Thinking of posting on Buy&Sell

Wanted: one new body. Preferably something that looks like Heidi Klum, but will take a Victoria Beckham if that's all there is available. Would like the face of Audrey Hepburn at an early age.

Willing to trade in one half-used, short body, in not bad shape and a bag of choc chip cookies. Please respond soon.

(I'd keep this one, but it's just decided to go into "that time of the month" without proper notice. I'd like to have been able to eat lots of junk food and be really bitchy for a good reason.)

Twitter: Facebook for ADD

I'm sorry I haven't written in a while, nor have I been on Facebook. I've been Twittering instead because it's so much more my style. A sentence or two is all that comprises each post and I'm meeting new people on there I'd never have thought I'd meet. I mean, I'm following GodtheFather, SeverusSnape and Hugh_Jackman of all people. Who'da thunk you'd be hanging with celebrities?

Talk about rose coloured glasses

Hubby was telling me an anecdote from work about this woman at work who’s so stupid...

(Audience shouts: How stupid is she?)

Well I’ll tell ya. She’s been living here for a while now, but her daughter’s been living in China on her own. Her daughter’s 20 years old, which is legal age by all accounts.

SW (stupid woman): I’m worried about my daughter; she’s at Granville Island by herself.

Hubby: Why are you worried about her?

SW: She’s there by herself.

Hubby: And?

SW: Well, she’s special.

Hubby: Special how?

SW: She doesn’t speak English very well.

Hubby: There are a lot of people here from China who don’t speak English well.

SW: But she’s special.

Hubby: Special in what way?

SW: She’s pretty.


So apparently the rest of us our dog meat and her daughter is the latest Helen of Troy. I will now go kill myself in shame of my ugliness.

Can I have my own planet please?

It’s amazing the mentality of many single men out there. I follow a guy on Twitter who has posted how he went down to some skanky Mexican strip bars and received lap dances galore, but then laments how he can’t meet women.

Hello, Earth to typical single male who thinks with his penis! Women are no longer sitting around (never have been actually) waiting for some guy, any guy to come along and marry them. These guys all want pure girls, but think it’s all fine and dandy to go out and do things that they probably wouldn’t want their mother to know about, let alone someone they want to sign a marriage certificate with. I admit, I’m old fashioned, but I appreciated the fact that my husband had less sexual encounters in his single life than he has toes. Way less.

And on the note of male bashing, please visit http://stupidstuffmyhusbanddoes.blogspot.com/ and share your stories with Kelly. I personally will be visiting that site at least once as week to see if I find stories where I can point at the computer and say “OMG, I know exactly what she means!”

So much Twittering, so little time

I really don't know how my sister does it. I'm now following 31 people on Twitter, and have 19 following me. That's already enough to keep me distracted from working, not that it takes much when I'm transcribing minutes. I guess that's why people have Tweetdeck, to respond directly to those twitters that are directed to them, but there are some interesting comments floating around in general.

Good food even in the 'burbs

In my econ class, someone had written about an article about how McDonald's is still making money in these hard times. The funny thing is, it's not cheap to eat at McDonald's, ethnic foods is so much better, tastier and better bang for the buck.

We went to a little Japanese restaurant the other night up by our place, where, there were actually (gasp!) Japanese sushi chefs. Hubby, being his usual conservative self, had a miso soup and chicken and beef teriyaki. He likes miso soup, who woulda thunk it? Not that this was his first time having it, but I always figured he had it because it came with the dinner box.

I on the other hand, perused their fairly extensive selection of rolls, and ordered a Fire and Rock Roll. I can't remember exactly what else was in it, but there was spicy scallops and a sweet sauce and a tangy sauce. That and the miso soup I had for a starter was the perfect meal for about $10. Beat that McDonald's!

Be grateful

I was cranky yesterday (I know, what's new) but then I was thinking, there's so much more I should be grateful for than to be cranky about. It's been a beautiful few days, I really like the people I work with, my husband will actually help with cooking and cleaning (if I let him) and I don't work in a toxic environment anymore.

Now if I could just win the lottery...

