tell me if this is a good idea

(i'm mostly soliciting the opinion of steph on this one. if she still reads this pathetic excuse for a blog). i've been toying with the idea of getting a digital perm this summer. i'm sick of fighting with my naturally voluminous, giant, thick, bushy hair and trying to get it to be straight, and i've noticed mad asian hotties flouncing around town with bouncy, juicy, beautiful, soft, waves and curls, and i can't help thinking that that could be ME. although, i don't know if it works on my super-thick, super-stubborn, super-coarse hair. i have the most UN-asian hair ever. i mean, just looking at that picture i can tell you that that girl probably has the straightest, glossiest, thin, shiny asian hair around. mine is the opposite of all that. anyway, i'm sick of going straight, and my adventures in hair-curling last summer had me inspired and since i have a tendency to get all hippie earth-mama (bring on the muumuus!) in the summer anyway, why not get soft curls? the contraption looks CRAZY. apparently it sends an electrical charge through the hair and it lasts for like, ever and it's awesome because asian people are the best like that. what say you? yay or nay?

in other news, tell me if i'm being a b***h about this scenario or not. so, i really really love my steel cut oats. it's like the whole oat grain that's cut into tiny pieces (instead of being steamed and rolled the way most oatmeal - instant or otherwise - is). it takes forever to cook and i like to eat it for breakfast. it bears repeating that it takes FOREVER to cook and you kind of have to babysit it. so every time i get it ready the night before (you can shave some of the cooking time off by soaking the oats in the cooking water overnight) and every time i make it, the roomie asks if i can make enough for her too. so i do. every. single. time. for the past two years she's been living here. she LOVES this stuff too, and will rhapsodize about how it's so much better than regular oatmeal, etc. then i realized, that if i didn't make it, she would never, EVER make it for herself. she just wouldn't eat it.

so i started getting a little annoyed at the fact that she would never do the work of prepping it the night before, or get up early to stir it and stuff, and i would make these exasperated comments like, "how come YOU never make ME oatmeal?!?" half-jokingly (this is obviously not THAT big of a deal...it's not like sunni and shiite over here). then she would claim that she "didn't know how" and that it was "too hard" (it's a 3:1 ratio of water to oats, and then you simmer it until it's done. seriously. that's it). so i told her how to do it a million times, but she still won't do it and will always ask me to add some for her when i make mine. anyway, the long and short of it is: i've gone on strike. i only make it for myself now. and i will continue to be on strike until such time as she makes ME a bowl of oatmeal. she knows i'm doing it. she doesn't ask me to make it anymore (i'm nothing if not a vocal and plainspoken striker) but she just doesn't eat oatmeal. so i'm on strike until such time as she makes us a bowl of oatmeal. barring that, i'm only looking out for myself in the oatmeal department. does that make me a b***h? sometimes i can't tell anymore.

don't get the wrong idea. inter-housal relations are going swimmingly. this oatmeal thing is not going to result in anyone having to find new living arrangements. but i will continue on my tireless, quiet civil disobedience crusade until my dream of having oatmeal made for me comes to fruition.

that's a pic of last night's chicken noodle soup. tasty looking, eh? if i somehow manage to avoid contracting the dotytron's flu, i will be a miracle of modern science *knocks on wood* i've basically been bathing in a sea of viral matter as our house guest precluded me from sleeping elsewhere, so i've been sharing a bed with the dotytron's snot-headache-tired form for the worst of his bout. so far, i don't think i've had the flu before *knocks on wood a billion times* this probably just means that my body doesn't give it up to any old run-of-the-mill pansy a** influenza. no sir. only the hulking, stone-cold steve austin avian bird flu for me, thanks. tonight for dinner i cribbed from the dotytron's nany and poppa and made a rigatoni in a roasted yellow pepper rose sauce. so easy! 1 onion, chopped, sauteed with garlic. roasted off 2 yellow peppers, took the charred skins off, cut them into small pieces and added that with a can of diced tomatoes to the onions and garlic. seasoned and simmered it and finished it off with a glug of cream. with a baby spinach salad with avocado and red onion on the side. delicious and nutritious. i'm shoring up the bodily reserves to fight off any potential infection waiting to colonize my stressed out body. not on my watch!

fin.

earth hour

so i got out of cooking last night. the plan was to have people come over for wine and cheese by candlelight, and then head over to el sol so i wouldn't have to cook for a bunch of people i only kinda-sorta know. we celebrated earth hour by extending it into a whole evening of picking at this charcuterie spread by candlelight and drinking wine (everyone else) and shirley temples (me). we had a giant hunk of st. andre, some majorero (spanish semi-dry), and a hunk of either manchego or zamorano. we also had two kinds of cured italian sausage, olives, my spiced nuts, some proscuitto, these olive and fig crostinis and some toasted multigrain and regular baguette slices. i also served a blood orange tart in a hazelnut crust, which features the smoothest, creamiest, blood orange curd i've ever tasted. it was divine.

all in all it was a lovely evening with some weird awkwardness that i won't describe here (hint: the awkwardness was not coming from me, but from my witnessing various people's awkwardness with each other).

i'm the midst of playing nanny mcphee right now, as the dotytron is ill with some kind of weirdly debilitating flu. i hope i don't get it! he seems to be really weak and sleeping all the time and congested, and he's having trouble sleeping and gets sudden chills and has a dull headache. he says it feels like he's been beaten up. i'm nursing him with a patented technique that consists of:
- homemade chicken noodle soup with lots of dill, parsley, root vegetables and noodles
- clean sheets
- orange juice and hot ginger-lemon tea
- apple cinnamon cold and flu ny-quil
- reduced productivity on my end
- good movies from the 80s.

we watched "indiana jones and the temple of doom" yesterday. i find this to be the weak link in the series as it basically makes BOTH chinese people AND indian people into the bad guys. however! short round is really the star of the movie and for that i'm grateful. he's such a great kid! he's plucky and brave and inventive and shows real ingenuity in tough situations. i think we might dress up as indiana jones and short round next year for halloween. the love interest BLOWS though. she's the worst. all she does is cry about breaking a nail ten billion times a second. it's so lame. and she's hella shrill.

i tried to rent "parenthood" and "sneakers" but blockbuster didn't have EITHER one. what a weak-ass video store. how do they decide what to stock? if you don't have two of the best movies of the late 80s early 90s, then what DO you have? stupid movies nobody cares about like "saw"?!? or "pirates of the caribbean"? or "forrest gump"?!? laaaaaaaaame. there's a whole generation of people out there who are missing out on some of the best movies of our time, and it's a crying shame i tells you.

through the course of writing this post i started to feel a little headachey myself. uh-oh. i hope i'm not catching what the dotytron has! hopefully it's just the after-effects of a weekend with way too little sleep and way too much pork and porcine products along with a good shot of butter-based desserts. maybe i just need a nap.

i'm going to try to finish my sociology mini-paper and take a short one before dodgeball.

fin.

stuff white people like

okay, so idiots everywhere are going apes**t for this blog, "stuff white people like". my culture theory friend in sociology hepped me to it and wanted to get into an email discussion about this curious dissection of "whiteness" as a racial signifier with its' attendant cultural associations as espoused on that blog. the blogosphere is all abuzz about it, messageboards are a-twitter anyway, i checked out a few of the entries and fired back a response to the my friend, which basically went something like this: "yeah, yeah racial semiotics, blah...my main issue is: IT'S NOT FUNNY." it's almost criminally UN-funny. on par with the criminal unfunniness of "flight of the conchords" (which is currently occupying a high-ranking position in my ongoing, epic list of "deal-breaker" cultural products).

