international development vs. ME

my food course is driving me bonkers. it's got way too many young, save-the-world white people in it and it seems like the class discussions end up inevitably de-volving into modified versions of impassioned, grade 10 ethics class "debates" (but replace "euthanasia" and "schma-schmortion" with "GMO's" "transnational corporations" and "capitalism"). everyone is sooo typical! i shouldn't say that, there's a few peeps in there who interjected some worthwhile business. but they're vastly out-numbered by people who say "capitalism does this" "capitalism takes away people's choices" "the peasants (!!!) have no choices" blah blah blah. then the teacher does something really lame by taking down a speaker's list. so by the time you want to respond to something, it's like 10 people removed from where you are and conversation ends up being really stilted and stiff (more like singular orations than a dialogue). way to go u of t with your freakishly large grad seminars, way to go.

the only word(s) i got to pipe in was when some kid who was trying to take the "i'm a poor student card". i was like *funny voice* "you're privileged, buddy" and he goes "what! how am i privileged? if it wasn't for a loan i wouldn't be able to go to school" and i was like, "you're STILL privileged" at which point the professor told me that it was so and so's turn to talk. lame!

this one girl (pure parkdale, indie-loving, faux-mullet, vintage swathed) made the following statement (in a breathy voice fecund with naive befuddlement) (about GMO's and food production): "i. just. don't. understand. we have LAND. and we grow VEGETABLES on that land. and then we FEED. THE. VEGETABLES. TO. ANIMALS. and then we eat the animals?!? that seems so wrong to me, i mean, we have LAND."

at this point, my eyes are about to roll on out of my head and i'm looking around the class trying desperately to see if anyone else is HEARING this crap. there were a couple of people who had maybe a glimmer of awareness of the absurdity, but they were doing a better job of hiding it. like, lady...WHAT ARE YOU GETTING AT? what's the problem here? i have absolutely NO issues with vegetarianism, but c'mon. like seriously, c'mon.

at another point in the class, this other woman was trampling all over the agency and rights of people in developing nations (without knowing it, and under the guise of benevolent liberal pap) when a car pulled up outside the classroom (we're at bloor and spadina) and was blasting that ludacris and pharell tune (right at the chorus):

Shake your money maker
Like somebody boutta pay ya
I see you on my radar
Don't you act like you dont hear
Shh
You know I got it
If you want it, come get it
Stand next to this money
Like - ey ey ey

effin catchy as all hell. i hear that song, and i wanna get down. this girl, stops abruptly while the lyrics boom through the classroom and then as the car drives away, says, "i'm sorry, i forget what i was saying because of that rap [disparaging to the MAX] music" wow. that's all i gots to say. wow.

anyway, there's a lot of trampling all over the agency of people in developing nations. this one girl who's amazing, is in an international development program at u of t and she responded to this other girl who was saying that gmo's are disgusting and despicable and the scum of the earth by saying, "well, i agree with you to a certain extent, but if that's what a developing country chooses to do in order to feed their people and get them up to par with the developed world, then it's their right." which i totally agreed with. it's a matter of who gets to say, if it comes from the people of india versus monsanto, i'm all for it. there was another dude who piped in (who is my kindred spirit in the class, although i think he's just auditing it) and said we couldn't continue the discussion until we adequately defined the actors. that a famer's needs in canada is very different from a farmer's needs in india and you can't just subsume them all under the title of "farmer". i should be more forgiving though because i was 100% that to a T when i was in undergrad, so it's probably that i'm at a different age, experience-level, and stage of my life than some of the other kids. they're well-intentioned.

blah blah blah. last night me and the roomie ended up going for drinks and visiting with my doppelganger and her bf, who very much acts like a counterbalance to her me-ness in the same way the dotytron acts as a counterbalance to my me-ness. we're like a doppelganger couple. i really really really like them both and they just got an apartment on the danny so we checked it out. it's sweet! i love having friends in the neighbourhood. then, because the roomie grew up in this hood, we rendezvoused with another old friends of hers who alsolives on the danny, and coincidentally ran into yet another old friend who used to live in riverdale and now lives in taiwan. it was a fun night, but i'm exhausted.

today i'm going to visit hamilton with dr. rei. her mummy is making me a persian feast! i'm soooo excited. i've never eaten persian food before. i made a fig and walnut tart and those cocoa-and-orange love cookies the boy made me that time as gifts. the fig walnut tart looks beautiful but it's the first time i've made the recipe so i don't know how it'll taste. i also overworked the cookie dough a bit so the cookies are tougher than when the dotytron made them, but they're still very tasty, just not as delicate and sandy as i would like.

fin.

i'm not a litigious person...

something tells me that if i fight the law, the law is totally going to win. so i called the wsib yesterday, to see if they would cover my time away from work or the reconstructive therapy. my adjudicator (who is very nice) didn't seem to think that they would, since i have "functional" ability back on my foot and it's just my foot, and blah blah blah. so i called a personal injury lawyer my mom refers cases to sometimes, who was also very nice, but seemed to indicate that it might not be worth my while. it's all very complicated. you have to get a letter from a doctor (that costs like, $1000-$1500) saying that i'm in great pain and suffering and it's causing me untold and more importantly, incalculable amounts of strife and trauma and impeding my ability to function like a normal human being. call me the world's greatest survivor, or the toughest gal on earth, but that's kinda not the case (p.s. who are these scheisty doctors anyhoo? all i can picture is dr. nick riviera). then the lawyer said the same thing, that since it's my foot, and it can be covered up, it's probably not worth my time, energy, and money. and if i take action against my employer, i'll probably be held accountable for half of the accident, which cuts into my potential earnings, plus lawyer fees, etc. at which point i interject and go, "look. i'm not a litigious person, i just want to have the reconstruction covered" and lawyer dude's all like, "you may not be a litigious person, but you have to understand how the litigious system works". basically, it seems the only way i'll get any money to cover the costs is if i claim "pain and suffering" which is the x factor in litigation. otherwise, it's a series of charts and checkmarks used by actuarial scientists to figure out how much having a non-disfigured foot is worth me. the other option is that i might be able to take action against the wsib for NOT covering it.

i think people have a very skewed sense of our legal system. the amount of times people have looked at me sympathetically and said, "you should sue!" with a maniacal gleam in their eyes (no doubt gleaned from countless stories of american justice packed into our heads of windfalls from finding a severed digit in your baconator burger at wendy's), i know they're thinking enviously of the piles and piles of money and how my ugly foot is my ticket to a work-free life. this is not the case. the law is a lot more dry and didactic and boring than you would think. it's very procedural. foots are worth x amount of a facial scar. size equals x amount of renumeration. boring.

i also think that when i tell people i have a "scar" on my foot, they're not exactly picturing what this mother looks like. the reconstruction isn't merely cosmetic, i have like a 1" growth on my foot that kinda impedes putting on shoes and stuff.

ah well, the lawyer dude is going to call me back and give me a heads up.

in other news, i'm exhausted right now but this weekend is supposed to be fun! tonight i'm staying in, sleeping, resting, and trying to work on a paper due in a couple of weeks. tomorrow morning i'm doing the same thing, and then i'm packing up and heading to hamilton to visit with dr. rei's family for the first time! we're going to the ancaster fair. apparently there's tractor pulls and other such things that i adore. then sunday we return home, do a little more work, then it's dodgeball, wings at duff's and dj premier (of gangstarr) at revival! what a night!!!

tonight for dinnie is leftovers.

fin.

