March 18th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I can’t tell you everything that’s been going on for the past month or so. That’s because it’s a mix of “nothing” and “I’m not ready to talk about it yet.” Don’t worry—it’s nothing serious. Oh, all right, here’s how it sort of went:

Nothing’s happening. How about now? Nope—nothing’s happening. This is kind of disheartening. I know I have some long range plans on the horizon but the lack of any immediate change in my life is dispiriting. Also, there’s nothing to talk about on my blog. I haven’t even made any cakes lately. *sigh*

[INSERT MEDIUM-SIZED REVELATION HERE]

Hey, Carla—how about this idea? You like it?1 How about we work on that in the short term? Awesome! Wait until I blog about… aw, shit. I probably shouldn’t talk about this until it’s a little closer to happening. Still, we’d best get to work.

And so here we are. I’ve been busy for the past few weeks working on something I probably won’t be able to talk about for another couple of weeks, but at least I’m not sitting around wondering what I’m doing (in a short-term capacity, anyway).

In the next while I’ll probably try to come up with something new and exciting food-wise to tell you about, but for now I’ll just drop a list of the top three pop-cultural things I’ve been enjoying lately:

1) Harry Potter, as read by Stephen Fry
2) D&D Player’s Handbook 2
3) America’s Next Top Model (but only for Creepy-Chan)

So, exciting updates will be forthcoming sometime in the relatively near future. Yep—I live to keep you in suspense.

February 18th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I did it. I actually baked my first cake. And you know what? It was pretty kick-ass.

Here’s me, before the mixing and baking commenced:

 
And here’s the cake after I took some of its still warm deliciousness and slammed it in my facehole:

So, first things being first, I preheated the over to 325 (or slightly below because our oven is really small and heats up too much).

Then I sifted 3/4 cup of cocoa, 1 1/4 cups of all-pupose flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt together, like so:

 
Next came the fun part (or at least the messy one): chopping and splintering 8 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate:

 
Unfortunately, very soon thereafter I came down with an outbreak of Chocohand:

 
The chocolate was put into a bowl with 12 tbsp of butter and that was put into the microwave until it was all one glorious, gooey mess.

Meanwhile, 4 eggs were getting cracked into a bowl:

 
And after 1 1/2 cups of sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract were added… THEY WERE ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
Then comes the stage when the chocolate mixture is whipped into the eggs, which is also the stage when your wife tries to surreptitiously lick the chocolate spatula without you noticing:

 
After you’re done scolding your wife and after she’s done cleaning the spatula, you add 1 cup buttermilk to 1/2 tsp baking soda. This is whisked into the chocolate. Then the dry ingredients (from way back in the beginning) are whisked in and the mix is ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
When the batter becomes smooth and glossy, pour it into a buttered 13-inch baking pan. And, just so you know, this is what awesomeness looks like before it goes into the oven:

 
Bake the cake for around 40 minutes (basically, until you can insert a toothpick in the centre and it comes out dry). While you’re waiting, why not do the dishes? The less mess you have kicking around when it’s done means more time to sit there and eat cake. Also, have you got something better to do?

 
When the cake was done the top had puffed up and created an air hole underneath the crust. This had no detrimental effect on the cake, but the crust did make for a tasty, crispy chocolately snack, which we ate while we waited for the cake to cool.

 
I’m not going to pretend I had much (if anything) to do with the icing—that was Carla’s purview—but it was delicious and egg nog flavoured. And when it was done we put it on the cake:

 
Then we ate it. The end.

February 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

+ After all of the drama, Sokka is okay. As I type this, in fact, (in a bit of a role-reversal) he’s bullying his sister.
- His adventure to the vet cost $550. I like to believe that the fluid IV drip helped him through it, because if it didn’t we spent $550 to make our cat even more uncomfortable for a couple of days.
- A day after Sokka came home I felt queasy for most of the day and that night came down with the chills.
+ If it was the flu, I’d fought it off by the next day.
- But I had to miss a free screening of Coraline in 3-D to do it.
+ I did however manage to get the books from The Purge II down to the local used book store and received $650 for the trip.
+ I was only able to make the trip thanks to the generosity (and car) of my awesome friend Jackie. Thanks, Jackie!
- Due to the random upheavals, my schedule is still thrown off. I’ve been able to keep up with the housework and general errands since I got back from Victoria, but not much else.
+ Scott Pilgrim v.5 just came out. This might be the best graphic novel news all year.

