Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Aug
19

The Return of High Garden

Category: food Tags: balcony gardening, food, gardening, growing food, herb garden, vegetables Leave a Comment

One of my favourite things about summer is growing food on my balcony – I like to refer to my little balcony oasis as High Garden (as my condo is on the 10th floor and I’m a Game of Thrones fan.)

And my garden seems to get bigger and better every year. This year we actually are fertilizing on the regular and, who knew?, fertilizing really helps the plants grow¹.

This year we decided to plant a few vegetables:

tomatoes
cucumbers
onions
potatoes
spinach

and some herbs:

rosemary
chives
thyme
marjoram
savory
mint
oregano
dill
parsley

and, of course, the cat garden:

cat grass
cat mint
cat nip

Planted on May 15, 2018:

June 16:

June 26:

Starting to see some flowers on the cucumber plant

Potato and tomato plants looking quite full of leaves!

June 28:

Flowers on the potato plant

We’ve been eating herbs all throughout the summer – I use them in homemade salad dressing, scrambled eggs, with various meats on the BBQ, etc. We managed to get enough dill to make a delicious dill dip, but then the dill plant died. The savoury plant looked pretty grim from the time we planted it and never really took. The parsley, which I planted from seed (all the rest were seedlings), didn’t grow at all.

The cucumber plant ended up only yielding two cucumbers, but they were big:

The spinach plants yielded enough to make a small spinach salad for each of us (I’m not convinced it was more than the amount of spinach leaves on the seedlings we originally planted!):

Last week when my friend Kim and her boyfriend Tad came over for dinner, we made mint juleps with mint from High Garden:

Yes, I realize that those are Moscow mule mugs, not mint julep cups. I don’t have any mint julep cups, so the mule mugs had to suffice! And suffice they did – they were pretty darn tasty – a very refreshing drink on a hot day!

Tonight’s dinner included these three potatoes (which popped up above the surface – there are still more to harvest):

and this onion was sautéed to go with our steaks:

All in all, I’d say it was a successful growing season for High Garden. I’m kind of sad that summer is coming to an end though (as evidenced by leaves on trees changing colour and Halloween candy appearing in the local grocery stores) – I’ll have to enjoy the last bit of my garden while I can!

The answer is everybody. Everybody knew. [↩]

Feb
4

By Beth

Five New Foods, Two Books, and One Hell of a Deadlift

Category: beverages, books, food, goals, rampant narcissism Tags: beverage, books, cooking, food, goals, health, reading, resistance training, strength training, weight training, weights Leave a Comment

After last year’s pathetic display of accomplishing so few of my goals, I’ve decided to come out of the 2018 gate strong. In fact, I’ve already made 5 new foods/beverages that I’ve never made before (of my goal to make 18 new things year), finished 2 books (of my goal of 18), and deadlifted my body weight!

The foods are:

chicken florentine – I had a bunch of spinach I needed to use up, so I picked this recipe.
grog – this was the house drink at my birthday party. It was pretty tasty!
slow cooker lasagna – made this for my birthday party. I’ve made lasagna a million times before, but never in a slow cooker.
kale salad from a recipe from Savio Volpe – Scott took me to Savio Volpe for my birthday and since the reservation said it was my birthday, there was a birthday card waiting on the table and in that card was a recipe for their kale salad. Which is delicious. And which I’ve made several times since then!
herbed goat cheese-stuffed chicken thighs – I had a bunch of goat cheese, leftover from my birthday party, that I needed to use up (do you see the trend?), so I google “goat cheese recipes” and found one for stuffing chicken breast with goat cheese that you’ve mixed with herbs. But I did it with chicken thighs. Pretty good stuff.

