Weekend varia
Apr. 20th, 2008 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeI have had a really, really good weekend, and the day's not even over yet!
Got up later than I wanted to on Saturday, and had breakfast with the Parental Units after making my way there via BMW (Bus Metro Walk). I walked to the metro as I missed the bus, but it was such a gorgeous day out that it was totally worth the extra 20 minutes it tacked onto my trip (that's walk + extra time waiting for the next metro, as I missed the one I would have taken had I not missed the bus).
I then spent a lot of time waiting for the Maternal Unit to get ready so we could walk downtown together, and I headed with her into The Bay, for my annual I-must-go-in-to-get-this-one-thing foray into the belly of the beast. My mother came with me, and she wanted to stop by the Lancôme booth at the front of the store. I have a special tactic for The Bay, which is a tried and true in-and-out strategy which takes no more than fifteen minutes and uses only the back door, so that I don't have to run the gauntlet of the perfume-sprayers (can we say "instant migraine" boys and girls?). Unfortunately, my mother's detour cost us an extra twenty minutes *and* took us down the dreaded Perfume Alley, which meant that after only 35 minutes I was just about ready to scream and/or kill someone with my bare hands.
Then we stepped outside into the street, and all the random homicidal rage magically vanished. I hate department stores, and The Bay is my own private section of hell.
The most important part of yesterday was when I got myself some Rollerblades. Yay! I am going to take them for a test drive tomorrow, to get used to them, and if I find that it's not too hard to manage (my little test in the store indicates that I will have to work on my balance a bit, but that otherwise it's close to rollerskating), then I will likely be rollerblading to work during the summer. It takes me an hour to walk the distance, so I'm assuming that it will not take more than forty minutes or so on wheels, which is only ten or fifteen minutes for than it takes me to get there by bus.
Anyway, this is the plan. Tomorrow I'm going to make sure that I can travel relatively long distances on the skates without killing myself first. Oh, and before you ask, I did get protective gear to go with it. I am not so much of an idiot that I don't know that I'm going to faceplant a couple of times at least with these things on. I already have a bicycle helmet, so I bought knee and elbow pads, and wrist/palm protectors. They are black and red and look very snazzy.
I joined the Parental Units for dinner, and as the Maternal Unit was a bit wiped out from walking all over downtown for the afternoon, I cooked dinner. I made baked salmon with dill and a bit of olive oil, and improvised a side dish of rice, green beans and zucchini which I first steamed and then sautéed in a pan with a bit of olive oil, rosemary, thyme, and lemon juice. My timing was a bit off, so the side dish turned out a bit on the smushy side, but it was very tasty. When I get my timing right, I suspect it will be a very good side dish.
Came home, passed out in a happy tired stupor, and rejoined the Parental Units for another breakfast this morning. I'm going to be working night shift for the next two weeks, so it's unlikely I'll be seeing much of them during that time.
I spent the afternoon in the garden with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ai731, where we did a metric ton of prep work for this year's vegetables. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and perfect for this: mid-twenties (that's Celsius), bright and sunny but not overwhelmingly hot or humid. I still can't get over the fact that two weeks ago there was still three feet of snow on the ground.
I turned the soil in two of the four raised bins while she raked up the fallen leaves from the neighhbour's tree. We both pulled up a record number of weeds (and OMG the giant centipedes! Not as big as the ones that I saw in Mexico, but for Canada these ones were pretty big!), and she showed me the ins and outs of tools and how to prep a garden. I sprayed the cherry tree with a sulphur-based fungicide, since it appears the tree is prone to some weird fungus in the late summer. Hopefully we've caught it early enough this year that it won't be diseased.
We planted potatoes, onions, garlic and broccoli today. To our surprise, we discovered that last year's carrots wintered over (over-wintered?). I have no idea what carrots are or aren't supposed to do, butai731 was apparently expecting them to rot in the ground where she'd left them, and so it was a pleasant surprise to find that they had survived the winter and are apparently still edible.
I wrote down as much of what she told me about gardening in my new notebook, and I'm very much looking forward to managing the garden and seeing what I can come up with when left to my own devices.
Now I am off for one more meal with the Parental Units (the Maternal Unit is making duck tonight!), and tomorrow I have a ton of things to get done before I start my two-week night shift.
