Halloweenies

If loving Halloween is wrong...I never, ever want to be right.

Here is my Halloween goon squad, in all their frippery and finery:

When you go to the trouble of making a bespoke custom tailored jacket for a 2 year old, you better believe that you want to maximize your ROI and re-use it.  The Purple Rain-era Prince costume was just as good the second time around.  You know me and my slavish devotion to all things thematically sound, so I had to make Quincess be 2015-era Prince.  A custom toddler-sized afro wig made from a knit cap and black roving,  a Nehru jacket assist from MHui, and last-minute perfectly matching leggings from my neighbour GT helped me pull it off.  

The Big Yam wanted to be a vampire (zzz).  Could I have bought a cape for $5 from Value Village?  Probably.  Would I ever do that?  Unlikely.  He got a glossy reptile-print black cape with red line and a stand-up collar, because I like to make my life difficult for myself.  

I dropped off the Big Yam at school on Friday in costume - turns out that's not a thing (?!)  I felt kind of foolish for a few seconds before coming to my senses and acknowledging that Halloween is for the children, AND the adults, and if you can't be a goofball when you have kids, then what g-d hope is there for humanity?  People who can't be goofs around their kids make me so sad.

I had a day off on Friday so I spent that day visiting with the Roomie and carving pumpkins and doing last-minute Halloweenie type things.  Saturday was all about final prep and the Dotytron fussing over the $20 worth of dry ice he bought.  You would think that, noted domestic miser that I am, I would have kiboshed the dry ice plans, but when it comes to Halloween...all bets are off.  Really, when you see this:

So worth it, right? 

Trick or treating was fun, but exhausting.  All the kids on my street go together, which means a gaggle of parents follows around kids moving at different speeds, yelling things like, "Remember your manners!" and "Don't run across people's lawns!" from the sidewalk.  I took the twins out to just a few houses on our street and then we dumped  them in the basement to watch a movie.  I went out with the Big Yam and was totally knackered by the end of it.  We had to do a mid-run candy dump back at home, before heading to a street in the 'hood where a local real estate agent pays to close off the street and then pays for a fire eater to do a series of shows.  That street goes ALL OUT.  It is awesome.  There was a house with a giant mechanical spider on the roof that was lit up and moved around.  There was another house where they had rigged up fishing line to make a skull pop out of a pumpkin at the street level.  It was all kinds of awesome.

I went back to form with my pumpkins this year.  The theme was "queens"

Bad girl RiRi

bell hooks

Freddie Mercury

Halloween and Thanksgiving spirit is my favorite kind of spirit.  It's just weirdos being weird and creative!  I love it.  

The next day we had a Dia de los Muertos ceremony at the cemetery for Poppa D.  More correctly, the Dotytron, the Big Yam, Momma D and Emdo did something, while I chased the twins through the cemetery and made sure they didn't desecrate any graves (much).  After that, was a Halloween party my neighbour threw.  It was exhausting!  

Although we did get some cute shots that day:

Lindsay's face in the two family pictures, kills me.  Look at what an innocent little bobbin he looks like!  Nothing like this guy:

 Exhibit A: Bam Bam trying to wrestle something to the ground with sheer force of will

After living with him for 2+ years, I can easily say that Lindsay is the most stubborn and willful of my children, which is kind of saying a lot.  That guy is VERY entitled and self-assured and has been seemingly from birth.

Here's a video of the Quincess conducting.  He LOVES pretend conducting more than even the Big Yam did.  Any time the Big Yam plays piano, Quincess will be quietly conducting in his high chair, transported to another place.  The way he does the little cut at the end!  

Quincess has also been referring to the movie Fantasia as "decoration" which is cute in and of itself, but even cuter when you hear it in his little lisping, Quincess voice.

Two weekends ago we hit the pumpkin patch with our neighbour, which officially means we've hit every item on the fall bucket list.  We ate doughnuts, went through the corn maze, walked on this musical bridge thing, saw a meteor crater (this pumpkin patch had an alien-invasion theme - weirdly), went on a hay ride, picked out our pumpkins, shot corn cobs through these hydraulic gun things...basically all the standard stuff (how weird is it that shooting corn cobs through a hydraulic gun is now de rigeur pumpkin patch fare?):

Starbucks has already brought out their red cups which means I officially want to bring out the barf in my mouth.  

