Happy Nowruz!

For the last 3 years (or is it 4?) I've been hosting a potluck to celebrate Chinese New Year, usually around the end of January, beginning of February. I missed it entirely this year. (Seriously, where has the time gone!?!) Thank goodness there are other New Years to celebrate! Nowruz is the Persian New Year, which also coincides with the first day of Spring, and it was a nice change for a potluck theme - Middle Eastern food, instead of Chinese. 

I have to tell you, our potluck was a Persian feast! For a small group of 6 people (small for a potluck anyway) we had a fantastic menu: 

Appetizers:

Veggie tray

Main Course:

Adas-Polow (a saffron rice dish with lentils and raisins)

Koobideh (beef kebab)

Maast-o-Khiar (a yogurt and mint side-dish that went well with the beef kebab) 

Jujeh Kabab (chicken kebab)

Persian Yogurt Salad (a yogurt and cucumber side-dish)

bbq grilled vegetables 

Ghormeh Sabzi (beef and herbs stew with dried lemons)

Zereshk Polow (Saffron Rice with barberries)

Drinks:

Ginger Sekanjabin

grapefruit and lemon Italian sodas

Desserts:

The Rebbetzin Chefs Persian Walnut Cookies

Faloodeh (Persian Rose Water Ice)

One of the important parts of Nowruz is the Haft Sin Table. I think generally this is a separate table set up with seven symbolic items. I didn't go with the full Haft Sin items, but selectively put some of the items as a centrepiece for the table. Mirrors, lit candles, spouts (from carrot tops because I couldn't get lentils to sprout), rose water, sumac, and live goldfish!

And now I have 4 goldfish to look after. Well, actually...only 2 now. I seem to have killed 2 today. Let's hope the other 2 survive the night. And survive Millie. :)

Apparently I'm a sadistic goldfish owner. I've been enabling Millie's curiosity and terrorizing the poor goldfish.

Discovery!

Close-up

View from above

Eye contact

Playing tag with the fish.

Finding comfort in a catnap

Oh, the life of a cat! This is the best image I can come up with, aside from those I've already shared this week, to illustrate comfort. To be able to find the warmest spot, with the best vantage point, and to have your bed there where you can curl up and make the world disappear into a blissful catnap! Now that's comfort!

Riders on the storm

Post-tropical storm Noel has come and gone, and none of us here in my little corner of the world seem any the worse for wear. Millie and I hunkered down last night for a quiet evening in (taking a pass on a family birthday party) to listen to the storm.



In the video you'll see the start of the storm - heavy rain, the blowing bushes and trees, and the wind blowing the water on the pavement (it's being blown up the slope of the parking lot). It was quite spectacular. And that was only the very start at around 5pm. The worst of the storm hit around midnight, but I was sound asleep and missed it all.

About 3am, the wind took out the power. According to CBC about 150,000 households in NS were without power; 60,000 of those in Metro Halifax. So I made the best of a dark and stormy morning with lots of candles, my solar powered radio, and a good book.


I'm half-way through Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck, and quite enjoying it! It was a struggle reading this morning - all cozy under the quilt in candle-light. I kept falling asleep! Read 1 page, sleep for 20 mins, wake up to feed the cat, read 20 pages, doze for awhile. What a great way to spend a morning!

And while I was relaxing, Millie was keeping watch and guarding our apartment from any rogue leaves blowing by the patio door. This kept her occupied for hours, and was quite funny to watch.

Now it's back to normal. The storm has cleared, and the sun was out this afternoon. Our power came on at 4:30. I'm glad to have hot water again.

Being entertained by cats

Watch this!



Millie likes the new quilt, but definitely not the camera flash!

Current status: moving

Here's a summary of the events of the last week of moving.

I packed my boxes. (Thank-you AO for the boxes, big and small.)
And on April 26th, the movers came and loaded the tail-end of a tractor trailer with my stuff.
It took 3 men about an hour to load the truck and complete the paperwork. It was done by 2pm, leaving me with time to kill before my flight the next morning.

To keep myself busy and distracted, I went to see the Emily Carr exhibit at the AGO, browsed the CBC boutique on Front Street, then headed back to Bloor to the Korean grocery (PAT) to stock up on the perfect green curry paste.

By the time I got "home" (though there was not much left to make it home), it was time for me to turn in my keys to my landlady.

