Poem.

It's a wedding weekend! (A wedding summer, actually) I'll post some wedding pictures and recaps later. For today I wanted to share one of my favorite poems, inspired by the number of times in the past two weeks I've driven by the huge-ass flare on Refinery Row.

photo from here

"I'd never cry if I did find

    A blue whale in my soup...

Nor would I mind a porcupine

    Inside a chicken coop.

Yes life is fine when things combine,
    Like ham in beef chow mein...

But lord, this time I think I mind,

    They've put acid in my rain."
                       - Milo Bloom from Bloom County
                              (created by Berkeley Breathed)

Kitchen Joy.

I feel like today has revolved around food. I went to Cora for a delightful brunch with a university classmate who's getting married in 8 days (congrats again Vince!) and went for appetizers this afternoon with a co-worker (awesome crab dip at the SP Sawmill. mmmmmm).

I still wanted to make something for dinner, so I turned to the blog of my dear friend Lindsey (check it out here!) Even though it was a pretty warm day out, I wanted to try making her Beef Stroganoff.

Stopped by Save-On after brunch for a few ingredients. And was randomly given a rose by a woman who worked there, which made a delightful addition to the bouquet currently sitting on my table (harebells from Danielle's front yard, day lillies from my parents' back yard)






While I was cooking, it occured to me that there a few things about my kitchen that I absolutely love, and think everyone should have.

1. Really good knives.

I have some Japanese sushi knives from Lee Valley tools that I got for Christmas a few years ago. (Unfortunately they do not still stock them in Canada - who knows why, they are AWESOME - but the closest thing they have is the Santoku knife from this set)

These knives are great for anything, but they are especially fantastic at cutting meat (sorry about the bowl of raw meat there..). Those really big, fat steaks from Costco? Slices those suckers in half like it's going through butter.  Having really good knives is guaranteed to make cooking easier. They're definetly worth the investment.

2. This thing...  I don't remember what it's called. (Maybe a garlic twist?)

Never again will I own a garlic press. All that's needed is two plastic pieces with interlocking teeth, and you too could have perfectly minced garlic in less than 5 seconds!

Best of all, it just rinses clean! No more picking away at the tiny holes in the press! For someone who uses a lot of garlic, this is a good thing! These things are also really easy to find, and not very expensive.

3. Cooking movies!

When I cook with my mom, we always have something playing in the background (usually a chick flick). I don't think either of us really end up watching any of it, but it makes for a nice background. The set up at my parents house is really nice, you can pretty much see the living room  TV from all over the kitchen, except right next to the stove.

In my new place, I can't see the living room TV from my kitchen.  So my mom picked this thing up at a garage sale for about 10$. And it's awesome! I can only watch VHS movies, so that pretty much limits me to Disney and the Star Wars original trilogy. As you can see, today's choice was Mary Poppins (Who wouldn't want to vicariously go on a Jolly Holiday with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke? No one, that's who.)

The stroganoff was a success! I tweaked a few parts of the recipe, but it was pretty darn fantastic as written (pickles+gravy=heaven)

Finished off with some saskatoon/blueberry/rhubarb pie (can you say summer?) that I made using up the end of last years Saskatoons. (Time to hit up the u-picks!!)





Lastly, a cooking tip to all you newbies out there. When straining peas,  it helps to make sure the holes in your strainer are smaller than the peas. ...Not that I speak from experience or anything...

"Treats from the Orient!".

I am rather sad. Tomorrow Danielle finishes her stay in Edmonton. Accordingly, we have been getting in as much hang out time as possible (the benefit of being teachers in summer... free afternoons all the time!)


Today I got a hair cut on Whyte Ave (which will explain the distinct lack of curl in my hair), then stopped by her place to visit, help pack, and go on one last random Whyte adventure before she leaves.
Happily, the weather was nice....

