August and Everything After...Is Unknown.

Somehow the months since mid-March have passed in a blur. A good blur. Like bokeh. The day I last wrote, I did indeed end up making madeleines that I gave to a friend for her 51st birthday. That evening at her party, I had a long conversation with her son. He seemed to be enjoying our talk, and I wondered if he might be interested in me. No, I told myself, he's younger...of course he wouldn't be interested in that way! But several weeks later, his mom put us in touch with an email, and we started emailing. Some weeks after that, he asked me on a date.

Here and there.

• I bought vacuum cleaner. A Miele. I love it. It's black and silver, though I chose it for other reasons. However, it coordinates very well with my home's color scheme.
• I vacuumed the whole apartment the day I brought it home. There are no longer little rocks on the floor in the 3-foot (half) radius around front door. And Booboo was pretty comfortable around it, which is a huge change from how he was with the previous vaccuum.
• At the store, the registration process for the 10-year free warranty (!!!) asked for the reason for buying a vacuum. There was not an option for "My ex left me for another woman and took the vacuum cleaner with him." So the guy at the store said I should just choose "Replacing a broken vacuum."
• My new Miele rolls behind me so easily, like a happy little puppy following me around. It was on sale, plus I even got an extra $40 off because I took one that had an almost invisible scratch on the bottom. Honestly, I probably did more damage to it on its maiden voyage around the apartment the other day.
• You know the risk I talked about in the last two paragraphs of this post?

Around here (in no particular order).

• On Saturday, I opened the fridge and found the cocoa powder in there. Oops.
• I have only been to the grocery store twice since June. I have been to the market at the Old Port twice or so for fresh veggies and to the corner convenience store a lot. Somehow this is working for me.
• I am working on a challenging and fun artistic freelance project.
• Did the title of this post make anyone else think of Counting Crows circa 1994?
• I only have about a month more with Booboo and that thought makes me so terribly sad I can't think about it too long.
• This summer I finally found coffee beans that make coffee I really enjoy. I used to like the beans from this one place near my apartment, but then the coffee started tasting like dirt. After I inquired about why their coffee now tasted like "la terre," as I put it in French, I found out that they had changed the blend's mix of beans. Unable to find anything better, we drank overpriced, dirt-flavoured coffee with a hint of "burnt" for months. Finally, I decided to experiment with beans from a different place in the neighborhood. My first try was an improvement but a little weak; the second try was perfect. I am now on my third bag of that coffee. No more dirt coffee for me.
• I finally ordered beautiful embossed stationery with both our names on it in mid-June. A lifetime supply probably. I went with stationery instead of an address stamp, because I figured our address was likely to change at some point. It was a little too risky. I had the beautiful cream correspondance cards shipped to my parents' home, and they arrived just before everything exploded. I never saw the stationery, which is probably for the best. I had been so unreasonably excited about that goregous stationary with our names embossed on it. I guess it will get recycled.
• Thankfully I had also ordered some for myself with my monogram. My dad mailed that to me, and I have been thoroughly enjoying using it.
• My car turned 20 years old in April. But I don't drive very much anymore. Maybe once a week, often less. But the car works well still, much to my surprise and happiness.
• I find I love having a life that is so local. I love walking to work and having most everything I need a short distance from where I live.
• I am not looking forward to winter coming. I keep telling myself if I can survive 'til spring life will look better. I just need to survive this death of our marriage and my life as I had expected it and make it to spring and wait on some sort of rebirth.
• Shoveling. Ugh. Do I need to say anything more?
• I have a bag of green tomatoes in the fridge. I bought them to do fried green tomatoes. I have been unable to motivate myself to do that though. My level of energy is more on the basic sandwich-level of Maslow's hierarchy of culinary needs.
• Last week I spent $11 and some change at the thrift store and got a pair of jeans, a skirt, and a top that all fit. This helps. Baggy jeans do not.
• I was undecided on the skirt but thought that for $3, it was worth a shot. Once I got it home, I realized it is kind of the perfect skirt. It is black with thin pinstripes, plus it's quick drying and ideal for travelling. A pretty great find.
• It's still raining. I don't mind.

