Or, at elast, here's hoping.

It really wasn't as bad as everybody made it out to be. The morning was a little rough, especially since I didn't sleep too well last night...but overall, it was just like doing yet another practice test, only in a quieter room. As long as I didn't think about the stakes being so much higher, I was a-ok.

Now I'm rewarding myself with uncharacteristic self-indulgence...I went out and bought not one, but two CDS - the War Child benefit CD and the Sam the Record Man 2006 compilation of local music. Then I made fabulsously fantastic sammiches with roasted mushrooms and red pepper and Sour Supreme (mmm, fake food good). And then I had chocolate. I should write big scary tests more often...

NOW who's the worst blogger ever?

Obviously, I'm suffocating in embarassment.

I have been repeatedly shamed by the members of my blogosphere and am finally updating. The problem is that my life has been busy yet almost wholly uninteresting. I go to my big-girl job and spend 3 hours a day prepping for the LSAT (which is in six days, incidentally). Occasionally I sleep, eat or watch House. Sometimes I freak out about having nothing to wear to my big-girl job.

Due to an unfortunate incident involving a canine companion and some severe indigestion, I was personally lucky enough to score a free ticket to the Metric Concert last week with Mark. We did a lot of people watching and felt superior to the silly teenage indie-rock posers, such as those who started crowd-surfing - 15 seconds into the first song. Not to mention Pleco Girl (obviously very inerested in her boyfriend, she quite literally "looked like one of those things that clean fish tanks")and the dude with the fauxhawk that really just looked like his head was pointy because his hair was way too short for a fauxhawk. Oh so silly.

And today we went to my grandparents' place for a family day, full of lunch and boatness and supper and a little bit of candy. My family is, as a whole, fairly awesome, as people often remind me. And they all told me I'd do amazing on the LSAT. That said, they also tell me repeatedly that I'm going to be Prime Minister.

Also: You all must be aware of how much I admire the work of Natalie Dee. It's partly because I strongly identify with her subject matter...

Unfair

Because I currently seem to be having trouble with the comment board at The Sneeze, I want to start my own unofficial poll and get my two cents in.

The question of the day is: are you physically unable to do any seemingly simple action (i.e. winking)?

I can only sort of whistle and I am utterly unable to blow up a balloon.
I can't roll my tongue, although both my parents can.
I can't burp or fart on command, and The Jenn mocks me for it often.

Your turn!

"Autumn's here, it makes you sad, about the crummy summer we had"

Okay it wasn't THAT crummy. I got to hug some trees and party a little. And no homework! But my point is, it got cold. Fast. So it is clearly fall and I didn't even get to a beach.

Anyway, as others prepare for school by taking advantage of all the school-supply sales, I must be all consumery as well. You see, my dear old computer bit the dust - or, in tastier terms, it is toasted, scrambled and fried. Mmmm.

All of this means that the purchase of a new Hell-Beast, I mean computer, is imminent. I'm going for a laptop this time, for the power-saving and portability-to-Victoria properties and the sheer betterness of it. The next question is what to get. My Code-ninja amigo Mark laid out what he says are my two best options. I'm looking for input from my readers, even if you're just some random who stumbles across the site by accident. So here they are:

A) A Dell, $600ish, best warranty in the business.
B) A MacBook, $1100ish, ages far more gracefully.

Mark for the record is a Mac person and is desperately trying to convert me, so we all know where he stands on this issue.

Additional considerations:
-My needs are very simple: email, Messenger and word processing. Occasionally scanning photos and obtaining mp3s off the Interweb. No silly computer games, no ninja coding, just the basics.
-I'm off to law school next year so I'd like something that will hold up ok for the next four years.
-I'm not broke or even poor(or at least, I won't be when I start my new job) but I'm trying to save up for the aforementioned law degree.
-I'm utterly spazzalicious and need a warranty that will protect against me accidentally mangling my electronics.

