chinotto is my nemesis

DonDon Izakaya

2012-02-16T21:25:00.002-05:00

Before everything went to hell in a hand basket this week, the Dotytron and I took advantage of some Momma D babysitting service and went out for dinner. We took one for the team and tried the new izakaya that had opened up on Dundas, DonDon Izakaya. We went in knowing it was a risk, given that Guu not only has the izakaya district of our hearts cornered, but is also pretty much our favorite restaurant, regardless of cuisine, in Toronto.

Reviews on Yelp had been mixed. I was heartened by the fact that the place was crawling with Asians (I almost always trust an Asian person's opinion of food over almost every other ethnicity - in Toronto, a place filled with young Asian couples and groups of Asian friends is a good sign indeed), but as it turns out, that hope was misplaced.

The space is nice enough. The staff, all of whom seemed to be Japanese, are like, the younger, less hot, less cool cousins of the Guu staff. Part of the joy of going to Guu is ogling the Japanese eye candy (see previous posts re: my Guu boyfriend). The crew at DonDon are not ogle-worthy. Awwww...poor guys. Now I feel bad for saying it. The atmosphere is considerably less raucous than at Guu - the servers still shout at you but the vibe of the room is just...off. No one is giving themselves over to the experience...it was like a concert where everyone is one their phones or sitting their butts in the seats and not engaging with the act.

Overall, the menu featured way less stuff we wanted to eat, and the dishes we ordered were mostly okay, with only one standout item. The food was missing the love and the care.

Tako wasabi is one of our favorite dishes at Guu, where finely chopped raw octopus is mixed with wasabi and served with little sheets of nori for turning into spicy raw octopus seaweed cigarellos. Here the tako wasabi was cut a little too big and served a little too warm.

This was egg salad mixed with raw salmon, stuffed into a smoked egg. It was a nice little bite, but it had been prepared way in advance and the bacon chip was cold. Cold bacon is never appealing. I feel like if you ordered something similar at Guu, it would have been made a la minute.

This dish was the ONE knockout. "Black Croquettes" - little creamy potato cod fingers coated in squid-ink panko and fried. So good! The insides were fluffy and light and creamy. This was so good we ordered another round.

They kind of do a Japadog type fusion hot dog thing. This was a pork wiener (with a very unpleasant, mushy texture) topped with a cold kimchi-based relish. I think if everything had been warm, this would have been better. As it stood, the vinegariness of the kimchi and the competing temperatures didn't coalesce into a proper fusion dish.

This was advertised as a pork belly bun - a la Momofuku. It wasn't pork belly, the bun was a little soggy from oversteaming and then sitting. If it had been pork belly and the bun was piping hot, this would have been a good dish. As is...it was meh.

This was chicken and mashed potatoes and bonito flakes. Another dish that had a good underlying concept that was undone by the shoddy execution. The chicken was a little flabby, but the mashed potatoes were divine (I suspect they were instant).

A teriyaki hot dog. Here the hot dog was all beef and had a better texture, but it was still overwhelmed by the lack of subtlety in the teriyaki toppings.

Ahhhhhh...hamachi sashimi. Impossible to eff up. Impossible not to enjoy. Why isn't there funding going to making sure that yellowtail can be farmed? Huh? What's up with that?!? If we can invest billions into oil sands, then surely, hamachi farming should be equally prioritized.

Kushiyaki (stuff on sticks!) Bacon wrapped asparagus, bacon wrapped oyster mushrooms, grilled quail eggs, chicken, and gizzards. I prefer my kushiyaki with just a sprinkling of salt. So good. This dish had a really nice, smoky flavour that enhanced the fattier items (like the bacon stuff).

This was supposed to be sashimi that was lightly grilled over a hay fire. This was awful. Here you have butterfish and tuna sashimi that was RUINED by the greasy flavour of the smoke. It tasted the way burning butane smells. If any of you have a grill, and have ever oiled the piece of food you want to grill and then had the oil burn over the hot heat and leave a greasy, blackened slick of burnt oil film on the food - that's what was on these beautiful pieces of fish. We couldn't even choke this dish down. It was sad.

Soy tofu. Silky, custardy, served with a seasoned soy. I prefer this dish warm.

Dessert was a nicely executed creme caramel for me and a matcha red bean thing for the Dotytron.

At one point, we saw the owner talking to another dude, and I turned to the Dotytron and asked, "do you know what language they're speaking?" He listened intently for a minute and then turned to me and shook his head. That's right. The owners of DonDon are CHINESE PEOPLE (they were speaking Cantonese). This is a classic case of Chinese people ripping off and trying to cash in on a successful business model. Sometimes, this works. Like, say, in AYCE restaurants. In this case, the attempt to replicate Guu but cut corners failed.

In the end, I'm glad I took one for the team. Technically, the "team" in question consists of MHui and her hubby, whose unbridled enthusiasm for Guu matches ours. At least we can relegate this place to the "never again" pile.

Sigh. There's nothing I can do...I only want to eat at Guu (sung to the tune of Hootie and the Blowfish.)

Fin.

Sick Kids

2012-02-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

I hope that you all never have occasion to visit Sick Kids hospital, but if you do, know that it is a place that brings you to your knees with awe.

Monday morning, 7am, the Big Yam fell down the stairs of our house. The entire flight. All 14 steps. It was my fault. I thought the gate was closed. I thought the gate was closed. That thought haunts me. I could have sworn the gate was closed. The sound of the thump that sent me running out of his room and the sight of his little body, face down and splayed out on the floor haunts me. I was in the middle of getting the Big Yam ready for the day. I went to pee, and I know the gate was closed then because he stood at the gate and watched me pee, and then proceeded to pee on the floor. I went and cleaned up his pee, and I could have sworn the gate was closed at that point, too. I got him dressed and I was grabbing his socks from his room when I heard that sound and even worse, that awful, drawn-out silence that followed it.

I ran downstairs and gathered him up and saw that his bottom three teeth were at a right angle and he was gushing blood and screaming and it was a freakin' s**tshow of epic proportions. There are no words. I called my neighbours to figure out where to go and then called Momma D and she came right away and we drove to Sick Kids Emergency, the Big Yam wailing all the while, though eventually settling down when I sang him songs in the car, even with the effin' massacre in his mouth.

Here's the thing about being a parent. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO BE AFRAID OF. I saw his teeth and I was freaking out. When we got to Sick Kids Emergency, they asked me a barrage of questions - how many steps, are they carpeted, what did he land on, did he scream right away (concussion check), could he move his head (concussion check), any vomiting, odd behaviour, were his legs and arms bent at a weird angle. I didn't even THINK to check that stuff. I picked him up like an idiot, when he could have hurt his neck or spine or any of that other stuff I didn't know about but actually learned when I did my CPR training.

They put a neck brace on him even though the preliminary check seemed fine. Then it was a matter of me trying to soothe him enough so he would be still for the CT scan. I tried for an hour but he was getting scared and I'm sure his teef were hurting like whoa and he wouldn't settle, so then it was a whole debate between the anesthetist and the trauma surgeon about weighing the pros and cons of putting him under for a CT scan when it was unlikely (based on the preliminary evidence) that he had any spine/head fractures/issues. Complicating things was the fact that he had eaten breakfast this morning, leading to the risk of pulmonary aspiration (what I learned - chemically induced unconsciousness leads to disabling of the natural block in the esophagus that prevents contents of the stomach entering the lungs). So there was a big argument between anesthetist and trauma doc that I unfortunately overheard. The end result after a consult with neurology and dentist was that he was going to be put under. So they let me into the room with him to help him calm down before he went under and then they kicked me out so I wouldn't see him getting intubated. Poor little guy. He went under so quick.

The entire surgery lasted about 30 minutes. They pulled his 4 bottom teeth out. I signed the consent forms after the fact because it all happened while he was out. Then the Dotytron showed up and we were there when he woke up. They wanted us to stay overnight so we were moved into the day patient room which is a bit of a misnomer because the other 3 patients in the room had been there for a few days, most of them waiting to be transferred to a private room. I stayed with him through the night and the Dotytron went home at 9pm to get some rest because his concert band is competing today in the Ontario Band Association thingamajig. The trauma doctor I spoke to last night said that he could have discharged us, but due to the height of the fall and the facial impact on the poor Boobla, he preferred one night just to watch and make sure that no concussion symptoms occurred after the fact. As he put it, he would have preferred that the Big Yam have a seizure at the hospital than with us at home (my preference too.)

We got discharged this morning. It was a long night. It's crazy how still hospitals become at night - how unearthly and alone you as the visitor seem to be, haunting the deserted halls, even though you're sharing your vigil with everyone else keeping watch over their loved ones.

I can't say enough good things about Sick Kids. Every staff member we met was phenomenal - kind, competent, warm, loving. Great bedside manners. It is an exemplar of how our health care system should work. They were obviously in a hurry to discharge us, seeing as how we were occupying a bed unnecessarily. I kept marveling at the miracles and the work being performed at that place. Each section of each floor has a a well appointed playroom for the kids, there's a library, a school, research facilities. Thinking about the amount of money that keeps that place running is mind boggling - the army of nurses, RNs, nurse practitioners, nutritionists, family counselors and the doctors in each section of each floor.

I came away thinking of how lucky we are and how ludicrous this whole parenting venture is. It's like the ultimate Ponzi scheme. You get sucked in not knowing how much you owe. There were people in the neurology, neuroscience, and trauma wing who had been coming to Sick Kids for years and years - who had effectively grown up there. There were kids there with undiagnosed neurological issues - countless things that you have no idea to be afraid of when you decide frivolously to have a child.

I came away from my 3am haunting of the Sick Kids halls completely humbled by humans and our ludicrous coping capabilities, our resiliency, our strength, and how low we can be pulled. The work that's done in that building is inspiring and I'm not just talking about the work of the doctors, researchers, and residents. The love that parents can have for their children and the ability of children to adapt and be kids regardless of situation is staggering - another example of the sublime.

My sis says I dodged a bullet and I am inclined to agree. I'm so grateful that my Boobla is okay, for the most part, unscathed except for the loss of his baby teeth and his newfound thirst for lemon flavoured Jell-O. We have to see a pediatric dentist to see what the long term ramifications are for a kid to lose their baby teeth so young. If it's only cosmetic, as I suspect it might be, I'm not that fussed about it. I couldn't believe that through it all - he still wanted me - he still wanted to be carried and kissed by his mama. Especially since I did it to him. I feel like he's Rihanna and I'm Chris Brown or something. I kept expecting to the Sick Kids people to call CAS on me - hell, I'm on the brink of turning myself in. My sis thinks I'm taking it harder because I am so controlling and have such high expectations that this slip up is harder for me to take. That might be part of it. Feeling like a bad, negligent mum is another huge part of it. Knowing that I hurt the little fatburger and ruined his fatburger mug is another huge part of it. I won't be able to hear him crunching into an apple again for a long time. The inside of his mouth looks like the human centipede and that's my fault.

This is what he looked like sleeping in the prison-crib at the hospital. They taped this foam block to his hand to keep all the IVs in - in case they had to give him medicine or something later. Awwww...poor little block hand.

I took the rest of the week off of work to spoil the Big Yam rotten and cover his human centipede mouth with kisses.

Fin.

BLW addendum

2012-02-10T22:20:00.000-05:00

I keep feeling like I neglected to add something in my BLW rundown...but I can't remember what it is. Ultimately, as with everything in life, you gotta do what's right for you. Did I follow strict BLW procedures? No. But how you interpret parenting styles/methods is also up to you. I know people who implemented BLW but would make individual turkey-quinoa patties for their kids to eat and then hover over the baby while they were eating, and then end up eating their own (different) dinner later. To me, that kind of defeats the whole simplicity of the BLW system. What I liked best was not having to make a separate meal for myself and for the Boobla. I also know parents who have 2 year old kids and still cut up everything into teensy weensy little bites for them cuz they're so afeared of choking. Again, if that's what floats your boat, go on ahead. You're talking to the lady who put a bumper on her crib from birth because it tied the room together. I clearly don't have all the answers.

I'm a pretty devil-may-care parent. I'm not over-protective, I'm not generally a hoverer (this will come later, when my kid develops guile - I'm DEFINITELY a check-your-browser-history type of parent), I let my kid fall down and I don't rush to make sure he's okay. It's just not my thing. A lot of it is ignorance - ie. I didn't know you're supposed to have a helmet on a kid when he's tobogganing - and some of it is just me using my own internal common-sense-o-meter.

Par example: I gave the Big Yam peanut butter at 6 or 7 months. We don't have any allergies in my family, the Dotytron doesn't, and I followed a tip from my neighbour where I rubbed some on his arm, then on his lip, to see if he hived up. He didn't, so he's been yamming p.b. ever since. I also gave him whole eggs - I didn't really get what the egg embargo was about anyway. I think the conventional wisdom is yolks only, but then Poh Poh told me that the Chinese way was whites only, so then I split the difference and gave him the whole egg around 7 months. He ate meat pretty much as soon as BLW was underway, he eats seafood and shellfish, he eats spicy food - it's all a go. The only thing I'm a maniac about is sweets. So he doesn't get juice, or syrup on his pancakes, or ice cream, or chocolate, and never sweet treats or prepared snacks. I keep some disgusting spelt Cheerio-type things around the house and he gets those, and the odd Mum Mum, but otherwise, I don't let him have any processed food. Sometimes I feel bad for the kid, cuz I think he must be wondering what's that EXTRA stuff we put on our pancakes and french toast, but then I get over it. He has a lifetime of desserts in front of him. He's had the odd taste here and there, but that's about it.

I keep thinking that I should put photos of the Big Yam's room up on OhDeeOh or something. Only because I think I did a good job with his room and it's all tied together. Maybe I will someday. I have some fantastic nursery ideas for the next one (if there is another bambino in our future.) I think part of my drive to have kids is for the decor purposes. I'm a strange one, admittedly.

Today is my day off. I wanted to keep the Big Yam home with me but I had too much shiz to do. A lot of school and prep and getting the house ready for the focus group I'm hosting tonight. I know, it sounds all weird and Tupperware party but it's considerably more benign. My friend J is writing another book on foodies and asked me if I wanted to host a focus group for some of my foodie friends. This post-doc is administering it and will bring snacks. Host gets a $50 g/c to Loblaws and participants get a $25. At the time, I didn't know how bucksauce my life was going to be so I went with it. I'm treating it very much like a focus group. Like, even though my friends are coming over, I'm not hosting per se. I'm definitely kicking everyone out by like, 10pm, because a) we want to take the Big Yam swimming tomorrow; and b) we're both exhausted from Ehmdo's show the night before.

The show was fantastic! I haven't been to Lee's in a long time. Predictably, I'm not used to going out to hear someone singing pop numbers. If there isn't a driving bassline or if it's not like, Heart or Prince, it's not really my bag per se. But my outlaw sis has a fantastic, expressive voice and a gift for writing catchy pop tunes and it was so nice to see her getting the support she deserved for the work she's put into this new album. We left at around 11:45 to relieve the poor roomie, who was kind enough to babysit for us. Yes, we got a preggo to do our babysitting for us. I love the roomie.

Tonight for dinner, we veered off Friday Night Takeout Night austerity measures and splurged on FOOTLONG PANZEROTTOES and FRIED CHICKEN. That's right. AND. FRIED. CHICKEN. Sick. I also made this cornflake crunch cookie recipe (haven't baked the cookies off yet) from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. Cornflake crunch is THE BEST! It smells like heaven when you're toasting it. It's crushed up cornflakes, milk powder, sugar, and salt bound with some melted butter and it is insanely delicious, eaten straight up, or lending texture and salty-sweetness to a trashy cookie like this one:

Tomorrow is a big day. Swimming, dim sum lunch with my fam bam in Markham, then back downtown for a bit of a date night for me and the Dotytron - we're going to try this new izakaya, called DonDon Izakaya and then we're going to my Discerning Coyote friend's birthday jam. We hope to be home by like, 10pm.

Fin.

Baby Led Weaning

2012-02-10T07:24:00.002-05:00

I've had a few peeps ask me about Baby Led Weaning (or BLW), so I thought I would take this opportunity to share with y'all how we did it.

This is particularly topical since I just weaned the Boobla off the boob this past week. It happened naturally. He seemed to be less invested in the boob as his source of morning and night time milk and so I just replaced it with a bottle and he was fine. Pretty painless for the both of us, although I was sad to see it go. I'm not going to miss the biting but I will miss the smushiness of it all. He's pretty content to be held during the morning and night time feeds though and it's been a nice augmentation to night time stories. When he brings his book to the pillow-fortified corner we've designated as the lounging space in his room, he pats the floor, I give him his bottle, and he settles into the crook of my arm and we read stories together. It's pretty sweet.

We've also snuggled him up beside us on the couch with his milk and a blanket over his legs and the sight of him like that just slays me for some reason. I can't believe we have a little Big Yam couch potato buddy. The look of him is at once older than his years and younger than his years and it just gets me.

BLW was spear-headed by Gill Rapley, a Brit in the grand tradition of Brits who are more into earthy mama-dread granola stuff (see: Brits and the animal rights movement, Brits and midwifery.) I've linked to her site under her name above. It basically comes down to this: instead of spoon feeding your kid purees, you let your baby feed themselves. There are several guiding principles:

1) BLW is not about "how much" your kid is eating. You let the baby guide the process. You're still breastfeeding and offering breast milk or milk before meals, so meal times are about letting your kid explore tastes, textures, and the social conditions of eating. The tagline is "just for fun, before age 1" (the idea being, that you don't stress about nutrients that your kid is ingesting before you wean them off of milk - they're getting everything they need from the breast milk, food is exploration time.)

2) Your baby knows what's what. You put our unseasoned, steamed or raw food and let your baby go to town. There's no pressure on your baby to "finish" anything. The baby will explore and play and taste what they want and eat more of what they want and reject the stuff they don't like. This isn't about force-feeding or shovelling food down a baby's throat. The underlying assumption is that your baby knows what they need (similar to how pregnant women crave foods that meet some dietary/nutrient deficiency they're facing) and you let them do their thing.

3) The food should be easy for the baby to handle. Sticks shapes (like beefeater french fries) or long strips are best at first. If your baby doesn't have teeth, just let them gum at the food - we had T working on chunks of steak and mashing avocado and sucking on pork chop bones - as long as there's nothing that can break off and cause a choking hazard. Sweet potatoes were steamed and then presented as disks or in two-finger width wedges or batons for him to eat.

4) GAGGING IS NOT CHOKING. You have to be pretty confident and know the difference. Our bodies are pretty well designed. Kids can gag up stuff pretty effectively, as long as the item in question isn't the exact perfect shape/hardness to obstruct their airway (that's choking). We were understandably nervous at first, but we just watched him and let him do his thing. Our confidence was also bolstered by taking the CPR course, where we knew how to resuscitate an infant and how to position them to free a blocked airway. The Big Yam gagged all the time. We became more nonplussed with it when we saw how good he was at it.

5) Offer sips of water. This goes along with #4. Give them sips of water and have water ready at hand so that if they are having a problem getting something down, they can flush it down with water.

6) Food shouldn't be seasoned with salt or sugar, etc.

7) Baby should be able to sit up unassisted and have the interest in food and motor skills to maneuver food to their mouths (or close enough.)

Ultimately, we did a modified version of the baby-led weaning program. I bought one box of cereal cuz I didn't trust myself and we supplemented that with the sticks of food. I pureed stuff that I wanted him to try but that I didn't think made good BLW sense - stuff like kale, rapini, turnip greens, etc.

I was pretty strict about things. The Big Yam got cereal and vegetables and I didn't do fruit for a very, very long time, because I know that we as humans are programmed to enjoy sweets and I wanted him to gain an appreciation for the full spectrum of flavours, not just apples, bananas, etc.

His meals went something like this: morning was a carb, some cottage cheese (or egg for protein) and a fruit. Lunch was all vegetables. Dinner was a carb, protein, vegetables, and a fruit for "dessert" (sometimes). I've loosened up on the fruit front but I am still willing to starve him into submission if he starts getting too picky. Last night he didn't want the spelt salad I made and only wanted a banana. So I stopped feeding him (he was just throwing stuff on the ground) and he got his milk (no banana!) This morning, when he was (obviously) ravenous, I offered him bites of the spelt salad again and only after he had eaten that, did he get his regular breakkie. So yeah, I can be a bit of a monster, but I justify it by saying that choice in food is a luxury, and he's not allowed to turn down perfectly good food. What if he was living on Red Cross packages?!? He's lucky he has spelt salad to eat!

BLW isn't as effortless as people claim it is. People are all like, "they just eat what you're eating!" Which I guess is true, if you're okay eating UNSEASONED FOOD. I am not. So there was a bit more work to it, but not much. I would just start with the food he was going to eat or put aside a portion before I seasoned at the end.

Here's a link to a BLW website (with a message board! Populated mostly with crazy Brits!) In the end I feel like our modified BLW approach made the most sense for us. There's no way in hell I'm making unseasoned food. And pureed veggies and some rice cereal was handy when we were travelling. BLW is a messy process. I do like not fussing about "how much" the baby has eaten. And I like the element of enculturating the baby into the process of eating.

In the end we approached it the way we seem to approach a lot of our parenting - we read a bit, got bored, polled some friends for anecdotal advice, did what made sense and what worked with our lives and were disciplined and systematic in the application of the methods, didn't stress, and were willing to be mean to our kid and not negotiate with terrorists. That's basically our style, in a nutshell.

This is the Boobla in his FOB-tastic "Boo Boo Town" vest. The Dotytron loves nothing more than when the Boobla is dressed like a new immigrant from mainland China. Also, there's nothing better than the words "boo boo town" in combination. Literally, the best.

Last night's dinner was poached salmon, with chimichurri, and the spelt salad, which had: roasted butternut squash, baby spinach, red onion, dried cranberries, toasted pecans, and a maple-cider dressing. It was hella tasty:

Tonight is the outlaw sis' CD release party at Lee's. We're having the roomie come over and watch the Big Yam. She goes on at 11pm and I'm loathe to keep a preggo up super-late, so I think we'll just end up catching a wee bit of her set and then heading home. It's too late for us! On a work night? Forget about it.

Tonight for dinner we had freezer tuna noodle casserole and sautéed rapini with lemon & garlic.