See you all on the flip side!
Got up later than I wanted to on Saturday, and had breakfast with the Parental Units after making my way there via BMW (Bus Metro Walk). I walked to the metro as I missed the bus, but it was such a gorgeous day out that it was totally worth the extra 20 minutes it tacked onto my trip (that's walk + extra time waiting for the next metro, as I missed the one I would have taken had I not missed the bus).
I then spent a lot of time waiting for the Maternal Unit to get ready so we could walk downtown together, and I headed with her into The Bay, for my annual I-must-go-in-to-get-this-one-thing foray into the belly of the beast. My mother came with me, and she wanted to stop by the Lancôme booth at the front of the store. I have a special tactic for The Bay, which is a tried and true in-and-out strategy which takes no more than fifteen minutes and uses only the back door, so that I don't have to run the gauntlet of the perfume-sprayers (can we say "instant migraine" boys and girls?). Unfortunately, my mother's detour cost us an extra twenty minutes *and* took us down the dreaded Perfume Alley, which meant that after only 35 minutes I was just about ready to scream and/or kill someone with my bare hands.
Then we stepped outside into the street, and all the random homicidal rage magically vanished. I hate department stores, and The Bay is my own private section of hell.
The most important part of yesterday was when I got myself some Rollerblades. Yay! I am going to take them for a test drive tomorrow, to get used to them, and if I find that it's not too hard to manage (my little test in the store indicates that I will have to work on my balance a bit, but that otherwise it's close to rollerskating), then I will likely be rollerblading to work during the summer. It takes me an hour to walk the distance, so I'm assuming that it will not take more than forty minutes or so on wheels, which is only ten or fifteen minutes for than it takes me to get there by bus.
Anyway, this is the plan. Tomorrow I'm going to make sure that I can travel relatively long distances on the skates without killing myself first. Oh, and before you ask, I did get protective gear to go with it. I am not so much of an idiot that I don't know that I'm going to faceplant a couple of times at least with these things on. I already have a bicycle helmet, so I bought knee and elbow pads, and wrist/palm protectors. They are black and red and look very snazzy.
I joined the Parental Units for dinner, and as the Maternal Unit was a bit wiped out from walking all over downtown for the afternoon, I cooked dinner. I made baked salmon with dill and a bit of olive oil, and improvised a side dish of rice, green beans and zucchini which I first steamed and then sautéed in a pan with a bit of olive oil, rosemary, thyme, and lemon juice. My timing was a bit off, so the side dish turned out a bit on the smushy side, but it was very tasty. When I get my timing right, I suspect it will be a very good side dish.
Came home, passed out in a happy tired stupor, and rejoined the Parental Units for another breakfast this morning. I'm going to be working night shift for the next two weeks, so it's unlikely I'll be seeing much of them during that time.
I spent the afternoon in the garden with
ai731, where we did a metric ton of prep work for this year's vegetables. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and perfect for this: mid-twenties (that's Celsius), bright and sunny but not overwhelmingly hot or humid. I still can't get over the fact that two weeks ago there was still three feet of snow on the ground.I turned the soil in two of the four raised bins while she raked up the fallen leaves from the neighhbour's tree. We both pulled up a record number of weeds (and OMG the giant centipedes! Not as big as the ones that I saw in Mexico, but for Canada these ones were pretty big!), and she showed me the ins and outs of tools and how to prep a garden. I sprayed the cherry tree with a sulphur-based fungicide, since it appears the tree is prone to some weird fungus in the late summer. Hopefully we've caught it early enough this year that it won't be diseased.
We planted potatoes, onions, garlic and broccoli today. To our surprise, we discovered that last year's carrots wintered over (over-wintered?). I have no idea what carrots are or aren't supposed to do, but
ai731 was apparently expecting them to rot in the ground where she'd left them, and so it was a pleasant surprise to find that they had survived the winter and are apparently still edible.I wrote down as much of what she told me about gardening in my new notebook, and I'm very much looking forward to managing the garden and seeing what I can come up with when left to my own devices.
Now I am off for one more meal with the Parental Units (the Maternal Unit is making duck tonight!), and tomorrow I have a ton of things to get done before I start my two-week night shift.
See you all on the flip side!