Help, help, fashion police, fashion police

Although work is a place of higher education, it obviously doesn't translate to higher fashion sense. Sitting outside yesterday with a friend, we observed the comings and goings of the students. One had on a jacket that went down past her her bum, but I think her legs were bare until her fuzzy boots started. How many poor innocent dust bunnies had to die to make those boots for her?

Another girl was almost worse, she was wearing a bomber jacket with white short shorts, dark leggings and boots. White?!!?! Unless you're in a winter photo shoot in the middle of the Arctic, trying to pose with those cute seal pups before they get clubbed to death, white bottoms are not a good look. Especially when all it does draw attention to your ass. Yet another was wearing those super high waisted jeans that I hope died a quick death. Those remind me of old men who pull their pants up to their armpits. It doesn't look good on them and it certainly doesn't look good on the young, I don't care how good looking you are, or you think you are.

And although I admire people who wear what they want, fashion or societal decrees be damned, I really don't want to see larger people wearing very short skirts that ride up in the middle when they walk. There was a girl the other day who was wearing exactly that, and even her pantyhose could not hide the fact that she had Costco sized containers of cottage cheese hidden (actually not so hidden) on her back thighs. I guess I'm just old, but I long for the days when people dressed to hide flaws, not put up neon signs pointing to them.

Hubby's antics

Our usual routine in the morning is I get up to exercise and put our lunches together and hubby makes coffee. We got a real lunchbag for him now so that he's not trying to juggle all his glass containers and coffee while getting into the car. It's a better system this way. This morning, I went to put his lunch into his lunch bag, and he hadn't even taken out his empty containers from yesterday. I chided him about that and his response was, "Musicians don't remember things, they're absentminded." That's professors you forgetful person you!

He also stole my book to read on the weekend, since I was away. The book is called "The Forger's Spell" and it's about a forger called Van Meergren who managed to fool the Nazis into thinking his paintings were real Vermeers. In fact, he managed to fool a few people, not because his paintings are as beautiful, but it's the art of illusion and deceiving people into believing what they want to believe (kinda like religion, wouldn't you say?) Anyway, hubby wasn't feeling well on Saturday, so he spent most of the day in front of the fireplace reading this book. He said he got through about 80 pages, which is amazing for a man who can't finish most books because of his lack of attention. Will wonders never cease?

rants and raves...missed

I was rather cranky on Monday, having one of those whatever can go wrong will go wrong sort of days so it's a good thing I didn't write here, otherwise, no one would visit again. I will instead, relay a funny story that happened early this morning. This is for the benefit of anyone who is passing by.

This morning, around 3:00am, I got woken up by hubby talking in his sleep. He was facing me and I was on my back. Normally, because we have a king size bed, by morning he's on one side and I'm on the other, as far away from each other as possible, but not this morning. After he woke me up with his yelling, I closed my eyes to get back to sleep. I heard him spit and I felt moisture on my face. The guy had actually spit at me!

I asked him in the morning, after we were both more fully awake if he had been having strange dreams. He said yes, that he dreamt he was having to face a 16ft. high llama that was going to eat one of our dogs (we don't have dogs in real life, so better in his dreams) so he spat at the llama. He hadn't realized that he had actually physically spat. Luckily for him I'm not too antagonistic otherwise, he would've ended up off the bed at that point.

Positive Thoughts

A friend of mine was telling me how she's find a new man...sort of. It doesn't appear that either are wanting to make a commitment but they're having a good time so that's what matters. Although I don't know her that well, it seems to me that she's a very good person and deserves better than what life has handed her. I've been thinking that she needed some goodness in her life and now she's got this. So that begs the question, does positive thinking help? Even by someone else?

My dear sister has won many a gift through blogging contests and deservedly so. She's got so many good friends that she's met on-line and I think it's because she's a positive person who goes out of her way to help out others and make people happy. I didn't realize, for example, that she had sent roses to a blogger friend to cheer her up. That to me, is what good karma is all about.

A new resolution

I'm going to take a page from my sister's blog page and try and write here a little more frequently. Granted, probably no one will notice except her, however, if someone happens to drop by looking for the end of the internet (and kudos for that link to a prof I knew) stops by and peruses, welcome. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable.

