Category: Food

Why I blog

Take that, people who say it’s nothin’ but narcissism.

Also, I have a terrible memory and a blog helps me remember when things happened.

Also, Katie has used my blog to help her remember when distressing and horrific things, as reported by me, happened.

Yesterday Paul and I drove up-island to visit his cousin Ruth in Nanaimo.  She’s living on an acre of land and she got it for a steal of a price, and she and her fisherman spouse are living very happily.  She has to walk fifteen minutes to get her mail, and another ten to get her eggs, but she’s a five minute drive from a yoga studio and she has her own well, so there.

She made us a fabulously warm welcome, and soon we were deep in talk about cob houses and straw bale houses and the Cuban 5 and the amazing local arts and politics scene, and after Paul re-strung her guitar I said I’m getting my mandolin, and she hauled out her Indian drums (sounds like tablas but they weren’t) and we had a fabulous 90 minutes of jamming.  I kept nervously checking the Malahat webcam.  Long about 4 we decided to head back.

And it snowed.  Paul and I were bemoaning our lack of cameras, because the snow slid down the road signs and just hung there, and some of the visual effects were quite funny.  The snow was worse in Victoria than up the Malahat, go figure.

Paul went off to hang with Dr Filk for the evening (more music, somewhere, and a meal in there too) and I grabbed some Mayan Chocolate Haagen Dazs and a small round of Brie (my god, they fell on it like animals…. well behaved, queuing animals) and Darwin had a noisy bath and went to bed and we ate pizza and I started reading The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling and at 7:30 I collapsed.  See what a day without coffee can do to me?  Also I did all the driving, since Paul has come to the realization that he can tolerate my tailgating and random lane changes way better than vice versa.  A couple of hours in the car also allowed us the opportunity for an airing of the grievances (or was more usually the case, the bragging of the amazingness) re the kids. Sometimes it’s good to have a chance to bash away at this stuff so we can present a united front when the next issue comes up….

Woke up at 4, edited the sound files I recorded yesterday of Darwin’s charming vocalizations, finished the Caryatids (three stars but I still want to know where the food of the future will be coming from), showered, and now I’m looking forward to a meal at my Granny’s place of residence and a nice ride home on the ferry, probably late in the afternoon.  And I can haz new quilt, which is actually a quilt that my mum made when I was tiny, so I am extremely happy about my ‘haul’.  Oh, also my grampa’s memory book (two thick tomes) has been delivered to me in duplicate for Jeff.

So far an AWESOME weekend, and watching Katie motor her way – reading, my god, she’s reading! – through the Sookie Stackhouse books is making me very very happy.

Singing makes me happy and so does Major Kusanagi

So Keith and Paul picked me up from work last night (Keith was driving) and we went back to their place and at pork chomps and salad and oyster mushrooms.  Then Paul and I sang and played for ages.  Honestly, we should put together a set list and then we wouldn’t have those long headscratching moments when we think “What will we sing next?”

Around nine I went home and found Jeff watching Ghost in the Shell Innocence.  Man, in HD on a big screen that movie is drenchingly beautiful.

Big dog

Samantha is a mastiff cross, and small, dainty and elegant do not describe her. What she is, is big, although as we slogged through the rain and mud at Trout Lake yesterday there were bigger dogs yet at the offleash part of the park.  My companion was amazed that there could be an offleash park where there were nesting birds, and I asked, somewhat rhetorically, if he’d ever been to Trout Lake in the summer time, when it is a warm green hymn to avian fecal material. Given that human beings also swim there (I have seen it, although you wouldn’t catch me in there unless the person next to me was encouraging me with a semi automatic) I don’t imagine the city fathers care if a few birds get harassed.  The fewer nesting there the better, and none of them are exactly what I would call endangered species.

While we were there, the tree next to the parking lot was full of birds, all singing as loud as they could simultaneously.  The light was crappy, but it sure sounded like starlings and red winged blackbirds having a smackdown.  It was so loud that I just stood gaping in the rain.

Samantha got in the water and got very dirty.

When my companion came to pick me up, we attempted a greeting kiss. We both ended up kissing Samantha’s nose.  I can’t remember laughing that hard in quite a while.  After the park we went to Burnaby Palace (Jeff got the leftovers, so apart from waffles on Saturday morning I dodged cooking every meal this weekend), and had a lovely time.

Church was great yesterday morning, Marci Green did the service, which was about the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign.

Kitties tell Jeff: All is forgiven; come home soon!

Yup, Jeff stayed out all night last night.  That’s the way things are in this crazy cuckoo world; you introduce your brother to your friends and the next thing you know he’s staying out all night with them (okay, Mike’s got a really comfy sofa).  I have this little thing called a job so I bailed on the festivities with Mike last night (it was awesome to see Heather) around 10 pm, got home about an hour later. Festivities included mighty tasty cilantro flavoured lasagna and at least two six packs of Lion Winter Ale, and I hung upside down like a bat in one of those found on tv devices for stretching out your back (mmm!) while everybody else played Buzz (laughing their heads off – I’m hanging upside down and smiling to myself as I listen to them), and Mike made me drag out his guitar (Jeff left the room) and I played The Evening News for some recently acquired friends of his.