the scar

just as my amateur epidemiology sleuthing on wikipedia indicated, the thing that has taken up residence on my foot is an abnormally large, abnormally thick, keloid scar (i suspect that being forced back to work was part of the problem). so the plastic surgeon recommended steroid injections (with the warning that, "they really hurt") as the first round of treatment in addition to some therapeutic massage to break down the scar tissue, and if that doesn't work, they can try cutting the scar off, and taking some skin from my butt and grafting it on (that apparently REALLY hurts, especially from the butt-al region, as you've basically got a patch with exposed nerve-endings...another open wound). so he prepared the steroid injection while i was right there, and the needle was thick. it was like a sewing needle or like a sewing machine needle, not one of those dainty, brittle-like-a-victorian-era-housewife vaccination needles, no sir. just before it goes in, he gives me a dramatic, "are you ready?" and i'm like, "what? no! you're freaking me out!" but he stabbed it in anyway. i'm happy to announce that my keloid is so thick that it is devoid of feeling (much like its' owner). i didn't feel a single smart, pinch, fluid entering the tissue, nothing.

now i have to try to arrange physio. i gotta see if workman's comp will either a) cover my time away from work to go to these sessions, or b) pay for a private clinic closer to my house which has hours that are more amenable to my work schedule. we'll see. my adjudicator is really nice. i'm also thinking of maybe suing canoe. i know i'm not a litigious person, but it's starting to rankle that i gotta go through all this bullcrap and they get to sit around all fat and smug and fat-babyish and give me a hard time about coming back to work and then give me a hard time about leaving even when i gave them two weeks notice and stayed for the hell that is summerlicious. the jerks!

my government documents course looks fun. it's got that kind of laid-back, chummy, practical-based professor teaching it that i dig. not big on the readings, big on hands-on assignments that don't seem too labour intensive. this semester looks like it's going to be my easy one. yay! also it looks like working where i do is really going to help with the assignments. the stuff is like, digging up statute citations and blah blah blah.

the work seems pretty spaced out too, and there's not a lot of running around gathering up readings, which is very nice. i met up with my friend richardson yesterday which was delight. she's preggos. being preggos has subjected her to a heretofore hidden side of her partner's mum (the shrill, controlling, censorious, patronizing side) that seems to come out in mums when faced with particular hot-button, big-ticket issues like weddings and babies and home-buying. for what it's worth, one of the amazing things about my mum is that she doesn't really butt in at all. she tends to reserve jugement, offer off-the-cuff suggestions, and laugh at my choices (with sarcastic, disparaging, oh-so-chinese flavour). i've talked over some of my wedding ideas with her, and she's pretty game, as long as she doesn't have to pay for it.

today is a public library then leg library day. then home. yesterday's dinner was delicious! i put some toasted pistachios and toasted coconut in the coconut steamed basmati rice and it was really texturally satisfying and tasty. my bastardized eggplant bharta really benefited from sitting in the slow cooker all day, and the one habenero pepper i put in added just the right amount of head.

i'm making a roasted beet and beet green pasta with ricotta salata. i peel and cut up the beets and roast them in the oven with some roasted garlic oil and salt and pepper. while those are cooking through, i smush up the roasted garlic and toss that in a pan with some chopped onion, and add the chopped and washed (beet greens get really gritty) beet greens. while the pasta is cooking, i reserve some of the pasta cooking water, and then toss the pasta with the roasted beets, the beet greens and some crumbled ricotta salata cheese. i'm hoping to serve this with a baby spinach salad with a red wine vinaigrette.

* i changed around the template for this blog because i think that reading white text on a dark background is better for your eyes - we'll see how well this takes*

fin.

collagen injections and a tummy tuck

i'm going to see my plastic surgeon this morning. i love saying that because it makes me feel so l.a. the real truth of it is much less glamorous, as i'm seeing him to see if anything can be done about my little friend on my foot. i just don't want whatever procedure is recommended, to hurt, although i don't have much sensation in the scar anyway so i guess it wouldn't matter?

one of the things i absolutely adore about working at the leg library is that one of my coworkers is really really into film. he's very knowledgeable about the entire canon and has a wide range of tastes (ie. in conversation he'll drop the name of a croatian cinematographer or a french actress), but it's not in a snobby way, just a really well-versed and enthusiastic way. i managed to finagle his "best of '06" list from him and it's very in-depth, but i like that he doesn't shy away from commercial films. if anything, he's very, very objective (insofar as one can be objective) in that he'll watch anything, with no preconceptions. there's always lots to talk about with him and it's nice to have someone's armchair-professional take on stuff.

i submitted one of my "reading responses" for my sociology of food course. they're supposed to be informal, but the syllabus has silly guidelines like, "in one page, your reading response should include 2 'keepers', 2 'questions' and 1 'so-what'". i hate it when profs try to overly-determine what's laid out as an "informal" exercise. i'll say what i have to say! this is grad school for pete's sake! mine ended up being kinda breezy but they're pass fail and she takes the best 8 out of 12, if you submit all 12. the readings this week weren't very inspiring. they were from the "socialist register" and attempt to illustrate the economic impetus for the current state of globalized food and its attendant societal ills (obesity, the subjugation of the developing world, etc). i appreciated a lot of the points, but i thought that the argument was too situated in a marxist base/superstructure binary, which left little room for the subject's intervention. it was a tidy little system all wrapped up in a bow, which is great, but the problem with the base/superstructure thing is that the end result is: we're screwed and there's nothing you can do about it, whereas, in my infinite wisdom as i age, i don't believe you have to throw the baby out with the bath water, and that there might be ways to negotiate within capitalism. i don't know what those ways are, but i find it a little more hopeful overall.

last night's dinner was a total winner. the zucchini was tender and al dente as was the pasta, and those oven-roasted, oil-packed chilis my supervisor gave me (the "toni chilies" as we've taken to calling them) make everything good. i'm realizing that my camera is starting to be woefully inadequate compared to other people's digital cameras. but i'm poor, so that's okay. it just gets my goat when i see like, 8.0 megapixel glamour shots of food that i know doesn't taste as good as mine. it's like false advertising! the paris hilton of food-blogging! sour grapes on my part, i know! i love my little camera though, so loyal to it i shall be.

tonight is my mega-long day so i'm packing an eggplant and chickpea coconut milk curry with coconut-pistachio basmati rice for my dinner at school. i made the curry in the slow cooker and it turned out alright if i do say so myself. a bit of a bastardized eggplant bharta.

fin.

ce n'est pas acceptable

so one of my co-workers threw out the dish sponge yesterday at the leg library, making claims of disease ridden, bacteria-laden, death bombs swabbing our dishes and leaving us with any number of wasting, flesh-eating viruseses (virii???). this would have been fine if we had a replacement but we didn't. her suggestion? using wadded up paper towels to wash our dishes. i can't deal. i almost imploded. i am someone who has VERY fixed notions of the proper way to wash dishes, and those notions have "sponge" as their unifying centre. not j-cloths, not wadded up paper towels...sponges. it almost broke me using the paper towels. the strange thing is, when it actually comes to the washing of dishes, i'm pretty lax (ie. the person most likely in this house to leave crusted food on utensils is yours truly). as long as they come in contact with soap and hot hot water, i'm okay. this coworker is a clean freak. she washes her sheets EVERY WEEK. now, maybe i'm revealing too much here, but i do it considerably less than that. mainly because stripping and remaking the bed always seems like such a herculean task that you build it up in your head until it becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle between you and sleeping bliss. seriously, the joy of the fresh sheet feeling only lasts for one sleep, and then you're back at square one.

