poll: breakfast

I had a terrible craving for oatmeal pancakes (prompted by a conversation I had recently with Lissa Allcock about all things maple), so decided to make some. I've only had oatmeal pancakes once, at a place called Mitzi's in Toronto...VERY yummy. The recipe I used came from The Breakfast Book by Diana Terry (1983, Doubleday). It uses yeast, which disconcerted me somewhat, but fortunately the rising period was only 30 minutes. They turned out very well, and I kept some warm in the oven for Jeff. Sadly, we only have artificial syrup in the apartment right now, yuk. I had some of Rikka's wonderful herbal tea, yum.

Which brings me to today's poll question:

Are you a breakfast person? What do you usually have for breakfast on a typical workday? Weekends? What's your favourite type of breakfast? Healthy or greasefest? Tea or coffee or juice?

Please Answer in Blatherchat (if the April chat board is closed, try May instead).

I tend to be hobbit-like on weekdays and have two breakfasts. The first is when I wake up (around 6:30 or 7 a.m.), usually cut up honeydew melon with low-fat yogurt glopped on top, and some water with a lemon slice or herbal tea. After I've worked a few hours, I'll have something else...like toast with cheese and honey, cereal (usually some of the batch that Jeff mixes up from Vector and Raisin Bran and keeps in a Tupperware container on the shelf) with milk, or an egg (over easy).

Jeff and I like going out for brunch on weekends, sometimes with friends and sometimes by ourselves. This is usually lunch for me, since he tends to wake up so much later than I do on weekends. My favourite type of breakfasts are buffets, with lots of choices and a minimum of grease.

On rare occasion, however, I'll get a craving for a greasefest...bacon, fried eggs, sausages, etc. I can practically HEAR my arteries hardening as I'm hoovering down this type of breakfast, but it's wonderfully satisfying to indulge every once in a while.

I haven't been a coffee drinker until recently, when I've done more of my novel-writing in coffeeshops, and have started drinking my coffee black. I'm not a morning coffee drinker, but like to have it mid-afternoon when I need a bit of a perk.

However, Jeff and I have recently made a pact with each other to try and cut down on caffeine, and drink more water instead. We'll see how that goes.

My running is going pretty well. I'm ramping up very slowly, but still getting a good workout in the process, am usually out for about 1-1.5 hrs. My favourite run is still along Harbourfront. Next goal: during my walk/run, to run a mile without stopping! I am still the slowest runner in the world. The trickiest thing has been to figure out what distance along my route constitutes a mile. I've found some pretty good information for beginning runners at About.com, and general running info at Runner's World (there's also a section on fitness walking, for those interested).

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Today's Blatherpics:

	I took this photo near Parki's a while back. Sort of a pathetic and funny at the same time, isn't it?
	Graffiti near One Trick Pony's office.

cleat boots

Yesterday was not a good day.

To make a (painful and ongoing) story short, I'm going through more Inkspot-related tax woes despite the fact that Inkspot was shut down by Xlibris over a year ago.

A while back I said that I've asked my friends to kick me in the head if I ever talk about selling a company again.

I now revise that statement.

If I ever talk about selling a company again, my friends have permission to kick me in the head and then stomp all over my prone body with cleat boots.

Today's photo is of me, taken by Jeff last weekend at the cottage.

UT sushi outing

Got together with Allison and Jodi last night. We went out for sushi and then to Starbucks. We discussed our playlist for our Relay For Life gig on June 7th (see the Canadian Cancer Society for details on this charity event). So far, our VERY tentative playlist includes the Hockey Monkey song, Neurotic Love Song, Cuz He's A Guy, Another Story, Alien Jellyfish, Seventies Song, Friendship Song, and Library Boy, with the possible addition of May It Be and Twinkle In His Eye. We've been tentatively slated for the 8:15-9 pm slot, but this may change.

We talked about our concert playlist and songwriting workshop for Conchord in California (August 2nd-4th), where we're Guests of Honor this year.

SPAM OF THE DAY:

Hey, I got an e-mail saying that I could become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours! The spam claims (with lots of exclamation marks) that I can do weddings!! Funerals!! Baptisms!! Forgive sins!! And EVEN START MY OWN CHURCH!!!!!

For $29.95, I basically get a certificate ("CERTIFICATE IS PROFESSIONALLY PRINTED BY AN INK PRESS") that "proves" that I'm an ordained minister.

I had no idea it was so easy.

Today's Blatherphoto is of me at FKO. It was taken by and is the property of Jim Leonard,
who kindly gave me permission to reprint it here.

asian eyes

Today's entry is part of an On Display collaboration project. Our assignment: to write about a body part.

Most of my childhood was spent in the suburbs of Toronto, where I was the only Asian in all my classes through elementary and high school. None of my childhood friends were Asian.

Because I was constantly surrounded by a sea of mostly Caucasian faces (there was very little ethnic diversity out in the suburbs back then), I think that I subconsciously figured I blended in with everyone else, that I wasn't really that different.

I didn't want to be different.





From time to time, however, I'd be reminded that I was different, whether I liked it or not. I'd be glancing over a class photo, for example, and be struck by how much my own features stood out from the others. I'd catch a glimpse of myself in the girls' locker room mirror, my jet black hair amidst all the blondes and browns and reds.

Sometimes I'd be reminded through comments from other children, sometimes innocent, sometimes not-so-innocent. I remember when a friend pooh-poohed my high marks in school, saying that it wasn't fair, that it was a fact that all Japanese people were smarter. A compliment (that I was smarter) and an insult (that I didn't have to work for my marks) at the same time.