I had a realization today that I've got a lot on my plate. Sometimes, I'm such a driven maniac and I thrive on being pushed so much that it feels like it's NBD. But then I realize that I've got a lot going on. Full time work and school and parenting and the all-around hustling/life management I do in general is kind of a big deal and I feel like I downplay it a lot. This is just me taking a moment to give myself some daps. To me, from me.

Fin.

Running!

2012-02-07T13:05:00.000-05:00

I am being run off my feet lately. I've had a slew of ideas for projects at work, which of course, only serves to make my life at work all that much more hectic and frenzied as I try to keep all the balls in the air. It's serious crunch time for school, with only about 6 months left of the program before I'm done and I get to semi-proudly add the letters MPPAL to my name.

Question for all you people - do you put your degrees after your name in your letterhead? Is that something I should add to my resume and cover letter or is it weird and poncey?

Then you've got juggling an active social life, being a parent, coordinating the Dotytron's and my shared medical benefits (which is seriously a part-time job in and of itself!) and on top of it all, all of this is being fueled (or NOT being fueled, more correctly) by my reduced caloric intake of late and you have the end result of me passing out on Friday night at the Golden Girls-approved hour of 8:30pm.

Would I have it any other way? Of course not. Would I perhaps prefer to be one of those people who are paid to post on Pinterest by companies like Pottery Barn (maybe not them) or Etsy or Anthropologie? Of course. Being an arbiter of pins is like, my dream job, following closely on the heels of being the librarian at Entertainment Weekly. And yet, would I REALLY want to have to limit myself that way? I love being a multi-faceted person with many (some would say too many) interests, always taking on too much and teetering on the brink of having it all collapse down on me. But since I've left the trenches of the restaurant industry, I think this is the only way I know how to be me - to simulate the experience of being in the weeds and the adrenaline hit of pushing through the rush and feeling your blood pumping and knowing that you are ALIVE, gosh darn it! Some people heli-ski, some people

free-climb, me? I'm a professional administrator of the daily mundane and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Seriously? Not a good look for me.

We've watched a tonne of movies lately.

50/50 was really excellent. I don't think it deserves "best picture" talk, but overall, the tone of the film is really warm, generous, and sweet, only occasionally veering off into maudlin territory. I think that Bryce Dallas Howard's girlfriend character was over-drawn (that seems to be her lot in life!), but Anjelica Huston as the protective, hovering, overwhelmed mother really struck a chord. There's a scene where she's in the oncologist's office waiting with Joseph Gordon Levitt and looks at the oncologist's degrees and says something like, "Hmmm...he went to a state school," and it made me think of something my mum would say. My mum would say EXACTLY that. LOL! It was very cute. The character's relationship with his parents going through this thing rang true and the humour is played perfectly. I think it deftly navigates the emotional eddies of a young person experiencing cancer and Seth Rogen is a perfect foil.

Unfortunately, I watched Moneyball after reading the book and so I was less interested in it. I feel like people just love Sorkin's writing so much that anything he's attached to makes the awards-circuit. This was good - not as good as the book. It just seemed kind of slight to me - they didn't really capture the essence of Billy Beane's internal psycho-social struggle or how renegade the Oakland head office was at the time. It was good. Not great. It doesn't linger with me.

This was more entertaining than I anticipated, mostly due to the inclusion of an orangutan character named Maurice. This is a classic installment in the "animals/robots/aliens realizing that people are bad" genre (see: Short Circuit, Project X, King Kong, ET, etc.) The Dotytron kept talking about Susan Sontag (ie. "See! They [the apes] just want to be Susan Sontag!") which led us to this hilarious clip from Gremlins 2 where the smart gremlin talks about how the gremlins are really just after "civilization" and talks about the finer things, which somehow includes Susan Sontag. It's pretty hilarious:

This scene is notable because you would NEVER see Susan Sontag (or an equivalent modern personage) referenced in a popular film today. I don't think so, at least. It makes me sad.

Attack the Block I had wanted to see for a while based on awesome reviews, but the Dotytron, being clueless, had never heard of it and was skeptical. The film opens with a mugging and as soon as the characters opened their mouths, they had us SOLD. We loved this movie. It's basically like, Revenge of the Chavs, or if Goonies has been made in a low-class apartment complex in the UK. It's an adventure film featuring a rag-tag, meatball-filled, gang of no-good, dorky kids, who have this big adventure and learn a little something along the way. A tried and true genre, but one that has been forsaken by the movie producers gods of late, for reasons unknown, since the end result can be so charming. Movies for kids tend to either skew too young, or too old, and the adventure element isn't done nearly so well with live actors as it was in the heydey of the style, which would be the 80s. Add to that the natural fondness the Dotytron and I have for characters saying "bruv" and "innit" and all the other amazing UK slang that we had exposure to through the jungle scene and it's a match made in heaven. We found this movie just all around charming and really funny. I think familiarity with the type of scene in question is a bit of a must. I don't know if it will resonate with you the same way if you didn't know anything about it, but we really liked it.

I watched Sideways and thought it was the boringest thing I had ever seen in my life. The Descendants, on the other hand, I loved. Some of it hit a little too close to home - it was hard watching George Clooney's wife in the film in a coma and the character's grief brought raw emotions to the fore. We have a deep and abiding love for Hawaii in this house. Certain places just seem to strike a chord for us, resonating deep. Spain is one of those places for casa Dotytron and Lagerfeld. Hawaii is another. Sure, you say, how hard is it to fall in love with paradise? But that's one of the threads that's explored in the film and there's a thesis there about life, generations, descendants, family, grief, and the ties that bind in this elemental place that I haven't fully thought through yet. I really loved that it showed the mundane Hawaii - the every day Hawaii of strip malls, and cloudy days. I was talking to my film friend D about it and he found it maudlin and he didn't like the heavy use of voice over. I don't know - I was quite taken with the film and I really enjoyed it. I find myself wanting to talk about it and think about it, which is generally the sign of a good one, in my books.

On Sunday morning I made us biscuits with scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, and crisped proscuitto for breakfast. I loves me a biscuit breakfast sammy:

This was last night's dinner - a lentil soup with lots of veggies, some chopped kale, and a ham hock thrown in for smokiness.

Tonight is a school night. I'm doing a presentation on public sector values and ethics and then busting outta there to get home in time to eat cake (I made the Momofuku birthday cake!) with Momma D and Ehmdo for the outlaw sis' birthday.

Fin.

T.G.I.F., mofos

2012-02-04T14:14:00.001-05:00

Sooooo glad it's the Friday. The Big Yam woke us up at 5am this morning and I was exhausted by 11am (when I had already been up and working for SIX G-D HOURS!) Any time he does something wrong he likes to lean in, reeeaaaallll slow, with his mouth gaping open, for a big, passive, dead-fish-mouth kiss. It's pretty cute. Sometimes, it's less cute. Like when he does it after trying to bite my nipple off. I said to the Dotytron, "I think he misunderstands the point of the 'sorry' kiss. He thinks his kisses can fix anything." We looked at each other for a beat and then said, "He's not entirely wrong about that." Seriously, the dude could have just blithely chomped down on my boob with his bajillion teeth and hung on like a pitbull with lock-jaw, and then he'll lean in with one of his kisses and I completely forget that I was mad at him.

I keep telling him he's a super-genius and I don't know if it's working and I have no idea what child development milestones he's supposed to be meeting, but I'm fairly convinced that he is one (you mean, you can't will your child to be gifted?!? Not on my watch!) When I tell him to go get his socks and shoes, he does it. His "bum!" noise in the dancing video below we've figured out his him trying to say "jump!" and do the action. He also tried doing up the zipper on his hoodie this morning. I can't wait until he can help me fold laundry and wash dishes. That should be in like, 2 months, right?

Speaking of genius kids, the Dotytron teaches a gifted class at his middle school who sound HILARIOUS. They do things like come up with mathematical equations for the bottom number in a time signature or when he plays "musical jeopardy" for them, one of them will write down the different category values as "2 to the power of 6 - 10" or something and I'm always joking that the Dotytron is laughing along with them but in his head is like, "HAHAHAHAHAHA! I don't know if that's right." Anyway, they're not gifted kids in the way I was a gifted kid. Oh, you mean I haven't mentioned before that I was gifted? I was. No biggie. Quit asking me about it, really. These are gifted kids in the math-y/robotics extra-curricular class kind of way. Anyway, the Dotytron was telling me that he was telling them yesterday about how he always wanted to do a musical installation based on Pi and the kids lost their s**t. They basically thought it was the coolest thing ever and were already wondering where they could find some "open source software" to compose the thing. Today the Dotytron told me that two of his kids wrote the program last night. The Dotytron loves his little nerdlinger gifted kids the mostest. Why are nerds so endearing?!? I love nerds, but I absolutely LOATHE (on sight) kids who look like this:

Kids in fedoras are the worst. Even worse than that are kids in fedoras wearing dress shirts with loosely knotted ties. That's like, every privileged kid whose parents indulge them (ie. the kids who go to the alternative school close by us.)

We've jettisoned Friday Night Take Out Night in the name of household austerity measures. We always have plans to eat at least one meal out (frequently more) on the weekends with friends/family and I didn't want to spend the whole weekend eating out. So Friday Night Take Out Night has morphed into Friday Night Junky Food night. Tonight we had moco loco, which is that Hawaiian dish we're crazy for - traditionally hamburger patties on white rice, with fried eggs and canned brown gravy. DEEELICIOUS. I also made us Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookies - which have potato chips, graham crumbs, coffee grinds (fresh, not used!), butterscotch chips and chocolate chips.

My plan this evening is to eat like a pig, watch a million episodes of Top Chef: Texas (rooting for Paul from Austin, obvs) and then pass out on the couch at 8pm, fall fast asleep, then wake up in a fury at 10pm and instantly start shriekily accusing the Dotytron of "keeping me awake" (I generally repeat this ritual about once a week).

Fin.

Major. League.

2012-02-02T20:23:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I had to shower in the morning so the Dotytron took over the dealing-with-the-newly-awakened-Boobla duties. The Big Yam likes to greet each day by dropping a steaming pile of bass in his drawers. It's his thing. Whatever. I don't know his life, I'm not judgin'. So when I came downstairs to eat breakfast, I asked the Dotytron, "did Big Yam poo this morning?" to which he replied, "Uh, yeah. Major. League." I started laughing and I was like, "Ummm...I don't even know what that's supposed to mean." LOL! So now any time we're trying to describe anything, we're like, "Two words for you: Major. League." It's actually an amazingly elastic descriptor.

I was laughing about it all yesterday, really. I found out recently that people I know are splitting up. The reason given was that their relationship had gradually become more of a business relationship and the so-called magic was gone. Maybe it's because I grew up in a broken home, but I'm always like, super paranoid that that's going to happen to us. Or I'm always sizing up our friends thinking, who do you think is going to get divorced first? I mean, you never get hitched or start living with someone thinking that it could happen. BUT IT COULD. It can happen to anyone! ANYONE. So of course I get all worried and I asked the Dotytron whether he thought our magic is gone and he rebuffed me by saying yes, of course. His preferred way of dealing with me when I'm being irrational is to NOT be comforting and basically say the exact thing that is going to send my paranoid irrationality into overdrive. It's a strange methodology.

A couple of weeks ago, when we took the Big Yam sledding, we ran into our neighbours, the ones who gave us their baby sled. They were out on the hill with their bigger sleds and offered us the use of their disks and fancy snow sledding gear to take a few runs down the hill. I was asking the Dotytron if he was going to go and he said yes, and then he asked me if I wanted to go and I said, no. And then he asked if it was because I was scared, and just joking, I said yes. BUT THEN HE TOLD MY NEIGHBOURS THAT IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS SCARED. I was so pissed! I wasn't ACTUALLY scared. I just hadn't gone out of the house emotionally and mentally prepared to go sledding myself. I just wasn't in the right head space for it. I was so mad at him (like, jokey-mad, mad.) I was all freaked out by what the neighbours would think of me being scared to go down a baby hill and what their assumptions would be. "Why did you tell them I was scared!!!" I hissed.

Anyway, for some reason those above examples came to mind when I was constructing my internal "relationship magic" litmus test. The fact that I find the Dotytron hilarious and that we can be jokey-mad at each other is a good sign, I think. This is what Mindy Kaling said in her book about great marriages:

"My parents get along because they're pals. They're not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals? It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents' case, it's essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs. They love gardening. They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week. They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of a Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed. They're pals. (Note: they are pals, not best friends. My mom's best friend is her sister. A best friend is someone you can talk to ad nauseum about feelings, clothing, and gossip. My dad is completely uninterested in that."

Way to go, Mindz. You basically summed it up pretty nicely. Hopefully the Dotytron and I are pals, through and through.

Last night's dinner of beef, barley, mushroom soup w/ thyme and leftover bread that my Discerning Coyote friend brought over.

Tonights dinner: veggie shepherd's pie. The vegetables were sauteed onion, garlic, carrot, celery root, butternut squash, and sweet potato. I was going to add peas but then forgot. Seasoned with curry powder, salt and pepper. Topped with mashed potatoes, topped with cheddar.

Fin.

Ugh.

2012-02-01T21:07:00.002-05:00

I pretty much had to post today just so Dax Sheppard's ugly, broken-nosed mug wasn't staring me in the face every time I checked the ol' bloggy bloggy.

For some reason the Grammy nominations are super-stressing me out. Because, you know, having a full time job, parenting, doing a full-time Master's degree, and having a million other interests isn't enough to have on my plate, I have to worry about Ye getting the Grammy nomination shaft. I KNOW. NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE GRAMMIES. But still! My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is easily the best album of last year (of all the albums I heard start to finish, which is like, 2). It was a pop opus. Say what you will about Kanye (and note that I am a die hard Kanye apologist), but he makes sick tunes! Four words for you: ALL. OF. THE. LIGHTS. I just listened to that song a million times at my desk at work 'pon the youtube and I never get tired of it. My whole body turns into a giant goosebump. Bon Iver?!? Are you trying to make my cooch dry up? Is that your end-game here, with your snoozefest, typical, indie-bait production and your weird falsetto singing? Because that's instantly what happens. If I was a 21 year old today, and some guy I was about to get busy with put that on, the party room would be SHUT DOWN. Mumford and Sons get a pass because I'm a sucker for twangy rootsy business and they do a pretty legit version. My sis isn't going to like this, but Adele got way too much love! There is no way in hell that Rolling in the Deep is a better song than All of the Lights. There just isn't. Sorry. Rolling in the Deep is over-produced and slick, even as it's trying to sound all old-timey barn-burn-y. Her voice is super-compressed on that tune! And that shiz is PLAYED. OUT. Women everywhere: get over it!

I totally had to get that off my chest.

In related infuriating, why, God, why?!? news, people yammering about Gotye (pictured above) have been turning up in my FB feed. He has this tune called Somebody That I Used to Know that is the equivalent of male sprites drilling into your ears with little wee shards of sprite magic glass. Didn't we learn anything about curly haired weirdoes being twee from Mika? OMG. I can't even link to the song because I'm pretty sure my vagine has crawled up into my body in displaced embarrassment.

Jayzus. We need a cleanse.

Tillers hepped me to this tune at Kdubsguelph cottage last summer and I instantly fell in love. So freakin' hardcore rave-tastic. Ahhhhhhhh...

Fin.

There's something you should know about me...

2012-01-31T18:03:00.003-05:00

and it's that I hate Dax Sheppard. Look at his face:

I find him disgusting. Which is why I never got behind Kristen Bell (aka Veronica Mars) being with him. When she did that (and when she appeared on Heroes in its horrendous second season, and then starred in awful, awful rom-coms, with a notable grace period being Forgetting Sarah Marshall), I totally gave up on Veronica Mars.

Then I saw this video today, and I found it so utterly charming that she might have brought me back around:

I also read this article where she talks about how The Hunger Games is "all I think about" and how she had a Hunger Games-themed birthday party where people dressed up like Cato and Clove and Effie Trinket and tracker jackers and I think that's so damned awesome, I'm totally on board. Dax Sheppard and his busted face notwithstanding.

Class tonight.

Fin.

Dream a little dream

2012-01-30T20:42:00.000-05:00

I've been having crazy, vivid dreams lately, but none nearly as entertaining as the great penguin dream of 2006. Speaking of which, can you believe I've been hacking away at this wee little corner of the blog-o-verse since 2006?!??? This is my fifth year of spewing my life all over the interwebs (in a non-message board format). Wowza!

My dreams have become the boringest. I woke up last week completely enthralled and elated because I had a dream that the Dotytron and I were stocking up on supplies for a cabin that was going to be snowed in all winter. Is that sick or what? It was the apotheosis of all my emergency preparedness/pioneer dreams. The dream basically consisted of me making lists of everything we might possible need to ride out the winter and making sure that we got enough bags of grain and salt pork and that the Dotytron had a good enough supply of wood. I'm totally insane. It must say something about me that the part that always captivated my imagination the most in The Shining (book and film version) - after I was done having the bejeezus scared out of me, was thinking of the stocks and supplies in the Overlook Hotel that would be needed by the Torrance family to ride out the winter. I woke up from my stocking-up-the-cabin dream so unbelievably happy that I immediately had to turn to the Dotytron and explain, breathlessly, how I had just had the best dream. Picture if you will, how unimpressed he was when he heard about it.

Last night I had an awful dream about shooters at a school. School shooters are the worst. Seriously. In the dream I was trying to get stacks of books to put in boxes and stick them in the windows of the classroom and in front of the door so that they would absorb the gun shots. There was also panic in my dream about how we were moving towards an e-book world and then what would we do?!? See - I'm telling you - the boringest!

We had a pretty jam-packed weekend.

On Friday night I preserved the integrity of Friday Night Takeout Night and ordered from Parlour Deep Dish Pizza which is this pop-up deep dish pizza restaurant running out of the kitchen of Trevor Kitchen & Wine Bar to gauge Toronto's interest in deep dish pizza. Let me tell you this: Toronto's deep dish pizza interest is high (if by "Toronto" you mean, "Karl Lagerfeld"), but I would rather just eat deep dish the rare times I go to Chicago, then suffer the over-priced, poorly executed rendition offered here. Lou Malnati's, which makes my favorite deep dish, serves a 14", fatty, greasy, soul-satisfying pie for $22.25. Two people can barely eat half. Parlour, on the other hand, insults you with a $25 10" pie, that with the delivery charge comes to $36. THIRTY SIX DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!! The classic Chicago pie consists of a layer of cheese, covered with a thin layer of sausage, and then topped with sauce. The Parlour sauce was egregious. It tasted tinny and raw and overly acidic, too much like tomato paste and not enough of sauce. The sausage was pork, maybe? That's how unmemorable it was. It was like the random TED Talk on social media equivalent of sausage. The cheese was pretty paltry and the whole thing was under seasoned. What makes a Chicago pie is the yellowy, buttery, crisp-chewy, crackery crust. It's a wonder of crust engineering. This was neither crackery or buttery enough, or good enough to stand alone as a regular pizza crust. It was in some weird hinterland of crust. A monstrous, New York style/Chicago style crust chimaera.

Saturday we went to St. Lawrence at the crack of dawn and I took out money from a TD Bank and they gave me 100 extra dollars. It was one of those plasticky new hunnies that slipped through the cracks. I cannot tell you how buzzing I was from the adrenaline rush of it all. The Dotytron was like, "We have to break it. We have to break it right away." LOL! FAO TD: I'm not giving it back. It's already been laundered (by way of food, into my belly) so tough beans. Take THAT! Every time we walked by a cop (and cops love nothing more than loitering outside of St. Lawrence Market), we got really nervous that the jig was up.

The upshot of doing all our errands so early on Saturday morning was that we were done everything by 11am and safely ensconced at home, to prepare for our shrimp boil night with L, and J & S. Those guys went buck. I delegated to them to bring bread, beer, and salad. J & S and then L EACH brought those things! There was a swiss chard caesar, a broccoli salad, cornbread, fresh baked bread, the shrimp boil, oysters on the half shell, and finally, the Momofuku Milk Bar apple pie cake:

This cake has only (!) 6 components in it: barely brown butter cake, apple cider soak, apple pie filling, liquid cheesecake, pie crumbs, and pie crumb frosting. It was AMAZING. So freakin' delicious.

I love those guys - the conversation was funny and hilarious.

Sunday we had brunch with M & M at Lady Marmalade and then we had dinner at Dr. Rei and Hanbo's. The Big Yam hit his nose on their coffee table and got a bloody nose which was kind of traumatic for the both of us. It was so gross! So much blood! Dinner was awesome - black bean chili, leftover corn bread, and I made this brownie pie from Milk bar cookbook (of course, since I'm systematically making my way through it). This only had 2 components - a molten, salty, chocolate barely-set brownie filling with a crackly crust sitting in a chewy graham crust made more chewy and deep-flavoured with the addition of milk powder.

Served slightly warm with a dollop of completely superfluous whipped cream, it was a decadent delight. Served cold out of the fridge, I can only imagine how good it would be.

We had such a nice talks with those guys. It was so cute to be lying on their Persian rug, watching Theo be a crazy butt, talking about: Stephen Harper, Attiwapiskat, ETFs, the situation in Greece, politics in general, etc. I love those guys.

The Big Yam has recently unveiled some new words. He said "bear bear" for the first time yesterday, and he routinely waddles up to me or the Dotytron and lifts up his arms and says "po-po" (which is Cantonese for carry [specifically carry a person]). When he grabs his ghey story he also likes to pat the ground, mimicking the motion I make when he gives me a story and I pat the seat next to me so he can sit down. He also started doing this hilarious standing-up dance, which involves cocking his head to one side, and doing a weird slow, spin, that inevitably results in him toppling over. There's also a squat element to the dance. It's the new Dougie.

I feel like my videos have gotten 75% grainier with time.

Tonight we had Momma D over for prime rib sandwiches, melted with cheddar cheese and horseradish mayo in the panini, with roasted brussels sprouts on the side.

Fin.