while at the cottage, i read miriam toews "a complicated kindness" about this semi-precocious, blase, mennonite girl living in a remote mennonite community in manitoba, struggling to come to grips with her life after her mother and sister up and leave town one day. it wasn't without it's small humours and moments, but overall, i don't know if it's my kind of thing. i don't really dig that kind of disaffected-but-naive voice (ie. catcher in the rye bored me to tears). and fiction (aside from harry potter) hasn't been doing it for me lately. some of the descriptions were kind of clever, but it was really just a compendium of musings from this mennonite girl, some of which were kind of clever.

wonderful but life-busying things are happening for the dotytron right now. he's working at the music store, and volunteering at our old high school one day a week to gain in-class experience for his teacher's college application. he also teaches music out of our house on sundays, but some of his students are shifty. while he was serving some lady and her kid at the music store, she was so impressed with his way with children (the dotytron has like, babies falling out of his fingertips, that's how good with kids he is), that she recommended him to her catholic school board, so on sunday he was offered a job teaching in their after-school music program on mondays and fridays. the pay is amazing and it's going to look FANTABULOUSO on his application. on top of all this he has a meeting today with another all-music school to see if he can teach there. poor little squirrel-that-looks-like-abraham-lincoln is working 7 days a week now, and he still has to finish two courses and do this crazy music jury thing where they have to learn like a billion songs, and the judges call like, 10 and he has to be able to play on them, cold. i'm sympathetic to his state and i'm being extra nice and soft lately, but i'm also secretly glad to see some hustle from him. eye on the prize! eye on the prize!

last night's dinnie was delicious. i have a secret passion for fried seafood and tartar sauce. tartar sauce is one of my "mother" sauces. in classic french cooking, the mother sauces are the basis for all the sauces in the french canon, and it's stuff like demi-glace, bechamel, blah blah blah. mine is like, tartar sauce, bagna cauda, sweet chili dipping sauce, etc. ha. tonight for dinnie we're having a quick pasta of zucchini that i slice thin and sautee with garlic and chilies and toss with the hot pasta and some grated pecorino romano. with a baby spinach salad with toasted pecans and goat cheese in a bacon vinaigrette on the side.

fin.

shellacked

we crushed the other team in last night's premiere dodgeball game, 14-5. in their defense, they were a really nice, easygoing and fun team to play, and it was a lot of the members' first time playing. so they're where we were, last time around. it was fun to run around and i'm not as sore as i was last time, which is good. i feel like i'm more in shape or something. last time we started in the spring, which comes after 3 solids months of me taking ttc to school and work, so i think it's working better. next week we're playing my brother's team, which should be fun.

today is my really long day at the library. i'm there from 8:30 - 5:30 with a half hour lunch. it's rough!

that's an unappetizing picture of what was a surprisingly appetizing dinner considering i pulled it out of my ass. last night's dinner conversation was fairly off-colour, featuring appearances by internet celebrities "tubgirl" and "goatse". anyone not familiar with these terms, i beg you, DO NOT GOOGLE THEM. suffice it to say it's disgusting (but LEGAL AND CONSENTING disgusting) - that disclaimer is for the prurient tastes of my lawmaker sister. the roomie has never seen goatse, so was intrigued by the concept (a guy pulling his a**hole inside out). i told her she didn't want to see it (and was quite emphatic about it). she said she did. i told her it looked like a meat flower, or a meat tulip, specifically, at which point we both almost died laughing. if i ever open a restaurant, i think i'm going to call it "the meat tulip". class-ay.

tonight for dinner we're having fried calamari sandwiches with tartar sauce and a salad.

fin.

i have a new monitor!

i've been neglecting to mention that "chinotto is my nemesis" is being constructed on my brand-new, 17", flat-screen, lcd, acer monitor. i feel so grown-up! the boy's lovely mum bought me a photodock and printer for our kodak digital camera for my birthday, but unfortunately it was for the wrong model, so the boy returned it for me and got me the monitor instead (i'm also in the process of having my dear friend aaron upgrade my computer). fancy pants! there was even some money left over for the boy to buy me a copy of joss whedon's "firefly" on dvd. thanks, momma d!

i'm going through a phase of anxiety and feeling like i need to perform a house-enema. i basically want to print up a bunch of my cache of digital photos from the past 3 years and put them in albums and frame them, and clear through some of the detritus in the house and reorganize, box and label things appropriately. this seems to happen whenever i'm in school, probably as the outcome of sublimated procrastination urges catalyzed by my incessant need to always be doing something/organizing something/producing something. anyway, the house enema is going to involve lots of rubbermaid storage bins and liberal use of my brother p touch label-maker that my little brother got me for my birthday last year. my little(st) brother is the best gift buyer because he ALWAYS sticks to the list.

thanks to my lovely coworker, i was introduced to this company, blurb, that has software that allows you to create your own books and will then "bookstore-quality" produce them for you. i suppose it's the same as a lot of the options made available by kodak and other photo companies, but the layout options and finishing on blurb are a lot nicer, and the pricing is a lot more affordable. so i think i'm going to indulge the inner-scrapbooker lurking just beneath the surface of my urban flaneur and make photobooks of our trips and of the past couple years, instead of going to the trouble of producing photo albums.

fish tacos were amazing and were deceptively light, thus enabling me to cross the hairline that separates "reasonable portion" from "gross overeating." the banana cake was delicious and simple, really just a moist banana bread/cake covered in cream cheese frosting. my love for cream cheese frosting is not to be underestimated. i would do many a thing and cross many an ethical and moral boundary for cream cheese frosting. thank goodness it hasn't come to that. yet. i also made a banana bread for my co-workers at the library. this morning we had an early sunday breakkie of peameal, cheddar, tomato and a fried egg on a soft kaiser, with beet-carrot-apple-cucumber-ginger juice.

dinner tonight is going to be pan-seared pork chops with cornbread stuffing and some kind of vegetable (maybe beans?). nice and simple. we're also playing our first dodgeball game of the new season this afternoon. weeeeeeeeeeeee! i'm fantastically out of shape. weeeeeeeeeeeee!

fin.

you win this round, magic oven

i was all prepared to find magic oven guilty of all kinds of upscale-pizza related infractions: soggy crust, meager portions, ridiculous toppings, and the worst of all - no value for your dollar. unfortunately, the pizza was pretty flippin' fantastic. the pizza is smaller than the XL at mama's, so the portions are slightly less than what we're used to, but still satisfying for a friday night meal. there's a wide array of vegan pizzas, chicken pizzas, and meat and seafood pizzas with pre-configured toppings. now, in my universe, i have no truck with all of the above save the meat pizzas and a clam pizza. seriously, chicken on a pizza wigs me out. there's just no need for that shiz! chicken is SO BORING, you might as well put cubes of tofu on your pizza (don't even THINK about it!). they also have a lot of options for hippity dippity crusts: spelt, whole wheat (oil free, yeast free), and white. i wanted a whole wheat crust WITH oil and yeast, but for some reason they don't do that for XL, and i don't even know if they do whole wheat with the yeast and oil (which makes no sense to me, but whatever...i mean, can't i have leavened extra fibre in my pizza?) we ordered the "harmony magic" which is: olive oil, proscuitto, garlic, caramelized onion, spicy italian sausage, light mozzarella, gorgonzola and arugala. the crust (white) is FANTASTIC. light, thin, crunchy on the bottom, nicely golden (as if fried) but not greasy or oily in the least, and with an almost flaky quality. that combination of toppings with that crust was an unqualified winner. it ended up costing us $37, which is decent for takeout night...on the high end we end up spending at most, $15 per person so it's well within the takeout night budget. i was kinda pissed though cuz the waitress stole my change even though i walked in and picked up my pizza, in which case, i never tip, because well, i haven't been served. that's fair, right? next time she tries to pull that i'm going to be right on her.

