Personal Vending Machine

One of the perqs at work is that we have subsidized vending machines (yes, this is actually listed as a perq in our benifits rundown). This means that instead of paying $1.10 for a bag of chips or a chocolate bar that takes me 1.5 seconds to inhale, we only have to pay fifty cents. Which is great...except that I have been spending up to $1.50 a day on junk, resulting in me feeling bad about myself (food issues, yay!), and also throwing away my spending money.

My friend suggested I set up a personal vending machine instead. I have stocked my desk with some small cans of tuna, 100 calorie granola bars and chippy things, weight watchers cakes, and some cheese and crackers thingers. I also brought in a coffee can, and put a photo of the Slayer Scythe on it. Every time I want a snack, I pay myself the fifty cents, and hopefully by next year I will have collected enough to buy the replica to hang on my wall.

The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd

Last night we began the second of three weekend-long runs of "Come Back to the 5 & dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean".

Although I have been performing steadily since graduation from university, it was mostly in outdoor venues, save for one very negative experience, and I had forgotten what it is like to be under lights. I had forgotten that you have to work differently to reach your audience when you can't make eye contact with them. I had forgotten just how much I love doing this.

Edna Louise has been such a wonderful challenge for me. She is sweet, but doesn't get the joke (any joke, ever) and is a doormat (for the most part). I spend a lot of time on stage not saying much, instead reacting to the stuff that is going on, the stories that the other characters are telling. I have re-learned how to listen on stage, to both the dialogue and the subtext, and how to use my body to convey emotions, as I also spend a fair amount of time not directly facing the audience. I have had to learn not to get the joke, and how to see the world out of someone else's eyes. So many of the characters I've played in the last ten years have been a reflection or inflation of who I am, so playing some one not-me has given me a stretch that I needed, and has made me so happy. I also find that I'm listening better when I'm not on stage, which is making me happy too, as I think I was losing that skill a little, especially the listening to subtext part.

I have had the opportunity to work with a fabulous cast and crew, who showed me that my fears about returning to community theatre were totally unfounded. Best of all I got to work with Trevor, a director who knows and loves this show even better than I do. He's fun, and fabulous, and has done wonderful things for my ego. He also takes a damn fine photo.

Shameless Self Promotion

If you're planning to be in Southwest Ontario in October, come see me in this play!

I've been having a wonderful time so far, and we're only at the part of the rehearsal process where we figure out where we're standing on the stage, and when we move. The cast is full of very talented people, and I'm loving the director to bits. It's been about 3 years since the last time I did theatre, and it feels fabulous to be walking the boards again.

Lunch!

Today's lunch is a variation of my perennial favourite.

Sammich:
Oatmeal bread from a local bakery, with cheese and ham and some green tomato pickle and a bit of mayo

Salad:
Two kinds of lettuce, green pepper, snap peas (that I picked myself), tomato, a bit of herbed goat cheese and Apple Mustard Delight dressing, all from a local farm.

I really, really love summer time.

The Pratchgan is Done!

In this post from February I talked about The Pratchgan, and showed you my humble square.

If you click on the title of this post, you can get to Ramblings of a Yarn Junkie, the blog of the wonderful woman who was the heart and soul of this operation.

Here's her photo of the Pratchgan, in all it's glory:

Hopefully, she will be able to hand it to the man himself later this month.

There's been talk of doing a Pratchgan knit along (where as a group, we would knit squares designed by each other, so that we all wind up with our own afghans at the end of it). Given my group of friends' love for Pratchett, I may wind up knitting squares for years!

From left to right, that's Tiffany Aching, Magrat, Granny Weatherwax, and Nanny Ogg. Other attendees at that particular party included Lord Vetinari, The Cheerfulness Fairy, Death (with his guest, the Death of Rats) and the Luggage. Yes, we have a lot of fun. *grin*

Bitter Music

I am making a mixed cd for a recently single friend. She's into hard rock, skulls and leather, and is waffling out of the "righteous anger" phase into the "I sent him an email" phase and we're hoping to get past this part and into the "what did I see in him anyways?" phase sooner rather than later.

While noodling around on the intertoobs for song ideas, I came across this: Cold and Bitter, which ends with this paragraph:

"Full of Grace - Sarah McLachlan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
No matter how badly your relationship turned out, it's unlikely that your lover lost his soul, became a vicious killer, tried to send the world spinning into hell, then regained his soul moments before you had to impale him on a sword to save the universe. Lost and broken, Buffy wanders away from her hometown of Sunnydale at the end of Season Two, taking a bus to Los Angeles as this tearjerking song plays - "I know I can love you much better than this..." Yeah, I think you probably could. Just don't stab him this time."

