The laws of junk food

My coffee-buddy coworkers occasionally laugh at me when I’ll decide to grab a donut at Timmies instead of a coffee. They laugh because, they say, I eat so healthy the rest of the time, it’s hard for them to reconcile that with the sight of me nibbling on a boston creme. This post sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well – in particular the sections titled “Eat perfectly all the time” and “The Four Laws of Junk Food Efficiency”. Yay for putting my intuitive thinking process into concrete terms!

As for the boston creme, I choose it over other donuts because it’s the most delicious, but it actually also happens to be one of their healthiest choices. Yes, nobody I tell this to believes me, but it’s true – go look on the nutritional chart! This is also my problem with eating desserts out at restaurants – most of the time I don’t, because I feel that, frankly, they often don’t measure up to something I could make myself, and if I do talk myself into getting one I’m more often than not left disappointed. And if I’m going to eat something full of sugar and fat, it better be damn irresistible!

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Luck

This morning worked out so that I ended up being close to Bridgehead, a fabulously local and fair-trade coffee shop – so of course I had to stop in for a morning coffee to bring back to work. I got my delicious smelling coffee, and was halfway to putting a lid on it (literally!) when the unthinkable happened – I somehow knocked the coffee over, spilling it all over the place. I was staring forlornly at the dripping coffee, thinking that at least none of it got on me (besides my comfy mitts which are washable).

Eventually, I decided to try again and went up to the counter to order another coffee – only to be pleasantly surprised by the pronouncement that it was ok, they were making me another one at no charge. Awww, that’s nice. Thanks Bridgehead! I guess you really care for your morning sleep-deprived pre-coffee customers.

In other luck-related news, this has been a remarkable couple of weeks. First there was that $2 Lotto649 win a few weeks ago. Followed by a scratch card $3 win yesterday (and no, I didn’t get it myself, this is Dan encouraging my gambling habits!). And today, I won the pool we had going at work, to see who could guess the winning bid amount and buyer for the auction for my division (Optical), which was up for sale. Is this unusual, or what?! (yes, it is, for those who haven’t heard me complain about my luck).

So I’m sitting here, wondering if this newfound luck is a side-effect of the recent change in my marital status. So, does anyone recently married have any comments? Have you noticed a change in your luck after getting hitched?

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T&T supermarket

I finally gathered enough courage to accept all the warnings I’ve received about how CROWDED T&T was, and planned an outing (even managing to drag Dan along).

First impressions – WOW. This one is even better than the ones in Vancouver, but possibly that’s just the shiny glossy newness speaking. Yes, it was more crowded than your average Loblaws – but not as much as I had feared from all the feedback. More importantly – it was awesome!!

There was a dim sum section, with freshly steamed goodies. Sadly, they were out of BBQ pork buns, so we had to settle for regular pork buns. Still flavourful and delicious. This made me really excited for my birthday, when Dan promised we’ll go out to our regular dim sum restaurant.

The bakery section was also quite impressive, with lots of different flavour-stuffed buns (I got red bean), as well as steaming fresh egg tarts. That reminds me – mmm, that’s what’s for dessert tonight!

The sauces aisle was fantastic. I bought a few jars, but I’ll have to go back once I find a bunch of recipes to use them in. I’ll also have to read up on the merits of the 20 or so different brands of soy sauces they had – although most likely I won’t, and will just go for the best (funkiest) label + price combination I can find.

I have to admit the fish section was a bit of a disappointment. Ok, the live fish section was cool, especially seeing all the asian women trying to wrangle live lobsters out of their tank and into a tray, with regular flimsy tongs. The disappointment came from the frozen fish section labelled sashimi – they had a few different kinds of frozen salmon (which I can get at a regular Loblaws), and squid (which I’m not the biggest fan of), but no other fish. I was hoping at least for tuna, as well. The presence of pre-sauced unagi redeemed the sashimi section, though!

Oh, and today also marked my first visit to Dan’s mecca, the Princess Auto store out on Walkley. I can see why someone like Dan would like it, but my general reaction is – meh. Although I wouldn’t mind going there once or twice a year, just in case!

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Weekend

We had a fun weekend, which started on Friday night over sushi and then board games. Much delicious food was consumed at that dinner. I’ve been laying off the sashimi lately, in favour of rolls and sushi (with half the rice picked off due to the presence of sesame seeds, heh) – but my hands-down favourite at that place are fried scallops. Yes, I know, a travesty, to forgo raw fish for cooked non-fish – too bad. We finally got around to taking a picture of the plate when we realized it looked a lot like a cartoon bunny with huge eyes (like in Bolivia, use your imagination).

Dan also decided to try on my hat while I had gone to the washroom. The colour really brings out his cheekbones, don’t you think? I really don’t understand how he can call DY “girl Dan” after pulling stunts like this himself…

On Saturday, we went out to celebrate Mary’s upcoming birthday with glow-in-the-dark mini-putt, followed by dinner and drinks. Here is Shaun praticing his choke-hold on Dan.

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Happiness

Just as I was about to write about the books that I read on our trip, I finally got around to watching a video someone had sent me a looooong time ago. The video is vaguely about making people feel happy, and one of the books I read, “Happiness” by Will Ferguson, is about what happens when a self-help book is published that actually worked – rendering everyone who read it “happy”.

The video is a bit on the long side, but you should definitely watch it if your day needs a pick-me-up. There’s a deeper message, but I don’t want to over-analyze a cute little short film.

I loved the book. It is equal parts of Will Ferguson hilarity, bizarre coincidences, and a description of how I vaguely thought the publishing world worked like, anyway. Highly recommended, although as Dan noted, the ending is a bit of a cop-out. But other than that, great book!