in fact, if you did a regression analysis (i have no idea what a regression analysis is) which tracked respondent's favorable ranking of both "flight of the conchords" and the "stuff white people like" blog and then triangulated it against whether or not i loathed these people on sight, my hypothesis would be: HIGH DEGREE OF CORRELATION. it's a weird thing where i actually tend to get ANGRY when people like stuff that isn't funny. it really irks me. but it's selective. like, i find the show "friends" criminally unfunny. but! "two and a half men" doesn't register. "that's so raven" makes me hoppin' mad, but "hannah montana" doesn't merit comment. weird, eh?

if you took the 10 best entries of "stuff white people like" and pitted it against the expressive hamster (my favorite iteration remains, to this day, the "kill bill" version), i think we know who would win THAT particular internet meme battle. or that blog versus "the waldo ultimatum"? not even a question to be asked. hells, i think on my funnier days i could give that blog a run for its money. i just hate how OBVIOUS it is. i mean, does it really need to be said that white people love st. paddy's day and that most children of visible minority immigrant stock (aka me and dr. rei) loathe it and can only face the usual st. paddy's day university-pub-crawl slurry of vomit and poor decisions with an appalled incredulity.

anyway, the point is: it's not funny and i don't get why people find it funny.

in other not-funny/funny news: last night's dinner with dr. rei and bwong (aka the ham-tang clan) was VERY VERY VERY funny. the dotytron feels like he has the flu so he bowed out of the festivities. which left me, dr. rei and bwong to tear down an 10 LB HAM. we ate SO much crispy, cracklin' pig fat that we were coated in a sheen of sweet, pure, clean, lard. is there ANYTHING better than pig fat? i really don't think so. we got the ham from the mennonites, and it was the best ham ever. it was sweet, not over-salted or brined, juicy, and bristling with an inch-thick layer of fat and skin, which crackled up obligingly in the oven. it was soo good!

we had the carrot cupcakes for dessert and then proceeded to walk it out by doing our usual tour of laps around blockbuster. hilarious lines of the evening are numerous and difficult to capture, but suffice it to say, they were plentiful and spot-on.

dr. rei and i watched "the jane austen book club" which is a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE movie about a bunch of crazy, sad-sack b***hes who find the secret of love and relationships by plowing through jane austen's books. NOT MOVIES, books. jane austen books are the boringest. you only read them to get to the parts you like (ie. the hook-ups) and that's why movie adaptations are so much better. anyway, this movie featured a cast of people who were seriously damaged goods and who required a big dose of professional, medical help, but were presented as if their actions and motivations made any sense. dr. rei and i were fairly convinced that one of the character's mom's had had a stroke and needed IMMEDIATE help, but instead, her poor decisions were being passed off as a result of being a "hippie" and "smoking pot". it was crazy!!!!!!!

anyway, tonight we're supposed to have the roomie's friend's over for dinner (my preggos doppelganger and her bf) to celebrate our friend pingy being in town and being together...but it's turning into a giant CF. because another of the roomie's peripheral friends (they see each other like, 4 times a year and never talk on the phone) wanted to come over and have dinner with the visiting friend from out of town, and it was kind of foisted on me, and i'm not sure that i want to cook for 8 people who i'm friendly WITH but who aren't exactly my bosom buddies, 2 of whom (the last minute addition and her bf) i barely know at all. i'm a little irked by it cuz i find it kind of rude and an imposition. does that make me an a**hole? i would never invite two random people to a dinner hosted by someone else. AND the two new invites are like, former vegetarians, and i'm planning on making this spanish bean dish that contains: pork belly, smoked pork hock, semi-cured chorizo, and blood sausage. which she probably won't eat, which makes things even more awkward. so i'm not supposed to make something special, but she wants to come over for dinner, but what am i supposed to do as the host? and oh, did i mention that i only know these people through the roomie?!??? i might just put the kibosh on all of this and suggest we go out to eat. with the dotytron being sick and all, it seems to make the most sense. but then i have ALL this stuff for a lovely spanish meal: 2 cheeses, olives, wine from spain, the bean dish, vegetables with romesco...

anyway...we'll see. otherwise, i'm going to bang out a short sociology paper on omnivorousness. omnivorousness is the prevailing paradigm in sociology of culture for the past 20 or so years. the traditional class distinctions of upper-class people liking "highbrow" arts (like opera, and the classics) and lowbrow people liking "popular" (or mass) culture has been replaced with new lines of taste distinction being draw. so now, in this new age of class "democracy" (you can't really exclude people on the basis of land, or money anymore), status seekers have to differentiate themselves in other ways, and it's through an "omnivorous", selective, sampling from traditional "low class" cultural products. the country music scene is a good example. SOME artists are okay to like for taste-makers (like hank williams, lucinda williams, johnny cash) but people like travis tritt, can't be recuperated. so it's a highly strategic omnivorousness. my prof wrote this paper on the topic with his wife (who i took the food course with) on how gourmet food writing uses the tropes of "authenticity" and "exoticism" to recuperate various items (hand-made pasta in poor areas, the hamburger), in specific iterations, to construct a privileged, omnivorous palate. i'm basing my paper on that and some of the things that came up in class discussion.

i'm also going to try to chip away at my paper for the advocacy class.

fin.

carry on my wayward son

yesterday's was the dotytron's grandpa's service. the dotytron read a short poem he selected (he did quite well, considering he was asked to read only the day before the service)...i thought the poem was absolutely lovely, and very much encapsulated our feelings about grandpa's passing:

Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
-Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul's Cathedral

isn't that nice? the minister was a pretty decent chap and conducted himself as well as could be expected, considering he didn't know grandpa (i don't think). he made this weird digression where he seguewayed from the dotytron’s speech into this story he wanted to tell, but tried to make it sound like a seamless transition. it kind of went like this: “thank you, dotytron. that reminds me of a story...” then he sauntered over to where the dotytron’s young second cousins (his mom’s niece’s kids. is that second cousin?) were (they’re around 4 or 5) and started telling them this long, rambling story that his minister had told him, about this water bug that was living at the bottom of the lake, and then saw light glimmering on the surface, and swam up to the surface of the lake where the water was born, and then hung out there for a bit, and then one day broke free and became a dragonfly. (!!!!!). at this point, i was already having a small case of the giggles because of the weird segueway, but when he talked about the water bug turning into a dragonfly, me and the dotytron gave each other the sidelong, wtf? looks, because um, that’s not biologically possible. waterbugs are waterbugs and dragonflies are dragonflies. i also just paraphrased like a mofo, because no word of a lie, the minister’s story lasted for like, 20 minutes. it was just too strange a metaphorical leap to take to adequately express his point for the kids (basically, that the waterbugs left behind were happy at the transformation of their buddy into something that could fly and was beautiful). all i could picture was my niece. if someone had come up to here and tried to tell her a story for 20 minutes that was that narratively obscure, i could totally picture the look of skepticism on her features.

all in all, it was a lovely service. it’s hard though. even as you’re welling up, you’re trying to constantly tamp down the rising flood of tears because it’s a CELEBRATION.OF.LIFE. and you keep repeating that to yourself like it’s a mantra, even as you’re bawling your eyes out. it’s nice to have everyone together sharing in memories and fond thoughts and eulogizing someone. i kinda wish that funerals could happen when people were still alive…if you know what i mean, because i think it’s so nice to commemorate someone, and it’s sad that it only happens when they’re gone and can’t have all their loved ones and old friends together in one room, telling them what they’ve meant over the years.