Since July 4

Light bulbs that have blown: 4
Fuses that have blown: 1
Splinters received from walking barefoot on the wood floor: 2
Days that have passed without crying: 1
Movies watched: 0
Times I have made waffles: 2
Original vintage windows that have decided to no longer open: 1
Trips to the grocery store: 1
Birthdays: 1
Weddings attended: 1
Books read: 2
Favorite pens that have run out of ink: 2
Journals filled: 1
Times I have bought myself flowers: 1

An update of sorts.

• Earlier this summer I was fired up to write a post about how I was seeing a lot of rudeness in society these days. But....eh. I decided not to.
• This is partially because we escaped away from it all and spent a month in Australia. A month in Australia can do remarkable things, including reducing levels of annoyance.

Photo credit: S

Photo credit: S

• See? It does wonders.
• The jet lag I had after coming back was the worst I've ever had. It took me ten days to get back on our Canadian time zone. But hey, it was fun staying up to dawn again; it had been an unbelievably long time since I'd done that.

I miss you, Cheez-its.*

Isn't this little Cheez-it family adorable? The large box is a normal size box, and the other two are the cutest little baby Cheez-it boxes.

They were all equally delicious. And rationed out. Cheez-its are the food I miss most from home.

*And I am really, really hoping that the arrival of Target to Canada will also bring original flavor Cheez-its to Québec.

Tutu

The tulle Booboo was attacking in the previous post was tulle I bought to make a no-sew tutu for S's niece for Christmas. I had found a video guide on YouTube that I liked and went to Fabricville to get the supplies (I used pink grosgrain ribbon and pink tulle).

Basically, you roll the tulle up, cut it in 3 inch strips, and tie it to the grosgrain ribbon. Super easy and it didn't take very long to put together.

And that is the finished result. (And his niece seems to really like wearing it!)

First Thanksgiving Dinner in Canada.

I forgot today is Thanksgiving until I got an e-card that reminded me that (American) Thanksgiving is, in fact, today. Here in Québec, they obviously don't celebrate American Thanksgiving, but neither do they celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving (which comes earlier anyways). Last year, I did not celebrate either Thanksgiving and I missed it, so this year I decided to host dinner this coming weekend for some of S's family. I will be the only American at our Thanksgiving celebration, and most of the conversation will be in French, which I find pretty great and also kinda funny. I am looking forward to sharing this part of my culture with S's family.

In Chicago, I used to host an annual Day-After-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Potluck and I miss that. Since I am an only child and our celebrations eventually became just me and my parents, one year I decided it would be fun to invite a bunch of Chicago friends, and we celebrated the day after so that more people could come. We once had 16 people there, and we often had to eat on chairs in a big circle in the living room, with our plates in our laps. I have great memories of those celebrations with my family and friends and am so glad to have had those years of potluck Thanksgivings.

However, having only been in our new apartment since July, I still don't quite feel established enough to host a big shindig. Plus, it would probably be weird to have a potluck for Thanksgiving here, since it isn't celebrated here and the guests are not people who celebrate Thanksgiving. But I think I can handle a sit-down dinner for five adults and two kids. I have cooked before for seven adults, so I have experience with this size of group. But I have never cooked a whole Thanksgiving dinner without my parents' help, so I am a little nervous about the timing of it all and have created a spreadsheet schedule to organize every dish and every task that needs to be done. I hope this level of organization will help it come together and that I can pull off making all the dishes I want to do, some of which are new dishes. (Yeah, I like to live on the edge like that and often try new dishes for company.) And I still have to figure out what to do about the turkey. As a mostly vegetarian, I am not going to cook one. So...I guess I will look at the grocery store to see if there is an already cooked turkey or chicken I could purchase from the deli, and then do the rest of the dishes myself. Or maybe skip the meat part altogether, like I usually do when I cook? I like dressing with gravy (and no turkey), but I don't know if it would be weird for others. Though since they don't do Thanksgiving here, maybe they wouldn't miss it? I enjoy hosting and I am looking forward to it. The only thing is that I often (almost always?) run late in life and when I host people for dinner, I often get stressed in "crunch time" when trying to pull it all together. Hence, my work to prevent this by creating the extensive schedule that begins with tasks today. I will not be trying to iron tablecloths right before guests arrive this year. :) And I am excited to try this new recipe for delicious-looking yeast dinner rolls.

