This, also, was a good run.

Please join me in bidding a fond farewell to my bottle of Chili Amor, which I bought for a dollar in Mexico in the summer of 2009.

Chili Amor has been the backbone of all my tex-mex dishes for the last year and some, including but not limited to tonight's enchiladas.

So long, C-A.  You will be replaced by a generic store-brand hot sauce, but you will not be forgotten.

Shopping and bread!

Oh my oh me, shopping and bread.

The snow rained out just in time for my sister (and her entire female in-law contingent) to descend on Victoria for Black Friday.  Apparently this is a thing now, where Canadian stores will have sweet deals for American Black Friday.  The crowds haven't yet caught on.

The in-laws do this every year, so they are very strategeric about it.  We met for lunch on Friday, where boo and I shared a quesadilla and got matching grease stains on our jeans.

This is why you can't take us places.  Anyway, then we went to Hillside Mall for three hours, and Bluenotes was having a half-off everything sale which ruined us for every other sale.  Alas.  Then we went to Mayfair Mall for four hours, and then some of the cousins went out to a movie while boo and I went home to have brownies and tea and pass out watching Disney's Robin Hood, because seven hours of shopping is Serious Business.

Saturday morning we had Darren's cousin Michelle over and made Cap'n Crunch-breaded French Toast, which probably needs to be fried in butter rather than a Pam'ed pan because it's difficult to cook the eggy-bread-bits without burning the Cap'n. 

We needed the fortification because Saturday was as long if not longer, shop-wise.  We all hit up Value Village and to Chintz & Co, and after about eight seconds boo and I were done.  The Contingent was just catching its second wind but we were fresh out of winds so we moseyed around Chintz, sitting on all the expensive furniture while the staff gave us side-eye.

This is also why you can't take us places.  We had Pagliacci's bottomless bread (also soup, but soup is just an excuse to eat bread amirite?) for lunch and then hit up the Bay Center, which was a mistake because nothing looks good on you when you have bread-body.  It was dispiriting.

Anywhatever, we had a few hours to kill before the In-Law Contingent was going out for dinner and a show, so we wandered around downtown with Michelle and talked a chocolatier into giving us free samples and staggered through the Festival of Trees.

So many lights numb the mind.  Bekah and Michelle left for dinner and I wandered my weary self home to eat the rest of the Pagliacci bread and slip into a bread-coma.  There was a short but vigorous hike Sunday morning to counter-act the bread products, and also so boo could meet Chelsea and Shannon (and Seamus) and so I could sweat into my new hoodie.  Won't be returning that one now.

Good sisterday weekend, bundtling.  Thank your In-Law Contingent for absorbing me into itself.

That was a good run.

We knew it couldn't last, this non-stop blogging business.  To be fair, I ate nothing but bread this weekend, and that'll do the strongest soul in. 

Pagliacci's, you are my fried, tasty nemesis.

Many doin's a-transpired this weekend, but I accidentally have a quiz tomorrow and need to go read a trashy Gothic novel very quickly.

It is still snowing very hard.

I have a paper to write today and normally the snow would be incredibly helpful because it's as good as excuse as any for not going outside but I have been looking forward to this sisterday weekend and if this keeps up boo will be trapped on the mainland and there will be no French Cap'n Toast Crunch. 

I'm usually a fan, Snow, but you chose a lousy time.

To cheer us all up, here's a video from this last summer of us getting ice cream in Istanbul.  Sunshine!  Cold treats!  I will not tell you the story of how the little guy tried to cheat us out of our moneys afterwards.  Instead, enjoy his tricksey performance.




There is a marching band at the end because I'm still figuring out how the youtubes work.  The internet is hard, yo.

NaBloPoMo needs to be in a month that is not November

Today I went for a run at the gym instead of outside (remember how boring that is?) and worked on a paper and made jalapeno-cheese bread and single-handedly stopped it from snowing with my mind (I know, the snow is festive and lovely, but if it keeps up there will be no sisterday adventures this weekend and I have my heart set on breading some French toast in Cap'n Crunch) and all of these things make for tedious blogging, so you get (as usual) a picture of my dinner.

Don't act like you aren't jealous.

I cannot blog right now.

