A picture I took of Taylor holding Georgie at the breeder’s house, on June 12th, the day we picked her up.
A picture I took of Georgie to this past Saturday, August 27th, to send to the breeder.
Wow. WOW. Is this even the same dog??? I can’t believe how much she’s changed! As she gets her big, fluffy adult coat she’ll change completely again, it’s so crazy. I keep trying to imagine how she’ll look but I can only see her like this, all scraggly hairs, puffy ears and long, skinny legs.
I made these using the recipe that came with the mini doughnut maker, with a couple small changes: instead of nutmeg in the batter I used lemon zest, and instead of dipping them in cinnamon & sugar I made a lemon glaze (which sort of turned out).
I didn’t have a sifter when I made my first batch of doughnuts so I broke a teaball in half to make 2 mini-sifters. It’s useful for sifting small amounts of confectioner’s sugar (not pictured) or straining pulp & seeds out of small amounts of citrus juice.
Now, if you have a mini doughnut maker you basically have this recipe, but JUST IN CASE here it is.
doughnut ingredients:
5 tbsp margarine
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 tsp lemon zest
1 1/2 cup flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
Mix butter & sugar thoroughly. Add egg & lemon zest and mix well.
Sift flour, baking powder and salt together.
Add dry ingredients to butter-sugar mix, alternating with milk.
Put the batter in a pastry bag (I have a jumbo size one) with a round tip. I’m not sure what size mine is, but the batter is pretty thick so it should be fairly large. Pipe into pre-heated, oiled doughnut maker and bake 3-5 minutes (until golden brown).
I managed not to underfill this time so there were no scrawny mutant doughnuts, just 36 plump ones!
Before glazing move the doughnuts to a cooling rack in a parchment paper lined baking sheet. I don’t have a REAL recipe with amounts for the glaze, I just sifted a couple teaspoons of confectioner’s sugar at a time and mixed it with 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice and 1/4 teaspoons of lemon zest until it reached what I judged to be the “right” consistency (ie not totally liquid like last time!). I still need to figure out the best glazing method- I tried piping it with my smaller pastry bag and I tried brushing it on with a silicone pastry brush and neither really worked well. If anyone has any tips or ideas I’d like to hear them!
While my glazing technique leaves something to be desired, these doughnuts are a total success! Delicious and lemony and sweet. Unfortunately Sym is at her dad’s this week so I don’t have a picture of her testing them, so here’s one of Dougal and Georgie being best friends instead.
1. To respect other people’s property.
My backyard is actually shared between three houses, one of which contains another childcare and all of which contain my most ancient nemesis: NEIGHBOR KIDS. The other child care provider and I have toys we leave outside- either they’re too big to move in and out of our apartments, or too dirty, or just not appropriate for inside. We don’t mind if the neighbor kids (and their friends, neighbor kids from down the block) use the toys, but what we DO mind is when they trash them. Not a week goes by that I don’t have to rush out to stop the neighbors kids (all of whom are unsupervised and all of whom are old enough to know better- some are even neighbor TEENS) from breaking, stomping on, throwing over the fence, bashing against a tree or otherwise ruining things which AREN’T THEIRS.
This behavior isn’t limited to daycare toys- toys belonging to the neighbor kids themselves and even pieces of furniture are under attack. Recently I had to intervene when a neighbor kid’s friend from down the block found a remote control car belonging to another neighbor kid, somehow determined it wasn’t working (it was switched off) and was about to “fix” it by hurling it on the flagstone path, and just this week the neighbor kids were playing a game that involved putting resin Adirondack chairs upside-down on their heads and chasing each other around, causing chair collisions with trees and gardens, the fence and other Adirondack-chair-hatted children. Why aren’t the parents telling the children not to break things they know belong to their neighbors?
2. To respect other people’s privacy.
My apartment is a basement apartment and my windows are at ground level. If I have the blinds open and someone happens to walk by, they’ll usually glance in the window, their eyes caught by light or movement. I really don’t like people looking in, so I usually don’t open the blinds on the yard side. I just turn the slats horizontal so that light can get it but you can’t really see into the apartment unless you go right up to the window and peer in. Which is what the neighbor kids do, sometimes even banging on the glass to get my attention. ON WHAT PLANET IS THAT OKAY??? Part of the reason (the other being AWESOMENESS) that I put up the bunting in my library windows was to make it harder to see in here, but it just makes the kids try harder to see in! Why aren’t the parents telling the kids that it’s rude to peer in windows like that?