i still think my funeral should be fun. i want it to be a rollicking good time, with funny sketches, and speeches, and youtube video clips, and kansas and journey and gangstarr playing. i want there to be a barbecue buffet, with popeye’s fried chicken, big macs, and filet-o-fishes, lots of cupcakes, and pies. hopefully hologram technology will have progressed to the point where my 3-D talking likeness can be displayed and i can “participate” (like princess leia in star wars) and crack jokes.

there were oodles and oodles of old people at the funeral. the extent to which i get along with old people is mind-boggling. they love me! i’m the hit of the party! i think it’s because we share the same values. old people and i generally see eye-to-eye on: fiscal conservatism, the value of a work ethnic, pension security, shaking our heads and clucking our tongues at the antics of young people, a return to no-nonsense common sense, and handicrafts like cooking, baking, quilting, knitting, and building things with an honest day’s sweat and toil.

tonight i’m having the bwong and dr. rei over for dinner. then we’re going to get together with our friend from out of town, pingy and the roomie, once they get kicked out of my female doppelganger’s house (the female doppelganger is even MORE house-bound than i, and has a 10pm festivity-threshold – after that, you get the boot).

we’re having a southern americana meal. a giant baked ham, glazed with ginger-pear jam. either biscuits or scalloped potatoes or some kind of smothered potato gratin. braised cabbage with bacon and apples or green beans with bacon. carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for dessert.

fin.

freedom to procrastinate

the ides of spring are in the air (i have no idea what the "ides" of anything are supposed to be, but i vaguely recall that "ides" are generally paired with spring-like things like the month of may). am i right? anyway, the mysterious ides are conspiring to have me NOT doing a lick of work. other things that are in collusion with the mysterious ides are: easter weekend, the service for grandpa reid tomorrow, a visit from the dotytron's friend last night, a visit from the roomie's friend from long island this whole week, my desire to have a life and cook and eat and lead a life of decadent leisure.

i had a meeting with the husband half of the prof that i'm doing the r.a. work for, and he gave me a VERY open deadline (end of may!!!) for my research, which is helping to take a load off, considerably. i'm only marginally chipping away at my work load though and i can feel the drive towards productivity slipping through my fingers. this is a recurring theme on this here blog, and i can well understand my waning readership's boredom with it.

anyway, the work i'm doing for them is compiling a body of research on the how the term foodie is employed, contested, etc. my final paper for the course is going to fold up the research i'm doing and be another one of my solipsistic, self-indulgent attempts to capture myself in writing: in particular, my own uneasiness with the term "foodie" and how i hate self-identifying as one, even as i exhibit all the textbook hallmarks of someone of that ilk.

another paper i want to write talks about the discourse of authenticity that's continually invoked when popular media discusses "the wire" [note that i've reverted back to quotations for titles...it's a lot easier from a formatting perspective]. this is evident even in so far as there's that popular rumour circulating that when the show is broadcast all the police radios in the baltimore area go quiet because all the drug dealers and police are busy watching the show (or something to that effect). fans of "the wire" continually reiterate it's authenticity in discussions as a sign of its legitimacy as a cultural product. to which you kind of have to invariably respond: "how the f**k do you know?" which is when they generally revert to the example of the police radios going quiet. i don't know why a show like "the wire" has to be authentic. but i think there's a general trend towards recuperating this show for a liberal, privileged audience by appealing to its' authenticity (which tends to be how most high-status cultural hallmarks of distinction are justified for the consumption of a cultural and economic elite).

i'd like to write that this summer. but my list of things to do this spring/summer is growing exponentially. to wit:

- get my G1 driver's license
- take an advanced CPR course
- take a bike mechanics course
- take a defensive bike riding course
- tear the house apart and do a MASSIVE spring cleaning, get rid of tonnes of s**t and reorganize what i'm keeping
- start quilting
- continue knitting
- go back to the farmer's markets
- spruce up the house and buy the odds and sods "house things" that we need
- organize all my old photos
- sell a bunch of my vinyl
- eat outside and hang out
- go spend at least a weekend with my sis
- try new restaurants
- go back to old ones (harbord fish and chips, i'm looking at YOU)
- go bike riding with friends
- start running again
- regularl yoga classes
- dodgeball training
- explore the city for food purveyors
- cottage vacations with my family and the dotytron's family
- pack away all my winter clothes
- short film festival
- hot docs
- lobster-fest version 2.0
- a & j's wedding
- start paying off my osap
- save a tonne of coin

eep! that's pretty ambitious. we'll see how much i get done.

last night's dinner was grilled eggplant (sliced thin and pressed on the panini press), smeared with a ricotta basil mixture, rolled up, and baked in the oven with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. the eggplant was bitter which wasn't nice. maybe next time i'll bread it and fry it instead. we had that with garlic bread (my award-winning recipe) and a salad of romaine and cucumber in a balsamic vinaigrette.

on monday, i made a white bean, rosemary and roasted garlic soup. i served this with a quick, chicken-liver spread that i made on crostinis (i LOVE LOVE LOVE chicken liver spread!), and a roasted beet and baby spinach salad with horseradish and a quick lemon vinaigrette, with some tournevant de nature goat's chese (quebec cheese, mild, with a creamy, not chalky, texture. divine).

tonight i'm eating leftovers as we have quite a backlog to slog through.

fin.

"if you believe, that j.c. came back from the dead...

(back from the dead)" <-- set to the tune of r.e.m.'s "man on the moon" chorus. this weekend was ram-packed. it was actually, JUST what the doctor ordered to remind us around here about the joys of routine, family, friends, and young hoppers. friday saw the whole team danforth household committed to being home and scrapping plans for industriousness. we sat and talked and watched the wire and had a visit from my bff and upstairs neighbour, who is making the extremely poor decision to vacate the gorgeous 2 bedroom unit upstairs. if anyone in my limited readership is looking for a place to live (or knows someone who is) please leave a comment and i'll get back to you!

friday evening we went up to markham to celebrate my mum and my littlest bro's birthday. i baked a chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. my new go-to chocolate cake is the BOMB. i repeat: THE BOMB. saturday we had dim sum with my sis' friends chris and kate and their lovely twins, molly and jacob. molly is a fairly blase, skeptical little lady, whereas jacob is as jolly as someone who looks so much like winston churchill should be.

saturday night was all about the foo fighters concert, which i'm ashamed to admit i slept through intermittently. i haven't been to show with such a preponderance of w.p's (white people) in a looooooong time. you could count the number of visible minorities on one hand (and most of them were us!). it was a good show: the sound was clear and crisp, they played for a long time, and re-worked their tunes in a fun way...exactly what you want from a concert. i'm just not particularly connected to that kind of rock music. the show DID feature a special guest performance by geddy lee and the guitarist from RUSH. which was awesome. even though they didn't perform any actual rush songs (they mostly just shredded).

sunday was all about the big easter egg hunt for the kids (50 eggs!) the dotytron went a little buck with the hiding (i don't think he really took the age levels of the participants into consideration) but it was pretty hilarious. then we went for brunch at a brazilian bbq place in markham that does all you can eat. it was pretty good (if EXTREMELY heavy on the meat and salt) and the family did a family portrait after. after that, the boys went to a basketball game, and my sister and i took the kids to riverdale farm. it went over with mixed results. my niece can be a bit of a sissy sometimes and she didn't like the smell of the barns and got freaked out when a goat came too close. the nephew though, had a BLAST. he was freaking out and added some new words/sounds to his vocab...he couldn't get enough.

then we came home and watched enchanted. it was okay...amy adams did a good job of investing her character with the suitable amount of wide-eyed naivete, but patrick dempsey is a smarmy a**hole, and he kind of ruined it for me. it was a nice trifle...but it's definitely not my favorite in the disney pantheon (lilo and stitch, i'm looking at you). last night the dotytron and i watched michael clayton.