One thing that barely deserves a mention is that the MacBook comes with a free iPod nano. Personally, I think that's just stupid and a symptom of our ridiculous consumer-obsessed culture (yes, I'm always on)...charging more than is necessary for something and then trying to sweeten the deal by throwing in something that people don't need and, in my case, don't want and will rarely use. It might be useful for my occasional long bus rides to Maine, but that's about it. Mostly I've found headphones creepy ever since I read Fahrenheit 451 in grade 5 or whenever it was. Maybe I could sell it and recoup some of the exorbitant price of the computer...

Anyway. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better idea. Thanks folks!

I heart vacations

My paycheck will suffer but my happiness certainly has not. I started out the week by attending an environmental law & policy workshop and strategy session hosted by the NSE in response to the proposed amendments to the Nova Scotia Environment Act. The biggest problem seemed to be that the Act gives the Minister of Environment and Labour tons of discretionary powers but doesn't compel him/her to act, meaning that enforcement of environmental legislation is likely to continue to be patchy. Not to mention that the public consultation period ends 8 September (I dunno about you, but I JUST heard that the thing was going on) and they haven't been actively engaging with the public on the issue. The NSEN initiated this particular event in Halifax, and there's been nothing in any other part of the province. Just a quiet invitation to submit comments. Gah! So we're asking for them to extend the consultaion period and actually go out and get input from the public. This is our future, and we can't just let it be decided quietly in the boardroom and on the golf course. So please contact your MLA, Mark Parent (Minister of Environment and Labour) and the Premier and tell them you want a more thorough public consultation on this Act!

Anyway, I spent the rest of the week getting/making work clothes, cooking, cleaning, reading, staring at the walls...it was brilliant. I dragged The Boy on a brief hike in the Blue Mountain/Birch Cove Wilderness Area, which is a gorgeous and peaceful, though somewhat inaccessible, retreat from the insanity and bad-driver-ness of the Bayers Lake industrial park that borders it. We went to see Accepted - predictably cheesy but really enjoyable - and I finished off the week by taking Jenn to a going-away party for one of my high school friends who is joining the exodus out West. We met some fun people and recruited them for Fantoga 2006. Then on Sunday I cleaned my old room at my parents house and that wasn't so much fun because, well, it was cleaning.

Anyway I have loads to do this week because I'm going to Maine next week to visit the family before starting my new job. More interesting posts to come, I promise. The Republican branch of my kin never fail to amaze and entertain me...

R.I.P. shiitake log

You never produced any shiitakes, but you were a source of hope for 8 months, and the bright-yellow fungus that you grew in your final days added a splash of colour to the apartment before Jenn raised concerns about what kind of toxic spores it might be releasing into the air. May you journey unimpeded to mushroom-log heaven.


Great weekend...market, cooking, Buskerfest with the Sackville crew, then a glorious Sunday full of reading and staring blankly at the walls.

The difference between a duck

Well as most of you have already heard, I now have employment of the gainful sort, and after all the cover letters and stupid boring job-hunting crap I've done, all I needed to do in the end was to have friends who are willing to pass along my resume to the right people and give me glowing recommendations.

So that frees up a lot of time in my life, for LSAT prep and hugging trees and spending time with people and reading the summer issue of The Walrus, which after much ado finally arrived in my mailbox yesterday. I went on a Sierra Club excursion to Long Lake Park yesterday and forgot to bring swimming gear, but that's okay because one person brought an adorable dog and a few of us stayed on the shore and played fetch with him. I miss my dogs.

I wish I had something witty and awesome to say but my life is quite vanilla at the moment and I'm happy to have it that way.

Wicked tasty

God often appears to me in unusual ways. Right now I'm experiencing a divine revelation in the form of a sour yellow plum.

Overall, it's a good day to be alive.

