Good Memory . . .

This is one of my favorite pictures. For some reason, I had been thinking of this photograph and was starting to worry that I had lost it. But I found it last friday at work while I was searching for something else.

This photo was taken when my son was about 8. I can't believe how short his hair was back then! I had just bought my Volkswagon Jetta and needed to get away, so I took 5 weeks off of work, packed the car and headed off to the West Coast.

We headed to Vancouver Island, first stopping at Quailicum Beach where we flew a big black shark kite on the windy shores and spelunked the clautrophobic caverns of Horne Lake Caves.

Then it was off down the winding highway to Ucluelet. The fog from the ocean made everything damp and I remember shivering in the tent at night. It was here, at Ucluelet where the picture was taken, when we took a whale watching excursion and rode the open sea on a wild Zodiac.

My favorite part was camping at Long Beach which is part of Pacific Rim National Park. Everyday we would walk the path from our campsite to the beach and spend our time walking in the surf, finding driftwood and climbing the rocks which jutted out of the sand. We discovered slugs of monstrous proportions and at night I would fall asleep to the roar of the ocean waves, in the distance.

After the Island, we returned to Vancouver (because I just couldn't get enough of that city), and then I reluctantly started the trip back to Saskatoon. The trip lasted 21 days, and was one of my favorites. It was the first time I had driven through the mountains, and the first and second time I went to Vancouver.

~b~

Okay, I've Changed My Mind . . .

A while back when the cold hit, I went about muttering, I hate winter to pretty much anyone who would listen to me. And I vowed to myself that this would be the very last winter I would spent in this horridly cold city.

I thought that the security of my job was holding me here, so I came up with a few alternatives that would allow me to keep my job, and yet avoid the cold.

This is what I came up with:

• Mass Migration. The birds do it, so why can't we? I'm up for jumping into my car and driving down to Mexico every fall and returning in the spring. Once we get the oil companies to realize they can make a fortune by jacking up the prices during Migration time, I'm sure the government will be soon to agree.

• Hibernation. I most definitely don't get enough sleep and when I really don't get enough sleep, I'm slightly wonky. This would be the perfect solution to my lack of sleep problem.

• -Public Servant Exchange Program, or PSEP because we're all about acronyms in the government. Surely there's some idiot we could dupe into spending the winter here. We could turn it into some kind of Survivor series: Come and experience wonders of snow. Battle the daily onslaught of frost on your windows. See the wee electric blankets we use to keep our car batteries from freezing and take care not to inhale too deeply through your noses, lest your nostrils stick together, permanently.

. . . . . . .

My friend kidnapped me on Saturday. And I am only forgiving her because she introduced me to the wonders of Dim Sum.

Ang: Thank you for showing me what Dim Sum is (which I thought was a noodle dish, like the Phad Tai I had at Keo's). And thank you for introducing me to Crab Rangoon (my life is now more or less complete) and thank you for letting me eat Coconut Buns, its been a while since I first had them at Folkfest in the Bowl.

So, not only did I spend a Saturday in the company of good friends, but the weather this weekend was absolutely beautiful.

Sights like this tend make me forget the harshness of winter.

I think I was a tad bit hasty in the last winter I'll ever live here rant. It's not so bad and it's not really the job that's keeping me here. It's the friends, and the family and the possibilities. So I think I'll sit tight and wait and see what the winter has in store for me.

~b~

Tapas!

I spent Wednesday night at a cooking class at Wild Serendipity Foods.

The class was called Tantalizing Tapas and the menu consisted of: Chicken and Chorizo Empanadas, Bread with Mushrooms and Alioli, Patatas Bravas, Pan-Roasted Shrimp with Garlic and Sangria.

The classes are taught by owner, Michelle Zimmer (check out her blog).

Michelle demonstrated a few things, like making the elusive pastry (which I can never manage to get right) and the Alioli sauce. We were quickly set loose in the very large commercial kitchen to work on our assigned tasks:

This is the Chicken and Chorizo mixture that will be used in the Empanadas.

We used Yukon Gold Potatoes for the Patatas Bravas (which is just a fancy title for: crispy potatoes in tomato sauce). The potatoes coming out of the oven were such a beautiful golden color.

This is the Tomato Sauce that will be poured onto the potatoes:

Check out those diced onions (diced by yours truly) (also stirred with love by yours truly)

Michelle is demonstrating how to make our empanadas.

The making of the Alioli Sauce which did not "break". Michelle is such a pro in the kitchen.

Mixing up Sangria.

The Emapanadas, ready for the oven.

The best part of the evening was sitting down and eating.

The Pan-Roasted Shrimp with Garlic and the Patatas Bravas. Simply delicious.

Bread with Mushroom and Alioli. This was my very favorite. I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful this was. Lets just say that I had seconds, and I don't even like mushrooms.

The cooking class was very hands-on and a whole lot of fun. I had such a great night and met some very fun and nice people. I can't wait to sign up for some more classes.