Making lasagna in the slow cooker

Kale salad

The two books I’ve finished so far in 2018 were:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker – I started reading this massive tome last year and it took me about eleventy billion years to get through it, but I finally did. The gist of the book is that violence has decreased over human history and Pinker puts forward his theory as to why. Often people think that we are living in particularly dangerous times – probably at least in part because we hear about violent events on the news on the time, but that’s actually a skewed perception, as the news covers the most sensational events (If it bleeds, it leads). Overall we are at much less at risk of being a victim of violence than in any other time in human history¹ There’s a tonne of data illustrating the decline in violence and we can see it also in what is considered acceptable – e.g., it used to be legal and considered acceptable by society for people to keep slaves, for a man to rape his wife, for parents to beat their children, to people to brutalize animals, for example². Pinker presents a pretty extensive theory as to why violence has declined and I’m not even going to try to get into describing it all. You’ll just have to read the 800+ pages to find out for yourself!
Ready Player One: A Novel by Ernest Cline – {SPOILER ALERT – Don’t read this if you don’t want the book to be spoiled for you!} After reading such a long, dense book, I decided I needed to have a quick and easy read as a bit of a palate cleanser for my brain, and Ready Player One fit the bill. Plus, there’s a movie version of it coming out this year and so I figured I should read it in case I decided to see the movie. I know a lot of people *love* this book, but I thought it was just OK. I mean, I enjoyed reading it but I got the exact same feeling from reading it as I did when I read the DaVinci Code – I was compelled enough by wanting to see how the various puzzles would be solved to keep reading, but the writing is so flat³ that it was kind of a painful, if easy, read. He does a tonne of name dropping of 80s games (game dropping?), movies, and music. Having grown up in the 80s, most of these were familiar to me (especially the movies and music), but the excitement of “hey, I remember that” gets pretty old pretty quick and then it just becomes annoying. And most egregiously, the Deus ex machina of Og showing up to give them a completely impenetrable fortress from which to complete the end of the game was just too much.

And then the one that I’m most excited about: I deadlifted more than my body weight! One of the challenges to doing this was that my body weight has increased due to the muscle mass I’ve put on from all the weight training⁴. I’d thought I’d lifted my body weight one time last year but then when I got home and weighed myself to confirm, I found that I’d been just shy of my weight.

In this month’s training program, one of my exercises was to do bar bell deadlifts where you start with a weight you can lift for 12 reps, then you up the weight and do 9 reps, then you up the weight again and do 6 reps. Then you start over at 12 reps, but with the weight you used for 9 reps the first time through, then you do 9 reps with the weight you did for 6 reps the first time through, then you do 6 reps at a higher weight. As you can see from my record sheet, on Jan 30, 2018, I did 6 reps of 67.5 kg!

Since I’m of the generation of Canadians that still thinks of our body weight in pounds instead of kg, I had to do the conversion to confirm that this was, in fact, more than my body weight:

And I do, in fact, weight less than 148 lbs, so hooray for me – goal achieved!

Of course, this is not to say that there is no violence or that the violence that does happen is not horrific. [↩]
Again, this is not to say that these things don’t still happen or that they aren’t legal in some societies still today. But they are legal or accepted in far fewer societies today than in the past. [↩]
Full disclosure: I saw the description of the writing in this book as “flat” in a GoodReads review and it totally fit with the feeling I had about the writing that I couldn’t find the right word for, so I totally stole the word! [↩]
Also, it’s kind of cool that after several years of setting, and failing to achieve, a goal of losing the 15 lbs I put on during my MBA (I’d get part way there from half marathon training, but never quite lost it all), I’m now actually happier with my body size despite weighing the most I’ve ever weighed, because it’s all been muscle mass gain. Don’t get me wrong, I still have some fat mass I’d like to lose, but I’ve got some kickass muscles that I’ve never had before! [↩]

Dec
28

By Beth

New Foods I Made in 2017

Category: food, goals Tags: cooking, food, goals, goals 2017 Leave a Comment

So I guess now is that time of year where I do all my year-end wrap up postings! Decided to start with one of my 2017 goals that I actually accomplished: Make 17 new foods and/or drinks that I’ve never made before.

In fact, not only did I achieve this one, but I surpassed it by 8!