January 31st, 2009 by Chris Eng

I kind of figured that after Sokka ate his mousie and barfed it out of his system, he’d work through it and bounce back to normal like cats usually do.

I was wrong.

He kept throwing up into the next day; he had no interest in his food and he was barely moving around. There was nothing to do but take him to the vet.

Now, we’re not at the bottom echelons of poverty, but I don’t think that Carla and I will ever be mistaken for “middle class.” As a result, having to take the cat to the vet was a big deal financially—not for the examination or the various tests he’d have to undergo, but because (God forbid) if he needed surgery we were up shit creek. So, we left him at the clinic with no small degree of trepidation and tried to get on with our lives.

Long story short, he seems to be okay. The x-rays picked up something in his stomach, but it could have been a number of things. They had him on a fluid drip to rehydrate him and he came home with me yesterday (a day after he went in), cranky but otherwise well-disposed. I fed him a small portion of food a few hours ago—the first time he’s eaten solid food in two days—and it’s stayed down so far (fingers crossed); if it stays down, I’ll work him back up to full portions over the next day or so.

Things I’ve learned from all of this:

1) Pet insurance is more than a pretty good idea; for us, it’s essential. I’m going to be looking into various plans next week. (If anyone has advice or suggestions, I’m all ears.)
2) I still need to work on my organizational skills. I’ve been much better about keeping everything in order lately, but it fell apart again over the last few days. I know it’s been a bad couple of weeks in general, what with my grandfather dying and then this—hell, even my tattoo appointment threw things a little out of whack—and I’m probably being too hard on myself, but I can’t help thinking that I’m setting myself up for a lot more responsibility in the future and I’m going to need to keep a handle on things so when my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own Satanic herd right when the crops need to be brought in I’ll be able to navigate through it more smoothly.
3) My finances are much more delicate than I had previously realised. I’m not sure there’s much I can do about that in the short term, but having to pull $600 out of my ass at a moment’s notice has certainly made me aware of it.
4) Kittens are trouble. Damn them for being so cute.

January 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

+ I have a new tattoo. It is nerdy and awesome. I will post pics after it’s healed.
- The new tattoo is on my forearm and is preventing me from doing some of my chores (most specifically, the dishes), which is stressing me out a little.
+ I got the tattoo in Victoria, and since the journey to and from the city involves a ferry trip and multiple busrides I caught up on the latest season of Battlestar Galactica while in transit.
- They’ve been auctioning off all the sets, props and costumes for BSG over the past couple of weeks and I had no idea until yesterday (some auctions are still live on ebay right now).
- I can’t afford any of the props anyway, and even if I could, I’m not sure where I’d put the command console from the control room. Or the life-sized Cylon raider, for that matter.
+ After the kerfuffle surrounding my grandfather’s funeral, things have finally settled more or less back to normal for me (which means the blogging should return to a relatively normal schedule, too).
+ In the wake of the funeral, I got to reconnect with a bunch of my family members I missed seeing (some of them literally at ‘the wake’).
- In the kerfuffle, I forgot about my library books. They are now a couple of days overdue.
- One of our cats ate his mousie and is gurving up all over the house. No more of those for you, mister.
10x - He just gurved up ALL of his breakfast in our bedroom. It was a two-towel job. Yeah. I’m pretty sure this is a large part of the reason I don’t want babies.
+ Luckily, they both enjoy the catnip, which doesn’t make them barf. More dope for the kitties!

January 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I’ve kept to-do lists on and off for year, and while I haven’t used them in any organized fashion in the last year or two, I thought if I was turning over a new leaf this might be the time to do it. What I need, I thought, is a pocket-sized book—preferably one divided up by days, in case I need to make notes in advance. Yeah, a day-planner, but which one? There’s plenty out there.

The first consideration (it being January and all) is one that’s on sale. The second is one that’s tasteful. The third is one that’s going to survive all year being tossed around in my bag. The winner? The Moleskine 2009 Pocket Diary—specifically, the one with a separate page for each day of the year:

It’s got an elastic to keep it shut tight and a ribbon bookmark to keep your place. Plenty of room on each page to jot down what I need to do (it’s divided in hourly gradiations, but I don’t use them for that—I’m not that anal), plus phone numbers, emails or whatever else needs jotting. It cost me $9 on sale (at 50% off), but I’ll happily be paying full price for it next year.

(And yes, that is a Sleater-Kinney sticker on it, because A) notebooks need stickers, and B) S-K are still teh awesome. For additional radness, check out Carrie Brownstein’s music blog Monitor Mix on the NPR site.)

