Cruisecation: Day Two

Our hotel promised continental breakfast, which in Canada is toast and maybe jam if you get there early.  We were pleasantly surprised to find that the lobby smelled of waffles, on account of the hot waffle griddle and the dispenser of waffle batter, for the purpose of making one's own waffles.

We had some hours in South Beach, which we mostly spent walking said beach and wilting and getting as damp as possible.  Our summer in BC has been lackluster, and we are not accustomed to things like sunshine and heat.

Also, we saw Versace's mansion, where he was keelt.  The doorman in the black suit (who discreetly stepped out of our picture) looked like he was going to melt.

The bus that was to bring us to the cruise port broke down and all the company had to spare was this limo.  No complaints.

Ok and so the boat.  The Allure of the Seas is, together with its sister-ship The Oasis of etc, the largest cruise ship asea.  It is, you guys, so large.  It is a theme park and a city and a shopping mall and a food court and it floats.  It has a central park.  And a carousel.  And a mini-golf course.  And a cupcake store.  And a hot dog stand, where you can get hot dogs because it is afternoon and you sort of forgot to have lunch and are starving.

So for the first day we had hot dogs and ice cream

and looked at all the things, and planned our future eating and carousel-riding and staggered into dinner a little overwhelmed.  And ok.  I have never been on a cruise.  I have heard you can order All The Entres if you want.  This is nuts to me, but I am totally for ordering several appetizers and a few desserts, because THE MENU!  She entices.  Plus, if there was ever a time to try watermelon gazpacho with celery and cucumber, it's on the hottest of days.

And this may have been the cucumber talking, but it was refreshing as hale.  So refreshing that I would try all the cold fruit soups for the rest of the week.  Cold fruit soups are frequently just smoothies in a bowl, you guys.

I also had the fancily-named fruit salad

the pork medallions

and the peach and blueberry cobbler with a side of chocolate mousse.

They make the entres smallish so's you can justify two desserts, me thinks.  I would eat like this always.  And THEN we went and saw Chicago! because cruises have musicals, and then we all did silly vaudeville moves (is any vaudeville not silly?) for the rest of the week.

Cruisecation: Day One

Shall we?  Ok.  Our cruisecation began at an hour in which one does not normally choose to get up, when our limo came to fetch us to the airport (because it's actually weirdly cheaper to rent a limo than a van large enough to seat eight people and their luggage)

and continued at an hour in which I am usually still sleeping, in which we spotted both Mattias Ohlund (Canucks defenseman extraordinaire) and Will Wheaton (former Star Trek: The One With Patrick Stewart star and current cameoster on Big Bang Theory) at the airport.  Ohlund was on our plane, and I may have brushed his arm.

Some many, many hours later, in which planes were delayed and infants wept, we arrived in Ft Lauderdale and barrelled down the road to our hotel in South Beach.  The hotel's location was chosen partially because of its proximity to this:

wherein you are given the impossible task of choosing A Thing To Eat off of this monstrosity:

and end up eating this:

at 1:00 am.  Or maybe you get a tuna sandwich and put an onion ring in it, I don't know your life.

PNE!

Superdogs!

Mini donuts!

For cheap!

For five!

For my belly!

Pulled pork!

Trick motorcyclists!

Cotton candy!

Enormous cattle!

PIGEONS WITH HUMAN LEGS I.E. FODDER FOR MY NIGHTMARES!

DOES! NOT! WANT!

And one more for good measure.

Boxes, boxes everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

We are semi-unpacked.  I still don't know where any of my pants are, and I only just found my cache of socks.  But the important bit is done.

That's Señor Bones down on the bottom left, ogling Estella the Lady Skeleton. Sam Skellington is in storage, so the good Señor has roughly eight months to make his move.  But he also might be forced to wear Sam's various hats, so it's a bit of win/lose for him.

I have vacation posts (in my brain.  Not written.  Unpacking makes me nappish) but to tide you over, Joel and I stopped at Pig for pulled pork sandwiches on our way out of Victoria forever.

We will obviously be returning, if only for said sandwiches.  If you are of the meat-eating persuasion, and in our province's capital, and in possession of six dollars, make your way to Johnson and Blanshard.  They have soda pop in glass bottles as well.  I am jealous of my past self.

I just took a 2-hour nap.

We are home and it is raining and I can't find any PANTS because all of my pants are packed.  I had planned to re-wear hastily-washed cruisewear until we unpacked such unnecessaries as pants.  But Vancouver has other ideas.

I will have posts.  They will be photo-laden, and most of those photos will be of food.  Brace your hungry eyes.

Notes on the last day in this house.

