Blue Moon

The Dotytron has been obsessed with Beck's new album, Morning Phase lately and I wasn't feeling it as a whole - it's too sad and wintery and morose for me, but one of the songs that immediately grabbed me is Blue Moon.  So gorgeous.  Perfectly encapsulates this never-ending winter and grey days slowly bleeding into more sun and slightly warmer temperatures and green shoots in our garden and the promise of bike rides and beach picnics and shorts and low tennis sneakers.  I will say that the album makes for good listening while sitting on the couch at night with a quilt piled on your lap hand-sewing binding on.  Maybe the Dotytron is wearing me down?  Sewing binding on a quilt is one of my ALL TIME favorite tasks.  It makes you feel like SUCH a pioneer (and y'all know how much I love playing at pioneer life).

Guys, I just bought a jean shirt and it's CHANGED MY LIFE.  Summer uniform!  I'm going to wear it as a jacket over all my hippie sundresses and love life.  I also bought these sneakers:

I'm picturing a summer uniform of jean shorts, t shirts, and one of my many billion summer dresses all paired with these.  They're pretty cute, I must say, and I like that you can throw them in the wash.

I'm not ready to say goodbye to winter foods (I never am), but I am ready to stop worrying about losing gloves and putting a billion layers on squirmy babies.

This braised barley dish with fried eggs & parm is exactly the kind of winter food I don't want to say goodbye to, just yet.  Adapted from this recipe, and made slightly less virtuous with the addition of crisped pancetta cubes and the use of frozen beef braising liquid to cook the barley in.  So good!  I love kale.  

Sour cream peach pie.  A little watery from the frozen peaches, but I still ate the whole thing (not the slice, the whole PIE) because I'm not one to look a gift pie in the plate (new expression, trust).

My mom and youngest bro's birthday cake - a golden cake (from Smitten Kitchen, here) and a salted caramel Swiss meringue buttercream.  

Friday night was crunch wrap night and we all couldn't have been happier.  Especially the Wonder Twins, who acted like they had never tasted food before.

Sunday morning breakfast was my long longed-for blintzes.  Served up very non-Kosher with English bacon.  

Fish tacos!

Fin.

Mater Familias

My first mother's day! Truth be told, I don't really care about it - it has been nice to use it as an excuse to have Sunday breakkie made for me for a change, and the Dotytron is being really nice about indulging my whims and tidying the basement and telling me that I can go to Canadian Tire and buy more clear Rubbermaid bins for labelling and organizing and cataloguing stuff (aka my FAVORITEST THING IN THE WORLD!) He's also been really nice and let me do some minor furniture arranging/vacuuming/cleaning and he said he was going to clean the bathroom. AND he got me a Kindle - so he's been super-dee-duper nice to me. At the end of the day, the Kindle is just bonus - I'd be over-the-moon if he just did the other stuff (ie. let me make his precious Sunday NOT FUN by demanding that we do a billion house projects/chores/boring organizational things.) I shacked up with a really good guy. So for Father's Day, I'm going to reciprocate by letting him spend a day of leisure without putting anything on our agenda. It's a fair trade.

He made me "Eggs Do-Do" - the maiden voyage for this recipe. It's basically eggs on bacon on toast with cheese, topped with a tomato-oregano sauce - almost like breakfast pizza toast? It was really good and he spent a long time thinking/executing it and it turned out really delicious:

Yesterday we met with our caregiver. The Dotytron came up with her nickname. We were outside talking to the neighbours and enjoying a street pizza party and as we were walking back to the house to get ready to meet the daycare lady, he turned to me and said (all put out because he hates doing stuff on the weekend): "So, how long is this meeting with the ho-bag supposed to last?" LOL! Anyway, we met with the Ho-Bag, who I've gotten to know through the drop-in centre, but it was the Dotytron's first time - we both really liked her after talking to her more in-depth. She's from Chile and has 2 kids of her own, who are like, 12 and 10 or something. We met in her house and met her husband as well. She used to do non-home daycare and has a university degree in Chile in early childhood education. The thing we really liked about her is that she seems really experienced and the home daycare experience means that she's willing to accommodate you to a certain extend. She's very relaxed and calm and any questions we had her general response was "we'll work together to find a solution."

