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!)

Changing tastes

Here is a list of foods I like now but I didn't like or hadn't tried before I started living with Matt. Is it all his fault? Who is to say?

• butter


• beer


• wine


• party pizza


• mushrooms


• olives — green and black


• capers


• asparagus


• pizza crust dipped in ranch dressing


• goat cheese


• onion rings


• pickled eggs


• eggplant


• Indian food


• seven layer burritos

Are you from the 50s or something?

Tonight I discovered that IKEA has stopped carrying the bedframe I planned to buy next month. Bastards. We found a nice looking dining table and chairs and cabinet/server thing on Craigslist (go Craigslist!) that we are going to go see tomorrow. I really like the (currently out of stock) table from IKEA that we picked out. It's very solid. But maybe this table and chairs will fit the bill even better. And hopefully the dude who is selling me two bookcases will get his helldamn act together and actually bring them by this weekend.

Mustafa just cleaned out Danger Kitty's ear with his tongue. Gross. Yet intriguing.

TJ is now on Myspace. Woop! He says his favorite TV show is That 70s Show. I'll pretend I didn't read that.

Matt has turned me into a wino.

Today I remembered that we have the first eight episodes of season three of Battlestar Galactica downloaded from iTunes, and that kind of got my inner geek excited. But I pushed her back down. She's not allowed to come out.

Matt is in love with this one song by TV On The Radio that is straight out of the 80s and makes me want to listen to the Pointer Sisters. Jump for my love!

I am crocheting red, white, and blue leg warmers. Hell yes!

I think I'm going to be entering into the world of tight deadlines this upcoming week. Wish me luck.

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.)

Extra protein?

Today I made two recipes from the cookbook Chelka sent us for Christmas, The Balanced Plate by Renee Loux. One was seasoned steamed greens and the other was wasabi mashed sweet potatoes. Both were quite tasty and pretty darn easy, although I did put a bit too much wasabi in the potatoes. Matt finished his food, and I had about two bites left when I wondered aloud about the little white oval shaped things in the mashed potatoes and popped one in my mouth to see if the taste would give it away. "Looks like insect eggs," Matt said as I swallowed. I didn't finish my mashed potatoes.

The last two weeks I worked and worked and worked like a crazy person. I racked up 90 hours in ten straight days. The most I worked in a day was 15 hours this past Thursday, although the Monday of that week was a close second, coming in at 12 hours plus an hour of commuting time. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

BUT! Some good came of it all. I produced two games for Telus Mobility: a text messaging game that challenges you to translate textspeak into real English and a picture/video messaging game featuring monkeys.

I also kicked out a holiday card for SHS where you can design your own ugly holiday sweater and view a gallery of sweaters that others have made. I highly recommend this site. I usually get sick of my projects, especially if I have had to produce them quickly as I did this one, but I keep going back to see what new sweaters people have created. I am really impressed with the number of people interacting with the site. As of this moment, there are 346 sweaters in the gallery. With user-generated content sites, the general rule of thumb is that 1% of people who visit the site will actually contribute something. I think this site blows that 1% statistic away!

Change of world view

Tonight I realized that the word camcorder is short for camera recorder, and now it sounds even more stupid to me than it did before.

My baby's a damn good one

Yesterday, Matt spend a good chunk of the day making me a present, which turned out to be a mix CD. When asked why he put each song on the CD, he would answer, "Because it's a good song about love." I love my new CD, but I don't think I expressed my gratitude very well yesterday. So let me take this opportunity to tell everyone that my mix CD is awesome, almost as awesome as the boy who made it for me. He's a good one. Lemme tell ya. The rest of ya'll missed out, cuz he's mine!

Ketchup Ball

My teachers in school sometimes used the term "catch up ball," as in "Don't get behind in your assignments, or you'll have to play catch up ball." While I understood that they were saying "catch up" I always thought it was a funny phrase because it sounds like "ketchup ball." How would you play ketchup ball anyway? Sounds pretty messy to me.

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.

New recipe post: apples

I just posted a new recipe post to my myspace blog.

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.