Oh. My. God...

....it's just tooo much, too cute, it's cute overload!

Greek(ish) Beans

Tonight I tried out something new for dinner (I'm a bit of a food kick if you haven't noticed). I based it on this recipe but changed it up a bit according to what we had (I used canned tomatoes and white kidney beans instead of broad beans (crap-market didn't have any)). It was very easy and very tasty. I served it with warm bread rolls and some chunks of feta that I'd drizzled with olive oil. I also did a little green pepper and cucumber salad (w/balsamic and oil) on the side. It was a really delicious and not-too-heavy dinner (I'll take a photo next time!).

Beautiful

I've been reading Lisa Congdon's blog A Bird in the Hand for a while and have been intending to blog about it for just as long. Anyhoo, she has just launched her artist website and do, if you do any surfing today, go check it out. Her work is absolutely beautiful (I am especially a huge fan of her log-cabin pillows) and I often visit her blog when I've had a grotty day just because I find the colours of her art-work and photographs so very uplifting.
In other news, I've been assigned as TA to a wicked wicked class with a legendary prof. and really awesome instructor. I am SO excited (though a bit nervous and intimidated) about working with them. There are a couple of other projects in the works that also have me doing a happy dance when I think about them. This year is really shaping up. It's been a lot of work to get here and I'm as ready for it as I've ever been. Now if I could just get LJ to stop playing WoW for five minutes then it would be purrrfect!

Great Salad

LJ and I were feeling kind of burned out today, possibly coming down with a bit of a cold and still out of whack after a late night on Thursday. I was wondering what kind of restorative grub I could put together this evening, and while I was doing my daily blog-read, I happened upon this recipe at Feministe. Wowsers. I did change it up a bit as our local crap-market (we live in a really great part of the city but our local supermarket seems to stock 99% processed junk) didn't have flat-leaf parsley and the mint was really expensive and very wilted. I substituted some spinach leaves and they actually worked really well. It was absolutely delicious and as a bonus side-effect my hands still smell of limes. Nigella's recipes are really good and I find them nice and easy to follow. I've added her website to my blogroll so check it out!

'Cho for Prez'

We have had a very low-key weekend. Went out for dinner at a very good Greek restaurant here in Calgary on Friday and rented some DVDs last night. I had seen clips of her before but finally got to see a Margaret Cho stand-up film. I got Notorious C.H.O and thought it was great. You know when things come at a particularly good time? Well me watching Notorious C.H.O came at a really good time. I had spent the day in one of the trendy inner suburbs, drinking coffee and (window) shopping with a good friend. Well, I wasn't really window shopping, I was kind of looking for some new pants or perhaps a skirt. And I couldn't find anything that really fit well. Everything was really expensive. I ended up feeling really unhappy about my body and frustrated with price/selection of clothes in the stores we went to. I think it's a combination of my getting older and the change in enviroment. My metabolism has definitely slowed down, I've been nesting and as a result I've put on a fair bit of weight in the past couple of years. At the same time, of course, I also moved back to Western culture. I have found things more extreme in Canada, 'extreme-West' perhaps. Anyway, I've been obsessing about my body and 'fatness' in a way that I have never really done before. I'm also craving more junk food than before. It is advertised everywhere and available there too. So I was in the middle of this post- unsucessful-shopping trip grump, and feeling frowny about bits of jiggle and just funky in the not good or fun or fab way. And Margaret Cho kicked the ass of my bad mood. I laughed, I nodded, I felt cheered up and cheered on. Even though it's been on my blogroll for ages, do go and check out her website and blog. She updates her blog regularly and it's really interesting and cool. Plus she has a super-cool tattoo. And she reminded me that I have better things to do with my time than worry about the backs of my thighs. Like watch Margaret Cho films and cook up yummy-sounding new recipes (recipe via Not Martha).

I'll second that emotion

...that is the big *snort* (I'll raise her a hearty chuckle) Feministe's Zuzu gave this response to the Asian mail-order bride business or perhaps rather common Western perceptions of the mail-order bride business and of Chinese and Japanese women in general. There are a few of my ex-colleague ex-pats out in Taiwan I'd love to send this to but, oops, I guess I never asked for their email addresses. Can't imagine why I forgot.

Typing this with my jaw on the floor

My addiction to celebrity gossip (I know, I'm very guilty about it) means that I often end up here or here or here when I'm farting about online. Anyway, after another day of 'organizing' (trying to comb through the papers we have been carting around with us for the past three years) I popped over to Defamer for a little R&R. And I saw this, thought to myself 'what are they talking about?', followed the video link here and watched the 'News Report' in question. It just seems very very wrong to me that people's reaction to the news of the death of a one-time colleague is the subject of a news report. Well I guess the death of Bruno Kirby was the the news story, but it was an awfully strange and uncomfortable angle on it.

