Weekend of Food, part two

I am now back in the sunny Okanagan (not to say that Vancouver Island wasn't equally sunny), and I brought home quite a bit. Movies to watch, books to read, banking to do. And food. I probably brought about 3 or 4 dozen cookies on the plane. Why?

Because my house in Vic was consumed in a baking frenzy all weekend. First I baked cookies. Then my mum baked cookies. Then she baked more cookies. Somewhere in there a pie and a cake both appeared. And muffins. All over the course of about three days.

But that's only the beginning. If I were to give you the itinerary of my weekend home, it would look something like this:

Saturday
Pre-flight Timmy's; donut and hocho consumed.
Post flight Timmy's with sister; donut and hocho consumed.

Sunday
Grilled cheese sammich; cheddar, salami, mustard, and pickles on brown.
Baked cookies; oatmeal cherry chocolate chip.
Thai red curry with the fam.
Two movies with the fave cousin; cookies eaten, popcorn consumed.

Monday
Pancakes for breakfast.
Lunch out with Shawn; sammich!
Timmy's with Kayla; donuts and hocho consumed.
Thanksgiving dinner made; turkey, stuffing, potatoes, balsamic onions, gravy, apple-raspberry pie, pumpkin spice cake.
QV's with Alex; blackberry cheesecake and chai tea consumed.

Tuesday
More cookies baked. Muffins also appeared from nowhere.
Timmy's with Jen; donut and hocho consumed.
Leftover Thanksgiving dinner for lunch.
Leftover Thanksgiving dinner for dinner.

As you can see, I might have a bit of a Tim Horton's addiction. Juuuust a little bit. It doesn't help that there's a Timmy's on campus, either. Oh, and that mysterious word hocho? It's short for hot chocolate. I'm a lazy West Coast Canadian like that. I can't be bothered with all the extra syllables. Same with the word sammich. You'll just have to accept the fact that I'm rad like that.

Pictures of the baked goods will be coming in a future post, likely titled Weekend of Food, part three. Awesome sauce.

Cookie Monster would be proud. Right, Cookie?

Weekend of Food, part one

Because I am a Canadian, I get to celebrate Thanksgiving this weekend. This also means I get to go home! Together, these things mean that many favourite things will be eaten. Let's just say that right now I feel like this:

Omnomnom!

Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Zoe all (c) Sesame Workshop, footage from TLC

Bits and Bobs

This is an update post, 'cause I'm not feeling very focused today. Prepare yourself for a little randomnimity.

I have a Formspring! You don't even have to go over to my Formspring page to ask a question - there's a handy little widget off to the right. Use it well. I'll probably answer every question that gets sent to me, but only the best will make it onto the blog. I'll probably put up a Formspring post once a week. If you're not sure what Formspring is, it's basically a website that allows you to ask me any question you can think of under the safe guise of anonymity. Handy, eh?

Last night I took the plunge and wiped my MSI netbook. It was starting to run a little slowly, but instead of just defraging or running a clean-up wizard I uninstalled the OS and replaced it with Ubuntu 10.04 Remix for netbooks. So far I love it. All of the functionality of the hardware has remained, which was my biggest fear when switching over. My new favourite feature? There's a photo booth program, like iPhoto on a Mac. The best part? There's a Hulk mode. It turns your skin green, the background purple, and whitens your teeth. RAD!

Final update: I have a bucket of kettle corn and caramel popcorn. Heck yes.

That is all.

hulk photo of me by me

Purple Shirts and Social Causes

If you have Facebook, you've probably seen at least one event in the past few days about wearing purple of the 20th of October. You might be "attending" one, you might have ignored it. You might not even be sure what this whole purple thing is about.

Well, I'm here to tell you.

Over the past few months, six young men have lost their lives to suicide because of bullying. These individuals were bullied because of their sexual orientation, and each of their lives were ruined and eventually taken by the actions of their peers.

So on October 20th, people are rallying against bullying by throwing on a purple shirt. The organizer calls it Spirit Day. It's easy to do, and, although it doesn't do too much by itself, it shows solidarity and support, and raises awareness among youth. Some of you might remember the pink shirt campaigns to combat bullying: supporting a child who was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to his school. These boys didn't stick out because of the shirts they wore, they "stuck out" because of personal choices they each made.

I'm taking this day a step further.

As I mentioned, wearing a purple shirt won't do too much to combat attitudes toward various lifestyle choices. At my school, the University of British Columbia, I'm organizing a Free Hug Day event on the 20th, to coincide with the Spirit Day event. With help from our Pride Resource Centre on campus, I hope to be able to not only show support and hug some people, but also deliver information and resources to those who need or want it.

I encourage all of you to support the purple shirt event, and to become involved in local LGBTQQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, questioning, and ally) organizations throughout the year. Note that "A" on the end: it stands for "Ally." An ally is anyone, regardless of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity, who stands up for the human and civil rights of LGBTQ people.

Now, if you don't mind, I have some planning and networking to do

update, Oct 8th: It seems that I'm not the only one looking to run an event on campus that day. October 20th will now host a 2-part event: the aforementioned Free Hug Day, hopefully with the Pride Centre and the Equity Office on hand, as well as an equality and diversity night in one of our residence buildings, again with the Pride Centre and Equity Office present. Maybe we'll even rent the campus theatre and show Rent afterwards. This is snowballing so quickly!

wristband photo by me

Resolutions, an Update

So a week-ish back I posted a list of things I want to work on over this school year: my New School Year Resolutions. Here's how I'm doing so far:

I have a few post card recipients lined up. All I need to do is purchase the cards. My aim is to pick some up while I'm in Victoria for the Thanksgiving weekend.

The running hasn't started yet. I'm still playing volleyball twice a week, and am slowly getting back into a yoga routine, though. Once I re-establish a decent sleep pattern things should get easier.

In my cupboard I have whole grain pasta, spinach pasta, and brown rice. Fibre, check.

A week isn't really enough time to "branch out" from the staples. Besides, I did a lot of eating out this past week. However, I also ate in at my friend Kalun's place the other night, so that's another goal covered.

In my opinion this blog counts as writing. Plus, I've been throwing the odd work onto Protagonize, and responded to a few of the prompts on Marc's Daily Writing Practice. Who knows, I might actually make an attempt at NaNoWriMo this year.

The name game is making very slow progress. Like, at a snail's pace. But, remember that I proclaimed the snail to be a devoted and hard-working creature. I'll get there.

I've also succeeded on eating less more often. Really, this equates to me eating more, which is the end goal. I've also taken up breakfast again. What would I do without cinnamon raisin bagels? Here's what: go to Timmy's every morning.

Finally, the complimenting. I'm a green, as you all know now from my True Colours post, so I don't really do the whole touchy-feely thing. I've gotten better with the whole hugging concept (y'know, reciprocating the hug and all), but I'm still not a compliment-er. Maybe I should just scratch that one off the list and make it "Give sincere hugs more." Meh.