Goodnight, sweet prince

Today we gave away The Snot Rocket. May he have many happy times with his new family!

In which Mustafa poses with our newest acquisition

$5 from a garage sale in St. Henri
It shall soon be on the art wall!

Squashed

This is why I should never attempt to make any sort of baked good involving zucchini ever again. They always end up like this.

Kickin' my own ass

Last night I reluctantly left my warm, cozy apartment mid-Phillies game to venture out into the chilly night and make my way to Club Lambi on the Plateau to see Portugal The Man, The Great Depression, and Rocky Votolato. You may or may not know this, but I hate going to shows. I especially hate going to shows by myself, and last night I was on my own. Happily, it ended up being a really good time, and I'm extremely glad I dragged my butt out the door to have a little adventure.

Portugal The Man was rocknroll. The Great Depression was full of lovely harmonies. And Rocky kicked some serious ass. Yay Rocky! He played mostly new stuff but some older stuff too, including "Like Silver" from "Burning My Travels Clean" and "Montana" from "Suicide Medicine," which I really wanted to hear. While the first band was playing, I attempted to purchase a t-shirt from the merch girl (who I think may be his wife, as she is on the cover of one of his albums) but was thwarted by lack of funds. I only had $8, and they were $15. Damn. After The Great Depression played, I tried to put those same eight dollars to use for one of their CDs, but they were $10. Damn again. When the whole show was over, I did something I never ever do. I went back to talk to the merch girl/Mrs. Votolato. I told her that the show was awesome and I was so glad they had come to play in Canada, and wonder of wonders, she told me I could have a shirt for my measly $8. Yay! Humans are really nice sometimes.

As I walked all the way down St. Laurent to the bus stop at Sherbrooke (and just caught the bus, thank goodness!), I was in a haze of lovely Rocky Votolato music-ness. Mmmmm, good shows are so very good. There were tons of people still out and about, lining up to get into clubs, drunkenly leaving clubs, shouting across the street to each other, chatting on cell phones. It was such a nice feeling to be in a city where stuff actually happens at night and to have just taken part of a little bit of the action.

And the Phillies won.

What I did on my weekend vacation

This past weekend I went to the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. There were sheep. There was wool. There were also alpacas, llamas, goats, rabbits, and border collies. I enjoyed looking all all the fibers in their various stages of processing, from being attached to the animals, to being sheared, picked, dyed, spun, and knitted. Meeting people who do the sheering, dying, spinning, etc, was also pretty cool. I only bought two skeins of yarn: one intended (the wool below) and one impulse (the silk).

Besides the festival, I enjoyed a bean and cheese burrito. Mmmmm... even mediocre Mexican food tastes amazing when you come from the land of Quebec. I really like being in Burlington, Vermont. Being a college town, and this being the beginning of the school year, we did see some stupid college kids, but compared to many other college towns I've visited or lived in during the same time of year, the Catamounts were overall a very tolerable bunch.

Were we to leave Montreal, Burlington would be my first pick. I haven't spent a good amount of time in any of the rest of Vermont, so perhaps there are other places in the same state I would like just as well. Burlington has a nice small town feel, like there is a strong sense of community there. It's nice and laid-back and pleasingly hippy. I know Matt is against living in a hippy town. As leftist as he can sometimes appear, he actually has a deep dislike of hippies (you'll have to ask him what his definition of a hippy is since some might think he is married to one) and is disgusted with liberals. It can be trying for me sometimes. The anti-hippy part, not the anti-liberals part.

I'll leave you with some photos.


Sunset on Lake Champlain


An alpaca


Cormo wool yarn from Foxhill Farms in Lee, MA. One of the sheep who contributed some fleece to this skein is named Carabee.


Silk yarn

You can see many more pictures in the couple of blog posts the lovely Ariadne ladies have posted recently.

Matt is not dead

Don't worry; Matt's appendix hasn't ruptured. He's not dead. He's actually feeling better. If he was dead, though, I think this would be a good picture to blow up really big and have framed and displayed at the funeral.

Watch out, boys

Boom boom bah boom.

More hair nonsense

Thanks to all my lovely friends for voting on what i should do with my hair. It was a very tight race with the Joan of Arc hair barely beating out the blurry hair and the long hair with bangs, which tied for second. Unlike the Quebec government, there can only be one winner; all other candidates must be discarded. Photoshop to the rescue!

As it turns out, I don't look so very wonderful with bangs.



And as Joan of Arc, I look a little akward.



But this one's not so bad.



Right now, I am sold on that last one. Is it just because I did the best photoshopping job on that one? Ack! Must stop wavering and just get my hair cut!

Stormie style

My friends Abby and Larry recently had a little baby named Stormie. I crocheted her the Fine Lines jumpsuit/romper thing from Candy Babies. It turned out pretty cute, although I do have a few issues with it. One is that I used cotton/acrylic yarn instead of just cotton. Stupid me didn't read the label closely enough. It ended up kind of heavy and not as soft as I had hoped. And of course, plain old single crochets all the way through are so boring and kind of ugly to look at. Why can't crochet look and feel as nice as knitting? Why???

Hair help!

Dear reader(s?), I need your help. I am dreadfully sick of my hair, and I need a change. But what to do to it? Here are my main concerns:

• I haven't had it cut since July, so it's pretty shapeless and boring. I end up putting it in a ponytail a lot.


• I hate having my hair even the tiniest bit in my face, but it looks dumb when it's all shoved behind my ears. Hence the ponytails.


• I have no styling ability or patience, so I need something super easy.