****** SPOILER ALERTS ******


overall, the film was great...the music was well done (but i thought it was heavy handed and over-directed the emotions of the viewer at times). the sound quality was great and the staging of the shots was well done, with some really painterly scenes and compositions. as a character study, it does an adequate job and the plot is a nice little pot boiler. HOWEVER, there was some MAJOR issues with my ability to suspend my disbelief (to be outline below):

a) tom wilkinson's character, lives in a multi-million dollar loft in nyc and he has one of those CASSETTE TAPE ANSWER MACHINES THAT BROADCASTS YOUR MESSAGES?!?!!!??? WHO DOES THAT ANYMORE?!?!!!! you can't have someone using a blackberry and then have that person exist in the same world as someone who uses an old school answering machine. sorry.

b) for someone who's a "fixer" michael clayton makes some bonehead moves. when he has the memorandum in his hands...does he scan it and email it to the press or a dozen people for safe-keeping? does he mail copies to everyone he knows as insurance against his own life? no. he walks around and makes a TARGET out of himself for a good chunk of the movie, for no apparent reason other than to unnecessarily ratchet up the tension in the film artificially.

c) for someone who's a "fixer" michael clayton is a pretty gullible rube if he thinks that tom wilkinson's character actually killed himself. a guy doesn't go around buying about 20 billion amazing baguettes and then OFF himself. buying 20 billion amazing baguettes is usually a pretty good signifier for an unmatched joie de vivre. just a tip.

d) the assassins go the extremely elegant route of staging a drug overdose in the MOST professional way imaginable, showing the utmost planning and care, and when they go to off michael clayton, they go with a CAR BOMB?!???? how the EFF are you going to NOT draw attention to a CAR BOMB? and the car bomb fails because of problems with the GPS SYSTEM?????????????????????? flimsy, much?

the above contrivances made it difficult for me to really get behind the movie. that's just sloppy, bros.

***** END OF SPOILER ALERT *****

friday also saw me putting to rest two knitting projects i've had on the go. one is a double breasted baby sweater that ties inside and outside. it's pretty cute, although i can't finish seams worth s**t. i know what i did wrong though, so next time it will be better. the baby sweater was gifted to chris and kate's kids.

i also made another one of those lacy scarves (same pattern that i gave to the dotytron's sis for christmas). the pattern is called "montego bay". i made alternations by making it wider (about 1.5 times as wide as the pattern dictates) and consequently, it's shorter. i was going to gift this one, but i've fallen in love with the colours and i don't think i can let it go. i have more of the sea silk yarn though, and i'm pretty quick at knitting them, so i can definitely whip another one up. you can also see some belly action in that picture...that's what a weekend of copious meat/sugar consumption will do to you.

today is a day of kicking some serious school ass, lest i be left doing school long after i should be (my goal end date is april 18th AT THE LATEST - i want to be done before then if at all possible).

for dinner tonight i think i'm going to make grilled eggplant rolls stuffed with basil ricotta and mozzarella, and baked in a tomato sauce with a big spinach salad with lemon vinaigrette.

fin.

getting back

grief is a strange, lumpen, funny thing. it's hard to get back to where you were before...posting about my dinners or the usual flotsam and jetsam that usually fills this blog seems like the ultimate in frivolousness. but you kind of feel like you should, because the flotsam and jetsam makes up the bulk of your life, padding out the spaces in betwixt and between those seminal, seared-into-your-memory moments that provide touchstones for reminiscing.


last night i made a delicious salad for dinner. on the bottom is a bed of baby spinach tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, and fleur de sel. on top of that is a warm mixture of lentils, pancetta lardons, onions and garlic. on top of that is two thin pucks of breaded and fried goat's cheese, and a poached egg, the whole thing served with whole wheat crostinis. it was so so so good!

here's another tribute to grandpa reid (my brother hepped me to this):


^^^ i'd like this played at my funeral (aka house party). also on the playlist: "maneater" by hall and oates, and "carry on my wayward son" by kansas. "full clip" by gangstarr might be on there too, but that might be a little too rudebwoy.

4 day weekend is well-timed and well-earned.

fin.

in memoriam

harvey mcgregor reid passed away yesterday, a day shy of his 91st birthday.

he could fix anything and he played piano beautifully.

he bought me a subscription to gourmet magazine every year for christmas. this past year, his health wasn't all that well, and when january rolled around, i figured that it had slipped his mind, so i sent in a cheque for a subscription myself. in late january, a magazine showed up on my doorstep with a card from the publisher, informing me that harvey reid had purchased a subscription for one year on my behalf. that's the kind of man he was.

he was a good, decent man, through and through, with the kind of quiet fortitude you get from living through a depression and two world wars. he was very sweet and gentle and knew so much. the last time we visited him, we spent an hour talking about the differences between snooker and billiards. they don't make his kind like they used to.



he built one of my favorite places in the world, by hand, and every fond memory i have of this cottage (and there are many) are a direct result of him.

there's no one else in the world i'd rather be mistaken for a philippine nanny by.

i love you grandpa.



fin.

anxiety attack

i've been having mild anxiety/stress issues for the last few weeks, off and on. it's different from other stress i've experienced in my life before, in that it's manifesting itself in a physical way on my body, and while my mind doesn't feel more junk/activity-filled than it usually is, knowing that i don't feel quite right in my body isn't helping alleviate my symptoms.

i'm not really tired at the end of even my longest days. when it comes time to go to bed, i'm having trouble going to sleep. i'm waking up really early and my appetite ain't what she used to be. i'm pretty big on eating if not 2, then 3 square meals a day, and i'm eating like a bird all day and then waking up the next morning without an appetite. also, my blood pressure is pumping higher than it should be (based on my own diagnosis, derived by placing my index and middle finger against the main artery in my neck) during times when i shouldn't be stressed (on the way to and from work, say).

it's pretty sucky. i'm usually the kind of person who THRIVES from having a over-brimming plate, so feeling my body racing when i'm at rest is freaking me out, which in turn ratchets up the blood pressure and so on and so forth.

it's no secret to anyone who knows me that i have huge problems with mortality. i think everyone always has those moments when you get snapped out of the cinema verite that's your life and you realize that this mortal coil is slumping towards an all-too-predictable end. even typing the words and verbalizing it freaks me out. usually i have those mortality moments every few months, at most. lately, there's a couple of nights a week where i'm wide awake as the dotytron slumbers blissfully beside me (the dotytron is much more at ease with his mortality than i am - on the surface - because he sees it as an opportunity to join the great, pulsating, universal energy of the cosmos), thinking about what those final moments must be like. wondering if you KNOW it's happening in that split second as it's happening, wondering how you feel about it, whether you have time to reflect before it all goes black. it's morbid and for someone as superstitious as me, a bad road to be traveling down.