3. To respect our shared space.
As I mentioned, a lot of people share the yard. It often gets messy (especially with the neighbor kids trashing things) so the other day I decided that I would take a trash bag out and clean up all the broken toys. In addition to trucks with missing wheels, cracked buckets and popped balls, I found garbage. Lots and lots of garbage: empty Slurpee and Frappuccino cups, napkins, ABC gum, used band-aids, candy wrappers, empty sunscreen bottles. None of these things came from me, my family or my daycare kids, so I was cleaning up other people’s trash, or rather, other people’s kid’s trash. I would wonder why the parents haven’t told the kids not to leave garbage in our shared yard, but these are the same people who leave trash bags outside and don’t bother to tidy it up when skunks, squirrels and raccoons rip the bags open and strew smelly yogurt cups and ancient couscous on the lawn. These are the same people responsible for the pantyliner incident.
Never Let Me Go, 62/104; Cocktails for Three, 63/104; Mockingjay, 64/104
… to the handsomest, kindest, funniest, most wonderful man in the entire world. You make every day of my life the best day ever, and being married to you makes me the luckiest girl.
I was going to take a picture of Taylor today, like, RIGHT NOW, but he’s currently sleeping in a weird position with his mouth wide open. While he is forgiving of most of my sleeping husband photography, he probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I captured him right now. Instead, here is a selection of Sleeping Husband Classics.
It was Symphony’s dad’s birthday the other week, and she wanted to make something special for him. She designed a small pillow with an applique of a wombat and a little pocket for him to put his ring in. I cut out the pieces and helped her when she made mistakes, but she did almost all the sewing on her own. She’s already an accomplished drawer of baby fawns, and soon she’ll be an expert sewer of tiny things like myself.
I wrapped it in plain white paper which she decorated with stickers and I gave her the little giraffe card that came with my Kristiana Parn print in which to write a nice note. I think she did a really good job with everything. Sometimes I still think that she’s a tiny little kid but it’s things like this that show me how grown up she’s becoming. It’s amazing and sad at the same time.
Last night Jenn and I went to the Lady Gaga concert, and let me just tell you it was AMAZING. But then I had a terrible experience this morning so I’m all traumatized. Okay. Good story first!
We met at Subeez at 6 and quickly determined it would be more cost effective to get a whole bottle of sparkling wine instead of cocktails (but then we had cocktails too, opps haha).
I don’t have any real pictures of what I wore but here is a photobooth pic from after I got home.
Georgie was FREAKIN OUT and wouldn’t let me put her down. I bought that sequin skirt back in January to wear on my birthday, and I legitimately forgot to take the tags off so afterwards I was going to return it (YES I’M AWFUL I KNOW) but I never got around to taking it back and now I’m glad I kept it! I wore it with one of my signature grey tank tops, my vintage black crystal necklace, and (not pictured) some grey flats (that MURDERED my feet), and this great black trenchcoat with grey leopard lining I got at H&M last winter.
I bought tickets in March right before we went to Hawaii so I couldn’t really justify getting expensive ones so we ended up in the balcony, but close to the front and less than halfway down the stadium. So while our seats weren’t great, they definitely could have been worse!
Now it’s time for a series of fuzzy photos that demonstrate my camera’s zoom capabilities, haha.
One of my e-friends WENT OFF about this dress (it’s remote control and all the pieces move around) but almost the whole time Lady Gaga had it on she faced the opposite side of the stadium!
The “Fame Monster,” it was like a giant inflatable octopus-anglerfish hybrid.
AMAZING!!
Now for the HORROR STORY (and be happy I DIDN’T take pictures of this): When I took Georgie out this morning I noticed Tina Fey‘s grave looked disturbed, so I went over to check it out and it had been straight up DESECRATED. I had buried him in a box under some bricks but I guess that wasn’t enough to stop raccoons because the bricks were tossed aside and the box was TORE UP. There were scraps of cardboard and paper and little tufts of hair everywhere, it was so horrible.
I figured I’d just shovel everything back into the grave and pretend he was still buried there, but while I was in the middle of that I happened to glance into the grass and that is when I found out that even though the raccoons had dug up the grave and torn open the box, they didn’t eat what was inside. My poor little dead hamster was now a horrible reeking bloated rotting corpse and I HAD TO CLEAN IT UP. I puked in the bushes twice, it was awful. Later this morning Georgie had diarrhea on the kitchen floor and I was like “HOW IS DOG DIARRHEA THE LEAST DISGUSTING THING I HAVE TO DEAL WITH TODAY??” I’m seriously so traumatized.
