First Day

Well, our first day of daycaring for this round is in the books: only 600 more or whatever crazy number to go. With Nikki Dee off to real daycare today (she goes twice a week), we were broken in gently on this initial day. Zachary had a good nap this morning and behaved well for me while Cuppa attended a Monday afternoon social event. We're tired, but some of that has to do with getting up earlier than normal and then moving into gear much more quickly once we are up. Here are a few pics from the day. Fear not, I won't recap every day in this way.

Q&A's

I have never gotten into the commenting on comments thing that most of you do so well. I think I started blogging before it became a standard method of procedure. Besides that, it is most cumbersome and I, therefore, resist it. If you are in the habit of hiding your email address (and why you would do that is beyond me), I'd love it if you emailed me your questions. You can do that rather easily as I refuse to hide mine (and oddly enough I find that the email addy which publish for y'all gets less spam than my other account — which is moot because gmail sorts spam so efficiently that I never have to worry about spam. You have heard of Google and Gmail?). Regardless, since no one would think to go back to the previous post, here are my answers to some very important questions.

Q: AC, what sort of relish do you use in your meat loaf/meatloaf?
A: Since I am an ordinary guy sans savoir faire, I just use whatever ordinary kind that we have the fridge. My question back to you is: how many kinds of relish are there? Whatever the answer, I think you should go wild and report back to me. Actually, I don't think you can go wrong with that recipe no matter what relish you choose.

Q: What's relish?
A: Danged if I know, but we serfs put it on burgers and hot dogs and the like.

Here is what Wiki, which sounds a lot like a German gal I once dated, has to say:"In the United States, the most common commercially available relishes are made from pickled cucumbers and are known in the food trade as pickle relishes. Two variants of this are hamburger relish (pickle relish in a ketchup base or sauce) and hotdog relish (pickle relish in a mustard base or sauce). Other readily available commercial relishes in the United States include corn (maize) relish. Heinz, Vlasic, and Claussen are well known in the United States as producers of pickles and relishes. One of the best known pickle manufacturers in the UK is Branston."

Here's what it looks like, more or less.

Q: Will you please share the tourtiere recipe that you also mentioned.
A: I did have it linked in the last post, but I guess that's easy enough to miss so here goes.

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/French-Canadian-Tourtiere/Detail.aspx

Q: How are you feeling, old boy?
A: Thanks for asking (although you didn't, but I'm sure you would have had you known my plight). I'm not terribly ill, but neither am I brimming with health. A very bad and unusual sign is that I am eating little, and I am the kind of guy who has been known to order pizza right after projectile vomitting. I am also sweltering right now, but I am likely to be shivering until my teeth chatter within the next ten minutes.

Q:Whacha up to this week?
A: We are starting our babysitting gig. We did this for 8 months two years ago and stopped just over a year ago when Zach was born and Thesha got another year off work.I wonder if I should, therefore, hope for another pregnancy? (Cuppa, Thesha and SIL shake their heads from side to side, briskly and vehemently.)

Q: So ... it's deja vu all over again?
A: Yes indeedy. I was sick when we started the last gig and here we go again. You know, I didn't used to get sick so often before I had grandkids.

Q: What's you favourite song?
A: Heave Away ... ohoh ... gotta run ... and then order pizza ...

Cooking on the Boyle

I guess it's weird that ole AC would go on a cooking spree on a Friday afternoon, but that's just what I did — for part of the afternoon anyway. First, I made the French Canadian Tourtiere that I had meaning to try for months but hadn't gotten around to. I dunno why, except that I have a French Canadian SIL and have tasted his mother's tourtiere a few times, so I wanted to give it a shot.

As I prepared the recipe, I played our recently purchased Susan Boyle album (blast the changes in terminology as they'll always be records to me) CD, I Dreamed A Dream and listened in my usual distracted way. The woman has a great voice, which supports my notion that the best singers are probably doing their thing well out of the limelight. Otherwise, we make do with the supposedly marketable types where the first rule is that you have to look good.

