slackin'

i've been taking it pretty ez these past few night once i get home, so that's why dispatches from the lagerfeld camp have been intermittent. things have been kind of hectic at work and the dotytron is on march break which means lots of togetherness and less time to be sitting in front of the ordinateur.

we've been eating dinner and then hunkering down in front of the glowy box to watch movies while i knit knit knit away on my niece's knitted bolero. it's going to be pretty cute! i'm making some pattern adjustments to suit my taste and i'm optimistic about how they'll turn out...i had to rip it out at some point and almost ended up having to unravel the whole thing - fixing the mistake has cost me some precious time and meant that it's been consuming my thoughts/leisure time until i got it back on track and right again. the roomie is sick with a head cold so we've been enjoying the quiet comfort of escaping together into random tales from hollywoodland.

i biked to work the past two days and tried going for a run yesterday at lunch. i didn't even make it a 1/4 of the way around the park...but i kept at it...walking in between little bursts of jogging. i'm excited to get good again...the key is making sure i make it a priority to stretch afterwards, lest my already tense hamstrings retract into even tighter coils of petrified muscle.



last night for dinnie i used leftover corned beef to make us reuben sammies. it's my first time making the CLASSIC reuben, complete with sauerkraut (i had been unnecessarily suspicious of its inclusion before) and thousand island dressing (in lieu of the more traditional russian dressing.) reuben sammies are AMAZING! alongside we had a giant salad with more (kraft) thousand island dressing (i was having weird thousand island dressing cravings yesterday - a desire for a creamy salad topper instead of the usual vinaigrette coating i gussy up.) this corned beef is the gift that keeps on giving. i have enough leftovers to turn into a corned beef hash for a future breakfast or breakfast-for-dinner. that's THREE meals out of one 4.25lb corned beef. thrifty thrifty!

tonight we're continuing "irish springs" week and having lamb and guinness stew with carrots, mushrooms, rosemary, and a root vegetable mash (potato, sweet potato, rutabaga, mashed with my roasted garlic-parsley butter and some milk.) i threw in some bits of calf liver too, just to clear out the freezer some. i know that's going to gross some people out but it was really tasty. i'm testing out the new slowcooker. it's okay. i liked the old one because it had a light that turned on when you turned the knob so you knew that it was working...but really, a slow cooker is a slow cooker is a slow cooker - you don't need all the bells and whistles and for it to tweet you when the food's ready.

on monday night we watched 'little dieter needs to fly,' a documentary by our hero, werner herzog (he turned it into a feature film starring christian bale, called 'rescue dawn' - a way more michael mann-ish hollywood title befitting the fictionalized treatment.) the documentary chronicles the story of dieter dengler, who spent his whole life wanting to be a pilot. he finally gets his wish and enlists in the u.s. navy and is shot down by enemy fire during the vietnam war and captured by the viet cong, held captive, tortured, before making an escape.

it's a hellish portrait that leaves you wondering at a person's capacity to endure, process, and exist with such horrific memories and through such limit-defining experiences.

to counterbalance the monday night screening, the dotytron rented 'role models' which stars lagerfeld fan favorites paul rudd (i want to marry him) and jane lynch. this was surprisingly not not bad for a movie featuring the actor most well-known for playing stiffler. it's formulaic, kind of dumb, but not COMPLETELY insulting to the viewer's intelligence, it has a lot of heart, and it champions the causes of the underdog/oddball and LARPers (that's live action role play to you and me.) it got more than a few chuckles out of me and so was worth the rental price (just barely.)

i have a book review for you but i'll save it for another day. in the meantime, allow me to just say that while i was amongst the luddites who grumbled about the LAST facebook update and then rapidly forgot what the previous iteration even looked like...this new one is TOTAL balls. it makes everything a lot harder to use/less intuitive and it's super-annoying. almost enough to turn me off using it entirely. not impressed facebook impresarios. and when you lose a member of the creative class (i've taken up richie florida's charge and am self-applying the term) (don't you love how i call him richie florida?) you lose a not-so-valuable-though-no-less-vociferous cog in the great social networking machine.

fin.

