My Mom thinks I'm cool

I luv my Mom - she is so sweet.
I've always liked penguins and she called me last night out of the blue just to let me know there was a documentary starting on PBS about them.
She and Dad are coming to visit tonight as she has a schwack of doctor appointments here in the city tomorrow. It'll be nice to see them for a bit.
Hmmm...strangely enough Dad doesn't want to stay and visit when my brother comes on friday, as that's when all hell breaks loose at our house - I mean, why wouldn't he want to help: snake my floor drain, snake the line to the sewer, dig a trench, go get and unload a truckload of dirt, lay pipe, fill in the trench and fix the dryer? I mean, sounds like fun to me. What a way to start the weekend.
I feel like Tom Sawyer...Man, I can hardly wait - yeah, it'll be great! Anyone want to help? You're really missing out on a whack of fun here.

Stupid weather...stupid magic bean...

SOooooooo,
the huge blustery noisy storm that kept me up all night blowing stuff al over the place has appeared to have put a big crack in our windshield. *sigh* I have no idea how, but the way stuff was blowing around last night it could've been all sorts of things. Sure the crack is in the passenger side, but what gives? I can't fix that. I just hope it'll last til spring for use to fix it.
That's always the way it goes for us.All at once. I already have a broken dryer, dishwasher and we have someone coming to dig a trench in our yard on friday so the basement won't flood whenever it rains a lot (yay!). It'll cost a lot (boo!). But it must be done. Anyone know someone with a truck and wheelbarrow I can borrow on friday? I have to buy some dirt to fill the trench back up, as they have to actually hydrovac out the trench because we are lucky enough to have a wierd shaped yard where you can't get in to do it any other way. Lucky us. Lucky lucky us. Oh well, at least I won't be mopping out the basement anymore (I hope). Woot.

And now, my poor little Peanut? He took us through the mountains and this is how we repay him? If we didn't have to dig the trench we could probably fix him...I'll just have to be nice to him until that magic bean I planted in the yard grows into a money tree by spring. I'm not to hopeful tho. It's been a month and nada. Maybe I should be watering it more...

And another great thing about me...

Thanks to scary white girl here's another list of 26 pointless trivia about me...all true.

1. What's on your bedside table? On top? My alarm clock, a sandalwood book mark, a safety pin, a pen, a candle holder, my spare glasses and Alice in Wonderland
2. What's the geekiest part of your music collection? Heh heh..I have Boston- First Stage and some Elton John. (*blush*)
3. What do you eat when you raid the fridge at night? Cream cheese, or ANY cheese and some kind of cracker to eat it with.
4. What is your secret guaranteed weeping film?It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve seen it a zillion times, but I cry every time.
5. If you could have plastic surgery, what would you have done?I’m generally against plastic surgery unless you have a kind of deformity or a real problem. Yet…I’d think about having the stretch marks taken off my body (I don’t think it can be done tho). Losing lots of weight that I gained when I was young has left me with them all over. I don’t mind too much – I look better than I ever have. It’s just one of those things…they don't tan well so I go all zebra in the summer.
6. Do you have a completely irrational fear? Yes, of the dark...and that there may be zombies there in the dark. Go on and watch The Fog when you’re 4 – see what happens to YOU!
7. What is the little physical habit that gives away your insecure moments? When my hair was longer, I’d wrap it around my fingers a lot. I look at my watch and bite my lip when I’m nervous.
8. Do you ever have to beg? Not really(…not about anything you’d want to know about anyways) I'm too independant. I earn it and take it.
9. Do you have too many love interests?No. Just 1.
10. Do you know anyone famous?I know an MLA, does that count?? A friend of mine's hands were seen playing the piano in Little Women...how about that??
11. Describe your bed:4 poster rustic black/bronze metal frame, draped in sheer white fabric with lights and crystals hanging all over. Super high thread count sheets and a homemade quilt. This winter we’ll have a duvet. Oh yeah…
12. Spontaneous or plan?If it’s a longer trip I plan the sh*t out of it (I have a lot of unorganized friends and I'm tired of how they always need/run out of stuff and if I plan for it, it never seems to happen). As for everyday stuff, I’m up for just about anything. There's an advantage to having the world in your purse.
13. Who should play you in a movie about your life?Neve Campbell. I’ve been told I look like her by a lot of people and I like her.
14. Do you know how to play poker? Yup. Not very good at the poker face part though. It’s too random a game for me. I'd rather play Hearts or Wizard.
15. What do you carry with you at all times? My keys. They're on a clasp on a beltloop at work and they just stay there jingling away until I take them off at night. And, I seem to always end up with my purse, as somehow wives end up having to carry the wholehouse around with them “just in case”.
16. How do you drive? Badly. Well, OK maybe that's a bit harsh...just a bit too fast and too close. I usually ride my bike, so I don’t drive often enough to be really good. I am good with a standard though. Oh, and I’m not allowed to pass in the mountains anymore…I’ve nearly killed us twice.
17. What do you miss most about being little?You could run and play and be silly without having to justify it to anyone. Plus someone could always kiss it and make it better.
18. Are you happy with your given name?I used to hate it…I wanted to be called Rayven. I’m OK with it now. I’m actually glad to have a name that can’t be shortened. And no don't try...then I'll just have to kill you.
19. What color is your bedroom? a happy pale lime green. My happy color…with white accents and dark wood.
20. What was the last song you were listening to? The last song on The Bloodthirsty Lovers self titled album – on the iPod when I exercised this morning.
21. Have you ever been in a school play? Yup-a camel in the christmas play. I was horrible - I had 4 lines and forgot 2 of them. I kept to the props & light crew after that.
22. Have you ever been in love? Yup.
23. Do you like yourself and believe in yourself? Most days yes. I feel more at peace with myself than I ever have. Occasionally I'll get down on myself. I often wonder what others think of me, but as for me, I think I'm pretty OK. ("my mom says I'm cool...")
24. Have you ever done any illegal drugs? Yes.
25. Do you think you're cute? Damn straight.
26. Do you consider yourself to be a nice person? Yes. I can be quite revoltingly happy in the right situations! And I try and make the world a better place starting with myself. There's a quote by confucious (which of course I can't think of right now) about getting your own heart and soul in order before trying to fix/help others...I really believe in that. If everyone paid attention to being a better person a whole lot would change.