The Fault in Our Stars

2012-01-26T12:50:00.002-05:00

The Fault in Our Stars is John Green at his absolute best (which is how he is, like, always). It is electric and touching and deep and thoughtful and funny and true. It is what writing has the potential to be and what readers like me are hoping to find every time we crack the spine on a new novel. The novel follows 16 year old Hazel, a girl diagnosed with terminal cancer that is being kept at bay through a radical (unfortunately, fictional) drug and requires her to lug around an oxygen tank because her "lungs don't know how to be lungs." Attending a support group, she meets 17 year old Augustus Waters, who is recovering from bone cancer and is an amputee as a result of it.

I know what you're thinking: Gee, Lagerfeld, this sounds like a hoot and a holler of a good time! Believe me when I say that even though you know you will go into the novel and most definitely cry, the tears are sweet and cathartic because they come from that place in all of us that is moved by the spirit in all things, great and small.

There is something you have to know about me: I'm like, super into the Romantic sublime. Reading this book was, for me, a sublime experience. John Green's writing skill is unparalleled. He is able to take this material (two young kids with cancer!) and make it funny and touching without being overly sentimental and maudlin. He doesn't resort to easy outs, or the stereotypical depictions of the person with terminal cancer in their last days, and indeed, he sends up those very conventions. At one time or another, all of us, have been kept awake by the churning of our minds trying to grapple with our own mortality - the finality of it all, the great unknowingness that lies beyond what our senses can apprehend, the totality of the one certainty we know - that we will die and that there is nothing to prepare us for how we handle those last moments before the great unknown. What allows us to go about our mundane (and thrillingly so!) existences is that for most of us, death is an abstraction.

This book talks about what happens when death isn't such an abstraction any more. When your cells, when what makes you, you goes into overdrive. When that basic drive to just make it in a workaday world, when taken up by your own cellular material, gets ratcheted up in the wrong place at the wrong time. How can you hate your cancer? How do teenagers, at that very moment in life when your own mortality is never more abstract, deal with their own impending end? How do you reconcile the futility of existence? How do you shout into the eternal void? How do you cope with the crushing loneliness of knowing that shout is never heard?

These existential questions are in the book, all wrapped up in teenage (sometimes gallows) humour, lovable characters, and a story that simultaneously references Anne Frank, German philosophy, and all sorts of other thought-provoking material that sets of sparks of ideas and deep thoughts. You can't really see the entire picture until you step back from the book and think about what John Green is really trying to say. And what he is trying to say is big, and beautiful, and comforting even in its sadness. He is a brilliant, brilliant author and I wish that every book was as enjoyable a read, and as intellectually satisfying a read, and as emotionally resonating a read, as this one was.

Here's where the Romantic sublime comes in. Wordsworth, Shelley, and all those foppish Brits mooning about the countryside were so taken by nature that they existed in this kind of stunned awe when faced with nature's totality. We can't really comprehend the enormity of glaciers, wind, the oceans, or mountains. But in trying to do so, when we miserable cretins put our limited faculties at the task and try, the limits of our capacity to understand boomerang back on us and reaffirm the glory of humanity. The fact that we cannot but yet we still try - reaching and reaching and reaching until we hit that invisible point at which we can go no further, but oh the glory of the attempt! That is the Romantic sublime. It is a metaphor for existential crises that has sustained and nourished me - that captured my imagination lo many years ago when I took a course on the Romantics in undergrad.

The Fault in Our Stars is a book that speaks to the sublime. The sublime of human existence, of mortality, of the great shout into the void.

Read it. I defy you not to love it.

I feel like talking about 50/50 in this same post, cheapens The Fault in Our Stars. I'll save that for tomorrow.

Fin.

Chinese New Year!

2012-01-24T17:49:00.000-05:00

ZOMG - we had a crazy freakin' weekend. It was fun and very sociable, but exhausting.

Friday night was chill, but the hectic nature of the day and the week preceding it meant that the Dotytron and I passed out at like, 9pm in pools of our own drool, laid out on our respective couches of choice. It was pathetic.

Saturday we spent going buck, cleaning up a storm to get the house ready for Chinese New Year, which is technically just the lunar new year, celebrated by a lot of East Asians, not just Chinese people, even though we like to think we have exclusive purview over it. False!

We did get to start Saturday off with cheese blintzes with blueberry sauce and bacon though. Which the Big Yam turned his nose up at, because he's a weirdo.

Then we went and grabbed our friends Paul & Sandra to take them to Paul and Sandy's Real BBQ out in the wilds of Etobicoke. Just take a minute to appreciate that thematic unity. We ate with a Paul and Sandra at Paul & Sandy's. BEST. We really like the food there. The Dotytron and I split ribs, chicken, brisket and meatloaf. The brisket at Paul & Sandy's is some of the best I've ever had. So juicy and tender and flavourful - falling apart but with a nice, robust, even layer of fat melting across the top. So freakin' good. The Big Yam ate like a pig, because when it comes to barbecue - he's not a weirdo.

I had spent considerable effort procuring supplies to make the Momofuku Milk Bar Birthday Cake for our dessert, but then was a total loser and forgot it at home. Luckily for us, but unluckily for P & S, we got to have a slice. They missed out. The Momofuku cakes are frustrating and labour intensive, because they're all build in a 6" round cake mould. So you make all the composite elements (in the case of the cake below, that's 4 - the cake itself, the birthday cake "crumb" - little crunchy bits of salty, sandy goodness, the frosting, and the milk soak), then stamp out the cake layers out of the sheet you've baked and layer it all together. It's nuts. Not only that, but of COURSE you have to go out and buy sheets of acetate to line your cake mould and so that you have something to support the finished height of the cake. Then, you also have to go and buy speciality ingredients like glucose and

citric acid. Yes, that's right. Glucose and CITRIC ACID (which you use like, a pinch of in the cake). It's bonkers. Needless to say, the Big Yam was over the moon happy about all the Kitchen Aid mixer use in the service of the Birthday Cake.

At the end of it though, I can safely say that this cake is FREAKIN' delicious. It's mean to invoke the spirit of boxed cake mix (the funfetti variety, specifically) but it's a particularly delectable iteration. The genius thing about Christina Tosi (the pastry chef at Milk Bar) is that she has one of those born and bred understandings of texture and flavour balance in a dessert. The crunch of the crumbs against the tender cake, the tang of the frosting ameliorating the sweetness, the punch of salt crystals, they all work together to invoke and play to the elemental cravings of a person. It's all about balance to the excess. It's all about understanding the best part of a something - be it the awesomeness of the graham cracker crust, or doing a dessert shout out to those people who love the nutty, crumbly bits of crunchy streusel on top of a fruit crisp - the people who will eat the crisp and leave the fruit, or the ones who love the buttery, toasty taste of unadorned pie crust (she has a pie crust frosting that is mind-blowing). It's clever, but also grounded in giving people what they want and not over-intellectualizing things. It's pleasurable AND smart food. This cake is divine:

Sunday was the most buck. Big Yam slept in until 7pm (that's good!) - but that meant it was a MAD scramble to get out the door and up to the burbs to make parent & tot hours at our preferred pool (that's bad). Do you have ANY idea how much we have to pack to go swimming in the burbs? It's insane. The prep to swimming time ratio is like, 95:1. Then we went to T & T and Costco. Then it was home, to sew my Poh Poh's pants (my mum made me), then taking Poh Poh out to lunch (at Phoenix, yum!), then it was back home to hang out with my mom and Poh Poh some more, then over to R & R's house so that the Dotytron could give R a guitar lesson, then picking up takeout and then home. It was EXHAUSTING. Also, our car almost exploded from all the crap we were carting around by the end of it. It was also the best guitar lesson of the Dotytron's life, because R & R gave him beer, bought Babu samosas and mutton patties, made chocolate chip cookies, AND R gave me a pair of jeggings that didn't fit her (!!!!!!!!!!!!) You know what I did? Brought over HALF OF A CAKE (the cake pictured above, actually). WHAT THE HECK?!? So imbalanced an exchange!

Yesterday I took a 1/2 day off work (even though I really should not have because of the volume of work I have to do) to attend to final preparations for our Chinese dinner. We had Momma D and her friend/roomie R over for dinner. Even though about half the dishes were bought from T & T - it ended up being a bit of work. The dishes I was making aren't the kind you make in advance - you can't steam a fish in advance of boil dumplings in advance. We had 8 dishes: fried turnip cake, steamed rice with Chinese sausage, Buddha's delight (vegetarian dish), steamed green bass, roasted pork & bbq duck, oyster omelet, and pork & chive dumplings. I also got this coconut & red bean pudding that we ate cold slices of for dessert. I obviously made a TONNE of food and now we have leftovers for days.

Warning: don't look at the photos below if you have issues with toddlers wearing hilarious (and possibly racist?!) cultural attire. We bought the Big Yam this outfit at Pac Mall two weekends ago and I dressed him in it for dinner last night. It was AMAZING. He was so cute in it that we could barely stand it. He was also very slippery because of the silk/polyester. LOL! Seriously, we could barely get a grip on him. I keep looking at these photos because he's just so adorbs that it makes me happy. We'll definitely have him sporting these threads more often.

Fin.

Potpourri

2012-01-20T18:06:00.001-05:00

This is going to be another random grab-bag of a post. I'm not quite ready to sit down and tell you all in excruciating detail why I loved The Fault in Our Stars and why you should all read it. We just watched 50/50 last night (who knew that the theme of my cultural consumption for the week was going to be "cancer"?) so I'll probably review them both at the same time.

Today was my day off. I had a massage and then grocery shopped and prepped dinner and cleaned the house in preparation for Chinese New Year, which we're not really allowed to observe this year - we're supposed to wait until 1 year after the anniversary of Kung Kung (and also, Poppa D's) passing(s). We're not supposed to give out lucky money, because that would be like "giving out death." We're having the Dotytron's family over for dinner on Monday - it's going to be a Chinese food dinner, but it's not going to be "Chinese New Year" dinner, per se, in order to get around the whole Chinese juju aspect.

I picked up the Big Yam from daycare early and we're hanging out. I'm hoping we get a lot of snow soon because I want to take him sledding again. I can't believe he's like, a semi-sentient being. He has a favorite book. It's a pretty hackneyed selection from his library, in my opinion, but he loves it. When I say the word "story" he walks over on his cabbage roll feet and grabs it and then crawls all over me or the Dotytron trying to get into his "story" position. I can't believe he's showing a preference for a cultural artifact. It's kind of blowing my mind. BTW, his favorite story of the moment is I Love You Through and Through. On Tuesday night, when I got home from class, I asked the Dotytron for a debrief. "Oh he was fine," he filled me in, "we were cracking up during dinner." The idea of the two of them cracking each other up is so cute and mind-blowing at the same time. Like, the fact that the Boobla is starting to have a sense of humour?!? And he started off as a cell in my lady parts?!? WTF?!?

So yeah, I'm guilty of being able to have my mind blown by the miracle of life. That doesn't mean that I don't find Jay-Z going buck over Blue Ivy to be super-annoying. He wrote this ghey song for her, featuring her, called Glory, and it's seriously the weakest, lamest, most hackneyed attempt at expressing the wonders of creation, like, ever. I get it, I do. But that doesn't mean that Beyoncé is like, special in any way for being able to squirt out a brat. It also doesn't mean that you get to "dear diary" a rap tune. Also in Jigga Man annoying news: he's said he's not going to use the word "b***h" anymore on account of his baby girl. FRAB! So weak! I'm sure pro-lifers and pro-choicers are interested in knowing at precisely what point in Blue's gestation did she become a "girl" enough for him to lay off calling people b***hes? As my FB friend said, why not swear off on account of his wife, mom, or any of the other remarkable women in his life? It's just so...typical Jigga. Thinking that he's so G-D special or something that anyone CARES that you've been "reformed." Double FRAB.

In other news, we received our first gift subscription (from the Dotytron's Uncle Mert) issue of Reader's Digest this week. I haven't cracked it open yet. Am I wrong in thinking that Reader's Digest is a magazine with religious undertones? Am I making this up? I feel like I always see headlines like, "The Christian side of Islam" out of the corner of my eye at the grocery check out.

Finally, to round out the "am I right or am I right?" observational stand-up comedy stylings of this post, it kind of infuriates me when I see recipes for "lightened up fettucini alfredo" in my food blogs. I feel like if you want fettucini alfredo, you should just eat the G-D fettucini alfredo! Lightening it up is like, the worst. It does a disservice to the dish and to you, cuz you're not even going to get what you want. It's just like, why you guys gotta lighten everything up? Just let it BE! If you want a chocolate chip cookie, eat it. But if you're a chunky wunky who can't handle chocolate chip cookies with butter, rather than trying to "lighten up" a million 1000 calorie meals, just EAT SOMETHING ELSE THAT'S HEALTHY AND ALREADY DELICIOUS. Lightened up fettucini alfredo isn't going to help you.

That's actually a good segue into the non-cancer book I read recently. Born Round is a memoir by Frank Bruni, former restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. It chronicles his unlikely journey from the over-fed, well-loved, son of an Italian-American family (with the stereotypical, Italian Nonna, always pushing food on him), to the restaurant reviewing post at the Times, an unlikely position for someone who battled an eating-disorder and an unhealthy relationship with food and his own body, for much of his life. Bruni is an excellent writer - funny, observant, capable of bringing his beloved mother and his nonna to life, all the while peppering the recollections with the kinds of salivation-inducing descriptions of food that only a true-blue eater can conjure. Bruni is someone who loves food, who loves eating, who loves the whole gamut of tastes, textures, and memories that food can evoke. He can rhapsodize equally over his Nonna's frits (fried dough, either dragged through sugar, or stuffed with mozzarella and tomato sauce) as his first experience eating cold sesame noodles. Amidst all the eating, Born Round documents Bruni's struggle with his weight, his unhealthy tendency to gorge and overeat, and his failed attempts at achieving slenderness (and peace with himself) through shortcuts like occasional flirtations with bulimia, laxatives, and fad diets. He also documents his journey through the world of journalism, which in itself is kind of fascinating - how he went from the Detroit Free Press to the Times, moving from section to section - covering Washington D.C. with no political reporting experience, then becoming the Rome correspondent, before finally landing as the Chief Restaurant Critic.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Bruni is a likeable person, and his writing is open and honest, drawing you in. I don't usually love all memoirs, but either because the subject matter was near and dear to my heart, or through the strength of the writing and story alone, I really liked this.

On Wednesday night, we had whole wheat farfalle with broccoli pesto. An oldie but a (healthy), goodie.

Last night we had the roomie over for leftovers and bean salad (made by her - delicious). Feeling bad about serving a guest (insofar as the roomie constitutes a guest in our home) leftovers, I whipped up a batch of the Milk bar chocolate-chocolate cookies. The above video shows the Big Yam in action whenever the mixer gets whipped out. He loves it more than anything.

Tonight we had shrimp and cheddar grits. The grits were made in the slow cooker - simmered all day in a mixture of milk and water, with a touch of cream. They were sooooo creamy and delicious.

Fin.

Jason Wu for Target

2012-01-17T17:56:00.002-05:00

Bonus Jonas post on account of the fact that I have to kill time before I go to school! Besides, I know that when I finally get down to writing a review of The Fault in Our Stars it's going to be pretty bleak and sad and it wouldn't be tonally correct to tack on a screechy style segment to the end of it.

The look book for Jason Wu's collaboration with Target was released recently. It's quite divine, if you like looking like a lady (and lately, I doooo). Here are the things I'm coveting/considering buying:

This gold top and this pleated black skirt are great basics. You can always use a fantastic shell and a black swingy skirt.

Love the colour and cut and weight of this cardigan. It will be nice over sleeveless summer dresses at work.

This skirt is what sold me on the collection. It's PERFECT. Look at it! Love the colours, love the cut, love the preppy nostalgia. Also love the ribbon necked blouse. Want them both.

Also love this blouse, but I have a lot of long-sleeved shirts already. I would buy the skirt though. Again, a great basic that can be paired with a simple shirtwaist or pintucked top for a really smart, professional look.

I like this sweater, but if budgeting gets tight, it might go. Although this would look smashing with my wide-leg navy pants.

If I stick to a budget, this will probably get axed. It's jersey, which means it'll be comfy, but jersey can also be super-clingy. And I don't know if it'll be tailored enough to stand up to work.

Love this. Already bought it (j/k, but I might as well have).

Love this outfit. Want both pieces (already talked about them separately above...but look at them together!)

This purse is okay. It's a little too lady for me. Like, the purse with the outfit directly above it is too old lady slash Alexa Chung. I don't consider Alexa Chung fashionable.

So I've been on the hunt for a nice, cross body, grown-up lady purse/satchel lately. It's been tough. Everything has either been too expensive or not precisely what I want and not enough selection, etc. So I finally went back to my old stomping grounds, Ebay, and came up with LOADS OF CHOICES! All you have to type in are like, "Gossip Girl" and "satchel" and billions of stuff comes up, most of them priced to sell at like, $30. Thank you, Chinaaaaa! I want one (or two) summer ones and 1 winter one. This is my short list:

I think #1, 2, 4, and 6 are going to make the cut.

That's all, folks!

Fin.

Grunge lives!

2012-01-17T17:01:00.001-05:00

...kinda. The Big Yam admittedly looks odd here - his mouth is hanging open, his weird faux-hawk hair is in full effect, he's just not as his best. But! Behold the wonders of a plaid shirt and jeans on a petit bébé! It's his grunge look - we tried to get a shot of him with the sleeves of the shirt tied around his waist, but he is still of the age when his arm length does not appreciably exceed his girth, and so the sleeves were too short. He's also wearing his "A Minor" xmas prezzie onesie, which was really, a prezzie for the Dotytron as much as a prezzie for the Big Yam.

This is the Mexican tortilla soup I made last night. Look up recipes for a similar soup on Epicurious or similar sites and you'll find that many of them would have you frying flour or corn tortillas to make the topping. THAT IS RIDICULOUS. Ridiculously unnecessary! We just topped ours with sour cream and crunched up tortilla chips and diced avocado. This soup was lovely last night - on a blustery and cold day. Bonus points for the fact that it required no pre-cooking prep and I just left it to simmer in the slow cooker. Meals that are done in the slow cooker so that you arrive home and - PRESTO! - dinner is ready to go are like magic, aren't they? It was soul satisfying and warming in flavour and spirit. It reconstituted a sad and dejected me who finished reading John Green's latest, The Fault in Our Stars and arrived home sobbing, after not-so-discreetly weeping openly on the TTC. I was felled see, but it's Big Questions About Existential Dilemmas and it's story about two kids with terminal cancer who fall in love. I will post a review tomorrow (or shortly), but be forewarned: I AM A JOHN GREEN DEVOTEE and this might be his best work yet, and I will proselytize to you in person and on this forum ad nauseum about how genius this book is and how you should read it RIGHT NOW.

In the meantime, tonight I will miss seeing my little Sweetest Pancake pictured above and I will attempt to sit through my entire Tuesday night class (a feat I haven't accomplished since September, which could account for my 60% participation mark in my first term class).

Here is the recipe for the soup. I still owe you a salted caramel chocolate mousse recipe. That will come this week, promise.

Fin.

----------------------------------------------------

Mexican Tortilla Soup

Serves 6 as a main dish easily, or 2 adults and a baby with plenty to spare (and freeze)

3 dried chilies (guajillo, ancho, pasilla – your choice)

2 chipotles in adobo sauce (from a can)

1-2 white onions, diced

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 28oz can of diced tomatoes

1-2 potatoes, chopped in 1/2" chunks

1-2 sweet potatoes, peeled & chopped in ½” chunks

1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed (I used 1 c. of dried black beans, soaked overnight)

8 cups of water

2-3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (or chicken legs, with the skin removed, bone-in, as long as you don't mind fishing out bones later)

2 cups of frozen corn

Salt and pepper to taste

- put the dried chilies in a bowl and pour 2 cups of boiling water over, let them reconstitute for 10 minutes, and then puree with the chipotles in adobo sauce.

- put everything else except for the corn in the slow cooker, cook on low for the duration of the work day.

- When you get home, check the liquid of the soup and add more water depending on how brothy you want the soup to be. Stir in the corn. Taste for seasoning, season with salt and pepper and serve.

To serve (all optional):

Diced avocadoes

Chopped green onions

Sour cream

Crushed tortilla chips

Cilantro

The weekend

2012-01-15T14:56:00.001-05:00

This weekend, I almost made the Dotytron divorce me on account of how infuriatingly indecisive I was being about Friday Night Takeout Night. I spent an unconscionable amount of time on Friday (considering people have like, real problems in this world of ours), waffling back and forth on what we were going to eat and whether to go out or bring it back and how the logistics would work if it was pick-up and blah blah blah. I called the Dotytron no less than 8 times. EIGHT TIMES! I was being the worst about it. In the end, we got Chinese BBQ takeout and I ended up having heart burn, so it served me right.

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind getting a divorce. One, because being a divorcée is dead sexy (in my books). Two, because I kinda hate being married. Just being part of an institution that I don't believe in makes me mad. I hate that like, people can't just be common law or live together in a relationship forever nowadays. Like, you still have to be MARRIED for your relationship to be considered legitimate. It's annoying. I hate that since getting hitched I get mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. I Dotytron." It makes me SO MAD! I hate how it's assumed that I lost my identity or autonomy upon getting married. I gotta say, peeps can do what they want, but I'm not a fan of a woman changing her last name. It's so wrapped up in patriarchy for me. It's so outmoded and retrograde. It would be one thing if the decision to take a last name was negotiated between the individuals...but it's not. It's the woman taking the man's name and I think that's bulls**t. I think our next kid is going to bear my last name. Just to make a point about it.

Anyway, that proto-feminist rant aside, here is the obligatory, kid-in-pjs-under-the-tree shot, featuring the Boobla in his musical instrument jim jams that he's already outgrown (he outgrew them as soon as I bought them, actually):

And here are some bundled-up-for-the-outdoors shots. Kids who are wearing a million layers that turn them into stocky, chunky tree trunk starfishes are so cute. I love it. We basically robbed him of the use of his joints by stuffing him into 4 layers of clothes to brave the cold yesterday. He could take a few stiff-limbed steps and then he would face plant or fall back. It was hilarious.

Why I love my street, part #996848481. They opened up a Toys R Us Express at the mini-mall near our place and I was there on another mission and saw these little blue sleds on sale. So I bought it. I was carrying it back to our house when my neighbour said, "You didn't just buy that did you?" and then went back to his shed and got his old one and gave it to us. So best. So good to re-use and not just contribute to the garbage piling up in developing nations. I love my street and hood so bad. Here is us taking the sled out for a spin - it's pretty grainy - probably something with our camera settings. One day we'll invest in an HD camera.

