Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Greedy Gail
Greedy, greedy me. I now have two GMail accounts. I also have two invitations left. Hmmmm, be nice to me if you want one!
Shot in Paris
Claire shot me in front of the Eiffel Tower. In full daylight.
Claire got a rare shot of me, taking a shot of something else as we boated down the Seine.
Storyeum
Man, I wish I had time to post about the Storyeum. But I gotta get some work done, so I'll just have to leave you all with some pre- and post- photos, since I wasn't allowed to take any photos during the tour. Storyeum (STOR-ee-um, in case anyone wants to know), is sort of a history musical play. It's an interactive, human museum with the assistance of multi-media. More on it later.
Storyeum's huge can't-miss-it entrance
on Water Street in Gastown.
Storyeum lobby.
Some of the photo archives along the wall. They really need to mount the text properly, though -- Blu-Tack is, well, tacky!
Some of Hostelling International volunteers... although the second person from left isn't a volunteer, he's Atul, the program director.
Near the entrance to Gastown,
in front of the Waterfront Station.
Sunset from West Cordova.
Storyeum's huge can't-miss-it entrance
on Water Street in Gastown.
Storyeum lobby.
Some of the photo archives along the wall. They really need to mount the text properly, though -- Blu-Tack is, well, tacky!
Some of Hostelling International volunteers... although the second person from left isn't a volunteer, he's Atul, the program director.
Near the entrance to Gastown,
in front of the Waterfront Station.
Sunset from West Cordova.
Monday, June 07, 2004
New Stuff
As you can see, I've been busy hacking away at my blog template, changing colours, adding, removing, revising, updating... I've been a busy little Canadian beaver here on Beach Avenue (with this, anyway).
Some new things:
- a guestbook! (sidebar, under my French train pic)
- a guestbook map! (courtesy of DigiLin)
- a page index of posts (sidebar, top left)
- new pics
- new links
- photos hosted on Hello, clickable for larger version...
So click, click, click away, and don't be shy -- sign the guestbook and/or plot your location on the world map. Cheerios.
Some new things:
- a guestbook! (sidebar, under my French train pic)
- a guestbook map! (courtesy of DigiLin)
- a page index of posts (sidebar, top left)
- new pics
- new links
- photos hosted on Hello, clickable for larger version...
So click, click, click away, and don't be shy -- sign the guestbook and/or plot your location on the world map. Cheerios.
Springtime in Stanley Park
Maddy baiting a baby goat at the
Children's Farmyard in Stanley Park.
Mr. Michael looking all serious-like,
with his papa's hat on.
Melissa eyeing an engine while we go
on the miniature railway.
Maddy, wreaking havoc on the playground.
Melissa the monkey.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
'Tis
When my guilty feeling for indulging in my Work Avoidance BehaviourTM of writing in this blog finally subsides, I will tell you the story of one of the strangest jobs I've ever had, working for an Irishman in the far north of Australia, and my first experience with being robbed right under my nose while I slept, also by an Irishman. My fondness for Irish people is not a blind, sweeping one fuelled by glossy tourism brochures, Enya, or the awful film "Far and Away" in which Tom Cruise sports the worst Irish accent in the history of fake Irish accents while Nicole Kidman plays second fiddle with a much better grasp of the dialect. No, this fondness is not a fairweather one.
The Savage is in Morocco
Stage Eight- Morocco
He's got a real 80's-boy look going on in some of these photos. But believe you me, it is looking a good sight better than the Grizzly Adams overgrowth he was sporting when I saw him in London six weeks ago or so. I was ready to hack it right off myself, but Steve said he was meeting up with some old friends before leaving for Morocco and he wanted to "surprise them", so I refrained. On second thought, maybe he should've kept the lumber jack style to scare off some of the touts who've been messing him about.
What's In Your Fridge?
I took a break from my aforementioned Work Avoidance Behaviours to forage for food in the neighbourhood. What started out as a simple sandwich errand turned into a full-on grocery shop, complete with shower caddy. One left, at $1.49. Lucky me. Anyway, the food-foraging mission was to balance out the oversupply of condiments with Real FoodTM. I think you know what I'm talking about.
Looked in your fridge lately, people? Forget the mental inventory -- trust me, it doesn't work unless you just cleaned out your fridge. Go on, stick your nose in there and take a cursory inventory. Are there:
- half-filled bottles of sauces, eg. ketchup, HP, Worcestershire?
- packets of fast food condiments like vinegar, ketchup, mustard, or pseudo-salsa?
- tiny bottles of deli items such as capers, hot banana peppers, or chutney?
- salad dressings, eg. vinaigrette, diet/lite stuff that tastes horrible but you can't bear to go to waste unless someone with less discerning tastes comes over who you can pawn it off to?
Yeah, I thought so.
I do things kinda backwards. For example, when I was last fiddling with this blog template, I had a look at the Haloscan commenting gallery, picked a decent commenting template, looked at the colour codes, applied them to my blog template, and -- voilà! -- it's all done and everything matches. It seems this method is a good deal faster than previous attempts using a colour matching system that gave me the full spectrum of colour available to the naked eye. I just couldn't bloody well make up my mind.
So how this is related to refrigerated foodstuffs, you might ask, is this: I was standing in Supervalu on Davie St. a couple of hours ago, trying to figure out what to buy, and it occurred to me that the only way I'm going to reduce my stock of condiments besides either throwing the whole lot away (which is in direct conflict with my instinct to not waste anything), or giving it away (who on earth would take a half jar of American-style mustard? -- not me!) is to buy food that I would actually use with those condiments. Now, I know what you're going to say, and that's a great big "DUH!!!!" But hey, this is easier said than than done when you've got stuff accumulated from:
- a number of overseas visitors who would rather have stuff shipped from back home than go without;
- overseas visitors who hired an RV to to tour BC and Alberta and left all leftover stuff behind from that fridge;
- ex-boyfriends with a penchant for buying family-size quantities of condiments from Costco;
- people who have stayed with me (or stayed here without me, even) and left stuff behind.
