In here life is beautiful… The girls are beautiful…

I’m not sure if this will ever appear on the website in question, but as far as I am concerned There! I Fixed It! totally applies to the following:

For some reason I decided I’d like to make truffles to hand out at xmas time. I’d looked on foodgawker and Martha Stewart for recipes and then, surprise surprise, a very simple recipe appeared in the most recent issue of Everyday Food. This is a magazine I buy every month and have had subscriptions to in the past. I try, each month, to do at least one recipe, just to keep things fresh, but haven’t been terribly successful in recent months. Anyway, the recipe had 4 basic ingredients: chocolate, heavy cream, vanilla and salt.  Sounds easy, right? Well. Here’s where things go terribly wrong…

I chopped up the chocolate but instead of weighing it (and YES, I do have a kitchen scale!) I was lazy and measured it by volume. I followed all the instructions to a tee, even leaving it in the fridge to cool longer than recommended (while out and about), but it never set up. I guess I didn’t use enough chocolate? Anyway, it refused to roll into balls, being the consistancy of thick pudding. Delicious, creamy, expensive pudding…I didn’t want to throw it out and I didn’t want to just plop it into bowls and serve as is so I decided to make a bunch of crepes and layer them together.

Voila.

It tastes great, lemme tell you. It’s a little rubbery and hard to eat neatly, and in hindsight, I probably could have rolled the chocolate up inside the crepes in a more traditional way and sprayed them with whipped cream…but, you know, hindsight 20-20 and all that.

I had a super day: I went to ROM all by myself which is a great way to see everything I want to see without worrying if everyone else is having fun. It was so nice, the Vanity Fair show was wonderful, I love portrait photography. Plus it brought me up to the 4th floor where the gallery of textiles and costumes is, and I love that. Sad, sort of. Our family membership expires on the 30th so this was my last chance to go.

Then I ate at Whole Foods, again, I love it there. I looked around at everything first, then I ate at their hot and cold prepared food bars. SO GOOD. My favourite salad in the world is there, the purple kale with raw beets in an orange vinaigrette (and if any clever people out there have this exact recipe, PLEASE pass it on to me), and I have it with extra beets. Raw beets ftw. And I had some scalloped potatoes and broccoli and quinoa salad and a corn salad. All for almost $10. I also love the bathroom at Whole Foods, not just for the awesome sign on the door and the magical hand dryer, but because they have a thing at the bottom of the door that lets you open it with your foot, rather than dirtying up your hands on the handlebar. Perfect.

Then I went on to a weird designer sale in the basement of a church that had shoes and clothes and stuff but I managed to resist. Then more shopping, gearing up to Xmas.

OH. Then I overheard an awesome conversation at the corner of Bay and Bloor, right outside the Gap store there. An old man begging for money with one of his pants legs rolled up and picking at the most revolting leg ever: purple and drippy, his sock was stained OMG SO GROSS.  A young woman had stopped and was lecturing him “you should cover that up, it’s NASTY!” and he says “well, I don’t got my medication for it” and she says “yeah, well, you should get a bandage or pull your pants down ’cause it’s so NASTY!!!” and I couldn’t help but laugh because she was right, it was about as nasty a leg as I have ever seen. Poor old fella. He looked like this old weirdo that used to shop at the Snail when I worked there.

Anyway, when flying with a 6 year old there are many ways to entertain them, here is just one of thousands: draw on magazines. I think this is a habit I picked up from my sister (who’s birthday it is tomorrow, Happy Birthday Megan!) when I was a kid. It amused the hell out of Ari on our way home from Costa Rica.

Poor Jaycee and Elizabeth, we really went crazy on them. Not for any reason either, there just happened to be a lot of clear pictures of them. And you might notice that a couple of faces have been re-drawn to look like daddy. Hee hee!

I got some gorgeous yarn in the mail today, it’s called Banana Problem and it’s from play at life fibre arts. It’s sock yarn but at the rate I knit socks, I doubt that it will ever be footwear. And because I am pretty much exclusively knitting gifts for xmas this year, this will go into my stash basket until the new year.

If anyone has any suggestions (with appropriate patterns for 400yds, 100g of Merino) that would be swell!