Her hours were a little worrisome at first. She works from 8-5 which I understand, is already a long day for her, and then she has to transform her house from daycare to her own home, and cook and do her own home/life stuff, but I was worried how we'd swing it. I think the Dotytron is going to do pick-up and I'll do drop off. She's also amazing because she doesn't do late penalties - unlike a lot of other daycares where it's like, a $1 a minute or something. She's very understanding that most of the time you'll be there around 8 (give or take 10 minutes) and pick up at 5 (give or take 10 minutes), but that if there's a storm, or rush hour, or something, she gets that these things happen and is accommodating and doesn't penalize you - as long as you don't make a habit out of it. I also think that while an earlier drop off and a later pickup might be nice - that's a really long day for the Big Yam to be with someone else. So if that means we have to re-jig our work schedules a bit to minimize his time in care - I'm okay with that.

The Ho-Bag was also willing to continue with cloth diapers and if we want special food, we can bring that, but otherwise she makes a healthy breakfast and lunch and takes the kids out every day. She was also willing to support our early potty training initiatives (which have been a complete failure this past week as he keeps s***ting his pants while he sleeps!) which is nice. Her rates are also really reasonable - $55/day up until 18 months and then it drops down to $50 day. She works for 2 weeks and we pay her for those 2 weeks after she's worked them. She get paid for all statutory holidays, but we can take 2 weeks vacation without paying her and she takes 2 weeks vacation where she doesn't expect to be paid, so I guess it works out to about a month off all year we don't pay. Anything about 2 weeks she expects to be paid, which is fair - it's her livelihood too. Anyway, I'm feeling really good that *knock on wood* we've got things really established and we can rest easy that the Big Yam will be in good hands.

We went to see a documentary yesterday, called The Pirate Tapes about this guy from Toronto who goes and tries to infiltrate a Somali pirate ship. It's CRAZY. The doc is really slick (funded by HBO) with a hip soundtrack (which I found a little intrusive sometimes - the music is turned up too loud in the mix) and talks about how the genesis of Somali pirating is that international fishing boats were coming in and robbing Somali villages of their livelihood by fishing the crap out of their waters. Then, international companies were also dumping illegal sewage/toxic waste in Somali waters. So the pirating was initially an attempt to fight back against the illegal practices of European and North American companies. However, as aid workers who were interviewed in the film stated, the original "Robin Hood" impetus for pirating was quickly transformed into straight greed - as they said, if pirates were really politically motivated, you would see some of that money being fed into the Somali economic system and into the villages - but you don't. There was also an allegation made that there is external funding of these pirates and that North American investors actually invest into these pirating raids. The footage was really fascinating, although I did fall asleep during some of the middle bit.

Some of the factual allegations in the film were kind of tenuous (in the Michael Moore fashion) and I also thought that the ending was rushed and that important facts/events weren't being investigated fully (the infiltrator is captured by Somali police and held and detained without contact with the outside world and then suddenly is released) and there was more there than was being revealed. This Toronto Star article alleges that there was a disagreement between the filmmakers and the subject but when pressed during the Q & A, they kind of glossed over any tension and said that everything was fine.

I will say that footage from the Somali hospitals where children were being brought in, with mysterious ailments (some of them horrific, like a small boy where half the skin on his face had loosened so that he looked like a human version of the Batman character Two Face), probably caused by exposure to toxic waste, and who all died by the time the filmmakers returned, was heartbreaking to watch. At one point the camera focuses in on a little boy, so malnourished his neck is so frail and thin and his eyes so big, who has cancer, and the little boy stares at the camera and in my head I was flashing to the Big Yam's cherubic face and rolls of skin and I just thought how lucky he is and how lucky we are to live where we live. We talked a bit about adopting and whether we would want to do that for #2 or #3. I'm willing to and I think the Dotytron is willing to as well. That all sounds altruistic, until I share with you this snippet of our conversation:

Dotytron: "But I think I would want a baby"

Me: "But that's bad! EVERYONE wants a baby and the older kids need homes too! It's like how everyone wants kittens!"

Him: "Okay, well then, how old would you go? I think I would take up to a 2 year old"

Me: "I'd go up to 5"

Him: "REALLY?" $$%!!&???!

