part one of my new favourite things about california - bread & cie

I grew up about 500 miles north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada, which means that walking home from school in the winter months often involved slogging through snowdrifts in -30 degree (Celsius - I don't speak Fahrenheit yet) temperatures.

Luckily for me, my mom stayed at home for most of my childhood and was a prolific baker. In fact, she even baked all the bread for our family - Wednesday was bread baking day. One of my favourite memories of childhood is tromping up to the house, scrambling over the big pile of snow the plow inevitably left at the foot of the driveway, and coming in the door to the smell of fresh baked bread. I'd seat myself in front of the fireplace with a book and she'd present me with a thick slice of fresh baked bread, still warm from the oven, smothered in butter and strawberry jam my grandma had made the summer before.

Bread and Cie brings back those memories for me. What else can I say?

i'm too lame to think of a pithy title for this post

man i never would have believed that you could make whitney houston's 'greatest love of all' *more* elevator-esque and cheezarific, but here i am stuck on hold with rogers wireless wishing i could scrape my eardrums free from this offensive blandness with a chopstick.

grawr. ok done with that. i have now set up my blackberry so that (even though i am unemployed) i am constantly available via email. sadly, this makes me happy. i have felt disconnected and slightly dismembered since losing my email...

i also am now the proud owner of a fully unlocked blackberry pearl, which is also a very good thing.

here's a scenario for you - a what would you do kind of thing.

say you were walking down a moderately busy street one day, and as you passed a car you heard someone calling for help from inside the trunk. would you call 911 and walk away, afraid that whomever locked the trunk with the person inside is going to return and do you harm? or would you dial 911 and stay with the car, supporting the person trapped inside until help arrived?

i have that damn aerosmith song in my head again

ugh i don't even know what to write about. thanksgiving... good but weird to spend a holiday with someone else's family... weekend - kind of uneventful except for a nice bottle of wine friday night and a big hike down the beach up a hill back down the hill on saturday... i was feeling really sick then realized i hadn't taken my meds since wednesday duh...

today i don't seem to want to get out of bed, even though the sun is shining through the blinds, i need to go buy deodorant so i can stop poaching the architects, and i desperately need to do some laundry.

le sigh.

oh man - anyone watch how i met your mother? this is an honest-to-god ad i found for apartments: "Live, Eat, and Sleep in the hottest location on the south side of SAN DIEGO. Dowisetrepla apartments feature hardwood floors, silestone countertops, all appliances and more. Our club house is open 24/7. Located within a minute of the dog park, we welcome dogs of all sizes."

heh. dowisetrepla....

base the turkey on frida kahlo

so tomorrow is my first ever amurrrkin thanksgiving. i'm a bit nervous, as i will be sitting at a table surrounded by the architect's extended famdamly. yeah i've met most of them before but still.

i might be a bit drunk 'cause i opted for wine as dinner.

heh.

this morning the door rang and i leapt out of bed but was very careful at the same time that i not disturb the cat from his spot on the end of the bed at my feet. this was very sweet of me, and a response driven completely by habit, because the cat is back in vancouver till christmas. funny how the brain works, no?

one of the top ten blog posts ever

crack/ass by keith via dblogged...

the bottle in front of me's like a

i just read this crazy article on frontal lobotomies via npr. npr has become my cbc replacement, cause we don't have an in the house stereo and i can only listen to the cbc in the car, now, courtesy of my friend sirius.

it's funny the things you miss when you move to another country - i mean, besides the big things like friends, family, le chat... things like the cbc, my chaise, the gas fireplace, smarties....

anyhoo, back to the lobotomy. it's crazy to think that frontal lobotomies with (essentially) an icepick was considered a valid medical technique to treat everything from depression to (if one believes the feminist rhetoric) poor housewifery as recently as the 1950s. mind you, hysterectomies were used to treat nearly every female ailment including pimples, so why should this surprise me?

oh ok not pimples. i made that bit up.

the plus sides to california are, of course, the sunshine and the cheap wine. oh and the fact that i have no car, so i've been walking / biking everywhere and so am getting skinny again...