30 Helens agree

"try this: for the rest of the summer, or maybe just a week, or even a day - unplug. Put away all your electronic gizmos and go outside. Lie under a tree. Watch the clouds. Smell the air. Enjoy real life, rather than a virtual version of it"

~David Suzuki
(Just another reason why he's a hero of mine...)

Best breakfast ever

OK, so take a fresh, soft, lightly toasted, multigrain bagel, spread blueberry cream cheese on it and then put some sliced peaches on top.

Mmmmmmmmmm......bagelllll......

The Mosters in my Closet

I always empathised with Binkley, the kid in the Bloom County cartoon who had a monster in his closet, because until I was about 13 or so, I was convinced I had one too.
When I was 4 we moved to a small town and to a small little house in that town. It was built around 1920 so it was all little rooms, tiny closets and a dirt basement. At first I shared a room with my brother and he enjoyed scaring the bejeezus out of me whenever possible. We had walkie talkies and they were used to create monster voices under the bottom bunk (my bed) and the closet. The storm sewer was under the room. Glen convinced me that monsters hibernated there in the winter. It was a long first winter...A dripping tap in the kitchen sounded like someone was hitting a key on our living room piano over and over again...but noone was there! After I worked that one out, my brother entered his teen years. I adored my brother (still do really) and would idolize him and try and do everything he did. He's about 6 years older than me, so when he got into his teenage watching slasher/horror film phase I followed along and had nightmare fodder for years to come. Any noise at night was Jason/Freddy/Michael/aliens/zombies and those Fog creatures....well you get the idea. Lets just say I have a very active imagination.
I'd just begun to figure out that I was probably not on the monster lunch menu when my dad fixed up my bedroom after my brother left for college. Somehow he managed to mess with things so that the air pressure in the room was somehow released by a heat vent in the closet. Sounds boring, but to me, it meant that I'd go to bed in my dark room (no window), turn off the lights and a few minutes later my closet door would slam open for no reason...I would have screamed, but then the thing in the closet would have known where I was. Flashlights didn't help - what if it was invisible? A vampire? Who knows?? I slept with my neck covered well into highschool and it took a few weeks to get "used" to the closet. I never could quite convince myself that there was nothing in there. To this day I like to sleep with the closet door open...and until I met my husband I often covered my neck with the sheets when I slept. I mean, it's not a good idea to tempt the vampires you know...



This small look into the monsters in my closet and why I am as wierd as I am today was brought to you by Sunday Scribblings....

Seeeeeeeeee! Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The window J & I designed and I made is in the door and the door is painted - so it's real and finished and ever so cool...

Ooooh!

Aaaaaah!

Now I have to find something else to do...nifty.

Drinking and cooking are a great combination

It's time once again for me to blather on about something yummy I invented.
It's veggie season and I'm having a blast inventing new ways to eat as many of them as I can. Last night I had a craving for a creamy curry chicken with green beans and zuchinni to serve over baked potatoes. Soooo I cracked open a bottle of wine and made it up as I went along. It was so good I wrote it down to make again. I submitted it to Allrecipes.com but they don't publish all their submitted recipes so I can't take the chance - because it'd be sad if you never got to have it too! I get to have it again for lunch now. Yay...