today is homework and errands day, as my mum bailed on a proposed ball gown mission with me.

tonight for dinner we're having fish tacos. lightly floured tilapia pieces, pan fried and served in warm corn tortillas with guacamole, salsa, shredded lettuce, sour cream, etc. i might make a banana cake with cream cheese frosting for dessert, or rice krispie squares to use up the boatloads of marshmallows left over from the cottage.

fin.

yay yay yay!

today is the class i'm looking forward to the mostest. it's a sociology classed called: SOCIAL ECOLOGY - FOOD IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT *swoon* *lovebirds* *hearts and unicorns* it's like the class was MADE for me! yay! i hope it lives up to my expectations! the prof sent me an early copy of the syllabus and it looks right up my alley.

last night's dinnie was spectacular. so comforting and tasty. as you can see, i ended up going with cornbread with the now de rigeur butter and maple syrup as my side starch. and i just had it for breakkie too! you can't lose! tonight is take out night. magic oven (a gourmet pizza place with veggie/vegan leanings) just opened up practically across the street so we're going to try them out. the pizzas are on the pricey side so we'll see how it actually stacks up, tastewise.

fin.

going to bed with a stitch from laughing

is a very, very good thing.

so, there's been some talk in my family that i'm not really living up to my full potential or capabilities, considering my abilities, talents, whathaveyou. they think that me doing library school is a bit of a cop-out. i'm not gonna lie, it kinda is. basically, my ambition in terms of career is to have a fairly cushy job that's not too taxing with three week's paid vacation (that's to start, mind you) and sick days and personal leave days and a hefty pension. this is what i decided after giving my life to cooking for 4 years and seeing nothing come of it - and i'm not going to piss around the bush here, i was GOOD at what i did. and after pursuing grad school for a while and becoming disillusioned (yes, there was a time when the golden light of idealism shone through the swiftly thickening crust of hard-boiled cynicism encasing my soul). the thing is, i'm STILL good at what i'm doing now (librarianing, researching, etc), but this way allows me to pursue my REAL life's ambition, which is to have a rich fulfilling life (and the wherewithal to do so) surrounded by people i love. so i think when my family looks at my career choice and are lamenting the fact that it doesn't require as much of my exceptional genius as something else, i think they gloss over the fact of how fantastically happy i am. like, disgustingly happy. like, so happy that the superstitious chinese in me types these words ever-so-cautiously for fear of tempting the capricious and malevolent hand of fate. *kow-tows to confucious and lao tsu and mulan*

anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that i went to bed roaring with laughter over two things. a) the other night, i started calling the dotytron "lady di" and for some reason i still find this side-splittingly funny. i think it's a new nickname in the making. b) we were sleepily talking over our halloween costume ideas for this year. i want to go as simon and garfunkel. the only problem is, i'm concerned that with the sweaters and whatnot, it's going to be too hot to go dancing. then we started saying how much funnier it would be to show up to a jungle party as shimon (from ram records) and garfunkel. hahahaha!!! especially if that meant that i had to go in blackface (it turns out shimon is a white guy, ah zoot...i can still do whiteface i guess). i almost peed my pants. the reference only has meaning if you're a drum'n'bass fan, but believe me, it's funny. we're all about our obscure halloween costumes. the first year we did a pair thing, we went as matthew and gunnar nelson.

while at the cottage, i coasted to the finish of the Harry Potter phenomena-zeitgeist-wave. j.k. rowling is the shiz. after all the ink and type that have been exhausted on this, i feel i have very little of worth to contribute, only that she has managed to craft a deeply moving, sophisticated, and engrossing series, and that as a cultural movement, the idea of so many people for so long a time in so many different places coming together over a story (that's not about racial purity or ethnic cleansing or arms trading...actually, i guess the story kinda IS about those things, but in the good way, not the bad way) gives me goosebumps.

i cried buckets during the climax of the narrative, because this is the culmination of a long relationship with these characters and this world and it was ultimately soooo rewarding. i highly endorse you to read the series, put aside your misgivings about its' popularity, ubiquitousness, whatever your qualms are. it's a piece of well-crafted fiction in the grandest, epic sense, and it's well worth your time.

yesterday my multiculti class is what's to be expected from a class that tries to tackle multiculturalism in any form, public library oriented or not. we had a class discussion about a very poorly written article written by some dude about whether germany could stand to adopt canada's stance on multiculturalism. talking about such broad terms in such a broad way does my head in. the failure to define the specificity or frame the argument in any way results in grade 10 debating class style "big topic" wrangling that stresses me out. it's like trying to encapsulate the enormity of the universe or conceptualize what existed pre-big-bang. it does my head in. i actually heard a classmate say something like, "so, in canada we have the cultural mosaic, as opposed to the states, which is a melting pot" !!!!!!!!!!! wow.

i saved the best part for last. yesterday, after class, i went to my department's library (called the "inforum" *rollseyesdotbarfdotgif*) to get some books and photocopy my readings for next week. didn't have any money on my card, so i tried to borrow someone else's, they had no money, i decided to suck it up and go to robarts. add money to my card and robarts and photocopy my readings and then head back into my faculty building and take the elevator (in itself a weird occurence cuz i almost always walk the stairs) to the inforum to drop off my books and leave. as the elevator doors open, what entrancing visage do i see before me? DR. REI!!! the expression on our faces was hi-larious. our mouths gaped open and glee washed over our perpetually youthful good looks. best day ever! i love seeing familiar, good friend faces on campus. it reminds me there is a life outside of the wackness of FIS. it was such a fluke too!

last night i made that cumin-mint dressed red pepper, celery and cucumber salad to go with the perogies. i wanted something crunchy and fresh beside all the starchiness. we tried a new perogie brand. they were alright. we also thought outside the box in terms and deviated from our usual flavour (potato cheddar) to try their sauerkraut and mushroom and broccoli cheddar kind. i dunno if it's worth it. the reason i eat perogies is as an excuse for loads of full-fat sour cream and caramelized onion mixed with something vaguely starchy. i don't need all the bells and whistles, methinks. tonight for dinner we're having a creamy stewed chicken one-pot dealie with peas and baby carrots. the return of hectic-ness means the return of the slow cooker to the repertoire. yay fall! fall food pwns! so i browned some chicken, added leek, celery and garlic mirepoix to the pan, tossed in some flour, cooked that out, deglazed with wine, and chucked it all with the baby carrots and chicken stock into the slowcooker. when i get home, i'm going to fish out the bones, so it's just shredded chicken meat, add some frozen peas and some cream and bake some biscuits to go with. mmmm!

fin.