It is cold and snowy, so we are going to build a fort in the bed and drink cocoa and watch Toy Story 3.

I need to start wearing mittens over my gloves.

I was doing eleventy loads of laundry yesterday and after I thought I'd done I found some towels that needed washing and was all, Feh, it's been a while since I've washed ALL MY PANTS.  So I washed the towels and all my pants and dried them and when the buzzer buzzed I thought, I need to go get those otherwise I will not have pants tomorrow.  But instead I went and opened a bag of chips.

This morning I woke to clear, cold-looking skies and considered going downstairs to get pants but we are currently embroiled in a battle with the basement troll where we are passive-aggressively trying to get him to stop leaving the door open all the time on account of it is winter.  We have sense on our side but he is armed with pure, unadulterated crazy, so.  I opted not to complicate things by entering his lair before noon, and wore a dress with tights.

I totally chose unwisely.  It dumped snow while I was in class and continued to dump snow while I walked to the gym (aside: as I'm walking to the gym this guy is like, Only in Victoria would someone be using an umbrella in the snow.  And I was like, What an odd thing to say.  Right?  Maybe not everyone has an umbrella on them AT ALL TIMES but I am from Vancouver, where it rains all of the days, and if you have an umbrella on you and it's precipitating you will use it, right?  This is not just me?  Bizzare man) and my knees froze and two buses passed me because they were full and people who claim to love the snow obviously do not take public transit and I will not be leaving the house until this is done.

We are terrible at procuring booze.

Joel and I took the evening off last night to watch the Canucks game, and because we haven't got cable we have to watch them online, which usually means that we see the same commercial every commercial break.  Last night the confluence of a sloppy first period and the same AA commercial played maybe nine times convinced us that a few beers would help the rest of the game go down easier.

There are two liquor stores maybe four blocks from our house, and then a BC Liquor maybe six blocks past that, and as we're driving to the closer of the first two stores (closer only because it's on our side of the street) we're discussing whether it's worth driving the extra six blocks for the slightly cheaper booze.

I don't know if it's the HST or what, but six-packs at our closest store are exceedingly expensive now, so (looking very shifty, I'm sure) we left empty-handed and drove to the BC Liquor.  But because it was Saturday and nearly 8:00 pm, the BC Liquor store was closed.

We swung back to the closest stores, this time going to the one across the street, and made a selection only to almost NOT BE SOLD TO because I hadn't brought ID.  Because we were just nipping out to the store(s).  And Joel had his.  The gal is like, I have to ID both people if they're shopping together, so I'm all, Fine.  I don't know this guy, I am just going to go stand outside for no reason.  Joel's like, I will meet you in the car, person-that-I-do-not-know.

After I left the lady hemmed and hawed and finally sold Joel his beer, and we went back to watch the Canucks lose 7-0.  You were right, AA commercial.  Alcohol has lost its magic.

I wasn't kidding about the wands.

Some of you may remember Sam as that girl with all the expensive shoes but little did you know that she also has wands.  Three of them.

Sam and Claire are enormous HP fans, and I am totally willing to throw on a pair of round glasses and stand in the cold for half an hour for a good cause.

They let us in at 6:00 for the 7:00 showing, and an hour is a long time to kill so Sam and I ran around causing a ruckus

and choosing sides

which culminated in a duel

that I clearly won.

Both these treats are well-deserved.

Starbucks has a 2-for-1 deal on their holiday beverages between 2 and 5 pm for the next three days, which I know is like the most specific deal ever, but I like to get at least one peppermint mocha in my body per season AND both Joel and I had the afternoon off school AND had mad homework to do.  So.  I wrote 3000+ words of sloppy term paper and drank this delicious baby on the (semi) cheap!

Now I'm going to grab my wand and go see Harry Potter.  It's...not actually my wand, and I'm not actually bad-ass-core enough to wait in the cold to see HP the day after it opens, but I have friends who are and I like doing things with people who are keen enough to bring their own wands.  And to bring me one as well.

Two posts in one day!

I am a blitzkrieg. 