Last night's dinner - mushroom barley risotto and pan-fried lamb sausage

C-Hova came over last night to learn how to make beats from the Dotytron. D'awwwww...he also wants to start DJing and throwing small parties, so I finally have knowledge that will be useful to him. It's about time!

I also made a recipe from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook last night. Christina Tosi (the pastry chef) is my hero but she's buck. For a chocolate cookie recipe, I had to make a chocolate crumb component first before then incorporating that into the cookie dough. Each cake recipe consists of at least 4 individual components. I had to buy citric acid and glucose and acetate and a 6" round cake ring for the cakes I'm planning on tackling from the book, and I've devised a plan of attack that consists of making a component a night leading up to the assembly, which has to take place 24 hours before I'm planning to serve, because all the cakes get frozen and then defrosted. It's bucktown. But I'm totally inspired. The chocolate-chocolate cookies pictured above are heavenly. They're like a giant, cookie-r version of an Oreo cookie, salty, deep, dark, chocolatey, with a crisp-chewy texture that's to die for. These would make amazing ice cream sandwich cookies, or a nice cookie to crumble down to mix with whipped cream or turn into a crust. I happen to be doing a fine job eating them as-is, though.

Our Cleveland friends bailed so today we went with Momma D to Pacific Mall to pick up Chinese New Year swag and to buy an outfit for the Big Yam. Spoiler alert: his outfit is awesomeness. For breakfast I made us this outrageously rich eggs benny: poached eggs on oven-crisped proscuitto, on top of sliced avocado, on top of tater tots. With hollandaise!!! Insane!

For dinner I roasted us a duck and roasted some potatoes in duck fat. We also had brussels sprouts and sautéed rapini.

Fin.

I saw the sign

2012-01-13T06:51:00.000-05:00

and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign (life is demanding, without understanding)"

I was randomly singing those lyrics tonight during dinner and the Dotytron was all like, "What does that even mean (specifically referring to the 'life is demanding/without understanding' part)?" and then I started futzing on my computer and tuned him out while he was pondering out loud, only to tune back in to catch the phrase, "a really capitalist perspective." So then I go, "I have no idea what you're talking about" to which he replied, testily, "I'M TALKING ABOUT THE ACE OF BASE. YOU KNOW GODDAMNED WELL WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT." At which point, I DIED LAUGHING. LOL!!!!!!!! HOWLZORZ!!! "The" Ace of Base is the best 4-word combination I've heard in recent memory.

So, I have an important fashion tip update. The other day I rocked a pretty slamming outfit at work - my shrunken (kid's bat mitzah Value Village) blazer, my real skinnies from the Gap, and this orange patterned sleeveless blouse with this touch of black net overlay around the neck. POP POP! Plus I got my hair thinned by SMckay when she came over for movie night with Lolly the last Thursday before vacation ended and I had put the effort in to straighten it so I looked pretty boss. Benetint on the cheeks + straight hair (so much easier to straighten when I have 50% less of it on mi head!) = fly. ANYWAY, MHui gave me a good tip: ladies, don't wear your shrunken blazer with capris, otherwise you look like your clothes got sent through the dryer by accident. It's a little too Pee Wee Herman, naw mean? Okay good, carry on.

Speaking of the opposite of shrunken, while in the States, I went to Stride Rite to stock up on real shoes for the Big Yam, seeing as how he's walking around now and I don't want his indoor slippers getting all jacked up on concrete and whatnot (my views on indoor/outdoor shoes never the twain shall meet-ing are well known round here). Turns out, my kid needs DOUBLE EXTRA WIDE shoes. I liken it to stuffing a cabbage roll inside a teeny tiny miniature sneaker. His feet are as like, as tall and wide as they are long. Not quite, but it's kind of cute...the little fat footed f**ker.

Ehmdo has some new chunes a gwanning. She sang on this Canadian country dude, Josh Macumber's song, Tomorrow and got to be in a big, fancy video:

I kinda find that Josh guy to be...uh...not a looker, per se, but the song is catchy in a red-state kinda way and Ehmdo looks really pretty in it. All that glamming up makes her look older than her years, though, which makes sense because they probably don't want Josh perving on some young 'un. When I watch the video, I keep thinking to myself, "JUST COMPLETE THE PHONE CALL!" cuz the phone gets hung up so many times. LOL!

This is the video for the first single off her coming album (one of my favorite songs on the album):

Oh you fancy, huh? So fancy! I'm so proud of her.

I took today off of work to take the Big Yam to get his 15 month shots. He was such a trooper and we had a really nice day together. I normally try to ditch him with his daycare provider on my days off so I can do stuff unencumbered. Stuff like: groceries, banking, cleaning the house, etc. But I was talking to my friend G at work and she was saying that she keeps her kids home with her on her days off, because soon they're going to be in kindergarten and she won't even have the option of taking them out to stay home and I got all guilty and totally changed my attack. She speaks the truth! I should cherish these days I get to spend with him...why else do I work so hard? QT with my fam-bam and friends, that's why. So we hung out with the roomie as well and I took him to his appointment, and we played and read books and sang songs. It was super-cute and fun.

For dinner I made us pizzas. Three different kinds because I'm crazy like that. A potato, rosemary, roasted garlic oil and gorgonzola one, a proscuitto, grated parm, garlic and baby arugala one (mimicking my favorite pizza from the Magic Oven, a chain I refuse to patron because their pizza is so overpriced), and our favorite, a "spicy pig" sausage from the Sausage Partners, fresh mozzarella, roasted garlic, and caramelized onion one. Woooeee, that last one was delicious.

So excited that tomorrow is Friday! We thought our Cleveland friends were going to be coming into town and cleared our calendar. As it turns out, they can't make it. So we have an entirely free weekend, which is nice. And as an added bonus, we can delay our top-to-bottom Chinese New Year house clean for a bit.

Bonus shot of the Boobla rocking what we call, "The Rooster" all day:

Fin.

Deep thoughts

2012-01-11T20:27:00.001-05:00

Here are some deep thoughts from me:

1) Remember bruschetta? Remember how bruschetta used to be like, a thing? Like, any restaurant you would go to, regardless of type of cuisine would have bruschetta and people saying, "I loooove bruschetta" and getting all weirdly faux-Italian with the pronunciation was a regular occurrence ("BROOOOSCHKKKETTTA") I don't know why this came up recently, but I've been weirdly fixated on it. Like, it was SO ubiquitous, guys! As if chopped tomatoes with some basil on garlic on bread was the be-all and end-all. You couldn't show up to a graduation party without it appearing. I love it as much as the next person (in season), but I feel that the benefit of distance allows me to say that bruschetta is a b***h to eat in public. The tomatoes get everywhere!

2) Last week we walked into Kernals to pick up some supplies for our planned Settlers of Cattan date with Dr. Rei and Hanbo. While we were there, we met this guy who was basically the Kernals-version of Randal Graves. Anyway, we were riffing with the guy about his job and then the Dotytron said something like, "yeah, and then 8 years later, you're still here" at which point I proceeded to die inside while the guy said, "8 years? Dude, I've only been here for 6 months." When we left the store I was like, way to make that dude feel like he's doing a go-nowhere job for the rest of his life and he has no future. LOL! The Dotytron is all like, "what? Noooo...he got that it was a joke, right?" And then when the ramifications of what he had said sunk in, proceeded to feel really bad. We realized that he picked a number that was all-too-feasible for a Kernals front-line employee. It's really easy to meet the 8 year mark doing a gig like that. The Dotytron should have picked like, 80 years or something to drive the joke point home.

3) During what was a generally hilarious conversation later that same evening, the topic of the "2nd earth" (aka the Christmas Planet - worst name, EVER! Why not just call it "unobtanium"?!?) that had been dominating the news over the holidays came up. Hanbo, ever the sensible one, asked, "How do they know the planet is so earth-like?" To which Dr. Rei and I, already on a spinning-each-other-up tear, responded at the same time (respectively): "They just do!" "They can see it........trails off uncomfortably" LOL!!! So typical us.

4) So, as some of you may know, the Dotytron and I availed ourselves of a 50% Porter seat sale to book ourselves a little 10th anniversary trip to NYC. The big question mark was what to do with the Boobla. My mum said no, it's a lot to ask of Momma D, and we weren't sure if we wanted to part with him anyway. The interim solution (which allowed for maximum unfettered restauranting on my part) was going to be dropping him off with my sister so that she would take him into the daycare Little Big Cuz goes to and then picking him up. Not bad all around (even if my heart did falter at the thought of him eating US institutional daycare food for 3 days). Anyway, we were still up in the air about what we're going to do, until Momma D came up with the brilliant plan to come with us to NYC. That way, she could watch the Big Yam at night while we did our own thing and all was right in the world. So cute!

...

Until I started getting the odd email with a food/restaurant suggestion (full disclosure: there have been 2 emails, and 1 of the restos was already on my spreadsheet). I am such a control freak that it had never crossed my mind that in travelling with other people, THEY MIGHT NOT CEDE GASTRONOMIC CONTROL TO ME. LOL! Like, my family generally lets me do the meal planning, if something like that is available. When I've traveled with other friends, it hasn't been an issue. Either they're eaters like me that I trust implicitly, or, they're willing to cede control to me and eat weird random sandwiches on their own time (see: Dr. Rei and the Dotytron in Florence & Rome. See: what a hard time they gave me when I refused to eat anything that wasn't on "the list"). Anyway, Momma D has been lovely about it and has as much as said that I can meal plan the entire trip but even the odd innocuous email suggestion stresses me out. Because I'm a psycho. LOL! We're having to adjust our eating plans anyway to accommodate the presence of the Big Yam.

It just goes to show you that in all things Lagerfeld, it's Lagerfeld's way or the highway.

Tonight for dinner we had braised squid and chickpeas with whole wheat couscous and light, simple, mixed green salad. The braised squid was pretty terrible, I don't think I'll be making that again.

Fin.

High-low dialectic

2012-01-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

First, I'm going to get all high culture on you and talk about the two last books I read. Commencing forthwith.

Téa Obreht is a 20-nothing writing juggernaut who makes me green with envy. She's like this decade's Zadie Smith, though less funny and more sombre and lyrical. Either way, it's maddening. When I asked my friend K if she was planning to read The Tiger's Wife, Obreht's debut novel, she responded, "No. I'm not a fan of phenoms." LOL! The publication of this book was a bit of a literary event and it's received overwhelmingly positive reviews. The story follows a female doctor in an unnamed Balkan country, newly emerging from the fog of war (it's widely considered to be about Yugoslavia/Serbia). Upon learning of the death of her grandfather and after traveling across a newly established border to delivery inoculations at an orphanage, stories of her grandfather's youth mix and mingle with myths and lore to weave a textured tapestry of history, mortality, nationalism, war, kith and kin. Was I smug about how her editor didn't correct Obreht for using the word "shivering" no less than THREE times in the first 25 pages as an adjective describing the motions of plants? Of course I was! "Some phenom!" I scoffed, with the over-sized scorn of the bitterly and enviously untalented. She is a gifted writer though her writing isn't necessarily to my current taste. It's a little too mannered in a stereotypical "literary" fashion for my taste. And I thought certain chapters dragged. The chapters narrated by the grandfather figure resonated the most. I would certainly recommend this title, but I wasn't head over heels about it.

Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke & Bone came to my attention when it received an A- grade in Entertainment Weekly (my pop culture bible). Subsequent breathless glowing reports from my sister confirmed that this had all the makings of being able to fill the void left by The Hunger Games in my YA reading life (my sis also introduced me to The Hunger Games, about a billion years before it became zeitgeisty). This is fantasy-driven YA about a human girl, Karou, who is an art student in Prague, raised by demon-like "chimaera" with no knowledge of her past or of how she came to have this strange family. Mysterious things start to happen that kick-starts a breach between Elsewhere and the human world that you and I occupy. Elsewhere plays home to a centuries-long war between seraphim (angels) and the chimaera (demons) and the events of the book follow Karou as she discovers who she is and her role in the battle for this other world. It is GOOOOOOOOOD, folks. Like, I read 2 pages and was INSTANTLY hooked. Like, I read it in 2 days good. It's got everything - forbidden love, sex, demons, angels, a strong female protagonist, Prague as a backdrop, good, evil, war...all the awesome stuff you want. I can't recommend this enough. If you're not susceptible to fantasy then you might be turned off, but all I can say if that is the case is that you're letting irrational discrimination keep you from an excellent yarn. AND IT'S A SERIES! I don't really know how I'm supposed to wait until the next installment gets released in 2012...but it's going to be freakin' tough.

I recommended it to my friend, Montréal I, who is the person in my life MOST likely to love it. We saw her over the holidays and she was lamenting her current single state (she's been single for a while now) and how she's on the lookout for a warrior with the soul of a poet. It's really funny if you actually know Montréal I, how much that archetype is PRECISELY who she's on the lookout for. However, as we were trying to think of people (fictional and otherwise) who embodied this - it became pretty tough. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is pretty much the standard-bearer and then it becomes pretty slim pickings after that. Once you get into real people, forget it. We couldn't think of a single person who personified warrior-with-the-soul-of-a-poet.

The low culture part of my post comes when I start talking about style. Here is my newest style tip for you ladies who have to dress business-casual. When you wear a sweater/cardigan type thing over your blouse and you are concerned about looking mumsy (which this look can very often devolve into) - my tip is: roll up the sleeves of your sweater so that they're 3/4 length. This very simple trick takes a mumsy-looking layer and turns it into something a little more fashion forward and sharp. Trust me.

So, my updated spring/summer work wardrobe is in need of some killer footwear to polish it off (that and the ultimate satchel/purse...but that's proving to be a difficult fight). Here are some contenders:

SM Reilly Sandal is a more casual entry - not exactly what I'm looking for, this would be more suitable for casual, weeknight/weekending than my every day shoe at work.

Ted Baker's Denoo sandal is almost exactly what I'm looking for. One of the looks I'm trying to get going is a slouchy, trouser-y khaki pant, rolled at the cuffs with a blouse, a shrunken blazer, and shoes like these to give the outfit some lift. These are a perfect shoe to elevate a more casual outfit and ground a flirty, flimsy summer dress. At $119 though, it's a little more than I'm looking to spend on one shoe.

The Adrienne Vittadini Aspen sandal is a more neutral, classy, understated version of the summer shoe I'm looking for. This would be a more versatile shoe that can support a more dressed up look (ie. a summer wedding - if one was actually happening - or, the favorite fashion magazine event that never happens in real life - the garden party).

You can't go wrong with a patent flat in a neutral colour. This will be a summer time workhorse when I'm tired of wearing heels (so like, everyday). These are SM (I think that's what Steve Madden is called now) Gypsi flats in camel.

Finally, Jellypop's Garlie sandal is like a low rent version of the Ted Baker ones above. Priced to move at $25 - these will be a good substitute for me to try this look instead of committing to the price of a multiple-season shoe. They're a little clunkier and a little more cheap looking, but at my work, no one really notices these details except for me.

Decisions, decisions! I probably have it in my budget to get 2 new pairs of shoes...we'll see which ones I end up with.

For dinner tonight we had cheddar broccoli soup and Ace Bakery olive boule with butter:

Fin.

Culture Club

2012-01-08T11:13:00.001-05:00

Watched a lot of movies and have read quite a few books over the break. I'm a little sad about going back to work tomorrow, especially since I seem to have contracted a mild form of stomach flu. The plus side is, all this pooping is going to help me lose some of the holiday weight I gained. J/K! I kid, I kid (not about gaining the weight, but about being glad about having a case of the scoots to lose it). I am NOT endorsing this type of behaviour, impressionable readers.

I will be glad to get my body back on track though. My sis and I hit up the outlet malls near her place so I could bump up my spring/summer work wardrobe. Alls I gotta say is: J Crew outlet. YES! Mad fist pumps! I loves me some J Crew - got me a simple black pencil skirt, a few Jackie O cardigans, two button down shirts, a patterned pencil skirt from their resort line (pictured below) which looks a little matronly but which I think I can sass up with some cork heeled open toed shoes and the right bag/tops (also, the photo below is grabbed from the interwebs...I would NEVER try on a skirt with socks - that's a recipe for dressing room failure. Seriously. Just take your damn socks off and see how the outfit looks with ankles! It's worth whatever phantom case of athlete's foot you're worried you might contract at J Crew.) I also got this pleated, tulip shaped skirt in a neutral, dark khaki griege (that's the new design blog shorthand for grey and beige, yo!)

I also went a bit buck at Banana - got a few blouses and $20 pants. I spent quite a bit, but now I'm pretty much done building my spring/summer work wardrobe and can kick back on that score. I'm a very focused shopper - I know how I want to look, I make a list of the pieces I need, and then I go out and bang it out. If I can't get it online and I have to go to stores, this is a lifesaver for me - it's so efficient. I don't super love aimlessly shopping any more - it's just not my style. That's what the interwebs is for, sons.

I can't believe what a Banana/J Crew slut I am. This is the way it is for the working woman though. I also can't believe how I can pull together a work wardrobe, but like, Zooey Deschanel can still get away with acting like a twee girl-child and people find it adorable.

Shortly before New Year, the video above made the rounds. Dr. Rei and I have already debriefed about this, but we both find this video HELLA ANNOYING!!! I'm just like, YOU'RE 31!!! How come I had to to progress my style and you're wearing a tiara?!!??? GET OUT! What the heck? Are you going to be wearing mary janes and tights and too-short dresses and tiaras when you're 37? NOT APPROPRIATE!!! There's nothing wrong with being a GROWN-UP. Being all girlish and coy and precocious and cutesy is SO not my bag anymore. I mean, all my friends are adorable in their own way. But it seems like such a put-on. I find it annoying the same way I find the Olivia years on the Cosby Show and Elmo annoying. Don't try to be cute. Just be who you are. And maybe that's who Zooey is. I don't know her life. Alls I knows is: it seems like a put-on.

By comparison, I feel like Tavi Gevinson is someone who is moving through adolescence into womanhood in the public eye in such a real, accessible, relatable way that I want to vomit. She's put together this online magazine called Rookie and it's the best. Seriously, check it out. This is the kind of magazine that 14 year old me in high school could have really used to help navigate being a weird duck and that 32 year old me now enjoys reading as a window into how 14 year old me could have been. Originally, I thought I was going to be all over Zooey's venture (with Sophia Rossi and Molly McAleer) Hello Giggles, but it's just not for me. I still find Molly McAleer's blog pretty funny, but at the same time, I realized that these women are way too into Beyoncé for me. I don't love Bey. I just don't. And I also don't love 2 Broke Girls (after making the criminal mistaking of making a decision after the first episode and tweeting about it). It's kind of racist and the writing is poor. They also all love Drake and Lil' Wayne and I'm sorry, I can't go down that nasal alley with them. Sorry.

Auto correct always fixes "relatable" but I'm convinced that it's a word and I can't be bothered to figure out how to spell it.

Anyway...here are some reviews of movies I have seen (in the order that we watched them):

I watched Country Strong on my own waiting for the Dotytron to come back from his last winter concert before the break. I had been hankering to see it for a while. As some of you know, I am a frequent collaborator in the common fixation-hate for Gwyneth Paltrow that is shared by many women in North America. It's like, she's just TOO MUCH. With her patrician features and always going on about being macrobiotic and then flipping the switch and pretending to love eating fried chicken and being a regular gal who also wears Stella McCartney and Balenciaga and can sing and dance and act and "cook" has Senor Spielbergo for a godfather. SHUT IT! Anyway, I wanted to watch this movie, which is ridiculous, because it shows her as a not-so-recovering alcoholic who does self-destructive shiz like try to have sex with disgusting, bloaty guys, and scream, "GIMME THAT BOTTLE!!" while lunging for said bottle across an unmade bed in a designer bra. It was laughable and super-melodramatic, but not without its entertainment value.

So...y'all know that I'm a rabid hypochondriac, right? THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE MOVIE FOR ME. It was super-freaky and super-real and you get to watch GWYNETH PALTROW DIE OF A SEIZURE. Which is kind of the best (see above). Like, she's not wearing any makeup and she looks RUGGED and then she foams at the mouth. Amaze. For people who harbour apocalyptic-preparedness delusions (ie. me and most people I consider deep kindred spirits), then this movie is the exact combination of reality-fear to whip us into a state of taser/cross-bow/semi automatic arsenal gathering. It has the following hallmarks:

1) illustrating the thin line separating civilization from anarchy

2) illustrating how ill-prepared the government is to handle a crisis

3) how quickly disease can spread

Brutal. It also didn't help that my sis was like, "the Centre for Disease Control is one of the most consistently under-funded agencies." AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! We don't even need a zombie apocalypse...we're like one Spanish flu away from total chaos. Which is all to say: this movie is pretty good.

I had super-high hopes for this movie that were quickly dashed. This won the grand jury prize at Sundance last year. Promising, right? It's about these two young uns who meet in America but she overstays her visa and then gets shipped back to the UK and they can't be together and it's hard because they're in lurve. The actress, Felicity something or other, also won the acting prize. The film is beautiful in that hazy, Instagram-y way that shows young lovers in the best light and to which my generation is extremely susceptible. The acting is very natural, with a lot of the dialogue improvised by the actors. We just couldn't get into it. I was like, YEAH DUMMY, YOU OVERSTAYED YOUR VISA SO OF COURSE YOU GOT THE BOOT. WHY DIDN'T YOU FOLLOW THE RULES?!? And then it goes on for too long and ends like, 3 scenes after it should have ended and is kind of silly. The Dotytron's theory is that you either have to be the age of the characters in the movie to appreciate it, or like, 60 years old and nostalgic for the thrill of young love. Anyone in between is gonna think these guys are just janky losers with first world problems.

