I’ve had to make my own dinner every day this week. While I like to bake, I hate cooking. I once flipped through a Jamie Oliver cookbook, and the “dashes” of this, and “guesswork” of that, were enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

I do occasionally throw something together for both of us, but since I was eating solo, I decided it would be easier to make a sandwich. Well three days and three sandwiches later, suffice to say I was pretty frustrated.

I think the reason I hate cooking so much (other than the fact that I’m not good at it) is because I consider such a colossal waste of time. Think about it. The time any one person spends grocery shopping, making food, eating food and cleaning up after food is exorbitant to put it mildly. The opportunity cost is high and the payoff is low… well according to me at least.

So whatever happened to those food pills that were promised to us in a once not so distant future? I’m actually half mad, half disappointed that they don’t already exist. Talk about saving energy, various types of resources…etc. Besides the fact that if they existed, they’d be..

And since I’ve already given up on the possibility of teleportation in my lifetime. I don’t think food in pill form is really so much to ask…

Christmas this year was great. When I was selecting the pictures above, I initially thought that I should do some colour correction, but all of them were so warm and captured the essence of spending time with family that I decided to leave them as they were.

Christmas day I:
- got pummeled by bouncy balls in the basement by R and my nephew. They’ve already learned to gang up on me.
- played hungry hungry hippos. Something I never knew - each hippo has a name and one of them is called “bottomless potamus”.
- decorated gingerbread men (one of the 4 is mine, guess which one!)
- had an amazing dinner c.o. my sister, brother in law and mom!
- hunted their cat
- took a million pictures of their beautiful centerpiece
- played Catan and lost… no surprise!
- got farmopoly - total surprise!

I got a cold shortly after Christmas and now I’m trying to get better while watching “Canada’s Worst Driver 5″ Best. Show. Ever. Angelina is nuts. I can’t believe someone like that exists. Arun should be stripped of his license for public safety. Father Giles seems sweet and hilarious and I would probably go to Church if I had someone like him giving a sermon.

I have a lot of laundry to do. I have a lot of Neo Citran to drink.

At a dinner party this weekend I let it slip that I like animals more than I like people. There are a few exceptions to the rule, but it really is a rule. I trust animals more than I do humans, and they are almost always more entertaining.

The picture on the left is of a lamb snoozing all curled up. The purpose of the blue on his head was to identify which lamb belonged to which ewe. It was hilarious to see all these adorable lambs with colors on their day old heads, especially considering the babies stuck close to their moms at all times. But I loved the contrast between the fluffy white and the bright blues and reds all the same.

Speaking of sheep, I found a woman who has sheep and donkeys and blogs here. She made the lifestyle switch at 26. That is insanely courageous and amazing and I am jealous of her 200+ acres. I ended up reading a large portion of her entries, and there are sometimes equal parts sadness and joy in farming. It would be extremely difficult for me to find one of the animals hurt or killed (as she experienced many times) but I think I would appreciate the world that much more. It’s strange to think that several decades ago a disproportionate amount of people -compared to today -experienced that lifestyle.

We’ve lost an amazing amount of knowledge with the migration to cities. For example, did you know you can soften brown sugar with a piece of bread? A certain farm kid told me that. True story, and trust me… it works.

I have a hard time with this season. Sure the colours are beautiful, and my favorite holiday (Halloween) can be found around this time of year, but let’s be honest. Fall has some serious baggage. For one thing, there’s less sunlight, the days are never crisp and warm like we imagine, and somehow, despite a lack of snow, reminders of the impending holiday season creep in and smother us whole.

Well, maybe it’s not that bad. I can still bike around the city… even in the rain. But this morning, when I saw a drenched squirrel run up a tree, it occurred to me that the branches were bare and he would have no shelter from the storm.

That’s just not right people.

The food of Fall is one of the few saving graces. Thanksgiving and its turkey and stuffing, pumpkin pie, squash and Ontario harvest apples. How can anyone write off the season entirely?

I finally (finally!) started baking artisan bread, an endeavor I vowed to embark upon a mere eight months ago. You can’t blame me for the delay. Bread baking is best in the Fall. I also made my Thanksgiving apple pie topped with a turkey shape that looks less pigeon like than last year’s. The butternut squash soup was an adaptation of this recipe… and admittedly that is a bay leaf I placed at the last minute for decoration. And finally, some delicious home made jams made by a friend of R’s mom. I suppose all of the above makes the 10-20 degree drop in temperature worthwhile after all.

Every time I go to write a new post, I think to myself, OK that really didn’t take a whole lot of effort.  I can do this more frequently… and then a month passes and I get busy and forget.  So the cycle begins.

The past 40 days have been pretty busy though.  We:

- Had a TV show film near us.  The first time we heard gunshots, we dropped to the floor.  Then they re-did the scene 10 times and it got old fast.

- Built a bed out of thin air.  OK that’s not 100% true.  R. built a bed out of thin air.  Thin air and 2×4s… which might as well be thin air.  I am sitting on the king size bed right now, and it looks like it was made by Mennonites.  This bed was nothing but 800 dollars of oak boards a month and a half ago.  CRAZY.

- Celebrated my nephew’s fifth birthday.  I can’t believe he’s five already.  Time flies.  Today is also my younger nephew’s first birthday.  He made a cooing sound over the phone to me.  I think it loosely translated as “Why didn’t you come over for my birthday?  I will hold this against you forever.”

- Moved everything out of the old place.  Moved everything into the new place.  I painted 5 rooms in two days.  I got maybe three hours of sleep a night during the week of the move.  I was a wreck.  ETC.  A lot of crying was involved.

- Did an overnight sleep study at a sleep clinic.  Electrodes and wires are not fun to sleep with.  Knowing that someone is watching and filming you sleep is extremely weird.