getting older sucks. you think about this stuff more and more...it becomes more and more of a reality and there's no escaping it with the cocoon of adamant renunciation (working in tandem with youthful hubris) that buffered you as a kid, when the days stretched long and endless like one long, dog-day afternoon in the heat of summer, at the height of vacation. sometimes i take comfort in the weirdest things. i was having a mortality thought on my way to work one day and grappling with the inevitable moroseness it inspires, slowly meandering my way up an escalator, when i realized in a sharp moment that karl marx had lived and died. for some reason, i found that comforting. it's like he's removed enough from me for it not to sting with keening, piercing pain of losing a real loved one, and yet, his genius and the high regard in which i hold him means that it's something we can all transcend. karl marx did it! and look at his legacy! or for a while there i was finding some peace of mind in quantum physics. according to particle theory, we're here and not here and alive and dead all at once. i like that. maybe i should start reading more speculative fiction. become at ease with parallel universes so i'm not so doggedly tied to this one.

then i start thinking about having kids. oy-vey. if i'm stressing about my own mortality, can my neuroses handle worrying about my progeny too? i feel like i'm already stretched to the limits of my capacity for worry. that's what i get for being such a careful, planner of a control freak. i feel like i can keep bad things at bay by planning for every contingency and i'm massively perturbed by the fact that all my planning will always be for naught when it comes down to the zero-sum equation of life. i think i love my life too much ***knocks on wood for the benefit of the fates***

sorry this post has been a downer. but what is this little insignificant blip in the blogosphere (retch) for if not for me to spew my mental detritus onto the shoulder of the information superhighway? as an aside, i think i should cool it on the wire marathons. the violence and wretchedness of humanity tends to bring out the morbidity in me. the last time i had a really bad spell where i was scared of dying was after watching layer cake. it wasn't pretty. i don't even know that i'm scared per se...just fearful of the unknown. i want someone (other than mitch albom) to tell me that i'll definitively join the universe in a cosmic omniscience...with authority. anyway, i should have stuck with my first instinct this weekend and rented raiders of the lost ark. i'm on wire marathon moratorium for the time being. i'm going to wash that grimness right out of my hair with a frothy shampoo consisting of episodes of top chef (chicago this season!!!!!) and project runway...i think that should do it. i'll lighten it up with a return to your regularly scheduled programming now.

tonight for dinner i made a broccoli rabe, walnut, parm and chili pasta. it was easy peasy. brought a pot of pasta water to boil. took a few leeks, sliced them, soaked them, and sweated them over low heat in olive oil. added two bunches of coarsely chopped rapini and turned the heat to high. hit it with some salt and pepper, and then added a few ladles of the boiling water for the pasta to keep it from sticking to the pot and to braise out the greens a bit. toasted some walnuts, and added some of the oil and a whack of the oven-dried, oil-cured chilies my old supervisor at work gave me. cooked the pasta, threw in a touch of the pasta cooking water, and tossed everything together with a big handful of parm and more salt and pepper to taste. it was delicious...the only thing is next time i'd use pine nuts instead of walnuts. the slight acrid bitterness of walnuts wasn't a good match for the bitterness of the rapini. i think the butteriness of the pine nuts would be a nice counterpoint to the greens, and take the place of the usual greens companion of some kind of fatty pork product.

i'm feeling better already. did some yoga today and i think i'm going to go for a run tomorrow after work. i also think a date with the band is in order. or tom waits.

fin.

the mood struck

big-time. i went from "not really feeling like making anything for dessert" to turning the house into krapfen central. krapfen are german doughnuts. the criminal thing was that i've had a deep fryer for over a year now and HADN'T MADE DOUGHNUTS YET. criminal! i forsee a heavy period of doughnut experimentation until i get to my go-to recipe. the krapfen were nice, if a little bready and not as tender and soft as i would have liked. i'm going to reduce the amount of flour and replace the whole eggs with egg yolks and see what happens. or, test a new recipe and see how that one works. i placed a teaspoon full of dulce de leche in most of them, and stuck some homemade raspberry jam in the rest. overall, i was quite pleased with the results (and by "quite pleased" i mean: "ate about 10 dozen"). the dulce de leche gets really molten and gooey inside, and were offset nicely by the crunchy cinnamon-sugar crust and ultra-bitter chocolate dipping sauce i made.

i was so tired after all my busy-bodying yesterday. i went for a long walk to the yarn store and back for my needles, and then i was basically pumping out product. i made: chocolate caramel tarts for my co-worker's baby shower, made a batch of profiteroles which turned out AWFUL and had to be discarded, made fish cakes, made a ginger pear jam, doughnuts, and pie crust for the coming weeks. i was pooped!

we finished season 3 of the wire. damn, son! i SO didn't see the ending coming!


***SPOILER ALERT***



stringer bell did it to himself, though. i actually feel worse for avon barksdale. because stringer set the ball in motion by trying to get omar offed and using proposition joe's product. dayum.


***END OF SPOILER ALERT***


today is a day of reading and then dodgeballin', mexican foodin', and then home for some top chef chicago action. yes!!!

i love sundays!!! can't wait til i'm done school!

tonight for dinnie we're going to rezbozos (i think). this spring-like weather is making me feel all giddy for summer time. biking, fish'n'chips, eating outside, going for walks, exploring, weekends in rochester...ahhhhhhhhhhhh

fin.

growed up

...not quite. well, yesterday's adventures at playing grown-up went predictably off-kilter. it would appear that the dotytron and i are not quite willing to relinquish our hold on all that is young, fiscally responsible, and cool in the name of financial stability (or rather, that in the eyes of the capital "E" establishment, we don't quite yet qualify for the respect that true "adults" deserve).

everyone had been giving me advice: my stepdad, workmates, randoms. NO VARIABLE RATES! so what happens when we sit down with the (seemingly) nice lady at bank? she starts by giving us the spiel: "now, everyone has their favorite mortgages. MY favorite, is the variable rate" (alarm bells!) you know those faux-leather giant desk placemats a lot of businesses have? she proceeded to produce from underneath the leather placemat thing, this giant chart (the andex chart for those in the financial know) that showed how if you invested $100 dollars in 1950 and put it in canada savings bonds, you would only have $1000 today. but if you put in $100 into stocks, you'd have $156000 today. the chart was unspeakable complex and my eyes kept frantically trying to search for the key that would show you what all the numbers/colours/figures could mean. (that's an example of a similar chart at left). she then prefaced her statements by saying, "this isn't the chart for mortgage rates, i think i've misplaced that one, this is for investments, and all you have to take away from this is that the line goes UP over time" *auspicious, chummy, pointed finger-tap on the right hand side of the chart* the dotytron and i were all like, "whaaaa?!?" it made no sense! i had no sense of inflation, what each of the lines represented, or HOW this related to interest rates, etc.

so after "selling" us on this concept that over time, the line goes UP, she gets down to business and says, "let's see how much we can pre-approve you for" and then mentions something about a credit check. at which point the dotytron and i are all like, "whoa, whoa, let's not step down that road" (not because we have bad credit, but because we just wanted rough figures based on our current income and to see what our options are). as soon as we put the kibosh on a credit check, she dropped us like a hot potato and told us that there's a mortgage calculator on the bank website! lol!

anyway, the thing we took away from this is: we're not buying a house until we have 20% down. that seems to me the most sensible thing to do. i'm in no rush. we enjoy a FANTASTIC quality of life, with vacations, dining out, doing everything we want to do in a gorgeous, spacious apartment that more than meets our needs in a location we adore...so we're okay for the time being. no need to go buckshot. hells, i'd be happy renting for the rest of my life if i could sock away the equivalent of my mortgage payments into a high yielding investment option.