That's all for now!

Fin.

Reading Rainbow

My grey matter has been hyperactive, of late.  I've been getting a lot of mental inspiration from stuff I've been reading/seeing/thinking about and my pistons are firing (in case you couldn't tell from the last post).

Further to that, I was at a dinner party last weekend and when the talk about white people being racist came up, a smug white person (is there any other kind?) of the mansplaining variety said, "but aren't we all racist?" and I was like, okay, yeah, fine.  And then this other mansplainer jumped in, and to his credit, talked about racism being a structural thing, so everyone is bigoted (or can be), but not all people possess the structural power to exclude others.  He said something along the lines of, "I'm sure there might be some cultures where whiteness isn't dominant" at which point I was just about to interject that I don't believe that to be true, when my dear friend gave an example of "racism" when she was singled out and treated differently when she was a white woman living in Japan for a year.

Keep in mind: I was the only person of colour at the table.  The Dotytron had left for another engagement.  In that context, among those people, I consider the Dotytron a person of colour, because he's really the closest thing to it.  He's considered "black-ish" by his colleagues at school.  I tried to make a point that Japanese men fetishizing her whiteness is still a privileging of white skin (although a twisted articulation of it), but it got swallowed up in the din of whiteness and mansplaining (a lethal combination).

It was very difficult to sit at that table and listen to that conversation unspool as it did.  I didn't speak up because I'm not very deft when it comes to doing that.  I would have gone full-bore FRANZ FANON this! and bell hooks THAT! And probably gone berserk with post-colonial, can-the-subaltern-speak talk.

Here's the thing: some of those people are wannabe public policy wanksters.  They're not, because they're the kind of oily political staffers that I see prancing around my work, in shrunken suits, who don't actually know how to do anything but play the "game" of politics, but the point is: they FANCY themselves to be the "right" people to make those decisions.

You've heard me go on and on about the myopic nature of the left and how entrenched positions never yield fruitful conversations.  This was a table full of that.  Big voices from people who don't know anything beyond their own narrow slice of urban smugness.

I'm sorry, but you don't have to go very far to get a sense of the discourse on white privilege and racism.  Like, it got played out in the Taylor Swift-Nicki Minaj beef on Twitter.  It's on Scandal, like, every 5th episode.  It's kind of everywhere?  IF you take a minute to step outside the narrow confines of a limited peer group.  It's weird how rarefied your world can become.  I'm sometimes shocked by how much otherwise intelligent, smart, thinking people I know don't know about stuff.  Maybe this is what happens when you only get a CBC/NPR view of the world?  What is that world even like?

Thankfully, I'll never have to know.

Edit: I love my best friend because I have been working on this post all week and then we went to lunch and basically hashed out all of the above.  She's a glorious, brilliant, magical, inspiring creature who makes me a better person.

This week I saw Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a talk organized by my friend JT.  It was awesome.  Yes, please smart Asian-Canadian women who are feminists and think about girlhood and coming-of-age, and narrative reliability and are kick-a** illustrators.  Yes, please.

This One Summer is their latest work (they also write independently of each other, although Jillian does illustration whereas Mariko doesn't).  This won a Prinz and a Caldecott, kind of a big deal.  It's covers a summer spent at the cottage with two friends, Windy and Rose, both who are on the cusp of early-adulthood, and who are experiencing that transition and the shifting of their identities in different ways that strain and balance their friendship.  There are confusing things afoot with the adults in their lives, and with the townie teenagers the two spy on.  I love Jillian Tamaki's illustration style.  I just love it.  I couldn't love it more.  It is the perfect balance between clear and expressive and referencing traditional cartooning.  The story is fragmented and the telling of the narrative evokes summer itself - how some days are long and languid and some seem to flash by in a blur.  There is a lot that isn't said through text, leaning all the more on Jillian Tamaki's wondrous illustrations to add the nuance and shading and subtext.  It perfectly captured the confusing miasma of fraught female friendships at a tumultuous time.  

