update: I am going to hurl

mila just took me up on my offer of a few kernels. but then she stirred in a spoonful of philly smoked salmon cream cheese. it looks less than appetizing, I must say.

nutritional analysis

oh god I just saw that my current variety of popcorn has 76% of my daily trans and saturated fats. TRANS FAT WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO DELICIOUS?

also mila it would be nice if you would share the popcorn with me. I would just give you a few kernels but I would pretend you ate half the bag and then I would just have had a temperate 38% of my daily fats.

my world is in shambles

food critic james chatto, who do you think you are? your increasingly flowery prose and ballooning metaphors have not gone unnoticed, you know. a recent blog post of yours gave us this gem of a simile: "a quality canadian restaurant meal is like a perfectly cut, bespoke velvet shirt. the european version offers the same shirt made of silk." that makes no sense. very bruni-esque, though. are you hoping to decamp to the US and take over frank bruni's post as the food editor at the NYT? I am even more suspicious now that you have revamped the TOLife star system to be more in line with the Times. more troubling even than your potential emigration, however, is the fact that I am now very much thrown off my ratings game. hiro at 1 star? bymark at 2 1/2? those make no sense, and now I am going to have to relearn all the ratings and I have exams to study for you know.

first baking, now this

responding to my accusations that she had no hobbies, mila apparently took up baking, and has now taken up horticulture. so far she is growing a jade plant and two egglings. the thing is, I cannot seem to recall the last time that mila watered her jade. she just yells over that it isn't looking so hot, and then I walk over with the watering can and tend to it. on the eggling front, the basil in particular was looking pretty droopy last night, for which I received a particularly severe tongue lashing. as with the jade, the egglings somehow seem to get pretty dry if I am negligent in watering them. odd.

a couple days ago (in the egglings's better days) mila sent me some pictures of the egglings. I got a couple dozen emailed pics of them in various poses about the living room. from that series:


basil on the left, petunia on the right. at least I think so. maybe I should ask the resident horticuluralist.

mila is trying to poison me

mila made some banana bread recently. she did not know where a lot of things lived in our kitchen, but that is okay, at least she was undertaking an independent baking project.

alarmingly, however, mila opted to replace the butter that the recipe called for with apple sauce. this is really quite unacceptable. next thing I know she is going to be slipping carob chips into my cookies and trying to poison me with flax seed. it is like some kind of hippy den in here. and her resistance to using copious amounts of animal fat is really getting out of hand. as far as I am concerned, pasta with spinach in it is health food, no matter how much butter and reggiano you throw in. I am off to do some whipping cream shooters or something.

quick word of advice

do not be afraid of pepperidge farm's flavour-blasted line of goldfish crackers. I waited far too long before trying the atomic bbq, having been turned off by the bold metallic packaging. big mistake. atomic bbq is delicious. it is like savoury candy. I think I could probably survive on atomic bbq goldfish and multivitamins.

xtreme pizza, on the other hand, is vile. I do not know what I was thinking when I bought it. I wonder if I could sell an almost-full bag of goldfish on ebay. I bet they would fetch a tidy sum once people found out they were from a celebrity blogger.

forecast

18C, sunny with a chance of blazer. finally.

long distance update

at the moment, I believe I am finally free from the deathhold of primus. all of my telecommunications are now safely with bell. I am sure primus will continue to send bills for a while, but that is okay, I have been missing our daily telephone chats, so the erroneous bills will at least give me an excuse to phone swapnil and catch up.

for a few days, however, we were in a no-mans land of long distance. the end result was that we were required to place all our calls using the operator. now you may think this sounds old-fashioned and quaint, but let me tell you, long distance operators today clearly have something better to do with their time than place long distance calls. such franco-canadian surliness like I have never heard before! usually they would yell at me for not dialing the number myself, though sometimes I was spared their ire and they would just disconnect me (sir, you dial one plus your number, you are not requiring operator for this call. goodbye.) thanks bell!

business casual

as I was ironing a shirt last night, two thoughts came to mind:

first, my blue checked shirt really requires a good starching on the cuffs. I must say that I felt rather lackluster today with my somewhat flaccid french cuffs.

second, no matter how much spray starch one uses, a casual H&M button-up with mesh panels does not somehow turn into a business blouse. I feel mila was suffering from this misconception when she packed her suitcase for her medical school interview. rectifying this matter required several hours in what is surely the most desolate mall in southwestern ontario. in future, perhaps a quick screening of mila's suitcase for cans of easy-on starch would be in order.

historical find

somehow a post entitled "this is how we rock it in the t-dot" was saved, unpublished, in my blog archive. it was empty, so I guess I never actually got around to explaining how exactly it is that we rock it in the t-dot. but I'll bet that would have been a really awesome post.

trapped in suburbia

as we strolled toward our minivan, our shopping cart filled with doubtlessly unethical but extremely reasonably priced grocery products from walmart:

"I could get used to suburban living," said mila.