If this goes well, I'd like to host a drop-in Christmas gathering in December for a larger group? Maybe one weekend afternoon with appetizers and desserts? Or an evening, but make it potluck? Our apartment is not quite ready for that level of event right now though since we still are getting settled. Last night we completely re-arranged the living room and now have a configuration of furniture that is infinitely more pleasing. Before it looked like we had thrown everything in the living room with the couch in a bad orientation and had not unpacked much; now our living room looks like a living room. We are slowly making progress in finding the places where things truly belong in this apartment. We lost a room before moving into our apartment, so we have too much stuff for the size apartment we have (and almost no closets), so it has been quite a task to get organized. Plus we are combining all our stuff (since this apartment was the first time we lived with all our stuff together). I used floorplanner.com to create a floorplan for our living room and the furniture, and then could virtually experiment with various arrangements. It is an amazing (free!) tool, and I highly recommend it! Plus you can even look at your design 3-D to see how it "feels." The square shape of our living room was weird to work with, and I had to think outside of the box to fit everything in. Anyhow, now our couch floats in the middle of the room and half the room is the TV and couch area and the other half is my desk, one of our sewing machines, and a reading area. It feels pretty good so far.

Difference.

 

Does anyone else notice the way a particular packaged food sometimes tastes different in various countries? I strongly believe that Fanta is way better in Norway than in the United States. And this Snickers above? S brought it home from Japan and I happily ate it last week. My conclusion: Yum. But what I most picked up on was that it had more of a peanut-y taste, and less of a caramel-y flavor than a U.S. Snickers. Good, but noticeably different. 

I get a kick out of exploring international grocery stores and seeing all the new-to-me foods. I like to do this when I travel abroad, and when I find stores where I live that happen to carry good selections of international foods. One of my favorite grocery stores in Chicago seemed to be Greek-affiliated, and they had some delicious food in the deli and interesting stocked items from all over the world. And there was a Hungarian grocery store in the Chicago area that I wanted to check out, but sadly, I didn't get there before I moved. Thankfully, there are international grocery stores in Québec too. In Montréal, there are all sorts of fun places to explore. Last spring, I went with a friend to a Bosnian grocery store/diner-restaurant and had a tasty Macedonian Fanta (that made me think fondly of Norway) and a delicious vegetarian sandwich the cook made especially for me since pretty much everything on the menu included meat. Don't worry- he is the one that suggested the idea, all with a great sense of humor and slight aura of disbelief at my seemingly-odd-to-him preference of not eating meat. I was going to attempt to be low-maintenance and just get salad or fries or something on the menu, just to eat at this fun little grocery store/diner-restaurant, but he wanted to improvise a veggie sandwich for me on the spot. Experiences like eating that meal with my friend in that Bosnian establishment are something I value.  This desire to connect with people from other cultures, both in small moments, and in deeper relationships, is something that I appreciated from living and traveling in Europe and has now become part of my life. Last week I found an international grocery store in Québec, and after wandering through it to see all the interesting food it offers, I left with a new spring in my step and some fun food in my bag...feeling just a bit more at home here. I guess I was afraid that moving away from a large city like Montréal or Chicago would mean losing the international atmosphere I have grown accustomed to since my days in Europe, but I am happy to say that Québec also has its own international community which I am slowly discovering.

