Verbalized

Like a lightning bolt

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:22:33 -0800

I love the feeling of sudden inspiration.

Seasonal progression

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:43:15 -0800

Somewhere in the space of the last week and a half, Christmas decorations have suddenly sprung up all around the city. First it was subtle: Some garland on the Fort Street lamp posts, a wreath or two, and tables of ornaments and gift items in the stores. A few days later I realized that it had escalated significantly when I walked through the mall and ran smack into a massive shrine to the holiday season featuring Santa, some elves, and excessive amounts of glittery fake snow. The annual Christmas parade made its way through downtown last night, (are we feeling festive yet? NO!) and today I heard the strains of a particularly obnoxious and upbeat Christmas song playing over a store’s speakers.

No, you're not

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:30:12 -0800

A homeless man is wandering along Yates Street. He is tall, with wild reddish hair and a an equally unruly beard. As he passes us, he announces boldly, confidently: “I’m Michael Jackson!”

“There are two ways of spreading light: To be the candle or the mirror that reflects...

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:35:00 -0800

“There are two ways of spreading light: To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Wharton

This morning, as I was about to wash my dishes after breakfast, a very large black spider climbed...

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:59:00 -0800

This morning, as I was about to wash my dishes after breakfast, a very large black spider climbed lazily out of the drain in the kitchen sink and made a beeline towards a stray cereal flake.

Yesterday, as I was stumbling into the shower, a brown spider with excessively long legs dropped silently from the fan onto the toilet seat and then down onto the floor before heading towards my bare feet at a pace just a little bit too quick for my still-sleepy, pre-breakfast brain to handle.

I’m hoping that this kind of thing doesn’t become a trend, because I just can’t handle spiders before, say, noon.

Dilemma

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:57:04 -0800

For Christmas, do I escape to Banff for some skiing, relaxing, and quality catch-up time with a friend, or do I hop on a plane to San Francisco, the city with the magnetic pull that I just can’t get enough of?

I think I just discovered one of the most hideous, retina-burning pieces of clothing in existence....

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:53:05 -0800

I think I just discovered one of the most hideous, retina-burning pieces of clothing in existence. Observe.

Tales of a handywoman in the making

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:20:28 -0800

So, as you might have noticed from this picture, my dining room was playing host to one extremely large, ugly light fixture straight out of the worst of the nineteen eighties. This light fixture was so hideous that I never even turned it on, because really, why would anyone want to draw any more attention to that overhead monstrosity?

Yesterday, I decided that I needed to take action and deal with the light. And by deal, I mean remove it from the ceiling, replace it with an attractive, low-profile light in a more modern combination of brushed metal and frosted glass, wrap the old light in several garbage bags, and smuggle it down the hall of my building to my storage locker where it could join all the other remnants of my unauthorized apartment improvements. The garbage bags were completely necessary, because I couldn’t exactly carry the light down the hall out in the open in case I ran into my landlord (“Oh, hi, I’m just making electrical modifications to the apartment, don’t mind me!”), which could make for an awkward conversation.

To make a long story short, I should probably consider a backup career as an electrician in case the whole business thing doesn’t work out. Because normally I would be terrified at the thought of sticking my hand into a cobweb infested hole in the ceiling to touch some bare electrical wires while standing on a kitchen chair and holding up an entire light fixture with the other hand, but I managed to get over most of the fear and power through the whole process, stopping only twice for small panic sessions — once when a chunk of plaster fell into my hair and I wondered if it might be a spider, and again as I was about to flip the breaker back on and could only envision the spectacular explosion that might occur if I had screwed up the wiring.

Anyhow. The light fixture is installed, it works, and it looks SO MUCH BETTER — really, like a million times better — than the relic of the eighties.

Also recently added to the apartment: Two gorgeous lanterns (like this, but way bigger and with an elaborate raised pattern in the metal) to sit in the corner of the dining room and provide ambiance, a rug for under the coffee table, a vintage map of Paris, and a chalk board for the kitchen. Pictures to come.

Just close the door

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:54:57 -0800

Why is it that some businesses feel the need to leave their doors propped open at all times, even in the middle of November?

Case in point: I am sitting in a coffee shop, sipping a latté. It’s pleasantly warm in the coffee shop, the latté is warm, and I’m feeling a general overall sense of warmth and contentedness as I curl up in a huge leather easy chair. Then, someone somehow gets the idea that hey, maybe it would be a good idea to prop open the door even though it’s practically winter out there and cold enough for coats and scarves. Suddenly I’m sitting there shivering, my latté is doing nothing to warm me up, and I’m debating whether or not it would look weird if I attempted to wrap myself from head to toe in my scarf. And that sense of overall warmth and contentedness? Totally shattered.

Should come with a warning

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:35:53 -0800

In a moment of rare junk-food-craving weakness, I purchase a small bag of potato chips. The flavour is BBQ, and the bag is emblazoned with text shouting “New Bold Flavour!”

The first few bites taste normal enough, but by the fourth chip I’m starting to feel a strange sensation on my tongue. First it tingles a little bit, then it feels oddly rough as though I’ve just scalded it on something, and finally it feels like flames are erupting out of my mouth. The chips are hot, but not in that typical spicy way – my whole tongue feels huge, my face is warm, and suddenly I know why there’s a picture of a flaming BBQ on the bag.