This will be less about food from now on, since there are so many good food blogs out there, but rather more my thoughts du jour or just rants because I'm PMSing. I'm doing this for several reasons: 1) it's as good a way to procrastinate as any, 2) hopefully I'll learn how to take thoughts out of my brain and put them down in writing again and 3) with any luck, this rant will give someone a good chuckle or piss off anyone I didn't like in the first place.

So happy reading through this and all the much better posts out there.

A Fresh Start

Reading my sister's blog and seeing all her friends posting there has motivated me to write a bit more. I was spoiled this Christmas with a breadmaker. I've been wanting one for a while and made do with the food processor and mixer (and the top of the coffee machine for proofing) but this is so much easier! It' s so easy in fact, that we bought our dear friend one for Christmas so that he can tell all the girls he meets that he bakes. What gal wouldn't love a guy who can do that?

With all the snow we got this winter, we got rather snowbound, which isn't a bad thing, until you start to get cabin fever. For me it was a chance to do alot more baking (3 different types of bread in the first couple of days of having the breadmaker) as well as doing other cooking. I decided, since I had bought 36 eggs, that it was a good time to make pasta. I have 2 different pasta machines, one which kneads and rolls out the dough (kinda like the Playdoh machine for making hair) and the second one is just the one that rolls the dough. I decided to use the latter because I thought I would try and make some turkey tortellini/ravioli. There's something very comforting and down to earth about running the dough through the pasta machine. As you turn the dial to get the dough thinner and longer, it's almost sexy in a way. I think I'm chanelling Nigella.

I made the ravioli but as we weren't having it that same night, I decided to store it. Note to self for next time, dust with more flour! By the time I got around to cooking it, the dough had congealed into one big lump and wouldn't separate nicely for love or money. Come to think of it, what would ravioli want with either anyway? So I ended up cooking it for a lot longer than I would've if the pasta was fresh, but the porcini mushroom sauce I made to go with it made it all worthwhile.

Christmas baking

Well the idea was to start my Christmas baking this weekend, but somehow it got waylaid with the here and now instead. I had grand plans to make some icebox cookies so that they could just be thawed out when it came time, and thrown in the oven and save myself tons of time. But then I noticed I had two lemons to be used, so first I had to make lemon poppyseed muffins and a lemon bread. Then I had a hankering and R. always has a hankering for chocolate chip cookies, so those had to be added to the list. But I wisely started on the famous UBC cinnamon buns first, at least scalding the milk and waiting for it to cool and made the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies while the milk cooled down. While the cookies were in the oven, I continued onto making the dough for the buns.

I have to remind myself next time to halve the recipe. While I love the idea of having 18 buns (or however many I ended up with), the mixer just cannot handle that much dough. It mixed it, but it also went all the way up the mixer and I spent almost as much time cleaning the mixer as I did making the buns.

At least the black and white cookies were also easy to make while the dough was proofing. That's the great thing about cookies, everything goes together so quickly and the baking time isn't that long, it's almost instant gratification.

The best part is how nice the house smells when there's baked goods in the oven, and how warm it gets. It was a good prelude to doing the Christmas baking at least.

Food, in a manner of speaking

We had an administrator's retreat today and for the professional development part of the retreat, a speaker was brought in to do a presentation on the Power of Food (that's what he called it). Now far be it for me to say how much you need to pay a motivational speaker but no matter what the cost, I think it's important that the person does due diligence in researching their topics before speaking.

I'd heard of the talk before, in fact, this gentleman has been on campus to speak a few times now, and he's almost as popular as Rachael Ray. His talk is on how the foods affects how we feel, our energy level, blah, blah, blah. I'll give him credit in not talking about one hit wonders, like the Atkins diet, however, he was there mostly to promote his product line which he sells, along with his motivational books and recipes, and services as a life coach.

The main reason I found this entertaining is that being in the field of Medicine, two of our faculty members attended the session and you could tell that they were not nearly as impressed by his talk as some of the administrators. In fact, in discussion over lunch, our director said that some of his statements were downright false. Of course the faculty members are far too polite to say anything, but I wonder if they were having thoughts like I was. I was sorely tempted to raise my hand during the session and ask if his background was in Nutritional Sciences, or Chemistry, knowing full well from reading his website, that it was neither. Also, as my boss pointed out, the speaker said when he opened his fridge, he could see his cooked quinoa, his flax seeds and hemp seeds and whole oat groats waiting for him; when she opened her fridge, she has a large bottle of wine and some different jars of sauces for flavouring. My boss looks great and so you think I'm going to follow the sayings of some snake oil salesman, I mean speaker, or a doctor who's studied the science of health? I also managed to lose a fair bit of weight in my early 20's, I just wasn't smart enough to make a living out of telling people how I did it.

