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.

----------------------------------------------------------

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?

it's 3am i must be lonely

i have no idea what frickin time it is. angus' clock says it's 6, my house clocks say 6, and my mobile thinks its 5. i'm all screwed up.... i'm lying here waiting to fall asleep, listening to satie and the slight sounds of snoring emanating from the architect... my brain is running about a million miles per second and i just want to sleep.... oh and know what time it is. maybe if i just knew the right time it would all be ok... probably not though.

the cat is crawling around, trying to get under the blankets, looking for attention i haven't the attention span to give him.

we had such a good night out... dinner at rime, parade of lost souls.. drinks at a friends... dancing dancing dancing at the dollhouse till the wee hours (what time? no idea... for gods sake will someone tell me what time it is?) ok satie is getting too jangly for my nerves... garden state soundtrack it is. cat wants out of the bedroom architect still snoring away... brain still running running a billion miles a second. (you'd think it would slow down thanks to the tylenol pm and the 24(?) hours i've been awake but no it just goes faster and faster waiting for the drugs to be over or at least for the new ones to kick in.

less than a week till d-day, or should i say sd-day... the kiddo will be in his new place with the sister ok i have to let the cat out for gods sake ... i'm sure its for the best the catbox and/or foodbowl call sing their sirens song like the one in my head waiting waiting to fall asleep please god let me just sleep...

courage, my word

i've been watching these fires in san diego with a great deal of interest (which is, surprisingly, surprising to some people). the sister feels that i've become a bit obsessed (though that's fading), but i think it's at least somewhat understandable. this place to which i'm shifting my entire realm of existence is in flames. bad omen? possibly.

or, it could mean nothing at all, other than the fact that i'll probably have some seriously bad allergies for the first few weeks i'm there, as they are expecting the air quality to be in the tank for some time.

i have been making some inroads into the packing, which is to say that i've been tackling it a box or two or four a day. i've got all my books squared away and experienced a bit of a panic attack slash dark soul teatime when we sold our bookcases = they really did make our dining area oh-so-homey and warm. le sigh. the architect chided me for becoming attached to *things*. i tried to make him understand that it wasn't the bookshelves i missed, it was the atmosphere they brought to the room. what does he know, though, he's a boy.

the cat and i are spooning. he's forgiven me, clearly, for collaring him (literally). he's going to stay with the parents for a few months and he's got a tendency to escape, there, and i worry so i purchased a collar with a tag engraved with his name and our phone number. you know, just in case, 'cause he's my little fuzzy no-nuts. yesterday, however he was royally pissed and he (literally) pissed on the sister's slippers. heh.

bleh.

i'm a wee bit sensitive today. i feel like hiding in my bed with my book and/or my computer, so perhaps i will.

le sigh.

i can't tell if this is general malaise, the result of a night chock full of bad dreams and restlessness, or my impending girl time. probably a combination of all three, really.

well not to mention the fact that i no longer have medical, so i've been hoarding my meds 'cause they've all of a sudden gotten extremely expensive. probably not the best plan, but there it is.

not to mention the fact that i've got all vowels in one of my scrabble games....

like a river flows

man i've been lowballing my blog. i admit it. it's been like mental masturbation - i put my fingers on the keyboard and these pithy non sequitors come out. i'm just going through the motions and we all know it. i don't know what it's going to take for me to go back to writing like i can. i sit and clickclickclack through the archives and remember what it's like to do it - what it's like to put down words and have them *feel* like something *mean* something, i just don't remember how to do it.

how can i reconnect my creativity with my emotion? is it true that only miserable people are creative? is it true that i'm only creative when i'm miserable?

i dunno. maybe when i'm wandering the streets of san diego, camera and notebook in hand i'll see stuff that ... ughn for the lack of a better word inspires me.

fuck how emo can i get?

hello how are you

it's amazing how busy i find myself, now that i'm technically unemployed. every day seems to fill itself up so quickly. who's got time to pack when there are cars to wash and wine to purchase and drink?

(here's a secret - some sick impulse drove me to purchase and eat a macdonalds cheeseburger happy meal yesterday. not only did it not kill me, it was delicious. seriously. i'm not sure what this means (can i eat beef? do i want to? maybe there isn't enough beef in a macdonalds cheeseburger to really have an impact - could it be 97% sawdust?) but what i do know is that the other day i ate a tim horton's bagel with tomato and puked my guts out, but the burger simply went down like heaven. figure that out.)

i apologize for the poor quality and number of photos being displayed in my newfound return to the blawg. the architect mistakenly took my camera cable to san diego with him, so i'm stuck using my phone. it takes not bad photos, but they still have that camera phone feel.

hm whass new - let me think. not too much, really, aside from rapidly running out of money, and having a new haircut. oh and have i mentioned that i haven't started packing?

heh whoops...

clickaround

and here you never thought you'd get tired of me....
go here for more arcade fire fun-ness.

bestill my beating heart

the constantines are a band burdened by our truthfullness. pile the facts like guitar tracks.