last night's dinnie was fun! it felt a little growed up too, because we were talking about buying houses, remodeling kitchens, and having babies. but it wasn't weird or anything...that's just the stage that some of our dining companions were at in their lives...it's not like we COULDN'T talk about anything else.

last week i saw the diving bell and the butterfly. i thought it was a fantastic film, with some reservations. the strongest thing it had going for it, was the painterly composition of a lot of the sequences. schnabel creates exhilarating shots with an almost pointed level of aestheticization, which provided a nice visual counterpoint to the narrative locus of the film - the impressions of a man (a former editor-in-chief for elle magazine, whose life had been a glut of ride-ranging cultural excess), who is a quadriplegic, able only to blink his left eyelid as his only medium between his still-active, function mind, and the outside world. for all the empathetic fear one intuitively feels at being presented with this story (based on the book by the same title, "dictated" by that same man through a laborious process of blinking his way, letter by letter through the alphabet to string together words, sentences, and paragraphs), the movie is very much NOT a downer, preserving a sense of humanity and hope, mostly through the indomitable spirit, wit, and self-deprecating black humour of the protagonist.

certain scenes were gut-wrenchingly powerful in their execution. notable mentions would be when you experience the man's right eyelid being sewn shut from his point of view, or any time roman polanski's wife, emmanuelle seigneur is on-screen. schnabel allows her luminous face and expressive, crooked mouth to fill up the screen with choked-back emotion. i thought it could have used a bit more discipline, overall. i could have done with a few less "diving bell" scenes and there's a segment that involves a trip to lourdes (that is obviously about the nature of faith) that sacrifices the point of the sequence in favour of choppy, music-video style editing and overly composed shots. this was a strong year overall for film.

today i'm going to try to bang out an assignment before lunch-timeish. then go for a walk to my local yarn store for some needles i need for a cardigan/jacket i'm knitting for myself. i had the entire back and half of the front knitted, but i decided to rip it all up because i thought it was going to be a bit short. it breaks my heart to frog (knitter-speak for ripping back) my knitting, but it was already in the back of my mind that i wanted it longer, so what's the point of spending all that time on something i would either a) never wear or b) when i wore it be unhappy that it wasn't what i wanted? i also experienced the delight in giving someone a hand-knit yesterday. it's the BEST. RUSH. EVER. it's similar to making a meal for someone and getting the accolades (all cooks are megalomaniacs in the end)...the recipient was so pleased! it made all the headaches of knitting worth it. i'm hooked! i'm going to walk around and do some errands and then come home, make dinner, watch a few movies (i've been craving a re-visit of indiana jones lately) and knit and sleep. rrrreeelaxing.

tonight for dinner we're having fishcakes (breaded and fried) with a big salad. i don't know if i'm going to make dessert or not...right now, the mood doesn't strike me.

fin.

effin A!

i think i've just gotten enough information together to finish my international organizations assignment almost a week early! yes, guy! i'm so pumped! this puts me wicked ahead of schedule (kinda). this one was relatively painless, all things considered, but i can't hope that the last assignment is going to be the same. the last one is shaping up to be a marathon, 20-hours-at-the-gov-docs-library, epic, panty-twister, hair-puller. but it's best not to dwell on such things and in the meantime, think happy thoughts about how this one only took me like, 5 hours to do (with a little help from my friends - shouts out to the coach, sg!)

the dotytron and i are going to play grown-up tomorrow. we have an appointment after work at the bank to try to see how much money they'd be willing to lend us (as in, pre-approved mortgage). this should be interesting. my friend g at work gave me a list of things i should bring: t4, bank accounts, loans/visas, liabilities (i'm ALREADY bringing the dotytron...ha!), etc. i'm not taking this *too* seriously at this point...like i said, it's just pretend grown-up to see what kind of hovel we'd be eligible for. i'm picturing a spectacular cardboard box along the rt route in scarborough, leaning just-so against the graffiti murals.

tomorrow evening we also have plans to take my very pregnant co-worker out to dinner along with my work friends, k and g. we're going to el sol...i hope they like it! i always feel so responsible when i recommend a place...although i don't know anyone who DOESN'T like it there (even WITH the exorbitant, $10 guacamole...ai yi yi!).

in other news, i'm enormously thrilled because next week, my first ever boyfriend (whom i'm vague acquaintances with now) is having a 30th birthday party, and i stalked the email invite list and lo and behold, my FIRST REAL NEMESIS IS GOING TO BE THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sooooo exciting! she's a high school nemesis, which is when i first started cultivating a REAL hate-on for stupid b***hes. also, i haven't seen her in years and years and years and my half-assed stalking on facebook (getting the dotytron to add her as a friend using some trumped-up excuse that they used to live down the street from each other in markham...lol!!!) reveals that time has not been kind. AMAZE. i know i sound like a petty, awful person, and i kinda am sometimes, but at least i OWN it. i don't know what i'm going to wear! this outfit has to be chosen with the utmost care to transmit equal parts "young, confident, successful, cool" AND "insouciant, devil-may-care, pop-culturally savvy, and haven't-thought-about-you-in-years-and-possibly-don't-even-
remember-your-name."

to flesh out the terribly sordid and banal back-story, i had been dating my first ever boyfriend for like a year, and he had two sets of friends: the lsd-loving industrial-music, beyond alt subgenious crew (most of whom i still consort with to this day) and this weird, keener, goody-goody lame-o, shrill, girl posse of losers, who were all about doing charity work and volunteering and exhibiting school spirit. my nemesis was in the latter group. and she kind of hated me on sight, but was too much of a shrill, keener, lame-o to come out and say it, so instead chose passive aggressive tactics to illustrate her disapproval. like oh, i don't know, SETTING MY BOYFRIEND UP ON A DATE WITH HER RECOVERING ANOREXIC BEST FRIEND IN FRONT OF ME. i repeat: I WAS STANDING RIGHT THERE. "l is coming home tonight from so-and-so, do you want to come over to my house and welcome her home?" B***H, PLEASE. i know it doesn't SOUND like much, but to the credit of my rapier-sharp instincts, shortly after we broke up, guess whose arms he went running into? that's right clever readers: the recovering anorexic best friend. the recovering anorexic best friend became guilty by association. she tried really hard to overcompensate for her innate goody-goodyness by fostering an interest in semi-out-there music (if you consider, like, clutch or the early 90s sonic unyon stable to be semi-out-there - not like, danzig out there) and being overly saccharine to me and feigning an interest in my awesomeness (my awesomeness was somewhat latent, but simmering just below the surface, visible to those gifted with an exceptional perspicacity.) she wasn't mean, per se, but she was mean by virtue of having a skag for a best friend. sorry folks, that's just the way the cards were dealt. nemesis was on a campaign to get me ousted from my first boyfriend's life. THE WORST. i don't forget slights like that, easily (dr. rei would say that i don't forget ANYTHING easily, because in addition to being an industrious pig, my memory is that of an industrious elephant-pig hybrid). i tried to add recovering anorexic best friend as a friend on facebook but she was too crafty for my stalking, voyeuristic ways. this prompted me to stick a nail in the coming-off-as-a-right-proper-nutjob coffin, by sending her a message where i basically laid it out on the line: "look, i OBVIOUSLY only want to add you as a friend so i can check out your pictures and see what your life is like, so why don't you just cut the crap and give it up?" <-- ever the charmer, i am. smooth as siiilk.