I just wanted to slap on my smug face because I know that it's rain-snow-slush-sleeting in Vancouver today, and though Victoria may be inconveniently located and expensive and snooty, this is what it looks like out my office window right now:

I need to rub this in now, because the next time you are taking public transit and your bus gets you to where you want to go without making you change eighteen times, you can think of me and laugh and laugh.

Why I can't stop watching Glee even though it is SO BAD now.

See!  Here I am, and it's not even 9.

So.  I really only watch, like, three shows (four since I remembered that 30 Rock is legitimately funny and not just a time-kill) and all of them are half-hour comedies because I don't have the attention span or the emotional endurance for dramas. 

Glee is an hour (44 minutes sans ads) but I forgive it this because it has SINGING and DANCING and the first season was full of heart-breaking teenage drama and I cried a lot (remember when Finn thought Quinn's baby was his and he had to tell his mom that he'd gotten a girl knocked up and was going to have to give up his dreams of a football scholarship and college and stay in that two-horse town to raise his baby and then he sang I'll Stand By You to the baby's sonogram?  Me = a soggy mess).

The latter half of the first season slid slightly downhill, but this season outright stinks.  Things that I hate:

• Mr Schuester
• Any scene or storyline involving Mr Schuester
• The way they make Schuester out to be this rad guy when all he makes are awful decisions
• The way they've reduced each character to a token issue (Mercedes = food, Kurt = teh gays, Rachel = being domineering and then realizing that she's domineering and then getting over herself until the next episode when she's domineering again)
• Rachel and Finn as a couple when, before they started dating, all their interactions were exceedingly negative and yet Finn was still all, I want to be with you
• Schuester rapping
• Schuester singing at all, really
• How all they do is complain about the budget and yet their numbers get bigger and costumeyer and the other night they sang Singing in the Rain in actual, indoor rain.  I know it's not a real high school glee club, but it used to actually look like one

Reasons, on the other hand, I can't quit it

• Brittany.  Her schtick might get old eventually, but for now 'When I pulled my hamstring I went to a misogynist' is the best thing that ever happened to that show.  Also she dances like a dervish.
• Sue.  Obviously.
• Figgins
• I actually quite like where they're going with Kurt right now
• Allllllll right the singing and dancing.  As much as I can't stand Schuester and Rachel only has two settings (Petulant and Broadway) and that's easily half the numbers right there, the group bits are usually very fun and I really like show choir.
• Uncle Jesse as Carl

Which leads me into my next, more prolongued bit about Schuester and why I hate him, because I had a serious problem with him chasing Emma in season one while he was still married and the show being like, This is a fine thing for him to be doing because his wife is clearly crazy.  See how much the crazy?  So his philandering is totally fine.

Which, yes, the wife is crazy.  I'm not thrilled that she's back, but I'm even less thrilled that Schuester is all, I will sleep with you and then turn you away again because you, crazy lady, clearly need more heartbreak in your life.  Also, I will continue to pursue Emma even though she is HAPPY and HEALTHY with Uncle Jesse (who is surprisingly hilarious) and I want to sabatoge her emotional growth.  But I love her, so it's ok.

Let us not even start on the Never Been Kissed episode where Beiste was all, A kiss is a symbol of affection and trust and ALL SORTS OF GOOD MEANINGFUL THINGS and Schuester is like *pity kiss* which misses the point entirely of what she was saying.

But she went for it!  They always go for it.  Everything Schuester does is portrayed as misguided at worst, and last episode made a point of having the Glee-sters go on about how awesome he is.  The guy is a dick.  Everyone on the show has made a few unwise decisions so far, but Schuester repeatedly makes an ass of himself and no one seems to notice.

So I guess that's my beef. 

This post is about my dinner.

I made meatloaf last week and it was delicious but it turns out that a giant loaf of meat is too much for two people and there's really no time in the day when a leftover slab of meat sounds like a good time, so today I made a meatloaf pizza for dinner.  Experimental repurposement!  It was pseudo-delicious but it only used up maybe a third of the leftover loaf so we'll be having pasta and meat(loaf) sauce in the near future.

I swear tomorrow I will not leave this daily posting business until it's late and I'm annoyed because I took 42 minutes off to watch Glee and I always forget how I kind of hate that show now.  Tomorrow I will write you a post that wasn't about my dinner.  It'll probably be about why I can't quit Glee even though it sucks so bad.