"i have this thing..."

so on monday night, one of the boy's co-workers (he works at a music store) came over for a quick visit and chat. this dude is like, 30 plus, and he comes over, with a basketful of sour grapes, about one of their coworkers, who i guess had seniority, but is now second-in-command in the store. so he's complaining about how he got called into the office, and this is what dude man says: "okay, so i have this thing, where sometimes, i sleep through my alarm, and i show up to work like a few hours late. i mean, it's not like it's a big deal, it only happens every few months and ___ is going to bust my chops about it?!?" so i kept expecting him to explain what this mysterious ailment was, but he didn't. i was VERY proud of myself for being able to bite my tongue and not call him out for being the lazy, irresponsible schlub he clearly is. dude, if you're flaking out on work, at least have the balls to admit it. "i have this thing where i sleep through my alarm?!?" who DOES that?

i'm all for people doing what they want to do, but i'm telling you, staying at that music store is bad news for the dotytron. it's a bunch of dudes with arrested development (not the boy, and i guess not everyone is like that)...it's like a head-in-the-clouds "musicians" holding pen. yikes, is alls i gotta says, yikes. i mean, i'm sure it's fun day to day, but they sound like a bunch of preschoolers sometimes.

first day of class was good, except for my professor breaking my heart. it's that same uptight professor as my last term. who lectures for the FULL THREE HOURS and EVEN A LITTLE BIT OVER but is so well-meaning and well-intentioned that my heart shatters to pieces. especially when he does stuff like during break, go sit on a metal chair in the corner of the room and engage in some kind of quiet reflection. how heartbreaking is that? not even shuffling papers, or going to the bathroom, or going to his office! he just sits down and stares at his hands !!!!!! gah! i'm going to talk to him next class. something tells me i'll be talking to him A LOT since i have a 4000 word essay due in less than 3 weeks, PLUS a 12 book annotated reading list. we're off to the races, people!

i have another class today, "public library service to culturally diverse communities"

i'm soo busy! it's crazy...it's already non-stop. when i get home, it's a race to make dinner, eat it, and then get to doing odds and ends before i can even THINK of doing my actual schoolwork. yeeps.

tonight for dinner we're having perogies with caramelized onions, sour cream, and some kind of salad. i keep forgetting to take pictures of my dinnies but i'll start up again, post-haste.

fin.

quiet reflection

in marked contrast to my first week of cottaging, the following week at the boy's family's cottage was a time of quiet introspection, reflection, and lots of lots of naps and eating and reading. it was refreshing and nice to have the opportunity to do both kinds of cottaging. this past week of idleness has left me feeling recharged and much more zen about stuff. that's the view from the hammock. the cottage is accessed by boat only, so it's quite removed. it's on the finger jutting off of a very large lake and their part of the lake is a dead end, so there's not a lot of boat traffic and only a scattering of properties. we went on long canoe rides and i portaged for the first time ever! (incidental note for factual consideration: the portage was about 4 feet) the next few shots are pics from our early morning canoe adventures, featuring my first experience with a real beaver dam. beaver dams are palatial residences that seem to occur near swamps with fetid smells. i'm just saying, is all.

most of my time was occupied with swimming, fishing (i caught a crapload of fish but they were too small to eat/keep), and playing games at night. we found this game called "up words" (we called it "word up") which is kinda like scrabble except you can build up your words vertically as well as horizontally, and the value is consistent for every letter. i was hooked!!! there was also a game called "rummy" (with tiles, not cards) that i suspect is very similar to mah jong, which means that i've received the preliminary training to continue my grandfather's lineage of gambling supremacy round the mah jong table. aces!

today is my first real day back into real worldsville. le sigh. my class today is called: "reader's advisory: reference work and resources", but i call it: "bird course: karl's fulfillment of credit requirements with a minimum of effort and labour expenditure" it's with that prof who has the stutter who's kind of ocd. he sent out this wacky email over the weekend thanking all the students who had already downloaded the syllabus so i'm like, "wtf guy? where the crap am i supposed to download the syllabus from?" and i emailed him something to that effect with no response. i'm telling you, universities are saving a crapload on paper costs by getting US to shell out for ink cartridges and paper and whatnot. and yet, tuition continues to rise?

also, one of my resolutions upon returning to the cottage was to limit my time doing purposeless interneting/tving. to that end, i'm trying to break my addiction to online celebrity gossip. however, i couldn't help but watch britney's performance at the vma's. wow. tragic. you can see the dawning awareness of her own irrelevance in her eyes. it's like the bard himself couldn't have crafted a more poignant scene of crushing self-realization.

tonight for dinnie we're having pasta with leftover sauce but i'm going to switch it up and bake it in the oven with ricotta and mozzarella and have it with caesar salad again. the roomie made a solid meat sauce! she gone done good.

fin.

backstreet's back, aight!

well, it's the new, improved, less stressed, more relaxed version (2.0 perhaps?) of karl lagerfeld esquire round these parts, which is what two weeks of doing absolutely nothing will do for you. i mean, we did do things, but we didn't HAVE to do anything, which is the major point for the very existence of the muskokas region, as far as i'm concerned. the first week with my family at the cottage we rented was non-stop laughs; hilariousness; bawdy, off-colour humour; ruminations round the fire every night; star-gazing; lazing on the dock; swimming in the unseasonably warm water; snacking; and eating outrageously, sinfully well. the lake we were on was fairly small (only about 1 - 1.5km across) and wasn't overly deep, so the water was really nice and refreshing. we were blessed with fantastic weather - hot, no humidity, blazing sun for every day except for one. the cottage was fairly well-appointed, although the "fully stocked kitchen" was a big, fat, lie. i mean, i guess it was "fully stocked" if all you were going to be eating was weiners and beans, but for the way **I** cook at the cottage, it was slim pickin's. the good thing was, that in my infinite wisdom and obsessive compulsiveness, i packed about 30 tonnes of kitchen equipment to make our lives easier. my other major contribution to the events of the cottage was the idea to create thebaby-containment-holding pen known forthwith as "babydome" (2 kids enter, 1 kid leaves). basically, i stuck some blankets down inside a mosquito tent on the property, we'd chuck the kids in there, and then zip 'em up while we went and drove atv's drunk, mixed heavy machinery with depressants, and drove around in a shallow lake with a 160 horsepower engine. fun! i jest, though. in reality, we were mere steps away, mainly to prevent alarmingly brazen chipmunks from slipping into the tent and terrorizing the children.

it was a fantastic, family-bonding experience. i'll put up some pictures of our time at the boy's family's cottage tomorrow. i was clever enough to take the day off today to futz around and clean and prepare for my insane-o weeks to come. i've got 12 hours of class time, 20 hours of work at the library, and 8 hours of work at the public library, bringing me to 40 hours from monday through friday. not counting the work i have to do for class (which is basically a joke, as faithful readers all know that i don't DO work for class).

i've been eating like a disgusting pig so it's back to healthy portion sizes and lots of fruits and veggies for me. tonight the roomie made us some kind of meat-based pasta, which we're having with caesar salad.

finally, what kind of geek-family cottage vacation would it be without a time-lapsed documented attempt at drawing the batman logo in sparklers?

fin.

gone fishin'

well ladies and gents, for the next two weeks i'll be internet-and-blog-free, hanging out at a cottage my family rented in bracebridge for a week, then spending a week with the dotytron and his family at their cottage in the muskokas. i will be in engaging in plenty of the above, as well as communing with this:
and hanging with these peeps:

it's going to be so much fun! i've been waiting for this all summer. i can't wait to wake up and have the only pressing concern (and not that pressing at that) be making breakfast and dinner. long, endless hours spent reading in screened-in porches, listening to the sounds of water, stargazing at night, roasting marshmallows over a crackling fire, laying on a dock, getting up early to watch the sun rise over a lake as still as glass. there's something about cottage country in ontario that tugs at my heartstrings. i can't think of any place i'd rather be, surrounded by my families and unwinding.

enjoy the next two weeks, team!

fin.

lil' baci

did not disappoint. my only quibble (and it's a small one) is that the room is all hard angles and consequently very loud. it makes for a very shouty dining experience. the company was nice, although i didn't feel i got to talk it out as much as i like to. however, i did get to express my hate for various things, such as: alberta, faith-based funding of schools in ontario, and i think there were some more but i forget. which caused one of my dining companions to announce, "wow, you hate a lot of stuff" which i thought was a most egregious reading of me. for some reason, people tend to focus on the stuff that i hate, making me seem like i'm some willy nilly hater of all and sundry. not true! last night, with equal weight, i professed my love for the following: cured meat, akon, and some other stuff i also can't remember.