We followed that up with Pearl Jam 20, which is a Cameron Crowe directed documentary about Pearl Jam. Cameron Crowe has deep roots in that scene and the footage was extraordinary. It's a really engaging, entertaining documentary, that has appeal for anyone who likes Pearl Jam, even superficially, or who grew up in the 90s. It just makes you realize how s**ty music is nowadays and how superficial and how no one sings and how artificial it all is at this point in time (I recognize that things go in waves). I think we're about due. Anyway, grunge was the best. Being in high school at a time when that was the alternative to aspire to was really special and we were lucky that the uniform was oversized t-shirts, ripped jeans, flannel on flannel, and in the Dotytron's case, 3 hole Doc Marten's (aka business shoes...LOL!) The story of how the Dotytron always wanted Docs and then his parents got him 3 holes is legendary around here.

Midnight in Paris is one of the more commercially successful Woody Allen films in recent history. I found it meh. I think you either have to like Woody Allen or you don't and I don't think I do. I get that at the time when he first started, his style was pretty revolutionary - but now, I'm always left at the end of his films being, "is that it?" The same with this one. It was kind of fun to meet that Lost Generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals in Paris (Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Dali, Gertrude Stein et al), but the story around it was so flimsy and the present-day relationship between Owen Wilson's character and Rachel McAdam's character was so unbelievable. I also discovered I have a new pet peeve: when people time travel in movies and the movie spends too much time with the time travelling character being all like, "whaaa?" "where am I?" "Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda...hmmm...this must be some kind of elaborate joke." I'm like: WE GET IT. YOU TIME TRAVELED. MOVE ALONG. It's such a waste of the audience's time.

The Adjustment Bureau is based on a Philip K. Dick story - which I've come to realize make better stories than they do films. They are at once too slight for a film treatment and too sophisticated for a film treatment. There's no room for the importance of Dick's investigation into the nature of control and free will to really sink in - the story gets turned into this action-adventure lots-of-people-running thing that just doesn't do the material justice.

I'll do a literature round-up tomorrow.

Fin.

Holiday photo omnibus

2012-01-03T19:59:00.000-05:00

I know it's churlish to complain that the end of one's two-and-a-half week vacation is drawing to a close, but well, there you have it. We've got a small case of the Monday blues and we're trying hard to not wish away the last 4 days of our time. It's been a whirlwind holiday - here's a capsule review of what we've done:

Montessori parenting - the Big Yam experiencing "water play" (am I the only one whose mind goes to a dirty place when I hear those words?) on the floor of our kitchen. It kept him occupied for a full hour, but he was soaked through after. Next time we do this in the winter, I'm going to blast the heat and just have him sitting in his swimsuit.

Crafty Xmas - homemade Big Yam snowglobes

This year's holiday cookie plate - from the top: chocolate coffee toffee, skor cookies, ginger molasses cookies, walnut cinnamon rugelach, macadamia shortbread. I also made orange-almond meringues (like amaretti), but those were done day-of.

Christmas at our house...you'll notice our tree's lights are brighter on the bottom because the sets of strings are different brands. I'd be lying if I said that the brighter lights on the bottom didn't gnaw away at the Dotytron's soul.

For Xmas breakkie, we roasted up this oven-roasted bacon slab from St. Lawrence Market, which is one of our new favorite delectables. We also had Momma D's ham and cheese strata which featured bread spread with butter on one side and dijon mustard on the other. It was killer.

I followed a Thomas Keller tip by way of a FB friend and torched the outside of the prime rib. Such a good crust on that thing, which was kind of wasted on Momma D's family because they eschew fat (so weird!)

I'm really, super proud of this dinner. I was so worried that I had overcooked the prime rib and it emerged a beautiful, rosy, perfect medium rare. We had roasted garlic mashed potatoes, jus, roasted brussels sprouts & chestnuts tossed with brown butter, maple-ginger carrots, yorkshire puddings, and Momma D's apple squash gratin. So good!

To finish, I was really keen on making this salted caramel chocolate mousse, which I thought would be a nice, light ending to the meal. It was delicious. I'll post the recipe in the coming week.

This is my family's Xmas

This picture is kind of a big deal.

The obligatory "matching PJs shot" featuring the extremely rare and much sought-after Rocher phone.

This is the Dotytron, Manda, and S-dawg assembling S-dawg's gift to my nephew W. It's a 6 foot long, helium-filled, remote controlled shark that's supposed to hover at around 5-6ft. It's HUGE!

Seriously. I can't reiterate enough how much this thing is a blimp. With my family, we open presents in reverse age order, in a series of one-present-at-a-time rounds. The first gift that W opened, he chose because it was a big, heavy box. As he finished tearing off the paper, imagine how flummoxed he was to be confronted with a helium tank. The whole family was mighty confused. We were like, "are you serious? Open the box!" and then S-dawg was like, "no, it's actually a helium tank" and we were all like, "uhhhh, oooookkkkaaay." A few more rounds went by and then W opened the shark. It took 3 people over an hour and a half to put the thing together. It's kind of awesome for like, 5 minutes and then the reality sets in that you're stuck with a 6 foot long shark zeppelin.

For the Dotytron's birthday brunch with Momma D and Ehmdo, we went to try this new brunch place in our hood, Hammersmith's. It's been getting pretty decent reviews. We had the duck hash plate which comes with 1 fried duck egg and a few slices of baguette - for $13. I had a few problems with this place. One: the service was MEGA-SLOW. It's the chef-owner manning the stoves. We got there right when the place opened at 10am, and he must have literally just rolled in 2 minutes prior. They were turning on the lights, the place was cold, the stoves were cold. I don't freakin' care if it's your restaurant, YOU SHOW UP AT LEAST A HALF HOUR BEFORE THE RESTAURANT OPENS! That's restaurant service 101! So the food took an hour to get to our table, and if you look at what we got (alongside a side of bacon hash), you're kind of like, WTF? What took so long? The duck was already confited! The portions were a little small for the price. And I don't appreciate getting dry toast. Offer some butter on the side, please. The Dotytron's take was that they were a little too hype on their own shiz. We also split a "scone plate" for $5 (scones are otherwise $1.25 each) and the scones were TINY. Like, about the size of 4 postage stamps put together. That's HIGHWAY ROBBERY! Also, the scone plate came with jam and honey, but the plate was more than the cost of 3 individual scones, so I'm like, does that mean if you get just one scone, you get that tiny scone with no jam and honey? WTF? How are you guys running your business? Wack attack.

I'll be posting about my time in Geneseo, next.

Fin.

Ringing in 2012

2012-01-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

We spent about 5 days in Geneseo, hanging with my sis and Uncle Rico and the kids. It was an absolutely lovely, relaxing time of eating delicious, vegetable-free, fatty foods, watching a tonne of movies, reading, knitting, and watching my niece and nephews be goons. A few funny things happened.

One day, I saw this felt toy that I had gotten for my niece 3 Christmases ago, sitting in a corner, all forlorn. I was harping on her about it, so Little Ze said that he would make a scene using the felt and then I would take a picture of it to preserve for all eternity. Then, Miss Ramona said she wanted to do one too, so I came up with a plan that we would all vote on which scene we liked best (secret ballot). Here is #1:

And #2:

To reiterate, I, a grown woman of 32 years, decided it would be a good idea to rank and judge two siblings "art works" through secret ballot. This basically flies in the face of ALL contemporary educational research with its emphasis on differentiated learning, child self-esteem, etc.

Needless to say, it was a disaster. Everyone voted for #1 (Little Ze's) and when I realized that it might be 5-1 in favour of #1, I changed my vote (I was the one reading out the results) to #2 at the last minute so it wouldn't be such a wash. Miss Ramona was NOT PLEASED. To say the least. She actually kind of lost her shiz. There was much crying and moaning and angry accusations that, "LITTLE ZE'S ISN'T EVEN STRAIGHT!" and when we tried to console her by saying that it was all a subjective opinion, that two people voted for her, she let out a wail, "BUT ONE OF THEM WAS MEEEEEEEEE!" LOL!!! We all died laughing (secretly). It was kind of the best. It didn't help that I tried to introduce an "artist's statement" section and Little Ze's "explanation" was the most rambling, convoluted thing since like, Hegel.

We did some cooking one night - we had what we called "white trash" tapas the day after New Year's Eve - shrimp cocktail, wieners rolled in Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, artichoke dip, Mexican dip, baked brie with apricot preserves in puff pastry - it was one of my favorite kinds of meals:

There were also lots of opportunities to watch these two homeboys hang out - it's pretty cute. Little Big Cuz wanted nothing to do with the Big Yam but the Big Yam kept going in for kisses (he does this slow, open-mouthed approach) and was continually rebuffed. The Big Yam is also a pretty empathetic cat. At one point, during dinner, my sis was offering Little Big Cuz some ice cream and LBC was shaking his head and holding out his hand (implying he didn't want any), and when my sister moved my spoon in towards LBC again, the Big Yam, sitting beside him in a booster chair, started shaking his head, "no!" It was really cute.

I will say that my colon is glad to be back home, though.

Fin.

Sicko

2011-12-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

I meant to post before this but then I done gone got myself sick. Woke up at 2am on Thursday with awful, awful lower abdomen cramps that had me thrashing and moaning and being a sucky baby that wouldn't let anyone (read: The Dotytron) sleep until they had heard the full extent of my grievances. Called in sick to work on Thursday as my tummy was still all jacked up and tender...limped my way to drop the Big Yam off at daycare and lay about and slept with a heating pad on. By the end of the day things were slightly better, but I was still weirded out.

Yesterday took the Big Yam to the doctor and explain my symptoms. Guess what he told me? He said, "girl you better try to have fun..." no, wait, that's Prince. As soon as I started saying, "I had these awful cramps in my lower abdomen" he kind of sucked in his breath and sighed and said, *Sigh* "The abdomen is really tough to diagnose because there are so many things in there," *sigh* "and with women, there's the extra stuff..." He said that basically, because I was feeling better on Friday, there wasn't anything to do but monitor it. He felt around to make sure my appendix hadn't ruptured and gave me a clean bill of health. The Big Yam, too. I got mother-in-law'd into taking him to the doctor because he's had a dry cough for the past week...as I suspected, there's nothing to do with a cough sans phlegm, fever, sluggishness. He's just gotta work it out. The doctor said that this time of year, they see hundreds of people with coughs and they only treat about 15 of them.

There was a flurry of wrapping and last minute shopping and braving the Mennonites for my Christmas dinner order, and standing in line-ing yesterday. We're mostly done today, as of the time of this post. Just some last minute finishing on tomorrow night's dinner that can be done ahead and last minute tidying.

This was Wednesday night's dinner (pasta w/ rose sauce):

Last night was our Chanukah meal and since I made a 3lb brisket, we put up the House of Plenty signal to try to get peeps over to help us take 'er down. L'Armi and the Roomie obliged and we had a delicious dinner of brisket bourguignon with sweet potato and yukon latkes, apple sauce, and sour cream. It was SOOOOO good! I used a recipe from Serious Eats, which has been my favorite food site for a while. It's just written by my people. They've got good recipes, good restaurant reviews, and they're not snooty like Chowhound (ie. they review fast food restaurant breakfast sammies in all earnestness). This is a link to the recipe I used. No changes made and I wouldn't recommend any, either. It's perfect as is.

Because Chanukah is all about oil and deep-frying (and the festival of lights and the reclaiming of the Holy Temple, blah blah blah) I made a low-key version of doughnuts - churros. Some dusted with cinnamon sugar and some injected with dulce de leche. Dulce de leche churros were sooooo freakin' good:

Huge Chanukah breakthrough for the Big Yam. Walking suddenly "clicked" last night. Fortified with a bellyful of latkes, brisket, and clementines, he went on a walking tear - doing crazy loops and shouting joyously the whole time. He kept it up for almost an hour and you could see the unrestrained glee in his face at the knowledge of his own burgeoning physical autonomy. It's a bit of a nightmare from a baby-proofing perspective, but it's also a wonder to behold:

Note: the above video contains an asinine observation from yours truly that you love your kid more than your niece and nephew. LOL!!!

Tonight it's the traditional Christmas Eve takeout and movie with Momma D and Ehmdo. Poppa D will be missed.

Merry Christmas, all!

Fin.

Attack of the blob

2011-12-21T06:40:00.000-05:00

Have you guys ever had congee? It's like a savory rice porridge that my people generally eat for breakfast in the homeland, but has been adopted as more lunch/dinner fare here. We made it for dinner last night and even though I KNOW that it's like the most cost-effective, high yielding food of all time, I stupidly decided to double the recipe like a total n00b. The thing with congee is, that rice is like the most absorbent starch of all time (this is not a scientific method-based observation.) So it CONTINUES TO ABSORB for like, a full week after you started putting the dish together. Anyway, 2 cups of rice and 20 cups of water later, I have vats and vats of preserved egg and pork congee to keep me warm at night.

It's been a very Asian week so far for dinners - spicy beef kimchi udon on Monday, followed by congee yesterday. The Big Yam has been so-so about it. He's a big fan of spicy food though - he was very nonplussed by the chili heat of the spicy beef udon.

On our way home from the Dotytron Family Xmas to-do, I was pondering aloud about what kind of kid I want to raise. Having been forced around the company of adults from a very young age, dragged to business dinners for my mom and Big D's clients and such, all my siblings and I were forced to learn to sit and smile and be pleasant through interminably long, multi-course epic mealtimes with people who we shared very little in common with - either they were old (meaning adults) or they were weird, nerdy, future doctors of America (the children of said adults). I may not have acquitted myself with grace back then, but it's kind of important to me now that my kid is able to be well-rounded, well-read enough to be comfortable keeping company with adults. I want my kid to have the social skills so that they don't clam up if they're forced into situations where they don't appear to have a lot in common with their companions. I want my kid to okay striking up a genial conversation with all kinds of people, not just other kids. I want my kid to be able to know how to ask questions and find commonalities with others - not just talk about themselves and their own narrow interests.

I want my kid to be the opposite of narrow. I want the Big Yam to have broad interests, to be intensely curious, to be interested and engaged.

This might all be a pipe dream. Right now he's pretty self-absorbed. He can fake it pretty well though. He has this fake curious sound he does, which is a super-exaggerated, "hunnnnh" followed by a "hmmmmmmm" that goes up at the end so it sounds like a question. It's pretty cute but can also be pretty infuriating - especially when he unleashes it after randomly calming down after being a bear. Suddenly he's all like, professorial inquisitive guy, going "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?" after you've been dealing with him lying on the floor wanting to be picked up for half an hour when you're trying to make dinner.

Ahhhh, life.

Fin.

Walking it out

2011-12-19T06:43:00.001-05:00

This weekend was crazytown. At one time or another, it featured me, the Dotytron, and/or the Big Yam all being foul owls.

Friday night I had the brilliant idea to make our weekend "easier" by organizing this after-work, super-ambitious, Friday night weekly grocery shopping mission, the intent of which was to free up time on the weekend. Well - what little time I freed up on the weekend was quickly squandered by the Dotytron's tension levels at STILL having 2 more holiday concerts to get through, compounded with the usual bemoaning of the busyness that is a life with a kid, a house in Toronto, a super-type A significant other, a demanding job, and a full social calendar. So imagine his dismay, when he met up with me at the veggie store, and I, blithely oblivious and offended at the state of the brussels sprouts at my usually stalwart Fruit King, said, "we have to go the Farmer's Market tomorrow to get carrots and sprouts." He damned near lost it. "BUT THERE ARE CARROTS HERE. JUST GET ANYTHING." Me: "But I want colourful carrots" (imagine, dear readers, how well that reasoning played - know your audience, readers, know your audience.) Suffice it to say that what ensued involved a lot of f-bombs (me) and a lot of long-suffering, tense pauses (the Dotytron.)

When the dust had settled, we realized it was because I didn't pitch it correctly. I should have said, "do you want to go to the Farmer's Market tomorrow morning and get breakfast and have coffee and walk around and then maybe we can see if there are nicer carrots for Christmas dinner?" That would have gone over waaaaaaayyyy better.

Anyway, when we got home, we had this waiting for us:

That would be warm, trippa alla fiorentina (tribe, Florentine style), which we scooped into bowls direct from the slow cooker and topped with grated parm, a dollop of chimichurri I was passing off as salsa verde, and sided with big warmed hunks of my roasted garlic, caramelized onion focaccia for dipping. It was heavenly. The Big Yam didn't think so, but that's because I had bought his grocery shopping compliance with cheddar bunnies. I got him to eat it on Sunday, after he rejected it for lunch, by starving him into submission. Is that mean? Maybe. I don't give picky eaters no quarter, though. Choice is a luxury that is not allowed to him, unless I deign it so, and if he starts throwing perfectly good food on the floor, he can go hungry until he's willing to eat it later (which he was.)

The Big Yam, after 6 months of being a fantastic eater (which isn't all that much time until you realize it's like, half his life) has started to become "snoopy" in the words of Nany. But it's weird and day to day with him. One day he's dumping handfuls of apples off the side of the high chair, the next day he's taking bites out of an apple the Dotytron is eating. There are certain consistencies - like he will always eat: French toast, oatmeal, toast, most carbs, all berries, bananas, clementines, most fruits, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, avocado, corn, beans, etc. Other vegetables are more touch and go...I just keep offering it and offering it again and again.

Anyway, our morning at the farmer's market ended up being very nice. We woke up and bundled ourselves in schluffy clothes into the car and went to St. Lawrence Market and had breakfast sammies from Carousel Bakery alongside some extra strips of oven-roasted bacon from one of the meat purveyors. Did our shopping and came home and got ready for the Dotytron family xmas party which was being held up in Pottageville or some other place off the map.

It was a gong show getting there. First we timed it so we would go to Costco and pick up gifties first and then head to Pottageville. Got to Costco (which is MADNESS on a weekend generally, but ESPECIALLY SO on a weekend leading up to the holidays), and realized I had forgotten my wallet at home, which kiboshed the Costco mission but also kiboshed the me being the designated driver scheme we had cooked up. So we had to drive all the way home and then head out again.

Dotytron family xmas was lovely, though. It was kind of a pot-lucky affair - I brought: thyme and Gruyere gougeres, proscuitto-wrapped prunes, and the homemade kit kat bars. We were supposed to go to Supper Club afterwards but we left the family thing late (around 8pm) and it was too much for us and especially the Big Yam. It would have involved getting him out of the car, waking him up, hauling him to Supper Club for an hour, only to pack him back into the car, him falling asleep, and then hauling him back out again when we got to our house...it just wasn't feasible and fair. I think we'll be more ambitious when he gets a little older - in fact, it's very important to me that he get used to falling asleep at people's houses and being bundled up in his jammies and taken home, but for right now, it's too disruptive for him.

So we came home and started watching Louis C.K.'s show, Louie, which we INSTANTLY fell in love with. It's the funniest thing ever. We were laughing so hard we were crying. It's also viciously smart, nuanced, highbrow, lowbrow, and keenly observant. This scene, is brilliant. Near the end, there's a discussion of the use of the word f****t, which I thought was so layered and perfectly encapsulates comedy, the simultaneously elasticity and rigidity of language, the nature of semiotics, and the use of taboo words. It really struck me.

In retrospect, it becomes all the more striking when it is revealed that my mother-in-law, the dear Momma D, might possibly have heard me call the Dotytron a "f**king c**t" on Sunday. Whoops. In my defense, I was joking. He left the lock for the stroller at home and I was jokingly berating him for messing with my system. She was in the car and this all happened outside the car, with the car doors closed, so I'm not 100% sure she heard it...but the Dotytron is convinced. LOL!!! I actually find it pretty funny. But I can see how this probably doesn't improve my image as the shrewish, shrill, harsh-o-matic outlaw daughter always giving her son a hard time. I can't help it! I've got a potty mouth!!! I come by it honestly, having worked as a blue-collar worker for many years. Cooks have the filthiest mouths. I also go straight to: "I'm going to f**king kill you" any time something small happens. In fact, the smaller the thing, the sooner I am to jump to: "you're an idiot" or "I'm going to f**king kill you." I guess from outside, if you don't know me, I can see how it looks bad...but I don't mean anything by it! That's just the way I talk. Anyway, Momma D and Poppa D like, never had screaming matches (according to the Dotytron), whereas in my family, from the outside, it sounds like that's ALL WE DO. So it's a cultural thing? I don't know. Alls I knows is - sometimes, I'm going to throw down the c-word, and it ain't no thang in my books.

This all happened on the way to the Toronto Christmas Market, which was amazing, the only downside being that it was a victim of its own success. Basically, they turn the Distillery District into this European-style Christmas Market, with little wooden stalls selling mulled wine (DELICIOUS!) and apple cider, and maple taffy, sausage on a bun, schnitzel, mac'n'cheese, candied bacon, etc and also little tchotchkes and stuff...there's a GIANT Christmas tree and there are twinkling lights all around and a bunch of stuff for kids like a Santa's village, and the shops are open so you can stroll in and out. It's beautiful and lovely and very festive. Because it was so awesome, it was also a s**tshow, with way too many people trying to navigate around dogs and strollers and a million other people. If they do it next year, I would want to take an afternoon off and be leisurely about it. I also hope they extend it into the holiday break so that it spreads people out during the holiday, instead of all crammed into the weekend. I highly recommend it, though!

So the long and short of it is, even though we were foul owls at some point, in the end, the weekend was perfectly lovely - full of experiences, good food, and family.

Here is a video we finally managed to capture of the Big Yam working on his crip walk:

Spicy beef udon for dinner tonight. Shazzam!

Fin.

Favorite moments

2011-12-15T06:56:00.004-05:00

My favorite moment of the week this week was having the three of us on Monday night, after the Boobla's bath, in pajamas, lying heaped together on the floor of the Boobla's room, while he quietly played with his toys in his post-bath glow, listening the Nat King Cole Christmas album, playing all scratchy and warm on the Dotytron's record player.

This is hands-down my favorite Christmas album - no one in the world has a voice like Nat King Cole. And on vinyl? Quit it. It's just insanely good. We suspect it was recorded pre-multi track, which is what makes it so good. Remember when the room used to matter? Like where you recorded was a big deal? It's a miraculous album.

The Dotytron was telling me about how when he was a kid, like 5 years old, he would put on the Nat King Cole Christmas album and listen to "O Tannenbaum" and go to the tree and plug in the lights and just sit under the lit tree listening to the album and be like, "this is the BEST!" D'awwwwwww...how cute is that? Picturing wee Dotytron sitting in his footed jammies alone under the lit tree, transported by the pure joy of Christmas as made manifest by Nat King Cole's velvet voice. So darned cute.