I also read “Great Expectations”, Charles Dickens’ tour de force. It was actually a much easier read than I had expected (I figured I would barely have time to get through this one book, while in fact I ended up stealing the other two books from Dan). The characters are fun, the morals are straightforward, and the ending not unhappy.

The last book I read (not in this order, though) was “A short history of Tractors in Ukrainian”, by Marina Lewycka. I was pleasantly surprised, since I hadn’t been expecting much from something I’d never heard about before, and had plucked from the 50 cent bin at a used book sale. It’s a story about two middle-aged women whose widowed father goes off and marries a woman much younger than her new daughters-in-law. Poignant at times, entertaining throughout.

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Fog and Frost

[I wrote this sometime last week, but kept putting off actually posting until I could upload the pictures.]

Today started as one of those days where you can’t see more than 20 feet in front of you once you’re outside. Beautiful, puffy, white fog. What it brought with it was even better – crisp, patterned frost. I love frost. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not a fan of everything it stands for: dead plants, cold, approaching winter. But it’s just so beautiful, that I love it despite all those things!

On the way to work, I was able to finally put my new little camera to the test for the first time. At least, the first time in Ottawa. Since I got it before the South America trip, it’s more like the 4060th test, give or take (yes, I really took that many photographs on a 5-week trip). But the other excuse for buying this camera was that I’d actually be able to use it for everyday random photos, instead of the planned photo excursions I seem to need to be able to use the dSLR. I just had to pull over at the side of the road and take a few pictures of these absolutely gorgeously frost-covered cattails. Later on at work, I saw the most delicate frost-covered spiderweb – sadly, it was gone (melted) by the time I passed by that spot on the way to get my camera.

Also, vaguely related to frost – after finding this article on winter sowing, I’m completely stoked to try this for next year. Yes, I suppose this will come as news to Dan. The good news is that this means I probably won’t take over the yellow room for 2 months to turn it into my little grow-op, as he called it. The bad news is that I’ll probably be asking him to shovel snow off a portion of the deck sometime in January, so I can put the containers out.

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I won in the lottery!

Ok, it was only $2 (on a $3 ticket), but hey – I won. It’s been at least a few years since I’ve won anything else, and yes, I have bought…. at least 4 tickets between then and now!

Of course, then I had to add another $1 to my winnings to get another ticket, because seriously, who takes cash when they win $2 on a lottery ticket. So does this mean I’m now down $6 if this ticket doesn’t win? Ah well – it was so worth $6 to hear the machine play its little tune!

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A meta-post

After only starting this blog very recently, I’ve been trying to find some ways to encourage myself to post, instead of abandoning the blog for weeks on end, which is what I’ve done in the past.

Conveniently, I was told that November is NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) – the idea is that you write a blog post every day. Now, given that it’s already a third into the month, I’m going to modify the rules** by saying that as long as the average number of posts ends up at 1 per day, I’ve satisfied the requirements.

** I reserve the right to modify the rules as the month goes on. Or cheat and split up the posts into sub-topics. Although that may work out to my advantage, because I tend to write about too many things at once, anyway.

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Women

How often have you been the ONLY woman in a meeting? If you work in high-tech (well, and if you’re a woman), it’s pretty much an everyday occurrence. Or at least an every-meeting occurrence.

The other day, I was in a meeting that was ALL women. Seriously. There were 4 of us in the room, and three people joining on the phone conference. Every time someone joined, and it turned out to be a woman, the room erupted in a burst of giggles. I guess maybe that’s why they never make all-woman teams. We’re too easily distracted by random coincidences!

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Ottawa Green Bin

I’ve been really excited about the green bin since the program was announced a year and a half ago. We have a compost, but there’s a lot of stuff that can’t go in it that the green bin would accept. This would cut our garbage output to maybe a quarter of a bag per week. Now, this issue has gotten under my skin ever since I got back and found out that now council is debating charging people to use the green bin (without letting you opt out if you already do something as radically environmentally-friendly as compost). The article today is just driving me nuts.

First of all – I would really like to know who are the genius councilors who approved this project without apparently knowing how to pay for it. Second – how the hell is blue and black bin pickup affected by this program? In particular, how does introducing the green bin magically increase the costs for existing pickup? It feels like they’ve decided to try another go at Larry’s “0 means 0″ promise by simply cutting out the offending costs from the tax bill – “look, your taxes only increased by 2% this year! – oh, and don’t mind the extra new costs on other lines of your bill which add up to another 4%”. All this does is free up space in the budget for them to put in another harebrained project without feeling too much like they’re breaking their “no tax increases” promise.

From the article: “Hume said the new fees will be fair because the cost of the waste programs will be removed from the general tax base.” Well, no. Wasn’t this program started in the first place as a social benefit, in which case it is the responsibility of the “general tax base” to start with? Also, if he wants to talk about fair, it would be “fair” to reward people already engaging in the behaviours they’re trying to promote (like composting) and charge people who are not (e.g. a cost for garbage bag pickup over 1 bag per week). Actually, did you notice that the green bin is now also replacing the yard waste pickup? So for a lot more money, you’re getting a real cut in the amount of waste they pick up, as now you have to cram organic waste + all your yard waste into 80L. So… does that mean the 4 other yard waste bags from our fall cleanup on a given weekend get to go in the garbage?

People who don’t currently recycle are not magically going to realize the error of their ways and start mucking around with separating their compostable waste from the non-compostable stuff, buying specialty garbage bags and carrying the waste daily between the small container in the kitchen and the large green bin in their garage. They won’t – although I’d like to be proven wrong, Ottawa.

On top of being paid by the city to process the waste, the company (whose name is conveniently not mentioned on the City of Ottawa green bin site) gets to sell the compost back to the public. For $68 a year, I want my share of that compost for free and delivered to my yard!!

Not a good start to my day. Wednesdays suck. Rant over. For now.

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