This was OBVIOUSLY an Academic Book Club pick.  I don't know from Ann-Marie MacDonald.  I didn't read The Way the Crow Flies or Fall On Your Knees because I suspected white lady problems and I wasn't up for it then, and I'm rarely up for it now.  This is about a character, not-Ann-Marie who lives a very similar life to Ann-Marie but isn't her, okay?  Even though they are both lesbians living in the Annex with similar professions for their spouses and raising kids and blah blah blah.  I didn't finish reading this to be honest because it was about how she was feeling suffocated by stifling domesticity.  It's a Talking Heads, is this my beautiful wife? Is this my beautiful car? type of book and I'm sorry, but from rich white ladies who are all, "how do I find myself here?" I'm like, figure it out! I don't care!  I couldn't get into her "problems" and I didn't want to try.

The Girl on the Train was last year's answer to Gone Girl but not as good and without the feminism.  An alcoholic woman named Rachel pieces together a mystery from the glimpses of a house she passes by on her train commute every day.  Secrets abound, blah blah.  It's a page turner but I didn't really like any of the characters and the writing wasn't all that great and the twist ending wasn't all that surprising, so the end result is that it was perfect for that time in my life (I read this over a year ago...I think when the twins were quite wee and my life was punctuated with tandem breastfeeds every 3 hours).

All YA books are set up to be like, "The next Fault in Our Stars" or "The next Eleanor and Park."  This was marketed like this but it's quite different.  It's about a Hasidic Jewish girl and a West Indian boy who cross over their respective communities' boundaries in Brooklyn and meet in a hospital elevator during a hurricane.  Their families disapprove, their burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret.  For the most part, the book defies easy stereotypes - Jaxon, the boy, is a high-achieving nerdy student and the book ends with melodramatic elements, but a more realistic ending than most.  I liked this book - it was sweetly touching.

Saga.  You guys.  Brian K. Vaughan is obviously a hero in the comics world.  I love his writing.  But Fiona Staples?!?  Where have you BEEN all my comic-reading life?  Look at those drawings!  The drawings are incredible.  This is about two members of alien races, at war for generations, who fall in love and defect to raise their child, on the run from bounty hunters and government forces.  Brian K. Vaughan's writing is always slyly political, but funny, and very wry.  I love this and can't wait for the next installments.  Again, the illustrations, guys!  The worlds that are created!  

SMcKay recently questioned me because I got midnight screening tickets (thanks, Bruce Wayne!) for the new Star Wars: Force Awakens film.  I was like, dude, I'm a nerd.  And she said, "I'm a nerd, too..." and I was like, whoa whoa whoa.  I am a real, deal nerd.  Like, an old skool 90s alt-Asian girl nerd.  I like Star Trek: TNG, Star Wars, comics, Voltron, Ghost in the Shell, Autechre, Aphex Twin, all the rest of that stuff.  You want to talk Brian K. Vaughan?  Let's talk Brian K. Vaughan.  This is real comics, not the Seth/Adrian Tomine, graphic novel stuff.  It is a brilliant series though...you have to take my word for it.  

Allie Brosh's web comics (and maybe some original material?  I'm not sure) were collected in this book, Hyperbole and a Half.  There is something about her naive (but assuredly time-consuming) MS Paint illustrations that are the best.  In particular, her series on her own depression and wanting to die, is one of the things that has best crystallized for me, what it must be like for someone to be going through those mental health issues.  It's strange, but her writing on her depression is one of the first times I've actually understood what it must be like.  It made that expression of mental illness accessible in a way that it hadn't before, and in so doing, made me able to empathize with people with mental illness on a much more intuitive level.  

I mean really, isn't this like, me all the damn time?!

I know, I'm so behind on book reviews that you read and digested and loaned this to your friend already.  Allow me to join the chorus of voices who loved Amy Poehler's book.  I love this woman.  I was told by people that some of her reactions to situations as detailed in the book reminded them of me, and by that I mean I think Amy Poehler and I share the propensity to be small, smart women who are cocksure and as a general rule, DON'T TAKE S**T LYING DOWN.  I am generally honoured by the comparison.  

I loved this book.  The essays were by turns funny, true, heartening, and revealing.  This is the kind of book that as a woman, you sometimes clutch it to your breast and just breath, "yes."  I get that.  This woman gets me.  Women getting other women is a magical gift and is not to be trifled with.  I enjoyed this more than Bossypants because as a whole, I find Poehler less guarded.  Tina Fey comes off very cerebral and her smart can be distancing, whereas Poehler allows you in a bit more.  Whatever, they're both brilliant, funny, amazing women and there is room for both of them and a whole lot more.

