Jacki's Journal

Back To School!

2010-09-02T13:46:00.001-07:00

Today was orientation! I took the day off work and headed down to the Guvernment Koolhaus to meet my new peers. Although it felt ridiculously early to have to be somewhere by 9:30 (normally I work at noon), I had to remind myself that this was two hours later than when class starts next week.

When I walked up to the building, there was already a line of people slowly working their way past people from various organizations throughout the college giving away pamphlets, flyers and swag. Inside the building, despite the early hour, the lights were dim and the music was pumping. I believe there were close to a thousand people inside! And we were all wearing ridiculous matching mustard-coloured t-shirts. It was the whole chef school and hospitality school, probably 15 or 20 different programs. We worked our way through the first two rooms, visiting kiosks along the way filled with people looking to recruit for sports teams, telling us where to get our lockers or offering support to international students.

In the third room, we were seated with people from our specific program. I was relieved to find that I didn't feel or look that much older than the people at my table. I think I'm going to fit in okay! And my program is almost entirely girls! I think there are at most 10 guys in a program with 150 students.

So we sat through some speeches. I got to put some faces to the names of people I dealt with last year in my battle to get into the program. After the speeches, they gave us an activity to get to know the people at our tables. We were given an apple, an orange, two bananas, a plate, a bowl, a pipe cleaner, some toothpicks, a napkin and two paring knives and were told to make a presentation of the fruit. I contributed to my group's display by making checkerboards on the on the apple wedges.

There was some judging, and then we all left the club to head back to the school for our program orientations. As we walked back, I watched the sea of hundreds of yellow t-shirts as they crossed the Gardiner Expressway and just laughed. It was pretty ridiculous.

At school, we were herded into classrooms specific to our program where we found brown bag lunches. I had an egg sandwich, it was exactly what I needed.

The next hour was spent listening to a power point presentation of the school rules. My worst nightmares were confirmed: No jewelry, no nail polish, no ponytails.

Somehow, I will survive.

I think most of the programs did a tour after their sessions, but ours didn't, so we were free after that.

First I tracked down my locker. My suspicions when reserving my locker online were correct. The odd numbers meant it was a top locker. Excellent.

Then I tracked down a women who is helping me with my math exemption (there was a bit of mix-up where I was told it was confirmed, but it was not confirmed at all, so I've been trying to get everything fixed up this week). I gave her the form and she was optimistic that I will be exempted from the class, and told me not to register for it.

Then I went to the bookstore to pick up my last few things. As expected, it was an absolute zoo. The bookstore wasn't big enough for all the action so they had set up a stations in the hall for trying on uniforms, buying knives and buying linens. Each station had a huge lineup. I was happy I took care of all that last week. My favorite part was that Mark's Work Warehouse had set up a big truck outside the bookstore where you could walk into the back and there were chairs inside so you could try on safety shoes. Inside the bookstore, the line wrapped all the way around the perimeter of the store and out into the hall. I had lots of time though, so I picked up my shoes, the notes for the math class (Even if I'm not taking it, for $12 I figured it wouldn't hurt to flip through the course notes), and the info I need to do my sanitation course online.

By this time it was only 1pm, so I decided to go sit in another long line and get my student loan stuff sorted. I was really surprised at how easy the process was, no wonder college kids get so far into debt! I won't actually get my loan for about a month though because I opted out of the direct deposit option. I don't trust the government with my bank account number! The loan people thought I was crazy though. They kept trying to convince me that it's perfectly safe. I mean, they really tried. Regardless of whether I agree with them though, I just think it's such a minor inconvenience to wait a few weeks that it's totally worth saving that little bit of my privacy.

After that, I decided to head home because I had a headache. I learned something about myself today. I'm officially addicted to caffeine. I didn't have my regular noon cup of green tea, and from twelve o'clock onwards, I started feeling worse and worse. So I came home, made a cup of tea and started blogging!

Okay, so I'm sure you're wondering....What kind of stuff do you need for pastry school?

Well, I just happen to have finish collecting all of my supplies, so I would be happy to show you!

Of course I need textbooks, course notes, notebooks, pens and an adorable netbook.
The textbook looks amazing, plus it came with little flashcard/cheat sheet dealies that contain all the mixing instructions for the main things I will be baking. The idea is that if you give me a list of ingredients to make say, bread, I can find the corresponding flashcard and it will tell me exactly how to combine those ingredients to get the result that I want. Nifty!

But what am I going to wear???

I got three fresh uniforms, complete with pants, jacket, neckerchief, bar towel, hat and apron. Yes, I'm really going to wear those hats. And I got a cute pink laundry bag to haul my dirty uniforms home at the end of the week. It wasn't until after I got it home that I realized it matches my netbook. John just laughs when that happens.

I got another bag to hold my school books. It's a Targus bag, so it's really nice and it was on sale which is also really nice. My safety shoes are not particularly cute, but apparently they have steel toes and are slip resistant, specially suited for those in the hospitality industry.

I know what you're thinking. "But Jacki, what's in that black case tucked back there in the corner?"

My baking tools! The case opens up like a book. On page one we have wooden spoons, spatulas and yes, that is a paint brush. The only use I can think of for it is maybe to brush crumbs off a cake?
On page two, we have oven mitts, a sil-pat sheet (used instead of parchment paper to line cookie sheets), a strainer, two piping bags (how will I ever survive with only two?!?!), a peeler and two sets of ten piping tips - just round tips and star tips in varying sizes.
And on page three we find the fun/sharp stuff. Two ice cream scoops (have been jonesing for these for ages), a microplane grater (been jonesing for that one too), some heavy duty scissors and some knives. One of them is bigger than anything I have at home!And lastly, in the outside pockets, we find a scraper, a decorative edger, a smooth edger and some kind of probe that sits outside of the oven, but the stick part goes in the oven, into the food and continuously monitors the temperature.
Apparently this is all I will need to bake all manners of wonderful desserts!

So in conclusion, I am going to have three really heavy bags to lug in everyday. If I come out of this program with nothing else, it will be strong arms!

Gettin' it all Figured Out

2010-08-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

The very last piece fell in place yesterday.

Work approved my part time schedule!

That was the last thing I needed to organize my school year perfectly. I'm starting out with a small schedule of 16 hours a week. Then in November when I can work Saturdays, I'll ramp up to 19.5 hours per week. And I'm just going to play it by ear - if I feel like my course load is light enough that I can take on more hours, I will. I figured it was better to start small and ramp up, then start big and stress myself out because I took on too much.

So I have a commuter situation that is nearly impossible to achieve in Toronto (and I still give John all the credit for this since he is the one who found the apartment and found me my job). I wake up, hop on a subway for 6 stops (20 minutes) and it lets me off two blocks from school. After school I come home the same way, then pop next door to work and pop back home. So basically I can go to work school in the same day, come home in between and still only commute less than an hour a day. Considering a typical commute in Toronto is 45 mins - 1 hour each way, I think that is amazing! My streak continues!

Now I'm just getting all my back-to-school stuff going. I've signed up for orientation on Sept 2nd. I found my book, uniform and supply list, so I'll probably start picking that stuff up next weekend (I have to buy a $350 baking tool kit, how fun is that!) I'm starting to get excited! It's starting to feel real!

We had an Earthquake!

2010-06-23T12:47:00.001-07:00

Crazy, eh?

I was at work and it was interesting to watch everyone realize what was happening at the same time. I couldn't feel the earth tremble, I just felt the building sway from side to side. It's two hours later and I still have a funny feeling in my stomach.

Some people went home from work citing being too shaken up to continue, but I think it's just because it was so unnerving. It wasn't bad enough for anything to fall off my desk, for example.

So I don't think we were in any real danger, but it was definitely spooky!

Garden: Day 8

2010-06-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's only been a few days, but there have been some changes in my garden!

My sprouts are growing a bit better, but still not enough for a sandwich.
And that's not the only thing sprouting!

My green onions have started to sprout. They're so tiny, I think it's impossible that they'll every become vegetables.

The green onions were actually the last ones to sprout out of everything I planted. The mesclun greens have tonnes of sprouts. I still have no idea what any of them are, but I can see subtle differences between them so I know I've got a few varieties growing.
And check out the zucchinis! They got this big in just a week!
After they were already planted, I decided to do some research on them (backwards, I know) and it turns out that a single plant should be enough to keep us in zucchinis for the summer. So maybe planting 16 was a bit overkill. Apparently each plant produces a zucchini every two days. Yikes!

But to be honest, given my track record with seedlings, I'll be impressed if more than say, five make it to maturity. And worst case, I'll dig 'em up and give them away. Apparently you can eat the flowers too! You can chop them up and put them in frittata or use them to wrap soft cheese in and fry. This should be interesting!

Some of the plants have improved over the past week. My cactus is starting to get its colour back. It had turned a deep purple over the winter, but now it seems to be returning to its original pink colour.

The banana tree has a couple of fresh new leaves. Those ratty old ones will be gone in no time. It's also weeping at night (drops of water drip from the tips of the leaves) so that tells me it's happy too.
and one of the strawberries has started turning red! I can't wait until these are ready to eat.
And we have new additions! Introducing.....

Sage!Chives!

Raspberries!

These plants were on sale at Canadian tire last weekend, so I bought two. I'm not sure how well they'll grow in a container, but I figure it's worth a shot!

They've already got the start of a few berries:

At the same sale I picked up two blueberry plants!

The little tag with them promises 1cm blueberries in late July.

And the plant I'm most excited about? Rhubarb!
I found this at a fruit stand near our building when I was on my way to my bridesmaid's dress fitting. I was too excited to find it, rhubarb reminds me of home. I know they get bigger and stronger every year, so I gave it a pot big enough that it should have lots of room to grow its roots. I'm not expecting too much out of it this year, but hopefully I'll get at least enough for some strawberry-rhubarb sauce for vanilla ice cream.

And lastly, because I had some leftover dirt, I decided to try a little experiment. I took a couple of cloves of garlic from my fridge and buried them. I wonder if anything will grow?
I'm really happy with my garden! With the exception of dill, I think I have all of the plants I want. Which is a good thing, because I'm running out of space!
The next step is to make it a little cozier. I want to put down some bamboo mats and John wants to put out a chaise. Oh yeah, and here is his contribution this week to our improved summer lifestyle:
Definitely an improvement over last summer!

And since we're talking about gardens, I thought I'd share a picture of some other flowers I'm working on:
Fondant calla lilies for Jess's wedding. 41 down, 69 to go!

Garden: Day 1

2010-05-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've caught the gardening bug big time this summer!

As usual, it started with a basil plant I picked up at the supermarket. As I'm sure many of you know, I have a long history of killing basil plants. I think last summer alone, I killed four. So when I saw one at the supermarket about a month ago, I figured it's never too soon to start trying again. So I brought it home and through some miracle, managed to keep it alive!

John asked me if I wanted to go putter around Chapters with him last weekend and I remembered seeing little grow-your-own sprout kits there, so I tagged along. Next to the kits I found a book called You Grow Girl that had cute pictures and looked beginner-friendly so I picked up both since I had a gift card.

Much like the quilt I made a few months ago, once I start reading about a new hobby, I get a bit obsessive. By the end of the week I had finished the book, mapped out how my shiny new container garden was going to look and researched several plants and the best way to grow them online (youtube has some great container gardening videos). It makes John giggle when I get like this because I'm so predictable when I get a new hobby. I'm unstoppable.

So this morning we rented a car for a couple of hours and hit the garden center. We started with Wal-mart for cheap pots, soil and fertilizer and then went to two nurseries for the plants. We got home and made lunch and then I went straight to work setting up the garden.

It was a lot of work and I made a huge mess of dirt everywhere, but I found it really enjoyable and I felt like I was making progress quickly. I sowed some seeds, transplanted some starter plants and repotted all of my house plants because I thought some of them could use new nutrient-rich soil (I used Miracle-Gro Premium potting soil).

I've decided to take pictures of everything every couple of weeks to keep a journal of the garden this summer in the hopes of being able to look back on it in the fall and figure out ways to improve it for next year. So, although I planted a few of the plants a couple of weeks ago, I'm considering today Day 1 since that's when I planted the majority of them.

Let's start with the herbs!

First up: The basil that started it all. It still lives indoors next to the window because I find it so sensitive to water levels, I'm afraid it will dry out too quickly in direct sun.

Then we have my favorite herb of all, Thai basil. It lives with some tiny pepper plants. I just moved them outside three days ago and the basil loves it but the peppers hate it. I'm not sure they're going to survive.
Next up is greek oregano. I got four tiny plants and spread them out in a pretty pink planter I rescued from the lobby downstairs where people abandon stuff they don't want. It has no drainage holes, so used a layer of acetate (left over from when I had to make that house shaped cookie cutter) with holes in it to create drainage inside the pot.
Next up: The Herbal Teas

I can't wait to make my own herbal teas!

I couldn't find a peppermint plant, so instead I got spearmint. I think it will still be delicious.
And this is a magical hybrid plant called chocolate mint. I'm very interested to find out if that's how it actually tastes.
I've heard lemon verbena makes a lovely tea, so I picked up two of those (since each one was just a couple of stalks). Apparently it can grow to 6 feet tall but I don't think that's going to happen in this little pot.
And this is too cool: Stevia!! I've heard it's really tricky to grow but if I can pull it off I'll have a natural sweetener that is supposedly sweeter than sugar but with very few calories.
That's it for the herbs! On to the Fruits!

Guess what I found? A new banana tree!! I'm super happy about this, my life has been noticeably void of banana trees since my last one died over the winter. It's in sad shape now, but I think I can nurse it back to health. Banana trees with ratty leaves remind me of stray cats with torn ears. They just need a little love.
In sadder news, the cherry tomato plant I bought about a month ago is on its last legs. I had to cut off almost all of its leaves as they were all dead.
Check out my strawberry patch! I have three plants and they are supposed to provide continuous fruit right up to September. The one on the left has a couple of sad leaves but hopefully it will be healthy in no time.
Is coffee a fruit? It grows berries so I guess so. I've had this plant since I was in Halifax. I think it's about two and a half now. I'm told that after three years I should start to see berries. Some day I hope to be able to brew a cup of home grown coffee for John. Pipe dream? Maybe.
And Erin, this one is for you. Here's how my lemon tree is looking. It has only grown one leaf since I left Halifax, but hopefully today's repotting will change that. I'm still 14 years away from fresh lemons.
And our last category: Veggies

These are the broccoli sprouts I planted last week. The instructions said to just sprinkle the seeds on the soil but it seems to me the only ones that sprouted are the ones that were actually buried so I may put a layer of soil on top of them if they don't sprout soon. Supposedly the go from seeds to snacks in ten days.

The next pictures are pretty boring because I just planted the seeds today. The saran wrap is to keep the moisture in until the seeds germinate.

Green onions. Yes that is a foil cake pan, I ran out of pots. 60 to 75 days until maturity.
Gold Rush Zuchinni. I planted two rows of them. According to the packet, they take exactly 49 days. I find it impossible to believe they can predict it that accurately.
And the veggies I am most excited about: a mesclun greens garden. I hope to have at least nine plants grow to maturity (40 to 65 days). I used McKenzie seed tape so I actually have no idea what kinds of plants are in there.

So that's it for Day 1! We'll see how the next few weeks go and if they go well I'll probably plant a few more. Actually if they all die I'd probably plant more too. So there will probably be more planting! I will post updates over the summer, wish me luck!!

600 Cookies

2010-04-23T05:40:00.000-07:00

For a week, I disappeared off the Earth.

If you tried to reach me to wish me a happy birthday and I didn't return your call, it's not because I didn't want to! It's because I was a slave to the cookies.

So many cookies.

By some miracle I managed to pull off my biggest baking project yet! John's company ordered 200 gift bagged 'favours' for a large meeting they were holding. The instruction I was given was that they wanted something with their logo. So I put together some samples of ways I could make the logo on little fondant circles and said that I could put it on either cookies or cupcakes. They picked cookies.

Well, one cookie isn't much of a favour, so I offered to put together little bags with three cookies each: one with the logo, one shaped like a house, and one shaped like a car (there's not much cookie-friendly imagery to work with in the insurance industry as I'm sure you can imagine), all done in the company's colours.

Piece of cake, right?

I planned out everything in my head. Worked out costs and what supplies I would need. I figured I would start them a week ahead of time and freeze them as I go. John and I went out to the Michaels in Mississauga and picked up the bags and icing colours.

On my birthday last Friday, I had taken the day off work but John ended up having to work, so I thought it would be a great time to get a head start on the cookies. I woke up early and headed down to the St. Lawrence market because they're the biggest suppliers of cookie cutters I know of. I found a circle cutter for the logo. They didn't have any car shaped cutters! But they had one that was supposed to be a bus but actually looked like a PT Cruiser, so I figured that would do. I picked up a motorcycle cutter too, just in case.

But there was no house cutter! So, I left, feeling discouraged. I called the Bulk Barn, McCalls and Kitchen Stuff Plus, but it seemed no one makes a house shaped cookie cutter! How on Earth was I going to make 200 house shaped cookies with out a cookie cutter?

This was the first of many snags.

Eventually I realized I was going to have to make my own. I headed down the street to Loomis and Toles and bought a sheet of heavy acetate. I drew out a picture of the house I wanted and measured how long the sides would be. I cut a strip of the acetate and carefully scored and folded it into a house. How to attach it together? Well I wasn't sure how food safe crazy glue is, so I went with the classic duct tape, wrapping it around the back so it wouldn't touch the food.

Okay, I had a house cutter. It wasn't pretty, but it was the right shape and it would cut out cookies.

Time to start baking.

I threw together a batch of sugar cookie dough. Of course it had to chill for an hour before I could bake it (otherwise the cookies don't come out light and fluffy). Once it had chilled, I turned it out on the counter to roll it and made another batch of dough to chill while the first one was being baked.

I got a great groove going. At all times, one batch of dough in the fridge, one sheet of cookies in the oven, one ready to go in the oven next, and one that I'm working on. After three batches of dough, I had all the circles baked. Awesome.

Once that was done, I took a break from baking and made white some royal icing to dip them in. I dipped the 200 cookies and laid them all out to dry. They all fit on the table, so I was able to do them all at once. Not a bad day's work. I went to bed feeling really good about how productive the day had been.

On Saturday, John told me that for my birthday he wanted to take me out for brunch and then to the zoo. How fun is that! But it was raining out, so we decided to just go for brunch and put off the zoo until after he gets back from Honduras.

He took me to a little restaurant called Simple Bistro on Mount Pleasant Street, only a 10 minute walk from home. We had the best eggs benedict that I can ever remember having! It was a perfectly poached egg and hot peameal bacon on a home-made croissant with hand whisked hollandaise sauce. And it was served with crispy home-made shoestring fries and greens. Perfection. Even the tea was good. We will definitely be going back.

When we got home I decided it was time to make some cookies. I started baking houses.

My crudely constructed cookie cutter worked out okay, but it was about this time that I started to understand the magnitude of the project. I realized the houses were going to take six batches of cookie dough because they were somewhat bigger than the circles. Baking them would take more than a day. After three batches or so, I decided to work on icing them. That's when I realized they wouldn't all fit on my table. I could only fit about 80, so it would take three rounds of icing to get them all done and each round needed 4 hours for the icing to dry and then it would take a further 3 hours to pipe all of the finishing details on them. Frantically, I started working out how many hours I had before they were due, Thursday morning. I started to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew.

By the end of Saturday I had most of the houses baked and two rounds iced and decorated. And I realized that there was no chance of all the cookies fitting into my freezer. I filed that one away in my brain as another problem to solve.

On Sunday, I realized that I had to get as much done this weekend as possible so I woke up at the crack of dawn. I finished baking the houses and got started on the cars. It was at about this time I remembered that they had also ordered a cake for Tuesday, so I had better get that started today too.

And I realized that I had yet to even start working on the 200 fondant logos so I got to work on those too. After three and a half hours of punching out little letters with a cutter and cutting curves out (using another acetate cutter I made) and then carefully attaching them to the cookies with royal icing, I had 70 done. Yikes.

By the end of the 3-day weekend I had about 500 cookies baked, two chocolate cakes baked, stacked and crumb coated, 400 cookies iced and 270 cookies decorated.

From there on, I started running on very little sleep. I was up at 6am each morning and in bed by 1am if I was lucky. Each day before work I would ice another 80 and let them dry while I was at work. Even on my lunch hours I was either running around looking for ribbon or at home making buttercream. At night on Monday I finished up the cake (it actually turned out pretty cute) and did another 70 fondant decorations. On Tuesday night I piped the details on all 200 cars. My fridge and my freezer were absolutely packed with cookies.

Wednesday night was crunch time! John started bagging them while I finished the last 60 fondant decorations. I was terrified that he would get to the end of the bags and realize that we were a few cookies short because I hadn't had time to double count them. I had cookie dough in the fridge and extra royal icing standing by just in case but I really didn't want to be up until 3am doing more baking. I lucked out though, we actually had 6 extra cookies.

We were finished at about the same time. I joined him at the table and we tied little blue and green ribbon bows until 2am.

When we were done, the only containers we had big enough to hold them were the laundry baskets.

On Wednesday night I went to bed feeling so relieved that they were all done. I still can't believe I pulled this off. John said he couldn't wait to get them out of the apartment. It smelled so strongly of sugar in here that I actually had that feeling you get from eating too much sugar when I hadn't even eaten any.

When I got home from work yesterday I just flopped out. I laid in bed playing video games on my DS with peanut butter and banana toast. I had missed relaxing so much!

Tonight I need to clean this place up though, there's wax paper, ziplock bags and ribbon everywhere!

Overall, I'm not sure whether or not I would do this again, but I think I probably would if they asked me. It took so much more supplies than I thought though, so next time I would price it differently I think. I kept running out of stuff I never expected to run out of, like wax paper, salt and baking powder. And I went through a whole 10kg bag of flour, about 15 lbs of icing sugar and I lost count of the butter at 10lbs.

I definitely learned that I need to work on my time management skills. I get into a zone when I'm baking and I don't realize that 4 hours have passed, so I'll think I have more time than I actually do. I also see a lot of ways this process could have been better streamlined, but I was limited by the size of my tiny kitchen and oven.

And the fact that I didn't hate these cookies by the end of it, I was actually still having fun, makes me a little more sure that this is what I'm cut out for. This is what I'm meant to be doing.

Happy Birthday John!!

2010-04-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

John turned 32 this weekend! And it was the first time since January that he had a whole weekend off! He's back to working Monday to Friday again, so life is good.

On Saturday, our keys from AutoShare arrived so we decided to go for a drive. I needed some baking stuff, so John offered to take me out to Michaels in Mississauga. We Googled mapped it: 26 minute drive. Ok. So we booked a car for three hours thinking that would give us plenty of time.

This was my first time leaving the city by car since we moved here and I didn't expect to be so nervous. My stomach was knots though on the highways. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not used to being in cars anymore or if it's just that Toronto highways are so intimidating (or probably a combination of both) but I got pretty squirrelly.

It took half an hour just to get out of downtown, and when we got on the highway, there was an accident, so we had to find an alternate route. The end result is that we got totally lost and by the time we got to Michaels, about two hours had passed so we only had about ten minutes before it was time to go home.

I quickly ran through and picked up some new icing colours, some large cakeboards for the cakes I'm making for his work and a really cool kit that I can use to make fancy fondant letters.

On the way home we got lost again. I think we went too far East. After 20 minutes of wandering through midtown trying to find our little corner, we finally got our bearings back and pulled into the parking lot at 4:01, one minute late.

The next person to use the car was waiting there. She said she had just called AutoShare and was on hold waiting to report that the car wasn't there, so we got there just in the nick of time (the fees for returning a car late are pretty substantial)

So that was our first drive out of the big city!

We stopped for Chinese food on the way home (Manchu Wok, blech!) and had a lazy rest of the afternoon. At night we watched the fights (Silva, your fight against Maia completely destroyed any fleeting hope I might have had that you would someday return to your former glory of being the top pound for pound fighter in the UFC.) and had snacks. It was a good day.

On Sunday it was John's birthday so I made him a special breakfast of eggs, bacon and pancakes shaped to say "32" (and there may have been a heart shaped one too. Maybe.) In the afternoon we went to see Clash of the Titans. I really liked it! I wish it had been longer though.

After the movie we went out for dinner. John had requested fajitas for his birthday supper so we headed over to the Pickle Barrel. We split a pound of half chicken, half steak fajitas, they were so good! 2 oz cocktails were $6.99 so I ordered a peach bellini that ended up being as big as my head. It was yummy though.

And when we got home it was time for birthday cake! Check it out:
John had requested fruit flavoured cake so I made him a triple layer blueberry cake with strawberry filling. It's covered with a thin layer of vanilla-almond buttercream and a layer of marshmallow fondant. I used my 6" pan but somehow the cake still turned out huge and really heavy!

On top I put some happy cats that I had made in advance. They're fondant too. And you can't tell from this photo, but their tails are linked in the back. When I brought it out, John burst out laughing, so I think it was a success. And it was absolutely delicious. For flavour, it was one of my best cakes yet! There's still a tonne of it left though, I don't know how we're ever going to eat it all.

All in all, we had a fun weekend. And I took this Friday off for my birthday, so it's just a four day week!

Reflecting

2010-04-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, my birthday is coming up, and like every year, it has me looking back on what I've done with my life so far and sadly realizing just how fast time flies.

I can't believe I'm going to turn 29 in two weeks.

I can't believe I've already been living in Toronto for almost a year.

