He really is that tasty

To give you a bit of background before I delve too far into this story, I hate letting stuff go to waste. Last time I made soap, I had the dregs of three different oils left over - olive, sweet almond and grapeseed. Not wanting to toss it out, I had an aha! moment and decanted all three into a little bowl, for use as massage and/or bath oil.

M'love just got home from Meet the Creature, and I ambushed him with a backrub. Tonight is the first time I've remembered to use the oil.

I poured it on, thinking to myself that it smelt pleasantly of almonds, and proceeded to oil up his back. Three seconds later, a very interested cat had her nose glued to his skin. The little bugger was so enraptured that she tried to nip his moles!

I spent the whole backrub fending her off while trying not to get oil everywhere. The stripy monster has the strangest food fixations!

Shouldn't the busy taper off after a while?

First and foremost, having electrodes attached to one's body is no fun at all. Did you know that they abrade your skin with this nasty little sandpaper thingie before slapping on the adhesive? I've now had this done twice, the latest of which also involved a treadmill. All this to learn that I only have a minor heart abnormality with a vanishingly small chance of any harm coming of it.

In other news, the past month (oops) has flown by. In no particular order:

1) M'love and I have gotten our shit together for the Cuba trip. We now have passports and lovely immunization bruises on our arms. The only things left are finding a suit for him to wear to the wedding, which he and the bride will be taking care of over the weekend, and convincing someone to watch the cats for a week. I left my shopping waaaay too late and was damn lucky to find a dress. Never mind a bikini - I had to go to The Ridiculous Megamall On The Other Side Of The City to find one that wasn't priced ridiculously, eye-searingly bright or so cheap it threatened to fall apart at the first touch of water. But, that's the price I pay for refusing to go somewhere tropical with only a frumpy black one-piece to swim in.

2) The guest bedroom is finally done. The flooring and baseboards were installed last Wednesday and Thursday, after much nagging of the contractor. Now I can move the bed back in and fix the damn thing.

3) M'love had a birthday. I schemed and searched, and finally managed to obtain a copy of the Beatles Mono Box for him that was not only in stock but priced reasonably. Madness! The few days before and the day of were spent on food-related preparations - he had home-made eggs benedict with fried mushrooms for breakfast and chicken cordon bleu with crab risotto and fresh salad for dinner. I also re-created the Infamous Birthday Cake on his request (if you don't already know, I ain't telling), complete with grape licorice lace and nibs for detailing. Yes, there are photos this time.

4) Just to randomly throw this out there: I've developed a yen to cook up some fresh lobster. Not sure how I feel about the killing part yet. I'm afraid I won't be able to do it, or conversely that I'll be too cold-bloodedly unbothered. How's that for stupid? However, I love lobster like few other foods on this planet, so I anticipate I'll be finding out sometime in the relatively near future. Christmas, maybe?

5) I have a Perler problem. My coffee table is currently covered with fish, frogs, crabs and other nautically-themed critters, and they're starting to crowd out the Nintendo characters and the Pac-Man ghosts. I may end up taking them to work to quirk up my desk. The 3-D palm tree is almost certainly destined for it.

6) Stupid, stupid teen books. Namely, the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson. I purchased an omnibus of the first two in a moment of utter insanity. They're like popcorn in book form. Highlights include mangling of the English language (it has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer's brand of dialogue, but very, very British), an absolute nut job of a cat who enjoys trouser-shredding and poodle-baiting, and a little sister prone to hiding pooey knickers in the oddest places. I'm equally amused and utterly horrified by the character's extreme self-centeredness, and am startled to laughter as often. It's caused me to develop a new respect for both parents and teachers. Titles include such gems as Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, Knocked Out By My Nunga Nungas and Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers. Tremendously fluffy. DOUG help me.

7) I've remembered what my bathtub is for. This has been aided in part by the aforementioned fluffy teen books. I may actually finish fixing the shower downstairs soon just so I can have the tub all to myself again.

8) Video games. I've gotten back into them, albeit in spurts. I'm currently re-playing Yoshi's Island DS while working my way through Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. Next up: Fossil Fighters (because I'm a paleontology geek to the bone).

9) My hubby is totally awesome. Just had to throw that out there. I got my Christmas gift really, really early last week, and I'm not ashamed to admit I did a little happy dance right there in the comic shop. It's a cold-cast statue of Goliath from Gargoyles, and it's occupying a very conspicuous place of honour in my library. Now I'm hoping that Disney sees fit to do a Demona to go with it...

There you have it. Exciting, no?

Because it smells too good not to share

Ask anyone who knows me: James Barber is my personal cooking god.

I have several staple recipes I can attribute to him - my chicken wings recipe, for one (Chris knows what I'm talking about). However, there are a TON of recipes of his I haven't tried. Tonight's dinner is one of them.

I'm attempting his bastard version of korma, and good grief it smells good simmering on the stove. I've adapted it to my own tastes, of course, being chronically incapable of following anything other than a basic bread recipe to the T.

Here's how it's written (paraphrased by necessity of the cartoon form of original book):

Mix 1 small yogurt in a bowl with 2 tsp tumeric and 1 clove garlic (chopped). Stir in 2 pounds cubed meat (he suggests pork, chicken or beef). Marinate for at least two hours.