I almost forgot you were here.

I have oodles of work to do but Joel is on-call tonight and I just got back from drinks with my theory class (nerdiest beer I ever drank) and I just remembered how funny 30 Rock is so I might spend the evening burning through Season 4, which I appear to have missed entirely.

Sometimes more is more.

I made cookies today but I forgot that I was only making a half-batch and put in the full allotment of add-ins.

The butter and sugar is basically just acting as a binder now for all the white chocolate and craisins, much in the same way that baby carrots are simply vehicles for getting ranch to your mouth. 

They are not terrible.

I am a thrifty ninja.

Katie the Interrobanger has a grey cardigan that I covet because it is long and simultaneously chic and comfy-looking and because grey goes with everything and because all of my cardigans look like I borrowed them from hobos.

I went cardigan-shopping the other day but you can't buy one for less than $30 these days and really?  I just want to spend $10, and the only $10 cardies were those ones that are longer in the front than the back, and make you look like your torso has catfish whiskers.  Several turns around the mall later I walked out with an accidental belt but no cardigan.

I paraded through the Salvation Army quickly because you never know what's going to be in there (my best-beloved gold flats were a $3 score) and unearthed a long grey sweater for $4!  Victoire.

I wish I'd taken before-and-after pictures, because I had to edit it down, but it's a Large and it's B.U.M. Equipment which makes it an XXL in clothes-that-are-not-for-slobs.  Half an hour and eight cents worth of thread later...

That'll definitely do, pig.

My parents have been married for a very long time.

My progenitors are celebrating their anniversary in Sidney at that awesome hotel where you can bring your dog.  You know the one.

Aw, who's happy to be included?  Yes she is.

Since that is practically in our backyard (if our backyard was 25 minutes away) Joel and I went out there last night for a visit.  I'd been running around all day and had a muffin for lunch and Joel had been on-call where he frequently runs out of food so we were more than happy to let them order in Greek and then swing by the bakery to pick up a few things.

We couldn't choose between the cream-cheese cannoli and the orange-brandy cannoli and the lemon merangue tart, so dad got us all of the things.  As dad tends to do.

I thought that with that, and the wine and the coffee, I'd never eat again, but we stuck around long enough to eat all of their chips.  And maybe some of their Babybels.

Thanks for letting us eat you out of pseudo-house and temporary home, parental units.  And for letting me beat you both at Ticket to Ride.  (Also, I beat Joel.  Which has only happened once before.  VICTOIRE!)

It's. About. Time.

It is sunny and today I will be seeing many of my favorite people including but not limited to my parents, my honors supervisor, and my friend Nicole but MORE IMPORTANTLY THAN ALL OF THAT, Meredith Jean a.k.a. Baby Byrd finally dawdled out to meet us.

I thought you'd be pregnant forever, Robbie.

(Photo of Baby Byrd withheld until I get to meet Baby Byrd and snuggle said Baby Byrd with my face.)

I could start wearing a watch, I suppose.

Ay me.  Today one of the girls from a class I took last semester was back on the island, and she and I and another girl from that class (we sat in the back right-hand corner and were awesome) went for coffee.  We met at 1:30 and I thought we'd have a million hours until 4:30 when I had to go hang with my twin munchkins, so color me surprised when Twin Munchkin Mom phoned me at 4:45.  The time, she flies.

I was half an hour late for the munchkins, which threw off their evening and the one was wretched while the other was squirrelly.  We got nothing resembling work done.

Now I am exhausted and I feel like I should take a multi-vitamin or something, because I had oatmeal for breakfast and pasta alfredo for lunch and a box of triscuits for dinner.

I need to go lay me down.

Any old one can make a cup of coffee.

I always thought that if I lived somewhere long enough I'd end up with a barista or something who was my barista, and she would recognize me and I would go to her because she made a swell cup of coffee, but that would necessitate buying coffee out more often than I can afford to buy coffee out.  What I have ended up with is a cobbler.

I have a pair of much-beloved slouchy black boots that I wear every day between September and April, and I wore through the soles to the point where the guy at the Shoe Clinic said they couldn't be fixed.  I wish I'd taken a 'before' picture, because they were h'ruined.

