Transit

Took the train to Ottawa today, that was super YUMMY!


Drove home.  That was not.


Love train trips.  Hate driving.

Good side?  The girls are home, and we chatted quite a bit on the way.

Delightful to see them again, and to top it off, the man is going to get the boat launched tomorrow!  Ready for us to have our mini sailing vacation starting part way through next week!

Soooo ready for that.

Books, paint, family and sailing.  Does it get better?

Hmmm, should get some super yummy groceries.

difficulties

It is odd sometimes having an unusually difficult time coming up with a post.  Today was intense at work, very intense and it is filling my head as I troll around for thoughts to work into something to say.  I, however, cannot talk about any of that.  So it rolls around and around some more.

Here in Toronto it is tomato season, and many many families are starting to process and put up their years worth of tomato sauce.  How it is most often done is with a machine in the yard that you feed the cleaned tomatoes into and it separates out the seeds and the skins and pulps the flesh.  A huge time saver, then it is put into a large kettle (not always, but often) and cooked down a bit.  Into the large jars goes some basil (sometimes) and the tomato.  The jars are sealed and put into a boiling water bath so the canning is safe.

An interesting factoid that goes along with this is that the women who work on this have to be in a certain part of their cycle or they cannot participate.  To this day.

I do adore something about that, maybe not the fact of it so much, as the continuance of the tradition.

Also learned another olive technique.....soak them in plain water, changing it every couple of days for a few weeks, at this point I lost the train a bit, but you would then put them in brine?  With some garlic? It was not exactly a complete recipe....

May try again this year and see if we can figure it out.

Running dilemma

Seems the iPod doesn't like being tucked inside the sports bra when I run.  Got all hissy and fussy and wouldn't work right this morning.  I'm not really all that sweaty, but there must have been a little too much damp.

Now what?

Hold it in my hand or what?

Any advice out there?

Stupid mutt is right under my bed and barking.  Making the bed shake and noisy. Like a kid's worst nightmare.

Laughter

Got together with a good friend tonight, and her now adult child.

Laughed and laughed and laughed.

Goodness gracious, but it felt great.

Then I ran across this when I got home so I laughed some more.  Not only laughed, but saw some great witty protest.

Thought I'd share.

Who d'you laugh with most?

Good think I slept well last night

'cause today's been one long kind of irritant.

Don't even want to get into it, cause in a while, most of it will go away.

The bright side?  The man and I went to dinner at one of our favourite places in the city, we went there on our first date way back when.  We also figured out that the waitress was probably in kindergarten that day.  

Got a WHOLE stack of yummy books today too...

• The Road Home, Rose Tremain
• Fabre's Book of Insects
• Proust and the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain, maryanne Wolf
• Reading and the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene
• Wisdom: from philosophy to neuroscience, Stephen S Hall
• The Emotional Brain: the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life, Joseph LeDoux
• The NUmber Sense: How the mind creates mathematics, Stanislas Dehaene
• A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, V. S. Ramachadndran
• Forever Today: A true story of lost memory and never-ending love, Deborah Wearing
• On Being Certain: believing you are right even when you're not, Robert Burton 
• How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer
• Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer

So, maybe today wasn't all irritating, new books and dinner with the man.

Cup's half full when you add it all up.

Hope yours is too, 

Cheers, 

O

Last night

You know those days when you think you're doing just fine, and then you stop?

Yeah, cause when you stop you realise your nearly dead from being so tired.  Honestly you didn't even feel tired before that moment?

Last night....got home, the man and I had been out with friends we hadn't seen in ages, had a lovely time, I was all set to walk the mutt with the man before getting on-line, checking the email, blogging yadda yadda yadda...then I sat down on the bed to change. 

Gone.

Managed to stagger out and brush my teeth but sooooo

gone.

Feel much better today though.  Hope you're all doing well.

Cheers,

O

House update #7,652

The usual view down into Youngest's....

View of the new dining room:

Eldest's room with a doorway into their bathroom:

Part of Youngests:

Part of Eldest's, looking up into her loft:

All sent by the architect last week.

More to come.

Hmmmmmm

Friends in Spain have rented a little finca, a cabin and a bit of land in the woods.

Looks pretty darned nice doesn't it.

Enough to set a girl dreaming.

play and inflexibility

I am getting to play with the new netbook that my nearly 100 year old great aunt bought herself while I set it up.  It is doing a weird skipping thing when I type that will have to stop very very soon or it will make my aunt nuts.

While reading stories to Youngest, Eldest was using the netbook.  Did not like it one little bit cause it's different.  Also it is set up for an older person.  Minimal buttons, big fat curser, etc, etc, etc.

I do find it odd that she finds it more difficult to adapt than I do.

Thought the young were supposed to be so flexible.

urge to run, how weird.

Having run a grand total of twice, I am now feeling quite compelled to run every day.  Odd isn't it, considering it is something I really don't like at all.  Something about this program is nice though, cause it forces you to start off slow enough that you actually feel faintly competent, though maybe my expectations were just so very very low.....

possibly it is just that, I am stunned by having any ability at all in an athletic endeavour I have always found so profoundly difficult and horrid.