Days

Today is Lammas, or Lughnasda if you will, the first festival of the Harvest (the second being the Autumn Equinox). Some people observe this holiday on the first or sixth day of August according to the Gregorian calendar, but I prefer the calculation that places it on the secong full moon after the Summer Solstice. It pulls our focus away from the artificial blocks of time that we've created for ourselves, and makes us pay attention to the natural rythms of Earth. Holy crap, am I becoming more hippie by the hour? It's a good exercise for me, though - everyone who knows me is undoubtedly aware of how calendar-obsessed I normally am.

Today also marks the 61st anniversary of the day a US warplane dropped a plutonium bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. It's worth pointing out that there is a movement underfoot in our fine city to get Mayor Kelly to join Mayors for Peace, an immensely important step albeit one that will require great political will from the mayor of a naval port city.

Just a couple of points that I thought you all might be interested in. Other than that, this hipster's life is relatively uneventful as usual...still languishing in underemployment in my overheated little store, still looking to improve that situation, still trying to find the time to get done all the things that I need done. I went to Mahone Bay for the weekend to partake of the Classic Boat Festival, formerly the Wooden Boat Festival - an annual event full of overpriced, very non-vegan foods and tourists who can't drive. I love it though, and I go every year. Everybody gets into the spirit and I generally get my ass on my grandparents' sailboat which is always a bonus.

I recently had a neat employment-related idea, but it's far too early to be talking about it with too many people. If anything does come of it, you'll hear all about it; if not, maybe I'll just withdraw from the job market and become a hermit like some repentant Dr. Seuss character, growing my own food and making my own clothes out of miff-muffered-moof.

Yeah I've done this before...but I was tagged!

omg nerdiness, fun, LOVE!

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag three people.

"Yet no one in charge seemed to see this as a failure. Or more precisely, no one in charge and none of the supporting ideologues were able to see this as a failure of the Globalist theory - a theory that had growing power for two decades. That is, twice the length of Napoleon's reign, four times that of a world war."

-John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism
(my "light summer reading")

I tag:
Jenn
Lisa
Matthew
(Mark is going away to San Francisco for a while. Bye, Mark!)

Totally wixjed

Yeah, that's right. I'll tell you about my weekend in a minute.

But first: I'm meeting Adam's mom tonight. I'm good with parents - I play the good-girl card extremely well - but it always makes me nervous. Especially right now, I'm still in partial wilderness mode because I haven't had time to cut my nails or do laundry or catch up on my sleep since getting back from the AGA yesterday. So let's hope she doesn't judge me on my appearance!

Anyway, over the weekend I went to the Sierra Club of Canada Atlantic Canada Chapter/Nova Scotia Environmental Network's AGA at this beautiful property in Yarmouth County. Imagine camping, vegetarian food and treehuggers all weekend, and then just try to imagine me not loving it. I'm not going to go into ridiculous detail right now, although I promise that the aprts that stood out for me will come up as I act on them. It was such a neat experience, as a rookie environmental activist, to go in and learn about the diverse efforts and where my talents are needed, and to figure out how I can plug into those networks. And people who are like me!

Huge step outside my comfort zone, what with the sitting in circles and sharing our "passions" plus the fact that just about everybody knew more than I did about the movement...but it was such an exciting start.

Cookies

A cookie for anyone who can tell me why I'm so insatiably hungry today. Then again, maybe I'll just eat it myself...

Walking around in glasses is like watching a 3D movie: ordinary things like chairs and tree branches pop out at you, looking abnormally well-defined and just a little fake. I've been playing this pointless little game where I look at things and see just how pronounced the difference is with the glasses and without. With, without. with, without. And so on, until headache ensues.

Dolphin-friendly tuna is all well and good, if you're not a tuna.

Pointless post. Blame BTFF, because he's bored and complained about not having any fun weblogs to read.

