Rick Cluff on CBC 1 is interviewing Bill VanderZalm about the Pope and the visit to Vancouver BVZ organized for the Pope in 1984. I don’t think the Pope has died yet, but everyone’s talking like he has.
Bill VanderZalm’s sweet, insipid voice from my radio. Such bliss!
ooh he mentioned Lillian! I want to call in and ask about Lillian.
Oh, it’s the Pope’s 25th anniversary as Pope. Happy Pope Day!
I think I have forgotten the flavour of cheese.
Alliance + Progressive Conservatives = New political party to mock!! Pat Carney thinks it’s an important first step. She still has not had surgery to correct her sinus/adenoid issues.
Anyway, the flavour of cheese. I still want pizza. I still want lasagna. I don’t so much crave nachos, though it’s only 7:15 am and I never crave nachos at this time of day unless I’m still up from the night before or have been to sleep but am still drunk. Any way you crack it, nachos before noon is a bad idea.
But what does it taste like? I fear that in a week I will open up the cheese and feel vomitorious because it is bacterial yuck and my brain will know that again. That would be sad! I have travelled long distances learning to love cheese. Then, to hate it, would be heartbreaking.
Yesterday, at the grocery store, it was 5:30. I was shopping with all the other people who work because I worked yesterday. So the express line was clogged with slightly damp, cranky women with straggles coming out of their ponytails, buying whatever foods they had been craving all day while sitting at their desks or in their cars on their way home. I got in line with olives, salami, chips and salsa and quickly realized I was in the chatty cashier line. This woman is so friendly -really, it’s great, as she is also efficient and gets your groceries scanned quickly and your change to you bam! like that – that she will keep talking to you until you’re out of the store and back in the parking lot. She will turn and keep yelling the story she’s telling until you’re out of earshot. She was doing this with the man ahead of the woman ahead of me. Talking about the weather. The woman in front of me was very in a hurry. Her ponytail was in its end stages and she really needed that apple cider in her fridge at home. Maybe she had a date, or she wanted to get her dinner ready before The West Wing started. I don’t know, but she was huffing and puffing like a steamtrain. So cashier is yelling “have a great evening! watch out for the bad drivers! enjoy your sandwich!” at the man, and the woman is pushing her groceries up, up, closer, THERE. “OH!” says the cashier, “I know what you’re making! Lasagna!” Sure enough, the woman in front of me has, like, 17 kinds of cheese. Ricotta, parmesan, brie, mozza; plus ground beef, fresh noodles, etc. It’s a good guess. “Something like that,” says Miss Crankypants. I mean, what else could you be making with those ingredients that’s Something Like Lasagna? A lasagna casserole? That’s lasagna, right there. Lasagna soup? Well that’s just fucked up.
Little anecdote about cheese, that’s the only significance there.
I have a headache. My father’s wine is suddenly headache inducing. This is Not Good.
The pumpkin cheesecake was good but would have benefited from more pumpkin. Like some of the 3/4 of a can I still have left, mysterious and with a strange glow about it, in my fridge. I suppose I could make pumpkin soup.
The glaze never did re-solidify. It squelched and ran all over the place. And was sticky. But tasty! And the colour was correct: orangey brown. That’s the right colour for a pumpkin cheesecake.
My left wrist is inexplicably stained with what looks like oil or the contents of a black ballpoint pen. Let’s see: I spent 40 minutes in the pool, 10 in the car and the last 15 doing the dishes. Nope, no black sludge in any of those places.
I am trying new pools and today’s was not my favourite.
Last Thursday I tried the first new pool and it was good: nice and old (I like them old because there are less buff, scary people at the old ones) and dark. Not too much chlorine and hardly any people. Of course, it was 9 am. At 9:30, an Aquafit class started, kicking off with Enrique Inglesias (it wasn’t “Don’t Turn out the LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII” but that was OK). Of course, I stayed and pretended to swim more, just so I could watch the bizarre scene which is 30 middle aged women bouncing around in unison to very loud pop music. (And then the Chemical Brothers played. And then Platinum Blonde!) The showers were kind of small and poorly positioned and the changeroom was very cramped, but overall it was a nice pool.
Today’s pool is very new, very fleh. It’s an “integrated” pool. You can wade in to the family area, then scoot over to the laps area. There were the usual three sections for laps: Slow, Medium and Fast. I always swim Medium. That part was mostly good; it was a little bit too warm for me, but again, not too many people (again, 9 am) and hardly any chlorine. Then I swam my second lap and was blinded by the sun coming in the glass roof. Not so good. Then the fast lane was shut down so there could be Aquafit and all the fast, cranky people came into the Medium lane. Aquafit happened right next to the Medium lane and, while this was entertaining for a bit, it became more like The Perfect Storm had broken after a few minutes. Wavy, in other words. And the music wasn’t as good. “Beat It”? C’mon. It’s not aerobics, it’s Aquafit!
Plus, both ends of the pool are shallow enough to stand up in. For some reason, this bothered me. I don’t go to a pool to walk around. I go to a pool to feel like I might drown. That’s the impetus for swimming. Sink or Swim.
There was a man I thought was sinking, but he was just doing his own calisthenics under water. I have no idea if he could hear Beat It! or not, but he was doing some weirdypants movements way down there. He was very short, which, I guess, is how he could do all that without touching the bottom.
