champs, for various reasons.

About a week and a half ago, I got a call from my friend Kerry at 11:30 p.m. There was all sorts of noise in the background and she sounded frantic, demanding that I HAD to send her the criteria and instructions for the cleanse BEFORE breakfast the next day.  This was a matter of life and death, as she had eaten too much sugar that day and somehow I was the one responsible for fixing that fact in a timely manner.  So, I rallied myself and got the task done.  Before breakfast as I had been instructed. 

So, I texted her today at lunch to ask how the cleanse was going and got this interaction:

Bb: How is cleansing going?
Kp: Cleansing? What?
Bb: Dude you called me at 11:30 p.m., demanding the directions for the cleanse before breakfast, and now your response is "what?"
Kp: In our friendship contract, one of my explicit responsibilities is to keep your life interesting. Just fulfilling my end of the bargain.
Bb: You are ridiculous. I am blogging this.
Kp: I demand royalties.
Bb: Cool. When I get a book deal I will give you a dollar.
Kp: Contract says 15%
Bb: Friendship currency is priceless

High drama with Kp. She is right though, she keeps me entertained.  Also, now I get to feel smug because she flunked out of the cleanse, and we, on the other hand were TOTAL CLEANSE CHAMPS.  And, as predicted, it totally had its expected effect of sparking a new wave of interesting and better home cooking.  Seriously, worth it just for that.  Favourites included: homemade hummus, quinoa salad with zuchinni, tofu baked in braggs and sesame oil, delicious soups, and chili-lime pan-toasted almonds.

The Cleanse

I've been doing a 12-day cleanse for the past 7.5 days. "Cleanse" is sort of a pretentious word, but whatever. I've done this one a few times before (once-a-year-ish) with various combinations of friends, and this time it's with Joel, Lori, and Rebecca.  Yay.  Doing most things is more fun with company, and this is definitely no exception.

Say what you will about cleanses, but this one's not that strict or crazy (no cayenne-lemonade juice fast) and it's not really a weight loss thing either, at least in my experience and opinion.  And the best thing is that both times I've done it I have benefitted just because it forced me to cook almost all of my meals at home and put a lot more thought and effort into eating healthfully...with the eventual realization that it's not that hard and *can* be delicious.  To state it simply, the rules are: no sugar, no dairy, nothing fermented (like vinegar), and no flour (of any kind).

I made the poor choice of scheduling this one over my sister's birthday, but I did okay and managed to fly under the radar.  She was accommodating and made sure the meal was mostly cleanse friendly.  The most epic cleanse fail (saying "epic fail" was for you there, Kerry) so far has been soymilk.  Last time I did it I drank SO MUCH SOYMILK.  Even though it says to have it in moderation.  I assumed that the "plain" soymilk was unsweetened, but this just reinforces that you always have to check.  It's sweetened with cane sugar.  FAIL.  I haven't been drinking hardly any this time around, but relished the thought of having an occassional soy latte.  So much for that. 

The best thing we did so far this time around was have a meal all together on Sunday night and a "soup exchange" at the same time.  Eating together and hanging out made it feel less deprived, and going home with three or four different dishes to eat through the week made it so much less of a mental obstacle.  I hardly have to think about what I am going to eat for the rest of the week, thanks to Lori and Joel's soup and hummus, and Rebecca's curried chickpeas.  We should do this all the time. 

Belated Resolution

My resolution for 2011 is not only belated, but also sort of unoriginal, since I posted about it in November.  But, if you know me you know that I like to keep my resolutions manageable and realistic.  Although sometimes/often even then I don't end up fully accomplishing them.  Ones that come to mind where I had only partial success include: drinking more water, wearing out my yoga mat (took two years instead of one, but I just now realized that I did actually wear it out and had to buy a new one.  GO ME.), and reading all of the unread books on my shelf.  That last one is probably my most impressive failure, because in 2010 I managed to re-read more than 32 books that I own and have read more than once already instead of tackling my stack of unreads.  But, you know, I read mostly for fun, so I don't want to beat myself up about it too much.

On to the unoriginal resolution....

