Things that made me happy today

I was watching the news today and they did a piece on those hikers that were rescued after they fell off a cliff on Mount Hood. Apparently one of the reasons they survived is that their dog, a black lab named Velvet, lay on top of them and kept them warm. It made my heart positively burn with love for all the labs that I have been fortunate enough to know in my life: Nicki, Coco, Maverick- by far the most loving, sweet natured, marvelous dogs in the world.

My Mom lost her job yesterday at 1pm...the company did totally shit last year, and they had to downsize. But today she got a new job at 10am. Seriously...less than 24 hours...that's not even enough time to really get the pity party into full swing. I love my Mom...I'm so proud of her.

I was watching Oprah today (I swear I am not a regular watcher...I hate when she gets all find-your-bliss and shit...but sometimes...sometimes like today) and they did a show on small homes - like really really small homes. Two of them were under 300 square feet, one of them was only 7 feet wide and one of them was a mere 89 square feet in total. And all of these people were utterly blissful in their tiny homes. It made me think two things: 1) I need to do some serious reorganizing because my just-shy-of-500 square foot apartment is positively palacial in comparison and 2) How much space do we really need?

Ok, I'm off to drink wine and clean my glorious mansion...in truth, I love my apartment...I just wish the parking situation wasn't so completely shitty.

A Fork in the Road

Hmm...Just two weeks out of a relationship that never really ended in a way satisfactory to me (though I am in no doubt that it is in fact over), I have to ask the new ex for a favor.
I'm of two minds on it...actually three: 1) it could be a good thing...perhaps fast tracking the whole friend thing, 2) it could be a bad thing for two reasons, he could say no - which would really piss me off, or he could say yes, but it could confuse the situation.

I'd really rather not...but I'm sort of without option. Fucking thiefs who break into my unlocked car.

Green is supposedly cathartic - thus I now exist in shades of green.

FYI, I was watching CBC world of sports today - speed skating. I learned something interesting. So the dutch are phenomenal at speed skating. The sport has a long an glorious past in the country and apparently back in the day they used to run the races on the canals/sloughs when they froze over in the winters. I think that would have been fun.

Tasty Tomatoes

For Xmas this year I was gifted with a cookbook entitled, The Improvisational Cook, by Sally Schneider. I'll admit I was skeptical...I tend to rarely use cookbooks, and when I do, I tend to stick to the stained, spotted, greasy old faithful ones. But this one is very interesting. Rather than sectioning the book into courses (as recipe books are wont to do), this one is more of an instructional textbook in the physics of food. The vast majority of the book is comprised of lessons in pairing flavors, building dishes, texture, temperature, and function. And these lessons are taught in the process of teaching some basic building blocks to innovative cooking - a chapter on oil, one on fries, one on vegetable soup, one on roasted red peppers, one on risotto etc. The author deconstructs the recipes, discusses the component parts, and then builds them again in different ways explaining how the substitutions affect the end product.

Since Christmas, I have learned how to make a delicious risotto using brown rice and only a bit of butter (varying the flavours), I have adapted cornbread to a variety of uses, and always have a supply of roasted red pepper and carmelized onions sitting around the house. But my latest favorite thing are slow roasted tomatoes. I go to Costco, and pick up big flats of them and do a whole bunch and throw them in the freezer in packages of about 10. Then I'll take them out one bag at a time and leave them in the fridge so that they're ready to use whenever I want them. They're simple - quarter tomatoes, add sea salt, pepper, a touch of sugar, and drizzle with olive oil, and roast in the oven at a low temperature for hours. They are so unexpectedly and unbelievably good - depth of flavor, tantilizing your tastebuds, just delicious. And they can be added to anything your mind can conceive - pastas, soups, salsas, canapes, tarts, pizza, even jams or antipasto plates.

Enter improvisational lunch: a twist on a standard BLT. I used this nutty, squirrelly type, gluten free bread...lots of seeds and stuff (I really stress about the healthfulness of my bread...in particular...I don't know why I'm so focussed on it but ads for things like Wonderbread make me very upset. I'm considering buying a bread maker just so I can be confident in the quality of my bread). I spread plain low fat cream cheese on the toast, then covered the cream cheese with arugula (I buy that fancy lettuce mix, which is great when you want salad, but even better when you want just one particular type cause you can just pick it out rather than buying a ton of it at the store). Then I added some of the slow roasted tomatoes and sprinkled the top with lots of pepper, a touch of salt, and crispy bacon. I ate them open faced and they were mighty delicious. The tomatoes are so flavorful, sharp and deep and a bit sweet and tart all at the same time. They were clearly the highlight...well my experience has been that they are pretty much the highlight of any dish you add them to. The other ingredients balanced out the tomatoes in ways that I hadn't expected. The cream cheese served to mellow out the sharpness of the tomatoes, it sort of lengthened and rounded the flavour. The slight bitterness of the arugula was a nice contrast to the sweetness of the tomatoes, centering the flavor. And then the saltiness of the bacon...well aside from rounding out the whole flavor of the sandwich, doesn't bacon just make everything taste better.