Green Bean Chicken with Curried Cream Sauce

1 chicken breast, diced
1T olive oil
½ bag (~2 ½ c) frozen Green Giant green/yellow bean & carrot mix
2 ½ c chopped zuchinni (~1/2” squares)
1 stalk celery, sliced
½ red onion chopped
5 cloves garlic, diced
1 rounded T Pataks Curry sauce (hot) (dissolved in ¼ c water)
¾ t turmeric
½ t cumin
½ t coriander
¼ t fresh ground pepper
1 T low salt chicken OXO
1T Worcester sauce
¼ c white wine
~1 c water
1 can Campbells cream of mushroom soup
1 T cornstarch dissolved in 3 T water

Serve over/with:
4 Yukon Potatoes, baked

Before you begin, prick potatoes with a fork and wrap in paper towel. Nuke them until they are cooked to your taste.
Steam beans, carrots and celery until they are nearly done in ½ c water (~6 minutes), and set aside.
While the beans are steaming, sauté chicken and garlic in oil in a large saucepan until chicken is cooked and then add the onion and zuchinni, wine, chicken OXO and Worchester sauce and sauté for a few minutes until onions start to clear and zuchinni begins to soften.
Add the curry, the beans and the water they steamed in, ½ c water and the other spices and simmer for a 2-3 minutes. Add the mushroom soup and stir to completely dissolve the soup. Then add ~ ¾ cup of water to have the desired amount of sauce (if you want more/less sauce adjust the water accordingly). Simmer on low-med heat for about 5 minutes to incorporate the flavours in to the sauce, but don’t let it boil.
Thicken with cornstarch and simmer until the veggies are cooked but not mushy (however you like them). Rewarm the potatoes, slice them open and serve the curried veggies over them.

PS -wtf is up with blogger? It took me ages to post this. Then it posted 4 of it....

Hubblicious

Seeing as I started a bit of a political sh*tstorm with my last post, I'll focus on another area of interest for me today.
Ever since I was small I've loved to stare at the sky. My brother and I had a little kids telescope and were always staring at the moon in the back yard. Our friend Ken has a telescope and is really into it and whenever there is something extra interesting out there we try and go sponge off his astronomy skills to see the universe. With his help we've seen Mars and Saturn. We've even got glow in the dark stars inthe basement for when it is too cold to go outside and look at the sky in the winter (there's a Saturn and moon down there too - I've yet to track down the other planets). Even last weekend at Waskeiu we tried to take shots of the perfectly clear starry sky (no tripod, but we tried...). J and I sat by the firepit and stared at the sky for hours long after the family had gone to bed.

And so I'm always checking out the Hubble Telescope Image Diary and the NASA site devoted to the Mars rovers. I still can'tbelieve they're still going - and noone seems to pay much attention. I mean, PEOPLE! There are robotic exploring cameras scientifically analyzing the surface of the planet Mars and they've been going 10X longer than anyone ever hoped for! You can watch them, see what they see, hear what they heard as they landed, and learn what they learned. Cheers I say! A few my way also scoff at the Hubble and it's practicality as a research tool. I'm no astronomer or physicist, but the images it's taken take my breath away...so many beautiful worlds and galaxies. Just. Beautiful.

What brought this on? Well, I'm a little blue, as Pluto (my second favorite planet after Jupiter) is no longer officially a planet, but we've hung out and had a few beers and a chat in the back yard and I think both of us will be able to come to terms with it!
I've never been partial to labels anyways...

Can anybody fly this thing?

I have come to the conclusion that our prime minister is an idiot.
Recently a member of parliament compared Hesballah to the Nazis in WW2 in their desire to wipe out Isreal. Did Prime Minister Harper ask him to retract or rephrase the statement? Nope. He said it was a valid and fair comparison. Perhaps he’d had sunstroke? I hope so…

Because after all, having a resentment about the Jewish nation and wanting the nation gone from your traditional homeland is just like wanting to exterminate every single living Jewish person in the world.
Oh yeah. Sure…no differences there at all.
In fact, I don’t like the neighbors that bought out the land I used to own all of and moved in next door. They have weird customs and beliefs and are trying to push them on me – hey I know - I want them exterminated…yeah…that’s it. It’s not that I want them to move out and get my land back -I want to kill them all.

*sigh*
See what I mean?

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t support terrorism as a way of getting what you want. It is deplorable and many helpless people suffer. I don’t think things have ANY easy solution, but if they have a political wing and the world was willing to meet and debate with the IRA, how is this much different? To me, it’s like the Catholic/Protestant thing in Ireland. You can’t take something fundamentally different, change it and force it on people without making some people unhappy and you can’t use brute force to crush terrorism. These people firmly believe what they do – enough to die and kill innocent people for it. They’re not going to just give up and go home for tea.
And after the way that Isreal has been acting lately? Are they any better? It is deplorable in my eyes…they are using the rescue of a soldier as a ruse to wreak all sorts of havoc and noone seems to have the balls to say “Erm…pardon me, but that is just too far.”.

So...wow, I’m really off topic now. Rambling in my old age.
So let me sup up:
-Terrorism is bad
-Our prime minister is a bafoon…I hope he’ll be gone soon.
- Hesballah are NOT like Nazis is enough ways that I shouldn’t even need to describe it
-Isreal needs to step back and stop pillaging - they're turning into a mini US
-I need to stop watching the news. It just angers me.

Well...off my soapbox. I got labwork to do.

Look down, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down

So the post I did for our waskesiu trip is below my post from yesterday....
Not sure why, but if you want to see the photos scrol down.
Waaaaaaaaayy down....
(Cue Friendly Giant music...)