I suggested this for Academic Book Club.  It generated a s**t tonne of discussion but I had major issues with this book.  I think Lena Dunham is a creative, gifted, incredibly accomplished woman who has her heart in the right place.  I think the video advice series that she developed to promote the book was brilliant and funny and I loved it.  The actual book however, I do have notes about.  She's...just not that great a writer, guys.  She's a voracious reader and she's been around a highly educated, artistic milieu her whole life (what comes through loud and clear in this book is how much she idolizes her artist parents), and I've heard her speak and she's articulate and insightful...but it doesn't translate as much to the written word.  

I've subscribed to her Lenny newsletter that she does with Jenni Konner and I'd say the same thing.  She's not a great interviewer and the writing just doesn't equal the sum of the inputs.  She is an oversharer with some things, but then when the time comes to discuss her relationship with Jack Antonoff, she gets weirdly shy and reticent and all, "that's private!" and obviously I get that everyone gets to choose what's private for them, but it just seemed incongruous and kind of juvenile.  There are ways to talk about your boyfriend/partner/significant other, whathaveyou, without giving it all away and feeling like you sold yourself (see: Amy Poehler above).  It was worthwhile reading because this book generated a lot of mainstream interest and was zeitgeisty, and as we all know, even though I'm a nerd, I stay on top of the zeitgeist like it's my full time job.

That's it for book reviews today.  Stay tuned for Halloween wrap-up, more musings on parenthood, what I've made for dinner lately, and more!

Fin.

This is a Rant

They see me rantin', I'm ravin'...

Very much not into this ^^^ lately

The Dotytron has some extended family members who are...how do I put this delicately...ummm...RACISTS?!?  They are "old stock" Canadians and lately, I'm like, done with that shiz.  An uncle referred to a musician at a Jamaican resort he didn't care for as a "Rasta piece of crap" (you are surprised that your musician in JAMAICA was [might] have been Rastafarian?!).  That same uncle also believes President Obama is a Muslim, and furthermore, THINKS THERE'S SOMETHING INHERENTLY WRONG ABOUT THAT.  A groomsman at a wedding that I (thankfully) didn't go to, used the N-word IN THE RACIST, NON-REAPPROPRIATING WAY.  An Aunt re-posted a picture of the twin towers with accompanying text to the effect of: "this image is going to offend some people [emphasis mine] that our government is too PC to fight back against but I don't care (blah blah blah insert nationalistic - American! - jingoism here)..." In the run-up to this past federal election, the only people on my Facebook wall who have been posting scare-mongering stuff about how Justin Trudeau is going to run up a giant deficit or op-ed pieces from the Toronto Sun (!), about how stellar Harper's record has been are from his aunts and uncles with accompanying entreaties that we should read their posts and "think before we vote!"  These are people who get their "news" and political information from memes.

I also made the mistake of clicking on the comments from provincial PC leader Patrick Brown's Facebook message wishing Muslims a happy Eid.  It was, as you could imagine, filled with racist vitriol and the linchpin issue for scared white bread old stock everywhere, how you CAN'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS ANYMORE AND YOU HAVE TO SAY "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" AND WHAT A TRAVESTY THAT IS AND A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION, etc., etc.

At a Dotytron family xmas event a couple of years ago, an aunt mad an off-hand snide remark that someone better watch what they say to me, because "otherwise she'll be posting about you [on social media] with the things she doesn't like" and just the mere memory of that makes me so. damn. mad.  I am filled with a howling, chomping, rage that rises in me and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I'm sorry, am I too smart, critical, and outspoken for you?  What's the role of a good woman in your books?  That I should be making shortbread cookies and planning my wedding and taking my partner's last name and accept mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Dotytron"?  HOW ABOUT YOU TAKE SOME OF MY BRILL OPINIONS and sit down and quietly be spoon fed them the way disenfranchised people are forced to quietly be spoon fed your white privilege since time immemorial?  

These are opinions that family by marriage (only - thank goodness), think it's okay to share PUBLICLY.  So I think to myself...why do I want to be around that?  What do I get out of descending into that intellectual decrepitude?  What must they think of me?  What must they think of my beautiful biracial children?  