Taylor is the best husband in the world- he offered to clean up the carcass after work (I didn’t want to leave it there so I did it myself in spite of the HIDEOUS STENCH), but he did finish filling in the grave (which also stinks, I need to go dump a bunch of Borax or baking soda or something in it) AND since I was having such a bad day he stopped at Chapters on his way home and got me a present.
MOCKINGJAY !! I’M SO EXCITED YOU GUYS.
Saturday was the least fun day of the year: carpet cleaning day. Yay, let’s get up early on the weekend and move furniture and vacuum! Fun! The cleaner was supposed to come between 10-12 but he actually showed up at 9:30, which was good because he was done faster but bad because it meant I didn’t get to have a shower.
He was done by eleven, and rather than spend the whole afternoon hanging out in the linoleum-floored parts of the apartment while the dogs languished in their crates Taylor and I decided instead to embark on an Epic Quest.
First, we went down to Barking Babies in Yaletown so I could buy Georgie a new collar- she already outgrew her baby one! I got the same colour/style/brand: red glitter! I haven’t put it on her yet but it’s very cute.
The next leg of our journey took us to the edge of Chinatown and the weird Tinseltown mall. Taylor wanted to go check out some nerd hobby shop so I went to Yoko Yaya and bought a bag full of origami paper, Japanese stationery, glitter stickers, pens and tiny plates. Taylor was disappointed by the store he went to and Yoko Yaya makes him crabby, so he went and sat outside. When I found him he said he just wanted to go home, but I was like “… and spend the whole afternoon hanging out in the linoleum-floored parts of the apartment while the dogs languish in their crates??” and he agreed to accompany me into Chinatown proper. To try to cheer him up I took us to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park (the free side, not the classical garden you have to pay to get into). I love it there, it’s like a ~hidden oasis~
when I took this picture I realized that I could see this Martin Creed piece almost perfectly from where I was standing
After a quick trip up the street to try to find some good Hello Kitty toys (no dice) we swung back past Tinseltown, where I’d promised to buy Taylor a frappuccino and some doughnuts- he was pretty hangry (hungry + angry) by this point and I didn’t want our day ruined. Once we were re-energized we headed into Gastown, where we stopped at nood– we were looking for end tables for the living room, a chair for my new desk (I think I may have found one at a different store yesterday but that’s another story) and Taylor also bought a salad spinner (another story, this one about lettuce).
Taylor trying to find out what this store was going to be
some Halo thing next to Waterfront Station
the exterior of the Fairmont Pacific Rim, it says “lying on top of a building… lying on top of a building… lying on top of a building… the clouds looked no nearer than when I was lying on the street”
Instead of cutting through downtown to get back home we kept heading west until we reached the Olympic cauldron (which is a fountain now), at which point we got down onto the Seawall. Other than a couple cauldron-viewing sessions back in February I hadn’t been down to that area in forever, back when it was all detours and construction sites. Now it’s all little parks and restaurants and weird art sculptures all the way through Coal Harbour, so it as a really nice walk. We went as far as Cardero St before heading up the hill to go home. We got back here at about 4 o’clock, which means we’d been out walking around the city for FIVE HOURS. Wow. WOW!
Digital Orca by Douglas Coupland- how Vancouvery!
Kichou is all wet because he fell in a fountain, haha
I think we really made the best of Carpet Cleaning Day, although by the end I was pretty footsore and hangry myself, so I don’t think we’ll be doing that again soon, I do want to go back and check out some of the stuff we saw again, just not all in one fell swoop, you know? Spread out.
Guess what? This blog has a new domain, and it is SUPER GENIUS (I can’t take any credit since Taylor thought of it. I didn’t change the hosting so old links will still work (you can update them if you want) but you might have to add the new address to your google reader? I’m not sure.
(also sorry for the double post I HAVE MY REASONS)
I thought for this week I’d try something different than juice and fruit, with somewhat peculiar results. BEHOLD: the Nutella/Vanilla Yogurt Pop!
It looks… I don’t even know. Anyway.
These were pretty simple- I mixed together 1/2 a cup of vanilla yogurt and 1/2 a cup of Nutella and used my trusty piping bag to get the result into the popsicle mold. My popsicle mold holds more than a cup of popsicle mix? batter? but I didn’t want to make a full batch in case these were a gross failure.
The result was… idk. They were hard to get out of the mold and I had to run hot water over them for longer than I would have liked so they were pretty melty. I don’t think Nutella is a good candidate for freezing anyway. Symphony and her friend Ali said they were good at first but halfway through they were like “WE DON’T LIKE THESE ANYMORE” and threw them in the sink. I think Taylor’s face pretty much says it all here.