there was also a hilarious mission for cupcakes after dinner that was very peanuts-esque (as in, the beloved charles schultz comic) in its execution and resolution. i was also wearing a new(ish) ebay purchase that i love. it's a cream coloured dress with silver chevron stripes, slightly sheer, in a style and cut that makes me feel like faye dunaway. kind of late 60s, early 70s dreamy feel. today i'm wearing a new blouse from ebay that makes me look like an intrepid girl reporter from a slapstick romantic comedy from the 50s. i LOVE clothes. see? so there.

i'm going nearly bats**t insane with cottage preparations. it's killing me. what's also killing me is my family's near-obsessive need to turn any situation that could easily be resolved with SIMPLE AND TRANSPARENT COMMUNICATION into a giant, disorganized, cluster of epic proportions. i love my mum, but her spirit animal is a monkey wrench.

tonight we're having a salad nicoise with poached eggs for dinnie. i'm trying to keep things simple as i'm going on a two week vacay on saturday.

fin.

pizza day!

remember pizza days at school? when the mere suggestion of pizza being brought to your school to break the monotony of an endless line of sandwiches, minute maid fruit punch juice boxes, or snackables was enough to send you into a flurry of novelty-infused excitement? i sure do. this is, of course, before you hit your late student/university years, when pizza loses its novelty status and becomes the rotating staple in a short card of regular dinner options.

this nostalgia-tinged preamble is merely to preface the announcement that i'm having a pizza lunch at work today. weeeeeee! i convinced my supervisor to order from mamma's. she's also making us ceasar salad and bringing pop or water or juice and having watermelon. i baked a lemon curd tart in a poppyseed crust.

last night's dinnie was muy fun! great company is the best stuff ever. i've also taken out some "learn italian" cds from the library to practice before i go to florence. oh yeah, i'm planning on going to florence, rome, and venice with dr. rei and the boy (aka ian...thanks, spoiler alert jenn!) after school ends in late april/may. which meant that i was answering the phone with a booming, "buon giorno!" all afternoon and night, which meant that the telemarketers who make up the bulk of our phone calls (we have no friends...or at least, no phoning friends) were mightily confused and hung up a few times.

tonight i'm going to lil' baci for dinner with some old high school friends of the boy's (aka ian)

fin.

getting your wed on

congratulations to my dear friends attila and jen who are getting hitched! they're a couple that makes sense (actually a rarity). do any of you have any couple friends where you wonder that they simply MUST have some kind of secret, behind-the-scenes life that provides the fuel for their companionship, because when you see them out together, you just don't understand how it works? i do. attila (aka my male doppelganger) and jen are NOT THAT. i love you two!!!

in other news, i haven't done a lit round-up in a while, but that doesn't mean i haven't been reading. au contraire, mon frere. a month or so ago, i finished reading "the 100-mile diet: a year of local eating" written by a canuck couple living in vancouver or thereabouts. they're writers. i kinda knew that i was going to hate it, but it's one of those things where i HAVE to read it so i can know in concrete terms exactly what it is i'm hating. the two decided to embark on a 100-mile diet (which works for them because they live in one of the more fertile and ecologically and agriculturally diverse areas in canada) for all the usual reasons (fossil fuels, blah blah blah) and go about it and write about it in the usual way (the de rigeur earnest-and-self-congratulatory-with-interjections-of-wry-self-awareness-
that's-supposed-to-mitigate-the -earnestness-and-self-congratulatoriness) taken by young, privileged, urban thirty-somethings with aspirations of pastoral redemption. bah. the book was REALLY annoying (i thought). they go through month by month and it's more of a personal journey than you would think, which on the one hand makes it more engaging than a laundry list of their dinners (from a voyeuristic perspective) but on the other hand makes the scope kind of limited to how much you want to know about their lives (for me, i found them annoying, so i didn't care all that much). let me put it to you this way: their relationship starts to "crumble" (or at least the reader is led to believe this) and is redeemed by them finding a source of wheat. oh yes, my friends, WHEAT becomes the symbolic and literal turning point in this slim narrative of ponciness.

meh. it just wasn't my thing.

tonight we're having the coach and her co-star over for dinner. we're having fried masa and fresh corn cakes (kind of like really THICK tortillas...sopas?) topped with a guajillo pepper black bean chili with monterrey jack, guac, salsa and sour cream. i also want to make that blueberry sour cream pie so we can eat that with ice cream and clear some space in the freezer. we'll see whether i have enough time.

fin.

the blame china chronicles continues

first, allow me to say that my first gander (haha) at cooking a goose was a cracking success. i roasted it and served it alongside a port-enriched gravy, with the goose-fat roasted tatties and the casserole (i skipped the corn). it was delicious! the verdict is in: goose is > turkey by about a billion. the meat is so rich and flavourful and because of the high fat content in the animal, it doesn't taste dry in the least. also, i think geese are more active birds, so unlike the freakishly over-fed and lethargic turkey specimens we get nowadays, the flesh has actually developed some toughness and flavour. the thing i hate about turkey is that most of the time, people overcook the poor thing so that it's dry as f**k, and the meat is spongy and beyond bland. i lurve the goosey goose!

the cake also turned out amazing. you can't tell from the picture, but part of it buckled under it's own weight and collapsed a bit. heehee. isn't she a beaut? the lemon curd was a last-minute addition but it helped to add some freshness and a suggestion of lightness, even if a slice of the cake itself probably consisted of your day's caloric intake.

i saw pictures of an old high school classmate's wedding that took place in nelson b.c. in their backyard, and for the first time in my LIFE, i wanted to move there. they have a huge property with a river running through the back, and views of mountains. it's absolutely stunning. the thing that gets me is, i can't imagine being 5 hours flight away from my family. i mean, you never know where people are going to move, but still. being proximal to my family is something that definitely factors into the equation. although, now with the dollar being almost par, and knowing how cheap housing is in the states, i just might move down near rochester and buy a house in the finger lakes. a 3 bedroom (decent) house on a large-sized lot costs under a hundred grand in the states. redonkulous. also, the top rated music school in the whole united states, the eastman school of music, is based in rochester, which definitely has piqued the boy's interest.

okay, finally, the "blame china" brigade continues. we watched the final few episodes of planet earth and it ends in a SPIRAL of blame china (and africa. and the rest of the non-westernized developing world). basically, the last disc is reserved for all the proselytizing about the coming doom of the planet that they refrained from (though it was subconsciously implied) during the previous episodes that make up the bulk of the series. it's the head of the wwf, and noted conservationists and academics and the camera people talking about how as people in china start to want to consume on the level that we do, that we're in dire straights. it was REALLY annoying listening to a bunch of poncey brits blather on about how it hinges on the DEVELOPING WORLD to save the snow leopards and shiz. it's like, "oh really britain? how many NATIVE SPECIES DO YOU HAVE LEFT?!?!!!" there was no point when they were like, "you know what, we effed up royally" it was all finger-pointing at how it rests on china and africa's shoulders. EFF YOU! i hate that crap. clean up your own backyard you colonialist, imperialist f**ks.

on that note: today is my long day and i'm packing a nicoise sandwich again.

fin.

a study in yellow

last night's dinner ended up being very yellow and golden, except my chicken didn't brown as much as i would have liked it to. i made cornbread for the express purpose of eating it slathered with margarine and maple syrup, and it holds up to further scrutiny. i don't think i can have cornbread any other way. i ate an ungodly amount of chicken skin, which made me feel VERY guilty afterwards. not so guilty that i didn't eat dessert, though (blueberry pudding cake with vanilla ice cream).

you know what time we went to bed last night? TEN PM. we're practically geriatrics round these parts. to be fair, new york friend was hung over, the boy was mildly hung over, the roomie is on call, and my excuse? i'd been buzzing around like a bee all day.