You know what this is?  This is white privilege folks.  The kind of myopic, "convenient theories for me" narrative that means that women, women of colour, women who don't fit the box that is convenient for us to be place in by the constructs of the dominant hegemony, have to behave in a certain way, lest we be designated as too "loud" or "opinionated" or "untoward."

BE UNTOWARD.

I chose Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for the next Book Club I'm hosting.  We had just read (or in my case, hate-read and then dropped 1/10th of the way through), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and I was looking at options and I was like, you know what?  I'm tired of reading about white women!  I haven't finished this, but the review is forthcoming.

Last night we finished watching Fruitvale Station, starring the hotness that is Michael B. Jordan. I suggested the film as an accompaniment to the reading for Book Club. After the last few years where the black community has become increasingly visibly radicalized in the face of systemic and visible murder by entrenched racism and the demonization of black masculinity, the film enraged me.  Oscar's story happens all the freakin' time.  We have a confluence of entrenched racism in the United States, lack of class mobility, segregation, disempowerment, a heady gun culture, and the simultaneous fetishization and demonization of black masculinity contributing to black bodies being treated as disposable.

Then you read reports about how something was "disrupted" by Black Lives Matter advocates.  You see news reports that fix the rioting in Ferguson in a fetishisitic gaze while simultaneously moralizing and wagging a finger at our collective entrancement with the activities images of black bodies "acting out."

Why do we hold oppressed people to a higher standard?  Why do we grind people under our heels and then expect them to be "good corporate citizens" or to protest in a way that we deem acceptable and not give in to that rage?

All my life I've been told that I'm too angry, too outspoken, not basic enough for this world.  I was born with a surfeit of confidence and the privilege of an upper-middle class upbringing in a developed nation to back it up, but still, rage is

Can you imagine what it must be like to be black in America?  To be Hispanic in America?  To be First Nations in Canada?  To be Muslim around the Dotytron's extended family (lol!)?  

I just finished reading Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.  It is a collection of Gay's essays.  This was good stuff, folks.  She talks about how we have to stop lobbying accusations of privilege, how it feels being a feminist but still liking questionable pop music (e.g. "Blurred Lines") in spite of yourself, what it means to be a "bad feminist."  I loved this collection, even if I didn't agree with all her points.  There was an essay about the N-word and I gotta say, as someone who has studied language and writing and meaning,   Surprisingly, my favorite essay is about Gay's entré into the world of competitive Scrabble playing.  She balances the line between anger, indignation, reflexivity, passion...I can't believe I'm only discovering her now, but I'm so glad I did.  It's nice to have a woman of colour be represented in mainstream feminist discourse, especially one as funny, self-aware, critical, and whip smart as Gay.

I saw Straight Outta Compton a few weeks ago with a friend.  Dotytron had gone right when it was released with his Record Club homies.  I saw it after ingesting all the information that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the movie's release about how Dre has a history of beating up women. I don't know much about rap history or about NWA, other than the hits from that era that everyone knows.  It was definitely an entertaining movie and the performances are almost all uniformly good, especially Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Ice Cube.  In particular, Jackson Jr. is incredible.  It helps that in a film where the actor's likeness to the character they played could be tenuous at best (I'm looking at you, the guy who played Snoop), Jackson Jr. looks EXACTLY like his dad and the mannerisms were perfect.  The guy who plays Dre, Corey Hawkins, got daps but he relies too much on the squinty eyes (admittedly, so does Dr. Dre in real life).  All that aside, there is no denying that the movie is very entertaining.  However, there is no denying that the guys who comes off the worst in the film are a) the guy who is dead (Eazy-E) and b) the guy who is a known psychopath (Suge Knight).  Dre and Cube come off as angels, and as I linked above, we know that is certainly not the case.  It could be because Cube co-wrote the film?  Who knows.  I did like the fact that Eazy-E's widow is one of the executive producers.  The other thing is that the film trades on a LOT of misogynistic depictions of women and quite frankly, I don't have the stomach for that anymore.  The film also glosses over the fact that the fetishization of young black male inner city culture was packaged to a white audience to sell it.  In fact, I think the film does the same thing, and trades on it to sell this film to a mass white audience (the film did remarkable box office).  Once again, you have the Narcos phenomena of the simultaneous glorification of the violence, and misogyny and the vague finger-wagging happening in the sub-sub-subtext.  We glorify the exploits of this disenfranchised black masculinity as a means of selling movie tickets.

Rant over.