I can't believe John and I have been together for three whole years.

Yikes! What happened to the time???

It's John's birthday too next week. He handles it with much more composure than me, he's totally unfazed.

A couple of weeks ago we decided it was time to commit to the fact that we're going to be living here for quite a while so we headed to the MTO and traded in our licenses. We both have Ontario licenses now, it makes me feel like a real Ontario citizen.

John signed us up for a shared car pool thing so we would have something to drive. I think it's called AutoShare and it will give us access to a car for like $6/hour including gas and insurance. There's a parking lot on our street corner where they keep them and we can just pick one up any time which is pretty cool. So this summer we'll be able to do more exploring than last year! And John can get to dive sites!

I know it's early, but it really feels like Spring is here. The days are bright, the weather is so warm it's a bit unsettling, and my lemon tree has sprouted a new leaf for the first time since we moved! In the next week or too, I'm going to pick up some plants for my window boxes. Fresh herbs as usual and I think I'd like to get some berry plants as well. More for decoration than anything, berries are so cheap here to buy.

I tried on some of my Spring clothes and I think I still need to lose 5 or 10 lbs to have them fit well, so I'm back to working out and dieting, not that I ever really stopped, I just slacked a bit.

But that doesn't stop me from baking!

I've been doing some experimenting in the past couple of weeks. I made some awesome biscotti (this is my new favorite way to use up bread crumbs). This weekend I broke out the ice cream maker Aunt Debbie got me for Christmas and made some french style (meaning you make a custard on the stove first) chocolate ice cream. It was my first attempt at ice cream in many years and it needs improvement for sure. It came out so rich I could barely eat one scoop (although John could) and it ended up freezing solid so it's difficult to scoop. I have all summer to figure it out though!

The ice cream recipe called for 8 egg yolks, so I had a bunch of whites leftover. I decided to make an angel food cake, also a first for me. It came out with great taste, but it fell sort of flat, I think because I didn't have a sifter to sift the flour. Next time I have egg whites I need to use, I'll try again. It kind of amused me though, watching John eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream and angel food cake, because really he was mostly just eating a bowl of eggs.

And I've been making cakes! John's work ordered a cake from me for their training class that was graduating. It was the biggest cake I've ever made, a double layer 12" chocolate cake. It was the first cake I've made for a business, so I kept it kind of low key and professional. I filled it with dulce de leche between the layers and iced it with vanilla buttercream. I carefully recreated the company logo out of marshmallow fondant which I put in the center of the cake, and wrote "Congratulations Graduates" in fondant around the edge. I finished it off with some basic shell borders.

John said they were thrilled with it! Although I didn't take any photos of it, he said that they took a photo of the cake with the training class all gathered around it and that it will be appearing in their next company newsletter. Cool! So they want another one for the next training class, and they said this time, I can have a little more fun with it. I guess they actually offered to be my 'guinea pigs'!

And also as a result, some one else in the office has ordered a cake from me! So this is becoming quite the hobby. I'm surprised I'm enjoying it so much since I'm usually more of a tiny dessert person. But I am actually looking forward to making these cakes. And maybe one more little cake for John's birthday,

PacMan Cookies

2010-03-22T08:10:00.001-07:00

I don't think anyone would argue that I'm a bit of a nerd.

I think that's why when I stumbled upon a site called Sprite Stitch, a site devoted to making crafts involving 8-bit Nintendo characters, I was instantly hooked. I think I flipped through the first 50 pages of the site without taking any breaks.

Well, one of the things I learned from that site is that when flipped upside down, a tulip cookie cutter looks just like a PacMan ghost.

And once I had this information, I couldn't get it out of my head. I had no good reason to bake cookies, but for some reason I couldn't resist. So here they are:

The background was John's idea. I thought it was a little over the top but now I'm glad he convinced me.

They're just basic sugar cookies with royal icing. I used a Wilton tulip cutter for the ghosts (about 1.5") and a circle cutter for PacMan. I had a tiny little triangle cutter that I used to cut out his mouth. And the dots were made with a tiny circle cutter.

It took two batches of royal icing. I divided it into half cup portions and coloured one red, one orange, one yellow, one blue and one the lightest purple I could do (because the ghost is almost white in the game) and I left one bowl white. Each of these I diluted with water slightly to make them runny enough that I could just dip the cookies in. Then I took another 1/4 cup of white and coloured another 1/4 cup black in a stiffer consistency to pipe the eyes. I piped the whites of the eyes with a #5 tip and the blacks with a #3 tip.

I'm thrilled with how cute they turned out. And of course a batch of cookies makes more than eight little one inch cookies. So I made some more!

264 cookies. Or as John says, 256 bits plus a byte.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to individually pack them neatly into bags, I think it's because I want to make sure that anyone who eats them gets a complete set so they can play with them first! John is going to bring some to work and so am I, but I haven't figured out what to do with the rest of them yet so most of them will be going in the freezer.

It was a fairly time consuming project as far as cookies go, so it gave me a lot of time to think about what I was doing. And I've come to the conclusion that I am completely mental when it comes to this stuff. That's the only explanation. I have no idea why I do it, I just get these ideas in my head and I get almost obsessive and I have to see it through. I feel like once the idea was there, there was no possibility of these cookies not getting made.

John tells me it's all good though. He agrees that it's a bit ridiculous, but he loves me just the same. And he always manages to find homes for all of the wacky stuff that comes out of our kitchen.

I Made A Quilt!

2010-03-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

Quilting is something I've always wanted to try, but I've always been intimidated by it. It seems like there is so much to know before you can even attempt such a big project. And it's so important to get it right the first time because of all of the work that's involved. You don't want to spend months sewing tiny stitches only to have it not turn out at the end! And come on, we're talking about a family heirloom here if it's done right. That's a lot of pressure!

But how do you connect the pieces? How does it all stay together? Where do you get the pattern? But most daunting for me was the question: How do you select the fabric? And from there, a million other questions: What kind of fabric is best? What is the filler? How much do I need? How do I pick the colours?

So for the longest time, I didn't even know where to start.

When John and I got home after Christmas, we went out to do some Boxing Day shopping. We had some gift cards from Chapters so we went to the bookstore next door which is where I found a book called Leslie Linsley's New Weekend Quilts in the bargain bin for $6. I figured it couldn't hurt.

Reading the book, I learned all kinds of shortcuts to make quilting about as much work as knitting a pair of socks. I learned how to cut out squares ten at a time and triangles 20 at a time. I learned that by sewing two strips of fabric together lengthwise and then cutting them into strips crosswise, I could cut down the number of seams I needed to sew to built my quilt squares by half. And I learned how to assemble the whole thing when I was done.

Not only that, the book had all kinds of patterns, each with a list of exactly what fabrics you would need to complete them. A few searches on the internet to answer a couple of questions I had and I was feeling confident that I could actually pull this off.

Which makes me wonder of course: How did anyone ever do this without mega bookstores and the internet? Nannie, where did you learn to quilt?

So with my new found confidence, I headed to the fabric store. I decided to do a really simple pattern for my first try. Four colours, three solid and one patterned. Black and three shades of purple: light, medium and dark. Should be easy, right?

It was. Black broadcloth was $4/meter and the medium purple jumped out at me immediately. I found a dark purple to complement it right away. Finding a light patterned fabric to match it was a little trickier, but I eventually saw a white printed cotton batik (looks sort of like tye dye but without being tacky) with light purple swirls through it. It was gorgeous and matched perfectly. Two meters of filler, a few spools of thread and I was good to go! Everything came to $70 after tax, the most expensive craft I've done in a long, long time. I had better not screw this up!

John had bought me a huge cutting mat for Christmas. It was such a thoughtful gift and it made cutting out the pieces with my rotary cutter a breeze. I think I was done cutting in under two hours. Sewing the pieces together took maybe another day or two and that's only because I'm neurotic about pressing every seam open after I sew it. I don't think my iron ever saw so much use or felt so needed before. It was really fun to watch it come together: first squares, then strips of squares, then connect the strips and add a border to the outside.

The tricky part was putting it together, and this was the part that made me question why quilting is a hobby mainly associated with old women. It was hard work! And if I can still do this when I am an old woman, I will be very happy.

First I had to move all my furniture around until I had enough floor space to lay it out flat. I laid out the black backing fabric and taped it to the floor so it wouldn't move. On top of that, I laid the filler (also called batting). Then on top of that went the quilt. So it was like a quilt sandwich. Then I crawled around on the floor, hand sewing basting stitches starting in the center of the quilt and working outwards in a star pattern so that I could move the thing but still have it stay together. That took the better part of an evening.

The next day I started the actual quilting! (You mean all the work up to this point wasn't quilting? Nope.) I had a bit of an internal debate as to whether I should quilt it by hand the traditional way, or by machine which I wasn't even sure my ancient sewing machine could handle.

Well, my laziness and my desire to see this thing finished won out and I decided to do it by machine. I quilted around the borders and then a basic checkerboard pattern through the middle. I had originally intended to do more than that but when it was done the quilt felt very stable and I didn't think additional stitching would really add to the aesthetic.

The last step was to sew the edges together and I was done!!

All in all it took just over a week. I really just couldn't put it down once I started. I'm thrilled with how it turned out and because I preshrunk all of the fabric and used polyester batting, it should be completely washer and dryer safe. Yay!

Here are some pictures. I don't think they show the true vibrancy of the colours and you can't really see the pattern on the lighter fabric, but it should at least give you an idea of what it looks like.

This is the quilt draped over the closet doors. It's really big! I think it might be big enough to cover a double bed.
And here is a close-up of the individual squares. I was really impressed by how flat the seams lay. Even up close it looks so flat that the different colours could be printed on rather than pieced together.
And here is a picture of the back so that you can see the actually quilting.

Overall, I thing I did a great job with it but I think one is enough for one winter. Maybe next winter I'll make another one that is more intricate. Only time will tell! Right now it lives on the back of my couch. It's super warm and cozy!

Knitted Wristwarmers

2010-02-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

Finished up one of my crafty projects this week. Check out the wristwarmers I knitted:
I'm really happy with how they turned out. I took a couple of tries to get the fit right, but it worked out in the end. I think they'll look cute with my black peacoat. I used this pattern and a ball of yarn I think I paid $2 for on boxing day. Knitting is such a cheap hobby!

So let's talk about school.

When I got my letter this week, I was actually really surprised. The honest truth is that I had given up hope on going after the mess that was last year's application. I guess I just thought that I didn't get any more qualified in the past year so I didn't have any reason to expect anything to change with this application. But, I guess that when the admissions officer told me last year that they fill it first come, first serve, she was telling the truth. Apparently the secret was just to apply in the first week of October.

So when I first realized that I could actually be going back to school this year, I got a bit overwhelmed. I couldn't bring myself to click the 'accept offer' button on the website. I needed John to convince me all over again that this is a good idea and that we can manage it and that committing to being a pastry chef doesn't mean that I will be poor for the rest of my life. Luckily for me, he is not only an extremely supportive boyfriend, he's also a very persuasive speaker, so after talking to him about it, I decided it's definitely the right thing to do.

It surprises me that this was such an easy decision last year back when going back to school meant moving across the country, leaving my family, finding a new home, a new job, etc, etc. But now that I'm settled here it was a little harder because I'm on a good path now and I when I look at where I would be if I stayed on this path for five years, I like what that looks like. It would be easy, and I would be successful.

But in the end, I think life is about chasing your dreams, and this mine. So I think that even though I'm choosing a more difficult and less conventional path, I believe that it will be more rewarding in the long run.

So now I have a little game that I play every morning when I wake up. Before I even open my eyes, I think of how I'm going to spend my day at work. Then I block that out and instead I pretend that I'm going to spend the whole day making flowers out of sugar and piping intricate cornelli laces. And the feeling that I get knowing that could be a career for me helps me reaffirm every day that this is the right choice.

Welcome to George Brown College!

2010-02-04T05:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Jacki

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the baking and pastry arts mgmt. program at George Brown College. This is the first step towards your future career. By choosing to attend George Brown College, you will be studying in a friendly, supportive and diverse environment that promotes academic and career success.

To confirmed that you plan to attend the baking and pastry arts mgmt. program at George Brown College, you must confirm online with Ontario College Application service by May 3. 2010.

Once you have confirmed your acceptance, we will mail registration and fee information around mid-June. George Brown College offers a wide range of payment options to suit each student's financial situation.

Once again, welcome to George Brown College. We look forward to seeing you this fall on campus!

Sincerely,
Lesia Gryschuk
Manager, Admissions

Time for a Weigh-In I Think

2010-02-01T17:40:00.001-08:00

Not a lot of excitement. After December, a month that is practically defined by excess - eat too much, party too much, spend too much - I've kind of enjoyed just putting my nose to the grindstone and working hard this January. It's been nice to have some discipline back.

So every day I worked on making my situation a little better and a little better and to show for it I have lost 7 lbs and I've saved a whole lot of cash. It feels really good! So I may not have had the most exciting January, but I'm really pleased with the results. Hopefully February goes just as well, my goal is to lose another 5 lbs this month.

John is still working six day weeks, but we managed to have a little fun this weekend. We finally got to see Avatar. What an amazing film! I want to see it again. On Saturday night I cooked a big dinner of beef stroganoff, salads and orange creme for dessert. On Sunday afternoon we went to the gym together. I just played around on the exercise bikes and ellipticals. John is thinking of joining a Ju Jitsu club that meets up there. That night we met up with Marc and Alisha for drinks. We don't see them often enough I think for how close they live.

I'm sure most of you have heard, but I'll post it here anyway: John won a scuba diving trip for two to Honduras through an online contest! He's really stoked about it. I think he's going sometime in May to Roatan and Utila and he's taking Alan with him. People seem to think it's strange that he's not taking me, but I didn't feel right about going. There's no way I would be ready to dive 100 ft deep by then and it would be no fun for him to have to go alone so I think that taking his dive buddy is a much better fit!

Other than that we haven't been up to much. It's been really cold the past week so I've been keeping indoors for the most part. It would be nice if we had some snow!

Offer letters for George Brown are supposed to start coming out this week. I'll keep you posted!

Quiet Week, Quiet Weekend

2010-01-18T07:45:00.000-08:00

Last week I got back on track health wise. I worked out every day, I didn't cheat on my diet once.

John and I are on kind of opposite schedules right now. He leaves the house by 7:30am, I get home at 8:30pm and he's in bed by 10:00pm. So we only see each other for about two hours a day during the week and he's working Saturdays so our weekends together have been cut short as well. And I've been trying to save money so that I can go back home in March. So as a result, I haven't been getting out much.

For the most part I stayed inside all week. On Saturday I decided it was time to get out of the house so I took a walk around the neighbourhood. I've set up my diet so that from Monday until Saturday at 1pm, I eat healthily. From Saturday afternoon to Sunday night, it's my free time to eat whatever I feel like and Sunday is my day to rest from exercising. This keeps me at a 80%/20% ratio of planned living vs. unplanned. So on Saturday afternoon I was very excited to finally be able to eat some junk food after a week of whole grains, lean proteins and veggies, and I was starving!

I walked up Yonge and surveyed my options. Pad Thai? Cheeseburger and fries? Tacos? Chinese? Cupcakes? Soda! So many choices! So I stopped for a moment and paid attention to what my body was asking for.

A bagel sandwich and a blueberry smoothie. That was what I truly wanted. I couldn't believe it. For junk food I used butter, processed ham and some cheddar cheese, but it was still a whole wheat bagel, and I still put veggies on it.

It was sort of a revelation. I know that when you eat healthily, your body adapts to it, but I didn't expect it to do a total 180 so fast! Two weeks ago, my body was in a carb and sugar addiction cycle, begging for a sugar high, crashing half an hour later and then looking for more carbs. Repeat ad infinitum. Seriously, I was pretty much living off cake and cookies. Now, after only a week, already it was just looking for fresh produce, protein and whole grains. Real food.

Awesome. This isn't going to be as hard as I thought. And John is totally pumped about getting back in shape, so I know he'll keep me motivated.

Don't get me wrong, I did eat some junk this weekend. I baked some brownies, ate some popcorn at the theatre on Sunday (we went to see Daybreakers. Great movie, terrible ending), and went out for tacos on Sunday night. But by the time this morning rolled around I was happy to get back on the healthy eating wagon. Oh, and I've lost three pounds so far. Not a bad start at all!

Hey! Remember the handbag I posted last week? It's been featured on the craft blog of the girl who designed the pattern! You can check it out here. Cool!

New Year, New Me!

2010-01-12T20:32:00.001-08:00

As I think most of you know, my best friend Jess is getting married this summer and she has asked me to stand at her wedding. What better motivator to get back in shape then wedding photos!

So Monday was the day.

I spent the weekend planning out my menu and my workout routines. If there's one thing I know about healthy living, it's that planning is the most important step. It's not enough to say "I want to lose weight and build muscle". You have to have specific targets and time lines. You have to know the actions it will take to get there and be dedicated to them. And you have to give yourself the tools to succeed. I plan for success and I plan for failure. I reward myself for doing well and sticking to the plan, but if I slip up, I make sure I have some relatively healthy junk food around in pre-portioned amounts so if I cheat on my diet it's maybe a piece of whole wheat banana bread instead of half a box of chocolates.

I set reasonable goals. Diet and exercise five days a week, two free days. In my experience, I can't stick to anything more strict than that for more than a few weeks, so even though I would like to tell myself that I'm going to stick it out for six days a week, I know it isn't reasonable for me and I would be setting myself up to fail.

So with all my plans and my healthy groceries and feeling fully committed, yesterday I started my new health regimen. The first step was to get on the scale. Or in this case, my shiny new Wii Fit. 156lbs. Yikes!

But that gave me a place to start. My goal is to get to 130lbs by June as I think this is the weight where I am the healthiest.

And John is on board too, which surprised me! Usually he shies away from this stuff because with his high metabolism he can usually get to his target weight by making only minor changes. He's actually signed up for a membership at a gym though because he wanted access to their squash courts, but he's been working out and taking classes there as well.

I'm two days in and so far so good. I was worried that making such drastic changes would be hard on my system and willpower, specifically my sugar addiction. But it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would! I've been eating six small meals a day and working out for 45 minutes each morning and so far I haven't felt at all deprived. And I know that in a few more days, I will start to see improvements on the scale (the Wii Fit puts it all into graphs! lol), and that will make it even easier to stay motivated. I'm also not putting a lot of pressure on myself for the first few weeks, as I think that at this point I will probably lose weight just by not eating Christmas cookies anymore. I'll step it up more in a few weeks if I start to plateau.

It's a great feeling to know that no matter what else happens in your day, you're making positive changes for yourself. Life is all about finding ways to be better!

Aunt Debbie, I know you're on board! Anyone else want to lose weight with me?

Handbag #4

2010-01-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

I have this cold that I haven't been able to shake. Part of it is that my voice has been scratchy at best and at times has disappeared completely. So I've been pretty wimpy lately, staying indoors, wrapped up in a blanket with a cup of tea, a bag of Halls Centres and box of Kleenex whenever I'm not at work. John tells me that all the stress over the flights we took in December (I'm quite frightened of flying) probably shot my immune system and that's why it's taking so long for me to get better. I think he might be right.

But I'm not complaining. I'm kind of enjoying staying home, watching TV and being crafty. This week I made a crochet handbag using some of the yarn I bought on boxing day. This is actually my fourth handbag. First there was the grey tote bag I made in the summer, then the pink and grey knit bag I made in September. In November I made a black and purple handbag for Erin for Christmas and this week I crocheted number four.

This is by far the most complex bag I've made yet. It's the biggest thing I've ever crocheted by a long shot and I incorporated more detail into the liner then I ever have before. I made a matching change purse and most impressively, (in my opinion) I figured out how to install a zipper in the top of both of them. I've always been very intimidated by zippers so I'm really proud of this!

Here is the bag:
I made it using the Starling Handbag pattern (large size) from Futuregirl's blog. My friend Jennifer over at The Craftinista has been making bags from this pattern for ages and I've always thought I'd like to make one myself. I really like its simple shape and clean lines. The pattern was pretty simple to follow and I think it turned out pretty nice! Here is the side so you can see the width.
I didn't have any suitable fabric for the liner, so I headed over to Fabricland where they were having a sale on holiday fabrics. I found this wonderful, heavy pants fabric with shiny silver and black diamond print that was buy 1, get 2 free so I ended up getting half a meter for under $2. Actually, all in all, I think this bag cost about $10 to make, it was really cheap because I got almost everything on sale. I backed the lining with stiff interfacing (pellon 70 I believe) to give more structure to the bag.

Check out my awesome zipper installation! Rathere than attach the zipper directly to the outer shell, I put about a centimeter and a half of fabric on either side. The zipper I used is pretty heavy duty and meant for outerwear.
I decided that it was time to start signing my work, so I borrowed the idea for my name tags from Futuregirl as well. The text is hand embroidered with DMC floss on felt using a whipped backstitch. I love how smooth this style of stitching makes the letters. I sewed them into the liner using contrasting thread because I thought it looked better.

On one side of the liner I put a zipped pocket, the name tag and a credit card holder. I already knew how to do the zipped pocket from the first tote bag I ever made but the credit card holder was quite a bit more challenging.

I couldn't find any tutorials online so I ended up reverse engineering it from an old purse I found in my closet. I basically took at 9" wide strip of fabric and accordianed it a few times until I had two pockets. I sewed satin ribbon across the top of each fold for contrast. Then I sewed the back flap to the liner across the middle so that the back pocket wouldn't be so deep that you lost credit cards in it. I tucked in the two sides and the bottom, sewed around the three sides to attach it to the liner and sewed a seam up the middle to divide it in half. Voila! A six credit card holder!

I think this side looks pretty sharp! I love a lot of pockets.
I put two more pockets on the other side, again with a satin ribbon lining the top. One of the pockets lays flat against the bag and the other folds out to hold something thicker like a cell phone. I did this by accordianing the sides of the pocket and then sewing the folds down a the bottom so that only the top folds out.

Lastly, I took a metal ring, threaded a piece of ribbon through it and attached the ribbon to the bag (you can't see it, but the end of the ribbon is tucked into the seam attaching the zipper to keep everything neat), to clip on the matching change purse that I made. Here is the change purse. I had originally intended to make it striped like the bag but I ran out of black yarn after about four rows. So I switched to pink and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

I cut some flowers out of a piece of felt (left over from making the name tag) and embroidered cherry blossom details onto them (yes Mom, those are french knots!) I sewed them onto the change purse with black thread so that you can't see it. I had originally planned to make pink flowers as well and attach them to the actual handbag, but I couldn't find a pink felt that was a close enough match to the colour of the yarn.

I attached a lobster claw clasp to the outside using a jump ring so that the change purse can be hooked into the bag.
As you can see, I lined the inside of this one as well, installed another zipper (!!!) and put in a credit card pocket and a name tag.

Here it is full of stuff so you can see how much it holds.
So that's it! All in all, I'm pretty impressed with myself. After I finished it, I took stock of all of the different techniques I used putting this bag together and realized I'm actually getting pretty good at this! It's just funny because I never set it as a goal for myself to learn how to make handbags, it just kind of happened. I made the first ones to learn the rudimentaries of sewing and knitting and I just kind of kept stepping up the liners each time. This time I was just enjoying the process of putting it together so with every detail I took my time and looked for ways to improve every aspect of the bag that I could.

And now I find that when I look at the purses I've bought over the years (right now I'm looking at my pink Soprano purse), I have a much better understanding of how they're put together and I feel like I'm not far from being able to recreate them. I just need the right materials and maybe a sewing machine that actually has a reverse stitch!

It's kind of neat to wake up and realize you've picked up a skill without meaning to. I think it just goes to show that you learn by doing and if you do anything often enough, you'll definitely see improvement.

So just to summarize, here are the skills I learned from this project:

how to crochet a foundation single stitch
how to crochet a handbag
how to embroider onto felt
how to hand sew a whip stitch
how to applique felt to crocheted fabric
how to install a zipper at the top of a bag
how to make a credit card holder
how to make a fold out pocket

My next project is going to be much simpler! I'm knitting some wrist warmers.

Whirlwind Christmas

2009-12-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you are all aware, John and I couldn't get any vacation time for Christmas this year, so we crammed as much as we could into the four short days that we had!

We packed all of our stuff on the night of the 23rd. I worked on the 24th until 2 o'clock and as you would expect, it was very quiet as most people are not thinking about their insurance on Christmas Eve.

My friend Sherry, whom I met at work, is a holistic healer and she worked really hard to get me ready for my flight. I hadn't been on a plane in four years so I was very nervous! We did chakra exercises, pressure point massage and homeopathic medicine to help calm me down.

When I got home on Christmas Eve, it was pretty much time to go. First was the subway, down to Union Station. Next was the shuttle bus to take us to the ferry. The ferry took us out to the Toronto Island airport where we caught the plane.

We decided to fly Porter Air because their airport is so much closer to our home. The airport is small and cozy with lots of free snacks and drinks. We were on the plane before long but we had to wait over an hour on the tarmac. They had to keep de-icing the plane because the line for the runway was so long that they kept freezing. Each cycle took about half an hour. At one point I fell asleep. When I woke up about 45 minutes later, I thought we must be halfway to Halifax by now but in fact, we were still on the ground.

Eventually we made it up into the air. The flight was smooth and they served us little boxed lunches that were just adorable. When we made it to Halifax, Erin and Allan were there waiting to take us to Mom's.

