Days Off

I'm starting to think that maybe I spend too much time on my own. As much as I love it when it's needed, maybe I should start, oh, I don't know, calling people? I'm just starting to feel bored and depressed most of them time. Gee, ain't that fun?!

So I've been doodling more and more comics. Paul's given me some good ideas, and I'm thinking up some of my own. Now it's up to me to put them on paper. I want to make 10 solid comics before we continue with everything else (making a website, etc), and the going is... a little slow. It's mostly because I've just been so fucking bored today, I can't be bothered to focus. I have my room, my living room and my bathroom to clean as well, so I'm avoiding everything and playing Fallout, of course.

Max isn't back for another 12 whole days, and I'm so bummed out. Hopefully we can skype tonight, and oh my god I just grew the greatest picture.

I Don't Know Where We Go From Here

Happy news! I'm making a webcomic with my friend Paul! Now, normally I'm not one for group projects, since I always want to take control and make everything my own way. But maybe that's just Old Lisa talking. New Lisa is a little bit more self-actualized, and much calmer. I am a writer as well as a doodler, but I'm content to just do the drawings while Paul does most of the writing. That being said, I'm definitely going to put my own ideas in there, but I'll mostly be trying to focus on drawing.

Eeee, I'm so excited! While it would be fun to have my very own, just me webcomic, it's definitely going to be easier with another person. Maybe if I've got someone nagging me to get shit done, shit will, in fact, get done. So he gave me a couple of short scripts to work with, and I'm going to scribble them out and see how things go.

In other less cool news, Max is gone for two and a half weeks on a trip with his friends to judge and play in a bunch of Magic competitions. While I'm happy that he's going off to have a fun time, I'm mega bummed that I'm not going to see him for so long. Work has scheduled me a lot, though, so that will fill my time, and we've both got Skype now so it'll be easier to keep in touch, and see his nice, handsome face.

This is just a short, silly update, since I've been too lazy to do a proper one. I started to write one the other night, about serious stuff, but bah, who wants to be serious? I will have a lot to talk about soon, since school is starting up in a couple of weeks, and... yeah, that's all there is to look forward to right now. But I'm super stoked! It'll be a nice change to be back in school again.

Also, I've been trying to play Bioshock again, but I-I just can't. It is the fucking scariest game. I have no problem walking into a metro tunnel and talking on 20 feral ghouls in Fallout, or running up to a Deathclaw and shooting it in the face, but Splicers are oh-my-god the most frightening things. Peter thinks I'm a pussy. He would be correct.

Laugh Out Loud

Ah, I'm listening to Radiolab again for the first time in a long time. It's really just the best thing to listen to. Today I'm listening to a show about Laughter, which as you can probably imagine, is a lot of fun to listen to. There's babies laughing, people laughing, and rats laughing. Yes, rats.

There's a segment in the episode where they talk to a scientist named Dr. Jaak Panksepp who was watching a bunch of rats playing soundlessly together, and he wondered how they could be making absolutely no sounds at all while they were obviously playing so hard. So he put a microphone into their little rat box, and he found that on a level too low for us to hear on our own, they were making sounds. These cute, rapid little chirping noises. Dr. Panksepp and his grad student couldn't figure out why they were making these noises, and then one day they decided that they were going to try and tickle some rats to see what happened. And as they ticked these rats, with the microphones there, they were making the same sounds. Really, it sounds very adorable. And Dr. Panksepp realized "My god, what if that's laughter?"

People have, for a long time, thought that laughter is an expression reserved only for humans. Aristotle believed that babies laughed for the first time on the 40th day of their lives, and that was a sign that they now had a soul. In reality, most babies don't laugh exactly on their 40th day of existing, but I understand what was meant by this. It was like a sign that you were a person if you could express mirth. I don't agree that laughter is for people only, though.

A lot of people were critical of the idea that rats could laugh. But why? You don't think that animals find things funny? My dog, Macey, can't physically laugh, but it's very obvious when you play with her that she's having fun. It's a shame that she isn't capable of laughing because that would be hilarious. But to anyone who has had a pet, you must all know what I'm talking about. They have fun, just the same as we do, and the only thing limiting them from laughing like we do is that they're just made differently. Indeed, monkeys can laugh. It's been recorded, and I dare you to listen to the part of it in the episode and not hear that as laughter.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who claims that animals have souls. I don't even think that we have souls. I just think that if we can laugh, why can't animals? We are, after all, animals as well.