Some people are enterprising and sometimes those people are me.  I have made soup out of Things Left In The Fridge.  Thanks, Past-Me, for leaving Future-Me the use of a deep enough saucepan.  And a knife.  And, inexplicably, a bay leaf.

I thought I needed to buy more bobby pins but I really just needed to clean my entire house.

Somebody is going to need a bath after this.  But not in my clean bathtub.  (Somebody is actually just going to go to sleep with very dirty feet.  Probably in the next ten minutes, actually.)

I am not as agile as formerly.

Eat New York!

You guys!  I have been packing!  It has been hellish.  We won't talk about it.

Instead, I will do a food round-up of our New York trip, which I just now realized I never did and should do otherwise it won't get done and then I will go on a cruise and come back with more food pr0n and forget about this.  Everyone knows trips are for eating!  So!  New York, how we ate you.

(I will be doing this without the aid of my beloved Document, which is now packed.  Woe for my memory.)

My sister and I are not mens, and as such we prefer near-constant snacking to several hearty meals.  So for the most part we got A Thing and then split that Thing and then a few hours later got another Thing.  That way you get to sample more Things.  But our first night in NY we were so starved that we each got our own Thing from the pizza place across the way.  The pizza slices were 'uge.

Mine had spinach and tomato and a soft cheese which was probably unpasteurized and therefore off-limits for my pregnant self, but mad tasty (and I didn't get listeria, so).  Bekah's had broccoli and diced chicken fingers, which SOUNDED TERRIBLE but was excellent (I hear.  Chicken was on my no-fly list, and I can still only eat it if I don't have to look at it or think about it.  Why you so gross, chicken?).

Our first morning we were all, What does one eat?  Because we hadn't yet fallen into the habit of ducking into ANY DELI ANYWHERE and getting scrambled eggs and home fries, or french toast and home fries, or french toast and scrambled eggs and HEAPS OF BACON for, like, $3.25.

So that first jet-lagged morning we ate at Dunkin Donuts and were like, Well now that's done.  We made up for it by going to Coney Island later that day and getting hot dogs

and funnel cakes.

We ate loads of tasty street-cart meats (and at least one more hot dog outside the BEA, which was nast and kind of put me off my feed) and no small amount of bagels (which really are better in NY and have forever ruined me for west coast bagels), all of which were delicious and none of which got photographed, because we were busy eating them.

But certain foods were iconically New York and obviously we had to get a soft pretzel in Central Park (it helps that wandering lost through the Met for hours works up an appetite)

and a cheesecake(s) from the bakery around the corner from our hostel.

That bakery was a dangerous sauce, because every night we'd be staggering home, exhausted and maybe a little hungry, and we'd duck into the bakery just to see and we'd walk out with fritters the size of my face.

I already talked about our Mexican extravaganza at Panchitos, so I'll just repost this photo and move on.

What I haven't talked about was Brother Jimmy's BBQ, half a block from our hostel.

We'd walk by there every night on the way home, hungry enough for the bakery but not quite hungry enough for some South in our mouths, but then the day that we got lost in Little Italy (again) we had PLANNED to have dinner there, like a bunch of fore-thinking grown-ups.  Getting lost = extra starved = hush puppies to start

and pulled pork to finish

and nothing left on the plates, and every one of the sauces sampled LIBERALLY

and everything was amazing and everyone was happy.  We need THAT to be HERE in my FACE.  (I would like to point out that there were four pickles and that Bekah ate three of them when I wasn't looking when HALF OF FOUR IS CLEARLY TWO and they were very excellent pickles and I'm still resentful.)

After Brother Jimmy's, what are you going to do, right?  Nothing.  I can't remember a single thing that we ate after that, except that I had a very disappointing bagel at the airport in Toronto, and that we had quite a good knish at some point after trying to figure out what they were for ages (a deep-fried mashed potato patty.  How is that not going to be good?) and that, aside from the Sarah Dessen whoopie pie (azmazing) and the Shel Silverstein black-and-white cookie (disappointing), we also ate some ridiculous tiny cupcakes at a booth that asked if we were a small business, and that nearly half the booths had candy out in the first few days and we lived kind of mostly off that for a while, and that none of our airlines fed us and so we bought some overwrought pastries from the pastry cart outside our hostel (that we weirdly missed seeing until the LAST DAY) and they got crushed in the carry-on but were perfect anyways, and that even though I was very newly pregnant I wasn't sick or tired, thank the goodness.

New York, you fed us well.

I am thinking ahead.

You know how sometimes you buy a Cheap Basic Whatever and then a month later you wish you had it in blue or a year later it gets a hole or you wear it all the time and you suddenly wish you had bought SIX of it?

That will not be THIS day!