Fin.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things...

Yam and Wonder Twins edition.

I rebelled against regulatory red tape and sent the Big Yam into school on Friday with homemade cupcakes for his birthday.  The line from schools is that you're generally supposed to bring in store bought treats but the idea of bringing in grocery store cupcakes in those little plastic clam shell containers broke me inside, so I said, F**K IT, PREMIER MOM, I'M CELEBRATING THE BIG YAM TURNING FIVE IN STYLE.  I asked the Big Yam how they went over, and he said, (and I quote), "Everyone. Freaked. Out." LOL!

Our household accounts for about 1 million of those 6 million views.

My kids are obsessed with orchestral, instrumental music.  Like, OBSESSED.  The Studio Ghibli anniversary concert is back in heavy rotation, and Quincess has taken to pretending to conduct and he mimics Joe Hisaishi's hand motions and it's freakin' adorable.  Other scores in rotation are the theme from How to Train Your Dragon (which seriously makes me cry when the French horns kick in. Every single time), Peter and the Wolf, and Pirates of the Caribbean.  So. Much. Pirates of the Caribbean.  Whenever we hop in Eddie Van Halen the request comes for Pirates of the Caribbean.  To the point where, last weekend, after we had finished one round of the theme, out of nowhere, Quincess said, "I love Pirates of the Caribbean. I love it."  in his cute little lisping Quincess voice and it was so sweet and pure.  That is his first ever unprompted "I love ___" and it was triggered by a Klaus Badelt score?!  My kids are weirdos.

Not in situ, but still cute nonetheless

Lindsay is very good at showing when he's unimpressed with something (which happens a lot, because he is unimpressed when he doesn't get his own way, and about 98.78% of his life is lived in the pursuit of requesting his own way).  He scowls, his brows lower, he purses his lips and then he talks in a growly, stubborn voice.  The other night, at dinner, as he was getting choosy over which green beans we were putting on his plate, we heard this from him: "No want that one bean. Want this one bean. ALL DAY." In his scowling, pouty, low voice.   LOL!  We died laughing.

Thanksgiving, man.  What's better?  Nothing.  We spent the weekend with family, eating good food, going on nature hikes, thinking about how the two best people in the world (Dr. Rei and Hanbo) got hitched, thinking about how my Big Yam is now five (!!!!!), celebrating his birthday, and getting lit on the good vibes.  It was a good time, though a bit of a whirlwind.

I measured the Big Yam against his closet door frame and the kid has grown about 10cm (close to 4") in a year.  UMMM...IS THAT LEVEL OF GROWTH SUSTAINABLE?!?  He's only FIVE?!??!!!  Is he Andre the Giant?

 On the first of two nature hikes we undertook.  Our attempt to get a decent family photo thwarted by: my crazy hair, my crazy smile, my crazy outfit, the Big Yam's inveterate goofiness, the impossibility of getting all the kids looking in the direction of a camera at the same time without (and oftentimes with) serious coercion

 This 2 photo series cracks me up.  Quincess' mouth is stuffed with one of the Belgian waffles that are a Farmer's Market staple for us

This seriously might be as good as the Xmas card this year gets, folks.

 Love this pic of my sibs and all our SOs

 The Thanksgiving table!  Featuring 15 people all crammed around in my mouse house

 My bird

The plate: my bird, my sausage-sage stuffing, my gravy, Manda's mashed potatoes, my sis' green bean casserole (to die for) and squash puree

One of two desserts: pumpkin pie with salted caramel and whipped cream

The Big Yam's smile!

The Big Yam's birthday cake - chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and salted caramel buttercream

Even though we pooched the picture day outfit, the Big Yam saved us with this hilariousness.  Ummm...why does he look like a 23 year old?!?

 An enchilada casserole that I froze over a year (!) ago, brought out for Taco Tuesday.  It was good.

I used leftover turkey (the sinewy dark meat parts from the drumstick and the firm parts from the wing) in this turkey and wild rice soup.  I served it with my go-to cheddar sage biscuits (I omit the bacon).  The soup turned out very thick and required a lot of thinning with extra broth/water/cream.  Next time, I'd keep the flour portion at 1/4 cup instead of 1/2 cup.  It tasted like the best parts of Thanksgiving dinner, reimagined.

