Alyson

There are two very small baby slugs crawling about in the soil of one of my houseplants. I recently re-potted and resurrected this plant, which was nearly dead, using garden soil - which clearly had slug eggs in it! There's life everywhere, booze everywhere, jazz everywhere...

They're really cute. I don't know how long they'll survive, though. I don't really want them to eat the plant, and there isn't much else for them in here. But just for today, I'm not going to do anything about it. Now, off to the post office, to send a large package to Laura in Korea! It's probably going to be expensive, but everyone is chipping in!

I know this is kind of a long shot, but does anyone know if the Willows Galley fish'n'chip shop is owned by the same people as Demitasse (one or the other of the Demitasses in Victoria)? Google is not helping me out with this one.

My bank statement clearly says I spent $15.49 at "Demitasse Coffee", but I know for a fact that that $15.49 was spent at the Willows Galley on an oyster burger, a galley dog and a regular order of chips. So I'm guessing they have some connection to one or the other of the Demitasses. I got all confused at first, because I was at Demitasse with April just yesterday, but she bought my lunch. Seeing "Demitasse" show up on my bank statement made me wonder if someone had stolen my debit card info or something - but I didn't even take anything out of my wallet at Demitasse, April was so sneaky, she'd paid for everything before I even realized what was going on, and I KNOW that I spent about $15 at the Willows Galley. SO yeah.

To make things more confusing for everyone, there are not one, not two, but THREE places in Victoria with the name "Demitasse." There is the lunch/brunch coffee-shop at Blanshard and Johnson, the bakery store on Broad (what used to be the Rising Star bakery) where they make the bread for the Blanshard shop, and there is (as far as I can find out from Google and Eat Magazine) an entirely separate place in Oak Bay, owned by someone different, which is also a cafe/bakery called Demitasse. Apparently the Oak Bay place tries harder to be French, but I've never been there so I can't comment.

I'm fairly certain that no one stole my identity or my bank account information. Even if they did, they would have discovered quite quickly that I have negative amounts of dollars and given up, but all the transactions on my statement make sense to me, other than the fact that the Willows Galley is apparently actually Demitasse Coffee.

i went and saw 'where the wild things are' tonight at the imax.

i cried for ninety minutes straight, oh lord, my face is a puffy red mess.

oh my god it was so good.

I got a lot of knitting done in the last two days. I called in sick to work on Saturday, and then heard the distressing news about my brother's friend's death, and so I was not only sick but also sad and really didn't feel like doing anything. But knitting always seems to calm my mind, the way that yoga or rock-climbing or other activities that force you to focus do. And so I knitted, because I didn't know what else to do. All I have left to do on my dad's sweater vest is the few rows of ribbing around the neck and sewing in the tails. Then blocking, and it's done. It may be a little bit too wide, but I made Jason try it on and it didn't look too ridiculous, so I think it'll work. My dad's wider than Jason, anyway.

Interestingly, when I called in sick on Saturday, my co-worker who answered the phone immediately told me I should stay home and rest up. My experience with this place of work has been that everyone comes to work sick, and when you do call in sick, the managers will try and convince you that you can work anyway. Uh, and give it to everyone else who works there? Not to mention the fact that we're working with food, and it's a damn bad idea to work with food when you're ill. Perhaps my co-worker had, like me, read the Wikipedia article on sick leave, and was bound and determined that he wasn't going to catch whatever I had. I don't think we get more than one or two paid sick days per YEAR at my place of work, and that's probably only for full-time or salaried staff. I think everyone should read that Wikipedia article, especially the people who decide whether or not to allow for paid sick days. Dammit. The statistics say it all.

My mom keeps asking me if I'm going to get a flu shot. As in, an H1N1 flu shot. Well, not right now, as I seem to be fighting something else off. But I don't know if it's worth it or not. She even admitted that it does seem like "a bit of a crapshoot." She also told me that most of the people who end up in hospital with the H1N1 are women, between the ages of 19 and 40. I suppose I do fall into that category. I don't know. I just don't see myself getting it done, especially not before Christmas. Maybe I'll consider it again after that.

I decorated the cake, a bit roughly due to lack of time and proper decorating equipment, but then I hacked it up into a bunch of little square bits anyway, so it didn't really matter. Here's a picture (there are a couple more in my Flickr stream, too):



Yes, it was definitely worth making that cake. I got so many compliments on it. One girl actually said that she and her husband used to make a point of seeking out a certain restaurant in Alberta when they lived there, because it had the best mocha cheesecake, and that my cake was better than that. Last time I made a cheesecake I got similar results (people saying words like "best ever" and "delicious"). The great thing about cheesecake is that it's EASY. It's what Ruth Reichl describes as a "cheap trick," because it's easy and everyone is always impressed by it. The only difficult part about this cake was making the chocolate ganache - I must not have had it quite right, because the fats seemed to want to separate from the chocolate solids. This didn't matter for the ganache layer that got baked into the bottom of the cake, but the stuff I put on top of the cake wasn't the prettiest - hence my needing to decorate it further.