feeling faint

so, i did it to myself AGAIN. spent my lunch surfing realtor.ca and simultaneously casting myself into fits of ecstasy/losing my mind in a reverie of unrealistic fantasy wish-fulfillment/anxiety over not striking while the iron is hot and having the market correction in housing prices slip through my fingers. this ALWAYS happens whenever i spend any small amount of time on realtor.ca...it's like the sweetest home-heroin kiss you can't deny. also, because i've been bad lately and have racked up my line of credit - i won't be back on the saving track until march (when my contract ends, how fortuitous!)

the point is...i'm hoping and crossing my fingers that somehow, somewhere, the dotytron will stumble into a job in this dire market for educational professionals, that my contract gets renewed, that we don't lose our shirts entirely on this performance thing, and that the predictions that things won't start looking up until at least early 2010 are TRUE. please please please let them be true! so many houses on the market right now - most of them are calling my name!

yesterday was so much fun! the hart house buffet makes up in ambiance what it might lack in dizzying cornucopia of selection...you basically had 4-5 salads and cold things (cold cuts, etc), a turkey and stuffing entree (a cute little boob of stuffing draped fetchingly with dark and white meat, pre-sauced), roast beef, a fried fish thing, roasted potatoes, and root vegetables. and there were desserts of the bought variety. the great hall is a lovely venue though and it was gorgeous with the mid-afternoon light streaming in through the windows...it was a very very very poor wizard's version of hogwarts, but enough of a fascimile for a boarding school-fetishist like myself.

then i went shopping with T which was highly enjoyable. she gives honest opinions and we both have clearly defined personal styles.  i accidentally sabotaged my savings attempts by buying 2 sweaters and a dress (all on sale!!!) but from here on in - it's dedicated paying off debt/socking coin away time. seriously, when did the gap become the best?  i know they're an ailing brand...but i really like what head designer patrick robinson has done.  the clothes are great for work and every day...gone are the cartoony colours and in their stead you have nice, flattering, muted tones and figure flattering cuts.  the problem is the price point, which is why the sales rack beckons me with its preponderance of lovely bits marked down to ameloirate my recession guilt.  i love the sales rack at the gap and i love the fact that because they're an ENORMOUS corporate chain their customer support is exemplary (90s days for a full refund on unworn merchandise!!!  be still my heart!)

after wreaking havoc on the queen west strip T and i headed home with our ghandi's rotis in tow for some couch surfing and gabbing.  she bought me the loveliest, thoughtfulest, completely unexpected xmas presents that made my offering of the xmas cookie tin seem downright scroogelike in comparison.  

i got a pair of cute underwear with a robot printed on them (i wore them today so you'll have to go without a picture), i got this t-shirt, printed with day of the dead type skeletons causing a ruckus:

and i got two lovely balls of b.c. yarn:



so i signed up for twitter two weeks ago - i kind of hate it and don't see the point. K gave me obviouseyes when i told her i wasn't keen on it, accompanied with the dripping-with-sarcasm, "really? really? you don't like twitter? you're not 140 characters...you need 3 paragraphs." she's an astute one, that K is. OKAY FINE, IT'S TRUE. 140 CHARACTER IS PALTRY! the stingiest character allowance ever! plus, NOT BEING ABLE TO SEARCH FOR PEOPLE IS SO COUNTERINTUITIVE! like, apparently there are some writers of interest that i'd like to follow who don't happen to be in my email contact list (quelle surprise.) but there's no easy way of finding them unless you know their handle. otherwise, i have to wade through who my friend's friend's friend's are following in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold in a sea of banality. not worth the time investment, in my humble opinion. no no, in the end, i feel like macroblogging of the k. lagerfeld, esquire variety is > than microblogging.

tonight we had dinner with T, her man J, her bff L and L's man N at lil' baci.  

spent the rest of the night wrapping my xmas presents (the ones i've gotten in the mail so far, anyway). i wanted to be more environmentally friendly this year so i went with korean/chinese newspaper with one piece of wrapping paper that i cut up to use for accenting. i d/l an "asian" type font that was cute and printed that on label paper for gift tags. i think they turned out really nice, actually!



in other news: they're calling for 10 centimetres of snow tomorrow!  TEN CM! HAPPINESS!!!!!!!!!!!!  

fin.