chicken parmesan casserole
pork tenderloin in bourbon – this was bourbon-licious
cedar planked salmon – thanks to cedar planks that I got from Costco
cedar planked chicken – because I got the cedar planks from Costco, there were eleventy billion of them
oat fudge bars
BBQ pizza
zucchini chocolate chip muffins – these were a big hit when I brought them into the office
maraschino cherries – I made these from cherries I picked up in the Okanagan and a cherry liqueur that I also got in the Okanagan¹
amaretto cherries – I decided to try making these in the same way that I made the maraschino cherries (i.e., soak berries in booze). When I tried then after about a week in the booze, the maraschino cherries were delicious, but the amaretto ones didn’t seem like they’d absorbed any of the amaretto yet, so I’ve now left them for
tarragon vinegar – with fresh tarragon from High Garden
BBQ Chicken with Sweet Chili–Peach Glaze – I had some fresh peaches and made a pretty delicious glaze to go with BBQ chicken
cauliflower tots
broccoli tots
Garlicky Butter Chive Parmesan Pork Chops – not gonna lie, I did not leave these
pita bread – my friend Steph made these when I was at her place and they were so good that I asked for the recipe. And she was like, “these are so easy, I don’t even use a recipe.” So I tried making some (with a recipe I found) and they were, in fact, really easy!
raspberry jam
figs pickled in balsamic vinegar – with figs from Tig & Pat’s annual fig party
fig infused balsamic vinegar – this may or may not have been the left over balsamic vinegar from when I pickled the figs
pickled spicy beans – sooo good
pickles – nor these
pickled beets – haven’t actually tried these yet
sautéed beet tops – since I had the beet tops from the beets that I pickled, I tried sautéing them, because I read that was a thing to do. Didn’t love them, but they weren’t terrible, so would probably make them again should I be in possession of beet tops
jalapeño jelly – nor these
bitters – from the “make your own bitters” kit my sister gave me last Christmas
vanilla sugar – from vanilla beans that had previously been making vanilla extract

My first ever batches of spicy pickled beans, pickled beets, and pickles!

Spicy pickled beans, pickled beets, pickles

Making jalapeño jelly

Cedar planked salmon

Cedar Planked Chicken

Oat Fudge Bars

BBQ Pizza

Zucchini chocolate chip muffins

BBQ Chicken with Sweet Chili–Peach Glaze and grilled peach and veggies

Broccoli and cauliflower tots

Sauteed beet tops

So they aren’t technically maraschino cherries, which should be made with maraschino liqueur, but I figure they are close enough. [↩]

Dec
24

By Beth

Christmas Baking 2017

Category: events, family, food Tags: Christmas, Christmas 2017, Christmas baking 1 Comment

This year’s Christmas baking was a low key affair. We’d decided to do our baking on Friday, because we had a party to go to on Saturday and wanted to bring some baked goods with us. But then my sister got booked into a meeting all afternoon because Friday was still technically a workday and we were already scheduled to go to see Star Wars that night, so me, my mom, and my niblings just did the baking without my sister¹.

I made my old stalwart, shortbread cookies from my Great Granny’s recipe that was taught to me by my Aunt Wendy:

And then I made fudge because (a) it’s easy, (b) who doesn’t love fudge?, and (c) it involves sweetened condensed milk, which means that I get to lick the lid of the can of sweetened condensed milk!

My niece made peanut butter snowballs, from a family recipe that she got from her grandfather:

My nephew made Rice Krispie squares with festive rice krispies:

Rice Krispie Squares

My mom was the most prolific baker, as usual. She made butter tart squares:

Apricot almond squares:

And Eggnog Meltaways:

Sucks to be her because baking >>>> meetings. [↩]

Dec
18

By Beth

Stuff I Learned This Year: Canning Edition

Category: books, food, goals, Nerdery, science Tags: books, canning, cooking, goals, goals 2017, jam, jelly, learning, Nerdery, pickles, preserves, science, stuff I learned this year Leave a Comment

And speaking of stuff I learned through books I read: this year I learned about home canning!

Last year, I made some jams. But this year, thanks to a book that my friend Linda gave to me, Foolproof Preserving: A Guide to Small Batch Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Condiments & More, I actually learned more about the science behind making jams, jellies, and pickled things. This also allowed me to add seven new food items to my list of new food items that I made in 2017 (this year’s goal was to make at least 17 new food and drink items that I’ve never made before):

raspberry jam
figs pickled in balsamic vinegar¹
fig-infused balsamic vinegar²
pickled spicy beans
pickled beets
pickles³
jalapeño jelly

Scott and I just opened a jar of the pickled beans yesterday and they are super tasty, if somewhat sour. I gave Kalev a jar of the jalapeño jelly, but haven’t tasted it yet myself. The raspberry jam, of which I made a tonne thanks to buying an entire flat of raspberries at one of the local farms, has been enjoyed by many as I’ve given it out to a number of people. The pickles and beets and figs have yet to be tested.