I can't wait until this little nugget does that. Well, actually, I can wait a good long time (I don't want to rush him to the age of 5), but when he decides to do it, it's going to be just as sweet:

So, I don't know how many of you know this, but Dr. Rei recently got a job at the Ministry of Magic. It's well deserved, it's what she's wanted, I couldn't be happier for her, blah blah blah. The funny part comes in because she's had a RUUUUUDE awakening these past two weeks as a member of the gainfully employed. You see, Dr. Rei was operating under the mistaken impression that doing a post-doc and being in grad school somehow approximates a job in the real world. So we've been exchanging hilarious text messages about how PWNED she's been getting having to get up early, not take a million personal calls at work, make her lunch every day, not go home when she's tired, etc. LOL! It's been making me laugh. I love that gal. I think now she's starting to understand why so many of our telephone conversations when she's called me at work have consisted of me responding to scandalous gossip with the most terse, non-committal, "uh huh" "i know" and "yeah." Ha!

This was Tuesday night's dinner - freezer polenta lasagna:

The past couple of night's we haven't had much in the way of dinner because yesterday I had this massive holiday catered staff lunch at work and today was the annual buffet at Hart House which is like eating at Hogwart's (think, long wooden communal tables, portraits of headmaster's past, a grand piano, turkey and stuffing and a carving station). So consequently, we haven't been doing much in the way of dinner around here.

Fin.

Rock and a hard place

2011-12-13T09:38:00.006-05:00

I'm stuck in the hinterland known as the place where my practicality butts heads against my principles. It's a bit of a pickle.

Because I'm trying to move away from extravagant xmas presents from siblings, outlaw parents, outlaw grandparents, and the like, I haven't provided preemptive gift list suggestions this year, as I think doing so would be hypocritical and a tacit endorsement of a system that I'm trying to extricate myself from. Yet, at the same time, I know that by NOT providing a list, I leave myself open to all kinds of well-intentioned but misguided items that will subsequently be sitting in my basement until such time as we do a basement clean and they make their way to Goodwill and the like. Is it awful of me? I don't know. I know you're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth and be grateful for the sentiment, etc. - but surely we've all been the recipients of gifts where we appreciate the thought and feelings behind them but can't bring ourselves to submit to the actual execution? It's kind of crazy how wrong people can get it, sometimes.

Anyway, so I'm torn. I hate the waste when people spend their hard-earned dollars on stuff that's just not me. But I'm not going to submit a list. All this pent-up frustration has to go somewhere though, and so here are some things that I adore.

Roll Call of Awesome:

BleuForet cotton tights. These are the BEST cotton tights in the whole, wide world. They're so soft and stretchy and warm - like the very best attributes of soft, thin socks and tights mashed up together without any of the thigh-cinching, waist-pinching aspects that can go along with tight-wearing. They are ridiculously expensive, so I can accept that all my cotton tights can't be BleuForet brand. The grey, prune, violet, and pine coloured ones are particular favorites of mine.

In the winter time though, tights are generally a good bet for me. Black, opaque, fishnet, patterned, they're all good and since I almost exclusively wear skirts and dresses to work, I'm always blowing through them.

I've been pining after this for a while. David Chang edits this kind of expensive magazine called Lucky Peach (well, expensive by magazine standards, I guess - it's $28 for 4 issues). It's a compendium of food writing from people and chefs I admire, all packaged in a cool, hip little bundle.

Other good literary-based gift ideas for me: Amazon gift cards so that I can stock up my Kindle, renewing my subscription to Entertainment Weekly for me.

Cast-iron cookware. I don't use Teflon anymore and I'm almost exclusively cast-iron when it comes to cooking nowadays. The problem is, that I only have a small, 10" skillet and while it's seasoned beautifully, as you all know, when I cook, I COOK, and I cook for a crowd. So a big, 14-15" cast iron skillet would be lovely.

As a daily fruit eater tired of retrieving bruised bananas and pulpy pears from the bottom of my purse, a banana guard and a froot guard would be lovely, cheap, stocking stuffer presents for me. So practical!

You also can never go wrong with gift certificate to my favorite stores: CB2, Crate and Barrel, ModCloth, Joe Fresh, Ruched, Anthropologie, Social Butterfly on the Danforth. PEOPLE LOVE GIFT CARDS. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE UBIQUITOUS.

I just recently started using this stuff after reading about it in the pages of In Style magazine for the past 17 years. I got a trial, sample size from my friend M and it's kind of changed my life. A little blush and a bit of eyeliner go a LOOOONG way with me - turning me from a wan, snake-eyed, sickly looking thing in the winter, to someone who looks robust and healthy and glowing. Seriously. I've gotten mad compliments from colleagues who are all like, "you look fantastic after having a baby!!!" and then you have to go and admit that it's all smoke and mirrors and it's only because I'm wearing a bit of this stuff on my cheeks. It's so easy. I don't know how to use highlighter or any of that shiz - but I can rub this stuff on the apples of my cheeks. I find it hard to justify buying a full-size bottled of the stuff though. It's like $30 for a little bottle of dye. That shiz just ain't right.

Sorry for the GIANT photos. Thanks to my gal, Mindy Kaling and her super-smart guy writer friends who helped contribute to her Black Friday gift guide, I've been hepped to Creative Recreation shoes. Look at those kicks. Just look at them. That's some fly, motherf**king s**t right there, folks. That's like the perfect Dotytron shoe. Uh huh. Hot. And they're hella affordable, too.

That's it for this installment of Roll Call of Awesome.

Fin.

Successes/Failures

2011-12-12T06:55:00.004-05:00

Things I'm succeeding at, lately:

- skipping class

- watching movies

- making people laugh

Things I'm failing at, lately:

- attending class

- blogging regularly

- not eating a million sweets/fatty things

I have much to tell, but never enough time to sit down and crank out the lengthy, verbose entries that all my dedicated readers love.

On Friday night I hosted Academic Book Club. We got our house looking as cute as Lil' Ugmo is capable of looking and our little wee house got some rave reviews. I have to say - our house does have personality, even if it is wee. I'm lucky I'm such a visually oriented person and that making our house look all Portland-crafty-blogger-librarian-design-enthusiast magazine ready is something that I enjoy. A few things came out of book club.

1) Those honky grandmas are still trippin'. I love book club. They make me laugh, they really do, and those women are smart and learned and they're like, truly good people, but I feel like some of the ladies just don't know what's what in the world, even when they like, REALLY know what's what in the world, in their U of T professor-y kind of way. Like, they can probably talk about Israel and Palestine in a way more informed fashion than I can, what with my knowledge-gleaned-from-listening-to-2-seconds-of-a-Noam-Chomsky-lecture-before-falling-asleep-and-Joe-Sacco-graphic-novels-derived education on the Middle East. But...but they're also adorably clueless. Like, we were talking about role models and one of them was talking about Tori Amos.

...

That's right, Tori Amos. I kind of died inside. My vagina was cringing. It was the worst. WHO TALKS ABOUT TORI AMOS?!!!??? As a feminist role model?!?

2) They don't really get comedy. As a basis of comparison, I cited Mindy Kaling and Donald Glover as role models. I like ivy-educated funny people, who are creative in a pop-culture relevant way. Is that sad? I dunno. I feel like my way is better because I get humour. So, par example, they were talking about Sarah Silverman, who I don't like, because I find her schtick seriously one-note. I get it, you're cute and you say filthy things. I don't like Chelsea Handler for the same reason. I get it, you're a woman who likes to booze and have sex with dudes with giant d**ks. That's not charming or smart or witty. Boooring! It's not sustainable humour. Anyway, a few ladies were talking about how they love Sarah Silverman, but that sometimes (ie. when she jokes about rape) she goes too far. I feel like that's kind of missing the point of Sarah Silverman, don't you?

Then they found these fake beards I made for SMckay's birthday party. And they were asking what it was about, and I said, "oh, I have a friend who's really into Judaism and beards" and they started laughing, but at the same time, as they were laughing, were like, "I'm so offended!" (a lot of them are Jewish). I get that, I do. Fetishizing someone's religion is kind of offensive. But it's got to be contextual, right? So like, SMckay's appreciation for Jewish culture, while it's an unlearned appreciate, is funny precisely because it's so throwaway...it also has a limited range of applications. She doesn't go around telling just anyone about it (at least, I hope she doesn't) and it's more of a joke for close friends. I just think it's a question of context, and I feel that the younger generation (of which I am tenuously a part) has a more nuanced understanding of context and humour and what's disposable and what's not. Or maybe me and my peers do. As the Dotytron sagely noted, "they don't know where to draw the line." Which I thought was sooooo apt. It's not that Sarah Silverman doesn't know where to draw the line, it's that you don't know. The Dotytron is a super genius, sometimes.

3) I may be a bad person, but I'm just saying what everyone else is thinking. As another example, one of the women listed Dorothy Day as her mentor/role model, because she started the Catholic Worker Movement, where you take in homeless people to live with you, not as charity, but as like, a member of your family and community. To which I immediately blurted out, "ummm, do you like, interview the homeless person or are you supposed to take the first one who shows up?" and they all started laughing again, but I'm like, SERIOUSLY?!? AS IF ANY OF YOU, WHO LIVE IN HOUSES WAY NICER THAN MINE, WOULD LIKE TAKE IN A RANDO HOMELESS PERSON!!! A lot of homeless people are weirdos. And it's not societal. They are skeevy. Skeeviness isn't a societal issue, all the time. Sometimes it's just skeeviness. Wanting to vet a homeless person who you're taking into your home, while it might not fit the acceptable definition of St. Francis of Assisi-style charitable Christian goodwill, is just being a normal person. You just wouldn't do that! I mean, I guess it's awesome that there are people out there who are willing to do that, but I don't actually think it makes them better than other people, sorry. I just don't.

Anyway, we laughed our butts off and I do love my book club ladies. They're the best. It's refreshing for me to be around them because it helps me to realize that not everyone is like me (even if they should be).

This is Thursday night's kimchi fried rice, which the Big Yam ate a lot of, thereby assuaging my fears that he doesn't like Asian food and only likes Indian food:

Saturday morning's breakfast was a homemade sausage and egg sammy with aged cheddar on the most boss buns of life from Strickland's butcher's up the street. I love Strickland's because they're all old-timey in there and it's really bare bones and ghetto looking and they make no claims about selling organic or naturally raised meats but they're 3rd generation butchers and have been working with the same farms for like 75 years and so they're as good as being all hip and trendy and organic. They're super nice and sweet and don't know a think about being modern or cool and I love them for it. They also sell mincemeat tarts in pre-made tart shells and jams, and buns and sausage rolls. It's very odd and the butchers are old and they walk very slowly. In other words: I LOVE IT. Because I'm an old people champion. And I love things that exist in this world that can't be cool and hip and trendy and continue through the support of normal, regular people who still like things like genial, warm customer service. Anyway, the buns are PERFECT. I know, because I live with a bun connoisseur. The Dotytron is very choosey about his buns (human and bread). They're soft and thickly flour coated and so giving and plush - the perfect sandwich bun:

Saturday, I skipped class and we hung out. We decided to do a neighbourhood exploration and so after considering and rejecting the Distillery District and the Junction, we settled on Parkdale - we wanted coffee and to check out the junk shops. We found out there are quite few junk shops, unfortunately, and as Dr. Rei mentioned, that what we really wanted was to be in our own neighbourhood, which is where people go when they want coffee and furniture and antiques. Whoops. It was still nice to go for a stroll - we checked out the Drake General store and found a Christmas tree ornament that looks like Hedwig! Perfect! I've settled on a theme for the tree - we're going with birds and vintage mercury glass. Bird-themed ornaments can be of any material, but anything not a ball or a teardrop or an icicle, will be a bird. I can't tell you how glad I am to have that in the bag.

The best part of our walk (aside from getting the Hedwig ornament) was that I found a vintage Valentino skirt in my size that is work appropriate and was reasonably priced !!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE finding vintage designer stuff! It's suitable for wearing now, which is another bonus - like, it's not some kind of weird relic piece. I love it, so. The thrill of the thrift!

On Saturday night we had Lolly over for a dinner of carnitas and leftover cookies and such:

Followed by a viewing of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1.

I don't even need to do a review of this movie. It's terrible. Nothing happens - except for a long-awaited-by-Twihards marriage, sex, a pregnancy, and a baby. I know when I write that that it sounds like something happens, but seriously, nothing really does. Also, I disagree wtih my sister, who loved Bella's wedding dress. I agree that the back was lovely, but the front! The front looked like this weird harlequin/street mime/Russian gymnast singlet that was entirely too plain and did weird things to her boobs. Also, did Kristen Stewart actually become anorexic for the role? It seems like she did, thereby adding to the list of highly irresponsible and questionable rules that Stephenie Myer, in all her Mormon, anti-feminist, schlock-writing glory, espouses:

1) you should let a guy control you and emotionally manipulate you

2) you should subsume your desires when you fall in love with the guy who controls you and emotionally manipulates you

3) you should not foster any friendships/relationships with your family when you fall in love with a guy

4) you should just barely finish high school but give up all your career aspirations/independence for love

5) sex (which you shouldn't do without being married first) hurts. If your husband leaves bruises all over your body, you should crave it and make excuses for him and say that you love them.

6) when you get pregnant, it is YOUR choice to keep a baby that is killing you

7) it is okay to drink human blood when you're not a vampire to keep your weird, sicko love baby.

WACKSAUCE. I hate the Twilight phenomena and I view it as a highly troubling indicator of the problems with America in general and the modelling for young girls in particular.

Here's a bonus shot of the Boobla Khan looking super-cute in his Christmas party finery with a bonus shot of our tree in the background. Look at how cute he looks, snacking on some cheddar bunnies and in his plaid shirt/cardigan combo. So cute! We went to Momma D's side of the family's annual Christmas party in Markham yesterday. It was fun - although I was the victim of some mother-in-law-ization when I voiced that the Dotytron and I had decided we're not into lining up at the mall to get the obligatory kid-with-Santa photo. Momma D gave me the "You're not getting the traditional photo with Santa!" along with some "what's wrong with you?" eyes. I would like to defend myself and say that the Dotytron and I are in agreeance about this - we have no interest in standing in line and wrestling the Big Yam into submission for a photo with a weird Santa where he'll inevitably be crying. We just don't care about it. And we certainly don't want to pay $20 for the privilege of an over-flashed photo with the Big Yam in some ridiculous white people fancy garb. It's just not our style. If anyone in his life really feels strongly that he's missing out, then they are more than welcome to take him to fulfill this rite of passage.

In the background, you can see our tree, which is a real tree, because as I've mentioned before, the Dotytron has very strong feelings about real trees, which I find endearing. What I also found endearing is that our tree, while a handsome specimen, doesn't have much of a smell, and I've been hearing about it NONSTOP since Wednesday. The Dotytron is truly anguished about it, and it's cute. To the point where we had to buy balsam fir scented incense to make up for it. The balsam fir incense doesn't smell like tree though - it kind of smells like an electrical fire. LOL!

Here's a photo of him at the City of Craft free photobooth they set up. LOL! City of Craft was a bit of a bust. I'm glad I went, because it gave me and Dr. Rei a chance to poke around her hood, but I didn't find anything I would buy. Some of the items were expensive, some were too arcane. There were some people doing some nice prints, but then I got lazy and didn't want to spend the money.

Tonight for dinner we had a chickpea, leek and parmesan soup with salad.

Fin.

Better

2011-12-07T20:43:00.004-05:00

I'm feeling better today. The prospect of a long weekend certainly helps. The smell of hybrid Douglas Fir scenting our vestibule is also easing things along. We're setting up the tree tonight after it's had a full 24 hours of drinking from a bucket of water. Hopefully, if the boughs drop by tomorrow, we can decorate during the Dotytron's PA day and my day off. I'm not sure how to manage vintage mercury glass ornaments & a grabby-handed piccolo bambino, but we'll figure something out.

This is going to be a fun weekend - day off tomorrow with a massage, erranding, xmas tree decorating and then I'm hosting book club. Saturday I have class followed by a carnitas dinner with Lolly and Dr. Rei and their respective SOs, coupled with a screening of a bootleg copy of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1. Then on Sunday I'm going to City of Craft with Dr. Rei and my friend S, followed by Momma D's side of the family's annual Christmas get together - which this year is taking the form of a jambon dinner. I loves me a jambon dinner. There are going to be a lot of rugrats running around, about whom I feel fairly indifferent, but there is the aforementioned jambon dinner to see me through things. I kind of don't like it when people dress their kids (usually daughters) up in like, ball gowns for a family Christmas, during the day. I just find it really odd and uncomfortable-looking. I kind of hate kids (usually little girls) in velvet and satin ball gowns and those shiny black mary janes. Maybe I'll be tuning a different harp when and if I have a daughter of my own...it's just not my personal style.

On Tuesday we went to see the Dotytron's winter concert - it was so cute. He's so good at his job. There's talk that the school is going to do a "pops" night which is when I'll hopefully see my dream of a kid orchestra playing Kanye's All of the Lights. I've been harping on him to do it for the past year. Any time he's talking about entering Kiwanis or something, I'm like, "you should do All of the Lights" (even though my suggestions/opinions weren't invited), to the point where now, whenever the Dotytron is talking out loud about his orchestra, he preemptively tells me to shut up because he knows what I'm going to say. He's promised that he's going to try to throw something together for the pops night, which has me thrilled. I'm actually contemplating going to the morning rehearsals, because I really want my vision to be realized.

My problem is that I'm a super-idea-generator and I'm also a control freak. After the concert on Tuesday night, the Dotytron and I spent a good chunk of time debriefing, and I'm seriously considering joining the Parent Council at his school, because I feel like I could really up the calibre of the shows. That's psychotic of me, I know. BUT PEOPLE ALWAYS SCREW STUFF UP! I just want the show to be killer. I want them to tear the roof down. I want people to be talking about that shiz for months after and for it to be sold out.

I feel like I would be an awesome school administrator. I'm so good at being organized, it's a damn shame that my talents are being under-utilized running my household and my workload at work. Like, have I told you guys about my awesome fund-raising idea for the Dotytron's band? I think they should sell raffle tickets so that the winner gets to throw a pie at a teacher's face.

...

Genius, right? It works on so many levels!

Monday night's dinner was an old standby, 'round these parts: spaghetti and meatballs. So freakin' good.

Last night we made curried potatoes and cauliflower on brown rice, which I supplemented with Malai Kofta and Kari Pakora from MotiMahal in Little India. Malai Kofta are paneer and potato balls in a creamy tomato sauce. Kari Pakora are chickpea balls in a tangy, yogurty sauce. I kind of got stressed out because it seems like the Big Yam isn't so down with Chinese food, but he freakin' YAMMED (har) that Indian food like it was what he'd been longing for all his life. Fistfuls of cauliflower, spoonfuls of kari pakora-soaked brown rice. I feel like he's a traitor to his race.

My fears were somewhat assuaged tonight when he ate a big bowl of kimchi fried rice. Guys, kimchi fried rice is the lick. I fried up some ground pork in some garlic and ginger, added soft scrambled eggs I had cooked up in another pan, cold leftover brown rice, two jars of kimchi, some frozen peas, and chopped scallions and tossed everything together in a bit of canola oil until hot. SO GOOD! So very, very good.

Tell me that kid orchestra doing this isn't going to be murderation. I can see it in my head: stage is completely pitch black, single spotlight on the Dotytron while the cellos start up, then when the first lyric kicks, full blast lights on, horns going - goosebumps! As I listen to the lyrics, I think we might have to do some rejigging of the lyrical content, but that's a small concern. EEKS! It's gonna be so good!!!

If the Dotytron can realize my vision, that is.

Fin.

Shock

2011-12-07T06:49:00.003-05:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've had a feeling that the initial shock of Poppa D's passing has started to wear off. The strange, insulating numbness that allowed life to continue on with only the vague notion of loss appearing intermittently at the periphery of my life is starting to give way to sudden disruptions of my usual routine with the crushing weight of my loss, the Dotytron's loss, and the Big Yam's loss. I feel like at any moment, the ground shifts beneath me and an event, a thought, will leave me crying at my desk the way I did today. For a while, life continued on with relative ease, as if we just hadn't seen him for the usual amount of time that we'd sometimes go between visits. I took for granted the safety net of the comfortable knowledge of his existence, fuzzy and indistinct like the out-of-focus crowd in a photograph, but still a presence in that mass that could be called into sharp relief if only I wanted it so.

Lately, lately I know that wanting it so won't make it be so. And it makes me so very, very, very sad. I'm sad for the Dotytron, for Momma D, for Ehmdo. I'm sad for the Big Yam and finally, I make room to be sad for myself - for the sadness I feel because of the sadness of these other people. The Dotytron and I will sometimes just start crying together or he'll come down with red eyes or have to stop a task because something reminded him of his da'.

I think this is contributing to my general sourness about the holiday season and the emptiness of the gift buying. I just don't have the mustard for it. I feel like I can't face going out and shopping and trying to come up with something thoughtful and personal to give people. I just don't care. I care for the kids (because as hard-hearted as I am, I'm not so hardened as to want to deprive children of wonder and joy), but I'm also not into kids with their epic, toy catalogue wish lists and short attention spans and disposable mentality. The glut of plastic, branded crap makes me feel physically ill.

I want Santa to give us a do-over on this past year. A chance to take all the good stuff and enjoy that without the too-numerous funerals we attended this year. When it comes down to brass tacks - would I want to erase this year? Ultimately, I guess not - we've come out the other side and the conventional wisdom seems to be that the bad stuff is part of life too. I guess I just want a bit more of my innocence back. Not all of it - but more time thinking that Poppa D was going to be around for a long, long time. More time thinking that he would be able to pick up the Big Yam from daycare and take him to do white-person-grandpa stuff. Just...more.

Fin.

In which I injure my own child

2011-12-05T06:34:00.006-05:00

So...how was your weekend? Mine, mine was okay. EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT I'M A HORRIBLE PARENT AND HURT MY OWN SON. Still feeling awful about it. On Sunday, I stuck him in an empty laundry basket to hang out on the kitchen floor while I rolled meatballs for tonight's dinner. He had a bowl of cheddar bunnies to keep him happy so he seemed okay. Then he tired of the bunnies and tried to stand up and haul himself over the side of the basket. Laundry baskets being the flimsy things that they are, it toppled over, the Boobla toppled with it, landing face-first onto the kitchen tile and biting his upper lip with his bottom teeth. There was so much blood. The poor little lamb's lip swelled up and combined with his cold and possible case of viral conjunctivitis, it wasn't a pretty sight:

Why am I the worst parent ever?!???!!! Who does that??? He's such a good kid, and here I am trying to maim him. Ugh. I still feel terrible - I can see his face all smeared with blood and tears and it makes my heart stop.