Boyle, of course, is unique because of her story. She came onstage at Britain's Got Talent in all her bizarre frumpiness and promptly "rocked this joint" (her words, I believe). She does have a great voice, but we all fell in love with her story because that's the way it works. It fits with what Cuppa has been telling me about her latest read,
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H Pink who believes that having a story and telling it will be key to success. Well, Susan Boyle is a story, and she is being quite successful these days. She made it onto Queen Oprah's show for goodness sakes.

After getting the tourtiere in the oven (are you following my thought shifts alright?), I prepared my own meat loaf. It's the only recipe that I can only lay claim to creating rather than simply following, and even then I only tweaked an old recipe from the Red Roses cookbook. My mother had this book and gave Cuppa and updated version when we wed, and I think Cuppa passed an even more updated version onto the kids, but I may be mistaken, and since she's out at the hair salon becoming even more stunningly beautiful, I can hardly confirm it.

Shifting back to the CD .... although it's not my usual thing, I enjoyed Susan's fine voice and gentle delivery. It's a good, relaxing background mix in my opinion, but the songs are older classics, so if you're into contemporary top 40, it ain't for you. Oddly, there are two religious songs in there, which I don't mind but some might, as well as (and I find this really odd, but again, I don't mind) Silent Night. While I probably wouldn't play the album a lot (which is not an indictment as such because I don't play any album a lot), I will probably put at least two songs in some playlist or other: her BGT original, I Dreamed A Dream and Up To The Mountain and perhaps even a few others. Other thoughts: although I wouldn't recognize perfect pitch even if it was thrown by Sandy Koufax, Cuppa says that Boyle has it, and we both think that, at least in spots, she sounds Barbara Streisand-ish, which can't be all bad. Or can it?

Another shift ... my meat loaf is really is quite good (considering that it's meat loaf, if you take my meaning), so just in case ...

For the Mix

• 1 egg beaten
• 1 medium onion chopped
• about a half packet of onion soup mix
• about 2 tbsp of relish (be generous)
  
• several tbsp of plum sauce (or more)
  
• a little salt and pepper
• some beef seasoning

Meat Mix

• 2 lbs ground beef
• 1/2 cup or slightly more of oats

Topping

• 1/4 cup or more of plum sauce
• 1 or 2 tbsp of brown sugar
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of dry mustard

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350F (180C)
2. Combine mix ingredients in a bowl
3. Mix beef and oats together
   
4. Combine the two mixes
   
5. Pack into loaf pan (about 9" x 15" or 13cm x 23cm)
6. Spread the topping
   
7. Bake 1 1/2 hours or until meat is cooked

The Grands in January

We (read Cuppa, the indefatigable camera woman), take a lot of video clips as well as pictures. There are too many to post to YouTube, even if they were all good and non-repetitive, which they're not. So for January, I decided to cut and paste a bunch of clips from our various efforts into one file. For your incredible viewing pleasure, I present the month of January condensed to less than three minutes of video footage. Tada! (Although one sincerely doubts that a digital file truly can be said to contain footage.)



See on YouTube

My Two Cent Review

Guess what we did yesterday.



Give up?

How about ...



In our last week of freedom before we start babysitting full time again next week, we took a few hours off to visit the planet of Pandora and its Na'vi inhabitants. Since everyone and Oprah are talking about Avatar, we had to see for ourselves. Thinking that we might as well go all out, we drove far past the nearest theatre that was showing the movie in 3D and all the way to East Ottawa to see it on the large Imax screen.

Frankly, misgivings about the plot aside, it was so worth it. The visuals are stunning; at least in Imax 3D form they are. In my almost worthless estimation, it's a seminal movie that has forever moved the bar and advanced the goalposts and .... well just go ahead and insert your own favourite cliche because at 2:30 AM, I'm running on empty.

What I think: go see Avatar in 3D on the largest screen that you can find, and sit back and enjoy the incredible visuals without letting the thinness of the plot get in the way of the WOW factor.