According to Dolly

I know I bang this particular drum a whole lot and there are more than a couple of friends who are starting to get that glazed look when I bring up Ms Parton but I did promise a while back that I would quote a little from Dolly's autobiography My Life and Unfinished Business. These lines are actually also used on the book's dust jacket and when I came to them in the body of the text itself I was, well, a bit goosebumpy really:

The journey is on a road, not a highway. We don't travel this road in a fine car, or even in the most humble horse-drawn wagon. We walk it each step of the way with the dust of the rugged road clinging to our bare feet. Although we seldom realize it at the time, that dust is more precious to us than gold dust. It is the dust of experience, or error and forgiveness, or risk an reward. Maybe from the dust that has collected on my feet you can sift out a few specks of goldthat will be of value to you on your road.

Tee-hee

This made me giggle today. Mind you, I've been generally pretty happy since the stomach-flu) or whatever it was that gripped me in its vomitty claws) I had yesterday seems to have, um, abated.

Thirsty

I'm thirsty. Thirsty for travel and books and knowledge and sights. I've been reading about the Renaissance and I'm hooked on history. I have no idea why I didn't take history in school (secondary school that is - high school for North Americans). In the Irish secondary system, after the Intermediate Certificate exam (which was, after my time, renamed 'Junior Certificate' and may have since been renamed again, I'm out of touch) you (or me, or 'one') studies for the Leaving Certificate, the results of which determine which third level course you gain admission to (if you desire access to, or are lucky enough to have access to, third level education ). I always assumed I would go on University. My parents were both the first generation of their families to go to Uni, they are both big readers, very into education, my Dad is a Uni lecturer and I loved going into work with him. I was a huge bookworm as a child, and have certainly used texts as an escape from my own reality all my life. I'm getting off point aren't I? Anyway, a lot of my swottiness as a teen was focused on science and I took Biology and Chemistry for my Leaving Cert. At that time you picked seven subjects, with Maths, English, Irish, and a modern language being mandatory for Uni admission. I picked Art as my seventh and, though remarkably lacking in the drawing/clay modelling department, I was good at and enjoyed the Art History part.
Thank goodness I did take it because at least some of what I am reading about the Renaissance is at least somewhat familiar. It's painfully little though and I'm realising just how little I know about European history. I should know more, having taken English at University but I suspect I may have spent a large number of crucial lectures in the University bar or canteen playing Gin Rummy and smoking cigarettes. My point being....ah yes, I'm loving it - it feels great to finally put into context those little scraps of information I had stored away in my brain. But it is making my thirsty for more - to revisit works of art I hurried past in Italy when I was only interested in busts of late Republican politicians; to read more about and of Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne; to go to Florence; to travel in France; to perhaps even (shock) learn another language. Perhaps I'm infected with the desire to be a Renaissance Woman when I know that, given my snail-like work practices, I will be lucky to manage a fraction of my dreams. Sigh.
I am going to have to switch my focus though, Uni starts in a month and I think I have chosen my courses for the Autumn (Fall) and Winter semesters. I am very very excited about these choices, and will post more about them when the decision is final (I have to run them by the course advisor before I register). I suspect it's going to be busy chez-Georgia come September but pending the revelation of my schedule and the demands of the courses and my TA work, I'm thinking about putting aside half a day each week to devote to reading all of those texts I ignored when I was an Undergraduate because they were showing Billy Connolly videos in the bar. I'm compiling a reading list for myself at the moment. If you have any suggestions for texts (prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction...) that you've found particularly significant, I'd love to hear them.

To Read

Via CultureCat, a great post from a blog I haven't read before but surely will again. I certainly share Holly's aversion to what she calls 'graduate-seminar-speak' (although I have another four, possibly more, years of it to look forward to!). I also share her interest in the subject of personal and political writing, particularly from a perspective that holds the personal/political binary in one hand (for observation and discussion) and the tenet (which I identify with feminism) 'the personal is political' in the other hand (also for observation and discussion). Here's a taster of the piece, which is well worth a read:

It’s become a commonplace to say that the personal is political. What does this mean exactly? Do we take this to mean that one person’s story of an abusive situation, say, becomes “evidence” in the argument setting out the social/political steps that should be taken to reduce such abuse? Or is the political seen as a super-aggregate somehow (not quite sure how this works exactly) of numberless individual sets of experience and points of view? Or does some equivalence relation exist between the two realms, some set of correspondences and metaphorical connections? To what extent is this claim, “the personal is political,” used as a rationalization to legitimize the use of personal experience in social/political discourse (which, by implication, is clearly the superior mode)?

(Emphasis mine).