The birthdays that keep giving

Friends of ours took us out for dinner the other night, as part of my birthday gift. It was a dinner at Bacchus Bistro, at Domaine de Chaberton in Langley. My first thought was, what would a place out in Langley know about good food. Well they obviously know a fair bit. The service was impeccable, very friendly server who reminded R of Drew Barrymore, and of course our friends were fun and great conversationalists. We began with appetizers, L had the foie gras which of course came with brioche toast, fig marmalade, pickles and dipping sauces. He'd never had foie gras before, but loved every bite of it. C had the onion tarte, which smelled absolutely divine. For some reason, I think R & I had the seafood bisque, which while it didn't have the salt air about it that the one at The Chef and the Carpenter had, was still absolutely amazing.

Dinner was the venison roast for L (the special of the night), the salmon for R, and I had the halibut special. (don't ask what C had, I can't remember). But everyone definitely oohed and ahhed over their meals. Oh, and they brought us scalloped potatotes to share, which was so rich and yummy, I would've scarfed the whole thing down if I hadn't been feeling so full already. I wasn't thinking of having the menu prix fixe, but it turned out that since I had already ordered two of the specials, I might as well have the dessert as well. I had the lemon tart, which was a perfect way, I thought to finish off the evening. L had the chocolate mousse which looked sinfully delicious.

It was nice sitting outside on the covered patio as there was a large party of 30ish women inside, and we all know how rowdy a group of women can get. We finished off the evening with some chocolate at home to make it the perfect evening.

This past Sunday, N took us out to dinner for his birthday. Silly I know, but he had a gift certificate from the Washington Avenue Grill for a free meal for him. We'd been here before with R's parents for brunch which was very lovely. The one thing about going to White Rock is that you have to pay for parking, all the time practically. They're worse than downtown Vancouver about their pay parking times. But I guess they figure they're a small area, so they're going to milk it for all it's worth. But I digress.

We all began our dinners with the seafood chowder, which was really tasty. It was a difficult choice since so many items looked so good, but that turned out to be a very good decision on our parts. For entrees, N had the mixed seafood trio, I had the ahi tuna and R had the special of the night, Alaskan king crab legs and an 8 oz. steak.

I guess I had expected more out of this restaurant since they do call it fine dining, and the chef had done a really nice job with the food, but the service left something to be desired. I'm not expecting, or even wanting a super bubbly server and a prancing pepper boy, but at least show that you've had some training in service. The girl who re-filled our glasses would reach across the table to re-fill N's glass, rather than going around to his side. The only good server really, was the one who brought us our food and knew to serve from the left. However, they didn't bring R either a shell cracker or the seafood fork so that he could extricate the meat from the crab legs. They completely forgot the crab legs for another table.

I'm not upset by this, but I think that the owners should try and have the servers put a little more effort into their jobs. Or maybe I'm used to Vancouver restaurants where they actually have to compete for business.

And the free things in life

are best. Got my book from Joanna today (yay!). Can't wait to read it, however, wait it will, until I finish at least a couple more questions for my homework. I flipped through it quickly and it looks like exactly what I need.

We had a surprise farewell for a guy at work today, so of course, that meant more free food. I helped get the food ready and got kudos for presentation. It's amazing how the little things can make people ooh and aah like that. I had placed the strawberries around the outer edge of a plate, all facing the same way and in the middle of the plate, I had placed orange wedges. Then I took some more strawberries and placed them between the oranges. Simple, but people seem to like it.

The good things in life

Not the best things, those are free; the good things cost a lot more. well some at least. The surprise bday party hubby threw for me was good. Lots of good food like BBQ duck and soy sauce chicken (which BTW, I didn't get to eat nearly enough of, being the guest/host of honour), fried rice, fried noodles, lasagne, cheeses coming out of the yin yang, spinach dip, hummus, hors d'oeurves, cheesecake, chinese pastries and the birthday cake. Yes, a beautiful cake from PICA which was way too big for the amount of people we had there. It was a lemon flavoured cake with bits of strawberry jam making a checkerboard design on the inside. Absolutely wonderful.