I remembered to think about when the Aquafit class might end and to get out of the pool and into the shower before the cool-down music started because nothing is worse than four showers and 35 women trying to use them. Ick. The people who told me that this particular pool was gross because there was hair everywhere were right: there is. That doesn’t bother me so much. What did bother me is that they use a “token” system for their lockers. You get a token from the reception girl for 35 cents. (You need to know this before you get to the changeroom. I was half undressed before I realized I needed a token because even though I told the reception girl it was my first time there, she didn’t tell me. But I digress.) So, great. No quarters, no muss, no fuss. But you don’t get the token back! When you unlock the locker, you get your stuff back, but the token stays in the locker. And your 35 cents stays with the reception desk. And you’ve now paid, um, $4.85 (which is already 70 cents more than every other rec. centre in this city) plus 35 cents for the privilege of bad music, sun in your eyes and 2 crummy lanes to swim in that aren’t even deep enough to inspire fear! Now, at the pool on Thursday, the locker didn’t give me my quarter back. But I think it really meant to – it was just a mistake. These new fangled pools and their complicated fleh. Screw ’em.
On Thursday, I will try pool # 3. It is my mother’s favourite pool so maybe that’s the one for me, too.
And so.
The cake looks & smells good.
I made a glazesque-type topping from spiced rum, maple syrup and more cinnamon and nutmeg. Though the glaze, pre-saucepan, was goopy, after it boiled it became runny. I expected it to re-solidify as it cooled, however, it only reached halfway to its prior goopiness. So I poured it on the cake anyway. It tastes good (the glazey) and soaked right into the cake so hopefully we don’t all get drunk on pumpkin cheesecake later. By the time we actually eat it, the “bad”ness attributable to cheese will be hardly worth considering.
The combination of maple syrup (real stuff, from Ontario) and spiced rum makes a nice, if somewhat poisonous, beverage. Far too rich for 9:30 am anyway.
Extravagence: yesterday purchased a CD single for $12.99 for a band I’ve heard a bit about and have seen one video for: Sigur Ros . They’re from Iceland and you know that’s good. I was looking for the CD single “Hey Ya” by Outkast but couldn’t find it. (though I almost bought “Shake Your Tailfeather”) I’m not so extravagent as to indulge in a double album of music for one song, but one CD single for one song seemed reasonable-esque.
S’anyway, the Sigur Ros song is called “Untitled #1” and is a very beautiful, surreal piece. I dig it. The video, which I saw a few months ago and never forgot, is all kids playing in this cruddy, black, post-apocalyptic world where they have to wear gas masks to go outside.
Ordinarily, I shudder when people put children in videos because they’re usually used as a device to make us cry and buy something. But in this case, they were used as people, as actors. My heart didn’t break because they were children, our future, innocent, all that nonsense. My heart broke because they were the world.
Oh, and the single came with a DVD too.
Yesterday I was walking up the street that has all the pizza places on it and I thought about lasagna and I actually drooled. It was very embarassing. It would have been more embarassing, but it was also pissing rain and there was no one on the street but me. But oh, lasagna. Beckoning to me with your saucy, cheezy layers. 9 days.
Although, if I eat cheese today (even in cheesecake, see yesterday’s entry) do I have to start the 21 days over again? If I was clearing out my body of allergens & toxins I would say yes. But I think that I won’t. I think I will still end my cheesefast on the 22nd. OK.
ps: recently I seem unable to spell. As I used to be able to spell quite well, I am not the kind of person who uses the spellcheck so there may be errors in my blogging. If so, please know that I am deeply ashamed. I am hoping this spellfreeze stops soon because it is disconcerting: it’s not even just typing, it’s handwriting too. Gorble!
By making a pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving, I am in no way cheating on my cheesefree self. (Day 12!) I don’t crave cheesecake – I don’t really like cheesecake – and I am only making a pumpkin cheesecake because it’s an experiment. I’ve never, to my knowledge, heard of pumpkin cheesecake but it seems like something that should exist…creamy things with graham cracker crusts: I think of cheesecake and pumpkin pie immediately. Oh, sure, pumpkin pie is usually in a real crust. But I prefer graham crumb crust anyway. Anyway. For tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Chicken (my mom prefers chicken to turkey) Dinner, we are bringing dessert. And in an hour we’ll see how that dessert will taste. So what I did was mix half a cheesecake recipe and half a pumpkin pie recipe and add some spiced rum. The glaze will be spiced rum and maple syrup. Stay tuned and find out how it turns out.
Now, the reason eating cheesecake isn’t cheating on my cheesefree self: because it’s dessert. I don’t like dessert the way some people do. I never ate dessert when I was a kid unless it was a holiday or we were at someone else’s house or sometimes at Swiss Chalet I would have the coconut cream pie (damn, that pie is THE PIE!). Plus I have the wrong kind of cravings – I have the saltyspicy kind not the sweetysugary kind. So cheesecake, for me, is not a taboo food or a dangerous one. Nachos, on the other hand, would put me in an early slow boat to hell if I ate just one. You can’t be addicted to something you don’t crave. I don’t crave cheesecake (even though there’s cheese in it). Therefore, I am not addicted to cheesecake or its properties. Like the spiced rum. If I was an alcoholic, it would still be okay for me to eat the cheesecake because the rum is cooked and robbed of its alcoholy properties. You can’t get drunk on cheesecake. Unless your addiction is to cheesecake.
Interesting fact #5 or so: My catt likes pumpkin. He was sitting at my feet, whining because I was opening a can with the can opener and a long time ago in a land far away we used to feed the catt soft food from a can. To teach him a lesson, I scooped a bit of canned pumpkin (blech!) onto my finger and offered it to him. “Do you like pumpkin?” I said sarcastically, “Go on, eat it!” Well, he did. And kept whining for more. It was at that point I remembered that the last time I made hummus, he also whined (canned chickpeas) so I gave him some and he liked it, too. S’fucked up is what it is.
I like that popcorn has no cheese in it, because I really like popcorn and later we’re going to go to a movie and I will eat some popcorn.