When we got to Mom's everyone was happy to see us because it was the first time we'd been home since we left in July. Nannie and Grampie were there as well, I was so glad they came to Halifax to be with us at Christmas.

It was pretty late by the time we got there so we just wrapped a few presents, ate some ham and cheese sandwiches and then we were off to bed.

In the morning we got up around 8:30am. Erin and Allan showed up at 9:00am and we dug into the presents! Everyone got lots of nice things - Nannie's stocking was obscene it was so big! I hand made a lot of the gifts I gave this year and I think everyone liked them.

Once the dust had settled a bit, Grampie made breakfast while the rest of us got dressed and John helped Mom get the turkey in the oven. Christmas breakfast is my favorite breakfast of the year. Nobody fries an egg like Grampie. I don't know what he does but they are consistently the most amazing fried eggs I have ever eaten.

From there we made the trek out to Lake Echo to visit Dad's family. That was when I first noticed that it was a green Christmas. Apparently Halifax had snow earlier that week but there was very little on the ground for Christmas day.

At Dad's house we opened more presents and drank apple cider. Dad gave us the tour of the renovations he did to the basement. He put in room dividers that have built in bookshelves which I thought was pretty clever! I also got to see Erin's motorcycle, hiding in the garage. We drove back in to town with Dad to pick up Robbie at his dad's house. There was a bit of a Christmas mix-up as we had gotten him the same gift that his dad did. Luckily, video games are easy to exchange.

It wasn't long before we had to leave to return to Mom's house for dinner. When we walked in we could already smell the turkey! Heavenly. Mom's friend Steven had arrived while we were gone, so we did a round of introductions. We all took rounds in the kitchen helping out with the cooking, retreating to the living room to play with our new stuff when the kitchen got too crowded.

Dinner turned out wonderful. John did a great job with the turkey, Steven whipped the potatoes, Mom makes a mean gravy and I thoroughly botched the cheese sauce. John said he enjoyed the 'flavour lumps' in it.

After that we were so full that my memory of the rest of the evening is a hazy sort of fog. I call that a successful Christmas!

Saturday was Boxing Day so nothing was open. So what is there to on a freezing cold December day in Halifax? Well, in John's opinion it was a great day to hop into the Atlantic ocean!

There had been a bit of a mix-up when Allan rented scuba diving gear for John so it would be ready when he got there, so instead of a nice warm dry suit, John ended up with a wetsuit. I think most people would have been detered by this, but not John! No, instead he practiced all day Christmas by not wearing a coat so that he would be ready to really freeze on Boxing Day. He tells me he was in the ocean for over half an hour and when he got out, he couldn't feel anything below his knees and he was shaking so hard that it was difficult to get out of his suit. He's crazy, but I love him.

Meanwhile at Mom's house, we had a lazy morning. Nannie and Grampie headed back to Moncton. Erin came over around noon and we had the Boxing Day shopping itch, but nothing was open! So we decided to hit up Shoppers Drug Mart for discount chocolates and wrapping paper. It was my first time walking around the city since I'd been home so I was happy to get out of the condo.

We had so much fun! It was one my favorite moments from the trip. Mom got an amazing deal on an Elizabeth Arden gift set of her favorite perfume and scented lotions and soaps. Plus they had a huge Elizabeth Arden makeup set available for purchase on purchase. It got a little crazy after that but I walked out with a La Roche Posay gift set that included a full size bottle of my regular moisturizer, an Elizabeth Arden lip gloss, a box of Quality Street, a shiny pink wallet and some blue Christmas gift tags.

We stopped for Tim's on the way home and when we got back John was still out (he had gone to visit his grandmother after diving) so we all settled around the table and played with Mom's new makeup. The kit had two blushes, at least a dozen eyeshadows, two eyeliners, two lip liners, a mascara, three lipsticks, lipglosses, makeup brushes and I can't remember what else. We tried out all of it.

Erin and I put together the Christmas puzzle like we do every year. This year we finished it in 51 minutes, three minutes slower than last year.

When the boys got home, the four of us headed out to Chabaa Thai for the best mussaman curry in the city. I had forgotten how delicious it is, absolutely to die for and the pad Thai was just as good! I have yet to find Thai food that good in Toronto (although I expect that I just don't know where to look).

On Sunday the 27th, Erin was over at the crack of dawn. I stumbled out to the car in my half-asleep stupor and we made our annual pilgrimage to the Lush Boxing Day Sale at the MicMac Mall. When we got there I couldn't believe I almost hadn't wanted to bother this year. I love that sale! All of the holiday stuff and the soap was buy 1, get 2 free. I got two bottles of Snow Fairy, my favorite shower gel, 3 containers of shower jellies (champagne snow showers and strawberry santa), three emotibombs and three sugar scrubs. Using the gift card from I got from CJ and Robbie, I was out of pocket about $12. Awesome! Erin went for completely different stuff and instead got huge chunks of soap, bath bombs and bubble bars.

We wandered around the mall for a bit after that. Erin picked up a blouse at Eclipse, but nothing else really caught our attention so we left and headed to Dartmouth Crossing. The first stop was Michaels for discount yarn. We don't have a Michaels in Toronto so I was really excited to go. I got enough yarn to make a handbag, 6 dishcloths, a pair of gloves and two pairs of socks for John. I know, I'm such a nerd. Should keep me busy for most of the winter though!

We puttered around the electronics stores after that, Futureshop and Bestbuy, but all of the good stuff was gone (I think they had been open since 6am). We headed home after that, pleased with our discount hauls. The crowds started picking up when we left, I think we were home before 1pm.

For dinner, the four of us headed to Sushi Nami, another restaurant that John and I had wanted to visit while we were home. Honestly, the food was disappointing. The honey avocado salad and the grilled eggplant were lacking the sweetness I was looking forward to, the yam tempura was missing its crunch and John said his mackeral wasn't cut properly. We are choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt though, that maybe their regular chef was off for the holidays. I hope so, anyway. We will go back and give them another chance next time we are down.

Next we headed to our friend Cliff's apartment for a game of Rock Band before our brewery tour. Cliff used to be our across-the-hall neighbour and I have to say it felt very strange to walk into our old building and even back to our old floor knowing that we don't live there anymore.

We weren't there for long before it was time to walk up to the brewery. We were a few minutes late so there were already lots of people there by the time we got there. We had a great turnout, probably around 25 people or more. Luckily I brought a lot of snacks! Probably about 50 or 60 cookies, and Alisha brought a huge tub of homemade amaretto almond popcorn. There was enough time that I got to talk to almost everyone there for at least a few minutes. Not enough time to really get caught up with everyone though, we need a longer visit for that.

Afterwards we went back to Cliff and Justin's place for more Rock Band. I sang until I was hoarse. We stayed pretty late after that (I think I fell asleep while John stayed up talking with the guys) and then cabbed it home. I had a great night.

We slept in the next morning, then woke up at started packing. It was time to leave! Erin and Allan came over and picked us up and we headed for the airport, stopping for one last Haligonian treat along the way: donair sub for John and garlic fingers for me from Basha's. We ate them at the airport after we checked our luggage. They were so good!

We were expecting long lines because of the security threats over Christmas that everyone was talking about but there were really no lines at all. Everything ran smooth, the plane was on time and we were back in Toronto before we knew it!

We took all the modes of transportation in reverse this time: car, plane, boat, bus, train, finally arriving at our apartment. We only stopped for a couple of minutes before heading back out again. I wanted to go to the Futureshop here to look for a deal on external hard drives that had been sold out in Halifax (it was sold out here too but I was able to order it online, so it all worked out) and then we crossed the street to get some tacos for supper.

It was cold as we walked there but when we actually started to eat, it turned into a full fledged blizzard! We put our hoods up and our heads down headed out ducking into the nearest subway entrance as soon as we could. We took the underground tunnels back from there. The convenience of it made me happy to be back in Toronto.

When we got home this time we settled in for real. We made hot drinks, curled up on the couch and opened our presents from each other. It was really nice.

The next day, it was back to work! We were only open until 5pm though so I was back home early. John's brother Allan and his friend Amanda arrived shortly after. John made supper, after which we exchanged gifts as well as opening a few gifts from Santa that had mysteriously appeared under the tree. Santa had left us some pretty cool toys; remote controlled cars that drive on the wall and a Zhuzhu pet.

The next morning I felt awful. I had been getting sick for about two days at this point and I was just a wreck that morning. I kept waking up in the night because I couldn't breathe, I was so stuffed up, and I felt like there was a battle waging war inside me causing me to alternate between a fever and chills.

I was determined to go to work though because earlier I had asked for these days as vacation and I know how bad it looks to ask for vacation, have it refused and then call in sick those same days. Somehow I managed to pull it together but I only made it through half a day before giving in and going home sick. I spent the afternoon curled up in bed with a box of Kleenex and a bag of Halls Centres (they are so wonderful) and tried to sleep. In the evening, Allan cooked us dinner so I ventured out to the couch and stayed there until it was time to go to bed.

Today is New Years Eve and I'm feeling a little better although I'm still not back to my full self. I'm not sure what we're up to tonight but we have enough liquor to supply an army, so I'm sure we'll think of something. We've been invited to a party but I'm not sure I feel well enough to venture out. We'll see. I'll save it for the next post.

Winter Extravaganza!!

2009-12-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I was fast asleep, when when I was awakened by the sound of "Jacki, Jacki! Today is the Winter Extravaganza!! Wake up!"

I opened my eyes to see John peering down at me. "Huh?" I said in my groggy state.

"Extravaganza! We're having an extravaganza today!"

So I rolled out of bed to find out what he was talking about.

One of the things I love about John is that he is a planner. I can just lay back and relax and he'll make sure we have lots of fun things to do. On this particular Saturday as it turns out, he had thought of so many fun things to do that he decided it was worthy of a dramatic title and that is how the Winter Extravaganza came to be.

Originally the plan was to go skating, see Avatar in Imax 3D, go for Korean barbecue and then watch the fireworks/laser show downtown. Definitely a full day! But I had fruit cakes to make! So we decided to cut out the movie and leave the house a little bit later.

I got to work making the pineapple Christmas cake. It only takes a few minutes to throw together but it takes almost two hours to bake, so we had time for a leisurely breakfast of egg sandwiches and an episode of One Tree Hill before it was time to go.

Since we were going downtown anyway, I really wanted to see what the crowds at the Eaton Centre look like on the last shopping weekend before Christmas, so we got off at Dundas station on our way to the rink (the mall is so big it hits two subway stations!), check out the crowd:

I love it! And there's something Zen-like in the feeling you get watching other people scurrying around to get their last minute shopping done, when you've already finished all of your shopping weeks ago. The Christmas tree you see there is for Ferrero Rocher, and the small tree in front of it was made entirely out of the little chocolates.

Then, just for you Aunt Debbie, I made sure we got some shots of the Swarovski tree! Here it is from far away so you can see how big it is.
Mom, you'll be happy to know that it spins. I'm afraid we weren't able to capture the sparkle of it but here is a picture to show you how densly packed the crystal ornaments are on this massive tree.

and here is a close up of the ornaments. They were all snowflakes (my favorite!) or long crystal drops. All in all there must have been thousands of crystal ornaments on the tree!
From the mall, we headed down to City Hall where there is a free skating rink! Anyone can go and it doesn't cost anything, but if you need a skate rental like we did, it's $9 each. We waited in a long, chilly line for our skates and then found a spot to sit down and put them on. Here they are, getting the rink ready for us:And here it is full of people:
Once we got our skates on and got onto the ice, I was amused to find out that for once I was better at something than John! At first he wobbled around on his skates but after a few trips around the rink he was picking up speed and looking more stable! I don't think I've been skating since high school so I was pretty happy to find out that I still remember how to do it. It was a lot of fun and it was a great way to warm up!

From there we headed to the Korean grill on Queen Street W. It was absolutely packed, so we took that as a good sign!

It's an all you can eat place with a grill in the center of each table. For about $16 per person, you get all you can eat chicken, pork, ribs, chinese sausage (yum!), beef, white fish fillet, salmon, squid, ox tongue (!!!), another organ meat that I can't remember and veggies including cucumber, lettuce, green pepper, onion and pineapple. Plus you get an assortment of appetizers (sesame bean sprouts, daikon radish pickles, some kind of bean salad, spicy fried tofu and kimchi), soup, rice and tea. And you fry it all at the table! Check out the spread:
I have always wanted to try Korean barbecue, and I was not disappointed! I had lots of fun cooking my food at the table. My favorites were the beef and the barbecue sausage. I wasn't brave enough to try the organs, and my attempt at cooking the fish was pretty terrible (I over cooked it so it all fell apart and into the grill, lol) but I did manage to grill up some yummy pineapple and onion slices. John was much better than me at it, I think because he is the one that does all of the barbecuing.

You could tell that the restaurant pays attention to details. The portion sizes were almost the perfect amount that we almost finished everything and didn't have to ask for anything extra. The tea was smooth and not at all bitter (a pet peeve of mine in Asian restaurants), they used chicken thigh meat instead of breast meat so that it wouldn't dry out on the grill and I had a glass of fresh watermelon juice that was to die for! It seriously tasted like summer in a glass (very welcome on Winter Extravaganza day!). I need to learn how to make it!

We were done much earlier than expected, still hours away from the fireworks, so we decided to try and squeeze in a movie after all. We headed to the Scotiabank theatre for the Imax and I waited in the lobby while John went to get us tickets. After about ten minutes of waiting in line, he came and found me to tell me that when he asked for the tickets the woman at the counter actually laughed at him. Apparently they are sold out until Monday. Who knew it would be that popular?

At that point we were pretty chilly, and the fireworks were still a while away, so I was starting to feel Winter Extravaganza'd out. We decided to call it quits and hopped on Subway to head back home, stopping only for some Starbucks peppermint mochas along the way. When we got home, we curled up on the couch for a bit with hot drinks to warm up. It was still early so I baked a few more fruitcakes (this time Nana's recipe) and we stayed up to watch SNL.

All in all, I had a wonderful day. It was my first day to really enjoy the winter side of Toronto and I had a great time and a great person to spend it with!

Cookie Exchange!

2009-12-18T05:37:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday I headed into work early for the cookie exchange. Check out my haul:

I brought the peanut butter balls, everything else was brought by members of the training department.

All in all, everything was good but nothing really jumped out at me as amazing. The Skor bit cookies got eaten up the fastest and I thought the lime flavoured shortbreads were a neat idea. I also liked the tiny rum balls (which is funny because I don't usually like rum balls). We also swapped recipes but I think the only one I would make again is the Portuguese biscuits. I'm really impressed by their texture, it's exactly like the cookies you get in the blue tin at Christmas.

It was definitely a fun experience though, and I hope to do another one next year!

A Couple of Christmas Pictures

2009-12-16T05:54:00.000-08:00

I snapped some pictures this morning to show off our holiday spirit!

Here is the Christmas tree:If you look closely (you can click on it to enlarge the picture) you might even spot a little hedgehog hiding between the branches.

I know that it's strange to have a Christmas tree decorated all in pink with presents underneath it wrapped all in silver and blue, but I'm am just so in love with this combination that I don't care at all! Besides, I'm sure I will get to see a traditional Christmas tree when I get home to Mom's house.

And just for fun, here's a picture of how I painted my nails this week:

It might be too bright to see, but I used two different patterns of snowflakes, one in light blue and one in dark blue. I love how it turned out!

12 More days....

2009-12-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

We are in full fledged Christmas mode!

It started last weekend with the cookies. Oh, the cookies! My friend Sherry from work came over last Saturday to help me decorate the snowflake sugar cookies. Last year I only made 40 and they didn't last long, so this year I decided to step it up to a hundred. The turned out way prettier than last year and we got them done in way less time! So I think I'm getting more efficient with this which is a very good thing.

After that, I was feeling like I was on a roll so I made 118 peanut butter balls and 40 marzipan covered cherries. Whew! All of the baking I had planned for the weekend done in one day!

But the next day, I couldn't stop! I made a double batch of lebekuchen (my favorite!) and a double batch of hazelnut apricot thumbprints. Then I had to stop because nothing else on my list was freezable so it was too soon to start on it.

The next challenge was getting it all into my tiny freezer. The short version is that we took a whole chicken out to thaw and John and I had to finish a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream that was there. But I got them all in!

On Monday morning I finished up some Christmas shopping. Tuesday, we put the tree up and on Wednesday we decorated. It looks gorgeous as usual! I love my tacky artificial tree covered in pink and white sparkly decorations (and one lone scuba diver ornament). Thursday was more Christmas shopping and on Friday I did most of the wrapping.

So I'm almost ready! One more present to buy, cakes to make next weekend and that's it! I'm excited to come home!

Work has been challenging. I feel like the two months of training didn't really prepare me for the actual work, but my team has been very supportive in making this a smooth transition for me. I've been doing lots of job shadowing and supervised work, so I'm learning a little more each day. It's been pretty exhausting mentally though, to have to learn so much so quickly. I've been feeling pretty drained at the end of the day and I suspect that's part of why I've been baking so much. I'm looking forward to the day when I can go to work, do my job confidently and effectively and then go home.

One of the girls at work organized a cookie exchange for later this week, which is something I've always wanted to do! The concept is that everyone brings 36 cookies, and you give 4 cookies and the recipe to each person so everyone goes home with 36 new cookies in 9 different flavours. Fun! I'm bringing peanut butter balls.

Other than that, we've been taking it pretty easy around here. We got our first snowfall this week. It stayed for two days and then the rain melted it. I've been totally hooked on One Tree Hill. Does anyone else watch this? Yup, life is pretty exciting here in the big city.

Stuck in an Elevator and a New Health Card

2009-12-02T20:06:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm on a shift that doesn't have me at work during all of the business hours of the day, I decided it was time to hit up a government office and and get my health card. John was amazing enough to set everything up for me so that all I had to do was go in, skip the line, show them my birth certificate and that's it.

I got lost on the way there. I wandered around Yonge & Sheppard for about twenty minutes before I finally figured out where I was trying to go. I talked to the receptionist and she gave me a priority ticket to go to the front of the line (did you know government offices even have these? I didn't). I got up to the counter and filled out the application. She asked for proof of my address and I gave it to her. She asked to see my birth certificate and I gave it to her. She asked for something with my signature and I gave her my driver's license. She looked at it and in a patronizing tone said, "We don't recognize out of province licenses."

So I asked "What do you need then?"

She said "Do you have a Visa or a Mastercard?"

Yes, the government of Ontario places greater credibility on a piece of plastic issued by a private company, signed without a witness and at most a hologram to prevent counterfeiting than a government issued piece of identification. Figure that one out.

Anyway, the point is that I got my health card. So that's one more thing I can check off my list.

Today's excitement occured when I left the apartment to go pick up my watch which was out being cleaned. The doors on one of the elevators in the building has been acting weird for the past day or so, opening really slow and then closing just as slowly. When it stopped on my floor to take me downstairs, it opened really slow, but when I hit the button for the floor it closed right away, so I'm thinking "Great!".

Then the floor indicators shut down, the elevator doesn't move and the door won't open.

My first thought was "How long does it have to be like this before I'm officially considered to be stuck?"

My next thought was "How come I'm always too lazy to charge my cell phone and bring it with me?" followed by a wistful regret that this experience wouldn't make me change my ways.

By the time I'd had those two thoughts I decided it was appropriately long enough to call the emergency phone. It rang twice, then I heard "Your call will be answered by the next available representative" and then it hung up on me. After doing that four times, I gave up on it and started ringing the alarm.

Then the elevator started moving. But it was moving so slowly, I couldn't tell if I was going up or going down. I started yelling, hoping that there would be someone on one of the floors that could hear me. Once or twice I thought I maybe heard someone but I couldn't be sure because the walls of the elevator are so thick and well insulated.

So I yelled and rang the siren for a little bit. I was feeling pretty good about my calm under pressure. My heart rate was up a bit, but I wasn't panicked or anything.

After about 10 minutes someone knocked on the door. I yelled "Can you help me? I'm stuck in here." because for all I knew it was just some random person who has no idea how to rescue someone from an elevator (myself, for example).

Next I heard the strain of metal and then saw a little gap starting to form as someone pried the door open. On the other side was an older gentleman who didn't speak a word of English, so I still don't know if he was actually someone sent to help me or just a random passerby. I thanked him profusely and emerged from the elevator to find myself on the very bottom floor in one of the lower parking garages.

And then I got on with my day! Although I was a bit squeamish about elevators for the rest of the day.

Finished Training!

2009-11-30T20:12:00.001-08:00

It feels like I've been at my job for a long time, but in actuality, I just finished training today. I think that means I've been there seven weeks. Tomorrow I start the real work. I've already met my boss though and he said that he's going to buddy me up with one of the more advanced analysts to watch my every move for the first week or so and hold my hand. So hopefully it will be a smooth transition. He seems nice and laid back, I think it's going to be a good work environment.

Starting my job for real also means that I will be working the night shift, 12pm to 8pm. And at the same time, John is starting his early shift (8:30am or 9am, I'm not sure which). So we're going to have to figure out how to make our schedules mesh. Tonight I made him lunch before bed so it will be ready for him in the morning, and I intend to make supper (lasagna) before work tomorrow at the same time that I pack my lunch, so it's ready when John gets home. Hopefully he gets his studying done in the evening so that by the time I get home we can hang out. We'll figure it out, I am sure.

The weekend was busy but fun. On Friday I went to see the new Twilight movie. It was pretty terrible (there were scenes when the whole the whole theatre full of Twi-hards actually burst out laughing, it was so cheesy) but I still really enjoyed it. I love a good terrible movie.

Saturday was our stay at home day. I did housework and some sewing while John studied. Today was the first day of his RIBO training, so he's pretty much out of commission for the next two weeks.

On Sunday we got up bright and early. We headed to Wal-mart to pick up a couple of Christmas gifts and then over to Chinatown for produce. I'm not sure what we're going to do when the weather gets cold and all of the outdoor fruit and vegetable stands are closed, I'm growing pretty dependent on them. When we got home, we dropped off our stuff and headed to a Dim Sum restaurant next door that I had been wanting to try. The food was absolutely amazing. Everything was in much smaller serving sizes than we expected, but it each bite was delectable. We had the best fried rice I've ever tasted in my life, deep fried taro dumplings, chicken curry and lotus stuffed pastries, peking duck pancakes, mango pudding shaped like a fish and hot sweet almond soup. And unlike any other dim sum experience I've had, it was hardly greasy at all. I loved it. I will definitely be going back.

In the afternoon I gave my sister a call and we chatted for a bit. I baked a mac & cheese casserole for dinner and so that I would have something to pack for lunches and we spent the evening watching cartoons, as usual. All in all, a good weekend.

My Christmas spirit is in full force now. I've got almost all of my shopping done, and the baking starts this weekend. My friend from work is going to come over and help me. The first weekend in December is the perfect time to bake freezable things like cookies in my opinion! I'm feeling really good about it, we'll get the tree up in the next couple of days. I'm so glad we didn't have to leave it behind in Halifax, for a while there I really thought we would. I only wish there were more hours in the day so I could find the time to practice carols on the piano.

Starting to get into the Christmas Spirit

2009-11-23T16:23:00.000-08:00

We had a fun weekend. We actually left the apartment to do more than just grocery shop!

Friday night we just laid low, made snacks and watched a movie on TV. John fell asleep around 9:00pm if memory serves me correctly. I stayed up to watch Vampire Diaries.

Saturday morning, we made omelets for breakfast and spent the morning lazing around. I worked on a sewing project and John played video games. In the afternoon we went to see the movie 2012. What a great movie!! I love movies that show the graphic depiction of the planet being destroyed and this is the best one I've seen yet! It has taken the place of The Day After Tomorrow as my favorite destruction-of-Earth film of all time. They showed the world being blown apart in ways I couldn't even imagine. The effects were incredible and the story was great!

I know what you're thinking. "But Jacki, why were you sewing this weekend? What about the socks you were supposedly knitting?"

I finished them! Check it out!
I'm so proud of them, they turned out awesome!! They fit perfectly, the heel is reinforced, the top is ribbed, the yarn is so soft and the seam at the toe lines up exactly right. I can't wait to make my next pair but I need to see how they hold up in the dryer first to make sure that these are the right size (i.e, I may need to make the next ones bigger if these ones shrink). They're labour intensive to be sure, but I had a lot of fun making them. Once I got the hang of knitting with four tiny little needles, the rest was easy.

Okay, now that I've bored any boy who might be reading, here is the secret part of today's post: John said he was going out for drinks with Brandon tonight so I snuck away to the mall to do a little Christmas shopping. Have I mentioned that I can go to the Eaton Centre from my apartment without once stepping outdoors? It was my first time there since University and I forgot how gorgeous the domed ceilings are from the inside. And this time there were giant sparkling star decorations hanging from the ceiling for Christmas. It was beautiful! And Aunt Debbie, I wish you could have seen the Christmas tree in the middle of the mall! It was was at least 50 feet tall with what must have been thousands of lights. And to top it all off, the tree was absolutely covered in Swarovski crystal snowflake ornaments! It wouldn't surprise me to find out there were ten thousand of them. I can't even begin to describe how it sparkled, it was like nothing I'd ever seen. It was absolutely incredible.

I didn't stay long because I knew what I was there for. Next time I go though, I would love to take an afternoon to explore it. The Sears alone is 5 floors! I hopped on a subway and headed back home. I sneaked into the apartment, happy to see I had beaten John home and stashed the goods in my secret hiding spot. Success! Okay, back to talking about the weekend.