...unlike the last time we went window shopping.... (when it looked more like this. For the record, that is my mother's umbrella. D is FAR too cool to own anything like that.)

I ended up buying some earrings to wear to a wedding on Saturday (more on the weddings another time!)

We also had a great adventure in Chapters. Danielle found a random gift card while cleaning her room, so we decided to buy something that matched the monetary value left on the card. (It ended up being $1.77)

In this book, Seed Catalogue: A Poem, the author writes things like "No. 1248. Hubbard Squash" and random stories that seem to somehow be about life on a farm. But we were a bit confused at the sections that started "My father was mad at the badger..."

(Even if we could have afforded it... we weren't about to buy it. As an English teacher, she did not approve)

I will clearly need to read this one to be convinced as to How the Hippies Saved Physics. If it's because everyone was on drugs when they named the quarks... well that's nothing new. And don't get me started on string theory. Mathmatically it's okay, but in layman's terms? "And everything is made of tiny vibrating strings!" Someone was definetly on something when they coined that explanation.

One of the more "interesting" books we found was a wannabe Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging. Called Withering Tights, the jacket actually contains the following words:

"What she doesn't expect is feeling like a tiny bat's barging around in her mouth when she has her first snog."

GOOD GRAVY, WHAT IS LITERATURE COMING TO?

I also discovered my hidden talent at the Harry Potter display...

I am KILLER at Magic Eye. Oh yes. I can look at them, and in about two seconds, without moving the book towards or away from my face, say "obviously it's Hedwig" or whatever the picture is of. How's THAT for a wicked cool party trick?

So what did we buy with the gift card you ask?
  

A knock-off My Little Pony called Filly Princess, of course. That may or may not be named "Duchess Romantica".

The other patrons of Block 1912 must have been sooo jealous of how awesome we are.

We ended our visit with gelato (not the 2 lbs. she tried to feed me last time... a more respectable scoop) on the walk back to her house. I will miss her heaps when she is gone... but we've had some awesome times hanging out the past few weeks!!

(I need to say things like that as she plans on showing this blog to her students as a way to get them into blogging as a form of journaling... HI DANIELLE!!)

Running.

This spring, I decided to take up running. (I KNOW!)

If you know me... this is rather unusual.

I am not a runner; never have been able to do it without heaving and gasping and ending up in a drooling heap at the end. Maybe this is because most of my running experiences involved junior high phys-ed (so many memories I prefer to block out...)

In any case, I decided to take up some physical activity after too long a period of NOT doing any, and running seemed like a cheap, long term, healthy choice.

Surprisingly, I enjoy it.

Maybe it's the solitary aspect of it... no one beside me who is NOT heaving to judge me (I like to think that the people who drive by look at me and think "she must be going a long distance... good for her!" when really, I am doing a 2k loop through my neighborhood)

Or it could be the fact that I feel pretty good afterwards (while I'm running I want to die, but 20 minutes after I get home when my legs stop throbbing, I feel pretty darn good).

Unfortunately, running hasn't happened a whole lot lately, for two reasons...

1. Mosquitos. If you have been anywhere near the Edmonton area in the past month, you'll know what I'm talking about. They have been BAD this year, due to a crazy  unseasonable amount of rain. (I know Edmontonians have a bit of a reputation for complaining about these things, but trust me... they were BAD!) Not only have there been a lot, but they were persistant, ambitious, huge mutant buggers who, upon being smacked against a convenient thigh, would drop, shake it off, and come back in for another try. The few times I tried running in June/July, I would make it a few hundred meters from my door, swatting my head frantically like a woman possessed, say "fuck it" and go home to do Pilates instead.

2. Ankle troubles.  It's kind of an embarassing story... We went to a group pole-dancing lesson for my friend Penny's stagette, and I somehow managed to high sprain my ankle. It's not NEARLY as "exotic" or "sexy" as the story may sound... Regardless, I injured my ankle, and am supposed to treat it with kid gloves until it gets better. The problem is, every time it seems like it's getting better, I think "oh, I can do <insert random activity here> again!" and stress it all over again. (It's been two months now... and my "pole dancing injury" still won't go away!)