~b~

Sugar Cookies

One of the first things I ever learnt to bake were these sugar cookies. I had my own little apron and small roller and would love cutting out the shapes with the cookie cutter.

And the recipe is so easy and tasty and it is, in fact, the very first recipe I put in my own recipe book.

Here's the recipe:

Becky's Signature Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp vanilla

5-6 cups flour

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and milk and all that other stuff. Mix away and add the flour. Bake at 375 F for 12ish or so minutes.

I usually sprinkle with decorative sugar before I pop the cookies into the oven, but I used some coarser sugar I got from my sugar dealer, so with the ghosts, I added the sugar after they came out of the oven.

And now a little chemistry:

Cream of tartar is really potassium hydrogen tartrate (KC4H5O6) and is used to help activate the baking soda. The baking soda is added to raise the pH of the cookie dough which then weakens the gluten and the egg protein structure. This makes the cookie spread more and is crispier and browner.

Sorry for delving into the depths of chemistry, even if none of that makes any sense, this recipe is fun and easy and makes a very tasty cookie.

~b~

I May Be a Little Weird . . .

but I've always been slightly jealous of a man's facial hair. Dont' get me wrong, I definitely do not want facial hair of my own, what so ever. It's just that there are so many different styles, so many options, so many ways to express yourself.

Handlebars:

Pai Mei from Kill Bill is sporting some pretty fancy eyebrows:

One year at University it seemed everybody was growing beards. We would sit in class and wonder whether the prof would start to have birds start to fly out of his beard.

His grad student had a beard that had its very own shadow and was working towards getting its own postal code:

(Identity has been hidden to protect the innocent)

I'm sure if they would have kept up with it, they would have ended up like Hagrid:

~b~

Irrationality

This whole H1N1 thing has gone overboard. And I just want to stick my fingers in my ears and yell out LA LA LA LA when I hear people talking about it.

I'm sick of the media hype and the constant inundation of messages. It seems that only way capture our attention and sell stories, can only be done through the use of fear and the sensationalization of horrific events which often happen to only a small portion of the population. And then we spend our time talking about the latest catastrophe and all its horrific aspects, and what a terrible state our world is in. Because it's a lot easier to regurgitate the latest story we have "heard", by which, we are merely turning this horrific news story into a form of entertainment. Because talking about it is much more interesting than doing anything about it, or questioning it, or finding out more answers.

Rationally, I know that there is a lot of overexposure and hype from the media and that everything needs to be put into perspective. However, sometime this past week I seemed to have lost any perspective I may have held, along with any kind of rationality I may have had. And it was all because I overhead a story in which a 13 year old boy was taken into the Mediclinic by his mother on a Saturday, send home, and then died on Sunday. At which point I realized that my son is 12 and he is my world.

It was then that my perspective fell away, my cursed imagination ran wild and I became an irrational person for the past week. It didn't help that my coworkers were away sick (all for innocuous reasons, like a headache, and pink eye) and I was all alone with no one around to help me to come back to reason.

And so this week I had done the following, very irrational things:

• I self isolated myself and stayed in my lab all day. I stopped going to the lunchroom and instead left the building for lunch and coffee.

• I loudly stated my opinion that it wasn't fair to us healthy people (who have to go to work if we aren't sick) when sick people show up, coughing and sneezing - because we get sick leave and get paid to stay at home when we are sick.

• I repeatedly asked my son how he was feeling and quizzed him on the status of his classmates health and considered keeping him home from school when the absentee rate hit 10%

• I kept phoning my mother to find out how she was feeling and when she didn't answer the phone, I drove all the way over to her house to check up on her.

• I started to fret over the possibility of losing the people that I love which is not a good thing when you have a very active imagination.

When I was in high school my friends and I used to spend a lot of time picking each other up and driving around the city. One night my friends boyfriend was driving and I just couldn't get over this nagging premonition that something was going to happen. Every turn that he made made me more and more anxious. By the end of the night I just wanted him to skid out of control and drive off the road, because this feeling was getting so strong that I could barely take it anymore. Well, as he was driving to my place to drop me off, he decided to take off after this car. He made a quick right turn and hit some slick ice. The car ended up sliding across the road, up over the sidewalk, where we finally stopped when we hit a snowbank. We were only shook up and needed to only hop out of the car, push it out of the snowbank before we were back on the road.

And that's how I feel with this whole H1N1. The whole build up that my son would get sick was much worse than him being sick. And he did get sick this weekend, with the common flu. And I will love him and take care of him until he gets better. And yes, he will get sick again. And he could get H1N1. But life is what it is, and I will not let fear dominate my mind or my actions anymore.

~b~

You Capture - Technology

This weeks photo challenge which is posted at I Should Be Folding Laundry is Technology.

This past week I blogged about the self-tuning Robot Guitar, it can be found here => click.

In an attempt encourage nag-free guitar practices in my house, I took my son to see the documentary It Might Get Loud. It's about the electric guitar and features Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White.

Here's two pictures of the bridge and humbucker on my son's electric guitar:

Check out other Technology photos at: I Should Be Folding Laundry.

~b~