As Saturday night rolled around, I lamented that I had no orange juice to mix with my vodka until I remembered that I had a whole bunch of limes in the fridge from the time they were 8/$1 in Chinatown. So I decided to try my hand at homemade limeade. Oh. Em. Gee. It was awesome! I just mixed the juice of 6 limes, 1/2 cup of sugar and 4 cups of water. It was super strong, and super sour. Adding the vodka watered it down a bit and the sourness was so overpowering that it completely eclipsed the taste of the vodka. This stuff is so smooth, it's deadly! I loved it.

Around 9pm we went out in search of a place to watch the UFC fights. I wanted to hit up a sports bar called Main Event but John suggested we try a place called Philthy McNasty's because they have a better setup of TVs.

So we that's where we went. At first it was pretty cool. There was a big screen TV right in front of us, a smaller TV built into the booth and the pizza was great. But around 11:30, the night crowd started moving in. Before we knew it, we found ourselves in the middle of a Saturday night pickup bar. There were lots of scantily clad girls, they started playing dance music - think The Palace. We laughed it off and stayed for the rest of the fights, but I think we won't going back. We lucked out in that the fights were really good this week. It was the return of Tito Ortiz and he didn't disappoint! It's been a few months since John and I have had a fight night out on the town, so we had both been looking forward to it and we had a lot of fun.

On Sunday we made our weekly pilgrimage to Chinatown for produce. This week limes happened to be 15/$1 so it looks like I will be making more limeade! Seriously, they barely fit in the fridge. Other great deals included 10lbs of potatoes for $1.59 and quarts of strawberries for 66 cents. I don't think I will ever get tired of watching them ring this stuff in! Although now I have to figure out what to do with 3 quarts of strawberries. Last week I made strawberry cheesecake tarts. This week I'm not sure. Coffee cake maybe? Anyone have any suggestions?

When we got home, John's friend Marc happened to be in our area, so he stopped by for a visit. He and John had a good chat over tea while I baked bread, peeled pomegranates and roasted chestnuts. I love puttering around the kitchen on a Sunday. I'd take it over housework any day of the week.

Sunday night was cartoons as usual, followed by early to bed to get a head start on the week.

Ooh, I forgot to mention that John brought home his RIBO books on Friday so that he can spend the next couple of weeks studying for his exam. I love it!

Still Having Fun!

2009-11-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

I've been a bit lazy about posting. Time goes so fast!!

Our Christmas flights have been booked! We pretty much couldn't get any time off at all. So our visit will be super short, but it's better than nothing! We will arrive in Halifax late on Christmas Eve, stay the weekend and return early on Monday. Back to work Tuesday. I work untill 2pm on Christmas Eve, so we couldn't get home any earlier. All of my vacation requests got denied. Basically, if you want Christmas off, it has to be booked in January. This is what I figured would happen though, starting a job in October. So although it is not ideal, we are grateful for the time we do have and look forward to seeing our loved ones!

John is still loving his job. He comes home with big smiles every day. I'm still in training until the end of the month. It's pretty dull, but it's a stable routine at least. I'm definitely getting a better grasp on all of the insurance concepts and am remembering the little details better as well. So all is well there.

We found the most amazing Mexican restaurant last weekend. Erin and Alan, you must come visit so we can take you there! We went there to celebrate John's new job. Everything was from scratch, even the sour cream! And the flavours had both strong and subtle elements and were amazingly combined and balanced. I think it was the best meal we've had since we arrived in Toronto. (Do you know it's been almost 4 months we've been here?!?)

We also found a Vietnamese place where the prices are low, the portions are ridiculously big and the food is amazing! It was my first time trying pho and I fell in love. It was so good! The broth was light but so tasty, with scallions, Thai basil and other flavours I couldn't identify. And I think it was only $5 for a bowl that was more than I could finish.

That same afternoon, we went down to Dundas & Yonge and watched the Christmas parade for a few hours. It was awesome to see it in person rather than on TV for once. Plus we scored some candy canes. The crazy part is that it was so warm I took my sweater off and just wore my t-shirt. Kind of strange for a Christmas event! We probably watched it for an hour and a half before heading out, so we didn't see Santa, but it was still a good time.

Yesterday the subway was shut down south of our stop. Insanity!!! Apparently a contractor had been digging for one reason or another and accidently dug right into a subway tunnel! So rocks fell onto the track, and they weren't sure how stable everything was, so they had to shut it down. People were already upset because subway prices have just gone up ($3 a ride!) and I guess that when the service was shut down, they flipped out. I wasn't there myself but one of the girls at work said she was actually shoved into a train. Crazy. I guess there were three hundred thousand people stranded at Bloor and Yonge (the major intersection of the subway). I guess on this one street corner they were lined up right around the block waiting for shuttles.

So I am feeling quite fortunate to work on the same block that I live (not to mention the $120 I save each month by not buying a metropass). And John works in the North, so although delayed, he at least was able to get home on the subway.

I hear that the Olympic torch was carried across the bridge yesterday! I am sad to have missed this a once in a lifetime opportunity in Halifax. It seems like whenever I leave, that's precisely when the excitement happens.

John's brother Allan came to stay with us for most of the week. We have a pretty good deal: I made him cookies and he made dinner for us last night (mmm, porkchops). And I came home to a kitchen that had mysteriously been cleaned during the day. So that's a great kind of houseguest to have! John managed to get today off work so they could hang out.

That is the news around here for now! I'm going to go enjoy my first glass of eggnog of the season!

Monday, Monday

2009-11-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

I have a basket of guavas in my apartment.

I know this because the gorgeous, fresh scent of them greets me the moment I walk in. The aroma is incredible and the smell is so strong it permeates everything. So I've decided that guavas are the new potpourri.

We hit up Chinatown for produce this weekend and among other things, guavas were $3/dozen. I haven't figured out what to do with them though. They're sort of like tomatoes in that it's pretty much impossible to get at the flesh without eating a few seeds. The difference is that the seeds are hard and not particularly edible. So I'm thinking there must be some trick to it, but I haven't figured it out just yet. But honestly, I'm just happy to smell them, I don't really care if we eat them.

We didn't get up to much this weekend.

Friday night was popcorn and V for Vendetta on TV. I love that movie.

I was super productive on Saturday. I did all my laundry, baked bread, finished knitting my first sock, sewed pillow covers to match the drapes, made sauce out of all the leftover overripe raspberries, planned out the next week's meals \ and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom. I'm still figuring out the whole work/life balance thing so a lot gets put off to the weekend.

On Sunday we decided to head down to the St. Lawrence market for some stewing beef but when we got there it was closed. Apparently they shut down Sundays and Mondays. So instead we headed back up to Chinatown for more produce, dumplings and pastries. The best finds were pineapples for $1, Spanish onions 5/$1, and peppers for 20 cents each. We paid closer attention to the prices this time and the best guess we can come up with is that they take the price of everything, subtract $5 and then don't charge tax. It's the only way we can explain how we go up with $17 worth of ridiculously cheap produce and when they ring it in, it's $11.

We stopped for BOGO blizzards at the Chinatown Dairy Queen and then headed home to drop off our groceries. Then we headed back out for a walk around our neighbourhood to see if we could find a little butcher somewhere. We headed up Yonge and then back down Mount Pleasant, but all we found was an organic butcher which was too pricey for us.

But we had a nice walk in the 17 degree weather. I commented to John that Autumn feels like a season here whereas in Halifax it felt like a week. It actually makes sense here to buy transition weather clothes because there's lots of time to wear them. Today it was 19 degrees!

I'm also in love with the squirrels here. I loved them when I lived in Waterloo and then I totally forgot about them when I moved back home. They're black and as big as cats with the fluffiest tails! And they're friendlier than regular squirrels and not as afraid of humans.

By the time we got home, I was pretty tired so we just made some snacks and watched cartoons for the rest of the night.

John was up at 5am this morning, excitd for his first day of work. I packed him a bento and we parted ways. Turns out he didn't need it though, they took him out for lunch. When he came home tonight he was super excited about his new company. He said the people are wonderful and that for it only being his first day, he's already seeing lots of ways that he can contribute to the company's success. It makes me so happy to see him so enthusiastic about it.

So life is good. I feel like we're pretty far off the track that we planned for ourselves when we were in Halifax planning to come here, but I'm really happy with the track we're on. I'm starting to be able to see how our lives are going to shape up six months down the road which is the furthest I've been able to guess at yet.

John Got a New Job!

2009-11-04T15:55:00.000-08:00

John is not very good at being unemployed. He didn't spend a single day in his pyjamas. He didn't beat a single video game. He didn't watch any soap operas or gain any weight. I never found empty boxes of bonbons on the coffee table.

Although he was great for making dinner every night and taking care of all the apartment stuff. So I guess he was good at that part of being unemployed.

But he wasn't good enough at it to stay unemployed. He's been doing interviews since the first day he was off work and yesterday he was offered a new job!

Yesterday, he greeted me outside of my work when I got off tonight, dressed in a suit from yet another interview. He said that while he was at said interview, one of the companies he's been interviewing with for weeks called and left a voicemail that he got the job. Then today he got his letter of offer and he starts working Monday!

The short version is that he will be managing a team of insurance agents and he has to write the same exam that I just did (MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA). For the long version, you'll have to give me a call (or have me call you) as John is not always cool with me posting all the details of his life on the internet.

So we are very happy to have that all figured out because it we've been on a pretty tight budget for the past couple of months and we're eager to get back out there and experience more of what Toronto has to offer. For the first time in over a year, we're back to being DINKS (a fun acronym for dual-income, no kids).

I'm still puttering along in training, so no change there. I'm learning lots though! I start actually working on Dec 1st. Mom, you'll be glad to know I put in my request for vacation for Christmas yesterday, although I haven't heard anything back yet.

This evening when I got home, I found that John had invented a new type of soup/casserole that is so delicious! It has a million ingredients, the highlights being hominy, tomatoes, chicken and cheddar cheese. It turns out the hominy is not actually a bean, it's kernels of corn that have have the outer peel removed. And it turns out I love it! It tastes like corn, but it has the texture of a bean and it's really filling You would use it as the main starch in a meal. I love trying new ingredients!

An Evening with Friends and Eating for Cheap

2009-11-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

For the first time in four weeks, I got to actually leave my apartment this weekend! No studying!

I got off work at 6:00pm on Friday and we headed straight over to Marc and Alisha's place over on St. Clair West. It was the first time we've been over there since Marc was back in Toronto, and they were having us over for dinner.

Alisha is a wonderful cook. She made baked and breaded chicken breasts stuffed with cheese, garlic and onions and topped with raspberry sauce, mashed sweet potatoes with walnuts and steamed asparagus with pecans. It was so delicious and there was so much food I almost couldn't finish it all. I brought some cupcakes leftover from the ones I made for work, although no one had room for them until much later in the evening.

After dinner, Marc made lychee martinis for Alisha and I, the boys found some beer and we had a nice evening just hanging out, chatting and getting caught up . We had such a nice time that we decided we should do dinner together more often, maybe a couple of times a month.

One of the nice things about Toronto is that the transit runs really late, so you don't have to feel like Cinderella, running home before the clock strikes twelve. I think we left around 12:30 or 1:00 and went straight to bed when we got home.

We slept in late on Saturday and dawdled away the morning. John made egg sandwiches and I played some Pikmin on the Wii. We spent most of the afternoon going for a walk up north towards Lawrence street.

The weather was nice and warm so we didn't need coats. John somehow knew about some parks up there so we went exploring. We found some paths and even a couple of streams. We found one park that was sort of nature-y wilderness and one that was neatly manicured with cement walkways. The leaves on the trees are almost finished turning so it was just beautiful. The ground was completely covered with layers of fallen leaves. We saw lots of people out walking their dogs and that made us want one (although that's obviously not practical while we're in a one bedroom apartment). It felt as rural as anywhere in Dartmouth, it was hard to believe we were in the heart of Toronto. After a few hours, we were getting tired so we stopped into a little market for some ginger beer and came back home.

We didn't end up going out for Halloween. There were a few parties going on but I don't think either of us was really feeling like getting dressed up. Instead, we stayed in and ate hot beef sandwiches and watched the original Dracula. I quite enjoyed it, although I must say vampires have come a long way since then.

The clocks fell back an hour last night so although we slept in a bit this morning, technically we were up bright and early according to the clocks.

We needed groceries but we decided that rather than hit up the Metro, we would venture out into the city in search of better prices. We did amazingly well I think.

The first stop was Dufferin station where we hit up Wal-Mart for discount Halloween candy. It was pretty picked over, but we did pick up some sour peaches and swedish berries for 91 cents a bag. From there we headed across the street to La Tortillarie where you can get homemade corn tortillas that they make fresh daily for $1.75 per half kilo. We use them to make amazing tacos, or enchiladas, nacho chips, etc. John also picked up a can of hominy because he saw a recipe for hominy soup that he wants to try. I think it's a some kind of bean, but I'm not actually sure.

Next we hit up Chinatown. The first stop was the Ding Dong bakery where we went a little overboard. I can't help it though, I love it so much! We got barbecue pork buns, barbecue pork pastries, wintermelon pastries, egg tarts, coconut and red bean mochi, something called Japanese pumpkin cake that looks like a Swiss roll, and two pizza style buns that we ate while we shopped. Their mochi is so incredibly fresh and sticky that it's almost impossible to peel off the wrapper. It's so good, I think they actually use coconut milk in the mochi itself. Eighteen items and everything came to less than $12, taxes in. Ridiculous.

Then we hit the fruit stands. We bought:

3 little pomegranates and 1 huge one
3 half pints of rasberries
1 sweet potato
1 lotus root
1 broccoli crown
a pound of chestnuts
a bundle of asparagus
6 tomatoes
7 plums
3 persimmons
a bunch of bananas

for $13. Seriously. Containers of raspberries were 3/$1 and they look great. Chestnuts were $0.99/lb. Bananas were $0.29/lb.

We walked past a Chinese herb shop so I popped in and found blooming tea balls that were 3/$2. Usually I see these for $2.50 each so I picked up a couple. They're basically loose tea leaves that are shaped into a ball and they bloom into a flower when you put them in the hot water.

The big splurge of the day was when we found a shop that makes homemade dumplings. They had a huge list of combinations but I just stuck with my favorite, pork and Chinese cabbage. $10 for 3 dozen, but the truth is, it would cost me $8 or $9 to make a batch of about 60 dumplings from scratch and it takes two hours, so it was worth the price to me.

So when all was said and done, we ended up with all of this:
for under $40.

Not bad I think.

We have some whole chickens in the freezer, so I think we're going to thaw one of those out and pick up some ground beef and we'll be set for the week! I think I'm actually going to pack bento lunches this week since we have all the stuff for them.

I'm so in love with the fact that you can get homemade, quality foods for such low prices if you know where to look. And I know we're only going to find more great places to shop the longer we live here.

And in other news, any of you who remember Michelle Chouinard will be happy to hear that she had her baby. Joseph Pierre Ferguson was born healthy into the world on October 26th. Congratulations Michelle!

I Passed!

2009-10-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, the craziness is over, things should be back to normal now.

On Monday I got up at the crack of dawn and headed downtown to write my RIBO exam. I will say that I felt pretty important to have business on Bay Street to attend to. That was a Toronto first for me. I headed to a floor high up in the Simpson Tower and wrote my exam in a board room of about 30 people.

As is typical for me, I was the first one finished so I had no one to talk to afterward to compare answers with. So I hopped on the subway and went home to have lunch with John before going back to work. When I returned to the office, everyone was freaking. No one (including me) felt like they had even passed, let alone done well. Almost all of the questions had been unlike anything we'd seen in class.

So we spent the next couple of days on tenterhooks and finally this afternoon we all headed back to Bay Street to get our marks back. I got at 92%. So I guess I had nothing to worry about after all. Actually, everyone in my class passed, although some only just barely. And no one did better than me! So I'm now a licensed insurance broker for the province of Ontario. Neat! I get a membership card and everything. Only six weeks to go until I actually start working. I made some cupcakes tonight (pineapple and coconut flavoured) to bring into class tomorrow since we all did so well.

That's all I've been up to for a week. But hopefully now that the pressure is off we can get back to having some semblance of a life again. Although we did make it to a movie last night. We saw Zombieland. I didn't think I would like it because I think zombies are lame, but it was actually one of the cutest movies I've seen in a long time. Woody Harrelson was great.

John's been keeping busy as well. He's on his third round of interviews with two different companies and he's been sending out resumes every single day. I'm not sure what he's going to end up doing yet. All I know is that I'm quickly growing accustomed to having someone else do the cooking and cleaning!

It feels like he and I have gone through many changes in our work/home dynamic. We started both as coworkers, then to me being the stay-at-home and him working, and now he is the stay-at-home and I'm the worker. And hopefully soon we'll both be working. But we've adapted to these changes so easily and I believe that is because I trust him to do everything he can to take care of me and he trusts me to do everything I can to take care of him. We're a solid team and I am grateful every day to have someone I can depend on absolutely. And who will make me snacks several times daily for two weeks solid when I have an exam to study for.

I found out my work throws a big Halloween party, but I don't think we'll be going because we don't have costumes (because we thought we had nowhere to go). But it does feel nice to be part of a company that does that sort of thing.

That's about it around here. We've been total homebodies. The leaves are just starting to turn and it's quite beautiful. Yesterday it was warm enough that I didn't need a coat, but that has been the exception these past two weeks.

Recap + Our First Turkey Together

2009-10-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't forgotten about you all!

I can't even tell you how much studying I have done this week. It's consumed my entire week. I get up at 7:00am, get ready for work, study until 8:30am and head to work. After work, I go straight to studying. Most nights I take an hour off to watch House or Glee or something, continue studying until 11:00pm, chill for half an hour and go to bed.

I'm not complaining. It's only for two weeks and I'm learning a lot so it's all good. But it does mean that I've had to drop a few of my fun things, one of which was blogging. But here I am at 9:30pm on a Sunday night and I'm finally done my studying for the weekend, so I thought it would be a good time to get caught up.

Last weekend was Thanksgiving and it was the first time I've ever hosted my own turkey dinner. My mom is pretty dependable when it comes to making Thanksgiving dinner, so I've never needed to do it myself.

Well, although I did miss spending Thanksgiving with my family at home, I think John and I made the best of what we have here. We put on an amazing spread and had a wonderful time with friends and our Ontario family.

John and I cooked all day. I made some turkey cupcakes first of all. Here's a picture of them: John actually found two kinds of candy corn for me, orange for the noses and red for the tails. The cupcakes themselves are root beer flavoured! I was so proud of them. I used a combination of root beer flavouring (you can buy it in little bottles, like vanilla) and actual root beer to get the flavour to come through.

I also made pumpkin squares. I don't like to make pies because I have no pastry skills and we were expecting too many people for a pie anyway (there were supposed to be eight of us), so I pulled out my 9" x 13" pan, started with a layer of oatmeal crumble (like the bottom of an apple crisp), topped it with pumpkin pie filling (canned pumpkin, evaporated milk and spices) and threw it in the oven.

John was in charge of the turkey. We got the biggest one we could find, it was 7.5 kg. He had all these secret turkey cooking tricks that I thought he was just making up, but the end result was the juiciest turkey I've ever tasted, so they must have done something!

I wanted stovetop stuffing, but he wanted to make his own so we compromised and made both (although the stovetop had to wait until hot turkey sandwiches the next day). I love any compromise that results in more food. He made a couscous dressing with onion, apple and cranberries. He thought it came out soggy (because couscous takes 5 minutes to cook, not 5 hours) but I thought it was perfect, I loved it.

For veggies we only made broccoli with cheese sauce. John has a no-cheese-whiz rule, so I did a roux-> cream sauce -> cheese sauce sort of thing. It turned out perfect. The secret is I used three cups of cheese to one cup of milk!

For starches we made a huge pot of mashed potatoes and John put together some whiskey sweet potatoes. I don't care for whiskey so I didn't expect to like them, but they were awesome. They were nice and sweet and didn't taste like whiskey at all.

Throw in a couple of cans of cranberry sauce and a couple of bottles of wine and you've got a meal!

Here is our beautiful turkey:
And here are John and Mark during the carving. I meant to take a picture of us all at the table with all of the food, but we were so hungry that we totally forgot!It was me, John, Mark (John's best friend), Mohammed (a friend of John's who just moved to Toronto from Halifax as well), and Judy and Allan (they stayed for the weekend with us). There was another couple that was supposed to join us but they were no call/no show.

It felt wonderful to know that we have friends and family here and that we could all be together and feel at home away from home. And John and I truly love to feed people, and we were thankful for the opportunity to do just that.

Everyone raved about the food. There was lots of everything left over. Most of us were too stuffed for dessert, but for the people who had room, I brought out pumpkin squares with whipped cream and they were very well received. No one had room for cupcakes!

After dinner, we took turns washing dishes. Everyone stuck around because we still had beer to get through. Check out our mini keg:

John wants to make it a Thanksgiving tradition of course!

We sat around with full bellies and played a board game that Allan brought, and then we watched Gladiator which was on TV. Everyone left with a tray of turkey cupcakes and I put together a little snack pack for Mark's fiancee Alisha, since she couldn't make it because she had to work.

It was a fabulous first Thanksgiving in Toronto! Lots of food and lots of friends and I hope to do it again next year!

Sadly it only lasted a day though, and on Sunday I was back to studying. My week was kind of a write off, but John had a productive week. I told him to take a few days to relax, but he just jumped straight into job interviews. I think he had at least three last week and he has another one tomorrow. I'm not sure whether any of those will pan out or not, one was definitely a bust (another one where he got there and found out the job was not as described). But I think there's value just in getting out there and checking out the different types of businesses if for no other reason than to get a feel for what kind of environment you want to work in and what's available.

I really don't want him to rush into any old job just because it's there. This city is big enough and there are so many opportunities here that I know there's a good fit for him out there and it will come along when the time is right. I hope that he is able to find a job for himself as good as the job he helped me find, and I believe he will.

This weekend was really quiet. Mainly studying, and we finally got the curtains up. I had to shorten the curtains from the old apartment, but on the bright side I have enough fabric left over to make pillow covers and curtain ties, although I didn't have time to make them this weekend.

I made some cupcakes to bring to work tomorrow. Cherry cupcakes with almond frosting, one of my favorites. Hopefully they like them! And I found some time yesterday to bake some bread. It's my second batch since we moved here. Slowly we are getting all of our routines back!

So all is well here, I'm just really busy. I'll be studying all this week as well and then my exam is next Monday. I think that if I keep working as hard as I have been, I'll be just fine.

First Day at my New Job

2009-10-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day!

I was up at 6:30am and ready for a work a half an hour before it was time to go. Did I mention that I love not having a commute?

When I got there, I met the other people in my class (my training class is tiny!) and we were welcomed with breakfast! We had a bunch of presentations, took a tour of the area and did some studying. I have to say, the environment felt so positive and welcoming, I really enjoyed myself. And there was a steady supply of green tea.

So much studying though! I spent the last two days studying for about 6 or 7 hours a day. Then again tonight I spent 5 more hours at it. And I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. We've been assigned about 80 pages of dense reading each night, plus assignments and tests. I try to read through everything twice to really cement it in my head, but with only 24 hours in a day, it's not always possible.

I don't mind though. It's fun to play student again, I get a kick out of being a keener, and it's only for two weeks anyway. After that I write my exam and we start the normal training. And the material is interesting enough, although sometimes after a few pages I find myself reading the same sentence over and over.

The other thing I will mention is that John's last day of work is tomorrow. He decided to leave his job as it wasn't a good fit for him, so he's taking a few weeks to figure out what he wants to do next. We were just waiting to make sure I got this job before that happened. He's not as comfortable putting his life's details on the world wide web for everyone to read as I am, so feel free to give me a call or I can call any of you guys if you would like to hear more.

Ooh, I almost forgot. I think we're doing a turkey dinner this year! I think that's a big milestone for us, we're really grown-ups now! I'm in charge of desserts, I think I'm going to make pumpkin pie squares and turkey cupcakes. Hopefully we have at least five people coming to join us, but not everyone has confirmed yet. I'm really excited!

I Got the Job!!

2009-10-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Yay! The bank called me to day to let me know that I have a job! I have to go in tomorrow to pick up my text books so that I can start studying before my training starts on Thursday. Apparently there are so many of them that the recommend I bring a "sturdy backpack".

So that is good news. And I'm actually genuinely excited to be going back to work. I'm looking forward to this job. I haven't felt this way since I've been unemployed, like I actually want to go back to work. But I feel like this is going to be a really good thing.

The weekend was pretty quiet. It rained Friday night so we didn't end up playing capture the flag. On Saturday we headed down to the St. Lawrence Farmer's market (this time it was open!). We got all kinds of produce, some gorgeous baby back ribs and a pork shoulder. I also picked up a bottle of cherry extract (I had never seen this before!) that I think will be great in frosting. We had lunch there. I had a delicious crepe stuffed with chicken, greens, scallions and hoisin sauce and John had a gigantic sandwich.

We headed back home via Chinatown because I wanted to go hunting for mooncakes. Sadly, however, everywhere we went was sold out as it was the last day of the mooncake festival. Next year I will have to go earlier!

But it wasn't a total waste because we found a fruit stand selling pomegranates 5 for $1. Can you believe that? Twenty cents for a pomegranate! When we got home, I removed all of the seeds while we watched Gladiator on TV. It took ages, but now we have an amazing hoard of pomegranate seeds and it only cost us a dollar.

