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04/27/2006
Back in good ol' Ottawa
I'm back from Nova Scotia! I've also got the images downloaded onto my computer so I'm posting a couple of them here for you. They're not exactly postcard photos, but I'm getting better. At least I don't have any pictures of the inside of my purse or of my belt buckle this time around. :-)
Below is the famous fire hydrant in Liverpool, which I mentioned in my last post. Isn't it cute?
I was going to post a photo of the Bluenose II, but as I was saying before, it really doesn't look like anything, and everything is just grey and black and dreary. You can't see much, and since space on BlogSpirit is a precious commodity, I'll save it for more interesting, cool things.
Cool things such as, for instance, the Cabot Trail, which is shown in the next photo. It too is looking a bit brown and dead, but that's because none of the deciduous trees have any leaves yet. In fact, when we passed through some of the higher altitude passes, there was a considerable amount of snow still left on the ground! Anyway, here's a view from within the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. I think this particular spot is pretty much the most photographed along the whole Cabot Trail.
As you can see in the picture, there was a slight haze, but luckily the real fog managed to stay away as we travelled. We could actually see the blanket of fog sitting offshore, just waiting to pounce on unsuspecting tourists!
The day after we did the Cabot Trail, we went to visit Cape Split, which is near Wolfville, about 45 minutes' drive northwest of Halifax. We thought it would be a drive to the Cape, take some panoramic pictures, and head home, but as it turns out, you can drive as far as a trailhead, and then it's another 8 km hike to the actual tip of the cape! We had no idea there would be a hike involved so we didn't bring any hiking-type stuff with us, but we decided to walk the trail for a little bit. The day was absolutely gorgeous and it was around 15 degrees - the perfect temperature. Not too hot, not too cold. However, since we'd been having a string of about a week of bad weather, the trail was full of mud and was in the woods, so there wasn't anything really interesting to take pictures of. We walked for about 15 minutes, had a snack, and then headed back to the car. It was great though, and we finished off the day with a nice meal in a restaurant in Wolfville.
Then the clouds and rain and wind moved in on Monday again. I guess the message is you need to take advantage of good weather while it lasts!
12:23 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/18/2006
I saw the Bluenose!
Yesterday Thomas and I went on a bit of a road trip, just to get out of Halifax and see some of the countryside. We headed west along the south shore of Nova Scotia, and had lunch in Liverpool, one of the towns along the way. Liverpool was actually quite a nice little town, and the restaurant we ate at has quite nice food as well. The fire hydrant out in front of it was painted to look like a red-coat soldier (basically, like your typical nutcracker), so I took a picture of it. Yes, taking photos of fire hydrants may seem a tad silly, but it was just too cool to pass up.
Also in Liverpool is a lighthouse park. The actual lighthouse visitor's centre was under construction, but it's not like there were any other visitors anyway - it was so cold and windy and generally unpleasant outside that we were I guess the only people silly enough to be out trying to do touristy stuff. I ran around, took a whole bunch of pictures as quickly as possible, and then raced back to the car.
After lunch we decided to go visit the marine part of Kejimkujik park (separate from the main Keji park), which turns out to be either totally unmarked, or not where it appears to be on our little map. We drove around the winding road leading through Southwest Port Mouton, but decided to turn back once the road turned into an even-more-unmarked dirt road. The "real" Keji is easy to find, so my guess is that we were probably on the wrong road. Oh well. We got to see Southwest Port Mouton, which is a typical windblown, paint's-peeling-but-oh-well fishing village.
On the way back, we decided to stop in Lunenburg. I've been looking for the Bluenose II for ages now. Usually it's either in Lunenburg or in Halifax, but it seems that whenever I go visit one or the other, the Bluenose is out somewhere. Anyway, third time's a charm, so we headed back to Lunenburg, after seeing the "Bluenose II in Port" sign attached to the main highway sign for Lunenburg. Sure enough, when we got to Lunenburg (which was surprisingly nearly deserted), there was the Bluenose quietly bobbing up and down at her little dock! Woohoo!! Of course, it actually took a couple minutes to make sure it was actually the Bluenose. First of all, when it's just sitting there, the sails aren't out so it kind of takes a bit of imagination to get it to look like the boat on the back of the dime. On top of it, it just so happens (boy I'm lucky) that there's a pile of repair work being done on her, so she was covered from bow to stern with a big white tarp. All we could see was the hull below the deck. Anyway, despite these few limitations, I took some pictures, and everyone will have to use their imaginations to make it look more like the schooner on the back of the Canadian dime, and less like a giant marshmallow. :-)
(And in case anyone is wondering why I don't post any of these pictures, I don't have with me the cable to connect my camera to the computer, so that will have to wait til after I get home, which is on the 25th.)