Ugh, I don't think I can type anymore. I haven't eaten anything yet, and the bright screen combined with hunger nausea is making me feel really sick. Until next time.

Finally

I was checking Post Secret today, and found this. It made me so happy that I almost cried, because I think I'm finally beginning what I was born to do too!

No real update today, just this. As I look out of this house's old windows and a cool breeze rolls in. I'm secretly happy though, because this is my favourite weather.

Just work work work for now, and Max tomorrow and Tuesday. Yessssss.

For The Love of Food

I want to share something with you, my children. It's a lovely chapter in this book I have called Eating My Words: How Marilyn Monroe is like a grilled artichoke and other food observations, by Eve Johnson. Now, I don't like to call myself a "foodie" because of the arrogant associations that come with the word, but I love food beyond the mere eating of it. I know saying "I love food" is kind of stupid; everybody loves food. Everybody loves eating, especially when everything tastes good. The difference between people who love food and people who love food is all in the preparation.

I love cooking. The eating is nice, but the cooking is mostly my favourite. When I cook or bake things for people, the joy I get out of it is in the process of creating, and seeing the reactions of people. I don't always enjoy eating the things that I cook myself, because I am always too critical of my results. It's much nicer to see someone sighing over your Blueberry Vanilla Cream Pie than to taste it yourself and realize it's not as nice as you were hoping it would be (though that pie was one of the best things I ever made).

The chapter in this book always sends my mind reeling into my own imagination. It's written so perfectly, and... well, let me just type it out for you. I hope there are no legal issues with me typing out a chapter from a book, word for word, and posting it here. I don't really see why there would be. I'm not claiming it as my own, I just want to share it with people who might appreciate it. It's long, but please bear with me.

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WOOD STOVE

One summer I spent a week on an island too sparsely populated to support a store, perfectly content cooking on a wood stove in a cabin with no electricity and no running water. I came back half convinced that our kitchen don't ask too much of us, but too little.

That doesn't mean that I want primitive fixtures in my city kitchen. (A tiger's love for her kittens pales beside my love for my dish washer.) But once in a while, I like to reconnect with fire. For if cooking is a matter of reading labels and pushing buttons, then how important can eating be? If cooking means evoking the fire god and courting him through the tempestuous drama of roasting a chicken, then what comes to the table is an offering, and thanksgivings are due if it isn't burnt.

For visitors, the island is a place of gently enforced inactivity. People swim in the lake, or row out on the battered rowboat to see the family of loons at the other end. Or they go for walks along the path by the water, or through the fields that a big, hard-working Swede homsteaded in the 1930s. He planted orchards and fruit and vegetables, and built rock retaining walls around parts of the lake, and canned and ate his horse Lindy after she accidently hung herself in one of the apple trees.

Six people bought the island in the early 1970s and built some cabins. In mid-July, the family that has claim to the old farmhouse was there, a couple with two children. So was the property's caretaker, who farms a little garlic and keeps a vegetable garden. He lives there year-round in a cabin close to the old homestead. His son, a four-year-old wild man with hair to mid-back, like his father's, and a grubby fist forever brushing it away from his face, was one reason I wanted to make cookies. The boy had a Popeye doll, and a beaten-up plush parrot. When I held the parrot on Popeye's shoulder and croaked "pieces of eight, pieces of eight" at him, he looked at the parrot with desperate regret, and said, "I don't have those." I wanted more access to the world of a four-year-old. He had a sweet tooth, and I am not above bribery.

Going to the island means going back to turn-of-the-century technology, to wood stoves and kerosene lanterns. Our friend Jerome, known to his partners as Mr. Crisp for his fastidious ways, has a propane fridge that miraculously makes ice cubes. Small quantities of ice cubes, to be sure, but enough to clink in a glass at the end of a hard day's basking on the rocks and cooling off in the lake.

I brought to the island olive oil, basil and thyme from my garden, the pasta shells I like for pasta salad, sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, olives, sweet onions, Belgian chocolate, and, on an impulse, a little jug of real maple syrup. Blueberries, lots of lemons, oranges, apples, baking soda and powder. Smoked salmon. Sausage and cheese. A dozen beer, a bottle of Scotch. A roasting chicken, frozen solid, bought from the last big supermarket on the route. The dense, heavy sunflower-seed bread from the bakery down the street. And one litre of milk. If we hadn't had to carry the food on a trail that climbed from the ocean, then dipped into the lake, there would have been more milk.