The best thing is unrelated in a way, altho it happened on my birthday (or close enough to it that I'm going to count it as such), I won a prize from The Soapbar Blog. Mind you, it's not nearly as good as winning something that was made by Joanna, however, it was still winning something, and as my dear sister said, maybe this means my luck is turning.

Back to reality

Well my sister and her family have gone home again, after two weeks of fun and lots of eating. The best part of when they come to visit, besides the fantastic company, is the eating. Besides the fact that our parents try and kill us by feeding us chicken that's been left out overnight, we do get to eat all sorts of other wonderful things. Our parents would go and get crazy chinese things for us, such as the squid dyed to a bright orange, or the boneless chicken feet (WTF?)

Almost every other day, our parents would go to a chinese bakery and buy all our favourite buns. And because I was off for the whole time this time, I was able to go for dim sum with them. Oh boy did I miss doing that. Just don't get into town enough to do that, although it's probably a good thing.

On our own, we visited tons of great restaurants. Thanks again to my wonderful sister and b-i-l who treated me to all those meals out. I hadn't been to Bridges up until then and I can see why it's so popular. Great food, incredible view and a sunny day doesn't hurt either. We also went to my sister's fave restaurant in Vancouver, the Afghan Horsemen. For once she didn't go with her usual entree of Bandejan Borani, which I'm sure surprised the proprietor more than how much the kids have grown. The food there is always great, and now in their new location, while a little more difficult to find parking, at least you can fit yourself and another personality in the bathroom without hurting yourself.

We also ate from Green Lettuce, various vendors from Granville Island, McQueen's Upstairs and Salmon House on the Hill. The boys were enamoured with Dolce Amore on Commercial Drive, and were very disappointed when they first thought it had changed to be a full time wine tasting establishment. Once they realized it was just more streamlined they happily went there as often as they could with their dad.

Another great thing about my sister's visit is they bring the nice weather with them. Course that meant that the weather was also nice enough to go for long walks at Bunzten Lake, and thankfully they didn't take me along to hike Lynn Headwaters. But we certainly did a fair bit of walking, almost enough to walk off all those calories that we ate.

Lucky number 13

Considering the circumstances, this has been a nice weekend. First I had my friend come over on Saturday for the first time. Then an old, dear friend dropped by on Sunday to offer more moral support. It was a gorgeous day out, as well as our anniversary, and so hubby said that we should go for a walk and then he'd cook me dinner. To me, a walk means a pair of shorts and runners, so I was a little surprised when he was all dressed up in dress pants and a jacket. He finally admitted that we were going out for dinner and he was hoping I'd dress up.



We drove downtown and surprisingly, he didn't bite anyone's head off for being a stupid driver. It took a little while but we managed to find a parking spot and went for a nice long walk from Sunset Beach to Stanley Park. I was a little overdressed for the walk, in my little black dress, with a black blazer and black shoes, but then again, there's a real cross section of people down there, including one guy we saw who was probably only 2 inches taller than me, except he had his hair teased up so high, he must've stood 5'5" to 5'6". Here's a picture of the guy. It's hard to really tell from this picture, but his hair is quite high.











Dinner ended up being at The Fish House at Stanley Park. We began with martinis, I ordered hubby a Lemon Drop (Absolut Citron Vodka, lemon liqueur, Triple Sec with a sugared rim), and I had the Lost Lagoon (a variation on Blue Lagoon). These were our substitutes for our appetizers. Maybe not the smartest alternatives, but they were tasty nonetheless. For our entrees, hubby had the Salmon Wellington, and I decided to indulge (at the server's recommendation) and had the Ahi Tuna "Diane". Both were served with roasted organic new potatoes, asparagus, two types of summer squash, (pattypan and a mashed butternut) and kale. The nice thing about finer restaurants, as I pointed out to hubby, is that the food is about quality, rather than quantity. We were both too stuffed for dessert, but since it was our anniversary, the resatuarnt provides a free dessert, so we shared the raspberry sorbet.



So for us, 13 wasn't such an unlucky number afterall.