The store is as full as ever of zany madness...the people who sold us our freezer just over a year ago now want to charge us $750 to fix it because it's defective. Let me tell you the story of the freezer. See, for about a week it would blow its circuit every single day. The university electricians got sick of fixing it, because it was the only appliance on that particular circuit and shouldn't have been tripping the breaker, so they told us we were on our own. After almost a month the freezer company finally stopped dicking around and sent somebody in to look at it (today). The dude tinkered with it for a while and, trying to make conversation, I asked him if he'd figured out what was wrong with it. "It keeps blowing the circuit," he replied, as though that weren't (a) blatantly obvious and (b)the very reason we had called him in.

So an hour and a half later he leaves us with a partially-fixed freezer that I still don't trust, a wholly incomplete explanation of the further work that we need done, and a bill for $90. The general consensus around here is: I want that job.

Rainy weekend rising

(Sorry, I was listening to CCR at work today)

I hope it's sunny for the parade tomorrow...my "gay boyfriend" Matt is going to be in it and I'm going after the market to cheer for him.

Anyway, I've been cleansing for almost a week now and it's interesting to say the least...if anything I feel slightly worse than usual but apparently that's normal - the awesomeness comes after. I probably have less to detoxify than the average bear, what with the locally-, organically- and plant-based diet, the no coffee and the hippie soaps etc., but I'm sure there's lots of crap in me that wants to get out.

Anyway I've been doing pretty well...chocolate cravings haven't killed me like I thought they would, although I did cave and have a Clif bar at one point. I also got some process-y Italian-style veggie sausages which were SO GOOD. I've been waiting around for so long for decent veggie sausages. Aside from hot dogs (and possibly macaroni loaf), sausages probably have the lowest meat content of the meat products...so why has it taken so long for soembody to make a decent veggie substitution? Anyway, I commend Yves for their achievement. I'm not usually one for veggie meats, but sausages are the one flesh product I actually miss. I can't wait to try the Bavarian style, with some Oktoberfest mustard, maybe a little sauerkraut...mmmmm awesome.

I've also been drinking loads of water, with milk thistle and dandelion extract, which leave a very slight (but not unpleasant) flavour. It's kicked my liver into overdrive. Because of that I think I'll allow myself a beer tomorrow night - Matthew's visiting from Ottawa and a bunch of us are gonna kick it Griffin-style.

Anyway I promised information about some delicious ...I'll post the recipe soon, but for now let me say that they were fudgy and delicious, despite being made with carob powder, 100% whole wheat flour and no refined sugar. it's simply that I am a genius. Actually Jia Patton is a genius and I just adapted one of her cookie recipes from John Robbins' May All Be Fed. The genius on my part is knowing that in general (Dreena Burton's "More-ish Brownies" notwithstanding), if a vegan cookbook has a recipe for cookies then the dough will be better suited for brownies or blondies, while "brownie" recipes make better cake than brownies. See? genuis.

Quizzy love

You scored as Faerie. Faerie: Aren't you a cute little flying person? Faeries are earth spirits. They live among each element completely hidden. They have cousins called Pixies. Pixies however, are very mischevious. They enjoy tormenting other creatures for fun. Little pranksters.. I hope you never meet one. Pixies have a bad reputation for finding a creature and clinging to them until death. Faeries can be somewhat close to a Pixie, but mostly they are loving, playful, and carry with them a child-like enthusiasm for life. Hide among the pedals of a Daisy, you are a Faerie.

What Mythological Creature are you? (Cool Pics!)
created with QuizFarm.com

Coincidentally, this is the picture that, after some softening and curvifying, became my tattoo.

Also, if anybody can help me resize this so that my sidebar isn't all wonky, i'd 'preciate it. Thanks!

Have you hugged a tree today?

Having lapsed in my environmental activism while I was busy with school and Women in House,I was really excited yesterday to get back into it. I went to my first EAC meeting in months, and registered for the Sierra Club Atlantic Canada conference and AGM (now to convince my boss to give me the Friday afternoon off, even though I'm the only staff on for the summer), and I'm going to be helping to organize a Sierra Club nature outing for early August. Anybody interested in coming on that, let me know.