The party was great, considerably less awkward than some of us were expecting, and I got the card of a guy who inspires me and makes me want to be an arborist. I'm not entirely certain that's the right career for me, as it involves a lot of climbing, but maybe. Maybe! Maybe I could try and get a landscaping job with this guy and see what kinds of things it involves. But nothing's going to happen until after my dad and I go to New Zealand in March, which is the current plan (not set in stone, no plane tickets bought yet, but definitely planned).

Unfortunately I was awake from 4am until 11:30pm yesterday, with no naps, and today my throat feels funny. So today will be a rest and recover day, hopefully involving a lot of knitting.

Yesterday I made an approximation of this cappuccino fudge cheesecake. I say "approximation," because I used vanilla cookies for the crust instead of chocolate ones, and instead of a nice lattice on top I ended up just smearing the ganache all over, because my attempt at a piping bag broke right in half and everything went everywhere anyway. Other than that, it's pretty much the same cake. I need to decorate it more prettily, though. I'm taking it to the potluck/grad party for the OMG course, which may be silly, since most people there are probably vegans and won't be happy about my unsustainable cake. I bet they'll eat it anyway, though. Maybe I'll put rosemary flowers on it for decoration - the rosemary has flowered recently. Weird plant. Why would you flower when it's below freezing? Maybe the flowers are all frost-killed by now. Hmmm. Only one way to find out.

I'm having a really hard time not cutting into that cake and eating a piece right now. I mean, I really ought to test it and make sure it's suitable to serve to anyone else. But that would ruin any pretty decoration I might add, and who brings a cake to a party that already has a slice taken out of it? Oh man. This is tough. Will the cake make it through till tomorrow night? Stay tuned to find out.

*LIGHT BULB GOES OFF IN HEAD* Oh, oh! I can cut a stencil out of paper - a leaf shape or something gardener-y - and put that over the cake and sift icing sugar on to it! Genius. I have tons of icing sugar that I hardly ever use. This doesn't solve the "cake needs to be tested but not destroyed" issue, though.

"I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn." -William Henry Hudson, author and naturalist (1841-1922) (via Wordsmith)

Yes.

Apparently my Facebook status updates are too ambiguous. I was trying to express gratitude for the friends and family I visited in Vancouver this weekend, some of whom fed me and housed me and let me sleep in their house-mates' beds while said house-mates were away. When you say you're grateful for friends and hospitality and other people's beds, if you have friends like I do, you then receive several messages asking if you are okay and letting you know that if you need a place to sleep, you can stay with them. A certain mandolin player offered his home to me if I needed it. I assured him that I was not in need of a home, but thanked him for his concern. He's a sweetheart, really. I hope he is doing better with his current girlfriend.

If there's one thing I like, it's a stable relationship. Jason, if by some freak chance you are reading this, I love you!

I was so angry about the recycling yesterday that I forgot to mention the extremely interesting dream I had the night before. In the dream, I had a baby. I had given birth to this baby, but then something had caused me to be away or at work or something, so it was later and a friend of mine had been looking after it for me for a week or so (interestingly, that friend was the lovely Elizabeth Morris, who sold me my cheap iPod touch in real life). Anyway, the details of giving birth and being away right after were blurry or perhaps not even included in the dream (I don't remember), and the dream was all about me coming back and taking care of my baby. It was extremely realistic - worrying I would drop her (the baby was a girl), changing her diapers, showing her to my grandparents and them being won over by her cuteness, despite the fact that I wasn't married. The baby had red hair and her father was definitely Jason. I think he was in the dream, too, but it's fast escaping my memory now. I don't remember if the baby had a name yet.

What's interesting about this is that, until this dream, any dreams I've remembered having about birth or pregnancy have been way more stressful. Once I dreamed I'd given birth to a tiny kitten; another dream involved my mother being pregnant at way too old of an age and me being extremely upset about it. I think there was probably one where I was pregnant and wondering what the hell to do next, too. Anyway, none of that stuff was in this dream. Nothing in it was particularly stressful - once I'd gotten over my worry that I would drop my baby, I felt very accepting of everything, loved the baby, changed her diapers, fed her, had her on my hip at all times, etc. I was happy, I felt love towards everyone, and I was very proud to show my grandparents my lovely red-haired infant.

Subconscious, what are you trying to tell me, huh? I must be getting old.

On an entirely unrelated topic: Have you ever microwaved a cup of coffee for way too long? I don't recommend it. Everything seems fine until you drop in a spoonful of sugar, and then it boils over everywhere! It was so crazy, I actually jumped backwards because I was afraid something might explode. Luckily nothing did.