When you come back to it, slice a large onion thin and fry in 2 tbsp oil. Add 6 cloves, 1 tsp pepper, one tsp cinnamon and 1 tsp salt. Let it all cook together for 2 minutes.

Add the meat and yogurt. Rinse out the bowl with 1/2 cup water and add that to the pan. Simmer, lid on, for 45 minutes.

Stir occasionally. Turn the heat up a bit at the end and allow to thicken a bit.

Eat with chickpeas or tortillas.

My changes:

I added 1 tsp ginger and a touch of curry powder to the marinade. Instead of just onion, I added 2 sticks of celery, 3 diced potatoes and about a cup of frozen peas, and fried everything in unsalted cultured butter. I opted for a dash of ground cloves instead of 6 whole. No salt. I also added 1/2 tsp ground hot indian pepper.

I'll let you know how it turns out! Allow me to re-emphasize how fantastic this all smells...

UPDATE (POST DINNER):

This one is getting added to the dinner rotation. It was a good, balanced dish that I dare call comfort food. M'love raved repeatedly and went for seconds. This is unheard of (the seconds, not the enthusiasm).

Must add a touch more spice next time, though. I ended up putting in about a 1/4 teaspoon crushed pepper flakes halfway through, and I think it could stand to have double if not triple that. Remember the source, mind you - my home has a wide variety of hot sauces that get eaten full strength with alarming frequency. I'm also contemplating adding a splash of white wine to the sauce next time to make the sauce smoother, but that's more a visual aesthetic thing than anything truly affecting my enjoyment of the dish.

Finally, I propose to omit the turmeric stain on my jeans next time around. While an attractive shade of yellow, it didn't add much to my enjoyment of the meal. If you'll excuse me, I have some laundry to run...

Random thoughts while painting

I'm on a roll with all the home projects right now. Spent the entire long weekend working my butt off instead of lazing around and enjoying it like a sane person (a solo activity right now, as m'love is working himself to distraction doing six credits in three weeks on campus).

To give you an idea, I spent one day doing yardwork (filled a huge compost bin with tree bits and weeds), and spent the other two alternating between painting the guest bedroom closet and refinishing a desk I recently acquired. The door frame of the closet is the only thing left that still needs a bit more work, and the desk has been successfully stripped of its previous finish and had the worst of the abuse sanded out of it. Go me!

At any rate, while I was painting on Sunday, I had a lot of time to myself to think. Strange person that I am, the following occurred to me:

There is an entire generation of young women out there who no doubt think that the Edwardian period is sex with a vampire while menstruating.

M'love was very amused. I'm blessed to have such a husband as he.

(Particularly since he, not being a vampire, is vanishingly unlikely to impregnate me with an ultra fast-growing, improbably strong, telepathic child who will need to be chewed out of me by its father before it explodes my fragile human ribcage. Hooray!)

My stomach dropped out...

...when I saw the newspaper this afternoon. I rarely look at the office copy, but today, something made me think that I should.

I find stories of grisly car crashes distressingly voyeuristic, always have.

Never expected it to get personal.

I don't want to go into detail, in the interest of maintaining the illusion of anonymity, but the articles I've come across about the crash are high on tear-jerking details of the victims' lives. There's even a "photo album" on one of the major new sites.

In case it isn't clear, I knew one of the people who died.

Not well, but I knew her. She was married to my father's cousin, and was an incredible pillar of grace and poise during his long illness and eventual death.

I haven't seen her, or my cousins, since his funeral. I was no older than nine, but it left a deep impression on me. My parents let contact lapse with that side of the family. I can't help but wonder what happened. Sure, my families traded a province for a territory several months after my dad's cousin passed away, but that shouldn't have changed anything - it had always been a long-distance relationship.

Whatever the case, I never knew her any better than I did at nine. I know that she was tremendously happy in the last five years, having finally found someone else to share her life with. I know that her children will miss her immensely, as well as the other two who died (see previous statement about anonymity).

Maybe this is a chance to change things. If so, it should have happened sooner.

I need to stop letting myself be held up by my parents' choices.

I was able to dig up an e-mail address for one of my cousins. I've sent him a message expressing my condolences, and asking him to pass it along.

Maybe he'll reply.

Maybe he won't.

But I wouldn't think very highly of myself had I not said something.

Lazy weekends have their place...

...but this isn't one of them.

The last several days have been tremendously productive. M'love and I have been working on getting the house in better shape. So far, the renovations of the office are nearly complete (shelving needs to go in and the ledge needs to be attacked with TSP, primer and a coat of white paint.

The downstairs bathroom is now entirely repainted. I'd very much like to paint the mirror frame, but m'love disagrees (despite the fact that there's no way to patch the abused spots and have it blend with the wood). We still need to put up wall fixtures, but that will come.

Next up is the spare bedroom. I'll be cleaning and patching the walls over the next couple days. A coat of primer on the patches, and I'll be ready to paint by mid-week. It will be the same colour as the office by virtue of buying a dramatic excess.

Yesterday was filled with purging, in preparation for painting the bedroom. We cleaned out a bunch of stuff we'd been meaning to for years and took it down to Value Village. Felt good. Among it was the last of the pots the previous owner declined to pack when she moved out, at long last.

Ultimately, I'd like to repaint the upstairs as well before the summer is out, but we'll see how well that actually pans out.