The weather is still ugly. It's currently 4 degrees (Celsius), with a windchill making it feel like -1. *sigh* The forecast doesn't look that much better for the rest of the week, though so far the weekend is supposed to be nice. Hopefully it will stay that way, because we're planning to go to Cape Breton and do the Cabot trail. It's supposed to be really beautiful. I wouldn't know. Actually I should know, since I did the Cabot trail once with my family back in 1994, but it was just too foggy to see things like the sea, the cliffs, the car in front of us, our hands in front of our faces, etc. Let's hope it goes better this time!
15:37 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/16/2006
Happy Easter!
Hello to everyone, and Happy Easter!
I'm in Halifax at the moment, and it's typical spring weather - wet and foggy. The first day was quite nice, with the sun shining and 20 degrees outside, but it's been rainy, cloudy, and/or foggy ever since the day after that. Oh well, at least it's Easter holidays.
What have I done here so far... not much - lots of chilling, lots of TV watching, and we've been out on the town a bit, though not that much yet. I went to the Halifax Folklore Centre and picked up some books on scottish fiddling, which should be really cool once I get back home to my cello. I'll have to translate the fiddle music over to cello, but at least I should have plenty to keep busy with!
I can't really think of anything brilliant to say at the moment, since I've basically just been chilling out, but I'll write again shortly.
Hope all is well with everyone!
19:29 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/11/2006
Nova Scotia, here I come!
Tomorrow morning, I am heading to Halifax for two weeks. I'm looking forward to the trip and enjoying those things peculiar to Nova Scotia. For example, the Urban Cottage store, which is my favourite place in all of Halifax. It's a consignment shop for antiques and collectibles, and they have a very eclectic and very interesting selection of all kinds of stuff, much of it at surprisingly affordable prices. (On top of it all, the price goes down incrementally as time goes by, if the item is not sold.) I love that place! Of course, everyone else around me just rolls their eyes when I talk about it. But hey, where's the fun in shopping at retail stores when you know millions of other people across North America have exactly the same items decorating their houses?
The only bad thing about this Halifax trip is getting up really early to make the flight. Oh well, you can't win it all!
Today was a gorgeous day here in Ottawa. The sun was shining, and it went up to 20 degrees. Loads of people outside, and those in their cars had the windows rolled down (usually with horrible boom-ba-boom-ba-boom music pounding at a zillion decibels!). The squirrels were in on the action too. I heard an incredible racket that sounded like angry birds murdering each other, and when I looked out the window, it was 2 squirrels chasing around the yard. From the looks of it, Mr. Squirrel was trying to convince Mrs. Squirrel to have a roll in the hay, while Mrs. Squirrel was trying to convince Mr. Squirrel to take a long walk off a short cliff. Looks like human men aren't the only ones with woman troubles!
It's actually been pretty quiet otherwise, as far as my life goes. I'm sure I'll have some interesting things to say once I get to Halifax! (I might be a zombie tomorrow so it could be a day or two before I post again. ;-))
22:27 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/08/2006
Happiness is a Sad Song
Happiness is a Sad Song is the title of an old book I got from my Aunt Judy quite a long time ago. It's a compilation of Peanuts (i.e., Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and so on) comics, each page illustrating a theme which begins with "Happiness is..." Other than sad songs, happiness includes things like:
Waking up, looking at the clock and finding that you still have two hours to sleep.
A Christmas vacation with no book reports to write.
Being too sick to go to school, but not too sick to watch TV.
I like the Sad song one the best though, because it can be so true. Today actually I've been transcribing a piece of music called "Hear My Prayer O Lord" by Orlando Di Lasso (who lived in the 1500s). It's very beautiful but the words are, well, melancholic to say the least:
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee.
Hide not thy face from me in the time of my trouble;
incline thine ear unto me when I call
O hear me and that right soon;
For I have eaten ashes as it were bread
And mingled my drink with weeping.
My days are gone like a shadow and
I am withered like grass.
But thou O Lord shalt endure forever
And thy remembrance throughout all generations.