conquistadors who took their share

so last weekend i dragged the architect to see control; the new biography of ian curtis by anton corbijn. if you are a fan of joy division, you must see this film. if you are not a fan of joy division, but are a fan of film and music, you really *should* see this film. to poach from another review, corbijn rescues viewers from the 'shiny happy' musical biopics we have seen for the past few years (i.e. ray, dreamgirls) and, for a hundred minutes or so, allows the audience to follow along with curtis' rise and subsequent fall. everyone knows how the story ends, and yet i found myself anticipating the band's success despite that knowledge. for me, that is the sign of a good film, and a good story - when you are hoping that somehow, at the end, romeo and juliet will live happily ever after; that king arthur won't be killed by his son, that ian curtis won't hang himself on the eve of the american tour.

it's beautiful and dark and inspiring and haunting. highly recommended.

don't want to close my eyes

i have no idea why that song's in my head this morning. i'm not a fan of aerosmith by any means... ooo the architect and i found a sweet little garden apartment down by balboa park - totally restored 20s vintage with hardwood floors... so sweet and in our pricerange. i emailed the property manager to see if we could view it. plus it's pet friendly so we can bring tonymontana down with us at christmas. i guess he's having a rough time at my parents place because the dog just won't leave him alone, and is very jealous of any attention given to him. worse than kids, these pets.

here's a funny piece of trivia for you to pass on if you will: last night i used 'patootie' in a scrabulous game, and was informed that 'patoot' is cree for vajayjay. how fun is that? i wonder if that's where the word came from.... modern english is such a wonderful hodgepodge of so many other languages. i love words. ok done with the geeking out.

some stuff i've been perusing:
1) from slate - a cool article about black metal and environmentalism.
2) also from slate - musings on the death of email in the wake of facebook and other social networking sites
3) from cracked - 9 words that don't mean what you think (man i wish i had this back when i was teaching...)

le sigh

i miss having friends.

the sun's coming in through the window and highlighting all of the fingerprints on my computer screen

it's funny how reading certain writers can make you want to write more write better write with a certain modicum of legibility and coherence. for me it's chuck klosterman and tony pierce. i've read a bit of both this am so here i am tappity tapping away while the architect is at work. i guess veteran's day isn't an 'everyone off' day like it is back home; it's really more of a bank holiday.

i kind of missed its approach, this year, because people don't do the poppy thing round these parts. maybe next year i'll ask someone to send me one in advance because, like so many other things i didn't understand or appreciate when i was a shitty little brat, remembrance day has sort of become important to me.

or maybe it's that i didn't know it was important to me until all of a sudden it wasn't there.

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the architect and i spent saturday (i kid you not - we left the house before 9am and didn't return until past six. we spent ALL SATURDAY) shopping for our little abode. it's starting to become more of a home. i don't think either one of us expected to feel at all comfortable here; when we stayed here the last time it was being used as office space / storage by his cousins and so it felt cluttered and dusty and ... not cozy. now, though, we've had some good meals and sipped some nice wine and played some dominoes. it can't be a home without the dominoes.

today i think i'm off to a cafe patio with my book. that, or i may take the bicyclette down to balboa park and lounge about and read. i can't quite decide...

just a little heat

is it just me who sees a craigslist posting titled ROCKER - $60 and expects the link to lead to a picture of somebody who looks a little like this guy?

watch this mo-fo-ers

r/r

just shut your eyes... it's happening

well hello! and welcome to san diego! it's not sunny here, and hasn't been since we arrived. i have been assured, however, that the locals are currently relishing the opportunity to wear their sweaters, and that when it's 80degrees and sunny at christmas i will be longing for this weather.

heh. ya right. at christmas i'll be in vancouver IN THE RAIN. bring on the 80degree sunniness, i say.

interestingly, i'm lying here in bed listening to my favourite vancouver rainyday band the be good tanyas. i mean, let's put this all in perspective: back home it's pouring and 8 degrees. here outside is overcast and +16 flavoured. we went for a walk after dinner last night and didn't *really* need hoodies. so i can't complain *too* too much - just a bit, right?

right.

so anyway, now that i'm unpacked and a little bit more organized i shall do my utmost to post here at least once daily. i've got some grand plans for my little brain, and i'm reading the new chuck klosterman book, so that always does good things for my writing.

i can't make any promises, of course, 'cause i wouldn't want you to have anything to hold against me (unless it's dave grohl - you can hold him against me all the time if you want).

PS - that's the view from my front door. wanna come visit?