January 25th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Yoda: “I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.”
Obi-Wan: “He will learn patience.”
Me: “Obi-Wan, you’d better be right, because my impatience is slowly creeping toward the far end of the spectrum.”

Just one of the many problems that Generations X-onward have had to contend with is that we’ve never had to wait for anything. Ever. That doesn’t sound like a problem, I know, but it means that we’ve been gifted with an extremely stunted sense of proportion. In the days before cell phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to wait until they were at home to call. No instant messaging, no texting, no emails. Before downloading, you had to wait until something was available to the mass market before you could listen to/watch/read it—assuming you could find a store in your area that carried it. If you wanted to buy a house, you saved for a down-payment and talked to a loan officer at the bank.

Things have changed. Now we live in an age of immediate wish fulfillment. You want to talk to your friend? If they’re even slightly plugged-in, you can probably have everything but their precise GPS location at a moment’s notice—and maybe that too. Looking for that new album/movie/book? It’s as close as minutes, even seconds away online—less time than it would take to put on your shoes and coat if you were going to look for it in stores. And, up until recently in the States, you could write your own references for a mortgage with no money down. Why wait for anything? The world never stops rotating, and your life shouldn’t be dependent on things like the rising and setting of the sun. We’ve beaten the system; the rules no longer apply to us. In short, we want—and get—everything now.

I made a monumental life decision a few months back: to move out to the sticks and learn to garden and live naturally—so why don’t I get to do any of that immediately? I know I set a five year goal to own property, and it seemed reasonable at the time, but I want to be doing it now! What’s the hold-up?

Okay, I understand I can’t afford the property, but why can’t I go out and garden?! Oh yeah. The seasons. Right.

I learn skills primarily by doing. I love to read, but if I’m learning something physical I need some hands-on experience. And consequently, if I want to learn how to, say, garden, I have to get out there and work the soil myself. If I’m not doing that—if I’m just reading about gardening, I feel in some regards like I’m not doing anything at all. It’s not the most reasonable perspective—there’s a hell of a lot of information out there that I could be assimilating and keeping on file—but having chosen my new path, I want to set it into motion. It’s more than a little unfortunate on the timing front, though, what with planting season still another few months off. Still, I’m trying to set the prejudices of a generation and deal with the fact I’m not going to be learning much horticulture until the spring.

Which brings us back to patience. The world doesn’t stop spinning, but it does rotate on an annual clock and my constantly stimulated North American, 21st Century, ‘Net savvy self is going to have to get used to the cycles of the year again, because when I plant my first crop (wherever that may be, I don’t have a yard at the moment), I’ll have to wait for the plants to sprout, then grow, then ripen. And if I haven’t shored up my expectations by that point, there’s going to be a rude awakening—one I’m sure I’ll end up texting you about.

January 14th, 2009 by Chris Eng

If I could spend all day fucking around, surfing the ‘net and reading, I would. This isn’t an exaggeration—I’m a world-class procrastinator. If there’s something that needs to be finished in a timely fashion, it can wait until I’ve finished the next Castlevania level or get caught up on Battlestar Galactica. I’ve tried various methods over the years to motivate myself and get things done early, but none of them have ever worked. As a result, I remained an undisciplined slacker past the point I thought it possible to get away with.

But the winds of change might finally be blowing. Over the past month or so, two things have occurred to shift the balance of power toward motivation. The first is simply the will to change. I’m tired of the way I’ve been living and I want to get more done. Continuing the way I have been isn’t going to give me the time I need in order to complete everything I need to work on and learn, so obviously a change is in order. Which is fine as far as it goes, but wishing for change isn’t gonna do jack unless there’s a plan to back it up—luckily I’ve got one.

Half of you may start rolling your eyes when you read this, but here’s my simple plan (which has worked so far, I might add): get up at 7:30am. “Chris,” you say, “you want to grow and raise your own food. That’s what a farmer does. If you were a farmer you’d have to get up a hell of a lot earlier than that.” This is true. The crucial difference is I’m not a farmer; I’m a freelance writer and comic shop employee at the moment, and getting up early doesn’t automatically mesh itself with those lines of work. But I’m taking care of the dishes and laundry on a daily basis, as well as studying and getting my writing done—all of which can be accomplished by noon if I get up at 7:30. On the days when I’m at the comic shop it means I can have everything done by the time I have to leave for my shift. On the days I don’t, my afternoons are free to do chores or whatever other projects I have going on. Which is pretty awesome.