We were tired from all of the walking, so we stayed home that night. On Sunday, John made raspberry waffles for breakfast. They were to die for!

We only left the apartment once all day, to hit up the grocery store for a few things to make dinner. We cooked up half of the ribs using this recipe from the show Chuck's Day Off. What an amazing way to cook ribs! The short version is that they're seared and then oven braised for 2.5 hours. The long version is a list of a zillion different flavors that are all combined to make the best ribs I've ever tasted. Here's a picture of it before we put it in the oven to braise:

Oh yes, those are apple slices that you see!

We also boiled up some of the corn we got at the market. It was probably the best corn I have ever tasted. And we panko breaded and fried some tomato slices, but they didn't turn out as good as I'd hoped.

And that was the weekend. Just lots of food and relaxation. Works for me!

I also applied for school this weekend, so my application is in for Fall of 2010. Nice and early this time. I hit a bit of a snag though, in that they don't want to transfer over my transcripts to my new application. I spoke to someone today who eventually said her supervisor would transfer it over sometime in the next few days. So I'll keep an eye on it. Hopefully everything will be fine.

Quiet Week and a Disturbing Breakfast

2009-10-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much because not a whole lot has been going on this week. I'm still waiting to hear back as to whether or not I got that job but my references are reporting that they've been contacted, so I think that is a good sign.

The temperature is starting to drop a bit (it's sweater weather but not quite coat weather) and it's been rainy a few days, so I would say that Fall is underway. Rather than close the windows though, I've been letting the apartment cool down a bit so that I have an excuse to wear socks and sweaters. I've missed them!

It's also been an excuse to use the oven! On Wednesday, I made my first batch of homemade bread since we moved to Ontario. It turned out perfect, I'm actually eating peanut butter toast as I type this. I made chocolate chip cookies yesterday as well but they did not turn out great as I'm still figuring out my oven. Apparently at 325 degrees it's too cold to cook anything but at 350 it bakes cookies too fast. That's as much as I've figured out.

The most traumatic event of the week occurred on Sunday morning as we were making breakfast. John heated up the frying pan for the eggs and when it was nice and hot, cracked them in. One of the eggs contained bloody chicken fetus. Yup, it was fertilized. The image of that bloody mess sizzling on the stove is one I will never forget. I am so fortunate to have a brave man in the house to take care of these types of things while I freak out in another room. It took me five days before I was ready to crack an egg again.

I called the Metro head office (since it was their house brand of eggs) to complain. They were totally nonplussed about it, apparently not concerned about how this has shaken my trust in Ontario bred livestock and the inspection processes they use (apparently ever egg undergoes a light test so that the fertilized ones can be removed). I lived in Nova Scotia for 26 years and in that whole time saw two eggs with the tiniest of blood spots. I've been here not two months and I've already experienced a horrific interruption to breakfast. I don't like those odds.

So they sent us a $5 gift certificate in the mail. And that's how I came to acquire the peanut butter that is on my toast.

That's about it around here. We've stayed in every night this week because John hasn't been feeling well. He caught some sort of bug I think, although I think he's feeling better today. He wants to head downtown tonight because there's a big game of Capture the Flag tonight at King & Bay Street. Apparently thousands of people take part in it and you get a glow stick necklace to show which team you're on. The flags are blocks apart and you can run around by foot, bicycle, skateboard or even take the subway to get the flag back to your base. So I think that's the plan for tonight.

Somehow I Managed To Do It Again!

2009-09-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Halifax, I had the sweetest deal going. I had a sweet, downtown apartment which was connected to lots of stores and my work via pedway. I could stay inside all winter if I wanted to (although I love playing in the snow too much to actually do that). No time was wasted commuting, life was perfect.

It was hard to give up. But I wanted to come to Toronto so badly that I was willing to settle. I was willing to commute to work up to an hour each way and to live in a tiny place if it kept the rent low.

But my amazing boyfriend found me an amazing apartment in heart of where I want to be. It's attached to more shops than were in Scotia Square Mall and they're even closer than the pedway was! The apartment itself is a little bigger than our old one. All my stuff actually fits in the kitchen. Everything is perfect.

So I wasn't expecting to luck out any more than that.

But of course, this is John we're talking about.

Knowing I was looking for work, he would send me job postings to apply for every single day. And one of those happened to be at the bank where I've been interviewing all week.

Well, they offered me the job! (Pending credit, criminal and reference checks of course). From what I can tell, the job is going to be something I enjoy doing, in a positive work environment, for more money than I used to make. And the entrance to my building is quite literally six steps from my door to the outside. Unbelievable. Not even across the street, or through a pedway, or two doors down. Just take the elevator to the bottom floor, head outside, six steps and you're there.

Now before you think I am completely spoiled, I must concede that I will be spending the first two months in training which is half a block away.

Life is good. And I am so grateful to have John's love and support as I work through this whole not-going-to-school thing and put together my plan B.

So I guess my point is that it was easier than I expected to build a life in Toronto better than the one I had in Halifax (minus friends and family of course) and in such a short time. I start on October 8th.

And my other point is that I think all of my friends and family should join me here in Toronto because it's great :)

Allan and Judy left this afternoon. We had a great two days with them. We didn't go out much, just to karaoke on Wednesday and puttered around the shops on Thursday. But I got to do lots of cooking. My chili on Wednesday turned out great (it's the first time I've ever made it) and last night I made some potato and leek soup and some chicken drumsticks. And Allan made an apple pie! I was thrilled because I never make pie and it was a particularly delicious pie.

So I think John and I are going to take it easy tonight and just enjoy being home alone. He hasn't yet revealed to me the plans for the weekend.

I also want to share with you my latest favorite thing. Konad Nail Stamping! I even took a picture of the manicure I did today, just for you guys!

Houndstooth! How hilarious is that? I honestly burst out laughing every time I look at my nails. It's so easy to do too, you just stamp it on your nails and then clean up the edges. I'm a big fan of things that look impressive but are super simple. I've been painting my nails every two days since I got this stuff because it's so fun.

The Job Hunt Continues

2009-09-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

We had a quiet weekend. John had been working a trade show for the three days prior and I think standing all day did a number on his back, so he was content to just relax for Friday and Saturday.

On Sunday though, I needed to get out of the apartment, I was getting a little cabin fever-y. We decided to hit up the Saint Lawrence market downtown. When we got there, there was a flea market going on across the street so we puttered through there for quite a while. Aunt Debbie, you would have loved it, there was so much jewelry! There was costume jewelry and quite a lot of fine jewelry as well, some of it quite high end. There were people selling all kinds of antiques and even a woman selling furs.

When we finally got to the actual market, it was closed. I'm not sure why a farmers market that is open all week would be closed on a Sunday, but it is what it is. So we headed off to see if we could find some brunch. Not a block away, we found a french restaurant that was serving just that called Le Papillon.

I ordered the eggs benedict and John ordered a tortiere. The eggs were good but the tortiere was amazing. The crust was flaky and golden and the filling was a combination of I think beef, veal and pork. It was so rich and decadent. I was so surprised because I though I didn't like tortiere. The dessert menu was huge, so of course I needed to order. I ordered the profiteroles and John ordered some kind of toffee sponge cake. Omg, they were the biggest desserts ever! Mine had two huge cream puffs, two massive scoops of homemade ice cream and lots of chocolate and whipped cream. John had a giant piece of cake absolutely drenched in a rich and delicious caramel. They were yummy, but too sweet and much too large of servings. I didn't even make it halfway through mine before I was sugared out.

Feeling heavy and full, we ventured back outside. With nothing to do now that the market was closed, we decided that it was a good day to see how long it would take us to walk home from downtown, so we headed to Yonge Street and started walking.

I really enjoyed our walk because I got to see all of the different areas along downtown, each of which has a very distinct personality. All in all, it took us a bit over an hour to get home, so I would approximate the distance as being the same as from my Brunswick Street apartment to the Halifax Shopping Centre. By the time we made it home we had sore feet, but we still weren't hungry. I don't think I ate again for the rest of the day.

So far this week, I have been a cooking, cleaning and interviewing machine. I spent Monday and Tuesday finishing up the unpacking and organizing. Now there is not much left in boxes and almost everything has a place. It's looking good. I will eventually post pictures.

On Monday, I spent the afternoon interviewing with the bank insurance company. I did a behavioural interview and a computer scenario test. It took about four hours but I think I did quite well. When I got home, I had another hour of web-based personality testing to do. My mind was mush by the end of it.

This morning I had a phone interview with another insurance company and they want to bring me in on Friday for an in person interview. It's a further commute than the first company though.

Then this afternoon I went back to the first company for a second interview. This time it was in a different building which turned out to be right outside my apartment building. Amazing. I couldn't have planned it better in my dreams.

I think that interview went well also because afterwards they got me to shadow someone else doing the job I would be doing for an hour. It actually looks really good, like a job I would enjoy doing. The atmosphere in the office feels both comfortable and professional. So I'm feeling optomistic. All there is to do now is wait for someone from HR to call and offer me a job which could happen any time within the next two weeks (I would start on Oct. 8th if I get it). So cross your fingers for me!

But I am still going to go to the interview on Friday, just to keep my options open.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cooking. I made chili, cornbread and peach cobbler because we are having company tonight! Allan, John's brother, and Judy are coming to spend two days with us again. I'm looking forward to seeing them.

Yesterday's Job Hunt

2009-09-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

Well, one thing I must say about Toronto is that it takes no time to find a job. When I was looking for my last job I went from resume send out to two job offers in 12 hours. This time was no different.

I had been sending out resumes and applying for jobs online periodically throughout the week. On Thursday I started calling companies, so for Friday I had two interviews booked.

On Friday morning I headed to a small sales firm at Bloor & Spadina for my first interview. I immediately fell in love with the company. The overall feel of the office was laid back and everyone seemed happy. There was music in the air and the manager that I spoke to was extremely casual in his language (He used phrases I can't even type here, they are so off colour. I was actually shocked to hear him use them with someone on a first meeting). But despite all of that, the atmosphere was professional as well.

We chatted for a bit and I got the feeling that the job would be a harder sale than I am used to, the leads were pretty cool, but that the pay would be higher as a result. He offered me the job on the spot and I told him that I would think about it and call him back. I seriously considered his offer. The pros were that the pay would be good and it seemed like a pleasant work environment. The cons were that I wasn't sure how I would handle selling so hard, I think that takes a certain type of personality. I also was worried that spending time in this type of job would result in me getting sort of 'stuck' in sales and it would be harder to get out with my next job. Although maybe this isn't something I should worry about if my next job is going to be pastry chef anyway?

So I headed home, grabbed some lunch and headed to my next interview. I was excited about this one because it was less than a block from my apartment. The company was an insurance firm and my first impression is that it was a very professional atmosphere. The walls were lined with awards and plaques and everything was brightly lit. About thirty seconds into the interview, we determined that I was not a good fit for the job. In other words, the position required a car. The interviewer was like "Didn't I tell you that over the phone? I'm sure I did." No, I would remember that.

But the recruiter apparently has a sort of deal with another recruiter at another company where they trade applicants who don't fit at their respective companies. So she was like, "Do you want to work for a bank? I'll call my guy, he can probably find a spot for you". She called him while I was sitting there and left him a voicemail, gave me his card and I thanked her and left. So no job, but at least I came out with a lead.

I went home and called John to see if he thought I should accept the first offer, but he didn't answer his cell. While I waited for him to call back I got a call from another company for whom I'd applied online (although I don't really remember applying).

This time it was the insurance division of a major bank. They wanted to do a phone interview. After chatting with the recruiter for a few minutes we were both feeling pretty positive about the match up. The position they're filling pays well, offers good benefits, has advancement opportunities and provides training for skills that would be transferable to other jobs. And the best part is that it's on my street corner! The only downside is that I wold be working until 8pm at night, but John expects that he will be working later over the coming months anyway as he deals with more clients in western time zones so it probably isn't actually that bad.

Apparently the recruiting process is pretty complex, so she said it would take at minimum to the end of next week to complete it and that if I was sucessful, the job would start on October 8th. The manager from the first job I was offered said their training starts on Monday. So I had to make a decision. I called him to let him know I wouldn't be coming in on Monday but he wasn't available. The receptionist took down my contact info but not my message but he never called me back. So I guess he has no idea if I'll be there on Monday, but I won't be.

Over the next few hours I got an email from another company requesting a phone interview. I emailed them back with a time for them to call me. I got another email from the Investors Group asking me to come in for an information session. I wrote them back to say no thank you. I had actually already heard their pitch when I was in Halifax and like real estate, it's definitely not the kind of job that you take to make a lot of cash in your first year.

So the day ended with one job offer, and three good leads. Not too shabby. I feel much better now about my decision to leave my job earlier this month. I think that most of the people I spoke to on Friday had jobs better suited to what I want to be doing and they all paid better than the job I was in at the end of August. Things are looking up!

Not Much Going On

2009-09-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted much lately, it's been pretty quiet around here. I've just been puttering around, organizing the apartment and job hunting while John's been working at trade shows (he gets all dressed up for them, I love it).

I finished the bag I started making at the craft cafe last week, it turned out awesome. Here it is before felting; big, floppy and ugly. I think it might be the biggest thing I've ever knit but it actually only took a couple of days because it was a simple pattern.

A few spins through the hot cycle later and it's a perfect little fuzzy bag. I let it dry filled with as many books as it could hold to give it a nice rectangular shape. I really like the effect of the felting. It gives the bag a thicker, heavier and more sturdy feel. It doesn't look knit at all anymore.

I lined the inside of the bag with matching satin. I decided to make it a knitting bag since it's just about the right size to hold a couple of rolls of yarn and some needles, so on the inside there are three little pockets for things like scissors and stitch holders.
On the opposite side I put pockets to hold two pairs of needles and a snap-top pocket for stitch markers. Don't mind my hand getting in the picture. I had no pink thread so I did all of the sewing in grey thread to provide contrast. It made me really focus on making my sewing neat, so I think that's a good thing.
Next I think I'm going to try to knit a pair of socks. I find that if I don't choose projects where I learn some new techniques each time, I get pretty bored. So I always try something new. And sometimes it turns out great and sometimes it doesn't.

I've got two job interviews today, both for sales positions. I'm not sure that either of them are going to end up being good fits for me, to be honest. But I feel like at this point I'm not in a position to say no to work that pays well, so I'm trying to go into this with an open mind and look for the positive. I will keep you all posted as to how they turn out.

4 Moves in 40 Days

2009-09-14T04:19:00.001-07:00

That's it.

We're finally done moving.

I can finally unpack. For realsies.

Here's a recap, in case you've lost count.

Move #1: Halifax to Toronto
Move #2: Moving from one floor to another in our building (necessary due to some administrative errors from the rental office)
Move #3: Getting all of our stuff out of the new apartment so that they can refinish the floors
Move #4: Getting all our stuff back in

Yeah, my biceps are huge now from all the lifting.

Now here's the long version.

On Thursday night, we moved everything out. All that was left on Friday as I waited for the floor guy was a couch cushion to sit on and my laptop. He showed up around noon, so I had to leave. We had to be out of the apartment for 24 hours in order to give the varnish time to dry.

Overnight stuff in tow, I decided to spend my day on Queen Street West, investigating the fabric and bead shops. I had visited the fabric shops before, but the bead shops were brand new to me. There are about five of them in the two block span and they carry a huge range of junk beads, gemstone beads, freshwater pearls, swarovski crystal beads, silver plated and gold plated findings, and sterling silver findings. Some of them specialize in specific types of beads like cloissone or wood beads. And they range everywhere from 99 cents up to $3,o00 a strand. If you're wondering what kinds of beads you can get for $3,000, they were huge, gorgeous, clear raw aquamarines. If that's too rich for you, can get large, faceted citrines or raw kunzites for a mere $1,700 a strand, lol. I didn't end up buying anything because I didn't have any projects in mind, but they were certainly fun to look at!

It was only about 2:30pm by that time and I couldn't meet John until 6, so I headed West down the street to The Knit Cafe. I had never been there before, but it's a lovely little shop. On one wall there are all sorts of original knit patterns that you can choose from. I chose a felted bag because I've never tried felting before. Each pattern tells you what supplies you need which you pick up on another wall. From there you go to the from cash to pay and to order your tea and snacks, and then settle down at the central table for some knitting.

So I hung out for a bit, chatting with the other people in the store, sipping my green tea and knitting away. Felting basically means that you use wool yarn, knit something big and floppy, and then throw it in the washing machine on a hot cycle. Wool shrinks in hot water, so the result is a small, stiff project that has a fuzzy sort of finish. It actually barely looks like it was knit, more like it was made of felt that's been sewed together. I'm still at the knitting stage, but I'll let you know how it turns out. I had a lovely afternoon.

I rode the subway from there all the way to Finch station where I met John. It was my first time on the subway downtown during rush hour. What a zoo! From there we headed back to St. Clair West station and caught a streetcar to Alisha's house, where we would be spending the night.

Alisha is an amazing hostess. She made us a delicious beef stir fry with basamati rice for supper and then we spent the evening chilling in the living room, telling stories and having a few drinks. It was lots of fun. In the morning she made us some of her delicious open faced breakfast sandwiches and we left at 10:30 because she had to get to a wedding.

It was too early for us to go back to the apartment so we headed across the street to the library. John took out a million books (he needed some fiction to read on his long commute to work) while I posted on my blog using a library computer. After that, we decided to catch a noon showing of the movie 9, the new Tim Burton film. John found it visually appealing (I found it ugly, lol) but we both agreed that the plot was full of holes and the ending wasn't very good. After that, we finally headed home.

The floors looked pretty good, they had replaced all of the missing tiles and sanded away most of the water damage. We set to work getting all of our furniture back which took most of the afternoon. We put together John's new desk that we had bought about a month back and set up a cute little office space for the two of us. For supper, we ordered some pizza and we just relaxed for the evening.

On Sunday we took it easy in the morning and made some incredible breakfast sandwiches. We watched The Patriot, which was on TV, and did some more unpacking. We headed to the Sobeys for the first time (normally we shop at the Metro) to get our groceries for the week. It was a bit disappointing. The Sobeys was much smaller inside than it appeared from the outside and the prices were no better than the Metro. So it wasn't really worth the extra walk. But we got what we needed and headed home, stopping at The Golden Griddle for lunch. I had a blueberry waffle and John had a bowl of chili. The food quality was pretty much exactly what you would expect from a 24-hour waffle place, I was happy.

I headed home with the groceries and John headed out to find a haircut. He came home with a new style, longer on top than he usually gets. It looks good. He went out after that to meet a friend for drinks who has just moved here from Halifax. I stayed home and watched the finale of King of the Hill. I like how they ended it. John got home around midnight and we headed to bed shortly after.

Despite being homeless briefly, it was a fun weekend.

I Didn't Get In

2009-09-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

After months and months of run around, someone finally got me in touch with the right person at George Brown College. I spoke to the woman in charge of the whole application process, who had investigated my application because of the concern I had expressed to the dean.

Turns out I never had a chance.

She said that my application was processed on January 29th and considered on-time (contradictory to what several people at the school had told me previously) because the deadline was February 1st.

However, at that time the program was already full.

She said that they fill it first come, first serve and by the end of November they already had all of the applications they needed to fill the program. She also said that they don't care who has what relevant experience, who has what education, just what your most recent math mark and English marks were. So for example, a high school graduate with a high school math mark of 96% would rank higher than a university graduate with a university math mark of 94% who had worked in a related field for five years.

So in the end, I wasn't treated unfairly, it's just a flawed system, But it's what I have to work with, so I will try again next year and just apply earlier this time. The admissions woman said she would watch for my application, for whatever that's worth.

It seems misleading to me that they would have a deadline though, when it doesn't really mean anything. The way I see it, given that they have 100 people in the program, then they accepted another 350 people onto the waiting list, at $70 per application it seems like a big money grab.

So I do feel a bit better, because at least now I know what happened. Of course I'm still sad that I didn't get in though. But I will do my best to see this as a positive opportunity to spend the coming year in a productive way.

Sleeping Under the Stars and an Iron Chef Competition

2009-09-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

John didn't make it home from diving on Saturday until about 7:30pm. He took public transit with all of his heavy, heavy dive gear all of the way from Hamilton, so he was understandable exhausted when he got home. He was happy though because his first freshwater dive was a success (no nosebleeds!) and he saw more fish that he had expected. We decided to stay in for the night, so we put together a little nest on the balcony. I mixed a pitcher of Southern Comfort, vodka, orange juice and maraschino cherry juice (So-Co&O as I call it), found some beers, and put together some snacks and we curled up under a blanket and just chilled for the evening. We accidentally fell asleep out there. I don't think I've ever spent a night asleep outside without at least a tent before. It was so warm though! We woke up at dawn with sore backs and stumbled into the apartment. I went to bed but I think John stayed up.

When I finally got up for real we headed to the Pickle Barrel for brunch. It was comparable to brunch at Your Father's Moustache, bulky carbs and hollandaise sauce from a mix. It was alright though. From there we headed down to the Harbourfront Centre (seems like we've been going there a lot lately) for the Hot & Spicy Food Festival. The festival was so-so but we got to see an Iron Chef competition that was really fun.

The theme ingredient was Ontario beets and the chefs each had to come up with one spicy dish incorporating the beets in 30 minutes. There was a Vietnamese and French chef from New Mexico who made a spicy marinaded chicken breast with a gorgeous looking sauce, sauteed beets and mango and lime salsa. His competitor was a Canadian chef who owns a restaurant in downtown Toronto who made a very complicated dish involving beet encrusted chicken breast, some sort of sautee with chicken livers and more beets, a beet sauce and some other cut of chicken that was wrapped in bacon. The New Mexican chef won, I suspect because he was finished on time where the Canadian was not. I think that must be a good feeling to travel to another country for a competition and coming home a winner. This was only the semi-final round though that we watched. I don't know who won overall. The event was sponsered by FoodTV.ca and I recognized one of the judges from TV.

From there we caught the Spadina streetcar and stopped in at Chinatown on our way home. Produce is so cheap there! We bought a ton of veggies, fruit and berries and it only came to $10. Whole pineapples were $1.50 as were pints of blueberries. We also found a great Chinese pastry shop! It's called the Ding Dong Bakery and it has the biggest selection of Chinese pastries that I've seen since we moved here. We got red bean filled mochi balls, a pineapple cake, little coconut tarts, bbq pork pastries (my favorite!!), and sesame balls, all for under $10. They make everything fresh onsite and you can see them working in the back. So far, everything we've tried has been really yummy.

We walked along College to the subway station and headed home from there. I'm finding that these weekend walks are slowly helping me get a better feel for where things are in the city and how far apart everything is.

We fried up some lamb steaks and made some coucous and roasted peppers for supper and settled in to watch a recording of UFC 102 which we had missed. Best fights I've seen in probably the past five UFC's. The Couture-Nogueira fight was some of the best technical fighting I've seen in a long time. It reminded me of how much I'm bothered by the sort of non-confrontational style of fighting that's becoming more and more common thanks to Silva and Machida. And a new fighter named Duffee was introduced, that I would love to see fight Brock Lesnar. He's big enough, fast enough and seems to have the right attitude that it would be a really interesting match-up.

Today we're just waiting around for the phone and internet guy to show up. He's supposed to be here by two. We're going to try to get some more unpacking done, but that's about it. I don't think anything is open today since it's Labour Day.

Finally in Our New Place

2009-09-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

I know it's been a while since I posted. It's been a trying few days because of the move, it's been busy and stressful. So I decided blogging could wait until things settled down a bit. Get comfy, it's going to be a long entry!

We were supposed to start the move on Monday afternoon, but we couldn't get the elevator so we were stuck just moving the little stuff. We started the real move at 6:30pm on Tuesday. We had been supposed to move in on Monday as the previous tenants had moved out on the 27th. The landlord was supposed to come and replace the floors which had sustained all kinds of damage under the last tenants, reglaze the bathtub, replace the vanity in the bathroom, replace the screens on the doors and just do general repairs, and then everything was supposed to be ready for us to move out on the 31st and new tenants could move into our old place on the first. Just like clockwork, right?

Well apparently the old tenants had decided not to turn in their keys on the 27th (presumably so they wouldn't have to face the landlord given how much damage there was to the apartment) even though they had vacated. So the landlord didn't do any of the repairs. When I first walked in to the apartment I was disgusted by the condition of the floors, many areas were black with water damage and many tiles were missing.

But they needed us out of our old place, so we had to move in. The landlord said our floors would still be done, but it would require that we move all of our stuff out of the living area and vacate the apartment for 24 hours because the varnish would need time to dry. What a pain. I had been so looking forward to finally unpacking all of our stuff after a month of living out of boxes, but it was apparently not to be. At least not yet.

Luckily the bedroom floor is in good condition so it doesn't need to be refinished. We arranged with the landlord that we would do the floors next Friday (after we've had a chance to unpack and stow as much as we can into cupboards and closets). We will move as much stuff as we can into the bedroom, bathroom and part of the kitchen, and anything that's left we'll stow in the storage rooms downstairs. Not looking forward to this but if it's that or have disgusting floors, I feel like we have to go along with it.

We had expected to have three people helping us move, but Brandon was the only one who showed up. We were grateful to have his help. Elevator full after elevator full, we trudged along moving our stuff to our new floor. Brandon could only stay until 9:30 so we started with all of the furniture that took both of them to carry. After he left, John and I kept plugging away and didn't finish until about midnight. I was so exhausted both physically and mentally because I had been packing all day and moving all night. I had blisters all over my hands and feet and scratches all over my arms from the boxes, and I was pretty much in a daze, asleep on my feet.