Use stuff up.  That's the umbrella that my resolution for this year is falling under.  And in general, I am trying to develop it into a life habit.  But I don't only want to use stuff up, I want to use the things that I already have as they are meant to be used, and make sure that I stop to consider the necessity of a new item before I purchase it.

So, in light of that goal, I gathered up all of my accumulated post-it notes from my desk at home, chose a few stacks of the ones I liked the best, and brought all the remaining ones to the office to use at my desk.  I am waaaaay more likely to use them here.

Other successes including beginning to use up my collection of cotton balls and qtips, old make up, and hair products.  Also shoes.  But that's a hard one and I am working myself up to that.  Oooh, and food/dry goods.

I have also decided, as an amendment to last year's resolution on books, to seriously evaluate my desire to read the unread books that I have.  If I don't want to read them and have owned them forever, AND don't think that it will be worth it in the end to force myself to do it as an enrichment exercise, then darn well I am going to march them over to the wee book in and exchange them 2 for 1 for books that I WILL read.  I'm thinking The Flying Troutmans, The Book of Negroes, and I'm not sure what else yet.

The additional motivation here is to ease the great merging of belongings that will be happening between Joel and I when we get married.  We have a garage sale in the works for this spring, so I am saving some of my best castoffs in a box in my storage area so that our sale doesn't stink.

So, there you have it.  My resolution.  Maybe next year I will pledge something a little more exciting, but for now I'm good with the practicality of this one.

Keychains, Oh Brother

I'm pretty sure everyone has had at least one collection, intentional or otherwise, at some point in their life.  I've had the beginnings of a frog collection (regretttable), an owl collection (trying for it not to be regrettable), a doll collection, a stamp collection (incredibly brief), some Lion King trading cards, marbles, pogs, and probably a Monchichi collection. 

Most of those collections listed above were when I was a kid.  The owls were also more recent, but in that case I was hyper-aware of keeping it from becoming a collection, lest I become known as the owl collector/enthusiast and start getting it all the time for gifts (note: if you have given me an owl gift I probably liked it, so don't feel bad). My current accidental collection is bell jars.  I am obsessed.  I just can't get enough.  They will be the worst things to move, so I might have to slowly start detaching myself from at least a few of them.

Anyways, after an unfortunate discussion that I had with my dear friend Kerry as I dropped her off at the airport on her way to London, wherein I demanded that she bring me a souvenir and that it not be a keychain (I was joking, but also serious, but mostly joking), she decided to start me a keychain collection.  I think it was in large part to teach me a lesson about being bossy or demanding gifts.  She pretty much bought me a keychain from every major tourist attraction in London (and probably spent at least $40 doing it).  Apparently it was hilarious at the time.  And apparently it is still hilarious, because the joke has unfortunately not died.

I have recieved keychains as part of at least two Christmas gifts since then, and random keychain giftings in the interim, including a very dissapointing but still funny package I got in the mail about 2 months ago, with like four keychains inside and a note that said "I'm just house cleaning ".  Super dissapointing and also props to Kerry for a good joke.

I'm both sorry and not sorry to say that the London keychains did not make the cut when I moved over the summer.  Sorry, Ker.  It would have been great if I had them to include in my keychain collection photo below.  But, mostly I just wanted to remember the story.

Keychains pictured above include: Camp Evergreen carabiner, two identical Maligne Lake keychains, a zombie zebra (flashlight mouth), my beloved and much-used (partly due to obligation) ear-ring, a TODD SPENCER orange foam surfboard (which will henceforth be for my spare keys), and a Camp Evergreen lanyard (for spare car key).  Not pictured are the keychain versions of Big Ben, the crown jewels, a double decker bus, a phone booth, and a few more things I have forgotten.  UGH.  Enough already, Kerry.

On the other side of collections, you know, the fun and not maliciously revengeful side, artist Lisa Congdon is coming to the end of a year of documenting her various collections. Some of the ones in the early 2010 were really beautiful. I haven't followed much since then, but it's kind of a neat idea. Visit her Collection a Day blog: http://collectionaday2010.blogspot.com/

Shortbread: Courtesy of the Hospitality and Information Service in Washington D.C.