When I began living in Chicago years ago, I learned how to do that don't-make-eye-contact-with-me city attitude that is useful when you don't want to attract unwanted attention on the subway or while walking home alone at night. But then sometimes, I would stop and remember to be aware of all the people swirling around me as I make my way through life among so many diverse people, cultures, and languages. To concentrate on being present in my transitions. And when I was awake and open to the world around me, I was reminded of the overwhelming beauty of humanity in momentary, yet authentic connections with strangers. Quick almost imperceptible smiles, short conversations, shared subway seats, a exchange of a look of appreciation over a beautiful baby or adorable young child. A brief, friendly conversation in French, a second language for both me and the woman working at the international grocery store last week, and a promise to come back.

Those moments give me a quiet hope. These type of connections transcend differences like nationality, language, socio-economic or religious background, and a gazillion other cultural distinctions, and instead become a moment about recognizing and honoring our shared humanity. Though I may never know a person's story and how his or her journey through life brought them to that place, the moment itself has value and beauty. And sometimes those brief exchanges unfold into friendships. And slowly, a bridge is built by one authentic moment after another, and the lasting friendships that are developed over time. A powerful action of peace and love.

"The Can"*

Our cat, Booboo, is quite social. He even likes to accompany us into the bathroom and "go" at the same time as one of us. In our new apartment, we set up the litter box beside the toilet, and I found it HILARIOUS when Booboo would go alongside me.**

But those communal potty days are now over. We have been talking for about a year about toilet training Booboo, and now we have just begun the process.*** Our current bathroom set-up is like this:

The other night, I walked to the bathroom in the middle of the night and found Booboo busy using it. So I went back to bed to wait until the toilet was free.**** We plan on keeping the litter box like this for the next month, and then start the next step of the process, which will involve S building some type of contraption to fit in the toilet. Then the idea is to reduce the litter (and usually to also open up a hole that slowly increases) until Booboo is standing on the toilet seat and going without litter. That's the goal anyways. We are going to take each step slowly to make sure Booboo successfully makes each transition. So far, so good.

* Southern colloquialism for "toilet."

**Except when he goes and it is super smelly and I have to quickly escape the bathroom to recover.

***Yes, it is possible. There are plenty of YouTube videos to prove it.

****Yep, you have to move the litter box (or later, the contraption) to go. Oh well...long-term it will be worth it.

Recent Vintage Finds.

A couple weeks ago, S and I went to meet a friend for lunch in Montréal and discovered the street with the restaurant was shut down for a pedestrian-only weekend street festival. All the shops were having sidewalk sales, so S and I wandered a bit after lunch. I saw an adorable vintage dress at a second hand shop, but I looked at its tag and saw $125. Since I rarely spend over $10* on clothing, and since it was a cute, white dress and I am not in the market for a wedding dress, I sadly walked away. But I kept thinking about the dress, so later S and I went back to it, and I thought it couldn't hurt, you know, just to try it on. For fun. Since I was Not Going To Actually Buy It, of course. 

So, I was looking at it and trying to come up with a reason why I actually needed a cute (expensive, for me) vintage wedding-y dress, and the sales person comes up to me and said, "Those are two for 15." I said, "WHAT?" And she repeated herself and I quickly grabbed the adorable dress, and another cute off-white one I had noticed while racking my brain for good justifications for buying the first dress, and made an immediate decision to buy both. She asked if I wanted to try them on and I, at first, said no, because I was so confident they would fit.** Then I decided I might as well try them on, since I was there and there was a dressing room, after all.

And, as I had suspected, they fit just right. I might need to slightly shorten the straps on the first dress, but yeah...they both fit well. These were the most fun vintage finds I have had in a long while, and now I am brain-storming ways I can work wearing these little white dresses*** into my life in a non-bridal way.**** Any ideas would be appreciated!