But we weren't done yet. There was still cleaning to be done. And the landlord would be stopping by in the morning to show our floors to the contractor, so we needed to move our stuff around within the apartment to show the areas of worst damage and to clear walkways.

So John offered to do the cleaning and headed back to the old place while I stayed in the new place and set up the bed, the coffee maker (because John had to work the next day), and the bathroom. I rearranged boxes to take up less space and then headed back to the old apartment where John was just finishing up. Exhausted, we walked back to our new place together and fell into a very sound sleep.

The dean's assistant had called me earlier that day and left me a message, upset that someone had told me I would need to wait at the school to get a spot. Of course I had already quit my job at that point. I was really annoyed by her message because she seemed really concerned about hunting down the person who told me that, so that they wouldn't tell anyone else on the waiting list the same thing, but not at all concerned with what I should be doing instead to try to get in. What I mean is that the waiting list is still gone, so if an opening comes up (which I'm told can happen during the first two weeks of class) there has to be some way that they're deciding who gets in, but she didn't mention anything about that, basically indicating that I should just let it go because the odds are stacked against me. I felt as though I was being dismissed as she attempted to resolved her internal issues. This compounded with the fact that I still haven't received any resolution from the letter I wrote to the dean's office, nor received any updates to the investigation they said they were doing (from her message it sounded like they were no longer working on it) made me feel reluctant to turn in anyone in the admissions department since I feel like they have at least been willing to work with me on this. So I haven't called her back.

I instead called back my contact in admissions. We worked out that rather than actually going in and sitting around all day, I would call in every morning to check for openings and provide my phone number so that I could be called back if anything came up in the afternoon. She said that if an opening comes up, she will call me right away. I'm not sure what happens after that, but I feel like it's my best option at this point. I called in every day this week and so far there have been no openings. They said that classes start next week so it's more likely that if anyone is going to drop out, they will do it then. My hope level is at about 4% right now.

The second last thing to go wrong on moving day was when we tried to get the phone and internet switched to our new apartment. John had called in at the start of the month to arrange it and was told that because we were moving within the same building, it would just be a matter of flipping a switch in their computer system, no technician would need to come out. So on moving day we called in so they could flip the switch. We were told that they had to send out a technician and because it's back to school month, no one could come out until Monday. The call centre agent blamed us for the delay "You should have called in last week!". After waiting on hold for half an hour for a supervisor (since we were misinformed), we were told one would call us back that night. Of course no one called. And so our phone and internet are disconnected for six days.

The last thing to go wrong is that a little wicker basket went missing during the move. Inside the basket were all of this month's bills, our two Nintendo DS's, John's camera, the remote control to the TV, our wireless router and John's cell phone. None of us remember removing it from the apartment and it wasn't there when John did the cleaning and I did the out inspection. But it wasn't in the new apartment either. My head started swimming as I worked out the cost to replace its contents.

Wednesday morning started at the crack of dawn as John left for work. I got dressed and headed to the rental office for the out inspection. Everything was fine. Then I tried to make my morning call to the school admissions office only to discover that the automated phone system ("press 1 to enter an extension") didn't recognize when I pushed the buttons on my cell phone. And of course my land line was disconnected. You would have laughed to see me, I tried everything to make it work. I even plugged in my home phone, held it up to my cell phone and dialed the extension on my home phone hoping the system would recognize it. No luck. I ended up hunting down a payphone. Did you know they cost 50 cents now?

I started plugging away at unpacking. I put together some of the Ikea furniture. At about 2pm, Erin and Alan showed up! They were on their way home from New York and had been in Niagara Falls that morning. They came to spend a night with us before returning to Halifax. I was so happy to see them!

We had lots of fun. We went for lunch, and then came home and lounged around, getting caught up. I showed them around the neighbourhood and we did some shopping. Erin got some really cute earrings.

When we got home, John was already here. We headed to the Pickle Barrel for supper. John and I shared some fajitas and for dessert we ordered a sampler of six different desserts that we all shared. It was really fun!

From there we headed across the street to Absolute Comedy and watched I think six comedians perform. They were okay but not as funny as the last time we went, which was a bit disappointing. It was more of the really crude, shocking humour and less of the clever, truly funny humour, if that makes sense. We came home and went to bed early because Erin and Alan had to be back on the road early the next morning.

In the morning (Thursday), we said our goodbyes, Erin and Alan headed home and John headed for work, so I was alone in the apartment. I tore the place apart looking for the basket. I looked everywhere! I was starting to think it wasn't here.

I got lots of unpacking done, most of the bedroom. I couldn't finish it because we're waiting to put the shelving unit up until after floors are done because we don't want to unpack anything that takes up floor space. I managed to move all of the furniture into the places where it belongs instead of scattered around randomly. I got the basics in the kitchen unpacked as well. The superintendent came over and did some repairs and a contractor came in to reglaze the bathtub (meaning we couldn't use it for 24 hours). I felt good about my day's work.

When John came home I asked him to see if he could find the basket, thinking maybe I'd missed something. He searched the place and came up empty handed. We went to a little 50's restaurant for supper(called Mars Diner) since the kitchen wasn't fit to use yet. I ordered a milkshake and it came with two straws but John was unwilling to have a sharing-a-milkshake-with-two-straws moment with me, lol. Our verdict was that the prices were too high for what you get (I had a grilled cheese sandwich and what tasted like McCain Superfries), so we probably won't go back there. We just laid low for the rest of the evening.

Friday was a crappy day because as anyone who knows me can attest, I'm neurotic about needing to shower every day.

I started the day by making signs advertising our lost basket. I put one next to the elevators on this floor and one next to the elevators on our old floor. Then I got to work unpacking the kitchen. I worked on it until about 3:00pm and still wasn't finished. It definitely feels like there is more room in there than in our old kitchen though. The shelves and cart we bought at Ikea fit perfectly and look kickass. I'll take a picture when it's finished. I think I'll be able to fit almost all of our stuff in this kitchen, and considering how much kitchen stuff we have, that's really saying something.

Contractors showed up around 2:00pm to put in the new bathroom vanity. They were done in about and hour but after they left I realized they didn't install a toilet paper holder! They just set the toilet paper on top of the vanity so I know they noticed that there was nowhere to put it. John's going to put in a request with the rental office to get one installed. I'm tired of dealing with them.

3:30 came and went and I was freaking out. It had been 29 hours since my last shower. I couldn't wait anymore so I went down to the rental office and asked the woman working there to send someone up to replace the bathtub fixtures so it could be used again. She was like "We'll have someone come up sometime next week." It took all of my self control not to flip out, giving her the benefit of the doubt that she didn't know what she was talking about. Eventually I convinced her to call the superintendent who said he would be up right away. He fixed the tub and replaced one of the screen doors while he was here. By 5:00pm I was finally clean, dressed and ready to start my day.

John got home and the kitchen still wasn't ready to cook in, so we headed down to Bloor & Young. We hit up the Canadian tire there for picture hangers, hooks, linseed oil (because John wants to finish the Ikea cart in the kitchen in case something spills on it. It's untreated right now), and drop sheets to block the doorways when they refinish the floor and keep dust from getting in the kitchen. Then we went to a small Thai restaurant called Indochine that was nearby.

I wanted to like this place, I really did. It was beautifully set up, the prices were good, the food was beautiful and the ingredients were fresh. But the food tasted off. It was like the chef had different tastes from us. The pad Thai was too tart, the hot and sour soup was too tomato-ey, the beef dish John ordered had a flavour in it that I swear was shrimp and the rice was over cooked. So my quest for a good pad Thai in Toronto continues. I know I will find it eventually.

We came home and vegged for the rest of the night. John had to be up for diving in the morning (His first Ontario dive!!!) so he went to bed early.

I woke up to John shaking me. "Put your robe on!", he urged, putting my arms through the sleeves. He picked me up, still half asleep, and carried me to our front door. "Look!", he said.

I looked down and there was our basket with my sign taped to the top! It was taped to a jigsaw puzzle box that as soon as I saw it, realized had also been missing. And there was another box next to those. John had to go diving, so I brought everything in. Everything was still in the basket, nothing was missing!

I sat and stared at everything, puzzling. Someone had seen our sign and returned it. They had come in the very middle of the night because I had been up past midnight and John had been up at 7am. They had clearly opened the basket and gone through it because the items were not arranged as I had packed them. The pieces of paper I had laid on the bottom were on the sides now. And they had taped it to the puzzle box, I hadn't done that. When I looked in the cardboard box, it was full of our stuff, but I'm sure I didn't put that stuff in a box, I think it had been out loose. And the box was unfamiliar and not filled to the top and I always fill boxes to the top. So they had done that too. But they had cared enough about doing the right thing to return it. And had somehow figured out which apartment is ours even though I didn't put it on the sign.

I've mulled it over and it seems there are a few plausible explanations. I believe the most likely is that a couple saw our stuff next to the elevator and thought it was just left there by people moving out so they took some things. I think it was a couple because they took a big pink puzzle so there was probably a girl, and given the amount of stuff it seems like two people could carry it without feeling like it was a lot of stuff, one person would have been loaded down. I also think that when there are two people involved, it's easier to decide to do the right thing. I think they may have seen the sign, realized that these things were missed and returned them in the night wanting to be anonymous. Although that doesn't answer the question as to how they knew which apartment was ours.

I can think of other explanations that work, but I would love to hear anyone else's theories!

I'm just so happy to have our stuff back!

So because of all that, I was up early this morning when there was a knock at the door. It was the flooring guy coming to do our floors. He looked at the big mess in the apartment behind me and then looked at my incredulous face. I was like "We said next Friday, remember?". He said "I know! But the landlord called me last night and said I was to come today."

Another miscommunication by the rental office. I've lost count of them by now. The contractor and I were on the same page though, so that was a good thing. He'll be back next Friday.

So now it's time to start my day! John's at Niagara all day, diving the Niagara river. I made him promise me not to go near the falls. I plan to finish the kitchen, do some laundry, bake some banana bread (my first baking in over a month!) and go for a walk if I have time. I took the return of our stuff as a sign that our bad luck is turning around, so hopefully this will be a good day!

The Latest Update

2009-09-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

When I got home from work last night, John said that the school had called. They said that they're throwing the waiting list out the window and if anyone still wants a spot in the class, they have to show up on Wednesday morning and sit in the lobby. If any spots open up, it goes to someone who is present and waiting at the school. This will go on until Friday.

Obviously I am beyond frustrated given how much work it's been to deal with the whole waiting list thing to begin with and given that I was ranked 10 our of 350 on it so I'm losing a good spot on it. And I'm frustrated because I never did get an update from the dean's investigation.

But it's the only chance I have at this so I have to go. And maybe if I'm lucky no one else will show up (although I believe this to be quite unlikely).

So after discussing it over with John, we decided I should quit my job. I was told in the training that we would be fired for missing any time within the first four weeks and I will need at minimum Wednesday morning off and at most Wednesday through Friday off. So if I'm fired anyway we figured that I should take today off as well since it's our moving day. I talked to Jess and she said she thinks this is what I should do as well. She believes there are tonnes of jobs in Toronto and I won't have trouble finding a new one.

So I'm officially out of a job. I called the recruiting department last night to tell them I wouldn't be coming in today. Worst case scenario I find myself on Friday afternoon with no job and no school. Best case, I get into school.

Not holding my breath on this one.

I appreciate weekends a lot more now that I'm employed

2009-08-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

We had a fun weekend.

On Friday night we met up with Jess and lots of her friends at a little place at King & Young called the Beer Bistro. John was in heaven, they had the biggest list of beer we've ever seen. And I got to try Kobe beef for the first time. Kobe beef comes from a certain part of Japan and is considered to be the best beef in the world, so I've always wanted to try it. However, the beef was in the form of delicious tacos (in blue shells!) so it was too spiced for me to really appreciate whether it tastes different from regular beef. Next time, maybe!

We had a really nice time, there were people there I hadn't seen since college. I was tired though, from the week of early mornings, so we didn't go with them when they went dancing afterwards, we came home instead and went to sleep.

We were supposed to move this weekend but the tenants in our new apartment never ended up turning in their keys so it was not to be. We'll be moving on Tuesday night instead. But on the bright side, it meant we got our weekend all to ourselves!

On Saturday we had a lazy morning. John made the most amazing steak and cheese omelettes with bacon, pepper and tomatoes. He spoils me. We walked down to the Metro for some groceries and puttered around Futureshop for a bit.

After that we headed down to Union Station and caught a street car to the Exhibition Grounds for the Canadian National Exhibition. What a big fair!!

I am a sucker for midway games. I love them so much! There had to be over 50 of them, probably closer to 75. We fired water guns, threw skeeballs, broke plates, tossed rings, whacked moles and threw darts. I loved it. John won me a big talking horse and a smaller plushie lion (he's very good at breaking plates and whacking moles). They're both super soft and squishy. I won a smaller lion and tiger by myself. And somewhere along the way, John won a little plushie penguin.

After we played our games, we headed over to the rides. John went on all of the scary ones, he's fearless. He went on the ones that go upside down, the ones that drop you from the sky and the ones that spin you around up in the air, and then his only comment afterwards is "I'm really impressed by how well these rides are made. The seats are ergonomic!" But between you and me *lowers voice*, when I took his hand afterwards, they were cold and clammy, so I think it was at least a little exciting for him. I stuck to the less scary rides.

By the time we did all that, it was almost 7:30 so we went into one of the huge buildings also filled with fair stuff. We walked through a huge trade show exhibition of consumer goods and electronics. We didn't have much time to walk through but I did manage to stop at the Konad kiosk and get one of my fingernails stamped. That stuff is so cool! We also checked out a houseplant competition (I'm a nerd) and a sand castle competition.

At the other end of the exhibition was the theatre, it turned out to be a big ice rink. We got great seats and waited for the show to start. At first it seemed kind of cheesy. There was a screen on one end that showed still frames from a movie and a singer singing a song from the movie's soundtrack. Then some ice skaters would come out and do a little act.

But then an aerial acrobat came out and she was amazing. She flipped around a bar way up in the air and tangeled herself up in ribbons that were attached to it. It was so beautiful to watch, but I was so worried she would fall.

After that it was easy to get lost in the magic. Elvis Stojko was there skating, he spun so fast I felt like what I was seeing wasn't real. John said it was the first time Elvis had skated in a show in years and he looked like he was having a good time. I was thinking where else can you go and pay $33 for a whole day of amazing fun and have a show starring an Olympian included in the price of admission?

But the star of the show in my opinion was the aerial acrobat on the ring. She spun so fast and at one point was only hanging from the ring by the back of her neck. I can't imagine how strong she must be. It was really an amazing show.

As we wandered out of the rink, we must have gone a different way from how we came in because we ended up in a huge warehouse filled with shopping. There were racks and racks and racks of cheap clothes from Stitches, Suzy Shier, Levis, French Connection, Urban Outfitters and more. And by cheap I mean $1 - $3 for a shirt. The catch was that there was nowhere to try them on. There were also bins and bins of drugstore cosmetics and nail polishes for $1 each, lots of CoverGirl, Maybelline and Sally Hansen. We didn't take much time to shop though, because there was still so much more that we wanted to do.

We headed back outside for a light show because by this time it was dark. We found a booth selling ice cream sandwiches made with waffles they were making on site. They were so yummy!

The light show was kind of neat. They were basically showing the history of evolution in images on the front of the Direct Energy building. We didn't stay for the whole thing though, just from first life on Earth up to sea turtles.

We headed back to the midway. I did some midway gambling, the kind with the big spinning wheels like crown and anchor. I played at five or six tables and came out up a dollar. Then we went and did a whole bunch of rides one after another; bumper cars twice, a haunted house, tilt-a-whirl (I forgot how much it is!) and a night time spin on the ferris wheel.

By the time we had done all that, we were tired and ready to go home. With queasy bellies from a day of junk food and jarring rides and a zoo's worth of stuffed animals, we got on the streetcar and headed back downtown. We stopped at the Metro to pick up some healthy food, went home and conked out for the rest of the evening. We didn't even have the energy to go down the street to watch the fights.

But I had a great day. It was definitely the most fun I've ever had at a fair and it was the first time a boy has ever won me a giant stuffed animal. And we didn't even see everything! There was a dog show, a horse show and a whole section of animals that we missed, not to mention a big food area and a beer tent. There were all kinds of shows going on that we didn't see, so there will be lots new to do if we go back next year.

Today we took it pretty easy. The only really interesting thing that we did was to go see Inglourious Basterds. I think it was probably the best movie I've seen by Quentin Tarintino. I didn't like it as much as District 9 though.

Tonight we will make perogies, do some of the packing and watch TV. Sounds good to me.

Pictures!

2009-08-29T06:24:00.001-07:00

Judy happens to be a bit of a photographer, so when she and Allan came to visit, she took lots of pictures of our neighbourhood! You may have already seen them on Facebook, but here they are again, just in case you missed them.

Here we are with Allan on top of the roof of our building. The whole thing is set up so you can walk around up here, it's about 25 stories up. There are chaises if you feel like sun bathing and a rooftop indoor pool.
Here is our view of the downtown core. What I was most surprised by when we first went out on the roof, was that our view is almost entirely trees. I still don't understand it because when I actually walk around the city, all I see are are streets and buildings, but from this high up, all that you see are trees everywhere with a few pockets of buildings here and there. John says those are the subway stations.

This is our view of Eglinton West. It's the street I travel every day to get to work. It's lined with shops on both sides, so when you're actually on the street it looks very commercial, but up here it looks like beyond the main drag is suburbs, maybe.

And here it is at night. At night our view is almost all black with a few brightly lit streets here and there.
Here's another one that was taken during the storm, looking out southwest.
The next picture is what you see when you walk outside. It's a walkway that leads to the mall and at noon it's filled with people in suits lounging around eating lunch.
And this is the sign out front. Look for it if you come to visit us!
And lastly, here is a shot from inside our subway station.
So, as you can see, we're very much in the city, surrounded by concrete and tall buildings, which is exactly where I want to be. But there are lots of parks around and the transit system is great, so we can surround ourselves with nature if we want to too.

Some School News! Just a Tiny Bit Though

2009-08-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

As I was working my way through my third day in training, someone from George Brown College called my apartment!

It was the dean's assistant. She wanted to let me know that the dean had been on vacation the past few weeks (I knew this) which is why he hadn't responded to my email. She said that he apologizes that I've had such a bad experience and has tasked someone in admissions with investigating what happened with my application and whether or not anything can be done about.

It's the best news I've heard all week. In three weeks in fact.

Even if they don't left me in, I will feel better knowing that at least the dean cares and at least someone made an honest effort to see if they can fix this for me. It's the first time since this whole mess started that I've felt like I was actually in communication with the right person. I really hope they let me in. Classes start next week. I feel like my hope level is at about 20% right now which is an improvement over the 5% I felt yesterday.

The reason I haven't posted in a few days is just that I've been too tired. I've been waking up at 5:30am every morning which is proving to be a difficult adjustment for me. My evenings have just been a waste.

I'm finding that the days at work feel really long, but I'm working on shifting my attitude and trying to be more positive about this. Slowly but surely. Hopefully by the end of the week I will be in a better headspace. I've made some friends at work though, so that's a good thing.

First Day of My New Job

2009-08-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 5:15am. My first thought was to panic.

I can be a bit irrational when it comes to testing out a commute to a new workplace for the first time. Even though John and I did a test run on the weekend, I still ended up feeling and acting neurotic.

I left the house at 6:40am to be there for 7:45am, knowing that it took 30 minutes door to door on the test run. I got there half an hour early. Tomorrow I'll try leaving at 6:55 and see how that goes. It was training all day. And by all day I mean ten hours and fifteen minutes.

I won't say much else about it. I don't necessarily feel that it's a good idea to post honest thoughts about your place of employment on the interwebs. You all know my email and phone number anyway.

I was exhausted when I got home. I'm not used to waking up that early and getting home that late. So I decided it was a good night for Erin to buy us a pizza. Thanks Erin! I watched last night's episode of True Blood and John and I went to the Metro for some groceries.

Almost bed time, another early start tomorrow!

More Guests!

2009-08-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

About 20 minutes before Alan and Judy left, I got a phone call from my best friend Jess! She had just arrived in Toronto from Calgary!

We met at Bloor & Young. It was the first time I'd seen her in over a year. We headed to a restaurant near Bloor & Bay called Hemmingway's for martinis. I had never been there before and it was really nice. They had two levels of rooftop patios, so we went all the way to the top ordered some quesadillas, potato skins and drinks. Everything was really good, but the service was slow (probably because we were seated so far from the kitchen). We stayed through two martinis getting caught up on her life in Calgary and my new life in Toronto. All is well with her, she has a great job but she said she missed Toronto.

On the way back to the subway station we stopped at a fabric store and picked up some green cotton with kitchsy teal and grey flowers so that I could sew her an apron. It was really cute.

We came back to my place so that she could see the apartment and say hi to John. We were only here for a few minutes before we headed back out to the movies to see Julie and Julia. It was okay, Meryl Streep was fantastic, but it wasn't great and the ending was anticlimatic.

By the time we got back to the apartment, it was time to head out again, this time to a club called Sacco that's about a block away. There we met Christa and Jenn, whom I haven't seen since university. It was really nice to see them again!

Yonge & Eglinton, where I live, is also known as Young & Eligible because it's an area full of young professionals. The bar had a martini by the same name, so I figured that now that I'm a local, I had better try it. I forget what was in it, but I do remember that it reminded me why I don't really care for peach schnapps. But I couldn't complain because the drinks were over 3 ounces.

So we sat around and swapped stories for a few hours and a few drinks. I got to hear all about Christa's wedding, and we talked about what we had been up to for the past while and reminisced about the times the four of us had hung out in Halifax. It was really nice to get caught up and reconnect with people I hadn't seen in such a long time.

On Saturday, John and I had decided to pay a visit to Chinatown because I really wanted to see it. First though, we went to take a trial run to my work to get an idea of how long my commute takes. It took us a while to figure out where to catch the bus, but eventually a bus driver took pity on us and showed us where the station was. Apparently the bus runs ever 3 minutes during rush hour. Crazy, right? We caught the bus and rode it to Eglinton West station and took the subway from there to Lawrence West. The trip took half an hour so I'm going to hope that giving it 50 minutes will be enough to take traffic into account and still make it on time. Apparently we're getting a street car over the same stretch of road by the end of the fall, so then it will be quicker.

On to Chinatown! We took the subway to Bloor & Spadina and headed south, but we sort of detoured into Kensington Market.

I had heard a lot about the market so I was interested to see it. In my head I pictured a huge farmer's market but in actuality it's a series of streets with really quaint little shops. They sell everything from organic food to locally made art. It's sort of a hippy area. We didn't go through the whole thing because then we wouldn't have made it to Chinatown, but what we saw was pretty neat. We stopped for lunch at a little sushi restaurant in the area and I think it was the best sushi I've had since we got here. They had a vegetable tempura maki roll that was really delicious.

From there we headed to Chinatown. Oh my, there was so much to see! I was most impressed by the kitchen supply shops that carried every Asian cooking implement I could think of. The grocery stores were amazing as well but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was near things I was looking for but because I don't speak the language, I couldn't identify them. For example in one store there were packages of fresh herbs, and although I thought I recognized many of them, I couldn't be 100% sure they were what I thought they were since it was the first time I had ever actually seen them. And of course, none of them were labelled. I did find one shop that sells banana blossoms though, which I thought was pretty cool. I have some recipes that use these that I want to try now.

We walked around for hours visiting the little shops and two Asian malls. The Chinatown festival was going on as well so a section of Spadina was blocked off and full of performers and kiosks. Because we had spent so much time at Kensington, we didn't have time to fully explore that area either. When I checked my watch it was 7:30pm. Where had the afternoon gone?

We headed home after that. I was exhausted from the day in the sun and the fact that we had been going pretty much non-stop since Tuesday. We were supposed to go out dancing with Jess that night, but I just didn't have the energy so I had to cancel. We spent the evening tucked on the couch watching movies on TV.

This morning we were up pretty early. I finished up the apron I made for Jess and we went to Bathurst & Bloor to meet her for brunch at a place called Butler's Pantry. The eggs benny were great and the hashbrowns were shaped like adorable triangles. We were joined by Aseem and Neeti, friends of Jess that I hadn't seen since university when Jess was living on Queen Street. It turns out the Aseem plays squash so he and John made plans to play.

From there we went to a store called Honest Ed's that is like a giant BiWay. They sell everything you can think of and they sell it for really cheap. And the decor is gaudy like nothing I have every seen. There was the most gigantic, frightening grandmother clock in one the stairwells. It was about ten feet tall, and at the top was a psychotic looking deer head with giant eyes bulging out of it's head. The rest of the clock was carved with various images including a dead rabbit. And to add to it's freakiness there was a layer of dust on it about an inch thick.

Apparently Ed was an immigrant who came to Toronto and wanted to make a place where everyone could get anything they need for little money. Once a year (Thanksgiving I think?), people would line up for blocks and he would give them each a free chicken. Now there's a village named after him.

Next we walked to Kensington where Jess was meeting Riley. It was getting late in the day so John and I didn't stay. We headed to Bloor & Bay to check out a Winners that Jess had recommended to me when we went out for drinks. I had a hard time finding it (my sense of direction is still pretty shaky), but it was worth looking for. It is the nicest Winners I have ever seen, they carry some really high end stuff. John and I both found a couple of work shirts so it was worth the trip.

