me who thrives on that. also dr. rei invited us to crash tuesday night dinners (TND) at her pad and rather than have to ditch one outing for another - i'm opting out.


i'm also craving home-cooked, REAL food after my tummy upset this weekend, which is another reason why i bowed out of the unknown that is someone else hosting for dinner tonight. i feel like my body just needs a general recalibration - so i made us vegetarian chilaquiles...usually i throw in some chorizo but i just made this with kidney beans instead and topped the dried-chili tomato bean sauce mixture with a fried egg, crushed up tortilla chips, scallions, sour cream and guacamole.

as an aside...do you know how loves their supernanny more than anything? the dotytron. seriously, he rogers-on-demands that shiz like you wouldn't believe. he's hot for jo frost and her sensible disciplinarian parenting advice!

so, apparently people who weren't invited to the performance, or who we dickishly invited and then UNinvited, want to see all the photos from the big day...so here they be, in facebook album form:

tied to the hitching post

the thing i'm gladdest about is that we got to take individual portraits with EVERYONE who was there which is kind of the point of wedding photography, imo. i want photos of us with our family and friends...not a billion photos of us when we have albums and albums of a billion photos of us looking probably better than we did that day and in funnier scenarios (possibly) (that's a roundabout way of saying that i regret wearing my hair down). we still have to take the tapes of the actual ceremony in to be digitized and then we'll edit them into a movie for yous and then it'll (hopefully) catch youtube by storm and then we can be famous and get a million mom hits and then be in people magazine as one of the dreaded (imo) regular, non-celebrity people featured in people magazine.

i "read" or listened to, michael chabon's "manhood for amateurs" for this bookclub my friend J has started. again, J is the only person i know in the club. yikes! i'm sure it'll be fine. i'm a little worried about being the youngest/only person in the book club without kids...but there's clearly nothing i can do about that.

ANYWAY, this book was quite good. chabon did the reading himself for the audiobook and i listened to it while i pieced blocks of my quilt. it's a set of short, non-fiction, memoir pieces on manhood, parenthood, and masculinity. i've never read his work before (i guess i missed the whole "adventures of cavalier and klay" thing) and he's quite extraordinary. the essays run the gamut from chabon's experience losing his virginity, to his reactions to his mother's boyfriend, to reflections on his relationship(s) to his brother, his wife, and his kids. the writing is confessional, conversational, nostalgic and elegiac in tone. what struck me the most was chabon's dexterity with metaphor, allusion, and simile - the phrases he turns and the images he conjures are fantastically present and visceral. it was nice to read ruminations on masculinity - to receive a break from the female perspective for a change - it made a particularly fitting follow-up to tropper's "this is where i leave you." there is ultimately something universal about chabon's experiences, an intangible thread that speaks to the mortality fears, anxieties, and sorrowful love that's in us all. the incomplete and yet ever present primordial certainty that things used to be better...in a different time and a different place, when kids could roam free and wild and get lost and bike at night. i think it should be required reading for all parents or soon-to-be parents.

fin.

"do you want to have breakfast at cracker barrel tomorrow?"

"do you even have to ask?"

yes, yes...it's another hotly anticipated weekend in geneseo! sooooo pumped! the captain is going to get tricked out with some slick-a$$ winter tires and new rims (steel rims - aka the kind that give you NEGATIVE cred in the tokyo drift community); i'm going clothes shopping for my sister (a task i LOVE - nothing makes me happier than helping my sister look her best); we'll roam the aisles of wegmans and load up on bob evans sausage and scharffen berger chocolate; i'll poke around in target and try to pry the dotytron away from the $5 dvd bin (the only dvds he ever wants are in the $5 bin); and most importantly, we're going to spend time with the two greatest kids in the world. apparently miss ramona drew a picture of me on my wedding day that she wants to give me because she loves me very much. d'awwwwwwwww.

this is last night's dinner. sautéed cauliflower got bumped because i found a rapidly shrinking head of radicchio in the furthest reaches of my veggie crisper - and we had so many brussels sprouts on hand! i love brussels sprouts, i really do. i find them so tasty when they're all caramelized and browned.

today i had lunch with my dad. nothing is worse than being told by your quasi-dead-beat dad that "marriage agrees with you." *gnashes teeth* i think he's lonely. he kept making a big stink as he kept me company in line at the bank about how i had made an offhand comment that he should come by lil' ugmo but never formerly invited him and that he's been waiting and waiting and i don't call. so of course everyone at the bank thought i was the most rotten daughter around. i WOULD have brought up the years of neglect and cursory sunday visits by my pops but i didn't feel like getting into with joe q. public as witnesses. then he made a big deal about how s-dawg has been coming over fairly regularly for friday night dinner and how we should go up to richmond hill and visit him on friday nights and have dinner with him instead. and he kept repeating it! after lunch i put in a frantic call to s-dawg about this sudden, old-man guilt tripping, and s-dawg sagely noted: "this is so 'cat's in the cradle'" and then proceeded to give me line-by-line close reading of the lyrics and how they pertained to our family dynamic. lol!

it IS so "cat's in the cradle" but what the heck are you supposed to do? just forget that for a big chunk of time your pops was kind of a weird, pragmatic, apathetic, slump? the thing is, the older i get, the more i realize: yeah, you're supposed to forget it. cuz at the end of the day, he's still your dad, and as much as you want to deny it, his genetic material is inextricably a part of you and we're all just getting older except his end of older means that he walks slower and looks at you with watery eyes that force you to bite your tongue when he talks like he knows you and is always right and i couldn't manage two chickens. it's what you do.

by popular (dr. rei) demand, here is my recipe for the kale and ricotta pie.

have a lovely weekend everyone!

fin.

---------------------------------------------

kale and ricotta pie

makes 1 9" pie, or serves 4 as a main course (with salad or something else)

1 9" unbaked pie shell (can be frozen - if you're a shoemaker like that.) (i kid!)
1 bunch of kale
1/2 spanish onion, sliced (note: whenever i talk about onions, i mean a spanish onion, not a cooking onion, which means the amount of onion is probably more than you think it would be, if you're going by your standard tennis ball-sized cooking onions)
some minced garlic
1 container (approx 475g) ricotta cheese
1/2 ball of mozzarella cheese, grated
2 eggs

- sauté your sliced onion and the garlic in a glug of oil until translucent
- take your kale and thinly slice the leaves and some of the stems, but don't do ALL the stems...like, slice down the leaves until you have all the leaves and some of the stems done, but don't chop up all the stems, too. i mean, you can if you want, but it's not as nice in this dish as the leaves are
- add the kale to the onions and garlic and cook it down until it's bright green and wilted. season with salt and pepper
- dump the ricotta in a bowl and stir in the 2 eggs and the mozzarella cheese. add the cooked kale and stir it all together
- spread this mixture into the pie crust and bake in a 375F-400F oven until the crust is golden and the top of the pie is browned. a knife inserted into the pie should come out fairly dry (no streaky raw egg on the blade). it should take about 35-45 minutes.
- slice and eat!