Want some 'shrooms?

In Canada, they call them "washrooms". I hadn't noticed til I read a newspaper article the other day that this is different to the Yank terms "bathrooms" or "restrooms". Some Canadians I have heard refer to the "loo", but you rarely hear "toilet".

I'm working in an ex-primary school building at the moment, which has been reclaimed for office space by the board. Halfway down the hall are the "washrooms" and someone had put a sign up some time ago saying so. The sign is stuck to the wall of an alcove so that it sticks out into the hallway and you can see it from both sides. Problem is, from our side you can't see the "wa" so it just says "shrooms".

So really it seems our board has bigger problems that just literacy if the board staff are selling mushrooms to primary school children!

(Unfortunately, when I pointed this out to our secretary, she changed it. She did see the humour, but was being far too responsible in my opinion. I was quite happy to add other signs around the place offering "meth" outside the math room or "E" where they hand out report cards or "coke" at the tuck shop...)

Name Change

I am changing my name to Goom, the Gormless Goo.

It was a tough decision, with Booford Bones being the other shortlisted name, but the state of my sinuses tipped the scales in the end.

You may call me Goom, or the Goo, or Goom the Gormless Goo.

That is all.



PS. I'm going to a conference in Montreal next week. Yay!

The Evil Living Curry of Doom

We had some bad luck recently with our cooking. We had a ton of vegetables to use up so we figured we'd do a massive veggie curry in our big pot and freeze half of to eat some time in the next few months. Rachel has a veggie curry recipe for lentils and tofu and whatever veg is around, involving mustard seeds, cumin seeds, curry powder and coconut milk, and she also threw in a tin of Patak's Korma curry sauce too to give it a bit of zing.

Now we still don't know exactly where the evil contaminant came from. It might have been the Korma sauce, but it could have been something else. We cooked it late on a Friday night and left it on the stove overnight with a view to finishing the cooking in the morning and adding the coconut milk (which isn't supposed to go in until you're done with simmering). When I lifted the lid in the morning, it had a weird "head" of froth. I didn't think much of it at the time and just gave it a stir and turned the stove back on low.

Later, after we'd transferred it to plastic containers to cool, we discovered that it had actually started to dribble over the edges of the containers, still doing this weird frothing thing. By now, the kitchen smelled of this weird creamy curry smell that wasn't entirely appetising. We were wondering what could be in there that could make it froth like this. It's not like there's any yeast ingredient, and anyway if there was something in the Korma sauce it would have been neutralised in the long simmer. We were starting to doubt whether we could actually eat it at this stage, but for a lack of a better idea we put two big containers of it and two smaller lunch containers in the freezer.

Rachel got the other curry from the freezer - the Madras curry we made a month ago to freeze for a rainy day - and put it in the fridge because we needed the room.

By the next day, we had decided to get rid of it. Freezing it helped because we could tip it out into the green bin (can't use plastic bags cos it's organic waste, so there's an extra messy logistical problem...). I got them out of the freezer and dumped them. 2 or 3 containers' worth, I can't remember, but there was bucketloads of it because we had used a ridiculous number of vegetables in it. It was such a shame because it was so much food to go to waste. But it really did smell very strange. At least it didn't smell as bad frozen. (I _hope_ I can get the smell out of the plastic containers...)

The next night, we were going to eat the Madras curry (the good one from the freezer from a month ago) and I got it out to microwave it. When I was scooping some into a plate, I noticed something funny. This was definitely not the beef Madras I was looking forward to all day! It had lentils and tofu and that weird smell ... oh crap! Hang on, if this was in the fridge then that means I threw out ... oh crap!

Or maybe what really happened is that the Evil Living Curry of Doom evilly twisted our perceptions so we _thought_ we were throwing it out when really we were throwing out good food! Or maybe it switched places! Or maybe it infected other containers in our freezer so that they _all_ contained Evil Living Curry of Doom!

Right now it's on the front lawn lurking in the un-emptied green bin. The garbage truck usually comes today but didn't. _Maybe_ it's because they always come a day later when there was a public holiday on Monday (Thanksgiving Day for Canada), or just _maybe_ it's another Evil Plot! Given how much time it's had to melt, I'm really quite scared of what I'm going to see in the green bin after emptying. I couldn't really do a very good job of wrapping it in newspaper because there was such a big dripping wet half-frozen mess of it. It may require some sort of exorcism if this continues.

If anyone has any holy relics that are useful for exorcising your house of Evil food, they would be very helpful about now.

--

This Evil Living post was brought to you by the Evil Vengaboys of Doom

"Doom, Doom, Doom!
I want to meet my doom!
We'll meet our doom together,
From now until forever!"

Magic & airport safety

Passengers are advised that wands must be given up before boarding the aircraft...





(I made mother take this picture for me when we were in Philadelphia airport on our way to Virginia. : )

Anniversaries, Lipstick, and the Wrong Side of the Road

Howdy!

Rachel and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary just two weeks ago. We went to the 1010 Bistro in Westdale and had the Salmon which was very nice albeit a little on the sweet side (pineapple based sauce). We got each other stuff! I got Rachel a "Roots" T-shirt (there is a Canadian clothing company called Roots - as in grass roots - that Australians love to make fun of), and she got me the Underworld Back To Mine CD which is really cool! She also got "The Court Jester" with Danny Kaye on DVD for the both of us and we watched it and had a great time!

Rachel impersonates the Venus de Milo

We've had a few dramas lately. Rachel left a whole tube of lipstick in her jacket pocket before it went into the wash. We was hwith cold water so that would have been fine, but I didn't detect any problem until the whole load had been through the dryer twice (like 2 hours worth) by which time the whole tube had been pretty much emptied all over our clothes :-( Rachel went to work with the stain remover and did a pretty good job with it for all the important garments! There's still a few specks here and there, including on some of my underwear...

I went to a Magic Pre-release tournament in Oshawa last weekend, which involved getting up at the crack of dawn to drive about 150kms on highways to the site (Oshawa is beyond Toronto from where we are) with 3 other rabid Magic fans along for the ride. Well, I finally did it! I drove on the wrong side of the road! After more than an hour of driving, I took an exit off the highway (remembering that slip lanes are effectively one-way streets) and when I got to the next intersection, I turned left as though I was back in Australia! It was about 8am on Sunday morning so there weren't any cars around - which is probably half the reason I made the error. Anyway, Mike who was riding shotgun is thankfully a very calm thinker in times of crisis, and called out "You are on the wrong side of the road!" It can't have been more than a few seconds before we noticed, but it was long enough to come up to a set of traffic lights and be wondering why there was a guy pointing at me with his headlights on (stopped waiting for the lights to change thank heavens...). Anyway, after taking a moment to asses the situation (median strip so can't just cross over to the correct right-side, intersection zone ahead so can't usefully go forward) I looked to see if it was clear, drove out to the middle of the intersection then reversed around the median strip til I was waiting at a red light on the correct side of the road. Whew! There were about 3 cars waiting at red lights at this stage, and now I'm hoping that nobody took down my plates and reported to police (I haven't heard anything). So that was extremely hair-raising!

When we stopped, one of the guys in the back said to me "That was soo cool!" so at least I gave the guys a thrill they may not have otherwise had! And thank heavens for Mike because I seriously did not realise what I'd done (and why I couldn't see any traffic lights pointing at me even though I was at a traffic light intersection etc).

Hooray!