I admit it, after almost a year, I shampooed my hair tonight. I’d washed it with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap a couple weeks ago, during the lice fiasco (which, for the record, I didn’t have and do not currently have) and my hair felt so light and clean that after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to go back to using shampoo once a week. I’ll see how it goes. And I need a hair cut in a bad way and didn’t feel like subjecting Judy to that.

ps. the picture I took in the summer was finally posted on The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. You’re welcome!

I went to the Royal Winter Fair last Friday with my boss and my dad. It was the first time they’ve met and they got along really well. As always, my favourite part (since they didn’t have any poultry worth looking at) are the giant veggies. This beast is a 32lb beet. Imagine how much borscht that would make!

It’s scrawny compared to last year’s winner. No free toilet paper this year, but I did get 10lbs of free potatoes AND a wooden spoon. Good stuff.

Remember Puppers? He thinks Shannon is the business. He licked Shannon’s arms so much that I do believe that the tattoos have faded. What a sweet dog and what a lovely family Ashley has.

Thank you times eleventy million for your hospitality (AND those steaks, WOW.)

I filled my MP3 player with old mixed cds I made 10 years ago and it’s been making me happy. For example today, on my way to and from work here is what I heard:

1. ‘Homeboy’ by Adorable

2. ‘Girl You Know it’s True’ by Milli Vanilli

3.  ‘Money Can’t Buy Me Happiness’ by Jelleestone (no video?!)

4. ‘Detachable Penis’ by King Missile (shitty video)

5. ‘I Can’t Go For That’ by Hall and Oates

6. ‘Valley Girl’ by FZ  (this video is AWESOME!)

7. ‘I Feel 4 U’ by Chaka Khan

8. ‘You Suck’ by The Yeastie Girls

9. ‘Back in Baby’s Arms’ by Patsy Cline

10. ‘Boogie in Your Butt’ by Eddie Murphy (shockingly there’s no video for this amazing song, what a shame!)

11. ‘Freedom of 76′ by Ween (and Beevis and Butthead!)

12. ‘Living on Video’ by TransX

13. ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ by Grace Jones

14. ‘Bored’ by Iggy Pop

15. ‘I Wish’ by Skee-Lo

16. ‘Poison’ by Bell Biv Devoe

Ok, so on my knitlist, here’s what I have going on-all at the same time:

From the left, I have 2 baktus scarves (the first one is some kind of sock yarn that I can’t remember the name and the second is more of the Misti Baby Alpaca Hand Painted Sock) on the go. Then a Calorimetry head scarf in Noro Silk Light (which looks super cute on), then a straight up green scarf in that super plush Lang Perl yarn, and then sock #1.  I dread sock #2 although it can only be easier the second time around, right? I swear my brain’s been damn near exploding trying to figure out this pattern… And if you read this please DON’T TELL MY DAD!

Remember I wrote about the Google ‘next’ button a while ago? And the ’subscribe’ button? Amazon’s gone ahead and topped those. There’s an ‘add to wishlist’ button for your browser now. It automatically adds whatever piece of amazingness to your wishlist so it’s one stop shopping. Love it.

Well. Sort of busy.

I still have my ears full of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter to me. I think I love Stephen Fry. He’s amazing. Have you ever watched QI? I mean, maple slurple. Think about that. So I have been watching that too.

And, believe it or not, knitting. I’ve finished lots of small projects and I’ve taken on a more difficult project-socks-and that’s occupying my hands. And between that, scarves. And maybe a hat. Maybe, baby. I’ve also been commissioned to make more baby scarves, joy!

I also got new jeans today. And made sloppy joes. No, those 2 things are not related.

Here’s what I do at the gym these days: 20 minutes on the bike at 145rpms, approx. 45o cal burned. Then I do 40 regular crunches (20, rest a minute, 20) then 10 side crunches on each side. Then I do 20 pulldowns at 40lbs in front of me, then another 20 @40lbs behind my head. Then I fall into a heap. I kid! Then I feel good about myself and go to the grocery store and buy cinnamon buns to make up for all that effort. I kid!

Maybe. I think I need a personal trainer to tell me what I really should be doing. And if that involves running-any kind of running-they can forget it.