There’s still a number of things that I want to try canning – blackberry jam comes to mind as, for the second year running, I failed to go out blackberry picking again this year. But that book has a number of other cool recipes that I’d like to try, such as peach-bourbon jam, mulled cider jelly, red pepper jelly, pickled carrots, pickled asparagus, roasted tomato-lime salsa, spiced figs in syrup, Dijon mustard, and applesauce. Not in the book, but which I want to try: plum sauce. Looks like I have a good list of potential new food items to make for my 2018 goal of making 18 new foods that I’ve never made before!

Beans, beets, and pickles.

Yes, the figs did come from Tig & Pat’s annual fig party. [↩]
Yes, the fig-infused balsamic vinegar is the vinegar that was left over from when I made the pickled figs. [↩]
Why don’t we call pickles “pickled cucumbers”? Everything else we pickle, we use “pickled” as the adjective followed by the name of the thing we pickled. [↩]

Jun
14

By Beth

Stuff I’m Learning This Year: Growing potatoes on my balcony edition

Category: cats, food, goals, Nerdery Tags: balcony gardening, cats, cats love their leafy greens, gardening, goals, goals 2017, growing potatoes, herb garden, herbs, learning, patio gardening 1 Comment

Last year when I made my herb garden, I learned that one could grow potatoes on their balcony. I didn’t get to try it out last year due to travel and balcony power washing that happened, but decided I would do it this summer. Fast forward to the May long weekend – Scott and I set out to buy some seedlings to plant this year’s herb garden and while at the store, I remembered the potato thing! I hadn’t remembered early enough to actually sprout some potatoes on my own, but fortunately one can purchase “potato seeds” (which are little potatoes that have been sprouted).

Basically, you cut a bit off of the potato, put some dirt in a bag, and bury the potato cut side down.

After about a week, you see the plant sprouting above the surface, and then you dump more dirt on it to cover the sprouts and let it grow another four weeks. And then you have potatoes!

As you can see, my potato plants are sprouting quite nicely:

June 4:

June 10:

June 14:

Also, the bag that I bought to grow the potatoes in has am opening, which I’m assuming is to make it easier to harvest the potatoes when they are ready. However, such a bag also doubles as an excellent astronaut costume (as long as it is before you put the dirt in it):

Since I still had more potato seeds, so I decided to get myself another bag to grow a second batch. But since the space suit potato bag appeared to be made out of the same material as Ikea bags, we decided to just buy an Ikea bag for less than $1 and cut a hole in the bottom of it!

Planted on June 4:

June 10:

June 14:

In addition to growing potatoes, also picked up a bunch of seedlings to make this year’s herb garden¹. For the record, this year’s garden consists of:

chives
cilantro
dill
marjoram
mint
oregano
rosemary
sage
tarragon
thyme
tomatoes
jalapeño
strawberries

Does anyone know why this tomato is called a “mortgage lifter?”

Also, while we were picking up seedlings, we discovered that the garden store was selling cat grass seedlings. And seedlings of variegated cat grass. And cat nip seedlings. So guess who got their own little garden?

You can’t see it in the photos, but the cats are wearing harnesses and leashes because I don’t want them falling off the balcony!

I also toyed with the idea of growing a hipster garden when I saw that you could buy kale, quinoa, and stevia seedlings, but decided that the cost in money, effort, and space on the balcony would outweigh the joke. Of course, if I had, I would have to have bought the “craft” compost:

Anyhoo, like last year, I’m enjoying having fresh herbs to cook with, as well as enjoying watching the garden grow! And I’m really excited to get to harvest some potatoes!

I didn’t find a way to bring last summer’s herb garden inside, given that my cats would eat it all and that I really don’t have anywhere to put it all, so I had to make a new garden from scratch. [↩]

Feb
28

By Beth

Pokémon – Now In Candy Form

Category: events, food, friends Tags: birthday, candy, cooking, food, goals, goals 2017, Nerdery, Pokemon 1 Comment

Look what I made!

I’d been dying to make these Pokémon candies since Scott sent me the video of how to make them. Well, it was Cath’s birthday the other day and that seemed like the perfect excuse to try out the recipe!