the gist of it is, i can't wait to do my usual "descend in a blaze of karl lagerfeld at 28 glory, mingle long enough to shore up the stores of petty vindication for years to come, disappear in a glittering supernova puff of sparkles" routine. watch, just my luck i'll come down with ringworm over my entire face...or the michael jackson disease i'm periodically convinced that i have. ha! serves me right for being so vain that i probably think this song is about me.

i had leftover stew for dinner tonight...i can't wait for el sol tomorrow!

fin.

scaled

i went to the dentist today to get the other half of my mouth scaled. it was with a new hygienist (well, they're all new to me as i've only been to the office one other time, so by "new" i mean "not the person who cleaned my teeth last time"). here's a confession for you: when faced with potentially awkward social situations (ie. when a stranger has his hands all up in your grill and is poking and prodding at the tender flesh-pods of your gums), i like to take a pre-emptive tactical strike at the looming spectre of painful, strained silence by unleashing a barrage of aggressively inane questions to fill the ever-widening chasm of socially dictated patient-professional interaction. *obligatory interjection on behalf of the dotytron* [dotytron] "by aggressively inane, lagerfeld means that the questions are aggressive not in delivery, but in HOW inane they are" [/dotytron]

this basically means that any time i had the full use of my lips/tongue/teeth, i was executing a coup against normal, civilized, dentist-office pleasantries by randomly pointing at things and asking if they got sterilized. "what do you do with the instruments? do they get sterilized?" "what happens to the handles on the light? does that get sterilized?" "what do you guys do with the spit bowl? does that get sterilized?" i think the guy thought i was nuts (if i was in his shoes, i'd probably think the same thing).

things all came to a head when he asked me why i didn't return when i was initially scheduled a few days after my first visit to the office (this was after my disastrous appointment in december when i didn't receive my full cleaning but got charged for it, even though the hygienist was the one who was late. that was also the same appointment where i was convinced that the dentist was preying on my hypochondria by trying to get me fitted for a $400 bite guard). "because i was pissed off at you guys" "why were you pissed off?" "because you guys were trying to hose me"

^^^^ that right there ladies and gentlemen, is a CLASSIC lagerfeld's dad kind of move. the jackfruit doesn't fall far from the tree, folks.

in other news, i watched last night's taped episode of project runway today. BEST LINE OF THE SHOW, EVER --> contestant christian (pictured) had just graciously given another contestant some extra snaps he had. during the obligatory reality-tv show, one-on-one with the camera "confessional" says this immediately after (in reality tv time): "i didn't want to give him the snaps, but you know, sometimes, you can help another person out...........and they still produce crappy work" HI-LARIOUS. at first i hate christian, but i effin' love him now. "fieroccia coutura" lol!

tonight for dinnie we had a lamb, rosemary and guinness stew on top of the silkiest mashed potatoes ever (courtesy of the dotytron) and a heap of steamed broccoli. i've been lovin' my broccoli lately.



tomorrow is the long long long day and my question load at work, while not terribly heavy at the moment, is involving long, fruitless chases for information that i'm fairly certain doesn't exist in one aggregated spot. it's frustrating to the max and the last two mornings i've slept in and haven't eaten breakfast which makes me uber headache-y and grumpy after staring at a computer screen all day. NO MORE! one more night of excess (pie for dessert tonight!) then i'm back on the healthy train.

fin.

note to self

a) don't try to do 150 crunches in a frenzied attempt at a pre-emptive strike for the good of health (knowing that your weekend is going to consist of both a sour cream apple pie with pecan crisp a la mode AND the deepest, richest, devil-dog cake with 7 minute frosting), after you've been mia on the crunch-front for the better part of 6 months
b) don't undertake (a) when you're going to be suffering the ill effects (achy stomach) and you know you're already prone to being a hypochondriac
c) don't undertake (a) when you know that in the same weekend, you're going to see a film about a mysterious, rare, condition known as "locked-in" syndrome, about a guy trapped in his own body after suffering a cerebrovascular stroke, because the addition of (b) is going to result in you being extremely paranoid of every miniscule ache, phantom pain, and twitch in your extremities.d) after seeing the film noted in (c) make sure you tell everyone you know that you love them and make sure you take extra special care of your extremities and make silent avowals of your love for your nerve endings all day
e) when the internet is down at your house call the internet provider right away so you're not stuck assuaging the fears of your bffffff dr. rei at the lack of daily updates by surreptitiously blogging at inopportune times.

i took lots and lots of pictures of the devil dog cake (moistest, richest, chocolatiest cake around! the cake is going to be my go-to chocolate cake recipe, usurping my devil's food cake previous claim to the title...the ingredients aren't that fat-heavy, either!) and the holding-the-blizzard-at-bay apple pie, but as the internet is down at home, i'll have to update with the drool-worthy evidence at a later date.

we got shellacked in dodgeball last night, by an amazing team who have almost 3-4 YEARS experience (not seasons! years!) under their belt. it was an intense game, made all the more intense by the fact that my brother has been playing on our team (to make up for the players we lost) and the combination of the two of us is a potent dose of lagerfeld-competitive-yelling. yikes.

tonight for dinner i think i'm making french onion soup with croque monsieurs. i have to write a paper tonight and try to finish seaming up a baby sweater i made for my co-worker. i feel the need to reiterate how much i love blocking. blocking makes everything look so sharp and tidy and makes the edges of your knitting lie flat and neat and square. it's fantastic! i'm still having huge problems seaming my projects (knitting-speak for sewing together all your knitted components [sleeves, fronts, backs, etc] to make a finished product), as i'm used to sewing which is totally different than working with wool and yarn. it's so bulky that it's actually quite difficult getting smooth, even seams. i'll post pics later!

i'll also post a full review of the diving bell and the butterfly when my internet returns at home, as well as a review of chuck klosterman's iv.

fin.

dippy eggs and toast

another winter storm! *happy dance* i know, i know...i'm the only person left who is still loving the winter coziness and isn't loudly proclaiming to all and sundry that "i'm really tired of winter" or "i just wish spring would come" or "i'm really sick of all this snow". i am NOT. i am not sick of the snow, cold, winter, nor am i dying to have the sticky torpid humid toronto summer come and take over my life with its insatiable demands for energy-sucking air conditioning and its attempts to colonize my lungs with all manner of fine particulate matter. no thank you! all the complainers out there: it's actually NOT that hard to experience a comfortable winter. you need to a) get a pair of PROPER winter boots
b) get a warm, practical coat
c) get an assortment of mittens and gloves
d) cook winter food

all of the above serve to ameliorate whatever negative effects of winter there are. granted, it's not fashionable per se (although i think i look pretty cute...i don't kid myself that i'm christian dior-worthy), but you're cozy and comfortable and impervious to the weather, and when you come home, it may not be exciting per se, but there's nothing wrong with barricading the door and surrounding yourself with good company, wine, food, and conversation. i love it!