My fridge is one big condiment repository. Sometimes I'll rummage around the kitchen cupboards and find things I didn't buy but were put there by others, eg., the tube of Tomy mustard that Daniela brought from Liechtenstein, some Knorr powder from Switzerland left by Krista, capers that Iris bought (was it last year or the year before?) before heading back to Germany, barbecue sauce that Chris bought before returning to California... jeez, that stuff has really got to go -- you know it's time to do some spring cleaning when the barbecue sauce has outlasted the relationship, and the time passed is exponentially longer than the longevity of the relationship itself. (I'm cringing at the thought, yes I am.)
The Singleton's Fridge. Full of condiments, vestiges of meal experiments gone awry, and a head-scratching mix of vegetarianism and carnivorous cravings. There are tetrapaks of soy milk next to bottles of organic cow's milk. There are chickpea burgers next to barbecued spicy chicken wings. Beansprouts next to Bavarian sausages. And then there's the freezer! There's frozen yoghurt next to a tub of Oreo ice cream, neither of which were purchased by me. The bottle of Number 10 gin that's in there is Matt's replacement bottle for the one I bought at duty-free and he swigged while I was in Europe. I returned with a collection of W. & J. Graham's port from the duty-free at Heathrow, because I simply could not be bothered to lug around any more stuff after Spain, but at least I don't have to refrigerate it, otherwise it would be lost in the Big Black Hole that is my fridge.
Looked in your fridge lately, people? Forget the mental inventory -- trust me, it doesn't work unless you just cleaned out your fridge. Go on, stick your nose in there and take a cursory inventory. Are there:
- half-filled bottles of sauces, eg. ketchup, HP, Worcestershire?
- packets of fast food condiments like vinegar, ketchup, mustard, or pseudo-salsa?
- tiny bottles of deli items such as capers, hot banana peppers, or chutney?
- salad dressings, eg. vinaigrette, diet/lite stuff that tastes horrible but you can't bear to go to waste unless someone with less discerning tastes comes over who you can pawn it off to?
Yeah, I thought so.
I do things kinda backwards. For example, when I was last fiddling with this blog template, I had a look at the Haloscan commenting gallery, picked a decent commenting template, looked at the colour codes, applied them to my blog template, and -- voilà! -- it's all done and everything matches. It seems this method is a good deal faster than previous attempts using a colour matching system that gave me the full spectrum of colour available to the naked eye. I just couldn't bloody well make up my mind.
So how this is related to refrigerated foodstuffs, you might ask, is this: I was standing in Supervalu on Davie St. a couple of hours ago, trying to figure out what to buy, and it occurred to me that the only way I'm going to reduce my stock of condiments besides either throwing the whole lot away (which is in direct conflict with my instinct to not waste anything), or giving it away (who on earth would take a half jar of American-style mustard? -- not me!) is to buy food that I would actually use with those condiments. Now, I know what you're going to say, and that's a great big "DUH!!!!" But hey, this is easier said than than done when you've got stuff accumulated from:
- a number of overseas visitors who would rather have stuff shipped from back home than go without;
- overseas visitors who hired an RV to to tour BC and Alberta and left all leftover stuff behind from that fridge;
- ex-boyfriends with a penchant for buying family-size quantities of condiments from Costco;
- people who have stayed with me (or stayed here without me, even) and left stuff behind.
My fridge is one big condiment repository. Sometimes I'll rummage around the kitchen cupboards and find things I didn't buy but were put there by others, eg., the tube of Tomy mustard that Daniela brought from Liechtenstein, some Knorr powder from Switzerland left by Krista, capers that Iris bought (was it last year or the year before?) before heading back to Germany, barbecue sauce that Chris bought before returning to California... jeez, that stuff has really got to go -- you know it's time to do some spring cleaning when the barbecue sauce has outlasted the relationship, and the time passed is exponentially longer than the longevity of the relationship itself. (I'm cringing at the thought, yes I am.)
The Singleton's Fridge. Full of condiments, vestiges of meal experiments gone awry, and a head-scratching mix of vegetarianism and carnivorous cravings. There are tetrapaks of soy milk next to bottles of organic cow's milk. There are chickpea burgers next to barbecued spicy chicken wings. Beansprouts next to Bavarian sausages. And then there's the freezer! There's frozen yoghurt next to a tub of Oreo ice cream, neither of which were purchased by me. The bottle of Number 10 gin that's in there is Matt's replacement bottle for the one I bought at duty-free and he swigged while I was in Europe. I returned with a collection of W. & J. Graham's port from the duty-free at Heathrow, because I simply could not be bothered to lug around any more stuff after Spain, but at least I don't have to refrigerate it, otherwise it would be lost in the Big Black Hole that is my fridge.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Work Avoidance Behaviours
My SFU coursework has had some stiff competition lately:
1. Blog template fiddling (do you like the new look?).
2. Writing overdue e-mail.
3. Writing overdue postcards to distant friends.
4. Catching up on regular reading of others' blogs.
5. Finishing novel that I've been reading since what feels like the dawn of time.
*Sigh.*
1. Blog template fiddling (do you like the new look?).
2. Writing overdue e-mail.
3. Writing overdue postcards to distant friends.
4. Catching up on regular reading of others' blogs.
5. Finishing novel that I've been reading since what feels like the dawn of time.
*Sigh.*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