Let's just say it's written in a minor key. ;-) I'm going to try recording the various parts on my cello (so you won't hear the words unfortunately) and try mixing it to form the cohesive song again. I'll post it to my website if the experiment works.
It's a very sad piece but at the same time inspiring. Basically it's saying, life sucks so bad I would practically rather be dead, but Lord, you're still so great I'll teach my children to love you. The faith is so strong even when life was so rotten. How many times people nowadays, even me, stumble in faith when things start to get a little rocky!
Last night I also just finished reading a book: Dragonfly in Amber, by Diana Gabaldon. Let's just say I went through more than one kleenex! There's a very sad part where the two main characters (husband and wife) must part, as the husband heads to certain death. They both know it and both know it can't be avoided, and try to enjoy their last few moments, trying to record last memories of each other. Boy, is it EVER sad. Even though I know it can't be the end of either of them because there are 4 more books in the series, I was still acutely feeling that anguish. (The sign of a good book!) Like with a sad song, happiness can be a sad book. :-) I can't wait to read more! Anyway, I'll probably find time in a later post to wax poetic about all the things that are right about Jamie, the highlander who's the lead male character (whose "certain" death I alluded to earlier), and why so many women wish that more men were like him! :-) (Might start with the kilt. I think if men knew how sexy they are in kilts, it would be a whole lot more fashionable that it currently is!!)
00:35 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/07/2006
The buttermilk saga turns into a hardwood flooring saga
First of all, I finally managed to finish all that buttermilk. I made 3 recipes' worth of chocolate cookies, which (clever as I am) happened to use up exactly the 1 3/4 cups of buttermilk we had left. Finally we're done with the buttermilk, and we have a ton of chocolate fudgy cookies today, thanks to the double recipe of Fudgies I made this evening. (Which should last until... tomorrow night probably. :-)) Ooh my tummy hurts...
Actually my brother has a good deal to do with the mysterious disappearance of cookies left unattended. Yesterday, my parents and I went to visit some showhomes in a new development in our area (more on that later), and in the hour we were gone, six cookies vapourized!
So yeah, we went to visit some showhomes in a new development, Avalon, which is near where we live. In our house we kind of have a running joke about Avalon. Probably around 4 or 5 years ago, the whole area was a swamp, a prefectly good swamp which they drained and filled in and made into a typical residential suburban-sprawl type neighbourhood. I think I mentioned it earlier. This is the development with the yuppy street names like Esprit and Chardonnay (oh pleeease...) Anyway, yesterday, on the way to the showhomes, we discovered our new favourite, aptly-named street: Aquaview Rd. The problem Avalon's been having is that, as I mentioned, it's built on what used to be swampland. It probably wasn't the most brilliant idea in the world, because now dozens of homes are having lots of water-related problems, such as majorly cracked foundations, doors that won't close, and in general, houses sinking in unusual and decidedly not-good-news ways. No wonder they're viewing a lot of aqua these days...!
Anyway, when we got to the series of showhomes, there were six of them all in a row, all in order from smallest to largest. Our house is a 3 bedroom home just under 1900 square feet. Not exactly tiny, and adequate for our family of 4, which is roughly an average-sized family nowadays. Well, with respect to those Avalon showhomes, the square footage of our house is roughly halfway between the smallest and second smallest showhome! Makes me wonder just how much "house" people really need...
We were actually not visiting the showhomes because we're looking for a new house. Instead, my parents are planning to put in hardwood to replace the dingy old pink (now brownish) carpet that's original to our 17-year-old house. Soooo, we went to the showhomes to look at what they've done with the hardwood and the decor in general. Then today, we went to flooring places to look at samples. We actually did find a sample that all three of us (my parents and I) loved, which is a miracle in itself. (Usually, Dad automatically hates anything I like. :-)) However, at $9.29 / sq.ft., it was too expensive, so the search was on for a suitable alternative. The search is still on, but we had some fun along the way.