Made me giggle.

So, here's the tentative song list:
Bloodletting - Concrete Blonde
Who Knew - Pink
Not a Pretty Girl - Ani DiFranco
Thorn in my Side - Eurythmics
I Don't Care - Apocalyptica feat. Adam Gontier
Pain - Four Star Mary
Laid - James
Ballad for Dead Friends - Dashboard Prophets
Hate Me - Blue October
Juke-Joint Jezebel - KMFDM
Wearing Me Down - Dashboard Prophets
Bullet with Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins
Machinehead - Bush
Everybody Knows - Concrete Blonde
What I Did For Love - Me First and the Gimme Gimme's
Time of Your Life - Green Day

I deliberately left out stuff like "You Oughta Know" because she's already got that one and similar songs on a different "Bitter" compilation I made for another friend a couple of years back, and I'm aiming for this to be on the harder side of things, Eurythmics and Ani DiFranco notwithstanding.

So, any suggestions?

Weekend Update

My weekend started (sort-of) 12:15 am Friday morning, when the husband and I went to see The Dark Knight. Woo! Definitely worth the lack of sleep! I napped before and after the movie, and then went into work on Friday, where I mainlined coffee all day. The movie was dark and wonderful and creepy and exciting, and I'm so glad I went.

Saturday we went into the Big City to visit friends and eat sushi (yum!) then we got together back at home with friends to watch UFC. How I went from someone who hated sushi and wresting, to someone who will drive 1.5 hours to eat sushi and will spend 4 hours watching men pummel each other until they bleed/pass out is beyond me.

The very most exciting part of the weekend was yesterday when I spent the afternoon making cheese with my friend semicrunchymom.

We started with milk (and a couple of other things from the cheesemaking kit she bought):



And ended up with mozzarella:



Then we started out with milk again (see previous picture; it looked exactly the same), and ended up with ricotta:



It was very exciting to see the change from milk to curds and whey. It was one of those things that happens in moment, much like the moment when whipping cream turns into butter and butter milk. It was a lovely afternoon, and a fantastic reminder that cooking is really just math and chemistry.

Happy Dance

One of the best things I've seen in a very long time:
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Take a tissue, 'cause you'll cry while you're laughing. You might just get up and dance yourself.

Either way, it's truly joyful.

A woman in harmony with her spirit...

"A woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense, and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself, and only herself." ~ Maya Angelou

This week at work our whole team - all 15 of us - have been face-to-face for the first time, ever. We have had people visiting from Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada), Irving (Texas, USA), Egham (England) and Singapore. It's been a pretty neat experience all around.

Yesterday morning we did an ice-breaker, a get-to-know-you kind of exercise in which we had to answer questions anonymously with one or two words and then guess who had filled out which form when the answers were read out loud. I described myself using the words that came to me first, not over-thinking it, and was the first one finished. When it came time to guess, I was consistently guessed for almost every submission, except for the ones using descriptors like "sporty" or "adventurous", and my own.

Finally, on the fourth time my sheet was read, and after 12 of the 15 profiles had been accurately guesses, they put me together with my submission.

I've been trying to figure out since whether I don't project myself the same way I see myself, or if in the 8 1/2 months I've been there, people haven't been paying much attention, or if it's some combination of the two.

This has caused me to really think about how I see myself, and how I think I project "me". I've come back to the quote at the top of this post. That may not be quite how I'm doing things right now, but it's certainly where I'm heading: to being me, and only me.

Father's Day Lunch

For a number of different reasons, I have been spending more time experimenting with food the past few months. Yesterday, I decided to take ideas from Angry Chicken, my Weight Watchers meeting and Noirbettie and throw them together in one meal. I was so excited by it that it wasn't until half way through lunch that I remembered to take a picture for the Today's Homemaker Flickr pool!

I roasted beets and russet potatoes in some olive oil with some garlic (this is the part from Angry Chicken). While that was going, I bbq'd some bacon wrapped steaks, and made a viniagrette out of 1/8 of a cup each of maple syrup (the real stuff), apple cider vinegar and olive oil, about 5 strawberries and a couple of slices of red onion (blended using a hand blender so that it was all frothy and pink). I tossed the viniagrette and roasted potatos and beets with more sliced strawberries, spinach and boston lettuce, then sliced the steaks and put them on top of the salad, and sprinked the whole thing with some sunflower seeds.

The bun on the side of my bowl came from the same local farm the lettuce, spinach and straberries came from, and the butter is the stuff I made using Noirbettie's post about making butter.

Yum!

Short List

Boo:

• Weather is making me cranky and icepick headache stabby
• Allergies are out of control and otc remedies are not cutting it
• Certain websites don't want to load at home now that husband put in funny router thing
• My iPod sounds like it's playing underwater.