Y'anyways, there's a cobbler downtown and his little shop looks like a smithy, because all of his cobbley machines are super-old and everything is covered in shoe-dust.  He looks exactly what a cobbler would look like if Disney drew him.  He is the Geppetto of cobblers.

He fixed my boots up right sharp and didn't demand my first-born, and threw in a couple of guards which, how did I not know about these?  They are little caps that are nailed into your heels, and then when you march through them you just get them hinked off and new ones put on.  It's a whopping $5 each time, and saves you having to get your boots re-heeled entire.

Today I was downtown running some errands, and I wandered into his shop to ask when I should be getting new guards.  He caught my foot up like I was a horse and said that about now was a good time.  I stood on one foot while he fixed up the other foot's boot and we debated the merits of boy-children vs girl-children and whether teenage girls are easier if they're the only one you have.

He told me last time he'd left his crappy banking job to become a cobbler, and it's so obviously the only thing he wants to do.  I want all of my people to be like this.  I want them to be like my optometrist in Abby who was so appalled by my contact lenses that he took them out of my eyes with his fingers and threw them in the trash (he gave me free new ones).

I have a professor who doesn't give enough damns to prepare for class.  The last two times I've gone out for coffee, the girl has given me (and charged me for) a medium even though I asked for a small.  But at least I am well-shod.

You know how I love a skull.

You guys, I have been missing out on sugar skull decorating for 28 years.  This is a Day of the Dead thing?  Eyeunno.  All I know is I could have been making skulls out of sugar and merangue, and then decorating them, AND THEN EATING THEM.

Think of all the ways you could decorate a sugar skull?  Cookie hats?  Gummy eyes?  Icing beards?  I know what I'm doing next Nov. 2, and you are all invited. 

For dramatization purposes only.  Estella is not edible.

Many movies. Ok, just two.

My oh me.  This daily blogging is very daily, isn't it.

We had a mini movie marathon last night because I am sick and Joel is tired and when you've spent the whole weekend working on papers or on-call, those last four hours on Sunday don't really count for much.

We saw The Blind Side, which was pleasant and heartwarming and you sort of kept expecting something dire to happen and it never does.  I mean, Big Mike crashes his truck, and that is SUDDEN, but everyone is fine and Sandy isn't even mad.  So.  Very soothing.

And then we saw Repo Men, never to be confused with the seminal '84 classic Repo Man, starring Emilio Esteves and concluding with an alien abduction.  Of the car.  An alien repo man!  I just got it.  Anyway.

     ≠

Repo Men was waaaaaaaaaay less mellow than The Blind Side.  People are cut open on the regular.  And I have a hard time with Jude Law as a badass.  He is his Jude Lawiest playing the straight-man-with-the-gambling-problem to someone like The Downey (Jr).

Now I will crawl into bed and read Nightmare Abbey, which is a parody of gothic novels, but not a funny one like Northanger Abbey.  Unfunny parodies are worse than unintentionally funny Serious Novels.

All the fun of having a dog, without having to clean up the poops

We're moving back to the mainland in the fall, which is sad for Shannon and Chelsea and I because I'm not quite sure how I'm going to survive Joel's fourth year without them, so we planned to spend most of this year hanging out.  We used to have 'book club' where we'd get together to gossip and eat brownies and drink and then watch a movie.  It was 'book club' in only the loosest sense.

Book club was hard on our nearly-30 asses, so now we walk the doggies and gossip instead.  Chelsea has an aggressively keen lab/spaniel and Shannon's friend lets her borrow the puggle for walking purposes.  It's a good thing Victoria is rife with beaches

and parks

and more beaches.

I don't have to train them or have them stink up my house, but I get to snuggle their smushed-up faces.

and see Chelsea and Shannon, on the weekly.

For your hungry eyes

This isn't a baking blog but sometimes in November it will be because I haven't put pants on today and a day in which you do not put on pants is generally a day in which you do nothing worth blogging about.  Or, you know, nothing you can appropriately blog about.  I am definitely in the former camp.

Y'anyways, here is some food pr0n for your Saturday evening.  For the halloween party last weekend I made fingers and bones. 