This was my first week at the new job.  I love having a private office (!) and the work is interesting, although because I worked right up until last Friday, my head is in two places...this weekend will be a nice chance for me to decompress and get myself back into the headspace.

Fin.

Moving On Up

...and over, laterally, under.

Things are moving and shaking at Casa Dotytron and Lagerfeld.

Move #1 - the Big Yam.  After going through the rigmarole of applying for Optional Attendance to a desired, but outside of our catchment area school, setting the Big Yam up in his new classroom, with all new homies and a slightly longer commute, he was happily settled.  Until, that is, the dreaded September reorganization happened.  The dreaded September reorganization for people who don't have school-aged children is when the school rejigs things based on actual enrollment, versus the projected enrollment that forms the basis for class placement at the end of the previous school year.  As a result of the shuffle, the Big Yam was moved from his 2nd floor, beautiful kindergarten classroom, to a dank and depressing basement class taught by a newly-minted teacher (who had been the ECE in his old classroom).

We were actually fine with everything, because the important thing for us is that the Big Yam was moving with his homies, and he did.  Until the parents of his homies went BALLISTIC about the dank and depressing basement classroom and went full-on mental (let's just say, there was a feature on Global News about it).  Don't get me wrong, the new classroom wasn't ideal - there are only a couple of small windows, the bathroom is outside the classroom through a dingy and dank storage closet, and there isn't any running water so hand-washing is an issue - but our main concern was that the Big Yam adjusted socially.  He was also totally fine with the transition - new teacher, new classroom, losing some homies (more on that later), because outside of our home, he is the most unflappable, easygoing kid in the free world.  Inside our home, it's a totally different story, but fine, whatever, he continues to make us look good in public, I'll take it.  Anyway, some parents went apeshiz and pulled their kids into the Catholic system because they were so upset about this classroom situation.

I actually went by the classroom yesterday to check it out, and the TDSB had BUSTED THROUGH THE CONCRETE WALL and framed a doorway so that now the kids have direct access to the bathroom.  They cleared all the gym equipment out of it, had repainted, had a sink roughed in...it was incredible.  Which goes to show that when there's political pressure to make things happen, you can cut quickly through the central services facilities backlog and get prioritized.  The weird thing is, that it was thanks to the efforts of the parents who ended up leaving the school that this got done, and now they don't even get to see the fruits of their labours.

Move #2 - New job for me.  I had back to back to back interviews the week after Labour Day and it damned near killed me, but the result was I received two job offers.  I ended up taking a promotion at my home position and I start right after Thanksgiving.  It was a tough decision to make and it involved me talking the poor ears off of my life decision sounding boards: the Dotytron, Dr. Rei, the Roomie and constructing a decision matrix with weighted scores.  YOU GUYS. DECISION MATRICES ARE THE BEST.  I seriously couldn't have made the choice without one.  Even if one of the categories was "Lync" which is the Microsoft-instant messaging system that people in the public service use.  We use it at my home position, but the firewalls mean that I can't communicate with people outside of the organization.  Anyway, the point is, being able to Lync with Dr. Rei has improved my employee engagement by about 10000%.  IT LOOKS LIKE WE'RE WORKING, GUYS.  Anyway, the Roomie and the Dotytron were very dismissive of my ability to IM Dr. Rei showing up on the decision matrix, but I weighted it the lowest, and seriously, I can't tell you how awesome it is being able to chat with your BFF while at work, and IT LOOKS LIKE WE'RE WORKING.

My new job comes at a cost of the awesome people I've met while on secondment and the loss of opportunity to continue to build my professional reputation in the public service.  I was finally feeling very engaged and energized where I was and saw lots of movement and opportunity ahead - it's hard to think that I might be letting that go taking on this position.  I think that's always going to happen whenever you make a change, though.  So I'm trying not to get too worked up about it.