Bleh.

Yay:

• We have air-conditioning at home, saving both people and animals from expiring in crazy, all-of-a-sudden-it's-August heat
• Husband has hit his more social time of the year which means that we're now spending time with friends together
• We're going on vacation in about six weeks to a cottage on a lake
• I got cast in Guelph Little Theatre's fall production of "Welcome Back To The 5 & dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean"!

Woohoo!

note from roo

i decided that today i will tell you all about what we do in the morning at our house1

sometimes i have to stand at the bottom of the stairs and cry because it has been forever since fred went to bed and no one has come to see me, but most mornings i am still sleepin when angela comes downstairs i am always happy to see her, and i do a little dance to tell her that she lets me go out the back door and then i get a cookie, but i don't always want to eat it right away because i know there are going to be better things than cookies in the kitchen soon

i always help while angela puts on her coffee and gets out her cereal, and i watch her eat verrrrry carefully to make sure that she doesnt forget to let me lick the bowl when she is done she and fred call this prewash i dont know what that means, but thats ok with me, cause i just like to lick dishes

after breakfast comes the really good part of the morning when angela makes her lunch for the day i help her get stuff out of the fridge then i stand on her feet under the counter just incase anything falls on the floor angela calls me hooverdog then and i dont know what that means either, but she says im good at keeping that part of the floor clean, at least so this is why this time is best, angela makes herself something that she puts lettuce on and she lets me have the crunchy bits thats good, but its not my favourite my very favourite is carrots111 if angela makes her lunch and doesn't give me a carrot i go woowooowooo to let her know that i am very unhappy

today was extra extra special, because there was one piece of cheese left over and angela said i was being soo good so she let me have it111111

after all that angela gets ready to go away sometimes i try to go with her, or not let her go, but she says she has to go , or she wont be able to pay for more carrots


anyway, i hope you are all having a good day
bye111

roo

You may call me "Mistress"

Two of my very dear friends will be marrying each other in about a year and a half. Last night at tea (yay, Tuesday) I was very honoured to be asked to be their Mistress of Ceremonies.

They're actually going to give me a microphone! Wooooohoooo!

(Just kidding, guys, you know I'll behave myself.)

So excited! *grin*

Little Things

Things I do:

• bring my coffee to work in my own cup
• bring my lunch packed in reusable tupperware, or re-used baggies
• pack my dishwasher as full as possible before running it
• use cloth or reusable bags for grocery shopping
• separate cardboard out for recycling
• hold off as long as I can get away with it before turning on air conditioning/furnace
• use biodegradable bags to pick up after the dog
• use some household and personal cleaners that are friendlier than others
• use some energy efficient light bulbs
• use as much recycled household paper products as possible
• eat locally grown or organic food
• I quit smoking last December, reducing the chemicals I'm putting into my body, into the air, and the butts that were being thrown away

Things I plan to start doing:

• keep replacing old lightbulbs with the energy efficent kind as they wear out
• keep replacing household/personal cleaners with friendlier options, and look into natural alternatives where possible (like vinegar as a glass cleaner)
• put up a note saying that I don't want junk mail/newspaper/flyers delivered to my mailbox
• start separating recycling beyong cardboard, and take it to the dump myself (our townhouse complex only has two dumpsters available; one for cardboard, one for everything else)
• find out if I can set up a composter in my back yard
• figure out a way to collect rainwater
• cut down on pre-packaged food, make an even bigger effort to eat local
• request a new fridge/stove/dishwasher from the landlords when we renew our lease so that we can get more energy efficient models
• take an extra bag with me to pick up garbage when I walk the dog

I'm sure there are more things that I could do, and likely a couple of things I'm already doing that I can't think of right now, but this is a pretty good starting point, I think.

I used to have a t-shirt that said "We don't inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our children." That was a good shirt.

Bye bye FB!

I've just gone and deactivated my Facebook account. I had a virus propagate from my account last weekend and it upset me enough that it soured the whole experience for me. I contacted one person that I want to keep in touch with and don't have any other way to contact, then deactivated the thing. I've been neglecting The Watcher's Diary lately anyway.

Tuesdays are my therapy

Usually on Tuesday evenings I get together with girlfriends and we have tea, and chat and sometimes do crafts, and sometimes do other stuff. There is always laughter, and sometimes there's some crying and hugging, and sometimes we have cake.

I firmly believe that it is my Tuesday nights that have gotten me through some of the crappiest parts of the last few years, and I'm just not the same when I miss out on them. That said, I won't be going tomorrow night.