As for the rationale behind the rest of the shopping list, I reasoned that we could always go to the next big island for staples. But we'd have to come right back to civilization before we found a store selling Belgian chocolate and sun-dried tomatoes.

I can swim and read and lie in the sun only for so long. I take a certain pleasure in hacking back salal so that a walk along the path after a rain doesn't soak the chins, but that's the sort of thing I want to for got only twenty minutes at a time, to clear my head. I had endless time for cooking. And because there was no store, I was blessed by limits. Except for the beans and beets, all coming ripe at once in the caretakers garden, the materials here were finite. What we had was what were were going to eat, so I was free to concentrate on the food at hand.

The first meals where simple, with a minimum of cooking: smoked salmon and cream cheese on slices of sunflower bread, with fresh thyme, a drop of lemon, a little black pepper and a slice of sweet onion. Then a green salad with olives and artichokes for heft, and sun-dried tomatoes for salty, concentrated flavour. Then fruit and chocolate for dessert.

Sometimes in the two years since Jerome had last stayed at the cabin, someone had borrowed the sugar. No one wanted sugar on the coffee or on cereal or fruit. But once we lit the wood stove, I wanted to bake. We had fresh flour. There was a copy of the aptly named Joy of Cooking on the shelf, and two flour-company cookbooks, the kind that are a monument to the marriage of commerce and cooking. My mother used to say: "They want to sell more flour, so everything in there is guaranteed to work," and she was right.

We first lit the oven to bake the chicken. And if the oven was on for chicken, then there was no reason, apart from the sugar shortage, not to bake cookies. I studied the Joy of Cooking, and with the help of the sugar substitution chart, made thin, crisp, elegantly coffee-coloured maple chocolate chip cookies, the chips cut from the clock of Belgian chocolate. They tasted magnificent. The chicken roasted to red-brown, crisp on the skin and juicy inside. I was in love.

I had never been in charge of a wood stove before. When I was a child, and saw them in my prairie aunts' kitchens, they frightened me. You would burn yourself if you brushed against one, which was not true of the electric stove at home. To me, wood stoves were just one more proof that the country is full of dangerous unknowns, and the city is safe. Later I stayed in cabins with wood stoves, but I was unsure of my skills. Besides, there was always someone there first, already weaving the dance of fire. Poke the fire, or add a stick or wood, and you would only throw them off their game.

My knowledge of fire is far from perfect. But I can light one, and keep it going, and modulate its temperature. As days went by, I studied the science of the damper, opening and closing it to feed air to my fire or starve it. I leapt to the pleasant challenge, at the end of baking time, of stirring up the coals just enough to keep the oven heat constant, without having to add more wood. I was playing with fire, a game made all the more because of the stove's defects. Rust had loosened the oven handle and opened a hole in the oven wall above the door, and another between the oven and the top of the firebox. When the fire was too hot, you could see orange flames rush over the oven roof. The required adjustments were minute but constant.

I never got around to learning to tell the temperature by the number of seconds that I could keep my hand in the hot oven. I'm told that's the sign of a wood-stove master. But I cooked, using a far bigger chunk of attention and skill than it ever takes to set a number on a dial. On the last afternoon, I made cinnamon buns. I had time to nurse the dough, and the classic place to let it rise: the shelf over the stove. When I lifted the bread bowl to put it in it's place, I felt centuries of cooks with bread bowls stretch into the past behind me.

I put the buns in to bake after dinner, while we did the dishes. We waited for them on the deck, drinking plum wine that Jerome had made seven summers before. Six rainy winters in the back of a kitchen cupboard can have good effects or ill. The wine was as clear and as rarefied and good slivovitz, the dry, slightly bitter, plum brandy.

The oven was warm and glowing. Too warm, I realized, when I saw through the hole over the handle of the oven door a stream of molten air, quick with sparks, flowing over the oven roof. I put a light pan lids in place to protect the buns, but it singed the top of some of them. By the time the dough was baked, the surfaces that weren't under the lids were charred.