This weekend was fairly uneventful, in the end. Except that our car died. AGAIN. Captain Save-A-Hoe is not doing so well. This is the 4th time The Cap'n has died. First time was en route to Cleveland. We get the battery replaced, continue on our way. Then, it dies again, while Miss Ramona was visiting. We get the alternator replaced, and continue on our way (the idea being that the alternator was the problem, since it wasn't charging the battery). Then, our car died AGAIN last week. We got the alternator replaced for free, as it was still under warranty. Finally, on Friday, the Dotytron noticed it was giving the same troubling signs that usually precipitate an all-out car death (brake light goes on, flickering battery light, radio gets wonky) and he managed to cruise into a gas station with the last remaining juice the car had in it. I've told him that since the Captain has a tendency to DIE-die (like to the point you can't put the hazards on, or shift it into gear), that he should pull over as soon as he sees the signs, rather than risk stopping dead on the 401 or something and getting slammed into (my heart stops at the thought). Our auto electric people now think that it's not the alternator at all, but the computer getting the signals all jumbled up. Ahhh, life with the Captain. What a mess.

It doesn't help that the Dotytron has like, 2 holiday concerts this week and so he desperately needs a car - he's borrowed his mum's in the mean time. The only ray of light is that our ROI on our CAA membership is through the roof. That's cold comfort.

Thursday night's dinner was spinach & feta pie:

Saturday morning breakfast was oat scones with devonshire cream and jam:

We scarfed that before jumping into the car at 7:30am to go swimming...only to arrive at the pool in Markham and find that it's closed for maintenance. The number of times we've showed up at that pool, happy and expectant at the prospect of seeing a joy-filled Boobla splashing around in the water, only to be turned away due to an error in our reading of the swim time schedule or some other such thing, are too numerous to count. So we did a bunch of lame errands which made the Dotytron unjustifiably testy at me (he seems to have a hard time understanding the fact that now we do errands on the weekends and that's what being a grown up is about, unfortunately). We had lunch with my grandma and my mom at Ajisen Ramen in Markham. It was good. I like the selection better than the selection at Kenzo Ramen, but I like the base broth better at Kenzo. The Ajisen broth was a little too salty and msg-laced for me. But they have this thing called "tenderous" ribs which was pretty boss and the pork ramen that I had was chock-a-block full of tender, fatty, pork neck pieces. I do loves me some pork neck.

Saturday night's dinner was roast chicken legs, tatties roasted in chicken fat, brussels sprouts, and carrots:

Then the Dotytron abandoned me to go see his friend A, who'd been staying with us while he was visiting from NYC play a show. So I ever-so-foolishly PAID for Love, Actually on ROD and instantly regretted every second of it. Mostly because Alan Rickman's character does a very foolish thing and I hate situations in which I can't like an Alan Rickman character. It makes my heart stop.

Sunday breakkie was my attempt to recreate a dish I quite like from Lady Marmalade. My version is a wholewheat crepe, stuffed with ham, quick-sautéed spinach, rolled up and baked with a cheddar cheese sauce on top, and then topped with two poached (in my case, over poached) eggs. It was deelicious.

Here is my latest holiday craft - my felt ball garland! So cute, huh? I've got it hung in that broad expanse of light grey hallway we have in the house. I'm using little mini wooden clothespins to clip up any cute xmas cards and such that we get this year - it'll also be nice to hang any artwork done by the Big Yam in the future:

Tonight for dinner we had spaghetti and meatballs and salad.

Fin.

Bunkering down

2011-11-30T06:30:00.007-05:00

All I want to do is hunker down in Lil' Ugmo with the boys and haaaaannnnggg out. I'm feeling very sluggy lately. I don't want to do anything but quietly craft and eat cookies and wear flannel pjs. It's that time of the year for me.

Last night we had a perfect night with the Big Yam. It was one of those nights when dinner came together quickly, he ate well, we gave him a bath, he went to bed without a fuss, and he was in a good, giggly, laughing mood the entire evening and didn't whine or squawk once. Those nights are somewhat rare (it's rare that we don't have at least a little jag of whinging), but it's so lovely when they happen - like all is right and good in the world.

I'm so committed to hibernating that I've been a bad dodgeball coach and I haven't really been trying to hustle to make it to games. We had to forfeit this week because we didn't have enough people to make a team and I was not-so-secretly pleased at the prospect of another quiet night in. The following photo is for the benefit of one SMckay. Two years ago, shortly after we first bought Lil' Ugmo, I upgraded all my plates to a set from Crate and Barrel. In between each plate was a piece of corrugated cardboard meant to keep the plates from chipping. Well, shortly after we moved in SMcKay was over and I was wondering what to do with the cardboard and she was of the opinion that I should throw it out but I was of the opinion that I might be able to recycle it into some kind of craft project. Here is the resulting craft project, two years later:

Ta-da! It's a garland of corrugated cardboard stars strung on red yarn that we have hanging over the archway between our living room and dining room. I think it looks quite handsome.

While we were sick last weekend we watched J.J. Abrams' Super 8 which I really wanted to love because it stars Coach from Friday Night Lights but which I couldn't love because it was boring and lacked emotional resonance and failed utterly at capturing the childhood wonder and adventure of 80s films that were standard bearers of that genre like, E.T. or Goonies. It just fell kind of flat the whole time and the cast of kid characters was too big and too poorly developed for you to care about them the way you care about Chunk from Goonies. I feel like I'm ready to come right out and say that I don't like J.J. Abrams. I don't get what all the fuss is about. The Dotytron also attempted a viewing of Crazy, Stupid, Love which he turned off after a good 45 minutes because he couldn't handle how unfunny it is. I still don't understand how so many people went crazy for that film and thought it was the smartest, funniest, mature film treatment on relationships in years. FALSE!

Tonight for dinner we had shakshuka eggs and warmed pitas. I love shakshuka eggs - it's a tasty, filling, 20 minute meal. What's not to love?

Fin.

Words cannot express

2011-11-28T19:39:00.012-05:00

What has been happening around here lately! I haven't posted since Thursday because things have been insane. I worked my little butt off to get my literature review for class on Saturday (that I skipped) done by Friday so that I could go into the weekend and not feel stressed. I did it (got my marks back today and I got a 98% on it too!) - which meant that in addition to just generally feeling pumped for the weekend, I had the added high of handing in an assignment early. That is one of the greatest highs of life.

This was our Leslieville Wanderlust dinner of beef stroganoff, root vegetable mash, and brussels sprouts:

So good! Look at that? Don't you want to faceplant into that bowl? I know I sure as heck do. The Big Yam has been a bit of a picky eater lately. He basically just wants to eat nothing but fruit and carbs. Which overall, is better than wanting to eat nothing but straight up fried carbs, but not enough for the controlling mother in me. He's been sick from one thing or another for the past month or so, so I'm willing to give him some leeway, but he's just being a weird jerk sometimes and refusing stuff he's eaten before and just hucking perfectly good food on the ground, etc. So I've asked J to cut out his afternoon snack and it seems to be working. He can't afford to be picky if he's hungry, right? Works for Africa, right? (Too soon?)

The Wanderlust was so much fun. We met up with my friends M & M and had a grand old time being idiots on the street. Dr. Rei and I were yucking it up non-stop and we ran into some friends of hers at Bobette and Belle. All the stores had little nibblies and cookies and we got to poke around and window shop. It was a good time. There was also this weird, sketchy homeless-looking guy selling charcoal-grilled souvlaki outside of this rando store on Queen East called Holy Cow! which occupies a disproportionately large storefront and seems to be in the business of selling vaguely "ethnic" looking tchotchkes like giant fiberglass cows. The funny part was how willing the Dotytron was to eat a souvlaki from that guy when I made a joke about it. It was hilarious how sincerely he wanted homeless souvlaki.

I wanted to buy some birch branches to put in these galvanized planters I have outside the house, flanking our Costco wreath which only cost...wait for it...$17.25. SEVENTEEN TWENTY FIVE! FOR A REAL WREATH! Steal of a century! I want birch branches and like some of those branches with the berries...but birch branches are expensive and the participating florist at Wanderlust wasn't cooperating with big enough deals.

On Friday night I was feeling tired and cranky from a sick Big Yam waking up at like, 3 am. So I opted out of Ladies Night Out on my street, even though I was the one who organized it and made the reservation, etc. I was sad because I do love a chance to hang with the Ladies, but it just didn't make sense for me, considering the rigours of the weekend to come. So I went straight home and started holiday baking and got to live out one of my sublimated dreams of parenting:

First of all - look at how cute he looks in his polo and dark rinse jeans. Seriously. It's a fine line when you're dressing children. Dressing them in mini-versions of adult clothes can be super-cute (see: little black toddlers dressed like Kid Cudi or Kanye) but it can also be kind of icky too (see: little toddler girls wearing faux fur stoles and mini Uggs.) Basically, it comes down to this for me: don't dress your kid like a privileged spoiled brat in first year at York University. It is a difficult line to negotiate, but I will say that light rinse jeans for kids are THE WORST. Why you wanna be dressing your kid in dad jeans? Secondly, look at how cute he is all up on the step stool watching (soon to be "helping") me put together a batch of cookies. He's such a little homunculus!

Saturday morning breakfast - french toast, cinnamon peaches, breakfast sausage. Did you know that the Dotytron claimed that he didn't know how to make french toast? I couldn't believe it.

Saturday pre-Prince we had a surprise birthday party for SMckay - the theme of which was "SMckay's favorite things" which meant: beards, Jewish-related stuff, and Pizza Hut. So I made rugelach:

So good! And so easy! I'm adding it to the Xmas cookie rotation. They're so cute, too. The cream cheese dough comes together lickety split and is really easy to work with. Here is the decor that I picked up:

Then there was our date with His Purple Majesty himself. I can't even describe it. That guy is pure charisma. The sexiest, velveteen miniature pony with winged eyeliner that has ever walked the earth. How is he so sexy? No one knows. It seems so counter-intuitive. It was non-stop hits - banger after banger that had us up out of our seats dancing our little heinies off. A few well-placed slow jams. A rocking light show and a backup band of super models. It's insane. Like, hotter than the servers at Moxies by far. I don't know where he breeds them, but they're all gorgeous, insanely talented musicians/singers, and 99% female. It's crazygonuts. Anyway - he is so over-the-top and melodramatic and he brings a pretty diverse crowd out. People bedecked in ball gowns. More leather leggings and stiletto ankle boots than I've ever seen in my life. He introduced a "special guest" to the stage and it was his guitar. LOL! And the man can SHRED. Each time he's done with a guitar he tosses it off to the side and it's the responsibility of some poor AV tech to make sure they catch it each time. So G-D funky. I loved every minute of it. We had been primed that the people on the Friday night show had received 5 or 6 encores and so we were so disappointed when we only got 3...but the man is 53 and totally gave us our money's worth. I wish he would move back to Toronto. I mean, Andy Allo is okay, I guess - if by "okay" you mean, "gorgeous, talented woman"

I think that Prince is the only person left alive still supporting Versace. He finished the concert wearing a velvety Versace number. Zomg. I can't believe how good this concert was. It was the first show I've been to in like, over a year (since I was pregnant and went to see Rush) and it was PHENOMENAL. What a freakishly talented person. Shouts to Lolly who totally babysat the Big Yam for us while we went out.

Post-Prince, post-being up super late, post-post-party cleanup breakfast of hanger steak, over-easy eggs, Brick Street Bakery bread toast and chimichurri. We finished up Sunday with a visit from the Dotytron's good bud A, who is in town playing a few shows from NYC, and I took the Big Yam with me to our friend L's hot dog party at his house. He made up a bunch of fancy hot dogs and J & S brought homemade hot dog buns and I brought baked beans and made these maple doughnuts which were THE LICK. So good. Such a nice doughnut recipe - all yeasty and light.

Bonus shots of the Boobla in his skeleton PJs, looking all cute:

Look at his skinny little legs and his chubby feet! In other Boobla news...he's taken his first steps!!! He did it last week some time...I can't quite remember exactly what day...I think it was last Monday, November 21st. He's so funny - he won't do it all the time...but J has been practicing with him. He's tucks his arms up by his armpits like little chicken wings and he walks with his belly out in this loose-limbed, drunken, old-man sailor way that is really funny. We had Momma D over on Sunday for a brief visit and it was classic mother-in-law behaviour...the Dotytron mentioned that the Big Yam had started walking and she says, "What! Nobody told me!" *insert accusing glance in my direction* I dunno!! I forgot!!! And why is it my responsibility??? Anyway, he's not walking just yet...more like he'll take a few stumbling steps from one set of arms to another. Pretty cute that the Dotytron may or may not have teared up the first time he saw it happen. D'awwwwwww.

This was dinner last night. Freezer Greek Mac'n'Cheese and salad (not pictured - just greens tossed with balsamic vinaigrette) and my new favorite, quick, cheaty appetizer - proscuitto-wrapped prunes baked in the oven for the ultimate in sweet-savoury one-bite goodness.

So I'm having this ongoing dilemma about xmas - basically, I don't want to buy presents for anyone over the age of 18. I think it's ridiculous. But Sdawg is insisting and to a lesser extent my sister is insisting that we continue to the holiday consumer glut. My sister, whom I love dearly, and Sdawg (whom I also love dearly. Most of the time) are way more "American" and "mainstream" than I am in their general belief systems and degree to which they can be swayed by the forces of capitalism. Growing up, we didn't get presents. We went away on a trip over the holidays, and to this day, I prefer experiential gifts over stuff that's essentially garbage (I'm talking more like, grandparent presents or presents from people who go-off list) - garbage in transition?.

I feel like buying on the list is stupid, because how much thought is it for me to go out and get you your freaking windshield wipers? It's the antithesis of what I enjoy about gift-giving. But going off-list is even more dicey, because you're basically just making me help Value Village line their pockets when I inevitably dump that stuff off to them. And it just sucks all around. In my heart I would much much much prefer that people kept their hard-earned money rather than knowing that they spent it on garbage for me. I would rather they did something useful with that money other than create clutter. However, I believe Sdawg feels that he missed out as a kid and that's the line my sister gave me last night when she was trying to talk me through how much I don't want to be doing it. Because it makes them "happy" to do this big, ostentatious display. But then I'm wondering, when does my happiness get taken into consideration? When does the fact that I believe it's at stupid, crass, empty display of poor financial management in action get to be heard and taken under advisement? Short answer: it doesn't.

It doesn't help that my family is the anti-handmade gift type. Like, my brother always makes a big show of being a jerk and saying, "how much did YOU spend on your niece and nephew?" when I've knit them a sweater or something (this after he goes out the day before Christmas and gets in line to get them a tickle-me-Cookie Monster that just gets neglected in their mountain of toys.) If I had the time to make by hand or craft something for everyone I would. Especially if I knew they appreciated it...but as a general rule, my family comes from the "if it doesn't come with a price tag, it's not a present" school of thought. Meanwhile, I'm always gazing enviously at all those shiny, happy, design-y families in the blogosphere who get together to craft beautiful presents of engraved mugs or something else charming and sweet (and impeccably designed and executed).

I think ultimately, I don't like having my hand forced. I like getting stuff for people when I think of it or when I come across something thoughtful and personal and specifically tailored. I don't need you to get me my cotton tights. What I DO want is stuff that you can't afford. Like a Fisher Paykel 2 oven gas range. And I certainly don't expect you to get it for me.

Anyway, the conversation with my sister was redeemed by some funny moments when I asked her what we should get for Little Big Cuz. "Don't get him toys," she told me, "he just got a GIANT sock monkey from his aunt, I'm talking life-sized." To which I replied, "What do you mean 'life-sized'? It's a sock monkey! Is it the size of a sock? Or a monkey? Or a human?" LOL! Little Big Cuz is also a fan of those intensely boring non-fiction picture books that I personally can't stand - the ones with photos of real babies and trucks and real animals and stuff. So my sister goes, "well, there is one thing he does like, he likes my Everyday Food magazine" (which, in case you're not aware, is a Martha Stewart recipe magazine). So I guess I'm getting my nephew a subscription to Everyday Food. LOL!

Fin.

Clobbered

2011-11-24T06:51:00.002-05:00

The clobbering of one K. Lagerfeld, Esquire continues! But the weekend is in sight and if I work very very very extra extra extra hard, then I will have my literature review done and I can have my super-packed weekend of fun unencumbered.

I finished reading Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River the other night. I really enjoyed this book and the frustrating cipher heroine at its center, one Margo Crane. Margo takes off at the age of 16 down the Kalamazoo river in rural Michigan in search of her mother, armed with a stolen .22, her copy of an Annie Oakley biography, and her own preternatural still, reflective, observant nature and drive for survival. She is beautiful, remote, and as more than one character refers to her, "a throwback" in 1970s Michigan with her ability to hunt and fish and provide for herself. I haven't met a character quite like her in modern fiction and I enjoyed that this quasi-survival tale was told from the perspective of a woman, with the unique challenges faced by women trying to make their own way and choose their own life, given their due. The novel is spare, a little haunting, and draws you into this small-town world by the banks of the river. In a way it reminded me of Winter's Bone, with alternating periods of more and less menace that that depicted in the film burbling below the surface. The book can be maddening at times, with Margo's innocence and ignorance coming together again and again to undermine her naive attempts to "live her own life." I highly recommend it.

These are last night's perogies:

Tonight we're having beef stroganoff with a sweet potato, regular potato, and celery root mash and sautéed brussels sprouts. Dr. Rei and possibly Hanbo are coming over for dinner and then we're all going to bundle up and partake in the Leslieville Wanderlust - a night of shopping and nibblies and live music at the various stores in our 'hood. I LOVE MY NEIGHBOURHOOD! Not for nothing has the New York Times proclaimed us the Williamsburg of Toronto (which I don't think is true, but n00bs will buy it and I can deal with that cool-by-association pedigree). I had to manage Dr. Rei's expectations...last year's Wanderlust, while fun, wasn't like some kind of winter-wonderland/Rockefeller Centre tree-lighting extravaganza...but it was still fun and it's worth it just to sample Bobette and Belle's hot chocolate with the torched marshmallows and poke around all the vintage/antique shops.

Fun!

Fin.

Busy as a motherf**ker in here

2011-11-23T05:55:00.003-05:00

I am getting OWNED right now. OWNED! Work is busy, school is busy, life is busy and I'm so OVER Christmas. Actually, revise. I love everything about Christmas except the gifts. I'm over getting gifts, I'm over the pressure to get gifts. I'm definitely over gifts for anyone under the age of 16. I just think it's so ridiculous. Like, what are you going to do? Get me stuff I can buy myself? As a believer in the "Treat. Yo'. Self." school of conspicuous consumption, I don't really need someone to get me rando shiz. I like, REALLY REALLY REALLY don't need someone to get me rando shiz. I just feel like the holidays are stressful for everyone, and we all KNOW it's stressful going out and buying something special and meaningful for people on your list in like, the 2 seconds you have when you're not running from work, to home, to socializing with people in a meaningful way, to being at home and doing meaningful, non-capitalist driven stuff that actually HELPS the world more than more stuff does - so why do we do it? Why do we do it to each other? So not worth it!

I love seeing my house lit up with the kind of kooky, non-Martha Stewart approved light display I cooked up while still recovering from gastroenteritis on Monday (I teetered on a step stool while experiencing the chills) and I love being with family and visiting with friends and I love eating cookies and baking cookies and giving cookies and I love crying through the Peanuts Christmas movie and I love snow and hot chocolate and wearing slippers and soft flannel jammies and the smell of firs and evergreens and the holiday buffet at Hart House which is the closest I've come to eating in the great hall at Hogwart's.. Those are all things I love about the holidays. The gifts? And the shopping? And the endless piles of garbage-making? I can do without.

Next year I'm going to make the Big Yam an advent calendar and I'm going to put like, 1 piece of chocolate in and the rest of the pockets will be filled with activities like "drinking hot chocolate" or "watching a holiday-themed movie" or a book or something. Holiday memories are about being together. The stuff is the least of it. I will make a concession for a stocking. I like stockings. But I'm going to take a page from Little House on the Prairie. You know what Laura and Mary got in their stocking? I'll itemize it for you:

1 tin cup each

1 cookie cake made with white flour

1 penny in the toe of the stocking

That's IT. There might have been a stick of striped peppermint candy, but I'm not sure if that was Little House on the Prairie or Little House in the Big Woods. Either way, it's pretty chill. I came across this grouping of stocking stuffers in my blogroll and I like the categories: something to eat, something to read, something to play with, something to wear. That seems very reasonable and yet still fun.

Things that can take the wind right out of your sails: finding out, 3 weeks after submitting your mid-term exam, that you did the wrong version of the exam, the version of the exam that was longer and had more components, because the prof didn't send out an email about the revised take-home exam available on the course website, and you always leave class mid-way through so you didn't hear the announcement. AI-YI-YI, papi! What the heck? I'm waiting to hear back from the prof on how we're going to fix this little situation.

I have a lit review, a final exam, and a research paper (a baby one) due by December 10th and I'm working my butt off to get everything in by then. Technically, I have until the 16th...but I don't want to be working until the 16th. I want to enjoy my Hart House Holiday buffet lunch on the 15th with an empty belly derived from my clear conscience.

On Monday I made us minestrone with spinach-cheese tortellini:

Yesterday we had tuna noodle casserole with a buttered challah topping:

I really, really, really love me a tuna noodle casserole. It's so comforting, with the Campbell's Cream soup all up in there like it's the 1960s all over again.

Tonight we're having dressed up perogies with caramelized fennel and onions and bacon and roasted broccoli and sautéed kale. With a billion pounds of sour cream, of course.