We went home after that and ordered in some Thai food for dinner. There's a website, http://www.just-eat.ca, where you type in your postal code and it gives you a list of restaurants from which you can order delivery online. You don't even have to call in, it's great. We ordered from a place called Mai Thai and when it got here, it was the best pad Thai I've had since we got here (I've had two that weren't great before this one, they were too tomato-y). I felt like ordering in so that I would have time to do my chores tonight and leftovers for lunch tomorrow since it's my first day of work.

Dad called to check in on me which was nice. He told me that hurricane Bill was no big deal despite the media's warnings for the past three days. It was nice to hear news from home, it makes me feel like I'm a part of it. I'm not homesick per se. I'm quite happy to be in Toronto. But I do miss my family and friends at home.

Our First Houseguests!

2009-08-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

After two and half years, I have finally met some of John's family!

John's brother Allan and his girlfriend Judy came from Orillia (sp?) to spend a couple of days with us. Although we're not unpacked yet, we managed to put together a place to sleep for them and to find four seats for us to sit on. They arrived late Wednesday afternoon, so John left work a bit early. We went for dinner at a pub called Scruffy's on Eglinton and had some drinks and nachos and got introduced.

Prior to Wednesday, in my mind Allan was just the subject of legends. I had heard so many crazy tales of John's childhood and the trouble he would get into with his big brother. And more recently, whenever John would go away to pay him a visit, he would come home battered and bruised, telling me that they like to practice their various MMA and judo moves on each other whenever they get together,

"Jacki, I learned a new throw from Allan, want to see it?"

"If you're asking if I'd like to be thrown, no thank you. I will take your word for it that it's awesome."

So when it was finally time to meet him, I was a bit nervous. As it turns out, as the legends tell, he is in fact a big guy with a big personality, but my overall feeling is that he's a friendly, funny guy. And Judy is really great as well. I really enjoyed having them as company for the past few days.

After nachos at Scruffy's we headed to the comedy club across the street from our apartment, called Absolute Comedy. It was amateur night so we got to see six comedians perform. We were sitting in the very front row so of course we got heckled. I have to say that the amateur comics here are much better than any we saw at Ginger's tavern in Halifax (with the exception of Mark Little). At some points I was laughing so hard I started crying and so did John.

After the comedy show we headed across the street to Main Event for some karaoke. Allan is a great singer so when he heard I've been known to sing a tune or two at karaoke he said he definitely wanted to go. John and I were happy to check out Main Event anyway since we had never been there and apparently it's a bar you can go to for UFC fights.

We had fun at karaoke, although the sound quality wasn't great. It was hard to hear the singers. Allan sang Rebel Yell by Billy Idol and I sang Over My Head by the Fray. Judy doesn't sing and despite my best attempts, I have not yet been able to convince John to sing a duet with me. John and I left shortly after that because John had to work early in the morning and there was a long wait to get up and sing so it would have been over an hour before Allan was able to sing again.

Have I mentioned how much I love that on any night of the week I can leave my apartment and go to a comedy club and a karaoke bar without going more than half a block from my apartment? This neighbourhood is incredible.

The next morning (Thursday), John had to work, so I spent the day with Allan and Judy. We lounged around for a bit in the morning and then we went out to do some shopping so they could explore the neighbourhood.

Yonge Street goes on forever. We probably walked up it for about 45 minutes, and there was no end to this part of the shopping district, before turning around and walking back down the other side of the street. We visited all kinds of little shops and then stopped for lunch. After lunch we explored the mall attached to my building and they decided to see a movie. I went home for that since I had already seen most of the movies playing.

John got home before they did. We made some bagel sandwiches and hung out on the couch until they came home. Allan had offered to make dinner, so we hung out with Judy while he slaved away in the kitchen. He made us ceasar salads and some kind of chicken penne with a curry cream sauce and pineapple. It was excellent. And he made a ton so there is still lots left in the fridge.

After supper it was already pretty late, so we headed out again to yet another karaoke bar, this time one called Gabby's that was about a 15 minute walk away. The atmosphere in this place was a lot cozier and the sound quality was better. I sang Womanizer by Britney Spears and Girl's Not Grey by AFI (my favorite song to sing). Allan sang a couple of Nirvana songs and Paralyzer by Finger Eleven before John and I left, although I think he sang a couple after we left as well. He sounded much better that night than the night before and I think I did too.

We had to leave early to pick up tickets for something called the CNE. I'm not sure exactly what that is but apparently the price of the ticket includes rides, so I think it must be some kind of fair. As I write this and feel like an idiot, it occurs to me that maybe I should ask John for more details when he is planning our fun. Although he's never steered me wrong so I'll probably just keep going with it, content in my obliviousness.

Anyway, the point is that the tickets were on sale until midnight so we had to leave early. We bought them at 11:55pm, just under the wire. Then we headed home for sleeps.

John had to work early again this morning so he woke his brother from some groggy hugs before he left. I made breakfast for the three of us and then we went upstairs to the pool. Allan and Judy went for a swim and I laid out on the roof reading.

After we got back to the apartment, Allan and Judy packed up their stuff and headed off for the myriad of bus transfers on their journey back to Orillia. It was really great to meet them and I think they had a good visit with us as well. Judy said she wants to move here, so it can't have been all bad. It's a nice feeling to know we have some immediate family less than two hours away, makes it feel a little more like home.

More Weekend Stuff

2009-08-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we decided to hunt down a Wal-Mart so I could pick up a hot plate to use with my new donabe. We found one on the subway line at the Dufferin Mall. Sure enough, they had hot plates for $12. Awesome.

There was a Winners in the mall so we headed over there too. John found some shirts, I found a pair of sunglasses and some much needed brown wedge sandals that I can wear to work. I have a ridiculous tan line on my feet that is evidence to the fact I haven't worn sandals all summer (I just didn't have a decent pair), so hopefully that's about to change. They were 75% off too. The Winners here isn't nearly as picked over as the ones in Halifax, there was all kinds of brand name stuff.

We had planned to head downtown to the Toronto After Dark film festival, but we had so much that we were carrying, we headed home first and dropped off our stuff. Then we headed back down to Bathurst Street W and bought our tickets for a film called Warlords that John wanted to see.

We had some time to kill before the film started and we hadn't really eaten all day, so we decided to track down a late brunch. We popped into a little bakery/cafe and ordered some eggs benny. The atmosphere was cute and summery, the waitress was friendly and attentive, and as John put it, the food we were served was probably the worst meal we've had since we've been in Toronto. The bread was stale, there were shells in the eggs, the ham was burnt and the iced tea was so terrible that I couldn't put my finger on exactly what they had done wrong. If I had to guess, I would say they left out the sugar and lemon and brewed the tea too weakly.

But we ate it anyway because we were hungry and we didn't really have time to find another place. I couldn't drink the tea though.

We headed back to the theatre. The film we were seeing was one of I think 14 being shown as part of a horror festival. The festival was held in a beautiful old movie theatre with only one screen (think of the Oxford). The seats were all on the same level, rather than raised up stadium seating as you got closer to the back. I had never seen a theatre laid out that way before. It sort of messed with my perception of which seats were too close to the screen and which ones were just right.

For being part of a horror festival, I suspect this was the least horrific of the movies being shown. It was a story of a group of bandits in 1800's China that became solidiers and formed a legendary army, starring Jet Li (but without any kung fu). We both enjoyed it.

We decided to walk part of the way home afterwards. We walked east down Bloor and then north up Yonge. We saw all kinds of things; parts of the U of T campus, the ROM, all of the expensive stores at Bloor & Bay like Tiffany, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, etc. Everything was closed of course since it was Sunday evening. All in all we walked the distance of about 6 subway stations and it took about 45 minutes. So that helped me get a better understanding of how big the downtown core is. Some day this will all be second nature to me.

I talked to Erin on the telephone when I got home, so that was nice. We heated up some of the barbecue pork buns from the market the day before and watched TV for the rest of the evening. It was a good weekend.

Today it is so hot that I was already breaking into a sweat by 10am.

Banana trees are pretty neat. At night they soak up the water in the soil around them. It travels through the leaves and in the morning, you can see little drips of water falling from the tips of the leaves. I realized today that my banana tree hasn't done this since we moved to Toronto despite the fact that I give it two cups of water every day. So I'm a little worried about it. I've decided to start giving it two cups twice daily to see if that helps. All of my plants are suffering in this heat though.

I knew it was only going to get worse so I decided that today was a good day to go check out the (air conditioned) library that is across the street from our building. It turns out it's actually quite nice! I stayed for a couple of hours going through their sewing books. I found several books from the Singer collection of sewing books that I wanted to check out, so I went and got a shiny new library card. I haven't had one of these since I was a kid.

I got back home and finished the skirt I was working on. Despite all of the challenges I had making it, it turned out awesome. The patterns match up better than I expected and it looks perfectly tailored. I'm really pleased with it. The only problem is that it is much, much to small for me. I didn't understand how I could be so off with my measurements so I've been looking at some different sizing guides and all I can figure is that sizes on patterns in no way reflect pant sizes. So I think that what would be a size 6 at the store is actually a size 12 or 14 on a sewing pattern. I'm not completely sure though, so if anyone can help me out with this, please feel free to comment!

Nonetheless, I'm still really proud of how it turned out and I learned a lot by making it. Hopefully next time I can make something that fits!

I think I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon doing housework so that things are tidy when John gets home. I think we're probably staying in tonight.

Movies, Asian Grocery Shopping and New Dishes

2009-08-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we didn't get up to much. I did accept that job offer at the call center, I start in just over a week (at 7:45am no less!). I spent most of the day trying to sew a skirt with some leftover fabric I had. I thought it would be a good learning experience and I was right. It's not quite finished yet, but I've learned:

How to use fusable interfacing
How to read a pattern and how to transfer it to fabric
Twill tape and bias tape are not the same thing
Measure your fabric before cutting out the pieces (I ran out so now the patterns don't match up)
My zipper sewing skills are inconsistent
I am currently hopeless at figuring out my measurements. I don't know where my waist is.

So I expect that when I have finished, the skirt will not fit and it will look a little sloppy, but making it has definitely been a worthwhile experience and I'm just out a meter or so of fabric that I probably wouldn't have used for anything anyway. And 99 cents for a zipper.

I've decided that if I'm going to waste a year in a call centre, I might as well learn to be an amazing seamstress as well so that I'll come out of this year with at least one new skill. I've got a few more projects in my head I want to try out and I hope to start taking sewing classes in the evenings this fall.

When John got home, we headed to the SilverCity theatre and saw District 9. What a great movie! I don't want to give anything away, so I won't say much other than that we both loved it and it gave us lots to think about. I hope they do a sequel!

This morning we slept in and made a leisurely breakfast of bacon, eggs, bagels, grapefruit and blueberry smoothies. I'm addicted to these bottled smoothies they sell at the grocery store. I've been drinking them pretty much non stop since we got here. I think it's a combination of the fact that we've been eating so much convenience food (because I'm trying hard not to unpack the kitchen) so my body is craving anything with real nutritional value and the fact that no matter how many liquids I drink, I seem to stay dehydrated. I don't understand it and John's saying he's noticed the same thing since we got here. I can drink 6 big glasses of water in a day and still be incredibly thirsty and feel dehydrated. Our best guess is that because the air is drier here than the ocean air we're used to, maybe it pulls more moisture from our bodies. Who knows?

After breakfast, John wanted to show me where he works and he wanted to show me the Asian grocery store and dish store in the attached mall. I gained a new appreciating for his commute as it was quite far away. We rode the subway all of the way to the end of the line, and then caught a bus from there. It was so hot out and so bright I was practically blinded. The bus ride was another 15 minutes but John said during rush hour it's closer to 35.

When we got there, we walked around the mall. We headed up to his office and I peeked in through the window of the locked door. I couldn't see much but at least now I know where it is if I ever want to come visit.

Next we headed to the Asian grocery store. It's called the T&T Supermarket, and it is amazing! It's about the size of a SuperStore, it's clean, bright and has all kinds of different sections. In the deli we picked up some dim sum steamed pork buns. In the bakery we picked up pretty much one of everything. I wanted to try so many things! The fish section was unbelievable. I'm used to a grocery store having one tank full of lobsters. This store had tanks and tanks filled with all sorts of crustaceans and fishes. One of the tanks held a live fish almost 3 feet long! There were all kinds of varieties of whole fishes on ice as well. I couldn't even take it all in, there were so many fish.

We puttered through the grocery sections, picking up a few odds and ends. I found agar agar, a form of gelatin I've always had trouble finding before and ube spread, which is a brilliant purple spread made from sweet potato yams (I've seen that you can make some crazy looking frosting with this stuff and I've always wanted to try it). We also picked up a couple of staples; noodles and a can of sweet red bean paste.

The produce section was incredible. They had so many wonderful veggies that I've never been able to get before. The meat section was the same way. They had fresh chinese sausage, sukiyaki beef and whole roasted ducks, none of which which I had ever been able to find in Halifax.

After we made our purchases, (Sadly I didn't get much because I don't want to have to move lots of food at the end of the month. John said I can just tell him what I need though, and he'll pick it up after work any time) we headed next door to this wonderful Asian dish shop called Utsuwa-no-Yakata.

So many beautiful dishes! They had stoneware, ceramics and lacquerware. They carried every type of Asian dish I could think of and a few I had never heard of. All of the pieces were heavy and felt like quality, well-made dishes. And the prices were lower than I could even believe. Dishes that I would have paid $25 for in Halifax are $7 here. Or less. I probably spent an hour just taking it all in.

In the end I settled on these. Everything looks small in this picture, but the dishes are actually fairly large.
John picked out the square plates that were $5 each. They are about 8" across and they look like planks of wood. I'm not sure what I will end up using them for but I know I always find myself short of pretty plates so I'm sure I will find something to do with them. The light brown pan is made to go from the oven or stove to the table and it was only $3 (it was the last one) so I figured why not. It will be good for cooking meats that need to be seared on the stove and then baked, or for baked side dishes like gratins.

I've been looking for bowls like the black ones for months, ever since John ordered the teriyaki bowl at Sushi Nami and it came in this type of bowl. It just looks so beautiful half filled with rice and then meat and veggies artfully arranged on top of that. Plus our current cereal bowls are terrible (they have the 1" lip around the bowl that makes it hard to sip the milk out of it at the end. Yes, we have no manners.) so I expect these bowls will do double duty.

And the piece de la resistance is my fabulous new donabe, a Japanese hot pot. I have wanted one of these for years! It is another dish that goes from stovetop to oven to the table. And if I can find a portable hot plate (do any of you know where to buy these?) I can use it to make sukiyaki or shabu shabu, which are sort of like Japanese versions of a fondue in that they are meals cooked at the table. I can't wait to try both of them!

I had only seen these a couple of times in Halifax, never looking particularly authentic (it would be like Wolfgang Puck's version or something like that) and always with a price tag of at least $80 and sometimes up to $160. The hotpot I bought today is exactly what I've wanted and it was a mere $30. Incredible.

The whole experience has completely renewed my enthusiasm for Asian cooking and I'm really excited to get back into it after the move in September. When I was in Halifax, I constantly had to find substitutions for ingredients I couldn't find or cooking techniques I didn't have the tools for, and it became tiresome. I could cook Asian food but it was so much work and so expensive to get it right. I think that now that I have the proper ingredients and tools readily available, it's going to be a whole lot easier and a lot of fun! I'm excited!

It was so hot out, so on the way home we stopped for Thai food at the food court in the subway station so that we could enjoy the air conditioning for a little longer before heading home to our oven of an apartment. John ordered a red curry and I ordered the mango salad. I've been ordering them everywhere we go, trying to find a good one to take the place of the salad served at Cha Baa Thai in Halifax that I love so much.

This wasn't it yet, the dressing wasn't quite right, but I was pleased to discovered that they had added fresh Thai basil to the salad. Thai basil tastes sort of like a mild licorice, so you might not think it goes with mango, but it was actually a really awesome combination. I was delighted to discover it. I've been growing a Thai basil plant since the start of the summer and haven't had a clue what to use if for, so now I have at least one idea!

By the time we got home, it was almost time for John to go meet Brandon for drinks so he took off and that's when I started blogging. I think I'm just going to take it easy for the rest of the night. Probably make a snack and watch some TV.

Taste Trippin'!!

2009-08-14T05:22:00.000-07:00

When I was going to one of my interviews on Wednesday, I walked through the mall at the Yonge & Bloor subway station, the Hudson's Bay Centre. At the time I was wearing uncomfortable shoes so I just walked right through it, but yesterday decided to go back and explore it properly.

It's so easy to get there from here! From the time I lock my door, it takes about four minutes to get on the subway, five minutes to get to that station, and that's it. The mall is in the station. The transit system here really is amazing, even though I don't have it all figured out yet. The subways run every four minutes, so you rarely have to wait for them for more than two. From there you can take a bus or a streetcar, and they come by really frequently as well, at least every ten minutes. Everything runs quickly and seamlessly. When I think of all of my long nights waiting at Lacewood station in Halifax for a bus that only ran once every hour, I'm amazed at how much better the system here is.

When I got to the Hudson's Bay Centre, I found that there were several smaller shopping centres attached to it, so I think I actually ended up exploring three or four malls. Most of the stores were unimpressive, but I did find an H&M, a MAC store, a nice hobby shop and a Fabricland. And of course, the Bay.

I was really happy to find the fabric store. Fabricland is a larger, generic fabric shop unlike the boutique style shops specializing in particular types of fabric that I found on Queen St W last week. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's run by the same company that runs Fabricville in the Maritimes as they use similar signage, have a similar loyalty program, etc. They had so much flannel there! It made me want to make pyjama pants. I didn't buy any though, because I remembered that I still have a couple of projects to do that I already have the materials for and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.

When I got home, I did my chores and then I started looking for something to wear out that night. I found two long denim skirts that I loved once upon a time but hadn't worn in probably four or five years because they were dated now. I tried one on and it was cute as a button but it was a really awkward length (halfway down my calves) that I think was only ever in style for a couple of months. So I decided to bring it up to date by hemming it up to a bit above the knee. I found this method of hemming jeans and it worked like a charm. It preserves the original hem so that you don't get one of those obvious homemade jean hems that look so terrible. I was really impressed with the results.

The skirt looked great when I was done. It's such a good feeling to find something in your closet you once loved and make it into something you can love again. I have to do this with more of my old clothes!

I made a quick supper of boiled corn on the cob and lemon chicken for when John came home, and then went off to a taste trippin' party!

This is something I have wanted to do for at least a year now. I was so excited! At a taste trippin' party you eat something called a Miracle Berry. It has a funny effect on your tongue that makes it so that everything sour tastes sweet for the next hour. I've been dying to know if it really works.

So we headed over to the Drake Hotel on Queen St W and were each presented with a berry in a shot glass and a sheet of instructions.
You put the berry in your mouth, remove the skin and pulp and let the seed rest on your tongue for two minutes. Spit it out, and two minutes later you're ready to go!

They had all kinds of foods to try. There were lemons, limes, oranges, sour soothers, pickles, cheeses, brussel sprouts, mustards and apple cider vinegar to drink. This had better work!

The lemons and limes tasted just like candy! I was amazed! The flavour of the limes was indistinguishable from sweetened limeade. The oranges were so sweet that I actually didn't care for them. Here's a picture of John sucking on a lemon. He normally has no tolerance for sour food so he was pretty excited too.Next I tried one of the pickles and a creamy cheese. I was disappointed to find that the restaurant had provided us with sweet gherkins and feta cheese, I wanted something with bite! Later I found out that they were in fact very, very sour pickles and sharp goat cheese, it was just that under the influence of the miracle berry, I honestly couldn't tell!

There was a gruyere cheese that tasted normal, the berry didn't seem to affect it. The sour soothers just tasted like regular candy, say Swedish berries. The mustards were intensified in flavour. I could barely eat them they were so strong! The brussel sprouts were delicious! They just tasted like yummy raw vegetable with none of the bitterness that makes uncooked brussel sprouts generally so unpalatable. And the vinegar had such a pleasant taste, unlike anything I've ever tasted before. John couldn't get enough of it.

The experience lasted about 20 or 25 minutes before it started to wear off. It lingered for about an hour after that, so the lemon wedges went from tasting like sweet candy to tasting like sour candy to tasting like sour lemons.

Here's a picture of the tasting area:
It was so packed, you could barely move. There was also a film crew there from The National trying to capture everyone's reactions. Here are our friends that came with us, Wanda and Bryan:

Afterwards we walked down the street to a bar called the Brooklyn for some drinks. They all tasted funny because of the berry. I had a cosmo and all I could taste was the vodka at first because the berry took away all of the bite of the lime and the cranberry. John's beer was sweet and delicious and without the bitter aftertaste. As time went on though and the berry wore of I realized it was actually a really well made cosmo and I actually didn't like John's beer after all.

On the way home we stopped so John could get a shwarma at a place down the street from us, came home and went to bed.

It was a really fun night. The fact that there are always cool events going on all over the city is something I'm really starting to love about Toronto.

Plan B

2009-08-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't given up on school 100%. I've still got, say...10% of my hope left. But it means that I need a plan if this doesn't work out.

So, as much as I hate to say it, I'm returning to call center work. But I swear I will only do this as full time work for one year. After that, I may switch to part time as I go to school, but that's it.

The way I see it, assuming I get into school next year at the latest, I'm in for two years as a poor student and then about three to five years as a struggling pastry chef. So I figure that if I'm not able to go to school this year, I should bank as much money as I can. Call center work and waitressing are the only ways I know to make money fast and I prefer the one that doesn't have me on my feet all day. If anyone has any better suggestions I would love to hear them!

So I went to a couple of interviews yesterday and I got offered two different jobs. One was doing outbound surveys and one was doing inbound sales. The sales one pays significantly more, so it was a pretty easy decision. They're running reference checks on me right now, so I should hear back in the next couple of days to finalize it. I would start on August 24th for four weeks of training, and then working after that.

While I sat in their lobby waiting, I couldn't help but feel that by accepting this job I was sealing my fate, condemning myself to call center work forever, but John keeps telling me not to lose sight of the fact that this is temporary and that I have a plan, it's just been delayed. He reminded me that who I am is a baker, this call center job is just something that I will do, not who I am. So I just keep reminding myself that this will only be temporary, and of how hard John is working every single day and I vow to keep my chin up and stay positive about this.

And there are lots of positive things about it. I will hopefully be able to save up enough money that I won't need student loans after all, or at least not for both years. I'll get to meet some new people and hopefully makes some new friends. And in the grand scheme of things, when I think of how I pictured our lifestyle here a month before the move, we are actually in a much better position and living more comfortably than we had initially expected. So I have no cause for complaint and nothing to be unhappy about.

I was surprised at how easy it was to find a job here. From the time I sent out three resumes, I had two interviews within about an hour and a half, and two job offers within 24 hours. Easy as punch. The hardest part was getting around the city in pumps after I hadn't worn high heels in about a year!

We went out for sushi last night so I could tell John about my interviews. There's an all-you-can-eat place just around the corner from us so we went to check it out. There was loads of food, but it wasn't very good, but the prices were very low. I ordered a bento box for $7.99 and I couldn't believe how big it was. It contained, 6 pc sushi, a cup of rice, miso soup, a big plate of salad, a spring roll, 6 pc veggie tempura, some kind of coconut and bean sprout salad, 2 pc agedashi tofu and some teriyaki chicken. It was huge! But I don't think we'll probably go back again. There are too many other places to try to go back to one that isn't amazing.

Sad News

2009-08-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

For about the 10th time since June, yesterday I set about trying to get any update as to what was going on with my wait list status with George Brown College. For the first time ever, I got ahold of someone on the same day I called in, so I was feeling good. But the woman I spoke to had bad news.

She told me that of all of the people that were initially offered positions in the program, all but one had accepted the offers and had already paid their tuition. Which is why, as seventh on the waiting list, I hadn't received a call. Except it turns out I'm not seventh on the list anymore. I'm tenth now. Apparently since the last time I spoke with them, three more worthy candidates had applied and bumped me back.

So it is highly unlikely that I will get into the program this year. I'm pretty sad about it, but I had already suspected it when I didn't hear anything back in July like they said I would. So today I sent a letter to the dean. I didn't know what else to do.

Not much else to say about that I guess. Will post if I get any updates.

Lazy Sunday

2009-08-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

John was pretty tuckered by the time Sunday rolled around since he had been going non stop for about 10 days, so it was time for a lazy day.

We slept in, had cold pizza for breakfast and watched some TV. I knitted/crochet a pair of Mary Jane slippers to keep my feet toasty on the hardwood floors of the apartment. They are dark blue, made from some yarn I forgot I had that I found during the move, and they turned out super cute.

We got dressed and headed to the mall to see the new G.I. Joe movie. I really liked it, it was much better than Transformers, just a fun summer action movie. We went to the Pickle Barrel for supper afterward because we wanted to check it out since it was so close to home. It's a family restaurant that falls somewhere between Swiss Chalet and the Keg. The food was good though, we ordered a chicken and spinach salad and a pound of beef fajitas and just shared everything. They serve all day breakfast too, so we will probably go back for brunch some time.