we watched "hot fuzz" last night. it's about as funny as "shawn of the dead". i mean, there weren't points where i was dying with laughter but it elicited more than its' fair share of chuckles. it's kind of a send-up of those michael bay-buddy cop action flicks, and as a satire it works pretty well - highlighting the forced dramatics and ridiculous action shots frequently employed in that amped-up genre. the absurdity of the storyline matches the satiric tone of the flick and there's lots of likable characters.

it's my stepdad's birthday: HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG D!!! (he doesn't read this)

my mom emailed me really late to do something, but big d's so lowkey, we kinda figured nothing was happening so we planned something here for the roomie instead. tonight we're having roast goose, with a port gravy, potatoes roasted in goose fat, a broccoflower and carrot horseradish casserole, and corn on the cob. it's a bit of a strange, dickens-christmas-in-the-summer vibe, but i'm trying to make oodles of space in the freezer for the glut of cottage stuff to come. for her birthday cake, i'm making a lemon curd, mixed berry and whipped cream golden layer cake.

fin.

i know, i know

dear readers: i'm as deeply troubled by the hither-and-yon, flighty, unpredictable posting times around san dimas here, as you are. if there's one thing k. lagerfeld, esquire adores, it's regularity! order! schedules! things have just been crazy, what with my 1 hour earlier start time at work this past week, and the non-stop party extravaganza that was last night.

first: an interjection. behold my quickie dinner last night! it's a nicoise sandwich, which means the components that make up a salad nicoise, stuffed into a roll (in this case, an ace bakery rosemary focaccia roll). there's blanched green beans, sliced tomato, roasted red and yellow pepper, a hard boiled egg, and my infamous green olive tapenade. it's nutritious and delicious and really hits the spot. comes together in about 20 minutes (if you have my infamous olive tapenade waiting in the recesses of your fridge to be called upon for just such an occasion).

truth be told, last night's parties were rather sedate (at least, at the point that we arrived/left). it was good times though, although it inexplicably became FREEZING cold last night. i was alright, but biking against the wind felt like it was november already. not an encouraging sign of things to come.

i've just worked a 4 hour shift and have a mighyt list of things to tackle. *ahem* *assumes list oration voice* : lemon curd, strawberry fig jam (make and jar), caramel peach jam (jar), infamous olive tapenade, tonight's dinner, roomie's birthday cake components, blueberry compote for roomie's birthday breakfast, poppyseed pie crust, wash and fill in my 4 month laminated calendar, yoga, and start thinking about packing for the cottage.

i've actually ALREADY started packing for the cottage. i started last week. 3 weeks before we're going. heehee. i can't help it! i won't be happy til everything is packed and accounted for. there's nothing that makes me happier than regularity! order! schedules! things accounted for!

tonight for dinner we're having bbq brick-weighted grilled chicken (the chicken has the backbone taken out, is spread flat, and is grilled weighed down with bricks) slathered in my chipotle bbq sauce with corn on the cob and grilled yellow squash. last night, at the high school friend's birthday hoo-ha, i was hepped to something glorious. they had it at a cajun creole restaurant called southern accent. well, they serve cornbread there, and the high school friend's brother slathers the cornbread with butter and then tops it with maple syrup. HELLO NEW FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD, I'M KARL LAGERFELD, YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND! it was amazing.

fin.

birthday asplosion!

this weekend is a birthday bonanza. it is: the roomie's birthday, high school friend's birthday, canoe friend's birthday, stepdad's birthday. that's a lot of birthdays! we're hitting two parties tonight - the roomie's "dirty thirty" party that she and her crew are throwing (about 5 of them turn 30 in august), and then the highschool friend's party. it's going to be a frenzy of drive-by/one drink affairs and then home and rest.

this weekend is going to be pretty lowkey. i'm packing for my cottage vacation, doing some preserving, and making a special birthday meal for the roomie.

tonight for dinner i think i'm going to make a nicoise sandwich, with beans, boiled egg, olives, basil, roasted pepper, and tomato. and some sweet corn on the side.

fin.

is there anything cuter

than a fat little bumblebee, stuttering around, all drunk on nectar? i don't think so. our garden's in full bloom right now and we have a couple of plants that are bumblebee favorites. which spurred the boy last night to suggest, "we should keep bees". YES! how fun would that be to make your own honey? i have a co-worker whose husband is a beekeeper so i'm going to get the lowdown from her.

the neighbours STILL haven't gotten rid of the garbage. they've moved it under a tarp in their backyard. apparently a lot of it isn't "garbage" per se, so they're waiting for nice neighbour lady to get back to give a final verdict on which stuff is for keeping and which stuff is true garbage. i'm no expert, but i think this is a bad idea. if you have someone who has a tendency to keep things in general, why would you give them the option? OF COURSE they're going to want to keep it. that's what they do! i'd just haul everything to the dump, myself.

last night's dinnie was just what the doctor ordered. a juicy epitome of burger-ness. i will never understand why people feel the need to gussy up hamburgers. breadcrumbs, eggs, worcestire, etc. all you need is BEEF. and salt and pepper. look at that corn! finally sweet corn paid off like crazy. it was practically dessert.
real dessert was that blueberry pudding cake pictured to the right, which i know, i know, i overcooked. preparing food poorly plagues me. it eats away at my soul. actually, doing anything half-assed or poorly eats away at my soul (except for school, where the half-assedness of my school doesn't inspire full-assedness from myself). i'm a total perfectionist. i can't help it.

tonight i'm getting my hair cut, which puts me in the queen west area, which means that i'll be grabbing takeout from gandhi's for dinner. mutter paneer roti, butter chicken, malai kofta, and maybe a lamb curry one for my little bro.

fin.

the baconator

is my new best friend. i was taken out for a belated birthday lunch of all you can eat indian food at kathmandu (yonge and wellesley) by two of my super-nice coworkers yesterday. the buffet is delicious there and i ate a LOT. so, feeling full from that, i naturally decided to scrap cooking for dinner. since the day was already a partial write-off, i decided to make it a full write-off and tried my very first wendy's "baconator". it's AMAZING. there's no vegetables on it! it's just the beefy patties (and i will say, that wendy's manages to imbue their mostly-soy-and-chemical-composite patties with an amazing amount of char-grilled beefy flavour) with processed cheese and loads of bacon. it's amazing. i really really really enjoyed it. we scarfed down this cornucopia of empty calories with the movie "drumline" on bravo. it's pretty good, mainly for the drum sequences and marching band formations (i love formations!), but it lacks the heart and cohesiveness of "stomp the yard" which is the definitive film in the screwed-up-kid-who-learns-humility-and-team-work-through-group-activity-involving-choreography-and-music idiom.

i also experienced my first do-you-own coin carwash yesterday (hey, i'm an upper middle class kid from markham...my family doesn't DO do-you-own carwashes). i had *just* taken a shower when in comes the boy, enticing me with promises of fun, sun, and suds. being the game-for-fun intrepid, plucky little thing that i am, i said YES! it's not how you imagine it. it's actually kind of seedy. and you get COVERED in filth, and film, and the water jets out at a velocity that coats you in a dirt-encrusted fine mist. but i was pleased with the boy for showing some initiative to clean out his parents car. which was a right mess and emerged a slightly-less-right mess.

dinner tonight is burgers. real ones. made with proper beef. and a salad. and blueberry pudding cake for dessert. real. healthy. proper. food.

fin.

sad!