ergo, i'm greeting today's winter storm having prepared in advance: all my necessary errands were accomplished during the week, the larder and pantry are stocked, i'm sitting in my flannel pajamas (which i don't plan on vacating all day) and i had a lovely breakfast of dippy eggs and toast. i think i'm coming around on the dippy eggs and toast. the dotytron and the roomie are staunch supporters, but i was on the fence. i tend to be very particular about my food (well...about everything, really) and i was fearful of the mess of slicing off the top of the egg and having little bits of shell in my yolk. i was also fearful of having my toast fingers get cold. the toast fingers DID get a little cold, but there was nary a shell fragment to be seen in my egg, and the yolk was very saucy and tacky and yolkily rich...it is quite a lovely and frightfully dignified breakfast - it makes you feel like the very best kind of upper-crust victorian-era brit having a bite of breakfast gazing out the window of your country estate (and you know how much i'm not a fan of the brits)...it's so neat and tidy and i love bread as utensil.

dinner with nany and poppa was a hoot. nany doesn't like her picture taken because in her words, "i'm always thinking, who's that old lady?" so i won't identify the people in the above picture in order to protect the innocent. we had a lovely salad with lots of veggies, bread and butter, rigatoni in a rose sauce, and my lemon tart. i'm obsessed with their dining room table set and the buffet they have. i'd love a buffet for holding plates and things, and it makes such a lovely piece if you ever do an hors d'oeuvres party or well, a buffet. both the table and the buffet (and the dining room chairs) are this fantastic mid-century modern piece...timeless and sleek and burnished and glowing with a gentle patina. nany and poppa are such great company and we see eye to eye on so many things. i LOVE having my opinions validated by the aged set. it's THE BEST! we're hatching plans to do an annual doty family get together in the summer, to provide another opportunity for the whole clan to gather outside of the christmas brunch thing, where we're always in a restaurant and don't have as much of an opportunity to mingle and whatnot. i don't mind organizing it...it'd be easy...have some sausages and burgers, condiments, have everyone bring a salad, and some desserts and booze in coolers, and you're good to go!

after we came home from that, we had a quick visit with my bff and his lady friend. i really really like them. they're funny and so good together. the bff is doing a project on kids identified in the school system as "gifted". i was one of those kids...i wrote that standardized test when i was in grade 3, and got called into the principal's office shortly thereafter to do a one-on-one with some kind of educational gifted assessor (i remember thinking that i was going to the principal's office to get my eyes checked...and then WHAMMO! logic and reading comprehension and spatial relations test! on the fly!). i guess i did well because i then went to xavier's school for gifted children, which basically means that i was put into another class with a bunch of other similarly identified kids, and that was my class from grade 4 to grade 8. we never mixed with the other kids and it was the weirdest, most isolated group of misfits ever. most of them had pretty s****y social skills, and puberty kicked all our asses and we were pretty much the nerd-bombers of the school (although we were granted the privilege of early and sustained exposure to computers, which is probably why my wpm is so freakishly high). the bff says that now the common practice isn't to separate out the special needs kids or the gifted kids, but have everyone be all together. i personally think that's a TERRIBLE idea. there should be SOME together time (ie. we shouldn't be isolated the way my class was), but how can one teacher deal with such a wide swath of kids and meet all their needs? the next generation is going to blow because of this kind of coddling, "fail the kid up the system" "heaven forbid you tell the kid/parents that their kid can't hack it" mentality.

here are some of the characteristics of gifted kids that the bff is reading about: "highly motivated people with an extraordinary ability to process information in a speedy manner who are highly passionate about broad ranges of thinking and possess a strong sense of morality and justice." he says that from a very young age, they develop a very strong sense of morality and justice and therefore tend to learn best by being argumentative and combative (spurred on by this sense of morality underpinning their convictions) and that as children, they get easily frustrated talking to their peers and prefer to engage adults in conversation, and thus can tend to feel very isolated and lonely.

sound like anyone we know? haha. i've probably told this story before, but i distinctly remember coming home from kindergarten and telling my mom one day, "i don't like the other kids because they're stupid" and what was my mom's response? how did she seize upon this future-hallmark moment to impart upon me her invaluable pearls of wisdom? this is what she said (or thereabouts): "well, you better get USED TO IT because the world is FULL of stupid people." hahahaha, i love my mom. from her i learned the skill of not suffering fools. i also think i get my soft spot for old people from her too. she's such a softy. from my dad i get my bull-headedness and my obsessive compulsive aspects and my sense of order and my varicose veins (curse you, father!), and from my stepdad i get my yell-y side and my long-winded argumentative side. it's fun seeing yourself in your parents as you get older (or seeing your parents in you)...you spend all your teenage years chafing against this and thinking that THEYJUSTDON'TUNDERSTAND how you're SODIFFERENT and how YOU'RENEVERGOINGTOBELIKETHEM and then you just end up being this curious amalgamous mish-mash of all their genetics and a fat dose of your culturalization.

today is a day of homework and reading and baking and comforts-of-home type stuff. i'm going to make a big ole' king-don type cake (moist, deep chocolate cake with marshmallowy clouds of frosting) for tomorrow. tonight's dinner is a pan-seared salmon fillet, served on an onion bun with boston lettuce, sliced tomato, and dilled tartar sauce. with sweet potato and regular potato latkes and a big, crunchy crispy salad. i have a bit of pie crust left that i think i can stretch to make some kind of apple-crumble tart/crostada, which i'm going to serve with vanilla ice cream and the whiskey toffee sauce. there's nothing better than a house smelling of apples and cinnamon and cream on a cold wintry day.

fin.

why my sister is better than yours

one of the many reasons that i think my sister is so amazing (aside from the obvious: she's sweet, smart, tender, caring, the best mom i know, she puts bad people in jail for a living, tough, etc.) is that for someone in their mid-30s, she's still pretty effin' cool and like, WITH it. i don't know many other peeps that are her age, have two kids, and are married to a boor (haha, j/k outlaw bro!), who know who tay zonday is (and above and beyond that, think he's awesome) or what the deal is with the 2___s, 1 ___ phenomena (salient parts blanked out to protect the innocent). anyway, one of the things she's introduced the rest of the family to, is this vh1 show called best week ever. it's a HI-larious rundown of pop culture ephemera, internet viral memes, etc. you know all those shows on much music with "canadian" comedians trying to be flippant AND funny about stuff? it's like that, except these are ACTUAL comedians and they're ACTUALLY funny. and they're also talking about up-to-the-minute ish, not rehashing paris hilton as if anyone gives a flying f**k. anyway, this week on best week ever's website, they featured this video, made by a hamilton crew of sketch comedians known as the imponderables. i know of them through dr. rei. they did the following video, which is pretty flippin' hilarious. convergence!!!

tonight for dinnie i made a chicken and dried apricot tagine (with ground almonds, orange juice, mint, baby carrots, chicken stock, berbere powder, cinnamon, ground ginger, and paprika) on top of whole wheat couscous tossed with toasted almonds and pistachios, and sided with eggplant stir-fried with honey and mint. pretty tasty! i made a boatload too. we'll be eating this for a while!

tomorrow is a day of work and then we're going to the dotytron's nany and poppa's place for dinner. i LOVE the dotytron's nany and poppa. they're the most adorable people around (readers should search for "nany and poppa" to find previous stories of our encounters with them - the dog and the alcohol is a notable yarn) and they always make a great meal. actually, i love all the grandparental units i'm around. the dotytron's grandpa is a stoic, dry kind of guy, and well, my grandparents are hong kong gangsters. i'm bringing a lemon curd tart with whipped cream for dessert. so far spartan-week has gone reasonably well. i feel a lot better and i've banished my throat tickle and i can't help but think the two are related (but i'm a raging, neurotic hypochondriac, so what do i know?). i'll post pics of tomorrow's dinner fo' sho.

fin.