At my apartment - my very empty apartment - there was nothing to do but wait out the night. It's interesting - I left Toronto with almost exactly the same amount of luggage as when I first arrived: a suitcase, an overnight bag, a laptop and a storage bin. Except this time I'm also leaving with a cat. My flight with WestJet was due to leave at 7:15am, so I arranged for a taxi to pick me up at 4:30am. There was not point in waiting at the apartment, when I could be at the airport. So I packed up Millie in her carrier, and managed to shuffle the remenants of my seven years in Toronto to the airport. And thus ends the Toronto chapter of my life.

Alarmed

...Twice in one night...

So the good thing about having wireless in my ground floor apt. is that when fire alarms go off in my building, I'm able to take my laptop, pick up a signal, and blog outside in the damp cold morning air while we wait for the "okay" from the firemen.

The alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, waking me and Millie out of the dead of sleep. Naturally Millie dodges for the deepest darkest corner under the bed, so it's a struggle to reach her, and naturally I'm incredibly grumpy, particularly since this is the second time this has happenend in the last 12 hours and it's for no reason at all except that the connections in the panel are damp (so my landlady says).
I've been in this building for nearly 5 years now, and this is the first time I've ever heard the firealarm go off. I'm a little glad to know that it does actually work because, I'll admit, I did have my doubts. It's also good to know that the fire engines show up fairly quickly - though I suppose they ought to with the station being so close on Yorkville! 9 firemen arrived at our building, though only 6 actually left the trucks to check things out.
I have to tell you, too, the firealarm is piercing! Poor little Millie's ears. I mean it's nice having an alarm that will get me up immediately out of the dead of sleep (very little could!), but does have to be SO loud. Betty informed me it was 80 decibels, but I think it was louder - 80 decibels is normal city traffic sounds, this was much louder than that - so loud my ears hurt, and are still ringing half an hour later. And right by my front door is the loudest. I really should have ear protection! And who knows what kind of damage it's doing to Millie's ears. Certainly it must hurt.

Oh yeah, and the other thing about waking up to an alarm...being evacuated in your pajamas. The idea is to get out as fast as possible, I know. And by the time I get Millie from out of the deep recesses under my bed, I've already wasted a lot of time. The fact is, if this had been a real fire, and the building was actually burning, I might have been left with only the clothes I was wearing - and those would've been my lobster pajamas.

Okay, so we've got the "all clear" - now what do I do, it's 6am and my alarm clock has now gone off. Do I try to grab a few more moments of sleep? Or do I take a shower and get ready for the day? Oh the dilemmas!

Let's hope the alarm doesn't go off again during the day....

A close (re)call

The big news this week was the MenuFoods pet-food recall, and though Millie rarely gets soft catfood, I did check her supply. I was grateful to find that her food was unaffected by the recall. I'm still not taking any chances - it's all been purged.

The product code on the package of Iams I had in the cupboard is 62204197, and the dates of the affected catfood is as follows: codes dates of 6339 through 7073 followed by plant code 4197.

And Whiskas, the other package I've had in the cupboard for awhile, isn't even on the recall list.

So Millie is safe-and-sound, enjoying her 2/3 c. of Iam's dry catfood each and every day.

In bloom!

The tulips are gorgeous! They are just beginning to open now and are revealing their dramatic centres. The colour brings a whole lot of cheer to my apartment.

And, at the risk of being the crazy woman who takes too many pictures of her cat, here is another photo of Millie. She flaked out in the most unusual place - precariously perched on a little end table with her head resting on the futon arm. The shot is dark because I turned off the flash so as not to wake her. Must leave sleeping kitties lie.

Knit one, purl two

How beautiful is this yarn!?! I went shopping today after work with a friend who knows more about knitting than I do. She took me to Romni Wools, an amazing store in the Queen St. W. neighbourhood. When you walk in you you're immediately hit with the smell of wool. You look around and all you can see wall to wall are the vibrant colours of balls and balls of yarn of all different shapes and sizes. Balls of yarn tumbling onto the floor. Soft cottons, silk and mohair yarns to itchy, coarse wools. Everything you could possibly imagine, in dyes that are almost beyond imagination! It's sensory overload.
This was my first knitting project. It started off as my practice piece, but was just the right size to fold in half, stitch up the sides with a blanket stitch and add a drawstring at the top for a hot water bottle cozy. I tried out a few different type of stitches in this piece and had a bit of fun with it. It's not the nicest knitted hot water bottle cozy, but it's a start.
Millie likes the yarn too. :)