When my mom was 25 she married my dad and they moved away from rural/small city Alberta to Washington-freaking-D.C. to live the life of diplomats.  Now that I am 27 that really puts things in perspective.  At this point my mom had been a diplomat's wife living in Virginia for two years.  Ack.  It's pretty neat, though, that they did that and it was a super interesting time for them to be there.  They stayed in the Watergate hotel when they first moved and were getting settled, and it was RIGHT after the Watergate scandal had broken.  Crazy times.

Anyways, one of the many things that my mom did there was learn how to host a mean cocktail party.  This involved gathering some party tricks and crowd-pleasing appetizers and other good things.  So, she invited Kaeli and I over the other night to pass down her scottish shortbread recipe, and to tell us the story of where the recipe came from.  It was a cute night.  And the shortbread was delicious.  I'm not going to post the recipe but some of the pics are worth sharing for sure.

This shortbread started with me purchasing glace cherries, which I have never liked because they remind me of fruitcake.  But Joel loves them.  He figured out long ago that my mom always has some in the door of the freezer and whenever he used to come over he would go find them and sneak a few.  I ratted him out, but only because I knew my mom would think it was funny and would like the fact that he felt comfortable enough to help himself.  I like that too.  Anyways, he's eaten them all so I had to buy some new ones and bring them over.

I also brought some Christmas coloured smarties thinking we could use them to make the little holly berries instead of the glace cherries, but we ate them all before we even started baking.  Who was I kidding, I knew we would not have any left to decorate with. Pshaw.

Here is my mom kneading expertly, as she tends to do.

And here I am crammed up in my favourite spot on the kitchen counter. For some reason Kaeli and I like to cram ourselves between that pull-out cutting board and the cupboard.  Always have, always will. 

Mandatory lay-on-the-floor break.

And while I did that the shortbread magically got finished!  Okay, so I don't have pics of cutting them out or doing the glace cherries.  My mom did all the cute little holly berry cherries.

But it turns out, after all these years, I finally decided that I like the darn cherries.  But only baked on to tasty shortbread.

And finally, a sweet photo by dad.

The Thrill of the Crayon Box

The Pantone colour of the year was announced.  Honeysuckle is the shade for 2011.

pic from ApartmentTherapy.com



It's like a reddish-pink that I would group as a relative of the coral family, which my friend Natasha recently informed me is one of the most flattering shades for people in general, as in blondes and brunettes alike (and a host of people with other colourings) can pull it off.

If you got to Apartment Therapy you can read the full post with more pictures, but I copied part of the rationale over here for you...

...Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues. Honeysuckle derives its positive qualities from a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum.

I can dig it.

Every year, when I see the Pantone colour announced, I realize that I have been seeing this trend popping up sporadically on blogs for a while.  It sort of builds slowly and once it's announced the design bloggers go nuts.  Being on trend with colours might be a quixotic pursuit, and sort of futile, but I can't help feeling like colours are still fun.  The thrill of the crayon box in adult form.

I can't think of colour trends without thinking of the scene from "The Devil Wears Prada" where Meryl Streep's character bashes Anne Hathaway's character's cerulean blue sweater.

You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.

And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.

And of course, I can't think of the colour cerulean without thinking of April from Gilmore Girls, who we love to hate, and who loves the colour cerulean.

Life Lessons

When I was in high school I spent part of one summer volunteering at a sort of resort-camp for teenagers, and had to fold a lot of fitted sheets.  They are a pain in the butt to fold.  The supervisor showed us a pretty good way to fold them, but they are still a pain in the butt and never look as nice as you want them to.

Then in university, I was friends with one or two guys who lived in a house full of boys, and I have a really distinct memory of hearing them tell the story of learning how to fold a t-shirt in an amazing way where it works almost perfectly every time.  Apparently one of the roommates had learned and was showing the rest of them, and they were all so amazed that they were practically cheering at the results.  Five or six guys cheering over a folded shirt is a sight I would have liked to see.  Here is a video showing the way they were doing it...



Anyways, when I came across this video I had to share.  Partly because I want to be able to find it again when I need it.  I hate the way that fitted sheets are always bunchy on my shelf.