After I got home, Adam and I went for a walk to escape the oppressive heat in my apartment. I'm comfortable when everybody else is dying of the humidity, so if I'm uncomfortable then you know it's REALLY sticky and gross. There's a chance of thundershowers tonight, so hopefully that will break up some of the humidity...even though this summer's rain is already affecting harvests and driving up the price of Nova Scotia produce, which is no good.

Anyway, I should get back to work. I'll post later about the fabulous carob brownies I made on Sunday, the sassy new glasses I'm getting this week, the progress of my cleansing routine and various other hipster-related issues.

Friday!

It has been a long week of sitting indoors doing data entry. Oh well, I'm developing Excel skills that will help me get a new job...right? I've been doing up some applications and waiting to hear back about one that I sent off on Tuesday. The idea of having a Real Job (Capital-R, Capital-J) is at once scary and wickedawesome. Change is one of the best things in life, and when you add a challenge to that, it gets so much better. Now I just need to find somebody interesting to hire me.

The cleansing officially starts next week, so I'm going to the market and getting lots of healthy foods which I will cook tomorrow night in order to get me through the week. This past week I've been testing for a soy allergy, because when I first went tofu-head I suspected that I had one. It was probably just my body adapting, though, because I haven't felt different this week. That said, I cheated every step of the way. Don't judge: I work 35 hours a week in a convenience store. I make minimum wage. It's been too muggy to cook. Everything contains soy and if you don't believe me, just go into a convenience store and read a few ingredient labels. We even have a pile of soy-laden energy bars here in the store, which have expired and thus are free.

Actually, I've felt pretty fantastic lately due to being more mindful of my health. I start the day with an apple - I heard it was better at getting you going in the morning than a cup of coffee, and surprise! it's so true. Plus none of that crummy feeling that coffee causes in your stomach. I walk to and from work whenever the weather's nice, and Jenn and I have started doing Pilates or yoga together three nights a week. And this morning we had smoothies made with rice milk, frozen bananas, frozen peaches, fresh blueberries and this "natural flavour" Vega stuff that I found at the Superstore and had to try (what? It was endorsed by Bif Naked!). This very green powder, mixed with water like it suggests on the package, tastes (as my mother would say) "healthy". Meaning yucky. However, blended into the smoothie it was pretty good and I could say "whee! I just drank a synergistic collection of plant-based superfoods!"

We also smudged our apartment this week. I waved the smoke from burning herbs into all the rooms and Jenn used her pendulum to find spots of negative energy that we needed to neutralize ("Hey Alex, there's a lot of positive energy over your bed!"). I'm a skeptical little pagan but at the very least I find it psychologically beneficial to go through a physical act of expelling old energies and feelings so that a fresh start is possible.

Speaking of a fresh start - I now need to go work on some unfinished projects at my unskilled, minimum wage job. Sigh.

Oral fixation

I have a problem: I really like food. When I'm bored, I snack. When I'm overstimulated, I snack. I snack when I'm alone and in social situations of any description. Then, when I feel icky from all the overconsumption, I eat some more. One day my metabolism will forsake me and I will balloon out to approximately the size of a house.

This gluten-free week is a challenge (a fun one), especially given that I live next to a largely useless grocery store and lack the time or funds to do a really great job of this. So far I've noticed no change and it makes me want to just give up because I highly doubt that I have a gluten allergy. But, I have four days left and I'll stick them out.

I've had a lot of great stir-fries, rice noodles, tofu omelets and trail mix. Lots of extra protein in my diet this week because I would normally fill up on breads, etc but I haven't been able to do that.

Yesterday, being desperate in the morning, I grabbed some leftover rice and beans, and a can of tomato soup. As I was mixing them together at work I happened to glance at the soup's ingredients. ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR. Effing effdiddly eff. However, I would not, could not waste food so I had about two tablespoons of what-laden tomato soup concentrate. Bad girl.

Today I have spiced lentils (yummy) with some pickle stuff that Jenn got from somebody. And gads of water, with which I hope to drown the tapeworm.