Needless to say, there hasn't been a whole lot of running lately. But I did manage to get out this morning before it got too hot, and I'm feeling pretty good. Not good enough to go out and do it again... more like I can justify sitting out on my porch with some homemade iced tea and a good book.

Spice.

My lovely friend Danielle is back in Edmonton for a few weeks in the middle of a two year teaching stint in Dubai. Knowing how much I love to cook, she brought me back some awesome spices!

I love the spelling of "Fannel" and"Chilly" and "Koriander"!

I also enjoy the random mystery spices... Pretty sure the round things in the middle are nutmeg... but what about the mysterious purple-y stuff on the left? Tamarind? I have no idea. Anyone know?

Plant Parenthood.

I love plants. Okay, maybe that is an understatement... I LOVE plants. My friends make fun of me, because I treat some of them like my children.

Some people have pets... I have plants.

When I say "I have plants", what I mean is "I have a lot of plants." At last count I had 20 potted plants in the condo. ("Sandi... I think you have a problem..." says my friend Stef)

Recently, a friend commented on the fact that my plants seem really happy and healthy. As if it was something really exceptional. Why do they do so well? Do I have a green thumb?

Unfortunately,  it's nothing like that. I'll let you in on the secret...

If they don't thrive, I chuck them out.

That might sound like something really harsh from a self-proclaimed plant lover, but it's true. I've tried to select plants that will do well in my low-light living space, so if they start to shrivel, they're gone. (It's not like I don't try...)

This is especially true for the ones that other people gift me (they tell you you have a plant problem, but does that stop them from giving you more?). For my birthday, I received a lovely sunflower. It was happy and perky for about 2 weeks, then started to droop and turn yellow-y. After a while, I chucked it. Ditto the mini-rosebush... and the creeping jew. .... and one of the cacti.

Oddly, one of the things that does grow well in my kitchen is orchids. I was given a few from a co-worker who is moving, and was really happy when this one started to bloom...

It has had it's 6 blooms for almost a month now...  Does the fact that I took some pictures on my phone to show people (as though it were one of my children or my pets) make me a creepy plant parent?

Begin.

Recently, I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine about the current state of education (a sadly common occurance due to the political environment we are currently living in... but that is another story.).
Now, this friend of mine is a very smart girl, but she's just not that into science. Her last formal science education was high school Biology; she never took Physics or Chemistry after Science 10. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but you know what they say, "the more you know, the more you know you don't know". I find this to be particularly true with science.

This friend expressed to me that she was recently embarassed by her naive misunderstanding of the concept of evolution. Controversial subject that it is, teaching evolution in schools often ends up spreading as many misconceptions as it does actual knowledge.

I blame pictures such as this one...

(Image from Observations of a Nerd)

Now, looking at it, it seems to imply that life is a logical progression from other primates towards man. To say this idea raised an uproar when Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution by Natural Selection is an understatement. People were incensed by the idea that we could be descended from apes.

Here's where the misconception comes in. We are not descended from chimpanzees or neanderthals; we all share a common ancestor (much the same way that you and your cousin share a common ancestor -your shared grandparents- and yet are two different people at the same time). The difference between our relationship with neanderthals and chimpanzees is the degree of separation (just like your siblings have a closer common ancestor with you than your cousins). It is this idea of common ancestors that is often lost in the classroom; evolution is not a line of inferior creatures marching towards mankind. Darwin never proposed it to be - On The Origin of Species outlines how variation among offspring can over time lead to speciation by the mechanism of natural selection, not how one species "turns into" another. Life is rather more like the branches of a tree... we are one twig on the end of the primate branch, coming from the same main stem as the chimpanzees and other great apes, yet a distinct species of our own.