The first place we went, a lady came in, also looking for hardwood floors. As it turns out, it's her type that makes me remember why I never ever want to be in sales. The poor salesman, I felt so sorry for him. From her, it was a constant barrage in a condescending tone you'd probably use with a delinquant teenager. "What's the best type of flooring? Can you tell me that? What's the most expensive? Canyouexplainittome? The whole house, I want the whole house in hardwood. What's the best colour? Canyoutellmethat? What about durability? Canyouexplainittome? Huh? Huh? Huh? Not once in the whole time could she shut up long enough to listen to what the guy was saying. It was almost like, "I need hardwood and I need the perfect hardwood for my house RIGHT NOW and I want you to tell me what I need so I can buy it and leave and have my house look like a designer magazine and then I can be off to bug someone else for the next thing I need to make my life perfect." The poor guy saw us quietly trying to mind our own business and rolled his eyes when he had his back to her. Then as we left the store she asked my mom where a particular road was, and as mom gave her directions, she seemed to be listening but not really, barely restrained from subjecting mom to a barrage of questions by the fact that mom's not paid to put up with this garbage. :-) As we headed out the door afterwards, we exchanged sympathetic glances with the salesman, who just shook his head, smiled and crossed himself. The poor guy. I told mom she should have given this lady directions to get far, far away from this city. ;-)
Anyway, we'll have to see how the hardwood floors turn out. I'm making progress on getting my parents to be more adventurous in their decorating, but it's a bit slow-going with Dad (bless his heart. :-)).
23:59 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/04/2006
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snowwww!!
After all the nice spring weather we had in Ottawa, pretty much all the snow had melted, and I was thinking of taking a photo and posting before and after pictures of Ottawa to show the snow, and the same scene without the snow now that it's spring. All last night I could hear it raining, so when I woke up this morning, I thought, woohoo! It's not raining anymore! I opened up the curtains with a dramatic whoosh and... well it had stopped raining alright. The ground was white and it was snowing. So far for Easter weather. It's Christmas all over again!
I don't really mind too much though - I'm just too happy at the moment! I finally, FINALLY finished a draft of a journal paper I've been promising my UVic supervisors for months now. They finally won't have to take turns bugging me to get it done. I'm not too sure how it happened actually - all of a sudden I was in the mood to just sit down and finish writing the thing, finish working out numbers in Excel, and I even wrote a couple of hundred lines of Matlab code to get me some reasonable numbers for one of my scenarios. It felt so good to get something done!
I think the daylight savings time also helped. I love that it's light later in the evening. Yesterday morning (the day after daylight savings time kicked in), I woke up at noon feeling like the walking dead. I'm not sure what happened there. Last night I finished the famous paper at about 1:30 am, and went to bed. For some reason, I just couldn't sleep. It was literally 5 am this morning by the time I fell asleep. Then I woke up around 10:30 or 11, feeling absolutely great. As much as I'd love to, I just don't have my body clock figured out! :-)
So today, with a draft of the paper done and sent off, I can finally goof off guilt-free. I baked some squares, even. We'll see how good they are. This kind of relates back to my Dad's famous birthday cake. The cake recipe for Dad's cake ("Died and Went to Heaven Chocolate Cake") has 1 1/4 cups of buttermilk in it. The trouble is, buttermilk only comes in 1 L cartons, meaning 2 3/4 cups of buttermilk were left over. These squares I made today, a gingerbread-y spice type of square, contained 1 cup of buttermilk so now I'm down to 1 3/4 cups. I think next I'll try a recipe of buttermilk bread, followed by some chocolate buttermilk cookies. Last time we made this Died-and-went-to-heaven chocolate cake, we used up the buttermilk in pancakes, which I actually didn't like very much. Hopefully we'll have more success this time around! Maybe I should write a letter to the dairy companies and see if they'll make smaller cartons of buttermilk! (Which reminds me, we have a stray 1/2 cup of heavy cream that needs to be used up too. I wonder what I can make with that!)
Hmm, what else. Oh! Sunday night was the Ottawa Chamber Orchestra rehearsal, with two of the four pianists who will be competing in our piano concerto competition. The two of them both seem to be 16-18 years old or so and oh man, are they ever good. Wow. We were joking that we should award the prize based on the highest notes-per-minute ratio. It's an awfully large number in both cases we've seen so far! One of them was playing the Grieg piano concerto and the other was playing Beethoven's 3rd piano concerto. Next week is another competitor also playing that same Beethoven, as well as someone playing the Prokofiev piano concerto. He/she had better be good, because I've been practicing a lot of D-flat major scales up in thumb position just to be able to play the accompaniment!! :-)
For right now though, I'm in such a good mood, let it snow, and bring on the D-flat major key signatures! Yay!
17:36 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
04/01/2006
And speaking of cooking lessons...
I should probably add another important lesson I learned a couple of weeks ago:
Thou shalt not try to cook anything with chocolate chips in a microwave.