We stopped in at the drugstore and then headed home to settle in for the night. Shortly after we got home, the thunderstorm started. I haven't seen a thunderstorm like that ever in Halifax, if at all. The sky was normal at first, and then the thickest, blackest cloud cover I have ever seen covered the whole city in about five minutes. The rain started, and then the thunder. The flashes of lightning came about every five to ten seconds and lit up the whole sky. Sometimes we would see two or three lightning bolts at a time. John and I watched the storm for about an hour, until my eyes hurt from all of the bright flashes, but it went on for at least two more hours after that.

Weekend Stuff

2009-08-09T07:28:00.000-07:00

On Saturday morning we were slow to get going. John woke up really early and I slept in a bit. I made bacon, egg, avocado and cheese sandwiches on English muffins for breakfast and tidied up the kitchen and then John went back down for a nap to see if that would clear his headache from the night before. It was probably about 1pm before we were both up and dressed and ready to go.

We had made a whole list of things to do and explore in the downtown core today, but we didn't get anywhere near through them all. We started by trying to find the school I would be going to in the fall if I got accepted. Like each of my last three ventures out into the city, we got lost first, ending up finding Hooters instead, but eventually we found the school.

It was mostly closed up because it's a weekend in the summer, but the security guard was kind enough to let us in to look around.

I fell in love. The downtown campus is spread over three buildings but the chef school is all in one building, about half the size of my high school. There place is filled with lecture rooms cooking demonstration stations as well as practice kitchens with rows and rows of ovens and mixers. Everything was modern and the pastry section was undergoing renovations. I almost started to tear up as I realized just how much I want this. I left feeling glad that I'd seen it but sad that I may not get accepted this year.

From there we went to a huge farmer's market that is right across the street. It's open every day but is bigger on the weekends as the displays extend outside of the building and in a building across the street. We meadered around and saw all different kinds of food. There were huge sections of produce, seafood, baked goods, meat, and a few restaurants. There were whole pigs and skinned rabbits that still had their eyes. That creeped me out quite a bit. In the middle, there was a kitchen supply store that had the most amazing display of baking pans and moulds I had ever seen. I don't know why I love baking pans so much, but I do. We bought some biscotti and coffee beans and looked around for some lunch.

We had some sandwiches at the deli there and headed off into the city. We walked from there to the Harbourfront Centre. It was quite a long walk but we got to see a lot of downtown that we hadn't seen yet, so it was nice. I could't get over how empty it was for the heart of downtown Toronto. John assured me that it was just because we went on a Saturday so it was all tourists, but that during the week it was packed. We passed the CN tower and the skydome just as a game was getting out, so hundreds of people were streaming out onto the street. We eventually made it to the shore of Lake Ontario and crossed a cute little walking bridge to get to the Centre for the Southeast Asian food festival.

The festival was a disappointment. We had been expecting an array of foods from all different ethnicities (the advertisements had boasted "flavours you can't find anywhere else") but all we saw were kiosks serving Indian food. There were probably at least ten different stands, all serving Indian food, except one that offered a single Malaysian dish. We had been hoping to sample a cuisine we hadn't tried before so we weren't really feeling Indian food. So we skipped the food and instead walked through the Centre, looking at the art exhibits that are there all of the time, not a part of the festival. Our friend Alisha works there so we looked for her jewelry in the displays and the gift shop, but sadly we didn't find any of it.

It was getting late into the evening by then, so we hopped onto a streetcar and went home. We were the kind of tired you get from being out in the sun all day, so we just vegged once we got home. Later that night we popped out to get some fresh air and a panzerotti from the Pizza Pizza across the street (thanks Erin!) and then came home and watched TV. We have full cable here which is an upgrade from the five channels we had in Halifax. We stayed up too late watching food network challenges and stumbled off to bed.

More Exploring

2009-08-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Thursday was a pretty quiet day. I went for a walk down Eglinton West to see what's down there. I found our local park which is only about a block away. There are lots of organic shops, a produce shop, an organic butcher, as well as a few bakeries in that area. Besides the park, my best find that that day was a place that offers sewing lessons. They're a little expensive so it will have to wait until after I find a job, but they teach everything from intro to clothes design. I think that would be an excellent skill to have.

In the evening, we had dinner and John helped me figure out some of my transit questions and gave me some suggestions for starting points for my job search. I'm not looking for a career job, just something that can do for the rest of the summer and then (*crosses fingers*) switch to part time if I get into school for September. We found a few postings online, but I think that I'm going to need to make a concerted effort to figure out what businesses are actually in all of the office buildings around here and go from there.

On Friday, I decided that it was time to venture out into the city on my own while John was at work. I'll be honest, I was pretty nervous about it. I didn't trust in my ability to not get lost and to find my way home again.

One thing that I hadn't seen in all of my walks around the area was a fabric store, so I decided to hunt one down. After a few Google searches, it seemed like every fabric store I could find a listing for was on Queen Street West, so that's where I decided to go.

I got on the subway. No problem. I got off at my stop. No problem. I emerged onto the street and my heart started pounding a little. I consulted my little map and headed out into the city. I walked for about 10 minutes, not seeing any of the landmarks and street signs I was expecting, before I figured out that I was going the wrong way. The bad news was that I was lost but the good news is that I found the Eaton Centre. So now I know where that is.

I eventually found my way back to the subway station and set off again, this time in the right direction. I walked for a few blocks and and found myself in a trendier, hipper part of town. It was a little run down, shabby-chic style, and the streets were lined with little boutique clothing shops and trendy looking restaurants. Suddenly I started to hear screams off in the distance and for a second I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into. As I got closer to the noise, I realized it was just the MuchMusic office. The sidewalks were absolutely packed with noisy teenagers, so I guess there must have been someone worth getting excited about there that day.

I kept on my way, and about two blocks down I came to a block that must have had at least ten fabric stores, five bead stores and some other miscellaneous craft stores. There was so much to see, I was completely overwhelmed. Some of the stores were absolutely crammed with fabric, a maze of narrow passages with walls of stacked bolts of fabric going all the way up to the ceiling. Only one store was spacious and roomy, and they had the most amazing assortment of oriental brocades I have ever seen in my life. Stunning colour combinations and delicately embroidered patterns. And that was just the beginning. Some of the stores carried fabrics I don't think I could even imagine without seeing them first.

Despite the selection, I wasn't able to find any cute cotton cupcake fabrics. The focus was more on the designer fabrics rather than quilting cottons I think. I did pick up a few different fabrics for a bag I'm planning to make though, so it was worth the trip.

I found my way back to the subway station with no problem, although in retrospect it would have been easier to catch a streetcar rather than walking, but I'm sure I'll have all of that figured out eventually. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and made a supper of teriyaki chicken, parmesan risotto and steamed asparagus just in time for when John came home.

We rested for an hour or two and he told me about his day, and then we headed to the liquor store on the way to the first party we've been invited to since we've been in the city. The cashier strongly tried to dissuade us from buying the Smirnoff pomegranate martini, but we went ahead and bought it anyway.

That actually reminds me of something I've noticed since we got here. The people here seem much friendlier to strangers than Haligonians are. More often than not, strangers in the apartment building will say hello, merchants in stores are chattier and strangers seem more willing to help each other out. John's theory on this is that Toronto is a city of non-natives so everyone wants to connect to everyone else in the city or can at least appreciate how all of the people new to the city feel. And because the city is so big, everyone's had to ask for directions now and again, so that opens the dialogue between strangers a little further.

But the cashier was right about the Smirnoff. It tasted like grenadine and vodka, not like pomegranate at all. But we drank it anyway.

The party was at Wanda and Bryan's new apartment. They are friends of one of John's dive buddies from Halifax and they had been visiting Halifax a couple of weeks ago and came to our going away beer tour which is where we met them. We took the subway all of the way to the end of the line to get there (takes about 40 minutes) and ran into another guest on the walk up to their building, so we found the place together. We ended up having a really nice time even though we didn't really know anyone. Like Cinderella though, we had to leave at midnight in order to get home before the transit stopped running.

We stumbled in and fell into our post drinking routine of water and bagels on the couch and then off to sleep.

Finally Caught Up!

2009-08-05T18:55:00.001-07:00

John started work on Monday. I spent the day trying to make the apartment livable, rearranging boxes to make walkways so that we could get to everything in the living room and so that the furniture was all positioned correctly and everything was at least in the correct room, if not unpacked. It was so tempting to unpack all of the boxes, but I knew that I would regret it come September 1st so I left them alone.

I ventured out of the apartment by myself for the first time. I explored the lower floors of the building, found the mailboxes and the laundry. Then I headed over to the mall connected to the building and explored it as well. It was a holiday so most of the stores were closed.

The grocery store was open though, so I picked up some groceries and came home and baked a big pizzagna. It's one of John's and my favorite lazy foods. I've been known to put one together the night before a party and we spend the next day hungover on the couch, watching bad movies and eating reheated pizzagna. It's easy, makes lots of food, dirties minimal dishes and you can throw in extra veggies so that it's a little less unhealthy. I used canned tomato sauce (don't tell John! He's a tomato sauce purist) to make it even easier.

John didn't get home until around 7. He has a 50 minute commute each way so his work days are really long. But despite that, when he walked through the door I was immediately struck by the fact that I couldn't remember the last time he came home from work smiling and happy. It was so wonderful to see! We sat and had dinner and he told me about his day. He loves the people and he loves the job. I'll admit I had been nervous that we would get here and maybe it wouldn't be what he expected or he would clash with the people, or something else could go wrong, but it turns out I had nothing to worry about. So that is a good thing!

Tuesday, I again spent most of the day working on the apartment, this time tackling the bedroom and the bathroom. I went for a long walk around the neighbourhood, still trying to get my bearings, recognize the local busses, figure out where all of the amenities are like the bank, the post office, the drugstore. I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

I got my watch battery replaced and a second set of keys made as well. The locks here are pretty friggy. It can take me over a minute to get the apartment door unlocked (Note to Mom and Aunt Debbie: Don't worry, we have two deadbolts on the door too. We are safe!). The key maker actually looked at my key and asked me if it worked well because apparently I'm not the only one in the building who has this problem. He said the locks are 15 years old and have been discontinued so he has to order in custom made keys to cut for them. I'm not going to bother complaining though since we're only here for a month. Hopefully the next one will be better.

When John got home, we went out onto the roof. There's a pool up there and a rooftop patio. He gave me a lesson on which directions were which and how far we were from different things. The view is pretty amazing from up there.

Then we took a long walk exploring even more of the neighbourhood. It seems to go on forever. I guess that's not surprising given that Yonge Street is the longest street in Canada. We popped into a little sushi place where the prices were low and the sushi was good but the pieces were almost too big to fit in my mouth. I had a beef teriyaki roll and some veggie tempura. John had mackerel and eel. He said the mackerel tasted like it had been frozen which I guess is to be expected since we're not on the coast anymore. At the end of the meal they gave us each half of an orange that was cleverly cut in a way I had never seen before. I love that sort of thing. It poured rain while we were in there, but by the time we left it had almost stopped. By the time we got home it was pretty late so we went to sleep.

Today has been pretty uneventful, and I feel like we're starting to get into a routine. I finished putting the apartment together and spent about an hour pouring over maps trying to figure this place out. I had planned to go out and track down a fabric store but John borrowed my transit pass for the rest of the week so I ended up putting it off. He has to switch to weekly passes because of something to do with the fact that he uses two different transit systems in the morning, so I met a guy from kijiji and sold him John's old pass. Then I picked up some groceries for tonight's dinner and headed home. I revised my resume to reflect my new address and to target less impressive jobs. I'm not looking for anything fancy, just somewhere I can work part time while I go to school (assuming I get in of course). Still no word on whether or not I'm being accepted, but I did get my first piece of redirected mail today so at least I know that if they try and send me a letter, I'll get it.

John got home early today so I didn't have dinner ready. I did the cooking while he got settled in. We ate, watched an hour of TV and he passed out around 8pm. I think he's still getting used to these early mornings after all the months of late shifts.

That's it for now. So far so good!

August 2nd - Day 2 in the City

2009-08-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

I was feeling ambitious the next morning so I decided to cook breakfast. I unpacked the coffee maker, made a pitcher of ginger iced green tea and put some bacon in a pan on the stove. That's when I realized I had no idea where the cutlery was, or the spatulas, or the bread knife, or the mugs, or the toaster (I still haven't found it) and that the microwave wasn't even in the kitchen let alone plugged in and ready to go. It was a mad scramble, but I managed to pull together some egg mcmuffins, coffee and OJ. I was pretty pleased with myself. We didn't have a table to eat it at, but at least we had the couch.

After breakfast, John turned to me and said "Well, we've got some extra space in the kitchen, and we have a big empty truck for two more days, I think we should hit up Ikea."

I love him.

Somehow he knew how to get there without a map, so off we went. We puttered through the displays, ate lunch in the cafeteria (it was actually pretty good, I had the quiche), rummaged through the accessories and picked heavy cardboard furniture boxes out of the warehouse. We came out with these:

along with some beer glasses, oven mitts (I burnt through my old ones from overuse if you can believe that) and $1.30 plants.

When we got out into the parking lot I looked at my watch. The afternoon had disappeared and it was 5 o'clock. Neither of us could figure out how that happened. We both had thought it was maybe 3 o'clock.

So we accidentally wasted the whole day and nothing got unpacked. John marveled that he actually enjoyed himself given that he generally gets bored of shopping inside ten minutes.

We picked up some Vietnamese food at the little restaurant in our building for supper. I was hoping it would be awesome since it's so close, but it was only so-so. Later that night we went for a walk around our neighbourhood. I really love this neighbourhood. There are literally hundreds of shops within about three blocks from our building. Some of them are big box stores like Sobeys, Futureshop and HMV, but most of them are wonderful little small businesses. I love the complexity of the window displays. Even the picture frame shop has over a hundred frames arranged neatly in the window, and there is a jewelry shop with what must be over five hundred pendants all individually positioned and carefully lined in the window.

And despite the huge number of businesses in the area, when I look out my window, almost all I see is green. There are so many trees and parks here. I will post pictures just as soon as I get the cameras unpacked.

We found a little gelato place and stopped for treats and then walked home by cutting through a really high end subdivision where everyone had beautiful gardens. When we got back to the apartment I noted that it felt like coming home. This little apartment already feels like home to me.

Our First Night in the City / Moving In

2009-08-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

Once we got our keys, we hopped on the subway and headed over to Marc and Alisha's place. Lucky for me, John had the whole public transit thing figured out and actually knew where our destination was, otherwise I would probably still be lost since I haven't taken TO public transit since university. After he explained the system to me though, I think it seems like getting around is pretty straightforward, but I'm going to need some time to get a feel for where everything is.

When we arrived, our gracious hostess poured us drinks and ordered us Thai food and we spent the evening getting caught up. It was really nice, I hadn't seen Alisha in at least a year I think. That is one part I'm looking forward to about living here. Although we left lots of friends behind in Halifax, we have lots of other friends who have moved here over the years that we've lost touch with and now we have the opportunity to get reacquainted with everyone.

We stayed up late because we wouldn't be able to start the move until 2pm the next afternoon, but we still ended up waking bright and early. Our first thoughts were of the truck, so John went back to make sure no one had tampered with it in the night. I puttered around much slower, and Alisha and I made breakfast. She makes the best eggwiches! It felt really weird trying to kill the morning on a moving day. I'm so used to waking up early and getting straight to work on those days but really there was nothing to be done.

John's brother couldn't make it to help us move, so John spent the rest of the morning calling movers in the area but we couldn't find anyone on such short notice. We had the two of us, Alisha and our friend Brandon though, so we figured we'd be okay. When we got to the elevator to start loading it up, there was another woman and some U-haul movers already there. John managed to talk one of the movers to stay to help us after he was done that move, so that made things a bit easier.

It took the full two hours and by the end of it we were exhausted. I think all the exertion of the week was starting to catch up with us and the heat of the day compounded it. Alisha had to go to work and we went for supper with Brandon at a pub style restaurant called Duke of Kent. The food was pretty good, but after four straight days of restaurant food, I was craving home cooking so I think I didn't appreciate it as much as I would have normally. The sangria was good though! On the way home we stopped at a little grocery store and picked up breakfast foods so we would be ready for the morning.

When John and I came home to our apartment for the first time, we were both pretty wiped. We tilted the couch onto its right side, set up the bed, unpacked the plates, glasses and pans, hung up the shower curtain, looked at all the boxes strewn through the apartment and flopped out. Everything else could wait. We slept like stones.

Road Trip

2009-08-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

I think there are probably not very many countries where you can drive for two days and not get halfway across. Canada is very, very big.

I love road trips though. I love sitting in the car for hours with nothing for entertainment but conversation and singing. I brought a book and my Nintendo DS, but I find it hard to concentrate in a moving vehicle so they stayed in my purse for the most part. In retrospect, I wish I had brought something to knit or crochet. John was a trooper. He drove tirelessly for hours and hours without complaint.

On the 29th, we drove from 8 in the morning to 6:30 at night. We stopped for coffee, bagels and snacks in Stewiacke N.S., lunch at the Big Stop in Woodstock, N.B., maps in Degelis, QC and dinner and sleeps at the Comfort Inn in Levis, QC.

By the 30th I had lost track of all time. I think we were on the road around 8:30. First up was Quebec City. No problem. Next was Montreal. I was really nervous about getting lost but we flew right through it with no problems. John's strategy was to locate a semi truck with Ontario plates, tuck in behind it and hope it was planning to just drive straight through like we were. It worked! We were in and out in no time.

If I thought that was bad, Toronto highways were ten times as scary. From Oshawa to Toronto there were more lanes than I could count. There had to be at least 12 and traffic was back to back. I'm amazed that people can drive through it. Luckily it doesn't phase John at all. He's the brave one.

We actually didn't see too many interesting things on our drive, but we sure saw a lot of trees. Two days of nothing but trees. And a pig truck. It had two floors of pigs, probably close to 70 of them, all sticking their snouts and ears out of little holes on the side of the truck. It was adorable. So I occupied myself by endlessly flipping through radio stations (no cd or mp3 player in the Uhaul) which I'm sure annoyed John to no end although he didn't say anything. And at one point, in the thick of the traffic on the 401, we came upon what looked like a couch cushion in the middle of the highway. It had fallen out of a pick-up truck which the driver had pulled into the shoulder, left his vehicle and was actually running through the 6 lanes of traffic to go retrieve it. I had to look away.

I think John maybe has a GPS built into his brain because we drove straight from Halifax to Toronto without being lost for a single moment and when we arrived in this massive city he just drove straight to our apartment building without thinking twice. I'm not sure how this was possible exactly. It was my first time driving through Toronto (I've always flown in before) and I was overwhelmed by how big it is. It's just so big!

We got to the apartment building, signed our lease and went up to check out the apartment. It's perfect. A little bigger than our old place, hardwood floors instead of carpet, well lit, feels safe. But we didn't have the elevator booked until the next afternoon (it was booked solid) so we couldn't move in that night.

The scariest part of the whole road trip was figuring out what to do with the truck at night. It had all of our worldly possessions guarded only by a simple padlock. Over the course of the move we ended up leaving it overnight on Brunswick Street, Tobin Street, Levis Comfort Inn parking lot and a block away from the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. Nobody touched it. Canadians are trustworthy all over, our stuff was safe.

Moving Day

2009-08-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

John and I had a deal. He would take care of finding the apartment and the driving if I would do the packing. Fair.

I did my best to pack as much as I could in the two weeks before the move. The post office was kind enough to give us a whole bunch of cube shaped boxes and I had them stacked in piles six high all over the apartment.

It was such a big job to pack our little one bedroom apartment. I can't even imagine what it must take to pack a whole house. In the last two days before the move I basically packed from dusk until dawn. At first I neatly labeled each box with all of the contents and the room where it should be placed, but after I was done you could almost tell the order in which I packed the boxes by my penmanship. It got progressively messier and more rushed and the last few boxes weren't labeled at all.

We had it all done by the night of the 27th. That day Dad took us for lunch and then our to Lake Echo to pick up the truck and say our goodbyes to Robbie and CJ. We were up early the next morning and joined by Cliff, Ian, Erin and Alan and Ryan, a guy that John worked with. He would help us load the truck and in exchange, we brought some of his stuff up to Toronto with us so that it would be here when he moves up next month.

The whole operation went off without a hitch. We worked efficiently and had everything in the truck within an hour and a half. I don't believe the truck could have held a single extra item, it was filled to the ceiling! Somehow John managed to fit all of our stuff in there and even managed to get the plants in without crushing them.

We spent the rest of the day cleaning. The apartment wasn't very messy but it still took Erin, John and I the whole afternoon to finish it. Erin scrubbed all of the stains out of the counter, John washed down the walls and cupboards and I vacuumed and cleaned the appliances and fixtures. We finished around 6:30pm and did our out inspection. Happily our work paid off because I got the whole of my damage deposit back. I had been worried about it, so it was a relief.

We headed over to Mom's for showers. Alan showed up and we all went to Henry House for dinner. I must have been tired because I had two drinks and was ready to pass out. John was no better, he fell asleep as soon as we got back to Mom's. I stayed up to chat with her and Erin, I figured sleep could wait.

I slept in the next morning but Mom made sure I got up. We had teary goodbyes and were on the road by 8am.

The Plan

2009-08-02T18:12:00.001-07:00

We had been toying with the idea of coming to Toronto since last Fall. John had been looking to get transferred through the company he worked for and I was unemployed so I was free to follow him wherever. At the same time, I was taking a good look at my life and what I wanted from it. I made a hard decision that I would follow my heart and my passion instead of chasing the dollars. So I decided to go back to school, learn my trade and start off on a new career path. John was amazingly supportive of my decision so I started looking at schools in Toronto.

I found a great program at George Brown College. It's two years and teaches you how to be a pastry chef and how to run a small business in the food services industry. So presumably, after finishing I would have all of the skills and the knowledge I would need to open a small bakery. Perfect.

But John started hitting a lot of dead ends at his job and by about December/January, we gave up on the idea of him getting transferred. It looked like we would be staying in Halifax. On a whim, I submitted my application to George Brown anyway, albeit a day late. Although at that point I didn't believe we would be going, I thought it would be an awful shame if somehow we managed to work out all of the details involved with a cross country move and I arrived here with nothing to do, so I ordered some transcripts and filled out some forms and sent them off.

A few months later, I got a letter back from George Brown. "Sorry Jacki, your application was late so you've been waitlisted. The program holds 200 students. The waiting list is 150 people long. You're number 7."

Cool. Whatev.

A few months went by. John was getting sick of his job. I think repetition isn't good for him. He needs new, exciting problems to solve. He's amazing but only when he's engaged with what he's doing. He applied for lots of jobs in Halifax, but nothing was the right fit. Nothing was even close to the right fit.

I really wanted to get into my program though, and I knew that staying at that job wasn't doing anything positive for John either from a career advancement perspective or an emotional/mental health perspective. We were both stagnating in Halifax and we both knew it. I said "Let's go anyway. There can't be fewer jobs in Toronto than there are in Halifax."

But John is the sensible one. He can't just quit a stable, well-paying job without knowing where his next paycheck is coming from. So we worked out a compromise. He would go to Toronto, spend a week there, try to get a feel for the job market and decide whether it was worth the risk. He contacted companies in Toronto for meetings and friends to stay with. He came home with a brightened perspective and new job offer.

So we were going.

Moving from one province to another in Canada is no small feat. Especially if you want a nice place and want to take your stuff with you. Which we did.

My family was amazing. My dad is a logistical genius so he hooked us up with our truck, directions, the best roads to take, the best places to stop. My mom gave us her full support as well and let us crash at her place before we left and got the family all together so we could say our goodbyes. My sister and her boyfriend were there on moving day and I don't think I would have gotten the apartment clean in time for my inspection if Erin hadn't been there to help us with the cleaning.

The most stressful part was finding an apartment. John promised me he would take care of all of the apartment details but I would stress out just thinking about it. It got to be two and a half weeks before our scheduled moving date and we still didn't have a place. I was freaking. It turns out that Ontario has a law where if, as a tenant, you take an apartment sight unseen, you have a set amount of time after you move in (I think it's 30 days?) to break the lease agreement. It's to keep landlords from misrepresenting their properties, but it also has the effect that many landlords are reluctant to rent to people out of province over the phone because if they rent it to someone who comes in from off the street instead, they don't have to worry about the lease being broken.

Finally we found the perfect apartment. Great! We'll have someone come in tomorrow with the check for the deposit. No problem, we'll hold it for you until then. The next day we found out that due to a miscommunication between rental office staff members, the apartment had been given to someone else and the lease was already signed. Me: Panic. John: Problem solving.

The arrangement we finally worked out is a bit convoluted, but we have a home and that's good enough for me. The short version is that we live in one apartment for the month of August and then we move to our 'permanent' apartment in September. That's the bad news. The good news is that we didn't have to pay first and last month's rent, only first month. And we didn't have to pay a damage deposit. And we're located exactly where we want to be. So I have no complaints.

And that was the last major detail! Everything was in place for the move!

In case you've been wondering what we've been up to...

2009-08-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start a new blog, this time a journal to keep all of our loved ones back in the Maritimes (and in Calgary, bestest friend) up to date on all of the excitement and happenings as John and I attempt to start a new life here in Toronto. We've been overwhelmed by the love that we have been shown in terms of people offering to help us, to take us in, and to check in on us to make sure that we are safe and happy, so I thought it would be nice just to have a centralized place that anyone can check in on us whenever they like.

We are very safe and incredibly happy.

It's been close to a week since our adventure started which gives me lots to talk about, so I think I'll split this up over a few posts. Like any blog, I suggest you start at the bottom for the oldest posts and work your way up.