I hope it was just the jumbo bag of miniature licorice allsorts talking. also have I mentioned that she loves the minivan? oh we are so trapped in suburbia.

aa

architectsalliance it is great that your website is finally no longer under construction, but why do you just have three projects listed? where is spire? I guess I will just have to go elsewhere for my architecture porn.

kelly kwan

google why have you pushed me down to eleventh place in the search results for kelly kwan? now I am not even on the first page of hits. how do you expect kelly to find my site and have his eye-opening susur revelation, causing him to leave the restaurant (emailing me first to ask my advice, of course) and join the team somewhere where his excruciating passion for service would be truly appreciated and then invite me to dine at the chef's table and of course the chef would cook for me and even though I was right in the kitchen and the chef could just pass me the dishes kelly would still insist on serving me and my water glass would never be less than half full and the plates would not waiver from their carefully considered orientations and even the most minor spills would see kelly saute-ing toward the table with napkin in hand ready to delicately place it over the offending blemish and all night long kelly would coo "ballotin of rabbit" and "monkfish liver sous vide" and "single origin cluizel house truffles" and napkins would be refreshed with wanton abandon and I would say "thank you kelly" but he would reply most genuinely: "no, sir - thank you."

life not imitating art

when I was at the hospital today and the doctor started dabbing on ointment just like they do on nip/tuck I assumed that there would be some serious doctor/patient emotional tension just like there always is on the show. you know, the doctor had been dating the patient's adult daughter but then the forced intimacy of applying polysporin with a tongue depressor was simply overwhelming and the doctor immediately dumped the adult daughter for the septuagenarian facelift patient. anyway none of that happened today.

the simon wears prada

I was reminded recently of a prada briefcase that I purchased in the summer of 2005 which has been sadly sitting in storage for the past while. I will have to try to break it out some time. the problem is I never really have any business papers to carry around. maybe I will just carry some scraps of paper and a pen in case I get bored and want to draw some dining-related comics.

just fyi, it is 100% real prada. one should never trust designer goods unless they are from a reputable dealer. well of course mine was from a reputable dealer. when I stopped by the side of the road to buy it, the salesman immediately stopped his aggressive hawking and became a consummate man of business: "will this transaction be in US dollars or euros?" he asked. it was like I was dealing with some sort of swiss banker. I guess it is service like that that makes the designer prices all worth it.

also I know it is authentic because when I bought it the man quickly waved a lighter under it. he told me this demonstrated that it was real leather (and, ergo, real prada). I was previously unaware of this lighter test for leather, and I continue to be unaware of what one should be looking for during this test. perhaps a fake bag would erupt in flames as soon as the lighter came near. or maybe a fake bag would fail to produce the noxious fumes that mine continues to emit to this day. it gives me a headache every time I open it up to get something out. those thrilling aromas of conspicuous consumption are just too much for me I guess.

exquisite van-ity

ev-hq recently acquired a motor vehicle, which is great given the suburbian environs. but yours truly is now cruising around in a minivan. dear makers of the ford windstar, can we talk dealer-installed accessories? spoiler? new rims? car bra? some extra chrome detailing? maybe a nice fat exhaust pipe? because this stock minivan is really killing the cred here. what if one of my doctors catches me walking to the parking lot? I guess I would probably just lie and say I did not have a car and then take the bus home and then come back under cover of darkness and shamefully retrieve the minivan. actually maybe I would send mila to get the minivan because, bizarrely, she appears to have no qualms with it. lack of standards, if you ask me.

I have been really busy

out of sympathy for jesus, I was on a 3 day blogging vacation. before that I was just busy. and by busy I mean doing cryptic crosswords.

urgently required

1 harpsichord

also: one of those white wigs, a conservatory, glasses on a stick, sundry capes, a few marble busts, some servants, et cetera.

typographical proposal

I wonder if professors would object if I appended a short blurb on the typeface at the end of my essays. that brief hit of typographical history at the end of a book is invariably one of my favourite sections.

I guess that would require me to write some essays, though. maybe I will just hand in an unsolicited history of caslon. or perhaps futura.

p.s. when is that helvetica movie coming out?