• All the girls in Montreal are beautiful and hip, so I want something with at least a bit of style

Here's what it looks like now, freshly blown dry and frizzy:



Here are a few pictures I've found online that I'm considering:

Just cut bangs and let it grow.

More pictures of this same girl can be found here and here.

Cut it off in a way that will grow out nicely.

There is another, less blurry picture of this chick with her hair grown out a bit longer here.

Cut it pixie short.

Too '90s? Looks like it requires more styling than I'm prepared to give it.

Cut it boring short.

I can't tell if it's cute or if it's too Joan of Arc.

So... what should I do?

Voting has ended. View results here.

We love carbs

Matt got The Bread Baker's Apprentice for his birthday from my mom. (His response was, "Danger Kitty, we're gonna destroy this thing.") Yesterday, Matt helped me make my first loaf of bread. It actually started the night before, as I had to make a starter, but the baking was yesterday, and this is what we got out of it:



I'm pretty proud. It was tasty. There is just a tiny bit left today, and I bet it will be gone before nightfall.

A couple days ago, on Easter, Matt made us hot cross buns since all the stores were closed, and we couldn't buy any. The recipe made six. We ate them all that night. Here's a picture of the last one to be devoured:

My first sock ever!

One down, one to go. For all you yarn junkies out there, the yarn is Opal Flamingo.

Shalom in the home

I have a theory about people and their houses: the home of a person who feels really comfortable and at peace when they are there sort of soaks in that peacefulness and it eminates from the very walls of the space. I used to think this peaceful house phenomenon only happened with aging hippies, but now I realize that it can be anyone; aging hippies just tend to have a sense of peace about them. Some peaceful homes I have encountered are the Gelbarts' house, my great-grandma's house, Matt's mom's back porch, and the peaceful home to end all peaceful homes: Kathy and Howard's house on Jefferson. My goodness, you walk in that house, and it's like all your troubles have melted away. Sometimes they would go out of town, and we would be in charge of feeding Caramel and Missy the cats. I didn't take near enough advantage of those times when I was allowed to go in that house all by myself and bask in the serenity. One time they were out of town during one of those pre-spring warm spells, when for a couple of days in late February or early March, it's in the mid-70s and sunny with a nice breeze and you're tricked into thinking it's time to start planting your garden. During that time, I went over to feed the cats and then sat on their back porch -- screened in, unlike ours -- and sat and played with Caramel and let the sun and wind calm me. It's one of the most peaceful moments I can think of. Since then, at this time of year when spring seems to be creeping in, daylight savings time has started, and march madness is on tv, I long to be in a peaceful house with a peaceful back porch on a peaceful day. This is my ultimate goal: to have that kind of pervading serenity and calm in my house.

Consumer madness

I am in love with this sweater, but it's costs $650. Why???

Pee-Wee loves me

Check out what I got from Pee-Wee Herman. (I don't check that email account very often or I would have seen it earlier!)

Done, done and done!

This morning, I finished the baby blanket for Lauren's baby. I could have finished it last night, but as the midnight hour approached, my level of sobriety decreased, and I thought it wiser to finish up in the morning. I guess it works out better this way since I finished the blanket in 2007, and the baby will be born in 2007 too! All in all, this took about four months to finish with a few Christmas presents taking up some of that time too. I started it in the car on the way to a canoe trip on the Niagua River in Missouri this June and finished it this morning on the couch here in Montreal. I also worked on it on a few different Greyhound buses on trips to Vermont and Boston. I'd say it's a well traveled blanket. I'll be sad to see it go, but we had a good time together, and now I know that I can easily make another with fewer mistakes in it. (Don't tell Lauren about that last part.)

Animal liberation + uncheese

Tonight Matt and I made the worst pizza we've ever made. It was kind of my fault and kind of Matt's fault, but mostly I think it was the fault of Jo Stepaniak, author of The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. Yes, we made uncheese pizza.

I should have known better when I saw that the recipe called for 1/2 cup of nutrional yeast, which I find to taste really nasty. I should have stopped when I realized I was missing a key ingredient. And I really should have let the blender run longer so as to avoid chunks of oatmeal in my cheese. Alas, I did none of these things, and now I have about two and a half cups of mushy stuff that looks like hummus but tastes like... well, not cheese.

Matt's part of the story is just another chapter in his endless search to find a pizza crust recipe that tastes really good and not bready and doesn't take upwards of three hours to prepare. This time he went with a recipe involving beer. Was this just so that he could go buy beer? He may deny it, but I think it was. (Incidentally, I was the one who pointed out the fact that cases of Stella Artois were on sale at the IGA and that the purchase of said case intitled one to a free commemorative tote bag. The tote is huge.) Despite several reviews stating the contrary, the pizza crust was really bad. It's what I imagine hard tack or whatever the pioneers ate on the road tasted like. Only fresher, not that that makes it much better.

The pizza sauce I made was tasty. Not my best, but tasty nonetheless. Here is a picture of our pizza. The uncheese is under the sauce since its texture would have made it impossible to spread on top of the sauce. The cheese on top is colby that I wish I had saved for more noble purposes.



One highlight of the evening: an animal liberation protest outside our house! Oh yes! This is the second protest we've witnessed on our street. Both times the cops have shown up before the protesters. This protest lasted much longer than the first, and there were way more cops this time. We even saw a few in riot gear: masks, clubs and all. However, as I'm sure you can imagine, there was no need for riot cops. The vegan protesters were quite peaceful as well as bilingual. The first protest was in French, so I'm not sure what their demands were.

Thanksgiving #2

On Thursday, we had our second Thanksgiving feast of the year -- this time on American Thanksgiving and in Boston with Kris And Friends. This picture of Kris and Porky Roy sums it all up for me.