I've been called Jap, Japanee, Chink, Slanty-Eyes, Geisha-Girl, but always by other little kids. Though obviously meant as an insult, neither the name-caller nor I fully understood the implications and history behind the terms.

I've always found it baffling how the lack of or addition of a fold in the eyelid (or a difference in skin colour, hair colour, or whatever) can change so much how some people can perceive you. ("Ah, she's Japanese. That must mean she's good at math, is inscrutable and takes a lot of photographs!")

Er.

Okay, so maybe the part about the photographs is true. :-)

As a child, I had always wanted to fit in. As I grew older, I learned the value of being different. I'm not talking about just physical differences, but all other aspects as well.





It freaks me out to hear about some Asians would actually have plastic surgery to look more Western. Okay, perhaps these people don't explicitly say they want to look more Western. As this page about blepharoplasty seems to indicate, they want to look "less tired" and "more youthful" (implying, of course, that all Asians look tired and old!).

I like my eyes. They may not see all that well without glasses, may have wrinkles (sorry, that should be "laugh lines") starting around the corners, may not be the "look into my gaze and drown yourself in unbridled passion" eyes on the faces of gorgeous magazine cover models. But they're all me. :-)

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Today's Blatherpics:

	I took this and the other photos on this page during my run along Harbourfront late yesterday afternoon.
	The roof of an outdoor metal gazebo-like structure in the Toronto Music Garden. I didn't even know there WAS a Toronto Music Garden until yesterday afternoon! Each section of the garden has a musical name, like "Prelude" or "Gavotte".
	Yay, was glad to see that these flowers survived the recent snow. :-)
	I took this photo from the Toronto Music Garden, looking toward the CN tower. The building in the photo is a condo complex.
	My eye. :-)

survey monkey

My 5-year-old niece Annie drew today's Blatherpic (says her proud aunt).

And YAY, we just found out that our friend Christine's MRI came back normal!! :-) :-)

Thanks to those who posted or e-mailed about the Mamma Mia plot. Russell Martin had link to a pretty good synopsis. I'm still somewhat at a loss at how to explain to Sara (who is 7) about why the heroine doesn't know who her father is. Any suggestions (particularly from you parents out there) welcome!

I'm experimenting with a service called Survey Monkey (thanks to Jeff for telling me about it). I'd be grateful if some of you could try out one or both of the following brief surveys and let me know what you think.

Be warned, however, that if you have your cookies disabled, you might be sent into an endless redirection loop! (Thanks to Keris for pointing this out)

-- General Blatherings Survey

-- Terence Chua Domicile Survey

Great to hear from Martin Gordon-Kerr in Blatherchat. I didn't get a chance to properly say good-bye to Andy and Martin at FKO:

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Just catching up with everyone again - we had a great time in Canada! Nice to meet the people we had met before, and a good time to meet new people - I spent most of the first day of FKO tying email addresses to faces!

Just catching up on Blatherings - good luck with the guinea pigs. Just don't let them out of the run too much - we've only had to chase the rabbit round the garden two or three times, but one was 11am on the Friday of the UK Filkcon, where we were bringing the tech kit and the con was three hours drive away. Andy chased Scrumpy round the garden with a carrot while I turned the run into Castle Colditz 2 and muttered recipes for rabbit stew under my breath...

Just looking back at yesterday's blatherings - I'll agree with Dave. You are definitely insane! However, having had just a few days in the Algonquin National Park when we were in Canada (staying at a place called Bear Trail near Whitney) I am jealous of just about everything else apart from the swim! The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, and it was definitely the highlight of the trip. We tried cross-country falling (sorry, skiing) and had fun, even if we only covered a few miles, and hiked a couple of the trails off the road.

The first one went OK, but on the second one the snow was getting deeper, and the ice under the snow was getting steeper. And then we discovered the sheer cliff edge near by. At about the time we realised that we hadn't seen a waymark for a while. And that all the park rangers were on strike, so we weren't going to get any help for a while!

Fortunately, retracing your steps in snow is a fairly easy business. Annoying, because we must have been three-quarters of the way round. But if the alternative was slipping off the cliff into the lake, which would either have caused concussion or hypothermia (unless you are Debbie!) depending on the state of the ice, then I think going back was probably intelligent.

Wonderful area. We have been saying we will have to go back sometime. May well be a long way off, but it WILL happen.

All the best

Martin GK

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Thanks to Gary McGath for pointing out Mark Mandel's guinea pig filk.

And some predictions from Sherman, prompted by the Inkspot pens he received as a prize in the Oscar Poll...

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Debbie,

Thank you so much for the pens! They arrived yesterday, and it's definitely given me the motivation to go out and make more predictions. A sample:

1. Jean-Marie Le Pen will be defeated in France and move to Quebec. He will be arrested for speaking the wrong type of French, becoming one of the immigrant criminals he fears.

2. The Montreal Expos will win the World Series before a crowd of 3,416, counting the guinea pig in the pocket of Marie Floue, a 9-year-old who left home that day to attend her first curling match (before her dad took a wrong turn). The guinea pig is a Yankees fan.

3. The winner of the foreign-language film Oscar next year will be "Sartre in Toronto," about a confused amateur play and its leading actor who dies from too much Starbucks coffee in a tragic evening filled with miscommunication about the meaning of life and the TTC (he forgot to get off at the Sherboune station and later said in his caffeine-induced reverie that there was a sign there reading "No Exit"). The fact that it's in English is apparently no impediment to the Oscar, as the members of the Academy don't speak the language.

4. George W. Bush will land in Ottawa in late 2002, declaring "Ich bin ein Towotan," confusing everyone.

Sherman
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