Tomorrow I will be leaving work at lunchtime to drive into Toronto. I will be visiting with friends from my old job, then I will be attending the Yarn Harlot's latest book launch at night. There will be space for 500 knitters. I'm betting the space will be full to overflowing.

Next Tuesday I will get to tell my friends all about it, and although not one of them is a knitter, they will listen to my story and be happy for me that I am happy.

I love Tuesday.

Comedy Update

I heard from the ex-husband today.

His stand-up gig went wonderfully last night. The audience loved him, the host gave him extra time, the performer after him said that he was a hard act to follow, and a professional comedian that we once saw perform together was there, and complimented him on his set.

I'm so proud of him, and totally not surprised.

Since I got the update from him, I think that if he gets a chance to do this again, I may just go and see. :-)

Sometimes...

...you think you're done with something; that you've healed, that you've moved on. Then you hear a song, and you hear it, really, really hear it for the first time, even though you've sung it a bajillion times, and it sends you into a tailspin (apologies to Sarah McLachlan for only quoting some of the lyrics here; these are the ones that hit me hardest).

Through the years I've grown to love you
Though your commitment to most would offend
But I stuck by you holding on with my foolish pride
Waiting for you to give in...
You never really tried or so it seems
I've had more than myself to blame
I've had enough of trying everything
And this time it is the end...

In the terms of endearment
In the terms of the life that you love
In the terms of the years that pass you by
In the terms of the reasons why

There's no more coming back this way
The path is overgrown and strewn with thorns
They've torn the life-blood from your naked eyes
Cast aside to be forlorn...

Funny, how it seems that all I've tried to do
Seemed to make no difference to you at all...

Apologies have been made, as well as a tentative peace, and I was puzzled by the whole thing coming when it did, and wondered about the reasons, but I took it (as I always have) at face value, despite all past evidence that I am a naive fool, and then got on with things because while it was unexpected, it was no longer a huge thing in my daily life.

Now, this hit me out of nowhere, and made me marvel at the layers of the psyche. I've had a good cry, and a cup of tea, and I'm feeling level again, which is good. It's just a scar that I didn't expect to be laid open at 9 pm on a random Thursday.

Why my mother is awesome

I sent her this email:

"hello angela's mum, this is roo.

angela says that when people do things for you that make you happy, you should say thank you, so I wanted to say thank you to you and frank for sending the long red rope home with angela.

on monday when she came home from work, instead of letting me out in the back yard to bark at the kids like normal, she got out the long red rope. at first i thought we were going to play a pulling game and i tried to take the end and run around the kitchen with it, but angela got me calmed down and we went out the front door. we walked through the parking lot and down to the street and i was sooooo good even though i was very excited and i pulled a little, but since the long red rope is so strong angela was able to help me understand that pulling isn't a good choice, especially when there are small people around who get scared easily. we got to a light and had to wait, and i even sat down for angela, which is something neither of us could figure out how to do with that other silly little string thing. finally, we got to a field!

i got angela to take some pictures of me in the field after she was done falling over in the snow (i helped her get up, i am a good dog!) so you can see how happy i am now that i can go to the field.we walked back home, and i barked at another dog but didn't try to chase it even though it was trying to chase me and angela said that i was a good dog.when we got inside, i stood still for angela while she cleaned me off. playing in fields can be dirty! then i got a cookie, and defended my cookie from the cats, and ran around the kitchen and living room a lot and barked and jumped up and down. angela said that after a 45 minute walk like that i should have been tired but i was not, nope nope nope, so we played tug the rope with the proper rope toy and then i got a carrot while angela made her dinner. later on i did get a little sleepy, so i had nap on the couch. it was a good day, and angela says she is going to take me to the park tonight, where the snow might not be so deep and she might not fall over in it plus there is a garbage can there so she doesn't have to carry the poop bag in her pocket. yay!"

This is what my mom sent back:

"Hello Roo: Frank and I enjoyed your email and were so happy to see the pictures of you in the snow. We are glad to know that you are a good dog and look after Angela when she can't stand up. Sometimes it is harder for people because they only have 2 legs.

Love Angela's Mom"

It makes me so happy that get gets me. :-)

Oh, and here are the pictures from our Monday walk.

Yarn Barf

Last night I attempted to wind some yarn into cakes from skeins in order to start knitting Fred some socks. I don't own a swift, and I didn't have an extra pair of arms around, so I thought I'd rig something up using a chair and a vacuum cleaner.




It didn't work quite the way I'd hoped.

Plus, I had "help".

I got frustrated, and gave myself a headache, so I went to bed.

Tonight is my fourth last shift at Giant Bookstore, so it's going to have to wait until Friday for me to tackle it. Unless Zoe can fix it while I'm at work...