Dad has a nice recipe for microwaveable brownies which usually work quite well. These are cocoa-based though, and have no solid chocolate in them.
Unless you use really low power, solid chocolate (like chocolate chips, chocolate squares, etc.) burns quite easily in the microwave. And microwave-burnt chocolate is really nasty stuff. It comes out in a nuclear-incinerated mass, almost as though you hacked a chunk off a boron rod out of a reactor core and suddenly had it appear, smouldering, in the bowl you're retrieving from the microwave.
I learned this the hard way a couple of weeks ago. For probably two years now, Mom and I have been trying to find a recipe we really liked, which is peanut butter cookies (or squares) containing chocolate chips and dried cranberries. It seems like an odd combination, but it all tastes great together and they're extremely addictive. We had a good recipe, but can't seem to find it, no matter how hard we look through the piles of cooking magazines and recipe clippings (we're quite sure it wasn't in an actual cookbook). So, Mom went on the net and found a recipe that seemed about the same, and I decided to try it. I decided also to make squares rather than cookies, because I was feeling lazy and it's just easier to dump the batter into a square pan and be done with it than to make the cookies one by one. Anyway, so I made the batter, and I had the feeling that something wasn't right. Even though I followed the recipe to the letter, the fact that it was mostly peanut butter with a bit of sugar and an egg worried me. Usually, there's some sort of thickening agent like flour, or, if I recall from the old recipe, a fair quantity of icing sugar. There's also usually some sort of leavening agent, like baking powder and/or baking soda, which this recipe also lacked. Anyway, I patted the whole thing into the 9x9 pan and put it in the oven for the required amount of time, and more. The edges were pretty brown, and if left longer in the oven would begin to burn, so I took the pan out and let it cool somewhat. I then decided to try a piece of my chef-d'oeuvre, and as it turns out, only the very edges were cooked - the inside was still absolutely liquid. I was literally better off with a spoon than a fork, and that's not at all an exaggeration.
So Dad comes to the rescue, and given the success of the microwaveable brownies, figured we could zap these square to help them cook the rest of the way. (They were already in a glass dish, so that was fine.) We zapped them for 3 minutes, and the dough was just boiling! Like a soup! We decided to zap it 2 more minutes, and by the end of that, the squares were inedible, with the whole centre part still (initially) like a soup, then (later) like some substance resembling a slab of graphite with a mutated peanut butter resin.
This recipe definitely wasn't the one we're looking for, and the resulting squares are also definitely not microwaveable! The search continues...
20:20 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Cooking lessons for the day
Yesterday was my Dad's birthday, and today we had a little family party to celebrate. I was planning to spend the afternoon working on the famous paper I owe my supervisors from UVic, but around 12:30 Mom was in my room telling me she would be out for the afternoon and would I make the cake and cook dinner. Well! OK, make a cake, no problem. I asked Dad what sort of cake he wanted and he figured he'd like a mocha cake like Mom had made a couple of years ago. That must've been while I was in BC, so I asked Mom where the recipe was, and she hadn't the foggiest memory of making that cake or where the recipe was. Finally we decided just to make the Died-and-Went-To-Heaven Chocolate Cake and put some mocha icing.
I learned a few lessons along the way:
1. The corollary to "a watched pot never boils" is, a tester never comes out clean in a watched cake.
2. "That ought to be good enough" usually isn't, when it comes to properly greasing and flouring a pan. Which leads to...
3. Reconstructive cake surgery is an art.
4. Go easy on the coffee part of the "mocha".
I had about 3 tsp of instant coffee granules dissolved in a few tablespoons of water (which is a common ratio in other mocha icing recipes), but good grief, that stuff is powerful. Half that quantity would have been more than enough. I had 3/4 cup of cocoa in the icing also, but I could still barely taste the chocolate, and eventually upped it to 1 cup. The other problem with coffee is that it's bitter. Very bitter. To offset the coffee and cocoa (which is also not at all sweet), I needed a LOT of icing sugar. Which reminds me of lesson #5:
5. Make sure you have more than 2 cups of icing sugar in the house.
Another trip to the grocery store and about 4 pounds of icing sugar later (*grin*), I finally had an icing which, though still not what could be considered sweet, did not have the nasty "bite" it did before! The final lesson:
6. Dad will love you anyway even though the cake isn't up to professional standards. :-)
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