Hmmm...I'm thinking back to university when every Sunday we used to eat Everything bagels, from Fairmount Bagels in Montreal, with creamcheese, fresh tomatoes (poor man's lox) and S&P while doing the crossword puzzles. I bet these roasted tomatoes would be out of this world on those bagels. Or you know what...even better would be to mix some of the tomatoes, chopped, right into the cream cheese - hmmm maybe I'll try it next weekend. Now if only I could find a half decent bagel in this city.

The best thing that could have happened to me

Given my blues these past two weeks, the news I just got is the best possible.
It's Random Acts of Kindness Week.

Just when you think that the world just ain't no good, something like this pops up to remind you that maybe things are looking up.

There's a whole society of people who devote themselves to doing nice things for anonymous people - the Secret Society of Serendipitous Service to Hal. It was started in memorium to Hal Reichle. Read the site to find out more about him, but as far as I'm concerned, it's not so important who the man was, but rather what his memory has created.

I don't hate people any more. Happy good deed doing.

Shameless Friend Promotion

My good friend Ryan Landels is trying to make a go of it in Hollywood as a director. Since we were kids I've watched him hone his craft, and fantasized about him one day thanking me personally in his Best Director Oscar speech (no not really but he does know that I'm keeping my calendar open in case he requires an escort down the red carpet).

He has a new commercial entered into a contest for Southwest Airlines. Vote for him (and the other commercials cause that'd be fair)...but vote for him more.

And check out his website - he's got some fantastic movies/commercials there. I recommend Midnight Express in particular, and the commercials he did for Coors and Coke.

Some people are just so fucking creative/talented/driven/passionate, it's just awesome. In the true sense of the word.

I returned from my weekend away feeling quite refreshed actually, drew a bubble bath and my world came crashing down yet again. I don't want to get into it...I'm actually tired of talking about it...but I have learned a few things over the past few days.

One: It always amazes me how when you are in a state...a mood, sometimes you hear a song and it just is you...just is exactly how you feel and who you are at the moment.
Tegan and Sarah have this song called There's Still Time. It is me right now...every bloody word.

Two: Sometimes winning doesn't make you feel as good as you think it will. I had a dispute at work yesterday...returned home to 3 completely horrendous emails from a colleague that I have a great working relationship with. He essentially accused me of negligence and incompetence and all of these other things. He was wrong. I was irate...livid...so angry I couldn't see straight. So I call him and leave this message for him telling him that we have to talk. And then I spend four hours planning out exactly how this conversation is going to go, and how I'm going to tell him how disrespected I feel, and how I refused to work under such conditions etc etc. And then I saw him and the first thing he did was apologize and take responsibility for the entire dispute. But I'd spent four hours compiling this argument, so I plowed forward. Nothing mean, no blame...I fought fair. But he is going through a lot of stuff at home right now with his very pregnant wife, and lots of other difficulties. And by the time I got through my prepared speech he was so defeated...and as he walked away, clearly the loser in the argument (I got my apology, I was vindicated, I won)...I felt terrible. It's a fine balance - standing up for yourself vs. just being mean spirited.

Time to Hit the Road

Ok, so amidst the uncertainty that is my life, I am being led by the nose away from the sources of all of my problems.
And so tomorrow, I am going with two of my friends to the mountains for a ski vacation. We're meeting two old university friends there. If I have anything to say about it, it will be a weekend filled with speeding down mountains, hot toddys by the fire, lots of games of cards, and maybe some mild flirtation with a tanned Australian liftie.

I sit writing this entry in my Family Law Practicum class, and because things really really seem to be going my way these days the topic of this class is the mandatory Parenting After Separation Course that divorcing couples must take if they have children. The Stages of Separation - this is what we're studying right now. I'm finding it rather difficult to confront the feelings I'm experiencing in reality, with the feelings they say you're supposed to experience in theory. Things are just too fresh and too raw to deal with right now.

Best to leave town. I'm going to go home and make chocolate chip cookies for the drive.

Broken

How can it be that something so blissfully easy, so exciting and perfectly harmonious can just evaporate in the space of a sentence? A sentence that she does not have a clue of the significance, and that he chooses not to illuminate or even ask for clarification. And then two weeks of her probing for the source of his discontent and of him scapegoating every other fault in his life except the one that matters in the context of the relationship. Until she wakes up one morning and knows that he has been lying and the source of his discontent is her. And she forces him to explain and then explains herself and she asks him if he wants to end it, and he says - no...he just needs some time.
But she knows in her heart of hearts that it is too late. She can feel it...or rather, she can't feel it any more. And what breaks her heart...breaks it into tiny pieces...is knowing that it truly didn't have to be this way. Had she even an inkling she never would have said what she did. Had he trusted her a little more, she would have explained that. But she didn't, and he didn't...and time passed. And the more time that passes, the more hope she loses that they are doing anything but delaying the inevitable.
And so she is broken...and she is having trouble trying to see how to pick up the pieces.
And then someone smashed the window of her unlocked car to steal nothing...she leaves nothing inside... and she's having trouble not seeing these events as some sort of karmic punishment but merely as a terrible coincidence. And she's having trouble motivating herself to leave her house. And she's having trouble knowing in her heart that she can be happy again. She's having trouble seeing anything but her own grief, her own self-pity and her own self-blame. She feels like she's lost her fight.