Poor Jeff, he finds my singing unbelievably tedious.  So do Keith and Loki – it’s just a cross I have to bear for being so relaxed and creative, that I’m continually surrounded by men who hate what I do.  Makes me look forward to the days when it won’t be like this anymore, but that will come in the fullness of time, I suspect, along with a number of other of environmental shifts that I probably will have no control over whatever.

This morning around 3 the cats both started calling and running up and down the hallway. Normally they’d be bugging Jeff.  I just rolled over and ignored them until the alarm went off at 5:45.  Then I let them out and made coffee, and now I’ve got about ten minutes to stuff the rest of my morning activities into a nice bolus of output and get the hell out the door.  “I’ve got a little project I’ve been working on.”

As I stood sobbing over the pie crust

Yeah, I know, but I screwed up a double batch (Gimli glider error – I was converting measurements and dropped a decimal up) and I was damned if I was going to consign all that butter to the trash.  So I stood there (and no, I wasn’t sobbing, but I was some upset) and asked the pie crust dough what it needed, and it said BUTTER, so I added more, and now I can at least roll it out in big enough chunks to make apple tarts.  Which are baking.  Right now.  And you won’t get any, unless you come over in the next 30 seconds, cause sure as evolution and customized arboriculture made little Macintosh applies, Jeff’s going to pull a Zoidberg on the darned things and schloop them all up.

busy cooking

It was quite a weekend for cooking.  I made rum drops (cheap version of rum ball, and not super successful because I didn’t use powdered sugar), pork roast with the trimmings, massively unsuccessful pie crust, and apple filling for the pie crust.  I also made macaroni and cheese, and that was an unqualifiied success, and I also added sauce to the chick peas I cooked, so they are now officially yummy.

It is with some annoyance that I have made the determination that the skin goop I bought for forty dollars a tube always makes my skin break out, and the stuff I got for free from London Drugs, which has enough perfume in it to fell an ox, doesn’t.

Paul and Keith came over for dinner and we watched a really cool show about the four winged ancestor of birds.

How shall I rescue the pie crust?  I am at a loss.

Next one will be a hole in the wall

The sunset, annoyingly enough, didn’t cooperate, but the rest of yesterday evening was loads of fun.  I finally have a date for meeting Sammy (my date’s dog); that will be next Sunday afternoon.  I am going to secrete a couple of milkbones about my person and then I should do fine.

Horizons Restaurant is just as excellent as it ever was, and I will be thinking about the Arctic Char for a while – it was superlative.  By mutual consent, our next meal will be someplace much less classy.

I have Scottish blood, so I’m allowed to laugh

HRNK!

I fed Katie and Dax last night, at Brentwood because Dax is not 100% with the welcome mat here and Katie didn’t bother telling me until I was committed that Dax was with her, then came home and saw Jeff hauling in a ten kilo bag of flour, which is a good thing, because there was no flour in the house, and we all know what that means.  No waffles. I’m not saying that me continuing to live with Jeff is contingent upon me making waffles at least once a week, but I’d like to not take any chances.

The Luddite resurfaced in my inbox long enough to forward about ten links to educational videos from Vivid Entertainment.   I only watched half of one; I am not sure I want to advertise myself as being someone who needs remedial sex ed.

I highly recommend 101 Reykjavik.

Fabulous evening

So I went with my/an “I-met-him-on-line-so-I-don’t-know-what-to-call-him” to a dinner party last night and I had more fun than I knew to predict, that’s for sure.  I mean any evening that starts with “Bring your mandolin, they’ll love it” is shaping up to be okay.  I drank a lot of beer, and two shots of Grand Marnier (when did that stuff become so yummy?), ate perfectly cooked prime rib, laughed until I cried about three times, sang and harmonized my lungs out, listened to Pete Seeger’s greatest hits on the stereo, stood up to play Spinal Clinic and got hijacked into playing backing instrumental on Heidi singing/improvising “Border Collies are smarter than you” and got called outside to see the ring around the moon.  I met some wonderful people, I mean really seriously wonderful folks, and now Jeff and I are consuming waffles and trying to figure out if we really need to do any running around today.

Feeling better

Jerome and Shannon came over last night and GUESS WHAT!!!!

Yeah, well, what news would you expect from a couple who got married last summer.  They are progenizing, and Shannon looks glorious and Jerome looks pleased.  I hope they have a hundred fat children.  No, actually, I hope they do whatever they want and have fun doing it, and that seems to be a) how it’s been and b) the continuing plan.

I fed them spaghetti and they watched The Road to Guantanamo with us.  As we said to each other after we watched … Going to Afghanistan 3 weeks after 9/11 was their first mistake, and it got mistakier from there.