through some gentle prying, the boy found out yesterday that the nice neighbour lady is the hoarder, NOT shortround! for some reason that makes it really sad. she's the nicest, sweetest, most neighbourliest lady around. apparently she has a "problem with clutter" and her family is trying to get her to seek help. she's away visiting her mum for 6 weeks so shortround and his parents (nice neighbour lady's sister and bro-in-law) are attempting to clean it up before she gets back. but if you're a hoarder (they didn't use that term but it's patently obvious), i suspect you're going to feel very violated if someone came and did that to your place.

yikes.

in other news, my mum came down unexpectedly and joined us for my bro's birthday celebrations. i'm always nervous but my mum was a hoot. she had a blast and was laughing hysterically at the antics of one dr. rei, md. and we all had a grand time. she's the cutest.

this is the cake i baked for my bro. it's a bit of an in-joke.

tonight we're having burgers with salad for dinner. sounds boring, but my all-beef burgers are award winning.

fin.

lateski

you can forget about my early-morning posts this week, as i'm starting work at 7:45 in the am covering a co-worker on vacation, ergo, vis-a-vis, i'm waking up about 10 minutes before i leave and bolting out the door.

my neighbours are wack. this dude, J owns the house, but i *think* keeps another residence someplace else. he looks like shortround from indiana jones (like a 40 year old 12 year old if that makes any sense) and dresses like a hip hopper. he rents the place to his aunt, and this other greek gentleman (my neighbour who lights his charcoal bbq with a propane blowtorch). the other greek "gentleman" has been significantly less than gentlemanly lately. in the late spring, he fell off a step ladder and twisted his ankle (he works in construction. kinda. let's just say he seems to work for the kind of company that holmes, of "homes on holmes" fame regularly lambastes for their poor workmanship and cavalier attitude to building codes). anyway, after dude sprained his ankle, he sat at home getting wasted all day. his normally bleary-eyed visage became more bleary-eyed and florid with each passing day. then the leering began. he'd say hello to me and the roomie and give us the not-so-well-hidden leisurely up-and-down look. it's gotten the point where i used to be friendly and chat him up and now i'm curt in the extreme. also, the next time i catch him blatantly staring like a ugly sexed-up boar, i'm going to ask him "what the F**K do you think you're looking at?!?" (it's my patented line at the public library - except i replace the expletive with EFF).

anyway, it's a "shared" driveway, but previous tenants to us, made life miserable for the nice lady (shortround's aunt) by parking a giant truck in there and being dinks about moving it so that she could park also. so our landlord, when he shows the apartment upstairs to new tenants, doesn't mention parking, and just let's nice neighbour lady have the run of the driveway. which is fine. the odd time we have a car in our possession, nice neighbour lady is very nice about moving in so we can park behind her, or communicating with us so that it's vice versa. happy happy.

shortround, on the other hand, is another story. suddenly, he's parking there ALL THE TIME. which is annoying cuz it's hard to get my bike in and out. nice neighbour lady is gone for six weeks. we had a car on the weekend, shortround calls us at EIGHT AM SUNDAY MORNING to ask us to move our car as he's "moving some stuff" and doesn't want to scratch it. so fine, the boy begrudgingly wakes up on his one day to sleep in and moves the car. shortround then proceeds to unload about EIGHTY full black garbage bags from the bowels of his house and pile them in the driveway, his front porch, and the second level front porch. it's gross! and then proceeds to LEAVE THE BAGS THERE all day. no communication, no nothing. they were still there this morning. it's ridiculous.

i had read an article about "hoarders" in some women's magazine and was joking that it must be like that in their house. now we know that it's TRUE. hoarders are people who maintain "normal" appearances outside of the home but you're never allowed in because they never throw anything out. these are the kind of people who die in their homes and neighbours don't find out until it starts to stink and when you do go in there, there's rotting food and dead pets and showers rendered unusable by 30 years of accumulated dirt.

that's what it's like next door. except now the insides of next door are outside. also, in one of those bags is an alarm clock that's going off and there's not a single thing to be done about it.

crazy, eh?

he's got a batman thing. today is an extra long day so i packed a dinner of corn, bacon and potato chowder and a cheese and focaccia sammy.

fin.

yesterday was a very very good day

even though i didn't do much. i finished my bro's cake (which is AWESOME...i'll post pics tomorrow because i don't want to ruin the surprise), and finished my peach preserves, and my 8 hour shift at the public library went swiftly, and me and the boy wandered down to leslieville and had an amazing meal at this new restaurant, lil' baci, which is owned by the same dude who owns kubo radio.

it was DELICIOUS! the idea is a simple, italian trattoria type place. the interior is really cozy and comfortable and unpretentious. there's a selection of pizzas, a few pastas, a meat and fish dish, antipasto and salads. the boy had a new wheat beer which he was thoroughly enamored with (he loves going to places where they have something on tap he's never tried before). warm bread was brought to the table with a fruity olive oil to dip in. we started with the three antipasto for $10. we had: marinated chickpeas with anchovies and chilies, brussel sprouts with horseradish, and oven-roasted cured olives. everything was fantastic, and the plate came to the table with a final seasoning of salt and pepper. i love chickpea salads, and this one was nicely balanced with tender chickpeas, fiery chilis, and the faint brine of the anchovies, all lubricated and made slick with olive oil. the brussel sprouts were tender and dusted with freshly grated horseradish that added a sparkly bite, and the olives were tender, fatty, luscious little bites. we accompanied this with the meat antipasto plate (3 for $13) where we had a musky, thinly sliced bresaola, a slickly slow-burning salumi picante, and a feather-light, porcine-sweet proscuitto crudo. again, the meats came to the table slicked with a shot of olive oil and a dusting of salt and pepper. we then shared one of their pizzas, which were thin crusted. the crust was whisper-thin and had a good amount of chew (my preference over the cracker-crust) had mild-bread flavour and was blistered on the bottom. our pizza was the "gorgonzola dolce" (pizzas range from $9-14) and came with gorgonzola, soft, cooked shreds of new potato, woodsy rosemary, and guanciale (!!!!!!! my beloved cured pork cheeks). every bite was fantastic. the pizza was also offered alongside their home made pepperoncini (hot pepper oil) for drizzling on top. finally, we finished our meal with the "lil' baci" salad, which cleansed our palates with a balanced mix of flavours and textures. it consisted of baby arugala and radicchio for bitter notes, oven roasted tomatoes for sweetness, shavings of aged asiago for a lactic bite, and chickpeas for a starchy backdrop smoothing everything out. the flavours were bound with a simple oil and vinegar dressing.

we were stuffed and thoroughly impressed with every aspect of the meal. our servers were knowledgeable and friendly, explaining the elements of the plate in a manner that was informative without being condescending. dinner for two with two glasses of beer came to under $75, which is SUCH a bargain, and it's a 5 minute bike-ride from home, to boot! you couldn't ask for better in a neighbourhood restaurant.

we walked next door to kubo after our meal and picked up the last two red devil babycake cupcakes, and two maple ones as well. both come with cream cheese frosting and are the best cupcakes in town.

all in all, it was a lovely evening. i love biking around the neighbourhood with the boy. it's so freeing and chummy, and we always emerge from our adventures all love-drunk and happy.

today i'm being taken to canadian tire for birthday prezzie shopping, then futzing around the house (i might start packing for the cottage) and then having some people over for my little brother's birthday dinner. for breakkie we're having fried eggs and bacon on kaisers with celery-apple-beet-carrot-cucumber juice. for dinnie we're having grilled red wine, garlic, and rosemary marinated lamb chops with stuffed potato skins (chives, dill, scallions, bacon, cheddar) and a marinated green and yellow bean salad. i baked him a devil's food cake with brown sugar buttercream for dessert.

fin.