The Big Yam had his one year check up yesterday and our doctor was loving how he sat so still and quiet while he checked his ear and then of his own volition turned his head so that Dr. S. could check his other ear. He did cry when he got stabbed with 3 needles but it subsided quickly. The little muffin. I love seeing him all bundled up in his bulky winter coat and his weird sock-mitts that I knit for him with his face framed by his aviator cap - there's something about when you frame the Big Yam's face that makes his eyes look extra dark and his little button nose extra-buttony and his chubby cheeks extra chunky wunky and his little pretty-boy mouth extra girly.

Okay - that's it for me for the time being. I've got a book review for you tomorrow.

Fin.

What a waste

2011-11-21T11:59:00.002-05:00

...of a perfectly good weekend. This past weekend was supposed to be SO FUN! We were going to a party hosted by our friends R & R featuring gin-themed cocktails and then we were supposed to have our anniversary dinner at Woodlot (our second attempt), and instead, shortly after leaving Costco on Saturday afternoon after a dim sum lunch with my mum and grandma and CHova, the Big Yam started on a puke-a-thon. Like, stomach-emptying, partially-digested chunks of char siu bao and blueberries barf-o-matic. Like, all over the clips of the car seat vomitorium. So. Gross.

The grossness aside, the Boobla couldn't have been more of a sweetheart. He was so unbothered by it. One minute he'd be laughing, then he'd barf, and then he'd get tired and fall asleep in a pool of his own vomit (this was when we packed up the car and headed home and he barfed on the DVP). Seriously kid? Why are you the gentlest little soul around? Then mid-way through Saturday night, the Dotytron, who'd been feeling off but had chalked it down to feeling bad for the Big Yam, started his own journey down the barf-brick road. Then I started feeling woozy on Sunday morning. It was THE WORST. Ugh. I'd just been bragging about how I never get the flu and I felt awful. Thankfully, my immune system is pretty freakishly strong and I didn't get the barfs or the scoots. But I was so tired and cranky and miserable and feeling like my whole body ached and that my skin hurt - it was like coming down off particularly bad LSD (not that I know anything about that.) By that point, the Boobla had gotten over his bout of illness and so imagine feeling so uncomfortable in your skin and then having to deal with a happy baby on what turned out to be a gorgeous late-fall day and being cooped up in the house begging your equally sick partner to please feed you saltines because your arm hurts too much to lift a cracker towards your mouth. THE WORST!

The only good thing to come out of it was this photo of a particularly sweet moment:

It's like the Big Yam knew exactly what his Baba needed. He usually NEVER sleeps on us. His new heartbreaking thing when he wakes up from sleep is to sit straight up in a corner of the crib in his dark little room, crying and staring at his balled up fists in his lap. It's heart wrenching. So he woke up from his nap and was doing that thing but when the Dotytron picked him up he just snuggled in and went back to sleep. Durrrrr...so freakin' cute and sweet.

The weekend had started off really promisingly. Settlers of Cattan with Dr. Rei and Hanbo was hilarious (but cut throat) fun. My sunchoke-celery soup turned out delicious - especially topped with roasted garlic oil croutons. I loves me some croutons in soup.

Our banh mi was spectacular. Look at that thing. That is a TWO DOLLAR sandwich. How is that possible? That's an MBA thesis, right there. It's like a foot-long crusty-but-soft French loaf, stuffed with a smearing of salted butter, a smear of pate, some roasted pork, some ham-type stuff, pickled daikon and carrot, a cucumber, and sliced chilies and cilantro, if you so please (I do not). It's crazy town!

I also made us my cardamom-spiked pineapple upside down cake, which I make at least once a year.

I took today off of work to shake the rest of the sickness - last night I got some pretty bad sleep on account of the body ache and general mind-fuzz from a day spent motionless on the couch watching bad movies on TV. I can't imagine that I used to marathon TV. I can't do it anymore. I don't have it in me. I used to crave a day spent inside with blankets on the couch/bed eating snacks and considering it a failure if I didn't prepare properly and had to leave the house. I can't do it anymore. It makes me feel downright sick. Granted, that was in my early 20s, and a lot of the things I did then make me feel downright sick (see: previous post on the shady, seedy weirdos with whom I used to keep company).

Tonight we're having the roomie over for dinner. I'm making minestrone with spinach-cheese tortellini (tortellini is purchased - I'm not crazy) and we'll have it with bread and butter and maybe cheesecake brownies because I know they're the roomie's favorite. It'll be nice to get back to our regular scheduled, pretty healthy eating routine.

Fin.

I love this show

2011-11-17T12:51:00.004-05:00

I don't know how/why this came up, but it did today (came up in my head) and it made me laugh so I thought I'd share it with y'alls. This show is still consistently winning me over, unlike say, other comedy winners of years past like Modern Family (too sentimental!) and Community (too something - too caught up in its own shiz). The best thing about Community right now is Donald Glover, who is one of those insanely multi-talented people (like Mindy Kaling) that I aspire to be. He wrote for 30 Rock, he's an actor on Community, he does stand-up, and he produces some pretty good tunes with one of the best names of all time (other than Gucci Mane, natch), Childish Gambino (from the Wu-Tang name generator, natch natch). And he does most of his own production:

Seriously? Why aren't more people in my generation like this? Instead you have people who are like, mired in consumer debt, easily polarized by fringe issues (I'm looking at you, America), and who are more often than not, like the majority of my classmates, first rate dumbys. Ugh. It seriously makes me scared for the future of the public service that it's made up with so many people who are so limited (by themselves!) in so many ways. Actually, let's expand on that: I'm seriously scared by the future of our world that it's made up with so many people who are so limited in so many ways. Being smart, being politically aware, being into popular culture, and being funny are NOT mutually exclusive attributes (see also: Aziz Ansari)! The above track is like a perfect storm for Lagerfeld love - I love tinkly, anthemic, orchestral rap tracks with slow, sluggy beats. It's like my kryptonite.

This is a bit of a randomonium post. Can I also tack on that I don't like Adele? I think she comes off as phony. Her songs are such "all the single ladies" sad sack young woman bait. Meh. What I **do** love is the Prince versus Charlie Murphy skit on the Chappelle Show - so good. We watched this last Friday and were almost in tears, laughing:

Last night for dinner we had twice baked potatoes. They look like zombie potatoes because I used Guinness-infused cheddar for the topping...which obviously has to melt down like a bad skin graft. They were delicious, though.

Tomorrow is my day off - so I'm going to be doing errands and sorting out my pension and other scintillating stuff like that. We're having Dr. Rei and the Hanbo over for dinner and Settlers of Cattan, though. Maximum bo!

Fin.

2011 will forever go down in infamy

2011-11-15T19:59:00.003-05:00

as the year we paid about $500 in parking/speeding/driving without valid insurance card tickets. Seriously. We can't take Captain Save-A-Ho anywhere without getting dinged with a ticket. Add to that what we had to pay because it turns out that the Dotytron GOT HIS LICENSE SUSPENDED (he fought a parking ticket, missed the court date because of what happened with his da', forget to pay the resulting fine, and BOOM! that's the recipe for getting your license suspended in case you were wondering).

This means that this week he's been getting up just after 5am to TTC it to work. We *could* risk having him drive with a suspended license, but knowing our luck, he'd get pulled over or rear-ended or we'd end up like my friend G's neighbour, who got pulled over with his kids in the car with a suspended license and they were going to call Child Services to have his kids taken away.

Just thinking about all that money is enough to make my hanging-on-to-middle-class-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth a** cry. I keep thinking about our long-delayed kitchen/bathroom renos and how all those tickets could have gotten us...I don't know...a Toto toilet or something. Thinking about kitchen/bath renos has been consuming me lately. But that's okay. When it gets done, we are going to do it RIGHT. I'm talking: Toto toilet, Bosh dishwasher, composite counters, Marimekko shower curtain - the whole lot. Maybe...maybe...a 36" stove. Neither me, nor my line of credit(s) that will be subsidizing this venture are f**king around. We're going whole hog and it's going to look gorgeous.

Which isn't to say I'm not happy now. Look at what we had for dinner on Monday night - made in our current kitchen, with the manky mirror and the holes in the ceiling that are getting cobwebbed:

That's a delicious bacon, roasted pumpkin, and swiss chard risotto with asiago cheese. Pretty darned fantastic.

Also, truth be told, getting up just after 5am doesn't make a huge difference when you're GOING TO BED AT 9PM. LOL! That's what we do now. We watch 1 episode of television (lately it's been The Walking Dead), then go upstairs, brush our teeth, go peek in on the Boobla, and then read a book/knit/massage myrrh into our nail beds (I'll leave it to you to assign the preceding activities to the fitting party) and pass out. Also, I don't know how we could push back our mornings any more. The Big Yam wakes up at 6am invariably...and in order to get out of the house by 7:45, I need that much time for feeding the two of us, cleaning the two of us, dressing the two of us, and packing the two of us up to start our days.

The new baby has started at the daycare. He's a bit of a crybaby. Like, any time he's put down he cries. Which had been making me worry about the amount of attention that the Big Yam is getting but J is fantastic. As she says, crybaby "he has to learn" and she makes a point of distributing the love. She also seems to favour the Big Yam a bit right now because he's such a good sport about, well, everything. He smiled his way through his fever and roseola and he starts every day with her so calm and good - I think she appreciates that so far, he's a chill baby. Hopefully he stays that way so she'll stay in the biz and be willing to look after any potential future chillun of ours.

Tonight we're having twice baked potatoes for dinner. I love me a baked potato. Did you guys know that a lot of people don't eat the potato skins? That's like, a travesty for me. Potato skins are SO FREAKING good, ESPECIALLY as vehicles for sour cream and butter and dill. I love the textural contrast of that papery, dry, chewy skin giving way to a flood of buttery, dairy, potentially-bacon-studded richness. Anyway, yeah, twice baked potatoes for dinner topped with Guinness infused cheddar. Nom nom.

I devoured Mindy Kaling's book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) with unseemly haste. Well, maybe it was seemly, considering I've had it pre-ordered since early last year. I found this collection of essays so entertaining. Kaling is whip-smart, self-aware, okay with being narcissistic and frivolous and aware of pop culture (which is where I find myself warming to her more than say, Tina Fey) and as a consequence, I find her very easy to relate to. She's also hilarious - her lists and the stories of her growing up with her professional parents as an androgynous, chubby child are laugh out loud funny, which is precisely what I needed after the heaviness that was Tom Perrotta. She has also perfected the modern, social-media fostered technique of giving the reader the impression that you're getting "real" access to her - which was nice, because I personally found Bossypants (Tina Fey's essay collection) too guarded. I don't know why I'm comparing the two - is it anti-feminist to compare the two? That seems to be the trend - both Tina and Mindy are like, "don't compare us just because we're two funny, Ivy-educated women who published books of humorous essays within the same year" but I'm like, "I get that, but why shouldn't I compare you? Wouldn't I compare two autobiographies of Andrew Jackson, 7th president of the United States of America if they were published with fanfare within the same calendar year?" Like, what's more sexist here? To compare, or to allege that the comparison is sexist?

I dunno. All I know is that I found this book utterly charming and funny and her depictions of the strictness of 1st generation American parents resonated. Go get it!

Sigh. There's a new Oscar season ramping up and I feel like I've barely made a dent in the films I wanted to see last year. What's a girl to do? This season is pretty thin, IMO. Not too enthused. Did I also mention that we're pretty much booked up until the New Year? [deadpan] yay [/deadpan]

Fin.

The weekend that was

2011-11-14T07:08:00.005-05:00

fairly uneventful, by all standards. I made us a pre-class breakfast of baked eggs florentine in ham cups - it was okay - I think it would be better topped with hollandaise or a cheese sauce next time. The ham gave off quite a bit of liquid - maybe I'll try with proscuitto next time, or maybe bake the eggs in bread cups and serve the ham/proscuitto/other breakfast pork product on the side:

Saturday night after class we had the Dotytron's childhood friend S over for dinner - I made us carnitas - which are the BEST entertaining meal, ever. It's so easy! The pork does all the cooking all by its very own self and all you have to do is warm corn tortillas, open up some bottled salsa, maybe dice up some avocado if you're feeling extra ambitious, and quick-pickle some onions. Otherwise, pork shoulder slowly braised with garlic and cumin in citrus juice and then fried-crisp in its own rendered fat truly doesn't need any other adornment. My favorite mode is the pork, some pickled onions, and diced avocado squirted with lime. I ate an ungodly number of these, accompanied by a red cabbage slaw that was also extraneous - it was nice to feel like we were consuming some vegetables to combat all that lard.

The next morning I scrambled up leftover carnitas with some eggs and we had it for breakfast, with me again eating an ungodly number. I think we're going on a healthy eating binge for the next little bit - too many meals out this past week.

Sunday was a day of errands and such. We had a bit of a sad moment when I had it in my head to finish up the photo albums I've been working on by tagging them with post-it notes when the year changes - otherwise, it's kind of hard to know when things happened - when you have 10 years together, they kind of start to blur into one another. I found a photo marking a definitive year and then worked forward...coming to the end of 2010 was really, really hard. The photos for the year always end with the Christmas festivities with my family and with the Dotytron's family. Seeing my Kung Kung and the photos of Poppa D broke my heart a bit and made the sadness come. I can't quite believe what we've been through in 2011. It feels like the funeral for my grandpa was so long ago, and yet, he only passed away in February or something. I still can't quite believe that Poppa D is gone - I don't know when I'll start believing it - he was so well, until he wasn't, and it happened so quickly. The past two months feel like a living dream and look - we're midway through November already. I don't know how to express how I'm feeling - how mixed this past year has been - watching the Big Yam grow into the little joy-filled being that he is - a year of laughter and happiness punctuated with so much sadness and so many tears. I'm still in shock. I sat at our dining room table and cried for a good long time, until I looked up and beheld this:

I don't know how we're supposed to reconcile that face with losing Poppa D - the two emotions don't seem like they could possibly exist in the same world. Somehow they do - and I guess that's what makes this living.

We've lost a lot of things this year - my Kung Kung, Poppa D, the Dotytron's license (it's temporarily suspended - that's a story for another day), and, for an all-too-extended period this weekend, the Dotytron's cell phone. The little Boobla hid the Dotytron's cell phone for the better part of Saturday and Sunday, but he hid it in an obvious place and when we slowed down to actually look carefully, we found it again. I'm hoping we can do that with the other stuff, too.

Fin.

10

2011-11-11T07:50:00.006-05:00

Yesterday marked 10 years in the ongoing saga that is Karl Lagerfeld and The Dotytron. That's a third of our lives spent grinding it out, together. This is what we looked like when we first got together:

Just about every other person in that photo we no longer hang out with/associate ourselves with because they're either mad seedy, or weirdos, or jerks. I mean, I guess they're like, normal people, but totally not our style. Anyway, that's not the point.

Look at what babies we were! That was at the apex of the Dotytron's Abraham Lincoln, chin-strap raver phase. Awwwww...he was such a PLUR-tastic n00b back then. I always thought that when I met the Dotytron, I was like, old. Like, it's not like we were high school sweethearts or anything...but when you think about it, we met when we were both 22. So only, 3 years out of high school, really (well 4 for me, because I fast-tracked through high school back in those prehistoric days when there was still an OAC grade. Anyway, NBD *cough* Iwasinthegiftedprogram *cough*). And here we are, a decade later, in a house, with our happy cute little baby boy, and our 2 cats, and our network of non-seedy, non-weirdo, non-jerk friends, and our extended family.

I can't believe how quickly the past 10 years have gone by and all we have as a record of it is a few scattershot memories and photo albums. Nothing that speaks to the hundreds of thousands of mundane minutiae that make up our life together - all those companionable hours sitting on the couch, or driving to buy groceries, or walking to get coffee, or doing our respective reading before bed...no one particular moment from that swirling mass of everyday stands out, and yet taken together, the ordinariness of that blur provides the backbone for us now, 10 years later.

I got lucky somehow. So yes, maybe we're not soul mates or something, but at this point, we might as well be - we've grown on each other and together like loud, opinionated, brassy lichen on an easy-going, funny stone.

We spent our anniversary evening having dinner with Dr. Rei (pretty fitting, as my bff-ship with her dates back the same time) at Duff's Wings talking about urban transportation, the city's funding shortfall and Vibes Kartel. Which is a pretty hilarious, fitting, and timeless snapshot of the M-R-I dynamic. We're going out for a nice dinner this weekend. And we might squeeze in a Guu dinner with our Guu compadres, MHui and her hubby, later in the month. That's a pretty good way to celebrate 10 years together, I think. Even if all the Dotytron wants to ever do is go to Hashimoto and eat a $300/person kaiseki meal.

Today is Remembrance Day, which is a government and bank holiday. I kept the Big Yam home and took him to the drop-in centre and then we biked to Riverdale Farm and visited with Poppa D at the necropolis and visited with the animals at Riverdale Farm. Riverdale Farm is an urban treasure, guys. Whereas High Park Zoo makes me super sad (because I don't think it's right keeping those animals penned up in the park), Riverdale Farm, because of the farminess of it and the focus on domesticated beasts of burden, is awesome. They also do all kinds of cheap programming like knitting and needle craft and pottery for kids which is so cool and when the Big Yam is old enough, I'm totally signing him up. I'm ESPECIALLY signing him up for "Farmer's Life" which is geared towards 10-13 year olds and inexplicably has a million spots open on it's registration list. Farmer's Life 4-eva, sons.

Lolly is bringing us dinner tonight, which is sooo nice! I love having dinner brought over. Can't wait to get a visit with her. Our stove is also fixed. Huzzah! The roomie brought over Coyote Willies on Wednesday and it was pretty tasty. They make some mean "fries" (they're like crispy on the outside, but pillowy on the inside fries in the potato wedge idiom). I'm going to make us dulce de leche dessert crepes tonight.

I have class tomorrow. Boourns.

Fin.

Kim Kardashian

2011-11-09T17:13:00.003-05:00

So, the person in my life with the most to say about Kim Kardashian's divorce is (somewhat surprisingly) the Dotytron. He is OBSESSED with Kris Humphries, in a kind of classically Dotytron way. Which means that he doesn't know his name, but will periodically update me on the status on Kris and Kim's relationship by asking questions like, "Have you seen the guy Kim Kardashian is dating? He's a centaur!" So I've been hearing centaur-related updates for the past few months. I find is so funny that he thinks Kris Humphries is a centaur.

Not much to report here. I have dodgeball this evening and then the roomie is bringing us dinner, which is good, because our stove is all effed up (yay! Exactly what we need right now!). It won't turn on and when you turn the dial the "burner on" light flickers but doesn't go on completely - I think it's just a loose wire and I'm trying to get someone in to fix it. Still a pain in the butt - how are we supposed to go a few days without a stove?!??

We've started watching The Walking Dead, and by "watching" I mean, I sit with my hand up blocking my view of the television and hyperventilate and repeat tersely "I hate this show. Why are we watching this show. I hate this show."

I've also started stressing about the holidays because well - the holidays kind of blow. What the crap am I supposed to get for the Big Yam? He doesn't even know what's going on right now. He only recently figured out how to clap his hands together! I think next year I'm going to go more buck making an advent calendar and whatnot for him, but for right now, I think he'll just be happy that we have a tree that he can destroy. Ugh...I just want to call Christmas off all together.

This has been a pretty randomonium post. Sorry.

Fin.

Roseola butt

2011-11-07T19:55:00.003-05:00

Coping with a certain little roseola butt accounts for the blogging delays. The little mister had a pretty rough weekend - he was clingy and didn't want to be put down and was being a bit of a whiner. It was tough to deal with, especially when you're trying to get a midterm done at the same time. At a certain point, when the Big Yam was crying to get my attention I just kept saying, "SHUT UP" and then the Dotytron chastised me for being a jerk and I felt really bad.

Especially because later that same day, I was lying on the futon mattress on the floor of the Big Yam's room (we haven't moved it out from the night we kept a sick and sleepless vigil over him) trying to nap while he crawled around and played around me. At one point, he lay down on his back beside me and I sang "Twinkle Twinkle" and did the hand motions and then we found a scrap of paper and started playing this silly made-up game where I kind of flapped it around and it made him giggle over and over again. Imagine how bad I felt then for telling him to shut up when he was sick and just wanting to be held. IMAGINE. I'll give you an idea: REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD. Like, approaching war crimes-bad.

Out of all the wonderful, wonderful, new, heart-piercing feelings that are associated with parenthood, you and your child lying on the floor on your backs, side by side, looking up together - playing with your hands, reading a story, watching the slow-moving drift of the mobile - is an especially sweet one. Feeling your child's giggles reverberate through his cheek pressed against yours at the same time as you hear that sweet, sweet sound so close in your ear will make your heart swell with a love you didn't know was possible. I love the little muffin top so much.

[/gross human-interest story sentimentality]

Holy crikes. I might as well be that great dane with the seeing eye dog friend at this point.

Friday nights' dinner: braised Chinese style pork belly in a sweet soy sauce with eggs, sautéed Chinese greens from our CSA, and brown rice

The Dotytron and the Big Yam at the Evergreen Brickworks. This photo doesn't adequately capture the magic of that place - the cold snap of the fall, the whispering visibility of people's breath in the air, the comfort of chilly fingers wrapped around warm cups of coffee, the camaraderie around the fires, or waiting in line for a breakfast crepe. This is fast becoming one of our favorite Saturday morning rituals.

Saturday nights' dinner - turkey and brown rice cabbage rolls. So good.

Saturday night's dessert - pouding chomeur w/ vanilla ice cream

Sunday breakfast - toasted pecan whole wheat waffles with bacon and bison breakfast sausages from the new store, Sausage Partners, that just opened up a hop, skip, and a jump away from us.

Sunday night's dinner at Momma D's: red currant glazed, prune stuffed pork tenderloin, baked potatoes, asparagus, her special turnip & apple casserole

Monday nights' dinner - braised sausages from Sausage Partners again - the "organ grinder" (organ meats) and the bacon and bison ones with a white bean, kale, tomato, and rosemary ragout.

Last night was book club - I love my academic book club ladies. I stayed until almost midnight talking with the stragglers. It's such a nice, supportive atmosphere and it's funny to see how this disparate group of women spanning a wide age range has come together and found commonalities and become friends.

Class tonight - ugh. I definitely have to go as I've missed the last 2. I'll leave during the break and hope for the best when it comes time to do the final take-home exam.

I brought leftover braised sausage for dinner.

Fin.