The crowd consisted of Paul (who had to leave for work at 7:30 and thus missed the movie, and brought the bread I made french toast this morning with as there was otherwise no bread in the house), Keith, me, Jeff and the developing duo.

I suppose I should say that after the best part of a year of saying, “Aw, c’MON – where do you get your goofy ideas about movies anyway??? Don’t you trust me?” Jeff talked me into watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Yes, I liked it.  Now, cleaning and tidying and working on Valentine cards and getting read to go to a dinner party tonight.  I’ve been asked to bring my mando.  Yee!

It is 4:16 in the morning

and there are still 35 filkers up and singing.  I left the big room just now and Cindy was singing John’s Song (about Shepard from SGA).  Anyway, the biscotti fairy has been through both filk rooms and I STILL HAVE BISCOTTI LEFT.  Just goes to show how much I made and how many people are allergic to nuts and wheat.

I had just enough energy in me when I woke up to do the rounds, and now I am going back to bed.

Sleep and food and Saturday links

Casting the witch in the Wizard of Oz.
 I heart Margaret Hamilton.

This is just freaky, but I’m only posting it because of the Firefly reference.

I was really suspicious of the do not call registry right from the beginning, mostly because after the gun registry debacle I didn’t think the Canadian government could organize something conspicuous in a camouflage store.  Now we learn, surprise! bafflement! that the government is SELLING the list at a nominal price to whoever will pay for it. Alas, Ottawa.

In about 2 hours I’ll be jumping on the transit for my coffee date.  Instead of swithering, I’m sorting laundry, acting as cat doorwoman, paying bills, cooking AWESOME split pea with ham soup, making breakfast for me and Jeff and answering emails.  I had a wonderful night of sleep – slept maybe 1 1/2 hours longer than normal.  I actually feel good.

Perhaps it has something to do with the departmental meeting with the new Ops great grandboss at work.  Like Holy Paradigms Batman.  I was buzzing like a thwacked beehive and dancing up and down like a little kid when I got home last night (met up with Keith at Brentwood station and the little bugger did a ninja on me, sneaking up behind me in the bus line up) because I was so happy with the meeting.

There are four priorities in the new configuration of the company.  Safety, Quality, Customer Service and Financial Results.  So I recited them to the dude to indicate that I’d stayed conscious during one of the town halls, and then I asked him to give me the matching 4 mantras of corporate culture.  In a very TED lecture kinda way, he said, “Respect, Metrics, Voice of the Customer and We’re Only in One Business, and that’s the Only Business that We’re In” (not phrased like that and over a much longer period of time) and gave examples to support it.  The previous group he’d been with had just sat and stared at him.  Patricia and I peppered him with questions until he told us (respectfully) to let the men get a word in edgewise (and just think about the state of the world that this would be the case… I love the 21st century).  Then I insulted his wife’s taste in sweaters (yes, I know, and I am going to be punished, I’m sure) and we went home.  It was supposed to be a half hour meeting and it took nearly two hours and the time FLEW BY.  My hopes and fears for the future remain the same, but my hopes definitely have my fears in a hammerlock.

I’ve been conversing with Deb about her daughter Jenn and her Pitbull rescue organization.  Here’s the link. Unfortunately it’s not possible to get a tax receipt for Canadian donors but I urge my American readers to make a donation if it meets their criteria for a worthy charity.

And tomorrow, time for a baptism.  Me happy.

Food and family

I had a wonderful day and evening, sorting papers and rendering my room quite tidy, and then visiting at Planet Bachelor, where for an extra special bonus there was Jim, Jan and Nita (who was just back from a demonstration re Gaza in Surrey).  Nita is at VCC – like Katie, but at a different campus –  taking heavy equipment repair, go women in trades.

After Paul picked me up – accompanied by Keith, who promptly started asking me pointed questions about my parenting, or lack of it – we went to Burnaby Mountain and looked down over the city. There were kids sliding down the hill in the purest, most mood elevating sunshine, on that grainy crystalline snow that Paul calls corn snow, and the city itself was resting under an enormous smooth blanket of fog.  I was very glad to get up the hill in the sun however briefly, and Mt. Baker on the way down the hill was so beautiful…

The pork roast Paul cooked was better than anything I’ve produced recently, the company was awesome, and then I had a miserable ride home on the transit.  25 minute wait for the 106; seconds of waiting for the Skytrain, and then another 25 minute wait for the 25 bus.  I was so chilled when I got home that it took me about half an hour to warm up enough to go to sleep. Note to self – dress for the outside, not the inside, dummy.

This morning I decided I had no interest in the Mexican coffee that I am finding kinda bitter and savourless, so I cracked open the Sumatran, and the aroma that is currently permeating the kitchen could be used to waft angels home.  Happy sigh.

I hear from Lady Miss B that Vixy (half of noted filk due Vixy and Tony) will be watching the inauguration live.  I am happy for her.  It’s an historic moment and I’m glad that someone I know will be there.