Really, all you need to make these are some candy melts and silicone half-sphere mould. The former were pretty easy to find (I got them on sale at Michael’s craft store, but later discovered you can also buy them in bulk at the Bulk Barn), whereas the latter were more difficult. We checked every kitchen store in the area, plus Michael’s, Canadian Tire, Winners, and London Drugs and found silicone moulds in every shape other than half sphere. In the end, I had to resort to ordering it from Amazon!

Candy Melts are available in just about any colour you can imagine!

Silicone half sphere mould

Then all you had to do was melt the appropriate colour Candy Melts, coat the mould with it and stick it in the freezer. In ~15 minutes, they popped right out and were all beautiful and shiny!

We made two yellow half spheres to make Pikachu, two blue half spheres to make a Polliwag, and one red & one white half sphere to make the Pokéball! Then we made some ears for Pikachu¹ and then, using food safe paint brushes and melted Candy Melts of various different colours, decorated them up. Then you use the remaining melted Candy Melts to glue the two halves together and you are good to go!

The original video shows you how to make them as piñatas, but I didn’t think it would be nice to smash a poor innocent little Pokémon! Well, at least until you are going to eat it.

They are Pokélicious!

Sadly, one of the ears fell off on the way to the party! [↩]

Dec
31

By Beth

New Foods I Made in 2016

Category: food, goals Tags: cooking, food, goals Leave a Comment

Like my book goal, I managed to achieve my goal of making 16 new food items that I’d never made before – in fact, I surpassed my goal by 1 item.

1	Cream puffs	28-Feb-2016
2	rice krispie easter nests	24 Mar 2016
3	Asparagus and Mozzarella Stuffed Chicken Breasts	14-Apr-2016
4	breaded zucchini	9-May-2016
5	macroons	14-May-2016
6	macarons	23-May-2016
7	sauteed garlic scapes¹	16-Jun-2016
8	crushed salt & vinegar potatoes	17-Jun-2016
9	BBQ’d country style pork ribs	25-Jun-2016
10	grilled zucchini, green onion, and lemon salad	25-Jun-2016
11	fig sauce	24-Jul-2016
12	blueberry jam	24-Jul-2016
13	apricot jam	24-Jul-2016
14	garlic parmesan breaded chicken breasts	24-Jul-2016
15	chirizo stuffed zucchini	1-Aug-2016
16	chicken schnitzel	10-Oct-2016
17	banoffee pie	25 Dec 2016

Taking up canning this summer helped my cause, as I made three things with my new canning set: 2 successful jams and one failed jam that was re-imagined as a sauce². I also see a trend of making breaded things, with three different kinds of breaded chicken and one breaded vegetable making the the list.

My favourites of all the things on this list are macarons (super time consuming, but so delicious) and the crushed potatoes.

Why did no one tell me that garlic scapes were a thing before 2016?

Also BBQ’d garlic scapes on June 25, 2016, but didnt’ think it was different enough from sauteed ones to count as a different item. [↩]
Note to self: next summer, try making raspberry and blackberry jam, jalapeño jelly, pickles, and canned spicy green beans! [↩]

Dec
29

By Beth

Blogging at 30,000 ft

Category: cats, family, food, friends, rampant narcissism, travel Tags: aunty blogging, cats, Christmas, family, people who are cool enough to let me visit them, Toronto, travel 3 Comments

The following was written on a plane earlier today.

I’m on my way home from my whirlwind Christmas holidays and realized that I have to do 9 blog postings in the next 2.5 days to achieve my goal of publishing 116 blog postings in 2016. So I figure I better get writing! I have a few year-end blog postings that I typically do that will fill out a number of these, including:

Year in Review
Items I Knocked Off My List of 101 Things To Do List
Books I Read in 2016
New Foods and/or Drinks I Made in 2016
How Did I Do on My 2016 Goals?
Goals for 2017
Favourite tweets
Nerd Stats 2016

So I just have to write all of those, plus this one, and mission accomplished!

I guess before I get cracking on writing all of those, I can tell you about my whirlwind Christmas holidays! We arrived back at my sister’s after our four days in NYC on the night of Dec 23. Happily, we got in earlier than expected, as we had whizzed through security because we got TSA-Pre clearance so we made it to our gate before the previous fight to Toronto had left and we were able to get three seats on that flight. This meant that we got home before my niece and nephew had gone to bed, so I didn’t have to wait until the next morning to see them!