From Jerome's deck, you can see lake through the trees, and hear loons on the lake. We drank plum wine and ate cinnamon buns brushed by fire and spread with the last of the butter. While we ate, the bats came out to trace the rapid kiss of their black shapes on the sky.

I have never since found myself with maple syrup, a need to make cookies, and no sugar, but I have made these cookies again. They're perfect cookies to make on a whim, a small batch that mixes up in the time it takes the oven to heat, and irresistible while they're still warm. I make them small, so they have plenty of room to spread on the cookie sheet.

Maple Syrup Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup very soft butter

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 egg

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup coarsely chopped Belgian semi-sweet chocolate

Preheat the oven to 350°F

In a medium mixing bowl, beat the butter and syrup together with an electric mixer until smooth. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until well mixed. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, and chocolate.

Using a teaspoon, drop the dough onto a greased baking sheet. Bake for 12 minutes, or until the edges are browned.

Makes 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

(I know, I know, it doesn't mention salt anywhere in the ingredients, but then makes reference to it in the directions. You could probably leave it out and it would be just fine, but a pinch of salt for good measure won't hurt a thing.)

Sigh. I feel like I've just returned from a tiny island with a cabin and wood stove myself. If after reading this you don't feel this deep longing to eat chicken and cookies and cinnamon buns cooked in a wood stove while drinking plum wine and listening to the loons on the lake, then I am saddened to have to be the one to tell you that you don't have a soul. My condolences.

I could personally read that chapter over and over and over again and still want to go that island. The cool thing is that the author is from Vancouver, so she's probably talking about someplace on the Sunshine Coast! I wonder if I can email her and ask where? I would love to go. It sounds to me like it's one of the ones around Saltspring, Gabriola and Galiano Islands.

Well, it's late now, so I bid you adieu. I hope I've given you some lovely brain fodder to mull around in your pretty heads.

PS. Still obsessed with that song by La Roux. It makes me want to dance all the time.

Pictures, My Boy and La Roux

These are a couple pictures from Amanda and Brendan's wedding! They were taken by our friend, Elmira, who brought a pretty nice camera with her. I didn't really take that many, because I am, in fact, a moron. But that's okay, because there are other people out there who aren't morons, and they can always be relied upon for nice wedding pictures. I don't think I look very good in any of these pictures, but Amanda looks great, and that's what really counts.

Yesterday I got to see Max for the first time in a week, and I know a week isn't really that long, but boy, it felt like a million years. We didn't do anything special yesterday. Just met up, had lunch at Whitespot, walked to his house, watched Community (which is my new favourite show) and then walked to Hastings so I could catch the bus home. But it doesn't need to be more exciting than that, because I can be pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything with Max and have a good time.

Mostly we just talk, which is great for me because I love talking. I remember when we first started dating, he didn't really do much of the talking. This bothered me at first, because I come from a family of talkers, and when someone isn't talking that means that something is wrong. So I asked him about it one day, and he said "Oh, no, I'm just not a big talker. I like listening to you talk, though." I always hear about couples where the girl is greatly bothered by the boy's lack of communication, but hey, is Max says that he just isn't into talking as much as I am, that's good enough for me. I still do most of the talking, I think, but Max talks much more than he used to.

I think it's the mark of a great relationship that you never, ever run out of things to talk about. And hey, if you do, you don't feel the pressings of an awkward silence. You can sit, or walk, in silence with each other and that's okay.

I'm not very good at communicating my feelings to people, and I even struggle with it around Max sometimes. As sure as I come from a family of talkers, I also come from a family of emotionally uptight people. We're not huggers, we're not affectionate, but that's okay because I think we know each other well enough to know how we feel about each other without saying it. I hope my friends realize that I'm like this. I'm just more comfortable using the word "like" instead of "love", again, even around Max. But I know that he knows, so we don't need the words.

There are all these things I want to say, in regards to the way Max makes me feel, but I'm finding that I can't even say them here. I want to type them out, but saying things like this makes me feel stupid. Oh well, maybe one day I'll have the balls.

On a final note, I want you all the listen to La Roux. She is, to put it plainly, amazing. My current favourite of hers is called I'm Not Your Toy, and if you haven't already heard music by her, I encourage you to click on that link. I find that I'm not defined by genre the way most people seem to be. There are people out there who are refusing to even give good music a listen because it's not what they normally listen to. Me, I'll listen to anything that's good, genre be damned, and I hope that everyone else can do that too.