Move #3 - Lindsay Lou Lou is moving around each G-D night after we put him to bed and thrashing his room like he's all the members of Motley Crue.  He takes all the clothes out of the dresser, he climbs on top of stuff to chuck all the books off the book shelves, he tugs on the blinds until they snap up and can't be brought down again, all while Quincess watches from his jail/crib and conscientiously objects, "Noooo! 'Top it! Lenny! 'Top it!" His little voice wailing is the most heart-breaking thing.  His distress is compounded by the fact that like every child in the free world, he wants to be sleeping in our bed.  We don't know what to do.  Lindsay isn't angry or anything.  He just goes on a systematic tear.  The odd time I've opened the door and he's just working at the easel and greets me with a raised eyebrow, mid chalk-stroke.  The rest of the time he hustles his fat bubble butt to his bed post-haste but resumes his thrashing as soon as you leave again.  We've had a small measure of success the past two nights by lying on the floor of their room until they're near-drowsy.  We also got drawer guards so he can't open the dresser drawers.  I don't really care about him thrashing the room, but I am worried more about him climbing the dresser and bringing it down on top of himself, and then poor Quincess having to pay silent witness to that on top of it all.

My friend JJ referred to Lindsay as "Bam Bam" and it's so apt.  He is such a Bam Bam.

I love these little nutters but two 2 year olds is hectic.  And yet.  And yet I go around exhausted at the end of the night ("end of the night" = 9pm, when I'm at the drop-down point of the day, stumbling around the house in a haze), and I go to hang up a little vest and I feel the pockets heavy with something and I empty them out to find this:

20-something "corn-eggs" tucked into a pocket for saving.  C'MON.

We have been terrible parents lately.  Dropping balls everywhere.  We forgot to send the Big Yam to school with his "1 item related to fall" today.  We forgot that Monday was picture day and he looked like a scrub.  But!  I was a rebellious parent and sent him in for his birthday with homemade cupcakes and I asked him how it went and he said, "Everyone. FREAKED. OUT."  LOL!!!  They were a hit, apparently!

Quincess' "handsome face"

They're moving out of a phase where they were obsessed with Disney's Cinderella.  I put hats on them like Cinderella does to her mice and started calling Lindsay "Gus-Gus" and Quincess "Jaq-Jaq" and they wouldn't take the hats off.  I like this photo cuz they look like stoners in the common room in residence in undergrad

So yeah.  They're friggin' adorable and I love their trying little butts.  I put Quincess in our bed the other night in this misguided attempt to show Lindsay that if he doesn't thrash his room, he gets privileges.  Quincess hunkered down immediately, the covers pulled up under his nose, and I turned off the lights, told him I would be back, and he was just so thrilled to be in our bed that he poked his little head up just enough for me to see his teeth flashing in the moonlight in this ultra-pleased grin.  It was the cutest thing.

Last Friday, we were all piled in the basement, watching Peter and the Wolf and goofing off and the Dotytron turned to me and said, "You ever have those times when you're just so high on your family? This is one of those nights." A family can come in many forms.  The Dotytron and I were a family long before the goon squad came along, and yet, adding to your family is a magical thing. I like the idea that there are more people to bear witness to the quirks and trials and tribulations that make up the idiosyncrasies of our family, and more people to contribute to them in the intimate way that goes along with living under the same roof.

We've been making a point of availing ourselves to urban nature exploration.  We did a tiny portion of the Humber River trail last weekend, and before that, Highland Creek.  It's pretty awesome.  Exploring the watershed is amazing and honestly, what else am I supposed to do on weekends now that I have a pair of Blundstones?  Are you even allowed to live in the city, work for the government, bike to work, wear Blundstones and like, NOT do urban nature hikes?  Probably not, amirite?

Here's what we've been eating lately:

Taco Tuesday one night was chilaquiles

A torched salmon sushi rice bowl where I thinly sliced raw wild salmon and then torched it slightly with a blowtorch, to give it the aburi sushi taste that I like

I got ambitious one weekend and made blintzes

We've been going hard on the Sunday suppers.  This was ginger-pear glazed ham, smashed potatoes, grilled zucchini, and the ever present green beans

The Big Yam kept pestering me for "pumpkin pie with a cherry in the middle" and so I made pumpkin pie, and I suspected, he had no idea what he was requesting and didn't eat a single bite of it.  However, one night I put Lindsay to bed and noticed that his hands smelled strangely of cinnamon.  Then, I came downstairs and found that the slice of pie I had cut on the counter looked like it had been compromised.

Sunday Supper - Rosh Hashanah edition.  Braised brisket, latkes, broccoli patties, and the ever present green beans

Mushroom pappardelle.  Killer stuff.

Coconut browned butter cookies

Quickie weeknight dinner - bacon, mushroom, spinach, and cheddar quiche and zucchini patties

Fin.