The next day was Christmas Eve and we woke to pancakes that were made by my nephew, Thomas. He got a cookbook from the school library on the last day of school specifically so he could make those for everyone and they were delicious (I should add that Thomas is 5 and a surprising good cook (and baker) for his age.. with a wee bit of assistance with the stove part). After that, we mostly just lounged around, though I did wrap my presents and about eleventy billion trips were made to the grocery store for various things that we remembered we needed (as the stores would be closed the next day!), each thing being remembered only after the last shopper had returned to the house. I should note that I didn’t make any of those trips because it was cold outside and I am a delicate west coast flower. Christmas Eve dinner was a cornucopia of appies – crackers and breads and spreads and jalapeño poppers and shrimp thingys and chicken fingers and various things wrapped in various pastries and we were all stuff to the gills will deliciousness.

Christmas Day was as Christmas Day should be – awaking early to see what Santa had brought for the kiddies and what everyone had gotten for each other and the biggest winners of the present getting were my niece’s three guinea pigs and my cats. That is not to say that the rest of us were deprived, as we spoiled each other rotten, but the fluffy members of our family got some pretty sweet gifts. My mom made fritattas and a hot potato salad for breakfast (I was supposed to help, but she got up at the crack of dawn while I was still in dreamland¹, so my contribution consisted of the sophisticated work of toasting English muffins and crumpets.). My sister made an amazing turkey dinner and for dessert we had individual-sized banoffee pies made by my mother and I (I actually did help make those!) and they might now be on my list of top desserts ever². There may also have been a PokéWalk³ before dinner for my niece, my nephew, and I, as I figured that I should probably leave the house at least every other day. It was cold, but worth it.

On Boxing Day, we were supposed to go to my Aunt Wendy’s place for an open house, but a combination of icy conditions and that fact that all of us had a pretty nasty cold (that we didn’t really want to give it to the various babies who would be there) kept us away. Boxing Day consisted of lounging, building Lego things, playing various games, and eating our weight in leftovers.

On Dec 27, my mom, sister, and I went to the spa for pedicures (a Christmas present to us from my mom), followed by lunch with my Aunty Eileen and Aunty Lynn. That evening me and Nancy met up with Dr. Dan, Rick, and Rob, another guy we’d all gone to high school with that Dan keeps in regular touch with but who I hadn’t seen in 20 years. We stuffed our faces with Mexican food, drank margaritas the size of our heads⁴, and then went to another restaurant and stuffed ourselves with more drinks and desserts.

Yesterday Nancy, Jeff, Madeline, Thomas and I went to see Rogue One. I won’t say any spoilers in case you haven’t seen it yet. My mom is not a Star Wars fan, so she stayed back at my sister’s house and made a trip to the bakery, because clearly we hadn’t food shopped enough! That evening, Sarah and Dave and their munchkins came over for dinner. Their munchkins seemed to have a pretty fun time playing with Madeline and Thomas and I had a pretty fun time catching up with Sarah and Dave!

At some point in all of that, Nancy, Jeff, my mom, and I found time to watch the first season (all 10 episodes) of The Man in the High Castle⁵. Or as we called it “The Man in the High Tower”, “The High Man in the Castle”, “The High Man in the Dark Castle Tower”, and “Professor Plum in the Library with the Candlestick Holder”⁶. If you haven’t seen it, you are missing out. I can’t wait to watch season 2, which I only just learned existed yesterday.

And now, it what feels like a blink of the eye from when I left, I’m on a plane back home! It’s always so sad to say good-bye to my family, but I am excited to see my kitties. I have a suitcase full of presents for them.

You may notice a trend in this blog posting of my being a lazy SOB on my holidays. [↩]
Alongside chocolate amaretto cheesecake and espresso cupcakes with mascarpone cream. [↩]
Where one goes on a walk for the expressed purpose of catching Pokémon. Yes, I am still playing PokémonGO. [↩]
That may have been just Dr. Dan and I. [↩]
A TV show on Amazon Prime that is based on a Phillip K. Dick novel, in which the Nazis and Japan won WWII and the story is set in a post-war America in which Germany and Japan control the eastern and western parts of North America, respectively. [↩]
For some reason we kept screwing up the name of the show. It started with someone accidentally calling it “The Man in the High Tower”, and then we all started screwing it up like that and it escalated from there. [↩]

Aug
24

By Beth

A visit from my mom and my niece

Category: cats, family, food Tags: Arts Council of New Westminster, family, hockey, Mom, neice, New Westminster, New Westminster petting zoo, people who are cool enough to visit me, Pokemon, Pokémon GO, recap, Science World at Telus World of Science, Vancouver Aquarium Leave a Comment

Hey remember that time that my Mom and my niece came to visit me? Of course you don’t, because I didn’t blog¹ or tweet/Facebook/etc. any of it while they were here because we were having way too much gallivanting (and perhaps spent all of our tech-related time catching Pokémon instead).