Of Weddings

Now, before I start talking about the wedding and how nice it was, let me tell you something that's equally, if not more, important. I have found the perfect shade of lipstick. I know. You're jealous. Who wouldn't be? But the good news is that this perfection is available to you! The colour is called Siren, and it's made by Revlon. It's just a crème one. None of those fancy pearl styles ones for me. I like 'em plain. To be honest, I would have preferred something matte, but you can't win them all.

So, this is the point in the blog where it autosaved, and then I fucked up and navigated away from the other two prefect paragraphs that I had written, and proceeded screaming curse words at my computer screen. Fuck. Shit. Tits. Et cetera. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to recreate them.

Okay. The wedding.

This was possibly the nicest wedding that I have ever been too, and I know a few other people, my mother included, said the same thing. It was just so simple, and included all the elements that every good wedding should have: the glowing fathers, the teary mothers,one nervous groom and one bride with trembling lips. I couldn't keep my giant smile from creeping onto my face, and hadto blink away happy tears more than once. Actually, I'm quite proud that I didn't cry all over myself like I thought I would.

I hear a lot about the drama that comes along with all weddings, but I am pleased to say that we had none of that going on at this wedding. We left Amanda's house at about 8:30 am, and arrived at the salon for her hair appointment at 9:00. Exactly one hour later she was finished, and by 10:30 we were at her grandmother's house. Her dress laced up perfectly, and I wrestled into my own dress with considerably ease. The makeup went on, and we left the house around noon, and got to the chapel at noonish. At this point there had been only one teensy hitch. Amanda's mum, Candy, had left Amanda's dad's, Jason, boutonnière at their house, and he had to drive back real quick to get it. After that though, it was smooth sailing.

We (Amanda, Candy, Jason, me, Kevin (Brendan's brother and best man) and Fern (Brendan's mother) all waited in the brides room at the chapel, and promptly at 1:00 pm, Hugo the pastor came to tell us that we were going to get things started. Brendan's aunt played beautifully on the piano as Candy and Fern walked in with lit candles to place at the table where the marriage certificate would be signed. Kevin and I followed, grinning ear to ear. Brendan was standing up on the church stage, nervously clasping his hands and smiling. The Vancouver crew (Elmira, Carla, Alma, Cerina and Dru) were sitting in a pew together, smiling. We took our positions, and then Amanda and Jason came in together.

I'm going to admit, it was kind of weird seeing Amanda all dressed up as a bride. Earlier that day, as I was doing our makeup, I said to her "I'm confused. Aren't we still 17 and having lunch in D-Wing?" (That was our old highschool haunt.) We laughed, but it was still strange to think that we were growing up to the point where we and our friends were going to start getting married and living our adult lives. I still feel like a little kid most of the time, so while things like this are definitely fun, they get mixed with this sense of melancholy.

So, as Amanda was walking down the aisle, I could see her lip starting to quiver and her eyes tearing up. It was so, so, SO cute. I looked and Brendan, and he was blinking away tears too. The icing on the cake, my friends. After this, the rest of the ceremony went along faster than I thought it would. Hugo told a couple of jokes, and then before we knew it, their vows were being sealed with a kiss. I got to sign some official looking paperwork, and then everything was over.

There were a couple of reception parties to go to after the ceremony, which were all very nice, but I was just so wiped out by the point that I was daydreaming about naps. As fun as the whole day had been, and the months leading up to it, I was drained. My maid of honour duties were over, and I was more than a little relieved. I ate some at the parties, met some nice people (and dogs! At Josh's house, a friend of the newlyweds, he had a dog that's part wolf! He was so big, and his name was Koda!), and finally left for home at 9:30 pm in Dru's car. We made it home from Chilliwack in an hour, no joke, mostly thanks to Dru's speed of 160 kmph on the highway. I have never gone that fast in a car before in my life, and to be honest, I don't think I ever want to again. I came home, and passed out.

Alright, now that I've finally written that all down, I've got to go out the door now. I'm sure I'll add more details in a later post, but I need to go and be reunited with my Max, who I haven't seen for a little while, and I'm starting to get this pang right where my heart should be.