Me: "I mean, only if it's a black kid"

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL! I am a horrible, horrible person. So horrible in fact, that when we were sitting in the theatre before the doc started and a woman a few aisle overs fumbled her bag of popcorn and spilled about a third of it into the aisle, I started laughing my butt off. Silently, mind you, but uncontrollably. As I broke into laughter, I turned to see the Dotytron looking at me with a patient-but-loving-incredulous-but-ashamed expression and just silently shaking his head at me. Which only made me laugh harder as I got caught in this meta-feedback loop of: woman dropping popcorn = funny : me laughing at that and finding it so funny = funnier : the Dotytron finding himself married to someone who has such a lowbrow sense of humour = funnier still : the fact that I fancy myself so intellectual but at the end of the day finding people falling/spilling popcorn/rude fart-bodily fluid jokes/Gallagher smashing stuff beyond hilarious = funniest of all.

What is wrong with me, indeed?

We ended up scalping our other tickets and sneaking into Guu Saka Bar for an impromptu dinner. We got there at 6:20 and only had to wait like, 10 minutes to be seated. I think things get really bumping there around 6:30 and it was a nice day, so I think people were thinking patio and didn't want to eat early. Being a party of 2 helps as well.

Picked up the Big Yam from Momma and Poppa D's house to find that he'd been an insufferable, screaming-his-head-off prig most of the night. Yikes. He's starting to get all stranger-danger and when we walked through the door was crying his head off but as soon as he saw us, was all giggle-Gerber baby 2000. Super annoying!

It's a beautiful day out today so I think we're going to skip the afternoon doc and walk around instead. The Dotytron's sis was supposed to babysit for us, so maybe we'll spend the afternoon walking around with her.

Happy Mother's Day everyone!

Fin.

I HATE YORK UNIVERSITY

and i haven't even started it yet! so frustrating.

firstly, the program administrator is a TOTAL flakebot supreme. like, speaks in a sing-songy voice, doesn't remember anything about your client file, and gets all "i can see why you're upset" as soon as you say anything remotely ON TOPIC OR ASK A POINTED QUESTION no matter your tone of voice! i hate having to say, "i'm not upset, i just don't understand what you're saying." lol! she's so disorganized and she is the most scattershot person i've dealt with in post-secondary education in a long time. like seriously?

then, the program director is a total shacker who acts like his program is the shiznit. they keep congratulating me for getting in, "congratulations, this is a very competitive program" and i'm like, ummmm...ACTUALLY IT'S NOT. it's for working professionals, the minimum grade requirements are a B+ in your final two years of undergrad (nevermind that i got straight As in my previous masters), so it's kind of like fake grad school for mature students. stop being so high on your own juice. as if they wield so much power! a program that has to extend the application deadline TWICE by as much as TWO MONTHS is not one that's got people beating down the doors. lol! get over yourselves. i've been emailing back and forth with him asking him questions on how i should proceed with spumante on the way and he's all like, "well, if you recall from my presentation at the information session, the MINIMUM expected attendance is EVERY CLASS" and i responded to the effect of, "ummmm...i was the ONLY PERSON TO SHOW AT THE INFORMATION SESSION, and as such, didn't get the formal presentation but asked you my specific questions about the program" lolz.

then i feel a little bad cuz i remember how sad he looked sitting in that room by himself with a powerpoint all loaded up and ready to go. but i'm ALSO like, I SAW YOU IN THAT ROOM ALL BY YOURSELF, don't conveniently forget that i saw that no one showed up and that i'll actually BUY that this program is sooooo in-demand and that people are beating down the door to get in.