That's my opinion, which has got to be worth something if I can recommend the film after having to drive home at night in a blinding snowstorm. Okay, it wasn't blinding all the way, but when the snow did abate it didn't matter because by then the road had disappeared, and it was all just a teensy weensy bit nerve wracking.

Princess or Ballerina?

Or is it Flower or Daisy?

Actually, when she gets dressed like this, it's supposedly to be a ballerina. She'll dance and in her little way, try to do a ballerina twirl. But it's really more fairy-princess-like to me.



She's donned this outfit any number of times, but not being the most observant guy in the world, yesterday I exclaimed in surprise that the tip of her wand was a flower (see below).



She corrected me. "It's a daisy."

No, honey. It's cute. As are you.

Boops and Brains

Sometimes, I am surprised by how smart kids are; I shouldn't be, but I am. For example: Nikki Dee, who is still several months away from her third birthday, has surprised me twice recently, basically over the same meal served several days apart.

I had prepared tuna casserole when she visited last week. I thought it seemed like a good idea because she loves it, but then I thought again and realized that she actually loves her mother's version. Knowing that my recipe was different, I was fearful that if we called it tuna casserole, she might be dismayed by the different taste of my rendition of this standby recipe. Therefore, because I am exceedingly clever, I decided to tell her that the dish was called noodle boops. In the event, however, she took one look at the dish and declared that it was tuna casserole, and no amount of proclamation on our parts could shake her conviction.

As it turned out, she didn't like my dish no matter what we called it: I think because it contains crunchy celery and pepper as opposed to her mother's mushy peas.

Yesterday,when she visited once again, we had enough leftovers to try the dish one more time. Once again, she surprised me by declaring at the get go that she didn't want any boops. Why she would recall that name, when she had originally insisted that it had been tuna casserole and not boops, is beyond me. But it does give one pause to realize just how much kids absorb and retain. Whatever her name, she wanted nothing to do with those cursed boops even though we had thought to remove the crunchy bits. Fortunately, after much futile cajoling, we were able to sneak a bit into her open mouth, and as she chewed she figured the boops were now okay and happily consumed the rest of the dish.

The point, however, is my surprise at what she is able to absorb and retain at her tender age, and I think that I had best be careful about what I say from now on. After four decades of sailing The Seven Seas under The Jolly Roger, it will be difficult for me to give up my sailorish manner of speech, but I guess I'll have to try.

Zach's Photo Album

"So, wacha bin doin AC? Yiz haven't bin hangin rown here much?"

Well, since you ask so nicely, I confess to being pretty busy AC: creating a photo album of Zach's first year. I had made one for his sister, and it was time to come up with the goods for the boy, and as it was his birthday [party] on the weekend, the time crunch was on.

Three years ago, when Nikki Dee happened into my life, I pretty much put her album together as her first year unfolded. She was the first grand after all and everything was new and fresh. I was in love with her, and she didn't haven't an older sibling to distract me and demand my time, so it got done.

With Zach, it was different. With his sister requiring much energy, I never quite managed to get around to making the album as the year progressed — at least that's my official excuse. But I always planned to present one on his first birthday, and as the day drew nigh, I began to get busy. Here are a few samples of what I have put together with the slideshow of the whole album below, including a link to the larger view directly on Flickr.

From week 2 ...



One thing I did realize, for perhaps the first time, in creating such albums is that a collection of head shots without lots of extraneous background makes for more pleasing composites than a group of dissimilar shots with different backgrounds. Since one must work with what's available, and since you want to show representative pictures, you can't often put together such pages, but here is another grouping of a somewhat similar style ... from week 3 ...



And a less busy collage from month 4 ...



Finally, this is the last page in the album: month 12. When lightning strikes, I may add a page or two for the party. Meanwhile, if your are family (or just curious) and want to see more, see the slideshow of the whole album is below, including a link to the large version.





Click here to view the slideshow larger.