They are v-neck tees and they were $5 and they FIT ME and yes there are two white ones you know what happens to white t-shirts don't tell me you don't.

I also bought a giant floppy hat.  Bring on the sun, little darlin.

I am packing.

I am packing for our move next week, but I am also packing for our cruise the week after.  I am packing the things we won't need at our parents' house, i.e. the long-storage, but excluding the things we need to live for the next ten days.  I am packing the clothes I won't need to look at until after I have this baby separately from the clothes I won't need to look at until it gets colder, which in their turn are in a different box from the clothes I don't want to wear on the cruise or in the next ten days except maybe I will.

I am packing my books, and they are refreshingly straight-forward.  Into the box, little ones.

To catch you up.

My intrawebz was down all day yesterday.  It was a quiet and lonely day.  I purged the filing cabinet and my closets without the crooning of internet-radio or the cheery chirp of my email to keep me company.  Here's what you missed while I was stuck in the interpipes:

I've taken up swimming again, and it is awesome.  I'm like a very small, freckled orca.  BUT.  I had bought new lotion because the chlorine makes my skin go EHHHHHHN and friends?  If you buy the not-Aveeno-but-the-cheap-lotion-packaged-to-look-like-Aveeno, Aveena or Oveeno or whatever, and it says 'oatmeal and menthol' on the package and 'for hands and body,' what that means is do not put that shit on your face.  You will regret it.

Speaking of swimming, I bought the most expensive swimsuit of my life today.  None of the $14 suits at Urban Planet and Sirens and all my usual suspects have tops anymore, it's just row after row of bottoms, so I went to a proper bathing-suit-selling place.  Those places GOUGE you.  But the lady kept bringing me options based on what I asked for (halter, please.  And bright.  And not yellow or white) and I kept putting this tangerine with white polka dots back on and it FIT and the COLOR is SPLENDID and did I mention the fit?  But the price.  But I have been so frugal in this pregnancy so far!  But egads.  But I love it and have zero buyer's remorse.  Talk to me in a week.

Speaking of buying, I was in Urban Planet picking up some $5 tanks (see?) when a girl was caught shoplifting.  And security came and there was shouting and the girl was ADAMANT about SOMETHING and the cashier and I looked at each other like, How exciting!  And after they marched her out and the gal rang up my purchases she's all, That'll be the highlight of my day.

Speaking of highlights, I made a flan yesterday.  And not like that time Robyn and I made a low-fat flan and it was basically an omelette with syrup, but an honest-to-goodness flan.  Several flans.  My flan recipe (which is actually a halved recipe already) makes four small flans, so yesterday Joel and I each had a flan, and tonight I will have flan after dinner without having done any of the work for flan and it will be the highlight of MY day.

Except for buying that bathing suit, which I'm still stoked about.

I love a summer weekend, when the internets are quiet because everyone is out beaching.

Scavenging nature for my own pleasure. Part I.

I've never had a garden before, so I've never been able to (as every heroine in every Victorian novel ever has done) gather flowers for the drawing room, or whatever.  We have a garden now, but it is the basement troll's baby and domain, so we don't touch.

EXCEPT!  The basement troll is tree-planting for the summer (I'm sure I've mentioned this, AND done a happy jig already, but *jigs*) so our gardens are neglected.  The front yard looks like this

and the side-yard looks like this

and the back garden looks like this.

Anything that rampant is obviously weeds, but *I* don't know different, so.

Hullo, pretty kitchen!

Speaking of gardens, my three-plant mini-garden is doing splendidly.  I think.  It is making THINGS, anyways.

I promise this will not become a mommyblog.

Because I am doing other things besides being pregnant.  Like ANNOTATING!  Remind me to go off on a tear about this anthology we are annotating, and how annotating is way more nit-picky than I'd ever imagined anything could be, and how we sometimes spend half an hour trying to confirm via reputable source when some guy DIED.  Maybe that was my tear right there.

But anyways, I was pregnant for a long time and not blogging about it, which was weird for me.  Here are all the things I couldn't tell you, intrawebz:

We knew for about two weeks before I told my sister, and a month and a half before we told our parents, and it was wacky to me that we were going to have a baby and our families didn't know but all my doctors knew, and the receptionists at my doctors' offices knew, and the girl who takes my blood at the clinic knew.

Pregnancy has turned me into a mouth-breathing moron.  The blood vessels in your sinuses swell up, making it harder to breathe through your nose and I'll be sitting here reading with my mouth hanging open like a yokel.

You can't just throw on something with an empire waist, or buy regular clothes in larger sizes, like I'd planned on doing.  Your boobs are too big in the first case and you are wrong-shaped in the second.  Dressing yourself becomes infinitely more complicated.

My boobs are ridiculous.