ANYWAY, the annoying thing is that these are my options, given that the fatburger is making an appearance in november:

1) THEY DON'T ALLOW YOU TO DEFER, so miss a whole year and reapply next year
2) accept the offer, start in the fall, pay the $2000 term fee, APPLY for a leave of absence, and then pay $200 FOR EACH SEMESTER of my leave.
^^^ with this method, there's a chance that the director might consider that a "false start" and then make me re-do the work or kick me out AND i'd have to wait the full year's cycle for the courses to be offered again
3) accept the offer and go balls to the wall and hope for the best.

i'm leaning towards #3. as dr. rei says, if she's going to bet on whether or not i can do something i've set my mind to, she's always going to err on the side that i can do it. lol! i've also spoken to people who are doing the program (colleagues at work) and they're like, yeah, the profs totally accommodate people missing classes all the time because of work commitments. since 1 course is offered 6:30-9:30pm downtown once a week, and the other course is 1 saturday, 9-5 a month - i figure the chances are good that i'll only have to miss 1 or 2 of the weekly classes and maybe just 1 of the monthly ones, and i'll pump my way through the rest of it. and lean on my friends and family and their babysitting/housecleaning services :)

it's not like there's NO PRECEDENT IN THE HISTORY OF GRADUATE STUDIES for extensions/allowances/accommodations to be made in the face of life events (or in my case, as the queen of extensions, with some b.s. reason like "shiz is getting too real") which is what the program director is making it out like. again, get over yourself.

so i'll probably miss a few classes in november/late october. classes only run into the first week of december anyway, so it's not even a deal. i think i'll be fine. i mean at this rate, NOW IT'S EFFIN PERSONAL and nothing inspires me more than a grudge match/schooling someone/proving someone wrong. i just have to get myself some slick-a$$ electrical pump and pump my way into a MPPAL.

i love my sis because she reads the blurg and then in phone conversations she'll tell me about how i got details of her life wrong and then i have to promise to post a correction. so yeah, she didn't get 3 months mat leave. she said it was like 6-8 weeks, tops. consider it corrected, T!

last night's dodgeball was aces! we ended up accidentally messing up and playing the intermediate team, while the intermediate team in the gym next door played the rec team that we should've been playing. here's the thing, even with 2 new members on board (people who were on the team but hadn't been able to make it to the previous games) - WE WON! wooooooooooooooooo!!! by a significant amount, too! what what!

it was the best!

tonight the goosetang clan is going to rise from the ashes like dumbledore's phoenix fawkes and go to see dj ayres (of the rub) at never forgive action at the drake:

so pumped! it's going to be aces! we're considering it a success if we make it to past 1am. we're meeting up with those guys at dr. rei and hanbo's pad and then having dinner at poutini or massimo pizza and pasta or mother india and then heading out for some old skool hip hop dancing fun. i feel like i'm leaning towards mother india right now, just because i know that by 8pm i'm going to be STARVING and that i don't necessarily want to make a whole meal of poutine, in light of last night's dietary indiscretions.

the next couple of weekends are kind of insane and jam-packed.

this weekend we've got brockin' out going down tonight, tomorrow is 2 hot docs, sunday is a mother's day brunch with dotytron's fam-bam and then asian legend dinner with my fam-bam.

dinner with the roomie and l'army on tuesday, massage wednesday, dodgeball and beers thursday, dinner with friends S & P on friday, kdubsguelph hangs on saturday, supper club on sunday.

then a whirlwind 4 days with a dinner with our friends S & A before heading to NYC over the long weekend, which we tacked an extra day onto to make extra-long. NYC is going to be THE BEST, because not only are we staying with pingy, but dotytron's good buddy count chocula is down there doing his masters in jazz playing at NYU and is there, and xtina and buns are going down, and i have 2 cook friends down there, and my foodshare friend M is also heading down that weekend. i've got our restos planned out - it's going to be light on the insane-tasting menu type places and more on the neighbourhood-y joints (like, $60/person instead of $250) interspersed with cheap, $20 meals of hot dogs, pizza, momofuku crack pie, gelato, etc. interspersed with buying us new kicks at century 21 and me some fat person clothes at uniqlo and jcrew and built by wendy and maybe some fun stuff at pearl river mart. interspersed with a tonne of jazz music and hanging with the best people on earth.

then we're back on tuesday for a midwife appointment and then hooking up with J & S to see sharon jones and the dap kings. then around for 2 more days before we decamp to geneseo for a long-desired visit with that crew. which is going to consist of mass amounts of five guys burgers & fries, delmonico's, brian's USA diner, aunt cookies subs, pizza pauls/mama mia's, cheesecake factory with some shopping at target, the jcrew outlet, and marshalls for discount designer gear.

and then onward into summer!

FUN!

fin.