- I fed a donkey an apple.  It made his lifetime.  For real.  I had never seen this particular donkey happy until that day.

- Longed over a farm.  Two actually.  One six hours north, and one three hours east.  I dedicate probably two hours of my day thinking about owning a farm.

- Went to my good friend Meg’s wedding.  HER wedding.  It is still crazy.

- Visited Niagara Falls for two days.  Stayed at a Hilton hotel.  They give out cookies on check-in.  I approve!

- Watched the end of season four of House and cried my eyes out.  R thought I was a loser because of it.

The end!

Twitter has ruined me. It ruined me in the way that only a micro-blogging site could to an individual who is often faced with a short attention span at the end of the day. As a result, I haven’t been able to put together a coherent blog post on this site… a quality that once came so easily to me. It’s much easier to write a sentence and leave it at that -than it is to create multiple paragraphs to convey something worthwhile.

I haven’t even posted about the bajillion times we’ve gone to the Bowling Alley since this picture was taken at the charity a bunch of us attended. Bowling has become the go-to when we’re at home and bored. Usually a Saturday night, and once as late as 3 am. I am never usually the champion of doing this, but get outvoted by the group… and I end up enjoying myself anyway, so it all works out in the end.

So what’s new? I have been stressed out, and until last weekend, I don’t think I realized how bad it was. After a 40-50 hour work week, I wasn’t able to shut off my brain. I tried to do some work around the house, and I did prep work for Easter desserts. The day of, I put the pie in the over and tried to brown the crust in the oven… I left it, and 10 minutes later the oven was billowing smoke. It wasn’t one of my finest moments. I had a mini-meltdown and R tried to console me as much as possible…. the rest of the day was great however, and included a bunch of us playing with my nephew’s soccer ball in the yard.

I will try to post more and avoid twitter-inertia. YES. OK.

I wish I knew the story behind these two. But all I know is that he appeared one Sunday, as did we, after a long absence on her part. I think it’s safe to say he’s hers, and judging by the way the calf kept brushing himself under her head, I doubt anyone would argue differently. When we saw her two weeks ago, she was in the barn and none too pleased about it. Mooing up a storm and the like. But when we saw her this time, she was outside grazing and prancing with the calf. The animals can tell that spring has arrived, and refuse to be denied the beautiful weather.

Something from deep within us transforms with winter’s end. A mixture of shedding layers, increased vitamin D, the need to clean our homes, renewed life -plant, animal, human. I don’t fully understand this cycle, but I’m grateful for its reappearance year after year. It almost makes the devastatingly long winter worthwhile.

I am exhausted. I could go to sleep and it’s only 9:15. I imagine this is the type of thing one gets used to, when shifts are not shifts but rather stable working hours. But I am not there. And neither is my body. It’s remarkable how much your brain/psyche/muscles become accustomed to things once they become a habit. It’s scary and encouraging at the same time.

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting here much lately. The way it seems to work out is something like this: When I don’t have much work, my life is boring and I don’t have much to say, and when I’m working all the time, my life becomes work, and because my work relies on confidentiality, I can’t say anything. Follow?

One thing I can say is what I’ve noticed - I’m really giving everything to this job. It’s by no means a career, but the students are so wonderful, and I enjoy talking to them, so I feel energized by what I’m doing. Except I come home and I’m exhausted and a bit grumpy, but still excited for the next day.

Other good things: Flowers from R’s mom during a particularly brutal sickness, a Sunday morning trip with R to see my favorite goat, bowling for charity next weekend (details to come…)

See me up there? I’m the one on the right, with the macbook, the grey turtleneck and looking a bit upset. That, however, is my expression when I’m content and interested. Seriously! I was at an un-conference this weekend dealing with government and citizen participation in the context of new media. It was fun and engaging, and for the first time in a long time, I felt excited about contributing to something big.

The last time I felt that way was back in Kingston, which, as of late, has become a very touchy subject for me. I’ve started a new coping mechanism recently: When I’m upset, I tend to close my eyes and piece together my old room. I pretend I’m sitting on my bed and staring out my favorite window (documented here and here). I think of my desk and the vinyl records on my wall and my little plastic ornaments. I think of the walks I use to take along Princess Street, or how I felt when I was in my favorite room in the JDUC… and for a second I feel at peace.

And then it evaporates and I’m only left with feelings and visuals of the library on Johnson street, of the Market and conversations with farmers, of my profs, of a sense of community I don’t have here. It tortures me. Who would’ve thought that such great experiences could turn into such haunting memories? Needless to say, the coping mechanism isn’t working as well as I’d intended.

I miss Kingston, but going to the “un”conference made me realize that I need to create the community I had given to me at Queens. It is much harder here. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do it, or how I’ll go about it, but I know that I have to try. Obviously I’ll try to keep my efforts updated here, but if anyone has any ideas on how to go about this, please send them my way!

R. & I spotted this beautiful dress at the fair and when we found out it was 1500, he took 3 pictures of it and said he would sew it for me (I know! I have it pretty good). So we decided that instead of exchanging Christmas presents, we’d get a sewing machine and make projects. I’ve wanted to make a quilt for a while now, so that’s something to look forward to in the new year. Now if only I could put together computers like he does… I think we’d be even.

I still want to make a gingerbread house before we leave though… maybe not quite like last year’s… and hopefully it won’t meet the same demise. I’m leaning towards a gingerbread village. Tonight we watched The Number 23 followed by The Hot Chick and then half of Babe before stopping it because was getting too sad. The part where the puppies get taken away is KILLER. I know that this isn’t much of a post, but I figured I’d publish something akin to stream of consciousness… And considering I got 5 hours of sleep, I think this is pretty eloquent.