The dress that caught my eye initially:

The second dress:

*Who am I kidding? Most of my clothes are about $3 or less a piece. I love (and am good at) finding cute/normal, unique/weird, vintage, or high-end designer clothes for cheap at thrift stores.*****

**After shopping for years at thrift stores that don't have dressing rooms, I have gotten wildly accurate at choosing clothes that fit well without even trying them on.

***For YEARS, I avoided white dresses (and white clothing in general!) like the plague. But once I fell in love and actually started planning a wedding, I discovered an urge to buy white clothes and actually wear them. Like, I bought 3 white tops at one go at a second-hand shop. All this, despite my previous fear of wearing white tops because of the dire consequences of spills. Oddly, the timing coincided with lots of white clothing appearing in clothing stores, so I guess fashion trends and my sudden obsession conveniently coincided to aid and abet each other.

****I have an idea for pairing the top dress with tall black flat boots and a black little bolero, both of which I already own. I am a little more clueless about how to make the second dress work. I could see how I could maybe pull it off by wearing it barefoot on a beach, but since I don't live anywhere near a beach, that look is a little problematic. Anyone else have ideas?

*****I can have quite eclectic taste at times. But I am an artist....that makes it okay, right? :)

Ah, BooBoo...

My nearby companion.

BooBoo just had a summer haircut (well, shave). He looks cute/funny. S left a little poof on the top of his tail.

BooBoo's Busy Work Day

 
A little work on the computer...

 
Can I help you?

 
Oh, I really should make some calls....

This was a funny, completely unstaged cat moment. I was getting ready for bed (in my bathroom which is right by the kitchen table*), and BooBoo hopped into my normal seat where I usually work. Since my camera was right there on the table, I grabbed it and caught him in action.

*Hmm...could this be a benefit of the close, "efficient" location of this apartment's bathroom?

Edit: Thanks Mrs. T, I'm not sure why the photos didn't show up when I originally posted.

Crafty.

I got inspired and made a birthday card the other day. I used some leftover wedding supplies and made a sort of banner to spell out the friend's name. On the other side, I wrote out a birthday haiku wish. It was a fun spontaneous creative project.

American Classic?

I got this "American classic" the other day at the dépanneur (small corner store). I thought it was funny because, though I am American, I had never heard of this "classic" until maybe last year when my friend L introduced me to them because she was baking them and trying to perfect her recipe.* It made me think of L, standing right there in my Montréal dépanneur, so I bought this funnily packaged whoopie pie.** It was huge and I learned, after finishing it all, supposedly two servings. Oops. I liked the cake part, but the filling could have been better.

The funniest part of buying it was when I took it up to the guy who runs the register at the dépanneur and he got excited and said they had just started carrying them and he had been wanting to try one. Wonder if they will be a hit?

*It is possible these are an American classic. But growing up in the South, our "classic" was the Moon Pie. Yum.
**I found the explanation of the origin of the name hilarious.

I wish.

Bonne fête, S!

How to Live

Courtesy of the street-namers of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Yard Art.

This was another spontaneous stop S and I made to appreciate some "art." Immediately after buying our red wedding shoes mentioned the other day, we stopped here. With amazement, we browsed the cement yard art in southern Indiana somewhere and then went to Taco Bell. Loved it. And it especially cracks me up how it looks like the Holy Family made a pilgrimage to Hardee's.

Because I get a kick out of it.

S and I share an enjoyment of ridiculous tackiness. (Though we do usually leave it in its native environment and do not bring it home with us.) There is this place in Québec that I love for its over-the-top-ness; it's a rest stop/restaurant/motel about halfway between Québec and Montréal. During our early dating days, S pointed it out to me while we were riding in a van on one of S's touring gigs. One day, when we were driving by, S suggested we stop to explore its dinosaurs and monster trucks. It was a wonderfully fun experience and a great memory now. Thank you S for suggesting we spontaneously stop! (Another reminder of the joy to be found in living in the moment...)

PS. Happy 5 months, S! Our first long-distance month-versary... Looking forward to sharing many more dinosaurs and monster trucks with you.