It feels good too. I have more energy since I started my new schedule and I’m genuinely getting more done. It’s not like the urge to screw around isn’t there anymore, but I’m able to put it in its place thanks to a positive routine. And sure, some days it takes me until afternoon to get everything done I wanted to, but I figure that happens to everyone sometimes. I’m getting a lot done aside from that; the bar is leaning much more heavily toward productivity than it was last summer.

Do I feel slightly smug about my newfound drive? I think I’m entitled to a little of that. But in the interests of politeness, I’ll just keep it to myself. If you need me, I’ll be over by the sink, drying dishes and chuckling quietly with self-satisfaction.

*heh heh* Awesome.

January 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

My grandpa passed away this morning. He died doing what he loved doing—sitting in his chair, reading a book.

In a blog about trying to figure out how to live a sustainable and environmentally sound life, it might not be immediately apparent why I’m discussing something so, well, personal. But it’s because my grandfather was inspirational to me.

He grew up on a farm in rural Alberta and came of age during the war. In fact, he lied about his age and enlisted the first chance he got, looking for a chance to get out of the Prairies. He got it—he was sent to the front lines of Europe where he served his tour, managing to make it out with nothing more serious than deafness in one ear from the falling bombs. He never talked about the war; that wasn’t something he liked to brag about—it was something he did because it had to be done. He honoured those he fought with later in his life, though, by mounting and displaying their medals. This past Remembrance Day, a selection of those he’d mounted belonging to female freedom fighters was displayed in the lobby of the Provincial Museum. He wanted to make sure they got their due.

And it was that kind of tenacity I hope will guide me through the rest of my life. His drive to do the right thing, embodied, in this case, by making sure the next generation appreciates the sacrifices of the previous ones. As well, he clung to his passions with an intensity I hope I will be able to match. He bicycled around New Zealand in his 70s and kept biking until his arthritis got too bad. His love of the outdoors never waned. And he never gave up his love of reading. Maybe that’s genetic.

Two months ago I got my first new tattoo in the better part of a decade. Its of a WWII-era pin-up girl with the motto “Touch not the cat bot a glove.” The motto is Clan McIntosh’s—my grandpa’s side of the family. The girl is based on the wartime tattoo my grandpa got on his forearm. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the fact that he never got to see it before he died—I was planning a visit to show him at the end of the month—but I’m glad, at least, that my mom told him about it. It’s important that, although we never really shared that many heartfelt moments, at the end he knew I was proud of him.

Goodbye, grandpa. I miss you; I love you.

Colin McIntosh, R.I.P.

January 9th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Well, my goal to get better at cooking has gotten off to a good start. On New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d celebrate by making dinner for Carla (an event that happens much too infrequently). So, early on in the evening we went to the seemingly only supermarket in the city that was open (the SuperValu at 1st and Commercial) and I picked out some ingredients. We trundled them home in the snow and with just a little bit of effort I managed to put this together:

It's chorizo, zucchini, mushrooms and peppers in a tomato sauce served over rice, with oysters. I did the actual cooking but Carla hung out and helped me with the fiddly bits, like how to get the best results when frying sausage, which spices to add, and at which points to put in what vegetables. Those are the things which (in many ways) simply require memorization and which I don't have the background or experience to know. For instance, putting the zucchini in at the beginning (I did not do this) will give you a main course that is, for want of a more perfect phrase, seriously friggin’ gross-ass. Carla knows all that back to front and was happy to impart her wisdom.

And when all was said and done, it ended up pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Still pot/pan food is kind of what I’m good at already. If it can be chopped it up and simmered on the stovetop, I can improvise with it and come up with something tasty (even if I do need advice now and then), so I wasn’t really stretching my wings too much with this one. What is really daunting to me, and which will be the focus of my next personal challenges, is the range. I want to start making broiled and baked things, both sweet and savoury. I’m going to start with a cake this month. I’ve never made a cake before and I figure it’s a good introduction to baking. I’m sure I’ll move on to gougères and spanakopita next month.

While we’re on the subject, though, I did make my first loaf of bread the other day. Okay okay, it was in the bread maker, but still—first loaf! And edible! Tasty, edible bread! At home! In, like, ten minutes (of prep time)! And I don’t have to bug Carla to do it! No, it’s not like it was ever a complicated procedure, but it’s one of those things that you have to be shown and I just never quite got around to asking. But I’m on the cooking path now and I will work my magic with the bread maker. And someday… someday I will make bread without it!

But, y’know, in the meantime I’ll whip up some cake.