Neighbourly

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:22:54 -0800

The girl who lives in the apartment above mine is generally fairly quiet, making her presence known only in the morning when she runs around the apartment for a few minutes in high heeled shoes before the door slams and the footsteps thud down the stairs.

Lately, though, this neighbour - who I have not actually ever seen, and therefore can only make assumptions about based on what I hear - has been upping the ante on the noise level. On Friday evening she graciously shared a selection of muffled but pounding eighties rock music with me via my ceiling, and on Saturday morning at approximately 6:00 she delivered a wake-up call that sounded suspiciously like hammering. Sunday sounded relatively uneventful, with only a few episodes of sporadic high-heeled running in the afternoon, but Tuesday featured a few more hammering sessions, a loud crash or two, and an extended eighties rock redux.

The End, take 2

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:20:00 -0800

This morning was my official university convocation ceremony. The whole thing felt kind of surreal and anticlimactic all at once — graduating is pretty cool, but I feel like my real graduation was back in August when I finished my classes. Weirdness aside, I now have a sheet of paper to represent those four long years of blood, sweat, and tears, and I can advise future university graduates to make sure that their mortarboard is tight enough that it won’t slide off their heads every time they move so much as a millimetre but not so tight that it flattens out their hair.

I just realized that I never got around to posting any photos of the apartment, so here you are...

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:20:00 -0800

I just realized that I never got around to posting any photos of the apartment, so here you are — take a look at the living room, dining room, another view of the dining room, and the kitchen.

On grocery shopping

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:36 -0800

While I’ve recently discovered that I actually enjoy cooking, I passionately loathe grocery shopping. There are two major chain grocery stores about three minutes away from my apartment, each with its own unique set of aggravating characteristics:

- Safeway: Massive, but still somehow manages to not stock any of the brands that I actually want. Shopping carts are chained to each other and must be released by paying twenty-five cents, which means that I always end up either hauling all my groceries around in one excruciatingly heavy basket or stalking someone as they’re unloading their cart so that I can grab it the second it’s abandoned. Cashiers are surly bordering on downright rude, and no, I don’t have a club card — don’t need one, don’t want one - just take my Visa card, swipe it, and let me get out of here. Produce is positioned with the intention to confuse, meaning that if you’re looking for, say, an avocado, you might have to check three bins full of three different types of avocados, but each bin will be located as far away from the other avocado bins as humanly possible. In short: Shopping cart rage doesn’t just happen at Safeway, it was inspired by Safeway.

- Thrifty Foods: Okay, I want to like this store because so many of their stores are excellent, but this location? Not so much. Always excessively crowded with primarily old people unable to maneuver their shopping carts around the corner without taking out three people and knocking over a display shelf in the process. Constantly sold out of the smoked gouda cheese with walnuts that I so desperately want to buy. Lineups for the checkouts are usually so long that it’s entirely possible to skim through an entire magazine while waiting. Also, the parking lot is in a state perpetual near-chaos, meaning that I just might be taking my life into my hands every time I try to shop for food.

Tipping point

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:31:07 -0800

There are now more leaves on the ground than there are on the trees.

The Internets

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 11:35:37 -0700

Saturday morning: A lady in the coffee shop is complaining that “the internets have stopped working.” She has mousy brown hair in a shapeless chin-length bob, perfectly round glasses, and she is holding an ancient, brick-like laptop computer. She pokes at a few keys experimentally, then announces to nobody in particular: “Maybe they just turned the internets off today — they’re always turning these things off to maintain them, you know.”

Cook this

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:10:46 -0700

Baked Cod with Olives - file this one under “incredibly easy but impressive nonetheless”.

I substituted Snapper for the Cod, added more lemon juice than the recipe called for, and also threw in some chopped up grape tomatoes for more variation in flavour. Cook up some orzo to go with the fish and throw together a quick salad as a side.

“Sweet Sadness” by Gabin

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:01:02 -0700

“Sweet Sadness” by Gabin

On rock climbing

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:42:43 -0700

Rock climbing is proving itself to be as awesome (and terrifying) as it looks — I feel sort of like a strange cross between an unathletic klutz and spider woman when I’m up there on the wall.

The climbing gym, however, smells fairly strongly like old socks and sweaty feet. They might want to work on that; a little bit of air freshener would do wonders for the whole experience.

Cook this

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:56:48 -0700

Roast up a red pepper or two: Slice them into quarters, press them down onto a baking sheet, and put them in the oven with the broiler on. Keep them in there until the skin turns black and look like they’re about to burst into flames, then take them out and put them in a bowl with a lid for a while.
Chop up some cherry or grape tomatoes, some fresh basil and some olives.
Cook up some spaghetti.
Peel the blackened skins off of the peppers, then slice them up into little bite-sized strips.
Toss the spaghetti with some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, the chopped up veggies and roasted peppers, and a good amount of crumbled feta cheese. Top with salt and fresh cracked pepper.
Eat it. So quick and easy… So good.