For the bones, stick a mini marshmallow on either end of a pretzel stick (stick it in the side of the marshmallow, not the end, for more bone-looking bones) and then toss in white chocolate.  Allow to set.  For the fingers, take sugar cookie dough and add green food-coloring.  More food-coloring = witchier fingers, less = undeadier fingers.  Roll into tubes between YOUR fingers, which will give them ridges that look like knuckles.  Slap an almond slice on the end, to make them almost too fingery to comfortably eat.  Bake.

And then yesterday after my run I made these

which were not super-delicious but which ensandwiched dulce du leche, which I also made yesterday, and which involved boiling an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk which is terrifying because that shit explodes.  You know, sometimes.

Mine did not explode, and while it was fine and whatever between the cookies yesterday it was VERY EXCELLENT today on an apple.

So I win this round.

Nothing interesting happened today.

I went for a run because it stopped raining but it only stopped raining long enough to fool me into thinking it'd stopped raining and then it rained again, but it was more heavy-misting than raining and it would gather on my face and then stream down and I felt like I was sweating super hard but only in the face.

And then I made cookies to offset the run.  Life is about balance.

L'allorween

Joel and I were invited to an intimate gathering of festively-attired friends, which appealed to the side of us that was unentheused about getting hilariously drunk in a crowd of acquaintances and strangers dressed as a sexy [occupation/animal/cartoon/historical figure].

But what to wear?  I jellyfished it up, with tentacles

and phosphorescence

and a stinger, for stinging.

I was hella stoked about my costume but Joel was too busy to think of anything and I felt like I'd already used up my one good idea for the year when IDEA BULB!  Man Being Eaten By Shark.

All those years of Early Childhood Education, i.e. Four Years Of Learning To Make Things With Posterboard and FunFoam, finally came in handy.  The shark was a big hit, particularly at the later stages of the party when costume bits became swappy, and the Girl Scout ended up in my tentacles

and the late-comer ended up in the Girl Scout's hat

and Fred Flinstone donned Super Mario's hat

and Wilma Flinstone and I swapped lids

and no one didn't wear the shark.

So, a success.

It's better this way

TV-watching, Plett-style involves accrueing large amounts (preferably an entire season) of unwatched episodes of a particular show, and then having at them all in one go.  We watched the entire first season of LOST over a Thanksgiving weekend.  I watched the current season of Project Runway the other night when Joel was on call.

It's delightful both because there is no suspense, no waiting a week for resolution, and because you only have to be invested in a show for a few days at a time.  I find syndicated television-watching exhausting, like it's an appointment I have to show up for every Thursday at 9.  Who is that organized?

When we lived in Vancouver I would bus out to Burnaby every Wednesday to watch America's Next Top Model with Joel's sisters and a couple other gals, and since we've moved to the island I've been watching with a handful of the med studentettes.  Tyra is the great unifyer.  But third year makes it impossible for everyone to commit to one night a week, even if PVR lets us choose that night.

So tonight we got enough of us together to watch the first four episodes and it was so great.  Because we didn't have to wait three weeks for the makeover episode, and when a girl we didn't like didn't get kicked off, we just watched the next one to see if she'd get kicked off then (she didn't). 

It is a perfect system.  The only downside is that if you don't get around to watching the PR finale because you have to go to class, the internet will inevitably spoil it for you.  This is one of the laws of nature.

I will not be eating dinner tonight.

The downside to having people over more than a week before Halloween to carve pumpkins which they will then leave on your stoop is that those pumpkins spend that week either quietly rotting from the inside out

or collapsing into an aggressively soggy mess

and at any rate gathering flies.

NaBloPoMo?

Hullo, internet.  It's that time of the year again, where I post every day even though it's that time of the year when I do a fat wad of nothing.  I'm not even sure if National Blog Posting Month is even a thing anymore.

ANYway, in an effort to stretch out my fun and photo-filled weekend into as many posts as possible, here's one that has nothing to do with that.  This is my tribute to my sister's 30 Days of Drawing project, more specifically to today's drawing, which is in its turn a tribute to J D Salinger's short story, A Perfect Day For A Bananafish.  I have added a comma, for hilarity.