Highlights of their trip included:

the New Westminster petting zoo (which I’d never been to before, despite being a New Westie for several years now!)
My niece holding a bunny at the Queen’s Park Petting Zoo in New West
the Vancouver Aquarium, where we petted rays and saw beluga whales, dolphins, otters, sea lions, and much more
Science World at Telus World of Science², where we did the spy exhibit. Wasn’t really any science to it, but it was super fun! It was challenging enough to keep us engaged through all the parts of the exhibit – and my niece was the master of figuring out the clues! For the record, we totally figured out who stole the computer chip and why!
New West StrEAT food truck festival. It was insanely hot out, but that didn’t keep me, my Mom, my niece, Kalev, Andrew, and I from checking out all of the 88 food trucks. Among us we had an Aussie meat pie, a Japadog, bubble tea, a tacotino, pizza, hurricane potatoes, a Beaver tail, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting!
My niece was inspired by a photo of a child with ridiculously placed chocolate on his face on the side of the Beaver Tails truck to place some chocolate in a similar ridiculous fashion.
BBQ dinners, including pork tenderloin and steaks
Granville Island, including Lee’s Donuts³, jewelry shopping⁴, looking at fancy brooms (and my mom saying “How can I fit this in my luggage?” and then not buying one because she can’t fit it in her luggage – a tradition of hers when she comes to Vancouver), sitting in hammocks (and saying “Where could I hang this?” and realizing we have nowhere to hang hammocks and then not buying them – another tradition when my family comes to town), and lunch at Edible Canada.
This was a menu item at Edible Canada, but we were pretty sure it is actually a Pokémon.
Delicious pizza from Pizza Garden. Crick became obsessed with the pizza box⁵, even choosing to sleep there at night instead sleeping with me like she usually does. After a few days, I decided that it was time for the pizza box to go (given that it does have bits of food in it, which will get icky) and said “I’m going to take the pizza box to the compost”, and the Crick bolted from across the apartment to the box and stood on it and looked at me as if to say “You aren’t taking this anywhere!”
Crick is in her happy place
Pokemon Go! With all the walking around we did, we had ample opportunity to hunt for wild pocket monsters. We caught an Electrobuzz at the New West petting zoo, and 3 Tauros in one day! We also collected so many Pokémon that we had a whole bunch that we could evolve, so we planned it out so that we could drop a Lucky Egg (which gives you double XP⁶ for half an hour) and then evolved about 40 Pokémon, which resulted in me finally levelling up from Level 20 to 21 (and getting a good chunk of the way through Level 21 to boot.)) We evolved a few Pokémon that I didn’t have before – a Persian (from a Meowth), a Wortotle (from a Squirtle), a Venomoth (from a Venonat), and a Poliwhirl (from a Poliwag) – and a bunch of ones that I already have just to get the extra XP⁷.
My mom, helping us catch a wild Hypno.
A very exciting semi-finals hockey game in which my summer hockey team went to an eleven round shootout to decide who went on to the finals!

Lowlights included:

Losing the aforementioned hockey semi-final in an eleven round shootout.
My mom’s triple injury – she burned her finger on the first day here, she cut two fingers quite deeply on her second day here (trying to open a package with an overly sharp knife)⁸, and then a few days later is poked herself in the finger with a bamboo skewer while making dinner.

Other than to mention briefly that it was upcoming. [↩]
That is really its name and the ridiculousness of that name makes me laugh every time! [↩]
Hands down the best donuts in the city. [↩]
My mom bought be a gorgeous necklace as a Christmas present. [↩]
As she usually does when I have a pizza box in the house. [↩]
Experience points. [↩]
I’m looking at you, 21 Pidgey evolutions! [↩]
Needless to say, there were some “Not to be trusted with knives” jokes made. [↩]